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(1,'5fe61eecb687b',NULL,'Physical Robots.txt File Detected','AIOSEO has detected a physical robots.txt file in the root folder of your WordPress installation. We recommend removing this file as it could cause conflicts with WordPress\' dynamically generated one. AIOSEO can import this file and delete it, or you can simply delete it.','error','[\"all\"]',NULL,'robots-physical-file','2020-12-25 17:18:36',NULL,'Import and Delete','http://action#tools/import-robots-txt?redirect=aioseo-tools','Delete','http://action#tools/delete-robots-txt?redirect=aioseo-tools',0,0,'2020-12-25 17:18:36','2020-12-25 17:18:36'),
(56,'657b564a6549c',NULL,'Introducing Support For Additional Page Builders: WPBakery and Avada ?','<img 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\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-1019\" style=\"object-fit:cover\"/>\n\n<p>If your website is built using WPBakery or Avada, then you’ll be happy to know that <strong>AIOSEO 4.5.2</strong> was developed with love just for you! ❤️</p>\n\n<p>Now, you can use AIOSEO right inside your favorite website builder, making it easy to perform SEO tasks as you work on your posts or pages.</p>\n\n<p>Update AIOSEO to 4.5.2 and give your page builder that much-needed SEO superpower. ??‍♀️</p>','success','[\"4-x\",\"lite\"]',1010,NULL,'2023-12-13 14:43:22',NULL,'Learn More','https://aioseo.com/introducing-aioseo-support-for-additional-pagebuilders-wpbakery-and-avada/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_campaign=aioseo-plugin-notification','Get AIOSEO Pro','https://aioseo.com/lite-upgrade/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_campaign=aioseo-plugin-notification',0,0,'2023-12-14 19:23:54','2024-09-11 06:18:35'),
(4,'60ad44537233e',NULL,'Introducing Breadcrumbs - Boost SEO & User Experience ?','Now you can easily add breadcrumb navigation on your website to improve user experience & boost SEO rankings.\r\n<br /><br />\r\nOur breadcrumbs feature is available for all users, so you can get an enhanced website listing in Google.\r\n<br /><br />\r\nIf you want more control over Breadcrumb templates, then please upgrade to AIOSEO Pro today and save 50% off.','success','[\"4-x\"]',59,NULL,'2021-06-24 12:58:36',NULL,'Learn More','https://aioseo.com/introducing-breadcrumbs/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_campaign=introducing-breadcrumbs-v4&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_content=Learn More','Get AIOSEO Pro','https://aioseo.com/pricing/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_campaign=introducing-breadcrumbs-v4&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_content=Get AIOSEO Pro',0,0,'2021-05-25 18:39:15','2021-07-06 20:39:10'),
(5,'60d4ea838528c',NULL,'⚡ [LAST CHANCE] - 60% OFF AIOSEO ⚡','We’re celebrating our 14th anniversary by offering you a <strong>huge 60% discount for a limited time!</strong> If you want to optimize your site on Google, this is your last chance to update your AIOSEO plan without the high costs.\r\n<br /><br />\r\nUnlock powerful features like <strong>Local SEO Module, Image SEO Module, 301 Redirects, 404 Error Tracking, Custom Breadcrumbs, Smart Schema Markup</strong>, and more…\r\n<br /><br />','success','[\"4-x\",\"lite\"]',70,NULL,'2021-06-29 00:00:00','2021-07-31 00:00:00','Upgrade AIOSEO NOW! (60% OFF)','https://aioseo.com/pricing/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_campaign=14th-birthday-sale-last-chance-v4&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_content=Upgrade AIOSEO NOW','Learn More','https://aioseo.com/aioseo-turns-14/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_campaign=14th-birthday-sale-last-chance-v4&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_content=Learn More',0,0,'2021-06-24 20:26:43','2021-07-06 20:39:10'),
(6,'60d4ea838602d',NULL,'⚡ 14th Birthday Sale - 60% OFF AIOSEO ⚡','Want to upgrade your AIOSEO plan without the high costs? As we’re celebrating our anniversary, <strong>we’re offering up to 60% OFF for a limited time.</strong>\r\n<br /><br />\r\nUnlock powerful features like <strong>Local SEO Module, Image SEO Module, 301 Redirects, 404 Error Tracking, Custom Breadcrumbs, Smart Schema Markup</strong>, and more…\r\n<br /><br />','success','[\"4-x\"]',68,NULL,'2021-06-24 00:00:00','2021-06-28 23:59:00','Upgrade AIOSEO NOW! (60% OFF)','https://aioseo.com/pricing/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_campaign=14th-birthday-sale-v4&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_content=Upgrade AIOSEO NOW','Learn More','https://aioseo.com/aioseo-turns-14/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_campaign=14th-birthday-sale-v4&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_content=Learn More',0,0,'2021-06-24 20:26:43','2021-06-28 20:30:18'),
(7,'6101c747ed02d',NULL,'? Introducing Full Site Redirects + Headline Analyzer','Now easily redirect your ENTIRE website to another domain. No need to hire a developer!\r\n<br /><br />\r\nPlus, with our brand new Headline Analyzer, you can write catchy headlines that users can\'t help but click.\r\n<br /><br />\r\nTo get full access to our Pro features, upgrade your license today and save 50% OFF.','success','[\"4-x\",\"lite\"]',76,NULL,'2021-07-28 11:37:03',NULL,'Learn More','https://aioseo.com/introducing-the-new-aioseo-full-site-redirect-and-headline-analyzer/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_campaign=introducing-the-new-aioseo-full-site-redirect-and-headline-analyzer-v4-lite&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_content=Learn More','Get AIOSEO Pro','https://aioseo.com/pricing/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_campaign=introducing-the-new-aioseo-full-site-redirect-and-headline-analyzer-v4-lite&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_content=Get AIOSEO Pro',0,0,'2021-07-28 21:08:23','2021-08-11 21:30:39'),
(8,'6115931711ac3',NULL,'? Announcing HTML Sitemaps: Help Visitors Find Your Content Faster','Help your visitors to discover the posts, pages, and products they’re looking for.\r\n<br /><br />\r\nPlus, help improve your rankings by making your website user-friendly and easy to crawl.\r\n<br /><br />\r\nTo get full access to our Pro features, upgrade your license today and save 50% OFF. ?','success','[\"4-x\",\"lite\"]',86,NULL,'2021-07-28 11:36:58',NULL,'Learn More','https://aioseo.com/introducing-html-sitemaps/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_campaign=introducing-html-sitemaps-v4-lite&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_content=Learn More','Get AIOSEO Pro','https://aioseo.com/pricing/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_campaign=introducing-html-sitemaps-v4-lite&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_content=Get AIOSEO Pro',0,0,'2021-08-12 21:31:03','2021-11-01 23:29:57'),
(9,'6139318d5a4ea',NULL,'? Introducing Local SEO Map Embeds!','Now it\'s easy to add multiple locations and embed a custom Google Map on your website!\r\n<br /><br />\r\nEnter your address or drop a pin on your precise location, then choose from 4 different map styles.\r\n<br /><br />\r\nPlus, get access to SEO pro tips in your editor sidebar so you can make sure each post is fully optimized.\r\n<br /><br />\r\nTo get full access to our Pro features, upgrade your license today and save 50% OFF.','success','[\"4-x\",\"lite\"]',92,NULL,'2021-09-07 00:00:00',NULL,'Learn More','https://aioseo.com/announcing-local-seo-map-embeds/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_campaign=introducing-local-seo-maps-v4-lite&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_content=Learn More','Get AIOSEO Pro','https://aioseo.com/pricing/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_campaign=introducing-local-seo-maps-v4-lite&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_content=Get AIOSEO Pro',0,0,'2021-09-08 21:56:29','2021-11-01 23:29:57'),
(10,'61831c4c53d52',NULL,'? Introducing Our Updated Redirect Testing Tool + Enhancements to Sitemaps','Check out our completely revamped <strong>Redirect Testing tool</strong>! Now, you can easily test URL redirect right within your WordPress dashboard and see the status code with a single click.\r\n<br><br>\r\n<img style=\"width:100%;max-width:400px\" src=\"data:image/png;base64,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\" />\r\n<br><br>\r\nWe\'ve also added a number of improvements to sitemaps, including the last generated date and a custom 404 page.\r\n<br><br>\r\nUpdate to AIOSEO 4.1.5 today and take advantage of these enhancements!','info','[\"4-x\",\"lite\"]',110,NULL,'2021-11-28 01:13:23',NULL,'Learn More','https://aioseo.com/introducing-our-redirect-testing-tool-new-enhancements-to-our-sitemaps/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_campaign=redirects-testing-tool-v4-lite&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_content=Learn More','Get AIOSEO Pro','https://aioseo.com/lite-upgrade/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_campaign=redirects-testing-tool-v4-lite&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_content=Get AIOSEO Pro',0,0,'2021-11-03 23:33:32','2022-01-19 16:01:55'),
(11,'61831c4c54c92',NULL,'? Celebrating 3M+ Active Installs + Get 60% OFF Today!','Your beloved SEO plugin, All in One SEO (AIOSEO), just crossed <strong>3 million active installs</strong>!\r\n<br><br>\r\nTo celebrate this milestone, we’re running a huge sale for a limited time.\r\n<br><br>\r\n<strong>Save 60% OFF any AIOSEO plan!</strong>','success','[\"4-x\",\"lite\"]',107,NULL,'2021-11-03 14:11:37','2021-11-09 00:00:00','Upgrade AIOSEO NOW! (60% OFF)','https://aioseo.com/pricing/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_campaign=3-million-installs-v4-lite&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_content=Upgrade AIOSEO NOW',NULL,NULL,0,0,'2021-11-03 23:33:32','2021-11-08 23:40:37'),
(12,'619ed54642992',NULL,'? Save 65% OFF AIOSEO - Limited Time Black Friday Sale!','This Black Friday, we’re offering an incredible discount, up to <strong><em>65% OFF</em></strong> on AIOSEO!\r\n<br><br>\r\n<strong>This is the biggest sale we have <em>EVER</em> had, and it\'s available RIGHT NOW!</strong>\r\n<br><br>\r\nIf you’ve been thinking about becoming part of the AIOSEO Pro family, now’s the perfect time, but you’ll have to act fast since this remarkable deal expires soon!','success','[\"4-x\",\"lite\"]',165,NULL,'2021-11-23 18:42:05','2021-11-27 00:00:00','Upgrade AIOSEO NOW! (65% OFF)','https://aioseo.com/black-friday/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_campaign=black-friday-2021-v4-lite&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_content=Upgrade AIOSEO NOW','Learn More','https://aioseo.com/black-friday/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_campaign=black-friday-2021-v4-lite&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_content=Learn More',0,0,'2021-11-25 00:13:58','2021-11-26 00:14:55'),
(13,'61a41c5f3692b',NULL,'? Get AIOSEO Pro (65% OFF Today) + Donate for a Cause ?','Want to boost your SEO rankings while giving back something in return?\r\n<br><br>\r\nThis Green Monday, we’re offering <strong><em>up to 65% OFF</em></strong> on AIOSEO Pro purchases.\r\n<br><br>\r\nAnd a portion of sales will be donated to The Conservation Fund, a non-profit that protects America\'s legacy of land and water resources through land acquisition and more.','success','[\"4-x\",\"lite\"]',183,NULL,'2021-12-13 00:00:00','2021-12-14 00:00:00','Upgrade AIOSEO NOW! (65% OFF)','https://aioseo.com/pricing/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_campaign=green-monday-2021-v4-lite&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_content=Upgrade AIOSEO NOW',NULL,NULL,0,0,'2021-11-29 00:18:39','2021-12-13 00:52:18'),
(14,'61a41c5f37727',NULL,'⌛ Cyber Monday Sale is Ending Soon!','This Cyber Monday sale is your last chance to grab the world’s best SEO plugin for the best price.\r\n<br><br>\r\n<strong><em>This is the biggest sale we have EVER had, and it\'s available RIGHT NOW!</em></strong>\r\n<br><br>\r\nIf you want to step up your SEO game in 2022, then you need AIOSEO Pro, and NOW is the best time to get it!','success','[\"4-x\",\"lite\"]',176,NULL,'2021-11-29 00:00:00','2021-12-04 00:00:00','Upgrade AIOSEO NOW! (65% OFF)','https://aioseo.com/black-friday/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_campaign=cyber-monday-2021-v4-lite&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_content=Upgrade AIOSEO NOW','Learn More','https://aioseo.com/black-friday/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_campaign=cyber-monday-2021-v4-lite&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_content=Learn More',0,0,'2021-11-29 00:18:39','2021-12-03 00:29:47'),
(15,'61e9ffb4bfa48',NULL,'? Introducing Link Assistant + Our Stand-Alone Headline Analyzer','Check out the brand new features in AIOSEO 4.1.6! First, we have Link Assistant, a powerful tool to help you build effective internal links and audit external ones.\r\n<br><br>\r\nWe’ve also added a stand-alone Headline Analyzer to help you craft, and A/B test your headlines right from within WordPress.\r\n<br><br>\r\nUpdate to AIOSEO 4.1.6 today and up your SEO game without breaking a sweat!','success','[\"4-x\",\"lite\"]',203,NULL,'2022-02-08 13:39:00',NULL,'Learn More','https://aioseo.com/new-introducing-link-assistant-a-stand-alone-headline-analyzer-and-more-in-aioseo-4-1-6/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_campaign=link-assistant-v4-lite&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_content=Learn More','Get AIOSEO Pro','https://aioseo.com/lite-upgrade/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_campaign=link-assistant-v4-lite&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_content=Get AIOSEO Pro',0,0,'2022-01-21 00:35:00','2022-02-28 23:34:50'),
(16,'6202ac7f73966',NULL,'? Introducing IndexNow and Page Builder Integrations','Check out the fantastic new features in AIOSEO 4.1.7! First, we have IndexNow, a feature that gets your new or updated content indexed faster on Bing and Yandex (with more search engines to follow).\r\n<br><br>\r\nWe’ve also integrated AIOSEO with 3 major page builders, namely Elementor, Divi and SeedProd. Now you can work on your SEO right from within your page builder.\r\n<br><br>\r\nGet AIOSEO Pro today and up your SEO game without breaking a sweat!','success','[\"4-x\",\"lite\"]',223,NULL,'2022-03-01 16:19:06',NULL,'Learn More','https://aioseo.com/introducing-indexnow-and-page-builder-integrations-in-aioseo-4-1-7/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_campaign=index-now-v4-lite&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_content=Learn More','Get AIOSEO Pro','https://aioseo.com/lite-upgrade/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_campaign=index-now-v4-lite&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_content=Get AIOSEO Pro',0,0,'2022-02-08 17:46:39','2022-03-28 15:04:03'),
(17,'621eae0ba962c',NULL,'? Announcing 4.1.8: Improved Site Redirects and Modified Date for Posts ?','Redirects have never been easier! Our 4.1.8 update comes with a powerful feature that enables you to implement a redirect from right within a post.\r\n<br><br>\r\nWe’ve also added a \"limit modified date\" feature that allows you to make minor edits to posts/pages and keep the date the same.\r\n<br><br>\r\nUpdate to AIOSEO 4.1.8 today and enjoy these 2 powerful features and more.','success','[\"4-x\",\"lite\"]',241,NULL,'2022-04-08 19:59:50',NULL,'Learn More','https://aioseo.com/announcing-improved-site-redirects-and-modified-date-for-posts/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_campaign=introducing-on-page-redirects-and-limit-modified-date-v4-lite&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_content=Learn More','Get AIOSEO Pro','https://aioseo.com/lite-upgrade/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_campaign=introducing-on-page-redirects-and-limit-modified-date-v4-lite&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_content=Get AIOSEO Pro',0,0,'2022-03-01 23:36:43','2022-04-26 08:33:54'),
(18,'62434a9d26cb4',NULL,'Microsoft Clarity Integration and a New REST API Addon ??','Now you can see how your website visitors interact with your web pages with heatmaps and session recordings, thanks to Microsoft Clarity.\r\n<br><br>\r\nWe’ve also added a REST API addon to make SEO easier for your headless website.\r\n<br><br>\r\nUpdate to AIOSEO 4.1.9 today and enjoy these 2 powerful features on your website!','success','[\"4-x\",\"lite\"]',263,NULL,'2022-05-03 15:26:42',NULL,'Learn More','https://aioseo.com/introducing-the-new-microsoft-clarity-integration-and-rest-api-addon/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_campaign=microsoft-clarity-rest-api-v4-lite&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_content=Learn More','Get AIOSEO Pro','https://aioseo.com/lite-upgrade/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_campaign=microsoft-clarity-rest-api-v4-lite&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_content=Get AIOSEO Pro',0,0,'2022-03-29 18:06:21','2022-05-31 17:21:40'),
(19,'6252271fbc753',NULL,'? ? Sale! Sale! Sale! ? ?','<img 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\" />\r\n<br><br>\r\nOur spring sale is on! Get up to <strong>65% off</strong> our plans and save big.\r\n<br><br>\r\nHurry, this offer is only valid through Monday!','success','[\"4-x\",\"lite\"]',282,NULL,'2022-04-08 19:59:50','2022-04-12 00:00:00','Get AIOSEO Pro NOW! (65% OFF)','https://aioseo.com/lite-upgrade/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_campaign=spring-sale-v4-lite&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_content=Get AIOSEO Pro NOW!',NULL,NULL,0,0,'2022-04-10 00:38:55','2022-04-11 22:30:54'),
(20,'626b0d79bda56',NULL,'? Introducing 2 New Features! — Dashboard Widgets And Shorter URLs ?','We’ve added 2 new dashboard widgets. One to help you set up your website for better SEO and the other to show you an overview of how optimized your posts are.\r\n<br><br>\r\nAnother feature you’ll love is the Strip Category Base Prefix feature that enables you to create shorter URLs by removing the category base.\r\n<br><br>\r\nUpgrade to AIOSEO 4.2.0 Pro today and enjoy these powerful features on your website!!','success','[\"4-x\",\"lite\"]',308,NULL,'2022-05-31 21:15:05',NULL,'Learn More','https://aioseo.com/new-dashboard-widgets-and-strip-category-base-feature/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_campaign=dashboard-widgets-strip-category-base-v4-lite&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_content=Learn More','Get AIOSEO Pro','https://aioseo.com/lite-upgrade/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_campaign=dashboard-widgets-strip-category-base-v4-lite&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_content=Get AIOSEO Pro',0,0,'2022-04-28 21:56:09','2022-06-20 23:36:20'),
(21,'6271fd9149034',NULL,'? Awesome Motive Just Hit 20 MILLION Websites Using our Software!','We\'ve got some exciting news to share!\r\n<br><br>\r\nAwesome Motive (our parent company) just hit the <strong>20 MILLION</strong> website milestone. ?\r\n<br><br>\r\nTo celebrate, we’re offering you up to 65% off our paid plans for <strong>only the next 2 days</strong>! ?\r\n','success','[\"4-x\",\"lite\"]',312,NULL,'2022-05-03 15:26:42','2022-05-06 00:00:00','Get AIOSEO Pro NOW!','https://aioseo.com/lite-upgrade/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_campaign=20-million-v4-lite&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_content=? Get AIOSEO Pro NOW!',NULL,NULL,0,0,'2022-05-04 04:14:09','2022-05-05 16:01:24'),
(22,'62986f2312b6b',NULL,'? Introducing Crawl Cleanup and Import URLs to Your Sitemap!','AIOSEO 4.2.1 now allows you to manage Search Engine crawl quota by removing query args (URL parameters) from selected URLs and disabling unnecessary RSS feeds.\r\n<br><br>\r\nYou can also import bulk URLs from a CSV file to add more pages to your sitemap.\r\n<br><br>\r\nUpdate to AIOSEO 4.2.1 to take advantage of these powerful SEO features today!','success','[\"4-x\",\"lite\"]',327,NULL,'2022-07-19 14:22:11',NULL,'Learn More','https://aioseo.com/introducing-crawl-cleanup-and-importing-urls-from-a-csv-file-to-your-sitemap/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_campaign=crawl-cleanup-v4-lite&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_content=Learn More','Get AIOSEO Pro','https://aioseo.com/pricing/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_campaign=crawl-cleanup-v4-lite&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_content=Get%20AIOSEO%20Pro',1,0,'2022-06-02 08:04:51','2022-07-24 21:09:11'),
(23,'62b2a04d8af01',NULL,'AIOSEO 4.2.2 is HERE with some great new features! ?','Connect your WordPress user profile directly to your social media accounts for improved SEO.\r\n<br><br>\r\nOur new Translations API enables third-party translation apps to hook into AIOSEO’s data for multilingual SEO.\r\n<br><br>\r\nUpdate to AIOSEO 4.2.2 now and enjoy more SEO opportunities!','success','[\"4-x\",\"lite\"]',338,NULL,'2022-07-19 14:22:11',NULL,'Learn More','https://aioseo.com/announcing-our-new-user-social-profile-tab-and-translation-api-in-aioseo-4-2-2/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_campaign=social-profiles-translations-api-v4-lite&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_content=Learn More','Get AIOSEO Pro','https://aioseo.com/lite-upgrade/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_campaign=social-profiles-translations-api-v4-lite&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_content=Get AIOSEO Pro',0,0,'2022-06-22 04:53:33','2022-07-24 21:09:11'),
(24,'62b56fca7d25f',NULL,'AIOSEO is Turning 15 YEARS OLD!! ? ?','<img 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\" />\r\n\r\nTo celebrate, we’re running a sale with as much as <strong>65% off our paid plans</strong>.\r\n<br><br>\r\nGrab it while the party lasts! (<strong>Hurry! This offer won\'t last long!</strong>) ?','success','[\"4-x\",\"lite\"]',346,NULL,'2022-06-28 14:12:59','2022-06-30 00:00:00','Get AIOSEO Pro NOW! (65% OFF)','https://aioseo.com/pricing-lite/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_campaign=15th-birthday-sale-v4-lite&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_content=Get AIOSEO Pro NOW! (65% OFF)',NULL,NULL,0,0,'2022-06-24 08:03:22','2022-06-29 07:06:30'),
(25,'62bbf9f638f56',NULL,'LAST CHANCE: Our Birthday Celebration is Almost Over! ⌛','AIOSEO just turned <strong>15 years old</strong> and we\'ve been celebrating all week with as much as <strong>65% off our paid plans</strong>! ?\r\n<br><br>\r\nThe party’s almost over and you’re about to miss out on this amazing birthday celebration deal.\r\n<br><br>\r\nMake sure to grab yours ASAP because it <strong>expires today!</strong> ? ?','success','[\"4-x\",\"lite\"]',399,NULL,'2022-06-29 00:00:00','2022-06-30 00:00:00','Get AIOSEO Pro NOW! (65% OFF)','https://aioseo.com/pricing-lite/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_campaign=15th-birthday-sale-last-chance-v4-lite&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_content=Get%20AIOSEO%20Pro%20NOW!%20(65%%20OFF)',NULL,NULL,0,0,'2022-06-29 07:06:30','2022-06-29 07:06:30'),
(26,'62d76b5cc5342',NULL,'? AIOSEO 4.2.3: Introducing FAQ and Table of Contents blocks + URL Slug Monitor.','You can now add <strong>FAQ and Table of Contents blocks</strong> to increase your visibility on SERPs and improve user experience.\r\n<br><br>\r\nAnd our <strong>URL Slug Monitor</strong> is a powerful addition that checks for changes in your URLs and prompts you to add redirects which helps <strong>prevents 404 errors</strong> on your site.\r\n<br><br>\r\nUpdate to 4.2.3 today and check out these powerful new features!','success','[\"4-x\",\"lite\"]',414,NULL,'2022-08-16 12:14:02',NULL,'Learn More','https://aioseo.com/introducing-aioseo-4-2-3-faq-and-table-of-contents-blocks-all-new-url-slug-monitor/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_campaign=introducing-faq-toc-blocks-v4-lite&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_content=Learn More','Get AIOSEO Pro','https://aioseo.com/lite-upgrade/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_campaign=introducing-faq-toc-blocks-vv-lite&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_content=Get AIOSEO Pro',0,0,'2022-07-20 02:41:32','2022-09-13 00:55:31'),
(27,'62df61eaec147',NULL,'We\'re celebrating 100 million downloads of AIOSEO!!! ?','And we want to share this HUGE milestone with you by <strong>slashing our prices</strong>.\r\n<br><br>\r\nWe\'re offering up to <strong>65% off</strong> our paid plans until July 28.\r\n<br><br>\r\nGrab it while the party lasts! (<strong>Hurry! This offer won\'t last long!</strong>) ?\r\n','success','[\"4-x\",\"lite\"]',417,NULL,'2022-07-25 15:21:38','2022-07-28 00:00:00','Get AIOSEO Pro NOW! (65% OFF)','https://aioseo.com/pricing-lite/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_campaign=100m-downloads-sale-v4-lite&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_content=Get%20AIOSEO%20Pro%20NOW!%20(65%%20OFF)',NULL,NULL,0,0,'2022-07-26 03:39:22','2022-07-27 05:03:47'),
(28,'62df61eaed5ba',NULL,'LAST CHANCE: We\'re celebrating 100 million downloads of AIOSEO!!! ⌛','AIOSEO just hit <strong>100 MILLION DOWNLOADS</strong> and we\'ve been celebrating all week with as much as <strong>65% off our paid plans!</strong> ?\r\n<br><br>\r\nThe party’s almost over and you’re about to miss out on this amazing celebration deal.\r\n<br><br>\r\nMake sure to grab yours ASAP because it <strong>expires today!</strong> ? ?','success','[\"4-x\",\"lite\"]',456,NULL,'2022-07-28 00:00:00','2022-07-29 00:00:00','Get AIOSEO Pro NOW! (65% OFF)','https://aioseo.com/pricing-lite/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_campaign=100m-downloads-sale-last-chance-v4-lite&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_content=Get%20AIOSEO%20Pro%20NOW!%20(65%%20OFF)',NULL,NULL,0,0,'2022-07-26 03:39:22','2022-07-28 10:17:23'),
(29,'62fbd993ad458',NULL,'AIOSEO just got more powerful with version 4.2.4! ?','Easily eliminate 404 errors with <strong>automatic redirects</strong> using our massively improved Redirection Manager. \r\n<br><br>\r\nThis update also includes some huge improvements to our Image SEO addon, making it much easier for your content to rank. ?\r\n<br><br>\r\nUpdate to <strong>AIOSEO 4.2.4</strong> today and take advantage of these powerful new features!','success','[\"4-x\",\"lite\"]',463,NULL,'2022-09-22 20:05:34',NULL,'Learn More','https://aioseo.com/announcing-aioseo-4-2-4-improved-redirects-and-image-seo-updates/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_campaign=improved-redirects-image-seo-v4-lite&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_content=Learn More','Get AIOSEO Pro','https://aioseo.com/lite-upgrade/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_campaign=improved-redirects-image-seo-v4-lite&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_content=Get%20AIOSEO%20Pro',0,0,'2022-08-16 17:53:23','2022-10-10 23:47:46'),
(30,'63212c51780aa',NULL,'The Next-Gen Schema Generator is here! ?','This is a huge leap forward in WordPress schema implementation, and you definitely want to add it to boost your website SEO! ?\r\n<br><br>\r\nWebsites with schema markups enjoy better SEO rankings, higher traffic, and more sales. AIOSEO 4.2.5 makes it possible without touching a single line of code.\r\n<br><br>\r\nUpdate to AIOSEO 4.2.5 <strong>TODAY</strong> and enjoy the power of our <strong>new Schema Generator!</strong>','success','[\"4-x\",\"lite\"]',492,NULL,'2022-09-13 00:00:00',NULL,'Learn More','https://aioseo.com/announcing-aioseo-4-2-5-next-gen-schema-generator-to-improve-your-seo-rankings/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_campaign=schema-generator-v4-lite&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_content=Learn More','Get AIOSEO Pro','https://aioseo.com/lite-upgrade/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_campaign=schema-generator-v4-lite&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_content=Get AIOSEO Pro',0,0,'2022-09-14 01:20:17','2022-11-08 05:55:50'),
(31,'632cecb4bd1cd',NULL,'? Our fall sale is on! ?','Get up to 70% off AIOSEO Pro to improve your SEO rankings.\r\n<br><br>\r\nThis will get you access to our Next-Gen Schema generator, powerful Link Assistant, and dozens of SEO features to grow your traffic.\r\n<br><br>\r\nUpgrade this week and save BIG!','success','[\"4-x\",\"lite\"]',503,NULL,'2022-09-22 20:05:34','2022-09-29 00:00:00','Get AIOSEO Pro NOW! (70% OFF)','https://aioseo.com/pricing-lite/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_campaign=2022-fall-sale-v4-lite&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_content=Get AIOSEO Pro NOW! (70% OFF)',NULL,NULL,0,0,'2022-09-22 23:16:04','2022-09-28 12:15:36'),
(32,'63466117cef2b',NULL,'The much-awaited SEO emoji picker is here! ?','Now you can add emojis to SEO fields to get <strong>higher CTRs and engagement on SEO and social media platforms</strong>. ?\r\n<br><br>\r\nPlus, we’ve also greatly improved our multisite SEO module, making it easy to <strong>manage WordPress multisite SEO from a single dashboard</strong>. ✅\r\n<br><br>\r\nWith AIOSEO 4.2.6, you’ve got more tools to help you rank your content, and that <strong>without touching a single line of code</strong>. ??‍?\r\n<br><br>\r\n<strong>Update to AIOSEO 4.2.6 TODAY</strong> and enjoy the power of our new SEO emoji picker and improved multisite SEO module! ?','success','[\"4-x\",\"lite\"]',512,NULL,'2022-11-28 20:45:42',NULL,'Learn More','https://aioseo.com/announcing-aioseo-4-2-6-new-seo-emoji-picker-multisite-seo-improvements/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_campaign=emoji-picker-v4-lite&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_content=Learn More','? Get AIOSEO Pro NOW!','https://aioseo.com/lite-upgrade/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_campaign=emoji-picker-v4-lite&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_content=? Get AIOSEO Pro NOW!',0,0,'2022-10-12 06:39:19','2022-12-06 11:37:18'),
(33,'636be88b25500',NULL,'Announcing AIOSEO 4.2.7: Google Merchant Center Schema to help you Boost Visibility and Sales! ??','Do you sell products on your website? We’ve got great news for you!\r\n<br><br>\r\nEnjoy greater visibility and higher CTRs for your products on search engines with our new <strong>Google Merchant Center</strong> Listing schema support. \r\n<br><br>\r\nSo, go ahead and upgrade to <strong>AIOSEO Pro 4.2.7 TODAY</strong> and get more tools to help you rank your content and products!','success','[\"4-x\",\"lite\"]',526,NULL,'2022-12-06 20:35:55',NULL,'Learn More','https://aioseo.com/announcing-aioseo-4-2-7-drive-more-sales-with-google-merchant-center-listing-schema/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_campaign=google-merchant-center-schema-v4-lite&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_content=Learn More','Get AIOSEO Pro','https://aioseo.com/lite-upgrade/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_campaign=google-merchant-center-schema-v4-lite&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_content=Get AIOSEO Pro',0,0,'2022-11-09 17:51:07','2023-02-06 18:09:32'),
(34,'637beb5a892dc',NULL,'Black Friday: HUGE Sale! Get Up to 70% Off AIOSEO ?','Our biggest sale of the year is now live! Get up to 70% off AIOSEO, the world’s best WordPress SEO plugin. You’ll unlock our NEW Link Assistant addon, redirection manager, local SEO module, image SEO module, news/video sitemaps +more! PLUS enter our giveaway to WIN an Apple 14” M1 PRO Macbook Pro - no purchase necessary!','success','[\"4-x\",\"lite\"]',534,NULL,'2022-11-24 19:50:33','2022-11-28 00:00:00','Enter Giveaway','https://aioseo.com/black-friday/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_campaign=liteplugin&utm_medium=Plugin Notification&utm_content=bf2022-enter-giveaway-v4-lite','Claim Your Upgrade Discount','https://aioseo.com/black-friday/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_campaign=liteplugin&utm_medium=Plugin Notification&utm_content=bf2022-claim-your-upgrade-discount-v4-lite',0,0,'2022-11-21 21:19:22','2022-11-27 11:40:51'),
(35,'6392b3c86deea',NULL,'AIOSEO 4.2.8: More Control Over Search and Social Snippets with SEO Preview ?','Get greater control over how your search and social media snippets appear with our <strong>new SEO Preview tool</strong>.\r\n<br><br>\r\nPlus, check how well you’ve set up your page’s SEO by getting an overview of your meta tags and basic SEO.\r\n<br><br>\r\nSo, <strong>update to AIOSEO 4.2.8 TODAY</strong> and boost your rankings and drive more engagement on SERPs and social media!','success','[\"4-x\",\"lite\"]',560,NULL,'2023-02-24 16:13:04',NULL,'Learn More','https://aioseo.com/new-seo-preview-more-control-over-search-and-social-snippets/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_campaign=seo-preview-v4-lite&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_content=Learn More','Get AIOSEO Pro','https://aioseo.com/lite-upgrade/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_campaign=seo-preview-v4-lite&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_content=Get AIOSEO Pro',0,0,'2022-12-09 04:04:24','2023-03-09 01:51:02'),
(36,'63e36fda6290a',NULL,'Introducing SEO Stats for WordPress - Track Your Keyword Rankings and See Important SEO Metrics with 1-click ? ?','Want to see exactly how your content ranks in search results inside of WordPress? You can do just that with our brand new <strong>Google Search Console integration</strong>!\r\n<br><br>\r\nTrack important keywords and get in-plugin tips to help you grow your traffic. <strong>Plus: Try out the new speed test tool!</strong> ?\r\n<br><br>\r\n<strong>Upgrade to AIOSEO 4.3.0 (Elite) TODAY to ignite your SEO and outrank competitors!</strong>\r\n<br><br>\r\n<img 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\" />','success','[\"4-x\",\"lite\"]',570,NULL,'2023-06-27 12:55:16',NULL,'Learn More','https://aioseo.com/google-search-console-integration/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_campaign=google-search-console-integration-v4-lite&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_content=Learn%20More','Get AIOSEO Pro ?','https://aioseo.com/lite-upgrade/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_campaign=google-search-console-integration-v4-lite&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_content=Get%20AIOSEO%20Pro',0,0,'2023-02-08 09:48:10','2023-07-02 20:17:30'),
(37,'63fa635890775',NULL,'❄️ Save up to 70% OFF Link Assistant, Search Statistics and MORE During our Winter Sale! ❄️','We’re kicking off our winter sale and you don’t want to miss the hot deals we have. ?\r\n<br><br>\r\nIf you act within the next 7 days, you can get AIOSEO <strong>for as much as 70% off</strong> with access to our <strong>Redirection Manager, Link Assistant, Search Statistics and MORE</strong>!\r\n<br><br>\r\nWith all the powerful features we’ll be adding to the plugin this year, getting the plugin at these discounted prices is a steal. <strong>Seriously</strong>.\r\n<br><br>\r\n⚡ So, claim your discount now before it expires! ⚡','success','[\"4-x\",\"lite\"]',603,NULL,'2023-02-24 16:13:04','2023-03-02 00:00:00','Get AIOSEO Pro Today! (up to 70% OFF)','https://aioseo.com/pricing-lite/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_campaign=proplugin&utm_medium=Plugin%20Notification&utm_content=winter-sale-2023-get-aioseo-pro-today',NULL,NULL,0,0,'2023-02-25 19:36:56','2023-03-01 10:51:34'),
(38,'64162e8be088c',NULL,'?[FLASH SALE]! Get Up To 70% Off AIOSEO For St. Patrick\'s Day! ?','Our St. Patrick\'s Day flash sale is here, and it\'s your chance to get <strong>AIOSEO Pro at a HUGE discount</strong>! This sale is almost as good as a pot of gold!\r\n<br><br>\r\nDon\'t rely only on the luck of the Irish! ☘️ Supercharge your website\'s SEO, making it easier for your customers to find you online. With our limited-time offer, you can get the whole AIOSEO experience at up to 70% off!\r\n<br><br>\r\nWhether you\'re a small business owner, blogger, or marketer, this is an opportunity you won\'t want to miss. Hurry and grab your discount now before the sale ends!','success','[\"4-x\",\"lite\"]',636,NULL,'2023-03-17 02:11:24','2023-03-19 00:00:00','Get AIOSEO Pro Today!','https://aioseo.com/pricing/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_campaign=v4-lite&utm_medium=Plugin%20Notification&utm_content=st-patricks-2023-get-aioseo-pro-today',NULL,NULL,0,0,'2023-03-18 21:35:07','2023-03-18 21:35:07'),
(39,'6443ccaa85c8a',NULL,'[Last Chance!] ? Save up to 70% on AIOSEO during our spring sale! ?','Did you know today\'s the last day to <strong>upgrade</strong> and <strong>save big</strong> on the world\'s best SEO plugin?\r\n<br><br>\r\n⚡ Power up your traffic & sales with our futuristic <strong>AI tools</strong> and <strong>Google Search Console integration</strong>. \r\n<br><br>\r\nDon’t miss out on these amazing deals. ?\r\n<br><br>\r\nBe sure to claim your discount before it\'s gone!','success','[\"4-x\",\"lite\"]',661,NULL,'2023-04-27 00:00:00','2023-04-28 00:00:00','Get AIOSEO Pro Today!','https://aioseo.com/pricing-lite/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_campaign=v4-lite&utm_medium=Plugin%20Notification&utm_content=spring-sale-last-chance-2023-get-aioseo-pro-today',NULL,NULL,0,0,'2023-04-22 12:01:46','2023-04-26 14:48:37'),
(40,'6443ccaa86f54',NULL,'[Spring Sale] ? Get up to 70% off AIOSEO! ?','We just launched our huge spring sale. Now you can get <strong><em>all</em></strong> the SEO features you want to amplify your traffic and sales. \r\n<ul style=\"list-style: inside;\">\r\n	<li>Supercharge your <strong>keyword rankings</strong> with our <strong>Google Search Console integration</strong>.</li>\r\n	<li>Save time with our premier <strong>AI tools</strong>, like our <strong>ChatGPT integration</strong>.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\nFor only 7 days you can get <strong>deep discounts</strong> on the world\'s best SEO plugin.\r\n<br><br>\r\n⚡So grab your deal while it lasts! ⚡','success','[\"4-x\",\"lite\"]',651,NULL,'2023-04-21 16:17:02','2023-04-27 00:00:00','Get AIOSEO Pro Today!','https://aioseo.com/pricing-lite/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_campaign=v4-lite&utm_medium=Plugin%20Notification&utm_content=spring-sale-2023-get-aioseo-pro-today',NULL,NULL,0,0,'2023-04-22 12:01:46','2023-04-26 14:48:37'),
(41,'6454027ddc43a',NULL,'?️ [AIOSEO 4.3.6] Announcing Content Rankings: SEO Performance Tracking Made Easy','Get valuable insights about how your content is performing on search engines using our <strong>NEW Content Rankings report</strong>.\r\n<br><br>\r\nThis includes SEO data to help you <strong>optimize your articles for better rankings</strong>. Plus, you can also easily spot <strong>content decay</strong>, making it easier to combat it.\r\n<br><br>\r\nSo, <strong>upgrade to AIOSEO Pro TODAY</strong> and boost your rankings and drive more traffic to your content!','success','[\"4-x\",\"lite\"]',677,NULL,'2023-06-27 12:55:16',NULL,'Learn More','https://aioseo.com/announcing-content-rankings-seo-performance-tracking-made-easy/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_campaign=content-rankings-v4-lite&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_content=Learn%20More','Get AIOSEO Pro','https://aioseo.com/lite-upgrade/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_campaign=content-rankings-v4-lite&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_content=Get%20AIOSEO%20Pro',0,0,'2023-05-04 19:07:41','2023-07-02 20:17:30'),
(42,'6474de605d895',NULL,'[Last Chance!] ?? Save up to 70% on AIOSEO during our flash sale! ?','Did you know today\'s the <span style=\"text-decoration:underline;\">last day</span> to <strong>upgrade</strong> & <strong>save big</strong> on the world\'s best SEO plugin?\r\n<br><br>\r\n⚡ Power up your traffic & sales with our futuristic <strong>AI tools</strong> & <strong>Google Search Console integration</strong>. ⚡\r\n<br><br>\r\nDon’t miss out on these sizzling deals. ?\r\n<br><br>\r\nClaim your discount before it\'s gone!','success','[\"4-x\",\"lite\"]',721,NULL,'2023-05-30 00:00:00','2023-05-31 00:00:00','Get AIOSEO Pro Today!','https://aioseo.com/pricing-lite/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_campaign=v4-lite&utm_medium=Plugin%20Notification&utm_content=memorial-day-sale-last-chance-2023-get-aioseo-pro-today',NULL,NULL,0,0,'2023-05-29 17:18:24','2023-05-30 21:06:01'),
(43,'6474de6061958',NULL,'[Memorial Day Sale] ?? Get up to 70% off AIOSEO! ?','We just launched our Memorial Day sale! Snag <strong style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><em>all</em></strong> the SEO features you want to surge traffic and sales. \r\n<ul style=\"list-style: inside;\">\r\n	<li>Save time with our AI <strong>ChatGPT integration</strong>.</li>\r\n	<li>Boost <strong>rankings</strong> with our <strong>Google Search Console integration</strong>.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\nFor only <strong style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">1 day</strong> you can get <strong>giant discounts</strong> on the world\'s best SEO plugin.\r\n<br /><br />\r\n⚡So grab your deal while it lasts! ⚡','success','[\"4-x\",\"lite\"]',708,NULL,'2023-05-29 13:43:06',NULL,'Get AIOSEO Pro Today!','https://aioseo.com/pricing-lite/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_campaign=v4-lite&utm_medium=Plugin%20Notification&utm_content=memorial-day-sale-2023-get-aioseo-pro-today',NULL,NULL,0,0,'2023-05-29 17:18:24','2023-05-31 21:13:45'),
(44,'6478c52fb18ca',NULL,'[NEW] Set a Primary Category to Customize Breadcrumbs (+ WPCode Integration) ?','<strong>The wait is FINALLY over!</strong> One of our most requested feature is live in AIOSEO 4.3.8! ? ?\r\n<br><br>\r\nWith the brand-new <strong>Primary Category</strong> feature, you now have <strong>full control over which category displays in your breadcrumb trail</strong>.\r\n<br><br>\r\nPlus: customize your AIOSEO experience with <strong>clickable code snippets</strong> courtesy of WPCode!\r\n<br><br>\r\nUpgrade to <strong>AIOSEO 4.3.8 Pro TODAY</strong> to ignite your SEO and outrank competitors!','success','[\"4-x\",\"lite\"]',751,NULL,'2023-07-25 13:50:35',NULL,'Learn More','https://aioseo.com/announcing-primary-category-and-wpcode-integration/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_campaign=primary-category-v4-lite&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_content=Learn%20More','Get AIOSEO Pro','https://aioseo.com/lite-upgrade/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_campaign=primary-category-v4-lite&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_content=Get%20AIOSEO%20Pro',0,0,'2023-06-01 16:19:59','2023-07-28 02:52:29'),
(45,'649b2fbab5137',NULL,'It\'s a Sweet Sixteen Kinda Day! ? ?','<img 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\" />\r\n\r\nWe just had our 16th birthday, and to celebrate, we’re offering you massive discounts on all paid plans. Save <strong>up to 70%</strong> when you purchase a new plan or upgrade TODAY!\r\n<br><br>\r\nPlus, we have a <strong>sweet giveaway</strong> with 3 prizes including a <strong>Pixel 7 Pro, Pixel Tablet and Pixel Buds Pro</strong>!\r\n<br><br>\r\nHurry, this deal won\'t last long, check it out TODAY!','success','[\"4-x\",\"lite\"]',766,NULL,'2023-06-27 12:55:16','2023-06-30 00:00:00','Get AIOSEO Pro NOW! (70% OFF)','https://aioseo.com/happy-birthday-aioseo/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_campaign=16th-birthday-sale-v4-lite&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_content=Get AIOSEO Pro NOW! (70% OFF)','Enter Pixel Giveaway!','https://aioseo.com/happy-birthday-aioseo/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_campaign=16th-birthday-sale-v4-lite&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_content=Enter Pixel Giveaway!',0,0,'2023-06-27 18:51:38','2023-06-28 20:54:30'),
(46,'64a38e1879f70',NULL,'? [New] Advanced SEO Tracking with SEO Revisions & Google Updates Integration','Track the changes you make to your content and see how it <strong>connects to changes in your search rankings</strong>.\r\n<br><br>\r\nPlus, see <strong>Google Updates on a timeline in Search Statistics</strong>, so you know how they impact your SEO.\r\n<br><br>\r\nWe’ve also added many more new features to version 4.4.0 of AIOSEO. <strong>Upgrade today!</strong>','success','[\"4-x\",\"lite\"]',801,NULL,'2023-09-19 21:26:06',NULL,'Learn More','https://aioseo.com/announcing-seo-revisions-and-google-updates-integration/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_campaign=seo-revisions-v4-lite&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_content=Learn%20More','Get AIOSEO Pro','https://aioseo.com/lite-upgrade/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_campaign=seo-revisions-v4-lite&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_content=Get%20AIOSEO%20Pro',0,0,'2023-07-04 03:12:24','2023-10-15 21:11:57'),
(47,'64bfe43b20d4a',NULL,'NEW: Announcing the AIOSEO Analyzer Chrome extension!  ?','Speed up content reviews and technical SEO checks. This new free tool is designed for you!\r\n<br><br>\r\nAIOSEO Analyzer gives you a big-picture view of your SEO, bringing problem areas into sharp focus. It works on both unpublished <em>and</em> published pages.\r\n<br><br>\r\nAnd it’s <strong>100% free!</strong> Download it today from the Chrome Web Store. And take it for a test drive!','success','[\"4-x\"]',809,NULL,'2023-11-25 04:17:13',NULL,'Learn More','https://aioseo.com/announcing-all-in-one-analyzer-by-aioseo/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_campaign=chrome-extension-v4&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_content=Learn%20More','Download','https://aioseo.com/announcing-all-in-one-analyzer-by-aioseo/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_campaign=chrome-extension-v4&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_content=Download',0,0,'2023-07-25 15:03:23','2023-12-06 00:42:25'),
(48,'64c4945076b5f',NULL,'?? Embrace the summer vibes with our scorching HOT Summer Sale! ??','<img src=\"data:image/png;base64,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\" />\r\n\r\nIt\'s time to turn up the heat and celebrate the season in style. Whether you\'re a long-time user or a brand-new one, we\'ve got something special for you!\r\n<br><br>\r\nIn honor of summer, we\'re offering you sensational discounts on all paid plans. Save up to a refreshing 70% when you snag a new plan or upgrade TODAY!\r\n<br><br>\r\nBut don\'t lounge around too long under the sun – this irresistible offer won\'t last forever! So, hurry and dive into our Summer Sale before it\'s gone. Your special deal awaits!\r\n','success','[\"4-x\",\"lite\"]',827,NULL,'2023-07-28 18:10:46','2023-08-04 00:00:00','Get AIOSEO Pro NOW! (70% OFF)','https://aioseo.com/pricing-lite/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_campaign=summer-sale-v4-lite&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_content=Upgrade Your AIOSEO Plan NOW! (70% OFF)',NULL,NULL,0,0,'2023-07-29 04:23:44','2023-08-03 14:37:41'),
(49,'64e77012c218b',NULL,'[New] Improved Crawling and Indexing with AIOSEO 4.4.4 ?','Improve your site’s crawlability and indexability with our improved robots.txt editor. With new directives and advanced functionality, ranking your site on search engines just became easier.\r\n<br><br>\r\nWe’ve also added many more new features to version 4.4.4 of AIOSEO. Check out our announcement for more information.\r\n<br><br>\r\nUpgrade to AIOSEO 4.4.4 today!','success','[\"4-x\",\"lite\"]',832,NULL,'2023-11-25 04:17:13',NULL,'Learn More','https://aioseo.com/greater-robots-txt-file-customization-for-improved-crawlability/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_campaign=robots-editor-v4-lite&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_content=Learn%20More','Upgrade to Pro','https://aioseo.com/lite-upgrade/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_campaign=robots-editor-v4-lite&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_content=Upgrade%20to%20Pro',0,0,'2023-08-24 14:58:26','2023-12-06 00:42:25'),
(50,'64f74e42a765e',NULL,'Flash Sale: Get Up To 70% Off AIOSEO This Labor Day ?','At AIOSEO, we want to celebrate your hard work by offering you the best WordPress SEO plugin at <strong><em>ridiculously low prices</em></strong>.\r\n<br><br>\r\nWe’re offering <strong>up to 70% off</strong> AIOSEO for a new purchase or upgrade.\r\n<br><br>\r\nBut this is just a one-day sale, so you better ACT FAST!','success','[\"lite\"]',840,NULL,'2023-09-04 21:39:37','2023-09-06 00:00:00','Get AIOSEO Pro NOW! (70% OFF)','https://aioseo.com/pricing-lite/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_campaign=summer-sale-v4-lite&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_content=Get AIOSEO Pro NOW! (70% OFF)',NULL,NULL,0,0,'2023-09-05 15:50:26','2023-09-05 15:50:26'),
(51,'650fef42b3e64',NULL,'[New] TruSEO Highlighter: Instantly locate readability issues! ?','On-page SEO just got easier with our new TruSEO Highlighter! ? Turn on the highlighter to instantly find readability issues on a page. ?\r\n<br><br>\r\nThis is our most requested feature! With TruSEO highlighter, you’ll instantly find readability issues flagged by AIOSEO.\r\n<br><br>\r\nUpdate to <strong>AIOSEO 4.4.6 TODAY</strong> to simplify SEO & get traction.','success','[\"4-x\",\"lite\"]',848,NULL,'2023-11-25 04:17:13',NULL,'Learn More','https://aioseo.com/announcing-truseo-highlighter/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_campaign=truseo-highlighter-v4-lite&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_content=Learn%20More','Upgrade to Pro','https://aioseo.com/lite-upgrade/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_campaign=truseo-highlighter-v4-lite&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_content=Upgrade%20to%20Pro',0,0,'2023-09-24 08:11:46','2023-12-06 00:42:25'),
(52,'652f7de549617',NULL,'Elevate Your SEO Strategy: Meet Cornerstone Content in AIOSEO 4.4.8! ??','Introducing Cornerstone Content – your secret weapon to boost search rankings and dominate your niche. ?\r\n<br><br>\r\nBuild <em>authority & expertise</em>, improve <em>crawling and indexing</em>, supercharge your <em>semantic SEO</em>, and more with this game-changing addition in <strong>AIOSEO 4.4.8</strong>.\r\n<br><br>\r\n???? Upgrade today or click to Learn more!\r\n','success','[\"4-x\",\"lite\"]',860,NULL,'2023-11-25 04:17:13',NULL,'Learn More','https://aioseo.com/new-supercharge-your-seo-and-content-strategy-with-cornerstone-content/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_campaign=cornerstone-content-v4-lite&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_content=Learn%20More','Upgrade to Pro','https://aioseo.com/lite-upgrade/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_campaign=cornerstone-content-v4-lite&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_content=Upgrade%20to%20Pro',0,0,'2023-10-18 06:40:37','2023-12-06 00:42:25'),
(53,'6546b4e3f1e4c',NULL,'Black Friday’s Here ?: HUGE Sale [Up To 70% Off] + Giveaway!','<img 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\" />\r\n<br><br>\r\nOur biggest sale of the year is now live! <strong>Get up to 70% off AIOSEO</strong>, the world’s best WordPress SEO plugin. You’ll unlock <em>tons of new features</em> like <strong>Cornerstone Content</strong>, <strong>Search Statistics</strong>, an <strong>advanced robots.txt editor</strong> and more! \r\n<br><br>\r\nPLUS enter our giveaway to WIN an <strong>iPhone 15 Pro Max</strong> ?and <strong>Apple Watch Ultra 2</strong> ⌚. No purchase is necessary to enter!','success','[\"4-x\",\"lite\"]',894,NULL,'2023-11-20 00:00:00','2023-11-27 00:00:00','Enter Giveaway','https://aioseo.com/black-friday/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_campaign=liteplugin&utm_medium=Plugin Notification&utm_content=bf2023-enter-giveaway-v4-lite','Claim Your Upgrade Discount','https://aioseo.com/black-friday/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_campaign=liteplugin&utm_medium=Plugin Notification&utm_content=bf2023-claim-your-upgrade-discount-v4-lite',0,0,'2023-11-04 21:17:23','2023-11-26 10:05:09'),
(54,'6546b4e3f327e',NULL,'Cyber Monday Sale ?‍? Last Chance to Get Up to 70% Off AIOSEO!','<img 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\" />\r\n<br><br>\r\nIt’s Cyber Monday ?. It’s also your final chance to get <strong>up to 70% off AIOSEO</strong>!\r\n<br><br>\r\nAs soon as you upgrade, you’ll unlock our next-gen <strong>Schema Generator</strong>, <strong>Local Business SEO tools</strong>, powerful <strong>Redirection Manager</strong>, <strong>Link Assistant</strong>, and more.\r\n<br><br>\r\nDon’t miss our biggest sale of the year!','success','[\"4-x\",\"lite\"]',905,NULL,'2023-11-27 00:00:00','2023-12-02 00:00:00','Claim Your Upgrade Deal Now','https://aioseo.com/black-friday/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_campaign=liteplugin&utm_medium=Plugin Notification&utm_content=bf2023-claim-your-upgrade-deal-now-v4-lite',NULL,NULL,0,0,'2023-11-04 21:17:23','2023-12-01 02:56:13'),
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\" />\r\n\r\nEver wanted an easy way to know if your URLs have been indexed? Now you can with AIOSEO’s new <strong>Index Status feature</strong> in version 4.5.0.\r\n<br><br>\r\nYou can check your URL’s index status and other important URL information from <strong>right inside your WordPress dashboard</strong>.\r\n<br><br>\r\nUpdate now and get this game-changing addition in AIOSEO 4.5.0!','success','[\"4-x\",\"lite\"]',958,NULL,'2023-11-25 04:17:13',NULL,'Learn More','https://aioseo.com/new-index-status-enhance-your-seo-visibility-by-ensuring-all-your-urls-are-indexed/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_campaign=index-status-v4-lite&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_content=Get%20AIOSEO%20Pro','Get AIOSEO Pro','https://aioseo.com/lite-upgrade/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_campaign=index-status-v4-lite&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_content=Get%20AIOSEO%20Pro',0,0,'2023-11-17 20:34:08','2023-12-06 00:42:25'),
(57,'65a7d9c1d3af3',NULL,'[New] Boost Your Rankings with Our Author SEO (Google E-E-A-T) Addon ✍️','<p>We’re excited to announce our latest SEO module in AIOSEO 4.5.4 — the Author SEO addon ?.</p>\n\n<p>This is a simple yet powerful module that enables you to demonstrate your expertise, experience, authority, and trustworthiness <strong>(E-E-A-T)</strong> to search engines and users.</p>\n\n<p>As a result, you’ll get <strong><em>better rankings</em></strong>, <strong><em>increase your traffic</em></strong>, and <strong><em>boost your conversions</em></strong>.</p>\n\n<p>So, go ahead and <strong><em>update to 4.5.4</em></strong> and give your site that much-needed boost.</p>','success','[\"4-x\",\"lite\"]',1030,NULL,'2024-01-16 19:39:13',NULL,'Learn More','https://aioseo.com/introducing-author-seo-google-e-e-a-t-addon/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_campaign=author-seo-eeat-v4-x-lite','Get AIOSEO Pro','https://aioseo.com/lite-upgrade/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_campaign=author-seo-eeat-v4-x-lite',0,0,'2024-01-17 13:44:33','2024-09-11 06:18:35'),
(58,'65b56f0b1c8d4',NULL,'Winter Sale 2024 ❄️ Get Up to 70% Off AIOSEO!!!','<img 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\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-1039\"/>\n\n<p>Our Winter Sale is On ?. This is your chance to boost your SEO and save up to 70% on AIOSEO!&nbsp;</p>\n\n<p>Whether it’s a new purchase or an upgrade, you’ll unlock ? <strong>POWERFUL FEATURES</strong> that will help you take your SEO game to the next level.</p>\n\n<p>Start the year off with a bang and save big!</p>','success','[\"4-x\",\"lite\"]',1035,NULL,'2024-01-26 18:20:28','2024-02-02 00:00:00','Get AIOSEO Pro','https://aioseo.com/lite-upgrade/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_campaign=winter-sale-v4-x-lite',NULL,NULL,0,0,'2024-01-27 21:00:59','2024-02-01 18:48:33'),
(59,'65cbd821a5ad6',NULL,'[NEW] Updated SEO Preview, Redirection Manager, Author SEO, and More','<p>AIOSEO 4.5.6 is live, implementing many of your suggestions! ?</p>\n\n<p>? Improved SEO Preview - To better match Google SERPs.<br>? Redirect Scheduler - Schedule seasonal redirects easily.<br>? Import Redirects from a CSV File - Add redirects in bulk.<br>?️ Improved Author SEO - Improvements to the E-E-A-T addon.</p>\n\n<p>AIOSEO 4.5.6 comes packed with many other improvements to the modules you already love.&nbsp;</p>\n\n<p>Update your plugin to version 4.5.6 NOW!</p>','success','[\"4-x\",\"lite\"]',1042,NULL,'2024-02-12 22:15:51',NULL,'Learn More','https://aioseo.com/new-updated-seo-preview-redirection-manager-author-seo/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_campaign=aioseo-456-v4-x-lite','Get AIOSEO Pro','https://aioseo.com/lite-upgrade/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_campaign=aioseo-456-v4-x-lite',0,0,'2024-02-13 20:59:13','2024-09-11 06:18:35'),
(60,'65cbd821a69e5',NULL,'Be Our Valentine and Get Up To 70% Off! ?','<img src=\"data:image/webp;base64,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\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-1053\"/>\n\n<p>It’s Valentine’s Day, and love is in the air! ❤️</p>\n\n<p>Get up to <strong><em>70% off</em></strong> when you upgrade your plan TODAY ONLY!</p>\n\n<p>So, take advantage of our Valentine’s Day sale and get more power under your site’s hood TODAY!</p>','success','[\"4-x\",\"lite\"]',1049,NULL,'2024-02-14 00:00:00','2024-02-16 00:00:00','Get AIOSEO Pro','https://aioseo.com/lite-upgrade/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_campaign=valentines-2024-v4-x-lite',NULL,NULL,0,0,'2024-02-13 20:59:13','2024-02-15 19:16:11'),
(61,'65f6d526e69d6',NULL,'? Flash Sale: Get Up To 70% Off AIOSEO This St. Patrick\'s Day! ?','<p><strong><em>Happy St. Patrick\'s Day!</em></strong> Today\'s your lucky day because we\'re celebrating with a flash sale that\'s too good to miss.</p>\n\n<p>Score <strong><em>up to 70% off</em></strong> when you upgrade your plan <strong>TODAY ONLY</strong>!</p>\n\n<p>With this deal, there\'s no need to chase down a leprechaun to find that pot of gold. ? But hurry, like a rainbow, it will disappear before you know it!</p>','success','[\"4-x\",\"lite\"]',1061,NULL,'2024-03-17 00:00:00','2024-03-19 00:00:00','Get AIOSEO Pro','https://aioseo.com/lite-upgrade/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_campaign=st-patricks-day-sale-v4-x-lite',NULL,NULL,0,0,'2024-03-17 11:33:58','2024-03-18 14:07:48'),
(62,'65fb5b7626f69',NULL,'? [New] Query Arg Monitoring for Improved Crawling and Indexing','<p>We’ve revamped the Crawl Cleanup module and added a <strong><em>NEW</em></strong> <strong>Query Arg Monitor</strong>. This game-changing feature gives you greater control of your query args, resulting in more efficient crawling and indexing.</p>\n\n<p>AIOSEO 4.5.8 comes packed with many other improvements to the modules you already love.&nbsp;</p>\n\n<p>Update your plugin to version 4.5.8 NOW!</p>','success','[\"4-x\",\"lite\"]',1058,NULL,'2024-03-19 19:37:40',NULL,'Learn More','https://aioseo.com/new-query-arg-monitoring-for-improved-crawling-and-indexing/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_campaign=aioseo-458-v4-x-lite','Get AIOSEO Pro','https://aioseo.com/lite-upgrade/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_campaign=aioseo-458-v4-x-lite',0,0,'2024-03-20 21:56:06','2024-09-11 06:18:35'),
(63,'6617c2e169abf',NULL,'The AIOSEO Broken Link Checker 1.2.0 is live ?!','<p>Now with 3 powerful new features to make broken link management much easier. Update and get:</p>\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>? Unified URL UI Improvements</li>\n\n<li>✍️ Broken Links Highlighter</li>\n\n<li>⏪ AIOSEO Redirects Integration</li>\n</ul>\n\n<p>Check out our announcement post for more and upgrade today!</p>','success','[\"4-x\",\"lite\"]',1069,NULL,'2024-04-10 19:13:10',NULL,'Learn More','https://aioseo.com/easier-broken-link-management-with-3-new-features/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_campaign=aioseo-460-blc-120-v4-x-lite','Get Broken Link Checker','https://aioseo.com/pricing-broken-link-checker/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_campaign=aioseo-460-blc-120-v4-x-lite',0,0,'2024-04-11 11:00:49','2024-12-20 15:08:49'),
(64,'6626d2dc4f428',NULL,'? Get up to 70% off AIOSEO this Spring! ?','<p>Take advantage of our <strong><em>spring sale</em></strong> for AIOSEO Pro. <strong><em>Up to 70% off</em></strong> ?</p>\n\n<p>Amplify your online presence with advanced features that will transform your site into a dynamic, high-performing powerhouse, at a fraction of the cost!</p>\n\n<p>These massive discounts won\'t last long, so act now!</p>','success','[\"4-x\",\"lite\"]',1074,NULL,'2024-04-22 20:24:47','2024-04-26 00:00:00','Get AIOSEO Pro','https://aioseo.com/lite-upgrade/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_campaign=spring-sale-v4-x-lite',NULL,NULL,0,0,'2024-04-22 21:13:00','2024-04-25 16:39:40'),
(65,'663d669aac77e',NULL,'Have you connected your site to Google Search Console?','All in One SEO can now verify whether your site is correctly verified with Google Search Console and that your sitemaps have been submitted correctly. Connect with Google Search Console now to ensure your content is being added to Google as soon as possible for increased rankings.','warning','[\"all\"]',NULL,'search-console-site-not-connected','2024-05-10 00:13:14',NULL,'Connect to Google Search Console','https://route#aioseo-settings&aioseo-scroll=google-search-console-settings&aioseo-highlight=google-search-console-settings:webmaster-tools?activetool=googleSearchConsole',NULL,NULL,0,0,'2024-05-10 00:13:14','2024-05-10 00:13:14'),
(66,'6644be0f545a4',NULL,'[NEW] Easier Site Connection to Google Search Console and Automatic Sitemap Syncing ?','<p>AIOSEO 4.6.2 is live ?!</p>\n\n<p>We’ve made it super easy to connect your site to <strong>Google Search Console</strong> — so simple that you don’t even need to mess with verification codes!</p>\n\n<p>We’ve also made sitemap management easy! Your sitemaps can now <strong><em>automatically sync with GSC</em></strong>. This means we\'ll make sure that Google knows about all the necessary sitemaps automatically!</p>\n\n<p>Check out our announcement post for more. ????</p>','success','[\"4-x\",\"lite\"]',1080,NULL,'2024-05-14 12:43:31',NULL,'Learn More','https://aioseo.com/easier-site-connection-to-google-search-console/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_campaign=aioseo-462-v4-x-lite','Get AIOSEO Pro','https://aioseo.com/lite-upgrade/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_campaign=aioseo-462-v4-x-lite',0,0,'2024-05-15 13:52:15','2024-12-20 15:08:49'),
(67,'665666a2ad45e',NULL,'?? Memorial Day Exclusive: Get up to 70% Off on New Plans or Upgrades! ??','<p>t’s Finally here ?</p>\n\n<p>Memorial Day—the unofficial beginning of summer.</p>\n\n<p>We’re offering <strong><em>up to 70% off</em></strong> new purchases or upgrades to celebrate.</p>\n\n<p>This is a limited-time deal, so <strong>grab your savings TODAY!</strong></p>','success','[\"4-x\",\"lite\"]',1083,NULL,'2024-05-27 17:12:32','2024-05-29 00:00:00','Get AIOSEO Pro','https://aioseo.com/lite-upgrade/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_campaign=memorial-day-sale-v4-x-lite',NULL,NULL,0,0,'2024-05-28 23:20:02','2024-05-28 23:20:02'),
(68,'667ae0f112154',NULL,'Have you heard? AIOSEO Acquires LowFruits to Boost Your SEO Power! ?','<p>We are thrilled to announce that AIOSEO has acquired LowFruits, a leading keyword research tool! ? This exciting partnership means even more advanced SEO capabilities are coming your way.</p>\n\n<p>Get ready to elevate your SEO game with the combined power of AIOSEO and LowFruits!</p>','success','[\"4-x\",\"lite\"]',1089,NULL,'2024-07-01 00:00:00',NULL,'Read the Announcement','https://aioseo.com/aioseo-acquires-lowfruits/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_campaign=aioseo-lowfruits-v4-x-lite','Get AIOSEO Pro','https://aioseo.com/lite-upgrade/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_campaign=aioseo-lowfruits-v4-x-lite',0,0,'2024-06-25 15:23:29','2025-05-01 12:12:41'),
(69,'667ae0f113b81',NULL,'Celebrate AIOSEO\'s 17th Birthday with Up to 70% Off! ?','<p>Your favorite WordPress SEO plugin, AIOSEO, has just turned 17 <strong>?</strong>! And to celebrate, we’re offering you massive discounts on new plans and upgrades.&nbsp;</p>\n\n<p>This means you can <strong>save up to 70%</strong> and get advanced SEO features when you purchase TODAY!</p>\n\n<p>Now that’s a sweet deal!</p>','success','[\"4-x\",\"lite\"]',1086,NULL,'2024-06-24 19:39:24','2024-06-30 00:00:00','Get AIOSEO Pro','https://aioseo.com/lite-upgrade/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_campaign=2024-birthday-sale-v4-x-lite',NULL,NULL,0,0,'2024-06-25 15:23:29','2024-06-29 00:57:17'),
(70,'668da34952417',NULL,'?️ [New] Integration with Thrive Architect and SiteOrigin Page Builders in AIOSEO 4.6.6','<p>Is your website built using Thrive Architect or SiteOrigin?</p>\n\n<p>Then you’ll be glad to know that AIOSEO 4.6.6 was developed with love just for you!&nbsp;</p>\n\n<p>Now, you can use AIOSEO right inside your favorite site builder, making it easy to perform SEO tasks as you work on your posts or pages.</p>\n\n<p>So, go ahead and update to 4.6.6 and give your page builder that much-needed SEO superpower.</p>','success','[\"4-x\",\"lite\"]',1092,NULL,'2024-07-09 15:11:31',NULL,'Learn More','https://aioseo.com/new-support-for-thrive-architect-and-siteorigin-page-builders/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_campaign=aioseo-466-v4-x-lite','Get AIOSEO Pro','https://aioseo.com/lite-upgrade/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_campaign=aioseo-466-v4-x-lite',0,0,'2024-07-09 20:53:29','2024-09-11 06:18:35'),
(71,'66972f391bc90',NULL,'? Celebrate World Emoji Day with Our Exclusive Flash Sale! ?','<img 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\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-1110\" />\n\n<p>Today only, we\'re offering you a <strong>special upgrade discount of up to 70%</strong>! ? Don\'t miss out on this fantastic opportunity to enhance your SEO at a fraction of the cost.</p>\n\n<p><strong>Why Upgrade?</strong></p>\n\n<ol>\n<li>Unlock premium SEO features</li>\n\n<li>Get priority customer support</li>\n\n<li>Improve your chances of ranking higher on search engines</li>\n\n<li>Benefit from in-depth on-page analysis &amp; identify optimization opportunities</li>\n</ol>\n\n<p><strong>Hurry!</strong> This flash sale ends today.&nbsp;</p>\n\n<p>Upgrade your plan now and make the most of World Emoji Day! ?✨</p>','success','[\"4-x\",\"lite\"]',1100,NULL,'2024-07-17 00:00:00','2024-07-19 00:00:00','Get AIOSEO Pro','https://aioseo.com/lite-upgrade/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_campaign=emoji-sale-v4-x-lite',NULL,NULL,0,0,'2024-07-17 02:40:57','2024-07-18 03:21:28'),
(72,'66a92ad3ea795',NULL,'Summer Sale 2024 ?! Get Up to 70% Off AIOSEO ? ','<img 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\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-1116\" />\n\n<p>Our Summer Sale is on ?. This is your chance to boost your SEO and <strong>save up to 70% on AIOSEO</strong>!&nbsp;</p>\n\n<p>Whether it’s a new purchase or an upgrade, you’ll unlock ? POWERFUL FEATURES that will help you take your SEO game to the next level.</p>\n\n<p>Upgrade today before these discounts expire! ⏰</p>','success','[\"4-x\",\"lite\"]',1114,NULL,'2024-08-02 00:00:00','2024-08-09 00:00:00','Get AIOSEO Pro','https://aioseo.com/lite-upgrade/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_campaign=summer-sale-v4-x-lite',NULL,NULL,0,0,'2024-07-30 18:02:59','2024-08-08 05:52:42'),
(73,'66bc1d564bc0d',NULL,'[NEW] Powerful New Schema Types and Updates ? ?  ','<p>AIOSEO 4.6.8 is here ?</p>\n\n<p>And it’s packed with powerful new schema types to boost your content visibility:</p>\n\n<ol class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>Course Info Schema</li>\n\n<li>Product Review Schema</li>\n\n<li>Car (Vehicle Listing) Schema</li>\n\n<li>Table of Contents Schema</li>\n\n<li>Expanded Organization Schema</li>\n</ol>\n\n<p>We\'ve also enhanced schema visualization and updated existing schema types to match Google\'s latest guidelines.</p>\n\n<p>Ready to dominate SERPs?&nbsp;</p>\n\n<p>Update to AIOSEO 4.6.8 now and unlock these amazing features!</p>','success','[\"4-x\",\"lite\"]',1126,NULL,'2024-08-13 00:00:00',NULL,'Learn More','https://aioseo.com/announcing-aioseo-4-6-8-powerful-new-schema-types-and-updates?utm_source=WordPress&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_campaign=468-v4-x-lite','Get AIOSEO Pro','https://aioseo.com/lite-upgrade/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_campaign=468-v4-x-lite',0,0,'2024-08-14 02:58:30','2025-05-01 12:12:41'),
(74,'66cf0a153ccaa',NULL,'Great Savings This Labor Day! Get Up to 70% OFF ??','<img src=\"data:image/webp;base64,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\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-1144\" />\n\n<p>Our Labor Day Sale is on ?. </p>\n\n<p>We honor the hard work you put into your site and want to help make it easier. That’s why we’re offering you a chance to unlock more SEO features by offering <strong>up to 70% off new plans and upgrades</strong>! ?</p>\n\n<p>Take your SEO game to the next level by working smarter, not harder—all thanks to AIOSEO, the world’s best WordPress SEO plugin.</p>\n\n<p>Upgrade today before these discounts expire! ⏳</p>','success','[\"4-x\",\"lite\"]',1138,NULL,'2024-09-02 00:00:00','2024-09-04 00:00:00','Get AIOSEO Pro','https://aioseo.com/lite-upgrade/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_campaign=labor-day-sale-v4-x-lite',NULL,NULL,0,0,'2024-08-28 11:29:25','2024-09-02 22:03:55'),
(75,'66e2b776d0b6b',NULL,'[New] Keyword Rank Tracker: Track Your SEO Performance with Ease ?','<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Drumroll, please! AIOSEO 4.7.0 has arrived with a super-awaited feature: the <strong>Keyword Rank Tracker</strong> ?</p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Now, you can finally track your keyword performance with ease, right from your WordPress dashboard. No more guessing games!</p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Key features:</p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">✅ Track up to 100 keywords<br>✅ Group keywords for better organization<br>✅ Seamless integration with post-meta box</p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Get ready to dominate SERPs!</p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Update to AIOSEO 4.7.0 now and unlock this SEO powerhouse.</strong></p>','success','[\"4-x\",\"lite\"]',1148,NULL,'2024-09-10 00:00:00',NULL,'Learn More','https://aioseo.com/new-track-your-keywords-effortlessly-in-wordpress-with-aioseo-4-7-0/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_campaign=aioseo-470-v4-x-lite','Get AIOSEO Pro','https://aioseo.com/lite-upgrade/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_campaign=aioseo-470-v4-x-lite',0,0,'2024-09-12 09:42:14','2026-07-15 22:08:46'),
(76,'6705aa07ce280',NULL,'[New] SEO Email Reports and Bulk CSV Imports/Exports to Enhance SEO Management','<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">? New Feature Alert! </p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">AIOSEO 4.7.2 just dropped with two killer features - </p>\n\n<ol class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li><strong>SEO Email Reports</strong><br>? Say goodbye to manual SEO performance tracking and hello to laser-focused insights delivered straight to your inbox! ?</li>\n\n<li><strong>Bulk CSV Import/Export</strong><br>⚡️The new Bulk CSV tool lets you manage settings across your entire site in a snap. ? Export, edit, and import easily – it\'s like having an SEO superpower at your fingertips! ?</li>\n</ol>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Update to AIOSEO 4.7.2 now and unlock these game-changing features!</p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"></p>','success','[\"4-x\",\"lite\"]',1156,NULL,'2024-10-08 00:00:00',NULL,'Learn More','https://aioseo.com/new-seo-email-reports-and-bulk-csv-imports/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_campaign=472-v4-x-lite','Get AIOSEO Pro','https://aioseo.com/lite-upgrade/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_campaign=472-v4-x-lite',0,0,'2024-10-08 21:54:15','2026-07-15 22:08:46'),
(77,'671b548b03191',NULL,'Fall Sale 2024 ? Get Up to 70% Off AIOSEO!','<p>? Our <strong>Fall Sale is here</strong>—and it’s your golden opportunity to supercharge your SEO!&nbsp;</p>\n\n<p>For a limited time, you can get <strong>up to 70% off</strong> on AIOSEO when you get a new plan or upgrade your current one.</p>\n\n<p>Unlock <strong>POWERFUL FEATURES</strong> that elevate your SEO game and enhance your site’s performance. ?</p>','success','[\"4-x\",\"lite\"]',1159,NULL,'2024-10-25 00:00:00','2024-11-01 00:00:00','Get AIOSEO Pro','https://aioseo.com/lite-upgrade/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_campaign=silent-fall-sale-v4-x-lite',NULL,NULL,0,0,'2024-10-25 08:19:23','2024-10-30 23:29:18'),
(78,'672d14b9cffc8',NULL,'[New] Meet Your New Writing Assistant ✍️!','<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">? New Feature Alert!&nbsp;</p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">We\'re thrilled to announce the release of our groundbreaking feature —<strong>Writing Assistant</strong>, powered by AIOSEO and SEOBoost ?</p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>The Writing Assistant is your new personal guide to crafting SEO-friendly content right inside WordPress! ? </strong></p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">No more guesswork—just optimized content that ranks.</p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Update to AIOSEO 4.7.4 now and unlock this revolutionary superpower!</p>','success','[\"4-x\",\"lite\"]',1166,NULL,'2024-11-05 00:00:00',NULL,'Learn More','https://aioseo.com/new-revolutionize-your-content-creation-with-aioseos-writing-assistant/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_campaign=474-v4-x-lite','Get AIOSEO Pro','https://aioseo.com/lite-upgrade/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_campaign=474-v4-x-lite',0,0,'2024-11-07 19:27:53','2026-07-15 22:08:46'),
(79,'674540312aaae',NULL,'It’s Black Friday! Get Up to 70% OFF ?','<img 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\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-1177\" />\n\n<p>It\'s the perfect time to supercharge your website\'s SEO. ?</p>\n\n<p><strong>Get up to 70% OFF</strong> on all new purchases and upgrades of AIOSEO. That\'s right, you can save BIG on the ultimate SEO solution.</p>\n\n<p>? What\'s in it for you?</p>\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li><strong>Dominate Search Results:</strong> Boost your website\'s visibility and attract more organic traffic.</li>\n\n<li><strong>Skyrocket Your Rankings:</strong> Climb higher on Google and other search engines.</li>\n\n<li><strong>Effortless SEO:</strong> Simplify your SEO tasks with AI-powered tools.</li>\n\n<li><strong>Expert Support:</strong> Get 24/7 support from our SEO experts.</li>\n</ul>\n\n<p>Don\'t miss this golden opportunity! Upgrade your plan or purchase a new license today. </p>\n\n<p>This Black Friday Sale is your golden ticket to level up your SEO and crush search rankings! ?</p>','success','[\"4-x\",\"lite\"]',1176,NULL,'2024-11-25 00:00:00','2024-12-02 00:00:00','Get AIOSEO Pro','https://aioseo.com/lite-upgrade/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_campaign=black-friday-24-v4-x-lite',NULL,NULL,0,0,'2024-11-26 03:27:45','2024-12-01 08:57:08'),
(80,'674a7786d0881',NULL,'Cyber Monday Madness (Up To 70% Off AIOSEO) ?','<img 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\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-1185\" />\n\n<p><strong>Cyber Monday is here!</strong> The deals are still hot! ?</p>\n\n<p><strong>Save up to 70%</strong> on AIOSEO. It\'s the perfect time to level up your SEO game.</p>\n\n<p><strong>Why choose AIOSEO?</strong></p>\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li><strong>Easy-to-use:</strong> No technical expertise required.</li>\n\n<li><strong>Powerful features:</strong> Advanced SEO tools at your fingertips.</li>\n\n<li><strong>Expert support:</strong> Get help from our SEO pros.</li>\n</ul>\n\n<p><strong>Don\'t miss out!</strong> Upgrade your plan or purchase a new license today.</p>','success','[\"4-x\",\"lite\"]',1184,NULL,'2024-12-02 00:00:00','2024-12-06 00:00:00','Get AIOSEO Pro','https://aioseo.com/lite-upgrade/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_campaign=black-friday-24-v4-x-lite',NULL,NULL,0,0,'2024-11-30 02:25:10','2024-12-05 10:33:07'),
(81,'6758a1c11d9b1',NULL,'BuddyPress, Web Stories, and Enhanced Author SEO — An All in One Update! ?!','<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">We just released AIOSEO 4.7.6 and it’s loaded with some exciting updates!</p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The top ones include:<br><br>? <strong>BuddyPress Integration:</strong> Fully optimize SEO settings for BuddyPress content types, including user profiles, activity streams, and more.<br>? <strong>Google Web Stories Integration:</strong> Take full control of your SEO settings for Web Stories, resulting in more eyeballs on your content.<br>? <strong>Author SEO Improvements:</strong> Effortlessly showcase Google\'s E-E-A-T guidelines and boost your site\'s credibility.</p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Update to AIOSEO 4.7.6 now and take your SEO to another level ??</p>','success','[\"4-x\",\"lite\"]',1192,NULL,'2024-12-12 00:00:00',NULL,'Learn More','https://aioseo.com/new-aioseo-4-7-6-buddypress-web-stories-integration-author-seo-improvements?utm_source=WordPress&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_campaign=476-v4-x-lite','Get AIOSEO Pro','https://aioseo.com/lite-upgrade/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_campaign=476-v4-x-lite',0,0,'2024-12-10 20:17:05','2026-07-15 22:08:46'),
(82,'676ed28c450f6',NULL,'Email Reports','Stay ahead in SEO with our new email digest! Get the latest tips, trends, and tools delivered right to your inbox, helping you optimize smarter and faster. Enable it today and never miss an update that can take your rankings to the next level.','info','[\"all\"]',NULL,'email-reports-enable-reminder','2024-12-27 16:15:08',NULL,'Enable Email Reports','https://route#aioseo-settings&aioseo-scroll=aioseo-email-summary-row&aioseo-highlight=aioseo-email-summary-row:advanced','All Good, I\'m already getting it','http://action#notification/email-reports-enable',0,0,'2024-12-27 16:15:08','2024-12-27 16:15:08'),
(83,'679a50d0b0559',NULL,'[New] Smarter Keyword Rank Tracking &amp; WooCommerce SEO Made Easy!?','<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">We just released AIOSEO 4.7.8 and it’s loaded with some exciting updates!</p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The top ones include:</p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">?? <strong>Smarter Keyword Rank Tracker</strong>: Our Keyword Rank Tracker just got some massive upgrades you don’t want to miss. Now you can get related keywords, import keywords from GSC and more.</p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">?? <strong>Support for WooCommerce Product Attributes</strong>: Setting product attributes in WordPress just got way easier. Plus, you can also export product attributes! </p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Update to AIOSEO 4.7.8 now and take your SEO to another level.</p>','success','[\"4-x\",\"lite\"]',1213,NULL,'2025-01-28 00:00:00',NULL,'Learn More','https://aioseo.com/smarter-keyword-rank-tracking-woocommerce-seo-made-easy/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_campaign=478-v4-x-lite','Get AIOSEO Pro','https://aioseo.com/lite-upgrade/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_campaign=478-v4-x-lite',0,0,'2025-01-29 16:01:20','2026-07-15 22:08:46'),
(84,'67b083a73c83a',NULL,'? Fall in Love with Better SEO: AIOSEO Valentine\'s Flash Sale!','<p>This Valentine\'s Day, stop settling for \"meh\" rankings and give your site the love it deserves with AIOSEO! ❤️</p>\n\n<p>For a limited time, grab AIOSEO at up to 70% OFF!</p>\n\n<p>That’s right, we’re spreading the love with a flash sale on the #1 WordPress SEO plugin. Whether you\'re upgrading or starting fresh, everyone feels the love! ?</p>\n\n<p>But hurry, this offer vanishes faster than a box of chocolates on February 15th! ?</p>\n\n<p></p>','success','[\"4-x\",\"lite\"]',1218,NULL,'2025-02-14 00:00:00','2025-02-16 00:00:00','Get AIOSEO Pro','https://aioseo.com/lite-upgrade/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_campaign=valentine-sale-2025-v4-x-lite',NULL,NULL,0,0,'2025-02-15 12:08:07','2025-02-15 12:08:07'),
(85,'67d970dda0207',NULL,'? St. Patrick\'s Day FLASH SALE - Up to 70% Off AIOSEO Today Only!','<img 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\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-1235\"/>\n\n<p>Get a new plan or upgrade your AIOSEO NOW &amp; unlock up to 70% OFF advanced SEO features - </p>\n\n<p>? Powerful SEO Optimization<br>✅ Advanced Sitemaps<br>? Redirection Manager<br>? AI Internal Link Assistant<br>? SEO Mastertools<br>??‍? Search Insights</p>\n\n<p>Drive more traffic with cutting-edge optimizations. This deal vanishes at midnight ?</p>\n\n<p><strong>The clock is ticking—grab your discount before it disappears! </strong>?</p>','success','[\"4-x\",\"lite\"]',1229,NULL,'2025-03-17 00:00:00','2025-03-19 00:00:00','Get AIOSEO Pro','https://aioseo.com/lite-upgrade/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_campaign=st-patricks-day2025-v4-x-lite',NULL,NULL,0,0,'2025-03-18 13:10:53','2025-03-18 13:10:53'),
(86,'67d970dda11fb',NULL,'[New] Supercharged Crawl Cleanup and Query Arg Monitoring! ?','<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Is your WordPress site slowing down? Or are AI bots scraping your content? ?</p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>AIOSEO 4.8.0 puts you in control with</strong>:<br>? <strong>Supercharged Crawl Cleanup</strong> – Stop search engines from indexing unnecessary URLs.<br>? <strong>Advanced Query Monitoring</strong> – Optimize UTM parameters automatically.<br>?️ <strong>Bot Control</strong> – Block unauthorized AI crawlers.<br>? <strong>Internal Search Optimization</strong> – Prevent spam &amp; boost performance.<br><br>? Keep your site fast, secure, and SEO-friendly. Update now! ?</p>','success','[\"4-x\",\"lite\"]',1222,NULL,'2025-03-11 00:00:00',NULL,'Learn More','https://aioseo.com/introducing-aioseo-4-8-0-advanced-crawl-features/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_campaign=480-v4-x-lite','Get AIOSEO Pro','https://aioseo.com/lite-upgrade/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_campaign=480-v4-x-lite',0,0,'2025-03-18 13:10:53','2026-07-15 22:08:46'),
(87,'6819fc5e4144e',NULL,'Spring Sale 2025! Get Up to 70% Off AIOSEO','<img 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\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-1240\"/>\n\n<p>Save up to 70% OFF on AIOSEO &amp; give your website a vibrant boost this spring!&nbsp;</p>\n\n<p>Ready for new growth? Whether you need a fresh plan or a powerful upgrade...</p>\n\n<p>? Unlock pro-level features and cultivate top search rankings! Don\'t let this season of savings pass you by!</p>','success','[\"4-x\",\"lite\"]',1239,NULL,'2025-05-01 00:00:00','2025-05-08 00:00:00','Get AIOSEO Pro','https://aioseo.com/lite-upgrade/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_campaign=spring-sale-2025-v4-x-lite',NULL,NULL,0,0,'2025-05-06 12:11:10','2025-05-06 12:11:10'),
(88,'683319bcd60d0',NULL,'[New] Get Indexing Data Right Inside WordPress!','<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Worried Google\'s not seeing your amazing WordPress content? ?&nbsp;</p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">AIOSEO 4.8.2 introduces the <strong>Index Status Report</strong>, giving you crystal-clear visibility into what <strong>Google\'s indexing</strong> (and what it\'s missing!). <strong>Uncover hidden indexing issues</strong>, see post-level details, and track your rich results—all within your familiar WordPress dashboard.&nbsp;</p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Stop losing traffic and ensure your hard work gets seen.&nbsp;</p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Update to AIOSEO 4.8.2 today and take control of your website’s visibility! ?</p>','success','[\"4-x\",\"lite\"]',1249,NULL,'2025-05-22 15:19:11',NULL,'Learn More','https://aioseo.com/introducing-index-status-report/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_campaign=aioseo-482-v4-x-lite','Get AIOSEO Pro','https://aioseo.com/lite-upgrade/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_campaign=aioseo-482-v4-x-lite',0,0,'2025-05-25 13:23:08','2026-07-15 22:08:46'),
(89,'6871e12970a19',NULL,'[New] AI Content Generator: Supercharge Your Content Creation!','<img 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\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-1276\" style=\"object-fit:cover\"/>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Tired of the endless grind of crafting content, SEO titles, meta descriptions, social media posts, and FAQs?&nbsp;</p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">We get it! Creating high-quality, optimized content can be challenging and time-consuming. That\'s why we\'re thrilled to introduce AIOSEO\'s new <strong>AI Content Generator</strong>!</p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Automatically generate content snippets like:</p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">✅ FAQs<br>✅ Key points<br>✅ Social media posts<br>✅ Email copy<br>✅ SEO titles and meta descriptions&nbsp;</p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">... and much more to come!</p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Update to AIOSEO 4.8.4 now to unlock these powerful AI features and transform your content creation process! ?</p>','success','[\"4-x\",\"lite\"]',1270,NULL,'2025-07-09 13:36:07',NULL,'Learn More','https://aioseo.com/new-ai-content-generator/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_campaign=aioseo-484-v4-x-lite','Get AIOSEO Pro','https://aioseo.com/lite-upgrade/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_campaign=aioseo-484-v4-x-lite',0,0,'2025-07-12 04:14:33','2026-07-15 22:08:46'),
(90,'6890c35635cd6',NULL,'☀️ Summer Sale - Up to 70% Off AIOSEO Plans!','<img 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\" alt=\"Summer sale\" class=\"wp-image-1288\"/>\n\n<p>? It’s the Hottest Sale of the Summer! ?</p>\n\n<p>Get up to <strong>70% off</strong> AIOSEO, whether you\'re grabbing a new plan or upgrading your current one.</p>\n\n<p>This summer special is only here for a short time, so don’t miss your chance to SAVE BIG!</p>\n\n<p>☀️ Grab your discount before it’s gone!</p>','success','[\"4-x\",\"lite\"]',1286,NULL,'2025-08-01 00:00:00','2025-08-08 00:00:00','Get AIOSEO Pro','https://aioseo.com/lite-upgrade/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_campaign=summer-sale-2025-v4-x-lite',NULL,NULL,0,0,'2025-08-04 14:27:34','2025-08-07 06:26:33'),
(91,'68b223d55af69',NULL,'Introducing Site Audit in AIOSEO 4.8.6','<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Tired of guessing why your website isn’t ranking higher? Or frustrated by SEO tools that give you too much data but no clear answers?</p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">We’ve supercharged our SEO Analyzer to give you crystal-clear insights and action steps—right inside your WordPress dashboard!</p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Now you can:</p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">✅ Scan your <strong>entire site</strong> for common SEO issues.</p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">✅ View issues <strong>page-by-page</strong> or <strong>by issue type</strong>.</p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">✅ <strong>Get instant tooltips</strong>, 1-click fixes, and quick keyword additions.</p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">✅ <strong>Track progress</strong> with satisfying visual checkmarks.</p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Update to AIOSEO 4.8.6 today and take the guesswork out of SEO!</p>','success','[\"4-x\",\"lite\"]',1298,NULL,'2025-08-27 00:00:00',NULL,'Learn More','https://aioseo.com/site-audit-announcement/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_campaign=486-v4-x-lite','Get AIOSEO Pro','https://aioseo.com/lite-upgrade/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_campaign=486-v4-x-lite',0,0,'2025-08-29 22:04:05','2026-07-15 22:08:46'),
(92,'68ff3604ed021',NULL,'? 4.8.8 is Here — Unleash the Power of AI on Your Website!','<img 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\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-1311\" style=\"object-fit:cover\"/>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Ready to create content, images, and boost your visibility faster than ever? With AIOSEO 4.8.8, you get cutting-edge AI features right inside WordPress:</p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">✅ Instantly generate blog posts, product copy, FAQs, and more with our new AI Assistant.</p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">✅ Create stunning, one-of-a-kind images with the Image Generator — no designer needed.</p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">✅ Take charge of how AI engines see your site using the new LLMS.txt Generator.</p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Update to AIOSEO 4.8.8 now and supercharge your site with the future of SEO — powered by AI. ?</p>','success','[\"4-x\",\"lite\"]',1310,NULL,'2025-10-22 16:06:34',NULL,'Learn More','https://aioseo.com/aioseo-4-8-8-release/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_campaign=4.8.8-v4-x-lite','Get AIOSEO Pro','https://aioseo.com/lite-upgrade/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_campaign=4.8.8-v4-x-lite',0,0,'2025-10-27 09:06:12','2026-07-15 22:08:46'),
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Fall Sale: Up to 60% Off AIOSEO Plans + Upgrades','<img 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\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-1317\"/>\n\n<p>Fall is here, and so is your chance to rake in the savings. ?</p>\n\n<p>We’re celebrating the season with <strong>up to 60% off t</strong>he best WordPress SEO plugin. Whether you’re starting fresh or ready to upgrade, now’s the perfect time.</p>\n\n<p>Think falling leaves, rising traffic, and incredible savings.&nbsp;</p>\n\n<p>But hurry, this sale is only here for a limited time. ⏳</p>','success','[\"4-x\",\"lite\"]',1316,NULL,'2025-10-24 00:00:00','2025-10-31 00:00:00','Get AIOSEO Pro','https://aioseo.com/lite-upgrade/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_campaign=fall-sale-2025-v4-x-lite',NULL,NULL,0,0,'2025-10-27 09:06:12','2025-10-28 15:29:39'),
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Final Days: Your Purchase Makes an Impact!','<img 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\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-1374\"/>\n\n<p>This is it—the final days of our sale! This is your last chance to get the powerful SEO tools you need to grow, and do some good for the planet at the same time. ?</p>\n\n<p>Upgrade to AIOSEO Pro now for<strong> up to 65% OFF</strong> and you\'ll get:</p>\n\n<p>✅ Access to more AIOSEO features to boost your rankings and traffic.</p>\n\n<p>? A portion of your purchase donated to the <strong>International Tree Foundation</strong>, an incredible organization that empowers communities to restore forests and fight climate change.</p>\n\n<p><strong>It’s a win-win.&nbsp;</strong></p>\n\n<p>You get to grow your site with powerful tools like the AI Image Generator, and we all help support global reforestation. ?</p>','success','[\"4-x\",\"lite\"]',1338,NULL,'2025-12-05 00:00:00','2025-12-10 00:00:00','Upgrade & Make an Impact','https://aioseo.com/pricing/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_campaign=green-monday-2025-v4-x-lite',NULL,NULL,0,0,'2025-12-05 19:26:24','2025-12-09 09:37:41'),
(96,'699e5f57259f3',NULL,'Meet Your New SEO Checklist in AIOSEO 4.9.4!','<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Maximize your site\'s potential with our latest update:</p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>✅ SEO Checklist: </strong>A new interactive guide to help you complete your setup and explore advanced features. Finish the tasks to see the confetti fly!</p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>? AI Suite:</strong> We’ve renamed AI Insights to AI Suite and moved all AI Content Settings there to centralize your tools.</p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>⚙️ License Tab:</strong> The General Settings tab is now the License tab, featuring a clearer UI and easy access to AI Credit connections.</p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Update to AIOSEO 4.9.4 and follow the roadmap to a fully optimized site! ?</p>','success','[\"4-x\",\"lite\"]',1397,NULL,'2026-02-24 00:00:00',NULL,'Learn More','https://aioseo.com/aioseo-4-9-4-release/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_campaign=4-9-4-announcement-v4-x-lite','Get AIOSEO Pro','https://aioseo.com/pricing/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_campaign=4-9-4-announcement-v4-x-lite',0,0,'2026-02-25 02:32:55','2026-07-15 22:08:46'),
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One More Day to Save Up to 60%!','<img 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O8czLBWa4HLL/i3/0pjvbIwUSqTKRfstLkYVS9jnd2QxTv51xEUPw6Bg0sQ7GtTGO6mlg5EeSv6TPOeGVrVVizZmsfNaE4FoVzNbuS0ere4uoMmVIYI6FZlZCQbWiiiqeM0+19/LM3KtquzOjTpYh+bsAxed5THhPobk8/BbW/hUzIZCMwJjzdM1NqLrOMaca+U0RI/VTvkllBMoPU7qfzSICEpqzgqN5nj6YYp85QI1LBdZTdSyC8h4E5VYt7RM1etoqEe8GiJTmn3dMAUDjh3mlRpCsOztzJL0pYEC3cH4svhPJp1NXpEFSVmilZyaghwT5dH+SLJDFI1E8xzzSD8snyOzCEateTVWd0U9XMnuEhEAc81WQOzqiKtqY8Vfqfs451RUclgDRT8/M0bBodvpIXaWZq80ZUDP/ev7eOWZOXHVY5EjzFFs3Eyzwnfn7e/xtWB3ITMFu/T++vI7Z16gZQOL9Z/71r7+0VlX/aCr3zzSLrPSrEzlJdeQYHHU/M6f7WWFIPb7mwu/uOlcOZFf1gvVWfoN10gvChW53HZmWqOepmSifunhOxBRGDVwzKDC6JsIQAKf/t//6z1tKKPK7i7eqqy9+PsZwZ6rpC2/G3aKqmhdt0O1r0OUmQWcG7pQAmMGImkS5QY0CCF2o6qND8nn6n/efXlUec/ec5uN6/UyO5e6WrD50qVDmRlxb68wKDAOYGEMyEmTYJoReN4Cn+4zur8NEYOPa3cUxgad7MJ2SRg8f4aycS92cM9WtIKBT1VUlzfO03zTC1VDjo1S1FSuoGbFUfN45hZyMt3vxjekbcfxp01gGBoh4z1/OfzzEDAA9fx3qGdSomqQKBU23j4UChJlSCaf5mMtgFqxLH6IszjRbOP6Chvf8i+/aWCQfM6/J60JF9oO2mPNbdVLlzbhMH1PAJOeMm+cs6oVCrlDQWwJbfbK0MphjsDaooMFFXDA4jb23Yj89Os1cCa4uJXHlfPQ6c9PYIL5thDT/YYSo0shKBpJdt4SNQs90rtlpbg2GYtDxKi+/7kuiZ4e60vfSzReiJWqU1EVzvpbKXH2tK7Lc6m6/q1ZIGdWQkbNKA1kRhbDmDJtRlRmiDX09xnqXGKmwdvOpuXzHeO34JsbH6HzySNc8xQtkt1kbILVvepiDS/74324D6ddQ+DpCuN/IrTdY1N2dgFGfWoCNgbRInalIP4k9LvyL0uS5Ycmz2Tow2uDlCgSTN2anTMNHBZa/YcvhFNpRk98CZZvZ7Sy3jRM+YUGepDkWLYpoLmjE6ijQ8WFjVSuGZKS0rNJMAHJESf3xirdNAqrbBTZR4I8iKI0vZqa6UzMoIkj39pK7PFJtcjHKhCvlNMmDMGM+91a52WGcnl2xEbHf/6PdwjS/sExkG/u51FMW1+XxiDkzhlbyyr8H5JfWUbFeJPqqakWxujXRZaX0GXTxvBPQwuhFNjk01vlFVuBdXNvYLJvnfpyGzKs4w+c2Q/MBEtk1RX9p/7BX74w6l4XhIbxHxUL53LSamTPe9ZOuPzUzi33L/N1S7kUruolRFc5Rm3MTLWTyvVhd1oqnKcVubcDCbTcnbEQvIxRoTFDiY6FBSpfbcwNjmwiL1DFgAytHLBg7c4rs3UJeRE+X/SPvO8Fx1uvAgskW/MgJfvXPCxDD22pXXRTQRGnGFBllEMosN1xsdbd1+IwDgIZ9U3WKLItC9QFJRKMs+m521u49hlzHWy5ONTsr0ZAnL3WL4DJP208xx3VqCNuqfTtCpdayISNrsNDZD4zoI91AqmtK6qe9sa33rShDdkvGJBIJxmQXTU7dwP14yrt7Kije10eWzFMQg8HuUl9N8+3iNLSTo8x9tXtfaleO0N15R0WCRyqhykLTvJC7W8NdpXKccJ7kUbxQcknb5ULofc+/+u/MNMpdxy3eFuIGZlfyotghcqXso7E/SyflEFQ5qnW/i7EJ15BjaqsNbxi96KowIsWlWS/OBwjt6uoKhwZVFYnZKH9sFQljymuRHeE6mwjiefrMdNfRCVCqiXTcliiUyxJ5s2O56/lBUQ00HKv2zOW0S4jjoxlycWLESvLnpEZm6c1XV/UsYS5wNALu7zEC67XbBpF1LxkabJoBhXOmoxw2EB+XRT+VYxYqoKres92z+HQbBXu6VmsiAX9VGlSTXeeMxNFsnYQLTfuftbr5Gf39PdfAsU24+bq1duziBPh0a2W+zTJmAe3yYblBn5Cr8o95uxef/o///b89f74beFUxYGx+t8Ewm+eb0SeOqD2j8eTuzx61dK0oP1fS/YZNDqhmToQCC+JhURzXCIsuoYKcYWogsfR0HZ3n7wmZoCnyaZJ8Hm/vmpmnG5HzWdZlUceJv7EoykWY21PT9WZypNd3kveSOM1oqyrfXOkDmybij444FFAq1Pu+jMye7nu7630Pa4xiGGzoWhlbjs7ZTaprEYwvZWQVBwpd9Z5jHLfzV5hMfyo2E+QuJoFjSHWxWT31V11L/oxZJVj0fOtR5p6GThVsP3j6D5aUKG2FbHpxgdr2C+Rgdje+7FMqS/moBkEVC5qn/+wiMO/KtXnZ1/H39xeodeUl7pM06qcJVPPe03FRBqo04wFQXTWWAW+PvWW30l7GIkiNroRCP04Y0BoIuA806txPAwP2+sRweQEqLFPbjIv40ZDr5+Nk8G1uozgWuPYFnItWP4bis1K7Fs3TjG16V3CfumaiSmL3HJm1ctM688abwjzQVFUsq1kMGBiVGOnHEJdeSFA/ZbndnHMtxJaTMcgLa5G2WWOKgd6Z6ee+ICMLP50018e4pkj/Q6QNudsDVpnFCkFuvlSa3dHA7X/TpnA//zZhDFfDrwlceVb8VMsBWZeuQHZK0yX9Nn74YTXiRVkP1f3V3wEbVsW/n/F7xpNgf4bbp9QNtjjVSvRrmzT73C7Dcp2kxvIvxR3B6qqTSle5sjZC3y4VDVtZy339k3nqKzmyJMTtMatA0FWsWZP8OavybkEY0vYzH5r0hSwxiyKgFtRR0LeZYelqfe+RsoZM3tXi4rwChanSSG2/xn0dULFH3sIG17A4VYQYKz5X9aJRIMk5d99YB96kjFRcqfCtfAzc9FMz6qdWk6sF5dcr61vaGmOGyvg1QLqw0wzLRCuaF0IRGZgjP/xAZxUSHfy+KsieEN37mekLHg2BMDbezlXrYLv9UDxnW3YjinfrPY+VzLlSTWJmVROo6jlTxByLWu3gQHQEq1z1M8+VGr59NcABWdIeAyrUOScyWSzYJy1tKZLvvE//bc90jU8C0V3//HNMOBTTXnWXMA973Etomj1zXK1h9ZXGVCC/GlFMq5EusFySpmWySnwtUZpT3TNjQNBmMxuJtXoev30ba2bm6bJhB0uJpyXVIl8mEkfFnnNy7RftfAv5UGkv4xZbS34/Zb5rGWaR1NFfuyg/2UD+cULj4jhwwyKiOKMKLhmEhF3ilIsfy0NoSKKAM5qCKHbVOeep4BFcIunS9DE2y8oadZcOBSOnWMn9NfhysnmDe0Va7wqlPryPXltksgHcsQtH7w0dWMDLhlHO3OqEI6F4JB8W1QxjPNIAze765z2uP83/x4PK0K9Px2ws4sy6J3KbYNUulDDH6CAe63jNEOYMojsrCwsjCg6Gm5c+g27j+CykrI1Aw/f7xdoEkn9/z/selgs8K0/KvpuZ+av65z1dNcfGFuvGVxGwwqjGp9q4qngJqhmplo8cHQ1H+qunkyzAa0aLEEXXqI7VD1u+Lpt1rZgL6wM1Kenv75mbfbD4OcFqYBR/HfH4pCOLfBe23n7YHrEBaFme1uOwFKJvpZw8J1pFVLFXNmWNJQX39iwOxPZSGNtx/p7ebxW6pP1jLLvlc+qGwOSIz8OrtZZUT79HqR6ry1rrWR3Kl0RAO7OMWVhEsTgv7ccBOHj7f/t//ue8ZpMslRBBTkXNFa4J/uv2qfU7rz0+rv6jXR+3o9Os6GaMnQZUDGYpqJ9ecmzOHG9yMxU65s3zRdx0VVUbNaSJ9Zb01IOlL5xD4M0GyuzqWCsW5RqfP2eDDNuXd5D+IGq4YMMUm9LRANOsbkuHX8EUoq6M3RhR8+mqxuP6kLm7SKKtVn+seARpXVZPdPlrTCrf3EEc3L9ZGlfVRZ55MQDVHSGnP4UwT/dPnEaZeCSENpTJp/vWxz5tzVLaj/l0SWNFLwtz3q4GhlXnvE89T7VlVKLsDzQ6wMI62YAaQpoDSjDOOrw+izBgBaD5B0shfOjPaT7mB0Bn51gCfrq7q4RDfCBdVTSiH+8XNH4jdgAWu92eLJcIV0InqUIVx43hibAKxWBpbYAg7GLwMfkzo+vxHvaqSPWIAdEs6fhcDHs2/smO0Ygx/nb3nDdEyZaKz/O3ms+JNOYM6E84q1vU/cAw2kTqpCsLyWOxpRtXhhRZMYKdqWZhFJew1E1XwF6QZ/Q8a7FzaX6OV687Xnc/MZCcqVp0PCfVLAPjsAbYR7d8ViXGIP/Zl8Dg5pdI7EreEL5yexNtQo+b2ttb5JC/9ldtxWxtaJ5kjGpZQmvlRFx/jEM/lU63u6lP0bZI2dcnGSBYChRzDtsaXAvm9iQO1LJnRix9PuWXn1s1iAOOUG7jxTUUSSsyv21uurgtiWe/oBN32sBcrBpLbl4EwSQM8clOQPn0qxs6ZRyyI1PptdL1+qbST+aPdJGjlapjxfqB04Iu3BY3err0HGsXzCLbcoAfCBqskL5EXFJFPnAWK5ixrNdFIS7ZU3GiWgnWW3KlrFy/roRQBLqyuQBnXN5004xGR/Eea2aqXZp8KoEqnhl7KxzJ4w7h6VQktiHUrioXp9ndtYgGBY1mHNXR0cynE68GXtTjy1U4RNj7gBndDCJh+XeF8BDG2tfeguAu+7TrlntG3Dtm+AojXtrdC3GK6Kfdoqzk0mWHJfNYaeu257ygmOHP4GLWj7ml34MEtYRg7ko/tLXjGixzz2APFcR6InxNNtXuU/1QIy5C7mdA8eh0lA8+cvroVK9Zq2i15zkSpoinmcwYqCtIjfMIZo6NIUbEuIvJJiJTcJNwoTjlbMtM/xA8yBIVt6Ps5t0KN0onYhDDdrWeo/zblo4bSyMChgNGxxasv+eZkXCq7qFiOjd40j231plmoYqRwQBeLEfR4ZLPkKrrvANxRk8/84Vt2U7MFYDkgLeEwAcHTnqPQoWLc3qT5q+b5D/va6uGoAG6O2B9u37Q50QoEqYc53n+AFY/0QSxliDle9Tubytdtvmfc0b8TTEDwafblv1CtR29tWFPUPGpwjrkC+sIdQs65hCbIN9z+nkGKvBQVVWogeGJz4kw9GPR0y3KD+S4RfRfuovQRuL1eV4pluoTv6PSbFiYPWRRKX1ddBiD+Os+Nq00J8ABzzFNLhM/tiyuGQld3V8u4q0uanAet+5mmb1cTOxViKXn6YnCKIEC12wMqbqrqBOIU6QlLx0vKl09/z0dtAJjU3SxBlpFm6VP80RdJ0h/f8+SrQaXK4Z2awZQ/7wvCbO+n1ogLFt1glSc9mB7JE3cuRToLgk2oNp91iSIo5HwPE3y7+E5tmEEdMfB60iFwPEU8PT2rdaTTYBj17Cj+avHGJ+PzWYNzjL4Obtr5WZOgbEkMJx7LTMiUNX//f/4j+DPi5j67A81QTf84Y73UJ/q0uQ62eO9y96/Mlru42szBm2ARp2ZyBL8+Uzfb6Bpjop1ZknIJhTmqMnux+Ves6+wtTumn8TA+Auv7mWxBl0jmaE4AwCWz/pQHnsObfzduus6vLnJdqas9t+u1X/Ewpl/FL1T+mEn9KVG3fbFnDigI7u2Vn8hbNtcSedLwp/20LT2Ncr74ldZ3KgLXM8oCkint8kB9Z7XYTbu/atL85ZYzTlHPyo1o6RIWilSH6xoJyB67aUUFXqcRZuwGHHMglLT9bzzjz/QhjqU4tlQShJf5JtEszVk8BbGR7D5EKbtV3YSGdwHaLMIyyWE1+eUPdmrF+IX/7lqSRbsl1uf0rXLgR3y0ZL453nWRWaZ01uLUKaxMet9NkKtNrQOYDUNogUAACAASURBVBpILXhwjaZKtJ27wcLM1NKKzv1jcrEoBfbeWj++yoRPrlsvKsoVwkiqx0QTLtBuZmy1ke7ZQgijPl3cYuTRWa4k0Bj8T9ezcXO4ESTrspLMmejynxuZZT3SvpNeZmvZFOyLdnejoxCt5qydOjPaoJMPZKzVIjNsPzfadAv/WLMryhBeKdhPLIlWysuPz/w1QwJCY7HD62W98QRXq7sV+oxDP77gvY2v0dfq4octvckoG5uYrXJ/BNtFROSMG2ajVXZsYqwZPEsZNorlCkTjU/13Y7quxBULXN6Uv5m3n8Jsvsx974M8883d/Al30arfUx4uY7Sy1GzS2/zGJ7Yaxfsztrdp4cq8pqzGuuI/H+n+vmZiPzrXnQn3OKqoeOuSdXvafLrZNV2klOa+39qDJPITB/wUv6+2KcPH50OUSIoIc8VvWdouFbrqJ0SNl1iLjHFsarphLLk13Dop+kbLOLeD0nX3VrW1eNmBe7noSgb3a1ryjQ8AsbUu7N9VvEhjLKWviGOdYP5KyVEbIHyIL31c20/MEbV4gt+71Z43jiNeLK6J1k2j64CN9omGACHbfwOT/02msfKKDWjQChkTrPCelZXSncA1+zGJz/JNxMhYESL0fqKLHOI7sTfP2HkzweK3ZSZEzJZJq3mv4BrFwnlnYed0HobUw5JFcKUCz6jT2pn15jkTiIZbs95eFDk0XLmZj6xiQLolsxzMY3u83Wg0tTgTeNHZVvqU9u87rgz7qT2VI6ANOLV3edpsYM4GnMa5h3octjlWOmpuoRW04brLfYTHfhLFBDfe7Iugutkqhq38uQT/onXXL3kV4rQCYDvzxvt1UY9yHCtk+v6el5wvSnoDYb+7F46y5EJBmqhUS5/EOoZDl9/2GEPExk8kRcJRlhYKod0AXAxxQ3tqLzJ/hnNOCplu4WI9Ic83UTPdsR1F+nwQiJM/wmyfVLMpR4vMxNbNYyEVPvKZ3qyF9z0k+8kljTFcPLGo81ocWLYFXrMYCPKxns5sw2C+TG9YYsXraWCE2zZ3v+Ynq845zTrv6RBdFwveZLaJNMchX0fDqllDb0oYJGAg0oGxGjcm6SsYOyOwzsaMWfLq5bp4dpI+M6khz2rj12rlJL7gNW5EuT4O/81OItGNZL5Yagr4fRrxHKn/43/8B9e0/YOXl8FxizCvXmuwnv0v+44QnmoHGzlwpeK81LUuWp3sLk35epPxBstoOo7lnTcK+7GlDT9zAn5kUakd84hqVytGNyp3tqfak05M/Ay3W+BTrZknSYxuNzi2d2wYxMxgxN74uOSGixtfI+npZ87JmYLV4rMINXqrEOTK3fCrgp3cm4xthViSD5A1XDFHOTe2WMChEjhefSvu3CuxkbBufW87vhXGG+U9/qY6p2GFih26uj/hUvNh2wJXXatJSOgL3avUXg/XGLchhLeQQjQ7tf/RyPtU9ZxjZULmN/wU8fpcVZtwwSvCvPkfhZ+QJQQBAUWdtExBlxUkJHft6r/ufAOyUNCZnSSBDbffgLINNk/YmHGHtarfGQVLDv/2CrPmOPOqG3qWP6DbnWoW4NPPds1vxf3um1OeZm/Rd2yZtwyDY6PXfBaNQTmVLqnrUZ64rrfGfQ1Iuxo3hdp91OzT2rCWK28j+yocip66EQR4BUFO8qDOV7Pf28TfciJiWVnBL1i9jUUMGIiGc7fT5ndewegaoaOhvbz9Varht1Gpm/iSeJglk72ELoQRh5g+k8xGcS7vZZojn7M2u+gLvEyC2ZYksaptHrTW2bKYVNKgcC9WOz7mC09ZbdftGK/V/BtNsimUQdF1JqbYnyM16+yrkGbNatcKVLcNW53mqlmc3nTdTfO9vG0vtvheWWxqmtVt8kaa3q0n5V0n+o83+n+79Pi1QhcbVsrnSsukn6vj6+33f/Gnob+tTljoK/NG/lpsMFIV3vfEJV7kGuG7+xwHsE1dF6hGohtm7hABn8C897GwBuEJmKLNYb25JY4L3diJqgilVuZAulXYbHzG9oJ5w7bN6LqyTEPRxgqvz3g4veD58Lkr70ayhI0J7Hg/2Y00yplgGZ6+jF+t7XBLZ3ZiM5y2J60r3XLcu90+vO6Si0BiEp7+HGhc6T7uttSNy1on9shssCGuqyVLentSKnPcpnj5YKBwHxv34p6h7pCX5AH6Yjk7yqVqz7RgMbPRBrYE7gFSrt0/Y/eSERv9HSDDJ09Yq0LxSZvhoiV86KJVdziN5GhHk4HZ5VqopDln7Onoai6Q5ALmZNDRmji19HtQnBRSye5vztn6BgHWJxXn2LiXAl0f7r8WDz4+oKwKM5y0mfbRfG4EjfdKQeNCeXFMJ7f5xwotfpL4eO4+iG2zQZydMhNXp8d8+Tece5A4ayBVqt9ven2XZKJTEbGBZ8379ZUwbdZJAoquA6lye2yAdjTPiyzsALZKl96Sc+ZcDFhU9aOoBCScOckQuuDdRkBFPJ8XEQjYLJ8D5EZXeGX9ds2ZHFYROri2jwWsvsy2/Kr06k1uEsxa9GdH53CnCuWmM+MYUABfiLdVbBrN2VFV3rCDYnt9do5l9rLKTUZ6DVYvbxRh8w71GU9hiiqtu5115KX+bJZO//W8L1HHSvVRfVePvQm5l084nmvx3QEXdCTvrZ3Q4PvP6WqS3b15ex3Azqyp8b1sh9nIYuEHsnzP1bXdtO/kFWlJO+9TV3rniI4EK+rIcp/27IBuOt78qP/7//G/XCOGOEjsLEQ1Q+hNUDtdJ1axbWy444bMni53ETAicYukRg40vxM8nGDbVWOCmGLxJFoQHHYzkR6Z9ZRjJUqvTcGp9eH4XLsaDxYb5fClfjodqWTnIckHfGKSxmDu5Dqt+5YF4UDHBgNNePlmDSbVLaIATNLjz/Ayc4BdbS470NcOl1ryeeUUljym7I0Li3K6dALNk8ZR+DdkaVPFeHsVd3qKKGhRendjevqRTqc9G3huYOafrRe5i+BfPXuijYcQLAb/hXQvc5y4vPRjCZ1zkJ3R58Kkrbce9YqISE8HWttAtGqXaWS2TearhL4gNuI/5IaW7XAaCAlUA9STlIKSjoHJnxQQ/lsEd1Gj7rIZOmmDOTkj4azOmerSrdcjGjnozkUgUE/t0Dg5rHvblju9LWMY70S3kGbWZ24bvaHkN68rx/GvOTyWj/QuN99y18ItOpOY6u590cEE8yZNpLoxhvAzkCfPqrdO4u1Hv1lCGnb/paAcfSNCcU9F3rgeRal6g9drJeWrLL3ijd9pd05qrm0VAY9euKzC1/fsDEJ+4HcCQi6beFMH09beTimNrvBNk8NyCJ9MfLuuzS+eEIvXHaifkiknfvH+e7dDe/9t8ue+kGBbeyhv/1Ox5eKyEA5NCZt3q7i1A5XVLGFXtQa2CQebdM/5Jln95Ppi/+afKREphgZffKKWNqlr+sBHH//yIdb4JbPXe3zhnt02WkdmLfCtKIoXzt+eMcz+nX36TSGMMAAfdvRvftR8nrg+k/Xqg+86QnHXAdieSqjPDpPs1tkAVd2xAbXrbVHEPJgbHqZRhvnxa7+x08xWlIS5YA2CqU8ylnV10zNqB9hES8VPCjGbO2uLs1Ub+xN+kU3GwmSXdK50hU+2WNojdjyIYrkmXo/aTd6p2Jjv5JXcnAGktkpZSKqrU9xgvYKJUakdGaXox4BtgX7WTMCm6H7P0U4VyliS7pqzXZbTAlTYYqOWkbgDbAtkiyjMEFFpYm4L+s2O9bWylt076SQDNbhXo67X0R6QDbezOvdMcjvcVZFkdT8VvI5aYCeBjPeBuIHV6hdqgXaHMQYJZPoYEOe19jKQ6B4G9/KZTIrmhnICz/OY5YnlKQjjycHmmjCnDLrpJHZJ50yCprjDDL+5MvGGZJfL88ki1q3FeVatzM2LXI7cCbqZkbQJhTdXdYmbirKa/+6hLnb4lgCODLQXn8TYTr31kdOqdvMU6pw79NUa9AStdTOlYAZiXpSJN0NlPG4nlvjADZl3mWKjPUzbDFKyEiwzNp34ernmEvqIirlG+/xWX3/dEQCyaQMkvMtcPFD+VuedfkrQnK0rpKV7nBw51WUl1Zcm5wx2A9nkx2Dv/ZUuMrYCAXjPqSf+T+Nl39yuuq7FclhQntIRYkrKdDzrgDal6Eb+7bWaI2LNcg3nJM2IbeIEc8QqnbGdwHfXaOLk6k68/FUmhfDYtmomKRPrvtvpD5zBzaij8PevZ+sfKLk7lr+6Z82sVDtjn25HGToLy54viyBSoX1mxTiPfFvl0mmeido8Ifye0aK1YRfn3EhnsHj+meepH+RXzTaDv2OEqEED/Z//478xQxSTTbPu1fL0cV5tgdvZRVqrisre6t45Fd+w9ZzUOwRTxXq6N9LIjXgsTAn0tZep8NRfWEGqu6rs6RsWuhpnMmc8+do5TfwrBscHyX3xviTsFmz+FiGz+Tdrvv+ZtcKdzJO54g7HLffSx/WKVSJPPR77+NQjHaIiSVzYb2YA1VPX9LW8cP7f9nJIVPytgJPIh+epO6N8NpGViTy5ivHr69CMp/c2EHm0ZxJ2e/p53YyGrhvDRvvRfOwaMjH47fDokoenVaQXo61gbCBIhOadluaLEPIWHTHhFrSYirjRBc/T68HijnvaGQxXDRLd0ZcznqhuZEYNNy3uRpzdacSFxcmEqox8FT3dOdiu43PwM8i4Mix1Pt2U+Yo8vOk7OmIUKLYyMI0dRIp3cplZlJkLqRsW2+BdG4eS6GMHbCfxIBT0ik+0vcFm1V2Ojj79v6RdsgbvTYxbbGl/3qNNot9dhnlUzXnnJpdeSJU/QATDnvU3XF66Fj4lLHHDJ/AzIt45Iqtddd7vzEWK92HOCqu+QBE41H3H2AdsyiCN5RNuAMknSF5bws2P/fF4Yid2XPPXRphwdp7HHomODcAPyMyEcsQxjRWaGjI/kzrMxk7EX6EzefjJ0K85kyZSX8ZMnrV1bqsdv4bTXdvRRXmW4c9OiYgkggfijrLcSSGW8Bk01fJPtudBGk9LX1Y8Djr9W95P9MM/KtcUo1dXFv9GF752486/Sbrv7dP6uYSSYoXiNZXmXv88jRuYMWc8CbWKX1jCJTk38+kCFPdbFFcEzr1Eamdq7MqwvC3rspImmcRu6sqGm2VPGHaqRxX6SayDffYuyDSD+9mU58/tIqLhuQFBi1PYnJb7yIdztQ/hb0KxJYoDz3Cp8tSiq1TA5phHG2ohElszprluyx8sTPb225yZSLpaB+WsON/szxqpV3zuwQGJLUzkKboy9a6+DF3Eyptg2VQLNttDtkhix5li58sZPRz7BIOSeDZHzI/foOysbUtqAXsCf7gz7WGe1ZU+vOxlAm/y8OWGF2bzlhiJ5cJ9Vu1Oj8Jy4HasKoHLUc2EV1fpoxxr5uhnlqk1VZ2xz4ghxe6YZ3kub9Cuuxt/cJ1Ncrve5sziukJ3jtOHVgYTe/lJ7T2a97wOCtkh2kr/j2Hp+GB0H3ilOp7j1xemHRlVcTChxhw4i+/Feq5UPCByX1DrfLBRnZkGzg2xqyund9/DrnaA004HsUwuY7sdygJFBJs0Q5a8sJO7s8lBGyG8Sd8hi0xqxnC49amutsFm37khantsNL/FJmZwsHP/n9LRHYPkQ9vBpAO4nXUUcJFzzl8/ceI1geJsjnlch1w6SEeDlXEpqZWel5aA76TK+4Fk4NBxOuDTfaziyTiA+nzvxeSWJ+3WISi1T8GcGnf4Vt1Qe3Z02pHDlIWsmedUzYetIzZqRx4HqZihp6mu8aeXerYbk8lIAEmcHS6Vs0VV7KeThliOcjAG3ed9q8uHBn/qNJsPeydbPF3G6DyGfRkc7uNyUjNu/MCddLRE60quCc9EuA1Sd2tlIKiMFddErT3Holc16z2n2Sza44zm+4p00EMLx7wXC05Be5w0W6QSBm6n6c16FAPyDqbYd9wsBT7V//2//pd7L0ejsZGTrmO8H2Kv1G6QFVGMMpVUyWbFxsXqIv3eK8/Tq57XaNbBrYvsj2Zz+Z8VY1a5LBPRd3R1pfqMvrkWm9Rc/kFlpsu+uHCVmoWYHTfT15J3kwDrJoCfpENu3PXi3JvH4bbKik1LdzKhvvvjGO8YHB1cw8MWmhna5mkNDNigwpMclM+IFVegbcyG+vklEf5Qw8epcyt6USq2ryDb5OjIpUIyoNRst7VGm2amy/zq8TlrTtzqgtfzNAvrHFs7JTmaMycrfQ+P7joz1cxtscXDSNUeXreepboiwl+Ne/3kT2xdxRwfEbuLK3XGZv0vfZrFbPfmdwQ7PRKXYebdKgcbF1OMTsNbvr6UjJyw60DzvbgKoyRjcpNAvNtjdtXnFbxtxQTRwlhb8qX0X9PR1xfgWiTSJF/OTff2QVXE97Rgf+vBTL1bna297F8MDOHEl70Vo/3/VPTXmnYVVwh3mi5ola6/M+r4M0ju34ZFrKlt50mok//gdtqQ9qxZaB3zHm3EHR1G3dfy4yPfYNv6fGSZ+zD7Kda3tp7DGMe/yJzloD9D6SqIkcFKkUPy9mxb4OJ6JPDzW66KcoWv+1g+1hEbOVL18VV3VBrrhrNEGYYPoMYOj0KmKt1Y+O0cNjxSvyrRj2L71H+W3CchJgxk8XeKvRG6ncZBa4K4kz2hj4LG8sbcAfPXg2l1QSJHF+TYWAJ+AfZfq8l7VOJ7mPrchkH19TkLilciujHId2Jf5gP9CH7zaQwvXIvphjDb7jhrOLql41oYsAXxBfB0xRxa7WteVgYObS5ximnrxknHDawA5MfiOA4Ti+qQTvBMl3pjR0qDH7tmnAjtHNGMcr54jbgzAB+nLGZM6WjNMN2PY+muEmW1/1aC+BD7pM6Jid/RRNpslSgbQyXFO+rkYd8l7xlsHoAPgTnHaZ8RaazS+w4/4M1A2hCPkLFRHOg7vJTiAZ9JVpuCHR3v1ra1Rvpsw9Xv8e6939Gflx6/eZGLOkVk4kuQ5Bw93ay6zNTdd8nSWLPQgrbRy/3oBTCZJPHNIuZODC98QT7usmaN0m5OAuZWXa2m/XX6RimuYlI3MWslsYANk/TAFH3AnDXi2tyyWP1Xce1cPUmDOVIvfLXFe5Ixr5LBH8zS2vOe6rgYJKE/M/ZCn5ViaJGca33qp+edG7m7viTAA2+TJG+Jxw/6uRoEZaLrCra3qnOsnY8yP7mr24xk1GX9RG6tPaDSwPCOP7Ddm1eOayKxV0CYGaq6fIGjR01UlDyPPV9nUGVIQPejYIc8gd1tkupGZmo9SusMzzXabuXxg8bvtTZSiWfm769nRU2fkDvzk4eu9zZ21v+3N7XPtJmj6a5j53dDCPMUj+ZsaY3rFPbLP0rC+aJsJgnPnrYuYLb52hPjs/F7sMeXf5CCuWJAzVTeBXnX71Cfq8s5tDvLQgGCOZrgs44pQVS4KCoTO6Mlgj2QrMFUROBRMWR8QH1A/J1QtVO1MCtQOu/EU3p+bBmsqhZ3wAb0oYcF52Ml2RW8pqSxGuV//a///EIUmCfb3XPrvQpIQzqyJVMHSK4BTA57jfON36yM3qLAtFsOpqc4m/xROYbjE50PygoTAt2x3yZPHHeRUcjicG5k/R2+zPKQ69m06Pi4CDTbqpunOtcsRPB5Hh2/aQ9mSOjFNZssgtvK6Rmye36GcRfrzHna2fo1GdM5KzWG55LOjGaevydCKIHgTdrgz5gpBiQDgPO+1W1ZLFPKGCziGd/W7ULJs0rdpaeknRzquLkgucZoOfXP1eRLYWNLyeepc15jDcC5E/Ycssob3g+IQ6hDOvoA7ar6533/nn85VnED8D3d4TnvwYex5P9c7Rc0pIOtKm4EAFUzJ4O/IkNfVVTgg6tz0F4V2gkzT+LOdSVYmjnVxhuoOeSiSktq3ZkOqSO8AHhpzARJOYA7IZGsTSv2HbzjYXccw89wLUbUHqM518NZGxxce/ZuRJ50UxN+T2TtGefiA1u7r2nKMQ09P1VqsWfM1JE7DcmnZ5gr3MmrOxHet9p8PXBaggzVvgHf2NRBfKknqz8slmXehqUSMrl+Q89LwJE9K6ykhuhk4nYcCDcV3k7I9QiSzBAIRnzP1WhhY3J2aq3/LTfsnqtQwUIq+AGjbbnpG2B5B1IvWFnbgu1n/MZiV3RBSMhm2svVN8ZYtQQmPkFUalNkfkzwbOgTMhK/Xl1u9Aj3yF11tPTLG2z2s26m/p3X8gmyMgCFDN52x8Gno++MiISZ3TVwfZmcV5S70tVfwT/ud78K3JswxJtagx9uJrhyZkh86Ey4ivq5PfdXbPbnhe53LtaeNPqJsQV3xJyuHW47b3x4ClCFOY5lap2xmamcBrniXg9jqo3ulCfx7sHWoRsrxg+JQEaBO8d4hYize38TzOsms1KI/kU3k+aObfCuqaPXg5L1ozavDfHY8Q/fdo4OIm/qQuBBGvcJaPY3cpkpeoKZauMP1jlTLtfjztrMSV/lNW+UIeecvijI9X8y9NFtvedcNEGbaUBl1Jv5+Dsvk0niXzHJrEZuDbtp8xzopXy+K9nF7cF+pMlXqMw1PH9xJgavN6555znMVLxOOyYHXzplb/Nc5SHPmZkS6ddNHvIJsp0bIlBMIzIHlzOZCAprcK7zIOM+kWGz39gzRchuHn7c9K2yKV6b5g/ulOnom/TDSd7PLLUeUIc7/MVxEp7kuZZipPreHrqqYpW679515qC65j391CAM3AXv1sh2h4/IsEA6UpSDOlzvZK3aq5YezCO7Ol4k1spSTPNmebtiM/dFQLXOvY08M5GGS2Ir94jnWs8xm6rqPi62Llouev7CNSa4qLvnG/4NGSvvBE9sZ2XIXsBNt4JJaF9mb+EYUOfVkyaqlHIwNsLbdt7xx16QyOiUKkaj0TR7mXFTDtRBbWROJRnlvLn2QnAfDx3JuKlE+7iZKv5IItKfOZ85qFt9Rv1SBX4qOiqkyfdMR5OgsoRvM7PHItHgBLhyY0MqG1tVEUvo2iriOBPGXwRNTyqqn+FVBN9/3vpbU9s62t3OLQPBL6Lscm6W1L5zpa93RmtK6hn72pBM+A2L9EWwM0oN2f1I5373cvzVkuJyL847OwtDemP/niOUU28WkPj//v//3yjonHMykVzAHLvXdDmQ7xpOaJfuujYJBg1V6rFWqneFX89sVUueJD9XZ1QJO0ER7zmAnufxSMJ55+l+z3t/f3dEZRtUscN/Kn2wU7l8T+Mnc9y0FTNZFRqwPch1jFXpoJ/eeJDDIPQ48yYMAzGJ7XjeAhyIox0RhnrKGph8weLMnPd4BLx5qMhcPZI9dxvBKd7p1FgAL/6fc051D0bnWPQ4ermO5IQAbRU+Y3n0gb3FbcWMbolDVDcx8HCIBIEdh50eDaHjmFnufPPRpBBPIJjmJGnXhmOPT9gcBsPbp4J55KSC03RnMu8o8rsyM+knZqEpgKpnQ1Z5zvs8jz/8MRbewpBtyZUhlpLOxiQWPNLqjMfdZOp90d11pZ9UxjmyzxzpH7IzwpTorvPPMeq8tws1R2KvbSVDrIEvVeAbLqjqzqw4y5mSq2Nh+rkJOlqX10J3ExlN1zh5xTNcg2TdwA1t9BnXLv+T7dHXIi9e5R8/jctNXsnneZ1OjA0oCmB6szq/WXk3pmzLiV2ouZQMuyJiMHfQNWt0uaPYPung1VqumzNhLvnj2tA7wyuwIsggApcwWsLqsjviTT6M5XUS+RCXNvJajWjgG7ttfcHmWX75lv/GRkUl+83Oume58NWa+JK7QELnE5+ZW4q24puqB+7A0/uqtxtPS6FvYnbC+LK0uLHRqbYirNtNZB25PAbtWndcQMdpwM+6pOTVlL0tTnfU6MaZRVe1Htn7QS0zXuleeSSJQiCXjq9A7kjdO01GOV+XKFvqg0mjnCl2kjx0ozA8CjRAQCiqtZ2QrKedxr4ZXWk6r5l8r7BUGLircbBSw4yHVqLL1p2+lPGmaHzc9Q8ik9J8NFZAVPsv9PK+L9LvAjYshRDa1WibekRE2skc9TGrrB1VjMtrKT1wr2k9s2q18y2cNT1MT2sidG4MUeIWdFWirml6RlAjvgzvGk7mRemGZJ0znnFH8pyzNrLbEriNr9Bgd2zMzFwcMIeZvrHd1uxMCgYdyUrdJDA5+IRz04Z+prPMJaBr4Z4wLWKXtfEZALjzxhI17Bgyj6CcE12PWcgMUjqpBEaRbv6kiulLGeuVDNxZa5mA55Zj5tRmatft/40ihKlJP7MOhjTb9RjUPzvjFPzMDZkkpzvLrFi6SXh8z8t2lHRzmGFoxbORMJqpXu3vqo7POxknhW/8j10u9FTe1K1WsQ6xTsVBkUNJOJka9fibNkrkDJ6iz5n4ZLYciopmxvYP/956et5BokhtUeVZos9X49E3j2eC+twx4KaTvpk6Olfm47FqHn44O3gwh9i8px7qeMRT7PEbEe8C0UPeVl1J6mTq3Dmnqo9Od5+Tz9xVo8RcR+iYXjTq3ve8tZN4IdnIc3SKVGmOnH3VT53JgO3VeMxKo3Te+dffnzQuyc6c1S5OLbRSG898M9dWvZGJW3MTgAYLD9fNnT/nJTwIMPOxrDxw8KrlUVaWuZ3LwQe8R3Wn+Y5noqKfPnNWzmMROxtlyMZH8mwvNFwLLT35vdZbtcy5ybpqzxA651i/qFLGk3uYghK7stvYE+ntwa4b6rBeRM7MrqoyseD8FF/ZPnjPmSEfh9ZUOZZnoMeHsCDpedrlQRRzJxPjJJ61rlgN+57DLhtNPd3rJ6XWaWIWdFTB23m668UheM5Jx58EuJAMOTarznv4sP/zf/w3J8gan46Ksz6FETeeiTsbxAnXa0i39Qeeb+Pm+/lmCWwcYvlBItaIRa1BeojhnHmiPUguH5ax9DKUMiPFZO4WUvJtcccrHcWB8Hh6uByhISZxSN0R3MwdxbazdG+4uUV9YbR3TlcjAZYggRORtKdfrAHR/XlmE9iFW0jsAwAAIABJREFUUtjcwuMuonMprpTQ2aiI/moiEcANor0utKSkelKtLRQxczqdanZLrOD36RVGB2iq+9A8EasaODfQkRP5+mj2C0xV40tBhWg/+hWSaUFv3XEUthNMcvOSggjozP/8OBxbElBafeYi3DdVjiP510Ul2vUzwVxV1fV44sMlJdZewgyKheempELdsMSlf1NZn60LdRGp6DwiMKs7oTOQvWSLyLwT/garBFCS3HfIjWsBu/WWGtCFmVQLOE8GoBG7EirZIPiZJBH5MDe6Yh/a1Od0uaQW7qzVlWn778lkng1tmx23nWnHaUs+2lHf0IKI6OSgv63Kzcp+CBF01uzBDHa7U9jxC7zPFaB9cxzW5bUM51KXw8wb+ER63Ok1N3P8C4X7IkBr3WSZwLmOiAFr/k3rdTtDYxy1479zZe4E4MqMppWaWiVgx8usjzfDxDcQq36YRl679qXpcgfPZVBdZflvuONnIh30t55zJP1ImHGl7xtsnQT/0NSxhWwPD6Ho/tD8SrCCjGrE8Tyemc9JtX4VJAfcf/ajUj5ZJ7+opJ2sNclWuQoIo0t3tHR9IkxuMImkMT610Msa/3H37udfu9RgfRETS47P7wSFHyn5Spd/QodxZ5QsvsQ7g6EirdygxztFAh9yEdHWZdHUT+3E+22HZLMNrkN/7cd3SfBn8AFSDFek8HGU1cdsbyOnK1hXpE1YwcJ1d8+J4A23usKd93DdSDlLNz8wZbR1OfLluQGuX4jISB4aHh7rk2N/IxwKH5yPHeFDZFJmRy/lZtubedouR+1snjDWd6RnLqIueKKSJQYzh8WnnyXOudHvuDKYtbLnXKufBpW9CQdp/e1WSLIaN3VgnOhg5GWl2BcEMV2898uJgeKxGnOMnHbV2I9UlUtrGYdYWpbJzyfcsIPAubFCK9SI/1StT7b5Bb1c6nL3295WGz8zNxMfGa6gK7bZO6Vd+tWSjTtPwJLmlQMcTNshFiP0zoHJ7PVem4mdxmzwBpz8WybZFeeYRd+ZoLQGzOMEuy+6diMijtxaaLN8SShN63cJ3cznxEbUCqgveX5GbGXHeer3Eas86vgKD0KdarVtHpqNeBR9aHeyXoDMr8I2FjJ2fAcPuYTzVdU7xC42RGaehVZ/0atk7qpuFqv71ua6U0C35AhFhGihPZ4KyWfvZBr36kDim74zmnb+CbeScNV/h9ncW46WCVwBRv3qHpN7v5Ox6kYK+ED0EL8Jd0nbFJ/nT68+v9+nTDlY7E1ry5J58p3yoEEX+YX4LoeYiWHeJhvHuFp3x/ykg7qDqVnQPJnpZ6bWP2hoSdX1sDYNXcXYQKvwr+cxLwWZrtDOcmfVz4QdfNL4p3vOSZo0vxp3ByLkiP6xxcCmMY+VIvke402BazF63ICAx2ijav0LIND/63/9p5HgM8r5GGncp4mqqgNxJHiOuc57nLZ0jV07sCtnFBPCkImWHTBz3QtVLBznxoxSSEFVz5nz9/zNOfZLyCPpNA6nrPqS5WpR2BAU6eyxWKBLmY0STkpqsnRFtTjzRteFMrtqojmjV2Aksi8knBSYNfT3D5EV1R9B4MwWTJ5+vLYnj55D8o6cH8478elH137dVi42PSJG57wb63mNJXv963T/8WNko8KXTrGAOopcxscL5uyQiTXlpLBHVwBFYYypWC2on4j91JeL6a6yqe4AFW0m2mi6C3M878u/7szgU/FYU6Q700ZfkuEVtbTrzNFhlRk247O2O9452DPHEgm3Sd69AKsLn/w48743i8ci2umoRj3LPvnrjDlmiQXDZMZiJnGdG2BBnfE4plDJi1R3t85klKUTyybp6nRC6ZKrWvqNzIKJcm91SzsHUQbictw/mWFynWzLEfF6q+5IrjxXf857ScxUxyrJ4k1IIX9S6uk5BFoQXrd8AhBuUGJ9RCC/onm1q7oCPkXEfaXA0bHOzpPwbp3y5Ibqa0jMSBT+tA/7e5QptyuhqN0pkcV8GZTSucGA3HAmTwfkT3d4PUUb6FLzavmhT8P55bhv+VsZwvYZCBmvOS7gyDtcLqEvCepYQXhdKc8+N+y8xC+YMdzh5rLpZz7PzizYgaBfPfIjma4r9v2/TKCIfl7rB/0GWW1gjHAHI/1bV819AuGntHNQ9PMzX/f3eUst8Ibb6Z178UWjrDq0uPDiwpS6ksJ/l0nffs3vi1eezh+drZJJo8ulK+z2jGZr/fo1veNavO6o2FQ5C05dbWDK2m2PG1v73pIU1+dmdf9EjuX1n9Gdvaqkm3Dx8wXXX3e3pAkz8d9gAtzy3Quda89wKrWuezUzpXgzOQhWr4HOEEktpL0o3jKZmR55aauJ6IFnxpO7PEJgN0J6+TO4O1eYIKj6HmliTZejjr0iBi39SNFyzlt/AjmZMfMFd8twUysd8j5XDsrvxPZAWp73DNAo2ZM2ZxWUMonhO15nQi/8MI2LUsUs8aFsWII6rLC+4ZuAo9d9O88cu1QiX8QYRumuwdHSdd2tyUr2Y1rV3+fd/bCnX6n6Hu4sU+OeeX2nx81NSdldvgp4lyKJEKtKnuc1++oEVc+Cu6szDPDuJBfuXJejkctij84Om5JG/dSXar0A9HY7WUKVS1e2sX3hFIOnPTFzk/nGea8/829X2VFddScuhnMHWDiZ53bX3qZ/c0ZoCnie9kuqqp0xn/OiPs+Ux7DZDa6d9Jwvbnzz768V2Tb0MyezagdAR6YXkyokDuc9tcwEgONxUld4GgAMg3FckNkh7D2987cZA3/1UaBnDUaorneOkRuTKutpt3prnnbKaTjdaiRfuCMW2EGgWi2IR//NY6Pdjpqeb+7zbtp17vnLnflMTzEijeqvHfH6nvM4yXLnRV24f8ZpdanzC2UeGwMHTp0z/fScnBh29807jvfUIIk3GynAp30f8dco1zUTmnQ88srd4aiXWgX5f3L1NjG7Z9l11/44z723qrv6005jTOwQBsgRHhBAUSQmEYzImCkE20RiwgQFKwgmSATJiSKhAEIwMCgEEBLOJJYQmIERGBE5xnHHbQvZjtNld3e5u6vr41bde9/n7L0YrLXP/ylmdlXXve/7PP//Oftjrd8y5kaMobaBJjJ0xX3XUvYmToYUS9XFAAlVXUyhVEPe1icSBrSl6ZruMK9N8Z13IzJ2QUCWc0PyovmZn/2p8BAeKTjYDhJR3YO7u4alBZmfvauqNFfGOfXUu7BYicgTg8wllgyak3HPfUiKKWlGlKWHjj+mqRJTOdlbhwtL7UUkvXznJtAvlR5p3tU8RnO0HCvyEO0bFdzJjKG/quYFZqOl5W/6Ih2+DtTUg6xLH/2SJ1s5rBWXN2xGxEXimMJYeAHncRHwk0fXQxBzB7ud2SOEM1mlJr9hWkHo9iI3CFZm8jH69OctbyEIvRtldHG2sHJdhJQaEU8czr4MbIMiCPFzMSWi49CpmRXLI2zvXkvxLxLyKm1jLmNzLu4UpjxWM+8Jix9U66VKcRDOZoDnkMQbZF1W7Yw8G/0hTCbnlTR4nlA6+gzNzz5qyqwjiESHXVMXLuPl/Jvvt6vH9sNJ0hRbKROjnSxHGGWcHJ024GdHQnH26dlYt6c/VORt7Jb9YGZntxEw97ylj0/GR/p1OFCU+zpkaKH3w4N1Dt+1pcsZdoIN7djyqSTFIMt9wu7toksQvWjd7im7MDrGdihZDSa69OJxMgmTN1C7p/WItfykZp8MtOA75pMkP8NTwq5kajruOMM1XIjrBhry4El2pUelQL7lhSLwiYGzQxueiEB+7xlnVEoQ4mkd2aIf9MRZmJ+M9zDu7e1ERk6WJiZdEA9D5ytcBMPDOKoMvghnSCO9Ik7WwmVSHJCaTULGA3lCfjkJQLp45ArQH9ew7ArWjCvb6tqGuBaZmiaoYPKgoVw3Cx4iSa8Zgw/r4TgBbQItKE8YdUQfVk7IyaWUzgv6fxZ8SvBzP3L6mfGfYIqTznLIFCfpZIIQ/HLnSrIVNvJhP8FQvP4Z5D0pCQ9h65xm8xoaGvHJzphGJ4Zp4xO36BOi410czJ33X6tyKI/BnOBBToW5XQgeG9fAJKdDjhNnoetjnkV35i6Ywu6J94sDblHW6IlN5aY249hu3bwG/nTkoCZoJzJ8VHN+9RjHm9c+9j8flM0AgR8WRW6hlLOxVHMbFhE8YN2t6NKaBRTOQpWef5OvRtB2n4ZEsbwx+btM7ZNBOoX4m6JPAMmAdVAM5m7wrh3h5HcS+z3DWw6LkQ9uJgxl/qFt88sd0Kq+wqK6mFThM7nJZIJ2TsqgpPEtgsN1jrsioP0zY4FjOsP09sdvHJdB1RqCMfiD+xpOa1y1ZLrcFGRmxiUxAwesKvpwltcsfH3C1nPGh61gAxWQu2rgT+6QJ4jI/szsVpDYCXTmk1Qo9odt1lXxGXHb0OnQpeQZiTsUjWAOZ9EIbsxamaCKvTjbYAWThBMmAAZcUWreDZZVU1IyRk9Ay8aDMASHLTxWkWD4E1vfIiqChPZpVAig4o0pa8cs4MuwMmGW8B7DOmBHQlpqqs1gpfxqaTkmhsgnHijO98EksAzvo9rQkGiiT0tqCLYlErm7RUZ1MXuDR1KLv+JzgQnst9biodqFZGy9LoATIT75YHzaiyIdqXR6zlwq24m03fzwSQWcb1rOOwoSG+Fx3zsiu5ArmcRJU2WuRPUZNGgE43nSthqAdQ+dnSEiuI6zK4eEIRNsCZKY9PAGwx44SnTAVjoNgPyjbwwM1JXd/O0mwn5IHj1D4IZndE+szOA2DiA63AsdGe6xd62bfloeqaXcEa82d8uf+Us/PfkKIYfJvPkMp2YwQVO9oQAjpcMBzSc4cLYCdqDpmk4UWBmW8m0mDwujxijkCmsJdLo6tSVj+guOms3NaDqP4W4oCcY6XfwaCphdVg+vVgI7AxVFmCKPWAP+jnQeXpPo1BFJC0d1rVgMtZnGIlwSmSN6seZr3Gwv1QrxoWFzqJyqyWxZkY3LIsInjDZuygziihXir1QqUywyVli4ed2bVl2rdm+PpGi8D7+enqsMGytChDn3Wu3hXrsfuAKICGvsvQkFJltvlumD6j4jcg5hJ8GrCwcCdbtFdy/PKlYrNyiBwHFywM6Gh8YG0HbaZ9FqANv+lZTmMkTd3ALVxPZkLOitSO7ZQG09u7Upd2PqiyNOu6helAH63Mstgbos6WLSzFr+2mY4nTO5Qq4hMdDEcsRxvJtHSu4Zl831CCNFHuSFTarQoT4AFpEegbbMxafkpHH3BY28GqWREASOd9cDKKm/Mj4DPBwiqx+NXAjuzC2N/G1aa0RwSEScqF9mGx+wL39yvoejAw2bGOQL+fRQmQi1DRGTTaqhdGNhGnQhPtbu+ogaJtpwHpQLZx+kJkiIgkl8nhADwVMY9hBOjxm7QIErLbWUHpkOrR5oA5C3qL25Mpy4PG27glS6CSd8GPEoEu0QzSW2HGXsFaI4twtwzb9nfjuAGh5B/E16FNQ4c35F8drD1m7EX5ivWPlvEsCId8pnLzHn0jRjxybpgx1SavBMSeOz5qkz0IwByT6kZgyd8WoFcbIt2h6WgJxiztLVH1QxV4t8YXfHqzkATEFVWvMIbfke0kcvVL8bK33XZthDMp+HSFlCtgFxCeaKnPC7Ez/LJ7bZ/+QVdHn2iYPFwRXdJ9ycGEsDbJM6BmZm65ZEU/JNvDrU2WVV0aM0SP1wtKk6zItiy0mTEGizEM/U+EFOtDGicb3SBQngQ8HrTA7gAUQ9XpVd2TRwN6uWneHkUoRuOuXChbrcI6BlPXFtTd3NmlKxEyhKqXIPnUhzm0yh45jGAZ0M5A87ESO+QrfOxOHcbrmrSCBYnu3wdrZea8nd5zG6YX6PLVKoUa9HPaQ5ShNHKRLhBlvBAHFaNOj2z7P8Xtr1zSa79HGNls/dLT3PNIR7zpVZW9aACb/Vk0aONNcqDo+l6jCZjCRf02A8x2cDif90khO+I/uwEmHVM2ckCl4T1y4GHnPMbPgFIWCPC1e7d/Er0IpmH2SxsanThqfbNHJSqR1cDqR+/Tb0NnNU27otqWz6QTng0n+1otiyu27rtrc2/z7pEJNKFZy0CkPi8rve1q0dTMPTN4oRVDMBmq7L+Vj63hMXI3xgNxfGQa9N7aJMt3Zd2Z0YBwORUy4SqSNa+ZDN7Hi7vNa9VorDrMGQLP4UabcV78ekAi6FmpuEcAOwck0ypK8Mji1mLKmUawA5dCu603vSQdOtdpkjPFBz2R3yJSVTjUWz8YEOhEvf5ppiuOsQyMxGG4Jrwf201y139bPbOheHiFFgevbE+oVbeJr3cCJ9xNXSALZ2dKk2yZTIVZ08yvTRtXvW7oysVm7LaK1t9L3qYjJjFyRtMKT7WsmLae89NGVjOaFPdTIAGwiuUNpuKzmmGWG8GUNlZ1xLpwpnQBM0oDzJ8FjRz7//7eyy528dCWibeYMJ6mgcvoRMbyMsUeWZWVV5W7HC04v/YTME1QyeP/2zf2GGfpjPmwOVQx8a0SO98hPvgzr8T/XKD2F6tPYJqMQdT1w52vaovOZILAbDsNYSfXhg35PnRixNmxtCK/aHrD8Jq2IQ+4QiUBfNgYGvKR1IyT/vAnQSucuCdWgWY5sZWdFnQxGqN8fGucJkQcWKNLNdO8bXdVIJ3aNR3OeK4kVfSHCTW4YjyIyz3zi4+TGMQfvVDFiZI2/MkwHaPO0sYDEywhnW4sQQu40BWRsuygdEgI4MdD1K+TODa8xJnK9DEVTxfGXWtxRUDliHZfVdSRnmTLcHITOL4Xt+Qtdm63ioETzcRbrgsqJrr7W6Kma0TQWbn3x6mjc43h4LPsPKrsOUp4TgTrxKx07wIKLhFlhlb8xeUbaoCZw1uPDoV1qDarsDgNGeSnk4OiPypDlbT/aatny5hDg7SjsM+jkmHkPxcZq62UllMAcKmPLChIQ/Rjt7GMkGI4omj2soJ4jgSEmLjMNc8cFlDQMd1m0+hd2VS6HE87hgOZigSDvxbg8gSjM+b7OKwgWNOWHzD6EICtKFAuXl0lF0BqzZS9ilRtRa1menPfMmfCZx3OPAVy2uTLw50TBH9pUnfwiNfpKnDoUsLpinzFpmn5Fl+rUUHcWpHpS4RCJKQH1QYs5zBTsBYkeJiUcPk8k/M3KvS3wytc5l2LUTRBd+oiw0tsjP2hQfZW+zU2d+WExT5v6QkDLetNBBM719sN2Nx1bQ6SlKWdpi8DWnLh8g2wWP9tNR2oUCsphASNPLZRe3+CxvHygm8SBzBixM5CdvxiQTjYETORJ2wuXkOOpBJ7uypv9/wR6hOYVKcjGHQ7cqQxs4sRgjAMjA6/ZMLd8evH/cIaZdwWc4tq8LftQzJJ6Qd1EmZMk+gH5dEdV2PKwTCOkU7lIdWtVHnmo++kvhEKQXWStPUBMMsQ5Aa444NtXnrZHXgGJIzOpBASQs79j3k6rdgCfEL+zOdKqamGwkHNbMR8Y3+5D5GaKsKY6YTAg3IyBnTP560MKnDOhY0nN0wx0TYM35mI6t4wW9ElB4fSj2XCkda2XvScVU3aIDPCZRySfMaehR8yfPUlvr5IvOCMW/A2a+8rqhycs1WWaODJ6nvzPI28j14RZgc2zAiy916M3t1hI1GEBFDBcsFSdLoAXcU0uAPr9Pkscd3uhbZtvlixyj50FzNdzY6pCoSe2YxYPy1TlPFtQtI8hSWiu7GWUkD8uINnuypudodjenY5xVopu58hJlKVUYsIBS7szfYkj9WtkNXJhjMQhC6hJScJqBwxzQewTHCqPlnFnuGM/Ozpj7WuL9MOgy/lPC/BUuaiwmuRrtiNBC8nCkGVg3KbCPqU8RAeNUAN24rVTlBuXMWuDkFHGrPHieyS3tkkJBNQ9uK7l35W6DLy/NR+mxYlWXrGATNDp1h0VSL2oT9qGTs62ZYA5DodIDyrHws5DkgYLBsaInN8epr2dZKIwycV+xOO5QZRJx2BFUiFC/6B5Jjy7rgohgQgP/9/qvlXNseUvKFiZOBWsF36AQNqmbtwUfFUbHugKBJF30kNA9pv0xv33vD+KX/8dPf+UX3/7Dr+8f/0ncnod73PKcwONb7lmI8w/Xr+ZCqipjnJ9ChjssIzJSe75/82d/yqw1oc8Hth4XRGGT9Inx2FRmovsyCvtwhtkZ8o0PEeqO0XNuAlENFLQao5LhjE20h5GNxdUzpJQsrJAD6PSkdzxDId7sTsm94jvAznYJcohJlFWyZHJHq1sQcpP7AWt51T24IXV9T663qNkNcgXMYz0knwbv+EYfYAlDEJuME5JmgIyEZDnSExBswO4uzB0cNPqDJ58aVZbgFWGxxF4ryi/T970kZHOYWdriU7v3nZkQ1O1pFDKpKQxdHZ4bHYZKJk1yTT0K9wnPXdU7M/O22Hd0dQ7F53hsIlZjR3gLYjHDsMDIvywY96lTT913ZlJRYxq+8sYOWHPOtNYt5k7jP+zaxvEs5wsZABCdHvBOZjCb0S4thhl5PO7mNIfQlUoA0gj+TMZuabyDvo6OsEZlUGZh3R1rmdJUixP4tYK3Cw3GB5CkDxkyHEZeyPvxTxZPHmBPmR/mbVYeDEvUWRzKGRkiaF5bzUhOeMusbNz/VFg0Sm69y1h9soZIEm91EpOoadrVgzmzV47cwfxMhYIDfPKR258wPz/tAlc3bQd94cdhOMJwWRxO2EDbdcmB6umpttuvzD/kCj+sauPM3B8D7l0pFY8YUvARJF2aL7U+WYlaXcRnSZB8xqLjo7COK/wShzJw2RRnraYmRH+j6GmkjBz6gV1vkU00hLEys2HDauHFYDpJSfEQ4sfDs/WbT492EgivpJiLaTN7pwkvOtbusYJPIMBlD7Vzal/1TD7GefdIX8Zoa1DMeiuqu8FBVU/v9yAKPsnPzJs6IsPhTJwvV9KTs0H2wXiPfQryesp3b5JjDU20BPLwoP4ZFvDoiXNwzr/p6pwATujOsdO32xg8+X+j2F0o35l6l57gZfPwzCHynSdnwgZiAMMro/bIHGZAgLKxB4e6a9MQGi5HXMbgQNUZNBdx/A3IkLxKXiOe7qDRKSbsWdsh1AixcFN30jUu09DeOMPhCLO2fcD2Ge5JV9Xh79qDe7RPkmQk4WsW6bwTZVY/SW5pocEJ9aJt7SvNPDMdKO6L4nT4sLFbBSQ1rFxBaRlgt9siZUC8KPNCEfmhm1+qLQ5kz/gkZLdbMZOsCUvoJnZgEp0xAOpW7WsO2NJzgnXLiNg0XARWBtCZqSOw0Zpw2VqLIIeYobY+qIG0tYluOS64sYA6qhU1TPnwqLzNw5JGlRH7emTP2Iv0JEl6rD2dLqbx785K0EaoRTf7hDYLf+Fu6FzpjygpzPRdIWO2q3KlAHvmQPG0TLHpKGLy+70wu9QJPzAUMqNQgeDXqvVvpjLlBOdsKlGbJAWAr8m0HLmrkxT+5rh8EHxedibObhleQITtKpbZIt5NOjfLxRnchbV5WniibaWzHVHWqERSHcZYemc0WChOS+fCiqUqiNKhdPleJ8xI/XYOzkDTKzae3mANo8ys+VaZKCHzlLsXJmrcOzyrqycssqs9T2bdBF+j3YPvHb/WFXGv4oYN6GdrdRc/Rn7OVeUhFxID5KpaiRDmFlgpJj8Mi1JnQ0buXeYWKyKSk+YiFoTC3GZdyhg2eaOJzhX0XrerJKO5vCQdgvEHUvqLUAxudMdo3INhh0KKCXf3evPGX35g2PH8LXWYQu14sygdsVveNKlpFrf08kHLUt6tBPrw5DfvPBqLagPw6//bN/+bv/YPf/VXf/Cd9z5479tffufz/eN/yjNqEO78zDlnmTrLTLlQ0G9onqPBlAxBDqTJaG3Ln/pL/zp1F22Pwt0TKn20T4rcfpT+s8na+z6+F+WwuUFjtjigI0QOxqlx1PKcX84sY1ynrcPazTM8PdlXD3JbNAUZCJ1ltw/qADQ2iPFMIFZcngSneFVy5EZrRZYZjyHgDaAq1xpu4dlVlBAankaBFuDmaWljnPIr2kfhvylSnya7bNCHfNxi388guasPoJWRLLy8JQpUcqt2QoN4ED1ZKYUmFUd6Ntraqmqtc8Q1IQGUuZOgHC4u7QSyzlcS3lW8bDKC4KPqzWO6qiOWOSVwxbI9L2pi+cNChLT0HPXdmVlOkeGjh6Q4PPhTAQoImWBDTQ20X+Ucp3pFnpUR1dK00nrbirCeiHZZ5uCgLEcCCczqnA9D4NC7e91ukw5rc/NOcMLAYOORHDsZyefJP/wKjLxPkS/Deefa8CEjNpXypJM3Cbx9SKfl1CfROXF5qr9pmc9xvhk8cvELKGVCYC7XuGJJr/ZDx+jp8LpOIgJOcS3Sq12L1pNN5pHw0bANYYMQOM18+MpNzeFiPxy7m+jCbnTYTw4HFyxjgz61xfg0NcaKlUfCYsME97FpzoZnmCoKZZrMa/Nkaqhf97o8jHbBGE9fK+AA38o4Ueh+wU8II/QHj9woFn3MUaH/8srbVlLAUFHU4LD1b9lQzwN2VCUtn+TAQsf4rl2OH3IPnKLYGZBdxKE4Gk5W6cMls8n+ffzVAHktT1jgyezEhUqhksqvrhRDQLm2kpywMAgk4vJz6re+4sNPIuvV/83S8TArro2c08t3SldFI+m85C0/UFWMxYhjkCFa9fEZgl3T0blNlsvZpLom+uFVE5esueyYpzCxOBdeaLSs+pZx6SFHNUq4ORH2CkbSPuPskKT6Gp0yYuTqpZ0YMSAnE6xpIsAJsZyJzLE385WpLr+C3nSAK2pJ0/0j5pA2UqIJeGFT5zlcKzdTVVocruckUHZnSjdLq9hkw/bkyB2+8YgCFc0gwUtG8AwgMeIcC2dlzCAZUprYdfSGQlnEBZCFhcQCGjqsucgMt88ysc7SHjYYSSjY6QCZL2mxlDFKNmv+zPypcGTW/GRgRWdNRt7vm1my7qYS+SKEELKShySZwzlVAAAgAElEQVTMJcxQFEYzEGdjDpjdYlFcNkIVKUPDvGcDrATj1sLfLIBekZJdWLSroxCtR6S3o2AkY7DPcR0j+w7z3odroOUqBUf87gIe6YPxB0YdHRb8VltmTF+EssqpIB+TIH9kIvRxJ1uxY5o5BOGCxxUIOQTi3hUWhQ5CdE0E9whroll0AqkSbrlPNc0X9KFHMBUivRfEsGTzrccYQmtOjoNya9nVk0vJkVxPq3CkopgoMuZ8uRMSDzMbmu4Da0f0PC21hGY5dSlxqRNPjDO/mHS+zUi0Y9g1f7Zu/HAKm26pI1gLY5tq1Ug/OclSYQxOwq175UIzQJ4Tc3PzWDHV7wQVjvfLDRksODMmKhkP0pb15uMX7//Oi4+/Gfsl/Na3F4zu6cmt4U2y6y6RkEfVveW+UbivGe67KCiNFVZevLmOpPoKJ7RCd9f+w995+Qv/6f57v/j83d+sP/nPYd0orGMKTlfv3UJLRxDowi0criJBjCtVlN3NZAjOkgtMTYj765e/8De++bf/2/fe/YOPP3716un+5n7/0pfeevbP/jkb1x2dAj0+efS0vpG9N4Mr0E7MGw2H6R5uVWCen1ymGfkX//JPKSoAk6QNp1CYz6nTgql4LENb1/H7OpUtfO7aYMW0dK86Y+ZxKjfOhmBMXUaaaDDMJ7LutJD63j0c3it7VDfeFTNIHyPMbZyHfYwlHg40v1BFcDSIPFGoY7WEAzml6lw8kkukwcAm/lDcwxdQ6evKxD68h4hJ0+L7Wx6euKIUePH2eFEkUx6uCkHiQJk+sKnPwpmsJRWNpB3u1CvbBX2kOl9KA5i1d0ujHuFuLcIOnAKJZ2tVtU4EfcVm1hdf4USjELwGihO41I3M8AhoP9zkH6xBb43MjrqvaFq3Q8HNowpkBlTx+Nh7R0yAMsU6rVUEtXky50iK4lrtiuJgbtZVmZxaNI/LmK8j6NaQV4oWKZwOUIzQgbxRUd5NrEWPmvSEx8oSGJ4XBFLsk3hIhrHmTsBPSYyJg8bJMfdDPWkLO4mr+RAlEBOF7RjbVXiaInr8eGrdL5vcyQc9yjrNijjb9qBt1S7W2NgslZjBETGxywtdNNZGjPGRdJLjjtK9E5RnXvxvjnL0QE8w0bjZJy/gsCRjOmW4Z198IIm9r8qMR1bLmD4pGmL2AFPyYKKiLsSftDIYx7JfmcI+AkegqQPH0c/ZZ1h7hEAkB0lHs2qzc+WXnRPbfZ17PX/R+ZMbo/ebSnHIw4PJmZyoWfMewuoEe/jV6o4yUPZO2WHZSsVB7l93ElzVZCti/kQeKtneXHQHPQ92+WHtRPXALeaJyokS9Wto0txk9gH8+DAX43B0gjfO+ajCc12YTuFY6fOLE9U84TDHlEtkqp+O0+VDi+n8zx4bzljeg9V/QJUeRKlI+7m67MHu6AP0PwPUC1zKwVx40lB0hRO2vq6q8UGwHBk/74HFokdsHmfed0R6rBcnKJxLXDtNrA9PD3r6pKmnxozumkTDgvs0QnWnOZBZQBgUD+tiQAK4iML04VTcdE9IwoB/DJNmL2b4pEQO/FvhdWkoB6kII0zwNEXVXykIlzRRgjr+itpwehWOifoKNCIONJlbqE+FvoOqngAD11cNm2TjEYR71qE19siE+fY1JUVucOYmNEW/baloe4Zxp2JWrbn3P4b5QQrzxjykKJ0rGURrehfEvKEqbypvWPNTXZksyWidqtJYnLaUC2Cr+CzaW5iefh0jR1MRrnBtvfeWZkbxJcf6e29R0KH4h9o9DicjQP56GZnZTe9ZX0YFyfth6Rqa+NDw1dMMM5ajEHlaeS4RP0PGkmHxuk8SPnvlqq6MLOuwJOdfSIEGKxwWo7tKgh0lB4rWKLg/ESDn2HerTcLi6Cz78EJE6/XBmQCm3MIwJmE0Oj05LunzGo58RvTgJnk+zTosqu503cfKmRGczNOms1KODODif6vK4t717FlEuNHaGzMg032jUHFepQXJt/m4tvxTQ2ubdq6InTesCfQ7tl7NodoyjE8LVXgZiXnx42AOx0jVNfibGZXxN9wlzkSEW7mOU5MBGO3WnNfgrW/9P1/7rf/67W/+0jvf/pUf/v7f/dzv/tLzl99+un0Rb39FHK8yO2CgkUkrX0F3tAM+MRixC+khmEUJd793azzAB+bp9Qe/9De/9bf+k3/0W7/9wfvf2y8/+MKf+In1tR/tardEo629LVeGRSa3JiFqvAGGYul1mTlkO+Ighg22EkrfvH7/v/urv/0//51PPnn14YdvPn2qiHz+4sVt5Rf/hX8J+dx88iHdxo7u0kSY7V2ZS99tSFpI62WLT4CTjKDp0k//u39hXIeHToATN4kJeJAEf3dkSC0jCz/LfUz9cBxJxmxFYQDjCtGWosmHwt+YIA6tJhq4xVAoh0NlV0iaDG9h3qgIKMS0qR4hg87Y3lCRnHn0eEaNnysvt33SZGg8JQ+DfQYjIxudkXDIMnRm3gPaCfncrHdTdU0F+RmmU73LtV53rdTMSK/l7F457NFX52NmiThLiUGXY1j8851J1EQqWmdkV2cs2IUGnbYHJ+otV1K6nfL/xMpl0ern5ybPzC6yucsVqEJnS42y1xuleiJGLe3edowKblcgxnAvjiYOQwJUNXEisDTqEt9oFGmywFJvwBgY2IplVtQqX1EuZZlX1JUNSibcRvqFQ630B8wxo5kvK6mm32whTg7fiaWTJemUb5K8+bUQZtrLGQdObIQLtO1jAqamXH5F/QnHr3MWR/Zgu3Q/KdvGDtfP6KTN6HrFyeTh69N8iTKplDPl4KhHEq5QcmvViwgxLTi4eVgTjXOwccSHdtLAj29Ny98iqOrKJOL3JUyfXYkUErXInO1jMiabCH6lKfm1VAkRDty5XdZhB++TvTEx7rPOUF9naoSuNuJ0xUcNcTRSo9TUNTY3IkvGGV5AUXk+9HY+0LNYwhXXcS0Lr7iAAxo9/YZ+Wp7DsgGeOIuxfB9c4UMugp8Z8NXHzlYJdo5sH4iRzyd7KUuPL27iy87nPgh6XCgdPzbDGIvm1ZvxBlZjoUUEJmDRLsvoBG5inKtXRISZ55r4P+s5YOcF/Iw95oKO2iCRMcZILqEoLMGDdUd7DjsGch9l7PQ2ej5KuJTQYnDAeC5GmHcoG1pI6gssrFHRDOWvYfGV2TM/TJzWXnR77a0x40v4SfHGg3gHx396iXclNtbU3yeEUFz/c9HozhUOXKER7t66e9vTcN6DyRAzEd5H6qvUqUcjkARK3Dbj9NVx1qY+u+zLkSv2aVzbcM4pcgUD6+0BYauAr6Fgj9xCU7C2Zg8fyS2wN7PpFS+RbRWyaIWggmd1wlkX1xcaxhsmE4U6yTHvqZDtgafFzFIceEjJsTgkXAZiexaKH1uu+VSngSQSj7R97b3lepIwgvupPmPchieJOurKaI+8GHKyhOCYl/xcRPFI4z3qgdATEY7CGnh7X8mAGr212FditimHOR/ttYgIDBdQ82vKgMPiemb52UQ1/ISJeLArHjc61sqSVN5u68aPgz4RnryZImm1Vk+XJ10/jEV1j0vFpUSVv0npLrRJd4+i4KQCkkami2z2n5Fqv4PDCAUrxaXkuyJqhqpNkWhMyeFBbydth2wPKDDtidgwbYbZ6mnrflZn4m5EuHPdeLHKzkcwnHgAsRyl6an03IzIi0f/uLEzrypyGCbND26+rQmU4kMFw1qrmkyaOUSoRQ+kcDGuLwtKbuCyg9+Cu6enecNj0KA2uHiLiOdPL7/8jZ//oa88v3/6dEchV2K/+n9/Hb/7v3/hmb/64j9pcTu9fTJYDkg/Khg/7v21gskZrHmCeRApEymDMvn21Scfvvvz//Hv/eLf/v77n3zvgzfMtf/Kn/iT68d+gqfnyuSRYm3rGSdc4YpmNU7VU/Og5u8sOeuYgQk9cXf76P3v/vxfeffv/h+v3+zXb/B691NZW6Etn8UP/5l/2T//xc/QyTRz7xjdTebi5n++CMBsbwokmeLmLYlg0OCQP/Oz/4augpDtEI1YE65gTp8uNRKjlrGuNuUZqhwMzTnpmuDGyjMlrMpce1d4pMSUckDuewmDRyUAaxq2WApeSx/EM3d2KwPhGSlNTxNmzYUVnfRYkdUFL54ybLullwg7230OICOOwcdEJWVjIzW/E3wQEcyxEJTcEFrq1mDCiV/wxs7IkKtbiL8BXunmo0JcPlT2Ld7Ti3d4utw4EhPYfNM8DmSAJBcpTISY2SmNXpeGWf6Fmm7JIi1vV8xJ2wJLXnsDtzZSNCMXLYIPiuLmV2NICCyMkxAZA53tNmIAju2HuaN8E45AkGuCgeOzgshDBzZzOgFMxmLexBk0paioaT92L/EA9F8xRmeUSy14h9GJAZsQaVIWurubKTgx8yFzzyG1PODLXRmgB9eiX7wZK3/EOVLuapxhco5NlL3id6hNEcvPh/hvfaSYs3wr5ZMdFo5MgT0wgz5h9DgmaUgNy22nHsC+APx+Ie+YpnUEJ8KPcNFnR4o5yZ9j+8VFFjZtG5ybIpweRslLhzvFl4qxvR7Ke7pAnFxWHNJIGD2iJxD0uMJUM+XVJE5Ysx0BgtgaBg+xFsdc1qfk+gxCk1PhOHW3zZN20bB8rEqX6GEsRpighQPCG+kFLbvxGMgx3Qt7bx5QV2iaXZf2IclgTIU4VwEeOBNH/hsZytidmCR/iA0+2WQYPdQMK2fhO3syEUeHH0OM24FmXG7HviSsJzD9sGTmAXhUOTpNobOW1H/3kGYxYfEnTtwH5O9X16qfXZrUCftSH6JP9Tgez2Z0fEocl7NS7IM5o5EbE9s9m0Dm/VQsmqtPW4vBwWPyGFpJeriWMRzPk5da2ktPZOLJ5Di5arOp5nPIKpyj1fCr8RRzYp6KQ66LFNziIFUeQ0ImIdUP5NaHO3V2xwcPJzjsfP8z9So7dNo4Xk3MyqE9x8jjooOwD62xZp35W8x2d56EYyq2cQnrW5nyFwavqrVI34lM7Z+l7PUczwYzogowy4nMYWoft9lUeQT3fnhQAdPyyH6YxvYOMxL5BsZuwgqE2gaejivzEBMstHVH4chujVyGDNpGHjM/VXxK1jhl/QxWqre7+zJGLsWD2DsyXQ4oXknT53MwOciKkygrwUiGW/iYAOXfjgjPvuiT8sKpNAzrXZFKw/QzrGhGgJTD1lpNh0XIiO0DJuWbLqPKZAqO/NnhXl3klOmh6usdf/6MySrM0WvGvg+4kq5+kY2CD874ye9VYryHCedrWLlOhgiDw89c4zHTVn9WmEdUF8Nd+ko4lVZ/3ZKzqUJnBlgaERvRjJH2iwEUD8BRkp39kqIIZwplms8oyPdc/QKiu6+Ve28anSTimM+KaemxziFsjGqTJSniJCW2lTBRJAPRTBTJYYcizc68KejPlH7ftRgEc88zsq1TNJ4gNHFllK48BM3N8p3S3sk9/46ZOYVFjt1a8dqxzJCxiMFMOx2q/7EPv7H/4P9acdvlb73zYtetbm89+9JXM5+ef/c33nn66PVX/5TdnmtdOQT4A3yiNdXcUBaZKNye3xIaE5wKX2E2aLThO7/7O3/j33v31379g49e/dEPPi348/Q2fOmH/9jbP/lnW2I51V3rNjoUvrCcKD2m2k4M2gi2aZhU3l6//94/+s/+/W/95tdffvTJhy9ff/S6Pn59f/FsvVj5bPnzZ7cf+ef/xedf+1EaQR68iC24TiugnfOvSObbtaeQTuz2GUFHNf5t3bhgCAYlxQyXM7LuHYrmIWl3xBdzLzDSZNfuxn1vdiBtZebVPYmHqELfAfP7fU8ZLdSyu3chPdZtyf8PZ585iEsXhNeahvjugnftdqB6A3ZbuVYuLt1CarTMuO97BMKdbcycgR2hQ+fA/S4RkJhaYW7V5dJDUogRjARgi3KWSG3VBbTdN1CG6kYxtZz5LYMyV6EbZEm3uQmAeSo/dSxtnp4ekpxWuXvZFqaPjswJpWtURFRvUZOUchkH0EesVnd17/STiGl90QnkBFMFmope4IMke2QkmaI0CNDWQmlBFTzaiSOXwnN4HYbwzEyI/zn4CogvL81M8zDyVkkVCk31oaIxNKJrgqrBy9i9DZiAew7SXFwfhM+cQs43Pb5l3YROC/FkQKNUtnX35oVIB3CuHCxhiavBaUrzbJhNQKh7cXWApiqclF0NfVroyAj0ZAcfxsdANwC4M17JxAXVZJkdRJ+t+2UmgaVychRNjmERZDpzOhVUeNwjUJ4p+fjaFTSoABPDfHSD1qNxfSwlbSLSi0lO+ifpc8LiygcH5eWFSV/ybkVf2RQtZg06Fo5FSPYqd2IF9ZG6HgMpoNZU/+PAlAY58LCaojjnpJ8dtx4N82gZwdEMiaGJr4fbh6Pw7dmZ82Xp7hhGKLVznOTy2SZHzh5z4mdfOsIjlztFoTOnQwuizGiuOYG0pMFSdsLPLMNjOZ0AJ1jwRGmS9x2RU/fMrnJWr1dS5vSzZ1Kkbc90BLMLHMWI29g5rrbQT57J6PeEPJj9reGE2tkQyMwz/CBN5KY4e77J4RzC7ehX/bx3A0kQit0N3eUnsFKKRqolgzUTSq+NSyTZptWKTj2MCPYkVaAmI2SC3Y4KEQSvXXu8OJT9ofuMty7MiB1CuQ1hWD8mXz8TUzvDwns8cNKqNBVWE+cwsXn2mehLTR2EGMB8eowOVwKDVBLzIRMHKP4RXGw0aSx5TObonHD0FMpS0nkzsK7BDcA9eveFihrWJ5WZ46KM2YpCq+A+B7FF6B2UKrYPZlZr9YioZnZpQxcB3UE9MI92cIjMctbq3mfcqcwJGV79rMWnI4R7V3ejcyn+rtsyYldXK0mMz5XBu/gxUk80XnIgTTLXXOkRGSv1rHvtsge8k3TUD9ALMrq1BPYmaM3cvB3dhd4TwkzNPNCRgLW2Ewxn75GunsOKG8LZzplVC0fMksVRQGN5klHhdhTaPOm058KWjtYV69BAB/s93Pk31q7WkosnOCY8LOBcJWk4Tt8pumkniTnN2sSDWKmvrHcxuE25i+DdCY+QIq+1EsgV7t5FByYKbeYZi/oj6kiHIEoRkz/dq+XYiRnoRzu6UVVhiY2T7SR/YyHc930rVY6hWY1CdTULzrVipZN5s6t7d+0yM0JNtYRkzwwDnG9kXtRug3cGg/cKYqXb096evlHi63RJKDRClr17QxdTUTKNDo+9q3lBWBtVoum5kgYrKS9a0FQP5oXYgWReI2DhfGMDFgn0LRcK4UkPF2+Z5KbUvLoMpXxHpkGG3e931qH8BTy9unujDG52W4uq2+7q3Q3KwLlqSnv10e2td56e3uz+9NXHr59efRptb7399rPPf3W989Uf+8r3f+j3fyF6K0KjrdHFQoI4sPAmmDzdzSKj32ylGnKIDNVPhr6tePP7v/n1/+jf/r1f+/vf/8Gr73309ObJbstg/vTUH3/nXeaiUQLD9L4uwFBlYV4nQYQKxGG2rYwTQecRnlHkGrz8wXv/1X/47d/6xutXr18+4eXdXz/htuK27LbMeodHv3x/75K8hsVc6y5Eb4pv8xYSSJIGuoIupme3FQmtFMIigiw9g2xj6vZ4T8MsPVkqd3XMIsvGEAl+n11uKBRTXGp3eKqnYjqQpyXE2z2GBtZ+7rS0Rsa+b7QG1WstNz851BJzTqan2jcNqBBhe1f1PvDeQQiwRLZu6y5ZxQAObHzkthcWRHWqcjo5A+rGvt8JUqvq3kQ004daqqBLTIhbrqMjU0BkH1J/mMUuuJb+srWc2Ei64V3dvM+FN1UNShF4geY7I2p28CIMiwmKbQN6KznKBinl15A+qfzIZHvIfEL3jojMXFLuuQrsSTNvLv3duFyezYRSXkm6WjPaH6MXxmPWfgRFvDVP6PkU5gx3von3IGSwTV7JGVSx92h3q43TLBmfloPQ0In4wL7QS40umOlnICr6IC1npXHTsq9PdKmDxBfCtHcDPDrF46YxNQhrJSRock2cS8hQYXq+0Qd8P/+r4LvA+RD6Ku6GrgALHEEaSvU9Q73GIiWzjdRzdh5vm5ylWJkDM5gQJ1K2+lr2MFDmLLbOV+QPmzGZVaQVl5+Qo2WbXAe1ZkxvsylzFUHYh9tkbZETbeF5hbqdHNET6CeTs18Tbh7ZGp+rNZVckwPMoZ6ah5FXLlHKRGdqSZuXzWm0ND6+XMlhwMwxLb7tqC0hsRvvdZfaN+gCcpw0eOO7hjo6VrG9XEMct4JAUObH0MXsAiUL2Tgw+Z1agAQNYuw4WzmOTMT5CQkBGQfbpIkqxk0qBfF21HFCRqm2WeQPc6fFjCHMg65x3XBy0ekCnRTmyxfHAYL0WHWWqi4Xw4M9gb/UjIPyctjOIGNyU6YDm4hXVrqHwn+SfnQ3t43yuqcJHxW+3FMmtKGdhXB0C4l0tcfTW+rEA04mGCkxXf3QhI8GQ9tLH5wGgeTyvvL6c4sJv9F4Sw3b8TtBIll+9XPREYFt86TBI1Jg+oyBoZ5slJ7HaV6QySEyO4HxpCayzpdOryGjux1xn2Nzu+/pbtum65uNNxh7OLPvMUDKt1w24HWHec+rx0QHhZfGwYHM2nAGE2GpZQK8YV1onb1hM6MilaLuxT95siuC2hbNE9p71LZxOYQHcK6xkIV7W1W3ZDg9EDTA2rqBbeHZxcNCq2I7g54mIVnPD5+MXHHF+XKBA7+a6BGX7qorDW+uq+DUc6ZXhJl3EzPW18hbrfAxq4vH0N1hpt7Hzkob6vti8nukalFwOZ9uftQadRW84BQHEQPXSjzynPB10v/nINp3xgtpd2oOJm91I67xkxJKDqeH59XuErI12SVxEUhcKdYwYTn02ffiKPjahZrHCm/PM6/B8CLkDwo57cv2nYPE5FrBPTEHn/S68KqmwTIYG+MnNGzcasLGW1fHCTwNXVIr0+RbItxePjUO5qoFWiguHxy7mr0Wr/nUktpJYMCIhq7oy4mEocWU1oau4uzmjt0GgTqHqBkPqUt2UsVzVibX0phPuZ6lCZsNyvfCEOZJJyfXj20xOUwAt6ZWVQyiYEWwwjNG1ut+y2Xu1bKfysAOm2y07qoPXr356HsvbX3uxYvbfvNyPX/ejU8//Tgj8ezz33vvwy+++gdvfffvg1iGoKLNare7VaMKEemR1Ay3dbnaa78I5xJ2fvgb//dv/JV/571vffTRq/7ex69f3+35MzxbtuvJIu6vX0HWbXTX7VkS+A94rJHXc6LJEA4PwDJi7zp7S0WmrfD76z/6m3/13X/wG5++rg8+evPxp28+efX0VNXbo62eGAGw7eWHh8qGS3HHk9er2jPCfGV0W1HvNgdoz6Q1PazdmjWhg/xNDOZ9DKkET6lcDl/oQMMoYQfGBcfUFf69ZmHdRVKLHKs0tpUZ+APNiJLgzUyuHoKA/Pn0u3DBJ+fp70npbbFb1UjJts47qxqw2kV6tblF0kWo8Vs4h0/qwtiptyrizrW6qykKdotARsquNhtLlvwnqzgz0U7+Ryg3/Xj5Jlii7dRYmSE412hUPS8kALtgSX04k/TDuWn+dRnZXUA3NqsZzPz5lisyY9FbDM0MrA+H11CSulUDqN2mBDxO6SqkhxRwbKgS5uYr1oQUXV4vEnROjsoxi41bpp0Y8T7oA5i3C78OYbvDu8WUc2XTcWzfJLlnhBvWs3XAJ7lScsZRw16lWB/Og1G9rRMcwSXnWHdO56YNgSH41deuviLgnQHT1pYpcvqxuJiz2Il5uRRMd/Qm42FJDj67mngVeccU+AHtOPl6sdZrjT4G3KRVQrgvaUT4n4zXsefSRFyv8Ja3bYxMmrCjOlaMwu20xDJ38g3l5MKuQ3xG+Vf5rrETwa2akLNQYiCNIwI4xE61zSZDiPOqMKty/8wO6iHlgtUkfPRvsnU1unDlncb5/HT/Cw0qmb5Oyu5HUqwreW5yJNDsLPIUCewH0CcBWeEGGjn11SviM5EKrHRZzOposjZp69XgnrTFYylzT2YZx2RDXSJHn1hEg6WrBzvywim1ZUjmwicEdmQwoDhm1m1tzgCry0NiPaw5H1DCFGDu4cSjzZdPkIOxItRGBQ8xPerFaC2Lccu0Xf7LIPVK7xfOBBYG1c1ofRl2/WExSl5pH9Aenux9oK/Qra2rZls48ry5QQT8nVShs6i6sDR+wKReW/7VjDwNLb8SDmHHIuu5lkO43XGJBHf+ZhF+O8pqXk/nCx99PbOz5UKcIBhXlpsIbypZPWYGIYoYJZTsWn0Uwe4gxjMu1fdhGV5xeXZ9/q6VcpwVVdnRjNCnFhF9bjWI+MqQ5zBPRgOQgOpGZYnHpNRckW4ym4AyuBNbUifOkV+AFmsoLo7mbEOzuq3d5vNhMqlLDd7k1RAESRn/Co69CT7S9mMYl2Gx5qBgLxuSyXNqIOb7CTUMC17Nyg0yd9iKjKRUfnStZiwEcfJ9DaiOS4pkreXcrNkjLARxUbTaYYjAwqIZYGbKLlZAonPae252IvpS4i4P7lJyFsvF8oz5ckokFH6XtvrJ/hFqQT/rGWzFoB49tbZlrUCLAbwh5JUCL3BCZ7mM81xHQyF3CLdha2k0xteiaktaIHMN2DHqmZGNHVWdw5yv6i6gGpNiGemMQwG4qbjuxOPohcGsOBlfGXZJLNWlV+k8IayIj3g3avP749Vs8z/jDnRo4tPdr5WNklgIJ2nZeJnfMtZaYZGR6p3SDZ4yQlw7ZMxAlnjME/4+ZkQfz4Jxr+3H3jmDGD/hSG17b8aNVBXLsEIbwBkE5y9VzSfWZ5+k2SdHDBkecbvlkbDYIUSIlRLYbTMovz4iMzPbzQow+IbVbgGKiPPRiY0wn0vE+UrWRnW9/Nqf/u533/34Nd7UW1/46o+8+eijz33x87Furz555YaqF/WDj97+3t9T5LyHxwTKa0KUdW9NS9EAt8qwQKHduYu1XPHBr//y1//6X/m9RAkAACAASURBVP7+e99//+OXP3jZr5/MYW/f4hb2bOWL5zd7elX317EElFP0V+kkj1RQN289APcqQI4qmZYp5zGz6vf+1l/7zq/+n5988urVJ28+fdqf3r2RBnt+W971LDNu676rn17PcSepHZfHFDN6OEMputQo0YNDaVLXTCsjzjyTxLsAeqKO+U8nNU3TxrBua6WS8UPaXVadM6MyIb2hUFpFu1pXe8u4SYVeixutTYwz0WMSpLu7q3PGAeZGDCvdR9xfxySpxxRwawW1QMH4T6Jk0ObF5jJzDllTbMnw9mCBEUw7jVgsESm4IrGG2gmlHtkK3YNWLfGPVlct3eMoy7kY6pm3sWGBe/hyhfxUW1N6xMEtDQ/QUCEOw6rNvUFscxP0wjCWiDDvSCE9eEbnCrOOAKIyLBKR7YFw7yrmyUgfH7aSm27mZqrmdyPKlCEWkGTXJJjUAvDIUZhXiF27DuA1g3lIzdg6Ogkp5W+dK8rJYKCtA41tQNd2QeIluKxdykscJh0tdpOLPjmQDIBSvi5A5sAFC8YRv6mQna1AJGNmLdZiPBffGQl0qW4w7O4JkjEP6yorLiP7JDRQkNtCBx5hZ09wjp/U2c/iK2YuP14vix6bUPsRGc4Fyyua20tyLTXeblFkj7QSVXKOAYwAQcEt+t7qliHFqoG1eBlQtal29zkIuP90XfzK9q7iit8t4AG35oozk70uf9Q2B7rgrTSzDKEpJBkzCnJP8riKCDsWW0zFTqGjjEfQtwdDVW+2QT2qCXomlCpxSkOibsxtdmnSNpO0CTsaKNcevN0RfunKNGye7TTHRtqsGlDN8mcWxScPWiXv4f0M17RnPM3uIQd92TqEJZO0oW2dUPiLWmoGyqcHEUDOi87rwdwfXTI8x4HXbSOm9VnHXzHrqCMhPjQj/oGaH/ZxwlKViZOESbWXgwpJPGRnu6YG6KPe5PGecRA7+ht58sSSlNAFFrLLIjsh8sHdMizCUz8tP+6OMc9xrOAEL5n7JK+ABEIOig7YxQVPNjOWcVQcDdTkMQ7EevdJ6fD5IFyr3+kR7ah/59t0SKU6zRgmp1RFp3JneHFs82Z/pcfGGNvQI6EPN0tZhlqhcLDuunBrav94BkFFmbhM+h5b6SJUiregkxrFENo3qBK9GjqQMytiszk9cTB07I5FWbu17pkJjv6YO4HZMNvkJ/vwRTuUXaCRQ6ZnOooRRJ4ZqFMrTzr5pQIKd89lnkayPSNGc4UNf7erGuVT9bMIPeQl5QkpHjpYvVGeEMHoJX53lhGZifIR1LsBa5mndVRbwe7t1djc8yrDNjjnQnFeKMYBzy9D03DosF4+C5ygv0s/JNuPtmqUUaLU0s32BargMNHDvKsE/j0Za41Y1yPEkBKLUBzcOZTKdt8JtExX7sUwT/SJr+BSGuEI91sughQ00ZDim9mk84ahCzXONE4KOiK6N7tint/hGjxIfpLuoQT5jEk96RN+1GiOX9n4d6RZk93arBP4YzPtMBa6q3ZJyi5ZKOW+Ma5jTqeSux3pf2GxIjIi/YxG2AzHyRMIb0LaDcn9mnt4RzCwag7y0NiNM/rMeWNpsKd4rWlKYlgL/waNUHIFvO1h6jjm2y40MyT5DiqfzDrS8pbUl/Hw7Wpn5YYGG5oj4J+5FV1ndDA1KiMIxc21rI6rqMXPdzfz221xdDKaFCfiWJskd8De7IoVT3sfjJ9pn+b0LC8tco0cWYv0d756+zM/vd//1tPT06vXT89fvPXphx/jjoh7vXrptV9V3/YbWkkJ4MiV1pbzzN74z9MjnM+GCvuwZlid9ye//41v/Oc/953v/OAHr+LTuz/tDfTnX8Rbz3K5PXv+AvVUT0/Rd5YcOq1gzAxgANiuMgAx1pLBCHHWIxM70MAPfvkXvvnL/8sHH3zy9KbvtasXGum+0lfvZxHdZXW/edj9abME7NbIIAe/tZzVfma6lEvOfm3X9jh+C00MRQA5RxvXx6pql6Oa2z7Ke6oNIENILKAwzwgW3nNikv8D5iRS5G6Pvlhza7MyozaAMVYStKTsZO6RS8dlpqEjcnZEoyALXxOjaw4iS8iAAlqQTFrLIyMiPZvwKhmYTTdoeET27qoSn43+a7mkkDm43jmSMsKiuexxw8o089u6ucVt3bj97C66Dnhi8LzziVc8P7hA/Bnw4u3BzVhK7ctfNE9SOzHgXWVX6jvVRxNoY122V7qhq7beWHcLirYRBg+73VZVgX8OIasR3R20Yw08PIKbSgHvQ6d556J5UEIgKTK7+PyvGz/50DDeMOCXmH7J+ZUMkbzMsGJ5NG3xKrtA8GJRzZ6LIjwbqJ2cpQpes1HYhudKGsPMESvOkXrxclSSm8omMSpNdqDa0rUwPFo9s4/aOepSy3Eq0UNwpaKm3fJMEDEYDC7AJytieCAkHWtOqcVqV5u1Bbq6a8vkxraH/RQXXwIEd0Q63Xcq3ZiGJGiJB1jVDcXe0b3W4tQmJtpbiCCqLFkMMaAlXIg1FF+u2a4oyu301G5XfiMfiFRMTLsZrLhO1NDaFI6gYs1Peh3H5hgLWBtOGIbER2P3aRxJsTUAxl7zmsdgNk+6YExIARQexcS42fXB4KiqGW3YA1WNIYSnCgfr7SPvCO00IGDyhHG5t0mYQCnUwXoCpWbUWgrpWTaaUqFU2ugQP9ETbG5bZmO4N1DUxMPaA7jkwsawJBRBDzOtRXuAArPgZmRafa6nutuH/8yBUZCnICbwqZkfQu75KIpOjtQ3iNklayzG/2/UA64IuxA0KBdLTyITSXAYKcIMqvU9Hgq70zZs1hayU8aY3INCLDcfxYcp8ENPh48PaApZETYH/QVc8mnYQTRr3ytKsxS5Gu7aOikCPppzAPA6qRMlbdUBjnvYbM4bZrF3iatE07920lKDF2W4Xuac9chCxn9J0/HASHwUwL7FJPVrpuucwlTEUN7VXfiJpozFsV1oo2jmKQ7DUK/cPTl9iYXajbKwdlhXX9Y4k6x8og4Qw5+d5XG5W/X2sK5NIE2juprgx8uAILlySMYcJwxIco6QyIhpunp5NNoBqkGuuoBOBVT5HH3puji6uHdpUQzkTBl4k8htBIfynw53zb1RHKM4XO5Blz3bJ9Kmq89Dyiv8xOGsMQEL6H+5GfmFhjBCJlqYlnYRUFAsrdW0otaaBbE5au/ubhTTPgXvPKG6JuOALomQISGm13OLPpHc3GLJoMoTjKaVok3RwfVdUJ2g/aRFemqzqhuASSbspMgKpKyWCmyHIZa0OfGQQtk1mWHH+wOzGilcOD1K3Da2rLkdYTKPOZNsHVtGysxkpRtpEWzuDu+AIAaPS5k95w6Ex5TAVdxT3enoZh5V8ttsZRgkeZXBtBlnylVrgD2WLVJh23D859oC6OgLoenjmu/AUhOxbGt6Mrsb7gWER3pA3MfoRlVjENmMrYZZkjmRsbVpBczuu5iuXnWvujOWdiCWVr2DmYQKeGBuMAzIFQ9AVQNwy9SbqmLJVgYPcua535JeRj9y59KooBlwwM+TArdYaV1mePbP/Pn9p/+1r/3QF9wLt2TDmuXP3/4C7O63F0/v/MjIZ2gaAl/YiWLFs1yq96oF3uTYyODu+6Pvff2v/wff/fb3n3a+evN0v28ei5+72S3t2e0WjvA07Hr9CZlYtAcL7r2SNgn32F3hDpSkQkP0KEq9n2U33vzhP/y9/+G/8F57273w6gmv7vfuenGzt9O8t8HS7ZbLvPcnHwWzMBqDbWu47+7afDi8q8TP2M0zaWWKiGbOSBzKpCmL25QYhKUjHApUIZRhKRgVKWUp+MInzNvc7HneSJIOmLWxbqdzM8IyfBFIw+F+Icd2ySOYKV4Usq8Md2/r7k1pxH3fk466iRxAoza6savDUmkiCK1NTPxA3mtdNOYJ3d0N5d2ZRaxxq7c1MtItUDCgqqiAzTjANoUBqjiZ8k677Nm2V4kPkbFk8OtdBc7rtRyExPcKZi1B+IIrUShN4/AV2IKyeAmj9ZciDnPStvpphbmVo52Zg6hwZw47dwUyDU2qK4Ab30PXOL9Q5qjewq66JDrcsHnQjihcofxyBkryUZhKwmYgcAwuUBTe+JpsYk8dY9nxsa5Z+Dxd0hUAV/wEzJqNCScpaYTHnFt/+BgSSoW5UaXJat9mleqDxowBt9jDwlBmG2VYVU8WrRR01BtM7jDzRlPqX/drGagsb2FHDXItXrHjnLnRB9+jXm24WazgbFe+P1J6gCNjYfYC/6KRazoIdxnV+0mDECKD0gD1t9yPnOrKjjZ7isWjaGTVHYfHGcGmjn8iRu+ktpKiuOG2QBseynsoBZ3mfbg7dkSoKR6FcbomjRy1LSVi6GQuKZxDxwj1pB4o80aMSIZ1xYVImbbtIcSQw875e3vyr4jrHSoPYeXjFxqJJmaPMTOVscnNtGGApXrCgEMCHbivsqDYlXO8P4n0EFW4j/cPYwA0/Sucx2leLTx4bw6qYbAHRxl4GsvwSx13LagxGQvwh8deBvNDHKWdcnI0h4DrJ9zliq7iA3BsjcJAjEJT1kdqkaodwRc2M9DM+tYyLgidwwjR2VY1pS3E2QtCzRSAHFPC6JIO5HVQUpg8bEKhQ+t0JxuwJ/pIy/tkbpEdnVdLVTiPpXrl9Di5MpFuKGYdGTp9MIBm7tk1MhyTFos3WXJ5Ll+GTWwviSbFFlYrKb7gD5ZkbeOPqopZWCEDQrgvp96HKRW8Rkavi8Hb+rBdGnkwPJelxK3YMsfsZkM54HZhwIJup4aPwjk80XCk27wbQX28q1DOZLIy7EpRW7HEIG47iXxCE7U55RoQTXewa+aeYQucRz8oXPm17Kr05PRPIeZzKJF+HubeZLIHuknPVtfdAyGNS0jV1Qr+Yk1pVPeo9R0FuAfvbn4g1JAzAUp2qO5CA13NJ5JtZFdXQdvphsGpVKIBiT967fKMg/nS0YRgUWiwsMxcalfOV2kc+ru73dbiJlDDSi3CwB0iFx0ZzPbFOaMOrtjcN/ZkS2PGUQinPxbdxdc2I29rARCqhvcIijKiApjUIn1NeBePsqZNxi+NtynDXekiEDWAF4frS1PQn0uKokapqIngOdDskzKSKnQ+tWOcVvvXDfdAdVhWbexJ6ZT/0rvA2Ex5pBikXhXEqIyBhWLIpeWMu1kq0EKiDH2AYRFR1Sh0G0omzlYudyjKZdjUIR/rbLYR5vB0LtDNqP9sFD1IEgw7ZparphkT4IxcuTLXiuUZEUVOoLl77P3EeTd32be1gE5PoHf3tj4xPMyZDGMEn9Myxvk7xzEc/LiTtmL3ro2qKIDaBxvhLYEe1C9pkJKZ+148pjf6k3/iz777Y//q8y/96Fe+/OXerxD3euYUL3/pR/6pV3/8z2UEqjNkGK9dw7BEd99rK9AluJSywXWin9781n/5cx/8wXuvd3/8+n6vet3IiHc+d1tub7948fzZysi3336r7tVPnxbfaoKC6USqWqw8XWmNGfF0f9IcJPzkNFS11dMf/vc/9+qjj//o+x+9fKpPnva9EdVfdX/b43ngrXWr2h72dO/qikg32/ciH4VtM1/B20oNnTI2B2RutdsKRv2mKNFDg1PINjKOhJTzGws0C0GX+b7L0NGdmlPNILz4UpfGxjCmhMt3Bg10IrxrS3pnBZRRWhYMmPSMQFfdtwv2A3dk5u2mdFQ+rgpBlXeC4RDB55jy6cyommlLKwjygDEivbvXSgO6N05gbSZbCQpBVvAeRJGPpfW7Hxn6safAiTm9ZzisPNDYHoDtcKu6W5h5t+nHE/AgLmWuIJkQ4ORiSvoJDZt8N57R7YG0bemOKnQtxuAaHLZ8ZYou5i4EHyenmYu/geb1xlYE7lbV6cNH8BgShMJuCJqbPAppRHkqTXyGtQTYs8RyGgrGNiHr50iSpSxmhdPHUEWAnnqz8X9OAUpBCPeCzkGnETWJNkYjnkRk9yp0x1AqD9MuqtuaerbAuPOlNbWDXMO+b87sIhXCa2Z5o84hFcozyP6usoMKhdwKjc7MyOXkncZ8YiTDMOGwRcLM9Yw4A0rgqip8Cegymu2RpOfZ3JI+jxLQ2loQJpsHlrZG1bLk5VWHS4V05UyxelOEYVofHs15JlpJcyPpPN9LnKCwKWpHPmYnallzVtn5JzSBslV3N/1GOCwcHhJ4iDO40OosQolTmupcrEK/MiGm4x0pkxSvEohTIfFQvF7Ur3a30L8H0QJpCIFVxm5nD+yNKzPe5rU+7agNfQeHy6qAGJ/OcQiLDz5+e4yXOBltFmNCU/og/5i2g9s4XIoTMBhjF4FSSgSEQ+GigdpxHuIziRGaV0wgGLNBYHReydCYIUWwX5+qXZimK1vv/GqhiUNIGig2ZqAtmJWE8XraSbe6kgBOoqNC5PQdCMQFeYcl6jtszAg6peiVcODEIVlEEB8qcw7HdWgbzj47RBxoPpXnDXMMR949XJJqWKOHya6w796btdc0yRFjuWRJygKed8GER0SX29XLjjSGNH1mXk92x6z7Og6z2IkgdyXBFrlqPOqNYurJKHFVzNAyk/epI4JzMRyIPeJ4F9mxTo9FWxeMXJUysxW+ArdltwSLAfaEN1/eWI6wtJJpgOH0WvnXBIi3kZJOHOW0OhGhKG2F6bUFYlGw0W5uKzLkgTZ3X9KHYKRr4fA0xoJZ5PAOcI0PJvwwpWqjSZXnIG8rnaCT/Suf6JCfG/RltXoPKAAJBgt6LZgkJ2it5teWXDmFSeKhvaePJz2sESsaXbWl9SYhoEqL7vFhUkLMz1CaEZLYYLmCmqbIZdXpi7/I3lsA6mFJT/QcQcftbWbMUlJMH39rfnSUABzD+7h+XepmPxoPwPq+tzsa2ycYXi6IyQRuBoLvQvWz29Jn0r0iPQcdNZvPkwvSSs46zFobfy38CrDxw45mbcCwB9nHutG1+I8Y7y6BA2i5Sk+wBA/qKpNWGANuKzITsN6UX1g1LXnFQ7ub0E6+aBqloa8rAzXgFpOEPlxuzOfrGbcpLIqkpJB+wjY3bmEAqtoRZLVyFVa7MTnDsULQO7QHil06GvozYbC9yzidHC4fp2y7ynT0WVPce2x+5OG3clpo4TnPoUncZxeLu7obpIdERG19I0knIcP3aCEhaYoloxbLc2XCqBxuIJa34+Mv/9O/+xP/1rf/+L9iX/rx7v3i2bO3337nC//4T377H/vzH9++zEejGhGRFrfIMA+pnOyWWV1u1rWHLiRew7f/1//pj37tV19Xb9jTm9pV1r0czxOZgPnuKPO991q32JWGLoQH/0CeFLtK94s1DPfamVld1W2FWzJ8qxz9/q/8nfd/+xufvO4PX++Xnz5VO4C3l71YuHk9yyzrZ8+f08nRfttVDHRIj0xeT0Vx+C4yOzyF5yO+1mbUa0qw4/ZCOCjd5gvo27o5mEWO1OlgPQwScsR6d3i0dY4sZnZczeqDH2SsxHALG02yanWtjO4d6Yr3bP4PECtCoDvo9oc55ByDch7bI9ICRpTzQe/S3dcwu993sGEYwwmtJeQgMcqgu4lxYjVYva8Axhi/TVVm7KkNWxnXxsCWlaF5IQ6r/7WHxNxctTds5YJtHrGNrQiSQEBel6bUdqwdTDsMpR0bGivT0/Z928xrafha4d19y1v3nTV0eJqhsBMJ78nTqwk6H/+owXLUeW5kUgYzRsPDk9tFDHMTVjRamHntTQFK0FdNmU0krhwfxYZTNERHFswjzW11d0ZUV0iG5STfoCvzxvgOHt95I6jNuipXKnaoyoyVHTKZpxcTjKl9okdQ5hARLWqB5XLRR8z4rTN584RZoxEp+I2ZNypvqpdF/WLBXDAOjCO6OynQADxZVFlXr2ermnE6wUmI/J09QXwhuxFQ0pe6d7+Jdau9Ly7I5BD6tFwCtAIcjnDdfWpUao9VO2coxY4j/6adBinIw/lm2y2AOqqh2Y8RHebnUDRzt01vvuY7QwCUIBlFZqnHVLE+0dWiF7Dm7qkSQLmIA3SPD8T6tE0nrG9oegNLYHFIZbykwz6JphNcNk6kS/5HnZhZwTyT8yu1aspQtBwOFpLhxcLR0yarsm/S9ugTk6LYZPTvhzA3CBrEO/8hB8olg20KMfQZhh1g7ki23EzGA+ma1YWrJB8QiB+H5KwZhagJhUnGrK9NNq35NcDHf0BEfmFvDfCeYI/JYxz6y0ks8BA7zq2teY7Jn6lCjxbQQ2zExLXD/f/j6l1idV2z66x5ef+19zlV57iqfKlUYsci2A5WiCBKQhIpBiQaENGgYRANOqFDL9ADRAOJBh0aKAo9EhEhiESIjCFgxcgKSZyADbGxU47LsavsqnLdq86pc9n77L3W+t85B40x5vsvU5Zdx1X78q/v/773m5cxnhGmlAKazCvcUZurtzOXn7gVClNsBB0Wbl3mYSjTdI4ru/Bqk33geEshG6EYHd3EQjSaJf5IF/omEvYaUYKo8srBHtflk0xro4qCr0c+GnQugeNOj8gk+UnrjtEwn5wzF0hGnnPqdjLZJWL6D4JYkMkNqosjT7MaJpNC611DN9I9rLdlWMEiFWZISyT3AAyYNk30qJVqapIjrHbnZYHzA9HjT8AAzC3DhMeaqOv0bEO35YoqLg2LSyZuCNKtKyI7Vla1KcTOqpBhABZfKO5woCrlf+CUi9q2qNpOj87EC/vMp2rXUC68u9s6MikFtyFSNzoyu4vzgTarrrWi++Z8GZ6Ud2NoQUMVOgpDE19RYQMRYXbd7cqLKEesldUoZW/S0N6ZF97HXe0lgBOdsdyIq5OzvLG61b7rf+FUWERk7BOZA0Tm9NlOLQ+ZmcDwQnbHwOWoHWeRHTNm3dZMtqhd4xi2letaV5tEXrRlEofDzkVMaTT7FzBLWvn17Kg4vk/nqpBC0Wb69q7IaBUl49Ne0QgDdu+BDspKWtdtEr17XqJrsO/sE3Lgah7mYIz4bbTRyIxuHDzDrmaIJW/4tdzI5mULJ6d6o2jeK48w7Ft5aX7tHRGb7FmoYS7U8kQjM4s3T3h3e0Vh9HjBkj0ogclL1i7X1FiKjTuyQPvKmW14KuTGweGLXCsMUEGvu6zqSyQzUNZaA2mE3qdDLDO3u5W7OlbykZlrxqdChne9iXv7pOOGBQtWPjJn5jvGQa1PemRHoURNFY18OsJjoxnmuVYWOiMKDS1Ho2qvWFVtKXJUenRtwZ44p2hzz8vFH65tjgJ8vfHu9/0pfOpP5uMHl8cPM9frZ98Lf2bShAsuCB5wbm5eaPe87h3JWz2rmgGVtfHit3/jSz/91168vL6uevm6rlXh/tbCx5/n3QoiiDqyzO6eP3u8Pvr1UZHmAOOpYwXKTKmGlhFlnRmMixP7q5Bmmfn63W9863/5q/Voj1e7XO5e7ardz2BvhV3CK2x3rcy9H+/efF48+q73T80Mil5z7F25Vrd1b616zFYmUrIdg69BZ4dbocn6lZmIFtIiubiKOWuEgsgyzXlYeqP4S8xbFj5STgEjf0Uq+Y4x/lJUuWIJ32/RnGf7OAK6LPQNu2Ck3tYZy/W5y3JEVAAPOJMC2LiUn+ifinROK/mfC9irTqZpuoNXozceQkxI4vg7hFrxXb3Sc0mc1uP8vrvQQdFtXdacIa1YqO6qPopzt70flV1nyEi6eDUE1XZjBItkeK5Ei1LDtINdVbu4YOd3BXR4Z8TFI7xXprtnJge9K9Ic6Z7LTdAMWiuX3Qh7PB5MdsoUhOZwBfVGdBhIUdPobq01S4SZw9OxOYsahaM3CpUZ0Ni8uhpW7lW1Db17s5Ti6U/N3loZc6vI2WKWF6plccw28sUoZGnC4hy3FIdUGLGf7PkWFZBrsSpu7elo52+xVj85aAeFTFZyJO/cNvOuU+Hb1VW860yWkoy9H4U84duN845uQfFDQ7UZee7u5uYcfSXKyI4h4EkWGuAwxqDxJQSYtElcxPpZw3Idlnl0NOYGFENTTpg4bajMClNOhLdHudXEniueIfXsuzJbelLUJqAOfu5goa4ioEw+avkmk314KnzoK6LBA8SaOAT3bivJFjXrGaOg9ROJJEQJmsEya/8gh3IyH8lv4t4hgsciDFXMsCIUB8XraeQNSL9Fl3M1YcIHBDIIKvEJpht0bcqPq1swmxOufpsGj61OBJeRhaMng/s0JcN61wTeZ8h1+ygTF2sHlandG8buK1qonONaSoJlnFbSY06WdAkTjYBbfrboDDSO3pAr9mSddyPEs+6oPmWsCNWjXDrxyMfaFG6xFDB4wyyhpYNixOhEAkpj3GfD27edslvVYULWLZz9NlO2UZa0Ud4sFAihWTFxzpLNcDFi3rSEHbRD5FCXtdaespnCP2KCoezNWduSZQ1OcJUNyLNSwjOab6XI8LHh3iA7mmc5q9/qptPNzbpAflGkIOEaATSjlg1uKW5oETMWKfkGbXiNdkekvqBGqWtadEQ7W2je9lQ62lRW0gaET9qkudll+XCYeKuWG8Iqbad32DWwA3tFc2bYmq0olYpjO6e3CtVdyuBkMpxIM7Kf8er0WWWH5Abs7sKjq/xmQ4a7391d0MhIXn/e5NVYHKXZLbqIVlifZ2l8/IAxZdu1AB2XOhqXAZ0l+XndIXqNGlKuDngLeKSiHdxIKbdDMR83GhOEdbYH3APBDDeDy5gzRPTg6G3EK+gJUFrEgRITchbPfBzoZNlFQEjOfFM1gMG8q3ZOGkkGX7A43vGTk8n8Fh8lvMjhBkrjBowtxz5gGWvvcWnSiBSMtZgJh8VKdzOhjMxqVywzNLnmjPCh8oWXhzBn6GmyCL+sNJ+4kaUqUW4x9gWBZCYhG+PSKvXZs7vJcfAcwvWufXi2LMlWzHi6AdGw7OKra5ujBgVBGk7ZTlazZrs6Cbmi17Fb/dsJJhGFQFgj4g8VVS/JK1tvk2EyHIWAP/bmLbnpBWztkI0cGdcfsqtUQUHgrpxQdwAAIABJREFUDzbNHPC5dQyIKCMZUB00+7kBvbtOskWjaS4LYUVtUj1t13bz7s1bNBVdXBOHZua48KoBZrVxrX7kVxlmUnG77d7cD5Mzy3SCSDP4hdxbcLteZo7nn3j8xA+/+thntq9rX3mkAF3dqaH0kdOHWVHy2laFjlxF1ur14Ys/9Vfef//l+68fP3j5+OKj+zfffP72XXzme56/9SzdkWEOXMJXLnhuwK6lP3xY97olQgLGvXfCuSFDc3SCZGOGfufn/vqLd999+eKj3tdXL19eHzaq3o54Y/nzULRV9b67BKovl4yVHPIxggWlfgTA3WWxWouIMKflt661ZDqb/f0RgxE/bTCz675KKMiv8/AvVWxBsVTnLozwzBnTwBSebubh1UXZpAUAVF3Ju1oR3RUpDaeUUJh3X1vtamPkodqJgEBzmyLsyaw2LmR6K+fEzGC1K6HqtYUsTxIFDLZRNqU5HEtvyOJonwA3idIp2AeLBi2OgE5DhKXbdW+2zehenjwir4+PNEWgd/W1axc2cTLmZO53d+c6YeQofhhIzMOmZa0g9jWThwL3P7jLNbos1mTFdguocPTuS6yBCEnHWBtuXrvd2MO70oeZnXy+4EbGBL6NXXnkT5Qa3xZW4Ym2qnPTUwHb1R2BCEMhHBGxa7tFA9Sid2+i6TL5lZXBekOmItTM3gzozBR6R3EzVCAMIt+0ECB4OCP5IYktRivay8YDgOL9oJQRqZehN8RIkYkqZTw0NcYWHvAe/yKF1vQDgDnmGetcK5jBizN+vR5lZbDMVSczkVpNdd159JZV1dWoDrfGpiq7SQeFOcoRYv2J9moTyDnxQBGekzu3ixi0ybhLkt8MCOKsI8bYpvSWG9VG8Q1KTpssOP6lgqkIVXWsInOqzItPPjS2OsPnmMA9pa/FmElHu3iLp9Y438YkLZhET+qdneRhHza6jVV1NJxEBcQ5+ej8tEnFcrfyA+HEYQCYgmrk3bWh2hwgS9uEnfawD0SM4P3Z05NNjLjdqjwuxzAgDakYesSlIycxN9F3xEgwO/9wPoibqxGe9ePstKjL5dJmkvaOFnSwFoyLtDFlHY3rE4oOg3lGAStN9I0oM0avE+gqKrWNckzf+/lL+Xeh+V5T79l6tCYhzyYOT4IWjnS5o/Km8VfbcoMFnWC6U6aVpdJjsK0j8oAcjqc3YLiFPI/jhdPL5EiLqRZmt49ZfJJN6iVBzrmqVK/50R1Qz85Vt5hQAxynZ4zRiAp1d1bA3DMwQNwl7pX1lKGCMud2d8TE2vlYCtOfWD6b4sQMEcLCIwngsVuKQ3fNvSQHlAY4LZG5HdW3jfHJxzNJd7xiMybk3gBDXSdNB2pHCXF290y+d6qqrJBi5AqyymOHabUxigHJy33uGEiZwlxcdIUrWZYVhXI1DUW9birbkNSrfa27y3IT74CXhZvJ4AZvjOxCZzdpyXPM8/pbnbW5x2DTUlm4KcNgwI11dkzlbx6LQnRO7BzEG5a3pSh3zGuhjFMhqhlnaOuI6m5UhFnyS2d2FPUmtCJSoY2q3ag2bgh75RLUucq1w1afxycXGrnXrBz46u82CFery0uemcG6+fbqDr0aprTv1quuRgYPOS44pLzWVQ7tARdXt7tlRnFGYIW2lSG4Z2CwRt7ovYu+3EXpnhtcHd0I7I1QhWXe3XKmqyt1EkrDLCMK1PXYdVfIQWB77xUZ7stzZF99ycWS2OFnWG+agp1c066+RvruCiObROYWRggqTYfRJwU3v1432oq9WQ34H6DMtKwbne61WzGapEjtisGyFQPbzdqwYsG4JwBgK9I4HxlwabrtvaU+hZtbXTtY3sBRuNZ2Z4S9V7c5MSTWjctKvk9htrsycl93eqqi4DgXZ7jZBi905qpdVXvs+5NbRnqtdTfEt8INWw232lc3r12hySQrpeLBtevqjAkwXoFy1QWN3QAy4+6OYwA9aEp9SQv3K0usCARHPJEZ6OL99uIf/cK7v/bZ1/f20cPDBx89tLldr5961hfbzxa4/8/oa5fZfrh/9ebd2tf7bkNbrlRBvbuakkZSiNPDL5EOWxlEdDxed5u/+trvfPvnf/b6YHub5wLskvlxj4Vi29neFn7HGYkzKSotups5qqbQl90O2128vGmjTkfnimuVH/MWdTHjTXENejrcFhjCFp7huyqIl7fiyyM90R1wWFEJRymT3gJtJzlHdixK0czW8lbmmPajkdaFCK+qyYDzU4agYUElDzYeyVxg5bF8ccxgYb2bdkE+9lR+6HhupESxQyrvTk8GG+jcIdZZkiB3y7Bot13XoAUZdrcWdknA4+ERta+KxlIwve++rlxkM4Z7VYUHKxCeMgoJ9HKEe+yHHQJ2e8jCu9rb3WLJrUmPorwHkdV8MqsLK6O7cpCtaEtfVRVu5A1QaQlD+GLunAKRBlZ1pnFdnRFU4U5cuDLmG7arGJZo5l1TTHtOrYa9EeGxaKtICyGyHN4GdK1cnB9f96NYWBxdlPaldNkxC+WyVjV1Mb7WpeuqmWwsdJHWxU4CQERC+TDGa+5PHGiYRJMQEoYPA6WkhhCWc9KjWZNZpErgS3JvVcIhsm6b8QFjfKoqFuuWOpxPw+ZKJPPCSf/gQ21frwNPp3rFtZFAZyz0FuHGRCJekbSVuoi1W+LSThpuLax2qaE1Rpl3ZlYjMzn8rqr0dUg7NlGfGJcmyQTEkodHK0V6yuPATX4pAxEpWc7hONAuWi84qTWHGwccdhwO19qpCHs/1MOYVF/h0+VSDHQbWLRaNzIXv0GfoDJW+b1PdATX1DIU3bKCFd9OZ1PQe9DWK7KrCVKnQxdjeFNSIjh1UuFGN7WFo8vhcMsDluQHAvwGrJn9tXYGoZpc1477BxvBrcnTJ02ySHImnaI6B3UbrR61caybwS09cNLq5QkLHKjItI7j3xhciKtuDvOI3pJFzT5EP35qmd2TZzUtqwTMOOl2sg/Zkzw9jIXIxwXQCM9uSliZ0aLhAb+7PlF4w43kO6VRjeDvyoujJKmbZak4H6q1Q7MY5d9xyQyRWnrWeUEqVorTEoP/VoIO+BtDqnI35tC2Im8EkDDDWlmUKujqKNksucFzcxq9NxXeHMzEIfB4ZLMTLo9Ew/k08U0x6u5ASXvj3mYMqiImbnUhU/MJtq9Cwpx4d2CldSnGblTYA/cO7+50310rFAtpQ0XONCB6q6fVJTpbcvgh6fuY3CmXndcKJfzOVWZyAFXwaEocypKRsHBfzkF5xwErbl8ZaEviFRmxUHCPRnHuHJLs24je1XRTzs3Lt3IxyrHRwYFX+0oGcEuC22WR0XvzfST6HQ02boPCVu5qtxHAbrdgUkN5G6anskDAb9OHiFTwKnX1KTi2u5mCNO00ezp5TZQd3Stp3U0QDntu8nC7O3xxbFzVxig9Q3hiF09Lnu3EvJGhkKY47NGAA0Xru8k23wiPXTVaYhXu4bm7SbC/1s5c1SOrlGqdb9Gw8Ou11NdlNHcNHi7rKQSw4VYa3VfRqWJk/35AcO67WyrotlxZW1r8XLm7M0hkhcey7q5e4bU5luI4yba3gEA0SlijvJrJW2bYDoc3x6YNJLMcPRu4RFz3deUCOs25z6nuQq+Vu3FJYt4NTJpN1IZb7Cru+FJGKtKYAxQwBWUDXLnZZV0UuW6tjQVZpmZtfZfrWhvmd3mBzE+2d+dau/ZM9zw8G7zsSM9GJ927u050EYXjqIaiESxWdDHUhG2T7eoVy9wueQGh723QXAm1r3TpL7NYXlWXzFYWLjM/s2sHAeXVbF+req3FMb7bcRWQ9BdMc6S6aqXv3c8ui835iihULq/u5d7wFQZ4mbvhbl24brdwbgvnaZfxQqYzandLIeZNdFF4RiDgXW5Z2GSbrbV29YJ/+W/+tQ9fPLz/4v7Dl9iF58/X82WfeGM9S8RdPjzgjXWRLDn9ziNtvdgvfvk3f+aDj757l5cf+v4f/aHv/ZE3nn8Pj2KHd3GoFldc0/PazQctMrrxtZ/9H16//+H96+t11+NjpUWg3kxbZslc86GOPbus12W72h357HnEAA4tqiv4gE+J4AgyOautrnvlYojf3n25u/QuTux4Vlx986ZdbAbSY++yhi9r9JKV+UL3oSL1PJh/0t0xyxwmENBX2Ohoa/Qik0OyqOJQsRoroq0tgsYsifQYxEx3hM4FuTzWSoNf69Gd4zDkSkHoQLYCDTxzV2k7RKeSmXvD4mRGAbmirhVLeeASvFVlZPVO80zf+5oqmAy+62prRdXGUbonLrHQ5mSI06niCA+kVXUGk56azsxk8Qo4ECt70/d5XZkG7F3utpu4oQDKTC8/6V3DgFpLW0fUTb5v5rkC3dTd0NmZnv7kQGcAIGBV5WFrrdrk6ziaEF7qiCrMxSK82ZykUV6ehTrQQGzSF7a2XihfibLM1dO6ZJDnG+48DQfN6sGkSl+c3iWwI3xfH3O5t7t512NmOs+k5jsCVTsXJ1vWRpgELGdXY5LzmfR7JmOM05GFzOhbZuC5sOiWFxOaL8i3IB9ash/JulZcNFaIoC02adkkAO3Akbn9a6o1vHtM9l0VGXXtyMTgcGZ7I5njyqXqGTVYQv57mHvXXrr/px1x6Wr6uiODIknDtjP2IFkYrgHuiPAUNgtk2hzpHFpFXysXi+MDPxcGn18hw7tjVmHAGCO9jeoBjmY2qBsf0yPY+dBUKBB96D8MkVpJPOrDrYzgW7YlVLbmmRMRtTdTc0ZaeLRQsCctSthpSJr2lUYzvJUZ6NDLgjHzTDUR/4mqcQxHDiNsoJgT1epZQ6lhcxaZhQ1rHr2bUqMefOtkiMnFJ4Of0KYabs2g2w+G0mGsXXgV+YuPyHfANU/gLtPFSSjOVjkwcmstkzAhNmouaL27bZzo+2EspWTVmjvGAQsq0UVBrBPAiQFPkUU5FlabCPZZiMnfaIciyDQdG1mmjGQRnA2fjATF7FZp3RpPbr90xI3OQmS5DBQCLSg3wifK2QzoFEMS8EhCoUWmASIIWWKSG2H4HPFI5cHZs9pamDRSbuZWhWPFlSkO5suG82mT1sganf7FigytVzEWAEfVNknnbDj+djpJPmhh1k3pfsKK9GhmsueKvbmEMXqBxFXyNiLv4WYMQowuCdT9PInu1YiMDO+iNxi6vehk64KMD6aQ3u5cQTVrHsdzzPUAxipMJXtXZbjtutI2ohmLdcCr1JlGOJerJXGTGeBLQ6tdLbJ2IITz1O2QGV3jczGlhO8BFrihCrGiiw3S0HTdPb13TWaXjS+aqjmmNdIbb1391D3LMVBm7C6mBFfhconrYzMG0G9ze4J3Q1YX0hFzUcprOn1cQa7sCb3Xyu5birRRfIRo64ik6oqr9erizcyl4sIiO82TxGaLpNWfGvG+QcGp9CYtI3zXTr6qoUKEIVRVtTylrA4rg5XFOkJpKN3Fs7o8PX2NtFq+XFZoFNNS3EjbJxnzNAascLHO5H6xxtXc8xJV0maTNpgrxZUPM0s0xwrNQVlbR7Oj81hxvW7OizOssM3sWpXuqGvkGn8EnHYr2AruCc3hCLiTqBlVe3nulg/cu93TIpV25vIbcylibrvrEuu6H+/yUoFu+VDQWBntoI7/iu3tkbF35woYVma1LKYIpAX/SO76OHPj4bc8Kcd1yshzdZeZ78e63K2HvRkbzoHyRl+Qm8JOjXKJkvCV0a3lUlW7xe5294wFsVJmPB0xmKDZNDYB7M1QIRd6dNSFBaOROLO60G2XtXvztrlcLnxCGXbmFg7ftXt33CVPOvNe5goBXWIsVfVAdOXiWJd13e0N9w6zjEt1kU7CB2eF/+7f/O/e/+IXIbZzZXrv6/O7dTE8B+7CX91ZVK28613LLpbxhU+vz/3WTz/sXVUwR/3cG3n3Rz/zx//Yj//Ln/nBHxs/pW3UirXRl1jXXZEJ9ONXPv+d//tvv/ro4bo3PIB915Vuz83v0lY4A5ZXuHnuqoxca4lKzzrVbe/OCMgozo1RNiojO8yAZ3d31eUwlK2VtQuwYLrYil0VDMaIyH/vP/7zbtHdl7Vs8Ot8cVfvu3VHk7FSNSl1YEvu3rtvRnnJtzrG5TOsBWIBTlHIoyFvzplZMzP6jpyPTFZEDSBUoA9yjir+GBS73hBhN1XmDcbACHfGslH5qmGpOzWfnB/3AGYoicbQpTMUFhSWHu23CK5ZGvBtHb4iJVdx6N/0z4R9K3WNUITZbTZ1hnxdJWOY0TCsu1Tj3IoAJpqF1juZhUZrNyOxw3XvA/z0kwVPGoTGuoqIilQJdrJM+RPFxDDQAhGHXSGpm+wWMZpSYseq0aXMumAko8ouzX8VKz8ZTiYrf7unc8Ldja5ZJdnwOSRnFEX9YKyI7epj/tFBrzKY8dx24+9xyTmMGRn7yDi+cfb4cXMCuMRQ8DGD2Ug1EZGQ9Bdd7fG0Fj+Ws1uSuE5oJpXFkev5aL4ID3Tp28Xa1/JJIeD6WZp5zyqgLBhONe0DzqRjWgJMwVEMtg09pHT7aI1zos9NZAU5CQ/pk5vOY+jU/sd6eJWi3tM9edNzyvKjrakP3sulD7tFdc+mTDK8m782NE4fHeAQq1xOMA9FnJ00aNaX4VYnWajn89JwstTY89EeJ97EhA5G0KZp8zjesbmXxmUkduXAclXZ5PDxb94/Np0jtozbMaK8T2HTXRTY6RyP/e6EaJ0/5/YtP0kgYC6FnRR7E7pGShw/Tj34WAnGIzlThzA8STPgu3vuZN12k4JiRyTsYTSp+41r7ic5Rs+SkjD4wPrEnIz67tb+ivFnWtTpw4nzdECgN9L9yD4HZ0xsyTmvjiRS3sIk+9cGIC3eLGc7sshKkMlZxgiOT+16HJicmODoZm8jFyJhn6zVgtdh3JA4mnPlFJ+o4CXyBxWkuNkvIRBKCPejzzR6ekzSWvj5onjInVwN4HhK4wkcR85Vly0T83iSO+y3+JOIeQZsXOeuXb3Et3zARZNNGrlxokT18SkVOSZYr2bz7GtxBsf+arCffnsqz4/GM7sKpJ4+kbzaCSqUoJeif1DPyfl1MTu8GUpukZnO6PDuvMQME3ESVTy5Z8vebWE9qe70cNtkInbzqW8lPJPCPoJ4H9omLXYyWZ+nA1rAsxWUCl/1iV5qK8MRfJ1mrmFceUp0oBjMzDByVmGRGo1HesRqzt85IHMhKJvrzYgu6I5xJxJiKQheYVvklkXE7mtYeHpLtWcMGe6RxzfOEXGU24LjNioig9mYJhDTyqhSaAEVQCrwmg+7NtsiItrEZNKmmNm3CBzurmOEUQwYZYkVuzvdxbmJGFZPc4/UjZVeknHLJRvhhVbCCczYlGZ0W+YQ2U5qiyFjFXo0KnEGuikoMBUf0EXVeSdf68rBXHpHpg/expQwERMvBPHqWGk3IlJCa/OMzHBuTVQyBScwJ3iocy3+gfyr9T25m9ldXnhVOSpcy5V2dTu0burxZFQOEEynBAq9PKHYWGcFmOHpeZ7oRi2VEVHWtZuY8FBAqY90iDsSb+eHpPQgRnk7nlQfmqA1hVQ6VBXER7p3tIEbcjfLtSCZLeYXS/f48M63f/Mv/5cv3vvg9cN+/9X1/rEbeOsSn7yzN+7iE89jpb986LffemM99/vO696/+4fe/twf/lQVajcFrVX98PDwu+9++dd+6/969yuff/Njb33i7U/DLSOuVZdYWme5udlXf/qvfPhbv/3By9ePj+htj4/7mfvz8Gfhz9JWunu8KrMkD9MQgVzPnj//zB//M/lP/RE3r+q1kkmbOug5NfZsA9rSo7AvsaDwwBAq31UvXNYitMaVNdnaUKu+h3U13V/VGw4PqjGLWSbCfJ64KpA5K5ad31wvNAxpKkj9NmsADhe7+wSz0nkZARnVGkeXpSx4TovHUURXAJOPyMKZMS+P3SbJwxSyOaInQUfkUNtdxNVkpOQHgiIWy9Y+6XzYWqDTTEURiA0zu3mslVGBRtQexXQtcZRWGdHdZQ4w6Q6c0sPc977Sfetu+3F3lyYo5oaRvbXv61WRG61EaRVFksmbmWWcC378HUpH7ye5FGHMNwBQ1sRIMsZA7eb1+kiH3QSI2yGZhQ17DQaAsn5SQGmzMXhho9qsA7EiwtMR6WS1B5XkxMbS1IJmLCMNgcYx7akaefsduHXMF8xu7TjWDiyOJawkDUq3OqQQbyszG4I8KaPsFbP7uLDshisxz0ymQptFd5H1R7ZYj83Mbrw/XvEY9onkVlJ733DZDt3IikGWxMSaWUIZK4k9ke1vXlYQ3pJvCO5tHNog+zGCSJI3CxoOKTLcOiBbeTBEkkSBwb/EhDM+8ef1sf01ygOnLOdfPciiiYcZrain8UqMi2tAi+EnE+nQafykfyoGsE8I41kOkK5BxgjOGB8942xQGCN2iwX5umflrvD005P6+B7nX6z4YqZa3PbEkygUjaWCWgktwaQ7FLiYwUl+FgXHO+EnK3JIKkqgVia7Hf7Q2b7FeSFPos9IAI8oXMsWnsXSwY6tS2E8diJiRJZ3n8nfFKZPD3Anq6dxmh+b4R47KAqqp6nWOTBcganbTw6XDXqE+QHHg0ZB7LFJY94pTqonzuHjhJ4PWjgGPkHywdyZJQqf/ix1OPKlMs+ly9rI+TqthruvS+onVBvpJ4NeWLUIrS3lw5swLx9rovZOWknchMQEcoydUgr742isOdM42J/3VB+IF7fNZGtO8lGPrTczOF2Xg9KdlGWn30nnADTfPJeDs1qcRBTPRWuHLAlSyp9Br58Qh57Ro1xD9PmgmjIHMwM2Rg4sN28YWX/UW9Ah0t1d7egk6w3VVR6T9jN0aHX5CoVr5cKj+VRWEzOGKVSRidH8KmLUBoC4q6WlDyNyxnlzdRt87ytgxFHtqql/3cNqt1n0tXrEtRSHmqjtLahwsKQx5mgAQEhEYAzmk4Ff66MbEk3Bfca1qoe3tTmKn0bjdOumWD98eaMbXgWEbyqhY2IXzcP5Cqb2ImhbZi/XNuTWmW2lHIFn4hNnFtQjhBckzJzitBWL7NmV/OVBpJxNzKALoxMnQfTEBXNCXfI4t0ck+6vwRttEPXdJOEkznqJB2fdaYjZ2Iqf1OBe0aayhYMHa+QuaRDlrYpxttNacCVcVEb6LSKJQUA4lx3aKAFh47GuFj2uuqTTREoRZfyHfLHxo3eTwR9juFs9zwwpUSdB+skv/TInW7hJjGd27VLd0GTioCnHZgknrcfDa/M7aOpL+Orj7Rp3Y1CpVK6Q4XWJJBsK9sDvl3JLlD8o75kWzd+3aM7zTerokh4524a/cozl2YDyBB6zdOmOxjO8qY40XfujSBFCb4+WLb+/rq+pyi0KxxOCZW2jyiciYCPddm71AGbXE0MzMvRubtsMu6rH3vvJIJKuagXmcon7z7/7Me998537j5UNX27rkx5/H993lG5kLixC1S66w68fv1jL/zvP+4o9+wrbtXVW8Z2FmlhkZ9339f7/xj/7Hn/1Lf//v/Pe9Hyjt2ux9gDC/fvDdl5/9hb135J1ZkC2WwAWdqLuMZ+mODjCAO1au8CUzrpeZV5VnFPjoWBcNUhGRbZoRdMMtNrYPSp5tcIsWgsfa5r4LtXsdK31XUzRlN8qIsH7U1SU3wePPF6x2xtFazAuPq5E+s+Ub3LqgUCpFki8s0JJq3QiJFIKvt5wceRFF0cneTAGqJt+FWdtaq0WyhjsivbZR1l9AQsOMs3JogJRpckrZpGYsDRhbO7RuLFnUMdMutzBsdEmHzXIlJ1DVzK36aaVFBxu/JKbYKwBjxv3E3aLITe6JbOa0KbsrM1GU3cauWneL2c1jETrSr7CD3B/SoHTbvO+F7pdNgj9gLhuOjIfnhB+SpU16os9I+xR4guULwWOI8IyUd+LIwjQMZdUh+xxT0V17ErpjzdO6tO1HaZrFRITaWjgTVE3rY/c1kxZKITi69qmgVVKFhPsRRF74iRV3vlR4SKV3m0dC0c83l5QpRtAoUe9WC8f/Gb7rEWFnhitqgerQyOnB+LKIie5yg2de0IWebLTmpJbufEaThVagVe4D/IWDimHGD3mZng41HehOX13lql4x2Q9xotBcEtvgqVU3fqSbBWVRt1Ap+da4f9D8Mpbau5CkRdqUuFEROTqhchKzDlUaLOepHLe4olRnD2HuJGaYXJNGfSrDAidLXUNWaHoxHjFVRMJwjn19qsFzFyvA2v7/+Yp8aBkokhzxDHRkRkiAhMqzzIyz3lHvPOkRB9DhEyUMSwL3tSe3kwUCa+8n2ks3g+R5qudjpjx26ykmDQ4TD2GZ3Adx1w3jNkBeDp8o0aekKLqGJnFekL+zq3Nzs+UomgJ0AcdYC5u4kTg9L3PkclpnP0tEwntFiKWW0mTMUj1/5nScUBCADM68hh0TEV19Mgm1Wzf3BmF93KuQ9R/pXdwXtVtUw1G39ISeWfRxQCnhzAVLb/jiZdKl1lk08kjDbYVLYDVdlruM4+xu+m/aLNDqFz3ocD1UpJANHna+aP7sVq3KvOjyjT49I1SrZXrvkfayHypme3CRam0t0TffCeFpVqT8yTdkYE9eY8iUejjpcRuQ25B/6MZ3ZGTtmsxPv+2yzdxTvm0/mRDNZRcr5AhaOejfZ+Aw1Ni1SfZI9fGU9RGJxlrJLBhjDubRO6v/mxGr+bLcvikhOesCPiY0QPPaU3HAPLsV6+gF0kONnVbwZY02kKvXDJQpmLf2pNqA0bkREFO0nzio2QiBxapaU8zgh5rNbeYt6QqPR9NOKdJ7G0UdHpZ+sbBiEdDqyTX+dfQ2V4wG63IX82xIjLpMjbLJ2/BbnpPUDTL9eXd78odVkbM8q8/oXB70CGOOAlFw4k+u3MWjosN4AyvxfWQCUbvXCg7U1YOZaBQF9yAfPgstWlqE3r9dGbG70hcRudz42UQVamLenIO40zgKJUPRrhnaj0kj4OYkR40iAAAgAElEQVT7+MMtWDh4RiJa9aREQAW3rkxFng4MGZd1mR2y8uiLFs1lC1HoTIJSkiaptFWSij2650ZxchEZN7g6V2QTBorJcqFwjCdtbxrxgy9HOO7W2ldtqLdVMqQ3vXbf3QWRe+yid+10Ylox6HJVfNwpcddIHRMj0RnHmit5kndbVUXmaF7dza99zchCM6Uc0Zd1qV1tFZm15Uo1pRFxKI+963r/4htf/bu/+o2f33X/J3/k3/7BP/BnuSSg445T40EzSiG/Mq/76hmcznO8pqX8jD9z3nKZtAPwoOfCydz9+uKDr/7iz7943a/v90ev9+vqcHsz4s2wT3787o2AI7vtLu1ifllxjfr6n/7hHRdcmTAqEByaDhSDWz/ud64f/Nxn/7cvf+sL/9Kf+cm33/q+Dz9498XL99758Dvf/fBr//SXvvL6ne/Uw8bDdvR+eKTeKZNrVX0rl6XXFIDqsqpnz5+XX9ral0uqxr0ueLorNW3Lf6TsnO66u7tcrxXsBgvw9uSizh7vv/2db/zdBdmQ3A8RXXtq4lI2Pc1wxMqzztIkDxYBswCZ/nqq8jax7mESz/B9YtdZ37pCcwA53xoTtWUZEgRa2PKsLoaEDLvpCOq9m3EFYPQQwRtsPEjgYIoL7+lWPqlk/wHJXJtZOm0RiMjmFCUXpZtA8lIHGHILP3aXwdvw0SGBTgRwbjC0qjq7NSUUsIKkukm5PRx/RnT1WtlVmdFdGtu65XJUa5UXMkUUjw/YzbtQfdiqQ783pYs2PWwY1xbVBRSIS5s68n3Te2KJeueg2oHb9YzA3sh1Cypja6kUIqksNW+g79lHCOzu8tEJmhSHg0/z4dR7k54WToMr9QldHSvZQHIUKXGXJtdgGoRwguOpFveCK+SzlQs3olYQykrif5+BovfZByo93MmYjAHTgIqBS6FmG0z0YgVvR4goiglI8DkBa6MA48BSyyJYhecJpqMXd5TOuNFIhhGhc8Ed1pHptC0NJVJ8CLmyhr7sg/LUhaZQLSZr7QwSEO6eoZlinMwUHIqmTxt0U1TSDwtORu3IF0d7508GC0e0OCkapy8SH//JPcDpzEgucWL0MIq4Ix91ZcEzuWmSFGLYKJA16uhicYswVvKHz71L3GUoAvj8mmntBqo5pmR/Iqt8ynpnogyNECNJHSKjW5ynZdJKJ6Fe0nSlpR1t7aHozGVQjJs4Ijp1R2VPg2LIisRss5oEC/dzfXusOSfDcxrl8+3LwuozPz6aPmlGTK6TA5IFLJaCl+Qhc52UJwrx+A71gW3iV84v8QnUcRz5b3gIvAqVtl3tyRBkPm6cItqSJUzKPAnhCCqrnqtuty+WYqgyJSI1GNvncgo4buu1URNkGHyl0uvI3Qkjfzip9xw4kPWRXAyfdrIc/ThiMWgg2JPQSM59CEUgaef08XNrOWk2iudmEoUbQ6FGkuxB+7/P7J+CM5+VvI6EUDoikxihBZ8wJHGAwNw4nBQKViSKISFvR8Ag5FrdTewSFTkrXUnOrj1Vt8UpBhpq4bjgEYOHmyDBlLVD5EqgWaPwzMRNoazbp2eVOLIZrXwF2rJh8+Stkcao9XRTJ+1MN+03QCi/aVzCx1hpon5QVTfy7pkCcF3JUTqnYMx6jNEb90B91iKBI8yyqimM7G56YfTA0RbBAK3FHD3Qj2pNYJT7goPTGQ78lL6J6HDvWar2RmZaGP1BzVFFmROaP+p96AYsAeQCOl+4nCkwOiA72ixadyTLoqT5wm9Banq4LCS1wLBoopYnWVfwlrp1eGkeHojqSs8egBQBLTW5MjxEZ4uLwTvRDRR8gbnfpPVVyCWlkjH2XZwGHQMsPhuKSdMjeSACmLz4rshwdjK5HWEl2Bi7e3RN+lEqs0d2EFg4A5wdEvlpDzQK/7Li2oAsK/IdHdjeTFowt2AKsXmxPCgjLiQjeD+AJH85ieUqigjmkNP/3aw64MwvZdyGrKc8Xl3ONEtHtWdINcoVE8EnHhMRHbWbxJ3Xr977nW/9vd/56NfevvzQH//hn3z2/G2D/cZX//d/8vVf+taH33E8/uJv/PV/7e0fe+Nj38/miBAZRYQbvC0ubo3ezagw4Zec3Kyoc1+NYofBEh7eopniJCR/9I9/6eFrX7+W33e83rUby+1jGW+9ebGHh499/G7Ztrzs1xV+sfXWF37M7n/gU3bdIDKkhS00UWxFVa9dux5//Suf/Z2v/ubyFe0VKMMnH+vTX/rmfvXQjxboFRaGO/fkV8yMCovqQjjaL8/Ww3Vb+mIx8uZbKi/CyElqs/C8XmtdstEOP06ys7J/fLxmRrWlB4KkTXvvg1+99sMXv/o/f/3DLyw3Gy+ZSI2LHAUXqlEpTB5dCI92KOdeizR368HpNgty3gM4xEYLIpKEF7MwwUhb06IQIWwCrFwE5exxXSMydu8VSVojC0jcAOewdnRFmpWm0axU3Rjx52Xl8gN5d13WQrfTxCwXSiDbrFum5zjESJ75R3qo4Cq0/LjWHLbCbGWy0oIEEiGnSAhWQsQ2ZRt9dPM8UKbau7tcuhgi3Ey6nLqI7THxuhZhu2oADgIS+ghoXK1yyl8joLMPvhIUJ7h0ZVpSyUUz+eOe3tUrs6rMPCKJIKK0IXPpS2xz8SqMUyIZJjOsm6AkvvFBME6rT6OtHmaJaFIQUO4LKAY0COIaAW/KblnG8Rtgs2pcO0hopW1RV3EJACW5acF4AhVILZHrDDDbQgv4rSyQe+bGWfSxzLmMkTH+SGPWdh9fXFVznMlxKelw9LWj4W2uz6yukstZrWUpbWQ72G0B5pna04WaKspiJSVRIy9wkyY3OXdW0h253eQ7J8+dcYyT53nzo0mjyEWHwjJONX/8UnzCFWhOignj/lxvTp4UAoE2tNKDhKmiw57QCJltMIx7zBoAI1y4NbGDxqQOYhaKhnMDExoRORz/gK7Q4e+63f62+S1nsjIUGfIa/JgeZ9Ty5M548q9BXN7GDTe6yYAFT/SGLsSRW7omDm5HXYsRu8bkVc4IezopNW9+29H0IQTS5rrhIy0ecZNb3KyKvJTTi1PccSSy0s7REfo0BOP8+eNynBZncjHYlI+NyTmitp7QSLvl7tzcYaY7iq3S2V/q/6Tdxm2SqGDXYAonx4ODDJukNl4fRokqRINyY+FquKI0yRxp4eP9FmZ1yzjhEDRXVtV47fxAq//BZ3/573/2l77wtS+Z2+/75Pf/2T/6J/7cn/4JDp95VvAspD9Gb85ZPz85cp1+7GNDpfwpltW2sePa8Pqn23t6nVLDI/DFpm8nGAoOl9TcQMVk4gg6xnGsUVUq6/T2hyensRJiuai51nP9YfOZlRj05ANPNgrngEyDCLUEWnp3mfIggC2kuQaOjDKa/FEOcGGBdQ4kv92U+sM9Wmd7czQAw/FCq9JX+4oJvdTkqnbnWow/EXpK/jTJvdwQy8zaI5WNxBjwkrGcjTSjGvlN8WZsRd02I8hInNZ+gYFHFoa20h3OhQ/RNRySklnKeKrzwNOXaBMLfpLkHVbWHDjRnMZvdJGqRa+B9APBkZOwWRmz1axRmVg41bOz3MOAHD21VXKkR7uRJX7k+Woz0gunR4Z0oVI9WKRVtY+MRJGPEd6dLN/NY3m1ZjRiA1Mn5sbQjtSozOkpcKWpIllmxZwwMdC1w1jWSZs5MUzE9FmwS5KUXcXeGfD4SKcjN9pVT8wAdFaRHAx6O8CDYzhN5N5nrCHwybgaWWhz2yhZY6jMTwuPa9ViIVk8SjvCC9XwzAjzhIPg3xXVCMTs00DebHAVCFC9HArqFWtK+CkfFO3IpsYXPtsaTMCRFCFYyyfQULh15HjVmCp3SNQMNa7HX//yT33ug19/78UHD6//yTvf+eq//qf+w1ePH/zi7/6dVy9e9X1EXL6LD3/5N//bt976gU9974/80Kf+TMaFRab4RE4bgZuDU6eIKO3/0xqXiFaX4pHRW8/druv9w33Zw/314bLyLp6vfPa1X/+HL66Phf36fn90323+LID7az6/+8THnn981TOPj3qn2UJ84/L49X/mB4HY5DF6euR177SAh6V1XSX2i7DGFf365QfrAfWIjAD895dd3/3o+oi9Abf719csC2/miaXbcndKbasjeu+6XBZ8wSzd4/mbkzhMJYvKjMslu3tFMnCF2cMKL1F6lmdYEQ7n8bVv/sw//u2/dv/Rw6uHa8bdGmRiiElO7TSXclUeqfGf6u9E1QyRKbDied8TFHt0n86dWMQy7yqsFahBOUcItTQLkqmxnCHgl+X7enZrmMziAImYHsbNr6Q2iCAGczFPUxaNsc44hV7aN3mEW14Gh4GMdfLuJONj4pzRnmtkjodns/sa9hLJ8EHp04DWBS2sVuSAHUgCzwiaDYJRNnK7GRCx6bW17kZX361UPxl1pskRi1zMLstw1BnntjOph6NnKruabrFb6awtViSz1IJg38iuUvUmuWa7RV+VEJj0SgkcTtFmSdnomLTu5PYm0ppWVpaCXcRPjfccfgMvqKzP8GqFTrNlAiHRt1G0o+tAAmCdmd3dxQ0wDgOdBQFj5ChcCVFMOInQZ9CGuiGxBi2s4x6cTlUj4yHK3cRynBDzEz7pCcrNYyWDPbipK0lhWaPXqC9vPIaTyTO7QpeCnpKploBYz1fX6EBlytKm95aR7WdY00XiqLmXwhJEXhk6pZQGNtIKuHR8ah5Mxgf9CrPB+XKWASVxmRuqpMsafYLMHsd8gdNZ2IDUJsVxmGgx0XzHqWhPgvr8xiU/3eAsylzMeevznxzilAPAFqtN2wazoR+ZSKGEWLAuYeNI55XmSXp7y4/ax1Rmtz7PnzSEEDHPFTSimfV4BsfFrrNJXXoX+SUaJJ22/SCN7JZwiHnGVZQ8EeSeX0Y67ixhY5IgXKXhbOmhNIZkvJ4GT9r53hpYzAhmNsMTOTUpiz4Plsyf5/dOWYExzWE6/za7IUrFi2FSO/9SBlxxtEcdzmwhwdck6Co4v10IHI4cQ0vIlBXQ1GK1wdtjuQLcppFijMpZC0nEqcqahzxnmtHdE8vpnDF947vf/k/+8l/8wte+dG7Jz3/1y3//1/7hX/3Zn/qv/oP/9NOf+N6jy9ZmzLS4oBlwYMDwIEXD1Ca3pE8RYWVu0Vaz7BqL7IqD5hfIUW1YuVLmvbfdJIs8HFo9kjHs+xx9jtEVn5AVrf8jktpmoeIYnZJuHqjtB+jdt0r7jHFaOFmeGuGM3JhDoLeyMbS9CXY1+pgdY0wNJ9ER1pux7Ioyh8t5XmwCT0Idf4XJpwCa6RzeM1MbHxTYNKGRi1E4MTIITYIjTOAE6oD9lMo1wzXAPH2dAc+oZtjUaSA7aaKhP0zvJULpDcUM+rEScJ3bnI4O/qBrKMJ8GcWkRVJszJ2dFTr1PKDR6clcTAsHYybPSK5o/Auxa9GHKgbrlbGrmQx0pkXsBZjmpUemBSpXJhoOkCm6O8wifHdxNO7uxDScl6CZUu8slIXgc4/JstN2Se9uCPM6526czxCNXrEsvFg6WlBLJeV192WtXc3UO+5zqqg77XVZKOYhxGzC5QBv5TQi03d1d2fm2QS2KksO9K1tulC274EpFaVXSfjelZJvxFpRrWgQys8bIA24gfBVtblb8wyaQXLO+0iFWoVjmcO8WJ1zmxa2dxmcqe7cVykFFu2wJLWoZbfhWshbVa01wn2jIwPX3hZJR+VEGafn7tnWBhXITcLUbrlp3Gw3MXh2zB3GiDXHtz744i+/8ysvP7q/vqp977/53ud+7Pv/z4993x/48L1HfIRwIPF9n/j0p+Mz33z/y5975x/8+Pd+/o/92J83wlJb9vWMhIvtwDzzDC0GzX0resoj/INX3/3cV37lt779ua+/96XXjw9MfeyZNpohvyfy3/wjcX99eP/V43c+yvce8OHDw8vX9vr+k5a/H1jL34W9D7/3/oUf//6HFenwzIWojTKzu8sGsL33Y3N75m4Zva+9K9L3de/7ff+477a/Udgdrx/x+Ljzcmf1wBz7oJGVojYDIrxiuV8Su8ovd7bufK149iZfXb3L0q2srVN9ID2xghKwFWP8Ad/UrTS4WBFfeu9X3nv9Il6vuK4qX+z/6tqDLTRuhFjlc8cqtoHH9XolbaK6M/I4kjlO4V9lI8sV67o3huwuSUA4rDdvI9bG6VZdXZLqWdXW0rTaaP8jnSVEMyuP3NhdlSvcbFcpJ1B1A2OBCF3v3oBhLSL2B5XtYbKJ6Z1sQMD5WqVDoLZFLsxmKdcyITaZi6wU5pSl2z1sXzc727GacB4ADwaergxrdK48FhjrjrBluauosGAhx7IpVSgDsOvemcvQK2PqbqYXabA4eU0aW4ZpvWaHj6I0rY5Yhg5fOhl3h+wV/AknA3DaHYy2hXlHXeVBEQ7LTfMmShxrQa5LIHJ1d8gqKouX7JUTS7bJg5dk6+bqsrOahZkFrITswmrKfePQMswDRz4q6GjG7IikCQqnrrbDchSbvjKpROJpS+O+3Nush9zDUs2W9qgq7FOIy1AQZYsLyDis03WYWPnikjjfu3pzKFRN4SzWvGKAd1VmThqYRcgzMG61WaaNax8amlB6bWuxG5FRSGM0m/LInSu/KVQdT0JfDgSROuPZ77W8yGoFZ63YB2XqVn3WDRF2FuxqhvhwHYml9rHyPavLXUHT/FGFmxnDUfwkSpxVGsb1Pq43aQ5nlsvqo29qLRu255B5x3oao2x/OkliQqMCEmWtATeluu9GEHpWZ5wmcWY/AsghW9gYZQa5qSWVIpNvG09Gs5xWxybd/fD65ADc7VNYmN2eGp8D5/TSHFFxI82LdrtWJqrk+cD+ZFn4JIVw9pX0Ex6Z6DyvEjoOH0bDQbqZNizVMzKuA4Bn+G236hj4vB1RhgSZkywiMAOflzzmGT85MjRO0p065iYm1uugdlnIWnC1caRPAMwwO9Vx3ZQXT5iFBngzM1wDnG9+9zv//l/6z7/53XfObn2ul3/zu9/+C3/xP/tv/qP/4mPP35gJheEkZihGT1sMc+NL3c8PvhlUNcMZ97AUtn768N6lzxHo/WQAoz1nmAIvLXMieijLIGZwHGg27g0ljj6RrdokPyhXxdKmbg5Et8aUBx2iP6nY4kMqLxzzLQ6YRv2MNqhcMtjjtXPRloxI3ZPB11ZonOZSjZqHMdCP+6k2WLknQy/pzx/dYVjvjkxzpGf1vLybIbqySXe3eZqVKBPmFu1NyZm+2N1YK80kOaGTmZoX3vOjqxX1oKrJ68FM8aBCRGYWCnbSsqjZDOf882R08G7P9B501qZp0Ge3S5dXwMI3LWpBCyQG8G2ES6WYcl7MikDfrUvtijTP4EVuKEWJmRxB0dOBZPL+mMyhEmJwLIi03igbxtM8wnd1Fwev0Q1YM1fwVhC23XhLUnV6V2OA3jAr3mMRVk3SL5qJ2TlXItoaGxTKcto2e/LOta57T8gwf6iizppq7bxE7d5FYwth6d7ccTbMrcrMemVU112uMjTaZAKIRmck3SskHa5c7tGlSN+6Fm8NKrnIPmlSYoe401ZmzkSuQPL2Dvd2TfDbWimgQHWlhyzDRkuwNBHFSWOEu5VxGO2XS+5Heo5vjFzKHakBZNy8ee59dfdN0k8ZTXcdMNjelStMQdCCiChe0pLfP/OnIr16Z0Q1TM5bYey7sPv1737wK4+Pu16jX7m9Wq9f3//iZ//OT/zEv/Xw0WN8ZHcXXN549ulnP/idV++8u99/8fjw2x/9wj/3o/+OI9xtZUJ5ZN1ApJWC7lQqUJGdY4/6R7/7//yvv/o3Pvrww3513424woq/uYoxlCs7OZfK+Pjd5fvfbvRLs3u3dx/vP//q+gdff/QHX95/4lv3b63+wh/+xD//mbd+3PfzFx/U9fHZGx//5B/6sf3x73t/P3ztoxdf+c5Xf/vFw7sbH7hdw+sRlsvT994VVV11v9+870+51/VxJsLbNo0qCMdyC4sAYsX10dbyZxcPdHl0o/Y1Ln339vdcaTc5Ikre2B7ovlwubHfZvskwk1HVvXfmYutowA+89Se+9Pqz/SqwrasWz2KC2tAwppHsLafhEQNxNRtu7iIIAVJjMp8U3bY1upAnxc4+AdXK7148ERgvIf0WZwxURNWuoV/AYCuZsDlbAlkTHbY9bK14ql/SbTAZdKy3IHD8yG/yZt9XQYvKyVE8tqhY3MrEeRd3lyh3MTVIpuKVu0gwBjN+LCIILhB18KQ8o6udLBR1MqHUr0bZs+RYqNAWmWY8kiD3XQTbuVxezcDrpvOaoXanv5CcdCzzNy2VUgOMOxA2GFDgXkgyOmUZmB8IaYkzmXDgXWBWKeTwOkF5CslggGy4h0Wr1CDAxiH8IZOmtbmVr/14uZmi6KQfjLNZGBIgopu5kdxSQvVru2faFBaYqd5wAv1G0h+fUEbwbaEYC+V5hNyujM/lzSaF88lW0Ui22yKZGU1vNDRAZjWWs/CkC0UJfh1Jc3rKRkI9mbqjOAs1jxgp3SxfxqVzw/uzX+PO2mcFYzfEyWweXIxVviZvPdkBdZwV66nnp7EakfTpDuRs6ZEJDIYUkzF3227FXKtx3o1Fa34mbdmU9wgRscam1QTGxjQwfovaE83DOe0fLgL3HsPUfQLIH3TEUb2IMISzNz1Pjx9N7vEz2khAJ4fwNgSeMHtph8gMmmsxrkoNbU4iJXPJlaRzc9+53cYmnnHMTSdasM/dyxY9qEvym40RN6rNJANMKzkLmRA4UB3peWLs6In12M0/hJ0ENAbTaXk+qwGNY3i831Au3ARphxlj9BrD25gNGs4glts++KySx1B3dFk9ifapR9af4C/VJ+cIh2NIo3SaYXob0se4Wgw7BhIxB7n7lbTPJISEYnE0Wx2VCA+uv/q3fvqb333HbweM3Vyp5t96/52/8fd+7t/9c/8GW2yccJNJZ/k90BeGsIdLbj0n0pNVuRTTNOlgALuKH1pW1cfDe7bHuAUV8u1GRX2bnzB6cm5cRh1NL8SXA8ytb9kro2pgfAuPPv7ibsQimIogjzBMfysShqvQ6InSlfdC8j8zy9QQsM3MigHrcC7kSdjXLUdZQ6sCyZKlpWdq6cpCp8TH3D2tzZIe3aCwxHguWjNfnpKAcQbKZyiP2djkGZJBXi6ptFC4lAU3PBTYsihCRzpKT3m35VrdG8qOF9pA2W6cqLdgPJPzSWGz7+64xVTQwDiJUD0ZDwTeoJ0Qt3RX1gdXJXvi5k2uP5h4bwimubBkYl6FQkdL9WEZ8CQk1hzrEnXVkLFPLK0pqkexexh5XwNdvhKb0tOJFjLnfoV/6fEQs2ezme/rRKJJsYsbg/SlSVCVh4UtcYOGCkqbVV4iTMmEuEU6Mn4u3KN672uHp6fLxS3+GsKjuHspCQRWxu7B3Q9fKs4ETvTOgXEcjyqJQeSBixdgKOTSmtHHzuiw8Gxu4fYV6TRlNLDIhjGLTLFCp8QaLZjV3rG8i/siBJpR7Bx5C0nAgfXS/2vt1kTZ2ehcEeO6dNErAC5Xd8dySpND2dzRfHObXvpMZF25uhBzohw9z8uXX/vNb/7sr337F+3RcN94oA53fe1bX/7KF3+r7nF9LHf/gTe+51sv37vi/gP74P76+NIuzIobJQOZcW5wRhqr2IO5W6qBh7nvvv7tX/jp+MYH3/vhzispt9Z7G7yBAnY9FBru29Fp++IPy/DGHe7i+ubl9V188PZbn3/rTf90vfkj/vZ+/PG3P/4ven7P6xf16qO3P/72H/ln/4VP/fi/Ym9+0rHr9Xsvv/qLX/mNX/nyN7/59fv7z1/x5RW/sfe33Xu1P896/6Ee6vfVWnh8fLhe7t404NWr12G23BK2gr2Fr+WPhvv2lXbJbPRlXR7MVvqbb9z187dk0/WIjOvjpvY3xKDo9qPW8uZssTrMciVfxJlRjR/9wX/1/p37X/6l/wm4uvsyBY+Gw7YBhkKttbqrgcxcbi2ZqExOPOIzEl09xPbwFGd5jL3cL6PaUqC5TEr/zTC0K2qBbQAAZuR4jeck3AzVbDnJj4fPFlCiLFB6rzs5PAXZtOuuy0pGWRqRpHHjoOvB4MpvztdGcVhC6nbD6Jfr2m4RSxJCRWq1yfXrRoZRn4XOUBrp0utuoDPTHN78S0lz5ivDlAHVGDMxDzgGmEJiWkNmkg0UAhDbWtJ/ui+Z2W3nyho4QMSyBrGuenqZBZQLpHi1xPoz9+0I78TQjZ+og6ndETsGF8ZRziavDZm+d2v+fMbaiqxxzotZuGvrUj25OuL9hA1fh4XYWI8wttgGIhZhxEBHLkONpLBd6lmPFbC28t6dlzgms4l4NsfNxtZoU97dQpdS/QD02OXdmTkrSZJWCODEhRbKXFq9mltVsXBxcyv4CgIfendm1i6iZZWNEYHebHhhzUsUqQhWO7iAUYr6LcB7EqHp8KCuabRAdOuFi6xuN9qeHKzNVxrlpPpn/WQDfGdRfhaYswmST98mDaHOqMYjzG9rs4n3kcBpHBdQ7DKOeW2oXD1tWTxRmOh9bxOYfJaj5rc4Ge6Eh4kyoYmYPX1M8iHVdCcEjZSXkygxOP6esn40j8H+0M7Fn1QDFQQnE4+V+EA141RIY6iTsvH34GB8KpQW8aTRAZw9HqV2InOP5Fg72YblZPW5lrwcz9382N2ZfiBCt59NnEPcolthfVt1UpKqCmWErPi9GbM3Vwn37QoiiyeBExxfzgpZwoezvDxpHsPyORkX/LkG/zX/CqT57VuW09ZiTKo2uC6Z8wZM4knF4ZH1a2Bk+o7aJvFNmaU3VpaPfHJITNNic4/9K5//Db8NWOz3LgnNzH7q5//WX/jJ//rlR/8H8BHLZP24Urr7k/uevmLXiAMHV6M0MGL6j4WDBWVj/FceRDVgBAxH/B5xUFBDQZrtKX9oOfoGtQRxAVCNcdPjFlMtgO3AYYrTZ60AACAASURBVL0nYJYtRIzPjlTe9rAI34+INJR5Os1uAPjeDI9GzUWeDECeukBOd+3hNenwyVGp/GwOa44sRxptNe6V5V6qwtGwPBM3GkkcmdHw27fr0Tr8kXy9cs3ch7en4E2qWzN9F9wsETTLlPTk4vG72MhBWTLxoVLQhOyOMmaK/kPPSmdEq+YWgFmY7rCMoOJRhyS3Upw04UCZzNo0lzRvlEkt8//R9ebRlp5Xeece3nNv3Rqkkqo0lazBlmR5wLMsOx7AJNiAAZmhOwmYYFYA4z+gGdJ4he7VduOVrG4SepF00003ECesBZghYTDYBkGwZGOwjCxsGWzJkicNpalUqtKtO5zzvXvv/uPZ+/1OyUSLxbJBUt17zje8ez/P83vAtq11szvCI1mZo2o4+wl7WjDyplOWYEIdAurRw6DiErOShLk3gFWY05WaDOXINLlIbnKzgrX8NLh38+IhCXYJBL/h2FQmkEhB8aqbCOiNXIapNHJHKYuHq6bhjlBYgm4dXIE4bAWrcu8mdZ+7W/mOgNYTVnY3TvOxS7CC9tcE4f0opxBiLMXdcGe8lDM/ZR5NFG0m6PDAo7HlUyXMjQUTfEKhFi2LMd1JmTyoafUN1stxst4S9SweDljRYkN778rsmVuB/u3SoOIICJ/SFPElLOv7ZKoatUzBw7WpBqPIyaWee20hXuSkVfiGNMpK+i4iZuiXD11I7xZOpBIJ/HAmdYr7n/izzz/9mWmKmGLBrU/Tat+mlYf3xx5+wFZhKz986PgiDm1vn9tve0uZphV9zfO+bWOxiWsKLTcsPPWepaBJmZXi3rEwNdXJ3HrfPLkrT644iI2JxL17wKEXHpmTjbBGFCvSXfNw5lVnj0XzDV4px4FFHOTVVtve2Hj0zPI2Wh4Wf0E7/O2XXvWS575eLj5B0cmFfUs3Du81Wbr13XPP48WrDx45cf1zHox264OPfeTkyQfDpv2+tdFsObW26N5772TMFLBzSFDDTKTcnT0CVnISNgtdsC7a4SNH4tBRimgixOTdWlOwgsJdWjryWIg9dRsssCKIzFlbBLlPp05+9O4HPyz98Mte8u133/Nft/ce1be/822qIyZOcOPHYA559G5Nc5VFRCiylEx/KczZ2rRb1yYQryUTM2LeVTUs2aZmgd55NBFIFlcyhteBvODy1GM3ykyqKeInrp3mOma8fpo0PAKSrYTqcakqz0oLZF22iqTNEaeF0goomrS0w8EjlEVPucDHfMuSPNgYYYyyZkllXWmt/FFyOpL0UQDpje+InJk1K2kVt6FKWk4wDqUbAucPmCeHATAPJZy/I4aQjIHhICNzZolzVSokORmnMpy+TMEClTMZiFAK3vQIEjRpNah70wb9szzAwREW0ZriHDCEnHS0kCRKK9ZUF9HK+QQcGtgjsJDozHKM+jyCSEV679o0gD8Oi+As6Z0DT1jzCyXJgcpoZ/lt5Hs/aHQ8IajnzgqULgd7pN0qmxV5DMdehMmCAUtLaEF1ambfFU5JmWOhKO559d5W3nQUlBRiFI6uojKNJsBE2KZKLkVPRbHXOMTXAB3zVFaOFBzhoYOUAEKavbr57uSME0COLbWB5+q5IMerPBvlEvVNAAPkaX7MPHmwLZYkkEB5aJhrLSljkIUP9flMD6rY4JfmT1J6V9nUaFbJqFrPpSyUayJMFVBgFM/ehTV1qj5/Hc2BudwYuR2c4VLMlkHPiZGiw48oaSfOaum0RdUflvjfMjXRnM0J1GRFngTzEs2P1WPWEkG/HPHttS672T066p3W4aeFb4kBtal/eXUXD+ct11ZmLnCfVUyEDbkqboZlkLIrcsA2aIadUfJFSrgdN0sCD8qgy7yON0qOFI8QTI3eeNClhJB7bVLhUrajuJcYdLM1GzWu+IpmOTr7t6qJMfcFkuHmbFIup2cFxveW+7/4/t+cKyNpvlDH2Lyclt/7pp86fOj6bl8JMsr1BCXri8pCOqCNQzvlxNXgqe2EA58lp4zQkJIkUbyUMEkpKp6R2nPHgxB4MEi3xMBNS25f8L4XZl+7tYCvr+1HXo3DilIqf3nCkc5AhCQZPNIyKj83vGSvB1kk0Ngsr9J0CBX3uLVEkui6c3mNjuphPJfRB9DcoyzNwyupkZ3vsLfBNwsvI6bBfHUCzolFdlbXkrY8usBaJzwzhJDyCidhZh2LjuJMlSci8p1LFCRNVdQj3HMbLipmNra3cDpmjZmotpZLXRn9uhIWc643bcxSmWRSkQzOqVZVMtdq2GeGFR742UyR3NvisWftH2cNJ7t7nuvQOUkgunM9tEXSMhXJyUx8sUTGQQ0jELMEsXfYPlU4rdjllWdWzqoTgQ/Qwf7BFeVRV245ZZHZ07JuMJFbOpDzpihfNmyR5b6ZedjDIxPhuEjxruFcxjIkes5qxrTLEgdqMGRQu5yR2iplMoJCVZCNYmLnRDGJSCtbGQkM0I7jdx6DyRs3ZhJWoGTRlMdaUWZiZtJkl2ebGpW80a03sCdIRsaHKjmMJnBLXHk4QHThQhJOok2EIw16GkQqmnoPMXk0bdlBkip0sKomb0ncbaELc5vZXZYtiji6Y9rEufjjX/n90/tPrZZT33PfdzHxFdnENtHTZ5/qbM3kymPXbO+d25/2uyxt6a95/nf9gxd/p6UlO5u0wlxZtUm2ABNrPgHYiZpI7y7MG22j724/+uD93AWwYrSIrfpk7mE++eRh3frUe7feA7uOYAvpTsve9n2xa3x2GU/u2endaXfVV7Y7+YPstz399G995q//7sEvbMjG5RceE5qWT5189IkHH3n0yTPbS3M/dPjwpSeueNmLX3LLK1/7xisvf+j2u3f37XlHFgd2l6FttVp1M++xSdgH8qbwZqONxkwxie5bNOXWxIVXFG1jQzc3L7vhOZs3vQlPMw/LkEg9BCTYszIV/TfWVMMz3SpN4Yx7+Ik/v/vLv/bEkw+devjRhx+4J/aX+7vLNtxl4ZACADNM4zM5hmxTEY9YqBhAJpFQrfQsOTVpnn3QHOwibOYLVSfHRsSRT6UQ0W4ryONCTFqBQyL8UzhleUSD66/qItJAJNq9pyaYMABlpsaNgrS1rAJnpghtijGSsT6J5OAERas2EvRbQNgwVNJj42LO8AZUFXWtvkJGDxaTo+EgW7y8Xl44oDvawvHgJFJUiEbehD6cNXiHByxVGGuJus+O0yRaEiMsHkSKIkvOzWcqZswoe0RXj/U6MEUQAOJptcEkIIZpRDW8e2RwAo/F7MFDQ0uPRVv0jvHeMNeFh4sLdrzMIcHO09SbpltitBSktYxyNMJZt86PMl6QM3cvNeb0AyRsw/NNpioRLk2zDKCwQ8PvaN2liacsTdrE4FDNNxeSlh0xg4SI1Vhi3RYbzbpBZMtDYcwEXzdPKq+HiGamu9N5dNfIIAkVLRCrx1LMiAkDLXv+6C4syc6pFUYea7hFOKMdJKqONgbCg0RK+UpCdrYvVrFCySsC8TLQopz80Kjk2Gx9HOilMZoOEykhvyQ0TIsY3XhMJEjEVT2uV9k5Fay1inoGd0Lmtveoho7sjyod37ozXvtpWBmfcUUoxwBQ80diEQYPuOhHJQoxIbbqAzXKVfhdLjsvd3HSSspbMKeqaiZJTjfnTZ8SUP66oyOnQn05s2Xt9chE8XxmK5askM+1GvmhSZ2qS9SsvlNyS1tVFJ0lz9FlWYhSz4pun9WCNcSQZifkQD1Dj8qbkUrzyf0WUHkA950nCnv9/MnJyChm/asH/ah2B5Vo5VIjPS86iD9C1eGQZwtJZ1p9A6M4Hs8K3FMyYMLFLWJZaykpR1YaKZMmyDX75Ygu9S+Hb1KYLAamFR+QPL27sz4NJthp5nXmc2l798yRg9cu2g22f/csffOw3gnDZY98WSCXjpsoh3D3ECU3cC/BtUpwpXLWo5VhO83ECNphZ8+SzZa4NIUpWkWsU2qUCgZj8eCVeJZRdstMCGpX4IEy7ltNPw20esh/idRPJCAQX8gvZNgpKCjQBIs1H85y5WeDJZCdKcxZNZeDVA8HVlD44ZjC3GvW4VVGSzBX6sU8Mn4aThGiuppWuRvMTZGzM1xOgHllyEqSXKPMAehLmphy7wnzvDurjnoQHpshISbk01TDqcOWh61oJO/RPZpqBwrbUnM1d6mtt0NWimyFkRyVoxQtHeMi4nJpVS32lYq6T1zvWcFyX9m8A6oOAieOHJ7R4kAaE4GQMCNhUVoZImEJUEm2FpK95O7eWI3wfnRmwnjQyTjAd3PnrNhhZnMXIvNYLARbC3SZhNFcPVQ53mKwMwohkWCH46yxGhmTBlkdwhIyT/ndqYkVlXns4HK5gFxiufqjAf/vqNG1uojYwnCDm5mzNd3obrCeNUGnprqH5IuJg5yMVJpRkpHwMIQdt+w3oYjmR2jTqU+iYtGVWveJqRG5BanoNE1NmyFg1Z2Vef3tz8xEU+8brSUCJ9FnGVNUESxEzFy5wWjA5jVnU/L7jFhElM2Cibr5xqJ1d056Z8+3ocrKXInnkgdCvLCLaOS8mO8cFfUwYEeqVzaec8nrH/rib0/dejdfia+CQxcsRnRuZ2dDFwcOHn749CPm/cJDF7/o6q97+Yu/4YLDx4JiITp1Ax5CnFxSpk4RLAg0B+wPeyF/jfzVb/iu0088fv/f3elLy3Gwu09OFKu+MjcPAkh/slXaWQQnWA0K4gmLCBFunWl/FbKyhfZDbfdA7G6d+72zT33g3ruec/TY11/3/K+/YGv73O7+ZNPKD11wqC02trYOMrPxdPzokat3pqNPLo8eWTzNtJqWrAvutCGEhHdjViVFcwxJj2DRtjBWlMwtFhubJHLgimtFs08Ft4lNHhFt0UTZOroWeziZ2KK15WrZtOFk0JedRUl5e3rybJwJZzea+sqJDh06pG9/5/dnfYKHhwll6B/NPKICBd7NqYL4IvmuHMkokSwDRGkBRxoSzC3qdKaioxdblD1jf6GlIc0o+fVyMC5GLzGhzTWcAyEFJqKmeLtpotwjlBVWR2Ye5d+SbfGIpACASRQe+eAsanrUzz+ACTk/5Hk0+S5YowlTZJ2XshI5BxvIoxl7gNAgqhl8z55yIuZYLBQLsyq/DgoW5SzfVFF4LDKalgczrTJ0nLDgaeGMdyJLlzEyqyb2oXlC7WQlR7sgJf0hj+iSATOcmTO5oHn+MMcuE0upoAhpDP+e5KOerfe20Bzds4+Y8jWcj8BIzzqNZhsvm+Kcd8lTSMwd1EC6FhQuzSKq2WqCk8p4Duqi5fsTlQ8pfeAawnkW+hFWgJ5fNZpgYbrTcVjGN1tzTUXRItUzWZNf8txfCMmkKxMRh+SWDkDknMsiP2StY0tUE3dNHDoMZEHzFj/P0Tqj/DPVKlS1n3O37KiCj3m7DWmXRpgwaG1Ky7o0FMpVwxf+4IR0Y7cxBLTKkp0n6NXXUlzvuvkKg1CYqvxy6wviuVaDE6dMY4U/usi5OApULoCslZL8E5MxzpKeHqGqWxv9jSOXWecDLoVyrsDAHz2XCs7ij8d8SYy44yxNDjFtgPSqFaLCHlXugsNG5R7rz12Xm2ZpbbhVPUXDWYWv3TEmkfFfU5jPostKkwZGx7rKeMSLU3RABXCs/Shzu4dWHUs+skjmHzfRoREzZ7LsA7mVL+75jIPJa24uQ6yfqC6NbJdLaBISL4W7iUTFcJWOV+mi5mJOSk/PbgOqiHhOl6jXGAoUIMC1ukg9PmiI+VG9mAVeFT5y8PBv3/bHq97Xc4PrpZT4AX7qu/8dEakeXS4/Nztjx2SZT4pC5Eo5eyOY4LVgEXZLOkDWBGTZMmqJFiQxq305GKcura3eIMnAn53+wL3QGqRpJsn7oEBLnCe+4yrJSs+h9Kx1kAxfRX7Ayb/Je6Qk0EglHHZ3Vcl/Xwl/HHhEM60tYCRVncJTMJyr6X5FD5hTsvjz/FBg9iSzV3q/jNNSTz6uvpfxbMu1c+JR81oVWKVY5v7U3FMFc1lgy9KouJuKdIo/FuvnxIOhuUoz0CZMwklhl7B6M7Gs2ZFnqTY/8CJZoWAqZfM1kjGl70CoaDG5XaUQVkI7ZRberlfn4ioNC6suJXFLyLYoM4mqBLjoBYFX1mx7HpGAkNw+ziSlup/gsq0WSBE2d3PPm744yZxvbxjQGAyYsYMxBDTTKw0mnFC+cwZymtgxqCWCq4qwSVUKNk7riX2EToMsDKZWDIlVD4KFq8/NvdlbY4Z/gVuotiAXAcEoXzfCtVAT9rVsAohIWPrDjSycKVPyaKpeQfzs/dMWuVDIM6SqWHRogxGkUAgKn8ZOuFOMAj3VRJQu66qRwBVl4FQRKWKKhmQvYBGcxZAy9xJH1ApKJMxVFCtUfIQDUJ/PdREiOnH0uqZbT5574uzTT+/vke3TatdsFebeo28uNg9vHTq02LrhxPUnLr3Cp3NfevCv/vbhP3/i3BePHbl6ox0cjvco9C1TsiclhdYo3mDO8yp84wtfubT9hx+8j4zMzM3MvC+7dZ8mm1a2Wtq0MutmFlP33r07TdYn6ysLC+9B3XrMPIbYWMWBfdYd811b7S8f292+65EvfeCBB768N/Fkm315qC0uu+Tii45ffOCCY7q19fRTT3z2ts9Yd1JfTmEuulCajFaGw4qKbCo1kg1lFtoJ33Pf2BBmnpiCW1scOHhk6/Kbv1aufkGlx0OYRBifAMo/UWtHCgQDAmLUtE2TAf7ExBccvPbxp++y/X3dCD3ITQ7snN3XH3zn92naJEZVN16xxC0IOago35fmNxruGcKP8XRmnMiV1cxaa8HQBtHOl927Be11aLsqDQlGYoL1NBHJ2AUGzvTwWMFB6gyCFOEjQDdrxqY4bXZAN7N5T5B8pCMTL0St7DIVbk6rKQ5xlCw+AKe5hNeqQQoSrATTewbPhDvI0t4WzXN5r6PrGzk9YdJUFQxlU3ge8brNqF6o5Tsdz1DWHOGyikDSX8Kszgxvhjt3cK6JWaWN88ZgUeYPI9lOnXv0KqyGXpRV7FnVkAs/iGMqqFKoxbHUll3FQEDFqz1Kc6h2rPS45qyFDaKaG4jnUuNaITUjXWpj2Qr/ZcXra12NH4A8LGvTMlxMIuyW6+dx2MnK+UizFhStOa7HRVhEW4CW9YfLm5cNEOUyjeJuVwP4jK+pCgRJTgWKsxwfSCrvyOPknZXtqAg0SfnW1irWWST/6Txkaaa9YY0TWKGGwJev0KiTZ40NyeUppmhNKTPTfCApct6KcSAen2KqfFwMmcQ50mBdEp/nnHMa/eZZHkXMeDLU3cm89m+XcZzkcTyTkgFpKJQ1isRs+SOec1KjT4CzA4NlHS20JjVEtpBXpdfaHCQ0SsHzKYKzSOW8Sq3lishVqCrbwyQXXEU2qkMOj3lpoD5S6lsrs66ujmwKnjOco1U56nXIcwXhWGrM8byhEeZev+5ZKYvuuHLmX3x8HcnGrGmUR+Vpps1mfOtgTNIgo88Dcp4wZrBoRGWrUNnqMaOHqDZc84dGlawrpb6lvwNvpTGC4G09CEBrY8wAJcGHj2FjLe0NY1p+uQJdC0xMHsXtEsOpPGzOG4vFHZ/7NK2vDUquh13weVe/7L97ww8TEbOuVveypg03z8hoQoV3RtEFBz2NKpnsLOIGHz52nnkPZUeA5lMmbVwyT5s43CMpSZVHxZeCRsS5Wp2GU4BqDsoDavoCwLz0EpUlByNkDXC5mMfgr5a0LsVeyo6buWKDxcikTu3Zi0tQktLPFpyzR2X3yMNwqSKMl7eXZvQdklRurCl5s7mKlRS9pWylrMkp4XLbqiZVOMpNMtYcOQgminWUvXCyITPR4k5G+S6omRKoEM8HZjDOxyaSky9kJWKVSj9iGB5AWhQ283lLANAINWX6dBLGSPBCp81opQiakHLq49oPiQhxk8bCTSRhsEQqbLg9VQH4zS+c2XqookBEam526KBNm3vHfOKgVgriXIBlCMpjpNRjEUk8Ysahwf+pZo7cO6e12zzjmplFGs03zIb8CKjL4VKP71irOgonhcfDk92axwsRKiw+fsG8crAK4QCmAVkkWB/zmFvpJlU1r8cgwKQjoFMDdU9edGo59eThIJdQMEBy4CUf5DCRcn8g9+hhTi0TNyQCEy9WXcgPs5sh5IlSvB5dRUaGRYSbtroDhZkUHTzViyKqQIxhq4JDtrBGBb3LdReqmlRwmIa0CaKpgELJgLCNkDzXoz79wCp84sJnv/zaf/j8K26+7sRLDh266NAFh/f8nDQ/uLVx1cWXH9g4Yu57y73dvXM99mMRO/TEo+fuPXf2nqsve91io2XQS1mFhEm5BmaQEYlQtskpomQE4+pnv/Do8cse/vLnV3tL79ZXfZqm/f39aWXTZKtVXy279eiT2RTWw1ZmyzBjW3VbhXXr7pNZd7MIw/bQXVkWq1jsM+9435l2VvsnV6sH2ubpw4dWy70jTM++8qoLL7+M9eC0f/aOD9wRbTHFyjpn24oHd8c0qxKbTIsmG0osdA5WemZpuiTyEKe48PjRS177TXTJs4a/wyOQL612HqI6UDsl3kWYDWsyFIqLCG8eivbU/mfNJnfy7XaoXaI//M63jWAS5fWajrKIyMcP5qgFQ5objrOFtkQkIpXmwZG+RAvDb4s3ECLL4S6qHp0jPLqqDI+cJEerq2hwWObmQwV/InKxg1OSeIO1F1gC8XqfRr0mCzn1Ov5FNrZKSL5KEe724r7lerAihSB4+KJtVlt0uA13aCCAJ8hYcwg8JYLIZZN8XoVHR1rQu2nD1xSqbG64Wd26lJ+JhbPNHAF6vBRx44Hm6xmazfaLVAuDxJnIzTAEFMzQMaWURQ0uDpDELOp8hCQVC2vTctgLkxRxNC1BJIGOykVTM4PNBLVImclhcutY+qoqIR5bxCAuhkswYCeCyT+iV7wLNPTEx1VeBwMFetxrtZ54G+OW/18ac4twYUJNG6h3hH7hkuWCBHVkExOx4t0pZYAKDg4j0Lciq2ZBlAYszJkKVDscVZTnAUyBjnZdGlpfiKKBc9QwQMdJeiLWa9u7O2d2t8/t72zv7pzb3w73zQ0lWOhQVZ8bRmOW8J4xsogQmKqcAd0jdrLsFUSQGBcA1q5ENVbOi9pEHc4yYUSYoCqKSpgbfj8ZbfFBEuE+sDWxFhSMjDtyDURSqZTRabH2xpY1GbP8jiOp5LXrIx5m2rmbezR9zQkz4UFDHJXzeUekl28oXnnTZfEUDfr3GGYrL4rTvWZ4S8rgzUMk1KFwzuGevIpVRqdYSU8Rs+dxHsoE5r8s6RzL9DmCl7sgTUqQ1Fc51I5k9OnaSFK5pjoY1IMNdQ485xJjmEUrICcs9z304Mfv+cznH37g5OlTq9V07MKjMtYSNZuRrIuYPDKuhUEtBE+yhTw1rFnAO18NzYShlyoVc/ZMsIuJ3HbgcKtZ95IiEAq7w3m24JPUtiL1oayFjGweHybe0WEZpIq5xSuSO9odx3snVyhfc+31j50+dd/DD4wo8vlSIX3jzf/ktS/6Jvznqd/vsT9OqiOFF3XlqeQlGu6qSWGlQKYaJVXEmtekuQsXZyOP+jGKTziPXzyaDkZzAuOtCuwuo7KVapFhEQbgQonzCeApQ3hgCOjWccEPi0rUKJ6cc83SHnMSzXYCtKYzhjfNpoEUXiSzqg7QSxYyouoWjwTPUhyOlKDE4T6lgSgiinADvZODQ9ytab7bRTTJqGlk4PSbcS30CnGNKy3wiGupuaG7tR6HYWR13xlu27ZIJq8nhBbU6SQJBBkRO/Ws7Q04p1ohl7GgZA/ysLQkYTuglF5crumCqg3Rgwuzp+kpmt3sG7ro0wpv9uytTScRMYVIczdm6m752xflGi5KqetJm3jQYqNhfA6hJhLk3Z3ElZpRBxNbtLb2ROYERKAoiGMS+EryyOEDHcXz4wkAmzJi5SuSjVxkDuMB7ITjZbHVOBcQdc+m4Y/IyCJMWUQz5SeUhAzHQ6+hcCu0KaRXI9e5T0d69JbwX0XCMqtQyn3iFG6ORf3kluOrMOVcx3mkq27PbsZCRsaJUMr4Yq5FhNzCEQnKyhNqmJBzlQ1LM1bLDjAqVEQVVfQHjuKNIBS3egD94kK5ckK3FmUbTTiqC8KTcarq4XVojQLNUO/GkivaYlyRNumotg9HksBhLuCkOQoramCVBcTKveXZO77woU/c86EHTn7uzJnHqPcN1cOHt5b707Muvebx7cdXfbWy1Y7tnaPtlew6T+dWp5914fMObl3KzAbQ3HD3RHoQRGTynqEncBGCQjBs+yWXX3X9i27a2Tn71MlHaYrlan9a2mqvL/emaeV9aX2vT/vWl2ZLtxXZyjEWxuS2DO9EK/Iu0+SYGHsPqIhmrj0WnQ8smVaxu1w9tuonNw5+bmVf+vKjR8KvfdY1u9tnP/pHd2QrEsnSozX2pbNnif2CedFkodwaceNtDyI+cGDDgnqQOTvxZZceu/Drv4MOHSWiJuIeTbRXPSbwKe4WHmbJoWyqvdvspZfcfpw+e88DT3986StabW61Z7XDB1pktBSVHhTsIqiIBa/FytkF4Y26GZ6mrGLJYMx4iXlnFhVQlb13b02QHMtcqajbxCzOrtLMTMGAdRcS806UvnMV3CduFG4hpLn8rZzGOO9EOKGHEiXT1dWDoBqG49zNQdMBSpREqxwUB98Y+Pfa6OEV3m3KA3MEM7lNURl5MwNIA60uThYei6ZmPaW2oIU0C/PeG3zBCGemCz9IQqVlSX2qvVI5K9xdfY3Uz04OYZHLEwdadGQlbIOaX9WxAHlD34si98hoJB/JQ/TpRTGygEdNejXeNuGLRcNTOklcidw04WZmkHtUGo4RQIG7hYMqBDKqSljG7LNNy6b6abNukXWNDZIInyx3SuxGFvJwxOhoD856wNxPK4tnu07xdrNRPQ0SHo6G4yTKlhlVUabSkOwlVAAAIABJREFUEoCeamA4B7lRpgEz6ZE6RIH1YQVRzw1IWqqIKQwevPVvhHb29+576Ev3nXzw/pNfueu+vzu3t7e9t7sOosC/+YqLj19x7PiRAwdffsMLnvusa19+/fMw7opIgcY9tRoPFvX8SWQMD8SEyHgdrWNYLqvxIJM5JeMFeaaqmHVOxXEqLxmPK6mEmxS2Moa7GyprRGzv7N738ENrKYPqNo7RsT5Ow3PcsTS+qoMgIuYTF13CTFccOz4kyio69xy0Yohgka68+VcMVuCIUwaLmttGwz3Xlj0GdFNTTUq9rnai4XmmnQ8MTGGRMskaUbN2ObOUOr7cQbEqza0YiLI2AdJapJMGmKeCG5mvZtBuq85hbninQVCQEbSr+Hfyj+fWuiTEVg8QUXzwEx973223fv6hB2Ko8RRXXHz8h978lm+9+XVDQnQqw0ZtBJKkIaNKIakMXB1ckdSO8b8Gj7SaANNZwVm7IqPhI7I4jsPdcgWav08M+8O60fbc3t5v3Xbry2+48RXPfX7xQus1wkEBl/XobShElgHSNAATefGnjTpGoA4KBv3od3zvXfd97pHTp2h0jqz99dY3/tj4z+7nENmJ4aOm7GPI2E1WlnuuTkrMr/Bw1njif0QLPjOwE5bgsHElszg5f/xv73x691wWdQyQZfjwacfsCx76OegUdNnFxyn48MGDlx695Mihw9i4G5juPpKxFG5aYi92xMB8hocKUXhYSMOl6O4uTG4o05MSHDgGaKtysJZTU3iEilr5//EBmlEIul4od155c6BREOFPxGFchC2cmcw8zcJEAjZMEb5QsNS7Y5WGp+FA+IiAna4gdUiwuTeWyGmEkuUQUOTwcXbKqdizTRdfv6N0hzyMggX4TWFcUeVjzfpBFg7LbDpC78E2Ev7MpCyB9tqUc9nchWXySZomB6Vb7jBwUifqMQmxuTORGbWWLRRwbElwsIuyG1kPNFJgDSws3TpV+n2yVRKVybOsC9e1SkSE5oHNyQiZuRGGl2DWqBWqkzGJUW4HEdEkZlRKmzlALUWPykdOU7EMFoq7t6ZIFaEVradlGFay5AdF1q9HwrTREszhAaojCVMPwyjvmKYyVu8YJtGriEEcaROTYEeSA8obuQerEFFjgsCBm9zcVcg8yCPAOnD00EWlqyMa3gsOWZVS566YJTGORpP1jdaWfbUQXcWkTcxtYlq01s2g+HEmNkPQUYlu4sjGuNG9a2HamnkISXcTEXMQClOkVRHHWVwgrSRODecdt4CUNGQVIupeLam4B92YqLuJys7eqc/c/4HPPfxXe+cmWjGtiImOXnzRft99/KlHX/381+xOx08/fXbqq2nZRTvzSrb6RLYXO4CyikiYMWs4OTseo84EbjAFO1VdZzVViAoFHb/0ilu+70c//ewXfuLPfn+6b9pd9r7vfa9P+5M4uZl39wlklMaaKx1qygthZWnKbQolVeEFkzILyQHlxk2bCC8WyitenCNvvH142jmgjx6MP/vLO15+xye/7ZprzcmnzspMcrA1s+Vq6ko8WRC7VJ18U14yc7iQcEzE2ju3xQEW2jq4EYcvpoKs4qGkiBATdTMcZjoWE2ZENPUJFawIoYUIOVn45Ze94cq9L5zbO3XxpS9+/JEnbnjO85vAcMJlQEo6RC67lTWxLpCngGZDgJsMX7uoRpgHqTYYoEXFzeCFzOmIKLvjKMMBEZ2DDKZTJkiI7gQXaFVWhSBrHz7W+h5BhTzN1b5kG143L8tfvWCqDBdPBBVyI1VBfxENUxol0SzclQSehwGGRq48CDXflLYCJ9TRmzGJ++jGTiyEq2QQRJhCOdjMXFEtyuTuKjpgORXQzWhb78ngRneaigbVgpURDkm1xMOZNI+c7MpZUMEJF2qJkhcu4Bs2zhTeIXqmk4O42v6YKNxSwsJbkYX7lHrjyAFmrQKHMpv53KJOTEHmoZIsnSRZghFQaQr3LqLEFG6DFbFWpY3q27LHZv8dsG4QheoQkFNiJdxUExkuLBIhEp7mGVqD3yeAcVTYoVEVHj6rlkwnkijIJBjiaMyTFKBppLfJUq9Xj55msiwS4Bwag7b3dz7ymTs/9ImP3PfwV87t76wrI7MkNQep4pHTpx45/QQR3/6Zu/D3vOy653/rq772FTfceOLiYzVJRd6hOLVyurIdGLS6wnn24qXrJHtHQcOteSWSzo3xwVMTo0QOVKQHsfm06Hm2nPkYQiAqmsftd//Ne37tvc/oZxuTw9wQ+Mwz9Hn5tWf8bUe2tq44dsmJi45fceySl1//vBMXH7/xWdewlNt0TXYjqdaBwEFfkl5KVW8nyS2es3k6B0UzcM/P+Lmq7hzPolpR5zQ1vK7FnuG14eE8nY9jLcQo5XUpc2b+PIM3U2VX637aqAc1M8ZR/P3odK08KMbYYfetgZiZmcyKWcJrDYEi23u7P/XL//6T990zOD31FfAjp598z6+999HTp9/+5rfMNvBEVnGsNYHEmA/HrwB1pJ4PlHpm2T5pIIVzNYBPI+lN9Qu4VxXnyANWenUEw3Cd3/X5z330b//mg3d8dHtv7z98iP7L//pvrzx+CcXQMDGuDGprOirzADVoTHnKz0jPHI4cdQ0k4XFk69D//D0//CO/8K/W7t/865bXve3E8WtrGjyTJBURNH7h1UQ2C/F48KI+cS4DnD/Q3KQEkWhAUCJ4FqtlMtJjWbOrE7H/zp9/8O4vfI5o/e6j/8Zf82qG+e/5m6+78prLL77s2SeufvF1L7z+qmsPHzyUTnpIgRgEGkUoA4acDwcRzZ698e9EXgD8k6wjZ3A7KvYVhLINIclQOjMZ5/Tr1HLZkfaQMoxnuCvKil/2d1d01isJK9q686HrpayFe+/Aga55GOqdhXot9+AIIw/sf4PFqYLEMTz5s2U6pbmOzgy3IFIF/Q7P7YLNZq6+PPRlJ6jknkMxSlZrOJxyMShdFfjE22920geThDT27uBJpdTmFOSlHhQHRDC9YCUn4Qafp6iUiZjNTVW6T0xh5srSPfuZisqTCa9YsxJwzGW2eBQIsZmNs4counmzry8fXhZobmzMhucMvtzK73VzyRxJzU7BoMJGFv1lRCjTy/VcMlQ6G/Y6jkOgWbCQWeSmNaHIRJ4Fbl5vAoDxRQQcRBG0/FLipHU0aWkPa6SkHOZNgcCRpmGWCAUEeGrUBSuSnEVcO1kwq7Rx/IMXDO6szcViOa20iWUFtktIY+2GyyTQAEPCquweKoJyL8ssWL7Rpm6aJ2SdzBatTSts0rPqTzHxq/SMaEVCrQoBODq3PRxsWHc3T06+mYuyd4LNufd+3yMf/dK5+5c+UTK24uiRC5qIWyeyR888dOnR40vf692XHL31EOoru+jgZVceewkABMm5ViILCNNUFUK45YWlky+auJMK9wQI8WrqG6297HXfcMOLbvrz3/jl+/7rbbpYHDji0/45sW4r60Z7vVuEsDjxzsrNac/CJtu3WMW+qU4RthASIhXeYNkQ2eS+UF7I/oJ1QxprkyZnKTb79oXLdkg+dmTrI5+8+5q+d5NtHtqQp/cnaQvltuIlvGsw1W0INQlmnSJEFdohNpZB3JoeOHbcN7ckHSJCnA0xDGRGaJAT86K17NWgqMpTPNbYu4sqOzXdesV1P7K7f+ajd/5/N7/8+yme4jse+xNVRRTXshXas7TOnYRVmvWpFqrDAZTqcC7hhcNJlM1MSAI2P/JMVEN2ExFS8ynMg01IyxQV3XzRNnqfmmq3KVk1qPqzECFyRv611CEiJhW27ii7DxtBRKNgaeLu7qbaat4AD5OIWBoHbvhsZc+RmonDXCQocW9QHNXJw8o5SfmxwJNvPlfVY/OZp4sQIhNwrt2IJHxq2mqIIjIqNY/A5O3QCfHaQKmrmS60otkcXvtUy38Q79rkLwqbu6rYBFL2GoC0GmjdY9EWnpWVPhT/muIKwwlFbvRzR4ziIAp2cynThrmhslZo0A+zf7IqtPLIZd0RGXUslQeMD703lKiRgnRFpFG+FwthBjAEkYDR44iDOiaW8u9BdET2Jg930U0USiBUR6kfMq1Wlp2/Ui5EyeaNCjvNRXNUhuMAZXSQMYDpN6D9eHj9uzPF9v7eb3/4Q7/z0Q9t7+2OY1aNSfP884yp6avPamOGfMX1z/uWV73mW29+XZR6EGvuSDNHQeUcfivZNtwZhX1g9xBHkEoNlnm0EzdDjiIxlcIBZThdrz5UnRIKUnWEZIe/7eSTpz5wx1++789v3d7be8ZvsnbKPK8Gfe13jPPZKkM7Fcp2lPzryNbWTTe84Gtf/IpXXP/8E8eOsYjXCFHqSjULQuibIfE0joyjYz7DdTCoc5FarXpK3Uf8L78pzCcYYBTD//n/ztqiiHJV7vi8Akh3Fs2w3PrZhhhVv+uaVDfMDB6j12T4HkcUdPzWw1oWtaWeJSFsWiK08s3v+D//9zvvu+cZg/ozrsm3v/ktb3/zt8+Z0qi43ShnjFQvaS0KnHU+kcbj4mfOymz96KVjqKJGqKzFAE4OwuEQtSko3OKRJ0996gv33Pfwgx+84y/O7e+u7x1+72d+7vKLjuPvx0MHlvgsFTCa4SXpOwkokOlpzDwgj3bHPMdXM+jZne1v/p/eMT6x8R8++G++OAbCqd+7t3vn3KqchibGWzSNJ6VdIrsAQWQ21CFGOz+3MKzKcPpHoCxPJDXjVNG/8MiDv3vbH//xHbd/9be5fifOUOL5rqTzs5GzfwH/3xdf/4I3vvINL73hRZdedLykRl5vLqEILPQwz3BuEgscjDFPa8EhhC0GHlR4YztqATHYaEsYrwo5dzA8kijiNRuivz6yZg2yVTqNB3G4hAusFDRLOMd1C1ZqAkiT6s4Z50rijoiy9S4tr+Zwr0mMqkOXkU3Dtp5Kl/f8ZllUyQgg+GAbXmz4a9M3G8GswVHCplC1gfboUisAzJxmXh4Fbq31qfNY3UZG47jYCcl0HQ8YZ4ayGZm2RwVUoiRFzTLD4sCFisI9lKD/IG25fHQKVbEJRpO51zEKAeVhQoLRKHHZKBVMlkWR93LOWRvPhIM4C7DRL72GtcJ1g+JZ6143dR1rc80vGZBn7jYlxydCuPVu2tSt5mFHqCRGhxJymCIy9S5VclaY5ZywWtPeR86UV90WTVXELTLVSSCvMkWoajfUE9bCsEwug/EmzJ1cqeHQhvONWVdt3TrAp2hpFxFJd494eBNFGxheKMojG6XBjhJLbbqaViAFMpr8XHCysoSrBzmJSDdDnRJCeg5IYbCoCJHZCGhEEl2EVbU7RONouujWUekU4b/3N//bozsP7Z5b2Tn3XTnIhw9tHu4+nds7e+7MuRPHrnn2lVc/sXp8h88Y7Uf0C/zC66591dfc8E2bB45y7ccK1JEMR+Aq4Vy14G6hmX1WZG0IQGZH81Pj04/Ebb/71O1/6HvLvZ0dEd3f7XurlRsb2eS8cp7Yz5yjRaNdix60DN5zX65iIt7tsdtjZby0WAmtPFbEvCneWLYabYguuG02FuImdCj0wg05dkB0etkXd154JlaTG7e93f3V7jStwoIOKB3d4EObdOCAqMjT5DsrZtHDF26e3Zv2OhlvXnTxBS/5xtcf+O7/BcNRcDQR7P0kgAYA28IjrRBZ9UmaaWARdWdVxZPo0VN3febz73/x83/g2NFnRVBD3CtPKoANc/VIkijcw1LFRuHCgjAsvNQgmwgJKxCXZNYXC+1Glejg3M2EQ6YHdr8ye6iXaBTUtAU8qBFNW1CYdxFlYtZMmadlTgWP72G1KtIWNB1M9s4BxiL2QzV/FqehilkpcV44H/No78oJyCkYRMgYD1r87jqw1uGds1lHhixLuaPENOMkGhRN1MJTvPZ61wZ8mJAcYMSXcNfFojLEhIYuj/TIOXnTFgWtTCyCiFnIoijvNW94bjgDcFfC8TgNS4nW4Hw11j8po2U7W/hEsaVAn0w2ZBdRCm/UNPkyIyxBDkOjB5Oke4TyeJcZHo/0NKIWTzQVm5SvOhGxgo5VzEoYO2BNYHIyyNEAMUPk9uJehQVrXsD4IN0HpZnT2IRiXJidxouHI3cZ7lwOzLIhxWDx0dySPsMyMksDjdFid7n7mx/+4O985I/LFEozKL8E+RPHr/n6l337iePXHtm6kIhOPvmVex/89Cfvve3pnTPnD1Fc7e70yfs/d9cX7vmVP37/m1/52m951euvPHYck8/opfS5th68B5c0DY4hr2CVnE0PrFkSDHRw8Vyy2KsY/TFDQbJ2acBS6n9nUXycOHb8h775LS+//sZ3/PufPd8GOXroRoZq/TBKN179kpOnvrK9+9SaRjGQPednzii29/Y+fPedt33mk0H0rTe//u3f/B0njh3P79SrYXxQeuu1TgUqHVGV+k5ruXBewIuG0nAedzN91/BJ8ZrHdaYkR/j4O0vI5my4LmGq5ibUZp1X6h5lL+S1tkHmIWRVt01+t7PeOQyHGaCWtal47oDO20GSRBh/eMdfYBqcxz8egMrZjPnLH/qDV9z4mldcd1luZMl5HnE9BU+LOaspaz7hRE3hfcFVVlkP3Xka4VxhZDFF7cUiHnny1COnnzy3v7e9s7u9v/v5Bx945PSp+x5+4Nze7uAvj9xr3ZWbi42XmD/m9jhO5unXy3dkynE5liXvMe2a61LxzM+MarJhCqIjhw6dOHb85JNPrO8L3vGWd49pkIiWe5+lREAV5h6OA/HC2BAWDqm3p2ZGtQehOgFX66mSwJ9WyeQEGRKh8jevFYnrn3XVO9/69oMHDvzu7X+yTl06D+0aM/IHN+MNz3rBG1725rs+f+ed99xWav3afiKIme6+/7Of+cJnI+iNr3zDm27+updc98J0ozRAToxJcWUmnNxHFpiAskuIC9rOaoeFEoT8nQpRGyFkucgjo8kQteB5e+QEZg+KnbixWTAT6dxOm7gsluDsFaIwypBIzVQgbwSFcrpzwdcKGxDUxA00oZCEL1asNOeZLO8LTiR1udEr7e7ZgMVoRkv4MxaUWHPjYcwzmSsL0mEcpVAWIXGxfIDX2zycsRLAAQYYPxz4iyCV0CdzZxazDgVIgr02A7kZxG0M+XEheIdnFSHewi5AuCXzhtnCiQjQf3MkFlgLvsCCu0/MDD31mCvwvMQV35idSKnqYmfTDQeRpdM4HyDjGZVVNcRO5hVazg2pG971HOzhrGAdmLSBj1Z3a9pwTeZFLrkj9MSTKpKZfeoLFcRhwzHhEAtZzyJ4JrLwJs3dNxZChDq3PI9N0ZVROMbLvmzamgur9tzYJiQ6A5RKvTuLODsmPqx0RdTctChBaQode2umBbYYjuduNOB2cq3qYSEkJORmTQQZYyAYUGSaTvYIVHkoKKbg0ArK0SQrVXHHcvU3c5DipB8B7UEg1vXRKOxBm4cu3N+/jzacD8aFWxdesXXF0/vb02rlfakLjdh6Yv8xWyxJJiJj7pcfvvymF/1TpL5WZguBTkPGoQJveUduvZFYFtJKghRBoQgHS9ciNjgOf+Hjm3/1R+3Rey++KPoFi+5H+/5qb88n20pTe8RyaX0Su0Cm8P2l7a28Ewcvdla29Nh12V31VcQOb+4tDu3s7ruTuU/dpnO2b31vmpYkXXnzgPYNkq39dnx/85oDd91wYPPMxmX3b8f2FOZTp2WnptwkWgOAk1fBk4moSoNQohHGMR29YOvAFc+JgAob2CasFUQXx5GF2TmFMWi8AHZKrBVBffpLv3Xy0c+87iU/euTwZcnZvPOJPwNImwIbLpQlzNtDWbuMkJ2Kah92d2hxICZSZOZNVPq0cnIRUVERERa3DsqoKHv3pq33Pjp5VLn6jPAMhee++PgkWdrrSUrEgUYIa7yQ0dSeu09L03D6+kpFU5QQ1Ogw3v9J8krWsqjiTvDurWFgBho0DYFYZzbVDKDDESgAHkBlAvsGLs0KfyMAXVkiztgkM6fiR3NEBjaoqpvkZHCpCIXEfD5kHplszAAo2ODkDAQhO4cNQWTdAg4lLO4mPH9kpf/AoJtyaPq6LEUwfOmJu0u2EHEVjpn3hBNHTboUioZrydUqQ/6tnrFqaAhhHaIFEt4FQkR0M1+WCdmj8xrGoE2525wPmr/0NdZiFnlJHe15oA6rPG6kKPNFgqRAudpwi7hIqxFAyidYDsC0IGaFxd/c99l//b5ffOT0E88U+Qqi+Yobv/Ydb3n3TTe+4e81b73/L/7T//v+95w89eX5l1g/w9Vr68RFx9/8qtf98Ju/M2gtPMgS5ITF2GgfgfSRdBP+5OfvecVzX5A9xQW5mWe1XMqWnjQ38OXjIKrcr4QI4nVC/xD6gn/m1977Rx//2PmCHz3DLhtrHw50lXsf/NS9D3zq/R/71Tvvvf2r/6n5HPBVH8u3vvr1b/+m7zhx8fHIY0HJ1elpiTkbliGsqmRY+1SzK4XndgQ63/yawnsSZEq9qcYRrUN/WklH4XtpVpV34mDa3tnZ3t89ceyStb+XxkxbwvQ65LNSZLXaoNm3OdKGkTI80/m/V32xa2nFqCv+lnf/i0dOn4pnfNQ8916Ov2563ht+6Sd/PqZPR2qeJSfJMH9SAJLhVIehmlEzJpS7CtEqveMRJSwHe4Gvy5pNFPGeX3/vB+742N+jJcfff4ER0wd/9p4Tx59LRMvd3ws7V+J2rCNpqcrxBtymZsvz5fl5PTGKJSiIXvvj37t+NX7PN/zYT333z48fYZq+uFz+VVkoEq6CQ2Zxi/JJiO6AQgVROGmVNhYXWEgAuJdhK0W9W9QxjMsPT4CjBEXIzt657/mZn9jZ211Lta7fQzTrtkQUdNPzvu5X3vlhIjp56ssf/tQf/Pqt/+6RJ78Sz7j5zhfyrz9x7Q9/x/e/+LoXrD/sYtYqA0g3rydNwQIGBSmvZPfQzH4PcHMimVnVrPLeaWCvphB4OhA5l/SRW++cFND8rsBUKC4nJb86/wiaVeuqqiEafXgztRZZ9B6+oYtkwBTocyTSg7PjBGd2c4xogNtKRYHz54dKafk4wnuqNg+owutOqIYCoCWF+HHJOhWPFDoWJhNmsmy6E4qymVEeogaVMQvuA+am1EhBx0mVtwm4iqizk0bhUGgyRe/lPw+KKv5VHnUQjHaIzKdnPi0DmWmWBhEXRxHy2hAx1THXI0m6bHA/1pu77IuV0cjEXYB2EWuACApgcfNZiv9illnAyuejEyKpeVCeJbRqUOqZzMxCkxnKn1Wam0GyYhGvFt4wj7VHZzC5m6im+hnMrJkDYjwTYsDmyziNnCnPmQi8bqjYnoL+mHEKwRFEqs4jU+RCoiLdzD2aNmRFwqhbx7SNMrbW1A3mQzefNxFYIeTPL5IuqCBRBfWHiYMM8HYUhFJkDwsxdzOkDSElrnz3U4/+yWcf/OjO/vZLj9709P6Zx/dO7+3ubD995rmXvPbkydPXPvvSL+3e3TZXHGa2vO7QS/7ha38a4ZUkHidLI5pq733U9ArLVID2MFJVSm5F4Km7uf3klZ/8rfjKp2laMdG0t+rmfbLVciVoUyQi5+Xenjbty9Vk5sbLiYx0f2+HnFfLyUT2ppgoto8/Z+fia/b1cA9aLfeXe0veObN55rGdxx5TtlNdzO2CrfY0CesGbfDRy9qhqw5ecvSCo6d27eTO9lPLhx/aWXlsLuKig3xkwW2DW+On9h3FI4cOim9unt1ehmy52Q1fc+3VP/Av7YaX54WdJ1gAUoCyKycJfLMqZp6rk0yXqIq6uUV0Wwk30ebZW036jn/5/VCT8X+BwSwSYjnqv9Zqe5jCyiJHlcrJI5Hl+QSUZyFmEm144PHABUTeVElACk9cCnntjLmcRhEeItp7H4U/VLhsT7mjyv2GmIAHUyK10y6p2tzTsAX3uaxxH8DuQ1CeRk9DsKp6vu+NhD2sbPrwokRLauIok0jdTynbDt06k4SVsSo/OfxuVvhmHSkR5NmExH30MYHZnL1G7qNULT9QnkUn53S8409PNHqSMJEApcHuD2H2SqKraFjevrnihIsDIB7hYY+UAlQSlR6l7N1YivzKCSxmCXLQtspyE+Pd6nUmLjY3TkJcR7CoGoNIdmg3p1Ftl0QErdq7fAmsJa7GabeWrpymIMHDNwHSms2BPneDwSuKtWAifjj78wh+yzoUMKr/ioeaz14SchLR//DB//yvf/MXz+3t1qmR5+mHmYl/+C3ves8//4/rGsIz/rrx6pe+9Y0/duL4Nfc+8OntvbPzrHAeeYS293fvuv+eD9zxF99y8+s22gaWNWUVpLm+KIkyBDX1kSefeOu/edejp0997YtetiadzSpUzJkuyUpArVhOtRRwNaHDx5btQzEXJGCVc+TgwT/6xF+OLcaw91TvE5/3GzG/9Y0/duTg0eMXXn7j1S+95bXff8tr37a9d+beB++uhwjPH8WsHc/Htc8//JU/+uu/2GwbL37O9eRrRRR1KUSWzvE6hrTso/NBFlfyeAIO+i0Ls7DbgG3Oc8nsdir6wfi/V/Pg+pCVp/5//K9++gN3fOyfvuGNQx5cr1+bOx3mDNta0x0P8nz9/LHmOy0JpZKNSZ0Z1RdDnmXmO++753233ToeK/nt8PkTeOUCt/fO/MC3/nxEkD9auvVcXVPrpPrthSnztGOBMn4REoVcnxcPZHzcesDTR4J5sgPwxPHjq6l//uEH1n6qufNjvpTH1UL81jf+5JGDR4nIpnsiVsV1ZRl9GiS5MkjpdXSSzPdsqjyerCCeiUP8qfs/98FPfHTc6Dde9dKf/9HfW7+XV/u3u3cZLuW6QWmG7mIXWczWkSObv7niTvLskA/DEy5GbWABCzWzexnfYgreWGw+8PjJ+x9+4Ly7ff075vUPkE4cf/Ytr30bER05ePTFz3n1W9/448R0570f4fNLMtej0Ke3z/7pX9/++OknrjtxzaGtwzIHjOv38IzA/1rdAAAgAElEQVTBJxMfj/mQ8lFX6GCOvY5ZnRN0EczMTZqgH4hD0dluqQBURyilWwTKCPbXWb8Ke39Vf2I28OqJIR5LGFZOGzxK6kuEyYWYMGAn2bnlXiWw2ZxOMz6JssmqCiww18GJMBbyiZ4dCYr56+Fhj2gyk3+IQ1Esj/ilMwkpNa5+pnGPC9wxGCy9SmJlrojUptYNWTXU2cfYM3CKAG7BJNY9HWMERreyJKoCi3iqRLqwOFyXbuMtaWZ5zuEcobMMg2IuWQ+ukg/hKiHLcyPRXGUTyRao4jGGdRz7AyHxosJC3EVbSlCIKubFcA4PdHK4B/Q9GjeniI/SCI5qPGJlhV3IzKVShfWw0cG+w7Wxxn+O4XQo5hBcshn7cCfNQk3KTixVd6MQClosGt5HHi6q462E0vkoH5+KMFMjBXhWRNwc5+FcFkPxUwXYiMYuoNgT9VASMkAEAUj38d7Hsqb6d+bqp6AowC2hghtq9phOuJpVSXghm1df+MKXPuubrj9+80NPf/Kp6fE9O7e32lntTa97yT9+cvXEC677BweEz+2fmpartpJXv+j7jxy5LOmQ1UNL8yoy3SieqSGlnBuluq8y7b+5f/bqv/rVxaN3KwWzLJh00VhlY3OzbbS2sWgqGxuysSkHDm20BW8dWBw6srVostXkgq04sslHDiwu3JJDB/iiKy6/4Hk3X/rKN1/y7BdeffU1Vz7rqkuOXXLVscPP0XNHH/zcFQf0qi29YhHXXdiefcC/5ojcdBG//tL42ov0ZolXbPQXXqgvuOrwNZcfuPLSzYNbBw8utsT60nyy8LbZXbRRSFx0eGs1dWftvnHogkPHLj5ywT/6Tj54AU752jRxJAVow7ooCocdQd7zdy96H3lWDYdwoyj7KBGztMQWx/CLsGpexzSHgpQ5Oy7ReU6Z48tlXJbP5JFazD1TYCr17Q0BofqMHRSEIBLnGCALFnJzba37pNLMezgt2kauTyP72wQx+nqaZIMUYBDmog0FLzFPmMn2jQqdE3MPwyQhKr0bnjLWQ5WrdSONdXgFIOJgEQSsMLFZJ+am6tzFWVhNJoFjkSLMlRcWk4rAy6os5pbTkDQzYxrVhzREOZyr8l2Su3yVYglkzrncKwGkZ0axXbVVJTFWobABzt7aKkhEmp+ZSBQt5zq6U1EEBNJp2ZFcEQawLECkLL8it9JFae5Vs5iU8jwAehgMA54V81QU77SAYirMCcKzGpGAlacYKNSxws+yyCi8VFTDn2R7RQwkAI2Li9pCKUhLSMGGEpAA9CJn6wEu9Xrd5KfskZaSenW54U7zKv+LMkHSr3zod977p//lGfXio+aPiL7ttW97xy3vfmZG0He8PxS+QzQRBclh1aO3vOZ7brrxDT/xC99170OfWo/zPEMoO3n61JGDl7qdq9zRaLSEcmk1eYV1e+zMU+/4v342od6SYmk92Qd3p57ia1Bs/L4VdpJ59VnVEFw96VFqFys//6prR8vg2qb9fMGPmb4qNun+FPOhE8evfc8//49vfeOP/8QvfMfJU1+hZ3I4ad1uiv/z9u7u//F7v/7I6VM/+Z1vHXiTsY4oQ0QxEscZHYXP+d9kmEvzn3WiYTVNMSYfbbEGRB1aQa7P6uLIzj2nKt2E1kM/959//eRTT9IaUQKbvCGrZP20ZA0cYiTzOEXpxxxKCivP9Jwqow8azdpoKqPqRkwaR3g88uQTNB8917oNn/kXB9H27tmTp7584vhLPR63fnIIRWAtJIuoylfCQrSglJGRHnzjoowuL/dioo4uDYQ2peb0akh/7pVXv/uf/eCRgwff9+E/nU2ta6M3rU848dXQlEFT9pzc8TE0zsmzCspHrYbTetyAGOcrHjXx9MFP/MWI1d1049f9/I/87vofOa3uDt/JB3iBZ+AvICQt0SWtUjtNr/hi4WeHA5mdIru5o6YUbChYmFw8vKx/8K0PUxyz0PVXXvsn9NE1gW/4LZ/xiZ33pXc7s+wnN/SSd9zy7lte87Yf/Lf/6OSpL3/VRVF6bdCtf337p7/42X/2pv/+Ta/6OkqMOQNlgQUFyAL5uq/2tWwuF0puLc8lrFnfSdREqEqo0YsLkyMTq9Jc45n7LBYGq0nwrM4epgwqsAfgzKbEoTzAxU0V+y+PCNh8mL2jAtFFNBcz4UD5E5N3QyZdEMRCbzkHr/F7S+h2kSbMZqQqfWVRJO0CJdQ7Lsqxv7YHQhdX786ckPDoGRImuAARBDNT1uAKEmd3CLbVeTaqXQirNjdn0XXGmDDDaJdlRaW5qqqThQUp3tlOLlmeKGrmGbbBT6wpKKUSy9yaIvukLD0cKFGJxPYw4xwCloxwsKH3HvNOkLDWDr+ww4EDSVBwODdl4AIdrWnBXkt0sDRF1LyLKjkxB4n0yUlYmzCJLMR7VAuIN1V3DzfRRSrDPNpcOTnviD5hVdGCAgAPjnBVJsOXS5VErX44qK+RA1L0skwzCYu5MROqHeEXdRvFLckoiry08uzLzqj9DIpOhuLFmUTNRMJmZuEbrYWnKVsavNBVAgmS1uCtAfEqok3NHfh9FGBYN4LLOPC9J0WSZZCCM/Cs3MJDF2FGqIbWEFZcw3Ls8OX7BxZn986uuC/78ppjz7/u2pfLgc1Pfv7W73rdj517+ht7LDc3jx48eAnYGagtwcogq+N8fq1DCnV3EoB2GdekELsHh111760be1/2xgI+aaDVVEW0bbRpb39rY8OAlfLO1GDWWxzZstDGG/uPPaa+NN9YHDlqz3396rnfQAeOwmLal8udM09uPPRw33l4+wJeNDGP1V4/fKSpyOFN4QVvHtatxhsazS32Jl6sThzevPqSo6+6+eLdJZ099fT9X3zi7nsfX63SU31wS1jJgsOotdhQOnzREb7wGKEqnCU8mrTkHTDjF/cslHIoSaLCwpqY6ugeTRUYSPcwCTMUpThRtEId4GnCAcBGSgGiIhYIFjLkHpyK8s2YHErPqxye426iTJn2HHmbos/AGMEZOoEwTZmxzgd9U+0+MVHvK+EWMFqkwF6nasY7OoJcgMLN3Z6JSABKjoeXzykayGJZYmvGHCyCW6NKxnA9O0vW81pEbqjISpvjLLFNf6B3MgkR4W4rToJoPsTdexa1l/rKxKEUlnc+r0V11liTXIbIBJBiNyYiOWsTacuvIb+sEHJCRDvXIpiYM5qScBcRdQty8qCmWspiZC8TOmQGkABjn/ncmIcfTmTU71YxAeoconieQM70HPKQh8GhMLwEFs/Cd676IMrucgpPuYMZRtngCHfW7IUDsXRuVF6rpMiSv8GbIiK2lERkHXzjtWa0oBCNsNFsIuvU/iRfZPM86jGSCQnEn3KeaOEPYY733vr77731d8sD90x0AxGdOH7tO25513mTT3/cpr/1/mjF24p6KEzhlx569m++6/Z3/6f/4f0f+1X6b+BZjhw8uth6k/cv2OrTmcP0FNjXWlSg5vEvfegPTj55qox5TnIZy+MF1J+HPBGu2dxnq+TadnZIVyM2UyWBFVMxZ+FDBw4cOXhoe283noEvpPMte/xMlo7v3xZ+jvgiacduuOI5v/Xuu9713h/48Kf+YDYDrNtxvsrV+RsfuXV7f/dd3/ODKWYaThZojWdp9RsrFzwuQQJFJz5/1JWB1IoS+YPy5EQFcCo+5Dz959/GXG74UbMY9Bu33fq+2/+URtcFbxBvROyu9fJV4HB2f8INXokxyYki/aKgYlb+Lc+XnjY2nt2haaj2Kt12Wzdc8uibX3NmfpXNF/9x8WLqJ1NGiDqbUmbA5sc2yn2qumSElnlotyWW5TbGS/DPMZLWxl4Kih968y1/9PGPbe/vPZO/tI5MiWf+tPX1RUYJuD66AH2BYs65rpFZebzwBvM28LW79Q/e+Zcf+MRH8Gf+k697009/34fOm6ame/p0N+5H8gDbgZm9dxbJ91IN+9X+Q0lAS8tchrpjhlBFuZ4j7SPZ7R0smgVCmvH0Ek7DjQ5vHZyht0zn3YDrmVFelxApaNpd/d0us8rBI4ev/KX/8Q//xf/9vfc+dPf8jwyhoD69x5584ufe9/88dvrxt77xO1G6454IoyyGz9bsmMmp+eSR3Mbmxw4RbZioqY74JEweBo0RdA88bRC6CyOWxCog4wTyypDRUTUeYSprr0EmaRVetUEcjiBqCzFL+gBC6REYUEeTJ0meD9IXnbBiSH9ZaoJf3tyQmXd8G8rNfIpS5ZDTKzc7DQ8+slJKMqLI6BjMxHj8/+y9a5RdV3XnOx9rn3qoSrJUJdmSbGNbsmQefmAL80iw3ZjwCK/mJn2bAOnudAD70knfJiG5GXd0HnQyLmkCSW6Am4ZAEgLEJN1xgjEBG4xBAgxY8hMbS7JsbFmlhyWVrHqcOmevOef9MOfae1fJGf2p+0u7hoeHrcepU/usvfaac/7/v3+roscSphiz+dJsVS/YwDOTs3t5mdmA3G0UH4FzkwjJyF+eE4UBEY2ULGlh8/qPKxpE2QiMATImVgj/ZEQRoIGCYz/VjAxM/W8Bl/wnAAV11YCfOWKdx5SRC34JqbXUAqIalmNgpN6rn48bQ3FhAkZN2CZYOkDVFMwkVcnbEaoaXpeCeYAoa9V/Up+FiRaFZ2wrbkKwrMrEGskNQkQeoUoIGuZeiwRDMK0FEJnIxA8xWuzEZQ4W9FqPgvC80FBSGDaL1El56F3ycD6K+tjO0CeFyJ7ERgiiRMmV+VocQ0SRQ60ASkWLbGaiiCSmxJSzoiH6FMEPqHHSgvIoxNIUIEAUEZ9/qokniytowsSErsR61QW/sIdvOXns0Iatl1xxyWsYecvGS+95/NYHnrrtyue9EV1h7qU+ABBlkfjsisyCmj6ml8RiqaLsZ1/TEI8DrH/64VUnH0ZMGQi0zjpg4ArIEoKJnzBVpGJG0F6PtRZMZGdv601trYWBIW1ZGMzs5WOPVxNjw3O3T264wB1xiLg4vzhy6nF8bOdw4eDEdG8kpb4oDqS3ipGYUamXxsYSRxiJWQKugnFWDebGJY9P0/qp6Usvm3rq8NzBw3L02OlqRPKwztlEaDBcWrVqfOKCrUPukcv3shJjoM4BiFDQxXTScLyDVKZqCCrAhAjRIhnm7JNerkjVyEgNSLVtQPkwnokSExObqn+WpvEFBT/JyNH0Q6PQ5cc2zUz+IqbahFiHZ8+diKoey+4u1CatwafnoiomhGxgTJVbf9Q9wUGtsAZ5H/LOBgUcZxJwRYkrrYu+UqGZmgO5yzmlFPBrceUkqIqBGYOqaARbW7Bwoq6JtOKAVjNSIsliqKDKjAjGhCnmWhb5hxEFo36JQCPU28MTwRoBbRGGxxDKH2DWNJN8S/ONQM1bQyYqkVfBWPJkMSBh1jornTCpogACBUQbexghqDICETCjZPFYCCtwETUrCiQgz7VXLfNgb5r673qksiB6NHwK4kR8LKagjjoIVRiTJ3GDJ6NoFhVQgaJRMRDX4nacgaZZA1lmHg1mIq7k0lavSOjc7yaDoDmvGCoE8Ayc0kpIoIzWyhdF3E8b67fIJRABJIuZimSfMTUpGuheA7Mvf3/np2/7+9aG1AgaG3Ej4o7t13WVojJ4sO5/XYeHS6J3EPVKFYBSPzZc+Iffese7r7vip7qv033lTdMXIK3i3mXV+FsBRwK/FmVxY5REQPjUV2+59QffaVLjkVZVY6+l6hUdtklcw6A1qViQ1xrNegPAtIZngW1TI+r2cFMaAMDE2FhJhW/OmrjysN69XMvqwlmtD+jS18bsmx++4UM3vvm3Wm3rshfsygVDK/KlH3z7A5//lGk8PiM2A8oiLO4kbcZlZeTYuCj9riPsLC2/H4u7TBvnn+9vsZVBuX+jR2FhMcKAlygcOnH8k1/5B2h+1yyNvjGNvsYlZ4Xd4/EHas9CeizdD6LoLqsVEIW1uJwgM2t5LnQ33FJlqMcMTrWXrlulA6xYwP6rvoYR13nuciNXbXMdyaF8jUHPb9vmDUAJxLMWotPYkqExKUMJ0uxaBG1ybPzic89f+cYQz3i3tHKQ1V0yHfpW+YPYrObo15E1s4jg/5WywswOnzz+6a/eDIgT46v+z7e+41d+9leWj7hPDoe7oyYHIKZWHMGGaP5vBEVS39S5pKbHd/CQA9XicG/7fYF998VKbn2zRhlebL1YNLueJkUrb7oVV+zMW9IF+qBikmVhqd7f6z300f/wse3nXQ4rRMWuN+tc/M/e/ne/+5k/fmZursFcR9eVEEyJ/VBshOZLBYmCz0kN4c2z40uouvPLQL2CxjIDpMal78s6qLnGjIkJTP36UGNPF4tHryv3SoVJEfdiDTnZvTqMZIoq4jWjsww4cdFgO3XTp7cUTY1OImJHmRydI67KanMOBwiSmUT2IbTTSrNCX0MCNWFElz8S+UqIURUSFk02dhzLjegI1I9xwVAXVWGXGxL5xoGFnWaqhEAJzDTEoWCSFQlil0Hh8DSDo9SJqOLKgz1ElAg9GI0aUnkL6PLkPfU9w0dwHGAdM1OVkAkUI21sxm568V2W2JlAJR7N3Gdo4ctTUVWPmw5mhAc4YmiUNGvcyCHwBwASyUCYcxafxvlNxtGY98aeF8eMjjo1UEjMnupMTABEBszISKkBKqKhkapRIkUVEAWVplrzLJOKQgJKrjNyMRpGzagqEht+Im5hhAgqYuWMrcFO1kJJA0XQyCfz+QAhIic2daUlZnVvIiQmQ2MOlLuIqMVkVr2h3mjQLNhLPnoSN6ipeK/fSvIngHEiIjJxho2aCQGBmNSCBlJnz1UHgvHempdf8PY3vew3drzgzVUa84v9U1f86z1P3fHIka9HyDNjVkBFUKiYfcoarcPGnGlmCiKeLuPDLghOr1mS4frHd9FS30zQFE16xJVmGy6SDi0v9UzIMiOAZrJs9ZAsk1m14RJJk6KYBwNTzTBm1Ui15uxV571kfNXYyEhvZGSk1xtdVVE1c3daODYxkdZM0siYrNo0tebCC8bPXj+xerw3wqvGU0IcGa0SQxpJXKV4OoporrWuc7/Pmtf07PnPm3z1Kza87voLLzp/9WBgdSYxTL2qWj2WNm9PnPwZRIxaplJMqNkLLqsS+0HdqUIVcWLGrIkRAVIiM8OEnMIBJPEXAUHJJ1oKKiIqBmKxFHz3BCwBr15s+fNGh7lmrHy25ofGus5xZxIhUM5SUiWI3Dkdj1Il1yyasR9T1BeMZ4Wbs+7rXHt0OCEDaHjztAGXF2FFcaSZqHnAj4FmM1UZKhq5RtxEPcPKSg9bRM2grkVFVbzRG/JFU2uMyNgeGrB5uPoc0gxFs+SchzmlBB7C6zUKgNSiWZr8ehVxFmvk5yBReW0spgfx1PgiYvRxXTsR1VJ0uGDGBe0et4aF62NxHIwcdu8nmkkWD6so+Wt+5DA0VKldUMsplQLeRbXq5FWt1RPdchYEMxGzEIh43KBfUsnZh0IRdq8GQJqVOJVRvnvwXDJaYBg+mQRyEnQj5DM1TyXxQWPxeVMQc4iJyL+XirrbyHLwIUMjUQuYOUC3IQL4qcKkqXNDeN8GMxshoNRCfsKKZh8BmGQTkdDceMaRKHtImmvVCQngyOzTf/LFm1YwU8oxufW2bz//8vbIWD+m9YPh8qRolKMnA3uvW6IGk8GB3/q5t21ct754z+Jo7v89MX5WOZVNgA0aOh+gYYmYM4NvPnDfJ796izWBeTSZRl9bjuPkAgHN4BeqeFjLVKdJje+gSqwkYVkhVXZI9VQ0eM15qHs1OkVY6yTE5WrY+AGJyRRMF2xw17uuv+pNL/+ZFRe2i/doEq79n1vv/s4Xvv0dik5ySJPD1lv+AqcyjAJEiz66o2jcsBFS4W6UQ3GFuBa0IIfLqDBmPtBexkJ78f+dOfH0jR/9/dP9dhjIIy9BmkCaaH2G4QMMyx8iEIeXunTZSseinNyx4JxjRB4T7hg1FAihNZHuaK3sdse2SybHxktEOLTLrPMBlasN1734LeVd9sBWNV7VNi7D2+5RApbTfWNs8IDTiDxtklGswb0ilPa3lQGaWgOV8mt91cXbmzfZrqXu2+6ErjfFDRqaoEpAc1VNBVSs8Xy6/93Nxi05tkmo9OmQxvjwN/7iTw6fPHHNpVf91ft/923XvparLe2tLceWFr8OCqZWvCxmYmiu2/f408Jdca8uxbYes5bOcbiYNPwfA0VvwanEvRT5E6DIJq1RDEHRFDzkYMW1suV7yIqr11JUiBiJfcd2I0I6/B//9bvOntrQXR6dS42NxOQ7D+3+jU98EMkYiZndVGxiLrlHQM2ocZ717rU1Fmh/5rK3XB0qQphrKzb1BhkQWZFmLvy0iAQoER3kJ3gkkew/JBP4p2xZzRQUCdAEyjk60O1U4CJOXklcoRUCnIJmIR+AlMA/QtRaTf0QAmQYKfDqvrhQPxOS1opoKnVr2VZA5+8hklpBckIRuprUyogiRsHUBnDuRxSN8ampI1LMk8DVZRoEsR0hatgHzOrhwEANpHh6yYsAQvIGAADUUqvltjmGBqYpkYgAQlY1tboeqkmdhz60TBUbqIKimWQBA05eJJvrUd0hYgBUop7ducDMZZYApqYRJxxNbR+kZ5VGc+ZOPH/+iJ/vnNxT4nyQDSgm536uxWJGUVHxSGsfyal4VINB46k2QBjm2kDCFU2O5IkSRMCyiZ/T2IH7jupXaCpe0MioRzPJOaw6Yp6CGPEApqYZCbLUqm3pbpJFVUQIMUUcSJhYzBQVI39YNCIBInrIz5+KhijALomMy2SiVtc5+EFmhJBVxFSC5xxsJb/kVOKI/QKCkS+tFBN/s2yM7H0W75WJZlUTyWiYa/G9OiEjAKOrW2Mk4FKyLLWpqjnpVAmxSsn7oWtXbb7mwn+x89G/+9aP/nIwXBzWUrE7b0Fq9ao/iye6+aAi0ieqhJLFDOqcQz1maqbrDj88cvqg6RKocOJelVQyWkYZ6GIfl/q21E95yHnY09qGNdYDNM2DhdM/3rtw7HD/madPHDp47LED9cyBiUrp3MvS6rMIiZl7vVGqEp96ePXJfeNjNDI5LmqjL3jl2utvXPu6Gyeve9fIla8aOedcYkqjVR6KDHLOeTgcSp1B1FTrwdDqXCFjNh1mVmCz6Um+bOv09Lrxfl8zkgCOpCptushEgn1sBuqPMMhinv/hCzKU1ao+gHOmlG89oQ3Omoe5RON4JhBwDLICm1FSTAwAISVmcj26BfPD/HHFDtj0DDo0AkXGVHgNrnBQKmBgUBHJolrw6OE0DZF3NG/UdzyKWR4mYgSsmCFoRaYmxPHAp4Ypjuh+yjjMuRGYyB8BUOSzLiUnhGJVNyb2SB8i8gNfZP4gcThwPC1DG+ONl+NuaPETGvkLpOCvIBIDMyADE6O33yzg/67FNyi7LVh8l2jliT+BJOwUzKVF7M10725he1IrwE3VAIJF/4zKXMH9mQqRSuRZi6GcAwX1qoiJwPc4Fa+BGDlxih6txkEckKogd4MvESrMqcgjcRBqw8MITzirmAFBk4BNBObpTxhjkXL2AnCiLTEnbILCzQvdwLL7nyFo2+SEpOLWcOdQECCZ5+X4A97PGUHEAf+gkYhik2o9byC+4YIDsgnMxDzGiomJMLl3PriVbuGO0z9E8x4/ffsX55YWi4kF2o8r+GRelUBTvJku5MEPHZvj+YfhXDdosiEKLgyJaXKs94lf/o3J8VXF0dSgY2BzM3K0YSkmCYwQ2OJAiUdmZ//TX/95oAx8QshnI06U8ytE/Ac55oeaaODQ7gRz1Kl51M3DcFgchH4XAcjUCXvsvcnm3NlwOArfBTq1RytnbMWfznwXP4d6XPipX33LqzdNTUPnpRp8CbbmOGzALZ/86n87PHcONKY+wsgMbGPTmlGLK6ujZes9TiT05oKjGhocYgMmNQlThr9mVG/YIcMBUIOwQJzr93/t0x87PHuiVKkIgKl6fuuttCbg0TflMlcsFzAU9y4FayyU2BydGuAULKvsImOizI7KGw3FlMLbrn1N4y5sZIVNM71baL3z1f++/ZjKPCSGaF7SadO8xhaeZ+0f8Z/U246m4MIEDNMXdN+xA469nvKxgR9NNq2dbtb/ctsbWmduvQKYalCYOha2hdg5kTxWNiRWJU/Sd25QUPF2UpsZdnj2xMa16z/23v/rP//bX944Nc3VRam6qChFfzTofw1hGPj+kHj5zk3BSGsZNmGJ8f0lJlSujIASWF2mzwC+ocVDgBP4uV99WiBO7XYmJHivrTQCoLOEWs5QWPfazBRslBZtFY0YAzmv1tXWr5n+tbfd2JGVNtyQhhsQ/xw4/ORHvvBJ1UgdQgDiFEmPBsQxD/TjeYqqgOOxIuZ0jUKTxtTDACS2GmCfyDVh9KSixMhIqP50BorZSxweAFyTIhHr58AYdgWjed3GUfj5uQcJGRUTVioOBUFGQjACRiAyKknlgGihZ/KLK8hIaGgCpi4cbt+q/0kqbcDonHrDIASTARLwQxEG3KXBJAdTjz0aHdEz5XxGF+/GSSQYKDA/1xkYp0REhF4de2OLurQuMEhclY005m/kM11CMGB0USgHGNkyIEjOpgACiMTMhKgR++zMTmBg7++XKpo1ihYN+RRSFL1Kaj7ZRo9/RpfbAqqpZKHoeQIZJuAiOHeDrhVEAhKHhDY6TljYCDFWE0/G8lagS17VrLAwPPsiADymUWMSUcIkouhOO7Dk1thAPhK2yYJEhCYGYujDQ2uQf8RI3kP3zG0/A3kKFxGxt8lcpZW4uK/IClvCu+1U7MBqqgYVpyLEIM1OccfEiQgrZgUQAyb2Zi95qyKC0bHhiXvr08eGIuojqehLOtbUzCKNUKPdAOHMcbwNuUMyUj3aRNy4SGJ+riUgLbSlXEtiTsSM9KLzr3np8372wWO7dj3y+R6zB6C4DNibPs1sP87RLjcO8KxWFTdtU9HT4YUAACAASURBVDSYOrRbBotSq9YZcq2CI6MjYTXSDIMl0wyazcRUUDKI0FKuFuuJY/fTozvl0W+PHt13dv3kOatO69lbe897OaWen1eBCPsn4cBOW5yl0dFqfBQQn+kPhqePLs7O1MOlauNVIy+41lZvWMoyJOitW4Mjvd74JPTGloayNL8odT3s1/2FxWF/IF7IGzBgYnz5FZuvvnQzAomOrr/wvDy1KQLWYmGYqdT9vvQHeXGgYqqmapp9IhWd65yzlpFYkOmIOLFXChROehWR5J8oFLo3GhkZA2cRRLeAu0iUrMirEIE5qWQAVBUv6iIfInT4pfNMVo5ZFnkYZsA+jgtqSri5ogEFjCxOQQEY1MOKklpmT3UzYwJQVuecRuvZScGlMrE2NMqhIwgI6L52MjNkjMGmKqWYB0BBP4kIIqto4jDjhXjfN+zIgAhja0g5lOKoH+zlGH4QoYoQkVqDoXQLE7uKjyPQFjFCe4GQFIW5ZyqdsLFQfzGjijH7nNCCw+kaVzATLCkdEfPqXOww+bqIm9C9qmEe1uxPITWgAFwFaDrSZQgBIXEDegs9VUS6u7XTpTjIsdTYd0P3JhlzKvgNbchsAAQojYunOP6gARkDMZoCcJSFFAMENNQifwHPYQFITJEy1Kq/IiQdwDu4GievCLzXjqbR4lPhEHMDuoGBVMyFB07gYkBVJTN0Q2agyNyMFk+NIyef/se7dzXR4s9iX4qHC8wtPlMKwmNg89ZWNd6ko1jZMeJrhVuIsGlq/btf/5Y/vPkmWG7s2jh1QfmVBTMkt+bHcY8QYObk8Rs/9vvzS/0CRj9DGkbY0IIQPSuySU2wTiCAugSxFCbWiC4RSyPXLIT7y4OtoRtoYyuUa41ccIWGlIppxDHlaGaTo+O//XO/+J6P/WcoyUvdbLQGvV0OMnB64dRvf/b/+bP3fVIH3ztjAAntj1lGblAASCUbAVQBuIGOFL8tRyu6NVO5rQNDjGEdV6Nam334kb//670zBwG6aJiVX8w++e/Q9xBQOxrLFmVu3fCPJgAlPI2FFOI+5IYpamE9L6pDAlO74fVvvufRvXsO7G0Um3Am+Afhxjf95o7t13ZGYXPU1QA3ae7Y2P1XeBCbTx+b9wNFXdZkxsTshEpJ2ezrVga01MytsfVXnuFFxeWlYpMQUsS31nx7IFR1MaIbaKPPFLDB5riH4X/cNDX1oXf/cmnfjKfeZQBgNszD+/PwR1BSfZyn5cITKn4ma+MWXfDZWBU1FKrUBKJFqlMT1WGeKuqhAgKUij8NAJjAG4AEGvDkCKUsE0Hsxt+0uYJdnPiKZRkQzuZ7AiBWRJdtecFbr3n9zd/6CljXJb1sQfs3um33rk1TF//cq18LULs52jM2w06IAAQillKUzTEfK/xXPx0wxtnd8Y+uaU+ecCtRTpkhBEfAmlEoIoiYtwKLfwUDKxpWrdioKDkn3NycYwpx7nSCHqGaJqIWJxYLk4GMY6Vj+fj8tzo+wAYba+D9dI/I8uQa5hKEW4BMscmgw/CC/BddXAMkY2/AoUIT+QnUBlVApDc7+RKcHqeiYJIlJSqo1YhJ8L6AqRGzihiQZ5chkEr2+lI0l6SxKD9S1bNizQQj9/yLRtxkE1wQbQcmFQOwxCQlJk/FEleSc1jBIrBYGZOhMCY38GuQZI0Js3oyobMT1YtvCXxrk9qHqsqJ1AKD5rQFb/eJYFEFOz0oriEzGULFlLMmZm8fYRzcUC0ywcCUgMSpSKXj24TYIKJIRk5M7EEekoUotaZsJ6kCidZWmiNUjKwghoSSNcYf7I0YVVExRUTym7zxQ6sZkw/zXP8iZimxqQpo6iWpRc00Z+ZYwFKID+EOFVEFYlYTFJfkIBQ2D2iQkxoJgHjzmMlUC8gdG0U9AkpEl5TnkwkxArHWVk7mRIkMomLMKp7iRkzZlIGRSAGuuvB1a0Y3TIxOU2IVDS0t+ETHY7v95WO/KBu5UkLX5fqdPbF4fGTuKUpEVouoZIGlRSY2UROFpYHmTCJQ9bzDEaEjbiTt90d5OJGQaRG4lw1Gz79Cpy8iwwzCmCQLn3q0v/97CCCgTDoy1ls6tG+xNzGyZj2OLKrp6Mj04unBqlRBhf3BAFMvD+rECZh7vRGS2hIaGKWeDIaYcFgrMFajvamx/LIX9nqrzjq5YOvO32ijE8OnDuUTs7NPz/ZPzw8Wl5aGQwMkJkQcXTU6uWH9mum1Y5vOwfFR4spV2CmlRs6J3SwgwkiRQVIABkyRfkk+tIkzqaqShVbUNzGXazeGrDoPGclQHW0iIgDGHhFeMnpixBHH5oj/hRhJsbfCzIzYze/iHQtTSymBWVZP9hR/TDVKEgUxBEZATj47ElO0ls5FDs4V7VU90exCKVUnz8aDxJ3EkoW9QRd6QmFOquLbSkwG0FtT0fjXmKEgBkrEXeDGGHk+zIxoOUuhN8TLuxXEgwzM/XsR2KBATZaBywVqv/8xGDnsJ1OIox4Hq6rNn/ckw7I5uvYP3dTOahmIAKQlOockTD0dJMDZyc9XoKqpwpwDxcoRWmYEECG/4XuPdJHwLoNGZloM8gjRKJHkYdBWLFsb9KiIZJCx5Ml4r8HiIrsBKlxvjjYtuFeXLWvkfZfIACZ2b2ojksIoXNksEzeYBEQUBHIlKCI6vd3hP+YgcCAk1KzE7Aoi8u5fpHR4Cqq12QQuViIC1W8+sGdFv7z42DufExgC3HnfLe989S8DgMosBJHSgFAlE3GuhylVDkr2s71TT7wraQo/d83rvvXgfbv3/6gT7AaTZeoIVpeCyIij5Tlz4uSNH/v9mZPHoZ1bLjsOOsEH2jlTU0xaQKgtDhsYtIM2TT44lo3HoJvNBx3KCGIX0gAdAGQHebg8QC5WQ+g+mkgDJbhy6/Y3v+yVt3z/2820o1N2NrOg9kfcvW/nPQcOXnnhdq0fiSKrQYxC2JCaeJKY7qoGwbM9nGJQQ63ZjrQMclHF2rRAbLgqpacT/A/8nc99+ta7v9NJznPFFC7/uUFFG81jY++0Jui+SUlBT4UGx2WVEA1ARGVvCTp5F7o1aqmJrE12dt4s4off9e/e/+mP7350b4xbV3xKCO+4/pdvfPNvtid+eZKwvdQmEaLqG0KAQLQTEdrM8Mz5GbF1U2GfEKNkNyyAq5OgzUwLgVkp/DDAkt08wk5iJpwJSi0QBg9pjfZWfNzFE+EKK1TXlLfBSJ2E+pBuxNiODGF0/FqkVZIP5vpulfmAgcWrxcMOGU20lL4RiUo+83EVTvQ90WEUbTqJEXlIuqeiFXZD6U9Qgz6KozE7/Dksb9g69s2Wy7JLjY8dqkz7ZOlcv0K+BPXIQ69jf/6nfub2H+ycX1qI5VlovVbWZ8Oe+ovb/vxlL/jpCzbVZsYMkoWZs2Qicks3J5LG+hr6u+jTIYA4pdMicS4lNggqCSA4rNKtLkyookwJ0IiqLBkKHtn1isxRCHkQgwbCNEg2AQMXIyLv+DRDVBWlRIiYIteeEJVTQU8HgIgRtIEEB/yTfDGUs0SBbpsJKKgCsQYjPQa74R5XMwIyUCL2bapBYQOYgCKwu5MRSSFS4KHNNYksJAYETFmGSCR5mFISk9KHpSzKyCWPSkGNOZlv+D6AcTpCxFEUuhZCAkaI6ZBPE0xBJBOzGYhkP70gIqjTCtFdtGIZgVU8XJ5UBAmNDBE0AxIkYgNLUGURIOeysEEoWolApZHvY8l1FQACBTVB5rDokAKgZh8Oh6wy11lUE7NHD6qZ03tdi4FmwyyeLoZKYgLg2d8eKm1ZsiFIpHyhD4v9VB07rap/FhRYLOcR+I1TzjYIopk5xYFNFWNOXniwCIlYtTA7VZAUyVWmUT86CZJSgbsW87HUmi1H60cM3UmoqiYEJGaJOIu6yVa0cN7BDElBiVlUKRG6eRARHC5qnjAZJo5c55RSFvGaLNSeoY1xqm6gHlNKOWfLpqCpSt4dDeUbgSEmTOKsRxUHMPnZWVS2nP1iMfWsOTVxyZ+qFdm0P1mBAB1i5Nm2OWuK9hIg0epTB00XTFWzQl1XCLVDQkRzXUekiuUkVhMocBqpEvJg7rQbVVnQxAQMe8oXvxTOuYJ6I2aCgNksLRwd3ncLz52C8TU9xPzMQmJcXw36T+4+3R+bHz1rfO3q1aNsuY8jIADc69VDTchVr2cIS/PzHINWyDCwOteYDSAbAUMyGQV52YXjR3X6wcfnTnz8vyxBdToRVSMgYcnQRud5Co4cPVr10uTk5Ibp6c3bL+b109DrqSkzIWAtqj5KMUM3bhACorc2xDs6gFBLdjNFqKLNNxoNbg8ogauTMWcRVe9PmJiZ5Zxdpq8qACiW3dPi2CY3hPmDtlhVLUttWazjinBnc8DKVRWc7WlV1SNiHxBZ8ViXIYAbdTQBIkAvcVWAP64zG9a1Vw7usGNvnarHv6ppjAFdV2kggCiSQ/Gi8Vo+8ZSskZ/uB9pAzxBi8s0ui4CCKaoW4b6ZmbnpVkSaM4+pGBoyOJtEQdXLEX/GOvRZM5oCaIoWZuRVIFMxkYaX0kNowByn5pwMdC1o2W0979RNzxYGd9WExOURVH7H363moYIYmCVGQkBGivQbXzwmIqKCENygePqbMWOYWR0eIdmRCa6IBRAgE80GKlabqaiommh2u7toBhTwehm0kOUUA0JjYEYQXqJGFWcmzkHFyBcWVTHLgGqaO43rOLohIBKbAao/nLCZuHjHKBZhFgJl8tl29lT3xASqmsvR1sLSCGTIsOvhPV0jnLWnua41Dg1w996dc4unAABhSATInmdQI6lZTj0yzM4uIVLvyEUybKms3v26f94KFAEBcHJ8TTnyziHWSOozQgQ4fPL4jR/74MzJ463GEle69Yq/vqOIgyb7jWJc1EguS+vdL5dHV/mAHBrLWGPAKhTYoimFrmMQG7vGsjfWwFc1GlRi5T34YVEA4G2vvL6bQ+fgNute//Llv/LF736WqksBx9BiyNMUoZ32ShyoGleSywTcXaNhPw3bj3t9m/TLVj/spWBznqfyYyp84POfvvXu78bCwI7swM6oX4onM1z11L34Teh9cb757sTUGVVqY1jsaD6LNZp9VN+pgUtKy6rR8f/vvb/6gXe+f9P0BSusZdvPu/yP3/vffv1tH+kWW1I/jA2JqJlNFD8zkb9zayAvoe03JHadZkDI4iq6MZhLmJC0gNsY3DoYvViDm/XfMkgMYMWvrIjMKD8sgRuWXBTtL1hywCgUw047NVNsJ2ghag3WWKA+J1QWBou3DxbvlDwXYcyRhFRWJ4B5Zp1F6aRZqZmhR5gIEZEXEe4BiQAnByK6lTw+fTUFdAdcFlBDcIxzk27SkFRBWiBw7EjNndIQlNq7EjuBmtAhNqgfmwKtBqiEuGZi/Geu/enWyWlNp6zc7MVkiIgf+Oz7ybYhmOTMiTUOG1DYMAomkSKjDSnHnRbGiQr/CUF9JGAixYKJXuApIWRVYlLNYChSY7PmI8XMHB8aDS5/OY17uTACnBADBdHhWjUhRMnZjfSmSqQEoCrO23PrjpawY4dnlmgoTUw5iz8EKXIK6jCk+LeyWkCsuOgxICOgqpZdkR7ETt+dDAo9Wj15TNEPKX7aRnNjWIxoiMRqIs5SE7OIkHMCyGpRMKizZFETl4RiFn8n0iRlWsR1iUo2zWVW7/RNJsQsEvNoMcniWtachQAl50LT0cIqo8guB//MTdVALfr/KqJiarUT5iQjQdZa1Qgt14KCpsoFBU+RIRWOt5h0AaBZziZqidjpmqoyrGv1eYBpzoYIKTXNQESDKI9dp2pKSEwJjOI55E4ldxVQYMJEhN3MRqC1qCgjqZmAwwotVey5iAKWVRBQLSOi5OwhAYqNf8o0i4rFoBUMAHIW1/Gpmou8VMXjO8HPnCExV3NnIwEyqytHEnoGg6tMw9RoZiAEaIrhn2rhf2gKqOgk/BDMQ8SDgYKYoEGupaqSqiRKTNgMk8W0lmxqnggpKmogIg6CSSmJExyljWzyvZEQRNX5EL7BZckMfueFh7+HBGZZhACyCiAqiOd+E6CKgDrYnJmc9ej+gjx5cj/U/o6wNzrKxDw6AlxRGkWqEle9sXEXqNMwY608NtWfPDutOYdHRpmIEHWQQWR01YRWa9Oa84gSEbvlanjw3sHjT+gg17On8uy8ZTG1YX+plxfW8NMXpJl1x++tDu+Z6Kka6SDXg4xZTTXX9dLcPGMCHFFhVZdUkqRKqEqmPDCikXrtpXfXO75ydOuPRy48TuMnkQUIBdBgZHR0/fr1mzeefd65G8/eMDU5OV5Rqvv1yadP7N+3/67b7zi087tp5kjKoqKDnAGBCXPOFHgv1CxFmABkmJiasR5wCZTwq+kRETnnXqpyzp59xO7hilKRJLQpjhBGQE3IpgZkzRPUGyTIoZgiIAUpfj5vHhfqtIGpxwA618Mk5wjrxGbYFuJmLD58CH08aOFx+YPVALz+ERV3mXvZJQqgBASS3TXYbG7AlEQkJc6eAyOWEokqJ3aLhgN2TZ2THMwNNQElReVSJ4ApejYnoiM6HcQMzaBfjYnULDG62E6yJiZFjwFNzoESMSL/d2MmaWH4ZQAbcG5VSMylHC2wQP8oW55eYWO7FVikuIg02FERrxCi/2B5FyqG6z+4yatorAZYuqGArl8K9b2PAcw52smH1+HCdwx2TKcVmUDEu5mqEjKX1h3kcGt1K3YEgRGqE27Q9SLcVN2IaFmRPLWTnMcc3U7zLFpuIIxhW0IyiTFFCPd9ANjOUVBNUePUHedaKmxFwHsO7F0+8OrMVjpqPV8Af/ql3/v1f/lhg6rJ+4mg3PIEjrtUizUupET+mNMdF2+7auvz9xx4pFGebS6SUdV58GRSBUTcO/PUr//Fx2dOniiHY+uq97qZgP6wI2ogla1Px+cR0KkVrfUWhTeliYaiaHAuo8h3q512AFwijMNlbrYyQYCD4xNxiE0WHCICbj/3/B1bL9n96N42gq69P5r6py1277z/S3P9D0+M/ETu394FMLYJitgGRZRE97Zla12bXKHWRhHooQLFRWWdoWLkrSGdXlz4tT//+D0H9nW0nt3YPFxmgGtW/7IqM6QKkV4BJYpiGUY3Zp4lR1ib9AhXO0dt4Uf6MmHSBu1gYXp5w0suectP7tw3c2zvwfvnFk9Njp+1/bzLt5932QoNqQzvNTviP2+JjbYmcRFaaBZ0dRbFIVkeEI2aAousMZS/CH7qKUVO3AjQiB0aWGlx+FjjsV7+Kx0FspeV0a8IlmCMiUo7Awq9ITRs3pR0TYF53HPB7ceITeeH/W+Wz6gkarQj8WX4UmdpEaBG1BFEY8rzY8EIUdxWwNT+FL5IrBkthgberQRxh2RrLoUKxoi1hNAWu2Rn7RmceYk6/4ftLWvRkmhnCYiaFZF+5trX/d2urywUPFJZfu1d32w7M8efuPnbt77z1W9dHPzIVJlYMLs+wymjKpGsGIcJtfKAcM0nG7rjPXQHWLLXA50PYAAu6XRDQYRcRHwHRGAvtSrx8AlbIE4KiMtrfmQkjXTvEMXE4KhwoCWeL661ISmJL0zJA4cV3LBAqurgSYLolDNRzpKqBG3ghgeskaoweQxgDoNGgQJTSUsH8+8O5t0rbLROJm689PJRDcMnwgaaqBLLzgL1u+9Hjz74nXvvfHLmsYWlxTOiJc9gMv33v4pJ6Vl/79ley5Y9M1f+N5z5i9aMtWG5+Pmf/But7rpNBA61V+dlYPlLrnypf+JqWNuUbJ/v5ogabD0Jrdi9c4QrT/SwGDT9qlbp0O1n+daxMmDVlv33MpHJikCerky8Y9kYH50866xzLr3kmgsvuGL99Lla7Crhs/GDtIlrvwiBgcWkSowEbORzTlX1Nc8AlkhEq8Se0qmFqp2IfTCrFglkJkAVu9qLIz+nxJZLTsSuOeslyirMqVZBBEY0MhQQHxSgUTgpkMhHt2LOQkRAgLH+M2OzT2RAwqSWs6qIEiVZGiSDCgFQcy0AOBj2+ayNE9fdIBteUFWjuT+bD9wDj9xaHz3YI0QioVW09iIbnyTA7LsGWHXqgM3uz4tY9USZ60HGoRGjJUwVWx4kJkic65yH0kvJHW8KJoM6cSUKjAaAKgRLNr+QV02O8erV86dnR8+66ChvflwvODhup9Y8A0aM1iNas3ryvHM2nrNhanrNWSOpUjNhyqZL/cX5+f7iYHDs+NNPHDw4f3ru4YcfefLgzPaLt5zzokv6Z02ImubAsiQiVUseAhcKd0slqEqJYxLo8FpmctFaQs5u3NQgr3guYCwaJAkUIxkAUQLPfmkQwQiMSVGyp14oAAEDmYoToKJRbMBIWZR9LufH2TAOeT1okj0xBgiQiMGUSp6mGWQVQv8GAEBo4N0LhRAblPuOfJgdeutwR7sUmrzS9Z4NmhGTU4abv04Fb9UQQXPOhKimjKAmbJ7nnoJ3rMbEIuK9ScfTON/JTBBJRDmRo3IVLCFnf2IpqWmVkqpRMp/7N0/WTjCYanGKsEvbw/ZvxJGkxJQKKr2cGh1GKkpEKsGDLZuSgpE3SxyrHEpxRVULvFmp7L2A8Z6cqSChf6xmrYGrUcSZRqPbWTsOvSRANUspqSogY1x8D9Fjr4p9mbnVgksUYawxiwctArrWN1C2JVzVVywRNyFjCO4j9ehmV2sAEZgIMbsYMkz/Ks4KUhVANBUmzKYOzPFDQ+j3APcd+vFySxx0KxTraDF9x/v8HR971RVvvmrrJbl+BCPIWFsTrKeONrJU79sG9ssR23LDG97ynj/Z+ywyS6gx/hje8v3v/uE//O18fxHaxwMu14J16xAsHWhPuiuhWI2zxQsM75s6AZGw1VhCHGdKiDsWkSfYGXkSzXEfsUPfQTxT44fl4SRSKoDQYBsCXPuiF+8+sO9ZtIG4/GMA8Cz1vQcf2LH9GuSzIR/zFy86TwueVjHL+o5HhNo6Gy2+L2JZY60Fzp+j1Fgnw6cXEq/Ds8dv+OgfzMyeeFas/7McmxoNX6dOtYLoDb9ZSGrDuWKFpBKMJ2uGIPHJm7is1Fp2TwF4+qG8OyZFgjz45rbN120/7+f/qfep9cOW74/iuV0FkXBTxiMx4WkV1NhIHGOE1UBTy+BdQ1yNTW5Qk6JY4K9aMk6wi5YF7MqhsZHVdpxyUrwTFt6B4K8WhBgRWkRwRQa1k9+JCyGs1FHouaPQGWxbREX4PVHiDTuZf+5VKhOi4McAhjMZIqBc3N1QgosiL0fBzequ0AvfO6OINRGr/tf9g/fYPRFrYCrWyB8BupbLFQuy2zzs+IvdkhBOwpYMhDYxNvaaHdfcvOursGyXW+nd9H997o6PvuP6X6rS06InNNKnwCvxJsMGCURC6uwsBCRgQBMkIBVIyFIy88SFm+bPMvX5n6fFVok9JyLOjREgXKBKxK5DEVOK4FrvZZCqeUialtBtjDw7AFTvaGNkxHMWISIkpyIREptlPwT7bN8RRU0TTI0MzMszTpQlM7GggRgxEHqvgUxQQZjInRrMiIyuySpbUFD7y9RamNkJ/4iGycebGKN3Zw4jidX+nhHxycOPff5Lf/6jx34Iz339L/x1Eg4/dXjfD3+0c91ZG1/zql986VVvMgUu8bZIqCKJOEK3Vc0gjqweIOmp9MxZc4kDR2aLJqMBgqXEYqqixFwcQAhgmFDNb2UnMblLKBiE2bstaCrSq6iuMyUCtJwtMYvz5zVcM6iIHKMFb/JasZFMn3wchvOEjrghdHZjf0lzzmZopv3a6loEV1/9v1eveR+tPhsJAIWA6i07Tm56Pn/lg/jMzGBxMVlN6zZyVeV6iEhqYPWCHn9Cl8SgErC8UCOhmBhSmhit5wfIxIk1Q2JFxHppCYiBUrV6tSwuLp1eTCMjA6yATOtMVVWNVwvDRXjGaNWG+45NHVq7+Zj0hypU0XjVO3fjOeefs3HjhumptWeNj40V+nh0vbJKNj116tSGNRNbzjv/xzMzhw4dfWZu7oGHfjR78uSlL71qfnpdTV7OgIrXU6Rex7kTzTTGIyIKBiJCjEToJiuPZ0hOOwo2oSO24jHvEhGm5OgKdzgkTABEzEjIzAIi2UZGRrzdq+DR5MyJyEPby3SemZzBFQcuaNOYDYBTgFhcMxJKkootZG0ejYJU4kd8zy1uayQmMxQRYgIESuQTB1VQRQZnSwZ5EiOZQcDZuGbIELNEBDFREI8z8mtVVcl7jeouAj8jKjJ7m4TciGUBB4CAj2oJMvVqDyibkLHPhRKnJiWZgtfdMP6dnulBnRgG7jINYOICOHUXk2LQmcGpX8xkYBS4GSZCdPt0GKQVkSgRJ/YgB3+qceVGBg88LENIP4iqIJpqRgYvn5BQCg6nVNrmdj63PKGbStE8gwjMzLJz2eNki1lNDCQeZh675LjxNjbaKJFjusKL4uDAiNThBriPHFRGVTMxRwL5yRVB0DQlbtxKoKYiLlGSnJ3179qW1GPvPIl33AkV1EzmB0vLa5FOvvuzNy/hNz/znsOzfcBegKT9KEwhNwrDJblntRGoCWCtsGRQX7nloqu2bmtD4aaeVyaEfdO8MFz88M1/84EvfGauv2j/RLXU4LniaM1RyZTVBWJt/4F8dIiEjC4/hlaLGPJDAzMVMAnqDICIGpojPWEZwaLbX23I9c92mUIZbm2iFaD3lRTs2ktf/E885p6FPAkAjzz1AABQtQU5AqMbgUAbNeohz4bIqBDAlbaoLzUwM8UUNdIpCLEzMio5h2b2hV3fePsf/O7M7IkVR2Q888Tc6bI358e24sCG5dxCR72GKYlk/vZQ42wbusBwzREs848VhaBhVG5Wkv/CqGsDWbo9D78NOr+yZJWTeekOrX+gqiFgM+tkBJqXLkU1EJLXMnONvlW8Z7IGKFOE3x3zZ3mRlt0KEPj+FYGWRY+9TAuNuPIG9G1OhBKG+cJbj6CFOzj60AAAIABJREFU0qwQCD/z6AIFQwIV9Uq2qDK0RE9YCRgxRA9fV/+hAuKf2moduQg3vAGBZq6QN2MqWWJNtG+EU4Zfktgfi+IKTj9AaXbsMwIIoBEZYJBOVBXIiNwV6R3+hrzYDWTEM3YtXEHjMQBDJbayq3vxZobq3/GVl195ZvmHRSXc6UPh3OIzn7vjY6vHXwJA4KblAvXGgtaK3HkANfW7Kl6CzLyxDeqHxwh1APNINGYipsQMSJRIwoXi7V0frHnN7K6qAiJWRxea586JCoBllZJbaymxq3u8z+IwAi/JFDVV7OiyAJdB3Hyx/ou0OWBGCIaCiLUMXYfhB6TIHjR3ebl4yy1VygndPqp1MclTpDL7mDpkDAZ1nQ0spZCHQAkFc7ebn5ASV6KSmA8eefyDn/jN56rB577ayvDU4S/c/Hu3feNT7qz2yXQWQaSsGhMeRs8WcNcuMZqTdfyUG5uzhZ8IAFSJw4DtyQVOeFLx7BNlwIooeVM/dsTITEqEZkpkmExBmZEZDZATimQmcuw7Fa+027g4NalhZmY0HKw9dJ/WfVO1rJaH9WAJRYhdi+F/iKhKY+deOP6a96XVGwhluLjw9S//4//7wQ9++e/+a159LrziF2hycmKsGp6aW1yqRSXeLRHmviyczgM0gpxVBBcX6jrr0lBOL+lwKMOhzZ5aFFVVHA5ERJmYgXV+aTg/EKCchbW2pSFRL6sO64yAwmvv7W9/etOlj59+Zmg2Njp63vT6a1/ykle/7BVXX375+Zs3Ta5aVVFk1job3Zi4qkZ6oxumNzx/y7ZLnve8rRvPvuwFz7/8hS+ynJ86cvgHO7+z5vCxSsQUsnjsjeSc43AFJioJECqucs5uF05VclWk615CreETQjDIyglzrb41M6csGSlS2t2QjBCJImaKFs1OBDt8dOZXfv9dz911z339T/s6Z9303/zHP3I2nUkILiL8B4ETu/Y50HTReWVTT0wOTg1XDBqOHEII74Y5ZU5cSImEqrkzFsQurmF5oHYz3sWZ40/84h++9pP//o/PnjgeB1fvqEWEXUZqWBEuPFMsPiIfn9zw+je+56N/5CewxkM41z/+13f+400775xbXFxJhrDlSM/lOrESRQDLVYzYpBNFDGjBhQc+phnjBIvXAFBEKNpGAZgGgDOuxXK1zjIdDLRkWylaKtP2zXFc5E1T05Njq+ZcroYr5Ed4xmvi3oP3AwDxeQI9oCGENYjK2zIzODx7AgwOnzoxObZqcmxs1cjomlXj0IGJqClxSCOLBDCUuEEqKmETu/fv++Ttt+w5sK8z1+8MLQ2WiZ/acksptA5tRnt8CpG92iYDqsHp+cW5pYVNU9PeR+sMAK0rJ+hk0IU4v8XoOD63CIO1pHIDIuQDdT6AtBZwHWLPYIgw+9TRvZumpjHCLQMlojEsBe9ndUWdPrXHchN5pzk8UgVf1Mj/IJK+i7Y0qMXWTrgL/9RsuSjsTCCqnfFbpYfh42tvjrriLqBN1sSdlJSfmMu6cIYd9OeTmkDMJ/b5YlPKq0LTBfcA2GZZqgEzHjp5fN/Bg0dmT84PFmdOHMcyfjrnrKmNU9Mbp6ZffNHFJRo1sLXBnAYGLOxocsBITOsMQq8Y18lD3jEksBEURN1OS6c3gA2hFeEMADEGarUEXbpDIdA8QECXXbj9nLXTR4JZVUxHK+/rWP+fv+Nj77z+l8ZGti0MHsIivjQAECt4LyhSkeJeQzxy4mlEmO8vzi0sblq/YXxkbHxkjIg8j8qzdkWNmUuEetDCILnhAJiSai68ae/DApiGUlgNgt6JBWEK5NYpVARUEHftoVP0KHIDVQHNqIi4i5ZbocjtvLbPnSGzmqRUiQkjZndkhDGGDEAC/Eaqwt5CVeAKRVTMyEXfCsiYUhViUe9YKhiYqECMu7EV98YRTgAhMR8+dviPPvPBhaWF5w4Jz32t+PrqHX+25YIrt1xwhWGTbWnsSj2nb6CSYqP/EKfgmvq0jSGZxgbuXkpRZzdGojJTaR6L1qLMypxUM4EjT5Ma5Lo2gJTihnSiqarmHPt9xSzabP/qugR3SHrfJAC6alOzT1bzT+WsIJlUVaGilAAUsgKxiJqlKgHS+Iv/N1g9xWRHZo781V/8xSXP377v8cf+8nOfnRitfvv9/+HKDdvS43cPRqvxyXWmKnWmlEwzLC2OprFqpLewsARAS/P1EOiZsQ2rr3xNOv+S+aXhM0ePDB+/e9PpR9ZOVImsNpGhpITDWqpUQS3mGCRMZkC9SSbDsbWPDc87su7cHx85Ojo2Nt4bvXDj2S+59PJzN24AIIOsnUBgbd0EocZDRGaeXL36she+8MTxY/sOPPGSK658aO8jx0+c2rlz5yte8fLB886VROCKd8/lVUVESpQIyMQ8ac3ZCS6ZA3cGuvQr7PaABJJDquEM4kiGdUF/EQGBAJLrWEDNEpJo7Yr2T73/680o47mv577+x33ded8tn/3aBwlIRVsrk2fdeAxxRGMiIAd2CUxFOZVToJtuxUM1hJhNHRUgTNRolTm1fPfmmNWSL9uGewM7be07MyeefM+fvO8T733/xrNGsZSbjYXQVWsuEgNtfFMc4WhIV229ZHJ8fG5xERAmx8/63B0f33vw/jvvv9WJNR1vVUd2aMUaiAhgMyee/OJdnwMz02NaH/Ai48qLtm5et97VF+WsWX6mkMlhYQ4H3ckaTaDFMKvoTWPqbC0LzlYWgsuktstdDyVZvbHPlTMiND34ifHxuaV+2DOwA0pcpoq15dK1HuI60yOOxttzYN8jTx3cc2DvvkMHZ2aPN4WrFRHjxOjYts3nbV43ddXW7Vdt3bZp7VTBvRRGrms4PbkF4ZsP3rvnsX3ffPC+w64RbZArhc7e0cw2pbd98a7PBiVp6Xs+E9y4buqqLdvaj1IDwltkgTi3uHjTrm/c9K07Vo2NfuTfvnfbps3xA1KxchGcnl/Ye+ipb/3w/j2P7p3r9w/Pnti4dnrj2nXXXXrFdS+6fNPUdHOpm/A5DAI7NxNZ05MAs6cXF/Yc2HfTt+7cc2D/r7zlZ9/xz66H0guATioChA4SIfiZ2ITQ3vPo/n1HDu09dHDvwafmB0vz/f5cf3Hj2nUTY2Orx8d3bN125ZZt2zdvnhgZswLyLBk73Ym2rTDmAT7boBWfzV5EjsBrTYx3PnDv/FK/ND6gAbE09WcQaDrfMcazCNe96PLJ8VWStQXKdzTcPs4sEk6c6y/uPXTwyz+4a9cP759bWmzlL5313yLTEF68ZdtPX/2Tr7/qJ4gCo6ORKEhBAFegxGWEKG28Z9R12DqRivfYYltrP6Az4hs7YuJl3aJwCjsrxcyAzBSY2WuPV7zoypt3fS0GxWdO+zvZFnP9Z7541+fe8aobFpf2qdRh0A11mvl8QRUWlha/vvs7jx0+eODQE0dmjy8uLZb7sahDELdsOn/D2umLNl1w6YXbX7RluwtAKJF66rfZ9/feO7cw5+rTOD4VGGNAswGLLsZ9hhglltlLX7hjfHS85BEYURRvzajQuXmgaAbfe+ju/nCp2TFUxAgQ3AsKEEoE+2c7rlVV5krqMKN7lYgWSXKNRTDXOZEH1IMBaG0U4eQBF0jIauKITk5M5ckgkeYXBLg6C0VurjdgTFVvufNvj88ee+6Q8NzXs379wz/+0a++9zOaNSEbASKJChhmzQF1B2MgM8siVSIXMqMnZikQoBQ6VZaMgIZq87Ojx/fTYBFGxwarN9YTmyClFFYYVDAFY6Jc18QceT2GTG6qYjWFsJhhPdTYuzyUxcItjB5npgDsugkAxqkjD9SD01zA3MislrOKmSCDqBJiroepGqGLflLBEsAffuhD7/4/3jW/2N+3f//cYn++v/Rnn/nCH/zMxeu2bBuse8Ho9AV9c7q1gBovHs3HD+fhYGS0WhrAYFVv4cWv3/LPf+nscy9MFRuAqSz1B0/cu9N2fxae/mFPEioO+wO1pFAz0XBJRlaNEUE2MgOZWP/j/oaZs7b9eG5hZHR0Ynzsos2bXnn11WsnJzAuFLSAjmUbrO/e6g8RJkCqptefveastffed9+1L/3Ju/bsPn167vvf23PNyNjpTdMDUydPqyhXycwYOTl32CnPqhIMbkNVIcZcKzMzsqkYiNsIfY/TgrfzJ6X7x8IkxtQ4zXopRYQ9gAvbNjUJ2s99Pff1P+xrcvysMraiOCRHaIGnghkBOcCgmLURwDixE+QcHxqqIRPkgp8x4cQiGZvIDRUA3Dy9foWTvluaYHMaauOo4g/PnHziho9/4Df/5S9ctfViIjaXUoT0AlQCjQrN+MLlSOzsBXv7tdd/4qu3+vf60N/+WncS2WrqOoSH5dBF3L1v1+59u1bY+j/w9n+zaWo9EmvwhJaNN0Mu3B7wMOjkCKDgCRleYJeIa5esN9+6ySR/FucSrogR73AvSpYalBFlDGM3rZ2aOXmiKb5XpKt1R3LLPFG89uDTD926+66bdt7hA8ausBah9TQawNxSf8+BffccgC/dfRcgbt907tteef2Oi7dtWjddEi/NWUpectz07W/seXTvs02tsBuZZ8tcpvhbn7nBbNmY801Xv/yqrduadx8RCwqn+wvffOiBW+++a8+jwTGaW1rcf+jgtk2bQzhqaIinFxZu+vadN33rG/P9xS5Q4PDsiZnZE/c8tv8jX/yvN7z2je953RvBMXPFaUrcQXuqLdb9Rw49deeD9335B99vrtW3HnrgHdddDx49qgV/0MbEmzc3PP5u9/79X979/W/+8IH5fn/lQBTh8OxJmAUD2P3ofoAvI8CbXvKyN770ZTsu3hZUIogI+zZ+o4zCGkjNmZP4zvLpLoaIH2iCEG/aeceex/Y/y4B5xWs26NfOd9m07n1Xbd3eRIYU00qxnEYGI80NFr7wrW/8za5vnO4vdl4Jz0xeKZZaQIB7D+y/97H9n77tS2/Y8YrXX/0TG9euR4o5ORKYOG6nYfLEsBo9ig0iPlwLhDbApp0xLDzbFYNlDRXsTAg9GFEhYFqxR4kraQF+4oVX3bzra2dCa1bcAb7+77zv1nde/0vjI9v6w4cUgRAjTRFwfnHhtu/v+u7D9zx44JEVn0LE23TUCwdmnjww8+RdD90DAGevnb50y/Pfcf1bz5nawMx1Xfeq6r988TNHZ4+v8HKf+b8RsVpk4/7fv7d6+rItL0RCMQV16wK2bMQSW+8E0y/fdfsPH3vo2fb/ZQ2w63Zcl7jnKo8W/IZkAGZCwM6yN4AqkYiaxkJlxibuz3OhC2nLOMKb0FQAiZGyLxL2ZHlCjEQcVRMVItr94F1nPi7f/PJ/tWP7NW180XNf/wt87T14/+fv+OjM8R93f/HQ4X2PPnbPtgt3GIGT4J0fyTFRKzAIQjUUsWjeuZTHPdGIoooabWI+um/0RzdPUD08PadZEvBwbKre9ko9d4dVIxCzehBQYlDNGIsaPdUpMjnQVIyAKooscSDn/ykjZ1UfC3LiLOpy0mrQHz35KBlIraRFzU1Y55oR0khv2O9rzlyxUOLp803t2NNHv/3d71z3U9ffftttB598QnJWs2f69X33P7x2G9Ha5+noJKllNSDMeQDzT8vc0rAGUhng6OyLXn/Zv/q/162dZrDh0uL3vnvX4ZnD5z/vgktecPVSRcOv/baeWlSQ0cnJemmwtFBXVTKRpX5tpumssX5NR5bOHr3i1T9+5EDVG1m1amzL+ef/5JWXjevppdMLI5PrFLnZULxN3lpHjMrOLgUgYMSc0ujVO6588KGHLtu+ffdDD8+env/BD3a/7NpXPL1ujVpGIgIycZu1JIpeooetl2DPENdjIjYzMQmbJ1EWofDih0rX3fkEAMyO3fEQrfhE1RCc2GvP3X7Pff1P/7Lm4K2RqOL+ZXcMOhYl2P1IZJoJGRjVTEQYGTwM3GOiQJGSSI3BBGI1ceDKOWvXTYytml9aDONJJ4NreXEYJ9VGZgkGh04ev/FP/+CG1735XT/1BmQP3CPP/ClHOM+k6pAtS6v/7de86tDJk5umzm9qjsCcWJkHdmqhMi4oo4wOhwxbaWgctKPXU5rhxNRIQTwprsXxkcUpiiCITVKAGerSKezUd6EyXTa+KCl5K4Lpm8CQBolm4pyEwHvEqATaDLYVl7oAOLvx9TBz4sk//dLHv3jX35SzN3bOhS2FrSkkrBM8aWaPHDr4O1/4y8mx8Z+75vq3X3v95Oh4SCSKrgbLB9EpMbEbn978VrM8Wn1kZ+FCMcyCweGTJx45dHDPgX37Dh3c89j+9geFmM4BAtEIQGU6D2h7Ht3/Ozd9ZubkiRXlfKmh4j184rZbv/nD+z/x7963emy8+RmfWVw8fOrE3kNP7Tt0cN/MoT379614hfYwTZMmcw1RE4qrvCQr4p4D+z9x25f3PLp/2dy287lvXDsV8ZjQQkdvuft7t9z9vU3rpt7zuje8+eqX+wzKEzUlQhfjz7cw0u6ddcb6X1aUkDu6I8HoV97yL77w7Ttvvft77frvwJYiVK8sLUScHBm7eNO5177oih0Xb9u4bsrjKSCKU4DCYSrgGbpp5x2fuu1Lp/uLBaIa639ybPwNL3n59vOev2lqK+HE/pmjd95/2+59u7DNwQEwODJ74lO33/Ll3d/9xde++fVXvjw6U4aYwEmYRga1QgrwcjRiEFzZ2GZJEIqqy4KX81eXacS7679bLJbPVV3B6k9zQQe2maldfN75pUKx/+76v3vfztOLpybHtvXrfWhZAwmMN++6/a9u+/v5/kK3MLfmdjAr9yqeuf6Pzp44snvX13fvetkLr3rPG39+09QGVf3Av/m1fQcPfP6Ovz86+/Szrn/ozhzLFrJh7fq3v/qtW8670FG1iRgIVeH/Z+/b4+SqqnTXWvtUVVd1d7rTnWd3HggkAYHASFBAGAVxdCAEryMjDhHHq0BwZhhl1BEfiOCgo/jCUQKK3gGDovNKyAMhEJAQAmlAgkCekGfnQfqRru56nLP3WvePtc+pU9UNMo/r+LuT8wv8uqurTu2z9zr7rMe3vk88H01CQOW3akT83xcuXLZ21cNPPzrm/l9oap5/1h/PnDIDxfidSfujtJGUtBHAMDgSdMK6vZnACCv5KSlbs6YBFK9FSsLsQPsnEUj3SEXoCQGBcaAKG6xUOogQBPjC9ucbwKJdnTN/+MnVRzL1/wOPeXPetuDMyz5683naTFF7RB7YOvuYU4ElMMQsVgQNAUCABsmrXaryvGrFO2FAAgYrQoloW2AAGKMo+8Kq9kK+WLSQn8hALqrgyEDhqV/I3ucqc9/j2roCMtY5sEpbiOSZPMCAUUkWZIh3NmGUbJCx1oXFcql/mCNnQ4sIQpAtFILWpmxLXre55uHebHmAOHIojh0hObEkYoKMWKEooiBLmSyHkZlyjAQZAWkb3/bnH/nQV//u7wYGBp1zAOycGxjqB9spM94EM/7AotdJFHZUHbZ7npFin6NAIJKumSdefMXEiRNJ8OCBvXf94z9+73uLGSBDwclzT/z01X8xafKbM4MPhRGLRKVSlDWBc66lJV8cLjkiKJeGMzPDjumPbtlhgQq53NHTus88cTbvWNPXvx1y41vnnNfS0S2pnL53jHzMLDFbsoc96DAJKcjkTjjhjT3rn5h7wgnrnnyi98ChbRtfmHn6vL4MOeuCIPBEjYQBg0NBEjYGrGUVB1WdB7YxhaLyQzCr5jt4ZS1i33gtBoyq9Ohm66xTijMR1I5EFW0/chw5frexYBwOoSbTtd1Cu+C0zznm7ddynGVEw+B8CRG9VpIi6HzTkbOKukEi0WgwrgnM6pqmogKxO1qXYq/FXb4ZKiUuIIAIt913771PrrvtLz4xpb3Di15SEhHF9Coxgi3u0ZKWQuGGP/uQCICE9930IgDY0r9QcPxHv/uXvX37EgIqSBP0J+6zwLmnXPjpP/0aAAj3i9ujrmxLPm+yzSDAdh9ASaGAbL1gkO9L8rQyqHoz4kXDJF3Ti+kOpSYVKFAjnPCXT5ASUZH6soV3flNkqDHVatyohKh4P683GSMya4yVCct4TL3zkwe/d+vym4qlQagLlWs4tDjWxtZ821DpcC1arOFvAQCK5fLt9y9f3vP4Nz78sdld03waHgEAbv7wVUPlEiKgmX7zv/54zbNrMIGZ1SLzlOONKCD33fSC/pXDjT3bnl686o7Ne/de8vUvFyvl3r4+SDelStq0/IApONbk3wsScvjw4pV33n7/ivoiD9buCT8UP2mb9+750k/vHCqXEaR3oL9YKg9XSpA0/0FKyzOpIyEitpimdyFNceGTYl+QWtDsg8N9A/1fvPsuHwoiNtj/cdPnfvK9fzln+txxzdMAsk9te+YL/+eK3v7dgIKxUsm+gf4v/fSup7Zt/eg7z+/q6FRmLK88EetPSO0+w0SCJUnDpOw/XZKUtMzI7K7pX7zkQ1M7Om//5YoGGt4YO+rLZeMK7X92zoc+8IfnNOfyWq2lWPaQ3W6QMJFh0Y6tfQP9N/zs//Rs2+K/K2X/557y7usv/VJb6xzErI7qLW+Ehed9ordv59fu+ds1G+9NgJ0KtN430Pfln/74jl/e+92rrpnaPgFJQAyRKqCrULwHkoOXbNLaZE2WUlkhfJG5ptb4WvZfV98T9tTNKW2GFEJYCtn8MVNnbN+3CyEu5MZQAqnpgNTsf82zyy86Y2E+d8xweRMi7B/ou/4fb9neu0viMXjW1mQh4r2ru3Pm3kM7R9s/xJDx9S88vf6Fpxe+808W/tF7Z0zunjmle+6xx3/2hzfv69s3pv0nteJ4m8Xz37JgwekLkVA538rugIBVSnLHDp0PuMVBTLsNR02Z+dfvWzRl/JSfrv5Fw/7f3Tnj7z/27SnjJyoUVgvpxXCXh4n6lnEQdNorpaxWqjiNnu4pJiUCZBX1dYCBUrqxOAZA64kujDHknAsyGeeUEdp64ilSrj0olRs5ohYtuK5rwlFLHvzuktW3NBSLjhz/f6OoFpx52afe/40ffnL1+dfO0k4THxDu3wqIHOcdSClIFFDFrBtiYALHjoAYODCBcEwIg15uTJXLcgdfADs4Us4jZXMZFwmZTDO1jq9WRkrbnh4XHRp548Vu8vEkwAYFkIyIsGUgA5DI2XnSamaR8qGhLRu27N+86/BAqVKpVsrlKGRVKA2ICi35QnO+dXxLy6SOqS1RtTSlAw90ZspBIOzEiBO2Ejm0kbPOGHCAQNg0eZYwIrEh89GPXH7BO995yz9891+X3esYCLFSLjc3Z4KWcdw22RGydU3ZXBhWq2GVWMqHy64qQTO4N5w65eg3IghztG7dY/v2HwytzWSzloRzTd/4zveuu+S0CZMmmlKxVOLm1jywi0JbsZYyJgA6HEw+nJtZnjpneNv2XIa6J054y/Gz7Uurot6tmaYCuMNu8ABNmObEpx0TFAcLMwCJKPNkTL5W6wsghKxpmjfvLY+uffToo47aun3L1m07pnV3ZY+dbk2gm6gmnAIyZK1DQmsVieIJL5lFa8QAAIxAQoaSVgRAUpkBAyKOLFuDhp1Tsn7ljXXICIJg1EPzTfdHjiPH7+5ARZ4jA8RSlQCAQhw5zd8joTDHhSwQdl5QBFGAgYVF3+k5SJXNFYFUnYxFe6pBAE499rhnXtqaLvskt62k8VlYB9RKoImIsG+g/8Ivf/7yP5q/6F0XQszH73XwVIkRIdX7k5RZEEDEburqnAsAtmli0PxuxByksGH1wLDa762F9rindyZAI2OnyDqxL3lnlmqXwUnLnBdQSTVLKkuwPg2cbwPzfJsxfrYeJudxqJh2TOvLZEm4SN6j8pGkEpPs7e9r0DZMo/cSlJ/+4aFnl2/e81wM2RVs6DNDEIDuCTNu/NBt82afDQC9fTs/fusHNu/ZmIQRUr+Ovf39H/jGl/9mwcWXvv0doLGxyLhCobWQRwDMnTWu+f441sUUprCOCFM39lRz9cwtB3C4cvu+/j21Am7K/8Z6rREf5JvJiFnA7G33P3zb/Su8hWC6Hy4OSwBSZVUQgDW/2TjaQGq1lJrRpUqa1II0BQAomOHsC3ofecYYhJ8++sht960slksa60oaOoey8Ny//PSf/n1donr22atuevFrP//bnzz0vfQ4EeDeDU/0bNv6zY9cOWtqd5JroEQbBHEMdDY2apCly4T+rhHlafR/uvyd859+aWfPtt+kKuqe3B8JWvNtl577FwvP/dirAerCchHcwVoSg3Bff/+V3//G/oF+rxWENfvv6pzx7av+ZczzdHXO/PbHfnbr8ptuXX6TpJlxAAFh/0Df+2767Of+9MPz3/JWZifKD+tBy4AGY2VpSDoGNVxiASJ0nkg+6RIdrYsDdV/a0Nyo+nhGG2NEi/NegpIMszume8b2fbslLdKSTmbX2//m3c/BGZChKQKb7u9Z+/2ld49USnFbco2GJxnYuEL7ped+TJegt2/n0seX3Lr8pjr7T+F5BeSuB/55e++OT1x8eXNT89SOSd+84q5LvnLeq9l/6vIFEJ9/eeuElnnJtR8ori3bVzQYU9dLP8rC4ACRIBBxIogXnPmunz34Tw37/x1/c99o3oShyk7RMC1WwFIyG0/OLAyAgckoJ6Fjp3AVQSBjhAUNWsdEjGg09RYgIpJlC4RI6KxV2m0CUj54Z60hgygj5ZHRUUFv386v/+yaIx7D/6ijWBpcsvqW1nzbogXXnXPKgmXr7kzDSXTbidgGGAAzKmwJgQjFCYs4Zu24QUbrLBEReb5PdqwPWEII9+8u5HIGMRe4CqO1kQlQhPPNzdljjhvXFGZ3/7KvdSLnOzzsUctICKites5zPgkiER7u7Vt967/t3zMYhQwAuVyWCKvVUKGtNnLSVxSGcqWChnKBKeSDQtDSEQRvnFA6tbs8e1Z3NLgXhQNiK2VxhFVLBjDfiSRI+PzGjU9ueLK847vrAAAgAElEQVSn56n1T6y3LJYZgAKipuZm09TCJuOb0J0LgqAUhVQZJhBHaIGCCdMYIAB8+KHVD/1qzapVqylLAhYYt27acs6Zb1553/oPHHU4Cqs2EghdIdNEmUyxUnFiOJMtVgrZE/5g/bbtBrFj3LgTZh8T7F9X6t1OjCISINjKoHPsxbIblK59TvDVXWEDJpc9+ZQTi+s3TOzsGBgq/ub5TadOmXiwuUl837UToID1wRgTTQiJSsMBgCFl7SegmDNDZZrIiLZhsNeqzEgGRDAbgLcQABQDCAgGwVkXABo4UiM8cvzuD05amnxMIyDCaIKk0wYJ2MUBl/LTKeUMSJwcARRWF1LYxtg0FSokBkEgEviDo2fX0u2xi1GnyB7XxFKqa7UkevK2H9y/YsWG9Ve864IF885Isv2+gy72tVApnASAyBAyi4s2ETQjjEBKJEFGbRz/vnga0TNoKiRS+1I4JjIUr30ci4knXC++mIkGRVIY1QbHPE29MUodOwmXhZURItasi+tAmv3asnd3sVyuVfBSZYjRMw+Im/c8l1ohlPryFwAcN23uHdesSihbuzpn3nHNqo9864837d7YeLbUtXzz3n8aVyhc+OYz0uDJuHkN6yp0o7WCPTy17sLPPWX+cdMf//jiS+LvxXSNLhkzpsDA+tdbl9+0eOXidI95ve01yrUnzEOnzf7DebPPSpzs5LPpH7AOa4e1NUopRLLIN5b+292/eihl/3VjuGr+566a/9mx1nr403/69z1bH9VLTiPu9g30f+Dmr1x/ycILTztDRCiGN+NYKyL1gWsjp4yAqMIAxhI25CXO33biKT3bnq9Zanxvzpt19o0fuq2Gyq6NOGQe4Gg3y0HkYQ9pFBGA/Yf7Ft36zf0D/bFh141wUf3li4TOvsQ8yHYYCInGX/7uj8yZNve6O68sloewEWCMBw5XlP4vjppQYlYUEhTwoBxVlfbEWfpX8mDGxIBG2//Ye0W8utrGLABoCCOGWF1GUMjQMVNmCDymA4s1G7BW3au3/56tjwJANpj0xIu/+fo9dyR3SlKCjjHkAgDjCu13XLNqzrSTkrtSTWjx8pvq7T+xGQSAdc8/LfKD6//8GufchI6R95z1rqWP3f9q9o+pldqwZW3PlkfnzT7bcmmouinkwcAEkY0QjTEZVn5DABMYrxNrtTIrLYXm+inFRfM/m44GnUSDlZeqPOAR7yLoVPTLqdoI+zQfAagemKKvSfHNqvkpAOAh+cAgBtD6Lm02CuyPWZcISJANZlg4MIFH80pdan7OtJMBoGfzI0d8hf+Zx+Y9GyElW5U4LqrGiRIgAAXkmEmbyRA8g61B1mezl/1CEMVfoWoN6KY0EgEUbXMuQnTZTBBCgADsKpaJkIZGuDVzKLf1wZGTLhbwDMoq9eTYoVa5VeoMMByuPHrnyk0b9zqW5uZ8odA0pWtiZ2dbNoeExAIjwyOlkVJ/f/GVgwOlUmWwWO4bVE5mXrstNBbfNAs+88Uvdc+cFr6yNzq4NYtuZOevpW+XtE0WZkL8zGc++eLm54WaGMFGFgAA3fgCjW8zLsgDNrGLW5CYTbWvvG+XADNDrmU8t09htg552lEzmltampvzNqwwM4sUh4d6D+yP9u/ko/K2MpzDpoqgBQAb5k1QKVX63biB1smvsDBDIZ/tmjxlihkovfxrW60GQcaJGCQSxx6ggXVwF0ny6X57jlPdNeIZFAgMtnVMnDFhXFXMwUMDB/v7Rvbsy8x6gw1InICgMRAwswEiSZ9CVQG1UwGQgNhYdkqTpcJiZEysSu+MGMfOGBIrgqy0pdqJiBoNohEA1ZQ/chw5fmfHcHnk6ltvSiBBSZXucx+4cmp7BwIAiTCLCBkDmj6PBdwE4iIhgNa9BcEAogFwPsSMq4Wg3X5vOmbOm46Z/fT2LXVKD43uPyTsLgC1Lrekb0l/6B3ov/5ndz29fesV77xgSmcHxFz4AoSk3OUiLNpR7VgF0EOO1gsLEtjSv4KMpJBXY3t4aUdQ3B4On1YS40Q3AyBMVOnQi2kDCvjeQkgEwnU+Uk1HrPzHoDzy6RCz0eXElJz5aA8eBaiumopJnxIBCGzq3ZMUtBpblhrqaZLCkQo0yHNrpN3VMSMdDcYZ9LZPX/zl//2ti0YTU8SATxCBm5f94tRjT+jqGAeeoRaAxZXXsNuVqgVDXamtZg91VDpu5F8EYFIebr5s4Qe+eX2xUgapSzTUATixJgm/9PGfLF7xlVRDojSUXCXRA4iBykkmeMOWR7+16Kc9W9Zu2PLoWMWjJMhtNGtETZqoGAN86Z67l/c8kQoj6uy/e8KMxmiQ+120wdlDAJGwXLPgwiu+/1zC8ZsO6q7/2ZLWfPM5J8715S8tH8e3T92Fpqer/hJishypVe3Ru+YgYZJvSArCn774qwvP/YtRsWvIdlNUfYHIIvjmRqV/1K+6bdXy3v6+pBNV6jluT5t9dm2t7Z5qZR1AKIxokCMBPCDw4umzmq95719d/5O/g4YJR5g55e2F5gXl8mrmYWGDXlgCnGNjKJZ5JGbW7SstNapXm2ocbjTmujRDaj6Va1gTNKrgRxnS10UEnDiQKZ0TPI43ub+kLnGQtv9Ne54DgN6+XV/7+Y9SqZk07RQmpdFPXfzVJBpMjivO//iaX6/YtHdjAoBPCukJAvbxF5+5deldiy5caN3hhee954GetSPa5j3K/msKjQIA8NCvl8+bffZItOtw6SVjjGMhQ9rIGm/SkmxeSpMYQJBS9RAA7O6ss3bLpb3FR6s8gkDMjIF2fHqlbxBQsRURYnGBMSrnmTwlCNEpODwepxMHRKFTXUQABlUD948KQscOAZzYjAmcY0QvK3fENzhy1OqEI4Njvm6ILDsCsuKMincrcNxxJsg6p+BlTzFgvEsAwGAC4xwrlIDFZd8w99BT/zpx3lwJK64yxEMVGD+BiKJyKdfWLqYwfHggE+0gF0rQZAxZX+xjCojICDMBUUBsZeevt2zd2FsqVY0xlVKUzWaGh4qZDEya1G4CctWopaUwNDSECNZGzkU2rAoSqrRpEGA2WL9138IPff5z119z1rv+sGnaXBEszP0TjEIU69gh0umnv6W5pYBBbsfOnfv3HwhtFGSCtlx2wqQuyk5iRCJwVpTuKeARMq6cpWyA+w72z5gyk10EADOnz/zcpz7z4Q9e9qM77vj5z/+ZHQdZc+DgwWBwpDpCAtkoFAIzVBxpyjfZaiUzrnVfZXLrcaeteWl3JtfUOX78cTO7w23/Zkcq1jI2URYMKm24ErYn2kuS5PcEY/Js1V7V5JipUQCKABik446fu2PXqokd4wdHhnbu3nP8G2YcIq+BiwKBeBkK//AiBGeZEIG8ljnHFBOqLqj985JsK4JCQkpGTyAMDh0hGTIsjAyEZIUDJDzCKXPk+F0HhKVntr04+nWqgTSdB3SJExACVXFmBFK9FBBFXFkVJ2f2YFHl8Y4zuMpHygD88Qsvvuw7N9UBAhMiGRizSOa92RqWMsX8vqzniWU966/8owsuOfvtrU1578ZoTMZARKLUqQxkUDud4qapUk1xDhICmSRwwFpwlYyGq+KK6t0pHav2tigEALkutmKWGgUKizYMQ73yIgA657NCvpyT7qRMT0vN7UwoQmInUtWzCBNF9ZTLKICwfMO6mtB2yhWTOhLTul8bpOlSaDG8av5n66JBGXbVdWwPnNKF846e3fPS1rqibyyupv8vlstf+vnyH/zlDWxfTIkxRCAWENNfKmnTgDEk9ERG9H1d41vffuLJ9/asT/qjGmQ50i/29u1auv5uqY+xa0Qt9cUeqZtnT8761NZHr5p/7YZvPYqJg97IBZvgHuvxhBqdESz+5ap7NRpMNw2mrviOT6yqCwajFzh6UqlTkQAI3vSGqa1N+WKlApCiXI0pZa+/56453ddNaW/RSxKWZEEb5qVu0etjKq0HgsR0ROJZO7ZociF+47hC+7cX3T0vFbxpVdBGL3K4SSBSOXMEJvKiefoQXt6zfvlT6xNks4y1xPFIhisjD3lxFwPs1SBV6a74rrnTDr/n0m8tXZKCxQIAdHfOJGpubr6oUl1vo5e9SREYIN+8Az4wEED2ulFx92CqjXe0/ddMxTc9Yn3YDwTIKJ5cFFHJYJBAnBDRsV0z0tXANDQh0blJ239v385bl3+lWD6cCh6x8SZFuOj0Sy86Y2HNZiQqVjYPh9sE7NtPPXHT3udS91EKnRtb+NJ1D7z3rZdP7rQtTXjeqW9dtm71q9l/endauv7uRfM/m8t2EvraiBJ1UkxXBEDCktQaETCy0e5DvfGKj1EK3lP8VSgjOj3ZbGCtQ0TnHBryzZ+GHAsikJ6cMMZ8i7CojgWDEJASz2iyAT0ZoMQYXQEAy9YoSAsJWayzHsyCZkwsxpHjyNGQMrYuAiBBRkDHnAuCahQBQS6TtY4NxRo9icyJ9pcBOpXc1N42kWDSjKlnvru59AznJg3x+OwEIWDLkQwP2gAl1wrZdmMMIjNC5JwiTY0xKLV+AxcxIe569uWRYlmcixgRbblczhhA4bBccewiayvVqo1ctWKjKKpWI+ecdVWiDBjMIra2Zsa1tI0MDC/+3j8effxREydNRAq8RygBhCEH9OlrvyDMA4P9G59//umnnnr2uY2btr8wbXyepGrbJos47TLIBJkoLGXybdQ8jgsZV2WLUmifIALM7pWDB1asXLnqvvuee+45vU3bxrVUK+UwjAgyVMhKuWowMM2dlcqQyWWGTdu2aOL0pmYMgmw2O7FjwoTK3vJgnwGkbFals52LwKP+BRLuChGqg8MQIkPst1LMo5HEhIYo39J69JTxxX2lA32V3gMHj3+l30yfLA6MKvGigGftQxEU52KhWxERMRTET0xJ5JsMkTCDsLXWoBLNIIsokahBgwDWMQERkYBk0ICHxR85jhz//UesxyUAxHE5QLO2zGKMARGTCTw5CddCEYMELIRGUzQKjVSnkoRQ8PhpMy85+x1x8IKAiavyav+ghsdKOfHpCOe2+1de+s2vrnjqSYi5bVDiWE5ZNQiUZtyrjdcVKP2/VFNQcvL6cERDNqqBEZgT+TtPKeYbkDyKNeYWoTgaVKpFFs+76GsvWF8nwvqvjvXVkz5owDrFCBWyFVXJw1ShTwCgd7C/56Vt6StKzWTdtQPia64Cajp/wRmXpkqm/ba0AuxBNZjZ3dPSgxrzDBu2rn16R5nMMfXBn9SNB+uXvtEYapVQfXHeMbNTM9b4kfSLDz27ordvV/Kn02adfeNli7+z6O4Fp//ZGJZQ/3GNHIdKh+dMn5u8/iqm27hG8ZTgkocfvv3+VXU2Vm//5558YRp4ydEzLnxC7c6oZrcgAKjSxqgpAgAslitf+sVKExzr/4DUODwfA4+e3jgZhL6agvUB/b6Bgae2b0ve3N058+efe6whGmS7PyyvsOFGwEglrbzyn0YY7GftBw+siNMfY64ybtiyVk8Yhc8mSEX02V1UoT8iI4AXn3nWH55wSmzV/l/Sx4hQEG0604wWqCqmxLcJ+tq8dvI6ZKetwK+6F0n6i+rvWl/JQkBEx4oaFxQQFnaCSMzSkisksM+xzBUa7P+hZ1csXX/3b70xL0rdlSxR38ivitUXES0Rvvm4U0YbScMPgvDdpd8dXzjVsXvrifNew/7T90ixfHjJmu83BRPz2UkBBSJgtNtPRDFj2k2jHT2IICjGmJf2vpyse3fnzPTID5Wfr3BRVU8E1NFCADCBEQfOAaBxnHQ1K9xXfSptZFBxecUEO0J0whiLcbBSn5Jm6wCUDTJ2BMkYxXKrC3eE7/3I8Tp8pARrQ5ovi6wTEGQIwyhjjEYI1joWYRYUTzxOhnSLSFKCAlA56aJK11sKbdl8QTmTgiyXMh1TIdsKIiGazMRj2RRARFlLhEWsAINjp/TIiCBO9u/YVypXnQgwh2FYHBo+1Dd48GD/tq07d+3aP3i4PNA/cvDA4J49B4pDw6VysRpVQmtDW2Eb2igKTNDW0dI2saVUjjasfaI8PGSrVRuFLrLsHEsUhmEYVh3b8ePHv+2ss//mE5/6xx/d+dgDj//dj3/RNv/z2cnHZ7JNmSCTzWZNYAwFlcF9UWW4uTnvDAyjCZoKImIEzj7rD2/6ylef2vhspPoUgtXQcbWcc9WwOBCVKuWqq1YrWah2tBVyHRM3287D2bbtBw4QYPu4lumdbSPb10bFSqVSBfCyH0ABUkDq33HyOKsp1Meiz4qg4hi+kezH7PdDMjNnHZ8tHc5ls0NDI4cOHMxUrX90MRAhsHPgGchUmg21ZZ+AAFxAhACGiJRMAkicEBkCCigAAWZGAiJVuicCBKKAjOYVCNE6m7RyHTmOHL8Hm50gkiEEEfIc79qeEQQBqfC6WAYRxAAQyAQAYNCw1WZaVqA8IIkGPwxAXpznmvkXz+6aDnU1wYbaxegB/ZZ39A70f/Fnd33gW1/d19+vSWGRWKZcUBgJERwgaON3DJpM/asl7Rua1epqZSJOatSrcWOYPhxIm7wBVc4bkZLGN+Xxl0SOSJJHCYEAEo1ZG/XRr8T+dNLdVB9o6B+8PGoKQCoit923fNRl4Kt8S6rMgenYu9Yxds7J81O+/7CtPCASxs0S5NcUE47T+vPHP9y64quUnQfYMipuTAQhoaG8NkZytgZ/lJZ84TXel7503x4J0Jov/PCvbrnjmpUXnXHpOSfPv/FDi3/0iRVJ2DbmtyeP/9Z8W9eEmY3X1fiNjaspDPsGBm5/4L46GpBRK572j4GHOfw1prKParcE2NqUf43J2bD1seW/3knBdBjz1kooNOvtP23kSShISAQqmYTLetb3DvTFJbij7vjEyoamQVvdYCurQUqow0wCYTVv5SkG2Lpvb29/fyokGgOet2z93X4O3CsMcbZXx6HlLSKPG0D6/MWXtTYV0kswtWNGPO0l7eTX+1U7fAiRkIySoAIaz0CAnq8hjZ+vt//Gjage7YmAwOCsehmoaj76pdrhmzFBayHfki+kkjuNd0eD/d+64itjrGC9iXZ3zkyH5UOVX0c8qBGYs9zdObl59A2S1l8FAIENW9eGUaGj+U0nzJgz9+jjX8P+01+9dP3dAFDIdImAoUBFPgAhUGk/RBDJmiAGUCECPvHiM4n9z5tVG7bl0mBlkxHjrDNItcRa7MKZDDq2CglDoYAyhBgIkkESYq1pa4cQMiIKSmAMkrCwb9pEAQYDBoRtxDrajMkIC7LyPSEgCLJnCjxyHDleO2kOsfRrzHNgiBApGwTWWWbHIkiERCpqAiLiRPVnQZnkRAwQAQJme2dc2DflbR0TJo3vzOfzyEFbGFkGYeH29okj09/CAERGQVgiYsho1xo7CAIjLFG5XB4eERYQsc46F4WhrVbt4OBIFHG16vb3vjJcHBkeLjnrKpXQRo6ZAdixtTZidsXhoWqlkskEmMUdu/ccOHigXB6JwgrbyDnnRSbYRZGtVsNqNaxWKmG1KuAgaIpMc+TAOQYhBBJhQAZqtghlJjLYNnGC1hvDStmGkSK4UEjbagaHB6rDlY58FjOtURhhxlSdK0WuIiBtE3ZX8rPeePyhwQFjsNCUHS/9ONhfrpRRwFmLADZy4iExokBcSXpgEpwDx6guZhTVrE7rUyjkUwziuPGTWnIINorC6t79B5qsVb1AFiYiDMiAaGcUCkDGEKAY8P3orOBU50QgIFKcuyEiQhN3qbNjbahXlR5kBEAGMRiwsBellyMh4ZHj9wMNgSTsFdMESOHMKugszJpn9a1Z4pQWHBFZWGW+UBhRRJxwRJp6QW0sYURG4pv//Iqujs6EqKmWe46rYbUCwuifPQSwwZ1FANzSu+eCv/vCbQ+sGq6UVacbwEv8sdJbooi28KRh4xL3tNU849SZG1zAVFCmCo0A7Lt/UZsIJAasS0wcCOw41vcC5lg/PW5+Ye14jGXLa1eXFgyoi21S7jsmLKRe6T6RJt/X379swxPp+Un6eupeTIcHadczWZ24pDpv9lmpWtBzKFHMLg8iMKeru3aqxpJjrfS6ac9zQ+WyyZ2pJdY4O4cC6YC8/gyjgpbE+QPA1qZCw+XUPpKcJGVCXZ0z7/n0D0477n1pg583++yrLri2ZgZpG0jOKdAd8woIYJ1XnbaWZN5SBxF+Y+m/FisVLxRVb8x6/tZC+zknX1Bzkcur0ustvvcJ2QvejWH/yTmXPX530HQ2YEtM3RlXtDCe55TyRLpcFT+GGsuJT7+09fYHVur5p3Z0/vCvf1QXDUpoyw9wuFkfxxj34vn7qp6O86ltW5IBS/1CJ0N9csvanzz0fX2/8YoHAByfVXlhGFBQBFoLzV+45EPJSrXm28bFqGaREQAkMl4RVMen8gQCvnLlsaxCXtYSa+tbb//QMOdpgwTfZEdx1Y0w2VwAGBDROYtIzU0F0EZkrLeBsey/WBoaZf8I9bdYeiFK4Y6S3aWCG9rrbJ2bPH5CoyUn50lliNY8u7w5d3Qu07bwHRe9mv037JC9fbt6tqwtZKcHlBNhg0ah4MJMcdclC6v4gyE8MHBg/QtPJfZ/1fxra+XB0vMaBxokYGDrCJFZVVTIGIoXSB9EGLkIQHWRSJCTAJIQtcZIiGh8xVsFlAIyWgI0aHQDYREnzsNbibQ2mCHD7I74AEeO3+ojBcYQgkEipMArCoggR2xZBBFNrBbIMeDZkx6JcrqjwQABDRlDhBC80jp3a9d7ou55rW359lyxs2WoozWYNHla5ai3jTRPRQDrHCExS2AyAKIq0EpDgIjOci6bIzIKe3bOOcvVclSpRgODI/19Q8PF8kD/cKUSVqthzIHMnnJAOAoja6W/fygMQxEYHBoZKhYrlXI1Cq2zzkbinHPOWuucY2FmsdaGYaUaVm0URWHVhlEURTYKo2roHAuDCRyTowyYpmwA4JwFliiqIoP2WIoVEXKCwswOWrLOhq4pl3flqLXQks83S5lHDh8+MBiVIicIgTFTOtrzxb1R2WazOSICB1E1ctYyOxuJsk5hrLHkA8Q4pRr7faQZ/DjVrsJECTxeKJMfP665M5u3woeHR0y14sEuPn/paYNidngGg4aZMyZgz2rDRJ55MW4dVDVa5wkQQbycGCsdoscXMzsSck4/eASocOT4PUl/sSFFNwqQBQEkQWRE34oLwkj+HvKttMBEQsAmK4JOgJFEk+bgc+a6MTKATB0/fvGiq6d2dEhMBSxYg2MlDmrMEuwVpmpifVgHOVSHU2L+g9vvX37JN7/y1EtbQKvzziV4NdXPcGkKC3+Xx0WRGD+ZIkavaxNSkJJikyDGJShYPWGL8G6npgQVxZSO4NCroSmCDhMBAF83qCnIQYx2kFqNAhuqSrHfhQmfiW6GxXLp8sXfwWRKMeXnpzx/nbRxze2Q4tFOvlGS0FHflm+P/exhDrfFsZmPV1oLhQSLKIn+eJrqGUEAiuWhff270ExGM5kwUU+Pq4Wp/iJJYhNo3Bm92mGy0ycr1RiL1UNAEQTgO4vunjbprUgttbO5/a6ybv6b3lCzxlp2DiXxnxFmTzsJ0i15WGN9TD6VGLOklEyWPfnEmuc3Sl1dECW1BIKQLpiI3clclCRx4XkyfOdqsVJ+DfsHhCe3ru3Z+mTQdBZ7DtzarZRUZRNj8/ZfXwwSEIpVPvf29X3xnrv05K1N+duv+lxX5xvrasXllWz3Kx2x+Pwso8o6KMtKfBcgQM/L25IBI9VYWySJ9hAQ8e//6dqlj99NwWQNKIlIgB0LO/ZsTAbRk+vC2cfP/YOjZ+s1pskABSJh58M8YUKVe2EER+jR4wAg7BRASgn/0Fj2n8xhrVKIdfgBX+kXZuc8hhtVql6Umdk515ovSIrztr4s/1vsX8eT3ic1wZGcqeJ2sLPCYq0LiAwRgrTkm9P2X/sKin9AFICerY8BQFvhlBPfMKvQVBjT/msmF5/q+yu+Sphpzh3lVWpi9VVNgiSkxwrbfe6lTclyz5t1dhLKRlwaqewWwMAYQkNEqiThSctQAJCd96eBAVgMGeu095gRaxxe+nTCWFNEy7VZExAhCJFiVQANmoAMIQqrEy9I6FCQyLEEQXDEBThy/LaAEFHUoWAAcewUlE4IBIgGBNixFccIgCRIgCCZIAiIAkO1NjfNzQkJCItUg7bd48/edMyVu0/4y/6T/uLgrEtemvXe/vFzBICUnEmciAizKtFj/HQgIgJoGdfUVMgGQQYACQ0gOHHWWnbCTpxj0W0UFLmqFFN+c2bm8kjFRmG5XAUgdq5cKg8PD0fVahRFzrnksauwcHbMYJUxC1icc+wcOAYWZsfMjCAtkzPZTNCSd0StTVLt62WGTKYpm82wY2vZilh2Dl1TLp8DOHVqK2cljGxTPhe5CASamowL8pjJUaHJZLK5pqZmQzLQ6xwgGCLjbIiCEIZoXUAGiQQx5dx5aJbE+tJxOss/W9FvE+l8qADChAmdpjoYlqvlcqVaHBGWbEDGEImAJpwMkjFEyirqnAFyLiLUVn/DSUWFma142uskkSyiypHsdyAtaDIgOfGCJEdAo0eO35fNTqWa0ACAwcBTD4ogGvFYCRXS0QexAUQE4zWgHRvUBIwS9mkVEQAcxortCNDV0XnblVd3dXSmU+4pUqhYwBUxZvOvlcviXzGpdiVNL3rH9Q70X774O4vvXxGX1zz5uTpaVEccoc3BnpBRam12KHVdNHEmCcEYRETtTUozYgjEyShMRhxLQisnumek0S4WARSgVOQgdSFZuo0Qlcu45s/VddMldFSeSJ0ABL54z096B/rrRMnjK9IffBgJOK7QfuMHvw9xN6NAeuOqa6gbqhyOw5U9Kc58SUoWyZtjNQn/jZiuNsT0iZiZm7CiSKpSFZtB7Iljsih1V61SYwn4NtUemao1YUKS6cs+H7vg2jnTTgLqSEpbrny/q6wWt31qW6guWfsAACAASURBVNSaL8TNUsks1crR7zn9Ui09YWJ1vuibmjRPdtgYfN/2wH3S0CSZsmT9d1pdAXabdp+iFpAR02oIw5XKa9s/AG7a8xwFU0x2VjKwhu61lDQh1pFo+CANWVgQegf7Ll/87d6BfgBszRduv+rj0yedhtScpAZsuJpdEeL+VTKYqBwiokGfCU8GWayUa4vlm25r91ra8j9/18duv+/nWklWF8QQEiEJAohiDlCVnwAv/6P5eqVp0iNni+h7PhQpi4qwUo+KfNOfSJz70vjBL/Eo+0+XuxGT/s+UTQqyCBEZ8jyb7Gp7jXM2G2BLPo+19unaV7w++2+AGSMADJX8Xem4VA4PAJIIGIOOnaqwQ8KkFW+nPjgUSG+5elfmggmGmv7XmeeNtn/E1O0c2/+GrWt7+3c1Z2cgMwsjCAojMDuHKhMhgISZbMYx3/PwvyX2f9EZf1aLY6NDkOJodYqlY3HMiGSVlh7BWotIfo3EGUPMLCyeWUZULQVjuSFEQRXAddYBgArQO2AhYICqdRwjOATASex+IbkjPYRHjteRNXfCykrCyMp3FZM6M7BWCI2gNpihQVIaOSfAjg0hMxOANrMxOy1xmwBZhNFUW6YON884nJvoqIlRjNa0mQlNxhhhb+IZY4iMYxEGk81NnDRhXFveGMkYExhDglp4B2AQBs2mgAA4ZgcChjAwFHe0MDCLQxc5do4MaDc5O7YcWReFYdU5qwERMwOys8wMLMD+NR8GeQloNJifEEw7nrLZ/LjmSePCQ+uXVYcOC9Ipxx03Y8aMcW3jOwvNpx8/48/edfrZx3ef1Gy6WirZIAA2iEiORkYqhw/DUO9g1uBgaYgZmvP59hyZSiUbZIgCEMhmsihgACQMgdm3GccBXy17pbzmsZCpb2j3vd7ep42zzQIAreMnNGeIRKxzleIwAbBV5nxApQsDBnQIAixsjCGEjMnE0AjJmAABjDEIGBiD2nrBhKI9V6TyUBmTMcaoI6QQi+SRSEd0CI8cvycBoaA4URN1kSUkBANAiqUhQkAyZAAEiQCZyABwxhhAEjEgxlDADhEMIRkMUJA5JspnhZRSV/uEHyz6+Oyuo9NxVVIcSxymdO1IpCYlU3PI6jqgarDwxfevvOCmL+4b6E9KbIr0QHXZUsn4JGGPWGOXSepWtUS+1xFCAfSaEUSAKEovw37fSeQbtEsQEREN1qj+fXTnOci0CktpiKMfT/LlMYNVLR5O5ynFsQc6MILgULl8/c+XrHl+Yy1ISzFoCqRiJMRxhbYffXz5uSdf0Jpvr4t+Y256PwxEROw9tCsOVw4kwvMJY4e4ZAmwAScoMdWNTm9v3y4AIBrPkFF/Mf0t9TyKmHyqXonDR7/1+oF1St/xMiRJQOjunHHVBZ9JPdCHbXm58EFPMp/SG0jz/+tcdXXMrH02HmcczdVsD9Jw5Pjo2b6td6A/vZra5goAaUs+LpENkNDZnV7XgQAJfXcW+MJLz/Ztv9X+fdQdTEkmBBElviJBHNP+kzK4vjxcqVyx+JbegX790ycX/MmcaW+i7MmpCXyA3XANW0r+vtCgkhLiXieICjmQpBqczKHfFsay/9t++eMbfrFk/+HDABQY8oVGQhQiUgg4G2ME6dSj51xw6hmA2JU0EEpIYIVFnBAwxLV9iuXfEYC0eUOzVwBGFNyFY9p/nOBKdFAapl1EOAgMM6ueOsXtySIsLIYwsg6Akq0MU93Lr9P+ayKE8a+b9vrOWMvDKEQgRnmViYgUjp66NRKpkhqRk5b0sRine3LB1Pec+a7mpkLa/gXqRpUe7dLH7w6okAs6UCsVSJ5mTFtphMWJs+6FnVsODPTpV3d3zrzo9FpAODDyotYA9a4g9a/VI2IJtDELwZDxKDC9KEYyRgBCG4lA5Jxm6JDAkFE4KTAZ3RnYR5jKAYEghkBEM0okLEYTIc5zkh05jhy/DUTlZcSN8YhoJVTyezWDOHDOJfueFXEKJAQOiFTd3DmLWnAinztzllFAnKD4ajZbBlZblYzJsGPnhJTa3EE1ssxCyreUNUEuO66tKZszQQaJJMgSBpLJEhpGI4CCJCDWGAIQIkVMgCFE9AoZzjoXcRRFnZ3j8vm8AFhro8gJO+tsGNooiqyzHjsaOWddZK11DEhAyCKRuIgdMwtD0NSB3fOw0JoNuNDcOuHAw8NPrzp8cO+fLFjQXA3//MKTlnzz/bd98Z1XL+j68sfOvO76iybOOiqXMxlkDjkIMGcyuaYgaG2d1Jw1ARkyzYVccwYQMcg0EQVEgWJEbRRJZSTat7Hyyg5hp63g6a4Ijyf3bXuoxN0eSurRXP5Hpb9obm6PyiMIyFY4dGCdEwagQAS0GotEzrpYDEwldp1vnRJgdIhorQ0wAJBMYCIbIRASBBAwOKQAEu0rFS4j9PIVsbbb/8dHsTTY27ezWBoEgDnTT06I4F7nsWzdncvW3bl597PF0mBroX3O9JMXnHnZgjMvG/PNPZsfWbbuzp4tv+o9tAMAujpnzpvztkvPu3rO9JNHv3nz7mc37362q3PmmKPSM+jRWmj/9w5bB6yfHfPbf08PUrMEATZk2GkTIGnBXFXJfPIFNd0SafaFyMTSB8p+KYDE4mq+FCu4Wrk2Zcr49ruv+fy3lj/8k0fuSskMYFL4qVP4xprmVOqFWhiAsR53IjbaO9h/xW23fOPPr5gztduPKi0znUJmeraCRNi+PhXvNxZXX3IDYMtIKITiBFBQIz0NKliUX9SjzH3VEzwXOjMiCTPGeM+0N1yH7Gp4Do0u5mpfu9KKDvRfc+ftm3v3Yv3H05zxyc/dHTN+9PF7Fbi14PQPLFmzOBHRq0VWKZ2MhzauXHjuVQCAGNbJIRKA4FMvb0tJCDbyT6QF4uMwJkvUAjwAUIfRxXRQl6wsjoUaJW9GDXPlywi1FfQRwFUXXJs+g6s8AjKiqwCIvf19xXI5PeAEZTeu0PadK3/SwKGSVltM6gyNawMAAEuf+GnDCMcQNkCcPf2kOPO8H+MKjO9BSPAtgGuef+712H9v/+70VaShTgJj2X9dpcuz6V6++Nt7B/r1a2ZP7V5w2nmm6a1JuOXKqwFG6mcghdnTy2UAFCREFIPEIlPHdwpsrbPJ+si2wf5XPPXE0y9t++g7zp9/6lu0mq7kkaJwZVFuSWCkj543HwDOmXtOPMISIGjYGBflxItJaa2MffmVEIQdIDoBTQCPaf9JSgmgQScHAAANKlZTSX8RwXrlKakFdFwrokPK4F/N/ufNOqtn69pR65tecejt3z1UPjwu3+a4BCiKydAuZXauVC0fGOxL75y1LEA98DW5Z5syE5tzO9556luXrludbMVJYTQR5kmgtXetWXzpuVe1Fd4YDq3VYr8x5JhZgEgCY6xjEHnomceSq543663p8iBLWf1RJNXPZJOGqioIwYFWWhBJvEis1ku0JMiZjGEW57xIPcYpNk1EEmHMLASOmQiRVU5J2DEFwMyIBCQGSPA/kppfcOZlN3z4jtd+z/nXzkp8knuu60m7E5t3P/vRm89Tb0GPS9/xV5+65Jvpj7//hnmbdz+rH1/51W2vc2DX/fgjy9bd+R8YpH7RDz+5Ov3XT3z/fTqG1DivvvS8v0p+XbL6u0sevCX5dd7st/3wU6tfzSHsPbRjza+XJcMbfbyeK1287IbF996Y/PrDT66eN+dto9/We2hHb9/OzbufXfbYnZv3PPufdZEIAiIRsI59TtNDppV31HmSZ6GYc5gDk1G1G+tsTJTFAmgAA2OcMAgYNAyOGVTExSudEzELgdaZDBOTqDC9EBEiOWYTkGU5cGhwx8v7Jk5oF3EgJrJRBgNEikJkJ2QEESSTDTKERJkAWVy5FEaRYxYhDowJAiMIFMjUaVPQBIiYyTQBIQNaawWsCQxbJnIkpGAyx5bQCMdkCrE6qADYIMDOuU1dTwe24qJSc4Zx/6ryyJYzj5rZffk7j24bHNr07N7+fhtaImPLlSaW8ZNaqlwkNOVqVQxwpVRoaR4f2BANi80FGSNRQBkOssjMHDnggAAQ2Tkc6C89t5SOe3eu+3hEgsRjg1gbFWJshySdJwAADoQScVYEBMrm8kiBoLA4dg7CCDIBEgQCLE7AELM1Xk5N+zidgsZMQCIsjMwcmIw4DgyFLgIAg8jC4Bu8xRB5n5MMgFMondL2IwH+O6mtlq2787offyT59YYP35EOkMb8a2/fzvM/c+yYZ2sttM+b87ZzTlnwalHWKZdnXs+oRt//PZsfWXzvjT2bH0m/OGf6yZeed/Wrfddr7Gi6lfRsfkSjvm997J8agrTF9964eNkNdRtB306NJxctuG7RhV9Iv37djz+SHtjoN5x/7axXm+HXjgOXrL5lza+Xpfd3jUsXXfiFrglHNczPR28+77VPqHvcR28+r2Ea/wO75+tLf1kU0dvJgcaGSGRYmaMQRKmUiFWFGWLCJq3biO8jU/IZIVKkNGpXocR1RWClHSheM/9tc6af+PV/vmmoPJTSgG6U0YZag496WI1viOWXpeavIO4d6Lv81u986U8vffsb53pxPqppxNdI7VMuEtZOVS/PV0vZePJi9FJvkrT+qQRF3PqlzhmIE20z1vhQm7MQfLUkUbWHhmiqFhNptwBC/bRo2CnCRDRUKt396CNLHl1TrJSTi6pTOauvAS08Z9HHzv9Mgq/74DlXLVv/02J5KP4KrBdJQ0TYsPWxni1r580+CyCThBlKnbpvoP/21atgNAtjupSZaCQmAT6NFx6QFLe9r4OmonaJNSEbQi2PWSUYQwaw0TAERhkMhxtBBlWSTp8NPdu3pT6rGmYAgt2d079zxU/Sqt81CpxUsFAvmCjpYa3ZuDJeOw0PEjG7ujUdl2+rBYTaKGbQN4powYVBRB5+/jcp+6/79rT914d/mJ6KJBQVLwov9ZMoSIAINy/7l829exPz27xv76+2yLmnNPsaZrhaZLhOKhOVJoi8sSpjAQIqOwggiyDgnK7u5UmRP5mElCjfaPvfP9h/4z/ddceDKz9x4XvffsLJHpOjew4qUguZXVdH5+cv/mAQTIjXuCrAHq5N3lSRkttP0IhjAWYHTEieDscb2xj2H4/ZTzvWk8oQiRVBBKdTAAjk1MrFax0wEQ1XKvHZYlm8pJA9yv7nzXpra77toY0r6vIjksrGIILIrSv+/m/fdxNRFmOaHBa0jg3RPz/2wP6BQ8nlxDXw2g45+ghMm8nQmW9809LHH4wvONX2WCdeKQBYLB9e+vjdHzz3qoAKVkqAXkCLCGxkyRgEKVXKT2x6Jpm3D557Ve1pXtnlk4ssSq+lPrGG8SwcmIzTmgiCsFjmwBhP1AisbVvCDEIEwCSEZNECGGY2SIJgAiMgZNBap5EngJAxnlfDCwEBABMQAyeqsv/vjt6+nV+/52/Ssdmc6ScvuvALX7/nb5JH+aXnXd3g7zVEYr+bo8FdueHDd7z/hnn1rmNb+j11QrWvfrQW2ucU2udMP/mcP7ho0YLrFi+74TXCwv+qC+macJTWBpatu3PxvTem0/3/kZhQ2Cm1CAMiKu2nbqzGGBYHAI4tklFsonU2g2StQxExRsmPyYCAOBBhITLsXBAYFDCBiUKrpuul9QidYwAwZKIoDIKsMQrXdOyEEAMyrd2T+vuHjzl6ZhTaShgCBQKsdJ5R5AIh51wmE5hARkaGd+zfS0a6p76BTBBWI8TAkNGN+tjZ3S2tLUQmm8tbsTnKCUAmmxWWsBoioggxqOIWAJBj5y9fmNBYdsaQCKEg5CcNTzgh13cAel/M5bJQeZkObG/OFI7P5Qd6+sJKjktFAVMsRmKr4ybm0VXBOLbinEjELpRS+WBry/Q+Q1rmC4xhJMw0QeREEIAjG2qWyEJo+vce3nzfOLKF7hOUc138o8mznXnfC8Sj5uuymehlyeLWTAAUBmZHKLrzKmOsY3EsbMUyOwTHLlQGaxFmiRAEwAYGkdgYYrBamXTiQDhWTBXLllkMGnEOCRmEwSWdSs79d3JbFUuDa55Zet2PP5JsSf8l5/zozeeNGcZs3v3sdT/+yPmfOfa33pOL773x1XYKDTUbNs2GaLAhk7Tkwe8mv44eWMOulD5VV+fM1xkNLr73xvffMG/ZujvT0WASl77/xtPSY/g9hUMAAGrMhBQDH4UtCGtd0BhDxCq2qXV3rWKwZecYteyelONV7yFWZVBWYk8grncpDF9wcsfP//bfujtnxIA6aFSlSxGrSE3T+9Vk6/zP6l4VK+Uv/mLJlv17fSzBwF5DkCQuDsb+enL+NCNfCownKrUV90nFYAOMJRCVOIowQQ+yCINmsBQUQFSLaUWU5DClJj+Gfl3CAio1UsrasWVf7+L7V87/ypcWr15VrFTSk5CWodOfEWnesWf96OP3/u37vpJ+ck/tmHLblddOHd9RL72Y6j0TGFdo26t1J2ph9vQ5RLRvoP+au36wd6C/juuy9r2I6hPXFigJBZohpW8mAogE9avfKE2RLHwcM8aLkb7qOqRx+sUE68h2Y6Idov/tG+jvGt+BSBhDSOcde9aXP/gP993wbDoaBBkGCRMdP2m0ulorn77Ss3XtUOlwOmxKa9AlPCV1VCjcr16GWE60+9iJiOw/PLis58mU/cOr2b+OuTHWS7V6SoP9pyqEIHDr/SuXrH04WXo97df+5UtD5cMAYKs9HPWrym8CtYlVXpgIiRLKlrgPzbOkwttPOKl+VKkJeU373zfY/6k7f3jDz3+yb6A/7tf1vFH6XSwWEdjtt/ZlAHA8Ai5OVnugoQCiOl9KPayFNINo0KNG66as3v4T+0phqpMkjjAzEYOwosBZHBlEAhaHIGSEiJCoWCnXTh7fkq9m/6359i9f9r3TZp1dRwicurN0iy6WDwNAxrQDgmMrAoA2MHjX6qVLHlqRtv94m6GapY66vwxmrLMnvWHW3DfMTte643g4jTH2i7v0iZ8BQHPTTPK8OkwIAo4IlMtl/aZnRqol/cic7pOSG8pyabi6Q8R3bwOpto5OhOLq0Vobs7E6Rg50VtmpnhsCsnOI4MAxCDNHrgogAo6EWIFc4pitE4cEIg5JCAMWByCs/e3xTmLZujTp2P/LY9m6O9c8s7Su1Hbe1Ulpa9GC69JRVm/fzgZX57/rmDP95Evf8Vf/xaFa58wbPnzHp97/jd/ZVSw487IffnL1fxK05dgKMpIYo7gIQSTF5SOLsukRIFgOKAjIGCAKggwZJGTnAmMCRVExADsRtlEYuwSAACbAhKmYkFjEEBoy1kYAGEWhMItjcBJkdJvjOW+e1drcPlIaaWrONhey+aZMLpcB4CDAbJaCDCIKkVQq1R07theHiwODr2x/aVNgAmMom81ksgES5ZrMrONmdLSPz+fzzOysc8757DhiEASa42NxQuhczFFFqO+tRqFTIhsXsTiHkOk+rdp9em7mqdGwjQZKpupMWM7ZUseE3KQOaGk1zRh1t/PxR7dMnNJkq9Umkyu0tjTlmoggmw+CDBmIojAElmoYMosEeUsFyI8z+TbCDGDAQiKAJktg3KHdI0//orjpMXBR4iVoxgdi9JZWLCjVgEOe1QEQUBgr5SJbIDKAEtlQEb/sJBAOQQSYM0FGnDA6ASTPv08OnDEAwhkiZqtkQcAgwABAmBFhg8ASBZSxLADsJFLx1UA5+vXposiG34NjyepbWvNtixZc95+PBt9/42mvHe/19u18/42nvcadWSwNpqOy1kJ7a769t29HeldddOEXkiLhb900Fy+7YcEZH2wttPdsfiQZ26XvuLpnyyOaflu27k4N/DR+SxcPX2c0+BoRqV7R1392jQJCfo8jQgT2/hChYbEKRvIUIgJiBVXAWmqsfIRGtCruE6yssG0RJqAYUKpemb4nFnAHRBmeVNi48gs/XfzAsltXfq2GcUqJ5KWoKOrc71eTa0lhoqBYqVx+2y33fOK6qe0tiOgdF6kBRLEBIYqpyCPx33Tj82PiVNo87ggkzwPpa5zxpAEpm47e77VSKpBHsWPifWKDC59AZOtc9w1bHytuXLl5z2+e3PzL3sH+BKXriyc1cGZNVK01P27esWctPPfK02adNWq5h23p/jlTCz+48q9ve/BXDz/fM1Q+nGY0RYB5x771y5f9gzZooZlOZhMAFqvlux97ZMnaNcVKpQ7TG5dVoFaXi09Ug2moCIckhY5UuFdbO6mhXOuF6Sn+EMZcK+kqbyLokDCmph/k4XPp3xWVecU7/vjK8/64WCnvO1xtb7+otTCuNT8q1S2hqzwMEtWheZNuM6mVr5PjwY0rU+BMGIU0HKOiyNwPnpicYqYTQMB9gwOXL/5ejCesgYzHtP/jpp1Yhw+OJ6txDHUASB/b3PbAqtsf/GVSFvKFRIC9/buXrFm86N2Xi32J0Le1xIJzClP0HWtxlE2+jq41cAYQ6RrfMe+YWT3bt44tNfla9o+AsPzpJ5c//eT5p77l8nf+8dT2Dl94FwABMkYZ+KLqcyDi7G4ywCJklOedRDVCCZhJEkkD0tQVxVkgSlljjcoqGZakJrCerVjEIZDEncoYq5PG7b8CbN3+gb40RncMttKU/XdPmN6ab/vRx5f987pbf3DfbXv7d8cL7qPo47pPXHjOootO/wAAGCwgBDrLG1/efuf9K57bsTUNdqjhVOMF9YKqjWI2SILMvPDcBc++dHM9iDp1N6Xsf/Pe32zY+ti8Y99crGwVCUHQsiVjgECskMHVz6yVGPux8JxFabwoSALRJXEujdclJAcuMMTMIKKwNBYBBacJKNgbnAAYbVnEJFEnRIY9+5TPpnl8eWRtYJKq+v9l7t3j7ayqc+ExxpzvWvueZO9w27nKLSAIKAkoWmMAFbAQTusp2Ihf/UQbOYXvZ0vanl8lPUXPd3oqaKXnICKKn4Atp0UhyE0DAeVSTLiEixIIl5BkJ4Fk7519WZf3nWOM748538t690qIIVLfnz9Msvda672MOdcY43nG86DfpUUlt0oBeWe+Zld+/+Jb55xYLPw8/tbbOa3Ufb5u1ZVvE846gMfy81auWX/nAT+fZWdeNrTztXesXe7ZsG+Zo+45R2IFp142XRgRPCIICtZYZjGEzrGf6RBhETAGOGkSoipbY0WT4OalIgoUgGlR8fN3DATCEssEgK1EvQjoRAlVWIi86C4TIiAJOyQE1dlHHPre0969bdOWzk4EIWM6Gs0GqFHBGMJoMygM7xxhiRUcgDqRxHEURTYiYU3i+H2Ljn738cd1dHeBoWq1GiZfVL2VRRRFIiAqhMrsDFlhVlDnmoQe7WKijFDJCNqszqQFZ433zwetyJuv9oy9yQ0Xc82iNZQc3B9JnwpFFcC6c5hIM0lIsTJ9WkWxGZk+mvEGzJ9o1FVkYmLC4UxBg4ZEUQDV9kpDnGsAxhqrjbHaYVx9svH6I2b6QOXgBYhGAExLyhi2WSVRCURfpXTURBVUJsdGo66e5q6xGVE/AGJUUUEktQh1smjACDtANakjkgoCqLWkng4DECYCER04P0+vmoAvXBEQ1QTVZK8eK44ZvBIRCBACxu/wwu7tmr5g9okAsGHL+iKcdcv9/7TszMtKVMyFR+e07KHhTcVVtGB2Pn2XlXZfu/Uv9mWljddGv/S//7DEp8/ZVk+vKi3gwZnzixzL8dromqdX+d1z1aM/KI38nfeBz/R2TVv12E3Zv4/XRlc9+oNlZ142tGtTdl0rLrx6zVN3fOnaT3roMuOp/qbw4N7xyeLxtX/58wWzT2jLdB+cOX+wf97UJzX1N4tPJH3tvAMSGBQYUaiiatgPFXmwK3zjephLU/Y8hhwFc76aeAnyYLwj4kc7IGwuAEpkPI7vc14CBYnXfWHJ7y099Q//4ba/e8Bn0nthIe7hXzLOp7ZuAOONxsp/vf2G5f9V3eYcySmzUnVqftrCPszs2xCyTC9NIzT3ocCgLRo2HgG/9LPJn0Knqmw1D3ssb3Na4Jdv/rPyTQhW3UWuIAJAX9e0099zzslHf/CME85pU+EASPKCNJ8GiZFocMaMv/ujP7adt6zduHbr8OtDu14fHJjb1zlt0VEfLL52Iu741WvDa557aNW6xz3iMTij/wunn/XfbvuhtoJRba6oRSU1ZWZmBNS0+teyiAy0orWK2voEi+N5LY9P291KzR93XkcDIPR2dE7rO44qc9plABOu/hDISKutRTGRbp0uQwCADVue87Nue1tv2Drmp3FITVPpS891ue5n9w2Njuz1esMxa2BuLtqRfXpJi2gP/ce7nlx3/f335Wh8ocUAANfe/Q9L3/+pg7tmg9uSvw8iEYoIkv99SEXbMtcMDNNvCID4t//5U8uuuXqsXi+svKyi3qf4v+uJx+964vGLzzjrE+9bdNj0AbKoAuopNojixpru0VSZOPRavWSrplQgf9bqLeiwtegp8hEK/EzdO6lCAiU+4zIiIBFKuEOoCtvHRsq1X3EWdUr896ZGLx9f+KFPLDp3045RvyoBoKdr2ilHfmhwoCVQxyb6fvTo95999aVnXn3Jv+0fLzn7udc2rn/1xTxsFPJRQMS2Gw8SouDxcxd0d3ZPNmppkxCn9Kzz+P/W3f/wvf/njq5o7kTzZSQlsl6ewUa4Y2TXc5teyj5u0dH5AOF4/WU/7ugpGuRrP++e6WUYicI3CXsJUePNiwgIFVJvTkzjPGX2qiIBswR1eVQAMGg8XOg9KCQNTsLUHQ5AhEFR+AAUhKXBtj0lPyu/f3FxSG9wYN7yc68oJQZ+4KXUSS+O8JQmA0vjQm/zJNvmjVf+yQ1vOefS9vDTNJBO0JSudMWFX997qbmXoae9XOPQrk29ndMXzD1x4dEfbmW3Tl9+7hX7eK+mJEmKkPi1RGE7FT854riZpTTkvU5YKtZKEPlEQ6TYUFZA9BpGhMjMiCbY0pmgRDVcf3n1hu9XcdqHj/jjdbAzbAAAIABJREFU7uqMjo5eVUXjjCEJWpUgCkjEAspMxi48+7iffm9H/4ye3aPjiXOR2MhQM4kNgHNACKIYOyfCIk1E7OmcZoiiyHr5zf6Duk55/0m93T2d1a5Qw8SJNdavR098FWFjIlFBRMeJsRYRCYyoAIug9y0zzjESGVRkFhPBQe+2/XNh23NuyxPxy89XqdlIhOOm6+m2UUfSaGoj0WqXzuzESoeYLoNWk1ol6oCoR6cddVBCw6++Pj4Zc6WDBZRIBRnUdM8QcYgubiaGOG4mqMY4IjtSf+EBIeoaOMrrLAgqqlLoJQOHXlDeJsu2N1Xd9cbOhhpjrTVGOqpojAKAoAVsAgKgBWQJMxJAxqifgQpNUEAiAAZFUaYCyyyMOAMSKkOCJAhWwRCqEIg6Bufb1oy1d7ggXHLSedk+UuRPjtdGN2xeX1qrxcnA0j7yjf/yb1Pn4kpbmNeAWTDnxKFdm9Y8dUfx5UO7Nt2y+pq2ENyG15/O658Fi/2nLFywuLj9LTz6w6F6fGpV8bW3XrE2+/3i5rXuxZ8X2fnj9dFixeUT31WP/qDIJn3LOey2+OSCOSeuuOBqTwZb9+LPS5z16+78yg3tCsLzPnDRPqKRbWe1D8yRtsTReNV4Pz2YTucBmOD2G9rfCKgERODdorwjhbAQEagqBcvmILFnlcUZyrzICRBBgh4X8MuHdLzxzYu/dccvf/Kte/7n1uHNLQIvutd0UQude52K98G6jWt/8vRrnzhhAGQkZUlp6icOU/3E29YzgQ7r+/R+F/G0L8lfIcGxJ2TMWAAgg+4HaNB+EJ2CT7aTKMECeIt7qox9Bdg32D/nmFknLJh93KKjPrRg9vF7fMqyg5vrUd7ItikAAJ5w9Z8tOmLxooLwAwCM13e/sOW5dS89svalR17Y+ux4bSy7Ics+9JHlZ5w1Vq8VwNz24QRT4J+UENhOLad1rq31IYRNNQiMtP3cNg+0oHoKQaiFCPPJxlDA94BMQItR4Q5JXhb3SlrDtxpCKra5zPTH4/UxKIFMCFOr3ex+qkyoBAlOESGTljWql39i6YahoRe3Db1l/H/l0/+r2MRog0iWQfbw1w1bn/3aHTe1Fgfle/vlmy797mW3iL4BEmvWJvHCm14qCtNxuIKUd66dJnLYjP4vnPmxq+68PWeDl9bAvsX/Dfffd9cTv7z4zLN+/+RTc0MvUSK/q6Ty5wQopAJkMhNnDwepKHgAShWRipUAFtfUnvcfzE/Ko5EFmdAU7CJA9pf05thoWvpOqanKOC8CQmHxJmPNf3/XoR+eupxf2PLcupce3rDl+fufvWs8taAAwMMPnXX5Jz8z/5DBv/7eNW1A1zahmK8OMpF3Flv6gdN/+OBdUBhhbNOoUfSchbH67u6OeWPNFw1YUU8PAQC8Zc2dWfwvff+FmQxszLtjN+b3Qm/qLSqh5tdAsDBEAorqnYz8s/WrHxCNNZ5hIABo0LIwkRVgDB16wDBlmI8wGzBOWAEMIXhTMRYgP74IBg0QWGPesRxs3YaHbrn/n4p0odLo4O8OWbSlGb1g8bIzLt0PNM935MNf7vzKead9ZsUFVxf73cvOuPQATi351CvL5QYH5q244Ool711azEu/dutflKZ79ukQRmAitGBYnQqQN44jkdCoELXkRAwgGWRsgHps0ACC+OlBRUQUdb7D7hW4nBMb2cna7uk9Ay/uWL9122TEjfXwY44aS47/vMFKxaAK+0ZIxVYcsCCIiDGRODf/6ENP+cAJb2zdPjlZj12TDCgaEkQlC5gkAqC9vb3jE12iLoo6BmYcbAwqqAh3dVcuXHbOsce8u6Ozo1rtUGZVjTzTVDLbBoiiiggbQhZGRO+Zwep8P8Za65kaiBDHTS8+n7AjJI36dM5pk9Pn08wFTSRXmwSouSR2tSbaqFmpVKtVUKg3mtHA/JgiECeS1BlJD4ve3AUKjUZ9tMFgIlvpZjXU0xsjNqtdPPJGIuOQjBluKDrLDk0N4HXY8FD1pINtzwzP7crqP82mSTTPyvI+ssr2HW9Wpk2vxHFnZ4fayBgrIkhkrUpkiKWJvpdIQmIBhCw4SYDJmKpKrKqgDEAEqCgAYI1lYeUkogqLA4SKRQYBjRENAgo7Y8B/UTkWg9F/5Ao/+sPFEigD0PbvKFWDy8+9Iity/CTxgjknekQuwyTbF4RbninWV34DHdq1qbdz2oJWrgW0KoIWf7pwweIFs0/MdKV8kZkN7WzYvP5L136ysGXML5V2S05a2hbKm3rJxRPweGa20503c/7CBYsvuHJhtvV4zmrpEn5HjlQNAjKJCkRFIDUOxX+PiiESlEzRjgCcE2PIuyCICln0rqyqXiZL/GIUTssAkTDFpF6VXtLVOpHUbv/9952w6Og7blrz7ZsfvD7MrxRJbhnNMqNK5kIgWbKCOaMvDIzBtff849JT/93V78oMGFo79Tn3r9RB19QyyE9Dqah3m/XKMSCYMvI085z1YogYiKfhZxmJNFXQKIpqTCn2EHO0LL8HuGD2ccfO8ibp8WD/nL7ug3o6+46d9Z7ezmkl0KDd042Ft2vygvIOLwPpIZ18koxHXH01VU+YiPvWbfzl2pceXfvSwxu2Pp9rbKQZZW9n59Wf/twpRx6pGk24uS13vnjbFdon+umIYHEcq+WSi69pA6RqNt2U8pmL83BaDoPiPRDxRn9a0B/yw/uu+TQmz4BGaHpUYpVYNYagyl2wRcmKvzy6MBPgyD7uhS3P5XTNFlwUC0IqMN4Y81qR2Zn4BSh+xp0QAXs7O2/4wiVf+8kddz65bk/x39c17avL/ldrMY/F+C9j6wXwdWj49cuu/7/Gm82CCm/hOabH2pceWbdx/cnzF2j8rG+DBP6zvzuY1tsp3VpEPOEcCSW12PvUBxeP1ZvX33/vHsr4t4j/cANVt42OfOW2f77hgfu+dtHnjjp0lv8Av5lkZGz0+iSG1Av3pZxERLREwuwdLDB1fykrDLc86/ZtKb+EDRI7JQIk8obDKUvCD9LCWK2mWQOqNLiJ5Uvu7ZyW6QyxTKrGo40HqvZdvZXjn3j56Q1bnnvgmbtf2PpcKAIzcSxEAPhPpy35zBnnVqOos3qYoZ6WJ5gvz1ZQtPAEmBlUyNAffvCjd/z7mol6LVciylno5fi/Zc31XzxnRdUeFLtdCogS9KDWv7Yh5VTA0lM/lRMNmq8SoYL4+0sE4lQRlBUsGSAlYNVUh903FVAAwq2tGHGenQuA5FStjUSF0CbOU7SIVciSaAhAJGWW1OSWmMVYA6rOk18wtYV7Z/2/rlt15ZITz91TJnDL6mt+d8iiLUndgSCOrnr0B4MD84q535L3Lj2wBWGpul75/YvvXrC4WIKe94GL9qOyNeSiygSiYXaWEFFJLSABCIsYNI6dQahE6JRZ1FLkxBkDSMZiBIASVEx8msBAiIpI5Ch5ZujBxzY9NFOPOOLgIxtvQrW3smnkzaQ68nuyu6PS60OYUCJrUF0FlVEAjFIiAjO6pn14yaK777i/uzlpLE5O1pLEGTHoEkU0xiBI/4xpoHNV2Vaq1c6qCiaxM5Xk98/72Jw5s3v6+sgYULC2IsrMYV6XHXtJTWbPkZQwP8SCXkeMyKt9qgCzIIIhEkVRtsaoqIiwiO07VHoPYccqiSVDzpGRqFJFGykLghjnqKuHHLCIJA1pxrRttKej0yAmcfzm6NjM/kOa0QyaMegi6xy7GbPkkIn6rm2mudsmNRl9oxLv4lpiKoxjQ83XHqEFZ1LUgWnrv0VardxwRgBs1idHJiaHJiWKqt1dVezrdS7QN6xz436v8FqxCARkWZoABgAV0cXjCuwktoYkKM0AALnEb/WYgBBFzYQB1RChICA4l6BBryrAwrYSJfHYf+DyLlWAbdll+34UqZ6+DVMGJ9+7dOGCxUVMsm11ND45Wugt7S4KIvs3WfFHV2WvGhreVDj/6a1cyvlZQeiv1NMV/AkUZ7uv/OwNpdJuxQVX7dMlt+KTpb6XLxGXnXFpsdRc8/SqUjvQn16xMh8cmLenr4qSIs6+VK37yoYgo6JeVFNBvE+9KqMaAFAWD8GrKHofdBARtJa8HFagTnqqtCKIKqd4GkgQwlNANMGCzzd/83EkBUBJnjmoo/svl37xoiXLL7v+og1bn2+pA1oF91PXP8wgBCjM52ChnNg6vPmBZ1cvOe60ojqLFidiCrLvLaAFpniDH53MMtXUOMIrm3uCXlafqIceci3TIEmaISvYKpUylSAZ3qyAmSnANZ+/6a0Lv6l1oNsM+qY0NwHEBVpcUNYKKouIgLr25ad/+Mg1617Z6BmhmSSmr3L9+Rx92OA3PvPF2TOPRDMb7OEU79DiLpuauGkrGlEiqaUaGZmKfT6TWcAUsZyipUKoiEUoBlvhMARsCYPWCKd01rAgvaiZ6xoAJKCj4EfjvBo0llwcMsdw0FZQKIvH7EdYqmYRi+iQf8lEbSwUAOnz9oN5Hkb2CEdvZ+eVn7zw/Pd/5pZf3PPAs/cU47+va9rSUy685Jy/7O3sK4OwMMXnAHJDBf+PW4df//LNlw4Nb9Z0qKvYE9HWC/jyLZf+61+t6aJXVSdQ/cy85r1XxXQ6NC/RVdNmSGoK/KdnngUI3159H5Zifh/iv2haCABDIyOfvuaq3z950ec+ctas/n4N889KQaxFvVUmBnuYsDUhZCwGTCf5td08MaTlftkOp4WFqwiAxvip4GCJ7m0uyBhhRqCN2zM/GCg9o9ayDAFhwaxcykgkRoTxeu0Hj177bw+vmUiVaYo2GP6duzs6v3jOJ89e+NGqndMRHVy1BxvzjWz8uMCEwDJdNb9Yv4mjgvZ0dH30fafd/uj9hbDBQlneEv8/ePDby5Z8YXrncW+OP0xILExEP33ykR2jO32dOtg/p9iqaMRv+maBnwhmcURG0cOFqAjCXpQj1ZMFUAVjjBoUVmH/OkUlEbHGiohfwdZGnrmGCsxsyGpwHEMkI8IA6tghkYgwiCpYT4EDVCqRE/a/Xir1uEti6XshjpbIU7/Vom4fT/LAEkdbKt5WMGBwYF5v1/Q9QXaDA/Oe/k5SyoJ+o3PIhoZy8GDuSftx2hON3a9te05QRJiQvNKeQUySGADJRIrgnKiKMQTC6ptUqAjW25gTUpAfJgQO68g7N6zdvm54d23Xjpe2vLy9GYsDnhiT4444aWz3lgkyzC70lIkMRpp2NQ1a55KB6vsPO3TgI2ee+sDqX+x8c5RBqB4zcyWqxnHsG43W2oMO6gdQx6yqSawDB1U/dtbpC445YmDmTCSMTCTC1laYE0QWAUAVEUQTRdZxAqqiQkSxS8gYFfVfAcKi5NNFTWJH1ssMk+eXJq6JiM2md97SatQhqMZWgdR0dDjn1MtqEzWbCRmLKsZUKpHp6Y53Do/09nTtHB575fUtx5x8rMFqw1RYRIGSqJooNKcdynGfQe3oP0Jrb3aOD41Pbu8zjWTk1crELtM/K4wzZAlENu7TyutRgTe2bIJqT333cLWjs6tSNTNmhi0dwY6Mb1QUY6045811FNAPDBBaESGKWGpIwMxRJRIXEgsyJom9QBYhGhbwyleqDg0pA3kCvDfzqNPw7p3vcBG4YfN6P/O2YcszJcGrt6O/NF4bLa7nhUcvblvSLJh9QrGk2bB5fZuCsLG7wLG8ckoNdseG15/O5g9bPB5ap+naSiF/45J/u27Vlaseu8m/cOHRi5efd8XgzPnXXf3RYim7jyCep57uvTwr3dW23bXSwEARXC0dpX2wtFG+TYjQGBO8xL2dGDMZqyo+BxHPJzWkvqUqXvktza2JfFKBKYvM915XPbl23csbzzv51Pe963ACEwQ2xc9voDe0VgncM0RErHHzF4d2v+tf//Ind6z9ybfu+drQrteLeuvFVEZb7SJaE51cnR8Bb3rw+tNPuB1ND8BwnlNppmWfy7tPRQLSSg99hQyeu5gVcgIgKV1OW33tc+IcYF4KYsAx9jAShq3pWjqxqPuUsWisMokwIjyibgfoaBjuQi1enR/vTHNefGHrlqvuun3dqy8HDCrHznz+R37/XHrqhX91/l/0dg8iVkoFXkshl5aR0JqMZvfDc2+DZXbhzhd4hGUjiryAz5UmWz4R0nfQqXy4kF+DdwfxqK6KpvZRKSAm3jwycHp9zyLEJGE2WYoFsom2MCxzNAmL03EpaxILtiqYdgt++dIj5w9ciFjJ628iTMFbEU2tEeh9c3HRxd9E+sHalx4BgPH67ln9c9tygyV5eWr8a0vPJMR/X9e08cZY5rhQin+EYsWuQ8Nbbl5z/Rc//pmk9tMAeBNlBOAgT+ylLH1FHZKd9As4Vaf609PPWjC44Oq7bh8a3qyty/mt4j9nYmc/+ckTa5945ZWVf3DhoiOPduzlFoI4preeF07lf1PtEAqDalZBUTVdnZgGYTH+IZcWzv+52C3yrmF+bwQkUlBlL8SK/pavf/XlgnVEShnIY74l/hcddVp2H0Ynt/7bI6tve+TBiUY9k83NBHazCJw1MPeq//ubx805laawjdqwtnO6NmBBfSolQXiXVPrQsSf9+NH7S2HTNv7H67vv+PdbL1ryBUNVltiQRYL7n3kMkXz8X3LOXxbgwdcTN2GMZXb+KRiyIoxgVAXIEJCSGCLHQogCSkBIqL6IBDREzjECMggRMYs1hoURiMWBgBKA52qEtWw8HcWgZWYkAgFB8fmZiCKRc86QEX6n5f2mEkfbfsX/hx/eOTDLbTxx9G2+51QwYC8F4YHKe98++OFcs9YYAQVjUVQVxCXKzIBgbCQCjCIKBrXZSCITKasicuyMNXFTiEBVkNGpIJJomj6hKsi8aGCkPlpv4pu1YUbpt/0nHTsHDO8Y3pi42BBZW1EFUcOJq1TRiRiD4tRipAcvwioceeT8rq6On67+xRtDO5sVx8wIDgDiOFERoEQU2Sk76e3tPGbRnEWnHj9jRv/AwMxKpVKtVFC0mcTWWFU1ZEEVUIhImJ1LgAQRXOwsWFBQFgIkS86xsBoDiEJobMWyuMSBIeAkFgWypAwIYIwRwMTFSCioyNRIJroqnaqmGU9aYxCImQ1RnCSEODC99/WtOGfW4K6RkeHdk7WoqxcwiQyqcY4RDaBhE2m1U4STSE33HESC2q5KPYlGdzZ3PG+nHRLadXknDaHg+4qpaRMLv/jSi9zVIzTc29tt+rorPVa0CYqsZBs8Ym2FY0ZEp6xCRISkShonHEVRwzWMNcIMBM0ErYm8yWmSCBkTRoQEEUmFhZQAVUgRhERYjRoVRYeKjXe+IGzrbLPvVdAeSqPd+9hh2o9XTd2hSv2efT96u6avuPDrKy78+tDO1zLT+RI86G0JvYnq3uvkMsTaTgamdFf375LfMdpoaqkMomKsEXEZHgYC/kuUSIHAGAxaAH5P85RRMo6ZTDqfAfKTJ9eue2Vjb2fH++bPC26EIN7b1GMgwkJI6E2D0ZsFqrhXwG0/7+T3nnHCAzet+fa37r0KCkNQZcX8XOITtMQdTDG9F7Y879Xz85SuCDpMgSGKYInXOVAQVUU06YhK6I0BpFlqyPsDQ8HzlDKA0PNsIUjVE2FwKihaPoRLwJyiVeDuFa5ZhkWGUxrkJEACGoOOqMQgk4h5GpcncZKSVQl9zgeinvV38y8euuqu29PWGWqOnmFBUxAvOXvFJeesKMOPjce0cJNzILfNuForJbAVh8nBPc0qE2jhlEJ65pDeOQ/PhNuFRecSLNnShpdnOhQ+EUy1XjF10aMwMuGrwRC/KZqaic9mBnKlSAtwk7ZeWq5YmZEr05IYEABe2PocAABWkCooMWSzipJ7nBD5gfiYa/dRx8LSnGf5icSPAO/IvTHyRxNc41ONXwCF3o5pf/UHX/2bmy8rxX+BAJvimYoAcNOD15///gsP6jxE3Y5UZRS83y6l5vQe/xeW0HERgCBe7J+pEtFHjnnXsXOu/Pbq++745b8U79je4x9b67FMgHjb6PDy71678g8/dd7Ji/zwoOaSReJFRzGtpbxMAqLRIHkcRIAxTRdaPrEQ/yWCuY8TX1ewCBAikCeWk7GiII6NIQF5aduW4uPIAhVbo8j/NFMDfmHrs392/f+7Y2Q4DGqWkFMf8wiz+ufceNntg/0txIFavNHJ7vxeZTZcWpqwxUJLA/3ot19Y75l31EmHH/P0Ky9k55zL+U6J/weevfuiJV/orrxrvL5B1b2xe/SZjC+KUAzXycYmb5LhN9V0tpMExBjDAg4YAZouISDxj9/4RryXFdXEOQRi5/wJGERVNUQs4ttQzGIMIpCiWhshAjN75pvfrsmQn/ZyypGJWJylCu6nL/3bPZaceO7USul3MC9YeePnihKAy89b+dv2D/xdPWLE3Wgo4aaq2GBrCSJaq8WKKMBoxCUuwkqdEY3GcaJgjB8XFCE0gNKMnbWEiBKcBhVAd2oDpzfNGM7Azo6ubo5laNtIpUe6uuOuSsQsjVgMAYKQgSRhExmUKKJIYxtZi2QQ4NDDDvvEx0//1a9eXL/++SSpJdWOer0eRXZyot5oqog7+NAZ7z5u/vzD586bO2d6/3QV6Kh2IoJrcrWj2tnRxY7JGGZWUGGuVCrNZtNxQkq+oyfeVUuRAZSBCA1aPwnsJCY1oECIiYsJ0RCxY0JMEk7AEZGxRIBkiMUZoiSJWVUBRdABq4iqGkMiIsJ93Z22Uu3r7q033IaXX/+9k96TKDeURJlZvHMQgCVrQAWRpWd61NWfNLaLqGvWUTUdFGxxkfX60hnzTBS2D21lWxnasaPaXZ3W09M9a6a4GhkCRCKyZLnpxixFLomttZ5h4q1myYpzMSGySxDBkFGFJGkSEosYEzE3AI2qGLKi6piNooJv9IK3wPHnxwqIye9CmHsplLfzDqWOSwk629N+V3Ti2tOx7IxLFy5YvGHz+rbEy2JjaWjnpr1Ua3uq08Zro8V39oXxdXd+5ZbV1/h37u2avuzMy4rm9cXzL1aS47XRqTVh6ZLfJi/3t10Rhv+QEqJI4qsL9dkH+iks8Jq9KkBByN2XEAzguTrI7DxEkMJo+JOnnlh+xsf6uroVRJVUVRIOZtHoPVu8wqISes0PAZzgxtpO6ln+8YvPf/+nPnvNf9o6/HqxrNCiMXhO78uJZsVfmGiMDQ1v1hZ2aKYynzbdMYWYCiCEqCKhpAOWAQ3Nc/7MFjxFEkOuiMb3pn3NkgJmHhoF8ZL8WtIbzS8BodVGouUhcfNBlYmsmkpxyTR39yV1apgR4CkK+gqqioYAQBlUYOVt/7zqybUZLTKXl8SWm9ymGpQRrj0kbjvkBE5N0UIsCbWWkq1UkD+X3Ukpi5pqIWbakIWb48tyScHDnNBXVAMpgDllMwgftAHwRkDxrDdEZUFDGY6nGroZmZleUXujyPBLsVDIXb8R/Rofq+/O59DyfD4rKcIfAykaALGiFAfj3KLLpQKz+OkOwJjrj4h5mSrHkp1bLgWTjZqsV40hZ9IWlUQyX/tC/CMsPfXC2x+/de3GR4rxX1CcKV4CTjTG/ubmy773Zzc5ucvLonpXCcgK+bT1kc61BTNgVAQCUlAJDaRDukevvODzi4467dp7rsrW9d7jv+VfijsAACBc+aN/njVjxsnzD/fyfYLeBVSIiABE0hRAlBA8lwkUU41gv71hzi/C8iaT9TuymPSO8AJARJING4MHB4EMAsjGbVvHG/VsgDCQgvP9SovxP9g/xyOEdzx+69/ccmkeZYV406yiR5jVP/fGy35crAZFk7HmUxONVwSSwmvTLa4wdwo5eSqljIKih1BFQOGiJb//9KsbSjHfNv7Xbnxs7UuPnnzkolrzVdbkvicfzuL8/FMuyE7PSS3hEe9I5AvpEBm+RhcgRN9WMEDBxBLJzx0wp8ueCBUJTbaxImBwE0mHk705ijhJ1AGBJQMapknJGKSAYluMRIXAKorzS+ztg2k7XytlHXtJQpadcenUFvyB4mQeqJPMfuG6O7+SpYg+I3o75zB1KGbvlXBpUqYtpPGWKe5vdMnty8GkMTa+0wmj8ePlYtEyJ4JKRCJA1sS1OIosQx1UlVVUEcg5FBVjqBkn3j2QGRSRkETIICFiVeqVajTnXRE2QbAncfEuGlO7exB7u4STOLaWRARV0ZCoSjOpRBJzvccOEAICinBkzMDMGYtOOWnu/ENf3vjy669vBoB6PSY0vX3dhx56cH//jN7eaR0dHd1dXTaKhAVQrbWiKiJx3KxWOvz26D0G4zgWFVVtNuMospWo0oyb1lpf33oPGCQwZJIkNobyDUKEFUUcICYspMAqaowIVyoVBhYRQONYwjevEVVgx8YYdqKqkTGzDj34medeeM8xRz2+/vnnX9m08D3Ha2OSuqahISVU1q6ODnbNCMm6Bri65aRZb1YBEtesKqChNA0CyP3oCVq+kNFJ8uqGFzft2Dk2MTFj5rS+vs6B2V0MNbIWwQiCbTbHidBJ0xAmjQYarNiKSxKy5CSx1KnsgAQVRMIglBOt2MhxogxIhGAA2LlYwSTCXkjCmLCPsvoZHoxl8sAu9d+03Ortmr7sjEunGk7sB/I2OHN+dgIbNq9vWx2tWX/nW55hb8e0IvV0xYVfB4Al711aNAnMPmiwf96GrCDc1XL5xVnEvaB8t9z/T9m7eUnikq+g90X0N2rvDNi2uGWpl9aWvL7kvUuXnHTevpztPmqf7l8tKMGXRUCBNZhBeUJDEERB8AwfP0gNge/gq0MLwl4KgIKSCgGot00fbzR+sn7Lpz/yJ+Je0WS7Z2bnfCT1pDPwwsqZViERsYxD/e6Duw6/d+WD37rvW9+65yptIYVCq6AMlsUjC1f3wpbnCqAcQFHWpSVzL8myZ+MzqcxBUWYRc9wpvYlaKA01l1rBFpWV1HcBS1VLieqYU29bPPS8pL7HXEKiKUUtjcKwmIgXByq09jWc+98wADLbAAAgAElEQVT+6J9XPbkuK6MLDtQ5LRMAP/2RL5SqQXGvaHMdQNJa37TCHa2E0sLJh3NuvVLUKf+dwtwNdugIflatRaeyFWeCFvUgyEMiE4LJyYEARKSparR3P8tH4whVMnJdqzlbC2BVQOQAejqnjdXHMGsYAE4h8qXekhsfHauP9XX2gTkEkgktzqP6FgOl41TZQJ7s4MY2BkBzKAIAVkAmVIdBQcTDie3jv1yMpj+95OwVn/2nR4vxP8XGI18Jazc+uu7lZ06edwwnzyCk81yqmcRoaEQU8L0AeQ1tfXFo2+Jj393b2eXpk67xzCdOmL100UM3/fyWmx+8fuvw5r3Hf0YBKC7h4qP/u9v+5Yd/9pXeaiPUhKIEKKKGfBGg2Yhv4BT6IRBVzJSU28X/HsFtUa9SowDk98Z011JRJQWll7cPZfdzL4/A/46vBh945t6/ueWyqf6VLd0v8NhgSzXopDZSezjhYSJTjM8MtC/INJXo2IAAwmqt5SAVSMfNfdch0wd2jA5jvp3CnuL/2nu+duNlP+6szK41X/3Z+seyVbnkhLOzV+2ubchcB0FBWNEAggkLDwkNOif+6YhkZhwgvnMeLDqDXj8AOGGLNu1zhWFAABAGQI2sZWYAZFFrjIHgSW+InAigijCRYU1AySDpgbAhXPXoD/ZRHbSkqlI89lvM84CfZEuatPqaJSedd6A0C0oCEz5d3Es5+jYr5MGBecX8av9KSgBQ5IQnDRkUZOVK1bhmwxABKDPbSiWJ65GNQGt+ExbhyEagoKIsiqCRQVWOjMnID97KPmm6WUbmz+jYVavY7ubWZKIhE2q4D3UaJEQuipxvUCeOI7AKEFnrkiZZQhNbqqTfGp66bmYODFhrDz/icE5cwi6yEQBUOzqEpVqtWmujSsVay8QiDADWWOcSMhDHMSIwOzJojHHO+d5VpdKhyo5dFEVxHPt+UBRFjl0cu66uLmsNIAqrKDvmiokajbpjZ4xFRWZmSRQiUXXOVSpRupEQO+c4RjS+YW09eAoYc9xRiWb09kRdPdP7enZP1FY/8suzP/z+sfpuino6qlW0EYiII0yaVQQHSAawo8PVHFJndfphmiWZXlQqqBBI+I4EBEAWeW3Di5NqRhOpdnVO7+7RQ0ZeGlptjDFklbGju5tAagR15Ia4hrVs0SXJOFLsuG4MM0wINgAbok3mpjUimCC5mJsMsWCi2gRqKDSsZacTig2FpmA94TpzE40AxEhO0AVfyv3tc5SKjZKsS3sjuwWLb7h8tf/f3f/jpV98883l5618m9VgW/7Dyu9fXPqFkgfDVMnQtGQ6sYDjzds7tlb85aI0y4bN6zNFmam8zRL7tNS0y6rBhUcvzm54W7PBopYxtBMH27B5fekZZYYZpcLSW3RkRh172UmL/zuA3xNeIZCFQX3Vh6Leg9AvJwtKKkgYoTEABGhUEcGIKqIRx0EaXBEUyX/FKo03Gj49vPOpx0x0JNk5GNByj7eFAcLQ3xVQRVBCQAJSURQDipq8KvW7l59x1jcv/n5f57SsnMCCwZ3mRu3ZcFxRxBKzi2z7Byx4u+dJmKTgm6Z1mIYExFdzgccWxiDzdElFU2eaNLlX9Gy6wqe2OVVsVc6A3CqnZISXgj3eHDKI2ISpJK9xpSLCXrIdMx0XUQVRBPz2mp+tenJdCsuUxx4zwv2sgbl//Qct2YPEz2jjMZUY0pkxnWq+3mY8Mv+RaCaOmF1sCIecwTblPgRVeoPeRS6HOLBcUbd+aAHdyMFKRN9TpaBIBN4jBbRQ22uYhi2SFDOYOIycQTnMFADg2NnvKZZVWNCYySI2FBOINz94PQCQGchqhRRfyvSyw3wqEYGv/UVBQZJt6rZr8jroSK7GS79h/AMsOuq0ZR86uxj//jLLMZkeX77lsgk3C6A73NJgPpGeLxF4R3hRkLwm/uHDv/jb2/7lh48+TIjCaS3PW5P6zz79oTNvvOzHl5y9Ylb/nL3EvyoWmjjFijGVmRkduedXI1Q9AgHEy18F0Cm8j79mAgJVUv8HMEiqe4x/aL0bRRozERKiis/pVIEMGkQSAQASQUD4xa+eK66IoizW1PhfeuqFQ8Obv3zLpeX4L9p7pn/+5ue/X6wGWSaHa2sSHgH1TY12DZeCZ2a5X6C++6boa3xmg/ajJ7zfqzgVJxDbxr/va3RUDnv6tRd2jO7y2+Jg/5wzCgVh7HapqDHGG6kBgDJqMPlGQuMSQUBDFgCttaBE4GWogQwY8lrWqiKo5BK2ZIQFFZUBgayhyFjytSUYL9GvAAYI0TCDKhprHAuCKCsiCTOpAQYFYMfvJBVn70nX8vNWvh1Bh98ecfSAMFqXnXFpqRjev/Js36vBb/yX28oeaS/+fH9yJBBjWU3T4QSaZpJMknGJTjqpI8TN+pg1zvFugMRJQzQm0iSui8QiiXCswknSIAPsGsxNl9QTbnJSZ66hiVmTzeNmcrI+rVN67WQSNeZ0w+EVQp2Ik3F2dZWGcNOQU22Sxi6ZcK6RJI2GGxNxnuzgnENEa2xHtXPG9OkzZgzMnHnwwPQZM2YMTJ/e39nR1dPTi0iRrSAiMxtDUWRVFEQtYoQ2MgYAjbWimiQJARhjjLW+i+1N+IyxomzJqKIhS0QqDEBJ7ELyI5zEiTG2WqmmHq2CSHHsmFnEj95gHDsASDj2RJhms+kShxCsgLxM/dy5s3a/se3k9xyHoJuGtj3x/Aap1WhyIjImiiJDWCWqGER01aoFdkhQ7eqijh6NegAoGIIFdpSCKoj4GhgRBWTn9m3jzeaLQ0NN53q6Og8e7Gp2b3buDed2NGpbGo2tO7f/msiIqENyxjBrI+EaoVNIrBUniUjC2lRlQYdGHDvjFc0kNiTGOqBEoAGQKCSVigUQlliVkRRAnCSIfgSTNRgS/gbBXdxH1m14aOWNn1u34aE1T91x8VVnFtfV4MC8tntK5g2aWfwdqKNUHa156o5z/vpIb+635qk7Vt74uVJNtSfWQfG01zy9ypdYQ7s2FdHF7CaUGj9fuvaTX7r2kytv/FyppVT6tbxGXXVlDjYOzDvvtM8UEb8bVqzOdMD8GPTU6rp4D30r65bV1/hLvu7Or5RO420Oav522aKat+GBDKCqeNRQUZE5SblhYSZORQFIQIwlUTaRVRCypARoSQE9CWe83vBpwwtbn1+78VFjjwCMAEkFVFQCgQ8VDCgBoPEeLl62FwkpCI8rxByv//CRze/92U29nX2AxeGWkKYgUp705xNlWEATS25sqQIoZi4IrSxDCpxMQA1CLOGdAsPVp25BXFFUJM38KHyo39ryKhUxZNGawVwFGll6zoViBluqmvR7ibyxtuZu4LnYqqqX/9LsNNISEtHfXtw6OnLd/T9Nh6szsiWmhWogZCrAjZf+qJWZ+Iw0n8loZgWdyZwlWExz0xS2pZqllMCfkedyCAIDuqlQNkBLabYZjRAL9m6YngBln4uthaIWcTfKghiUNXjBs6r4cbKUGJgKfgamSfrO2VkXylGEAtdw0ZEfyDmFRdgts6/IvMgVbnroOwAAOANSHKQwb6bpmoOgO6pepYgwmJqgn2ABBS9HoyKhvJka/4hTK4GQgJ7x0Z5qR3a2LTVDHpPhDm8d3nLzQ9+3Haf5z02rAiDfFvHmyp5nS1k5LUOjIwDww0d/sbtW80ORfuoYdMLVHzm0Z8slH19+42U/XnrKBXuMfyxECOZLXguFygPP3Bt1nAbmoBS704CWBQGroHscCJsYXLayqdSp8Q+pMk8mUJf1ByQ1ZEYUTW04POMdSY2hsVrz5796tliN529SvMMKgDDYP2fRkadddsNnx+rjLfGf/TenfOL5p154zKzjC9jg5JuTDyrUvUyooTAwk0Vmq0Zr4RqLNT9SeHagaIyC/uEHz+zu7Mxx2r3G/80PXl+NZj747K+z+7b01AuzM6zFW1jqCkoaIt9a6zswhKG9Y8ggoAgQGBH1gwPpk0Bh8XJLkbWigoYchxRTEQgNqzgRAQj2PgQIBpUA0TkHQEIau8QTSo01zI6IyCB6PUh654YIpzZzL77qzGKt1ds1/bdHBdp/Atr+uiMOzpy//Nwrlp97xYoLrr77f7zkOV8lqOCA32H/id+45N9uXbluKo6yv84ZCsiGxHgXLkMJJ6KKJEpqCOMkJjKOE2uNKrAkhH4CgYHYcWwjaDbrigooZEDVkQUCIBQw1AGTgzMSZj6k0nh/T+UgCwqMREREVhHBp00EKiLASITWYCKTMU+km5Iyi4IoaGSjyES2EnX19FSr1c7OakdHtbu7u7OzSpZ8S4s5EVFjrKp6ZkEcx0RkyCJQR7Xq2CFiHMeqmiRJ4lwcJ6BKaATUpyHVasTCzAkiOJcAiCErIMIsIiASN2LHPFGvN5r1ZqMZx42JyXERdi52LiG0qsjMIqwgExPjTphVIhshQiWynZ0du4Y2Hz77sFq9ue6Fl2KMupQrHFcjY9VFGlfIWWNImECtEVPtxo5ptncGpo1mSvuSmdIoIAro+MjOF3/9q5215q7J8a7O6mEDM+KDn1DdEpmdykPGvIG4vVLdZYmCEmBTmoRkDCqqISOe70SeXOECPwEYkBTFGCvikNB7HAEqq6gwEWIUmBciUPGOSQBAivSbaVv1dk0vOaiUBCr3BMq/A8dUqsPQrk0rb/zcnirbPZ2htw3NyrBz/utRUxWoMpzNl2TZ8h6vjZakU/fyWSV4cPl5Kwdnzi+JvrylBkyJ8T+0a9OeHHU8HxV+V4/gt+5HrVQQSIHJB2hmuqrGW2iqCBKyOMIgIMGckCHHTEQiSujn7nC82UgtBPTae6668dIfmeoRrvlr9F4soe0UUjQNozwZDV01NyD0gh8TR0x/6bt/+t/+8z/+eU5kw5akvzAcWMSLtK+rL0VACqgPZtNfRU2NMn8TM1mKwDfTwO6TYKyMhlQlOJ4rBGeOTOXGM0Ml5Zahz99bWv7tSGTQqhhfYF1KNtqGqQVGoBaSDXqtgd4KgCpoSCX4fgDAt1bfl12p5nNiBX4sKCAUR4AAQJMXJH42B44CSS7Tfczz2xYDtymK7umJtX5iWtAqtupctqB9ChJS74JsY/FZto4UtjrUewPJUMOkVFs0BV+1AAMrZmhMioGUWH970MkJl7xg9vGZjkyqlQOtZvGZ14aO13ff/vit5596AUDF464t4jSYNSxC+Y0KQKCsKWaFRP7CJYWF2sd/Pk2IJYNG6Ovq/NMzP3bVXaumLB9tcV5IvRVveug75596wcHVQ1R2IKKIAJGwFMF6DGsk1JMbtg0p4Hij8c+PP/XFj10k8WbVZibT45obofnSId3HfuVT//2Ssy+/9t6rbn/81lL8a8b3TU0xsnuSLgZd+8pjY/Wx3s4PxrU7AV2YS1ZAQnZiDAKoMSiKEKZRTdH1pBT/Ux5WK9RNmqpZIlkI3jpBEUhB4Re/Xl884dZPKX/iF8++/IFn792w9fnWzy34avo+CQIAXnL25a3Y4IMik0ieMB7Ec7Rl6Wmro2CbrMMQsWaGzaKIXR2Vj5/0gR/9+5ocV9xz/N/00HdOP+Gsu568J6089fxTL8h+PtnY6i8nEec1JzxioCqJFxUD8e0OQHAqlPpbBLEyYGMiEbU2YhYCo8qGSFSNsUCYMCMZP+yAhtR3ypBFwQAi2oQTATCEjgUBGNmQFQV1DKhRFJkDMUM41dEBAEq+WYMD80ppwC33/9O6DQ997da/KBaBXtbht+HOty8neWCJo3vhx04ljrV9+VQ19etWXbmXMnIv2e9+l7U+wUCjwqGdksRsrAEVskZBFITQetOZxDGIGkvsBFGYmQhNBRGggyJW53XNrLUAyJogoCGe3g1oCBgiY8PUrB94Q1UGRCVrAjFfVZA7Kh1OHUBScyO90RxmF9zOQb3ebmRRSQmjJHGqGFlbb9SMjYS5UrWiSmR988XDZcyiBAk3DRkEmqzXq5UKMwNAkiTGmMACQ3TiUNCYSFXjOAYFASGkKLJJkjhOVJTIAogTZkjEiUFkEFV2Tq21ziUi0mw2iAyzJC6emBi1plqJOiqizjnnnDEmjuPDDjtkx/YtB8+cdfBA/66x3T99+JFzzzijT9Ul40AxQN2gIAmCssbUWbVkqdJHtiPMOaff7EFbQcELWU2MDj/++JObR8Zee2NDV3fXQG9X3xGbR2krAYE2jaokQQyfRJzjJpIanwiLACKL8/NRBqy4hAgI0FoCVCAxhlSdNYTCiALACgKkiMqchKYVIQE4l6AiiwNVj13+puv5LVGmwYF5b3Pqd/+OFRd+fV+oDt7AfS9Fb2lar6zLUphp7u2avuKPrnrLO7YneHBq0VjEYFfe+LmsoN2TN+DCBYv3scy78k9u+J2FB0MWKt57VL13cPDUQgWU0PVH9U0oMCDARCAiIsHh1wvtek2ClLyZUvIAwMsPbHwU7RGo5EtK32MmQ2jJS+6DeAsADx4KgJcByafFEOGog+Tyc5ZOwRCwFVsoX95g/5xcFqbMwsrgrJaXq58J9AMtKikUE7JMzay4DfqyMKTsxk/JFKAjDfBcntKqtviWt+WnePkDQEBqFWMM4BCRd7GBFtVVzTir4RLUE9sAgEBUh4ZH7nzqidYbhVPrUQA8vcD4Apng5rpc9x/DGUzhZxbeE9s9iEzAEaf+QgFtK59YCgciAGGh7Ew9fIp/xiKsVBj883Rf9Cl8sdYCZckc1ijDPdK38VJyrW/YFr/FFCE8ra9revr4Msc5bP+UAf/nj1eO1ceocixkgZ5WotlzxMLslnImPYoIKOyZMBDEQNthgEWmaCH+8zj/49M+tPDwI0vxX3oK2cDkeH3s73+00nSeplhhEURS3y0uOKz4/wvyPArjjaCnfcvD90/ycaZyjEfw/L31oDbHv3a1nx7SPfzVC//7T/927fmnXNga/9hSjWl43Bqee/iFifpupB6yR2QmGv6eWEOBli6qIgDeXFQAtUzHbhPMbXo2KgFwJqMiwX8GUpUaAfg/j/18amykGB0V439W/5zzT7ngjsf/T7v4x0LbCAHw9PecVWzTDE8+wjJJSKBCPlZVWjYXbLlv+dsiFa+OExYRBRBWUEAVUD3jhEVTemPt43+8PvblW76UveGioz5YlJOpNYdcEouInwQUFWER4WA8T0FB1rMtgnutihMnwv5eOecojPgCg0MEAfEmMb47QAECVhGHqkTpzgfqJFb07iPqjSe84IVP8ESlmTSbSfMdI4uWWEXedXDVoz8o9bKXnXnZAfQZPlDHga1RS3oN7wDIefFVZ+4vPAgIwImENhQgkYqwOHZxEqT2EJAQFS0ZQHTOk+OhUrVIpAzKnrluCUhUkTw4ZDzX35hIGSV8txtVIGNcIqhkjFHFJGZPrQJUQuvYgaKo7o6HMm6NeJIIAhmLRNZEqlqJoiiyCur1YExkNYUAEJElAQ9iEVlrCUlVHbuOaodzgmgqlaoIk0ERFnFEFNmIvGWLMUSEBiMbiYhjBwDWWE+zJCBVNMaSMYpgyBpjPQ7JzCJijGVWZo6bjXptLIkbZNA5F1UqURQ16g0RjpP64fNnb3t9wynvO6F/Wt/uidqdax6qI/b3dNLkrgqKNWoJiaBixEYdUO2ig+ZSR7d4xkNgsCAiGK+Kqrjt9c0P/fzhV0ZHN+/c2dFR7e/rPvTIxmj0GGFTuSbNSZCawQShaTEhALXWgHe0YUVD2RiRQWKIEYmZFSROYgJSQXUKAMwsAuzEq5mRACBYQwYBUJxjIBAV1kRBWFzbXt1bgoQ3XL56L6XFgjkn3nD56gMyFrgfx60r1+3dpmbh0Yv3fv6wVw69l+EqvnzJe5fuSSK1t2v6iguu3kd4sIjBZuhrxiDdS89p+XkrV1xw9V6uyBfAJUrt79rBImCEXazejRQIEYlMCqho8POidBZaAjURCZCMgiKQiKaSM6RCW3buauEsIX75h18imgHmYCKTUiUJFJQBkITDXwm8E7w3J9Ywaig+iSEA+vQHF5/8riNaSYmFPxfrDUQA7O2Ydsys43O8TtslXohlyC4VxFRNET1CP29DYQ8HT3lPZeu96xVm80qY5rI+ywFJCaL5lF35VPM/aDGZa03T1VvaBGDQ53BEiBQaeJi6rQc/vZDCAgKse+2VjLuoU+9V4UwWHpm7orn6agQMYssprbKlTEpfq+klpENfCG3mAzH7Omr5HcQ9ck0RPcvFGwaED8rLm0LSrIW3ygGyVBBI8oFQ/zTDQBeht+Lwr2ilkKGWVD2mhlxr5Cz78MUw9SXY7jIBx+vj37r3aqoc61ONwCXWTIk1ZMkA6MsNJKMZWxjTJ0t03QMPrLztNmwX//6eaDn+C+gp4ReWnNkmCLH9o3ng2fvWvfKMrRxryAQIXVEFJIQf+SXjOUUvbt+WVaTj9fGbH/oORceoWkIkIlQIbiIAiJPcXB/Xf3ZoX/zVZf/41WX/mNYVradR5FJqywLx7jImmqd+kE8NQJhbUwHPOzbGIBhVYEZVVMYWNm/pJrQ+LC2W2EigKGIIQQQVSBVFQAWefvXlF4e2KkxdVpBTndPQ/ebF3xuvj93/3L2FldJ6DvlWgEWyaMO95niEAEQYFcWJH7GFUsMleyuF1kZMHgOCQGRQwRqLQc7IHHXYvBPmH9US7XuO/xeGns8IsUtPyeHBWuN1ArRkSVVElQEVMx62Z5QIe1t6MN7AUBGUCC0CeaF7MpQ4BgAlCcPSIQP35HsWdarOw+QsccJNQ0DGC7sTArPGjuNEmmBEgBNuNF29wTWlxGkD6J2YIZxKVioOraz8/sWlWuXKz373PyqR29ORGVm/zWO8Nvqlaz/5TlaD3s5+v6tBv2QJDAp5JWpVNYhkrQowB0CPRZUwSRwogASxIueU0BASkVEBYRAGJOOYRcHbG6AacYBIqCiB5G5E1UYkXtUPNYqsc4JIhiIFFQBR4cTtrL3q5Z1909qzFwGFTHC68oWi735aIlRlZhb23X9jbeKcCNcbdd958Q7NiBBF1rmE2VWrlbjZJCIAqNebftA3CJ8iElKYwlViFq8cTAYSTry7PRFh6vVqrTXGNJsNx845NmQIaffoyHPrHoknhgHYRqYZN7yBGSgTcmT4+MMPe+3Zx087ZWH/9OmjYxO33nPv+k3bNerX+mS1UY+AUWNDztiIbLWjd9BQRAgGkch4AwwkEgJO4vVPPXXPQw89vWXr9l3DlWrHzBnTj1jQOVJ9AISTWl2TJmgS15tJvSbOxXGDjDWh30RoqzYb+zYEMTdAVUVICBQqNvJ5n6Lmg0N+rJJZlD2pTAVIwSAiSFQlNKCizKnq9W++rdxw+erl515RKkIWHr34ys9+99aV6/5jkagVF3797r/fWJqX6+2a7kvBG1asfsvT6+2afuvKdVd+9rsLZp/YQpc97TO3XrF2amW17MzL7v77jcvOuGzh0YsHB+YPDsxfMPvE5edecesVa/eElLaFB7PzL9a0HrHcC+fBn8ANl69edsZlxRP2T2T5uVfcunLd72Crr9z9MgDo1SwYQILNjLJqSJW8DyeQataaJZ/HkQqjBnkr37n3rMWJuJlRMX0itWV48/++92rbcUKqmgggEiihkkuf+wlGRMJQAQIZQiJhUREgVNUvnv6xbOTLZ7z5eF+me4lBTz2AXViYR8Is64b8fYrzNn4GDwGIUrIVtgJdAecjMv6sRTSXTdVUmySjtCmmJvWYvhYzDRvNELDsjmWXBtnpFUrCHOAMsjcpHlJABhBApIXvhvjAr5/PaJCIebWj2Z9TFLOvsy8ki+5l0AmvWeLdI/0dHqvXFVPnSiicf2vFXTpzoExFCNNSAooJd+GxYvkLOUxItoBe2Q3JXpuXcFPB04KchwcisvIPDXlEC1MvzhaTQcTsWeR6NoUitAAGwtKFH0snr1oenxYUWfN7hXDTQ9/5wc//P1M9EgmQQrrs8Ur/0d70LuAoBcQG03t5xxPrvr3m/qGREaA28V9Ad7ANiK4KAIuOOPyPT/tQcTasuChaby8A4pd/+OcUHYOmWwOUnoYfgjCnorCqoEMjwwHWC/TCG8YaDVM5VlOWq/dsQEBVr3c+6WqPutqPz3vvwtv+cvVFH/58+UyKJW06Puv/2tc5HQDIHIJQCUwHkDAoGLzjUTjMEaaKUrnTYTH+W9wmMqv5gmCSCKSZEyF6BQMfS3rD6nuzxZ2O+UKLQnK6X336I58/ZtbxL2x9rhD/mMd/zhcN0TI4kMODE83nvGdmGGoiQ0QQyJdZrEKxZZOti9LqsB6jIAMgSCisCASgFy3+RH573zr+AQBmDcw9/5Q/yt653tycbsqGlBCA0M9aGq/IavwAI3hjL/HzqIRACMbP4RIoKCE7SUT+f/bePEyO6robPufcW909o5nRjMQizYhVAoRAtlkkNgdbwgZsYpDjjZgPJ8aOw5LFfjFvEjvGCe/rvCHx9hHjFQwxxsHYmC0mmE0sxgiEJBCgBdAC0sxonaV7Zrqr7j3nfH/cqu7qngGMk/eznye6Dw8ajWa6q+qeqj7Lb2HGBNArxio10SpTzRCLxopOoCY6LjqB4Lyf8L4iGgtXmScAE6SaYiJSRYqjgpCNTRQbiiObWPL/P3zItgCjWrrSlYmRFim+yfjS34X17bv/128mAxOEGO761Q+uvOET7/2bIyaze/7rR4J7tj698ZGbH7jmk19+13+yGsw+OpRIlZUIbWRS6AgZSybrtSGQkEVVtZEhYwJmSJgh4J1ECMEUCSFUiQYJWViJWTlM2DwzCihratEsIl6DUFYUWUQCEMo44WRoT7zB+XET8Jwg1pKhdMwuIswe0xk6GmOMTYFNEOpJzz5xqqwAbW0FERYVa01AdXrvAJTFx0lso0hUVMnaSESMMUGGUERExYu3UQQqzN4lTpTDKRtDFJxC67a6EGRrigTE3il6URl86Zm1yx/cvW0jaUwmaP1bOfIAACAASURBVKd5l4wltTKpc9XRNuuPntPph3e/49STZh+wfzX29z36xCMvvDha7ItmznLVio5uj8BFBbTWRB0dSASESIhGA4bFuWTzxpd+evud9zz55PbRcSAqlYqz9+8+6pj2vdPuEJgQ5wnRe2EWssgqoqwgNrBNAsWZlQkoZEKKoS+FBolFRAXD6AAFGLx3iMTCNjLCajDg8lklOCFrELzhhMOUVYQFfkO14wDLvvjcKysTI3W7vKmN0adCYP9mUIfXL4pa3jQA4uuH9xvUqIF7/Wu+Qu/MQ644/01YKV718etfh7d9xflfvfjcKzdue7azvbtFyOcND+ANdyQATX/NTXkdbO1/7UphZxTM9zwhcSoGBWRIWZkVCVBD5qcCogKGDAsjEFAYuxCkg0QS0EqtpimFKsPgKfzw0evev/gj+5UOUN5BhMqS+lpDQGyL1pFzmvolYArzC4BuDGitEw49vKvUFqBo2mR0kOPNZFOReoKSp51hjummDWZMk2+6Zr7coX7SzNM8P7bK/XqmcpzXO2lgODUAPExaeKS8IEyHafljgBbD+nxRFXzSA7A2dWdHUNa0fM1lfKkfAORs0QHGalVtDCkwT+bLGwwAYOqIACBuu6b5Xo4EhXrzE79slsXPeUFAY4jYpA6TChVpXgQ/zSm1qWzRyeAJbHDCWyRn8pcOcSrYpOZc4gVyirIZxDHtJWTWjWl1o6BZITYF47NRgKM2kSX7Zhy46LC5K7dsbjLGaKIrIjZv7tW3/x3q5//wxJmALp2eEoA0+Hv1OykQ9IgwQ8ToSzsH//menwPgp5YsHRwdafilZPHfvDuTdFnDXBvxT5e+667Vq8ZqNWj93aZNCce0fWjbTY/+6wWnnY38SLaDmt4rzdS1gZHhuqqLApSr5W/e+5W/XvZ5cRsUkjAnCpWQQqAoKyCKr6j8qgTTrnjfxzrbu66996uQ45g237bpVexs6+qdMSfr5kTAiWaSPKnXYBZAKboyKEIRYvMQOEfdy9I8nQKEm9KKJWg/oGe1BlX1nmdWrtm6CbIDQ6w/xBo3hWZg0UvPvhwA+oe2K0wR/9r0lIL6CBQAEj8gMgGgda1cQgSkweG9z76yqdW9oxn5qc00XwBQFFAUZQVFFSQKJPC3HjLvwO79do7uVZ0ai98S/6qwKIcsiN0ez+OamqkE9pMG8jlgQJSAACCSBIUGSjuFigqIIkzGggqLACEBCDKAcVwDBBOZ8BHhVY2NYhcTqWhirFEli0aEALxYNYoMCaIEXpOoE5HQb4lriYA695sYgL2WgsNrrff+zRFvOMV6259E/7Vv/WYPcmDvK294DB+56sTXO4sXf92z+I0PoGX9X3VuzKcDwaAPSVnEs4hXYwyQMioAifdoNJMpAu89WQqfw2QIg74RIqHpHpt24HixrQrWWFcqbOrZVTbjymJs5BwTkoCQNSIMiNYaZh9ZKyzGkLIqhlYXGksu8bGW9yabZxUXBgoOIYII+AQkYZ8YUwT2yqrIREZEDFnnfVCSF1QA8N6XSqUk8aW2kkucgLAwoXHiEFG8GDLe+WKhzaMjRAGo1WpkCAGNNeKVyHhmUCEiUDBkmBkpUIHUGvKJEhIzWxuFtNCQVVB2bnx4cP2qJ8aG92za+MLcBQujyEKYtbpahDJeGe2c1uGr5fYIyG9/9bn+hUcd07Nnz6ZXt20d2LF91+55hx160IGzDz7kCDe8rc2IiSJT6GKRMByN44nhoeHBHQMvvPTStt1DsRqy1lrsaOs8uHf/noP27qA7WZyxFEh8RIGHQRDMtEmtcHj4iQJFFAkqS0iAlUURgVXJIKhR5axNWG87B5cdRSQRH7B3ooxojEFhNsYIM5EJn1L/yRh9narjd2H95w/vt3WCne3dv9lY73d8R17zYaeiWOcNioAKBnMqEgEKlP3gRgoSelRojARADqGykKEQ2KEzRGjG4riOuKtP1SrVyp9f/4mfXn5bbexnQTwggMZQNbjAA6gIhKopFWFJ6UbptA1DZ5pgyYKFd655GnM5PdQT1rrOCkDfjINS4cecARdi3pWuIZrRVHxhk8rGwMjwDx9//OEN6/qHh7va2o6cNeu844///eOOa5iupYo1QeAzc1qv08CIgvtoKvqSlUuQS9YbVWk6VwSF1jo1iK5iXeQmoFgNAkLqflH30cu67lllg3XDh/Dp1qwV0ch0wyXa2P9Cet1kZzgOzcQblWD5C+vuWv10/TibMtl0mzJVHc3PLaEhCQsNP0DNG5sD5GRjmuaDgEgmwFYnl4v1ak215RsZRamej6eHF4ZvLAGnlg0/mqwjFRSkBRSas5fM5rwtXpEAcNUHPvLer/xjYxNzHLzgzl5X9cXMQ/PqO740Un7PJWe8I5RnaT8C63GidfmftEAlBNXl69dfeftPyrXa0qMXLD788LvWrGmJ/6bCIB//+YEzKwB0lUqXnPHuf/r53ZPDohGHuSO/9t6vnrf4I9PsgRIiRBRypNYA0UWFwZHhlj364aPXLVv84SP3n8/Jc4HZlTrciGrQNgmkXAXECR8/8adLTh2dGLz5sVu02c8P800ChaNzcEqAKN1BVeCAM6hfA5CAcchaODpV/OeKas22SJt/UiFUMKAEAZjI43Ht+gd/kbcBrCvKYrrd6SXqLHXd8Gc/rc/hXyv+Nb8FAMuf+8XH3vEnAOB5OIXAahYNiKMTE//jxmvz8a8NR9R66OU7K00bjICiQsaw5yACCgpnvu2kmx75j5x95mvGf/j3UOKGNR5v1mDskHZ0xBB6cAIASoDAkGGMw4wutXoRUAxcHNEY0ThNEDQKCqoKxgihtQSsrKJggMi1GyuciIY+ileMPMaxmxDgxFUdi/MOAJ1nL4lXVVH2HojE896xXbBv7VtvNCMUEUTDKgAgzLZQYGYEEJYowpRfwyJeMaOJBCqNiNiCMUTdcces3dPaJ3bNKMUTNWS0MEZHyYFrZmxTcspMlJoeeeeC1TuSWDIAhIKStaTDfecDjlr11fJTBx5wbBA7IEUfl4Fjn4wLJ4Viu7rIkHoObMRS4tVERUQEYfYiqkSUJEmhUEgSR0RxHFtjOQDJCT0KgAbXUGOs9w5IFYGQPHvwYExkUZPEWRsFrq9zLoqiuBZjZIBQvUckRRSRWq1qbKTCWCgaE6FW45GB8t5dkcWXn1930mn9Xd1dcc0Hu5nxym5JGEzR+wR8XMBkbo9Z/8xD+x1y9PRjjnxlcNfeofKGjZs3vPRie1tH57TO/febmSRjbu193Z0dtWRirDJeHquMJ5x4caiRKVqLkYlmzew5ct6BY+2P7MaNoGoyBeeMJIWExCqh32dBiVIJe/COyVpRVhFrjTWBEx0IKYJgggA/EqAldkoRsZeUcGkNiSqkiA4vCkhehBA9syp4x/tusn3rd2E5dE4cKqgyGgMSbOqBQQmFlSmw+w0qS2AzqQgZg0EbCUGUgUjEAwqiEfGV6ngTzDL7YsPAC1ff+eXL3/N+8c8hoYgG7ad6ZUAm5IIUuGaS0yIBRcnqt9nTu9PkpI6BzMnE11Peaz5xfS7lwkZdgK0jrJxWe3MTXODOZ1Z9+Z6fl6vVUPeVq9Wnt25dtXXrg+vWX/WBP5je1hZSzDRNEg26DCENDSxtYaXw4BFouJ/nhmSNuVROWjQ/D4Fc7SgZFhQyXKGwBL4ZGVBNlWBDuljXySTCzlJb03xuij5oekG++Yuv3jDvJwAQ1C9Dch+a/S8ODnzx9ltbFHo0lyY3dFmaRQkzqGhd/aRJTVXrNhiTneXrKjkCgY/QMvhIr3yGWoRJhnVpPRP2KPxuoN8TAijVi2jVIBKrQQWXGhPF1Bq+VccfciZvjQPq7e6+eMm7vr38gcnxr3lXujrgFhEBvrP83rvXrPj7ZR9cdMRcgEyjJC3HFTMwaUjyR2u1L9/z73etWR2u1RXvPQcQgYrpwAanZqhjngEalmiQQ1DRj5562l1rVm0YHHztNnnd2RLHapWrb//i/z7/f2n1DhElS1kvNWPHIgDghsHBptsTAAH/8fa/u/Gym9ltBE3CJ284Jgm28poFSZA9SDb9yduPuvOpUiWuYcuoHxsj4fMWfyj/SEsFW5HSNo8KEjUkiwFAgYxplmBpejJoS5Q2mZSC+FQXPuR8QaPmew/9YmBkOGNsav4u1lx3DAGu+cT1fdk8sz7Gbon/1mYNwFObVgwMbe+dMcfLmNYH8YQoOFqduPxfr905MgR1DDlifnKdj9vWKTGLigKhMUZBCIiVARiBzj3h9NtWPDxeq9ZnmK8d/7Bo3in1k/IyVqltUhVBIbTCTIZYQUAYfPAnY1FCY4xJ+eIBqB1kFAVt+rLSXoy8c8pBxIE9e8+swMw+4QSNJt6zJhPVcTTkXBxkD0W1WCyiGsc1Zg/AkS1Ua9ViIQIRooghicjaEqHG+3KAfesNligQCEgw+0FDLMzOAyIRMQfxAHAsFJDvooaoVnNEZIiSmjsi6evdgwYrvjBzFNuKXSoeIsUi4lt6Fq4urwoUHYqseLEFIx5UWZyQMcJc55ewUzSECgRGgAlp+/iq+e6cEswgUOdjcmX2sQFF0Or4SKnY5mo1VQIgjxbIgk4TKnhFE0WS1AAtWlOreSJkFjKUuKRYLIGS884Yo6IQAXu2kUVL7D0CevZIBgwBCjMjgnOxMQYyuKopWFDlrA+uKtba8GA1hYKq+HjC6vjI3oHyyBAaHCuPbN7wwgGz+sgWCEjVF5AogurYMIi3hHHsIoiPOcg63v5qf9uxh8yzC45ev2nr9sEd5bHx8lilf8dAKN5kxy6qWyUjUsG2AbS1F/frnn7onAOhc8MA3iMaG2PEq4oaSwBibVStJhQZUC0US+y9iFgFFU41+I01omwQ2ZCE1DcgW4gyUQ1i8erARCa041WRWU1kg9wXGcqGGwAgBCZAIxDBWNp3l+1bvwuLxQMpgwNBVIGAz0QS8QoonN3JEoATimAAhD1TkJoMbtTgQ88aVAyZgfJwPf/LarS0A37To9d1trV96vT5wuV6GpglvRSUPygrZlItjaxwwMzgeyypQTpqaxZGz9UDF57+yfl9x7Smw6CYg4TVxw462SQBAABWbt1y5c9uq8+I8gnQwxvWf/G2n33tggsAUKQJr4gNu7k0mQ/PgRx6DutXRnOwPp1cQuRTtwxHqypI6dAv+IdpfbKUYdRCH081lPEIpL0zejKh0gbtUFvfBAFg5csrvvmLr1161mcAIoAklJ6VWu3mJx7/1oP3A0BnqVSp1bJZlrbWrJDLvHNlWypmC7nLnxvFaK5+bCUfZq8hk+cbDXcEnUIWPzciUc4MLKEBzGs4hmeT1/rGgdSdGql55NY6S9Z8Paigohec+vblG9ZtGByYHP/QMPxoOUYcGBn95I3XnXjY4ee97YSjemcfNWs2NNieioDl6sTKrVvuXr3qofXr6lfhU0uW9vb0AM2g6C2AP4Ip7VNAW+K/MT6VusYPfPa97/vk9d+d6jRbN1QB7lj5k2WLP3zCwfMlXq/Z2A0UkIJDMSpCJY61aYdUAVZueuLa+75x8dL3arxKsl6NZvMrIkxtNSXsCnW1T/voqb/3neUPZKP1BhogXJbeGXMa1DVNhMdC40Dqo6uU8KOgqVsxIGI45lYzBmwZ2oUdbIkqorpbjiCRiF730C9ufeKxHI61KYzruICutq6/XvbFDLYAAHBk7xFTxj82ngyNAPjjaz9042U/md5eRMEUX6GwZstL/3zXLYMjexFwVveMHSN7m/wbGzgDbTjN5OMVlEyquIoCjJ7SgOfO9vYz33bSHU8+8sbxD7AsV5PX3E6lRCXUmx6JBERJmRkJQb0oFKxR9QQiwBqMulTZJ0jofSIKCddYXU3iOElUgYWzFjySAqsTEVWwUYSqxtjE1YIqBqkYwiSeIERUQyoK4NxEW8mAJowMmlgDBlkEEPy+HGDfeoNFKVPae2+QUh9lYwhAGYAwAPgpe9giGc9iDQGhMh8x0j1z12DUtV+F2xSirqK1FryCd65nWltx2gE8HNRLEViRUFywgUeUOuM5ReOTTdnAQaoUDCVJbePIvcfP+ENNEolHlBMAFWZjCBMV5wgiVk/WgrKLxzgeFSqUOg5UJhEoRtb7lA5NRD72hUKJOe1HMjsRsWiNJedipCCjCiZVE0SVlBxYKpVqtSr7hMh676MoipPYGCOIxWKhVosRjfc+fLiSIcIY4vLG59YmiQ8PkOdXrz3uhBOpMM0WIksWVZOkVjSUCNZq49ZQYO4Bjy+YTXH8yujE4MIDZ80/5KBKnOzYvXvv0HC1GiuzUU+IkbFE1NZW6p7eMaN72rQeSYrrh/RehpqoEKCwkEEJEDUl75msYRZEGhuremEWtRD0mRWYXUDoC4sxRtLMFyJrnPfpM1SFgICURdAQhMkKESgGsR0WICRhydBTIsJkSVT23WL71u8KGAJUhFFNmvuqKKqqAIJnT4heYiQhVDKRqnpVQoMIAhRg8SwOCYFElZCMIperE2kfJOfFVp9cfPMX31D5+CfffgRRA0glkPkCBsZJUJrBumcAhhIo1DEbBndkMM/JZQgAwPy+BX/9/r8DaJ0jgeLkdLkBcZz0C1feflvdvD6DSjWgZcs3bFj1avn4g7uonmxnEz5RCdoMWPc/TLGXWb7bSNmwuWTNMsis+GlkhZJJD9Y91sMvU9AR1YZ6iNanjRn1UeHEQw/74a8eb9DkmhmRjfNCUIVr7/3qHU/devGSd/ROb6/UahsGB25+4vFKrQaIncXS1y/42Ceu/279ksIUFQi2lnOqQDl4GTRwmq2/1ZyiZ8g9zKCumCsn6+ky5LwroGkKmk1KRDJsseS89XKtBIVgw5azkNN8Pp0/sJbpd3OFSthZKn7toxd++NprxuLa5Pif+kyzIefTW7Y8vWULAHS2lfq6ezqKJSAcq1bL1VoweW/0HBTPO+64S5YsRXuQKb4d8M4pqV6pJ2Uu/jWX6KA04uTEww49920n3PXM6pzFXz3m63eB1i/dP97x97ddfhe6TaoxSsPqM8VII24cHGzgxoPVqAIgfPPery2ee8rxvd0Ew8LZfopkk3ZNOWZphGBfz8xJ8/L0CgDCpWf9j0Yrn4cCLRkz7d8ApkIyac1FSkjS5GYxRfznpHRxigpbBTK1BhG5Z83T1y+/H6Z2LczqYMCutq4bLrs136VSdQdOf7WjWMrMORpRkSeC1oN8YHj7H1/7oeMOO/qMhfMAcPOOwcfWr33mlU3hBz72zves3fryjpGhfBOsHsbZq026WxHQBIyrKCgReE6AhJAA+My3HXf7k4+8Yfx3tnUtXXh2/Zsj1dWqCSIQkCIKOAAFBuCk5mqqoqSjE1Ug9j6JJWZ2Ip69eueFBEiQEBQl0AWsAQVLERoV9kQm9jGioEVgFPGKKkIUoU+8tUaFFSRV8EMEEhRUdaxePYuysRZUOI3HfVitfesNlqp6L0QQGaOgRi0ZEFFQNAUMxDnvPJkgjZsSk8ODf/Zo98Jqec+0rhFXQlQiLE/UShGyqxEWOqfb9SNbhAUNBsmStEvFoqpoUFXJGvZsjEniJPgBRtaCF9BA2MHttScPqh23n8xWXwUFFUZEn3BGRVf2nhCSJAYA9p4oSSqKtmSjaS5GQAPKgoIKQfBJWIw1ziVIBKKhkCsWi3EcI6K1NkmSAIACVGExZJ3zAEDWBCy9qBQKhWq1aq11LgEAZrbWMrNnX0CU2u7xvTu2vLgJUD2j97prqFwZ3nNAX4dzCRawQAzokyRhYVGsxUlEhiyICgsX7fj+tQF9+ZelzgPt3OOmFctHHN7lkzaXRMgFRRCWQqTt0wrV9qf38nOjOkxBEoCCc2Hm4UUISCzMIrXYi6hnEVY0JCwWAIUFiMiYoO5KxngWS4aVC0SefUCcipdCsZAkSSr4Dqqg1hpmEdXA3iGDokrBGzrw241RRUOkoe++b+1bv+310tC6Md2vFE2LKCpEFoCKURHFRKaAgUkNAqgevHBCaFVRxCNpsIgQEYMRsBIZAAbxDDAwNKz5nnQDg5UmmN964EbxZ39qyekBoB14MBn2kgiAVSnLYtEERWMIYIyBoaFVWzfnlPTrtuRpQdnXM+eai65vfqC7BgMqP5ipZ/wNZmFjrXply8DISKO5nvkK5vlEN69Ye9KRV0r8OAToUepSCMFYNrh0Y5opA0CqATM4MtqUr+Wd3DWjP8EkNh0CBtIbZr5G4UXqNvGY08fR+oGnos8nHja3s62tUq3W37fBVsoz9zJ82MBw/xd+dnNroaxw1Qc+1NvTDXX6XAuRCJp4fpVqpakCaijpQyY3UQd95gmWrajPVKwsXwrmKV/42hPC+qgn0CAFkIJcNKTzrFBIiAZp23oUKTdGZ3kP9Fz13oR2bgoqhN7u7us/8Scf/uY3poz/Rtxmf9Vc0yK7dLUN1cHWvB4aNLOjZs++4pz3m9LbKZoHAJVauf7DzTvSSvaqVMuNTCfVjEzLtivOOefhjevL1SrkhuGvFf8b+l+49r5rL1nyPh8/EZR0pT5sJRjICIRNAEhMA+/Pv//JGy7+l7k9QykcPMQ2pLpV2JCfVUAsVyeaLzvUhYYuPfMz+dkUu01hHK+EIAJAqgIm6ACEYWSgjRJQThpqqvhPZ4NNMZaf/KkoqPD3H37w+uX3N/2AtqgeIajO7zvmmouua0GKlmuPeK2cddyJP13x+OT4b3ouZUoz/UPb+4e2//uq+1vi/+3zF/7RO8+68pb+xsGnlqf1V8vw2grlLABURcAzw/1rV73rrceLegAWlDDMN7Zw8AE9bz30sLWvbH39+D9j4Vl1SmSltnX70FoniaVC7JLYO0UWEWZmZBEfRZGoagBsqYgwUEDXc+oqCMSOjTECHsIYQtiDA/YKmsRCBF58ISogIln1CbMGNqwyoIK6JCnYCBGBUJgVwFiLEFr4AOo9s3omMqL7CsJ9643b5uEBxRwQTaKIwadeRImAWWxkwiARAZlFFdBAkQuHDie7ExwvtEdGrToHhRJJQV1s2oYqW7fv8C/NGDWR0bT5EbAViqTMQsYERwlECDYPKaRBArtBRAGJEo6fG7n97R0fC/RxZkYkYe99EiEqGCRg8WRABdVYBBU35qsjxVKHk4KaaYVSB0hg+nnnnPc+PCsMGVOySRwbosQlhUIhjmMVNBQJu4BLMmQIgEGDQhizWGtFNXFJdu0IUYwxwXmCQCIpJ278udWrR0bKTrDGECcgY36sMrZfXCNTdHFNXFWFRViBFdjYNKEyxqqqJgmO7Cr4PV21vcPKuzs2JxxHXdYPdZS2v32s0Pb8uvUL5x81a78Z420vaWHCeEtkgqe0VwARZkh84r0IizGWRVRABKyJwhPJkA1+aAYBWJmFQUG8RMYGjD0DqiAZAhUgSrxDMsJhbwwCBUEsQlJGIssM4iUli0iKMxUGZUQw+26yfet3YbHIeDxejvcMTQxuG9k8WH5l2/CWV0ZefGnPui1DL768d+Mro69uHx3cNTayd2x0tFYeT8YYEhEFBhBENZ69IoRveGEBqMS1RobU6hCYfv87D9/7qRuu2z40nLVQJLW3RmUVMsQY2CAiwU88JePCdx5+MGcdBi3ea309c2687NZ84iXJeoBkCjMDaPXsWrlpRf4j4MHn100aNzW/I+LGgXVoD6biaalJXk63M1CMgnFhykZDRMKNO3ZoLnFvslNvfvGAXd8wsK5Ra6Tik4F5SXUjBWzUlQ3bsbrCfUjmOoul/+fk0/LnotCkSp+JvuSN11r96C5Z+q4zFrytb7/Tu9q6JiNpcdIp3LHyJwND28Opr9yyeeWWLa0XE1rYTdlevPxEvWZ5esuWc776lYc3bNg4MNgaSHkDt/rpA5YbNQ/UrXjD/4QlxeE0TBGzSlXq+FJFQiIaGBmpb0SaGDSHcfiiUWLljIiOnDXrqj/4QGdb25TxD1O9jjZfvaBzOmVgzO875sZLb+6Z+fFQDQJA/97NjWpw0uXNf6d/aHv+HtAAQAIAhK720kdPPbXJQPJ14/+mR6/fMVaiaFbQXSBCwvSqDgwNN0Kr2fxQASq1yse/8xePvrQz54ahmo0Qswo5/e9HKx5vvlzpF8sWffjSsxvjQZUxTl5ObTAllEtBHkBBUv9GYQagMBF7ccfAm4j/fG4ICIKVavVzt9x03fL7Xyf+w/cvO+szt3323vxDSTUZq65I3A6L9kOnnN5RLLXEf6uX4JQxn309b1bf/zz3I5HZ/+D9j6kffD1QEbHe+AgvValVrv3F18Lfdo3uueKm73z17p+sePk5jAQtkCUgRgOiidfqB047oUHrfY34X7aoUZO/tPOB3ZUdQ+U9O0e2las7Yre35oZiHmEtA49b65knEGqICZFEVhE4MgDoiATBI4H3sarzWlOXCCcurjBXvVQcTzDHAA6AI4PMTiQRTgwqqFOJlWMVr+yMRUWBDKRKFAKCEZgUDFHBWIsR8r48bN/6tUaEpAgsBoxNjfVMcGYPRIbgTOOcA0BFFVUySICd450mjrkwozOSkvE+KVupdRRpHNr2jL86Mj603oxOuCpzYMgbH3DQDN4JKLrYg5CIsgB7McYwiCJ68azsRVVSm8Eht21rvMaQ1exDDkSsLXrvvYsNkrIkcQICIGrIKCsIJNVxiIe10u/H9yAnBWOtIUvGkAmoCfbsnLMmIrKEllmFQUFVBMl68QrAqhwqURFQVNUkSUS4GJUKUYnQBgMKZiYkUEVX5erw8O6hxx95olz1IzUcG4eumu0Yqe54dddYpeziCfSOEI2xqGqACpG11oJRImQQVZS4ZmvlklEzfdYGs82pIyLvPEyrVHH3oX1zjn/L26a1t+8d3b53fEd5pFqpuOGR6shoPLQ3roy68iiPT/i4ppwYhIJ4AjEEESmpD2JdBjzagFpjVkFFQgSwNhJhgyQiwQ86s19UQmQWUFCnxiCSmOAyrQAAIABJREFUEVFWQURjrLASkSISklegCEHVO8GsYb/vLtu3flfwEKqEEZGqoLFGvRJFQOSYjS1U41g1NoTqvbFWlRARhAo2MsZGZCOyhUIhwoIxESGI8ODISFM2qZqTTGnMr1Zt3fKnN3zv94877pIzzmAvhFZVAQwisjI0YGtS7+x/56EH7npmdW7k1OjHK+iieadc8/HvNeT7AECGJFnV290TMnvICe81fYEIqv1D2z9/y+XnnfihDdsee+j5n6/csvm1+oWtNDd7sIlmq9+ZetaJIqXG9JqZntdVRjcO7qgPA7XZkaBxrRpsIr3jqZ+cceyZAICGwGNOsSJHXMT0gyhMY+pCgEip5EzINi845bSHNqzfuHOwlTupTfYQTVSoxvhL/+f7Lr7wtN+naD5g4ai+Y1ZuWtF0tI3HWn7MVX73/z51ft8xA0PbyrVKs9Jrg9PXPBRBBfj8LZdfetZnVPGpF3921+rVAHDU7NnL16/P1X75fWzdoI3963LJeeMMkVBFQg2Ym8VoXZkGRPMj4qZpMjZUSnMXDQFgw8C6zKtDEVE4HXmd+7bj58/u/fTNtw6M7Joc/zle3hQIUqjLrUBeHlQBcdHhJ19zUVOci3v5qZfur08QXzvIAUBXbnrijIVnAkDDCJKyESXgJUuX3rVmzcDICLzmh1TT/n7u3y6/4ZJvC/+8AUwFSM1Im+xUMKfqgoBQqZb/8of/cvGSMy445dTOUltw8g3OkJDirkEBv7v8wSDW0nI8yxZ96Et/2GQ45GrPQCYhmpo2ULAyJ0jJ/4KIwclGWZevf+HNxH9jnDhWc7eseOyWFY9VqtXXj/9Fc0/50h9+pVVCRt3oxAOOh4ND44HdPR9feta//Mdd+fhv3FmtD4fW+D9x7glXX3DFjI65BXvAmW8t/OiXt9TnsKAAeRuL3Gl+8xdfv3PlTxRwYGg7IJxzwlvfcvDMytgOAY6TWMUn3nl2nuOedujpaBseq75W/Pf1zKmzIh1P7BlbBVizUZi7CyCiCAWbShURH/paLEyECoiGa47DvQmg4AlRWSTCgpKoiLGkqoSERr0XYwhRRTgTp0ZAhgiABQRJhVFQSYTRgLVGQYSVDACjD7gKAVUIIsMC+zKxfeuN5oMpHN6oCLME458gxRnYYcIKwITkHRMiKBCisFoAKE5nBM86vaDUNsNFkXb2dOjISNWNzemutNcUgmIbAEBUtKHOQyJENBD838mQURUvwSFGhdVERAQiGvxiBPSZ0V90dc/q0RkiPvD8MO33iXMOgEOlaS0FZiCiMrOIsIiM7yKIQfdDjBwrEnrHlPJRgmOEBQBmLhQKqsrsoygyZMNTigz5xBlrUwt7iwDqkpoyhsY1EVljAAFcYnl3HI+tXPHE7qGhMY84IfOs6WyPprVPI2X2CWnRuSQqFiYmqkAS1BBcLS4UrAoYIjc2PC0ex6QcdZd293WVi7uAUQGMKQjptP1x5949T6x+ZtbM7mMWHLR71LE6BbRRwRqbet+qGjVEKigqQatPRQQNqtfw5CIiYhAGVRTMXJbZOyJiZTIEoJR6VYhJ+QkBhJo+J8lkjrIqREQGjQ2yoqws7CV0jhsujfvWvvXbXqLAIDG7mvcKkHjnxDvvHXtGdT5mYDAY+1gj44DFSsyuKrVxrY7Eo3tqewbG+l8dfnXr6OZXR7ZsHdm2s7r7yo+c/XsLDsscu9KKJQ+sq2fCg6Oj33v4kXO+/JW7nl396tAuj85J7LQm4FN3afSAKiDlavXL9/z8O488lKX5+SEHdZam//X7/+7GS3/cVA3qmK8+CoAXnHxqveOuMGlQ03Brxjue+unHv/WRq//9G09t2ZL9ZO4/pCx3D6Mb7J2RukVTtCDzHsNUqVhVOPjWp8pSRGZgZOSbDz+oDbsFyL14zjS6PhYAfOj5+zb0rwOAVO9KoeEKrRntEgkJMoVDxDSrRmHNJ7IdxcLXz7+gd3pPbuhUF+TH3P+hQZ1CBIDOtq4bL7v1j5Z8jgpvASwAwGVnfia3EbnfmnxSgBsG1pWrFVX46Kmndba16WSH7MZ7pbyp/qH+z//bZ//2x5ffuXoNIH72Pe8BhDvXrIG6s2Xej6NpdxAAHnzhvjCZDK3L9PwRAjk2eF7XIyKrGRuUMjQIAHesXh1kcMOuhrFvk/dlIw7xpkevhzrjkRqxNn/27O9/8k/m9y2YMv6hZXrT9Gf9nzCvh3vpmZ+58bKmOFceWrHhxxt37so5xuXNSiA/WFPAO56+LUxQkQqZw0pKLgxtl6ve/weZ6tAbxD8Arty84uq7rqFoIWQtjtC0fuf8o/9+2R/09szQpgsFkNl6hFD59vIHP/Ktb9y5ZnX/cN2jIpi/y+ptWz514/e+tfwBrUdLFqJ/teyLLdWgT9aK31L3G5TMZSRk/0SpMpCGMaTK3WufHhgd+TXjP3yjUi0/9fKKf/73a5Z97R++t/z+QKkFzD1Scl8smnvKjZfeeuNlP26pBlmGRybuYRkO5skIiiAfOOmUP37nGfn4bzwHQtTldyEX/xee/ol/vexns7pPKdgDAGDR3JPn9x7TTFjNNk6zYMsioX+oP1SDvTM633HMrIHhLTuGX7Vw8PD47qGxvWO1ciI1IWHgk4+a8zrxf+nZn6mf3c6xVQmX0TqFGNApeIHgQO2UvJBzPmZOGBIldhw7V2WNgbyAE3GqDOC9T6xF52oAAqQsDlSQVFSIQIRZHJmUUuy9UxAANpbIqggjoIgHCpaG4pkB1HvvxZOxggIEBBIVrI0sEO7LAfatNywJCRFIKSKKEC2BBQVg4STxoBQ+gBXBFiwaMoYUQQFG7ESNCoXCNEPFMV/wEe4/q2taV7XUZsYO7h47sAAIBi1CUNTTJPYKQgYIgwabgqK1hARIaI0NqrzFtoLJWAzWGAUtRBEafnL0Jxx5JGJVEc8swVOUVVkhMpEKuMQ555JkQlmUHTuPgKAcjw37iV3JxI4IHaoGySqvGkWRakojLBQKLKyqxlgOxDtmQhNaz9778HFpyKBaVTSGyKAJtqIghsu2OghJ9dWXX1n95DMOjMTw1qh0dFfX0V0ze4vtXR2dqurZeZd4721kFUiUmT2IsPfGIAJxuTLUv0V9TTvbn6dXVCH2Uk38yER1pFrdOTy4e3BEJ/DF57Y+99SmSn8n2SJhhGiBCNEgorURICojKIEiBP6mMYhoiwYNpQDXlJmg6LwrliJRMYVIvLfGCgTVcxVVIsOh1whojXHOG2NEuW4SZoxNktiABVUiQGM9+wC3YGET0o19a9/6XXjUFWyh2IYADC5hBhBUClbxwXvTAtbi8UJU8uwiE3nPpmiMEgKgkoKayLD3zALgE1erJbWCNRe+87izj5/72Atw7zMP5dI/yImfNMYfg6OjV91xFwIcf+ghp88/8ojeWb3TO2dP7waA/uHRl3buXr3l1bvXrBmL47rgXmqvB4AIi+ae/KXzv9ySeIGMJRP3I4yrwDvnL1hy1NEPbVyPddpQ3vUhxdRpfmrU19P9tfMv+OSN15drtSbeYQMbhoDQwEpRT8pO04z2g0iZzV1I0EYnJj59y48GR0YRW1J/ncqFQjNTbfiLGz91wyW3zG6fIX5CRAAQTGOQEnwc0zFW6OCLBAeFrFgLTSoBpN6enusv+uQXbr9t5dYtmSZaXfon2xdsmjEtW/yBvzrvi02VNsAJB7df8Z5z/vk/7sklz40d0ea6Jnzz4iVnXrr09/q6u//pP/4DmqdXjWBoBieG63Dx0iXLTjzhouu+n0fuKU5FGcxM6srVyp/d8KlvfPy7szqjupN4eI8go5sOi7KXgsw7BABYhAi/tfzBO59ZjTnFyOzs6nYRGT8REQFueuyGMxaeNX/WrFDEhbcLykgHdpVu/bMv/OjJtT949IcDw9snx3/dm6FuPgiNHakDPmHx3JMvO+vTi+ae3BznQ68M/NuVt9+aUh9zciiTr1WI/0q1fPWdV33p/C8rdiAN1zmoCBAQQSceetjS+Uc/tHF9PQJfK/7Dsd302A2dpbZP/d48gAn2kokq4bnHHX/e8SfctWbjtx9Z3j+8PfebTSXwwMjwF++4DQB6u3t6u7sBoFyrDgwPj8VxKp+b3p4AgIvmnfzX5105v29BczW4ydeeCUPF7J7OVJlMgHVJKr+kooqrXnnly/fek1an2Y32WvEf/li56cmT//Yt+UtavwSYi//enjnLFn3wwtMvarlfwqomL4zXnjWWVAFQCI1nRgQi+OMlSxT1xoeXT4r/RmDUrSwQ4Ki+BX+z7MqWYEj8rs99eOnlN2zbNVrJG37kQ0ubBZWPO/QtH33HLEtqbdfCvot62o+s8diesTWgFIwEWXnpwkOWP/dKzfkp4z9/DK/ufViNRyFAUNKg0SCiiESKgBAVyItXUM/OkAmqWxFaQXHeR5HxMRtC8WyNURUCQIpUg/8XkwlasZAkbA0pSESRgoAii0MlMiReLUXMwT0GTAY/NjYCAEsFAABLBoG9GGwCjW7c/iwA9M48ZF9i8N9znXvaxwBg47a1zSgqYOGA+1MEFRYERSAyRCjiAZFZ0WIw9wNVC4YIXXuy5+BoYTIdYKLYZskAFPxOkTVmR4Vq7NmSUQBLpKLOs7WkgkAIrBQ+SAypgnfeRtZ7NpbUmKCBTWQAQVgja0VFFBIz9uT4zxYVfp+AlMOzjgFJwBtABfDsCzYSrlKYigUDvvCsJEiqY4WoLU522rZpYNpt1Iai7D0RinAQ0Ao5BllUAWut94lnhynOTInSCkgUomJRvDeGVLy1JPGIH9thSKpj1Z/f/fORciVmPajYcVhnV3d7VCy0xYbUABgaHx+PQG1UBCLPWT/PFr3ULKBL4rbaniKOFaZ1vtRT2CN74xFGNIKirMPbZMOPt/XsVxDBV9b17960s7vbzjyo44I/ekd3V7dTP+L2Dk5s2xlvZcehOtPU4JdUQTxolgmQtXj3urNBlYUJg08rUaoSiAjIkvmiUSBdgyEToL0SXIbTZDXlyTufWEuimj4QAQPuFBDKleSrNzx+z/95qXe/Q/fdhPvW/+11169+cOUNn5jyn/72kmUzutuFFQhVmIWVoa3QJgAENlgagCIrF4xBJEQSVTJGgqE9CwKgJVJSwCD8bYhQ0bM//tAv7K1UV25acdOj319f58JNkkuZSgykFbOhU/116hQZQHiHm1gO4pAI0ahypVb99vKHfvTkino9Wc9qcl+nX83vXfD/XviF2R1jNz+58up//y4041PrOVbvjDn3f/6X6UeGjPuJO7LPD81UPDQzOdDlGzZ8+pYfvf7pTHnK9Wv1V+dcdMGieU2lFygQqk/p5oqa6mRii6dD7hU1eCQW7n5+5JsP/CBN03NTumz8gJ3FzmWLP7j02DMXT768ydPs1iPgyi2bv3D77QMjwy1O15lrWVrfLcq2SXUYYNoPH/vh/7nzqhas3mTrRQXoauu69MxLOwujV999QzlVYmy8+KTty0MSAQD6Zhx0yRnve9/C2RnGTbNpHDb0hDRrBGS1X6Vau+iG61/cMTjZzqJhVp47Bsj92NJjz/z6+WeoxA1Nn/DpggjYs2Ni7h2r7r3jqZ8OjPS/qfhfPPfkZYs+uGzRB1u+r7zjX5f/w7eW35fJVE79apgzVqnHf9+MOV+/4NNHHjABGvo/ASeDICAKA6Mj53/rmy3XvCX+WzC7vd3dV5z93qVHH52mDsGVRNQUDrJtS1ZuWvGDR7//4PP3vfn4T6Nk8dyTLz3r05Ojkd3mZOKXk8w7tWFSgRgebkG5/fIf/2j5hvXQfAqT439KWkeuDGw4rnSVuhbPO3nR3JPPWHhmb8+cKXfQy67x6grmMUEFFVE1JsWDSZCnEVGAcrX7B488fufKn0LOfKLlTlk89+QLT78owMjza+/Yhg2D36+58d1jlfue2fTkxn7IOdTjJK+XzmLnhe+46LIzP11zewGgFM0EgM27731h8N8IAtALCERFAfW+Na/eu+bVyfH//kUf/NL5Xw5/n0h23bfxMgJUEGZvjBHhwLIx1qRYLRAiUlWDyCDBvpLABEApEmqg1RCqgLEoDBo+UQARkZmRVBgMGrQgrAYpOIkYQ2lPR5E5LR1NBt1HRYMkCsxsI0IwBklQn1778h0Prspfxus++8CJR73j5geuufnBfxnYs3Vf8vDfZHW2d19wxp9ffO6VA3tf+chVJ1YmGrSXuYfvf9opc4MzcsprxuCXisxBrRZEBA1FkU2rJpbgzqoM89oP6oECElZ8dYDLw74SFS0iiCp7hhDdmbRxsIYtRLYWJ8YYUQEgYSGLQdUmU+HC4IluDAUwPCA555DoADhsUds5knhhEWVD1rMjRPYewJAF8eydC0/pgI3kcAwgRAWBRJSKpWkQ9agpGGO8IAsjGg1yYaAKDGozP11kZma21oBq4ry1UeirIgCwI3BSHeZk1KBy4u746V2PPvaEU6jF8M6eWYf3dHa3lwio3FXsOP6IA+fM1ngimah1zJyBZJzziasK+8haYxXYwa5BM7y5o0h8xBGPzhis+dgUrPj0Abf2Z9WdT5c8ROM15+Ok1A4dHVF3R+Er//iX07tKGJx3Le2s7X1o4I6y35XqWQMYQucFAQnRGBIQBbWk6IURFQkNEHsmUwjar5xJRQgzsKJBZfReDKUAdxYmMqqMokLI7AEwDFEDb4EVMCjxKNSNPvatfeu3u1SFPSOQshhrCY2xhr0AYOaRoCICwXCCWIGtiVziACV0dkHRKCqqMnj1kbGsDsAoytrtXz9k5jkhl+0f2v7Q8/c9+Px9Kzc/WReyh3wun6ftZLooDeW/Bu9MO0tdyxZ/6Ixj3z25FFRNOHnGJy+ABCGQ0DuDzlLps2efPb/viLufffGpTU8268I3tDgWzztp2YmNzPuPlrx7487hO5/+aXZUjYSwt7vvxktuyb3xONYtDlL/xMzwIZtaLDr08Fy+GqHteVMElumdC8B0oA6DQmP4KHXP9IY8KTRTolIzxKZsOXnfwgOWLb736S3Pb+hf99SmFZVquVItd7Z3dZa6+mbMOePYM4/qXTDFlEMTjh8WvzOgV0887LB7r/inR1/WB56/b2P/uvUD6xufr6XO+X0LFs07efHck+vbhNgDABeeftE7jz74Ww/c/dALD1dqZZ2KJ9XXM2fZ4g9c+HsXdbV1/eDR73e27d/ZFn5uTDVCLDaNWHXqIkMVKnEX4DSQSr1PlxnL1T2jsG45GC5UJa6NxfHsnsbuIHXkc+nWyjcnTFmpVtDO5/iZdJBC0HhLGZo9zV36ro9dduan71j504deuO+pl1aUa5XXiH8AgK62rmWLPrj02HdProIAgJNnJH5mYGRXZ6nUWSplp13AMANp4SvCFFXXuD8AoB/AhWoQM4VPRDhoRs8lS5be9MQT6blDrsjCSfVT9jWZWSqgpKAU/B7IoLhtjL9adNhbFs39bv/Q9pWbVtz02PfX96+H5nqvuQJsOE52FIvnnfDed731w1NeBF97mt36oFCaemxyXV8Jg7aTBhaIptCm3ukzTjzksIafBk5DmvZ6bYm81CfC7OkzREb6eg6ds/+xc2YePn/K2yR/hLxrInkucTtUgv16mKCysFprVTkkB5ZIEffrGP/b93/ssjM/vXLTig0D6zYMrKtMlAGgd8acvhlz5vcuWHrsmVO+3atD97+488cKQAT7Ty+e//Yj/+p9//zA2qdWblqxYWB9uVoOUdDZNr2z1LV43knnLfpg/chDKQgAo9VXXtp1O6J45qChxOBR1EbRCUfs9+SLOyPTHpmO/uG6KBHmmxQbdvzYAiY+QQBriT2rgqgQkqaGX8GHUAmD7TUZJK0PjQVAlBCttd45AATGIN8hKtaSd2ytYe+tIVWxJvIiCmDICAs7QYNExN4jESgQGu88UQqXVQBhjqIiEagKg7iEZx8ws+VKXnnDJ6777AMXvOsvLnjXX+xLD/67rcrEyGeu/UC+GgSAjmlFBfCeg10fkAbr+dCAsNaw4zDU9y74MyuDqgdDRoxujgeC+bAqoEEbGRd7ExEZCtKXQZcEGIw1KAyEsffGGu+9sUZZEMGgURXxAgDGGqVAShEF9J5TDRinFMGgf3kl/fy4wnsUhAQVlBSNsRQhs7BnQkIg7xNrC6mqb/hsE3S+aqxBZV+bQBcjlRwWlGyp1JGIJ2NZOIXPghIhM3svxlqLNjhhGWsAhABBPHJN/JgkZfFBcZSefXb9o79cEXwYEHF6R1tHR0dpWvsoO+3riUrFyJqJCbbFgooCaRzXyESgzJ7FixnZBZWRgh+3hx27umtUVAuFIrMQAqJRBQtYQKMS6I8oykccdtCn//KPe2YUktoYe6fClmw3Fs85+MIH+m/dVXvVmJQpoKJkjbCQAWYFFLx73VmBdBLmIgVrPUtko9C984lXFGONiAIAoVGRwNsx1ogwixKiMeiZkUBY0RgFUQGTtQBUUFhGJ5Kv3/CrfRPCfeu3PiH83J+e2zO9jdAiAIsnBFUsGCtcAFElJjSKKk5NhKikSAIswoYMgioJKrKXQqGoqMHrV1kQMnA26LTCfgf1nDOrMxUeKFfLT29a8dSmJzcMrNvQv64uCNnQfMkNturG3F2lrvm9CxbNO2nR3JOnTA0BwPvBuPYQ6DgIZVbtgISoYox1LISm0LZk3HWHfAsUBkb6e7v7Otu65syYc+Lck6dItmTstl/9w7cefmhgeGf9OM845sy/Ou8LeZAqxysk2VxP6VNmoqTNoHrVG4YwolFh2ruBet70Rsq4n3gAsKqiRJksvgJlXvM5EzNoMYPI1UlhcgVAHVQ8hcyBv27vwG/i2tN1y5w6NtFER1PhxPrmVmrlvteYk6Qn4daye5bsfFNY9NSmFRv715VrlYHh7Z2lrs62rr6eOYvnnTTlpEXcs8rrqXAm0ow30fKQIY4fBh0L4kSZ6k/q+RvEnxEbdY6mdgzptTOFt1L0ljfTYkl8fJ/KUHg9ASUIMjNoDAEC0Hy080OhlZ5+tTww0l+vQHpn9PX1zFk07+TXuozKOzh+RngQID8EAqSOqO29kC/h3jCg/MscPx7ApJo1LwLHNeiFmtI7yR78Jl4wXuvjZ4mwHv9IICwKiPZwW3xrOPH+oe0bB9aFh0ClWg7wgQytPaerrWt+79FH9S5YPO/ko2bPQyxMdeQ7fbxKZSjthmha36UftERpfR+KAQliPz74yBsiUSEioP2K05ZM+fr/ycUyFvvNcbJRNFZUZQ30PVFRAIMmc8BTZu/VO3ZeHRBU47GetpPmdJ/966awtW0v7/7x3vH1QewgyCKxaHth5qKD/qa9sH/4sf7h7Z2lrtepXfdOrFu1/StexlXUJU6DtjMAkREvRAhgLLUvmPW5c65+T/iV3p6++z//WP0V7lv/p5WJQWNJRAW8NZZFKYiVgWHxyooRIoKNSFiFNWSWAKgoqRoHGPYMAEQ29AyDrRkZIiBFJQTnxRoLoqwasF5EobFnVYUQgyWu52DsDQUbeWEEJGORgkUbhepxvFr76g0/r9VabcDOPfVj5576sX2Zw3+rUnDj9rV3/eoHk8fC7z5j/uze7rjqyBARkCEWQSL2TIQ2Mj7xxlhmH4Z4KmiNDd12FTUFElYkYGZjI0BVL0G5WkHJIHshAiBEARVQAu88ElhjhAUBRRQAo0LknFdVE5Gw1uH0xlgvHIZVhkw4qk4z4y2Fszr9dBVRYUOWQVQQQZkTFcPiUvaEguekWCjUajGSBFU/ETDGkCkCiAIBkgAWSm1gpglZBBIEIuM926ioouITQkjYK/uiAfUx10aFq3FSNUgEAKawd+fOm67/wUD/oGdhROf0fYcefcTMmbG63TOjmYfPOaCvz4Am1TFDxkQFx55V/z/23jXmsvM6D3uetd59zjczHN4kkrpREkVLlh3LiuVcjSY2isRt0jRo0AJpgRRtkzZNUSQI0P4pUuRX0B9tgTRFEaBBarQBirRpk6bNPbbruHHjRJYvUiLJkkhdSFEkh+QMOTPf952z33etpz/Wu883dBw7l9b9w/2HHHwz59tn73e/e6313MxsPR6g2I2xe+P5s7h46LH9P3j2oZfPLkBElGme31gee7J96LN/5cVP/81vDe7ePD/09bAs+V//iT/yPZ/4cBzv9/X8sF6y98iexG5347b3v/rSD43otngFPCJA99G7F5n9L3/+ByNSpAHeKhuVSdCQEYJAK1vYZfESHI7M5i0zyyemvLPqXVi7XSgq/MrdSMtQhN66f/zjP/R3/vR//CPvsNXfOX4Fjh/7uf/jv/if/6Nf9Ef/ye//HY89cr3yBmnMUa5WrapYIZvtq3ZRGptJYdbGCIL0LBa7m5tZTkM3M5pyOjhA8uYZec0ff/T6xz/wyG95aP/2MK7Lu1/61hfuXt596fY37x3u3bu8W4lq73vsA4De/9jTD1+7+e3v/85fuse4PH79OH5a8S2HmRlU6dSERLNEQnJfjAKWXfvetnziH6+XuDMufzzjvu8+/rMvjepdf+0/3Dfm+Xr+v5cR6pb4phOIhzkc3DCG9nQ7+83/LHcz15/N9UslF6wyOnNKpCZIkpUXV0keV5TRSbbcEs+mJ317xpfv/qW6CK2Kr2q8mOPVkjumZGXWn0kyU+ZP+dn38ZdrRXK8kvE5xS0hlWq7X+VbJ/nLdlnZPwt0W34N/snLd+X97J9Tf35zumGGzFliy5qznoAhnppq2/n+t/Kfom8HMl6I49/a7sfJTbbGHAJu2vIs/Vn+kzRv8wKO5xDPb5/zAAjcflU7+9Q/TW+j++Pwt6TbShXHdUuKl4H0m37tX/onuubK+3H8DOKbmvLMtyGp5u+x5ePWnv6nX//j1lg/i7wVEBLuVhFeEpGVsiBJpGWeghMJBEApCWTCvO1v/Cb/ZziNX4xtsfZ4ZR3fWvsL4AF0KYUwKkUpQ2uERvQ1Dpei7gsjAAAgAElEQVTrIXhcY+15XHPtvS+7llFkDd04e/czj//L73n4+36JX3f74gvfuP03X37r7+3aWWQqy3dTZhaZQJztnvjou/7Vpx/7/l/6tHuef+32X/3y639OoYixjb1KFGQpMU0JiDT+b3/31k8991LdzP/sd//nJ4TwhTs/+tMv/FebbhbNGSGjVWBqzs5OzZ1Wrn6KkQa2tjuMQ/HNmi+IyTeu1FmalaGF0WYFzCRsTmxQhn8+54YB8wKEkUj3Ym8RJS701g/d21L1Lo1j5LLY3/r0F37kJz73TpHwzvGLHg89tP9dv+uTSlXG+LJrUKUH2IhBsFmTQolUZqR5i0hvbYxwECYBJk5DS7DtLNakl8MkQnI3ARFjt1tqJqnIyBCkIXNKoNUixxiz16jqwptLqsZprAOiu0WEGfft2kfbb34/P4oxBOQaoMw4ei/2a7kwWVvGOBQTNBVS5WpQmTAzs4oEU0oKtD1gvlzPCONizdJaHtayvVkPdzXGQN+ZKfqIYe71NTPy8u7dV7/50nNf+tKXvvLca2+8eXmI911/9BPPfAiP79/9wSeffP/T++s3xvFiJEgnovcOqK/9+tnulW985XEdzvobjz3xri8/s3v5ocOIoJkS3vzd+2d+07t/m84vXnv5jR/5sZ//yU9/5YWXXlv78Tu+48N/6r/9Y9d3/XC8zMPFejxXRoyLfjzS9tcfefzH7v6NF85/vu0aYGMMJUkVxpsjWoUrmrlCFGaKcWQtAKp4oUwhNjZxJVKQyIy5iQrlc519pNQWD6iikFursKvJW/13/8vf8s7z9s7x/+9h7lUCG22MUKA5IfWM5i2HSSoT5JGJDJJjdBCZsGQqAKtyBKy37LBlERJAKg2WI8x4GbeP937ytfOfXPj4kw9/6vGzTz56/WMAHr728K/9RyB+v+wx8vLW3Z98/a2fuXv51aXtnO5mzdp+WXZtf213zdkaamxswEiZIY/rpyNvu3+0tff9owv6V3J8LdavlSt/jC9/6oO/wZff8IuVv+fj8kfwAF2TpFKTOIor2l5N4wzIuIUTFnra27dcgLdZgugqoOHK7z1XbAkKm2ymkgNm9No0z5wZ3DzBlfmA2eRse5Tqz6t/FfYk/XHzp8C92KBOrcK5+ovUncx1WiJupoqblIiT/ZuvxuVfRPuA+dO0xx5E8KRVeQf5ao5Xsr9C56bipuKL4/JFW77b/Ol/VMuhvK94PscXkast3yms0PqLac5OkeVXl+5KVkiSO10p4USrAHNuKCoLzquFvTnJLMAinb89JOPBO/H283gbz3DHDba9Clu/4sXez/5Zjs/CnqU/TX/PL9PIac14XuPFHK9IyQcchTJhFS1vD0GrtP4CPPiX+X8AhLggrpSCJS8hDVTmPfbPsX0cU9KGX+pDeWXUKgIJbVraLeSPylvj8lXwBu1JP/tO+8fut6U11q/m+GaOV4WZCwUyc0KbVw+RKNjVCYpAsrkmtwpmUIbGeeJVXD2dlhqEvy0cY/7/L+DdWiKU90GLvJs6z7w34o6wkglqKCSNjDHWi34/NPoYI/vlepGZmSuajeitmZkNhER3ZKyUKQeF88Mrn/3mn/qC/bknHv7OG7v3P3Ltw82uk7zsty7Ga29dfO3W+WcO612DAX653nf3WqFOH9kT6bB7l9/6mRf/my++9meffvgHnnj4E4/sn1n8+mwC436P89fPP//inR+7v37jst/jtoNFhpuJMFooi4Rp9MQg8JWXXzuNNx7ct79x+0crVsTcUjFGuLcyg5EV4Y3VB1oiswIiRfcRvdEpkJYjyqdeqcqqiJiR1ppmflFeuBlwI4yerSZvmaBzxo6YXA6llKIjIGgdq7v3Mbx5JBxcmkn6dd/17Gc+9/ybd8/fKQbeOf7h43u/5+kYuW1qQM7CJrNqHCVCgVQUbzCV1pgRS2trX9W17Jo0Ce0EFdNurmyvzZAKAEYvSe2UFyYFmoVgokiBVG6ZsZIbJSkylAJHjppxZB/LriGxxuHn+cOv+Ve/Y/nnzuJG2oBSMPMGgbm6WVCESFcOc9cgYRGdZubNgBid5FhrT1Ac7u2WszGO0Vdf9jxAbhqjrxdulhkKsbX0JZXmHmPAGKMjoeaPPfHE9z700LMf/dibb959/fZru/3+0UcefuiRh24++gh3u4vz891usWYCL+4dAV5e3Iv793rT+vLzly1vPnX9yx9cXji70JAVFtrsod3jv/X9/6av98LHh9775O/515/8jd/3XT/1s8//0J/5C9/+8Weu3ThbD4N00X25ZtS92+cx5B7j/OK9u2deuPhSSpm9Yj4gjBFupBn/0uf/BWxKv8woj2WjqeyrQWuGVE6fIQBWdzpJJ2ZCyK5RKnQ2lQ47DaAF0FyhJAyV84Hoqxlbsxj44//9T965e/nOQ/jO8St2/JE/8DsfffiGcRaCY422tIyKyLKJ76UgRKabBTIDZgW0mBlDQWNzzziZXMLdUoBCOYVH3pokc8sxuVKL33j07GOPnn38xv4DD5093ez6P2YTeLG+ePfyK3cvv3Ln/EvNfYwgGmDKoNcMx0A1mtH3y85piy+L7a7tbuzazmmGmrKdub/H/N0QaDcz7oMH6V5fXyY76aC5rLo8CN4+0vbfbQ+gOjG+OY4/Dd03Qw5YyVOyzEtIIiPAEjOWxaVF6oEJHMyoBOm5sUDNWIiftryO6Q+5RX4/YIAiADbDBlVgHYwPuCMK4mSKaIa0VYFctNLJfretwSsjEJ2cafg2DIobI++USJbiA86oVZiblwfsjlgUF7AH2l1tDfAkJT6gybOnzB6D7Y03NBubc41XlPc38uGpJdm4xRtTcrs4ReDXVbsEpFSxUZjBEyzd4NZgn1RnmKlomoaWwuY5S1Un/Tburap/nFalhdfRiNQ0sq+ytaL07MrYsWRs24dcXTv6e8DHaDvg+tZWSXmuPEe8ApyjvBR1JRet+3vyLM1I2on5yvpGlZd70sFB87tvbXya2ybo1dXfqYWUNN+sRCcz2XAVbnelws2Umc93orOozDWOKBO1q/tRQc4nMx4SuE5/l7WnaI+BO/PH3jYLUFfcUb4Z/VXoTgV7FhIeGXaS6eL0LYJVOnH6YaqcMjUlvakwpyLpriib9Hq/B5B5NdNxSXQ8EAODiA5aZsCakPCaqGePNTN6HI7rRdchIg9j9WZrX/vopEWPxZsMoIxMlA8BjFZUhlAo02lIhSIRbuyRyiyE1WlzilFm5thozZHeGsJoqm49a83TUkIShtQoUBRJ87h+9mTk4XJ9iwUAu2cEjTEC8zmqSyADUXQ1louefu7rd//833mpVs+vefbb/swf+Bt1py7WW3/t879X0LJbJMQYNFClnZlICIyEeu/LbpeR5j4ikGqtISXK3BRBOoAQzCfRY4yg0c0AxQi6uXmGCDc3ZfjSMtLcRk+aUMVbmgokLHt4WhnV1GdmpnvbZDx4+bU7/8Nf/L8Ox/5OPfDO8eDxyU+8/5O/+umM1OTdYIxRZpMSI9I25UZzppLmmcxM97IgcSVMk95pzcZIb5PVWcrYPgIpmrtZquD9iHz0a/1w7/ytZ66d3dyXyaUKKJRkbUYbnwaMESlVAoKpJ1j7vPnOMnKxa8+0X/MhfldLy+wRaYC00lqK5k0jYgxrrTSKEIQ04xgJBGYGBs3R116jF2+IQTZXhqqkUdKpwFCU72C9n8fox8Ol09wsIsZxzYHL83NfOMbYXT+DY+0DWIZyt+wvL88Pl+dmu9uvvdaO9/vtFxfkGfKxp67d+tiNlx8bZgRMyBhJ2m//4L//9EPPxnpXcdQYObrMwq7/0T/2J9/znvf9wT/4e/eLRT/P9RDrYX/t2vHunfP7bxGk4c2Hxt9848/W+4v15koRyMigt0yZV+8Oa5Zlwi1heh1DQ4kwNwTLbb9iTnOQjohcWqsJsxt7H9sKYJWDs0o2NrK5RWZENLf5TuUv6zb3zvHO8f/yIRXQ1CQl4PsWXRAUrL0AM6gGbFObYQ2h2CAPtaVFTC63MuRQYvNVMpsyQJS+XyxwJjJFO3/t/GdfvfcZ85ah/XLj+vJ082tn/vhud9Nx1uyaEse8DeDQXz/2+4d4+dBfr4rEQDM/jtG4kCRMLikzoy1e6pTQuFRAZGhE8D69uZm57a61aztve3t98WXv++IAKJN0VRxq9kk3BY0uWMSXx/lXWnuf0ADmuEWuQhot08Byt5/Yhap4pRPCfEm4lER5HoKVjZacseBEmRVvZeks6+c08ZRMYXaSWhbulCEYIGZuHv3V7SQmTFLtG1iYjW3WJbNB2tiMVTXOMEVMgPNkwYmr/gObcV/FOtPIiDQnyltoVpRdWAEiQWOmyj66fsdmwqqqkRUy3cq4BczmSwVoGrg1qFUQT64/Z2FnM1QAytwy4GxDher64xTLtpEhiSvgEJVuvVnpb+zCU4t0QgU17w6unPd16tK5ZeuJsHltVF2oNSrybVK/6WVS96uUJKl8RXgFYzurMZ1Jpymo5G6crZQeUDzSCtK0q/TJiWwlKnJ3nlilfpfporZEQrNM8QGiLLegbiOTmJnH2LSX0nSZK+5MisYqFcpzPLXFz5/IMttqmX8oN9yC0Gdiyn3j5Ti+qFSNEpTaLKVsQ1lZrSBtJiVK4imOk8a5yJNwFEg+T4xC0gwKgOLwenpcYspSkNQ1F1mCVudmXmKboIFwQaMPGI/jfEQ/9PPMWPOw9nXtQ66RK80h631lA0kO0dwWA2LZlTe9RnRBi7fIQbJX2+0cMQwIUcqeA1DCjVDDeujLssTovvPic85CbWal2BircTNyIDIAWmQnzdz66LCgOapwE966+GZry8mIqve+zQ/QnKNnPa2lX6rrgPLCy/zp5948tcf/xm/8D04vkS9863+kwSsqO8p9nql0r3+tsYqy0GiLn9I0mjvJHEkDAY00W0CJwJCy0FwtyzJiFG/NmpVsh+YFzjgNRW2NgIHmSpEOk8EilAAjwWxsRMl4TJijASQlvf+97/r9v/uf/zN/8SfewQnfOerY79qnfvXTH/nwE/3Q2ayCBhRq3kbkHAVOC64qHOZErbkNzNFtQes1CM7N0AUZBGoKkyMdhHtKNSXJyL7i+cvXX757Pg6RS37PB/bJpO8hIbsV15SCqPnaLR9lQ6RCWXRrgFZWlhi2fnH98Rf9c9/Wvvd9/u2t9u7cpcLpObpktjSHs7kSwBAsI8CMMZbW+gjfLzFit9tHH5EpMaK3+YLGst+N3gUMDLJYrvXSrBgNk7RGQPLdopY39jcTXMY6IscYUCbXyIxVtq5trHdff2299cr5Wy8j7l+7vrRPPf2lZ/bH/aCQShfvvHn8xr3jR2589zOf+C7oGGwZq2FRrr2vuxs3/uh/+of/ux/6C3fuvPnEu9/F5QZS7u3ycKAtpPXDhYhxPYE0g7VQJODKtOaGXAOtlC0K2OaRtTSv4hXCsrQxhtEywvemSF98RAAw16xdtpjjVLLRyLScROGq5AoxgUUFEBGn3LKocf07xzvHr+BBoLQW7hg1ZjI4W3UuYCV4c3hZbPnGAIMZkFIyI4wGkomkGakFmKE0iUndgbnRCKYg+Kz3MgPOkQNgx+Xd8aU4pE2nAZCMyOZtZCqGLw5JmWYNUGLG/QWDcGMZiqaRER1G0sV0LlVI0b3yMHrGIc7furh7tj8rfN/NFt81a/vd7oy7nbXGnaMBUaDLUECDYIgZ39jsEAUYQalBA3V9crMuyaA7ONnloFIxQbRpoDBl5SkYZudYsRDcGoer/6icOWCGq96FFSWes3O4QoRmyY6ikFZ/VI6Xp8DuK5Rq4nTbP3mgCFfpqVExPLMnnDItlFvgCbKcIExWn2BVVZ8Ik8AJKuDWjXAqLrNK+tl0GStRev6K04dXbynTSQZJn5dza5CohCppUJMRygop3wiypzwQPOj6w5ORzATKZ2jhCX+rTtBmJ1hMXZplZn1kOeZzGuNOqHQmjuQDzfx2EmYzvX0DSx+IGyzxp3OyTE/9XeQWU7+F5emKwMsHEwjNClDdTFaugla4NfiagBpObfOE1E7ZJCwrgLo1uAKQr8SQtVJm8NSpqTylHJTOQjF92uuHBVajoDltdkvFHrSaQ58i+CqdftukquktvExTCPrgF5xdKIIwKwZi9aEcFfqXgDRya8iVR9DqYwXB6pmsMJ3e++h5XONw6Mc1Donoow+NMVaSTmYAhY/vfWgkCQ2acU/SUqt7lRhB0xijBL2BYWY9IqXQoAkQYs5cUlCgNYsIKs2tx4Bh7YdlaZmdTkWKJgWmbWfudi2il+GK5uCp0AyFBrdunhQ9VC3RJDyBpDeTomQBAMznBwNalpaSEBkCeH/V129d1HJ87Mby/d9xpW+8ffhCIs09iyTMNFtMKvfaHNlaA+FcpETSSxAl0uj0YmBZPdEJJXxpMwwcjBhtcSkr3NLMwA2cgWRVWxtIN1MCZsQpmjXczeYYgD3CaMakS0I5cxgsMh559MYf+nd+8Mtfv/WFL7346ht3j8e1im67mvi8TQt7eqqMjFrHesDn+erxm3vwnPphTkNOEoCTd9pptJTaIie3bdqMmQBU96jqxFP8wNQ4XE0DH8zIvDIuPo3VijiwDbb0AAbB06jwAYY8TmG21eT8gsgoM8vUyeOXc/RzFXYiyMwqB/d0XtvnXHHUtzHfL0h/eZCVf9qMT5bf8wWc+kUSguZfmI6Ttc3zdMFx5W/8C42jH3v0+lNP3nz22SecFJNmNXFbluVwPFL0xRSCEDX/ra8vgxKO3vvmb0yrMqnmvoZRWfOZ1nwiUUpzn8oQQ4C38uGvvfb6m68eoWburx8GPrS/3N+8J3/rzsX7l+s3l0Mtp5ToVGrZtRFDkNOKu1UU1u072hjh7gfe+1z/P7+MT7/HP/ZB/64b44aLEQmytaXoBMwaZjZJyXQaWlPKd4tou93SR9Db0qTIpTWFzI2miOgxmptBEaO1NrJSZZSj93WdhaNy1DSvFJLKcTiO9XB+ceFJHS4vjvfa4d6bd24fjseLi3s8w+573nP48I07j9CXKJ+L9fP3f/b1+88t9LOzb3vsptsSsTodvs/ouds5LKQ7d16/d/fevXuHJ94NCImGHBJGskekctlfO+ertFQSIXdDyhcTIhVnLZsZCZhbxFyqiUyGQHePEW4uB4IRVXfWI1LEI3izjHBf5owVWT6L5ZElITLpVo27N4eSNWAHAbSGdwLr3zl+pRvCGVzOSBlNkwU335RElSDiRCAUiuaeQUBmrkzKajsrck41le5UKENmyVnBzLQtOmdoe70mUzZ7BVUBGBn1lkAGrIq5IYrl2UUHNAOd0QoZgAaQzTwCNDRroYEcgANRnmDMBJgaQhi5LAYEw4IjZRHRj4MHEmw0p7m5wfdtf7acufniu+ZuNMlpRU7DZto53Koz7JjeLkUJL5s7Sgmrd7wZIRS5saiVtVtVlQyAVS7zgWbwqjB/8P14IhbiKkeBVkAWH3yx0jY0Dg90g5O9ub2VRVHIYk5ub1znJBliq7kL3hQeiGQ4xYfwZKe6UQmBQv/sCjesFLLJVp2Y50notdU3mszPVFE2cNV11G57UlXiVFddRZ7PBodbZEBOpeOpkS6wcEtyP5FPJ1+uuqmrhMMJeW2QZoF7ISKrN9YDjfGkthY7d4Px3Cd4y40je+pk6ozK3uakUZztasX4pSaV9QROXpVlkxT6tgQXoCpnFXe3bl/VYlPUdxVLx621PsHRV/TgScU91U9bql/9scixgmyjvBaSNAcHNq9czuUxaYc61Wsynv68EaE3sd4D51PGSGV2WfExJlxBpGR1X0E6MpLD0BJdKVGl9KG3xEotwWHGjRRcfeWQ5cjDOo4jjhfrYeR6cTz0XKUUs2yTCbXWADkbyt7PTMos161AaGhulbatY8EUmcphaPU4j7ULZczgVQxlJIupDETOVjZGFJUglFC6AfSpQImE4Jn7/ZKKlHzXcoTR3H3EYC02BGhmJfY2EjkGi7MJmyo7iCz3/LbdLMFrNmLmptSaw+aEAeb2w3/vW3MMJn3/x3/n9d2Ttd6+9ebfvTi8ShTW56IaF2WQFn2QJJzwVBpkvkDIzMpv82bSxNITciEhaxYx3Fs9JpFBwt0wYO5KVSghphzUahEqESMAurcYKAd5uhPMMYdTbpONVYG6oWFuNTPLDBo/+sxTH/nQE4U+z42GImGwjCyRRCozY2QOjTGGgWvvkSOR09/LaChvVQPU9n5cR70ZUX+hTNdsDjxSgyV1yGnZzYo0wCaL5iTy+FJILWLE7qwp8+QCNXeNtHLhD+WytNGDXtQPkVaheUVYq7FdDQcwRyaTKxEhGNtWl9IsYhQPqBCnCLEi21LmBaqfhouVyVcP+ESbvS1ZmXeazaGqDAiSbG1qRDPgi+WI1ESAq7vMrCuZV6yAuY84Ut6s5g6TDyKBdLfeR2stI6YVZyVhymIMgN4YRXEXzS0lFeVeytOWWA+JRDN39t6RkgtRAcB0N2VOSd4Mpdv26toQK5VrcxffeRsxuLQoeLBWbyTIKr3OU8+9/srlvTUvWz+MtuOS/sZle/H2vdHX0Djq+ic/0FLp22yVzXsfnM3EyRMUzDnkw9jy4iMFHXD/a/Ez38ovvN8+8VT/VQ/7WTMzWaIpgzMbJ8isWdKutUiE5CBk7tsUmplD7q4MEszYubvZGjH68fL+xeFwuR6Ou2Y2DuP8co24uH/edjsoixow1oNGZL88XB6O5+cj14uLfnk4H+N4/7jefPzGYz/44fGRs/UMhG7QWvMxxu2//sJPhN58+AbNYS1GGIvcnzS13XWMnRRjxNnZ7s6bb/6F/+Uv/6E//Pt2OyciMs/P7+foOdTXfu3Rp5Sv7Je2GbMrCTJjZAXIt1KKcmEJXEzKTNIziqNR3HQI0+MqNefr9CKFTrVoMcUU3Px5EJkOs6IJoXg+yco2MdTqf6cbfOf4lT9SyhHbG0gKLM1TdFNtDkYT4e6QQmrWIDTzjBADYCodpSCyTClBZ2a6MSQh5wdFAHI3yDh33CStx6gGcZtpzelaRphbKvvoNBaX2zaUpFA0ylJBQ2SWOCcJZSZiCmiQRdYiGlKKFSa6HaPvl33vIgxOaQC+tKlEiojIcISQl/0CfQYlE3D3M98ZuXDZL2eNe5d7M4UTaL4kR88wNLMWuVZXU29Pk50KVSufaWzAk1hKvilXrAJZ81tLIkM0nXI5TjU6K812etiYW1E9pyyQpePSg7NkbC4qJUd60A11gl3gVUe1zZDNbGt4TqxAZIr1VsuT98bUKdqWrMdpWjanw5EPNBtbMnx1IFc9kiYLkZpk+42qWoDlNmLeurtJQX1g1p1bsMR2Kd7WqZKTqLGBqFeuPFXcbCTbE9S10dxOOsBT90pAzE11uWWa50l7N0Mu6j6e3EwlbMpG5GxzKsFo63NQMd6bAFLb9boSlFZA7vT1qb7/QWzSMG9KzmnOJKniKk4wlfVJyLdHAVqtignYTpxuskbxQAtY10bbHGLmKoGqTaNG4DxlWkwUOGnYEpZLEDpxGG3Di2qeIwIGTUXcNM8hJCsaLaSy76OyAwlBPCaiTHHcXTBhTRyBIxIrjj0vhsb54XyMfjHuj4gxegqh0czdbR2j0QCn27oevXlklzpgh34BwRp7SuAYnWaUKaWoUUoDhpnB2dfuS5Oy94uTCdNYuy8ek1QJN5eQGqLM0XsWdzWy+85YtX5GbSAUfQqAGTmjI2uVEOh9LfRhjFh2s7EjwXl26UbKYKQx58WvZTa2p1+j7oByt1vWw3Cz+ptJ3b43fua5t2beI/lv/8DvPj1rL735Y5NUCiBgFZ8dSKVbK8KD141MSsqUO90ssxLYkEybG+ODGxGUYc3NEJl5zGVZcpRiELIaYCmiF2BXAScSR3TSYkwTQikTortK5kAOHd1aoeCJrJmaL62v625nEVND2wyERR+yIG09rsnsPYQYEb0POcdYTbbsl4lfuXZt6esYOZp7z0HDetnNvY8wq4AB0hEjjT5RbvhYhzdH0hrdFzNGpjtj5LTVibn+zRzKtm8RUWuvchozlClvqJYVqIWTkM8pWM4AA6XFGrPhirm3Cjz5SbbFM6YRwBih0c2sryNjS+uRlTwAAoXew92mq1NmRJgbGmg2RlSeXrWIU1wACvC56yFTMaLmkxXQ7ZXOJ0GygmmMRYVEyoyI0l0zUhGqAYoCvmN98QwZvHaSMsSOkUq4z61m9CzOUO0ahGhWdkqGihI32izgKfU13BuNlbUwk4oA9yUiJ7lHEOiL995Js2aZufiSOcxLjptuHiknMwGDmYtJ+uhj2Xk7gvA+tB7j8iLtEg+d6bNfOOzoXMjmuHbIvEazlIEJcKyDzSKyuddsjZqixUlmmYa9iSlhRoa+ccgffu7v33n1p5+9/sRHHnv/J5/+yPtuPHFj2UGDkQZz0NwBBNObtRkUKj/ZChDOpcDyNfL+8eLN+299/dYLn/uJ51979c03XntTpmA8dv3mb//4Iw/p4u79u9H2Ds/U2X7v6EvLi/NzoJ0f4/Yhvnk3v3a7v5lUw1315dXjE3H5nhduvP+D1598343Hn7hmTP8Ht5/b7d5YbPGFNDm+eeul49qbz4WtIcEzBW/3Lu6/8eb9L3/l67/td/zgJz7x7PGgi4seaZcXl5fnl2e7hyR+581ff77/1uvja5VgQS8zjdJkolXiogFsyMhSHqfSvZE2Ylhpyms8JS7eIrNkEYByDPNWQ9wYaSajRQQTRkuIadnTd74R+ItupMapcXinP3nn+BWnjFIyJoqNKGJ0uYGwNCEzkQgbGc29oKLItEndKHyPqSBpzuhBo9NCkNDcxsjiukh09wnXRCatnBLO9vuSRFelohLTVgIsZUmaT2AEAWSIJpalAACnB8Imb12AToVyQu4FwJk0aL7YrufIkJn3MZqfQfUjABlTlBC6MY4AACAASURBVGXenHPoSHMjXYpQEhh9rGMtXmj9qLE5fGHb+W6xdrZcb2xkMFGwIUFhSBaQMsxdhlTQDfCaTEMlyYMVEmN1QZTyEsVFwhg2saCSC5VoLwUZLRHV+02jBNsatiqUrhC9ibxBtBP9dGu5UnD3mmNvUNBsA3LG8QCbGf2GB9psM0poytnGgKcQyVPuQimVNlCvCMUnGtDWbEzzm+LeL14ydyMn8TMnXevEptTJxXI2MxsRdGNdaWOMnixnTnhasXkLPSCQATrMrSC14lmZT8C8oKpTRgU3+BGcvj40m/LBrfe2zb3m1MkJmuQzQYI3lnVTmd/MvL6NlHXygyERE3ucZFpdOdPyBBhuV5K4olDq1GHO27TNXOZCwkYIo5Q4GRZtBo12SrXUphAtKHgTz2xCxKnBxSYfmaw9yUTRLUdM9p1tI1SdFKHFZPM8satVWaY178ic49Ie0/pUSRcg5lC4NakTXupchFKdxOV4c43L8/Vuz3Xt68VxzXn3FmLIAjAwuNBLf5yj+IaJIUb0ZEPXSAxL03TMTEZ5adFboxTZxZEGN1OuZkgQSW8e0UuBnAlJ7t72JRpGjGSzGMWYqFCrBs62l0ZFQIQjmb54ca/mmpsrjI4kkSfru8gcsbghkBHwygC8YtcCih5S+tIiZZK504ypv/KZV9/zrv2vffbRoQSxrsPMUllt290L/ekf/sa2nPiRJ5/+2FOfqhV+sd568fbfIYk0M9a/WlqrnkeAIunVd8HMRozWWmRgkgaIlNNL22zmIyKTKaV686WvYU6Dwa5cOmaFqxMbOkvdE5G0VGpze8oo3SlVLhc1ffK2bD43gmZySYxhxr52mK3HS1vs4jAS2fuYQTXQ6B2aJBp3BPLafh8jqnElmZGRHYC5C2mTKsgcaW7TeIOm0NUIKzMiW2tzU4p6ymeESDUtJNuuxRrlbgli9O7eItNbm9aspeFIZdbvEt1OrF2CbNZ7eF3GRiUQqtdoZGTKACVSFIJFknBK2rWWhfuXhDuzsiUtqw33xswoz00Kas1t0unT3Se5HSogrplvQmSomPDb9bWdxYhNOI3m1MZFzZhmJ8iCUkgQoaV5hOAwWHh1Pdv2bMqhTJlr4pCTAmO9D9IxcUnYwlpyjc3IEcPdo4c10jh6tp0TyBH1q5t5ZooyWF/7breTQjELojHGsrQYiYS3Fj1m21nRUHMM7GULo5CIzCC5rnHW9B2PXPvahb16X8d+uZ731y7HY7FbHmnXrt88e0hne/Sx7nalcBYIFuM0ka7o5aKUNJ+sRZuIevEOYuSh3biFh7701bv331xHxudvf/PTLz7/5z/9N/69D77v776Cxx974ql3PfbUI+967xPvvnnjYSD2vi/7JWd17CEpMt966/7rd966PKzfuv/Sz734/Ddu3Uo/v/7U4eW7l699nTwzmdLpo9/7+Vv/yqP2M2/x1nop2a61vr7x6LXrzZAjLkf/5uF4YLsTkTvarryC/QB888XjK68e/v5nb/sZ2vXlU0/sf8ND7/65vNgvN0hLscG++soLz7/49W//8IfoLTRqMhsg4G+9ef7CN146v3/423/70x/64BOxXpYJ8tm1h/Zn129cO+v9EMfjB/fffTu+AWaaUuHuBGpa36whEyO7kZExEec5tgw3F6aQo1Qq5la9vjdGFMUOkVHVR5FAMIFEIQEXG0FmznBCQEVjYNMvNDF/53jn+P/+mMuPXsoLsGwwBNamNxEhAiOiuUNo9JyhXjVzxUm9IMirPxSEMg3fMPMrLwqS8o3ANEpprdO7AaKqfMyUu9vUdBXL2jCGDBBHxNm+jYjpvsGSUQ/CKlYRBRRYowOyTPRY3U2koUmogNjCoaL89CRLo8mibbK0BgqGVLg353LqhWkks+dxTV1K6AVUmvtCcb/sF2tndrZrbef7Zm5stVtNF+I0sZM2RW7EHPpVcBHSVPtSdURW9qUA6NUhxgNNT5ZpcZ5oOxuEskE7M5ztpLMoC+Ur98sJd/HKVcWgmMJBbWdIPKgom+DYJgisC3ICg67Qtq3hPNE9N/yMsxGcnqs1dbUrbcdJ6XQ6VdoUnm0p6jwpRGZbmCJsay91+uUbYFjXudCVTc8YMymkOvOJE54w1c1Y9crTdHNtmbTLjZg7u9M52SNmoNp26Tf1Jk+BCV6EyZwOQTGVpqcerHrPWd7UFZ7NKjGVCicDnCv279ZV88RPvYJRtXkJPSDmmb8rNsnlqWucdFCeWGXbk16A+dU92p7QK0nnRnvVBJkzrRgH0sn8tvhZc6VgLqSJSaJXdpfKPtcsRsAgDlOra5ZYCSc5cg2OyPU4Lte4PL+4d4j7cBz7Zc8oimDzHRYlAgaNC8BHhrsjkTlEmg2YUgNbQW7eYm6IOaJ7m+290zMrKXpl0lrpcKRN4lXbiuSC3NtMJDZGDkVW3rovSCWggqVLR1cTuMiozqX8cczVR2/mOXLeU/Poueys9zTAzEeMjDDS2jwBA5p7Vj4aZVYiF3ej6Egs3qo1NeFvf+n2//2lNwUc1/y+j787+lh2TsBlGXrhjeP/9BMv3jkfk1AN/L4f+A9Pr49b9z63W/Y9uypWQjlZcGAFqcEwBdMGEI1NQFta77ExqC1HikCzCoEOCUCzFhFKxbzmKtUu3R0tcyTF0qkKNIwYk7ZPQEkv61GEYudLsRvMSJWKPZWJmV+Z65pjjFRSto4uCV0FwGZi2XsffVl2bddijM25tCEiMsvGGXWik5MCQ4LpzlQV7lO9Zs0RssWVWTkZRm+YL7i2zOFThW1npC/MkVBSblZZHVnZSlKWGf42sMvpSwYBiti6poKNDIp0sm4Qy+yqAnYskWhuNLqXQNEyJSIyWqvMg4lWGJm01jgG9QC3wlSeanK3zLK8TGueM+g1WnlOptJkoDfLITqs+YmuMHpnRdBhG2sWgd+LeG8RYc2mvkBKUZk2bYXTcmPN1u8S6LRminRn0duHRGBZWgzBjJQ56ml2N05uhEWI7jSQMFfF1RJyb+CJFQwQ+92udBRowVnqo9Dp0kzTGZkUfPHa2ylDNdtZb21LRYk1zO1d1/OxZ9r99+L5r+kLX8bOvTxeOle1wznjZn/oyZZzP9/0kylYToLGZOPblLBHZna525p4/vLaMc5e+8Zb91/v/dB3bXeIFeR1er/z0sdX/MjPfuFrDy1v3Tu/dnZ2fe9Pv6/dyLNrlzffjaf2Wi7Xw3o8jjUh9DVfu/P6azdes6eOd1e7/QYeeaI9Jj7xne2156S9oWFxPNriiev21F739u3zY2Tvdjk0kvfv6ygstB1z51wEdzfUvYbMaXTdfIp+ht6tr/GBly5e+PVn7d4KIBMyRWgcL3/8R//ah3/Pv8VlT4iREbmOAOyv/9UfP1ysEl548WtuvHbjhjUgIyKUAxG6OK6Hyyeufbj57qj7YpY7V4RgJmOLSBKttTHGbt9inPyy6k0WqNlejQiloTB3IMeAkZGShsFS8sUiigwGb4AYCBWVuRT7FT9SGtB6UyL/tX/xOzJEK8K6uJEKJBkopLWWUV6IPFGHYs5sRKKPLlrNVLx5TTWdNjF6assdmQlWNTKJnG6qZlOykYBPhoPlpOrNPMaZRh1Z8RluylRrPmfScULgNw/9EJ2pdLasaIJtUKKNU4QTv8iJBGWJLKdp0hAC5M0wLeKZMby1CpwqJ0aKGVmkmCh+gjEyprnB5lLo5iFFH3VxKsdzZBg4RoByY20opCsTydZalTBZFlLRS1i3tDb6cLNUuC8ZU6BDoi1LZnmcsIwQBWYM1ai4OaDmHhsji9NDbxonloFEkfGLuzmDQcsxQkJO4zc2U5bLZc7Z/IyJKwockTk5gZIEd46RFf9AulGPP3ozA2AAXl8/oUQy4bTAINmajSEDJbXW+lir2nN6ZBAcY+z2++hRjOm2eIys3ZDAiCQ4RrTFFm8jR7H86+1lVkT8UhYiUgBaa6lYvOZ/9UsrB3FtrRUtwlrro5u30i7bJDRaZCxt1peVd+y29L5uLMiISMFJQ+JE2osMkopUoxKBtdw7Xc3ZlFqjL4xlWcboiy2Roc62OCS6KEbK3SEcx9HZ1kMvPfl+t8uIZq25L7bftf2+XTPxrJ05G6mEjIgJDwm5QXEw4QiZwY2lRKoBUzdzVTZIAghWBcIrFR8LhJn8xmmYvKnMZxbCzLHOzdkyUeHPs4WI2USR1agWKVUnx49SguXJ++QEhdWoa/MA2ZwMbLajwqT8nTiem8/lhrpNlmj1upONUbF4E+DDdJCfGRpm3PSoG4cfm71X8U5pV0YFRV66MurEKYOjOvGNFjvrlO08J/S5PVyYgQGTgJkyZ0ozEm0SITcDmZNebuZr16SSE9Odm5Vl5ukXzTCSCeDpZH5afSCNGTI+0KxOf88Hur5NKlo2dCeusTYR3jz7KWcqewbqSjO4kVQ1+aucQk0BD3i6bO0j5mra6M5bHiCsBEVW23Y1/BlZlJmNflrXOmwireusbqnkoCxTcCQ6EcEA7Bj3I/P88n6k7sf9Hr3HqmmUrMx0eqjDGJG75WyMFVAylQPOMZLGkQJpbhqZ2ZADUmV9lR/V5kuT5pqxH4lk0EwhN5OJwm5ZxhhOixjWvK9pZPR+YgWbeUqQ6La0pY9VgpXJBMTKfkjIKug1WW6vopmNrqXVmJ/WLEIS2Hjs3YxJRT/CQEuV58HUD1KIZNnUY0RUD1TiQBBi1ozptXvHH/3c7aLi/qXPvPb5F85/9Uduvuvh/fWdv/TG4We++tZXX70oOPg0EPl1z/76U0P43K3/NUc0a2uOpNx9jFjcI6MtBdmxlMDznipJ9j7MPUY0N6RV0RwSax92slKPzClFWb80A7JYFyMH3akUMyW6neyJYnqWUspqzxdvQ31ny7H3YqD3de1rB1OT8q0IiWreSnoQUo5orWXCHQVb9bXTi5ecvY9laRmiYWy0bZAxeluaImQAWREg8CmHFWz08Ga1/ZpU1tCgVetVkmCx4l6qMxminK0gQFJlxoacsbJGI23tvUZKbXHKCRrl7hGzJ982D5hZ9vDFxxggmJxgJCmpeQPU+yiTuM1wCJm535/1vk56JQCEeQOAhjxmpKxN5njFs43IVFRAd1u8HAoiopkpUtWMe22GSqW7jZ773ZIRGWqLu3ult6Wy0N7CyX0x9YSTgUkmj7DmGb15kzxzRrMYWE65IhdvohyRiQogB0V3K6pKJBJs8wXadj7GbOTNPSJYEfB5sqoGjUVwNVooTjueOTPCa5ArFU0UBnrB454jzTDGHKaDbPQY6SxisN1eH/37z92++8b6yEN7hfe4d/3mtctcd9lH72NdYt/2bZeWkMEShNJ7j2VnmVns9VP4cb1wbp/bT72wrJfS4f7xGL0PM4vp6Y27jD/xjctnIz723oe++Nadm4+28/NA9vWaR7+4E6889/Xne+qwH4ncn5mvvtzb20f7zafszmv21uu5XDu7uIvrN/nU+86e2l1+18P44I189j2PPHxzeUv+ddnLvM+83/ZNEsIUtLtDzXgt90+2fjdvPMVxgXFuohJM4sbjtnvYuCBWv36M7//kt/3J6AIiZBSTcJr4yktf/NbXv/j4ez8czOiDbBH4qc/89I//+N+jNebhN/66T1y/vjRvI7q3xn7MQI2AmtO1XOPDK89LSVyMJ6PGiDapNRFGjl5ShPIEnMapY4zWWqZOWnyCfSQJtua0LNlrKkYsy26MVZLkEBxehbYSmdmsQUYZMqxRZhn60HsfMZ8OWpElcjEI1jxGr5wQ0swEOck+RtFC6l1/HD1rBci0OU1M1MJYsWfTmEFou9n5sXh1WaWVFQo6nRLKDsuNpDsp9DEmRXYzFs8M9+KkWeWlGF3l2aa0adyvVBq9iAIjg6C79ZFLayOi1TCp6HLV4pZHP9kmE31qXSJzt299xBQobXNxoxWJBDYhWcKsgdAIeTlriUVj0NxMkSEpl6VVBxURY43W3N1LS2CVyR5p7rQyOqt0KGAaiE8iQRU1ZlaUqkpGqu27rL366JSVOrotS0YUUcrMIqLMFctkqHkbo89Bu81yLkeN3CCkcxHSaWN0kBB3uxYVjVqF3RDdMydi5LQ+opV4OmfD5r6QhBjRzUyeEkfv5e5GR4woClB0LeYg3FrGKM/J2hjdlsixW5aTYo1CP3bOt1qJJVA3NEeEMTMd1g/dvCgtyJSbwzJCSlhzMCjEKKN56727e4zRvGVkaZ9gXLy4RubmoAYCws53kJgoThdpMVZ6laHT50VMZaGXgEwhmzqome9eHWu9KrpWKJtb5JqH7mYDqYS5rWsnidgAIqUGChaoSINmy3Fdm9lhvRTgdnGlqBP27czQru1uGHHWrjl91xqqDIbgnXIyBoJKTlf9yjCM2cNUdIWG0Upzt8mfoZgFT8Swje54wn+qGNYDoQxX6OCJ04n56dp0dyd0sf5d6ioQ/oSnbfLB6a2HLYBh44Jicz7cvEhOq3Y6W3BT4lWoAk7OLhIQeCBNfnqPKCZ9czPFQ6lNNuO8zb61nFG3Zq1Q0KlGyw0k3C6LPZhWv4US82R7ckXHrfbuirFJwidiVmeRW+iftoEuzKmx5VHOuY0AsF0Z+Jyc/Sq3QyfTPFCbmEcnD8MNK6yChmbc5oybTQ5xJd4sleOGZqq+gemBJJJttLSBx3ZlYMSrGBRu2MYpCGW670xbT6oSUWYKOV0YlaMVMYxAEbcwEoOyEaUNKouGUEAYQkSMjot1HC7OL9a8XOO4jnFcVzMT0toC1iAzU+lEYqS6gQNr2rjUhVmLgDmiq+LpIoroG0iHSHYR3qyP0dwjIuU1x5MCV50rgSwL0DF6W1xjrD0JhCXBGNEaI9KbARw92uJScFJBGdkN1mN1X5ZmAmOMmv+aISGHAdPuoo9ws3K/kJT/D13vEmtbel3njTHnXGuf+6i699atKharWMUiLSqSKVlWKMmBncAGJAV5AbGQjuJGmkEC22m54Wa6aaXjNIwkjpEEQQIIghDLCQzYsR1HNuIoJE1JNMVX8VnvW/d9z97rn4805r/2uRIQECBYj3u4z95r//98jPGNAYC6MIaLSCvNOhpRtX1fKcL0hAoyCan9AWu5fi/AG3juEbbYl79773LkmaT7zkeX73x0WX8UO3YV0gL88hd/5Y07b/Q/eXD5ztPtw67+u7ROhKiOTJVG7jSXYy7EO2Fi23w9LMNdKb1cyazlcNh8dG2TmVCe0zcywxbrokhEPdLUqioizJhZ5akKoNyj7VhAupdQjtuJ1osSiKqQ4zTE1HNkpopQkfPrhK7XwwNVQvg4UeS0BU068TJG2qJToTCnOXNqVlGJWtdD70UbIoISQkwlokQlRlKQmfNYiBars5BqklFbpop0lGxVdQ0gVEqnlnsmC1kIkZ56wzPJnC4AIqvVlaKqzXSZ3GqgKjrVgCIRc32XVSqiJV0lbtvoGaJCpDdy7bwwuzydDqtFZEQUs8AxfDksOVKsgdEMTzF6eoyQbguHq2lEdE6piKSXWrebaFNlIkUYI5ZliebKkSTdk2TMoKYpOCAQI1ikVxZoDW7JRsWMEWaKlKlWxdwKpAc6DEboW4gSVSpa0etc5j44E9MR3uAgMalAZApUepaQiMx1XcZw31wWyazISC9dlJy733U9bKcxqwsykAYZJ19MxxYi7F5TRKuFAmQFXFzAp7j5rY/vhR9Z9eKL1wPp27VbN49f+NT1B0/1hYt45daSW0bELt+lZ/Q43T17wVOo8LTVWqv843sXX/vx8uj+U3hY1Zdee+F6rd+5f/nDJ+PFG/prP/fK59fr/8Nv/LN/4XJxUV/83Itx6SNATSE+flCHZb3+EzkC978rl4/jsz/F9Xrl65HQErn7af34w/HypxcEXnoV1w7yl3469OL2N67xa5Hf+uaDy1PSiKIsxt3WnhPfgPUVO7xah1s83OHxQ/izhGhXoJeXmQ95983l4aN8G3J49VPf/94fFA92MExcMhASFdvp/uOPTxm5ncpx+J2v/PD/+ie/G4MsmiyvfuqVw+E6qsa2OTwyfbjCLq7ddB/uKU3yy2bvwEx7+G5dWJB0j7156paMEaGrLmJzujnXUvDh0v9K3xXemjFDlo8NCVWtHbJdBHvzl0yWqhUK0OnED0DZvYx7UXne1WckaRUTBuUeZJroostuVI3jGO37XMV62NxzZRMF23NZKZmx64RqaVVTRhBiZhE+93ojGyqlqhREtF9jSXgXSdIjUyDCd96dzkCNljLN0Q9yFgvNT/N+0xaVyAS4Lja8vc4zDywRE6Bf0btZz6TQI0GYqKh6VtbEsHUAnYhGxJy8oyOcJDOqBBBtvnXXkqJdyeW+2qCIR5L042CraiCdqheegTS11jvGqNYtNHJYRMYYppaVFMkIWwxVohJtPeqlXH+MKKWI0j1IhruKzsVvVpcgNWtU8TFUNbOnxmz6XG8rWoCeGd2PmSxRqSaZM2o9tpRVYo4y2RMwd1eRylTVBDOqNaIRRZaqdYnfnIOs7IWMaFNzJZpIVhXhbcaTPbrLfZiJb62ROINLWh/GXkWOk6tKRDVTTqRl1ZCS7nKte8VMMd3p9GifdEb1MNvDUciMmu5yqUjPnjJMoPNsL72pdNonT0sJVQRV/a7SxdQo1ZpYSE8rGJnS09TKNoqQOpdmkB7NmC7DN+nRdNWs40XgQZWKonK4dyejolscTW2kq2mT7WepmxDRZ9uliD4+PaZAhEY1LEo1W1touixmZQIreCWFqbJkjSwCJYyZI4H2jMtcH3G+/Cpy74D2dIe2nyVAPUMvcZWl3l/GPxoBh5lp2O1CI0P3hfYeJ7C77M+W85zN2FUfyNkX9Qto0UH7Ic+Y8F2KyRluEef4Os7XP6Gqzbx9Lrh17rJ4TjjAbIGeY5HvDrnems4fNZEdE2XU0YQ7ffRKYdvzncwSOVv+mqXeto1dKrkTTs/i594EnMmYu0OvvZXE7sycu8xs2OsV+KUttfPtFZTPjCc8l07fC6uZxoHnF5fYFXVTOTYxm/NnE6gpwd1/5QkffY4U236fq8yOOU88h5M8l0hxtfFjVZJ6tnhhcmUjkT14yXQIga1HkQJGbqJLxlblp9Mp0p+Oh1ucTuPJwNjGse+0TG8Vui7lsakZJAMDZFY4NoQ2jgkZGSWykh0EzyyloKELFVGQnsprhxaQHmFqTZITMuYkcz6l++q7gF7ZSZyG2vz+9AHSwRVMFrNR5FUlaAWHZjpKqmo9WLhPg1ubphJtoaSg0L1omWrDD6UkEW25TA8WMoJEjBKFUsvhWyzrkp62a5IzE61/A2KkLpoeS0NZUGoaI/7lj55OY/G+E79KQT3bep+jGv/yF3/l3Cp+9+O/017i3YfmIhLVu7Xohyerz95e2URkres6hvc706LoyCp3UsbYxKQKfupnVSpq0ZX7hqfAw7I2hwzM43YCC8E4eQee+mmI6RiBKKo2zGlzNzV37wlQeJBUamZ0z3w27OY0voKFcsoCECrSN7MCWRleqtYNWEWJoIiMFJOxDZpMuM08+pDnpB9F46XnUaeN/WQB5QmhYraONY9inPMsRo6aGyiSlogWr1WUiGaGgJBZYmmxskHg2AXwAM1HmKkPh7IhNBM2IxRlePWN0A5E35zCRIpot4tjxK5BYHio2TiFGBHVMFjMa7GDZwNBUW0rfk1ROmZiu0hz4wqQnjKrZQb3LNuoXk7QVE+nzRadBfZV7kVPYBvkWdOgLnMRrVSc6SCgiE13A2CLokiFezSGoJTh7SAGR1BkO7maNj5HkDNaI+GeusjxOFqDOs3NhKxSiUgwkkCUqwopkGrijleZ2bY5d+DZJE1SVaSYsAqPIj68fLTpMRfXBYcXJdRfWK59+jV596F/7iVb2jTcqTrZA+vQRcZpdAaHmZ4ngDmqRL/94cW3312ePn0WPsbmP3mQf/tP/cmf/fzP/s4//Dv/7Ve/8frta3mtTrdv/mtvLz9/j99+iR9fM15T0N1x/17cv5cv3uZ6IT96h1vm4dZyAq8dBof+8J1x91W89mn9uT9zfdvi4prZQTVwgr48nn18z7912PyF9for3B4gT/2N4K5mzSLkdqwvg4qLWwat9ZY8fQBIyUKIiCgoH/8QJXbXxmNWyoKdmSSiWYTUVvnseLx143B8cu/Zw4ff+e7Hv/lb33jh1h1bF/E0s+sv3AV1jGdCDHcQYpY+vIpUcDnlMQsq08mcXTyD1rzRAky0pitpQrGlgb8tKkctLYoTEWrrolV7FywslgdNtLR05qBQiyWFK3CcABkhrVD2PndMmpchIomKUjMCY3iTmnrjRKHZEiOFmpGQiohE2WIjIj1Pm6tMzNtUUmD6FXs+VESbxSeyPEHFadtUNcNRENHTGCxs7jvcG4EQASHl6RW9DqvW+5GRuegS4WwtXibPIdnV0PCW185X1cI/FHuL0wNKCrtKjH3yYaIefXz37dKnYkZ460nFtFOSaIKEKMJj7YGiMjyXRbN6MH0OSUZmagtrMb/Tw71jl2SaXSjTioRCikiBokS20qZneym6RAwRZuWyLpmxV2Z5FXB85kcKK3fLaPscWtkibPxmd+A7mSpQjdsqkhHVOeZC7sqs9mDl+QfqIo2ZrkoIs7IPNczUk5nxUJVKmc4C7Wo/CPEIVWtjBs5sQ0yGditg+5grRDEByYplsUJOUQqrpU2YvOkUMiM6WatHBt1eqkhlVUYb1UrbKTRZJmzP+pw3GyERTmF3hrv5q8nULYBsHPLEbEQMNes3v3VIqtJ5OzMTkMgKdm4XJbNUrafsVQmk6Jxk+dhEFJmi2iPqqty9+tOBGVFCeqZKTXGj9uXEwEbVoFPZ+46OUVPRRFSmiRSKUpUF0W34Vl6spVZsRagA67qyxNSs7LBeW0QVqgqZkyYmYmeNNDO6hFqElkwYWlHKeJa97a3jDLyC7FkE8yQ8NzCZNfPHK0fgnwAAIABJREFUpwF0T6nqeSrOgVqcss8pK+SVCLTOTsXOTeSV6b93Lc/ZHK9IqHXGsrThrvr9nG2OzB5057rUlZHwHIZ3RWOdStRmbnaoYjWY6Dlky7SxRF9Wc7oncsXL2eOyMCn5szjrw3xP2cipjO09J3p1uTPxz7AW6i7F5R5/cF7GdIrvH/X17RbDCattkFBbCrF/gM+9A5MDWNkyjnMvv0dXFa/ew5kVse94G0LPc6TX3t+iozWY85/Wvm3mWV67J5h1mEpQtDBQVunNGe7XAPHIEEXJhEdFbhmx5ckjLsfTZ/70eHrmNdwj4UAWSk0SSGbkoMnANqu7RUqOE6zUAU6KQsSWlBKFAFFDUvtdzhhiUlFEysLygJFaxYqIDrjr66aqRKxHTNqpp7Gn46CpJY2mlEKqoFARCcLbvkEotC1kSEQrZTIwqcs1tkJL9qPHedXXbkQQU8XdpxaFqpZevWOhSDF0FXhV1rI0vRMkLtY1USrknLWUqrSta6/RpwpGVWKkb7GYvfdguyLw8vln8Y8yDciqeuPOG7/2pV+7MhA++f3+c14BrQKiUuZVoqrM6NxQZvV/CsJE2tJYRev1iFCiBkV0VaDNb6Ii7bJxdylC0O2TbyHg6XQqYvgw67iLaWegaWTZosE8rNZljKkWU5WRWZKtYYgOdp0YiXnIRAySyWCR1q2ERLqoFBk5t4kNxZmGN0H6vAHXw9LhH2KaESqSmN9Oj1AVWcAUcsdlU7JKqVGZWcEJBWk/S5GV5ykq3XMyvgTM9vimmvaD14P7ZbXw7BEMiJ5uoG/AkaqakbZ2yHZnHexw0RLVzMDsg3Z4aZNCl8O85mbuHIXR59i+OW71KUtEMqkigGZlRU4zG9uPhEK1brl2oCiVmcgMU41KkZ7DdhZ8tfY4MyuiibEiEJlAtP5pLdrq37RP7Koy2lTE7DaCXttmFlF+KltVlBPNwjkia5WKrRbhVrrHyJcZq2CLTOB2ZSugGqPaJF4Wuh9rCVVPmVsFIKS7k+xi0j1kkg9aSAGhwpgRry18bNfvyenwylK3nxVjpN65ti4mf/BRXF/56o28tcpiiOFVtFX7G02ZcpuZZSCSVf/ynn793Q1Pjh61RWnh8Ojxf/d//N2Xfu8f/+Ibr+PrH1x+6e6Xv/fsD/H9L33hrW/+4J1vvxfL9RtPn4ybN3Gh8snHHhH3fsRDLssN6HXdLnE6Yr22fP9HNVw+fg93bsXhOpd16pI3qb/1QX7pU+u/+xPLn3+kf+/e+O4FqBTV8jwg//wXX0Vee3a8/PrvP/ro2bPLj/zap2Tz3D6Qy4clBpqkii4skdGAbq3rqCenJ6mNXanqlBQWD/Lsw9PDh4/uvHitFrVFfZxMcTgsy7raFtt2+ejhkxJX1W3bCG7jhECEZ6aZpZ1GPFFIRlZUrXNKmAWTpeVYc95be6ZH5Ux8qQbxCX001RrsxWcXKNV6wFQzz4FzkhXKamfgKgmhSVZlpEzNE1WZBY8U5aQOosLDVhVVEstVekm2HxbSwoYdVR9BlEp7h9od0VNqtMl79kIR1gpJiuqc6YhApqG5l/8waKFMZTt5OxLTU4ms0sXmbHKpdmgKRSlbpoKEGDNRvoWI9AxGyEKTpSGQvAJfV2WFlMEKNXKQJWKLWkQsi0xGU5XIjK/t4cp6OFQikZGppmcfUFRAOTKnZFQQmZ26joyZly1SuXvLZ4Z1Ks0rWPQqpWSG6FKVZrJrwzQzmhvQZVxmCiimKBx02bZNVLrEVbXJ/L2CPFSrT3sTmJXM7mjm1qB9JuF5WJfMjJjUzfWwDh/dXfcjVxHtZvbhy7K6j26lw6tIMRIon+NkETbkaM+p7cKarXym0Mcws4iwxSJDKZ5BYSFVpKMIe4hJBWUOREBUplGjgjMkb+4tesoS6Y2n1inB16paF6vMdV3HNmYFulNASqpFv1VA3w2c6VQB75pGdI1W0UBlzmeosnNNCqLqw1WWLopRsMWAio5liDRrfzooDI8ezkm78qhgiYj7mFuRFgHIlJ2YWubETkQLfghoEYjI5aAAKxKUQJDwDLOlKoUW4f3l67wpzwCgnW6N5rB3x95rO5LqNQgfkcdnJ1Fu26ZqdrSqUlFVNdOVh1XXVQ4CubBVrYfGLM+ScrhMMKAFL3vPqbX0RVWAYplkl2IxZdc+iTBnxV3pedaD9lWK3bt2DvbbtZfYETRX28irgORdB9Vqq7mnmr3ZztW8ymKfYeZ11kLtZ+tEtpBtvdvDmK5ilK+sjLiSlSKLOkWk6TnzPs48u25spha3uPe24TU7rN1DPBmpO0Hn+fTCOaWo2XE3SJB7+MfV/m0Pp28/QG8NZ9LnGQC/Q2HaPLwjZrCXK89FDtaenTh9lUVpAeou1UhM0SnO4X5tBN8R/3wuvaNHbGT90aTq2oMeyU7yrGnQ5NwV1yxukV6wUdnThipCsFCqKgpeDEgR6e4jx3F7ejw9enZ6dvJnWdmS6EhXUVTRJHyzZUHFCEcLH5dKbipWiRGjdR6BqILSkpXpIqq9y8Fs83zEslxE+roc3L0CMKkRzd5QdB7d9BHMgDLp0L/ZiqvNsUMHHHbEwrpaZvioQmTloia0MbxYQEEbtIh27vcPbEdZJYmpVpA5LJNAKmXGznf3niBFiD5LhRSbfnWPMV2smbYuforsGTQBU6Aqph+sMiaRCNBdVEZj587fe+xXqdznLwvxx//H/i/85V/9K+e/evfh//1sfAQ244oRTXPSRIkYwQyMbD8Y5mxBpdpPTNEVUTtsU7joCtbmUYksR9YoVtVpbB2l4yNqTrQnoQDIjnotgUgvqbKLihEFYJSjobMFExsxZM4Qc6YdekkzWgWRRaNQY6QtS2ynFlUCVTonXKrilWJX5hRt6WY7yamn4aZacCEhGjU71awy1ZzfuVTVMQKd52TqI8XY64QEKGiDn5BQRGVG2mICaVs+QDmob1EJai2L+Ii+lqdyTek+BI1sLVumi3u426KRk5Pby8PWX3QPD3bUZbYRLhNcIIrTcahNcji7MtqZZfNQT9AA9HeHdR4uYl8ckFAQ9PRKqGnuFrv+TAlEhVB8ahkmrxiekRURNlvliZX2efTUqkt3wFykbxMRQZRHUCYhvAGboorMZVXfSjQLGMNtUm36G5e2qG+7nUQolH3M2rlWvXnzpSERQEfL9A0kC33EYkYVjMyqisYdoATKuXUoZNtre5Lvw1XV3dUkKlfWF+/Cbx3eO+l7OG7H7a5ckHjhgF960z54kPee1cFKe4CVNUfnnFCRjuJpYvN3HvHhLdzNuPdNjs3vSvz1f+9XPnz40T/8zr8YgX/0B38Yps769GduP7p//Nrx4V/7L/7a3/6tv/nb711+cC9ffqa3bsQbb9ndV6iB5QJv3r04nujDr13P4+XxzS/owwcVl2bX6vFj3PtAXnkDd1/D9tiT+v8+4Ve/dfxzryy//rb88P743x6efjDEyn72zVc//BNPa32KEb9047X//R9+R5TeeKSAHbQEWCjKbLohmQpdTEeOOO2qI9ZctxTNttp++OMfv/2ZN4S6Xlz79KfvvnTrw0Rdv3b98vIkasu6IjjGlkiQSEaMDgkTauaTTJ8SI5lLoAY+2RyXd0BarwI6K2L6sKEQsSUzu0QWYcXk/Hp0yrwYxD1sMQ9vDkenqVbBVo0RJZVRBFWQCFaTnydrps5++iwWMlJVwnNuMwbUpOa1gcrSVbM9DFkT81CT3jcTMsj2MCglEBCOkSymTbW2UEcFvIn+VCjQOzrZtsGCqlK49lwnMyIrQkzH8JZCt2bMj0OMJI5bH01zeKkqEKgae51Rp8gylcioyjHCVs2Yw1gRKno41HE9UVkmtokoCQNdjZZF903UkJUFZG+9kpSOITJKdvwRKhUe0Z3knCzJ7GI6CqmRBtrF1M7Vm3TZ/k8gGVTOi5aDRSlpxCUpvrmpJdLEuumNSI9aIKLiw0WlwZxCpUhmlEzVoTSeOKIpBmO47RSc1lt2rJ+ZdUpya8ePx21dbDttvRpqD1SPM3LWjPtIrz1RwjG8nSRq6sMpkiOsyffCcCc4IkT2DN+ON9LOs0JrlYVS+0pzGtN7JN6gC50b976NmjUnIpCiyHA/mFVmxwFjqi6Y4cu6ZKapJEp3cz+I9O7BW3A2QDa8YfKUyQLCC+W2Lhlt8Y1J8FOL0TvMyISqDo/FrMoj2LN6UtwDKF3gHqqipkL1MeZllwmIlmZEFU2XRAgFVnucFFHMiH5+I11EWLJ3wjLySBFCihmZbCMQNAgyZtJYOlU7MsMzRbLvTpb0eHtZ7KzpPW5HBtR5lGeVSSqLQlmXCwIHvbi2Xqxy0VwlJbOOe3y7BY7IUl2q0nMIjfM7LF1SAKzS6k33jAff1YHP6UWLRDZR6iqUbnLPchcp5ZntiXPw8bltK4BXSRb1XGLENCx1cNbkneaUwczmdJp7scf37HK+VjZOLBMrZzj79LJOPzPPiNTu1jptuXZcSlUj+Kq1nLmv46YgddJQmVcwnuSuzSzIGbEDXmU8XM3R995V9o1iz8ZqJ9bgvKlp/sqOC71qhSe8XBAd/dVzNkZk62h3/+oOhsG+Y+2f1SjW3sw0xKKyMfAdNxgNKejI9N4VKyr74+jM4qlNmCF1yAonNZGFKg8KKpUTvBjlkfDhTy+3x0+3h08uH2/jNNIpomJIlnjXoD2AyvIs11wh2PxErbKsLM9TZQk1c1RVK+cXW/qBA6JJXR4FbCqSoy3QUCVykJWxEaEszCerKV451RndSmV2Q1eR+1OPDPQEfo48EiJ62nxpcQYVRaFupzFVMCJN2yLRs+T0EkUWkFDZcbL7lreblshQZdacSjRgahupoqLi7jNWFCMCZGdCVHh0sxyeYhoRy7pEtBtrrk7dnWIiMEiy3ENU3HOuUMj/H8L5c5Js8I07r//S53/p/M/ef/zPW5g+prtP5mhVWJlOFOiRKE56tOzQAc+QEDKaskaO9MY4VwLgadtU5vlpohEengJ6hDYhpEsasudu/VWojH7+h4e04WJLKgo0ZUPFMmZQLZS+ua2TaTg8KVU+PZZ+SrMlMjwSvX+alICJyA3vcG2MLWxR92iakUDGcFONLFEodEQoKSKbu/ZWjwx0Kn1VIXo8AOyZePtDV9X5702h2zvnFiBkRO/8UQGPnq0JbGorYoSa9Z8VmTAlpUixVaPokPYoWQQlGV0YtBGg3RaktRGBHkk2WLVlqswoM409ZKiy1PazmKis9JomlA43KnT8esSY0pBIzP/mui4jvOfl4cEWQGVt7qoz0m1ZFhFEsDJFtJ/8qpJlurXbYeg+wxuFbKxAFpSKgppWJKm+TXBxZplaojijqnCGAuoi4TWtKE1T7/gkR0plwjOlmYcFlbXdnukNwytGRqaZdgxmLw+yWBOnMQONK9NjmFlVyiJji95tZKZpvXk9X8LtsWx3L/YV8YiXb+IuSiCgamOJ51A8G0bYpoCx+Qe+fnADUjhdRibr5H/hcy9d+6we7z18La9dPtIfP7iU24tdLBD78Y8/uXb94n/83d94KIH1YrXx4GGw9NabdbguJLT0zvrKo5v3ewsLX5fr19aLJxV49/vLaTs8PcW1o3xqyQf3k1QgR9k/+ghf/ST/6tsXf/0Ln/nPf+P9n/npi8/9K9fi+otfHe+/vF7Xx+BlbR9DSLtR25PASjFle2tE0LsxQyoIkTxOBum+obOkXqxP8tHDh48+uv/gtbs3zLaX79x6/Y273/vRYzN2xNdv/sZv/+mfeVsZreMQFa9WRYUpT3kvkRWTvtuDJ0Iy0irTCyZWTE6jLScUUQQpxVltt4omveaetlV5gW4uJ/qZbd6dWZxA+Yz36aqhc8Ab7ZcVosucb7ffbwJBA+06k64pFZnRN6AtKLKvvYhiSWf+1ig9TDINwNiGiAm5uTd+mhAY+rpoIFi/F/2rBJJCocTI6eKLTVSHZ4tAeu7sY+yuNyglgWU19+gpSxV9tL2wRkZVCX05iLvroh4+AtlsKFT/qf7/H6cU2dkDlG0bi62nHGhA6y5LExElTbVbF5a01F9UJyZcquvufggKhQ1NAOvlxa7XEtXWokg04aswEzljuke4ExMrimB6tKjVTMoLJpUwVVHC2bTokEYwK4XhBSC2sFVaaqR76jpLRDnG4FWATgrV0739flEZaSI2IdrSN24vksKTM68PonTfMqGmNSkc4iNt6cj4pop1xd4Hh1SVmoTHGaaflcuytIe2VwayTKcBvL1DxmUSR7LFUWgEPCTOMUElIiNHD3HZVklqjBBK5+uyJw6K8hYz00eA1SlPOdpvk/t2BzWCrMa89KuNs2pu1ufMclIyPTMbphDuouLRAIZSa7RbkdodY5/VXTvHaJc2UTUQQu1NUWaZaGTT6TtLJqdvsCFvvWEItvx7KqWZvSIFQkQqQckKKkSMPmKEq4gIvAITCxyq5jmyyMqUssWOp1NlTuVw0dOlzyJFeBiuFTIruhq7HM8IPj4+0ktTQJUiojSTBcVrh5sKUS6LrMiOe9obDXjUtFQTkhyEdqZ6TyGvgsz6JJM2w8x49+dIkdXvzdwINK2kVTrEpN0S5xi6PRbjLBblDlRpJ6FgF9jz7HzDOVmdZ5LmVWz61D1ODCl3rWYvAWZ7xt1uJzs/c8Ik64yO6f1ePZfaN3dlMV28eB6iU3wu6+FM4ezOYZ71565V2l7UcHrgTB/dQ+5nZkgvyeaTtivqsRNEUcxRVykge5LgVevY+9jcyaHdYIDdCPVD2t/c2X7mHpbRhpnaf6xw3r3TaNi7vqp9ATDNzGTWltlQ+Aj3UdtxXD67fOJ5uhzPPI/Dj52Yp2ZlXLiqrBlRdGp5hifKk9YrkcASUREJmQHYEGUEsrYO4Gt8WWREZzkIEIx+eZW1VXOUpB/UjuquUJur746DazurUiZNZGe7Cts3RVXJcCntqUQjrDNR4sIapxIjAgL6iAbC9WeiIuHtCdTMkAb6F1rctR3dDlZRjnSPdT1Uo4O7PG1hcLV4RxvE3Yv0rq2lOaGe1ZM7Y7cEkUlojCKbdTfvo2VZIqt6ZbKn9JG8fd0Oix5H4ry+vmII45xo0n/7L37pL55xMk+3D7937+/3AL2ZMb3nZP+aWc3WNipFIgdAqozwaHDY8Ixo1quoVjEqC6GiVVTRRMY2RBkV7tkbPLW2LjS0gBWRVaacc0mQigyIcNopc7If244+eixbfbAlgNM2zKQKjW+9EptXZoNcVHtPJpJNcu4oI1P1TBMVEd86BrDFGPncyEzIMtXMjNHehGwLL0T2uIRGMhGF8mr4ZyWk4VJz987KjuDkrpqYJ9M0ckf2yqHpDuEhKul1NpKkp4h2lixaepolixACn66TPn9SoVOnE7t0AHLWAtSERKnp2Jquuk/cCiTco69FsPwUaiIq6blPx4J74rzsmgMUfHgn8I4MPleitBi4zhJ1R8dQ9XkcHqSM07TDqPWJOZ3YslhduRmTOUvuToyIqBbmb5svF5qR2evtgm8pIj5SwJnFm9W+VqYUE1VUrUIGWFDjOI05dpssrhm6FN2dThw0UaUmTYWsLoA6iTCD7N+0Ikubj1BQ4c3cZN3HKJPRXWrqW5nKiKQKa44m05uIh9hiw/rOuHj67LGp37i7PHnf46Px3rsf/d3f+Qc37lzcvLWArsta10Vg733/kYfoKvefPX7pxo31Qdx+OZfSF65tyypI3B6v/Mz6b7ykLy8X9nA8HHmUGza2+Or6f97HD0bqcYvlwrZjjRMfvRtCjVMkIBS9EGHe85cefvytV//s619ZP7ZQ02Urjl/45D9440/+z//178V9ydvA9SmXm7ovbXhmEgIyDwfxuWqoQkPRCDrinp7uP3j8+OmTl1+6lbD15uH112//4MdH0zJVE/3yV3//n/zOV37hX/38jes3zA6+beEhRCQvj0fcWKQkasI+z57hKuiv/ydvi4p0MMMkbV6JJ5oS1iAvNPxUOGX6EwzQX3a27jEjKERKzxjMVMyqyna/U1WZCad7sDpRQNrhXug81iaA7jGWNU3qwpk5m9O43D4/VWG7inYUXj94zTtq/VvjGRvrvC5Lpydn5W6J3Bvctg+1qECkq3+PAhGIbEesSQPpi8XWGFSqiWdUFlnhyem1k1b/mc6FzHTrJRruvKwr2LHmEC1SWmCjurQXeT8WJpxgOzkFHjGGjxiX23Hz40gfOaqYKBFZFyPo4btuoYe5grlZqp4Kz7MAUNVeC6qKlAJJoQ9X0QLElKAUZSrNC0ga9sQ7pHOXZooIJzuhYgqxlL4FQDWtzKySHcpKaRyrRSaVEUGBiBYRHYOpnLkUBBvKq4Iq4Vxok+zZRAslhW2AbwN3LmYdql4Apb2TzXzPdhj2tsWblbz7i0y1KnyUKk2MFKGgMxJavltJWCNBTLRH0q2Cy5a6JbpZ5c6mNJ1UEyrCZ2Bgl5s9+s0MUWmX/O5h29kurYudiESIzKj0tqZl5aI60jNHCmzvoIoQCNEFn0+/Sku1MYPRWhQKUFRZLKTS0EXTLPGbDCkZpaaZQVVOeQ1VO1Ke1Ck30MUKLsrJ8c8SQnZ5an+nRKmqhWoVky6SjSgFokoMVYiJxMyYUTP9+9QIJ6CyJhKihLi7mLCzaSjQKkoQkTkyt9hOvj16+uCYp6fj6aPt0YNnj0cnsuwNDUWqHAQYID1HsYojml/K3gUVpTJKqP0sNf1lTyXsg46zAeYMiMKOKNzX7rjirO5CynMpNtMsOylmt2xNJk0LKHZp6HNEVJ6bsXNHxD2PfQ++I+WMzOT+AuqstDwHYMwKWKSeh4DuTemEdE7aOybEpR3az8ld9zFmUneNQXYOT2ey92nMM2VnJmm1Lr0zLbLBhirQ/t6iFMnKvoV0mhXaJtiKUAon3KRPH+4JGRAqOvyqLV2z9+sGWnexYLedeqbRYB+ZUFh0MCJPMI/cqga1YyR6DzRO4+nlePjxg3fvPXv3h/e+8/Hj9z5+/MGT0ydP/VEyvLbUgkBUChNGHxhep8Bpq6PXKCloJCJinAtrzEV+r3872yVEmVmR0A65bsEFCjLTm2xRdhxcV5dKU82GgWWfKirUSIf0ZyneOdQQ02a87QmWV+NdNqpN1bJaGDJZRtIxiVWFir77dCZJtHx5Mn6rVLTb72U1H019LFu0aeE7eEnAfZvbZz6RUaq20wdkz91MikKkN0IRoR1nXDPAvJ98labdzCNqYorA8FC1jx6d3n84rsYfV+il53pC4I07b/xX/9HfOP/Nr/34v3l4fCczRa2istJUpmkckZNpQvctyrPyNE7HcRrlp7FFeBU8kloU0YNGxWygekU3jf1ntEAr/L0fNbF5djfVSYyFhlHPGVBGqWqXSXPbXxNlBAUV0SBBkdoHDZ0oM5VfkugbktKUbukZCgRzIM6MiW3y0W0wQUaEypyTYiqEp2ahTen966lqs2txFRw2jyMPN5WZ1EVQqNquElHtSCqd8Ug53y6ltA1eVGpm7cw9Z3d54akN0utvtQlQatb6i5xvI0S1kMhJP2yoe8dUdLXZhgKlzPhKVUx2cZ33dQ1yazUqmLvdOLuP0n7C+9Taqda6KHb8clsMUYjoyBApohK29j6nVLRHXbKP/8QaNtkUoHb50sygVY0zUpmJR1dxPFkQSAe4M3zy+fZkQclIFRnDbTEzmXXTpOkUimJsH1fmBJ4T0qEyc105P+vqsbUtOp+BDFGt6fNuk0DaYpHZv62KirBiXmsyIeqs7BKjMlFt5iw08JaEmvawKqMHMfx/3jm89+FlnMajd+N0rE++e3l66n/q7beePDu++/6jx48uKbAV9x96Vn5879Gbn7nzZ//0Gz957aXf/lvfvPP5m6+8HtcPKcP9nv1U/OLP3vxzL7/w8q0Xb9958c7tw+27F6/cvvHSnZu3XpO3T7nhpfuHG1mlhe3lV/jdf+Y5cOvVeOUzdetO/JnPyp3XX/itL39y/3j5k3fvPnj1VFnXNzyR0Ir4Tnz79x9AUKMAwkSuKVfrSfasFoQUu6v+pVf1HzxOiAoEUZwplLJdjk/54eUXX7p5/eKw8uJw+OD+s29//6GobJv78O00vvKV37t+7eKtt17PwKPHT6pwOl6ObbNFT9dOPz59jSDbt9sPPIQsExGdRlVm1GyvQBFxr6aY9IC8vEylV3P9NYhoaQfTXVQLRaM363+UmnqEFoVsAWFXm32RwRp0kR1svzMbkE2BzCyRyFyX1Ud0WdwS8NYYCKXPTfe0RRASc1KSgeowcV20RvamviHdionO6xbADuIxoXNKCUYXYWoSWSIaFexDJ0kr7egzEwzHnhfRItFWdwBlhwWFggKEBiFRBcJHLotUUVU72vV4HGCpITO2kWaak2hSdrDMwlT5TOqIWbuMJGIwKUoVi8zIOsmJuxbjcFhUZIUusmTFxbIWy+F9Opqq++h5pGjrPwVo6WCrfEtMkqXSudEsShPBzSQz3SOlzJbMRGeOVJXkGB0aCYS0RZMUW1REKdiiWgDbAiQRQi09rYd5nD1lFeygWeUjoCXGWdUWM6MJhvsHlC137eg5obXmCyhbzCOULKHNIq+oYEyAXBUbmmKqEUmmhlB64su29jVGQxTa6QwTsWDROM1CVS2LeiCRapTimMNC9ARLWlonjV1EeqpKi1tJUbG5sNO+oqoYFDEwE6YayMzsH6UiiUDIzIcs8fRlWTqYuPotZgmEumcgICsEEBURUhWVDpYolboDl1Cd9AKZO7epIpsmEIK2auNNuuRqtS1Qc5AcgQ669dEO/XML1H4msmfYJZCMTAkRQUkxfHiXubP970tuRzU2WZ6sQDC7acvEiSVIJyhG99EK2KwwWrflVWmqAIu1rNe22PpBLuTjZ4+1o3IoSi4qB71YxK4vN4xlYgTmjo3T2Qlwi8gqKTFagSibYdiUyASLpTmbtm4K0eTVphnsktKsAAAgAElEQVSRLUytLia4wyqnHJR/3JXX6XjP8TJ7UDfRpJntX8LZPjED2M/OxY6gbtlXC0Sv9JisqyQBwX7v77bbidWdhVfinBQ6HdE7TRQ4d5q1J33NIXEHBog0SlT3degMRM3YR/1NZAZynriCulpdTr/enpyxbxuv1E2IPVKxdmbWFRyy/4yck0P6gO4hR6KHawMponvWfSEDkGxvNaUynFVRXjnaCFdgMY7b08vtyeW4PMXx4eX9p0+eitFUZ8BuS7iRFAnZquB5FOpxG4tpSY3soB2gckQsZlEDk3QlQovsmw6xFTUzJdNFkIkcSZIqWaliVKlwsKaFDNzGZqIUDPfFlNXRTdJzdF0UKM+hqwCF5Bih1oSxyGY/ZJmtOQEzmPGKVaoEcl0sq9xHZgoqpWRvuswEYM/11NTDZ54HevAcauYjh3uhgD63y1QquyCuiLRVsS/Qu6NUYYZXTKZIk65NLLJQKWZjhMnSqSk5whZDxkxZrNghvQjMLyMAM6XiF3/i9pe//xTPNYH8Y5ZCgOR//x//7fNfPts+fO/RVxrWVRVRrmpbjAbHdDhbbkVuWaWi2zbW9ZC5ZdSy6JScNDtbmR6ZqXt73WjWfjYEoMjwQdBWG8NpHeOU2Wc10WlzVSRoq4RnJqpcoDFHLdWej162jFFmEpHdMwsRDkhVgEQUKiBa3KPvxKTTPTrOKisNyoWAVNZ6sfoYDXukgILmM9pqooqqbh1VJSPau1Gtt/aEiFr/yqWKrEm4VRNtuTvg4UKtClDN5pIzh1MZw0U5PFVUBJF+zvgRheSMRdVmngNRpSKRSUr0g73P2nTpENSOXi4VNG5XpGG20s+M7QxP5D5SRlGlHVadRAaKDyehJjI9seo+Fls8vHc/i3bADG1RorCIe/TcOL2Ns62IKBEmMY0qkTkjuASs5s5kYHbIffQVFtXMoPeqsho+r4tW1Szhaq5Kovc9xYhcdOm8mawUY0aIURTh3peNj9DFMlFMqUbpqpo0MDwZCWDEulqPakabXXvKOzW3KWrNWW3UU3p0fgEaXq0yAzlY7jFZ3MLw4KS/CqRM1T1NxT0hLeTfGwGVrPrRQ33vYVw+HXk5Lu8dxwPfnkSAv/nhN379L7z5mVf1IerDjx5E8Y3Pv/Dgwye/8LOffd3q9M8/+Rv/y/e//p0nr+Sqt+PZD8fxSX3+My9/7t/8qbt3X7p163aa/6/f+J8ef/LwV7/wa29++i0fce3i2vUHv/q7f/9bN77gd7+QNP3g68/y0l794unn//2b938Ain9y4D+98ezVv5Sv64t3n2qcXvrUM70R9o+X997iq1/lO2/9O0uEnh7h2eNxejxSVddFNGf6sVDMIHiv8rMv3/ns5dPvH0c5JjynJ2d3b3zvO5989v33X3v1pZvX76TgtTs3ho+Lw7UbN64nIM/Wy8vtez96AOiyXrzwgjx58rgKqrKs60f5/sT8zGKc6aULc8BqhrV3YnkvS6QvbxER1W3bwLa+zPJFO1+e5ESKpaiItduzRCUyIBiejQj1PTuIE/9VMaJHW8JOU+W04xdVSWsEETXE3VtNXsjM6OQzmsRVTCmqUpQVSCJ7osMOBgRFOsCnrWEzoNazF+492YiozgCYEVwd91Nz8JC1+9O8Z70teUW/GTmhBc21o1Ddu+RFU5IzUk3a4hwJa/0qWcxlFY+I9mtNq562SCHc246cOdOwbJEunjKjKT0FeiZLKTCRjAmt2bYRmchUNWUtpyPIdbGF68Vy2HyzRacyNpI1YwMRe2JbgkqhxkRbiiA7QzI7/Ku3iRUt7p9xYWQrvpAUo5xJLFkicE+lQiqjwIpKhcCDtDGGqVa1wKNQ6IOye7By0BKJlilCSpRR6ZtTW6aSWaVmbTFikJTwoMi2DdHp/iugxVGVUCGYFGv0DgGWiEqk18QjzzwKASKzNycdJzUBX0R6ecYirJpcO4FwjgG1vxwipPYItrc5NaN4OiIJFcOpFMq+tFP2UNA0mbVPZBWCmjocM9m20eZYH5st1uK4rDLTjgmZI0UoAKVmRIlUqz0SurDdEZmJZPQn2GtYFGSmM537i9hHBmii3S6kyUjTyXwSSlVgp2NnlnICpQr0kQCi2o/aNbxnJ5HuFBQKIrxbl91GklHFAJAqWujPsdV9AbITmknpRj8zkoGsIjyL6H1IdxhSc8U8lQ5ZIxOReHZ6VkXUR60yXXRZuN68uLGoaZ++O60zs1ydWFAJbIQIFJKCpWaL1vKdPVViV4ruWQm1p97Nd4m7oW7f012h4aZUe+e4TCNizmf8SqODfm7knDs/R/UdYN+vqFPzZtc/gad7ivrUgNTezjZXczc8Yp/i74vl5o1xh9jUud3D+XNsS2XlVebiviudDBucnVutDKMStm9K92h5Ts4Zzy8mp+DhuaDFSXQ6q2p35S5rPhhz4tEryqyzDdKronia9KtCy5pJqYpiSGUpIrbIMcbp8vTkcjw9xbPL03HE5p3pSk/melMkpu7AMWSRgcv57kYB5T5EFSxn7r4DVqAwj3qSLMlIzzAr1aVfZ2+EeiSQGS2gySztXVIlvQq0bskwCWcgyLLdk1O7Snmuk6vmNU9SWqeevdGthraRGdGJwtUcOQAoj1QiWI3RbmWBu5tO9lhWdWT6HKFK89Oa+l1AZx501ma1VqVN7OeoyXNUmoCdaLLPO6Z9S1uXlHWFBSLMLCPnqrfxpGT0FEYEAihmHRzZ04uKVMhbL60///YLX/3ek3o+oOXKRMhC/ZVf/stnsSiAb9/7e0/GBz7TC8U9qN5nuKrWDivpGbdHwOSUg51jPLz3rj00h5cojRp5VmS0xKCWZQn3cBdlJcYINRneAJO+jOmjg8I0M4KZY5YiTQVTlaho042ZxvSuzw9dSwvRSNaYxpw5WhIRdzdTU/XIuY2NbJBpV2cijJoK1nYGURje5V8zIAI9qhvtbZOqskU7XWAmhV4dXSIiGUEVRJESke2pLpmgTncXRRdJzOwmh4VixWTtTBdzD4KMsg1XYVMnTMQ9W+HZJoh+Y8WaCiuY6VyVqEWtRzPVMPqJ90oIyxOSYwQhFWmKQPaRM7VYLArTM9nkcEH1NFiygxJnhm3JnorRopIpZRZkgZUmOjbXRVskoIvONMvKPeZx+pUavVGAtiQJUjLpZSIcXllDzaIVp8XM8m0spjtbTtvDHJjcQZpWjNzTLbKwHJbJy5m7yo50nitZNqt4YSKl5Jwkq2cEYVZ7ZzIr0hfV1nv35pCU3jlVpqkmoCK9EcmqzGmIighRjm0sZg0uaSU/SzJhKuGxLPaDe+tpO5KyXL8Orodb6U9Obz27/ydQdy8f3Tj91M99/m352fzexz9aaD+49eHXvv3N40vXfuEXPvdf/vK/9Vf/s7/5wWFVVdy5XO/goTx96803X3311WvXr33w+P0XX73I9eF37/3hT7z9k4LNyK+/+90ffbjh/bi4WWRcfnLAUm/+3PLx9+ObX30B2pzpyKrV6mvL/VfWm19+/NGvfebzr75344M7Tw8/bTdvyHrBwwEX168/vp8/+J14933Q+OJbxkP4MxwfoAqP9fDx0/zXP/vGO994h/sZUL2zvtAHN+rD+/e/+90fHBa9ffvitU/fJcbhcAuQ5eJ63cmKcfvWzfXiGkWzalkNWplu6/WP/XvnVYoqREV1T6b5D//Tt2cge022C1R7UJVNHCaa3czu1yGZrTG4GjlHdEBfe9J74ZsiItRCagezFGaWwI4q2NHekpmdoJBViVJV33xyKSlXCc3zxtpJ8DNYOavKVITS9OYIZCE8mphYQA/wUCnLRM+T2JMVuwYNCDvRvvkrldzxXNPLsN8cDc/smWW1QLFVEzqhN7Nv7GSzvsY8WxjMiDOjitN9W3QPoaIPLwomU3yf7gsLDA+QuQ/EixWZvc6giA/PCaVpyTsXsZZxZ2ZGnbbtOLYnl5fDw6cdTKwhWURmXVysXpFANfS2EB1Zva8DPEKoXYu37C37MBW6B0vDGzwFpU6sTkFEfAfK9R+MiqYDz0td7Ort7aNoD11p6H9lZwaytfhU5ujbvUwlK0Vs54KgH8I+n+scobJn9cxucJannebH52n9MqM2phx6Bop6EbsKdK5NAMDMKrtIkoqzRFQm0bDhBRTZk7W7cFGzaUoCRGU3du+SwtzXHFMloq287aeuD9xz5E43ohFZgKp1G0yRSjSTsPYAlKrOjEazWHLk3DkJVXv7T0zNAAQTQCFsSzp3/5Fkdvhkhc/U6X5b+ighGBFSLTigis7vbisq99QEEfZthNzjGCYNaILsKqNxC/3SW3o2u3FhGyR6ytgX6QyWmgSSaWfKytba1UxerxaCkgmWD8f+9M5JI7jFto3j0Z/eP37y6PjwwbP7D08PHx0fH7fjmDnzWiFkF6z9XbCsERhVmeWFBkV4Idv138IezhFD770qu+yoKeWcYXdzITbf0qnJbEPgHsh+VvQ9BzPlc9JQ7K37zCP+/9h601hLr+w8b037nHtvVbFIFlnFocTm0M2hW05LosS21JJjy5KtRIotQ5I1QAISQ0iEtoEAsYH88Y/ESOLASAIYcQIbRiA5iBE7kCXBkI10LMtOt2a1uls9kj2x2CSLxSJrvNM5395rrfx41z7FBBHQgkBVF+895/v2XsP7Pu+9JVvhaKb+E9iD0qPO3m3nFKxOUCZgh3YH6Q7bC08I32vNpuMxSYofci/J4Z7JfCo2M4VJKC2zFFP1MzPt/kP34gGlBP/F4hOwYJmlRNQ1RM9d944pIS4pyDWSOHIhGk5OnJGDFcqupHTSxX2T2fs4uXty493bb9w4vPr2rdffOXzz9un1k35n6yceCymrhDZKvHk8IAENdlIfsZAQCQiZiVkSPvhwhzQVZ7uKUswfNRkQNfA/IFOLSBGlXb8dSTVyEi1OSZk4dyPe2fjNmJ+caZtcFzRmCu4hLLupBQ5S/ElYjGdNKTlXPVUzU7FbMR6ttr0STOehWiMErMSxlKvIQbTmoM96pLBx4Jveaa1nS5XIMQbDB/pAJBUXEMdaiwGDcojCEF4jqpje0kRiksAZzuXtzXpJVOypi/tfvbY52jrfCy/ZvSD01/7sX/1rP/CxXTd4uL32f33pby59ZHIfTsSQ70QGm06zKcaG6R6s7Jk+M1LGCEgfAy4gliA0Y/PB9WTCwgozaDSvKapjxAx7LOkCZVGiWDhjZjslZSQazvAywoSnqkQ5PAkGmQjU3EGTfYLbdyBrGjpMFEFUfgCZJ0ZQPQAzWy9QlpTJNxjTcDiFFWlJUZ8A4ixFxbvP5X69C5hcoZyLTGGWZpPeDBut44r0Xpml8K5jlgrRys4CLabIdafqwxg+2AzySIrKLirPdmKfxkTsIyGLR6kJNHFN+9MF2jkEO6HbS8LKpUb8s6aB8Z5Z7ikakpjFx47Rw+E0zX4wUKSPUGaEXjBzFtJJMyg8hFhNx7ZjgqDougapiirHwIyWHEmhI+bLidQ+THZztW4RESNFJbrXGgOiUyXvXjoRkNFIYm5Ndo9EZf1hDhsUjhNGZsA1h4NtjqsBhhuSOtzKpCAsqK7H1kXx1U8JagQrSj5RExwosKdVCHph+ksGm0Smeryhz7wmp9uNiKQwWT51sHzsWx/66JMP86Nnvv8v/ofv/xPP/uHtP/i13/vNMfql+x559vFnN3fbp7766o2To/c/d/GRc/G5P7gujx60A2Oj083JX/7oDz968RKbnm3n9mx1Vi88+9C/88B9DzSWW8fH/93Hf2nk1tbrSO7DiDX7eOaldvs63727Io7vHv3D3p9ea0S+m7ZdTs4s8cbh5mvbceWI7rzd3vkGv/v6mdevtKuvyObEn/7OfOMPtrK/PrikBw+qJJm0Zcud6MHN4Q9+23O/duUtcuaYhpOgDOqa+u7peuS58+fOHhzs78sbb7z51rU7e2s7e7Y9fP/68sNnX/y29z/55BOU0UeP4cP7en9/rE5f2fxrsOvrCKrEXXl472H9yf/4CVWdFATeue0rlctjZ7CuDJosikL9ocSGRYiIFObwko2D7aZq2EdJJQ0gz6R8KTRdsAQZck0IkGbNajp9HXgAxjRnJYlUdSGkKiaGciFIMO6CfhVvbKQD84gNTGZqszEGPHXltBOOQHoez1I3+3DgKAPzZJ0TxOJ9TZ4qgiXm/gG/DuQ6RBIU6XAGS0mhmCGWS08VRRuCpgfCkSmRBTpFIOhFdg3w6XN2zqpSJPey8BEnIxaJCUZ3IUkxcD6TiZc+lrFs+mbj2957RNjKMlnN3KOtWoxkrbHj/B9BMA5NTF0FeCuc0Oa9m5mYgmhEjMjHHXCi7qpZTValhD5OZvE6w2RhE6vYHVVDwQ8DUThwsoHvZVIyeArrSotWBbCgdYbwCRapaqFJ2D1MjUqYnnUVZJktkYeL7MlVW4UXRakArXiFrI6oXQGORlpIGE53oswhauEuzJ7pI1ozUBYA8o2ewpLuES6s+OHxG0QGC3lHG8pYTu600wDwiJZpr7h/oqgChSt2GPO6pAyvX6oeF0lVG91j5qrN/Ey4R+pjnFcjgteTVTHMVsUO1yusD/q0RNOoSYRJhJSdFPWFJoUAJVpuDcU6AtYX9E1SFpqShqgJcDt4OVQYtvQKOODUxpGhamq4mSrmODIynYh8dBaOMUb0FPccgCouvY+IIMcuxawhypKE1RocMp6x9X7aD4+3xyfbo+NxeDKOtr7Z9BNiZjIWZP4ycSQVFRZnbFCPGmjPWFSuwTj6onn8MXAyXD5YRjGH7B8RPMf1PFChYmqIkmWJfE9oe31fu8g+wnznXsk7YRAIF92FSZTRWip9RGa0g4gQl63pXhYFTh+p7hQvwc6NTTtz4+SjgnBTbR6yWUh5DnGmkYynhnNn5uEayREzKcV048yuNZMolWslO0sWYmJH0Z65JAWRe2yIcuQJ64jcsCTRIMrum+N+4/Dk5vW7b1y/8803b752c3P9cLm98DJ4OEdIaJORSUYkHjJS+7ZvPAcrsThJkqQ0AuvJvYJPVCUyoGpurSWl+xAF5jQg1wOd0poihpSIMwrXEQNFdkQ6SaoaaEMVecqshskUJJMMyx94GxMnKqo6vNi5mJlUP8kpVGwtZs6BvG9SkwleItOqvcwU21o4vVFK7xC7WFfkjp8L75kywhjeu+gri5wms4UnIZ86wKuogTIj+gVRL1L3+G6djmBuWFLdB347YmabyYSKE0Bq/Cycye6JvRBR4MFWZYl86QPnI3PpFw63hzO8k1966rv+9o//13/pxR99787wlz/9V7qflBICN5omGYUHcXb3ZHL0YxysQviKK4rNVUXFAAGunl8k3CFARD8QiS4jGQZRR0RXsFKtrSilfAHcVs0jfODiLgKWNhl9oIRC4LitJDx0hY6rFoyYJGiz6K4GOEdiHshKSMzCBAj3wmq1ipGImZ3UUWyNAq0RHIBgPptq+ZMrnZXCcRzM8FMnkDOYCEMKB5IULnfImUGnN8lImmGxPLMsRFRm9ItM+F399VKvv8h85IiwBqwpFZOKpifNy5SIPQOB9bg16iSsRRnXPK20bNiaOiJAZA6yTcXhZEss/40QcYiaAUO3MtKTqUDEhF4oIvCBiACMRyLGSTBuUAkcMAFL0VkWIe6VyBpTCUkziLX60lqv4btKT84ECyEGECGMJSR80wgFxXfB8OEkAbMnJMTsw9u6cRSsmYVVhZGGWJt3kHeSmJBOoSoegYsObsAa3s2RPBUnFUosjswYqVpOS8WogghvLgsjxiJiTnBwZxET543T9devj4gQJqb+ly6d+S++/z/41K07f+/KlfuzxWNHn37zU1/42te/5eKFH33pL3z+819c9OTf/1N//otf+uIJnd45vEXHp1//7NHphWZ7ClHYCw88+dwzH6BIIb108MT77n9qreu99X4f4x9/8te+dO1rogwy7cggJl78+Y+u33w1jzrzsvnpiwfPZDxtOVb8xeQP7tHPizz6oHxic/pk7z/74N6fO8PP7NEbp3na9vthe+jy0Tuvcvbm27A1tzOq+zkW8sHHy/iLT93/+28f3lxcnCQqKImSuNnxZrt/5Gf3Ds4e7K+bfPeL7/+T3/749774+J984YEXnz3/wpP79x3k3gOPBAgX6ev1Std7Xxr/4tDfFrXdKsRMiOnAz/3Ukz9mauoxkhTvXnX1CNV1UpNIF9aah1D26OW599BmNAqeLjKTBjC9TUl2UHdTiElJ4EryZJhiqYBRARQAebgYarzZuNWKfbqfd/c9BmBEPhwYRq8oUmPOZQxUeOGpyqN3CGQL3c7MI907NOJIUcfuDg2wWH3mlGRoOxPuL2jnOCijpyhJw/rRRTQpAK1hLQ2p92Dh3nvZQmp1UY2DD2Jma0rC0VNNkN4qwn1xznuzdwePVCnHXBvU1JVtJWM7cKAQx+jBwiaSLKoQYvkYQgKXTNXfxbDL6NtOwtyZT0/39lbKpqJOqWLGrY8hQixJyWw83FmZUiKDFZ2WEKVHqLCqkaTHKEuAMps4gDw46zkS2r9kD8e4EHx/j2HWcgRUKe6ZDGWRTCs5ovtcKo+JSsufpJUcDY4cKOOgHSdEaU6IoMys3BQm5qUPEW66hmZ0DGeT9BCSkcOIlQswTUzNbPSBK8Y9tCFdAKHeWARJjgHNDCQT2CJaU6IQ0ohBSkFhVtQvqJi0WTV7TGKGhCKcznBK4AwVk0ltjDFIjKfBJpnZ1GAQZaLhriJJQSQRrqYSQaqS4jFsJUzqfeClZpY+FhZWkb6MZg3GvXTaZQxA74pRtDCnKEaqmNs1U3cJckbX4ZjIJJczTAgiE3TIJMO7aRsxTCwp4dpCJlLtPwE6F1KW4a4N25VkxHgA+UjCzLZSHy5aRj1cGF5rHzR1IeW8DxHpy2LNwlEdp5i5OzWmBDY4ljFW2sIByBrFUGmaMB8HJ2fP3nPkclptzIaETWVlZgdtf6Wrta2NjcgllXHfF0Uw3GN2VYHAOiFFNi9SgGH5C4/KVpD6UKJyLjFbRfgv13q+VmiwGNcHVD3/e7Z56XOdtOu9JmmTmQBiKfcUFJbMcz2+m+fQe7ZCtFs8vsfUMLu0qRzC3pukvHzCRFEZP1n4u5JOAYQwsYO7/R4yOHbGLoZeMRELWSZflBSeKZWErkIygjolJQ+SJTIzlkwjFiIl8j6223GyGSd3j28c96Mgz6Bl2QizrTUbQNSxjBEZZEE0IiQJ4pQJM06Sxr0vNRYESx7+HiUPx8InspJ7l2XRpiLsMYiIBLFMI0jVJNn70m2FcDDBSE9J4IhAnxmOjB8f7vDIOWhP058syirSOyICw1R9eM+hplGHIafQGMPMiGn4qIEfMUvsAidjQATOPoot3mMIcUaY8XCfzQUrVuW4ChLwT3BHEWOVppqTm4yxQialwwUuO+igcpBSX4aIAWESEarkFJwEAxhGor1Ha1o+WeyjTJICJ5Luy1hCV6vwZJtCPSZSImbR9MwxRu9JC9rg/J7n9v/Gn//rNw4fePP2m0T8wiPPP//Yc/+fGIpPv/5LJ/6ONo0RqPuTHPzScG+KJMTq/91TLSlIBb7iVFMEvZqZxxCTkUPTpCknLcODRr2AgohzFzCcJwY90mMgNg7lG48MVWPlIHeq6MgYkUpJESMFbFJiMB3K2Y5BJ4WocaYY9FAprCkzAgavpBRCVE3H6NxwjOPei/reuaDugZm3p2j2xdUqrVNVkCntXm1uQB6WSaDBlUeBiXO4izIxqwm5E9Hog43DoxylYOPBrkzkI9AnlXYsMyjSURgmsoNZNdOTdzsAjaJRUNlftcZY09zAtQRPTk6QFiuHlshH4L2uWTYnZiV9DIyufLiZRmZIcLL70JWR84ihaqCyT24coPQBhUIpW6C+iQDxRRSOa/Su7LjmCKScKoGCkCow2sqYOMaglLpEmbwjIoNUa+CXmbYSHy5CMFHpSonYpxmxrZowLduBIBnsACqk14egooQyFktoiLKFM7Uv3j3a2tyBGk8FGgycRSJHo07pA8kZUbePYJ7FwaP3bKaCYSmCxKP8I8wcNDJZplmcSZhYlG8drSidkhotP/XEpf/oz/yV/+r3f/Vf3XzLzt0vG/vcp79IZ9uLH/jQow9eevrBD/6Dr/7Spc2ZD3/rCx/7mZ/75d/85Yv7+/fZ9q2bV86de8hHDyFb2x+99oUf5h9qnH0GV65WrYl+/ejdf/v1P9AiaCKNUzjHv/dcC136IpT0+Jn9/Ug/u8oe5/aMbveDdDUjabbc+dnHHz53sjm5cObZ66c/9kD7X44W0VivuC9BOSTXPEgt+pEvh0zMr1P7+O99+adfePq/+ezrDtZwuSuFmU8etC++9q5+IVsz0cuUtLe3VtJoOk4369ZktRYKVssgWktavrL8q6unXxBl0kwMehyFJD/vL6zagdUlRJAQcBKZWe8IgY0kKvo/kyf1vohiahJJtGwHpjXayD1H+MzMYOEBMQ8yx/AElEMPDjysNBxBYCBE3QMHV5OQRDk8k4JUhUPYkPjrzCoiRO6eQsiUIliOVKWPEBKSEliKkpl6VNUSTMK1cwiHi5pb096HYGY2g6uBSmdl984so4+qo1RYyd1BHgmK8mAlESVk66Io75hnJh7wpDXGBotd2UdMXw9FxPCwAnikKucgNjLVSA/lkqkQBoU5+mDlSKdMClbDXo/BkgKZ2vYyg8KTkoeP2oWOZMrW1h6dRCV59OjZiZekMG3MtFJrZka6EiOvCCnslzyhOwoi0pVGMAsHeRI7DWX2CJUVEwcNFVGxAW0nwBCcuwR5aEyRkkywx0z+GDCGakrMEa6kSSFNw93YAOeE9GV2+hJZQVgeribDh5lQphiPgeaf+3aoWUaO7CvdG9Gp0M2c7KY6xgDis7Dm7qI6fMlyTU3n5ExSoSRbWaSDo1uGgCRRcqh/5iYFgE0I+ltro+yCRHsAACAASURBVLuZxfBKIKRUk/BKCwDCx1QjEfvJTKJGWOuNkcSpYrv8z3tzAuEMZxF3J8VkYkcAT8iZJuNEk8J7V9WAt2R6eitJQUBQkyh6CXGymmZGBnmOCSepD0aJM9kJSY/CBEM/i6h3N2sQ9EYUe5CYVXn4oCDSqZaMDAkxjRg7JWsSqWgg1h46KUCqJuY2HYKrqHQNAp8aekvXJr1vUXPAhRUZO61dhDP4e0JEEIYtONnC06yZWIwA5ltVATQ0bUIa6Zvt9nR7KKyeQ8hWulrraq3r/fWekVnuKReZgzgyMtIGLZKaFJwi0mjnuVPNSqqsoPq5MRPsePBhF+61YgBnXjxKH6pTZscgzXvLN6qRM890scKF5732LHf6z+L0Q3EaFTlL4VPQQQSRP3JIqG6FEkWBIlNCRJ7dY238qOpBPBs6f5dKlp8w1WlrrH2j3MvESHa0+ggvST4NzxSHdndyexAsOTw9crvpJ3dPbx5uDjfjhET6ssHapDXL8LayrZ/2nsksyNUscnXEcBcXVjXLDEonYY9wD9GdvBc0oGSVDEKBBdhMeJpJEKiPtf8Dvguj/hQnDtIdnrhI92biw7mgUzQtoKUqx3wqPMMdP5hDp2cqTjlB3AZfFlU7MdkSwczNZHiOEdbYmsJ2Thms8A1CIweANGeQKvcxssJONYCcAg9W4GSSZYNMQkaCKwqNCYWlMUIA6Z3S4mAk5SQLtbbqfYhJSfWQDFOeLuKUyBTV7r5atRxOymUhh11QpLub2fAALwH57eEIPugZ5DEoKXqIsCiMMPSpN/7+Dzz3d156+rv+/zIJ6TOv/6+fvfq/QZmCJRKIHelESloAzHsL9SJgC0WEmACJOnwYOitmHy6mWQESjI0xoDLE5KMTaudpFqXOYhyZTW0sQ1QCTpMmxLEsnummmMymCvC6ScmsksHuVdyzCkmFqWJsF2U8EFX2ylNJNXFHUuggEc9IgSMWC5kgoh5dxTJAxSyLAVB51pS4oAs5XEQG/pgnbvZSOyeTEg14c+DpgFgUMyNJihjBzhWzRIhUZbaZxSeQAZcwPXAVpmM1jppqdHgESjyFZG/s4T0yMtmL0VPjkAgpeRmohRQOCk8KcURo7SESox8Bj90qeAhEHzMLsAmYYSTjCn4QL6dDYKHtI6lomRSUrdmyHdZwaHhF1iKDESqAkgZQJmz2AhtICjnCxHh+9cSRzAYhlLp7EGTkjLqIKpaMxuIsgDClIHuQta119CzZmglRBjylgf8SJZAWIxj4gyj0wkrVh6spCfaNsVo1H25rgwUdX73azDTK1JVm4AQNVRMJbF0BN74n1IIJX4RGDCepJbMzZ4y4vUnKbBw/ceGBn/2eH/+rn/yll7cnJi1l9Iv3/+mHnnntnTc+8MRTD+4/+pmv/e6tqzc6n7529SvPXvrQRx66/NYXX9m/fePnf/qFf3r3UEwkJdb8e6999uTw6ODM2e1y/ObtK4+ffUJJM/Nv/7N/0GNRQ5SaJNODlj//5Nm7p4dv7ksfJCwXxrJaVn75Ar1585w1ypP7zbjzYciTF86ePV30/H0fv3nnR0Iesyb9KNe2OrPu44i4jzu+XfS8SorQCBUbQf/2+vjPLh9+i/LrIytnBSFd6ax8+uj+N64dy5e/cnBwIPzgxb0zqoOjtfN7arYMf/2dL/MjaXpwu7/xzumXTvNOaYug5XZIIGl/nNs/WThIf+oXnsLe1qOEpBgIR1086ssQNQ+HQLGEZSBcVawBzRRjrf16FMYFe4ZCz8GDLlCaEfLlkuA1D2QZMSsz4yXJjAxn6EaQZIIZVcASlpEkqrhcVdTDhdgjKBIzyvSMKP9K0dIBpy5X4fTa7/x6BSJIIo6eaFEQ787MkV7amDIMADNc6/WdcTg9RCcGPSdqHXmnksKw4yNBtUKfcWnCKEJJHk4pauojmEtivsM94Ax3ZGEVql4zo7WG3zdZFPhQxT4ngvCRZ+0GncJ9boaxO8QklQv0xBmZy7Jd+rJdNtuxOT49SURYMYvYTmBcPTzU6AlrgUakmRbJsEImYzLHQBuBXK5oyxmM1FjE6aQnIZxHOCLHCORuJ4WZjN6R7mrahg/3UFN4MMD/TMImUIJcSHNyjCDnB+wNMlSHuEIkCEnriYdwZS2WlFJ1ggCUM8NNCA04zViFynnv8DmB4yusE+CRSNuDRxeENayU8WlkpHuY1sggKwIS6n6qYsrJVuruuPXTUbUqTw1PMccpFUknw5HZDXEopeBfVBF5Oy5jJiswJJaRigEg1vKAKCEemmUMj1F2ol3Zj649IjEWgbNukvQsRr2eEQmduTQBUmg+/IOKHOOIC0f3JaJwjMwcBlgpSIQhEsOL6hmQqHk44pBm+pa31jxcppR2Wpe7imSGKnPUbRQjShdNoiIURJEeQekMWBpFUrCyh5PlZtlSRh/bpBTVEUNUIRGsiSUB9D+W2PbY3t3evXN69+729tE4PFyOltgGheNnEuS2KbF4uggUvR4UkUOEk2MWBBNcNSkt1fDWGo2qRYTzlktCkIgmp+k+nVvAe3SWSoK+t2yXHbaOJwqmBMZTlUoTRVP9JM/k+XtJGFNpzKUQ2/kNIBqPxNgR/F34SVAp0uxMp/NlPqZUGV/vtS9GduYIGkk9eZsUKZuKPKclOTf97sbv3Dh869rtK9fvXLl257V37rx5d7mx5JLkTkNUSIJVQIUY1L1CIDLq/4gKVedUNR9YvLk0DQpJIOPL+xvTBxwj8exB9YcQw4wCv4qIKKh75c3OcFHpy7DWOLmmNqySDGP8GJ2SrBnVuUyqikxEKdy/zmc8CWv8JIpUkpS6qoioWTk4YKiuDMa5qsUPqszKEun4i+ZqsXIQ3JMjMayC6T0ibWXgvLBIJFJxK0aVYmeB10ppmi6jWnQUr1azCBSId5c5TqCpdSVmzSRoU81sjAGRNqQznpmZSx8Zud0OluzdN5slMscYRLLtPTlHjHByD51BsmLqEdt++vL1Xxfhs+tLKzu7awWv3v3jT37jv3/l7Y+TUHpW4onjXpCKZ1ECGn23y4azbtYqDNEHumIo8UQFadpQOtbLLUJIGDdJzIehwSEGeUsKmzRdtarhHpkKQTmEJx4YdBaLOBle5anA1LGgJICwZYfm4Snq5rl4oUwKn/MDZdgCiGu9rziewAcLUhNK8Qj8oOlRKpiY54EwkfjiMIaoakkTEUrqSZkQsvQFHBQHSQ+BfqwyRoiIe0THGo0yU3Dv1xATsBPA7WQKEeF4mPacpBiRwQBvqsm0NOP2wQgyRWRz2s1sxtRUDLWK1lfADL8ivq/6KCMrQ6J+IyZ8/ngvmiK7JT19hCgSiYWNcyS+FO/OlS9NGRWcFgMdIyT386fFE1htFL4/WZahKiD3UoHxCOVT7WUnySYq4qL8jFXLTYxzFbcjzQwNt0cAjggBuXsQpQ9i0Z3qGdmp05hAUag/jSCGMAQwqgImwIxWSRJjBMasHnNe5QlVqnvRoSqViTgpZGbCZYYae+Q3b+/dOezft4qf+uAL/+03P//ZozscoSTR48rh4TdvvbNcuyUH+c7tN7/8x5/uG3r4ofuvXnv3S1/5Qty4+c/+xde+fMp/62dePOQnXr75trJ4Zm/0MJ977lue/Ye//z/9k8//4itXvvBdlz/6y3/4G79z5Q/NDG9+Sjyj8Tee279wbvWPPn3n8vee+coXKNV+8PyZx2K5onpuM3LfPnF49JH99rjT6/vrW7n5DpKjFX/jePs8rbar9e+cnuhZeuqZ/L6PPPX4+8/Heu9ow8e38vTGXNSL3GWjd6//8PPv+7+vH5FxeoL8W1k9pptVXrt59+qr146Wcf3w9Ljzu0fbz1957d9c/cZvvP3yO3svH6+/dG354p14w2ODEXxE0ISM4xg2l0s3N+fOP2CiIGGT1OVRT06OwSK9dzMdMTJYWxnHOJQY1CYvbqcDvULuQcGqnMkO6j4T1Jh921WBqZCIdBpIiSABCwNm9GShsYxKR4lBoukYuaaygVVYKs0q8RGAO2B5IBipIdsUEkphG+7EFDESCHhNIvLw5FQ4/Z2cB4xbZoYHEZsZVa3paxCGLjX4zIRIiVn6GErKxKoqGBERgeDvPYkruJZSnKK1RjnRHVlTHXe3pqN7Jpm29MwRBacB9Bw7Danrx9QyUlV9OCuptBil32KmMVJIvA8BRjkdYHRoGke6rmXxRcUoU7UO/ZgbS21C7qotcnhQeiZl355KcnCum6makKykrU2UKren985CfSxmNmoZ61Pwxcxs1qjmDJReECojRWOt1vroM01QIhE1UVUUQu17Hyo6wldt5X1AIczEqjL6sGYeXra2DBEOSvTGquqZkkxOCN0q2EM4o1ZRIiYzY6LeY7WyXcdLu+ImIikkGQ8/7LUmGpHKrawcmWaGAFmSkGCsmDCt9BGiqmqZJGreRxIYbpGO7Q/GpaDjSXLEIDXzZSiQngCBUI4xmlhylh9jFJ8NNVwfw9SIaCxR9Ue1TJzQc2Ce7SSkkblaNfDrd8W5iJLW9qxogSwVtxhCXKh05tyl2YpWS9m7tyaR5N0jk8hJzTcdFmKnAQ0h7JGQyDpFOpEQwkvhiglMsaLmyNqYJSk4y2WeIwaDxsssRunEIstYFIAeB/WelYWkMZOwCvNIR+jXqhkqgChOTxJTU+2LA3mAYgJt0OiuLCOHmY5YIsfo0WMREiL2EXt7+5FdtIhrqICDgkS2Y5ORh9vb4d5sLSQqurfeX3Fr2pocRKiCLs9JFN1P4QVFqgILmLFlxK14sR2ipZpXz3QIjxHliLZwkh0rn060nIGzwmQED9/bvlV5U+6v8odyvrdJw79+rg+LfJOUrBOoiiAy2PjqRqHigTETa5SWXNwH10kOikatUFmUZUILWdB1s1CEU1E1FmCMMj3J3TcbP9wsmzubm8fLSY/t4gsY8OqWQmarkNG5iyazbv0E4zsYGyNDmkJ/Dp2WZ4hwkpPwoK2uW3iQUB9LM0tNQytLBXmvJlmTBrMk3GWmzYdDTO5eS7XwKbzNxBpfTSk4KDIGPBQR0VbNPVQtM2KkmY7uYMRjE54OrUuIaoyCdiK63cwms42YUkUw/8KgidWEq8jLdDUbS28ry/TgFCTxEMHsgBovRrCyj1QWdzZdofruvUeSmmVQZnqPtm9AU7KIkAhL74NNqgQUMcVIt2zbEYNEKINFfXiSK8sIF1ZRhD8ZO9KB00dSjISGckRkOhzAxOUETnLEc5gRhYhGps3KUoyEWu+Qjbw3kTn/8LVf/IPXfvGx8992bv1oBL1z9NU7mysDQeGIhuYQljGCxoybEnYI6hTrJ4oRYjqWvlpLrbVVxhjEHMOz2oOMGJmsqbiXmQVMrJqizumLRz0emFpbY9Tf1pq7i8lYOvqE0YMpW7OIJHT7GcN9/+z+6IuqZnAfXraxGcApGPZ1J+yihUgonCiRPYZELRqbkZWuykAfe6RJcQBg4UnoTjNg/Vy2o63KnOLDaZCqMrP30CZE2Zr5CC7NVPgol5xaw1UFCXRVl560m0UIFz5KmDK1WfSRRMKKpXR6kgI4xTtcko+IzPnng1WXbWc2VR1AgElpr8w0hu+t1hnOJuTl4i5QinB6IaUpuEBuzA6ijwAHiOkAZ8RcICt+2czYcbtAJaSs3EERFjUMuEWZMFEG6L5YxJzJ2nj0DM4Y2NzwCGfn0GzWiPJ009fWgMwA1wDcjDGGkiZnRIxIhQ1zqSWNiHi4JAcFkVRQLSfAtUiDRPAJJVmlWCecmZgTCUsgjF7YRyhgGTm9PQX7YLzITBmOJAnM5LGwRYanmzY1lYqeF2GBT9U9YUFS1fChrMHkg4RUUi7n6fcu/nc//6nf3TvA2zmyC+vg+Moymp698/UjXcfj4+D3j9/8U8+/1PrJOvzlz71+xVe+3fsff+UT/8lP/NinX3vg2uYwKKL7r33hN37oxT+7kkYs46R/4Y2X/4/P/7ooB7GsVrEsP3hh9cPnup6/8Lc+/mqes+2pZzL340dSRO3Wlr5FdU3JvZ/Vg0w+7MuZJVj0JLyFs9Aml03w/StqZg89uL5wKV54Yb1s7nvtan/1yvbK1dOT4Um55fwt3//g6+/83JMX/vfXb848IMR6pprGSpfLe1893r7y8h+NT4Vvtqv79vli27949kPPn7v81F5Oeh/qfCJWFh8jhSJIjDnymI/funO4fOrj+tMfezonlg5PqggRJBKId4coGXhJEBHgGEZamE7N9WRwiiHghnbh8slBTGYCQj1zTjpLimqMDhqBQ1XMCZJBRHBScMmKBG7Dye8ICtQH4CBgzo+SHCljIpA2xVT6kaiaac5B2wSNhimOG6YdFDkzkDufsCYqzEUkcOulKidjWEsAWpTFWBJ/FSONvZg7VPWTMrZVwoSJC2C7GSieYmfUh9sYWz2d6yO1QqXM8qOQNgV1UKpIX+HwQXwPwToXm/VT4Nu2IsRB5ZIw8yOGCAhBsNRYpd5+nTE4SafLdrAfbzcb3wzx4Z0bk9bWKlLUDARHElYp13uPbTBsMQh4FWRjYD+GfRoLeYSKSYkRWVQzYu5McGQYNLdQE2IIr2qRAdZ+VfkII4aQJomTIrOZlXeh6lZAUuYCJYomOf9JoTiFOaPSRIDJxHRGKruVo/yPSpkeoVoMtNoDYLpWURaKrLuMEFWRef8X0aMIR5wghiHBlolIDaSY2SSU54SDMoA4KmM5ZCEVzlghv1nzRVGhCFKimrhVEHB4NLWswEsY9xUu3ip/7uUPzDAFTiUW0QRTDO4n4UxSUSrNdcJSQpGAP1EFSdY7WKq5ANQAR49kplkDHj0nNp1FgMVAjguuGWw1QTctdF5dt4TIYIwzZxodQTUtdZqgJVHUNNYkM0nJ3dtKI1JtVWtVgZKZimjHwoynlFgJIFNtGulivPjWwyM8JT3co9ByqjI/DYrwHsumH2/89KQf3d3eOtzcOdweno6N5+i5ENYmsotKJy7kvicXNDF5sOIHyyRQCHep7Cg0yoA4vYBS1FN8mDQd5fdy/FKmSnWH2pvm//cuAudicMJpJhNm/n3+nnxznmvGnOEZNKMScU1BCTK9QFlzTyRlODMl9aANMSf14FNiD16Sj4LGyfado+Xdm4dvXj96442bX3/n6OqNk2ub2Cx+GrSwcvJwja1sssWQ3qVn64O3C20TXgHqbBnpLEASerKTUJITImeUkqI1y0RKSpoqMwEQogKqbRGfMBjVpuhsK3VdKHkUM0uYiXz4qsnuTTJTIoLyn0Wncro8lKrCPB/OYnNIUTTngVFbmnuEWHjDplWBBeRGUDdUBQNN96AMNpxyHhnQtsXkik/kPbAoCqYcrjmk5WKACKhHXZT4vaC3EYRFVb71NJJgypA1rGBSNYpkleC0JqoSlBDO7e7B4TFGJFMfvXsf3j1GUHYPRHlHupQTKWytkCexlk/JSwtClNTHYBWPJGWwUb2EM8xCh5tr7x5/7ebp17d+KynVEK1eiecxF+gIXAWiUq2WgUkBf4E2i0CiGrwtJEKiFaGsyhBS5XRhkc5B/BwFimqQzyDyDOzKwKShDHIIYUjSDEqIfM9rDrgR6Vq9B5GQMDHEKaiRAv8VYq4o9gJuklYaABQ/QXPbpobPlgRljoj3mH78euqyzBG8011B4KMQeBBkfiVDcA8TYeG+DGu2U6oXKFiEGaHFxFSWsVLFw1aZXBcclqcIOJkdOJjGtZjFjDt8ypiRW5CquE9w4lSHCdJt5RMKFdSNEHyLOhCfBosqhsS7WzWn1KzsjsJqoqqFycJNl0BiB/b82MSaWkaUaFVKbsDv2QcH4iuUKkuGqhtEnji2ekKS5JlpUikXkD5hLoOfEFczBuVisMgXhTgzVKv6qh+11G2FoM+M6VCve0ObCoIKRdTw5qU2BfIgk1XZ1BLTKJo6+aRMNpOq1BB70JSYrJAfog0pIJHI6AFFpvhmbHBFkRQjXSQybm7lO67dPj0jv0JGKYZ9d3Ft6eTtw+Nffe0HH/+Wx45OPvnb3/jq5b0PPvrA//xPPvXbX37rNz930621s6s39+Xh/vZ/+hd+7P985aunmcx5Y3P7Yb7/x1/68Uv2yDNnP/R3PvmPTnxDIqFyJv3nHvUffd/BN/j8//ClK7eaXLgo5x+J119tF4x+6Pz9MsblA8nNwmv7vdtHH9lbnyf7TJweKL0/7da+3T7qz9j6bep/NPjcff3yU/bg6iyO6NVaLj3Unnv/wUsfPvfYwwdmGsy3Fzoc/N1yePb++18+PCm28AxcEhYxlZXQ+dYu7a0un917ZP/g0v73vXj+O16AqriYdlXyEQ13Q5jfBHwy07bH3Vde07/8C+9LZmXxGAATUL0k1X3wzncLNUhgEkBYwWM/BoQcFGkJn5LXlAaT8tICwfQhEo6hSOkw602D0HOWIpmBKD+o20urVFpzOFvqPEqPapkUEKdA16rKKnN6DQMZS9S9FLv8H4CbMlNqOQ8cMRMjEByVS60qBJz6Sl4mHzXFIaoiIANKvIwowyEaO1XyymWu479gM9P2zEJirMqBv8qIRMx0siXTPdAacVY4BEBVmB9hDFyHuMy8BWZEEmsZawSlAnmYaZlJBVhXmRwIKg28sDtUhpkCNUtO1hwjxI+IhsfJdnu63S592SxDVFjNMyg1CWAhQKKIwNUMiXQVZWGsd9LTzALJH0SCnS38YcoGADqFADuZ4ihQOFWNaJpZOLmWfZAmpJpR5GplyvfkZkgBhsASRAQVxYdfeLec/FIiVchWPTLF4KHX2oRjCVxdN2SNAr46KdMcK9KUzoWHmvIE/WdlRaCHQS471w0EI7g0iIohSYJ1E2VWRqgpkiF2uOeSaTER4vMosXAGxYiU0udH8B7K1xRbxsyQE4pgLiNwfePCDkP5jgZZvj1ctGVbU5sZU8UsTejjyjTKU5Vc8QdMzK1eHBZTfKcZ6eSKjQFKLPCnmMZwgBZXq1WFgNKU6sn8FxB7uKlN54arrbDmAkWpBgfueA3FFCvooBQtzCcaL0FLTwJyMj7hcncwe3hbtxhQq2JHrRnZRxeVKZnJ4rp5j/SAUtE0wovlYBbpmTxiOMXS+5LL0XL3cHv37ub2YT883Byd9tORIJc60ZjXcUb25OJPQmhKEkEjMogjJai4XYHkaAS14x2JqfUsnRUq3l1A4HtCCMuXGPfW/MgpFSjPowJw5niq4KqiEhMreM95WtjyXYxhznjEQaWJG8QROYKWoB58mhJOm6BO4plbp83wfuP42jt3r717+PabN15969br7x5eP4nj480RSaYkKXkM5nRy1nSOESM1gktM7jk8nEnRKYsI5IiEO01rnBgeZowJZlImU7OGbgg7gRID7pLKWCj4Xsr5jHRHAnsACEhzEAkMY6SPMC3oDqCUOP2qpqbp7WGeTjwpUrzXCEmR1FKZNQyUX4n34XZDNSkcEZ5uKkkh0JWVYxaJEBVugT1DFike/zBEBR1mhV5SCNI1pi0IbvykZELzKR7RrKElSGZVLYNziNSdiN07cSqpUOQI33pP5kj8zdSHD3fPGBGDfIS7OzORVCpAPVIoX5mYgSsDZoySGQbmqPwAIiE1zQhiQRIEprog0gUFV1Ri0gyLzUi2IiW6p5pJseiqZghKUWUhoA4EqEZlht67UmcquQfIREgxoaDDbA6BNKYV2JMcAN2xFlwzKVg0OCdfWtC4q0r0ZCbWEmjPqAbCNTc6ds4V6FGRUwi3lXpKe+XLy05H6p7WpKS7Re2sKL+chuNiQlLK9HjVCx+7U6Qm5giB4oRWrbjgohIjK2ShhJ+kpjFCTcR4ZvYIhto1/KW0ZjMYjKCnpWKB1jEFqydNgeLoXiGQPJnGuJ0hgtXqurFFQPknTXxEUqrocCBeUB2waOUncRWr1TMjDaqmGFTNT83RmCAOUhb3YapqHIi6iIweisZJFVJYGCaBbUFjjAoBkCcfwUyiypIZlY3Bc0sR4RAbCSsRC02bFREGHE4pJvAWgUOxq+eB7FITYFFFVGAvCme6F5JUU54yLxXlHrZMxVeTxMoZOBhpHjJcGTZc2Rj/r8QBoiRS44xoTXOeNllfN2LectVsDIRRUWsCELdHPtDX77995x+H3W1NC33AxEEiR3eO7Dde+9ZvbG99/pvy2vVHHjzz+4+uf+CDz7569dXX/Zy0ttprew+sL/+ZB1/XePjqyz/x4Q998s2bxxks8vWrX/uRD//g+y49/fc+9U+vHF3FU/rSpXN/87suPX3/3q+8tf315ZY82nzwhQt033m6+taZ5/f4g72v79t746zcd+pJ+blx+tKZg33nz7hfOqtPDH131ban/vTKbqzkM5lnzm2efnr/wb3zmdlUq00hyswH77enLq++44Nnn3vqzH2Prsf5vb1vvPOIrF7rHqoQtTEnc5ipalutdLVeP/bowQvPHvzp7zx49CFC3Bc0dHjHIHOwJhFQwehO3XLaclxf9Gc+9lRWCidnlBPM3TNJVVnEKkWwwgAFljBRItKV9D7aqhlCBYSAUUGCNl53vJA1YSKkG8ETnz6Gqk7afg4M3SLVpnOG6spNSgMPNAOnzL3Iqkypm50SY13SjJBJqVMRUyUKFl768IwYASmtWqVwRGQt5DylSkDcAaEi7qME3FjVeuyI7bsUmgq1D4QlRg2lsLuYjz9mWo4SiSZlIUBryUzM6dKszX0ssnQCSirEVVVwM2AZsSvfMjI8As5Dnb+CCKKLuLsLla3RTCk5PFsz3PQiGog2oDBRghoko5LMMjyhFodIKjLF680sZ50wu+cYfnq6jOHb7ebk9GSz3aiap1Mivlkr0kfaGENYIPYA8s6aQeYA6SAzi4kPRIKnqXpW8CHKoDKm8m7pKricfHhSMZeFhYk9xvQmVa5RQlsZGEDmLioXxNTMEDFsF5NItYJUkCCAW636tJKP8NRbFleQcORxz+SmqAAAIABJREFUzSlpBnzXYA8XBs0cN6Z6hGgOzpE2RgR2M7NgXY8JC1fnTyKiYnOGTUivVsWWUZJTRDG0RMAR8B8FZUOcQEkPSZgBwxSD/Kx4HjAJ49Dv3Vng0Ee34KZtRnCBtaERKAeHiWUifBMIJmAPHPYYxOKVEpzIPZg4SsBHFKlNcrbpOHlUxCPVFNIFLBJ1x21zrzk0nttKbdEI92kRjvnPqwHiHMPV1HPgmh+9R4Udk2q594loPj+C9EgisjJMwuUnyNtttqLcFU/F8QSgOImGD1FZ+hJVjJeOJgKIjkr+9dF9oCXOZWyON4eH29t3l7t3Tm8ebu6cjpM+Fo/hDAMeOYGmD2aDJoL1im7kVNMoInJWzlpT39v0cuXAlXF0bsrvdYY0R1e77UjVXjNEi2ZkhczcQt5Bs2aTOHd/mMlzOj6YjBwsTDKCtiwevpBk8GmQs0iMxXO76XeONjduHl57++arb9169dbda6f9zuk4HNSDhjSJdG02YmGlAH5SOjz/yYGdAxNH1hSAiJFgQkHVxSVTBI4CYoKykadKX1WoXOVRMvImsGnB7w37Pd6+OdCsEVXgGprt9swIFUW6TAGNUDHiR8IJDXARUe3rEOFVRrSdmk5E8OELM+y+EYlcOHSmYPqxMNTIIjlGCCuQYwXKp4R4WwAb88o/yRkDxcLeHXZ6MWwXBfXfbhkEZ6+ajTEYuxrS4MCkPiOFTVQyOLIkAlnmdh40ho/TsfQcSXJ62kcERG4RNLxYXCqWE4KFVUYGl6ABCzIU08nF58UVwhWAySI+ArZDzNcUM+vk4fBfhJDUX0hWnjm4rB1x2TjffN4VEfiaEHnpke4iNXbCPBU0GyQbI/EbLJeafOFXgygynEiWzdZWhmfYK3MEosnEoFmmSnsMzPUlHJJgzjKLWzj4HRi2sqiIae/DVL07RBxjuPA0UgqvVpYRNVQlSk9DDCBBbYRqp6ihFDDiBDZp5QFGnl5FSnJAoDtXxBGO5TRQWJCQFBtGwZGepnRmGC7wpOHjwiIebU1WuCVFUNVpwfgxctqYIXhBKkBZfAODYuGZ3CrMASJgsgcAdsJM6aGmfduZ7mWPxXxmAkUQHsEMadPwtlPPY8wiujM0UmXjgpsdFeMUJCaookUlhu/Ok8kakAJHQ2WgQknNtHdXVeWJg5192QzmIwryJCFxBD5lWFPyLKswpuoZxKIi+GZxxIVD/TZlRF53RGSYGW6NZpozD1cYYmyOoHByh/OFMkhNQanAF1SFT1TaTUaAHq9AJ4YTsdU3JaiPMRwDKdB7NLNlGcxcidbItPBITuRYvG/Rq8fxCWkczPBDSibxsnX6rde+5+XNxQP5wBPy+MX1RZNPP7B/GEc/+dFv/8TvvCxnDg7Oru/7IJ89q7m//uSXj544ev0nv/XJ337z6LD7CW+XdzefO77yr7/yiWQ6b/rXX3ruZ545eOWNk//8X776+ePNucdW67VI8uUnIrZ67cbBRy/Q+8/sHd3XfvXqyYt7vGerV0Z85/mzq+34LOuZdT7t7VjpobWdDf9ay1e6XXws3vfY/oHtYRth2CRHjWLhwlut4tx9snrQ7Mkzh2/cfbHtX1zluXVrKueaXTq7f/nR9fufXn/Hnzj3Pd+2/tAzevECmQDHlYIgR8ivksMjoWMkiAWwnBNEPPjFff3pjz1V85mgibsNM4NKiYOHDzT9A0nQCYlJuIcUu4qSM9xL4BQsIpWGWf/BFTvX3FlIq13fhT04QpDq/o7Sf1lTSmqqaDUziYNA/OdkZMFWupXTiLCSmiRqSRVRFZJcmTGxaIOjWkhYNKOydzNAaFFk6HkRXuuFm4INEdZiWqGeCZAhLZNVBFMoYeRvc10au/iueE8JVp50xmdFVcNBUYC0QMGVFk6s5KOTkIrFyN2iqb41Z89QsRjBrGN4a4I5StmQoE4JVdPiE4ZTAh5bwnofDrO7mkWEsMLzQHXRUO0ikQ8S0zMAVXnEcJ+7STjrPDy7xzLG4enxto/TvmG1PhYWUW1K3HTlNFhph62DKADXlbXmkzQAglEmSQiQdKis0ivWMrxEFpnko8BptONiUApZZIhoeCAt3euIFDUpzU0EghFLaIr13/wSBSY2hGKjz0RnWhLcSark0jBA8EZB1iwG/sLA/8YVomo+Qs2gLVKxycPk6hUC3SM6HJ/rzVBRhP/W3A/l7AwOFpb0dK/1LTMyptWLIYELSaFGhhJWoX7GqDBKSjqHSTq6EwqegfgsJSfQJpANiDYhetiqZRUyqfXgBRxrUrEBySLADiYB5y1Moob7W3ha/5HdNDnrpX7BbQpVjhoMsTx6L2RRgUoEMnLcW5HpTlY5lhUTh1B7RBaYmWcQ+iEiSRaTGKEiswSvFJ0KTEMMibQpjwIYMHZqVRFJj+pIicKHmY0ezKzawlGOl9Oz54hIJDcmhRBekIqkC4rkZCVWGd6DeVBu++Zoe3K8PTraHB2e3j3enm592Ww3nsMnm4rJkKZDqU5ea1thj5GYFEMqXQQhJ44CkFZMYmD0Wyo44ZlNvrvdk98LkJnb9yx4Tcnx618xgebJGTSmUm14blOXpExeRixBWyJJCY/N8GWz3L17cuPGnTfeuf3N63eu3rz79vFyp8cJkiuksfNIHboij5HqTpuUWGKT7CnDI0IyMkaNMMijQ//MImN4W9XTBaZOyUxAlppUMZVi/OJrRg1d21Gsxwd8EDr5qJw+E9W5AMU7IrEwrMeT9Vnpc1Gnx5QGwoZEmekxw3hnTRxFWahMNhbGM5mVWTo8TAUodoD7CtU5Y0AQCuoRChHpTASh6X0qgi+XNSI9iMkjMit0jSpVSXLihXzEarVC/ACspEJaJDUyqEtFLSOH+xiDiDe9AwYzMhb3pY/uI4ncyYGy4MwO1R7V4JVpGR3aOHTsRLUaFVZl8e7CwqoZnCMrxBXzqADCoJxLu7FgTD8t/uR8mxmHzCTB1JPuEaJapX0NScpwgSwZITZTj4AAeILEYRzQSlshLjAOkzsYS3Xze6RH2BrwMyrAAUYGQiIK+no6gmdSUhHvypyMG4EIJU/l0IIxgzkvV0hyJbvOP8UlO2Eu+7tgIYaVAir1AqSVUZhjFNC4VKMTzofo1ghS5ZxyAsxBhIRClDWTE/xt2iUdQiOpNL/o8OIyJMimYGUNykxjQbvLxfwvDCDEb4hKd3dI0zGUH+GAtWAKg+8UjLRKQy2sb+0/05EMUX77ql2TPUJYoQ0vm2TJvwVhkxhGoDbDddZayyRVtJEz2bhabPjbaxgaDkoFVVMkNPoA7jVybjuxMQCCy2saPJW0MjWZTEEe2fD6YngvJS9PIjKKESBY54ArUMhDG5iZVNKROv8QOZiq2ofX7TpNsHhIOdkz01lUyO+tyn3QPR11pohBOGQqAlUaWERNHJ08bqsoYfb0LfPuhAE4kCjJC4EUnuEpZpg/fnj/qX95++ibJ6ERhOgRYo88feX6h3/3xlOyeuYxfvZxPbefa5KD1QP/hjbfduk+sxtv3m6rB9aPfLC1tu6bPvZXv/XG8mg/+ZHHV5+7fngs9sXbr37pxqu5LN9/6eH/8t/91of59O/+xpW//4dvtidW7/vI/t4ZYVLmuPgw9+N86931V+8uf8T8xyd0a9DXx8lrxldP/eHL95/cZ596Z3s11t/+5MHDp/18OF9+4J+/c3pX2iOPnz5x8cxB2x99mOlwhF1PPWhMpBqxSKrphefvO3h+74EH27OXz37kQ5de+MDBk8+1J57Qiw/YwTqYHUxPaxipAMiI7TpDHpgAIE+KEjT3tXJvrD/1C0/y3FYEhLvl/CzXAYAzQIVDBV5Jyap198yaAJWZys5tlIzRQFR04NwpATbDqvBgECdbCSBLw0SS8Lngussyb+1UrABa8hiO7Zk1zPBqHTM9MESSRdQIN1UKWVmDcykiEAcL1sLUNXLvg3EUmySlELtDo8gxAoJteK948vqgpaT5DsBhjHaR702m5q7PA4+ssMTIEoASiwocm6KKby5GVKRTxTXs+O8V9ERBI1xFiLOZQmsamYrc1DqbSdXA0SpcYVJbNUiJaj8zBeKZMO6lTJAaxtfhISTWGioYOPSIwO+ageao5vH/VskkbazKydFHX2K7LNvN9jjCe3TPYYK5tShbJtoZCmzwZqQ9E2QaimRuqlKDkJ4H8piKESGnjsoEIVICyAkRbTv2KYGGgvOUlcXd0Wjx/8PU2/xadl5nfs/6eM+9t4pVxQ+RlGlKouSW5bhhwwhgBwEaMdDINKMgDSTzToJkFCCj/An5FzIIMupZowdJpwMkMdDdhtufsWHHattp25Rki6REssiquvecvddHBs/ahzYM+Eumqu49Z+/3Xet5fr/WypTroknmzDQ92Co2LnisG/rLdEbZ1gEjiKJwV+H/SPAjByUUcAqWGzO6DCGQyypftf2lgeU+QazxmDdLi9ktIlmtoqprmQ+FfBpH3p38kbF9yt+7zCBfIdpCG+R0NTOT+eohhfYxOhVSPel94h64mfhPxiyLUG+mrnSeO5y/6nyE5OgW8uNalW5uImYuUzQbvnxWMmBirlNfmWw7iCvglU8P9izYmuCBli29viKC+amanwD/mpB2O1WmqSXvPNzwcs98oFe5++XKhFTSA2tGh9KsgLhiVFuHugOmouZV5UaNa7FunePw6OnKKXcdY16tHiBhNwppZszDt1WjzL0VUak8ZbKyLYtRtGy55CU6H7ZXL8/3r+Lhxf3L+217iIfgfZIeEUb0u02dazquPbu7kYPkbTQCUkN8IdGnOOCbH9R87Af0PlFnXH3eODL80M65CwF1+IDQEt38t9hL7rujOxpRvVdtXfmwv/jy4eOPn3/4yfMPP3v58RcPP7nfXu61NaqQ7RkIrGrvkoB0dmRusC5Eo6I2tWFEUee+1g0/9pkxbSSWwUQ658ePQw0JaXPhl5119+725eSKoXW5ZZa5RuaBwucFQirLxFh8+Mqsa4pqfmyuEQNcA7PjyOYgZsg/3PzrIe2Yo7/IGFlVDkNj4VByztgRJCfboGJljCyEnTAUgIaZmdsaYwQnXBPn0cHSKkW7nBW4memRNCGQK3mBnlp7Zp3WYgWDJ1dmIqamNclzycq9MrKiMgh7JLYnuUYhqrHJMOccQVVzT1/Gx9FcX4mtlGv7Qzp7yKoQ2BwkzUaqjmKvXtTZNOHzUO0wko+VRSWyzCYkT/MhM4dsCnSDS5KDzVwT3+eTuaAqHIi6W8Y0lvlh0CM2SKaum2e0zlNdGp1VbMGbydhKBVA9dstt7rHnnCSIGOdGsa9QUMH1oHZ0hgH41Qze3aiTexQNZtddmnQ1Jb38vUeE+WGGAfOzNpxg1WPJAFoBaA/y5VMEwECnjdDO4zkce5lb8rMKUZOk+2o6xj0K4a4WFEqNA+vrx3vguapKlbPaNCpVD90HKxW8pxmK7W7Fcs0sjO15OjrKZfhXwXjFJEL5Zqk5rQn/UjwA2LTCnZk5rYKfrBu8dTdyNoyAQNbN4phl+GfKfgrc/RodV72aXbmaMwJ7ZjGpvKSX2Xw1mGbPKEojDoI0o3FHR2wuh91Zyo6mjgFr7uezI8o5bOH6slaOQtwX4RXUq4gpP7dcZphaA11iqipaNaZfNfpwRvp1GAdEdJbq5FoF4VvkNjsX1E2aJDeeNZcf1sfIfdVuhoPoOOBBCir8XxYAW/r3n/zC//L//dU5ZeIBghbEi/Nrv/HXv/wlfuZN+bkPbh8/0jfffHZ+iFcPd7/18nz/2PpcP3oBeL/1s3cPLy/mcnvnn7+w3/npw3uPH/+nX8dHnz787enuuwv//d//xn/8zSf/5+/+1f/wv/3pv43t9p3b060/fsts9flFnV/U08f9zrfzcr+dHq9LxYtznC/1ca4fbvpSH/3R8/iD53WvN2fgt3/68IPX9E9W//OPz5/qqYF3fvblB197XUqZGbYDlsmkrS0TYSGlpmYl8GX+eOkTjdt9t60mWFJo8IzK1LeqqhjXv0eFe1p2k6zA1KOGxJHlZo4Wde3uzjKXiFq6cg/zoyPMuFfuougUdM4clM2cCR7A3WIvANseaxm617KqkoK5Yy4+LaZVSXkop9rztuvikEDaVKWTJyWS6o+MFWkvalVV1czpiUNzojtccZhJMfMhvcTbOiobUnu4nqJySYuJm22xdzXd68q7K3rdOMdkuaewDzNfHrFFdKdywzh7GMVyE9EaU1i7m6luY4/Q6jY6zc2uAIDOrinWaXTO3Kh7hgQEhECyy833LRnb6+51WhFDfFaDce9avWfbIggEqrZt+1KnEa6J5lcwx2LLOkun1MkmW4tCVfY9fI0BwtSabSiFLxNVjngJFTDTFhw1GK5Gtasj2bTutfx8OUPEHC7WUQx8P+wXd6/zw/Kzqp/WyaCmp3W63fe9UJxiVqURHcbVsSrrxdZaqMwSJ3vNjh7dWG4zMyFmK7O6OypV5bLvpprda/owqOqTezd8GUqi0rR9ccUrMQminDhSltGSwkDIoVJj861QAjWXat6UMjr55nOzSc6LQJVhIQhqZ69dCs0cGo4IVnaaWWSYkXNNQ+jIUxj0nwTIfOm1WeHRzuJusMyd/k92bHraZ3MLyU5Iu9hs8455NtDaMulVHpMbEcFJbla5O9/EkSllIcQetkDcLSLnHZZFfswMLQoiximysN0UOaiXWXZj6bCIFWrLYk9Sobp20QEvqElEDPpVUCVDCRKNfReFzjdZSSh1t32nFLhVPGI3dWY7G71v+2kRYMMPMJeWglZXr1Fr2OHP06xUUV1Te6iqihDVIvG4Ct2mGrGLwd0j9kJ1dki7L/DNBo3Yli80m/GEf1pmNJQw4XO+cnd1fdgfphVzcMzHDwk0ytwkvUpET+jYY3fzV/tLCcn7T9daKrpsqeqj9WjZ7UlP0/hQzwo5aApooyIPkKwLAIVGqcliZKWbrbke/yPtg8I46iGRFRXMpHxks1LdnbUJgcHYIUHkLCtze+xbvdr284uHL758+DyxMcasLtxczaaEL0W16q0dXVtGM5RVKKmCyB6hxkvggkpHnnzFvpuaSEnPcKcymAudIwvvYNVqtV9CGVeozISZAd2ZM88xdLWpRMRaVo3YU9XWsuwanFJ3ZPgy7qfddM8YdstYGqX4nMc8IXkh4jU1S1TbjV/GWmvFvrvOF4F9rQOkpExg8W7ma237NihpUXOR4uICjIZS/mSuRZZflyiQreoQzcqBfJix/X5lze4ZyLkNNDMLnBYK6CMz9YaiiwyVyJSS8d9CSgKQLaOS+gnQO8LddPFYVwPO5ehxFD5bmfNJ3pXFUI6oVID8Kkr6aiDdaHRroZXfd3UdmzkBZk6CVhNLphzfmAl6j8TcanQYYD0lgAKqksfWQkak6TjWRAkUkc4q1MBWTPdItPKVrSL7njxV8zm4Tou7jtlNmkZmZYshMYeio6QjDDFVlbmz9adEGUWryr7l8lPkLlAZRyVELSvHdysQ04pyV5jEJUU1Mu3Y9kOQAUgPOkGtMiG9fGUFkyUsJ3CCdvWIDkaedVbe0rNUnCl31veT3RslZALrNMayo2hXfvKMUHGxEhhHeq7+cL7w7XaUEqaIYe4RKaJywuQvuv007Pdp9laqqUKKKKBqP1lGLjca0IbUR4w2f8Uy5T2pEvXM6ihyBBvIPddaIj1XMp7PujKhpubKHYMtE4i29biCzVRjj6OsWItI2CEkV1XbooSwTBUKejtH3yeUr3gX36TW2ThmkYnyZSxhVl9rKIxvjQYso5TBTgy5gCMDvrCMQRtRc8lBqVd2mZmYVHZE2DLpEsg6OQS58bujXNvy/ogqNS2RqtSlGZNDUbPKurmxiB7GQWd3Mz1uZkDZ0tiDpQoWoGJPxgDHsGfXV4zsW64bp49tRDUmHXWI7yQonKz1ZbRBVbSRmdUt93/xyS9+gqc3/d67/ujO33r32f2LV8/eurEfvnr3o/it08f51O2RGeqjD8+qfXrct7dyPkeo/k8/+uLn6/Jf/PJ3vvPRx//4V3/x3/zpR//t//r9D7MfvfPaa49NrLP65Wf52rPTy+d7q//uv3z1wXfX629vj1/vm7u+eeQ3a+0Pff9y3/aIc4vcbZtcLn7/Qj56yMteoYral+9vfD2XuNsaqxbvhFJVvcxYCM9KGOjDPJj30mglk7JLuCsKQo9NJXsczaBRtpuH5lJRpV6OZSIVUeTequInhbT80z/49e5ep6HNVlTTLxSM/HZXr5uVGVxrkAVUe5MEyYeXm2aRiY+qIh6tlR8JuFlm45jz8XVFHys/98bCCU9g0l0dw8lkgoU3FvZdDiJXHyu9QdXh6MoL+UWHUgsHgN7EVEX3jIzSZZkoYI/IIPhCAZ0JpmruxbghJ7V0g+rSilTKgophJAZYy05KESK3f0zERSVKfEl1Z/Cm+pW7phMkLJuLuFakqUSlTP2sGTbDdMlyLW9CtXUy/fslMtPdMlmI53oLzi5BlVDBB4rabfiCDTPlP5z/j9z2zGYg63Ty7M7or3ICaD/gJTJ8gMm78wSsMDk2qKQOzNXUBkXGJ6a7i3Rms1EASFao2HI3t6Xua7mIL+sC0Ylo8LDS6LXWHsHLZ1a4GWbBMkuWoxhtIFwuW02puzU3GWk7ZUStatDqrIgUFbeDKTTKk3K36mR5j6SlKWaQAh1tX+3xjghwsbbUA4BJ2iw5AMuKIuqGB2ge2qbNpTMx5dpBBd2jaOtCVap77AEoC8GDWhXFpDezUCISuR/WVwrHSLzhqI+voHGyc4ovItu2q6kdgUxR4b5OFYUYBkaLuVeXwiD0WChzkmYaGUI8gFynNsrpLy1IACpEXc202RhsCjY5fTyySVLZKS0ihgGX1NH+nC8+pRT8sU8/blTWIqKdVUjIgFIH2taayVlGN7Qr0aJLp0wV0agJAdUx3eR8/Jod6jp4p1CoqmV3ZfCGLWLVqVNrFFGr2I/7ZM1xlgAalOtpakZMqraa26SDGCitXZyxZwrigG4eDd2sKjvhvqgx5H2kuwRUs3BVJaxdZY4DQUw4ZzfRk51uT7c3tlyWu5saqphTFfGqnSOfA7MrqnZABI4xNpOQTOVPvh1VBcL2kAIULiBVnsW8yoiHLV9scT7Xy5f3X97vLydpVUl2l3PtPCSSVsN2vlDd0d3Qjgw/uQq7dXzUcHlf7PSyOp9BHrJmJjlPOdWvKbeLduax4W8AKaroNFWBdXdEu3lVDscPbL8XMym8RlaDZ5chSdTkKGvnFF/mszf3Kc1OKQxosdrMihYZ8czE0aSQwZWNsd3cKT0jYiozICVQMesoYYdWZYRdzcOEVFahlDSLquFMCYSXZ5eMnvgN5mXKn6GZR6Qtz31X167KZObbqhulrSVTV7bxK6oUoorjy86dwK0juyhaqNjDzNRNBNXIvcwku/ctfNmsWqHX4wdjsyMj9YN/pdxLt9uq7ozslnWjIh17Mv9npnsErwDqxsnpzEmLCjt+ICeCR8nwLEKr+DkkkXrP/OqFKi2qkoBKRX6FVqJvgDixeVYMM5fn16pay/ada0CYakapC0ojy9322M21iliXZrdf9Ph9QcgRmRcNBjcxeYiWylIzd6HswXgFZds0ypd3J/guWxZ7kCPG6UZm61KZ3kGR5s2DVo+Otc2Mf825Akfy1iyQHhdYS4vfrKoaYwQDaVlMSs8pgmN11aw44G1AViYVCNKCjOR/Px5aDp3Z2x0+Ijh/4f48s9wch+60yYZQEYeK7pfwk4/q46DTZxRmlU0rZDckN4b0SkXsNAcXaejifYyMiVKV2NPclDFv7apUNSqmhlIzBQmSluiTmBIGr3wD4yWYsKecxaMCf4AHbXnAdUSBik7z/2B5N1JH8WjI7EHsqlz9UtwLE8BgvpK3guIh96uhCgqn0+pG8oCO40Olx3Q7B7rGqgjnfTq0GqmulmL9mZ8Hllm4RW+C99DVcHYxFp30nXsqr7WYqltnm2sdrcjsGvWsSGaaa2erQlX3PY5MU5Hb9h8+/gf/3b/87WggslFh+fDqvP73v/j1H8bfe9d/6d978uYbuHt09+Xz/bW7mx98Kf/iw9PDa6cf2/0P7i6XN2/ryXr05qkjqm1/iLhkNcz8m18+/x//4b//T37zb/7n7//tzVs365HoAgbFAzVpKRhUNO5Ld+wvol9lhrjmozfy6Tt2e6O3j+x01+s2Hz3yyu10a8/efHTzmuJOXl0eGniCm/du3qns0zpdLruvMS3zVm+Q7FYnvviYcRwXqMqsbEZRMtqXVFUmKVNTdGdzH2QiFAnJNbl0PtuTO1sU8nJO+0f/1bd8+QgIAbQYkQk1yGhfFpFyhGRMNLNsKWuB/JOTh2uqvM7Nw5FtFGWIaNxWPDL83YCcilTwqSpVXUzFKUQ0o0RtLmM2a9AmipcxuW5imPj6YTOqutTssBoaReTBx33zHwgCxDPbXb/CtBEqZcaKLbO3A+1lDpr5cp4Qo65zGjGGiMjFZ2i0hT8f5XdCzSQTKhNjOPAVYxUTlapDJ8bGeU0dbuwHjcrplXV1J2KbSGFVrxvPaIG2SCU6YVyd9cgUevJpvL3OV59n34gQ1+TtkQXgxnUvqmoqMtt80aZmVBUtBF6xw58FckvIazYznWkzf9PDCrPFn7ZlJTnOIjYJE8EWcT5fHvbzq/v77tou+1ACxFRh6mA93Vm8tsiqSKogjUR/AVTGOYma1+cRuq0sBZsM1xxXHeO00ewcHZGDJzYiOE6yh48IQWfxSDQbLlx/d3VA+LV6wi0UXs3sB7jG3L9qFTA5WVCzmh2vXz+W3Ok32m2SY6bGa5Wy/pjD46XzijckNxtFcg0rjv9cAJ1y7HEGgCHzy21bFluQ0Ntc2aNpSc4s9BRseNBtGWmKQFzd3AC1Ccmpyih9UZA2Cv0ycq2FIfDLqODIAsTUZuZqlmw888cigJiyXkte85goAAAgAElEQVQQhnblcL2vRFf0dWpBUXvuOfdVleafRFpaddHWhXmD5gAgiSugMVnNYq/KJHFhoFqELx36l6oc0uCwUzsri6O+Ec4ckcRuQUlaVzb9cR3dMD+Ml23oVJM6KCyVOdFvMq/+ToyTNcue3u3U9xgA6sMcU1UQzdxFRGBVkag2OW/nh7h/cX7x/P758/vPX5y/eLm9PO/nrbfIvbujg0/Klu7KqhTJymzs/OsT9jjgZ3hWkPNI5GRLNrbqzDyft1cvHz7/yfMPP3r+Fx89/8vP7n/86cuPX20viRLhkT9qL1Tl3paCuuS2xaWQhYAgO0QEWkzVs1teVeYWlQBsHWZFCJrjavGlVQmR3LtRaBa1uRJE5zDVVeb4xitBtw7iBVKAm00upaSqBBpRhBUxtkIyImomJgeb1zN4Mm7k0aC9Sh/nXyn8swPaUyw88qR93QkcifS+zlkmQi8zkaHqdVYA3CdIS2Wx9szSAZMsvDR2HcQYMjRzulWM03PKeihK0d0liGgxHRaIu6tKa6U08HDZMjuRUbVdets7squ1oZncH+JKKBJjQwy5TZm+uw/S2lySETw7sHal7sYXpS0//lLq7lMVyzbXba9ONjCbH4yqIbXSxX3A6fi9bgHUjXeZKC5sJWLITyxjd8/Fhjnoo4096PvqyqhrZIN6Hv66s2oSoXVlXgrd3jhS6lwgkxMZkWs5ix5osCo+LBOegaAsAkC4wBykkJjkXuashqALwbUJU6xQHEp0CutnojrJsskq8hlNZM4VjtLVbCJ30lWALkZwExCZcBPmPm2aQdBXXXGaAyztttkpUY95pAWHlTBrDhWlrI8YGI7ImQE53tvGx6+6ZI64fOYD7CmIViUvxkMaLzk6AV/R9giE1dGeyVHAuxKGhVOtrrkuCaQIvzlyK/ONaxQnziUkZ064j+1TgMILoptICqT6aB7XuI5BMdA7ldox4iVTPZoWRJezS88NJ0v+AhtsPuRYfupATksqCi0VOQgcVf7JOZNtPs4HHyAUsJKjziUS73umWuzeT3s/FZrH4EM5qcTwYDAS3BLA7MSJto26ZEJGmGdmFwUbHK3KTA1IMdi3hB4hrMFYzm1B5qjQx/V7wsn8T1F54/bNP/nx/b6LJjJ3qNx//Py9/+fFtx3f/sbN08f96LTUbs+Xc6tezvtff+nr7unTevzB/uy9j+rZJw/y+fm81er1a/4Ltw9q0V8+//JdX/WTz//Vhz/56Zuqd63alUnFY6LFKRxWtBSPVMuxHCJRGid9kP78p/XJX8aP/ujyk39dn//rzt+/vfuzr9mfPHvzr97+Rnzj6Tf1nds3nq3HXVDz2FNVYw+BZpYe2AWugYkqJA+pVao6GTEASsaYzRoXk6XuRqzBgV/CIfPLgzuNPgAKatKCajE7aPFusmciGSeGiUQf6fxuPQoJXN2SRw9qAE3pYzg4Kl1sW7XMFbGuNDOd0OjB2uaBMLPcF1TBeKigMvmF8huPjThKrqClkHydmVpFuXlmkjOZMflvcueHlFjFQ7a5RaabZ7WJu/nD5UwK5ckEjuqOxEk1srVBzXcy8mo83KNrFPNjUDHhzZm/jBHuHJdhdu/5xUvOto6yB2YdNKJSoYHdtI7H1vyIsq5p1cbYCGMvW9bCd2VDRF0Kra5VbXOe6T33GTnXJEIbyC6ro6UiwiUtp8JsmMuRBpE5OvBYKW5amc2ntMu1+zGOsiZ3cbhSo4HJYYpc2WKipuYRmZVQSelmyiXbzffYhQWnRlV98fCyq+2iy2/c16PTMuidn1T1EhcTq42SCUQWpbc8KQFgDZoI1qniQDiWjuQupVxl/JoMqJjMFoF22kHK82JAtDkEChvWOETowJujAN/TvDUcPNrmCESEgSJpiQwzh5MJie4DXKADAbtyjHi5Zh6guI6gCKtHAaxLK+ZwzCcmqTYtxABIN9ZpNTqDiVP+pig/7AyesEnfLhFjlC73NNc59Bvx+YKi7gluQwkeQKzMlEEYr2Vy0uZ9xv5SC0rRVQZtExGJPRl9VGmFtRQUkbuZT8NKuksYOrU1EVlma4/2+YxhOClDNWCohHRk2jJh46ggantsghGyJVLbSK+ZMC3lKfOOQTMjVCVOI04rFK2VCUVluhm6L+cHcz24m1e0YPIEzyE3masU/0zyrbSwc0hU9P5KR25oQ6U56zqlNpQ0QtimBcrWiFplqvlxBdFECiTHHGA6fRvLDJXFcvYgGNXEpKTbZqylrrkHurb9co5zn+dj4Lru7M6gvk4nXwY71eIjHFIZF8CyVRoRIlIte8EArY6H86vL9mKL8/ny4n57tcclGljdTb216Y0p+uH8agQMUqUh1tnVaYVgdag6RWxMXEIJZE1iSVsg2anGc6qNOaOhzkAJ9n1T8+O66DNxqmGsEKo5v3URpHaJmnIAMnPRrH3mj1KZ6+TDh8zaMwWiJ+0cPM/oGdSByj0ZimPahW3bozPE5ScW31DVsGGSmllyFtkphZ52xkQp+bKsrHVypPydkqf0NV/HOj2XANENuEqZkAJKVnBESKMKZgpFIYeFdL3VHvfMYufZpq0IEYXHzjVd7BW5FVT32K21dUrwPRgJc5s/JA0rLAuoiPqs8XmqtyWDmeMVbRgA/K9aVVkN5VaW0aYZdqi23Vhl+UH/B+8C3c2vg0BKGu1LyeScMIJOzCwrmV1XVXPlncQW6ypdXeRAZqRMLku6ay1HCmM22oeGBcJN45x0j1wXmdiVKUs6J2ZkxvUCCJHe913dKg7ZhYm09mHT5TKN3UKgXW1GY6IlHVvasi7YUkmOaRTH6JbsjYGtUmXkhyqadMGqjlJVc6u9fI0YoIaUM34UfrahoiZxSYpPSgf7sW5ZIhjm1oC7MtXnGcg8uToyuo8eMq/lld3d+7ZTK824Ct3X2cWAnC1Ba1dntDlF2qitj+wLYlL3oP1VZQhP7JCrCTlz84dLDBe22lwJAYp50wtftUzb8vFO+USHQMuX5V5iw4WibFNFu2dsB+nMNHUospKj1QZ8OaMKx66yAalJVLZkYxitRfbPMt8ymCNjYuuAjXKXzYvxAZLhtS6zWxq9llVCl6HazcTQSaAd5/gjyfhqk2O6R04sli1BpjG4/ipp7eWrUFJooWIgbC2DiDbp6MrxgXhGOAcr/RU4CJEm1+aqiF63iGxEd0tHla0rC03YzmC4Y9ZlVYBUZqEqwSzSZMG6P7z/qw9ee/KwPVz2Kl3n3PsnL5+86ru39NnTdXe3ZK2HS9p69Pz5BvTNjd2LrrvbjLrx2/fSvv3CH1305tkvv/70Z88352x5/Xtv/PCjv/ni/PxXf66/dnn+yRcf4UZOj24/e/XlJy9+Uo9lH30dupBb1CX6oeXV3l8kXmHfCqZPcPNMbm715tGTm66+sXW6WbKwI2MXV809wDtAlbtm5unO4zIK61GzNRIgelcxX+qBD5t05mmtjKpKtBgBS1AKUPku484ws+AMp0iSDA+BlLp2FEqIAnJTMSci4op4OCJyIwwbJxX71kYusGp1YvoVea0Ud5cvpSiZWNErkGAu+sWuBQFfGnuoaXYijwsTZfQHBE+1xVBZNdpkaWl1RUGXBXXhPFH7hEUh0sGfadM7pIfHc69U0exskh4JlHN0szvU7u6JyCpIaZmoLqmeqHR3+41Xdh8GGxnoFbjPjS5Xyy39tORA5EBatNVQ2bQqNE0gTMGl+FrdvV/2AfLolK3Z4FHyDxQYm88xgzK1EzKZz5yri7ggGspmroJIVXpsSVQLWvhAXD5G8jl1eTaAXFajhA6MRZp52JJG154oiapl1srqptkcx9jJtkYnMju0+FpRdelUsREbqtOPpHsH68yJKhSQRiTVofLLLEEA/fxyVu2XdaMtJzsth/tyOVJhAg7OKlsdh1lotiWTzPZjLS1tKlnlawR22SnJT4uy/KSqghLRoUkWZlRDaJBSPttNPomKLTkExtJZoiYoPXlVmnnu6WamWsULpBIs7O4889GrrqbkfFDFMVdZFSOJqMEqC1DsS1ADjZRkyaxntkowLnnZApgb7xXoq+EMLbPJjN5VvAaxKPTVQWqIUUVdvFEXcfAz58lO+aGqxha+TKQUrW7TS6kqCRUn4ZrcfwHaWFgUUcsIurkUyi/1HPrn372rhzCmLVFpIrAGKPQsXkGrIdiFtDwZYjWKQa9GzZ4Bc03u0VY1pqw/K7YBPlbXOjmPNXxzq4GnRDUpFKpsKdtf02LpIaDRNWaGw+Mz1lY1Y1UYxmluQkAgk7TYksyD6Au+7Mvd95iv9ro97fvmfmqpfd9c0hf5+wocRk2x7CDHzwy6NLatCqeT7/s24mjAXVU9czPXy1whOFVPU8vaSnqv7T7vXb32EoGbO9YyW6onc4O7Lil1WQKpiG17ed5fPWz3l/3hvN1nZHSsG5eFsL0F2a0mUVEIhXTtfUqBRp1rGKeiJuKCBFSoI9r3FG0xoEpgY55kUn9ypFkoM5UuKeUJ/ojtQXmQLTS6xoiukHFMq0kSHNpQV+ToOkkZm4ZCK1SQTT09sw9txlcVd8NqJtZdzReEQcWlWJHV2YDA5EBMw0+OKnXpaBGooQKtaDD5GQftiCRRVDfJFlw4RObp5ChUl5ZhXhRCaxKzKhm1TquVkFXt49MdtTPKld3MQ8zO2TwyCJODaRZ1NaXmmXu71FE/PuceGQeE07Rz3Vh0ZZSfnFe5rt73GC5ccxXAJXzBtSonO2gDNhRtCNrA5vMeYWow4QgG0uLSwXHcjDV5kGUWg4wf1IySu8nWdxmmXZdUSZmoOleXySmYmrZUy9gLulPssBGANoKcqFsNfKQTUdmV6FY3RtorpSRFkCh1VAb/3bOS4Zq07tHYJjfDflqV2YLWtqU6Sy1Rw1QE+BFV6eMcv5bPkq140VJ3wrHGPgeIL7rvUEXWn66lETFDWxuVhi3mBfoI7/Duh31PyPT3KKwyRbO6D5hKdfnJqhQH3lMUBWIwB1PtJyNbfTLDmA5e7EmBx3KyAFS0K9PdeE1SoulpNfR2aETzSDlGPWk2YJGirl0jqxMTd6tIlg/nHuLaxLNXExJrZiQ1mBp/XPsebB2dTp57JmPniqoUAwx5SfI8KnO6hUxrDyCK8uQwH/FYQ/20SMzukoikJyn5vqjODuKyBWJqPTjTkomRF7cF2777Wvtlt5MBcP5lWRDgFSuLKieaxvRQmxK5YkYShFPh5staK4KBcK3iZlgrI2qUhqxjQ1vEQOKjS2b6ycw0tlIRX2uEG2Iy56uD3TrG1FprSPtdJeDUAOaD62eGWYy4hM6GmBb3t8znlBwFNO6cW007CJudd7YAYr2WZ6Y6IAXgVX3xvXdf++H9DfbKTMHW59bC3Z3d3YiI3t+3rczWqP21J+88fVkP9HiraZywJyofHrZH6/T5/cvf/L9+45s/+96T15/d3D568uzrT54++6Bl27dX9/dSfXr75ocf/fA3/vhfnG7R1atVom/Lb9K1ROo2t5TTsluLrpf35ye3frpZvly1oQYvaL3cznpzukQ0x2jjmQwwHOEaEW7OJQGsVTT2lGqBPO3XbnetyK0DN/68v4xMddHSjjZxkdwyfBkMCI5Vpap8KWPvyfC50XgHUekFnh1QcFHZ9234UYpOlHQlxGTwNSqZLA3XYg6tO2tXMyBzFhQMJWb1DENPyy+XvaFS/NNYd9qy3lud7zlUtqwD/51FOBs5ws1k6xii21QT4zvqwsGYkkYnCq0u/DBbdipEFLHt5l5TsSORItVVOEs59MFo2YODsWQe1Vz9tPYttr2HzFwT4WB0VE0ialLtmGYRUQHLrLJPNz7CcRmqKqJrQhTcnjRIwRaxpVG7wvzkHaM2owOG2Alu1SNKBzQnoy9TZGYnAXWiJgV0NeNSkyMXmGl2On2AnEd0twiNVcnkqojzVNoiQGSsNRxIoIGyJXvkYUjv5cZDQTUMHdVkHyv/XfhYXzI7ruQpDZXtKoy8iikAt3WlPLfitGzP7O6TeaEr0p0yiG5g23LHAyBdrwRQUVe7Pd2oyPKTu2UmV+GFNtWsXUaEWgIbAJWYCL97FVmA2PLOFmstzU4msvTQATcZsKqdyZAMpW9ZZZN/GRMW67XSMPdRCqIFEpdAY52U82MRcKvTPU0Nd9KWtSqykyAtPWgQ3ahIXpPMTA0KK+IhjvosYZAqukcaTHR02WZaKEGrm8qEpgYlp5w8Fa/zJkpcgZOurvx/FGkxdUAiw53LriBHh1UlbipIZWi0r5WRolq5Q3vkCxzYg33UKW6JyrUwxovstA0Eue9qSnmhFiLD1carpsdFTgUEhJocFq5Gy/KV0aYwt8wiPsdUSSbgP7Q63Yzns+WniDiyl0NEJcRvWoR8r/bhKcgEtLKWTfqXjkN0uy/CopKTYznwp6XdHbkTNE+ljqBZPyi0iAM7pOAWsZOYsncIZsKfsS8/Re1A240AvcemRskA77pdVYI5XfH2Ky4OuewPZBSJyL7tx6M0cp+2dXUZrKt2jKSE7ZQtL3Si7rVt3ZpACvuC1Z1xzt6jgnEs5tvXSeWuW3K/nGNqL1KVqh7FYFFJw5dsGdIiBtNTVXYWCVVTcHKvKFq4MkPUMpnlEi4v9thZN1rLK7JqNm0z7wDcRU3ULKPQNIkbgl7BgUQKD6AcguqMgVSMHobimkh1OOmc9MdoRSNLp/gGLptzCzqy6NSeL6RabGFLj7o7QGJWs8Mn25brRJ2zRMY6WWw1BBdO6ArZ3B63uggQkRBksqwkgGTPhS2ZSVDsuUtL8wXRvVwjNzt5q1ZPeyezVdtv1hahrhMiUJ4qpbuzEeiOKkNDYk+I5ZQJnLKE2MpcE91bGfGPgBCbjjTVRKlY1v4VJi3bXPZkl77cPLYoUJ9QtEdUpDL0m1Uh1a3mBJ11laBp+jUzVUV2Sc83WqiZAUc4WTUnY5kmmPvwurYtOH6vaiBFJLq0U0w7iuYud2Ut4qiRMh0y5DAcPTQc07jM3dfat4AOs2nP6G5RGq2s9lSS9rg0aekqcW8pCPad+5Y+QDjoHKBAV8+jUkeWwFL0bMd5EuoiIw6dY6SqoKEnKxh54nFfADW+mrl4VxAck/PiEhExy6kFNoxXNeMz+Hg1SyTTR2PvkO7M5BWT4UClx4J5DJLGAL8hvZMa+lZjh+LK7JGsQ3asQvT07EsYn8wxhdKoLcWaxuw0FSIm23k3t0qoK0eKleWuhcoqEvIrWlv2PcDz4JRa2pZ2VWW6i4jusavKFP110tYmtm+BDp4udGQbUlViVkeieN0upRuJcY+Encb3W1nm1kDuJQl1adVOcK3K7gZNyCUQEySiUwbOZzo3SVHo8bWfI5aRlSHzcQhMffqqXikxTlSncEQ2j0PVWbXxZVXpN24ilWknQ0lmMfmryjDCGETY+eFuOSlLgpprZJA8HJn8XZGfSTApPzUMAU3JRgBj6fIYxUZXJad10/cxcsk1MwTqJzuSwOinH//q137m32w35/O5LxJZMFvLafDZAlK+X+rubr04/+Rb737tR6/0JlQqBYgCUAYx889efOEPX1x++GV9vCLiskWWRmPdPrLbO3v89Bvf/fnvfu/nf/CHv//ki3NXiUkmGOqo7k3kzp0j4r1hty7ey6UrTE8ZtW/pJ9zo3ZePPnuklsVDNbprLZvmecHMG4jIx/7IRNAVy1brf4TvyfZ8v9y7STX2z+Pute/95CTb5dXTunmEE0LuHr3xe/7DD+uH3BuP/cGFG7K1VgRRyFw2YcoJq2Pfzc3+0X/5zdFudk5K+3pp6j7QWJxrN3W9zEZmBs9wM7MdFrc0l2sJtDTD5RC6RI5U3nhzD0m9FGcVSksJ905TqkYxWW7XttcYBaozkt4CoMU0MrLKuF3BnOV47csqW4KSwxkFFcsIHvGHmo15aXQW3dPLbeJw2dteImpiIhrJ6O1Ae+vIEJYw/NmMSrJu58ti46FpLhAiApdK+IgTcmzQgbFXsUFUx98AEjGdOFZamWvPTBPtToi62zjrG/tWVaMTy+3g3ZPsxsK6ouraJMTwsyrdFFdgDHCoqAdENvtxRvjpT5sG8+Em46alWsCXGH/UPYQIm9g9R3iHOG7INNRY7xsZGCKQ3ItsdCiSPqIxkreZVaSI7hGX2M+xPWyX++2StA6qGM813P11+nITJa2AkBgS+Un3bRQgnY2DUTI1MhmSFekppN+y3ulqphJ7svKRQcLBUZFNCDPRyf2kqvL90VUJUFTYpop5BxGRwiHFwFqPJipsSrN1TUHzSyRf8YPnhcu3LNu8XJUX3wlytTYXKbVjoRskxAyQeIaNDJk5sUJ6WkwoFXT20cWvQmX2PC4ObTEZRTyr9cEuv1qtmLIeDDc1nk2oH1h2pVSJXsrqa7u+VWYASS788QAFfYxUmk6CDvOG4+OBdChSEDOjmMkVWqGKtok52BHf2uO8FtIXqwaxWCNrIXCd9KbsKPCPmmj4oq0Be4XI1SDdqpJ1MVE0++FTvePrOivJYuGHR/XgEaEbScxsDQBWWJpQdQ41WGMjf2VcGAoesllorarqvaqrQ4WZXsbGCyiYVMfRH8ju2nMTlchzVFZdRFlQ3zK2zMrYIx7uL8/vt+fn/eXWL8/7S1hGbdFbawT2kC077s/38MqOqmjZqqIqWKUulABZQ33menNEmryesr+X7WY6R3zl90ZVW/nzrCEJ0aYgJq3dX2my+BsEEPsENMb+Z9CjPoRGZEnrbH9AzXcpP5ApWW2qVRNwAuSypSrnSmpiHM+TexCXZJbvKHKwBOZVrW6MZjCg6WZEJuIoIHUJa+N6sJqmXVzoZii12SZIknDmHw9edBMzY5iUB5tt18dCA4KDvdlJ8jvAzDdUeQfbibVsVKKq9j0fLntm7ntF9Z5DwLxcNnfnt74akdUg20P5qxO17bxDtaeU2CISeyyG8KF7pKoxtiombENBVM2P1K/SUZw1IcwJAWMUcDLGDdik9+UrECXm/kYbqphVdURNm47UjZib1XxaKgtdx6hCwDgrm/FgjOW4bXPyK7kHTx1DsMM4ybPK1AiZ62PezQaUYbqvKsqX+AFIBO3NFMceFTWaNjAmtzqcPVwd0MPLd5XJ0IBU2VIha00P9h7r7lRVHdTHadNJS7fQExCXGAIcnXyNhnRUF8THY8x3/ACuu47OywH+I/mG3wGR2JtG3+qSuhrzhlTM/kgPv/Xotwkg2tnuljtpIYfMs2cvzIB2J5Bglbuq+eDldI8+jIl9ZhFilMU4NyW9/IMoO0c8eBBzUlFcx2FQAqwVDCOISdR5erQQo00JM/Vu0vPEGCqsjnp1JDEc7OlgC82sjkoqm0UjKWFzMhvEAhOUGN2NCXNxWjxAjSJztwvu5Pe2mWKkEcUBdGaS8Dml90MOtEUcspuJ+bAmzfknvS+zQh6OIVnHI6KgVy4iTYbyNdzmryKsjSnyKPuTDBuLdkayg1aZPMoKNHNakYQOcl7Qk9Zubs9AVg1VHUBumXRENyrSH71Yop893Dyczy8++ww/fvi5R/7eOx5tN49PKvpw2f1Wv8j64j5/55uP//rR+Rx5SlmlHamhj77xwcc//ezTH3z49M47dwEUvYjyjXts51effb6evfbWe1//wZ993/eH+8g//fiLp0/ulpmJtuD//ZuffO3pnYvQJsw6pTLzvIUINtkfHvWr12/62dtP3noh2ipqrh3oQkVfrzkr7dfjO9++vPGt7cn7D48+2B5/4/7013/w2//qt35Q6Y9Pum/bs9ef3CDfOr968viDr7/7c8vFkdvl/t3Tk/f8G3vhy3jZ0gTURaaJRDa33PMdlGlWkwUIiP3n/80HvOahD4cfJPaYBdrY2GaSyqXB4T1jBVVGSdVzC1I1V5+xDSb8zBiBqjft9qQqk8LPKCQhbdrs1qqYtpKUyBA8PxlkYfFxI2LHlUZ7qpVjaR+1TjUF15RTyxVmWJ3H8/0o7pO6zm+XjyGoOTtToVyxJLca68tcsXmT1OmR9zhQMphLKa6triBvjjD5RF6mTN/wOYsWqPpI0ISypNlMHB0Ad0N1xjy0h1uAdpv4AZPlqkCCTPO50pgagebHiXm8dwMLyZI01X3LaX7yd99QRc1zas6dKHDoXplm1uRriFZW7HkY4XlnLNa1kaImFWME4XP/iNexe8nHHHtl6qpjRxeZ61NxDSJQBkem6M2sQjFvh77Evmfcbw9nEv+7s+tmnQTYI4dXywCzDkCl/44fieNHg1Ue4L4xcTMnimPORjZs0m7H67aZfdWGrxJiu1izh1YQ29WqNoOE5nFNVGejqNMk7Aw+Qw1XI1jPVML+zuHy6NYfk9T+ykbUzYqHsLc1cWKxzBIg9yQQeEzc3ZVjnpWGmWUnmFg67q6Y9jl1oILJYB847iM5fSWbHW993rHZDZo4KIfEfNMLJFE6M4g2s33f2N7hOp6vmZqDDv0dBLJzOcqGZrOtZ2rHV/JYmkvHvpN7uXz1sDKYM6F1kF3aA1k8txO6eo6PMXfyrJ5NKNiqUsWo/TJVri8IfnI/8Y0IkUbFKEyRlTKXFsvMYlJR9YAKdQtrSnWUkaxxpSiLTjbBWP4lDJkT2p5jNTEpndgGYDJ19IJUSbQkt6iq0kiGbVjMm79jN7RFxFykWtCR2/355WW/f3X+8uHyxSVf7XXOzsTOK33UhumMMKuAYrLj6CkRoAeTZJag0VaFZCoTXTYYZGFlYl4p6yDBmmZGA7YkqYjU7qzl8+1gXZ4fDea1MMT7mkQof3rz7Z7nCsMbYy5VZ8uO1zkRQyOTOKW5PSq0aqTzaJ1uRLYvZ1zFzNCCFFT7UvY5ORHImL1Wzy00+AKaKj5HqBip2jKPSN4w5oEg6ENg2McTxtQnTedSVVGtZoWqbKhk5VrGmiX5jXaymvfdjN4OJwOZ5g1IRG2Ze8XD+XK+XI4a2RzLMiAmqjbtvKpM8ghmFJzx1BAAACAASURBVMI36XQdi+OhWZCLKHmM1LrwIG4ucZkHXRUTLUKJH9WIxI8LLbhVekjwlAteEoDrgEBmiQ2tQETnL96jpa2hrRgSx8pCqgKGsZPPdUjpN5eRpsLXmt9bQaBZSYdtFXo6wIISMQO6jhBQRNrMI3nYEoxJjMMEyU5e6NRFwFoELa+ChpnknlyZUN08wWOdtryKNWashmp1m1MNMLEOxjVoNyGEl0QQ9LAjjoF51wHVFggko1Sgbuxr6OwepxqB4kOXNAq+xeaONB03AthkbrDq1gx2Z3X38UIbNlJmZZa6dY4AFpQKYIgymbT1UEKA6qs2GdAxs7nNoE5JhSHVBg3MgUdNpEC+2hjeeazibHDu83IVfkSkqsUenBcfge2BHnFq2jUrjeppoxDcye6DiKpJRR6P31ZuNWiB4yO4ey3jEGDE1dnHjhFmfg1VsfqlRzUXIlmoqoxj4MKHXZe6kJXFeGE3hOdbmwca38h0jUakE7sIYtjJQSVMEPzvJ5ydELNjUo7ry4KBRmlFd9IJQWlWDbu4WRvrVmNQv9fJk4MHMJ6mQ1oqQX1VWOV/6HHo5YwAw14el/1+CffF9QDnI9kQ6WdPL6/Z6dOX6/PnX3waly9eyDe/9d77r1c0dus8ySvIy9Pjv113H77/1v7Mnz+LDx/d//j0cHlau9bbb34TbZl9eXildorsjCA8WaBVomqvvfPu619/78//5I9PVZuuT8/nNx/dOaG47u+88YYJtGVwjuqXPV72/qXtP32S9+/b+sUn/q3HL0svl37jyZO7Jw8C6RQ19ukLhb/n77//8s6+/8Vv/tPf+Wf//I/+4Hf/+vmPfxSf/vSjP//xb/yTj77/xy8/+dO//fyv/ub5v/vkh7/1F3/5m//u7W9888//8rMPvvtNW49uHj+7ubuT7SLn+194/ee/9/jnG/Lp9ml1n5Zl1Fpr34K/F86nuZRi08fU7D/7r9+n53ESN1cBZLc6KVWpemABDwBjVesy5mdIsecOiaGbxpVJjAMmpYfwwDP3EYjP9xyzlJhwQJOZJqrstYsYJi+hV4bncpeRlc+JVI3DBhys4Wah6HSzMoKxLshR7z4aVxE1I1hWz4c8CXXGxFclsRnwJbe3J84l6eBmGjuqpgU/qyQ+Go7htNC40LYUk8aBuTaw1pA8Bi7WZHdBRStmf+dk+RR4TDW3w2zMnaqoaOwx/MloPtT4VVFzyu4PCiMDqFC+r0xi3wuhDgUq5pjFxLarstyvrsnP6aw3lcJ3xl/dTGGkUblbVqvAeTsyBiGJyFkqIi6kSZLByNOamNag9MpUSTkg2bWAyrTlXJyxQTCXHzqb2XhxK26tKUERycxLxDn2S+V52/fYW0nlgLnzWmDLmG9hpEdNOtrIVjEZx8BBRgFgZtx+u3tXcT3Dl6a5QwYcqjZi1uP4BYpEMxPa5oR2l8r8CqSH+3a1w1/pryxOH5/noWmqaedR4JMDLz3yMKaBy+YiCiK2uYLpqmJ1TXS5V2ZzFdvti8mBgYPyTMZLuxpUZkjBS4c5L64cu9BCSaKEzqubij1RBp9UnJbs4nWO5t+msboENoxTsLqgTn0Lpz+uky81qDDBlaJthHzyKg5tlKpmBrHaaoOYwABxSkXplpksTRePwpzrmFkNtFMJdlNhiN/E4Gxjzo+bIJMydT5tGO+kfZvbLXXNal+LFaauyIrxjLMLMRMarkGNN/ARPTNrAKHRAcfgtrtaB1JBTmxVHvynUmPkbL7i141hdVWFOqJCVQiEmXvfRBi6tarS3bIC2tW1x8N5f7Hleavzw3bees8OX6bOdmbbyRsUdoXMXqihAj/6XVotBZOWluVRBdGB9FhVpxqPXxyMgHYstt3AhUhBTatzBH5KFhe/4T1fwOEX8rPT5pZ7uZrwtDHmFUEzAslNgHCXpceLTs0pxgSGBY8JwbSaVjZdRSpC0tLwqE6nPsbwKiQqj3bCT8r/kwKqnlWqJJfYwCUJG5zcwSCgxSS77fjXTzoaza6+mKguPvqKK5QMziWPSenIN5j4N6OaFTKAU6Z21eYWLbaMD8BgkLd6yzif9z6UCVCYqJrApHIYv4zSz/uJwmhX4hPnND5zvDYfQ28xUmBt7mScsG/Gveg66dUtoaq8aqoR79nz4kN3FaXfPIREMFmgMkOw5vSYIQvi8kSFox5zbcG+bXUIl7rKbKCtappdBPbKwXLjT6YbrKQykXEdEE17iuIEliCZ8soy5+6TpT5OtUa9I4LJasrxrucvfjZdGJlAjQ1o5mpD19HOLIxVawjHMiwj8aExdxes0bLvweE8RSyiKkq01Uw357h1Vd3rUL5UiWciWAiDweZFTkTbpinAnafyGDNJVZmExajDRjA2jBB6EXnkRW7JXd21i84Ai7qKduzZpBvTCCkT0xmJuemhHG7CEDlCcjeCEIZ9KqrGt/ExdJ7fjpkb92Y8foiTZytqkpmcQs6mDm2qvoydo/mNZ3MA5yfeMI0x5nmUjRQQAPWDpSo3tyfUASGdUUOrWkSjkfOPanU7eOaAli5pDPaG3zJRAoqOdqbyb3p86xUHE7DtpBOCHRm98DNmrqrCKxk18cTbjoMbUp3rpFDppJxD5Jjb8neAGWASM371cwl57Uz7k2Gs0nkAc7tLxMRJ6CkcEUEOWfWAHjGq00Uu+nHVaNiyziSVVUzNPav85MceCCokjEzC68mTy9uv4aOXpxf7/tF2/uNP9l/59f/kybvv4+5ue/39V49+5tWz9z5//MaP7/Jc2S268DO/9rS+ndsvi54ffefuO0/e/Nov/Qf/4J3vfPf2zbff+uDnnrz/LXvypj16/fbps9OTx4/f/NrTN9/8sz/8w6cqtyLvPn283FIE0nv1JePe4jPdftz3H9/FD25f/fiN+OT1enhj9Rs365mf7mwPCO4iEpcnb3/jUkhfBiDD9k/ef/b8rdd+/NnNfvPma6/95G8vL573CStf4fd+5/J7v//5divf/IXHv/Rrb//KP/ze22+/83//Hz+6e3q6e/r8b/7g+x/+xb99+ubrT9543X3d3j59+uTNy/n+8e2T9/SNX3n7H/7gB6ftonq6ZO1qU9BhFp37jCnaN+Sf/cn/z9S7/PqenWde72399t7n7qpylcuxy27bStIhnYQoDWoJGhjQF5AyQEoCDGDWt7+EEROEYAJCYoACgmZGo6aFmkuLSyJCHNJJCI5jJ3a5ylXnVJ1z9t6/71rv+zJ4nvU7ljKIreNz9v79vt+13svzfJ6/ahSFaVKTi7NbpfMnKlSLcDMvWNWRtZKFd7JLxHrQAwPfsJtrrmJkR0ExLKaa2a0M1YFiDo8RjgJc7RCPIUMWDxC0zgJIrnkuCfdarIeguDNcA64F8fVGh3NZgYF5qYdlAuXHthVBYch+AYenWDbBvtJuviAoqs6ug3QUoE0R6QtlswiYadLYEC5cKrgekeHudMhaWK7EDBITF9RqlUwFx8eFohbi6bUKLqxCLoVJrYTBHbGQK1NVZiabERQMrlubKFCJIMZAKDzSnGv4yCJMj4J8t87WwIdqyGfHajc8atY4DYi5CcZMgEkwh7TdkrSp5UwTMbPObrjIUP5hA8LOUBhYlEyRFnORYv4kpk7Zrp3wGe8dDiPvRFQtJ40luD/WXB6WK0+nqNVuPkbcXI3hbmrDPbtzlqGrnWoqJRLqmUulI4aoXK7f7nSN4zxjmJGcZaC6N7uuRvNGCgzX7iJqUvTlIkrOBKwFy67L4BADRQAbwux8HKdTVFYMX9nuY84JhwykHVVLQBviEtIKdiMkhS6s/E2KMHkkn6p6uB/H4a6MTRLJam+DTWKtZe7Ax2Qv2dEdGMriOQ8f8Aa0lHsw4ISNmsy5cC14eK50i4R5rlMVXXFLK1MNmX+xmLwHQ0XjjUttxeQ1a0MUodOWyiNR4wpWJaRSkRqPxyZzqRuU5JUpba0SYavSRBFCg9CanIlqjMoIYYom6PZFnGx15tXVdebi6ESIBGxu+ijjxKMuXm7eSeGZYEC1ExVzlbvHGCsnG0EUgOLdWHpT/qfi4PXhR+oWC8lZ5i7Sa6aF5GyRsuFmXitF2ixaJmRv4VF9uGCEVwBFtJlIrnWeOREvgTOisxzjE9V1lHni0Qh3ofdYqtdeyLiKrJwIp1HH8qmHxaplMP7XihGquo5jL7IhUaFYzMx/Qimx/S7V3ZJd7raJbqTaAv2PQUZlRgwpq27DihJB1RxPagPo72xIuhvC45Zeq01DegJD7WpVWA7xdhCAsrurwBcRd8+VLe0euQAPZHqeuYq1iTV0Z9VgvlmYimZlESADqJWYER1cXRGRq4aPNY+wYSG1urq6EMSHR6sKlCdBRY7Vqs85sRAAg56yZ+kSBspFBFRtLW0u1X3MWmutphO+VXJSB9iaXdZdp6tRme3RkHe2wslZmafrU651HKmqyHfl12jtHmvmBuvDnF9mGmYJt5KZ0ZWp1OFjEd/4anSudMCgwqFfoN4TFFPpLecjJ0lKgfAWLTVAPnWuQpS8SHdork3CNGx0TU0MoYWiZljpeJPz3swQUu1s9KigfWLLlAss35hzVkvsnEMRuboex/nQzeODWFGsaamAZrPgputMHKowgVutbgHfki+iQ+zaLWIxQlXmBB5MqrcRsSgkgjgFC6gYccx1GpGVgEGb+VpzXJ2Q8rdLL+ZCoSpgmNNc7l4TqeuSWebeSR7pMRcsgubIyRAmFlSD11IFv6ECipaZJqoh6jpBjAf0u9s0+MFKIwJkZZp4dwdgO8gk6wLvQF1yVZhV5dWDq1rQ2QIvpIja05a1Mk7emRG2QBQK4rLNu6rXscbpxOfKLsd9ucGThj+qmTVOcQk0EtM1FzgonFmbmttay8NzZqWM06YPYKnUllUIrd1Rw3x/8fJCn7ItXTRzie4KrNHRiamuWRGx5jIfuQq4YtFCixtB5ZG2ViG6OVaVsH9rKkVA0mIz6YjJEuTHqUoR5W9mKnJxs0fA46yZWZIenqvCBtGhF4OTamb5CNFWWj1zjMjsXBguMxELsrVOGaHihn0s8ycxcam6urk63x6GPbXIWsvdCm7h4dqamWqec+EMUVcmGba01Gev9L//X+tP/ugHx8cvr8/j1/7Vf+2v/dIvXbXcvnp1t9Y/vf/R//76j1+vOedhp/76X3R1fT3v/vyf1s33bx69vPnS+194Eo8fjUfXfjPiFO6VeX97Z13XDx+223/4m//x6YG2tbu36vX7ldcpp9Mnf3Z++vWr2+c9X4sE95zurqXmdnXy999/UOvqfFvXdvXFZ+/89M/4sw9+KKou15//wc8/f/7q/OKzP/39P/rkx5/Zur/6/PMvRv/Kz7zz5Q+e/OjjO3vQ3/qpR2+/FTPHD/7g5dNxH9eff/Wnv3lX19/93t23/5cff3b3fN3EBz/7tW/9/Dfefuctc/kf/9Hv/Pn3P/yLv/zz/f5f+sK7X378zs33/Der7+ea7i5uuXC+pYf26szS//bb/xIOKTwKmUtU3S2rFMsT01zZIhGesz3cgHMwy+zq7EYwy97eFaG9RUqEYk7kDhNWYXy943p6e9UUbP216jQCG3QMSCpRIOhls5fVDhRUN/Njus0EMH+lDp57D4jeG4YoUCVFemWJRoyWbcpqnSuRYejmUmhstKEMYy5fV0Kh3keu1fAbIsulLplOHg5Vba51yWZYM30b3CUp8XLTNZkiQndEdYSLds3S4DA0WS8qiGpdDYb/Jd5HSjWstplqrfbQzrbhEPBQqyA1J6FhFpG5cdeFywDaNZESD0JQAKEqbq00V+KfdaUAg2+7aWVj72XhsiWWRAdBurVKXSHpMWR5q3cWpTssQbGcbrqkhKqAbslK51dQyLjzYJUsFLCwSxSGTqtyKSsQLeTKMaKlu9YprkboaZzCIzyGB3TIvQoQs6w6jRPmsO5e2TChmVpLUtTIFsWoB8a3ZVRQYF0N7h8AX1U13EuSKhS4GOUi+IQd95J+KIh77ipDSSeXlVRLFzRFfYnlLeZSisrwU86ELBZEpVypLtIKGTOKFXftBuVe2ed37wAoBJ0bZO7dkrVcUcv5BmQA/4W9xEBYMM4QNeuGNDmQJmLua001MS1YiYYPIOBB9QOUT9VbEjkWGAljkGGt7dnZ5l6MR7/EUaRDtMkMUy0mrTcjnRLwW6mVsJBwwuIOFJBbFCLMSqBVE6m1lllYGIqskhZ8RNXuAUtTmzIvXlZeLLUqZi6M4Sj3yLUsTLRrSWX5GJXYsZeih0UejxJbAfWYBYWkOz9dqoAIz53HVchiQr+paoidNR1VC/5GfPLCX63NSk1n3q85u48SyUxEeam5VMkO3MawtjqRf6Z8xwu3w5qFRn2ndhqyAUWaggVM8lGft4i1FGk6TDd2esiEDxVjRHstNowiiciiZoy7uYEzSNdxt2h7hOwAN2gNYJjNlVc3J1HJdYlcpqsK5MOdC2P4FA1VubZgW2W2jbxUbyKKxsLMfK1ERjBFuY2njLsFLCRVbR4La4TLSla7hfqbPSKgH5K9AeNDsc1C3DyjtwntF2poRM26aP4VNpxw9xXKdEbLgtffMldlSXa29HEktJegOCIgDRitsi4E1gKWqw5AcXMi15j7V8PjLWMEBA474K4Sfnv3Ro6OtdQOj3NDWKu6IU0Kf9dFDLazIpvWNBXw7rOwGr1wXKgkX8glM1KD18oYjuo5GQDbiDLekj/scMQCqUsp3E4IgP7hhpX0Wqlutf9CeFU6C9htM83qLcQFVqkDNuksUQ3ztdKGFrsvMdOSylWnEZkVIzq7kvE/SF/srRwM8pBYUxaV6pRXIA6R9FjfgXu7KWXakiiQ13jXai0Eo5tapWDDJiJInRXFhSSt0OYpBVMb2QDC+/bW8BvAzsrMqsvUsXgEmm6bom0hZV6KFYXirixmD4jggKuWzAwPNkKAN7FeZOOWa+F1QBHEPN7uGAOGgs4FPEHTENXwt5sZU9d4udIpml0jPKvd3rC+W7qTaenmLlKd8O4J3JTdMpBZr5I70cRMj/sJkCPEjRpSq0R8/7IlprVKW6GiTDTyDWMeDzRGVwL1sws8RBPigwUN3sOOeYb3C8hNzmOKoRJunpXqeN+lS4RkR6oJnHHTKD5ZikRsQ1Zvf4Yb/gIfViWFdWcJLUjVl/Kr22Cw36nOXHVDsa+Eb4HNzYIZ24VTxMoSlbUSKYjkAGNWxVKyDVUhyjw1jADUEZRF9ECLuAd+qTXzT3/oP/gwP/34bJI//a23fvaDt5+OJ4+PD/7J97/3+89/cJt3c+XVjbz7jXbpkv7+d86vPtJXH746PVpXTyTP+Te+/LW//tbDf+8f/OmL8rfeeirzePTo8Q8+/Pj7n3/cN+ZPQyLc7dl78+m7Y3jUavH10Xfr5ScAxotHSLZYh4asfPToSkSvx7VVPHnw5L23v/Dzv/JpXN/X3aP/93/4wh/88R/dvbq/P59VfCDIdeXDkz55JJ9+eN/n28dX5nZ1vqufevvRt37u5lzrRz88aq0Pvvb2b/3By09f3duI66t4+71n773/pcdvv/Pg8TuPnz179vhpnIaW3NX9i6t/eGcfuqsiJd1irgUXEpTx+vd/569W1vCAZQornTmnwcJaba4Ll3GJK4dduOdgVMteUjSsnk5W2eD8YrPsHkLKbLPkABcIL3kWZHVZ4F+yZoVdjSmmrRaIAkNpjyMWoe3b8g0Icm4PgKm0BRnHihCkhnvNhB1jAYPpKyFjB4W6K4HiASxxIdyLanM0nUUzXpver1rday6EHJeUh+UCEZ4B3j60C2cHslzTT5FzMa9XutabQG2DBRxKhsHWBolJohuVUz3CC+gwRjt6Sa8jBYnegKpgfY/DiFW9NP3qQFswjoKdjIq55yQNrFbbMA9Eq2OJWh42j2U0jllVh9qapQECZ4MVBgd/HjmuRq5JZo8Ris2UFRQBIuI9Z6E+bxGHkdm0GeIoIHxsOXCbGOpsNF4AeloA0gA8OZEMW0QnZlJSWqAUmnZXCnck0ldXp6txfeOnqzhVpZqEXa2cpubmcDZ2d3fi+IYbhGcW9uwutQDUYVw7OtSSbUyrwiwZ0ibwWlRF22sjZFAt0TRWeMv0mAtTfDgrGFnI+MdVDZULUno6Tj6PKdKdcOvpFkpJUcmpLeIWlYmPMyvRvLnRZZerfNAdmit9SDE3UUs6POacm/fbTM9zfNKOB8rMVx5gFFRn+EkQDoZdZacqs7+0TFXmWkHZnjeQ1YT0auM+ZuSSqspaWSmibYzT2JoWpvp0VuM6HGOo7ES7bXzpbh++6sB8OsYJHp41Z5jPucYIAPrUvLGsVzOaokVEXOyYh6p5qJS+eZeMrmpFiY28kgb5cKx5MCnUAxlrZr56MQHFPReW29p5Me1D9rP9noEycEe/bso/lo3dpWYeNF9Id2WLYTGLjdqx8g4js5UH8EdxHZUJGyrmPJVLOEovDZWu45gj4qLQNHgv0bBlUVW+ysPXmio9Tqd1HLR0CpmZ7N67hYdpSSsas0oyit08axpW2RbSVPdDPdiYH0mqyFqlzoR1NddGj7pYZ0CaVV3WYWPOY2CvbroB68okHgSw5AIRFDASM11VbgO7f0PGJkQK3RbRWZltuyVDkQK02c5b0p3CrXXxcpvKovKf/xO3NScEq/hsw30dhbNFGO1ML41q7y0OCl0VlbWWayDWUgUxalLd5kDv8MSs6pRes3OmmAIbDuN9q5hGp5QgjABCMl8zfXhlMQ2yVbR5pxeGXMsi9E2+vK01L869rYrVyqY6ei+G0Swz6VRVdk56q+RC8CMkTOJha07ZybhQMTJlBisYWBa7LDRn4eITRM+vaqObdX8bEOpA32hZ1dqMb0aknfU6+LWiNyjo+7Mbm+FcwwNKGXfL2lRbEh4LvgbtCyAapbAmotNM1rHY9kfkTOWlSCIBmWGY/CFXoBq8lhiDhsnsMG3rNSmuVjMx9bDz/dHZFgYstlAwqJs0JIxWV+X9ngUuy7jy4ziYsJdcPBuz6mDbazPV1tp9VjOXERxpQXIAFF/qbgKYrRV/ge3X25g/H4YePLsI6MY8nY9lC+g74IYy9w9RZxgttGIFqdql6tLZmWCMtRnDSCCMjIh55LiKXHmJ55YtMWqVNXOE5ZZcAY0GqSSBhSrrSBvGjPuA8wDZbBjOWmWKC7ZwOPzNdUMTHcQKCNMqi+BTDHCRNgEv5U4qu4RHqqAUv+RpUIvSPUVlZnoE1H3QadUC0MItIgs0KC1JaXG16hrDc0GdZ1hsmBEEQaW9GawyLZa9RgQUN1kFvRV8lR5WC+aabm3ULY70+a2vwd4SL8LKdDczWzNJXAM4SETxX4YJp9J7AgWCH/IecWYYTLmGqwH2bppQtEFsvoCLtPeOpHUzyNqHrXP+7nfe/uhVvj5eV0llnR7VF78kDx6OH3xv/fjDc4s8fGZXD3ud5eHr4z/4lX/mP/kn3/7NH72OB1Ivzn5S1Zp3kTP8C9HaVyOevOuPHvWDh6dKrbVefzb/7P87gKM3cxcAe0RFTxEnH2F2Haehp4cPHv3stx595ac/lFb54c/9zv/80e/97rc//OTH96/PeBpbpId5xNX16fr65vrBqayPue5vzz3lmAcPtLCHDx/cXJ+uH19djRMQkpnZ1dp6c3316MHDL7397s/9pS/HN34X9Gj4kTA6p1lJJVf6v/V3vsY3DSctWSoaYaqiIVUZMXKmuzZZYlrVzrm0VPcIb+1w8macN0VfejYPKF5EtX1vgk0MsYFEGijpYSoXN2Cp2WXjZOaqPEwvvMHK7L0EM9PO8nDD8eaGjGxrEG9BGe0tu+f4WVq1zcMwnQNeIsKRX+xubVQ4Yed0GiPzsMDUTE5Xbq5ZjVUMqvbqQoAM8CqYkWCpAoKTU2hRbkDY0CfGxGxYU9lxGDW5JiIKIvZaWW+S1OiHYgoCjAOCWThiEs2GLlBhpbcSU7L6NE4by27mTqU+aDoDU/9YmR6I7cIcFF4Xlz3wU3yRWrmWulZLnPaAqtYlUEu2/EJU0PN7aCvgtrju91NHU6tmLTxpkH+hYlAxD6Xvq9rdyfByCAaQSdHmWtrqba4TQheBD6EKPh8XDxPV41hHzXOeX96/vJejre/nfYTDUBc+spcYMt6kC3Zty2ofjskifkgzx7eWmfCx4baDvAFLVCOT3ime4PyuIwYD1qqkNMKrqrrHcL0oErEtMNZ4huj2rVkdp8D+VlTHKRjmsQdqTfqibgZayUW80R0jcmWMqGzQN8JdRUAiMY4JxcNw727QEzG4VWViXBy2ZE9GI0vbGNIG2SnqPzVB0o4pxHVY1vE6aZCI3HCE62aaN9l0BWWpmVIUjgBMiBy6eKOJhcOV0d2NC16oPkVUEe/cXGnune1qK/N0GmARbXlC7ImkNVaybjR8SrdojBBt91hY9KuJqEjGiNZVgkBtwDDcPSK8QSQCB9pN9xQUnyruYr3kN5M44tLl7jOPHSEJ0Xd2lVR6wERD/5J2V031nvPuPF+d5+uqcwPD31UIO9O0gThQMZfMKSqdaSZ42p1hXx2nMFfsoElkMT6oMbDUxM4tbUdL43sxpdtNFACVkqoxQkRcXU0S0GMFfvMC+Sy/ZEMLUnNESnA6kbERZuGtLQrMkmemhqHGzUxgjFDHOF0DCESA7U32ll0uvr5O2t1RMfP/p4x/5yqbr0n5q0iDPUOXDSWu0m3gK+KdUjMGDuGkYpsHoV0R7mdWE1Eob1jHnP4ZyJlGiIjpxTwDNSPDfnI1KaNtw6qobpnZJX13niuhiSFCBq7Ftdos1Ly6NFQcNlcRxesDu/i2ADQqVfwByaYbCOKWqrLhvODcscwpWjFrjCG67ekq7iG7xVJ3dSU4kL7ZUDcVmZktmnAeOipNpWVth3wmGVRYb+q4GqLYIMu2TEBv0bbprQz7HuYIpqeXXTPx7mGxQz3qymnxtQAAIABJREFUJfZAtR2ybeAAsFRVQFAADpXqCjeVjjFUu6T4Orghjc3CARjTDShDg21BuskuFYy5vPxjmlmnUyC0TR1QFd0BDx1hGPPyglBYQqB+FXgoIMczB14JfBpTB69yIboWSi4bGJ6DVu97ayge/JsR+CEKXgjuGIg2F89tGK6Vk1/EgklbgCkXdiHHoB/AKKS0d9av5Cp1c/ONvpSNAFRoK4T145YtlGzzrfM/hmbu2iAkD7QNEmEJzTC8EpnDA7MJd92Xaw24RWg1ltY2UwvTcLBkslalbHOdUt/aXL2iS4ce8zgXNZlm++i2LIaoMWKqS1XXSnPkSbKJQbkIEwrfNbeqwzzWwtChLczMtAx/YIyRVWqStWAQ6CWQJZ9OgVk2LRUN0wRCqgpft7s1ww/SPeYx2eZxxCwqMEW/iS1G1vfW3ajAlKt49iSryL3LNtMIz5VjDJIC+BSJbpQrI+GUY5oIEzGpRtok7jnbx3un4ESqkuubExXIYMvtFABzFa1WifBa3a1//KOHj95fn71YMOzHw6rlc64f/fBSp0me1a7Hxy/WX3/v2VdO/g8/er3UH7398OEX7cHbN/rAamkH8t76vb/gN49GLn3x4f2LD9er57Jn8QJCQbirIQpV1RB7ixAXe/ky33pHbx6tevjRk/7KD//k+bpfx93sozK7U3SnNzWmvFWuPoafTqfrm9PN9fWjRw8fPbi5uT6hsF9rrjWxVaquOY/b13cPrh780i98/fpnf691IVYbcfFxiqpkrnSXh/uv/a2vVHW4cyFtkFLUiLHWNOgFGjiEhi6gLyG/SMQWSeTaowp27qZQ/vtwsJI8HNJ3zjsgMa+uXhwUwlewC/1CGn2AAsrUe93TTQxptimW+F1E1DfHZpJVUHOrbBWFSXZhRR4Ov5xzMwaZJXZQyhlzG44Vkl+6ykSrliICDC+rtJsi43jf2ZSjVKeamnNXpKLgpgSyXMmEbOQbitF4hnYZ0xdcrgBpMT6LVcU2CDrIrtylwk8dgUh0t3D0h7gilZdQq1lmh/txv2B5VwGNTRSUV4f8QFsaSj5TQwRTZ51Ow0JFoX4SvNIssQAy0YbHvbIQyrRxlIiNHbnKXVsKeGqwd4Ww6VKTzATzXVU7GxfZRrz0SrC3LzIJRjcbrlNHlQYUbYuKuraqBdV3OCbcbdYSUQ9zt6wslZX96v58Xuv1vD/XMXOuLMFfrMqcLtXLmhXMUrQeUM4cazpR9eU+cq0xrtDZIniU0E41yGZw3sv2VBrlw1JSzPxwNzfUjswd1N0sAd1pjpmeupZ2uLU29WPV5iKGARyEwbJDXXtzFlqqwymFYqAFyBb4h7isw9NhqHKKhkljmAOD1hrHQ7ckKt0qByFQSrRIDqtytqZeku5AU9Ao2sT4Eq1Rlb32rAYvGrsOozizJTwQPlld7qFcRvGBQw/pDG9oMqh2biQvx2p6u3sBN6ViUhJ+EoUmCsGSu4Kv7Z1VzUVmwIYP7byAkkCkXjiR4r1zhBu7Kq1KLKAAUMmuAPyD/XypmHSZ28wDOEo18VBsQd2g9q2W1ZIteazbI+/O836tu5SVeQBK25JVCSH0XPduVlokdrEkFjwwAJMopvBOftNFAwZ3N2hZRvqxLchOVFTb3c3xXiDEFUKyUhNMwdwja+EtxW0UbkhzQYj5yjxdDWoCgAMFv1sNlBcxSzDQcYQikgN/vxJVRUAoyZxELJupmhc46wSc6HGkWbQ0kEJE4PvuAnm5W6VUyTg5tuXCThgzlmKHHFGFclNVxHyT0xcN5PiNCMaksk6rxFxzdQzPhB4Ul4ijK+jutsbFh40jVuKmlt1ZjH9BykWLVObqnpldehxL1LLaFDGctvZ73IjLQ3+I1oRpa7pmjcE0XaKCjFyfokBmPy2i6kqDkxlodd0yTu5ARhAi3t2IgDPRjhELJN4EsV6zMq5ctEEF6/3pFdeLuEpEVIc74G21U3kTRnpVEIS5m0IEatFmwjQ5XJ1OT+9GmklWenhzcEWwNLwkzk5Dmiom4UkF0xRjq6q7LHhGZaaPsZ01XtnFqVZvGSDKBLUA76A9vCUdq/gmM9mYFNcIx1q50DxnAa2tIh1XDpkP1JtmOmeGB2QndPKvAqBLCmmtzoBJjNVwqZbgqCStCnMo4r46hueOPtJtaMWcMTvHKQRuUtTfOAlNMVyEsAA4SaxMaxGotV0GPucKp3lhQYir1i0+4iL5MYHCXkra1aH5AIJVjbvN1orhEE7hToEFRoyy9q1+F4AwzAwu5d4OlbpUSkKyPfor/ElzUGpgaREMmxDhhDU+8i9WktRQ2Ra0S5ECB+OHOY4jaOUku1aOEQBKb9U3axhAiSO8W9ZcNtyMRddFMDRnxhi0riqjwYD9JC0JNTzQjEjKNSYYN08rpSpPpU2yUrQAXhJ4VeWCZDcR6vgSuy+j7xvUtN6QpN6YdGN6Ns4LWZXuvmohFRZAVORIMfBLLtlYJRjBkx4koj13psjKiZVEDAOzDft2a3DZ1F2Jl2a91p/c3XzyOp5+eX7y4QQbtc72+uV8+Xmbesm0GJ1tHnatb5X9zSdXX/3SF7/740++q+7DRf3uRc87EOg1xMzt80/qyRfGOveH370/PYu7z4oId6tnP+U3T+x0ivNdimF3QhOphZvIuVadx/s/NVV1vPzmOk6v717fvb69u7vvo6xbU2S13FfeHvP1cby6u//89v7F/d2LV+fP747Xd7cvX969ur27u727uzvfne/Od+tune+Pec7MfvLgwXvvvvsz3/jW+3/hoTz7QVd5oJ7Urp5rYi9VXWAU+m/8rQ+wTd7eEcwPwPOk6x0yTFz3FOPh+jGrbAvEsPLMBVlh5zxz/r09GHtl50rF6a6zusidZJQJ0OkidPHCqoRdPQxvtkOIa+89u9y9MOcTauSqFKHbRHczS5wTG5xviH1zwHYBX+auSfivJJWGDhEtRPJZlzg4FpTh7gabDWVFsjPJascZ0cr4E6ktAM3BHVdtGOjt9M/KdPD9+Na6dBuuc76fJEAyBXIz9DfMjT5z4LlMwnYoswKdFUbKsJrwFOIRQ8nlxu5lpyEVTYkHwAPA/ANgCVqh9mH5KzsStdXUzU1KTZ0ixiYFBMBqYiq1sRxTeZM9CwUCFhRiUvPSD+sebGq+ieez7clvIdeBZR10lVA5dlVJc7WlEJl4rRIVSeh9a855P8938+487451f6yjFRLohqe/dkITPiaMeGGp9QgF3AJmHpzdWAjzFbsUNLA3gEkO/E9iIiGOVdhuhRGzkIsLZxpI0Cg2JcCbCY4Xngm/qpBIoa3FvyLFQD+MILE4wpfPpITk+hJzYuYjEPWmasoFBYCE+3rGaBAQTpE3GLTuxp63CzRXRIpVuOO1aIZAaGYFovagaFXDDUSxWEOwp6Jp5jvtGmxuvOJQZhJXuP0N3tK4ri+vPHpymmMgcC1kxKFrI7s/C9G6lD3vhsFU21SxjgjWUZxNoIBTCBMcC3tU0XS5wR1E4blxLdZdoIjj1dBtXfOALZMYZ9h5zsfZ1EryvM6zzse8rc5Zx/k4Vyaw/zDwNR7CXFWJskQVYF62/nSzyraOtLIGFd02TCiNvVtylYq11QWst9bC02kXL1k3aJ/YxjDOyBRoe2iGVZHCTCrEFhFpMgPDNrRA4C1dE2Qio8ZAKYgwQ+AbmZr7jFeynYCtw/UEODaRmFqLMwU3aCNBjXVIJ2E1AtelsjD/u/wicy7kR3dzKooXlNliZOEbtv2cG4iY6htjGCITlXZcKPzMvFMgpuWzXWwb5gHoETR/hiUD40XhUVTYCGVm3s+Z1XOVmMGBpuoWDrc4OKLFa0KZRG/UVeKrh9xOd/vi7nQNtVY16UF0tzbrtuQYzlTMNQKhfKZ7IEgUs4KXQ1KsmKA/Z4C5UjbW0urK8SIzkMCYgVagGKgtqPisd7YTXGeY3eGxAHQUZQkaJ2yAa6+FM9s81qKtAvMi3EwYyIpKp7S1XL4tmFaG5dpRA4Z9oWSXqx/HBKAWfwCFPx7PMKYHdfeaOU6xWWK2Mmnhy8SaEGZvYexBMwchG6GjmVJVbn4cy019eGWOGKsS0n0kXl66eshqJHs/s/rGA5xtylkP9Ynw0VSr2poJshEs4nw4W1bl6TTyyBZZB3RbqopgvY0QKpJH6APiftBUWXFhkphZCBIzDxEz9U4q2VD9wMVDXJLsbXZfxpe21ooI7BboF2GeEnnsWeXbG5xZKoERP2C5LLyE76+ZkfhHhjB4XOTwVMoYQcCM8B5VBRSaLP6c4Id7riW8IC7NJgc9tbCIJgOWPk+sN5ydmxrYxT7X8jB1PgxQY6KcML8YKGS72WnRxRmDcsyQk0G4b0MzjB++iZkgwprVNSQ/EMLvzBp4QdHuIawVfW7t8wi9MTYm0qDOKuJzoSdytzmTAhxSvMGVhF8Emec4c+EmsAgoRRMQbnOpKh/OoJoWcICMGcTFtSoDCGgl1ZYPP3764naeHueTJ6cXn6aIzLU442H4XbvH7L67z3/hyfUvP7iOuHkn8h9/9uo8u89WiyZJXI2iIqs/f57PP16VnfcqirWNnDy+9MHVw0duIi+ft5m2qSPhpEVK1HpmP7877NOHN/XeR9+xH/zZn3/y0Y8/f/XymFNM21uG6cni0enmnZsHX7h58IUnV48e3Dx9cP3o+ubZgwdPHz588ujB05tHTx89evr40ZNHT548fvjo4YObB6erK5Vys6+9+5W//M/+cx+883Pn/rxOzxv3u+ICIqRzm2TV/82/+zWc+ARnAlq/DaMRkRfQBDZvfAMALhXc0phK1A4VBIOkFsO+ILpCVDqVHplqama9o9zgrMWhg0fEzFa1eSCRUkGh4whPM0taEZrp6giDaiTVIthLmLdI7wpYna3Maa12D0prYMhqEdU1U92YQS0XmgoOBQYrqxuV7jzvtltdDDLTnKSHo0UEUFHBCKXwiQpY/EiVlUimQnRpNaLwGC3asiYuW0yvJXsxV0OaqVmmWS0MlUJAceMQQaRP8TSufb8YhFW1SPmT1mrQ7nUMBKnzjRLRWkX3iCoStGpfRWultNTiQ8CkXhNtqKQM0EsVN6PnytSry8PEdOXqqtPVwDlF4YTQWceCVVxaNo0T3HnyrZSKmvRwNVpKhMA0lPoVw9dM1iV2Ge/xDqYdPwVyc6g6+VDV9vRnZfd5rvtjvr67X73WmlhuuIcUtMmKZZu6zrVKKitPY/xEVjKDnMhB3S0cV8VbMsQMKSFGorpHnNDtwy4IDi2ZeCKrliCWKtkMC/VsCZcL7hjuszj0uUQFm4iUNuOSCInVNSeVR6FmXpmsPcnwR4YeK5w9dkfqlzO7T62ozMRqjg5hxvtKgZQYw+H75dMlJi1hXkmmezeXdZ0bs4+eSdqMa3B8oTsThQARbFsRp6vqldmtLeVYEXMLYMQjaavY+ZjmkWuh9sXSGI8doFmoaI23fgmnqoQkCnm7EhHd2dmgv3Rt9UPLBU+upsqYS3jCFHbllROtJpI/i6O0BotXtLJm5jqf77LXed3Neaw+qlYDeIV5rbY5xtULjtCq5AKBpXAyMAA3fvHbRv3nHhjTcOSquy5o7W4sMMMdGwbcC6DsuDp0uyj2TRTeQpXa4bEYDlqrgIyjwoMLMQKFN7ptb+aUnxkH9qMbEFEsEmuHO3OWT/QkwzLRZeJmUgvjzBncfViJlIgOgjdKuqQqpVlbYKzkHruwhoHdRGSugpQG3CbcWVjavzGDkQ4qWroPJRMxHNT0EkK3pFiswKLPDRT6QbyvqFY78TxI9QX+jnetsmtVraq726Mb6Hgp6VK+3C26ZrdKlc4DsEEsLV2B3nFk07cPz1WkXjX0clbVmaB0YzSEtlrB2btkdqtprVTVtaAT23NDwkK2IqEohmSM2x6jSIsUoy1RiGd1pUYw5kV3ShOokWtu1PDOiO3tdj0f54tv7TK95b6IgEcnS4/2esmJQD9lkQwfCgaxsKiAOF3SqpXVJW5o5/oiXJICI0QTVMQmAklKmQDeZZtRBA6tlOImNXKGBdI1EpWbLQSH5cApbYJ3I/hxRM7Uhuu6VXRE8OppOttrFeo3RiyYSQtCYTrxHdFxontgXcXULUwuMruJqAFwVV0cm5daPSJaODrPRWbyxWgpxCu3OLf0BRgeEv9onROE47n5WttUr2ImXXgFnNFTIoYXYTHyDdLiNztt+meswZPPXpkIGMsFUK2YmbuvldBjo16FKoqAAx4RBDzIPpe11WEZb2jUaXFdsyKGlOTCHvNi4hczlwuFS6RWqxmXKATPBhwCRF85m8+1EpNAzAQ3Ll59uIrjkTSz4zgQ6QlpezYKyL7gsjDi5MfjwghNZX0uItQuiZjFOi/dlRLuNzi4cIjt9HkGLaMVrO7iCEk7iY9S83UsU03k2+DxrE60uxuK2PITeYzZsORA9lx7DEjwo2ir0flQ1dXjxNnzmukemAchW1FK3kR6YjJV9r0fPTl98f765Ofb+fKzC4PJNlS83Hyivgz5d9+9eu/x+//+f/q7/8a/8vXvfPT8e6AXQMeHtOSTdQpVJ3DFowI3GVf97N3RK6+u4nwcDx/F7W1TmFwa4m993Z59Zdy9sJX544/v3tUPfvjRx599+uLlq1evbm9XTtU2czGxsHE93v7i2++9/95bbz1Jqfu78+3L18f9cZzvj/v7nLk6b66vHz18cH11crXz/TGPKWJf+8pX//Iv/PJXv/rVm5sHD+urn+jvtSzUadsBvgdAaqbi//bf+zpN/664gEw0s9U0BgQw2i2sLrsL4k+qgYpDNRWaz2Vr2JopsdgkMC9pqy0ixkZ3dreMGHg/cfxADiOtAaFgQRSX4ALb3m8jqgHH1jgNeOTE1M3Vgc3RcRrohiHSgz4GA0Tm59pOQyLGwyFyQ6Y69iFmsAXjwfJ9GUt49CoPe4NDsw5zpNMKdHvZa8FKJK0MuFuE/3auapVxGpUFxBbxA86sthjRol3aCco8qZSy0eNq1qJwYyO5B01mjMhaON6dIt6y0MqS5qtoZAFKVsXAhhBLqooR5gaUM7k1W7v1JlzoEp2+WwwfrAz0MgVfFTEYMqKaM3G1U1CgUlVxcmrllbWfh5MfgFgpM/bckGdVQkLppkL9SeMiqirQSYErY7JulcLeLISUsgLdqEZTk6KJcSdjURyxdTtyoZ+31Hket+f78zrujuOc5yXJ7EFqls09pBvSOM7AtNAmuxvivxVAmsIGz9255iVeqEiEx0uLFKC1Fsd+rmvN8IBq3/bPCSKO7VRMsg274RWBbEka3lRFHrTgAjcrbYwYgbtAECg1qi2iShkSAoEACWwAQnRvZygx3VNAh5J/LW7q9i3OjHsC1TlYUcw7dUtMEHOuwhcZpSAnWRzfroGZziX5Q2jRZD8tUlnk0ENBgEkE1O96cRlLQnNneiHL6xY7qML7QiIiblz+ADlpXXarBTVXa0fVQvwXNT9S5g7VgomrwzHC7rG6qtOZ7dZj+MzVu4WUlspcec4+H3l7Pu6r1+xDtOc8mCcGynFW2xYLSArBlwmNfZiTH1xMTDbXdUxBsqWUiucujhGkbKqN9SctzDvVDDEMXdxj6E8QoE3R/IOOkxjSVZEdznR1Q4aqcBQj3HsDzrAjDEryIm26oKP29wpoClIxnbpl6Fq5aCe0advOTY0npPglWQTjFS45FYUjVgEqojJGZEEyQTUdsnC5QxAIGdKD6iQcpwt+vzCKkhHQjqW80YlqPsTkTTLhtgPBIb9P1UszrAj4TQzXTNbKvWrSsOFic+V5zvs5USf5CDFTs4Q7N7xbTZ2G3N4qvm3Pg8qrOGmqGMBIMHQe/n78bbz/kHPYm86t2llYAuB1DvOVCwo33CALGTxN9jVDzGk4NA1rSHykRnglfPXbdGhmYdgHQmpLVb06swQzPaK6QaPJSmmpXmq4+wIZJDhEfVAoyAnEJmtiOcM0dkTRuO6Mky0l4CuLX3nzZhRqz1K13qLUVqksSYFRiIcR1YZrb4PNg8txQ0rh5YTcU4rMN4HgumNX4AYXMxMvaXXQv2qEtxQMH1vPT1NzdZkhr7KlCGqmAt9MtM29oe7egRmZ6WG5+Dt3S5yCKKtsBYbALTs9HE5F5q+aqAhsltCCqeo85hhDTYwGosSCLMIQEoPuxaDCMgKc4PFBo9UFsk7iC4AUy5kYrPAEZi6TrXAqyLgaFoO2TU+ujgh1DbVqWTMjvCt5A4lx8wb318JMh+aIXAuqSzP3k1/sqdgN5Cq88Q1fqyEiUmUPVgDZ3yp64KUR17FjLrvj5FU1qDwPonowDnd+YTUTgtusKllius5rnMalo89OFHU7P3y/8gb6jKxicnhJgVqoZP6LuSvQzd3j5J2lIqfT6Oqxs1gBmgI7EE9jI8tOpBYZU8hAr05+SrTzNBYqIFY201NMRZGihAocpsrMjHAC97rCqcjg1rQ3FqGhONDT6dRZVcmMui7EZZPPr0h2efTdHw0/ra56fbtev6Q6t1tWHYDimqi4t+k3x/x3vvG13/u9V//Rf/Zbf+1f/OYvvn/1j56/moXestC0d3UXn2fdYQpqGhYPHpze/nJdX12NMa6u7OrGXz6vkjRVSRWpB0/t8Vsnc5HDZnbfrbsf3T7/+NPPPv/89nyfmabWxMBLd53P6/PPP//8+evXn9+uYyJuoAtC6uqSecy7V3d3t+e72/s1U8UePXz47MnT07h6+uTJzc31n/zJd/+7//z/+eQPn/3yN//1ihfTXgJ696beNfXf+Ntf6y4zT2kPbYSpusMl7OBxNTUYHgpwYgRLOsRSoupCzxXhMESjVgNqjOvywoZnsPBifLngbaesX3YIrV2AM0beOhNXNifZzDRWrqDbAatI0v6VcM4aEQn1P8m1djkxt3HGTOMSWBDhVGATbE5bo4WYIhyWjrJOVi3cY2CPzLJM4NRXV7FuE6L8XHPVuArc1jt+oE5Xo6Q8Aqavztq01TcKwOp2OKSzcNxshCV+cVKVzbDvnRvhIgTdiRJg5oIi2NgR9ZYGbQIyAFn4+vZKlvEUyog/fFUeGyvDTFtmacDtTamAWIMyquI+wBpuFXcTVXdFuKIzcZtZwwndQgtymXBhOKWS20/f2QWuBBpXWlvd1MznWq1bkNo4gOgKMm1SEoTmT9IBIOpXsaCWssiZuOxJsCYp37nJKX0cx8v7z+7rdWpl9Vrp0AXgUduHZkmjy7q00GaWlJRJcXUhyIomrV6NeMON0wWJBGyVFlz5rFGxQBWRCJDZSJ9Xs26BQB+2PQFxgbJCMmaMgURE+TIyqBNLdXgemAvixEXuL435kXzpRCnhF8qsVcTDVcQjKnnu75xkoWguldo1aKuoJDcYksl0hVFEqIWWUmSq8u8xVYq6SsVGBBUyhLIwPt7NIIVoKsdEUSsL9+G4O8ODDk/H4rfYNkASX1Vdp9NJlZNKmP7Do3ohs5N9EhekTJPorrDRVshOECn6b8Ed6YTitbvmOtbKuc5rzcyZPbMn8hTCLGuZe9VUbZEqSZHCkFW6EXGfmaQSF4isVQX3snUTII4xJ0RHABP3RnIgFxRLab1sp+EEasOKw0++vaa7lWlAmxKjOZS5cBZRNKloKYvfWvOfwMDSd0adbr5EVYuWuXLGJ2qG/ZhsXL+2FD3rLQW7aYt7wPjHJSGdcMokJLdcRVwhTGV0miFevIrEl8QwQsx6a2HolcC0mDOI3lqDy0/e5nAAQkkuXchuNoRZ10q5JE1z0lGX+L7WiwaVDoURMbMwVaS2s3pVzlWvz/cLHYcF1GrdmtUWLmZrYYXYYpJCDpYFTFMk+leLDxWRGMHrQBTT0qzSMMySNJQ7E9FM5ClviiavbUiLcue0oiTAFOxNXAHTelS3vB/0OC4eQRtiEQk7dDZy7amTN2B74CRH/1DMdcgCwU6szHkgcPEILnEuKO1zFfO7t2p2wyqsujjlVmYvYRy1AF8RUogg8HE3OGGymi8RF5AFDyScVQi7x9S5uhAVYCaZFa4E/WCOoFsmzbwBBY5fVMRaHfUqMqd6rgVJjrujv+oN5cBgzsNZ69f2kmiLYsO/4PWF2MPIMIJtu5HbYcZvxexyX6LqVQZ7tagDsK7O4CujxdQk3DEIiOGt4IZ2JgUrxbgCtVAfYIzzmdzVGfUU8KZiPFA7KpbmBLksrArFgELZoQxD7I2l358J8oq40onY+TXGIakPyyoVy1Ux3FwyCYLlsljtYkRs6QUYW5W7RRiU8RhPaFitYuQNpC1ISzJVY0auUCfCG8/NpHUC8cVRF8G6UEpBinK6PmFhifrBw6jj025tGxyxFc1ZstE1omaUuRnCmZT1aiMyR8DRABgy4bnAmxiYLNtaKYrNDbqpEmnzoOrEFfd7nIyMY5ES8QGZksEdg8x6bFbgw2TOp5paW7hc4oKHyVZznE6BspCkD9gUjM0ylKvu6tvLgyJNt9NSTZ6vJ9/9wf3r27vzYS8+zS5NQMa1fQTjEKVbtU1/9QtXP//O+//1f/nbn3x89/zHL3/9V3/xo49+9O3bs6PvNpa1ptQTdUtErJzuujql5PG7riqvXs9xGmvV8+fT1Wu2ioSPx+/E1fAHD0xEXn9ez+fL40e3L378+etXL++PM2W42j7Cw68fPrh6eIrTUKmr05UAIeRKnq2JD1ezMU431zdxGjHidDphMuVqw60l/6u//9/8X7/9uz/8+Iff+e53v/neX/Evfj9zqUN/0Sribv7rf/cDuKEgK4SSQfZgpER3vplg5udmoFyiDQJeglMoV2AbsGO0IEafxMGLxU0URxKqyMyOGJl5cSeyi2gER2+bT6WK1SqVfSC24WipRppQtaoj9l0oGbiEuqGpMPUubbFKGKz4lncXyhcRSc7nqT92N641lKk7NCopTCnl7rWD5C4bNhHVYV0tDklAosMUaXGoNi8bLxLGdgJv1G0/AAAgAElEQVRqqeo8lrhq0LbeIjYop65KssSze7WbtnXOVM5KzU3nBNtTL5p4psE05s2Ug7fA0az7gW7VtlCmGfWFQqMXnzVJX8WDVdWqxIKOJyz04P0gwx3UBVAMzJqJcAXntKnWKttWaOpDVNeCYNUUg02TXEjCQYQZBHvdVTZ2aFg2dW/GxEUh67r3iWBCITzFRSaGP4jbQgzT8wKylN2RIURALwx3FrbkGGGyYpXa7a/vzue17s53d/P2bp7nMUXd3CxcCpMU5vAKa2Jdtcib7RZFQJO+yXDcoG5OIgDHyDR1ZhIUjncu22tbEd4gjwPov4IlV9uhVEHiJRmRNE1IEy1TFxgpJjbgluz4uM13paGotnWKIgpEq1NVOLO6RowNoUHUGM2KlLCvnTp5MZPMhrCzpZAo0D/Zboq+iUo09MgcaphZzcI4CRluVYlvWU09DIwU7HE5oh7Rgl6oxRkh6G5vZvJKlQ/UvK5xSQWUTvcT/EzAMlQmdn70TDqDo4WOe2imaq0Di34UogDDrJWZ81j3t8fr27vXJZkyu1K0qiZ+9ZKlriuXilZNbclaJYnATQT4jitPjlKL+wfXLpVqDKFwXLsPGCY3GRWZoonlPpCY4DyZ6oak2yU4E/PXcBcMmYUuHRGYnDrcoUzLrD3p1lXVUtDqy7ZeK/RoLT4GBn90bF5ACJckA+d3jdGyh2PDgURvkAB3PrtCh+YeDJY0tLnoSYUoF1AQmwJsWu25Sqs42Q43QBvgnEYY1XTjymt1SbrHWhXhqMtJZnKyo5oGm87tzMSkgIcZlAPcraMNMQhKqXgECrhaxFusK9X0yHV/rPNct3O6DziveG3hUTDbcY8YMpoNl9bKrC4Dl1JxuG1XYbY4xmbaIhs0yqwOhtbwZyS3UETBx1YOmwzTIpyP7l5Q9xRvMWH2sMTJK5ktBCLrqnQ1BBtcwifFEdOZ+yKnnk55yWMDoGuR4dHblY3wBnyaC85wJtwy11TVxBquXAjsQV8jZqMEm0Ykp9BlUCBL7V0T95OFcBWTi1KDyxnhgAGRUVR8boZ6xZWvI5knyZlF04JLlhiFrBrWTKsjcUroUqGigW+eaK4EX3FlMsi0Nndkr7MA1oUeEgYwBEpvIijca5orI7yyw+ySlIj6LYZDIMCC3ExFYkQ1qWl4YS+V4Ru3jkpVQeTZIiaW9WYTXsiYpbuPFuoYVgvG6zZhw92tbtaZO62FzChzzVWAG9ERB2M3h/u9jaYo5DC60e34laxq9Kt4kk23TaNFZZyiMjELAG8f46edy8I3FWlj7oYSafOemCDKIAGq+4upm43JF6IaGzTaN0nFoEpjg6iSWReVFop2Ks59/yMcrLe0nq6jmH1G5bYwAIsCXt7pRpcWjo9xGnOmu2q3hTf8Kd2C0OkWA/pegVFnLNKbcGDuOLS6XB2wbtsvLFM9KJmmyhe0KoZ8NHNKE4yZbB/uYWuu2hP8TqAHTJjTsWWnLtWSq2jJocMDpF/tkj998ejFp8dx18fMeXQ3ErjLTN/5kn7w9RFhL1/V6tZ1/3fef+z9+Df/i98yzefPX733xad/8xff+d9+8OqTzpzpAAxCqMLvRbPydApUmVmS2S+fd5300w/n+dzrMGjZTNVV3/nqcNdjinjfPu87mbd6vPiT53f391j8WWiMMR6drp88evrWoyfPnn7hrWcPHlxdXZ/UvHqWVJvEMHOLiHF9evDw5sGjBzdX11en4RHVOXOez/fXNzfn+9vf/8M/fP7p87/yL//zv//bf/hTX3//2TdeGFQyRRikiPiv/+2vIVcHidrmsZ0JHPe749QkUBi9jInFCFG18D2gN2xvAacAIFh9Z4xilNuw+Je0zMkYFlw2SniAsQAGIlw7qyBWcQ2mKkH5tsPZKKrG9Kj6IhTEBp9q/kww2eB0JWaixT0K24k9Uq2uanEDcAyGBNloR+2t1jFGFYlcFE21VzRVFjF8HGvNuWD8M1POKU26K4IGMOQR7z1eg5MuJhaecylppb2d7iAOSmWKGJJtgO2x3cDioDHwNNX2BFojXJAZIpbZgkieAn9JTb10VbYG43e6xdQ6+XbtKAUgtul/43da0tSpykVaI0xNt1pdJWsh5wO79sQdCZCJ7JVgL0p0ukBbMFGE/G4LAhYz1swkFRUo8PiFa4STkmVKe01Bc2JMtC8IJE2yqY00jkaQP4myRiltwNeRmfj6CY5P8hCUnqJEAG43EbKJkV5mvrp/fXs+f353ezfP93MNuR4a0glxxQJ+xkh5hqoN2uxxqaCxDMltU8fsdsQmMzcd27tXRTnLS1/UzI7zYWJKJ566ubasSmnS//ZWVRj/XbCdlIUj1wuCZ1yvXEjKTk4jXAHVvEsDIdo46NcxY4Thydm4fPMLr8igvqSdT6UTWiw6fWyjsXeZS8C5vsGBE2GCagOTPnOl0FSlLxk7fHQE5tXazBD8RC1SShotymXF9V4qmnBdk+grmE+TqE4ukBR+zMaEftu73DWrYMgvgnPXToIhUGDO+6zj7vz69u71zHP2mnmfuVzhfF6qrVrYgVevqoW8+K7iEWh44Lsyt4cXk7UKjNWLQkuGCDbp4SBDwMmfqxzDBS3uA806BSSn3izw7nb1y5JNSCBDtJSrNmLrjDWvYYxyOgUziFn17lg0+qDY2jcDZ43hg+BwgnW0CRddgvxGVTjNkCHUrc0pRltXk7hvltXQWc2V3DnglRfNqjByEbZE08jSM6nscTUq6ydwnnpRpkgDmStrlbSM0wCcvboBxOtsCG14G5nNlepuEWtm0fidnJ7AddMMvITXhm9Ec7EMQemqlVXnOees8zkRDhQ+GKwiZhZZSjeu64axATYIjlfLTwDAd5iNIZIXNTh+QDOhVyfrjbs7W0RXtqrElZtaLkyBpUqgLqlVgqCdDXGdx3Lk0XezwRDpUh8mbdUSI/KycGhryKz3b7+vGIMpIxezJ6hwadIEFMMpi95hg/hXLkNG5MQ2jxbQuJ0iG1GLUZVqljNJTezL/lYtfK5FubIa7lk1r0oLFzV4InBMr5k4VLE+KSgnRd2cSkjr1s6VqNE3GgiGyRK0UUoTPv6LfU7bhdiH/2FEdNP9VatUff9sYuH7o1BAz7pLmws4V9NS+KBxccBFxjUsqqtmKrJB2mq6VnWpZFHtVY3gGxEpHBciFl77wDe+YgIAD5Sr6AeE36BV4QrYr0ApcuHxo9YqdbvkBlFBk5KNoRspfZVNKJFJjHgTeblN9bhqJdXUal0CA0HUMDoM8D6wlQcqBt2dd3eugqpfNnVvHYUQVNwxjvRsJJrKBa0K14qqah4JsXGtVnZ0ewkqom7zwA+zZ/Fd5o6sV3D48SbiPV1rVfUYAYmEbB5Sdy8oXVVdLLNqXXaAjheNI5IqihmaN24EoIwII2HhTiafai5iliqrgP6AWQf8Nmkp+or5tAJ6d+FKYpaXRQSA82N32zRjuErRP4iY+zoyiE0mq/xSneIeUcVjLxwtZaN93cEaKqJrZnhIy6u7Z9/5s3E+z2rttkbBjWy5yAcP5PHTUx3y2ctu0Z+9zt/4+lf/wf/05//H//2DU2iY/J/f/ujXfvUXvmr9j198NsWQT/uFd/0r3zw9ftZmts6uqu2a+25bZ1sllTLv7f51IuDUPQBZnOc+PbRPP76/f+k5/WxZet8//PT+5dorZYur09O3nz5+9ujdL3/p3Xffefrs0bg6qdo5z5lZlYDj8g8Pv3lw8/Dh9dXNdYxwdxE9n49jzfM8r3V8+OGHr1/dv/NTX3z8+PF93X75p1dJ8vbBm6Xtv/H3vg4oCxxo+D9HdD1CPszloi0HHYtx2/Sgg5LocGugETEMSCA53Njv7g18UizXN7lQA/pjauTwH7UZqXwBinKeEbuDgplJWsQ5aQ6o/8kwvHhImKKu4ioOezluzW6thOaQKcnmboTTkAMGGaFxf4UgLllzVTdQ180LiHSTS4k9cwmB5MA2FPLNOA/DZdACEmav2jI9TCXpr0hobmiIMwTGmDv9D0VWG/WHqyK8xQnZVdtu0TfUnDeqv+qN8RR1fkv86CjmgbMFZlzEgkF4wM4BsNZahY5KWd4zdhC4avwAYwxktKtc6FW43xRHIUyKxnCKhjyMqTbbweRXWCmLu5K/JpZAzmVznW0ipp3UuaiqudQqlF9VZeGZaUFQNTw2NFS4ooUwNXAss1vV3AwIVlAKcbgbtSHACL/5iDEaR1npPnLi35U5j9e3r8/z7v44L+mVyx0YGNn2P7YZwU7MAMKp/5+qd/vZdb3Ou8bufr851y7LXss2Lsux42zdZtdCidi0ihoqoGqQGgoVcIpoUIU44ZD+C/wBqEIcspGQoBRKK5VN1UJJm0RykhInkZ04duys5RWvNTff+z7PGOPi4Br3O00OIttrzTm/+b7Pc99jc12/q2Eec7ky/IBapxbpuQlqBw5SxjYsM7ce/TOrP5uxOmsjhbq6eXd17wtI0PxefVteMVaB+aO3bYbqgDGfvPIl39lud3z7DgKTAWbKgGopj/F9AQA9EDAODrjAvVPOaW3ae5ItDdbNmGbq8944iUqjzP0eEbbtrFsg1+3LuouBKLDWnanVXW6zUeyB3LGcoMQR0lukyh21kBBVarIhzYPS6e5gIpzJitX0UGodeT3r1n0cx7U6q2uKEhTJ/jERkGXG8Uo3slHmSia8bEycCsy0kdhhPqozm4+IyrseeTIJ5isqstq15xPBroJGh0kS+fDuiDEYRS7x9kMMVZnsB8IJOU3T5mISVR0R9JzHYurmHVkuaHgYefF3yC3//fDoqoZEjEm1Jixrv6GbIE05MufT/H1mEL5sXOiiXbIpxRNlhiK7iBZsAj0pz9gxaPMEg87SOzNpAmZ5smHDQ0VlNMnE2wrQVKHyaYdKF0yM7i9y1yfUUHUC4lzdtx5gYOuA3F89iOo1z8frcRynqjXAIq+LFnpELDMX007ADQZR9RWyfVPm3nxYRYkdJ0dERCrvipCtShdO7ggqaupI6KoqcCzoxL3Qx12ziYW+SgYadUlV613+O+/j0Hd47Gy3pE5e6miAhbFSuLtOsgeEXu3h9/gHM8+zNtptIjorGV9+d0PMlEGdpntq1+elxjDweHlQOIc+iwcQZz7QyYEQ3AcDVskUinHMUI83w3RRGlBJA4oI2te5MhIgHpZCKVqa4iFmYCrzJCvVd8JFX02WRhVQuMtgFAoBrxKI1ghx56HlHcVrtA4OjDZuUe2OkOXAF/femHVFCWFFvpwJjbTZB9VkECo8d2CBMTJ6X9ZE93FHRgi8oDbszWxG/uam5qzvx9TNZdSw+kiP5LtHsVAXwSS4d3F8ZsZW48ZNAB82nzhzgJMajomp7A1zwqjDeV9XljJspkcGsPNvB9pHTSMpmBRfDd1aFSpV4IifP1jX6JErk0i5KRO3fH36MO64poLUuw+FjV0rU7l6M+BcVe6GdjPfs5jyCbIUNa2zBwa6AWsMYUJprP18DlSJKoY5z0dLxT659thx1zmTMWOkVMyEkb2AjCGQB9G8m2ME6PEIMNMGBQyBbNyCqpZHbv7AeEAoZ+vqtYLgd495aoRBF7p7EN3n5Ebg0hS9c5tYvQtrnOvLz379u9dbnl2daJiUNLoN+Oz3P3nzLQtxQb/19pMPPzr/yifjj3/yvf/8v/ilD58/fy1MtfM88Xj+3L/0ueOj57/6/CZq7lD0Jz7xcFn+Rx+cx8G0E7oaeq2AGbokdfY9xqQxKKxh59Uen8vS9eJ5Lc0/94W3fuib3372jdsHL4pwMTNfT9cbb73x5idf/9Q777711hsRlwJeXh+vLx/RUufJrpirmAi/PDx5+uRJXJaZk4J7nseZZ3U9Xh/f/9b7rz+89ca7b/S1fvfbX//0O29/32cwZwlrGRH/d/+jL1APQOv2JOtR64LtMeON2G2qhRTlZILvP9TVlbLJCdudh4ZDkm3zpWmY536j57CCmI9wZdgA5ti7ALKbGDIrgIUxt4STV3NXo15cUCoMKjaHivuqAv8zKXO+o97YsyS3/4SLOO1Dlhvw2CLugfuRSkWSDaqpkLZMd2zgZhY7id5GV3TrrU6+6YSTs0q8B4DsLLUpK7jNV8hw4aGxHC1kjU2Kq9GG57Q2YkSVEz67fb0jDRWFuIUNO4HtkOyUC4iQ4+gr+AEOv03FfQdODCu/eXGqyp3IpzoZtpygs7tXM1H4UKe45hNR+MWx1TI9rhqm+s4wVHbqxhSL9zgNnVBERlHL4CuHvBKvcngw8Qmhclcm3+GBZLX53Yd8jy6c/71z4B86w9SxcDDqF9p0TE1lPYnXBCKAQgiMl9bYKcnEDjla1kPcM4tgaMU185r58rx9fHvxeLuJ2XGePcFTzsggtYBIa6tayU4BMvoW5l6QwTixv5pNiKmTUstaQV3yPJmOBWWEg85l4FNA86FiSuyMNUOJeWhpdx9U4p3EjiFSiEF0cie6604+mIpA7E5sGycbBtwygKWB7XYsjh5gog2haFCdOc42sGzj+HCHlHIpiFZ1hqFz3y33PbrTsTAJUfxo+M4wCZd1hg99h+z73PLX5t/OjVTVnoa6YLEpy9pFr6DN++1OW8hJ5xV/qO5WQ9Z55lF1veYLIM/zNsMvJ3FXGDNuOk5L0mjNpFEtxUrLL4MamuhFxRC6NPf2T+8IonHSq3BcxpWdbMXvtL5V5sbosE4GMsodPLAD/fSeBKTDZt9uEwhQEU6S1XTRO76RRYS7jNt8Qqpsp8zsaPvaaZwY1/+gQXUcyD1IAZJOAJHwyDl1jakVJFjPuGcL5M19s6Ph5pXlO9RLR3k49MUdUS9qU+6QsAK6l3tS52iMyapYww7aO/dxtamYuLmaulaViO54G9Jy/n92iY2S5KhUt12D+35ebeN1PrKvx3nLZJfo6s0hpqn6nvUwE48ZTq4aVmD66/yVzXYe/cinB8qddcik1LYo3LnBHwUdJtlWqFeI2Jcpml6+u1F5Sm/ON7EXqSp1Fr1Gw4JydFEHJHV3c5nX4OqZXHqvTujKE6iQlMuQBlubPCd0cLX6zC55bm800cAQu+aspv3bZgrJu1t28iqIxnHnfTMel9kamaCbkhwdeQSZbAqIr/GQzAVE0Ye2kxO640N8Xzosaci9mBYBd0W5DOxm2ziZYMRTbNAgonGxzvJwj1kXdRcKvszM1Oddt0lD312QKNNExvbyqmefqJyWuzd+qD22iVM9A4HRI0yWXQ+JdIMCqf3ze4704ItNi+bB+VE5gtIprlwZ2DpRvjuLWo3Ros130C/BzfnAnH3iWqAay6tIy9s5WbyCw9CjPLg7cuYqGaN28yQY+boHn2Hdxl3dvXQs64lG1HnORwE8CNLGJPrONbnTCzY+ulVJELAIp7ya/hpzU2ycnlKE7CQnYbsVKM5gPNjeuPKkhYpVl6kNq5bZxbR3KmYkvg1BzGlQH6Epn/lwIxMRM667Gw59qBCAmnCbHRevvPe1u8K6U2lxXwjbzB3cmEgpJrvgJzyXl9S8NSoSa3HbuJtP6YK5ostiRFtiiu78HskY9hCJX3cD6jxpJ9KJ+iCCG83s59Z7376+/N3ry6OrtAc1JKTH9Ztvxnk7Y+nZfT67/bUvfvb9P7T/6r/+J4/JK1iW4g++/p1Pfer1P/vHP/XtZ/Lbx4sf+tKT7/vkkxDrrjff1nf+mfXhd24iznWBzGde5t7yilos4iIOc1E/qx+6/tIPvvvX/+xPf/+zD3/9y1/98jfOj1/S76Oq+vD6kyevPbzx5ptvv/tJd7+et48++khaHl+8vD7ehs0+n5qZqi2Ly0Nclhlv8M488zyv15fPnr988fx6fnz75Pe/8yd/9E/+w7//jz7x6c984ceNikVCQM3V/51f/DxVW820RxtJxeYXjolLJ7H2LlqeKb25Z3bEcrOq+t7IPx7uAzwcq94rzODEEO3fxsI6BSke7jrADNx1krAGwnykjDyAuhtNbQz1MDPGk63/ZF4Ki+sWCkerqF7hwqfVbSft7h2ymmJYZK8k4KJmSsIbLxLF9GZjqWjQMBkReXaLVCUBEbGUPhbq0e/8ShP12ImBbtOJ2XzoVMwqeWuqm3wOEbj7dlqqCpVRLIIRa+95fczNnc07rLqL++HGjpt3oNgS7DCi6pZ79GoDVeXm7l5HKzkpg4chqGAC2XfmR0/2Ny16Y0Uzki1YJFXmPcAX98BKV4JkpvoUasNG174brbkMqou+FNt9YAMe3HJPZp1wbyAC1CxCJ6VquhSF+HIV6YK6NUHR+/yqM2mOZ/aa4FXeUXWLtLgKfXk6EbEcCXMLh0aNQ2bu+u6m5NnDWojLrhb56OWza57Pr4+Pj4+3PG/nOchxQghNgbLw8VIbVJCZmOQfy0o2umGe2T7h8hyvwsxnTjmjB+V8bhpuuvO7Z+c8QnDdIZBE+M4wGUJoakPVw2m3mMuWujbaaKfflDuddcynE35LgJ+6B8kKKtJI5WjSjC7EQs0sWayy5w9hz3fPlPQhWLBPlFdekQkY28owbkum/xRtFaO/dOS13zOjcbfq3BKfuYmrUgSmasFSiCjvttUtpaLQusSlUZgTQI9+mXmD9i1fZKcqhvcLVOWKCGcbQb10iyq0uKaCVncK04DVOEgayRErRZoqqziJhjIDpuVVbAm6wXz10XxOfPOwgbhzdwt+ADy0O7nCMxFZl5U8KaRjxZYtTJCUuY5DyUbA5sGCgPoOoeqYc7QI4wCbkdyjXGLoS937zJnduBJ8N6BGD6sqX2PGclfpcRcDzVInlltITW29s8LDp/kan3DvM3z7x5iaDeFyaftbRwyy5RsjM+4a4yUgl8uSseTIXvIxNHnM5Hm2vkp1HIiOTyXHPcOwjclaoxeRbXNLe5h55FnZXYXbUbdrirrUiHHof3Wmj8JAZI+7hRbEwpLEGpBRrFVJzeSMYQxxiVlVS27tzFjy6Ey2CRKAh21mvkTEjpXFCMyGWt6xgtA4fqdg+HIo+wV6mPkEdgvxqg1hxztEOmcNzVtdUfNFxYqs5hcqI/Y3ai64eJzGdWfAmI62sFs2XYYNsIyZwY3URFXrTDHzxUZC0T2DiVFOintwmLJfHBdh6InS9T0GfDB3cZpSqhhWxPDLYGbU9XCtJIxsrd5guh2ih+Yodmqn8fmHV/a20QjNGmBB7FLVXfBdcpkOL4R9zdgpMd+ZR5i7NJEbdAzeq2pO3qesZAoo4Q6Nru6ibtl3rDE4g5ERB5oDvZarktc1vYKxrrBtWm9pyPKASBCNPv2dbvamGGnYLVyMs2vaOiOIk1PIS3bXBPP/5+vj42qMURHSUEZnuJeEFCtM7dnJVp8ZmxPmMc3/gCS0su9yoC7kkfNWq5L9y5eBl+/EJA68evKBbTKE2UUTjdOCrhqdzqTgNOUY3YCvWeHy96dFIbM20NhGN6VcU0sSUtV9P67p9hIFyz+mhcnWUw+Mbjb2mGJ4140YarRQ5m17fFy7tNvdu+mYBHyEmlCPQfBUTyQ4r6EhhLlW5VoLYxIRcRGRQukwNhTYWLLY+iMlj71jxfbEsuoQN4tl55F0YPYoXTFqs1fhZPjUevNPH+fbfX7r+vjMoxwwlIiUAP36G/r+B6eIfvcmPxP55z/3I3/zf/y13/zaty1Q3deSFynfvcmvfPmDf/Vnf+RPvGNf/vD6+BqehKLUTNcTu17x0YeCETsLexPxODrNTM0hru4pqqqhxxdfu/78Z1/7hc88vNcvfvP//cp///e++r/+yvHB85LJT0a4mdvltQdzqcrbcbx8/vLFs+fPnz2rW16vjzNWo3iSMyCbNxvSonLejsrKM6+3Wzc65dn7z+Kt9d7n3vvK//Nb+on1oz/1+rrsxHWIqvi//9d+kAgQsyBsugvSWgkGSYVbNZdhExduNvi/maQS68R3EUqq/s58F1cjokyAiCD3ac8tnPdKJiVpZhZobXYRsDprrWDvtzyqYO6gUb4wPKve4djuYsYMk24g1ZcfR3LxyB36BEZBwr2qFRSutm5tARfgNRNFaf59Gm67UplXim2sDGOQYzZVmPbZpnaczOdDd1WVMOd3BxcM2pGlgzFiARCpITV7F8gi53APO7Db+bfLYn2LRBVsy+U5U6fcv+fkg5l1zksyBh7eMCKoyY102oWZ86skwXq+YsprHX15WCyCsnMSKcIri6ierpoVpY6dA3vgNOrTEfRN1iQfLXNXp397AlLvLB9VA+2mJuoMSVefMIAx2VdN5S878mH+WJa9BXLn9NWnwSENjLkjQ4gBzULjMR+C3xR8APZ8U9FQH5s+T2MjEp76DugeeYy4qBMk5jGsglk9edZwQUmO7TIxEWRmSd7O27Pr8xfny+e3l9fzejtuLLPCl1pfLquzfA3UpCTdnFGt2R1rkR0PqSBVkoo7oZinq4vdBT+TtULNqlMG3nf3/RpVN3ZPhIfeRVCECt5zbyehQZrb6Vfd4JjbvgedRCBh9U6X0XuEg1B0ZZzg2kTGq8EwjFmRoflxAb6N/u6LPZve8353VqwJsczt7qpW3RGORKNUKLlq5QqQulHVRnWDcU9gqhJh5doyAZ49PyGqE8oBWefteDzrOOsR0td83tItyPOq99UsCkhIqaD6qDxbTvo+KJdTQyNFG/PJQEzzzJm4D5umVcxC0QmtoavqRDbfF9wew0ogwnhmjTPEnVEAyyN3kxaqjEk4JEu2R+4/KALR+yhYNslOtmiKQOO6gzG6mnhPU530nREvCQYMbWOkMir0olEUKRFUJoou9uwkuNI+tBOQh+li93y52XJzGNAjzUfBTAhM7g0knJmAbFRmse3xvVdWNcuTsAPcNQE2DlwX0TxblSprrLWqoOb8yrh0iois3BFP4+MV1fPIO/WerwJPJFuDW2OHc5x5vWYWjqPOA5mDiToPirwn8phOotoweyiObHVqo+dhoHkBM9Ox05EAACAASURBVINrFgr8q0GGZ1tzxSgaJgaoGxUB1ngVLyEF5klmFTc00oIaIZ+KMeORoyceTZnjPBRQo8stK/vY0YfS9jb/fs10TVXr7Oo2NbbrwdQ7sTFzY0ZCVeVmdXYs66H18NHiP5q099Hv9QbzDPuUzx8B1zSAxXSOfFuG6sgkUFS3qaOGzl/dLEWMPBneROzodny8NnOhSN427HymRhGPlNlMgZv8GzUGybKhppLfFOIbn0tnxphH6CrjfMHJ3svqZbH19rMaYvagwtydhGciwfbFNHzguXwp7y9RlcohVDfx91Bz5ciIEXyVpBeZoNW9i2CeKegZweJrOuSdHzvI2fMo6OyKO3lNQ0zd7Mxy9zrTwshLpnJVzeZ/kbuaTFGDtWClQfr/BIQMGIZPpib9ZjXEpK2kH6I1JR+TykLTR8GEl/ukGd3rpYgQaJ/3WG1uorUba2yE0ieqy8JV5off/ik+AxhJlU8CXlfdpdM0YfKsULWs1vEsD0KNUJqBz6k0k/Ym/B0qvnuoO4aQGwWbQPHCugQnzjwQ3D3PFFMuQml6x1gF+MfNSbv1avx0qbxw9mY2xHmA02LyoEemO6p7Xz4P8yS9YX5FFv/onZilosHSQqCUSGmY6BhQz2tSWkZpTBdIPP4eFa5UN4vve8DYt/q7n3zrUz++3viSHF/0x7MfryteNlIkUz78TtoT//Yf1u3F8R9//t03L+/+l3/j7z8/T/UBSLdINj5+xD/85ff/7X/jxz6Pl7/84vHlKR9/JNeXx3pTvvNRv3ihreJrgRuQWAgXQbu0evX1qTz+zLuv/Xs//um//i/++M9/4d0vPpEPv3P7v34n//YvH7/ylcdnL66VNQQmFzENjybVquV2fXzx8sXLF9fzdr68Po4gFvfppHT3Za08M5ajkMdx3s7jPHgLc8h+/aPr07efvLg+nh884lI//Cc+fXn94BXGutT/yi/+gM4AipMidePkY1JBajByE/iKAmMNAWwhyhxqZPsws1K2uS7W0t539ph010Q1jAicjCNqPsWUyHhr4OHhgmZunJjZWrHTb40zJHr+q6FKrrrmQR86yxfK+mnVmMiEyYcQUqFpDYdTRo+NF+XBtonwpprZprM024mxbLB0uiYj0kor63o92kUInnGy7xHugI5nN2YsLdiTHjA+u3k23QnU3AuY7vgsDuC5Q2dQYcQdPLCRPLIxELP7I+mOYzBzn3951sLgWcaxuroSJqEi7LqnhFLrbpGR9NyTuEcfryMS2EGxdGRLFbbPRlmcMTyDJREJ3ageKundyibbC75Zpj26/wkHB9olGBfJldCYVIcMIVUldxvljBXvFFi2hUHlzCwoMY2xuaLpCBlNkop5uIDZYkKO6+ig2BYO8VTisjhpHwpCdyzqeKfm4wnt7qQXoIBut+DJ6OGKAZ1kVqNvx/nydjwe5+NxffH4mF1KMSqmLnH1s5Pz9ZlTbs79PQiltXw5485lLvRt92cFYDu5TTdNWVy2B5P7pbENU5RCYGAzcYLHUfuEyolH3AuW3Z/LHuiRfclAA+Yv0RVTO9REAaksDlvYzHB/QjwmdYxKzJLA3KtSgz+pd7HvKso1bSd8VGcT7tptIWaaVehayzlAMRVIn3W6OcGDjGAXRVWat2grZfQA0Lfz2pqF2y1fZp+36wE5q06goY1OM1F0eFSlq7akDIG5hw9owi0fB9h8b3gXokH5E0sAAbqLIS4MB6Np0U0nj2BWT8YyYrvgGPPN8E3tIYlw3zPpBhZGBP/Ek6FnCDxoIh6eSoHXThcZ9vM493qrsdQIPWZ2yo4knHUN1Q/k0TP6gst8zuG7W8UJbBx9Zt/p9pizRUTNM3sa2t4ZHgLjAorByrMINZl4q1eSJL7OnChTJf4K7LODCGWziyZ6ZoeSjXaTnQ/n7jYmwAk/xOwEzLWrBi5y97mq3OEf84fAJms+KJbR8zgbePHydh7dPZAe9mAjZ3AVM5hCtVgNC2BWkOLxYzp1LdAb2szJwhAayZgRqPN4AduSIWdkT0jGzMKmlxPbdwvH9gXS3WyiCHzA4DCMR0CrWwXhgRKbsDW7g2cAthN2b855I9MpZKrI8QIJdPiomA0MC9PcZvsugGb73OC3zTJ2dzYASnV97215McAgmMAkECnWLY6acht4VQG0YHrmVqLw57Ng9oNtJSGHusx/B0zNF+sNHbGuEdKDrRoeG7BRzzKRBAYgIiY/a2gZKhALqwQInMOWCozMfOZpKLIVoKKdGA6eGpe3nLBYWKGGc8NJlCrd8piBC0gc5edMSoqZbzEXzYZaWzalosnru6oLU0dRt0xGmmif7Ss4tQeEY5ptI9CR5KjecybdvbI4cebHOeEg8+4MvYZatbtUbvZyui3WJZiQUlo7SL7YKVAUKzH+LqHu1DtQxUO5Utdwd/tVVKlmw1yzaHwRhiii28PpHZs+B0Ie6X4qScW3zMGKbnO4SCuBdwxEASPgbWRqO4oWOgJuRoIAm2xvnL+Lgglc9zqdg6zJu+a/ObpiYWROQkSo/1S6Y1jb9+Y+lGjs1dPGk97l/cJV/3iJ91S3Z9bcmxbGym1mrluyq+6UxvANGy7bREcS2bCfkNl0yTaaUUi5kypqs+Na3O14PFmhbXh7j+rBvRtOZb/IN+u733q4vdef+qnPfvZffufJz678qTi/8MZF4njZ+O6tTse/8kb9xX/2C3/37339H/zS77TRTDFyRT6G7394tZv8/M9+6d0Xj//bN26XT9ofvo/nH/v1jNTspRIG1bVCcLwpxzvy+FNv9S+898Z/8hPv/af/3Jf+0g9/7kdef+PZdx//8T/+2t/8W7/9y7/jH732Ix+8uH78/KPb48GZBbUPEmqiGtZSonJ7vJ23MzOrcnOU6ezdEV/jRBAA53mtQnWd50lvhZu62+Pzaxfe+PRrbvYTP/bjP/GnPnfGH/LCroaHB4C4LOnuhhoqM4fw3Er6s94hS7Gd99rKxIeVnZSfrvB7lzAEcOUr16pWQ2tQ7a0oCBORcMqFkdW+xhBKYRYZHt0otJplTZBuE14sCpMurZOmIJh6Q9TjLtrpLo9AC3cbybGTbLkLf1Q0+Xi0qfumOtvFuYgzs0Z6WEtxIenLTANFR7+2Qk0Lc/nestRJCm714Ynx5VyXqLMFyNxgZVODlWAi2paj2ldUptxT46u4ePdFfycKPZy0DdppyPl4PFwurB0bEupoEW1pbRRUK8stGBZIIY3ZWCrcjbBXNYVNiYYEChbbcAyphneH+/z8QBfcYmZzKiLt4WYh0m4ilUx2RsEYqdhqquFRXc1wQtM8J72Ucg8P7YKpIUB1KDXoMpWPqi1RuHgVxO5Jx8rUo9Fq7rx0FetKBmNkgrb1iVWdCArpEpRzwrD17qqQrSShnloho8/0iw3qzZVoTY9hG3CkKqqxFqvS5kqF3CMRALFWZTVz8DYGoFssyIktMaMDP5Yft9SHOOqW5+358dxdXf21hycmvtZ6up7yzfK4dJemkAZAheeZR6OtECuqi0VVod2iBStWd06cGiEBPWkmZsx2o0HsvilSoG05RKB9nHW5rPEriOhYy2osoDq6u8ry5VRj8+tnZzU8DtUVwXFJlVSnuXW2rwtGULJLKNOqMnJQTUVtWCzZLZ2ZHkGeKovZyjQ3daBkWWSlB2PBbZmqenVCSpSOKHVXoJ219Qw94IFGikjmSTVp4hSxPunGtM7T3X1Fd+1sHYGc3VK4mVp2ujl5gfwgNTS4UjCeNl1kg3AX6iLa9DUsmsGS/lsmVpHWSN8oQ02LCt7zOMNNKOGbrK5m1UHaU1bSggprarhlJiBqIV1CFJLuL051FsUjR+GQbfgp4jYccGfmO1dFE+vsnOoSNtNddHvDRVtMrKvcVWZ7L5nJwNXLk3UcJyNAeC1aKFroeaNDxjaaasp9m5F5dtoyVOeRHuTpt4q5WU7pYJCiS5DJOltVtblHuG+4MSDEHWDVUCdcZzSCojASpNkRt0w3wtEGjUBAK/iByHmcvvauYNuQzkxTffl4zZrYXpZUsTyr4xIEDBs7GpOsjovnWS2tHt0tLtj1GP1pHKzMkc9KUdRCZ7mnIlXmLmiW7O4OiF28Ad3W00ZfYkGEzAwxEBYNiEG4Qp/Nj5sAVWmqx3muB58GB+phRIBazCzF3GX+1kbJiCnL0wqzquqWrlLXzvbwqlS17HOGAi7dHQ/eWdKcaDSHaJe1MkudmCftCcvuuvXkk5ox0rYFnHJGeGf7Mv5I7mwYZMhJ9DRWUULvfmnCHt2Arkp3duzRXdJi5hYULgJEibiI4MwWk+x0RPW51nKPzGQRlVvdgy6LMF1U2YmK+UBhupph3ypbF689zhIVC6uze7jlTa8HgxnJtRJBt66H4H7VLUSh4ZW5dWGeZxE3QochUGIeF8+sCYtWc7NGCayriLbqbDX1cXBYm7BQFEqQbCIQdU7duIeajQBBpJvorAA6Lk5eKGprlVW7q7s8PLvCvLMJ1uJgzmxirsawZ+pmlW3iUEymFB3DDAqaqSapwSqihfYHF4YhcchVDPeT9eDnkRFWs0Pu7KZRHyflGMgSM40HIyJuRvybydnVZurLVVHd7h6X4A5zCA4KQM86Z/O5LG/pyzl2YSvpy7tnXmyqaBUTDauapOLuInRDQzr5j+HmHEmYO7qZR4WGuXRqVZm6Lc/MCd0g4ZmePPJjZMC25CzQN8SzmmoJD6+zgRafdI9CI4vzsp6x2HbCqmixb2lpUnwFXeqaSaKMxcUh6CxAY7HT5rCpZXPHzbomp7XWIrVkcBWXpyuzSKlRlXClMUCAFdSwTC76x3jxP/8v3/rml9//0k9/4Sd/8r1//gc+99N4/DfPEw+X3/rggw9VfyCePHthf+fvfvnjzMuaYLqsVrHlAtOXt/61b330t/6nr/1rf+GH/oPjq//g9vKnPv9JO+si2Ve9VD6VepL5tM83Q15f+tprb7zz9puvP309Xlz+j1/53a989aPf+eqH3/rmh0CvkMvrx1uf/tzlEkxJqNoJxhAtIEbVcb1e3XyCu7rVXbVmkcAVCqtfQLpvt1u4d5/ZhUaEq2pEGOzpm8+f/9Hzx+v1Uz/47s/8Cz8D/A4B3fyo88hQjcpU0xb6zTTczkr3qC6ba8N8LaBZlVR1Zj88XG7HERcXQeiq6oLwgRaTFqVmz8NqfLtm6uLbLqDaWaIOJEp9rYKUiFSbq7hUQaDVFrG4KHCzFqXqwsMrIcDlYQFAoQZYIJSH0RuDOXDRAg1zX1zH8yhvlKpbmKkTS91CiQhiAzzyqLg4NmpZnLKVNHWDwhnioYCWIKt0eaEm08EAiF8cLR6W1ZfL5ThOFlkermqFIipK3CqLsaqUdGN8j7Pym6pjYokJ8OMCSt0l/MJVT569LkEKsy/tMYupLRXeytaAINtcC6VKGK53swF2atm/J8iRNZ+LqahnFikd1a0jbxELnY2NGOQU9sl6TzgbFcEwE5ECmrJgEL/MX1bDVDB5RFWqGh6ttCSN7Gf4ihhaCUHEsRxJrU6D4VQQkQRUwlxjiOeXQOHMfnBvFEe8omYehYzLyjzp6ufzsGFsWqnV5w5THG5HJzNUxEMbLU62JMTV1bOyW9QYOK7IjotV1VoXxg8QUcvZ5HE7zS3PFh0cMyfHDUzeqD+gKxvdcsj5mHUeh0e42cXX60+fXOJh2QoL9ehOUzvqbC33YPSTuolJWOSZLWXqR16NAwMZ5iqpj0Uin2rtED9iciYItCZy83JZjXIL2S9ddQXjTmQW6ZWgJJuX/ewiZRSM3A1OxXzWhMNC05qUGlHGisNdKs/LunTP8oT9B2muJq6hQIlKmxiLQL9PQiAmyyPzmHuIcxQ7zUc5PHs7F4iex1U1xLIqq0/KazeNowUlkHBr6e7bJZ6clTyGObN0t+NI/lTmkomS4n+u+4tTNUNHAKIRZq6VqTqJj5zRcNHNRr2QZLgp4BG8BQ3qyyf8s6VbgrfFBiOJ4jzLTCGpCg8RdKgByEygpENVpc09uEiZGHe0mXtoT2ySddc927m7KzPMxVlecJAx37KZACMVUVGlR8St65zNRcNceKJOZlQDgrPSGflibBo9q9BMLhUqArsl3LJaufk3FrXm5upS4MZVunPFOs8alpQwa9L2YGLEAjYO7bHdYn55jbeG+y2miXSb2tFnmHdJNy6XRT5vD54Rg/NROyYJTRvFpjIeVmZS99GZWXi8HiLSCsPMvyyC79FZzWSdhtjosCq71fU4M5ZPwIM0ryCiFbLLtjBMRRHbmWnajYfL5Xac5Hw2xYgQj4WuO62E1aXJ7q+2j8uYUl318BDnkRx+cdsZbgMVNnnwVSgZEmBOViomNJKDHqiuCFNtSJ8thjxzXRY5ljyC0B2uZ6aHoTMukWdymezBBPqdKZhsA/R6vXlYl6CFe3EPPc/y5UNsVGG0qWIq9SqIWCukEStMd6rbHoNV43KJ4zjXiqycGJ5WUYlYLe07Qk1cBQizbqlOEj7Q8BViRT6nmLhFdZVM0qyF37GV68mlCplHRIhvDzBl7SYtHeET9GtD+60sUeea1N3qSAnroywMOrM5ymgxIlaTlrPTw+VMiGqY0kbrdrKUd4HCVwgkq0Vn7UXDg5mNvYTI2YuPfkS9u92c7J88y2ygoLuzZp9PwsP2Zzd18ppnecxKrLNjBQWEvEHMHSWXtVgoi2qdORtIgZtxV+EbJrlWbG4eqLSCWVZOXK2K2rAkqHOoLmPURZWK+cU6qYNpU+luCz2PvPOKMsuWC92PLtVNtHt3zTEivEp0wjZ7B3fqRrMsP88k66GyaDDhd+QPLhznkjhIN5PPyKvaB4WjBqWTF+beBJHOwBEWUdV9jpxnYy3h4UDbEmnvBorTEOmEX2YCx5R1jrwzy2SuId99uIcymgRVLXDnZA3mhuy90YSFTRQnsUZEU7SsC6UETRpT1aSRMVEIgF+YI1VkBVCnwgZEtdnyMee8N2JQtobsclkUE4HmbdeuUkEB5srgTRGoi1Y9e/H4t//Ob/x3/8Nv/LG3Lz/2g5/5wR/99I9+6dM/+cUfviyvfPzf/+/f/8o3/kjNsmuZioyTisK2dbF3/vTT//OffOPNN5/++T/z3s8WOo+lOM/DTR8uD75Wpang42fHH37rxe9/4/mv/9L1137z17/+zY9fnOWurwUeLnhy0UvYE7nig68+PHzqIS6xLsf1YAyCNZFx4gWFhYe5uV+IQOCadNPdETRBDNDtVSzcw+VhnHgeseLJero0vnb7PXkpz15+/Ctf+aUf++wzX6oyyXBmqv/NL/85FfEgwb/NxYyjwaGMTlACeq0QkTNzNIFhAk3kgDg48eCUkbPJCQjnKBCiGh5oqZ1rlWeRgMSgKlEKRcwMt7MiDCIumlWmrgIP76xqrIuzlJ/YnJ3dZO7cHobbPotUYC3lM+sFgeNkapnuH23U0rOrtm0+tvGvi0BydNvUFLHl1W7J7jOrpYonlCpDTrtRUjKkBh38BjWiDK02YwLkhCKQB5BNi6ObnmeJNxJQxArOA87Miz+cdQjuAQ56J/KbGbpo5Z/0v2HTowphRmkEg4aqCHFhC2TqfC9bYWKKanUK7byyWS+SozNgUjXGglVmXFZV0kVHn7SqEihsrBrNdOsNcMdTuTW7X4yKgHFkDK9XMY4GlbOwrqE/J3cjPd5u0TprXSKzSKPx5RhUNqM1VETyLDUx9/OokXECblaFhsZSJsWpaZ61PFCIiMz2UPc4MzFninT3Wt45kkm20wQljnW7BUBWT2QzaZNnxYNT2kHraqxVlXuZJsXRoyjzjsn5GWYcRMykYSoRfjsPU/haZ6UPO76Wh7t5+IM9uHvoxc0pNDNl5z864TCvTPIwM8vURSTi0lVMRulqHco8OUnePVRiIi4njZ1Mtm46A2U7dQGdcnAkuj3oMAAFj5AN+FDl2z169QZDkLyzVVqdR4lCJq9y1DDumSUtEWsrOYk4S7ERqVrMeGV75yhYqYkqdaluoMK8uqvOQrnZmQdKIe3qLYUSdaEThiaTzNPMN4Zu9vNM8R5rN5NVbZwL3aOsG39UnToZOdbZytA1xuWNP0S7UWeZ286VaV9emeaKlK2+G4uJbhIEi2ZpWIwQmNoKVJPW0tURhoJ5VJaIoNLcVZ3zdIWoeaMweV+CnZWsIuGMcMQO2pHKDh+NGK3Ld244R5i0k9aZZtpo9QFAcJV6nkm8/kBcVAs18QxCZW+qq5t11lqcILTIWMssjDaBuJi0VE9GC6sDvhQ7SEHMoinvqB5lqVDHqEyJUDEU6AmXTTkWkS71ZdrCbD1CK5iicVa7emXFGlchn2dzg8lx5F0o62akxZ7H2SLUs4tq5qlggHtwbM8oVHc7z6TJpzjjCjXTFhGjCle7J9e694SFQnQqyDKboRpUAE/sOO83wleaQbREi223CDckQYaFdsJcmlnljLBjvGQLp4ER3lJmfh6neXSXulcWSQ8gTAhTrTrv9cmBZHEs5pwQlIj1wFjFmWnesxOe4GK6Yd27q3oPBGnZCEPTMoQdDyBdZTEy4AkFrVHrsQcYM/BcoSxMe9LkekIo+MgxQl2c+hmtTAvLrAgHiq3C5iJwPUgJwx3GK2eeYwbeeYyEjqpPd0pajNwz5CffdVg0qtxcKZU7dbYPhJNzBOVnXlkRoYwBZvY3hldKZy+5DZkZy0XAXzW0VoH55MrmWYwyfZVoz+kc2znsOS8jfKqpgGVOCdAevsu5jbkSRTUgsZz7Zzc/brlBqgNmo12fmYfbQUdNi4pS+DPSdDaWFMJsxi97NJibjFYFle2uDP3LysuTndk4cF7lTpV/GSJtxwlSGAwLTXrd7loNXpdrOQpiQtM7tq4yFmPKSZUTAL7WMPMmT5gfzIizMtONriVGzSgUmIKq+VkNSY2EaYoFCvEQO3t9DEQk+trej3U2WVMNoEvUOP42V4VV1R3uSBWqmWUe7pFnRgTF6jv2o5GIi7lb1lR9dcIjWk6ZKEsqaWucWQM8ZGb8XLx0BGzCKAY4KUN5VWfQGlMubENSRE2Rs08YLS8fmtGLU6uik/ricxTWkWBI/VmAVpWHc7sjIsdj9X97PP+DF9/5zuP1PL7z8fV65JFAmwjefPvJu+++9Vtf/+DZcXMDCu5UlWur9lmi/uzEX/7PfrJenL/6N37rL/yZL77+xqXOfvaYL6/y7PF48ex2ff743WcvP37ep9q16rLcNLlVDteufnKxS+hyefoQ4aZxefnu53/7Dz76+u9983xxG6lJqF7Ml66nl8uT9fDaujy9XC4P7k4HA7/ZiVuVqYWHcrQ5bPw8Xd3MV6ynlydvvfbmO2998gd+6N33L//o8kRe+8wjCuGeWfRA+V/+xS8yyqxbIXKeDdVurZrKCuC5ZhA5c2crUcws6BJRP7PQomY9fBRSPbG96XI2TPVMQLQSVdP9m2HcfWCulEK0ejs6YC2C1nCfCCAa32sSXal7hoibm7mLmQxivhrqfjc0v0pMUM1u9jmsFNETsnSSScDkQ4iy6AmnDUC/JzteVRmWBdGsakGPv446cOyIXa1Gt1YWC2YPG+0CDX74ngxiUZTR42fi0lNwMpYJI7VWE+ONyKbCtu3B3e4p3tspaYJmJUeDLudzHJQMm01FbZChtHNIm7lJ61CkjKGCxv6ewUKEepkRRyUmlpn876POV9ueoikkRKWzsd2krJ9IrwWxLkLnHbsO7QJEwyzzHBYir4qeACJ2I3wQlVoRpWesdywB1iW4ohx5ujuqByBGbsTQ7mQC7tgpMzehZW/bN8VxyPgD+FFTJ0lssxDcg9zXuScYDteizlUk0x2cfLwB6JAOD3AtvJlwk1TLAQUVQV0V4SJSaFO6sBDLt6DSiSg7z+Oat9t5PH98/tHLj291Pnt8gYnps6oy4b6XxZYUuqpImuAo5FXyp1KZQ4IiV+3i5sXh8fCVZHQ4wm1bi1hEYKYOWmMEZak9qHkfz+fc3NLokhGVDQmJrX1i+skZiBKxS/GtCDy4kGjRUs3q7C6zCcghJaeZ2GjdldXZyDOPzON2e0RnIY/zdp4npKsOEek8Ta07hb1x3yzkPA9YNVL5XaH4h7rvosDGRLTnxKzDZHz+VJHJHCkTRdB023IsAlpiukD2wzD96SCq5DtFtQyrzJ4FuXGOxtRI1X00D1LfulqbdHjplohLZYoIqsRcWiIeBIpSAR9mK4ZNY3DBnW1hd0fTxkVpLBcoZWZdEw0o4JDLu+q+aub5xokSdzCAuAWNu/vn5C59+nlikOklDrce7BzncVHVOgF1ti06rPiH2UyMSmcrDCSgqErpcCPFoCrNF9CwQ193mWHSilZ3ms16QtWGdzyzHrIB12VRKDHeSYank7zMbNiqo+o4z/PMbkFrFo9ZkJvi5jSBQsU9cmzSlt0aDoGG97xpQrY+ilxG1qSie8YnBB+h3b2z3X1gJ0betGIQlrw49D76GfBPS0t39sDJhkEGFXWP0ZPqTqISnVIdbYNz0PN2UImqAndDtbRKS9i8BaQwCYFem3FEIHAdvUN/xn20WcgYOgtZMtkRPpx+SsnG3cN4FcVm5dPFujX8IspntSKsTnBEoswMg3RBxek7VVGFJfdUPTFFhG/vxak4F2WjItYqZvPO0U3IDYAqqeEpyF47M87VTLXPdvcdBcp9rLtbn62ieVY3Nr/HUIPiINxf1YcTMxx2JSlARDOLULqIRTkToebdg2pt1MbIj73WzIl1lB5T5WhSRcIm0HWSGJh8aMHi0GRiJznPzSQgCmoqPVZkdrwrlmzjMYBKWhU0jzSbjNnRdIqxKKNisWrGGDQQ0YDXJbZrvwk8ZKfKjgs7+WGjxU1d6hXRODw6i/cRMW8x8SdDntgmN6lsqlvXCsYO77mPZ/YMBaERxjIDO6Rp+OQyreX9NJ4LXiWLTR2YsDeWaXPZe7nxOJu32wAAIABJREFU4YsgJ1mBiRRdEpfIW9n4cCZcETVGSt4gkw+ujC9mmCebLhGA2/jRg/SW4WNyoYXFfMOUNiPJ4jPZLRIX59YUO9CDnoKJuDZnBcTjSPfZQssJV4Gm8zybmlBR3BNO1CVqAka2kRPf8GU8NJr/nUDHe/PDTc82QEIm8JCHknvExecKEHnQ9eSfupzXNy7deby23F0h0qZt/ZjnBx89P6u41+L7zVmf7PHK8xv+1L/+2c/+xNPv/iY++N3vfO1rH3zl9z76ja++/7Vv/NHvf/ujb3/4/LsvjtRuGpYijeRRg6q4wU0Z1mQq4frgpt22nnz4sp6/eJFnshIg9Z2jiy529ahuBhCQqcFgmOVurmsFGCOp6hG6k7jpMTazFbHi8tqT1z7xfW+/8Znba9//zctbpODeg5elC/4Lf/UH5njV/UgzgM0MOzND3RI5pnsXMnyYFSaQKolYWe2XyLP5C018qn/W0pMxaKYOFXZ6hHzT2Oo+Tmlz+pYmID7cVYWwFcLxa3AKYx2Ue1g5nV6icJ56+5SY1EEhgAQ7CGEnRXp1xeXCo8Q92PuNUn+8v69oYBCJWIVuaHZndXY1ocM1XukpV1ktF2rYTbWXuuNR4i9RMwhZiCoCg4hquEBbDAykVlWPuBuGfatxmC/soZgIju9N8KM0S7OK5z5HLiw6q6pKgslFBtZDEX63tI2ZBjNu55pxYucBGdj3bGwabGY41tLBPTHdVbrRal6VFiz7aMPzYsjrsNLGTu3LuSzlOSqKoc8zrpQj8L1VZhIjQRfyvQFZKuri4Z3DU36VBylYK7YPDfv/JhWTpkzf7YiH3ckQpgF0ZU1AvJsIsptMTjVd1FSrV6aYoCcagSWL+wyquwfBTA0Gx5xcZI26zYbW08PBV2YFeEQDU2kpLGjcF3SbxwBxRVQJGVJdJqaFsyC3Ol5cby9vjy+P49rXslLnKn7M4kOYRJu4KrLYzU+FDYh7EKNKXwog5rJ5M9IozhQjlrnWnUg2s8IGwNSNHT+mlWd3c6vM7AcITG3EolKNM8KKikemHkupT86hmYhmSQvK1LOv1Hu7O4TT8VLDmcd5voTUcXusOs/zJqjqszq7k8QL5a5fsFagy1wgvFrhTgNo7/hHcIqpAvV7HT1ei/GCYsMAMalibJk9TIQejMk6tRi/B8dS1NRZDDCVv1ydf3cy7pq58+YD65PeRkxRoJ0cF5euHrEQ/TqitIpRvcNlBbsC6kygCi0J3OPIxQZ0bmJkI41njJmCylsK3EHqUExlKEph55m+HCBMpQd/Nw+PUO4lquGLvRa/fZHZnN+ptHzau9t0ADmDQg5nFy2MlmbpM8+W3o8sRrlGGElRPB73bsPYO/OWs+GaqIpc1tKdZlY5O9I5WSc8kGpmmGkV8aF02EFdE5XVR56V/Xg7jiOb3unBdaiZc2zEtPGxMQPqMQV9NVNHANiK80yKLNSVJxIXj4NOM80zhQhIm0Ao9N1CJpwYCJi00TPt5v6Nikfe80pHlgwhNoiRF1r1pEnaHF1GhAmTnrqlxaDoYojxCBvBbEKTBgWeHoTKclcsKt3S4WOyVZMSiMi6WNcpo7QvPuoELJGXIOjLQ9wHqVs2omh43FvIkhC+C2rNLyciOKLjY5lnEWHP0R5/s/ssj1MtDxdIF4IBOc3fBLGsZugr67KqKJukak/zLAp9N9oF3DgxGc8HDm8NkJW7K3KzUNwzGLYTmy4+Qol4gaNB3A6qWUJR6RMXrz2Zo4yCfXU8LHSzVCR4MTzuzngPq52ljJIIr7MaWMt8YuXhYd2iLZzJrssQIPmY2WarcvfO25m7v1iLpw1lNXsICrR4xDScsXQm1D1Bda5d7ebKEwxamWhxcwFsCgDZpBmZcAUK7Zw2aeFScQUXU+Jh0KpqnrST3WWTV2EyL8u2xVLx0BPFxFwiDF1ChjvQtBu4m8YmAMnUH6i9iGBWR23rl9CSqsetVixVCfMNgiNGnhNetfDdTNuYd5hzNuxjvU/W+Y7wVOHWYUUMKUO3S0NEXffmViOCuQgc34TbDlYU2un57EUED1wii/KuQbDZ7VM1vcl/zZ3ETOU4dwBTd0ZKY5M2wK6e+vYmPmMECx4zr6Tu5uIMwRYBA5Z0B45UtzPxOwHqt7s9GBEpvpVxLAZRbcvmTn8R9uVnx/NnDyuW+5PAUr04VtBL0m4TGtRjLiUvWtw0whp9tv3MX/z8O9+/lsW3fvV9dz0G0kXPmpvzfa5pMw3LF9DhppwloS6XS8Rk36rIpW8vYR8/vx1n9n3UTuWlwETzLFClZWJU6onc40TJfCJIKmacDzdnXWfi4bHi4u6vP3369ptvX977PXv6kgQsSjlENNxN3f+tv/qFqYqF+HXj6nlAVjtmbOBD3cUVvZp5qCv3I9VY68IO/g4rYeKhqokJlb3cjZiaurqHILNbnd/fvqR3ZtFOElXZ6oU5oPZtjWHaSW+wXUPEZ4UYEeeZFowGmF2gh5l4b+0ZIZGxQlXOPES0K2no7BZiuJhnEEGrgKr77TyPE2c3QbQsFZkRxeHyMNFMIbCwWGRV0BumdPqbu8qrxkttWI6MzBBpGngoTyJlahJ1NLpLZk7WZpqdLBC3AkHMpbLjYui2Cb6fzSB1nmuFCGzR0wc383EAEhxPr6gCWBdDs50WM56DA6wPvskqas4x7ahKWmKFSJsr55RVFSvMx9YvMDQRaRNGr8Zd2VwDUxHrRA6oK1RiGV85ji/WQ5CdpWp1JoAJwhFsWA6FCRgArps0nj55msdBkcmK1d2uKm6qgImYevig8fgJMMOjOL2GhRK1mmcLzYrKaAQR4z/FFKaAueZxTqYqELGwlxIqUJvDHa1zbvng+NAwHSHSzm6YPA4KcqgG4eBezM8zaajcyTsqShQTd0gGgm0hBZTg5e32/Hp7dn18eVyPqpOBaOrKn2D47cQ+jXCnutnm0Yau+/EQhbmiWqEE06tYxPSxQFWnWJtRWEJxTLWkMawiJv+QzDQor9VWcdHkVylanIL6mrgRoMVLmmF0XX20JCQh9Xh7cR7H2cdRV+hxO19woWebk8hacwoCkZY0XWI0tMzpQtr75BYQY+I6mlVSaxruLn1PGJe9rGgaw1AdK6hOH4W5MseCOlj4ck5zmUvGr83cRGqK0t4XDKNgKIIYnTbMjbMJdf0ew1tLi4eZOZkcVODHwJm3wqB3RJhMnyBQM7mDHwmydWFR0uS2dXeYQoRhVgOGlUEkEw3Jwdw2C6i7NyhE4SlhlGRNcjQtSRNj0UrOE+n0ZOrdGckQ5it6BFW4I0yVNufJ01zUs6FliMkOR46t2uJL36q2Gc57Gc59vXEfEpk18HOohU+ijA+qvlAU493NSGceonbkqWbHeRyZLx8PiI7ZmxZilaq2ZRYuGyMJ+o2DdjFmoQjhQxrmoWJWfWgozTP83M5Md28pOst5kmAjNwmQ4I8aFxdFJ9zVmcdow75XoU91WEqUL4b5IEnNjWwlFXSHOyNwOa1YHq6Ohpu7+XIz0cvDQ7gZ7OGyXN1VL8vDPdzWMlNd4UGal5m7VZ307q+YvuWB5znSQ9RVwRSy3pOyZlnpoSp2nAed27xuaCuaCrVLXARYK7qaU1Gb0AXGBipUIqwbhXJ3Ze7cuEo6IgRiRnl/M1meRyvlshjgppQA1Ss8qzitLZQvFxNz73G5+6C5ekrV6Y5EIQO6uGOBZu05/3A2HndBylaWypZKKh1+pAjMHRJGs7E01MSWdcEjWOyzB+DKrbvJ2HN3hvo4DYKqjLJkmPPWXes8mSoDl9+pyCYzR/ZQc2XojBjF/tJdAmSVq3p4HslURzbMOvNEdKeHnWdJSw12aPBZomDvpJOOQ2Fw2Ah1eR+Jh9ns88WcoVb0v3LgOwNufvjcB5K0Pzj6mWPLZrjiDmsaptY29VRhZMNoMxPXOgubIw5YVVO7O8Nog7nlWbEWx1F91rosLmfnlCDHPpzODmNKmSoTNRj0qi5Md6vqe5aTcvnBaArWSq5n5sRrxX5gdBOYh81C4Q8s1NREwetbVDyCITcc7kzYiUsX3N1cZxs0Dek+z5VeBl0rpAcCw9utdqSBk2VF2YcIFMdx0t2n98HqTJImDnEs0ChdW7A8RowxH1JfNmIEkgFc+lWeStO64ssKRaP40/fj+Kcfepskrtfbw+WJ+0VR4fbETaVjcUNKkZeE+5Yvq5tmS7f9xM99+hN/7PLaO5ff/QfPpZHH0V0BE2XSlWVSZiZbWSHhaoLXHhYyKW7JqrCwUenVUv3O9XhMJkzhPhPdyOjhtZOiPOAZUarWsYHvHGWOiMOYwmcM5VuXeIjL229837ufet3f++0aqVGJGgPt0NrV/gv/4Q+Mr0bNuQen6rBFVOPitRfDTH8Nd9bkaG1I+Kqi3ajNKOagahRDrUT3hFioK7U9A3tQ1zG1T4U5EmMewdiz4kkGl217nftdx4xLZCYHydMbU5ZDPTrMyUiYsDUd34jQYSxDLGaw8ugxqmHuZzbVeP9fU+e2a9l2neV26mPOqvLe24eNg4NQooCQoiAOkZC4g3fgKXg1rpB4Abgh4gYhhCJElDhGxInteB+raq05emvt5+JvY1Z8Y1myt6vWmnOM3lv7/+8TUTb8s/LlPKt5m8GgqxUWXFz2dH458LbJuIO7QX7z5BrwkKsrowHoAqnRjJmZ8SM+ygTSh7hObFSYqwxdXK6yjIdWURRpEyzB9BbNzK5Cy3h8AHamw238Q5yTcudGjmv1uM4E/NrP9UR1An7zalQzGQriNdog+6Z2j3UMQtQ5fwwcivMjR3Bf7jY3VZ/40ydTkIhqZRIBj9mumF4x/WstNqfNsSzPpYXv0fnsEJrM2O9oBVSl8VThSTNgorRKcFUoI2dSPGc23MHztaeaVZNVgJqbu1WmXZ+9waLq7Lwqi8MVZ5FmuPwi9Mcy2Nx1pXFlTtLXHIghPMrZ+WvFVeufx0eQQTIdUYig2DMmNwIDyB7jL7LyzP3h5fXj6+NR5/cvHx+1dxeARKsGBCqL3GdTg5a7E3zJ+dkslK6l7tPfpSrcQ6sKqngxIBaHcwmgI2zUc0KNJNPwUnmaX99lK8HsD5m3qUrRztyQrj6r97lfz/0o7J2nGrJO0Y7Q6iSRZYU3WgXVm/cHVSktWxBoySnW8+AOTrvLzGWEMk82nVzq7FEG92VDxgg/MLeZ+WgJH9sXVoGE+rF7q4jPgUW4jlYVRmRHeKXPOpxCoK0ctKsoWqorLHbmZQ4soJfFCBhQqB7zNd0hI40UzikqK4b7J52YAOE81gUM13HGLXOTJ/TPaCw2UVUiiOecpdJVsSgVnEE5nz/dFctawMxwVsdhU7bsgqDRvhxAZ03qSMiXHs8DX7E8is28nAKradeCeU5W3y8ptnWNrQc64HIU1LUmvMCmbl1FAG8BNyc6QFEwKHv90I1LQJngLiCSRc9OE0D02JmJnXXNeuZYBGlTE5tyEetwqqo+wXE+S1uabwUoKBFkXATSNhvjSX9d8yHtPdJus4nrXAtQiWXSDeByJ0HcjJHdeWDq05oQ1ypshZtbTEgHy4fIaGoRfnjcjxsn5WF+HMdtxfI41uHL7rcjIt68Wcsj3I7jMJMVfjvWsfx2LFM7ItbhERGxwu1YvpaH+23FWhah9+MWHsv98GWqoSNbjohQjxXY84RkRYWrLXW5bnOzFDX1qlGMj0726QIRcdcWNMrUyKbumku6KPPemrv42aFHnjRXkoplpiuqUDcnOpLf8XDn55rvOfotnmebp9t9ViU9oRdigbqbMVT6FSks4ZV/7ivCiTj3SFT7TrXyiZvH0GZH0SZ9BftUgVnuRTjVNdL6dxI0Rgi1udHTY/rJxcn4D3UFY3eaZdB8WWS47gxwXjqX8bDLZSZ7ngmH/PlUAfPcxfErb3rdGFPiNQyVCbb13AJ5jCHDaihBA9DLDbsGqReLjlHVKWyLSBVofhqgBSZvKYOoFfK3Seu4KMRyqYaDT5wxtsKu35ShiwCLS8whdXl0GH5B1wwBQ2eLdb075ep+0+MzW2V05pBSrgDX9OfUGOGBuYWbh3Uliaa4/ppq3GbDxDvrUg4/dZs6p/ohIY1BWuYHLEF74TRIr2zFXBZinkicqcnE/Riokase73NV5Q8Q4xYSEZFYnlXuCgOzSuRX06rF1e7exaVOFxf4cDdtRISKIBv1PC5ObJsffFa+6YTuar2Ki7ff2vd/fv76e/mrr/dXr/brr15zP8z8sfdyiwgVrOXVnSCbhjNZYSJNVV4Tv/9PP/vdf/JOvb/+f4+Xv9mhtvx6GwncZGeraLiZwVQFdoSHq4l5aHBvDnkkGihgl5rIKfr1ZoPh+kSYEzRgqp9ScrOxVmrbet7AynGeXM1SteDKXU2P8BXr7f3tl59/+fnvfY0ffGWmNfFDm6s2xNxCoTwMEbg7cFE1ixHgmJi5VW5OujKhKhGRZ4rr7tJpKJFbEDzqNfp8pPcMBjLLxNq6s01djHHzxmyorYGw+XRWQcER1zT1eWd0pV4iLkY365c2v3LSLMwuPAnIg+7uaj5WRUUSG9eOmxuZiz0jXCrqCO81NMC0KlBdVaPRVdesZhLA3VVUSnvMhZ7M1LUwdMepX3crTCDuAanc/CVaVscsryrTSHGoUS6pXDZV4b5lnoHSlEcD7sqHRUTkhjQsRCCxojJdPXtosZlJPHFX0yGjEBPNR2GeG4ybl4lJUTZr8wguaWLlbJr3Ao3wvTOO1Q1XzWwZQokuj6pShRlD5zA37evlinZOd9p6Fqe91nrG0kyNVupuoS6clBE/7DKGzDpCxbLKaAQZHSJzv9Y8xHPHCP7BpNm/ozvxOgLnLsLHuZWcnSd6tsRjFVNps4V9pgyfQeiLCwsqlthB4hGvqp3cRVgZJAlCVA2vDWZsoH1dLQhOldq7lTwMHm4qIohkIJ5ULu97d3fSDt/DgKW8q4hjgIrYCuyyAQpLZrq79MZw9uaH2QIOzh/nCeijzvqYHmaKI24o3OIeto6I5ctFu9LGYeBtFbZaak60VR6Loly+AdwMqOsk2lfFywHify6dlnnldovujlhl1I3MS6sVjWTOeXBqnBrqoDRREhGNVOkqrOUFXjTRVUBnd3fzGDS/WuUtaoLEKv7YbWLaPJ341N2M66ZmOwUXvJxExBFyoNc6zv1AC6RYlrjIH5AGo/Xq5GiLmISv7lYDu0w5BWM+6Jh40sqSC09FcAz9tOIk9vg+iy9FQtsUljXLqwE8pFiQ/zNrzL6OqeGeuedYZ+pu87ql26yputHO5t6SPFh2c7qguEq8JABVkY9anUbZIvUysMxWKEJRgA0w6dxlV5HYKb/a81xjTQsCX1RNGJgpymS5uEUqESt4CPVpFomHkqGlM3lpVS9+s6rFRFzF+WkPc83de9daQfqXBHiyV6OgQsTYQldpVCGcBmWBNhTnTgB7n5Viy0Wlk6/LNnMR7i3VVPZOXGUFeyLygM6ian6fI7CGYCfU2sJVm6dhVJl7VkeYKEL9uSLoxHV87C5YGAokKECwzxxpsWruXMfBYNFxLCleU2VFoHE7DqYTbKTtffjq4W2gLnVkZbt5o9ixt7CqFkNTSQrLqlhe2Sy6MGhXWUS+8f3LZxHP2BEOScbkOuFi4Sszl5qKlVYsl7ZCcV7B2GRJa0hVimslWlCF7q4p7AbZvFmU1nRLKccQHgBKyzlTIGRLJWur2jqUwk/kzG7A51KXAIxXd2EiIz61Zz8sz+Rejcrynn496oQvAyTcqhoJUaHDAAJsiNGFCPoMLGSt6IS7V5cq3TYsL7CEOBdWFc0kQqmcB4O+XAc6tXNy/XnjYsOFFY/9mmw7PxUpOGl1n4fGbXnxsViippVgMVNUz01tqYiZmIyX3Kyk1Fh+rkvUZN1thCA2che7JEgeV+dOyFTEpw760HSokpp1boSjhYZANJuHNvkX0gtEMomWFdGGyD7JcdUrkcbsN+byo4aW1iYbU9rnnEbNquuuRM4g33TmR2EKQVXFsYwDAW2UmInWTGdY+skkAA2J6a2P+IQ/x2RtSrsblWIicBPJXX547Yb0M3CE7qQPUYTfLFOrnJiSaVRnuLeWQTPRXYxnV7aKEgs9D0nAfKSKStpQz7C7USKaW7rLlnfCI/a5BVhu5L2KCSPdatZSHGPlTo85aOMiWAnjIWZdM5lpuscWDaVCACk/sYULWgYt6bBD0aSPe4RodXe4Vxbv19Ltbp0FdGdVpYebKCptLZRUFUxMFSbmLKhUF9kw1pnnV+9+8d9/+ue//uFvfvXdx9es1jpfb94ur5rf/f0vNKIf1V/4h5vCjzi7d8mCEDI1MUCRl28LjeNY/+jffvnNn77W4/UwW3exB9vIdl/eKFdpibCyCFcU8LHr3NiI71/U/PbYLXGouYquaATUoUc7hLcNZUVahbK9RWh8VZeLFqdC0u1maYO5ni2NmGFMsGbmcRxxf3t/+8WPFn7yl6ZWlQwtkgjFvUrt9H/37/9gOi+jiMHUskWY257pso1xm4GchlRVRDCBYZPvUa53zLyqB43KgSjFROMOBQ/onJHPbsOjhkaDYCP20z93eEgcodFnWN2mpg2KqlmSoRtHIB7xxBOQdeHs8S9Vsyw4zbpmUkSSytU4VFdXVwjO6izCETi9YufNIEYgGhgPm786ZSyMEsEPR8/qB6Jo8jBNTGoXF/1XWUb57IPiasrI5YMi+OSSILtN80c4DjFuTBkrjVjqoxgmwr4pk9Mn5UlUxJYKKcukdVFMbjZdoJGtwC9ayYyvRFgKuvpCAEBJzqhgTSESV5OVIVWegZglkEuWLqoonYwKkzym15GXH6Fy57LWs3P6URe/ztyfIGxKMgoVQWIu6LxuFs360qtPP5z7islBz6USLBo1eemfkBZm0ljr4O3r6mfLBUZRXJPX2m36HPJBeyzfs5bhHtr51BOBLibugu0EmjBnsAEpfl+uPL33bnMRU3ff536GfqlApGCAsCF3VRcxyZ3uPrwfFq7cIE13C3vzqEmtVpfGtIVVzYJwPIGgt2YmYB9fXx57f3h5//71w0u+vJ6vIkZbx81v7soLBpf/pmqcXut0HqpSYDqAxzKXyh3LOZLifZX7m+4ylarNslyj9t6Zj32+Pj6e9IhymcYKq7lTAoGqxina42jhREXQ3KdKTa8INYBsNCOAHPurmJSaOIM3E7/hz4+Y5IHHeu3+JJyc4L64xz63ivoyNPgdHNFWXctAVw5Zx2wN0gjhYVzgThaXI5+Cupq5jBVKbDTtpF8JwS2sijN1Zhdekh9UcIqhpCRNn5aNUCgc2j2Hcr2mD64mphomV2+FoABCEjiXuZTZY0ki/4GpHVUwDI8JPRrpu3yQCqOuNopaFWafuHvVtUL47RNBTUCL645JbnaK2jqiu4QBOZmuLyeiV72W58/JTut0WCWOgIir9hVJuBYVpG3hgoHVc1EwYwfXK/hkpMeeWWeej72z0d0CIw+Dd2kz675ewHR7XNn+JzeP2xPjBXXMtyatw1sVcXegyADgOLwS7rZWXIgOQyLIxnFTFQ+mYeV2j2OFMxt/3O5+C/f7cX/79t19HUfEbR3c8t1vx23F/XaEq5ou4qpE1hGc6He387ZHX3w1YaoCzC4iceUxmPqe+T+/EapaZ13pmyHHTCJSpFhd627tSVqAhvT5J/J/SFM8tylOiRkJKK634wiJUD0ijohb+G2tt7f7Wn67Hcs9zO/HzVTvR7jpWgcFxJy4NypiAc0gN4uK5mKKsGAHgggX2uTVpcdB2UBx3hWLwwuZ7wU/deoT9pjXuLA/VlUizSigic3b/5M8iWa8eZib2KfmQQ+5fR1RJe5WAsVY7NkR5hK3cp7iqlJZ1CywfVNVwVt3GEPexDEQiuMr5jnDqg5q+FA8nMTMBT4pYVVURxhDvq6Z0gCBhppXFsNzfCYwpMDVNNM6JI0Q+EnNZlMkw+IAzNR4N2aEZy7cUNbsWRLWCwIfEW5GdQHVkZl5deybgFZTGy/OxXBQUdVgKZo4OzUtLTWF9rTWtbiREbQKTB20QXSGm5msMOlSqdvSyl2dfqgYZqOkm5BEpuOZznCzvU/yD0drI1jL1MA/B2MXOn/EZkR275PqVtMWKwBqbSa9M5ZNmB1dkqaqLgDicDQHrwnp7lTKGi6poEgX2pepSnXF4Vzq7tzHzV0J53dzJu35C53fv4c2uwGKQYXxpDtRn8Gr8aGqJpC8eOFN90NXDUxWhGNBxdV7VNXunfsZ0Y8wHaUocRsQbea9KIadaoGJhQClAjMxgXYfrmGGjz/8v//5Z3/2X370i59/9+HDfjyKll1R2/CHrBd597cv97/6Rn/1QT+Wfky5ud+t3oSao2liMzHTx9Z/+Ic/+v1/8a677z/xl1+vj798f3MJW6QYuYsyxKfN8F+Z/epFf/ld/M33737z+Pz787PUL055C/vc4k0cn8ft87K3hbeHvquytm3ecDUTDfUV6r7WWmtZmLoICVKY1nfyXTyZEh6sxNwa4hq34/b2uH3x2Rc//cmPPv+jP7PjAX0+rpXXGBlNtMU0mFWz052j8WKT0KY0EoLq5hlBPCyzROFrLl2U7c4BeIiCbBibcFyhPA2MrKkBc10Rr6+nqVGllYVYToNIoRlTJhcYrbGUkAsm4KuhojvhFoJS0yx+zlSgPCarWVWZCSN2oiqhOzvMIwarMHN/PukrZXlXu8mZtav3bh6VLJTXGBbza4jPqq5zM4Gu5Zn59Krx1TEXGCG79uIo8f7JO4bLtfS7cjwQXhq5GOaWbNbH85USzvPcDdoYIL4xfQGTrHSb2Lco+Y0dEdcBSVrTXCnymnybaYRXpyhThlZo9ACmzUycSUUR0cpCSRw8tRVUzMN5Ns2WJhh64isufhFSOWmQrqI8g5JfYj4LENBLKarIXeM5nBzBwBtnT4KeyCWA2mZHWt1tAAAXXUlEQVRa/GRTdGFiM8Il1E44weX/KW9HI/Zu6yqVZhBFYTIoufYLCbB3XljjrmQffUwGIibNRrvYMu4iwI6Dz16XJbSWVpFO/oKuVcMQZUpU1CCuRjFTK4BOxLK2pqqYDTq+4EnTrkYcS9AXmXGibnEEnQEm1p0eY+DhzsdkQnEzleBJRRuNCKV1A9xLk8mYGR4MZRPi+ar45vWDW6jp8jjCDl/HcrSGxeGHqi0PU2vjW5Yhq/KDuxogGmaytHZlbxXJnBu3KCqLwxYGYtW7ipVUifCWaedLa+3NEqmF7Cr+nWUO91qdQllCso3HN41lJQqqecUJaRJX7jCZCrHZrVwJc4GJKnC7H31pXll2N3egSBWnhxBQRvyFQD7hT7HFwIUbGWi8rlTS/0ks/nT4BlpbRfufqZrprpR54zqfLbGca4rBwV1ytirVfrY9xS7UAa92KGmjRWCuR7yTU+LeXAw2WBdn31iYezYDiuH/p2NwWAsqUxTh1AtKC4MAJkpDt1zi2ZYW7UGGt6o4Q1ykHGfXQB0SpPtOFlL68WAEVcKdCD5My004/ue+RX0mjIBYiJrlrit0gKfG5VP4e6xfcJnzEKaHLNkNeGVyb7arzjPdB5zSLR6LMbCuNqrEnQkmKWkucv/uy4JX7MYUyMil4KSAnKrDDRCXKEijeWq7LaWDhOZSEbkHhQDe0hbRMwNWuW4mHUtnTe/ExkCsNhraWcdhVBlRmx7m5LOrS+09Zxo1Nh26wP6kdov0WoMzIeNRWiwExq+2KqRLYH3FfaFOvL7xLcChm7kCdfnsBCVq5oIqYrRkP/ZaIXiSBybKIBc+FCl85neWmlcNK8/4GBVd7hBlrMxM6QBsHZMEv0HH0izARdCQklIxFYOJ7cwuHicAUe73SLTyELcJ6+p1v1Vq8K5AydW2UBMVt8xat8hdhfbwOsvVzWxPl0RIYfBJzbNBND8rKDf7Qxhhm1FNXRdrQlAUtGldBvzqGF9fUkKqA9JxUPiO7lJBKwpXnF61rra4hWmjAP6vKKNmtCA3FRANISu7PQy7iQGnGl5EfM2DS9DF+iUPhMuIGmarhbij7laFHSot4cGtCPPqdmUaKWV5FofMbJ6caBFQOTN5bvqcIgBUF59yWe2ippadolpVvkxautLDxTvMsruQEZGV6uIq5rMHK1FmqlVaJXbuddg+d4TzDatAo8REtFWc2dN1qFp0lasPe0aYuej7PWKS3Nek3lRNMlIkCMofDAH5QwnTtzJXAAjXwHhGovifoiqTdglbDILp4VDsFKSoohJQkTABj/HboCKd2dM5n/mjSAHSi+dk0QlqcqyKwWjHsoZUdfdUyTmzFAX/GWYt7OiQA+utTMqgUbAQ2qTcjbf2lgqfpsjO6SXO6KDhbm6K1qrk/zWyJxptjIYYpVwGHUaGabij4i//5If/50/it796//2333788Jrn7ouGTV2hSPOCYb6k9LcvR+ebr+Lj5yE/+UG8Wxu9i5I5yAp7PJI3FFH92b++ff8/P/N833u/SN+WZ3VJcR/8XdpX+/bxsQpvQu8W/saDOjRTNYcvXyuguMUBoDvC4swvXuqbD+dvNWZWuDzMTKRMl0G72jV6XAhiZgwStLW2uFm3Vsr9cFdbGm/vb3/y2Q+//KO/tncf6HWr2hNPE6UYDFLdHTVaIfiKPFn6UmYsW1XFeDLgfvYKvl8IYBVXK7SGXxNjUdfeOcOkkSQjC9Y6tTrO6LrXcWBQqmrLegJ7EIi7gu6xKlXZZ0Ml3CcpO1Fj5M7rHT/RJpi6hFh3J9CqwX3SznI3E2to1g6PbiXQvrPhOKsqd8mAJ6idYYMaecUGiSomU2UuaMXM1t49hUmGOs4SNVQJF/QCdFsYjdJX9E8BoKWNpGO0lKtRYNB7tp1XekebdhqZuEWhu9stSODVqzPNG7vu0yyae4m02oillbWbR2rxUMjkZMRw1n4CbqSbbykIqhDqDVARZipmXsLHAP8mtFeLirhZVls4Jb8XF9tV0JWw6Z1OTK80tWmIwvSw5+rLaKuZCyERaNDnJlBD5lN4i0ajVZvdfdWwQb5fPT1GdBroszACdKGHncp7mp3UvKesz2EYN8k8j2IWzXNonqIo47UtFRGj44PKc9TtBmkTc7dOYEB5U6kV08xeRxAChJbJFo7yQdeNCzFVtamAQar7FktiVI21S6cXJqpaaIEWurMjYtOwW4A/PQRlYm6OaRTS2jL1kqqabe302oQrlK6TAHFWBXypiHe3lJrh5dzv86P4eHEVEgNo8GMtU7vHjUuMOgtXSy5R5+OEtJoUknYqXFgFNw+Pqj19/lWmUthZ6W5SVtiwFoPKKtrpYuYXhZNXEP4r6SCWdvfuzp0eoSTE1mnh194CkFzLcifhxmzRMAoD0Ti8E6gZ6PIDMEQrWhdFcldDIpxo7Zlr82+mZD7igkfIU5dXCTXdj4plolq1mYsjNoYSJLmud9wMqEJ9DkkeWsWdFstPEosh+XL1Sg7Fu00v1409/aVUsTbntd19ortixVVLUzJgu2E6ciAuIUesWoWaouDQkGR+OjUU31kfjuHW9FoHGOf9ZrLMqxsym4ArkycRJq0NDOLFpKsZCCqSe0SlYGY9m3/SGYymEgv3UECkhDQpkQFeX/qrZzdUyHrV2X7O8rYMaNl5Vldm060Kwc50ooNFkcWFVldXbnPldbSqTK8gLrSqdFkX+J7VuZz7OlYXH1Mt6ibm7i7WTcWSqlJzp6ZqMRK/rpOyMgAtzuKDiXdVsEHA6vuAVqRKtSEs9kDFrLIJm+WFKjs5TABR/lImwSUsk4iVWNP28W7IlbcvKVUDks5epLiHSKHGPtwmVUlor7G0njwBN2vDgIHcyL9TCM+zJxXUIHlnItyqorbPbeKjrxQomCnnfs/1Ir5AUfsT71e0I/zxSGZZw53+LoS5SiELlHqpqp58sAag0ucILUSbARke9qrgXCzCbNHrpFMZkFaR2kqSNuvxlDDxCek+3jwb0JGixdVcrTlL4TqtQXCUhUtpPtnvaFu8AXrOV6CISwXkCsurB+0pTX4JmrDc7hwzw1SfgbVi71QXclxQM0gtmRbW+Uh3r10K4aOe6HJ1qDmx7xMxU3YHyw83kfu6fXw8zp0kCV3uJbgMmpt/i+nmCSa+7dYNN6/EtZsSaIPNRpCb1PhkvEBWxTIraz5wmbKVCvdu8pTQlSTWXYl9NdfubbCsVxpIHufDXU01e6s4Udqx3IQ30zSXpWYuP3h3TL6r9c3tyKwIK4gHgUhSlcsdiXVEJYYKoeSmSLfkLnPHdCNFzbKy0XS0rmUmEaZo0yU9IpsRmzGAaqpchzr3Ysjpd8NtkW1j6tI1hw5J4blxCLTAuWt6b8DeubMEkDB07Z3qi6tjDe3O3qXhwMhY0AX0TooTEWFxOASVfaiLIDOJkBjnIQvereD1FOKmJVXZsaKlKmGg30bDQXubLQs1gfiSu0cnGn0c7itcxcKE7lZVPjTdVCF1/axev4v/9Z9+9xf/+8O3X397vtTH71+rqkE9JqpTpMULnKdMPFuICvyY774/j1+97B8c9aO392Wv5pJnnVXf/PKsapaKP/t9/fHP3nz85cuuFLdVmpKi/j38N+fx7fsFeedxvCE1F+TgqjFKINyxMq/IUXCY6dHrnsct3nxff1uy6c1WEzGfAjPjkOwgxEjChUsUhQkUh7mi9L5ub29vf/zFZ1/+8c/jyw/7UbEiM6/xcavDY5bJrh6PSm+VFnen+NXZaBGTol7PqtpioUejwkmze7DZ6ldn29w6s+pK+0B2loerOWWfJpLJtJ6fZ5EKOxouFPNfnKztTCbzGT/iYrEnYadoJP80l5vI3Tol4lBBd1KRrKqZRcC3OotzlpWqbhJAa4t6vL6+FKu/fL4PMFie5VdAqqEO5aR5l5jmTl9TMBsS2hWLMTUZc7oxUqhuBaBEXN2tsggU4V+uEnPIaE20h+ejVbWzR9QBMktcYKjWmC0TD4gEas3uVaV6kEHoJsqgmn2AFkhYoBsK3hfMLHMirEJcO/jHLjPzcPdxuWbWIE8hBn7hB6ohAr9Ng9zM0aS2aO42s8pdJebaG/wtcHZJFnDu9jBbR9fughpEvFFO/H+TamlGXRQt04pOsDh6HehdWqe8NGZDhRnZRXimVrK5zgYdSKCStbvVZdTPnQRqTxEMLdpgbEaYkxFHJzetrU3/T6Fqg2h1XmtJGvChuahZVO4LXEtw8+Bw6EqpbOQUWtXR8y0ytnkdVl1u/vJ6vr3f0CRn2uyvzNAdWBupA3ziM0aefmNRcXELlRpwvKrlTlerrhXGDICJ1pncRoqRAAdVH3ej5N4QVXWXlJIEnXUpglrLzeS+QqpDlYbm1y41w6Nm5w8JDeAUEhTIekGNA51375IqE4eKVG1VgdvuLaL7bBG4WaG1VAMtGyoOTeIBe54Vs7DyaCTEaLpW9dwJiIW6GwHxqG7RCD/PCnOGBtmCIM+hG7tr1PO8tdIVNp/2Oby5m4vlrvFKD0scnE1ki8wy/xOntEts1mvzDBy3QQt7LiLahZIaR6ZOqEzF1QjWj2cUu7uUsYWxF7WpeVhmajmVsMjm4IDF/arkw5z3zzhiZ7pG6xCtwq1QDChUt5vmJlHqk+OoSeh260Rri2k3d/ia2Zl1HA7IrrYihEFNNbMh+toZYT3FTv6IJNw49O+CwBJNg2hMg4Kfca0N+FSRWFviPZOkrkpYBE9FIp374lgUDTq2HydtIl1SaDfr7vDIAqpeX0+GkdWMWtQsuuYngUz1KJnaEzbpMgXjGCLaCcbqXCVUdQ1znSllFzeP+aKarsPDfeyF6ud5+rIBromYMD3hEAiWSvWMJADIaPbMsgga4bh3JnSTATSpnJo2E5v7kRaGEXv2iFLc9mv7mhUER34UG8x89iJ81ATpy0072y2IHSJxXoAa6pdiikDE1dqzAj6CPDECt3gurc2ThO6zxynM2Knp/FfEGnCTymYmSpQfRhVI7dIwCtPUaEaBm0qhpBZ36aLoMnWxoHtTxX1K6bww+D0WTHaWv42q3jvZX+5qKaR0LN/nbiB8XXQCqcwIV65FlPIwXui8spmLNuHrWKDgFMkv3ng1o4C8ucHMJFRayCdAdTdsdSdYZoVyeyPKn7yoMIygqtWmAZqct4w5uZ+ZUq2EinhEJ/YraV1gQsnUq9pETUNQveGt0h3mmaWiyJkNqSq6QOpgsLLJorOsss/evQn3l5cXxjS62ybmfkHt+ypSKvqEu6LEwxTqc0phTLhtRucTBItwMky74HzpQ3pPI92XF1CZ6l7VAu3huDQfYlnwYC+i0ZU0wraZ6+GxzEX07XHjc2W9fbNuy6EznHB093LD7nVbgxFSKapTLnk3/5DMJpAPlDvnedm9GNh1Hx8HYGq1k5lj3i1HvquBkTO3icCkasAheZaZaiqjZAQKSlUDR4Q2k7+8tYHEaRLRQoU7uhV+3A3JDF3bbTVnBhxsm567wpeFoHtn7vsCJCsG1NcqJid2VlsQSdAoBKzPMtMjorpRJTDtGmGZu+lUKpxidbPlSwOxNNwifNniBDWrOL1d7hEMlaC73awAdZVSoInlrU3wsl7mW3n55vbf/sNPf/WL99998+Hlw5atonbc1lmni5irdGahE2GObp7JwUEv1CxUpWHfPOzbR7458O54MbU2/YM//smKld15Nkw//+fH4zf+/gVm/rLxXa9fvB7ffzwEb2Ot8HBf4b6ONRE5P0S1unalscUp6NJY7q5mDrTJm9vjfrzcvn79Zesp7qC8lU0gIugbA8aYJlcLJNwBLSnTPhQR/uXv4Xf/1V/4mzwfrR773CKix8rX05epSJ81BBaVeHnZXXUcy7qXu6nsrMODozkRVMEjKkuULkuiNmTi6V3r8O7u5OEbpmbLGRXmeXRnKtu8MIis5QRMcO+SWYO6DkWiBKrtOpxoVLUZRHiv5956rahOD2e0IG5OOY+0FPZV0iEl3kuL0u0GzKEwQb88HrVL1M73DxmvF+22AzZFC83JHADHoQWpLnPHYPr57wMNpVpaJ/8zYC5UW2gDkq3CiNRUaVmTuO4HDEIIiWHIXofnWcpMttn132Upq2bJSuNtwRiyolt5VoVz7gLNcqFE0pPAU4TmCem3jEHyrww+5QXzxJxGqDsgfERHDIdWWZU2Zbsys+hY1GEBs1va1akm6x68M1e1mcCkd0vPH766Gw9VUVcXz2yl/waIMExOgcJXa6Brkjn8O7IryHitjgUS5i6TOOWVSEV1HYeI5pkzrTTJQrdE+BDVSjh0eep3hAgPom46zSx3HREFrpvGGiSFdZskG/9o7k4Xs6kVSrotmIiWRlOKLSKd1QIiGEBGvzapBoZLYbSsW0yjutdaj52oimW44HDdLYqX1xehmIDc6twsWU0hxxyNfPRaMfOa0bs3M7cqKgZIW8gIKE1FscL2ThHL/RAfU9CiJr30zU0GQmgeZqrWJbKc/Y3eKceQZFZ4d0VwQTDMF8aQzEzDqkt1Di6s9UJatdkxYofaKN9T0WvEI75UtFGHh6oV0szaqSk1oH1OQmYCdVmxqosavfBo1LSXIeuIyr5cz3qx5khUN4BnUCXFh9t+xmwwgnnl5aeyquBBbiT95qLENgw7QfOsHtUB3Aa8TOcbE3qzCrueAMy5zV20i7l0MgY+Pera1DU3VOFqonC1IT2oGrz3QGuzivrzro7lZEhw6qGq0Ek1svzG6J+ZIbMTnKCiGj6QmGBgpAjhSIXEEfxTNUoUPU4I4naU7xR1RcGXQaUaelWOr/MPxC+gXll3q/G7ZoxdiqmFV7WF8sY6E5YhThNHQQihSJuMjHu6lblrHSsz+RBZR9SuFbF3uluq0JFA2p2H8aFdZy8/ChXsby8Ru5ozqqrBg85ajqEtHETlWii6XZ1BUBXngVYON7We0gKnAdDGcsssBu97gxFDVm44XyZHqAr0BV6KAhWFjQLOADn3joiR2rXw6kfwwHGLncmTxPXLQe0x4k4Ew4bKaO7Vu6E6qJVxgXZjPxBhaKDbPQol0hYOQhEANe9sVYlYXU04DXjU077S7lKkOpvl3i5e2qI+zmszApmIRMKlIel5YZkYKpt5GnJKmFYUVadYpMG8PevvHtaSKq4hVhz6sJIChUq2KFx8hbMdu+gXajRg2mflzoxl3Yz8S2V25v22GrWr2AhMtJS625mnX0WVRnmYFJyBE9O+AtTDYzchGKIGTy8azmiSLe+sbhyxmvdtk67ih1BGsaxVFevIs9YtLsK2Xo2pabystaRbW8MVDSfXkrCQUcZL5XYzoh8abIAr5kdZ47xToQS7ZotOVYB/8YO3K/y7D+9Rfb/dX+sU8eri1JzMGNI+gIy1xPuZ+amLUmJ2naN6sPAixbQbYWrkurU2zwkjWe0qttD7oUK2DcwPSEc4Csd9BX/6qr7UEKq6YnHMrCIrjszH6JRV1bV6XKmolgh0xc0rm6WSWK4y8FheSvOsuAVaNPQ8N7O0GHUFHo8kHYQzOB/cJ6WIEqLGzT+vIzrIlu5CyRFOIm4smsRbzZAtbHKuVdmZW6Hd0GSzkkN04U2jExDoUtQQwg4CnGlAEbRzhGTv3gSPjFCYxV0x2Qy18Gv2+kYJcCUmRoXwpBoNvUhmdWP57TgOrlfMVcHvYptbFqtqmLAArnqc2+J6hef5s44VG6lXWU7TVDtLuLWSIU1kHCvPzMf9f/zH3/mLP/3q5f2JbBTE5O1xs1BPeTzOlPIV99vRH14AyUqZoIih2+C7tkOlWt2A9eHEa9kRgOQ/+Gf3vUtNIlZ1/fhffv71f31f37zsws9f5bcvb18fb29xcw+zZebH/Xa/rdsREXE+XgGrTsiKUzILUClpldJCq4fdjpu7Hcc6jjiO+Otvf75lm1uEoMvCW4q6OzVzGMkw3TCLE9tU1+Go+vJ37A//zePv/eMPk0gKz53HLUR0P05b+hTbDGij8P8BhKx2m7p3h48AAAAASUVORK5CYII=\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-1406\"/>\n\n<p>Your luck isn\'t over yet! We\'ve extended our St. Patrick\'s Day Sale for ONE more day.</p>\n\n<p>Get up to 60% OFF all AIOSEO plans and upgrades — but only until midnight EST tonight.</p>\n\n<p>? <strong>SEO Checklist:</strong> Know exactly what to fix on every page.&nbsp;</p>\n\n<p>? <strong>AI Writing Tools:</strong> Create content faster, right inside WordPress.&nbsp;</p>\n\n<p>? <strong>Redirection Manager:</strong> Fix broken links automatically.&nbsp;</p>\n\n<p>? <strong>Rich Snippets:</strong> Stand out in Google search results.</p>\n\n<p>This is the final extension. Don\'t miss it and pay full price tomorrow.</p>','success','[\"4-x\",\"lite\"]',1402,NULL,'2026-03-18 00:00:00','2026-03-19 00:00:00','Grab My Extended Discount','https://aioseo.com/pricing/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_campaign=st-patricks-day-extended-2026-v4-x-lite',NULL,NULL,0,0,'2026-03-18 20:35:39','2026-03-18 20:35:39'),
(98,'69e7e658c284e',NULL,'NEW in 4.9.6: AI Schema Generator + Bulk SEO Tools','<p>We just released one of our most ambitious updates yet, and one of them is available to Lite users, too!</p>\n\n<p><strong>? AI Schema Generator: </strong>Add structured data to any page without writing code. Smart Schema analyzes your content and writes schema for you. Or use a prompt to tell it the schema type you want. No technical background or JSON-LD required. <em>(Available to Pro users)</em></p>\n\n<p><strong>✅ AI Bulk Actions: </strong>Generate SEO titles, meta descriptions, and image alt text across your whole site in one go. <em>(All users, including Lite, with AI credits)</em></p>\n\n<p><strong>✍️ Notes Field in Redirects: </strong>Add a comment to any redirect so you always know why it\'s there. <em>(Pro)</em></p>\n\n<p>Update to 4.9.6 and try the new AI tools today! Your workflow will be better for it.</p>','success','[\"4-x\",\"lite\"]',1415,NULL,'2026-04-22 00:00:00',NULL,'Learn More','https://aioseo.com/aioseo-4-9-6-release/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_campaign=4-9-6-announcement-v4-x-lite','Get AIOSEO Pro','https://aioseo.com/lite-upgrade/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_campaign=4-9-6-announcement-v4-x-lite',0,0,'2026-04-21 21:04:24','2026-06-08 21:38:18'),
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Spring Sale: Up To 60% Off AIOSEO Pro!','<img 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\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-1428\"/>\n\n<p>For one week only, get <strong>up to 60% off</strong> all AIOSEO plans and upgrades.</p>\n\n<p>If you\'ve been meaning to unlock more powerful SEO tools, here\'s what\'s waiting on the other side:&nbsp;</p>\n\n<p>✅ A real-time <strong>SEO checklist </strong>for every post and page, so you know exactly what to do</p>\n\n<p>✅ <strong>AI writing tools</strong> that create your titles, meta descriptions, blog drafts, and more</p>\n\n<p>✅ Automatic <strong>404 detection</strong> and <strong>redirect management</strong> for easier crawling and better UX</p>\n\n<p>✅ <strong>AI-generated schema</strong> that gets you rich snippets in search results (no coding)</p>\n\n<p>Sale ends Wednesday, May 6, at 11:59 PM EST. Don\'t miss it!</p>','success','[\"4-x\",\"lite\"]',1411,NULL,'2026-04-30 00:00:00','2026-05-07 00:00:00','Get AIOSEO Pro','https://aioseo.com/pricing/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_campaign=spring-sale-2026-v4-x-lite',NULL,NULL,0,0,'2026-04-21 21:04:24','2026-05-06 21:19:03'),
(101,'6a0cd5ce7afcd',NULL,'Memorial Day Flash Sale: Up to 60% Off! ??','<img 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JDvQlC0ETBLKWDdLXMhMwcvZLMMvXMLgYNOsACG63gaiTGyxqCrGBeP8UkMH8DAf5BHUgE1IhsvuhvBelL7WAoN20xZxodUohvOPSUIuyenu4vX0YkbRfSSDtzAg2XA4zkLhkjdbJIpD2t+0IpF8kWAII6QOQDCTvDStuXA/gNlh7gcu8RVQFqtc3cG18BoF85eaRX1zMo0Is49MhtQEq+8anLwRkEIF0KCASXqpGltX5R4Egi4TohXBQD2nFnidXBQSs1w4NOgjeCBfbBZDBRRVDjmQdw1xsV3XyYNXhxatc7jIDG4cXTQLSvrG/f/XcTraXQBrIGO34s2gFYzYQ6n24JZC+3dvb25fd5ACZ3DTukywQ4AABuZyEGrf3KJB7YwcT3hM6wGDRDOYuF/MPYHfLeBZAAEPKVkjdvAAyeLRP5eH/E4iJL9Z/ALLCKGQ/XU0D0oEs1defV85cJCBU3j488IIC8qwOcSTr5PbFAtShDy5ihmU85HHjPgCBtwfYcAUL0Aovh+nbolbwGXZkiljryogikPZaQAr4ZRMFlohh0aYyKyJl7AwgMnRou1bwAruDn7nR54tHVznrwTDnz0kyg8+LQCVjBQ8VkPn5eQnkgUrWGJ15DUjw/sV4ud8plUrgIe9LpfKLcVsuwzIkGQMlc6c8UJ64LmMdxHONu6By+falVC5ZCgjf8VUvoh+iAgl1CtF91QYCBh0+QrPnbSDoChYpG2IgWGdDq4PWH74yrg++71AFuHACwgqhdQEkayDH4SK/GhYBCS9iliX6jAqIFc8K54ROCsHwqxHNYogfwF3JW2P05ubrzc0xfC+pYXgwj2ldKkUedfCKX/G4DKThy5cvbcJl5YV+Rl9ViLlbNkoD18lCAVbvC8nCy21yt4B+s7T7Uti57yv13ZfKu7cD5Elp1/VCoXQLtDQgcthdIjHqtWmLUiD15+5qIONgJmy7mYxYGFdBHUI6uCIAgnWesA7AyIs6i2j9nHHQ+f7MuIJIMl40iuPtdhm+IiBQ06AvGL808QiYPVQA0RSS7Q8ZvGgaZfRd1+zLTPNb0CyQC4Oky+S5B8emtSgDNWRt8MUmaiOf3ecwYUggqU+fPjXoQR22RXUg0Sogu9fJ+5eFW7T4tVEATRZ2TXgHDRQKRqHwslsu72IHqbw7AZtvk6VbqIEJuwRCgyo2E0dPvV7vh6RrAAlfLobRhuPPl2EdiMhXGMiVqjPOQMJOIGECEsYojy/jmGVxTQAQJhJPxIXXGYgYMnEAId9UCLKLsowyp1ejKRHkd3eM0XOcDfXpPGU8LA4PamndPrta5pJTQLKHh4epSiCJ9O8UsnsN7LHBI5DdAlreAsvfJ18IiDFxPXBfukdGKBzQSdkqDBRuNSA40DUzVBsIh/QlGiiqVkg4PH6Fr/C+cYVrEsgwFQICO/ePuM7lJdcp0gfBZR3sUIXxIwIChV6wwYqaBn4rbMjRsZ6DCCQ8DkBoWMsBhF0WmL2M+S287YCLIFVYXSZ0Rijlsg4Pu/A3Dpusjef84PCwSKyKFCZyuSLn2wqInU/mqbzdMFJpHOiUMxcd/ZDCwP1uARQyYRgM5D5ZusfeELis5Au6LFguF0oF6Km+0K5rcKOIKaiAoILn5maGZl5XiFt0RGoCybWjHdtzOpDFKy6GAPJAps5nhZnpg4vYIYegjgiukFF7OJPBepksnJ0EQtvD+TxKJwxRH4GEF8WoTNTnDOo7uxw1ChjNKcmCyAGOYSxLaRdceqoNS1dbWzQYPHowclcbRYwMw1cWBQiyOHV0JBAuG5Tz8VCWaaRwcIMGyhEKADm/uBBArqGtX+8MUHM3bjHhK5FaghDUyxMT5d3yhHG9e32L4wXmPewCuUDlclnLsnDiO911mfmdy3pdIcYzNV5DA4KJsBgXOtLqFKWZc6SX56sspL24JWORaML7FtW7tIHkiJcsoCQCkuEE1LCgkci09/oa0l7qfOyQfxIdkQHsmmcrgEAxwcj5o4cg91GH969YKdxVRcVwMKHj5CrS3iyNk+N8EaGQ87kLv0h7gxM4XmnysoXN3ppgW0/ItNeElwlOgidEJctyAJknJDKOJHjoJFQtE+fzIQrIJRtRV4jIsiCzJYVcOapCuz9aRvOG8+3juHv50hBAqEIY+BialqBCeJmJZEwCwnQylqmAcM+QRkvuyfhytI66IqYGpIl+spRvD79dfF5EDPmcHDrgnilIY9+OGkXRF5JrVldXvGu0CYwwhj+jXaHj44M/1zH8WNchJkg224OL1SNZfCd1ZmVGAwJmWoYUcXt5edsyLnENgbTLK6OeOtfJQZ2MqmOYv5aX2czwsvyEQyfLBMTKLDMgUfOZqmxD4cr7JkqK8CwjEJ+vnsay1GhpsmyZu0xiQA6ocE+xr08CgV/oynJaR92k8aMcdYc4SuBSxty3c76i6nGJ5LurC5xeUzQ6FgUe0aaueOj8IPkHgciJi2r2O4+dLFWGEU6z5KwTaP3LULB1Ly8X0YRQjoycnb2GMTvCrVdUB+y+gWs4uGjRdirbGzS4iIv7osZ2lr9t44FqQI8eyiMuFs1t+4MSyEBSloUByF5ucanvmoZPd3Ej9BSN+wVYYJfVBMUyHp5BopjthcfHny1ScOYBj7PfTmreH1dSLAqhyjWLnF7TGAKhSQld8dj3PwyE5tjNaMPvVQGE7uEmBBChEGy5YOz97W0w5RWuYXwYVyWc4zq8F/rhl7h2aZx8hg8VybSPTznDPLk2nnAP1Mg+chWuSZ9+xBsVBn/TY472U3m0TDcBkcPvu2XK5u/vcJGvkJfBYb/Awh0phMoYxNmrIrm/7edLM/icyWS2RQgv4vLTfkYW2H65ba89SSBcRuEXFHOW/BPD7zsKSIfjCapQfa0QwlF9pjmhblDhXT0ISwbfGzLNoAnL+1oJyjp4iwczO147e483qMwHiJewbQdvUHE9iHy0YMp1LEEjW1/fxZ8Vm+R2fK7KMuwNEB7tD42NpeSHDP6+oALSNJbFs8k97NM9MvmZ1NiYuCwzqB9IW8FvJr8HRVKBtO0sKZzk/1g4hnQ4H/rUY4hcoiCCLotjCBEJwnlaE9/w9u3OyYm4hbuj3+2Ut3BP8PbtztlncQvX1fnef3JtUVJyfebv9IpbuDsn3/E2LyWX9OXinmoIeoFRi+/qwi61PYZDvnFL2crKNjQ1WJzgWWNgqaxJy2aKF8ysoIFGHEtZfIPTzKZEtSyaOEuHNk37FqFpaSuwNiYygzallLauqYODv/9E2X6bx+eKcLrd9EzFQ5/6PXUx1YAUklbPRuAzsd8P/Jvw4+3kqdMVkxz8/k3ci09L4xwIvnvcSZPivJt4d3nT20lTTsRMO68fbzqfff42irf566k7Lu98sEz157rEEDzoGe9Ds2NHc4NfH2uybc9NGS0n9SEL5q1jqqE3aZ7IUVUoQnxDmyIhvxaAdHXF8oN/pORpxtjNX18vZoYq+yFu/cG2WkB41olfm/7mFTN/tCknNEORH/5AQH7xTCLNMrEfRqCHcDsR4AHOy1JAHBNL7EmK5/3Igyf01QOPQzIlkuCCi8qCwti2j2mqZfYKILWLg6/8CHQ1Ia4/Ly6KOIMZf0ZbVitiVa5va5tUnUd+qujm68XWTC0gNpR6XxqfcxhSQKJRBxAvPfLpd1VqRNCieXKbm2Kt+iESfipaByKeMWQ16M87EguaeEw4UB8ojjGbBy1Xt3O2Xhu3+TbZ8isYVACRANqUQJTDkqhJIfF4HOf+7NHMxSWeo7W+93UlsbR0Pk3zxNbWb77iswOxY/W4xNrezQVOmYjHz6e/7smnvGi+2M3XFRuI1g/RpjwxkCqXhT5JTD30emvQ0GaP+tm9edVzPfoD1DSvS06UU0DEbG+bDE2GP5ZT8kkfh4ddxIMmxreBstJpd7xpzOHlXy/CxA4AbY5PNOk122p9F3YV4/EYdNm/QtNmIOs2kAsdSGyJgKxVAEGWhGSPHitadwCp7IEIY/Q7gTgUgkb3er3+2oXNTUBozevlOY7iiRGXmPxeDYSO63RX/T77EQnUx+Ehmi8eSq88FX/9esxs56HXCAl1ceZQOfumSgavGLYSRZsmhKZK99ZUQaQLNULzrtNLU1tf0a6BGwSyhEDYyFs4c1FTyPrNCAH5NoV1+Dkv8ZjXa0CkTPgfB4iOIY+syRiyKaYnem2FuGpIRO2kFa98IFrMfieF1QIi5lPLRuEDeRz3n2MccdeD/kPpy42n58VMnjtA1GXcfnz89etppCsVbfutOCqs+kpdJQzhnyqCOw9XdlERz+4skUIIgQ3kjQSy5ASyJRVCH9jjB70cQEIVRU5x4H8cIKYB4fPh0S4thgiby7nvanKv/QiC12XzsOe/u+QTWLWAhKqmIvHzXOfnKNwEaAI6ioCAO6LL4e3HX08bVw85ywyK8b1ovG3MGc1VgGmK6gmXtlNlBWPVpYn+mrQ4JeMTLxx+Oj4+XwpNCSA9K1PgoyCgCIVgDAEg67pC8O5KXKpIPum1pgHZqi4rIysjVGZnR7bw0cWpqTT+95utkZ5INxeaKdm92W3/6oV2QtlsxT3/dOPKP7xrU7zQ+0H3QWukB4+RSMzIo89szczY57ECG1Y2jlAV4fD4sBCFIiGG5q3c/tXGUxG64I9Hzemp46maJT21NPVvBf9rSc2NCfv//yTsKuKcZz2t3b29gUa019bIbKR7vXs9EPHA6tbWiKcViIDhe3tbYQtd7dZsJNBN07/Xe2F7b3drzyybfMSItLS2wm+reG0RpZFe8LVVFdgQ8WCB18bGRk+jJxKhj7fQxyIR2NFIFWB3BCt56K+RXhrh0xH4lKenB36xeERdcXg8Hn0rfwHW9ER63/348Jhvp1tgOD6z/VgEFBOSBHS/rzaKj4/bYaGb8eXtX62t3QF1QfpFicvS9qjddBXaJvtTrZUFrp8uGD/R2zu5uvpOK6uTvXDslkhrgIv8MtyIl9fSGmihRbjEiH1yYEdxLAMvXRQP/TbKVzYn/TRqG8DsqrYHDtwbCADj3kBvN/3QMh+pUdiWanpauB6USaoTgAoejwRjnwPX9vTM9nSf/ri7W1j4+fPv5TB6qF9PzfuoCp7GC6q4fHqmaAKwcJxKCmciejKL7Bu1axMNRTaX14rYB5Yha6oN2Jy4QKuf7Z6cnFx9t7oKb72TWGAR2visJxDoht9e3gRsoGGwrVupLTQ2BuDiPXyF8JWyJr6STqC24ak4cbViU+nRi7qgSKNoQnDtKAePqgAfigTwWGTzRlsLnh5hjxaUS2Oj/tW0neWBqy2rP+6SCwsL5ZcSEPn596+Nq5wpp3RnH66efj1uL4fDHNjDmV9Pl/sPWVnBsB5GfvWy5OgM6XJa1AE9sqF4hJ2FiGXbw/bciu1nEgyt8YAPzTaCSQOBFnQ+4NJnZ3vkGaODh5id2EqAmxoBJwZowM5gAlBFL0kJELVI87EZZDNvjAjhRpRCWlocLYlOfHZWerYt+HEUPJVZacseTyueOxydFRiRArJN7unRW6hUy6QschHEFYl0u378uPvx4weOpi/8QCw/f97d79CwppnbBxe1PY4eKizCyeV+ToR1ks1REdLh9vbw469G4R7hb3ZktiVAR1lVLRJLqy5MuzGq0w4EHDKbHcHA0IyBYhY8Fxg7Qo4YnFgj6gD9GaEiG0XAha16Zj2THz58gEU4WI/8NmjC6riNZA9S3bt3Bp3xLNpeWd+2OZrcIyMJKw+4zQo8s6rgco+Hr3iVzAotrKVCAOjuqIp0W8LN9uIP2aq3uxuEsYClr3xbTib7Srel5EKy9AKvC+VbZJGR8WQ5DOFkP6fF9Q2SDQYSqNAO4eYJDDeicpVmehWNCTRMHsnhrTA8oofhGCNPj71woIUEIq6bgmRjo3QREeEiZntIDuTPoHxACFCB3TPbAOkJVdAxxfeLNhIIGEIBfLKzHqERycH2WTYwwoEv0tViAEGP2yKkDp5QeTBEXaERpwzlAnz92cF70MMdxI1k8m4BX5ML5LjuCnfJ5E/0XMvjhAPjyeV+VsgiiCwgro9LUkI2Wcva+XZCzRUvji9RsRmZZf/qURrB0qqpR9hJj9q0grZGoalA/o5VJ5oYBVESZ6PMXlSL9BC8iGoDEUdEwzrGLFuNJUKU0fKzTsVUaKfSj20pTfVgziSaFaYYEQGzh3yqXTB8tUgyPRjCPX6wPRBIll8KFDvuYaVwXwIs5VJhAdAU7hAJ5Vnoo4JB/KNwgr0TvkkGOxGFnFVrgm5WJlcDMu2KiMbM9pHpiR3MOQ30yAocEGVEbRGxgLwe8kAiFBjwgvCPrjaCBmhp5LQpgt4Im6hoixHOSzmnFBkrHTciHZghk1BPj6enMsRyfMba+FWN+KOnKzICz/ZUuTtkaHu0HhH9MBnsFg1P5FqQIOLJIo1dihrJBS7suk5BMskf9/hauP+B4f3n6rWK7RROwsODg+1h7LGDLB6Uaiia4NgK5l+/JjE2RXRRygxDE6xHuB7huIQvUkVP1MAsbFyZF5/vB6YAAAMYSURBVLdEpJfT+mPU9khy3aoC7ZACFGkxs+NvMhpbWipydW1RnRXWF++O81CeNtCtJd7sv1qpMlSU18myBZeK6d47jHNYIOCRNiBe3MN74eUecYA0FhYKJXhN/igXYDfE+Z/gvMCD3ZUAiQUwMmFxw52yLEiy6HYmocBoQv1IysLAhc1GMAflJJTOTfRFAuJ0A8pMmGDY2YbmvjjwTYqlSUeV7oD4+GRlwY3iuyt3sco+sA9cFT7Q+PDhgzTNvxSsJo1Yte/dh9+W3+zGrkaS5pAQlzuWxo8fkFvdlcqYZ90DkLvSC2y5u7/F7Qunk495FMYwmBuEITPioEXdRBDN8PAg5Fnh7QxGE+zTWzsn/4gLtS/+9Ut9Z5941U7x6VWt9rv/4+ULc9q73omfDx8M6r6KjqJ6l31X1U1lJ2lrAFtWQBcItbCAUGmrI17okYO/U9WArh/ECIgUAKRcKsMyyAHixR3yoPDOr7Alia8LtIU6Jn/j7MaMgEEdxYdLiOykGLtLn1Vd+mwOgs2vVo4geoqBgTViO6Mej/IELRR0RPokknxOUhoplfrwYZXN0ttNBiB3jH+woPkt8d6rDy4F5LZeewP3Ko0aXUKOMiIb8HhkdtcikypbcpNKbNxxxfxCOCrleoXba6SRFUeJnKJ5EUh5INlXfoE8FzxWCV9v7zG836LfKuPyXQmzYJBJAWXy8uPnws+/HwFGkGY0BAkGDrDIsS7wYFbQELfRpQsLY/pFzSLSYntRvYPU4xEjO3ZOM0upCgKYtC93lWM5Of4K703uiRomt1gZOXrZ+AEJg8iJSNOt/D2kvQwg0KKyDMqTORtAZ79K4zO9dEJYyFN293ZrDb9XrvGQjR4MG8VgV4S32sEUm+UPEb+h6XMwFyGd3vDvjtRgB/nkHSZgybtTkEiZ503QdIUN7n6EofMRXn7Ex3LU3IVsMwT2PA+EQbAJb3+YZJ9OxqE2GRD5F/yJ0It5EmyO0IjfbOskSsHDkET6xTlpizC1TI/Jl63K+LAq/TyOoSgidEQcaIKlXjwPCl/Cs3h6Rv4fyoxYzealr6gAAAAASUVORK5CYII=\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-1440\"/>\n\n<p>Celebrate this Memorial Day with up to 60% off all AIOSEO plans and upgrades. ?</p>\n\n<p>If you\'ve been meaning to unlock more powerful SEO tools, consider this your sign. Real-time SEO scoring for every post. AI writing tools inside WordPress. Automatic redirect management and schema markup. Rich snippets without code.</p>\n\n<p>AIOSEO makes SEO easy, so you can focus on what matters most: growing your business.</p>\n\n<p>Limited-time deal. ⏳</p>','success','[\"4-x\",\"lite\"]',1439,NULL,'2026-05-25 00:00:00','2026-05-27 00:00:00','Get AIOSEO Pro','https://aioseo.com/pricing/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_campaign=memorial-day-2026-v4-x-lite',NULL,NULL,0,0,'2026-05-19 21:27:42','2026-05-26 21:31:36'),
(102,'6a2887fe33a0f',NULL,'19 Years. 3M+ Installs. Here\'s What We\'ve Learned.','<img 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\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-1443\"/>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Most ranking problems aren\'t about content. They\'re about signals Google can\'t read — missing schema, weak internal links, orphaned pages that get crawled but never ranked. <strong>Fix those, and rankings follow.</strong></p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>?</strong> <strong>It\'s our birthday this week, and we’re celebrating with a sale. ?</strong> </p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Every plan (and upgrade!) is up to 60% off through June 24. This is <em>the</em> best time of year to get the tools that find and fix exactly those problems. Plans from $49.50.</p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">14-day money-back guarantee. Sale ends June 24 at 11:59 PM EST.</p>','success','[\"4-x\",\"lite\"]',1445,NULL,'2026-06-18 00:00:00','2026-06-25 00:00:00','Get the Birthday Deal','https://aioseo.com/pricing/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_campaign=birthday-sale-2026-v4-x-lite',NULL,NULL,0,0,'2026-06-09 21:39:10','2026-06-24 21:49:29'),
(103,'6a3314ff8a54a',NULL,'AIOSEO 4.9.8: AI Agents, Free REST API &amp; 2 New Image Models','<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">AIOSEO 4.9.8 brings 3 new updates, and all of them are free for every plan, including Lite.</p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>? AIOSEO MCP: </strong>Connect AI agents like Claude, Cursor, and ChatGPT directly to WordPress. Give a command in plain English and they\'ll update your SEO data without touching the admin.</p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>? REST API, now free: </strong>Access your site’s SEO data programmatically. Update metadata in bulk, manage redirects from a script, and pull TruSEO scores into custom dashboards.</p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>? 2 New Image Models:</strong> The AI Image Generator now includes GPT Image 2 from OpenAI and Nano Banana 2 from Google. Select the model from the dropdown when generating images. (AI credits required)</p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Update to 4.9.8 from your WordPress dashboard and power your SEO with AI!</p>','success','[\"4-x\",\"lite\"]',1448,NULL,'2026-06-17 13:50:00',NULL,'See the AIOSEO MCP','https://aioseo.com/introducing-aioseo-mcp/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_campaign=4-9-8-announcement-v4-x-lite','Explore REST API','https://aioseo.com/aioseo-rest-api/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_campaign=4-9-8-announcement-v4-x-lite',0,0,'2026-06-17 21:43:27','2026-08-05 22:28:23'),
(104,'6a3aff6480a2d',NULL,'New Models Available in the AI Image Generator!','<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">AIOSEO 4.9.8 adds 2 new AI image models to the generator. More options, more ways to get the image you actually want, right inside WordPress.</p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>? GPT Image 2:</strong> OpenAI\'s latest. Photorealistic output, precise prompt-following, and clean results across a wide range of styles.<br><strong>? Nano Banana 2: </strong>From Google. Better suited when speed, creativity, and flexibility are the priority.</p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>How to try them:</strong> open any post, add an Image block, click Generate with AI, and select the model from the dropdown.</p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Available to all AIOSEO users; AI credits required.</p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">? Both models are available now! Just update to 4.9.8 and start creating!</p>','success','[\"4-x\",\"lite\"]',1455,NULL,'2026-07-02 09:50:00',NULL,'Read the Announcement','https://aioseo.com/gpt-image-2-nano-banana-2/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_campaign=aioseo-4-9-8-v4-x-lite',NULL,NULL,0,0,'2026-06-23 21:49:24','2026-08-05 22:28:23'),
(105,'6a3aff6481838',NULL,'REST API Is Now Free for All Plans!','<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Starting with 4.9.8, the AIOSEO REST API is free for every plan, including Lite. This update gives all AIOSEO users access to 28 SEO capabilities, available over HTTP in any language or tool.</p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Here are a few examples of what you can do with it:</p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">✅ Update SEO titles and meta descriptions in bulk from any script or stack<br>✅ Create, update, or delete redirects without opening WordPress<br>✅ Pull TruSEO scores into a custom dashboard or monitoring script<br>✅ Retrieve Search Console performance data by post or time period<br>✅ Check which posts are orphaned or missing internal links</p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The addon has been deprecated and merged into the core plugin. All you have to do is update to 4.9.8, and it will be there. ?</p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Not writing scripts? </strong>AIOSEO MCP connects AI agents like Claude, Cursor, and ChatGPT directly to your site. Same 28 abilities, no code required.</p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Update to 4.9.8 and start building!</p>','success','[\"4-x\",\"lite\"]',1453,NULL,'2026-06-30 09:50:00',NULL,'Read the Announcement','https://aioseo.com/aioseo-rest-api/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_campaign=aioseo-4-9-8-v4-x-lite',NULL,NULL,0,0,'2026-06-23 21:49:24','2026-08-05 22:28:23'),
(106,'6a3aff6481e05',NULL,'NEW in 4.9.8: AIOSEO MCP Connects AI Agents to WordPress','<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Starting with 4.9.8, AIOSEO supports MCP (Model Context Protocol). Connect AI agents like Claude, Cursor, and ChatGPT directly to your WordPress SEO — no code, no scripts. ?</p>\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>Ask Claude to find all posts missing a meta description and update them in bulk</li>\n\n<li>Create, update, or delete redirects from a chat window</li>\n\n<li>Pull TruSEO scores for any post to review SEO health without logging in</li>\n\n<li>Retrieve Search Console data by post or time period</li>\n\n<li>Check which posts are orphaned or missing internal links</li>\n</ul>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">There are currently 28 SEO abilities available through any MCP-compatible AI.</p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Set it up in 4 steps with a ready-to-paste config snippet for Claude, Cursor, VS Code, Gemini CLI, and more.</p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Update to 4.9.8 and start delegating your SEO. ?</p>','success','[\"4-x\",\"lite\"]',1451,NULL,'2026-06-26 09:50:00',NULL,'Read the Announcement','https://aioseo.com/introducing-aioseo-mcp/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_campaign=aioseo-4-9-8-v4-x-lite',NULL,NULL,0,0,'2026-06-23 21:49:24','2026-08-05 22:28:23'),
(107,'6a482fda62afc',NULL,'Do You List Events or Jobs on Your Site?','<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">If your website lists events or job openings, this update is for you. ?</p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Event schema and job posting schema are now included on every AIOSEO paid plan</strong>, starting with Basic.</p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">This means your event details and job listings can appear as rich results in Google search. ?</p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">(FYI: Event schema was previously Elite-only, and job posting schema required Pro or higher.)</p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">To get started, all you have to do is navigate to the<strong> AIOSEO Settings</strong> at the bottom of any post or page. Then, click the <strong>Schema</strong> tab and select your schema of choice.</p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">We’ll take care of the technical setup. You just enter a few user-friendly fields about your event or job listing, and you’re done. </p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Easy ?</p>','success','[\"4-x\",\"lite\"]',1461,NULL,'2026-07-13 10:00:00',NULL,'Learn More','https://aioseo.com/event-job-posting-schema-basic/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_campaign=4-9-9-event-job-schema-v4-x-lite','Get AIOSEO Pro','https://aioseo.com/lite-upgrade/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_campaign=4-9-9-event-job-schema-v4-x-lite',0,0,'2026-07-03 21:55:38','2026-08-05 22:28:23'),
(108,'6a482fda63598',NULL,'Get SEO Alerts Right in Your Email Inbox &amp; Slack Messages','<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Most SEO problems don\'t announce themselves.</p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Your site could have a broken robots.txt, a failed sitemap, or a homepage accidentally set to noindex — and you\'d only find out weeks later when rankings start sliding. ?</p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">S<strong>EO Alerts monitors your site every hour </strong>and notifies you the moment something breaks, by email or Slack.</p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">You can also add multiple recipients so the right people always stay in the loop.</p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Free for every plan, including Lite. ?</strong></p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Update to 4.9.9 from your WordPress dashboard to turn it on.</p>','success','[\"4-x\",\"lite\"]',1459,NULL,'2026-07-08 10:00:00',NULL,'Learn More','https://aioseo.com/introducing-seo-alerts/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_campaign=4-9-9-seo-alerts-v4-x-lite',NULL,NULL,0,0,'2026-07-03 21:55:38','2026-08-05 22:28:23'),
(109,'6a482fda639ed',NULL,'BLC Now Checks If Your Videos Are Still Live ?','<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Traditional link checkers think your site’s video content is fine, even if a YouTube video has been deleted or a Vimeo embed was set to private. That’s because most link checkers just look for a working URL, which, technically, these dead videos have.</p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">This means your site visitors could be hitting a dead player without you ever knowing. ?</p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Broken Link Checker 1.3.0 fixes that.</p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>BLC now confirms whether your embedded videos are actually live</strong> on YouTube, Vimeo, TikTok, and 10+ other platforms, not just if the link works.</p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Available on all paid BLC plans. Update to 1.3.0 and run a scan. ?</p>','success','[\"4-x\",\"lite\"]',1382,NULL,'2026-07-06 10:00:00',NULL,'See What\'s New','https://aioseo.com/blc-now-detects-dead-videos/ ?utm_source=WordPress&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_campaign=blc-1-3-0-video-support-v4-x-lite','Get BLC','https://aioseo.com/pricing-broken-link-checker/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_campaign=blc-1-3-0-video-support-v4-x-lite',0,0,'2026-07-03 21:55:38','2026-08-05 22:28:23'),
(110,'6a4ec7dabe3d6',NULL,'Flash Sale for World Emoji Day! ?','<img 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\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-1464\"/>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Every AIOSEO plan and upgrade is on sale for a limited time!</p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Here’s what a properly configured AIOSEO setup does for your site:</p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">? Every time you publish, it generates schema markup automatically. This is the structured data behind rich results like star ratings, FAQ dropdowns, and product cards in Google. </p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">? Every time you change a URL, it creates a redirect so you don’t lose the rankings you’ve built. </p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">? Content creation gets faster. Use AI credits to draft entire blog posts, SEO titles, images, and more.<br><br><strong>Higher plans go further. </strong></p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Plus</strong> adds local SEO with business schema and Google Maps integration, image SEO automation, and Custom Post Type support. <strong>Pro</strong> adds Link Assistant for automated internal linking, 404 Error Tracking, and Cornerstone Content. <strong>Elite</strong> adds Search Statistics, Keyword Rank Tracking, Content Decay Detection, and support for up to 100 sites.</p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">For World Emoji Day, <strong>every plan and upgrade is up to 60% off</strong>.</p>','success','[\"4-x\",\"lite\"]',1463,NULL,'2026-07-17 00:00:00','2026-07-19 00:00:00','Get AIOSEO Pro','https://aioseo.com/pricing/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_campaign=emoji-day-sale-2026-v4-x-lite',NULL,NULL,0,0,'2026-07-08 21:57:46','2026-07-18 22:10:22'),
(111,'6a6bcebc89ba6',NULL,'AI Can Now Fix Your TruSEO Score For You','<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">TruSEO just got its biggest rebuild yet, and every feature is available to all AIOSEO users, <strong>including Lite</strong>.</p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>? Optimize with AI:</strong> Click once, and AI rewrites your title, meta description, headline, content, and spelling together. Your original is saved as a revision first, so you can always roll back.</p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>⚡ Real-time scoring: </strong>Your TruSEO score generates automatically now, even outside the editor. No more posts stuck at \"N/A.\"</p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>? 10+ new languages:</strong> Set the analysis language per post, or let autodetect handle it, so multilingual sites finally get graded correctly.</p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">?<strong> Redesigned Optimization tab:</strong> One score out of 100, plus 5 clear sub-tabs: Keywords, Basics, Spelling, Readability, and Headline. This organizes your most important SEO tasks in one place.</p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">To celebrate, <strong>we\'re also giving away free AI Credits </strong>to everyone who tries the new \"Optimize with AI\" feature. All you have to do is open the post editor, click \"Optimize with AI,\" and you\'re entered automatically. We\'re giving away <strong>100 prizes through the end of August</strong>.</p>\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>5 winners get 200,000 credits</li>\n\n<li>10 winners get 50,000 credits</li>\n\n<li>25 winners get 25,000 credits</li>\n\n<li>60 winners get 10,000 credits</li>\n</ul>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Upgrade to 5.0.0 today to unlock all these features and explore the new and improved TruSEO.</p>','success','[\"4-x\",\"lite\"]',1481,NULL,'2026-07-30 22:01:18',NULL,'Learn More','https://aioseo.com/introducing-truseo-2-0/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_campaign=5-0-0-announcement-v4-x-lite','Get AIOSEO Pro','https://aioseo.com/pricing/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_campaign=5-0-0-announcement-v4-x-lite',0,0,'2026-07-30 22:22:52','2026-08-05 22:28:23'),
(112,'6a6d206bf2f96',NULL,'AIOSEO 5.0.0 Is Here. So Is Up to 60% Off.','<img 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\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-1484\"/>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>AIOSEO 5.0.0 just rebuilt TruSEO from the ground up. </strong>Now, you have: </p>\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li><strong>Real-time scoring: </strong>No more posts sitting at N/A</li>\n\n<li><strong>10+ new languages: </strong>Set custom language by post</li>\n\n<li><strong>Optimize with AI:</strong> Implement all TruSEO suggestions with the click of a button.</li>\n\n<li><strong>Spell checker: </strong>Fix typos before posts go live</li>\n\n<li>And more...</li>\n</ul>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">? This is one of our biggest updates ever, and while everything is free to all AIOSEO users (Lite, that includes you too), AI Credits are required to run some of the new features. </p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And right now, you can <strong>get up to 60% off all plans and upgrades</strong>. Each tier comes with AI Credits, which you can use to run all the AI tools in the plugin. </p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sale ends August 6 at 11:59 PM EST.</p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Bonus:</strong> Try the new \"<strong>Optimize with AI</strong>\" button, and you\'ll be automatically entered to win AI Credits. ?</p>','success','[\"4-x\",\"lite\"]',1483,NULL,'2026-07-31 09:00:00','2026-08-07 00:00:00','Get AIOSEO Pro','https://aioseo.com/pricing/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_campaign=summer-sale-2026-v4-x-lite','Learn More','https://aioseo.com/newsroom/introducing-truseo-2-0/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_campaign=summer-sale-2026-v4-x-lite',0,0,'2026-07-31 22:23:39','2026-08-05 22:28:23'),
(113,'6a71157bcde08',NULL,'It\'s Here: The Spell Checker with Instant Fixes','<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Tired of publishing a post only to realize it has a typo the second after it goes live?</p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The new Spell Checker takes care of that with the click of a button. When you\'re writing, <strong>it flags misspellings automatically</strong> and <strong>proposes suggested fixes</strong>. All you have to do is click the one you want.</p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It also has a <strong>built-in dictionary</strong> where you can add brand terms so they never get flagged.</p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The Spell Checker is free to all users and available on AIOSEO 5.0.0. Update the plugin, and you\'ll have it right in the WordPress editor.</p>','success','[\"4-x\",\"lite\"]',1486,NULL,'2026-08-11 09:45:00',NULL,'Learn More','https://aioseo.com/newsroom/introducing-spell-checker/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_campaign=5-0-0-spell-checker-v4-x-lite',NULL,NULL,0,0,'2026-08-03 22:26:03','2026-08-05 22:28:23'),
(114,'6a72675655c51',NULL,'Optimize with AI Is Here in TruSEO','<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">TruSEO just started fixing its own suggestions. Click <strong>Optimize with AI</strong>, and it rewrites your SEO title, meta description, headline, and content, all in 1 pass (and under 30 seconds). ?</p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Misspelled words? It fixes those too, so nothing short of perfection goes live. </p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Your original version is always saved first. You can revert any of its suggestions or keep all its optimizations. ✏️</p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">If you haven\'t already, upgrade to 5.0.0 to get the new \"Optimize with AI\" button in the WordPress editor. It makes your workflow smarter, faster, and better for SEO.</p>','success','[\"4-x\",\"lite\"]',1488,NULL,'2026-08-13 00:00:00',NULL,'Learn More','https://aioseo.com/newsroom/optimize-with-ai/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_campaign=5-0-0-optimize-ai-v4-x-lite',NULL,NULL,0,0,'2026-08-04 22:27:34','2026-08-05 22:28:23'),
(115,'6a73b90718a27',NULL,'The Highlighter Now Fixes What It Finds','<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">You already use the Highlighter to catch issues while you write. Now, you can click a flagged word or sentence and <strong>get an AI-generated fix </strong>you can apply right there in the editor.</p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Correct passive voice, typos, and run-on sentences with the click of a button. No manual editing required. ✅</p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Now, every post reads like your best one, not your first one. </p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Update to 5.0.0 from your WordPress dashboard to use the new Highlighter and AI-powered fixes. ?</p>','success','[\"4-x\",\"lite\"]',1491,NULL,'2026-08-17 00:00:00',NULL,'Learn More','https://aioseo.com/newsroom/truseo-highlighter-suggests-fixes/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_campaign=5-0-0-highlighter-v4-x-lite',NULL,NULL,0,0,'2026-08-05 22:28:23','2026-08-05 22:28:23'),
(100,'69f122b41a433',NULL,'Your SEO Works in English. What About Everyone Else?','<p>You\'ve already done the SEO work. <strong>Universally takes it further</strong>, translating your website into other languages where search volume is enormous (and often less competitive than English).</p>\n\n<p><strong>Universally is the #1 AI-powered website translation tool </strong>and can translate your content into over 70 languages. We love it at AIOSEO because it handles all the critical technical SEO tasks that most translation platforms overlook. For example, it manages your hreflang tags, URLs, and structured data for every language — automatically. ?</p>\n\n<p>This means you can rank in global search results where billions of internet users are looking for what you offer. </p>\n\n<p>And since you\'re already using AIOSEO, <strong>your existing SEO settings carry over to every translated page</strong>. The two tools cover different parts of the problem, which is why they work so well together. ?</p>\n\n<p>We secured an exclusive discount just for you. Get <strong>20% off any annual Universally plan</strong> with code <strong>AIOSEO20OFF</strong>.</p>\n\n<p>Want to learn more? Read the guide first, then grab your discount.?</p>','success','[\"4-x\",\"lite\"]',1419,NULL,'2026-04-28 14:00:00','2026-05-05 00:00:00','Read the Guide','https://aioseo.com/multilingual-wordpress-site/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_campaign=universally-cross-promo-v4-x-lite','Claim My 20% Off','https://universally.com/pricing/?utm_source=WordPress&utm_medium=plugin-notification&utm_campaign=universally-cross-promo-v4-x-lite',0,0,'2026-04-28 21:12:20','2026-05-04 21:17:09'),
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(3,2960,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,'default','default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,0,'default','default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,0,'{\"blockGraphs\":[],\"customGraphs\":[],\"default\":{\"data\":{\"Article\":[],\"Course\":[],\"Dataset\":[],\"FAQPage\":[],\"Movie\":[],\"Person\":[],\"Product\":[],\"ProductReview\":[],\"Car\":[],\"Recipe\":[],\"Service\":[],\"SoftwareApplication\":[],\"WebPage\":[]},\"graphName\":\"\",\"isEnabled\":true},\"graphs\":[],\"defaultGraph\":\"\",\"defaultPostTypeGraph\":\"\"}',NULL,NULL,0,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,NULL,NULL,'large','[{\"image:loc\":\"\\/wp-content\\/uploads\\/2020\\/12\\/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg\"}]','2025-06-26 02:55:45',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,0,'{\"linkFormat\":{\"internalLinkCount\":0,\"linkAssistantDismissed\":false},\"primaryTerm\":{\"productEducationDismissed\":false}}',NULL,'2020-12-25 17:20:19','2025-06-26 02:55:45',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL),
(4,2957,'Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors | #site_title','Thanksgiving travel volume shows how far things have fallen; we dig into digital vaccine passports; tracing my travel genealogy, is road warrior-ism hereditary?','[{\"label\":\"Coronavirus\",\"value\":\"Coronavirus\"},{\"label\":\"Covid-19\",\"value\":\"Covid-19\"},{\"label\":\"Digital Vaccine Passports\",\"value\":\"Digital Vaccine Passports\"},{\"label\":\"Holiday Travel\",\"value\":\"Holiday Travel\"},{\"label\":\"Hotel Room Cooking\",\"value\":\"Hotel Room Cooking\"},{\"label\":\"Hyatt\",\"value\":\"Hyatt\"},{\"label\":\"O\\u2019Hare International Airport\",\"value\":\"O\\u2019Hare International Airport\"},{\"label\":\"Road Warriors\",\"value\":\"Road Warriors\"},{\"label\":\"Siri\",\"value\":\"Siri\"},{\"label\":\"Thanksgiving\",\"value\":\"Thanksgiving\"},{\"label\":\"Vaccination\",\"value\":\"Vaccination\"},{\"label\":\"travel stories\",\"value\":\"travel stories\"},{\"label\":\"travel tips\",\"value\":\"travel tips\"},{\"label\":\"travel podcast\",\"value\":\"travel podcast\"}]','{\"focus\":[],\"additional\":[]}','{\"analysis\":{\"basic\":{\"metadescriptionLength\":{\"title\":\"Meta description Length\",\"description\":\"Well done!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"lengthContent\":{\"title\":\"Content Length\",\"description\":\"The content length is ok. Good job!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"isInternalLink\":{\"title\":\"Internal links\",\"description\":\"You are linking to other resources on your website which is great.\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"isExternalLink\":{\"title\":\"External links\",\"description\":\"Great! You are linking to external resources.\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"errors\":0},\"title\":{\"titleLength\":{\"title\":\"Title Length\",\"description\":\"Well done!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"errors\":0},\"readability\":{\"contentHasAssets\":{\"error\":0,\"title\":\"Images\\/Videos in content\",\"description\":\"Your content contains images and\\/or video(s).\",\"score\":5,\"maxScore\":5},\"paragraphLength\":{\"title\":\"Paragraphs Length\",\"description\":\"You are using short paragraphs.\",\"score\":5,\"maxScore\":5,\"error\":0},\"sentenceLength\":{\"title\":\"Sentences Length\",\"description\":\"35% of the sentences contain more than 20 words, which is more than the recommended maximum of 25%. Try to shorten the sentences.\",\"score\":3,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"passiveVoice\":{\"title\":\"Passive Voice\",\"description\":\"12% of the sentences contain passive voice, which is more than the recommended maximum of 10%. Try to use their active counterparts.\",\"score\":6,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"transitionWords\":{\"title\":\"Transition words\",\"description\":\"Well done!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"consecutiveSentences\":{\"title\":\"Consecutive sentences\",\"description\":\"There is enough variety in your sentences. That\'s great!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"subheadingsDistribution\":{\"title\":\"Subheading distribution\",\"description\":\"5 section of your text is longer than 300 words and is not separated by any subheadings. Add subheadings to improve readability.\",\"score\":3,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"calculateFleschReading\":{\"title\":\"Flesch Reading Ease\",\"description\":\"The copy scores 63.4 in the test, which is considered ok to read.\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"errors\":3}}}',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,'default','default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,'',NULL,NULL,'[]',0,'default','default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,92,'{\"blockGraphs\":[],\"customGraphs\":[],\"default\":{\"data\":{\"Article\":[],\"Course\":[],\"Dataset\":[],\"FAQPage\":[],\"Movie\":[],\"Person\":[],\"Product\":[],\"ProductReview\":[],\"Car\":[],\"Recipe\":[],\"Service\":[],\"SoftwareApplication\":[],\"WebPage\":[]},\"graphName\":\"\",\"isEnabled\":true},\"graphs\":[],\"defaultGraph\":\"\",\"defaultPostTypeGraph\":\"\"}','none','{\"article\":{\"articleType\":\"BlogPosting\"},\"course\":{\"name\":\"\",\"description\":\"\",\"provider\":\"\"},\"faq\":{\"pages\":[]},\"product\":{\"reviews\":[]},\"recipe\":{\"ingredients\":[],\"instructions\":[],\"keywords\":[]},\"software\":{\"reviews\":[],\"operatingSystems\":[]},\"webPage\":{\"webPageType\":\"WebPage\"},\"book\":[],\"event\":[],\"jobPosting\":[],\"music\":[],\"person\":[],\"restaurant\":[],\"service\":[],\"video\":[]}',0,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,-1,-1,'large','[{\"image:loc\":\"\\/wp-content\\/uploads\\/2020\\/12\\/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg\"},{\"image:loc\":\"\\/wp-content\\/uploads\\/2020\\/12\\/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg\"}]','2025-06-26 03:57:05',NULL,'default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,0,'{\"linkFormat\":{\"internalLinkCount\":0,\"linkAssistantDismissed\":false},\"primaryTerm\":{\"productEducationDismissed\":false}}',NULL,'2020-12-25 17:20:19','2025-06-26 03:57:05',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL),
(5,2936,'Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers | #site_title','Top 10 gift ideas for pandemic travelers; year-end status offers from airlines, hotels, and travel credit cards; work-from-hotel offerings; latest hotel reservation system data breach.','[{\"label\":\"travel gift ideas\",\"value\":\"travel gift ideas\"},{\"label\":\"best travel gift ideas\",\"value\":\"best travel gift ideas\"},{\"label\":\"travel gifts\",\"value\":\"travel gifts\"},{\"label\":\"gift ideas for travelers\",\"value\":\"gift ideas for travelers\"},{\"label\":\"best travel gifts\",\"value\":\"best travel gifts\"},{\"label\":\"gift for traveler\",\"value\":\"gift for traveler\"},{\"label\":\"gifts for the traveler\",\"value\":\"gifts for the traveler\"},{\"label\":\"presents for travellers\",\"value\":\"presents for travellers\"},{\"label\":\"gifts for travel lovers\",\"value\":\"gifts for travel lovers\"},{\"label\":\"travel accessories\",\"value\":\"travel accessories\"},{\"label\":\"travel stories\",\"value\":\"travel stories\"},{\"label\":\"travel tips\",\"value\":\"travel tips\"},{\"label\":\"travel podcast\",\"value\":\"travel podcast\"},{\"label\":\"frequent flyer status\",\"value\":\"frequent flyer status\"},{\"label\":\"frequent flier status\",\"value\":\"frequent flier status\"},{\"label\":\"travel credit cards\",\"value\":\"travel credit cards\"}]','{\"focus\":[],\"additional\":[]}','{\"analysis\":{\"basic\":{\"metadescriptionLength\":{\"title\":\"Meta description length\",\"description\":\"The meta description is over 160 characters.\",\"score\":6,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"lengthContent\":{\"title\":\"Content Length\",\"description\":\"The content length is ok. Good job!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"isInternalLink\":{\"title\":\"Internal links\",\"description\":\"You are linking to other resources on your website which is great.\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"isExternalLink\":{\"title\":\"External links\",\"description\":\"Great! 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(22,2747,'New World of Travel Insurance; Getting Medical Help on the Road','People are doing short car trips. For extensive travel, they\'ll want more spacing in aircraft, travel insurance, and finding medical attention on the road','[{\"label\":\"Coronavirus\",\"value\":\"Coronavirus\"},{\"label\":\"Covid-19\",\"value\":\"Covid-19\"},{\"label\":\"Doctor\",\"value\":\"Doctor\"},{\"label\":\"Frontier Airlines\",\"value\":\"Frontier Airlines\"},{\"label\":\"Lockdown\",\"value\":\"Lockdown\"},{\"label\":\"road trip\",\"value\":\"road trip\"},{\"label\":\"Thailand\",\"value\":\"Thailand\"},{\"label\":\"Travel Clinic\",\"value\":\"Travel Clinic\"},{\"label\":\"Travel Insurance\",\"value\":\"Travel Insurance\"},{\"label\":\"travel planning\",\"value\":\"travel planning\"},{\"label\":\"travel stories\",\"value\":\"travel stories\"}]','{\"focus\":[],\"additional\":[]}','{\"analysis\":{\"basic\":{\"metadescriptionLength\":{\"title\":\"Meta description Length\",\"description\":\"Well done!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"lengthContent\":{\"title\":\"Content Length\",\"description\":\"The content length is ok. Good job!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"isInternalLink\":{\"title\":\"Internal links\",\"description\":\"You are linking to other resources on your website which is great.\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"isExternalLink\":{\"title\":\"External links\",\"description\":\"Great! You are linking to external resources.\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"errors\":0},\"title\":{\"titleLength\":{\"title\":\"SEO Title length\",\"description\":\"The title is over 60 characters.\",\"score\":6,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"errors\":1},\"readability\":{\"contentHasAssets\":{\"error\":0,\"title\":\"Images\\/Videos in content\",\"description\":\"Your content contains images and\\/or video(s).\",\"score\":5,\"maxScore\":5},\"paragraphLength\":{\"title\":\"Paragraphs Length\",\"description\":\"You are using short paragraphs.\",\"score\":5,\"maxScore\":5,\"error\":0},\"sentenceLength\":{\"title\":\"Sentences Length\",\"description\":\"36.4% of the sentences contain more than 20 words, which is more than the recommended maximum of 25%. Try to shorten the sentences.\",\"score\":3,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"passiveVoice\":{\"title\":\"Passive Voice\",\"description\":\"12.8% of the sentences contain passive voice, which is more than the recommended maximum of 10%. Try to use their active counterparts.\",\"score\":6,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"transitionWords\":{\"title\":\"Transition words\",\"description\":\"Well done!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"consecutiveSentences\":{\"title\":\"Consecutive sentences\",\"description\":\"There is enough variety in your sentences. That\'s great!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"subheadingsDistribution\":{\"title\":\"Subheading distribution\",\"description\":\"3 section of your text is longer than 300 words and is not separated by any subheadings. Add subheadings to improve readability.\",\"score\":3,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"calculateFleschReading\":{\"title\":\"Flesch Reading Ease\",\"description\":\"The copy scores 59.5 in the test, which is considered fairly difficult to read. Try to make shorter sentences to improve readability.\",\"score\":6,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"errors\":4}}}',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,'default','default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,'',NULL,NULL,'[]',0,'default','default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,79,'{\"blockGraphs\":[],\"customGraphs\":[],\"default\":{\"data\":{\"Article\":[],\"Course\":[],\"Dataset\":[],\"FAQPage\":[],\"Movie\":[],\"Person\":[],\"Product\":[],\"ProductReview\":[],\"Car\":[],\"Recipe\":[],\"Service\":[],\"SoftwareApplication\":[],\"WebPage\":[]},\"graphName\":\"\",\"isEnabled\":true},\"graphs\":[],\"defaultGraph\":\"Article\",\"defaultPostTypeGraph\":\"\"}','default','{\"article\":{\"articleType\":\"BlogPosting\"},\"course\":{\"name\":\"\",\"description\":\"\",\"provider\":\"\"},\"faq\":{\"pages\":[]},\"product\":{\"reviews\":[]},\"recipe\":{\"ingredients\":[],\"instructions\":[],\"keywords\":[]},\"software\":{\"reviews\":[],\"operatingSystems\":[]},\"webPage\":{\"webPageType\":\"WebPage\"}}',0,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,-1,-1,'large','[{\"image:loc\":\"\\/wp-content\\/uploads\\/2020\\/05\\/IMG_1615-1.jpg\"}]','2025-06-26 03:56:04',NULL,'default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,0,'{\"linkFormat\":{\"internalLinkCount\":0,\"linkAssistantDismissed\":false},\"primaryTerm\":{\"productEducationDismissed\":false}}',NULL,'2020-12-25 17:20:19','2025-06-26 03:56:04',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL),
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(129,1998,'When You Think the TSA is Bad; Expired Money | #site_title','A last-minute trip to Pune, India provided material for this episode: a visa dash, very hands-on airport security, worthless rupee notes, flight disruptions. We read obits for smart bag companies and hear why MSP\'s T2 isn\'t so ghetto after all.','[{\"label\":\"Travel Tips\",\"value\":\"Travel Tips\"},{\"label\":\"Air India\",\"value\":\"Air India\"},{\"label\":\"airport security\",\"value\":\"airport security\"},{\"label\":\"Bluesmart\",\"value\":\"Bluesmart\"},{\"label\":\"Delhi Airport\",\"value\":\"Delhi Airport\"},{\"label\":\"flight delays\",\"value\":\"flight delays\"},{\"label\":\"Foreign Currency\",\"value\":\"Foreign Currency\"},{\"label\":\"Frankfurt Airport\",\"value\":\"Frankfurt Airport\"},{\"label\":\"Indian Visa\",\"value\":\"Indian Visa\"},{\"label\":\"Pune\",\"value\":\"Pune\"},{\"label\":\"smart luggage\",\"value\":\"smart luggage\"}]','{\"focus\":[],\"additional\":[]}','{\"analysis\":{\"basic\":{\"metadescriptionLength\":{\"title\":\"Meta description length\",\"description\":\"The meta description is over 160 characters.\",\"score\":6,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"lengthContent\":{\"title\":\"Content Length\",\"description\":\"The content length is ok. Good job!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"isInternalLink\":{\"title\":\"Internal links\",\"description\":\"You are linking to other resources on your website which is great.\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"isExternalLink\":{\"title\":\"External links\",\"description\":\"Great! You are linking to external resources.\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"errors\":1},\"title\":{\"titleLength\":{\"title\":\"Title Length\",\"description\":\"Well done!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"errors\":0},\"readability\":{\"contentHasAssets\":{\"error\":0,\"title\":\"Images\\/Videos in content\",\"description\":\"Your content contains images and\\/or video(s).\",\"score\":5,\"maxScore\":5},\"paragraphLength\":{\"title\":\"Paragraphs Length\",\"description\":\"You are using short paragraphs.\",\"score\":5,\"maxScore\":5,\"error\":0},\"sentenceLength\":{\"title\":\"Sentences Length\",\"description\":\"29.4% of the sentences contain more than 20 words, which is more than the recommended maximum of 25%. Try to shorten the sentences.\",\"score\":6,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"passiveVoice\":{\"title\":\"Passive Voice\",\"description\":\"10.7% of the sentences contain passive voice, which is more than the recommended maximum of 10%. Try to use their active counterparts.\",\"score\":6,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"transitionWords\":{\"title\":\"Transition words\",\"description\":\"Well done!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"consecutiveSentences\":{\"title\":\"Consecutive sentences\",\"description\":\"The text contains 3 consecutive sentences starting with the same word. Try to mix things up!\",\"score\":3,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"subheadingsDistribution\":{\"title\":\"Subheading distribution\",\"description\":\"You are not using any subheadings, although your text is rather long. Try and add some subheadings.\",\"score\":2,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"calculateFleschReading\":{\"title\":\"Flesch Reading Ease\",\"description\":\"The copy scores 67.1 in the test, which is considered ok to read.\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"errors\":4}}}',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,'default','default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,'',NULL,NULL,'[]',0,'default','default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,87,'{\"blockGraphs\":[],\"customGraphs\":[],\"default\":{\"data\":{\"Article\":[],\"Course\":[],\"Dataset\":[],\"FAQPage\":[],\"Movie\":[],\"Person\":[],\"Product\":[],\"ProductReview\":[],\"Car\":[],\"Recipe\":[],\"Service\":[],\"SoftwareApplication\":[],\"WebPage\":[]},\"graphName\":\"\",\"isEnabled\":true},\"graphs\":[],\"defaultGraph\":\"Article\",\"defaultPostTypeGraph\":\"\"}','default','{\"article\":{\"articleType\":\"BlogPosting\"},\"course\":{\"name\":\"\",\"description\":\"\",\"provider\":\"\"},\"faq\":{\"pages\":[]},\"product\":{\"reviews\":[]},\"recipe\":{\"ingredients\":[],\"instructions\":[],\"keywords\":[]},\"software\":{\"reviews\":[],\"operatingSystems\":[]},\"webPage\":{\"webPageType\":\"WebPage\"}}',0,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,-1,-1,'large','[{\"image:loc\":\"\\/wp-content\\/uploads\\/2018\\/06\\/IMG_0464.jpg\"}]','2025-06-26 03:46:19',NULL,'default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,0,'{\"linkFormat\":{\"internalLinkCount\":0,\"linkAssistantDismissed\":false},\"primaryTerm\":{\"productEducationDismissed\":false}}',NULL,'2020-12-25 17:22:09','2025-06-26 03:46:19',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL),
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(132,1961,'Brewing Best Hotel Room Coffee; Notes from Spain','How to make the best coffee in your hotel room and traveling in Spain\'s Basque Country','[{\"label\":\"Travel Tips\",\"value\":\"Travel Tips\"},{\"label\":\"Cider\",\"value\":\"Cider\"},{\"label\":\"Coffee\",\"value\":\"Coffee\"},{\"label\":\"Hertz\",\"value\":\"Hertz\"},{\"label\":\"Iberia Airlines\",\"value\":\"Iberia Airlines\"},{\"label\":\"Madrid\",\"value\":\"Madrid\"},{\"label\":\"Pintxos\",\"value\":\"Pintxos\"},{\"label\":\"Premium Economy\",\"value\":\"Premium Economy\"},{\"label\":\"Rioja\",\"value\":\"Rioja\"},{\"label\":\"San Sebasti\\u00e1n\",\"value\":\"San Sebasti\\u00e1n\"},{\"label\":\"Spain\",\"value\":\"Spain\"}]','{\"focus\":[],\"additional\":[]}','{\"analysis\":{\"basic\":{\"metadescriptionLength\":{\"title\":\"Meta description length\",\"description\":\"The meta description is too short.\",\"score\":6,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"lengthContent\":{\"title\":\"Content Length\",\"description\":\"The content length is ok. Good job!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"isInternalLink\":{\"title\":\"Internal links\",\"description\":\"You are linking to other resources on your website which is great.\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"isExternalLink\":{\"title\":\"External links\",\"description\":\"Great! You are linking to external resources.\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"errors\":1},\"title\":{\"titleLength\":{\"title\":\"Title Length\",\"description\":\"Well done!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"errors\":0},\"readability\":{\"contentHasAssets\":{\"error\":0,\"title\":\"Images\\/Videos in content\",\"description\":\"Your content contains images and\\/or video(s).\",\"score\":5,\"maxScore\":5},\"paragraphLength\":{\"title\":\"Paragraphs Length\",\"description\":\"You are using short paragraphs.\",\"score\":5,\"maxScore\":5,\"error\":0},\"sentenceLength\":{\"title\":\"Sentences Length\",\"description\":\"42.8% of the sentences contain more than 20 words, which is more than the recommended maximum of 25%. Try to shorten the sentences.\",\"score\":3,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"passiveVoice\":{\"title\":\"Passive Voice\",\"description\":\"14.5% of the sentences contain passive voice, which is more than the recommended maximum of 10%. Try to use their active counterparts.\",\"score\":6,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"transitionWords\":{\"title\":\"Transition words\",\"description\":\"Well done!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"consecutiveSentences\":{\"title\":\"Consecutive sentences\",\"description\":\"There is enough variety in your sentences. That\'s great!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"subheadingsDistribution\":{\"title\":\"Subheading distribution\",\"description\":\"You are not using any subheadings, although your text is rather long. Try and add some subheadings.\",\"score\":2,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"calculateFleschReading\":{\"title\":\"Flesch Reading Ease\",\"description\":\"The copy scores 66 in the test, which is considered ok to read.\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"errors\":3}}}',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,'default','default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,'',NULL,NULL,'[]',0,'default','default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,89,'{\"blockGraphs\":[],\"customGraphs\":[],\"default\":{\"data\":{\"Article\":[],\"Course\":[],\"Dataset\":[],\"FAQPage\":[],\"Movie\":[],\"Person\":[],\"Product\":[],\"ProductReview\":[],\"Car\":[],\"Recipe\":[],\"Service\":[],\"SoftwareApplication\":[],\"WebPage\":[]},\"graphName\":\"\",\"isEnabled\":true},\"graphs\":[],\"defaultGraph\":\"Article\",\"defaultPostTypeGraph\":\"\"}','default','{\"article\":{\"articleType\":\"BlogPosting\"},\"course\":{\"name\":\"\",\"description\":\"\",\"provider\":\"\"},\"faq\":{\"pages\":[]},\"product\":{\"reviews\":[]},\"recipe\":{\"ingredients\":[],\"instructions\":[],\"keywords\":[]},\"software\":{\"reviews\":[],\"operatingSystems\":[]},\"webPage\":{\"webPageType\":\"WebPage\"}}',0,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,-1,-1,'large','[{\"image:loc\":\"\\/wp-content\\/uploads\\/2012\\/06\\/IMG_1145.jpg\"}]','2025-06-26 03:46:19',NULL,'default',NULL,NULL,NULL,'{\"businessInfo\":{\"name\":\"\",\"urls\":{\"website\":\"\",\"aboutPage\":\"\",\"contactPage\":\"\"},\"address\":{\"line1\":\"\",\"line2\":\"\",\"zip\":\"\",\"city\":\"\",\"state\":\"\",\"country\":\"\"},\"contact\":{\"email\":\"\",\"phone\":\"\",\"fax\":\"\"},\"ids\":{\"vatID\":\"\",\"taxID\":\"\",\"chamberID\":\"\"},\"payment\":{\"priceIndication\":\"\",\"currenciesAccepted\":\"\",\"methodsAccepted\":\"\"},\"areaServed\":\"\"},\"openingHours\":{\"show\":false,\"closedLabel\":\"\",\"open24h\":false,\"open24hLabel\":\"\",\"open247\":false,\"use24hFormat\":false,\"twoSets\":false,\"timezone\":\"\",\"hours\":[]}}',NULL,0,'{\"linkFormat\":{\"internalLinkCount\":0,\"linkAssistantDismissed\":false},\"primaryTerm\":{\"productEducationDismissed\":false}}',NULL,'2020-12-25 17:22:09','2025-06-26 03:46:19',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL),
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(134,1947,'Travel Turning Me Hipster; Every Delay Has a Story','Traveling south to New Orleans and Miami in February is good travel. I walk through how each change in airport security has pushed me to be more hipster and how we all want to understand the real cause of the flight delays that inconvenience us. Also listener feedback extending our ongoing luggage thread. ','[{\"label\":\"New Orleans\",\"value\":\"New Orleans\"},{\"label\":\"luggage\",\"value\":\"luggage\"},{\"label\":\"smart luggage\",\"value\":\"smart luggage\"},{\"label\":\"travel tips\",\"value\":\"travel tips\"},{\"label\":\"hipster\",\"value\":\"hipster\"},{\"label\":\"Southwest Airlines\",\"value\":\"Southwest Airlines\"},{\"label\":\"toiletries\",\"value\":\"toiletries\"},{\"label\":\"travel delays\",\"value\":\"travel delays\"},{\"label\":\"United Airlines\",\"value\":\"United Airlines\"}]','{\"focus\":[],\"additional\":[]}','{\"analysis\":{\"basic\":{\"metadescriptionLength\":{\"title\":\"Meta description length\",\"description\":\"The meta description is over 160 characters.\",\"score\":6,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"lengthContent\":{\"title\":\"Content Length\",\"description\":\"The content length is ok. Good job!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"isInternalLink\":{\"title\":\"Internal links\",\"description\":\"You are linking to other resources on your website which is great.\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"isExternalLink\":{\"title\":\"External links\",\"description\":\"Great! You are linking to external resources.\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"errors\":1},\"title\":{\"titleLength\":{\"title\":\"Title Length\",\"description\":\"Well done!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"errors\":0},\"readability\":{\"contentHasAssets\":{\"error\":0,\"title\":\"Images\\/Videos in content\",\"description\":\"Your content contains images and\\/or video(s).\",\"score\":5,\"maxScore\":5},\"paragraphLength\":{\"title\":\"Paragraphs Length\",\"description\":\"You are using short paragraphs.\",\"score\":5,\"maxScore\":5,\"error\":0},\"sentenceLength\":{\"title\":\"Sentences Length\",\"description\":\"36.4% of the sentences contain more than 20 words, which is more than the recommended maximum of 25%. Try to shorten the sentences.\",\"score\":3,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"passiveVoice\":{\"title\":\"Passive Voice\",\"description\":\"14.2% of the sentences contain passive voice, which is more than the recommended maximum of 10%. Try to use their active counterparts.\",\"score\":6,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"transitionWords\":{\"title\":\"Transition words\",\"description\":\"Well done!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"consecutiveSentences\":{\"title\":\"Consecutive sentences\",\"description\":\"There is enough variety in your sentences. That\'s great!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"subheadingsDistribution\":{\"title\":\"Subheading distribution\",\"description\":\"You are not using any subheadings, although your text is rather long. Try and add some subheadings.\",\"score\":2,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"calculateFleschReading\":{\"title\":\"Flesch Reading Ease\",\"description\":\"The copy scores 67.3 in the test, which is considered ok to read.\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"errors\":3}}}',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,'default','default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,'',NULL,NULL,'[]',0,'default','default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,89,'{\"blockGraphs\":[],\"customGraphs\":[],\"default\":{\"data\":{\"Article\":[],\"Course\":[],\"Dataset\":[],\"FAQPage\":[],\"Movie\":[],\"Person\":[],\"Product\":[],\"ProductReview\":[],\"Car\":[],\"Recipe\":[],\"Service\":[],\"SoftwareApplication\":[],\"WebPage\":[]},\"graphName\":\"\",\"isEnabled\":true},\"graphs\":[],\"defaultGraph\":\"Article\",\"defaultPostTypeGraph\":\"\"}','default','{\"article\":{\"articleType\":\"BlogPosting\"},\"course\":{\"name\":\"\",\"description\":\"\",\"provider\":\"\"},\"faq\":{\"pages\":[]},\"product\":{\"reviews\":[]},\"recipe\":{\"ingredients\":[],\"instructions\":[],\"keywords\":[]},\"software\":{\"reviews\":[],\"operatingSystems\":[]},\"webPage\":{\"webPageType\":\"WebPage\"}}',0,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,-1,-1,'large','[{\"image:loc\":\"\\/wp-content\\/uploads\\/2018\\/02\\/iStock-535339649.jpg\"}]','2025-06-26 03:46:19',NULL,'default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,0,'{\"linkFormat\":{\"internalLinkCount\":0,\"linkAssistantDismissed\":false},\"primaryTerm\":{\"productEducationDismissed\":false}}',NULL,'2020-12-25 17:22:09','2025-06-26 03:46:19',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL),
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(136,1937,'Tips for Buying A Suitcase | #site_title','I finally scrapped my beat-up 10-year-old carry-on and resigned myself to the airlines\' ban on smart luggage. With so many bags on the market to choose from, here are my 5 things to consider when buying a new suitcase.','[{\"label\":\"luggage\",\"value\":\"luggage\"},{\"label\":\"suitcase\",\"value\":\"suitcase\"},{\"label\":\"travel tips\",\"value\":\"travel tips\"},{\"label\":\"business travel\",\"value\":\"business travel\"}]','{\"focus\":[],\"additional\":[]}','{\"analysis\":{\"basic\":{\"metadescriptionLength\":{\"title\":\"Meta description length\",\"description\":\"The meta description is over 160 characters.\",\"score\":6,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"lengthContent\":{\"title\":\"Content Length\",\"description\":\"The content length is ok. Good job!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"isInternalLink\":{\"title\":\"Internal links\",\"description\":\"You are linking to other resources on your website which is great.\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"isExternalLink\":{\"title\":\"External links\",\"description\":\"Great! You are linking to external resources.\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"errors\":1},\"title\":{\"titleLength\":{\"title\":\"Title Length\",\"description\":\"Well done!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"errors\":0},\"readability\":{\"contentHasAssets\":{\"error\":0,\"title\":\"Images\\/Videos in content\",\"description\":\"Your content contains images and\\/or video(s).\",\"score\":5,\"maxScore\":5},\"paragraphLength\":{\"title\":\"Paragraphs Length\",\"description\":\"You are using short paragraphs.\",\"score\":5,\"maxScore\":5,\"error\":0},\"sentenceLength\":{\"title\":\"Sentences Length\",\"description\":\"Sentence length is looking great!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"passiveVoice\":{\"title\":\"Passive Voice\",\"description\":\"13.6% of the sentences contain passive voice, which is more than the recommended maximum of 10%. Try to use their active counterparts.\",\"score\":6,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"transitionWords\":{\"title\":\"Transition words\",\"description\":\"Well done!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"consecutiveSentences\":{\"title\":\"Consecutive sentences\",\"description\":\"The text contains 3 consecutive sentences starting with the same word. Try to mix things up!\",\"score\":3,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"subheadingsDistribution\":{\"title\":\"Subheading distribution\",\"description\":\"You are not using any subheadings, although your text is rather long. Try and add some subheadings.\",\"score\":2,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"calculateFleschReading\":{\"title\":\"Flesch Reading Ease\",\"description\":\"The copy scores 67.8 in the test, which is considered ok to read.\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"errors\":3}}}',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,'default','default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,'',NULL,NULL,'[]',0,'default','default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,89,'{\"blockGraphs\":[],\"customGraphs\":[],\"default\":{\"data\":{\"Article\":[],\"Course\":[],\"Dataset\":[],\"FAQPage\":[],\"Movie\":[],\"Person\":[],\"Product\":[],\"ProductReview\":[],\"Car\":[],\"Recipe\":[],\"Service\":[],\"SoftwareApplication\":[],\"WebPage\":[]},\"graphName\":\"\",\"isEnabled\":true},\"graphs\":[],\"defaultGraph\":\"Article\",\"defaultPostTypeGraph\":\"\"}','default','{\"article\":{\"articleType\":\"BlogPosting\"},\"course\":{\"name\":\"\",\"description\":\"\",\"provider\":\"\"},\"faq\":{\"pages\":[]},\"product\":{\"reviews\":[]},\"recipe\":{\"ingredients\":[],\"instructions\":[],\"keywords\":[]},\"software\":{\"reviews\":[],\"operatingSystems\":[]},\"webPage\":{\"webPageType\":\"WebPage\"}}',0,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,-1,-1,'large','[{\"image:loc\":\"\\/wp-content\\/uploads\\/2018\\/02\\/IMG_0091.jpg\"}]','2025-06-26 03:46:19',NULL,'default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,0,'{\"linkFormat\":{\"internalLinkCount\":0,\"linkAssistantDismissed\":false},\"primaryTerm\":{\"productEducationDismissed\":false}}',NULL,'2020-12-25 17:22:09','2025-06-26 03:46:19',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL),
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(138,1916,'New Year\'s Travel Status Tips; How to Shop for a Suitcase','Four weeks into the new year and 50% have already ditched New Year\'s resolutions, but there\'s still time to get 2018 travel status lined up. Over the holiday break, I bought a non-smart carry-on to replace my now-banned Bluesmart; I walk through my shopping criteria.','[{\"label\":\"Aircraft Boarding\",\"value\":\"Aircraft Boarding\"},{\"label\":\"American Airlines\",\"value\":\"American Airlines\"},{\"label\":\"Bluesmart\",\"value\":\"Bluesmart\"},{\"label\":\"British Airways\",\"value\":\"British Airways\"},{\"label\":\"Credit Cards\",\"value\":\"Credit Cards\"},{\"label\":\"Frequent Flyer Status\",\"value\":\"Frequent Flyer Status\"},{\"label\":\"Iberia Airlines\",\"value\":\"Iberia Airlines\"},{\"label\":\"luggage\",\"value\":\"luggage\"},{\"label\":\"travel tips\",\"value\":\"travel tips\"},{\"label\":\"TripIt\",\"value\":\"TripIt\"}]','{\"focus\":[],\"additional\":[]}','{\"analysis\":{\"basic\":{\"metadescriptionLength\":{\"title\":\"Meta description length\",\"description\":\"The meta description is over 160 characters.\",\"score\":6,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"lengthContent\":{\"title\":\"Content Length\",\"description\":\"The content length is ok. Good job!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"isInternalLink\":{\"title\":\"Internal links\",\"description\":\"You are linking to other resources on your website which is great.\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"isExternalLink\":{\"title\":\"External links\",\"description\":\"Great! You are linking to external resources.\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"errors\":1},\"title\":{\"titleLength\":{\"title\":\"Title Length\",\"description\":\"Well done!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"errors\":0},\"readability\":{\"contentHasAssets\":{\"error\":0,\"title\":\"Images\\/Videos in content\",\"description\":\"Your content contains images and\\/or video(s).\",\"score\":5,\"maxScore\":5},\"paragraphLength\":{\"title\":\"Paragraphs Length\",\"description\":\"You are using short paragraphs.\",\"score\":5,\"maxScore\":5,\"error\":0},\"sentenceLength\":{\"title\":\"Sentences Length\",\"description\":\"31.6% of the sentences contain more than 20 words, which is more than the recommended maximum of 25%. Try to shorten the sentences.\",\"score\":3,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"passiveVoice\":{\"title\":\"Passive Voice\",\"description\":\"You\'re using enough active voice. That\'s great!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"transitionWords\":{\"title\":\"Transition words\",\"description\":\"Well done!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"consecutiveSentences\":{\"title\":\"Consecutive sentences\",\"description\":\"There is enough variety in your sentences. That\'s great!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"subheadingsDistribution\":{\"title\":\"Subheading distribution\",\"description\":\"You are not using any subheadings, although your text is rather long. Try and add some subheadings.\",\"score\":2,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"calculateFleschReading\":{\"title\":\"Flesch Reading Ease\",\"description\":\"The copy scores 66 in the test, which is considered ok to read.\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"errors\":2}}}',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,'default','default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,'',NULL,NULL,'[]',0,'default','default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,90,'{\"blockGraphs\":[],\"customGraphs\":[],\"default\":{\"data\":{\"Article\":[],\"Course\":[],\"Dataset\":[],\"FAQPage\":[],\"Movie\":[],\"Person\":[],\"Product\":[],\"ProductReview\":[],\"Car\":[],\"Recipe\":[],\"Service\":[],\"SoftwareApplication\":[],\"WebPage\":[]},\"graphName\":\"\",\"isEnabled\":true},\"graphs\":[]}','default','{\"article\":{\"articleType\":\"BlogPosting\"},\"course\":{\"name\":\"\",\"description\":\"\",\"provider\":\"\"},\"faq\":{\"pages\":[]},\"product\":{\"reviews\":[]},\"recipe\":{\"ingredients\":[],\"instructions\":[],\"keywords\":[]},\"software\":{\"reviews\":[],\"operatingSystems\":[]},\"webPage\":{\"webPageType\":\"WebPage\"}}',0,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,-1,-1,'large','[{\"image:loc\":\"\\/wp-content\\/uploads\\/2018\\/01\\/IMG_20141210_231414.jpg\"}]','2025-06-26 03:46:19',NULL,'default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,0,'{\"linkFormat\":{\"internalLinkCount\":0,\"linkAssistantDismissed\":false},\"primaryTerm\":{\"productEducationDismissed\":false}}',NULL,'2020-12-25 17:22:09','2025-06-26 03:46:19',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL),
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(140,1905,'Looking Back at 2017 — The Highs and The Lows | #site_title','After clearing the mists of last night\'s New Year\'s Eve party, I thought about some of the highlights and lowlights of my travels in 2017','[{\"label\":\"Airports\",\"value\":\"Airports\"},{\"label\":\"Bluesmart\",\"value\":\"Bluesmart\"},{\"label\":\"Craft Beer\",\"value\":\"Craft Beer\"},{\"label\":\"Hertz\",\"value\":\"Hertz\"},{\"label\":\"Overtourism\",\"value\":\"Overtourism\"},{\"label\":\"ratings\",\"value\":\"ratings\"},{\"label\":\"smart luggage\",\"value\":\"smart luggage\"},{\"label\":\"Travel Trends\",\"value\":\"Travel Trends\"},{\"label\":\"Uber\",\"value\":\"Uber\"},{\"label\":\"United Airlines\",\"value\":\"United Airlines\"}]','{\"focus\":[],\"additional\":[]}','{\"analysis\":{\"basic\":{\"metadescriptionLength\":{\"title\":\"Meta description Length\",\"description\":\"Well done!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"lengthContent\":{\"title\":\"Content Length\",\"description\":\"The content length is ok. Good job!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"isInternalLink\":{\"title\":\"Internal links\",\"description\":\"You are linking to other resources on your website which is great.\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"isExternalLink\":{\"title\":\"External links\",\"description\":\"No outbound links were found. Link out to external resources.\",\"score\":3,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"errors\":1},\"title\":{\"titleLength\":{\"title\":\"SEO Title length\",\"description\":\"The title is over 60 characters.\",\"score\":6,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"errors\":1},\"readability\":{\"contentHasAssets\":{\"error\":0,\"title\":\"Images\\/Videos in content\",\"description\":\"Your content contains images and\\/or video(s).\",\"score\":5,\"maxScore\":5},\"paragraphLength\":{\"title\":\"Paragraphs Length\",\"description\":\"You are using short paragraphs.\",\"score\":5,\"maxScore\":5,\"error\":0},\"sentenceLength\":{\"title\":\"Sentences Length\",\"description\":\"59.4% of the sentences contain more than 20 words, which is more than the recommended maximum of 25%. Try to shorten the sentences.\",\"score\":3,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"passiveVoice\":{\"title\":\"Passive Voice\",\"description\":\"You\'re using enough active voice. That\'s great!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"transitionWords\":{\"title\":\"Transition words\",\"description\":\"Well done!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"consecutiveSentences\":{\"title\":\"Consecutive sentences\",\"description\":\"There is enough variety in your sentences. That\'s great!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"subheadingsDistribution\":{\"title\":\"Subheading distribution\",\"description\":\"You are not using any subheadings, although your text is rather long. Try and add some subheadings.\",\"score\":2,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"calculateFleschReading\":{\"title\":\"Flesch Reading Ease\",\"description\":\"The copy scores 53.9 in the test, which is considered fairly difficult to read. Try to make shorter sentences to improve readability.\",\"score\":6,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"errors\":3}}}',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,'default','default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,'',NULL,NULL,'[]',0,'default','default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,75,'{\"blockGraphs\":[],\"customGraphs\":[],\"default\":{\"data\":{\"Article\":[],\"Course\":[],\"Dataset\":[],\"FAQPage\":[],\"Movie\":[],\"Person\":[],\"Product\":[],\"ProductReview\":[],\"Car\":[],\"Recipe\":[],\"Service\":[],\"SoftwareApplication\":[],\"WebPage\":[]},\"graphName\":\"\",\"isEnabled\":true},\"graphs\":[]}','default','{\"article\":{\"articleType\":\"BlogPosting\"},\"course\":{\"name\":\"\",\"description\":\"\",\"provider\":\"\"},\"faq\":{\"pages\":[]},\"product\":{\"reviews\":[]},\"recipe\":{\"ingredients\":[],\"instructions\":[],\"keywords\":[]},\"software\":{\"reviews\":[],\"operatingSystems\":[]},\"webPage\":{\"webPageType\":\"WebPage\"}}',0,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,-1,-1,'large','[{\"image:loc\":\"\\/wp-content\\/uploads\\/2018\\/01\\/iStock-454294231.jpg\"}]','2025-06-26 03:46:19',NULL,'default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,0,'{\"linkFormat\":{\"internalLinkCount\":0,\"linkAssistantDismissed\":false},\"primaryTerm\":{\"productEducationDismissed\":false}}',NULL,'2020-12-25 17:22:09','2025-06-26 03:46:19',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL),
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(142,1894,'Is Cash A Waning King; Don’t Make It Hard to Cash in on Loyalty','Am I the last generation of cash payers; upcoming smart luggage ban; struggle to redeem British Airways Avios points; a new Uber driver story','[{\"label\":\"Travel Tips\",\"value\":\"Travel Tips\"},{\"label\":\"American Airlines\",\"value\":\"American Airlines\"},{\"label\":\"bingo\",\"value\":\"bingo\"},{\"label\":\"Bluesmart\",\"value\":\"Bluesmart\"},{\"label\":\"British Airways\",\"value\":\"British Airways\"},{\"label\":\"Cash\",\"value\":\"Cash\"},{\"label\":\"Credit Cards\",\"value\":\"Credit Cards\"},{\"label\":\"frequent flier programs\",\"value\":\"frequent flier programs\"},{\"label\":\"Iberia Airlines\",\"value\":\"Iberia Airlines\"},{\"label\":\"LaGuardia\",\"value\":\"LaGuardia\"},{\"label\":\"luggage\",\"value\":\"luggage\"},{\"label\":\"smart luggage\",\"value\":\"smart luggage\"},{\"label\":\"Uber\",\"value\":\"Uber\"}]','{\"focus\":[],\"additional\":[]}','{\"analysis\":{\"basic\":{\"metadescriptionLength\":{\"title\":\"Meta description Length\",\"description\":\"Well done!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"lengthContent\":{\"title\":\"Content Length\",\"description\":\"The content length is ok. Good job!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"isInternalLink\":{\"title\":\"Internal links\",\"description\":\"You are linking to other resources on your website which is great.\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"isExternalLink\":{\"title\":\"External links\",\"description\":\"Great! You are linking to external resources.\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"errors\":0},\"title\":{\"titleLength\":{\"title\":\"SEO Title length\",\"description\":\"The title is over 60 characters.\",\"score\":6,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"errors\":1},\"readability\":{\"contentHasAssets\":{\"error\":0,\"title\":\"Images\\/Videos in content\",\"description\":\"Your content contains images and\\/or video(s).\",\"score\":5,\"maxScore\":5},\"paragraphLength\":{\"title\":\"Paragraphs Length\",\"description\":\"You are using short paragraphs.\",\"score\":5,\"maxScore\":5,\"error\":0},\"sentenceLength\":{\"title\":\"Sentences Length\",\"description\":\"30.4% of the sentences contain more than 20 words, which is more than the recommended maximum of 25%. Try to shorten the sentences.\",\"score\":3,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"passiveVoice\":{\"title\":\"Passive Voice\",\"description\":\"You\'re using enough active voice. That\'s great!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"transitionWords\":{\"title\":\"Transition words\",\"description\":\"Well done!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"consecutiveSentences\":{\"title\":\"Consecutive sentences\",\"description\":\"The text contains 5 consecutive sentences starting with the same word. Try to mix things up!\",\"score\":3,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"subheadingsDistribution\":{\"title\":\"Subheading distribution\",\"description\":\"You are not using any subheadings, although your text is rather long. Try and add some subheadings.\",\"score\":2,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"calculateFleschReading\":{\"title\":\"Flesch Reading Ease\",\"description\":\"The copy scores 70.4 in the test, which is considered fairly easy to read.\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"errors\":3}}}',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,'default','default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,'',NULL,NULL,'[]',0,'default','default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,79,'{\"blockGraphs\":[],\"customGraphs\":[],\"default\":{\"data\":{\"Article\":[],\"Course\":[],\"Dataset\":[],\"FAQPage\":[],\"Movie\":[],\"Person\":[],\"Product\":[],\"ProductReview\":[],\"Car\":[],\"Recipe\":[],\"Service\":[],\"SoftwareApplication\":[],\"WebPage\":[]},\"graphName\":\"\",\"isEnabled\":true},\"graphs\":[],\"defaultGraph\":\"Article\",\"defaultPostTypeGraph\":\"\"}','default','{\"article\":{\"articleType\":\"BlogPosting\"},\"course\":{\"name\":\"\",\"description\":\"\",\"provider\":\"\"},\"faq\":{\"pages\":[]},\"product\":{\"reviews\":[]},\"recipe\":{\"ingredients\":[],\"instructions\":[],\"keywords\":[]},\"software\":{\"reviews\":[],\"operatingSystems\":[]},\"webPage\":{\"webPageType\":\"WebPage\"}}',0,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,-1,-1,'large','[{\"image:loc\":\"\\/wp-content\\/uploads\\/2017\\/12\\/iStock-502842002.jpg\"}]','2025-06-26 03:44:53',NULL,'default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,0,'{\"linkFormat\":{\"internalLinkCount\":0,\"linkAssistantDismissed\":false},\"primaryTerm\":{\"productEducationDismissed\":false}}',NULL,'2020-12-25 17:22:09','2025-06-26 03:44:53',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL),
(143,1885,'Holiday Airport Bingo | #site_title','I remember playing license plate and travel bingo as a kid. But with more families flying to Grandma\'s house, airport bingo seems a more on-target game.','[{\"label\":\"Airport bingo\",\"value\":\"Airport bingo\"},{\"label\":\"travel game\",\"value\":\"travel game\"},{\"label\":\"holiday travel\",\"value\":\"holiday travel\"}]','{\"focus\":[],\"additional\":[]}','{\"analysis\":{\"basic\":{\"metadescriptionLength\":{\"title\":\"Meta description Length\",\"description\":\"Well done!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"lengthContent\":{\"title\":\"Content Length\",\"description\":\"The content length is ok. Good job!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"isInternalLink\":{\"title\":\"Internal links\",\"description\":\"You are linking to other resources on your website which is great.\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"isExternalLink\":{\"title\":\"External links\",\"description\":\"Great! You are linking to external resources.\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"errors\":0},\"title\":{\"titleLength\":{\"title\":\"SEO Title length\",\"description\":\"The title is too short.\",\"score\":6,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"errors\":1},\"readability\":{\"contentHasAssets\":{\"error\":0,\"title\":\"Images\\/Videos in content\",\"description\":\"Your content contains images and\\/or video(s).\",\"score\":5,\"maxScore\":5},\"paragraphLength\":{\"title\":\"Paragraphs Length\",\"description\":\"You are using short paragraphs.\",\"score\":5,\"maxScore\":5,\"error\":0},\"sentenceLength\":{\"title\":\"Sentences Length\",\"description\":\"Sentence length is looking great!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"passiveVoice\":{\"title\":\"Passive Voice\",\"description\":\"You\'re using enough active voice. That\'s great!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"transitionWords\":{\"title\":\"Transition words\",\"description\":\"Only 23.1% of the sentences contain transition words, which is not enough. Use more of them.\",\"score\":6,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"consecutiveSentences\":{\"title\":\"Consecutive sentences\",\"description\":\"There is enough variety in your sentences. That\'s great!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"subheadingsDistribution\":{\"title\":\"Subheading distribution\",\"description\":\"You are not using any subheadings, although your text is rather long. Try and add some subheadings.\",\"score\":2,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"calculateFleschReading\":{\"title\":\"Flesch Reading Ease\",\"description\":\"The copy scores 73.8 in the test, which is considered fairly easy to read.\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"errors\":2}}}',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,'default','default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,'',NULL,NULL,'[]',0,'default','default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,83,'{\"blockGraphs\":[],\"customGraphs\":[],\"default\":{\"data\":{\"Article\":[],\"Course\":[],\"Dataset\":[],\"FAQPage\":[],\"Movie\":[],\"Person\":[],\"Product\":[],\"ProductReview\":[],\"Car\":[],\"Recipe\":[],\"Service\":[],\"SoftwareApplication\":[],\"WebPage\":[]},\"graphName\":\"\",\"isEnabled\":true},\"graphs\":[],\"defaultGraph\":\"Article\",\"defaultPostTypeGraph\":\"\"}','default','{\"article\":{\"articleType\":\"BlogPosting\"},\"course\":{\"name\":\"\",\"description\":\"\",\"provider\":\"\"},\"faq\":{\"pages\":[]},\"product\":{\"reviews\":[]},\"recipe\":{\"ingredients\":[],\"instructions\":[],\"keywords\":[]},\"software\":{\"reviews\":[],\"operatingSystems\":[]},\"webPage\":{\"webPageType\":\"WebPage\"}}',0,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,-1,-1,'large','[{\"image:loc\":\"\\/wp-content\\/uploads\\/2017\\/12\\/iStock-672260056.jpg\"}]','2025-06-26 03:44:53',NULL,'default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,0,'{\"linkFormat\":{\"internalLinkCount\":0,\"linkAssistantDismissed\":false},\"primaryTerm\":{\"productEducationDismissed\":false}}',NULL,'2020-12-25 17:22:09','2025-06-26 03:44:53',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL),
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(238,500,'Winter Travel Tips - Things to Remember When The Snow Starts | #site_title','Winter storms in the Northeast and the South shut down airports across the region. So it\'s a good time to recap travel tips from past episodes of TravelCommons.','[{\"label\":\"business travel\",\"value\":\"business travel\"},{\"label\":\"business airlines\",\"value\":\"business airlines\"},{\"label\":\"travel tips\",\"value\":\"travel tips\"},{\"label\":\"business travelers\",\"value\":\"business travelers\"},{\"label\":\"travel planning\",\"value\":\"travel planning\"},{\"label\":\"road warrior\",\"value\":\"road warrior\"},{\"label\":\"winter travel\",\"value\":\"winter travel\"},{\"label\":\"travel delays\",\"value\":\"travel delays\"},{\"label\":\"Travel Commons\",\"value\":\"Travel Commons\"},{\"label\":\"TravelCommons\",\"value\":\"TravelCommons\"}]','{\"focus\":[],\"additional\":[]}',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,'default','default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,0,'default','default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,62,'{\"blockGraphs\":[],\"customGraphs\":[],\"default\":{\"data\":{\"Article\":[],\"Course\":[],\"Dataset\":[],\"FAQPage\":[],\"Movie\":[],\"Person\":[],\"Product\":[],\"ProductReview\":[],\"Car\":[],\"Recipe\":[],\"Service\":[],\"SoftwareApplication\":[],\"WebPage\":[]},\"graphName\":\"\",\"isEnabled\":true},\"graphs\":[],\"defaultGraph\":\"\",\"defaultPostTypeGraph\":\"\"}',NULL,NULL,0,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,NULL,NULL,'large','[{\"image:loc\":\"\\/wp-content\\/uploads\\/2011\\/01\\/514658906_24223535241.jpg\"}]','2025-06-26 03:34:59',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,0,'{\"linkFormat\":{\"internalLinkCount\":0,\"linkAssistantDismissed\":false},\"primaryTerm\":{\"productEducationDismissed\":false},\"truSeo\":{\"highlightingEnabled\":null}}',NULL,'2020-12-25 17:23:15','2026-08-28 15:03:50',NULL,NULL,'{\"focus_keyword\":{\"score\":28,\"items\":{\"introductionKeyword\":{\"score\":3},\"keyphraseLength\":{\"score\":0},\"keyphraseDensity\":{\"score\":0},\"keyphraseDistribution\":{\"score\":1},\"metaDescriptionKeyword\":{\"score\":3},\"subheadingsKeyword\":{\"score\":1},\"textCompetingLinks\":{\"score\":9},\"imageKeyphrase\":{\"score\":3},\"keyphraseInSEOTitle\":{\"score\":2},\"slugKeyword\":{\"score\":3}}},\"general\":{\"introductionKeyword\":{\"score\":3},\"keyphraseLength\":{\"score\":0},\"keyphraseDensity\":{\"score\":0},\"metaDescriptionKeyword\":{\"score\":3},\"metaDescriptionLength\":{\"score\":9},\"subheadingsKeyword\":{\"score\":1},\"textCompetingLinks\":{\"score\":9},\"imageKeyphrase\":{\"score\":3},\"images\":{\"score\":9},\"textLength\":{\"score\":9},\"externalLinks\":{\"score\":9},\"keyphraseInSEOTitle\":{\"score\":2},\"internalLinks\":{\"score\":9},\"titleWidth\":{\"score\":3},\"slugKeyword\":{\"score\":3},\"singleH1\":{\"score\":9},\"imageAltTags\":{\"score\":9},\"keyphraseDistribution\":{\"score\":1},\"subheadingsTooLong\":{\"score\":2},\"textParagraphTooLong\":{\"score\":9},\"textSentenceLength\":{\"score\":3},\"textTransitionWords\":{\"score\":9},\"passiveVoice\":{\"score\":9},\"textPresence\":{\"score\":9},\"sentenceBeginnings\":{\"score\":9},\"wordComplexity\":{\"score\":9},\"spellingChecker\":{\"score\":3}}}',NULL,NULL),
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(240,554,'New Travel Goodies; Losing Elite Status | #site_title','Visited the 2011 Travel Goods show for a preview of new travel gadgets; growing WiFi congestion in hotels; different ways frequent traveler status is dropped','[{\"label\":\"business travel\",\"value\":\"business travel\"},{\"label\":\"business airlines\",\"value\":\"business airlines\"},{\"label\":\"travel tips\",\"value\":\"travel tips\"},{\"label\":\"suitcases\",\"value\":\"suitcases\"},{\"label\":\"business travelers\",\"value\":\"business travelers\"},{\"label\":\"travel planning\",\"value\":\"travel planning\"},{\"label\":\"road warrior\",\"value\":\"road warrior\"},{\"label\":\"TSA\",\"value\":\"TSA\"},{\"label\":\"full body scans\",\"value\":\"full body scans\"},{\"label\":\"travel technology\",\"value\":\"travel technology\"},{\"label\":\"Hotel WiFi\",\"value\":\"Hotel WiFi\"},{\"label\":\"Air France\",\"value\":\"Air France\"},{\"label\":\"Travel Commons\",\"value\":\"Travel Commons\"},{\"label\":\"TravelCommons\",\"value\":\"TravelCommons\"},{\"label\":\"United Airlines\",\"value\":\"United Airlines\"},{\"label\":\"Marriott\",\"value\":\"Marriott\"},{\"label\":\"frequent flyer status\",\"value\":\"frequent flyer status\"},{\"label\":\"elite status\",\"value\":\"elite status\"},{\"label\":\"travel trends\",\"value\":\"travel trends\"}]','{\"focus\":[],\"additional\":[]}','{\"analysis\":{\"basic\":{\"metadescriptionLength\":{\"title\":\"Meta description Length\",\"description\":\"Well done!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"lengthContent\":{\"title\":\"Content Length\",\"description\":\"The content length is ok. 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(243,605,'Video #2 – One City, Five Hours: Frankfurt | #site_title','I &quot;sprint toured&quot; Frankfurt using Hemispheres Magazine\'s &quot;One City, Five Hours: Frankfurt&quot; article during a 6-hour layover between Mumbai and Chicago.','[{\"label\":\"business travel\",\"value\":\"business travel\"},{\"label\":\"Frankfurt\",\"value\":\"Frankfurt\"},{\"label\":\"Germany\",\"value\":\"Germany\"},{\"label\":\"Quick Break\",\"value\":\"Quick Break\"},{\"label\":\"Europe\",\"value\":\"Europe\"},{\"label\":\"Layover\",\"value\":\"Layover\"},{\"label\":\"TravelCommons\",\"value\":\"TravelCommons\"},{\"label\":\"Travel Commons\",\"value\":\"Travel Commons\"}]','{\"focus\":[],\"additional\":[]}','{\"analysis\":{\"basic\":{\"metadescriptionLength\":{\"title\":\"Meta description Length\",\"description\":\"Well done!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"lengthContent\":{\"title\":\"Content Length\",\"description\":\"This is far below the recommended minimum of words.\",\"score\":-20,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"isInternalLink\":{\"title\":\"Internal links\",\"description\":\"We couldn\'t find any internal links in your content. Add internal links in your content.\",\"score\":3,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"isExternalLink\":{\"title\":\"External links\",\"description\":\"Great! You are linking to external resources.\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"errors\":2},\"title\":{\"titleLength\":{\"title\":\"Title Length\",\"description\":\"Well done!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"errors\":0},\"readability\":{\"contentHasAssets\":{\"error\":0,\"title\":\"Images\\/Videos in content\",\"description\":\"Your content contains images and\\/or video(s).\",\"score\":5,\"maxScore\":5},\"paragraphLength\":{\"title\":\"Paragraphs Length\",\"description\":\"You are using short paragraphs.\",\"score\":5,\"maxScore\":5,\"error\":0},\"sentenceLength\":{\"title\":\"Sentences Length\",\"description\":\"66.7% of the sentences contain more than 20 words, which is more than the recommended maximum of 25%. Try to shorten the sentences.\",\"score\":3,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"passiveVoice\":{\"title\":\"Passive Voice\",\"description\":\"You\'re using enough active voice. That\'s great!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"transitionWords\":{\"title\":\"Transition words\",\"description\":\"Well done!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"consecutiveSentences\":{\"title\":\"Consecutive sentences\",\"description\":\"There is enough variety in your sentences. That\'s great!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"subheadingsDistribution\":{\"title\":\"Subheading distribution\",\"description\":\"You are not using any subheadings, but your text is short enough and probably doesn\'t need them.\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"calculateFleschReading\":{\"title\":\"Flesch Reading Ease\",\"description\":\"The copy scores 54.4 in the test, which is considered fairly difficult to read. Try to make shorter sentences to improve readability.\",\"score\":6,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"errors\":2}}}',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,'default','default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,'',NULL,NULL,'[]',0,'default','default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,88,'{\"blockGraphs\":[],\"customGraphs\":[],\"default\":{\"data\":{\"Article\":[],\"Course\":[],\"Dataset\":[],\"FAQPage\":[],\"Movie\":[],\"Person\":[],\"Product\":[],\"ProductReview\":[],\"Car\":[],\"Recipe\":[],\"Service\":[],\"SoftwareApplication\":[],\"WebPage\":[]},\"graphName\":\"\",\"isEnabled\":true},\"graphs\":[],\"defaultGraph\":\"Article\",\"defaultPostTypeGraph\":\"\"}','default','{\"article\":{\"articleType\":\"BlogPosting\"},\"course\":{\"name\":\"\",\"description\":\"\",\"provider\":\"\"},\"faq\":{\"pages\":[]},\"product\":{\"reviews\":[]},\"recipe\":{\"ingredients\":[],\"instructions\":[],\"keywords\":[]},\"software\":{\"reviews\":[],\"operatingSystems\":[]},\"webPage\":{\"webPageType\":\"WebPage\"}}',0,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,-1,-1,'large','[{\"image:loc\":\"\\/wp-content\\/uploads\\/2011\\/05\\/hqdefault.jpg\"}]','2025-06-26 03:34:59',NULL,'default',NULL,NULL,NULL,'{\"businessInfo\":{\"name\":\"\",\"urls\":{\"website\":\"\",\"aboutPage\":\"\",\"contactPage\":\"\"},\"address\":{\"line1\":\"\",\"line2\":\"\",\"zip\":\"\",\"city\":\"\",\"state\":\"\",\"country\":\"\"},\"contact\":{\"email\":\"\",\"phone\":\"\",\"fax\":\"\"},\"ids\":{\"vatID\":\"\",\"taxID\":\"\",\"chamberID\":\"\"},\"payment\":{\"priceIndication\":\"\",\"currenciesAccepted\":\"\",\"methodsAccepted\":\"\"},\"areaServed\":\"\"},\"openingHours\":{\"show\":false,\"closedLabel\":\"\",\"open24h\":false,\"open24hLabel\":\"\",\"open247\":false,\"use24hFormat\":false,\"twoSets\":false,\"timezone\":\"\",\"hours\":[]}}',NULL,0,'{\"linkFormat\":{\"internalLinkCount\":0,\"linkAssistantDismissed\":false},\"primaryTerm\":{\"productEducationDismissed\":false}}',NULL,'2020-12-25 17:23:15','2025-06-26 03:34:59',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL),
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(245,755,'More Comfortable in India; Tipping To Android? | #site_title','Lots of business travel this month. Comparing business class seats. Adjusting for jetlag on Asian flights. iPhone international data usage. Enjoyed traveling in India this time. Comparing new Samsung Android &quot;Honeycomb&quot; tablet to iPad2.','[{\"label\":\"business travel\",\"value\":\"business travel\"},{\"label\":\"business airlines\",\"value\":\"business airlines\"},{\"label\":\"travel tips\",\"value\":\"travel tips\"},{\"label\":\"international business class\",\"value\":\"international business class\"},{\"label\":\"business travelers\",\"value\":\"business travelers\"},{\"label\":\"travel planning\",\"value\":\"travel planning\"},{\"label\":\"road warrior\",\"value\":\"road warrior\"},{\"label\":\"Travel Commons\",\"value\":\"Travel Commons\"},{\"label\":\"TravelCommons\",\"value\":\"TravelCommons\"},{\"label\":\"India\",\"value\":\"India\"},{\"label\":\"Mumbai\",\"value\":\"Mumbai\"},{\"label\":\"iPad\",\"value\":\"iPad\"},{\"label\":\"Android\",\"value\":\"Android\"},{\"label\":\"Samsung\",\"value\":\"Samsung\"},{\"label\":\"Verizon\",\"value\":\"Verizon\"},{\"label\":\"iPhone\",\"value\":\"iPhone\"},{\"label\":\"jetlag\",\"value\":\"jetlag\"},{\"label\":\"international cellular data\",\"value\":\"international cellular data\"}]','{\"focus\":[],\"additional\":[]}','{\"analysis\":{\"basic\":{\"lengthContent\":{\"error\":1,\"maxScore\":9,\"score\":6,\"title\":\"Content\",\"description\":\"Please add some content first.\"}},\"title\":{\"titleLength\":{\"error\":1,\"maxScore\":9,\"score\":1,\"title\":\"Title\",\"description\":\"Please add a title first.\"}},\"readability\":{\"contentHasAssets\":{\"error\":1,\"maxScore\":5,\"score\":0,\"title\":\"Images\\/Videos in content\",\"description\":\"Please add some content first.\"}}}}',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,'default','default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,'',NULL,NULL,'[]',0,'default','default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,0,'{\"blockGraphs\":[],\"customGraphs\":[],\"default\":{\"data\":{\"Article\":[],\"Course\":[],\"Dataset\":[],\"FAQPage\":[],\"Movie\":[],\"Person\":[],\"Product\":[],\"ProductReview\":[],\"Car\":[],\"Recipe\":[],\"Service\":[],\"SoftwareApplication\":[],\"WebPage\":[]},\"graphName\":\"\",\"isEnabled\":true},\"graphs\":[],\"defaultGraph\":\"Article\",\"defaultPostTypeGraph\":\"\"}','default','{\"article\":{\"articleType\":\"BlogPosting\"},\"course\":{\"name\":\"\",\"description\":\"\",\"provider\":\"\"},\"faq\":{\"pages\":[]},\"product\":{\"reviews\":[]},\"recipe\":{\"ingredients\":[],\"instructions\":[],\"keywords\":[]},\"software\":{\"reviews\":[],\"operatingSystems\":[]},\"webPage\":{\"webPageType\":\"WebPage\"}}',0,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,-1,-1,'large','[{\"image:loc\":\"\\/wp-content\\/uploads\\/2011\\/05\\/IMG_01371-e13062031715791.jpg\"}]','2025-06-26 03:34:59',NULL,'default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,0,'{\"linkFormat\":{\"internalLinkCount\":0,\"linkAssistantDismissed\":false},\"primaryTerm\":{\"productEducationDismissed\":false}}',NULL,'2020-12-25 17:23:15','2025-06-26 03:34:59',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL),
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(248,811,'Apple iPad 2 vs. Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1: Hands-On Impression','Real-world comparison of Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 to Apple iPad 2; two months of travel, including a real pressure test -- two weeks in the UK without a laptop.','[{\"label\":\"Apple\",\"value\":\"Apple\"},{\"label\":\"iPad\",\"value\":\"iPad\"},{\"label\":\"Samsung\",\"value\":\"Samsung\"},{\"label\":\"Galaxy Tab\",\"value\":\"Galaxy Tab\"},{\"label\":\"tablet\",\"value\":\"tablet\"},{\"label\":\"Android\",\"value\":\"Android\"},{\"label\":\"travel tips\",\"value\":\"travel tips\"},{\"label\":\"travel technology\",\"value\":\"travel technology\"},{\"label\":\"business travel\",\"value\":\"business travel\"}]','{\"focus\":[],\"additional\":[]}','{\"analysis\":{\"basic\":{\"metadescriptionLength\":{\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"lengthContent\":{\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"isInternalLink\":{\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"isExternalLink\":{\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"errors\":0},\"title\":{\"titleLength\":{\"score\":6,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"errors\":1},\"readability\":{\"contentHasAssets\":{\"error\":0,\"score\":5,\"maxScore\":5},\"paragraphLength\":{\"score\":0,\"maxScore\":5,\"error\":1},\"sentenceLength\":{\"score\":3,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"passiveVoice\":{\"score\":6,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"transitionWords\":{\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"consecutiveSentences\":{\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"subheadingsDistribution\":{\"score\":2,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"calculateFleschReading\":{\"score\":6,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"errors\":5}}}',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,'default','default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,'',NULL,NULL,NULL,0,'default','default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,76,'{\"blockGraphs\":[],\"customGraphs\":[],\"default\":{\"data\":{\"Article\":[],\"Course\":[],\"Dataset\":[],\"FAQPage\":[],\"Movie\":[],\"Person\":[],\"Product\":[],\"Recipe\":[],\"Service\":[],\"SoftwareApplication\":[],\"WebPage\":[]},\"graphName\":\"\",\"isEnabled\":true},\"graphs\":[],\"defaultGraph\":\"Article\",\"defaultPostTypeGraph\":\"\"}','default','{\"article\":{\"articleType\":\"BlogPosting\"},\"course\":{\"name\":\"\",\"description\":\"\",\"provider\":\"\"},\"faq\":{\"pages\":[]},\"product\":{\"reviews\":[]},\"recipe\":{\"ingredients\":[],\"instructions\":[],\"keywords\":[]},\"software\":{\"reviews\":[],\"operatingSystems\":[]},\"webPage\":{\"webPageType\":\"WebPage\"}}',0,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,-1,-1,'large','[{\"image:loc\":\"https:\\/\\/migrate.travelcommons.com\\/wp-content\\/uploads\\/2011\\/08\\/ipad-galaxy1.jpg\",\"image:title\":\"ipad-galaxy\",\"image:caption\":\"Tablet Wars\"},{\"image:loc\":\"http:\\/\\/img.zemanta.com\\/pixy.gif\"},{\"image:loc\":\"https:\\/\\/migrate.travelcommons.com\\/wp-content\\/uploads\\/2011\\/08\\/ipad-galaxy1.jpg\",\"image:title\":\"ipad-galaxy\",\"image:caption\":\"Tablet Wars\"}]',NULL,NULL,'default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,0,'{\"linkFormat\":{\"internalLinkCount\":0,\"linkAssistantDismissed\":false},\"primaryTerm\":{\"productEducationDismissed\":false}}',NULL,'2020-12-25 17:23:15','2024-06-02 15:32:10',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL),
(249,825,'Travel Stories from September 11th; Traveling with a Google Chromebook','Travelers trying to get home when planes were grounded and US borders were closed after 9/11 attacks. Hands-on review of Samsung Chromebook','[{\"label\":\"business travel\",\"value\":\"business travel\"},{\"label\":\"business airlines\",\"value\":\"business airlines\"},{\"label\":\"travel tips\",\"value\":\"travel tips\"},{\"label\":\"business travelers\",\"value\":\"business travelers\"},{\"label\":\"travel planning\",\"value\":\"travel planning\"},{\"label\":\"road warrior\",\"value\":\"road warrior\"},{\"label\":\"Travel Commons\",\"value\":\"Travel Commons\"},{\"label\":\"TravelCommons\",\"value\":\"TravelCommons\"},{\"label\":\"Samsung\",\"value\":\"Samsung\"},{\"label\":\"Chromebook\",\"value\":\"Chromebook\"},{\"label\":\"Chrome OS\",\"value\":\"Chrome OS\"},{\"label\":\"September 11\",\"value\":\"September 11\"},{\"label\":\"travel stories\",\"value\":\"travel stories\"}]','{\"focus\":[],\"additional\":[]}','{\"analysis\":{\"basic\":{\"metadescriptionLength\":{\"title\":\"Meta description Length\",\"description\":\"Well done!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"lengthContent\":{\"title\":\"Content Length\",\"description\":\"This is far below the recommended minimum of words.\",\"score\":-10,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"isInternalLink\":{\"title\":\"Internal links\",\"description\":\"You are linking to other resources on your website which is great.\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"isExternalLink\":{\"title\":\"External links\",\"description\":\"No outbound links were found. Link out to external resources.\",\"score\":3,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"errors\":2},\"title\":{\"titleLength\":{\"title\":\"SEO Title length\",\"description\":\"The title is over 60 characters.\",\"score\":6,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"errors\":1},\"readability\":{\"contentHasAssets\":{\"error\":0,\"title\":\"Images\\/Videos in content\",\"description\":\"Your content contains images and\\/or video(s).\",\"score\":5,\"maxScore\":5},\"paragraphLength\":{\"title\":\"Paragraphs Length\",\"description\":\"You are using short paragraphs.\",\"score\":5,\"maxScore\":5,\"error\":0},\"sentenceLength\":{\"title\":\"Sentences Length\",\"description\":\"80% of the sentences contain more than 20 words, which is more than the recommended maximum of 25%. Try to shorten the sentences.\",\"score\":3,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"passiveVoice\":{\"title\":\"Passive Voice\",\"description\":\"20% of the sentences contain passive voice, which is more than the recommended maximum of 10%. Try to use their active counterparts.\",\"score\":3,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"transitionWords\":{\"title\":\"Transition words\",\"description\":\"Well done!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"consecutiveSentences\":{\"title\":\"Consecutive sentences\",\"description\":\"There is enough variety in your sentences. That\'s great!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"subheadingsDistribution\":{\"title\":\"Subheading distribution\",\"description\":\"You are not using any subheadings, but your text is short enough and probably doesn\'t need them.\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"calculateFleschReading\":{\"title\":\"Flesch Reading Ease\",\"description\":\"The copy scores 44.9 in the test, which is considered difficult to read. Try to make shorter sentences, using less difficult words to improve readability.\",\"score\":3,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"errors\":3}}}',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,'default','default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,'',NULL,NULL,'[]',0,'default','default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,72,'{\"blockGraphs\":[],\"customGraphs\":[],\"default\":{\"data\":{\"Article\":[],\"Course\":[],\"Dataset\":[],\"FAQPage\":[],\"Movie\":[],\"Person\":[],\"Product\":[],\"ProductReview\":[],\"Car\":[],\"Recipe\":[],\"Service\":[],\"SoftwareApplication\":[],\"WebPage\":[]},\"graphName\":\"\",\"isEnabled\":true},\"graphs\":[],\"defaultGraph\":\"Article\",\"defaultPostTypeGraph\":\"\"}','default','{\"article\":{\"articleType\":\"BlogPosting\"},\"course\":{\"name\":\"\",\"description\":\"\",\"provider\":\"\"},\"faq\":{\"pages\":[]},\"product\":{\"reviews\":[]},\"recipe\":{\"ingredients\":[],\"instructions\":[],\"keywords\":[]},\"software\":{\"reviews\":[],\"operatingSystems\":[]},\"webPage\":{\"webPageType\":\"WebPage\"}}',0,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,-1,-1,'large','[{\"image:loc\":\"\\/wp-content\\/uploads\\/2011\\/09\\/071.jpg\"},{\"image:loc\":\"\\/wp-content\\/uploads\\/2011\\/09\\/071.jpg\"}]','2025-06-26 03:36:20',NULL,'default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,0,'{\"linkFormat\":{\"internalLinkCount\":0,\"linkAssistantDismissed\":false},\"primaryTerm\":{\"productEducationDismissed\":false}}',NULL,'2020-12-25 17:23:15','2025-06-26 03:36:20',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL),
(250,832,'Plane Conversation Etiquette; Decline of Hot Flight Attendants','Sitting next to a huge guy on a prop plane got me thinking about how to deal with row mates &quot;of size&quot; and those who like to chat. The Global Entry program saved me from a huge line at ORD. And we ask &quot;What\'s happened to all the hot flight attendants?&quot;','[{\"label\":\"business travel\",\"value\":\"business travel\"},{\"label\":\"business airlines\",\"value\":\"business airlines\"},{\"label\":\"travel tips\",\"value\":\"travel tips\"},{\"label\":\"business travelers\",\"value\":\"business travelers\"},{\"label\":\"travel planning\",\"value\":\"travel planning\"},{\"label\":\"road warrior\",\"value\":\"road warrior\"},{\"label\":\"travel stories\",\"value\":\"travel stories\"},{\"label\":\"Travel Commons\",\"value\":\"Travel Commons\"},{\"label\":\"TravelCommons\",\"value\":\"TravelCommons\"},{\"label\":\"Global Entry\",\"value\":\"Global Entry\"},{\"label\":\"flight attendants\",\"value\":\"flight attendants\"},{\"label\":\"fat passengers\",\"value\":\"fat passengers\"},{\"label\":\"TSA\",\"value\":\"TSA\"}]','{\"focus\":[],\"additional\":[]}','{\"analysis\":{\"basic\":{\"metadescriptionLength\":{\"title\":\"Meta description length\",\"description\":\"The meta description is over 160 characters.\",\"score\":6,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"lengthContent\":{\"title\":\"Content Length\",\"description\":\"The content length is ok. Good job!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"isInternalLink\":{\"title\":\"Internal links\",\"description\":\"You are linking to other resources on your website which is great.\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"isExternalLink\":{\"title\":\"External links\",\"description\":\"Great! You are linking to external resources.\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"errors\":1},\"title\":{\"titleLength\":{\"title\":\"SEO Title length\",\"description\":\"The title is over 60 characters.\",\"score\":6,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"errors\":1},\"readability\":{\"contentHasAssets\":{\"error\":0,\"title\":\"Images\\/Videos in content\",\"description\":\"Your content contains images and\\/or video(s).\",\"score\":5,\"maxScore\":5},\"paragraphLength\":{\"title\":\"Paragraphs Length\",\"description\":\"At least one paragraph is long. Consider using short paragraphs.\",\"score\":0,\"maxScore\":5,\"error\":1},\"sentenceLength\":{\"title\":\"Sentences Length\",\"description\":\"36.8% of the sentences contain more than 20 words, which is more than the recommended maximum of 25%. Try to shorten the sentences.\",\"score\":3,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"passiveVoice\":{\"title\":\"Passive Voice\",\"description\":\"13.5% of the sentences contain passive voice, which is more than the recommended maximum of 10%. Try to use their active counterparts.\",\"score\":6,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"transitionWords\":{\"title\":\"Transition words\",\"description\":\"Well done!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"consecutiveSentences\":{\"title\":\"Consecutive sentences\",\"description\":\"There is enough variety in your sentences. That\'s great!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"subheadingsDistribution\":{\"title\":\"Subheading distribution\",\"description\":\"You are not using any subheadings, although your text is rather long. Try and add some subheadings.\",\"score\":2,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"calculateFleschReading\":{\"title\":\"Flesch Reading Ease\",\"description\":\"The copy scores 69.1 in the test, which is considered ok to read.\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"errors\":4}}}',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,'default','default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,'',NULL,NULL,'[]',0,'default','default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,75,'{\"blockGraphs\":[],\"customGraphs\":[],\"default\":{\"data\":{\"Article\":[],\"Course\":[],\"Dataset\":[],\"FAQPage\":[],\"Movie\":[],\"Person\":[],\"Product\":[],\"ProductReview\":[],\"Car\":[],\"Recipe\":[],\"Service\":[],\"SoftwareApplication\":[],\"WebPage\":[]},\"graphName\":\"\",\"isEnabled\":true},\"graphs\":[],\"defaultGraph\":\"Article\",\"defaultPostTypeGraph\":\"\"}','default','{\"article\":{\"articleType\":\"BlogPosting\"},\"course\":{\"name\":\"\",\"description\":\"\",\"provider\":\"\"},\"faq\":{\"pages\":[]},\"product\":{\"reviews\":[]},\"recipe\":{\"ingredients\":[],\"instructions\":[],\"keywords\":[]},\"software\":{\"reviews\":[],\"operatingSystems\":[]},\"webPage\":{\"webPageType\":\"WebPage\"}}',0,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,-1,-1,'large','[{\"image:loc\":\"\\/wp-content\\/uploads\\/2011\\/10\\/4275897174_f7c83887ab_z11-312x510.jpg\"},{\"image:loc\":\"\\/wp-content\\/uploads\\/2011\\/10\\/4275897174_f7c83887ab_z11.jpg\"}]','2025-06-26 03:36:20',NULL,'default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,0,'{\"linkFormat\":{\"internalLinkCount\":0,\"linkAssistantDismissed\":false},\"primaryTerm\":{\"productEducationDismissed\":false}}',NULL,'2020-12-25 17:23:15','2025-06-26 03:36:20',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL),
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(275,1666,'Uber Driver Stories; Overseas for the Election','Back from Tuscany avoiding the noise of the US presidential election. I ask Uber drivers for their life stories and talk about using Bluetooth in rental cars.','[{\"label\":\"business travel\",\"value\":\"business travel\"},{\"label\":\"travel podcast\",\"value\":\"travel podcast\"},{\"label\":\"travel stories\",\"value\":\"travel stories\"},{\"label\":\"Italy\",\"value\":\"Italy\"},{\"label\":\"Tuscany\",\"value\":\"Tuscany\"},{\"label\":\"Bluetooth\",\"value\":\"Bluetooth\"},{\"label\":\"Car Rental\",\"value\":\"Car Rental\"},{\"label\":\"Revolut\",\"value\":\"Revolut\"},{\"label\":\"Global Entry\",\"value\":\"Global Entry\"},{\"label\":\"Elections\",\"value\":\"Elections\"},{\"label\":\"Uber\",\"value\":\"Uber\"},{\"label\":\"Lyft\",\"value\":\"Lyft\"}]','{\"focus\":[],\"additional\":[]}','{\"analysis\":{\"basic\":{\"metadescriptionLength\":{\"title\":\"Meta description Length\",\"description\":\"Well done!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"lengthContent\":{\"title\":\"Content Length\",\"description\":\"The content length is ok. Good job!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"isInternalLink\":{\"title\":\"Internal links\",\"description\":\"You are linking to other resources on your website which is great.\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"isExternalLink\":{\"title\":\"External links\",\"description\":\"Great! You are linking to external resources.\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"errors\":0},\"title\":{\"titleLength\":{\"title\":\"Title Length\",\"description\":\"Well done!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"errors\":0},\"readability\":{\"contentHasAssets\":{\"error\":0,\"title\":\"Images\\/Videos in content\",\"description\":\"Your content contains images and\\/or video(s).\",\"score\":5,\"maxScore\":5},\"paragraphLength\":{\"title\":\"Paragraphs Length\",\"description\":\"You are using short paragraphs.\",\"score\":5,\"maxScore\":5,\"error\":0},\"sentenceLength\":{\"title\":\"Sentences Length\",\"description\":\"27.4% of the sentences contain more than 20 words, which is more than the recommended maximum of 25%. Try to shorten the sentences.\",\"score\":6,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"passiveVoice\":{\"title\":\"Passive Voice\",\"description\":\"11.1% of the sentences contain passive voice, which is more than the recommended maximum of 10%. Try to use their active counterparts.\",\"score\":6,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"transitionWords\":{\"title\":\"Transition words\",\"description\":\"Well done!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"consecutiveSentences\":{\"title\":\"Consecutive sentences\",\"description\":\"The text contains 4 consecutive sentences starting with the same word. Try to mix things up!\",\"score\":3,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"subheadingsDistribution\":{\"title\":\"Subheading distribution\",\"description\":\"You are not using any subheadings, although your text is rather long. Try and add some subheadings.\",\"score\":2,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"calculateFleschReading\":{\"title\":\"Flesch Reading Ease\",\"description\":\"The copy scores 70.7 in the test, which is considered fairly easy to read.\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"errors\":4}}}',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,'default','default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,'',NULL,NULL,'[]',0,'default','default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,90,'{\"blockGraphs\":[],\"customGraphs\":[],\"default\":{\"data\":{\"Article\":[],\"Course\":[],\"Dataset\":[],\"FAQPage\":[],\"Movie\":[],\"Person\":[],\"Product\":[],\"ProductReview\":[],\"Car\":[],\"Recipe\":[],\"Service\":[],\"SoftwareApplication\":[],\"WebPage\":[]},\"graphName\":\"\",\"isEnabled\":true},\"graphs\":[],\"defaultGraph\":\"\",\"defaultPostTypeGraph\":\"\"}','none','{\"article\":{\"articleType\":\"BlogPosting\"},\"course\":{\"name\":\"\",\"description\":\"\",\"provider\":\"\"},\"faq\":{\"pages\":[]},\"product\":{\"reviews\":[]},\"recipe\":{\"ingredients\":[],\"instructions\":[],\"keywords\":[]},\"software\":{\"reviews\":[],\"operatingSystems\":[]},\"webPage\":{\"webPageType\":\"WebPage\"},\"book\":[],\"event\":[],\"jobPosting\":[],\"music\":[],\"person\":[],\"restaurant\":[],\"service\":[],\"video\":[]}',0,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,-1,-1,'large','[{\"image:loc\":\"\\/wp-content\\/uploads\\/2016\\/11\\/IMG_0201.jpg\"}]','2025-06-26 03:40:39',NULL,'default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,0,'{\"linkFormat\":{\"internalLinkCount\":0,\"linkAssistantDismissed\":false},\"primaryTerm\":{\"productEducationDismissed\":false}}',NULL,'2020-12-25 17:23:15','2025-06-26 03:40:39',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL),
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(277,1658,'Craft Beer Hunting; I Hate Rick Steves | #site_title','My son and I talk about hunting down craft beers; a few &quot;a-ha&quot; moments from a trip to Scotland; Bitch tweeting; Why I hate the Rick Steves travel juggernaut.','[{\"label\":\"business travel\",\"value\":\"business travel\"},{\"label\":\"travel podcast\",\"value\":\"travel podcast\"},{\"label\":\"travel tips\",\"value\":\"travel tips\"},{\"label\":\"Scotland\",\"value\":\"Scotland\"},{\"label\":\"Coffee\",\"value\":\"Coffee\"},{\"label\":\"VPN\",\"value\":\"VPN\"},{\"label\":\"Craft Beer\",\"value\":\"Craft Beer\"},{\"label\":\"Travel Guides\",\"value\":\"Travel Guides\"},{\"label\":\"Rick Steves\",\"value\":\"Rick Steves\"}]','{\"focus\":[],\"additional\":[]}','{\"analysis\":{\"basic\":{\"metadescriptionLength\":{\"title\":\"Meta description Length\",\"description\":\"Well done!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"lengthContent\":{\"title\":\"Content Length\",\"description\":\"The content length is ok. Good job!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"isInternalLink\":{\"title\":\"Internal links\",\"description\":\"You are linking to other resources on your website which is great.\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"isExternalLink\":{\"title\":\"External links\",\"description\":\"Great! You are linking to external resources.\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"errors\":0},\"title\":{\"titleLength\":{\"title\":\"Title Length\",\"description\":\"Well done!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"errors\":0},\"readability\":{\"contentHasAssets\":{\"error\":0,\"title\":\"Images\\/Videos in content\",\"description\":\"Your content contains images and\\/or video(s).\",\"score\":5,\"maxScore\":5},\"paragraphLength\":{\"title\":\"Paragraphs Length\",\"description\":\"You are using short paragraphs.\",\"score\":5,\"maxScore\":5,\"error\":0},\"sentenceLength\":{\"title\":\"Sentences Length\",\"description\":\"33.5% of the sentences contain more than 20 words, which is more than the recommended maximum of 25%. Try to shorten the sentences.\",\"score\":3,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"passiveVoice\":{\"title\":\"Passive Voice\",\"description\":\"13.5% of the sentences contain passive voice, which is more than the recommended maximum of 10%. Try to use their active counterparts.\",\"score\":6,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"transitionWords\":{\"title\":\"Transition words\",\"description\":\"Well done!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"consecutiveSentences\":{\"title\":\"Consecutive sentences\",\"description\":\"There is enough variety in your sentences. That\'s great!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"subheadingsDistribution\":{\"title\":\"Subheading distribution\",\"description\":\"You are not using any subheadings, although your text is rather long. Try and add some subheadings.\",\"score\":2,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"calculateFleschReading\":{\"title\":\"Flesch Reading Ease\",\"description\":\"The copy scores 69.6 in the test, which is considered ok to read.\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"errors\":3}}}',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,'default','default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,'',NULL,NULL,'[]',0,'default','default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,91,'{\"blockGraphs\":[],\"customGraphs\":[],\"default\":{\"data\":{\"Article\":[],\"Course\":[],\"Dataset\":[],\"FAQPage\":[],\"Movie\":[],\"Person\":[],\"Product\":[],\"ProductReview\":[],\"Car\":[],\"Recipe\":[],\"Service\":[],\"SoftwareApplication\":[],\"WebPage\":[]},\"graphName\":\"\",\"isEnabled\":true},\"graphs\":[],\"defaultGraph\":\"Article\",\"defaultPostTypeGraph\":\"\"}','default','{\"article\":{\"articleType\":\"BlogPosting\"},\"course\":{\"name\":\"\",\"description\":\"\",\"provider\":\"\"},\"faq\":{\"pages\":[]},\"product\":{\"reviews\":[]},\"recipe\":{\"ingredients\":[],\"instructions\":[],\"keywords\":[]},\"software\":{\"reviews\":[],\"operatingSystems\":[]},\"webPage\":{\"webPageType\":\"WebPage\"}}',0,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,-1,-1,'large','[{\"image:loc\":\"\\/wp-content\\/uploads\\/2016\\/09\\/5777D166-DB5F-4FAF-A0D5-84AC87F58834.jpg\"}]','2025-06-26 03:40:39',NULL,'default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,0,'{\"linkFormat\":{\"internalLinkCount\":0,\"linkAssistantDismissed\":false},\"primaryTerm\":{\"productEducationDismissed\":false}}',NULL,'2020-12-25 17:23:15','2025-06-26 03:40:39',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL),
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(279,1644,'How to Avoid Travel Delays | #site_title','Airline system outages and thunderstorms; travel delays are part of this month\'s travel experience. How can you avoid delays, or at least minimize their impact.','[{\"label\":\"business travel\",\"value\":\"business travel\"},{\"label\":\"travel podcast\",\"value\":\"travel podcast\"},{\"label\":\"travel tips\",\"value\":\"travel tips\"},{\"label\":\"Travel Delays\",\"value\":\"Travel Delays\"},{\"label\":\"Marriott\",\"value\":\"Marriott\"},{\"label\":\"Hertz\",\"value\":\"Hertz\"},{\"label\":\"Security\",\"value\":\"Security\"},{\"label\":\"Washington Dulles\",\"value\":\"Washington Dulles\"},{\"label\":\"Middle Seat\",\"value\":\"Middle Seat\"}]','{\"focus\":[],\"additional\":[]}','{\"analysis\":{\"basic\":{\"metadescriptionLength\":{\"title\":\"Meta description Length\",\"description\":\"Well done!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"lengthContent\":{\"title\":\"Content Length\",\"description\":\"The content length is ok. Good job!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"isInternalLink\":{\"title\":\"Internal links\",\"description\":\"You are linking to other resources on your website which is great.\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"isExternalLink\":{\"title\":\"External links\",\"description\":\"Great! You are linking to external resources.\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"errors\":0},\"title\":{\"titleLength\":{\"title\":\"Title Length\",\"description\":\"Well done!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"errors\":0},\"readability\":{\"contentHasAssets\":{\"error\":0,\"title\":\"Images\\/Videos in content\",\"description\":\"Your content contains images and\\/or video(s).\",\"score\":5,\"maxScore\":5},\"paragraphLength\":{\"title\":\"Paragraphs Length\",\"description\":\"You are using short paragraphs.\",\"score\":5,\"maxScore\":5,\"error\":0},\"sentenceLength\":{\"title\":\"Sentences Length\",\"description\":\"29.8% of the sentences contain more than 20 words, which is more than the recommended maximum of 25%. Try to shorten the sentences.\",\"score\":6,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"passiveVoice\":{\"title\":\"Passive Voice\",\"description\":\"17.8% of the sentences contain passive voice, which is more than the recommended maximum of 10%. Try to use their active counterparts.\",\"score\":3,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"transitionWords\":{\"title\":\"Transition words\",\"description\":\"Well done!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"consecutiveSentences\":{\"title\":\"Consecutive sentences\",\"description\":\"The text contains 3 consecutive sentences starting with the same word. Try to mix things up!\",\"score\":3,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"subheadingsDistribution\":{\"title\":\"Subheading distribution\",\"description\":\"You are not using any subheadings, although your text is rather long. Try and add some subheadings.\",\"score\":2,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"calculateFleschReading\":{\"title\":\"Flesch Reading Ease\",\"description\":\"The copy scores 69.3 in the test, which is considered ok to read.\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"errors\":4}}}',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,'default','default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,'',NULL,NULL,'[]',0,'default','default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,88,'{\"blockGraphs\":[],\"customGraphs\":[],\"default\":{\"data\":{\"Article\":[],\"Course\":[],\"Dataset\":[],\"FAQPage\":[],\"Movie\":[],\"Person\":[],\"Product\":[],\"ProductReview\":[],\"Car\":[],\"Recipe\":[],\"Service\":[],\"SoftwareApplication\":[],\"WebPage\":[]},\"graphName\":\"\",\"isEnabled\":true},\"graphs\":[]}','default','{\"article\":{\"articleType\":\"BlogPosting\"},\"course\":{\"name\":\"\",\"description\":\"\",\"provider\":\"\"},\"faq\":{\"pages\":[]},\"product\":{\"reviews\":[]},\"recipe\":{\"ingredients\":[],\"instructions\":[],\"keywords\":[]},\"software\":{\"reviews\":[],\"operatingSystems\":[]},\"webPage\":{\"webPageType\":\"WebPage\"}}',0,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,-1,-1,'large','[{\"image:loc\":\"\\/wp-content\\/uploads\\/2016\\/08\\/IMG_0725.jpg\"}]','2025-06-26 03:40:39',NULL,'default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,0,'{\"linkFormat\":{\"internalLinkCount\":0,\"linkAssistantDismissed\":false},\"primaryTerm\":{\"productEducationDismissed\":false}}',NULL,'2020-12-25 17:23:15','2025-06-26 03:40:39',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL),
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(303,913,'1st Trip to Beijing; Important Hotel Technology','Lots of domestic/international travel since last episode. My 1st trip to China made quite an impression. All this travel proved the thermostat is the most important piece of hotel technology.','[{\"label\":\"business travel\",\"value\":\"business travel\"},{\"label\":\"business airlines\",\"value\":\"business airlines\"},{\"label\":\"travel tips\",\"value\":\"travel tips\"},{\"label\":\"business travelers\",\"value\":\"business travelers\"},{\"label\":\"travel planning\",\"value\":\"travel planning\"},{\"label\":\"road warrior\",\"value\":\"road warrior\"},{\"label\":\"travel stories\",\"value\":\"travel stories\"},{\"label\":\"Travel Commons\",\"value\":\"Travel Commons\"},{\"label\":\"TravelCommons\",\"value\":\"TravelCommons\"},{\"label\":\"China\",\"value\":\"China\"},{\"label\":\"Beijing\",\"value\":\"Beijing\"},{\"label\":\"Airports\",\"value\":\"Airports\"},{\"label\":\"United Airlines\",\"value\":\"United Airlines\"},{\"label\":\"travel technology\",\"value\":\"travel technology\"}]','{\"focus\":[],\"additional\":[]}','{\"analysis\":{\"basic\":{\"metadescriptionLength\":{\"title\":\"Meta description length\",\"description\":\"The meta description is over 160 characters.\",\"score\":6,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"lengthContent\":{\"title\":\"Content Length\",\"description\":\"The content length is ok. Good job!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"isInternalLink\":{\"title\":\"Internal links\",\"description\":\"You are linking to other resources on your website which is great.\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"isExternalLink\":{\"title\":\"External links\",\"description\":\"Great! You are linking to external resources.\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"errors\":1},\"title\":{\"titleLength\":{\"title\":\"Title Length\",\"description\":\"Well done!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"errors\":0},\"readability\":{\"contentHasAssets\":{\"error\":0,\"title\":\"Images\\/Videos in content\",\"description\":\"Your content contains images and\\/or video(s).\",\"score\":5,\"maxScore\":5},\"paragraphLength\":{\"title\":\"Paragraphs Length\",\"description\":\"You are using short paragraphs.\",\"score\":5,\"maxScore\":5,\"error\":0},\"sentenceLength\":{\"title\":\"Sentences Length\",\"description\":\"28.3% of the sentences contain more than 20 words, which is more than the recommended maximum of 25%. Try to shorten the sentences.\",\"score\":6,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"passiveVoice\":{\"title\":\"Passive Voice\",\"description\":\"10.2% of the sentences contain passive voice, which is more than the recommended maximum of 10%. Try to use their active counterparts.\",\"score\":6,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"transitionWords\":{\"title\":\"Transition words\",\"description\":\"Well done!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"consecutiveSentences\":{\"title\":\"Consecutive sentences\",\"description\":\"The text contains 4 consecutive sentences starting with the same word. Try to mix things up!\",\"score\":3,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"subheadingsDistribution\":{\"title\":\"Subheading distribution\",\"description\":\"You are not using any subheadings, although your text is rather long. Try and add some subheadings.\",\"score\":2,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"calculateFleschReading\":{\"title\":\"Flesch Reading Ease\",\"description\":\"The copy scores 73.1 in the test, which is considered fairly easy to read.\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"errors\":4}}}',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,'default','default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,'',NULL,NULL,'[]',0,'default','default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,87,'{\"blockGraphs\":[],\"customGraphs\":[],\"default\":{\"data\":{\"Article\":[],\"Course\":[],\"Dataset\":[],\"FAQPage\":[],\"Movie\":[],\"Person\":[],\"Product\":[],\"ProductReview\":[],\"Car\":[],\"Recipe\":[],\"Service\":[],\"SoftwareApplication\":[],\"WebPage\":[]},\"graphName\":\"\",\"isEnabled\":true},\"graphs\":[]}','default','{\"article\":{\"articleType\":\"BlogPosting\"},\"course\":{\"name\":\"\",\"description\":\"\",\"provider\":\"\"},\"faq\":{\"pages\":[]},\"product\":{\"reviews\":[]},\"recipe\":{\"ingredients\":[],\"instructions\":[],\"keywords\":[]},\"software\":{\"reviews\":[],\"operatingSystems\":[]},\"webPage\":{\"webPageType\":\"WebPage\"}}',0,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,-1,-1,'large','[{\"image:loc\":\"\\/wp-content\\/uploads\\/2012\\/03\\/image1-825x510.jpeg\"},{\"image:loc\":\"\\/wp-content\\/uploads\\/2012\\/03\\/image1.jpeg\"},{\"image:loc\":\"\\/wp-content\\/uploads\\/2012\\/03\\/photo-1-e13307957324511.jpg\"}]','2025-06-26 03:36:20',NULL,'default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,0,'{\"linkFormat\":{\"internalLinkCount\":0,\"linkAssistantDismissed\":false},\"primaryTerm\":{\"productEducationDismissed\":false}}',NULL,'2020-12-25 17:25:18','2025-06-26 03:36:20',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL),
(304,931,'Best Hotel Amenity? Free Breakfast | #site_title','Recent surveys say the most popular hotel amenity is free WiFi. They\'re wrong. Experienced travelers know it\'s the free hotel breakfast.','[{\"label\":\"Hotel\",\"value\":\"Hotel\"},{\"label\":\"breakfast\",\"value\":\"breakfast\"},{\"label\":\"free wi-fi\",\"value\":\"free wi-fi\"},{\"label\":\"hotel bandwidth\",\"value\":\"hotel bandwidth\"}]','{\"focus\":[],\"additional\":[]}','{\"analysis\":{\"basic\":{\"metadescriptionLength\":{\"title\":\"Meta description Length\",\"description\":\"Well done!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"lengthContent\":{\"title\":\"Content Length\",\"description\":\"The content length is ok. Good job!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"isInternalLink\":{\"title\":\"Internal links\",\"description\":\"You are linking to other resources on your website which is great.\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"isExternalLink\":{\"title\":\"External links\",\"description\":\"Great! You are linking to external resources.\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"errors\":0},\"title\":{\"titleLength\":{\"title\":\"Title Length\",\"description\":\"Well done!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"errors\":0},\"readability\":{\"contentHasAssets\":{\"error\":0,\"title\":\"Images\\/Videos in content\",\"description\":\"Your content contains images and\\/or video(s).\",\"score\":5,\"maxScore\":5},\"paragraphLength\":{\"title\":\"Paragraphs Length\",\"description\":\"At least one paragraph is long. Consider using short paragraphs.\",\"score\":0,\"maxScore\":5,\"error\":1},\"sentenceLength\":{\"title\":\"Sentences Length\",\"description\":\"31.8% of the sentences contain more than 20 words, which is more than the recommended maximum of 25%. Try to shorten the sentences.\",\"score\":3,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"passiveVoice\":{\"title\":\"Passive Voice\",\"description\":\"You\'re using enough active voice. That\'s great!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"transitionWords\":{\"title\":\"Transition words\",\"description\":\"Well done!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"consecutiveSentences\":{\"title\":\"Consecutive sentences\",\"description\":\"There is enough variety in your sentences. That\'s great!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"subheadingsDistribution\":{\"title\":\"Subheading distribution\",\"description\":\"You are not using any subheadings, although your text is rather long. Try and add some subheadings.\",\"score\":2,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"calculateFleschReading\":{\"title\":\"Flesch Reading Ease\",\"description\":\"The copy scores 55.6 in the test, which is considered fairly difficult to read. Try to make shorter sentences to improve readability.\",\"score\":6,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"errors\":4}}}',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,'default','default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,'',NULL,NULL,'[]',0,'default','default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,89,'{\"blockGraphs\":[],\"customGraphs\":[],\"default\":{\"data\":{\"Article\":[],\"Course\":[],\"Dataset\":[],\"FAQPage\":[],\"Movie\":[],\"Person\":[],\"Product\":[],\"ProductReview\":[],\"Car\":[],\"Recipe\":[],\"Service\":[],\"SoftwareApplication\":[],\"WebPage\":[]},\"graphName\":\"\",\"isEnabled\":true},\"graphs\":[]}','default','{\"article\":{\"articleType\":\"BlogPosting\"},\"course\":{\"name\":\"\",\"description\":\"\",\"provider\":\"\"},\"faq\":{\"pages\":[]},\"product\":{\"reviews\":[]},\"recipe\":{\"ingredients\":[],\"instructions\":[],\"keywords\":[]},\"software\":{\"reviews\":[],\"operatingSystems\":[]},\"webPage\":{\"webPageType\":\"WebPage\"}}',0,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,-1,-1,'large','[{\"image:loc\":\"\\/wp-content\\/uploads\\/2012\\/04\\/IMG_1159-825x510.jpg\"},{\"image:loc\":\"\\/wp-content\\/uploads\\/2012\\/04\\/IMG_1159.jpg\"}]','2025-06-26 03:36:20',NULL,'default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,0,'{\"linkFormat\":{\"internalLinkCount\":0,\"linkAssistantDismissed\":false},\"primaryTerm\":{\"productEducationDismissed\":false}}',NULL,'2020-12-25 17:25:18','2025-06-26 03:36:20',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL),
(305,949,'American Airlines Reaches Out to Apologize.. Again and Again | #site_title','American Airlines has reaching out to let me know they care about me. A phone call, replies to my Tweets – but I’m not sure this is having the desired effect.','[]','{\"focus\":[],\"additional\":[]}','{\"analysis\":{\"basic\":{\"metadescriptionLength\":{\"title\":\"Meta description Length\",\"description\":\"Well done!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"lengthContent\":{\"title\":\"Content Length\",\"description\":\"The content length is ok. Good job!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"isInternalLink\":{\"title\":\"Internal links\",\"description\":\"You are linking to other resources on your website which is great.\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"isExternalLink\":{\"title\":\"External links\",\"description\":\"Great! You are linking to external resources.\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"errors\":0},\"title\":{\"titleLength\":{\"title\":\"SEO Title length\",\"description\":\"The title is over 60 characters.\",\"score\":6,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"errors\":1},\"readability\":{\"contentHasAssets\":{\"error\":0,\"title\":\"Images\\/Videos in content\",\"description\":\"Your content contains images and\\/or video(s).\",\"score\":5,\"maxScore\":5},\"paragraphLength\":{\"title\":\"Paragraphs Length\",\"description\":\"You are using short paragraphs.\",\"score\":5,\"maxScore\":5,\"error\":0},\"sentenceLength\":{\"title\":\"Sentences Length\",\"description\":\"Sentence length is looking great!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"passiveVoice\":{\"title\":\"Passive Voice\",\"description\":\"12% of the sentences contain passive voice, which is more than the recommended maximum of 10%. Try to use their active counterparts.\",\"score\":6,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"transitionWords\":{\"title\":\"Transition words\",\"description\":\"Well done!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"consecutiveSentences\":{\"title\":\"Consecutive sentences\",\"description\":\"There is enough variety in your sentences. That\'s great!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"subheadingsDistribution\":{\"title\":\"Subheading distribution\",\"description\":\"You are not using any subheadings, although your text is rather long. Try and add some subheadings.\",\"score\":2,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"calculateFleschReading\":{\"title\":\"Flesch Reading Ease\",\"description\":\"The copy scores 68.9 in the test, which is considered ok to read.\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"errors\":2}}}',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,'default','default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,'',NULL,NULL,'[]',0,'default','default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,83,'{\"blockGraphs\":[],\"customGraphs\":[],\"default\":{\"data\":{\"Article\":[],\"Course\":[],\"Dataset\":[],\"FAQPage\":[],\"Movie\":[],\"Person\":[],\"Product\":[],\"ProductReview\":[],\"Car\":[],\"Recipe\":[],\"Service\":[],\"SoftwareApplication\":[],\"WebPage\":[]},\"graphName\":\"\",\"isEnabled\":true},\"graphs\":[]}','default','{\"article\":{\"articleType\":\"BlogPosting\"},\"course\":{\"name\":\"\",\"description\":\"\",\"provider\":\"\"},\"faq\":{\"pages\":[]},\"product\":{\"reviews\":[]},\"recipe\":{\"ingredients\":[],\"instructions\":[],\"keywords\":[]},\"software\":{\"reviews\":[],\"operatingSystems\":[]},\"webPage\":{\"webPageType\":\"WebPage\"}}',0,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,-1,-1,'large','[{\"image:loc\":\"\\/wp-content\\/uploads\\/2012\\/05\\/photo-640x510.png\"},{\"image:loc\":\"\\/wp-content\\/uploads\\/2012\\/05\\/photo.png\"}]','2025-06-26 03:36:20',NULL,'default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,0,'{\"linkFormat\":{\"internalLinkCount\":0,\"linkAssistantDismissed\":false},\"primaryTerm\":{\"productEducationDismissed\":false}}',NULL,'2020-12-25 17:25:18','2025-06-26 03:36:20',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL),
(306,961,'Stolen Luggage; Restaurants Want Your Smartphone','Stolen luggage/passports in Brussels; walking thru TSA PreCheck with my shoes on; Apple\'s FaceTime &amp; iMessage not reliable in Europe; hotel wifi bandwidth woes; restaurants want to use my smartphone.','[{\"label\":\"business travel\",\"value\":\"business travel\"},{\"label\":\"business airlines\",\"value\":\"business airlines\"},{\"label\":\"travel tips\",\"value\":\"travel tips\"},{\"label\":\"business travelers\",\"value\":\"business travelers\"},{\"label\":\"travel planning\",\"value\":\"travel planning\"},{\"label\":\"road warrior\",\"value\":\"road warrior\"},{\"label\":\"travel stories\",\"value\":\"travel stories\"},{\"label\":\"Travel Commons\",\"value\":\"Travel Commons\"},{\"label\":\"TravelCommons\",\"value\":\"TravelCommons\"},{\"label\":\"stolen passport\",\"value\":\"stolen passport\"},{\"label\":\"luggage theft\",\"value\":\"luggage theft\"},{\"label\":\"restaurants\",\"value\":\"restaurants\"},{\"label\":\"smartphone\",\"value\":\"smartphone\"},{\"label\":\"hotel WiFi\",\"value\":\"hotel WiFi\"},{\"label\":\"TSA PreCheck\",\"value\":\"TSA PreCheck\"}]','{\"focus\":[],\"additional\":[]}','{\"analysis\":{\"basic\":{\"metadescriptionLength\":{\"title\":\"Meta description length\",\"description\":\"The meta description is over 160 characters.\",\"score\":6,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"lengthContent\":{\"title\":\"Content Length\",\"description\":\"The content length is ok. 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(307,983,'How Much Do You Want to Tip? | #site_title','For a calculation that can be performed on a four-function calculator with buttons to spare, determining the right tip seems to mystify many travelers.','[{\"label\":\"tipping\",\"value\":\"tipping\"},{\"label\":\"tip guide\",\"value\":\"tip guide\"},{\"label\":\"travel\",\"value\":\"travel\"},{\"label\":\"eating alone\",\"value\":\"eating alone\"}]','{\"focus\":[],\"additional\":[]}','{\"analysis\":{\"basic\":{\"metadescriptionLength\":{\"title\":\"Meta description Length\",\"description\":\"Well done!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"lengthContent\":{\"title\":\"Content Length\",\"description\":\"The content length is ok. Good job!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"isInternalLink\":{\"title\":\"Internal links\",\"description\":\"You are linking to other resources on your website which is great.\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"isExternalLink\":{\"title\":\"External links\",\"description\":\"Great! You are linking to external resources.\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"errors\":0},\"title\":{\"titleLength\":{\"title\":\"Title Length\",\"description\":\"Well done!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"errors\":0},\"readability\":{\"contentHasAssets\":{\"error\":0,\"title\":\"Images\\/Videos in content\",\"description\":\"Your content contains images and\\/or video(s).\",\"score\":5,\"maxScore\":5},\"paragraphLength\":{\"title\":\"Paragraphs Length\",\"description\":\"At least one paragraph is long. Consider using short paragraphs.\",\"score\":0,\"maxScore\":5,\"error\":1},\"sentenceLength\":{\"title\":\"Sentences Length\",\"description\":\"52.6% of the sentences contain more than 20 words, which is more than the recommended maximum of 25%. Try to shorten the sentences.\",\"score\":3,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"passiveVoice\":{\"title\":\"Passive Voice\",\"description\":\"26.3% of the sentences contain passive voice, which is more than the recommended maximum of 10%. Try to use their active counterparts.\",\"score\":3,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"transitionWords\":{\"title\":\"Transition words\",\"description\":\"Well done!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"consecutiveSentences\":{\"title\":\"Consecutive sentences\",\"description\":\"The text contains 3 consecutive sentences starting with the same word. Try to mix things up!\",\"score\":3,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"subheadingsDistribution\":{\"title\":\"Subheading distribution\",\"description\":\"You are not using any subheadings, although your text is rather long. Try and add some subheadings.\",\"score\":2,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"calculateFleschReading\":{\"title\":\"Flesch Reading Ease\",\"description\":\"The copy scores 59.4 in the test, which is considered fairly difficult to read. Try to make shorter sentences to improve readability.\",\"score\":6,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"errors\":6}}}',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,'default','default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,'',NULL,NULL,'[]',0,'default','default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,82,'{\"blockGraphs\":[],\"customGraphs\":[],\"default\":{\"data\":{\"Article\":[],\"Course\":[],\"Dataset\":[],\"FAQPage\":[],\"Movie\":[],\"Person\":[],\"Product\":[],\"ProductReview\":[],\"Car\":[],\"Recipe\":[],\"Service\":[],\"SoftwareApplication\":[],\"WebPage\":[]},\"graphName\":\"\",\"isEnabled\":true},\"graphs\":[],\"defaultGraph\":\"Article\",\"defaultPostTypeGraph\":\"\"}','default','{\"article\":{\"articleType\":\"BlogPosting\"},\"course\":{\"name\":\"\",\"description\":\"\",\"provider\":\"\"},\"faq\":{\"pages\":[]},\"product\":{\"reviews\":[]},\"recipe\":{\"ingredients\":[],\"instructions\":[],\"keywords\":[]},\"software\":{\"reviews\":[],\"operatingSystems\":[]},\"webPage\":{\"webPageType\":\"WebPage\"}}',0,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,-1,-1,'large','[{\"image:loc\":\"\\/wp-content\\/uploads\\/2012\\/06\\/tipping-421x510.png\"},{\"image:loc\":\"\\/wp-content\\/uploads\\/2012\\/06\\/tipping.png\"}]','2025-06-26 03:36:20',NULL,'default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,0,'{\"linkFormat\":{\"internalLinkCount\":0,\"linkAssistantDismissed\":false},\"primaryTerm\":{\"productEducationDismissed\":false}}',NULL,'2020-12-25 17:25:18','2025-06-26 03:36:20',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL),
(308,995,'Downgrading Elite Fliers; Finding Time Off the Road','Airlines \"realigning benefits\" in lower status tiers; finding shelter in ORD during summer storms; re-creating alone time when off the road.','[{\"label\":\"business travel\",\"value\":\"business travel\"},{\"label\":\"business airlines\",\"value\":\"business airlines\"},{\"label\":\"travel tips\",\"value\":\"travel tips\"},{\"label\":\"business travelers\",\"value\":\"business travelers\"},{\"label\":\"travel planning\",\"value\":\"travel planning\"},{\"label\":\"road warrior\",\"value\":\"road warrior\"},{\"label\":\"travel stories\",\"value\":\"travel stories\"},{\"label\":\"Travel Commons\",\"value\":\"Travel Commons\"},{\"label\":\"TravelCommons\",\"value\":\"TravelCommons\"},{\"label\":\"frequent flier programs\",\"value\":\"frequent flier programs\"},{\"label\":\"elite fliers\",\"value\":\"elite fliers\"},{\"label\":\"thunderstorms\",\"value\":\"thunderstorms\"},{\"label\":\"breakfast\",\"value\":\"breakfast\"}]','{\"focus\":[],\"additional\":[]}','{\"analysis\":{\"basic\":{\"metadescriptionLength\":{\"title\":\"Meta description Length\",\"description\":\"Well done!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"lengthContent\":{\"title\":\"Content Length\",\"description\":\"The content length is ok. Good job!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"isInternalLink\":{\"title\":\"Internal links\",\"description\":\"You are linking to other resources on your website which is great.\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"isExternalLink\":{\"title\":\"External links\",\"description\":\"Great! You are linking to external resources.\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"errors\":0},\"title\":{\"titleLength\":{\"title\":\"Title Length\",\"description\":\"Well done!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"errors\":0},\"readability\":{\"contentHasAssets\":{\"error\":0,\"title\":\"Images\\/Videos in content\",\"description\":\"Your content contains images and\\/or video(s).\",\"score\":5,\"maxScore\":5},\"paragraphLength\":{\"title\":\"Paragraphs Length\",\"description\":\"You are using short paragraphs.\",\"score\":5,\"maxScore\":5,\"error\":0},\"sentenceLength\":{\"title\":\"Sentences Length\",\"description\":\"28.4% of the sentences contain more than 20 words, which is more than the recommended maximum of 25%. Try to shorten the sentences.\",\"score\":6,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"passiveVoice\":{\"title\":\"Passive Voice\",\"description\":\"13.9% of the sentences contain passive voice, which is more than the recommended maximum of 10%. Try to use their active counterparts.\",\"score\":6,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"transitionWords\":{\"title\":\"Transition words\",\"description\":\"Well done!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"consecutiveSentences\":{\"title\":\"Consecutive sentences\",\"description\":\"There is enough variety in your sentences. That\'s great!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"subheadingsDistribution\":{\"title\":\"Subheading distribution\",\"description\":\"You are not using any subheadings, although your text is rather long. Try and add some subheadings.\",\"score\":2,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"calculateFleschReading\":{\"title\":\"Flesch Reading Ease\",\"description\":\"The copy scores 66.5 in the test, which is considered ok to read.\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"errors\":3}}}',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,'default','default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,'',NULL,NULL,'[]',0,'default','default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,93,'{\"blockGraphs\":[],\"customGraphs\":[],\"default\":{\"data\":{\"Article\":[],\"Course\":[],\"Dataset\":[],\"FAQPage\":[],\"Movie\":[],\"Person\":[],\"Product\":[],\"ProductReview\":[],\"Car\":[],\"Recipe\":[],\"Service\":[],\"SoftwareApplication\":[],\"WebPage\":[]},\"graphName\":\"\",\"isEnabled\":true},\"graphs\":[]}','default','{\"article\":{\"articleType\":\"BlogPosting\"},\"course\":{\"name\":\"\",\"description\":\"\",\"provider\":\"\"},\"faq\":{\"pages\":[]},\"product\":{\"reviews\":[]},\"recipe\":{\"ingredients\":[],\"instructions\":[],\"keywords\":[]},\"software\":{\"reviews\":[],\"operatingSystems\":[]},\"webPage\":{\"webPageType\":\"WebPage\"}}',0,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,-1,-1,'large','[{\"image:loc\":\"\\/wp-content\\/uploads\\/2012\\/06\\/4373298709_b408072134_b.jpg\"},{\"image:loc\":\"\\/wp-content\\/uploads\\/2012\\/06\\/IMG_1145.jpg\"},{\"image:loc\":\"\\/wp-content\\/uploads\\/2012\\/06\\/x2_6bbbfa1.jpg\"}]','2025-06-26 03:37:09',NULL,'default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,0,'{\"linkFormat\":{\"internalLinkCount\":0,\"linkAssistantDismissed\":false},\"primaryTerm\":{\"productEducationDismissed\":false}}',NULL,'2020-12-25 17:25:18','2025-06-26 03:37:09',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL),
(309,1021,'Social Trip Planning Not Quite Ready... | #site_title','New social media travel planning tools didn\'t help me planning a road trip. I fell back to clipping articles from newspapers with virtual scissors.','[{\"label\":\"travel planning\",\"value\":\"travel planning\"},{\"label\":\"social media\",\"value\":\"social media\"}]','{\"focus\":[],\"additional\":[]}','{\"analysis\":{\"basic\":{\"metadescriptionLength\":{\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"lengthContent\":{\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"isInternalLink\":{\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"isExternalLink\":{\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"errors\":0},\"title\":{\"titleLength\":{\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"errors\":0},\"readability\":{\"contentHasAssets\":{\"error\":0,\"score\":5,\"maxScore\":5},\"paragraphLength\":{\"score\":0,\"maxScore\":5,\"error\":1},\"sentenceLength\":{\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"passiveVoice\":{\"score\":6,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"transitionWords\":{\"score\":6,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"consecutiveSentences\":{\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"subheadingsDistribution\":{\"score\":2,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"calculateFleschReading\":{\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"errors\":4}}}',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,'default','default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,'',NULL,NULL,NULL,0,'default','default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,90,'{\"blockGraphs\":[],\"customGraphs\":[],\"default\":{\"data\":{\"Article\":[],\"Course\":[],\"Dataset\":[],\"FAQPage\":[],\"Movie\":[],\"Person\":[],\"Product\":[],\"Recipe\":[],\"Service\":[],\"SoftwareApplication\":[],\"WebPage\":[]},\"graphName\":\"\",\"isEnabled\":true},\"graphs\":[]}','default','{\"article\":{\"articleType\":\"BlogPosting\"},\"course\":{\"name\":\"\",\"description\":\"\",\"provider\":\"\"},\"faq\":{\"pages\":[]},\"product\":{\"reviews\":[]},\"recipe\":{\"ingredients\":[],\"instructions\":[],\"keywords\":[]},\"software\":{\"reviews\":[],\"operatingSystems\":[]},\"webPage\":{\"webPageType\":\"WebPage\"}}',0,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,-1,-1,'large','[{\"image:loc\":\"https:\\/\\/migrate.travelcommons.com\\/wp-content\\/uploads\\/2012\\/07\\/Drive-South-Google-Maps-1.jpg\",\"image:title\":\"Drive South &#8211; Google Maps\",\"image:caption\":\"A Drive South\"},{\"image:loc\":\"https:\\/\\/migrate.travelcommons.com\\/wp-content\\/uploads\\/2012\\/07\\/Drive-South-Google-Maps-1.jpg\",\"image:title\":\"Drive South &#8211; Google Maps\",\"image:caption\":\"A Drive South\"}]',NULL,NULL,'default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,0,'{\"linkFormat\":{\"internalLinkCount\":0,\"linkAssistantDismissed\":false},\"primaryTerm\":{\"productEducationDismissed\":false}}',NULL,'2020-12-25 17:25:18','2024-06-02 15:32:42',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL),
(310,1034,'Southern Road Trip; Breaking Up with American Airlines','Best piece of hardware from Google I/O, dirty subway ride to SFO, observations from my southern road trip, and breaking up with American Airlines after 30 years','[{\"label\":\"business travel\",\"value\":\"business travel\"},{\"label\":\"travel tips\",\"value\":\"travel tips\"},{\"label\":\"business travelers\",\"value\":\"business travelers\"},{\"label\":\"road warrior\",\"value\":\"road warrior\"},{\"label\":\"travel stories\",\"value\":\"travel stories\"},{\"label\":\"Travel Commons\",\"value\":\"Travel Commons\"},{\"label\":\"TravelCommons\",\"value\":\"TravelCommons\"},{\"label\":\"American Airlines\",\"value\":\"American Airlines\"},{\"label\":\"road trip\",\"value\":\"road trip\"},{\"label\":\"Google IO\",\"value\":\"Google IO\"},{\"label\":\"Priceline\",\"value\":\"Priceline\"},{\"label\":\"Louisville\",\"value\":\"Louisville\"},{\"label\":\"Memphis\",\"value\":\"Memphis\"}]','{\"focus\":[],\"additional\":[]}','{\"analysis\":{\"basic\":{\"metadescriptionLength\":{\"title\":\"Meta description Length\",\"description\":\"Well done!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"lengthContent\":{\"title\":\"Content length\",\"description\":\"The content length is ok. 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(311,1068,'Food and Drink Highlights from My Drive South | #site_title','On my Drive South, I ate and drank my way down I-65 and back up I-55. Here are the restaurant and bar highlights of my trip.','[{\"label\":\"Restaurant recommendations\",\"value\":\"Restaurant recommendations\"},{\"label\":\"craft beer\",\"value\":\"craft beer\"},{\"label\":\"South\",\"value\":\"South\"},{\"label\":\"Memphis\",\"value\":\"Memphis\"},{\"label\":\"Nashville\",\"value\":\"Nashville\"},{\"label\":\"Louisville\",\"value\":\"Louisville\"},{\"label\":\"Birmingham\",\"value\":\"Birmingham\"},{\"label\":\"New Orleans\",\"value\":\"New Orleans\"}]','{\"focus\":[],\"additional\":[]}','{\"analysis\":{\"basic\":{\"metadescriptionLength\":{\"title\":\"Meta description Length\",\"description\":\"Well done!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"lengthContent\":{\"title\":\"Content length\",\"description\":\"The content length is ok. Good job!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"isInternalLink\":{\"title\":\"Internal links\",\"description\":\"You are linking to other resources on your website which is great.\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"isExternalLink\":{\"title\":\"External links\",\"description\":\"Great! You are linking to external resources.\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"errors\":0},\"title\":{\"titleLength\":{\"title\":\"SEO Title length\",\"description\":\"The title is over 60 characters.\",\"score\":6,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"errors\":1},\"readability\":{\"contentHasAssets\":{\"error\":0,\"title\":\"Images\\/videos in content\",\"description\":\"Your content contains images and\\/or video(s).\",\"score\":5,\"maxScore\":5},\"paragraphLength\":{\"title\":\"Paragraphs length\",\"description\":\"You are using short paragraphs.\",\"score\":5,\"maxScore\":5,\"error\":0},\"sentenceLength\":{\"title\":\"Sentences length\",\"description\":\"36.2% of the sentences contain more than 20 words, which is more than the recommended maximum of 25%. Try to shorten the sentences.\",\"score\":6,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"passiveVoice\":{\"title\":\"Passive voice\",\"description\":\"17.2% of the sentences contain passive voice, which is more than the recommended maximum of 10%. Try to use their active counterparts.\",\"score\":3,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"transitionWords\":{\"title\":\"Transition words\",\"description\":\"Well done!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"consecutiveSentences\":{\"title\":\"Consecutive sentences\",\"description\":\"There is enough variety in your sentences. That\'s great!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"subheadingsDistribution\":{\"title\":\"Subheading distribution\",\"description\":\"You are not using any subheadings, although your text is rather long. Try and add some subheadings.\",\"score\":2,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"calculateFleschReading\":{\"title\":\"Flesch reading ease\",\"description\":\"The copy scores 64.1 in the test, which is considered ok to read.\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"errors\":3}}}',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,'default','default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,'',NULL,NULL,'[]',0,'default','default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,80,'{\"blockGraphs\":[],\"customGraphs\":[],\"default\":{\"data\":{\"Article\":[],\"Course\":[],\"Dataset\":[],\"FAQPage\":[],\"Movie\":[],\"Person\":[],\"Product\":[],\"ProductReview\":[],\"Car\":[],\"Recipe\":[],\"Service\":[],\"SoftwareApplication\":[],\"WebPage\":[]},\"graphName\":\"\",\"isEnabled\":true},\"graphs\":[]}','default','{\"article\":{\"articleType\":\"BlogPosting\"},\"course\":{\"name\":\"\",\"description\":\"\",\"provider\":\"\"},\"faq\":{\"pages\":[]},\"product\":{\"reviews\":[]},\"recipe\":{\"ingredients\":[],\"instructions\":[],\"keywords\":[]},\"software\":{\"reviews\":[],\"operatingSystems\":[]},\"webPage\":{\"webPageType\":\"WebPage\"}}',0,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,-1,-1,'large','[{\"image:loc\":\"\\/wp-content\\/uploads\\/2012\\/08\\/IMG_1380.jpg\"},{\"image:loc\":\"\\/wp-content\\/uploads\\/2012\\/07\\/382380_3350829861633_1849689155_n.jpg\"},{\"image:loc\":\"\\/wp-content\\/uploads\\/2012\\/08\\/IMG_1345.jpg\"},{\"image:loc\":\"\\/wp-content\\/uploads\\/2012\\/08\\/IMG_1381-e1344996846435.jpg\"}]','2025-06-26 03:37:09',NULL,'default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,0,'{\"linkFormat\":{\"internalLinkCount\":0,\"linkAssistantDismissed\":false},\"primaryTerm\":{\"productEducationDismissed\":false}}',NULL,'2020-12-25 17:25:18','2026-03-07 15:10:52',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL),
(312,1095,'ORD Layover Excursion: a 6-Hour Tour of Chicago','A long layover can be an impromptu vacation or a mind-numbing marathon of CNN Airport Network shows. Here’s what I recommend you do on a long layover in O\'Hare.','[{\"label\":\"Chicago\",\"value\":\"Chicago\"},{\"label\":\"O\'Hare\",\"value\":\"O\'Hare\"},{\"label\":\"&quot;One Day Tour&quot;\",\"value\":\"&quot;One Day Tour&quot;\"},{\"label\":\"Illinois\",\"value\":\"Illinois\"},{\"label\":\"&quot;Millennium Park&quot;\",\"value\":\"&quot;Millennium Park&quot;\"},{\"label\":\"&quot;Wrigley Field&quot;\",\"value\":\"&quot;Wrigley Field&quot;\"},{\"label\":\"&quot;Loop&quot;\",\"value\":\"&quot;Loop&quot;\"},{\"label\":\"&quot;Chicago Transit&quot;\",\"value\":\"&quot;Chicago Transit&quot;\"},{\"label\":\"&quot;Chicago L Train&quot;\",\"value\":\"&quot;Chicago L Train&quot;\"}]','{\"focus\":[],\"additional\":[]}','{\"analysis\":{\"basic\":{\"metadescriptionLength\":{\"title\":\"Meta description Length\",\"description\":\"Well done!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"lengthContent\":{\"title\":\"Content Length\",\"description\":\"The content length is ok. Good job!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"isInternalLink\":{\"title\":\"Internal links\",\"description\":\"You are linking to other resources on your website which is great.\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"isExternalLink\":{\"title\":\"External links\",\"description\":\"Great! You are linking to external resources.\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"errors\":0},\"title\":{\"titleLength\":{\"title\":\"Title Length\",\"description\":\"Well done!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"errors\":0},\"readability\":{\"contentHasAssets\":{\"error\":0,\"title\":\"Images\\/Videos in content\",\"description\":\"Your content contains images and\\/or video(s).\",\"score\":5,\"maxScore\":5},\"paragraphLength\":{\"title\":\"Paragraphs Length\",\"description\":\"You are using short paragraphs.\",\"score\":5,\"maxScore\":5,\"error\":0},\"sentenceLength\":{\"title\":\"Sentences Length\",\"description\":\"Sentence length is looking great!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"passiveVoice\":{\"title\":\"Passive Voice\",\"description\":\"You\'re using enough active voice. That\'s great!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"transitionWords\":{\"title\":\"Transition words\",\"description\":\"Only 18.2% of the sentences contain transition words, which is not enough. Use more of them.\",\"score\":3,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"consecutiveSentences\":{\"title\":\"Consecutive sentences\",\"description\":\"There is enough variety in your sentences. That\'s great!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"subheadingsDistribution\":{\"title\":\"Subheading distribution\",\"description\":\"You are not using any subheadings, although your text is rather long. Try and add some subheadings.\",\"score\":2,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"calculateFleschReading\":{\"title\":\"Flesch Reading Ease\",\"description\":\"The copy scores 72 in the test, which is considered fairly easy to read.\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"errors\":2}}}',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,'default','default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,'',NULL,NULL,'[]',0,'default','default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,93,'{\"blockGraphs\":[],\"customGraphs\":[],\"default\":{\"data\":{\"Article\":[],\"Course\":[],\"Dataset\":[],\"FAQPage\":[],\"Movie\":[],\"Person\":[],\"Product\":[],\"ProductReview\":[],\"Car\":[],\"Recipe\":[],\"Service\":[],\"SoftwareApplication\":[],\"WebPage\":[]},\"graphName\":\"\",\"isEnabled\":true},\"graphs\":[],\"defaultGraph\":\"Article\",\"defaultPostTypeGraph\":\"\"}','default','{\"article\":{\"articleType\":\"BlogPosting\"},\"course\":{\"name\":\"\",\"description\":\"\",\"provider\":\"\"},\"faq\":{\"pages\":[]},\"product\":{\"reviews\":[]},\"recipe\":{\"ingredients\":[],\"instructions\":[],\"keywords\":[]},\"software\":{\"reviews\":[],\"operatingSystems\":[]},\"webPage\":{\"webPageType\":\"WebPage\"}}',0,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,-1,-1,'large','[{\"image:loc\":\"\\/wp-content\\/uploads\\/2012\\/09\\/maxresdefault-2.jpg\"}]','2025-06-26 03:37:09',NULL,'default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,0,'{\"linkFormat\":{\"internalLinkCount\":0,\"linkAssistantDismissed\":false},\"primaryTerm\":{\"productEducationDismissed\":false}}',NULL,'2020-12-25 17:25:18','2025-06-26 03:37:09',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL),
(313,1119,'Future of Mileage Tracking; Search for Local Food &amp; Beer','CEO of GoMiles on the future of mileage tracking, and how to break through the frequent traveler &quot;travel bubble&quot; by looking for local food and craft beers','[{\"label\":\"business travel\",\"value\":\"business travel\"},{\"label\":\"travel tips\",\"value\":\"travel tips\"},{\"label\":\"business travelers\",\"value\":\"business travelers\"},{\"label\":\"road warrior\",\"value\":\"road warrior\"},{\"label\":\"travel stories\",\"value\":\"travel stories\"},{\"label\":\"Travel Commons\",\"value\":\"Travel Commons\"},{\"label\":\"TravelCommons\",\"value\":\"TravelCommons\"},{\"label\":\"American Airlines\",\"value\":\"American Airlines\"},{\"label\":\"layover excursions\",\"value\":\"layover excursions\"},{\"label\":\"mileage tracking tools\",\"value\":\"mileage tracking tools\"},{\"label\":\"artisanal food\",\"value\":\"artisanal food\"},{\"label\":\"craft beer\",\"value\":\"craft beer\"},{\"label\":\"skipping car rental\",\"value\":\"skipping car rental\"}]','{\"focus\":[],\"additional\":[]}','{\"analysis\":{\"basic\":{\"metadescriptionLength\":{\"title\":\"Meta description Length\",\"description\":\"Well done!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"lengthContent\":{\"title\":\"Content Length\",\"description\":\"The content length is ok. Good job!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"isInternalLink\":{\"title\":\"Internal links\",\"description\":\"You are linking to other resources on your website which is great.\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"isExternalLink\":{\"title\":\"External links\",\"description\":\"Great! You are linking to external resources.\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"errors\":0},\"title\":{\"titleLength\":{\"title\":\"Title Length\",\"description\":\"Well done!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"errors\":0},\"readability\":{\"contentHasAssets\":{\"error\":0,\"title\":\"Images\\/Videos in content\",\"description\":\"Your content contains images and\\/or video(s).\",\"score\":5,\"maxScore\":5},\"paragraphLength\":{\"title\":\"Paragraphs Length\",\"description\":\"You are using short paragraphs.\",\"score\":5,\"maxScore\":5,\"error\":0},\"sentenceLength\":{\"title\":\"Sentences Length\",\"description\":\"35.9% of the sentences contain more than 20 words, which is more than the recommended maximum of 25%. Try to shorten the sentences.\",\"score\":3,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"passiveVoice\":{\"title\":\"Passive Voice\",\"description\":\"You\'re using enough active voice. That\'s great!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"transitionWords\":{\"title\":\"Transition words\",\"description\":\"Well done!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"consecutiveSentences\":{\"title\":\"Consecutive sentences\",\"description\":\"The text contains 3 consecutive sentences starting with the same word. Try to mix things up!\",\"score\":3,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"subheadingsDistribution\":{\"title\":\"Subheading distribution\",\"description\":\"You are not using any subheadings, although your text is rather long. Try and add some subheadings.\",\"score\":2,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"calculateFleschReading\":{\"title\":\"Flesch Reading Ease\",\"description\":\"The copy scores 65.6 in the test, which is considered ok to read.\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"errors\":3}}}',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,'default','default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,'',NULL,NULL,'[]',0,'default','default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,90,'{\"blockGraphs\":[],\"customGraphs\":[],\"default\":{\"data\":{\"Article\":[],\"Course\":[],\"Dataset\":[],\"FAQPage\":[],\"Movie\":[],\"Person\":[],\"Product\":[],\"ProductReview\":[],\"Car\":[],\"Recipe\":[],\"Service\":[],\"SoftwareApplication\":[],\"WebPage\":[]},\"graphName\":\"\",\"isEnabled\":true},\"graphs\":[],\"defaultGraph\":\"Article\",\"defaultPostTypeGraph\":\"\"}','default','{\"article\":{\"articleType\":\"BlogPosting\"},\"course\":{\"name\":\"\",\"description\":\"\",\"provider\":\"\"},\"faq\":{\"pages\":[]},\"product\":{\"reviews\":[]},\"recipe\":{\"ingredients\":[],\"instructions\":[],\"keywords\":[]},\"software\":{\"reviews\":[],\"operatingSystems\":[]},\"webPage\":{\"webPageType\":\"WebPage\"}}',0,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,-1,-1,'large','[{\"image:loc\":\"\\/wp-content\\/uploads\\/2012\\/10\\/2012-08-03-21.17.30.jpg\"},{\"image:loc\":\"\\/wp-content\\/uploads\\/2012\\/10\\/IMG_1281.jpg\"},{\"image:loc\":\"\\/wp-content\\/uploads\\/2012\\/10\\/2012-07-14-14.08.12.jpg\"}]','2025-06-26 03:37:09',NULL,'default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,0,'{\"linkFormat\":{\"internalLinkCount\":0,\"linkAssistantDismissed\":false},\"primaryTerm\":{\"productEducationDismissed\":false}}',NULL,'2020-12-25 17:25:18','2025-06-26 03:37:09',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL),
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(315,1169,'Managing travel itineraries: Digging into Trip Management Apps','A side-by-side comparison of the free and paid versions of TripIt, TripCase, and WorldMate.','[{\"label\":\"business travel\",\"value\":\"business travel\"},{\"label\":\"travel tips\",\"value\":\"travel tips\"},{\"label\":\"business travelers\",\"value\":\"business travelers\"},{\"label\":\"road warrior\",\"value\":\"road warrior\"},{\"label\":\"Travel Commons\",\"value\":\"Travel Commons\"},{\"label\":\"TravelCommons\",\"value\":\"TravelCommons\"},{\"label\":\"TripIt\",\"value\":\"TripIt\"},{\"label\":\"TripCase\",\"value\":\"TripCase\"},{\"label\":\"WorldMate\",\"value\":\"WorldMate\"},{\"label\":\"travel apps\",\"value\":\"travel apps\"},{\"label\":\"trip management apps\",\"value\":\"trip management apps\"},{\"label\":\"travel itinerary management\",\"value\":\"travel itinerary management\"}]','{\"focus\":[],\"additional\":[]}','{\"analysis\":{\"basic\":{\"metadescriptionLength\":{\"score\":6,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"lengthContent\":{\"score\":-10,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"isInternalLink\":{\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"isExternalLink\":{\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"errors\":2},\"title\":{\"titleLength\":{\"score\":6,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"errors\":1},\"readability\":{\"contentHasAssets\":{\"error\":0,\"score\":5,\"maxScore\":5},\"paragraphLength\":{\"score\":5,\"maxScore\":5,\"error\":0},\"sentenceLength\":{\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"passiveVoice\":{\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"transitionWords\":{\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"consecutiveSentences\":{\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"subheadingsDistribution\":{\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"calculateFleschReading\":{\"score\":6,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"errors\":1}}}',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,'default','default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,'',NULL,NULL,NULL,0,'default','default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,83,'{\"blockGraphs\":[],\"customGraphs\":[],\"default\":{\"data\":{\"Article\":[],\"Course\":[],\"Dataset\":[],\"FAQPage\":[],\"Movie\":[],\"Person\":[],\"Product\":[],\"Recipe\":[],\"Service\":[],\"SoftwareApplication\":[],\"WebPage\":[]},\"graphName\":\"\",\"isEnabled\":true},\"graphs\":[],\"defaultGraph\":\"Article\",\"defaultPostTypeGraph\":\"\"}','default','{\"article\":{\"articleType\":\"BlogPosting\"},\"course\":{\"name\":\"\",\"description\":\"\",\"provider\":\"\"},\"faq\":{\"pages\":[]},\"product\":{\"reviews\":[]},\"recipe\":{\"ingredients\":[],\"instructions\":[],\"keywords\":[]},\"software\":{\"reviews\":[],\"operatingSystems\":[]},\"webPage\":{\"webPageType\":\"WebPage\"}}',0,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,-1,-1,'large','[{\"image:loc\":\"https:\\/\\/migrate.travelcommons.com\\/wp-content\\/uploads\\/2012\\/12\\/Logos.png\",\"image:title\":\"Trip Management App Logos\",\"image:caption\":\"The Usual Suspects\"},{\"image:loc\":\"https:\\/\\/migrate.travelcommons.com\\/wp-content\\/uploads\\/2012\\/12\\/Logos.png\",\"image:title\":\"Trip Management App Logos\",\"image:caption\":\"The Usual Suspects\"}]',NULL,NULL,'default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,0,'{\"linkFormat\":{\"internalLinkCount\":0,\"linkAssistantDismissed\":false},\"primaryTerm\":{\"productEducationDismissed\":false}}',NULL,'2020-12-25 17:25:18','2024-06-02 15:32:54',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL),
(316,1177,'\"Heads In Beds\" Review -- The Story Behind The Front Desk','Jacob Tomsky\'s \"Heads in Beds: A Reckless Memoir of Hotels, Hustles, and So-Called Hospitality\" is a fun read, but tries too hard to be the hotel version of Anthony Bourdain','[{\"label\":\"book review\",\"value\":\"book review\"},{\"label\":\"Heads In Beds review\",\"value\":\"Heads In Beds review\"},{\"label\":\"travel stories\",\"value\":\"travel stories\"},{\"label\":\"travel tips\",\"value\":\"travel tips\"}]','{\"focus\":[],\"additional\":[]}','{\"analysis\":{\"basic\":{\"metadescriptionLength\":{\"title\":\"Meta description length\",\"description\":\"The meta description is over 160 characters.\",\"score\":6,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"lengthContent\":{\"title\":\"Content Length\",\"description\":\"The content length is ok. Good job!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"isInternalLink\":{\"title\":\"Internal links\",\"description\":\"You are linking to other resources on your website which is great.\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"isExternalLink\":{\"title\":\"External links\",\"description\":\"Great! You are linking to external resources.\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"errors\":1},\"title\":{\"titleLength\":{\"title\":\"Title Length\",\"description\":\"Well done!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"errors\":0},\"readability\":{\"contentHasAssets\":{\"error\":0,\"title\":\"Images\\/Videos in content\",\"description\":\"Your content contains images and\\/or video(s).\",\"score\":5,\"maxScore\":5},\"paragraphLength\":{\"title\":\"Paragraphs Length\",\"description\":\"You are using short paragraphs.\",\"score\":5,\"maxScore\":5,\"error\":0},\"sentenceLength\":{\"title\":\"Sentences Length\",\"description\":\"39.1% of the sentences contain more than 20 words, which is more than the recommended maximum of 25%. Try to shorten the sentences.\",\"score\":3,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"passiveVoice\":{\"title\":\"Passive Voice\",\"description\":\"17.4% of the sentences contain passive voice, which is more than the recommended maximum of 10%. Try to use their active counterparts.\",\"score\":3,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"transitionWords\":{\"title\":\"Transition words\",\"description\":\"Well done!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"consecutiveSentences\":{\"title\":\"Consecutive sentences\",\"description\":\"There is enough variety in your sentences. That\'s great!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"subheadingsDistribution\":{\"title\":\"Subheading distribution\",\"description\":\"You are not using any subheadings, although your text is rather long. Try and add some subheadings.\",\"score\":2,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"calculateFleschReading\":{\"title\":\"Flesch Reading Ease\",\"description\":\"The copy scores 60.3 in the test, which is considered ok to read.\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"errors\":3}}}',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,'default','default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,'',NULL,NULL,'[]',0,'default','default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,87,'{\"blockGraphs\":[],\"customGraphs\":[],\"default\":{\"data\":{\"Article\":[],\"Course\":[],\"Dataset\":[],\"FAQPage\":[],\"Movie\":[],\"Person\":[],\"Product\":[],\"ProductReview\":[],\"Car\":[],\"Recipe\":[],\"Service\":[],\"SoftwareApplication\":[],\"WebPage\":[]},\"graphName\":\"\",\"isEnabled\":true},\"graphs\":[]}','default','{\"article\":{\"articleType\":\"BlogPosting\"},\"course\":{\"name\":\"\",\"description\":\"\",\"provider\":\"\"},\"faq\":{\"pages\":[]},\"product\":{\"reviews\":[]},\"recipe\":{\"ingredients\":[],\"instructions\":[],\"keywords\":[]},\"software\":{\"reviews\":[],\"operatingSystems\":[]},\"webPage\":{\"webPageType\":\"WebPage\"}}',0,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,-1,-1,'large','[{\"image:loc\":\"\\/wp-content\\/uploads\\/2013\\/01\\/cn_image.size_.heads-in-beds-jacob-tomsky-cover.jpg\"}]','2025-06-26 03:37:09',NULL,'default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,0,'{\"linkFormat\":{\"internalLinkCount\":0,\"linkAssistantDismissed\":false},\"primaryTerm\":{\"productEducationDismissed\":false}}',NULL,'2020-12-25 17:25:18','2025-06-26 03:37:09',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL),
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(323,1289,'Top 10 Holiday Travel Tips | #site_title','Snow, ice, and cold temperatures hit North America early this year. Here are 10 tips to help you navigate the holiday crowds and weather.','[{\"label\":\"top 10 holiday travel tips\",\"value\":\"top 10 holiday travel tips\"},{\"label\":\"top ten winter travel tips\",\"value\":\"top ten winter travel tips\"}]','{\"focus\":[],\"additional\":[]}','{\"analysis\":{\"basic\":{\"metadescriptionLength\":{\"title\":\"Meta description Length\",\"description\":\"Well done!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"lengthContent\":{\"title\":\"Content Length\",\"description\":\"The content length is ok. Good job!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"isInternalLink\":{\"title\":\"Internal links\",\"description\":\"You are linking to other resources on your website which is great.\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"isExternalLink\":{\"title\":\"External links\",\"description\":\"Great! You are linking to external resources.\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"errors\":0},\"title\":{\"titleLength\":{\"title\":\"Title Length\",\"description\":\"Well done!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"errors\":0},\"readability\":{\"contentHasAssets\":{\"error\":0,\"title\":\"Images\\/Videos in content\",\"description\":\"Your content contains images and\\/or video(s).\",\"score\":5,\"maxScore\":5},\"paragraphLength\":{\"title\":\"Paragraphs Length\",\"description\":\"You are using short paragraphs.\",\"score\":5,\"maxScore\":5,\"error\":0},\"sentenceLength\":{\"title\":\"Sentences Length\",\"description\":\"Sentence length is looking great!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"passiveVoice\":{\"title\":\"Passive Voice\",\"description\":\"10.4% of the sentences contain passive voice, which is more than the recommended maximum of 10%. Try to use their active counterparts.\",\"score\":6,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"transitionWords\":{\"title\":\"Transition words\",\"description\":\"Well done!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"consecutiveSentences\":{\"title\":\"Consecutive sentences\",\"description\":\"There is enough variety in your sentences. That\'s great!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"subheadingsDistribution\":{\"title\":\"Subheading distribution\",\"description\":\"You are not using any subheadings, although your text is rather long. Try and add some subheadings.\",\"score\":2,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"calculateFleschReading\":{\"title\":\"Flesch Reading Ease\",\"description\":\"The copy scores 62.8 in the test, which is considered ok to read.\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"errors\":2}}}',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,'default','default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,'',NULL,NULL,'[]',0,'default','default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,94,'{\"blockGraphs\":[],\"customGraphs\":[],\"default\":{\"data\":{\"Article\":[],\"Course\":[],\"Dataset\":[],\"FAQPage\":[],\"Movie\":[],\"Person\":[],\"Product\":[],\"ProductReview\":[],\"Car\":[],\"Recipe\":[],\"Service\":[],\"SoftwareApplication\":[],\"WebPage\":[]},\"graphName\":\"\",\"isEnabled\":true},\"graphs\":[],\"defaultGraph\":\"Article\",\"defaultPostTypeGraph\":\"\"}','default','{\"article\":{\"articleType\":\"BlogPosting\"},\"course\":{\"name\":\"\",\"description\":\"\",\"provider\":\"\"},\"faq\":{\"pages\":[]},\"product\":{\"reviews\":[]},\"recipe\":{\"ingredients\":[],\"instructions\":[],\"keywords\":[]},\"software\":{\"reviews\":[],\"operatingSystems\":[]},\"webPage\":{\"webPageType\":\"WebPage\"}}',0,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,-1,-1,'large','[{\"image:loc\":\"\\/wp-content\\/uploads\\/2013\\/12\\/2013-12-10-07.55.43-825x510.jpg\"},{\"image:loc\":\"\\/wp-content\\/uploads\\/2013\\/12\\/2013-12-10-07.55.43.jpg\"}]','2025-06-26 03:38:22',NULL,'default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,0,'{\"linkFormat\":{\"internalLinkCount\":0,\"linkAssistantDismissed\":false},\"primaryTerm\":{\"productEducationDismissed\":false}}',NULL,'2020-12-25 17:25:18','2025-06-26 03:38:22',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL),
(324,1305,'Serious Hotel Reviews; TSA Gets Something Right','My checklist for hotel reviews; Key travel apps; Airline Twitter stalking; TSA PreCheck expansion','[{\"label\":\"business travel\",\"value\":\"business travel\"},{\"label\":\"travel tips\",\"value\":\"travel tips\"},{\"label\":\"business travelers\",\"value\":\"business travelers\"},{\"label\":\"road warrior\",\"value\":\"road warrior\"},{\"label\":\"travel stories\",\"value\":\"travel stories\"},{\"label\":\"Travel Commons\",\"value\":\"Travel Commons\"},{\"label\":\"TravelCommons\",\"value\":\"TravelCommons\"},{\"label\":\"TSA\",\"value\":\"TSA\"},{\"label\":\"PreCheck\",\"value\":\"PreCheck\"},{\"label\":\"TripAdvisor\",\"value\":\"TripAdvisor\"},{\"label\":\"Hotel Reviews\",\"value\":\"Hotel Reviews\"},{\"label\":\"Travel Apps\",\"value\":\"Travel Apps\"},{\"label\":\"New Orleans\",\"value\":\"New Orleans\"}]','{\"focus\":[],\"additional\":[]}','{\"analysis\":{\"basic\":{\"metadescriptionLength\":{\"title\":\"Meta description length\",\"description\":\"The meta description is too short.\",\"score\":6,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"lengthContent\":{\"title\":\"Content Length\",\"description\":\"The content length is ok. Good job!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"isInternalLink\":{\"title\":\"Internal links\",\"description\":\"You are linking to other resources on your website which is great.\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"isExternalLink\":{\"title\":\"External links\",\"description\":\"Great! You are linking to external resources.\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"errors\":1},\"title\":{\"titleLength\":{\"title\":\"Title Length\",\"description\":\"Well done!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"errors\":0},\"readability\":{\"contentHasAssets\":{\"error\":0,\"title\":\"Images\\/Videos in content\",\"description\":\"Your content contains images and\\/or video(s).\",\"score\":5,\"maxScore\":5},\"paragraphLength\":{\"title\":\"Paragraphs Length\",\"description\":\"You are using short paragraphs.\",\"score\":5,\"maxScore\":5,\"error\":0},\"sentenceLength\":{\"title\":\"Sentences Length\",\"description\":\"30.8% of the sentences contain more than 20 words, which is more than the recommended maximum of 25%. Try to shorten the sentences.\",\"score\":3,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"passiveVoice\":{\"title\":\"Passive Voice\",\"description\":\"12.7% of the sentences contain passive voice, which is more than the recommended maximum of 10%. Try to use their active counterparts.\",\"score\":6,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"transitionWords\":{\"title\":\"Transition words\",\"description\":\"Well done!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"consecutiveSentences\":{\"title\":\"Consecutive sentences\",\"description\":\"There is enough variety in your sentences. That\'s great!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"subheadingsDistribution\":{\"title\":\"Subheading distribution\",\"description\":\"You are not using any subheadings, although your text is rather long. Try and add some subheadings.\",\"score\":2,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"calculateFleschReading\":{\"title\":\"Flesch Reading Ease\",\"description\":\"The copy scores 66.2 in the test, which is considered ok to read.\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"errors\":3}}}',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,'default','default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,'',NULL,NULL,'[]',0,'default','default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,89,'{\"blockGraphs\":[],\"customGraphs\":[],\"default\":{\"data\":{\"Article\":[],\"Course\":[],\"Dataset\":[],\"FAQPage\":[],\"Movie\":[],\"Person\":[],\"Product\":[],\"ProductReview\":[],\"Car\":[],\"Recipe\":[],\"Service\":[],\"SoftwareApplication\":[],\"WebPage\":[]},\"graphName\":\"\",\"isEnabled\":true},\"graphs\":[],\"defaultGraph\":\"Article\",\"defaultPostTypeGraph\":\"\"}','default','{\"article\":{\"articleType\":\"BlogPosting\"},\"course\":{\"name\":\"\",\"description\":\"\",\"provider\":\"\"},\"faq\":{\"pages\":[]},\"product\":{\"reviews\":[]},\"recipe\":{\"ingredients\":[],\"instructions\":[],\"keywords\":[]},\"software\":{\"reviews\":[],\"operatingSystems\":[]},\"webPage\":{\"webPageType\":\"WebPage\"}}',0,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,-1,-1,'large','[{\"image:loc\":\"\\/wp-content\\/uploads\\/2014\\/01\\/2013-11-04-07.32.55-2-825x510.jpg\"},{\"image:loc\":\"\\/wp-content\\/uploads\\/2014\\/01\\/2013-11-04-07.32.55-2.jpg\"}]','2025-06-26 03:38:22',NULL,'default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,0,'{\"linkFormat\":{\"internalLinkCount\":0,\"linkAssistantDismissed\":false},\"primaryTerm\":{\"productEducationDismissed\":false}}',NULL,'2020-12-25 17:25:18','2025-06-26 03:38:22',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL);
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(325,1323,'Worst Travel Experiences Ever | #site_title','Recent trip to Beijing, tough winter travel, and some of my worst trips ever','[{\"label\":\"business travel\",\"value\":\"business travel\"},{\"label\":\"travel tips\",\"value\":\"travel tips\"},{\"label\":\"business travelers\",\"value\":\"business travelers\"},{\"label\":\"road warrior\",\"value\":\"road warrior\"},{\"label\":\"travel stories\",\"value\":\"travel stories\"},{\"label\":\"Travel Commons\",\"value\":\"Travel Commons\"},{\"label\":\"TravelCommons\",\"value\":\"TravelCommons\"},{\"label\":\"travel apps\",\"value\":\"travel apps\"},{\"label\":\"Beijing\",\"value\":\"Beijing\"},{\"label\":\"China\",\"value\":\"China\"},{\"label\":\"travel technology\",\"value\":\"travel technology\"},{\"label\":\"worst travel experience\",\"value\":\"worst travel experience\"},{\"label\":\"travel toiletries\",\"value\":\"travel toiletries\"},{\"label\":\"VPN\",\"value\":\"VPN\"}]','{\"focus\":[],\"additional\":[]}','{\"analysis\":{\"basic\":{\"metadescriptionLength\":{\"title\":\"Meta description length\",\"description\":\"The meta description is too short.\",\"score\":6,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"lengthContent\":{\"title\":\"Content Length\",\"description\":\"The content length is ok. Good job!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"isInternalLink\":{\"title\":\"Internal links\",\"description\":\"You are linking to other resources on your website which is great.\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"isExternalLink\":{\"title\":\"External links\",\"description\":\"Great! You are linking to external resources.\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"errors\":1},\"title\":{\"titleLength\":{\"title\":\"Title Length\",\"description\":\"Well done!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"errors\":0},\"readability\":{\"contentHasAssets\":{\"error\":0,\"title\":\"Images\\/Videos in content\",\"description\":\"Your content contains images and\\/or video(s).\",\"score\":5,\"maxScore\":5},\"paragraphLength\":{\"title\":\"Paragraphs Length\",\"description\":\"You are using short paragraphs.\",\"score\":5,\"maxScore\":5,\"error\":0},\"sentenceLength\":{\"title\":\"Sentences Length\",\"description\":\"Sentence length is looking great!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"passiveVoice\":{\"title\":\"Passive Voice\",\"description\":\"10.5% of the sentences contain passive voice, which is more than the recommended maximum of 10%. Try to use their active counterparts.\",\"score\":6,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"transitionWords\":{\"title\":\"Transition words\",\"description\":\"Well done!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"consecutiveSentences\":{\"title\":\"Consecutive sentences\",\"description\":\"The text contains 3 consecutive sentences starting with the same word. Try to mix things up!\",\"score\":3,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"subheadingsDistribution\":{\"title\":\"Subheading distribution\",\"description\":\"You are not using any subheadings, although your text is rather long. Try and add some subheadings.\",\"score\":2,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"calculateFleschReading\":{\"title\":\"Flesch Reading Ease\",\"description\":\"The copy scores 75 in the test, which is considered fairly easy to read.\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"errors\":3}}}',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,'default','default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,'',NULL,NULL,'[]',0,'default','default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,89,'{\"blockGraphs\":[],\"customGraphs\":[],\"default\":{\"data\":{\"Article\":[],\"Course\":[],\"Dataset\":[],\"FAQPage\":[],\"Movie\":[],\"Person\":[],\"Product\":[],\"ProductReview\":[],\"Car\":[],\"Recipe\":[],\"Service\":[],\"SoftwareApplication\":[],\"WebPage\":[]},\"graphName\":\"\",\"isEnabled\":true},\"graphs\":[],\"defaultGraph\":\"Article\",\"defaultPostTypeGraph\":\"\"}','default','{\"article\":{\"articleType\":\"BlogPosting\"},\"course\":{\"name\":\"\",\"description\":\"\",\"provider\":\"\"},\"faq\":{\"pages\":[]},\"product\":{\"reviews\":[]},\"recipe\":{\"ingredients\":[],\"instructions\":[],\"keywords\":[]},\"software\":{\"reviews\":[],\"operatingSystems\":[]},\"webPage\":{\"webPageType\":\"WebPage\"}}',0,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,-1,-1,'large','[{\"image:loc\":\"\\/wp-content\\/uploads\\/2014\\/04\\/2014-04-06-12.11.37-825x510.jpg\"},{\"image:loc\":\"\\/wp-content\\/uploads\\/2014\\/04\\/2014-04-06-12.11.37.jpg\"},{\"image:loc\":\"\\/wp-content\\/uploads\\/2014\\/04\\/2014-04-07-10.12.09crop.jpg\"}]','2025-06-26 03:38:22',NULL,'default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,0,'{\"linkFormat\":{\"internalLinkCount\":0,\"linkAssistantDismissed\":false},\"primaryTerm\":{\"productEducationDismissed\":false}}',NULL,'2020-12-25 17:25:18','2025-06-26 03:38:22',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL),
(326,1353,'\'Round the World in 8 Days; Beijing Mass Transit | #site_title','Highlights from 8-day around-the-world itinerary; miserable Beijing taxi service; United vs. Delta Twitter service, the secret to buying Bose headphones','[{\"label\":\"business travel\",\"value\":\"business travel\"},{\"label\":\"travel tips\",\"value\":\"travel tips\"},{\"label\":\"business travelers\",\"value\":\"business travelers\"},{\"label\":\"road warrior\",\"value\":\"road warrior\"},{\"label\":\"travel stories\",\"value\":\"travel stories\"},{\"label\":\"Travel Commons\",\"value\":\"Travel Commons\"},{\"label\":\"Beijing\",\"value\":\"Beijing\"},{\"label\":\"Manila\",\"value\":\"Manila\"},{\"label\":\"Twitter\",\"value\":\"Twitter\"},{\"label\":\"travel technology\",\"value\":\"travel technology\"},{\"label\":\"iPhone vs. Android\",\"value\":\"iPhone vs. Android\"},{\"label\":\"Bose headphones\",\"value\":\"Bose headphones\"}]','{\"focus\":[],\"additional\":[]}','{\"analysis\":{\"basic\":{\"metadescriptionLength\":{\"title\":\"Meta description Length\",\"description\":\"Well done!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"lengthContent\":{\"title\":\"Content Length\",\"description\":\"The content length is ok. Good job!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"isInternalLink\":{\"title\":\"Internal links\",\"description\":\"You are linking to other resources on your website which is great.\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"isExternalLink\":{\"title\":\"External links\",\"description\":\"Great! You are linking to external resources.\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"errors\":0},\"title\":{\"titleLength\":{\"title\":\"SEO Title length\",\"description\":\"The title is over 60 characters.\",\"score\":6,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"errors\":1},\"readability\":{\"contentHasAssets\":{\"error\":0,\"title\":\"Images\\/Videos in content\",\"description\":\"Your content contains images and\\/or video(s).\",\"score\":5,\"maxScore\":5},\"paragraphLength\":{\"title\":\"Paragraphs Length\",\"description\":\"At least one paragraph is long. Consider using short paragraphs.\",\"score\":0,\"maxScore\":5,\"error\":1},\"sentenceLength\":{\"title\":\"Sentences Length\",\"description\":\"30.8% of the sentences contain more than 20 words, which is more than the recommended maximum of 25%. Try to shorten the sentences.\",\"score\":3,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"passiveVoice\":{\"title\":\"Passive Voice\",\"description\":\"You\'re using enough active voice. That\'s great!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"transitionWords\":{\"title\":\"Transition words\",\"description\":\"Well done!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"consecutiveSentences\":{\"title\":\"Consecutive sentences\",\"description\":\"The text contains 3 consecutive sentences starting with the same word. Try to mix things up!\",\"score\":3,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"subheadingsDistribution\":{\"title\":\"Subheading distribution\",\"description\":\"You are not using any subheadings, although your text is rather long. Try and add some subheadings.\",\"score\":2,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"calculateFleschReading\":{\"title\":\"Flesch Reading Ease\",\"description\":\"The copy scores 71.1 in the test, which is considered fairly easy to read.\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"errors\":4}}}',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,'default','default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,'',NULL,NULL,'[]',0,'default','default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,76,'{\"blockGraphs\":[],\"customGraphs\":[],\"default\":{\"data\":{\"Article\":[],\"Course\":[],\"Dataset\":[],\"FAQPage\":[],\"Movie\":[],\"Person\":[],\"Product\":[],\"ProductReview\":[],\"Car\":[],\"Recipe\":[],\"Service\":[],\"SoftwareApplication\":[],\"WebPage\":[]},\"graphName\":\"\",\"isEnabled\":true},\"graphs\":[],\"defaultGraph\":\"Article\",\"defaultPostTypeGraph\":\"\"}','default','{\"article\":{\"articleType\":\"BlogPosting\"},\"course\":{\"name\":\"\",\"description\":\"\",\"provider\":\"\"},\"faq\":{\"pages\":[]},\"product\":{\"reviews\":[]},\"recipe\":{\"ingredients\":[],\"instructions\":[],\"keywords\":[]},\"software\":{\"reviews\":[],\"operatingSystems\":[]},\"webPage\":{\"webPageType\":\"WebPage\"}}',0,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,-1,-1,'large','[{\"image:loc\":\"\\/wp-content\\/uploads\\/2014\\/06\\/2014-05-02-17.52.56-768x510.jpg\"},{\"image:loc\":\"\\/wp-content\\/uploads\\/2014\\/06\\/2014-05-02-17.52.56.jpg\"}]','2025-06-26 03:38:22',NULL,'default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,0,'{\"linkFormat\":{\"internalLinkCount\":0,\"linkAssistantDismissed\":false},\"primaryTerm\":{\"productEducationDismissed\":false}}',NULL,'2020-12-25 17:25:18','2025-06-26 03:38:22',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL),
(327,1359,'Regional Jets Ruining My Life; Visa Hassles | #site_title','Regional jets make flying to mid-size cities difficult; Chinese and Indian visa hassles; Airline Twitter response times; Carry-on bag throwback; Skipping SkyMall magazine','[{\"label\":\"business travel\",\"value\":\"business travel\"},{\"label\":\"travel tips\",\"value\":\"travel tips\"},{\"label\":\"business travelers\",\"value\":\"business travelers\"},{\"label\":\"road warrior\",\"value\":\"road warrior\"},{\"label\":\"travel stories\",\"value\":\"travel stories\"},{\"label\":\"Travel Commons\",\"value\":\"Travel Commons\"},{\"label\":\"Regional Jets\",\"value\":\"Regional Jets\"},{\"label\":\"LAX\",\"value\":\"LAX\"},{\"label\":\"Visas\",\"value\":\"Visas\"},{\"label\":\"China\",\"value\":\"China\"},{\"label\":\"India\",\"value\":\"India\"}]','{\"focus\":[],\"additional\":[]}','{\"analysis\":{\"basic\":{\"metadescriptionLength\":{\"title\":\"Meta description length\",\"description\":\"The meta description is over 160 characters.\",\"score\":6,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"lengthContent\":{\"title\":\"Content Length\",\"description\":\"The content length is ok. Good job!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"isInternalLink\":{\"title\":\"Internal links\",\"description\":\"You are linking to other resources on your website which is great.\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"isExternalLink\":{\"title\":\"External links\",\"description\":\"Great! You are linking to external resources.\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"errors\":1},\"title\":{\"titleLength\":{\"title\":\"Title Length\",\"description\":\"Well done!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"errors\":0},\"readability\":{\"contentHasAssets\":{\"error\":0,\"title\":\"Images\\/Videos in content\",\"description\":\"Your content contains images and\\/or video(s).\",\"score\":5,\"maxScore\":5},\"paragraphLength\":{\"title\":\"Paragraphs Length\",\"description\":\"You are using short paragraphs.\",\"score\":5,\"maxScore\":5,\"error\":0},\"sentenceLength\":{\"title\":\"Sentences Length\",\"description\":\"27.7% of the sentences contain more than 20 words, which is more than the recommended maximum of 25%. Try to shorten the sentences.\",\"score\":6,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"passiveVoice\":{\"title\":\"Passive Voice\",\"description\":\"10.6% of the sentences contain passive voice, which is more than the recommended maximum of 10%. Try to use their active counterparts.\",\"score\":6,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"transitionWords\":{\"title\":\"Transition words\",\"description\":\"Well done!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"consecutiveSentences\":{\"title\":\"Consecutive sentences\",\"description\":\"The text contains 3 consecutive sentences starting with the same word. Try to mix things up!\",\"score\":3,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"subheadingsDistribution\":{\"title\":\"Subheading distribution\",\"description\":\"You are not using any subheadings, although your text is rather long. Try and add some subheadings.\",\"score\":2,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"calculateFleschReading\":{\"title\":\"Flesch Reading Ease\",\"description\":\"The copy scores 72.5 in the test, which is considered fairly easy to read.\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"errors\":4}}}',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,'default','default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,'',NULL,NULL,'[]',0,'default','default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,87,'{\"blockGraphs\":[],\"customGraphs\":[],\"default\":{\"data\":{\"Article\":[],\"Course\":[],\"Dataset\":[],\"FAQPage\":[],\"Movie\":[],\"Person\":[],\"Product\":[],\"ProductReview\":[],\"Car\":[],\"Recipe\":[],\"Service\":[],\"SoftwareApplication\":[],\"WebPage\":[]},\"graphName\":\"\",\"isEnabled\":true},\"graphs\":[],\"defaultGraph\":\"Article\",\"defaultPostTypeGraph\":\"\"}','default','{\"article\":{\"articleType\":\"BlogPosting\"},\"course\":{\"name\":\"\",\"description\":\"\",\"provider\":\"\"},\"faq\":{\"pages\":[]},\"product\":{\"reviews\":[]},\"recipe\":{\"ingredients\":[],\"instructions\":[],\"keywords\":[]},\"software\":{\"reviews\":[],\"operatingSystems\":[]},\"webPage\":{\"webPageType\":\"WebPage\"}}',0,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,-1,-1,'large','[{\"image:loc\":\"\\/wp-content\\/uploads\\/2014\\/08\\/pic-r-1402317187245-825x510.jpg\"},{\"image:loc\":\"\\/wp-content\\/uploads\\/2014\\/08\\/pic-r-1402317187245.jpg\"}]','2025-06-26 03:38:22',NULL,'default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,0,'{\"linkFormat\":{\"internalLinkCount\":0,\"linkAssistantDismissed\":false},\"primaryTerm\":{\"productEducationDismissed\":false}}',NULL,'2020-12-25 17:25:18','2025-06-26 03:38:22',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL),
(328,1380,'Seatback Recline Wars; Craft Beer Tourism | #site_title','Finally weigh in on seatback recline wars. Why has this become some sort of Manichean morality play? Also taking Atlanta\'s MARTA subway; tagging beer hunting onto Midwest business trips.','[{\"label\":\"business travel\",\"value\":\"business travel\"},{\"label\":\"travel tips\",\"value\":\"travel tips\"},{\"label\":\"business travelers\",\"value\":\"business travelers\"},{\"label\":\"road warrior\",\"value\":\"road warrior\"},{\"label\":\"travel stories\",\"value\":\"travel stories\"},{\"label\":\"Travel Commons\",\"value\":\"Travel Commons\"},{\"label\":\"seatback recline\",\"value\":\"seatback recline\"},{\"label\":\"Atlanta\",\"value\":\"Atlanta\"},{\"label\":\"MARTA\",\"value\":\"MARTA\"},{\"label\":\"craft beer\",\"value\":\"craft beer\"},{\"label\":\"St Louis\",\"value\":\"St Louis\"},{\"label\":\"Indianapolis\",\"value\":\"Indianapolis\"},{\"label\":\"leg room\",\"value\":\"leg room\"}]','{\"focus\":[],\"additional\":[]}','{\"analysis\":{\"basic\":{\"metadescriptionLength\":{\"title\":\"Meta description length\",\"description\":\"The meta description is over 160 characters.\",\"score\":6,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"lengthContent\":{\"title\":\"Content Length\",\"description\":\"The content length is ok. Good job!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"isInternalLink\":{\"title\":\"Internal links\",\"description\":\"You are linking to other resources on your website which is great.\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"isExternalLink\":{\"title\":\"External links\",\"description\":\"Great! You are linking to external resources.\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"errors\":1},\"title\":{\"titleLength\":{\"title\":\"Title Length\",\"description\":\"Well done!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"errors\":0},\"readability\":{\"contentHasAssets\":{\"error\":0,\"title\":\"Images\\/Videos in content\",\"description\":\"Your content contains images and\\/or video(s).\",\"score\":5,\"maxScore\":5},\"paragraphLength\":{\"title\":\"Paragraphs Length\",\"description\":\"You are using short paragraphs.\",\"score\":5,\"maxScore\":5,\"error\":0},\"sentenceLength\":{\"title\":\"Sentences Length\",\"description\":\"26.3% of the sentences contain more than 20 words, which is more than the recommended maximum of 25%. Try to shorten the sentences.\",\"score\":6,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"passiveVoice\":{\"title\":\"Passive Voice\",\"description\":\"10.3% of the sentences contain passive voice, which is more than the recommended maximum of 10%. Try to use their active counterparts.\",\"score\":6,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"transitionWords\":{\"title\":\"Transition words\",\"description\":\"Well done!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"consecutiveSentences\":{\"title\":\"Consecutive sentences\",\"description\":\"The text contains 3 consecutive sentences starting with the same word. Try to mix things up!\",\"score\":3,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"subheadingsDistribution\":{\"title\":\"Subheading distribution\",\"description\":\"You are not using any subheadings, although your text is rather long. Try and add some subheadings.\",\"score\":2,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"calculateFleschReading\":{\"title\":\"Flesch Reading Ease\",\"description\":\"The copy scores 71.1 in the test, which is considered fairly easy to read.\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"errors\":4}}}',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,'default','default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,'',NULL,NULL,'[]',0,'default','default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,87,'{\"blockGraphs\":[],\"customGraphs\":[],\"default\":{\"data\":{\"Article\":[],\"Course\":[],\"Dataset\":[],\"FAQPage\":[],\"Movie\":[],\"Person\":[],\"Product\":[],\"ProductReview\":[],\"Car\":[],\"Recipe\":[],\"Service\":[],\"SoftwareApplication\":[],\"WebPage\":[]},\"graphName\":\"\",\"isEnabled\":true},\"graphs\":[],\"defaultGraph\":\"Article\",\"defaultPostTypeGraph\":\"\"}','default','{\"article\":{\"articleType\":\"BlogPosting\"},\"course\":{\"name\":\"\",\"description\":\"\",\"provider\":\"\"},\"faq\":{\"pages\":[]},\"product\":{\"reviews\":[]},\"recipe\":{\"ingredients\":[],\"instructions\":[],\"keywords\":[]},\"software\":{\"reviews\":[],\"operatingSystems\":[]},\"webPage\":{\"webPageType\":\"WebPage\"}}',0,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,-1,-1,'large','[{\"image:loc\":\"\\/wp-content\\/uploads\\/2014\\/10\\/IMG_0002-825x510.jpg\"},{\"image:loc\":\"\\/wp-content\\/uploads\\/2014\\/10\\/IMG_0002.jpg\"},{\"image:loc\":\"\\/wp-content\\/uploads\\/2014\\/10\\/2012-10-11-16.11.25.jpg\"}]','2025-06-26 03:38:22',NULL,'default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,0,'{\"linkFormat\":{\"internalLinkCount\":0,\"linkAssistantDismissed\":false},\"primaryTerm\":{\"productEducationDismissed\":false}}',NULL,'2020-12-25 17:25:18','2025-06-26 03:38:22',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL),
(329,1398,'Holiday Airport Etiquette; Travel Tax Pile-Up','Airport etiquette for non-frequent travelers; how travel taxes soak you; a high-tech suitcase; hackers attacking Hilton Honors; expensive overseas WiFi session','[{\"label\":\"business travel\",\"value\":\"business travel\"},{\"label\":\"travel tips\",\"value\":\"travel tips\"},{\"label\":\"business travelers\",\"value\":\"business travelers\"},{\"label\":\"road warrior\",\"value\":\"road warrior\"},{\"label\":\"travel stories\",\"value\":\"travel stories\"},{\"label\":\"Travel Commons\",\"value\":\"Travel Commons\"},{\"label\":\"Holiday Travel\",\"value\":\"Holiday Travel\"},{\"label\":\"Airport Etiquette\",\"value\":\"Airport Etiquette\"},{\"label\":\"Frequent Flier\",\"value\":\"Frequent Flier\"},{\"label\":\"Hacking\",\"value\":\"Hacking\"},{\"label\":\"Hotel Taxes\",\"value\":\"Hotel Taxes\"},{\"label\":\"Wi-Fi\",\"value\":\"Wi-Fi\"},{\"label\":\"Luggage\",\"value\":\"Luggage\"}]','{\"focus\":[],\"additional\":[]}','{\"analysis\":{\"basic\":{\"metadescriptionLength\":{\"title\":\"Meta description Length\",\"description\":\"Well done!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"lengthContent\":{\"title\":\"Content Length\",\"description\":\"The content length is ok. Good job!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"isInternalLink\":{\"title\":\"Internal links\",\"description\":\"You are linking to other resources on your website which is great.\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"isExternalLink\":{\"title\":\"External links\",\"description\":\"Great! You are linking to external resources.\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"errors\":0},\"title\":{\"titleLength\":{\"title\":\"Title Length\",\"description\":\"Well done!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"errors\":0},\"readability\":{\"contentHasAssets\":{\"error\":0,\"title\":\"Images\\/Videos in content\",\"description\":\"Your content contains images and\\/or video(s).\",\"score\":5,\"maxScore\":5},\"paragraphLength\":{\"title\":\"Paragraphs Length\",\"description\":\"You are using short paragraphs.\",\"score\":5,\"maxScore\":5,\"error\":0},\"sentenceLength\":{\"title\":\"Sentences Length\",\"description\":\"32.6% of the sentences contain more than 20 words, which is more than the recommended maximum of 25%. Try to shorten the sentences.\",\"score\":3,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"passiveVoice\":{\"title\":\"Passive Voice\",\"description\":\"12.9% of the sentences contain passive voice, which is more than the recommended maximum of 10%. Try to use their active counterparts.\",\"score\":6,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"transitionWords\":{\"title\":\"Transition words\",\"description\":\"Well done!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"consecutiveSentences\":{\"title\":\"Consecutive sentences\",\"description\":\"There is enough variety in your sentences. That\'s great!\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"subheadingsDistribution\":{\"title\":\"Subheading distribution\",\"description\":\"You are not using any subheadings, although your text is rather long. Try and add some subheadings.\",\"score\":2,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":1},\"calculateFleschReading\":{\"title\":\"Flesch Reading Ease\",\"description\":\"The copy scores 66.5 in the test, which is considered ok to read.\",\"score\":9,\"maxScore\":9,\"error\":0},\"errors\":3}}}',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,'default','default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,'',NULL,NULL,'[]',0,'default','default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,91,'{\"blockGraphs\":[],\"customGraphs\":[],\"default\":{\"data\":{\"Article\":[],\"Course\":[],\"Dataset\":[],\"FAQPage\":[],\"Movie\":[],\"Person\":[],\"Product\":[],\"ProductReview\":[],\"Car\":[],\"Recipe\":[],\"Service\":[],\"SoftwareApplication\":[],\"WebPage\":[]},\"graphName\":\"\",\"isEnabled\":true},\"graphs\":[],\"defaultGraph\":\"Article\",\"defaultPostTypeGraph\":\"\"}','default','{\"article\":{\"articleType\":\"BlogPosting\"},\"course\":{\"name\":\"\",\"description\":\"\",\"provider\":\"\"},\"faq\":{\"pages\":[]},\"product\":{\"reviews\":[]},\"recipe\":{\"ingredients\":[],\"instructions\":[],\"keywords\":[]},\"software\":{\"reviews\":[],\"operatingSystems\":[]},\"webPage\":{\"webPageType\":\"WebPage\"}}',0,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,-1,-1,'large','[{\"image:loc\":\"\\/wp-content\\/uploads\\/2014\\/11\\/IMG_0159-768x510.jpg\"},{\"image:loc\":\"\\/wp-content\\/uploads\\/2014\\/11\\/IMG_0159.jpg\"}]','2025-06-26 03:38:22',NULL,'default',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,0,'{\"linkFormat\":{\"internalLinkCount\":0,\"linkAssistantDismissed\":false},\"primaryTerm\":{\"productEducationDismissed\":false}}',NULL,'2020-12-25 17:25:18','2025-06-26 03:38:22',NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL),
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(2,7,'','','','68.74.114.87','2006-05-24 16:22:28','2006-05-24 22:22:28','Just a couple of quick comments:\n\n- Loving the show so far! Stumbled into listening to your podcast through itunes while I work a few days (itunes is OK right now but I\'m going to go explore some and see if there\'s something better - something that does podcasts and rss which to me would be ideal) :) Slowly working my way through the old shows so I can catch up to the current.\n\n- Quick comment about Wordpress: it will do the abbreviated postings like you have here BUT only if the template you use has that \"enabled\" and you add text into the excerpt field (if you or anyone wants to play with this, an easy to find template that allows you to do this is \"Blix\".) I just started fiddling with Wordpress last Monday and there seems to be a lot of hidden functionality to it but so far I\'m loving it.\n\nAnyway, keep up the great work!\n\nHilary Baumann',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(3,7,'mark','mpeacock@travelcommons.com','https://migrate.travelcommons.com','68.74.114.87','2006-05-24 16:22:55','2006-05-24 22:22:55','Hilary -\n\nThanks for the suggestion on Wordpress. I use Wordpress for a private blog in which I keep friends/family up-to-date on the progress of our house construction project. I like it, but am only using the default template. I\'ll search out the Blix template and start to play with it. Keep me posted on your findings.\n\nGlad that you\'re enjoying the podcast. I currently split my \"podcatching\" between iTunes and iPodder. My current traffic seems to be about 75% iTunes, so it has quickly become the \"default\" podcatching client for most people. I keep using iPodder because it has a bit more functionality.\n\nRegards,\nMark',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(4,8,'','','','68.74.114.87','2006-05-24 16:14:52','2006-05-24 22:14:52','Mr. Peacock,\n\nWhen I load this podcast into my library it is named \"Travelcommon #5\".\n#1-4 are named \"Travelcommoms\" (with an \"s\" at the end)\nThis causes #5 to be listed just below #1 instead of just below #4 in the Library.\nDo you control the naming rights?\nCan this be revised?\n\nA loyal fan....',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(5,8,'mark','mpeacock@travelcommons.com','https://migrate.travelcommons.com','68.74.114.87','2006-05-24 16:15:11','2006-05-24 22:15:11','Fixed it. I fat-fingered the Track title on the ID3 tag, which is I think what iTunes uses to load Song Name.\n\nSorry \'bout that. I\'ll flog the QA elf a bit later tonight.\n\nRegards,\nYour loyal podcaster',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(6,8,'','','','68.74.114.87','2006-05-24 16:15:30','2006-05-24 22:15:30','FYI - Pocast #5 cuts off in the middle of where you are talking about airport celebrity sightings. Checked the direct link after the one I downloaded on itunes did it and both do the same thing.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(7,8,'mark','mpeacock@travelcommons.com','https://migrate.travelcommons.com','68.74.114.87','2006-05-24 16:15:47','2006-05-24 22:15:47','Hmmm, thanks for the pointer. I\'ll check it out and reload the file. I wonder if I had problems after I redid all the files to include the T/C logo in the ID3 tag.\n\nRegards,\nMark',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(8,8,'mark','mpeacock@travelcommons.com','https://migrate.travelcommons.com','68.74.114.87','2006-05-24 16:17:03','2006-05-24 22:17:03','This has been a troublesome episode from the QA standpoint. Looks like that the file transfer didn\'t complete when I re-uploaded this episode earlier this month. Thanks for the pointer. I\'ve re-uploaded the file and it should be fine now.\n\nThanks,\nMark',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(9,9,'','','','68.74.114.87','2006-05-24 16:12:24','2006-05-24 22:12:24','Mark,\n\nI had just finished listening to episode 5 (where you mention Sean Penn) while on the airport shuttle service from the Marriott by the SFO airport back to the airport. While waiting in line at security who should end up right in front of me before going through the metal detector but Sean Penn! It was almost sureal since I\'d just finished the episode where you mentioned your encounter. I didn\'t bother him and just went on to my gate. Then while waiting for my flight, I listened to this episode where you followed up on the sighting. It was one of those strange moments of timing.\n\nThanks again for a wonderful series of podcasts. As a somewhat frequent traveler I appreciate your insights.\n\nEd Vawter\nedwardv2@comcast.net',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(10,10,'','','','68.74.114.87','2006-05-24 14:39:37','2006-05-24 20:39:37','Just wanted to let you know that I subscribed to the Travelcommons Podcast through iTunes 4.9 and when I opened up the program today your podcast #7 automatically downloaded into my library. Cool stuff. Podcasting goes mainstream thanks to Apple!',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(11,10,'','','','68.74.114.87','2006-05-24 14:40:02','2006-05-24 20:40:02','i just got your podcast through iTunes 4.9... It\'s a great show... Really facinating advice and stories for travel lovers all over the nation... Keep it up! Thanks!',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(12,10,'','','','68.74.114.87','2006-05-24 14:40:26','2006-05-24 20:40:26','Mark, you are too funny! Your travelcommons podcast is my favorite of the 20+ podcasts I listen to regularly. Every time you talk about the \"bathroom of the week\", it just makes me laugh. I told my husband, and he said, \"does that mean he\'s doing a \"pottycast\"?\" Hmm. I was in Las Vegas last week, and was listening to you in the bathroom of the Bellagio - how\'s that for class?! Keep up the good work, and thanks for your humorous approach to a subject that can be very trying at times.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(13,10,'mark','mpeacock@travelcommons.com','https://migrate.travelcommons.com','68.74.114.87','2006-05-24 14:40:48','2006-05-24 20:40:48','I love the \"pottycast\" comment. If you notice the T/C logo that now (finally) comes up on the iTunes directory listing for T/C, you\'ll note the briefcase in the bathroom tile motif. Not quite as posh as the Bellagio, granted. But then again, you\'ll notice that, other than the Camelback Inn, I haven\'t been podcasting from the grand hotels. I normally choose my hotel based on proximity rather than amenities -- at least for my business travel. I\'m trying desperately to get everything wrapped up so that I can head over to Europe for two weeks\' vacation. I\'m hoping that the hotels there will be a bit more plush...',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(14,10,'','','','68.74.114.87','2006-05-24 14:41:06','2006-05-24 20:41:06','Podcst #7 was my first, and I enjoyed it.\n\nI\'m a regular traveler and often find myself dining alone. My son, a chef in New Orleans (Herbsaint on St. Charles) suggested sitting at the bar if they serve food, and I\'ve done that with some remarkable consequences. Bartenders will almost always chat (if they\'re not slammed) and I\'ve enjoyed some great conversations at Bistro Jeanty in Yountville, Jeanty at Jacks in San Francisco, Cafe Pinot in LA and many others. At Rubicon in SF, a restaurant known for its superb wine list, I had been chatting with the bartender about their wines. He brought a glass with about an ounce of wine and asked me what I thought. It was just superb. He then told me that it came from a bottle of 1952 Cabernet Sauvignon that had been brought in that evening by a very wealthy customer who had shared a glass with the Sommelier who, in turn, had shared it with the bartender and then on down to me. Friendly chatter will sometimes result in a bartender refilling a half-empty wine glass and \"forgetting\" to add it to the check, samples of new wines and a variety of other benefits those dining at tables don\'t enjoy.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(15,10,'mark','mpeacock@travelcommons.com','https://migrate.travelcommons.com','68.74.114.87','2006-05-24 14:41:29','2006-05-24 20:41:29','I\'ve eaten at the bar of the Rubicon a number of times and had some beautiful classes of wine. Haven\'t been comp\'d yet, but had some great stuff.\n\nYou\'re right about chatting up the bartenders. Having tended bar on Capitol Hill during my college days, on a slow night, you\'re happy for any reasonably intelligent conversation. It helps pass the time \'til closing time. And in many bars, the bartender is the alcohol captain -- everything runs through him/her. If they decide they like you, you\'ll get a little \"pay back\" for helping the night run quicker.\n\nWhat kind of food does Herbsaint serve? I\'ll look it up next time I\'m down in NO.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(16,10,'','','','68.74.114.87','2006-05-24 14:41:51','2006-05-24 20:41:51','New York Times travel writer Julia Reed described it as modern creole. (In a February piece in the Times she thought it among NO\'s four best in the creole/Cajun category.) The founder is an Acadian who really knows the food you find around Lafayette and Breaux Bridge. He brought my son out from Palo Alto to help open the restaurant five years ago and it has become very popular among the locals. They do some interesting stuff with rabbit, smoked sausages etc., and they have a very interesting wine list.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(17,10,'','','','68.74.114.87','2006-05-24 14:42:10','2006-05-24 20:42:10','Hi Mark,\nI\'m one of your original fans and every show just gets better.\n\nSince marketing is my business, I wanted to share some observations with you\non the new iTunes system.\n\nI\'ve noticed that the most popular of the independent podcasts listed on iTunes list themselves in several catagories.\n\nUsing the Dawn &amp; Drew Show as an example (the best example of good Podcast marketing since I would guess it\'s only the marketing that\'s made this one popular at all). It\'s listed in iTunes under \"comedy\", under \"podcasts\", and twice under \"public radio\".\nObviously the more catagories, the more exposure and subscriptions.\nTravlecommons could easily qualify under:\nPodcasts\nAudio Blogs\nPublic Radio (It seems to be a generic catch all)\nTalk Radio\nInternational (You give a lot of European travel information)\nTransportation (No one teaches us more about TSA than you)\nAnd the most obvious one of all:\nComedy (you are one of the funniest guys in Podcasting, come on!)\nKeep up the great work!\nMary',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(18,10,'mark','mpeacock@travelcommons.com','https://migrate.travelcommons.com','68.74.114.87','2006-05-24 14:42:27','2006-05-24 20:42:27','Mary -\n\nThanks for the suggestion. I\'ll re-work my XML feed when I get back from vacation.\n\nRegards,\nMark',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(19,11,'','','','68.74.114.87','2006-05-24 14:29:45','2006-05-24 20:29:45','My vote for the worst airport is Indira Gandhi International Airport in Delhi, India.\n\nThe underlying reason for this is that the airport suffers from the regular delays of any airport, made worse by the lack of urgency on the part of any officials.\n\nBut that only aggravates the real problem with this airport, at least the international terminal. (I\'ve never been to the domestic one, but I fear it would be similar.)\n\nThe international terminal has no bathrooms or food shops (to get snacks or drinks) after the security cordon. So if your bladder is not completely empty - risking, of course, dehydration - you\'re likely to be crossing your legs before boarding your plane. And if you have not brought enough fluid and sustenance to wait out an interminable delay, you\'re also out of luck.\n\nJeff Inglis, South Portland, Maine\n\nPS - I enjoy the podcast. Thanks for doing it!',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(20,11,'mark','mpeacock@travelcommons.com','https://migrate.travelcommons.com','68.74.114.87','2006-05-24 14:30:07','2006-05-24 20:30:07','Jeff -\n\nThanks for leaving the words of warning about Gandhi Int\'l Airport. And I thought Kansas City was bad! I have not had the opportunity to travel yet to India -- I was on my way to Bangalore this January, but had the trip cancelled at the last minute. I believe that my itinerary had me connecting through Delhi, and I don\'t remember any warnings regarding lack of services beyond security. Quite a difference from the places like London Heathrow\'s Terminal 4, which seems like a duty-free shopping mall with a few flights arriving and departing.\n\nGlad you enjoy the podcast.\n\nRegards,\nMark',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(21,11,'','','','68.74.114.87','2006-05-24 14:30:29','2006-05-24 20:30:29','Thanks for mentioning this in Podcast 9! Got a kick out of hearing it... And yes, be prepared whenever traveling in India - even if you\'re on business, you never know what could happen...\n\nBe well.\n\nJeff',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(22,11,'','','','68.74.114.87','2006-05-24 14:30:50','2006-05-24 20:30:50','Can you add the Oakland, CA airport?',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(23,11,'mark','mpeacock@travelcommons.com','https://migrate.travelcommons.com','68.74.114.87','2006-05-24 14:31:06','2006-05-24 20:31:06','Maybe I\'ll take the winners from the first poll and put them up against new suggestions. Oakland and Miami have received write-in votes...',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(24,11,'','','','68.74.114.87','2006-05-24 14:31:32','2006-05-24 20:31:32','I listen to quite a few podcasts, and I just wanted to drop you a line to let you know that travelcommons is my absolute favorite. While I have favorite podcasts for my auto racing/cycling iterests, I especially enjoy travelcommons for your unique and eclectic view of the world around us.\n\nWhile I\'m not a frequent business traveler, I\'ll be making a trip to L.A. for work in a week or so, and all of the insider tips and insights have helped me prepare for my trip... Whether it be airport tips, referring your listeners to Skype or tips on booking your travel itinerary... I appreciate the information.\n\nI found your podcast thanks to iTunes, and downloaded the latest episode. After listening, I went back and downloaded all of your previous episodes and was hooked. While I wish you had the time to put out more content, I know how difficult that can be when you are on the road. Thanks for the great podcast &amp; website.\n\nI really don\'t get to travel much these days, but am still a traveler at heart, and hearing the travelcommons podcast makes me feel like I am still in tune with the mindset of a road warrior.\n\nThanks again!\n\nTim G.\nMarietta, OH',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(25,11,'mark','mpeacock@travelcommons.com','https://migrate.travelcommons.com','68.74.114.87','2006-05-24 14:33:10','2006-05-24 20:33:10','Tim -\n\nThanks for the comments and complements. I\'m glad that you enjoy the podcast. I certainly enjoy doing it. I\'d like to put out more content, but given my work commitments, I\'m doing well to keep a once-a-week cadence. Years ago, I wrote a weekly business column for an alternative newspaper in Philadephia called The Welcomat. That experience taught me the difficulty/challenge in stringing together 600 somewhat-interesting/insightful words a week.\n\nThis podcast provides a similar challenge. I think about possible topics during the week, jotting them down in my notebook. I then write out a detailed outline -- typically on an airplane flight or after dinner in my hotel room. The recording is the easy part. I then take a couple of hours to assemble, edit, post and write the show notes. I may spend as much time thinking about the right introductory song clip as I do recording the actual topic!\n\nDon\'t know where you\'re going in LA -- whether LA proper or down in Orange County. Two thoughts -- beware of LAX, and get a hotel near the ocean. LAX has one of the worst architectural layouts for today\'s increased security screening. Give yourself enough time to pass through security -- I\'ve rarely spent less than 15-20 minutes in the security queue. On the positive side, carve out some ocean time if possible. I see that you, like me, are from the Midwest. We don\'t see the ocean every day, so we should grab every opportunity to smell a bit of salt air. The easiest way to do this is to book a hotel room by the ocean. It may add 10-15 minutes to your drive, but I think that it\'s worth it. Experiencing the beach communities of, say, Manhattan Beach or Huntington Beach, is worth it.\n\nTake care,\nMark',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(26,11,'Meegeekai','','http://emptyseat.net/','68.74.114.87','2006-05-24 14:33:54','2006-05-24 20:33:54','Mark - you continue to amaze and inspire me. I finally think I got this figured out and after a long sabatical have starting posting up my podcasts again. I am in Taiwan, Malaysia, and Singapore this trip and just posted up #2 and #3. I have copied your format somewhat, hope you don\'t mind. Just was getting too hung up on structure and not focusing on content. This too will evolve.\n\nThanks again, have a good vacation - Curt Taylor (www.emptyseat.net)',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(27,11,'','','','68.74.114.87','2006-05-24 14:34:14','2006-05-24 20:34:14','I\'ve listened to two your shows. I\'ll be back for more.\n\nWondering if you have comments (or have earlier shows) on:\n1 internet access in-flight\n2 mobile phone access in-flight\n\nthanks',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(28,11,'mark','mpeacock@travelcommons.com','https://migrate.travelcommons.com','68.74.114.87','2006-05-24 14:35:34','2006-05-24 20:35:34','Good topical questions; I\'ll try to address them in future podcasts. I\'m personally in the anti-mobile phone camp. When you have 150+ people crammed shoulder-to-shoulder in a cylindrical metal tube, loud mobile phone conversations just doesn\'t seem to be a good idea. Waiting for a recent flight to complete its boarding, a woman behind me forced everyone in a three-row radius to listen to her conversation with her husband because she was using the speakerphone feature on her phone. The rest of us all looked at each other in wonder/horror!\n\nMobile phone conversations seem to shut off people\'s sense of their surroundings -- they seem to ignore the people who phyically surround them and only focus on the person at the other end of the call. It\'s bad enough to deal with mobile phone conversations during the 20-minute boarding process and the 10 minutes between touchdown and de-planing. I\'m not sure I could handle the constant chatter during a 4-hour flight from Chicago to LA.\n\nRegards,\nMark',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(29,11,'Meegeekai','','http://emptyseat.net/','68.74.114.87','2006-05-24 14:36:00','2006-05-24 20:36:00','Lufthansa has started internet access inflight. A co-worker of mine from Italy just used it and loves it. Also, if you use IPass as an ISP they just announced connectivity from various airlines bring this service on line. As far as mobiles, have not heard or seen anything on this.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(30,12,'','','','68.74.114.87','2006-05-24 14:26:37','2006-05-24 20:26:37','Just wanted to drop a note and say I really enjoy your podcast! I work for one the large chain hotels and I love hearing the viewpoint of a roadwarrior like youself. Gives me another great perspective on what a guest mindset is and some intersting trends.\n\nDoug',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(31,12,'','','','68.74.114.87','2006-05-24 14:27:03','2006-05-24 20:27:03','One of my favorite podcasts. First time I\'ve made it to your site so I\'m still sort of looking around. I\'m something of a traveler myself, but not near as much as you. Just wanted to say, keep up the good work. I\'m off to vote for you at podcastalley.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(32,12,'','','','68.74.114.87','2006-05-24 14:27:21','2006-05-24 20:27:21','Found you on Itunes. Enjoyed your podcast. I am not a road warrior, but love traveling.\nWill check out your future podvcasts',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(33,13,'','','','68.74.114.87','2006-05-24 14:23:19','2006-05-24 20:23:19','Curiosity question: what VPN software/setup do you use OR which ones have you had experiences with (good or bad.) Great topic by the way. Also applies to coffee shops or any other easily accessed networks. Security is something so many people just ignor because they think it doesn\'t apply to them OR it\'s beyond their level of technical understanding so they basically give up on it. The tv hacking is also something interesting to ponder - hopefully hotels, the larger chains at the very least, will take some time in the future to really take a look at security issues they are creating.\n\nHilary Baumann',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(34,13,'Meegeekai','','http://emptyseat.net/','68.74.114.87','2006-05-24 14:23:47','2006-05-24 20:23:47','Mark - Listened to this on the way down from Taipei to Singapore this afternoon. Very interesting stuff on the hotel hacking. I recently picked up a D-Link (DWLG730AP) travel router. I have been reading about these lately on FlyerTalk.com and a few other places. There are a few other brands out there and you can even use an Apple Airport Express. The D-Link gives you the ability to 1) set up as a wifi router 2) set up as a regular wifi access point 3) use as a client if you don\'t have built in wifi on your laptop. It does provide WEP and another level of firewall security. Just plug into the LAN connection at the hotel and you are pretty much good to go with a \"in room\" secure wifi connection. Other uses include sharing one \'paid\' hotel connection with your traveling companions or in a meeting environment. We had a meeting in Seoul this week with around 50 people. There was only one wired LAN connection and a crappy wifi setup. I used the travel router on the wired LAN and disabled the WEP so the other 50 folks could get on line.\n\nPS - SQ is now offering Connexxion on there new Airbus 380\'s. Was not on the flight down to Singapore today from Taipei, but I am sure it is on the SIN-LAX as well as the SIN-JFK non stops.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(35,13,'mark','mpeacock@travelcommons.com','https://migrate.travelcommons.com','68.74.114.87','2006-05-24 14:24:18','2006-05-24 20:24:18','That\'s a good thought -- you get the convenience of WiFi plus the protection of a separate firewall. I find that configuring the software firewall within WinXP SP2 is a bit fiddly. I have a spare D-Link WiFi router somewhere in the basement. I think I\'ll stick it in my regular travel bag.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(36,13,'','','','68.74.114.87','2006-05-24 14:24:44','2006-05-24 20:24:44','Quick note. WEP is better than nothing but it\'s easily cracked. Airsnort or WEPcrack are easy to find and download to crack wep. WPA is still secure. If you\'re buying something new look for WPA.\n\nIf your tech inclined and want to play around with an old unused router, it looks like there may be some open source firmware to upgrade older routers (partiularly linksys wrt line) that claim to support wap (openwrt.org - but I haven\'t tried this yet.) D-link gives you a list of open source firmware they don\'t support (but may be an option for upgrading an old router if there isn\'t an official upgrade.)\n\nJust wanted to mention this.\n--Hilary Baumann',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(37,14,'Frick','','http://fricksworld.blogspot.com/','68.74.114.87','2006-05-24 14:19:03','2006-05-24 20:19:03','How about a pole on the worst airline?\nI flew Southwest for the first time this week, (a couple of co-workers raved about this airline) I could not stand their \"first one to check in gets the best seat\". I almost always arrive at the airport just before my flight so I was forced to sit in a center seat (that sucks) with no overhead bins left (that sucks) in the back of the plane (that sucks). Maybe I\'m selfish or just feel entitled, but as much as I fly I think I deserve to pick my seat (window) and have a place to store my bag.\nI fly Delta most of the time, I\'m not saying they are perfect, but their Sky Miles program is not to bad. Now if Delta could just stay in business or I loose a bunch of Sky Miles.\nJust my rant for the week.\nLove the show, keep up the good work.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(38,14,'mark','mpeacock@travelcommons.com','https://migrate.travelcommons.com','68.74.114.87','2006-05-24 14:19:27','2006-05-24 20:19:27','Sounds like a very good idea for the next poll.\n\nRegarding Southwest, have you tried the on-line check-in approach I described in T/C #2? You can do on-line check in for any SW flight after midnight the day of the flight. I check in, even when I don\'t have access to a printer. I then hit the check-in kiosk when I get to the airport and ask it to re-print my boarding pass. This approach always gets me an \'A\', which means I\'m one of the first 25 to board. I\'ve never gotten anything other than an aisle seat (my preference) when I have an \'A\'.\n\nHowever, to your point, when you pay your money, you expect a seat and a bit of overhead storage space. However, the flights are getting full enough that even with Platinum status on American and Premier Exec status on United (living in Chicago, I split my flying across the two hubs), I\'ll end up in a center seat if I don\'t plan far enough ahead. How these guys are going bankrupt with packed planes is beyond me!',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(39,14,'Frick','','http://fricksworld.blogspot.com/','68.74.114.87','2006-05-24 14:19:53','2006-05-24 20:19:53','Thanks for the tip, maybe I\'ll try SW again. My one way flight was only $80.00 compared to Delta\'s $200+ fee, so I guess I shouldn\'t complain too much for $80.00.\nYou\'re right every flight is booked and in case you\'re blind the stewardess will still announce over the loud speaker \"This is a full flight\".\nThere must have been a strategy meeting to figure out someway to go bankrupt with all the mad cash coming in from the full flights.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(40,14,'','','','68.74.114.87','2006-05-24 14:20:21','2006-05-24 20:20:21','Really enjoying the podcast (also subscribed via Podfinder\'s recommendation). Older than most and now retired, your subject strikes home as I traveled internationally for a multinational for twenty years. Must tell you that I (female) once traveled for business twenty-one days in Japan, with two carryones, one on wheels, the other over my shoulder. I could barely stand the color \"Navy blue\" after that trip..\n\nNow, my daughter travels similarly for an entirely different industry, but to many of the same destinations. She\'s also prides herself in traveling light!',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(41,14,'','','','68.74.114.87','2006-05-24 14:20:39','2006-05-24 20:20:39','Mark,\n\nAt our hotel we have guest leave either 1 or 2 sets of clothing at out hotel, in which we send out for dry cleaning so when the guiest comes back into town they have a spare set waitign for them. In addition, since we are so close to an airport some guest will even leave a set here and pick it up, eventhough they might be staying someplace else.\n\nDoug',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(42,14,'','','','68.74.114.87','2006-05-24 14:20:59','2006-05-24 20:20:59','Since you were in San Francisco thought I would pass this link along....\n\nhttp://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/23/AR2005082300456.html',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(43,263,'Meegeekai','','http://emptyseat.net/','68.74.114.87','2006-05-24 16:32:14','2006-05-24 22:32:14','Hey - caught you podcast while in Singapore and listened to it coming back over to SFO this morning. Seems we have something in common with the travel format. I started Emptyseat podcast about a couple of months ago. Check out my site at www.emptyseat.net. You can get to the blog and podcast from there.\n\nIf you are interensted, maybe we could collaborate on something going forward. Will definitely post your link up on my site this weekend. Podcasting from the road is a ***** and I hope to have my 2nd show up this weekend. Will be focusing on more soundseeing stuff (have a couple of great ones from Hong Kong and Macau this trip).\n\nLook forward to seeing more from you also, keep up the good works.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(44,263,'Frick','','http://fricksworld.blogspot.com/','68.74.114.87','2006-05-24 16:32:45','2006-05-24 22:32:45','Listened to your first Podcast while waiting out a 4 hour delay at BWI.\nI can relate to the TSA stories. The lady at BWI this afternoon was on a total power trip \"You must remove you shoes and jacket\" she would announce every few minutes. Yeah lady I know the drill I do this several times a week.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(45,263,'','','','68.74.114.87','2006-05-24 16:33:03','2006-05-24 22:33:03','Mark, loved the podcast. But what I really want to know is what color is the tile in that bathroom?\nChris',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(46,264,'Meegeekai','','http://emptyseat.net/','68.74.114.87','2006-05-24 16:29:37','2006-05-24 22:29:37','Mark - Caught up on you second podcast this afternoon. Good job!! Thanks much for the recommendation to Emptyseat, I appreciate it. I really like the format you are using. Still working on my second and you are providing a lot of inspiration. Did a couple of promos this week, but don\'t like them and still tweaking.\n\nBy the way we (wife, younger daughter, and myself) were in Cabo during spring break. Sounds like you had a great time. We got really ripped on the hotel, but with all the stress the 3 of us were under, sitting by the pool, sipping margarita\'s was about all we were up to. I was really amazed at the amount and variety of activities being peddled. Some seemed pretty ridiculous, like the ultralight airplane rides. We have tried a lot of other places in Mexico and don\'t think we will be going back real soon. May try Costa Rica or Belize. We are not much for \'action packed\' vacations and really like to go someplace to decompress. I don\'t think this is a strictly Mexican phenomena.\n\nLook forward to your next cast.\n\nKeep it up, travel safe...',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(47,264,'','','','68.74.114.87','2006-05-24 16:29:53','2006-05-24 22:29:53','Thanks for the nice tip on the SW check-in while on the road w/o a printer. I have been printing the Boarding Pass prior to leaving from home for the outbound, but always have been left with \"Cs\" on the return leg. Never again.\n\nAlso, I have been lucky enough to always get a window or aisle seat even with a \"B\" bp on SW. Since SW is an all Boeing 737 fleet I would not be surprised if the number of \"A+B\" passes = the number of window + aisle seats. And the number of \"C\" passes = the number of middle seats. Just a guess.\n\nAAM',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(48,264,'','','','68.74.114.87','2006-05-24 16:30:17','2006-05-24 22:30:17','Hi Mark,\n\nI too am slowly (very slowly) warming up to Southwest, but I suspect that it is because business travelers seem to be replacing some of the leasure travelers. I just could not stand arriving at the gate in high heels and a skirt and subsequently having to stand in line for an hour because people were already staking their place so damn early. I always had to decide between sitting on the floor in line in my business clothes or getting the crappiest seat on the plane because I chose to wait in the seating area - decisions, decisions. The business traveler seems more \'last minute\' and is content to sit working on their laptop in a real chair until close to boarding time.\n\nOn the good side, I find that many of their flights are frequent enough and changing tickets is easy, that I do appreciate about Southwest. Oh, and they stopped all the cutsie talk they used to do, the jokes and such.\n\nGreat Podcast!\nChris',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(49,15,'Frick','','http://fricksworld.blogspot.com/','68.74.114.87','2006-05-24 12:00:33','2006-05-24 18:00:33','I never really thought about your point of our parents influencing our carrer choices. My dad also traveled and I am a second generation bag hauler.\nMy favorite story of his was once he was traveling with a co-worker. When they arrived at their destination the client asked \"How was you flight?\" my Dad\'s co-worker replied \"It was so rough I had to put my wedding ring back on.\"\nI remember my first year traveling how I counted the remaining flights and connectons till I reached any sort of medallion status. Now years later I don\'t that much attention to it until it\'s vacation time.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(50,15,'','','','68.74.114.87','2006-05-24 12:01:04','2006-05-24 18:01:04','I appreciated the mention on the show even if I did not make it to your top two shows. I will work on that :-)\n\nChris Christensen - the \"Amateur Traveler\"\nblog: http://chris2x.com\npodcast: http://amateurtravler.com',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(51,15,'mark','mpeacock@travelcommons.com','https://migrate.travelcommons.com','68.74.114.87','2006-05-24 12:01:56','2006-05-24 18:01:56','Chris - Sorry that I didn\'t have room to play some of the Amateur Traveler. I burned too much time on that segment explaining my 2x2 matrix :) Send me a promo or a good snippet and I\'ll include it in my next podcast.\n\nRegards,\nMark',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(52,15,'','','','68.74.114.87','2006-05-24 12:02:20','2006-05-24 18:02:20','The list of podacsts and classification was GREAT!! Very insightful - and helpful too.\n\nCan I add mine to the list, and maybe for you to mention in your great podcast/ blog!? I enjoy your show a great deal.\n\nMine is called \"My Travel Reviews (with Gary Bembridge)\n\nBlog: http://mytravelreviews.blogspot.com (I have a link to your site/ podcast on the linsk on the right hand side)\n\nRSS feed for podcast: http://www.bembridge.co.uk/podcast.rss\n\nIt is also in iTunes but not worked out the link yet...!\n\nGary',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(53,15,'mark','mpeacock@travelcommons.com','https://migrate.travelcommons.com','68.74.114.87','2006-05-24 12:03:27','2006-05-24 18:03:27','Gary -\n\nI popped over to your website this weekend. Thanks for the cross-link. I\'ll listen to your show and give you a shout-out in the next couple of shows.\n\nThanks for the comments and thanks for listening.\n\nRegards,\nMark',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(54,15,'TerryLee','','','68.74.114.87','2006-05-24 12:04:13','2006-05-24 18:04:13','Love your show and how each bathroom sounds a little different.\nYou mentioned other podcasts on traveling.\nIf you have not been to Kyoto Podcast listen....Just\nonce, you might get hooked. Excellent audio and use of topics.\nTo bring you up to speed, it\'s about an Australian\nwho was kicked out of Japan and now does a podcast\nabout Japan in Austraila. Love the way he speaks and\nhis use of pictures and special \"originals\" like you do in the\nbathroom. Keep up the good work.\nTerry',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(55,15,'','','','68.74.114.87','2006-05-24 12:04:39','2006-05-24 18:04:39','Here\'s a podcast from a different point of view. http://joepodcaster.libsyn.com/\n\nTHe corresponding blog is http://www.myflightblog.com/archives/000155.php\n\nIt features Joe Dion who is a pilot with a major US airline. He takes along a recording device and collects stories from fellow pilots and flight attendants. It\'s one of the first podcasts that I regularly listened to and unfortunately, there aren\'t enough of them for me.\n\nIt\'s great to hear about travel from the point of view of the airline folks.\n\nEd Vawter\nedwardv2@comcast.net',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(56,15,'mark','mpeacock@travelcommons.com','https://migrate.travelcommons.com','68.74.114.87','2006-05-24 12:05:53','2006-05-24 18:05:53','Just listened to a couple of his podcasts -- great stuff. Nice interviews and great production values. I\'ll mention his podcast in my next podcast.\n\nThanks for the pointer,\nMark',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(57,15,'','','','68.74.114.87','2006-05-24 14:16:04','2006-05-24 20:16:04','Mark,\n\nIn which industry did the term \"repurposed\" originate? This is the first time I have heard of this term...\n\nAllan',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(58,15,'mark','mpeacock@travelcommons.com','https://migrate.travelcommons.com','68.74.114.87','2006-05-24 14:16:24','2006-05-24 20:16:24','Good question. Not sure where the term originated, but I first ran into it in the web business in the late \'90\'s when many media companies \"repurposed\" content from their newspapers to populate their web sites. The subtext was that material created expressly for the web was better/more appropriate for that medium than content originally written for a magazine or newspaper and then put on the web site.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(59,16,'','','','68.74.114.87','2006-05-24 11:58:06','2006-05-24 17:58:06','I am really enjoying your show. Just recently found it via podcastalley.com. Would you know the name of that song in the middle of Podcast 13, the one about sleep? Thanks, and happy podding.\n\nj5may@comcast.net',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(60,16,'mark','mpeacock@travelcommons.com','https://migrate.travelcommons.com','68.74.114.87','2006-05-24 11:58:30','2006-05-24 17:58:30','The song is called Sleep. It\'s by Shelby Lynne from her latest album Suit Yourself. Here\'s a direct link to the song in iTunes. Her track record has been a bit spotty, but I remain a big fan of her break-out album (there\'s a word that shows one\'s age) I Am Shelby Lynne. Glad to hear that you\'re enjoying the podcast. I appreciate the comments and hope you stay subscribed.\n\nRegards,\nMark',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(61,17,'','','','68.74.114.87','2006-05-24 11:54:20','2006-05-24 17:54:20','My name is tim and I have a funny travel story. My whole family was going to Seattle, but in order for all the tickets to be covered by frequent flier miles we had to take two different airlines. My mom and sister went on Southwest and me, my dad, and my brother took Alasken. Our flite was at 8:30 and my mom and sister\'s was at 8:40. AM, or so we thought. We were standing in line to check in to Alasken airlines, having dropped the girls off at the other termanil. I looked up on the board to see if our flite was on time. I said to my dad, \"it doesn\'t have our flite, just an 8:30 PM one.\" He said, \"it must be a mistake\", but sure enough, when we looked at our papers more closely we had tickets for the 8:30 PM flite. Of course my mom and sister\'s flite was fine. We wound up leaving at 3:30 that afternoon.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(62,17,'','','','68.74.114.87','2006-05-24 11:54:39','2006-05-24 17:54:39','Hey, Tim. I can relate to that one.\n\nHeading out on a business flight, my husband dropped me off at the airport in West Palm Beach, Florida.I headed to the gate, ticket in hand. Then I realized, to my complete surprise, that my flight departed from the Ft. Lauderdale airport, instead, about one hour South!!\n\nA lesson in looking closer at tickets, I suppose. I managed to snag a flight from West Palm Beach anyway, but you better believe that I\'ve paid much closer attention to my tickets ever since!',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(63,17,'mark','mpeacock@travelcommons.com','https://migrate.travelcommons.com','68.74.114.87','2006-05-24 11:54:58','2006-05-24 17:54:58','Not quite the same thing, but when pulling the luggage out of our limo at O\'Hare for a trip to London, we noticed that we were one bag short. I got the limo driver to run me back home and there, sitting forelornly in the foyer, was the missing bag. The limo driver raced back up the Tristate Tollway -- luckily not in rush hour -- and reconnected me with my wife and kids a few minutes before boarding.\n\nYou would\'ve thought I\'d learned, but this summer, I stopped the cab as we left for our vacation to France and Hungary. I\'d left the plane tickets on my office desk. I\'m so used to electronic tickets, I never think about paper tickets anymore.\n\nRegards,\nMark',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(64,18,'Pekemom','','http://17fairway.blogspot.com/','68.74.114.87','2006-05-24 08:26:04','2006-05-24 14:26:04','Really enjoyed #15, Mark. And hope you\'re much recovered.\n\nIncorporating your friends\' \"Lightning Stories\" was very entertaining and created more than a few smiles at the listening end.\n\nYour podcasts are always interesting and full of wit and humor.\n\n~Nikki in Florida',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(65,18,'mark','mpeacock@travelcommons.com','https://migrate.travelcommons.com','68.74.114.87','2006-05-24 08:26:29','2006-05-24 14:26:29','Nikki -\n\nGlad you liked the podcast. I\'m still hacking a bit, but seem to be on the road to recovery. I was laughing out loud when Allan described the technician with the duct tape. It\'s the perfect visual -- getting ready for a 7-hr flight to Paris in the newest plane in the United fleet and a guy is fixing it with duct tape. It\'s priceless.\n\nRegards,\nMark',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(66,18,'chris2x','','http://amateurtraveler.com/','68.74.114.87','2006-05-24 08:27:02','2006-05-24 14:27:02','You have mentioned before using your iRiver to record the podcast. What model do you use? Do you use an external microphone?',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(67,18,'mark','mpeacock@travelcommons.com','https://migrate.travelcommons.com','68.74.114.87','2006-05-24 08:27:31','2006-05-24 14:27:31','Chris -\n\nI use an iRiver iFP-890, with 256MB of memory. This podcast -- #15 -- was the first that I\'ve used an external mic. All the previous podcasts, save for #1, were made with the iRiver and the built-in mic. Somewhere around podcast #4 or #5 I started using the noise reduction feature in Adobe Audition, which significantly reduced the \"white noise\" that I found with the built-in mic.\n\nRegards,\nMark',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(68,20,'','','','68.74.114.87','2006-05-24 08:20:05','2006-05-24 14:20:05','Salt Lick is a local institution, but just franchised out:\n\nhttp://www.saltlickbbq.com/\n\nhttp://www.ci.austin.tx.us/austinairport/nr3_10_03.htm',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(69,20,'mark','mpeacock@travelcommons.com','https://migrate.travelcommons.com','68.74.114.87','2006-05-24 08:21:08','2006-05-24 14:21:08','Thanks for the pointer. I\'ll bet that the chopped beef sandwich at the original Salt Lick is better than what I had at the airport.\n\nThe second link was also very interesting. It says that Delaware North operates \"300 restaurants and retail outlets serving more than 300 million customers a year in more than 30 airports across the U.S. including and Oakland International (OAK), Ft. Lauderdale/Hollywood International (FLL), Nashville (BNA), Newark International (EWR), and Phoenix Skyharbor (PHX).\" Host Marriott says they serve over 70 airports, while Delaware North serves 30 airports. Seems that the two of these would have control over the stomachs of over 80% of the US flyers.\n\nRegards,\nMark',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(70,20,'','','','68.74.114.87','2006-05-24 08:21:25','2006-05-24 14:21:25','Dear Mark,\nThis is Udayan and no worries, you pronounced my name well! Thanks for mentioning me. I really enjoy the podcast, and I have done a fair bit of travelling in my life, I moved from Singapore when I was 10 to London and now do a podcast called Life in London, it can be found in iTunes. Really enjoy TravelCommons, one of my favourite, alongside DSC, Diggnation and Squadcast - my top 4 in fact!\n\nThank you for your great podcast.\nMine is 10 minutes, 1/2 or more of which is Podsafe Music or from MashupTown.com\nUdayan - Life in London (http://www.udayan71.castpost.com/feed/feed.xml)',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(71,21,'','','','68.74.79.121','2006-05-21 22:57:41','2006-05-22 04:57:41','Many thanks for reading my comments out on the podcast about our trip to Mexico on American - my family enjoyed listening in!\n\nRegards\n\nDavid Glickman\nWelwyn (about 25 miles north of London)\nUK',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(72,21,'mark','','','68.74.79.121','2006-05-21 22:58:02','2006-05-22 04:58:02','David -\n\nThanks for taking the time to leave the comment. I was wondering, though -- Why Little Rock?\n\nRegards,\nMark',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(73,21,'','','','68.74.79.121','2006-05-21 22:58:25','2006-05-22 04:58:25','Thanks for the mention and comments on my Podcast (My Travel Reviews with Gary Bembridge) on this week\'s show! Much appreciated. As usual I keep enjoying your show and have a plug for your podcast on my forthcoming show this week. Keep up the good work - I love the variety in your show! Gary',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(74,21,'','','','68.74.79.121','2006-05-21 22:58:47','2006-05-22 04:58:47','I have the worst time finding pants that fit. I actually like low-rise pants but I also won\'t tollerate pants that make me moon people at the same time. Most of my jeans have some spandex in them so they stretch a bit and with a belt this means that even though they are low-rise, they don\'t go sliding down when I bend over.\n\nI also hate shirts (and this is probably more of a problem in women\'s clothes than in mens) that shimmy up over time. T-shirts, tank tops, and occasionally a dress shirt if it has some stretchy spandex or nylon. When I try it on at the store, it\'s fine, I move around a bit, no problems and seems more than long enough, but when I get them home I find that about once an hour I\'m having to pull it down so as to not expose my belly. Doesn\'t matter that there\'s no one around to see because I\'m at home, it still bothers me.\n\nI really do wish that there were some way of figuring out how clothes would wear before you buy them.\n\nAlso, I do like the new itunes links to the music used in each show.\nAlso hadn\'t noticed the clustermap before ... that\'s interesting as well. :)\n\n--Hilary',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(75,22,'','','','68.74.79.121','2006-05-21 21:31:49','2006-05-22 03:31:49','Perhaps you get this a lot but I just wanted to let you know how much I enjoy your show, you really have an eye and ear for detail. I look forward to each episode.\n\nRegards,\n\nDan O\'Leary\niTunes:HotelCoffee',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(76,22,'mark','','','68.74.79.121','2006-05-21 21:32:17','2006-05-22 03:32:17','Dan -\n\nI never tire of getting compliments :) Seriously, I\'m glad that you enjoy the podcast. Nice picture on the HotelCoffee iTunes page -- I\'d never have the nerve to post my own picture. Just listened to the Billings, MT podcast and enjoyed it. I look forward to hearing some good travel stories from you.\n\nRegards,\nMark',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(77,23,'leo_vegoda','','','68.74.79.121','2006-05-21 21:26:13','2006-05-22 03:26:13','Hi Mark,\n\nI fully agree with you that the traveller\'s experience has a huge impact on the decisions they will make.\n\nIn the show you mentioned that you found the cabin crew on Virgin to be really excellent despite being on three year, non-renewable contracts. I have to admit that some of the best cabin crew I\'ve ever seen have been on Easyjet flights. Easyjet is a budget airline serving short-haul routes in Europe. I know that they pay less than the big flag carriers, and it seems to work for them. And I *have* seen an Easyjet stewardess leap to clean up a pool of vomit a child created just after landing.\n\nThat being said, I do not believe that any one element of the travel experience can be overlooked. I stopped flying with Easyjet when Luton airport (just outside London) made it far less convenient to collect rental cars. I also stopped flying with BA because they lost my bags on three out of four flights. This is despite BA having the best cabin crew I have ever experienced on any airline (and a very good cup of tea).\n\nI have most recently been flying with KLM and Air France. On the whole, I prefer KLM for the convenience (I\'m based in Amsterdam). All their staff are polite and helpful - and some are wonderful. Air France have the disadvantage of Paris CDG as their European hub. It has to be Europe\'s worst airport. Even Moscow\'s Sheremetyevo is better! What Air France have is the best airline food I\'ve ever experienced. All accompanied by excellent bread and the most wonderful butter. I find the cabin crew slightly supercilious, though.\n\nOf course, this just means that everything is a compromise, and that compromise is normally about who I *won\'t* use, rather than who I will. It\'s very difficult for a company to provide a consistently excellent service in these days of tiny margins and intense competition. I\'m just not sure if the consumers really benefit from this state of affairs.\n\nKeep up the good work!\n\n-leo',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(78,24,'','','','68.74.79.121','2006-05-21 14:49:49','2006-05-21 20:49:49','Hi! I hope you don\'t mind, but I\'ve added you to the links on my site: theme tourism - I \'ve just started a podcast for and by my students of tourism and think that your podcast could be something they would enjoy and benefit from listening to. Keep up the good work\n\nGraham',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(79,24,'','','','68.74.79.121','2006-05-21 14:50:10','2006-05-21 20:50:10','I\'ve been wanting to post kudos and other comments for a while now, but it was this episode that finally got me motivated to post. (I\'ve got some other thoughts, but will save them for a later time.)\n\nThe reason for this post is that your comment about travel pictures really struck a personal chord with me. I was at a wedding a couple of weeks ago and, during the reception, I\'ll bet that approximately 2/3 of the guests were either perched in their seats or walking around with their cameras trying to capture the \"perfect moment\". And, since most of the cameras were digital, the majority of these people were taking pictures and then quickly reviewing them on the spot.... sometimes with other people too. This left a small minority of people who actually seemed to be enjoying the wedding reception, without a care.\n\nIsn\'t this really the way we should be enjoying life and all of its events and activities in which we participate? Don\'t get me wrong, I could fill a hard drive with digital pictures and many boxes full of printed pictures from the past. I really do believe in capturing memory on film (or bits and bytes!) However, a quote from Jackie Kennedy that I read just last night seemed to put it all in perspective for me: \"I want to live life, not record it.\" We need to figure out the balance of living life with documenting life.\n\nWell, that\'s all for now....Keep up the good work; you\'re doing a great job. I keep a blog and agree that it can be difficult at times finding (interesting) material on a regular basis :)',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(80,24,'Frick','','http://fricksworld.blogspot.com/','68.74.79.121','2006-05-21 14:50:36','2006-05-21 20:50:36','Loved the bit about checking luggage. When I first started I was on my first trip with a couple of others and I checked my luggage. All I could hear was \"What do you think we\'re on vacation?\" when I showed up at the gate with no luggage in hand. I also bought several meals and a bunch of drinks that week. Longest week of my life.\nI learned my lesson.\nI figure that not checking baggage saves me about 30 mins per connection. All in all I think this have given me an extra week or two in my overall life cycle.\nKeep the podcasts coming....',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(81,26,'','','','68.74.79.121','2006-05-21 14:11:13','2006-05-21 20:11:13','Mark\n\nWas interested to hear the points about the de-humanising aspects of the trend towards automated service. You may like to hear of my wife\'s experience on Sunday. She was booked to travel on BA\'s new route from Heathrow to Bangalore in business class. I checked her in online at home on Saturday and made sure that she had been allocated her preferred aisle seat in the club world cabin. On Sunday she used the self service device at Terminal Four to obtain her boarding pass and went on up to the lounge. On boarding the aircraft she was pleasantly surprised to be shown to seat 1k in First Class, and on checking the boarding pass she noticed that the machine had printed out a First Class boarding pass.\n\nI remembered that sometime ago BA had emailed us to let us know that there was an offer where one way upgrades were being offered for a limited time subject to availability. I guess I am impressed that BA have thought this through and have been able to link this offer to all their delivery channels and deliver it in a seamless unexpected way. She really enjoyed the pampering on the flight.\n\nJust to add to the Bose debate - ditch them! I too was devoted to them but have replaced them with a set of canal phones (Etymotic 6C\'s). I found that the bose headphones were great at obliterating the lower frequency aircraft noices but somehow accentuated the higher frequencies suh as speech. The canal phomes block everything out - they even work in the noisy back row of an MD80! Other big plus is that you get to free up extra space in your hand luggage.\n\nRegards\n\nDavid Glickman\nWelwyn\nUK',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(82,26,'','','','68.74.79.121','2006-05-21 14:11:31','2006-05-21 20:11:31','Mark,\n\nThanks for another great podcast. I enjoy listening.\n\nI tried to take the survey, but the link inside podtrack took me only to sign up for their internal evals and development - not to your survey nor a way to find that survey.\n\nI am a regular listener and always enjoy.\n\nAmy',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(83,26,'mark','mpeacock@travelcommons.com','https://migrate.travelcommons.com','68.74.79.121','2006-05-21 14:11:55','2006-05-21 20:11:55','Amy -\n\nThanks for taking the time to try the survey, and for pointing out the problem. I tried it earlier and didn\'t have a problem, but tried it again this morning and saw the same behavior you did. The sign-up form should come after the survey. I think they use an external survey tool -- Zoomerang -- and must be having problems with it. I\'ve sent them a note regarding the problem and have taken down the link until I hear that they have it resolved\n\nThanks again and glad you enjoy the podcast.\n\nRegards,\nMark',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(84,26,'','','','68.74.79.121','2006-05-21 14:12:12','2006-05-21 20:12:12','I am finally catching up on your podcasts after a much too long lapse. I listened to two of them today while walking on the Siesta Key Beach and it was just delightful. It brings me right back to my road warrior days of old. Alas, I am now one of the stroller and backpack crowd I used to disdain.\n\nI don\'t know if it was this one or the previous podcast, but I wanted to comment that I keep in touch with not only highschool friends, but elementary school friends as well. That kind of historical connection is rare in my view. For me and the others in this group, it is incredibly rich. In this world of moving around, it helps to keep those kinds of ties.\n\nWhy am I in Siesta Key? Good question. It is not somewhere I will be again anytime soon. If we left tomorrow after only two days, I would be quite happy. The weather is better than at home but not by much. The food is ghastly and everywhere I look I see my wrinkled, decrepit future. Not pretty.\n\nJoni',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(85,26,'mark','mpeacock@travelcommons.com','https://migrate.travelcommons.com','68.74.79.121','2006-05-21 14:12:30','2006-05-21 20:12:30','My wife\'s best friend is from her grade school days, so I shouldn\'t have spoken so soon. Perhaps keeping historical non-family connections like that seem rare only for those who have moved around a bit. For my wife, who\'s lived all her life in Chicago, save for 4 years each in Phila and Detroit, it\'s not odd at all.\n\nSorry to hear about drudgery in Siesta Key. I remember spending a Spring Break there some *cough*25*cough* years ago and it was a pretty happening time. Either my memories have gauzed over or the happening crowd has moved elsewhere.\n\nRegards,\nMark',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(86,27,'','','','68.74.79.121','2006-05-21 14:07:50','2006-05-21 20:07:50','Mark,\n\nAnother great show. Really identified with \"things you miss while traveling\". Personally I identify with the morning routine you mention. Particularly my home coffee maker and that perfect morning brew.\n\nthanks for the show,\nDan O\'Leary',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(87,27,'mark','mpeacock@travelcommons.com','https://migrate.travelcommons.com','68.74.79.121','2006-05-21 14:08:07','2006-05-21 20:08:07','We are, of course, creatures of habit and it\'s amazing how bad the rest of the day can become if we don\'t start off with our morning routine. Coffee is definitely a key part of that routine for most people. I have one guy on a project right now who brings his French Press from home so that he can start the day with a good cup of coffee. Not a problem -- until he gets into home roasting.\n\nRegards,\nMark',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(88,27,'','','','68.74.79.121','2006-05-21 14:08:23','2006-05-21 20:08:23','ps. \"Single Point of Failure\" was Spot On. well done.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(89,27,'Frick','','http://fricksworld.blogspot.com/','68.74.79.121','2006-05-21 14:08:53','2006-05-21 20:08:53','You just gotta love rentals. There is nothing like the excitement of walking down the isle and find out that you actually got a \"cool\" car. In Memphis I once got a bright yellow Ford Escape, I felt like I was on Baywatch.\nI have been off roading in North Carolina in a brand new Ford Expedition. A quick trip through the car wash erased any evidence.\nJust remember the difference between a Jeep and a rental car is there are some places you just can\'t take a Jeep',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(90,28,'','','','68.74.79.121','2006-05-21 14:04:57','2006-05-21 20:04:57','I just noticed that iTunes has a new section for podcast reviews.\nTravelcommons was (of course) my first review. After I posted it I recieved a message page saying that iTunes would have to \"review the review\" before it would be posted within iTunes.\nWe\'ll see how long that takes.\nMeanwhile, thought I\'d send you a copy.\nKeep up the great podcasts, and happy (hopefully travel-free) holiday weekend!\n\nREVIEW:\nRemember this guy\'s name (Mark Peacock), because I\'d be willing to bet that as Independent Podcasting listening audiences continue to grow, he\'ll emerge as one of the top personalities in the genre.\n\nI\'ve been downloading his podcasts since early spring, and although I\'ve picked up a ton of great travel tips and (even as a seasoned \"road warrior\" myself) have learned a great deal, this isn\'t the reason that Travelcommons is my favorite podcast. It\'s all about the delivery:\n\nIt\'s just the way he tells a story, his effortless wit and flawless comic timing will have you smiling no matter what kind of travel week you\'re experiencing.\nI pop in the earbuds and suddenly Travelcommons has me smiling from the back of the longest security line at LAX, or laughing out loud from a center seat in coach.\nDownload and episode and you\'ll be hooked.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(91,28,'mark','mpeacock@travelcommons.com','https://migrate.travelcommons.com','68.74.79.121','2006-05-21 14:05:14','2006-05-21 20:05:14','Thanks very much for the review on iTunes! I saw it a few days ago. I\'m glad that you enjoy the podcast and appreciate the kind words.\n\nRegards,\nMark',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(92,29,'Udayan','','http://www.udayan71.blogspot.com/','68.74.79.121','2006-05-21 14:01:23','2006-05-21 20:01:23','This is messed up! I reviewed the show in iTunes on the 11th of December, all praises of course but the bone I have to pick it with iTunes, they took down my review. That makes no sense to me whatsoever. Anyway, loved 26, hope your Christmas was wonderful! Udayan.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(93,29,'','','','68.74.79.121','2006-05-21 14:02:02','2006-05-21 20:02:02','<b>... the bone I have to pick IS (not it) with iTunes ...</b>\nIronic that the next sentence says Makes no sense to me whatsoever.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(94,30,'','','','68.74.79.121','2006-05-21 11:41:04','2006-05-21 17:41:04','Enjoyable podcast as always.\nI\'ve done a bit of traveling in the past few weeks (3 trips in 4 weeks) - much more than I\'ve been doing (although I used to travel every two weeks or so for 5 years) and I\'ve been finding a disturbing new trend - - outrageous charges for internet access.\nI remember when internet access was a standard part of buying a night in the room (like a bed, bathroom, etc...). Now hotels are charging $15-20 a DAY to acess the internet in the room. Of course, I can surf in the lobby for free, but this stinks! What is going on? Is this like the \"enivormental\" savings of not washing the sheets nightly - another way to pull money out of patrons? I am not enjoying this trend. What is next - being charged per minute of showering?\nAnyone else annoyed?\nAmy',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(95,30,'mark','mpeacock@travelcommons.com','https://migrate.travelcommons.com','68.74.79.121','2006-05-21 11:41:23','2006-05-21 17:41:23','What\'s really annoying/amazing about this trend is that you typically get Internet access for free at lower-end hotels (e.g., Courtyard, Best Western, Holiday Inn Express), but end up paying $10-15/day at more expensive, higher-end hotels. And given that hotel room utilization is going up -- more people traveling, less rate pressure on hotels -- I don\'t see it changing anytime in the near future.\nHowever, there is a bit of a guerilla movement emerging using the little travel wi-fi routers (e.g., Linksys\'s WTR54GS or WRT54GC). Somewhat akin to the open wi-fi access movement (people hanging wi-fi antennas out their windows for anyone to access), some travelers are using these routers to light up a 1-2 room radius with free wi-fi. I use NetStumbler (www.netstumbler.com) -- a free wi-fi sniffer -- to search out these access \"bubbles\" (as Linksys calls them) before I plunk down my own $10.\nRegards,\nMark',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(96,30,'','','','68.74.79.121','2006-05-21 11:41:46','2006-05-21 17:41:46','If you\'re going to have to put adverts in your podcast... at least make them obvious. Don\'t just segway in halfway through a sentence. Put them at the end or between 2 song bytes.\n- Dan',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(97,30,'mark','mpeacock@travelcommons.com','https://migrate.travelcommons.com','68.74.79.121','2006-05-21 11:42:06','2006-05-21 17:42:06','Good point. Still working through the insertion process. The set point only has a resolution to 1 second, which leaves a lot of wiggle room. I\'ve been trying to leave a bit of a 1.5 second gap between my \"This Week\" and \"Follow Up\" segments to facilitate an easier insertion and put a \"Sponsored By\" at the front of the ad to make it a bit clearer. However, I\'d appreciate any additional thoughts/suggestions. This 5-week ad campaign has been a bit of an experiment.\nAlso, let me know which episodes are botched and I\'ll go back and refine the insertion point a bit.\nThanks for the heads-up,\nMark',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(98,31,'HotelCoffee','','','68.74.79.121','2006-05-21 11:35:57','2006-05-21 17:35:57','Another great show Mark!\n\nParticularly enjoyed the bit about carry-on luggage. I use a black Swiss Army bag as well, it has proven to be quite bulletproof.\n\nDan',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(99,31,'Mark','mpeacock@travelcommons.com','https://migrate.travelcommons.com','68.74.79.121','2006-05-21 11:36:32','2006-05-21 17:36:32','Thanks for the feedback. I switched from an Atlantic bag to the Swiss Army bag this summer and have never looked back. I thought I\'d lose something with the shorter bag, but I can pack it a bit fatter, which makes more efficient use of the overhead bin -- except for some \"height-challenged\" bins on old Northwest DC-9s or American 757s.\n\nThanks,\nMark',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(100,31,'','','','68.74.79.121','2006-05-21 11:36:59','2006-05-21 17:36:59','I just finished listening to Travel Commons number 28, and for the first time since picking your show up around episode number 17, I am finally motivated to share some thoughts. I am not far away from you, except I have the priviledge of flying out of Milwaukee instead of the worst airport in the country, and you know which one that is.\n\nI work for a software company as a training specialist assisting clients with the implementation of our software. The implementation process for a client takes anywhere from 3 to 9 months and involves at least 6 training trips over that time. We take care to ensure that the same trainer covers as many of those visits to ensure quality control and consistency. Since we are a small company, everyone is based at the main office and we travel nationwide. It has allowed me to visit every corner of our great land, from Florida to Washington, California to New Jersey. In general, my schedule is fixed weeks in advance (almost zero no-notice trips) and the usual tempo is to be out of office 3 to 4 days per week, 3 weeks out of every four. It\'s a nice balance.\n\nThat said, I have a different take on carryon luggage compared to someone like yourself who does a lot of \"down and backs\". My suitcase is the next size up since I can be gone from 2 to 4 days depending on the trip. But with careful planning and knowledge of your destination, it is possible to check your bag and still not get hung up at your destination waiting for it. For example, if I\'m flying through Minneapolis with a two hour layover en route to Oklahoma City, a medium sized aiport with the rental lot just outside the door, then I\'ll check my bag at departure so that I don\'t have to schlep it around MSP knowing in the time it takes to get my rental car keys at arrival the bag will be showing on the carousel. But if that connection was much shorter, and I\'m flying an Airbus rather than a DC-9 (overhead bins are larger on Airbuses) and the weather is bad, then I\'ll seriously consider carrying it on. Or, if I\'m flying a non-stop regional jet from Milwaukee to Houston (IAH) knowing that I can gate check the bag, then I\'ll do that, especially because baggage service at IAH is slow and there\'s still a 15 minute rental shuttle to deal with. One mistake I will NEVER repeat is checking my bag when I have to switch airlines at Dallas-Fort Worth. Nothing is worse than showing up at your client the next day wearing the rugby shirt and blue jeans you wore the day before. Of course I\'ll avoid that itinerary altogether if I can. But on the whole I\'ve been lucky. In over 200 flights I\'ve taken, I\'ve only had to chase my luggage twice, or roughly 1%.\n\nOn toiletries, yes, my toiletries bag NEVER leave the suitcase at home. I think there\'s a psychological aspect to the toiletries thing, and that falls into the category of taking part of your home with you. But I have no firm data to back that up.\n\nA suggested topic for a future podcast: expenses. I carry a company credit card and the expenses are charged back to the client. I have a meal guideline of $60 a day (fine everywhere except Chicago it seems). In addition, I am alotted discretionary \"entertainment\" expenses that are not charged to the client. These cover things like movies, sporting events, and magazines. It\'s a nice perk. It would be interesting to see what others do.\n\nFinally, a plug for my blog. It\'s primarily a photo journal of my travels along with other morsels of my whim and wisdom. You can find it at http://richmanwisco.blogspot.com . I\'ve got a link to your show in it as well. Keep up the great work and I look forward to your next episode.\n\nRich',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(101,31,'','','','68.74.79.121','2006-05-21 11:37:20','2006-05-21 17:37:20','I wanted to comment about a recent experience with carry on luggage on Southwet Airlines. I live in Tulsa and fly occasionally, I guess I am one of your listeners that used to be the flying road warrior, but now I do most of my travelling by car as my region is only a couple of states. Anyway, I was in my favorite 737 seat in the overwing exit row and ths older woman asked if the seat on the ailse was taken. I said no and she proceeded to try to put her bag in the overhead. Being a gentleman, I tried to assist her, but the flight attendant said \"no, she needs to be able to do that herself if she is going to sit in that row\" She explained, \"you need to be able to lift 50 pounds and the limit for carry ons is 50 pounds, so if you can\'t put it up there, you can\'t sit there\" INteresting, she sat in the row behind and was happy to not be responsible for the exit door. I gladly accepted he responsibility and helped her put her bag in the overhead.\n\nAlso, I know the feeling of relief when the plane lands after a horrifying incident... long story short.. back in my real road warrior days, I lived in Phoenix and was coming home when our plane encountered wind shear as we were about to land. If a plane\'s wings are normally east and west, they went north and south.. or the plane was on it\'s side in the air..with the landing gear down. I looked down and saw the rental cars and thought.. this is it! The pilot raced the engines, pulled up the landing gear and aborted the landing.. he came around and landed it, after some very tense minutes. Very scary and the plane was dead quiet, except for those roaring engines. We landed and the pilots never said a word, never even opened the cockpit doors as we got off. I was just happy to be back on the ground.\n\n\nChris in Tulsa',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(102,31,'finn','','','68.74.79.121','2006-05-21 11:37:51','2006-05-21 17:37:51','When I listened to this episode, I paid particular attention to what you said about carry-ons,\nand as you in North America have the privilege of not worrying about the weight of your bags,\nI totally agree with you, that the added weight of the wheel and extendable handle assembly\n(found in virtually all rolling bags) is of no relevance there.\n\nThat said, I find it somewhat paradoxal if the web sites you mention who advise avoiding rolling bags because\nof the weight are based in North America, as here in Europe - the high bastion of luggage weight limit -\neveryone and their grandmother uses rolling bags.\n\nAlso, when you mention colour, it doesn\'t seem to be that much of an issue here in Europe.\nAlthough most people choose a discrete colour (black, dark gray, navy, dark green),\nthe ones who chose brighter colours, like red, beige, light green, etc.,\nare over here many enough to not stand out in the crowd.\n\nI guess there may be a cultural difference in there too.\n\nI myself use a black Samsonite, with rollerblade quality ball-bearing wheels.\nThis one\'s good enough to bring on board and store in the overhead bin, but since 9-11,\nairport security won\'t to let me through without checking it in, because it\'s a bit too big.\n\nAirlines in Europe let you check in objects of any mechanical size/volume,\nlimited only to what fits through the fuselage\'s luggage door, as long as it\'s within the weight limits of your fare,\nusually 44 lbs on economy class and 66 lbs on business class.\n\nI used to bring my laptop in a matching Samsonite laptop bag,\nwith a special sleeve sewn onto the back, allowing me to attach it to my rolling bag\'s handle.\n\nI found that very practical at first, but nowadays, I\'ve replaced that one with a Tumi rucksack, with kevlar plated inner sleeve for the laptop, as I anyway end up checking my roller bag, and the rucksack looks less conspicuous on the streets when carrying the laptop around while spending time at the destination.\n\nBesides, the rucksack is also very easy to stuff into most overhead compartments,\ntogether with, say, winter outdoor garments, be it on an Airbus, a 737, a Fokker, or a Dash.\n\nAlso, I\'ve decided to follow your advice on noise cancelling headsets,\nand ditch my Sennheiser for a Bose pair.\nThe Sennheisers do a good job of cancelling engine noise, but not screaming kids.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(103,31,'','','','68.74.79.121','2006-05-21 11:38:16','2006-05-21 17:38:16','Regarding toiletries: after having to do it by necessity a few times, when traveling abroad I now look forward to checking out the local pharmacies in other countries. Finding a new type of toothpaste in Paris, soap in London, Borotalco powder in Florence, or almost anything in Tokyo, actually provide more lasting memories than you would initially think. The process of shopping and purchasing gets you out into the city and provides at least a glimpse of the culture of your destination. And the new products can sometimes end up being instant favorites.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(104,32,'richmanwisco','','','68.74.79.121','2006-05-21 11:32:35','2006-05-21 17:32:35','Thanks so much for the shoutout Mark, and I must say it was a particularly excellent edition.\n\nI believe I\'ve also had an encounter with Marvin in Memphis. I distinctly remember a well dressed gentleman with the quintessential FM voice. Hertz should be very happy to have him as an employee.\n\nYes, tourist locales are not good for business. Try staying at the Holiday Inn Sunspree Resort in Panama City Beach, Florida sometime. The fitness room was essentially a non-entity.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(105,32,'Frick','','http://fricksworld.blogspot.com/','68.74.79.121','2006-05-21 11:33:03','2006-05-21 17:33:03','I have also been on Marvin\'s bus. If I recall he acts like it\'s his own radio station \"You are listening to wHERTZ on your quick 4 minute ride to the airport\". I was in Memphis the early part of December and didn\'t see him, but it\'s good to hear he\'s still there. I wonder if Hertz management knows that this one driver has that much of an impact on their customers?\nListened to the show on a night flight from ATL to West Palm, thanks for the mention.\nKeep up the good work...',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(106,32,'richmanwisco','','http://richmanwisco.blogspot.com/','68.74.79.121','2006-05-21 10:58:11','2006-05-21 16:58:11','I\'ll get to doing the survey right away.\n\nI liked the segment you did on headphones. I\'m not in the same economic strata as you are, so I had to find earphones that cost less. My choice was the Shure E2c sound isolating earphones. They are an in-ear canal type, and they work just by blocking the sound out just like earplugs. They probably don\'t cut noise quite as well as noise cancelling technology, but the sound quality is superb, even if the E2c is the lower cost model in their lineup. The E2c cost me about $80. And I agree with you that there is a real benefit to wearing them on long flights.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(107,32,'Udayan','','http://www.udayan71.blogspot.com/','68.74.79.121','2006-05-21 10:58:50','2006-05-21 16:58:50','I was looking into the Shure E2c but found the cheaper Sony MDR-EX81s to be far better. Plus they match the iPod - although if you don\'t have an iPod that doesn\'t matter. I liked the Sonys because they are lightweight and fit really well, and are just generally pretty good value for money. Down to $30 at Amazon USA',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(108,32,'mark','mpeacock@travelcommons.com','https://migrate.travelcommons.com','68.74.79.121','2006-05-21 10:59:14','2006-05-21 16:59:14','Remember, I didn\'t say I bought the Bose headsets. I used Diners Club points and ordered them out of Diners Club\'s catalog. Not sure I would have paid $300 of my own cash. My $30 in-ear Apple earphones (not the standard earbuds) do a decent-enough job.\n\nI saw a guy wearing Bose noise-cancelling cans on the train into Chicago last week. That\'s a bit much. I mean, I know the secretaries chatting about their boyfriends can be a bit annoying at times, but wearing the Bose was a bit of overkill.\n\nRegards,\nMark',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(109,32,'','','','68.74.79.121','2006-05-21 10:59:39','2006-05-21 16:59:39','I liked the segment on trains to planes. I agree that Boston is one of the best connections. Also good:\n\nHeathrow -&gt; Paddington Station in London\n\nwe liked the metro to Plaza Del sol in Madrid from the airport and know a nice little hotel run by an American expat just one block from there.\n\nThe one that we have done a number of times but I think twice before doing again is taking the subway to JFK. Plan on an hour on the subway from Manhattan, at least from the Upper West Side. Of course if your flight is leaving at rush hour, the subway might get you there and a cab might get stuck in traffic.\n\nChris from the Amateur Traveler podcast',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(110,32,'Brian O\'Donnell','od@midsouth.rr.com','','24.24.113.88','2006-05-23 14:37:14','2006-05-23 20:37:14','Mark,\n\nGood Job! I\'ve subscribed to you podcast since you came to Memphis in Feburary. Last week I had a business trip to Birmingham (via ground) and enjoyed listening to Travel Commons.\n\nBy the way, US 78 is 4 lanes all the way from Memphis to Birmingham. 3.5 hrs. and no security lines!\n\nBrian',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(111,32,'mark','mpeacock@travelcommons.com','http://','67.97.158.240','2006-05-23 16:37:55','2006-05-23 22:37:55','Brian -\n\nI talked about the fly-or-drive calculus in episode #23.  If you think about the flight from Memphis to Birmingham,\n\n	it takes 30 minutes to drive to and park at the airport,\n	 you should be there 60 minutes prior to flight departure,\n	 Northwest\'s direct flight clocks in at 60 minutes,\n	 add on another 30 minutes to de-plane and get a rental car,\n	 and finally another 30 minutes to drive to your destination.\n\nWithout any airport delays, you\'re at break-even between fly or drive and that doesn\'t take into account the inconveniences of air travel -- TSA hassles, being a slave to the airline\'s schedules, airport delays.  Sounds like you made the right decision to hammer down those 4 lanes -- so long as you only use the right 2 lanes each way.\n\nTake care,\nMark',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(112,33,'','','','68.74.79.121','2006-05-21 10:55:07','2006-05-21 16:55:07','Hi Mark,\nFinally took the website survey &amp; I\'m bookmarking expertflyer on my browser bar right now.\nThanks for the best podcast on the internet and keep up the great work!\nB. Breaux',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(113,33,'Frick','','http://fricksworld.blogspot.com/','68.74.79.121','2006-05-21 10:55:41','2006-05-21 16:55:41','Flew into Memphis Monday night took the Hertz bus no Marvin. I flew back out this morning and I was all set to inform Marvin of his somewhat famous podcast stature, but instead of Marvin I had Melvin as a driver. Marvin where are you........',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(114,33,'mark','','','68.74.79.121','2006-05-21 10:56:10','2006-05-21 16:56:10','We might have been on the same Hertz bus on Monday evening -- I came on the AA flight at 6:10pm and, yes, no Marvin. I flew out Tuesday afternoon and had Pauline instead. I had my iRiver all ready to grab a quick interview with the Smooth Jazz voice of Hertz himself, but to no avail...',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(115,33,'','','','68.74.79.121','2006-05-21 10:56:27','2006-05-21 16:56:27','If you don\'t have an issue with the name of the company, San Francisco based \"Nancy Boy\" has the BEST \'metrosexual\' shaving cream on the planet. It even comes in a travel size. Well worth trying out.\n\nwww.nancyboy.com',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(116,33,'mark','mpeacock@travelcommons.com','https://migrate.travelcommons.com','68.74.79.121','2006-05-21 10:56:53','2006-05-21 16:56:53','I\'ll try it out as long as the name doesn\'t show up on my credit card statement -- my wife will start wondering. Especially if she goes to the web site and reads \"Here at Nancy Boy, the customer is always Queen.\" Not that there is anything wrong with that...\n\nMark',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(117,33,'','','','68.74.79.121','2006-05-21 10:57:16','2006-05-21 16:57:16','Yeah, you know I really like the idea of carrying a badger brush along (nice idea), but I just can not give up the NB shave cream. It is that good. Even if the name DOES show up on the CC statement...',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(118,34,'','','','68.74.79.121','2006-05-18 19:55:49','2006-05-19 01:55:49','Thanks for the podcast, your humility and respect for the listeners compared to some other travel casters is key in retaining your \"customers\".\n\nYour cursory mention of NetStumbler in the last two podcasts whetted my wistle when it comes to travel tips. Please give more information about what NetStumbler is and how you use it (any special scripts, etc.).\n\nI\'m also interested in what other software you use in your travels (or line of work). Any other travel tips like the shaving brush and soap are interesting and useful. Speaking of a shaving brush and soap, what brush do you use, and what do you use for a case?\n\nCheers,\n\n- Dan',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(119,34,'','','','68.74.79.121','2006-05-18 19:56:07','2006-05-19 01:56:07','Thanks for the tip on the Continental President\'s Club wifi! Unfortunately I got shut out in ORD over the weekend-- club might\'ve been empty on a midday Saturday so it might\'ve been overly obvious that no one should\'ve been connecting...',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(120,35,'richmanwisco','','http://richmanwisco.blogspot.com','72.254.59.90','2006-05-18 00:06:15','2006-05-18 06:06:15','In Milwaukee, concourse C had been the slum terminal, but they\'ve just finished rebuilding it, and it\'s quite sharp. As for Detroit, I have but dim memories of the old terminal.\n\nBriefcase? I\'m stuck with the bag the computer came with. It\'s missing a couple of the pull tabs.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(121,36,'Finn H. Schoyen','finnyboy@mac.com','','87.192.69.168','2006-08-21 21:05:08','2006-08-22 03:05:08','I\'ve tried noise cancelling headphones from various other brands,\nbefore I decided to buy myself a pair of them Bose QuietComfort 2 you talk so highly about.\nThey\'re bloody marvellous!\nScreaming kids, engine noise, you name it! - Gone!\n\nI\'ve been meaning to get my hands on them for a long time, but other priorities forced me to postpone the purchase,\nuntil - that is - one of my vendors gave me a 35% discount, probably because they\'re going to stock the new QC3,\nfor the same price as the QC2 now cost.\nI even got a chance to try both of them out, and I must say, even though the QC3 have a more advanced noise cancelling circuitry,\ntheir on-ear design (as opposed to the QC2\'s over-ear design) isn\'t something I\'m comfortable with,\nso I decided to get the QC2 instead.\n\nI also like the rugged hardcase, despite it taking up more space than that simple drawstring bag,\nwhich most other manufacturers tend to ship with their noise canceling headphones.\n\nOnly thing I dislike, is that the audio cable doesn\'t come on a retractable reel, which would be a great feature for people on the go.\nI even mentioned that to the salespeople from Bose, who happened to be in the shop to demonstrate the QC3 just then,\nso who knows? Maybe the next generation (Would that be QuietComort 4?) will have that feature when it comes out?',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(122,37,'','','','66.161.8.132','2006-05-17 20:40:57','2006-05-18 02:40:57','I really enjoy your podcasts. Although, at present they are purely for entertainment purposes as I hail from north of the border. When I say north, I mean the real north and not the north where Toronto, Edmonton and Vancouver airports are dealt with - but further north where there are no TSA canadian equivalents - and in fact no security whatsoever - atleast for the 3 hour flight it takes you to get to Yellowknife where you\'re then forced to get off the plane and go through a more gentle screening process. I amuse myself with the comparison of our two processes - and I find myself shamed into perhaps being a little less frustrated on future travels. Your shoe wars have nothing on the gentle act of deplaning in -40, marching across the tarmac and pushing your carry on luggage through a metal detector or on the more rare occasion flipping open a laptop to have it wanded.\n\nNorthern road warriors find themselves more concerned with the return flight - and keeping the kid\'s goldfish alive or worrying about how to explain 5 cans of palm hearts stuffed in your parka pockets or the myriad of other products that are hauled back to tiny northern communities from big cities and make travelling light an unattainable dream.\n\nWhile I anticipate that one day I\'ll have to face the US TSA processes or similar ones in Canada - for now, your podcast is the gentler more kinder way of receiving that education. Keep up the good work.\n\nRegards.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(123,37,'','','','66.161.8.132','2006-05-17 20:41:22','2006-05-18 02:41:22','Thanks for playing our song, \'One Day\' on your show . We do very much appreciate your support for our music.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(124,37,'richmanwisco','','','66.161.8.132','2006-05-17 20:41:48','2006-05-18 02:41:48','We go on about TSA\'s foot fetishes, but try the Evansville Regional Airport sometime. Nobody, and I mean nobody goes through without getting their feet dirty.\n\nOne thing equally nagging and nearly as pointless to me is why on earth I\'m still forced to haul my laptop out of my case and send it through in its own bin throught the xray machine. We joke (wryly) how one sicko with a dangerous wad of gum on his shoe has brought us to minding our socks, what justifies endangering my electronics every time I fly? Anybody?\n\nKeep up the great work!',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(125,37,'','','','66.161.8.132','2006-05-17 20:42:08','2006-05-18 02:42:08','I listened with interest to your comments about the TSA which I am in complete agreement with, but a more irritating problem for non US residents is the always awful experience of entering the US and encountering long long snaking lines to get through immigration. I wont even attempt to decribe the average demeanour of the uniformed staff towards us \'aliens\'. This has become quite a hot topic in the travel sections of the UK press with horrible stories of unwarranted body searches etc etc. Interestingly as a result of complaints about the transit experience at LAX for people flying from the UK to New Zealand, Air New Zealand have decided to cancel the route and from the fall will be flying from Heathrow to NZ via Hong Kong. UK tourist numbers to Florida are also down 20% and this is also being blamed largely on the hassle of entering the US.\n\nI love vacationing in the US and pre 9/11 my wife and I would often travel to the east coast for long weekends but now we just dont think it worth the stress involved. I am currently planning a vacation on the west coast for later in the year and have decided that we will fly to Vancouver and enter the US at the checkpoint on Interstate 5.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(126,37,'Chris','claska@sbcglobal.net','','63.214.191.178','2006-06-14 11:59:04','2006-06-14 17:59:04','Love the podcasts, I\'m slowly getting caught up...by your Metra schedule, looks like we are not necesarily close neighbors, I\'m on the Fox Lake line everyday when not on the road. So maybe we cross paths at Union station?\n\nThe TSA \"Shoe carnival\" is complete BS, couldn\'t agree more. One question - has anyone ever seen the area around the metal detector disinfected? with all those bare feet, I worry more about athlete\'s foot than anything else...',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(127,38,'Udayan','','http://www.udayan71.blogspot.com','66.161.8.132','2006-05-17 20:32:58','2006-05-18 02:32:58','I completely agree with what you said about Disney resorts being great for families, I had a fantastic time there - they do simple things that are child-focused that Marriotts, Hyatts and Hiltons don\'t do.\nYour bridge music is excellent, I liked Pictures of You very much.\nHope to see it soon in the RSS feed, I\'m going on a trip and this would be good listening material.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(128,38,'','','','66.161.8.132','2006-05-17 20:33:56','2006-05-18 02:33:56','You made a comment on the show that you did not know if your Canadian listener meant -40 Celsius or -40 Fahrenheit, but that you assumed that he/she meant Celsius which would be much colder. As it turns out, that is the one temperature that is the same in both systems.\n\nChris from the Amateur Traveler podcast',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(129,38,'mark','mpeacock@travelcommons.com','https://migrate.travelcommons.com','66.161.8.132','2006-05-17 20:34:26','2006-05-18 02:34:26','Chris -\n\nThanks for that. I knew the two lines intersected, but didn\'t remember it was at -40. No wonder he didn\'t give a scale designation -- it doesn\'t make a difference.\n\nRegards,\nMark',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(130,38,'','','','66.161.8.132','2006-05-17 20:34:50','2006-05-18 02:34:50','I was just at WDW Swan and Dolphin for a conference this past week. Bad, bad, bad place for a conference, business-wise that is. And the mid-80s vintage Michael Graves hotel room interiors drastically need upgrading (but I like the whimsical building exteriors) I was expecting more from a facility that had the Disney name on it. I kept hearing so much about the \"Disney experience.\" I know this hotel complex is not \"on campus\" and is operated by Starwood (the only good thing was the bed), but I expected more. Shula\'s Steak House and the Todd English BlueZoo restaurants were excellent - but again only having two good places to eat during a four day conference does not make the grade as far as I am concerned. I am sure the folks with kid\'s tagging along found it to be more than adequate, as they could ship the significant other and children over to the park during the day.\n\nAllan',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(131,38,'','','','66.161.8.132','2006-05-17 20:35:34','2006-05-18 02:35:34','Mark:\n\nI work in accounting for one of the major hotel chains and I responding to your comment about the add on fees at many hotels. While services such as movies, internet access, safe charges, and guest laundry generate revenue for the hotel they each virtually make no profit for the hotel. In fact in most cases we are just passing on the costs of the services that we are charged. If you can believe it, we pay in the tens of thousands each month to provide internet access to customers. In terms of parking charges I agree with you and believe that they should be free in the suburban hotels, however with many hotels telecom revenues steadily decling since the rise of the cell phone, hotels are forced to look for other revenue streams to keep profit margins up and keep wall street happy. In regards why hotels just do not raise their rates to make up the additional revenue it is because in this day and age with expedia/priceline websites where so many transient guests, which are so cost conscience, are able to easily to compare prices between hotels across a city, hotels are constantly struggling to balance rate with occupancy to maximize REVPAR. Hope this helps!\n\nDoug',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(132,38,'Mark','mpeacock@travelcommons.com','https://migrate.travelcommons.com','66.161.8.132','2006-05-17 20:35:58','2006-05-18 02:35:58','Doug -\n\nThanks for giving us that view from the inside.\n\nRegards,\nMark',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(133,39,'richmanwisco','','http://richmanwisco.blogspot.com','66.161.8.132','2006-05-17 20:06:07','2006-05-18 02:06:07','Congrats on your mileage milestone. I, with my mere 310,000 lifetime Northwest miles and Gold Elite status, bow down before the platinum man.\n\nYou hit the nail on the head with the frustrating experience with the San Mateo Marriott. It frustrates because you know they know how to deliver an excellent product, but fail to pay sufficient attention to detail. There\'s really no excuse for it, either.\n\nI\'d like to take this opportunity for an announcement. You\'ve been kind enough to mention my blog \"This Blog Title For Sale\" and I appreciate the traffic. I have recently acquired the means to pursue something I\'ve wanted to do most my whole life, and that is to learn how to fly. I started about 3 weeks ago, and I started along with a blog to record my experience. \"Rich\'s Quest For Flight\" can be found at http://questforflight.blogspot.com. It\'s not terribly exciting, but if you\'re curious about what it\'s like to learn to fly, or might be thinking about learning, maybe it can be of some help.\n\nAs always, keep up the great work, Mark!',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(134,39,'','','','66.161.8.132','2006-05-17 20:06:34','2006-05-18 02:06:34','You worry about how badly visitors are treated by your authorities. No worries, it\'s a small price to pay for the laugh we have at the forms we have to fill out - my favourite has to be asking if I had any live snails with me! Who knew you were short of molluscs?\n\nAnd then there\'s the whole questioning of am I a terrorist, planning to overthrow the government or indeed be a drug dealer - come on, who is ever going to answer yes, even if you were a drug dealing revolutionary terrorist! Doh!\n\nI once showed a couple of US citizens one of these forms and they couldn\'t believe the stupidity of their government in asking such stuff. But it is hillarious.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(135,40,'Frick','fricksworld@gamil.com','http://fricksworld.blogspot.com/','12.5.125.130','2006-05-18 20:47:47','2006-05-19 02:47:47','The new design looks nice.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(136,40,'Geoff Slater','gslater@madriver.com','','68.142.47.129','2006-06-01 20:21:08','2006-06-02 02:21:08','Your story about getting frequeent flyer tickets to Sweden sounded very familiar.  I was trying to get business class tickets to  and from South Africa and first tried Delta.  I got a very bored Delta agent on the line who after searching for a while told me that there was no way.  I then tried American next and also got a really friendly helpful agent.  My first choice was to fly British Air.  That wasn\'t possible, but she did find a convoluted routing on Iberia.  I then started asking about British Air flights to nearby countries.  Instead of getting annoyed, she said\" \"This is fun!  I\'m always asked to find tickets to the same destinations and it\'s nice to do something different.\"  She ultimately got me two seats on BA to Lusaka, Zambia, although I still have the convoluted trip back home.  It was a really good airline experience.  (And by the way, the destinations that she is asked for over and over are London and Australia, and more and more, South Africa.)',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(137,41,'Dan O\'Leary','hotelcoffee@gmail.com','http://hotelcoffee.blogspot.com','69.233.236.83','2006-05-19 16:35:19','2006-05-19 22:35:19','Really enjoyed the \'looking out the front window\' segment.  It is a nice view.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(138,41,'mark','mpeacock@travelcommons.com','http://','68.74.79.121','2006-05-19 19:22:01','2006-05-20 01:22:01','I\'m jealous of your view.  Pre-9/11, they\'d often let first-class passengers take a quick peek, but that was a simpler time...',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(139,41,'Bellybones','barrymarketing@optonline.net','','24.46.118.17','2006-05-23 15:51:17','2006-05-23 21:51:17','I really enjoy your podcast.  Keep up the great work.\n\nIn response to the Hotel Chain accountant justifying the add-ons...he implied that it was necessary to nickel-and-dime us because today\'s advanced hotel travel-search sites put pressure on rates.  Am I crazy, or haven\'t hotel costs risen faster than inflation for the past 5 years (unlike airfares)?  I\'m not begrudging them their right to make money, but please don\'t insult my intelligence by implying that because of Expedia, et al, this is just your way of staying in business.  As for his example of paying \"tens of thousands of dollars a year in Internet access fees\", is that for one property, or the whole chain?  My guess is it\'s for the latter.  Pardon me for not shedding a tear if a chain like Hilton or Marriott\'s TOTAL guest Internet access bill hits five or six figures.  All you need for each property is one cable modem line (I pay $45, so maybe the commercial rate is, what, triple?) and a wireless router that runs you $70 at Best Buy.    If this charge is so necessary, then how come this is provided FREE at Courtyard, Residence Inn, Springhill, etc. but is a $10/night charge at Marriott/Renaissance?  Why do the higher priced prpoerties within the same chain charge for the access?  The answer is the same as that of an indelicate joke about dogs, the punchline of which is \"because they can.\"',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(140,41,'Frick','fricksworld@gamil.com','http://fricksworld.blogspot.com/','12.5.125.130','2006-05-23 20:02:55','2006-05-24 02:02:55','Bellybones, I agree last week I\'m in Montgomery AL staying at the Embassy Suites $148.00 per night before taxes etc..... Internet $10.00 per day I\'m a Hilton Diamond member &amp; they still charge me.\nThis week again Montgomery AL staying at Fairfield $80.00 per night FREE internet &amp; I\'m only Marriott Silver.\nWhat gives?\nWe are so dependant on high speed internet that we pay it, I don\'t even know if my modem in my laptop still works.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(141,41,'Amy','amy@amygreenbaum.com','','24.123.234.145','2006-05-24 14:14:50','2006-05-24 20:14:50','Mark,\n\nEnjoyed this week\'s podcast.\n\nYour rant (and the Minneapolis commentor) on current airlines \"fun\" resonates with me.  I recently got back from a trip to Israel and I took NW aka \"Northworst\" (and yes, I grew up in MN) from my local area through DTW to JFK.  I was appauled by a new NW online check-in \"convenience.\"  To get a seat, I had to pay an additional $15!!!  I went to check in for my flight online, as requested by the airline, and saw that it wouldn\'t assign me a seat. On the website was a statement that said something like \"book your seat now, don\'t wait for the rush at the gate as your seat will not be guarenteed.\" The only seat available was an additional $15.   I purchased my ticket a month before, was not permitted to get a seat then. What is up with this??!!  I asked a NW rep at the gate about it who basically told me \"you don\'t have to pay for the seat, we could have ticketed you here, except we are usually oversold and don\'t have enough seats, so it is good that you paid the money.\" What? Sheez.  What will they think of next.\n\nWell, now that I have ranted at NW, cudos to El Al. Both flights were on time or early, the staff was nice and accommodating, the food was good and the seats pretty comfortable for economy.  I was traveling for work and was unable (long story, not El-Al\'s total fault) to pre-reserve my vegetarian meal.  On the flight there, the flight attendant put together all but an entre (and by the way, El Al uses real silverware and dishes, even in coach) and on the flight back, they were able to find me a full meal.\n\nWell, that is enough of a comment for now. I\'ll keep listening.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(142,41,'rich','rmfraser2@hotmail.com','http://richmanwisco.blogspot.com','69.210.55.61','2006-06-04 17:56:26','2006-06-04 23:56:26','As long as we\'re talking about Northwest, frequent travelers (and Gold Elites) may have noticed fewer free upgrades since they\'re booking to higher capacity and the platinums are grabbing what\'s left.  But that\'s not the point of my comment.  I was fortunate to grab and upgrade on a Memphis to Milwaukee leg, and I noticed they served no drinks prior to takeoff, something they had been doing for quite a long time.  Then, once in the air, instead of offering a plate full of snack bags from which we could take what we wanted, the flight attendant asked if we wanted nuts or pretzels and then was given one bag of what we requested.\n\nNow maybe it was just this flight crew, but how could they think the savvy traveler doesn\'t pick up on these nickel and dime measures?  Just how long will it be before all first class becomes is just a larger chair?',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(143,41,'Udayan','email@udayantripathi.com','http://www.udayantripathi.com','80.0.28.4','2006-06-11 16:24:37','2006-06-11 22:24:37','I downloaded the 900+ SXSW songs - I\'m working through them, although daunting it\'s great to find new acts. I reccommend it, with the warning that it is a long download even with SXSW servers or something helping along with BT.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(144,42,'Frick','fricksworld@gmail.com','http://fricksworld.blogspot.com/','68.215.218.128','2006-06-23 19:13:17','2006-06-24 01:13:17','I started to write this from the Hampton Inn in Mebane NC, then I started over at the Comfort Suites in Baltimore MD and now I am starting over again from my lazy boy (they used to call it a barcalounger until I sat in it) from home. Great review of the first year, and we can all safely assume that you made at least Marriott \"Gold\" from the bathroom medley.\nMy first year on the road I took a picture of every hotel room I slept in and then made a PowerPoint (groan) how depressing was that to sit trough, this process stopped after the first year.\nSomehow listening to someone else’s time on the road is not as depressing as reviewing your own. Keep up the podcasts and may you get all the upgrades you are entitled to, seriously.\nP.S. my seat mate on the flight home last night was truly fascinated by the Harry Potter section of the Sky Mall magazine, weird. And by the way does anyone ever buy anything from Sky Mall?',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(145,42,'David Glickman','david.glickman@mac.com','','172.202.115.149','2006-07-03 12:15:03','2006-07-03 18:15:03','I always enjoy your comments on the joys of encountering TSA folk, but for us non -US nationals our anti-heros must be the Immigration Officials.  I thought you might enjoy the following extract from a piece by Jeremy Clarkson (the UK\'s leading motoring journalist) which appeared in this week\'s Sunday Times:\n\n\nWe begin at Los Angeles airport in front of an immigration official who, like all his colleagues, was selected for having no grace, no manners, no humour, no humanity and the sort of IQ normally found in farmyard animals. He scanned my form and noted there was no street number for the hotel at which I was staying.\n\n“I’m going to need a number,” he said. “Ooh, I’m sorry,” I said, “I’m afraid I don’t have one.”\n\nThis didn’t seem to have any effect. “I’m going to need a number,” he said again, and then again, and then again. Each time I shrugged and stammered, terrified that I might be sent to the back of the queue or worse, into the little room with the men in Marigolds. But I simply didn’t have an answer.\n\n“I’m going to need a number,” he said again, giving the distinct impression that he was an autobank, and that this was a conversation he was prepared to endure until one of us died. So with a great deal of bravery I decided to give him one. And the number I chose was 2,649,347.\n\nThis, it turned out, was fine. He’d been told by his superiors to get a number. I’d given him a number. His job was done and so, just an hour or so later, I was on the streets of Los Angeles doing a piece to camera.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(146,42,'mark','mpeacock@travelcommons.com','http://','68.78.149.252','2006-07-03 12:24:02','2006-07-03 18:24:02','Dan -\n\nThanks for posting that story -- it\'s a great one.  The only way that story would have been funnier is if he gave him pi (3.14159) as the number....  Yup, I\'m sleeping safer at night knowing this Immigration guy is on duty.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(147,43,'Leonard','leonard@pencilgraphite.com','','209.19.202.197','2006-07-10 16:17:35','2006-07-10 22:17:35','I heard this song on Jonathan Coulton\'s Thing a Week podcast and couldn\'t help but think of the recent episode with facts about skymall.\n\nhttp://www.jonathancoulton.com/music/thingaweek/SkyMall.mp3',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(148,43,'Ed Vawter','edwardv2@comcast.net','http://www.qdinformation.com','24.20.63.1','2006-07-07 14:30:49','2006-07-07 20:30:49','Another great podcast Mark and the new Wordpress blog loks great!\n\nI loved your stories about the overhead luggage problems.  Couple of additional stories.  On a recent flight on United, after they called first class, they then called for premiers, premier execs, etc and almost the whole waiting area got in line!  There were only about 5 or 6 people not in line!  Everyone crowds on as soon as possible in order get that overhead space, but when 90% of the plane has that privilege it creates problems.\n\nRegarding the unofficial rules/etiquette for overhead luggage, I have witnessed people take out luggage in the overhead without asking anyone and proceed to move it four or five rows towards the back of the plane and then place their bag in the overhead bin above their seat.  This created a major incident since the person who\'s bag was moved had to make a tight connection upon landing and he noticed what had happened.  It escalated to the point where the flight attendant had to intervene and placed the person\'s bag with the tight connection in the closet in the front of the plane.\n\nWith planes as packed as they are its almost certain to lead to more air rage especially during the busy summer travel season.\n\nEd of <a href=\"http://www.qdinformation.com/searching/\" rel=\"nofollow\">Searching the Internet</a> podcast',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(149,43,'Chris from the Amateur Traveler podcast','chris2x@chris2x.com','http://AmateurTraveler.com','208.37.12.13','2006-07-03 01:03:08','2006-07-03 07:03:08','If you have a list of \"gotta dos\" for Chicago, you should come on my show and share them. I have had some requests for information on Chicago from at least one listener from Argentina who travels up your way periodically.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(150,43,'Marko','marko@karppinen.fi','http://www.karppinen.fi/','80.222.179.182','2006-07-13 04:15:14','2006-07-13 10:15:14','When I fly in the US, I very rarely get a boarding pass without the dreaded SSSS on it. I assume this is because I\'m usually either on a one-way or a convoluted multiple segment ticket, often bought from a dodgy third-world country (what can I say -- I like a deal when I see one). Anyway, my reaction\'s usually different from your friend Mike\'s: the secondary screening itself only takes a minute, and I\'ve learned that I can often skip the long lines to the regular screening by pointing out the SSSS to the \"gatekeeper\". I\'m sure the secondary screening has been a net time saver for me on multiple occasions.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(151,44,'Chris from the Amateur Traveler podcast','chris2x@chris2x.com','http://AmateurTraveler.com','208.37.12.13','2006-07-31 15:47:20','2006-07-31 21:47:20','I know how you hate to check baggage so I thought you would enjoy this story.\n\nI just had a trip to Africa with 9 others. We brought school supplies with us so we each had 2 checked bags. Since we had a 7.5 hour layover in London I was glad we had checked as much luggage as possible. We managed to get out of the airport to Windsor for a couple of hours which was a nice break. But the luggage? 11 of the 20 bags did not make it to Tanzania with us. 10 showed up the next day. One has not been seen since.\n\nmoral to the story: all of those who were told they could book their luggage all the way through to Tanzania got their luggage, those who were told at SFO by the next counter agent that they would have to pick them up in Nairobi and check them in again had to wait that extra day.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(152,44,'S','','','198.151.12.10','2006-08-01 11:37:47','2006-08-01 17:37:47','Welcome back Mark! Good to hear your show again.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(153,44,'rich (richmanwisco)','rmfraser2@hotmail.com','http://richmanwisco.blogspot.com','69.210.87.38','2006-08-04 19:50:46','2006-08-05 01:50:46','Hey Mark, good to have you back.\n\nI was blundering about digg tonight, and I happened across what seems to be an excellent travel resource.  It\'s at http://seatguru.com and it is a guide to the seat configurations for aircraft types as flown by the major airlines.  It also details amenities and inflight services.  I checked the charts for Northwest, and they seem to agree with my seating experiences.  It\'s worth a look.\n\nPlease allow me to flog my blog, \"This Blog Title For Sale\".  Thirteen months and going strong.  Perhaps I can petition for a link?  Thanks!',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(154,44,'Dave','','http://sandandtsunamis.blogspot.com','143.46.96.68','2006-08-07 02:25:00','2006-08-07 08:25:00','Mark,\nSurfed over here from HotelCoffee a week or so ago and have really enjoyed the podcast.  I spend a lot of time on the road here in Japan with about 2.5 hrs to and from work daily.  So, I\'m always on the lookout for something to keep my mind occupied.  I\'ve really enjoyed the perspective of a \"true\" business traveler, as well as the other links that you provide through the podcast and site.  I\'m currently working through them all from the beginning.\n\nIf it\'s OK, I\'d like to link to your site from ours over at Sand and Tsunamis...We\'ve been overseas for a couple of years now, blogging about our lives.\n\nThanks for the regular entertainment and highly informative podcasts!  Looking forward to the next submission.\n\nDave',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(155,44,'Ed Vawter','edwardv2@comcast.net','http://www.qdinformation.com','24.20.63.1','2006-08-10 13:01:44','2006-08-10 19:01:44','Hey Rick (comment 3).  I talked about Seatguru and some other seat mapping websites in my \"Searching the Internet\" podcast episode 5 (http://www.qdinformation.com/searching/2006/06/01/searching-the-internet-episode-005/).  The whole episode deals with travel related sites.  If you don\'t want to listen to the podcast, you can still check out the links to the sites in the show notes.\n\nEd Vawter',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(156,44,'Frank','frankzeg1@mac.com','','67.176.68.156','2006-08-09 19:32:34','2006-08-10 01:32:34','Mark\nHeard the podcast and your comments about more cars having at least an accessory jack for an iPod.  You said something about carrying the wire to connect them.  if you use Bose headphones ( the later generation ones) you already have one.  Pull the plug out of the left phone and it presents a standard miniplug.  I used to do just what you described- carry a \"dubbing cable\" with two male plugs.  But in an effort to  shed the amount of crud I have to carry on travel I found this to be a great solution. So far no damage to the cable or phones.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(157,45,'rich (richmanwisco)','rmfraser2@hotmail.com','http://richmanwisco.blogspot.com','69.210.87.38','2006-08-10 22:24:07','2006-08-11 04:24:07','Just got back from my trip to Kentucky, and by the time I passed through Louisville security at around 6:00 p.m., things were pretty much normal.\n\nLook at it this way.  Plenty of room in the bins for bags now that many more bags will be checked.  That, and the local Walgreens and WalMarts will be stripped of the travel size mouthwash and hotel chains will grind through record amounts of free shampoo.  At least somebody wins, but not the traveler.\n\nSo add to the shoe parade and laptop show and tell, the \"Palmolive purge\".  And there\'s no end in sight.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(158,45,'Ed Vawter','edwardv2@comcast.net','http://www.qdinformation.com/searching/','24.20.63.1','2006-08-10 22:30:36','2006-08-11 04:30:36','Mark, when I caught this on the news today there were several podcast friends I thought about, you included.  Another one was in Portugal and trying to get back to Amsterdam.  As you can imagine, he had even more problems.\n\nI\'ll be listening to see how your experience at SFO goes since it\'s one of the airports I fly into frequently.\n\nEd Vawter\nSearching the Internet\nwww.qdinformation.com/searching/',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(159,46,'Ed Vawter','edwardv2@comcast.net','http://www.qdinformation.com','24.20.63.1','2006-08-11 20:10:20','2006-08-12 02:10:20','I have commented before that unfortunately the types of people attracted to these sorts of jobs tend to be ones that want to feel important and control circumstances and they can sometimes take advantage of just this sort of situation.  They certainly aren\'t in it for the money :)\n\nI am constantly amazed at how poor communications is in a lot of situations but especially in those involving several different groupd or agencies.  Hey, the FBI, FAA and other agencies can\'t even come up with a consolidated no fly list after almost five years!',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(160,46,'Frick','fricksworld@gmail.com','http://fricksworld.blogspot.com/','68.218.5.213','2006-08-12 07:04:50','2006-08-12 13:04:50','I spent last week driving (not flying) and it looks the same for the upcoming week, thank goodness. The following week it\'s back to the airport,maybe they will have all this cleared up by then, maybe.\nNow do I break my rule of \"No Checked Bags\" and rely on the hotel to stock my DOP kit each trip?\nAnd what were you going to do with a roller bag anyway? I would imagine that the corner of a 6lb Dell laptop to the skull would do as much (if not more) damage than a roller bag, but then again I\'m not smart enough to work for the TSA and figure those things out.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(161,47,'Udayan','email@udayantripathi.com','http://www.udayantripathi.com','80.0.28.4','2006-08-15 20:44:47','2006-08-16 02:44:47','Mark, as you always hear me complain; your shows whizz by too fast! You\'re right, it\'s crazy that so many use coaches to get around Europe, from a train station nearby there are services across into Eastern Europe, which is horrible.\n\nStill, it is far cheaper than the EuroStar and EasyJet can be a zoo.\n\nFinal thought; your appearence on the Amateur Traveller was very insightful, I\'d love to visit Chicago with that MP3 playing.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(162,48,'Dave','','http://sandandtsunamis.blogspot.com','143.46.96.68','2006-08-16 01:26:49','2006-08-16 07:26:49','Great story, Mark...still haven\'t had to fly recently, and figure that (hopefully) by the time I do, things will have returned to some semblance of sanity.  Love thepodcast.  Keep it up.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(163,48,'Frick','fricksworld@gmail.com','http://fricksworld.blogspot.com/','12.5.125.130','2006-08-16 15:06:54','2006-08-16 21:06:54','I would imagine just a few scant weeks ago your TSA \"Buddy\" was at his previous job uttering \"You want fries with that?\" Your right it\'s not worth missing a flight just to prove a point with the guy.\nForget the hair styling wax just shave your head....',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(164,48,'mark','mpeacock@travelcommons.com','http://','68.75.37.254','2006-08-16 15:29:09','2006-08-16 21:29:09','No need to shave -- I\'m rapidly heading in that direction naturally...',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(165,48,'Hilary','hbaumann@fascinationdesign.com','http://www.clothingcult.com','74.131.35.44','2006-08-17 12:10:32','2006-08-17 18:10:32','After that I would probably go out and buy a 4oz bottle of contact lens solution so I could put whatever liquid I wanted in the bottle (since 4oz of contact lens solution/saline/eyedrops is an acceptable liquid) and a lens case just to complete the masquerade.\n\nOr if you try the wax again maybe put it in a ziplock container so they don\'t associate it with hair gel. Maybe it would get thrown out just for looking strange but it would be worth a shot.\n\nFrom a woman\'s point of view the lipgloss, mascara and foundation/concealer not being allowed as carry-ons is a problem. I guess they will assume that women will have bags other than their carryon but if not and you don\'t wear a drugstore brand it\'s going to cost a good $15+ to buy each item each place you go. Even with drugstore brands and just mascara ($7), lipgloss ($3) and foundation ($9) that\'s still an estimated $19 and lots of waste. Add in the toothpaste, shampoo, conditioner, hairspray/mousse/gel, makeup remover... it gets expensive.\n\nLast time someone (a family member) convinced me to check one piece of luggage it took a trip to LA for a couple of days without me. I also know your thing about waiting for the checked bags and I couldn\'t agree more - waste of time.\n\nI am so glad I haven\'t had to fly anywhere in the last year.\n\nHow\'s that Eco-dent tooth powder by the way? I\'m thinking about putting together a full list of alternatives to the banned items that shouldn\'t get confiscated (sans suggestion about the lens cleaner because that\'s pushing things.)',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(166,48,'Udayan','email@udayantripathi.com','http://www.udayantripathi.com','80.0.28.4','2006-08-17 18:20:20','2006-08-18 00:20:20','With this sort of plain attack on your kit, I would just land at the destination and buy from a checklist.. I know it sucks since it is wasteful but is it really worth the argument with the person, who for that moment, is in charge of your life?',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(167,48,'mark','mpeacock@travelcommons.com','http://','198.241.217.15','2006-08-17 20:12:31','2006-08-18 02:12:31','Hilary -\n\nThe Eco-dent tooth powder tastes <b>awful</b>!  Incredibly salty, but that shouldn\'t surprise me given that it\'s mostly baking soda --sodium bicarbonate.  But it\'s not bad enough to make me want to burn an hour waiting for my bag to pop out on the luggage belt.\n\nUdayan -\n\nYou\'re right, of course.  The sane thing to do is shrug and move along.  But every once in a while, my pride and general crankiness take over...',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(168,48,'Udayan','email@udayantripathi.com','http://www.udayantripathi.com','80.0.28.4','2006-08-18 10:34:00','2006-08-18 16:34:00','Realistically I too would probably get nastily angry &amp; get myself in trouble. I mean it\'s not their job to hassle passengers!\n\nOn a side note which is all over the internet, anyone seen Snakes on a Plane yet? I\'m going tonight &amp; I\'m stoked!',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(169,48,'fred','','','65.26.226.129','2006-08-19 02:15:12','2006-08-19 08:15:12','actually the Eco-Dent toothpowder tastes fresh and clean and is the only stuff I use even when I am NOT traveling!',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(170,48,'mark','mpeacock@travelcommons.com','http://','67.169.54.69','2006-08-19 10:08:15','2006-08-19 16:08:15','Perhaps I chose the wrong flavor.  I went for Tartar Control because I\'m late for my dental check-up.  Perhaps I should have chosen the cinnamon flavor instead...\n\nOn a completely different note, \"Snakes on a Plane\" got a great write-up in the San Francisco paper.  I\'ll have to go see it.  There\'s nothing better in cinema than seeing Samuel L Jackson say \"M*therf***er\".  I hate it when I channel-surf and see <em>Pulp Fiction</em> playing.  I immediately lose an hour watching him.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(171,48,'Udayan','email@udayantripathi.com','http://www.udayantripathi.com','80.0.28.4','2006-08-19 12:59:07','2006-08-19 18:59:07','The movie was wonderfully awful. I loved it. That specific line was a little anticlimactic, my suggestion follows the many reviews; go with a large, rowdy audience!\n\nAnother thing, RyanAir\'s CEO has spoken out against the new travel restrictions;\n\nRyanAir a leading European discount airline, has threatened to sue the British government if it doesn\'t ease off on its security measures.\n\n    Michael O\'Leary, the outspoken chief executive of Ryanair, described the new restrictions as \"farcical Keystone Cops security measures that don\'t add anything except to block up airports\", as he issued the ultimatum.\n\n    Mr O\'Leary ridiculed the notion of searching five- or six-year-old children and elderly people in wheelchairs going to Spain. Such scenes, he said, would have \"terrorists laughing in the caves of Afghanistan\".\nVia BoingBoing',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(172,48,'Heather','','','24.106.49.227','2006-08-28 09:38:30','2006-08-28 15:38:30','I use Eco-Dent toothpowder daily... give it more of a chance. The taste is striking at first but after a few times it tastes great and leaves your mouth feeling really fresh and clean.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(173,48,'mark','mpeacock@travelcommons.com','http://','68.74.156.92','2006-08-30 23:02:23','2006-08-31 05:02:23','Heather and Fred -\n\nI gave the Eco-Dent another chance this week while down in Houston.  Once the taste surprise wears off, it\'s not so bad.  Not good enough, though, to replace my Tartar Control Crest at home...',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(174,49,'Udayan','email@udayantripathi.com','http://www.udayantripathi.com','80.0.28.4','2006-08-18 10:37:35','2006-08-18 16:37:35','I love your new format of writing more posts along with bi-weekly TC Podcasts.\n\nOn this topic, I think a permanent change will be rather foolish, however it\'s not unprecendented - you still have the shoe issue.\n\nI think perhaps it\'ll last through the year and when it shows up as the No.1 reason why people hate to fly, airlines (hurt by the September declines that you forecast) will try to persuade the TSA for change.\n\nPerhaps that\'s only wishful thinking.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(175,50,'Udayan Tripathi','email@udayantripathi.com','http://www.udayantripathi.com','80.0.28.4','2006-08-21 20:40:17','2006-08-22 02:40:17','Kinda makes me sad that you now have to pay $100 to get the ability to do things you did for free last week.\n\nStill, it does (as you rightly say) give some purpose to an otherwise unneccessary scheme. From what you wrote, it sounds like the original potential of the scheme would have really benefitted those who needed this advantage (eg; you)',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(176,50,'Udayan Tripathi','email@udayantripathi.com','http://www.udayantripathi.com','80.0.28.4','2006-08-21 20:42:07','2006-08-22 02:42:07','One thing I forgot to add, why did the TSA not go along with this seeing that the people cleared through this were veted and did not pose a threat. I guess it\'s just an example of how the archane system that the TSA implements runs.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(177,50,'Ed Vawter','edwardv2@comcast.net','http://www.qdinformation.com/searching/','72.255.2.111','2006-08-26 09:11:44','2006-08-26 15:11:44','Mark,  with all the recent problems lately (seven yesterday; Aug 25). I\'m not looking forward to my flight back to Portland, OR from Cinncinnatti today.  I would gladly pay the $100 if it meant being able to carry on small amouonts of toothpaste, etc but my worry is if the TSA could understand and enforce two different screening procedures.  THey can\'t even get one standard procedure at all airports.\n\nThe bigger problem is if you happen to get on a flight with some idiot passenger who decides to become unruly or even worse, someone who brings a half stick of dynamite on the plane!!  You end up geting caught up in the situation and wasting a bunch of time due to some else.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(178,50,'rich (richmanwisco)','rmfraser2@hotmail.com','http://richmanwisco.blogspot.com','69.210.76.109','2006-08-27 12:54:39','2006-08-27 18:54:39','Your comment on 43 about the service and environment on british airways and the picnic environment on our domestics resonated with me for a while, then it hit me.  A new marketing angle for our domestics.\n\nStill paying $7 for a burger fries and cola?  not sure you can take it on the plane?  well, xyz airways is proud to announce \"new\" food service on all flights of X duration or longer.  now you can get gourmet meals on board for what it costs you for that boring terminal sandwich.\n\nmidwest airlines is the only airline i\'m aware of that serves meals for money (not to be confused with the \"snack\" boxes), but they only serve sandwiches and they only advertise in the airport.  if the airlines can make it appear as a viable alternative to the crappy terminal fare, then they should be able to make money off of it.  and the intangible effect is a sense of \"service\" reminiscent of the good ole days of yore when flights had a certain \"restaurant in the air\" feel to them.\n\nAnd the late night guys can start making jokes about airplane food again.  good times, good times.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(179,50,'mark','mpeacock@travelcommons.com','http://','68.74.156.92','2006-08-31 20:47:02','2006-09-01 02:47:02','Looks like my thinking is in line with the \"powers that be\" at Homeland Security (there\'s a scary thought).  Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff came out in favor of Registered Traveler in an <a href=\"http://www.usatoday.com/travel/news/2006-08-30-chertoff-registered-traveler_x.htm?csp=34\" rel=\"nofollow\">interview</a> published in today\'s USAToday.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(180,51,'Chris (Amateur Traveler podcast)','chris2x@chris2x.com','http://AmateurTraveler.com','68.26.202.16','2006-08-31 09:29:45','2006-08-31 15:29:45','I believe that the Apple iPod Camera Connector (http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPLE/WebObjects/AppleStore.woa/wo/3.RSLID?mco=55EFC253&amp;nplm=M9861G%2FA) is compatible with the 4th generation iPod (which has the color screen if I remember correctly). I have one that I got to use in the unlikely event that I left the laptop at home. I have not made extensive use of it but it worked with both of my digital cameras like a snap.\n\nEVDO is very nice but terribly addictive\n\nto combat spam on wordpress get the \"Akismet Spam\" plug-in, it works very well',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(181,51,'Doug','','','68.32.163.140','2006-09-14 22:29:38','2006-09-15 04:29:38','http://news.com.com/2100-1008_3-6115982.html?part=rss&amp;tag=6115982&amp;subj=news\n\n\nCheck this article out.   Maybe one day',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(182,51,'Rob Safuto','rob@newyorkminuteshow.com','http://www.newyorkminuteshow.com','71.247.113.12','2006-09-16 13:40:45','2006-09-16 19:40:45','Just found the show via a recommendation from a friend. I\'m traveling regularly on flights from Newark these days and I find the lengths they are going to at security to be ridiculous as well.\n\nI\'m all for increased security but they need to be smarter. Hopefully they will soon allow very small amounts of liquid or gel.\n\nOne unintended benefit of the new regulations is the fact that I no longer hear, \"This is a very full flight, please place smaller carry ons under your seat.\" There always seems to be spare room in the overheads now.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(183,52,'Frick','fricksworld@gmail.com','http://fricksworld.blogspot.com/','209.137.140.218','2006-08-31 08:10:31','2006-08-31 14:10:31','True, I\'ve flown the last two weeks and as we are boarding I\'m thinking to myself \"Man this is fast\" then I\'m waiting for my luggage \"Man this is slow\"\nWhat the airport shops need to do it start selling a \"Quick Grooming\" kit, just deodorant, toothpaste maybe shower gel just the basics for say $5.00. Set up a kiosk right by ground transporatation or the rental car area, they would make a killing.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(184,53,'Hilary','hbaumann@fascinationdesign.com','http://www.clothingcult.com','74.131.35.44','2006-09-08 00:13:26','2006-09-08 06:13:26','Thanks for the link - I\'m really hoping that the list will help people who don\'t want to check their toiletries. Have you (or anyone else reading this) ever tried mailing your toiletries to a hotel you will be staying at? I\'m really beginning to wonder if this might be the best overall option (I\'ve just been traveling from one end of the state to the other this summer. Maybe I\'ll test it even if I\'m not flying if no one knows how well it will work.)\n\nI found two more powdered toothpastes - \"Tooth powder\". They\'re a brand called \"Uncle Harry\'s\" and I found them at greenfeet.com. One says it\'s a bit salty but the tooth whitening version SAYS it\'s lemony.\n\nI will probably continue to add to that list as I find things.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(185,54,'Amy','amyehodge@yahoo.com','','71.135.121.224','2006-09-18 17:28:22','2006-09-18 23:28:22','Hi Mark,\n\nHaving just returned to San Francisco on a non-stop flight from Boston, I felt the need to vent some irritation at the airlines and felt this the perfect place to do it.  :)\n\nI know that the airlines are cutting costs, so while it irks me that they no longer give out food for free, I have to admit that I\'d rather have good pilots than good food (and it\'s not like the food was good in coach anyhow).  My problem on this trip was that the food service (buy a $5 snack box) was offered 30-minutes into a 6-hour cross-country flight.  Most people, knowing the food service on board is lacking these days, were eating in the airport while waiting for the flight, myself included.  Why can\'t the airlines offer the food service, say, half-way through the flight when people are starting to get hungry instead of forcing people to eat immediately and then get nothing else but a small cup of some of drink for the rest of the flight?  Sure, you can save some of the snacks for later, but it\'s kind of a hassle to jam everything into the seat pocket in front of you (or wherever you can find to put it).  It just didn\'t make any sense to me.\n\nOn a lighter note, the TSA agent at the security screening in San Francisco on the way out on Saturday was a one-man show.  He kept us all informed and entertained in his loud booming voice, \"Ladies, you CAN take lipstick on the plane.  And men, since this is San Francisco, you can take your lipstick on the plane as well.\"  At least it got people smiling and eased the pain of the mandatory shoe removal.\n\nSafe travels,\nAmy',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(186,54,'mark','mpeacock@travelcommons.com','http://','216.163.76.131','2006-09-19 01:31:26','2006-09-19 07:31:26','Amy -\n\nOne of the greatest things about Virgin Atlantic\'s Upper Class service was that they served you the meal when <i>you</i> wanted it, not when they felt like it.  On a Miami-San Francisco flight, they fed us in the first hour and then we still had almost 6 hours left... to do what, watch Matt Lauer on Today show reruns?  In-flight food is as much a diversion as a meal.  I agree that on a transcon flight, they ought to space things out a bit.\n\nRegards,\nMark',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(187,55,'Frick','fricksworld@gmail.com','http://fricksworld.blogspot.com/','68.215.214.92','2006-09-24 07:14:45','2006-09-24 13:14:45','Similar to your Bay Trail discovery I stayed at the <a href=\"http://hamptoninn.hilton.com/en/hp/hotels/index.jhtml;jsessionid=VCTSM3FF2IYSACSGBIX222QKIYFCXUUC?ctyhocn=CAENWHX\" rel=\"nofollow\">Hampton Inn Columbia, SC</a> located on the banks of Lake Harbison. There was 11 miles of trails and the hotel had bikes that you could check out and cruise the trails with. It was an unexpected surprise.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(188,55,'Hilary','hbaumann@fascinationdesign.com','http://www.clothingcult.com','74.131.35.44','2006-09-25 12:31:36','2006-09-25 18:31:36','I thought of something to try to maybe replace hairgel - aloe vera powder. It\'s basically freeze dried aloe that can be reconstituted with water.\n\nAlso, if you look up \"homemade hair gel\" I found a couple of suggestions to use unflavored powdered gelatine.\n\nNot sure which will work best - you\'ll probabaly have better success with it on your short hair than I will on my long hair - I have gelatine here so I may actually try this one myself sometime soon.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(189,56,'Dave','','http://sandandtsunamis.blogspot.com','143.46.96.68','2006-09-27 21:11:16','2006-09-28 03:11:16','I\'m glad someone applied a dose of common sense to the liquids ban...\n\nI can understand the security implications and necessity to perhaps prohibit liquids/gels/etc before security (until some technology can detect liquid explosives); however, if you can buy it once you\'re on the other side of the screening stations, why shouldn\'t you be allowed to bring it on board?\n\nFinally, a sensible decision...I\'m especially glad, b/c, coming from Japan, all my flights to the US will be a minimum of 3 hours (to Guam) or up to 12 (other entry points).  I kind of like to have my own drinks so as not to have to bother the flight attendants any more than necessary.\n\nKeep up the great work on the podcasts and posts.  I really enjoy them.\n\nDave',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(190,56,'Allan','amarko@apple.com','','17.221.155.126','2006-09-28 16:13:50','2006-09-28 22:13:50','I agree. Starbucks coffee is too \"darn\" hot...',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(191,56,'Casey','CMilch1@aol.com','','199.111.98.148','2006-10-02 09:44:43','2006-10-02 15:44:43','Mark--\n\nI\'m loving your podcasts.  I hope one day to become an avid road warrior like you.  The tips, advice and stories rock and just whatever you do...don\'t stop podcasting!!!  All the best.\n\nCM--Arlington, VA',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(192,56,'Shaun','sanchez_the_outlaw@hotmail.com','','81.156.68.113','2006-10-26 07:25:26','2006-10-26 13:25:26','A quick note on Starbucks, you can order your drink at 140 degrees - warm enough to drink fast when you\'re in a hurry but not so hot you feel as though you\'ve bought a cup of lava.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(193,57,'Chris from the Amateur Traveler podcast','chris2x@chris2x.com','http://AmateurTraveler.com','208.37.12.13','2006-10-08 00:55:16','2006-10-08 06:55:16','I had not heard Alan tell that story. That\'s great!',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(194,57,'Robert Fenerty','robert@fenerty.com','','75.24.215.23','2006-10-09 16:23:39','2006-10-09 22:23:39','I\'m not sure if it\'s your midwestern perspective, your voice, or your balanced attitude about travel, but there is something very soothing about  listening to your podcasts and I glad I stumbled upon them.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(195,58,'Scotland Barr &amp; The Slow Drags','slowdrags@scotlandbarr.com','http://www.scotlandbarr.com','71.32.254.109','2006-11-01 23:35:21','2006-11-02 05:35:21','Hi There,\n\nScotland Barr and the Slow Drags here.  Just noticed that you played a snippet of our tune \"The Distance\" in your podcast.  Thanks for spreading our music around!\n\nSincerely,\nScotland Barr &amp; The Slow Drags\nhttp://www.scotlandbarr.com',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(196,58,'Ken S','Kasakato@gmail.com','','207.188.64.149','2006-11-14 00:21:42','2006-11-14 06:21:42','Hey Mark!\n\nIts Ken here. You mentioned me on your PodCast and I am more than thrilled. I let my family listen to it and they found it interesting too.\n\nThanks Mark, keep up the great PodCasts, happy traveling!\n\nKen S',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(197,60,'rich (richmanwisco)','rmfraser2@hotmail.com','http://richmanwisco.com','75.44.43.144','2006-11-27 22:33:05','2006-11-28 04:33:05','Hope you had a great holiday!  Looking forward to more great travel stories.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(198,60,'mark','mpeacock@travelcommons.com','http://','72.254.42.117','2006-11-29 10:18:44','2006-11-29 16:18:44','Wired News just published a great article <a href=\"http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,72181-0.html?tw=wn_story_page_prev2\" rel=\"nofollow\">\"Never Lose Luggage Again\"</a> on current and planned use of RFID tags to track luggage.  They have a nice description of the Las Vegas McCarran International Airport implementation referenced in the original post.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(199,61,'rich (richmanwisco)','rmfraser2@hotmail.com','http://richmanwisco.com','75.44.52.87','2006-12-08 21:46:47','2006-12-09 03:46:47','Hey Mark-\n\nThanks a bunch for the shoutout on the podcast, which was another fine episode, as usual.\nI thought that you, as a flatlander, would recognize quickly the end of the handle as my state of residence, but I can\'t assume too much. :)\n\nJust a quick semantics note, my blog is \"This Blog &lt;i&gt;Title&lt;/i&gt; For Sale\".  You wouldn\'t believe how many referrals I get from Google searches on that, yet it\'s the only blog with that title that I know.  And to think I thought I was being unimaginative when I came up with it.\n\nI was bemused when you brought up Hertz and how your assigned car is usually a surprise.  The reservation generally is for a certain class, and if your company is like mine, it\'s for a compact car.  And I can assume you are a 5 Star Gold member, meaning you\'ve earned automatic upgrades with your rental.  So why is it a surprise when you get to the stall?  I can pick my seat on the plane, why can\'t I pick my car?  And why is it the presumed upgrade turns out to be a Hyundai Sonata?  That\'s a premium car?  And oh, by the way, how about that Ford Five Hundred?  After years of design and development, Ford has succeeded in building from scratch a car that feels and performs just like...........a Taurus.\n\nMy time is up!  Keep up the great work and have  a great holiday.\n\nRich Fraser\nWatertown, WI\nrichmanwisco.com',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(200,61,'rich (richmanwisco)','rmfraser2@hotmail.com','http://richmanwisco.com','75.44.52.87','2006-12-08 21:48:02','2006-12-09 03:48:02','Oops.  You can throw a flag for improper use of the italic tag.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(201,61,'Frick','fricksworld@gmail.com','http://fricksworld.blogspot.com/','68.218.0.213','2006-12-09 14:26:37','2006-12-09 20:26:37','I also appreciate the shout out and as a subscriber to Rich\'s site I thought his name was Rich Manwisco or Richman Wisco. Now I know he is just a rich guy from Wisconsin.\n\nI flew Airtran this week for the first time in years and with no rank in the Airtran frequent flier program (if they even have one) I must say it was painful boarding in Zone 6. Well next week it\'s back on Delta. Hopefully that should wind down the travel until 2007, hopefully......\n\nI wish our crack IT department could figure out how to connect a Crackberry or a Trio to our Notes server, hey we just got a VPN in the last 12 months, you\'re fortunate.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(202,61,'mark','mpeacock@travelcommons.com','http://','68.74.159.246','2006-12-10 07:19:17','2006-12-10 13:19:17','It was sweet and sour with Hertz this week.  Got a Mustang in Memphis and a Chevy Cobalt in San Francisco.\n\nIn SFO, my colleague also had a reservation with Hertz, so we schlepped over to his stall number to check out his ride and it was .... a Taurus.  Back over to the Cobalt.  I can\'t remember the last time I had a car without electric windows or door locks.  We kept forgetting that we needed to manually lock every door.  Surprised that we didn\'t find someone sleeping in the back seat.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(203,61,'Saurab','sbhargava@roundarch.com','http://www.saurabbhargava.com','67.162.124.40','2007-01-25 21:52:13','2007-01-25 21:52:13','Mark - just got caught up on the last 2 episodes...thanks for the shout out! I was on a United flight from EWR to ORD tonight and suddenly I\'m hearing the intro to The Void on my iPod and wondering what just happened. I had one of those odd \"is this really what I sound like?\" moments. Anyway, hopefully some listeners liked the sounds.\n\nIn other news, I had 2 \"firsts\" in flight tonight. The first was that during boarding of the 4:45 flight from EWR to ORD, the agent announced that \"since over 90% of the flight are premiers or above, we\'re going to have to board by seating area AND row\", followed by \"seating area 1: rows 15-24, rows 10-15, seating area 2, 3, 4, etc\". To your point in podcast #50 about airlines doing less and less for us \"regular\" elites, it\'s gotten so saturated now that we have flights that are almost completely elites - defeating the point altogether! Well, at least I\'m not back at square 1 and having to board in seating area 4. I\'m not sure those guys even got on the plane...\n\nThe second \"first\" of the night was that not only was my flight NOT delayed by over an hour, which would be a good day for the EWR-ORD flight, it actually ended up landing 40 minutes early (not a typo). How does a scheduled 2 hour flight land 33% earlier than anticipated? Is it me, or are these anticipated ETA\'s just way off?\n\nAnyway - keep up the good work and thanks for playing the tunes.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(204,62,'Drew','drewbacsi@yahoo.com','http://www.budacast.hu','91.120.105.51','2006-12-08 03:32:15','2006-12-08 09:32:15','Reminds me of 2 German brothers I had to sit between because of a strange seating arrangement: Dieter\'s breath was so overwhelmingly rancid from coffee and cigarettes that I could barely breath through my nose.\n\nOr a very odd experience in 1990 on my first flight to Hungary, when they turned off the no smoking sign and the back half of the cabin seemed engulfed in smoke. Those days are long gone, thank heavens!',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(205,62,'boberonicus','robert@fenerty.com','','75.24.109.71','2006-12-11 02:53:20','2006-12-11 08:53:20','My wife introduced me to the idea of lighting matches after using the toilet.  I thought it was odd at first.  But now, I like it.  Burning phosphor does a great job of masking odor and the smell is more pleasant than phony pine scent or potpourri.\n\nAs for smelly seatmates, I sat next to a guy about six months ago on a cross country flight whose breath could stun a horse.  I\'ve been carrying those little Listerine breath strips in my laptop bag ever since.\n\nSpeaking of carry-ons Mark, have you given up on your toothpaste alternative?  Have you considered baking soda?  Tastes bad, but might pass TSA muster more easily...',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(206,63,'Max Flight','30000feet@newsguy.com','http://www.ThirtyThousandFeet.com','69.177.38.146','2007-01-01 20:01:22','2007-01-02 02:01:22','This brought back memories of a recent experience. I made $600 worth of non-refundable hotel reservations about a month before the trip, then the next day received a very friendly email message welcoming me to the hotel stay - THAT DAY.  I freaked, then immediately called the hotel, explained that my trip was not for 4 weeks, and that I couldn\'t explain the date error.  After some conversation, they agreed not to charge me the no-show fee, even though they had a technical right to do so.\nAfter some subsequent reflection, I think what happened was this: I had the correct dates highlighted in the pop-up calendar, then decided I should log in so the reservation would populate from my profile.  When I then returned to the reservation, the calendar dates had cleared to the default of \"tomorrow\" and somehow in the next series of confirmation screens I missed my mistake.\nIt could have cost me a lot for not carefully checking the reservation.  Lesson learned.\nAnyway, keep up the great podcasts - I really look forward to them and I give you a plug from time to time on my site.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(207,63,'mark','mpeacock@travelcommons.com','http://','68.74.116.1','2007-01-08 12:03:01','2007-01-08 18:03:01','I\'ve also made that mistake booking airline flights on-line.  Luckily, most airlines seem to have implemented a 24-hour cancellation rule -- if you call them within 24 hours of pressing the \"Buy Now\" button and tell them you made a mistake, they\'ll cancel the ticket without a charge.\nThanks for the plugs on your blog.  I\'ve added your &lt;i&gt;&lt;a href=\"http://travelsecurity.blogspot.com/\" rel=\"nofollow\"&gt;Travel Security&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/i&gt; site to the TravelCommon\'s blog roll.  You do a nice job of reporting the latest TSA madness.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(208,63,'Leo Vegoda','leo@bind.org','http://www.bind.org','81.86.155.200','2007-01-17 17:12:03','2007-01-17 23:12:03','This story emphasises the value and importance of people in the process.\nThis evening I tried to book a stay at a Courtyard Marriott hotel through the web site. It failed twice and so I decided to call the 1-888 number and speak to a human. The lady I spoke to was polite and helpful and got the rate quoted on the web site for the entire stay.\nNot being able to book the room would be irritating and not being able to get the good rate would have been costly. Employing someone friendly and competent really did turn a frustrating experience into a pleasant one.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(209,64,'Mika Pyyhkala','pyyhkala@gmail.com','','66.251.53.130','2007-01-04 10:56:32','2007-01-04 16:56:32','\"Super-elites are the Skull and Bones of the sky,\" said the frequent-flier expert Joel Widzer, referring to the blue-blood secret society at Yale. \"Don\'t bother asking how to join. If you qualify, they\'ll let you know.\"\n\"\"You should have never gotten that seat in the first place,\" the agent whispered to him to avoid being overheard by other passengers. \"You\'re Global Services.\"\nHis membership, she added, \"means we like you a lot.\"\"\n\"Beyond all the perks, the real bonus is \"the \'Wow!\' factor,\" according to Mr. Brierley, the loyalty expert. \"It\'s those times when you land in a snowstorm\nin Denver, and your connecting flight is canceled,\" he said. \"There are long lines at the airport, and you\'ll probably be stuck overnight. But when your\nplane arrives, there\'s an airline employee holding a boarding pass for the next flight out - and you have a seat in first class.\"\"\n&lt;a href=\"http://www.elliott.org/archives/000070status.php\" rel=\"nofollow\"&gt;Elite goes platinum&lt;/a&gt;',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(210,64,'Mat','mattrevors@hotmail.com','','24.82.173.196','2007-01-06 22:51:31','2007-01-07 04:51:31','Just started listening to the podcast today and have listened non-stop all afternoon. I travel considerable amounts for work into remote areas for 3-6 weeks at a time, and I certainly relate to all of the topics you cover. We in Canada also suffer from over-zealous security screeners, which borders on silliness as I can never imagine someone trying to hijack a Twin-Otter in the isolated Northern Regions.\nThe situations that appear to be attracted to me while travelling to &amp; from range between annoying to ridiculous. This is mostly due to flying on the airline known as Innu Mikun, though Air Canada can provide me with countless moments of silliness as well.\nThe Innu Mikun flights are either 40 minutes or 4 hours long, if they actully decide to fly on the day you wish. Highlights of the last year include:\n- taking 29 hours to get home, consisting of 3 flights totalling 2 hours, 50 minutes;\n- spending 3.5 hours of the 4-hour flight next to an very intoxicated obese man that smelled very similar to rum-soaked dog feces, who had one arm in a sling made from a dirty dish towel, resulting in constant requests to buckle his seatbelt and pick up whatever he constantly dropped on the floor;\n- and my favourite: the 4 hour flight where one person suffered from airsickness, which resulted in 9 more of the total 13 people on the flight to become sick (I was spared), essentially re-enacting the pie-eating/vomit scene from the movie \"Stand By Me.\"\nThe unfortunate thing is that, in \"non-isolated regions,\" the wearing of sunglasses &amp; headphones while your face is stuck in a book, is generally regarded as \"no conversations, please.\" It isn\'t the case on these flights....\nKeep up the great work on your podcasts! They may take my mind off the constant taps on my shoulder to buckle a seatbelt.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(211,66,'Jeremy','gymboy689@aol.com','','24.51.70.89','2007-01-17 20:27:50','2007-01-18 02:27:50','Ft. Lauderdale airport also uses the \"puffer\" however it IS being used, AND you get to keep your shoes on.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(212,66,'boberonicus','robert@fenerty.com','','66.236.113.201','2007-01-29 17:57:06','2007-01-29 17:57:06','I\'m really glad that Richard Reid wasn\'t the underwear bomber.  Security lines would be longer and more embarrassing, but probably more fun to watch.\n\nSeriously, it is no comfort that the TSA stays in hot pursuit of outdated tactics.  El Al Airlines demonstrates that understanding behavior is what stops the bad guys.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(213,66,'mark','mpeacock@travelcommons.com','http://','146.82.17.226','2007-02-14 11:35:14','2007-02-14 11:35:14','Was passing through Albany Airport last Thursday and heard the dulcet tone of a GE \"Puffer\".  I didn\'t see anyone go through it though.  Perhaps they were only using it for <b>SSSS</b> selectees.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(214,67,'rich (richmanwisco)','rmfraser2@hotmail.com','http://richmanwisco.com','75.44.46.62','2007-01-23 22:50:52','2007-01-24 04:50:52','Federal Aviation Regulation requires that the pilot-in-command deny anybody obviously drunk from flying on the airplane.  That said, we all know it\'s easy to disguise our condition prior to boarding.  Now if this person was being served alcohol on the plane, then the flight attendants (subject to same regulation as a flight crew member) bear a certain amount of responsibility for the incident.\nIn other news, you\'re probably aware of the incident at General Mitchell Airport in Milwaukee last Sunday.  It seem apparent that the plane was below the rejected takeoff speed when the engine quit, but runway conditions led the plane to skid off the end of the runway.  Had it been going faster, the pilot would have had to take off (on one engine), and who knows what could have happened.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(215,68,'Leo Vegoda','leo@bind.org','http://www.bind.org','82.92.138.66','2007-02-06 07:32:38','2007-02-06 07:32:38','I have to agree with Drew. Schiphol is my home airport and I find it much easier to use than most other big transit hub airports. The one thing that bugs me is that none of the stores at Schiphol are allowed to sell chewing gum. But that\'s a fairly minor quibble and not enough to make me want to use LHR or FRA if I can avoid doing so.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(216,68,'Frick','stevefrick@gmail.com','http://fricksworld.blogspot.com/','68.211.145.7','2007-02-03 07:31:44','2007-02-03 07:31:44','As my ThinkPad R50 replacement is being shipped to me you are right my laptop is my office. I have the wallpaper that I want and change it when I get bored. My desktop icons are arranged the way I want them.\nIn the morning on the road I have my morning boot up routine: check office e-mail, check private e-mail, check my RSS feeds, check for hits on my site, basically the same type of a routine that I would have if I went into my physical office every single day.\nI have never had \"a desk job\" and really don\'t know if I would enjoy it, i think my butt would hurt from all the sitting.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(217,68,'Drew','drewbacsi@yahoo.com','http://www.budacast.hu','91.120.81.202','2007-02-03 08:59:20','2007-02-03 08:59:20','Hi Mark,\n\nJust listening to your meditations on making flights and it reminded me of my favorite airport, Amsterdam\'s Schiphol.\n\nNot only do I really appreciate the chaise lounge sleeping area, and the ubiquitous \"mind your step\" voice on the people conveyer belts in Schiphol, but have also recently discovered an art museum right in the airport. What a wonderful novelty to gaze at a Rembrandt and soak up a little history while waiting for your next flight.\n\nBtw, thanks for the shout out!\n\nDrew',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(218,68,'mark','mpeacock@travelcommons.com','http://','68.74.153.34','2007-02-06 18:30:37','2007-02-06 18:30:37','I\'ve only connected through Schiphol once, and I liked it very much. My mother-in-law and her sister typically connect thru Schiphol on their way from Chicago to Budapest, and have never had a bad experience. They once thought about routing through LHR, but after relating our experiences with the security lines last summer, they decided to stay with Schiphol.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(219,68,'Leo Vegoda','leo@bind.org','http://www.bind.org','82.92.138.66','2007-02-07 05:19:58','2007-02-07 05:19:58','Apparently they will change the rules at Schiphol in May, so that carry-on is limited to no larger than an attache case. There\'s also talk of introducing a compulsory shoe check on all flights. There\'s an interesting article on it on Expatica at: http://www.expatica.com/actual/article.asp?subchannel_id=19&amp;story_id=35756',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(220,68,'mark','mpeacock@travelcommons.com','http://','64.132.59.117','2007-02-08 16:53:19','2007-02-08 16:53:19','I\'ve always found it a bit of a pain that you have to pass through security (but not passport control) while connecting through European airports. Not sure how they will work the carry-on restrictions, though.  I can carry-on a rolling one-suiter in Chicago, but then I have to find a place to check it when I connect through Europe? That\'s going to be all bad...',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(221,68,'Arnoud','arnoud.heijnis@marriott.com','','81.154.12.201','2007-02-21 13:35:44','2007-02-21 13:35:44','Just a quick reply to Mark, my home airport was Schiphol and now I live in London I and have therefore the joy of using the BAA\'s finest. However, I would choose Schiphol over any major hub any time. To refer to your question. Terminal 1 and 2 in Amsterdam service the International flights and terminal 3 the \"Schengen\" flights. Schengen is the convention of traveling without customs basically which is in place in the EU (excluding UK), of course the security checks remain.\n\nThe interesting thing for you is that when you arrive in Schiphol Internationally you can go the \"Schengen\" by walking within the terminals (they are all connected, one building in fact) to terminal 3. The only thing you have to do is put you cabin luggage through the scanner and you\'re free to go.\n\nI would always use Schiphol if you have a chance.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(222,69,'Robert Fenerty','robert@fenerty.com','','67.116.253.31','2007-04-03 19:29:48','2007-04-03 19:29:48','Regarding laptop connectivity:\n\nThe real trick is to get a Bluetooth phone that can relay data to your laptop without cables.  I\'ve seen this done, but my carrier (Verizon) purposely  disables bluetooth phones from making data connections to laptops.  They would prefer that I use my phone to send 40 cent photos to all of my high school buddies and watch cool movies, rather than send email.\n\nLike you, I currently tether my cell phone via USB cable to my laptop.  I suppose a dedicated broadband card would be faster, but like you, I\'m generally only interested in email.  Many Verizon markets are beginning to get EVDO Rev A, which has about 500k uplink and better latency.  I think that\'s only a dedicated card service.  If I could get a phone with EVDO and unlimited bluetooth data connectivity, I\'d be hooked.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(223,69,'mark','mpeacock@travelcommons.com','http://','68.74.178.250','2007-04-09 21:45:39','2007-04-09 21:45:39','Bob -\n\nI use Cingular, which doesn\'t disable Bluetooth data connections.  So I use Bluetooth between my PC and my Samsung A707.  It\'s nice not to hassle with yet another cord... and I\'m a bit too cheap to buy the special data cord the A707 requires since Samsung chose to use a proprietary port instead of the standard mini-USB that almost everyone else uses (including Samsung on their Blackjack -- go figure!)',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(224,69,'Amy','amyehodge@gmail.com','','65.89.84.2','2007-05-01 06:34:16','2007-05-01 06:34:16','I\'m at the Adams Mark Hotel in downtown Denver for a conference this week.  I just ran the speakeasy test from my hotel room.  Granted, I am hooked straight in (this isn\'t wireless), but I got 4796 kbps down and 4154 kbps up.  That\'s an amazing upload speed in my book -- much better than my DSL at home!  And the best part is that it\'s actually free.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(225,69,'mark','mpeacock@travelcommons.com','http://','208.54.95.1','2007-05-01 06:42:16','2007-05-01 06:42:16','Wow, that is smoking!  Compare that with the numbers I just got from the T-Mobile WiFi service United Airline\'s Red Carpet Club in O\'Hare\'s Terminal C -- 1278 kbps down, 848 kbps up.  And it\'s not free...',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(226,69,'Marc','marc.loehrwald@gmail.com','http://marcloehrwald.com','91.64.35.159','2007-05-08 03:50:51','2007-05-08 03:50:51','Hi Mark,\n\nmy iTunes feed started to feel left out, so I checked here - again, no new episode.\n\nI hope, you didn\'t give up on traveling... ;-)\n\nAll the best,\n\nMarc',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(227,69,'Robert Fenerty','','','208.114.13.52','2007-05-08 21:38:10','2007-05-08 21:38:10','Finally opted for Verizon EVDO service.  Currently at Pinehurst NC where I\'m getting a not-so-smoking 120 kbps.  Well hey, its faster than tethering my cell phone to my USB port.\n\nOf course a day after I buy this, a guy shows me he how he attaches his EVDO blackberry to his PC, but that ain\'t Rev A so I\'m still the uber-geek for today...',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(228,70,'Marc Löhrwald &raquo; TravelCommons #53','','http://marcloehrwald.com/?p=103','80.237.130.32','2007-05-14 00:29:35','2007-05-14 00:29:35','[...] Mark Peacock from the TravelCommons Podcast was nice enough to play some of my music on his last show. This is just a little &#8220;Hello&#8221; to everybody that comes over from the TravelCommons site. [...] ',0,'1','','pingback',0,0),
(229,70,'Ed Vawter','edwardv2@comcast.net','http://www.qdinformation.com/searching','208.54.14.38','2007-05-14 12:13:10','2007-05-14 12:13:10','Mark, just got off a plane at sfo after listening to episode 53. Glad you are back podcasting.  I always enjoy listening to travel podcasts when I\'m  traveling.\n\nEd Vawter\nsent from my t-mobile Dash',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(230,70,'Jon','jon@jongarside.co.uk','','89.100.184.231','2007-05-15 01:22:39','2007-05-15 01:22:39','I know you have been on holiday, but its been too long. We need the regular feed - like a wino with an 8ace lager',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(231,70,'Joe','joecosentino@gmail.com','','24.58.127.16','2007-05-19 05:39:44','2007-05-19 05:39:44','Mark, Thanks for the show, I have been listening for a long time now but I have never sent in a comment.  I just want you to know we are out hear waiting for your travel stories.  I am one of those family travelers you talk about but our kids know the drill and we can usually get through security without any delay.\n\nThanks again and keep the shows coming, they fit right in to my morning drive to work',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(232,70,'mark','mpeacock@travelcommons.com','http://','68.253.186.194','2007-05-19 21:25:28','2007-05-19 21:25:28','Thanks to everyone for the kind comments.  It\'s nice to be missed... :)',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(233,70,'mark','mpeacock@travelcommons.com','http://','68.253.186.194','2007-05-20 19:00:24','2007-05-20 19:00:24','Got a good answer via e-mail to my question on why the Southwest flight attendant got to bypass the shoe carnival in Oakland airport --\n\n<blockquote>\nIf crewmembers are in uniform they don\'t have to take their shoes off. I am a pilot for CitationShares (a fractional jet ownership company) and most of the time the let me slip by as well because I have and ID that says \"CREW\" with some sort of TSA stamp on the back. Although we don\'t wear traditional pilot uniforms like the NetJets guys with eppaulets (we wear a business suit) they still usually let us thru with the ID. We are also exempt from the ziplock bag routine and carry on size/limit.\n\nI tried in Wichita recently to go thru with a coffee and was denied because I was in jeans and not in my uniform. I really don\'t get it. I had the ID around my neck but because I had blue jeans on and not my suit pants I was somehow more of a terrorist. I was still able to go thru with carry ons that exceeded the size/wt limit. ahhhhhhhhhh..........the TSA. And I thought pilots had big egos and were on power trips..jeez!</blockquote>',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(234,71,'rich (richmanwisco)','rmfraser2@hotmail.com','http://richmanwisco.blogspot.com','75.44.48.45','2007-05-20 10:45:09','2007-05-20 10:45:09','And those Walmart employees aren\'t having a chunk of their salaries withheld for union dues, either.  So that makes them about even.\n\nAs a (private) pilot, I read about pending pilot shortages all the time, and the airlines have only themselves to blame.  And if they have their way with Congress they will only exacerbate those shortages by making it prohibitively expensive to become a pilot.  And if you\'re not going to pay them enough to pay off the debts that got them the job, then you\'re not going to have pilots.  Plain and simple.  And who loses?  You, the fare paying passenger.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(235,71,'rich (richmanwisco)','rmfraser2@hotmail.com','http://richmanwisco.blogspot.com','75.44.48.45','2007-05-20 13:09:58','2007-05-20 13:09:58','I suppose I should expand on the point of pilot experience requirements for the airlines.  There are no federal guidelines for what experience a pilot should have to pilot a particular plane.  Any commercial pilot with instrument, multi-engine and type ratings can legally sit in the right seat of any jet airliner.\n\nBack when legacy carrier pilot positions were considered the best jobs to have, the airlines could cherry pick from a vast pool of candidates.  They could set minimum experience requirements arbitrarily.  With a shrinking pilot pool, a growing demand for pilots outside of the carriers (regional, corporate and charter operations), and lower paying positions, the legacy carriers are finding themselves in greater competition for a finite number of qualified pilots.  Therefore they are reduced to lowering their experience requirements.\n\nThis should not be interpreted as lowering safety standards.  All regional and national carriers have extensive indoctrination programs for new pilot candidates, and advances in Crew Resource Management techniques have made the flight deck a very safe place.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(236,73,'Moe','rufaei@hotpop.com','','84.235.15.128','2007-08-08 11:55:06','2007-08-08 11:55:06','Hi Mark,\n\nThis time it is Saudi Arabia, yes I listen to you loud and clear for a month now, downloading previous episods.\n\nMark I have 3 questions:\n\n1. Are airlines STILL required by law to send customers to hotels (if it is not weather) when the delay exceeds 4 hours? Are they required by law to provide meals for less than that? if the passnger was not informed by the delay and got to the airport, does he get refund for transportation?\n\n2. Who regulates this? IATA or the state &amp; federal governments? who receives the complaints?\n\n3. Mark, you sound like a very smart traveller, my guess is that you as smart in business, why not host a business podcast?\n\nbest wishes\n\nMoe',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(237,74,'Daniel M. Perez (The Gamer Traveler Podcast)','daniel@thegamertraveler.com','http://www.thegamertraveler.com','72.144.166.89','2007-06-10 09:30:54','2007-06-10 09:30:54','Speaking about international screeners, have you run into TSA agents in European airports? I have been meaning to talk about this for a year now!\n\nWhen returning from Holland last year, at Schipol Airport, we were attended by a TSA agent. Not a Dutch equivalent, but a TSA agent who along with his team lived and worked in Holland, both serving the international departures area, and helping to train the Dutch screeners in some sort of exchange program.\n\nI didn\'t even know there were TSA agents abroad! I also wish all TSA agents were as nice as this man: he helped us when we were obviously lost, helped us figure out our flight situation, boarding passes and such, and also checked our bags himself, by hand, all the time being amiable, funny and super polite. Why do we export this guy to Europe instead of keeping him to ourselves? Then again, do we want to send one of the overzealous TSA agents to represent us abroad?\n\nAnyway, curious if you (or other listeners) have encountered TSA agents abroad.\n\nGreat show!',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(238,74,'Leo Vegoda','leo@bind.org','http://www.bind.org','82.92.138.66','2007-06-10 14:13:36','2007-06-10 14:13:36','About a third of my travel is US domestic and about half is within Europe and I agree that European legacy carriers are better than US legacy carriers on short-haul routes.\n\nI don\'t know whether US budget airlines are better than European budget airlines as my US domestic travel tends to be one end of a connection rather than point-to-point and I think that may be one of the reasons budget airlines have an advantage.\n\nBecause their product is more limited, for instance no through ticketing with Easyjet, people are less likely to try and book a multi-hop flight and so are less likely to be disappointed when it falls to pieces.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(239,74,'mark','mpeacock@travelcommons.com','http://','68.253.215.140','2007-06-10 22:08:30','2007-06-10 22:08:30','Daniel -\n\nInteresting observation regarding TSA agents in Holland.  Outside the US, I\'ve only seen TSA in Toronto, but that\'s a long-standing agreement where you clear US immigrations and customs in Pearson, allowing Toronto flight to de-plane in US domestic terminals rather than international terminals. Did you still have to clear customs and immigration in the US when you landed?',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(240,74,'Frick','fricksworld@gmail.com','http://fricksworld.blogspot.com/','209.137.140.218','2007-06-12 08:36:26','2007-06-12 08:36:26','Mark everyone knows that the squat rack is for doing curls not squats. <a href=\"http://www.t-nation.com/readTopic.do?id=480680\" rel=\"nofollow\">squat rack curls</a>\n\nPulled my back doing deadlifts early in the year, yeah it\'s a pain traveling hurt.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(241,74,'Daniel M. Perez (The Gamer Traveler Podcast)','daniel@thegamertraveler.com','http://www.thegamertraveler.com','65.8.232.164','2007-06-14 16:08:43','2007-06-14 16:08:43','Mark, yes, I still had to clear customs in Miami. Like I said, it was weird; he was an actual TSA agent, one of quite a few, and it was the first time I\'d even heard of there being TSA agents abroad.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(242,74,'Craig (mars-hill)','blog@mars-hill.co.nz','http://www.mars-hill.co.nz','81.5.247.33','2007-06-19 09:33:11','2007-06-19 09:33:11','Hey Mark, thanks for another show. I have to say, most States-based travel podcasts don\'t inspire me to travel there! (May I never meet a TSA agent!) I hope the country gets their act together since there are meant to be some beautiful places.\n\nOh, and thanks for playing the audio comment I sent.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(243,75,'John F','midd_boy@yahoo.com','','213.161.94.33','2007-06-13 07:20:21','2007-06-13 07:20:21','I\'ve worked in customer service for years, and I\'ve learnt that there are two ways to deal with problems:  pro-actively (make sure they never happen) and reactively (fight the fire after it\'s been set).\n\nWhen Barbara Higgins, bless her, says “We want to proactively acknowledge that this is not the service we want to provide,” she is wrong.  Handing out travel vouchers and offering to pay expenses *after* they\'ve been incurred is not proactive.  It is reactive.\n\nSigh.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(244,75,'Drew','drew@budacast.hu','http://www.budacast.hu','91.120.89.104','2007-06-19 03:20:14','2007-06-19 03:20:14','It\'s weird to experience this from, relatively speaking, the other side of the fence. I, too, remember when we were treated as customers on flights. Now we\'re just filling seats.\n\nRecently I made the decision I will never ever ever fly Continental to the US because they charge for all their alcoholic beverages. Shell out 6 bucks for a glass of wine while still paying basically the same price as the other carriers? Nah.\n\nIn some ways I think we were just so spoiled - makes me think of my grandmother acting like a blue blood, flying Delta to West Palm Beach in my childhood. I ate my first piece of pecan pie on a plane, and it was actually pretty good.\n\nBut the airlines\' cost cutting measures these days makes me think of a report I saw once about an Aeroflot flight: someone was carting a frozen, dead deer.\n\nI guess these are some of the costs of \"flying for the masses\".',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(245,76,'Allan','amarko1@mac.com','','17.221.155.126','2007-06-26 18:32:14','2007-06-26 18:32:14','I assume this is a (or the) big difference between the legacy carriers and the new (now getting middle-aged) breed of low-cost operators. I believe one of the founding principals of Southwest was that each \"front office\" type had to spend time \"on the line\" like you describe: taking care of passenger business hands-on. I am sure the established culture perks and employee pecking order of the legacies is hard to overcome, internally. Too bad. I am a big fan of United.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(246,76,'rich (richmanwisco)','rmfraser2@hotmail.com','http://richmanwisco.blogspot.com','75.50.255.128','2007-06-26 19:36:39','2007-06-26 19:36:39','Count me lucky that I\'m not getting on a (commercial) plane for the next month.  Northwest Airlines isn\'t faring much better.\n\nhttp://www.aero-news.net/index.cfm?ContentBlockID=b8208fa4-794b-4988-9ab7-50cac2825767',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(247,77,'Brianna','briannak@gmail.com','http://www.randomaccessbabble.blogspot.com','38.117.159.162','2007-07-11 11:05:00','2007-07-11 11:05:00','Thanks for the mention if only sympathy could pay for a jet... maybe if I add it to my amazon wish list someone really generous will ease my pain.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(248,77,'Frick','fricksworld@gmail.com','http://fricksworld.blogspot.com/','72.145.230.160','2007-07-11 22:08:19','2007-07-11 22:08:19','Kudos an arranging a business trip to land you in Savannah without having to stop at Hartsfield. I\'ve never been stealth enough to pull something like that off without \"The Wife\" seeing right through my plans and busting me on it.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(249,78,'Leo','leo@bind.org','','194.78.217.240','2007-09-19 11:22:06','2007-09-19 11:22:06','I was a little surprised about your comment about the, err... close personal service you experienced from the security staff at AMS as I\'ve never seen that. And then I came back from LAX via AMS at the weekend. You\'re right, the security people have started... cupping (?) when patting down. They did this despite the fact that I did not set off the alarm on the metal detector. I was quite shocked by this and wonder if it\'s just one employee with a fetish or whether it\'s a new policy. Whatever it is, it\'s quite unpleasant.\n\nLeo',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(250,79,'Uncle Drew','drew@budacast.hu','http://www.budacast.hu','91.120.111.106','2007-09-04 09:58:16','2007-09-04 09:58:16','Uh oh, Mark, that scrapple stuff sounds spam-like.\n\nRegarding non chains in airports, I would find it a welcome surprise. One thing that\'s sort of (with emphasis on \"sort of\") local out of O\'Hare is having a piece of pizza at Pizzeria Uno before I go back to Hungary; yeah, I know it\'s a chain.\n\nAside from airports, I think it would be great if local business were offered space at toll plazas - could make traveling across America a bit less homogeneous and boring.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(251,79,'mark','mpeacock@travelcommons.com','https://migrate.travelcommons.com','146.82.17.226','2007-09-12 17:22:06','2007-09-12 17:22:06','I look forward to when I can get a <a href=\"http://budacast.hu/shownews.php?cat=3&amp;newsid=48\" rel=\"nofollow\">lángos</a> and an order of <a href=\"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5VYmc4JrhIg\" rel=\"nofollow\">hurka</a> when I next stay at the Budapest Marriott.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(252,80,'032 - Doing things local at The Indie Travel Podcast','','http://www.indietravelpodcast.com/2007/episode/032-doing-things-local/','69.89.20.51','2007-09-28 06:15:41','2007-09-28 06:15:41','[...] Links: Download transcript (260kb, pdf) Join our facebook and flickr groups. Listen to episode 57 of TravelCommons where Craig comments. [...] ',0,'1','','pingback',0,0),
(253,80,'Dave','sandandtsunamis@gmail.com','http://sandandtsunamis.blogspot.com','143.46.96.68','2007-10-01 02:53:37','2007-10-01 02:53:37','One of my favorite local restaurants from my days in the DC / NoVA area is 5 Guys, the absolute best greasy hamburger joint I\'ve ever been to.  On a recent trip home to the US from Japan, my wife and I simply ran out of time to make a trip there.  However, after we successfully navigated the TSA shoe shuffle (thankfully not done in Japan), we rounded the corner and to our surprise, they\'ve opened up a franchise there in Terminal C at Reagan National Airport.  With less than 15 minutes before we started to board our flight to Buffalo, we ordered, received, and choked down two burgers and their incredible peanut oil fries (and a diet coke).  Best darn burger I\'ve had in a long, long time.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(254,80,'vocalo','shannon@vocalo.org','http://vocalo.org','66.251.226.2','2007-10-02 10:35:19','2007-10-02 10:35:19','I was excited to find your podcast. It looks like you are based in Chicago. I am part of a new radio station called vocalo.org. It airs radio live on 89.5 in Northwest Indiana and streams off the website. We are building a strong listenership. We would love podcasters like you to add their stories, original music, and audio to the site. I would advise doing it in smaller clips, instead of entire shows, because it makes it easier for our host to put it on air. It’s a great way to get new people to hear your voice, and possibly start visiting your podcast. Once you have a clip on the site, be sure to direct your friends and listeners there to hear you. You retain all ownership of the material you post (unlike some social networking sites). Its also a great way to network with other people doing audio, from professionals, to podcasters, to people just starting out. Sometimes hosts even ask contributors to co-host.\n\nI look forward to hearing your work on vocalo.org. Please email me at shannon@vocalo.org if you have any questions.\n\nShannon',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(255,80,'TravelCommons &raquo; The Silly Season Begins&#8230;','','http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2008/08/31/the-silly-season-begins/','64.78.155.179','2008-08-31 21:30:00','2008-09-01 03:30:00','[...] demand for new transportation capacity impacts our nation&#8217;s economic health.  In an earlier podcast episode, we talked about the FAA’s FACT 2 study which predicts 18 airports  and 7 metro areas will need [...] ',0,'1','','pingback',0,0),
(256,81,'Udayan','udayan.tripathi@gmail.com','http://www.udayantripathi.com','81.97.219.27','2007-10-07 19:48:14','2007-10-07 19:48:14','I was quite impressed with our Enterprise San Francisco Ford Escape Hybrid. We were upgraded for nicely waiting while the attendant dealt with an angry late-return. While very plain and plasticky, it was clean, ran well and had 14k miles.\n\nNot bad Enterprise.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(257,81,'rich (richmanwisco)','rmfraser2@hotmail.com','http://richmanwisco.com','12.181.22.130','2007-10-08 19:09:47','2007-10-08 19:09:47','Never fear, Mark.  I have had success sending my complaints to Hertz customer service and I have received certificates for money off future rentals.  Fortunately for me, I have had only a handful of such incidents with Hertz, they\'ve been very good for me overall.\n\nNow if I can get Northwest to get my bag home from Oklahoma the same day I get home, JUST ONCE (they were oh for two).',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(258,81,'boberonicus','robert@fenerty.com','','75.25.180.66','2007-10-12 02:10:59','2007-10-12 02:10:59','My experience with Enterprise has always been slow and very sales-y.  I\'ve been pretty happy with Budget.  At many locations, you can simply get them to drop you off at the lot and \"pick any car from area 2\"',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(259,81,'mark','mpeacock@travelcommons.com','http://','68.253.219.223','2007-10-26 08:34:17','2007-10-26 08:34:17','I haven\'t had a car without a stained driver seat in more than a month.  Weds night at Hertz in Dulles airport, I opened my Chrysler Sebring and just about choked.  It reeked of smoke and had a cigarette burn on the driver\'s seat (right between the legs; someone must\'ve had a close call). The guy at the Gold desk was very apologetic and gave me a very nice black Acura, but how did that car get back on the line in the first place?  Someone had to drive it from the return line to the Gold canopy. Unless they had a really bad head cold, they should\'ve noticed the smell and pulled it out of service.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(260,82,'Nokia N800 at Marc Löhrwald','','http://marcloehrwald.com/?p=113','80.237.130.32','2007-10-26 03:21:45','2007-10-26 03:21:45','[...] &#8230;as mentioned on TravelCommons Episode 58 [...] ',0,'1','','pingback',0,0),
(261,82,'stephanie','bosco_stephanie@yahoo.com','','198.45.18.28','2007-10-26 08:02:10','2007-10-26 08:02:10','i recently flew frontier airlines from san fran to dayton ohio with a stop in denver. my best friend and i were on our annual vacation together. we loved frontier. we were on time, the staff was really friendly, AND we were given doughnuts when we got on the first flight! we were really impressed with this tasty treat! however about two hours later we were really regretting our decision as the sugar (plus the soda we had with the doughnut) made us so sick to our stomachs. it was like being hung over!  i would love to fly again with frontier but i won\'t eat the doughnuts!',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(262,82,'Joy','joydawg@bellsouth.net','http://airlinemiles','71.56.201.115','2008-03-03 18:18:27','2008-03-04 00:18:27','Mark,\nAgain, I enjoy the podcast!  I was listening today to what must have been an older podcast you did re: getting the most out of your miles.  I will be flying from Denver to Milan in Oct.  US Airways has a credit card deal, British Airways has a credit card deal, etc.  I\'m more confused than when I started researching, any advice?',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(263,86,'Bill Toth','bill.toth@sbcglobal.net','','75.13.37.216','2007-11-14 15:01:20','2007-11-14 21:01:20','It seems to be quite good for airlines.  But unless I wasn\'t searching properly, I only saw one cruise line(Cunard) and no railroads.  I hope they keep expanding their collection; it\'s instructive and maybe a little discouraging when you compare it to today\'s menus.  There is a trend now for the cruise lines to remove lobster from their \"free\" menu, for instance.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(264,87,'mark','mpeacock@travelcommons.com','https://migrate.travelcommons.com','68.253.200.245','2007-12-07 18:48:19','2007-12-08 00:48:19','Wired Magazine\'s Blog Network has an <a href=http://blog.wired.com/cars/2007/12/four-best-airpo.html\" rel=\"nofollow\">article</a> with their rating of the 5 best airport-to-city rail connections.  Their ranking -- Hong Kong, Paris Charles de Gaulle, London Heathrow, Tokyo-Narita, and Chicago.  Check out the comments -- they\'re as good as the article',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(265,87,'Joy','pollackfan47@bellsouth.net','','67.174.111.251','2007-11-25 18:53:14','2007-11-26 00:53:14','Love your podcast.  I agree that it would be great to take the light rail from Denver to DIA, there is however an alternative.\nI live in the Denver metro area and recently took the RTD\'s SkyRide to the airport.  The cost varies depending on your distance from the airport.  I live at the farthest western stop and it cost me $10 each way on a very comfortable charter style bus.  The driver even stored the luggage underneath and loaded and unloaded it for me.  If I had parked at the airport in longterm parking it would have cost me $36 for my 4 day trip.  The only cost me $20. The bus made a few stops in downtown Denver, so it would work for business travelers as well.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(266,87,'Finn Schoyen','finnyboy@mac.com','','87.192.69.168','2008-08-24 15:25:59','2008-08-24 21:25:59','Howdy Mark,\nI\'m more of a leisure traveller than for business, but nevertheless,\nI picked up a lot of great advice from this podcast. Thanks a million for your efforts.\nThey\'ve been invaluable in order to make my journeys smoother.\n\nThis episode got me intrigued, because I\'ve been frustrated out of my mind over so many\nairports being so  far away from their destination cities.\n\nNot so the case with Amsterdam, Netherlands. Of course, it needs to be outside of the city core,\nbut Schiphol (the \"ch\" being pronounced as a harking noise) is no further than 15 minutes by a\ncomfy commuter train from the city centre, for less than four Euro. You don\'t even need to go\noutdoors to get from the terminal building to the airport train station. If the weather\'s bad,\nyou won\'t get wet until you exit the Amsterdam Centraal.\n\nI also frequently visit Oslo, Norway, where the authorities decided to relocate the old airport to a\nlocation further away from the city entity. It used to be very conveniently located in a neighboring\nmunicipality, which was quite accessible for everyone in the city. Less than 10 minutes by local train,\nas opposed to 40 minutes by dedicated airport express train (despite their website claiming 20 -\nsee www.flytoget.no/eng), and the airport itself is in the middle of nowhere.\nBus or car takes at least an hour. (That\'s Gardermoen, and not Torp, where the budget airlines fly.)\n\nIn Cork, Ireland, where I live, there\'s no train out to the airport, but bus or taxi takes 20 minutes from\ncity centre (even though the bus company advertises 25 minutes). The airport itself is much better\nthan going to Dublin, which is almost as much of a nightmare as Heathrow.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(267,89,'Dan Grabon','dan@grabon.org','','65.37.209.131','2007-12-28 08:42:51','2007-12-28 14:42:51','Here\'s a thought on packing shoes for the gym:  How about racing flats?  These are the shoes that distance runners wear for races (as opposed to daily training).  They don\'t have much cushioning at all-- maybe even less than the Tevas you mentioned-- but they have a full upper that should take care of the blister problem. They\'re also extremely lightweight and should pack a lot flatter than most other athletic shoes, since at least some models have a very soft upper.  Just make sure you get flats and not spikes-- the hotel probably wouldn\'t appreciate having their treadmill torn to shreds!',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(268,89,'Arnoud','arnoud.heijnis@gmail.com','','86.160.14.12','2007-12-29 16:38:10','2007-12-29 22:38:10','Hi Dan, thanks for the tip on the flat racing shoes. I will definately have a look at that. Also I saw a advert not to long ago about a pair of shoes with really think fabric and a 1cm thick sole which could all be folded into a tiny package. I took the advert but then misplaced it, just my luck, and haven\'t been able to find it since. Thanks anyway for any tips and tricks.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(269,89,'Dawn Owens','dawnie@theowensfamilyhome.com','http://TheHappyHeadlines.com','71.237.24.207','2007-12-26 11:52:28','2007-12-26 17:52:28','It looks like I\'m going to start doing some traveling for my site.  What is the most accurate source (local tv, cable, internet) for checking weather for your destination (realizing that the determination for picking the television weather-people in our area is the whiteness of their teeth and the ability of their hair to look good in a blizzard)?',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(270,89,'Frick','fricksworld@gmail.com','http://fricksworld.blogspot.com/','68.215.214.197','2007-12-29 07:38:44','2007-12-29 13:38:44','I work out on the road every week and I pack Converse High Top Chuck Taylors (Old School). They  pack flat and have a solid sole. I do more lifting than cardio (sometimes the elliptical) and they have held up well, plus what other shoes can you find with flames on them. <a href=\"http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.zappos.com/images/713/7132155/6901-70057-d.jpg&amp;imgrefurl=http://www.zappos.com/n/p/dp/1633204.html&amp;h=240&amp;w=240&amp;sz=12&amp;hl=en&amp;start=3&amp;sig2=GcnKP9VtL24MAOdkPYETAQ&amp;um=1&amp;tbnid=4Z5QcBYStEkStM:&amp;tbnh=110&amp;tbnw=110&amp;ei=cE12R_6cG4-kedzT7Tw&amp;prev=/images%3Fq%3Dchuck%2Btaylors%2Bflames%26svnum%3D10%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26client%3Dfirefox-a%26rls%3Dorg.mozilla:en-US:official%26sa%3DN\" rel=\"nofollow\">LINK</a>',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(271,89,'Joe Cosentino','joecosentino@gmail.com','','24.59.78.18','2007-12-30 11:04:14','2007-12-30 17:04:14','Hi Mark.\nIt looks like all those holiday travelers with extra batteries for computers and cameras might have problems with the TSA lines after January 1st.  It looks like we now have to bag up our shampoo, perfume and now our batteries.  Oh don\'t forget to take your shoes off.  It seems like as soon as travelers get into the TSA rhythm they make a change that slows the lines down again.  Could it be job protection?  My guess is yes.\nJoe',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(272,90,'rich (richmanwisco)','rmfraser2@hotmail.com','http://richmanwisco.com','70.239.97.195','2008-01-05 10:37:01','2008-01-05 16:37:01','Happy New Year to you Mark-\nWhat I have found to become especially annoying, particularly at the smaller regional airports, is the annoying habit of the ground crews turning the plane around for the return to hub while we wait for 45 minutes for the luggage to come around.  We only get our luggage now after the plane has left.  That\'s how lean these airlines have cut back in order to attempt to maintain their schedules.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(273,92,'Udayan','udayan71@hotmail.com','http://www.sticksandstonesblog.com','213.106.166.23','2008-01-29 13:10:55','2008-01-29 19:10:55','Wow, that\'s quite a story. I suppose we can all resonate with the intention of the handler; ooh, a quick short cut here!\n\nOnly problem is that you never take THAT quick shortcut; it takes carelessness and recklessness to think up such a stunt.\n\nBizarre.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(274,93,'Dave','sandandtsunamis@gmail.com','http://sandandtsunamis.blogspot.com','143.46.96.68','2008-01-29 18:02:38','2008-01-30 00:02:38','Mark,\n\nInteresting take on going with the flow during travel.  It reminded me of when my cousin was stopping through Tokyo to visit us on his way back to the US.  He\'d been abroad for a about 6 weeks for some Taoist medicine training in China and Vietnam, both challenging travel destinations in their own right.  Due to work, we couldn\'t meet him at the airport.  We played phone and email tag for several hours before we finally connected.\n\nWe were a little worried until he called to say that he realized that he had been fighting the experience rather than flowing with it.  He ended up taking a 2 hour nap in a quiet corner at Narita to get re-centered.  A couple of hours later, with a refreshed perspective, everything worked out.  When we finally tracked him down for our short visit, he was the picture of repose, quietly reading Dostoevsky.   A good example of how sometimes you just need to take a step back, take a deep breath, and trust that somehow, everything will work out.  I\'ve never been in a situation where it hasn\'t.\n\nKudos on the move, and I\'m enjoying the collection of other blogs and podcasts at The Boarding Area.\n\nKeep up the great work.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(275,93,'Sak','sakortiz@yahoo.com','','99.202.181.51','2008-02-12 17:06:34','2008-02-12 23:06:34','That\'s why my iPod and soundblocking headphones are my best friends in such situations.  Usually, there is nothing I can do about it.  Suddenly I am worlds away enjoying a good podcast or movie.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(276,93,'mark','mpeacock@travelcommons.com','https://migrate.travelcommons.com','66.103.88.193','2008-02-13 07:15:31','2008-02-13 13:15:31','There\'s gotta be a way to work Bose into Zen koan...',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(277,95,'Gary Learned','learned@talentsinc.net','http://seat6d.tumblr.com','69.214.17.69','2008-03-03 11:49:57','2008-03-03 17:49:57','I had to smile as you were recounting your experience at Disney World. It reminded me of a recent trip to the Gaylord Opryland at the same time as the Red Hat Society was staying there.\n\nHis recounting of his recent experience reminded me of a trip late last year to the Gaylord Opryland for back to back conferences. At the same time I was there, they were hosting a meeting of the International Red Hat Society. While I’m sure this is a great organization (if you are over 50, female and in search of fun), it is not what I was looking forward to walking into upon my arrival. Hosting about 5000 Red Hats, the lobby was filled upon my arrival. As this is a resort hotel, rather than say a Marriott where I have status, I waited in line for about an hour while each of the ladies was asking similar questions about resort fees, and all the incidental charges on their bill. Upon finally getting to the counter, I too was informed my room was not ready (about noon), and I’d have to come back after 3PM. Trying to find a quiet place to work was as challenging for me as it was for Mark. I finally ended up in an employee only area where they stored Wheel Chairs.\n\nUpon finally getting a room, the fun continued as the resort is huge. The walk to the room is about 15 minutes with no traffic. When the halls and walkways are filled with vacationing people, traveling in clumps, it became a 25 minute obstacle course each time.\n\nBefore I am cast as someone who has it out for Red Hats or vacationers in general, let me say that I think the Gaylord was the perfect hotel for their convention. It catered well to them, and from what I could see, all were having a marvelous time. What is painful is when business events are scheduled in the same facilities.\n\nEarlier I mentioned the resort fees. One of the “benefits” that Mark didn’t mention about staying at a hotel like Disney World or the Gaylord are the added resort fees to cover the ammenities that as a business traveler you have no intention of using. By the time I added resort fees, associated taxes, etc. the room rate ended up being about $40/night higher than the quoted rate.\n\nMy plea to conference and event planners everywhere. Please please plan your events around hotels that understand business travel.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(278,95,'Robert Fenerty (aka boberonicus)','robert@fenerty.com','','75.24.109.97','2008-03-05 00:28:08','2008-03-05 06:28:08','Hey Mark,\n\nYou\'re right about the TSA relaxing fluid restrictions.  I keep waiting for them to confiscate my recently acquired 3.25 bottle of sunscreen.  A secret thrill every time it passes through security unmolested.\n\nAre you considering moving to the new Lenovo X300?  Probably not enough hard drive space for you.\n\nAlso, have you tried tripit.com?  I\'m sure you know about this site.  I now can\'t live without it.  Or my Venti Coffee Frappacino Light.\n\nAlso, I\'m in Schaumberg next week.  Any Chicago visit evening suggestions?  My only absolutes are Andy\'s Jazz Club and a true Chicago-style hot dog.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(279,95,'mark','mpeacock@travelcommons.com','https://migrate.travelcommons.com','68.253.208.159','2008-03-05 13:58:41','2008-03-05 19:58:41','Further on the environmental thread, a posting today in <a href=\"http://evansparks.wordpress.com/2008/03/05/and-emissions-trading-would-have-helped-here-how/\" rel=\"nofollow\">Evan Sparks’s Aviation Policy Blog</a> comments on the ruckus raised by environmental groups over an American Airlines flight from Chicago to London that carried only 5 passengers.\n\nThe Friends of the Earth spokesman yells \"Flying virtually empty planes is an obscene waste of fuel. Through no fault of their own , each passenger\'s carbon footprint for this flight is about 45 times what it would have been if the plane had been full.\"  Of course, he forgets about the hundreds of passengers who would\'ve been inconvenienced the next day if that 777 wasn\'t in London to make the return trip to Chicago.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(280,95,'mark','mpeacock@travelcommons.com','https://migrate.travelcommons.com','68.253.208.159','2008-03-08 10:26:25','2008-03-08 16:26:25','Further (again) on our \"flying green\" thread, <a href=\"http://www.dopplr.com/main/about\" rel=\"nofollow\">Dopplr</a>, the web site that allows you to share travel plans among friends, <a href=\"http://blog.dopplr.com/index.php/2008/03/07/dopplr-at-etech-announcing-carbon-calculations-with-amee/\" rel=\"nofollow\">announced at ETech</a> that they\'re launching a new feature to measure the carbon footprint of your travels.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(281,95,'mark','mpeacock@travelcommons.com','https://migrate.travelcommons.com','65.42.208.133','2008-03-10 05:08:25','2008-03-10 11:08:25','Bob -\nSorry that I didn\'t get back to you sooner.  Here are a couple of dinner suggestions...\n\n		When I\'m in Schaumburg, I always go to <a href=\"http://www.yusrestaurant.com\" rel=\"nofollow\">Yu\'s Mandarin</a> for great Chinese food\n\n		Down near Andy\'s, try <a href=\"http://www.fronterakitchens.com/restaurants/restaurants.html\" rel=\"nofollow\">Frontera Grill</a> for some of the best Mexican restaurant in the country\n\n\n\nFor a Chicago dog, try one of the <a href=\"http://www.portillos.com/portillos/locations/)\" rel=\"nofollow\">Portillo\'s</a> locations. There\'s one out in Schaumburg. If you take a double dose of Lipitor, try the Italian Combo -- an Italian sausage embedded in an Italian beef sandwich.  Order it \"dipped with hot peppers\", and you have a less-publicized, but no less real, Chicago meal.\nRegards,\nMark',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(282,97,'mark','mpeacock@travelcommons.com','https://migrate.travelcommons.com','68.253.222.235','2008-04-01 07:30:11','2008-04-01 13:30:11','I\'ve noticed in my web logs a few folks going back to T/C #49 -- I assume to check out Saurab\'s bridge music.  To make it a bit easier, here\'s a direct <a href=\"http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2006/12/02/podcast-49-working-hard-to-get-home-wireless-apps-that-help/\" rel=\"nofollow\">link</a> to the post and show notes for episode 49.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(283,97,'Allan','amarko1@mac.com','','71.142.69.167','2008-04-02 17:11:44','2008-04-02 23:11:44','Mark,\n\nIn TC #37 you also noted my story about a convention at Disney World a few years ago. A bad place for business meetings.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(284,97,'Lori in VA','lori@transparentsociety.com','http://loriva.wordpress.com','75.75.109.236','2008-04-07 09:06:17','2008-04-07 15:06:17','Mark - you really hit the nail on the head with your point about why people have such little respect for the TSA. I think that if the TSA management could just look through the PR problems through the lens of  respect and decency, instead of policy and procedure, they would get a lot more cooperation from us travelers. It\'s really hard to give respect when you aren\'t getting it. The nipple ring incident was particularly upsetting because they were just so focused on why she was setting the machine off and not on whether a nipple ring constituted an actual threat.\nI think that TSA\'s attempts at occasionally saying \"oh, we\'re stopping all kind of things you never see,\" isn\'t enough to justify the tax dollars and other intangible dollars spent on \"security\" and (I mean to use those double quotes!) In this case, actions truly would speak louder than words.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(285,97,'Leo Vegoda','leo@bind.org','','213.246.198.48','2008-04-11 07:07:24','2008-04-11 13:07:24','I passed through Denver airport on 9 April night and was very impressed with the TSA process. All the staff were cheery and helpful: the whole experience took less than five minutes despite being in a line behind a family with three children.\n\nBut I don\'t know if the friendliness and efficiency is typical of Denver as it was my first visit. 300 AA jets were grounded for safety checks that day, so there were probably a lot fewer people passing through the checkpoint. That must have relieved the pressure on the TSOs.\n\nBut I still don\'t understand why the screeners in Denver want to X-ray my shoes, while the screeners in Heathrow don\'t care about my shoes and want to X-ray my belt, instead. I have a feeling that it could be down to different screening equipment but that\'s just a guess.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(286,97,'Uncle Drew','drew@budacast.hu','http://www.budacast.hu','195.56.243.158','2008-04-11 14:46:16','2008-04-11 20:46:16','Mark,\n\nThe story about the nipple piercings going through the metal detector was amazing! I was in the supermarket as I was listening and started cracking up!\n\nViszlát!\n\nUncle Drew\n<a href=\"http://www.budacast.hu\" rel=\"nofollow\">Budacast.hu - Hungary\'s podcast</a>',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(287,97,'mark','mpeacock@travelcommons.com','https://migrate.travelcommons.com','68.253.222.235','2008-04-12 18:25:31','2008-04-13 00:25:31','Drew,\n\nThat\'s the great thing about this -- you can\'t make this stuff up.\n\nMark',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(288,99,'Frick','fricksworld@gmail.com','http://fricksworld.blogspot.com/','209.137.140.218','2008-05-01 11:17:26','2008-05-01 17:17:26','Congrats on the 3rd year anniversary I think I\'ve been listening since the 7th or 8th show. I must say that your travel takes you to better places than mine does as I\'m limited to mostly the southeast.\nMy hotel decisions are based first on price (gotta love those bean counters) and second on if they provide free or reduced access to a local gym.\nYour stories and tips are always humorous and enlightening and many time they are the stories that only \"Fellow Travelers\" completely understand.\nOver the years I\'ve put together some travel tips as well probably not a serious as yours but they help make my time on the road a little easier <a href=\"http://fricksworld.blogspot.com/search/label/travel%20tip\" rel=\"nofollow\">Travel Tips</a>',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(289,99,'Uncle Drew','drew@budacast.hu','http://www.budacast.hu','195.56.91.61','2008-05-05 05:18:13','2008-05-05 11:18:13','Mark,\n\nLoved the flashback mosaic of your \"studios\". And great music this episode, too, to accompany the always thoughtful show.\n\n\nUncle Drew\n<a href=\"http://www.budacast.hu\" rel=\"nofollow\">Budacast.hu - Hungary\'s podcast</a>',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(290,99,'Tony W','tonio6@infionline.net','http://www.need2sellwebuyhouses.com','63.161.172.10','2008-05-06 09:18:27','2008-05-06 15:18:27','I love the Nine inch nails songs.  It takes me back to school in the late 80s and early 90s.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(291,99,'Brian','bstenson@gmail.com','','63.240.122.129','2008-05-06 09:55:05','2008-05-06 15:55:05','Mark,\n\nThanks for reading my e-mail on the show and providing the insight.  Hopefully, I can get even more advice from your listeners.  FYI-I got my first upgrade last week Thurs on a 6am flight from PHX to ORD.\n\nOn the topic of credit cards, I use the Capital One No Hassle Miles Ultra—For Professionals card.  It gets me 2 miles per $ and when I fly on AA I double dip, by getting miles while using a free ticket.  I can also use miles to upgrade that free ticket.  The most interesting thing about it, I can use the miles on tickets I\'ve purchased within the last 60+ days.\n\nBrian - Naperville',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(292,100,'anonymous tsa mdw employee','tiphani27@gmail.com','','208.54.94.119','2008-05-30 05:44:08','2008-05-30 11:44:08','I work for tsa midway. I have been assigned to work in the black diamond or expert lane several times since its induction.  I\'ve noticed the same as you.  Most travelers in the expert lane are not quite experts, some have absolutely no clue.  I think one of the main problems is because it\'s a \"self-selecgt\" lane.  Which means anyone, even a first time flier can deem themselves an expert and go into whichever lane they chose.  And we as Tsa have no right to tell them to go into the casual lane.  Another reason some people complain is because of the long walk to get to the expert lane.  But if you are departing from concourse C the expert lane will put you about 100 feet away from your gate.  I hope you have better luck with that in the future.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(293,100,'mark','mpeacock@travelcommons.com','https://migrate.travelcommons.com','146.82.17.226','2008-05-30 07:53:36','2008-05-30 13:53:36','Anon TSA MDW -\n\nThanks for contributing your insight on this. People are self-selecting for what they think will be the shortest line, thus making it the longest. I understand the TSA\'s rationale behind self-selection, but perhaps some TSA personnel could help \"guide\" at least some of the less-experienced travelers into selecting the right lane.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(294,100,'anonymous tsa mdw employee','tiphani27@gmail.com','','208.54.94.21','2008-05-31 04:57:01','2008-05-31 10:57:01','Believe me when I say we have tried to so-called \"guide\" them into the correct lane.  But like you mentioned they just go where they wish.  And believe it or not they don\'t always go to the shortest line.  I have always said if there is ever a long line at the security checkpoint it is because of those passengers that have \"tunnel vision\".  Sometimes it feels like we literally have to hold their hand and take them to the metal detector.  Then the get upset and defensive when we talk loud telling them which way to go to get to the short lines.  But they don\'t realize the airport is loud and when your there for 8.5 hours 5 days a week you tend to talk loud naturally.  Not speaking about you personally...but some of these people that fly makes you wonder...why is this person roaming the free world by themselves?  Some people seem as if they need to be accompanied at all times.  But I guess I should be done...I\'ve gotten a bit off topic.  and lastly I would like to say...we that work for TSA have a heart...we are not the cold, heartless jerks that you think we are. Although I do work with some real assholes...only a couple.  But the majority of us do care.  People gotta realize its a job.  Like I would tell someone who\'s bag I am checking.  Do I think some of the rules are ridiculous?  Of course I do....But do I want to take care of my family? of course.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(295,100,'Seth Fisher','fishers@bnpmedia.com','','208.69.95.97','2008-10-24 15:51:20','2008-10-24 21:51:20','I had the opposite experience at Midway this week. First of all, the TSA employees there were some of the kindest I\'ve ever met, and that after plenty of traveling. Second, I noticed that the \"black diamond\" line was pushed by the ropes to be thinner. It also tails to the right, away from most of the gates, and thus looks more foreboding. In medium traffic, I noticed that people generally went to the line relatively within their travel expertise. I postulate, however, that during times of heavy traffic, travelers will get more anarchic, going for whichever line seems most likely to get them through the fastest. At that point, you might as well be trying to get cattle to read signs and head to the correct pens. This also holds for people more accustomed to the dog-eat-dog rules of crowd traffic. What you need to do is make the expert line more foreboding somehow. Or just make it for single-travelers. Sure, me and my girlfriend might pretend we don\'t know each other for the duration of the line, but if we know to do that, we\'re the type of people you want in the expert line anyway, right?',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(296,100,'Biz Traveler','rsmith187@yahoo.com','','65.192.187.158','2008-10-31 09:35:29','2008-10-31 15:35:29','The self-selection thing simply doesn\'t work.  In Boston going to the Continental gates, it\'s a disaster.  Everybody is an self-proclaimed \"expert\" traveler and that\'s the slowest line.  I stood in the expert line and watched the old folks and families with strollers cruise right through the casual/family lanes.  What\'s worse is it seems when they go with this self-select idea, they remove the elite/1st class lines, thus taking a step backward for all of us frequent business travelers.  Vegas desperately needs Clear lanes -- that airport is always a security line nightmare.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(297,100,'Leah','Leah@coolconstruction.net','','166.137.9.194','2010-05-09 03:44:02','2010-05-09 09:44:02','We just went through security at MCO what a nightmare!  We\'re elite with Continental and are used to zipping through the elite line within a few minutes.  Since there is no elite line we were forced behind a neverending line of strollers and children with Disney gear.  Although in the expert travelled line a family was allowed to check in behind us.  Then just as our ids were checked a huge crowd from another lane were diverted in front of us.  The screener told us to push our way in.  30 minutes later we made it through.  The most amazing thing this was at 5:00 a.m!',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(298,101,'rich fraser (richmanwisco)','rmfraser2@hotmail.com','http://richmanwisco.com','76.229.146.70','2008-06-22 17:22:25','2008-06-22 23:22:25','How long are the airlines going to be permitted to screw their customers until congress gets involved?  it\'s a clear end run around raising their fares, how stupid to they think we are?',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(299,101,'mark','mpeacock@travelcommons.com','https://migrate.travelcommons.com','72.204.178.79','2008-06-26 12:56:25','2008-06-26 18:56:25','The Clear line was worth it yesterday in SFO.  The United premium security line was 2-3 turns deep while the Clear line was empty. Watching the machine\'s screen, I was able to get fingerprint recognition on my first try.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(300,103,'Rod Schiffman','rschiffman@msn.com','','75.162.135.7','2008-06-26 14:14:05','2008-06-26 20:14:05','You\'ve really hit the nail on the head. Passengers aren\'t willing to pay for anything more than transport, so why are they surprised when that\'s all they get. On the one hand I\'d like to have the services I had 20 years ago back. Of course back then a ticket from SLC to SFO was $600. So that\'s probably $1200 now. My clients tend to pay for full fare flights since I don\'t get more than a couple day notice to come. So, I\'d normally be fine with almost all expensive tickets and more services. I don\'t pay for it.\n\nOn the other hand. I do like that I can generally afford to fly anywhere, with some advance notice, pretty cheap these days.\n\nPerhaps the answer is that one day there will be more differentiation between airlines than just price. Then we can make better decisions.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(301,104,'Steven Lubetkin','steve@lubetkin.net','http://www.lubetkin.net','70.104.92.116','2008-07-07 15:33:10','2008-07-07 21:33:10','At Heathrow Airport, they don\'t require you to take the laptop out of the luggage. I wonder what\'s different about their screening x-ray?\n\nMakes things move much more smoothly.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(302,104,'mark','mpeacock@travelcommons.com','https://migrate.travelcommons.com','72.254.54.43','2008-07-07 22:30:27','2008-07-08 04:30:27','An <a href=\"http://www.usatoday.com/travel/flights/2008-07-06-laptops_N.htm\" rel=\"nofollow\">article</a> in today\'s USAToday describes a TSA program to eliminate the need to remove laptops from their cases. Unfortunately, it will require you to buy a new \"checkpoint-friendly\" computer case.  How about instead the TSA buys the same x-ray machines they\'re using at London-Heathrow?',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(303,104,'Graham','grahamstravelblog@gmail.com','','128.223.180.18','2008-07-08 09:09:31','2008-07-08 15:09:31','I haven\'t lost my laptop but I grabbed the wrong one out of the overhead bin once, this was resolved just outside the gate fortunately.  Another time I was waiting for a plane and they switched the gate two times.  On the second switch I ran to the gate and completely forgot my laptop.  Fortunately no one noticed it and it was waiting for me upon my return.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(304,104,'Frick','fricksworld@gmail.com','http://fricksworld.blogspot.com/','68.215.217.155','2008-07-11 18:28:49','2008-07-12 00:28:49','I now have stickers all over mine, no one would dare mistake it for theirs.\nLast year one of the guys I work with left theirs at TSA security. All of us were wondering how he didn\'t notice that his laptop bag was suddenly 7lbs lighter. He didn\'t find out till he checked into the hotel that night, he did manage to get his laptop back.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(305,104,'Frick','fricksworld@gmail.com','http://fricksworld.blogspot.com/','68.215.217.155','2008-07-11 18:33:47','2008-07-12 00:33:47','On a tech gadget side note if you are ever in a hotel and get caught without a cell phone or laptop charger just go down to the front desk and say \"Last week when I was here I think I left my phone charger in the room\" they will pull out a box of tangled mess of Motorola, Kyocera, &amp; ThinkPad chargers. Grab one that works and return it to the front desk in the morning.\nYou have to remember to return it cause anything else would definitely be classified as stealing.......',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(306,104,'Meegeekai','meegeekai@gmail.com','','70.102.21.90','2008-08-01 13:31:55','2008-08-01 19:31:55','Lost track of you and this blog until you popped up on my linkedin page this morning. Go back to when you were starting TravelCommons posdcast. Check out this link http://adeona.cs.washington.edu/index.html. I actually tested this and it is works well. Will definitely add your feed going forward.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(307,104,'gobluetwo','andyrew123@yahoo.com','','204.152.235.217','2008-08-04 09:43:56','2008-08-04 15:43:56','I have never forgotten my laptop and don\'t know anyone that has.  It would be tough to do, but suppose I could see it if you\'re in a huge hurry and not thinking clearly.\n\n@ Frick, in fact, some hotels will just GIVE you stray chargers.  I once forgot my BB charger and the front desk told me to just take one of the dozens they had as the supply would be more than replenished by the end of the week.  =)',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(308,104,'Arnoud Heijnis','arnoud.heijnis@gmail.com','','194.72.144.205','2008-08-05 07:50:46','2008-08-05 13:50:46','Hey Steven, one of the smaller reasons, by far not the only one, is because of some elaborate theft scheme that had been running at Heathrow. At extremely busy moments at the security line people would send their laptops (when you still had to take them out) through the x-ray machine. Whilst they had to wait in line to go through the gate someone else on the other end would pickup their laptop from the tray and just walk off. About 4 people were hit by that method in one week. Luckily I wasn\'t one of them. After having enquired with BAA they confirmed it had been an issue but that the gang had been apprehended. No sign of the laptops though.\n\nApparantly they were entering the terminal on cheap tickets and somehow exiting with suitcases full of laptop.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(309,104,'Ray Medina','medina.ray@gmail.com','','65.217.57.101','2008-08-05 13:25:59','2008-08-05 19:25:59','Mark,\n\nI just received a twit with the following link that I think you should see.\n\nhttp://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/08/laptop_with_tru.html',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(310,104,'mark','mpeacock@travelcommons.com','https://migrate.travelcommons.com','146.82.17.226','2008-08-19 07:44:38','2008-08-19 13:44:38','Here we go, the TSA has solved our problem -- all it requires is for us to buy new laptop bags.  If you look at the bottom of this <a href=\"http://www.tsa.gov/press/happenings/simplifying_laptop_bag_procedures.shtm\" rel=\"nofollow\">TSA announcement</a>, you\'ll see a nice disclaimer -- \"Given TSA’s use of random screening protocols, TSA reserves the right to re-screen any bag or laptop regardless of the design of the bag.\"  Kinda like the Registered Traveler program -- you can pay some money and hope to avoid the hassles, but odds are, you won\'t',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(311,105,'Lori Humm','lori@transparentsociety.com','http://www.transparentsociety.com/wordpress/','75.75.109.236','2008-08-23 10:29:57','2008-08-23 16:29:57','Mark - I can\'t beleive I had not shared my tale of woe. I\'m a new entrant to the road warrior world, and I\'ve been flying every week since May. In June, my laptop was stolen out of my gate checked bag. Yes, I know, I\'m an idiot. But nonetheless, here is story.\nWe were waiting out storms delays in RIC and ATL and the flight time kept changing. We were told to stay near the gate in the event that we could depart at any time. Suddenly, we get the call to come to the gate and forget seat assignments, just get on the plane (a CanadaAir Regional). I had just bought my new roller laptop bag and assumed it would fit in the overhead bins. As I boarded, one of the gate crew grabbed my bag from me, telling me it wouldn\'t fit and gave me the bag tag. For one second I thought, \"Shouldn\'t I grab my laptop?\" and then I folloishly reasoned that we were rushing and nothing could happen to it, especially since in Atlanta, I would be standing right by the plan to pick it up. Well, I got off the plane in Atlanta, and saw my bag get handed off the plane. I picked it up instantly knowing it was lighter and looked down to see it zipped open. It was late, it was raining, I knew my next leg was delayed or cancelled and I tried really hard not to cry while standing on that rainy tarmac. I yelled at the gate people that I wanted a supervisor immediately, but they ignored my request. I went inside and ATL was in complete pandemonium with the flight delays and cancellations (side thought - is it ever any other way?). I filed my paperwork, and cooled my heels a couple of days. Then I decided to play some hard ball so I called RIC. I told them that they had criminals working for them and tha I intended to call the police to file a police report when I got off my flight next week. A day later I got a call from Delta saying that they could not give me any details but that they were investigating my complaint and that I would be reimbursed for the laptop.\nFor me, I am taking responsibility for knowing I did somethnig I really really should not have done, and I never expected compensation, but for everyone else who flies out of RIC I wanted to know that someone somewhere was going to check this complaint out. And, I bought locks that I lock after I pass through security. But I DON\'T leave my laptop in my gate checked bag either. I still worry about what I do leave in there (clothing and costume jewelery for the the next day or 2) but I\'m not sure how I could have resolved this any other way. It was frustrating to feel so out of control.\nSo, this sophomore road warrior learned a tought lesson that day. Thanks for your shows Mark, they are really enjoyable and very helpful!',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(312,105,'Dawn Owens','dawn@thehappyheadlines.com','http://thehappyheadlines.com','71.229.248.81','2008-08-23 18:22:43','2008-08-24 00:22:43','Nice Dante\'s inferno reference - you don\'t get many of those on travel podcasts!',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(313,105,'Ken Okel','tvguy@kenokel.com','http://www.kenokel.com','76.109.129.177','2008-08-25 11:55:00','2008-08-25 17:55:00','It\'s great to hear from you again, Mark.  I\'ve always wanted to go to Asia.  I\'m a big fan of international travel but with the great distance comes great challenges if something goes wrong with your scheduled flights.  I\'ve learned that when you get bad news of a flight that\'s delayed by 17 hours, it\'s best to keep a cool head and start politely asking the ticket agent questions about other flights.  Very often I\'ve found that agents can get tunnel vision with your final destination and not think of more creative ways to get you home, perhaps through alternate cities.  Some gentle prodding goes a long way here and I\'d rather take the long route rather than be stuck in an airport for hours.  Plus, it\'s an easy way to pick up some more miles.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(314,105,'Mark','mpeacock@travelcommons.com','https://migrate.travelcommons.com','72.255.5.122','2008-08-26 05:50:26','2008-08-26 11:50:26','Lori -\n\nThanks for that story.  Reminds of me the time many years ago that I had a Walkman (I told you it was many years ago!) stolen from my luggage on a flight home from Lisbon, Portugal.\n\nWhat\'s unique about your story is that, by gate checking the bag, there were only a few employees who had the opportunity to steal your laptop. I applaud your aggressive stance with Delta. That approach was probably the main reason you received reimbursement.  Now, I hope you had your data backed up...',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(315,105,'mark','mpeacock@travelcommons.com','https://migrate.travelcommons.com','57.68.10.185','2008-09-04 12:55:05','2008-09-04 18:55:05','Further to Lori\'s story of a thieving Delta baggage handler, the Queens (NY) district attorney today charged 2 American Airlines JFK baggage handlers with stealing 925 pieces of jewelry worth $280,000 from the checked suitcase of a jewelry dealer bound for LA.\n\nWhile loading baggage, one handler allegedly picked up a bag and said, “Wow, that’s a heavy bag. I think I have a good find.” His supervisor allegedly came over, opened the bag, and pulled out envelopes full of jewelry. Both handlers face up to 15 years in prison.\n\nThis one just makes you scratch your head and go \"Huh?\"  I understand that a bag that can hold 925 pieces of jewelry is probably a bit too big for the overhead compartment. However, you\'d think that the guy would\'ve locked those valuables up in something like a <a href=\"http://www.cabelas.com/cabelas/en/templates/pod/horizontal-pod.jsp?_DARGS=/cabelas/en/common/catalog/pod-link.jsp_A&amp;_DAV=perf&amp;rid=&amp;indexId=cat20772&amp;navAction=push&amp;masterpathid=&amp;navCount=1&amp;parentType=index&amp;parentId=cat20772&amp;id=0037552\" rel=\"nofollow\">flight-proof gun case</a> and then requested an <a href=\"http://www.tsa.gov/travelers/airtravel/assistant/editorial_1666.shtm\" rel=\"nofollow\">in-person TSA inspection</a> before re-locking it up tight.  This in no way justifies the theft, but I don\'t think you want to obliviously tempt fate (or baggage handlers or TSA employees)\n\nClick <a href=\"http://www.queensda.org/newpressreleases/2008/september/riviello_acevedo_09_02_2008.pdf\" rel=\"nofollow\">here</a> for the Queens DA\'s press release and <a href=\"http://blogs.wsj.com/middleseat/2008/09/04/jfk-baggage-theft-bust-tips-for-travelers/trackback/\" rel=\"nofollow\">here</a> for the WSJ.com story',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(316,105,'Sean','sean.oneill@budgettravel.com','http://current.newsweek.com/budgettravel/','66.151.126.253','2008-09-04 17:06:44','2008-09-04 23:06:44','As a longtime listener, I was delighted to be mentioned on your podcast. More importantly, I was glad that you were getting the word out about the study. I would like to point out one thing, though. By mistake, you linked to a splog, a spammer\'s blog that has illegally copy-and-pasted the content from our site. In fact, I\'m with BudgetTravel.com, and our blog is This Just In http://current.newsweek.com/budgettravel/  I\'m not asking for you to link to our site; but I just don\'t want to give a fake blog undue attention.\nSean',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(317,105,'mark','mpeacock@travelcommons.com','https://migrate.travelcommons.com','146.82.17.226','2008-09-08 10:31:33','2008-09-08 16:31:33','Sean, thanks for the note.  I\'ve changed the link to the one you provided.  I hate those splogs -- I get content vacuumed up into them also...',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(318,106,'rich fraser (richmanwisco)','rmfraser2@hotmail.com','http://richmanwisco.com','76.199.150.97','2008-09-01 07:59:10','2008-09-01 13:59:10','That\'s an excellent read on the situation, Mark.  The Chinese got to where they are because of their political system, a system that is the polar opposite of our own.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(319,106,'Airports in China','WmIce@hotmail.com','','4.168.45.226','2008-09-02 09:37:23','2008-09-02 15:37:23','ONE WORLD == ONE DREAM !!!\nChina has 400 airports under construction, Has their Aviation ministry designing planes to compete with Boeing. AND now building 20 oil refineries.  ITS\' GOING TO BE A COLD WINTER IN CHICAGO WHEN THE OIL RUNS OUT IN 2050.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(320,106,'Bobby M. Reyes','mediabcla@aol.com','http://www.mabuhayradio.com','24.205.171.143','2008-09-02 17:25:34','2008-09-02 23:25:34','Can we quote excerpts from this commentary of yours in a new article that I am writing about Senator Obama? Your commentary proves the argument of many Obama critics that even in Illinois, he did nothing really outstanding as a leader.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(321,106,'Michael','empathyangel_here@yahoo.com','','64.222.19.148','2008-09-03 07:32:58','2008-09-03 13:32:58','This article is very misleading and a disservice.  It ignores the fact that decades ago Congress passed many Acts to fund the development of our transportation system in the United States and that transportation system, while not perfect, has allowed our economy to flourish for decades.\n\nIt ignores the fact that airports and air traffic generate a significant amount of noise and air pollution and the health risks are not fully known or disclosed.  It ignores the fact that in the U.S., laws exist to protect people\'s health, the environment and property.  It ignores the fact that China faces growing environmental challenges and damages that are harmful to the health of their people. It ignores the fact the China is a developing nation and the U.S. is a developed nation.\nIt ignores the fact that the United States has had a regressive policy on developing a national high speed rail system.\n\n It ignores the fact that China has many competitive advantages over the United States, among them lower labor costs and a society that is educating its younger people for a new world in which the US is not as well prepared to compete, particularly in areas requiring education in math and science.\n\nI am tired of airport expansion proponents who claim the local economies are going to fall due to lack of investment in airports, and the political greed to control funds for airport development.\n\nThe economies in the US are failing for reasons of unbalanced economic policies, high energy costs, an uncompetitive labor force, better trained and educated workers overseas, and development of a two class system as the middle class continues to shrink and each year higher numbers of families are left with less disposable income for consumption and investment.\n\nAirports alone are not going to solve this country\'s economic woes, and demand for transportation capacity will be met one way or another.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(322,107,'Frick','fricksworld@mail.com','http://fricksworld.blogspot.com/','68.19.45.40','2008-09-28 12:19:27','2008-09-28 18:19:27','Thanks for the iPod tip on White Noise, I just installed it and can\'t wait to try it out. <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=286776738&amp;mt=8\" rel=\"nofollow\">Fire Drop</a>\n is my favorite for waiting out flight delays. <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=284035177&amp;mt=8\" rel=\"nofollow\">Pandora Radio</a>\n lets me listen to my play lists anywhere and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=287601348&amp;mt=8\" rel=\"nofollow\">iLightr</a> is great for concerts, since they don\'t trust us with lighters any more.\nSpeaking of chargers someone needs to standardize there. I carry 2 external hard drives each one has a different size USB connector, one of those match my Motorola Razor, but neither of them match my Jabra Blue Tooth and my GPS only works with the USB cord that came with it, maybe it\'s me that needs to standardize on a single manufacturer for all the gadgets. Enjoyed the show as always, thanks',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(323,107,'Lori','lori@transparentsociety.com','http://www.transparentsociety.com/wordpress','75.75.109.236','2008-09-28 15:31:02','2008-09-28 21:31:02','Hi Mark - thanks for the shout out. I\'m still nervous about putting anything of value in my gate checked luggage, so I\'ve just invested in a bigger purse!\n\nI wanted to tell you about something they are apparently piloting in Richmond security - once you pass through security you are asked to press a button. This determines if you are randomly selected for a secondary search. Would you, as a \"clear\" customer have to do this since there are no clear lines in Richmond? (The mention of Richmond screening is in the comments in this blog entry http://www.tsa.gov/blog/2008/08/update-on-chicago-aircraft-inspections.html)',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(324,107,'Ken Okel','tvguy@kenokel.com','http://www.kenokel.com','76.109.129.177','2008-09-30 08:16:50','2008-09-30 14:16:50','I too have played \"travel roulette\" while trying to decide how to avoid delays.  My batting average goes up and down and it really is more like lucky streaks.  However, I think I gain a lot of peace of mind in being able to be proactive about a problem, rather than sitting at a gate, listening to people complain.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(325,107,'Matt','matt@mccurdyfamily.net','','67.173.116.170','2008-09-30 16:12:53','2008-09-30 22:12:53','http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/18792\n\nI thought you might like this quiz relating to SkyMall - Is the product listed in SkyMall or is it a rejected patent?\n\nI\'m a high school junior and scored an 88%.\n\nThis also brings a question - do you read the magazines like SkyMall or American Way? Or do you not bother?\n\nLove the show!',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(326,107,'Robert M Fenerty','robert@fenerty.com','','71.198.195.84','2008-10-09 23:02:33','2008-10-10 05:02:33','My proudest rescheduling moment  came last year.  We arrived about 2.5 hours early for our vacation flight to Canada (why, Sweetie, why?).  I  noticed that our Air Canada SFO-YVR flight was delayed, but that no additional information was available, no estimated takeoff time, etc.  I immediately called UA and attempted to reschedule this award flight.  That turns out to be difficult, so we went to the food court, ate dinner, shopped for electronics, and looked at the ever-fascinating SFO museum for an hour. All the while, the UA agent kept apologizing, putting me back on hold, calling AC, etc.  The original AC flight was still in limbo, so I wasn\'t losing anything except airtime minutes.  We eventually were placed on a 30 minute later AC flight, which arrived before the original flight took off.\n\nAnd on the iphone, are you bummed by lack of tethering?  If it had that, I\'d buy it.  Without tethering, my laptop still needs my Verizon EVDO Rev A card.\n\nRobert',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(327,107,'Mark','mpeacock@travelcommons.com','https://migrate.travelcommons.com','68.253.209.20','2008-11-01 18:42:09','2008-11-02 00:42:09','As if the JFK baggage handlers thieving jewelery out of checked bags wasn\'t enough, a TSA screener in Newark was <a href=\"http://www.nj.com/news/ledger/index.ssf?/base/news-14/1223440600278090.xml&amp;coll=1\" rel=\"nofollow\">charged</a> last month with stealing two to three items per week from the airport since September 2007 and putting them up for sale on eBay. Among the items seized from his home were 66 cameras, 31 laptop computers, 20 cell phones, 17 sets of electronic games, 13 pieces of jewelry, 12 GPS devices, 11 MP3 players, eight camera lenses, six video cameras and two DVD players. I\'d say \"your tax dollars at work\", but apparently our tax dollars weren\'t enough for this guy.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(328,109,'Mika Pyyhkala','pyyhkala@gmail.com','http://twitter.com/pyyhkala','24.218.7.23','2008-10-15 02:17:48','2008-10-15 08:17:48','This is an example of an accessible kiosk design.  I have used the Amtrak kiosk in several cities to complete a number of different transactions using the tactile buttons and spoken audio output:\nhttp://trace.wisc.edu/handouts/ez-intro/\n\nThe Washington DC Metro subway system:\nhttp://metroopensdoors.com\nalso has accessibility features built in to at least 1-2 fare vending machines in each station.  You simply press an audio button which by the way is labeled in both Braille and print and the system provides voice prompts throughout the interface including functions like checking your SmarTrip card balance.\n\nThe Boston subway system:\nhttp://mbta.com\nalso has some spoken accessibility features in their fare vending machines, although the last time I tested it a year or so ago, there were several glitches including errors in how the audio menus were presented and no ability to check your CharlieCard or CharlieTicket balance via the audio interface.  It is important that an accessible interface provide the user with the same types of transactions and features as the visual interface.  Its also important that such interfaces are beta tested for both accessibility and usability by actual blind users.\n\nOf course we would like to see the airlines and hotels adopt accessible kiosk technology, and this is expected to be the subject of a future DOT NPRM:\nhttp://airconsumer.ost.dot.gov\nIn the latest revision of the implimenting regulation of the Air Carrier Access Act, ACAA, known as Part 382, DOT will require that carriers provide accommodations to ensure that people unable to use the kiosks are given expedited access to ticket counter personell.  I think they are going to suggest that carriers implement this by allowing people unable to use the kiosk to access the first class line at the ticket counter even if said passenger does not have elite status on that particular carrier.\n\nA partial work around to the inaccessible airline touch screen kiosks is to use web check in which works with most computer screen reader applications such as:\nhttp://hj.com/jaws\nhttp://accessibilityisaright.org\nI use web check in about 95% of the time when I fly to bypass the ticket counter.\n\nA local NYC advocacy group is apparently working to address the situation with the inaccessible NYC taxi touch screen system:\nhttp://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/15/arts/television/15watc.html\nI will add a comment when I learn more about this effort.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(329,110,'Robert M Fenerty','robert@fenerty.com','','67.121.114.183','2008-10-24 08:20:05','2008-10-24 14:20:05','This is probably old news to you, but I was recently delighted by a United pilot\'s decision to take my flight on what he called the \"SFO bay cruise.\"  After getting approval from air traffic control, the plane ascended to, perhaps, only 4000 feet?  We then flew north right above the Golden Gate, then turned south and flew down the bay on our way to Tuscon.  It was a bit foggy, but it was still a spectacular view and a really new flying experience. I felt like a little kid peering out the window for the first time.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(330,110,'Travel Tipster','pbz@Lowpft.com','','12.214.3.228','2008-10-31 21:19:40','2008-11-01 03:19:40','When the Missus and I fly together on vacation, and we both have to check bags, we each put half of our own stuff in the other\'s suitcase.  That way, if one bag gets lost and the other one makes it (which has happened more often than you\'d believe) neither of us is completely out of luck.  We\'ll have at least HALF of our stuff, which makes it easier to manage until the airline coughs up the other bag.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(331,111,'Ian','iamorgan@hotmail.com','','86.145.116.149','2008-11-01 09:07:59','2008-11-01 15:07:59','Hi Mark,\n\nGreat podcast!  I am a UK-based frequent traveller, but have mainly long-haul trips.  Recently, however, I\'ve been doing a bit more domestic and EU trips and can sympathise with your problems with remembering room numbers after having a long time away.  I always type my room number into my phone and hit \'dial\' then hang up -it\'s then in your call log if you need it!\n\nAlong with reservation numbers, I\'d advise people to always make sure they have a copy of the rate/room details of their hotel reservation; in the past, I\'ve had billing errors that the hotel point-blank refused to credit until I provided the e-mail confirmation showing them  the agreed rate!  I don\'t carry the original documents with me, but put it into a spreadsheet with booking ref, flight times/numbers, hotel name/address/tel, room type, rate, etc etc for quick reference.\n\nMy worst experience with trying to second-guess ariline delays was on my most recent trip to Hong Kong, this time, on holiday not on business.  The day before we were due to leave on a Qantas flight to Sydney, there was a huge typhoon warning, with wind speeds expected to be about 140mph -of course, the airport shut down almost immediately and my original flight was cancelled.  I was offered two choices, one was to depart the following afternoon on my original flight that had been rescheduled, in business class or the other, to transfer to the  0600 flight, in first, which was our ticketed class.  Qantas told me the plane was already on the ground in HKG with the crew and it was just a case of the airport re-opening overnight and we\'d be on our way.  So, we arrive at the QF check in at 4AM to find that the flight is delayed to 9 -Qantas had redeployed that plane onto the London service.  We had also been downgraded from first class to economy and the other pm flight was now full in all classes.  To cut a long story short, the inbound A330 didn\'t even arrive until 1pm, and by the time we took off, it was 3.  Then, we get an announcement that because of a high headwind, we weren\'t going to make Sydney before the airport closes at 11pm (we were showing 11:01pm ETA), and the airport authority had refused to extend the curfew by 1 minute -so we were going to Brisbane!  So, landed at Brisbane at 2310 to find that there was no way we could get a hotel, so ended up sleeping in the airport overnight before catching a QF flight the next morning to Sydney -ok so we\'re finally on our way...until someone had (what they thought) a heart attack, returned to Brisbane, crew out of hours.  To cut this story short, we didn\'t get to Sydney until about 6pm that afternoon -i.e. more than 24 hours after leaving HKG.  And the worst part was knowing that my rescheduled flight from HKG had departed HKG before we had, and got to SYD safely the night before!  Marathon of a story, but I can honestly say I will never try to beat the system and sneak onto an earlier flight again in those circumstances!!',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(332,111,'pleasure traveler','willsworks@aol.com','','68.200.129.165','2008-11-01 11:46:08','2008-11-01 17:46:08','First off I just started listening to your podcasts and I can\'t get enough off them. I just am a 2-3 times a year traveler but your stories and tips are interesting and helpful. I will surely be a subscriber for a long time. I was wondering have you ever considered flying out of Macarthur Islip when you travel to the Big Apple. Sure it is a extra 30-50minutes away from JFK or LGA but it is quiet,clean quick, and efficent. A shuttle ride that last 10-15 minutes puts you at Ronkkonkoma Trainstation that provides you with a direct link to Penn Station. Plus their is a direct service to Chicago Midway with Southwest. They may not have all the entertainment systems that Jetblue has but they all almost always on time and very courteous. Thanks for your time',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(333,111,'Mark','mpeacock@travelcommons.com','https://migrate.travelcommons.com','68.253.209.20','2008-11-01 16:09:36','2008-11-01 22:09:36','Pleasure Traveler -\n\nThanks for the comments on Islip. I\'ve considered it many times, especially after a particularly bad ORD-LGA flight, but could never figure out how long it would take me to get into Midtown Manhattan. I\'ll have to investigate the shuttle and train link to Penn Station.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(334,111,'pleasure traveler','willsworks@aol.com','','68.200.129.165','2008-11-05 15:37:42','2008-11-05 21:37:42','The airports website is macarthurairport.com and then you can go to long island rail road\'s website for fares,schedules and route maps. A train that leaves Ronkonkoma station usually takes about an hour. It is very clean and usually quiet and also is very punctual. For Islip it is expanding slowly but is very modern and it\'s security is very quick usually taking 5-6 minutes from getting in line to exiting. It\'s food and shoping options are also quite good. The new boarding area improvments that Southwest announced is done making it the perfect area for business travelers. Hope this helps you decide what airport to fly into when you make trips to Manhattan.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(335,111,'Leo Vegoda','leo@bind.org','','213.246.198.21','2008-11-20 09:18:19','2008-11-20 15:18:19','Hi Mark,\n\nI don\'t know if it qualifies as a \"top tip\" but I definitely like the tripit.com service. I can forward a booking confirmation e-mail from American Express or loads of other travel agents to them and it automatically generates an itinerary for me, with hotels too, which I can export to a calendar. It\'s such a simple process it\'s fantastic.\n\nI also love the printed itineraries they produce. They are so much easier to read than the ugly things the airlines send out. And having the option of printing weather predictions and driving instructions is great.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(336,111,'Linda','linda@mars-hill.co.nz','http://Indietravelpodcast.com','121.91.86.150','2008-12-01 01:38:59','2008-12-01 07:38:59','Hi Mark,\n\nI really enjoyed the podcast, especially the part about Travel Roulette. Actually, I think this idea demonstrates a good psychological principle - if you have choice, you\'ll be healthier. I studied Psych at Uni and I remember one study conducted on rats - they rigged up a double cage with one rat in each part, then give each rat a slight electric shock. One rat had the power to stop the current by pressing a switch, but the other rat had no choice but to wait until its partner rat decided to press its switch. The psychologists recorded the incidence of cancer in all the rats in the study, and found that the rats who didn\'t have a choice were far more likely to get sick than those who didn\'t, even though the rat on the other side of the cage was shocked for exactly the same length of time.\n\nIt sounds like hunting for better flights puts you in a similar situation to these rats - you have the choice to change flights, and I think that will make you less stressed than someone who can\'t change and has to stay on their plane no matter what. So maybe you\'re keeping yourself healthy by playing roulette - and you win whether the flight you choose gets in first or not.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(337,112,'Dawn Peacock Owens','dawn@thehappyheadlines.com','http://thehappyheadlines.com','67.177.250.223','2008-12-25 20:22:54','2008-12-26 02:22:54','You mentioned that it would be helpful to be able to access docs on your laptop while you were experimenting with laptop withdrawal.  I\'ve found that a filesanywhere.com account is very helpful as well as google docs - both of which I use quite a bit.  Of course, you need to be a bit proactive by uploading things that you may need, but it\'s a good tool!\n\nToodles!  And I\'m glad to hear that your wife\'s pupils are back to normal size!',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(338,113,'Allan','amarko1@mac.com','','71.142.77.205','2009-01-01 19:37:34','2009-01-02 01:37:34','So, how did you find out your client was \"business formal?\" Did you ask during the first phone conversation, or did you show up \"business casual\" for the first meeting (by mistake?)',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(339,113,'mark','mpeacock@travelcommons.com','https://migrate.travelcommons.com','68.253.186.63','2009-01-02 11:40:51','2009-01-02 17:40:51','I forgot to ask and instead found out on my first visit -- when I went there directly from a pharma client dressed in perfectly acceptable tweed jacket and jeans. Of course, if I had shown up in full dress greys at the pharma client, I would\'ve gotten a world of grief.  I was a no-win day.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(340,113,'Finn','finnyboy@me.com','','17.65.199.52','2009-01-23 08:28:20','2009-01-23 14:28:20','I recently bought a foldable suit bag which quite nicely holds a pair of fairly chunky Dr. Martens shoes in a separate pocket, without ruining the suit\'s shape.\n\nI\'m not sure if this is the model, but it was the one that looked most like the one I have:\n\nhttp://www.victorinox-travelgear.com/index.php?p=80&amp;i=5231\n\nIt also has a huge tread band across the back, so I just slide it over the retractable handle of my rollerbag, and off I go.\n\nThe shoulder strap removes with ease, and fits nicely in the side pocket, should you not need it.\n\nYou might find similar products from other manufacturers too, but this one was just what I felt I needed to bring my suit around with ease rather than crease.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(341,114,'TravelCommons » Good Restaurants for One | Sushi Restaurants','','http://sushi-restaurants.net/travelcommons-%c2%bb-good-restaurants-for-one/','74.52.142.50','2009-01-02 12:52:49','2009-01-02 18:52:49','[...] unknown wrote an interesting post today onHere&#8217;s a quick excerptSushi Sam’s - 281 E 3rd Ave, San Mateo, CA - Sushi restaurants seem to be second only to hotel sports bars as the default hangout for many travelers — trading high cholesterol for mercury poisoning. However, when I’m in the Bay Area &#8230; [...] ',0,'1','','pingback',0,0),
(342,114,'Allan','amarko1@mac.com','','71.142.77.205','2009-01-02 15:20:13','2009-01-02 21:20:13','I have to agree about Monk\'s. I lived a few block\'s away for a few years and it was a great place to have as a neighborhood default bar. One of the few quality places outside of the immediate downtown area in PHL. Great beer selection, menu, atmosphere, and service. I always liked the back room bar...',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(343,114,'Good Restaurants for One | Sushi Restaurants','','http://sushi-restaurants.net/good-restaurants-for-one/','74.52.142.50','2009-01-03 16:15:31','2009-01-03 22:15:31','[...] sarah wrote an interesting post today onHere&#8217;s a quick excerpt In past TravelCommons episodes, we’ve talked about how important it is for a frequent traveler to find good restaurants that welcome a single diner.  In spite of a former colleague’s advice to “ never eat alone “, I often find myself with nothing but the USA Today [...] ',0,'1','','pingback',0,0),
(344,114,'Traveling Chimp &raquo; Dining Alone','','http://travelingchimp.com/?p=206','74.124.210.249','2009-01-06 20:37:51','2009-01-07 02:37:51','[...] Peacock over at TravelCommons posted several recommendations for dining alone while on the road, and one of his recommendations was Monk&#8217;s Cafe here in Philadelphia. I [...] ',0,'1','','pingback',0,0),
(345,114,'HCIC','HCIC@travelingchimp.com','http://travelingchimp.com','98.114.13.106','2009-01-06 20:45:21','2009-01-07 02:45:21','Mark, I second the vote for Monk\'s, excellent choice. I will disagree with Allen though that it\'s one of the few quality places outside of the immediate downtown area in Philly. The amazing restaurants in the city are too numerous to count, and they\'re spread all through the city. South Philly alone has some of the best small Italian restaurants around. But again, great recommendation and great site!',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(346,114,'Allan','amarko1@mac.com','','71.142.77.205','2009-01-07 22:52:24','2009-01-08 04:52:24','HCIC - Spoken like a true person from Philly.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(347,114,'mark','mpeacock@travelcommons.com','https://migrate.travelcommons.com','146.82.17.226','2009-01-12 14:45:37','2009-01-12 20:45:37','Another Philadelphia recommendation -- I continue to be a fan of <a href=\"http://www.jacksfirehouse.com\" rel=\"nofollow\">Jack\'s Firehouse</a> -- across the street from the <a href=\"http://www.easternstate.org\" rel=\"nofollow\">Eastern State Penitentiary</a> on Fairmount Ave. Nice bar, great food, not crowded, but a bit out of the mainstream...',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(348,115,'The Size Of Life &raquo; Blog Archive &raquo; The Size Of Life featured on TravelCommons Podcast','','http://www.sizeoflife.com/blog/?p=251','208.97.167.21','2009-02-10 14:08:50','2009-02-10 20:08:50','[...] asking if he had any tips for the best seats on planes, etc.  Mark sent us a big shoutout on his TravelCommons Podcast #71 and let us know that he agrees&#8230; the window seat of the second exit row of an Airbus A319 as [...] ',0,'1','','pingback',0,0),
(349,115,'Tim Grubb','tim@sizeoflife.com','http://www.sizeoflife.com/blog/','132.235.27.71','2009-02-10 14:32:51','2009-02-10 20:32:51','Mark,\n\nThanks for the huge shoutout on the latest show and I appreciate the tip on the United A319.  As it turns out, Frontier uses this same configuration on their A319\'s as well and I rely on them at CAK for speedy, uncrowded, direct flights to Denver.  I\'ve updated my first post of that series to reflect your tip and also posted a new article linking back here to TravelCommons.\n\nThanks,\nTim',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(350,115,'Peter Rukavina','peter@rukavina.net','http://ruk.ca/','24.222.7.50','2009-02-16 10:06:51','2009-02-16 16:06:51','Your story about the \"Don\'t Pick up Hitchhikers\" signs on the I-94 brought back memories of a road trip I took in 1990, and prompted me to blog:\n\nhttp://ruk.ca/article/5246',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(351,116,'Lori','lori.humm@gmail.com','','68.11.232.58','2009-02-11 21:33:54','2009-02-12 03:33:54','Hi Mark\n\nThis former sophomore road warrior is well tested after 9 months. Reporting back to you that I\'m flying every single week now; unfortunately to the exact same place - Baton Rouge. While I\'m now intimately familiar with the entire Atlanta airport, (and I love the fact that there is maybe one person in line at Baton Rouge security every week) I had to tell you about when I flew out of my home airport RIC this week. I was not only the winner of the \"random selection\" for the full body scan machine, my purse went through the scanner machine twice, my laptop was then \"randomly\" selected to be swabbed AND I was pulled out of the elite boarding line for random screening. All of this because - my theory entirely - I was on the 6AM flight and the TSA people were ramping up for a day. Somehow I managed to be the one person that consistently got \"randomly\" selected. I can only hope that everyone on the Richmond to Atlanta flight felt safe. I\'ve been on the same flight for over 8 months in a row.\nAll this serves to remind me that it\'s so hard to give any respect to the whole process.\n\nSo, I achieved Elite status on Northwest just in time for the merger, and recently discovered that when I \"linked\" my miles on Delta and transferred my miles that despite the fact that I would normally be \"gold\", I\'m back to... nothing. That is, unless I book on Northwest, then apparently call Delta to tell them my SkyMiles number - every single week.  This is according to the person on the phone - I think if I continue to book through Northwest, even though Delta will be the carrier, I\'ll be okay, but it\'s very frustrating to finally hit elite status and yet - not be elite. I managed a few upgrades before this happened.\n\nI always enjoy living vicariously through your travels - keep on podcasting!!',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(352,116,'Allan','amarko1@mac.com','','17.229.22.163','2009-02-18 19:36:16','2009-02-19 01:36:16','I think it was only recently that UAL had the youngest fleet in the skies, correct? Taking deliveries on all of those new 772s and 744s in the nineties... Too bad it is getting a bit long in the tooth...\n\nLori: RIC/ATL/BTR - brutal. I was on SFO/LAX or SFO/BUR route each week for two years (but a few years ago now...) That was not bad, and easy hour in the air, typically an out and back the same day.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(353,116,'Lori','lori.humm@gmail.com','','68.11.232.58','2009-02-24 11:25:43','2009-02-24 17:25:43','Brutal is right - it is impossible for me to be productive for the 6-9 hours it takes to get from airport to home. The RJs are too small and not-too-private for doing work, then its the dash-and-wait in ATL, then it\'s the tarmac wait in ATL, and by the time we are at 10K, we are heading down. I feel like I invest a lot of energy in figuring out exactly what work to keep readily accessible so that I can pull it out quickly and get a few things done. It\'s a mind-numbing experience, no question. And there are people on my project who are doing this - from Toronto. Ouch.\n\nMark - with all your dashing about, do you feel work productive while in the actual act of traveling?',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(354,117,'Dawn Peacock Owens','dawn@thehappyheadlines.com','http://thehappyheadlines.com','67.177.250.223','2009-02-17 18:42:48','2009-02-18 00:42:48','OK - I\'m going to be a little snarky here but it has to be said!  For the love of God - give that woman an elephant tranquilizer.  Thank GOD she didn\'t get on the plane.  I can only imagine what the flight attendants would have had to deal with.  I\'m thinking hormone replacement therapy might be an option as well.  If I EVER act that way please load me up with progesterone, Prozac and alcohol!  I\'d rather act a fool because I\'m drugged/drunk than for missing a plane!  And her husband taped it?  It\'s a good thing they check for handguns in security because the second thing I\'d do would be to shoot my husband!  Hmmm - maybe I should get a drink - that tape bothered me a little too much!  Ha!',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(355,117,'Leo Vegoda','leo@bind.org','','192.0.36.118','2009-02-19 10:31:21','2009-02-19 16:31:21','It makes you wonder whether she\'s just a weirdo who can\'t cope with minor problems like missing a flight, or someone who missed a flight to see a dying parent or something similar.\n\nNonetheless, having just endured a 10 and a half hour flight filled with children running up and down the aisles and bumping into people in the aisle seats, I\'m not sure if I could have taken an hysterical adult on the same flight, too. The people on the plane she missed don\'t know how lucky there were.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(356,117,'Travel News - Las Vegas Mayor Mad at Obama, Airbus adds bunk beds, British Airways Jet Crash | Amateur Traveler Travel Blog','','http://blog.amateurtraveler.com/2009/02/21/travel-news-las-vegas-mayor-mad-at-obama-airbus-adds-bunk-beds-british-airways-jet-crash/','69.89.25.159','2009-02-21 09:01:58','2009-02-21 15:01:58','[...] Meltdown at Gate 42 [...] ',0,'1','','pingback',0,0),
(357,117,'John F','jmflemming@yahoo.com','','208.50.251.226','2009-02-26 05:40:31','2009-02-26 11:40:31','That woman seems seriously disturbed to me.  No, seriously.  I\'ve never known anyone to freak out like that.  She\'s simply braying at the top of her lungs just for the sake of it, kind of like a two-year-old would.\n\nHow weird.  I guess some people have no shame.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(358,117,'mark','mpeacock@travelcommons.com','https://migrate.travelcommons.com','99.16.131.181','2009-03-05 21:28:54','2009-03-06 03:28:54','USA Today has a <a href=\"http://www.usatoday.com/travel/flights/2009-03-05-airline-passenger-video_N.htm\" rel=\"nofollow\">follow-up</a> to this story.\n\n<blockquote>Cathay Pacific has apologized for embarrassing a customer whose anguish after missing her flight was captured on video by an airline employee and posted on the Internet.\n\nThe Hong Kong airline said in a statement to The Associated Press on Thursday that the worker who filmed the video has been disciplined but that another person posted the footage on YouTube, a video-sharing website.\n\nThe <em>South China Morning Post</em> newspaper reported Thursday the woman met with Cathay\'s customer relations officials last week and was calm during the four-hour meeting as she explained the embarrassment the video has caused her.</blockquote>\n\n\nAccording to the story, almost 5 million people have viewed the video since it was posted on Feb 12.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(359,117,'Maya','ladycascadia@gmail.com','','71.215.191.117','2009-03-06 19:44:36','2009-03-07 01:44:36','You know, at first I laughed like everyone else. Then it dawned on me this really isn\'t funny. In the past, I have suffered from anxiety attacks. Thank God I\'ve not had such an attack in more than a decade.  As I continued to watch this video, I realized that this woman may very well an anxiety disorder, too. Some anxiety attacks manifest themselves in this way that one sees on the video. I\'m just glad there was no YouTube 10 years ago, otherwise the world would\'ve been laughing at me like this. I really think a little more compassion and a little less judgement and mockery is in order here. It\'s really not nice to make fun of or exploit those with mental illnesses.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(360,119,'Dawn Peacock Owens','dawn@thehappyheadlines.com','http://thehappyheadlines.com','71.229.251.31','2009-03-11 14:25:25','2009-03-11 20:25:25','Rationalizing line cuts?  Hmmm, not sure if the nuns at St. Ann\'s would approve!  But then again, they probably don\'t fly commercially as often as you do!\n\nAnd for the things I never want to hear from fellow passengers - God, I should NOT have eaten that!',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(361,119,'Frick','fricksworld@gmail.com','http://fricksworld.blogspot.com/','68.214.63.31','2009-03-11 19:20:41','2009-03-12 01:20:41','I don\'t ever want to hear the pilot say \"I\'m so tired I could just crash\"',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(362,119,'Frick','fricksworld@gmail.com','http://fricksworld.blogspot.com/','68.214.63.31','2009-03-11 19:29:46','2009-03-12 01:29:46','I just noticed that this is Episode #72, wow I\'m pretty sure that I can remember way back to the single digit episodes. I\'ve enjoyed all the shows thanks for the stories.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(363,119,'mark','mpeacock@travelcommons.com','https://migrate.travelcommons.com','12.20.13.224','2009-03-17 20:06:12','2009-03-18 02:06:12','USA Today has a good <a href=\"http://www.usatoday.com/travel/news/2009-03-16-high-speed-rail-travel_N.htm\" rel=\"nofollow\">article</a> summarizing the competition among the different high-speed rail corridors for the $8 billion of stimulus money.\n\nInteresting statistic from the article -- \"Last year, Amtrak data show it accounted for 63% of the combined air and rail passenger traffic between Washington, D.C., and New York City compared with 50% four years earlier.\"\n\nI\'m part of that shift.  The deterioration of East Coast air traffic on-time performance and the TSA hassles at LGA and DCA have driven me from the shuttle to the Acela.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(364,119,'Greg B','gb720@sbcglobal.net','','68.94.193.214','2009-03-20 00:12:16','2009-03-20 06:12:16','one thing that I never want to hear at any stage of the flight ... \"BRACE FOR IMPACT\"',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(365,119,'Steve F','sfisher@doroinc.com','','68.115.67.114','2009-04-06 15:54:18','2009-04-06 21:54:18','Things you never want to hear:\n \"The smoke in the cabin is nothing to be concerned about\" In my experience, the smoke in the cabin is always something to be concerned with.\n\nAlso, at the gate on Continental Flight out of St. Louis, \"We have an FAA inspection team riding along with us, so we will doing everything by the book\".',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(366,119,'Tom','ar@logfile.ch','http://www.logfile.ch/','129.132.198.93','2009-05-03 07:17:52','2009-05-03 13:17:52','Salon\'s \"Ask the Pilot\" column explains why \"I gotta get outta here\" sounds more dangerous than it is on larger commercial planes: http://www.salon.com/tech/col/smith/2009/05/01/askthepilot318/\n\nNow, if the _pilot_ were to say \"I gotta get outta here\", that would really scare me!',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(367,120,'Which *A FFP is best for awards? - FlyerTalk Forums','','http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/star-alliance/941568-ffp-best-awards.html#post11562503','67.201.17.228','2009-04-10 20:41:15','2009-04-11 02:41:15','[...] all, but an interesting link to a study (well, just the executive summary of that study) is here: http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travel...lyer-programs/ (N.B., this may have been posted in another FT thread somewhere.)  It is only a sampling of a [...] ',0,'1','','pingback',0,0),
(368,121,'J.L. Myers','myerstvsound@comcast.net','','69.180.208.169','2009-06-20 09:52:26','2009-06-20 15:52:26','I experienced rudeness for no reason from a female TSA inspector in Denver on a recent trip to a friend\'s wedding. A smile and kind word did nothing to assuage the situation. I shut my mouth and moved on...KINDNESS COSTS NOTHING. Something\'s rotten in Denver!',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(369,121,'Undisclosed','jnanfeldt14@aol.com','','216.81.80.134','2009-07-11 14:00:13','2009-07-11 20:00:13','I work for the TSA in a different city.  I wish the news would cover ALL the major airports.  They do not hire manangement because of education or because of experience, it\'s who you know, what you know and what you can do for the upper management.\n\nI work at a big airport in the midwest and our management is extremely horrible.  It may sound like I am complaining, but I assure you all I am not.  I believe that our management should have nothing less than a BS/BA.  Then their management should have nothing less than a Master\'s degree.  I am currently at an \"F\" band pay level, I have my degree and I get paid the same as one of my co-workers who has a GED and nothing more.  This is why some TSA officers are frustrated on how things are ran; a lot of those with the GEDs are then ones being promoted to the \"H\" bands or higher levels.  The ones that have furthered educated themselves, will inquire about jobs within TSA, etc., so we can further our knowledge.  We get a bullseye mark on us and the upper management do not like being \"challenged.\"  As long as an officer within TSA is a \"yes-man,\" they are the ones that are going far in this gov\'t job/career.  Those are the ones that lack experience, education, have a \"rap sheet\" and retaliate against those they did not like...',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(370,122,'Robby Smith','rgs1359@cox.net','http://smithrg.dotphoto.com','98.164.24.220','2009-04-16 18:19:36','2009-04-17 00:19:36','Mark,\n\nI am sure about a gazillion people have pointed this out to you but what I never want to hear from a pilot is “I\'m not qualified to land the plane.”  It was reported recently that a Flybe flight from Bristol to Paris had to “turn around” because the pilot stated the airport was “asking for a level two qualification and I only have a level five.”\n\nI guess this might be the only thing I can think of worse that hearing that engine shut down while taxiing out to the runway,\n\nAs reported by Fox News:  http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,469547,00.html\n\nReally enjoy the podcast and enjoyed the intro in th eloo on your way to j-burg SA.\n\nTravel safe\nRobby',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(371,122,'Simon Mikkelsen','simon07@zip.dk','http://mikkelsen.tv/simon/','77.213.121.237','2009-04-17 12:03:41','2009-04-17 18:03:41','Hi\n\nThe thing about electronics and what it emmits. All electronics is tested and approved, so it can receive a certain amount of radio energy and still function. I am sure the rules for airplane electronics are tough!\n\nTwo good reasons to turn off stuff are:\n1. It is hard to test for unknown stuff, so better turn it off. Some chip may just happend to send out a nasty frequency in some special case.\n\n2. Cell phones with no signal will crank out radio energy louder than any crying baby in any flight. Let\'s not challenge the electronics during critical periods.\n\nBoth are also the reasons that you can offer wireless internet: It is known and tested, so you can protect the airplanes electronics, and because there are good access points inside the cabin, the wireless cards will emmit very little energy.\n\nThe reason the rules may vary is probably, that when you makes rules about the unknown it may vary. Some airports does not want to be the first to really find out if a cell phone signal can crash a plain landing on auto pilot.\n\nThank you for the podcast and have a happy day!\nSimon Mikkelsen, Aarhus, Denmark',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(372,122,'rich fraser (richmanwisco)','rmfraser2@hotmail.com','http://richmanwisco.com','76.230.0.45','2009-05-03 10:11:25','2009-05-03 16:11:25','In my own quest for good solo dining, my criteria are similar to yours.  Good food, reasonably priced, served quickly.\n\nMy near obsession in avoiding the chains (manufactured food, after all) I have found that Indian and Thai food restaurants fit the bill very well.\n\nAny town of more than 30,000 residents will have one or both, and I have been rarely disappointed in the quality.  The prices are reasonable (nice for the client) and the service is very fast, especially for curried dishes.  No need to bring a book, you won\'t have time.  And the food tends to be more authentic, unlike \"americanized\" chinese.\n\nFor listeners and readers reluctant to try those cuisines, there are very basic dishes of each that you can start out with and then you can expand your reach from there.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(373,122,'Lynn in San Clemente','lkamada@cox.net','','75.215.181.90','2009-06-15 22:34:57','2009-06-16 04:34:57','I\'m currently at a conference in Las Vegas, staying at the Bellagio, and went down to the Cafe for a solo dinner.  After being seated next to a window (a good place to ignore the other diners) and placing my order, I plugged into my iPod and was delighted to find this episode.  Unfortunately, when it started with \"coming to you from the loo of a South Africa Airbus\", I was reminded of another pitfall of dining alone - laughing out loud when you have no companion can be very embarassing!\n\nI also listened to your 4th anniversary podcast tonight.  I have been listening since episode #1, and can\'t believe it has been four years!  Thanks for all of the entertaining episodes and your hard work, Mark.\n\nCheers, Lynn',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(374,123,'Brett','uoflfan14@aol.com','','74.132.216.17','2009-04-28 13:16:55','2009-04-28 19:16:55','Of course! For an international flight business class is the way to go.\n\nFirs what kills it is JET LAG. A report says that flying in coach class with less recline and harder sleeping environment is one of the leading causes of JetLag. While you are in business class or first and have that recline you get more sleep which nearly prevents the entire \"sickness\" that can ruin the first 2 days of your vacation.\nSource: http://www.rd.com/living-healthy/jet-lag-and-sleep/article54848.html\n\nSecond, saving that time is amazing. Why wait to check-in. At most major airports the check-in queue is about 20-30 minutes. That to me is worth it. Plus you may get access to priority security.\n\nThe extra room in business class and service you get is well worth it.\n\nConsider looking for a business class ticket. Now-a-days airlines are offering big discounts. I just booked at roundtrip flight from SDF - DTW - LHR    . . . Nice - Amsterdamn - DTW - SDF all First/Business Class on NWA for a little under $2,000.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(375,124,'Sak','sakortiz@yahoo.com','','64.237.157.36','2009-05-17 17:25:41','2009-05-17 23:25:41','Congratulations and thank you for being \"on the air\" all these years. I\'ve enjoyed a lot your stories and hope to hear more.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(376,124,'Daniel M. Perez, The Gamer Traveler','gamertraveler@highmoonmedia.com','http://www.thegamertraveler.com','65.3.255.179','2009-05-19 05:14:13','2009-05-19 11:14:13','Congrats on such a milestone, especially in podcasting. Here\'s to many more years of TravelCommons.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(377,124,'mycolumbusohioblog','mycolumbusohioblog@yahoo.com','http://www.mycolumbusohioblog.wordpress.com','198.45.19.49','2009-05-20 09:12:22','2009-05-20 15:12:22','really enjoyed this episode! great editing! very enjoyable!',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(378,124,'Simon Mikkelsen','simon07@zip.dk','http://mikkelsen.tv/simon/','88.212.100.65','2009-05-21 12:14:14','2009-05-21 18:14:14','Big congratiolations with the many years. Your podcast does not put out the most episodes of those in my feed, but it just keeps on going and is the first I listen to when an episode arrives!\n\nI\'ve had two questions for a long time:\n\n1. What is our job? We\'ve heard a bit from time to time, but what requires so much travel?\n\n2. What is the last song, that is always plaied? I\'ve tried to search on the lyrics, but have not been able to find out.\n\nKeep it going!\nSimon from Denmark',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(379,124,'Mikko H','mikkoh@gmail.com','','193.110.109.30','2009-05-22 08:21:50','2009-05-22 14:21:50','As a longtime listener I just want to say \"Thanks\" for the podcast. Love them.\n\nMikko',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(380,124,'Frick','fricksworld@gmail.com','http://fricksworld.blogspot.com/','70.214.137.43','2009-05-25 14:13:10','2009-05-25 20:13:10','I can\'t believe that it\'s been 4 years, wow. I still enjoy every show. I\'m sure that at some point over the years we\'ve been in the same airport at the same time. Please keep the shows coming.....',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(381,124,'Allan','amarko1@mac.com','','17.229.22.163','2009-06-02 17:42:51','2009-06-02 23:42:51','Many congrats for all the great shows.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(382,138,'rich fraser (richmanwisco)','rmfraser2@hotmail.com','http://richmanwisco.com','76.229.204.191','2009-06-25 21:54:09','2009-06-26 03:54:09','The best resource for me for finding great local fare are the clients.  I can count on one hand the number of bad meals I\'ve had at recommended restaurants.\n\nGoogle Earth is another great resource, with restaurant reviews that are fairly reliable.  One thing negative though is that many local joints aren\'t listed in Google Earth.\n\nFinding a good local place helps to inject some variety into an otherwise mundane routine.  It\'s a bit like a scavenger hunt.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(383,138,'Zach','jknowles544@yahoo.com','','72.248.152.202','2009-07-14 11:57:02','2009-07-14 17:57:02','Great podcast.. wanted to share my other main travel resource with everyone.  It has been instrumental for my last few trips.\n\nhttp://www.linkedin.com/groups?about=&amp;gid=2072193&amp;trk=anet_ug_grppro',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(384,138,'Mikko','mikkoh@gmail.com','','193.110.109.30','2009-07-31 07:44:40','2009-07-31 13:44:40','Hey Mark, I believe #76 has a silent section for a minute or two at around 12 minutes.\n\nThanks and cheers from Finland.\n\nI\'ve been a fan of TC for years, keep it up.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(385,138,'mark','mpeacock@travelcommons.com','https://migrate.travelcommons.com','208.72.43.114','2009-08-04 08:26:02','2009-08-04 14:26:02','Mikko -\n\nThanks for pointing out the gap of silence in T/C #75. Somehow the ghost of Rosemary Woods took over my version of Adobe Audition. I\'ve uploaded a fixed version.  I\'m now flogging the TravelCommons QA elf.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(386,144,'Timo','timo.parssinen@gmail.com','','87.93.58.178','2009-08-03 05:54:02','2009-08-03 11:54:02','Hello!\nOn a recent Ryanair flight from Tampere, Finland to the misleadingly named Frankfurt Hahn airport I was also surprised to hear that use of mobile phones was completely banned even in offline mode. Curiously enough at the same time the company is installing systems that allow in-flight calls with your own phone in some of their planes. Being slightly annoyed with the fact that I couldn\'t listen to podcasts (including Travelcommons) I had downloaded in my phone I tried to figure out a reason for the decision. The only one I could think of was that using the phone might distract you from listening to the constant advertisements blasting from the PA system in broken English. Of course Ryanair is not considered as a business airline, but in the current economic situation many companies are tempted to cut down travel cost by using budget airlines. I myself wouldn\'t mind sacrificing some comfort if the savings are substantial, but I think Ryanair hit the rock bottom with their customer survey about willingness to travel standing up on short routes. No thank you, you just have draw a line somewhere.\n\nOn another subject, I agree totally to your point that on business travels you have to get something for yourself as a compensation for all the trouble and time away from home. This has a lot to do with your personal travel choices. The important thing is to break away from the routine. For example trying to hurry to a hotel as soon as possible driving 160 km/h on autobahn and having a late dinner in the hotel could be substituted by choosing a beautiful small road in the Mosel valley, eating in one of the beautiful villages on the way and arriving relaxed a little later. A delightful travel experience just requires a little imagination and preparation with a good map or a route planner on the net. With such small changes one can relieve the stress of business travel considerably. By the way, Flickr is a great tool when trying to plan in advance where to make a stop.\n\nThanks for a great show, keep up the good work!\n\n(Mr.) Timo\nTampere, Finland',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(387,144,'Joanna','joannaolech@gmail.com','','94.254.207.107','2009-08-16 14:27:29','2009-08-16 19:27:29','Hi Mark,\r\n\r\nIt was really interesting for me to listen to your impressions on the South African Airline, as I am heading to Joburg on a business trip in two weeks time. Actually, when I travel I almost never switch of my phone (obviously just turn it into the flight-mode), but this time on the SAA, I definitely will - thanks for the tip ;-)\r\n\r\nEven though I travel really a lot with my work, I have never seen - or rather heard - anything like that on any of my flights - even with the best airlines in the world according to the Skytrax ranking. Well, maybe with the economic crisis this is the way the airlines are trying to attract new passengers these days? :-)\r\n\r\nAnd thanks for the show - I\'m looking forward to each and every new episode!\r\n\r\nJoanna\r\nWarsaw, Poland',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(388,144,'Allan','Amarko1@mac.com','','17.244.98.229','2009-09-01 13:30:28','2009-09-01 19:30:28','So, you had a carry-on only for two weeks in SA. Wow. I assume that was the only way you were able to leave the grounded Dulles flight - no checked baggage. Two weeks out of a roll-aboard. That is some packing.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(389,144,'mark','peacock.ma@gmail.com','http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/','65.115.37.2','2009-09-03 09:53:15','2009-09-03 15:53:15','I may be good, but not that good.  I left my checked bag on the original flight -- since I was on my way home, I didn\'t need it right away. United offered to deliver it to my house, but since I had to be in the O\'Hare neighborhood anyways, I picked up my bag later that day.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(390,144,'Allan','amarko1@mac.com','','17.229.22.163','2009-09-08 18:18:40','2009-09-09 00:18:40','I thought it was against FAA regulations to leave a bag on a flight without a passenger match on the flight manifest. Do they \"bend\" that rule for GS members?',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(391,161,'Jon Garside','jon@jongarside.com','http://jongarside.blogspot.com/','195.171.203.136','2009-09-04 08:02:13','2009-09-04 14:02:13','Many thanks for the name check. I was really surprised, driving along the 85 outside Durham,NC 3500 miles from home to hear my name in my favourite travel podcast. Just as an aside I have included my blog details - not because I publicise it, but just to show how I let my friends and family know where I am and how I am doing on my trips. Might make for an interesting mini subject',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(392,161,'mark','peacock.ma@gmail.com','http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/','99.16.131.181','2009-09-04 16:16:14','2009-09-04 22:16:14','Jon -\n\nThanks for the tweet that gave me the idea for the topic. I\'m also glad that this is your favourite travel podcast -- there are a lot of them, so that\'s saying a lot. Hope you can grab some Carolina barbecue while in RDU. I used to spend a bit of time there when sponsoring some research at Duke. Pretty country, but the traffic is awful.\n\nI like using a blog to keep friends and family updated, especially if you can update it from a smartphone. I noticed that you are using Google Latitude -- how do you like it?  I\'m jealous of your pending trip to Pisa. It\'s been a while since I\'ve been in Italy...',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(393,161,'Jon Garside','jon@jongarside.com','http://jongarside.blogspot.com/','96.10.14.131','2009-09-10 06:33:26','2009-09-10 12:33:26','Google latitude works like a charm I use a Nokia e71, and I am not sure how but the GPS is on most of the time maintaining that feed and yet the battery still goes 2.5 days without a blip. I am also connected to a few friends and my Sales Engineer so I can see where he is, and vise versa of course. He is in Crewe, England this morning it seems.\n\nYour mentioning the Italy trip - I have to say TripIt is the most amazing tool. The trip I am on these two weeks in the US would have been hell to co-ordinate without it. 17 days, 16 flights, 5 car rentals, and 11 hotels.\n\nI love it',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(394,161,'Lori Humm','lori.humm@gmail.com','','75.75.124.42','2009-09-13 11:45:49','2009-09-13 17:45:49','Mark - I\'m about to lose my mind. Apparently, my airport, RIC, is about to be the testbed for ANOTHER level of security. We already have the body scanning machines and now this.\n&lt;a href.http://www.nbc12.com/Global/story.asp?S=11107272</a>\nI\'d love to hear your thoughts on the addition of powders to security, especially given your pride (and constant defense of) your tooth powder! I moved to using all powder cosmetics to avoid carrying any liquids at all, and am starting to resign myself to being make-up free if that\'s what it take to avoid being sidelined for additional screening.\nBy the way - still doing RIC to BTR weekly haul - this makes my 15th month. If that doesn\'t make someone lose their mind, this additional screening certainly will.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(395,168,'Ric Garrido','ricgarrido@frequentguest.net','http://boardingarea.com/blogs/loyaltytraveler/','76.209.130.21','2009-10-08 20:17:54','2009-10-09 02:17:54','I love this trailer.\nIggy Pop at the beginning sets a good pace.\n\nI haven\'t been to a movie theater in years so I guess I\'ll probably see it in 2010.\n\nUnless of course I take a long haul flight before it makes it to TV.\n\nWill United show the film? Don\'t want too many defectors to AA.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(396,168,'Mark','mark96732@gmail.com','','203.234.206.11','2009-10-10 16:48:14','2009-10-10 22:48:14','Listened to your podcast yesterday while flying from HNL-NRT. Heard your quandary about getting a new bag. Have you considered getting a non-roll-aboard? I made the switch to a Red Ox bag; no wheels, soft sides. Lighter, and I can fit more in it. Easier to stuff into regional jet overhead bin space. It also looks good.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(397,168,'Dave','sandandtsunamis@gmail.com','http://www.sandandtsunamis.com','205.212.77.237','2009-10-30 16:01:14','2009-10-30 22:01:14','Mark,\nAnother short video you might be interested in is \"Frequent Flyer,\" a documentary about \"mileage junkies.\"\n\nhttp://vimeo.com/7167640\n\nBy Gabriel Leigh, it is \"\"Frequent Flyer\" is a 20-minute documentary about frequent flyer miles, the people who collect them, and the world of airports and airplanes that they inhabit. Fittingly, I traveled around 35,000 miles in the making of it, from Osaka, Japan to Punta del Este, Uruguay.\n\nThe result is a look at the world of miles and some of its most enthusiastic participants, examining how miles and points have become an important world currency and, in turn, an obsession for those who have figured out ways to earn them in the millions.\"\n\nVery interesting.\n\nLoving the podcast, keep it up.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(398,168,'mark','mpeacock@travelcommons.com','https://migrate.travelcommons.com','208.23.198.194','2009-11-06 17:03:31','2009-11-06 23:03:31','Dave -\n\nThanks for the pointer to Gabriel\'s documentary. I watched it and am going to interview him for the next T/C podcast.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(399,191,'uberVU - social comments','','http://www.ubervu.com/conversations/boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2009/10/31/podcast-79-skipping-rental-cars-wifi-or-3g/','67.202.32.232','2009-11-09 09:18:30','2009-11-09 15:18:30','<strong>Social comments and analytics for this post...</strong>\n\nThis post was mentioned on Twitter by mfeed: Podcast #79 - Skipping Rental Cars, WiFi or 3G?: Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chica... http://bit.ly/1usNz4...',0,'1','','trackback',0,0),
(400,198,'Ray medina','Ray@raymedphotography.com','http://Raymedphotography.com','74.223.229.2','2009-11-27 23:09:20','2009-11-28 05:09:20','Hi there, i was listening to this episode and i decided to comment on the whole expense report subject.\n\nMy company uses SAP for our expenses, i carry and envelope to every trip with the name of the customer, throughout the day, i place the receipts in my wallet, every night i enter the information into SAP, move the receipts from my wallet to the envelope, so the wallet is cleared for the next day. Once i returned from my trip, i need to scan the receipt to submit to my cokpany along with the SAP\'s cover letter. Once i submit those, i place the envelope in my filling cabinet.\n\nIt takes time to get this routine down, but once you have it, you have it! Give it a try!',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(401,198,'Leo Vegoda','leo@bind.org','','76.169.64.143','2009-11-28 19:12:57','2009-11-29 01:12:57','I\'d add one other tip to your list.\n\nIf you cannot get a direct flight but have a choice of transit airports then choose carefully. For instance, while in past years there might not have been much to choose between changing at ORD or a New York area airport on a West coast to East coast flight, ORD is definitely the best choice this year. Fewer flights and a new, extra runway mean its on-time rankings have risen quite a bit. Meanwhile, looking at the FAA\'s site, \"Departures are experiencing taxi delays greater than 45 minutes and/or arrivals are experiencing airborne holding delays greater than 45 minutes\" today. Ouch.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(402,198,'Leo Vegoda','leo@bind.org','','76.169.64.143','2009-11-28 19:14:01','2009-11-29 01:14:01','Errr. Those 45 minute days are for JFK.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(403,198,'Lori Humm','lori.humm@gmail.com','','12.189.1.36','2009-12-07 21:38:38','2009-12-08 03:38:38','Hey Mark - You have us road warriors anticipating the Clooney flick. I don\'t know if you plan to post one more show before Xmas (the release date is Xmas day) but I\'m wondering if Reitman considered the small visuals that would make it realistic like things to do to remember your hotel room number, remembering and/or locating your rental car (or personal car) in a parking lot, or doing expenses. I think I might be ticked in the latter example if he just hands them off to a secretary (what are those, by the way?). An FYI - Terry Gross of Fresh Air did a great interview with Reitman where he talks about how hard it was to get some of the aerial shots he used for the movie.\nBy the way, I had to adjust my schedule this week and change a flight which means that the only way I can get home is BTR-MEM-CVG-RIC. Seriously Delta. I\'m really bummed that you didn\'t throw ATL in there just so I could say I visited all the hubs. Note, my usual route is BTR-ATL-RIC, and that ain\'t no picnic either.\nAnd finally, my 201 tip is: don\'t just pick your seat when you book your ticket; pay attention to the size of the  airplane. Most of the regional jets can\'t even fit a rollerbag briefcase. Every week I watch people shake their heads in disbelief as they board the plane and realize that there really is no room. And no, there\'s also no room under the seat. Carry the laptop separate in a padded sleeve and be willing to surrender the bag to gate check. (Full disclosure: I\'m the one that got my laptop stolen last year because I didn\'t grab it out of my bag at gate check.)\nThanks as always Mark, I really appreciate the time it must take to put these shows together for all of us out in the innerwebs!',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(404,198,'Ian','iamorgan@hotmail.com','','147.188.244.46','2009-12-17 09:44:20','2009-12-17 15:44:20','As ever, great show.  I agree wholeheartedly with your point about allowing a bit of extra time at this time of the year.  It still amazes me how many of my colleagues try to do a 40 minute connection in Frankfurt in December!!\n\nI think the key to any successful trip, other than experience, is organisation/planning.  Yes, you can \"wing it\" if you want to, but spending a bit of time making sure you have all of your travel plans on one document instead of 20, with contact numbers, membership numbers, reference numbers etc all to hand, can make the difference between a stress-free trip or a nightmare.\n\nThe simple thing that I always do is to google the place I am going to see what\'s on.  Not only can it be interesting to experience different local festivities if you have a bit of downtime, it can also make the difference between missing a flight or meeting or making it on time.  If there is a large festival on in the city centre, or a demonstration planned, you are going to need to allow more time to get to/from your meeting/hotel etc.  Indeed, when in Athens last January, I was aware that there were almost daily clashes with police in the city centre: I changed my hotel to a downtown loation.  At least this way it means that you aren\'t sat watching a cab meter clock up whatever local currency is in use, and you don\'t have to endure the cab driver\'s personal take on the situation after getting off a longhaul flight!\n\nSafe travels',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(405,209,'Ian','iamorgan@hotmail.com','','147.188.244.46','2009-12-17 09:33:00','2009-12-17 15:33:00','I think that is very true: it is so easy to become so engrossed with work that you can loose focus on what is really important in life.  I certainly look forward to watching this film!  Thanks for sharing -from a person who is spending the weekend in New York on business, before catching the last BA flight out of there back home to the UK before BA goes on strike for 12 days -let\'s hope all goes to plan.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(406,209,'Ken Okel','tvguy@kenokel.com','http://www.kenokel.com','76.109.129.177','2009-12-23 20:30:06','2009-12-24 02:30:06','I can\'t wait to see the film.  Hearing this episode reminded me of an experience I had a few years ago, that I include in my talks to groups (I\'m a professional speaker).  It\'s what I call a Flightmare.\nhttp://my.brainshark.com/Business-Travel-Flightmares-648699088\n\nContinue the great work on the podcast.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(407,209,'Laura','grahamlala@yahoo.com','','71.191.68.45','2010-01-28 05:48:58','2010-01-28 11:48:58','Two thumbs up for \"Up in the Air\"\n\nOkay....okay...I get that life could lose some meaning if you are traveling all the time, but let\'s just say that I wouldn\'t mind finding out for myself.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(408,219,'Air Koryo','Ffffffffff@ffffffffff.com','','216.13.201.106','2010-02-17 13:43:34','2010-02-17 19:43:34','When is your next podcast? It\'s been almost two months and I am hooked. Making my way through your back catalogue while waiting.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(409,219,'mark','peacock.ma@gmail.com','http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/','12.47.190.208','2010-02-17 22:24:14','2010-02-18 04:24:14','Sorry for the wait. I\'m writing a new episode right now and should have it up this weekend.  Thanks for hanging in there...',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(410,228,'thelma','islulu@yahoo.com','','69.242.147.3','2010-04-19 21:48:08','2010-04-20 03:48:08','I was thinking about this podcast with the news of that one airline charging for carry-on luggage. I was glad to hear the major carriers are not going to do that, but could this be a sign that sooner than later this is going to happen?',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(411,228,'John Stalvern','stalvern.john@yahoo.ca','','174.6.177.108','2010-04-26 23:53:37','2010-04-27 05:53:37','Where are you Mark?  Missing the podcast...',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(412,228,'mark','mpeacock@travelcommons.com','https://migrate.travelcommons.com','166.187.13.212','2010-04-27 00:22:44','2010-04-27 06:22:44','John -\n\nI\'m am working like a dog at this new CIO gig.  I\'ve been trying to get a new show put together, but work keeps getting in the way.  I should get something out before much longer.\n\nThanks for listening (when I actually produce something...)',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(413,228,'John Stalvern','stalvern.john@yahoo.ca','','216.13.201.106','2010-04-27 10:36:49','2010-04-27 16:36:49','Thanks for the update Mark.  I guess podcasting isn\'t as lucrative as CIOing, and should be prioritized appropriately.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(414,228,'DebbieT in Alabama','debbiet@wiregrasslive.com','http://www.wiregrasslive.com','24.94.233.241','2010-04-28 18:05:46','2010-04-29 00:05:46','Mark, just to let you know that there are those of us still checking the ipods for new episodes..... can imagine you\'re busy, but can\'t you find a friendly bathroom somewhere for a quickie?? *smile*',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(415,228,'Podcast #88 -- New Travel Goodies; Losing Elite Status | TravelCommons','','https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/03/13/podcast-88-new-travel-goodies-losing-status/','66.225.253.10','2011-03-13 17:12:10','2011-03-13 22:12:10','[...] in episode 82, I talked about how my job switch – moving from consulting to being the CIO of a technology [...] ',0,'1','','pingback',0,0),
(416,233,'Leo Vegoda','leo@bind.org','','216.152.165.138','2010-05-18 09:04:06','2010-05-18 15:04:06','These are all good points but I\'d like to add two more.\n\nFirstly, while the iPad is great at video, because it doesn\'t do real multi-tasking you cannot download a streaming video in the background to view in five minutes time. This would be very useful when waiting for a slow site to serve a video.\n\nSecondly, while I\'ve had some success at creating documents in Pages on the iPad I have been told that it does not handle \"track changes\" mode well. Anyone who needs to review lots of documents is going to struggle without good change control support in the word processor.\n\nBut as a media player it is excellent. I took two flights yesterday and saw lots of people watching video on iPads and laptops or reading Kindles and books. I didn\'t notice anyone watching the in-flight movie. Maybe the airlines can cut in-flight movies and use the savings to remove or reduce fees for checked bags (of course they won\'t).',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(417,233,'Jason Castonguay','jcast77@gmail.com','http://www.musicalmomentswithjason.com/','76.199.89.61','2010-05-18 09:55:16','2010-05-18 15:55:16','Perhaps this idea has already occurred to you, but I didn\'t see it mentioned here.  Another option for you is to obtain a good, Bluetooth keyboard for use with your iPad.  You\'d have to find a way to rest the iPad for optimal viewing while you type, but with the Apple Bluetooth keyboard, for example, you\'d have a nice, full-sized, comfortable keyboard on which to touch-type.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(418,233,'Sak','sakortiz@yahoo.com','','144.230.63.56','2010-05-20 16:14:36','2010-05-20 22:14:36','Mark, I went to Bet Bath and Beyond and found a foldable frame holder for less than $5. Works great and fits the iPad\'s case. Also, the USB camera connector works with some USB keyboards (depending on power consumption). Maybe a small travel keyboard might work for you. Miss the podcast.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(419,233,'mark','peacock.ma@gmail.com','http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/','166.203.80.189','2010-05-20 17:33:15','2010-05-20 23:33:15','Also got replies on Twitter about keyboards -- both USB and BlueTooth. As always, I try to keep the number of electronic bits in my briefcase as minimal as possible -- trying to reduce the number of things I can forget or that can trigger a TSA bag search. Hence, I haven\'t sprung (yet) for an external keyboard. I have to say, though, that I am getting better with the on-screen keyboard.\n\nI\'m taking both my HP netbook and iPad to India this week, so I\'ll have time to do more comparisons -- and to write a new TravelCommons episode.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(420,233,'noneemac','aaron@branditorial.com','','75.83.158.242','2010-05-25 21:25:56','2010-05-26 03:25:56','Forget the HP netbook. Way better is the Toshiba NB305. It\'s cool-looking, it\'s got 11 hours or so of batt life, it\'s got a great keyboard, and I love the USB port that charges devices even with the netbook is powered down. A great machine.\n\nThe iPad and the NB305 -- now there\'s an unbeatable combo!',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(421,233,'11-inch MacBook Air Review | TravelCommons','','https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2010/11/15/two-weeks-with-a-macbook-air/','66.225.253.10','2010-11-15 21:18:58','2010-11-16 02:18:58','[...]  For the past 5 months, my Travel PC was an HP netbook, which I compared to my iPad in an earlier blog post.  It worked pretty well, though the 10-inch screen was a bit tight for comfortably working in [...] ',0,'1','','pingback',0,0),
(422,246,'Air Koryo','Ffffffffff@ffffffffff.com','','174.6.170.22','2010-06-08 00:34:40','2010-06-08 06:34:40','Good to have you back Mark. Glad you had time to put this podcast together.\n\nIs your UGS status still in place?',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(423,246,'mark','peacock.ma@gmail.com','http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/','208.54.7.184','2010-06-08 05:58:59','2010-06-08 11:58:59','Glad you enjoyed the podcast.  Always fun to figure out how to do the intro in the aircraft toilet without having the FAs look at me funny.\n\nUnited chose not to continue my Global Services status for 2010 in spite of me doing 180,000 butt-in-seat miles.  I guess too many of those miles were Star Alliance miles, keeping me from clearing the Global Services\' revenue hurdle.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(424,250,'boberonicus','robert@fenerty.com','','71.198.16.144','2010-09-07 01:13:14','2010-09-07 07:13:14','It\'s always interesting to hear your impressions and insights, thanks for sharing your well produced video with us.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(425,250,'John Stalvern','stalvern.john@yahoo.ca','','174.6.173.78','2010-09-10 23:04:10','2010-09-11 05:04:10','Loved the video! Vietnam looks incredible. And is that an actual shot of the never-before-identified Mark Peacock at the end??',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(426,250,'Mark','Mpeacock@TravelCommons.com','','99.16.131.181','2010-09-11 08:51:29','2010-09-11 14:51:29','Glad you enjoyed the video and, yes, the final fade-out shot is of me -- and a new friend...',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(427,250,'John Stalvern','stalvern.john@yahoo.ca','','174.6.173.78','2010-09-15 00:29:40','2010-09-15 06:29:40','Why did this podcast get an explicit rating on iTunes? It seems pretty inoffensive by any standards.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(428,250,'Mark','Mpeacock@TravelCommons.com','','166.205.137.138','2010-09-15 10:52:21','2010-09-15 16:52:21','I flagged it Explicit in the iTunes RSS feed because of language displayed in the picture of a display caption from the War Remnants Museum. It\'s only displayed for 3-4 seconds, so perhaps I\'m being too strict. However, I wanted to give fair warning in case someone used it in, say, a classroom environment.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(429,250,'Andrew Peacock','andrew@thepeacocks.net','http://andrew.peacock.us','99.16.131.181','2010-10-31 20:46:12','2010-11-01 01:46:12','I think the rating is just a tad to strict because there are definitely worse things displayed in a classroom environment.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(430,288,'Tweets that mention “Now That I Have My Visa, Where in the US Should I Go?” | TravelCommons -- Topsy.com','','http://topsy.com/travelcommons.com/2010/10/17/now-that-i-have-my-visa-where-in-the-us-should-i-go/?utm_source=pingback&amp;utm_campaign=L2','208.74.66.43','2010-10-17 14:01:42','2010-10-17 19:01:42','[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Mark Peacock, mfeed. mfeed said: “Now That I Have My Visa, Where in the US Should I Go?”: As the US dollar continues to swoon, non-US friends, coll... http://bit.ly/aIoZs0 [...] ',0,'1','','pingback',0,0),
(431,288,'John Stalvern','stalvern.john@yahoo.ca','','216.13.201.106','2010-10-29 18:17:08','2010-10-29 23:17:08','Big leisure traveler here, but I will never visit any of these places you have listed, or anywhere else in the US, as long as TSA exists.\n\nMark, I know you are no TSA fan but what they have orchestrated today with the enhanced pat-down BS is beyond the pale.  I would like to see you podcast on TSA and its un-American, putrid slip into fascism.  \n\nSorry for editorializing, but I am absolutely sick of DHS\' fearmongering and public ignorance.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(432,319,'Tweets that mention Podcast #84 – End of Year Status Calculus; TSA Porn | TravelCommons -- Topsy.com','','http://topsy.com/travelcommons.com/2010/10/30/podcast-84-end-of-year-status-calculus-tsa-porn/?utm_source=pingback&amp;utm_campaign=L2','208.74.66.43','2010-10-31 14:09:07','2010-10-31 19:09:07','[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Phil Ferris, Mark Peacock. Mark Peacock said: First new TravelCommons podcast in 6 months. Come and get it -- http://goo.gl/Sw4E [...] ',0,'1','','pingback',0,0),
(433,319,'mark','mpeacock@travelcommons.com','','99.16.131.181','2010-11-05 12:56:18','2010-11-05 17:56:18','Here\'s an article that gives a good primer on the two types of full body scanners being used by the TSA -- http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2966/is-radiation-from-the-new-airport-security-scanners-endangering-my-health',0,'1','','comment',0,1),
(434,379,'Tweets that mention MacBook Air Review | TravelCommons -- Topsy.com','','http://topsy.com/travelcommons.com/2010/11/15/two-weeks-with-a-macbook-air/?utm_source=pingback&amp;utm_campaign=L2','208.74.66.43','2010-11-15 21:58:04','2010-11-16 02:58:04','[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Mark Peacock, mfeed. mfeed said: Two Weeks with a MacBook Air: I’ve been working with my 11-inch MacBook Air for two weeks — time to walk through... http://bit.ly/dqH3hx [...] ',0,'1','','pingback',0,0),
(435,379,'Podcast #85: Importance of Hotel Bathrooms; Maximizing Miles | TravelCommons','','https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2010/11/30/podcast-85-importance-of-hotel-bathrooms-maximizing-miles/','66.225.253.10','2010-11-30 21:25:14','2010-12-01 02:25:14','[...] by the X-ray screener, that cinched it – it’s the best Travel PC out there. I posted a full review on the TravelCommon’s website with my impressions after 2 weeks on the road with it. A full month [...] ',0,'1','','pingback',0,0),
(436,379,'Podcast #86: Fun with Layovers; Story Behind Closing Tune | TravelCommons','','https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2010/12/26/podcast-86-fun-with-layovers-story-behind-closing-tune/','66.225.253.10','2010-12-28 18:46:19','2010-12-28 23:46:19','[...] the last episode and in a prior TravelCommons post I sang the praises of my 11-inch MacBook Air as the perfect travel PC.  Which, of course, meant I [...] ',0,'1','','pingback',0,0),
(437,407,'Tweets that mention Podcast #85: Importance of Hotel Bathrooms; Maximizing Miles | TravelCommons -- Topsy.com','','http://topsy.com/travelcommons.com/2010/11/30/podcast-85-importance-of-hotel-bathrooms-maximizing-miles/?utm_source=pingback&amp;utm_campaign=L2','208.74.66.43','2010-11-30 22:39:20','2010-12-01 03:39:20','[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Mark Peacock, J C Bradshaw. J C Bradshaw said: Podcast #85: Importance of Hotel Bathrooms; Maximizing Miles ...: TSA&#039;s junk touching patdowns; hassles have tri... http://bit.ly/fBQWt1 [...] ',0,'1','','pingback',0,0),
(438,407,'Podcast #86: Fun with Layovers; Story Behind Closing Tune | TravelCommons','','https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2010/12/26/podcast-86-fun-with-layovers-story-behind-closing-tune/','66.225.253.10','2010-12-28 18:41:31','2010-12-28 23:41:31','[...] the last episode and in a prior TravelCommons post I sang the praises of my 11-inch MacBook Air as the perfect [...] ',0,'1','','pingback',0,0),
(439,407,'Sarah','ackerson360@gmail.com','','72.225.34.190','2011-07-14 13:27:23','2011-07-14 18:27:23','I\'ve been a listener since 2006, but as I am not a frequent flyer I was playing catchup after all my driving trips this past two months.  And wanted to say heck yeah to the bathroom being one of the most important parts of a stay.  I ended in a bed and breakfast in the middle of no where, with no wifi, and the bathroom made me want to tell everyone about it. It had a hot tub and a beautifully large bathroom. But even though i knew no one who was going to the area, i wanted to tell everyone about it. It\'s the Inn in New Berlin, PA(in case you care). Thanks for the podcast and the ability to pretended like I get to fly(by quoting your TSA gripes)',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(440,435,'Mika Pyyhkala','pyyhkala@gmail.com','http://twitter.com/pyyhkala','65.119.215.231','2010-12-29 11:05:17','2010-12-29 16:05:17','The Apple tech support experience I think is still better than you would get from any mainstream pc manufacturer in terms of ease of troubleshooting and customer service.  I imagine if they could not fix your Macbook Air likely they would have given you a replacement unit on the spot in AZ which is how Apple handles iPhone repairs.  Think of the troubleshooting steps off shore, outsourced tech support would have made you go through on a $500 netbook before dispatching a new unit, parts, or a technician.\n\nAlso curious how you generate the transcript for the show, although I think you\'ve mentioned you write up the script?  Just wondering if you used some type of software to transcribe the episodes?',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(441,435,'Mark','mpeacock@travelcommons.com','https://migrate.travelcommons.com','70.89.242.50','2010-12-29 11:17:47','2010-12-29 16:17:47','I think the Apple support model is a logical extension of their brand positioning -- it\'s all about the user experience.  \n\nFor me, being able to have someone give me that 4-key PMU reset experience over the phone or via a chat window would\'ve been fine -- I just don\'t know what number to call.  However, I think I\'m in the minority on this.  Everyone else at the Scottsdale Genius Bar was very happy with the personal \"high-touch\" service that Apple provides.\n\nThe transcript of the show is generated by me copy/pasting from my Word script into WordPress.  It\'s <em>very</em> low tech, but gets the job done.  Indeed, it\'s easier for me to do this rather than try to summarize the content into fewer bullet points (cue the Mark Twain quote <em>If I\'d had more time, I\'d have written a shorter letter</em>)',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(442,435,'John Naismith','John.naismith@ntlworld.com','','82.19.216.81','2011-04-15 14:08:33','2011-04-15 19:08:33','Hi Mark\nI\'m John Naismith songwriter with the former band Evangeline, I.m so glad you enjoy the song   Pictures of you, it\'s also good to know that people like Becky from Carolina can identify with the song because that was the intent when writing it, life on the road is hard and leaving your family behind is hard! anyway a million thenks to you for using this song for so long I wish you and your show all the best for the future.\nLove and friendship from Scotland.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(443,447,'Steve Frick','fricksworld@gmail.com','http://stillworkingonme.blogspot.com/','72.153.230.79','2011-01-02 21:56:20','2011-01-03 02:56:20','2. Unpack/Repack My Briefcase - I did that this weekend. 3 pairs of headphones, approx 2 lbs of loose change, 50+ business cards and at least 15 hotel room keys. No wonder my laptop bag was so heavy.\n4. Take more pictures - between the iPhone &amp; Blackberry I have been doing this, it\'s great.\n5. Be nicer to TSA agents - this I am trying to do, trying and trying to do.....',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(444,447,'What\'s in My Bag: Traveling Light But Prepared | TravelCommons','','https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/04/09/whats-in-my-bag-traveling-light-but-prepared/','66.225.253.10','2011-04-09 09:13:45','2011-04-09 14:13:45','[...] of my annual New Year&#8217;s travel resolutions is to &#8220;unpack and repack my briefcase.&#8221; Some people re-do their closets; I do my [...] ',0,'1','','pingback',0,0),
(445,500,'Tweets that mention Winter Travel Tips - Things to Remember When The Snow Starts | TravelCommons -- Topsy.com','','http://topsy.com/travelcommons.com/2011/01/16/winter-travel-tips-things-to-remember-when-the-snow-starts-flying/?utm_source=pingback&amp;utm_campaign=L2','208.74.66.43','2011-01-16 16:53:17','2011-01-16 21:53:17','[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Mark Peacock. Mark Peacock said: New TravelCommons blog post: Winter Travel Tips — Things to Remember When The Snow Starts Flying http://t.co/onhWP1s [...] ',0,'1','','pingback',0,0),
(446,500,'Andre','redsox104@gmx.de','','79.249.227.122','2011-02-06 13:01:10','2011-02-06 18:01:10','Wanted to share a positive experience with an airline call center. I was travelling to the US last week - this happened on two itineraries. Internationaly I was ticketed on AF (STR-CDG-JFK and back) for the domestic portion to Florida I used some miles I had in the bank with United (JFK-IAD-MIA). As my departure came near, so did the snowstorm moving west to east :???: Right as I finished packing my luggage the night before departure, I received an email from AF saying, that my flight out of Kennedy has been canceled - in fact AF kept all their 4 flights into JFK home in Paris to make sure their global schedule will not be screwed up by missing aircraft. Well there was no further remark in the email in terms of rebookings, so I called the AF callcenter. I told the lady, that I\'m currently in Miami and asked if this would be an option, the other possibility was to take a flight out of IAD since the UA flight back to Dulles will most likely take place (I was already expecting, that UA will cancel the feeder into JFK - what in fact happended 2 hrs later). The agent got back after a while and said, that she\'ll have to transfer me to a special help desk with Delta - she already warned me, that I might have to pay a certain amount, if I\'d like to fly out of MIA. Next agent told me the same, but she had to talk to AF in Paris anyways.\nAfter some minutes she came back and was totally astonished that AF, not only accepted the re-routing, but also did that free of charge  :razz: . I guess they were just happy to have one passenger less standing around in NewYork, that they have to take care of.\nSo, there are still moments where you think that you are a valued customer and they care about you.\nKeep it up ! Cheers from a long time listener in Germany',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(447,531,'John Stalvern','stalvern.john@yahoo.ca','','216.13.201.106','2011-02-09 12:25:12','2011-02-09 17:25:12','In discussing the contents of your briefcase, you mentioned a Moleskine notebook.  Which do you use and what is its primary purpose?\n\nI have recently begun using them and love the quality but am not pleased with the high price point.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(448,531,'Mark Peacock','mpeacock@travelcommons.com','https://migrate.travelcommons.com','99.16.131.181','2011-02-25 11:45:55','2011-02-25 16:45:55','John -\n\nMoleskine notebooks are definitely a luxury.  I use the pocket notebook (http://www.moleskine.com/catalogue/classic/hard_black_cover/ruled__notebook__pocket.php) as my travel notebook -- fits in my camera bag or jacket pocket. I use a larger squared/quadrille notebook (http://www.moleskine.com/catalogue/classic/hard_black_cover/squared_notebook__large.php) for work.  There are definitely cheaper notebooks, but I do enjoy writing in Moleskines -- especially with a fountain pen.\n\nMark',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(449,531,'Gary Learned','learned@talentsinc.net','http://seat6d.com','66.41.0.162','2011-07-17 23:49:33','2011-07-18 04:49:33','Have you taken a look at Notetaker HD on the iPad? Pair it with a good stylus and it replaces the Moleskine. It was developed by Dan Brinker, the inventor of VisiCalc.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(450,554,'Leo Vegoda','leo@bind.org','','130.129.26.183','2011-03-15 10:23:48','2011-03-15 15:23:48','More on the subject of being ill while travelling.\n\nA couple of years ago I attended a meeting in Cairo and picked up some food poisoning on my last day there. It gently manifested itself just before I boarded my flight to Amsterdam, where I was due to connect onto a flight to Panama. The effect of the food poisoning was uncomfortable at 35,000 feet.\n\nRather than continue the torment I stayed in Schiphol to recover before returning home.\n\nWhen I got home I discovered that a friend at the same meeting had been hit much harder and needed medical care for a few days before returning home. She was not the only one affected. A large travel industry conference was at the same hotel and several hundred attendees contracted the same bug.\n\nBased on this experience I place extra value in the medical component of travel insurance and select grilled meats and unpeeled fruits and vegetables over salads if I have any concerns over potential food poisoning.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(451,554,'Podcast #89 -- Trains Over Planes; Fit 2 Weeks in 1 Carry-On | TravelCommons','','https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/04/17/podcast-89-trains-over-planes-fit-2-weeks-in-1-carry-on/','66.225.253.10','2011-04-17 09:32:36','2011-04-17 14:32:36','[...] glad to get that out of the way.  Let talk about something more fun.  In the last episode, I talked about stuff that caught my eye at last month’s Travel Goods show.  One thing I forgot [...] ',0,'1','','pingback',0,0),
(452,605,'Rich Fraser','rmfraser2@hotmail.com','','12.158.23.130','2011-05-02 20:53:49','2011-05-03 01:53:49','I had the pleasure of spending 2.5 years in a medium size city north of Frankfurt.  Great times.\n\nOh yeah.  Kunst = art. :razz:',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(453,605,'Robert','robert@fenerty.com','','98.207.178.64','2011-05-15 18:24:00','2011-05-15 23:24:00','Portrait mode was fine. Even if you\'re unlikely to find work as a videographer, your journal was well edited and fun; it give me a much better sense of a city that I only know for its dauntingly long airport corridors peppered with 30\' long moving walkways. I think I had my passport stamped four times on my last visit and I didn\'t leave FRA! Although I\'ve passed through it many times, I\'ve never had the courage to leave the airport on long layovers.  Anyway, thanks for giving us a chance to walk beside the intrepid Peacock as you sampled the best and the wurst of the city.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(454,605,'Dave','sandandtsunamis@gmail.com','http://www.sandandtsunamis.com','139.161.2.10','2011-08-04 11:22:16','2011-08-04 16:22:16','Mark,\nGreat vid...we\'re bound for Germany in about 6 months for a 3 year tour.  Definitely will keep this on the favorites as seed for a more thorough visit of Frankfurt once we get there.  We\'ll be living fairly close.  \nIncidentally, I did a similar tour of Amsterdam a dozen years or so back.  Quick trip to the Westkirche, Anne Frank\'s house, and a museum or 2.  Although, of all the airports you can be stuck in, Schipol is one of the better ones.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(455,617,'Robert','robert@fenerty.com','','98.207.178.64','2011-05-15 18:40:58','2011-05-15 23:40:58','When I\'m on the road, I seek out live jazz. I can sit at a table for 90 minutes, order food and wine, and relax. In Chicago, I visit Bandera, where the servers don\'t hover and the private little booths reduce the \"look at that guy\" factor to a bare minimum. In Europe, jazz is easier to find than in most U.S. cities, but if you find the hip part of town and you can usually find jazz. But don\'t ask the concierge at your hotel, because they don\'t know what jazz is.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(456,755,'Steve Soechtig','ssoechtig@gmail.com','','174.51.26.42','2011-05-24 18:50:35','2011-05-24 23:50:35','Marc -\n\nLoved the post and particularly the idea of bringing a small power strip plus a voltage adapter for devices.  That\'s clever.\n\nI\'d throw one more thing out there, as a benefit to Apple.  The interchangeable external power adapter allows me to plug my Macbook into EU, UK, and AUS power outlets (so far), and the I have a micro 4 port USB adapter that I plug into the laptop - effectively giving me charging for the mobile, the iPad (yes, I still travel with both), and the headset.  Just a thought, as the USB adapter is probably 4\" x 1/2\" by 1/4\".  Very small.\n\nOnly other comment I\'d make is \"USAir?  Are you crazy???\"  ;-)\n\nLove the podcast - been reading for years.  Look forward to speaking soon.\n\nSteve',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(457,755,'Jim Kearns','VagabondJim@Gmail.com','','75.85.51.113','2011-08-07 23:17:04','2011-08-08 04:17:04','Some quick thoughts on the overseas data problem.  When you are done with one your current GSM phones (in your case, the iPhone.)  Don\'t discard it -- keep it for travels.  When you get overseas, buy a sim card and data plan.  It can be a phenomenal savings.\n\nIn Australia I paid $30 (AUD) for a card that came loaded with bonuses -- about $250 (AUD) worth of calling and data.\n\nIn Germany, it wasn\'t quite as good but still a better deal than roaming by a long shot.\n\nIn Fiji, it was a solid deal.\n\nYou get the picture.  You use this phone for email, Google Maps (which now allows you to pre-load data) and web browsing. \n\nKeep the sim cards for return visits -- you just need to top them up.  That\'s easy in most countries - you can even do it at ATMs in many places.\n\nIf you are crafty, you could use your current phone.  The sim card will give you a new phone number (and for you, that\'s a big problem -- hence the suggestion for the old phone.)  But I bet that there has to be a way to use Google Voice to forward those calls to the new number.\n\nI LOVE the bio page pic of you -- that hat is from the South African Life Boat Service (the NSRI).  I\'d bet a few Rand that you picked it up in Cape Town at the Sea Rescue store in the V&amp;A Waterfront...\n\n\nBest,\n\nJim',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(458,755,'mark','mpeacock@travelcommons.com','','99.16.131.181','2011-08-08 18:49:45','2011-08-08 23:49:45','Jim -\n\nI\'m going to see if I can find a couple of Rand coin to send to you.  You pegged the picture.  I did pick up that cap from the Sea Rescue store on the V&A Waterfront in Cape Town.  That picture is me waiting for my wife and daughter to come out of some store so that I can get a beer.\n\nCheers,\nMark',0,'1','','comment',0,1),
(459,755,'Jim Kearns','VagabondJim@Gmail.com','','12.151.89.10','2011-08-09 11:15:13','2011-08-09 16:15:13','I LOVE Cape Town and especially the waterfront.  It\'s been 7 years since I was there.  I need to remedy that.\n\nAnd, I have a few things from that shop too.\n\nJim',0,'1','','comment',458,0),
(460,770,'Leo Vegoda','leo@bind.org','','76.169.54.255','2011-06-21 19:45:04','2011-06-22 00:45:04','What you say about Ryanair reminds me of how Irish comedian Andrew Maxwell described them: \"Ryanair is what flying would be like if it was illegal\". I think that says it all.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(461,770,'mark','mpeacock@travelcommons.com','https://migrate.travelcommons.com','99.16.131.181','2011-06-22 13:38:00','2011-06-22 18:38:00','Looks like this power adapter has most of the specs I laid out in this episode, but the website and data sheet aren\'t clear about support for 220v...\n\nhttp://aluratek.com/mini-surge-dual-usb-charging-station',0,'1','','comment',0,1),
(462,770,'Mark Peacock','mpeacock@travelcommons.com','https://migrate.travelcommons.com','67.238.59.14','2011-07-20 12:29:50','2011-07-20 17:29:50','Glad to see American Airlines upgrading their fleet -- http://www.aa.com/i18n/urls/aanews.jsp.  Too bad they\'re waiting until 2013 to start their plan...',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(463,785,'Lori Humm','lori.humm@gmail.com','','12.189.1.35','2011-09-01 21:50:12','2011-09-02 02:50:12','Not so upbeat? Shame on him for saying that! I think you provide an honest view, and in addition do your best to provide practical solutions. \n\nI wanted to remind people that twitter is an excellent way to get customer service. Just be sure you are using the service channel and not the regular product one (@deltaassisst versus @delta). I\'ve used it regularly when I see something go awry and I always get an immediate response.\n\nI had some excitement today. Was trying to fly out of BTR and the plane was nearly two hours delayed. According to the Delta website, the plane had actually landed. This had everyone concerned then the gate agent made the announcement that the plane coming in had a mechanical problem. It sure did! It couldn\'t lower the left side landing gear. BTR has a great view of the runway so the entire airport got a ringside seat for an amazing landing by the pilot. The CRJ-200 landed with the right wheel and front wheel, then dipped to the left and dragged the wing until it stopped. The pilot had circled to burn off fuel before landing. Everyone was fine and passengers praised the pilot. \n\nNow, I have to get psyched to get on one of these tomorrow if I want to get home....',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(464,785,'Lori Humm','lori.humm@gmail.com','','12.189.1.35','2011-09-01 21:51:26','2011-09-02 02:51:26','Oh and about that Starbucks comment. I had a similar thought recently when Delta started offering \"Tequila Thursdays\" in the sky clubs. What part of free tequila and airplanes makes sense?\n\n:)',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(465,832,'Sak','sakortiz@yahoo.com','','198.24.6.135','2011-11-04 10:47:07','2011-11-04 15:47:07','Nice bridge music. I recently flew Copa Airlines Colombia between Medellin (MDE) and Panama City (PTY) and flight attendants were still young and hot. Of course, different country and labor laws and in Colombia is normal to discriminate by age.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(466,832,'Rich Fraser','rmfraser2@hotmail.com','http://richmanwisco.com','69.217.174.130','2011-11-05 13:02:50','2011-11-05 18:02:50','Mark, you gotta get to more airports.  As a domestic road warrior, I\'ve flown into some of the smallest airports with commercial service on a wide variety of turboprop planes.  Whether it\'s Mesaba (Delta) with their Saab 340s or Horizon (Alaska) with their Q800s, just about every regional carrier has turboprops in their fleet.  Up until their demise 3 years ago, Midwest Connect was using the Beech B1900D, a 19 seat flying minivan that did not require a flight attendant.  It remains the only plane that I could guarantee I could fall asleep in.\n\nYou big time international guys may look down and scoff at the small birds, but as a private pilot myself, I rather enjoy flying in a type that is closer to what I pilot.  It feeds the fantasy that I could possibly jump into the cockpit and take over just in case the crew had the fish for dinner  :grin: .',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(467,851,'Dan Gradwohl','dangrad@ix.netcom.com','','38.123.31.176','2011-12-01 00:36:32','2011-12-01 05:36:32','Mark,\n\n  Enjoyed episode 95 today, thanks as always.\n\n  One thing to note....today, November 30, 2011 was the final revenue flight for the Mesaba Saab 340 fleet....sad to see them gone.  Been riding on them for years. Two weeks ago my wife &amp; I took one last Saab ride to DVL &amp; JMS.\n\n  Also, Horizon\'s next-gen Dash 8s are Q400s, I think you may have called them Q800s.\n\nKeep up the great work,\n\nDan &amp; Sara Gradwohl',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(468,880,'Frick','fricksworld@gmail.com','http://stillworkingonme.blogspot.com/','209.60.61.86','2012-01-10 11:40:16','2012-01-10 16:40:16','I was back on the road yesterday morning and listened to your latest episode....Already one missed flight and a rental car with no GPS, I hope this isn\'t a sign for the years travels.\n\nI loved Untappd and it is a great way to find out a bit more about the city that I\'m staying. Now I seek out different beers instead of the same 5 or 6...plus I like getting awarded badges, I\'m not sure if my doctor would agree with that last statement.\n\nKeep the podcasts comming...',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(469,880,'Robert Fenerty','robert@fenerty.com','','173.36.196.6','2012-02-16 21:24:46','2012-02-17 02:24:46','Some Foodspotting photos are minor works of art.  Their photos are also nicely integrated into the $10 Fodors app. Fodors reviews are edited and tend to be less extreme than say, Yelp, where so many reviews are either \"awesome, 5 stars!\"  or \"The waiter looked at me askance, 1 star.\"',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(470,931,'Leo Vegoda','leo@vegoda.org','','76.171.97.185','2012-04-21 16:23:18','2012-04-21 16:23:18','I disagree. I would prefer to have good Internet access that I pay for or a good breakfast that I pay for than something free, which will inevitably be of lower quality. After all, on a business trip, sustenance and network access are reasonable business expenses. That being said, I think the best \"amenity\" I want at a hotel is a fantastic concierge. A superb concierge is much better than a quick search on yelp.com and will help make your stay in a city far more fulfilling.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(471,931,'Rich','rmfraser2@hotmail.com','http://richmanwisco.com','207.10.205.1','2012-04-23 16:12:56','2012-04-23 21:12:56','Nothing stretches your per diem dollar better than the free breakfast.  Can\'t beat it on value, although you have to get quite creative when it comes to those reconstituted eggs.  Various combinations of cheese, ham, and hot sauce make them much more palatable.  That, some yogurt, a cup of oatmeal and a piece of fruit, and I\'m good until lunch without snacking.  Just have to avoid the biscuits and gravy at all costs!',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(472,949,'lori Humm','lori.humm@gmail.com','http://lori.humm@gmail.com','166.147.115.244','2012-05-01 21:22:59','2012-05-02 02:22:59','Mark - you need to give Delta a try. I know the ORD hub is your issue, but I can\'t say enough about how well they treat elites. I was seated in coach for the first time in forever having not gotten an upgrade, and before we took off the first class attendant came back and found all the platinum and diamond elites and took drink orders for once we were in flight.\n\nI never experience the equipment issues you do, but I do do ATL gate dance once in a while (gate A1, no! B12! No! B 24!) but overall they do a fantastic job w customer service. Almost all of the things you talk about I think to myself, nope, not on Delta. \n\nIn general, they done a good job of automating so much and yes - you can change your seat after you check in. You can even check your upgrade status on a smart phone and track your luggage.\n\nSomeone\'s doing it right. I hope other listeners and readers can agree with me!',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(473,949,'Pierre','pierredevaux@hotmail.com','http://www.TravelingBones.com','50.136.157.53','2012-05-02 00:25:09','2012-05-02 05:25:09','Saw your post via a friend\'s share on FB, and I figured I\'d add my 2 cents. AA has been on my sh!t list ever since they wasted one of my vacation days several years ago. Instead of getting me to Costa Rica, they got me to LAX 4 hours late and their connecting flight was already gone. There were 20 other people going to Costa Rica on the same flight from SF -- they all lost a day as well. AA\'s reaction? Blame it on the weather (it wasn\'t the cause), then deny any responsibility, then back down and reimburse everyone for a hotel.\n\nThey are *by far* the worst airline in the world. They can\'t go under fast enough, IMHO, and I won\'t shed a tear for their demise.  I\'ve flown hundreds of thousands of miles on AA, but I feel no attachment to that crap company and their crap employees.  :evil:',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(474,961,'Jeffrey Carpenter','jjc@pobox.com','http://www.droopy.org','50.73.169.85','2012-08-06 06:29:26','2012-08-06 11:29:26','I am an experienced traveller and also had a bag stolen in Europe on the train. I was in the vestibule a couple of stations before the airport and a pair of guys distracted me and took my briefcase which was sitting on my luggage next to me. Fortunately, my passport was on me, but I lost my laptop.\n\nI did change some things in how I travel. I now use a backpack and when on a train or in a station, it always has something looped around part of me. But it is hard to have 100% coverage. Recently, a friend had an expensive camera stolen out of his bag while he was sleeping on the plane. The brazen thief replaced the camera with bottles of water to make the bag weigh about the same and delay discovery of the loss.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(475,983,'Rich','rmfraser2@hotmail.com','http://richmanwisco.com','69.217.167.48','2012-06-16 21:11:18','2012-06-17 02:11:18','This may be a touch off target, but the guide that you linked to states the minimum wage for tipped employees at $2.13 per hour.  What it doesn\'t mention in large type is that if the employee does not receive enough tips to equal the federal minimum wage of $7.25, then the employer is responsible for paying the difference.  Mind you, I\'m not suggesting that $7.25 represents any kind of living wage.  I didn\'t even really know that until a few hours ago when chasing a link about how restaurant chains (even the fancy ones) barely meet even that low bar.\n\nBack to this topic, I agree with your take on tipping the housekeeping staff.  I\'m probably totally off base, but I always considered housekeeping to be a service inherent to my stay.  I get that service whether I ask for it or not, as opposed to the bellhop, bartender or concierge, which are optional services.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(476,995,'Arnoud','arnoud.heijnis@marriott.com','','62.218.228.6','2012-06-27 10:44:24','2012-06-27 15:44:24','Hi Mark, long time no \"speak\", however I haven\'s missed an episode of your podcast. I am sure you can help me with this question. I since two years I have moved in to the 4 to 6 flights a week demographic and every time I\'m in the lounge looking at the depature screens I see the blinking green balls in front of a flight. Some have them, some don\'t, some are blinking and some aren\'t. I have tried to figure it out, thinking it had to do with boarding or not boarding, arrived or not arrived, on schedule or late. But I haven\'t figured it out.. I am sure you can tell me what the logic is behind this magic blinking balls ;) Thanks a lot...',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(477,1034,'Saurab Bhargava','saurab.bhargava@gmail.com','http://www.saurabbhargava.com','99.24.204.11','2012-09-24 14:39:54','2012-09-24 19:39:54','Mark - my many apologies for being so delayed in this note...I just caught up on ALL podcasts for 2012 on a long flight from LA to Chicago in which I left my iPad with TSA (successfully recovered though) so I was left only with my iPod to listen to podcasts.\n\nMany congratulations for this milestone! I\'ve always enjoyed these discussions through the years and I\'m always so grateful that you\'ve been such a supporter of my music as well.  So here\'s looking forward to 100 more (even if it takes another 10 years)...\n\nYour friend,\nSaurab',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(478,1068,'mark','mpeacock@travelcommons.com','','99.16.131.181','2012-08-16 23:15:34','2012-08-17 04:15:34','FYI, Catbird Seat is <a href=\"http://www.bonappetit.com/restaurants-travel/2012/09/catbird-seat\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\">#5</a> in Bon Appetit\'s <em>The Hot 10 -- America\'s Best New Restaurants</em>',0,'1','','comment',0,1),
(479,1095,'Jeanette Irwin','jeanette.irwin@gmail.com','','155.229.176.82','2012-10-26 09:48:07','2012-10-26 14:48:07','Great idea for a video series! I\'ve often wanted to take advantage of long layovers by making a quick trip into the city the airport in, but have never been able to figure out what to do with my luggage (if I can help it, I don\'t check my bag, but bring it on the plane with me). Do you have this issues as well, Mark? If so, what do you do about it?',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(480,1095,'mark','mpeacock@travelcommons.com','','50.200.5.112','2012-10-26 16:09:22','2012-10-26 21:09:22','Jeanette -\n\nWith increased post-9/11 security, short-term luggage checks are scarce if not extinct in the US and increasingly expensive in places like Heathrow. While I carry-on almost exclusively, I\'ll check my bag if I\'m doing a layover tour (I did this for my Frankfurt sprint). If it\'s a more spontaneous excursion, I\'ll try to check my bag at a hotel at the airport or on my first stop. I\'m usually successful, but I also generously tip to help grease the skids.',0,'1','','comment',0,1),
(481,1095,'Frick','Fricksworld@gmail.com','http://stillworkingonme.blogspot.com/','74.174.236.67','2012-10-29 08:04:33','2012-10-29 13:04:33','Great video, it seems my layovers are never long enough to pull off any excursions. I\'ve watched the Wiener Circe show on Tru TV, wow it\'s much calmer during the daylight hours. I was looking at your Flickr pictures, take a look back at your My Briefcase picture from 2006 technology certainly has evolved in the last 7 years.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(482,1095,'mark','mpeacock@travelcommons.com','','99.16.131.181','2012-10-31 21:55:02','2012-11-01 02:55:02','Steve -\n\nI lived around the corner from the Wiener Circle in my single days. I can tell you from personal experience that it is a very interesting/entertaining place after midnight on Friday or Saturday.\n\nI was looking at that old briefcase picture the other day. The Moto clamshell phone and Bluetooth headset are the standouts, though the old U2 clickwheel iPod certainly has a vintage feel to it.',0,'1','','comment',0,1),
(483,1119,'Frick','Fricksworld@gmail.com','http://stillworkingonme.blogspot.com/','74.174.236.67','2012-10-29 07:50:03','2012-10-29 12:50:03','You coud Marta up to downtown Atlanta, there\'s plenty to do in a 5 hour time span. I rely on Untappd (if for no other reason than to see how my liver is holding out) and just ths last year I\'ve become a big fan of Urbanspoon, especially when I\'m looking for a new pace to eat in a city I\'ve been to many times. The Food TV application comes in handy as well.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(484,1119,'mark','mpeacock@travelcommons.com','','99.16.131.181','2012-10-31 22:00:40','2012-11-01 03:00:40','Too bad there\'s not a MARTA stop near SweetWater Brewing.\n\nI\'ve used Urbanspoon before, but not the Food TV app. I\'ll have to pull it down and give it a try...',0,'1','','comment',0,1),
(485,1177,'Daisy Y. Hickman','daisy.y.hickman.fi58@lycos.com','http://alvarolopez50.wordpress.com/2012/11/04/para-quienes-saben-que-hay-algo-alla/','78.108.63.44','2013-01-20 09:03:26','2013-01-20 15:03:26','Tomsky’s freewheeling swagger—“Kidnap me, duct tape my face, drop me out of a plane, and I promise you I will land in a parking lot adjacent to a hotel and in less than a day I’ll be wearing a suit, assisting guests, earning a nice check, and making friends at the local bar”— can feel, at times, like overcompensation for the fact that his life has not much changed. He still works at a hotel, and as in any tragicomedy, escape seems impossible. Heads in Beds is not a redemptive tale, nor is it told with much distance. Mostly—though tacitly and maybe unintentionally—it’s about the degree to which youthful inertia can determine a whole life.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(486,1265,'mark','mpeacock@travelcommons.com','https://migrate.travelcommons.com','70.196.131.14','2013-09-25 14:43:39','2013-09-25 19:43:39','Another example that Apple Maps still isn\'t ready for prime time -- BBC News: Apple Maps flaw results in drivers crossing airport runway http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-24246646',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(487,1265,'Rich Fraser (richmanwisco)','rmfraser2@hotmail.com','','207.10.205.1','2013-10-07 13:01:05','2013-10-07 18:01:05','Long time, no squawk!\n\nThing that struck me during the episode (and you\'ve mentioned before) is how our tools have evolved over the years. Here is what I am using on my Android smart phone.\n\nFor maps, it\'s Google Maps, although their latest release hasn\'t been the most user friendly compared to the replaced version. Nice thing about it is that it leverages your other Google searches in other devices. For example, the Map that I created on my laptop is now accessible on my smart phone.\n\nFor flight information, it\'s FlightAware all the way. I have learned of flight delays on FlighAware before the airline posted them. In most cases you can find out where your connecting equipment is coming from, so that even if the flight you\'re on is running behind, you can also find out if the connection will be delayed. That is huge piece of mind. That said, all of the airlines\' mobile apps have gotten much better at relaying flight information than even a year ago.\n\nFor weather, it\'s largely a matter of taste. I am a pilot myself, and there is an app called Aviation Weather that gives me the plain text Terminal Area Forecast for airports I am flying to. It\'s a good way of predicting delays at places like Newark or O\'Hare.\n\nFor traveling as long as I (we) have, you have to admit that with all the information at one\'s fingertips has removed most of the stress from traveling.\n\nTip: If you\'re ever in Kalamazoo, the Beer Exchange is phenomenal.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(488,1265,'Lori Humm','lori.humm@gmail.com','','205.144.227.116','2013-10-15 13:10:58','2013-10-15 18:10:58','Hi Mark! I\'m still doing the gulf coast run, moving between Baton Rouge, LA and Jackson, MS so I concur with your summertime travel warning. However, as I also want to get home on Thursday night and staying over would get me home Friday noon, I have just learned to be patient and where possible work the Delta Diamond line for my backup flights. The one drawback is in Jackson, the Delta side of the terminal (they have two security access points as the airport is one long building)has no restaurant or bar! I often remark to TSA about the cruel joke that is putting a Starbucks right at the entry to security (or exit, as I routinely hit it when I land!)\n\nAs for Pre-Check though - I had to tell you that Delta has pre-check at Midway. I didn\'t think that pre-check was so airline specific, but I went through it in late September. \n\nI\'m very lucky as all my outbound airports- FLL and PBI have it (oh yeah, I moved by the way). In Jackson, they don\'t have a body scanner - they still have the metal detector - and if you are pre-check, they hand you a plastic card that allows you to to by-pass the procedures, even though you are in the same line as everyone. This process is laughable as it just serves to confuse the large number of leisure travelers in line. It also hold up the line because the TSA agent is explaining the process every single time. \n\nAs for why you might be getting pulled - this happened to me in FLL a number of times. And the problem was not my name. The TSA agent did not know that the three beeps when they scan your ticket means \"pre-check\" so for about a month, they assumed it meant \"random\" and they kept throwing everyone in the main line. Sadly, took FLL about a month to figure out why no one was going through pre-check. \n\nI\'m glad you are still podcasting! Thanks for the effort!\n\nCheers!',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(489,1284,'Chris Webb','chrislwebb@gmail.com','','109.157.22.61','2013-11-13 04:57:37','2013-11-13 10:57:37','Thanks, Mark. A really useful city guide. Will you be doing more?',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(490,1284,'Mark Peacock','mpeacock@travelcommons.com','','38.98.177.11','2013-11-13 09:48:58','2013-11-13 15:48:58','Chris, glad you liked it. I will probably do one for New Orleans next. I\'ve been travelling there on business since April, so I should have something to say. However, I need to do a regular podcast first. Video takes me forever...',0,'1','','comment',0,1),
(491,1305,'Frick','fricksworld@gmail.com','','66.229.74.188','2014-01-31 09:42:48','2014-01-31 15:42:48','Great episode.... \nAs far as travel apps I still like TripIt just for the fact that it organizes and places everything in my Google calendar. \nI have also been using Google Now when I arrive it lets me know whats going on locally. \nI\'ve been an UrbanSpoon contributor for years and have just this past week starting adding reviews to Yelp, we\'ll see how it goes.\nAs far \"What\'s Important When I Stay At A Hotel\" we just recently had this discussion around the office. Breakfast is very important, I spent two mornings this week eating powdered eggs at a Fairfield Inn, not a great way to start my day. \nA decent workout area is something I also look for, I get really aggravated with treadmill belts that slip and causes me to wrench my back. \nI also use the <a href=\"http://fitdeck.com/\" rel=\"nofollow\">FitDeck app</a> for working out in my room; <a href=\"http://runkeeper.com\" rel=\"nofollow\">Runkeeper</a> is another great app for tracking. \nFinally, I want the desk to have a clear view of the TV, yes nerdy, but it\'s important.',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(492,1353,'Mark Skinner','mark96732@gmail.com','','65.114.129.62','2014-06-09 16:55:36','2014-06-09 21:55:36','Hi Mark-\n\nLong-time listener. I enjoy your podcast. \n\nJust listened to the latest on a BOS-IAD flight (connecting to IAD-FRA-VIE). \n\nA few comments (edit, of course, as you see fit).\n\n1] A couple of years ago I had a 7 day around-the-world flight. OGG-HNL (overnight)-SFO-SEA (overnight, meetings), -IAD-DAKAR-JNB-CPT (meetings &amp; conference)-JNB-SIN-NRT-HNL-OGG\n\nI had to return early from my conference to brief a VP visiting our Maui operation, and noticed that if I came east, I could pick up a day crossing the date line that direction. I was in biz or UA Global First most of the way, so not too shabby. I hit the wall in SIN, and had trouble finding the right terminal for my flight to NRT, but I got there. When I arrived in OGG, my truck wouldn\'t start; it took me 45 minutes to get it going, but I was successful in the end. Made the briefing, and even took some customers out to dinner that night! I was a zombie for days afterwards, however. \n\nLiving on Maui, my \"normal\" first flight is usually 5 hours to the west coast. I\'m usually stopping there, or at least over-nighting, before I head further east. The short domestic red-eyes (HI-west coast, or trans-cons), even in domestic first, don\'t make it for me. Flights over 8+ hours are OK, but only if in BF or something with a lie-flat bed. I\'ll have dinner beforehand, and then take an ambien, and sleep for the flight. \n\nAbout the iPhone: Compared to my BlackBerry, the battery lasts for 1/10th the time, but on the otherhand, I get 10x the performance out of it. What I have found is to 1] reign in Siri, she sucks up battery power, and 2] put it into \"airplane mode\" ASAP, and turn off the display. Then it lasts forever. The worst situation it to get off a 5-7 hour flight, with no charging, and then have to use the TomTom ap for directions. That sucks down the battery in no time flat. But happily, I travel with a \"12-V DC\" adapter for the rental car, and that allows the phone to be used otherwise. \n\nI agree that UAL is having a bad season, with some issues, but I\'ve not been on strike yet.\n\nMark',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(493,1353,'Mark Peacock','mpeacock@travelcommons.com','','70.196.135.23','2014-06-10 14:50:05','2014-06-10 19:50:05','Mark -\n\nI think I\'d be willing to do 5 hr trips if I was coming home to Maui  :grin: \n\nMark',0,'1','','comment',0,1),
(494,1353,'Tony','Twhitefsu@gmail.com','','202.159.138.142','2014-06-19 07:43:09','2014-06-19 12:43:09','Thanks for the advice about the Bose headphones. I am an ex-pat living down under and I survive the Syd-Lax flight by watching movies(cannot sleep on flights).  I have been debating about purchasing the Bose headphones and I have decided to purchase them with my delta miles.\n\nThanks again for the advice.\n\nTony',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(495,1353,'Paul Filmer','skippyscage@gmail.com','http://www.skippyscage.com','198.241.174.15','2014-07-13 18:26:42','2014-07-13 23:26:42','Welcome to the wacky world of Manila Airports. All exactly the same surprises I had years ago, but now got used to. It makes travelling interesting at least!',0,'1','','comment',0,0),
(498,1478,'Frick','fricksworld@gmail.com','http://www.hypesouthflorida.com/back-again-and-gone/','99.123.205.71','2015-04-22 18:39:47','2015-04-22 23:39:47','Wow, after reading this post I looked back and discovered that I\'ve been listening to Travel Commons since 2006. \r\nIn 2005 I did a <a href=\"http://fricksworld.blogspot.com/2005/03/whats-in-bag.html\" rel=\"nofollow\">What\'s In My Bag</a> post as well. Here\'s what has changed with me. My ThinkPad is now a Lenovo. I no longer carry a digital camera. The iPaq &amp; MP3 player are long gone. No longer carry a presentation pointer thanks to an iPad, Keynote and an iPhone. The travel wallet, Altoids, Moleskin (even though I do have the app loaded on my iOS devices)and collection of pens remain.\r\nI\'ve added a flashlight, several HDMI connectors and a portable charging device.\r\nThanks for the memories.',0,'1','Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/35.0.1916.153 Safari/537.36','comment',0,0),
(501,1478,'mark','mpeacock@travelcommons.com','','99.16.128.30','2015-04-22 21:17:38','2015-04-23 02:17:38','Next month, I will have been doing this podcast for 10 years!',0,'1','Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/42.0.2311.90 Safari/537.36','comment',498,1),
(508,1505,'Dawn','dawn@thehappyheadlines.com','','76.25.22.12','2015-05-29 21:51:26','2015-05-30 02:51:26','Thanks for the retrospective - good stuff!  Also, this link is broken: “Like” the TravelCommons fan page on Facebook\r\n\r\nSorry - but broken links freak me out!  Safe travels to Japan and Scotland!  I\'ll be checking out the fan page (argh - broken link) for photos.',0,'1','Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/43.0.2357.81 Safari/537.36','comment',0,0),
(722,1542,'Richard Balls','redskinsfan23@aol.com','','199.116.241.101','2015-10-13 23:26:18','2015-10-14 04:26:18','Hi Mark,\r\nLove this stream of consciousness format of this episode. Please do more of these if it ensures a rapid production schedule. Travel Commons is the best travel podcast!',0,'1','Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_10_5) AppleWebKit/600.8.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/8.0.8 Safari/600.8.9','comment',0,0),
(723,1542,'Rob Cheshire','robcheshire@hotmail.com','','62.92.134.150','2015-10-14 13:18:10','2015-10-14 18:18:10','Hi Mark,\r\n\r\nGreat podcast as always!\r\n\r\nIn defense of BA, you stepped into the middle of their new hand-luggage policy roll-out, which is designed to reign-in the amount of cabin baggage, which had really gotten out of hand. They are being strict across the board, on elite members, as well as everyone else, and it is definitely having a positive impact on bin-space, as well as minimising the amount of messing around (checking the last few wheelie bags that can\'t be stowed) that the cabin crew have to take care of in the minutes prior to push-back. \r\n\r\nRegarding LHR T5, I agree it is a nightmare, UNLESS you have access to the BA lounges, which are spacious and well-catered. I assume your AA status gets you in the lounge, so what is the problem?! ;-)\r\n\r\nKeep up the great work!\r\n\r\nMany thanks,\r\n\r\nRob',0,'1','Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/45.0.2454.101 Safari/537.36','comment',0,0),
(724,1542,'mark','mpeacock@travelcommons.com','','38.98.177.11','2015-10-14 13:34:13','2015-10-14 18:34:13','Rob -\r\n\r\nOne thing that I liked about BA\'s luggage regime -- and I have it queued up for the next episode -- is tagging underseat bags (briefcases, backpacks) with a bright yellow tag to keep people from putting 2 bags overhead. I think it\'s a good way to shame rude early boarders.\r\n\r\nThanks for the comments. I\'ll use them on the next episode.\r\n\r\nRegards,\r\nMark',0,'1','Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/45.0.2454.101 Safari/537.36','comment',0,1),
(848,1598,'Frick','fricksworld@gmail.com','http://stillworkingonme.blogspot.com/','73.245.97.93','2016-03-13 16:53:53','2016-03-13 21:53:53','How do use Evernote, business/personal or both?',0,'1','Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:45.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/45.0','comment',0,0),
(849,1598,'mark','mpeacock@travelcommons.com','','99.16.128.142','2016-03-13 18:26:01','2016-03-13 23:26:01','Just personal use. I used to use if to store all sorts of things -- receipts, recipes, etc. Now I just use it to store travel articles (using the Web Clipper Chrome extension), podcast idea notes, and general to-do lists. I like how it syncs across all my devices. Am thinking of looking at OneNote, though.',0,'1','Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/48.0.2564.116 Safari/537.36','comment',848,1),
(850,1598,'Slashdogx','jrbmailx@comcast.net','','73.155.143.42','2016-03-16 08:39:52','2016-03-16 13:39:52','Hello Mark.   I always enjoy your podcast when it appears in the feed.   I have a question - I am going to Spain - Madrid, Barcelona, Granada, Seville - for the first time this summer.  You mentioned a URL of some of your favorite spots.  I did not see the link in the notes above.    Knowing the type of traveler you are from years of listening, I would be interested in getting a link of \'your\' spots.  Is that possible?  Thanks, Slashdogx',0,'1','Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_11_3) AppleWebKit/601.4.4 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/9.0.3 Safari/601.4.4','comment',0,0),
(964,1658,'Jim McDonough','jpmcdjr@gmail.com','','99.8.58.115','2016-10-03 13:23:05','2016-10-03 18:23:05','Mark- it sounded like the very first part of the podcast, the first intro, was from the prior podcast about delays.\r\n\r\nMy wife and I love Rick Steves (we call ourselves Rickheads) and use his books all the time.  But I know what you mean about his fans overwhelming a particular place. It\'s funny how many people in the States have no idea who he is, but in Europe, Rick Steves sits at the right hand of the father. Get your restaurant or hotel into his book, and you have it made.',0,'1','Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_12) AppleWebKit/602.1.50 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/10.0 Safari/602.1.50','comment',0,0),
(965,1658,'mark','mpeacock@travelcommons.com','','99.16.128.142','2016-10-03 14:00:24','2016-10-03 19:00:24','Jim -\r\n\r\nYou have sharp ears! Thanks for the note. Seems I fat-fingered a WAV file in production. I\'ve just uploaded a corrected file. I now have to go do a corrective action flogging with my production staff (namely me).\r\n\r\nThanks!\r\nMark',0,'1','Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/53.0.2785.116 Safari/537.36','comment',0,1),
(1167,1697,'Robert Fenerty','robert@fenerty.com','','67.161.23.47','2017-01-18 21:37:35','2017-01-19 02:37:35','Not many people are courageous enough to admit what a time sink it can be to find, purchase and setup a local SIM card. Sometimes it\'s easy, the many Heathrow SIM vending machines being a great example. And Austria is a breeze.\r\n\r\nBut outside of western countries, I\'ve had to hand over my passport, stand in long lines, and try to explain \"no, I need the one with data\" to clerks whose language I don\'t speak. Once I found out after leaving the store that my SIM was not properly initialized. Please go back to square one.\r\n\r\nI\'m sure you\'ve heard this before, but the Verizon Travelpass is a great alternative for those 2-3 day trips. It\'s often less expensive than the local SIM and it\'s about as painless to enable/disable as you can imagine. I\'ll spare you the technical details.\r\n\r\nPlease keep up the good work, the beer tips, and the warm sentiments from the road. Your podcast has become an old friend that I have over for dinner every once and a while.',0,'1','Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.11; rv:50.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/50.0','comment',0,0),
(1178,1697,'mark','mpeacock@travelcommons.com','','24.104.73.18','2017-01-20 13:20:19','2017-01-20 18:20:19','Agree with your Verizon comment. For me, the hassle-vs-cost break point also 2-3 days. I did a long weekend in Iceland and just used an AT&T global package. AT&T\'s package isn\'t as good as Verizon\'s. I hope competition pushes them in that direction.\r\n\r\nGlad you\'ve enjoyed the podcast over these many years  :grin:',0,'1','Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/55.0.2883.87 Safari/537.36','comment',0,1),
(1292,1718,'Dan','dbrener@gmail.com','','206.172.44.35','2017-03-02 10:51:52','2017-03-02 15:51:52','My biggest travel tip right now to my friends is get Nexus! Not only is it great when coming or going to the US (we live in Canada), but it gets you TSA Precheck while in the US which is great to have.',0,'1','Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_12_3) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/56.0.2924.87 Safari/537.36','comment',0,0),
(1341,1758,'Dawn Peacock Owens','dawn@thehappyheadlines.com','http://www.cbdtalkpodcast.com','107.2.142.4','2017-05-20 09:11:17','2017-05-20 14:11:17','Great job on the video!  I like it! :mrgreen:',0,'1','Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/58.0.3029.110 Safari/537.36','comment',0,0),
(1374,1784,'Mark Skinner','mark96732@gmail.com','','65.210.46.139','2017-08-22 12:15:58','2017-08-22 17:15:58','Hi Mark,\r\n\r\nLong time listener, really enjoy the show. \r\n\r\nYour comments on the Dreamliner were very interesting to me. I\'ve flown one long-haul on several occasions, and yes, the windows are fun to play with. But you didn\'t have any comments on what I think is the most important attribute. FYI, the 787 isn\'t just another \"metal tube\", and that\'s the whole point. It is constructed from carbon fiber, and can be pressurized to a higher level than most normal passenger jets. As such, the environment inside is at higher air pressure (like being at 6,000\' rather than 10000\' elevation), with a higher level of humidity (air not so dry), and more refreshes. I found it a great plane to fly on a long red-eye! Or any 5+ hour flight. \r\nI\'m looking forward to this fall, when I\'m flying one r/t LAX-SYD in UA\'s BF cabin (14 hour flight).',0,'1','Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_12_6) AppleWebKit/603.3.8 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/10.1.2 Safari/603.3.8','comment',0,0),
(1381,1798,'Kevin','me@kouyang.me','','38.88.213.82','2017-09-29 11:17:43','2017-09-29 16:17:43','Hey Mark this is great!\r\n\r\nLove your Work!\r\n\r\n :mrgreen:',0,'1','Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_12_6) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/61.0.3163.100 Safari/537.36','comment',0,0),
(1382,1854,'Back and Gone Again | Holiday Travel Bingo - Back and Gone Again','','http://www.hypeorlando.com/back-and-gone-again/2017/11/22/holiday-travel-bingo/','54.209.62.97','2017-11-22 20:44:26','2017-11-23 01:44:26','[&#8230;] Since I rarely have an original idea, this post comes courtesy of Mark Peacock a fellow road warrior over at TravelCommons. [&#8230;]',0,'1','The Incutio XML-RPC PHP Library -- WordPress/4.3.1','pingback',0,0),
(1410,1905,'Allan','amarko1@mac.com','','166.216.157.36','2018-01-03 10:16:42','2018-01-03 15:16:42','Have had our Away luggage for only about six months prior to the battery ban. I really like the ‘smart’ charging feature. Luckily the Away battery is a nicely designed self-contained and easily removable unit (two screws; screwdriver included!) Now the battery lives in my backpack, and the luggage still usable.',0,'1','Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 11_2_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/604.4.7 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile/15C153 [FBAN/FBIOS;FBAV/153.0.0.53.87;FBBV/84268146;FBDV/iPhone7,2;FBMD/iPhone;FBSN/iOS;FBSV/11.2.1;FBSS/2;FBCR/AT&T;FBID/phone;FBLC/en_US;FBOP/5;FBRV','comment',0,0),
(1411,1905,'mark','mpeacock@travelcommons.com','','99.16.128.97','2018-01-03 11:55:16','2018-01-03 16:55:16','Smart move to purchase the Away bag. I\'m slipping in one more flight with my Bluesmart before the 15 Jan deadline and moving to a new Victorinox Werks Traveler 5.0 22-inch 2-wheeler. My last Victorinox lasted me ~10 years, so I felt good about re-upping with them.',0,'1','Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/63.0.3239.108 Safari/537.36','comment',1410,1),
(1414,1916,'Steve Frick','fricksworld@gmail.com','http://www.hypeorlando.com/back-and-gone-again/','184.174.187.130','2018-01-29 19:37:49','2018-01-30 00:37:49','I replaced my luggage with the exact same bag as I had before, a TravelPro. It was an easy choice, I like you, wanted a simple bag. I knew my gear would fit, I already knew what to put in the outside pockets. \r\n\r\nOne of the guys I work with recently bought and then returned a 4-wheel spinner. The reason for the return....... he discovered that most hotel parking lots weren\'t level and each time he let go of the bag to raise the trunk lid his bag rolled away. It makes sense.',0,'1','Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/63.0.3239.132 Safari/537.36','comment',0,0),
(1415,1916,'mark','mpeacock@travelcommons.com','','99.16.128.97','2018-01-30 11:28:38','2018-01-30 16:28:38','Had that same problem with my Bluesmart 4-wheeler, except in airports rather than parking lots. I\'d put the Bluesmart against the wall in a restroom and it would wander away.',0,'1','Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_13_3) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/64.0.3282.119 Safari/537.36','comment',1414,1),
(1419,1937,'Robert Fenerty','robert@fenerty.com','','73.71.177.94','2018-02-06 23:31:21','2018-02-07 04:31:21','I want a four-wheel spinner; my wife loves hers. But I won\'t get one, because I believe that bags with only two wheels have a bit more interior space than four-wheelers of the same length. \r\n\r\nThat\'s because the spinners can\'t tuck into the side of the bag so you\'re losing the inch or two between the middle of the spinner wheel and the top of the stem that attaches the spinner to the bottom of the bag. How\'s that for OCD?',0,'1','Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.13; rv:57.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/57.0','comment',0,0),
(1420,1937,'mark','mpeacock@travelcommons.com','','12.208.132.3','2018-02-07 08:55:30','2018-02-07 13:55:30','I\'ll see your OCD and raise you! I had plans to measure the difference in the ground clearance between my wife\'s spinner bag and my new 2-wheeler and calculate the packing volume lost -- but didn\'t because I thought it was going too far down the rabbit hole. I\'m now rethinking that...  :idea:',0,'1','Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_13_3) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/64.0.3282.140 Safari/537.36','comment',1419,1),
(1424,1937,'Jim McD','Jamespmcdonough@gmail.com','','68.7.117.125','2018-02-09 20:36:10','2018-02-10 01:36:10','My favorite bag was a Rick Steves 21” rollaboard that had just one compartment and two really good wheels.  I used it for a decade and finally had problems with my wife’s equivalent bag (wheel fell apart) and the side of mine cracked from all the abuse.  He doesn’t sell them any more, because it was a hair too big for European airlines. We are now using Samsonite spinners.  They don’t hold as much as the old RS bags.  We only check bags when we are staying in one place for at least a week. Carrying on is simply liberating.',0,'1','Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; CPU OS 11_3 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile/15E5178f [FBAN/FBIOS;FBAV/158.0.0.44.98;FBBV/90997758;FBDV/iPad6,7;FBMD/iPad;FBSN/iOS;FBSV/11.3;FBSS/2;FBCR/;FBID/tablet;FBLC/en_US;FBOP/5;FBRV/0]','comment',0,0),
(1450,1947,'Rob Cheshire','robcheshire@hotmail.com','','86.188.102.54','2018-03-06 12:42:48','2018-03-06 17:42:48','Hi Mark, thanks for continuing to be the voice of the traveler!\r\n\r\nRegarding your lighthearted suggestion that you might start recording taproom video guides, I wanted to give this idea a big THUMBS-UP!\r\n\r\nHaving followed your craft-beer exploits on Untappd for the past year, I can certify your credentials are beyond reproach! \r\n\r\nI would love to see your taproom guide to Chicago, New Orleans, New York, Edinburgh, and for any other city that you feel qualified to review!\r\n\r\nBest Regards,\r\n\r\nRob',0,'1','Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/63.0.3239.132 Safari/537.36','comment',0,0),
(1451,1947,'mark','mpeacock@travelcommons.com','','99.16.128.97','2018-03-06 15:55:10','2018-03-06 20:55:10','Was working out the itinerary for a 4-taproom tour from Chicago\'s Midway airport last weekend; want to give Southwest fliers some layover ideas. Planning to do it next month (April), hitting Lo Rez, Whiner, Marz, and Moody Tongue -- taprooms that have recently opened in the grittier, post-industrial landscape of Chicago\'s near south side. Won\'t be able to do with this with mass transit; will be an Uber/Lyft tour.',0,'1','Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_13_3) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/65.0.3325.106 Safari/537.36','comment',1450,1),
(1455,1947,'Rob Cheshire','robcheshire@hotmail.com','','86.188.102.54','2018-03-11 14:35:20','2018-03-11 19:35:20','Sounds great Mark! I have a trip scheduled to Chicago in August to catch a couple of Reds games at Wrigley, and also to do some serious taproom touring. I will be very happy to field-test any guides that you might have published by then! \r\n\r\nI have been looking at the area North of Wrigley around Bowmanville/Andersonville, which seems to have a reasonable selection of taprooms in close proximity to one-another, including the Half Acre Balmoral Taproom, the Spiteful Brewing Taproom, The Empirical Taproom and Andersonville Brewing Co. Is this a part of town that you are familiar with?',0,'1','Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/64.0.3282.186 Safari/537.36','comment',0,0),
(1456,1947,'mark','mpeacock@travelcommons.com','','99.16.128.97','2018-03-11 21:25:11','2018-03-12 02:25:11','I\'m a bit familiar with Andersonville. Half Acre Balmoral and Spiteful are a couple of blocks from each other. Both relatively new. Half Acre is much bigger; both make good beer. Empirical can be the north end of a taproom crawl down the southbound side of Ravenswood Ave -- Empirical, Band of Bohemia (more of a bar/restaurant that makes its own beer), Dovetail and Begyle. That would put you back on Irving Park Rd, not far from Wrigleyville. \n\nAlso, check out Hopleaf on Clark Ave in Andersonville. It\'s a great beer bar.',0,'1','Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_13_3) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/65.0.3325.124 Safari/537.36','comment',1455,1),
(1457,1947,'Rob Cheshire','robcheshire@hotmail.com','','185.94.184.146','2018-03-12 04:57:16','2018-03-12 09:57:16','Thanks Mark!\r\n\r\nMy plans are coming together nicely!',0,'1','Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/64.0.3282.186 Safari/537.36','comment',0,0),
(1525,2062,'Rob Cheshire','robcheshire@hotmail.com','https://taproomadventure.blogspot.com/','194.168.209.214','2018-07-23 07:35:44','2018-07-23 12:35:44','Thanks Mark! I will definitely build a visit to Marz and Lo-rez into my schedule for my August trip to Chicago. I am undecided about Whiner, which my be a bit too \"European\" in terms of beer styles for my tastes.\r\n\r\nI am a bit conflicted about Lagunitas, being part of the evil-Heineken Empire! I have no doubt that they have some great beers, and that the tasting room is a very cool spot.\r\n\r\nThere are so many awesome independent craft breweries these days, that I feel I can safely boycott anything owned by the Macros, and not be missing out too much.\r\n\r\nHere in the UK, we have seen a couple of major sellouts in recent weeks, with Beavertown and Fourpure selling their souls to Heineken and Lion Brands respectively.\r\n\r\nBoth will no doubt continue to make great beers, but I will choose to avoid them, unless I find myself in a venue where I have no independent craft beers to select from.',0,'1','Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/67.0.3396.99 Safari/537.36','comment',0,0),
(1527,2062,'mark','mpeacock@travelcommons.com','','216.196.180.210','2018-07-23 10:02:01','2018-07-23 15:02:01','Understand the points. My first visit to Lagunitas was to their original Petaluma brewery, pre-Chicago, and pre-Heineken, so I have a bit of a soft spot for them. Same for Goose Island. Was a regular at the brew pub when it first opened.\r\n\r\nOn a Southside tour, you could sub in Moody Tongue (moodytongue.com), a couple of block walk (in daylight, with a group) from Lo Rez. Interesting \"culinary brewing\" approach. Nice taproom, complete with reasonably priced oysters and a great chocolate cake.',0,'1','Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/67.0.3396.99 Safari/537.36','comment',1525,1),
(1528,2062,'Rob Cheshire','robcheshire@hotmail.com','https://taproomadventure.blogspot.com/','194.168.209.214','2018-07-23 10:20:10','2018-07-23 15:20:10','Thanks Mark. I also have my eye on Vice District Brewing and Motor Row Brewing, all possibly do-able along with Marz, Lo-rez and Moody Tongue on a grand tour of the near Southside and Lower Westside!',0,'1','Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/67.0.3396.99 Safari/537.36','comment',0,0),
(1635,2093,'stephen frick','fricksworld@gmail.com','http://hypeamerica.com/back-and-gone-again','71.3.33.29','2018-08-10 20:01:50','2018-08-11 01:01:50','Lots of content as well as comments on this episode. Chicago Midway Layover Southside Taproom Tour video I viewed but somehow forgot to hit send on my comment. Thoroughly enjoyed the tour, when it comes to travel and Midway, all I can think about is delays. \r\nChicago, I recently sent all the members of my tribe there sans, myself (Someone had to watch the dog, or vice-versa). When my wife travels she always checks baggage..... we\'ve only been married 8 years. Upon arrival, I grabbed her bag off the belt and it was unusually heavy. The reason it contained 2 six-packs of Revolution Brewery beer, God bless this woman.\r\nTravel and health, this one hit home. Somehow I\'ve managed to \"keep it tight\"... somewhat. I hired someone about three years ago, and while he doesn\'t drink he managed to partake in every meal that he was invited to, (Side note, I advised him to keep it under control). So much so that the rest of us had an over/under on how fast he could gain 30lbs (Yes, we\'re that cruel &amp; shallow). After two broken pants buttons before he managed to get control. \r\nSorry for the long comment, but keep up the great work!',0,'1','Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/68.0.3440.106 Safari/537.36','comment',0,0),
(1777,2167,'Steve Frick','TRAVELFRICK@GMAIL.COM','http://hypeamerica.com/back-and-gone-again','71.214.21.44','2018-11-23 15:24:38','2018-11-23 20:24:38','It sounds like you\'ve also entered the \"Fountain Pen Zone\" as well, they\'re like tattoos, you can\'t have just one. \r\nI had used a Mont Blanc rollerball that I purchased in 1991, it\'s been broken and repaired several times and it had been my go-to pen... until someone gave me a fountain pen. Now several years later I have a collection on fountain pens, as well as inks. Ughhhh just what I needed another obsession. Great episode!',0,'1','Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/70.0.3538.102 Safari/537.36','comment',0,0),
(1892,2208,'Lea Ann (Cooking On The Ranch)','lannisam@gmail.com','http://www.highlandsranchfoodie.com','75.166.56.62','2019-01-25 08:22:07','2019-01-25 13:22:07','Great write up on one of our favorite places to visit. And I learned of a couple new stops from your article. And thanks for that Chicos shout-out - now I\'m craving New Mexico Cuisine. Perhaps a batch of Carne Adovada should be in our weekend plans.',0,'1','Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_14_2) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/71.0.3578.98 Safari/537.36','comment',0,0),
(2084,2508,'Leonard','ledii@hotmail.com','','198.151.252.23','2019-09-05 15:58:47','2019-09-05 20:58:47','Mark, I saw this on the news and thought of all the AA flights you take.  One less \"Classic\" plane to dread flying on.\r\n\r\nhttps://www.wfaa.com/article/money/business/american-airlines-retires-md-80/287-9e8d0c54-e346-4093-b9a9-e8d151b86faf',0,'1','Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/76.0.3809.132 Safari/537.36','comment',0,0),
(2113,2575,'Steve Frick','fricksworld@gmail.com','http://hypeamerica.com/back-and-gone-again','100.47.111.4','2019-12-10 08:46:04','2019-12-10 13:46:04','We did a Virginia road trip last year and hit up Monticello as well, fascinating. From there we stopped at Devil\'s Backbone brewery to recharge before also driving Skyline Drive towards Luray, VA, and a visit to the caverns.\r\nI haven\'t done a mileage run in years but came real close to losing my Southwest companion pass status for 2020. I had to change a few of my travel website profiles to use my Southwest card over my Hilton American Express card in order to hit it for 2020. It\'s always a tough decision do I want 12 points per dollar at Hilton properties or free Southwest flights for my wife. As always, another great episode.',0,'1','Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/78.0.3904.108 Safari/537.36','comment',0,0),
(2114,2575,'mark','mpeacock@travelcommons.com','','184.170.240.109','2019-12-10 16:10:38','2019-12-10 21:10:38','Hadn\'t thought of doing a credit card mileage run. I like that -- and much more climate friendly :wink:',0,'1','Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_14_6) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/78.0.3904.108 Safari/537.36','comment',2113,1),
(2194,2680,'La','grahamlala@yahoo.com','','138.88.60.25','2020-04-02 12:37:19','2020-04-02 17:37:19','I\'m with Irene...pretty colors should win.',0,'1','Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/80.0.3987.162 Safari/537.36','comment',0,0),
(2201,2725,'Hard Hobbit To Break','hardhobbitRub@gmail.com','https://hardhobbittobreak.com','95.215.111.213','2020-04-14 12:50:57','2020-04-14 17:50:57','Many insurance companies are now offering travellers the option of a Cancel-For-Any-Reason (CFAR) policy add-on. This means, basically, that you can cancel your trip for any reason – coronavirus, the heebie-jeebies, anything – and be covered for it (or a large percentage of it). If you’re planning a trip later in the year and are yet to book, CFAR will certainly offer some peace of mind.',0,'1','Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/68.0.3440.106 Safari/537.36','comment',0,0),
(2259,2936,'Allan','amarko1@mac.com','','69.181.106.208','2020-11-14 11:46:14','2020-11-14 16:46:14','I often change the Siri voice for a bit of variety. Currently “Australian Female” is providing my CarPlay directions. you can also ask Siri to “Play TravelCommons”...',0,'1','Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 14_2 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/14.0.1 Mobile/15E148 Safari/604.1','comment',0,0),
(2260,2936,'mark','mpeacock@travelcommons.com','','73.45.46.55','2020-11-14 11:59:34','2020-11-14 16:59:34','w00t! I see that now digging thru Settings|Siri & Search|Siri Voice on my iPhone. I\'m torn between the Irish and South African voice.',0,'1','Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/86.0.4240.198 Safari/537.36','comment',0,1),
(2261,2936,'Allan','amarko1@mac.com','','166.137.242.121','2020-11-14 13:21:54','2020-11-14 18:21:54','Those are both excellent choices also ?...',0,'1','Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 14_2 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/14.0.1 Mobile/15E148 Safari/604.1','comment',2260,0),
(2338,3026,'Allan','amarko1@mac.com','','107.77.92.32','2021-02-01 12:37:42','2021-02-01 17:37:42','Nice trip report!',0,'1','Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 14_4 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/14.0.3 Mobile/15E148 Safari/604.1','comment',0,0),
(2539,4135,'Dawn','peacock.dawnm@gmail.com','','96.61.72.127','2022-04-22 08:51:29','2022-04-22 13:51:29','You\'ll have to try out the Fort Collins/Loveland regional airport!  Karl is \"flying\" from there on United to Ohio for his friend\'s wedding next month before driving to Nashville.  https://www.flynoco.com/flights/  Gotta start somewhere!',0,'1','Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/100.0.4896.127 Safari/537.36','comment',0,0),
(2541,4135,'mark','mpeacock@travelcommons.com','','73.45.46.55','2022-04-25 13:18:19','2022-04-25 18:18:19','\"When contacting (United) customer service refrain from referring to the connection as a “bus”. Tell them you wish to depart from Fort Collins/Loveland aka Northern Colorado Regional\" ?',0,'1','Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/100.0.4896.127 Safari/537.36','comment',2539,1),
(2623,4175,'Geoff Slater','gslater@madriver.com','','209.99.197.236','2022-08-20 20:04:44','2022-08-21 01:04:44','Excellent return podcast! A a very frequent traveler, I agreed with everything. A quibble however was the advice to take a nonstop. While I don’t disagree, I fly in and out of Burlington, VT, so that’s rarely an option. So for me, I also consider my options for connecting airports. As a United flyer, Denver in the summer when it’s an option, and then IAD, and trying to avoid EWR. Getting a bit more esoteric for the non frequent flyer, I also consider plane type. And as 1k, I also take advantage of the same day change to avoid weather problems.',0,'1','Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_6) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/15.6 Safari/605.1.15','comment',0,0),
(2696,4284,'Robert Fenerty','robert@fenerty.com','','76.102.206.149','2023-04-06 00:30:33','2023-04-06 05:30:33','You need to fix the cert on travel commons.com, Safari is complaining.\r\n\r\nGiven the paucity of direct flights from Nashville, I suppose lounge access makes sense. But please don’t get a credit card just for Priority Pass access. I’ve had one for years through my Chase Sapphire Reserve card. But even as a 1K flyer, I rarely use it. With Priority Pass, you’ll encounter capacity controlled 2nd rate lounges where travelers on certain flights stroll past you while you\'re being added to the 45 minute wait list. And after your 45 minute wait you’ll be treated to a sardine-packed lounge where the primary benefits are lack of blaring TVs, cat food sandwiches, and a second-rate chair that might adjoin an electrical outlet. \r\n\r\nEvery time I buy an bold $20 glass of Cabernet at a Vino Volo or sip a remarkable east coast hazy at an airport bar with 20 taps, I think about how happy I am to not be begging for a second rate drink at a second rate lounge.',0,'1','Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/16.4 Safari/605.1.15','comment',0,0),
(2817,4436,'Allan','amarko1@mac.com','','104.28.123.176','2024-03-03 19:44:24','2024-03-04 00:44:24','I was assigned an EV by Avis at FLL last week. Curious enough to try it out for the relatively short distances I would be traveling, I got in. After starting, I noticed it only had a 10% charge, so, “check please.” I fired up the Avis app and selected a Chevy Malibu with 1,200 miles on it.  As for booking.com, we had tremendous luck using that website for most of our accommodations over a two month period in SE Asia five years ago - exclusively for hotels though.',0,'1','Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 17_3_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile/21D61 [FBAN/FBIOS;FBAV/453.0.0.47.106;FBBV/570990458;FBDV/iPhone16,1;FBMD/iPhone;FBSN/iOS;FBSV/17.3.1;FBSS/3;FBID/phone;FBLC/en_US;FBOP/5;FBRV/572595','comment',0,0),
(2968,4779,'AM','amarko1@mac.com','','192.145.118.247','2026-02-11 11:33:10','2026-02-11 17:33:10','Welcome back to regular semi-regular posting!',0,'1','Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 26_2_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile/23C71 Safari/604.1 [FBAN/FBIOS;FBAV/547.1.0.40.72;FBBV/876210555;FBDV/iPhone16,1;FBMD/iPhone;FBSN/iOS;FBSV/26.2.1;FBSS/3;FBID/phone;FBLC/en_US;FBOP/5','comment',0,0),
(2972,4779,'Debbie Trueblood','dstrueblood@gmail.com','','47.194.44.194','2026-02-12 10:37:59','2026-02-12 16:37:59','So nice to see you back.  And yes, I read your post in “your voice”!',0,'1','Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 26_2_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile/23C71 Safari/604.1 [FBAN/FBIOS;FBAV/547.1.0.40.72;FBBV/876210555;FBDV/iPhone17,2;FBMD/iPhone;FBSN/iOS;FBSV/26.2.1;FBSS/3;FBID/phone;FBLC/en_US;FBOP/5','comment',0,0),
(2991,4779,'mark','mpeacock@travelcommons.com','','136.29.132.21','2026-02-24 11:14:10','2026-02-24 17:14:10','Maybe I should use some past episodes to generate a Mark AI voice model that I can use as an audio option ?️?',0,'1','Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/145.0.0.0 Safari/537.36','comment',2972,1),
(3303,4903,'Ann Czarnecki','anniec_1016@yahoo.com','','24.63.17.135','2026-05-19 16:47:02','2026-05-19 21:47:02','Ok, I read it, figuring there might be some inspiration in the event something similar goes down with my upcoming itinerary. It should be simple: BOS-AMS-GDN, but as you said, Famous last words… \r\nAnd, as I’ll be traveling by train to several other cities, anything can happen.  I just hope my normally-strong spirit of adventure is not tested to such a degree. \r\nAnyway, I love that you took on the challenge as more of a quest. Well done!\r\nHope the rest of your trip more than made up for all the agida of getting there.',0,'1','Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 26_4_2 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) GSA/419.4.905781065 Mobile/15E148 Safari/604.1','comment',0,0);
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Try a tool like <a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/optinmonster-review/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=10.2.2\" target=\"_blank\">OptinMonster</a> to increase engagement.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:10:\"learn_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:169:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/optinmonster-review/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=10.2.2\";s:4:\"text\";s:10:\"Learn More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"06/11/2026 7:45 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"07/09/2026\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;s:4:\"read\";b:0;s:5:\"saved\";b:0;}i:71;a:12:{s:2:\"id\";s:51:\"monsterinsights_notification_mobile_device_20260611\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:30:\"Traffic From Mobile Devices 0%\";s:7:\"content\";s:527:\"Traffic from mobile devices is considerably lower on your site compared to desktop devices. 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This could be an indicator that your site is not optimised for mobile devices.<br><br>Take a look now at <a href=\"https://www.wpbeginner.com/beginners-guide/how-to-preview-the-mobile-layout-of-your-site/?utm_source=monsterinsights&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=9.11.1\" target=\"_blank\">show your site looks</a> on mobile and make sure all your content can be accessed correctly.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:2:{s:11:\"view_report\";a:2:{s:3:\"url\";s:146:\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=monsterinsights_reports&monsterinsights-scroll=devices&monsterinsights-highlight=devices\";s:4:\"text\";s:11:\"View Report\";}s:10:\"learn_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:211:\"https://www.wpbeginner.com/beginners-guide/how-to-preview-the-mobile-layout-of-your-site/?utm_source=monsterinsights&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=9.11.1\";s:4:\"text\";s:10:\"Learn More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"02/10/2026 1:21 am\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"02/23/2026\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:74;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:62:\"monsterinsights_notification_to_setup_affiliate_links_20260125\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:30:\"Set Up Affiliate Link Tracking\";s:7:\"content\";s:557:\"By tracking your affiliate links in Google Analytics, you can gather all the data you need to optimize your links for maximizing affiliate revenue. You can track affiliate link clicks on your website with little configuration needed.<br><br><a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/how-to-set-up-affiliate-link-tracking-in-wordpress/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=9.11.1\" target=\"_blank\">In this article</a>, we’ll show you how to set up affiliate link tracking in WordPress.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:9:\"read_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:200:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/how-to-set-up-affiliate-link-tracking-in-wordpress/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=9.11.1\";s:4:\"text\";s:9:\"Read More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"01/25/2026 6:44 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"02/17/2026\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:75;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:56:\"monsterinsights_notification_returning_visitors_20260125\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:44:\"Only 0% of Your Visitors Return to Your Site\";s:7:\"content\";s:330:\"Your site has received a low number of returning users over the past 30 days. Try a tool like <a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/optinmonster-review/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=9.11.1\" target=\"_blank\">OptinMonster</a> to increase engagement.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:10:\"learn_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:169:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/optinmonster-review/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=9.11.1\";s:4:\"text\";s:10:\"Learn More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"01/25/2026 6:13 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"02/22/2026\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:76;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:51:\"monsterinsights_notification_mobile_device_20260125\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:30:\"Traffic From Mobile Devices 0%\";s:7:\"content\";s:527:\"Traffic from mobile devices is considerably lower on your site compared to desktop devices. This could be an indicator that your site is not optimised for mobile devices.<br><br>Take a look now at <a href=\"https://www.wpbeginner.com/beginners-guide/how-to-preview-the-mobile-layout-of-your-site/?utm_source=monsterinsights&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=9.11.1\" target=\"_blank\">show your site looks</a> on mobile and make sure all your content can be accessed correctly.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:2:{s:11:\"view_report\";a:2:{s:3:\"url\";s:146:\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=monsterinsights_reports&monsterinsights-scroll=devices&monsterinsights-highlight=devices\";s:4:\"text\";s:11:\"View Report\";}s:10:\"learn_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:211:\"https://www.wpbeginner.com/beginners-guide/how-to-preview-the-mobile-layout-of-your-site/?utm_source=monsterinsights&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=9.11.1\";s:4:\"text\";s:10:\"Learn More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"01/25/2026 6:13 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"02/07/2026\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:77;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:46:\"monsterinsights_notification_visitors_20260125\";s:4:\"icon\";s:9:\"lightning\";s:5:\"title\";s:35:\"See how 0 Visitors Found Your Site!\";s:7:\"content\";s:122:\"Your website has been visited by 0 visitors in the past 30 days. 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This could be an indicator that your site is not optimised for mobile devices.<br><br>Take a look now at <a href=\"https://www.wpbeginner.com/beginners-guide/how-to-preview-the-mobile-layout-of-your-site/?utm_source=monsterinsights&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=9.10.1\" target=\"_blank\">show your site looks</a> on mobile and make sure all your content can be accessed correctly.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:2:{s:11:\"view_report\";a:2:{s:3:\"url\";s:146:\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=monsterinsights_reports&monsterinsights-scroll=devices&monsterinsights-highlight=devices\";s:4:\"text\";s:11:\"View Report\";}s:10:\"learn_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:211:\"https://www.wpbeginner.com/beginners-guide/how-to-preview-the-mobile-layout-of-your-site/?utm_source=monsterinsights&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=9.10.1\";s:4:\"text\";s:10:\"Learn More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"12/31/2025 4:14 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"01/13/2026\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:79;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:56:\"monsterinsights_notification_returning_visitors_20251205\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:44:\"Only 0% of Your Visitors Return to Your Site\";s:7:\"content\";s:330:\"Your site has received a low number of returning users over the past 30 days. Try a tool like <a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/optinmonster-review/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=9.10.0\" target=\"_blank\">OptinMonster</a> to increase engagement.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:10:\"learn_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:169:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/optinmonster-review/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=9.10.0\";s:4:\"text\";s:10:\"Learn More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"12/05/2025 8:01 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"01/02/2026\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:80;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:51:\"monsterinsights_notification_mobile_device_20251204\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:30:\"Traffic From Mobile Devices 0%\";s:7:\"content\";s:527:\"Traffic from mobile devices is considerably lower on your site compared to desktop devices. This could be an indicator that your site is not optimised for mobile devices.<br><br>Take a look now at <a href=\"https://www.wpbeginner.com/beginners-guide/how-to-preview-the-mobile-layout-of-your-site/?utm_source=monsterinsights&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=9.10.0\" target=\"_blank\">show your site looks</a> on mobile and make sure all your content can be accessed correctly.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:2:{s:11:\"view_report\";a:2:{s:3:\"url\";s:146:\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=monsterinsights_reports&monsterinsights-scroll=devices&monsterinsights-highlight=devices\";s:4:\"text\";s:11:\"View Report\";}s:10:\"learn_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:211:\"https://www.wpbeginner.com/beginners-guide/how-to-preview-the-mobile-layout-of-your-site/?utm_source=monsterinsights&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=9.10.0\";s:4:\"text\";s:10:\"Learn More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"12/04/2025 7:37 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"12/17/2025\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:81;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:46:\"monsterinsights_notification_visitors_20251204\";s:4:\"icon\";s:9:\"lightning\";s:5:\"title\";s:35:\"See how 0 Visitors Found Your Site!\";s:7:\"content\";s:122:\"Your website has been visited by 0 visitors in the past 30 days. Click the button below to view the full analytics report.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:11:\"view_report\";a:2:{s:3:\"url\";s:194:\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=monsterinsights_reports&monsterinsights-scroll=monsterinsights-report-overview&monsterinsights-highlight=monsterinsights-report-overview\";s:4:\"text\";s:11:\"View Report\";}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"12/04/2025 7:25 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"01/01/2026\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:82;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:51:\"monsterinsights_notification_mobile_device_20251110\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:30:\"Traffic From Mobile Devices 0%\";s:7:\"content\";s:526:\"Traffic from mobile devices is considerably lower on your site compared to desktop devices. This could be an indicator that your site is not optimised for mobile devices.<br><br>Take a look now at <a href=\"https://www.wpbeginner.com/beginners-guide/how-to-preview-the-mobile-layout-of-your-site/?utm_source=monsterinsights&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=9.9.0\" target=\"_blank\">show your site looks</a> on mobile and make sure all your content can be accessed correctly.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:2:{s:11:\"view_report\";a:2:{s:3:\"url\";s:146:\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=monsterinsights_reports&monsterinsights-scroll=devices&monsterinsights-highlight=devices\";s:4:\"text\";s:11:\"View Report\";}s:10:\"learn_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:210:\"https://www.wpbeginner.com/beginners-guide/how-to-preview-the-mobile-layout-of-your-site/?utm_source=monsterinsights&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=9.9.0\";s:4:\"text\";s:10:\"Learn More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"11/10/2025 9:35 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"11/23/2025\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:83;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:56:\"monsterinsights_notification_returning_visitors_20251016\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:44:\"Only 0% of Your Visitors Return to Your Site\";s:7:\"content\";s:329:\"Your site has received a low number of returning users over the past 30 days. Try a tool like <a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/optinmonster-review/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=9.9.0\" target=\"_blank\">OptinMonster</a> to increase engagement.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:10:\"learn_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:168:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/optinmonster-review/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=9.9.0\";s:4:\"text\";s:10:\"Learn More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"10/16/2025 3:22 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"11/13/2025\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:84;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:51:\"monsterinsights_notification_mobile_device_20251016\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:30:\"Traffic From Mobile Devices 0%\";s:7:\"content\";s:526:\"Traffic from mobile devices is considerably lower on your site compared to desktop devices. This could be an indicator that your site is not optimised for mobile devices.<br><br>Take a look now at <a href=\"https://www.wpbeginner.com/beginners-guide/how-to-preview-the-mobile-layout-of-your-site/?utm_source=monsterinsights&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=9.8.0\" target=\"_blank\">show your site looks</a> on mobile and make sure all your content can be accessed correctly.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:2:{s:11:\"view_report\";a:2:{s:3:\"url\";s:146:\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=monsterinsights_reports&monsterinsights-scroll=devices&monsterinsights-highlight=devices\";s:4:\"text\";s:11:\"View Report\";}s:10:\"learn_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:210:\"https://www.wpbeginner.com/beginners-guide/how-to-preview-the-mobile-layout-of-your-site/?utm_source=monsterinsights&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=9.8.0\";s:4:\"text\";s:10:\"Learn More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"10/16/2025 3:20 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"10/29/2025\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:85;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:46:\"monsterinsights_notification_visitors_20251016\";s:4:\"icon\";s:9:\"lightning\";s:5:\"title\";s:35:\"See how 0 Visitors Found Your Site!\";s:7:\"content\";s:122:\"Your website has been visited by 0 visitors in the past 30 days. Click the button below to view the full analytics report.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:11:\"view_report\";a:2:{s:3:\"url\";s:194:\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=monsterinsights_reports&monsterinsights-scroll=monsterinsights-report-overview&monsterinsights-highlight=monsterinsights-report-overview\";s:4:\"text\";s:11:\"View Report\";}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"10/16/2025 3:19 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"11/13/2025\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:86;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:51:\"monsterinsights_notification_mobile_device_20250908\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:30:\"Traffic From Mobile Devices 0%\";s:7:\"content\";s:526:\"Traffic from mobile devices is considerably lower on your site compared to desktop devices. This could be an indicator that your site is not optimised for mobile devices.<br><br>Take a look now at <a href=\"https://www.wpbeginner.com/beginners-guide/how-to-preview-the-mobile-layout-of-your-site/?utm_source=monsterinsights&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=9.7.0\" target=\"_blank\">show your site looks</a> on mobile and make sure all your content can be accessed correctly.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:2:{s:11:\"view_report\";a:2:{s:3:\"url\";s:146:\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=monsterinsights_reports&monsterinsights-scroll=devices&monsterinsights-highlight=devices\";s:4:\"text\";s:11:\"View Report\";}s:10:\"learn_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:210:\"https://www.wpbeginner.com/beginners-guide/how-to-preview-the-mobile-layout-of-your-site/?utm_source=monsterinsights&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=9.7.0\";s:4:\"text\";s:10:\"Learn More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"09/08/2025 1:44 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"09/21/2025\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:87;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:56:\"monsterinsights_notification_returning_visitors_20221209\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:44:\"Only 1% of Your Visitors Return to Your Site\";s:7:\"content\";s:330:\"Your site has received a low number of returning users over the past 30 days. Try a tool like <a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/optinmonster-review/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.10.1\" target=\"_blank\">OptinMonster</a> to increase engagement.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:10:\"learn_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:169:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/optinmonster-review/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.10.1\";s:4:\"text\";s:10:\"Learn More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"12/09/2022 4:06 am\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"01/06/2023\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:88;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:46:\"monsterinsights_notification_visitors_20240915\";s:4:\"icon\";s:9:\"lightning\";s:5:\"title\";s:36:\"See how 56 Visitors Found Your Site!\";s:7:\"content\";s:123:\"Your website has been visited by 56 visitors in the past 30 days. Click the button below to view the full analytics report.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:11:\"view_report\";a:2:{s:3:\"url\";s:194:\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=monsterinsights_reports&monsterinsights-scroll=monsterinsights-report-overview&monsterinsights-highlight=monsterinsights-report-overview\";s:4:\"text\";s:11:\"View Report\";}}s:5:\"start\";s:19:\"09/15/2024 12:58 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"10/13/2024\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:89;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:49:\"monsterinsights_notification_bounce_rate_20230111\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:46:\"Your Website Bounce Rate is Higher Than 88.72%\";s:7:\"content\";s:419:\"Your site\'s bounce rate is 88.72%. Double check your site is working properly and be sure it loads quickly.  <a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/how-to-reduce-bounce-rate/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.11.0\" target=\"_blank\">Here</a> are some points to remember and steps to follow to get your bounce rates back to manageable levels.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:2:{s:11:\"view_report\";a:2:{s:3:\"url\";s:216:\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=monsterinsights_reports&monsterinsights-scroll=monsterinsights-report-infobox-bounce-rate&monsterinsights-highlight=monsterinsights-report-infobox-bounce-rate\";s:4:\"text\";s:11:\"View Report\";}s:10:\"learn_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:175:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/how-to-reduce-bounce-rate/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.11.0\";s:4:\"text\";s:10:\"Learn More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"01/11/2023 8:46 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"02/08/2023\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:90;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:62:\"monsterinsights_notification_to_setup_affiliate_links_20241012\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:30:\"Set Up Affiliate Link Tracking\";s:7:\"content\";s:556:\"By tracking your affiliate links in Google Analytics, you can gather all the data you need to optimize your links for maximizing affiliate revenue. You can track affiliate link clicks on your website with little configuration needed.<br><br><a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/how-to-set-up-affiliate-link-tracking-in-wordpress/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=9.1.1\" target=\"_blank\">In this article</a>, we’ll show you how to set up affiliate link tracking in WordPress.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:9:\"read_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:199:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/how-to-set-up-affiliate-link-tracking-in-wordpress/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=9.1.1\";s:4:\"text\";s:9:\"Read More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"10/12/2024 5:47 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"11/04/2024\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:91;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:62:\"monsterinsights_notification_to_setup_affiliate_links_20240106\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:30:\"Set Up Affiliate Link Tracking\";s:7:\"content\";s:557:\"By tracking your affiliate links in Google Analytics, you can gather all the data you need to optimize your links for maximizing affiliate revenue. You can track affiliate link clicks on your website with little configuration needed.<br><br><a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/how-to-set-up-affiliate-link-tracking-in-wordpress/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.23.1\" target=\"_blank\">In this article</a>, we’ll show you how to set up affiliate link tracking in WordPress.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:9:\"read_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:200:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/how-to-set-up-affiliate-link-tracking-in-wordpress/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.23.1\";s:4:\"text\";s:9:\"Read More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"01/06/2024 2:27 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"01/29/2024\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:92;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:62:\"monsterinsights_notification_to_setup_affiliate_links_20230925\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:30:\"Set Up Affiliate Link Tracking\";s:7:\"content\";s:555:\"By tracking your affiliate links in Google Analytics, you can gather all the data you need to optimize your links for maximizing affiliate revenue. You can track affiliate link clicks on your website with little configuration needed.<br><br><a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/how-to-set-up-affiliate-link-tracking-in-wordpress/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.19\" target=\"_blank\">In this article</a>, we’ll show you how to set up affiliate link tracking in WordPress.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:9:\"read_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:198:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/how-to-set-up-affiliate-link-tracking-in-wordpress/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.19\";s:4:\"text\";s:9:\"Read More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"09/25/2023 5:02 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"10/18/2023\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:93;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:46:\"monsterinsights_notification_audience_20230430\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:34:\"27% of Your Audience is From China\";s:7:\"content\";s:546:\"Is your site properly translated? By adding translated content specific to your audience you could gain big boosts in pageviews, time spent on page and a reduced bounce rate.<br><br>If you need help choosing a translation plugin to get you started take a look at <a href=\"https://www.wpbeginner.com/showcase/9-best-translation-plugins-for-wordpress-websites/?utm_source=monsterinsights&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.14.1\" target=\"_blank\">this article</a> for the best options available.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:2:{s:11:\"view_report\";a:2:{s:3:\"url\";s:204:\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=monsterinsights_reports&monsterinsights-scroll=monsterinsights-report-top-countries&monsterinsights-highlight=monsterinsights-report-top-countries\";s:4:\"text\";s:11:\"View Report\";}s:10:\"learn_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:208:\"https://www.wpbeginner.com/showcase/9-best-translation-plugins-for-wordpress-websites/?utm_source=monsterinsights&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.14.1\";s:4:\"text\";s:10:\"Learn More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"04/30/2023 3:10 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"05/28/2023\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:94;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:62:\"monsterinsights_notification_to_setup_affiliate_links_20250405\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:30:\"Set Up Affiliate Link Tracking\";s:7:\"content\";s:556:\"By tracking your affiliate links in Google Analytics, you can gather all the data you need to optimize your links for maximizing affiliate revenue. You can track affiliate link clicks on your website with little configuration needed.<br><br><a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/how-to-set-up-affiliate-link-tracking-in-wordpress/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=9.3.1\" target=\"_blank\">In this article</a>, we’ll show you how to set up affiliate link tracking in WordPress.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:9:\"read_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:199:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/how-to-set-up-affiliate-link-tracking-in-wordpress/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=9.3.1\";s:4:\"text\";s:9:\"Read More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"04/05/2025 1:16 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"04/28/2025\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:95;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:62:\"monsterinsights_notification_to_setup_affiliate_links_20221030\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:30:\"Set Up Affiliate Link Tracking\";s:7:\"content\";s:556:\"By tracking your affiliate links in Google Analytics, you can gather all the data you need to optimize your links for maximizing affiliate revenue. You can track affiliate link clicks on your website with little configuration needed.<br><br><a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/how-to-set-up-affiliate-link-tracking-in-wordpress/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.9.1\" target=\"_blank\">In this article</a>, we’ll show you how to set up affiliate link tracking in WordPress.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:9:\"read_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:199:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/how-to-set-up-affiliate-link-tracking-in-wordpress/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.9.1\";s:4:\"text\";s:9:\"Read More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:19:\"10/30/2022 11:05 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"11/22/2022\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:96;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:46:\"monsterinsights_notification_visitors_20230328\";s:4:\"icon\";s:9:\"lightning\";s:5:\"title\";s:37:\"See how 116 Visitors Found Your Site!\";s:7:\"content\";s:124:\"Your website has been visited by 116 visitors in the past 30 days. Click the button below to view the full analytics report.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:11:\"view_report\";a:2:{s:3:\"url\";s:194:\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=monsterinsights_reports&monsterinsights-scroll=monsterinsights-report-overview&monsterinsights-highlight=monsterinsights-report-overview\";s:4:\"text\";s:11:\"View Report\";}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"03/28/2023 7:46 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"04/25/2023\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:97;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:56:\"monsterinsights_notification_returning_visitors_20240104\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:44:\"Only 0% of Your Visitors Return to Your Site\";s:7:\"content\";s:330:\"Your site has received a low number of returning users over the past 30 days. Try a tool like <a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/optinmonster-review/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.23.1\" target=\"_blank\">OptinMonster</a> to increase engagement.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:10:\"learn_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:169:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/optinmonster-review/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.23.1\";s:4:\"text\";s:10:\"Learn More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"01/04/2024 8:31 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"02/01/2024\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:98;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:46:\"monsterinsights_notification_visitors_20230430\";s:4:\"icon\";s:9:\"lightning\";s:5:\"title\";s:37:\"See how 143 Visitors Found Your Site!\";s:7:\"content\";s:124:\"Your website has been visited by 143 visitors in the past 30 days. Click the button below to view the full analytics report.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:11:\"view_report\";a:2:{s:3:\"url\";s:194:\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=monsterinsights_reports&monsterinsights-scroll=monsterinsights-report-overview&monsterinsights-highlight=monsterinsights-report-overview\";s:4:\"text\";s:11:\"View Report\";}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"04/30/2023 3:10 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"05/28/2023\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:99;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:62:\"monsterinsights_notification_to_setup_affiliate_links_20230828\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:30:\"Set Up Affiliate Link Tracking\";s:7:\"content\";s:555:\"By tracking your affiliate links in Google Analytics, you can gather all the data you need to optimize your links for maximizing affiliate revenue. You can track affiliate link clicks on your website with little configuration needed.<br><br><a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/how-to-set-up-affiliate-link-tracking-in-wordpress/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.19\" target=\"_blank\">In this article</a>, we’ll show you how to set up affiliate link tracking in WordPress.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:9:\"read_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:198:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/how-to-set-up-affiliate-link-tracking-in-wordpress/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.19\";s:4:\"text\";s:9:\"Read More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"08/28/2023 3:47 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"09/20/2023\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:100;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:62:\"monsterinsights_notification_to_setup_affiliate_links_20230309\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:30:\"Set Up Affiliate Link Tracking\";s:7:\"content\";s:557:\"By tracking your affiliate links in Google Analytics, you can gather all the data you need to optimize your links for maximizing affiliate revenue. You can track affiliate link clicks on your website with little configuration needed.<br><br><a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/how-to-set-up-affiliate-link-tracking-in-wordpress/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.12.1\" target=\"_blank\">In this article</a>, we’ll show you how to set up affiliate link tracking in WordPress.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:9:\"read_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:200:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/how-to-set-up-affiliate-link-tracking-in-wordpress/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.12.1\";s:4:\"text\";s:9:\"Read More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"03/09/2023 1:46 am\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"04/01/2023\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:101;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:46:\"monsterinsights_notification_audience_20241127\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:34:\"26% of Your Audience is From China\";s:7:\"content\";s:545:\"Is your site properly translated? By adding translated content specific to your audience you could gain big boosts in pageviews, time spent on page and a reduced bounce rate.<br><br>If you need help choosing a translation plugin to get you started take a look at <a href=\"https://www.wpbeginner.com/showcase/9-best-translation-plugins-for-wordpress-websites/?utm_source=monsterinsights&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=9.2.2\" target=\"_blank\">this article</a> for the best options available.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:2:{s:11:\"view_report\";a:2:{s:3:\"url\";s:204:\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=monsterinsights_reports&monsterinsights-scroll=monsterinsights-report-top-countries&monsterinsights-highlight=monsterinsights-report-top-countries\";s:4:\"text\";s:11:\"View Report\";}s:10:\"learn_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:207:\"https://www.wpbeginner.com/showcase/9-best-translation-plugins-for-wordpress-websites/?utm_source=monsterinsights&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=9.2.2\";s:4:\"text\";s:10:\"Learn More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"11/27/2024 6:12 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"12/25/2024\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:102;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:46:\"monsterinsights_notification_audience_20220719\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:34:\"19% of Your Audience is From China\";s:7:\"content\";s:545:\"Is your site properly translated? By adding translated content specific to your audience you could gain big boosts in pageviews, time spent on page and a reduced bounce rate.<br><br>If you need help choosing a translation plugin to get you started take a look at <a href=\"https://www.wpbeginner.com/showcase/9-best-translation-plugins-for-wordpress-websites/?utm_source=monsterinsights&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.7.0\" target=\"_blank\">this article</a> for the best options available.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:2:{s:11:\"view_report\";a:2:{s:3:\"url\";s:204:\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=monsterinsights_reports&monsterinsights-scroll=monsterinsights-report-top-countries&monsterinsights-highlight=monsterinsights-report-top-countries\";s:4:\"text\";s:11:\"View Report\";}s:10:\"learn_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:207:\"https://www.wpbeginner.com/showcase/9-best-translation-plugins-for-wordpress-websites/?utm_source=monsterinsights&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.7.0\";s:4:\"text\";s:10:\"Learn More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"07/19/2022 3:17 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"08/16/2022\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:103;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:62:\"monsterinsights_notification_to_setup_affiliate_links_20250904\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:30:\"Set Up Affiliate Link Tracking\";s:7:\"content\";s:556:\"By tracking your affiliate links in Google Analytics, you can gather all the data you need to optimize your links for maximizing affiliate revenue. You can track affiliate link clicks on your website with little configuration needed.<br><br><a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/how-to-set-up-affiliate-link-tracking-in-wordpress/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=9.7.0\" target=\"_blank\">In this article</a>, we’ll show you how to set up affiliate link tracking in WordPress.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:9:\"read_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:199:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/how-to-set-up-affiliate-link-tracking-in-wordpress/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=9.7.0\";s:4:\"text\";s:9:\"Read More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"09/04/2025 3:45 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"09/27/2025\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:104;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:56:\"monsterinsights_notification_returning_visitors_20220914\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:44:\"Only 3% of Your Visitors Return to Your Site\";s:7:\"content\";s:329:\"Your site has received a low number of returning users over the past 30 days. Try a tool like <a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/optinmonster-review/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.8.2\" target=\"_blank\">OptinMonster</a> to increase engagement.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:10:\"learn_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:168:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/optinmonster-review/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.8.2\";s:4:\"text\";s:10:\"Learn More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"09/14/2022 1:21 am\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"10/12/2022\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:105;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:56:\"monsterinsights_notification_returning_visitors_20250209\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:44:\"Only 0% of Your Visitors Return to Your Site\";s:7:\"content\";s:329:\"Your site has received a low number of returning users over the past 30 days. Try a tool like <a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/optinmonster-review/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=9.2.4\" target=\"_blank\">OptinMonster</a> to increase engagement.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:10:\"learn_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:168:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/optinmonster-review/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=9.2.4\";s:4:\"text\";s:10:\"Learn More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"02/09/2025 3:47 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"03/09/2025\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:106;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:56:\"monsterinsights_notification_returning_visitors_20250324\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:44:\"Only 0% of Your Visitors Return to Your Site\";s:7:\"content\";s:329:\"Your site has received a low number of returning users over the past 30 days. Try a tool like <a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/optinmonster-review/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=9.3.1\" target=\"_blank\">OptinMonster</a> to increase engagement.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:10:\"learn_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:168:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/optinmonster-review/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=9.3.1\";s:4:\"text\";s:10:\"Learn More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"03/24/2025 7:41 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"04/21/2025\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:107;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:46:\"monsterinsights_notification_audience_20240901\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:34:\"15% of Your Audience is From China\";s:7:\"content\";s:545:\"Is your site properly translated? By adding translated content specific to your audience you could gain big boosts in pageviews, time spent on page and a reduced bounce rate.<br><br>If you need help choosing a translation plugin to get you started take a look at <a href=\"https://www.wpbeginner.com/showcase/9-best-translation-plugins-for-wordpress-websites/?utm_source=monsterinsights&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=9.0.1\" target=\"_blank\">this article</a> for the best options available.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:2:{s:11:\"view_report\";a:2:{s:3:\"url\";s:204:\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=monsterinsights_reports&monsterinsights-scroll=monsterinsights-report-top-countries&monsterinsights-highlight=monsterinsights-report-top-countries\";s:4:\"text\";s:11:\"View Report\";}s:10:\"learn_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:207:\"https://www.wpbeginner.com/showcase/9-best-translation-plugins-for-wordpress-websites/?utm_source=monsterinsights&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=9.0.1\";s:4:\"text\";s:10:\"Learn More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"09/01/2024 8:44 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"09/29/2024\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:108;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:51:\"monsterinsights_notification_mobile_device_20250626\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:30:\"Traffic From Mobile Devices 0%\";s:7:\"content\";s:526:\"Traffic from mobile devices is considerably lower on your site compared to desktop devices. This could be an indicator that your site is not optimised for mobile devices.<br><br>Take a look now at <a href=\"https://www.wpbeginner.com/beginners-guide/how-to-preview-the-mobile-layout-of-your-site/?utm_source=monsterinsights&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=9.5.3\" target=\"_blank\">show your site looks</a> on mobile and make sure all your content can be accessed correctly.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:2:{s:11:\"view_report\";a:2:{s:3:\"url\";s:146:\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=monsterinsights_reports&monsterinsights-scroll=devices&monsterinsights-highlight=devices\";s:4:\"text\";s:11:\"View Report\";}s:10:\"learn_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:210:\"https://www.wpbeginner.com/beginners-guide/how-to-preview-the-mobile-layout-of-your-site/?utm_source=monsterinsights&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=9.5.3\";s:4:\"text\";s:10:\"Learn More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"06/26/2025 2:15 am\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"07/09/2025\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:109;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:56:\"monsterinsights_notification_returning_visitors_20221017\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:44:\"Only 4% of Your Visitors Return to Your Site\";s:7:\"content\";s:329:\"Your site has received a low number of returning users over the past 30 days. Try a tool like <a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/optinmonster-review/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.9.0\" target=\"_blank\">OptinMonster</a> to increase engagement.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:10:\"learn_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:168:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/optinmonster-review/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.9.0\";s:4:\"text\";s:10:\"Learn More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"10/17/2022 5:38 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"11/14/2022\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:110;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:56:\"monsterinsights_notification_returning_visitors_20250626\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:44:\"Only 0% of Your Visitors Return to Your Site\";s:7:\"content\";s:329:\"Your site has received a low number of returning users over the past 30 days. Try a tool like <a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/optinmonster-review/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=9.5.3\" target=\"_blank\">OptinMonster</a> to increase engagement.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:10:\"learn_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:168:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/optinmonster-review/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=9.5.3\";s:4:\"text\";s:10:\"Learn More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"06/26/2025 2:15 am\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"07/24/2025\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:111;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:62:\"monsterinsights_notification_to_setup_affiliate_links_20240915\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:30:\"Set Up Affiliate Link Tracking\";s:7:\"content\";s:556:\"By tracking your affiliate links in Google Analytics, you can gather all the data you need to optimize your links for maximizing affiliate revenue. You can track affiliate link clicks on your website with little configuration needed.<br><br><a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/how-to-set-up-affiliate-link-tracking-in-wordpress/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=9.0.1\" target=\"_blank\">In this article</a>, we’ll show you how to set up affiliate link tracking in WordPress.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:9:\"read_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:199:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/how-to-set-up-affiliate-link-tracking-in-wordpress/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=9.0.1\";s:4:\"text\";s:9:\"Read More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:19:\"09/15/2024 12:58 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"10/08/2024\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:112;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:54:\"monsterinsights_notification_traffic_dropping_20240729\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:32:\"Your Website Traffic is Dropping\";s:7:\"content\";s:520:\"Your website traffic is decreasing and that’s a reason to take action now. Less traffic means less opportunities to make your brand known, make relationships and ultimately sell your service or product. <br><br>Follow the marketing hacks of <a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/marketing-hacks-guaranteed-to-grow-your-traffic/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.28.0\" target=\"_blank\">this article</a> to start growing your traffic again.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:2:{s:10:\"learn_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:197:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/marketing-hacks-guaranteed-to-grow-your-traffic/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.28.0\";s:4:\"text\";s:10:\"Learn More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}s:11:\"view_report\";a:2:{s:3:\"url\";s:194:\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=monsterinsights_reports&monsterinsights-scroll=monsterinsights-report-overview&monsterinsights-highlight=monsterinsights-report-overview\";s:4:\"text\";s:11:\"View Report\";}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"07/29/2024 3:00 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"08/26/2024\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:113;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:54:\"monsterinsights_notification_traffic_dropping_20240104\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:32:\"Your Website Traffic is Dropping\";s:7:\"content\";s:520:\"Your website traffic is decreasing and that’s a reason to take action now. Less traffic means less opportunities to make your brand known, make relationships and ultimately sell your service or product. <br><br>Follow the marketing hacks of <a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/marketing-hacks-guaranteed-to-grow-your-traffic/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.23.1\" target=\"_blank\">this article</a> to start growing your traffic again.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:2:{s:10:\"learn_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:197:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/marketing-hacks-guaranteed-to-grow-your-traffic/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.23.1\";s:4:\"text\";s:10:\"Learn More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}s:11:\"view_report\";a:2:{s:3:\"url\";s:194:\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=monsterinsights_reports&monsterinsights-scroll=monsterinsights-report-overview&monsterinsights-highlight=monsterinsights-report-overview\";s:4:\"text\";s:11:\"View Report\";}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"01/04/2024 8:31 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"02/01/2024\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:114;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:62:\"monsterinsights_notification_to_setup_affiliate_links_20231101\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:30:\"Set Up Affiliate Link Tracking\";s:7:\"content\";s:557:\"By tracking your affiliate links in Google Analytics, you can gather all the data you need to optimize your links for maximizing affiliate revenue. You can track affiliate link clicks on your website with little configuration needed.<br><br><a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/how-to-set-up-affiliate-link-tracking-in-wordpress/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.20.1\" target=\"_blank\">In this article</a>, we’ll show you how to set up affiliate link tracking in WordPress.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:9:\"read_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:200:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/how-to-set-up-affiliate-link-tracking-in-wordpress/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.20.1\";s:4:\"text\";s:9:\"Read More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:19:\"11/01/2023 12:31 am\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"11/24/2023\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:115;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:46:\"monsterinsights_notification_audience_20230225\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:34:\"32% of Your Audience is From China\";s:7:\"content\";s:546:\"Is your site properly translated? By adding translated content specific to your audience you could gain big boosts in pageviews, time spent on page and a reduced bounce rate.<br><br>If you need help choosing a translation plugin to get you started take a look at <a href=\"https://www.wpbeginner.com/showcase/9-best-translation-plugins-for-wordpress-websites/?utm_source=monsterinsights&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.12.1\" target=\"_blank\">this article</a> for the best options available.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:2:{s:11:\"view_report\";a:2:{s:3:\"url\";s:204:\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=monsterinsights_reports&monsterinsights-scroll=monsterinsights-report-top-countries&monsterinsights-highlight=monsterinsights-report-top-countries\";s:4:\"text\";s:11:\"View Report\";}s:10:\"learn_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:208:\"https://www.wpbeginner.com/showcase/9-best-translation-plugins-for-wordpress-websites/?utm_source=monsterinsights&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.12.1\";s:4:\"text\";s:10:\"Learn More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"02/25/2023 7:40 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"03/25/2023\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:116;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:46:\"monsterinsights_notification_visitors_20250823\";s:4:\"icon\";s:9:\"lightning\";s:5:\"title\";s:35:\"See how 0 Visitors Found Your Site!\";s:7:\"content\";s:122:\"Your website has been visited by 0 visitors in the past 30 days. Click the button below to view the full analytics report.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:11:\"view_report\";a:2:{s:3:\"url\";s:194:\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=monsterinsights_reports&monsterinsights-scroll=monsterinsights-report-overview&monsterinsights-highlight=monsterinsights-report-overview\";s:4:\"text\";s:11:\"View Report\";}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"08/23/2025 1:51 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"09/20/2025\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:117;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:46:\"monsterinsights_notification_audience_20221209\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:34:\"23% of Your Audience is From China\";s:7:\"content\";s:546:\"Is your site properly translated? By adding translated content specific to your audience you could gain big boosts in pageviews, time spent on page and a reduced bounce rate.<br><br>If you need help choosing a translation plugin to get you started take a look at <a href=\"https://www.wpbeginner.com/showcase/9-best-translation-plugins-for-wordpress-websites/?utm_source=monsterinsights&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.10.1\" target=\"_blank\">this article</a> for the best options available.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:2:{s:11:\"view_report\";a:2:{s:3:\"url\";s:204:\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=monsterinsights_reports&monsterinsights-scroll=monsterinsights-report-top-countries&monsterinsights-highlight=monsterinsights-report-top-countries\";s:4:\"text\";s:11:\"View Report\";}s:10:\"learn_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:208:\"https://www.wpbeginner.com/showcase/9-best-translation-plugins-for-wordpress-websites/?utm_source=monsterinsights&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.10.1\";s:4:\"text\";s:10:\"Learn More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"12/09/2022 4:05 am\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"01/06/2023\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:118;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:56:\"monsterinsights_notification_returning_visitors_20250501\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:44:\"Only 0% of Your Visitors Return to Your Site\";s:7:\"content\";s:329:\"Your site has received a low number of returning users over the past 30 days. Try a tool like <a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/optinmonster-review/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=9.4.1\" target=\"_blank\">OptinMonster</a> to increase engagement.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:10:\"learn_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:168:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/optinmonster-review/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=9.4.1\";s:4:\"text\";s:10:\"Learn More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"05/01/2025 8:47 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"05/29/2025\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:119;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:54:\"monsterinsights_notification_traffic_dropping_20230725\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:32:\"Your Website Traffic is Dropping\";s:7:\"content\";s:518:\"Your website traffic is decreasing and that’s a reason to take action now. Less traffic means less opportunities to make your brand known, make relationships and ultimately sell your service or product. <br><br>Follow the marketing hacks of <a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/marketing-hacks-guaranteed-to-grow-your-traffic/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.17\" target=\"_blank\">this article</a> to start growing your traffic again.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:2:{s:10:\"learn_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:195:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/marketing-hacks-guaranteed-to-grow-your-traffic/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.17\";s:4:\"text\";s:10:\"Learn More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}s:11:\"view_report\";a:2:{s:3:\"url\";s:194:\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=monsterinsights_reports&monsterinsights-scroll=monsterinsights-report-overview&monsterinsights-highlight=monsterinsights-report-overview\";s:4:\"text\";s:11:\"View Report\";}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"07/25/2023 5:24 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"08/22/2023\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:120;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:62:\"monsterinsights_notification_to_setup_affiliate_links_20231206\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:30:\"Set Up Affiliate Link Tracking\";s:7:\"content\";s:557:\"By tracking your affiliate links in Google Analytics, you can gather all the data you need to optimize your links for maximizing affiliate revenue. You can track affiliate link clicks on your website with little configuration needed.<br><br><a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/how-to-set-up-affiliate-link-tracking-in-wordpress/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.22.0\" target=\"_blank\">In this article</a>, we’ll show you how to set up affiliate link tracking in WordPress.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:9:\"read_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:200:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/how-to-set-up-affiliate-link-tracking-in-wordpress/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.22.0\";s:4:\"text\";s:9:\"Read More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"12/06/2023 6:00 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"12/29/2023\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:121;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:46:\"monsterinsights_notification_audience_20221020\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:34:\"22% of Your Audience is From China\";s:7:\"content\";s:545:\"Is your site properly translated? By adding translated content specific to your audience you could gain big boosts in pageviews, time spent on page and a reduced bounce rate.<br><br>If you need help choosing a translation plugin to get you started take a look at <a href=\"https://www.wpbeginner.com/showcase/9-best-translation-plugins-for-wordpress-websites/?utm_source=monsterinsights&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.9.1\" target=\"_blank\">this article</a> for the best options available.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:2:{s:11:\"view_report\";a:2:{s:3:\"url\";s:204:\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=monsterinsights_reports&monsterinsights-scroll=monsterinsights-report-top-countries&monsterinsights-highlight=monsterinsights-report-top-countries\";s:4:\"text\";s:11:\"View Report\";}s:10:\"learn_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:207:\"https://www.wpbeginner.com/showcase/9-best-translation-plugins-for-wordpress-websites/?utm_source=monsterinsights&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.9.1\";s:4:\"text\";s:10:\"Learn More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"10/20/2022 6:28 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"11/17/2022\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:122;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:62:\"monsterinsights_notification_to_setup_affiliate_links_20230107\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:30:\"Set Up Affiliate Link Tracking\";s:7:\"content\";s:557:\"By tracking your affiliate links in Google Analytics, you can gather all the data you need to optimize your links for maximizing affiliate revenue. You can track affiliate link clicks on your website with little configuration needed.<br><br><a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/how-to-set-up-affiliate-link-tracking-in-wordpress/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.11.0\" target=\"_blank\">In this article</a>, we’ll show you how to set up affiliate link tracking in WordPress.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:9:\"read_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:200:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/how-to-set-up-affiliate-link-tracking-in-wordpress/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.11.0\";s:4:\"text\";s:9:\"Read More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"01/07/2023 7:04 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"01/30/2023\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:123;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:56:\"monsterinsights_notification_returning_visitors_20240423\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:44:\"Only 5% of Your Visitors Return to Your Site\";s:7:\"content\";s:330:\"Your site has received a low number of returning users over the past 30 days. Try a tool like <a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/optinmonster-review/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.26.0\" target=\"_blank\">OptinMonster</a> to increase engagement.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:10:\"learn_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:169:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/optinmonster-review/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.26.0\";s:4:\"text\";s:10:\"Learn More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"04/23/2024 3:06 am\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"05/21/2024\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:124;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:46:\"monsterinsights_notification_visitors_20230904\";s:4:\"icon\";s:9:\"lightning\";s:5:\"title\";s:36:\"See how 50 Visitors Found Your Site!\";s:7:\"content\";s:123:\"Your website has been visited by 50 visitors in the past 30 days. Click the button below to view the full analytics report.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:11:\"view_report\";a:2:{s:3:\"url\";s:194:\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=monsterinsights_reports&monsterinsights-scroll=monsterinsights-report-overview&monsterinsights-highlight=monsterinsights-report-overview\";s:4:\"text\";s:11:\"View Report\";}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"09/04/2023 3:38 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"10/02/2023\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:125;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:46:\"monsterinsights_notification_visitors_20240407\";s:4:\"icon\";s:9:\"lightning\";s:5:\"title\";s:36:\"See how 46 Visitors Found Your Site!\";s:7:\"content\";s:123:\"Your website has been visited by 46 visitors in the past 30 days. Click the button below to view the full analytics report.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:11:\"view_report\";a:2:{s:3:\"url\";s:194:\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=monsterinsights_reports&monsterinsights-scroll=monsterinsights-report-overview&monsterinsights-highlight=monsterinsights-report-overview\";s:4:\"text\";s:11:\"View Report\";}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"04/07/2024 1:24 am\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"05/05/2024\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:126;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:54:\"monsterinsights_notification_traffic_dropping_20240901\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:32:\"Your Website Traffic is Dropping\";s:7:\"content\";s:519:\"Your website traffic is decreasing and that’s a reason to take action now. Less traffic means less opportunities to make your brand known, make relationships and ultimately sell your service or product. <br><br>Follow the marketing hacks of <a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/marketing-hacks-guaranteed-to-grow-your-traffic/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=9.0.1\" target=\"_blank\">this article</a> to start growing your traffic again.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:2:{s:10:\"learn_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:196:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/marketing-hacks-guaranteed-to-grow-your-traffic/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=9.0.1\";s:4:\"text\";s:10:\"Learn More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}s:11:\"view_report\";a:2:{s:3:\"url\";s:194:\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=monsterinsights_reports&monsterinsights-scroll=monsterinsights-report-overview&monsterinsights-highlight=monsterinsights-report-overview\";s:4:\"text\";s:11:\"View Report\";}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"09/01/2024 8:44 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"09/29/2024\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:127;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:51:\"monsterinsights_notification_mobile_device_20250501\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:30:\"Traffic From Mobile Devices 0%\";s:7:\"content\";s:526:\"Traffic from mobile devices is considerably lower on your site compared to desktop devices. This could be an indicator that your site is not optimised for mobile devices.<br><br>Take a look now at <a href=\"https://www.wpbeginner.com/beginners-guide/how-to-preview-the-mobile-layout-of-your-site/?utm_source=monsterinsights&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=9.4.1\" target=\"_blank\">show your site looks</a> on mobile and make sure all your content can be accessed correctly.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:2:{s:11:\"view_report\";a:2:{s:3:\"url\";s:146:\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=monsterinsights_reports&monsterinsights-scroll=devices&monsterinsights-highlight=devices\";s:4:\"text\";s:11:\"View Report\";}s:10:\"learn_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:210:\"https://www.wpbeginner.com/beginners-guide/how-to-preview-the-mobile-layout-of-your-site/?utm_source=monsterinsights&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=9.4.1\";s:4:\"text\";s:10:\"Learn More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"05/01/2025 8:46 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"05/14/2025\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:128;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:56:\"monsterinsights_notification_returning_visitors_20230111\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:44:\"Only 7% of Your Visitors Return to Your Site\";s:7:\"content\";s:330:\"Your site has received a low number of returning users over the past 30 days. Try a tool like <a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/optinmonster-review/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.11.0\" target=\"_blank\">OptinMonster</a> to increase engagement.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:10:\"learn_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:169:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/optinmonster-review/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.11.0\";s:4:\"text\";s:10:\"Learn More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"01/11/2023 8:46 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"02/08/2023\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:129;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:56:\"monsterinsights_notification_returning_visitors_20241231\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:45:\"Only -1% of Your Visitors Return to Your Site\";s:7:\"content\";s:329:\"Your site has received a low number of returning users over the past 30 days. Try a tool like <a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/optinmonster-review/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=9.2.4\" target=\"_blank\">OptinMonster</a> to increase engagement.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:10:\"learn_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:168:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/optinmonster-review/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=9.2.4\";s:4:\"text\";s:10:\"Learn More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"12/31/2024 3:57 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"01/28/2025\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:130;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:46:\"monsterinsights_notification_visitors_20221209\";s:4:\"icon\";s:9:\"lightning\";s:5:\"title\";s:37:\"See how 100 Visitors Found Your Site!\";s:7:\"content\";s:124:\"Your website has been visited by 100 visitors in the past 30 days. Click the button below to view the full analytics report.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:11:\"view_report\";a:2:{s:3:\"url\";s:194:\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=monsterinsights_reports&monsterinsights-scroll=monsterinsights-report-overview&monsterinsights-highlight=monsterinsights-report-overview\";s:4:\"text\";s:11:\"View Report\";}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"12/09/2022 4:04 am\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"01/06/2023\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:131;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:62:\"monsterinsights_notification_to_setup_affiliate_links_20240901\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:30:\"Set Up Affiliate Link Tracking\";s:7:\"content\";s:556:\"By tracking your affiliate links in Google Analytics, you can gather all the data you need to optimize your links for maximizing affiliate revenue. You can track affiliate link clicks on your website with little configuration needed.<br><br><a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/how-to-set-up-affiliate-link-tracking-in-wordpress/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=9.0.1\" target=\"_blank\">In this article</a>, we’ll show you how to set up affiliate link tracking in WordPress.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:9:\"read_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:199:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/how-to-set-up-affiliate-link-tracking-in-wordpress/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=9.0.1\";s:4:\"text\";s:9:\"Read More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"09/01/2024 8:45 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"09/24/2024\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:132;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:54:\"monsterinsights_notification_traffic_dropping_20230328\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:32:\"Your Website Traffic is Dropping\";s:7:\"content\";s:520:\"Your website traffic is decreasing and that’s a reason to take action now. Less traffic means less opportunities to make your brand known, make relationships and ultimately sell your service or product. <br><br>Follow the marketing hacks of <a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/marketing-hacks-guaranteed-to-grow-your-traffic/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.13.1\" target=\"_blank\">this article</a> to start growing your traffic again.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:2:{s:10:\"learn_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:197:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/marketing-hacks-guaranteed-to-grow-your-traffic/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.13.1\";s:4:\"text\";s:10:\"Learn More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}s:11:\"view_report\";a:2:{s:3:\"url\";s:194:\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=monsterinsights_reports&monsterinsights-scroll=monsterinsights-report-overview&monsterinsights-highlight=monsterinsights-report-overview\";s:4:\"text\";s:11:\"View Report\";}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"03/28/2023 7:50 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"04/25/2023\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:133;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:46:\"monsterinsights_notification_visitors_20250626\";s:4:\"icon\";s:9:\"lightning\";s:5:\"title\";s:35:\"See how 0 Visitors Found Your Site!\";s:7:\"content\";s:122:\"Your website has been visited by 0 visitors in the past 30 days. Click the button below to view the full analytics report.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:11:\"view_report\";a:2:{s:3:\"url\";s:194:\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=monsterinsights_reports&monsterinsights-scroll=monsterinsights-report-overview&monsterinsights-highlight=monsterinsights-report-overview\";s:4:\"text\";s:11:\"View Report\";}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"06/26/2025 2:14 am\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"07/24/2025\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:134;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:46:\"monsterinsights_notification_visitors_20240901\";s:4:\"icon\";s:9:\"lightning\";s:5:\"title\";s:36:\"See how 59 Visitors Found Your Site!\";s:7:\"content\";s:123:\"Your website has been visited by 59 visitors in the past 30 days. Click the button below to view the full analytics report.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:11:\"view_report\";a:2:{s:3:\"url\";s:194:\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=monsterinsights_reports&monsterinsights-scroll=monsterinsights-report-overview&monsterinsights-highlight=monsterinsights-report-overview\";s:4:\"text\";s:11:\"View Report\";}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"09/01/2024 8:44 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"09/29/2024\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:135;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:46:\"monsterinsights_notification_visitors_20221020\";s:4:\"icon\";s:9:\"lightning\";s:5:\"title\";s:37:\"See how 128 Visitors Found Your Site!\";s:7:\"content\";s:124:\"Your website has been visited by 128 visitors in the past 30 days. Click the button below to view the full analytics report.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:11:\"view_report\";a:2:{s:3:\"url\";s:194:\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=monsterinsights_reports&monsterinsights-scroll=monsterinsights-report-overview&monsterinsights-highlight=monsterinsights-report-overview\";s:4:\"text\";s:11:\"View Report\";}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"10/20/2022 6:27 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"11/17/2022\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:136;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:49:\"monsterinsights_notification_bounce_rate_20230610\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:46:\"Your Website Bounce Rate is Higher Than 94.59%\";s:7:\"content\";s:417:\"Your site\'s bounce rate is 94.59%. Double check your site is working properly and be sure it loads quickly.  <a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/how-to-reduce-bounce-rate/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.15\" target=\"_blank\">Here</a> are some points to remember and steps to follow to get your bounce rates back to manageable levels.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:2:{s:11:\"view_report\";a:2:{s:3:\"url\";s:216:\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=monsterinsights_reports&monsterinsights-scroll=monsterinsights-report-infobox-bounce-rate&monsterinsights-highlight=monsterinsights-report-infobox-bounce-rate\";s:4:\"text\";s:11:\"View Report\";}s:10:\"learn_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:173:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/how-to-reduce-bounce-rate/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.15\";s:4:\"text\";s:10:\"Learn More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"06/10/2023 1:55 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"07/08/2023\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:137;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:56:\"monsterinsights_notification_returning_visitors_20240812\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:44:\"Only 4% of Your Visitors Return to Your Site\";s:7:\"content\";s:329:\"Your site has received a low number of returning users over the past 30 days. Try a tool like <a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/optinmonster-review/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=9.0.0\" target=\"_blank\">OptinMonster</a> to increase engagement.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:10:\"learn_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:168:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/optinmonster-review/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=9.0.0\";s:4:\"text\";s:10:\"Learn More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"08/12/2024 8:01 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"09/09/2024\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:138;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:56:\"monsterinsights_notification_returning_visitors_20240729\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:44:\"Only 7% of Your Visitors Return to Your Site\";s:7:\"content\";s:330:\"Your site has received a low number of returning users over the past 30 days. Try a tool like <a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/optinmonster-review/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.28.0\" target=\"_blank\">OptinMonster</a> to increase engagement.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:10:\"learn_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:169:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/optinmonster-review/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.28.0\";s:4:\"text\";s:10:\"Learn More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"07/29/2024 3:00 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"08/26/2024\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:139;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:49:\"monsterinsights_notification_bounce_rate_20220701\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:46:\"Your Website Bounce Rate is Higher Than 71.46%\";s:7:\"content\";s:418:\"Your site\'s bounce rate is 71.46%. Double check your site is working properly and be sure it loads quickly.  <a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/how-to-reduce-bounce-rate/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.5.3\" target=\"_blank\">Here</a> are some points to remember and steps to follow to get your bounce rates back to manageable levels.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:2:{s:11:\"view_report\";a:2:{s:3:\"url\";s:216:\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=monsterinsights_reports&monsterinsights-scroll=monsterinsights-report-infobox-bounce-rate&monsterinsights-highlight=monsterinsights-report-infobox-bounce-rate\";s:4:\"text\";s:11:\"View Report\";}s:10:\"learn_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:174:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/how-to-reduce-bounce-rate/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.5.3\";s:4:\"text\";s:10:\"Learn More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"07/01/2022 4:47 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"07/29/2022\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:140;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:46:\"monsterinsights_notification_visitors_20230111\";s:4:\"icon\";s:9:\"lightning\";s:5:\"title\";s:37:\"See how 133 Visitors Found Your Site!\";s:7:\"content\";s:124:\"Your website has been visited by 133 visitors in the past 30 days. Click the button below to view the full analytics report.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:11:\"view_report\";a:2:{s:3:\"url\";s:194:\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=monsterinsights_reports&monsterinsights-scroll=monsterinsights-report-overview&monsterinsights-highlight=monsterinsights-report-overview\";s:4:\"text\";s:11:\"View Report\";}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"01/11/2023 8:44 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"02/08/2023\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:141;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:54:\"monsterinsights_notification_traffic_dropping_20221209\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:32:\"Your Website Traffic is Dropping\";s:7:\"content\";s:520:\"Your website traffic is decreasing and that’s a reason to take action now. Less traffic means less opportunities to make your brand known, make relationships and ultimately sell your service or product. <br><br>Follow the marketing hacks of <a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/marketing-hacks-guaranteed-to-grow-your-traffic/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.10.1\" target=\"_blank\">this article</a> to start growing your traffic again.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:2:{s:10:\"learn_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:197:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/marketing-hacks-guaranteed-to-grow-your-traffic/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.10.1\";s:4:\"text\";s:10:\"Learn More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}s:11:\"view_report\";a:2:{s:3:\"url\";s:194:\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=monsterinsights_reports&monsterinsights-scroll=monsterinsights-report-overview&monsterinsights-highlight=monsterinsights-report-overview\";s:4:\"text\";s:11:\"View Report\";}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"12/09/2022 4:07 am\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"01/06/2023\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:142;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:62:\"monsterinsights_notification_to_setup_affiliate_links_20220714\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:30:\"Set Up Affiliate Link Tracking\";s:7:\"content\";s:556:\"By tracking your affiliate links in Google Analytics, you can gather all the data you need to optimize your links for maximizing affiliate revenue. You can track affiliate link clicks on your website with little configuration needed.<br><br><a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/how-to-set-up-affiliate-link-tracking-in-wordpress/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.7.0\" target=\"_blank\">In this article</a>, we’ll show you how to set up affiliate link tracking in WordPress.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:9:\"read_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:199:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/how-to-set-up-affiliate-link-tracking-in-wordpress/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.7.0\";s:4:\"text\";s:9:\"Read More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"07/14/2022 3:39 am\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"08/06/2022\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:143;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:56:\"monsterinsights_notification_returning_visitors_20230430\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:44:\"Only 5% of Your Visitors Return to Your Site\";s:7:\"content\";s:330:\"Your site has received a low number of returning users over the past 30 days. Try a tool like <a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/optinmonster-review/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.14.1\" target=\"_blank\">OptinMonster</a> to increase engagement.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:10:\"learn_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:169:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/optinmonster-review/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.14.1\";s:4:\"text\";s:10:\"Learn More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"04/30/2023 3:11 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"05/28/2023\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:144;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:46:\"monsterinsights_notification_visitors_20250209\";s:4:\"icon\";s:9:\"lightning\";s:5:\"title\";s:36:\"See how 69 Visitors Found Your Site!\";s:7:\"content\";s:123:\"Your website has been visited by 69 visitors in the past 30 days. Click the button below to view the full analytics report.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:11:\"view_report\";a:2:{s:3:\"url\";s:194:\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=monsterinsights_reports&monsterinsights-scroll=monsterinsights-report-overview&monsterinsights-highlight=monsterinsights-report-overview\";s:4:\"text\";s:11:\"View Report\";}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"02/09/2025 3:47 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"03/09/2025\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:145;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:56:\"monsterinsights_notification_returning_visitors_20231018\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:44:\"Only 2% of Your Visitors Return to Your Site\";s:7:\"content\";s:330:\"Your site has received a low number of returning users over the past 30 days. Try a tool like <a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/optinmonster-review/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.20.1\" target=\"_blank\">OptinMonster</a> to increase engagement.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:10:\"learn_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:169:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/optinmonster-review/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.20.1\";s:4:\"text\";s:10:\"Learn More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"10/18/2023 2:06 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"11/15/2023\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:146;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:56:\"monsterinsights_notification_returning_visitors_20230225\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:44:\"Only 5% of Your Visitors Return to Your Site\";s:7:\"content\";s:330:\"Your site has received a low number of returning users over the past 30 days. Try a tool like <a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/optinmonster-review/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.12.1\" target=\"_blank\">OptinMonster</a> to increase engagement.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:10:\"learn_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:169:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/optinmonster-review/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.12.1\";s:4:\"text\";s:10:\"Learn More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"02/25/2023 7:41 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"03/25/2023\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:147;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:46:\"monsterinsights_notification_visitors_20230601\";s:4:\"icon\";s:9:\"lightning\";s:5:\"title\";s:37:\"See how 137 Visitors Found Your Site!\";s:7:\"content\";s:124:\"Your website has been visited by 137 visitors in the past 30 days. Click the button below to view the full analytics report.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:11:\"view_report\";a:2:{s:3:\"url\";s:194:\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=monsterinsights_reports&monsterinsights-scroll=monsterinsights-report-overview&monsterinsights-highlight=monsterinsights-report-overview\";s:4:\"text\";s:11:\"View Report\";}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"06/01/2023 4:14 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"06/29/2023\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:148;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:46:\"monsterinsights_notification_visitors_20231107\";s:4:\"icon\";s:9:\"lightning\";s:5:\"title\";s:36:\"See how 57 Visitors Found Your Site!\";s:7:\"content\";s:123:\"Your website has been visited by 57 visitors in the past 30 days. Click the button below to view the full analytics report.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:11:\"view_report\";a:2:{s:3:\"url\";s:194:\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=monsterinsights_reports&monsterinsights-scroll=monsterinsights-report-overview&monsterinsights-highlight=monsterinsights-report-overview\";s:4:\"text\";s:11:\"View Report\";}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"11/07/2023 2:22 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"12/05/2023\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:149;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:49:\"monsterinsights_notification_bounce_rate_20220525\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:46:\"Your Website Bounce Rate is Higher Than 42.33%\";s:7:\"content\";s:418:\"Your site\'s bounce rate is 42.33%. Double check your site is working properly and be sure it loads quickly.  <a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/how-to-reduce-bounce-rate/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.5.3\" target=\"_blank\">Here</a> are some points to remember and steps to follow to get your bounce rates back to manageable levels.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:2:{s:11:\"view_report\";a:2:{s:3:\"url\";s:216:\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=monsterinsights_reports&monsterinsights-scroll=monsterinsights-report-infobox-bounce-rate&monsterinsights-highlight=monsterinsights-report-infobox-bounce-rate\";s:4:\"text\";s:11:\"View Report\";}s:10:\"learn_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:174:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/how-to-reduce-bounce-rate/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.5.3\";s:4:\"text\";s:10:\"Learn More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"05/25/2022 9:31 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"06/22/2022\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:150;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:56:\"monsterinsights_notification_returning_visitors_20230914\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:45:\"Only -2% of Your Visitors Return to Your Site\";s:7:\"content\";s:328:\"Your site has received a low number of returning users over the past 30 days. Try a tool like <a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/optinmonster-review/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.19\" target=\"_blank\">OptinMonster</a> to increase engagement.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:10:\"learn_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:167:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/optinmonster-review/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.19\";s:4:\"text\";s:10:\"Learn More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"09/14/2023 5:16 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"10/12/2023\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:151;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:49:\"monsterinsights_notification_bounce_rate_20230430\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:46:\"Your Website Bounce Rate is Higher Than 93.71%\";s:7:\"content\";s:419:\"Your site\'s bounce rate is 93.71%. Double check your site is working properly and be sure it loads quickly.  <a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/how-to-reduce-bounce-rate/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.14.1\" target=\"_blank\">Here</a> are some points to remember and steps to follow to get your bounce rates back to manageable levels.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:2:{s:11:\"view_report\";a:2:{s:3:\"url\";s:216:\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=monsterinsights_reports&monsterinsights-scroll=monsterinsights-report-infobox-bounce-rate&monsterinsights-highlight=monsterinsights-report-infobox-bounce-rate\";s:4:\"text\";s:11:\"View Report\";}s:10:\"learn_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:175:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/how-to-reduce-bounce-rate/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.14.1\";s:4:\"text\";s:10:\"Learn More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"04/30/2023 3:10 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"05/28/2023\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:152;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:49:\"monsterinsights_notification_bounce_rate_20220914\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:46:\"Your Website Bounce Rate is Higher Than 95.47%\";s:7:\"content\";s:418:\"Your site\'s bounce rate is 95.47%. Double check your site is working properly and be sure it loads quickly.  <a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/how-to-reduce-bounce-rate/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.8.2\" target=\"_blank\">Here</a> are some points to remember and steps to follow to get your bounce rates back to manageable levels.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:2:{s:11:\"view_report\";a:2:{s:3:\"url\";s:216:\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=monsterinsights_reports&monsterinsights-scroll=monsterinsights-report-infobox-bounce-rate&monsterinsights-highlight=monsterinsights-report-infobox-bounce-rate\";s:4:\"text\";s:11:\"View Report\";}s:10:\"learn_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:174:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/how-to-reduce-bounce-rate/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.8.2\";s:4:\"text\";s:10:\"Learn More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"09/14/2022 1:21 am\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"10/12/2022\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:153;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:54:\"monsterinsights_notification_traffic_dropping_20240423\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:32:\"Your Website Traffic is Dropping\";s:7:\"content\";s:520:\"Your website traffic is decreasing and that’s a reason to take action now. Less traffic means less opportunities to make your brand known, make relationships and ultimately sell your service or product. <br><br>Follow the marketing hacks of <a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/marketing-hacks-guaranteed-to-grow-your-traffic/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.26.0\" target=\"_blank\">this article</a> to start growing your traffic again.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:2:{s:10:\"learn_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:197:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/marketing-hacks-guaranteed-to-grow-your-traffic/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.26.0\";s:4:\"text\";s:10:\"Learn More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}s:11:\"view_report\";a:2:{s:3:\"url\";s:194:\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=monsterinsights_reports&monsterinsights-scroll=monsterinsights-report-overview&monsterinsights-highlight=monsterinsights-report-overview\";s:4:\"text\";s:11:\"View Report\";}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"04/23/2024 3:06 am\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"05/21/2024\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:154;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:54:\"monsterinsights_notification_traffic_dropping_20240523\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:32:\"Your Website Traffic is Dropping\";s:7:\"content\";s:520:\"Your website traffic is decreasing and that’s a reason to take action now. Less traffic means less opportunities to make your brand known, make relationships and ultimately sell your service or product. <br><br>Follow the marketing hacks of <a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/marketing-hacks-guaranteed-to-grow-your-traffic/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.26.0\" target=\"_blank\">this article</a> to start growing your traffic again.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:2:{s:10:\"learn_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:197:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/marketing-hacks-guaranteed-to-grow-your-traffic/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.26.0\";s:4:\"text\";s:10:\"Learn More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}s:11:\"view_report\";a:2:{s:3:\"url\";s:194:\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=monsterinsights_reports&monsterinsights-scroll=monsterinsights-report-overview&monsterinsights-highlight=monsterinsights-report-overview\";s:4:\"text\";s:11:\"View Report\";}}s:5:\"start\";s:19:\"05/23/2024 10:19 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"06/20/2024\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:155;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:54:\"monsterinsights_notification_traffic_dropping_20230610\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:32:\"Your Website Traffic is Dropping\";s:7:\"content\";s:518:\"Your website traffic is decreasing and that’s a reason to take action now. Less traffic means less opportunities to make your brand known, make relationships and ultimately sell your service or product. <br><br>Follow the marketing hacks of <a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/marketing-hacks-guaranteed-to-grow-your-traffic/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.15\" target=\"_blank\">this article</a> to start growing your traffic again.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:2:{s:10:\"learn_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:195:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/marketing-hacks-guaranteed-to-grow-your-traffic/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.15\";s:4:\"text\";s:10:\"Learn More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}s:11:\"view_report\";a:2:{s:3:\"url\";s:194:\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=monsterinsights_reports&monsterinsights-scroll=monsterinsights-report-overview&monsterinsights-highlight=monsterinsights-report-overview\";s:4:\"text\";s:11:\"View Report\";}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"06/10/2023 1:55 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"07/08/2023\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:156;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:56:\"monsterinsights_notification_returning_visitors_20240523\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:44:\"Only 0% of Your Visitors Return to Your Site\";s:7:\"content\";s:330:\"Your site has received a low number of returning users over the past 30 days. Try a tool like <a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/optinmonster-review/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.26.0\" target=\"_blank\">OptinMonster</a> to increase engagement.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:10:\"learn_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:169:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/optinmonster-review/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.26.0\";s:4:\"text\";s:10:\"Learn More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:19:\"05/23/2024 10:19 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"06/20/2024\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:157;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:46:\"monsterinsights_notification_audience_20230328\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:34:\"28% of Your Audience is From China\";s:7:\"content\";s:546:\"Is your site properly translated? By adding translated content specific to your audience you could gain big boosts in pageviews, time spent on page and a reduced bounce rate.<br><br>If you need help choosing a translation plugin to get you started take a look at <a href=\"https://www.wpbeginner.com/showcase/9-best-translation-plugins-for-wordpress-websites/?utm_source=monsterinsights&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.13.1\" target=\"_blank\">this article</a> for the best options available.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:2:{s:11:\"view_report\";a:2:{s:3:\"url\";s:204:\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=monsterinsights_reports&monsterinsights-scroll=monsterinsights-report-top-countries&monsterinsights-highlight=monsterinsights-report-top-countries\";s:4:\"text\";s:11:\"View Report\";}s:10:\"learn_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:208:\"https://www.wpbeginner.com/showcase/9-best-translation-plugins-for-wordpress-websites/?utm_source=monsterinsights&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.13.1\";s:4:\"text\";s:10:\"Learn More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"03/28/2023 7:46 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"04/25/2023\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:158;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:51:\"monsterinsights_notification_mobile_device_20250720\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:30:\"Traffic From Mobile Devices 0%\";s:7:\"content\";s:526:\"Traffic from mobile devices is considerably lower on your site compared to desktop devices. This could be an indicator that your site is not optimised for mobile devices.<br><br>Take a look now at <a href=\"https://www.wpbeginner.com/beginners-guide/how-to-preview-the-mobile-layout-of-your-site/?utm_source=monsterinsights&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=9.6.1\" target=\"_blank\">show your site looks</a> on mobile and make sure all your content can be accessed correctly.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:2:{s:11:\"view_report\";a:2:{s:3:\"url\";s:146:\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=monsterinsights_reports&monsterinsights-scroll=devices&monsterinsights-highlight=devices\";s:4:\"text\";s:11:\"View Report\";}s:10:\"learn_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:210:\"https://www.wpbeginner.com/beginners-guide/how-to-preview-the-mobile-layout-of-your-site/?utm_source=monsterinsights&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=9.6.1\";s:4:\"text\";s:10:\"Learn More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"07/20/2025 2:09 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"08/02/2025\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:159;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:56:\"monsterinsights_notification_returning_visitors_20230713\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:44:\"Only 2% of Your Visitors Return to Your Site\";s:7:\"content\";s:328:\"Your site has received a low number of returning users over the past 30 days. Try a tool like <a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/optinmonster-review/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.17\" target=\"_blank\">OptinMonster</a> to increase engagement.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:10:\"learn_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:167:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/optinmonster-review/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.17\";s:4:\"text\";s:10:\"Learn More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"07/13/2023 4:24 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"08/10/2023\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:160;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:56:\"monsterinsights_notification_returning_visitors_20241116\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:44:\"Only 1% of Your Visitors Return to Your Site\";s:7:\"content\";s:329:\"Your site has received a low number of returning users over the past 30 days. Try a tool like <a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/optinmonster-review/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=9.2.2\" target=\"_blank\">OptinMonster</a> to increase engagement.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:10:\"learn_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:168:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/optinmonster-review/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=9.2.2\";s:4:\"text\";s:10:\"Learn More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"11/16/2024 5:27 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"12/14/2024\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:161;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:62:\"monsterinsights_notification_to_setup_affiliate_links_20220608\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:30:\"Set Up Affiliate Link Tracking\";s:7:\"content\";s:556:\"By tracking your affiliate links in Google Analytics, you can gather all the data you need to optimize your links for maximizing affiliate revenue. You can track affiliate link clicks on your website with little configuration needed.<br><br><a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/how-to-set-up-affiliate-link-tracking-in-wordpress/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.5.3\" target=\"_blank\">In this article</a>, we’ll show you how to set up affiliate link tracking in WordPress.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:9:\"read_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:199:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/how-to-set-up-affiliate-link-tracking-in-wordpress/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.5.3\";s:4:\"text\";s:9:\"Read More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"06/08/2022 9:30 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"07/01/2022\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:162;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:46:\"monsterinsights_notification_audience_20230111\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:34:\"18% of Your Audience is From China\";s:7:\"content\";s:546:\"Is your site properly translated? By adding translated content specific to your audience you could gain big boosts in pageviews, time spent on page and a reduced bounce rate.<br><br>If you need help choosing a translation plugin to get you started take a look at <a href=\"https://www.wpbeginner.com/showcase/9-best-translation-plugins-for-wordpress-websites/?utm_source=monsterinsights&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.11.0\" target=\"_blank\">this article</a> for the best options available.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:2:{s:11:\"view_report\";a:2:{s:3:\"url\";s:204:\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=monsterinsights_reports&monsterinsights-scroll=monsterinsights-report-top-countries&monsterinsights-highlight=monsterinsights-report-top-countries\";s:4:\"text\";s:11:\"View Report\";}s:10:\"learn_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:208:\"https://www.wpbeginner.com/showcase/9-best-translation-plugins-for-wordpress-websites/?utm_source=monsterinsights&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.11.0\";s:4:\"text\";s:10:\"Learn More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"01/11/2023 8:45 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"02/08/2023\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:163;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:62:\"monsterinsights_notification_to_setup_affiliate_links_20240608\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:30:\"Set Up Affiliate Link Tracking\";s:7:\"content\";s:557:\"By tracking your affiliate links in Google Analytics, you can gather all the data you need to optimize your links for maximizing affiliate revenue. You can track affiliate link clicks on your website with little configuration needed.<br><br><a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/how-to-set-up-affiliate-link-tracking-in-wordpress/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.27.0\" target=\"_blank\">In this article</a>, we’ll show you how to set up affiliate link tracking in WordPress.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:9:\"read_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:200:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/how-to-set-up-affiliate-link-tracking-in-wordpress/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.27.0\";s:4:\"text\";s:9:\"Read More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"06/08/2024 4:51 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"07/01/2024\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:164;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:46:\"monsterinsights_notification_visitors_20230701\";s:4:\"icon\";s:9:\"lightning\";s:5:\"title\";s:35:\"See how 0 Visitors Found Your Site!\";s:7:\"content\";s:122:\"Your website has been visited by 0 visitors in the past 30 days. Click the button below to view the full analytics report.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:11:\"view_report\";a:2:{s:3:\"url\";s:194:\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=monsterinsights_reports&monsterinsights-scroll=monsterinsights-report-overview&monsterinsights-highlight=monsterinsights-report-overview\";s:4:\"text\";s:11:\"View Report\";}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"07/01/2023 7:41 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"07/29/2023\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:165;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:56:\"monsterinsights_notification_returning_visitors_20240320\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:44:\"Only 0% of Your Visitors Return to Your Site\";s:7:\"content\";s:330:\"Your site has received a low number of returning users over the past 30 days. Try a tool like <a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/optinmonster-review/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.25.0\" target=\"_blank\">OptinMonster</a> to increase engagement.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:10:\"learn_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:169:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/optinmonster-review/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.25.0\";s:4:\"text\";s:10:\"Learn More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"03/20/2024 4:26 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"04/17/2024\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:166;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:46:\"monsterinsights_notification_visitors_20220719\";s:4:\"icon\";s:9:\"lightning\";s:5:\"title\";s:37:\"See how 150 Visitors Found Your Site!\";s:7:\"content\";s:124:\"Your website has been visited by 150 visitors in the past 30 days. Click the button below to view the full analytics report.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:11:\"view_report\";a:2:{s:3:\"url\";s:194:\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=monsterinsights_reports&monsterinsights-scroll=monsterinsights-report-overview&monsterinsights-highlight=monsterinsights-report-overview\";s:4:\"text\";s:11:\"View Report\";}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"07/19/2022 3:17 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"08/16/2022\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:167;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:56:\"monsterinsights_notification_returning_visitors_20230610\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:44:\"Only 3% of Your Visitors Return to Your Site\";s:7:\"content\";s:328:\"Your site has received a low number of returning users over the past 30 days. Try a tool like <a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/optinmonster-review/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.15\" target=\"_blank\">OptinMonster</a> to increase engagement.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:10:\"learn_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:167:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/optinmonster-review/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.15\";s:4:\"text\";s:10:\"Learn More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"06/10/2023 1:55 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"07/08/2023\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:168;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:46:\"monsterinsights_notification_visitors_20241008\";s:4:\"icon\";s:9:\"lightning\";s:5:\"title\";s:36:\"See how 69 Visitors Found Your Site!\";s:7:\"content\";s:123:\"Your website has been visited by 69 visitors in the past 30 days. Click the button below to view the full analytics report.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:11:\"view_report\";a:2:{s:3:\"url\";s:194:\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=monsterinsights_reports&monsterinsights-scroll=monsterinsights-report-overview&monsterinsights-highlight=monsterinsights-report-overview\";s:4:\"text\";s:11:\"View Report\";}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"10/08/2024 9:53 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"11/05/2024\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:169;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:46:\"monsterinsights_notification_visitors_20250324\";s:4:\"icon\";s:9:\"lightning\";s:5:\"title\";s:35:\"See how 0 Visitors Found Your Site!\";s:7:\"content\";s:122:\"Your website has been visited by 0 visitors in the past 30 days. Click the button below to view the full analytics report.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:11:\"view_report\";a:2:{s:3:\"url\";s:194:\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=monsterinsights_reports&monsterinsights-scroll=monsterinsights-report-overview&monsterinsights-highlight=monsterinsights-report-overview\";s:4:\"text\";s:11:\"View Report\";}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"03/24/2025 7:41 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"04/21/2025\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:170;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:51:\"monsterinsights_notification_mobile_device_20250823\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:30:\"Traffic From Mobile Devices 0%\";s:7:\"content\";s:526:\"Traffic from mobile devices is considerably lower on your site compared to desktop devices. This could be an indicator that your site is not optimised for mobile devices.<br><br>Take a look now at <a href=\"https://www.wpbeginner.com/beginners-guide/how-to-preview-the-mobile-layout-of-your-site/?utm_source=monsterinsights&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=9.6.1\" target=\"_blank\">show your site looks</a> on mobile and make sure all your content can be accessed correctly.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:2:{s:11:\"view_report\";a:2:{s:3:\"url\";s:146:\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=monsterinsights_reports&monsterinsights-scroll=devices&monsterinsights-highlight=devices\";s:4:\"text\";s:11:\"View Report\";}s:10:\"learn_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:210:\"https://www.wpbeginner.com/beginners-guide/how-to-preview-the-mobile-layout-of-your-site/?utm_source=monsterinsights&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=9.6.1\";s:4:\"text\";s:10:\"Learn More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"08/23/2025 1:51 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"09/05/2025\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:171;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:56:\"monsterinsights_notification_returning_visitors_20230815\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:44:\"Only 2% of Your Visitors Return to Your Site\";s:7:\"content\";s:328:\"Your site has received a low number of returning users over the past 30 days. Try a tool like <a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/optinmonster-review/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.18\" target=\"_blank\">OptinMonster</a> to increase engagement.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:10:\"learn_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:167:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/optinmonster-review/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.18\";s:4:\"text\";s:10:\"Learn More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"08/15/2023 5:01 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"09/12/2023\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:172;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:46:\"monsterinsights_notification_visitors_20241127\";s:4:\"icon\";s:9:\"lightning\";s:5:\"title\";s:36:\"See how 65 Visitors Found Your Site!\";s:7:\"content\";s:123:\"Your website has been visited by 65 visitors in the past 30 days. Click the button below to view the full analytics report.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:11:\"view_report\";a:2:{s:3:\"url\";s:194:\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=monsterinsights_reports&monsterinsights-scroll=monsterinsights-report-overview&monsterinsights-highlight=monsterinsights-report-overview\";s:4:\"text\";s:11:\"View Report\";}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"11/27/2024 6:12 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"12/25/2024\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:173;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:56:\"monsterinsights_notification_returning_visitors_20230328\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:44:\"Only 5% of Your Visitors Return to Your Site\";s:7:\"content\";s:330:\"Your site has received a low number of returning users over the past 30 days. Try a tool like <a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/optinmonster-review/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.13.1\" target=\"_blank\">OptinMonster</a> to increase engagement.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:10:\"learn_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:169:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/optinmonster-review/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.13.1\";s:4:\"text\";s:10:\"Learn More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"03/28/2023 7:47 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"04/25/2023\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:174;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:62:\"monsterinsights_notification_to_setup_affiliate_links_20240510\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:30:\"Set Up Affiliate Link Tracking\";s:7:\"content\";s:557:\"By tracking your affiliate links in Google Analytics, you can gather all the data you need to optimize your links for maximizing affiliate revenue. You can track affiliate link clicks on your website with little configuration needed.<br><br><a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/how-to-set-up-affiliate-link-tracking-in-wordpress/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.26.0\" target=\"_blank\">In this article</a>, we’ll show you how to set up affiliate link tracking in WordPress.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:9:\"read_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:200:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/how-to-set-up-affiliate-link-tracking-in-wordpress/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.26.0\";s:4:\"text\";s:9:\"Read More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:19:\"05/10/2024 12:15 am\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"06/02/2024\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:175;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:54:\"monsterinsights_notification_traffic_dropping_20240915\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:32:\"Your Website Traffic is Dropping\";s:7:\"content\";s:519:\"Your website traffic is decreasing and that’s a reason to take action now. Less traffic means less opportunities to make your brand known, make relationships and ultimately sell your service or product. <br><br>Follow the marketing hacks of <a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/marketing-hacks-guaranteed-to-grow-your-traffic/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=9.0.1\" target=\"_blank\">this article</a> to start growing your traffic again.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:2:{s:10:\"learn_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:196:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/marketing-hacks-guaranteed-to-grow-your-traffic/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=9.0.1\";s:4:\"text\";s:10:\"Learn More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}s:11:\"view_report\";a:2:{s:3:\"url\";s:194:\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=monsterinsights_reports&monsterinsights-scroll=monsterinsights-report-overview&monsterinsights-highlight=monsterinsights-report-overview\";s:4:\"text\";s:11:\"View Report\";}}s:5:\"start\";s:19:\"09/15/2024 12:58 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"10/13/2024\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:176;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:46:\"monsterinsights_notification_visitors_20220919\";s:4:\"icon\";s:9:\"lightning\";s:5:\"title\";s:37:\"See how 376 Visitors Found Your Site!\";s:7:\"content\";s:124:\"Your website has been visited by 376 visitors in the past 30 days. Click the button below to view the full analytics report.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:11:\"view_report\";a:2:{s:3:\"url\";s:194:\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=monsterinsights_reports&monsterinsights-scroll=monsterinsights-report-overview&monsterinsights-highlight=monsterinsights-report-overview\";s:4:\"text\";s:11:\"View Report\";}}s:5:\"start\";s:19:\"09/19/2022 11:22 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"10/17/2022\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:177;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:56:\"monsterinsights_notification_returning_visitors_20240214\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:46:\"Only -10% of Your Visitors Return to Your Site\";s:7:\"content\";s:330:\"Your site has received a low number of returning users over the past 30 days. Try a tool like <a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/optinmonster-review/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.23.1\" target=\"_blank\">OptinMonster</a> to increase engagement.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:10:\"learn_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:169:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/optinmonster-review/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.23.1\";s:4:\"text\";s:10:\"Learn More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"02/14/2024 3:53 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"03/13/2024\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:178;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:46:\"monsterinsights_notification_visitors_20220615\";s:4:\"icon\";s:9:\"lightning\";s:5:\"title\";s:37:\"See how 905 Visitors Found Your Site!\";s:7:\"content\";s:124:\"Your website has been visited by 905 visitors in the past 30 days. Click the button below to view the full analytics report.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:11:\"view_report\";a:2:{s:3:\"url\";s:194:\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=monsterinsights_reports&monsterinsights-scroll=monsterinsights-report-overview&monsterinsights-highlight=monsterinsights-report-overview\";s:4:\"text\";s:11:\"View Report\";}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"06/15/2022 1:37 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"07/13/2022\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:179;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:62:\"monsterinsights_notification_to_setup_affiliate_links_20240214\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:30:\"Set Up Affiliate Link Tracking\";s:7:\"content\";s:557:\"By tracking your affiliate links in Google Analytics, you can gather all the data you need to optimize your links for maximizing affiliate revenue. You can track affiliate link clicks on your website with little configuration needed.<br><br><a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/how-to-set-up-affiliate-link-tracking-in-wordpress/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.23.1\" target=\"_blank\">In this article</a>, we’ll show you how to set up affiliate link tracking in WordPress.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:9:\"read_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:200:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/how-to-set-up-affiliate-link-tracking-in-wordpress/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.23.1\";s:4:\"text\";s:9:\"Read More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"02/14/2024 4:36 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"03/08/2024\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:180;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:62:\"monsterinsights_notification_to_setup_affiliate_links_20230403\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:30:\"Set Up Affiliate Link Tracking\";s:7:\"content\";s:557:\"By tracking your affiliate links in Google Analytics, you can gather all the data you need to optimize your links for maximizing affiliate revenue. You can track affiliate link clicks on your website with little configuration needed.<br><br><a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/how-to-set-up-affiliate-link-tracking-in-wordpress/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.14.0\" target=\"_blank\">In this article</a>, we’ll show you how to set up affiliate link tracking in WordPress.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:9:\"read_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:200:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/how-to-set-up-affiliate-link-tracking-in-wordpress/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.14.0\";s:4:\"text\";s:9:\"Read More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"04/03/2023 1:36 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"04/26/2023\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:181;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:46:\"monsterinsights_notification_audience_20230601\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:34:\"40% of Your Audience is From China\";s:7:\"content\";s:544:\"Is your site properly translated? By adding translated content specific to your audience you could gain big boosts in pageviews, time spent on page and a reduced bounce rate.<br><br>If you need help choosing a translation plugin to get you started take a look at <a href=\"https://www.wpbeginner.com/showcase/9-best-translation-plugins-for-wordpress-websites/?utm_source=monsterinsights&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.15\" target=\"_blank\">this article</a> for the best options available.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:2:{s:11:\"view_report\";a:2:{s:3:\"url\";s:204:\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=monsterinsights_reports&monsterinsights-scroll=monsterinsights-report-top-countries&monsterinsights-highlight=monsterinsights-report-top-countries\";s:4:\"text\";s:11:\"View Report\";}s:10:\"learn_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:206:\"https://www.wpbeginner.com/showcase/9-best-translation-plugins-for-wordpress-websites/?utm_source=monsterinsights&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.15\";s:4:\"text\";s:10:\"Learn More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"06/01/2023 4:14 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"06/29/2023\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:182;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:46:\"monsterinsights_notification_visitors_20240812\";s:4:\"icon\";s:9:\"lightning\";s:5:\"title\";s:36:\"See how 58 Visitors Found Your Site!\";s:7:\"content\";s:123:\"Your website has been visited by 58 visitors in the past 30 days. Click the button below to view the full analytics report.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:11:\"view_report\";a:2:{s:3:\"url\";s:194:\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=monsterinsights_reports&monsterinsights-scroll=monsterinsights-report-overview&monsterinsights-highlight=monsterinsights-report-overview\";s:4:\"text\";s:11:\"View Report\";}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"08/12/2024 8:01 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"09/09/2024\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:183;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:51:\"monsterinsights_notification_mobile_device_20250311\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:30:\"Traffic From Mobile Devices 0%\";s:7:\"content\";s:526:\"Traffic from mobile devices is considerably lower on your site compared to desktop devices. This could be an indicator that your site is not optimised for mobile devices.<br><br>Take a look now at <a href=\"https://www.wpbeginner.com/beginners-guide/how-to-preview-the-mobile-layout-of-your-site/?utm_source=monsterinsights&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=9.2.4\" target=\"_blank\">show your site looks</a> on mobile and make sure all your content can be accessed correctly.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:2:{s:11:\"view_report\";a:2:{s:3:\"url\";s:146:\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=monsterinsights_reports&monsterinsights-scroll=devices&monsterinsights-highlight=devices\";s:4:\"text\";s:11:\"View Report\";}s:10:\"learn_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:210:\"https://www.wpbeginner.com/beginners-guide/how-to-preview-the-mobile-layout-of-your-site/?utm_source=monsterinsights&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=9.2.4\";s:4:\"text\";s:10:\"Learn More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:19:\"03/11/2025 12:51 am\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"03/24/2025\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:184;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:54:\"monsterinsights_notification_traffic_dropping_20220719\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:32:\"Your Website Traffic is Dropping\";s:7:\"content\";s:519:\"Your website traffic is decreasing and that’s a reason to take action now. Less traffic means less opportunities to make your brand known, make relationships and ultimately sell your service or product. <br><br>Follow the marketing hacks of <a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/marketing-hacks-guaranteed-to-grow-your-traffic/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.7.0\" target=\"_blank\">this article</a> to start growing your traffic again.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:2:{s:10:\"learn_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:196:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/marketing-hacks-guaranteed-to-grow-your-traffic/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.7.0\";s:4:\"text\";s:10:\"Learn More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}s:11:\"view_report\";a:2:{s:3:\"url\";s:194:\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=monsterinsights_reports&monsterinsights-scroll=monsterinsights-report-overview&monsterinsights-highlight=monsterinsights-report-overview\";s:4:\"text\";s:11:\"View Report\";}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"07/19/2022 3:25 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"08/16/2022\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:185;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:62:\"monsterinsights_notification_to_setup_affiliate_links_20230208\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:30:\"Set Up Affiliate Link Tracking\";s:7:\"content\";s:557:\"By tracking your affiliate links in Google Analytics, you can gather all the data you need to optimize your links for maximizing affiliate revenue. You can track affiliate link clicks on your website with little configuration needed.<br><br><a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/how-to-set-up-affiliate-link-tracking-in-wordpress/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.12.1\" target=\"_blank\">In this article</a>, we’ll show you how to set up affiliate link tracking in WordPress.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:9:\"read_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:200:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/how-to-set-up-affiliate-link-tracking-in-wordpress/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.12.1\";s:4:\"text\";s:9:\"Read More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:19:\"02/08/2023 10:47 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"03/03/2023\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:186;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:62:\"monsterinsights_notification_to_setup_affiliate_links_20250720\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:30:\"Set Up Affiliate Link Tracking\";s:7:\"content\";s:556:\"By tracking your affiliate links in Google Analytics, you can gather all the data you need to optimize your links for maximizing affiliate revenue. You can track affiliate link clicks on your website with little configuration needed.<br><br><a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/how-to-set-up-affiliate-link-tracking-in-wordpress/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=9.6.1\" target=\"_blank\">In this article</a>, we’ll show you how to set up affiliate link tracking in WordPress.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:9:\"read_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:199:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/how-to-set-up-affiliate-link-tracking-in-wordpress/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=9.6.1\";s:4:\"text\";s:9:\"Read More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"07/20/2025 2:10 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"08/12/2025\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:187;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:46:\"monsterinsights_notification_visitors_20240711\";s:4:\"icon\";s:9:\"lightning\";s:5:\"title\";s:36:\"See how 72 Visitors Found Your Site!\";s:7:\"content\";s:123:\"Your website has been visited by 72 visitors in the past 30 days. Click the button below to view the full analytics report.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:11:\"view_report\";a:2:{s:3:\"url\";s:194:\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=monsterinsights_reports&monsterinsights-scroll=monsterinsights-report-overview&monsterinsights-highlight=monsterinsights-report-overview\";s:4:\"text\";s:11:\"View Report\";}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"07/11/2024 9:44 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"08/08/2024\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:188;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:62:\"monsterinsights_notification_to_setup_affiliate_links_20221212\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:30:\"Set Up Affiliate Link Tracking\";s:7:\"content\";s:557:\"By tracking your affiliate links in Google Analytics, you can gather all the data you need to optimize your links for maximizing affiliate revenue. You can track affiliate link clicks on your website with little configuration needed.<br><br><a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/how-to-set-up-affiliate-link-tracking-in-wordpress/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.10.1\" target=\"_blank\">In this article</a>, we’ll show you how to set up affiliate link tracking in WordPress.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:9:\"read_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:200:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/how-to-set-up-affiliate-link-tracking-in-wordpress/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.10.1\";s:4:\"text\";s:9:\"Read More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"12/12/2022 9:37 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"01/04/2023\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:189;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:62:\"monsterinsights_notification_to_setup_affiliate_links_20230617\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:30:\"Set Up Affiliate Link Tracking\";s:7:\"content\";s:555:\"By tracking your affiliate links in Google Analytics, you can gather all the data you need to optimize your links for maximizing affiliate revenue. You can track affiliate link clicks on your website with little configuration needed.<br><br><a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/how-to-set-up-affiliate-link-tracking-in-wordpress/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.15\" target=\"_blank\">In this article</a>, we’ll show you how to set up affiliate link tracking in WordPress.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:9:\"read_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:198:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/how-to-set-up-affiliate-link-tracking-in-wordpress/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.15\";s:4:\"text\";s:9:\"Read More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"06/17/2023 1:40 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"07/10/2023\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:190;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:62:\"monsterinsights_notification_to_setup_affiliate_links_20241116\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:30:\"Set Up Affiliate Link Tracking\";s:7:\"content\";s:556:\"By tracking your affiliate links in Google Analytics, you can gather all the data you need to optimize your links for maximizing affiliate revenue. You can track affiliate link clicks on your website with little configuration needed.<br><br><a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/how-to-set-up-affiliate-link-tracking-in-wordpress/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=9.2.2\" target=\"_blank\">In this article</a>, we’ll show you how to set up affiliate link tracking in WordPress.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:9:\"read_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:199:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/how-to-set-up-affiliate-link-tracking-in-wordpress/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=9.2.2\";s:4:\"text\";s:9:\"Read More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"11/16/2024 5:28 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"12/09/2024\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:191;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:54:\"monsterinsights_notification_traffic_dropping_20221020\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:32:\"Your Website Traffic is Dropping\";s:7:\"content\";s:519:\"Your website traffic is decreasing and that’s a reason to take action now. Less traffic means less opportunities to make your brand known, make relationships and ultimately sell your service or product. <br><br>Follow the marketing hacks of <a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/marketing-hacks-guaranteed-to-grow-your-traffic/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.9.1\" target=\"_blank\">this article</a> to start growing your traffic again.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:2:{s:10:\"learn_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:196:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/marketing-hacks-guaranteed-to-grow-your-traffic/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.9.1\";s:4:\"text\";s:10:\"Learn More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}s:11:\"view_report\";a:2:{s:3:\"url\";s:194:\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=monsterinsights_reports&monsterinsights-scroll=monsterinsights-report-overview&monsterinsights-highlight=monsterinsights-report-overview\";s:4:\"text\";s:11:\"View Report\";}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"10/20/2022 6:28 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"11/17/2022\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:192;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:46:\"monsterinsights_notification_visitors_20240222\";s:4:\"icon\";s:9:\"lightning\";s:5:\"title\";s:37:\"See how 479 Visitors Found Your Site!\";s:7:\"content\";s:124:\"Your website has been visited by 479 visitors in the past 30 days. Click the button below to view the full analytics report.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:11:\"view_report\";a:2:{s:3:\"url\";s:194:\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=monsterinsights_reports&monsterinsights-scroll=monsterinsights-report-overview&monsterinsights-highlight=monsterinsights-report-overview\";s:4:\"text\";s:11:\"View Report\";}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"02/22/2024 4:12 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"03/21/2024\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:193;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:51:\"monsterinsights_notification_mobile_device_20240301\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:30:\"Traffic From Mobile Devices 1%\";s:7:\"content\";s:527:\"Traffic from mobile devices is considerably lower on your site compared to desktop devices. This could be an indicator that your site is not optimised for mobile devices.<br><br>Take a look now at <a href=\"https://www.wpbeginner.com/beginners-guide/how-to-preview-the-mobile-layout-of-your-site/?utm_source=monsterinsights&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.24.0\" target=\"_blank\">show your site looks</a> on mobile and make sure all your content can be accessed correctly.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:2:{s:11:\"view_report\";a:2:{s:3:\"url\";s:146:\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=monsterinsights_reports&monsterinsights-scroll=devices&monsterinsights-highlight=devices\";s:4:\"text\";s:11:\"View Report\";}s:10:\"learn_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:211:\"https://www.wpbeginner.com/beginners-guide/how-to-preview-the-mobile-layout-of-your-site/?utm_source=monsterinsights&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.24.0\";s:4:\"text\";s:10:\"Learn More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"03/01/2024 3:37 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"03/14/2024\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:194;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:56:\"monsterinsights_notification_returning_visitors_20240901\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:44:\"Only 3% of Your Visitors Return to Your Site\";s:7:\"content\";s:329:\"Your site has received a low number of returning users over the past 30 days. Try a tool like <a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/optinmonster-review/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=9.0.1\" target=\"_blank\">OptinMonster</a> to increase engagement.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:10:\"learn_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:168:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/optinmonster-review/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=9.0.1\";s:4:\"text\";s:10:\"Learn More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"09/01/2024 8:44 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"09/29/2024\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:195;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:46:\"monsterinsights_notification_visitors_20240118\";s:4:\"icon\";s:9:\"lightning\";s:5:\"title\";s:36:\"See how 33 Visitors Found Your Site!\";s:7:\"content\";s:123:\"Your website has been visited by 33 visitors in the past 30 days. 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Click the button below to view the full analytics report.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:11:\"view_report\";a:2:{s:3:\"url\";s:194:\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=monsterinsights_reports&monsterinsights-scroll=monsterinsights-report-overview&monsterinsights-highlight=monsterinsights-report-overview\";s:4:\"text\";s:11:\"View Report\";}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"12/31/2024 3:57 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"01/28/2025\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:197;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:62:\"monsterinsights_notification_to_setup_affiliate_links_20230803\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:30:\"Set Up Affiliate Link Tracking\";s:7:\"content\";s:555:\"By tracking your affiliate links in Google Analytics, you can gather all the data you need to optimize your links for maximizing affiliate revenue. You can track affiliate link clicks on your website with little configuration needed.<br><br><a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/how-to-set-up-affiliate-link-tracking-in-wordpress/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.18\" target=\"_blank\">In this article</a>, we’ll show you how to set up affiliate link tracking in WordPress.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:9:\"read_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:198:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/how-to-set-up-affiliate-link-tracking-in-wordpress/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.18\";s:4:\"text\";s:9:\"Read More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"08/03/2023 2:36 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"08/26/2023\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:198;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:46:\"monsterinsights_notification_audience_20250209\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:34:\"41% of Your Audience is From China\";s:7:\"content\";s:545:\"Is your site properly translated? By adding translated content specific to your audience you could gain big boosts in pageviews, time spent on page and a reduced bounce rate.<br><br>If you need help choosing a translation plugin to get you started take a look at <a href=\"https://www.wpbeginner.com/showcase/9-best-translation-plugins-for-wordpress-websites/?utm_source=monsterinsights&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=9.2.4\" target=\"_blank\">this article</a> for the best options available.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:2:{s:11:\"view_report\";a:2:{s:3:\"url\";s:204:\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=monsterinsights_reports&monsterinsights-scroll=monsterinsights-report-top-countries&monsterinsights-highlight=monsterinsights-report-top-countries\";s:4:\"text\";s:11:\"View Report\";}s:10:\"learn_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:207:\"https://www.wpbeginner.com/showcase/9-best-translation-plugins-for-wordpress-websites/?utm_source=monsterinsights&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=9.2.4\";s:4:\"text\";s:10:\"Learn More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"02/09/2025 3:47 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"03/09/2025\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:199;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:49:\"monsterinsights_notification_bounce_rate_20221017\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:46:\"Your Website Bounce Rate is Higher Than 91.94%\";s:7:\"content\";s:418:\"Your site\'s bounce rate is 91.94%. Double check your site is working properly and be sure it loads quickly.  <a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/how-to-reduce-bounce-rate/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.9.0\" target=\"_blank\">Here</a> are some points to remember and steps to follow to get your bounce rates back to manageable levels.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:2:{s:11:\"view_report\";a:2:{s:3:\"url\";s:216:\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=monsterinsights_reports&monsterinsights-scroll=monsterinsights-report-infobox-bounce-rate&monsterinsights-highlight=monsterinsights-report-infobox-bounce-rate\";s:4:\"text\";s:11:\"View Report\";}s:10:\"learn_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:174:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/how-to-reduce-bounce-rate/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.9.0\";s:4:\"text\";s:10:\"Learn More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"10/17/2022 5:38 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"11/14/2022\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:200;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:62:\"monsterinsights_notification_to_setup_affiliate_links_20240708\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:30:\"Set Up Affiliate Link Tracking\";s:7:\"content\";s:557:\"By tracking your affiliate links in Google Analytics, you can gather all the data you need to optimize your links for maximizing affiliate revenue. You can track affiliate link clicks on your website with little configuration needed.<br><br><a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/how-to-set-up-affiliate-link-tracking-in-wordpress/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.27.0\" target=\"_blank\">In this article</a>, we’ll show you how to set up affiliate link tracking in WordPress.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:9:\"read_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:200:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/how-to-set-up-affiliate-link-tracking-in-wordpress/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.27.0\";s:4:\"text\";s:9:\"Read More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"07/08/2024 8:02 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"07/31/2024\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:201;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:62:\"monsterinsights_notification_to_setup_affiliate_links_20230430\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:30:\"Set Up Affiliate Link Tracking\";s:7:\"content\";s:557:\"By tracking your affiliate links in Google Analytics, you can gather all the data you need to optimize your links for maximizing affiliate revenue. You can track affiliate link clicks on your website with little configuration needed.<br><br><a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/how-to-set-up-affiliate-link-tracking-in-wordpress/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.14.1\" target=\"_blank\">In this article</a>, we’ll show you how to set up affiliate link tracking in WordPress.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:9:\"read_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:200:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/how-to-set-up-affiliate-link-tracking-in-wordpress/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.14.1\";s:4:\"text\";s:9:\"Read More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"04/30/2023 3:43 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"05/23/2023\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:202;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:46:\"monsterinsights_notification_visitors_20241022\";s:4:\"icon\";s:9:\"lightning\";s:5:\"title\";s:36:\"See how 50 Visitors Found Your Site!\";s:7:\"content\";s:123:\"Your website has been visited by 50 visitors in the past 30 days. Click the button below to view the full analytics report.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:11:\"view_report\";a:2:{s:3:\"url\";s:194:\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=monsterinsights_reports&monsterinsights-scroll=monsterinsights-report-overview&monsterinsights-highlight=monsterinsights-report-overview\";s:4:\"text\";s:11:\"View Report\";}}s:5:\"start\";s:19:\"10/22/2024 12:11 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"11/19/2024\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:203;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:46:\"monsterinsights_notification_audience_20230803\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:34:\"19% of Your Audience is From China\";s:7:\"content\";s:544:\"Is your site properly translated? By adding translated content specific to your audience you could gain big boosts in pageviews, time spent on page and a reduced bounce rate.<br><br>If you need help choosing a translation plugin to get you started take a look at <a href=\"https://www.wpbeginner.com/showcase/9-best-translation-plugins-for-wordpress-websites/?utm_source=monsterinsights&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.18\" target=\"_blank\">this article</a> for the best options available.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:2:{s:11:\"view_report\";a:2:{s:3:\"url\";s:204:\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=monsterinsights_reports&monsterinsights-scroll=monsterinsights-report-top-countries&monsterinsights-highlight=monsterinsights-report-top-countries\";s:4:\"text\";s:11:\"View Report\";}s:10:\"learn_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:206:\"https://www.wpbeginner.com/showcase/9-best-translation-plugins-for-wordpress-websites/?utm_source=monsterinsights&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.18\";s:4:\"text\";s:10:\"Learn More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"08/03/2023 2:26 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"08/31/2023\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:204;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:56:\"monsterinsights_notification_returning_visitors_20241008\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:44:\"Only 2% of Your Visitors Return to Your Site\";s:7:\"content\";s:329:\"Your site has received a low number of returning users over the past 30 days. Try a tool like <a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/optinmonster-review/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=9.0.1\" target=\"_blank\">OptinMonster</a> to increase engagement.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:10:\"learn_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:168:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/optinmonster-review/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=9.0.1\";s:4:\"text\";s:10:\"Learn More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"10/08/2024 9:53 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"11/05/2024\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:205;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:54:\"monsterinsights_notification_traffic_dropping_20250209\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:32:\"Your Website Traffic is Dropping\";s:7:\"content\";s:519:\"Your website traffic is decreasing and that’s a reason to take action now. Less traffic means less opportunities to make your brand known, make relationships and ultimately sell your service or product. <br><br>Follow the marketing hacks of <a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/marketing-hacks-guaranteed-to-grow-your-traffic/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=9.2.4\" target=\"_blank\">this article</a> to start growing your traffic again.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:2:{s:10:\"learn_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:196:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/marketing-hacks-guaranteed-to-grow-your-traffic/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=9.2.4\";s:4:\"text\";s:10:\"Learn More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}s:11:\"view_report\";a:2:{s:3:\"url\";s:194:\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=monsterinsights_reports&monsterinsights-scroll=monsterinsights-report-overview&monsterinsights-highlight=monsterinsights-report-overview\";s:4:\"text\";s:11:\"View Report\";}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"02/09/2025 3:47 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"03/09/2025\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:206;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:46:\"monsterinsights_notification_visitors_20240610\";s:4:\"icon\";s:9:\"lightning\";s:5:\"title\";s:37:\"See how 130 Visitors Found Your Site!\";s:7:\"content\";s:124:\"Your website has been visited by 130 visitors in the past 30 days. Click the button below to view the full analytics report.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:11:\"view_report\";a:2:{s:3:\"url\";s:194:\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=monsterinsights_reports&monsterinsights-scroll=monsterinsights-report-overview&monsterinsights-highlight=monsterinsights-report-overview\";s:4:\"text\";s:11:\"View Report\";}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"06/10/2024 2:09 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"07/08/2024\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:207;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:56:\"monsterinsights_notification_returning_visitors_20231129\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:44:\"Only 2% of Your Visitors Return to Your Site\";s:7:\"content\";s:330:\"Your site has received a low number of returning users over the past 30 days. Try a tool like <a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/optinmonster-review/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.21.0\" target=\"_blank\">OptinMonster</a> to increase engagement.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:10:\"learn_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:169:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/optinmonster-review/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.21.0\";s:4:\"text\";s:10:\"Learn More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:19:\"11/29/2023 11:48 am\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"12/27/2023\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:208;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:51:\"monsterinsights_notification_mobile_device_20250405\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:30:\"Traffic From Mobile Devices 0%\";s:7:\"content\";s:526:\"Traffic from mobile devices is considerably lower on your site compared to desktop devices. This could be an indicator that your site is not optimised for mobile devices.<br><br>Take a look now at <a href=\"https://www.wpbeginner.com/beginners-guide/how-to-preview-the-mobile-layout-of-your-site/?utm_source=monsterinsights&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=9.3.1\" target=\"_blank\">show your site looks</a> on mobile and make sure all your content can be accessed correctly.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:2:{s:11:\"view_report\";a:2:{s:3:\"url\";s:146:\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=monsterinsights_reports&monsterinsights-scroll=devices&monsterinsights-highlight=devices\";s:4:\"text\";s:11:\"View Report\";}s:10:\"learn_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:210:\"https://www.wpbeginner.com/beginners-guide/how-to-preview-the-mobile-layout-of-your-site/?utm_source=monsterinsights&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=9.3.1\";s:4:\"text\";s:10:\"Learn More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"04/05/2025 1:14 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"04/18/2025\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:209;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:46:\"monsterinsights_notification_visitors_20231007\";s:4:\"icon\";s:9:\"lightning\";s:5:\"title\";s:36:\"See how 77 Visitors Found Your Site!\";s:7:\"content\";s:123:\"Your website has been visited by 77 visitors in the past 30 days. Click the button below to view the full analytics report.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:11:\"view_report\";a:2:{s:3:\"url\";s:194:\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=monsterinsights_reports&monsterinsights-scroll=monsterinsights-report-overview&monsterinsights-highlight=monsterinsights-report-overview\";s:4:\"text\";s:11:\"View Report\";}}s:5:\"start\";s:19:\"10/07/2023 11:31 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"11/04/2023\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:210;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:49:\"monsterinsights_notification_bounce_rate_20230225\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:46:\"Your Website Bounce Rate is Higher Than 94.44%\";s:7:\"content\";s:419:\"Your site\'s bounce rate is 94.44%. Double check your site is working properly and be sure it loads quickly.  <a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/how-to-reduce-bounce-rate/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.12.1\" target=\"_blank\">Here</a> are some points to remember and steps to follow to get your bounce rates back to manageable levels.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:2:{s:11:\"view_report\";a:2:{s:3:\"url\";s:216:\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=monsterinsights_reports&monsterinsights-scroll=monsterinsights-report-infobox-bounce-rate&monsterinsights-highlight=monsterinsights-report-infobox-bounce-rate\";s:4:\"text\";s:11:\"View Report\";}s:10:\"learn_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:175:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/how-to-reduce-bounce-rate/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.12.1\";s:4:\"text\";s:10:\"Learn More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"02/25/2023 7:40 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"03/25/2023\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:211;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:46:\"monsterinsights_notification_visitors_20250501\";s:4:\"icon\";s:9:\"lightning\";s:5:\"title\";s:35:\"See how 0 Visitors Found Your Site!\";s:7:\"content\";s:122:\"Your website has been visited by 0 visitors in the past 30 days. Click the button below to view the full analytics report.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:11:\"view_report\";a:2:{s:3:\"url\";s:194:\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=monsterinsights_reports&monsterinsights-scroll=monsterinsights-report-overview&monsterinsights-highlight=monsterinsights-report-overview\";s:4:\"text\";s:11:\"View Report\";}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"05/01/2025 8:45 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"05/29/2025\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:212;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:49:\"monsterinsights_notification_bounce_rate_20221209\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:43:\"Your Website Bounce Rate is Higher Than 95%\";s:7:\"content\";s:416:\"Your site\'s bounce rate is 95%. Double check your site is working properly and be sure it loads quickly.  <a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/how-to-reduce-bounce-rate/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.10.1\" target=\"_blank\">Here</a> are some points to remember and steps to follow to get your bounce rates back to manageable levels.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:2:{s:11:\"view_report\";a:2:{s:3:\"url\";s:216:\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=monsterinsights_reports&monsterinsights-scroll=monsterinsights-report-infobox-bounce-rate&monsterinsights-highlight=monsterinsights-report-infobox-bounce-rate\";s:4:\"text\";s:11:\"View Report\";}s:10:\"learn_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:175:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/how-to-reduce-bounce-rate/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.10.1\";s:4:\"text\";s:10:\"Learn More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"12/09/2022 4:05 am\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"01/06/2023\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:213;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:56:\"monsterinsights_notification_returning_visitors_20240915\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:45:\"Only -3% of Your Visitors Return to Your Site\";s:7:\"content\";s:329:\"Your site has received a low number of returning users over the past 30 days. Try a tool like <a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/optinmonster-review/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=9.0.1\" target=\"_blank\">OptinMonster</a> to increase engagement.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:10:\"learn_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:168:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/optinmonster-review/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=9.0.1\";s:4:\"text\";s:10:\"Learn More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:19:\"09/15/2024 12:58 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"10/13/2024\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:214;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:49:\"monsterinsights_notification_bounce_rate_20230328\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:46:\"Your Website Bounce Rate is Higher Than 89.66%\";s:7:\"content\";s:419:\"Your site\'s bounce rate is 89.66%. Double check your site is working properly and be sure it loads quickly.  <a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/how-to-reduce-bounce-rate/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.13.1\" target=\"_blank\">Here</a> are some points to remember and steps to follow to get your bounce rates back to manageable levels.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:2:{s:11:\"view_report\";a:2:{s:3:\"url\";s:216:\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=monsterinsights_reports&monsterinsights-scroll=monsterinsights-report-infobox-bounce-rate&monsterinsights-highlight=monsterinsights-report-infobox-bounce-rate\";s:4:\"text\";s:11:\"View Report\";}s:10:\"learn_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:175:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/how-to-reduce-bounce-rate/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.13.1\";s:4:\"text\";s:10:\"Learn More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"03/28/2023 7:47 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"04/25/2023\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:215;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:54:\"monsterinsights_notification_traffic_dropping_20230824\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:32:\"Your Website Traffic is Dropping\";s:7:\"content\";s:518:\"Your website traffic is decreasing and that’s a reason to take action now. Less traffic means less opportunities to make your brand known, make relationships and ultimately sell your service or product. <br><br>Follow the marketing hacks of <a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/marketing-hacks-guaranteed-to-grow-your-traffic/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.19\" target=\"_blank\">this article</a> to start growing your traffic again.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:2:{s:10:\"learn_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:195:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/marketing-hacks-guaranteed-to-grow-your-traffic/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.19\";s:4:\"text\";s:10:\"Learn More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}s:11:\"view_report\";a:2:{s:3:\"url\";s:194:\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=monsterinsights_reports&monsterinsights-scroll=monsterinsights-report-overview&monsterinsights-highlight=monsterinsights-report-overview\";s:4:\"text\";s:11:\"View Report\";}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"08/24/2023 8:03 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"09/21/2023\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:216;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:62:\"monsterinsights_notification_to_setup_affiliate_links_20240812\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:30:\"Set Up Affiliate Link Tracking\";s:7:\"content\";s:556:\"By tracking your affiliate links in Google Analytics, you can gather all the data you need to optimize your links for maximizing affiliate revenue. You can track affiliate link clicks on your website with little configuration needed.<br><br><a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/how-to-set-up-affiliate-link-tracking-in-wordpress/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=9.0.0\" target=\"_blank\">In this article</a>, we’ll show you how to set up affiliate link tracking in WordPress.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:9:\"read_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:199:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/how-to-set-up-affiliate-link-tracking-in-wordpress/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=9.0.0\";s:4:\"text\";s:9:\"Read More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"08/12/2024 8:02 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"09/04/2024\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:217;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:46:\"monsterinsights_notification_visitors_20230803\";s:4:\"icon\";s:9:\"lightning\";s:5:\"title\";s:36:\"See how 42 Visitors Found Your Site!\";s:7:\"content\";s:123:\"Your website has been visited by 42 visitors in the past 30 days. Click the button below to view the full analytics report.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:11:\"view_report\";a:2:{s:3:\"url\";s:194:\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=monsterinsights_reports&monsterinsights-scroll=monsterinsights-report-overview&monsterinsights-highlight=monsterinsights-report-overview\";s:4:\"text\";s:11:\"View Report\";}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"08/03/2023 2:26 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"08/31/2023\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:218;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:46:\"monsterinsights_notification_visitors_20240510\";s:4:\"icon\";s:9:\"lightning\";s:5:\"title\";s:37:\"See how 140 Visitors Found Your Site!\";s:7:\"content\";s:124:\"Your website has been visited by 140 visitors in the past 30 days. Click the button below to view the full analytics report.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:11:\"view_report\";a:2:{s:3:\"url\";s:194:\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=monsterinsights_reports&monsterinsights-scroll=monsterinsights-report-overview&monsterinsights-highlight=monsterinsights-report-overview\";s:4:\"text\";s:11:\"View Report\";}}s:5:\"start\";s:19:\"05/10/2024 12:03 am\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"06/07/2024\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:219;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:56:\"monsterinsights_notification_returning_visitors_20240627\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:44:\"Only 3% of Your Visitors Return to Your Site\";s:7:\"content\";s:330:\"Your site has received a low number of returning users over the past 30 days. Try a tool like <a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/optinmonster-review/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.27.0\" target=\"_blank\">OptinMonster</a> to increase engagement.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:10:\"learn_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:169:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/optinmonster-review/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.27.0\";s:4:\"text\";s:10:\"Learn More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"06/27/2024 6:44 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"07/25/2024\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:220;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:62:\"monsterinsights_notification_to_setup_affiliate_links_20250501\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:30:\"Set Up Affiliate Link Tracking\";s:7:\"content\";s:556:\"By tracking your affiliate links in Google Analytics, you can gather all the data you need to optimize your links for maximizing affiliate revenue. You can track affiliate link clicks on your website with little configuration needed.<br><br><a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/how-to-set-up-affiliate-link-tracking-in-wordpress/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=9.4.1\" target=\"_blank\">In this article</a>, we’ll show you how to set up affiliate link tracking in WordPress.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:9:\"read_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:199:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/how-to-set-up-affiliate-link-tracking-in-wordpress/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=9.4.1\";s:4:\"text\";s:9:\"Read More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"05/01/2025 9:09 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"05/24/2025\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:221;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:56:\"monsterinsights_notification_returning_visitors_20250823\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:44:\"Only 0% of Your Visitors Return to Your Site\";s:7:\"content\";s:329:\"Your site has received a low number of returning users over the past 30 days. Try a tool like <a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/optinmonster-review/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=9.6.1\" target=\"_blank\">OptinMonster</a> to increase engagement.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:10:\"learn_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:168:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/optinmonster-review/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=9.6.1\";s:4:\"text\";s:10:\"Learn More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"08/23/2025 1:52 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"09/20/2025\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:222;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:54:\"monsterinsights_notification_traffic_dropping_20231029\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:32:\"Your Website Traffic is Dropping\";s:7:\"content\";s:520:\"Your website traffic is decreasing and that’s a reason to take action now. Less traffic means less opportunities to make your brand known, make relationships and ultimately sell your service or product. <br><br>Follow the marketing hacks of <a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/marketing-hacks-guaranteed-to-grow-your-traffic/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.20.1\" target=\"_blank\">this article</a> to start growing your traffic again.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:2:{s:10:\"learn_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:197:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/marketing-hacks-guaranteed-to-grow-your-traffic/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.20.1\";s:4:\"text\";s:10:\"Learn More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}s:11:\"view_report\";a:2:{s:3:\"url\";s:194:\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=monsterinsights_reports&monsterinsights-scroll=monsterinsights-report-overview&monsterinsights-highlight=monsterinsights-report-overview\";s:4:\"text\";s:11:\"View Report\";}}s:5:\"start\";s:19:\"10/29/2023 10:29 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"11/26/2023\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:223;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:46:\"monsterinsights_notification_visitors_20231219\";s:4:\"icon\";s:9:\"lightning\";s:5:\"title\";s:36:\"See how 80 Visitors Found Your Site!\";s:7:\"content\";s:123:\"Your website has been visited by 80 visitors in the past 30 days. Click the button below to view the full analytics report.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:11:\"view_report\";a:2:{s:3:\"url\";s:194:\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=monsterinsights_reports&monsterinsights-scroll=monsterinsights-report-overview&monsterinsights-highlight=monsterinsights-report-overview\";s:4:\"text\";s:11:\"View Report\";}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"12/19/2023 1:30 am\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"01/16/2024\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:224;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:64:\"monsterinsights_notification_mobile_device_high_traffic_20241213\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:34:\"Traffic From Mobile Devices is 75%\";s:7:\"content\";s:169:\"In the last 30 days, your site has received 75% of traffic through a mobile or tablet device. Make sure your site is optimized for these visitors to maximize engagement.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:0:{}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"12/13/2024 4:13 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"01/10/2025\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:225;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:54:\"monsterinsights_notification_traffic_dropping_20240812\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:32:\"Your Website Traffic is Dropping\";s:7:\"content\";s:519:\"Your website traffic is decreasing and that’s a reason to take action now. Less traffic means less opportunities to make your brand known, make relationships and ultimately sell your service or product. <br><br>Follow the marketing hacks of <a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/marketing-hacks-guaranteed-to-grow-your-traffic/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=9.0.0\" target=\"_blank\">this article</a> to start growing your traffic again.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:2:{s:10:\"learn_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:196:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/marketing-hacks-guaranteed-to-grow-your-traffic/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=9.0.0\";s:4:\"text\";s:10:\"Learn More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}s:11:\"view_report\";a:2:{s:3:\"url\";s:194:\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=monsterinsights_reports&monsterinsights-scroll=monsterinsights-report-overview&monsterinsights-highlight=monsterinsights-report-overview\";s:4:\"text\";s:11:\"View Report\";}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"08/12/2024 8:01 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"09/09/2024\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:226;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:46:\"monsterinsights_notification_visitors_20230225\";s:4:\"icon\";s:9:\"lightning\";s:5:\"title\";s:37:\"See how 126 Visitors Found Your Site!\";s:7:\"content\";s:124:\"Your website has been visited by 126 visitors in the past 30 days. 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You can track affiliate link clicks on your website with little configuration needed.<br><br><a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/how-to-set-up-affiliate-link-tracking-in-wordpress/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.25.0\" target=\"_blank\">In this article</a>, we’ll show you how to set up affiliate link tracking in WordPress.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:9:\"read_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:200:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/how-to-set-up-affiliate-link-tracking-in-wordpress/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.25.0\";s:4:\"text\";s:9:\"Read More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"04/07/2024 1:27 am\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"04/30/2024\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:228;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:62:\"monsterinsights_notification_to_setup_affiliate_links_20240312\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:30:\"Set Up Affiliate Link Tracking\";s:7:\"content\";s:557:\"By tracking your affiliate links in Google Analytics, you can gather all the data you need to optimize your links for maximizing affiliate revenue. 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By adding translated content specific to your audience you could gain big boosts in pageviews, time spent on page and a reduced bounce rate.<br><br>If you need help choosing a translation plugin to get you started take a look at <a href=\"https://www.wpbeginner.com/showcase/9-best-translation-plugins-for-wordpress-websites/?utm_source=monsterinsights&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.23.1\" target=\"_blank\">this article</a> for the best options available.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:2:{s:11:\"view_report\";a:2:{s:3:\"url\";s:204:\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=monsterinsights_reports&monsterinsights-scroll=monsterinsights-report-top-countries&monsterinsights-highlight=monsterinsights-report-top-countries\";s:4:\"text\";s:11:\"View Report\";}s:10:\"learn_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:208:\"https://www.wpbeginner.com/showcase/9-best-translation-plugins-for-wordpress-websites/?utm_source=monsterinsights&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.23.1\";s:4:\"text\";s:10:\"Learn More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"02/22/2024 4:33 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"03/21/2024\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:230;a:12:{s:2:\"id\";s:67:\"monsterinsights_notification_upgrade_for_custom_dimensions_20260827\";s:4:\"icon\";s:4:\"star\";s:5:\"title\";s:30:\"Upgrade to MonsterInsights Pro\";s:7:\"content\";s:177:\"Upgrade to enable Custom Dimensions. Track logged in users, determine when is your best time to post, measure if your SEO strategy is working, and find your most popular author.\";s:4:\"type\";a:3:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:4:\"plus\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:23:\"get_monsterinsights_pro\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:154:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/lite/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=11.1.3\";s:4:\"text\";s:23:\"Get MonsterInsights Pro\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"08/27/2026 8:14 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"09/14/2026\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:3;s:4:\"read\";b:0;s:5:\"saved\";b:0;}i:231;a:12:{s:2:\"id\";s:65:\"monsterinsights_notification_upgrade_for_form_conversion_20260827\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:29:\"Easily Track Form Conversions\";s:7:\"content\";s:264:\"Track your website\'s form conversion rates by upgrading to <a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/lite/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=11.1.3\" target=\"_blank\">MonsterInsights Pro</a>.\";s:4:\"type\";a:3:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:4:\"plus\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:23:\"get_monsterinsights_pro\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:154:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/lite/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=11.1.3\";s:4:\"text\";s:11:\"Upgrade Now\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"08/27/2026 8:14 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"09/14/2026\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:3;s:4:\"read\";b:0;s:5:\"saved\";b:0;}i:232;a:12:{s:2:\"id\";s:66:\"monsterinsights_notification_upgrade_for_events_reporting_20260827\";s:4:\"icon\";s:4:\"star\";s:5:\"title\";s:30:\"Upgrade to MonsterInsights Pro\";s:7:\"content\";s:105:\"Upgrade to MonsterInsights Pro to see which content and events your visitors are performing in real time.\";s:4:\"type\";a:3:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:4:\"plus\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:23:\"get_monsterinsights_pro\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:154:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/lite/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=11.1.3\";s:4:\"text\";s:23:\"Get MonsterInsights Pro\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"08/27/2026 8:14 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"09/14/2026\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:3;s:4:\"read\";b:0;s:5:\"saved\";b:0;}i:233;a:12:{s:2:\"id\";s:55:\"monsterinsights_notification_headline_analyzer_20260825\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:56:\"Try the Headline Analyzer to Boost Your Clicks & Traffic\";s:7:\"content\";s:376:\"Try the <a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/announcing-monsterinsights-new-headline-analyzer/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=11.1.3\" target=\"_blank\">MonsterInsights Headline Analyzer</a> tool. 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With Google Optimize, you can use split testing and personalization to create online experiences that engage and delight your customers. <a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/lite/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.19\" target=\"_blank\">Upgrade to MonsterInsights Pro</a> to unlock the Google Optimize addon.\";s:4:\"type\";a:3:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:4:\"plus\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:23:\"get_monsterinsights_pro\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:152:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/lite/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.19\";s:4:\"text\";s:23:\"Get MonsterInsights Pro\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"08/27/2023 3:39 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"09/24/2023\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:3;}i:317;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:65:\"monsterinsights_notification_upgrade_for_form_conversion_20220522\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:29:\"Easily Track Form Conversions\";s:7:\"content\";s:263:\"Track your website\'s form conversion rates by upgrading to <a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/lite/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.5.3\" target=\"_blank\">MonsterInsights Pro</a>.\";s:4:\"type\";a:3:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:4:\"plus\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:23:\"get_monsterinsights_pro\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:153:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/lite/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.5.3\";s:4:\"text\";s:11:\"Upgrade Now\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"05/22/2022 9:51 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"06/09/2022\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:3;}i:318;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:67:\"monsterinsights_notification_upgrade_for_custom_dimensions_20220814\";s:4:\"icon\";s:4:\"star\";s:5:\"title\";s:30:\"Upgrade to MonsterInsights Pro\";s:7:\"content\";s:177:\"Upgrade to enable Custom Dimensions. Track logged in users, determine when is your best time to post, measure if your SEO strategy is working, and find your most popular author.\";s:4:\"type\";a:3:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:4:\"plus\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:23:\"get_monsterinsights_pro\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:153:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/lite/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.7.0\";s:4:\"text\";s:23:\"Get MonsterInsights Pro\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"08/14/2022 6:32 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"09/01/2022\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:3;}i:319;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:65:\"monsterinsights_notification_upgrade_for_email_summaries_20240915\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"warning\";s:5:\"title\";s:24:\"Get Weekly Email Reports\";s:7:\"content\";s:615:\"Wouldn’t it be easy if you could get your website’s performance report in your email inbox every week? 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Track logged in users, determine when is your best time to post, measure if your SEO strategy is working, and find your most popular author.\";s:4:\"type\";a:3:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:4:\"plus\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:23:\"get_monsterinsights_pro\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:152:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/lite/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.19\";s:4:\"text\";s:23:\"Get MonsterInsights Pro\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:19:\"10/07/2023 11:32 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"10/25/2023\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:3;}i:327;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:73:\"monsterinsights_notification_upgrade_for_popular_posts_templates_20230925\";s:4:\"icon\";s:4:\"star\";s:5:\"title\";s:30:\"Upgrade to MonsterInsights Pro\";s:7:\"content\";s:125:\"Upgrade MonsterInsights Pro and use up to 20+ Popular Post templates to help improve engagement and interaction on your site.\";s:4:\"type\";a:3:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:4:\"plus\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:23:\"get_monsterinsights_pro\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:152:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/lite/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.19\";s:4:\"text\";s:23:\"Get MonsterInsights Pro\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"09/25/2023 5:01 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"10/13/2023\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:3;}i:328;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:65:\"monsterinsights_notification_upgrade_for_email_summaries_20240711\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"warning\";s:5:\"title\";s:24:\"Get Weekly Email Reports\";s:7:\"content\";s:616:\"Wouldn’t it be easy if you could get your website’s performance report in your email inbox every week? 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Track logged in users, determine when is your best time to post, measure if your SEO strategy is working, and find your most popular author.\";s:4:\"type\";a:3:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:4:\"plus\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:23:\"get_monsterinsights_pro\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:152:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/lite/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.18\";s:4:\"text\";s:23:\"Get MonsterInsights Pro\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:19:\"07/27/2023 10:06 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"08/14/2023\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:3;}i:365;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:65:\"monsterinsights_notification_upgrade_for_email_summaries_20231206\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"warning\";s:5:\"title\";s:24:\"Get Weekly Email Reports\";s:7:\"content\";s:616:\"Wouldn’t it be easy if you could get your website’s performance report in your email inbox every week? 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Track logged in users, determine when is your best time to post, measure if your SEO strategy is working, and find your most popular author.\";s:4:\"type\";a:3:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:4:\"plus\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:23:\"get_monsterinsights_pro\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:153:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/lite/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.5.3\";s:4:\"text\";s:23:\"Get MonsterInsights Pro\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"05/22/2022 9:52 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"06/09/2022\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:3;}i:398;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:65:\"monsterinsights_notification_upgrade_for_form_conversion_20231206\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:29:\"Easily Track Form Conversions\";s:7:\"content\";s:264:\"Track your website\'s form conversion rates by upgrading to <a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/lite/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.22.0\" target=\"_blank\">MonsterInsights Pro</a>.\";s:4:\"type\";a:3:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:4:\"plus\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:23:\"get_monsterinsights_pro\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:154:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/lite/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.22.0\";s:4:\"text\";s:11:\"Upgrade Now\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"12/06/2023 5:58 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"12/24/2023\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:3;}i:399;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:73:\"monsterinsights_notification_upgrade_for_popular_posts_templates_20220927\";s:4:\"icon\";s:4:\"star\";s:5:\"title\";s:30:\"Upgrade to MonsterInsights Pro\";s:7:\"content\";s:125:\"Upgrade MonsterInsights Pro and use up to 20+ Popular Post templates to help improve engagement and interaction on your site.\";s:4:\"type\";a:3:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:4:\"plus\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:23:\"get_monsterinsights_pro\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:153:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/lite/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.9.0\";s:4:\"text\";s:23:\"Get MonsterInsights Pro\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"09/27/2022 1:42 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"10/15/2022\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:3;}i:400;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:71:\"monsterinsights_notification_upgrade_for_search_console_report_20240812\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"warning\";s:5:\"title\";s:27:\"See Top Performing Keywords\";s:7:\"content\";s:308:\"<a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/lite/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=9.0.0\" target=\"_blank\">Upgrade to MonsterInsights Pro</a> to see which keywords are driving traffic to your website so you can focus on what\'s working.\";s:4:\"type\";a:1:{i:0;s:4:\"lite\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:23:\"get_monsterinsights_pro\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:153:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/lite/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=9.0.0\";s:4:\"text\";s:11:\"Upgrade Now\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"08/12/2024 8:02 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"09/09/2024\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:3;}i:401;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:73:\"monsterinsights_notification_upgrade_for_popular_posts_templates_20240901\";s:4:\"icon\";s:4:\"star\";s:5:\"title\";s:30:\"Upgrade to MonsterInsights Pro\";s:7:\"content\";s:125:\"Upgrade MonsterInsights Pro and use up to 20+ Popular Post templates to help improve engagement and interaction on your site.\";s:4:\"type\";a:3:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:4:\"plus\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:23:\"get_monsterinsights_pro\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:153:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/lite/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=9.0.1\";s:4:\"text\";s:23:\"Get MonsterInsights Pro\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"09/01/2024 8:44 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"09/19/2024\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:3;}i:402;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:65:\"monsterinsights_notification_upgrade_for_email_summaries_20240106\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"warning\";s:5:\"title\";s:24:\"Get Weekly Email Reports\";s:7:\"content\";s:616:\"Wouldn’t it be easy if you could get your website’s performance report in your email inbox every week? 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Track logged in users, determine when is your best time to post, measure if your SEO strategy is working, and find your most popular author.\";s:4:\"type\";a:3:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:4:\"plus\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:23:\"get_monsterinsights_pro\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:153:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/lite/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=9.0.1\";s:4:\"text\";s:23:\"Get MonsterInsights Pro\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"09/01/2024 8:44 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"09/19/2024\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:3;}i:420;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:65:\"monsterinsights_notification_upgrade_for_form_conversion_20230510\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:29:\"Easily Track Form Conversions\";s:7:\"content\";s:264:\"Track your website\'s form conversion rates by upgrading to <a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/lite/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.14.1\" target=\"_blank\">MonsterInsights Pro</a>.\";s:4:\"type\";a:3:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:4:\"plus\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:23:\"get_monsterinsights_pro\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:154:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/lite/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.14.1\";s:4:\"text\";s:11:\"Upgrade Now\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"05/10/2023 7:26 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"05/28/2023\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:3;}i:421;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:71:\"monsterinsights_notification_upgrade_for_search_console_report_20240423\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"warning\";s:5:\"title\";s:27:\"See Top Performing Keywords\";s:7:\"content\";s:309:\"<a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/lite/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.26.0\" target=\"_blank\">Upgrade to MonsterInsights Pro</a> to see which keywords are driving traffic to your website so you can focus on what\'s working.\";s:4:\"type\";a:1:{i:0;s:4:\"lite\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:23:\"get_monsterinsights_pro\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:154:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/lite/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.26.0\";s:4:\"text\";s:11:\"Upgrade Now\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"04/23/2024 3:06 am\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"05/21/2024\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:3;}i:422;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:73:\"monsterinsights_notification_upgrade_for_popular_posts_templates_20241008\";s:4:\"icon\";s:4:\"star\";s:5:\"title\";s:30:\"Upgrade to MonsterInsights Pro\";s:7:\"content\";s:125:\"Upgrade MonsterInsights Pro and use up to 20+ Popular Post templates to help improve engagement and interaction on your site.\";s:4:\"type\";a:3:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:4:\"plus\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:23:\"get_monsterinsights_pro\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:153:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/lite/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=9.0.1\";s:4:\"text\";s:23:\"Get MonsterInsights Pro\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"10/08/2024 9:54 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"10/26/2024\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:3;}i:423;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:67:\"monsterinsights_notification_upgrade_for_custom_dimensions_20250405\";s:4:\"icon\";s:4:\"star\";s:5:\"title\";s:30:\"Upgrade to MonsterInsights Pro\";s:7:\"content\";s:177:\"Upgrade to enable Custom Dimensions. 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With Google Optimize, you can use split testing and personalization to create online experiences that engage and delight your customers. <a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/lite/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.9.1\" target=\"_blank\">Upgrade to MonsterInsights Pro</a> to unlock the Google Optimize addon.\";s:4:\"type\";a:3:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:4:\"plus\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:23:\"get_monsterinsights_pro\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:153:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/lite/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.9.1\";s:4:\"text\";s:23:\"Get MonsterInsights Pro\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:19:\"10/30/2022 11:02 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"11/27/2022\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:3;}i:430;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:73:\"monsterinsights_notification_upgrade_for_popular_posts_templates_20230815\";s:4:\"icon\";s:4:\"star\";s:5:\"title\";s:30:\"Upgrade to MonsterInsights Pro\";s:7:\"content\";s:125:\"Upgrade MonsterInsights Pro and use up to 20+ Popular Post templates to help improve engagement and interaction on your site.\";s:4:\"type\";a:3:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:4:\"plus\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:23:\"get_monsterinsights_pro\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:152:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/lite/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.18\";s:4:\"text\";s:23:\"Get MonsterInsights Pro\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"08/15/2023 5:04 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"09/02/2023\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:3;}i:431;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:71:\"monsterinsights_notification_upgrade_for_search_console_report_20220729\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"warning\";s:5:\"title\";s:27:\"See Top Performing Keywords\";s:7:\"content\";s:308:\"<a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/lite/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.7.0\" target=\"_blank\">Upgrade to MonsterInsights Pro</a> to see which keywords are driving traffic to your website so you can focus on what\'s working.\";s:4:\"type\";a:1:{i:0;s:4:\"lite\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:23:\"get_monsterinsights_pro\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:153:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/lite/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.7.0\";s:4:\"text\";s:11:\"Upgrade Now\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"07/29/2022 1:00 am\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"08/26/2022\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:3;}i:432;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:65:\"monsterinsights_notification_upgrade_for_form_conversion_20241213\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:29:\"Easily Track Form Conversions\";s:7:\"content\";s:263:\"Track your website\'s form conversion rates by upgrading to <a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/lite/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=9.2.4\" target=\"_blank\">MonsterInsights Pro</a>.\";s:4:\"type\";a:3:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:4:\"plus\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:23:\"get_monsterinsights_pro\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:153:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/lite/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=9.2.4\";s:4:\"text\";s:11:\"Upgrade Now\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"12/13/2024 4:15 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"12/31/2024\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:3;}i:433;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:67:\"monsterinsights_notification_upgrade_for_custom_dimensions_20221114\";s:4:\"icon\";s:4:\"star\";s:5:\"title\";s:30:\"Upgrade to MonsterInsights Pro\";s:7:\"content\";s:177:\"Upgrade to enable Custom Dimensions. Track logged in users, determine when is your best time to post, measure if your SEO strategy is working, and find your most popular author.\";s:4:\"type\";a:3:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:4:\"plus\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:23:\"get_monsterinsights_pro\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:154:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/lite/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.10.1\";s:4:\"text\";s:23:\"Get MonsterInsights Pro\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"11/14/2022 6:15 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"12/02/2022\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:3;}i:434;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:71:\"monsterinsights_notification_upgrade_for_search_console_report_20240729\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"warning\";s:5:\"title\";s:27:\"See Top Performing Keywords\";s:7:\"content\";s:309:\"<a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/lite/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.28.0\" target=\"_blank\">Upgrade to MonsterInsights Pro</a> to see which keywords are driving traffic to your website so you can focus on what\'s working.\";s:4:\"type\";a:1:{i:0;s:4:\"lite\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:23:\"get_monsterinsights_pro\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:154:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/lite/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.28.0\";s:4:\"text\";s:11:\"Upgrade Now\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"07/29/2024 3:00 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"08/26/2024\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:3;}i:435;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:67:\"monsterinsights_notification_upgrade_for_custom_dimensions_20240312\";s:4:\"icon\";s:4:\"star\";s:5:\"title\";s:30:\"Upgrade to MonsterInsights Pro\";s:7:\"content\";s:177:\"Upgrade to enable Custom Dimensions. Track logged in users, determine when is your best time to post, measure if your SEO strategy is working, and find your most popular author.\";s:4:\"type\";a:3:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:4:\"plus\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:23:\"get_monsterinsights_pro\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:154:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/lite/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.25.0\";s:4:\"text\";s:23:\"Get MonsterInsights Pro\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"03/12/2024 4:15 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"03/30/2024\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:3;}i:436;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:65:\"monsterinsights_notification_upgrade_for_email_summaries_20250626\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"warning\";s:5:\"title\";s:24:\"Get Weekly Email Reports\";s:7:\"content\";s:615:\"Wouldn’t it be easy if you could get your website’s performance report in your email inbox every week? With Email Summaries, you can view all your important stats in a simple report that’s delivered straight to your inbox. <br><br>You get an overview of your site\'s performance without logging in to WordPress or going through different analytics reports. <a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/lite/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=9.6.0\" target=\"_blank\">Upgrade to MonsterInsights Pro</a> to enable the Email Summaries feature.\";s:4:\"type\";a:1:{i:0;s:4:\"lite\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:23:\"get_monsterinsights_pro\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:153:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/lite/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=9.6.0\";s:4:\"text\";s:23:\"Get MonsterInsights Pro\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"06/26/2025 2:20 am\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"07/24/2025\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:3;}i:437;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:55:\"monsterinsights_notification_headline_analyzer_20241116\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:56:\"Try the Headline Analyzer to Boost Your Clicks & Traffic\";s:7:\"content\";s:375:\"Try the <a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/announcing-monsterinsights-new-headline-analyzer/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=9.2.2\" target=\"_blank\">MonsterInsights Headline Analyzer</a> tool. We built it to help increase engagement and make your content get more traffic from search engines.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:10:\"learn_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:166:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/headline-analyzer/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=9.2.2\";s:4:\"text\";s:10:\"Learn More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"11/16/2024 5:38 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"01/13/2025\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:3;}i:438;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:65:\"monsterinsights_notification_upgrade_for_google_optimize_20220525\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"warning\";s:5:\"title\";s:21:\"A/B Test Your Website\";s:7:\"content\";s:771:\"<a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/addon/google-optimize/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.5.3\" target=\"_blank\">Google Optimize</a> is a free A/B testing and personalization product by Google that lets you easily conduct experiments to see what content, images, and layouts work best on your site. With Google Optimize, you can use split testing and personalization to create online experiences that engage and delight your customers. <a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/lite/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.5.3\" target=\"_blank\">Upgrade to MonsterInsights Pro</a> to unlock the Google Optimize addon.\";s:4:\"type\";a:3:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:4:\"plus\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:23:\"get_monsterinsights_pro\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:153:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/lite/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.5.3\";s:4:\"text\";s:23:\"Get MonsterInsights Pro\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"05/25/2022 9:31 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"06/22/2022\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:3;}i:439;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:65:\"monsterinsights_notification_upgrade_for_google_optimize_20230727\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"warning\";s:5:\"title\";s:21:\"A/B Test Your Website\";s:7:\"content\";s:769:\"<a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/addon/google-optimize/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.18\" target=\"_blank\">Google Optimize</a> is a free A/B testing and personalization product by Google that lets you easily conduct experiments to see what content, images, and layouts work best on your site. With Google Optimize, you can use split testing and personalization to create online experiences that engage and delight your customers. <a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/lite/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.18\" target=\"_blank\">Upgrade to MonsterInsights Pro</a> to unlock the Google Optimize addon.\";s:4:\"type\";a:3:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:4:\"plus\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:23:\"get_monsterinsights_pro\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:152:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/lite/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.18\";s:4:\"text\";s:23:\"Get MonsterInsights Pro\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:19:\"07/27/2023 10:06 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"08/24/2023\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:3;}i:440;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:65:\"monsterinsights_notification_upgrade_for_email_summaries_20221019\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"warning\";s:5:\"title\";s:24:\"Get Weekly Email Reports\";s:7:\"content\";s:615:\"Wouldn’t it be easy if you could get your website’s performance report in your email inbox every week? 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Track logged in users, determine when is your best time to post, measure if your SEO strategy is working, and find your most popular author.\";s:4:\"type\";a:3:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:4:\"plus\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:23:\"get_monsterinsights_pro\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:154:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/lite/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.10.1\";s:4:\"text\";s:23:\"Get MonsterInsights Pro\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"12/12/2022 4:34 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"12/30/2022\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:3;}i:446;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:65:\"monsterinsights_notification_upgrade_for_form_conversion_20240106\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:29:\"Easily Track Form Conversions\";s:7:\"content\";s:264:\"Track your website\'s form conversion rates by upgrading to <a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/lite/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.23.1\" target=\"_blank\">MonsterInsights Pro</a>.\";s:4:\"type\";a:3:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:4:\"plus\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:23:\"get_monsterinsights_pro\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:154:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/lite/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.23.1\";s:4:\"text\";s:11:\"Upgrade Now\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"01/06/2024 2:15 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"01/24/2024\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:3;}i:447;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:65:\"monsterinsights_notification_upgrade_for_form_conversion_20231101\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:29:\"Easily Track Form Conversions\";s:7:\"content\";s:264:\"Track your website\'s form conversion rates by upgrading to <a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/lite/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.20.1\" target=\"_blank\">MonsterInsights Pro</a>.\";s:4:\"type\";a:3:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:4:\"plus\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:23:\"get_monsterinsights_pro\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:154:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/lite/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.20.1\";s:4:\"text\";s:11:\"Upgrade Now\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:19:\"11/01/2023 12:29 am\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"11/19/2023\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:3;}i:448;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:55:\"monsterinsights_notification_headline_analyzer_20231002\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:56:\"Try the Headline Analyzer to Boost Your Clicks & Traffic\";s:7:\"content\";s:374:\"Try the <a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/announcing-monsterinsights-new-headline-analyzer/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.19\" target=\"_blank\">MonsterInsights Headline Analyzer</a> tool. 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Track logged in users, determine when is your best time to post, measure if your SEO strategy is working, and find your most popular author.\";s:4:\"type\";a:3:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:4:\"plus\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:23:\"get_monsterinsights_pro\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:154:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/lite/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.28.0\";s:4:\"text\";s:23:\"Get MonsterInsights Pro\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"07/09/2024 8:54 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"07/27/2024\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:3;}i:453;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:65:\"monsterinsights_notification_upgrade_for_email_summaries_20230612\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"warning\";s:5:\"title\";s:24:\"Get Weekly Email Reports\";s:7:\"content\";s:614:\"Wouldn’t it be easy if you could get your website’s performance report in your email inbox every week? 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Track logged in users, determine when is your best time to post, measure if your SEO strategy is working, and find your most popular author.\";s:4:\"type\";a:3:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:4:\"plus\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:23:\"get_monsterinsights_pro\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:154:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/lite/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.20.1\";s:4:\"text\";s:23:\"Get MonsterInsights Pro\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:19:\"11/01/2023 12:30 am\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"11/19/2023\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:3;}i:458;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:55:\"monsterinsights_notification_headline_analyzer_20220617\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:56:\"Try the Headline Analyzer to Boost Your Clicks & Traffic\";s:7:\"content\";s:375:\"Try the <a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/announcing-monsterinsights-new-headline-analyzer/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.5.3\" target=\"_blank\">MonsterInsights Headline Analyzer</a> tool. 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Track logged in users, determine when is your best time to post, measure if your SEO strategy is working, and find your most popular author.\";s:4:\"type\";a:3:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:4:\"plus\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:23:\"get_monsterinsights_pro\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:154:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/lite/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.27.0\";s:4:\"text\";s:23:\"Get MonsterInsights Pro\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"05/30/2024 3:03 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"06/17/2024\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:3;}i:460;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:67:\"monsterinsights_notification_upgrade_for_custom_dimensions_20250904\";s:4:\"icon\";s:4:\"star\";s:5:\"title\";s:30:\"Upgrade to MonsterInsights Pro\";s:7:\"content\";s:177:\"Upgrade to enable Custom Dimensions. 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href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/lite/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.26.0\" target=\"_blank\">MonsterInsights Pro</a>.\";s:4:\"type\";a:3:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:4:\"plus\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:23:\"get_monsterinsights_pro\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:154:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/lite/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.26.0\";s:4:\"text\";s:11:\"Upgrade Now\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"05/30/2024 3:02 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"06/17/2024\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:3;}i:487;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:71:\"monsterinsights_notification_upgrade_for_search_console_report_20240627\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"warning\";s:5:\"title\";s:27:\"See Top Performing Keywords\";s:7:\"content\";s:309:\"<a 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Track logged in users, determine when is your best time to post, measure if your SEO strategy is working, and find your most popular author.\";s:4:\"type\";a:3:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:4:\"plus\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:23:\"get_monsterinsights_pro\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:152:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/lite/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.17\";s:4:\"text\";s:23:\"Get MonsterInsights Pro\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"07/05/2023 5:11 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"07/23/2023\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:3;}i:503;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:52:\"monsterinsights_notification_upgrade_to_pro_20230601\";s:4:\"icon\";s:4:\"star\";s:5:\"title\";s:45:\"Upgrade to Unlock Advanced Tracking & Reports\";s:7:\"content\";s:197:\"By upgrading to MonsterInsights Pro you get access to additional reports right in your WordPress dashboard and advanced tracking features like eCommerce, Custom Dimensions, Forms tracking and more!\";s:4:\"type\";a:1:{i:0;s:4:\"lite\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:14:\"upgrade_to_pro\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:152:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/lite/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.15\";s:4:\"text\";s:14:\"Upgrade to Pro\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"06/01/2023 4:15 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"07/09/2023\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:3;}i:504;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:65:\"monsterinsights_notification_upgrade_for_email_summaries_20230727\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"warning\";s:5:\"title\";s:24:\"Get Weekly Email Reports\";s:7:\"content\";s:614:\"Wouldn’t it be easy if you could get your website’s performance report in your email inbox every week? 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You can track affiliate link clicks on your website with little configuration needed.<br><br><a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/how-to-set-up-affiliate-link-tracking-in-wordpress/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.8.2\" target=\"_blank\">In this article</a>, we’ll show you how to set up affiliate link tracking in WordPress.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:9:\"read_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:199:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/how-to-set-up-affiliate-link-tracking-in-wordpress/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.8.2\";s:4:\"text\";s:9:\"Read More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"09/14/2022 1:31 am\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"10/07/2022\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:1;a:7:{s:5:\"title\";s:40:\"Introducing User Journey for WooCommerce\";s:7:\"content\";s:235:\"Imagine being able to see every step of a buyer’s journey on your site. 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For MonsterInsights Pro users with our User Journey addon, this is now possible. \";s:4:\"type\";a:1:{i:0;s:4:\"lite\";}s:2:\"id\";i:163;s:4:\"btns\";a:2:{s:4:\"main\";a:2:{s:3:\"url\";s:192:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/introducing-the-new-user-journey-addon-for-woocommerce-easy-access-page-insights/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=pluginNotification&utm_campaign=notifications\";s:4:\"text\";s:10:\"Learn More\";}s:3:\"alt\";a:2:{s:3:\"url\";s:116:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/lite/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=pluginNotification&utm_campaign=notifications\";s:4:\"text\";s:11:\"Upgrade Now\";}}s:5:\"start\";s:19:\"2022-05-06 00:00:00\";s:3:\"end\";s:19:\"2022-11-01 00:00:00\";}i:2;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:71:\"monsterinsights_notification_upgrade_for_search_console_report_20220828\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"warning\";s:5:\"title\";s:27:\"See Top Performing Keywords\";s:7:\"content\";s:308:\"<a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/lite/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.8.1\" target=\"_blank\">Upgrade to MonsterInsights Pro</a> to see which keywords are driving traffic to your website so you can focus on what\'s working.\";s:4:\"type\";a:1:{i:0;s:4:\"lite\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:23:\"get_monsterinsights_pro\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:153:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/lite/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.8.1\";s:4:\"text\";s:11:\"Upgrade Now\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"08/28/2022 7:28 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"09/25/2022\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:3;}i:3;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:55:\"monsterinsights_notification_headline_analyzer_20220818\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:56:\"Try the Headline Analyzer to Boost Your Clicks & Traffic\";s:7:\"content\";s:375:\"Try the <a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/announcing-monsterinsights-new-headline-analyzer/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.7.0\" target=\"_blank\">MonsterInsights Headline Analyzer</a> tool. We built it to help increase engagement and make your content get more traffic from search engines.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:10:\"learn_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:166:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/headline-analyzer/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.7.0\";s:4:\"text\";s:10:\"Learn More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"08/18/2022 6:40 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"10/15/2022\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:3;}i:4;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:65:\"monsterinsights_notification_upgrade_for_form_conversion_20220905\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:29:\"Easily Track Form Conversions\";s:7:\"content\";s:263:\"Track your website\'s form conversion rates by upgrading to <a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/lite/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.8.2\" target=\"_blank\">MonsterInsights Pro</a>.\";s:4:\"type\";a:3:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:4:\"plus\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:23:\"get_monsterinsights_pro\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:153:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/lite/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.8.2\";s:4:\"text\";s:11:\"Upgrade Now\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"09/05/2022 3:53 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"09/23/2022\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:3;}i:5;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:65:\"monsterinsights_notification_upgrade_for_google_optimize_20220814\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"warning\";s:5:\"title\";s:21:\"A/B Test Your Website\";s:7:\"content\";s:771:\"<a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/addon/google-optimize/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.7.0\" target=\"_blank\">Google Optimize</a> is a free A/B testing and personalization product by Google that lets you easily conduct experiments to see what content, images, and layouts work best on your site. With Google Optimize, you can use split testing and personalization to create online experiences that engage and delight your customers. <a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/lite/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.7.0\" target=\"_blank\">Upgrade to MonsterInsights Pro</a> to unlock the Google Optimize addon.\";s:4:\"type\";a:3:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:4:\"plus\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:23:\"get_monsterinsights_pro\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:153:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/lite/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.7.0\";s:4:\"text\";s:23:\"Get MonsterInsights Pro\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"08/14/2022 6:33 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"09/11/2022\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:3;}i:6;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:52:\"monsterinsights_notification_upgrade_to_pro_20220823\";s:4:\"icon\";s:4:\"star\";s:5:\"title\";s:45:\"Upgrade to Unlock Advanced Tracking & Reports\";s:7:\"content\";s:197:\"By upgrading to MonsterInsights Pro you get access to additional reports right in your WordPress dashboard and advanced tracking features like eCommerce, Custom Dimensions, Forms tracking and more!\";s:4:\"type\";a:1:{i:0;s:4:\"lite\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:14:\"upgrade_to_pro\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:153:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/lite/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.7.0\";s:4:\"text\";s:14:\"Upgrade to Pro\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"08/23/2022 5:08 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"09/30/2022\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:3;}i:7;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:73:\"monsterinsights_notification_upgrade_for_popular_posts_templates_20220905\";s:4:\"icon\";s:4:\"star\";s:5:\"title\";s:30:\"Upgrade to MonsterInsights Pro\";s:7:\"content\";s:125:\"Upgrade MonsterInsights Pro and use up to 20+ Popular Post templates to help improve engagement and interaction on your site.\";s:4:\"type\";a:3:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:4:\"plus\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:23:\"get_monsterinsights_pro\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:153:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/lite/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.8.2\";s:4:\"text\";s:23:\"Get MonsterInsights Pro\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"09/05/2022 3:53 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"09/23/2022\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:3;}i:8;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:65:\"monsterinsights_notification_upgrade_for_email_summaries_20220814\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"warning\";s:5:\"title\";s:24:\"Get Weekly Email Reports\";s:7:\"content\";s:615:\"Wouldn’t it be easy if you could get your website’s performance report in your email inbox every week? 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You can track affiliate link clicks on your website with little configuration needed.<br><br><a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/how-to-set-up-affiliate-link-tracking-in-wordpress/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.7.0\" target=\"_blank\">In this article</a>, we’ll show you how to set up affiliate link tracking in WordPress.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:9:\"read_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:199:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/how-to-set-up-affiliate-link-tracking-in-wordpress/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.7.0\";s:4:\"text\";s:9:\"Read More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"08/18/2022 6:40 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"09/10/2022\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:13;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:54:\"monsterinsights_notification_traffic_dropping_20220818\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:32:\"Your Website Traffic is Dropping\";s:7:\"content\";s:519:\"Your website traffic is decreasing and that’s a reason to take action now. 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Try a tool like <a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/optinmonster-review/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.7.0\" target=\"_blank\">OptinMonster</a> to increase engagement.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:10:\"learn_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:168:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/optinmonster-review/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.7.0\";s:4:\"text\";s:10:\"Learn More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"08/14/2022 6:30 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"09/11/2022\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:15;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:49:\"monsterinsights_notification_bounce_rate_20220814\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:46:\"Your Website Bounce Rate is Higher Than 95.38%\";s:7:\"content\";s:418:\"Your site\'s bounce rate is 95.38%. Double check your site is working properly and be sure it loads quickly.  <a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/how-to-reduce-bounce-rate/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.7.0\" target=\"_blank\">Here</a> are some points to remember and steps to follow to get your bounce rates back to manageable levels.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:2:{s:11:\"view_report\";a:2:{s:3:\"url\";s:216:\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=monsterinsights_reports&monsterinsights-scroll=monsterinsights-report-infobox-bounce-rate&monsterinsights-highlight=monsterinsights-report-infobox-bounce-rate\";s:4:\"text\";s:11:\"View Report\";}s:10:\"learn_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:174:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/how-to-reduce-bounce-rate/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.7.0\";s:4:\"text\";s:10:\"Learn More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"08/14/2022 6:30 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"09/11/2022\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:16;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:46:\"monsterinsights_notification_audience_20220818\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:34:\"19% of Your Audience is From China\";s:7:\"content\";s:545:\"Is your site properly translated? By adding translated content specific to your audience you could gain big boosts in pageviews, time spent on page and a reduced bounce rate.<br><br>If you need help choosing a translation plugin to get you started take a look at <a href=\"https://www.wpbeginner.com/showcase/9-best-translation-plugins-for-wordpress-websites/?utm_source=monsterinsights&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.7.0\" target=\"_blank\">this article</a> for the best options available.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:2:{s:11:\"view_report\";a:2:{s:3:\"url\";s:204:\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=monsterinsights_reports&monsterinsights-scroll=monsterinsights-report-top-countries&monsterinsights-highlight=monsterinsights-report-top-countries\";s:4:\"text\";s:11:\"View Report\";}s:10:\"learn_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:207:\"https://www.wpbeginner.com/showcase/9-best-translation-plugins-for-wordpress-websites/?utm_source=monsterinsights&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.7.0\";s:4:\"text\";s:10:\"Learn More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"08/18/2022 6:38 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"09/15/2022\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:17;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:48:\"monsterinsights_notification_eu_traffic_20220818\";s:4:\"icon\";s:4:\"star\";s:5:\"title\";s:36:\"Help Your Site Become GDPR Compliant\";s:7:\"content\";s:162:\"Your site is receiving traffic from the EU. 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Click the button below to view the full analytics report.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:11:\"view_report\";a:2:{s:3:\"url\";s:194:\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=monsterinsights_reports&monsterinsights-scroll=monsterinsights-report-overview&monsterinsights-highlight=monsterinsights-report-overview\";s:4:\"text\";s:11:\"View Report\";}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"05/14/2022 2:41 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"06/11/2022\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:20;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:54:\"monsterinsights_notification_traffic_dropping_20220514\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:32:\"Your Website Traffic is Dropping\";s:7:\"content\";s:519:\"Your website traffic is decreasing and that’s a reason to take action now. Less traffic means less opportunities to make your brand known, make relationships and ultimately sell your service or product. <br><br>Follow the marketing hacks of <a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/marketing-hacks-guaranteed-to-grow-your-traffic/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.5.0\" target=\"_blank\">this article</a> to start growing your traffic again.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:2:{s:10:\"learn_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:196:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/marketing-hacks-guaranteed-to-grow-your-traffic/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.5.0\";s:4:\"text\";s:10:\"Learn More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}s:11:\"view_report\";a:2:{s:3:\"url\";s:194:\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=monsterinsights_reports&monsterinsights-scroll=monsterinsights-report-overview&monsterinsights-highlight=monsterinsights-report-overview\";s:4:\"text\";s:11:\"View Report\";}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"05/14/2022 2:41 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"06/11/2022\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:21;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:46:\"monsterinsights_notification_audience_20220514\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:34:\"18% of Your Audience is From China\";s:7:\"content\";s:545:\"Is your site properly translated? By adding translated content specific to your audience you could gain big boosts in pageviews, time spent on page and a reduced bounce rate.<br><br>If you need help choosing a translation plugin to get you started take a look at <a href=\"https://www.wpbeginner.com/showcase/9-best-translation-plugins-for-wordpress-websites/?utm_source=monsterinsights&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.5.0\" target=\"_blank\">this article</a> for the best options available.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:2:{s:11:\"view_report\";a:2:{s:3:\"url\";s:204:\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=monsterinsights_reports&monsterinsights-scroll=monsterinsights-report-top-countries&monsterinsights-highlight=monsterinsights-report-top-countries\";s:4:\"text\";s:11:\"View Report\";}s:10:\"learn_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:207:\"https://www.wpbeginner.com/showcase/9-best-translation-plugins-for-wordpress-websites/?utm_source=monsterinsights&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.5.0\";s:4:\"text\";s:10:\"Learn More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"05/14/2022 2:41 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"06/11/2022\";s:8:\"category\";s:7:\"insight\";s:8:\"priority\";i:2;}i:22;a:10:{s:2:\"id\";s:62:\"monsterinsights_notification_to_setup_affiliate_links_20220514\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:30:\"Set Up Affiliate Link Tracking\";s:7:\"content\";s:556:\"By tracking your affiliate links in Google Analytics, you can gather all the data you need to optimize your links for maximizing affiliate revenue. 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With Google Optimize, you can use split testing and personalization to create online experiences that engage and delight your customers. <a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/lite/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.1.0\" target=\"_blank\">Upgrade to MonsterInsights Pro</a> to unlock the Google Optimize addon.\";s:4:\"type\";a:3:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:4:\"plus\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:23:\"get_monsterinsights_pro\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:153:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/lite/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.1.0\";s:4:\"text\";s:23:\"Get MonsterInsights Pro\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:19:\"10/25/2021 11:53 am\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"11/22/2021\";}i:25;a:8:{s:2:\"id\";s:62:\"monsterinsights_notification_to_setup_affiliate_links_20210917\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:30:\"Set Up Affiliate Link Tracking\";s:7:\"content\";s:557:\"By tracking your affiliate links in Google Analytics, you can gather all the data you need to optimize your links for maximizing affiliate revenue. 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Yet many website owners don’t know how to optimize their headlines for SEO and clicks. Instead, they write copy and hope for the best, only to see disappointing results. Now there’s an easier way! <br><br><a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/announcing-monsterinsights-new-headline-analyzer/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=7.18.0\" target=\"_blank\">With the MonsterInsights Headline Analyzer</a>, you can get targeted suggestions to improve your headlines, right in the WordPress editor.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:10:\"learn_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:198:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/announcing-monsterinsights-new-headline-analyzer/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=7.18.0\";s:4:\"text\";s:10:\"Learn More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"09/17/2021 2:09 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"11/14/2021\";}i:27;a:8:{s:2:\"id\";s:46:\"monsterinsights_notification_visitors_20210922\";s:4:\"icon\";s:9:\"lightning\";s:5:\"title\";s:35:\"See how 0 visitors found your site!\";s:7:\"content\";s:122:\"Your website has been visited by 0 visitors in the past 30 days. Click the button below to view the full analytics report.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:11:\"view_report\";a:2:{s:3:\"url\";s:194:\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=monsterinsights_reports&monsterinsights-scroll=monsterinsights-report-overview&monsterinsights-highlight=monsterinsights-report-overview\";s:4:\"text\";s:11:\"View Report\";}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"09/22/2021 2:55 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"10/20/2021\";}i:28;a:8:{s:2:\"id\";s:71:\"monsterinsights_notification_upgrade_for_search_console_report_20210922\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"warning\";s:5:\"title\";s:77:\"Get access to Google Search Keywords data by upgrading to MonsterInsights Pro\";s:7:\"content\";s:606:\"Do you want to find out which search terms from Google bring your site the most visitors? <a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/lite/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.0.0\" target=\"_blank\">Upgrade to MonsterInsights PRO</a> today and get access to the <a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/feature/search-console-report/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.0.0\" target=\"_blank\">Search Console Report</a> and more directly in your WordPress admin.\";s:4:\"type\";a:1:{i:0;s:4:\"lite\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:1:{s:23:\"get_monsterinsights_pro\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:153:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/lite/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=8.0.0\";s:4:\"text\";s:23:\"Get MonsterInsights Pro\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"09/22/2021 5:31 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"10/20/2021\";}i:29;a:8:{s:2:\"id\";s:56:\"monsterinsights_notification_returning_visitors_20210806\";s:4:\"icon\";s:7:\"default\";s:5:\"title\";s:44:\"Only 0% of your visitors return to your site\";s:7:\"content\";s:499:\"For any website, returning visitors are important because they indicate how successful your marketing campaigns are, who are your loyal customers, and how powerful your brand is. <a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/proven-ways-to-increase-your-returning-visitor-rate/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=7.18.0\" target=\"_blank\">In this article</a>, we’ll show you 7 proven ways to increase your returning visitor rate.\";s:4:\"type\";a:5:{i:0;s:5:\"basic\";i:1;s:4:\"lite\";i:2;s:6:\"master\";i:3;s:4:\"plus\";i:4;s:3:\"pro\";}s:4:\"btns\";a:2:{s:11:\"view_report\";a:2:{s:3:\"url\";s:160:\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=monsterinsights_reports&monsterinsights-scroll=newvsreturning&monsterinsights-highlight=newvsreturning\";s:4:\"text\";s:11:\"View Report\";}s:10:\"learn_more\";a:3:{s:3:\"url\";s:201:\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/proven-ways-to-increase-your-returning-visitor-rate/?utm_source=liteplugin&utm_medium=monsterinsights-notifications-sidebar&utm_campaign=notifications&utm_content=7.18.0\";s:4:\"text\";s:10:\"Learn More\";s:11:\"is_external\";b:1;}}s:5:\"start\";s:18:\"08/06/2021 5:35 pm\";s:3:\"end\";s:10:\"08/19/2021\";}}s:12:\"feed_fetched\";b:1;}','off'),
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(Audio Playlist included!)</li>\n<li>Fixed: Minor bug PodLove posts not showing up properly.</li>\n<li>Updated: SecondLine Custom plugin to version 2.0.2, update via Appearance &gt; Install Plugins.</li>\n</ul>\n<p><strong>Version 1.6.5 -</strong></p>\n<ul>\n<li>Updated: SecondLine Custom plugin to version 2.0.1</li>\n<li>Added: New controls in the Customizer for customizing playlist colors.</li>\n<li>Added: Support for PowerPress playlists. (Needs to be activated via the PP settings first)</li>\n</ul>\n<p><strong>Version 1.6.4 -</strong></p>\n<ul>\n<li>Massive update to the SecondLine Custom plugin -\n<ul>\n<li>Fixed: Multiple issues with the different elements.</li>\n<li>Added: New options into some of the elements.</li>\n<li>Added: Customizer styles now apply the default colors of the audio player added via Elementor.</li>\n<li>Tweak: Instagram widget optimized to display hashtags (it can no longer display @user handles)</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n<li>Massive update to the audio player -\n<ul>\n<li>Added: New audio player controls (Skip Forward 30 Seconds, Skip Backwards 30 Seconds, Speed Controls - from 0.75x to 2x. Rewind/Replay when audio is done)</li>\n<li>Added: Brand new audio playlist layout (works with the default WordPress playlist shortcode)</li>\n<li>Added: Option to use either the new audio player or stay with the old one - under Appearance -&gt; Customize -&gt; Media Player</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n<li>Theme Updates:\n<ul>\n<li>Fixed: Issues where footer/header would not hide.</li>\n<li>Fixed: PowerPress subscribe button positioning in some cases.</li>\n<li>Fixed: Author bio layout and icons.</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n</ul>\n<p><strong>Version 1.6.3 -</strong></p>\n<ul>\n<li>Added: Footer page builder option in the Customizer (use an Elementor Template to edit your entire footer)</li>\n<li>Added: Header page builder option in the Customizer (use an Elementor Template to edit your entire header)</li>\n<li>Fixed: Minor style changes for upcoming WordPress 5.3+</li>\n<li>Fixed: Footer widgets position on multiple columns</li>\n<li>Fixed: Minor issues with the post background image CSS filters. (Also added the -webkit- prefix for better browser support)</li>\n<li>Fixed: Newsletter subscribe form layout on footer/sidebar widgets</li>\n<li>Tweaked: Refactored page-template for Elementor templates</li>\n<li>Updated: SecondLine Custom plugin updated</li>\n</ul>\n<p><strong>Version 1.6.2 -</strong></p>\n<ul>\n<li>Updated: Better styling for the Gutenberg editor and several default blocks.</li>\n<li>Added: Support for upcoming WordPress 5.3+.</li>\n<li>Added: You can now apply CSS filters on the post background images. (\'Appearance -&gt; Customize -&gt; Posts -&gt; Post Title Background Filters\')</li>\n<li>Fixed: Display issue with video files/links with PowerPress.</li>\n</ul>\n<p><strong>Version 1.6.1 -</strong></p>\n<ul>\n<li>Added: Audio player can be displayed on archive/search pages (via \'Appearance -&gt; Customize -&gt; Blog -&gt; Post Archive Options\')</li>\n<li>Fixed: Fixed excerpts on archive pages.</li>\n<li>Fixed: Custom background images for WooCommerce pages.</li>\n<li>Tweak: For new installations, our new \"Podcast Importer SecondLine\" plugin is included</li>\n</ul>\n<p><strong>Version 1.6.0 -</strong></p>\n<ul>\n<li>Added: Full support for the new Elementor icon framework.</li>\n<li>Minor fixes and improvements.</li>\n</ul>\n<p><strong>Version 1.5.9 -</strong></p>\n<ul>\n<li>Fixed: Mobile navigation layout broken on some tablet screen sizes.</li>\n<li>Fixed: Some new RTL styles added.</li>\n<li>Tweak: RTL styles load properly in Child Theme.</li>\n</ul>\n<p><strong>Version 1.5.8 -</strong></p>\n<ul>\n<li>Fixed: Icons broken in some cases with Seriously Simple Podcasting.</li>\n</ul>\n<p><strong>Version 1.5.7 -</strong></p>\n<ul>\n<li>Added: Full support for WooCommerce (including custom styles, templates, and customizer settings)</li>\n<li>Added: Support for oEmbeds in the External Embed Code metabox.</li>\n<li>Added: Major performance improvements - using minified scripts and styles on some areas.</li>\n<li>Added: Recommendation for the Podcast Subscribe Buttons plugin.</li>\n<li>Fixed: Better positioning for the PowerPress/Seriously Simple Podcasting subscribe links.</li>\n<li>Fixed: RTL fixes - corrected post grid order in RTL layout and added a minor fix for the RTL audio player.</li>\n<li>Fixed: Issues with the audio player on infinite scroll with the Simple Podcast Press plugin. (Will work once SPP releases their next update.)</li>\n<li>Fixed: Minor bug fixes and improvements.</li>\n<li>Fixed: Theme Setup Wizard SVG files.</li>\n</ul>\n<p><strong>Version 1.5.6 -</strong></p>\n<ul>\n<li>Added: Setting to show/hide tags on singular posts.</li>\n<li>Added: Option to display non-cropped images (enable under \'Appearance -&gt; Customize -&gt; General\')</li>\n<li>Added: Style support for Gravity Forms and fixed some general form styles</li>\n<li>Added: Setting to modify sidebar widget spacing.</li>\n<li>Fixed: Minor bugs in the typography controls.</li>\n</ul>\n<p><strong>Version 1.5.5 -</strong></p>\n<ul>\n<li>Added: Support for WordPress 5.2</li>\n<li>Added: Color controls for Newsletter button in Customizer.</li>\n<li>Added: Global option to enable/disable featured image on singular posts in Customizer.</li>\n<li>Added: More styling options for category filtering buttons.</li>\n<li>Added: Global font controls to change the default theme fonts. (Appearance &gt; Customize &gt; General)</li>\n<li>Updated: SecondLine Custom plugin to 1.6.1</li>\n</ul>\n<p><strong>Version 1.5.4 -</strong></p>\n<ul>\n<li>Fixed: Better support for SSP.</li>\n<li>Added: Image Lazy-Loading support in Masonry layouts.</li>\n<li>Updated: SecondLine Custom plugin to version 1.6</li>\n<li>Minor bug fixes.</li>\n</ul>\n<p><strong>Version 1.5.3 -</strong></p>\n<ul>\n<li>Fixed: RTL bug with the audio player.</li>\n<li>Fixed: Several problematic Customize settings.</li>\n</ul>\n<p><strong>Version 1.5.2 -</strong></p>\n<ul>\n<li>Fixed: Instagram Widget error.</li>\n<li>Added: Demo content import fallback.</li>\n</ul>\n<p><strong>Version 1.5.1 -</strong></p>\n<ul>\n<li>Added: Full support for the WPForms plugin.</li>\n<li>Minor fixes and general improvements.</li>\n</ul>\n<p><strong>Version 1.5.0 -</strong></p>\n<ul>\n<li>Fixed: Better Gutenberg support.</li>\n<li>Added: New Theme Setup Wizard to allow smooth theme installation &amp; import.</li>\n<li>Updated: SecondLine Custom plugin updated to version 1.5.3.</li>\n</ul>\n<p><strong>Version 1.4.8 -</strong></p>\n<ul>\n<li>Fixed: Gutenberg editor styles now fully match the theme.</li>\n<li>Updated: WordPress 5.0 support and further Gutenberg support.</li>\n<li>Fixed: Minor bug fixes and improvements.</li>\n</ul>\n<p><strong>Version 1.4.7 -</strong></p>\n<ul>\n<li>Added: Search functionality option in navigation (activate through Customizer).</li>\n<li>Added: Ability to hide images on Episode Grid.</li>\n<li>Added: Better support for the BuzzSprout plugin.</li>\n<li>Fixed: Slider addon meta color and font size bug.</li>\n<li>Fixed: Excerpt length applies on custom excerpts as well.</li>\n<li>Updated: Additional support and compatibility with the Gutenberg editor.</li>\n</ul>\n<p><strong>Version 1.4.6 -</strong></p>\n<ul>\n<li>Improved support for new Gutenberg features.</li>\n<li>Minor bug fixes and improvements.</li>\n</ul>\n<p><strong>Version 1.4.5 -</strong></p>\n<ul>\n<li>Improved performance for larger websites (&gt; 5,000 posts).</li>\n<li>Improved support for Gutenberg and compliance with theme-check standards.</li>\n<li>Updated the \"SecondLine Custom\" plugin.</li>\n<li>Minor bug fixes.</li>\n</ul>\n<p><strong>Version 1.4.4 -</strong></p>\n<ul>\n<li>Added: New customizer options.</li>\n<li>Added: Reddit Header/Footer icon.</li>\n<li>Minor bugs fixes.</li>\n</ul>\n<p><strong>Version 1.4.3 -</strong></p>\n<ul>\n<li>Fixed: Missing icons across the theme.</li>\n<li>Fixed: Title Area background on Custom post types.</li>\n<li>Updated: SecondLine Custom plugin version update.</li>\n</ul>\n<p><strong>Version 1.4.2 -</strong></p>\n<ul>\n<li>Added: Initial support for the new Gutenberg editor.</li>\n<li>Added: Initial support for PodLove.</li>\n<li>Added: Grid now supports \"Podcast\" post-type.</li>\n<li>Updated: FontAwesome to version 5+. 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(5270,1119,'_aioseop_description','CEO of GoMiles on the future of mileage tracking, and how to break through the frequent traveler \"travel bubble\" by looking for local food and craft beers'),
(5271,1119,'_aioseop_title','Future of Mileage Tracking; Search for Local Food &amp; Beer'),
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(5284,880,'_aioseop_description','Latest wave of social media dining apps; how airline alliances are changing the frequent flier\'s experience; using travel compression socks; in-flight Wi-Fi service; the best airports for tech users.  '),
(5285,880,'_aioseop_title','Social Media Dining; Frequent Flier Alliances'),
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(5398,1758,'_aioseop_description','April\'s passenger incidents on United and American Airlines; SFO improvements; Budapest baths; Exploding popularity of food tourism'),
(5399,1758,'_aioseop_title','Video Podcast  — Airplane Fight Club, The Boudain Effect'),
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(5412,1435,'_aioseop_description','Comparing public transit &amp; drive times to US airports; SkyMall magazine; technology lost-and-found; winter flight delays; hotel perks more important than points'),
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(5425,1284,'_aioseop_keywords','Madrid, Spain, Spanish Food, Plaza Mayor, Malasaña, Mercado de San Miguel, Markets'),
(5426,1284,'_aioseop_description','3 minutes of what to eat, drink, and visit when in Madrid, Spain'),
(5427,1284,'_aioseop_title','What to do in Madrid... in 180 Seconds'),
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(5454,1095,'_aioseop_description','A long layover can be an impromptu vacation or a mind-numbing marathon of CNN Airport Network shows. Here’s what I recommend you do on a long layover in O\'Hare.'),
(5455,1095,'_aioseop_title','ORD Layover Excursion: a 6-Hour Tour of Chicago'),
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(5486,1774,'_aioseop_description','Traveling in Vienna and Hungary; Austrian Airlines; Vienna and Budapest airports; spending time in Budapest and the Tokaj wine region; Google Translate is magic'),
(5487,1774,'_aioseop_title','Notes from Hungary'),
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(5501,1760,'_aioseop_title','Airport Fight Club; The Bourdain Effect'),
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(5515,1747,'_aioseop_title','Hunt for Experiences; Pop-Up Entertainment'),
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(5528,1723,'_aioseop_description','Digital security with a VPN, reviewing 3 VPN products; dig into my Top 10 Holiday Travel Tips listicle, and follow up on stories from Uber and Lyft drivers.'),
(5529,1723,'_aioseop_title','Critiquing Top 10 Travel Tips; Reviewing VPNs'),
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(5543,1697,'_aioseop_title','Beating Traffic; Rethinking Carry-On Luggage'),
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(5556,1682,'_aioseop_description','As the economy recovers, so does travel volume. As you wade into the crowds, here are 10 tips to keep you moving over the river and through the woods...'),
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(5570,1666,'_aioseop_description','Back from Tuscany avoiding the noise of the US presidential election. I ask Uber drivers for their life stories and talk about using Bluetooth in rental cars.'),
(5571,1666,'_aioseop_title','Uber Driver Stories; Overseas for the Election'),
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(5584,1658,'_aioseop_description','My son and I talk about hunting down craft beers; a few \"a-ha\" moments from a trip to Scotland;  Bitch tweeting;  Why I hate the Rick Steves travel juggernaut.'),
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(5598,1644,'_aioseop_description','Airline system outages and thunderstorms; travel delays are part of this month\'s travel experience. How can you avoid delays, or at least minimize their impact.'),
(5599,1644,'_aioseop_title','How to Avoid Travel Delays'),
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(5612,1629,'_aioseop_description','Iceland is a hot travel destinations, maybe too hot? I think it\'s \"dramatic.\" And why am I always surprised by the amount of int\'l data my iPhone consumes?'),
(5613,1629,'_aioseop_title','Data-Hungry Phones; Dramatic Iceland'),
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(5627,1615,'_aioseop_title','TSA Lines, My Luggage is Where?'),
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(5640,1598,'_aioseop_description','Using guidebooks in the digital travel world; review Bluesmart smart luggage; packing strategies are very personal; foreign exchange apps; digital travel security'),
(5641,1598,'_aioseop_title','Where Do Guidebooks Fit In? I Hate Shopping for Suitcases'),
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(5654,1579,'_aioseop_description','Finding the right balance between hassle and hack; dig into JD Power\'s latest airport satisfaction survey; Spirit Airlines\' growth; expansion of US immigration pre-clearance.'),
(5655,1579,'_aioseop_title','Digital Security On The Road; US Airports Getting Better?'),
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(5668,1561,'_aioseop_description','Dodgy situations when traveling; switching back to Apple from Android; updating my TripAdvisor review criteria'),
(5669,1561,'_aioseop_title','Danger In the Travel Bubble; Switch Back to Apple'),
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(5682,1542,'_aioseop_description','Recent car rental experiences; Avoiding British Airways; Low cost international money transfer; yet more about luggage, TSA PreCheck, and eggs'),
(5683,1542,'_aioseop_title','Random Thoughts About Eggs, Scotland & Car Rentals'),
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(5696,1531,'_aioseop_description','Trains, mobile data, & very nice people in Japan; frequent flier award frustration; prettier and higher tech luggage; becoming a scrambled eggs connoisseur '),
(5697,1531,'_aioseop_title','Traveling Thru Japan; Luggage Trends'),
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(5721,1505,'_aioseop_description','Waiting for smart luggage; more about trains to airports; Semana Santa in Andalusia; looking back over 10 years of TravelCommons episodes '),
(5722,1505,'_aioseop_title','A Decade of TravelCommons'),
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(5739,605,'_aioseop_description','I \"sprint toured\" Frankfurt using Hemispheres Magazine\'s \"One City, Five Hours: Frankfurt\" article during a 6-hour layover between Mumbai and Chicago.'),
(5740,605,'_aioseop_title','Video #2 – One City, Five Hours: Frankfurt'),
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(5816,1227,'_aioseop_description','Losing frequent flier status; Finding a warm Delta body in Detroit; Unlocking a phone to use in Spain; Flying a new United 737-900; TSA\'s new knife rules aren\'t all wrong'),
(5817,1227,'_aioseop_title','Status Free Fall; TSA Knife Fight'),
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(6007,1947,'_aioseop_description','Traveling south to New Orleans and Miami in February is good travel. I walk through how each change in airport security has pushed me to be more hipster and how we all want to understand the real cause of the flight delays that inconvenience us. Also listener feedback extending our ongoing luggage thread. '),
(6008,1947,'_aioseop_title','Travel Turning Me Hipster; Every Delay Has a Story'),
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(8477,2402,'_aioseop_description','2 of this month\'s 3 trips spiraled into head-shaking metaphysical “What the hell is going on here” questioning of my decision to get out of bed that morning '),
(8478,2402,'_aioseop_title','Travel Interruptus'),
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(8507,1937,'_aioseop_description','I finally scrapped my beat-up 10-year-old carry-on and resigned myself to the airlines\' ban on smart luggage. With so many bags on the market to choose from, here are my 5 things to consider when buying a new suitcase.'),
(8508,1937,'_aioseop_title','Tips for Buying A Suitcase'),
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(8968,2609,'_aioseop_title','Travel Potpourri for $400, Alex'),
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(9017,2494,'_aioseop_title','Travel By Algorithm; Leaving Places Behind'),
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(9034,2626,'_aioseop_title','Planning the Trip of a Lifetime in Southeast Asia'),
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(16381,851,'_aioseo_title','Holiday Travel Tips; Bad Spirit In The Air | #site_title'),
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(16406,880,'_aioseo_title','Social Media Dining; Frequent Flier Alliances'),
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(16431,913,'_aioseo_title','1st Trip to Beijing; Important Hotel Technology'),
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(16457,931,'_aioseo_title','Best Hotel Amenity? Free Breakfast | #site_title'),
(16458,931,'_aioseo_description','Recent surveys say the most popular hotel amenity is free WiFi. They\'re wrong. Experienced travelers know it\'s the free hotel breakfast.'),
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(16477,949,'_edit_lock','1632832665:1'),
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(16482,949,'_aioseo_title','American Airlines Reaches Out to Apologize.. Again and Again | #site_title'),
(16483,949,'_aioseo_description','American Airlines has reaching out to let me know they care about me.  A phone call, replies to my Tweets – but I’m not sure this is having the desired effect.'),
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(16509,961,'_aioseo_title','Stolen Luggage; Restaurants Want Your Smartphone'),
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(16533,983,'_aioseo_title','How Much Do You Want to Tip? | #site_title'),
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(16557,995,'_aioseo_title','Downgrading Elite Fliers; Finding Time Off the Road'),
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(16579,995,'enclosure','https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_99.mp3\n0\naudio/mpeg\n'),
(16583,1021,'_aioseo_title','Social Trip Planning Not Quite Ready... | #site_title'),
(16584,1021,'_aioseo_description','New social media travel planning tools didn\'t help me planning a road trip. I fell back to clipping articles from newspapers with virtual scissors.'),
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(16606,1034,'_aioseo_title','Southern Road Trip; Breaking Up with American Airlines'),
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(16628,1034,'enclosure','https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_100.mp3\n0\naudio/mpeg\n'),
(16632,1068,'_aioseo_title','Food and Drink Highlights from My Drive South | #site_title'),
(16633,1068,'_aioseo_description','On my Drive South, I ate and drank my way down I-65 and back up I-55. Here are the restaurant and bar highlights of my trip.'),
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(16661,1119,'_aioseo_title','Future of Mileage Tracking; Search for Local Food &amp; Beer'),
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(16686,1151,'_aioseo_title','Trip Management App Comparison; TSA Scanner Shuffle'),
(16687,1151,'_aioseo_description','Comparison of trip management apps TripIt, TripCase, WorldMate, &amp; Kayak; TSA\'s latest scanner debacle; changes in what I carry in my briefcase since 2006.'),
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(16736,1177,'_aioseo_title','\"Heads In Beds\" Review -- The Story Behind The Front Desk'),
(16737,1177,'_aioseo_description','Jacob Tomsky\'s \"Heads in Beds: A Reckless Memoir of Hotels, Hustles, and So-Called Hospitality\" is a fun read, but tries too hard to be the hotel version of Anthony Bourdain'),
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(16760,1191,'_aioseo_title','Hospitality is Personal; Tablets Everywhere | #site_title'),
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(17188,1682,'_aioseo_title','Top 10 Holiday Travel Tips | #site_title'),
(17189,1682,'_aioseo_description','As the economy recovers, so does travel volume. As you wade into the crowds, here are 10 tips to keep you moving over the river and through the woods...'),
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(17226,1760,'_aioseo_title','Airport Fight Club; The Bourdain Effect | #site_title'),
(17227,1760,'_aioseo_description','April\'s passenger incidents on United and American Airlines; SFO improvements; Budapest baths; Exploding popularity of food tourism'),
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(17252,1774,'_aioseo_title','Notes from Hungary | #site_title'),
(17253,1774,'_aioseo_description','Traveling in Vienna and Hungary; Austrian Airlines; Vienna and Budapest airports; spending time in Budapest and the Tokaj wine region; Google Translate is magic'),
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(17276,1784,'_aioseo_title','Twitter Concierge Customer Service; London Tube Story'),
(17277,1784,'_aioseo_description','Using Twitter to get Hertz to reverse a refueling charge; taking the Tube to/from the Adele concert in Wembley; not excited by American Airlines\' 787'),
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(17279,1784,'_aioseo_og_title',NULL),
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(17302,1819,'secondline_themes_episode_number','133'),
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(17310,1835,'_aioseo_title','Ruthless Packing Tips | #site_title'),
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(17334,1842,'_aioseo_title','Value of Loyalty; Need Those 5 Stars | #site_title'),
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(17337,1842,'_aioseo_og_title',NULL),
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(17359,1854,'_aioseo_title','Airport Bingo; My New Old Travel PC | #site_title'),
(17360,1854,'_aioseo_description','Something for the Thanksgiving airport lines; TravelCommons airport bingo card; going back to the future with a new travel PC; yet another subway &quot;tap&quot; card'),
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(17362,1854,'_aioseo_og_title',NULL),
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(17378,1854,'secondline_themes_episode_number','135'),
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(17383,1885,'_aioseo_title','Holiday Airport Bingo | #site_title'),
(17384,1885,'_aioseo_description','I remember playing license plate and travel bingo as a kid. But with more families flying to Grandma\'s house, airport bingo seems a more on-target game.'),
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(17407,1894,'_aioseo_title','Is Cash A Waning King; Don’t Make It Hard to Cash in on Loyalty'),
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(17426,1894,'secondline_themes_episode_number','136'),
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(17432,1905,'_aioseo_title','Looking Back at 2017 — The Highs and The Lows | #site_title'),
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(17456,1916,'_aioseo_title','New Year\'s Travel Status Tips; How to Shop for a Suitcase'),
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(17475,1916,'secondline_themes_episode_number','137'),
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(17480,1937,'_aioseo_title','Tips for Buying A Suitcase | #site_title'),
(17481,1937,'_aioseo_description','I finally scrapped my beat-up 10-year-old carry-on and resigned myself to the airlines\' ban on smart luggage. With so many bags on the market to choose from, here are my 5 things to consider when buying a new suitcase.'),
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(17503,1947,'_aioseo_title','Travel Turning Me Hipster; Every Delay Has a Story'),
(17504,1947,'_aioseo_description','Traveling south to New Orleans and Miami in February is good travel. I walk through how each change in airport security has pushed me to be more hipster and how we all want to understand the real cause of the flight delays that inconvenience us. Also listener feedback extending our ongoing luggage thread. '),
(17505,1947,'_aioseo_keywords','New Orleans,luggage,smart luggage,travel tips,hipster,Southwest Airlines,toiletries,travel delays,United Airlines'),
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(17522,1947,'secondline_themes_episode_number','137'),
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(17528,1977,'enclosure','https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_140.mp3\n0\naudio/mpeg\n'),
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(17536,2042,'_aioseo_title','Sleeping in Business Class; Changes from Chinese Tourists'),
(17537,2042,'_aioseo_description','Another last-minute international trip, this time to Frankfurt; United and Lufthansa business class seats; changes driven by Chinese tourists; new smart bag'),
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(6,1,'2005-05-29 16:23:48','2005-05-29 21:23:48','Here\'s the third TravelCommons podcast, each segment recorded in a different place. This week, after 7 flights in 5 days, I seem to be on quite a tear on the TSA. I talk about bad TSA experiences at Chicago Midway and good ones at O\'Hare, Tampa, and Columbus, OH. Also, I talk about using the iPod to reduce travel stress and the first Classic Travel Story-- about Cleveland travelers eager to get to Chicago. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_3.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr>\n\nHere are the shownotes from the third TravelCommons podcast:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <em>Warmth</em> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Tough travel week -- 7 flights and 4 cities in 5 days</li>\n 	<li>Recording from the bathroom of the Camelback Inn in Scottsdale, AZ</li>\n 	<li>Hot weather and turndown philosophy cards at the Camelback Inn</li>\n</ul>\n<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/phx_temp.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-3083 size-medium aligncenter\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/phx_temp-300x217.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"217\"></a>\n<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/phx_philo.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-3082 aligncenter\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/phx_philo-300x289.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"289\"></a>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Rant on TSA screeners at Chicago Midway airport; compliments to the TSA screeners at Tampa and Columbus, OH</li>\n 	<li>Using my iPod to reduce travel stress</li>\n 	<li>First of a recurring feature -- Classic Travel Stories</li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_3.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','TravelCommons Podcast #3','','publish','closed','closed','','travelcommons-podcast-3','','','2021-11-07 19:08:49','2021-11-08 00:08:49','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2005/05/29/travelcommons-podcast-3/',0,'post','',0),
(7,1,'2005-06-03 16:20:58','2005-06-03 21:20:58','This week\'s TravelCommons podcast focuses on the good things about travel. Last week\'s podcast seemed a bit negative, so I try to bring a bit of balance this week. Recorded in the LAX Westin, I stow the laptop for a night and walk the Manhattan Beach, CA pier, reflect on a rare window seat ride on a flight out of Phoenix, and read from a friend\'s letter as he starts a new life in Sao Paulo. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_4.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr>\n\nHere are the shownotes from the TravelCommons podcast #4:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <em>Warmth</em> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recording from the bathroom of the LAX Westin in Los Angeles</li>\n 	<li>Made changes to the travelcommons.com website to allow everyone to leave comments about the podcasts</li>\n 	<li>Sounds from a walk down the Manhattan Beach, CA pier and the Manhattan Beach Brewing Company</li>\n</ul>\n<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/brew_pub_map.jpg\"><img class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-3092\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/brew_pub_map-184x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"184\" height=\"300\"></a><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/brew_pub_menu.jpg\"><img class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-3093\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/brew_pub_menu-282x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"282\" height=\"300\"></a>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Looking out the window of a night flight from Phoenix to Chicago</li>\n 	<li>Somebody types \"Cabo San Lucas prostitutes\" into Yahoo and ends up at the travelcommons.com website!</li>\n 	<li>Business travel to Brazil causes a friend to chuck it all and move south</li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_4.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #4 - The Good Things About Travel','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-4-the-good-things-about-travel','','','2021-11-07 19:09:46','2021-11-08 00:09:46','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2005/06/03/podcast-4-the-good-things-about-travel/',0,'post','',2),
(8,1,'2005-06-12 16:13:03','2005-06-12 21:13:03','This week\'s TravelCommons podcast comes from the East Coast -- recorded in the Mystic Marriott in Groton, CT. This week, I talk about recent experiences with rental cars, airport celebrity sightings, and my efforts to get out of my travel ruts. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_5.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr>\n\nHere are the shownotes from the TravelCommons podcast #5:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <em>Warmth</em> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recording from the bathroom of the Mystic Marriott Resort &amp; Spa in Groton, CT</li>\n 	<li>Thanks for the person who compared me to Bob Newhart in a comment on Podcast Alley</li>\n 	<li>The right rental car can make all the difference on a trip</li>\n 	<li>Airport celebrity sightings -- Vin Diesel, Sean Penn, and Wynton Marsalis</li>\n 	<li>Recognizing and trying to break out of my travel ruts</li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_5.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #5 - Celebrities in Airports; The Right Car Rental','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-5-celebrities-in-airports-the-right-car-rental','','','2021-11-07 19:10:39','2021-11-08 00:10:39','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2005/06/12/podcast-5-celebrities-in-airports-the-right-car-rental/',0,'post','',5),
(9,1,'2005-06-19 16:10:23','2005-06-19 21:10:23','This week\'s TravelCommons podcast is an \"odds-\'n\'-ends\" podcast, following up on items from previous podcasts and answering questions from web boards and e-mails.  I follow-up on last week\'s Sean Penn sighting and read the reply I received from the TSA in response to my complaint about Chicago Midway airport.  Responding to a topic request on the Podcast Alley comment board, I give my thoughts about frequent flier programs.  Answering some e-mail questions, I describe my convoluted podcast recording workflow.  Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_6.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr>\n\nHere are the shownotes for TravelCommons podcast #6:\n 	<li>Intro music -- <em>Warmth</em> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recording in my living room in suburban Chicago</li>\n 	<li>Follow-up on my Sean Penn SFO sighting</li>\n 	<li>Received a response from the TSA to my Chicago Midway complaint</li>\n 	<li>TSA screeners laughing it up after seeing Roberta Flack</li>\n 	<li>Responding to a topic request on the Podcast Alley comment board regarding frequent flier programs</li>\n 	<li>Answering e-mail questions on how I record my podcast</li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_6.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>','Podcast #6 - The TSA Talks Back','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-6-the-tsa-talks-back','','','2021-11-07 19:11:31','2021-11-08 00:11:31','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2005/06/19/podcast-6-the-tsa-talks-back/',0,'post','',1),
(10,1,'2005-06-29 14:38:00','2005-06-29 19:38:00','The TravelCommons podcast is back on the East Coast in Boston.  Recorded in the bathroom of the Residence Inn in Charlestown, I talk about the tight summer travel market, strategies for eating alone without looking like a loser, and more Classic Travel Stories -- fun on Air Canada.  Also, e-mail and audio comments from listeners.  Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_7.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr>\n\nHere are the shownotes for TravelCommons podcast #7:\n 	<li>Intro music -- <em>Warmth</em> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recording in the bathroom of the Residence Inn in Charlestown, Mass</li>\n 	<li>A great dinner in Boston\'s North End at Mamma Maria (<em><a href=\"http://www.mammamaria.com\">www.mammamaria.com</a></em>)</li>\n 	<li>Any hotel suggestions for my vacation in Geneva, Switzerland or Albertville, France?</li>\n 	<li>The first day of the new podcasting functionality in iTunes  is sending lots of new subscribers</li>\n 	<li>The summer travel season is upon us and it\'s going to be a crowded one</li>\n 	<li>Audio comment from Steve Frick of <a href=\"http://fricksworld.blogspot.com\">Frick\'s World</a></li>\n 	<li>Strategies for dining alone on the road</li>\n 	<li>Classic Travel Stories -- a trio of stories from Air Canada plane rides</li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_7.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>','Podcast #7 - Eating Alone; Classic Travel Stories','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-7-eating-alone-classic-travel-stories','','','2021-11-07 19:14:10','2021-11-08 00:14:10','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2005/06/29/podcast-7-eating-alone-classic-travel-stories/',0,'post','',9),
(11,1,'2005-07-14 14:28:12','2005-07-14 19:28:12','This TravelCommons podcast comes to you from my first day on vacation, recorded in the bathroom of the Novotel in Geneva, Switz.  I walk through the Internet technologies that I used to book a small non-chain hotel in the French Alps, talk about the sort of \"travel insurance\" that people believe they get from chosing well-known travel brands, and then reflect on the pleasures of unplanned wanderings -- trying to stay awake in Geneva and spending an afternoon at the World Beach <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tchoukball\">Tchoukball</a> Championship.  Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_8.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr>\n\nSorry for the delay in posting the show notes, but my Internet connectivity was a bit spotty at time, and I am, after all, on vacation:\n 	<li>Intro music -- <em>Warmth</em> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in the bathroom of the Novotel in Geneva, Switz</li>\n 	<li>On a 2½-week vacation in Europe</li>\n 	<li>Take the <em>Worst Airport</em> poll in the left column of this web site</li>\n 	<li>Using all kinds of technology to book vacation hotels in France</li>\n 	<li><em>Update</em> -- The Hotel Altiport was a great place in a beautiful setting above <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%A9ribel\">Meribel</a> and had a great staff</li>\n 	<li><strong><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/travelcommons/103657248/\">Direct Link</a></strong> to a picture of the Hotel Altiport</li>\n 	<li>Comfort in brands -- where to take risks and where to play it safe while traveling</li>\n 	<li>Serendipity -- finding an unexpected prize when traveling</li>\n 	<li><strong><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/travelcommons/103286072/\">Direct Link</a></strong> to a picture of the women\'s Beach Tchoukball finals</li>\n 	<li>For those interested in tchoukball -- <a href=\"http://www.tchoukball.org/\">www.tchoukball.org</a></li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_8.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>','Podcast #8 - TravelCommons on Vacation','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-8-travelcommons-on-vacation','','','2021-11-07 19:16:15','2021-11-08 00:16:15','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2005/07/14/podcast-8-travelcommons-on-vacation/',0,'post','',11),
(12,1,'2005-07-27 14:25:19','2005-07-27 19:25:19','Finishing my vacation with a podcast from the bathroom of the <a title=\"Budapest\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/hungary/budapest\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\">Budapest (Hungary)</a> Marriott, high above the <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danube\">Danube</a>. The second vacation podcast focuses on differences between business and leisure travel -- how to \"downshift\" from business to leisure travel, balancing cost with risk when choosing a travel brand, and a Budapest traffic accident illustrates what business travelers take for granted. Also, listener comments from podcast #8, and music/sounds from Budapest street festivals. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_9.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr>\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #9:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <em>Warmth</em> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in the bathroom of <a href=\"http://hotels.lonelyplanet.com/hungary/budapest-r2097989/budapest-marriott-hotel-q1192767/\">Budapest Marriott</a></li>\n 	<li>Finishing up a 2½-week vacation in Europe</li>\n 	<li>The transition music in this podcast are iRiver recordings of Budapest street festival sounds</li>\n 	<li>Listener comments about podcast #8</li>\n 	<li>What does it take to \"downshift\" from the efficient cadence of a business traveler; how to enjoy the act of traveling?</li>\n 	<li>Following up on the <em>Comfort in brands</em> topic from podcast #8</li>\n 	<li>Two great experiences with non-brands -- the <a href=\"http://www.altiporthotel.com\">Hotel Altiport</a> in Meribel, France, and <a href=\"http://www.fox-autorent.com\">Fox Auto-Rent</a> in Budapest</li>\n 	<li>Discount airlines taking over Budapest airport</li>\n 	<li>A traffic accident points out some of the things that business travelers take for granted</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/travelcommons/103646966/\"><strong>Direct Link</strong></a> to a picture of the wrecked car</li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_9.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #9 - Wrapping Up the Vacation','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-9-wrapping-up-the-vacation','','','2021-11-07 19:18:25','2021-11-08 00:18:25','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2005/07/27/podcast-9-wrapping-up-the-vacation/',0,'post','',3),
(13,1,'2005-08-06 14:21:46','2005-08-06 19:21:46','I\'m back in the US and back on the road -- ths time, though, on wheels, not in the air.  Recorded in the TravelCommons \"mobile studio\"  (a \'95 Chevy Blazer), this podcast talks about security risks of hotel Internet access, the hassle of replacing forgotten things while on the road, and, in the latest edition of Classic Travel Stories, fun times in <em>really</em> small towns.  Also, a response to a listener\'s question regarding in-flight mobile phone usage and Internet services.  Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_10.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr>\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #10:\n 	<li>Intro music -- <em>Warmth</em> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in the TravelCommons \"mobile studio\" on a rather warm summer day</li>\n 	<li>Back on the road; lots of flight delays due to summer weather</li>\n 	<li>Listener question about in-flight mobile phone usage and Internet services</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://www.jdpa.com/studies_jdpower/pressrelease3.asp?ID=2005097\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the JD Power 2005 North American Hotel Guest Satisfaction survey</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,68370,00.html\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the <em>Wired News</em> article on hotel TV hacking</li>\n 	<li>One of the worst feelings on the road -- opening your suitcase to discover you\'ve forgotten something</li>\n 	<li>Classic Travel Stories -- Finding creature comforts in <em>really</em> small towns</li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_10.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>','Podcast #10 - Hacking Hotel Rooms; Fun in Really Small Towns','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-10-hacking-hotel-rooms-fun-in-really-small-towns','','','2021-11-07 19:20:52','2021-11-08 00:20:52','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2005/08/06/podcast-10-hacking-hotel-rooms-fun-in-really-small-towns/',0,'post','',4),
(14,1,'2005-08-18 14:16:54','2005-08-18 19:16:54','Swinging through the West Coast, I recorded this podcast in the bathroom of the Orchard Hotel a block or two from the summit of Nob Hill in San Francisco. In this podcast, we talk about how the post-9/11 reduction in carry-ons has made packing for different business dress codes a real hassle. Is there an end to the \"shoe carnival\"? Recent news articles and a discussion with a TSA supervisor in Tampa suggest that a small bit of common sense may have infiltrated the TSA. And finally, a \"potpourri\" category -- collected odds-\'n\'-ends from discussion topics on the web site. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_11.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr>\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #11:\n\n&nbsp;\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <em>Warmth</em> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in the bathroom of the <a href=\"http://www.theorchardhotel.com\">Orchard Hotel</a> in San Francisco on a cold August night</li>\n 	<li>Being featured in Adam Curry\'s <em>Podfinder</em> podcast doubled the number of TravelCommons subscribers in a week</li>\n 	<li>Having to dress in business formal <em>and</em> business casual in the same trip is a real hassle</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/12/AR2005081201557.html\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to a <em>Washington Post </em>article says that the new TSA director is thinking about changing the current shoe screening policy</li>\n 	<li>Good discussion with a reasonable TSA supervisor in Tampa</li>\n 	<li>More follow-up on in-flight internet service</li>\n 	<li><strong><a href=\"http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB112345285640807000,00.html?mod=technology_main_promo_right\">Direct link</a></strong> to a <em>Wall Street Journal</em> journal article (registration required) on a demo flight for Boeing\'s Connexion in-flight internet service</li>\n 	<li>Following up on \"Hacking the Hotel Room\" from podcast #10, the new class of pocket wifi routers can provide a more secure hotel internet connection</li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"htp://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_11.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #11 - Business Dress Codes; Kinder, Gentler TSA?','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-11-business-dress-codes-kinder-gentler-tsa','','','2021-11-07 19:23:12','2021-11-08 00:23:12','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2005/08/18/podcast-11-business-dress-codes-kinder-gentler-tsa/',0,'post','',6),
(15,1,'2005-08-25 11:59:10','2005-08-25 16:59:10','Down in Florida this week, picking up a bit of the local heat and humidity. Recorded in the bathroom of the Marriott Courtyard in Oldsmar, FL, somewhere between Tampa and Clearwater, we talk about how travel skills are passed from parents to children, spotting some famous people in ORD and LAX, rare emotions in the Frequent Traveler screening line, and a review of travel podcasts. Also, the final results of our Worst US Airport poll. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_12.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file\n\n<hr>\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #12:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <em>Warmth</em> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in the bathroom of the Oldsmar, FL Marriott Courtyard</li>\n 	<li>Denver Int\'l Airport wins the <em>Worst US Airport</em> poll by one vote over LAX</li>\n 	<li>Stories of how parents pass down business travel skills to their kids</li>\n 	<li>Airport celebrity sightings -- Steve Case, Julie Delpy</li>\n 	<li>Intense emotions in the Frequent Traveler screening line</li>\n 	<li>A 2x2 matrix classifying travel podcasts</li>\n</ul>\n<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/matrix.jpg\"><img class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-3078\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/matrix.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"295\"></a>\n<ul>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://www.emptyseat.net/emptyseatblog/\">The Emptyseat podcast</a></li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://www.connectedtraveler.com/blog/index.html\">The Connected Traveler</a></li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_12.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #12 - Emotions in the Screening Line; Other Travel Podcasts','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-12-emotions-in-the-screening-line-other-travel-podcasts','','','2021-11-07 19:25:28','2021-11-08 00:25:28','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2005/08/25/podcast-12-emotions-in-the-screening-line-other-travel-podcasts/',0,'post','',10),
(16,1,'2005-09-01 11:56:27','2005-09-01 16:56:27','A hurricane came between me and my meetings in Tampa, so I stayed home for an entire week. This week\'s podcast has a bit of local flavor and sound, talking about how to spend rare time off the road, what we\'ll do for sleep, and introducing a new poll -- what\'s your favorite US airline? Also, some pointers to people who are linking to the TravelCommons website. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_13.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr>\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #13:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <em>Warmth</em> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago</li>\n 	<li>Thoughts going out to the folks in southern Mississippi who received the full force of Hurricane Katrina</li>\n 	<li>Lots of feedback on last week\'s \"Generations of Travelers\" topic</li>\n 	<li>Links to bloggers who point to TravelCommons -- <a href=\"http://www.mikebladon.com/blog/\">Mike Bladon</a> and <a href=\"http://hilary.fascinationdesign.com/\">Hilary Baumann</a></li>\n 	<li>Catching up with the local flavors at home</li>\n</ul>\n<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/chicago_dog.jpg\"><img class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-3073\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/chicago_dog.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a>\n<ul>\n 	<li>The hunt for sleep</li>\n 	<li>Revised final results of the Worst US Airport poll -- a tie between LAX and Denver</li>\n 	<li>A new poll -- Your Favorite US Airline?</li>\n 	<li>What makes you like an airline?</li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_13.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #13 - Enjoying Home; The Battle for Sleep','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-13-enjoying-home-the-battle-for-sleep','','','2021-09-22 13:32:31','2021-09-22 18:32:31','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2005/09/01/podcast-13-enjoying-home-the-battle-for-sleep/',0,'post','',2),
(17,1,'2005-09-14 11:52:38','2005-09-14 16:52:38','Traveling through the southeast US, I stopped long enough to record a podcast in the bathroom of the Durham, NC Marriott.  This week\'s podcast talks about two very different travel experiences at the opposite ends of Interstate 40; a special edition of Classic Travel Stories -- recollections from September 11, 2001 -- and the Scottish Band <a href=\"http://www.evangeline.org.uk/\"><em>Evangeline</em></a> talks about writing a great travel song.  Here\'s a <a href=\"travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_14.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr>\n\nSorry for the delay in posting the show notes .  My home ISP, Comcast, has for some unknown decided to block the IP address to this site.  I\'ve filed a trouble ticket, but I think I can probably change providers faster than I can get Comcast to fix their internal routing screw-ups:\n 	<li>Intro music -- <em>Warmth</em> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in the bathroom of Durham, NC Marriott</li>\n 	<li>Hoping to get out of the Carolinas before Hurricane Ophelia decides to come ashore</li>\n 	<li>Following up on T/C #12\'s review of other travel podcasts, Ed Vawter points to the <a href=\"http://joepodcaster.libsyn.com/\"><em>Fly With Me</em></a> podcast as one of his favorites</li>\n 	<li>Completely different airport experiences at the ends of I-40</li>\n 	<li>Classic Travel Stories -- Recollections from the week of September 11, 2001</li>\n 	<li>First edition of Great Travel Songs -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by the Scottish Band <a href=\"http://www.evangeline.org.uk/\"><strong>Evangeline</strong></a></li>\n 	<li>I found Evangeline on the <a href=\"http://tartanpodcast.com/\">Tartanpodcast</a></li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_14.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>','Podcast #14 - September 11th Travel Stories; Writing a Great Travel Song','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-14-september-11th-travel-stories-writing-a-great-travel-song','','','2021-09-22 13:34:44','2021-09-22 18:34:44','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2005/09/14/podcast-14-september-11th-travel-stories-writing-a-great-travel-song/',0,'post','',3),
(18,1,'2005-09-24 08:24:17','2005-09-24 13:24:17','Sorry for the delay in posting a new podcast, but I caught a nasty cold en route to San Francisco this week.  This week, a couple of friends and long-time podcast listeners let me buy them beers at the Shearton Fisherman\'s Wharf in exchange for their Classic Travel stories.  I also talk the change in attitude at United Airlines and, as airlines continue to \"de-content\" their cabins, there are two things left I really care about.  Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_15.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<!--more-->\n\n<hr>\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #15:\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recording was a bit delayed by the cold I picked up on my flight out to SFO</li>\n 	<li>Oracle World forces some bad hotel choices</li>\n 	<li>A high school friend from Mobile, AL writes in with some first-hand observations on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina</li>\n 	<li>Links to a podcast that points to TravelCommons -- <a href=\"http://teamtna.libsyn.com\"> The Team TnA Show</a></li>\n 	<li>Begging for business -- United Airlines employees providing great service</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB112717780464345669,00.html?mod=travel%5Fleft%5Fcolumn%5Fhs\"><em>Wall Street Journal</em> article</a> (registration required) on the latest moves by legacy airlines to pull content out of their airplane cabins</li>\n 	<li>There are two things I care about -- in-seat power supplies and in-flight magazines</li>\n 	<li>Recorded in the bar of the Shearton-Fisherman\'s Wharf in SF, two friends tell their Classic Travel Stories about wanting the straight scoop about lightning</li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_15.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>','Podcast #15 - Begging for Business; Needing to Know at 35,000 ft','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-15-begging-for-business-needing-to-know-at-35000-ft','','','2021-11-10 18:04:32','2021-11-10 23:04:32','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2005/09/24/podcast-15-begging-for-business-needing-to-know-at-35000-ft/',0,'post','',4),
(19,1,'2005-10-01 08:22:03','2005-10-01 13:22:03','Bouncing around this week, I recorded this podcast in the bathroom of the Stamford, CT Marriott. Visiting St Louis\'s Gateway Arch, we talk about wedging a bit of personal tourism into a packed business itinerary, how people keep mistaking physical closeness with personal closeness, and recounting some stories about mistakes even before the trip starts. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_16.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #16:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in the bathroom of the Stamford, CT Marriott</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewArtist?artistId=75387518&amp;forceArtistPage=1\"><strong>Direct Link</strong></a> to iTunes page for the Scottish Band Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>Pocket tourism -- fitting a bit of personal tourism into the usual packed business travel itinerary</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://www.travelandleisure.com/invoke.cfm?ObjectID=93F3A055-3C2C-42BF-89C54855C05C0056\"><strong>Direct Link</strong></a> to the Travel + Leisure editorial</li>\n 	<li>Touring the Gateway Arch in St Louis</li>\n</ul>\n<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/arch.jpg\"><img class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-3090\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/arch.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\" /></a>\n<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/arch_ticket.jpg\"><img class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-3091\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/arch_ticket.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"151\" /></a>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Too much personal information sharing in confined physical spaces</li>\n 	<li>Two stories about mistaken trips to the airport</li>\n 	<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/modules.php?op=modload&amp;name=News&amp;file=article&amp;sid=24&amp;mode=nested&amp;order=0&amp;thold=0\">Direct Link</a></strong> to the comments posted under Podcast #14</li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_16.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #16 - Squeezing in Tourism; Can We Stop Sharing?','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-16-squeezing-in-tourism-can-we-stop-sharing','','','2021-09-22 13:36:43','2021-09-22 18:36:43','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2005/10/01/podcast-16-squeezing-in-tourism-can-we-stop-sharing/',0,'post','',0),
(20,1,'2005-10-10 08:18:12','2005-10-10 13:18:12','Returning from a quick trip to <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/austin\">Austin, TX</a>, this week\'s podcast talks about the 15-part Airworld series in <em>AdAge</em>, the behind-the-scenes view of why every airport looks the same. A recent business trip to Detroit breaks through the state tourism propaganda and gets into the city\'s true nature. Ignoring WC Fields\' advice, my kids make an appearance, giving their views of my travels. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_17.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr>\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #17:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Tried to record this in the bathroom of the Austin Courtyard Marriott, but the exhaust fan wouldn\'t turn off</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Moonshiner</em> by Uncle Tupelo</li>\n 	<li>John Birkhead of the <a href=\"http://desertcast.libsyn.com\"><strong>Desertcast</strong></a> podcast sends in his description of the new event for the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"2012 Summer Olympics\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Summer_Olympics\" rel=\"wikipedia\">2012 London Olympics</a> -- the Gatwick to Heathrow dash</li>\n 	<li>Airworld -- our own little ecosystem</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>The Same Old Story</em> by <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Billie Holiday\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billie_Holiday\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Billie Holiday</a></li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://adage.com/news.cms?newsId=46093\"><strong>Direct Link</strong></a> to the Airworld series in AdAge <em>(registration required)</em></li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Lincoln Town</em> by John Hiatt</li>\n 	<li>Business travel helps you \"break through\" to what\'s really happening in a place</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Walking in Your Footsteps</em> by the Police</li>\n 	<li>My kids offer their opinions on my travel</li>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Ramblin\' Man</em> by the Allman Brothers Band</li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_17.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #17 - Generic Airworld; Kids’ View of Dad’s Travels','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-17-generic-airworld-kids-view-of-dads-travels','','','2021-09-22 13:37:56','2021-09-22 18:37:56','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2005/10/10/podcast-17-generic-airworld-kids-view-of-dads-travels/',0,'post','',3),
(21,1,'2005-10-16 22:53:10','2005-10-17 03:53:10','Emptying out my notebook with an odds-\'n-ends podcast. Traveling between <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/southwest/phoenix\">Phoenix</a>, <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/rocky-mountains/denver\">Denver</a> and <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/chicago\">Chicago</a> this week, I manage a 50-degree temperature drop and have the <a href=\"http://www.tsa.gov\">TSA</a> reject a checked chain saw. However, I haven\'t had to take my shoes off for two weeks -- are we seeing the end of the shoe carnival? We also talk about the fourth quarter tactics around re-up\'ing frequent traveler status, clothing problems, and update the results of our Best US Airline poll. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_18.mp3\"> <strong>link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr>\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #18:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Triangulating through Phoenix and Denver -- crossing from sand to snow in an a day</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"www.tsa.gov/interweb/assetlibrary/Permitted_Prohibited_9_6_2005.pdf\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the TSA\'s Permitted and Prohibited list</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em>Soul Traveling</em> by the Australian band <a href=\"http://www.stingrayonline.com\">Stingray</a> from the <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com\">Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://www.mytravelreviews.blogspot.com/\">Direct link</a> to Gary Bembridge\'s <em>My Travel Reviews</em> podcast</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Hotel California\" href=\"http://www.amazon.com/Hotel-California-Eagles/dp/B000002GVO%3FSubscriptionId%3D0G81C5DAZ03ZR9WH9X82%26tag%3Dzemanta-20%26linkCode%3Dxm2%26camp%3D2025%26creative%3D165953%26creativeASIN%3DB000002GVO\" rel=\"amazon\">Hotel California</a></em> by the Eagles</li>\n 	<li>Requalifying for frequent flier and frequent sleeper programs</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Flyin\' Shoes</em> by Lyle Lovett</li>\n 	<li>End of the TSA shoe carnival?</li>\n 	<li>How do you test for \"travelability\" when buying clothes?</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Good is Good</em> by Sheryl Crow</li>\n 	<li>An update on our Best US Airline pol</li>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Ramblin\' Man</em> by the Allman Brothers Band</li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li>Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_18.mp3\"> <strong>link</strong></a> to the podcast file</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #18 - Trouble with Chain Saws; Sprint for Status','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-18-trouble-with-chain-saws-sprint-for-status','','','2021-11-08 09:52:34','2021-11-08 14:52:34','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2005/10/16/podcast-18-trouble-with-chain-saws-sprint-for-status/',0,'post','',4),
(22,1,'2005-10-21 21:27:18','2005-10-22 02:27:18','This week\'s <a href=\"http://technorati.com/blogs/podcast\">podcast</a> is recorded in the bathroom of the Marriott Courtyard in East Memphis. I talk about the autumn tree colors coming visible from airports up North and worry about catching avian flu while breathing the same air as 150 other travelers. I talk a bit about some changes in Memphis since my high school days and talk about how it remains a Southern city. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_19.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #19:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in the bathroom of the Marriott Courtyard in <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/memphis\">Memphis, TN</a></li>\n 	<li>Jinxed myself by declaring \"End of the TSA Carnival\" in last week\'s podcast</li>\n 	<li>Listener explanation on why they voted for Midwest Airlines in the Favorite Airline poll</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em>When the Leaves Come Falling Down</em> by Van Morrison</li>\n 	<li>Autumn is a great time of the year to fly in and out of airports like Chicago-O\'Hare, Detroit and White Plains, NY, all of which have approaches that go over wooded areas</li>\n 	<li>Interesting comparison of the thread colors in US and Italian sewing kits</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>I\'m Like a Bird</em> by Nelly Furtado</li>\n 	<li>The bad cold I caught on my ORD-SFO flight (mentioned in podcast #15) has me worrying about catching bird flu</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/Bring-Family-John-Hiatt/dp/B000002GHH%3FSubscriptionId%3D0G81C5DAZ03ZR9WH9X82%26tag%3Dzemanta-20%26linkCode%3Dxm2%26camp%3D2025%26creative%3D165953%26creativeASIN%3DB000002GHH\">Memphis in the Meantime</a></em> by John Hiatt</li>\n 	<li>Spent time hitting the big non-Elvis tourist spots in Memphis -- eating dry-rub ribs at <a href=\"http://www.hogsfly.com\">the Rendezvous</a> and walked down an amazingly renovated <a href=\"http://www.bealestreet.com/home.html\">Beale Street</a>.</li>\n 	<li>A story about friendly Memphians at the end of a long night</li>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Ramblin\' Man</em> by the Allman Brothers Band</li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_19.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #19 - Colors in Travel; Visit to a Southern City','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-19-colors-in-travel-visit-to-a-southern-city','','','2021-09-22 13:40:47','2021-09-22 18:40:47','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2005/10/21/podcast-19-colors-in-travel-visit-to-a-southern-city/',0,'post','',2),
(23,1,'2005-10-30 14:51:27','2005-10-30 19:51:27','Recorded in the bathroom of Doubletree Club in <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Ana%2C_California\">Santa Ana, CA</a>, this week we focus on what\'s going on with the airlines. A listener story about the trials of getting from Wisconsin to Pittsburgh shows the importance of person-to-person interactions to the <a href=\"http://technorati.com/blogs/travel\">travel</a> experience. Does Northwest\'s latest cost cutting effort foreshadow the rise of the virtual airline? Also, how to define boundaries of personal space at 35,000 feet. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_20.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #20:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in the bathroom of the Doubletree Club Hotel in Santa Ana, CA</li>\n 	<li>The Chicago White Sox and the World Series have made for some late nights this week</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://udayan71.blogspot.com/\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to Udayan Tripathi\'s <em>Life in London</em> podcast</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://hotelcoffee.blogspot.com/\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to Dan O\'Leary\'s <em>HotelCoffee</em> podcast</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music --  <em>Before They Make Me Run</em> by The Rolling Stones</li>\n 	<li>Listener\'s story about difficulties with United Airlines on a trip from Tokyo to Wisconsin to Pittsburgh to Philadelphia and back to Tokyo.</li>\n 	<li>Cost cutting efforts that replace people with technology makes the remaining person-to-person interactions only that much more important</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Even Better Than the Real Thing</em> by U2</li>\n 	<li>Northwest Airlines talks about outsourcing flight attendants</li>\n 	<li>Is this a move toward a \"virtual\" airline?</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Whipping Post</em> by The Allman Brothers Band</li>\n 	<li>How to define my personal space inside an airplane</li>\n 	<li>A \"seat gripper\" invades my personal space</li>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Ramblin\' Man</em> by the Allman Brothers Band</li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_20.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #20 - Travel is a People Business; Personal Space at 35,000 Ft','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-20-travel-is-a-people-business-personal-space-at-35000-ft','','','2021-09-22 13:42:20','2021-09-22 18:42:20','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2005/10/30/podcast-20-travel-is-a-people-business-personal-space-at-35000-ft/',0,'post','',1),
(24,1,'2005-11-06 14:47:32','2005-11-06 19:47:32','After a down-and-back trip to Tampa, this week\'s topics include thoughts on the recently announced changes to America West\'s and United\'s boarding schemes -- are they focusing on the right thing? Also, the need to stay home sometimes, and how <a href=\"http://research.microsoft.com/\">Microsoft Research</a>\'s personal black box project might change the way we think about travel pictures. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_21.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from Travelcommons podcast #21:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Flew down to Tampa for a Monday morning meeting</li>\n 	<li>Haven\'t written anything in my <a href=\"http://www.moleskinerie.com/\">Moleskine</a> travel journal -- this podcast seems to be monopolizing my creative time</li>\n 	<li>Thanks to all the listeners who are using the \"Recommend Us\" link on refer their friends to the podcast</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://clothingcult.com/?p=32\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to Hilary Baumann\'s Pant Rant on her <em>ClothingCult.com</em> blog</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music --  <em>I\'m Standing in Line</em> by John Lee Hooker</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://online.wsj.com/article/SB113089422321485853-search.html?KEYWORDS=airline+seating&amp;COLLECTION=wsjie/archive\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the <em>Wall Street Journal</em> article (subscription required) on America West\'s new \"reverse pyramid\" seating scheme</li>\n 	<li>Shouldn\'t they be spending their time on improving baggage handling?</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Wall of Death</em> by Richard &amp; Linda Thompson</li>\n 	<li>A friend and I are surprised to find ourselves both in town on a Wednesday</li>\n 	<li>I seem to hit the wall every 4-6 weeks and have to come off the road</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music --  <em>Pictures of You</em> by The Cure</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail451.html\"><em>IT Conversations</em> podcast</a> about Microsoft Research\'s <a href=\"http://research.microsoft.com/sendev/project_sensecam.aspx\">SenseCam research project</a></li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://www.itconversations.com//clip.php?showid=451&amp;start=2:21&amp;stop=4:21\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to a excerpt of the <em>IT Conversations</em> podcast</li>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Ramblin\' Man</em> by the Allman Brothers Band</li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_21.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #21 - Science of Airline Boarding; New Ways for Travel Pictures','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-21-science-of-airline-boarding-new-ways-for-travel-pictures','','','2021-09-22 13:43:49','2021-09-22 18:43:49','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2005/11/06/podcast-21-science-of-airline-boarding-new-ways-for-travel-pictures/',0,'post','',3),
(25,1,'2005-11-13 14:44:52','2005-11-13 19:44:52','Another visit down to <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/memphis\">Memphis</a> prompts a confession about my obsession with pork barbecue and thoughts on how to find the best food in a new city. Other topics include \"voice of the travel company\" -- a letter from a British Airways manager gives his thoughts on the travel experiences of some TravelCommons listeners, and more Classic Travel Stories -- after-dinner stories about interrupted train trips in Eastern Europe. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_22.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons Podcast #22:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Down in Memphis again at the beginning of the week</li>\n 	<li>Picture of the re-wrapped chain saw that caused problems in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/modules.php?op=modload&amp;name=News&amp;file=article&amp;sid=30&amp;mode=nested&amp;order=0&amp;thold=0\">Podcast #18</a></li>\n</ul>\n<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/tsa_chain_saw.jpg\"><img class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-3088\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/tsa_chain_saw.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"200\" /></a>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em>Damn Shame (Memphis Mix)</em> by <a href=\"http://jayfarrar.net/\">Jay Farrar</a></li>\n 	<li>A British Airways manager provides his perspectives on the \"voice of the traveler\" stories in Podcasts #17 and #20</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://www.garageband.com/song?|pe1|S8LTM0LdsaSgZle_ZA\"><strong>GarageBand link</strong></a> to <em>Get Out of Memphis</em> by Chicago Kingsnakes</li>\n 	<li>Traveling to Memphis reveals an obsession</li>\n 	<li>Here\'s a picture of the Corky\'s pork barbecue plate in Memphis\'s airport<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/mem_bbq_plate.jpg\"><img class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-3079\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/mem_bbq_plate.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\" /></a></li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://www.chowhound.com/main.html\"><strong>Direct Link</strong></a> to the Chowhound.com website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>People Get Ready</em> by <a href=\"http://www.jeffbeck.com\">Jeff Beck</a> and <a href=\"http://www.rodstewart.com/\">Rod Stewart</a></li>\n 	<li>Classic Travel Stories -- Interrupted train trips in Slovakia and Hungary</li>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Ramblin\' Man</em> by the Allman Brothers Band</li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_22.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #22 - Other Side of the Ticket Counter; Finding Local Food','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-22-other-side-of-the-ticket-counter-finding-local-food','','','2021-09-22 13:45:09','2021-09-22 18:45:09','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2005/11/13/podcast-22-other-side-of-the-ticket-counter-finding-local-food/',0,'post','',0),
(26,1,'2005-11-20 14:09:34','2005-11-20 19:09:34','This week\'s podcast is recorded in the bathroom of the Memphis Marriott. A day trip down to Indianapolis begs the question -- how do you make the decision between flying and driving? Then down in Memphis, a nightcap at the Marriott bar provides some entertaining scenes. Also, we discuss the right and wrong ways that companies use to control travel costs. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_23.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #23:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in the bathroom of the Memphis Marriott</li>\n 	<li>Traveled to Indy and Memphis this week</li>\n 	<li>Please click through to the Listener Survey on the left side of the screen</li>\n 	<li>Listener comments on the \"voice from the other side of the ticket counter\" from Podcast #22</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em>Delivery</em> by <a href=\"http://www.jenniferhelane.com/\">Jennifer Helane</a> from the <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com\">Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\n 	<li>How to make the decision between flying and driving to Indianapolis</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Under Pressure</em> by David Bowie &amp; Queen</li>\n 	<li>Increasing travel prices are prodding some companies to look at \"strategic sourcing\" their travel needs</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Noise -- Random sounds from the Blue Shoes bar in the Memphis Marriott</li>\n 	<li>Regressing after spending too much time at hotel bars</li>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Ramblin\' Man</em> by the Allman Brothers Band</li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_23.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #23 - Fly or Drive; Scenes from The Hotel Bar','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-23-fly-or-drive-scenes-from-the-hotel-bar','','','2021-09-22 13:46:14','2021-09-22 18:46:14','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2005/11/20/podcast-23-fly-or-drive-scenes-from-the-hotel-bar/',0,'post','',5),
(27,1,'2005-12-02 14:05:58','2005-12-02 19:05:58','Back on the road after the Thanksgiving holiday, this week\'s podcast is recorded in the bathroom of the Durham, NC Marriott and edited in the RDU Admirals Club. A listener asks \"What do you miss when you travel?\" Also, some ideas on staying connected with the family -- replacing those random bits of conversation while on the road, and some careless moments with rental cars. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommon_24.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #24:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in the bathroom of the Durham, NC Marriott</li>\n 	<li>Paying for last week\'s holiday with a rough triangulation trip across Tampa, Memphis, and <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/the-south/the-triangle\">Raleigh-Durham</a></li>\n 	<li>Audio clip of an Atlanta-Hartsfield emergency alarm</li>\n 	<li>Here\'s the ClustrMap image showing web site traffic for the month of November<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/clustermap.jpg\"><img class=\"aligncenter wp-image-3074 size-full\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/clustermap.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"215\" /></a></li>\n 	<li>Please click through to the Listener Survey on the left side of the screen</li>\n 	<li>Another listener experience with <a href=\"http://www.ba.com\">British Airways</a> -- a positive one</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>A listener asks \"What do I miss when I travel?\"</li>\n 	<li>Recreating my morning routine in hotels</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Miss You</em> by the Rolling Stones</li>\n 	<li>The regular rhythms of conversation get disrupted when one party is on travel</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Fast Car</em> by Tracy Chapman</li>\n 	<li>A couple of stories about abusing rental cars</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/21561359@N00/103066097/\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to a picture of the Mustang speedometer in Phoenix</li>\n 	<li>Closing music --  <em>Ramblin\' Man</em> by the Allman Brothers Band</li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_24.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #24 - What Do You Miss When You Travel; Fun with Rental Cars','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-24-what-do-you-miss-when-you-travel-fun-with-rental-cars','','','2021-09-23 14:08:29','2021-09-23 19:08:29','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2005/12/02/podcast-24-what-do-you-miss-when-you-travel-fun-with-rental-cars/',0,'post','',4),
(28,1,'2005-12-13 14:02:41','2005-12-13 19:02:41','This week\'s podcast is recorded in the bathroom of the <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldsmar%2C_Florida\">Oldsmar, FL</a> Marriott. In the midst of a bunch of work and a tough travel itinerary, why am I surprised that I just can\'t get into the holiday spirit? A huge snowstorm blowing through <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/chicago\">Chicago</a> threatens to strand me in <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/memphis\">Memphis</a> -- until another traveler suggests driving the 550 miles home. And a Classic Travel Story from a former road warrior about finding love in a hotel bar. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_25.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #25:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in the bathroom of the Oldsmar, FL Courtyard</li>\n 	<li>Another tough travel week -- sleep deprivation from early morning flights, severe winter travel problems, and a whole lot of work</li>\n 	<li>Starting a 5-week sponsorship from <a href=\"http://expertflyer.com/travelcommons\">ExpertFlyer.com</a></li>\n 	<li>Steve Frick from <a href=\"http://fricksworld.blogspot.com/\">Frick\'s World</a> posts a great rental car comment on podcast #24</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music --  <em>I\'ll Be Home by Christmas</em> by <a href=\"http://elvis.com\">Elvis Presley</a></li>\n 	<li>I\'m having a tough time getting into the holiday spirit</li>\n 	<li>Maybe I\'ll have an \"espresso\" Christmas -- a concentrated, more intense holiday experience</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Run Run Rudolph</em> by <a href=\"http://www.dwightyoakam.com/\">Dwight Yoakam</a></li>\n 	<li>A winter storm in Chicago cancels flights and forces a decision -- wait \'til the morning or drive home tonight</li>\n</ul>\n<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/ord-mem.jpg\"><img class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-3081\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/ord-mem.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"287\" height=\"300\" /></a>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Every Picture Tells a Story</em> by <a href=\"http://www.rodstewart.com/\">Rod Stewart</a></li>\n 	<li>Classic Travel Story -- Meeting a husband in a hotel bar</li>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Ramblin\' Man</em> by the Allman Brothers Band</li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommon_25.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #25 - Long Drive Home; Meeting Your Future in a Hotel Bar','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-25-long-drive-home-meeting-your-future-in-a-hotel-bar','','','2021-09-23 14:10:07','2021-09-23 19:10:07','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2005/12/13/podcast-25-long-drive-home-meeting-your-future-in-a-hotel-bar/',0,'post','',2),
(29,1,'2005-12-20 13:59:55','2005-12-20 18:59:55','Recorded in the bathroom of the <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/pennsylvania/philadelphia\">Philadelphia</a> Marriott, this week\'s podcast comes at the end of my last flight of the year -- a triangulation across <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/boston\">Boston</a>, <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/new-england/providence\">Providence, RI</a>, and Philadelphia. A light schedule let me catch a good lunch and dinner in Philadelphia. A weekend ski trip to <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/rocky-mountains/denver\">Denver</a> prompts thoughts on the disconnect between business travelers and resort hotels, and the increased number of non-frequent elite status travelers. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_26.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #26:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in the bathroom of the Philadelphia Marriott</li>\n 	<li>Quick 3-day triangulation through the northeast -- Boston, Providence, and Philadelphia -- before settling in back home for the Christmas holidays</li>\n 	<li>Get a great Hertz rental car -- an <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infiniti_G\">Infiniti G35</a> -- and smoke the drive from Boston to Providence</li>\n 	<li>Had time for a couple of great solo meals in Philadelphia -- lunch at a counter in <a href=\"http://www.readingterminalmarket.org/\"> the Reading Terminal Market</a> and dinner at the sushi bar in<a href=\"http://www.morimotorestaurant.com\"> Morimoto</a></li>\n 	<li><strong><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/travelcommons/103281516/\">Direct Link</a></strong> to a picture of Tommy Dinic\'s lunch counter at the Reading Terminal Market</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/Changes-Latitudes-Attitudes-Jimmy-Buffett/dp/B000002PBN%3FSubscriptionId%3D0G81C5DAZ03ZR9WH9X82%26tag%3Dzemanta-20%26linkCode%3Dxm2%26camp%3D2025%26creative%3D165953%26creativeASIN%3DB000002PBN\">Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes</a></em> by <a href=\"http://margaritaville.com\">Jimmy Buffett</a></li>\n 	<li>The challenges of staying in a resort location while on business travel</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Brass in Pocket</em> by The Pretenders</li>\n 	<li>Predictions of growth in the numbers of elite status travelers</li>\n 	<li>Many of these new elites are qualifying through non-flying programs</li>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Ramblin\' Man</em> by the Allman Brothers Band</li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_26.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #26 - Business Travel Among Vacationers; Explosion of Elites','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-26-business-travel-among-vacationers-explosion-of-elites','','','2021-09-23 14:11:39','2021-09-23 19:11:39','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2005/12/20/podcast-26-business-travel-among-vacationers-explosion-of-elites/',0,'post','',2),
(30,1,'2005-12-27 11:38:49','2005-12-27 16:38:49','Spent the holiday week digging through the TravelCommon archives and assembled a \"Best of TravelCommons 2005\" episode. Starting with a medley of hotel bathrooms, we revisit some rants on the TSA, the 3-episode Sean Penn arc, and excerpts from some of the best stories of 2005. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_27.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_27.mp3\"]\n\n<!--more-->\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #27:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Home for Christmas week, recover from a tough 4 weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas</li>\n 	<li>Thanks to everyone who has left, or tried to leave, a review on the TravelCommons page of iTunes</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>Medley of TravelCommons Hotel Bathroom studios</li>\n 	<li>from T/C #5 - Why I record in bathrooms</li>\n 	<li>Medley of TSA rants</li>\n 	<li>from T/C #5-7 - Sean Penn comments</li>\n 	<li>from T/C #7 - Steve Frick of <a href=\"http://fricksworld.blogspot.com\">Frick\'s World</a> is a little uncomfortable recording in the bathroom</li>\n 	<li>from T/C #14 - Willie Evans from the Scots Band <a href=\"http://www.evangeline.org.uk/\"><strong>Evangeline</strong></a> talks about writing a travel song</li>\n 	<li>from T/C #17 - My kids\' view of travel</li>\n 	<li>from T/C #15 - Allan Marko tells a story about rapid airplane repair</li>\n 	<li>from T/C #3 - Flyers from <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/great-lakes/cleveland\">Cleveland</a> to <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/chicago\">Chicago</a> looking for an early exit</li>\n 	<li>from T/C #11 - Packing light leaves no margin for error</li>\n 	<li>from T/C #23 - Patrons at the hotel bar drinking shots</li>\n 	<li>from T/C #19 - Different colors in <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/italy/emilia-romagna-and-san-marino/bologna\">Bologna, Italy</a></li>\n 	<li>from T/C #13 - Imaginative way to sleep on red-eyes</li>\n 	<li>from T/C #21 - Decisions on vacation photos</li>\n 	<li>from T/C #4 - Disappointed web search</li>\n 	<li>from T/C #24 - Fun with Rental Cars</li>\n 	<li>from T/C #7 - Air sickness without the bag</li>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Ramblin\' Man</em> by the Allman Brothers Band</li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_27.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #27 - Best of 2005','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-27-best-of-2005','','','2021-09-23 14:12:50','2021-09-23 19:12:50','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2005/12/27/podcast-27-best-of-2005/',0,'post','',4),
(31,1,'2006-01-06 11:33:27','2006-01-06 16:33:27','Coming to you this week once again from the Oldsmar, FL Courtyard, I\'m back on the road in the first week of the new year. A listener asks about selecting a carry-on bag that meets the conflicting restrictions of airlines. We also talk about the hassle of forgetting things and have a couple of Classic Travel Stories about airplane mechanical difficulties. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_28.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #28:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in the bathroom of the Oldsmar, FL Courtyard, near Tampa</li>\n 	<li>Quick down-and-back trip to start the new year</li>\n 	<li>Still more leisure travelers than business travelers a couple of days after the holidays</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail764.html\"><strong>Direct Link</strong></a> to the Ze Frank podcast on airline seatback emergency cards at IT Conversations</li>\n 	<li>TSA seems to be back on the shoe warpath, now that they can\'t strip search people for lethal fingernail clippers</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Those Shoes</em> by The Eagles</li>\n 	<li>A listener writes that the airline carry-on restrictions are all over the place</li>\n 	<li>European airlines seem to focus on weight, while US airlines only care if the bag will fit in the overhead bin</li>\n 	<li>More important than anything else, pick a black bag</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Don\'t You (Forget About Me)</em> by Simple Minds</li>\n 	<li>Just can\'t get into the travel groove</li>\n 	<li>Forgot my toiletries kit and had to re-trace my grooming steps in the middle of the Oldsmar CVS so I could remember what I needed</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Every Picture Tells A Story</em> by Rod Steward</li>\n 	<li>Classic Travel Stories -- Just a couple of mechanical difficulties</li>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Ramblin\' Man</em> by the Allman Brothers Band</li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_28.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #28 - Controversy of Carry-On; Put Your Head Between Your Knees…','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-28-controversy-of-carry-on-put-your-head-between-your-knees','','','2021-09-23 14:14:10','2021-09-23 19:14:10','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2006/01/06/podcast-28-controversy-of-carry-on-put-your-head-between-your-knees/',0,'post','',6),
(32,1,'2006-01-12 23:30:50','2006-01-13 04:30:50','Recorded in the bathroom of the Bellagio in Las Vegas, this special \"Listeners\' Feedback\" edition is 100% listener content from e-mails and website comments. I tell listener stories about carry-on luggage and troubled airplane landings, while two listeners take the mic to talk about the technology they use in their travels. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_29-96.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #29:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in the bathroom of the Bellagio in Las Vegas</li>\n 	<li>Two trips this week -- a quick trip to Memphis, and then out to Las Vegas through the end of the week</li>\n 	<li>Highly recommend riding the Hertz bus in Memphis when Marvin is driving</li>\n 	<li>I\'m not a big fan of business meetings in Vegas -- it\'s too geared for leisure travelers</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Carry On Regardless</em> by Van Morrison</li>\n 	<li>Rich Wisco shares his luggage strategy. <a href=\"http://richmanwisco.blogspot.com\"><strong>His blog</strong></a> has some good travel pictures</li>\n 	<li>Chris from Tulsa describes an interesting carry-on weight test administered by Southwest</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>I Don\'t Like to Travel</em> by Byther Smith from the <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com\">Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\n 	<li>Chris from Tulsa talks about harrowing approach into PHX</li>\n 	<li>Allan Marko talks about getting his head between his knees on an approach to SNA</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>Travel Tech -- a new semi-regular topic about the technology that travelers use</li>\n 	<li>I found the <a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/whatsinmybag/interesting/\"><em>whatsinmybag</em></a> Flickr collection on the <a href=\"http://fricksworld.blogspot.com/\">Frick\'s World blog</a> <a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/fricksworld/6408911/in/set-160005/\">(here\'s the picture of his bag)</a></li>\n 	<li>Ed Vawter raves about the iGo power supply</li>\n 	<li>Dan O\'Leary of the <a href=\"http://hotelcoffee.blogspot.com/\">HotelCoffee podcast</a> talks about his travel technology bundle</li>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Ramblin\' Man</em> by the Allman Brothers Band</li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_29-96.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #29 - Special Listeners’ Feedback Show','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-29-special-listeners-feedback-show','','','2021-09-23 14:15:45','2021-09-23 19:15:45','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2006/01/12/podcast-29-special-listeners-feedback-show/',0,'post','',8),
(33,1,'2006-02-05 18:22:36','2006-02-05 23:22:36','Spent all week at home and ended up catching a cold from my son. This week\'s topics are spurred by listener e-mails and web postings. We talk about bad experiences with rude TSA screeners, some thoughts about travel toiletries, and the cost of broadband on the road. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_31.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #31:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in the TravelCommons studio in suburban Chicago</li>\n 	<li>No travel this week, but making up for it next week with travel to Memphis, Phoenix, and LA</li>\n 	<li>Go through the listener demographics from the Podtrac listener survey</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>State Trooper</em> by Bruce Springsteen</li>\n 	<li><strong><a href=\"http://mfile.akamai.com/11649/wmv/pepsicoinc.download.akamai.com//11649/mm/sierra_mist/tv_ads/video/wand_100k.wmv\">Direct Link</a></strong> to the Sierra Mist Super Bowl commercial poking fun at TSA screeners</li>\n 	<li>A listener tells about getting yelled at by a BWI TSA screener for attempting to take a pencil sharpener on a flight</li>\n 	<li><strong><a href=\"http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4438273.stm\">Direct Link</a></strong> to a BBC web site article quoting a former TSA official about problems being caused by overzealous officers</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>A bad Gillette Super Bowl commercial for a 5-blade razor reminds me of the old Saturday Night Live sketch about how silly a 3-blade razor would be</li>\n 	<li>A listener talks about how shopping for toiletries forces him to explore new cities</li>\n 	<li>My advice is to keep it simple -- take only what you really need and leave the battery-powered stuff at home</li>\n 	<li>No room for Metrosexuals in the Road Warrior ranks</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>The Shadowlands</em> by Ryan Adams</li>\n 	<li>A listener thinks that hotel broadband charges are the latest in a growing trend of nickel-&amp;-dime charges</li>\n 	<li>Many travelers are setting up free Wi-Fi \"bubbles\" with their travel wireless routers</li>\n 	<li>Use the free program <a href=\"http://www.netstumbler.com\">NetStumbler</a> to find free \"bubbles\" before paying the hotel fees</li>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Ramblin\' Man</em> by the Allman Brothers Band</li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_31.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #31 - TSA Rage, Woes of WiFi','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-31-tsa-rage-woes-of-wifi','','','2021-09-23 14:17:25','2021-09-23 19:17:25','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2006/02/05/podcast-31-tsa-rage-woes-of-wifi/',0,'post','',6),
(34,1,'2006-02-10 16:46:42','2006-02-10 21:46:42','Recorded in the Marriott Courtyard in Irvine, CA, this week\'s visits to old haunts in Memphis and Huntington Beach prompts thoughts on how traveling back home is different. Also, we talk about experiences in searching for free WiFi hotspots, and a bit of puzzlement about the TSA\'s \'Registered Traveler\' program. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_32.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #32:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in the Marriott Courtyard Hotel in Irvine, CA</li>\n 	<li>Finally received a bit of notice from American Airlines after hitting the 2 million mile mark in January</li>\n 	<li>A listener writes in about his public transit experiences in Boston, London, and Geneva</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Fly, Fly, Fly</em> by Adrina Thorpe</li>\n 	<li>\"Medley\" of past TravelCommons bathroom intros</li>\n 	<li>Driving through Memphis checking out old houses and neighborhoods</li>\n 	<li>Walking down Main Street and the pier in Huntington Beach, CA</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Beggarstown</em> by Hollow Horse</li>\n 	<li>Two resources for free WiFi hot spots -- <a href=\"http://wififreespot.com\">wififreespot.com</a> and <a href=\"http://metrofreefi.com\">metrofreefi.com</a></li>\n 	<li>Use the free program <a href=\"http://www.netstumbler.com\">NetStumbler</a> to search for hot spots</li>\n 	<li>Mid-tier hotels are racing each other to light up their lobbies with free WiFi</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Homemade Hurricane</em> by amplifico</li>\n 	<li>TSA\'a much delayed \"Registered Traveler\" program is in the spotlight again</li>\n 	<li>Benefits you get for $80 fee and a background check is unclear</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com\">Podshow Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_32.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #32 - Traveling Home, Trolling for Free WiFi','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-32-traveling-home-trolling-for-free-wifi','','','2021-09-23 14:20:42','2021-09-23 19:20:42','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2006/02/10/podcast-32-traveling-home-trolling-for-free-wifi/',0,'post','',2),
(35,1,'2006-02-18 14:03:53','2006-02-18 19:03:53','Two trips but no hotels means this episode is recorded in the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago. Rummaging through the virtual mailbag, I comment on listener e-mails and web site postings. I also talk about finding some free WiFi in Houston\'s Bush International Airport and give a guided tour of my briefcase. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_33.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #33:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in the TravelCommons studios outside Chicago</li>\n 	<li>Had a couple of down-&amp;-back day trips to Houston and Boston</li>\n 	<li>Bad times in \"slum\" terminals</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Love Survives</em> by Lovespirals</li>\n 	<li>A listener is interested in podcasts about travel, not tourism -- doesn\'t have time for touring</li>\n 	<li>Another listener talks about begin subject to \"TSA Rage\" in Saipan</li>\n 	<li>Chris Christensen of the <a href=\"http://amateurtraveler.com/\">Amateur Traveler Podcast</a> talks about his train-to-plane experiences</li>\n 	<li>Peter Rukavina\'s <a href=\"http://www.ruk.ca\">ruk.ca</a> blog corrects my Canadian Maritimes geography</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Turn Around and Say Goodbye </em> by C.J. Chenier</li>\n 	<li>Hanging outside or underneath Continential Airlines\' Presidents\' Club is a good spot to leech WiFi</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Shine </em> by Hungry Lucy</li>\n 	<li>An audio tour of my briefcase</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/21561359@N00/102434287/\"><strong>Direct Link</strong></a> to annotated Flickr picture of what\'s in my briefcase</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com\">Podshow Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_33.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #33 - Listener Mailbag, What’s in My Briefcase?','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-33-listener-mailbag-whats-in-my-briefcase','','','2021-09-23 14:22:17','2021-09-23 19:22:17','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2006/02/18/podcast-33-listener-mailbag-whats-in-my-briefcase/',0,'post','',1),
(36,1,'2006-03-04 14:30:55','2006-03-04 19:30:55','Back in front of the microphone after a week off, it\'s been a light travel week. A quick down-&amp;-back to Tampa offers the opportunity to take a 20-minute vacation on the Gulf of Mexico. A flight attendant on my flight back from Houston last week gives a smooth performance in passenger care, and a couple of listeners contribute to the latest installment of Travel Tech. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_34.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr>\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #34:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Back in the TravelCommons studios outside Chicago after a week off</li>\n 	<li>Had a down-&amp;-back day trip to Tampa</li>\n 	<li>Spending the rest of the week booking \"frequent driver\" points in the Chicago exurbs</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>10p Mix</em> by amplifico</li>\n 	<li>My last trip to Tampa and I decided I needed to see the ocean -- at least once</li>\n 	<li>Drove west from Oldsmar \'til I hit Dunedin</li>\n</ul>\n<img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/images/pix/Oldsmar_map.jpg\" alt=\"Google Map of the Oldsmar area\">\n<ul>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/travelcommons/107616114/\"><strong>Direct Link</strong></a> to a Flickr picture from the beach</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Emily C</em> by Fiasco</li>\n 	<li>A flight attendant does a smooth job of handling a disgruntled passenger</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Keep Your Motor Running</em> by Dave Hole</li>\n 	<li>Ed Vawter sent in audio comments about useful features on the United Airlines website and SeatGuru.com</li>\n 	<li>Leo Vegoda finds his new Bose headphones very useful on his flight from London to Perth</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com\">Podshow Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_34.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #34 - 20-Minute Vacation, Making It Look Easy','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-34-20-minute-vacation-making-it-look-easy','','','2021-09-23 14:26:21','2021-09-23 19:26:21','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2006/03/04/podcast-34-20-minute-vacation-making-it-look-easy/',0,'post','',1),
(37,1,'2006-03-22 12:37:15','2006-03-22 17:37:15','Back after a longer-than-planned absence, this episode is recorded at the Laguna Cliffs Marriott in <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dana_Point%2C_California\">Dana Point, CA</a>. We talk about the <a href=\"http://www.tsa.gov\">TSA</a>\'s return to a hard line on shoes, the thing I miss most when I\'m off the road, and the latest way for airlines to raise cash from their frequent flyer programs. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_35.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #35:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded at the Laguna Cliffs Marriott, overlooking the Pacific Ocean in Southern California</li>\n 	<li><strong><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/travelcommons/118543711/\">Direct Link</a></strong> to a Flickr picture looking out my hotel room window to the ocean</li>\n 	<li>Apologize for the longer-than-intended absence -- caused by moving houses and then a crushing load of work</li>\n 	<li>A stay in the <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_International_Airport\">SFO</a> Marriott gave me a sample of Marriott\'s new \"Revive\" bed -- nice but no threat to Westin\'s \"Heavenly Bed\"</li>\n 	<li>Leo Vegoda talks about great flights on Quantas and a bad time in <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurt_Airport\">Frankfurt airport</a></li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Waking Hour</em> by <a href=\"http://www.lorenamire.com/\">Lorena Mire</a></li>\n 	<li>The TSA seems to be going back to the bad old days of shoe fetish</li>\n 	<li>In some airports, though, the abbreviated secondary search is quicker than putting your shoes back on</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>One Day</em> by <a href=\"http://www.hollowhorse.co.uk/\">Hollow Horse</a></li>\n 	<li>Talked with two guys within two hours who both told me they were changing jobs to reduce their travel</li>\n 	<li>I couldn\'t <em>not</em> travel -- I would miss the different things I see</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Clear My Head</em> by <a href=\"http://www.thefiasco.net/\">FIASCO</a></li>\n 	<li>Chris Chufo sent in note about United\'s offer to sell Mileage Plus status through pre-paid airfare</li>\n 	<li>There have always been ways to accelerate your path to status, but travel companies seem to now be publicizing them</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com\">Podshow Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_35.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #35 - What I Miss About Travel, Milking the Status Seekers','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-35-what-i-miss-about-travel-milking-the-status-seekers','','','2021-09-23 14:28:26','2021-09-23 19:28:26','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2006/03/22/podcast-35-what-i-miss-about-travel-milking-the-status-seekers/',0,'post','',5),
(38,1,'2006-04-05 14:10:32','2006-04-05 19:10:32','Recorded in the Orlando Downtown Marriott, I talk about a real rarity -- a plane full of happy people. Also, the results of a recent study confirm that hotels are increasing their use of add-on fees and surcharges, and listener feedback about the timeliness of long-haul vs. commuter flights. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_36.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #36:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded at the Orlando Downtown Marriott</li>\n 	<li>Took a pass at staying in a Disney resort -- great for family vacations but not for business</li>\n 	<li>A listener tells a story about a good experience traveling from <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/new-zealand\">New Zealand</a> to the UK</li>\n 	<li>Another listener talks about clearing security in -40°C weather</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Carolina</em> by <a href=\"http:/http://www.jeremyhopkins.com//\">Jeremy Hopkins</a></li>\n 	<li>Had a happy flight down to Mouse Land with a plane full of international travelers</li>\n 	<li>A Japanese woman throws the flight attendant a curve by ordering an iced coffee</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Black Cup of Coffee</em> by <a href=\"http://myspace.com/askmewhen/\">Ask Me When</a></li>\n 	<li>Parking fees at hotels are starting to get under my skin</li>\n 	<li><strong><a href=\"http://www.hotelexecutive.com/newswire/pub/_12690.asp\">Direct Link</a></strong> -- PwC forecasts that hotel fees and surcharges will keep increasing in 2006</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by <a href=\"http://www.evangeline.org.uk\">Evangeline</a></li>\n 	<li>Leo Vegoda sent in an audio comment about his recent experience on a commuter flight from <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/the-netherlands/amsterdam\">Amsterdam</a> to London</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com\">Podshow Music Network</a></li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_36.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #36 - Happiest Flight, Long and Short of It','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-36-happiest-flight-long-and-short-of-it','','','2021-09-23 14:30:07','2021-09-23 19:30:07','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2006/04/05/podcast-36-happiest-flight-long-and-short-of-it/',0,'post','',6),
(39,1,'2006-04-20 14:00:34','2006-04-20 14:00:34','Recorded in the <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Mateo%2C_California\">San Mateo, CA</a> Marriott, we work through a bunch of listener feedback and follow-up items, talk about what seems to be a general increase in the crankiness of frequent travelers -- for good cause or the whining of spoiled brats? -- and stumbling across what seemed to be the spontaneous break-out of a \"Fame\" episode in O\'Hare. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_37.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #37:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded at the San Mateo, CA Marriott</li>\n 	<li>Lots of flying over the past two weeks -- triangulating across SF and Atlanta last week; just SF this week</li>\n 	<li>Ate dinner at <a href=\"http://www.mistraldining.com/lev1_restaurant.html\">Mistral Restaurant</a> in <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redwood_City%2C_California\">Redwood City, CA</a> -- the heart of Oracle land</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/download_track.php?id=CE7F00E4A147D957EAF4B39D80B3D884BF6DC2714AC89817905F6D823C3C58AA2D2BC4C1337AE3571166DB55DC19CD47\" rel=\"nofollow\">A Rose Among Ruins (Guli Dar Wairaanahaa)</a></em> by <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=47006A4B4EB5D7804F4A3D1F2E26A25623ED5CBC6275EDCD211CEE7D57B96215\" rel=\"nofollow\">The Afghan Music Project</a></li>\n 	<li>Chris Christensen of the <a href=\"http://amateurtraveler.com/\">Amateur Traveler Podcast</a> comments on the Canadian traveler story in episode #36 -- -40° is the same in the in both the Fahrenheit and <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celsius\">Celsius</a> scales</li>\n 	<li>Dan O\'Leary of the <a href=\"http://hotelcoffee.blogspot.com/\">HotelCoffee</a> podcast gives his thoughts on <a href=\"http://www.united.com\">United Airlines</a>\' Ted strategy</li>\n 	<li>Allan Marko relates his recent experience with a business conference at <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/florida/orlando/sights/entertainment/walt-disney-world\">DisneyWorld</a>\'s Swan and Dolphin hotel</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/download_track.php?id=8C49C1D87D4423CD6B5680C66970A634CCD72C687652ECF3EB567A09D45DD6EE2D2BC4C1337AE3571166DB55DC19CD47\" rel=\"nofollow\">The Point of Purchase</a></em> by <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=17CD797AF2C9A2E56269DAD9433E440623ED5CBC6275EDCD211CEE7D57B96215\" rel=\"nofollow\">Harry Manx</a></li>\n 	<li>Frequent travelers seem to be breaking out of the \"cone of silence\" to sound off on poor service</li>\n 	<li>Lots of niggling problems during my stay at the San Mateo Marriott probably means I won\'t stay here again</li>\n 	<li>United Airlines has <a href=\"http://ir.united.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=83680&amp;p=irol-newsArticle&amp;ID=844066&amp;highlight=\">named</a> a new VP of Customer Experience to improve how it interacts with travelers</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/download_track.php?id=CE7726A0F99EB44095D5130567DEDDB7F90A9BD8352B78EB3E13EB82943ACAEA2D2BC4C1337AE3571166DB55DC19CD47\" rel=\"nofollow\"><em>Daddy Was A Preacher But Mama Was A Go-Go Girl</em></a> by Southern Culture On The Skids</li>\n 	<li>Curt Taylor of the <a href=\"http://www.emptyseat.net/emptyseatblog/\">Empty Seat blog</a> pointed to the Office Whisper <a href=\"http://www.officewhisper.com/blogs/businessdevolution/archive/2006/02/14/16.aspx\">article</a> about \"Slight-Status Travelers\"</li>\n 	<li>A San Jose high school dance band launches into a spontaneous dance routine while waiting to board their flight home</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/travelcommons/134857554/\"><strong>Direct Link</strong></a> to a Flickr picture of the performance</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/images/pix/airport_dance.3gp\"><strong>Direct Link</strong></a> to a mobile phone video of the performance (in 3gp format; should be viewable with QuickTime)</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://promonet.iodalliance.com/\">IODA PROMONET</a></li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_37.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #37 - The Cranky Traveler, Spontaneous Entertainment','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-37-the-cranky-traveler-spontaneous-entertainment','','','2021-09-23 14:31:51','2021-09-23 19:31:51','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2006/04/20/podcast-37-the-cranky-traveler-spontaneous-entertainment/',0,'post','',2),
(40,1,'2006-05-04 16:00:21','2006-05-04 16:00:21','Recorded in the <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huntington_Beach%2C_California\">Huntington Beach, CA</a> Hilton Resort, I\'m once again triangulating across northern and southern California. My decision to buy a new Saab convertible now has me planning an impromptu vacation to <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/sweden\">Sweden</a>, a place that has never been on the top of my vacation spots list. Also, some travel stories about people who trust their GPS SatNavs a bit too much. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_38.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #38:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded at the Huntington Beach, CA Hilton Resort</li>\n 	<li>Triangulating between SF and LA for the second week</li>\n 	<li>The 3-hour delay on my United LAX-ORD flight last week has me flying American this week</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Get Together</em> by <a href=\"http://tamaranile.com/\">T. Nile</a></li>\n 	<li>David Chapman writes in to correct earlier comments regarding <a href=\"http://www.airnewzealand.co.nz\">Air New Zealand</a>\'s London-Auckland run via LAX. The Air New Zealand press release can be found <a href=\"http://airnz.co.uk/aboutus/mediacentre/pressreleases/air_nz_announces_second_london_service_via_asia.htm\">here</a></li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Bored Out of My Mind</em> by <a href=\"http://hansyork.com/\">Hans York</a></li>\n 	<li>Have decided to buy a <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saab_9-3\">Saab 9-3</a> Aero Convertible</li>\n 	<li>Taking advantage of Saab\'s <a href=\"http://www.saabusa.com/saabjsp/europeandelivery/\"> European Delivery Option</a> means an unplanned vacation to Sweden</li>\n 	<li>American Airlines did a great job of stitching together a last-minute itinerary with AAdvantage miles</li>\n 	<li>Any suggestions on places to which I should drive in my new Saab while in Sweden? Please send me suggestions at comments[at]travelcommons.com</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Sacred Place</em> by Gene Loveland</li>\n 	<li>Some people seem to trust their GPS SatNav devices more than their own eyes</li>\n 	<li>An out-of-sync Hertz NeverLost device caused some delays in Berkeley</li>\n 	<li>Udayan Tripathi\'s latest <a href=\"http://www.udayantripathi.com/2006/04/life-in-london-42-25-april-2006.html\">Life In London </a> podcast talks about UK drivers heading into rivers at the direction of their SatNavs</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from the <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/\">Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\n 	<li>Please pass along any suggestions for our 1-year anniversary show</li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_38.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #38 - The Accidental Vacation, Trusting Travel Technology','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-38-the-accidental-vacation-trusting-travel-technology','','','2021-09-23 14:33:41','2021-09-23 19:33:41','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2006/05/04/podcast-38-the-accidental-vacation-trusting-travel-technology/',0,'post','',2),
(41,1,'2006-05-18 23:14:00','2006-05-19 04:14:00','Once again coming to you from the West Coast, this time the Newport Beach, CA Marriott. After a week off the road, I\'m bouncing again between San Francisco and Orange County. Listener feedback from a hotel chain accountant on the hotel add-on charges and from an ex-Northwest Airlines loyalist. We have a travel story about the unique view from the front of the airplane and a suggestion about how to load your iPod with new music. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_39.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #39:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded at the Newport Beach, CA Marriott</li>\n 	<li>Triangulating again (still?) between SF and LA</li>\n 	<li>High airline occupancy leads to some digging to find the right flight to the Bay Area</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/download_track.php?id=A1F44F3B330BFBBD5C7863108B61B09977CADC67705C23C5AECA03FC6F2C0320A93C8CF03BBFAC71CD59B5710E25327F\" rel=\"nofollow\">La Tra (basephunk mix)</a></em> by <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/label.php?id=3AF558B2D658A22FFF10B13F9D87237D276517530C9606BA2CB20418C6A8B4CB\" rel=\"nofollow\">Omar Sosa</a></li>\n 	<li>Doug give the hotel\'s view of increasing number of add-on charges discussed in T/C #36</li>\n 	<li>A long loyal Northwest Airlines customer begins the defection to Sun Country</li>\n 	<li>Thanks to <a href=\"http://rmfoto.blogspot.com/\">Ray Medina</a> for setting up the TravelCommons Frappr group</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/download_track.php?id=6E494292C6B4E14E784F04400EB2C54CE135E29730530171C5F931345CAA3733A93C8CF03BBFAC71CD59B5710E25327F\" rel=\"nofollow\">All Around</a></em> by <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=AEF14840F87CD6C39BE8918AF693E89C276517530C9606BA2CB20418C6A8B4CB\" rel=\"nofollow\">Jel</a></li>\n 	<li>Looking out the window while landing in Ireland is always a visual treat -- the bright green against the grey grabs your eyes</li>\n 	<li>Mis-tagged passenger luggage leads to a long delay on a BA flight from Shannon to London-Heathrow</li>\n 	<li>I end up in the cockpit telling the luggage\'s sad tale while we descend into Heathrow</li>\n 	<li>The view from the front of the plane is such a completely different visual experience, I have a hard time getting through the story</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/download_track.php?id=39762D033AA7D415DE1BB614BC25CC248FFC9C2C87F5F8F94BFEABA4A2563317A93C8CF03BBFAC71CD59B5710E25327F\" rel=\"nofollow\">Various Stages</a></em> by <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=8913BD6C7DFA8B495260ABCCE092D7DCDA0387BCF4D6B4C03D24C64234934084\" rel=\"nofollow\">Great Lake Swimmers</a></li>\n 	<li>Traveling involves a lot of time staring and waiting</li>\n 	<li>I often use the time to sift through the massive music downloads from the South By Southwest (SXSW) Festival in Austin, TX</li>\n 	<li><strong><a href=\"http://2006.sxsw.com/toolbox/schedules/ipod/\">Direct Link</a></strong> to the 2006 SXSW page with links to the BitTorrent files with the music and a short primer on using BitTorrent</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from the <a href=\"http://promonet.iodalliance.com/\">IODA Promonet</a></li>\n 	<li>Please pass along any suggestions for our 1-year anniversary show</li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_39.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #39 - Looking Out The Front Window, Scoring New Music','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-39-looking-out-the-front-window-scoring-new-music','','','2021-09-23 14:35:35','2021-09-23 19:35:35','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2006/05/18/podcast-39-looking-out-the-front-window-scoring-new-music/',0,'post','',7),
(42,1,'2006-06-13 00:07:43','2006-06-13 05:07:43','Recorded in the Courtyard <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/boston/sights/square/copley-square\">Copley Square</a> in Boston, this special edition pulls the best of the first year of TravelCommons.  Starting with the \"bathroom medley\" -- the roll call of all the hotel bathrooms that have served as TravelCommons\' recording studios, we move on to excerpts from stories on topics such as the TSA, unusual activities in airport departure lounges, scary hotel rooms, and ranting cab drivers.  Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_40.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<!--more-->\n\n<hr>\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #40:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded at the Copley Place Courtyard in <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/boston\">Boston, MA</a></li>\n 	<li>Spent a few flights listening through the past 13 hours of TravelCommons episodes to select the \"greatest hits\" from the first year</li>\n 	<li>from T/C #1 - Why listen to this podcast?</li>\n 	<li>from T/C #33 - Listener feedback says that TravelCommons covers both the fun and the dreary bits of travel</li>\n 	<li>Medley of TravelCommons hotel bathroom studios</li>\n 	<li>from T/C #15 - Bad night at the Oakland Coliseum Days Inn</li>\n 	<li>from T/C #13 - Listener story about nighttime noises in a Korean hotel room</li>\n 	<li>from T/C #8 - Nervous night at the Golden Eagle Motel in <a href=\"http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=41.8302777778,-86.2508333333&amp;spn=0.1,0.1&amp;q=41.8302777778,-86.2508333333 (Niles%2C%20Michigan)&amp;t=h\">Niles, Michigan</a></li>\n 	<li>Medley of TSA rants</li>\n 	<li>from T/C #37 - Episode of <em>Fame</em> breaks out in O\'Hare</li>\n 	<li>from T/C #20 - Allan Marko tells a story about rapid airplane repair</li>\n 	<li>from T/C #18 - Pants problems</li>\n 	<li>from T/C #16 - A chatty seat mate</li>\n 	<li>from T/C #15 - <em>Skymall</em> magazine as a last resort</li>\n 	<li>from T/C #7 - Air sickness without the bag</li>\n 	<li>from T/C #34 - Behind shuffling snowbirds in Tampa</li>\n 	<li>from T/C #14 - Raging parking generalissimo at LAX</li>\n 	<li>from T/C #16 - Tactics for dealing with raging cab drivers</li>\n 	<li>from T/C #24 - Fun with rental cars</li>\n 	<li>from T/C #19 - Midnight car talk at the <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taco_Bell\">Taco Bell</a> drive-thru</li>\n 	<li>from T/C #9 - Downshifting to leisure travel</li>\n 	<li>from T/C #17 - My kids\' view of travel</li>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_40.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #40 - Looking Back Over The First Year','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-40-looking-back-over-the-first-year','','','2021-09-23 14:36:11','2021-09-23 19:36:11','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2006/06/13/podcast-40-looking-back-over-the-first-year/',0,'post','',3),
(43,1,'2006-06-30 00:19:05','2006-06-30 05:19:05','Enjoying a couple of weeks at home, in this episode we talk about the load level records being set by US airlines and its effects on travel courtesy.  Also, the challenge of finding the one thing you \"gotta do\" when you visit a new place.  Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_41.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<!--more-->\n\n<hr>\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #41:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in the suburban Chicago studios</li>\n 	<li>Been in town for 2 weeks now, triangulating between home, rural Illinois, and my downtown Chicago office</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Wanna luv you</em> by <a href=\"http://www.henta.co.uk/\">Henta Ellis</a></li>\n 	<li>Listener feedback on T/C #40, the first-year anniversary episode</li>\n 	<li>Some surprising <a href=\"http://multichannelmerchant.com/mag/sale_skymall_soar_01012006/\">facts</a> about the SkyMall catalog</li>\n 	<li>Geoff Slater talks about his good experience with American Airlines\' AAdvantage agents</li>\n 	<li>Ed Vawter of the <a href=\"http://http://www.qdinformation.com/searching/\">Searching The Internet</a> podcast gives an audio review of Yahoo\'s Farechase travel meta-search site</li>\n 	<li>T/C #2 discussed the love-hate relationship the travel industry has with these meta-search sites.  T/C #2 can be found in the archives under May 2005.  The meta-search topic is 10:50 minutes into the show</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Snub-Nosed Aardvark</em>  by <a href=\"http://podcast.penmachine.com/\">Derek K. Miller</a></li>\n 	<li>The planes are full and are expected to be getting <a href=\"http://www.airlines.org/news/d.aspx?nid=10026\">fuller</a></li>\n 	<li>Everybody who to Sociology 101 in college knows that crowding increases stress</li>\n 	<li>Travel courtesies seem to be breaking down regarding overhead bin space</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Baja Taxi</em> by <a href=\"http://www.brain-buckit.com/\">Brain Buckit</a></li>\n 	<li>When visiting some place new, always want to know \"What\'s the one thing I should do or see?\"</li>\n 	<li>United Airlines\' <em>Hemispheres</em> magazine has a good feature -- <em><a href=\"http://www.hemispheresmagazine.com/3pd/three/default.htm\">Three Days in...</a></em> -- for finding those \"gotta do\'s\"</li>\n 	<li>Listened to two Swedish podcasts to prepare for my vacation to Sweden -- the <a href=\"http://www.polarbearpodcast.com/\">Polarbear Podcast</a> and Radio Sweden\'s <a href=\"http://radiosweden.blogspot.com/\">news podcast</a>, but didn\'t find any \"gotta do\'s\"</li>\n 	<li>Used my old standby <a href=\"http://chowhound.com\">Chowhound.com</a> to find some \"don\'t miss\" restaurants in Stockholm</li>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"http://ad.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/show?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;bids=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\" alt=\"icon\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\"><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from the <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/\">Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_41.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #41 - Full to the Brim, What’s the One Thing…?','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-41-full-to-the-brim-whats-the-one-thing','','','2021-07-26 07:45:28','2021-07-26 12:45:28','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2006/06/30/podcast-41-full-to-the-brim-whats-the-one-thing/',0,'post','',4),
(44,1,'2006-07-27 20:19:20','2006-07-28 01:19:20','Back in the San Francisco Marriott after my Swedish vacation, we play an ode to SkyMall magazine, talk about the amazing number of lines in Heathrow airport that were between us and the start of our vacation, and how with all these new boarding schemes, airlines are paying attention to the wrong things. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_42.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #42:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in the SFO Marriott</li>\n 	<li>Back from the car-pick up vacation in Sweden and back on the road between Chicago and San Francisco</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>SkyMall</em> by <a href=\"http://www.jonathancoulton.com/2006/07/07/thing-a-week-40-skymall/\">Jonathan Coulton</a></li>\n 	<li>Listener talks about using the usually dreaded \"SSSS\" on his boarding pass as a ticket to the security express lane</li>\n 	<li>Ed Vawter of the <a href=\"http://http://www.qdinformation.com/searching/\">Searching The Internet</a> podcast talks about how moving overhead luggage pushes passengers to the edge</li>\n 	<li>Allan Marko points out Hilton Hotel\'s announcement about new clock radios that allow MP3 players to be plugged directly into them</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Car Crash</em> by <a href=\"http://www.smalltownsleeper.com/\">Small Town Sleeper</a></li>\n 	<li>My wife\'s observation -- \"This was a perfect vacation -- except for the flights at the beginning and the end\"</li>\n 	<li>An amazing number of lines at Heathrow airport stood between us and the start of our vacation in Sweden</li>\n 	<li>Only the last delay didn\'t bother me because it let me order another pint</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Hide and Seek</em> by <a href=\"http://www.lorenamire.com/\"> Lorena Mire</a></li>\n 	<li>8 out of 8 US airlines have reported <a href=\"http://blogs.usatoday.com/sky/2006/07/big_airlines_no.html\">profitable second quarters</a></li>\n 	<li>But much of the recent mail to TravelCommons has been about changes to airline boarding procedures</li>\n 	<li>America West airlines started it off by using some mathematical models from Arizona State University to <a href=\"http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,70689-0.html\">design</a> their new approach</li>\n 	<li>But Northwest Airlines has gone the other way, allow everyone to <a href=\"http://www.usatoday.com/travel/flights/2006-06-19-northwest-boarding_x.htm\">board at once</a></li>\n 	<li>They both claim the same results -- saving 3-5 minutes in boarding time. With so little benefit, perhaps they should be spending their time improving the flying experience instead, say by adding another flight attendant to busy flights or another ticket agent to cut down check-in lines.</li>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids99176.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from the <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/\">Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_42.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #42 - Waiting For A Good Time, Paying Attention to Boarding','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-42-waiting-for-a-good-time-paying-attention-to-boarding','','','2021-09-23 14:37:19','2021-09-23 19:37:19','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2006/07/27/podcast-42-waiting-for-a-good-time-paying-attention-to-boarding/',0,'post','',6),
(45,1,'2006-08-10 15:35:13','2006-08-10 20:35:13','I woke up this morning in the SFO Marriott to the news of the foiled plot to blow up London-to-US flights.  I looked out my window and was relieved to see planes lined up and taking off over the bay.  Turning back to the TV, I watched the live reports from SFO, OAK, and LAX.  You could see the security lines growing with every cutaway and the frustration growing with every traveler interview.  The breakfast crowd in the concierge lounge stared at the plasma screens while eating their eggs and oatmeal -- CNN on one wall, MSNBC on the other.  There was an air of \"here we go again\" resigned acceptance, with people trying to figure out how to best deal with the new rules.  The folks flying out this morning started eating faster when they saw the lines at SFO.\n\nI\'m lucky -- I\'m not flying out \'til tomorrow morning.  I\'m hoping that the TSA calms down a bit and gets the new <a href=\"http://www.dhs.gov/dhspublic/interapp/press_release/press_release_0976.xml\">rules</a> figured out.  I squeezed out a bit of Mitchum anti-perspirant gel into a water glass and then brought the mostly-full container into my client\'s office where I can re-claim it next week.  I just can\'t bring myself to tossing $6 worth of stuff.  My toothpaste tube is almost empty, so I don\'t have as much angst throwing it away.\n\nI\'m hoping the security pendulum settles a little bit back to reasonability by the end of the day.  Those of us flying out tomorrow are staying in touch with people flying today, trying to get a bit of forward intel on how the screeners are reacting.\n\nI was going to record a podcast this evening, but have decided to delay it \'til the weekend so that I can report on my SFO experience tomorrow morning.','Thrown for Another Loop','','publish','closed','closed','','thrown-for-another-loop','','','2006-08-10 15:35:13','2006-08-10 20:35:13','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2006/08/10/thrown-for-another-loop/',0,'post','',2),
(46,1,'2006-08-11 09:08:30','2006-08-11 14:08:30','After dumping my toothpaste and stashing my gel deodorant, I was turned back from the American Airlines\' SFO security line by a contractor saying that no rolling bags were allowed as carry-on.  A half-dozen of us were incredulous.  We had prepared for the \"no-liquids\" rule, but no one had heard of a \"no-wheeled bags\" rule.  We trudged back to the counter and waited 20 minutes to check our bags.\n\nI asked the American gate agent about this rule.  She hadn\'t heard of it, but said \"The TSA is changing the rules minute by minute.\"  Walking back to the security line, I asked a TSA guy about this rule.  \"Not our rule,\" he said,\" we\'re fine with rolling bags as long as they don\'t have any liquids.\"  I asked the contractor who turned me back whose rule it was.  \"American Airlines,\" she said.  I called American while in the security line.  \"Rolling bags are allowed as long as they fit the dimension limits,\" the agent said.  No one would claim responsibility for this.\n\nI don\'t think travelers have a problem following the rules -- we just need to know what they are.  I\'ll give American Airlines another chance on Monday when I fly down to Houston.  If they continue to make random, arbitrary rule changes, I switch to another airlines.  Travel is getting bad enough without airlines piling on their own unique hassles.','Making The Rules Up As They Go Along','','publish','closed','closed','','making-the-rules-up-as-they-go-along','','','2006-08-11 09:08:30','2006-08-11 14:08:30','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2006/08/11/making-the-rules-up-as-they-go-along/',0,'post','',2),
(47,1,'2006-08-14 20:40:16','2006-08-15 01:40:16','Recorded in the TravelCommons studios, I look back on my trip through SFO as I try to navigate the new TSA rules on the first full day of the new regime and gird myself for 4 trips through the gauntlet this week. A listener tops my Heathrow lines (queues?) story, and we compare and contrast European and US travel experiences. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_43.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #43:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in the TravelCommons studio outside of Chicago</li>\n 	<li>Delayed recording this podcast so I could give you my personal experiences with the new TSA travel rules</li>\n 	<li>Thursday morning\'s news is a mix of elation -- <em>glad they busted the plot</em> -- and dread -- <em>the flight home from SFO is going to be brutal</em></li>\n 	<li>Some mundane concerns -- try to figure out how to salvage my nearly-new container of anti-perspirant gel</li>\n 	<li>All for naught when a contractor decides that all wheeled bags need to be checked</li>\n 	<li>The growing tediousness of travel wears on the frequent traveler -- no recovery time</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Persephone</em> by <a href=\"http://www.myspace.com/etherealvox\">Ethereal</a></li>\n 	<li>Instead of recording my own podcast Thursday night, I was a guest on Chris Christensen\'s <em>Amateur Traveler</em> podcast talking about Chicago. Here\'s a <a href=\"http://amateurtraveler.com/?p=841\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the episode\'s show notes.</li>\n 	<li>Peter Rukavina sends in his own story of epic lines at Heathrow</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Ghost</em> by <a href=\"www.hollowhorse.co.uk\">Hollow Horse</a></li>\n 	<li>Some contrasting impressions of travel in Europe and the US</li>\n 	<li>Security screening is much less of a hassle in Europe</li>\n 	<li>Although there are a number of exceptions, I think that, on the whole, US airports are nicer than European airports</li>\n 	<li>US airlines\' \"no meals\" cost cutting has turned their planes into picnic grounds</li>\n 	<li>Europeans dress nicer on planes, but Americans seem to dress nicer on trains</li>\n 	<li>Just can\'t figure out why Europeans would travel thousands of miles in a bus</li>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids991766.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from the <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/\">Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\n 	<li>Flying down to Houston and hoping to get through security with my toiletry kit intact -- replaced all my gels and pastes with powders</li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_43.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #43 - Here We Go Again, Old World vs. New','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-43-here-we-go-again-old-world-vs-new','','\nhttp://amateurtraveler.com/?p=841','2021-09-23 14:38:46','2021-09-23 19:38:46','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2006/08/14/podcast-43-here-we-go-again-old-world-vs-new/',0,'post','',1),
(48,1,'2006-08-15 22:40:04','2006-08-16 03:40:04','At the end of last night\'s podcast, I mentioned that I had restocked my toiletry kit with the latest <a href=\"http://www.tsa.gov/travelers/airtravel/prohibited/new-items.shtm\">TSA banned substance list</a> in hand.  I hit the local Wild Oats natural food store and bought some <a href=\"http://www.eco-dent.com/dailycare-specialcare-toothpowders.htm\">Eco-Dent tooth powder</a>, Tom\'s of Maine natural long-lasting deodorant stick, and Jason Stuck Up! hair styling wax.  Even rode my bike rather than firing up the Blazer so I could get the full crunchy-granola experience.\n\nLater that evening, I headed over to O\'Hare for my flight down to Houston.  I arrived early, but didn\'t need to -- there were only a couple of folks in front of me in the premium security line.  A TSA screener pulled my bag off the conveyor and asked to look inside.  He spent a bit of time riffling through all my clothes and then finally asked me where my toiletry kit was.  \"In the front flap,\" I told him.  I\'d put it there for easy access, expecting just such a search.  However, this guy seemed to be one of the Ranger Rick/Barney Fife TSA guys, so asking me for help was the last thing he wanted to do.\n<!--more-->\n\"A-ha!\" he exclaimed, raising my new jar of Jason Stuck Up! hair styling wax to eye level.  \"Hair gels are not allowed,\" he said, unscrewing the cap.\n\n\"It\'s not a gel,\" I said, \"it\'s a wax.\"\n\n\"No gels are allowed, only solids,\" he continued.\n\n\"A wax isn\'t a gel, it\'s a solid -- a solid mass of hydrocarbon polymers.  A gel is a looser matrix of polymers in which a liquid like water is entrained,\" I explained.\n\nHe looked at me.  \"This is a solid,\" he said, rapping his knuckles on the metal table.\n\nIt was at this point that that the silliness of this exchange hit home.  Not to be elitist about this, but here I am, a chemical engineer with all sorts of materials science, thermodynamics and physics education, debating the definition of a solid with a guy that, from the look of it, maxed out his higher education somewhere around 10th grade.  This is not an argument I was going to win and the further I pushed it probably meant that losing was going to quickly get more painful.\n\nHe went for my bottle of toothpowder.  I could tell he so wanted it to be toothpaste.  He looked inside.  \"It\'s a solid,\" I said.  He just looked at me and put it back.  He walked over to the garbage can and slammed dunked my hair wax.  I so wanted to say \"Feel good?\", but I so wanted to make my flight even more.\n\nTags: <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/TSA\">TSA</a>,  <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/security\">Security</a>,  <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/airport\">Airport</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/o\'hare\">O\'Hare</a>,  <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/gels\">Gels</a>','Debating States of Matter With The TSA','','publish','closed','closed','','debating-states-of-matter-with-the-tsa','','','2006-08-15 22:40:04','2006-08-16 03:40:04','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2006/08/15/debating-states-of-matter-with-the-tsa/',0,'post','',12),
(49,1,'2006-08-17 21:28:40','2006-08-18 02:28:40','Last week, most of the news coverage about the TSA\'s new security restrictions was fairly positive -- travelers were inconvenienced, but taking it in stride and soldiering on.  However, with the TSA now suggesting that many of these restrictions could become permanent, the coverage is shifting.  USA Today, the unofficial newspaper of frequent travelers, put a red roller-board on the Tuesday front page next to the headline --<a href=\"http://www.usatoday.com/money/biztravel/2006-08-14-baggage-cover-usat_x.htm\"> \"Veteran travelers find it hard to carry on\"</a>.\n\nThe article quoted one fed-up frequent traveler -- \"I figured this couldn\'t possibly last and flying would eventually return to normal.  But now... I\'ve reached my tipping point.  I\'ve decided not to fly until the lastest Draconian carry-on prohibitions are significantly rolled back.\"\n\nAnother frequent traveler didn\'t go quite as far...yet.  \"I\'ll adjust temporarily by checking in my bag. But Sunday\'s 40-minute wait to get back my bag in Toronto was excessive, and needing to get to the airport an extra 30 minutes before to make sure I can get my bag checked in time will take its toll.  It\'s a touchy subject to folks like myself, and I can guarantee a drop-off in travel if more restrictions are enforced.\"\n\nAnd indeed the drop-off seems to have begun.  I\'m on my 3rd flight this week -- I flew down to Houston Monday night, back to Chicago Tuesday night, and out ot San Francisco this morning -- and there\'s a significant drop in seat occupany.  Two weeks ago, I was happy to score a middle seat in the exit row.  On my last two flights, I had the exit row to myself.\n\nIt also seems that people have factored in the additional hour caused by checking luggage into their \"fly-or-drive\" and \"train-or-drive\" calculus.  A colleague who lives in Dallas has started driving to projects in Houston and Austin, while East Coast colleagues are switching over to Amtrak\'s Acela service for travel along the Northeast Corridor.\n\nBack in Podcast #42, we talked about record seat occupany levels driving US airline profits in the first half of this year.  Full planes allowed the airlines to make ticket price increases stick -- the combination of which outweight the impact of rising fuel prices.  It will be interesting to see their September results...','The Frequent Travelers Begin To Speak','','publish','closed','closed','','the-frequent-travelers-begin-to-speak','','','2006-08-17 21:28:40','2006-08-18 02:28:40','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2006/08/17/the-frequent-travelers-begin-to-speak/',0,'post','',1),
(50,1,'2006-08-21 10:37:33','2006-08-21 15:37:33','At the beginning of the year, there was a lot of noise about rolling out a Registered Traveler program -- where, in exchange for a $100 fee and a more detailed background check, a (presumably frequent) traveler would gain the ability to pass more quickly through the TSA security screening.  However, the program died from lack of interest because the TSA never said what parts of the screening experience a Registered Traveler could avoid.  Indeed, the preliminary indications coming out of the TSA were that a Registered Traveler would be subject to the same screening as everyone else.  Then what do I get for my $100 and hassle of a background check?  No one could answer, and so the program withered away.\n\nNow, however, I wonder if a way out of the problems with the current carry-on restrictions is a Registered Traveler program.  This time, though, the value proposition would be relaxed carry-on restrictions.  In exchange for $100 and voluntarily giving up my privacy, I get to carry on 3-4 travel-sized toiletries -- small tubes of toothpaste, hair gel, skin creme -- and a cup of coffee.  With the growing frustration of frequent travelers, I think this idea has legs.\n\nTags: <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/TSA\">TSA</a>,  <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/security\">Security</a>,  <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/airport\">Airport</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/registered+traveler\">Registered Traveler</a>,  <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/carry-on+luggage\">Carry-On Luggage</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/toiletries\">Toiletries</a>','Finally, A Justification for Registered Traveler?','','publish','closed','closed','','finally-a-justification-for-registered-traveler','','','2006-08-21 10:37:33','2006-08-21 15:37:33','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2006/08/21/finally-a-justification-for-registered-traveler/',0,'post','',5),
(51,1,'2006-08-28 22:56:23','2006-08-29 03:56:23','Recorded in the Courtyard in Northwest Houston, we look at the decisions forced on travelers by the TSA\'s restrictions around carry-on liquids and gels. Is it a trade-off between safety and vanity? Are frequent travelers really that shallow? Also, I talk about how \"luggage economics\" made me trim my technology load when packing for my recent vacation in Sweden. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_44.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #44:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in the Courtyard in Northwest Houston</li>\n 	<li>Back in Houston again this week. Started last week in Houston and then went out to San Francisco where I was joined by my wife</li>\n 	<li>Stayed at three Renaissance Hotels while in the Bay Area; my wife rated the sheets at the Renaissance Stanford Court on Nob Hill the best</li>\n 	<li>TSA carry-on regulations are impacting the carry-out trade at Napa and Sonoma wineries -- <strong><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/travelcommons/228222015/\">direct link</a></strong> to a Flickr picture of a sign on the front door of <a href=\"http://www.arrowoodwinery.com/tastings.html\">Arrowood Winery</a></li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>That Ming Thing</em> by <a href=\"http://www.cageyhouse.com/\">Cagey House</a></li>\n 	<li>The blog entries between episodes is generating some great comments and discussions, and seem to be a good complement to the podcasts</li>\n 	<li>A listener tells the story of making top-tier status on Delta on an Atlanta-Omaha commuter jet run</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Break In</em> by <a href=\"http://www.podsafeaudio.com/jamroom/bands/1356/\">Mark Jungers</a></li>\n 	<li>The TSA restrictions on carry-on liquids and gels forces travelers to choose between lost time and lost looks</li>\n 	<li>The choice between checking luggage or leaving behind toiletries has much more impact on frequent travelers than on leisure travelers</li>\n 	<li>Recapping the <em><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=51\">Debating States of Matter With The TSA</a></em> blog post</li>\n 	<li>Listeners urge me to give Eco-Dent tooth powder another chance</li>\n 	<li>The ban is much harder on women than men -- Hilary Baumann of the <em>Clothing Cult</em> blog totals up the cost of banned make-up</li>\n 	<li>Commentators cast it as a safety vs. vanity choice, but no one feels that the TSA\'s new regime is making them any safer</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>When You Hide</em> by <a href=\"http://www.likewater.net/\"> Likewater</a></li>\n 	<li>I lightened my technology load on my recent vacation in Sweden -- I left my laptop home</li>\n 	<li>On last year\'s vacation to Switzerland, France and Hungary, I used it to store digital pictures, check e-mail, and produce TravelCommons episodes #8 and #9</li>\n 	<li>Skipped making a vacation podcast and survived just fine with only my BlackBerry and my Motorola V551 mobile phone -- they \"just worked\"</li>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from the <a href=\"http://www.podsafeaudio.com/\">Podsafe Audio</a></li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_44.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #44 - Dump Bucket of the Vanities, Leaving Behind the PC','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-44-dump-bucket-of-the-vanities-leaving-behind-the-pc','','','2021-09-23 14:40:19','2021-09-23 19:40:19','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2006/08/28/podcast-44-dump-bucket-of-the-vanities-leaving-behind-the-pc/',0,'post','',3),
(52,1,'2006-08-29 22:25:21','2006-08-30 03:25:21','The <a href=\"http://www.usatoday.com/money/biztravel/2006-08-29-bags-usat_x.htm\">lead story</a> on the front page of today\'s USAToday business section is headlined <strong>Fliers board faster as fewer carry on bags</strong>. The first sentence trumpets \"new security rules for carry-on bags are enabling airline passengers to get on and off planes faster, helping flights leave on time.\" It then quotes a number of airline spokesmen saying that boarding is anywhere from 4 to 10 minutes faster now that there are fewer carry-ons being stowed. Data quoted from FlightStats.com shows a 3.5% improvement in on-time departures, and it\'s probably logical to attribute at least some portion of that to faster boarding times.\n\nAll good news so far.  They even find some guy who claims to be a frequent flyer to give a supporting quote -- \"The new carry-on restrictions are the greatest transportation advance since the wheel\".  But then, 10 paragraphs into a 15-paragraph story, the rest of the story emerges -- \"if more flights are operating on time, that isn\'t necessarily true for luggage operations.  Many passengers report longer waits or other problems with checked bags.\", \"Airlines say they\'re struggling to deal with the huge surge in bags\".  So, people are boarding 4-10 minutes faster but are then waiting 30-45 minutes after their flight to collect their luggage.  It doesn\'t take complex math -- 10 minutes minus 30 minutes equals a negative 20 minutes -- to figure that this \"greatest transportation advance\" is actually moving people backwards.  While the airlines may be saving time, there\'re doing it on the backs of their passengers.','Using Addition To Tell The Whole Story','','publish','closed','closed','','using-addition-to-tell-the-whole-story','','','2006-08-29 22:25:21','2006-08-30 03:25:21','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2006/08/29/using-addition-to-tell-the-whole-story/',0,'post','',1),
(53,1,'2006-09-07 22:46:01','2006-09-08 03:46:01','Hilary Baumann has posted a pretty exhaustive <a href=\"http://clothingcult.com/?p=96\">list</a> of possible substitutes for liquid or gel toiletries on her <a href=\"http://clothingcult.com/\">ClothingCult blog</a>.  It\'s a much more exhaustive list than I\'ve provided in previous posts.  Her suggestions for substitutes for products like bubble bath, concealer, and mascara go far beyond experience set.  Why go through all this trouble; why not just check your luggage.  Hilary says \"the last time someone (a family member) convinced me to check baggage that I could have carried on, my checked bag took a 2 day trip without me to LA\".  Sounds like a good reason to order up some of those dry nail enamel strips...','Looks Solid To Me','','publish','closed','closed','','looks-solid-to-me','','','2006-09-07 22:46:01','2006-09-08 03:46:01','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2006/09/07/looks-solid-to-me/',0,'post','',1),
(54,1,'2006-09-10 15:48:17','2006-09-10 20:48:17','This morning\'s New York Times\' editorial page joins many of its ink-stained brethern in <a href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/10/opinion/10sun1.html?ex=1315540800&amp;en=45c3eaf878e957cd&amp;ei=5090&amp;partner=rssuserland&amp;emc=rss\">calling for a ban on carry-on luggage.</a>  While as wrong-headed in its conclusions as other editorialists, they\'ve focused on the right issue -- improved security -- rather than the \"improved speed of boarding\" argument which we showed in an <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=55\">earlier post</a> lacked a common understanding of simple mathematics.  I do think it\'s a bit rich, though, for the NY Times to be using the security argument to support this reactive proposition when when they\'ve brushed it aside in earlier editorials <em>against</em> proactive security-enhancing proposals such as <a href=\"http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/08/25/opinion/edharcourt.php\">passenger profiling</a> and data mining.\n\nI\'m not trying to be any kind -- left or right -- of wing-nut.  As someone who flies 2,3 or 4 times a week -- a lot more than your average newspaper editor -- I don\'t think I\'m arm-chair quarterbacking this topic.  Every time I board a flight, I have real skin in the game, my own.  And, having weighed the risks, I\'d like to be able to get some work done on the 12 hours I\'m strapped in a seat so that I can spend some time with my family when I\'m not.  While the NY Times editors, as the producer of printed reading material, certainly have a reason to hope that a carry-on-free cabin would cause \"some people ... to go over reading material, or even revert to pen and paper\", those of us with 21st-Century jobs know better.','Newspaper Editors Don’t Need Carry-On','','publish','closed','closed','','newspaper-editors-dont-need-carry-on','','','2006-09-10 15:48:17','2006-09-10 20:48:17','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2006/09/10/newspaper-editors-dont-need-carry-on/',0,'post','',2),
(55,1,'2006-09-20 23:52:15','2006-09-21 04:52:15','Recorded in the <a href=\"http://hotels.lonelyplanet.com/usa/seattle-r2103717/renaissance-seattle-a-marriott-family-hotel-p1058600/\">Renaissance Madison Hotel</a> in downtown Seattle, we have some good stories about missing luggage. I have some problems with Orbitz\'s live customer service, as well as an over-zealous TSA screener. I recalculate my fly-vs.-drive threshold given the added hassles and airport time caused by the TSA\'s no-liquids security rules. Looking back at all this, I work hard to remind myself that there <em>are</em> some good things about travel. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_45.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #45:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in the Renaissance Madison Hotel in downtown Seattle</li>\n 	<li>On a big 3-day triangulation -- Chicago-Houston-Seattle</li>\n 	<li>Dreaded the Monday Continental flights, until I found that my complimentary Northwest Airlines Silver Elite status gave me status on Continental</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Trees</em> by <a href=\"http://tamaranile.com/\">Tamara Nile</a></li>\n 	<li>Orbitz\'s fare matrix on the web is best-in-class, but their live customer service is at the bottom of the heap</li>\n 	<li>Monday morning\'s TSA screener dove into my toiletry kit, only to be disappointed in her zeal to keep airplanes free of toothpaste</li>\n 	<li>Check out Hilary Baumann\'s <a href=\"http://clothingcult.com/\"><em>ClothingCult</em> blog</a> for a <a href=\"http://clothingcult.com/?p=96\">list</a> of solid toiletry replacements so that you too can play \"Fool the Screener\"</li>\n 	<li>Updated the fly-vs.-drive break-even point from T/C #23, taking into account the added hassles of the TSA no-liquids rules</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Can You Hear Me?</em> by <a href=\"http://www.thestirring.com/\">The Stirring</a></li>\n 	<li>Looks like Congress and the Dept of Homeland Security want to keep the no-liquids ban in place for some time</li>\n 	<li>These rules force more people to check luggage, pushing the system to its breaking point and causing <a href=\"http://www.usatoday.com/travel/news/2006-09-19-baggage-screening_x.htm\">security problems</a> of its own</li>\n 	<li>Expect to wait at least 45 minutes for your luggage to appear at the end of your flight</li>\n 	<li>Stories of lost luggage from Hilary Baumann and Chris Christensen of the <a href=\"http://amateurtraveler.com/\">Amateur Traveler</a> podcast</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Railroad Car</em> by <a href=\"http://www.sarashansky.com/\"> Sara Shansky</a></li>\n 	<li>Scanning my blog posts over the past 30 days and you get the sense that the travel experience has taken a turn for the worse -- it\'s just a grind, a trial to be endured</li>\n 	<li>Enjoyed finding the <a href=\"http://baytrail.abag.ca.gov/vtour/map2/access/Btsm2mb/Btsm2mb.htm\">Bay Trail</a> running along the back of the SFO Marriott</li>\n 	<li><strong><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/travelcommons/248365281/\">Direct link</a></strong> to a Flickr picture of the City of Burlingame Shorebird Sanctuary</li>\n 	<li>Last month\'s NPR Music podcast carried a <a href=\"http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5711563\">story</a> about <a href=\"http://www.petermulvey.com\">Peter Mulvey</a>, a \"modern-day troubadour\", in which he talks about loving travel</li>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from the <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/\">Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_45.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #45 - Waiting for Luggage, Enjoying Travel','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-45-waiting-for-luggage-enjoying-travel','','','2021-09-23 14:41:32','2021-09-23 19:41:32','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2006/09/20/podcast-45-waiting-for-luggage-enjoying-travel/',0,'post','',2),
(56,1,'2006-09-25 13:33:26','2006-09-25 18:33:26','Effective Tuesday 25 September, the TSA is <a href=\"http://www.tsa.gov/press/happenings/9-25_updated_passenger_guidance.shtm\">loosening its carry-on liquids ban</a>.  According to the announcement on the TSA web site, we can now \"carry through security checkpoints <strong>travel-size toiletries (3 ounces or less) that fit comfortably in ONE, QUART-SIZE, clear plastic, zip-top bag</strong>\" (TSA\'s emphasis ) and \"bring beverages and other items purchased in the secure boarding area on-board aircraft\".  The zip-top bag will have to be pulled out of your luggage to allow screeners to examine your toiletries, so you still need to be careful about <a href=\"http://www.sun-times.com/output/news/cst-nws-pump14.html\">packing embarrassing personal effects.</a>\n\nGiven that I\'ve repacked my toiletries kit with all-solid toiletries (the most recent addition being a stick of solid hair wax), I\'m actually more excited by being allowed to bring my coffee on-board.  I can\'t tell you how many times I\'ve burned my mouth trying to chug a tall Starbucks coffee in the boarding line.','Pack Up Your Troubles in a 1-Quart Bag','','publish','closed','closed','','pack-up-your-troubles-in-a-1-quart-bag','','','2006-09-25 13:33:26','2006-09-25 18:33:26','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2006/09/25/pack-up-your-troubles-in-a-1-quart-bag/',0,'post','',4),
(57,1,'2006-10-06 18:08:38','2006-10-06 23:08:38','Recorded in the TravelCommons studios after a 3-day Chicago-San Francisco-Boston triangulation, I left behind some torrential rains in Chicago, which flooded our basement, causing me a good bit of long-distance guilt as my wife was left cleaning up the mess solo. We continue the thread on solid toiletries -- even with the recent relaxation of the TSA\'s no-liquids rule, it\'s less hassle to travel solid, though that tooth powder keeps fooling some screeners. We then wrap up with some things I\'ve recently overheard in bars. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_46.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #46:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago</li>\n 	<li>Had yet another big 3-day triangulation -- Chicago-San Francisco-Boston</li>\n 	<li>Heading out to London with my mother and daughter for a quick 4-day vacation</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://cyberset.cc/artists2.php?tr_release_id=104\"><em>Heaven</em></a> by <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=A951998E6011FA9B2D22387EB3CAC0B5EB05A36360E7FDA122C8D7A5C140F8DC\" rel=\"nofollow\">Electric Skychurch</a></li>\n 	<li>Orbitz\'s fare matrix on the web is best-in-class, but their live customer service is at the bottom of the heap</li>\n 	<li>The Eco-Dent tooth powder keeps fooling TSA screeners</li>\n 	<li>Staying with solid toiletries avoids the hassle of having to pull out yet another thing out of my bag for special screening</li>\n 	<li><strong><a href=\"http://www.theonion.com/content/node/53594\">Direct Link</a></strong> to <em>The Onion</em> satire on George Bush missing his Air Force One flight</li>\n 	<li>Stopped off at the <a href=\"http://www.portablemediaexpo.com/\">Podcast Expo</a> last week in Ontario, California. Got to meet up with T/C contributors <a href=\"http://www.qdinformation.com/searching/\">Ed Vawter</a> and <a href=\"http://amateurtraveler.com/\">Chris Christensen</a>, and Alan Lew of the <a href=\"http://travelgeography.blogspot.com/\"><em>Geography for Travelers</em></a> podcast.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/buy_album.php?id=DD892705BB88E6806EA6A2A4A4D1E7D699277BD6CE86C10FDC39095666B5D6CF\" rel=\"nofollow\"><em>One Foot Down</em></a> by <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=E67629501441F8BAAFB2B0D46F36C071EB05A36360E7FDA122C8D7A5C140F8DC\" rel=\"nofollow\">Peter Bradley Adams</a></li>\n 	<li>Torrential rains started in Chicago right after I left for San Francisco</li>\n 	<li>Hit the ground and was greeted by two voice messages from my wife about our flooding basement</li>\n 	<li>While some might call it \"lucky\", it\'s actually frustrating not to be able to help solve the problems at home that always seem to come up when you\'re on the road</li>\n 	<li>Trying to deal with the frustration and guilt over a phone line is fraught with danger</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/buy_album.php?id=39CE51194FB95B63577FBFD7E2EC168C99277BD6CE86C10FDC39095666B5D6CF\"><em>Heaven</em></a> by <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=BB22CBFF24501120EEC6ABA18AB0A15FEB05A36360E7FDA122C8D7A5C140F8DC\" rel=\"nofollow\">Los Lonely Boys</a></li>\n 	<li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=19\">T/C #23</a>, I did a topic \"Scenes from a hotel bar\" about what was going on at 10:30 on a Wednesday night in the Memphis Marriott\'s Blue Shoes bar.</li>\n 	<li>Overhead some classic California-speak in the <a href=\"http://www.plumpjack.com/falstaff1.html\">Jack Falstaff</a> restaurant in San Francisco</li>\n 	<li>Got a lesson in the pervasiveness of American culture at the <a href=\"http://www.tanumstrand.se/\">Tanumstrand Resort</a> on the west coast of Sweden</li>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://promonet.iodalliance.com\">IODA Promonet</a></li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_46.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #46 - Long-Distance Guilt; Overheard in Bars','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-46-long-distance-guilt-overheard-in-bars','','','2021-09-23 14:42:56','2021-09-23 19:42:56','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2006/10/06/podcast-46-long-distance-guilt-overheard-in-bars/',0,'post','',2),
(58,1,'2006-10-22 16:18:04','2006-10-22 21:18:04','Recorded in the TravelCommons studios after a quick Chicago-San Francisco up-&amp;-back and a 4-day getaway to London with my mother and daughter. We talk about the adjustment from BA Club World to AA domestic coach, the increased security precautions in London, and my continuing travails with tooth powder. Then, we devote the rest of the podcast to listener travel stories -- one listener has to crawl into a DFW chute to free his luggage, another listener gets some extra beach time in Miami, I interject a story about the dangers of seat-back pockets, and another listener sends along suggestions for new travel words. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_47.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #47:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago</li>\n 	<li>Back in the saddle after a quick vacation to London</li>\n 	<li>Tough transition from BA Club World to AA domestic coach</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://www.podsafeaudio.com/jamroom/play.php?band_id=1258&amp;song_id=4378&amp;mode=song_hifi\"><em>Shadows</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.podsafeaudio.com/jamroom/bands/1258/\">Antardhyan</a></li>\n 	<li>ORD TSA screeners are <em>still</em> flummoxed by my Eco-Dent tooth powder, but the SFO screeners don\'t seem to have the same problem</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://www.udayantripathi.com/wordpress\">Udayan Tripathi</a> sent a <a href=\"http://www.boingboing.net/2006/09/27/tsa_calling_kip_hawl.html\">civic lesson</a> about how the TSA overrides the First Amendment</li>\n 	<li>Saw a significant increase in security while in London last week</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://www.podsafeaudio.com/jamroom/play.php?band_id=1435&amp;song_id=5090&amp;mode=song_hifi\"><em>The Distance</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.podsafeaudio.com/jamroom/bands/1435/\">Scotland Barr and the Slow Drags</a></li>\n 	<li>Listener story about delays in O\'Hare on the way to Tokyo and stuck luggage on the way back through Dallas-Ft Worth</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://fricksworld.blogspot.com/\">Steve Frick</a> discovers a bike trail behind the <a href=\"http://hamptoninn.hilton.com/en/hp/hotels/index.jhtml;jsessionid=VCTSM3FF2IYSACSGBIX222QKIYFCXUUC?ctyhocn=CAENWHX\" rel=\"nofollow\">Hampton Inn in Columbia, SC</a></li>\n 	<li>Listener request that airlines space out the delivery of the $5 lunch boxes</li>\n 	<li>Story about a unique use for seat-back pockets on Air Tunisia</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://clothingcult.com/\">Hilary Baumann</a> sent along a <a href=\"http://dailycandy.com/article.jsp?ArticleId=27789&amp;city=15\">Daily Candy mailing</a> of their best made-up travel words</li>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://podsafeaudio.com/\">PodSafe Audio</a></li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_47.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #47 - Listener Travel Stories','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-47-listener-travel-stories','','','2021-09-23 14:45:48','2021-09-23 19:45:48','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2006/10/22/podcast-47-listener-travel-stories/',0,'post','',2),
(59,1,'2006-11-03 22:35:32','2006-11-04 03:35:32','Recorded in the Rancho Las Palmas Resort &amp; Spa near <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/california/palm-springs-and-coachella-valley\">Palm Springs, CA</a>, we talk about a surprise at the rental car lot and some good and bad TSA experiences. My search for frequent flyer seats to South Africa leads to a discussion about how diversifying or concentrating your \"deposits\" into frequent travel programs yield different results. The Travel Tech segment reappears with two topics -- measuring differences in hotel bandwidth and some travelers\' love affairs with Bose noise-canceling headsets. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_48.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #48:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in the Rancho Las Palmas Resort &amp; Spa in <a href=\"http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=33.7691666667,-116.421111111&amp;spn=0.1,0.1&amp;q=33.7691666667,-116.421111111 (Rancho%20Mirage%2C%20California)&amp;t=h\">Rancho Mirage, CA</a> near Palm Springs</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm_Springs_International_Airport\">Palm Springs Airport</a> reminds me of San Jose and Santa Ana airports before their big renovations</li>\n 	<li>A Hertz mistake gave me a convertible Mustang instead of a Buick Lacrosse</li>\n 	<li><strong><a href=\"http://www.qdinformation.com/searching/2006/10/28/searching-the-internet-episode-012-voter-and-election-information/\">Direct Link</a></strong> to Ed Vawter\'s special election edition of <em>Searching the Internet</em> podcast</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/myles-marginal/\"><em>Gold and rose</em></a> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/myles_cochran\">Myles Cochran</a></li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://online.wsj.com/article/SB116226062497308455.html?mod=Middle-Seat-Mailbox\">Monday\'s \"Middle Seat\" travel column</a> in <em><a href=\"http://www.wsj.com/\">The Wall Street Journal</a></em> (subscription required) airs complaints from travelers who have had their toiletries discarded by overly strict TSA screeners</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://clothingcult.com/\">Hilary Baumann</a> tells of her recent TSA experience at <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/the-south/lexington\">Lexington, KY</a>\'s <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Grass_Airport\">Blue Grass Airport</a></li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/falik-dreams/\"><em>Ika</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.magnatune.com/artists/falik\">Falik</a></li>\n 	<li>Waited a bit long to score some frequent flyer tickets to <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/south-africa/cape-town\">Cape Town, South Africa</a> for next March</li>\n 	<li>Started with American Airlines but they didn\'t have the inventory. Ended up with United Airlines, which is in the Star Alliance with South Africa Airways</li>\n 	<li>United first offered a \"back door\" itinerary through <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/china/hong-kong\">Hong Kong</a> and Singapore, but I chose the shorter route through Europe</li>\n 	<li>Having diversified my mileage across carriers let me make this switch</li>\n 	<li>I give up top tier status on one airline for this diversification strategy</li>\n 	<li>Depends on what you want -- flexibility to use miles or a better chance at first-class upgrades</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/cargo-alchemy/\"><em>Entry</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.magnatune.com/artists/cargo_cult\">Cargo Cult</a></li>\n 	<li>Been testing the speed of hotel broadband using the <a href=\"http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest/\">Speakeasy Speed Test</a> because it tests both upload and download speeds</li>\n 	<li>Upload speed is probably more important to business users e-mailing out big files than it is for residential users</li>\n 	<li>The afternoon downloads at the Downtown Houston Courtyard were 10 times faster than those in the evening</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/jag-cypress/\"><em>Homebound</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.magnatune.com/artists/jag\">Jag</a></li>\n 	<li>Lots of love in the airplanes for the <a href=\"http://www.bose.com/controller?event=VIEW_PRODUCT_PAGE_EVENT&amp;product=qc2_headphones_index\">Bose noise-cancelling headphones</a></li>\n 	<li>In the trade-off between comfort and compactness, I choose the Bose, but others go for in-ear \'phones like the <a href=\"http://www.shure.com/ProAudio/Products/PersonalMonitorSystems/us_pro_E3_content\">Shure E3</a></li>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\">Magnatune</a></li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_48.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #48 - Frequent Flyer Strategies, Measuring Hotel Bandwidth','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-48-frequent-flyer-strategies-measuring-hotel-bandwidth','','','2021-09-23 14:47:06','2021-09-23 19:47:06','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2006/11/03/podcast-48-frequent-flyer-strategies-measuring-hotel-bandwidth/',0,'post','',0),
(60,1,'2006-11-12 22:07:23','2006-11-13 03:07:23','An <a href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/12/business/12baggage.html?ex=1320987600&amp;en=d8547b7b1988e08c&amp;ei=5090&amp;partner=rssuserland&amp;emc=rss\">article in today\'s New York Times</a> gives the \"rest of the story\" regarding the impact from the increase in checked luggage.  The liquids ban increased the amount of checked luggage by about 25%, which significantly stressed an already strained system.  While flight attendents and <a href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/10/opinion/10sun1.html?ex=1315540800&amp;en=45c3eaf878e957cd&amp;ei=5090&amp;partner=rssuserland&amp;emc=rss\">newspaper editorials</a> have been calling for full bans on carry-on luggage, paying passengers who were forced to check their luggage came away empty-handed from baggage carousel a lot more often in August and September.  In August, there was a 33% increase in mishandled baggage over last year.  In September, however, the number of mishandled bags exploded -- 183,234 more passengers had their bags mishandled than the prior September, a 92% increase!\n\nThe article recaps the US Airways baggage meltdown in their Philadelphia hub during Christmas 2004 and walks through the reasons you probably don\'t want to check your luggage to or from Philadelphia in the near future.  Philadelphia mishandles three-to-four times as many bags as any other US Airways hub.  Financial problems that eventually led to bankruptcy has left the hub still short some 40 tractors to pull around baggage carts.\n\nIf you think about it, baggage handling hasn\'t made any real advancements since the \"advanced\" luggage system at Denver Interational began eating bags and was dismantled for scrap.  Las Vegas\' McCarran International Airport is installing RFID (radio frequency identification) readers, but these \"smart\" tags cost 20 cents a piece -- not very attractive to an industry trying to stay financially solvent by pulling pillows off of planes and charging you extra to book a ticket with a real person.','Is It Possible To Arrive With My Bag?','','publish','closed','closed','','is-it-possible-to-arrive-with-my-bag','','','2006-11-12 22:07:23','2006-11-13 03:07:23','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2006/11/12/is-it-possible-to-arrive-with-my-bag/',0,'post','',2),
(61,1,'2006-12-02 19:45:56','2006-12-03 00:45:56','Recorded in the TravelCommons studio after a week in the Bay Area and a tough struggle to get back home in the teeth of the first winter storm of the season. A listener passes along the story of a trip as an inadvertent stowaway. I walk through the timelime of my efforts to get home to Chicago and, in the Travel Tech segment, talk about two wireless applications I use every day. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_49.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #49:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in the TravelCommons studios outside Chicago</li>\n 	<li>Back in the Bay Area and had a real struggle getting home in the face of the \"thunder snow\" storms that blew across the US this week</li>\n 	<li>Had good hearty German food with a couple of TravelCommons contributors at San Francisco\'s <a href=\"http://www.suppenkuche.com/welcome.html\">Suppenküche</a> restaurant</li>\n 	<li>Having some very good Hertz karma</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://www.saurabbhargava.com/downloads/04%20The%20Void.mp3\"><em>The Void</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.saurabbhargava.com/\">Saurab Bhargava</a></li>\n 	<li>Tested the free WiFi at the <a href=\"http://www.monaco-chicago.com\">Hotel Monaco</a> in Chicago using the <a href=\"http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest/\">Speakeasy Speed Test</a> and found it a bit slow</li>\n 	<li>Received my new Nikon D-80 digital SLR, which made me check out the travel pictures on <a href=\"http://richmanwisco.blogspot.com/\"><em>This Blog Title for Sale</em></a> and <a href=\"http://fricksworld.blogspot.com/\"><em>Frick\'s World</em></a></li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/travelcommons/330509240/\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the <em>View from Here</em> out the window of the SFO Marriott</li>\n 	<li>The FBI <a href=\"http://www.theindychannel.com/news/10419665/detail.html\">dropped its case</a> against the researcher who created a web site that printed valid-looking boarding passes</li>\n 	<li>A listener sends in a story about flying to Chicago without a ticket</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://www.saurabbhargava.com/downloads/03%20Aware.mp3\"><em>Aware</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.saurabbhargava.com/\">Saurab Bhargava</a></li>\n 	<li>Bad weather threatening Chicago made me try to get home early, but the airlines were already canceling flights</li>\n 	<li>A timeline of my efforts to get home to Chicago amid cancellations and delays</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://www.saurabbhargava.com/downloads/08%20Conversations.mp3\"><em>Conversations</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.saurabbhargava.com/\">Saurab Bhargava</a></li>\n 	<li>On my struggle to get home, I used my BlackBerry to check <a href=\"http://aa2go.com\">American Airlines\' mobile flight status site</a> at least 50 times</li>\n 	<li>Yahoo! Mobile has a good <a href=\"http://mobile.yahoo.com/resource_center/wapdir/Travel_and_Transportation/Flight_Information/Airlines/\">listing</a> of other airline status sites</li>\n 	<li>To download Google Maps, point the browser on your mobile device to <a href=\"http://www.google.com/gmm\">http://www.google.com/gmm</a></li>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://www.saurabbhargava.com/\">Saurab Bhargava</a></li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_49.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #49 - Working Hard to Get Home, Wireless Apps That Help','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-49-working-hard-to-get-home-wireless-apps-that-help','','','2021-09-27 21:40:45','2021-09-28 02:40:45','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2006/12/02/podcast-49-working-hard-to-get-home-wireless-apps-that-help/',0,'post','',5),
(62,1,'2006-12-06 16:57:52','2006-12-06 21:57:52','It\'s been a few months since the liquid restrictions went into place, and not everyone flies as often as I do (I\'m averaging 3 out of every 4 weeks in the air), so I can understand when someone in front of me in the TSA screening line doesn\'t quite have the \"travel-size toiletries in the Ziploc bag\" thing down to a science.\n\nHowever, smoking was banned on most domestic airlines in 1990.  So I don\'t have a whole lot of sympathy for the woman who caused an emergency landing because, according to the <a href=\"http://www.usatoday.com/travel/flights/2006-12-05-flatulence-landing_x.htm?csp=34\">USA Today article</a>, \"she struck matches in an attempt to conceal body odor\".  I\'ve sat next to more than my share of smelly people in my years of flying and thought about offering some of the more rank a shot from my deodorant can, but lighting matches?  I stopped that in college -- before they banned smoking on airplanes.','What Was She Thinking?','','publish','closed','closed','','what-was-she-thinking','','','2006-12-06 16:57:52','2006-12-06 21:57:52','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2006/12/06/what-was-she-thinking/',0,'post','',2),
(63,1,'2006-12-31 13:13:32','2006-12-31 18:13:32','One of the first successes of the Web was on-line travel -- the elimination (\"disintermediation\" was the term during the Bubble Years) of the travel agent, allowing you to book your own travel.  I do this every week, though not always perfectly.  There have been a few times when I booked a room on the wrong day -- clicking next Wednesday instead of this Wednesday on the little pop-up calendar -- but nothing quite as monumental as reported in <a href=\"http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=oddlyEnoughNews&amp;storyID=2006-12-29T150336Z_01_L29815935_RTRUKOC_0_US-GERMANY-TOURIST.xml\">this Reuters\' story</a>.\n\nA 21-year-old German tourist used the Web to book a flight from Berlin to Sydney, Australia to see his girlfriend.  Unfortunately, he typed in SDY for his destination, rather than SYD.  SDY is the 3-letter code for <a href=\"http://visitmt.com/categories/moreinfo.asp?IDRRecordID=11367&amp;SiteID=1\">Sidney-Richland Municipal Airport</a> in Sidney, Montana.  Dressed for Australian summer, he stepped off the plane in northeastern Montana winter in a t-shirt and shorts.  He spent 3 days in Billings, MT before he could buy a ticket from SDY to SYD with money wired from Germany.  The final line in the story is this quote from his mother -- \"I didn\'t notice the mistake as my son is usually good with computers\"','Those 3-Letter Codes Are Important','','publish','closed','closed','','those-3-letter-codes-are-important','','','2006-12-31 13:13:32','2006-12-31 18:13:32','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2006/12/31/those-3-letter-codes-are-important/',0,'post','',3),
(64,1,'2007-01-01 22:19:46','2007-01-02 03:19:46','Recorded in the TravelCommons studio after hanging around home for the holidays. I talk about yet another tough struggle to get home when a pre-Christmas blizzard shuts down Denver, a couple of listeners share their trials of sitting next to travelers with killer bad breath, and we talk about new class distinctions among frequent fliers with the emergence of the Super Elites. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_50.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #50:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in the TravelCommons studios outside Chicago</li>\n 	<li>Did a good bit of flying right before the holidays -- Memphis, New York, and SF twice in two-and-a-half weeks</li>\n 	<li>Heading back out west this week after two weeks of doing nothing</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Flight</em> by <a href=\"http://www.freshmusic.co.za/\">Ga\'inja</a></li>\n 	<li>Drew Leifheit of the <a href=\"http://budacast.hu/\">Budacast</a> podcast talks about killer bad breath when seated between two German brothers</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Rocky Road</em> by <a href=\"http://www.kcentricity.com/\">KCentric</a></li>\n 	<li>My travel plans get derailed yet again by the second big winter storm of the season</li>\n 	<li>The problem is not with Chicago this time, but with Denver</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Wilderness Dance</em> by <a href=\"http://www.snarkyavenger.com/\">DJ Squirrel King</a></li>\n 	<li>In past podcasts, we\'ve talked about an \"explosion of elites\" devaluing of frequent flier status</li>\n 	<li>Have started to see the airlines put more separation between their top-tier and mid-tier status levels</li>\n 	<li>A <a href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/21/business/21warrior.html?ex=1321765200&amp;en=a67090fae4265899&amp;ei=5090&amp;partner=rssuserland&amp;emc=rss\">New York Times article</a> describes new levels of benefits for extreme frequent fliers</li>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from the <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/\">Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_50.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #50 - Yet Another Winter Storm, Travel Super Elites','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-50-yet-another-winter-storm-travel-super-elites','','','2021-09-27 19:34:44','2021-09-28 00:34:44','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2007/01/01/podcast-50-yet-another-winter-storm-travel-super-elites/',0,'post','',2),
(65,1,'2007-01-08 11:50:13','2007-01-08 17:50:13','My first-hand experiences with last month\'s travel delays were major topics in the last two podcasts.  As you would expect, the delays inconvenienced the airlines too.  United Airlines <a href=\"http://www.united.com/press/detail/0,6862,57179,00.html\">announced</a> late Friday afternoon how much of an impact the December storms had on its operations.  \"During December,\" United says, \"operations were affected by severe winter snowstorms in (our) two largest hubs, Chicago and Denver. United and United Express cancelled approximately 3,900 flights in Chicago and in Denver.\"  This was enough, according to the <a href=\"http://online.wsj.com/article/SB116803493245068548-search.html?KEYWORDS=united+airlines&amp;COLLECTION=wsjie/6month\">Wall Street Journal</a>, to drive United from a fourth quarter profit to \"a modest operating loss.\"\n\nUnited wasn\'t alone in happily bidding 2006 adieu.  A front-page <a href=\"http://online.wsj.com/article/SB116804368966768690.html?mod=travel_left_column_hs\">article</a> in Saturday\'s Wall Street Journal details the agonies of a December 29th American Airlines flight from San Francisco to Dallas that was diverted to Austin, TX because of thunderstorms over DFW.  They sat on the ground at Austin for 8 hours before the captain docked the plane at an empty gate without permission.\n\n\"How does this happen?\", asked WSJ columnist Scott McCartney.  \"After years of cutting staff, carriers are less capable of handling crises -- from not having enough telephone reservationists to handle calls, or extra bodies to empty toilet tanks or spare pilots and flight attendants to help out when delays stack up. Congestion in the air and at airports exacerbates the messes caused when storms hit.\"','The December Storms Hurt the Airlines Too','','publish','closed','closed','','the-december-storms-hurt-the-airlines-too','','','2007-01-08 11:50:13','2007-01-08 17:50:13','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2007/01/08/the-december-storms-hurt-the-airlines-too/',0,'post','',0),
(66,1,'2007-01-16 13:25:08','2007-01-16 19:25:08','The shoe carnival -- that degrading one-legged dance we do for the entertainment of TSA screeners across the country all because one guy tried (and failed) to light his shoe on fire some six years ago -- has survived the introduction of the ShoeScanner in Orlando\'s airport.  Home of some of the worst TSA lines, <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Orlando Airport\" rel=\"wikipedia\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orlando_Airport\">Orlando Airport</a> is piloting this new technology that is supposed to detect explosives in shoes.  However, it doesn\'t seem to have worked quite as advertised.  According to a <a href=\"http://www.usatoday.com/travel/news/2007-01-16-shoe-scanner_x.htm?csp=34\">USAToday</a> story, \"Of 50 travelers who used the ShoeScanner in a one-hour period this morning in Orlando, 28 had to remove their shoes.\"\n\nSounds like the ShoeScanner is going to take its place along side the GE \"Puffer\" machine as another waste of TSA budget.  Prior to the August \'06 \"no liquids\" ban, airports such as <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Tampa\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/florida/tampa\">Tampa</a> and <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"San Francisco\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/san-francisco\">San Francisco</a> used the \"Puffer\" as an alternative to the shoe carnival.  You\'d walk into the compartment, jets of air would be blown at you, you\'d wait 5-10 seconds while the machine analyzed the air for traces of explosives, and then the compartment door would open and let you walk through the metal detector with your shoes on.  It was great -- and fun too.  However, with the \"all shoes off\" order that accompanied the \"no liquids\" ban still in effect, the SFO \"Puffer\" sits unused (but still plugged in),  an obstacle to route around while in the TSA line, and a reminder of the amazing amount of tax money the TSA has wasted since its inception.\n<div class=\"zemanta-pixie\" style=\"margin-top: 10px; height: 15px;\"><img class=\"zemanta-pixie-img\" style=\"border: none; float: right;\" src=\"http://img.zemanta.com/pixy.gif?x-id=a70bedd7-5f74-4b76-b11b-164907580b98\" alt=\"\" /></div>','The Shoe Carnival Still Alive in Orlando','','publish','closed','closed','','the-shoe-carnival-still-alive-in-orlando','','','2007-01-16 13:25:08','2007-01-16 19:25:08','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2007/01/16/the-shoe-carnival-still-alive-in-orlando/',0,'post','',3),
(67,1,'2007-01-23 16:38:41','2007-01-23 22:38:41','I don\'t know what\'s going on with the flying public these days.  Last month, it\'s a woman lighting matches to cover body odor.  Last Sunday, it\'s a 28-year-old woman getting drunk and then breaking damn close to every rule in the air on a United flight from Boston to San Francisco.  According to the <a href=\"http://www.usatoday.com/travel/news/2007-01-23-drunk-flier-charged_x.htm\">article</a> in today\'s USAToday, she:\n<ul>\n	<li>Made mid-air cell phone calls</li>\n	<li>Joked about a hijacking -- \"\'I\'m calling 911 because the plane is being hijacked\"</li>\n	<li>Locked herself in the restroom with her dog</li>\n	<li>Tried to make her way to the front door while saying \"\'I\'m getting off the aircraft\"</li>\n	<li>Yelled, cursed and spit on the flight attendants after being restrained</li>\n</ul>\nI\'ve been flying between Chicago and San Francisco for almost a year straight, and have done the Boston to San Francisco route recently.  It <em>is</em> a long flight, and if you haven\'t planned ahead (or scored the rare upgrade), it\'s a long time between meals.  Something to keep in mind when the drink cart comes \'round.\n\nI remember a similar incident on a flight from Cleveland to Chicago.  One passenger was drunk and, on the approach to O\'Hare, tried to leave early through the back door.  The flight attendent and some passengers got the guy back into his seat.  After landing, the Chicago police came on board, looked around and asked \"Is anyone going to press charges?\".  \"I will,\" said the flight attendant.  Without a word, the cop grabbed the guy out of his seat, slammed him face first onto the floor of the plane, \'cuffed him, and then dragged him down the stairs.  And this was in the more gentle-and-sensitive pre-Sept 11th days.  Keep that in mind then next time you\'re ordering that double.','What Was She Thinking?','','publish','closed','closed','','what-was-she-thinking-2','','','2007-01-23 16:38:41','2007-01-23 22:38:41','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2007/01/23/what-was-she-thinking-2/',0,'post','',1),
(68,1,'2007-01-29 23:32:53','2007-01-30 05:32:53','Recorded in the SFO Marriott at the start of a trans-continental travel week, we talk about the need to \"re-balance\" your frequent traveler elite status at the beginning of the year -- should you re-up with your current airline or hotel, or move elsewhere? I\'ve upgraded a good bit of my travel technology over the last couple of weeks. I talk about my new toys and the reason travelers invest so much time personalizing these bits of circuitry. One listener describes the inner workings of United Airline\'s standby queue, while another listener tells some stories of traveling in the Far North. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_51.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #51:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in the San Francisco Airport Marriott</li>\n 	<li>Been traveling pretty much non-stop since January 3rd</li>\n 	<li>Stayed in the San Francisco W Hotel a few weeks ago -- not the same place it was during the Internet \"Bubble\" years</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/williams-dusty/\">Steam Train</a></em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/john_williams\">John Williams</a></li>\n 	<li>A listener describes the inner workings of United Airline\'s standby queue</li>\n 	<li>Another listener talks about his travel experiences on Innu Mikun airlines in Canada\'s isolated northern regions</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/babylon-knives/\">Roots Fi Cool</a></em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/burning_babylon\">Burning Babylon</a></li>\n 	<li>A listener talks about a recent flight from Newark to Chicago that was 90% elite fliers</li>\n 	<li>At the beginning of the year, the elite status counters are re-set to zero -- you should think about where you want to \"invest\" your flight segments and hotel stays for the year</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/kokoon-berlin/\">It\'s Time Know</a></em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/kokoon\">the Kokoon</a></li>\n 	<li>Passed my Motorola Razr down to my son and bought a Samsung A707 -- I like it as a phone, but haven\'t found much use for the 3G features</li>\n 	<li>The hard drive on my 2-year-old U2 iPod died, so I upgraded to a new 5th-gen black iPod. I like it, but what\'s with Apple\'s quality problems</li>\n 	<li>Frequent travelers\' phone, PC, and iPod are the furniture of their virtual office, and so they tend to spend more time personalizing them than they do their real office</li>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\">Magnatune</a></li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_51.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #51 - Change Out Status; Upgrading Travel Technology','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-51-change-out-status-upgrading-travel-technology','','','2021-09-25 08:48:54','2021-09-25 13:48:54','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2007/01/29/podcast-51-change-out-status-upgrading-travel-technology/',0,'post','',7),
(69,1,'2007-03-02 21:55:45','2007-03-03 03:55:45','Recorded in the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, we talk through some of the problems that have made <a href=\"http://www.united.com\">United Airlines</a>\' skies less friendly than their ads would like you to believe. This has definitely been the winter of United fliers\' discontent. I also follow up on last episode\'s travel technology upgrade topic. I\'ve now found a use for the <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3G\">3G technology</a> in my new Samsung phone, though not sure that Cingular would completely agree with it. A group of listeners have good things to say about Amsterdam\'s <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amsterdam_Airport_Schiphol\">Schiphol airport</a>; another listener ponders the impact if the 2001 shoe bomber had tried to ignite some other piece of his wardrobe. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_52.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #52:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in the TravelCommons studios</li>\n 	<li>Been running between the coasts for the past couple of weeks -- San Francisco to Orlando, and then San Francisco to New York</li>\n 	<li>Was able to get out of a 4-day up-&amp;-back to <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/china/hong-kong\">Hong Kong</a> and am pretty happy about it</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/yongen-yello/\">Give You Up</a></em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/yongen\">Yongen</a></li>\n 	<li>Drew Leifheit of the <a href=\"http://budacast.hu\">Budacast podcast</a> started a thread of commentary on Amsterdam\'s Schiphol airport</li>\n 	<li>Thanks to Drew for the link from his interview with the Hungarian newspaper <a href=\"http://www.nol.hu/kultura/cikk/434237/\">Napszabadsag</a>. TravelCommons is the example for (travel) podcasts</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/anamar-transfado/\">Going on a River</a></em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/anamar\">Anamar</a></li>\n 	<li>According to <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fado\">Wikipedia</a>, Fado is \"s a music genre ... characterized by mournful tunes and lyrics, often about the sea or the life of the poor.\"</li>\n 	<li>This has been the winter of United Airlines\' fliers\' discontent</li>\n 	<li>A front page <a href=\"http://www.usatoday.com/money/biztravel/2007-02-19-cheyenne-cover-usat_x.htm\">USAToday</a> story tells how United abandoned two planes of passengers in Cheyenne, Wyoming</li>\n 	<li>A <a href=\"http://www.chicagotribune.com/travel/chi-070301bad-flight,1,5898109.story?ctrack=1&amp;cset=true\">Chicago Tribune</a> story gives the time line of a United ORD-SFO flight that sat on the runway for 8 hours before finally being cancelled</li>\n 	<li>Leo Vegoda talks about a United passport snafu</li>\n 	<li>JetBlue\'s CEO <a href=\"http://www.jetblue.com/about/ourcompany/flightlog/\">blogs</a> a complete <em>mea culpa</em> after their service meltdown; United\'s CEO is no where to be found</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/vla-stuff/\">Look Around</a></em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/vla\">Very Large Array</a></li>\n 	<li>In T/C #51, I talked about how I upgraded most of my travel technology kit -- my laptop, my <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod\">iPod</a>, and my mobile phone</li>\n 	<li>I hadn\'t found a use for my new phone\'s big selling point from Cingular -- fast data access on their new 3G network</li>\n 	<li>A couple of weeks ago, I was at a financial services client with a completely locked-down computer network and cobbled together a 3G data connection using a copy of Samsung\'s PC Studio and an old Bluetooth USB dongle</li>\n 	<li>This <a href=\"http://www.cbs.com/classics/macgyver/video/\">McGyver</a> rig gave me 328 kbps down and 234 kbps up according to the <a href=\"http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest/links.php\">Speakeasy test</a> -- faster than some hotel WiFi spots I tested</li>\n 	<li>What about using something like this to replace the ubiquitous $10/night Internet charge at Marriotts and Sheratons?</li>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\">Magnatune</a></li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_52.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #52 - Flying Friendless Skies; Latest Speed for the Road','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-52-flying-friendless-skies-latest-speed-for-the-road','','','2021-09-27 19:19:42','2021-09-28 00:19:42','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2007/03/02/podcast-52-flying-friendless-skies-latest-speed-for-the-road/',0,'post','',6),
(70,1,'2007-05-10 20:54:21','2007-05-11 02:54:21','Recorded in Marriott Courtyard in <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/san-francisco\">San Francisco</a>\'s SoMa district, I confess to some base emotions -- my inner child has been throwing tantrums now that American and United Airlines have taken away some of the special treatment they used to give their mid-tier status fliers. I also had a bit of an awakening while on vacation with my family in <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/south-africa\">South Africa</a> -- the number of electronic devices they carry has mushroomed and they suffer from bad Internet withdrawal. We have a few stories about how diapers make for some \"smelly skies\", a listener finds great free bandwidth in Denver, and we feature some listener music. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_53.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #53:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in Marriott Courtyard in San Francisco\'s SoMa district</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Jazz Suite for Saxophone Quartet #1</em> by <a href=\"http://saxophonequartet.com/\">Vierung</a></li>\n 	<li>Ed Vawter wrote in with about a young couple in the row behind him who stuffed their baby\'s dirty diaper in the seat-back pocket on a flight from Chicago to Portland</li>\n 	<li>My breakfast on a South Africa Airways flight to <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/south-africa/cape-town\">Cape Town</a> was spoiled by a young couple changing their baby\'s dirty diaper in the row in front of me</li>\n 	<li>A listener staying at the Adam\'s Mark Hotel in Denver found their Internet service scored a smokin\' 4800 kbps down and 4100 kbps up on the <a href=\"http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest/links.php\">Speakeasy.net</a> bandwidth test</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Solen</em> by <a href=\"http://marcloehrwald.com/\">Marc Löhrwald</a></li>\n 	<li>In past episodes, we\'ve talked about how many airlines are devaluing their mid-tier status levels</li>\n 	<li>United has literally put out a red carpet for first class, and the top tier fliers – 1K and Global Services – and left the plain old tile line for everyone else</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail1749.html\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to IT Conversations podcast on <em>Creating Customer Loyalty</em></li>\n 	<li>What started as a nice gesture from the manager of the JFK Courtyard backfired when they didn\'t live up to the expectations they created</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Hola Cape Town</em> by the Sivukile Marimba Band. Here\'s a <a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/travelcommons/495032813/\">picture</a> I took of the band right before my daughter bought their CD</li>\n 	<li>Most frequent travelers have a pretty finely tuned travel routine and are, for the most part, solitary figures, sort of throwbacks to the hunter-gatherers of pre-history</li>\n 	<li>Traveling with their family requires some significant attitude adjustment</li>\n 	<li>During our vacation to South Africa, I was completely taken aback by the number of electronic devices my family carried that needed recharging</li>\n 	<li>The other think that struck me was my family coming almost unglued when deprived of their Internet access</li>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_53.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #53 - Wanting the Red Carpet; Family Travel Technology','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-53-wanting-the-red-carpet-family-travel-technology','','','2021-09-25 09:07:12','2021-09-25 14:07:12','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2007/05/10/podcast-53-wanting-the-red-carpet-family-travel-technology/',0,'post','',6),
(71,1,'2007-05-20 08:45:22','2007-05-20 14:45:22','We\'ve talked many times here about how the act of travel has lost its glamor, is no longer fun for the frequent traveler.  According to an <a href=\"http://online.wsj.com/article/SB117928013787304325.html?mod=todays_us_page_one\">article</a> in the <em>Wall Street Journal</em>, life isn\'t so glamorous on the other side of the travel counter.\n<blockquote>Airlines used to offer prestigious jobs with good wages and coveted flight benefits. Now, in the aftermath of aggressive cutbacks, a growing number of airline jobs are more akin to those at a fast-food restaurant. The pay is low, the work is tough and, in a new twist, airlines are having trouble hanging onto workers and finding new ones.  \"What once was a glamorous job...doesn\'t look so good any more,\" says Andy Roberts, executive vice president of operations for Northwest Airlines Corp. Mr. Roberts says Northwest and its peers used to have a list of applicants \"as long as your arm.\" Now, \"we have to go seek them out, even pilots.\"</blockquote>\nSouthwest Airlines\' ramp workers start at $8.75/hr.  Northwest Airlines ramp workers start at $9/hr.  Wal-Mart sales associates average, according to the United Food and Commercial Workers (who are trying to organize them) $8.23/hr.  Some may say that working in a Wal-Mart is a soul-numbing job.  However, working  outside on the ramp in Chicago or Minneapolis in January is a <em>body</em>-numbing job, and not for a whole lot more money.  The resulting short staffing, absenteeism, and high turnover just give us three more reasons not to check luggage.\n\nBut even positions where there seem to be enough job applicants -- pilots, flight attendants -- could the quality of the applicants be slipping.  A <a href=\"http://www.airliners.net/discussions/general_aviation/read.main/3411273/\">discussion thread</a> on the article at airliners.net  suggests that regional airlines are reducing their minimum hiring requirements and that the quality of new flight attendants is leaving something to be desired.\n<blockquote>I think these articles are true. I\'ve been with AA for 19 years, and the quality of many people hired in the past 7 years has steadily declined. I fly with flight attendants who NEVER would have been hired when I was hired. Although you can\'t generalize, because there are some good ones out there, I have seen many a newer hired flight attendant sitting reading a book or magazine instead of answering call lights and taking care of passenger needs. If you say something to them, they always say, \"They don\'t pay me enough to do that!\"</blockquote>\nNo wonder that in the most recent American Customer Satisfaction Index <a href=\"http://www.cnn.com/2007/TRAVEL/05/15/airlines.customers.ap/index.html\">released</a> by University of Michigan this week, U.S. airlines scored 63 out of a possible 100.  It\'s their worst score in seven years and, to emphasize the point, nine points worse than the US federal government... and two points worse than the Internal Revenue Service.  There\'s something for the suits to put on their bonus justification write-ups.','Trade Your Bags For Another $1/Hr','','publish','closed','closed','','trade-your-bags-for-another-1hr','','','2007-05-20 08:45:22','2007-05-20 14:45:22','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2007/05/20/trade-your-bags-for-another-1hr/',0,'post','',2),
(72,1,'2007-05-31 14:04:14','2007-05-31 20:04:14','A <a href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/30/business/30bump.html?ex=1338177600&amp;en=8d8ef936d95b2d99&amp;ei=5090&amp;partner=rssuserland&amp;emc=rss\">New York Times article</a> provides an interesting behind-the-scenes view of the balance airlines are trying to strike between maximizing revenue through overbooking, and raising the ire of customers <em>and</em> their front-line employees when passengers get bumped from oversold flights.  Interviewing a number of people at US Airways, the article reveals the tensions between the back-office analysts trying to wring the last penny out of every flight and the gate agents who bear the brunt of passenger fury when the desk jockeys get the math wrong.  One of the more revealing insights was the lack of repercussions (other than hosting a toy crow for a week) the analysts faced when they caused significant numbers of passengers to be bumped.\n\nThis is a timely article because, as much as I hate the \"perfect storm\" metaphor, I think this summer could be an ugly one for US air travelers.\n<ul>\n	<li>Airline seat occupancy is forecasted to be 85% this summer</li>\n	<li>Airport delays are already high and are growing as air traffic exceeds pre-9/11 levels</li>\n	<li>Airline profits are under pressure from high fuel costs</li>\n	<li>Airlines are having difficulty hiring the ground and support staff (ramp workers, gate agents, customer service reps) needed to handle disruptions caused by weather or plane break-downs (see this <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=78\">TravelCommons posting</a> for a further discussion)</li>\n</ul>\nAll this portends more passengers being involuntarily bumped in the coming months.  Knowing your rights when overbooked and setting your expectations <em>before</em> you travel is probably one of the best strategies for limiting inconvenience and high blood pressure.  The ASTA - the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"American Society of Travel Agents\" rel=\"wikipedia\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Society_of_Travel_Agents\">American Society of Travel Agents</a> - has a good <a href=\"http://www.travelsense.org/consumer/airlinebumping.asp\">primer</a> on their web site.  The <a href=\"http://airconsumer.ost.dot.gov/publications/flyrights.htm#overbooking\">write-up</a> on the US <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"United States Department of Transportation\" rel=\"homepage\" href=\"http://www.dot.gov\">Department of Transportation</a>\'s site isn\'t bad either.  The best single piece of advice -- if they can\'t give you a seat assignment when you book the flight, look for another flight.','Bumping on the Rise?','','publish','closed','closed','','bumping-on-the-rise','','','2007-05-31 14:04:14','2007-05-31 20:04:14','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2007/05/31/bumping-on-the-rise/',0,'post','',0),
(73,1,'2007-06-05 22:39:46','2007-06-06 04:39:46','The front page of today\'s USAToday -- the unofficial newspaper of record for the frequent traveler -- greeted its readers with an <a href=\"http://www.usatoday.com/travel/flights/2007-06-04-airline-delays_N.htm\">article</a> stating \"Flights on U.S. airlines arrived late more often in the first four months of this year than in any other year since the government began tracking the numbers 13 years ago.\"  Not exactly dawn breaking over <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Marblehead\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/new-england/marblehead\">Marblehead</a> for those of us who fly every week.  The top 4 airports on the delay hit parade were no surprise -- <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Newark, New Jersey\" rel=\"homepage\" href=\"http://www.ci.newark.nj.us/\">Newark</a>, <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"LaGuardia Airport\" rel=\"wikipedia\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaGuardia_Airport\">LaGuardia</a>, JFK, and O\'Hare.\n\nThe <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Port Authority of New York and New Jersey\" rel=\"wikipedia\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_Authority_of_New_York_and_New_Jersey\">Port Authority of New York and New Jersey</a> is 0-for-3 -- the airports they run own the top of the list.  I can\'t say that the Newark statistic surprises me.  The tight runways and the approach over the Jersey Turnpike has always meant that somebody just <em>spitting</em> on a runway can cause a 45-minute delay.  You gotta be impressed by the Port Authority\'s response, though.  According to the article, they said last week that they\'d \"set up a task force to study ways to reduce delays\".  There\'s proactive ownership for you.  If these flight delay findings were a surprise to the Port Authority, if they didn\'t know they had a delay problem months ago, then they have a whole other set of problems.\n\nThe number 4 and 5 positions on the list <em>were</em> a bit of a surprise to me -- <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Philadelphia\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/pennsylvania/philadelphia\">Philadelphia</a> and Charlotte.  What do these airports have in common?  They\'re both US Airways hubs.  Guess that old \"US Scare\" moniker still holds true.\n<div class=\"zemanta-pixie\" style=\"margin-top: 10px; height: 15px;\"><img class=\"zemanta-pixie-img\" style=\"border: none; float: right;\" src=\"http://img.zemanta.com/pixy.gif?x-id=f9e529d0-d6e9-4d71-9d3a-cc68a8eefbff\" alt=\"\" /></div>','Flight Delays Worst in 13 Years — Tell Me Something I Don’t Know','','publish','closed','closed','','flight-delays-worst-in-13-years-tell-me-something-i-dont-know','','','2007-06-05 22:39:46','2007-06-06 04:39:46','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2007/06/05/flight-delays-worst-in-13-years-tell-me-something-i-dont-know/',0,'post','',1),
(74,1,'2007-06-08 22:47:09','2007-06-09 04:47:09','Recorded in the Grand Geneva Resort and Spa, the former <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Playboy_Club\">Playboy Club</a>, in <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Geneva%2C_Wisconsin\">Lake Geneva, Wisconsin</a>, I talk about the travails of \"playing injured\" -- traveling while sick. A listener comment makes me wonder if I\'m exaggerating the state of the US travel experience. We get a good suggestion on how to wrestle with charging all those electronic devices we carry, and some detailed \"behind-the-scenes\" explanations of how air crews are treated by the TSA. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_54.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #54:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in Grand Geneva Resort and Spa in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin</li>\n 	<li>Been on the road every week since my last podcast, mostly here in San Francisco</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/headroom-jetuton/\">Hejm</a></em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/headroom_project\">The Headroom Project</a></li>\n 	<li>Thanks to everyone who told me that the podcast had been gone too long</li>\n 	<li>Craig Martin of the <a href=\"http://indietravelpodcast.com/\">Indie Travel Podcast</a> sends along an audio comment with a great suggestion on how to avoid the \"outlet congestion\" I mentioned in TC #53</li>\n 	<li>I\'ve found that for most electrical devices, you don\'t even need the power converter, just the plug adapter</li>\n 	<li>Received two good answers to my question in TC#53 as to why an Oakland TSA screener allowed a Southwest flight attendant to keep her shoes going through the metal detector</li>\n 	<li>This <a href=\"http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2007-06-04-workers_N.htm?csp=34\">USAToday article</a> suggests that airline and airport employees will face greater security measures as a result of the foiled JFK plot</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/falik-elvolution/\">Electric Butterfly</a></em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/falik\">Falik</a></li>\n 	<li>All travel inconveniences pale when compared to getting sick or injured while traveling</li>\n 	<li>Two weeks ago, I injured my back the morning before a flight to San Francisco</li>\n 	<li>Worse was the experience of getting food poisoning in Lyon, France and still having to carry on with business the next day</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/seismic-afterburner/\">Snake Eyes</a></em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/seismic_anamoly\">Seismic Anomaly</a></li>\n 	<li>An e-mail exchange with Udayan Tripathi got me to wondering if I exaggerate the problems with US domestic travel</li>\n 	<li>The TSA isn\'t the most charming group, but they\'re no worse than the screeners in London\'s Heathrow airport</li>\n 	<li>A <a href=\"http://www.usatoday.com/travel/flights/2007-06-04-airline-delays_N.htm\">USAToday article</a> this week reported that the number of passenger complaints to <a href=\"http://www.dot.gov\">US Dept of Transportation</a> in April about bad airline service had doubled from the year before</li>\n 	<li>The service from US legacy carriers is worse than in other parts of the world, but the new US carriers (e.g., <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JetBlue_Airways\">JetBlue</a>) offer better service than legacy or budget carriers elsewhere</li>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\">Magnatune</a></li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_54.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #54 - Traveling Injured; How Bad Is Travel Experience Really?','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-54-traveling-injured-how-bad-is-travel-experience-really','','','2021-09-25 09:05:22','2021-09-25 14:05:22','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2007/06/08/podcast-54-traveling-injured-how-bad-is-travel-experience-really/',0,'post','',6),
(75,1,'2007-06-11 12:13:04','2007-06-11 18:13:04','<a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Chicago Tribune\" rel=\"homepage\" href=\"http://www.chicagotribune.com\">The Chicago Tribune</a>\'s Sunday Business section featured a 3,600-word <a href=\"http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/chi-sun_jammed_0610jun10,1,5280955.story\">in-depth analysis</a> of a <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"United Airlines\" rel=\"homepage\" href=\"http://www.united.com\">United Airlines</a> flight that went terribly wrong.  United Flight 1073 was supposed to leave <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Montego Bay\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/jamaica/montego-bay\">Montego Bay, Jamaica</a> at 1:55pm on Saturday, March 31, 2007.  It didn\'t leave the ground until the following Monday, April 2.  The article is a very good read, and identifies two cost-cutting tactics as the main culprits for the weekend from hell endured by the passengers:\n<ul>\n	<li>United\'s employee count has been cut to a level that has no slack to handle extraordinary events.  Flight 1073 is just the most recent example. The December 2006 blizzards that closed United\'s <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Chicago\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/chicago\">Chicago</a> and <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Denver\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/rocky-mountains/denver\">Denver</a> hubs clearly illustrated the company\'s lack of \"surge\" capacity</li>\n	<li>United\'s bankruptcy restructuring included aggressively replacing United employees with contract workers.  However, they didn\'t replace the informal communication channels that company employees typically provide.  It seems that no United executive was aware of the situation in Jamaica until Saturday night when one passenger, according to the article, \"sat in the bathroom and sent e-mails to everyone he could think of: newspaper reporters, friends who work at United, even the airline\'s CEO, Glenn Tilton. \'Please, help us!\' the messages said. One of his missives was forwarded to (Barbara) Higgins (the new vice-president of customer experience), who eventually responded.\"</li>\n</ul>\nYou have to feel a little bad for Barbara Higgins, who just the day before took the job as vice-president of customer experience. She does stand-up and take responsibility for the problem -- \"What we tried to do was acknowledge the utter failure of our service on that flight.\" However, United doesn\'t appear to be doing anything new.  According to the article, \"Higgins and her team prepared to greet every person returning from Jamaica with apologies, $300 travel vouchers and a special lane to speed them through immigration in Chicago. The airline would later agree to reimburse passengers for all out-of-pocket costs.\"   \"We want to proactively acknowledge that this is not the service we want to provide,\" Higgins said.\n\nHow about saving a few of those travel voucher and hiring a few more gate agents, baggage handlers and call center agents?  How about being \"proactive\" about avoiding delays instead of flying a team around with make-nice coupons that, given the current seat occupancy rates, are nearly impossible to use anyways?  Higgins\' challenge is to improve the customer experience for everyone, not just paper it over for the few who endured a weekend in hell courtesy of United Airlines.\n<div class=\"zemanta-pixie\" style=\"margin-top: 10px; height: 15px;\"><img class=\"zemanta-pixie-img\" style=\"border: none; float: right;\" src=\"http://img.zemanta.com/pixy.gif?x-id=889066db-b583-475a-b1ac-43a4c20fe030\" alt=\"\" /></div>','Can’t Outsource Responsibility','','publish','closed','closed','','cant-outsource-responsibility','','','2007-06-11 12:13:04','2007-06-11 18:13:04','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2007/06/11/cant-outsource-responsibility/',0,'post','',2),
(76,1,'2007-06-26 11:52:13','2007-06-26 16:52:13','The drumbeat of complaints regarding United Airline\'s deteriorating customer service continues.  In the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=78\"><em>Trade Your Bags For Another $1/Hr</em></a> post, I mentioned the results of the recent <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"University of Michigan\" rel=\"wikipedia\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Michigan\">University of Michigan</a> customer satisfaction survey.  If the satisfaction index for the airline industry in general plummeted -- they\'re now just barely ahead of the IRS -- then the score for United Airlines did a free-fall, landing at the bottom of the list.  TravelCommons got looped into an edge of this growing blogstorm.  Our last post, commenting on the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Chicago Tribune\" rel=\"wikipedia\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Tribune\">Chicago Tribune</a> story about the weekend-long ordeal of United passengers trying to get home from Jamaica, was picked up by a <a href=\"http://www.professorbainbridge.com/2007/06/united_customer.html\">UCLA law professor</a> who then linked over to last week\'s <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"USA Today\" rel=\"homepage\" href=\"http://www.usatoday.com/\">USAToday</a> <a href=\"http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/travel/2007-06-18-ual-service-usat_N.htm\">article</a> titled \"United passengers air their bitter grievances\".  The article lists an incredible litany of complaints.\n\nThings only got worse last week when an IT tester took down United\'s entire operations system, stranding most of their fleet Wednesday morning.  I was flying from San Francisco (SFO) to Chicago (ORD) that evening and felt lucky that my flight arrived only 50 minutes late.  Two days later, I received a fairly bland e-mail apology from United\'s Vice-President of <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Customer experience\" rel=\"wikipedia\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Customer_experience\">Customer Experience</a> Barbara Higgins:\n<blockquote>Dear Mark A Peacock,\n\nOn behalf of United, I want to express our sincere regrets for any disruption to service you may have experienced when flying with us on Wednesday and Thursday this week. We know you expect us to take you where you want to go with on-time departures and arrivals. We failed to meet your expectations on those days.\n\nAs you may be aware, a computer outage, due to human error during routine system testing, significantly impacted our operations systemwide. Working as a team, we were able to get our airplanes and crews back on schedule ... and our passengers on their way.\n\nWe greatly appreciated your patience and know that we will make every effort to keep this type of situation from occurring in the future.\n\nYour satisfaction and business mean a great deal to United, and we look forward to our next opportunity to serve you.\n\nSincerely,\n\nBarbara Higgins\nVice-President\nCustomer Experience\nUnited Airlines</blockquote>\nI compare this to the impassioned, heartfelt apology over the PA from the lead flight attendant on my SFO-ORD flight.  Obviously exhausted by a long day, his voice cracked as he thanked us for \"hanging in there\" on what was a \"helluva\" day.  The whole crew lined up and thanked each passenger as we left the plane.\n\nThough I\'ve had more than my share of rude gate agents and flight attendants, this episode reinforced my sense that the cause of United\'s (and American\'s and Northwest\'s) customer service woes lies with those employees and managers who never see a passenger -- the ones who can hide by ignoring ringing phones and full e-mail boxes.  An <a href=\"http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118272836939946548-search.html?KEYWORDS=front+line+training&amp;COLLECTION=wsjie/6month\">article</a> in Monday\'s Wall Street Journal talks about the impact of training programs that require executives to perform front-line jobs.  I\'d like to see Ms Higgins roll up her sleeves and clean up the backlog of ticket refunds mentioned by so many passengers interviewed in the USAToday article, or help find some lost luggage, or help work some of those concourse-long lines that appear when United\'s delays and cancellations force people to miss their flights. Perhaps some front-line experience would incent her and her colleagues to fix United\'s mess rather than send me their generic apologies.','United’s Customer Service in a Free Fall','','publish','closed','closed','','uniteds-customer-service-in-a-free-fall','','','2007-06-26 11:52:13','2007-06-26 16:52:13','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2007/06/26/uniteds-customer-service-in-a-free-fall/',0,'post','',2),
(77,1,'2007-07-10 23:45:35','2007-07-11 04:45:35','Recorded in the Marriott Courtyard in <a href=\"http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=35.9288888889,-79.0394444444&amp;spn=0.1,0.1&amp;q=35.9288888889,-79.0394444444 (Chapel%20Hill%2C%20North%20Carolina)&amp;t=h\">Chapel Hill, North Carolina</a>, the current \"blogstorm\" about United Airlines\' poor customer service provides the data to calculate the true cost of connecting flights. A recent combined business and family trip to <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/new-york-city\">New York City</a> makes me realize that my family isn\'t a burden in my travels, but instead an eyeopener. Listeners comment on my recent blog posts; one uses Twitter to report his hotel broadband speed test results. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_55.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #55:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in Marriott Courtyard in Chapel Hill, NC</li>\n 	<li>Been on a weekly commute to San Francisco, though did get in a combo business/family trip to New York the week before last</li>\n 	<li>Have had very few problems flying to the Bay Area, but this last flight back from <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaGuardia_Airport\">LaGuardia</a> had us sitting on the runway for 3 hours</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Did We Make It</em> by <a href=\"http://www.caseydesmond.com/\">Casey Desmond</a></li>\n 	<li>Drew Leifheit of the <a href=\"http://budacast.hu/\">Budacast</a> podcast recounts a fond childhood memory of eating pecan pie while flying Delta with his grandmother</li>\n 	<li>John F corrects Barbara Higgins\' (United Airlines\' VP of customer experience) confusion between proactive and reactive customer service</li>\n 	<li>Daniel Perez of the <a href=\"http://www.highmoonmedia.com/tgt/\">Gamer Traveler</a> Podcast is surprised to see US TSA agents in Amsterdam\'s <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amsterdam_Airport_Schiphol\">Schipol Airport</a></li>\n 	<li>Mika Pyyhkala has been twittering his Speakeasy <a href=\"http://speakeasy.net/speedtest/\">broadband speed tests</a></li>\n 	<li>Steve Frick of the Frick\'s World blog has inspired me to take pictures out my hotel room window and add them to Flickr\'s <a href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/tags/viewfromhere/\">View From Here</a> collection</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Throwing up on the plane</em> by <a href=\"http://www.myspace.com/electromagneticimpulses2\">Electromagnetic Impulses</a></li>\n 	<li>Recent TravelCommons blog posts on United Airlines customer service got looped into the <a href=\"http://www.professorbainbridge.com/2007/06/united_customer.html\">edge</a> of a growing \"blogstorm\"</li>\n 	<li>Articles in the <a href=\"http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/chi-sun_jammed_0610jun10,1,5280955.story\">Chicago Tribune</a> and <a href=\"http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/travel/2007-06-18-ual-service-usat_N.htm\">USAToday</a> have fueled the storm</li>\n 	<li>The May 14th <a href=\"http://randomaccessbabble.blogspot.com/2007/05/dear-united-airlines-customer-service.html\">entry</a> in the Briana\'s Random Access Babble blog gives a detailed account of her efforts to fly from New York to Las Vegas to visit her family for the weekend; also a detailed accounting of her out-of-pocket costs caused by missed flight connections in Denver</li>\n 	<li>We use Briana\'s cash outlay figures to calculate the true cost of a connecting flight</li>\n 	<li>Leo Vegoda\'s recent missed connection experience in Washington\'s Dulles airport validates the findings reported in an International Herald Tribune <a href=\"http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/07/05/business/05late-web.php\">article</a> that says FAA flight delay statistics grossly understate the actual passenger delays</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Ghost</em> by <a href=\"http://www.hollowhorse.co.uk\">Hollow Horse</a></li>\n 	<li>I don\'t seem to have to \"downshift\" as much anymore when traveling with my family</li>\n 	<li>Traveling with my daughter has bumped me out of my usual rut</li>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from the <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com\">Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_55.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #55 - True Cost of Connecting; See More With The Family','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-55-true-cost-of-connecting-see-more-with-the-family','','','2021-09-25 09:02:47','2021-09-25 14:02:47','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2007/07/10/podcast-55-true-cost-of-connecting-see-more-with-the-family/',0,'post','',2),
(78,1,'2007-08-16 13:50:10','2007-08-16 18:50:10','Recorded in the <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_International_Airport\">San Francisco Airport</a> Marriott, a recent city-a-day business trip through Europe allowed me to do a first-hand comparison of the European air travel experience to the much maligned state of US air travel. We also update our thoughts on the state of mobile computing devices. Is it possible to travel \"PC-less\" yet, or are we still one release away from leaving the laptop at home? Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_56.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #56:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in SFO Marriott</li>\n 	<li>July and August have been heavy travel months</li>\n 	<li>Did Chicago\'s <a href=\"http://www.lateride.org/\">overnight bike ride</a> right before climbing on a plane for a city-a-day tour through Europe</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/download_track.php?id=CA84300ED431C297088FF88D72A178B3D5A6B8ADCC7B952E1A4A1E350BD450FA5840BD211C5180D7202C34D61CFFBC4F\" rel=\"nofollow\">Moving Forward</a></em> by <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=648F3E2C7F183297592F9B075C410E264C51054653F2D7CB016C2A94677CF9DF\" rel=\"nofollow\">Bitter:Sweet</a></li>\n 	<li>Alan Lew of the <a href=\"http://www.TravelGeography.info\">Geography for Travelers podcast</a> recounts sightings of TSA agents in <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/china/hong-kong\">Hong Kong</a></li>\n 	<li>Alan added pictures out his hotel room windows in Kuala Lumpur and <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/china/guangdong/guangzhou\">Guangzhou, China</a> to Flickr\'s <a href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/tags/viewfromhere/\">View From Here</a> photo stream. I added pictures out the windows of the Hilton Mainz and Paris Renaissance</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/download_track.php?id=B8FFD43EC56896775929CB3DCD2B1F2E5F6B3B0BE67F3AC30ED9588E915A88C55840BD211C5180D7202C34D61CFFBC4F\" rel=\"nofollow\">Scratch To Win</a></em> by <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=A540ACB4AF73C6EBAFA90EADEE4601D809748717F2419A98FB85DC7BD8639229\" rel=\"nofollow\">Ticklah</a></li>\n 	<li>The poor state of the US air travel experience is the travel topic <em>de jure</em> this summer</li>\n 	<li>My city-a-day business trip through Europe last month gave me a first-hand comparison of between the European and US air travel experiences</li>\n 	<li>Spent more time in lines in European airports but had much fewer flight delays once on the plane</li>\n 	<li>European gate agents and security screeners less polite than in the US, but airplanes were in better shape and the in-flight service much nicer</li>\n 	<li>All in all, the European experience was better, but not by the margin I had expected</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/download_track.php?id=CA84300ED431C297088FF88D72A178B3D5A6B8ADCC7B952E1A4A1E350BD450FA5840BD211C5180D7202C34D61CFFBC4F\" rel=\"nofollow\">Une Rose Noire</a></em> by <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=39CD9773095D43710560ACD6950AC8F009748717F2419A98FB85DC7BD8639229\" rel=\"nofollow\">Paul Cargnello</a></li>\n 	<li>Ed Vawter\'s latest episode of the <a href=\"http://www.qdinformation.com/searching/2007/07/09/searching-the-internet-episode-017-mobile-searching/\"><em>Searching the Internet</em> podcast</a> focuses on mobile search sites</li>\n 	<li>My T-Mobile GSM Blackberry allows me to go PC-less if I only need to track e-mail</li>\n 	<li>The Google Maps application for the Blackberry was very handy for finding a Paris restaurant recommended by a friend</li>\n 	<li>Apple\'s iPhone can almost, but not quite, replace a PC</li>\n 	<li>The high probability of a long flight delay means you want to bring along a device on which you can do real work -- a PC</li>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://promonet.iodalliance.com\">IODA Promonet</a></li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_56.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #56 - Lines Around the World; Shedding Some Electronic Weight','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-56-lines-around-the-world-shedding-some-electronic-weight','','','2021-09-25 09:01:12','2021-09-25 14:01:12','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2007/08/16/podcast-56-lines-around-the-world-shedding-some-electronic-weight/',0,'post','',1),
(79,1,'2007-08-31 15:05:22','2007-08-31 20:05:22','Sitting in <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Philadelphia International Airport\" rel=\"homepage\" href=\"http://www.phl.org/index.html\">Philadelphia Airport</a> drinking a pint of <a href=\"http://www.lancasterbrewing.com/HopHogIPA.html\">Hop Hog IPA</a> beer from the <a href=\"http://www.lancasterbrewing.com/home.html\">Lancaster Brewing Company</a> in nearby <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Lancaster, Pennsylvania\" rel=\"wikipedia\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancaster%2C_Pennsylvania\">Lancaster, PA</a> reminded me of a recent <a href=\"http://www.usatoday.com/travel/flights/2007-08-27-local-food_N.htm\">USA Today article</a> about the growth of local food fare in airports.  According to the article:\n<blockquote>\"There was a trend toward national brands in the 1990s, but now there\'s a desire for more balance with local brands,\" says Pat Banducci, senior vice president of HMS Host, a concessionaire at 102 airports worldwide, including 73 in North America.  Local restaurants make up 20% to 40% of all eateries at most big U.S. airports, Banducci says. He expects that to grow to 50% within five years.</blockquote>\nWe\'ve talked about this trend in earlier TravelCommons podcasts.  My travels through Memphis  last year were each punctuated with meals at either the <a href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/travelcommons/103278496/\">Corky\'s</a> or Interstate BBQ stands in the airport, and my single memory of Austin airport was lunch at Salt Lick BBQ.  However, beer seems to be the most popular local fare.  The Independence Brew Pub here in Philadelphia Airport, the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Anchor Brewing Company\" rel=\"homepage\" href=\"http://www.anchorbrewing.com\">Anchor Steam</a> bar in <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"San Francisco International Airport\" rel=\"homepage\" href=\"http://flysfo.com/\">San Francisco Airport</a>, the Gordon Biersch Brew Pub in <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"San Jose Airport (Mindoro)\" rel=\"wikipedia\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Jose_Airport_%28Mindoro%29\">San Jose Airport</a>...  Though my own personal sampling could be biased.\n\nThe USA Today article suggests that \"the shift to local restaurants began largely after 9/11. People are spending more time in airports, checking in hours before flights to meet security requirements.\"  It\'s not just additional security requirements, though, that are giving people additional \"dwell\" time in airports.  Through June, 27.1% of flights were at least 15 minutes late or canceled, a record for the period, according to the U.S. <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Bureau of Transportation Statistics\" rel=\"homepage\" href=\"http://www.bts.gov\">Bureau of Transportation Statistics</a>.  With 2-3 extra hours to kill in airports, getting a taste of local fare helps people get a little something out of a bad situation.\n\nAs good as this trend is, though, it\'s just not the same as getting out and about in the city you\'re visiting.  Somehow I don\'t think I\'d find the egg, cheese, and <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrapple\">scrapple</a> sandwich I bought from a streetcart this morning on 18th Street anywhere in this airport.\n<div class=\"zemanta-pixie\" style=\"margin-top: 10px; height: 15px;\"><img class=\"zemanta-pixie-img\" style=\"border: none; float: right;\" src=\"http://img.zemanta.com/pixy.gif?x-id=a04a3bac-f2a7-44ab-b0a6-e957ecea7b2b\" alt=\"\"></div>','Local Fare Eases Delays Just A Bit','','publish','closed','closed','','local-fare-eases-delays-just-a-bit','','','2021-09-25 09:03:29','2021-09-25 14:03:29','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2007/08/31/local-fare-eases-delays-just-a-bit/',0,'post','',2),
(80,1,'2007-09-23 21:06:32','2007-09-24 02:06:32','Recorded in the TravelCommons studio outside Chicago, I\'ve been bi-coastal since the last episode, bouncing between New York and San Francisco. A side trip down to <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/pennsylvania/philadelphia\">Philadelphia</a> yields a great street-food breakfast when I take the time to walk outside my hotel. Delays in my flights between O\'Hare and <a href=\"http://www.laguardiaairport.com\">LaGuardia airports</a> cause me to dig for the FAA\'s latest airport capacity report and gnash my teeth against the <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NIMBY\">NIMBYs</a> standing in the way of reasonable fixes. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_57.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #57:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in TravelCommons studio outside of Chicago, hopefully the <a href=\"http://www.chicago2016.org/\">home of the 2016 Summer Olympics</a></li>\n 	<li>Continue to bounce between the East and West coasts</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/media/files/DJBLUE/11541\">Hear Me</a></em> by DJ Blue</li>\n 	<li>Made United\'s top-tier status level in August. Get to walk on the red carpet all the time now, though it feels a bit dangerous cutting in front of other passengers</li>\n 	<li>Not flying American that much anymore, so dropping my Admirals Club membership after 10 years</li>\n 	<li>Leo Vegoda received a \"close\" patdown similar to the one I received in Schipol last month</li>\n 	<li>Craig Martin of the <em><a href=\"http://www.indietravelpodcast.com\">Indie Travel Podcast</a></em> gives a suggestion on Bluetooth keyboards</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/media/files/savoyard/10743\">Madrugada</a></em> by Savoyard</li>\n 	<li>After my morning workout in the Philadelphia Westin, I went for a walk looking for a breakfast place</li>\n 	<li>Bought a real Philadelphia breakfast -- an egg, cheese, and <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrapple\">scrapple</a> sandwich from a lunch truck</li>\n 	<li>Takes time to find real local fare</li>\n 	<li>A <a href=\"http://www.usatoday.com/travel/flights/2007-08-27-local-food_N.htm\">USAToday article</a> says local restaurants make up 20% to 40% of all eateries at most big U.S. airports</li>\n 	<li>On the same day, enjoyed a <a href=\"http://www.lancasterbrewing.com/HopHogIPA.html\">beer</a> in Philadelphia Airport from Lancaster County and an espresso in <a href=\"http://www.mwaa.com/dulles/dulles.htm\">Washington Dulles airport</a> from a <a href=\"http://www.mayorgacoffee.com/index.php\">Maryland coffee roaster</a></li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/media/files/djlang59/10579\">Crazy Love</a></em> by DJ Lang</li>\n 	<li>A trip from Chicago to New York gave me 2 hour delays each way, doubling the scheduled length of each flight</li>\n 	<li>On my outbound flight, the United pilot sent back personal apologizes to top-tier status fliers, similar to his colleague who made the <a href=\"http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118826634834410559.html\">front page</a> of the <em>Wall Street Journal</em></li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20724859/\"><em>BusinessWeek</em> cover story</a> from earlier this month says the <a href=\"http://www.faa.gov/\">Federal Aviation Administration</a> predicts there will be 1 billion people a year flying by 2015, a 36% increase from today</li>\n 	<li>FAA\'s <a href=\"http://www.faa.gov/airports_airtraffic/airports/resources/publications/reports/media/fact_2.pdf\">FACT 2 study</a> predicts 18 airports will need additional capacity, and 7 metro areas will need additional capacity by 2015</li>\n 	<li>The most important expansion -- the <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O\'Hare_International_Airport#Modernization_plan\">O\'Hare Modernization Program</a> -- is being held up by a <a href=\"http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-cemeterysuit_web_14sep14,0,2656304.story\">suit over moving a cemetery</a></li>\n 	<li>NIMBY-ism is responsible for much of today\'s travel hassles</li>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org\">ccMixter</a></li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_57.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #57 - Making Time for Local Fare; What’s Standing in the Way of Fixing Our Airports','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-57-making-time-for-local-fare-whats-standing-in-the-way-of-fixing-our-airports','','','2021-09-25 08:59:53','2021-09-25 13:59:53','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2007/09/23/podcast-57-making-time-for-local-fare-whats-standing-in-the-way-of-fixing-our-airports/',0,'post','',4),
(81,1,'2007-10-07 19:09:54','2007-10-08 00:09:54','For the past couple of months, I\'ve been wondering if it has been my bad luck with Hertz or the rental car industry trying to <em>stretch</em> their cars a bit farther.  A recent <a href=\"http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119137170889247162.html\">article</a> in the <em>Wall Street Journal</em> assuaged my paranoia.  Though Hertz claims their fleet age hasn\'t changed, the owners of <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"National Car Rental\" rel=\"homepage\" href=\"http://www.nationalcar.com/\">National</a>, <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Alamo Rent a Car\" rel=\"homepage\" href=\"http://www.alamo.com/\">Alamo</a>, and <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Enterprise Holdings\" rel=\"homepage\" href=\"http://www.enterpriseholdings.com/\">Enterprise Rent A Car</a> admit that they\'re letting their fleets <em>age</em> an additional 2,000 miles.  My personal experience -- I\'ve received more 20,000+ mile cars from Hertz this year than ever before, and this is with some level of status in Hertz\'s Gold Club.\n\nI don\'t care as much about the mileage as I do the state of the car when I receive it.  The last couple of cars I received from Hertz at <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"San Francisco International Airport\" rel=\"homepage\" href=\"http://flysfo.com/\">San Francisco Airport</a> made me pull a T-shirt out of my bag so I could sit on something clean.  Stained seats, soda residue on the center console, ashes in a supposed non-smoking car -- I could take an extra 2,000 miles if Hertz would just clean the insides of the car once in a while.\n<!--more-->\nSticky Hertz cars is the lesser of two evils for me, though.  I had switched over to <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Avis Budget Group\" rel=\"wikipedia\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avis_Budget_Group\">Avis</a> for 3-4 months.  I liked the free <em>Wall Street Journal</em> that came with every car and the WiFi hot spots in some of their locations.  However, my time with Avis came to an immediate halt when they called me about a damaged back-up light on a car I\'d rented 11 months prior.  When I finally received the paperwork, I pointed them to the line in the damage report where I had clearly printed \"Light was damaged when I received the car.\"  I haven\'t heard from Avis since.  But nor have they heard from me or my credit card.\n\nThe rental car companies may think these actions are reducing their costs and improving their profit margins, but it\'s actually costing them revenue -- at least from me.  The potential hassles and the disgusting cars are tilting me toward cabs and limos.  Last year, at the tipping point where the cost of rental car was the same or maybe even a bit more than the cost of a taxi, I\'d take the rental car.  I enjoyed the flexibility of having a car, and even looked forward to finding a fun car in the Avis lot or under the Hertz Gold canopy.  Now, though, I\'ll pay extra to <em>avoid</em> them.  The cost of throwing away my impromptu T-shirt seat covers is just getting too much.\n<div class=\"zemanta-pixie\" style=\"margin-top: 10px; height: 15px;\"><img class=\"zemanta-pixie-img\" style=\"border: none; float: right;\" src=\"http://img.zemanta.com/pixy.gif?x-id=210b2dd6-6eeb-486c-90e7-0db1bc3fc59d\" alt=\"\" /></div>','Rent-a-Wreck, or at least Rent-a-Stained','','publish','closed','closed','','rent-a-wreck-or-at-least-rent-a-stained','','','2007-10-07 19:09:54','2007-10-08 00:09:54','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2007/10/07/rent-a-wreck-or-at-least-rent-a-stained/',0,'post','',4),
(82,1,'2007-10-24 23:24:57','2007-10-25 04:24:57','Recorded in the <a href=\"http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=39.1319444444,-77.2263888889&amp;spn=0.1,0.1&amp;q=39.1319444444,-77.2263888889 (Gaithersburg%2C%20Maryland)&amp;t=h\">Gaithersburg, MD</a> Marriott outside <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/washington-dc\">Washington, DC</a> at the end of an intense week of travel that had me flying from the East Coast to the West Coast and then back east again... on four different airlines. With many airlines\' plummeting customer satisfaction scores, we ask the question \"Who raves about their airline?\" Recent trips allow me to do a \"seat-to-seat\" comparison of two high-buzz airlines -- <a href=\"http://www.jetblue.com/\">JetBlue</a> and Virgin America. Our recurring <em>Travel Tech</em> topic talks about replacing a laptop with the latest evolution of Nokia\'s Internet tablet, and hunting down power outlets in airports. Also, a listener suggestion on local food in DC\'s <a href=\"http://www.mwaa.com/national/\">Reagan National Airport</a> leads to frustration at missing a great burger. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_58.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #58:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in the Gaithersburg, MD Marriott outside Washington, DC</li>\n 	<li>Had an extensive tour of East and West Coast airports over the past three weeks -- EWR, DCA, IAD, FLL, RDU, SNA, OAK, and SFO</li>\n 	<li>Flying to the Northeast is much more painful than flying to the West Coast, even though the ORD-SFO flight is twice as long</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/junoon-infiniti/\">Nachoon Gi</a></em> by Junoon</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Dave of the <a href=\"http://sandandtsunamis.blogspot.com\">Sand and Tsunamis blog</a> talked about hitting the <a href=\"http://www.fiveguys.com/\">Five Guys Famous Burger</a> stand in DC\'s Reagan National Airport. I wanted to try it out on my DC trip last week. Unfortunately, Five Guys is buried behind security in the <a href=\"http://www.usairways.com\">USAir</a> concourse and I was flying United</li>\n 	<li>Chris Christensen of the <a href=\"http://AmateurTraveler.com\">Amateur Traveler</a> podcast sent along a review of TravelCommons from Acura Style magazine</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/lucas-divine/\">Old Mexico</a></em> by Jeffery Luck Lucas</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Who Raves about Their Airline?</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Most of the airline customer satisfaction problems are with what used to be called \"legacy\" carriers, now called \"network\" carriers -- USAir, Northwest, Delta, American, United</li>\n 	<li>Many elite fliers living in hub cities of network carriers (e.g., Philadelphia for USAir, Detroit for Northwest) complain about being \"trapped\"</li>\n 	<li>A stark comparison to the ringing endorsement of JetBlue offered by Business Week\'s executive editor in this <a href=\"http://www.businessweek.com/mediacenter/podcasts/cover_stories/covercast_02_22_07.htm\">podcast</a></li>\n 	<li>Virgin America still feels like they\'re in \"beta\" mode</li>\n 	<li>JetBlue offers a great in-flight experience -- good leg room, choice of snacks, free <a href=\"http://www.directv.com\">DirecTV</a> in seatback screens -- but the ground experience in JFK is a hassle</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://udayantripathi.com\">Udayan Tripathi</a> describes his flight across the US on Frontier Airlines</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://www.brunomisonne.com/aviation%20music_003.htm\">Johannesburg airport tower party</a></em> by <a href=\"http://www.brunomisonne.com\">Bruno Misonne</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Travel Tech Potpourri</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://marcloehrwald.com/\">Marc Löhrwald</a> is very satisfied with the <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N800\">Nokia N800</a> as a PC replacement, and doesn\'t have to take it out of his briefcase when passing through security. He is, though, going to upgrade to the new N810</li>\n 	<li>Finding power outlets in airports can be a bit of an Easter Egg hunt</li>\n 	<li>O\'Hare\'s Terminal 1 has put in a number of free workstations with plenty of plugs at eye level</li>\n 	<li>Other airports push their pay-to-charge vending machines</li>\n 	<li>Here\'s a <a href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/travelcommons/1736936801/\">picture</a> of the Medusa-like cell phone and PDA charger in <a href=\"http://www.rdu.com\">Raleigh-Durham airport</a></li>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\">Magnatune</a> and <a href=\"http://www.brunomisonne.com\">Bruno Misonne</a></li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments@travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_58.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #58 - Who Raves About Their Airline; Powering Up in Airports','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-58-who-raves-about-their-airline-powering-up-in-airports','','','2026-08-28 10:09:00','2026-08-28 15:09:00','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2007/10/24/podcast-58-who-raves-about-their-airline-powering-up-in-airports/',0,'post','',3),
(85,1,'2007-10-31 20:10:09','2007-11-01 01:10:09','<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2><strong>About Mark Peacock</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:image -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/IMG_2601.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/IMG_2601-200x300.jpg\" alt=\"\"/></a></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Mark Peacock has been a near-constant business traveler for over 35 years. Beginning with his first flight on his first day of first full-time job (an American Airline MD-80 from ORD to DFW), Mark has traveled continuously for high-tech companies and management consultancies.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Mark has lived in Chicago (three times), Memphis, Louisville, Washington DC, the Bay Area, Dallas, Philadelphia, Detroit, and now lives in Nashville.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2><strong>Contact Us</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>EMAIL – comments@travelcommons.com</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2><strong>About the TravelCommons Podcast</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Click <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/TravelCommonsMediaKit.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"mediakit\">here</a> to download a media kit</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','About Us','','publish','closed','closed','','about-2-2','','','2022-08-30 19:14:28','2022-08-31 00:14:28','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/about-2/',0,'page','',0),
(86,1,'2007-11-05 22:56:44','2007-11-06 04:56:44','Northwestern University Library just launched <a href=\"http://www.library.northwestern.edu/transportation/digital-collections/menus/index.html\">web access</a> to their Transportation Library Menu Collection, which includes \"more than 400 menus from 54 national and international airline carriers, cruise ships, and railroad companies, with coverage from 1929 to the present.\"  Most of the menus are from George Foster, a Northwestern alum, who appears to have mostly flown first class on his travels around the world for UNICEF and the World Health Organization.\n\nEach page of each menu has been scanned.  The <a href=\"http://digital.library.northwestern.edu/inu-tmenu/tmenu-UA005.html\">lunch menu</a> for a March 1969 United Airlines flight from San Francisco to Detroit supports United\'s \"Red Carpet\" theme with a bright red accent on each page.  The beverage list asks passengers to \"Please be our guest\" and order the \"United Airlines Special Very Dry Martini (Gin or Vodka)\".  On the facing page, we can see Foster commenting that the \"Poached Quenelle of Scallops, Nantua Sauce\" were \"Excellent\".  He didn\'t note whether he chose the \"Broiled Filet Mignon, Bercy Sauce\" or the \"Baked Langostinos Thermador\" for his entreé.  A bit different from the turkey wrap and the cold chicken salad I was offered when upgraded United\'s First Class a couple of weeks ago.','Recalling When It Was A Movable Feast','','publish','closed','closed','','recalling-when-it-was-a-movable-feast','','','2007-11-05 22:56:44','2007-11-06 04:56:44','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2007/11/05/recalling-when-it-was-a-movable-feast/',0,'post','',1),
(87,1,'2007-11-21 22:47:30','2007-11-22 04:47:30','Recorded in the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago in the middle of the one week a year I refuse to travel -- <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thanksgiving\">Thanksgiving Day</a> week. With environmental and economic reasons to reduce unneeded car trips, how easy is it to take a train to and from the airport? The answer is mixed and it doesn\'t look to get any better any time soon. We also talk about the deteriorating state of the rental car fleet -- which is making public transit look more attractive. A listener sends in a comment on airport power station etiquette, and we talk about a collection of airline food menus from the past. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_59.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #59:\n<ul>\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\">\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in the TravelCommon studios outside <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/chicago\">Chicago, IL</a></li>\n 	<li>No travel this week -- leaving the airports to the \"less experienced\" travelers</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/swivel-deep/\"><em>Arlos Auto Parts and Salvation</em></a> by Swivel Neck Jones</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\">\n<ul>\n 	<li>Received an e-mail from United the morning after a LAX-ORD flight that was delayed 3 hours. The e-mail gave a nice apology and 5,000 miles for my troubles.</li>\n 	<li>A listener talks about his travails in finding working power outlets in airports and on airplanes</li>\n 	<li>Northwestern University Library launched <a href=\"http://www.library.northwestern.edu/transportation/digital-collections/menus/index.html\">web access</a> to its collection of past airline menus. Talked about a 1969 United Airlines <a href=\"http://digital.library.northwestern.edu/inu-tmenu/tmenu-UA005.html\">menu</a> and a 1962 <a href=\"http://digital.library.northwestern.edu/inu-tmenu/tmenu-EAA001.html\">menu</a> from East Africa Airways.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/fuzz-messy/\"><em>Smiling Perspective</em></a> by General Fuzz</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Trains to Planes</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\">\n<ul>\n 	<li>What\'s the best way from Newark Airport to Manhattan? It depends how much time and money you have, and it\'s an inverse relationship.</li>\n 	<li>With lots of time, you can save money by taking the monorail over the marshes to a train station served by Amtrak and NJ Transit trains</li>\n 	<li>It’s a pretty handy set up, but as with many – too many – plane-train connections, not intuitively obvious, not very user-friendly, at least for first time users</li>\n 	<li>The \"gold standard\" of airport rail links remains the <a href=\"http://www.heathrowexpress.com/index.asp\">Heathrow Express</a> -- expensive, but convenient</li>\n 	<li>Subway systems in <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/washington-dc\">Washington DC</a>, Chicago and Atlanta inexpensively deliver you directly to the terminal</li>\n 	<li>Public pressure to locate new airports far away from population centers doesn\'t bode well for easy public transit links. Denver\'s new airport may get a <a href=\"http://www.rtd-fastracks.com/ec_1\">rail link</a> by 2015.</li>\n 	<li>Wikipedia has what looks like a good <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airport_rail_link\">listing</a> of global airport rail links.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/atek-phoenix/\"><em>Goa Life</em></a> by Ambient Teknology</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Renting a Rambling Wreck</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\">\n<ul>\n 	<li>I’ve received more 20,000+ mile cars from Hertz this year than ever before, and this is with some level of status in Hertz’s Gold Club.</li>\n 	<li>A <em>Wall Street Journal</em> <a href=\"http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119137170889247162.html\">article</a> said that rental car companies are letting their fleets age an additional 2,000 miles</li>\n 	<li>Another <em>WSJ</em> <a href=\"http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119500412182192191.html?mod=pj_main_hs_coll\">article</a> says that the drop in rental car customer satisfaction reported in the latest JD Powers <a href=\"http://www.jdpower.com/travel/ratings/rental-car-ratings\">survey</a> is linked to the aging fleet.</li>\n 	<li>I switched to Avis until they tried to stick me with the repair cost of a previously damaged tail light</li>\n 	<li>It\'s driving me to use cabs, limos, and public transit more often, even when more expensive and less convenient</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\">Magnatune</a></li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments@travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_59.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #59 - Trains to Planes; Renting a Rambling Wreck','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-59-trains-to-planes-renting-a-rambling-wreck','','','2021-09-25 08:56:45','2021-09-25 13:56:45','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2007/11/21/podcast-59-trains-to-planes-renting-a-rambling-wreck/',0,'post','',3),
(89,1,'2007-12-22 22:03:02','2007-12-23 04:03:02','Recorded in the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago after I\'ve finished up my <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_travel\">business travel</a> for the year. Since a number of listeners aren\'t frequent travelers, we provide some tips on how to blend in, look like a pro, and generally reduce a little of the hassle of holiday travel. Also, GPS devices are hot for the holidays this year. We talk about their good points and a few gotchas. Listener comments include suggestions on public transit to Denver airport, another happy <a href=\"http://www.jetblue.com/\">JetBlue</a> customer, and a call for help dealing with tight UK carry-on limits. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_60.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #60:\n<ul>\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\">\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in the TravelCommon studios outside <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/chicago\">Chicago, IL</a></li>\n 	<li>December is a funny time to travel -- light traffic the beginning of the month, crushing traffic at the end.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/magnacomp-christmas/\"><em>Angels we have heard on high</em></a> performed by James Edwards</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\">\n<ul>\n 	<li>A listener from Denver suggests <a href=\"http://www.rtd-denver.com/skyRide/\">skyRide</a> bus service as a cheap and comfortable way to get to <a href=\"http://www.flydenver.com/\">Denver International Airport</a></li>\n 	<li>A recent visitor to San Francisco agrees with episode #59\'s assessment of the BART system cloth seats -- they\'re gross.</li>\n 	<li>A listener from Richmond, Virginia raves about the new JetBlue service into RIC</li>\n 	<li>A listener from London mentions the <a href=\"http://www.bia.homeoffice.gov.uk/managingborders/technology/eborders/iris/\">Iris scan</a> speeds up immigration, but is looking for suggestions on how to handle the UK\'s restrictive one carry-on bag rule.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/magnacomp-christmas/\"><em>The First Noel</em></a> performed by Ralph Rousseau Meulenbroeks</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Tips for Holiday Travel\n</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\">\n<ul>\n 	<li>The most telling difference between an experienced and an amateur traveler is what the military calls “situational awareness”</li>\n 	<li>The place where experience shows the most is in the security line</li>\n 	<li>Tip #1 – Use the line to get prepared</li>\n 	<li>Tip #2 – Never let the x-ray machine go hungry</li>\n 	<li>Tip #3 – if you aren’t prepared, step aside until you are</li>\n 	<li>These three tips all have one key similarity – consideration for others.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/shira-castle/\"><em>Christmas Day in the Morning</em></a> is by Shira Kammen</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>GPS as the Hot Travel Gift</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\">\n<ul>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://adage.com/article?article_id=122751\">AdAge</a> magazine declared GPS as “hot for the holidays” with unit sales up 488% over last year.</li>\n 	<li>Bought a refurbed <a href=\"http://www.tomtom.com\">TomTom</a> One from <a href=\"http://www.buy.com/prod/tomtom-one-portable-gps-preloaded-map-of-us-canada-on-sd-card/q/loc/111/205833413.html\">Buy.com</a> for $160 a few months ago and it’s been great</li>\n 	<li>Advantage over built-in units and rental car units is the ability to upload information.</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://www.tomtomforums.com/forumdisplay.php?f=14\">tomtomforums.com</a> and <a href=\"http://poiplaza.com\">poiplaza.com</a> have custom point-of-interest files for download. I\'ve found the Starbucks file very useful.</li>\n 	<li>However, GPS units will get it wrong on occasion.</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing\n</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\">Magnatune</a></li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments@travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_60.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #60 - Tips for Holiday Travel; GPS as the Hot Travel Gift','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-60-tips-for-holiday-travel-gps-as-the-hot-travel-gift','','','2021-09-25 08:55:20','2021-09-25 13:55:20','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2007/12/22/podcast-60-tips-for-holiday-travel-gps-as-the-hot-travel-gift/',0,'post','',5),
(90,1,'2008-01-04 22:43:41','2008-01-05 04:43:41','Watching United Airlines cancel more than 600 flights at the beginning of Christmas week, I was glad that I was flying Frontier Airlines to Denver later in the week for a holiday ski vacation. The US Dept of Transportation\'s latest <a href=\"http://www.dot.gov/affairs/dot0108.htm\" title=\"US DOT Nov 07 Air Travel Consumer Report\">Air Travel Consumer Report</a> supported this feeling, showing Frontier with the lowest rate of canceled flights in November 2007.  However, I was less thrilled when I found myself waiting almost an hour in Denver and O\'Hare for Frontier\'s luggage carousels to disgorge my family\'s checked luggage.\n\nAs airlines grasp at profitability in the face of $100/barrel oil, they are tightly optimizing their cost structures.  Their operations don\'t have what project managers call \"slack\". In this case, the spare capacity or resources to handle less-than-ideal circumstances.\n\nUnited blames what they said was the <a href=\"http://www.united.com/press/detail/0,6862,58793,00.html\" title=\"United Airlines Reports December Traffic Results\">worst December weather</a> in company\'s history for the incredible number of flight cancellations and delays during Christmas week.  However, American and Southwest Airlines both managed to face the same weather issues at their Chicago hubs with only a <a href=\"http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/chi-tue_united_1225dec25,0,1421182.story\">handful of cancellations</a> -- United needed to cancel over 140 Chicago flights by Christmas Eve, while American dropped 11 flights and Southwest lost only 4. United\'s airline pilots union says the problem wasn\'t weather, it was lack of pilots. A <a href=\"http://origin.denverpost.com/business/ci_7833868\">union spokesman said</a>, \"They don\'t have enough people. A little bit of a burp, and boom, they\'re hammered.\" United could have built in buffers -- some slack -- into their December crew schedules, but then would\'ve lost money if the buffers weren\'t needed. United gambled and it lost.\n<!--more-->\nLack of slack isn\'t just an airline problem. On New Year\'s Eve, snow, high winds and avalanche danger closed Interstate 70 between Denver and Vail ski area, <a href=\"http://www.denverpost.com/search/ci_7849262\">stranding over 2,000 travelers</a>. Many of those travelers were heading down to Denver airport on shuttle services for flights home. When I-70 closed, shuttle customers were dropped at hotels and temporary shelters without transport to the airport when the road re-opened. The president of one shuttle told a Denver television reporter -- \"It\'s the holiday season; there\'s not a spare seat\".\n\nAll travel businesses should run cost-efficient operations.  But there is an expectation of service that overly optimized operations miss when they focus solely on cost savings. This short-sightedness is forcing the travel industry to spend money to fight initiatives such as the <a href=\"http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/01/04/BUS6U89C0.DTL\">airline passenger bill of rights</a> that will force them to re-balance their cost savings-vs.-customer service equation.  It seems that it would be a lot easier if travel companies would instead spend some of that money to give the passengers a little bit of slack.','Cut Us Some Slack','','publish','closed','closed','','cut-us-some-slack','','','2008-01-04 22:43:41','2008-01-05 04:43:41','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2008/01/04/cut-us-some-slack/',0,'post','',1),
(92,1,'2008-01-21 21:16:10','2008-01-22 03:16:10','Every once in a while you <a href=\"http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2006/12/06/what-was-she-thinking/\" title=\"What Was She Thinking?\">read</a> <a href=\"http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2007/01/23/what-was-she-thinking-2/\" title=\"What Was She Thinking-2?\">something</a> that makes you say out loud \"What was that person thinking\"? Indeed, after reading <a href=\"http://www.usatoday.com/travel/news/2007-09-21-mit-student-bomb_N.htmhttp://www.usatoday.com/travel/news/2007-09-21-mit-student-bomb_N.htm\" title=\"MIT student with fake bomb arrested at airport\">more</a> and <a href=\"http://www.dnaindia.com/report.asp?newsid=1145948\" title=\"Passenger offloaded from plane after molesting crew\">more</a> of these articles, I stopped commenting on them.  Passenger stupidity was no longer novel.  However, on my recent flight to Amsterdam, I did experience a novel level of stupidity -- new to me <em>and</em> the entire flight crew.\n\nIt was a United Airlines 767 flying out of Chicago.  The plane was full, but not jammed.  I was getting settled into business class -- collecting a glass of champagne from the flight attendant, finding a place to stash my pillow and blanket -- when I felt and heard a bang.  We hadn\'t left the gate yet, so I wasn\'t too worried -- perhaps someone was a bit rough in hooking up the tug or closing a luggage door.  However, when I heard the captain key the mike, I was less confident.\n\nThe captain had felt the same bang.  He called down to the ground crew and asked them what in the heck they were doing.  Only then did they tell him that one of the baggage loaders had decided to take a shortcut with his luggage cart and drive <em>under</em> the plane.  Unfortunately, he was a poor judge of height and didn\'t quite make it -- hence the bang.  The luggage cart hit the fuselage of the 767 <em>hard</em>.  The captain called out Maintenance who didn\'t take long to figure out that the resulting ding in the aluminum skin wasn\'t going to stand up to a North Atlantic crossing. We packed up our belongings and shuffled back into O\'Hare.\n\nAll the flight attendants were shaking their heads.  None of them had ever had anything like this happen to them before.  A few started a pool on how long it would take to fire the handler.  It wasn\'t a complete disaster, though -- for me, that is.  United ended up \"re-deploying\" a 767 bound for São Paulo to our flight.  And, walking up to our new gate, I heard my name being called.  I\'d been upgraded to 1st Class to compensate for the inconvenience.  So, 3 hours later, I was settling into my larger seat, collecting a better glass of champagne from the flight attendant, and listening to the captain say over the PA system \"I don\'t know what that guy was thinking...\"','What Was He Thinking?','','publish','closed','closed','','what-was-he-thinking','','','2008-01-21 21:16:10','2008-01-22 03:16:10','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2008/01/21/what-was-he-thinking/',0,'post','',1),
(93,1,'2008-01-27 22:58:32','2008-01-28 04:58:32','Recorded in the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago on a rare full week in town after trips to <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/the-netherlands/amsterdam\">Amsterdam</a> and <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/great-plains/kansas-city\">Kansas City</a>. In this episode, an unusual flight delay makes us think about embracing the delay rather than fighting it, and snatching a couple hour vacation in Amsterdam allows us to explore some high and low culture. Listener comments include suggestions on easy-to-pack workout shoes and a question on how to make air travel greener. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_61.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #61:\n<ul>\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\">\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in the TravelCommons studios outside <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/chicago\">Chicago, IL</a></li>\n 	<li>Talking about January travel means talking about the weather; everybody’s been clobbered by the weather this month</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/buy_album.php?id=28EF83EE66BC30F7A29060F2EE7D5A63853661EE921AD0B5F46646F31FC53762518D71671346229B61068D83046F9760\"><em>Nu Love</em></a> by <a href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=59ADD660576A8DD437473F3662DA2A64FF449762E1BA4F7793D9221B486E5F31\" rel=\"nofollow\">The Bex</a></li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\">\n<ul>\n 	<li>Good response to last episode\'s request for suggestions on compact gym shoes</li>\n 	<li>Dan Grabon suggests racing flats</li>\n 	<li><a title=\"Frick\'s World\" href=\"http://fricksworld.blogspot.com/\">Steve Frick</a> suggests flaming <a title=\"Zappos.com\" href=\"http://www.zappos.com/n/p/dp/1633204.html\">Converse Chuck Taylor high tops</a></li>\n 	<li>Urgency around the question lessened this month when the UK DoT relaxed its restrictions and now allows 2 pieces of carry-on</li>\n 	<li><a title=\"Peter Rukavina\'s blog\" href=\"http://ruk.ca/\">Peter Rukavina</a> asks what frequent travelers think about the environmental impact of their traveling</li>\n 	<li><a title=\"Virgin Atlantic Carbon Offset Article\" href=\"http://www.aboutmyplanet.com/climate-change/virgin-airlines-launch/\">Virgin Atlantic</a>, SAS, and <a title=\"FAQ on Continental\'s offset scheme\" href=\"http://www.continental.com/web/en-US/content/company/profile/environment_faq.aspx\">Continental</a> have announced carbon offset schemes</li>\n 	<li>Some <a title=\"BusinessWeek article on TerraPass\" href=\"http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_13/b4027057.htm\">controversy</a> about the efficacy of carbon offset schemes</li>\n 	<li>UK government’s Stern Report says that <a title=\"Stern Report\'s analysis of aviation impact on global warming\" href=\"http://www.sbac.co.uk/community/cms/content/preview/news_item_view.asp?i=14736&amp;t=0\">aviation CO<sub>2</sub> emissions</a> account for about 1.6% of global greenhouse gas emissions</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/buy_album.php?id=C28E7E6E86AA68440FF495227937622F853661EE921AD0B5F46646F31FC53762518D71671346229B61068D83046F9760\"><em>M4 (Part II)</em></a> by <a href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=1372C88AEC26DADFE416E71A587BFA89F55397894BB80F5E74747143A2524C8F\" rel=\"nofollow\">Faunts</a></li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n</ul>\n<strong><a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen\">Zen</a> of Delays\n</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\">\n<ul>\n 	<li>Listener pointed to a Conde Nast’s Portfolio.com <a title=\"What I Learned on the Road This Year\" href=\"http://www.portfolio.com/business-travel/seat-2B/2007/12/18/Best-Business-Travel-Lessons/comments\">article</a> titled “What I Learned on the Road This Year -- Traveling for business is a Zen practice: Keep your head down and take good notes”</li>\n 	<li>Don’t know if it’s Zen, with its emphasis on mindful acceptance of the present moment, or ju jitsu, with its training on using your attacker’s energy against him – the sort of “bend like a willow, don’t break like the oak” thinking</li>\n 	<li>This is, of course, completely antithetical to the concept of a “road warrior” – one who controls every aspect of their travel experience</li>\n 	<li>My Amsterdam flight was delayed for 3 hours by a United baggage handler trying to take a shortcut <a title=\"TravelCommons blog article describing the incident\" href=\"http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2008/01/21/what-was-he-thinking/\"><em>underneath</em></a> our 767</li>\n 	<li>Beer makes the Zen thing a whole lot easier</li>\n 	<li>Flowing around the evening’s obstacles I ended up in a more comfortable place</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/buy_album.php?id=C760A5AF2DBCB13FBF16916A7E363799853661EE921AD0B5F46646F31FC53762518D71671346229B61068D83046F9760\"><em>Central Calm</em></a> is by <a href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=CC53C7D4D44C3D89C4F8289D6CF77E78FF449762E1BA4F7793D9221B486E5F31\" rel=\"nofollow\">Skywards</a></li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Sneaking in a Vacation</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\">\n<ul>\n 	<li>Past T/C episodes -- <a title=\"Podcast #16 - Squeezing in Tourism; Can We Stop Sharing?\" href=\"http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2005/10/01/podcast-16-squeezing-in-tourism-can-we-stop-sharing/\">#16</a> and <a title=\"Podcast #34 - 20-Minute Vacation, Making It Look Easy\" href=\"http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2006/03/04/podcast-34-20-minute-vacation-making-it-look-easy/\">#34</a> -- have talked about the importance to take advantage of travel to take a little time to yourself</li>\n 	<li>Had a free afternoon in Amsterdam, so decided to walk around a bit</li>\n 	<li>Focused on seeing just two things -- <a title=\"Van Gogh Museum\" href=\"http://www3.vangoghmuseum.nl/vgm/index.jsp\">Van Gogh Museum</a> and the <a title=\"Red Light District overview\" href=\"http://www.amsterdam.info/red-light-district/\">Red Light District</a></li>\n 	<li>Thought about sampling the wares of one of the <a title=\"Amsterdam coffee houses\" href=\"http://www.amsterdam.info/coffeeshops/\">\"coffee houses\"</a> but then thought better of it</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing\n</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://iodapromonet.com/index.php\">IODA Promonet</a></li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments@travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_61.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #61 - Zen of Delays; Sneaking in a Vacation','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-61-zen-of-delays-sneaking-in-a-vacation','','','2021-09-25 09:09:04','2021-09-25 14:09:04','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2008/01/27/podcast-61-zen-of-delays-sneaking-in-a-vacation/',0,'post','',3),
(94,1,'2008-02-08 12:08:00','2008-02-08 18:08:00','A spate of recent news <a href=\"http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120233579961148771.html?mod=djemITP\" title=\"WSJ.com: Airline Merger Talks May Lead to Double Wedding\">articles</a> point to the growing inevitability of a domino set of mergers -- Northwest and Delta, immediately followed by United and Continental.  The only thing that seems to be holding up the first domino is <a href=\"http://www.usatoday.com/travel/flights/2008-02-08-steenland-merger_N.htm\" title=\"Why NWA CEO Steenland\'s role may be merger hang-up\">who gets to be CEO</a> of the new DeltaNorWest.\n\nWhile these deals may or may not be winners for the shareholders and the employees, they are typically disasters for customers, especially frequent travelers.  Airlines are notoriously complex beasts. Merging fleets, union seniority lists, hubs, and reservation systems is an inexact science at best -- as the recent USAir-America West and American-TWA mergers demonstrated.\n\nThere\'s been a lot of arm-waving by the carriers, especially United, about the need to \"rationalize domestic capacity\" even though seat utilization -- the number of seats filled with travelers -- in 2007 was at an all-time high.  The real driver behind these mergers is increased pricing power.  An airplane seat is a commodity.  A carrier can only raise prices if everyone else goes along.  If just one airline doesn\'t follow the rest in raising prices, everybody has to <a href=\"http://rickseaney.com/2008/01/15/50-roundtrip-airline-ticket-fuel-surcharge-officially-dead/\" title=\"$50 Roundtrip Airline Ticket Fuel Surcharge Officially Dead\">back down</a>.  Taking out two carriers -- moving toward an <a href=\"http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/oligopoly\" title=\"Definition of oligopoly\">oligopoly</a> -- makes it much easier to manage market pricing.\n<!--more-->\nWhat keeps the US market from deteriorating into an oligopoly?  New airlines -- companies like JetBlue, Virgin America, and Skybus -- <em>and </em>access to airports -- gates, landing slots, aircraft parking spaces.  Even when carriers like United have been reducing domestic capacity, they\'ve been loath to release gates at their hub airports.  The FAA has had a decade-long program to \"Reduce Barriers to Entry and Enhance Competitive Access\".  Reading through the most recent <a href=\"http://www.faa.gov/airports_airtraffic/airports/aip/guidance_letters/media/pgl_04_08b_competition_highlights_2006.pdf\" title=\"FAA Competitive Access Report\">report</a> issued in September 2006, airports like <a href=\"http://www.flynashville.com/airlinegate/\" title=\"Nashville Airport Airline Gate Availability\">Nashville</a> and <a href=\"http://www.flyoakland.com/competition_plan.shtml\" title=\"Oakland Airport competition plan\">Oakland</a> have restructured gate leases to make space for new airlines.  But, airports like LAX, which used long-term gate leases to finance terminal improvements, are in a<a href=\"http://www.thetransitcoalition.us/newspdf/lat20070108b.pdf\" title=\"The city\'s airport agency is considering acquiring terminals from carriers in an effort to increase the number of flights from low-cost airlines.\"> tougher spot</a>.   Some gate battle <a href=\"http://www.philly.com/inquirer/business/20071111_Gates_are_at_Core_of_Airport_Battle.html\" title=\"Gates are at Core of Airport Battle\">escalate</a> -- US Airways threatened to cancel its new Philadelphia-China route if Philadelphia Airport let Delta move their gates to a better terminal.\n\nThe algebra for frequent travelers is pretty simple -- more available gates equals more new airlines, which equals lower fares and better schedule selection.  Add a hot meal to that and you have travel nirvana.  How to get to this equation? Let the dinosaurs consummate their deals -- but at a price.  They need to share the \"1 + 1 = 1½\" benefits of consolidation -- the \"deal synergies\" -- with their customers.  As they \"rationalize\" (reduce) capacity, costs, routes and employees, they shouldn\'t need two airlines\' worth of gates and landing slots.  Force them to make space for the new airlines.  And not just in places that already have space, like Nashville and Oakland, but in places that need new entrants -- LAX, Chicago O\'Hare, New York La Guardia, and Washington Reagan.','Mating Dance of the Dinosaurs','','publish','closed','closed','','mating-dance-of-the-dinosaurs','','','2008-02-08 12:08:00','2008-02-08 18:08:00','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2008/02/08/mating-dance-of-the-dinosaurs/',0,'post','',0),
(95,1,'2008-02-28 14:58:01','2008-02-28 20:58:01','Recorded in the Newark Liberty Airport Marriott in scenic Newark, NJ. We cover a lot of ground in this episode -- why business travel and Disney resorts don\'t mix, some choices that can make our personal air travel a bit greener, my experience with Southwest Airline\'s new Business Select program, and the reason I\'ve finally given up on Hertz. We also talk about the atrophying of wired connections -- the modem is gone; is Ethernet next? -- and the importance of Starbucks to the frequent traveler\'s work day. And finally, is bad airline service bringing back the need for traditional travel agents? Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_62.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #62:\n<ul>\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\">\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in room 959 of the Newark Liberty Airport Marriott</li>\n 	<li>A 2-day conference in Disney World reminds me that it\'s a great place for a family vacation, but a lousy place for business. No early check-in, no quiet place for a conference call -- I definitely didn\'t have a \"magical day\".</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/rompaey-eastern2/\"><em>Indian Blossom</em></a> by Ruben van Rompaey</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\">\n<ul>\n 	<li>Revisiting <a title=\"Peter Rukavina\'s blog\" href=\"http://ruk.ca/\">Peter Rukavina\'s</a> question from T/C #61 on how to reduce the environmental impact of air travel</li>\n 	<li>Virgin Atlantic\'s <a href=\"http://www.usatoday.com/travel/flights/2008-02-24-biofueljet_N.htm?csp=34\">biofuel test flight</a> from London to Amsterdam received a lot of press -- as it was meant to do -- but biofuels are more about sustainability than reducing the carbon footprint of a plane flight.</li>\n 	<li>Air France-KLM\'s <a href=\"http://developpement-durable.airfrance.com/FR/en/common/pdf/Rapport%20DD%202005-06_en.pdf\">2005-2006 Sustainable Development Report</a> provides statistics on the reduction of hydrocarbon and carbon monoxide emissions as a result of its fleet modernization program.</li>\n 	<li>Three things an individual can do to reduce their in-flight carbon footprint -- choose the flight with the most efficient plane, take a direct flight, and fly into a less-congested secondary airport</li>\n 	<li>I liked my recent experience with Southwest Airline\'s <a href=\"http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/southwest-airlines-introduces-business-fares/story.aspx?guid=%7B655C87D9-A7A1-47A8-9C1F-7657BE5306AD%7D\">Business Select program</a>. For last minute travel, it gets me a better seat than I can usually get on airlines with reserved seats.</li>\n 	<li>Had yet another beat-up high-mileage car from Hertz -- this time in Orlando. When compared to the brand new Lincoln Mountaineer I received from Avis in Nashville, I\'ve decided to ditch Hertz for Avis.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://www.magnatune.com/artists/albums/williams-long/\"><em>Afternoon in the Sun</em></a> by John Williams</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Evolution of Connectivity</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\">\n<ul>\n 	<li>After mistaking the modem port on my ThinkPad for the Ethernet port, I couldn\'t remember the last time I used my modem</li>\n 	<li>Apple\'s new MacBook Air lacks an Ethernet port, depending completely on Wi-Fi. Is Ethernet going the way of the modem -- at least on laptops?</li>\n 	<li>For me, the big travel news wasn\'t the Delta-Northwest or United-Continental merger dances, but the <a href=\"http://wifinetnews.com/archives/008175.html\">announcement</a> that Starbucks is switching from its Wi-Fi partnership from T-Mobile to AT&amp;T.</li>\n 	<li>Starbucks has become a watering hole, some new millennium oasis for the web Bedouins -- those of us working out of our “mobile offices”</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/westexit-modern/\"><em>Arsenal</em></a> is by The West Exit</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Return of the Travel Agents?</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\">\n<ul>\n 	<li>In the Web 1.0 days, the travel agent was the classic example of an industry being “disintermediated” by the web</li>\n 	<li>However, when dealing with delayed or canceled flights, it usually takes talking to a person to get you home or to get you a refund.</li>\n 	<li>If you’re on a single-carrier ticket – especially a carrier where you have status – you’re usually OK going direct. However, multi-carrier tickets are best worked through a travel agent</li>\n 	<li>I used to use Orbitz or Travelocity for these tickets, but trying to get hold anyone there live to sort through a problem was near impossible</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a title=\"Magnatune\" href=\"http://magnatune.com/\">Magnatune</a></li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments@travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_62.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #62 - Flying Green; Evolution of Connectivity; Return of the Travel Agent?','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-62-flying-green-evolution-of-connectivity-return-of-the-travel-agent','','','2021-09-25 09:10:37','2021-09-25 14:10:37','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2008/02/28/podcast-62-flying-green-evolution-of-connectivity-return-of-the-travel-agent/',0,'post','',5),
(96,1,'2008-03-08 10:07:40','2008-03-08 16:07:40','It wasn\'t <em>that </em>bad a day -- for LaGuardia.  Some strong gusts of winds in the morning resulted in two-hour departure delays by the end of the day.  I had snagged a rare first-class upgrade on the 7pm flight back to O\'Hare, but when I got to LaGuardia at 6:15pm and found the 5pm flight still there, it was time to call an audible.  I gave up a couple of free drinks and (more importantly) 7 inches of leg room -- moving from seat 2B on the 7pm flight to seat 30F on the 5pm (but now 6:45pm) flight -- to have a chance to see my kids before they went to bed.  It really wasn\'t that bad of a trade-off.  I even arrived early -- 20 minutes before my 7pm flight would\'ve arrived (had it been on-time).\n\nLife wasn\'t so good for the guy sitting next to me in seat 30D.  He laid his jacket on the middle seat, loosened his tie, rolled up his cuffs, dropped his head, and was asleep -- sitting straight up -- before we pushed back from the gate.  When the drink cart rolled by, he bought two bottles of white wine to my one bottle of red.  Halfway through my bottle, the plane hit some big turbulence.  We were bouncing up and down, and my wine was sloshing just up to the rim of the little plastic cup.  The guy saw this and moved his jacket over to his lap, saying a bit wearily, \"That would just be the perfect end of a lousy day.\"  He was trying to get home to Omaha, was certain he had missed his connection, and wasn\'t confident that he had many alternatives.\n\nThis guy came to mind when I watched <a href=\"http://www.ritzcarlton.com/en/Films/Films.htm\" title=\"Ritz-Carlton Films\"><em>The Delay</em></a>, the first of three short films produced by Ritz-Carlton Hotels and American Express.  The first few minutes of the film were spot-on -- the downcast trudge through an empty airport when you finally get to your destination.  The rest of it, though, pounds the product placement a bit hard -- the one-second pause so we can fully visualize the Amex Gold card being handed over for payment, the empathetic Ritz-Carlton desk clerk mentioning the time the spa opens in the morning.  It\'s nowhere near as good as any of BMW\'s <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BMW_films\" title=\"Wikipedia entry for BMWFilms\"><em>The Hire</em></a> films from 2001/2002, but the opening sequence perfectly captures the mood of a head-hanging day.','A Head-Hanging Day','','publish','closed','closed','','a-head-hanging-day','','','2008-03-08 10:07:40','2008-03-08 16:07:40','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2008/03/08/a-head-hanging-day/',0,'post','',0),
(97,1,'2008-03-30 22:48:02','2008-03-31 04:48:02','Recorded in the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago after a week of skiing in Colorado. In this episode, we talk about some of the difficulties faced by today\'s frequent travelers. A listener gives a blow-by-blow account of the myriad of lines he faced trying to get home from Newark. Another listener relates about the challenges of attending a business conference in a hotel full of 50+ year-old women. We talk about how lengthy delays on the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"New York City\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/new-york-city\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\">New York</a>-to-Chicago route are giving regular travelers a dazed look that might be called the \"733-Mile Stare\". And I have to comment on a couple of recent <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Transportation Security Administration\" href=\"http://www.tsa.gov\" rel=\"homepage\">TSA</a> incidents. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_63.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #63:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in the TravelCommons studios outside <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Chicago\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/chicago\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\">Chicago, IL</a></li>\n 	<li>Just got back from a week\'s skiing in Breckenridge and A-Basin in Colorado</li>\n 	<li>Wanted to check out the TSA\'s new Diamond Lane program that its <a href=\"http://www.tsa.gov/blog/2008/03/diamonds-are-passengers-best-friend.html\">blog claims</a> is a huge success. However, the security line with the old system was much shorter.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://ghosts.nin.com/main/home\"><em>3 Ghosts I</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.nin.com/\">Nine Inch Nails</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li><a title=\"Evan Sparks\' blog on the 5-passenger AA ORD-LHR flight\" href=\"http://evansparks.wordpress.com/2008/03/05/and-emissions-trading-would-have-helped-here-how/\">Evan Sparks’ Aviation Policy Blog</a> picked up the <a title=\"Daily Telegraph story on the AA ORD-LHR flight\" href=\"http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?view=DETAILS&amp;grid=&amp;xml=/news/2008/03/05/nplane105.xml\">story</a> of a Feb 9th <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"American Airlines\" href=\"http://www.aa.com/\" rel=\"homepage\">American Airlines</a> flight from Chicago to London that carried only 5 passengers and the resulting ruckus raised by environmental groups.</li>\n 	<li><a title=\"Gary Learned\'s blog\" href=\"http://seat6d.tumblr.com/\">Gary Learned</a> tells about attending a business conference in the <a href=\"http://hotels.lonelyplanet.com/usa/nashville-r2102050/gaylord-opryland-resort-and-spa-p1045418/\">Gaylord Opryland</a> at the same time as 5,000 <a title=\"The Red Hat Society Website\" href=\"http://www.redhatsociety.com/\">Red Hats</a></li>\n 	<li><a title=\"Saurab Bhargava\'s web site\" href=\"http://www.saurabbhargava.com/\">Saurab Bhargava</a> sends along his account of a particularly bad day in Newark</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/buy_album.php?id=08E508A6096F11910641E13331B70EED6DFA5BB929282F731E19BBAFA8F08FFD686BD99DD86BA0D5E844DD5536E1AEFB\" rel=\"nofollow\"><em>Ghost Hardware</em></a> by Burial</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>The 733-Mile Stare\n</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>During the <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War\">Vietnam War</a>, the “thousand-yard stare” described the dazed look, the unfocused straight-ahead gaze of the front-line soldier</li>\n 	<li>Regular travelers on the Chicago-to-New York run are starting to develop their own dazed look as they try to fight through delays, and cancellations to get home or get to an important meeting</li>\n 	<li>Call it the \"733-mile stare\" – the flight mileage between ORD and LGA</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://www.usatoday.com/\">USA Today</a> <a title=\"10 Busiest Round Trip Routes\" href=\"http://www.usatoday.com/travel/flights/2008-03-25-air-routes_N.htm\">article</a> said that, based on 2007 passenger counts, the ORD-LGA route was the 3rd busiest in the country</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a title=\"MP3 Download\" href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/download_track.php?id=0E74C6FEB7390D18D02B4B399668093172F6C8CC66DDC09D90A3BF7DDA436823CFAC859AE2B2C73E46A278A4950E1030\">Lonely Dog Blues</a></em> by <a title=\"Tobin James\' Web Site\" href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/label.php?id=2A3449F03E7B8462FF74407B60F0C4B0A30A0CBE880C61DE37E3B342387F0643\">Tobin James</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>TSA Can\'t Help Themselves</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>USA Today <a title=\"Flier angry after TSA makes her remove nipple ring\" href=\"http://www.usatoday.com/travel/flights/2008-03-28-tsa-nipple-ring_N.htm\">article</a> on TSA forcing a woman to remove nipple rings</li>\n 	<li>TSA posted a statement on their <a title=\"TSA Press Release Justifying Nipple Ring Removal\" href=\"http://www.tsa.gov/press/happenings/lubbock.shtm\">website</a> and <a title=\"TSA Blog Post Justifying Nipple Ring Removal\" href=\"http://www.tsa.gov/blog/2008/03/tsa-and-piercings.html\">blog</a> saying that the screeners “properly followed procedures” and that they were “acting to protect the passengers and crews of the flights departing Lubbock that day.”</li>\n 	<li>Watched a TSA officer in Chicago-O\'Hare help a confused Chinese couple find their connecting flight.</li>\n 	<li>Why can\'t the TSA act more like the ORD officer and spend less time justifying stupid decisions like those in Lubbock?</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing\n</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://iodapromonet.com/index.php\">IODA Promonet</a></li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments@travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_63.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #63 - The 733-Mile Stare; TSA Can\'t Help Themselves','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-63-the-733-mile-stare-tsa-cant-help-themselves','','','2021-09-25 09:12:05','2021-09-25 14:12:05','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2008/03/30/podcast-63-the-733-mile-stare-tsa-cant-help-themselves/',0,'post','',6),
(98,1,'2008-04-07 15:50:40','2008-04-07 21:50:40','Gearing up for the 3rd anniversary of TravelCommons next month, here\'s a link to the first \"greatest hits\" episode -- the <em>Best of TravelCommons 2005</em>.  Listening to it again after a couple of years, the medley of hotel bathrooms is a chuckle, but the the travel story excerpts is what makes this episode worth listening to again.  Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_27.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_27.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr /> Here are the show notes from the <em>Best of TravelCommons 2005:</em>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Home for Christmas week, recover from a tough 4 weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas</li>\r\n	<li>Thanks to everyone who has left, or tried to leave, a review on the TravelCommons page of iTunes</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img alt=\"icon\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>Medley of TravelCommons Hotel Bathroom studios</li>\r\n	<li>from T/C #5 - Why I record in bathrooms</li>\r\n	<li>Medley of TSA rants</li>\r\n	<li>from T/C #5-7 - Sean Penn comments</li>\r\n	<li>from T/C #7 -  Steve Frick of <a href=\"http://fricksworld.blogspot.com\">Frick\'s World</a> is a little uncomfortable recording in the bathroom</li>\r\n	<li>from T/C #14 - Willie Evans from the Scots Band <a href=\"http://www.evangeline.org.uk/\"><strong>Evangeline</strong></a> talks about writing a travel song</li>\r\n	<li>from T/C #17 - My kids\' view of travel</li>\r\n	<li>from T/C #20 - Allan Marko tells a story about rapid airplane repair</li>\r\n	<li>from T/C #3 - Flyers from Cleveland to Chicago looking for an early exit</li>\r\n	<li>from T/C #11 - Packing light leaves no margin for error</li>\r\n	<li>from T/C #23 - Patrons at the hotel bar drinking shots</li>\r\n	<li>from T/C #19 - Different colors in Bologna, Italy</li>\r\n	<li>from T/C #13 - Imaginative way to sleep on red-eyes</li>\r\n	<li>from T/C #21 - Decisions on vacation photos</li>\r\n	<li>from T/C #4 - Disappointed web search</li>\r\n	<li>from T/C #24 - Fun with Rental Cars</li>\r\n	<li>from T/C #7 - Air sickness without the bag</li>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=78941.463233963&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a><img alt=\"icon\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\" /> to <em>Ramblin\' Man</em> by the Allman Brothers Band</li>\r\n	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_27.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Flash from the Past - Best of 2005','','publish','closed','closed','','flash-from-the-past-best-of-2005','','','2015-05-12 13:38:31','2015-05-12 18:38:31','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2008/04/07/flash-from-the-past-best-of-2005/',0,'post','',0),
(99,1,'2008-04-29 16:03:01','2008-04-29 22:03:01','Finally recorded in the <a href=\"http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=40.6247222222,-73.9522222222&amp;spn=0.1,0.1&amp;q=40.6247222222,-73.9522222222 (Brooklyn)&amp;t=h\">Brooklyn</a> Marriott in <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/new-york-city\">New York</a> after hauling my recording gear across the Atlantic to <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/the-netherlands/amsterdam\">Amsterdam</a>, over to Minneapolis, and finally to New York. In this episode, a number of listeners comment on airport security, we talk about breaking out of the \"travel bubble\" that insulates so many frequent travelers from the cities they visit, and I answer some listener questions on mileage credit cards and how to get the most out of frequent flier status. Also, at the end of the episode, we announce our 3rd Anniversary concert. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_64.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr>\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #64:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in the Brooklyn Marriott after trying to find time to record it in Minneapolis and Haarlem, the Netherlands</li>\n 	<li>A medley of earlier TravelCommons hotel room introductions</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://ghosts.nin.com/main/home\"><em>7 Ghosts I</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.nin.com/\">Nine Inch Nails</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Leo Vegoda inventories the security screening inconsistencies he\'s faced in China, the US, and Europe</li>\n 	<li>Enrolling in the <a href=\"http://www.flyclear.com/\">Clear</a> registered traveler program, I gave up images of my driver\'s license, passport, irises, and fingerprints</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://blog.transparentsociety.com/\">Lori Humm</a> and <a href=\"http://budacast.hu\">Drew Leifheit</a> agree that the nipple ring removal incident typifies the TSA\'s disregard for travelers</li>\n 	<li>I hate how far away the BWI and CLE rental car facilities are from the terminals. Makes me choose DCA over BWI</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>When Irish Eyes are Burning</em> by <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/music/listeners/artistdetails.php?BandHash=a45aaee36685b61a392acf793155e127\">the Ike Reilly Assassination</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Breaking the Travel Bubble</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Sometimes I get tired of traveling within the travel bubble that frequent travelers often construct for themselves</li>\n 	<li>Staying in the Brooklyn Marriott, taking the subway from the Borough Hall stop in Brooklyn to the 32nd St stop on Park Ave certainly gets me up close and personal with a lot of NYC residents</li>\n 	<li>Taking the commuter train from Amsterdam to Utrecht, I was engulfed in a swarm of bicyclists – the commuters got off their train, hopped on their bicycles in the dark, drizzly, 40 degree January night, and rode home</li>\n 	<li>Some travelers like to stay in the same hotel every time they visit a city – the \"Cheers\" syndrome – you wanna go where everybody knows your name</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Stupid Now</em> by <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/music/listeners/artistdetails.php?BandHash=be2a489f478e6d5335652fc8925eee03\">Bob Mould</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Mark’s Travel Tips</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Joy in Denver asked me if I use mileage credit cards. I primarily use <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Diners Club International\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diners_Club_International\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Diners Club</a> because it doesn\'t lock you into a single mileage program. I\'ve used it to \"top off\" other accounts, where I needed some extra mileage to meet an award level.</li>\n 	<li>I also have a Starbucks Duetto Visa card that I also use occasionally for business expenses</li>\n 	<li>Brian from <a href=\"http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=41.7480555556,-88.1655555556&amp;spn=0.1,0.1&amp;q=41.7480555556,-88.1655555556 (Naperville%2C%20Illinois)&amp;t=h\">Naperville, IL</a> recently earned Gold status on American and is wondering the best way to maximize the benefit</li>\n 	<li>Key benefits of this first status level are separate security lines and priority boarding</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing\n</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://nin.com/\">Nine Inch Nails</a> and the <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/\">Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments@travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_64.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #64 - Escaping the Travel Bubble; Mark\'s Travel Tips','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-64-escaping-the-travel-bubble-marks-travel-tips','','','2021-09-23 13:03:14','2021-09-23 18:03:14','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2008/04/30/podcast-64-escaping-the-travel-bubble-marks-travel-tips/',0,'post','',4),
(100,1,'2008-05-27 20:58:10','2008-05-28 02:58:10','I\'ve had first hand experience with a couple of the TSA\'s recent attempts to provide an \"overall increase in throughput\" -- the <a title=\"TSA Registered Traveler Program\" href=\"http://www.tsa.gov/approach/rt/index.shtm\">Registered Traveler</a> program and the <a title=\"TSA Expands Diamond-Lane Program\" href=\"http://www.tsa.gov/press/releases/2008/0502b.shtm\">Diamond Lane Self-Select</a> program. To save you the suspense, neither is going to create a sudden outpouring of love for the TSA.\n\n<!--more-->\n\nAs I mentioned in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2008/04/29/podcast-64-escaping-the-travel-bubble-marks-travel-tips/\">episode #64</a>, <a title=\"Clear Registered Traveler Program\" href=\"http://www.flyclear.com/index.html\">Clear</a>, one of the registered traveler programs, is offering a free first-year membership to top-tier status members of Hyatt\'s and Marriott\'s frequent sleeper programs. I applied on-line in April and then stopped by the “Clear Enrollment Station” in San Francisco airport to have images of my passport, driver’s license, irises and fingerprints captured. Flying through San Francisco (SFO) last Friday was my first chance to try out the program.\n\nThe Clear line was easy to find -- there was a nice bright blue-and-white Clear sign on top of a pole. I walked past the nearly empty 1st-class/premium status security line, past the mostly full regular security line, to the completely empty Clear line. I presented my driver\'s license and my Clear card to the TSA screener who then handed them to the Clear employee right next to him who then handed them back to the screener. I followed the screener to the Clear machine three steps away, inserted my Clear card, and was directed by the machine to put my right index finger on the small reader pad.\n\nMy first two attempts with the fingerprint reader failed. The TSA screener just shrugged and pressed the \"Try Again\" icon on the touch screen. It seemed a common occurrence. On my second try, I noticed a small window on the machine\'s screen that displayed my fingerprint. I could see that, because of the angle of the reader pad, it was only picking up half of my fingerprint. On my third attempt, I watched the little window, adjusting my finger until it picked up a full fingerprint. Bingo! It immediately approved me. The screener then escorted me to a regular screening station, holding off a couple of other travelers so that I could go directly to the metal table and start putting my things into the grey bins.\n\nOn that Friday morning in SFO, the $100/year Clear line saved me nothing over the free premium line. Indeed, with the card shuffle between the Clear employee and the TSA screener, and the three tries at the fingerprint reader, the Clear line probably took me four times longer than having someone glance at my driver\'s license in the premium line. The real value for programs like Clear are at those airports without 1st-class/premium status security lines -- Oakland (OAK), Reno-Tahoe (RNO), San Jose (SJC), and Orlando (MCO). Now, if Clear could sign up Las Vegas McCarran Airport (LAS) -- brutally long lines and no premium lanes -- then they\'d have a real value proposition.\n\nToday was my second experience with the ski resort-inspired Diamond Lane Self-Select program at Chicago Midway (MDW) airport. The right-most security lane has a black diamond sign, designating it for \"Expert\" fliers -- defined by the TSA as \"the business traveler who flies several times a month\". The next two lines have a blue square sign and are for \"Casual\" fliers, those who \"who travel less frequently, but are familiar with the security process\". The remaining three lines have a green circle and are for families and special assistance passengers. The program was initially piloted in Salt Lake City and Denver. The TSA claims that the \"pilots have resulted in an overall increase in throughput and greatly increased customer satisfaction\" and that both airports have \"experienced a reduction in wait times for expert travelers in the black diamond lanes\".\n\nMy experience was a bit different. The program started at MDW on Thursday, May 8. My first experience was the following Monday, May 12. Catching the first Southwest flight to Cleveland, I headed straight to the Expert line. So did a lot of other people, not all of which looked like business travelers who fly several times a month. It quickly became clear that the folks in front of me weren\'t expert fliers. They didn\'t have their IDs out and ready; they didn\'t know to take their shoes off; they tried to take a bottle of water through, and they had to make multiple passes through the metal detector because of jewelry and spare change.\n\nTwo weeks later, I\'m back at MDW catching the same flight to Cleveland. This time, though, I drop into one of the Casual lines. The Expert line is longer and, once again, about 50% of its inhabitants don\'t look like frequent business fliers -- the flip-flops are dead giveaways. I match my progress against an easy-to-spot marker in the Expert line -- a tall guy wearing a suit. The Casual line moves twice as fast as the Expert line -- even with our share of flip-flop wearers. I don\'t know what the TSA did differently in their Salt Lake City or Denver pilots, but I haven\'t seen any lower wait times for expert travelers and, at least this morning, the guys in the Expert line certainly didn\'t look like their satisfaction was greatly increased.','Jumping the Line - Using Clear Registered Traveler and Diamond Lane Self-Select','','publish','closed','closed','','jumping-the-line-using-clear-registered-traveler-and-diamond-lane-self-select','','','2021-09-23 14:05:47','2021-09-23 19:05:47','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2008/05/27/jumping-the-line-using-clear-registered-traveler-and-diamond-lane-self-select/',0,'post','',6),
(101,1,'2008-06-21 11:59:51','2008-06-21 17:59:51','Recorded in the TravelCommons studios outside of <a href=\"http://www.chicago2016.org/News/Pages/home.aspx\">Chicago</a> after taking a month\'s break. We see if there\'s anything to the TSA\'s recent attempts to reduce security line waits -- the Clear <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Registered_Traveler\">Registered Traveler</a> and the Diamond Lane Self-Select programs. We also take a look at Southwest\'s attempts to attract more business travelers. A listener story on traveling injured causes us to look into the cost trade-offs of air ambulance services, while another listener points us to the perfect song for the summer travel season. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_65.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #65:\n<ul>\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\">\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in the TravelCommons studios outside of <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/chicago\">Chicago, Illinois</a></li>\n 	<li>Other family \"creative\" obligations forced me to take a month off of the podcast</li>\n 	<li>Playing around with the <a href=\"http://www.dopplr.com\">Dopplr</a> travel website -- it\'s not bad, but hasn\'t yet provided a serendipitous meet-up with other friends on the road</li>\n 	<li>However, Dopplr helpfully totes up the <a href=\"http://blog.dopplr.com/2008/04/22/calculate-the-carbon-impact-of-your-travels-with-dopplr/\">carbon footprint for my travels</a></li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dl.nin.com/theslip/signup\"><em>Discipline</em></a> by Nine Inch Nails</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\">\n<ul>\n 	<li>Thanks to <a href=\"http://budacast.hu\">Drew Leifheit</a> for mentioning TravelCommons in his travel podcasting article <a href=\"http://www.vagabondish.com/travelcasting-travel-audio-guide/\"><em>Travelcasting: Lighten Your Backpack, Load Up Your iPod</em></a> on the <a href=\"http://www.vagabondish.com\">Vagabondish</a> website</li>\n 	<li>A listener shares his own \"traveling while injured\" story after listening to <a href=\"http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2007/06/08/podcast-54-traveling-injured-how-bad-is-travel-experience-really/\">episode #54</a></li>\n 	<li>Air ambulance service like <a title=\"AirMed Service Programs\" href=\"http://www.airmed.com/our-services/plans.cfm\">AirMed </a>and <a title=\"MedJetAssist Service Plans\" href=\"http://medjetassistance.com/plans/regular.aspx\">MetJetAssist</a> offer insurance-like programs starting at $225/year</li>\n 	<li>A listener points out a great <a title=\"TSA Theme Song\" href=\"http://www.crainium.net/jdjArchives/2005/04/tsa_theme_song.html\">song </a>for the summer travel season by the <a href=\"http://www.barandgrillsingers.com/\">Bar &amp; Grille Singers</a></li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>One</em> by <a title=\"Cargo Cult\'s Alchemy Album\" href=\"http://www.magnatune.com/artists/albums/cargo-alchemy/hifi_play\">Cargo Cult</a></li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>New Ways to the Front of the Line\n</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\">\n<ul>\n 	<li>Recently had first hand experience with the <a title=\"TSA Registered Traveler Program\" href=\"http://www.tsa.gov/approach/rt/index.shtm\">Registered Traveler</a> program and the <a title=\"TSA Expands Diamond-Lane Program\" href=\"http://www.tsa.gov/press/releases/2008/0502b.shtm\">Diamond Lane Self-Select</a> program</li>\n 	<li>The Clear security line in <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_International_Airport\">San Francisco airport</a> (SFO) was empty, but the biometric checks made it take longer the regular 1st-Class/Premium Frequent Flier line</li>\n 	<li>The Diamond Self-Select Program in <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Midway_International_Airport\">Chicago Midway airport</a> (MDW) doesn\'t live up to its promise -- too many \"non-experts\" self-select into the black diamond line</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Magnified</em> by <a title=\"Very Large Array\'s Stuff Album\" href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/vla-stuff/hifi_play\">Very Large Array</a></li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Southwest Skips the Nickels &amp; Dimes </strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\">\n<ul>\n 	<li>Southwest Airline\'s <em>Fees Don\'t Fly With Us</em> <a title=\"Dallas Morning News story on Southwest\'s new ad campaign\" href=\"http://dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/bus/stories/053108dnbusairnickel.3633d88.html\">ad campaign</a> goes straight at the legacy carriers\' new-found love of add-on fees</li>\n 	<li>Southwest is becoming more attractive to frequent business travelers</li>\n 	<li>Their <a href=\"http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/southwest-airlines-introduces-business-fares/story.aspx?guid=%7B655C87D9-A7A1-47A8-9C1F-7657BE5306AD%7D\">Business Select program</a> removes the \"cattle-car\" boarding queue that everyone hated</li>\n 	<li>Southwest\'s gate areas in Midway (MDW), Cleveland (CLE), and Balimore-Washington Int\'l (BWI) are impressive -- comfortable seats and lots of easy-to-find electrical outlets</li>\n 	<li>But Southwest still can\'t match the value of the frequent flier awards I receive from United Airlines</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing\n</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://nin.com/\">Nine Inch Nails</a> and <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\">Magnatune</a></li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments@travelcommons.com or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_65.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #65 - New Ways to the Front of the Line; Southwest Skips Nickel & Dimes','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-65-new-ways-to-the-front-of-the-line-southwest-skips-nickel-dimes','','','2021-09-25 09:13:45','2021-09-25 14:13:45','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2008/06/21/podcast-65-new-ways-to-the-front-of-the-line-southwest-skips-nickel-dimes/',0,'post','',2),
(103,1,'2008-06-26 12:43:42','2008-06-26 18:43:42','Today\'s Chicago Tribune gave <a title=\"Chicago Tribune DOT Forum Article\" href=\"//www.chicagotribune.com/travel/chi-airline-passengers-complaints-wejun25,0,5692929.story)\">front page coverage</a> to a US Department of Transportation consumer forum on air travel.  The story\'s title, <em>You Are Now Free To Take A Flying Leap</em>, says it all.  The reporter\'s conclusion is disheartening realistic -- \"airline passengers received an unapologetic warning at the forum that customer service will continue to diminish and consumers more than ever need to fend for themselves at the airport\".  The airlines\' ever expanding set of nickel-and-diming fees are less about generating additional revenue and more about cost reduction -- reducing the demand for services that aren\'t directly associated with keeping a jet in the air.  American Airlines\' $15 charge for the first checked bag is really all about reducing fuel costs -- incenting passengers to bring less luggage, reducing fuel consumption through reduced load weight.\n\nComparing passenger jets to \"flying buses\" is not an exaggeration.  The airlines are redefining themselves, shrinking the boundaries of their responsibilities.  They no longer sell a travel experience; they sell transport.  And they\'re <span style=\"text-decoration: line-through\">walking</span> <em>running</em> away from any service that doesn\'t directly involve transporting passengers through the air.  Is this a business opportunity for another company -- say, for one of the private airport operating companies?  Hmmm, not sure the result will be any better if BAA\'s <a title=\"Analysis of UK Competition Committee\'s Report on BAA\" href=\"http://evansparks.wordpress.com/2008/05/27/uk-competition-commission-leaning/\">stewardship</a> of London Heathrow is any guide.  The real question, though -- are regular coach passengers willing to pay for anything more than being hauled from one city to another?','In Case You Thought It Would Change Anytime Soon','','publish','closed','closed','','in-case-you-thought-it-would-change-anytime-soon','','','2008-06-26 12:43:42','2008-06-26 18:43:42','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2008/06/26/in-case-you-thought-it-would-change-anytime-soon/',0,'post','',1),
(104,1,'2008-07-06 21:25:29','2008-07-07 02:25:29','The <a title=\"Ponemon Institute\" href=\"http://www.ponemon.org\">Ponemon Institute</a> claims that over 12,000 laptops are lost every week in US airports, two-thirds of which are never recovered.  In <a title=\"Ponemon Institute Laptop Study\" href=\"http://www.dell.com/downloads/global/services/dell_lost_laptop_study.pdf\">research</a> sponsored by Dell Computer, which used the study\'s findings as a key selling point for their new laptop tracking and recovery <a title=\"Dell Computer ProSupport Mobility\" href=\"http://www.dell.com/content/topics/global.aspx/services/prosupport/en/us/get_connected?c=us&amp;l=en&amp;s=gen\">service</a>, Ponemon surveyed airport officials at 106 major airports to come up with this headline-producing number.  LAX tops the list with 1,200 misplaced laptops a week; Miami is second with 1,000.  Extrapolating the study\'s findings (12,255 laptops lost/week * 67% never recovered * 52 weeks/year) says that over 425,000 laptops are lost in US airports every year.  With these numbers, you\'d think that someone would\'ve noticed the growing stack of laptops a bit sooner.\n\nThe second phase of the study surveyed 864 business travelers in \"the airport environment\".   Only 1% of these travelers had ever lost a laptop.  You\'d think with 425,000 of them lost every year, the surveyors would have a better hit rate.  I\'ve never lost a laptop and I don\'t know anyone who has lost one in an airport.  I know people who\'ve had them stolen out of rental cars, who\'ve left them in a plane\'s overhead bin, but no one who has lost one in an airport.\n\nOne thing I have seen is people picking up the wrong laptop.  At the back end of security screening, it can be a race to grab your PC before it gets pushed off the conveyor and onto the floor by the constant stream of gray bins burping out the TSA\'s x-ray machine.  More than a few times, I\'ve seen someone grab a ThinkPad that doesn\'t belong to them.  Personalizing that black matte finish with a business card or a sticker or even a large gouge can help prevent a mistaken adoption.  Of course, not having to pull your laptop out of your briefcase would be an even easier solution.  Of the 864 business traveler surveyed, only 12% of them agreed that \"checking my laptop or notebook computer separately from other carry-on tems increases passenger safety and security\".','12,000 Laptops Lost In Airports Every Week?  Hmmm...','','private','closed','closed','','12000-laptops-lost-in-airports-every-week-hmmm','','','2024-06-02 10:33:44','2024-06-02 15:33:44','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2008/07/06/12000-laptops-lost-in-airports-every-week-hmmm/',0,'post','',10),
(105,1,'2008-08-22 23:16:34','2008-08-23 05:16:34','Recorded in the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago after a couple of weeks in <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/thailand\">Thailand</a> and <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/singapore\">Singapore</a>.  In this episode, I talk about some of my experiences in <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/asia\">Asia</a>, including a few travel (mis)adventures. We also talk about losing laptops in airports -- comments on a study claiming that 12,000 laptops are lost in airports every week, and thought on one particular lost laptop belonging to the Clear registered traveler program.  And a listener gives his in-flight impressions of Singapore Air\'s new A380. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_66.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #66:\n<ul>\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\">\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in the TravelCommons studios outside of <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/chicago\">Chicago, Illinois</a></li>\n 	<li>Business and personal travel has taken me all over -- Denver, Thailand, Singapore, <a href=\"http://www.townofboston.com/\">Boston, New York</a>, the Delaware Shore, and Philadelphia</li>\n 	<li>United Airlines\' troubles and ORD weather make the flight back from Singapore even longer</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Planetenstaaten</em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/weigl-landwater/\">Philipp Weigl</a></li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\">\n<ul>\n 	<li>A listener shares his recent experience flying to Tokyo in a <a title=\"Singapore Airlines A380\" href=\"http://www.businesstraveller.com/archive/2008/may-2008/tried-and-tested/flight-check-singapore-airlines-a380\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Singapore Air Airbus A380</a></li>\n 	<li>Lots of comments on the <a title=\"TravelCommons post on Ponemon Institute study\" href=\"http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2008/07/06/12000-laptops-lost-in-airports-every-week-hmmm/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">post</a> about the <a title=\"Dell-Ponemon Institute Study on Lost Laptops\" href=\"http://www.dell.com/downloads/global/services/dell_lost_laptop_study.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">study</a> claiming that 12,000 laptops are lost in airports every week</li>\n 	<li>Blogger Sean O\'Neill\'s follow-up <a href=\"http://current.newsweek.com/budgettravel/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">research</a> on this study supports my initial skepticism</li>\n 	<li><a title=\"Frick\'s World blog\" href=\"http://fricksworld.blogspot.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Steve Frick</a> wonders how someone doesn\'t notice that their bag is suddenly 7 lbs lighter</li>\n 	<li>The Clear registered traveler program loses, and then finds, a laptop with applicants\' personal data</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>The Collider</em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/clayne-vi/\">C. Layne</a></li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Impressions of 1st Trip to Asia\n</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\">\n<ul>\n 	<li>My family\'s first trip to Asia, so we did \"Asia Lite\" -- <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/thailand/phuket-province\">Phuket, Thailand</a> and Singapore</li>\n 	<li>If Southwest has \"cattle car\" boarding, then <a href=\"http://www.airasia.com/\">Air Asia</a> uses a stampede</li>\n 	<li>Driving in Thailand would be difficult because I can\'t read the <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thai_alphabet\">Thai alphabet</a></li>\n 	<li>Surprised to have a deep discussion of the US presidential race with a Thai cab driver</li>\n 	<li>The experience of eating <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Durian\">durian</a> in Singapore is seared into my senses</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing\n</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\">Magnatune</a></li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments@travelcommons.com or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_66.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #66 - Travel in Asia; Losing Laptops in Airports','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-66-travel-in-asia-losing-laptops-in-airports','','','2021-09-25 09:14:35','2021-09-25 14:14:35','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/?p=105',0,'post','',7),
(106,1,'2008-08-31 21:29:53','2008-09-01 03:29:53','Labor Day is the traditional start of US political campaigns and the associated silliness of political speeches.  <a href=\"http://evansparks.wordpress.com/2008/08/24/obama-chinas-airports-are-vastly-superior-to-us-now/\" target=\"_blank\">Evan Sparks\' Aviation Policy Blog</a> pointed to a <a title=\"Video of Obama Speech on Superiority of Chinese Infrastructure\" href=\"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-IvjXnkHwA\" target=\"_blank\">speech</a> by Barack Obama in which he lauds Chinese investment in travel infrastructure -- airports, train systems -- and asks \"Why aren\'t we doing the same thing?\"  It\'s a good question, if lack of money was the only thing delaying needed improvements in the US.\n\nLet\'s look at one example with which Obama should be familiar -- the long delay in starting the desperately needed runway expansion of Chicago\'s O\'Hare airport.  The start of the <a title=\"City of Chicago\'s O\'Hare Moderization Program Website\" href=\"http://egov.cityofchicago.org/city/webportal/portalEntityHomeAction.do?entityName=OHare%20Modernization%20Program&amp;entityNameEnumValue=130\" target=\"_blank\">O\'Hare Moderization Program</a> was delayed by competing proposals from two Obama backers -- Chicago\'s Mayor Richard M. Daley and Obama\'s national co-chairman US Rep Jesse Jackson, Jr.  The dispute was all about control of patronage dollars.  Daley wanted to expand O\'Hare while Jackson wanted to build a third Chicago airport in the <em>far </em>south suburb of <a href=\"http://www.abelincolnairport.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Peotone</a>, IL-- run by an airport commission controlled by Jackson\'s allies.  The O\'Hare program is now delayed by legal fights -- one about <a href=\"http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-ohare-expansion-15aug15,0,7623116.story\" target=\"_blank\">relocating a 159-year-old cemetary</a> that sits in the middle of a new runways, another about <a href=\"http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chicago/chi-ohare-demolition-bensenvilleaug12,0,1447945.story\" target=\"_blank\">500 of the 2,500 homes in neighboring suburbs</a> that must be torn down to make way for the new runways.  The O\'Hare delays haven\'t been about money.  They\'ve been about political clout, and allowing citizens to exercise their rights to appeal eminent domain decisions.\n\nEnvironmental impact statements, citizen NIMBY (not in my back yard) lawsuits, political interference -- these are the issues delaying expansion of our airports, not lack of investment.  Will a President Obama reduce environmental regulations, limit citizens\' (and their lawyers\') access to courts, or reign in members of the Democratic-controlled US Congress?  I don\'t think so -- anymore than a President McCain would.  The point Obama makes earlier in the clip -- \"[Chinese ]ports, [Chinese] train systems, [Chinese] airports are vastly superior to us now, which means if you are a corporation deciding where to do business, you’re starting to think, \'Beijing looks like a pretty good option.\'\" -- is exactly on target.  The inability to meet the demand for new transportation capacity impacts our nation\'s economic health.  In an earlier <a href=\"http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2007/09/23/podcast-57-making-time-for-local-fare-whats-standing-in-the-way-of-fixing-our-airports/\" target=\"_blank\">podcast episode</a>, we talked about the FAA’s <a href=\"//www.faa.gov/airports_airtraffic/airports/resources/publications/reports/media/fact_2.pdf\" target=\"_blank\">FACT 2</a> study which predicts 18 airports  and 7 metro areas will need additional capacity by 2015.  Money is important, but it\'s not the rate-limiting factor here.  Obama is a smart guy and I\'m sure he understands this. I just wish he wouldn\'t pander to the silly season\'s need for sound bites and instead talk about some real solutions to these real problems.','The Silly Season Begins...','','publish','closed','closed','','the-silly-season-begins','','','2008-08-31 21:29:53','2008-09-01 03:29:53','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/?p=106',0,'post','',4),
(107,1,'2008-09-24 22:54:48','2008-09-25 04:54:48','Recorded in the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago after a month of travel to and from the East Coast. In this episode, a spur-of-the-moment train trip bypasses a huge air traffic control problem.  A listener story gets us talking about theft after you entrust your luggage to the folks behind the curtain. I have fun saying the word <em>schadenfreude</em> -- German for \"taking pleasure in other\'s misfortunes\" -- while talking about the need to use <a href=\"http://www.apple.com/iphone\">iPhones</a> and <a href=\"http://www.blackberry.com\">BlackBerrys</a> to check the status of delayed flights.  I also give my thoughts on the iPhone after traveling with it for a month.  Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_67.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #67:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in the TravelCommons studios outside of <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/chicago\">Chicago, Illinois</a></li>\n 	<li>No exotic travel this month -- just New York and <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/washington-dc\">Washington, DC</a></li>\n 	<li>Last minute decision to take Amtrak\'s <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acela_Express\">Acela Express</a> from NYC to DC meant I missed the delays caused by the <a href=\"http://www.eweek.com/c/a/IT-Infrastructure/Corrupt-File-Brought-Down-FAAs-Antiquated-IT-System/?kc=EWKNLNAV08282008STR4\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">crash</a> of the FAA\'s traffic tracking system</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- Bend and Not Break by <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/music/listeners/artistdetails.php?BandHash=bcd26803274d04274d5d253b2a9f7fff\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Dashboard Confessional</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>A <a href=\"http://www.transparentsociety.com/wordpress/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">listener</a> tells the story about her laptop bag being stolen after gate-checking it on a Delta commuter flight out of Richmond</li>\n 	<li>I relate the <a href=\"http://www.queensda.org/newpressreleases/2008/september/riviello_acevedo_09_02_2008.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">story</a> of 2 American Airlines JFK baggage handlers with stealing 925 pieces of jewelry worth $280,000 from the checked suitcase of a jewelry dealer bound for LA.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Hollywood Homicide</em> by <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/music/listeners/artistdetails.php?BandHash=e09e260d6030c8da53cef085ca11edd2\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">The Frantic</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Electronic Schadenfreude\n</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schadenfreude\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Schadenfreude</a> -- German word for \"the pleasure taken from the misfortune of someone else</li>\n 	<li>Side effect of wanted to make the right decision in changing a flight</li>\n 	<li>4 weeks of delayed United flights in August had me jumping flights at the first sign of a delay</li>\n 	<li>Electronic schadenfreude -- checking your iPhone or Blackberry the minute you hit the ground to see if your original flight is still on the ground</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Rings and Fences</em> by <a href=\"http://www.moochacha.net/blog/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Donna Maciocia</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Month With an iPhone\n</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Picked up a 16 GB 3G iPhone in August from the Apple store in <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Stamford, Connecticut\" href=\"http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=41.0966666667,-73.5522222222&amp;spn=0.1,0.1&amp;q=41.0966666667,-73.5522222222 (Stamford%2C%20Connecticut)&amp;t=h\" rel=\"geolocation\">Stamford, CT</a></li>\n 	<li>Skipped the 1st generation 2G/Edge iPhone -- way too slow for the portable Internet access I wanted</li>\n 	<li>Hasn\'t replaced my <a href=\"http://www.tomtom.com\">TomTom</a> One, but checking real-time traffic conditions is great</li>\n 	<li>iPhone Apps Store has some good stuff for a traveler -- <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=288429040&amp;mt=8\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">LinkedIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=287350070&amp;mt=8\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Airport Status</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=284967867&amp;mt=8\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Twinkle</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=287197884&amp;mt=8\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Sol Free Solitaire</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=289894882&amp;mt=8\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">White Noise</a></li>\n 	<li>The only downside is battery life</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing\n</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>Some bridge music from <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments@travelcommons.com or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_67.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #67 - Stolen Luggage; Month With an iPhone','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-67-stolen-luggage-month-with-an-iphone','','','2021-09-25 09:16:12','2021-09-25 14:16:12','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/?p=107',0,'post','',6),
(109,1,'2008-10-07 19:00:49','2008-10-08 01:00:49','Mika Pyyhkala, a long time TravelCommons listener who works for the <a href=\"http://www.nfbmass.org/\" target=\"_blank\">National Federation of the Blind of Massachusetts</a>, dropped me a note about a problem he recently had with some new technology installed in New York City cabs.\n\n\"I was in NYC last Sunday and I took a taxi from La Guardia airport to mid town Manhattan.  I noticed that the credit card payment terminal is a touch screen visual-only interface.  The taxi driver had to get into the back seat to read and operate the system for me -- I could not tell what was on the screen. You cannot just swipe the card; you have to press the touch screen a number of times to initiate and complete the transaction, including pressing an area to select your tip amount.  The driver told me the tip options were 20% or 25%, but I am sure it also has an option for 15%.\"\n\nThere\'s an uncomfortable situation -- trusting your cab driver to select his own tip before he\'s pulled your luggage from his trunk.  I\'ve used these credit card terminals and they\'re one of the worst payment interfaces I\'ve experienced -- a complete pain for someone with <em>good </em>eyesight.  I\'ve stayed with cash ever since. Mika\'s note, however, suggests a challenge to the travel industry\'s broader moves toward self-service.  As airlines and hotels work to move more transactions to touch screen kiosks at the same time as an aging population\'s eyesight dims, good accessibility design will become critical to the success of these self-service initiatives -- a lot more important than a pleasing color palette.','Need Some Texture on Those Touchscreens','','publish','closed','closed','','need-some-texture-on-those-touchscreens','','','2008-10-07 19:00:49','2008-10-08 01:00:49','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/?p=109',0,'post','',1),
(110,1,'2008-10-14 20:55:34','2008-10-15 02:55:34','Autumn is the only time I willingly book a window seat. Today\'s approach into Newark had us flying over the <a href=\"http://www.nps.gov/DEWA/\" target=\"_blank\">Delaware Water Gap</a> on a clear sunny day. The leaves are beginning to change -- I saw dots of yellow and orange and red bursting out of a field of green. It made me reach back for into some old neurons for the word \"<a title=\"Definition of pointillism\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointillism\" target=\"_blank\">pointillism</a>\", which I learned on a grade-school field trip to the Art Institute of Chicago standing in front of <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Seurat\" target=\"_blank\">Seurat</a>\'s \"<a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunday_Afternoon_on_the_Island_of_La_Grande_Jatte\" target=\"_blank\">A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte</a>\".\n\nI don\'t take the window on every Fall flight. It\'s only a Northeast/Upper Midwest thing. You need maples for those vibrant colors. The oaks down South are more brown than bright. And the tree breaks that Plains farmers plant between their crop fields aren\'t wide enough, aren\'t broad enough to fill your field of view with color.\n\nEven in the Northeast and Upper Midwest, not every airport serves up the colors. I\'ll always take a window flying in and out of White Plains/Westchester County (HPN) and Detroit (DTW). However, the eastern approaches into Milwaukee and Chicago over Lake Michigan -- usually among my favorites -- don\'t do anything for me in Autumn. It\'s often said that Fall colors are Nature\'s way of paying us for the dreariness of Winter. For those of us flying, perhaps it\'s a way to pay us forward for the snow delays we know we\'ll start living through after those leaves fall.','Leaf Peeping From Above','','publish','closed','closed','','leaf-peeping-from-above','','','2008-10-14 20:55:34','2008-10-15 02:55:34','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/?p=110',0,'post','',2),
(111,1,'2008-10-30 21:18:27','2008-10-31 03:18:27','Recorded in the Philadelphia Marriott after a hectic travel month with two trips to Europe and a bunch of travel up and down the US East Coast.  In this episode, I talk about a bit of multi-modal travel -- some planes, trains, and automobile trips.  We have a trio of stories about playing \"travel roulette\" to avoid flight delays, and some listeners offer their favorite iPhone apps.  I then share some non-obvious, intermediate-skill travel tips -- a sort of Road Warrior 201-level class and close with some thoughts about enjoying the fall colors from up above. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_68.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #68:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in the <a href=\"https://www.marriott.com/hotels/travel/phldt-philadelphia-marriott-downtown/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Philadelphia, PA Marriott</a></li>\n 	<li>Lots of multi-modal travel this month -- a National Express bus from Heathrow to Woking, lots of Amtrak Acelas up and down the East Coast</li>\n 	<li>One of those \"<a title=\"IMDb Entry for \" href=\"http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093748/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Planes, Trains &amp; Automobiles</a>\" days had delays on every leg and every mode of transportation except walking</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/indidginus-seismic/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Superstring</a></em> by Indidginus</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>In Heathrow, many signs plastered on the screening machines said that I didn\'t need to take my laptop out of my briefcase for screening.  What do they know that the TSA doesn\'t?</li>\n 	<li>Two travelers tell their \"travel roulette\" stories trying to avoid flight delays</li>\n 	<li>Chris Truelove of <a href=\"http://www.globalbagtag.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Global Bag Tags</a> is happy with an external iPhone battery he bought on eBay. Listen to the <a href=\"http://www.indietravelpodcast.com/podcast/076-global-bag-tag-review/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Indie Travel Podcast</a> interview where Chris tells the story of lost luggage that led to the founding of his company</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/yoria-suerte/\"><em>Suerte Mijo</em></a> by Arthur Yoria</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Road Warrior 201 </strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>TravelCommons has always been about travel stories, hence I haven\'t done many \"travel tips\" segments</li>\n 	<li>I\'m going to skip the usual travel tips and give you some advance tips -- tips I haven\'t seen/heard anywhere else</li>\n 	<li>Tip #1 -- Know your flight, hotel and/or rental car reservation numbers and keep them immediately accessible on your BlackBerry or iPhone</li>\n 	<li>Tip #2 -- When you can\'t get through to a customer service agent on the phone, choose the unpopular path on the phone tree -- Spanish language or International Travel</li>\n 	<li>Tip #3 -- When shopping for flights, factor in the potential cost of missing a connection when choosing between direct and connecting flights</li>\n 	<li>Tip #4 -- If you\'re flying one of those chisling airlines that charge $10 extra for an exit row seat, it\'s worth gritting your teeth and paying it for a flight over 90 minutes</li>\n 	<li>Tip #5 -- When walking out of your hotel room for your morning workout, make your doorknob look unique in case you forget your room number</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/artemis-gravity/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Inception</a></em> by Artemis</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Leaf Peeping from Above </strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Beautiful colors on approach into Newark over the <a href=\"http://www.nps.gov/DEWA/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Delaware Water Gap</a> on a clear sunny day</li>\n 	<li>Reminded me of \"<a title=\"Definition of pointillism\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointillism\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">pointillism</a>\" and <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Seurat\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Seurat</a>\'s \"<a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunday_Afternoon_on_the_Island_of_La_Grande_Jatte\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte</a>\"</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing\n</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Magnatune</a></li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments@travelcommons.com or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_68.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #68 - Advanced Travel Tips; Colors of Autumn','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-68-advanced-travel-tips-colors-of-autumn','','','2021-09-25 09:17:36','2021-09-25 14:17:36','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/?p=111',0,'post','',6),
(112,1,'2008-11-24 22:13:02','2008-11-25 04:13:02','Recorded in the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago at the end of yet another busy travel month – Philadelphia, <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/pacific-northwest/portland\">Portland</a>, Denver, Northern Virginia – but am home this week, keeping to one of my cardinal rules of travel – stay out of any airport Thanksgiving week. In this episode, I talk about a successful experiment of going PC-less on a trip to Portland and give the conclusion to last episode\'s story about my mother-in-law being stranded by <a href=\"http://www.lot.com\">LOT Airlines</a>. We have listener stories on accelerated boarding on international Delta flights and some tidbits of <a href=\"http://www.ba.com\">British Airways</a> gossip on the cause of the 777 crash last January and the havoc around the Heathrow Terminal 5 opening. I then give my review of <a href=\"http://tripchill.com/main/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">TripChill</a>, one of the new wave of web-based personal travel assistants, and share some travel tips sent in by listeners. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_69.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #69:\n<ul>\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\">\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded at the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago</li>\n 	<li>Lots of travel, but staying out of airports over the Thanksgiving week</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/twilightarchive-ritual/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Flow of Know</em></a> by Twilight Archive</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\">\n<ul>\n 	<li>Booked a long weekend in Portland, Ore entirely on frequent traveler points -- somewhat at odds with the spate of media stories claiming that points are practically useless</li>\n 	<li>Went PC-less on the Portland vacation -- operated only on my <a href=\"http://www.apple.com/iphone\">iPhone</a> and BlackBerry</li>\n 	<li>Apple has to fix the iPhone Safari browser -- it crashes all the time</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://www.kenokel.com/\" target=\"_self\" rel=\"noopener\">Ken Okel</a> provides an audio comment on his boarding experience on a recent international Delta flight</li>\n 	<li>A listener provides some juicy tidbits of British Airways gossip picked up in a bar in <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/switzerland/geneva\">Geneva, Switzerland</a></li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/uniontrade-everyday/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Violent and Beautiful</em></a> by the Union Trade</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Travel Assistant in Your Pocket </strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\">\n<ul>\n 	<li>There’s been some sort of mini-explosion of new web sites offering to be “your personal travel assistant\"; sites like <a href=\"http://tripchill.com/main/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">TripChill</a>, <a href=\"http://tripit.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Tripit</a> and <a href=\"http://yapta.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Yapta</a></li>\n 	<li>Been trying out TripChill’s service off and on since their launch last August. Wasn\'t impressed at first, but has gotten better</li>\n 	<li>TripChill does a better job than any other site I\'ve seen in displaying flight alternatives</li>\n 	<li>TripChill and its competitor Tripit have well-designed mobile web sites that quickly display your trip itinerary on a BlackBerry or iPhone</li>\n 	<li>These travel assistant sites don’t seem to offer much new functionality, but they do offer convenience</li>\n 	<li>Wo;; probably keep using TripChill, but as an addition to my travel tool box, not a replacement for something I already use</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/lizzi-love/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Me</em></a> by Lizzi</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Listener Travel Tips </strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\">\n<ul>\n 	<li>One listener suggests a \"divide-&amp;-conquer\" strategy to packing</li>\n 	<li>Another listener sings the praises of hotel sewing kits</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Morgan\">Ian Morgan</a> offers a solution to my problem of forgetting my hotel room number when I go work out -- dial it into my mobile phone</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing\n</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Magnatune</a></li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments@travelcommons.com or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_69.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #69 - Pocket Travel Assistant; More Travel Tips','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-69-pocket-travel-assistant-more-travel-tips','','','2021-09-25 09:18:39','2021-09-25 14:18:39','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/?p=112',0,'post','',1),
(113,1,'2008-12-23 23:01:34','2008-12-24 05:01:34','Recorded in the TravelCommons studios outside of <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/chicago\">Chicago</a> after finishing up my travel for the year. But there was a good bit of travel before the year-end, including one of the craziest/stupidest(?) itineraries I\'ve done in a long time -- Chicago-London-Denver in a little more than a day. Many of the subsequent Twitter comments I received asked that perpetual question -- Why travel when you can <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videoconferencing\">video conference</a>? Traveling to a business-formal office for the first time in 10 years causes me to investigate different methods in packing a suit. And the December storms that have snarled air traffic across the upper two-thirds of the US have me singing the praises of <a href=\"http://flightstats.com\">Flightstats</a>. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_70.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr>\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #70:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded at the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, done for travel for the year</li>\n 	<li>Not before a completely stupid itinerary -- Chicago to London to Denver in a day-&amp;-a-half</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Greensleeves</em> by <a href=\"http://www.georgefletcher.com/\">Tequila Mockingbirds</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Difficult \"travel roulette\" story from Ian Morgan about trying to get from <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/china/hong-kong\">Hong Kong</a> to Sydney</li>\n 	<li>Linda Martin of the <a href=\"http://indietravelpodcast.com/\">Indie Travel Podcast</a> reflects back on her college psych studies and concludes that the hustling around involved in \"travel roulette\" is actually better for you than sitting helpless on a delayed flight</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://ruk.ca/\">Peter Rukavina</a> agrees that there\'s still value in frequent flier programs after scoring a last-minute direct flight from Charlottetown (PEI) to Boston on Thanksgiving weekend using the minimum amount of <a href=\"http://www.aeroplan.com/landing/process.do?lang=E\">Aeroplan</a> miles</li>\n 	<li>Experiencing a lot of pushback from taxi drivers when trying to charge my fare on a credit card. Are others seeing the same thing?</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Please Come Home for Christmas </em> by <a href=\"http://oppenheimermusic.co.uk/\">Oppenheimer</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Packing a Suit</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Always see more suits on flights headed east from Chicago than on flights heading west</li>\n 	<li>Have managed to avoid having to wear a suit -- much easier to wear a blazer and pack a couple of pair of pants in my rolling bag</li>\n 	<li>New client in Philadelphia requires me to suit up -- need to learn to fold a suit so I can keep using my rolling bag</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://www.google.com/search?q=packing+a+suit&amp;hl=en\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Google search</a> reveals a consensus around two different ways</li>\n 	<li>One <a href=\"http://www.menswearhouse.com/aboutus/fashion/articles.jsp?articleID=1408474395561309&amp;browsePage=3&amp;FOLDER%3C%3Efolder_id=1408474395564053&amp;ASSORTMENT%3C%3East_id=94653&amp;bmUID=1197642683816\">approach</a> is to turn the jacket inside out and fold it in half</li>\n 	<li>The second <a href=\"http://www.essortment.com/travel/travelfoldsuit_trgk.htm\">approach</a> – I can’t figure out exactly how they’re doing it – but it seems like some sort of suit coat origami</li>\n 	<li>I\'ve ended it up with my own simple method – fold the jacket in half along the back seam, accordion-fold it in thirds, putting clothes in the folds – boxed shirts from the cleaners work the best</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Merry Christmas Baby</em> by <a href=\"http://topcatrecords.com/\">Calvin Owens</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Why travel when you can videoconference? </strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>When I “twittered” or “tweeted” – pick your Web 2.0 verb – about traveling to London for a 2-hr meeting, the @ replies asked why I didn\'t use videoconferencing or <a href=\"http://webex.com/\">webex</a>?</li>\n 	<li>Had done all the prior meetings by teleconference</li>\n 	<li>But this was the final meeting and we were delivering some tough messages. And call me “old school”, but bad news is best delivered personally, face-to-face</li>\n 	<li>Gartner\'s latest “Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies” <a href=\"http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/mgmt/2D07F8BED99F6D70CC2574A60004AD10\">report</a> says “video telepresence”, their <a href=\"http://blog.gartner.com/blog/index.php?itemid=1969&amp;catid=51\">term</a> for a sort of high-def, IMAX-like videoconferencing set-up that supports “virtual meetings”, as “being on the brink of widespread adoption</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>I’ll Be Home for Christmas</em> by <a href=\"http://www.katimac.com/\">Kati Mac</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Outsmarting winter flight delays</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Winter travel -- usually not a question of <em>are</em> you going to be delayed, but by how much? Or worse, are you going to get canceled?</li>\n 	<li>I use <a href=\"http://flightstats.com\">Flightstats.com</a>\'s Track Flight Status by Route travel tool to predict problems</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from the <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com\">Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments@travelcommons.com or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_70.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #70 - Packing a Suit, Videoconference over Travel, Watching Winter Flight Delays','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-70-packing-a-suit-videoconference-over-travel-watching-winter-flight-delays','','','2021-09-27 10:23:07','2021-09-27 15:23:07','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/?p=113',0,'post','',3),
(114,1,'2009-01-02 11:36:03','2009-01-02 17:36:03','In past TravelCommons episodes, we\'ve talked about how important it is for a frequent traveler to find good restaurants that welcome a single diner.  In spite of a former colleague\'s advice to \"<a href=\"http://www.keithferrazzi.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">never eat alone</a>\", I often find myself with nothing but the <a href=\"http://www.usatoday.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">USA Today </a>as a dining partner.  Sure, I could dine in the hotel bar, but I can only eat just so many <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobb_salad\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Cobb salads</a> and watch just so many re-runs of <a href=\"http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/sportscenter/index\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">ESPN SportsCenter</a>.  Here are 4 recommendations to eating alone in your hotel room.\n<ul>\n 	<li><strong><a href=\"http://www.avecrestaurant.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Avec</a></strong> - <a href=\"http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&amp;hl=en&amp;geocode=&amp;q=615+w+randolph,+chicago&amp;sll=41.80855,-87.922509&amp;sspn=0.007469,0.013819&amp;g=615+w+randolph,+chicago&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;ll=41.885234,-87.643218&amp;spn=0.00746,0.013819&amp;z=16&amp;iwloc=addr\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">615 W Randolph, Chicago</a> - No, I don\'t eat alone in my home town.  But if I had to, I\'d be a regular at this West Loop restaurant.  They have a good selection of Portuguese wines -- not always an easy find -- and \"small plates\" menu focused on Mediterranean flavors.  I like to sit about 2/3rd\'s down the bar in front of the wood burning oven and watch the chefs do their thing -- much more interesting than any ESPN-blaring plasma screen.  I get a <em>large</em> order of the <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salumi\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">salumi</a> plate, a selection of 5 sausages cured in the fridge behind the bar, and then a vegetable dish to assuage my guilt.</li>\n 	<li><strong><a href=\"http://www.sushisams.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Sushi Sam\'s</a></strong> - <a href=\"http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&amp;hl=en&amp;geocode=&amp;q=218+e+3rd+ave,+san+mateo,+ca&amp;sll=37.566521,-122.3227&amp;sspn=0.007943,0.013819&amp;g=218+e+3rd+ave,+san+mateo,+ca&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;ll=37.566521,-122.3227&amp;spn=0.007943,0.013819&amp;z=16&amp;iwloc=addr\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">281 E 3rd Ave, San Mateo, CA</a> - Sushi restaurants seem to be second only to hotel sports bars as the default hangout for many travelers -- trading high cholesterol for <a href=\"http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/thedishrag/2008/12/jeremy-pivens-m.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">mercury poisoning</a>.  However, when I\'m in the Bay Area running up and down the 101, I always end up at the sushi bar ordering up the <a href=\"http://sushifaq.com/sushiotaku/2006/10/07/omakase-sushi/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">omakase</a> sashimi -- the chef\'s choice.  It\'s not cheap, but Sam serves up a selection of fish and preparations I rarely see at other sushi joints.</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://www.clydecommon.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><strong>Clyde Common</strong></a> - <a href=\"http://maps.google.com/maps?ie=UTF8&amp;oe=utf-8&amp;client=firefox-a&amp;q=clyde+commons+portland&amp;fb=1&amp;cid=0,0,9204446187365665864&amp;ll=45.523924,-122.681386&amp;spn=0.007021,0.013819&amp;z=16&amp;iwloc=A\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">SW 10th and Stark, Portland</a> -This recommendation may violate my rules -- Clyde Common <em>seems </em>to be the restaurant for the <a href=\"http://www.acehotel.com/portland\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Ace Hotel</a> -- but the great food and communal table seating wins it a recommendation for a dining-alone traveler.  The menu is probably the most adventurous of my four recommendations, but a good choice if you\'re willing to color outside the lines a bit -- grilled rabbit,  salt cod, ravioli with beef heart.</li>\n</ul>','Good Restaurants for One','','publish','closed','closed','','good-restaurants-for-one','','\nhttp://sushifaq.com/sushiotaku/2006/10/07/omakase-sushi/','2020-12-10 15:59:10','2020-12-10 20:59:10','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/?p=114',0,'post','',7),
(115,1,'2009-02-08 20:13:32','2009-02-09 02:13:32','Recorded in the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, back doing my thing to support the travel industry with lots of travel in January. We talk about some recent TSA observations, good and bad; my latest spin of the \"travel roulette\" wheel, trading the plane for a train in an East Coast snow storm; a look back at last year\'s travel courtesy of Dopplr\'s Personal Annual Report; and being saved by duct tape while flying the tatty skies of United. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_71.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #71:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded at the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago</li>\n 	<li>Back doing my thing to support the travel industry, visiting Washington DC, Denver, Phoenix, San Francisco, Stamford, CT, and Jackson, MI</li>\n 	<li>Noticing a lot more passengers paying attention to the pre-flight safety demo since the US Air Hudson River splashdown</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Beneath the Skin</em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/birdy-alter/\">Jerry Berlongieri</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Belated shout-out to Tim Grubb of <a href=\"http://www.sizeoflife.com/blog/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">The Size of Life blog</a> -- \"lifestyle news and reviews for the big and tall man\"</li>\n 	<li>Tim is doing a series of articles on \"Flying the (Big &amp; Tall) Friendly Skies\". The <a href=\"http://seatguru.com\" target=\"_self\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">SeatGuru</a> map he uses as an illustration points out the best coach seat for a big &amp; tall man -- the window seat on the second exit row of a United Airbus 319</li>\n 	<li>The new security checkpoint for <a href=\"https://phl-airport.com/\">Philadelphia Airport</a>\'s Terminal\'s D and E replace a near-medieval set-up with a much better experience</li>\n 	<li>Watched the TSA do a full body patdown on <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_George\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Cardinal Francis George</a>, the 72-yr-old Catholic Archbishop of Chicago.  Couldn\'t that screener\'s time been used more productively checking out someone who could <em>actually</em> be a threat?</li>\n 	<li>Lost a recent game of \"travel roulette\". Moved from the Shuttle to Amtrak\'s Acela Express to avoid delays from an East Coast snow storm. The train ended up 2½ hours late because of equipment problems caused by the snow.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Hurt Me So I Can Walk Away </em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/joy-float/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Michael Joy</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Looking Back at Last Year\'s Travel\n</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Dopplr sent me a 2008 Personal Annual Report on my travel last year</li>\n 	<li>Has some interesting factoids, such as my \"personal velocity\" in 2008 was the same as that of a squirrel</li>\n 	<li>And that my 2008 carbon footprint was equivalent to 2.3 Hummers</li>\n</ul>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/hummer.jpg\"><img class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-3077\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/hummer.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"194\" height=\"139\" /></a></p>\n\n<ul>\n 	<li>Of course, they could have used, say a Mercedes Benz S-600 sedan, which gets worse mileage than a Hummer H3, but I guess chest-pounding about big gas-guzzling American SUVs is easier self-awareness about big gas-guzzling Euro sedans – especially when your company is based in Helsinki.</li>\n 	<li>The factoid that grabbed my attention was this one – “In 2008, you spent 214 days at home; 152 days traveling”</li>\n</ul>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/days_home.jpg\"><img class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-3075\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/days_home.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"149\" height=\"65\" /></a></p>\n\n<ul>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Bulletproof</em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/musicinside-forces/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Music Inside</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Flying the Tatty Skies of United </strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>My ORD-PHX flight was almost scuttled by a broken luggage bin door.</li>\n 	<li>Those of us who spend a good bit of time flying United know that duct tape is not an uncommon sight. United is fraying around the edges.</li>\n 	<li>United is the only major US airline to not have any current orders placed with any aircraft manufacturer</li>\n 	<li>And the service has gotten a bit frayed around the edges. The 2008 American Customer Satisfaction Index has United ahead of only US Airways</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://crankyflier.com/2008/11/20/united-gets-beaten-down-over-phocuswright-presentation-on-customer-experience\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Brett Snyder</a> was at a travel industry conference last November where a United executive gave a talk titled <em>Customer Experience and Flying: Not an Oxymoron</em> and admitted that United would be \"overstretching\" if they tried to be as good as Singapore Air or Virgin Atlantic</li>\n 	<li>Was refused entry to United\'s London-Heathrow business class arrivals lounge because I was flying on an upgraded coach ticket, not a full-fare business class ticket</li>\n 	<li>United\'s employees continue to hold together their frayed company by reaching out to passengers</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img style=\"display: none !important;\" src=\"http://ad.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/show?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;bids=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Magnatune</a></li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments@travelcommons.com or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_71.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #71 - Winter Travel, Last Year\'s Travel, Tatty United','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-71-winter-travel-last-years-travel-tatty-united','','\nhttp://crankyflier.com/2008/11/20/united-gets-beaten-down-over-phocuswright-presentation-on-customer-experience','2021-09-25 09:38:19','2021-09-25 14:38:19','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/?p=115',0,'post','',3),
(116,1,'2009-02-11 11:34:30','2009-02-11 17:34:30','I don\'t mean to pile on United Airlines, but they do bring it on themselves sometimes.  The latest TravelCommons <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_71.mp3\">podcast</a> talks about how the \"friendly skies\" of United Airlines have become a bit thread worn -- duct tape holding together armrests, seat backs that can\'t stay up (which was my experience <em>again</em> on my Monday flight from ORD to SFO).  Not surprising since United is the only major US airline without any current orders placed for new aircraft.\n\nTwo new news stories illustrate United\'s slide.  Scanning the front page of yesterday\'s Chicago Tribune while sitting forward in my auto-recline seat, I saw an <a href=\"http://www.chicagotribune.com/travel/chi-tue-problem-0210-feb10-2,0,7331900.column\">article</a> about a women whose luggage was <em>burned</em> by United.\n<blockquote>As Shannon Tadel waited in the Syracuse, N.Y., airport for her flight back to Chicago on Dec. 1, a United Airlines employee approached her and asked if he could speak to her privately.\n\n\"He said, \'Your luggage has been set on fire,\'\" Tadel recounted later. \"I kind of chuckled at him because it was so unbelievable. I was like, \'Um, OK.\'\"The employee explained that her bag, containing most of her wardrobe, had been placed too close to the exhaust of a belt loader used to deliver bags to the cargo hold. Someone turned on the equipment and, voila, luggage flambe.\n\nA dumbfounded Tadel boarded the plane, not quite sure what to do. Moments later, the pilot summoned her to the cockpit.\n\n\"He said, \'Do you see that over there? That\'s your luggage,\'\" Tadel recalled.\n\nShe looked out the plane\'s window and saw a man with a hose and a big plume of smoke.</blockquote>\nTadel says she filed a claim on December 4 and didn\'t receive a check from United until last week -- after she got the Tribune\'s <em>What\'s Your Problem</em> columnist involved.\n\nAnd then comes the story of United\'s <a href=\"http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123432123461471495.html\">announcement</a> <a href=\"http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/chi-wed-brf1-united-call-center-feb11,0,7058622.story\">yesterday</a> that they are closing their complaints call center, telling customers to send a letter or an e-mail instead.  United said the reason for this move is to improve customer satisfaction -- \"We did a lot of research, we looked into it, and people who email or write us are more satisfied with our responses,\" said United spokesperson Robin Urbanski.  But this is also a cost-cutting move -- managing written inquiries is easier and costs less than taking phone calls.\n\nIt\'s also another push toward self-service -- putting the burden of writing up the issue/complaint on the customer rather than having an United employee take if from a phone conversation.  In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_71.mp3\">TravelCommons #71</a>, I said \"The duct tape holding together the tatty skies are the employees,\" that in spite of all the management mistakes, most of the United employees are doing a good job in serving their customers.  Yet this latest move by United continues a trend of separating customers from employees -- book your tickets on-line, use a kiosk to check in, and now send an e-mail if you have a problem.  I can\'t wait until they try to replace flight attendants with vending machines.','Don\'t Call When The Tatty Skies Catch On Fire','','publish','closed','closed','','dont-call-when-the-tatty-skies-catch-on-fire','','','2009-02-11 11:34:30','2009-02-11 17:34:30','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/?p=116',0,'post','',3),
(117,1,'2009-02-17 17:01:05','2009-02-17 23:01:05','I work very hard not to take out my frustrations with the airlines on the employees -- those folks are usually just trying to do their jobs; just trying to get through to the end of the day like the rest of us.  Others aren\'t so considerate.  Flying back from San Francisco last week, the guy next to me at the ticket counter asked the ticket agent at least a half-dozen times to \"show me some love\" after she told him she couldn\'t upgrade his Chicago-London leg.  I was impressed by her patience, keeping her cool long after I was ready to tell him to give it up.\n\nHowever, the gang at <a href=\"http://www.gadling.com/2009/02/16/woman-throws-tantrum-after-missing-her-flight/\">Gadling</a> has posted a video of a passenger who refuses to hold it in.  Denied boarding on a Cathay Pacific Hong Kong-to-San Francisco flight because she arrived at the gate after the plane door had closed, she has no qualms about putting her dismay on full display.  Here\'s the <a href=\"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i57IwNGu_qQ\" target=\"_blank\">URL</a> to the video on the YouTube site.\n\n[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i57IwNGu_qQ[/youtube] ','Meltdown at Gate 42','','publish','closed','closed','','meltdown-at-gate-42','','','2009-02-17 17:01:05','2009-02-17 23:01:05','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/?p=117',0,'post','',6),
(118,1,'2009-02-25 22:23:42','2009-02-26 04:23:42','When I used to work in Detroit\'s Renaissance Center, international cellular calls would occasionally appear on my bill.  After way too many calls to AT&amp;T, I finally figured out that whenever I used a certain conference room in Tower 600, my phone would grab the cell tower directly across the Detroit River in Windsor, Ontario.\n\nHowever, my hassles were nothing compared to a fellow Chicagoan who received a $28,067.31 bill after watching the Chicago Bears-Detroit Lions football game on his PC through his AT&amp;T wireless data card.  In the <em>Chicago Sun-Times</em> <a href=\"http://www.suntimes.com/news/zimmermann/1444692,CST-NWS-Fixer23.article\" target=\"_blank\">story</a>, Wayne Burdick said \"I was in Miami on Nov. 2 getting ready to go on a Caribbean cruise. I wanted to catch the Bears game before we left port.  It was 1 p.m. Florida time. The Bears game was starting. The ship was not leaving Miami until 4 p.m., so I slid in my wireless card and brought up my Slingbox and watched the game on my computer.\"\n\nIt appears that Burdick\'s wireless card associated with the cruise ship\'s microcell, which connected to the Internet through a satellite link and billed at international roaming rates.  Even after providing proof that the ship hadn\'t left the dock,  the best offer he could get on his own from AT&amp;T was a reduction to $6,000 -- still a good bit more than the $220 he normally pays for his unlimited data plan.  When Burdick got The <em>Sun-Times</em> <a href=\"http://www.suntimes.com/news/zimmermann/1444692,CST-NWS-Fixer23.article\" target=\"_blank\">Fixer</a> to shine some media light on the problem, AT&amp;T relented.\n\nAs more and more portable devices seamlessly link to cellular data networks, travelers who are even <em>close</em> to an international border need to watch out.','$28,000 to Watch The Bears-Lions Game?','','publish','closed','closed','','28000-to-watch-the-bears-lions-game','','','2009-02-25 22:23:42','2009-02-26 04:23:42','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/?p=118',0,'post','',0),
(119,1,'2009-03-08 22:00:50','2009-03-09 04:00:50','Recorded in the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago at the end of a full week home, decompressing after 6 weeks of straight travel. We talk about some \"travel rules\" violators -- the woman whose airport meltdown is a YouTube hit and an Amazing Race couple whose violation got them eliminated. A listener suggests a topic -- what is the one thing you never want to hear on a flight? And we close with a couple of suggestions on how to avoid the growing cacophony of flat screen TVs shouting out the depressing state of the world. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_72.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #72:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded at the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago</li>\n 	<li>Enjoying a week off from O\'Hare after 6 weeks on the road</li>\n 	<li>The Monday morning \"rush hour\" security lines are much easier to handle now that I\'ve fully embraced the \"line cut\" United Airlines provides the <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_airlines#Mileage_Plus\">Global Services</a> customers in ORD</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Santa Rosa Shuffle</em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/seismic_anamoly\">Seismic Anamoly</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Blog posting on the <a href=\"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i57IwNGu_qQ\">video</a> of a woman melting down after being denied boarding on a Cathay Pacific Hong Kong-to-San Francisco flight generated the most comments</li>\n 	<li>Most comments expressed amazement. One of the cardinal travel rules – don’t take out your frustrations with the airlines on its employees</li>\n 	<li>Watching a recent <a href=\"http://www.cbs.com/primetime/amazing_race/recaps/1403/?season=14\">episode</a> of the TV show <em>Amazing Race</em>, saw a <a href=\"http://www.cbs.com/primetime/amazing_race/bio/brad_and_victoria_14/bio.php?season=14\">team</a> eliminated by breaking one of the top travel rules -- always take the direct flight</li>\n 	<li>Was happy to see some economic stimulus money directed to high-speed rail, though not sure what we\'ll get by the time the $8 billion is spread across the 11 gov’t-designated <a href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2009/02/20/us/20rail-map.html\">high-speed rail corridors</a></li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Sproing-A-Dub</em> by <a href=\"http://www.magnatune.com/artists/albums/babylon-beat/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Burning Babylon</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Things You Never Want To Hear\n</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>A listener suggests asking people \"What is the one thing you never want to hear on a flight?\"</li>\n 	<li>There are the two classes of “things you never want to hear” – those coming over the loud speaker and those coming from the passengers around you</li>\n 	<li>Flying severely compresses our personal space creating two almost completely opposite reactions -- a sense of instant intimacy with complete strangers, or total obliviousness to the 5-10 complete strangers who can hear every word of a personal cell phone call</li>\n 	<li>Probably the one thing I don’t want to hear from a fellow passenger is – “I gotta get outta here” when I\'m still in the air</li>\n 	<li>If you do manage to “get outta here” at 25-35,000 ft, where do you go?</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Shinigami</em> by <a href=\"http://www.myspace.com/studiobebopmusic\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Studio BeBop</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Can’t Find a Piece of Quiet</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Tough to avoid the depressing state of the world with TV screens blaring at you everywhere</li>\n 	<li>CNN Airport News screens seem to be at every gate and an epidemic of flat screen TVs have covered the walls in bars, restaurants, airport clubs, and hotel lounges.</li>\n 	<li>Mini-trend of putting rocking chairs in airports is some help.</li>\n 	<li>Other fliers search out airport chapels -- no flat screens or PA announcements there</li>\n 	<li>I cram my noise blocking earphones tightly in my ear and dial up the Amazon rain forest on the <a href=\"http://www.tmsoft.com/iphone-whitenoise.html\">White Noise</a> iPhone app</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"http://ad.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/show?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;bids=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Magnatune</a></li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments@travelcommons.com or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_72.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #72 - Breaking Travel Rules, What You Never Want to Hear','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-72-breaking-travel-rules-what-you-never-want-to-hear','','','2021-09-25 09:39:54','2021-09-25 14:39:54','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/?p=119',0,'post','',7),
(120,1,'2009-03-30 22:32:34','2009-03-31 04:32:34','The two reasons most frequent travelers invest in a frequent flyer programs -- status perks (e.g., free upgrades, pre-boarding) and free trips.  While comparing status perks between programs is pretty straight-forward -- most airlines proudly <a href=\"http://www.united.com/page/middlepage/0,6823,1168,00.html\" target=\"_blank\">list</a> every status perk, the number of seats that can be booked with miles seems a closely guarded secret, making comparisons between frequent flyer programs difficult.\n\nIdeaWorks, a travel consultancy led by ex-<a href=\"http://www.midwestairlines.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Midwest Airlines</a> executives, took a <a href=\"http://www.ideaworkscompany.com/press/2009/Press%20Release45AirlineRewardReport.pdf\" target=\"_blank\">shot</a> at clearing away just a bit of the smoke by generating some real comparitive data on mileage seat availability.  Looking at the popular transatlantic awards, IdeaWorks \"made 6,400 booking queries at the websites of five US-based airlines and five Europe-based airlines during the latter half of January 2009.\"  That\'s either some good web code or a lot of keyboard banging.\n\nThe results?  Iberia, the Spanish carrier, took top honors, offering reward seats for 83% of IdeaWork\'s booking attempts.  American Airlines was the best US carrier at 58%, which earned it 4th place in the standings.  Indeed, the <a href=\"http://www.oneworld.com/\" target=\"_blank\">oneworld</a> alliance took 3 of the top 4 spots.  The worst was no surprise -- US Airways at a Scrooge-like 4% reward seat availability.  The full results are available <a href=\"http://www.ideaworkscompany.com/press/2009/Press%20Release45AirlineRewardReport.pdf\" target=\"_blank\">here</a>.','New Facts About The Best Frequent Flyer Programs','','publish','closed','closed','','new-facts-about-the-best-frequent-flyer-programs','','','2009-03-30 22:32:34','2009-03-31 04:32:34','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/?p=120',0,'post','',1),
(121,1,'2009-04-03 17:37:29','2009-04-03 23:37:29','I travel frequently through Denver International Airport (DEN) to visit family and to ski.  From this first-hand experience, I\'ve always believed that the DEN TSA crew is among the nation\'s worst.  According to an internal TSA report, a key reason is the local TSA management.  Denver\'s NBC affiliate obtained a copy of the report and ran an <a href=\"http://www.9news.com/news/article.aspx?storyid=113040&amp;catid=339\" target=\"_blank\">investigative segment</a> on last night\'s 10pm news.  The internal report labeled the DEN TSA management team \"retaliatory,\" \"inconsistent,\" \"lack integrity\" and \"antagonist.\"\n\nFormer screeners claim that the hostile atmosphere detracts TSA employees from effectively screening passengers and luggage.  One current screener who asked not to be identified said \"The culture is one that really promotes a lot of underhanded, retaliatory action from people and doesn\'t really promote hard work and ethical behavior.\" No wonder the TSA is at the bottom (220 out of 222) of the latest <a href=\"http://bestplacestowork.org/BPTW/rankings/index.php?t=scores_subcomponent&amp;c=index\" target=\"_blank\">Best Places to Work in the Federal Government rankings</a>.  Next time I get hassled at Denver, I\'ll try not to take it personally -- apparently it\'s just the TSA way.','Denver TSA Performance Poor Because of Management Harrassment','','publish','closed','closed','','denver-tsa-performance-poor-because-of-management-harrassment','','','2009-04-03 17:37:29','2009-04-03 23:37:29','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/?p=121',0,'post','',2),
(122,1,'2009-04-15 11:49:06','2009-04-15 17:49:06','Recorded somewhere over the Atlantic in the business class toilet of a South African Airways A340 and the <a href=\"http://www.proteahotels.com/the-rosebank.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Rosebank Hotel</a> in Johannesburg at the start of a week\'s stay in South Africa. We talk about inconsistent rules for mobile devices on planes, the value of renewing my CLEAR registered traveler membership, the three things that make a restaurant a great place to eat solo, and listener suggestions on the one thing you never want to hear on a flight. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_73.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #73:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in the business class toilet of a South African Airways A340 and the <a href=\"http://www.proteahotels.com/the-rosebank.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Rosebank Hotel</a> in Johannesburg</li>\n 	<li>En route to a week\'s business trip in South Africa</li>\n 	<li>Trips earlier this month saw very empty airports -- right up to Spring Break time, when they filled up with families and strollers</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Stinky Dog</em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/musicinside-forces/\">Music Inside</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://seat6d.com/\">Denrael</a> commented on Twitter that there are at least 5 iPhone apps available to keep track of your hotel room number -- free ones like <a href=\"http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=304561585&amp;mt=8\">Room</a> and paid ones like <a href=\"http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=309106848&amp;mt=8\">Zimmer</a></li>\n 	<li>Reached new heights of electronics inconsistency on my JFK-JNB SAA flight. After the stop in Dakar, Senegal, the purser announced that all smart phones – and he specifically named iPhones, Nokia E-series, Blackberries – were not allowed to be used in flight – even when put in Airplane mode</li>\n 	<li>Returning from SFO, one passenger decided that he was the electronics “hall monitor” and started yelling across the cabin at another passenger to turn off his “crackberry” as we were approaching ORD</li>\n 	<li>My <a href=\"http://flyclear.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">CLEAR</a> registered traveler card came in handy when in JFK\'s Terminal 4, but still haven\'t used it enough to justify the $179/yr fee</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Locovenido</em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/falik-dreams/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Falik</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Eating on the Road\n</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Eating a great dinner by myself at the bar of <a href=\"http://www.tintorestaurant.com/\">Tinto</a> in Philadelphia got me thinking about what makes for a good place to eat solo while on the road</li>\n 	<li>The sports bar might as well have been created just for solo guy travelers</li>\n 	<li>Outside the sports bar genre, what makes for a good place for a solo traveler? Taking “good food” and “cleanliness” as table stakes, there are 3 things -- availability, small plates, and bar seating</li>\n 	<li>Two nice-to-haves -- ability to make a reservation on <a href=\"http://opentable.com\">Open Table</a> and a web site built with something other than Flash so I can read the menu on my iPhone</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Just Don’t</em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/liebig-severed/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Lie Big</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>More Things You Never Want To Hear</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>In last month’s episode, we featured a listener\'s question – “What is the one thing you never want to hear on a flight?” and asked for your input</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://thehappyheadlines.com/\">Dawn Owens</a> offered “God, I should NOT have eaten that!”</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://fricksworld.blogspot.com/\">Steve Frick</a> said “I don\'t ever want to hear the pilot say ‘I\'m so tired I could just crash’”</li>\n 	<li>Greg B said the “one thing that I never want to hear at any stage of the flight ... ‘BRACE FOR IMPACT’”</li>\n 	<li>Steve F gave two suggestions – \"The smoke in the cabin is nothing to be concerned about\" and \"We have an FAA inspection team riding along with us, so we will doing everything by the book\"</li>\n 	<li>Michael Golden offers a non verbal thing you don\'t want to hear – shutting down an engine while taxiing out</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"http://ad.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/show?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;bids=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Magnatune</a></li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments@travelcommons.com or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_73.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #73 - Eating Alone on The Road, More Things You Never Want to Hear','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-73-eating-alone-on-the-road-more-things-you-never-want-to-hear','','','2021-09-25 09:41:21','2021-09-25 14:41:21','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/?p=122',0,'post','',4),
(123,1,'2009-04-26 12:22:30','2009-04-26 18:22:30','The International Air Transport Association <a href=\"http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/apr/16/airlines-lose-business-passengers\">reported</a> earlier this month that premium ticket purchases fell 21% globally in February -- which follows January\'s decline of 16.7%.  Part of the drop is due to falling air traffic, but a good bit of it is from tighter corporate travel policies that are pushing mid-level executives to the back of the plane.  Not good for the airlines because, according to one <a href=\"http://www.portfolio.com/business-travel/seat-2B/2009/03/17/Big-Changes-for-Business-Travel\">analyst</a>, it can take up to 10 coach fliers to replace the revenue of one business-class flier.\n\nThe question that no one seems to want to ask is -- is a seat in the business-class cabin <em>worth </em>a 10x price premium?  I flew business class on the three international legs of my recent trip between to Johannesburg, South Africa -- South Africa Airlines on the outbound New York-to-Johannesburg leg, and then returned on Lufthansa from Johannesburg to Frankfurt, and United from Frankfurt to Chicago.  It\'s a <em>long</em> trip, and so should highlight the value of business class.  But for me, it didn\'t -- it just reinforced the question.\n\nNone of these flights were particularly memorable -- the service was marginal, the food was at best just OK, though the wine selection wasn\'t bad (SAA was the best).  The big difference was the seat reclines -- full flat on SAA, almost flat on Lufthansa, and Lazy-Boy recline on United -- which certainly made for a much better night\'s sleep than the 3-4 inches of recline provided in coach.  So, the $5-7,000 premium is really about a shorter check-in line, 3-4 free glasses of wine, and a night\'s sleep.  Can you justify that in these economic times?  The airlines certainly hope so.','What\'s the Value of Business Class... to the Passenger?','','publish','closed','closed','','whats-the-value-of-business-class-to-the-passenger','','','2009-04-26 12:22:30','2009-04-26 18:22:30','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/?p=123',0,'post','',1),
(124,1,'2009-05-14 21:44:54','2009-05-15 03:44:54','Recorded in the Seattle Marriott Waterfront, this special 4th-year anniversary edition collates the best bits from four years of TravelCommons podcasts. Starting with the \"hotel medley\" -- the roll call of all the hotels that have served as TravelCommons\' recording studios, we move on to excerpts from stories about the TSA, Bose headphones, memories of better airplane food, the hassles of travel, and some of the most entertaining sights I\'ve seen in the last four years. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_74.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.','Podcast #74 - Looking Back Over Four Years of TravelCommons','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-74-looking-back-over-four-years-of-travelcommons','','','2021-09-25 09:42:17','2021-09-25 14:42:17','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/?p=124',0,'post','',7),
(130,1,'2009-05-26 21:36:01','2009-05-27 03:36:01','\"What do tech-savvy frequent flyers want most? The desire to stay connected via Wi-Fi topped the technology requests, according to a<a href=\"http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press/2009/090522a.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> new study</a> conducted by American Airlines and HP,\" says an HP press release from last week.  The online survey conducted by American Airlines reports that \"47 percent of business travelers surveyed indicated Wi-Fi was the most important airport amenity, outscoring basic travels needs such as food by nearly 30 percentage points\" -- a not-so-surprising coincidence given AA\'s<a href=\"http://www.aa.com/aa/i18nForward.do?p=/urls/gogo.jsp\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> recent announcement</a> of their roll-out of the <a href=\"http://www.gogoinflight.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Gogo</a> inflight Internet service.\n\nThe survey was obviously constructed to provide publicity around the Gogo roll-out, but I have to disagree with two of the key findings.  First, given the dire state of on-board food, I rate airport food availability much higher than WiFi -- especially if I\'m getting on a flight heading to or from the West Coast.  Between my BlackBerry and iPhone, I can handle almost all my communication needs with cellular data.  But having to make a meal from one of those $6 snack boxes?  That\'s a crisis in the making.\n\nThe other finding I take issue with is their claim that \"work efficiency drops dramatically in the air\" for lack of voice and data network connectivity.  On the contrary, I think my work efficiency <em>increases </em>without Outlook pinging me with a new e-mail or TweetDeck beeping with the latest tweet or my iPhone vibrating with a new text message or a colleague asking a quick question on IM or somebody calling me to ask how things are going....  I look forward to my 4-hours of enforced solitude on my flights between Chicago and San Francisco.  I get an amazing amount of reading and writing done.  Thank God that Gogo wants to charge $13/flight for their service.  If it was free, I\'d never get anything done.','Gratuitous Research On WiFi Cravings','','private','closed','closed','','gratuitous-research-on-wifi-cravings','','','2024-06-02 10:33:52','2024-06-02 15:33:52','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/?p=130',0,'post','',0),
(136,1,'2009-06-08 22:19:45','2009-06-09 04:19:45','A Wall Street Journal <em>Middle Seat</em> <a href=\"http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124407469840583393.html\" target=\"_blank\">column</a> illustrated how airlines can make a good thing bad -- flipping the proverb to turn a silk purse into a sow\'s ear.\n\nIn March, American Airlines restarted their program to replace their old gas-guzzling MD-80\'s with sparkling new Boeing 737-800\'s.  As someone who earned 2+ million American AAdvantage miles, I\'ve spent a <em>lot</em> of time in those MD-80\'s and I just despise them.  The dark blue interior and short ceiling gives them a cave-like aura, and the short overhead bin on the 2-seat side has led to many pitched battles for carry-on space.  So when I heard that AA is deploying the new 737\'s at O\'Hare, I started thinking about shifting some of my flying time from United to American.\n\nUntil, that is, I read a bit further and saw that American was cramming 2 more rows into the new 737\'s for a total seat count of 160 at a 31-inch seat pitch.  <a href=\"http://www.uk-air.net/seatpitch.htm\" target=\"_blank\">Seat Pitch</a> is the distance between two rows of seats and is a shorthand for legroom.  I\'m not that big of a guy (6 ft, 34-inch waist) and  I feel like I\'m shoehorning myself into Southwest\'s  seat with a 32-inch pitch.  There\'s just no way I\'m voluntarily doing a 31-inch seat pitch.\n\nMany commentators say that passengers have brought this upon themselves by making travel choices solely on price.  It\'s an oft-repeated claim, but it doesn\'t hold up to scrutiny -- at least for frequent fliers.  Five years ago, American had a completely different strategy, differentiating themselves with <em>more</em> leg room -- a spacious 34-inch seat pitch.  I flew American every time I could -- even when it meant paying a higher price -- because, even in those cave-like MD-80\'s, it was the most comfortable seat in the air.  Today, one of the main reasons I\'m a heavy United Airlines flier is their Economy Plus section, with its 35-36-inch seat pitch in the front half of the plane.  I get Economy Plus seating for free because of my Mileage Plus status, but I know many non-status fliers who gladly pay $350/year for an <a href=\"https://www.unitedpromotions.com/epahome/control/epa\" target=\"_blank\">Economy Plus annual subscription</a>.\n\nWhile Ryanair\'s CEO <a href=\"http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/jun/02/ryanair-airline-oleary-toilet-charge\" target=\"_blank\">continues to insist</a> that he\'s serious about putting pay toilets in his planes, I expect American\'s CEO will soon announce the sale of $15 shoehorns to get in and out of those new seats.','Shoehorning In More Plane Seats','','publish','closed','closed','','shoehorning-in-more-plane-seats','','','2009-06-08 22:19:45','2009-06-09 04:19:45','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/?p=136',0,'post','',0),
(138,1,'2009-06-24 23:19:10','2009-06-25 04:19:10','Recorded in the St Louis Airport Marriott courtesy of a blown connection by Southwest. We clean out the TravelCommons mail bag, going through listener comments on disabling in-flight electronics, eating alone, and finding good non-chain food on the road. We talk about the sudden collapse of the CLEAR registered traveler program and if in-flight WiFi will <em>really</em> improve frequent traveler productivity. I also give a little personal history about how I came to travel so much. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_75.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #75:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in the St Louis Airport Marriott due to a missed connection courtesy of Southwest Airlines</li>\n 	<li>This is a pretty big miss by Southwest. It’ll be a while before they see me at Midway again</li>\n 	<li>Haven’t been doing quite as much travel as usual. Passenger traffic in May was <a href=\"http://blogs.wsj.com/middleseat/2009/06/05/thanks-in-part-to-swine-flu-air-passenger-traffic-plunged-in-may/\">down over 9%</a> , and I personally contributed to that trend</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Ice Hotel</em> by <a href=\"http://www.paristocuba.com\">Mario Grigorov</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Thanks to everyone for the best wishes tweets, e-mails and website comments on last month’s 4th anniversary show</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://mikkelsen.tv/simon/\">Simon Mikkelsen</a> provided a nice fact-based response to my rant about the mess of in-flight electronics regulations</li>\n 	<li>The CLEAR registered traveler program replaced its <a href=\"http://www.flyclear.com/\">web site</a> with a single white page announced its immediate shutdown. Guess I made the right decision not renewing my membership</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Giving In</em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/senne-aerial/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Brad Senne</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Can’t I Fly Unplugged?\n</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Joint American Airlines/HP <a href=\"http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press/2009/090522a.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">survey</a> says most \" tech-savvy frequent flyers\" think WiFi is more important than food.</li>\n 	<li>A not-so-surprising coincidence given AA\'s<a href=\"http://www.aa.com/aa/i18nForward.do?p=/urls/gogo.jsp\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> recent announcement</a> of their roll-out of the <a href=\"http://www.gogoinflight.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Gogo</a> inflight Internet service.</li>\n 	<li>I rate airport food availability much higher than WiFi — especially if I’m getting on a flight heading to or from the West Coast.</li>\n 	<li>I think my productivity increases without inflight WiFi, but that\'s because I use a full-featured laptop</li>\n 	<li>However, the emerging class of netbooks, with their corollary assumption of constant Internet connectivity – the model of a low-powered client leveraging the power and storage of the cloud -- would need in-flight WiFi to be productive</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Traveling Light </em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/fielding-distant/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Adam Fielding</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>How I Got Here</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Simon Mikkelsen wrote “I’ve had a question for a long time. What is your job? We’ve heard a bit from time to time, but what requires so much travel?”</li>\n 	<li>Have tended not put too much of my personal background into TravelCommons. Kind of a corollary tag line – it’s more about the journey than the presenter. But after so many of you have stuck it out through 4 years and now 75 episodes, I thought I owed you a bit of background.</li>\n 	<li>I\'m in consulting now, but traveled a lot even when I had real jobs</li>\n 	<li>When I joined <a href=\"http://deloitte.com\">Deloitte Consulting</a> in Detroit, the real travel began. I made it to Northwest’s top tier in 9 months and had 750,000 miles in 4 years</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"http://ad.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/show?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;bids=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Magnatune</a></li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments@travelcommons.com or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_75.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #75 – Can\'t I Fly Unplugged, How I Got Here','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-75-cant-i-fly-unplugged-how-i-got-here','','','2021-09-25 09:43:35','2021-09-25 14:43:35','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/?p=138',0,'post','',4),
(144,1,'2009-07-30 19:10:41','2009-07-31 00:10:41','Recorded in the Washington, DC Marriott as I wrap up a week of business travel before heading out for a week\'s vacation. My recent trip back down to Johannesburg, South Africa provides a good bit of content -- on-plane security in Dakar, South Africa Airways\' unique <a href=\"http://www.moneyweb.co.za/mw/view/mw/en/page292671?oid=225852&amp;sn=2009%20Detail\">ban</a> on in-flight use of iPhones and Blackberries, and good luck with Skype. Experiences on the flight back home illustrate the benefits of being a \"super elite\" flier, which might be easier to attain with Delta\'s recent <a href=\"http://crankyflier.com/2009/07/27/delta-introduces-rollover-miles/\">changes</a> to their SkyMiles program. We wrap up with a couple of stories about how frequent travelers squeeze in \"instant\" vacations in the midst of business travel. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_76.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #76:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in the Washington Marriott in downtown Washington, DC</li>\n 	<li>Have been doing some easy travel – Tulsa, New York, St Louis, and now DC – but the month since the last podcast was dominated by a 2-week trip back down to Joburg, SA</li>\n 	<li>Will move from South Africa Airways to Delta for my next flight because of SAA\'s <a href=\"http://www.moneyweb.co.za/mw/view/mw/en/page292671?oid=225852&amp;sn=2009%20Detail\">ban</a> on in-flight use of iPhones and Blackberries, even when in \"flight\" or \"airplane\" mode</li>\n 	<li>Also not thrilled with being <a href=\"http://ashsd.afacwa.org/docs/pestdest.pdf\">sprayed with insecticides</a> after the stopover in Dakar, Senegal</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://www.magnatune.com/artists/albums/rompaey-mozaic/\">Bubbly</a></em> by Ruben van Rompaey</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>GoGo Inflight WiFi is offering 50% off their service through 8/31/09 using the coupon code 158FLF7365</li>\n 	<li>Have become a big Skype user with my travels to South Africa. Had good luck with the Skype iPhone app also</li>\n 	<li>A new hurdle in Joburg airport -- had to take off my glasses for an optical body temperature scan before going through passport control</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/travelcommons/3763764793/\">Link</a> to the picture of the taxi sticker warning of a \"$200 clean up fee\" for anyone vomiting in the cab.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/kokoon-berlin/\">How Do I Work This</a></em> by The Kokoon</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Real Benefits to Being Super Elite\n</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Delta stirred up the frequent flier world by becoming <a href=\"http://crankyflier.com/2009/07/27/delta-introduces-rollover-miles/\">“the AT&amp;T of the airline industry,”</a> allowing the rollover of elite qualifying miles.</li>\n 	<li>My IAD-JNB flight put me over 100,000 elite qualifying miles on United, the earliest I\'ve ever requalified for United 1K status</li>\n 	<li>Rolling over elite qualifying miles would give me a reason to keep racking up miles on United rather than flipping to another airline to earn elite status</li>\n 	<li>Special treatment provided to super elites is worth the qualifying effort. United\'s Global Services desk helped me avoid a 4-hour mechanical delay on my way home from Washington, DC</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/weigl-proof/\">Piano Circus</a></em> by Philipp Weigl</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Instant Vacation</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Flight attendants on my IAD-ORD flight had bid on a trip with a 29-hour layover in Portland to give themselves a bit of an instant vacation -- time that you enjoy in the midst of a business trip</li>\n 	<li>In the winter, I break up transcontinental flights with a ski day in Denver</li>\n 	<li>Spoke with people from <a href=\"http://www.snow.com/Default.aspx\">Vail Resorts</a> who said that this was the kind of behavior they hoped to see when they introduced the <a href=\"http://www.snow.com/epicpass/home.aspx\">Epic Pass</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"http://ad.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/show?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;bids=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Magnatune</a></li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments@travelcommons.com or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_76.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #76 – Real Benefits of Being Super Elite, Instant Vacations','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-76-real-benefits-of-being-super-elite-instant-vacations','','\nhttp://crankyflier.com/2009/07/27/delta-introduces-rollover-miles/','2021-09-25 09:44:33','2021-09-25 14:44:33','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/?p=144',0,'post','',5),
(161,1,'2009-08-31 06:09:16','2009-08-31 11:09:16','Again in Washington, DC, I\'m back on the road after two weeks at home. As my Twitter followers know, this trip didn\'t get off to the best start -- a 2 hour delay caused by yet another broken United Airlines plane. Listener comments continue the threads on in-flight bans on smartphones and falling prices of in-flight Wi-Fi. The collapse of the Clear Registered Traveler program makes me nervous about who has my fingerprints and iris scans. And, after my plane finally got into the air, I thought about what I miss when I\'m off the road. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_77.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #77:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in the Convention Center Courtyard in downtown Washington, DC</li>\n 	<li>On a bit of an Amtrak bunny hop up the US East Coast -- DC to Phila to NYC</li>\n 	<li>Most of my travel in August has been personal -- Aspen, CO and Door County, WI</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/music/listeners/artistdetails.php?BandHash=00168e9762768c8f9a16a59343f973d0\">People Go A Lotta Nerve</a></em> by Neko Case</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Timo from Tampere, Finland wrote in about Ryanair not allowing any use of smartphones -- even in flight or airplane mode -- on a flight from Tampere, Finland to \"the misleadingly named Frankfurt Hahn airport\"</li>\n 	<li>Ryanair -- what a mess with all their add-on charges and anti-customer service</li>\n 	<li>Interesting that Ryanair severely limits the use of smartphones while simultaneously trying to launch an in-flight mobile phone call service</li>\n 	<li>South African Airways plans to <a href=\"http://www.itweb.co.za/sections/telecoms/2008/0808281033.asp\">petition</a> the SA Civil Aviation Authority to allow smart phones to be used in “flight” mode</li>\n 	<li>Recent WSJ.com <a href=\"http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203706604574374571364228440.html\">article</a> discusses the results of Alaska Air Wi-Fi pricing tests. In-flight wi-fi is very price-sensitive. Will carriers get the return they need on their investment in fleet-wide wi-fi rollouts?</li>\n 	<li>New celebrity sightings -- <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> followers know that I recently ate a couple of tables away from Lance Armstrong and shared a 1st Class row with LeAnne Rimes on a flight to LAX</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/music/listeners/artistdetails.php?BandHash=747b6ccf16c7202fd38068d510c11fd2\">Give It Up</a></em> by Jimmy Mancus</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>My, What Pretty Eyes You Have!</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Federal judge <a href=\"http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/08/defunct-airport-fast-pass-company-banned-from-selling-customer-biometrics/\">ruled</a> Clear Registered Traveler can’t sell its former customers’ biometric data – the fingerprints and iris scans that were used to identify travelers at checkpoint machines at airports across the country.</li>\n 	<li>What’s the best way to destroy my Clear card? My biometric data was stored on the card\'s smart chip</li>\n 	<li>But what about the biometric data stored with Clear and the TSA? I just want my data destroyed, but two US Congressmen want it <a href=\"http://fcw.com/articles/2009/08/21/lawmakers-urge-tsa-not-to-destroy-registered-traveler-data.aspx?sc_lang=en\">kept</a> around.</li>\n 	<li>I\'ve learned a lesson -- I\'ll never give the government this kind of data again.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/music/listeners/artistdetails.php?BandHash=155e0ac479805586bd2cbef2e5c44ddd\">Orange Blossoms</a></em> by JJ Grey and Mofro</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>What I Miss When I’m Off The Road</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Not much this evening -- first flight in two weeks and it’s delayed for 2½ hours because of a broken nose gear steering mechanism.</li>\n 	<li>Will <em>somebody</em> explain the United Airlines the benefits of preventative maintenance? What good is being super top-tier elite on an airline that can’t get their planes in the air? It’s getting so bad, I don’t know why they bother setting a departure and arrival time. Just put an AM or PM on the board and shoot for the best.</li>\n 	<li>What I miss most when not traveling is the variety -- seeing and experiencing different things each day. While I loved sleeping in my own bed and not having to do the TSA shuffle, two weeks of the same train ride into the same office, seeing the same skyline (though I love the Chicago skyline), eating at the same lunch places started the soles of my feet itching.</li>\n 	<li>You also get a better understanding of other people when you spend time with them face-to-face. While you can do a lot over a voice or video conference, there’s nothing like being there in person to get an appreciation for the differences, the challenges, and the personalities.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"http://ad.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/show?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;bids=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from the <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com\">Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments@travelcommons.com or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_77.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #77 – Keeping Traveler Data Private, What I Miss When Off The Road','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-77-keeping-traveler-data-private-what-i-miss-when-off-the-road','','','2021-09-25 09:45:48','2021-09-25 14:45:48','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/?p=161',0,'post','',4),
(168,1,'2009-10-03 21:11:54','2009-10-04 02:11:54','Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, Illinois at the start of what\'s looking like 6 weeks of straight travel. In this episode, we talk about the need to have a place to blow off steam after a frustrating day of travel, and how the distractions of cell phone calls have caused me to leave a trail of personal belongings behind in hotel and airplanes across the country. Finally, while getting a knowing chuckle out of  the trailer for the upcoming movie <a href=\"http://www.theupintheairmovie.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Up In The Air</em></a> where George Clooney plays an uber-frequent traveler, the movie\'s theme about using travel to run away from relationships isn\'t all that fictional.\n\nHere\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_78.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the transcript from TravelCommons podcast #78:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, Illinois. It was a light travel week for me this week – just out to Philadelphia for Tuesday, Weds, and Thurs and then back to Chicago, but a heavy work week, which unfortunately pushed this episode of TC out from my intended recording date of Weds, Sept 30th to today.</li>\n 	<li>Looking at my calendar, I find myself in the midst of one of my 6-week-straight sets of travel. It started 2 weeks ago when I had to be in LA and DC the same week – I just hate doing the transcon thing in the middle of the week. Last week was Philadelphia and NYC – not too bad. Next week, DC and Boston, then another week in Philadelphia, and then another LA and DC week. The way it’s looking, I’m going to be traveling every week until Thanksgiving.</li>\n 	<li>Which is, of course, the perfect time for my suitcase to break. I think I mentioned a couple episodes ago that the bearing on one of the wheels is shot, giving me a nice “Squeak, Squeak” soundtrack as I walk down the airport concourse or go trundling through a prospect’s office space as I did last week in NYC. It was embarrassing – lots of “prairie dogging” – heads popping up from the cube field, looking to see who’s making that annoying sound. There’s a sure-fire sales technique for you.</li>\n 	<li>But now one of the handle supports has broken, making the suitcase twist every time I pull it onto a plane or cross a street, and making it just about impossible to attach my computer bag to it. So I’m going to have to suck it up and buy a new suitcase.</li>\n 	<li>It’s not like I haven’t gotten a lot of mileage out of this bag – 6 years at, say, 100,000 miles a year. Or that it cost me a lot – maybe $200 at a TJ Maxx. And it’s held up better than a colleague’s $700 Tumi – his is only 4 yrs old and last week dropped an entire wheel sub-assembly – the wheel and all the surrounding bits that keep it in the bag – while he was sprinting for a flight in LGA.</li>\n 	<li>No, it’s just the hassle. And how excited can you get shopping for my umpteenth black 22-inch rolling bag. Maybe I’ll go for a new color – something that will stand out in the overhead bin, something that will express some individuality – something like, I dunno, navy blue!</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/seldon-circles/\"><em>Making Circles</em></a> by the Seldon Plan</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Sometimes when you’re traveling and things start to go sideways, you want to vent – just blow off your frustration – but to whom? Certainly not to any airline personnel – at best, you’ll be ignored; at worst, you’ll be kicked off the plane and/or arrested. If you’re traveling with a colleague, you can kvetch a bit, but too much and you look like a whiner – not a reputation that will propel you far up the career ladder.</li>\n 	<li>For me, Twitter has become a little bolt hole into which I can scream my frustrations – from broken United planes to the conga line of frustrations that is Washington’s Dulles airport, I package my woes up in 140 characters and shove them into the Twitter-verse. Has probably made a few of you guys “un-follow” me, but that’s OK. It’s a small price to avoid getting busted by those gentle and caring guys who populate the Chicago police force.</li>\n 	<li>For Lori Humm, a longtime TravelCommons listener, the TravelCommons comments section can provide a needed outlet. Reacting to the latest addition to the TSA’s security play-acting, Lori writes...</li>\n</ul>\n<blockquote>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\">Mark - I\'m about to lose my mind. Apparently, my airport, Richmond, is about to be the test bed for ANOTHER level of security. We already have the body scanning machines and now this – screening of powders.</p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\">I\'d love to hear your thoughts on the addition of powders to security, especially given your pride (and constant defense of) your tooth powder! I moved to using all powder cosmetics to avoid carrying any liquids at all, and am starting to resign myself to being make-up free if that\'s what it take to avoid being sidelined for additional screening.</p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\">By the way - still doing the Richmond-to-Baton Rouge weekly haul - this makes my 15th month. If that doesn\'t make someone lose their mind, this additional screening certainly will.</p>\n</blockquote>\n<ul>\n 	<li>You know the TSA just doesn’t get it when they announced the powder screening as <a href=\"http://www.tsa.gov/press/releases/2009/0908.shtm\"><em>Implementing New Enhanced Threat Detection Capability</em></a> . In the TSA’s blog, Blogger Bob, as defensive and oblivious as usual, <a href=\"http://www.tsa.gov/blog/2009/09/new-procedures-for-traveling-with.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">says</a> “We haven’t received any specific threats that led us to this new procedure” , but we thought it made sense to put in place some new annoyances for travelers and get some practice in before the holidays. Just kidding – about the last bit. Blogger Bob did actually write that, unlike the liquid ban, there’s nothing specific that caused them to launch this powder parade accompaniment to the shoe carnival. I’m not so sure that my snarky annoyance comment is too far from the truth.</li>\n 	<li>But, having said that, I’ve yet to see anybody get flagged over for a powder check. I have seen a bit of an increase in random wipe-&amp;-tests – the guy behind me Tuesday at Midway had his shoes wiped and I had my computer bag wiped at ORD last month, but that’s not a big thing. No unpacking and re-packing bags, no rustling through your toiletries kit – just a couple wipes on the outside surface with a test pad and they run it through what I guess is some sort of spectrograph. Takes 1 minute – they’re usually done before I get my shoes re-tied.</li>\n 	<li>I gotta say, though, that the tougher part of that note is the 15 straight months of flying between Richmond and Baton Rouge. I may complain a bit about flying from LA to DC, but 15 months of connecting through Atlanta, think about it – Hartsfield twice a week – I’m not sure anybody should be hassling Lori about anything.</li>\n 	<li>And the final follow-up, we’ve have an ongoing thread through it seems like most of this year’s episodes about in-flight electronics. Flying out here to Philadelphia on Southwest Tuesday morning – OK, I know that I said that I wouldn’t fly SW again for a long time after they left me hanging in Little Rock, but they’ve got a double credit promo going right how and I have 12 flight credits in the bank, so with this trip, I’ll get the 4 more credits I need for a free ticket, which I’ll then give to my mother for a spring trip to visit us, so, in the vein of “don’t cut your nose off to spite your face”, suck it up if you’re close to a free ticket.</li>\n 	<li>So, anyhow, in the back of SW’s in-flight magazine, they had the best layout of allowed in-flight electronics of any airline. Whereas the South Africa Airlines rules about no in-flight smartphones was buried halfway into a paragraph full of rules, Southwest has a nice graphic layout that has 3 sections – Always Allowed, Allowed Above 10,000 ft, and Never Allowed – really nice. Nothing really controversial – Smart phones in Airline or Game mode are in the Allowed Above 10,000 ft section. However, I was surprised to see Noise-Cancelling Headphones in the Always Allowed section. Given that these have “on-off” switches, most by-the-book flight attendants see the red light on my Bose cans and tell me to switch them off. But on SW, I guess, they’re good through the entire flight. But still, one more example of the lack of consistency in rules – which I’ll say is one of the main drivers of traveler frustration.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a question, a story, a comment – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com, you can send me a Twitter message at @mpeacock, or you can post them on the web site at T/C.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/eliyahu-wind/\">Oh Yeah</a></em> by Eliyahu Sills</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Lost in Distraction</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>We’ve talked in a number of episodes about things being left behind by travelers – the study about the number of laptops left behind in airports, people walking away from TSA checkpoints without their shoes, the overflowing box of power adaptors that just about every hotel can pull out when you ask to borrow one.</li>\n 	<li>A couple of weeks ago, when unpacking from my last New York trip, I discovered that I’d left a pair of olive slacks in my hotel room. It was one of those “head smacking” moments – how could I be so stupid?</li>\n 	<li>Sometimes I feel like I’m leaving a little trail of belongings behind me as I travel.</li>\n 	<li>Most are small – pens, books, magazines, enough toiletries to make up a couple of complete kits.</li>\n 	<li>But some are big – the olive slacks, my original pair of Bose headphones, an entire suitcase in the trunk of a cab.</li>\n 	<li>OK, I’m not sweating the books or the tooth brush, but, come on – an entire suitcase? Other than creeping senility, what’s my problem?</li>\n 	<li>At least for me, it’s answering my cell phone. Every time I’ve forgotten something big, it’s been because of a phone call.</li>\n 	<li>The Bose headphones? My flight had landed in SFO, I was standing up, pulling my suitcase out of the overhead and the phone rings. Of course I answer it, and now I’m juggling my phone, my jacket, my suitcase, my briefcase while trying to slide out into the aisle. Distracted, I completely forget about the headphones in the seatback pocket. I don’t remember them until the next day when they’re long gone, a birthday present for the son or daughter of one of the cleaning crew.</li>\n 	<li>My olive slacks? One of those days when I just couldn’t get out of my hotel room because of serial phone calls. The phone rings, I answer it, 15-minute conversation, I hang up, re-start my packing, only to have the phone ring again. Another 15-minute conversation, then another call comes in on call waiting. I look at my watch – damn, I gotta get out of this hotel room if I’m going to make my flight home. I didn’t do my usual room scan and walked out light one of my favorite pair of pants.</li>\n 	<li>When I’m not distracted, I’m usually pretty methodical about leaving hotels or planes. I think my wife thinks that my hotel routine is border-line obsessive-compulsive. I empty the bathroom out, pack up my toiletries, then go back in, check around, turn off the light and close the door. Then, over to the bed, I throw all the pillows on the floor (which, sometimes is 8 or 9 pillows), snap the bedspread to send any hidden socks flying.</li>\n 	<li>Then, clear all the flat surfaces – it either goes with me or, like the room service menu, goes into a drawer. This is how I didn’t leave behind my iPhone charger this past week. I was clearing off the desk, which ends up being a tangle of hotel modem wires, lamp cords, promotional material, and my own tangle of electronics. I thought I had everything packed, but was making one more scan – cleaning off the flat surfaces so I could give the room one last scan. And there, as I was clearing off the desk, I found I had forgotten to pack my iPhone charger. I had missed seeing it in the midst of the Ethernet cord coming out of the hotel modem.</li>\n 	<li>Coming off a plane, I tick through a mental inventory, even patting myself down to make sure I have my wallet and iPhone. I look, but don’t put my hands into the seat back pocket – it can be ugly in there.</li>\n 	<li>But all this takes some concentration – avoid getting lost in distraction.</li>\n 	<li>I was thinking about this the other day when one of those iPhone commercials came on. There’s an app for this; there’s an app for that. I thought “if there’s an app for everything, there’s gotta be one to keep from getting distracted.” Then I realized there is one – kinda – and it’s built right in. It’s the Off button.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/liquid-seventythree/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Is That Called Love</a> </em> by Liquid Zen</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>A Movie About Us</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>&lt;1st audio clip from trailer&gt;</li>\n 	<li>I love that line – “I fly 350,000 miles a year; it’s 250,000 miles to the moon.” From the latest trailer for “Up in the Air”, a movie with George Clooney starring as a consultant who fires people. He’s good at his job, which keeps him on the road over 300 days a year. He lives – thrives -- in “Airworld”, the travel bubble we’ve talked about on prior episodes where frequent travelers seem to float over the places they visit, insulated by airline clubs and hotel concierge lounges and special lines that whoosh the statused elite along to their next destination.</li>\n 	<li>I’ll post a <a href=\"www.theupintheairmovie.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">link</a> to the movie’s web site. It’s just starting the fall film festival cycle, building word-of-mouth for its release during the Christmas season.</li>\n 	<li>The trailer has some good lines, like this advice on security line strategy that Clooney’s seasoned traveler gives to a newly-minted Ivy League grad</li>\n 	<li>&lt;2nd audio clip from trailer&gt;</li>\n 	<li>Going through both trailers on the movie’s website, you can see the premise is a bit deeper. The George Clooney character is using his frequent flying lifestyle to avoid relationships – nothing too heavy</li>\n 	<li>&lt;3rd audio clip from trailer&gt;</li>\n 	<li>While fictional, there’s more than a bit of truth to this. I’ve know a number of guys – and not the gender-neutral Midwest “guys”; they’re all men – over my career who used the need to leave Sunday night for LA or to stay over the weekend in Europe as ways to avoid problems at home – or, once divorced – which all of these guys eventually were – used the same excuses to avoid the barren new apartments.</li>\n 	<li>Oftentimes when talking to new consultants, giving them some thoughts, some advice about the traveling lifestyle that is part and parcel of consulting, I talk less about who to avoid in the security lines and more about the need to manage their personal lives with at least the same amount of effort as they do their frequent flyer statuses. I know I shouldn’t be, but I’m always surprised by the number of guys who don’t.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"http://ad.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/show?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;bids=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #78</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>The bridge music is from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Magnatune</a>, the <em>we are not evil</em> label . Making Circles by the Seldon Plan, Oh Yeah by Eliyahu Sills, and Is That Called Love by Liquid Zen. You can find these and more at <a href=\"http://magnatune.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">magnatunes.com</a>.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or MP3 file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to @mpeacock on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_78.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #78 – Lost in Distraction, Movie About Us','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-78-lost-in-distraction-movie-about-us','','','2021-09-25 09:46:46','2021-09-25 14:46:46','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/?p=168',0,'post','',4),
(176,1,'2009-10-25 15:14:57','2009-10-25 21:14:57','Last week, I had to get from downtown Washington DC to a Northern Virginia suburb for a client dinner.  I looked at the <a href=\"http://www.wmata.com/rail/maps/map.cfm\">Metro map</a>, rang up some car services, but finally gritted my teeth and rented a car.  That\'s pretty much my attitude toward car rentals these days -- the choice of last resort.  It wasn\'t always this way.  But with cost and fee increases, shrinking fleets, and more inconvenient locations, I work hard to skip the rental car counter.\n\nThe biggest issue is cost.  Rental car prices have <a href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/28/travel/28prac.html\" target=\"_blank\">soared</a> -- increasing an average of 60-70% over last year.  But prices are just part of the story.  Additional fees and taxes can add another 50% to the number that finally hits your credit card.  The concession recovery fee that airports and train stations charge is usually one of the bigger charges.   Avis hit me with 11.11% concession recovery fees on recent trips through Seattle-Tacoma and LAX airports, and a 10% fee for renting at Philadelphia\'s 30th Street train station.  Picking up the car in town doesn\'t always dodge this fee.  Hertz leveled a 13% concession recovery fee on a rental from the San Francisco Marriott hotel. On top of that, the rental companies add on a customer facility charge, a vehicle licensing fee, and an energy recovery fee.  And then the state and local governments\' turn.  My Sea-Tac rental receipt shows a 9.5% sales tax <em>plus</em> a 9.7% rental tax.  California adds 3.5% tourism assessment fee.  My Philadelphia rental had 4% passenger car rental tax (split between the state and the city) plus a $2/day state surcharge.  Just across these four examples, fees and taxes added 27-51% to the final cost of my rental.\n\n<!--more-->\n\nAnother problem is being able to get a car.  The easiest way for rental car companies to make more money is to increase each car\'s utilization -- the  number of days it\'s rented.  Makes sense, but when demand for cars increases just a bit, the pickings start to get slim.  Last month, I flew from LAX to Washington-Dulles and planned to rent a car because it would be a bit cheaper than the round-trip cost of a cab to/from DC.  I landed at Dulles around midnight.  Wheeling my bag across the empty Avis Preferred parking spaces, I saw a huge Ford F150 4x4 King Cab pick-up truck.  \"They can\'t be serious,\" I thought.  Oh yes, they were -- that was their idea of the intermediate size car I had requested.  This wasn\'t going to fit in a parking garage in downtown DC.  I walked back to the rental bus and asked the driver to take me to the taxi line.\n\nOf course, the drive back to the airport taxi line wasn\'t a short one because airport authorities have been aggressively relocating rental car companies to \"improved\" consolidated facilities that are a 15-20 minute drive from the airport.  Frequent travelers work hard to reduce the time spent getting from one point to another -- maintaining airline status so they can use the short security line, carrying on their bags so they don\'t have to wait by the luggage carousel.  Renting a car used to be a quick transaction -- walk off the plane, across to the parking lot, and into your rental car.  It\'s still that way at smaller airports like Nashville and Little Rock, but at airports like Cleveland, Baltimore-Washington, and Phoenix, you need to pack a lunch.\n\nI used to enjoy renting cars.  Now, I avoid it.  Hikes in prices and fees have made taxis and private car services more competitive, and moves to push rental lots <em>way</em> off property have made the alternatives a lot more convenient. Last year, at the tipping point where the cost of rental car was the same or maybe even a bit more than the cost of a taxi, I’d take the rental car. I enjoyed the flexibility of having a car, and even looked forward to finding a fun car in the Avis lot or under the Hertz Gold canopy. Now, I’ll pay extra to <em>avoid</em> them. While I work every year to make sure I keep my Marriott Platinum status, I fell out of Hertz\'s President\'s Circle without a care.','Skipping the Rental Car','','publish','closed','closed','','skipping-the-rental-car','','','2009-10-25 15:14:57','2009-10-25 21:14:57','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/?p=176',0,'post','',0),
(187,1,'2019-04-19 06:47:17','2019-04-19 06:47:17','','home-title','','inherit','open','closed','','home-title','','','2019-04-19 06:47:17','2019-04-19 06:47:17','',3141,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/home-title.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(191,1,'2009-10-31 21:46:28','2009-11-01 02:46:28','Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, Illinois at the end of one of those travel weeks where I lost control of my schedule – DC to Dallas to Houston to LA. In this episode, we talk about the problems with LAX security, my choices for <em>white noise</em> when I\'m trying to sleep on an airplane, and the reasons why I\'m skipping rental cars. I also talk with <a href=\"http://www.boingo.com/\">Boingo</a> WiFi about the choices frequent travelers are making in going wireless. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_79.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the transcript from TravelCommons podcast #79:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, Illinois, at the end of one of those travel weeks where I lost control of my schedule – the 6am flight to DC on Monday, the 6:30am flight to Houston on Tuesday by way of Dallas, the 6:30pm flight to LA, and then, refusing to take the red-eye, returning home Friday afternoon. Makes next week’s 4 days in Washington seem like a cake walk.</li>\n 	<li>Seems like I’m getting more of those.Two weeks ago, my travel week was Monday in Stamford, CT; Tuesday in Providence, RI; Wednesday in Philadelphia; Thursday back in Chicago, and then Friday in San Diego, returning at 6:30am Saturday courtesy of the red eye. I used to be able to sleep on red eyes, but not so much anymore. And with a flight time between LAX and ORD of less than 4 hrs, there’s not a lot of time for sleep – even after scoring a first class upgrade. I was pretty worthless on Saturday – I went straight to bed after getting home and then took a nap later in the afternoon. The red-eye is false economy – I’m not saving time; just snowplowing the problem into the next day. Hence, my lack of enthusiasm for another red-eye this week.</li>\n 	<li>I will say this, though. With winter coming in Chicago, I’m starting to look around for <em>strategically</em> located clients – Miami, Phoenix, LA. There are times when travel does have its rewards.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/clayne-potemkin/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>You Are The Reason</em></a> by C. Layne</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Robert Fenerty dropped us a line giving his point-of-view on many of the things covered in the last TravelCommons episode:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Mark, aboard a flight to Prague, and with 5 weeks of international travel ahead of me, I\'m also peering ahead to Thanksgiving. On the other hand, I\'ll soon have United 1k status and am looking forward to seeing Versailles, Madrid, and the Dominican Republic. As for keeping touch with my family, I really enjoy giving people a \"Skype tour\" of my hotel room. I find that the wet running clothes or the ironing board next to the TV provide an easy segue to the events of the day. I\'m lucky enough to have a client that pays for resort hotels, so there\'s usually something interesting to see and talk about. That could be a dinner plate-sized showerhead or a view of a golf course.</li>\n 	<li>As for losing things and making mistakes, my weakness is at the moments of transition. As I leave the car to enter the shuttle, my mind is racing ahead to claim check, the coupon, the passport, and the luggage in the trunk. But not the headlights, which I\'ve left on. Perhaps the answer is to pause, consider the requirements of the moment, and not the future. Incidentally, the parking attendant who jumped my car told me about a Prius that idled on and off in their parking lot for a week before running out of gas.</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Bob, thanks for the note. Reading your itinerary -- Versailles, Madrid, and the Dominican Republic – I get a bit jealous. But then I recall times when I had trip itineraries of Paris, London, Dublin, Zurich and other folks would say “Oh, that’s so glamorous”, but the reality was that I was spending my days in Paris, London, Dublin, and Zurich in conference rooms that looked very much like conference rooms in Cleveland, Nashville, Indianapolis, and Atlanta – except with different brands of bottled water and no air-conditioning. Of course, I’m hoping Robert is doing a much better job of work-life balance than I did.</li>\n 	<li>Leo Vegoda “@-signed” me on a Tweet from Seoul’s Inchon airport. Leo wrote – “Check in &amp; security at ICN a breeze. Noodles and beancurd delicious. LAX are you listening?”</li>\n 	<li>I was thinking about this when I walked into LAX Friday morning for my flight back to Chicago. The lines in Terminal 7 were a zoo at all the screening stations. It looked like a number of Japanese and Mexican tourists weren’t completely clear on the TSA’s 3-1-1 liquid carry-on limits. I saw 1 TSA screener fill an entire gray bin with liquids – toothpaste, shampoo, water bottle, sour cream (?) – from one family. Another woman kept unlocking and relocking her pink rolling bag to pull things out – first, her PC, then a bottle of water, then a jar of honey (?). It was not pretty.</li>\n 	<li>Of course, a big part of this is LAX with all its little terminals hanging off the access road, and none of them with enough real estate to house a proper screening set up.</li>\n 	<li>Walking into this, I took a deep breath – I wasn’t tight on time, but shuffling through security lines wasn’t the way I wanted to start the day. Sometimes when the main floor of Terminal 7 is bad, I’ll go up to the screening station on the bridge over from the parking garage. I went to ask Airserv women – the contractors at the start of the line checking boarding passes – if that line was any shorter and she spotted the Global Services mark on my United boarding pass and said “But you’re Global Services so you don’t have to worry about that.” She took my boarding pass and driver’s license, walked me past all the lines, dropped the line tape, gave my boarding pass to the TSA guy and escorted me right to an X-ray machine. It was the ultimate – and very timely – line cut. No noodles and beancurd like Leo had (a bit too early for that), but it did give me time to grab a cappuccino before getting on my flight home. And reinforced, once again, the value of being “super elite”</li>\n 	<li>I’ve talked in past podcasts about using white noise applications to drown out the cabin noise that my Bose noise-canceling headphones don’t cover. I use a couple of applications on my iPhone – <a href=\"http://www.tmsoft.com/iphone-whitenoise.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">White Noise</a> and <a href=\"http://www.naturespace.com/iphone.php\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Naturespace</a>. White Noise was the first one I used – I liked their Amazon rain forest.</li>\n 	<li>But then I flipped over to Naturespace because I thought the stereo quality, “aural spacing” of the sound in the headphones was a good bit better. But now I’m back to White Noise after the latest upgrade because I really like one of the new sounds – the Tibetan Singing Bowl.</li>\n 	<li>Maybe it’s just me, but this is the perfect white noise for me. Others I’ve played it for thought it sounded like a huge swarm of mosquitoes, but it’s come in very handy on the string of 6am Monday morning flights I recently had.</li>\n 	<li>And just a quick note, for those of you who check out the show notes, I’ve switched over from summary bullet points to more of a transcript. It’s a lot more words, but actually a good bit easier for me. Since the show is usually just me talking – as opposed to many other shows that are interviews or conversations among multiple hosts – I script out a good bit of my show. That may be disappointing to those who thought I was naturally this glib, but it saves me a <em>lot</em> of post-production time – editing out ums, ahs, and narrative dead-ends. Since I have the script, I figured that copy-pasting it is easier than trying to summarize it – sort of the show notes version of Mark Twain’s “I’d have written a shorter letter if I had the time”. So anyhow, starting with TravelCommons #78, you can wade through the gory details of each show by clicking through the “Read the rest of this entry” to the show notes page.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a question, a story, a comment – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com, you can send me a Twitter message at @mpeacock, or you can post them on the web site at travelcommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/seldon-lost/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Fire In The Day\'s Field</em></a> by the Seldon Plan</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Skipping the Rental Car\n</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Two weeks ago, I had to get from downtown Washington DC to a Northern Virginia suburb for a client dinner. I looked at the <a href=\"http://www.wmata.com/rail/maps/map.cfm\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Metro map</a>, rang up some car services, but finally gritted my teeth and rented a car. That’s pretty much my attitude toward car rentals these days — the choice of last resort. It wasn’t always this way. But with cost and fee increases, shrinking fleets, and more inconvenient locations, I work hard to skip the rental car counter.</li>\n 	<li>The biggest issue is cost. Rental car prices have <a href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/28/travel/28prac.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">soared</a> — increasing an average of 60-70% over last year. But prices are just part of the story. Additional fees and taxes can add another 50% to the number that finally hits your credit card. The concession recovery fee that airports and train stations charge is usually one of the bigger charges. Avis hit me with 11.11% concession recovery fees on recent trips through Seattle-Tacoma and LAX airports, and a 10% fee for renting at Philadelphia’s 30th Street train station. Picking up the car in town doesn’t always dodge this fee. Hertz leveled a 13% concession recovery fee on a rental from the San Francisco Marriott hotel. On top of that, the rental companies add on a customer facility charge, a vehicle licensing fee, and an energy recovery fee. And then the state and local governments’ turn. My Sea-Tac rental receipt shows a 9.5% sales tax plus a 9.7% rental tax. California adds 3.5% tourism assessment fee. My Philadelphia rental had 4% passenger car rental tax (split between the state and the city) plus a $2/day state surcharge. Just across these four examples, fees and taxes added 27-51% to the final cost of my rental.</li>\n 	<li>Another problem is being able to get a car. The easiest way for rental car companies to make more money is to increase each car’s utilization — the number of days it’s rented. Makes sense, but when demand for cars increases just a bit, the pickings start to get slim. Last month, I flew from LAX to Washington-Dulles and planned to rent a car because it would be a bit cheaper than the round-trip cost of a cab to/from DC. I landed at Dulles around midnight. Wheeling my bag across the empty Avis Preferred parking spaces, I saw a huge Ford F150 4×4 King Cab pick-up truck. ”They can’t be serious,” I thought. Oh yes, they were — that was their idea of the intermediate size car I had requested. This wasn’t going to fit in a parking garage in downtown DC. I walked back to the rental bus and asked the driver to take me to the taxi line.</li>\n 	<li>Of course, the drive back to the airport taxi line wasn’t a short one because airport authorities have been aggressively relocating rental car companies to “improved” consolidated facilities that are a 15-20 minute drive from the airport. Frequent travelers work hard to reduce the time spent getting from one point to another — maintaining airline status so they can use the short security line, carrying on their bags so they don’t have to wait by the luggage carousel. Renting a car used to be a quick transaction — walk off the plane, across to the parking lot, and into your rental car. It’s still that way at smaller airports like Nashville and Little Rock, but at airports like Cleveland, Baltimore-Washington, and Phoenix, you need to pack a lunch.</li>\n 	<li>I used to enjoy renting cars. Now, I avoid it. Hikes in prices and fees have made taxis and private car services more competitive, and moves to push rental lots way off property have made the alternatives a lot more convenient. Last year, at the tipping point where the cost of rental car was the same or maybe even a bit more than the cost of a taxi, I’d take the rental car. I enjoyed the flexibility of having a car, and even looked forward to finding a fun car in the Avis lot or under the Hertz Gold canopy. Now, I’ll pay extra to avoid them. While I work every year to make sure I keep my Marriott Platinum status, I fell out of Hertz’s President’s Circle without a care.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/fernwood-sangita/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">White Oak</a> </em> by Fernwood</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>The Best Way to Drop Wires\n</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Working in airplanes, airports, hotels, Starbucks, and the back seats of taxis, frequent travelers are always trying to figure out the best way to work wirelessly.</li>\n 	<li>This week, <a href=\"http://www.boingo.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Boingo</a> introduced an <a href=\"http://mobile.boingo.com/download/client.php?client=blackberry\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">app</a> on the BlackBerry platform for its WiFi service. At first, I didn’t think much of it, but then I got thinking – why would I want WiFi if I have 3G? I see more and more 3G modems hanging off of laptops. Is WiFi fading out?</li>\n 	<li>I spoke with <a href=\"http://www.linkedin.com/in/christiangunning\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Christian Gunning</a> of Boingo and asked him just this question as I was sitting in Houston-Hobby airport waiting for my flight to LA</li>\n 	<li>“It’s not an either/or,” he said, “the two technologies are complimentary.” In high-traffic/high-“loiter” areas like airports, 3G cells get maxed out by people entertaining themselves with streaming multimedia. While one cell can handle 600 voice calls, data quickly consumes those slots, pushing the capacity down to 50-80 calls. Moving that streaming data over to a Boingo WiFi hot spot gives much better throughput.</li>\n 	<li>Makes sense, but what about the cost? I can get a 3G mobile plan from AT&amp;T or Verizon for $60/month. I can get close to that in a couple of days with WiFi – paying $10 for a day pass in the airport, another $10 at Starbucks, and then another $10 in the hotel at night.</li>\n 	<li>Christian pointed out that Boingo’s monthly WiFi plan costs $10 for unlimited bandwidth – as compared to the 5GB caps typical for 3G modems –covers 58 airports, Starbucks, McDonald’s, and many hotels. Their smartphone plan – for iPhones and Blackberries – is 2 bucks cheaper. And as they continue to sign reciprocal agreements with other network companies, their coverage expands.</li>\n 	<li>He makes a compelling case for the continued relevance of WiFi – it’s built into every recent laptop, its higher bandwidth is better for multimedia, and the performance isn’t as variable as 3G.</li>\n 	<li>My cut at it is – unfortunately, a frequent traveler needs both. WiFi is great when you’re sitting in an airport or in a Starbucks; it’s no good when you’re inside the airplane waiting to take off or in long cab ride – because you’ve sworn off rental cars – or in a hotel with lousy broadband, because it’s not just 3G cells that can get flooded with streaming videos of , uh, artistic content.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"http://ad.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/show?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;bids=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #79</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>The bridge music is from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Magnatune</a>, the <em>we are not evil</em> label. <em>You Are the Reason</em> by C Layne, <em>Fire in the Day’s Field</em> by the Seldon Plan, and <em>White Oak</em> by Fernwood. You can find these and more at <a href=\"http://magnatune.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">magnatunes.com</a>.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or MP3 file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to @mpeacock on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_79.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #79 – Skipping Rental Cars, WiFi or 3G?','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-79-skipping-rental-cars-wifi-or-3g','','','2021-09-25 09:47:38','2021-09-25 14:47:38','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/?p=191',0,'post','',1),
(198,1,'2009-11-23 22:12:24','2009-11-24 03:12:24','Coming to you today from the Courtyard Hotel just across from Philadelphia\'s City Hall in the midst of a last quick trip before leaving the airports to the Thanksgiving traveling crush. In this episode, we talk about ways of keeping track of travel receipts and an airport theft ring that targeted black luggage bags. I update last year\'s \"Road Warrior 201\" tips for this holiday travel season, and have an interview with the creator of <em><a href=\"http://vimeo.com/7167640\">Frequent Flyer</a></em>, a new documentary about mileage junkies. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_80.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the transcript from TravelCommons podcast #80:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you today from the Courtyard in Downtown Philadelphia – just kitty corner from the amazing piece of architecture that is Philadelphia’s City Hall. Whether you think it’s impressive or impressively kitsch, there are few city halls that are so “in the center of things” as Philadelphia’s.</li>\n 	<li>The Thanksgiving travel season just seems to keep getting longer – more smeared out. Walking to my car in ORD last Friday afternoon after three incessantly rainy days in Seattle, I could see the holiday traffic already starting to build – lots of families, small kids pulling junior-sized rolling bags. I dunno, if you’re going to have your kid play business traveler, why not go all the way, get them a black or charcoal grey half-sized Tumi and let them feel the power the way that the primary colors of the Dora the Explorer bag will never let them experience.</li>\n 	<li>Me, I just want to feel the power of that tryptophan high from Thanksgiving Day turkey, maybe extending it with leftovers through the weekend, just being a couch slug until next Monday, when I have to fight with the tail end of the smeared-out holiday travel traffic and head back west again.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/beyond7-revelations/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Miss America</em></a> by Beyond 7</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Just to continue on my rental car rant from the last episode, I booked a car a couple of weeks ago in LAX -- $19 daily rate, but with an additional $15 in taxes &amp; surcharges. 44% of the total cost was taxes &amp; surcharges. Go figure.</li>\n 	<li>Arnoud Heijnis, a long time T/C listener, sent me a note earlier this month with the subject line – Expense Mayhem:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Work has forced me in to being a frequent traveller and although I’ve got most basics down and start to enjoy the efficiency I have made my own. However there is one thing that I still need to master. It may sound simple and you might think “what’s the deal” but I have a challenge doing and keeping track of my expenses.</li>\n 	<li>I know most people carry one of those transparent filing sleeves, as do I, however I continuously get caught off guard, especially when going from trip in to trip, which my company wants to see split. I have tried many things, apps for the iPhone, apps for the BlackBerry, different filing folders etc. But haven’t gotten to a system which is really satisfactory to me.</li>\n 	<li>My challenge is that I have receipts coming in from events in the evening when I don’t have my laptop bag at hand, at the airport, hotels, different settings etc. When I finally hit my desk for the two days of doing expenses I try to decipher the mayhem of receipts, hotel bills, car rental printouts etc. I’m usually pretty successful however feel that I’m not as efficient as I could be.</li>\n 	<li>I was wondering if you could enlighten me with some tips and tricks from a seasoned traveller</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Arnoud, thanks for the question. Keeping track of your travel expenses, and then getting them accurately into whatever system your company uses for reimbursement is a question close to the hearts and wallets of every frequent traveler. I average $5-10,000/month in travel expenses, so it’s real money to me. And there’s more than once where I missed filing a couple hundred dollar receipt, which then reinforces that uncertainty – am I getting paid back for everything I buy?</li>\n 	<li>I’m probably at the low-tech end of the scale. I use the transparent sleeves that Arnoud mentions, as well as a specific sleeve in my wallet that’s reserved for receipts I collect when I don’t have my briefcase with me – for taxi receipts, parking receipts, restaurant receipts. I also keep a business card in there (because it’s a nice fit) where I jot down cash expenditures – these are the ones I forget the most.</li>\n 	<li>I’ve known a couple of folks who’ve tried <a href=\"http://www.evernote.com/\">Evernote</a> on their iPhones – taking a picture of a receipt and then tagging it with the right project or account. I dunno – I keep thinking about trying it, but it never gets above the B level on my to-do list, which means it doesn’t get done.</li>\n 	<li>The method of capture, though, isn’t near as important as the discipline of doing data entry every day, or every other day max. You can re-create your day, even yesterday in your mind. But wait ‘til the weekend, and, unless you’re an elephant, you’re hosed. I get into trouble when I wait ‘til the end of the week to bang in my expenses. Every other day over an end-of-the–day beer is a best practice for me.</li>\n 	<li>If any other listeners have suggestions for Arnoud, please send them in or post them as comments to the website.</li>\n 	<li>Leo Vegoda sent me a <a href=\"http://www.abc15.com/content/news/phoenixmetro/central/story/Valley-couple-officially-charged-for-stealing/dKpV4Yry1EOFWqDe80dDrg.cspx\">link</a> to a story from the beginning of November about a Phoenix couple that’ve been stealing luggage from SkyHarbor airport since <em>2005</em>! The couple is accused of stealing nearly 1,000 items. After searching the couple’s 14-room home, a Phoenix detective said “there were suitcases everywhere. Floor to ceiling. Everywhere”.</li>\n 	<li>In his note, Leo pointed out an interesting fact in the story – “Most of the luggage is reportedly black and similar looking” – referring to my riff on replacing my squeaky wheeled bag – “not sure if going for black sounds like a good idea”</li>\n 	<li>It definitely wasn’t a good idea for a new colleague. Vishal was traveling to every week to DC for a project – the usual consulting grind – take the 6am American flight from O’Hare to Reagan National, catch the Metro to the client, crank all day, check into the hotel around 7, go out to dinner, and then hit the sack. So it was probably around 9:30 or 10pm when Vishal finally discovered that he’d pulled someone else’s black roller bag – same color, same model -- out of the overhead bin of the morning flight – some 12-13 hours ago.</li>\n 	<li>Sometime the next day, Vishal got reconnected with his black bag. He found the owner’s business card in one of the front pockets (an important travel tip for you new road warriors out there) and connected with him at lunch. Over the past two podcasts, we’ve talked about forgetting things in that moment of transition – when you’re leaving the plane or the rental car. Facing an overhead bin full of black bags after getting up at 3:30am to make the 6am flight… That afternoon, Vishal walked down to a tourist store in DC, bought himself a little red &amp; blue Obama bandana and tied it around the handle of his bag. Not a political statement. In this case, I think the “Change” on the bandana refers to fresh underwear.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a question, a story, a comment – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com, you can send me a Twitter message at @mpeacock, or you can post them on the web site at travelcommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/westexit-extra/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>On Condition of Anonymity</em></a> by the West Exit</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Holiday Travel Tips\n</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>A little over a year ago – episode #68 to be precise – I did a piece that I called “Road Warrior 201” where I skipped the usual tips – don’t check luggage unless you absolutely have to, wear loafers or slip-on shoes make security screening easier – and gave some of my intermediate level, I guess non-obvious tips. Listening to the holiday travel tips in the most recent <a href=\"http://indietravelpodcast.com/podcast/winter-vacation-holiday-travel-guide/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">episode</a> of Craig and Linda Martin’s Indie Travel Podcast – where they gave the TravelCommons podcast a nice shout-out – made me think about re-visiting the topic in time for the holiday travel season.</li>\n 	<li>Over my last couple of trips – returning from Seattle and this flight out to Phila – I paid attention to the families, the ones getting a jump on the Thanksgiving holiday. The families that made it through the terminal and through security were the ones who were paying attention. The parents took advantage of the time in the security lines and prepped their kids. They had the Nintendos already put away in the backpacks, their coats off and their shoe laces undone. They got their kids’ attention – putting away the Nintendos is probably a good help – told them what they needed to do, so that when the kids got to the screening station, they weren’t wandering around -- they were loading up their bins and ready to walk through the metal detector. Even the most hardened business traveler will give a family with young kids a break if they look like they’re trying. So the tip – make good use of the long security lines – get prepared.</li>\n 	<li>One of the “201” tips from last year’s podcast was to factor in the potential costs of a missed connection due to weather – when you’re responsible for room and board – when choosing between a connecting or a direct flight. If you tried, but you’re stuck with a connection, as we come into the winter season – at least in the Northern Hemisphere – give that connection a bit of space. In hubs like Denver or Dallas, airlines will offer connection times of as little as 45 minutes. Don’t take it! Think about it – that means you have 15 minutes to get off your plane packed with once-a-year holiday travelers, weave through the terminal packed with families wandering along four-a-breast, and find your gate before your flight begins to board. Any sort of traffic or weather delay and that 15 minutes is gone. Give yourself a holiday break and save the stress -- go for the 90-minute connection. Worst case, you have an extra 45 minutes to read a book or grab a beer. Cheap insurance against sleeping on the airport floor.</li>\n 	<li>Another stress reliever – if you’re on a direct flight or on the final leg to your designation, don’t sweat about getting your carry-on into the cabin. On winter holiday flights, if you’re seating area 3 or higher – odds are, between winter coats and packed flights – there’s no overhead bin space for you. Let the agent gate-check the bag for you. You won’t have to pay a checked bag fee and it’s very unlikely that they’ll lose your bag – it’s only traveling a couple hundred feet from the jet bridge to the luggage bay. Yes, it’ll add 30-45 minutes at the end of your trip waiting at the luggage carousel, but popping a vein in frustration will shorten your life at lot more than that.</li>\n 	<li>Another “201” tip from last year -- if you have to call an airline or hotel and you don’t have a special status 1K or Platinum number, choose the unpopular path on the phone tree. Travel companies don’t staff their customer service centers for peak loads – like the day when a Chicago blizzard cancels 400 flights. It’s too expensive. So on those days, you’ll wait forever for an agent if you’ve followed the typical path down the phone tree. On those days, choose the “Spanish” or “Int’l Travel” option because most everyone else is choosing English and domestic travel. Once you connect with someone, they’ll take care of you. They all work on the same systems in the same service centers.</li>\n 	<li>But, above all, be realistic – it’s going to be crowded. Steel yourself for it, get your inner karma tuned for it, and give yourself extra time. Figure out how much time it’ll take and add another 50%. At worst, you’ll have some extra time to watch the planes take off. But it’ll allow you to breathe a bit easier when the snow begins to fall</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/solace-medusa/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Subtle Vice</a> </em> by Solace</li>\n</ul>\n<strong><em>Frequent Flyer</em> -- The Documentary\n</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>In episode #78, we talked about the upcoming movie <em><a href=\"http://www.theupintheairmovie.com/\">Up In The Air</a></em>, where George Clooney stars as an extreme frequent flyer. Dave of the <a href=\"http://www.sandandtsunamis.com/\">Sand and Tsunamis</a> blog left a comment on the TravelCommons website pointing to a 20-minute documentary about “mileage junkies” called, fittingly enough, Frequent Flyer. I caught up with the creator, Gabriel Leigh, over Skype and talked to him about his film.</li>\n 	<li><em>Interview with Gabriel Leigh</em></li>\n 	<li>Gabriel’s documentary <em>Frequent Flyer</em> can be <a href=\"http://vimeo.com/7167640\">found</a> on the Vimeo video site. And on Weds, Nov 25th, a 13-minute <a href=\"http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/rough/2009/11/30000_feet_freq.html\">version</a> of the film will be on the PBS FrontLine site. Watch it – I think you’ll enjoy it.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"http://ad.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/show?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;bids=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #80</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>The bridge music is from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Magnatune</a>, the <em>we are not evil</em> label. <em>Miss America</em> by Beyond 7, <em>On Condition of Anonymity</em> by the West End, and <em>Subtle Vice</em> by Solace. You can find these and more at <a href=\"http://magnatune.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">magnatunes.com</a>.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or MP3 file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to @mpeacock on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_80.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #80 – Holiday Travel Tips; Frequent Flyer Documentary','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-80-holiday-travel-tips-frequent-flyer-documentary','','\nhttp://vimeo.com/7167640','2021-09-25 09:48:38','2021-09-25 14:48:38','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/?p=198',0,'post','',5),
(199,1,'2019-08-16 10:02:19','2019-08-16 10:02:19','','Main Button','','publish','closed','closed','','main-button','','','2024-04-17 17:45:01','2024-04-17 22:45:01','',0,'https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/?post_type=secondline_psb_post&#038;p=199',0,'secondline_psb_post','',0),
(209,1,'2009-12-15 15:34:17','2009-12-15 21:34:17','Last Friday night, my wife and I found the one theater in Chicago showing <em>Up in the Air</em> (it\'s in very limited release until Christmas).  Ever since the preview trailers hit the <a title=\"&quot;Up in the Air&quot; trailer on YouTube\" href=\"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yTWYeIK8P-w\" target=\"_blank\">Web</a>, people have been asking me -- \"Is this what your life is like?\"\n\nWatching the opening sequence -- a montage of Ryan Bingham (George Clooney) going through his well-practiced drill of packing, checking in, and getting through security -- was shockingly realistic.  It was like watching a replay of my Monday mornings, but with a much more attractive version of me.  As the movie continued, I started to pick up some niggling continuity problems -- international business class seats on an MD-80, an underground tram in O\'Hare.  But, except for the lack of any flight delays, the film does a good job of capturing the highs and lows of frequent business travelers.\n\nBingham\'s lifestyle -- 322 days on the road, leaving him \"43 miserable days at home\" in Omaha -- is a common one for young road warriors.  Bingham\'s empty apartment in Omaha looks almost exactly like my first apartment in Dallas, except that Bingham\'s has more than one piece of furniture in the living room, and his mattress and box spring are in a bed frame rather than on the floor.\n\nMost young frequent travelers enjoy this freedom for 3-5 years -- flying to, say, Amsterdam for the weekend instead of their empty apartment -- but eventually settle into relationships and a more settled way of life.  I do know a number of guys, though, (and they are all men) who never make that transition.  They continue to live their lives in the air, using business dinners and client meetings as substitutes for more meaningful relationships.  Their biggest fear is Bingham\'s -- that one day the music will stop, the travel will end, and that they\'ll be in stuck in an empty apartment with no way out.\n\nIn one of Bingham\'s motivational talks, he says \"Relationships are the heaviest components of your life\", counseling his audience to avoid them because they slow you down. You can\'t live a life in the air when you\'re weighed down by relationships.  But millions of frequent flier miles later, Bingham is dragging himself through airports with a little less snap, weighed down by disappointment and loneliness.  The melancholy air that pervades the movie is real.  It\'s the same sense of melancholy that rules airports late on a Friday night when the real-world Binghams walking off their planes, looking forward to nothing more than their Monday morning flights out.','Up in the Air -- Captures Life in the \"Travel Bubble\"','','publish','closed','closed','','up-in-the-air-captures-life-in-the-travel-bubble','','','2009-12-15 15:34:17','2009-12-15 21:34:17','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/?p=209',0,'post','',3),
(219,1,'2009-12-23 22:14:34','2009-12-24 03:14:34','Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago. In this episode, listeners add to our list of \"Road Warrior 201\" tips for this holiday travel season, I give my impressions of the new George Clooney movie <em>Up in the Air</em>, and gather up some stories about airport security into a Jeopardy-like topic I call \"Security Potpourri\". Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_81.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.<!--more-->\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the transcript from TravelCommons podcast #81:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, Illinois, back in town after a quick trip to a very snowy Philadelphia. My wife was a bit iffy about this trip – “It would be very bad if you got trapped in Phila.” But while it was a miserable weekend for travelers coming out of the East Coast, watching the stream of Twitter updates from United Airlines on Sunday, I could see them bringing the airports back on line on Sunday. Come Monday, I think there was more snow on the sidewalks of Center City Phila than on the runways at the airport. Phila was lousy at snow removal when I lived there during the late ‘80’s and it didn’t look like they’d improved much since then.</li>\n 	<li>This week continues my string of flight weeks. I’ve been flying to somewhere every week since Labor Day week – the first week of September. Since the November episode, I’ve been bouncing across the country -- Phoenix, New York, LA and multiple visits to Philadelphia. I haven’t looked at my calendar, but I think at 4 months, this is the longest streak of flight weeks that I’ve had.</li>\n 	<li>In past TravelCommons episodes at this time of the year, I’d be saying that I was done traveling for the year and looking forward to lying around the house for 2 weeks. But this year is different. I won’t get a chance to break the streak – but at least it won’t be for work</li>\n 	<li>We’re going to burn off some frequent flier and frequent sleeper points the week after Christmas – heading to Honolulu and then to Kauai.</li>\n 	<li>We hadn’t really planned it. Then United launched a weird little “stealth” promotion. I got an e-mail saying that they had reserved a number of seats for mileage awards on the morning flight from Chicago to Honolulu on the 26th (Boxing Day for those in the Commonwealth) and on the afternoon flight returning on the 2nd. They were opening a special web portal at 9am on a certain day to take seat requests – 1st come, 1st serve. Then, 2 days later, they’d send you an e-mail letting you know how many seats you got, after which you had two days to call a special number and book the seats or lose them. Weird, but getting prime-time seats to Hawaii at 40,000 miles a seat – it seemed a good deal.</li>\n 	<li>And as it so happened, on the appointed day and the appointed hour when the portal opened, I was not traveling, but instead, sitting in a project room in front of my PC with a solid network connection. I put my request in for 4 seats and got ‘em. So, after Christmas, instead of scraping ice, we’ll be eating it – shaved ice, that is.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>I\'ll Be Home by Christmas</em> by <a href=\"http://www.katimac.com/kati_home.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Kati Mac</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Skye Ho, a long time T/C listener, pointed me to a <a href=\"http://www.theonion.com/content/news/united_airlines_exploring\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">story</a> in the Onion that I think is very apropos for the holiday travel season – “In its ongoing effort to cut transportation costs and boost profits, United Airlines announced Tuesday that it was exploring the feasibility of herding passengers into planes and stacking them like cordwood from floor to ceiling.”</li>\n 	<li>\"Research shows that we lose millions of dollars each month by having them all sit upright in individual seats for the duration of the flight,\" said CEO Glenn F. Tilton, speaking to reporters at United Airlines\' corporate headquarters. \"However, if we were to remove these seats, we could just sort of stack them all in there, one by one, as they file into the plane.\" My flight home last week from LAX and my flight out to PHL Monday morning felt like pilot tests for this concept.</li>\n 	<li>On the website, Ray Medina responded to Arnoud Heijnis’ request for help in managing expense receipts. Ray writes –\n<ul>\n 	<li>My company uses SAP for our expenses. I carry an envelope to every trip with the name of the customer. Throughout the day, I place the receipts in my wallet. Then, every night I enter the information into SAP and move the receipts from my wallet to the envelope so the wallet is cleared for the next day. When I return from my trip, I scan the receipts to submit to my company along with the SAP expense summary. After I submit everything, I put the envelope in my filling cabinet.</li>\n 	<li>It takes time to get the routine down, but once you have it, you have it!</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Thanks Ray. That’s pretty much my system, except that my company uses Oracle and I’m lucky enough to have a secretary who makes copies of the receipts for me. Other than that, my workflow is pretty much the same.</li>\n 	<li>Since the last episode, I’ve been trying <a href=\"http://www.evernote.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Evernote</a> on my iPhone – taking a picture of the receipt and tagging it with a couple of words. Actually, I think I lasted only about 3 days. Getting out of a cab, calculating a tip, getting my bags, checking to make sure that I didn’t forget anything (remember the thread we had going for a couple of episodes about forgetting stuff in these transitions)… taking a picture of the cab receipt was just about the last thing on my mind. I found it easier to just be disciplined about recording receipts every day or so.</li>\n 	<li>Building on last episode’s holiday travel tips, a number of listeners posted some good “201” tips – the next level up from Travel Tips 101</li>\n 	<li>Lori Humm writes\n<ul>\n 	<li>Don\'t just pick your seat when you book your ticket; pay attention to the size of the airplane. Most of the regional jets can\'t even fit a rollerbag briefcase. Every week I watch people shake their heads in disbelief as they board the plane and realize that there really is no room. And no, there\'s also no room under the seat. Carry the laptop separate in a padded sleeve and be willing to surrender the bag to gate check. (Full disclosure: I\'m the one that got my laptop stolen last year because I didn\'t grab it out of my bag at gate check.)</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Leo Vegoda writes\n<ul>\n 	<li>If you cannot get a direct flight but have a choice of transit airports then choose carefully. For instance, while in past years there might not have been much difference between changing at ORD or a New York area airport on a West coast to East coast flight, ORD is definitely the best choice this year. Fewer flights and a new runway mean its on-time rankings have risen quite a bit.</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Ian Morgan writes\n<ul>\n 	<li>I agree wholeheartedly with your point about allowing a bit of extra time at this time of the year. It still amazes me how many of my colleagues try to do a 40 minute connection in Frankfurt in December!!</li>\n 	<li>The simple thing that I always do is to Google the place I am going to see what\'s on. Not only can it be interesting to experience different local festivities if you have a bit of downtime, it can also make the difference between missing a flight or meeting or making it on time. If there is a large festival on in the city centre, or a demonstration planned, you are going to need to allow more time to get to/from your meeting/hotel etc. Indeed, when in Athens last January, I was aware that there were almost daily clashes with police in the city centre: I changed my hotel to a downtown location. At least this way it means that you aren\'t sat watching a cab meter clock up whatever local currency is in use, and you don\'t have to endure the cab driver\'s personal take on the situation after getting off a longhaul flight!</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Thanks to Lori, Leo and Ian for those tips –definitely 201-level “been there, done that so you don’t have to” –type advice. Good stuff.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a question, a story, a comment – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com, you can send me a Twitter message at @mpeacock, or you can post them on the web site at travelcommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://www.musicalley.com/music/listeners/artistdetails.php?BandHash=b962a3af0d6bd40bee9dfd260e23f37b\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Blue Christmas</em></a> by Tom Keiffer</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Up In the Airworld\n</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>In episode #78, we talked about the upcoming movie Up In The Air, where George Clooney stars as an extreme frequent flyer.</li>\n 	<li>Ever since the preview trailers hit the Web, people have been asking me — “Is this what your life is like?” So, a couple of Fridays ago, my wife and I found the one theater in Chicago showing Up in the Air (it’s in very limited release until Christmas).</li>\n 	<li>Watching the opening sequence — a montage of Ryan Bingham, the character played by George Clooney, going through his well-practiced drill of packing, checking in, and getting through security – grabbed me immediately. Pack up, zip zip zip, walk with purpose through the terminal, hit the premium check-in kiosk (which was a bit of an off-note, because any self-respecting road warrior prints their boarding pass at home so they can go directly to the security line), let the overcoat and blazer drop off your shoulders in one motion… It was like watching a replay of my Monday mornings -- but with a much more attractive version of me.</li>\n 	<li>As the movie continued, I started to pick up some niggling reality problems — international business class lie-flat seats on an MD-80, an underground tram in O’Hare, Bingham doesn’t forget his hotel room number, but every time we see him going into a hotel room (usually in the company of his love interest Alex, played by Vera Farmiga) we see him juggling a half-dozen room keys – you’d think he’d pitch them during check out like the rest of us. But, except for the fact that none of Bingham’s flights seem to be delayed, the film does a good job of capturing the highs and lows of frequent business travelers.</li>\n 	<li>Bingham’s lifestyle — 322 days on the road, leaving him “43 miserable days at home” in Omaha — is a common one for young road warriors. Bingham’s empty apartment in Omaha looks almost exactly like my first apartment in Dallas, except that Bingham’s has more stuff – I had a futon and a stereo in the living room, and a mattress and box spring on the floor.</li>\n 	<li>Most young frequent travelers enjoy this freedom for 3-5 years — I’ve had staff flying to, say, Amsterdam for the weekend instead going back to an empty apartment in Chicago, or, when on a project in Europe, use their home leave allowance to visit Morocco rather than their belongings in Cleveland. But eventually, they settle into relationships and a more settled way of life.</li>\n 	<li>I do know a number of guys, though, (and they are all men) who never make that transition. They continue to live their lives in the air, using business dinners and client meetings as stand-ins for more meaningful relationships; motion – a meeting in Orlando, a dinner in Tampa, another meeting in New York, a dinner in Philadelphia – as a reason for being – as Bingham says “we’re sharks, not swans.” Their biggest fear is the same as Bingham’s — that one day the music will stop, the travel will end, and that they’ll be in stuck in an empty apartment with no way out.</li>\n 	<li>In one of Bingham’s motivational talks, he says “Relationships are the heaviest components of your life”, counseling his audience to avoid them because they slow you down. You can’t live a life in the air when you’re weighed down by relationships.</li>\n 	<li>If the front half of the movie snaps with the efficiency of a frequent traveler, the back half shows the dark side. Millions of frequent flier miles later, Bingham is dragging himself through airports with a little less crispness, weighed down by disappointment and loneliness. The melancholy air that pervades the movie is real. It is the same sense of melancholy that rules airports late on a Friday night -- when the real-world Binghams are walking off their planes, looking forward to nothing more than their Monday morning flights out.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Walk A Thousand Miles </em> by <a href=\"http://www.matthewebel.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Matthew Ebel</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Security Potpourri\n</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>It’s the last episode of the year or maybe I’m getting a bit of an early jump on the “hang loose” ethos of Hawaii, but I had some bits-and -pieces of recent experiences with airport security that I can’t get “grow up” into a stand-alone topic, so instead, here’s a bit of a Jeopardy-like “potpourri” topic.</li>\n 	<li>Last year – July of 2008 to be exact – the Ponemon Institute – any relation to Pokemon? – issued a research report that claimed 12,000 laptops are lost every week in US airports. I wrote a <a href=\"http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2008/07/06/12000-laptops-lost-in-airports-every-week-hmmm/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">post</a> that was a bit skeptical of the numbers – “I’ve never lost a laptop,” I wrote, “and I don’t know anyone who has lost one in an airport. I know people who’ve had them stolen out of rental cars, who’ve left them in a plane’s overhead bin, but no one who has lost one in an airport.”</li>\n 	<li>That is, until one of my recent trips out of ORD when I watched an older gentleman in front of me in security put on his shoes and walk off to his gate. Repacking my briefcase, I saw his PC sitting there – lost and forlorn – in a grey bin.</li>\n 	<li>I know how it happened. He had unpacked everything on the X-ray belt and headed over to the metal detector, but was sent back because he still had his shoes on. I saw a yellow Lufthansa boarding pass in his hand and guessed that he was European – used to taking his belt off, but not his shoes. I had already started feeding my bags into the X-ray, so we slotted his shoes between my bins. On the other side of security, he must’ve been distracted by trying to find his shoes and forgot about his laptop.</li>\n 	<li>I flagged down a TSA screener, pointed out the forgotten PC and the gentleman walking away down the terminal. She ran after the man and brought him back. He looked at the PC, then opened his briefcase – nice PC sleeve, but it was missing a key component. The TSA screener looked at me and said, “Thank you soo much”. I sensed that I saved her the hassle of filling out a lot of paper work.</li>\n 	<li>I recently paid $30 to avoid my own TSA hassles. My Illinois driver’s license was up for renewal and, because I hadn’t run into anything in that past 4 years, all I had to do was send in a form and they’d mail me back a 4-year renewal sticker to put on the back of my license. Nice, convenient service – except that the last time I did that, I spent the next 4 years telling TSA screeners and rental car booth bodies that – no, my license hasn’t expired, flip it over and you’ll see the renewal. It’s not really their fault – they’re just reacting to an expiry date on the face of the license. But avoiding that explanation every week for the next 4 years… it seemed worth it to make the extra visit to the DMV. The only downside – other than the $30 – a really bad driver’s license picture that will stick with me for the next 4 years.</li>\n 	<li>And then, on one of my recent trips to LAX, I was standing outside Terminal 7 waiting for the Avis bus, and an airport cop tells me to “move down a bit”. There’s a suspicious package sitting on the bench nearby. Suspicious? How far down did I need to move? The cops didn’t look too worried – they were standing right by it. Their dog didn’t look like he was reacting to anything. So I slid down half the island behind a big concrete truss – far enough, I figured, to miss the major force of any blast, but not so far that I’d miss the rental bus.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"http://ad.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/show?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;bids=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #81</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>The bridge music is from <a href=\"http://music.mevio.com\">Mevio’s Music Alley</a></li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or MP3 file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to @mpeacock on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_81.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #81 – More Travel Tips; Up in The Air; Security Stories','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-81-more-travel-tips-up-in-the-air-security-stories','','','2021-09-26 11:25:01','2021-09-26 16:25:01','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/?p=219',0,'post','',2),
(228,1,'2010-02-20 19:08:06','2010-02-21 00:08:06','The way I travel has changed significantly with my New Year\'s career change. Moving from consulting to the corporate world, I no longer bounce across the country. Instead, I spend a week in one of my company\'s three offices. This has required a bit of an attitude adjustment with regards to travel. The new job also drove me to reexamine my airline and hotel loyalties. Looks like my air mileage and hotel nights will be landing someplace new. In this episode, we also continue the thread on the best ways to track travel expenses, and a listener writes about how easy it is to do business with Southwest. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_82.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the transcript from TravelCommons podcast #82:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, Illinois. Sorry for the long delay between episodes, but I started a new job at the beginning of the year – after 17 years of consulting, I got a real job as a CIO – and I’m just beginning to dry off after drinking through a firehose for the past 6 weeks. I’m also in my 6th month of straight travel – I’ve gotten on a plane every week since Labor Day, but next week I’ll take a break, skip ORD for a week after 6 months. Now I will say that one week of that was self-inflicted – I mentioned in the last episode that I cashed in some frequent flier and frequent sleeper points to take the family to Hawaii for a week. Turned out to be a great decision – it was 75 degrees in Kauai, 7 degrees in Chicago. Since the beginning of the year, though, I’ve been back in full travel mode -- Philadelphia, DC, and multiple visits to Phoenix , Dallas, and South Florida.</li>\n 	<li>In January, I almost got trapped in Phoenix due to the huge rain storms that swept in from California. I was sitting in a Scottsdale Starbucks when an automated voice from United rang me up to tell me that my 3:30pm flight to ORD was cancelled. I called up the Global Services desk and got rebooked onto the earlier flight – the 1:20pm – and managed to keep my 1st class upgrade. A bit of an annoyance – I had to shuffle my afternoon calendar – but it was manageable.</li>\n 	<li>I get to the airport and ask gate agent -- why the cancellation? The 1:20 was now the last flight out. They’re forecasting 40 mph sustained winds and 70 mph gusts to hit town at 2pm. The agents tell us we need to board quickly so that we can get out before the weather hits. But then, nothing. We sit and sit. No boarding, no announcements. Oh, wouldn’t this be great. A January flight from PHX to ORD is cancelled for weather – in PHX! Finally, we board.</li>\n 	<li>But then, at the last minute, another delay. The caterer didn’t load enough lunches for everyone in 1st class. The sky is getting darker. A half-dozen of us volunteer to skip the rubber chicken – just get this flight off the ground. Finally the door closes and, as near as I can tell, we were the last flight off the ground before they closed the airport. Downgrading to the Thai chicken wrap from the back of the plane was a small price to pay for making it home that night.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/unkai-unkai/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Bahar-Un</a></em> by Un-Kai</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>We’ve had a bit of a thread over the past few episodes on methods to track travel expenses and manage the receipts. Around Heijnis started it with an e-mail wondering if there’s anything better than a set of envelopes or colored folders. Up to now, no one has come up with anything better.”</li>\n 	<li>However, I just started using on online travel &amp; expense tool called Concur Solutions which has moved me away from folders. Now, I don’t think it’s a single person solution – I think your whole company has to be on it – but if you’re on it, it seems to be pretty good. First, you use it to book your travel – airline, hotel, and car – which allows the system to create an expense report from your itinerary – automatically putting in your airline ticket, and place holders for your hotel and rental car. They also have can pull in the e-receipts that most hotel chains now set up, which is a huge timesaver if you work for one of those obsessive-compulsive companies that wants you to separately itemize room charges and tax across each night of your stay. Concur does that automatically when it sucks in the hotel receipt. It also pulls in electronic Amex receipts which you can drag and drop into the expense report.</li>\n 	<li>They also have an iPhone app that allows you to immediately record an expenditure and upload it -- complete with a picture of the receipt from the iPhone camera if you want – so that you can drag and drop it into your expense report. I don’t know what it costs our company, but it’s a pretty sweet system.</li>\n 	<li>I was thinking about this when I saw a review for another one of those travel scanners on Gadling. There were all sorts of comments about how great it is to be able to immediately scan your receipts so you don’t lose them… But I dunno, given that most of us are carrying around multi-mega pixel cameras in our pockets – embedded in our cell phones – I just don’t get the rationale for schlepping around another hundred dollar piece of hardware. If the multi-colored folder system doesn’t do it for you – and it didn’t seem to for the many Gadling commenters who extolled the praises of scanning receipts – then take a picture of it –shoot it on a white sheet of paper if the aesthetics of, say, a wood bar bother you -- and sync it back to your PC or do it across the network with any number of iPhone or Blackberry apps. I’m personally amazed that people are still buying those travel scanners.</li>\n 	<li>Mika Pyyhkala sent me a note singing the praises of Southwest. First, he loves how easy it is to gift someone with a Southwest award\n<ul>\n 	<li>I just had the best experience. I booked the flight I thought my friend wanted from PHX to IAD, and sent him the PNR locator. He could then log in himself under Travel Tools on the WN web site, and either view or change the itinerary to times that were more convenient. Imagine what the process would be on say UA, US, CO, or DL.</li>\n 	<li>While the media harps on bag fees, change/cancel fees are ****exponentially*** more money and more important to me. I probably check a bag 3 times a year, but often need to change my tickets. The media does not give Southwest credit for their consumer friendly change/cancellation rules, or point out how unfriendly the legacy carriers’ rules are in regards to that.</li>\n 	<li>I travel at least twice a month from BOS to Washington. I’ve taken 20 flights since Southwest launched the service and had only one incident where a gate agent was rude to me. I sent in a complaint and they gave me a voucher for the entire value of the ticket. And they didn’t just send a form letter -- it sounded like they actually investigated the issue I raised.</li>\n 	<li>I am knocking on wood that writing this does not now bring me bad luck.</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Mika, I have to agree with you on Southwest’s treatment. Having suffered through dealing with the crankiest set of AA gate agents and flight attendants that I’ve had in a while, it makes me appreciate the spirit and pleasantness of just about every Southwest employee I’ve encountered. My mother is a big fan of theirs too. Living in Denver, she was a loyal Frontier flyer until I gave her a Southwest award of mine that was about to expire. She came off that trip singing their praises and immediately switched her loyalties to Southwest. For Southwest, not a bad return on an free trip.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a question, a story, a comment – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com, you can send me a Twitter message at @mpeacock, or you can post them on the web site at travelcommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/solace-opium/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Opium Head</em></a> by Solace</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Changing the Way I Travel\n</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Moving from consulting to a corporate job is a significant change in so many ways -- I’m not even going to try and list them all here – but the way I travel is one of the biggest changes. My new company has offices in Phoenix, AZ, Dallas, and Naples, FL – but because of personal reasons – my son is finishing up high school, trying to sell a house in this market – we agreed that I wouldn’t move from Chicago right away. As the CEO said to me, “Mark, you travel all the time as it is, why change things?”</li>\n 	<li>So while I keep traveling, the way I travel is very different. As a partner in a consulting firm, I managed multiple project teams and sold new business. This meant usually travelled to multiple places a week. At the front of each episode, I give a quick rundown of the places I’ve been since the last episode, sometimes highlighting an especially whacky itinerary – like the time I flew from Chicago to London for a day meeting – flew to Heathrow overnight, took a lunch meeting, and then hopped the afternoon flight back to Chicago – and then continued on to Denver where I drove through a blizzard to facilitate a two-day workshop. And there have been more than a handful of weeks where I spent the front half of it on the East Coast and the back half on the West Coast.</li>\n 	<li>But now, I’m traveling to one place – one of our offices – for 3-4 days at a time. You’d think that this would be less stressful – and I guess it is in some ways – not as much packing &amp; unpacking of my bag, not as many TSA lines to grit my teeth through, not as many flight delays… But the act of travel – going to and from airports, flying, navigating to new places – fills the time.</li>\n 	<li>Without that, returning to the same hotel every night, there is empty time to fill. Work fills some of it. And you can only watch so much TV. Indeed, the travel is more like a commute, but without your family at the back end. The one saving grace of travel – experiencing new places, seeing new things – goes away.</li>\n 	<li>But talking to others about this, I appear to be one of the few people who likes to change things up on business travel. At a dinner this week, one guy talked about a recent stint of commuting between Dallas and Hong Kong 3 weeks out of 4. “Every trip, I flew the same flight, sat in the same seat, stayed at the same hotel and tried to get the same room.” Wow! We’ve talked about travelers who get in ruts before, but this guy had dug his deep and furnished it!</li>\n 	<li>But he had his reason – “After a while, the flight attendants, the hotel clerks got to know me. They’d greet me by name – ‘Hi Mr Jenkins’ – invite me to board early, upgrade my room, give me a free drink. It was nice.” In other words, he’d assembled a bit of a replacement family – some familiar faces to greet him at the end of his commute. Kinda the “Cheers” syndrome – you wanna be where everyone knows your name.</li>\n 	<li>It’s a common desire. One colleague had stayed for over a year straight at the Trumbull, CT Marriott, working on a call center project at a nearby corporation. She got the full “Cheers” treatment – greetings, upgrades, leaving laundry over the weekend, Christmas cards from the front desk staff. She was still getting cards two years later – “Come back; we miss you”. Heartfelt or kinda stalker creepy? You judge.</li>\n 	<li>I dunno – maybe I’m a bit of a misanthrope, but I’m happy with the family I’ve got. I use Skype videochat when the phone isn’t cutting it. And if I’m not getting to see new places, I’ll dig a little deeper into these places I’ll see again and again. In Phoenix, it’s been local sports – saw my first Fiesta Bowl and caught a local hockey game – which was interesting because there were more fans for the Buffalo Sabers than the home town Coyotes. Baseball spring training opens next week, so maybe I’ll get to catch a Cubs or White Sox game.</li>\n 	<li>In Florida, I make it a point to drive to a beach at least one evening. I take my shoes off and walk through the sand a bit. Haven’t gotten in the water yet, but I will soon.</li>\n 	<li>o So while the litany of destinations at the beginning of the show will get a bit more repetitive, I’ll guess I’ll have to work a bit harder to keep my travel from getting dull. If a hotel clerk greets me by name before looking up my reservation, I know it’s time to move on down the road.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Spaces</em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/fuzz-sunset/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">General Fuzz</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>New Year, New Programs\n</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>At the start of each New Year, I take a look at my airline mileage and hotel “frequent sleeper” programs and, because all the elite “counters” for miles and nights have reset to zero, decide where I’m going to invest my time. Because for frequent travelers, it is an investment -- the elite status is just as important – if not more so – than the actual points or miles.</li>\n 	<li>Most of the time, I let things ride – enjoy the status I have while building for the next year. Probably the last big change I made was swinging from American to United after I hit 2 million miles on AA. Up to that point, I had always split my miles between American and United, maintaining mid-tier status on each – Platinum on AA and Premiere Exec on UA. But hitting 2 million miles on AA meant lifetime Platinum status. Since there was nothing to lose on AA, I doubled down on UA – made 1K my first couple of years and then made Global Services in 2009.</li>\n 	<li>But now with my new job comes new destinations. I’m no longer regularly traveling to LGA, DCA, and SFO. Instead, I’m heading to DFW, Ft Myers, and PHX. ORD to DFW is AA’s trunk line – they practically have flights every hour between their two big hubs. No surprise there. But looking at Ft Myers, the only non-stops from Chicago are AA from ORD and SWA from MDW. I was surprised that there aren’t any UA non-stops. Hmmmm… Even AA’s ORD-PHX schedule is better than UA’s. I didn’t notice it when I was flying the big city routes, but it looks like UA got more aggressive than AA about taking out flight capacity. So since the New Year, I’ve swung my mileage over to AA and am working on Executive Platinum. Of course, UA made the decision a bit easier when they didn’t renew my GS status, even after I flew over 180,000 actual miles – or as the pros call it – BIS – butt-in-seat miles.</li>\n 	<li>The new job is even affecting my hotel choices. The hotels most convenient to my offices – the closest and the ones where we have the best rates – are in the Hilton chain – Hilton Suites and Doubletrees. By the end of January I had already hit Hilton Honors Silver and am on a fast track to Gold. I’ve been Marriott Platinum for 7 or 8 years, but it looks like that too will be changing.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #82</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>The bridge music is from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com\">Magnatune</a></li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or MP3 file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to @mpeacock on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_82.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #82 - Changing My Travel; New Mileage Programs in a New Year','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-82-changing-my-travel-new-mileage-programs-in-a-new-year','','','2021-09-26 11:28:09','2021-09-26 16:28:09','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/?p=228',0,'post','',6),
(233,1,'2010-05-17 22:45:12','2010-05-18 03:45:12','Last week, I swapped my standard corporate-issue <a href=\"http://www.laptopmag.com/review/laptops/dell-latitude-e6400.aspx?utm_source=Blog&amp;utm_medium=text&amp;utm_content=Dell_Latitude_E6400&amp;utm_campaign=smartlinks\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Dell Latitude E6400</a> laptop for an <a href=\"http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/sm/WF05a/321957-321957-64295-3841267-3955550-4094022.html\">HP Mini 5102</a> netbook and an <a href=\"http://www.apple.com/ipad/specs/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Wi-Fi + 3G iPad</a>. After a week\'s trip to Scottsdale with my lighter (by 1.4 lbs) briefcase, I found myself liking both devices, but for very different reasons...\n\n<!--more-->\n<ul>\n	<li><strong>E-Mail</strong> -- The main reason I\'m willing to dump the 14-in Dell screen for a 10-in netbook display is that most of my computer time is now spent running e-mail.  Back when I was developing code or creating PowerPoint decks, I was willing to lug some extra pounds to get extra pixels.  Now that my life revolves around Outlook, screen size isn\'t as important.  But a good keyboard is, and the HP\'s traditional keyboard is much more usable for a touch typist than the iPad\'s onscreen keyboard.  You can\'t rest your fingers on the iPad\'s virtual keys, and eliminating the semi-colon key causes some real problems for touch typists.  Also, being able to work in the actual Outlook client on the HP is a huge advantage over iPad\'s mail client.\nWinner -- <em>HP netbook</em></li>\n	<li><strong>Web Browsing</strong> -- Even though the HP\'s screen specs out larger than the iPad (10.1-in diagonal vs. 9.7-in diagonal), the iPad\'s screen looks bigger and brighter.  Perhaps it\'s the 132 pixels per inch (ppi), but it probably because the iPad\'s tablet form factor frees it from the desktop (or your lap) and makes it seem natural to bring it closer to your eyes.  And if you\'re browsing rather than typing, touching the web site is a more direct interaction than connecting your finger to the cursor through the touchpad.  Unless, that is, your browsing involves web sites like Hulu, which lands you directly in the cross fire of Steve Jobs\' Flash jihad.\nWinner -- <em>Apple iPad</em></li>\n	<li><strong>Writing</strong> -- Again, it\'s the keyboard.  While I\'m getting better on the iPad virtual keyboard after a week\'s practice, I switched over to the HP\'s physical keyboard to write this post.  As important, though, it\'s easier to get files on and off the HP.  The iron sandbox that Apple has erected around the iPhone/iPad may improve its security, but makes it difficult to use as something other than an isolated machine.\nWinner -- <em>HP Netbook</em></li>\n	<li><strong>Performance</strong> -- Moving from the Dell\'s 2.26 GHz Core 2 Duo processor to the HP\'s 1.66 GHz Atom chip, you expect to wait a few more seconds for applications to start up.  And you do.  But if you\'re just doing e-mail, web browsing, and some light Word/Excel/PowerPoint work, the Atom keeps up.  There are no such compromises with the iPad\'s custom A4 chip.  Video is smooth, and there\'s none of the stutter-step scrolling that has become so frustrating on my 3G iPhone.\nWinner -- <em>Apple iPad</em></li>\n	<li><strong>Battery </strong>-- This is the one disappointment with the HP 5102 Mini.  The 4-cell 29-watt-hour lithium ion battery specs out at 4½ hours, but was dying after my 3½ hour flight from Chicago to Phoenix.  It could be that I don\'t have Windows 7 configured correctly, but I couldn\'t get much more battery life even after some deep Power Option tweaking. My experience with the iPad\'s custom 25-watt-hour lithium polymer battery is the complete opposite.  I have yet to see the battery gauge turn red -- a pleasant change from my iPhone experience.\nWinner -- <em>Apple iPad</em></li>\n	<li><strong>Cost </strong>-- Doing a straight feature/cost comparison is tough -- these are two very different machines.  Comparing the two machines in my briefcase -- the HP 5102 Mini netbook with 2 GB memory and 160 GB hard drive lists for $535 on HP\'s web site while my 64 GB Wi-Fi + 3G iPad goes for $829 on apple.com -- HP looks the winner.  But if you can drop down to the 32 GB Wi-Fi + 3G iPad and factor in its lower cost AT&amp;T 3G plan, you get pretty close to breakeven after 12 months.  Is it a fair comparison, I don\'t know -- but it\'s a data point.\nWinner -- ranges from <em>HP netbook</em> to <em>a tie</em></li>\n</ul>\nWhat\'s the bottom line?  It\'s not clear.  I really like both machines, but for very different reasons.  The HP is a solid little machine -- great keyboard, reasonable performance, and a compact size that doesn\'t get crushed when the guy in front of me pushes his seat back in an American Airlines MD-80.  The iPad provides a much better way to browse web sites (non-Flash, of course) and watch videos.  I\'d love to drop one of them, but I can\'t -- not yet.\n\n<strong> </strong>','IPad vs. Netbook -- First Impressions','','private','closed','closed','','ipad-vs-netbook-first-impressions','','','2024-06-02 10:30:47','2024-06-02 15:30:47','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/?p=233',0,'post','',6),
(234,1,'2019-12-25 16:33:06','2019-12-25 16:33:06','','secondline-custom','','inherit','closed','closed','','secondline-custom','','','2019-12-25 16:33:06','2019-12-25 16:33:06','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/secondline-custom.zip',0,'attachment','application/zip',0),
(246,1,'2010-05-28 15:31:43','2010-05-28 20:31:43','Returning from a week in India, I started recording this podcast in the business class toilet of an AA flight from Delhi to Chicago. For the sake of listeners\' ears and the bladders of fellow passengers, I finished it in the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago. We talk about how Twitter has led me to some great meals while on the road, a poor experience with GoGo in-flight Wi-Fi, and how ATMs revolutionized business travel. I talk about my experiences inside the \"travel bubble\" while traveling in India, and compare my HP netbook to my Apple iPad. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_83.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the transcript from TravelCommons podcast #83:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you today from Business class toilet on an American Airlines 777 flying somewhere north of the Iceland volcano, flying back from my first trip to India. After spending 2 days each in Guragon, Pune, and Bangalore, I got on this non-stop flight back to Chicago – left Dehli at quarter past midnight Thursday night and some 14 hours later, get into ORD at around 4:30 am Friday morning. I’ll talk more about my India trip in the first topic, but now, I’m going to get out of the john before someone thinks I’m doing something strange in here – not that recording a podcast in the bathroom is normal for any except me.</li>\n 	<li>OK, I’m back in the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago – landed safely and am now spending the day trying to get my body clock reset. The first time I flew home from Asia, I arrived before I took off – left Tokyo around 5pm and got into SFO around noon. Made my brain hurt a little bit trying to figure it out. Now, I just roll with it. Flying to Europe, I make a point to get on the destination time right when I sit in the airplane seat. Flying to Asia, that takes too much work. I just sleep when I want and eat when I want and leave it to my iPhone alarm to help me power through the consequences.</li>\n 	<li>One more quick India note – I was standing in line to board my return flight – we had to run the gauntlet in the jetway of repeated security questions (“Has your carry-on been out of your possession at any time”) and another wanding and pat-down -- and now waiting to board when I heard a guy describing the scene to someone on the phone. It took about 20 seconds for it to hit me – Hey, I recognize that voice. I turned around and about a half-dozen people back was a guy I had worked with 6 years ago. Now I’m used to running into friends and former colleagues at ORD and LGA, but DEL? It’s either a really small world, or I know way too many people who fly.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/curl-complex/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">We Are Complex</a></em> by Curl</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>We’ve talked in past episodes about ways to find good restaurants on the road. I’ve mentioned Chowhound.com – a popular foodie forum – as one of my main tools. But Twitter has also become very useful. The last time I was in LA, I couldn’t figure out what I wanted to do for dinner. I tweeted – “What should I eat – sushi or In ‘n Out Burger?” – really thinking out loud to my family than anyone else, and then one follower replied “Try <a href=\"http://kogibbq.com/\">Kogi BBQ truck</a>”. What a great idea! I had read about these guys a few months prior – some guys running 3 taco trucks doing Korean-Mexican fusion food – like kim chi quesadillas – and tweet every day the locations of their trucks. I hit Twitter, found the closest truck – a 30-minute drive – and headed out. I found it and queued up with about two dozen other Angelenos past an Arco gas station, ordered up some tacos, and ate them on the hood of my car. It was great – and I wouldn’t have thought about it without someone responding to my tweet.</li>\n 	<li>The best meal on my last trip to Seattle was courtesy of Twitter – <a href=\"http://seat6d.com/\">Denrael</a> saw where I was and suggested the <a href=\"http://www.steelheaddiner.com/\">Steelhead Diner</a> and I ended up with another great meal. I think this is how the whole social media thing is supposed to work.</li>\n 	<li>Another thing that’s worked for me this year is hand-washing. When all the panic about H1N1 virus started up, I ignored most of it – except for the talk about the benefits of extended hand-washing. 20 seconds with soap and water, they said, was more effective than those little bottles of Purell. OK, I decided to give it a go – investing a bit more time under the faucet. One day, at the beginning of April, as Chicago began to warm up, it came to me – I haven’t had a cold this season. For the first time in as long as I can remember, in spite of doing the same amount of cohabitating metal tubes with sick people, inhaling their recycled exhales, I didn’t get sick. I guess those airplane HEPA filters work after all.</li>\n 	<li>I broke down and tried GoGo’s in-flight WiFi a few months ago. I’d like to say that I did it purely from an investigative standpoint – so that I could report on it to you, my podcast listeners. But actually, I had a half day in Phoenix, was racing to make the flight, and still had a bunch of e-mail that I wanted to get out before the end of the day, so rather than queueing up 25 e-mails and then blasting them out when I hit ORD, I ponied up for GoGo. So here’s my bottom line -- Gogo inflight wi-fi is a pig, a slow one. And it’s not so much the bandwidth to the ground, but just the response time from the web server in the plane – airborne.gogoinflight.com. Maybe because it was a full plane with lots of laptop-toting professionals needing to get on-line in the middle of the day, but still, come on. When I first connected to the Buy page, the price was $10 for the flight. But that in-plane server timed out, so I had to start again from the start – great user experience. Even better -- the second time I got to the Buy page, it was $13. I haven’t used GoGo since.</li>\n 	<li>Maybe it was a goofy day, though. On that same flight, the guy next to me tried to buy a cheese-&amp;-cracker snack with cash. And then was – should I say it? No, I shouldn’t… but I will – he was “cheesed off” that American no longer takes cash. I was amazed -- when was the last time this guy flew?</li>\n 	<li>And finally, listening this week to <a href=\"http://www.theworld.org/2010/05/25/tech-podcast-saving-our-bits-in-the-swiss-fort-knox/\">The World’s Technology Podcast</a> , I heard about the death of John Shepherd-Barron, the inventor of the ATM – the automated banking machine. For the business traveler, the ATM revolutionized our lives, as much, if not more than mobile phones. I remember traveling before ATMs were ubiquitous. You’d pay American Express a chunk of change for a wad of $100 traveler’s checks, and then spend a good bit of your trip getting ripped off by currency exchanges in the airports, and cutting out of meetings in mid-day Fridays to hunt down a bank before it closed so you would have some cash for the weekend. It took a lot of planning ahead. Contrast that with this last weekend. On Sunday, I woke up in Guragon, wandered over to the mall next door, found a Citibank ATM a couple hundred feet from the front door, punched a few keys and out popped 10 crisp 500 rupee notes. And without taking much note, I now had a bit of cash with which I could buy a cup of masala tea. Thanks, John.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a question, a story, a comment – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com, you can send me a Twitter message at @mpeacock, or you can post them on the web site at travelcommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/quist-lucidity/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Crazy</em></a> by Beth Quist</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Business Travel in India\n</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Long-time listener <a href=\"http://mlw.me\">Marc Loehrwald</a> came back to me in the midst of my Tweet stream from India asking “Are you collecting some stories for a new Travelcommons episode?” Even without trying, I came back with some.</li>\n 	<li>Deplaning at Indira Gandhi Int’l airport – IRI to the locals – was pretty uneventful, though the Immigration officer did comment that I looked much younger in my passport picture. After a 15-hour flight, I’d have been surprised if it was any other way. I told him “it’s not the years; it’s the mileage”, but I think he was a bit young to catch the Indiana Jones reference.</li>\n 	<li>Getting out at our hotel, I had the first of many security screenings during my stay. At every hotel and major building, I walked through a metal detector, was wanded down, and had my briefcase X-rayed. The whole exercise took 90 seconds and the employees were exceedingly polite (because they worked for the hotel, not an overblown government agency), but given what happened in Mumbai a year and a half ago, the security was understandable.</li>\n 	<li>Sunday afternoon, I was back at IRI, but this time at the domestic terminal for a flight on Kingfisher Airlines – yes, owned by the same person as Kingfisher Beer, but no, it’s not served on board; all domestic flights are non-alcoholic – to Pune. I walk up to the door and am stopped by a security guard – polite, but not as nice as the hotel guys – asking to see an itinerary. I have an e-ticket, I say, so I don’t have an itinerary. No paper, no entry. He points down the terminal to the Kingfisher ticketing desk and says they can print it out for me. 10 minutes and some aggressive line jockeying and was back with the necessary piece of paper – a printout of my flight itinerary. Now I can go in.</li>\n 	<li>And face more security. Going through security screening, everyone kept on their shoes and belt, but then everyone was wanded and patted down after passing through the metal detector. Every carryon had to have a tag, which was stamped after X-raying. These tags were then checked by a security guard as you boarded the plane. No stamp and back you went to security.</li>\n 	<li>Leo Vegoda, another T/C listener, responding to my security line Tweet – “Is the line still 2 hours long?” No, even with all this extra security, the lines weren’t long – there seemed to be enough staff to handle it. I don’t know – perhaps I was traveling at non-peak times; or perhaps their staffing algorithm is better than the TSA’s.</li>\n 	<li>What struck me most by the middle of the week was how isolated my travels were. In past T/C episodes, we’ve talked about the “travel bubble” that business travelers inhabit – seeming to float above the day-to-day activities of a given city – kinda like Glenda the Good Witch in “Wicked” (I’m just full of pop references today…).</li>\n 	<li>In India, I was in an extreme travel bubble – eating breakfast in the hotel, taking a private car to my meetings, then driven to dinner (usually in a hotel restaurant), and finally dropped off at my hotel around 9 or 10 pm. But unlike everywhere else, I wasn’t trying to escape it. I don’t think it was the poverty or a concern about security – I’ve dealt with that in places like Joburg and Rio. No, it was something else, but I didn’t know what it was.</li>\n 	<li>Finally, looking out the car window one day, on one of my many rides, I realized that it was the crowds – everywhere I was, everywhere I looked, there were always huge numbers of people moving to and fro – much more than I’d seen before, and never letting up. Maybe all the extra security got to me subconsciously. I’m sure that, in time, I would’ve gotten comfortable with the crowds, but the pace of the trip – 3 cities, 7 days, 15 hours a day in meetings and then another 3 hours back in the room catching up on things back home – I never got situated, never got comfortable with where I was.</li>\n 	<li>I finally fell out of my travel bubble transiting between the domestic and international terminals in Delhi. It’s a 30-minute bus ride, but security wouldn’t let me on because I forgot to print my American Airlines itinerary. I had to go outside and catch a cab – not a car, not a minibus, a regular street cab. Careening through the streets, I remembered the story one of my hosts told me a few days past, about how he had taken a cab between the two terminals – the cab went off to a side street and only continued onto the international terminal after he gave them $100. I watched the street signs – why wasn’t he taking the exit for the airport? Down and around the support pillars of the expressway, past a strip of hotels with neon signs, driving in a sea of motorscooters, we emerged in front of the access road to the international terminal. A couple of more jigs and jags to avoid construction and we were unloading my bags in front of the terminal. I tipped the driver 200 rupees on a 250-rupee fare and slipped back inside my travel bubble.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Blues for a Rainy Day</em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/markcook-highway/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Mark Cook</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>iPad vs. Netbook\n</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>At the beginning of the month, I swapped my standard corporate-issue Dell Latitude E6400 laptop for an HP Mini 5102 netbook running Windows 7 and an Apple Wi-Fi + 3G iPad. After trips to Scottsdale and India with my lighter (by 1.4 lbs) briefcase, I found myself liking both devices, but for very different reasons.</li>\n 	<li>The main reason I was willing to dump the 14-in Dell screen for a 10-in netbook display is that most of my computer time is now spent running e-mail. Back when I was developing code or creating PowerPoint decks, I was willing to lug some extra pounds to get extra pixels. Now that my life revolves around Outlook, screen size isn’t as important. But a good keyboard is, and the HP’s traditional keyboard is much more usable for a touch typist than the iPad’s onscreen keyboard. You can’t rest your fingers on the iPad’s virtual keys, and eliminating the semi-colon key causes some real problems for touch typists. Also, being able to work in the actual Outlook client on the HP – looking at other people’s schedules when setting up meetings, browsing shared Exchange folders -- is a huge advantage over iPad’s mail client. HP is the clear winner with e-mail.</li>\n 	<li>Even though the HP’s screen specs out larger than the iPad (10.1-in diagonal vs. 9.7-in diagonal), the iPad’s screen looks bigger and brighter. Perhaps it’s the 132 pixels per inch, but it probably because the iPad’s tablet form factor frees it from the desktop (or your lap) and makes it seem natural to bring it closer to your eyes. And if you’re browsing rather than typing, touching the web site is a more direct interaction than connecting your finger to the cursor through the touchpad. Unless, that is, your browsing involves web sites like Hulu, which lands you directly in the cross fire of Steve Jobs’ Flash jihad. But for non-Flash web browsing, the iPad is the clear winner.</li>\n 	<li>When I’m writing, the best keyboard wins out. While I’m getting better on the iPad virtual keyboard after a couple of weeks’ practice, I switched over to the HP’s physical keyboard to write this episode. A number of folks have suggested that I use a BlueTooth keyboard with my iPad, but one of my travel principles is to travel with the least number of electronic things as possible. Having lots of electronic bits show up on the X-ray screen makes any TSA screener twitchy – it significantly increases the probability of a hand search – something any frequent traveler wants to avoid.</li>\n 	<li>It’s also easier to get files on and off the HP. The iron sandbox that Apple has erected around the iPhone and now the iPad may improve its security, but makes it difficult to use as something other than an isolated machine. When I’m creating a document more than a few lines, I find myself switching to the HP.</li>\n 	<li>Now, moving from the Dell’s 2.26 GHz Core 2 Duo processor to the HP’s 1.66 GHz Atom chip, you’d expect to wait a few more seconds for applications to start up. And you do. But if you’re just doing e-mail, web browsing, and some light Word/Excel/PowerPoint work, the Atom keeps up. But there are no such compromises with the iPad’s custom A4 chip. Video is smooth, screens snap, and there’s none of the stutter-step scrolling that has become so frustrating on my 3G iPhone. From a user experience standpoint, the iPad’s performance smokes the HP.</li>\n 	<li>Probably the biggest disappointment with the HP is the battery life. The 4-cell battery specs out at 4½ hours, but it was dying after my 3½ hour flight from Chicago to Phoenix. It could be that I don’t have Windows 7 configured correctly, but I couldn’t get much more battery life even after some deep Power Option tweaking. My experience with the iPad’s custom battery is the complete opposite. I have yet to see the battery gauge turn red, even after pretty constant use on my 15-hour flights to and from India — a pleasant change indeed from the usual iPhone experience.</li>\n 	<li>Now, doing a straight feature/cost comparison is tough — these are two very different machines. Comparing the two machines in my briefcase — the HP 5102 Mini netbook with 2 GB memory and 160 GB hard drive lists for $535 on HP’s web site while my 64 GB Wi-Fi + 3G iPad goes for $829 on apple.com — HP looks the winner. But if you factor in the delta between the price of a typical cellular data plan for the HP and the iPad’s lower cost 3G plan from AT&amp;T, and can drop down to the 32 GB Wi-Fi + 3G iPad, you get pretty close to breakeven after 12 months. Is it a fair comparison, I don’t know — but it’s a data point.</li>\n 	<li>What’s the bottom line? It’s not clear. I really like both machines, but for very different reasons. The HP is a solid little machine — great keyboard, reasonable performance, and a compact size that doesn’t get crushed when the guy in front of me pushes his seat back in an American Airlines MD-80. The iPad provides a much better way to browse web sites (non-Flash, of course) and watch videos. I’d love to drop one of them, but since the TSA doesn’t make me take out my iPad before X-raying, I’m not in too big of a hurry.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #83</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>The bridge music is from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com\">Magnatune</a></li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or MP3 file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to @mpeacock on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_83.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #83 - Business Travel in India; iPad vs. Netbook','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-83-business-travel-in-india-ipad-vs-netbook','','','2021-09-26 11:29:44','2021-09-26 16:29:44','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/?p=246',0,'post','',2),
(250,1,'2010-09-06 22:43:26','2010-09-07 03:43:26','After returning from a 10-day visit to Vietnam, friends and TravelCommons podcast listeners asked me a lot of questions about our trip. In this video, I answer the most common question -- \"How did they treat you when they found out you were American?\" -- and give my impressions of <a title=\"Ho Chi Minh City\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/vietnam/ho-chi-minh-city\">Ho Chi Minh City</a> (Saigon), <a title=\"Hoi An\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/vietnam/central-vietnam/hoi-an\">HoiAn</a>, Hanoi, and Halong Bay.\n\n<iframe width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"https://www.youtube.com/embed/NQj_v6qK10k\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"autoplay; encrypted-media\" allowfullscreen=\"\"></iframe>\n<!--more-->\n\n<hr>\n\nHere is the transcript from TravelCommons video #1:\n\n&nbsp;\n 	<li>Spent 10 days at the end of June on a family vacation in Vietnam</li>\n 	<li>Ran the entire length of the country – Ho Chi Minh City (otherwise known as Saigon), to Hue, to HoiAn, to Hanoi, to Halong Bay, and then back down to Ho Chi Minh City for our flight home.</li>\n 	<li>It’s a long country – about the length of California.  So this itinerary didn’t allow time to get deep; go in-depth in any one place, but we did get a good “overview” of Vietnam</li>\n 	<li>Returning to the US, I’ve had a lot of questions about the trip, but the one everyone asks is  – how did they treat you when they found out you were from America?</li>\n 	<li>The short answer is “Fine”.  We didn’t feel the need to hide our nationality – add an “ehh” on the back of every sentence to pass as Canadian.  When we handed over our passports to hotel clerks, or told car drivers that we were from the US, we never felt any animosity or change in demeanor.  Everyone was friendly.</li>\n 	<li>The only anti-Americanism we saw was where you’d most expect it – on displays at the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"War Remnants Museum\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/vietnam/ho-chi-minh-city/sights/museum/war-remnants-museum\">War Remnants Museum</a> in Ho Chi Minh City and in the introductory video for the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Cu Chi Tunnels\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/vietnam/around-ho-chi-minh-city/cu-chi-tunnels\">Cu Chi Tunnels</a>, a park that commemorates the Viet Cong guerilla efforts.</li>\n 	<li>But never from the people we ran into, or our tour guides or drivers.  At My Son, a sort of mini Angkor Wat in Central Vietnam, south of Da Nang, our guide mentioned the temples destroyed by B-52 bombs -- never in an accusing way, just a statement of fact about something that happened some 40 years ago.</li>\n 	<li>Indeed, the bigger disconnect seemed to be between the South Vietnamese who had served in the war and the rest of today’s Vietnam.  There seemed both a political and generational divide.  I had to wonder how our Saigon guide – a former South Vietnamese army officer – felt taking us through exhibits that insulted him and lionized his enemies.</li>\n 	<li>A couple of years ago, when we vacationed in Singapore and Phuket, Thailand, I joked with my family that we were only doing \"Asia Lite\". Starting in Ho Chi Minh City – still called Saigon by many – is full-contact Asia -- 9 million people, 10 million motorbikes, and where crossing the street has been elevated to an extreme sport.</li>\n 	<li>Starting here was jumping into the deep end.  It wasn\'t until we came back the second time -- a couple of days before leaving -- that we began to feel comfortable with Saigon.</li>\n 	<li>Unlike Dehli or Joburg or Rio, I didn\'t see the abject poverty and shanty towns in HCMC that I\'ve seen in those other cities, nor did I feel as unsafe.  While we mostly stayed in District 1 -- the main tourism area -- walking back to our hotel at night after dinner and some evening shopping wasn\'t a problem.</li>\n 	<li>HoiAn is kinda like a Vietnamese Williamsburg -- a preserved historic port town and a UNESCO World Heritage site with no war damage.  The old town is really for tourists.  The historic building now house tailor shops, art galleries, trinket shops, bars, and restaurants. Can\'t be too interesting for locals, but it\'s a sort of \"Vietnam-lite\" for tourists weary of the press of Ho Chi Minh City.</li>\n 	<li>I was pleasantly surprised with Hanoi.  I had heard that it was \"cold\" to Americans -- which would\'ve been understandable -- but didn\'t see anything like that.  At only 4 million people, Hanoi seemed less \"crazy\", easier to manage than Saigon. Motorbikes stop at traffic lights -- crossing the street didn\'t generate the same fight-or-flight response as it did in Saigon.</li>\n 	<li>After a half-day drive east of Hanoi, we cruised <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Halong Bay\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/vietnam/northeast-vietnam/halong-bay\">Ha Long Bay</a> for two days on a 10 passenger replica of a Chinese junk.  Weaving among the limestone islands or \"karsks\", visiting a floating fishing and oyster-farming village, the scenery and pace was stark difference from what been, to this point, a very urban vacation.</li>\n 	<li>We love Vietnamese food, so eating was a real highlight of the trip.  The variety was great -- we really didn\'t eat the same thing twice -- except for pho, the classic noodle soup, but that was by choice.  I ate pho for breakfast almost every day, and for dinner our last night in Saigon -- pho for 4, 2 Tiger Beers, 2 Cokes -- $10.  It was the perfect last meal</li>\n 	<li>I\'m glad we went to Vietnam when we did, because it\'s starting to get crowded with tourists -- Australians, French, and a growing number of Chinese.  The drive south from Da Nang to Hoi An along China Beach -- hotel after resort after time shares under construction -- will flood the place in 18-36 months.  It seems to be in a sweet spot -- enough business to support a good tourism industry, but not yet completely overrun, and so still happy to welcome new visitors -- even Americans.</li>\n<div class=\"zemanta-pixie\" style=\"margin-top: 10px; height: 15px;\"><img class=\"zemanta-pixie-img\" style=\"border: none; float: right;\" src=\"http://img.zemanta.com/pixy.gif?x-id=044a6880-a7ee-4a80-b4c8-3d6bdfbd2094\" alt=\"\"></div>','Video - Impressions of Vietnam','','publish','closed','closed','','video-1-impressions-of-vietnam','','','2021-03-28 15:58:13','2021-03-28 20:58:13','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/?p=250',0,'post','',6),
(263,1,'2005-05-15 16:30:50','2005-05-15 21:30:50','Here\'s the first TravelCommons podcast. Recorded in the Wardman Park Marriott in Washington, DC, I talk about Hungarian prostitutes, \"Puff the Magic Dragon\" security portals, and the 5 Boro Bike Ride in New York. Here\'s the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons-2005-05-14.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the file.\n\nHere are the shownotes from first TravelCommons podcast:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <em>Warmth</em> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>A podcast about the first-hand travel experiences of a road warrior</li>\n 	<li>Recording in the bathroom of the Wardman Park Marriott in Northwest DC</li>\n 	<li>Bad but typical experiences flying from O\'Hare to LaGuardia and then LaGuardia to Reagan National</li>\n 	<li>Hungarian roadside prostitutes</li>\n 	<li>New airport security \"sniffer\" screening machines</li>\n 	<li>New York City\'s 5 Boro Bike Ride</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/21561359@N00/103092939/\"><strong>Direct Link</strong></a> to a cameraphone picture of the ride\'s start</li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons-2005-05-14.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','First TravelCommons Podcast','','publish','closed','closed','','first-travelcommons-podcast','','','2021-07-28 15:59:22','2021-07-28 20:59:22','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2005/05/15/first-travelcommons-podcast/',0,'post','',3),
(264,1,'2005-05-23 16:27:52','2005-05-23 21:27:52','Here\'s the second TravelCommons podcast. This week, I talk about the evolution of the Southwest Airlines customer, the growth of travel meta-search sites such as Kayak and Sidestep, and how Mexicans vacation in Cabo San Lucas.  There\'s also a clip from fellow travel podcaster Curt Taylor of emptyseat.net.  Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_2.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr>\n\nHere are the shownotes from the second TravelCommons podcast:\n 	<li>Intro music -- <em>Warmth</em> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>In town all week, but getting ready for killer travel next week -- 7 flights and 4 cities in 5 days</li>\n 	<li>Interesting travel statistic from Curt Taylor at <a href=\"http://www.emptyseat.net/emptyseatblog/\">emptyseat.net</a></li>\n 	<li>Changes to the typical passenger on Southwest Airlines</li>\n 	<li>Growth of Travel Meta-Search Sites, such as Kayak, Sidestep, and Mobissimo</li>\n 	<li>Differences between American and Mexican vacationers in Cabo San Lucas</li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_2.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>','TravelCommons Podcast #2','','publish','closed','closed','','travelcommons-podcast-2','','','2021-11-07 19:04:36','2021-11-08 00:04:36','',0,'http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2005/05/23/travelcommons-podcast-2/',0,'post','',3),
(288,1,'2010-10-17 13:15:00','2010-10-17 18:15:00','As the US dollar continues to swoon, non-US friends, colleagues, and podcast listeners are doing the math and thinking it might just be worth getting <a title=\"Bad Times in IAD\'s Immigration Hall\" href=\"http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/cda25e6c-c1ea-11df-9d90-00144feab49a.html\" target=\"_blank\">fingerprinted and photographed</a> by US Customs in exchange for a cheap holiday.  The question I\'ve been asked over the past 3 months is \"Where should I go?\"\n\nNot an easy question -- the US is a big and diverse place.  Assuming the folks asking me this question aren\'t interested in \"Disney World\" as an answer, I thought through the places in the US that I\'ve been recently and came up with a focused list -- one that\'s not overwhelming with choices, but will give visitors a <em>next-level</em> understanding of Americans.  I split my suggestions into two tiers --  3 Must-See Cities and 4 Regional Excursions.  The idea is that in a 2-week visit (remember, this list isn\'t for Americans), you could hit 2-3 Must-See Cities, or 1 Must-See City with a near-by Regional Excursion.\n\nBelow is my list and a quick rationale for each choice.  While I\'ve enjoyed visits to each of these cities, I\'ll leave specific sight-seeing suggestions to your favorite travel guide.\n\n<!--more--><em>First Tier -- The Must-See Cities</em>\n<ul> <strong><a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"New York City\" rel=\"homepage\" href=\"http://www.nyc.gov/\">New York City</a></strong> -- OK, no surprise here, but it\'s the only choice. If you have only one place in the US to visit, go to New York City.  Food, theater, parks, music, museums, shopping, sights -- it\'s all there and  easily accessible in a compact geographic area. The most densely populated US city, it can be intense. But you can\'t know the US without visiting New York</ul>\n<ul> <strong><a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"San Francisco\" rel=\"homepage\" href=\"http://www.sfgov.org/\">San Francisco</a></strong> -- Again, lots to do packed into a small footprint. It\'s another intense experience, but with a completely different feel.  To understand the US, you have to understand California -- the place where so many Americans have gone to re-invent themselves.  The quintessential American concept of \"creative destruction\" drives San Francisco and the Silicon Valley.</ul>\n<ul><strong><a href=\"http://www.explorechicago.org/city/en.html\" target=\"_blank\">Chicago</a></strong> -- This may smack of a bit of \"homer bias\", but the human drama of New York and the physical drama of the California coast often crowds out consideration of Midwest, a big part of the US.  Many East Coast transplants say Chicago has everything New York does except for the neuroses.  Perhaps a bit of overstatement, but Chicago allows visitors to experience the Midwest without sacrificing any of the culture, entertainment or shopping you\'ll find in New York or San Francisco.</ul>\n<strong><em>Second Tier -- Regional Excursions</em></strong>\n<ul> <strong><a href=\"http://www.cityofboston.gov/visitors/\" target=\"_blank\">Boston</a> (<a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"New England\" rel=\"wikipedia\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_England\">New England</a>)</strong> -- Pairing a regional excursion with New York, it\'s a tough choice between Boston (New England) and <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Washington, D.C.\" rel=\"homepage\" href=\"http://www.dc.gov/\">Washington DC</a> (Chesapeake Bay). Boston wins out because it\'s a more interesting city, it has a richer history, and surrounding New England has more diverse beauty -- from the New Hampshire mountains to the beaches of Cape Cod.</ul>\n<ul><strong><a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"New Orleans\" rel=\"homepage\" href=\"http://www.cityofno.com\">New Orleans</a></strong> -- The 1,000-mile distance between New Orleans and Chicago may stretch the term \"regional excursion\" -- until you consider making the journey on Amtrak\'s <em><a title=\"Amtrak\'s City of New Orleans route summary\" href=\"http://www.amtrak.com/servlet/ContentServer?c=AM_Route_C&amp;pagename=am/Layout&amp;cid=1241245653236\" target=\"_blank\">City of New Orleans</a></em> overnight train.  Or you can hop a cheap Southwest flight. The mix of Southern, Cajun, and Creole cultures has made New Orleans a unique city ever since it joined the US as part of the Louisiana Purchase in 1802. The trauma of Katrina dimmed its reputation as the #1 party city in the country, but 5 years on, New Orleans throws a good time again.</ul>\n<ul><strong><a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Austin, Texas\" rel=\"homepage\" href=\"http://www.ci.austin.tx.us/\">Austin, TX</a></strong> -- Texas is another unique part of the US that\'s often caricatured with big hats and belt buckles. Texas brings a lot of this on itself, but it\'s a more interesting place than most non-Texans think.  Ask Texans to name their favorite Texas city and they\'ll say \"Austin\" before you finish the question.  You can crawl through the 6th Street music clubs or explore the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Texas Hill Country\" rel=\"homepage\" href=\"http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/HH/ryh2.html\">Texas Hill Country</a>. With a motto like \"<a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Keep Austin Weird\" rel=\"wikipedia\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keep_Austin_Weird\">Keep Austin Weird</a>\", how can you go wrong?</ul>\n<ul><strong><a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Portland, Oregon\" rel=\"homepage\" href=\"http://www.portlandonline.com/\">Portland, OR</a></strong> -- The regional excursion from San Francisco is another tough choice -- go south to the LA beaches or north to the Pacific Northwest.  Deciding that you need to experience more than California, do I recommend Portland or Seattle? I go with Portland (by a very slim margin) because it\'s a bit smaller and feels a bit grittier -- and I think the food, beer, and wine is a bit better.  It\'s an excellent contrast to San Francisco\'s ...<em>um...</em> eccentricities.</ul>','\"Now That I Have My Visa, Where in the US Should I Go?\"','','publish','closed','closed','','now-that-i-have-my-visa-where-in-the-us-should-i-go','','','2010-10-17 13:15:00','2010-10-17 18:15:00','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=288',0,'post','',2),
(319,1,'2010-10-30 14:10:48','2010-10-30 19:10:48','Walking into the TravelCommons studios for this episode felt like walking into a confessional -- \"Bless me Father for I have sinned; it\'s been 6 months since my last podcast...\"  I talk about the new TravelCommons web site and the new Facebook<a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/153475331351358\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> fan page</a>. I talk about some recent WiFi experiences -- at 35,000 ft and while on vacation in <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Vietnam\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Vietnam</a> -- and a bad dining experience in <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Scottsdale, Arizona\" href=\"http://www.scottsdaleaz.gov/\" rel=\"homepage\">Scottsdale, AZ</a>. I tumbled the numbers on my mileage and frequent sleeper points and, applying some complex division with the help of my iPhone calculator, redirected this year\'s remaining travel to maximize my frequent flyer and frequent sleeper status levels.  Finally, after the TSA\'s announcement of their \"enhanced\" <a href=\"http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39889732/ns/travel-news/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">pat-down procedures</a>, I give up and let loose with a full-throated rant.  Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_84.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the transcript from TravelCommons podcast #84:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Chicago\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Chicago, Illinois</a>.  Picking up to the mic, I kinda felt like I was walking into a confessional – “Bless me Father for I have sinned, it’s been 6 months since my last podcast…”  As I mentioned in the last episode, back in May, I wanted to take the summer off to focus on the new job – which I did.  I also wanted to do something with some video, which I did – a 6-minute summary of our summer trip to Vietnam, which is up on the site complete with a bit of an Easter egg at the end.  John Stalvern picked it up – he posted a question on the TravelCommons site – “is that an actual shot of the never-before-identified Mark Peacock at the end?”  Yup, complete with my new-found Vietnamese friend.</li>\n 	<li>I also rebuilt the TravelCommons site on my own hosting service, pulling away from the BoardingArea site after they stopped paying me.  Not that I blame them – it’s a tough economy and their model is to sell banner ads for blogs.  I don’t think they ever figured out how to monetize a podcast.  So, I got a dump of my content and rebuilt my own TravelCommons site.  Because it’s my own site, I also have complete control.  So, my son built me a new look-&amp;-feel for the site, I loaded a better Twitter feed badge and will put up some additional stuff like polls when I get around to it.</li>\n 	<li>I also set up a TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/153475331351358?v=wall\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook.  I don’t know exactly what I’ll do with it yet – right now it’s a mix of some web site content and expanded Twitter posts.  Come by – there’s a “badge” on the web site – “like” it and leave comments/suggestions on the wall.  Help me figure out what to do with it.</li>\n 	<li>I’ve also been doing a bit of travel.  For those of you who watched the Vietnam video, you saw our itinerary – we toured Vietnam for 12 days and then stopped off in <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Hong Kong\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Kong\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Hong Kong</a> for three days on the way home.  My domestic travel has been a bit boring – mostly to our offices in Scottsdale, Dallas, and <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Naples, Florida\" href=\"http://www.naplesgov.com\" rel=\"homepage\">Naples, FL</a>, though I have hit Boston and San Diego recently, and have a conference in Orlando coming up.</li>\n 	<li>Thinking back on my travel last year, in 2009, I miss the trips to <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"New York City\" href=\"http://www.nyc.gov/\" rel=\"homepage\">New York</a> and San Francisco.  But as we officially hit Autumn and can see December in Chicago quickly approaching – places like Scottsdale and Naples are sounding pretty good again.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/Loveshadow/26219\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>SP*ANK Vox</em></a> by Loveshadow</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>OK, where to start, it’s been so long.  Maybe at the most recent and work my way back.</li>\n 	<li>In-flight WiFi – I’ve said in past episodes that I’m not a big fan.  35,000 ft is my last refuge of non-connectedness.  It’s when I read, or listen to music, or listen to podcasts, or really crank on my e-mail in-box – cleaning out the backlog of “I’ll read that when I get some time” e-mails…  On my last flight down to Ft Myers, though, I broke down 30 minutes into the flight and bought a WiFi session from GoGo.  The price was $9.95 for my iPad or my netbook; $7.95 for my iPhone or Motorola Droid2.  I ponied up the extra $2 to use a full keyboard.  While I cringed when signing on, it was useful not going dark for 2.5 hours.  Right then, I was in the middle of a number of customer issues.  Being able to run e-mail saved me a 20-minute e-mail session sitting outside the airport Starbucks clearing 25+ e-mail messages.</li>\n 	<li>The rise and now near-ubiquity of on-line storage/collaboration tools like Microsoft <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Microsoft SharePoint\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_SharePoint\" rel=\"wikipedia\">SharePoint</a> has also made me push the GoGo in-flight purchase button.  I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve clicked on an e-mail message to start reviewing a document and found nothing but a SharePoint link.  It reminds me yet again of the mental gulf between office dwellers and road warriors.  “Whaa… you’re not on the network?” is the refrain whenever I ask someone to send me the actual file.  I hate SharePoint…</li>\n 	<li>Since I’m on a bit of a rant, I got rudely surprised a couple months back while eating dinner at a restaurant in Scottsdale, AZ.  We’ve talked across many episodes about dining solo in restaurants.  It’s gotten much easier over the past 3-4 years.  It’s a rare restaurant that won’t serve you off the full menu at the bar.  I been to some places where even they have a little tray that evens out the slant of the bar so that your plate won’t slip into your lap.</li>\n 	<li>So, anyhow, I go to this restaurant – the Zinc Bistro – in the middle of one of the many shopping centers in Scottsdale.  I was supposed to meet a friend for dinner, but he had to bail at the last minute, so when I walked in, I asked if I could eat at the bar.  “Of course,” the hostess said.  I sat down – there was one other guy at the bar – ordered a glass of wine, a frisée salad, and a large order of charcuterie – it was a French place.  I ordered a second glass of wine, pulled out my iPad, and started flipping through the Financial Times app.  A couple of minutes later, an older guy introduced himself to me as the owner and then said, in a nice way, that computers weren’t allowed in the restaurant after sun down because it “spoiled the romantic atmosphere.”</li>\n 	<li>Really? At first, I thought he was joking.  I looked around – the place was empty.  It was a Wednesday night, in summer, in Arizona.  Not exactly the height of tourist season. I counted less than 10 people in the place, none of which looked to be interested in a romantic atmosphere.  But the guy was serious.  I paid my bill – no tip – and told him I wouldn’t be back.  I always say – You can have an attitude, or you can have my money, but you can’t have both.  This guy chose the attitude.</li>\n 	<li>OK, two negative rants – need to balance them out with something positive.  One of the biggest surprises of my Vietnam trip was the near ubiquity of free high quality WiFi.  Preparing for the trip, I didn’t plan to use my iPhone much because of the high cost of roaming for cellular data and voice.  I’d keep the phone with me in case of emergency calls and also figured I might download some podcasts off WiFi when in hotels.  When I got there, though, I found WiFi everywhere – almost every restaurant and bar seemed to have WiFi, most of which were open. I’d stand on a street corner waiting for my wife to finish shopping, and I’d have strong signals from 2 or 3 different places.</li>\n 	<li>Some restaurants did have their Wi-Fi locked with WPA or WEP encryption.  But it was still free – you just had to ask your server for the password.  Unlike in the US where the WiFi is unencrypted but you hit a portal of some sort where you log in, in these restaurants in Saigon or HoiAn, the session was encrypted, so once I put the password into my iPhone, all the over-the-air transmissions were encrypted.  Which, given the emergence of things like <a href=\"http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/24/firesheep-in-wolves-clothing-app-lets-you-hack-into-twitter-facebook-accounts-easily/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Firesheep</a> which lets someone hijack people\'s Twitter and Facebook accounts over unencrypted WiFi, seems like a pretty good approach.</li>\n 	<li>Well, once we figured out the program, the kids and I would be whipping out our devices whenever I’d stop for a beer – which given the heat and humidity in June was pretty often – and we’d ask for the WiFi key while placing our drink orders.  Usually, they’d point to a sign on the wall or bring us a small slip of paper.  However, at one restaurant, the waiter pointed to the little plastic stand-up menu holder.  We looked at it and then looked back at him? Huh? He pointed at the base of the menu holder where it said “Cisco. This is the power of the network”.  All that is the key?  Yup, he nodded.  That was one damn secure key.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a question, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a></span>, you can send me a Twitter message at mpeacock, or you can post them on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/trifonic/445\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Bored on Your Backside</a></em> by Trifonic</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>End-of-Year Status Calculus\n</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Last week, USAToday had an <a href=\"http://www.usatoday.com/travel/deals/inside/2010-10-21-airline-elite-status-miles_N.htm\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">article</a> about the importance of status to frequent travelers.  A timely article because October is the time every year that frequent travelers take stock of where they are in their various awards programs and figure out how they’re going to distribute their remaining travel to maximize their status.</li>\n 	<li>Status has become more important in the past few years.  As airlines have become more aggressive with add-on fees, the silver, gold, platinum, premiere cards that exempt their holders from things like baggage fees or added charges for good seats have real monetary value.  Checking a bag and getting an aisle seat in the front of the plane can easily cost $50-$75 a trip without status.  The calculus can be even better stronger with hotels.  Precious metal cards can get you free breakfast and free wireless (for those places that still charge) – saving you, say, $120 over a week’s stay.  You can build a solid business case pretty quick if you need a one more trip to earn status.</li>\n 	<li>But how to spread that status – is it better to spread it around – be mid-tier status with a couple of airlines and hotels – or should you double-down with just one and go for top tier?</li>\n 	<li>It depends on what you want and how you travel.  If upgrades are important – flying first class, getting bumped to a suite – then you need to go for top tier status.  As airline seat utilization goes up – the latest figures are over 80% -- there are fewer first class seats available.  My United flight down to PHX this week was completely full and a Premiere guy standing next to me – United’s lowest level of status – said he was number 52 on the upgrade list.  With 24 first class seats on that 757 – which is a big first class nowadays – he knew he wasn’t getting out of seat 13E.  But at least his status got him into Economy Plus for free – otherwise that 5 extra inches of legroom would’ve cost him $25-50.</li>\n 	<li>If you like to use your miles like I do --  my Chicago-to-Saigon flights were on miles and I just booked Chicago-to-Venice flights for next spring -- the answer isn\'t quite as straight-forward</li>\n 	<li>As airline load factors and hotel occupancy levels improve, award availability is the first thing to go. Award trips dropped over 10% between 2008 and 2009.  If you\'ve doubled-down and have all your miles/points with one airline and one hotel, your ability to use your miles/points when and where you want can be tough.</li>\n 	<li>My spring trip to Venice is a perfect example. The dates -- based on my daughter\'s spring break -- were inflexible. As was the location -- my daughter has always wanted to visit Venice and Verona. I knew this was going to be tough. I gritted my teeth, mixed myself a big cocktail, and started dialing awards desks. American could get me over the Atlantic, but couldn\'t get me back. BA couldn\'t get me to Heathrow, but could get me to Venice. Eventually, United could get me over on Lufthansa via Frankfurt and back on a double hop via Munich and Heathrow. If I had focused my miles solely on American, I would\'ve been $3,000 lighter</li>\n 	<li>OK, nice bit of theory, but what did I <em>do</em> ?  A little of both, really.  Starting the year, taking a new job, my destinations changed, and United and Marriott -- where I had top tier status -  were no longer the most convenient choices for where I needed to go.  So I switched to American and Hilton because, for me, planes and hotels are a means to an end rather than the end itself.</li>\n 	<li>Being in Chicago, with ORD\'s dual hub, I still put some miles on United based on schedule, but put most miles on American. Until this month. Tumbling the numbers, I didn\'t think I\'d hit Executive Platinum, so I pivoted most of my trips over to United to lock in at least Premiere status.</li>\n 	<li>On hotels, though, I went deep on Hilton because they were everywhere I needed to be. I hit Gold early on, which gave me free breakfast and WiFi, and will make top-tier Diamond by year end.</li>\n 	<li>So while strategizing to get early boarding and a free scoop of scrambled eggs may seem a bit pathetic to the occasional traveler, think about the efforts you expend to get a close-in parking space or a good subway seat. At least my scrambled eggs come with a free trip to Venice</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/hepepe/21074\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Bogi Beat Budapest</a> </em>by KarmaHacker</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>TSA Porn </strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Let’s start off by stipulating a well-known fact – I’m not a big fan of the TSA.  Nothing earth-shattering there.  I’ve been pretty frank over the prior 83 episodes of this podcast and in many blog posts.</li>\n 	<li>And I don’t think that I’m alone.  While there will always be some once-a-year flier who’ll pop up in front of a reporter’s microphone saying “I don’t care how long I wait; I just want to be safe”, I don’t know of any frequent flier who defends the TSA.  We see too much of them.  And while we see the occasional good deed – the Ft Myers’ TSA screener who was helpfully prompting older passengers to pull their toiletries out of their carry-on <em>before</em> they pushed their bags into the X-ray machine – it’s much more common to see them berating fliers at the other end.  Or to see a half-dozen of them standing around a closed screening machine chatting it up while we fliers stew in a 15-minute line.</li>\n 	<li>But the most frustrating thing is, 9 years after the September 11<sup>th</sup> attacks that caused the TSA to be created, every new thing the TSA does seems to make things worse – more inconvenient, and more and more intrusive</li>\n 	<li>The roll-out of full body scanners is an example of both.  Take shoes and everything metal off – belts, watches, jewelry – stand in the machine with your hands above your head holding your wallet for 5 seconds, then wait another 5-10 seconds for the all-clear, and then go collect your belongings.  And to think that, 5 years ago, I used to rail on this podcast about the inconvenience of taking my shoes off before walking through the metal detector.</li>\n 	<li>And invasive?  Look, I’m not a prude, but when a TSA screener <a href=\"http://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/stupid/airport-security-size-matters\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">beats</a> a co-worker because, after a training session with a full body scanner, of jokes about his small “manhood”, I’m not buying the TSA’s line about privacy filters.</li>\n 	<li>And they’re not using much discretion – there have been articles about screeners <a href=\"http://consumerist.com/2010/09/pregnant-traveler-tsa-screeners-bullied-me-into-full-body-scan.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">coercing</a> a pregnant woman into accepting a scan, or pulling a <a href=\"http://www.tampabay.com/news/transportation/airport-body-scanners-reveal-all-but-what-about-when-its-your-kid/1109659\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">12-year-old girl</a> out of line for a full scan – and this after the UK government has forbidden the use of scanners on anyone under 18 because the pictures can violate child pornography laws.</li>\n 	<li>And now, this week, it just gets better.  The TSA <a href=\"http://www.tsa.gov/press/happenings/102810_patdown.shtm\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">announced</a> on its web site that it’s “implementing new pat-down procedures.” OK, pretty innocuous.  What it doesn’t say is that these “enhanced” procedures will involve the screener running their hand up <a href=\"http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39889732/ns/travel-news/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">the inside of your leg</a>. OK, not as invasive as the patdown I got in Amsterdam a few years back when the screener “cupped” my “manhood”, but it’s close – and will be a lot more frequent.</li>\n 	<li>It does make me wonder why, after 9 years and hundreds of millions of dollars, all the TSA can say, if they’re really honest with themselves – in the quiet of the scanner picture viewing room -- is that all they’ve accomplished is to make the lives of their main constituents – the travelers – more miserable with each “improvement” they claim</li>\n 	<li>Well, I shouldn’t go that far.  They have improved the lives of one group of people – IRS employees.  They’re no longer the most reviled group of government employees.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #84</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>The bridge music is from <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">ccMixter</a></li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or MP3 file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to @mpeacock on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/153475331351358\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_84.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #84 - End of Year Status Calculus; TSA Porn','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-84-end-of-year-status-calculus-tsa-porn','','','2021-09-26 11:31:11','2021-09-26 16:31:11','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=319',0,'post','',2),
(379,1,'2010-11-15 21:18:48','2010-11-16 02:18:48','[caption id=\"attachment_491\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/MacBookAir1.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-491 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/MacBookAir1-300x225.jpg\" alt=\"My MacBook Air on the desk of the Hyatt Grand Cypress in Orlando\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\" /></a> My MacBook Air on the desk of the Hyatt Grand Cypress in Orlando[/caption]\n\nI\'ve been working with my 11-inch MacBook Air for two weeks -- time to walk through my initial impressions. First, though, it\'s important that I lay out what in technology-land is called my <em>use case</em> -- what I need my MacBook Air to do. If you don\'t understand my expectations, my conclusions might not make sense to you.\n\nI\'ve been looking for a Travel PC since the beginning of the year when I changed jobs and had to give back my Lenovo <a href=\"http://www.notebookreview.com/default.asp?newsID=3765\">ThinkPad X61</a>. With a 12-inch screen, a full-sized keyboard, a battery that would last from Chicago to LA, and weighing only 3½ pounds, it was the perfect Travel PC for me. Some might look at those specs and think <em>\"What a wimpy machine!\"</em>, but that\'s why it\'s important to know the use case.\n\nMy Travel PC is not my primary computer.  My primary rig is a big custom-built Windows 7 box that\'s spread across and under the desktop in my home office, complete with a quad-core AMD processor, 2 21-inch monitors, 3 500-GB hard drives, a Blu-Ray DVD burner, and a combo sub-woofer/foot rest.  If I want to do video editing or play with After Effects or have a serious Photoshop session, my desktop is purpose-built for it.\n\nWhich allows my Travel PC to be purpose-\"spec\'d\" for what\'s important to a frequent traveler -- light weight, long battery life, and reasonable processing power (in that order) -- and leaving behind what\'s not -- optical drives, superfast processors and video cards, big hard drives, and large monitors.  For the past 5 months, my Travel PC was an HP netbook, which I compared to my iPad in an <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2010/05/17/ipad-vs-netbook-first-impressions/\">earlier blog post</a>.  It worked pretty well, though the 10-inch screen was a bit tight for comfortably working in Outlook, and the Atom processor choked whenever my boss rang through to me on a video call (which is surprisingly often). Looking for the next step up from the netbook, there weren\'t many machines that met my Travel PC spec.\n\nAnd then Apple announced their new MacBook Air.  The specs are perfect.  And it is a very cool looking machine -- something my old ThinkPad X61 was definitely <em>not</em>.  But is there enough substance under that brushed aluminum unibody?  The answer is <em>\"yes\"</em>, provided you\'re willing to upgrade off the base package.\n\nThe solid state disk drive makes the MacBook Air <em>fast</em>.  Small applications like Cisco\'s VPN client instantly <em>appear</em>.  And when you open the lid, the MacBook Air instantly wakes up -- much quicker than any PC coming out of Sleep mode.  Such performance reminds us how artificial many of the tech web site benchmarks are. Though many reviews have commented on the Air\'s under-powered processor, for most knowledge workers who spend their time in e-mail, Office, and a few web apps like Salesforce.com, memory and disk speed are at least as important as CPU speed.\n\nHowever, for most corporate users, the 64 GB drive that comes standard with the 11-inch MacBook Air just isn\'t big enough -- because you\'re going to need at least 30 GBs for a Windows image.  Though Apples seem to be popping up everywhere, Microsoft still owns the world. On a Mac, the easiest way to do things like resetting network passwords or editing Microsoft <a href=\"http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/visio/\">Visio</a> diagrams is to run a virtual Windows 7 session.  I tested <a href=\"http://www.parallels.com/products/desktop/\">Parallels</a> and VMWare\'s <a href=\"http://www.vmware.com/products/fusion/\">Fusion</a> virtualization products. After a week of using them both, I didn\'t have a clear favorite, so I went with the cheaper one -- VMWare\'s Fusion.\n\nThe other add-on you\'ll need is the USB Ethernet adapter.  Contrary to Apple\'s view of the world, many companies (especially those in the defense and financial services industries) frown on the use of wireless networks.  Even at my company, I needed to \"jack in\" to the network to configure my MacBook Air for wireless access.  You probably won\'t need the Ethernet adapter often, but when you do...\n\nI\'m surprised how much I like the Multi-Touch trackpad.  I\'ve always hated the \"mushpads\" on PCs.  I usually turn them off and use the ThinkPad-like pointer on the keyboard (which I love) or an external mouse.  However, after watching the Help video a couple of times and practicing the different 1-, 2-, 3-, and 4-finger trackpad swipes, I\'ve grown to like this trackpad enough to leave my wireless mouse at home.\n\nAfter two weeks of hands-on-the-keyboard experience with my MacBook Air, it is the best Travel PC yet.  It\'s over a pound lighter than my ThinkPad X61. The screen, though smaller, is brighter and easier to read.  The battery life takes me to the West Coast with power to spare.  The solid state drive makes it applications <em>snap</em> onto the screen.  It instantly wakes up when I open the lid, making it easy to dash off a quick e-mail before the airplane door closes.  But the feature that cements it as the best Travel PC yet -- the TSA says that it can stay in my backpack during security screening.','Two Weeks with a MacBook Air','','private','closed','closed','','two-weeks-with-a-macbook-air','','','2024-06-02 10:32:19','2024-06-02 15:32:19','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=379',0,'post','',3),
(407,1,'2010-11-30 21:24:43','2010-12-01 02:24:43','Safely hunkered down in the TravelCommons studios during the busiest US travel week of the year, I don\'t know how I can call this a travel podcast if we don\'t talk about the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Transportation Security Administration\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_Security_Administration\" rel=\"wikipedia\">TSA</a>\'s \"junk touching\" <a href=\"http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/11/29/second-city-takes-you-ins_n_789315.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">patdowns</a>.  The general traveling public is finally catching up with the frequent traveler set.  The TSA\'s claim that it\'s groping vs. safety is a false choice -- their security theater doesn\'t make us any safer.  The increased hassles associated with air travel have increased the fly-vs.-drive breakeven point -- almost tripled it according to some.  A new <a href=\"http://www.amadeus.com/hotelit/beyond-segmentation.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">study</a> on the future of hotels neglects one of the most important features of any hotel stay -- the bathroom.  And we wrap up talking about mileage tracking websites with the CEO of <a href=\"http://gomiles.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">GoMiles.com</a>.  Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_85.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the transcript from TravelCommons podcast #85:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you once again from the TravelCommons studios outside of <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Chicago\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Chicago, Illinois</a> during the one week a year I make a determined effort to stay <em>off </em>the road.  I wasn’t successful last year – a client scheduled a meeting in Philadelphia the Monday before Thanksgiving, so I did an 18-hour up &amp; back – last flight out Sunday night, returned Monday afternoon – to avoid the building crowds.  But this year, I have a bit more control over my travel schedule.  And that means I actually put my roller bag away – not just leave it lying around empty in the bedroom.</li>\n 	<li>I hate to sound elitist, but this week is always amateur week at the airports – families, infrequent fliers.  They’re going to be the ones trying to take a water bottle through the security checkpoint, taking 2-3 shots at the metal detector before getting all their jewelry off; then walking slow, 4 or 5 abreast down the concourse, placing 5-adjective orders at Starbucks, crowding the jetway door trying to board with the handful of elites who couldn’t stay off the road, ….  Why should I torture both of us?  So I stay home and keep myself calm with a weekend long low-grade tryptophan-induced stupor supplemented by a steady diet of football and good-quality beer.</li>\n 	<li>Watching the TSA patdown controversy from this distance was entertaining rather than frustrating -- even though it cost me the opportunity to earn the special “Don’t Touch my Junk” <a href=\"http://mashable.com/2010/11/23/foursquare-tsa/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">badge</a> on <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Foursquare Solutions\" href=\"http://foursquare.com/\" rel=\"homepage\">FourSquare</a> . Coming during “amateur week”, there were more than enough infrequent travelers willing to put themselves in front of a reporter’s microphone and say “I don’t care how long I wait or how they need to touch me; I just want to be safe”. They’re always there when the TSA turns the screw a bit tighter. But this time, there were an equal number of people saying, “Wait a minute”. I thought the woman who walked through LAX screening in a <a href=\"http://www.examiner.com/airlines-airport-in-national/woman-bikini-avoids-tsa-frisk-at-lax\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">black bikini</a> made the point</li>\n 	<li>Though not many people voluntarily chose the full body groping during <a href=\"http://www.optoutday.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">National Opt-Out Day </a>, the organizers did get an impressive amount of attention focused on the TSA’s screening procedures. By Wednesday, <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"John S. Pistole\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_S._Pistole\" rel=\"wikipedia\">John Pistole</a>, the TSA administrator, must have gotten tired of getting wired up for the umpteenth remote interview with a news show..</li>\n 	<li>The pile-up of interviews and media investigations made the point that frequent fliers figured out long ago – the TSA’s justification – the scanning and the gropings are a necessary evil for secure flight – is a false choice. Most frequent fliers don’t think the TSA and their security theater makes us more secure – they’re just one more hassle we have to deal with before we can get to our destination. Last week’s hoopla just drove the point home to everyone else.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/content/Per/Per_-_DLDN_Instrumental.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">DLDN Instrumental</a></em> by St Paul</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>First of all, here’s a nice audio comment from Linda Martin of the <a href=\"http://indietravelpodcast.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Indie Travel Podcast</a>…</li>\n 	<li>Linda, thanks for taking the time out from yours and Craig’s jealousy-inspiring tour through <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Southeast Asia\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southeast_Asia\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Southeast Asia</a> to drop us that line…</li>\n 	<li>Thanks also to the folks who “liked” the TravelCommons fan page on Facebook.  And to the folks who follow me on <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Twitter\" href=\"http://twitter.com\" rel=\"homepage\">Twitter</a>.  I try to use both services to keep in touch with listeners between episodes – especially with the “expanded spacing” between episodes.  I was scanning the archives the other day looking for the 1<sup>st</sup> –year recap show to put in the iTunes feed, and I realized that almost half of the TravelCommons episodes – 45% to be exact – were done in that first year.  Of course I had a lot of content to mine – years of travel notebooks – so it was easy to do a weekly show at first.  Now that I’m doing well to keep to a monthly schedule, the Facebook and Twitter “short-burst” messages make it easy for me to talk with everyone – or those who are interested – between episodes.</li>\n 	<li>One such item I posted on the Facebook page was a link to an <a href=\"http://www.economist.com/node/21013202\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">article</a> by Gulliver, the Economist’s business travel blog, which itself linked to an <a href=\"http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2010/11/dear-airline-im-leaving-you/66750/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">article</a> in the Atlantic about the breakeven point between flying vs. driving. Back in one of my 1st year episodes (<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/11/20/podcast-23-fly-or-drive-scenes-from-the-hotel-bar/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">#23</a> to be exact), I calculated the breakeven point to be at the 3 hour/180 mile mark – the distance between Chicago and Indianapolis.</li>\n 	<li>Including <em>all</em> the time involved with catching the hour-long flight to Indy -- ½ hr drive to ORD, 45 minutes between check-in, security, and boarding, 1-hour flight time, ½ hr for deplaning and getting the rental car, and another ½ hr to drive to the meeting site – got me to 3hrs 15 minutes.</li>\n 	<li>But that calculus is 5 years old.  In light of reduced flight availabilities and increased TSA hassles,<a href=\"http://www.economist.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> the Economist</a> and <a href=\"http://www.theatlantic.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Atlantic</a> writers declared the new fly-vs.-drive breakeven point to be 8 hours or 500 miles – almost triple my number!  “If it\'s under 500 miles, I\'ll do anything rather than hop on a plane,” says the Atlantic’s Megan McArdle.  “And if it\'s over 500 miles, it had better be way over . . . or I\'d better be carrying a cooler with a still-beating heart in it.”</li>\n 	<li>Anecdotally, I know a number of families who used to fly to places like South Carolina and Florida for Thanksgiving, opted instead for the 10-12-hr drive.  If I’m an airline exec, these numbers tell me that I’m in a no-growth industry; that my one remaining value proposition – we get you there faster than if you can on your own – is being negated by the hassles – both my own and the government’s – that surround me.  And that I should be afraid.</li>\n 	<li>Speaking of afraid, I’m sure that everyone will recall the uptick in surgical masks on planes last year during the <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influenza_A_virus_subtype_H1N1\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">H1N1</a> “pandemic”.  After that whole thing died under its own hype, it’s been pretty much back to business as usual – with the exception of the occasional Asian mask wearer.  So I was interested – no, enthralled – when the guy next to me on an ORD-LAX flight whipped out a box of disinfectant wipes and cleaned all the surfaces around him – the seat, the armrests, the headrest, the headrest in front of him, and the tray table.  Even at the height of the H1N1 scare, I’d never seen quite such a swab down.  After he finished, I wished for a big sneeze, but couldn’t muster up much more than a cough.</li>\n 	<li>As I mentioned on Twitter at the beginning of the month, I switched over from my little HP netbook to an 11-inch MacBook Air. Yes it’s light, yes it’s cool looking, but when I left it in my backpack going through security at both ORD and Orlando and came away unberated by the X-ray screener, that cinched it – it’s the best Travel PC out there. I posted a full <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2010/11/15/two-weeks-with-a-macbook-air/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">review</a> on the TravelCommon’s website with my impressions after 2 weeks on the road with it. A full month and my thoughts haven’t changed. It can still be a hassle integrating it into my company’s Windows infrastructure, but I can live with it. It’s a great machine.</li>\n 	<li>And finally, following up on last episode’s riff on in-flight WiFi, Google\'s Christmas <a href=\"http://www.freeholidaywifi.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">present</a> this year to travelers is free Gogo in-flight WiFi on Delta, AirTran, and Virgin America airlines for the holidays – it’s started the weekend before Thanksgiving and runs through Jan 2nd. I don’t think I’ll get to use it – the rest of my travel this year will be on American – but I hope some of you guys get a chance.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a question, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a></span>, you can send me a Twitter message at mpeacock, or you can post them on the Facebook page or the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/content/Zapac/Zapac_-_Test_Drive.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Test Drive</a> </em>by Zapac</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Importance of Hotel Bathrooms </strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Yes, the TravelCommons podcast has long had a close relationship with hotels bathrooms.  Being born in the bathroom of the Wardman Park Marriott in Northwest DC, I think the penultimate bathroom recording was in the shower stall of the Camelback Resort.  The echo was so bad I had to re-record the whole thing.</li>\n 	<li>So I was disappointed – to say the least – when reading through <em><a href=\"http://www.amadeus.com/hotelit/beyond-segmentation.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Hotels 2020</a></em>, a future-of-hotels study from <a href=\"http://www.amadeus.com/us/us.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Amadeus</a>, a European travel technology company, there was no mention of the importance of the hotel bathroom – or toilette or WC – on the guest experience.</li>\n 	<li>Let’s be honest.  When we walk into a new hotel room, we look at the bed first – mostly because, being the biggest thing in the middle of the room, it’s hard not to catch the eye – and then look at the bathroom.</li>\n 	<li>It kinda makes sense – unless you have a suite, those are the <em>only</em> two rooms you have, so of course you’re going to check them out.  And, if you think about where you spend your time when in a hotel – you probably spend most of your time in your bed, with the bathroom in second place.  How close a second place – there’s way too many personal issues there for me to sort out in a 5-minute segment.</li>\n 	<li>So where did the <em>Hotel 2020</em> study focus?  The usual suspects – the replacement of the fortress-like front check-in desk with self-service kiosks and live people roaming around with iPads (so we’re replacing front-desk lines with mobbing a wandering clerk?  And that’s progress how?); packing the rooms with even more technology – 3D TVs (so they replace the revenue lost on WiFi with rentals on the 3D glasses), plug-in jacks so we can more easily display the content we’re hauling around on our laptops and iPads and Droid phones; figuring out yet more ways to sell us “ancillary services” – tee times, massages, spa treatments – more ways to make more money from us while we’re at the hotel.</li>\n 	<li>But no mention of the bathroom, which I think is a critical mistake.  The hotel bathroom probably the most underestimated, under-recognized cause for guest satisfaction – and dissatisfaction.</li>\n 	<li>Think about it –when you look into that bathroom and see a big shower stall, a fluffy robe, and some cook toiletries – a smile comes to your face.  OK, you think, maybe I’ll take an extra long shower – something I don’t get to do at home – try this loofa thing, does the shower gel go on it or on me before it….  Who knows, but it’s fun trying something new.</li>\n 	<li>Compare that with the alternative – small bathroom, water-stained tub with a small chest-high showerhead, and nothing more than a small bar of soap.  Not only are you <em>not </em>thinking of purchasing any “ancillary services”, you’re trying to figure out how to get out and book a room down the road.</li>\n 	<li>And it makes sense -- we all know that our basic physiological needs must be met before we can self-actualize.  And it doesn’t get more basically physiological than the bathroom.  If a hotel can’t deliver a quality bathroom experience, why would I trust it to align my chakras with a hot stone massage?  Give me cut-rate toiletries and I figure you’re cutting corners on the scented oil rub down too?</li>\n 	<li>So all you hoteliers, before you get too wrapped around the axle with the latest flat screens and electronic room service ordering and personalized e-mails and electronic concierges.  Make sure you’ve got a great showerhead and toilet that doesn’t run.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/content/oldDog/oldDog_-_Goodbye_sooner_or_later.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Goodbye Sooner or Later</a></em> by oldDog</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Maximize Your Mile – Interview with Founder of GoMiles.com</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Miles, points – the one thing that helps make frequent travel bearable is the idea that, through the hassles, you’re earning a free trip to some place you actually <em>want</em> to go.  This year, I used United miles to fly my family of four from Chicago to Vietnam, and used Marriott points to cover the hotel in Hong Kong on our way back.  I also used Hilton points for an anniversary weekend in Chicago – left the kids behind with their grandmother – and will use more United miles for spring break trip to Venice for my wife, my daughter, and me.  Doing the math just on this year’s redemptions – the dollar value of these points adds up.</li>\n 	<li>Of course, where there’s value, there’s a business opportunity.  A number of web sites for tracking miles and points have popped up over the past few years.  One of these sites is <a href=\"http://gomiles.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">GoMiles.com</a> – a free service that aggregates points across airline, hotel, and car rental programs and displays them on a single easy-to-read page.  I caught up with the founder and CEO Michael Komarnitsky for a Skype chat on why people use GoMiles…</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #85</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>The bridge music is from <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">ccMixter</a></li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or MP3 file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to @mpeacock on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/153475331351358\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_85.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>\n<div class=\"zemanta-pixie\" style=\"margin-top: 10px; height: 15px;\"><img class=\"zemanta-pixie-img\" style=\"border: none; float: right;\" src=\"http://img.zemanta.com/pixy.gif?x-id=9e618155-0c32-44bb-9572-c4107cad83cd\" alt=\"\" /></div>','Podcast #85 -- Importance of Hotel Bathrooms; Maximizing Miles','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-85-importance-of-hotel-bathrooms-maximizing-miles','','','2021-09-26 11:32:49','2021-09-26 16:32:49','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=407',0,'post','',3),
(435,1,'2010-12-26 17:18:18','2010-12-26 22:18:18','[caption id=\"attachment_528\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/5314961468_c424e091a81.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-528 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/5314961468_c424e091a81-300x224.jpg\" alt=\"View from my new office atop Squaw Peak\" width=\"300\" height=\"224\"></a> View from my new office atop Squaw Peak[/caption]\n\nFinishing up the year in front of a warm fire in the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago after a couple of warm-up trips to <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Phoenix, Arizona\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix%2C_Arizona\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Phoenix</a>. &nbsp;I carved myself out an mini-vacation during one of the trips and worked at the summit of <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Squaw Peak\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squaw_Peak\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Squaw Peak</a> for part of an afternoon. My <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"MacBook Air\" href=\"http://www.apple.com/macbookair\" rel=\"homepage\">MacBook Air</a> -- my perfect travel PC -- turned itself into a good-looking brushed metal brick on my last day in Phoenix, forcing an unplanned stop at the Scottsdale <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Apple Store\" href=\"http://www.apple.com/retail\" rel=\"homepage\">Apple Store</a> before my flight home. &nbsp;Trying to get some work done while I waited reminded me of the difficulty of finding a quiet spot for a phone call while living on the road. &nbsp;Missed connections caused by recent snow storms reminded me of ways you can have a little fun when stranded -- if you embrace the adventure of it. &nbsp;Responding to a couple of listener questions on the closing song (<a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><em>Pictures of You</em></a> by Evangeline), I replay the song\'s back story as related by the band\'s manager. &nbsp;Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_86.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n<hr>\n\nHere are the transcript from TravelCommons podcast #86:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you once again from the TravelCommons studios, wrapping up the year in the white icebox that is Chicago this winter.&nbsp; And it’s a cold one.&nbsp; Not as bad as what they’re getting in Minneapolis-St Paul – watching the video of the Metrodome’s ceiling collapse was pretty amazing – nor what New York is getting tonight, but I think I read that this has been something like the 7<sup>th</sup> coldest December on record.&nbsp; So I can tell you that I wasn’t too upset when my travel plans had me in Phoenix two out of the last three weeks.</li>\n 	<li>Packing for my last trip, I promised myself that, somewhere in the 4 days that I was in Phoenix, I’d find a couple of hours to get out of the office and go hike up <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Camelback Mountain\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camelback_Mountain\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Camelback Mountain</a>.&nbsp; It was 12 degrees in Chicago when I was packing and the forecast for Phoenix was 70’s and 80’s all week.&nbsp; I’ve always said that if you don’t take at least a little something for yourself from even business travel, you’ll hate your life.</li>\n 	<li>So I start looking for my opening.&nbsp; Monday, nope – inbound travel days are usually jam packed and American Airlines just added to it – making it like an overstuffed carryon – with a 2-hr maintenance delay, complete with swapping out planes.&nbsp; Makes me misty for the days when preventative maintenance meant more than…</li>\n 	<li>Tuesday goes by, Wednesday morning I think – ah, I’ll do it on Thursday before I fly home – but I stop myself.&nbsp; My Weds afternoon isn’t that full.&nbsp; I push some stuff around and, presto, there’s my couple of hours.&nbsp; I race back to the hotel, change, look at the map – hmmm, Camelback might be a bit too far of a drive, especially if I hit traffic.&nbsp; But Squaw Peak looks doable.&nbsp; And so off I raced. After 1.2 miles, 1,200 vertical feet, and 19 ounces of Propel sports drink, I was at the top.&nbsp; It’s a pretty view – with the hills to the north and the city to the south.&nbsp; I sat for a bit, caught my breath, and then looked at my <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"iPhone\" href=\"http://www.apple.com/iphone\" rel=\"homepage\">iPhone</a>.&nbsp; Hmm, full bars.&nbsp; Started running e-mail and turned the summit into my office for the next 30 minutes – reading a couple of documents, cranking out some quick notes while watching the planes and birds fly by.&nbsp; I took a photo at the summit, which I <em>later</em> posted to the TravelCommons Facebook page and Twitter feed if you’d like to take a look at my new office.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/swivel-deep/\"><em>Arlos Auto Parts and Salvation</em></a> by Swivel Neck Jones</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>In the last <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2010/11/30/podcast-85-importance-of-hotel-bathrooms-maximizing-miles/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">episode</a> and in a prior TravelCommons <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2010/11/15/two-weeks-with-a-macbook-air/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">post</a> I sang the praises of my 11-inch MacBook Air as the perfect travel PC.&nbsp; Which, of course, meant I had tempted the technology gods who, in response last week, reached out from their Valhalla data center and smote the little unibody of brushed metal – bricking it on my last day in Scottsdale.&nbsp; I opened the lid – no instant on.&nbsp; I pressed the power button, no instant on.&nbsp; I held the power button for 5 seconds, 15 seconds, 5 minutes, nothing but a dead screen.</li>\n 	<li>If this happened on any other laptop, my first course of action would’ve been to drop the battery to try and reset the power management.&nbsp; But, that ain’t happening with a MacBook Air, so after stabbing the Power button another half-dozen times, I gave up and headed over to the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Genius Bar\" href=\"http://apple.com/retail/geniusbar\" rel=\"homepage\">Genius Bar</a> at the Scottsdale Apple Store.</li>\n 	<li>Since our company allows Macs but doesn’t provide help desk support – the Development teams use Macs and stooping to call a Help Desk would be the furthest thing from their minds – the Genius Bar is the defacto help desk.&nbsp; Since it was near lunch time, I stopped off at <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Smashburger\" href=\"http://www.smashburger.com\" rel=\"homepage\">Smashburger</a>.&nbsp; A TravelCommons listener – I forget who – had replied to one of my <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"In-N-Out Burger\" href=\"http://www.in-n-out.com/\" rel=\"homepage\">In-N-Out Burger</a> tweets, asking if I’d tried Smashburger.&nbsp; It was a god burger – not quite the mystique or ambiance of In-N-Out – but a good burger.</li>\n 	<li>One thing that I should’ve done while waiting for my Smashburger was book a time at the Genius Bar. Walking into the Apple Store, the hipster with an iPhone told me it’d be a 30-minute wait.&nbsp; I checked my watch – I had enough time before my flight back home.&nbsp; Right at the 30-minute mark, a guy walked over to me, opened my Mac, punched the power button a couple of times to no avail and said “Wow” and took it into the back room.&nbsp; OK, it’s a bit better than having some guy in India tell me to restart my PC a half-dozen times, but still… I look at my watch again.&nbsp; How long before I have to fetch this guy and dash to the airport?</li>\n 	<li>Not long as it turns out.&nbsp; 5 minutes later, the guy comes back with my now-working Mac.&nbsp; My initial diagnosis was right – it was the battery, or the PMU – power management unit? &nbsp;Since you can’t drop the battery, there’s a multi-finger key sequence – hold down the shift, control, option, and command keys with your left hand and then hit the power key with your right.&nbsp; I wrote it down so I could “self-serve” next time.&nbsp; Not sure if the whole experience was any better than hanging on hold for a help desk.&nbsp; I am paying more attention, though, to the location of Apple stores.</li>\n 	<li>Now, the 30-minute wait wasn’t a complete loss.&nbsp; Though my Mac was dead, my iPad and iPhone were fine.&nbsp; So while I was waiting for my Genius to arrive, I was running e-mail and reading documents on my iPad.&nbsp; Not a complete loss, but it wouldn’t have worked if I had needed to talk to someone, if I’ve had a conference call.</li>\n 	<li>And that is a big problem with the “digital nomad” work style – no office, working out of Starbucks and airport clubs and the like – there’s no good place to take a conference call.&nbsp; You can IM, e-mail, and text all you want, but once you need to open that voice channel, it’s a very different story.&nbsp; Nobody wants to be the guy flooding the conference bridge with overhead Muzak or the signature sound of a barista steaming a pitcher of milk.&nbsp; Airports are no better.&nbsp; If they don’t have an Admirals or Red Carpet Club – or if I’m flying Southwest – then the hunt is on for a spot not under a PA speaker and away from the aisles with the beeping carts.&nbsp; And you think the hunt for a working electrical outlet is tough.&nbsp; I’m forever trolling through the new issues of Skymall magazine looking for a real-life “cone of silence” like they had in <em>Get Smart</em>.&nbsp; I wonder if the Brookstone in ORD T3 has one?</li>\n 	<li>In the last episode, we talked about the bathroom being one of the most important rooms in a hotel.&nbsp; For me, the workout room is another important place. I stayed in the <a href=\"http://www.theashtonhotel.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Ashton Hotel</a> in downtown Fort Worth earlier this month.&nbsp; Nice place – a boutique hotel in a historical building right near Sundance Square and a great beer bar – the Flying Saucer.&nbsp; But would I recommend it to friends?&nbsp; Hmmm… I don’t think so, because the workout room is so limited?&nbsp; Or lame.&nbsp; A small room in the basement with a couple of treadmills and an elliptical – with a stand up fan pointed at them.</li>\n 	<li>That might be good for a 1-night stay, but I was there for 3.&nbsp; I, like many frequent travelers, depend upon hotel fitness rooms to stay in some semblance of shape.&nbsp; A couple of treadmills stuffed in a closet just doesn’t cut it anymore.</li>\n 	<li>And finally, I just want to remind everyone that Google’s Christmas <a href=\"http://www.freeholidaywifi.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">present</a> of free Gogo in-flight WiFi on Delta, AirTran, and Virgin&nbsp;America airlines is still on. It runs through Jan 2.&nbsp; Perfect way to post your family Christmas pics on the flight how.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a question, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.&nbsp; The e-mail address is <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a></span>, you can send me a <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Twitter message</a> at mpeacock, or you can post them on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/153475331351358\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Facebook page</a> or the web site at travelcommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/fuzz-messy/\"><em>Smiling Perspective</em></a> by General Fuzz</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Fun With Layovers</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>One of the most sacred frequent traveler rules is <em>Fly Direct</em>.&nbsp; Be it winter with snow or summer with thunderstorms, adding that intermediate stop adds one more point of failure, one more opportunity for the airlines to screw up.</li>\n 	<li>And while many connecting flights are cheaper than direct ones, for a true comparison, you have to factor in the potential costs of a delay – hotel room (because the airlines won’t pay for weather delays), meals, replacement clothes and toiletries for misrouted luggage…&nbsp; In an episode last year, I calculated the cost – the breakeven premium between a direct and connecting flight -- to be $100-150.</li>\n 	<li>But, with the right frame of mind – an “adventuring” frame of mind as one person put it – you can actually manufacture something good out of a connection.</li>\n 	<li>The first requirement is to step away from the 1-hour connection.&nbsp; Yes, we usually want to get to our destination in the shortest possible time, but accepting a connection of 1 hour or less…. Think about it – a 15-minute delay on your inbound flight – which is as good as on-time for most airlines – and you’re sprinting through the terminal (remember when we used to call it “OJ-ing” it – that was a long time ago) and probably having to check your carry-one.&nbsp; A 1-hr connection is just asking for a stress attack and/or an overnight stay at the airport branch of the Bates Motel.</li>\n 	<li>The second requirement is to connect through some place you might want to visit.&nbsp; On those rare occasions where I’m forced to take a connection, I look at the flight choices and think – where would I not mind being stuck?</li>\n 	<li>OK, sounds a bit odd, but think about it.&nbsp; I’m flying from Phoenix to Ft Myers, FL – zero direct flight – no surprise there.&nbsp; So where do I want to connect through – Miami, Dallas, Houston, O’Hare, Atlanta?&nbsp; The total flight duration for any of these connections is within 90 minutes of each other.&nbsp; For me, it’s an easy choice – I go through Chicago.&nbsp; If I get stranded, I sleep in my own bed.&nbsp; If I get delayed, I call up my wife and we grab dinner.</li>\n 	<li>Traveling with my family to Cape Town, South Africa, I chose the connection through Frankfurt because I knew the airport wasn’t too far out of town.&nbsp; We landed after the overnight flight from Chicago, passed through Customs and headed straight for a cab that took us to downtown to Romer Square.&nbsp; We had lunch, I had a beer, and then we walked around downtown for 4 hours – a quick sightseeing excursion between our overnight flights.</li>\n 	<li>Some years back, my parents flew from Denver to Paducah, KY to visit my aunt and grandmother.&nbsp; Again, no direct flights so they connected through ORD.&nbsp; And, as you can guess, on the way home, their commuter flight was late out of Paducah and they missed a tight connection.&nbsp; My dad called me from the airport.&nbsp; It was New Year’s Eve night and we were having 3 or 4 couples over. &nbsp;“Get your luggage and book the flight out tomorrow,” I told him, “you can help me cook dinner.” Completely unplanned.&nbsp; I picked them up, brought them home, threw an apron at my dad, and we had a great time.</li>\n 	<li>Planning ahead for these possibilities is key, though.&nbsp; Last week, friends and longtime TravelCommons listeners Allan Marko and Chris Chufo got caught at ORD when a snow storm caused the crew for their flight to JAX to time out.&nbsp; That was a bad night – some 1,500 flights were cancelled between ORD and MDW.&nbsp; The United customer service line stretched all the way down Concourse C.&nbsp; A frequent traveler, Allan immediately rang United’s Premiere Exec line and got seats on the next day’s flight to JAX, then found a room at a nearby Hilton Garden Inn and stepped out of line to go to bed.</li>\n 	<li>But without luggage.&nbsp; United didn’t even try to give it back.&nbsp; And because they had to check one bag anyhow with presents, they decided not to carry on – avoid the battle for carry-on space on full planes because they had time – no need to power directly from the flight to a meeting.&nbsp; But now, though they had a hotel room, they had no change of clothes and just the toiletries they could scrounge from the Hilton.</li>\n 	<li>A small inconvenience, though.&nbsp; Since their flight didn’t leave ‘til 7:30 the next night, I shuffled my calendar around, picked them at the Hilton and took them into Chicago for lunch.&nbsp; We ate at <a href=\"http://longmanandeagle.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Longman &amp; Eagle</a>, a Logan Square gastro-pub that picked up a Michelin star last month – Chris and I had wild boar sloppy joes while Allan had the pork belly BLT, and then ran down a couple of blocks to a brew pub, <a href=\"http://revbrew.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Revolution Brewery</a>, where they picked up some fresh t-shirts and I refilled a growler with a <a href=\"http://beeradvocate.com/beer/style/140\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">double India Pale Ale</a> – though we thought hard about it, we just couldn’t figure out a way they could get a 64 oz jug of beer through security.&nbsp; By 5, they were back at ORD, fed, beered up, and ready to try again.</li>\n 	<li>It’s all about attitude. Do you lean into it – figure out how to get everything you can out of it – or do you back away? On her extended journey to JAX, Chris Chufo kept chanting a mantra -- “It’s an adventure” – and came out smiling at the end</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/atek-phoenix/\"><em>Goa Life</em></a> by Ambient Teknology</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>From the Archives – Story Behind The Closing Song</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>I’ve received a couple of requests over the past months for information on the closing song – the tune that wraps each episode of TravelCommons.</li>\n 	<li>Earlier this month, Becky Boyd wrote – “I can\'t find the name of the song you use at the end of the show by lyrics.&nbsp; It is so appropriate to me and my husband.&nbsp; We relocated from California to South Carolina, then purchased a vacation home back in California.&nbsp; We often find ourselves on different coasts from each other.”</li>\n 	<li>The song is <em>Pictures of You,</em> done by a now-defunct country band from Glasgow, Scotland called Evangeline – which is now confused on the Internet with a defunct country band from New Orleans called Evangeline.&nbsp; Probably explains why Becky couldn’t find the song through its lyrics.</li>\n 	<li>Back in 2005, though, the Scottish Evangeline was playing festivals in the UK.&nbsp; I found them through the Tartan Podcast which, as the name kinda hints at, covered the Scottish music scene.&nbsp; It too is defunct.&nbsp; This story is starting to get a bit lonely.</li>\n 	<li>Anyhow, after hearing the song, I sent a note to the band’s manager Willie Evans asking for a couple of words – a bit of back story on the song.&nbsp; Here’s his response.</li>\n 	<li>Five years on, I still think it’s a great song about life on the road.&nbsp; If you like it, <a href=\"http://itunes.apple.com/us/album/hard-way/id75388292\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">iTunes</a> or <a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/Hard-Way/dp/B000QQW5D8/ref=sr_1_cc_2?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1293560032&amp;sr=1-2-catcorr\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Amazon</a> are probably the best places to pick to it up.&nbsp; Given the on-line confusion between the bands, I’ll post links in the show notes at travelcommons.com and on the TravelCommons Facebook page.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #86</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\">Magnatune</a></li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or MP3 file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to @mpeacock on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/153475331351358\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_86.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #86 -- Fun with Layovers; Story Behind the Closing Tune','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-86-fun-with-layovers-story-behind-closing-tune','','','2021-09-26 11:37:03','2021-09-26 16:37:03','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=435',0,'post','',3),
(447,1,'2011-01-01 22:19:35','2011-01-02 03:19:35','[caption id=\"attachment_492\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/times-square-confetti1.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-492 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/times-square-confetti1-300x225.jpg\" alt=\"Times Square in a Confetti Shower by Carol Tsang\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\" /></a> Times Square in a Confetti Shower by Carol Tsang[/caption]\n\nI\'ve never been a big <a href=\"http://www.buzzfeed.com/melismashable/the-best-new-years-resolutions-for-2011\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">New Year\'s Resolution</a> guy.  Mine seem to have a 3-week half-life -- they don\'t even last to February.  However, in the spirit of \"<em>The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results\"</em> (a quote which has been attributed to <a href=\"http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Benjamin_Franklin\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Benjamin Franklin</a> and <a href=\"http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Albert Einstein</a>), here are the resolutions I\'ll be taking into the O\'Hare TSA security line with me next week:\n<ol>\n 	<li><strong>Plan Further Ahead</strong> -- If for no other reason than to avoid frustration.  The travel industry is recovering after two tough years.  2010 ended with US domestic airlines pushing through <a href=\"http://www.marketwatch.com/story/airfares-rise-more-hikes-likely-on-the-way-2010-12-29\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">two price increases</a> and data showing business travel bookings <a href=\"http://press.pegs.com/News-Releases/The-Pegasus-View-November-2010-Corporate-Booking-Volumes-Set-New-Growth-Record-of-30-6-Over-2009-13e.aspx\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">increasing 30%</a>.  Booking my travel earlier may not save me any more money, but at least I\'ll have a better shot at a plane seat and hotel bed.</li>\n 	<li><strong>Unpack/Repack My Briefcase</strong> -- I keep putting more things into my briefcase, but rarely pull things out.  Do I really need 5 pens or a half-dozen <a href=\"http://www.starbucksstore.com/products/shprodde.asp?SKU=647324\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Tazo Zen</a> teabags? When I add the <a href=\"http://www.motorola.com/Consumers/US-EN/Consumer-Product-and-Services/Mobile+Phone+Accessories/Headsets/Motorola-S10-HD-US-EN\">Bluetooth headphones</a> I got for Christmas, do I need to keep the two pair that are already there?  I only slightly comforted that I\'m not alone in this <a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/groups/whats_in_your_bag/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">OCD</a>.</li>\n 	<li><strong>Take More Quick Breaks</strong> -- In 2010, I took just three quick breaks during business trips -- a <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=1380114434979\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">walk</a> along the beach in Naples, FL a hike up Phoenix\'s <a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/travelcommons/5314961468/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Squaw Peak</a>, and a side trip to see the Taj Mahal while in <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/album.php?fbid=153481218017436&amp;id=153475331351358&amp;aid=33880\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">India</a>.  I have to grab a bit more time for myself -- maybe a bit more advanced planning (see #1) will help.</li>\n 	<li><strong>Take more pictures</strong> -- In 2008, I made a resolution to take at least one picture a day.  A simple enough resolution -- it lasted 3 days.  Maybe I need more inspiration (see #3).  And to carry a <em>real</em> camera with me more often.</li>\n 	<li><strong>Be nicer to TSA agents</strong> -- Repeat to the mantra -- <em>They\'re just doing their job</em>, <em>they\'re just doing their job</em>.  Even when they\'re feeling me up.</li>\n</ol>\n<div class=\"zemanta-pixie\" style=\"margin-top: 10px; height: 15px;\"><img class=\"zemanta-pixie-img\" style=\"border: none; float: right;\" src=\"http://img.zemanta.com/pixy.gif?x-id=c86501bb-338f-4af3-b047-fb57c335a5d7\" alt=\"\" /></div>','New Year\'s Travel Resolutions','','publish','closed','closed','','new-years-travel-resolutions','','','2021-02-08 16:41:24','2021-02-08 21:41:24','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=447',0,'post','',2),
(491,1,'2011-01-04 19:17:11','2011-01-05 00:17:11','','MacBookAir','My MacBook Air on the desk of the Hyatt Grand Cypress in Orlando','inherit','open','open','','macbookair','','','2011-01-04 19:17:11','2011-01-05 00:17:11','',379,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/MacBookAir1.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(492,1,'2011-01-04 19:17:30','2011-01-05 00:17:30','Times Square in a Confetti Shower, Carol Tsang, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic','times square confetti','Times Square in a Confetti Shower by Carol Tsang','inherit','open','open','','times-square-confetti','','','2011-01-04 19:17:30','2011-01-05 00:17:30','',447,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/times-square-confetti1.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(499,1,'2011-01-16 11:00:33','2011-01-16 16:00:33','Amtrak train rolls into Winter Park, USA','Amtrak, Winter Park, USA 1994','Amtrak train rolls into Winter Park, USA by Rohan Travellin','inherit','open','open','','514658906_2422353524','','','2011-01-16 11:00:33','2011-01-16 16:00:33','',500,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/514658906_24223535241.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(500,1,'2011-01-16 16:17:48','2011-01-16 21:17:48','[caption id=\"attachment_499\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/514658906_24223535241.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-499\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/514658906_24223535241-300x194.jpg\" alt=\"Amtrak train rolls into Winter Park, USA by Rohan Travellin\" width=\"300\" height=\"194\" /></a> Amtrak train rolls into Winter Park, USA by Rohan Travellin[/caption]\r\n\r\nLast week\'s winter storms in the <a href=\"http://www.ctpost.com/news/article/State-survives-storm-that-buried-state-953587.php\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Northeast</a> and the <a href=\"http://www.usatoday.com/weather/storms/winter/2011-01-10-storm10_ST_N.htm\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">South</a> resulted in <a href=\"http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2011/0112/As-winter-storm-blasts-Northeast-70-percent-of-US-now-coated-in-snow\">70 percent</a> of the US being covered in snow -- shutting down airports across the region, canceling thousands of flights and trains.  So it seems like a good time to recap some of the travel tips we\'ve covered in past episodes of TravelCommons.\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li><strong>Fly Direct </strong>-- This is one of the most sacred frequent traveler rules. Even if you\'re connecting through Houston, an intermediate stop adds one more point of failure, one more opportunity for the airlines to screw up</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Skip the Tight Connection</strong> -- If you can\'t fly direct, step away from any connection that\'s less than 60 minutes.  Yes, we usually want to get to our destination in the shortest possible time, but accepting a connection of 1 hour or less…. Think about it – a 15-minute delay on your flight into a big hub like <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27hare_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Chicago</a> or <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denver_International_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Denver</a> or <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detroit_Metropolitan_Wayne_County_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Detroit</a> (as good as on-time in the winter for most airlines) and you’re sprinting across terminals and concourses just to beat the closing door.  A 1-hr connection is just asking for a stress attack and/or an overnight stay at the airport branch of the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Bates Motel\" href=\"http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092622/\" rel=\"imdb\">Bates Motel</a>.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Connect Through a Fun City</strong> -- Again, if you can\'t fly direct, connect through a place you might want to visit.  On those rare occasions where I’m forced to take a connection, I look at the flight choices and think – where would I not mind being stuck?</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Keep your Confirmation Numbers Handy</strong> -- When you’re talking to a gate agent or on the phone to a service rep, nothing signals that you’re an experienced traveler like offering up that confirmation number. I typically put my confirmation numbers in the Outlook appointment that then syncs to my <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"iPhone\" href=\"http://www.crunchbase.com/product/iphone\" rel=\"crunchbase\">iPhone</a>.  I put the airline confirmation number in the subject line right after the flight number, and then put the hotel and rental reservation numbers in the notes of the appointment.  One click and it’s all there.  You may have use different technologies, but have a system that gets you quickly to your confirmation numbers without having to sift through a pile of paper.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Take the Phone Tree Path Less Traveled</strong> -- If you have to call an airline or hotel and you don’t have a Platinum or Premiere status number to call, choose the unpopular path on the phone tree.  Travel companies don’t staff their customer service centers for peak loads – like the day when a Chicago blizzard cancels 400 flights.  It’s too expensive. So on those days, you’ll wait forever for an agent if you’ve followed the typical path down the phone tree.  On those days, choose the “Spanish” or “International Travel” option because everyone else is choosing English and domestic travel.  Once you connect with someone, they’ll take care of you.  They all work on the same systems in the same service centers.</li>\r\n</ul>','Winter Travel Tips -- Things to Remember When The Snow Starts Flying','','publish','closed','closed','','winter-travel-tips-things-to-remember-when-the-snow-starts-flying','','','2018-12-07 16:38:40','2018-12-07 21:38:40','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=500',0,'post','',2),
(528,1,'2011-01-18 15:06:17','2011-01-18 20:06:17','From the top of The Squaw Peak Summit Trail in Phoenix. Took advantage of the 70-degree day since I\'ll head back to Chicago winter the next day','Squaw Peak Summit, Phoenix, AZ','View from my new office atop Squaw Peak','inherit','open','open','','5314961468_c424e091a8','','','2011-01-18 15:06:17','2011-01-18 20:06:17','',435,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/5314961468_c424e091a81.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(531,1,'2011-02-06 22:31:17','2011-02-07 03:31:17','[caption id=\"attachment_543\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/taxi-sign1.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-543\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/taxi-sign1-300x210.jpg\" alt=\"Warning in a St Louis Taxi\" width=\"300\" height=\"210\"></a> Warning in a St Louis Taxi[/caption]\n\nI skipped the Midwest\'s \"snow-pocalypse\" by flying to <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Phoenix, Arizona\" href=\"http://www.phoenix.gov/\" rel=\"homepage\">Phoenix</a> where it was unseasonably cold -- in the 20\'s and 30\'s F -- but without snow. It\'s been a cold winter and I came down with some nasty bug while visiting <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Dallas\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dallas\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Dallas</a>, which reminded me how miserable it is to be sick while traveling. Before my whining, though, I give a quick status on my New Year\'s travel resolutions, my observations on the status of the TSA\'s full body scanning program, and my struggles trying to use Avatron\'s Air Display app to turn my <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"iPad\" href=\"http://www.apple.com/ipad/\" rel=\"homepage\">iPad</a> into a second display for my MacBook Air. &nbsp;Gary Learned suggests a headset that can defeat overhead PA&nbsp;announcements&nbsp;at airports, and I go through my briefcase -- how I\'ve changed what I carry for business travel over the past 5 years. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_87.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n<hr>\n\nHere are the transcript from TravelCommons podcast #87:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Chicago\" href=\"http://www.cityofchicago.org/\" rel=\"homepage\">Chicago, IL</a>.&nbsp; I managed to skip this week’s “snopocalypse” -- the 20+ inches of snow that fell here Tuesday and Wednesday.&nbsp; Instead, I flew down to Phoenix on Tuesday morning – though not without a couple of glitches courtesy of American Airlines – and came back Friday evening.&nbsp; And yes, I did feel a bit guilty skipping out on the shoveling in the wind and cold, but that’s what kids are for.</li>\n 	<li>It has been a cold winter so far.&nbsp; I was in Dallas a couple of weeks ago where it was rainy, in the low 30’s and the wind was blowing a steady 20 mph – OK, no snow, but not any better than Chicago.&nbsp; And then even this week in Phoenix – the temperatures were in the 30’s, getting into the 20’s at night.&nbsp; Yes it was colder in Chicago and elsewhere, but still – where’s that global warming when you really need it.</li>\n 	<li>Earlier in January, Phoenix was much nicer – sunny and in the 60’s.&nbsp; The first couple of days I was there, I was running on autopilot a bit – for lunch, I’d dash out of the office, hop in my rental car and drive the quarter-mile north to the shopping area with the sandwich shops and a Whole Foods.&nbsp; Driving back the second day, I thought, “What the hell am I doing?&nbsp; It’s 20 degrees back home!”&nbsp; The next day, I took an hour for lunch, walked to the Whole Foods, bought myself a cup of soup, sat outside in the sun and ate it, and then walked back to the office.</li>\n 	<li>Which kind of reminds me of the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/01/01/new-years-travel-resolutions/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">New Years resolutions</a> I posted on the TravelCommons site on the first of the year.&nbsp; #3 was “Take More Quick Breaks” – along the lines of “take advantage of the travel because it sure takes advantage of you…” In the post, I mentioned the afternoons I took to hike up Squaw Peak in Phoenix or walk along the beach in <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Naples, Florida\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naples%2C_Florida\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Naples, FL</a>.&nbsp; Walking along a road to lunch seems a bit of a pathetic reach, but the spirit is there – if you’re traveling from snow to sun for work, don’t forget to grab a couple of rays for yourself.</li>\n 	<li>Actually, I did a bit better than that – I went to the BCS college football championship game while in Phoenix, and to a Mavs-Lakers basketball game while in Dallas – something for each week.</li>\n 	<li>As for my other resolutions?&nbsp; “Plan Further Ahead” because airline load factors/seat utilization is moving up again?&nbsp; I’m doing OK with that – I’m booking out 2-3 weeks in advance, which is a huge improvement for me.</li>\n 	<li>“Repack My Briefcase?” – check out the “What’s in my bag” segment a bit later.</li>\n 	<li>“Take More Pictures?” – just a marginal improvement – I don’t count taking pictures with my <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"iPhone\" href=\"http://www.apple.com/iphone\" rel=\"homepage\">iPhone</a> of bullet points on whiteboards</li>\n 	<li>And the toughest one – “Be nicer to TSA agents?”&nbsp; I was doing better because, at least over the past few trips, they’ve been nicer to me.&nbsp; I hadn’t been groped or irradiated on my first couple of trips, which will tend to have a positive impact on anyone’s disposition.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/music/listeners/artistdetails.php?BandHash=f81ac4222ffce06bc8c3c7c3ae01a7fd\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Shine</a></em> by Hungry Lucy</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>The TSA full body scan controversy that was white-hot during the Thanksgiving weekend seems to have cooled quite a bit.&nbsp; The TSA will <a href=\"http://www.politicsdaily.com/2010/11/22/poll-public-backs-full-body-scans-but-split-on-pat-downs/\" target=\"_self\" rel=\"noopener\">say</a> that this is proof the American public supports its program of full body scans or AIT – Advanced Imaging Technology – as they like to call it, and the “enhanced pat-down” as the TSA likes to call it, or the full body grope as the rest of us experience it.</li>\n 	<li>I think instead it’s that the TSA has pulled way back on their use of these invasive techniques.&nbsp; I hadn’t been hit with a full-body scanner or a grope-down from the beginning of December until last week.&nbsp; When the TSA dropped the scanners into ORD in July, they had <em>everyone</em> go through them, which doubled the screening time – at least.&nbsp; Then through the Christmas travel season, it seemed that the machines were off more than they were on, and even when they were on, they weren’t not on every security lane, so it was pretty easy to avoid them unless you’re going thru a small security checkpoint – which is how they last caught me in DFW.</li>\n 	<li>They also seem to be have slowed the rollout.&nbsp; I haven’t seen them crop up in any new places.&nbsp; Terminal 2 in PHX, for example, is still a TSA porn-free zone.&nbsp; Not that I’m complaining.&nbsp; Nice to be able to just move through security without having to hold my hands above my head.&nbsp; And remember when we used to complain about taking our shoes off…</li>\n 	<li>However, on my last two trips out of ORD, I was fully irradiated.&nbsp; Again, it was going through a small checkpoint – the status-only checkpoint in Terminal 3, where American lives.</li>\n 	<li>Though the TSA will say that the full-body scan doesn’t take much longer than the metal detector, they’re just flat wrong.&nbsp; The actual scan – the amount of time you have your arms above your head – is only a few seconds longer than walking through the metal detector, the entire screening process takes much longer.</li>\n 	<li>I’m beginning to consider the locations of these full-body scanners when I book flights.&nbsp; In ORD, it seems easier to avoid them in Terminal 1 than Terminal 3, so my next flight down to Florida I’ve switched over to United. Not completely driven by full-body scanners, but it’s definitely a factor.</li>\n 	<li>And continuing my thread about my MacBook Air.&nbsp; You’ll remember that one of the reasons I chose the 11-inch model was the TSA said it could stay in your briefcase – kinda like a bit iPad.&nbsp; However, when you briefcase – or backpack – stacks your iPad on top of your MacBook Air, be prepared to pull one of them out.&nbsp; Talking to a very pleasant TSA X-ray machine operator in ORD, he told me that when they stack up, they get too thick to properly scan.&nbsp; Makes sense.&nbsp; I’ve since moved my iPad to a difference section in my backpack – put some papers and magazines between the iPad and the MBA to provide a bit more separation and haven’t had a problem since.</li>\n 	<li>A number of folks have asked me why I carry both the iPad and a laptop – and I haven’t been able to come up with a real compelling reason.&nbsp; As I’ve said before, I like reading on an iPad and writing on a laptop, but does that justify the extra weight and re-packing hassle of the iPad?&nbsp; I was wishy-washy on that right up to last week when I thought I’d found my killer app for the iPad – Avatron’s <a href=\"http://avatron.com/apps/air-display\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Air Display</a>, which turns the iPad into a secondary display for the MacBook when they’re on the same WiFi network.</li>\n 	<li>Now here’s a reason.&nbsp; While I can work on the smaller screen of my 11-inch MBA (or the 10.6-inch HP netbook before that), having a second display certainly makes it easier to “spread out”.&nbsp; I have two 22-inch monitors on my Windows desktop box at home and love it.&nbsp; I eagerly dropped the $10 for the Air Display app and fired it up…</li>\n 	<li>And was disappointed.&nbsp; It didn’t work in the office.&nbsp; OK, our network guys must have it locked down.&nbsp; Not surprised.&nbsp; I get back to the Hilton and fire it up – again, no luck.&nbsp; At home, doesn’t work when associated with my Apple Airport Express, but does – just once – when associated with the access point that’s built into the big AT&amp;T U-verse modem/router thing in the basement.&nbsp; The only access point I can get Air Display to regularly work on is when I use my Verizon Droid 2 as a 3G hot spot.&nbsp; That’s a bit of a kludge.</li>\n 	<li>When it does work, it’s great – the few times that’s happened.&nbsp; I’ve been hanging around Avatron’s support forums for about a week now, but haven’t found a solution yet.&nbsp; Great concept; real spotty execution.&nbsp; If they can get this to work, my iPad is no longer a heavy Kindle – it’s a real productivity tool.</li>\n 	<li>And following up on my thoughts in the last episode about some of the hassles of the “digital nomad” work style when it comes to finding a quiet place for a conference call, Gary Learned sent in some thoughts…</li>\n 	<li>Gary Learned audio clip</li>\n 	<li>Gary, thanks for that suggestion.&nbsp; I’m hitting Amazon looking for that earpiece right now,</li>\n 	<li>And finally, the Gogo in-flight wireless guys have got a new giveaway as they continue to push awareness of their product.&nbsp; For February, Gogo is adding Facebook to their set of free sites. After the plane gets above 10,000 ft, fire up your laptop or smartphone and associate with the “gogoinflight” wireless network.&nbsp; Open your browser and you’ll get the GoGo sign-on page.&nbsp; On the bottom of the page, you’ll see a set of free web sites – typically the dot com site for the airline you’re flying, a weather site, ….&nbsp; And now, Facebook.&nbsp; Nice to know that you can stay socially connected at 35,000 feet.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a question, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.&nbsp; The e-mail address is <a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a> -- use the Voice Memo app on your iPhone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the Facebook page with GoGo’s free service -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at T/C.com</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Beggarstown</em> by Hollow Horse</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Sick on the Road</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>No, that’s not sick <em>of</em> the road – though that happens at times too.</li>\n 	<li>As I mentioned earlier, I was in Dallas a couple weeks ago – when it was just cold and windy; no snow or ice – and scored an invite to a vendor’s suite at the Mavs-Lakers basketball game.&nbsp; Definitely a premiere game.&nbsp; I went with a couple of guys from the office.</li>\n 	<li>It was a good game – Mavs were down at halftime but came back to beat the Lakers by 10.&nbsp; During the second half, though, I started to feel a tickle in the back of my throat.&nbsp; I couldn’t stop coughing – couldn’t seem to “finish up” a cough – and the beer and salsa were beginning to feel a little rough going down.</li>\n 	<li>Back in the hotel room, I just couldn’t get warm.&nbsp; I went to bed, but soon started shivering. The thermostat was just above my head.&nbsp; I kept pushing the Up button until I heard the heater kick in.&nbsp; After a while, I finally got warm enough to sleep comfortably.&nbsp; The next morning I looked at the temperature setting – it was at 78°.</li>\n 	<li>It didn’t get much better the rest of the day.&nbsp; I drug myself through a full day of meetings and got on a United Express regional jet for my flight home that night.&nbsp; Again, I couldn’t get warm.&nbsp; Since United Express seems to have followed American in pulling blankets and pillows from its planes, I swaddled myself in my tweed jacket and overcoat, and tried not to cough on the person in the window seat.</li>\n 	<li>Now, as being sick on the road goes, this wasn’t that bad.&nbsp; I’ve gotten food poisoning a couple of times, severely pulled muscles, flown with sinus infections that made my head feel like it was going to split in two during descent…</li>\n 	<li>But it did remind me how miserable it is to be sick on the road.&nbsp; For the most part, you’re alone.&nbsp; Though you may have co-workers who will try to help you a bit, when they go home to their families, you’re going home to an empty hotel room and are going to have to fend for yourself.</li>\n 	<li>And it’s not just that you’re lacking a spouse or child to help you out – bring you a blanket or a cup of tea.&nbsp; You need to find a pharmacy, perhaps a doctor.&nbsp; But even then, it can still be a struggle. When I was last in Paris, I tweaked my knee pretty bad and needed some ibuprofen for the pain and swelling.&nbsp; The hotel concierge pointed me in the direction of a pharmacy a couple of blocks away.&nbsp; Walking/limping in, I knew I couldn’t ask for Advil or Motrin – those US name brands don’t exist in France.&nbsp; So I asked for ibuprofen – the generic name of the active ingredient.&nbsp; Ibuprofen is ibuprofen, I thought.</li>\n 	<li>“Ibuprofen, s’il vous plaît” I asked.&nbsp; The pharmacist cocked an eyebrow and looked at me.&nbsp; “Ibuprofen, s’il vous plaît”, I said again.&nbsp; Now the other eyebrow arched.&nbsp; I fought the urge to say it again, only louder.&nbsp; What was I missing?&nbsp; Perhaps my throbbing knee was effecting my pronunciation.&nbsp; I looked around on the counter; grabbed a pen and flipped over some advertising flyer.&nbsp; I-b-u-p-r-o-f-e-n, I wrote.</li>\n 	<li>“Oh, EE-bu-pro-fen” the pharmacist said, and gave me the container of tablets I had needed since I got up that morning.&nbsp; Flipping French, I thought, and limped back to my hotel.</li>\n 	<li>So what do you do?&nbsp; Certainly “not getting sick” is the best approach – get enough sleep on the road – often tough to do in strange beds and with full schedules.&nbsp; I find that the old saw – wash your hands for a full 20 seconds and do it often – has significantly reduced the number of colds I pick up, even when I’m flying a lot.</li>\n 	<li>Packing a well-stocked medicine cabinet helps a bit – allergy medicine, cold tablets, throat lozenges, ee-buprofen tablets, ….&nbsp; For domestic travel, at least, you’re not trying to cure the sickness; just stave off the symptoms long enough so that you can get home and into the hands of your regular care-givers.</li>\n 	<li>International travel is a bit dicier.&nbsp; I know some travelers who have medical jet/air ambulance insurance so that they have a quick way to get back home if something catastrophic happens.</li>\n 	<li>While I haven’t done that yet, I am looking for a medical phrase book before my next trip to Europe, complete with pronunciation guides for common drugs. &nbsp;Ibuprofen, ee-buprofen – geez…</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music --<a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/music/listeners/artistdetails.php?BandHash=a3aaebb5e412ef546d1bddd6c9b4b4ed\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> <em>Love Survives</em></a> by Lovespirals</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>What\'s in My Bag?</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>One of the<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/01/01/new-years-travel-resolutions/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> New Year’s Travel Resolutions</a> that I posted on the TravelCommons site on Jan 1<sup>st</sup> was to “unpack and repack my briefcase”.</li>\n 	<li>Steve Frick, a long time TravelCommons listener, wrote the next day “did that this weekend. 3 pairs of headphones, approx 2 lbs of loose change, 50+ business cards and at least 15 hotel room keys. No wonder my laptop bag was so heavy.”</li>\n 	<li>Five years ago – February 2006 – in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2006/02/18/podcast-33-listener-mailbag-whats-in-my-briefcase/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">episode #33</a>, I did a bit of an audio tour through my briefcase</li>\n 	<li>&lt;audio clip&gt;</li>\n 	<li>The <a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/travelcommons/102434287/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">picture</a> of this de-constructed travel kit is the first picture of the TravelCommons Flickr photostream</li>\n 	<li>Five years later, some (and surprisingly only some) of the contents have changed, but the goal is the same – optimizing the trade-off between weight and having everything I need.&nbsp; There’s always that desire to have everything you could possibly need – to make your briefcase into the road warrior version of Batman’s utility belt, letting you amaze your traveling companions by pulling out just the right thing to solve any travel problem.</li>\n 	<li>So you’re always prepared, but you’re always trailing up the rear – either because you’ve got the heaviest bag or because the TSA is always pulling your bag for secondary screening because all that stuff makes them suspicious.</li>\n 	<li>And so back to that balancing act – what do I need all the time (and so would be a pain to be without) vs. what can I buy or borrow for the one or two times I need it?</li>\n 	<li>The technology has changed quite a bit, as you would guess, in 5 years.&nbsp; It’s kinda fun looking back.&nbsp; I’ve traded an IBM ThinkPad for a MacBook Air; a Motorola flip phone and U2-themed iPod Classic replaced by an iPhone; and an Aliph Jawbone 2 Bluetooth headset bumping the Motorola H710.&nbsp; No need for the Microsoft travel mouse or Bluetooth dongle with the MacBook. Also, my vendor-supplied thumb drives have been upgraded – from 512 MB to 4 GB.</li>\n 	<li>I replaced the Swiss Army briefcase – I called it a “poor man’s Tumi” in the podcast – with a backpack. And, of course, the TSA’s liquid ban stopped me from carrying on little bottles of hand lotion. I now grab them from every hotel and leave them scattered around conference rooms and rental cars</li>\n 	<li>What’s stayed the same?&nbsp; The Moleskine notebook, the selection of pens, the pink semi-transparent folder for expense receipts, a bottle with ibuprofen and zyrtec tablets, the iRiver MP3 player and recorder that I use to record these podcasts, and, most importantly, a tin of wintergreen Altoids to counter dry mouth when I fall asleep in flight – a pretty common occurrence.</li>\n 	<li>What’s new?&nbsp; An iPad, an extra battery for my iPhone, an AT&amp;T USB cellular modem which lets me skip paying for slow hotel WiFi, a set of Motorola Bluetooth stereo headphones that I use when I work out, a couple of Tazo green tea bags because in-flight coffee is just horrid, an inhaler to make it easier to breathe when I catch a cold (good advice from a “doc in the box” in San Mateo after being laid low in the SFO Marriott by bronchitis), and a Verizon Droid 2 for the too many times that AT&amp;T’s coverage sucks.</li>\n 	<li>The iPad let me ditch the printed reports I used to carry – I hated reading them on a computer screen, but don’t mind it on the iPad.&nbsp; The iBooks and Kindle apps also let me leave physical books at home.&nbsp; I also tossed the 3 business card holders I’d accumulated – my backpack has a pocket just for business cards.&nbsp; And do we really need business cards anymore?&nbsp; Unless you’re regularly meeting with Asian businessmen, business card exchanges are getting rarer and rarer.</li>\n 	<li>So I <em>think</em> I’m traveling lighter.&nbsp; But it might be a push – what I’ve dropped in paper I think I’ve made up in device chargers.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #87</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://musicalley.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Music Alley</a></li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or MP3 file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to @mpeacock on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/153475331351358\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_87.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #87 -- Sick on the Road; What\'s in My Briefcase?','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-87-sick-on-the-road-whats-in-my-briefcase','','','2021-09-26 11:38:28','2021-09-26 16:38:28','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=531',0,'post','',3),
(543,1,'2011-02-07 14:29:12','2011-02-07 19:29:12','','Warning in a St Louis Taxi','Warning in a St Louis Taxi','inherit','open','open','','taxi-sign','','','2011-02-07 14:29:12','2011-02-07 19:29:12','',531,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/taxi-sign1.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(554,1,'2011-03-13 17:09:21','2011-03-13 22:09:21','[caption id=\"attachment_565\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"215\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/Frequent-Flyer-Cards1.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-565 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/Frequent-Flyer-Cards1-215x300.jpg\" alt=\"Full House, Platinum over 1K\" width=\"215\" height=\"300\" /></a> Full House, Platinum over 1K[/caption]\n\nI\'m getting ready for a stint of international travel -- a couple trips to the UK, a vacation to Venice, and then bouncing around southern India. I visited the <a href=\"http://www.travel-goods.org/the-travel-goods-show/\">2011 Travel Goods show</a> in Chicago for a preview of the new travel goodies I\'d be seeing in the shops this spring.  Wading through a front room stacked with luggage, I hit the gadget room with the interesting stuff and interviewed some of the company owners. I also talk about the growing number of wireless <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Wi-Fi\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi-Fi\" rel=\"wikipedia\">WiFi</a> hotspots I\'m seeing in hotels, and about the different ways Marriott and United Airlines dropped my frequent flier/frequent sleeper status after my traveling patterns changed.  Also, a listener tells us about a good <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Air France\" href=\"http://www.airfrance.com\" rel=\"homepage\">Air France</a> experience re-routing around an East Coast snow storm, and an audio comment about being sick on the road. Listen through to the end of the podcast for how to enter the latest TravelCommons contest. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_88.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the transcript from TravelCommons podcast #88:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you yet again from the TravelCommons studios. I just can’t seem to get my act together enough to have everything written in time to record from a hotel room, though if there’s going to be an April episode, I’ll need to.  The beginning of April finds me in Venice, wrapping up the Spring Break I discussed in an earlier episode.  I then get a week at home with some family coming in, then down to Florida for a week, then to the UK, and then, the last week of April in India, bouncing across the usual suspects – Bangalore, Pune, and Chennai – with a weekend in the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Kerala backwaters\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerala_backwaters\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Kerala backwaters</a>.</li>\n 	<li>Not that March has been quiet.  I’m just back from a trip to New York earlier this week and then head down to Phoenix next week. I’m hoping to catch a Spring Training ball game while I’m down there.  I\'ve been working off and on in Phoenix since the mid-‘90’s and have never been to a Spring Training game.  Every year I say I’m going to carve out time, and every year something comes up.  This year, though.  This will be the year.  Again working on that New Year’s travel resolution about taking more quick breaks.  The fact that I’m still thinking about a New Year’s resolution has to be breaking some sort of rule.</li>\n 	<li>Stay with me ‘til the end of this episode – either the preferred way by listening or the ADD way by scrubbing – for a quick TravelCommons contest.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Keep Your Motor Running</em> by Dave Hole</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>OK, let’s see what bits and bobs I have been keeping track of on Evernote, and Twitter, and Facebook…</li>\n 	<li>For everyone who watched all the way to the end of the <a title=\"Video #1 – Impressions of Vietnam\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2010/09/06/video-1-impressions-of-vietnam/\">Vietnam video</a> back in September – and for those of you who haven’t, it’s still available on the web site, on the iTunes feed, and on the TravelCommons Facebook page – there’s a picture, a head shot of me, with a boa – the large snake, not the feathered thing -- draped around my neck.  You can plainly see the receding graying hair. So it caught me up short when a United gate agent looked at my boarding pass, and then at me, and said “You look too young to have a <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"United Airlines\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Mileage Plus</a> number this low.”  It worked – I gave her one of those customer service “attaboys’ they always send to their status fliers.  It reminded me of my last trip to India when the immigration agent looked at me a couple of times and said that I looked much younger than my passport photo.  Either I’ve unknowingly picked up the ability to cloud men’s minds or that picture of Dorian Grey I picked up at a garage sale actually works.</li>\n 	<li>We’ve talked in past episodes about how for frequent travelers, the cost of wireless data plans can quickly pay for themselves in avoided hotel WiFi charges – 3-4 nights in a month -- if you tend to stay in hotels that still charge for wireless or don’t have precious metal status at chains like Hilton or Marriott.  Anyhow, I’ve seen over the past few months a growing number of wireless hotspots when I pop open my laptop in my hotel room.  I see in the network browser at least 2-3 Verizon hotspots, a Sprint, and every once in a while, a Virgin hotspot.  I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised – most Android phones have 3G hotspot capabilities built in.  I guess it’s the power I’m more surprised about.  If I’m seeing 5 or 6 of these, they’re broadcasting farther than just the adjacent room.  And while most have security enabled, there’s always 1 or 2 running naked.  And this will only increase after AT&amp;T iPhones get hotspot capability with iOS 4.3.  With only 11 channels in the US implementation of WiFi, there’s gonna be some congestion in the air soon.</li>\n 	<li>Some good comments also came into the web site, the e-mail box and Twitter since the last episode…</li>\n 	<li>Andre – who describes himself as a “long-time listener from Germany” – left this comment on the Winter Travel Tips post\n<ul>\n 	<li>Wanted to share a positive experience with an airline call center when I was travelling to the US in January. I flew Air France on the international legs – Stuttgart to Paris-DeGaulle to JFK and back, and used United miles for the domestic portion to Florida – JFK to Washington-Dulles to Miami.</li>\n 	<li>As my departure approached, so did a massive snowstorm. Just as I finished packing my luggage the night before departure, Air France e-mailed me that my flight out of Kennedy was canceled.  Indeed, AF kept all 4 of their JFK flights in Paris to keep their schedule from getting screwed up. I called the AF call center. I said that I\'m currently in Miami and asked if there was flight to Paris out of here or DC. After waiting on hold for a while the agent transferred me to a special Delta help desk, warning me that I might have to pay extra to fly out of MIA. Next agent told me the same, but she had to talk to AF in Paris anyways.</li>\n 	<li>After another wait, she came back, totally astonished that AF, not only accepted the re-routing, but also did that free of charge. I guess they were just happy to have one less passenger standing around in New York.</li>\n 	<li>So, there are still moments where you think that you are a valued customer and they care about you.</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Andre, thanks for that story.  This was a tough winter in the US.  I have a friend from Detroit who was in Boston one week and supposed to be in New York the next.  One of those storms blew through, cancelled his flight, and his next available flight home was the following Monday, when he was supposed to be flying back to New York.  He just hung around Boston for the weekend, bought some new underwear, and then caught Amtrak down to New York Monday morning – much less stressful.</li>\n 	<li>Peter Zurich sent in a note about the running thread on the TSA’s full body scanners, specifically about my observation in the last episode about the partial roll out of the scanners.  What good was it to scan 100% of the passengers in ORD’s Terminal 1 last Monday morning – pushing security lines down the concourse, and yet have no scanners at all in alternative airports like Ft Myers, FL.  In this same vein, Peter writes\n<ul>\n 	<li>I am all onboard for security, but what we have now is security theatre that is just another meaningless escalation from x-ray to liquid ban to shoes off.  We joked about what a good thing it was that Richard Reid, the shoe bomber, didn’t have it in his underwear, and of course, that’s the next thing that happens, and we get the naked scanners.  On and on it goes…</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Yes, Peter, and so it does.  One thing the housing market meltdown has done is make people less mobile – they can’t easily get out of their houses to move to another city for a new job.  The number of people flying every week to their jobs is growing.  Making this work requires smooth predictable travel – something the TSA seems to have no interest in facilitating.</li>\n 	<li>And finally, yet another audio comment – I love these – this time from Lori Humm, another long-time TravelCommons listener, about a time when she was sick while on the road</li>\n 	<li>Lori Humm audio clip</li>\n 	<li>Lori, thanks for that story.  Makes me feel a bit of a whiner -- Type A flu definitely tops my cold I whined about in the last episode.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a question, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is <a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a> -- use the Voice Memo app on your iPhone or something like Virtual Recorder on your Android phone to record and send in an audio comment like Lori or Gary in last month’s episode; send a <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Twitter</a> message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/153475331351358\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Facebook</a> page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Baja Taxi</em> by Brian Buckit</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>New Travel Goodies</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Chris Truelove, another long time TravelCommons listener from the UK, dropped me a line a couple of weeks back, saying that he would be in Chicago for the 2011 Travel Goods show to launch the latest version of his luggage locator tag business. I had mentioned his globalbagtag.com business some episodes ago, and now he’s launching a new line – back2you.com.</li>\n 	<li>Always looking for some podcast content – as well as the opportunity to meet a listener – I headed down on Sunday afternoon.</li>\n 	<li>McCormick Center in Chicago is one of the world’s largest exhibition spaces, so finding the show took a little bit.  Walking in, it was luggage as far as I could see.  There were lots of colors on display.  Everybody – well, except for Tumi – was looking to make a break from black.  I couldn’t discern a clear alternative, though – was red the new black or was beige.  I did see a surprising number of hardshell rolling bags and in all sorts of wild prints.  Perhaps those are more targeted at the recreational market – can’t say I saw a lot of cheetah-print hardshell bags being put in the overhead on my morning flight to New York last week.</li>\n 	<li>In spite of all the colors, my eyes began to glaze over – you can only look at so many suitcases before sleep – or boredom – begins to wash over you.  Then I walked into the back room and things got much more interesting.  Rather than 2-story luggage displays, in here were smaller booths filled with all sorts of travel gadgets.  Even the bags back here had interesting twists. Powerbag showed backpacks and briefcases with built-in batteries, complete with built-in iPhone and USB cords to keep your phones and iPods topped off while walking down the concourse.  And a company called Runnur (<a href=\"http://gorunnur.com/\">http://gorunnur.com/</a>) was selling a fanny pack reengineered into something like a bandolier, slinging everything across one shoulder instead of resting on your back-side.</li>\n 	<li>It was here that I found Chris and so, using the Voice Memo app on my iPhone, I asked him to tell me about Back2You (<a href=\"http://back2you.com/\">http://back2you.com/</a>)</li>\n 	<li>Back2You interview\n\n[caption id=\"attachment_577\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"150\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/DSC_7791-copy11.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-577 size-thumbnail\" title=\"Back2You Tag\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/DSC_7791-copy1-150x150.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"150\" height=\"150\" /></a> Back2You Bag Tag[/caption]</li>\n 	<li>Thanks Chris.  Those tags could come in handy on my upcoming trips to Italy, the UK, and India where I won’t be in any single place more than a couple of days.</li>\n 	<li>Walking around the back room, I found some other interesting products</li>\n 	<li>TuGo interview</li>\n 	<li>I’ll post a picture in the show notes.  I tried TuGo (<a href=\"http://goodtugo.com/\">http://goodtugo.com/</a>)  out last Monday morning in ORD.  It got it on my bag in less than a minute, put my coffee in there, then put my backpack on top of my bag and it worked like a charm.  Not sure if the problem it’s solving is worth the space it takes up in my bag, but it definitely works.</li>\n 	<li>One of the themes in the back room seemed to be comfort – as the seat pitch – the distance between rows – shrink and planes get more crowded, people are looking to buy a little something to make the journey more bearable.</li>\n 	<li>Kuhi Comfort interview\n\n[caption id=\"attachment_576\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"150\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/DSC_7788-copy11.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-576 size-thumbnail\" title=\"TuGo Cupholder\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/DSC_7788-copy1-150x150.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"150\" height=\"150\" /></a> TuGo Cupholder[/caption]</li>\n 	<li>I tried the Kuhi Comfort (<a href=\"http://www.kuhicomfort.com/\">http://www.kuhicomfort.com/</a>).  It was more comfortable than the typical neck pillow. I’m not sure about the pouch for aromatherapy. I like a little lavender oil as much as the next person, but in coach, where you’re less than a foot from the other passenger’s head – one person’s relaxing aromatherapy is the next person’s eye watering stench…</li>\n 	<li>The other theme I picked up was hygiene.  There were a handful of booths selling bed bug powders and plastic barriers.  The booth across from Chris Truelove’s --Shelves to Go (<a href=\"http://www.shelvestogo.net\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">http://www.shelvestogo.net</a>) was selling a packable shelving system – lifts straight out of your bag and hangs on the closet rod – avoiding, as the brochure says, “the risk of possible exposure to dirt and insect infestation” from putting your close in the hotel dresser  -- I’ll put a picture in the show notes.</li>\n 	<li>And then there was this new twist on the lowly wipe</li>\n 	<li>Paper Shower (<a href=\"http://papershower.com/\">http://papershower.com/</a>) interview</li>\n 	<li>So there you go, no end of stuff to make your travel life a bit easier, and your bag a bit heavier.\n\n[caption id=\"attachment_579\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"150\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/DSC_7790-copy11.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-579 size-thumbnail\" title=\"Shelves to Go\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/DSC_7790-copy1-150x150.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"150\" height=\"150\" /></a> Shelves to Go[/caption]</li>\n 	<li>I’ll put URLs and any pictures I have of these products in the show notes.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Emily C</em> by Fiasco</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Losing Status</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Back in <a title=\"Podcast #82 – Changing My Travel; New Mileage Programs in a New Year\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2010/02/20/podcast-82-changing-my-travel-new-mileage-programs-in-a-new-year/\">episode 82</a>, I talked about how my job switch – moving from consulting to being the CIO of a technology company – was changing the way I travel, and how the new destinations were shaking up my frequent traveler program status.</li>\n 	<li>It all sorted out in mid-January.  Because of our office locations, I switched from Marriott – where I’d been top-tier Platinum status for at least 7 years – to Hilton for no other reason than sheer convenience.  I hit top tier Hilton – Diamond; gem stones rather than precious metals for Hilton – in December.  And, oddly enough, still haven’t received a new card or welcome packet.  Every other program – you hit a major tier and there are all sorts of thank you letters and program brochures showing up on your doorstep.  Hilton – nothing.</li>\n 	<li>As interesting, though was Marriott’s reaction.  I don’t think I stayed enough nights to qualify for any status, but they “soft landed” me.  They dropped me one level down – to Gold, which still gets you free WiFi and free breakfast in the concierge lounge – and an offer to let me buy back my Platinum status for 40,000 points.  Nice approach.  If I thought I’d be staying at more Marriotts this year, I’d have considered the buy back, but I appreciated the soft landing and have stayed at a couple of Marriott since them.</li>\n 	<li>United Airlines – not as nice.  No soft landing here.  I dropped two tiers – from 1K to Premiere, which is the status level I’d qualified for by the end of the year.  As I mentioned in<a title=\"Podcast #84 – End of Year Status Calculus; TSA Porn\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2010/10/30/podcast-84-end-of-year-status-calculus-tsa-porn/\"> episode 84</a>, when I saw in October that I would miss American’s Exec Platinum by about 10,000 miles, I flipped over to United to preserve a minimum level of status.  Which is exactly what I received.  Like Marriott, though, I received an offer to buy back my 1K status, but the price was a bit steeper -- $999 plus flying 35,000 qualifying miles in the first quarter 0f 2011.  Neither of those made any sense.</li>\n 	<li>I’ll probably go back to my old ways – splitting my mileage between United and American and keeping mid-tier status – Premiere Exec -- on United because, with monthly flights to Dallas and Fort Myers, FL where United has little to none non-stop service, there’s no way I’ll make 1K.</li>\n 	<li>Friends who left consulting used to joke that first January was one of their most conflicted times – down because they lost status and were now traveling with the peons; but happy with what it represented – that they were spending a lot more time with their families.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #88</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://musicalley.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Music Alley</a></li>\n 	<li>And now for the contest.  In the past, I\'ve run some quick contests to drive iTunes reviews.  This time, I – like every podcaster – am looking to drive Facebook “likes” – there’s got to be a better noun than that – “followers” on Twitter may be a bit creepy, but at least it’s not pathetic.  But, that’s the lingo, so I’ll have to go with it.  Go to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/153475331351358\">Facebook</a> page – there’s link in the shownotes and a badge above the fold on the first page of the web site – “like” it, and leave a comment.  The best comment, funniest or most insightful as judged by me, wins 2 drink coupons on United Airlines.  I look forward to some good stuff</li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or MP3 file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n</ul>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/153475331351358\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_88.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #88 -- New Travel Goodies; Losing Elite Status','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-88-new-travel-goodies-losing-status','','','2021-09-26 11:40:07','2021-09-26 16:40:07','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=554',0,'post','',2),
(565,1,'2011-03-13 16:56:28','2011-03-13 21:56:28','','Frequent-Flyer-Cards','Full House, Platinum over 1K','inherit','open','open','','frequent-flyer-cards','','','2011-03-13 16:56:28','2011-03-13 21:56:28','',554,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/Frequent-Flyer-Cards1.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(576,1,'2011-03-22 10:52:46','2011-03-22 15:52:46','','TuGo Cupholder','TuGo Cupholder','inherit','open','open','','dsc_7788-copy','','','2011-03-22 10:52:46','2011-03-22 15:52:46','',554,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/DSC_7788-copy1.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(577,1,'2011-03-22 10:56:26','2011-03-22 15:56:26','','Back2You Tag','Back2You Bag Tag','inherit','open','open','','dsc_7791-copy','','','2011-03-22 10:56:26','2011-03-22 15:56:26','',554,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/DSC_7791-copy1.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(579,1,'2011-03-22 11:00:36','2011-03-22 16:00:36','','Shelves to Go','Shelves to Go','inherit','open','open','','dsc_7790-copy','','','2011-03-22 11:00:36','2011-03-22 16:00:36','',554,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/DSC_7790-copy1.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(582,1,'2011-04-09 09:13:39','2011-04-09 14:13:39','[caption id=\"attachment_584\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/536019393_e9101f64b0_o1.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-584\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/536019393_e9101f64b0_o1-300x219.jpg\" alt=\"Passage between Kintetsu and JR stations, in Namba, Osaka\" width=\"300\" height=\"219\" /></a> Passage between Kintetsu and JR stations, in Namba, Osaka[/caption]\r\n\r\nOne of my annual <a title=\"New Year’s Travel Resolutions\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/01/01/new-years-travel-resolutions/\">New Year\'s travel resolutions</a> is to \"unpack and repack my briefcase.\" Some people re-do their closets; I do my briefcase.  I\'m always amazed at the stuff that accumulates over the year. Why did I think I needed a half-dozen pens, two sets of earphones, $5 of loose change in three different currencies, and two handfuls of USB flash drives?\r\n\r\nThere’s always a desire to carry everything you could possibly need while on the road, turning your briefcase into the road warrior\'s version of <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Batman\'s utility belt\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batman%27s_utility_belt\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Batman’s utility belt</a>, letting you amaze your traveling companions by pulling out just the right thing to solve any travel problem. But while you’re always prepared, you’re always lagging behind – either because you\'ve got the heaviest bag or the TSA is pulling your bag for secondary screening because all your stuff makes them suspicious.\r\n\r\nIn <a title=\"Podcast #33 – Listener Mailbag, What’s in My Briefcase?\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2006/02/18/podcast-33-listener-mailbag-whats-in-my-briefcase/\">episode #33</a> in February 2006, I did an audio tour through my briefcase.  Five years later, some (and surprisingly only some) of the contents have changed, but the goal remains the same: optimize the trade-off between weight and having everything you need. To make it easy, travel gear and accessories in my carry on bag fall into these categories:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li><strong>Personal Computer</strong> Most business travelers are knowledge workers. And the laptop is to us what a framing hammer is to a carpenter; the laptop is our main tool of the trade. However, many business travelers carry a sledgehammer of a laptop: 17-inch screen, DVD player and the fastest processor. This, along with a couple of extra batteries to keep it breathing between New York and San Francisco. But how much heavy lifting do we do when we\'re on the road? Most of my time is spent running e-mails, web research and some light document editing. My Travel PC needs to be purpose-\"spec’d\" for what’s important to a frequent traveler — light weight, long battery life, and reasonable processing power (in that order). And it leaves behind what’s not — optical drives, super-fast processors and video cards, big hard drives, and large monitors.</li>\r\n	<li><strong>Communications</strong> The maturation of the smartphone is probably the best thing that\'s happened to business travelers since the creation of frequent flier programs. The ability to talk without finding a pay phone and to send/receive data without hunting down an analog line has made business travel simpler and easier.  After you get comfortable with constant connectivity, you depend upon it. So now I carry an AT&amp;T <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"iPhone\" href=\"http://www.apple.com/iphone\" rel=\"homepage\">iPhone</a> 4 <em>and</em> a <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Motorola Droid\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_Droid\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Verizon Droid</a> 2 to counter dead spots, and an AT&amp;T cellular modem for when I\'m in underdeveloped areas where Starbucks or other wireless coffee bars do not yet exist.</li>\r\n	<li><strong>Entertainment</strong> Delays are an integral part of today\'s travel experience, so we need to carry some things to keep our minds otherwise occupied. It started with iPods, listening to music while waiting out a weather delay. Or a Nintendo for the just-out-of-college set. But in the past couple of years, the choices have exploded and the lines have blurred. I use my iPhone for a conference call and then play Battleship on it in the TSA line. Dual purpose devices let me cut down weight, making room for those hard-to-justify but just-gotta-have Bose noise-canceling headphones.</li>\r\n	<li><strong>Pens and Paper</strong> I used to carry a <em>lot</em> of paper - documents to review, analyst reports to read - because I hate reading these things on a computer screen. Now <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"iPad\" href=\"http://www.apple.com/ipad/\" rel=\"homepage\">the iPad</a> is another double-duty device that lets me jettison all of that, slashing dead-tree bulk and weight from my bag. I also tossed the 3 business card holders I’d accumulated. Do we really need business cards anymore? Unless you’re regularly meeting with Asian businessmen, business card exchanges are getting rarer and rarer. I still carry a couple of pens and a <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Moleskine\" href=\"http://www.moleskine.com/\" rel=\"homepage\">Moleskine notebook</a> because ... well, just because.</li>\r\n	<li><strong>Medicine</strong> Trying to find a pharmacy in a strange place can be painful. I don\'t want to carry an entire medicine cabinet, but I don\'t want to search the local strip malls every time I need some ibuprofen or allergy medicine.</li>\r\n	<li><strong>Food</strong> This is not about turning my briefcase into a flying picnic basket. Instead, it\'s a few small task-specific items such as a tin of wintergreen Altoids to cure the dry mouth I get when I fall asleep in flight, and a couple of Tazo green tea bags and tubes of Starbucks Via coffee powder because I think most in-flight coffee is awful.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\nGoing through this, I <em>think</em> I’m traveling lighter and smarter. But it might be a push. I think may need a fifth category called \"Power chargers.\"\r\n<div class=\"zemanta-pixie\" style=\"margin-top: 10px; height: 15px;\"><img class=\"zemanta-pixie-img\" style=\"border: none; float: right;\" src=\"http://img.zemanta.com/pixy.gif?x-id=9efcb271-495b-4834-9628-1289594c99ff\" alt=\"\" /></div>','What\'s in My Bag: Traveling Light But Prepared','','publish','closed','closed','','whats-in-my-bag-traveling-light-but-prepared','','','2015-04-21 16:01:16','2015-04-21 21:01:16','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=582',0,'post','',0),
(584,1,'2011-04-09 08:59:46','2011-04-09 13:59:46','','business-light','Passage between Kintetsu and JR stations, in Namba, Osaka','inherit','open','open','','536019393_e9101f64b0_o','','','2011-04-09 08:59:46','2011-04-09 13:59:46','',582,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/536019393_e9101f64b0_o1.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(590,1,'2011-04-16 17:32:16','2011-04-16 22:32:16','[caption id=\"attachment_594\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/3717874334_4b20cc0037_o1.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-594\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/3717874334_4b20cc0037_o1-300x225.jpg\" alt=\"Danish Train © Hunter Desportes\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\" /></a> Danish Train © Hunter Desportes[/caption]\n\nMy business-vacation combo trip to <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"London\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/england/london\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\">London</a>, <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Paris\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/france/paris\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\">Paris</a>, and <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Venice\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/italy/venice\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\">Venice</a> provides the source for most of this episode\'s content. Wanting to pack light, I had to figure out how to pack for 10 days, 3 cities, two business meetings and a week\'s vacation in a single carry-on bag. After landing in London, I skipped the airports and used trains for all my intra-European travel, not boarding another flight until we were heading home from Venice -- though not before having to wrestle through a randomly rebooting kiosk. I also talk about toothpaste tablets -- another way to avoid liquid in your carry-on, and a great restaurant in O\'Hare\'s Terminal 1. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_89.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the transcript from TravelCommons podcast #89:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you yet again from the TravelCommons studios. I know, I’m getting a bit bored with it too.  I tried to record this last week in the Doubletree Suites in <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Naples\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/florida/naples\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\">Naples, FL</a>, but couldn’t get everything written in time. I even downloaded Garageband for my <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"iPad\" href=\"http://www.apple.com/ipad/\" rel=\"homepage\">iPad 2</a>, but found that it has a time limit on its recordings – too short for the podcast, unless I wanted to be doing a lot more editing and stitching.</li>\n 	<li>I’ve racked up a bit of mileage since the last episode – doing my usual runs to Phoenix – where I did catch my first spring training baseball game, the White Sox and the Giants sitting on the lawn on a beautiful afternoon -- and to Naples, FL.  There were also some new runs to London, Paris, and then to Milan on my way to a vacation rendezvous with the family in Venice.</li>\n 	<li>It was kinda fun to meet up with my wife and daughter in a new city.  I’d taken the train over from Milan and got to our hotel first, so I was sitting on the patio drinking a cappuccino when they pulled up in their water taxi. I saw them coming down the canal and waved to them, but they didn’t see me until they were right at the hotel.  Indeed, my daughter took a picture of the hotel as they were coming up to it, and if you look closely, you can see me in the corner, waving from my table.  It’s pretty funny.</li>\n 	<li>It doesn’t slow down going forward.  I’m off to the UK, and then, the last week of April in India, bouncing across the usual suspects – Bangalore, Pune, and Chennai – with a weekend in the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Kerala Backwaters\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/india/sights/river/kerala-backwaters\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\">Kerala backwaters</a>.  I get back, take a week to adjust to Central Time, and then head out to San Francisco for the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Google I/O\" href=\"http://code.google.com/events/io/2010/\" rel=\"homepage\">Google I/O conference</a>.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Planetenstaaten </em>by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/weigl-landwater/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Phillip Weigl</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\">\n<ul>\n 	<li>Nobody sent in an audio comment this month, so you’re stuck with the sound of my voice all the way through.</li>\n 	<li>So let’s get the obligatory <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Transportation Security Administration\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_Security_Administration\" rel=\"wikipedia\">TSA</a> rant out of the way.  When I saw the <a href=\"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3sH1GaO_nw&amp;feature=player_embedded\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">video</a> of the TSA doing a “grope-down” of a 6-yr old girl in <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"New Orleans Airport\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Orleans_Airport\" rel=\"wikipedia\">New Orleans airport</a> I wasn’t shocked, I wasn’t outraged – I just shook my head at the mindless stupidity of it, numb to yet another of the endless stream of senseless TSA acts. When the screener is executing the grope-down while being filmed by the parent and, off-camera, the supervisor agrees with the action, and then in a follow-up statement, the TSA says “Yup, the screener did the right thing” -- this incident is a proof point that it’s not stupid acts of individual screeners.  The TSA as an organization is fundamentally broken; it’s developed a culture that can’t use common sense. The only successful thing the TSA has done is replaced the IRS as the most reviled part of the federal government.</li>\n 	<li>OK, glad to get that out of the way.  Let talk about something more fun.  In the <a title=\"Podcast #88 — New Travel Goodies; Losing Elite Status\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/03/13/podcast-88-new-travel-goodies-losing-status/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">last episode</a>, I talked about stuff that caught my eye at last month’s Travel Goods show.  One thing I forgot to mention was <a href=\"http://www.archtekinc.com/product_info.php?products_id=52&amp;osCsid=eb7322cb97f95ed64391f31ae19e1297\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Archtek Toothpaste Tablets</a>. Now I’ve talked in the past about switching from toothpaste to toothpowder some years ago to avoid the liquid ban, and then keeping it to avoid having to pull out a baggie full of toiletries at the screening point.  Archtek has a different spin.  You put one tablet in your mouth, chew it up, and then start brushing. I was a little skeptical at first.  Indeed, I had to remind myself not to swallow – it felt like a chewable vitamin.  But once I started brushing, it foamed up way more than any tooth powder I’ve used.  If you can find Archtek Toothpaste Tablets, buy ‘em.  Definitely recommended.</li>\n 	<li>Also in the <a title=\"Podcast #88 — New Travel Goodies; Losing Elite Status\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/03/13/podcast-88-new-travel-goodies-losing-status/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">last episode</a>, I talked about dropping status, specifically how United didn’t soft-land me from 1K status – they dropped me all the way from 1K to Premiere.  This had a big impact on accruing mileage – 1K’s get a 100% mileage bonus while Premieres only get 25%.  Another big impact is who you get routed to within United’s customer service network.  1K’s talk to United employees in corporate headquarters near O’Hare.  They’re the most experienced and best trained customer service agents.  The Premiere desk – when I had to change an award ticket to accommodate my London trip, I found out it’s in Cebu City in the Philippines.  It wasn’t a major problem – the agents were pleasant, spoke understandable English, and were able to make the changes that I needed.  But again, it was a bit of a jarring experience and reminded me once again of the little niceties status brings.</li>\n 	<li>A point that was brought home to my 17-yr old son when he traveled without me on his German Club trip to Germany, Switzerland, and Austria – while the rest of us were in Venice.  Picking him up at the airport, he said, “I hate traveling without you, Dad.  I treated just like a peon.”  I’ll take that.  As any parent will tell you, it’s nice to wanted by your teenager – even if it’s just for pre-boarding and access to airport clubs.</li>\n 	<li>So, in three groups -- my son, my wife and daughter, and me -- left for Europe out of O’Hare’s Terminal 1.  And all of us made time to stop off in Rick Bayless’ new Mexican tortas -- sandwich -- place <a href=\"http://www.rickbayless.com/news/view?articleID=171\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Frontera Tortas</a> in the front concourse, Concourse B.  Bayless is one of the most famous chefs in Chicago – he won the first season of Bravo TV’s <em>Top Chef Masters</em> contest and runs Barack and Michelle Obama’s favorite date-night restaurant Topolobampo. I’ve eaten at his Frontera Grill since it opened in the mid-80’s and have yet to have a bad meal. So when he opened Frontera Torta, I had to try it.  The lines can be long, but the food is great.  I had the cochinita pibil torta – pulled pork and pickled red onions with a habanero salsa on the side.  Good thing – that salsa was the spiciest thing I’ve ever had in an airport anywhere.  They did warn me, though.  Anyhow, great food – good place to kill a United Airlines delay in ORD.</li>\n 	<li>When I was flying out to London on United, I found it easier to check in with the self-service kiosks even though I was flying business class.  The line for business class check-in was at least 5 deep, but there were a half-dozen open kiosks.  I fired one up, put my passport on the scanner, and within a couple of minutes, was on my way to the security line.</li>\n 	<li>It was not that easy, though, on the flight back.  We were flying Lufthansa back by way of Munich. After catching a water taxi from our hotel – much cooler, and much longer than the water taxis to and from Logan Airport in Boston – I queued up for the kiosk. It was taking the people in front of my much longer than a couple of minutes.   But, they looked like tourists.  Finally, I worked my way to the front of the line – not exactly a linear process in Italy.  I started checking in.  The workflow wasn’t as straight forward/as well-designed as the United kiosk, but that wasn’t the problem.  It was that the kiosk kept re-starting/re-booting halfway through the check-in and the passport scanner was very fiddly.  It took me at least 15 minutes to get my wife, daughter, and me checked in.  There wasn’t another alternative.  There were only 2 desk agents but they were just checking luggage for those who had checked in with the kiosk – and they had no interest in coming out from behind their desk to figure out the rebooting kiosks. I don’t mind self service – when it works.</li>\n 	<li>And finally, going all the way back to <a title=\"Podcast #86 — Fun with Layovers; Story Behind the Closing Tune\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2010/12/26/podcast-86-fun-with-layovers-story-behind-closing-tune/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">episode 86</a>, from last December… Prompted by a question from a listener, Betty Boyd, about the podcast’s closing song, <em>Pictures of You</em> by the Scottish band Evangeline, I dipped into the archives and played an interview with the band’s manager that gave some back story on the song.  A couple of days ago, the song’s writer dropped this comment on the TravelCommons website:</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n</ul>\n\"Hi Mark. I’m John Naismith songwriter with the former band Evangeline, I’m so glad you enjoy the song <em>Pictures of You</em>, it’s also good to know that people like Becky from Carolina can identify with the song because that was the intent when writing it, life on the road is hard and leaving your family behind is hard! Anyway, a million thanks to you for using this song for so long I wish you and your show all the best for the future.Love and friendship from Scotland.\"\n<ul>\n 	<li>John, thanks for stopping by the site and leaving the comment.  And also, thanks for letting me use your song. It has always been, in my mind, the perfect song for the frequent traveler.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a question, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is <a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a> -- use the Voice Memo app on your iPhone or something like Virtual Recorder on your Android phone to record and send in an audio comment like Lori or Gary in last month’s episode; send a <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Twitter</a> message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/153475331351358\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Facebook</a> page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/yoria-suerte/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Suerte Mijo</a> </em>by Arthur Yoria</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Trains Instead of Planes</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>My Spring Break vacation plans for Venice, Italy got munged up a bit when a customer in London demanded my presence the Wednesday afternoon before we were to fly out from Chicago.  Doing a one-day up-and back to London didn’t make any sense – though, as long-time listeners will recall from <a title=\"Podcast #70 – Packing a Suit, Videoconference over Travel, Watching Winter Flight Delays\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2008/12/23/podcast-70-packing-a-suit-videoconference-over-travel-watching-winter-flight-delays/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">episode #70</a>, that hasn’t stopped in the past.  So instead, I visited staff in our Kew office on Thursday, a customer in Paris on Friday, and then vectored through Milan on Saturday to meet up with my family in Venice Sunday morning.</li>\n 	<li>Since I wasn’t on a tight schedule, I decided to skip the airports and do all these legs on the train.  No lines, no grope-downs – just glide from center city to center city.  In past episodes, I’ve talked about my preference for Amtrak’s Acela when traveling the northeast corridor from New York to Washington, so I decided to try the same thing in Europe.</li>\n 	<li>Last month, I tweeted a link to a <a href=\"http://www.tnooz.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/silverrail1.jpg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">graph </a>showing that, in Europe, rail is becoming the preferred method of transport when trip time drops below 3 hours.  Indeed, before digging the Chunnel – the Channel Tunnel, London to Paris was one of the world’s busiest air routes.  But now, air travel has dropped to <a href=\"http://www.tnooz.com/2011/03/21/news/how-rail-is-evolving-and-why-travel-websites-need-to-be-ready/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">less than 20%</a>. Since I needed to get from London to Paris on Thursday afternoon, I decided to start my train journey with the Eurostar.</li>\n 	<li>It wasn’t cheap – premium economy was $250.  I couldn’t in my mind justify the $400 business class ticket.  Rolling my bag through St Pancras station in London felt a bit like an airport experience – queue up, waive your boarding pass in front of a reader, put your bags through the X-ray machine, walk through the metal detector, go through passport control (you go through French immigration in London, kinda like going through US immigration in Toronto airport)… but it was definitely a bit more laid-back -- nothing like the full-on insanity that is Heathrow.</li>\n 	<li>It was at boarding time that I really felt the difference.  No calling out groups, no jockeying around the jet bridge door – we just walked up the ramp and found our car.  And pulling out, no PA announcements scolding us to immediately take our seats, no flight attendants giving us the once over to make sure we’d turned off our cell phones – people were still wandering around, and I was cranking on a document when I noticed out of the corner of my eye the platform slipping away.</li>\n 	<li>The journey under the English Channel – I guess I was surprised at how uneventful it was.  Indeed, I was in the toilet when we entered the Chunnel.  No announcement, no ear-popping from going down – just a 15-20 minute journey though a dark tunnel and  “pop” you’re up in France.  I don’t know what I was expecting, but I guess I thought there’d be a bit more to it.</li>\n 	<li>Saturday’s ride on the TGV – France’s high-speed train -- from Paris to Milan was a good bit different. The price was good bit lower -- $150 for business class. The ride was longer – 7 hrs instead of 2.  But the scenery was much better – up over the Alps instead of a tunnel under the ocean.</li>\n 	<li>Being a Saturday, it was more families, less business – kinda like my Southwest flight this week back from Ft Myers, FL.  In some ways, it was worse.  Once the kids were seated on the Southwest flight, they stayed there, buckled in.  On the TGV, the entire car became the playground for this one toddler – he kept racing down the aisle from one end of the car to the other.  This went on for hours because the train ride was more than twice as long as the Ft Myers flight.</li>\n 	<li>All that being said, I enjoyed this train ride too – it was an easy cab ride from my hotel to Gard du Nord, there was no security on boarding, it was able to get up and buy a beer whenever I wanted – provided I could dodge the running kid. I was really glad I brought an extra battery for the Bose headphones and had something to look at out the window.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/uniontrade-everyday/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Violent and Beautiful</em> </a>by the Union Trade</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Travel Challenge -- Fitting Two Weeks into One Carry-On</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>The night before I left on my European trip, I tweeted and posted on the TravelCommons Facebook page – “Today\'s travel challenge -- How to pack for 10 days, 3 cities, two business meetings and a week\'s vacation in a single carry-on bag.”</li>\n 	<li>Lori Humm wrote “My number one travel rule: pack light and buy what you need when you get there” while Allan Marko commented “Depends on how often you want to do laundry on vacation”.  Chris Webb tweeted back asking to know how it all came out.</li>\n 	<li>Actually, it wasn’t as tough as I thought it might be.  The challenge was packing for business and for tourism without looking out of place in either.  Lucky for me I was only covering one climate – European spring, and I’d be vacationing among Italians – probably the best dressers in Europe.</li>\n 	<li>My packing strategy always starts with a single color family, and usually that’s black.  Black jacket, olive and tan slacks, an assortment of shirts, a red pattern tie if absolutely necessary and I’m good for a week.</li>\n 	<li>But what about the second week.  When I would do two-week stretches in South Africa, I would pack a week’s worth of clothes, send my shirts to the cleaners on the weekend, and stomp on my understuff and socks while I was in the shower.</li>\n 	<li>For this trip, though, I took a different tack.  I kept the color wheel on black, but left my workout gear at home.  I figured we’d be walking all over Venice, so that would give me enough exercise.  Gym shoes take up a huge amount of space, which I filled with a couple of sweaters and another week of socks and understuff.  With a week’s worth of shirts, but two weeks of undershirts, I figured I could get two days out of each shirt – I didn’t think I’d be sweating too much in London and Paris in March. And most of the extra undershirts and socks were on their last legs.  I left a trail of Jockey t-shirts from London to Paris to Milan, making room for some souvenir Carnivale masks for next year’s Mardi Gras party.</li>\n 	<li>It ended up working well for me.  I didn’t return with one clean piece of clothing, but didn’t have to do any laundry for the two weeks.  I’m not sure I can use the same strategy for next week’s trip to India though.  With a forecast of 90 degrees and 90% humidity, that “no sweat” assumption just doesn’t seem realistic.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #89</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Magnatune</a></li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or MP3 file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/153475331351358\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_89.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #89 -- Trains Over Planes; Fit 2 Weeks in 1 Carry-On','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-89-trains-over-planes-fit-2-weeks-in-1-carry-on','','','2021-09-26 11:42:29','2021-09-26 16:42:29','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=590',0,'post','',0),
(594,1,'2011-04-17 09:24:42','2011-04-17 14:24:42','','Danish Train','Danish Train © Hunter Desportes','inherit','open','open','','olympus-digital-camera','','','2011-04-17 09:24:42','2011-04-17 14:24:42','',590,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/3717874334_4b20cc0037_o1.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(605,1,'2011-05-01 20:17:20','2011-05-02 01:17:20','I \"sprint toured\" <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Frankfurt-am-Main\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/germany/frankfurt-am-main\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\">Frankfurt</a> using Hemispheres Magazine\'s \"One City, Five Hours: Frankfurt\" <a href=\"http://old.hemimag.us/2010/03/01/one-city-five-hours-frankfurt/\">article</a> while on a 6-hour layover between Mumbai and Chicago. I shot this on my iPhone 4 and edited it in iMovie on my MacBook Air while flying from Frankfurt to Chicago.&nbsp;My iPhone video inexperience shows -- I shot the entire thing in portrait mode.\n\n<iframe src=\"https://www.youtube.com/embed/3s4aYmeoS2k\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"></iframe>','Video  – One City, Five Hours: Frankfurt','','publish','closed','closed','','video-2-one-city-five-hours-frankfurt','','','2021-03-28 15:54:14','2021-03-28 20:54:14','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=605',0,'post','',3),
(617,1,'2011-05-12 21:12:36','2011-05-13 02:12:36','[caption id=\"attachment_619\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/3080840638_1e4963b285_z1.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-619\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/3080840638_1e4963b285_z1-300x200.jpg\" alt=\"Woman eating alone\" width=\"300\" height=\"200\" /></a> Eating alone at O\'Brian\'s Deli. © Ron Tamondong / Flickr[/caption]\r\n\r\nDinner time on my last visit to Philadelphia  and I was sitting at the bar of <a href=\"http://www.tintorestaurant.com/menu.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Tinto</a>, a Spanish restaurant in <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Philadelphia\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/pennsylvania/philadelphia\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\">Philadelphia</a>. My dinner was a couple of plates of <a href=\" http://www.spain.info/en_US/reportajes/las_tapas_sabores_de_lujo_para_todos_los_paladares.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">tapas</a> -- one of grilled octopus, another of sautéed wild mushrooms and caramelized shallots. I put in the order for mushrooms and shallots immediately after the couple two stools down got theirs. The smell was phenomenal. I had a couple of good glasses of Spanish red wine and 60-second bursts of conversation with the bartender about her favorite wines and how business was going in given the economy. General chitchat.\r\n\r\nIt was a great meal and a nice way to spend a couple of hours on my own outside of my hotel room, both important things for a frequent business traveler. And it got me to thinking about what makes for a good place for a solo traveler to eat on the road.\r\n\r\nFor many guys, this question doesn\'t take much thought. The sports bar concept might as well have been created for the solo guy traveler.  It has everything a guy needs: a good burger, large glasses of <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Coors Light\" href=\"http://www.coorslight.com\" rel=\"homepage\">Coors Light</a>, and walls of TV screens showing all <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Espn\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">ESPN</a> all the time – ESPN, ESPN-2, <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"ESPN3\" href=\"http://www.espn3.com\" rel=\"homepage\">ESPN-3</a>, ESPN-U, ESPN News…. But, while I like a good burger as much as the next guy (though I’ll chase it with something a bit more interesting than Coors Light), a regular diet of them is an express train to the angioplasty table.\r\n\r\nSo, outside the sports bar genre, what makes for a good dinner place for a solo traveler? Taking “good food” and “cleanliness” as table stakes, there are three things that come to mind:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li><strong>Availability. </strong>Can you get in at a reasonable time? While on the road, I don’t start thinking about dinner until, at the most, a couple of hours before I’m ready to eat.  Any place with a month or even a day waiting list for a seat doesn’t make the cut. I’m usually working all day and have more work to do in the evening, so I have a tight dining window – I’m trying to eat somewhere between 6 and 7pm.  At Tinto in Philly, I walked in – 7pm Thursday night – and was seated right away. In <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"San Francisco\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/san-francisco\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\">San Francisco</a> the week before, I had a 7:30pm reservation at the<a href=\"http://www.slanteddoor.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> Slanted Door</a>, a well-known pan-Asian restaurant, wasn\'t seated until 8:15, didn’t get out until 9:30, and still had documents to review before I could go to bed. It didn’t make for a relaxing meal.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Small plates. </strong>I like variety; I like to try multiple things on a menu. However, a solo diner ordering a standard sized starter and main course will end up with way too much food. So, you either lose out on variety by only ordering one dish, or you feel guilty for leaving behind a bunch of uneaten food. Or, probably most typically, you eat it all anyhow en route to the 20 extra pounds that many frequent travelers find themselves carrying. Small plates – either small servings like tapas or sushi, or the option to scale down an entrée portion – are the way to solve this problem.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Bar seating. </strong>When you’re eating by yourself, nothing puts an exclamation point on it like sitting alone at a table for 2… or 4. You sit there, staring ahead, or perhaps reading, or perhaps playing BrickBreaker on your BlackBerry until your food arrives. Then you wolf it down, because there’s really nothing else to do at the table, and then you pay up and leave. A pretty soulless transaction. Skip the \"table for one\" experience completely. Eating at the bar gives you some shot at human interaction, be it with the bartender or some of the people sitting beside you. The bartender is usually good for 3 or 4 dialog exchanges. And though it’s a bit riskier, there’s always the chance for a bit of a conversation with the other bar patrons. I\'m seeing more restaurants move this bar seating vibe down to table height with communal seating tables – long tables at which they seat multiple parties.  <a href=\"http://thepublicanrestaurant.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Publican</a> and <a href=\"http://www.avecrestaurant.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Avec</a> in Chicago and<a href=\"http://www.clydecommon.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> Clyde Common</a> in Portland are places where I’ve seen this.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\nNow, if restaurants would build their web sites in something other than Flash so that I can read their menus on my iPhone…\r\n','Table for One: Eating Alone on the Road','','publish','closed','closed','','table-for-one-eating-alone-on-the-road','','','2019-01-23 19:47:17','2019-01-24 00:47:17','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=617',0,'post','',1),
(619,1,'2011-05-12 21:09:50','2011-05-13 02:09:50','','3080840638_1e4963b285_z','Eating alone at O\'Brian\'s Deli. © Ron Tamondong / Flickr','inherit','open','open','','3080840638_1e4963b285_z','','','2011-05-12 21:09:50','2011-05-13 02:09:50','',617,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/3080840638_1e4963b285_z1.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(755,1,'2011-05-22 20:36:42','2011-05-23 01:36:42','[caption id=\"attachment_760\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"225\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/IMG_01371-e13062031715791.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-760\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/IMG_01371-e13062031715791-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"Security Sign\" width=\"225\" height=\"300\" /></a> A Polite Intrusion © Mark Peacock[/caption]\n\nLots of business travel this month -- UK, India, Germany, Phoenix, <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"San Francisco\" href=\"http://www.sfgov.org/\" rel=\"homepage\">San Francisco</a>, and Madrid -- so there\'s a lot to talk about. The international travel lets me compare business class seats -- there\'s a wide range of experiences even within the same airline. While in India, a listener asks my advice on adjusting for jetlag on Asian flights. I was surprised at the amount of data my <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"iPhone\" href=\"http://www.apple.com/iphone\" rel=\"homepage\">iPhone</a> consumed while I was in Europe but I finally found the culprit. I found myself much more comfortable traveling in India the second time around. And, walking away from the Google IO conference with a new Samsung Android \"Honeycomb\" tablet, my <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"iPad\" href=\"http://www.apple.com/ipad/\" rel=\"homepage\">iPad</a> fixation starts to loosen. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_90.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the transcript from TravelCommons podcast #90:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>It’s been another full-contact month of travel.  I was out for a 2-week stint through the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"United Kingdom\" href=\"http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=51.5,-0.116666666667&amp;spn=10.0,10.0&amp;q=51.5,-0.116666666667 (United%20Kingdom)&amp;t=h\" rel=\"geolocation\">UK</a>, <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"India\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/India\" rel=\"wikipedia\">India</a>, Germany, then a quick jog out to Phoenix, a week to San Francisco for the big <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Google I/O\" href=\"http://code.google.com/events/io/\" rel=\"homepage\">Google IO conference</a>, and now, just returned from a 3-day trip to <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Madrid\" href=\"http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=40.3833333333,-3.71666666667&amp;spn=0.1,0.1&amp;q=40.3833333333,-3.71666666667 (Madrid)&amp;t=h\" rel=\"geolocation\">Madrid</a></li>\n 	<li>I got lots of comments about the Madrid trip – “Ooh, you so lucky”, “I’d love to go to Spain” – most of these coming from my wife.  Unfortunately, my Madrid trip was just another business trip sandwiched between two 8-hour plane flights.  Left at 4:30pm Tuesday, arrived 6:30am Weds, cabbed to the hotel, showered, changed, caught up on e-mail, met the rest of the team in the lobby, spent the afternoon in a customer conference room, went back to the hotel room to catch up on e-mail and conference calls, went out to dinner with the customer, back to the hotel room for more e-mail and calls, sleep 5 hours, back in the conference room for a full day of meetings, dinner, e-mail, conference calls, 4 hours of sleep, cab back to the airport Friday morning to catch a 9:30am flight home.</li>\n 	<li>Most of my time in Madrid was spent in a conference room without windows – so it could’ve been anywhere, really. The one bit of Madrid that I had was on our last night where, instead of going to a restaurant for dinner, we did a bit of a bar crawl on the street behind our hotel – a glass of rioja, some tapas, then onto the next bar.  It was good fun, but I was out and about more in San Francisco the week before.</li>\n 	<li>I had kinda the opposite in <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Mumbai\" href=\"http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=18.975,72.8258333333&amp;spn=0.1,0.1&amp;q=18.975,72.8258333333 (Mumbai)&amp;t=h\" rel=\"geolocation\">Mumbai</a>, where I experienced perhaps more of the local culture than I wanted. My last day was in <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Pune\" href=\"http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=18.4736111111,73.7977777778&amp;spn=0.1,0.1&amp;q=18.4736111111,73.7977777778 (Pune)&amp;t=h\" rel=\"geolocation\">Pune</a> and then I was to be driven to <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chhatrapati_Shivaji_International_Airport\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Mumbai Airport</a> – a 3-4 hour drive depending on Pune and Mumbai traffic. No one told me the length of the drive until after I was India and couldn’t change my flight. My colleague’s flight left at 10pm, mine left at 2:45am. I figured I hop the same car and just hang out and nap at the airport.  The drive between Pune and Mumbai was great – cruised down a 6 lane divided toll road across some mountain range.</li>\n 	<li>Walking into the terminal, the security guard stopped me, saying that I couldn’t get in until 4 hours before departure time.  So what to do – the cab driver is gone, and I’d purposely left myself with only a handful of rupees. I wandered around in front of the terminals, watching travelers pay their taxis, say “good-bye” and “I’m back” to their families. I played a bit of coliform roulette grabbing a bite from a food stall. Then, in my wanderings, I found the waiting area.  For 60 rupees – about a buck and a half – I could sit in air conditioning, ride the airport’s free WiFi, and use a men’s room – a bargain at twice the price.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Flight</em> by <a href=\"http://www.freshmusic.co.za/\">Ga\'inja</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Tony White dropped me a very germane question while I was in India\n<ul>\n 	<li>“I enjoy listening to your show every month and I put the knowledge to good use.  I have a question regarding jetlag and long flights to Asia and or Australia from the US.  I am traveling on my first business trip to Asia and Australia in July.  I have never traveled to Asia for business only for pleasure.  How do I prepare for traveling to Asia regarding the jetlag and time change?  My first meeting will be in less than 24 hours of arriving to Asia.  Do you have a routine to prepare for those long trips?  Do you sleep on the flight or do you stay awake to try to adjust to the time change?</li>\n 	<li>“Thank you for the podcast and taking the time to ask these questions.”</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>I\'ve always time zone adjustments to Europe and Asia differently.  Going to Europe, I set my watch on European time the minute I sit down on the plane and then force myself onto that schedule -- eating quickly and then putting on the eye shades and <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Bose headphones\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bose_headphones\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Bose headphones</a> for sleep.</li>\n 	<li>Asia, though, is a whole different matter.  With the long flight times (14-15 hrs between ORD and India or China) and 10-12 hr time differences, I honestly don\'t even try to figure out what the destination time is.  I just go with the flow -- eat, sleep, read, repeat until landing.  I find that the flights are long enough to get enough sleep that I\'m rested enough when I hit the ground to work right away.  On this last trip to India, I hit Bangalore at midnight and was fine for an 8am breakfast meeting the next morning.</li>\n 	<li>Everyone reacts differently.  I find that it\'s easy for me to push through -- perhaps taking a 1-hr nap before I go out to dinner the first day.  I do usually sleep poorly for the first 3 nights, but then am fine afterwards.  Everybody’s body clock is different, though. If there’s one thing I’ve learned over years of travel – you can only push your body just so far. Sleep is probably the most underrated and willingly ignored health tonic in existence.</li>\n 	<li>And speaking of sleeping in flight, my recent travels have given me experience a number of business class seats over the past few months. Haven’t done any of the top carriers – like Singapore Air – so it haven’t had a life changing experience…  It’s been more for a search for 5 hours of sleep before the next meeting. The difference, though, has been surprising. The best seat on a United flight to London – 22-inch flat screen, complete lay-flat seat,….  The United flight to Frankfurt was a big step down – little 5-inch screen, almost flat seat.  Though it may not seem much, there’s a big difference between 170-degree and 180-degree seat recline. Your bed is 180.  At 170, you have your knees locked trying not to slip down in the seat. Not the ideal sleeping position.</li>\n 	<li>The USAir seat from Charlotte to Madrid is probably at the bottom.  A narrow seat, no screen – instead they had some metal prongs that held a 7-inch Archos table that the flight attendant said was always wonky – volume magically went up and down, music would play while watching a movie, no real-time flight map to show position or ETA….  And the food and wine were marginal at best. Yes, it was still better than coach but that comparison isn’t going to get me on another USAir overseas flight.</li>\n 	<li>While in the UK, I was amazed at the amount of cellular data my iPhone consumed.  I had remembered to add the 100 MB international data option to my AT&amp;T plan before I left.  I then reset the usage counters before I hit Birmingham so I didn’t overshoot. I was OK in Birmingham, but in London, I say I was consuming 20 MB in a day!  I wasn’t downloading any music or podcasts over 3G – I saved that for the hotel WiFi.  I started paying a bit more attention to my usage.</li>\n 	<li>The difference between Birmingham and London was that I was walking to all my London appointments and was using Google Maps to find my way around town. Resetting the usage counters again, I’d see 5 MB every time I started up Maps. I needed to find some paper maps or figure out another way to work this. I “tuned” my usage a bit – opening up Google Maps in the morning while on the hotel WiFi and then scrolling to all the places I’d visit that day, trying to load up as much of the map data as I could in memory.  I worked pretty well and kept me from blowing past the 100 MB line.  But at $200 for the 100 MB of data, I think before my summer vacation driving through Scotland and the Lake District, I’ll blow the $50 on a GPS app that comes complete with its own maps – pre-downloaded.</li>\n 	<li>I do like the way that all my electronics charge up at warp speed when I’m overseas. Most electronics chargers will handle 110 and 220 volts – the only exception I’ve found is my kids’ Nintendo DS charger – so I don’t bring a voltage converter when I travel, just a plug adapter.  I carry a small power strip, use one plug adapter, and then plug my array of charging devices into the strip. And plugged into a 220v socket, it’s a quick charge.</li>\n 	<li>In<a title=\"Podcast #88 — New Travel Goodies; Losing Elite Status\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/03/13/podcast-88-new-travel-goodies-losing-status/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> episode #88</a>, I interviewed Chris Truelove at the 2011 Travel Goods show about his company Back2You.com, which helps travelers retrieve lost items.  Hopping in a taxi on the way to London Docklands airport, the driver gave me an AT&amp;T phone that an earlier fare had left behind.  He was trying to figure out how to find the owner’s information so he could return it. I wasn’t familiar with the model, but it wasn’t locked, so I started poking around. Calling the phone wouldn’t help – it would only ring in my hand – so I flipped through the contact list.  No ICE entry – “in case of emergency” – but I did find Mom’s Cell and Dad’s Cell, so I tried to call them – international calls were blocked; not surprised. Then tried to text them – those bounced too. I played around for 20 minutes, but no luck. Now, if it had one of Chris’s bag tags, I would’ve been able to send a quick text and his company would’ve sent a text to the owner. Glad I have one of his stickers on my iPhone and cameras.</li>\n 	<li>It was my first time flying out of London Docklands – so much more convenient than Heathrow.  I was staying near Tower Bridge and flying off to Frankfurt.  It was a 20-minute cab ride – as opposed to at least double that to Heathrow, or taking a cab to Paddington Station to then catch the Heathrow Express.  No check-in line, short security line, free WiFi, and generally just a more relaxed atmosphere than the Heathrow insanity.  It is a small airport, though. I was on a Lufthansa A319, which looked like the biggest plane they were flying out of there.  Felt like the pilot has us backed up to the end of the runway, then he locked the brakes, revved the engines ‘til the plane started to shake, popped the brake release, and off we roared like one of the Bonneville Salt Flats rocket cars.  He rotated up right at the last moment, it seemed, going nose up just as the Thames appeared beneath us.  Definitely woke me up. Recommended over Heathrow if you’re hopping over to the continent.</li>\n 	<li>And finally, if you haven’t seen it already, head over to the TravelCommons website or the FaceBook page and look for <a title=\"Video #2 – One City, Five Hours: Frankfurt\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/05/01/video-2-%e2%80%93-one-city-five-hours-frankfurt/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Video #2</a> – One City, Five Hours: Frankfurt. I had a 6-hr layover in Frankfurt on my way home from India. Rather than sit in the Lufthansa club all day, I ran through the 5-hour tourist sprint <a href=\"http://www.hemispheresmagazine.com/2010/03/01/one-city-five-hours-frankfurt/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">itinerary</a> from United Airlines\' Hemispheres in-flight magazine. The prior weekend – in Kerala on the southwest coast of India – one of my hosts showed us how he was taking and editing videos all on his iPhone 4. Which led me to videoing the Frankfurt sprint on my iPhone 4. I then pulled over to my MacBook Air and edited on the flight to ORD. It’s no where near as polished as my Vietnam video, but it’s a fun piece all the same.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a question, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is <a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a> -- use the Voice Memo app on your iPhone or something like Virtual Recorder on your Android phone to record and send in an audio comment – or iMovie if you want to send in some video; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at travelcommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Rocky Road</em> by <a href=\"http://www.kcentricity.com/\">KCentric</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>More Comfortable Traveling in India</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>At the end of April, I did my second annual trip to India.  I changed some things up – rather than doing the 15-hour non-stop from ORD to Delhi, I stopped off in Europe – for meeting in the UK on the way over; for the extended layover that I videoed on the way back.  This meant that I could skip Delhi and stay in the southern part of India – Bangalore, Chennai, Kerala. That made things a bit more temperate – 80’s instead of the 100’s in Delhi that I got to experience my last trip.</li>\n 	<li>And I found myself a bit more comfortable with India. Until my last day, driving through Mumbai to the airport, I didn’t see the abject poverty that I saw last year in Delhi.  I didn’t feel the need to cling to my “travel bubble” quite as tightly as I did on my first visit, which I talked about in <a title=\"Podcast #83 – Business Travel in India; iPad vs. Netbook\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2010/05/28/podcast-83-business-travel-in-india-ipad-vs-netbook/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">episode #83</a>.</li>\n 	<li>It started with some of the planning – choosing and booking my own hotels in Bangalore, arranging many of my internal flights. Seems petty, but on my first visit, my vendors organized everything.  I just arrived and was taken from place to place.  Now, planning, doing some research, and then making sure I had ways to get from Point A to Point B made me a more active participant in this trip – not just a passenger.</li>\n 	<li>I was also ready for some of the uniquely Indian travel rituals.  Like the <a href=\"http://www.indiatravelite.com/feature/indiancustoms.htm\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">welcoming ceremony</a> at each hotel – usually a combination of arati – an oil candle circled in front of you followed by a tilak – the red thumb mark applied between your eyebrows.</li>\n 	<li>And like Indian security at airports. At Cochin airport in Kerala, we started counting the security checks.  The first one was just to get into the airport – either a printed itinerary or a printed boarding pass (I never saw anyone use a boarding pass on a smart phone) and ID. Learning my lesson from last year, I printed out all my itineraries <em>before</em> I left for India. Now through the front door, we walked 200 ft and hit another security check – looking at the same papers – before we could get to the check-in desk. We then took an immediate left and put our bags on the X-ray machine.  After coming out the other end, a guy taped the suitcase’s zipper tabs together and sent us off another couple hundred feet to the check-in desk.</li>\n 	<li>Checked in, we head over to the security line. Our boarding passes are checked going into the queue.  We head to the Men’s security line.  The Ladies’ line is off to the side with a curtained pat-down area.  We put our carry-on bags through the X-ray machine, but get to keep our shoes on.  We queue up in front of the metal detector.  We walk through and then onto a wooden step where a security guard wands and pats us down. It’s the same whether you set off the metal detector or not. I’m not quite sure why they have the metal detector there other than to help form the line.</li>\n 	<li>After the patdown, the guard stamps my boarding pass, proving that I’ve been patted down. I pick up my carry-on. It too has been stamped – on a blank address tag – to prove that it’s been x-rayed.</li>\n 	<li>At boarding, the gate agent scans our boarding pass while another security guard looks for the security stamps on the boarding passes and the carry-on luggage tag.  No stamps and back you go.  We get on a bus that travels all of 500 ft and drops us at our plane. Another security guard checks our boarding pass and then we’re allowed to climb the steps and enter the plane – after 7 separate security checks. I had 5 flights in 7 days I was in India. I got pretty comfortable with the drill.</li>\n 	<li>But this trip, I was a lot more comfortable just walking down the street. Maybe because in Cochin in Kerala, there are enough European tourists that I’m not the only white guy. But then, walking through a huge crowd after a IPL cricket match on Monday night in Chennai, I wasn’t uncomfortable – or any more so than walking through the crowd after, say, a University of Michigan football game.</li>\n 	<li>A little more familiar, a little less alien.  I wasn’t clinging to my travel bubble quite so hard.  And so when I hit Mumbai airport and couldn’t get inside for 4 hours, it didn’t make me uncomfortable.  Annoyed, yes, but not uncomfortable.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Wilderness Dance</em> by <a href=\"http://www.snarkyavenger.com/\">DJ Squirrel King</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Travel Tech -- Tipping Towards Android?</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Me and 5,000 other Google IO attendees walked out of Moscone West in SF with some great schwag, specifically a pre-release version of Samsung’s 10.1-inch Galaxy Android tablet.  It’s a nice piece of work – slightly longer, slightly narrower, and slightly lighter than the iPad2.  No neat Smart Cover, but the screen is nice. The setup was easy – just logged in with my Gmail ID and it automatically loaded all the apps I have on my Droid2.  I was carrying it around with me all conference – as was everyone else – and found that I really liked it.</li>\n 	<li>There are definitely a few rough edges that you’d expect with a pre-release model – like plugging in the power cord makes it think you’re trying to sync it with your PC and so doesn’t appear to let you use it and charge it at the same time – but the tablet version of Android – version 3.0 or “Honeycomb” if you’re into Google’s dessert naming scheme – is pretty stable.  The Android browser locked up and crashed a couple of times on me – but then again, so does my iPad Safari browser.  And the Android browser runs Flash so I can use it on all the restaurant web sites that won’t display on the iPad.  By the way, I agree that they should all swap out Flash for HTML 5, but until then, I would still like to be able to read their menus.  Can’t do it on the iPad.</li>\n 	<li>But it makes no sense to carry around two tablets. Indeed, people keep asking me why I carry a MacBook Air <em>and</em> an iPad.  So right now, I’m traveling with the iPad2 – more out of habit than anything else – but find myself using the Samsung Android tablet around the house more and more.</li>\n 	<li>The bonus prize from the conference – I’d call it the <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagniappe\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">lagniappe</a> if Google IO was held in New Orleans – was the Samsung Verizon 4G hot spot they tossed in because the Samsungs they gave us are WiFi only tablets.  I had been playing around with it in SF, but not so much because the city is blanketed in WiFi. However, sitting on the plane this week in Charlotte, waiting to head out to Madrid – long story about why I took this connection, or actually short, it saved me $3,000.  Anyhow, sitting on kind of a beat-up US Air 767 trying to pull the last bit of e-mail onto my iPad before take off and I was getting nothing, in spite of seeing a full house of 3G bars.  On a whim, I pulled out the Samsung hot spot out of my bag, fired it up and it connected immediately.  On another whim, I fired up the Speedtest.net app.  I got 13 Mbps download and 5 Mbps upload speeds – phenomenal.  Trying it in just now in the TravelCommons studios outside Chicago, I got 7.4 down and 7 up – compared to 2.7 down and 0.9 up on AT&amp;T 3G.</li>\n 	<li>Not to pile onto AT&amp;T – ‘cause that’s a bit of a fish-in-a-barrel shooting exercise – but if the next iPhone iteration doesn’t have 4G, now that might be enough to push me to hug the little green guy.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #90</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from the <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/\">Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_90.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #90 -- More Comfortable Traveling in India; Tipping Towards Android?','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-90-more-comfortable-traveling-in-india-tipping-towards-android','','','2021-09-26 11:44:29','2021-09-26 16:44:29','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=755',0,'post','',4),
(760,1,'2011-05-23 21:09:50','2011-05-24 02:09:50','','IMG_0137','A Polite Intrusion © Mark Peacock','inherit','open','open','','img_01371','','','2011-05-23 21:09:50','2011-05-24 02:09:50','',755,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/IMG_01371-e13062031715791.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(768,1,'2011-06-21 04:50:22','2011-06-21 09:50:22','An Albatros B-type after coming to grief during landing. These machines were primarily used for training and reconnaissance. Before the war, this type broke various distance and endurance records.','Bad Landing','Bad Landing. © drakegoodman / Flickr','inherit','open','open','','3618600334_9b6d7c21a2','','','2011-06-21 04:50:22','2011-06-21 09:50:22','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/3618600334_9b6d7c21a21.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(769,1,'2011-06-21 04:55:55','2011-06-21 09:55:55','The Curtiss Wright R-2800-34 Double Wasp\'s 18 cylinders are highly stressed. They live in an environment, where their outside basks in air at -40C, and inside they handle hot and flaming gases. Cylinder heads respond by cracking. Other parts break off, like exhaust valves within a cylinder which are squeezed between the piston and the head. Changing a broken cylinder head above your head are tedious affairs involving stripping off the air baffles, ignition components, fuel injection lines, exhaust stacks and manifold intake pipes.','1366292835_a40fb811f8_z','Let\'s seeeeeeeeeeeeeee .... © Stefan Sonntag / Flickr','inherit','open','open','','1366292835_a40fb811f8_z','','','2011-06-21 04:55:55','2011-06-21 09:55:55','',770,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/1366292835_a40fb811f8_z1.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(770,1,'2011-06-18 17:14:30','2011-06-18 22:14:30','[caption id=\"attachment_769\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/1366292835_a40fb811f8_z1.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-769\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/1366292835_a40fb811f8_z1-300x197.jpg\" alt=\"Let\'s seeeeeeeeeeeeeee ....\" width=\"300\" height=\"197\" /></a> Let\'s seeeeeeeeeeeeeee .... © Stefan Sonntag / Flickr[/caption]\r\n\r\nWas off the road for two weeks for my kids\' graduations, but now back in the security lines with a mix of domestic and international travel. Listener suggestions include dining at local music clubs to avoid the \"eating alone\" stigma, and using mini-USB hubs to power your gadgets without carrying a basketful of international plug adapters. I\'m impressed by how a couple of <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Transportation Security Administration\" href=\"http://www.tsa.gov\" rel=\"homepage\">TSA</a> screeners deal with a silly carry-on. I\'m not impressed though by how American Airline\'s old MD-80\'s keep delaying my travels. And, after a lousy Avis rental return experience, an employee reaches out and wins me back. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_91.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_91.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript from TravelCommons podcast #91:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>I’ve actually been in town more than not since the last <a title=\"Podcast #90 — More Comfortable Traveling in India; Tipping Towards Android?\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/05/22/podcast-90-more-comfortable-traveling-in-india-tipping-towards-android/\" target=\"_blank\">episode</a>.  Both my kids had graduations – my son from high school, my daughter from middle school. I decided it would be a good thing to be around for those.</li>\r\n	<li>Of course, nothing comes for free, so my packed travel schedule in May was “paying forward” for two weeks off the road in at the beginning of June.  And then I was back at it last week – back down to Phoenix for triple digit highs, 105° F every afternoon. Yes, I know that it’s a dry heat, but then again, so is an oven.  Then out to London for a customer meeting – out tomorrow night -- Sunday night (I hate flying out Sunday nights – blows your entire weekend), back Tuesday afternoon – but then instead of heading home, I’ll pick up a flight down to Austin, TX for the last two days of a travel technology conference.</li>\r\n	<li>Then home, and then back to the UK -- but this time combining leisure and business.  We fly from Chicago to Manchester – on an American 757 which I have to say I’m dreading – head over for an afternoon in my dad’s hometown Southport – kinda halfway between Liverpool and Blackpool on the Irish Sea – then up to the Lake District for a couple of days of hiking, drive around the west coast of Scotland for a couple of days, head over to Edinburgh for a couple of days, take the train down to London, and then I’ll work in London for a few days while the rest of the family sightsees around. Looking at my <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"TripIt\" href=\"http://www.tripit.com\" rel=\"homepage\">TripIt</a> page, I have no other travel planned – an oversight that I’m sure will be fixed soon.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Robert Fenerty left a good suggestion at the TravelCommons website on the “Table for One; Eating Alone” <a title=\"Table for One: Eating Alone on the Road\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/05/12/table-for-one-eating-alone-on-the-road/\" target=\"_blank\">blog post </a>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>“When I\'m on the road, I seek out live jazz. I can sit at a table for 90 minutes, order food and wine, and relax. In Chicago, I visit Bandera, where the servers don\'t hover and the private little booths reduce the \"look at that guy\" factor to a bare minimum. In Europe, jazz is easier to find than in most U.S. cities, but if you find the hip part of town and you can usually find jazz. But don\'t ask the concierge at your hotel, because they don\'t know what jazz is.”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>That’s a great suggestion – find a live music club, linger, and enjoy yourself.  Because, really, how often do you get to do that at home – especially if you have kids.  I always enjoy taking out-of-town guests to blues clubs in Chicago.  My favorite is B.L.U.E.S – a small place in the North Side Lincoln Park neighborhood.  On the weekends, the place is packed, but during the weekdays, you can get a seat at the bar, comfortably drink a couple of beers – sometimes with the band during breaks– and enjoy the music without the scrum of the weekend crowds.  And I guess that that’s the other great thing about Robert’s suggestion – you’re going during the week – no crowds to get between you and appreciating the music.  Great idea!</li>\r\n	<li>Steve Soechtig, a long time TravelCommons listener posted this suggestion after last month’s <a title=\"Podcast #90 — More Comfortable Traveling in India; Tipping Towards Android?\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/05/22/podcast-90-more-comfortable-traveling-in-india-tipping-towards-android/\" target=\"_blank\">epsisode </a>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>“Loved the post and particularly the idea of bringing a small power strip plus a voltage adapter for devices.  That\'s clever.</li>\r\n	<li>I\'d throw one more thing out there, as a benefit to Apple.  The interchangeable external power adapter allows me to plug my Macbook into EU, UK, and AUS power outlets (so far), and I have a micro 4 port USB adapter that I plug into the laptop - effectively giving me charging for the mobile, the iPad (yes, I still travel with both), and the headset.  Just a thought, as the USB adapter is probably 4\" x 1/2\" by 1/4\".  Very small.</li>\r\n	<li>Only other comment I\'d make is \"<a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"US Airways\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_Airways\" rel=\"wikipedia\">USAir</a>?  Are you crazy???\"</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>Thanks Steve.  I like the idea of the 4-port USB hub for charging. I’ve been looking for a power strip that has both outlets and USB ports, but have yet to find one. Your solution sounds more compact than mine. The only reason I might stay with the power strip is that 220v play – everything just seems to charge so much faster when you move from 110v here in the US to 220v overseas.</li>\r\n	<li>And US Air? Momentary lapse of judgment.  Will never happen again. Sympathies to listeners in Charlotte, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, and Phoenix.</li>\r\n	<li>And, on a complete sidetrack, speaking of power strips, I have to tell you that I was hugely impressed during last month’s Google IO conference in San Francisco’s Moscone Center -- every 3<sup>rd</sup> seat had a power strip zip-tied to the chair leg.  Talk about customer service; talk about catering to your audience’s most primal needs…</li>\r\n	<li>However, I do think that I’ve just about hit my limit on electronic gadgets. On my trip to Phoenix this past week, I brought all my portable gadgets – my iPhone 4, my iPad 2, my Motorola Droid 2, and my new Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 running Android 3.1 – because I needed to load our new mobile apps for booth demos at the trade show.  Along with my MacBook Air and my Motorola wireless Bluetooth headphones for my morning workouts and my Jabra Bluetooth headset, I felt like spent all my time charging devices.  The power strip in my office was completely full all the time, as was my travel power strip and most of the outlets in my hotel room.  I kinda felt like the gadget version of Mr Creosote from <em><a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Monty Python\'s The Meaning of Life\" href=\"http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/monty_pythons_the_meaning_of_life\" rel=\"rottentomatoes\">Monty Python and the Meaning of Life</a></em> – one more gadget, just a small wafer of a device, and I’d take down the power grid for all of Arizona</li>\r\n	<li>OK, now God only knows that there’s no love lost between me and the TSA, and I make no bones about it on this podcast.  And, for their part, the TSA usually does a great job of providing fodder for my mill. Last month’s YouTube video of a TSA agent patting down an infant was only the latest of a long line of headshakers.</li>\r\n	<li>However, to give credit where credit is due, many TSA agents are thoughtful, pragmatic people, not on a power trip, and just trying to get to the other end of the day while keeping some sort of grip on their job, their pay check, and their sanity.  I saw a couple of these sorts of guys in ORD earlier this week when having to make an overnight trip to Dallas.</li>\r\n	<li>The X-Ray reader saw something odd, so one of the screeners did a manual search of this one guy’s bag. The screener pulls out an 18 inch long, 1 inch diameter metal rod wrapped in brown paper. The screener says “I’m sorry but you can’t carry this on. It can be used as a weapon”, and then swings it once, as if to punctuate what is a completely obvious point to the rest of us in line. Remember, we’re in the status line – the frequent traveler line. The guy looks surprised. The rest of us looking at him like “Really? This think is 100x more dangerous than a police baton. What the hell were you thinking trying to check this on?”</li>\r\n	<li>The screener calmly and professionally explained that he could either go back out and check his bag or leave his 5-lb metal baton behind.  He left it behind. Two of the screeners swung it a couple of time and said the same thing those of us in line did –“You really thought you could carry that on? Really?”</li>\r\n	<li>Reminds me of the Oklahoma man arrested at ORD for trying to carry a loaded gun. Said he thought he needed it for self-defense in Chicago. Again, really? Reading stories like these reminds me to be a bit more patient with the TSA guy at the front telling/yelling at everyone to empty their pockets before going through the metal detector. In spite of 10 years of going through this drill, there are still clueless idiots out there who either don’t think the rules apply to them – or just don’t think – period.</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a question, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is <a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a> -- use the Voice Memo app on your iPhone or something like Virtual Recorder on your Android phone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at travelcommons.com.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Can\'t Patch Planes Forever</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>In the last <a title=\"Podcast #90 — More Comfortable Traveling in India; Tipping Towards Android?\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/05/22/podcast-90-more-comfortable-traveling-in-india-tipping-towards-android/\" target=\"_blank\">episode</a>, I talked about the differences in the business class experience between airlines, that the commodity view of air travel – a seat on one airline flying from Point A to Point B is the same, is interchangeable with any other airline flying that route – is just wrong. There are real differences between airline services – the question is how much you’re willing to pay.</li>\r\n	<li>While taxiing out of Madrid last month, I saw three Ryanair planes at adjacent gates. Ryanair always makes me shake my head. Who places such a low value on their time and general well-being that they’re willing to put up with an airline that makes it clear they think very little of their customers? Spirit Airlines in the US strikes me the same way – we’ll give you lower prices, but you’ll pay for it – financially and psychically -- in so many other ways. Obviously a lot of people are willing to accept a lot for a low-price ticket – or a lot of people don’t know how to calculate the full cost of their experience.</li>\r\n	<li>Taking yet another maintenance delay on an American Airlines MD-80 last month drove this point home to me again.  5-7 years ago, when many of the US airlines were declaring bankruptcy to clean up their balance sheets – United, Continental, Northwest – American was proud that it stayed out of Chapter 11 and didn’t wipe out its stockholders – many of which were, of course, the executive management team. There was a price for that, though.  To conserve cash, they delayed buying new planes – a new Boeing 737 can cost $50-70 million depending on your negotiating skills. But today, the airline is still flying planes from the mid to late-80’s – when I first started flying American. When you’re boarding one of those MD-80’s, look on the left-hand side of the door opening. There’s a small metal plate – on it is stamped the date the plane was manufactured.  I look at it every time. I see lots of 1988s, ‘89’s, ‘92’s and nothing much after that.</li>\r\n	<li>So here we are in 2011 – is it any wonder I’m seeing a lot of maintenance delays? Flipping through my calendar, 75% of my recent flights on American MD-80’s have been delayed.  Flights on their new 737-800’s have been fine; the record on the MD-80’s has been horrid.  Last month’s flight from ORD to Ft Myers, FL is a typical example.  They board the plane. Departure time approaches and it’s eerily quiet – none of the “please take your seats, we need to leave” hectoring from the flight attendants. Then the captain keys his mike. I know what he’s going to say before he says it – “We saw something on the pre-flight walkaround and are having maintenance come out to look at it.”  This is an instant 30-minute delay, probably longer, with a 50% chance of them taking the plane out of service.</li>\r\n	<li>Now mind you, this was a 7:25am flight; the plane had been sitting at the gate for a while – it didn’t just arrive – so why is maintenance only just coming out <em>now</em>, at <em>departure time</em>?  And why didn’t someone do a walkaround earlier?  With these old MD-80’s, you’d think you’d want to get a jump on it.</li>\r\n	<li>This time, the delay was an hour and 15 minutes, which is right at about the average I’ve been experiencing.  Some have been shorter – when they just need to “re-boot” the plane – and some have been longer – when they need to go back to the hanger and find another plane.  But this flight was a bit of a tipping point for me – after this flight, I started paying attention to equipment on American flights.  Every American MD-80 flight I looked at, I added an hour to the flight time.  If American isn’t going to do something to about their MD-80 delays – like spend more on preventative maintenance – then I’ll do something myself, like manually adjusting their flight times to factor in expected maintenance delays.</li>\r\n	<li>Doing this, the American MD-80 flights start to look like connecting flights – they take a lot longer than competitors’ flights and there’s more risk – cancellations from mechanicals look the same as missing a connection. As I’ve said in past episodes, I’ve done some rough calculus on the value of my time and I’m willing to pay $200 more for a direct flight to avoid the risk of missing a connection. I’m now at the same place with American MD-80 flights – it makes sense to pay $200 more for a flight that I have more confidence will get me to where I need to be on time.  Indeed, I did just this when booking next week’s trip to Austin, TX.  I paid $150 more to fly back to Chicago on United rather than an American MD-80.</li>\r\n	<li>Now I’m not arguing about the need to fix planes before flying.  Like every other passenger, I want to get to my destination safely.  But I also want to get there <em>on time</em>.  I do <em>a lot</em> of flying.  The cumulative amount of time spent waiting for American to fix their old planes – I’ll never get that time back.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Saving Customers With A Personal Touch</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>On my prior trip to Phoenix – in May, when the highs were only 90° F – I had a lousy rental return experience with Avis. Parking the car in the return lot, I counted 20 people waiting to be checked in – and 2 Avis check-in people.  I didn\'t have that much time to wait – especially with how far away PHX put the consolidated car rental facility -- so I left the keys in the car and headed for the bus.  I like the way Avis immediately sends an electronic receipt, so I knew I wasn’t missing much except the wait.  While in the terminal wolfing down a salad before my flight, the electronic receipt hit my iPhone. I quickly glanced at it, and then looked at it much harder. The Avis employee who checked in my rental marked the fuel as empty even though I filled it up on my way to the airport, leaving the fuel gauge solidly on F.  I immediately called the number on the receipt and was routed to some customer service agent who asked me to fax the gas pump receipt.  Tough to do in PHX Terminal 3, so I told him that I would have it done the following Monday.  Time passed and I heard nothing from Avis.</li>\r\n	<li>Except an e-mail asking me to click through to a survey about my last rental. How timely. I ignore a lot of these requests – they usually ask way too many questions – but this one, I was more than willing to invest some time.  As you might guess, my scores tended to the low side.  Asked for specifics, I wrote that there was an empty Coke can in the car when I picked it up and that they had charged me to refill a completely full gas tank.</li>\r\n	<li>I have to tell you that I was surprised when, a couple weeks later, I received an e-mail from Michael Wu, production manager for Avis at PHX.  It was a very nice personal note – not some rote thing – thanking me for filling out the survey.  He said –\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>“I sincerely apologize that the inside of the vehicle being dirty with a coke soda can in the back seat and that this was left unnoticed and was not clean correctly before your rental. I will be following this matter up with the agent who cleaned the vehicle and the driver that is responsible for parking the vehicle on the readyline. I also want to apologize for the vehicles and not living up to your expectations.”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>OK, appreciate that, I wrote him in a reply, “but have to tell you that the empty Coke can in the back seat wasn\'t the worst part of my rental experience.  It was the car return.”  And then I went on to describe the incorrect fuel charge and lack of any remedial action.  “The result,” I ended my note with, “is that Avis made an unearned $12.99 on this rental, but has lost my business going forward.  I\'m currently in SW Florida driving a Hertz rental car, and will be back in Phoenix in mid-June and have reserved a Hertz car for that trip rather than an Avis car.”</li>\r\n	<li>I admit that it felt good to send that note to a real person, not just in a “Do you have anything else to tell us” comment box on a web survey. Mr Wu didn’t let me down.  Two days later, he came back with a follow-up\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>“I’m truly sorry that you were put into such a bad situation and went through all the trouble trying to get this resolved, without any resolution or follow up.</li>\r\n	<li>“I will personally adjust the fuel charge and a little extra for all the inconvenience. I will also forward this to proper management so that they are aware about issues in returns and the follow up.</li>\r\n	<li>I will also like to extend to you, a personal offer for the next time you happen to rent from Avis. Just need you to e-mail me your reservation number for Avis and I’ll personally make sure your vehicle is clean (coke can free) and ready for you. I will also add a free upgrade and money off coupons for all your trouble.</li>\r\n	<li>Once again I sincerely apologize and hopeful for the opportunity to better serve your car rental need in the near future.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>And the following week, the credit showed up on my Amex.  Now I <em>have</em> to rent from Avis the next time I’m in PHX. Mr Wu goes out of his way to fix the problem, follows up twice, and offers to take care of my next rental personally.</li>\r\n	<li>I’ve always said that, at its core, the travel experience is a person-to-person one. No matter how much cost-cutting technology companies put in the middle – kiosks, mobile check-ins – the moments we remember are how we’re treated by other people.  A flight attendant with a snarky retort to your question; a gate agent who went out of her way to re-book you off a cancelled flight – these are what we remember. And so I have to rent my next car not from Mr Wu – who just happens to work for Avis.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917626811141.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #91</li>\r\n	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from me -- an the GarageBand app on my iPad2</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_91.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #91 -- Can\'t Patch Planes Forever; Saving Customers With A Personal Touch','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-91-cant-patch-planes-forever-saving-customers-with-a-personal-touch','','','2017-11-20 22:37:22','2017-11-21 03:37:22','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=770',0,'post','',3),
(785,1,'2011-08-05 15:06:33','2011-08-05 20:06:33','[caption id=\"attachment_789\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"250\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/3300827223_3bea6ba1ff1.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-789 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/3300827223_3bea6ba1ff1-250x300.jpg\" alt=\"Train Crash at Montparnasse 1895\" width=\"250\" height=\"300\"></a> Train Crash at Montparnasse 1895[/caption]\n\nInto the summer travel rhythm with a mix of vacation and business travel. Using an Apple iPad 2 and Samsung\'s new Galaxy Tab 10.1 Android tablet during this mix gave me enough real world experience to make some recommendations. A couple of recent web links describe this podcast as \"not as upbeat as others\" which is true, but because it focuses on traveling, not destinations. Perhaps this non-chipper attitude is partially explained by a recent study placing 4 US airline companies in the top 8 most hated companies in America. And a listener suggests ways to reduce roaming voice and data costs. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_92.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n<hr>\n\nHere are the transcript from TravelCommons podcast #92:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Travel since the last podcast has been pretty evenly split between personal and business travel.&nbsp; First couple of weeks was summer vacation in the UK -- the <a title=\"Lake District\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_District\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Lake District</a>, Scotland, and a couple of days in London.&nbsp; Had phenomenal weather the whole time we were there -- one afternoon of rain, and the rest of the time was warm and sunny.&nbsp; Almost too warm for the clothes we packed. And everyone was amazed.&nbsp; All the bed &amp; breakfast owners were marveling at the weather. “It’s luvly,” said our landlady in Edinburgh, “Last week it was hailing”. Lucky us because we certainly didn’t pack for that.</li>\n 	<li>Just to make sure I didn\'t forget we were on vacation, we stayed at bed &amp; breakfasts the whole time -- until we hit London, when I made the reservations. Actually, when I think about it, it’s not <em>all</em> that different from the service I get in the concierge lounges at big hotels. Breakfast comes with the room -- though the full cooked breakfast, complete with black puddling in England and haggis in Scotland, was a bit heartier than the continental breakfasts I normally get in concierge lounges.&nbsp; And there’s a bit of nice chit-chat when we walk in, though the B&amp;B owners are typically a bit older/more <em>seasoned</em> that the typical lounge staff.&nbsp; The main differences -- most hotels I stay in don’t have dogs living there, and they prefer credit cards over cash.</li>\n 	<li>Of course, back in the US, the weather’s been sweltering.&nbsp; I was in South Florida a couple weeks ago and it was <em>cooler</em> there than Chicago.&nbsp; But that wasn’t good enough, so last week, I was down in Phoenix, where it was hitting 105-107 degrees during the day and wasn’t getting below 100 any time while I was awake.</li>\n 	<li>Tough weather to take advantage of the convertible red Mustang that Avis was nice enough to upgrade me to.</li>\n 	<li>Wednesday night after dinner, though, I decided I just <em>had</em> to drop the top.&nbsp; The dashboard said the external temperature was 102 -- and it felt it when I dropped that top.&nbsp; Soon, though, I found that the key to driving top-down in 102 degrees is the pretty much the same as driving top-down in 55 degree weather. Set the fan to High and remember to have the knob set to A/C.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em>Crazy Love-The Alex &amp; Lang mix</em> by <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/djlang59/10579\">J.Lang</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Let’s take a run through the comment bag.</li>\n 	<li>Sarah, who’s been a listener since 2006, posted a comment on the website on <a title=\"Podcast #85 — Importance of Hotel Bathrooms; Maximizing Miles\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2010/11/30/podcast-85-importance-of-hotel-bathrooms-maximizing-miles/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">episode #85</a> (!) -- she says “I was playing catch up after all my driving trips this past two months.” In that episode, I talked about how the hotel industry seems to be focused on spiffing up their lobbies and putting whizzy new technology in the rooms, and that they were making a mistake ignoring what I think is critical to the hotel experience -- the bathroom.&nbsp; Sarah says “I say ‘heck yeah’ to the bathroom being one of the most important parts of a stay.&nbsp; I ended in a bed and breakfast in the middle of nowhere, with no wifi.&nbsp; And the bathroom made me want to tell everyone about it. It had a hot tub and a beautifully large bathroom. But even though I knew no one who was going to the area, I wanted to tell everyone about it. It\'s the <a href=\"http://www.innatnewberlin.com/\">Inn in New Berlin, PA</a> (in case you care).”</li>\n 	<li>Sarah, thanks for the note -- and thanks for the pointer to the Inn in New Berlin.&nbsp; I do think we look for luxurious touches in hotels. And it doesn’t have to be anything big.&nbsp; The first thing my wife looks for in a hotel room is to see if there are robes in the bathroom.&nbsp; It’s a helluva lot cheaper than a tricked-out media panel, and it makes a much bigger impression.</li>\n 	<li>Sarah’s comment about wanting to tell everyone about her find reminded me of some stats I saw a few days ago.&nbsp; It said on average 24% of a hotel guests first heard about it from a friend or family member; 16% from a review site like <a href=\"http://www.tripadvisor.com\" rel=\"homepage\">TripAdvisor</a>. I would guess that if anyone could calculate the cost of creating an enthusiastic recommender like Sarah -- it would turn out to be a lot cheaper to do it with a great bathroom than a posh new lobby.</li>\n 	<li>Fast forwarding to <a title=\"Podcast #90 — More Comfortable Traveling in India; Tipping Towards Android?\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/05/22/podcast-90-more-comfortable-traveling-in-india-tipping-towards-android/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">episode #90</a>, Andrew Gill left a comment on the TravelCommons Facebook wall\n<ul>\n 	<li>Thanks for podcast #90, it\'s great to hear how 170 degrees isn\'t as comfortable as fully flat when my company has a different approach to travel. UK to Australia in Economy has to be tried</li>\n 	<li>You talked about using large chunks of roaming data in a recent trip and I\'ve a couple of hints to share.</li>\n 	<li>Google Maps is great but try <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/offlinemaps\">City Maps 2Go</a>. I\'ve been using it for over a year having tried other off-line mapping products. It uses the built in compass so I don\'t have to walk a block either way to figure out if I\'m going in the right direction.</li>\n 	<li>I\'ve also become a real convert to local SIM cards. Now this may not be perfect for a business trip, but I had two weeks in Chile in January and my iPhone bill was $500, compare this to two weeks in Australia using the AU$2 a day plan from Optus and my bill was $22. In Australia I didn\'t worry about when I used my phone or finding the next hotspot, because I had unlimited calls, SMS and internet usage all for AU$2 a day.</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Thanks Andrew.&nbsp; Sorry about the whinging on 10 degrees of seat recline. I paid for it on my flight over to Manchester last month -- 8 hrs of suffering in coach in a packed American Airlines 757. Even United gives you free beer in coach, but not American.</li>\n 	<li>Thanks for the tip on City Maps 2 Go.&nbsp; I looked at it for our UK vacation and since we were spending most of our time in the hinterlands -- the Lake District, the Isle of Arran, around Loch Lomond, it wasn’t going to give us enough coverage.&nbsp; I found, though, a great app from Phil Endecott called “UK Map”.&nbsp; For $11 you get all the Ordnance Survey maps, 2D and 3D views, combined with OpenStreetMap.org info downloaded so you can use it off line.&nbsp; It’s a universal app so I have it on my iPhone and iPad.&nbsp; If you’re touring the UK, I highly recommend it.&nbsp; I may end up back in Madrid in a couple of months.&nbsp; If I do, I’ll be downloading its map from City Maps 2 Go.</li>\n 	<li>I did find an unexpected but valuable benefit from my Starbucks obsession. I have a couple of Starbucks gift cards that I’ve registered.&nbsp; I kinda did it on a whim.&nbsp; They send me a card for a free drink after every 15 coffees I buy.&nbsp; I don’t use them -- it would be wasted on a tall coffee or cappuccino.&nbsp; I give ‘em to my kids who use them for venti frappuccinos.&nbsp; But anyways, while in London, I found that my US <a href=\"https://www.starbucks.com/card\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Starbucks Rewards</a> credentials gave me free WiFi in UK Starbucks. Since I was limiting my mobile data usage and there’s a Starbucks about every 200 ft in London, it was very handy.</li>\n 	<li>\n\n[caption id=\"attachment_1502\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"263\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/web0118-starbuckstrenta12.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1502\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/web0118-starbuckstrenta12-263x300.jpg\" alt=\"How big, exactly, is Starbucks’ new ‘Trenta’ size?\" width=\"263\" height=\"300\"></a> How big, exactly, is Starbucks’ new ‘Trenta’ size?[/caption]\n\nSpeaking of Starbucks, when I was flying out of ORD last week, one of the Starbucks in Terminal 3 advertised “trenta is here” -- Starbucks’ new “BigGulp” serving size. I thought about this while waiting in line to order my tall bold coffee.&nbsp; Should they really be selling the trenta in airports?&nbsp; I mean, does it make sense to sell someone 31 fluid ounces of a beverage right before they will be strapped into a seat for the next 2-4 hours?&nbsp; And odds are that the person ordering a trenta will be in the window seat.&nbsp; Meaning that he/she’s rousting two people at least twice during the flight to drain that trenta.</li>\n 	<li>And then, reacting to my comments about Ryanair in the <a title=\"Podcast #91 — Can’t Patch Planes Forever; Saving Customers With A Personal Touch\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/06/18/podcast-91-cant-patch-planes-forever-saving-customers-with-a-personal-touch/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">last episode</a>, Leo Vegoda wrote\n<ul>\n 	<li>What you say about Ryanair reminds me of how Irish comedian Andrew Maxwell described them: ‘Ryanair is what flying would be like if it was illegal’. I think that says it all.”</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>That is perfect -- and I think perfectly describes Ryanair and Spirit and all that ilk.</li>\n 	<li>And it&nbsp;shouldn\'t&nbsp;be too surprising then that 4 of the top 8 most hated companies in America are airlines.&nbsp; The latest <a href=\"http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/07/the-19-most-hated-companies-in-america/241344/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">American Customer Satisfaction Index</a> has American Airlines at #8, United at #7, US Airways at #6, Delta Airlines at #2(!), beat out by just 2 points for #1 by&nbsp;Potomac&nbsp;Electric utility.&nbsp; Impressive results all around.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a question, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.&nbsp; The e-mail address is&nbsp;<a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">comments@travelcommons.com</a> -- use the Voice Memo app on your iPhone or something like Virtual Recorder on your Android phone to record and send in an audio comment – or iMovie if you want to send in some video; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at travelcommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em>August (Reggae Rework)</em> by <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/elB/16075\">el-B</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>The Not-So-Upbeat Traveler</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>This podcast is a hobby, not a business, for me -- as if you couldn’t tell that from my haphazard posting schedule. So, I don’t obsess over podcast or website statistics, how many downloads, how many page views, all the stuff that real web business live and breathe and monitor on a real-time basis. I do, though, check in every couple of days to make sure everything’s running, clean the spam bin, and to look at site stats to see if anyone is coming by.</li>\n 	<li>I didn’t do any of this while on vacation, but when I got back and checked in, I saw that I’d gotten flooded with visits the first week in July.&nbsp; Following the source links, I found most of the traffic came in from StumbleUpon, while another bit came from a recent post by Chris Christensen on his <em><a href=\"http://amateurtraveler.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Amateur Traveler</a></em> blog.</li>\n 	<li>The StumbleUpon pointer was from “sher1lock,” a “woman from Ontario”.&nbsp; She recommended episode #88, where I reported from the floor of the Travel Goods show and talked about losing elite status. Her comment -- “A neat travel site. Not as upbeat as some.”</li>\n 	<li>Which actually lined up very nicely with Chris’ <a href=\"http://amateurtraveler.com/2011/06/30/where-is-the-darker-side-of-travel/\">post</a>.&nbsp; Titled “Where is the Darker Side of Travel?”, Chris was responding to a listener’s letter that suggested his Amateur Traveler Podcast sugar-coats the travel experience a bit; the listener challenged Chris to “bring attention to the darker side of travel”. Chris gave a good, straight up response that boiled down to -- “Guilty as charged; I’m an optimistic guy” and “If you want a podcast about travel from the point of view of how bad can be, listen to Mark Peacock’s <em>Travel Commons</em>. Mark is a friend and fellow podcaster but I describe his show as the anti-Amateur Traveler.”</li>\n 	<li>OK, so I’m not always the cheeriest guy about travel, but I&nbsp;didn\'t&nbsp;think I was a complete “Debbie Downer”.&nbsp; But, because I talk about more about the journey -- the act of transiting, travel as a verb -- rather than being a tourist -- what you are when you get to your destination, my travel stories are going to naturally follow what we all think is the dramatic decline in the travel experience -- airplanes as flying cattle cars, beat-up high-mileage rental cars, ....&nbsp; Any podcast whose major characters are <a href=\"http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/07/the-19-most-hated-companies-in-america/241344/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">4 of the top 8 most hated companies in America</a> just&nbsp;isn\'t&nbsp;going to be “as upbeat as some.”</li>\n 	<li>I have varying degrees of success in being cheery about my travels.&nbsp; It’s always easier to be chipper when there’s something new in the mix -- new destination, new air carrier, new plane,...&nbsp; <a title=\"Podcast #90 — More Comfortable Traveling in India; Tipping Towards Android?\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/05/22/podcast-90-more-comfortable-traveling-in-india-tipping-towards-android/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">A couple podcasts ago</a>, when I talked about flying to Madrid on USAir -- the USAir service was definitely a 9-hour drag, but it couldn’t dull the excitement of a new destination. But this last trip to Phoenix? Going to the same place for the umpteenth time, on American, on old MD-80’s (one of which -- with a 1983&nbsp;birth date&nbsp;-- treated me to yet another 2 hour delay), to temperatures in the 100’s every day.&nbsp; I had to drag myself to the airport. The best thing about the trip -- a toss-up between&nbsp; the convertible Mustang from Avis and the Tempe In-n-Out Burger where I killed some of that 2-hour delay.</li>\n 	<li>But then again, who really enjoys their commute to work?&nbsp; Most of the times, that’s what my travel is -- a commute to work.&nbsp; Some people drive 45 minutes to work; I fly 3 hours.&nbsp; And just like you should avoid road rage, I try to avoid travel rage. Specifically, when my commute goes wrong, I try to limit the collateral damage.</li>\n 	<li>First off, I try not to call anybody. There’s just nothing to be gained from talking to family or colleagues live.\n<ul>\n 	<li>“I’m going to be late coming home/getting to the office.&nbsp; American/United/Southwest/Joe’s Cattle Car decided to skip preventative maintenance this month in order to make payroll and so I’m waiting out a maintenance decision.&nbsp; The delay’s going to be either 30 minutes or 3 hours -- depends on whether duct tape can fix the problem.”</li>\n 	<li>“Oh, that’s too bad.&nbsp; I’m sorry to hear that”</li>\n 	<li>“Not half as sorry as I am to be living it”</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>See?&nbsp; That’s just not a good exchange for anyone. I’m not feeling any better, and worse yet, I’ve passed along my frustration, my lousy day to a completely innocent bystander.&nbsp; Best to rely on e-mail or text messages. Just make sure you immediately delete the inevitable frowny face emoticon from your significant other. Leaving it fester in your inbox will just lead to bad things.</li>\n 	<li>Same goes with airline gate agents and hotel clerks. They&nbsp;didn\'t&nbsp;overbook the hotel or break the plane.&nbsp; On a good day, these folks are just barely breaking minimum wage.&nbsp; They’re just trying to get on the other side of 8 hours.&nbsp; Unless they’re pre-emptively snotty to me -- they take an attitude before I even open my mouth -- I give them a pass.</li>\n 	<li>So&nbsp;we\'ve&nbsp;identified a lot of people who&nbsp;<em>aren\'t</em> responsible for botching up my commute.&nbsp; Who is, then? Who can I dump this rage on? Well, that’s the challenge.&nbsp; When you’re driving down the freeway and a guy cuts you off, you see the culprit. You can yell, you glare, you can flip him off.&nbsp; You vent and, if you’re a normal person, you move on.</li>\n 	<li>Airlines, hotels, car rentals -- you’ll never see the person that made your morning miserable. You can’t find them to flip them off; they don’t even know you exist. They’re sitting inside some operations center combining the output of some linear revenue optimization programs with the weather forecast and sending out e-mails that will complete jack up my day.&nbsp; Nothing personal -- I’m just collateral damage.</li>\n 	<li>Without that outlet, though; that ability to vent directly to the culprit, the frustration festers. The&nbsp;undisciplined&nbsp;take it out on innocent workers. The introverts mutter to themselves under their breaths.&nbsp; The majority of us, though, inhale, exhale and then make for closest repository of the three cure-alls for travel frustration -- fat, salt, and beer.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music --<em> I Will Writhe</em> by <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/26739\">SackJo22</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Tablet Wars: Apple iPad 2 vs. Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Regular listeners know that, over the past couple of years, I’ve migrated to an all Apple technology kit -- the 11-in MacBook Air, an iPhone 4, and an iPad 2. This isn’t a religious sort of fanboy thing -- the desktop unit that I create this podcast on is a custom-built dual monitor Windows 7 64-bit rig with 3 hard drives and a Blu-Ray DVD burner.</li>\n 	<li>Attending <a href=\"http://www.google.com/events/io/2011/index-live.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Google I/O</a> earlier this summer, I received a <a href=\"http://www.samsung.com/global/microsite/galaxytab/10.1/index.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1</a> with the <a href=\"http://www.engadget.com/2011/01/06/googles-android-3-0-honeycomb-for-tablets-a-guided-tour-of-the/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Honeycomb </a>tablet version of Android -- I think Honeycomb translates to version number 3.1 for non-Google-ites -- and a <a href=\"http://www.samsung.com/us/computer/chromebook\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Samsung Chromebook</a>. During the summer I’ve been traveling with both the Google and Apple kit -- a significant increase in carry-on weight, but the only way I know to truly compare equipment is live in the field.&nbsp; I’ll compare the tablets this episode and talk about my Chromebook experiences next time.</li>\n 	<li>Not only did I carry both tablets for business over the past couple of months, I also took them both with me on vacation to the UK, leaving my laptop at home -- a real pressure test.</li>\n 	<li>To cut to the chase -- which do I like better? -- it’s a real toss-up.&nbsp; Both tablets are nice pieces of hardware -- the screen sizes are a bit different (the Galaxy has a bit more of an HD aspect ratio while the iPad’s dimensions are more like a sheet of paper) and the Samsung is a few ounces lighter than the iPad, but in the real world -- it’s a push.&nbsp; They feels the same, both screens are beautiful, and their response times are great.</li>\n 	<li>As you would expect, the iPad has a better selection of apps -- the Android tablet just launched this summer while the iPad has been out for over a year.&nbsp; However, for apps that I use, the delta isn’t as huge as the raw number of apps -- iPad vs. Honeycomb -- would suggest.&nbsp; Apps that I use regularly -- Evernote, Kindle, Pandora, Dropbox, Skype, Concur expense reporting, Angry Birds -- are all available for Android.&nbsp; The Evernote app is the only tablet-specific one -- and it’s really nice -- but the others work fine.&nbsp; The only MIA apps that have any real impact on me are WebEx and GoTo Meeting. I think the tablet form is the best way to watch an on-line presentation and so I do miss those apps.</li>\n 	<li>The operating system -- Apple’s iOS vs. Google’s Android and the accompanying apps -- the comparison seems to be less of a “better-worse” and more a difference in philosophies.&nbsp; The Apple experience is pretty much locked down -- there’s only one place to get apps, the screen layout not very customizable, there’s no independent access to the file system. Now that’s not necessarily bad -- most people never change the default settings on their technology and there’s a lot to be said for not letting users screw things up beyond recovery. It’s Apple’s point of view. It’s a valid one, but it does have some impact.</li>\n 	<li>When we were in the UK with only the two tablets, I wanted to replace my Facebook profile picture with one taken that afternoon in the <a href=\"http://www.glengoyne.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Glengoyne Distillery</a> near Loch Lomond.&nbsp; My daughter had taken the picture with my iPhone. Plunking around the Facebook app, I couldn’t find a way to change my profile. So I e-mailed the photo from my iPhone to my Gmail account.&nbsp; Logging onto the Facebook site on the iPad Safari browser, I couldn’t save the picture from the Mail app to a place where the browser could access it -- for security reasons, all the apps seem to exist within their own sandboxes.&nbsp; Opening up Gmail on the Samsung tablet, I could save the picture to the folder of my choice, and then upload the picture from that folder to the Facebook site through the Android browser.</li>\n 	<li>It’s a little thing, but it illustrates why I found working solely with the Android system -- being without my PC -- easier than the iPad. The Android design philosophy is to give the users much greater control over their experience.&nbsp; Which means I can spelunk around the file system, tweak the technical operations, create truly horrid screen designs, and view Flash-based web sites to my heart’s content</li>\n 	<li>I also found it interesting that my daughter who’s starting high school this year, tends to pick up the Samsung tablet over the iPad. A lot of it probably has to do with the fact that she has an Android phone, but she seemed to prefer the Google experience.</li>\n 	<li>So as I said at the top, it’s a toss-up.&nbsp; I think the iPad is a more polished experience.&nbsp; It feels 1-2 releases ahead of the Android tablet -- which it is.&nbsp; The Samsung tablet, though, keeps right up with Apple in hardware and fit-and-finish, and Android lets the advanced user customize it better to his/her specific needs.&nbsp; Final recommendation -- at the same price, I’d recommend the casual/non-technical user go with the iPad, but if you like to pop the hood on your technology, you won’t go wrong with the Samsung.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #92</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from the <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">ccMixter</a> site</li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_92.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #92 — Not-So-Upbeat Traveler; iPad 2 vs. Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-92-not-so-upbeat-traveler-ipad-2-vs-samsung-galaxy-tab-10-1','','','2021-09-28 07:07:28','2021-09-28 12:07:28','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=785',0,'post','',2),
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(806,1,'2020-02-12 05:19:29','2020-02-12 05:19:29','','blake-richard-verdoorn-gM-RfQsZK98-unsplash','','inherit','closed','closed','','blake-richard-verdoorn-gm-rfqszk98-unsplash','','','2020-02-12 05:19:29','2020-02-12 05:19:29','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/blake-richard-verdoorn-gM-RfQsZK98-unsplash.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(811,1,'2011-08-14 21:11:26','2011-08-15 02:11:26','[caption id=\"attachment_821\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/ipad-galaxy1.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-821\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/ipad-galaxy1-300x225.jpg\" alt=\"Apple iPad 2 and Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\"></a> Tablet Wars[/caption]\n\nI walked out of the <a title=\"Google I/O 2011\" href=\"http://www.google.com/events/io/2011/index-live.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Google I/O</a> developers conference in May with a pre-release version of <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Samsung Group\" href=\"http://www.samsung.com/\" rel=\"homepage\">Samsung</a>\'s challenger to the iPad -- the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Samsung Galaxy Tab\" href=\"http://galaxytab.samsungmobile.com/\" rel=\"homepage\">Galaxy Tab</a> 10.1. &nbsp;Rather than put it up for sale on eBay like many attendees, I decided to take it on the road with me. &nbsp;I\'ve been traveling the last two months with both the Galaxy and an <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"iPad\" href=\"http://www.apple.com/ipad/\" rel=\"homepage\">iPad 2</a>, including a real pressure test -- two weeks in the UK without a&nbsp;laptop. Before Apple <a title=\"Apple yet again pushes for EU ban of Samsung Galaxy tablets, phones\" href=\"http://venturebeat.com/2011/08/19/apple-yet-again-pushes-for-eu-ban-of-samsung-galaxy-tablets-phones/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">blocks</a> Galaxy sales in any more countries, here are my hands-on impressions.\n\nBoth tablets are nice pieces of hardware. &nbsp;A Google search will provide no end of detailed comparisons of the hardware specs. &nbsp; But in the real world, it\'s a push. &nbsp;The screen sizes are a bit different (the Galaxy has a bit more of an HD aspect ratio while the iPad’s dimensions are more like a sheet of paper), the Samsung is a few ounces lighter than the iPad, and the buttons are in different places. &nbsp;There\'s no real difference -- they feel the same, both screens are beautiful, and their response times are great.\n\n<!--more-->\n\nAs you would expect, the iPad has a better selection of apps; the tablet version of Android (code named \"Honeycomb\") just launched while the iPad has been out for over a year.&nbsp; However, for apps that I use, the difference&nbsp;isn\'t&nbsp;as significant as the raw iPad-vs.-Honeycomb numbers suggest. &nbsp;Most of the apps that I use regularly -- Evernote, Kindle, USAToday, Pandora, Dropbox, Skype, Concur expense reporting, Angry Birds -- are all available for Android.\n\nEvernote and USAToday are the only Android tablet-specific ones (and are nicely done), but the others work fine. &nbsp;The holes seem to be slowly filling in, but the coverage is uneven. &nbsp;WebEx just released an Android app that runs on phones and tablets. &nbsp;The Financial Times app looks great on the Samsung, but the apps from the Wall Street Journal and the Economist only run on the phone versions of Android (2.2 and 2.3, or \"Froyo\" and \"Gingerbread\" in Google\'s dessert-themed code names) and won\'t install on Honeycomb. Understandable for a 2½-month-old product, but still a problem for real-world users.\n\nComparing&nbsp;Apple’s <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"IOS (Apple)\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOS_%28Apple%29\" rel=\"wikipedia\">iOS</a> vs. Google’s <a title=\"Wikipedia entry on Android OS\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(operating_system)\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Android</a> and each system\'s built-in applications (e.g., browser, e-mail) seems to be less of a “better-worse” judgement and more a debate between two design philosophies.&nbsp; The Apple experience is a locked-down one -- there’s only one place to get apps, the screen layout not very customizable, there’s no independent access to the file system, and it\'s tethered to iTunes (though this is expected to go away with the next release of iOS). This isn\'t necessarily bad -- it\'s a much more secure approach, most people never change the default settings on their technology and there’s a lot to be said for not letting users screw things up beyond recovery. It’s Apple’s point of view. It’s a valid one, but it does have some impact.\n\nWhile in the UK with just the iPad and Galaxy Tab, I wanted to replace my Facebook profile picture with one taken that afternoon in the Glengoyne Distillery. My daughter had taken the picture with my iPhone. Plunking around the Facebook iPhone app, I couldn’t find a way to change my profile. So I e-mailed the photo from my iPhone to my Gmail account.&nbsp; Logging onto the Facebook site from the iPad Safari browser, I couldn’t save the picture from the Mail app to a place where the browser could access it. Opening up Gmail on the Samsung tablet, I could save the picture to the folder of my choice and then upload the picture from that folder to the Facebook site through the Android browser. Perhaps less safe, but I got done what I wanted.\n\nIt’s a little thing, but it illustrates why I found relying solely with the Android system -- being without my <a title=\"MacBook Air\" href=\"http://www.apple.com/macbookair/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">MacBook Air</a>-- easier than the iPad. The Android design philosophy is to give the users much greater control over their experience.&nbsp; Which means I can spelunk around the file system, tweak the technical operations, create truly horrid screen designs, and view Flash-based web sites to my heart’s content.\n\nI like Android\'s widgets -- the ability to look at the screen and see new e-mails, Tweets, the temperature without having to open an app. But for enterprise users, the iPad does a much better job of sync\'ing mail, contacts, and calendars with the corporate-standard Microsoft Exchange infrastructure.&nbsp;It\'s interesting that my daughter who’s starting high school this year tends to pick up the Samsung tablet more than the iPad. It probably has to do with the fact that she has an <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Android (operating system)\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_%28operating_system%29\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Android phone</a>, but she seems to prefer the Google experience.\n\nThe iPad 2 is definitely a more polished experience.&nbsp; It feels 1-2 releases ahead of the Android tablet -- which it is.&nbsp; The Samsung tablet, though, keeps right up with Apple in hardware and fit-and-finish, and Android gives the advanced user the ability to customize it to his/her specific needs.&nbsp; Final recommendation -- at the same price, I recommend casual/non-technical users to buy the iPad 2; there are no sharp edges on which they could cut a finger. But if you like to pop the hood on your technology, you won’t go wrong with the Samsung.\n<div class=\"zemanta-pixie\" style=\"margin-top: 10px; height: 15px;\"><img class=\"zemanta-pixie-img\" style=\"border: none; float: right;\" src=\"http://img.zemanta.com/pixy.gif?x-id=a6fa3e5a-f086-4119-b970-8dd36cc1d883\" alt=\"\"></div>','iPad 2 vs. Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 -- Hands-On Impressions','','private','closed','closed','','ipad-2-vs-samsung-galaxy-tab-10-1-hands-on-impressions','','','2024-06-02 10:32:10','2024-06-02 15:32:10','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=811',0,'post','',0),
(821,1,'2011-08-20 09:18:32','2011-08-20 14:18:32','','ipad-galaxy','Tablet Wars','inherit','open','open','','ipad-galaxy','','','2011-08-20 09:18:32','2011-08-20 14:18:32','',811,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/ipad-galaxy1.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(823,1,'2020-04-06 09:36:04','2020-04-06 09:36:04','','Default Kit','','publish','closed','closed','','default-kit-2','','','2020-04-06 09:36:04','2020-04-06 09:36:04','',0,'https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/?elementor_library=default-kit',0,'elementor_library','',0),
(824,1,'2020-04-06 09:36:05','2020-04-06 09:36:05','','Default Kit','','publish','closed','closed','','default-kit-2-2','','','2020-04-06 09:36:05','2020-04-06 09:36:05','',0,'https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/?elementor_library=default-kit-2',0,'elementor_library','',0),
(825,1,'2011-09-09 17:00:30','2011-09-09 22:00:30','[caption id=\"attachment_827\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/071.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-827 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/071-300x202.jpg\" alt=\"Downtown Brooklyn. People return to Brooklyn over the Manhattan Bridge still in shock, after fleeing from the attack on the World Trade Center. © Joseph Rodríguez\" width=\"300\" height=\"202\" /></a> Downtown Brooklyn. People return to Brooklyn over the Manhattan Bridge still in shock, after fleeing from the attack on the World Trade Center. © Joseph Rodríguez[/caption]\n\nComing up to the 10th anniversary of the September 11th terrorist attacks, I repeat a segment from the September 2005 <a title=\"Podcast #14 – September 11th Travel Stories; Writing a Great Travel Song\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/09/14/podcast-14-september-11th-travel-stories-writing-a-great-travel-song/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">episode</a> that tells the stories of travelers trying to get back home when all planes were grounded and all US borders were closed after the attacks. Also, we finish up the two-part review of new Google technology with observations after taking a Samsung Chromebook on the road for a month this summer. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_93.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.','Podcast #93 — Travel Stories from September 11th; Traveling with a Google Chromebook','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-93-travel-stories-from-september-11th-traveling-with-a-google-chromebook','','','2021-09-28 07:11:12','2021-09-28 12:11:12','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=825',0,'post','',0),
(827,1,'2011-09-11 17:20:43','2011-09-11 22:20:43','','07','Downtown Brooklyn. People return to Brooklyn over the Manhattan Bridge still in shock, after fleeing from the attack on the World Trade Center. © Joseph Rodríguez','inherit','open','open','','07','','','2011-09-11 17:20:43','2011-09-11 22:20:43','',825,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/071.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(832,1,'2011-10-30 20:42:51','2011-10-31 01:42:51','[caption id=\"attachment_840\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"146\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/4275897174_f7c83887ab_z11.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-840\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/4275897174_f7c83887ab_z11-146x300.jpg\" alt=\"Chuck the Flight Attendant © hello jenny / Flickr\" width=\"146\" height=\"300\" /></a> Chuck the Flight Attendant © hello jenny / Flickr[/caption]\n\nIt\'s been a while since the last podcast. Contrary to what you might have thought, I haven\'t <a href=\"http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=podfade\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">podfaded </a>-- at least, not quite yet.  A flight out of Grand Junction, CO gave me a throw-back moment -- a flight in a prop plane. Sitting next to a huge guy on a very small plane got me thinking about how to deal with row mates -- row mates \"of size\" and row mates who like to chat. I talk about how the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Global Entry\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Entry\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Global Entry</a> program saved me from a huge line at ORD and comment on the now-infamous TSA exhortation to \"Get Your Freak On Girl\". We close with an economics lesson -- what\'s happened to all the hot flight attendants. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_94.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the transcript from TravelCommons podcast #94:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Looking at the calendar, it has been a while since my last podcast. I\'ve kept meaning to do a new episode, but then something – usually work – gets in my way. Also, I am absolutely the least efficient/most distractable writer I know. Probably contributes to the problem.</li>\n 	<li>Anyway, I\'ve been bouncing around a bit since the last episode – London, Dallas, Milwaukee, Orlando, Phoenix a couple of times, and a biking trip in <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Moab, Utah\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moab%2C_Utah\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Moab, Utah</a>.</li>\n 	<li>The biking trip did challenge my packing skills – how to pack for a 4-day biking trip followed by 3 days of work in Phoenix, all in a carry-on roller bag.  Luckily, biking gear isn\'t that bulky – except for the shoes. And in Moab, a non-faded pair of jeans is considered high fashion, so the after-hours clothing count was pretty low also.</li>\n 	<li>To get to Moab, I flew in and out of <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Grand Junction, Colorado\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Junction%2C_Colorado\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Grand Junction, CO</a> on the first prop planes – a Mesaba <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Bombardier Dash 8\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombardier_Dash_8\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Dash 8</a> – that I’ve flown in a long time.  I thought regional jets had replaced all of these things years ago.  Knowing that I’d be flying down to Phoenix on a commuter plane made my post-bike packing a bit easier. I could expand my rollerboard a bit because I wouldn’t have to fit it in an overhead; I’d be gatechecking it at plane side.</li>\n 	<li>So I was a bit surprised when the gate agent was encouraging people to carry on.  Really?  When was the last time you heard that?  Usually the gate agents are prowling the boarding area looking for oversized carryons to gate check. Indeed, with sold-out planes being the norm, more gate agents are announcing that everyone in the last boarding group will have to gate check their carryons – not even letting them get on the plane to try. I wonder if it’s a marketing ploy for the new airline credit cards that offer advanced boarding along with a mile for every dollar spent.</li>\n 	<li>Well, expanded out, my bag wasn\'t going to fit in a normal sized carryon bin, let alone the shrunken vestigial one on a Dash 8, so I grabbed a gate check tag and left it plane side like I always do.  I did, though, ask the woman there about what I thought was an odd request – why ask people to carry on? “’Cause we’re weight-restricted” she said, “and carryons don’t count.” So a 20-lb bag counts against the weight restriction when it’s in the cargo hold below the passengers’ feet, but not when it’s shoved above the passengers’ heads?  She just shrugged and pointed me toward the stairs.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/hisboyelroy/430\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Revolve</a> mix</em> by His Boy Elroy</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>We\'ve talked in past episodes about row mates; seat neighbors.</li>\n 	<li>Well, once I got on board that Dash 8 in Grand Junction, I found that my row mate was <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Larry the Cable Guy\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_the_Cable_Guy\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Larry The Cable Guy</a>’s overweight twin – or perhaps the more appropriate way would be to say “a passenger of size”.  Whatever way you want put it, there was no way I was getting the armrest down between Larry and me.  Hell, I couldn\'t even see the armrest. I didn’t make a big deal out of it – I had the aisle I could lean into to, and Larry kept his arms forward to try to minimize the spill over. But it still was an uncomfortable 2 hours. Pressing up against Larry for that entire time, I could feel (literally) the justification for making “passengers of size” buy two seats if they can’t fit into one.</li>\n 	<li>But then there was this huge guy on my DFW-ORD flight. Standing in the aisle for 5 min stashing his stuff, holding up the entire boarding process. |Not that he could\'ve stepped out of the aisle – he was too big for that. But then he got offended when people tried to squeeze around him as the flight attendants started banging on about the need for everyone to get seated so we could leave on time.</li>\n 	<li>I’m not a tiny guy myself. But, in spite of what the spokesperson for the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance\" href=\"http://www.naafa.org\" rel=\"homepage\">National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance</a> says, it’s not about rights.  It’s about being polite and living with the choice you\'ve made – or purchased. For a given price, you’ve bought a seat of known dimensions in smallish metal tube that you’ll share with 50-200 other people all trying to get in and out of said tube in as short a time period as possible. If you can’t sit comfortably with the armrest down, then buy the seat next to you, or buy a first class seat (or at least an upgrade) on planes that offer it (certainly wasn\'t an option provided Larry on that Dash-8).  If you don’t want to be rushed during boarding, check your bags and wait ‘til last call – or charter your own jet.  But don’t get huffy at the rest of us.</li>\n 	<li>While I was waiting to start my trip to Moab, I had a bit of dwell time in ORD so I did a little test.  I fired up my Verizon 4G Hot Spot and ran the Speed Test Chrome app on my MacBook Air – a smokin’12.3 megabits per sec down, 15 Mbps up. I then fired up the Speed Test app on my AT&amp;T iPhone 4 – 0.3 Mbps down, 0.05 Mbps up. I don’t know what’s wrong with the AT&amp;T data service in ORD, but it’s just pathetic.</li>\n 	<li>A year ago – in<a title=\"Podcast #85 — Importance of Hotel Bathrooms; Maximizing Miles\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2010/11/30/podcast-85-importance-of-hotel-bathrooms-maximizing-miles/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> episode 85</a> to be exact – I interviewed <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Michael Komarnitsky\" href=\"http://www.crunchbase.com/person/michael-komarnitsky\" rel=\"crunchbase\">Michael Komarnitsky</a>, founder and chief executive of <a href=\"http://gomiles.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">GoMiles</a>, a mileage tracking and management website.  Earlier this month, AA and SWA went gunning for Michael and other mileage-management sites, serving them “cease-&amp;-desist” letters claiming security and terms of use violations.  What it’s really about, I think, is not wanting travelers to have tools to be “more efficient” in how they cash in miles or frequent sleeper points. Miles are a big money-maker for airlines – they pull in millions selling them to credit card companies and the like.  They’re even more profitable when they expire unused.  Sites like <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"GoMiles\" href=\"http://www.crunchbase.com/company/gomiles\" rel=\"crunchbase\">GoMiles</a> make it easier to keep track of your miles, including expiration dates. I’ll put links to our <a title=\"Podcast #85 — Importance of Hotel Bathrooms; Maximizing Miles\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2010/11/30/podcast-85-importance-of-hotel-bathrooms-maximizing-miles/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">interview </a>with Michael and a <a href=\"http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204774604576627142338884936.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">WSJ article</a> in the show notes.</li>\n 	<li>In the<a title=\"Podcast #93 — Travel Stories from September 11th; Traveling with a Google Chromebook\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/09/09/podcast-93-%e2%80%94-travel-stories-from-september-11th-traveling-with-a-google-chromebook/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> last episode</a>, I was getting ready to head over to London, and was looking forward to testing out the Global Entry lane, seeing if it cut my re-entry time at passport control.  Coming back into ORD, it was a huge time/frustration saver. The US citizen line at passport control was longer than I\'ve ever seen it – all the cattle-pen switchback lanes were full and then the line stretched out another 50-75 yards into the terminal walkway. I walked up, showed the line marshal the “CPB” Global Entry sticker on the back of my passport and was waved through to a row of 6 Global Entry kiosks.</li>\n 	<li>It took me two tries to get a valid 4-fingerprint reading, but I was through in 5 minutes. Was definitely worth the couple of hours I invested back in July.</li>\n 	<li>Robby Smith wrote this on the TravelCommons Facebook wall –\n<ul>\n 	<li>I now have 3 data points for Global Entry in the last 3 months.  My average time in Immigration is about 20 seconds. Customs just takes receipt from the GE kiosk and say Welcome Home. IAH has a separate Customs arrival lane for GE only.  I know the GE program is only about 18 months old or so but I should have done this the day it came out. At $100 for 5 years, it would be ridiculous for me not to have it. Finally a Gov program that works and makes life better.</li>\n 	<li>BTW; United Mileage Plus 1K and GSM now get this as a free benefit of status.</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Robby, thanks for that.  I agree that it’s a great program – the one thing the Dept of Homeland Security has done to make travel a little easier.  And more programs are picking up the $100 fee.  It’s now a benefit of Amex’s Platinum card.</li>\n 	<li>And of course, the podcast wouldn’t be complete without a TSA item.  Every once in a while, on those rare occasions that I check luggage, I’ll find a card from the TSA politely letting me know they’ve opened my luggage and searched through it. Sometimes they re-pack things nicely, other times they leave a wadded up mess.  For one woman earlier this month, they left her a more personal note, printing “Get Your Freak On Girl” along the margin of the standard TSA card.  Prompted, she guessed, by the screener’s discovery of what she described in a tweet was a “personal” item – battery powered.  She was stunned, but kept a sense of humor about it. Given recent arrests of TSA agents stealing from screened luggage, she’s lucky the screener just left the note.  There’s a link to an<a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.forbes.com%2Fsites%2Fkashmirhill%2F2011%2F10%2F24%2Ftsa-officer-advises-passenger-to-get-her-freak-on%2F&amp;h=iAQHCGNplAQHy0Sz1-fzFBuZQC14G7hsgZZIeEhj3mbR1jQ\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> article</a> on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">TravelCommons Facebook wall</a>, and I’ll also put it in the show notes.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a question, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is <a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a> -- use the Voice Memo app on your iPhone or something like Virtual Recorder on your Android phone to record and send in an audio comment – or iMovie if you want to send in some video; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/#!/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at travelcommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/septahelix/34050\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Earth Soda</a></em> by septahelix</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Plane Conversation Etiquette or The Risks of Talking to Your Seatmate</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Humans love/need to put order to the randomness around them, and one of the most common ways to do it is the “There are two kinds of people in the world” construct – Those who like durian or mushrooms or Brussels sprouts or ferrets and those who don’t.  In travel, the classic split is between fliers who want to talk to their row mates and those who want to be left alone.</li>\n 	<li>You can see it when you walk on the plane – the people who sit down and immediately power up the Bose noise-canceling headsets and those who are looking all around</li>\n 	<li>I saw the ultimate example of a talker on the same DFW-ORD flight (yes, it was one of those flights…). The guy in the row in front of me talked for 45 min straight, seemingly without taking a breath – he must’ve been an amateur didgeridoo player trained in circular breathing. He started before takeoff.  Sitting in the center seat, he swiveled his head like an oscillating fan, equally torturing both row mates. I was half expecting him to swivel his head all the way around “Exorcist-style” and include me in his life story.</li>\n 	<li>Four of us in the two rows behind him traded glances as we watched him in a mix of amazement (equal parts how long he could talk and how clueless he was of what he was doing), horror (at the mental anguish he was inflicting on his row mates) and relief (glad we weren’t sitting in that row). We started a little pool – 5 bucks a piece – would he stop or be told to shut up, and when would that happen. I figured he’d eventually run out of gas – if his row mates hadn’t plugged in their iPods by now, they were going to let him go.  The guy across the aisle from me won the pot, though, because I underestimated how long this guy would talk.</li>\n 	<li>As you might have guessed, I’m not generally a talker. If you end up next to me on a plane, it’s pretty certain that the only conversation we’ll have is when you ask me to get up from my aisle seat to let you go to the toilet.</li>\n 	<li>I use plane flights as my alone time – I mostly nap, then read, maybe do a bit of e-mail or play solitaire on my iPhone while listening to podcasts. As I’ve mentioned in past episodes, I rarely use in-flight Wi-Fi.  I enjoy that little bit of unwired isolation.</li>\n 	<li>I do think I miss out on things, though.  On a flight down to Phoenix, USAir screwed up my reservation, lost my advance seat assignment, which dropped me in a center seat.  I was sitting in my seat, not looking forward to the next 3.5 hours. Getting up to let in the older woman who had the window seat, she said to me “I really don’t care for window seats.” “I’ll slide over if you want this center seat instead,” I offered.  She gladly took it.  I got into my usual position – plugged in, eyes closed, waiting for takeoff – my own little world. Only after I was walking down the terminal in PHX did I think – that’s a bit odd about not wanting the window; I should’ve asked her for the back story.</li>\n 	<li>I’m not like I’m a complete social hermit. Eating at the bar in a restaurant while on the road, I’ll strike up a conversation with the bartender or the guy sitting next to me. At dinner last night at a restaurant with communal tables, I got the thumbnail life story of the couple sitting next to me, even traded splashes of pinot noir for an impromptu wine tasting.</li>\n 	<li>So what’s different?  Well, in that bar or in that restaurant, if things get a little weird, a little uncomfortable, or a little boring, I can always excuse myself and walk away.  Not easily done in a metal tube 35,000 ft in the air. While I might be kinda curious about a person, I’m not <em>that</em> curious to risk being pinned against the wall of a plane for three hours…</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music --<em> <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/scottaltham/20747\">Hear Us Now</a></em> by scottaltham</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Decline of Hot Flight Attendants</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://www.theatlantic.com/megan-mcardle/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Megan McArdle</a> of the <a href=\"http://www.theatlantic.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Atlantic</a> magazine has become one of my favorite bloggers. I’m sympatico with her call-it “wet libertarianism”. Could be because we both graduated from University of Chicago’s business school where a sort of cold-blooded economic theory pervades everything.</li>\n 	<li>Anyhow, a recent article of hers caught my eye – “<a href=\"http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/10/the-declining-hotness-of-flight-attendants/246610/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">The Declining Hotness of Flight Attendants</a>”. The TV show <em>Pan Am</em> – set in the ‘60’s, a Mad Men in the air knock-off, has let to a string of “then vs. now” articles, comparing the “Clipper Class” era to today “Greyhound Bus” level of service.  Another blogger, Glen Whitman, had written a <em>Pan Am</em>-inspired post on the “<a href=\"http://agoraphilia.blogspot.com/2011/10/pan-am-and-economics-of-hot-flight.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Economics of Hot Flight Attendants</a>”. His thesis – prior to deregulation, with the Civil Aeronautics Board setting prices for flight routes, airlines could only compete on service. Since in the ‘60’s and ‘70’s, most fliers were male salarymen, airlines would pay more for attractive flight attendants to differentiate their service.  After 1978, airlines found competing on price overwhelmed differences in service and so out went any rationale for the hot flight attendant salary premium.</li>\n 	<li>McArdle’s response – “As a libertarianish economics blogger, I would love if this story were true.  But I\'m skeptical.”  And then she goes outlines a more plausible scenario – the combination of union representation, anti-discrimination laws and, as she puts it, “feminist shaming”, allowed the flight attendant population to age, resulting in “a workforce composed mostly of older and not particularly attractive people.  Mirroring the larger American workforce”</li>\n 	<li>Reminded me of when Virgin Atlantic started flight into Chicago. I was running a dot-com consultancy at the time (like 75% of the working population, or so it seemed) and was flying to London twice a month. I quickly became a Virgin Atlantic regular. The flights were much better than United or American or BA. The planes were new, the food was good, and yes, they had hot flight attendants.  On a flight back to Chicago, one of the flight attendants asked me for suggestions on things to do on her layover. She told me that she was bidding on different runs every month so that she could “see the world” since she, like other the other flight attendants, was on a 36-month non-renewable contract.  No danger of declining hotness at Virgin.</li>\n 	<li>Now, all that being said, it’s wasn’t the “hotness” of the Virgin flight attendants that mattered (though in and of itself, it wasn’t a bad thing), it was their attitude – lack of cynicism, sarcasm, surliness.  This was still new and exciting to them – unlike the 25-year veteran flight attendants at United or American. The Virgin flight attendants would be serving passengers throughout the flight, rather than racing the meal carts through the aisles and then hiding in the galleys. When asked to describe meal choices, I would receive a polite explanation, rather than the “Does this look like a restaurant” reply I received from a Northwest flight attendant.</li>\n 	<li>We won’t ever get back to the Pan Am Clipper Class days, what’s called the “Golden Age” of travel.  I’m OK with that.  I’d be happy for just some pleasant attitudes in today’s flying buses.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #94</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from the <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">ccMixter</a> site</li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_94.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #94 — Plane Conversation Etiquette; Decline of Hot Flight Attendants','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-94-plane-conversation-etiquette-decline-of-hot-flight-attendants','','','2021-09-28 07:26:44','2021-09-28 12:26:44','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=832',0,'post','',2),
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(840,1,'2011-10-31 18:40:12','2011-10-31 23:40:12','','Chuck the Flight Attendant','Chuck the Flight Attendant © hello jenny / Flickr','inherit','open','open','','4275897174_f7c83887ab_z-2','','','2011-10-31 18:40:12','2011-10-31 23:40:12','',832,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/4275897174_f7c83887ab_z11.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(841,1,'2020-07-29 16:51:15','2020-07-29 16:51:15','<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast/episode-1-how-we-started-podcasting/\">\n					<img width=\"800\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" loading=\"lazy\" srcset=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-1.jpg 800w, https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-1-300x188.jpg 300w, https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-1-768x480.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast/episode-1-how-we-started-podcasting/\">\nEpisode 1: How We Started Podcasting</a></h2>\n					July 22, 2019\n					<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/author/satchmo/\">Admin</a>\n							Featured, Tutorials						\n					02:16\n					<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast/episode-1-how-we-started-podcasting/#respond\">0 Comments</a>\n						<p>A wonderful serenity has taken possession of my entire soul, like these sweet mornings of spring which I enjoy...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast/episode-1-how-we-started-podcasting/\"> Play Episode</a>\n					<!--[if lt IE 9]><![endif]-->\n<audio id=\"audio-43-1\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast-player/43/episode-1-how-we-started-podcasting.mp3?_=1\" /><a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast-player/43/episode-1-how-we-started-podcasting.mp3\">https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast-player/43/episode-1-how-we-started-podcasting.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast-download/43/episode-1-how-we-started-podcasting.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Episode 1: How We Started Podcasting \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast-download/43/episode-1-how-we-started-podcasting.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Episode 1: How We Started Podcasting \" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Play in new window</a> | Duration: 02:16</p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast/episode-2-essentials-tools-for-podcasters/\">\n					<img width=\"800\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/chris-barbalis-101882.jpg\" alt=\"\" loading=\"lazy\" srcset=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/chris-barbalis-101882.jpg 800w, https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/chris-barbalis-101882-300x188.jpg 300w, https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/chris-barbalis-101882-768x480.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast/episode-2-essentials-tools-for-podcasters/\">\nEpisode 2: Essentials Tools For Podcasters</a></h2>\n					July 22, 2019\n					<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/author/satchmo/\">Admin</a>\n							Tech						\n					02:16\n					<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast/episode-2-essentials-tools-for-podcasters/#respond\">0 Comments</a>\n						<p>A wonderful serenity has taken possession of my entire soul, like these sweet mornings of spring which I enjoy...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast/episode-2-essentials-tools-for-podcasters/\"> Play Episode</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-47-2\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast-player/47/episode-2-essentials-tools-for-podcasters.mp3?_=2\" /><a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast-player/47/episode-2-essentials-tools-for-podcasters.mp3\">https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast-player/47/episode-2-essentials-tools-for-podcasters.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast-download/47/episode-2-essentials-tools-for-podcasters.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Episode 2: Essentials Tools For Podcasters \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast-download/47/episode-2-essentials-tools-for-podcasters.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Episode 2: Essentials Tools For Podcasters \" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Play in new window</a> | Duration: 02:16</p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast/episode-3-how-to-scale-your-start-up/\">\n					<img width=\"800\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-3.jpg\" alt=\"\" loading=\"lazy\" srcset=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-3.jpg 800w, https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-3-300x188.jpg 300w, https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-3-768x480.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast/episode-3-how-to-scale-your-start-up/\">\nEpisode 3: How To Scale Your Start-Up</a></h2>\n					July 22, 2019\n					<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/author/satchmo/\">Admin</a>\n							Entrepreneurship						\n					02:16\n					<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast/episode-3-how-to-scale-your-start-up/#respond\">0 Comments</a>\n						<p>A wonderful serenity has taken possession of my entire soul, like these sweet mornings of spring which I enjoy...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast/episode-3-how-to-scale-your-start-up/\"> Play Episode</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-51-3\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast-player/51/episode-3-how-to-scale-your-start-up.mp3?_=3\" /><a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast-player/51/episode-3-how-to-scale-your-start-up.mp3\">https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast-player/51/episode-3-how-to-scale-your-start-up.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast-download/51/episode-3-how-to-scale-your-start-up.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Episode 3: How To Scale Your Start-Up \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast-download/51/episode-3-how-to-scale-your-start-up.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Episode 3: How To Scale Your Start-Up \" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Play in new window</a> | Duration: 02:16</p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast/episode-4-external-audio-file/\">\n					<img width=\"800\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-4.jpg\" alt=\"\" loading=\"lazy\" srcset=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-4.jpg 800w, https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-4-300x188.jpg 300w, https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-4-768x480.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast/episode-4-external-audio-file/\">\nEpisode 4: External Audio File</a></h2>\n					July 22, 2019\n					<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/author/satchmo/\">Admin</a>\n							Tech						\n					<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast/episode-4-external-audio-file/#respond\">0 Comments</a>\n						<p>A wonderful serenity has taken possession of my entire soul, like these sweet mornings of spring which I enjoy...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast/episode-4-external-audio-file/\"> Play Episode</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-55-4\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/aj-jazz-trumpet.mp3?_=4\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/aj-jazz-trumpet.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/aj-jazz-trumpet.mp3</a></audio> 				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast/episode-5-mixcloud-example/\">\n					<img width=\"800\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-2.jpg\" alt=\"\" loading=\"lazy\" srcset=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-2.jpg 800w, https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-2-300x188.jpg 300w, https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-2-768x480.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast/episode-5-mixcloud-example/\">\nEpisode 5: MixCloud Example</a></h2>\n					July 24, 2019\n					<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/author/satchmo/\">Admin</a>\n							Media						\n					<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast/episode-5-mixcloud-example/#respond\">0 Comments</a>\n						<p>A wonderful serenity has taken possession of my entire soul, like these sweet mornings of spring which I enjoy...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast/episode-5-mixcloud-example/\"> Play Episode</a>\n					<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"120\" src=\"https://www.mixcloud.com/widget/iframe/?feed=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.mixcloud.com%2Ftukatz%2Fbillys-jazz-swing-dixieland-favourites%2F&hide_cover=1&light=1\" frameborder=\"0\"></iframe>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast/episode-6-soundcloud-example/\">\n					<img width=\"800\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-6.jpg\" alt=\"\" loading=\"lazy\" srcset=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-6.jpg 800w, https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-6-300x188.jpg 300w, https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-6-768x480.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast/episode-6-soundcloud-example/\">\nEpisode 6: SoundCloud Example</a></h2>\n					July 24, 2019\n					<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/author/satchmo/\">Admin</a>\n							Media, Tutorials						\n					<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast/episode-6-soundcloud-example/#respond\">0 Comments</a>\n						<p>A wonderful serenity has taken possession of my entire soul, like these sweet mornings of spring which I enjoy...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast/episode-6-soundcloud-example/\"> Play Episode</a>\n					<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"150\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/261000171&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true\"></iframe>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php?paged=2\" >More Episodes</a>\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-list-main -->\n			<h2>Subscribe To Our Newsletter</h2>		\n		<p>Subscribe to receive info on our latest news and episodes</p>[mc4wp_form id=\"22\"]','Episodes','','publish','closed','closed','','episodes-2','','','2020-07-29 16:51:15','2020-07-29 16:51:15','',0,'https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/?elementor_library=episodes-2',0,'elementor_library','',0),
(847,1,'2020-07-29 16:51:49','2020-07-29 16:51:49','<img width=\"1600\" height=\"1067\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ayo-ogunseinde-93181.jpg\" alt=\"\" loading=\"lazy\" srcset=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ayo-ogunseinde-93181.jpg 1600w, https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ayo-ogunseinde-93181-300x200.jpg 300w, https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ayo-ogunseinde-93181-768x512.jpg 768w, https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ayo-ogunseinde-93181-1024x683.jpg 1024w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1600px) 100vw, 1600px\" />											\n			<h2>Louis Doe</h2>		\n			Producer		\n		<p>When, while the lovely valley teems with vapour around me, and the meridian sun strikes the upper surface of the impenetrable foliage of my trees, and but a few stray gleams steal into the inner sanctuary, I throw myself down among the tall grass by the trickling stream; and, as I lie close to the earth, a thousand unknown plants are noticed by me.</p>		\n					<a target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\n						Soundcloud\n											</a>\n					<a target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\n						Twitter\n											</a>\n					<a target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\n						Instagram\n											</a>\n					<a target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\n						Youtube\n											</a>\n										<img width=\"1600\" height=\"1067\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/jason-rosewell-60014.jpg\" alt=\"\" loading=\"lazy\" srcset=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/jason-rosewell-60014.jpg 1600w, https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/jason-rosewell-60014-300x200.jpg 300w, https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/jason-rosewell-60014-768x512.jpg 768w, https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/jason-rosewell-60014-1024x683.jpg 1024w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1600px) 100vw, 1600px\" />											\n			<h2>Oliver Doe</h2>		\n			Show Host		\n		<p>When, while the lovely valley teems with vapour around me, and the meridian sun strikes the upper surface of the impenetrable foliage of my trees, and but a few stray gleams steal into the inner sanctuary, I throw myself down among the tall grass by the trickling stream; and, as I lie close to the earth, a thousand unknown plants are noticed by me.</p>		\n					<a target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\n						Soundcloud\n											</a>\n					<a target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\n						Twitter\n											</a>\n					<a target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\n						Instagram\n											</a>\n					<a target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\n						Youtube\n											</a>\n										<img width=\"1600\" height=\"1063\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/aricka-lewis-208112.jpg\" alt=\"\" loading=\"lazy\" srcset=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/aricka-lewis-208112.jpg 1600w, https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/aricka-lewis-208112-300x199.jpg 300w, https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/aricka-lewis-208112-768x510.jpg 768w, https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/aricka-lewis-208112-1024x680.jpg 1024w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1600px) 100vw, 1600px\" />											\n			<h2>Ella Doe</h2>		\n			Show Host		\n		<p>When, while the lovely valley teems with vapour around me, and the meridian sun strikes the upper surface of the impenetrable foliage of my trees, and but a few stray gleams steal into the inner sanctuary, I throw myself down among the tall grass by the trickling stream; and, as I lie close to the earth, a thousand unknown plants are noticed by me.</p>		\n					<a target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\n						Soundcloud\n											</a>\n					<a target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\n						Twitter\n											</a>\n					<a target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\n						Instagram\n											</a>\n					<a target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\n						Youtube\n											</a>\n			<h2>Subscribe To Our Newsletter</h2>		\n		<p>Subscribe to receive info on our latest news and episodes</p>[mc4wp_form id=\"22\"]','Show Hosts','','publish','closed','closed','','show-hosts','','','2020-07-29 16:51:49','2020-07-29 16:51:49','',0,'https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/?elementor_library=show-hosts',0,'elementor_library','',0),
(850,1,'2020-07-29 16:52:54','2020-07-29 16:52:54','<h2>Get In Touch</h2>		\n		<p>Oh, would I could describe these conceptions, could impress upon paper all that is living so full and warm within me, that might be it.</p>		\n			<h5>ADDRESS</h5>		\n		<p>101 Basin Street, New Orleans, LA, USA.</p>		\n			<h5>Phone</h5>		\n		<p>504-555-54321</p>		\n			<h5>Email</h5>		\n		<p>support@satchmo.theme.com</p>		\n			<iframe frameborder=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\" marginheight=\"0\" marginwidth=\"0\" src=\"https://maps.google.com/maps?q=Basin%20%26%20Canal%20Street%2C%20New%20Orleans&amp;t=m&amp;z=17&amp;output=embed&amp;iwloc=near\" aria-label=\"Basin &amp; Canal Street, New Orleans\"></iframe>		\n			<h2>Drop Us a Line</h2>		\n		<p>Any questions, remarks, suggestions, or jokes would be gladly accepted!</p>[contact-form-7 id=\"27\" title=\"Satchmo\"]		\n			<h2>Subscribe To Our Newsletter</h2>		\n		<p>Subscribe to receive info on our latest news and episodes</p>[mc4wp_form id=\"34\"]','Contact','','publish','closed','closed','','contact-2','','','2020-07-29 16:52:54','2020-07-29 16:52:54','',0,'https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/?elementor_library=contact-2',0,'elementor_library','',0),
(851,1,'2011-11-25 23:35:36','2011-11-26 05:35:36','[caption id=\"attachment_862\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/708473504_18da6d5b07_z1.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-862\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/708473504_18da6d5b07_z1-300x225.jpg\" alt=\"Standing in Line! © Lance Smith / Flickr\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\" /></a> Standing in Line! © Lance Smith / Flickr[/caption]\n\nOnce again skipping the mayhem of the busiest travel week of the year, though it\'s getting more difficult as the Thanksgiving travel crush seems to start earlier each year. Good listener comments about last episode\'s story of a rare prop plane flight sitting next to a \"passenger of size\"; then my own thoughts on <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"US Airways\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_Airways\" rel=\"wikipedia\">USAir</a>\'s completely inadequate <a href=\"http://overheadbin.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/11/23/8980390-flier-displaced-by-obese-seatmate-forced-to-stand\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">response</a> to the passenger forced to stand on a 7-hour flight because a \"passenger of size\" overflowed into his seat.  I update my holiday travel tips -- drive or train for trips less than 350 miles, pay extra to fly direct, catch the first flight out, and bone up on your geography so you know all the alternative airports. Watching news reports of the hassles of Black Friday shopping make me wonder why people would go through the hassles to fly airlines like Spirit Air. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_95.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the transcript from TravelCommons podcast #95:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Looking back over the past 5 years of Thanksgiving week episodes, I always say the same thing -- Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studio outside of <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Chicago\" href=\"http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=41.8819444444,-87.6277777778&amp;spn=0.1,0.1&amp;q=41.8819444444,-87.6277777778 (Chicago)&amp;t=h\" rel=\"geolocation\">Chicago, Illinois</a> during the one week a year I refuse to travel… But it’s true.  Let the families have the airports for this week. It doesn’t make sense for anyone to travel on business Thanksgiving week anyways.  At best, you get 2 days of business – Monday and Tuesday – because Wednesday is a complete waste – and even then, nobody’s head is really in the game.</li>\n 	<li>Indeed, Thanksgiving week has become even more worthless for business over the past few years. With more school districts throwing in the towel and closing down for the entire week, what was a four-day extended weekend has now become a full 9-day extravaganza.</li>\n 	<li>Which then pushes back the travel crush even further.  An <a href=\"http://www.chicagotribune.com/classified/automotive/traffic/ct-met-getting-around-1121-20111121,0,2606142.column\">article</a> in the Chicago Tribune earlier this week said that Air Transport Association forecasted that the Friday before Thanksgiving would replace the Wednesday before as the busiest outbound travel day.  Made me glad that I’d returned from Dallas a day early – the Thursday before – missing the crush.</li>\n 	<li>Over the last 5 years, there’s only one year – <a title=\"Podcast #80 – Holiday Travel Tips; Frequent Flyer Documentary\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2009/11/23/podcast-80-holiday-travel-tips-frequent-flyer-documentary/\">2009</a> – that I traveled on Thanksgiving week.  A client called a meeting in Philadelphia on the Monday before Thanksgiving. Really? Really. It’s called a power play.</li>\n 	<li>I had them schedule the meeting first thing Monday morning.  I flew in on the last flight Sunday night, took the meeting on an intravenous coffee drip, and then flew back home after lunch.  It was a 16-hour up-&amp;-back, getting me through security in Philadelphia airport just as the tide of strollers and Hello Kitty roller boards was starting to build…</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/seldon-circles/\"><em>Making Circles</em></a> by the Seldon Plan</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Rich Fraser posted this on the TravelCommons website, commenting on my lack of appreciation for the smaller things of travel…\n<ul>\n 	<li>Mark, you gotta get to more airports.  As a domestic road warrior, I\'ve flown into some of the smallest airports with commercial service on a wide variety of turboprop planes.  Whether it\'s Mesaba (Delta) with their <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Saab 340\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saab_340\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Saab 340s</a> or Horizon (Alaska) with their Q800s, just about every regional carrier has turboprops in their fleet.  Up until their demise 3 years ago, <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Midwest Connect\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midwest_Connect\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Midwest Connect</a> was using the Beech B1900D, a 19 seat flying minivan that did not require a flight attendant.  It remains the only plane that I could guarantee I could fall asleep in.</li>\n 	<li>You big time international guys may look down and scoff at the small birds, but as a private pilot myself, I rather enjoy flying in a type that is closer to what I pilot.  It feeds the fantasy that I could possibly jump into the cockpit and take over just in case the crew had the fish for dinner.</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Rich has me pegged.  I self-select out of smaller airports.  I’d rather drive 2 hrs from a major airport with more service than fly into a thinly-served smaller one. A few years back, I had a client in <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Huntsville, Alabama\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huntsville%2C_Alabama\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Huntsville, Alabama</a>.  Every visit, I flew Southwest from Chicago to Nashville and then drove the 120 miles down I-65 to Huntsville.  I liked the control it gave me – much more than depending on the one Delta flight a day between O’Hare and Huntsville.</li>\n 	<li>But as Rich will certainly remind me, you don’t always have that luxury.  I was doing some work in <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Sioux City, Iowa\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sioux_City%2C_Iowa\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Sioux City, IA</a> – which, of course, is most memorable for its three-letter airport code SUX.  I ended up on a 25-seat <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"United Express\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Express\" rel=\"wikipedia\">United Express</a> prop plane that had an intermediate stop in <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Waterloo, Iowa\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterloo%2C_Iowa\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Waterloo, IA</a>.  After half the passengers deplaned in Waterloo, the flight attendant came on, looked at everyone left and said, “you, you, and you – you need move to a seat behind the wing”.  We got up and shifted back, but I can tell you that we weren’t completely comfortable with the eyeball method of weight distribution.</li>\n 	<li>And continuing that thought about weight distribution, Linda Martin of the <a href=\"http://indietravelpodcast.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Indie Travel Podcast</a> sent this in a few days ago, commenting on my experience sitting next to a “person of size” on my 2-hr prop plane flight from <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Grand Junction, Colorado\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Junction%2C_Colorado\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Grand Junction, CO</a> to Phoenix…\n<ul>\n 	<li>Your comments on people of size got me thinking about <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Air New Zealand\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_New_Zealand\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Air New Zealand</a>\'s trans-Tasman and Pacific system, which was introduced a year or so ago; I think to compete against the budget carriers.</li>\n 	<li>There are four levels of ticket: 1. \"Seat\" which is just a seat, no checked bag, no food, 2. \"Seat + bag\": a checked bag but no food, 3. \"The Works\": a checked bag, a meal and extra entertainment, 4. \"Works Deluxe\": all of the above, an extra checked bag and priority boarding, and a guaranteed empty seat beside you. Since the planes are single-aisle with three seats on either side, this means that you\'ll be on the aisle or the window with the centre seat empty.</li>\n 	<li>I think it\'s a great system because it gives the consumer the choice to have a full-service or more-budget flight. But it\'s also great for larger passengers, because in buying the most expensive ticket (which is still cheap) they can get a seat-and-a-half for a lot less than the cost of two seats, meaning everyone is more comfortable. Plus it\'s a regular option off the seat menu, so there\'s no stigma attached to choosing it.</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Linda, thanks for sending that in.  I agree that the Air New Zealand approach is a smart one if they can get the price points to work. Study after study has shown that, far away, the main driver of flyer satisfaction is an empty middle seat. Think about it – every time the middle seat occupant shows up, he/she apologize to their seatmates – “Sorry but I’m in the middle”.  No one wants the seat, and no one wants it filled next to them. If Air New Zealand can make enough money off the “Works Deluxe” tickets, they’re in the bonus round – more revenue, satisfied customers, and not just those “of size”</li>\n 	<li>Because this size thing just keeps being an issue.  The latest story surfaced earlier this week when a USAir passenger Arthur Berkowitz told the <a href=\"http://www.elliott.org/blog/forced-to-stand-for-a-seven-hour-flight/\">story</a> of his experience on a July flight from Anchorage, AK to Philadelphia to Chris Elliott, a traveler advocate blogger. It was a full flight except for one middle seat, into which a 400-lb passenger tried to fit himself. He apologized, but with his size, he took up his seat and half the seats on each side of him. Not only could Berkowitz not put his armrest down, he couldn’t fasten his seatbelt. He ended up standing most of the 7-hr flight.</li>\n 	<li>Berkowitz rightfully complained to USAir, not only about the discomfort of having to stand for 7 hours, but also about the safety issues – the inability to use his seatbelt.  USAir offered him a $200 voucher to compensate – on an $800 ticket.  Berkowitz said, and I think rightly, that’s not enough. Their <a href=\"http://overheadbin.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/11/23/8980390-flier-displaced-by-obese-seatmate-forced-to-stand\">response</a> -- \"We have attempted to address this customer’s service concerns.  The way to ensure you have space available next to you — whether you are a person of size, or you would simply like to ensure you have more personal space to relax on a long flight — is to purchase that additional seat, or First Class, in advance.”  So to make sure I can put my armrest down, to make sure I can use my seatbelt, to make sure I’m not crowded out of the seat I paid for, I should buy an additional seat or upgrade to First Class?  When I first read this, I was dumbfounded.  But then I reminded myself – it’s USAir. Then it all made sense.</li>\n 	<li>And to wrap on a more attractive note, commenting on last episode’s Hot Flight Attendant segment, Sak writes\n<ul>\n 	<li>I recently flew Copa Airlines Colombia between Medellin (MDE) and Panama City (PTY) and flight attendants were still young and hot. Of course, different country and labor laws and in Colombia is normal to discriminate by age.</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>There you go, hot flight attendant <em>and</em> Star Alliance miles.  Who could ask for more?</li>\n 	<li>If you have a question, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is <a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a> -- use the Voice Memo app on your iPhone or something like Virtual Recorder on your Android phone to record and send in an audio comment – or iMovie if you want to send in some video; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/eliyahu-wind/\">Oh Yeah</a></em> by Eliyahu Sills</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Holiday Travel Tips</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Looking back over those past 5 years of Thanksgiving episodes and then listening to Craig and Linda Martin’s recent holiday travel tips <a href=\"http://indietravelpodcast.com/usa/holiday-travel/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">episode</a> on their Indie Travel Podcast reminded me that it’s been a couple of years since I’ve done my own holiday <a title=\"Winter Travel Tips — Things to Remember When The Snow Starts Flying\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/01/16/winter-travel-tips-things-to-remember-when-the-snow-starts-flying/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">travel</a> <a title=\"Podcast #80 – Holiday Travel Tips; Frequent Flyer Documentary\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2009/11/23/podcast-80-holiday-travel-tips-frequent-flyer-documentary/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">tips</a>, so here’s my updated Road Warrior 201 tips for traveling between now and the New Year.</li>\n 	<li>Holiday travel generates a real miasma of emotions for frequent travelers.  You’re traveling because (theoretically) you want to – you <em>want</em> to visit those in-laws, don’t you? – not because have to to stay employed. You’re out of your comfort zone, out of your travel groove because you’re not solo-ing; you’re traveling with your family.  You gotta move slower through the airport; can’t react as easily to flight interruptions (are you <em>really</em> going to try stand-by with your wife and two young children?). It’s like Superman dragging along kryptonite – other than early boarding privileges, you’re just another traveler slugging it out with the rest of the teeming mass of travelers.</li>\n 	<li>Add to this that airplane load factors – how full they’re packing the planes – have been at historic heights for at least 6 months and that, at least in the Northern Hemisphere, it’s winter, making weather disruptions a near certainty…</li>\n 	<li>Well now, <em>that</em> paints an attractive picture.  So how do you survive this?</li>\n 	<li>The first question might be – do you really need to fly?  We’ve talked about the fly-vs.-drive breakeven point in a <a title=\"Podcast #45 – Waiting for Luggage, Enjoying Travel\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2006/09/20/podcast-45-waiting-for-luggage-enjoying-travel/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">couple </a>of <a title=\"Podcast #23 – Fly or Drive; Scenes from The Hotel Bar\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/11/20/podcast-23-fly-or-drive-scenes-from-the-hotel-bar/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">past</a> <a title=\"Podcast #85 — Importance of Hotel Bathrooms; Maximizing Miles\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2010/11/30/podcast-85-importance-of-hotel-bathrooms-maximizing-miles/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">episodes</a>.  Now driving in the winter isn’t all sweetness and light either – especially across stretches of I-70 through Kansas or up the Jersey Turnpike, but depending on how you value your time and the state of repair of your car, I think the breakeven point has got to be at least 350 miles.  And if you’re in certain parts of the US – the East Coast, between Chicago and New Orleans, along some bits of the West Coast – take the train. Amtrak’s on-time record is never a thing of beauty either, but it’s always going to be better than Newark or LaGuardia in December.</li>\n 	<li>That’s all well and good, but you’re going from Philly to San Francisco.  You’ve got to grit your teeth and fly.  First, fly direct.  I know I say this every time, but it’s a foundational strategy – limit the points of failure in an overloaded system.  Expecting airlines already operating at capacity to ferry even more passengers between airports operating at or over capacity during marginal weather – and to do this all on schedule? Suck it up, pay the extra $100 and have a fighting chance of getting to your family on time with your sanity and your luggage in hand.</li>\n 	<li>Next, catch the earliest flight you can.  Again, it’s about avoiding congestion. Delays stack up as the day wears on.  As your airplane goes from airport to airport, the probability of it getting stuck increases.  If it gets stuck too long, the probability of it getting canceled increases. Overnight, airlines have a chance to recover – late planes finally get their destinations and operations groups can reassign planes.  So while the last flight out can be a crap shoot, I’ve rarely hit a delay on the first flight out.</li>\n 	<li>And the final tip, bone up on your geography – know your alternative airports. A couple of weeks ago, I got stuck in a rolling delay due to fog in LaGuardia. After two hours, I finally gave up my 1<sup>st</sup> Class upgrade for a middle coach seat to Newark – no matter how nice the seat, it has to get me where I’m going.  If LGA is jacked up, EWR – no matter how much I hate that airport – is the next best thing.</li>\n 	<li>Knowing your alternatives – and their dominant carriers – is a key piece of knowledge when trying to pivot away from a delay or cancelled flight. Now, the LGA-EWR pivot is easy, but others aren’t so obvious.  Everyone knows that Chicago has two airports – ORD and MDW.  But Milwaukee is only 80 miles north, but not an alternative that it top of mind to everyone.  If PHL is in trouble, how many folks think about Harrisburg or BWI?  Or SAC as an alternative to SFO?  I tend to think about alternatives in two rings – within 60 miles – SNA and LGB for LAX; and then within 100-120 miles, which now picks up Palm Springs and San Diego for LAX.  Someone will drive a couple of hours to pick you up if it means getting you to Christmas dinner on time.</li>\n 	<li>But, above all, be realistic – it’s going to be a zoo. Give yourself extra time. Figure out how much time it’ll take and add another 50%. At worst, you’ll have some extra time to watch the planes take off. But it’ll allow you to breathe a bit easier when the snow begins to fall.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music --<em> <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/liquid-seventythree/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Is That Called Love</a> </em></em>by Liquid Zen</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Bad Spirit In The Air</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>My undergraduate <a href=\"http://www.cua.edu\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">degree</a> is in chemical engineering, which means I had to take too many math courses to allow time for course like psychology or sociology.  Every once in a while, I feel this gap.  Like a few months ago when I walked past a huge line tailing out of a small shop in downtown Chicago. “What’s this for?” I asked.  “Waiting for a free cupcake,” a couple of line standers answered. 20 minutes in line for a $2 cupcake says your time is worth $6/hour.  Minimum wage is $7.25/hr. Huh?</li>\n 	<li>I kinda have the same feeling about Black Friday – is your time worth so little that you’re willing to camp out in front of a WalMart for a half-price Wii game?  There’s something more emotional than rational about getting a “deal”</li>\n 	<li>Which must be the reason that <a href=\"http://www.spirit.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Spirit Airlines</a> is still in business.  They advertise “low low prices”, but don’t tell you about all the add-on <a href=\"http://www.spirit.com/OptionalFees.aspx\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fees </a>– like the $34 fee for the convenience of booking the flight on-line rather than going down to the airport and queuing up for a ticket agent, but then you will be charged $5 to have that ticket agent print out a boarding pass for you. The Dept of Transportation fined them earlier this week $50,000 neglecting to reveal this full bill of fare.</li>\n 	<li>And it doesn’t stop there.  Want to reserve a seat? It’ll cost you, depending on the seat, betwee $1 and $50. Want to fly with luggage?  It’ll cost you $18-$38 for a checked bag or $20-$45 for a carryon bag.  Don’t worry, though.  They assure you that you won’t be charged for carrying on “reading material”.</li>\n 	<li>Once you’re on board, Spirit sports the<a href=\"http://www.seatguru.com/airlines/Spirit_Airlines/Spirit_Airlines_Airbus_A320.php\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> least amount</a> of seat space of any US domestic airline – 28” seat pitch with non-reclining seats.  Like everyone else, Spirit charges for meals, but <strong><em>unlike</em></strong> everyone else, Spirit will charge you $3 for a glass of water.</li>\n 	<li>So at what point does one’s self-respect kick in and say “enough” -- my time, my comfort, is worth more than this. Certainly for me it happened a long time ago. Spirit flies some of my regular routes – Chicago to LGA or to Ft Myers, FL – but I never consider them.  Indeed, they just annoy me – their fares which are artificially low because they don’t disclose/include all their fees crowd out the fares of other carriers, making me work to get to a true low cost fare.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #95</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from the <a href=\"http://magnatune.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Magnatune </a>site</li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_95.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #95 — Holiday Travel Tips; Bad Spirit In The Air','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-95-holiday-travel-tips-bad-spirit-in-the-air','','\nhttp://indietravelpodcast.com/usa/holiday-travel/','2021-09-28 07:29:03','2021-09-28 12:29:03','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=851',0,'post','',1),
(862,1,'2011-11-27 11:50:05','2011-11-27 16:50:05','','708473504_18da6d5b07_z','Standing in Line! © Lance Smith / Flickr','inherit','open','open','','708473504_18da6d5b07_z','','','2011-11-27 11:50:05','2011-11-27 16:50:05','',851,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/708473504_18da6d5b07_z1.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(867,1,'2020-08-11 11:12:59','2020-08-11 11:12:59','<h2>Welcome To Satchmo</h2>		\n			A Powerful WordPress Theme for Podcasters.		\n<a onMouseOver=\"this.style.color=`#2d2d2d`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#ffffff`\" onMouseOut=\"this.style.color=`#ffffff`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#c01f2c`\" style=\"color:#ffffff; background-color:#c01f2c\" href=\"#!\">Subscribe</a>   \n<!-- Modal HTML embedded directly into document. -->\n	<ul><li><a href=\"#!\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><img src=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Apple-Podcasts.png\" />Apple Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"#!\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><img src=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Google-Podcasts.png\" />Google Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"#!\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><img 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href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast/episode-1-how-we-started-podcasting/\">\n					<img width=\"800\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" loading=\"lazy\" srcset=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-1.jpg 800w, https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-1-300x188.jpg 300w, https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-1-768x480.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast/episode-1-how-we-started-podcasting/\">\nEpisode 1: How We Started Podcasting</a></h2>\n					July 22, 2019\n					<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/author/satchmo/\">Admin</a>\n							Featured, Tutorials						\n					02:16\n					<a 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srcset=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-10.jpg 800w, https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-10-300x188.jpg 300w, https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-10-768x480.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast/episode-10-season-finale/\">\nEpisode 10: Season Finale</a></h2>\n					July 24, 2019\n					<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/author/satchmo/\">Admin</a>\n							Media						\n					02:16\n					<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast/episode-10-season-finale/#respond\">0 Comments</a>\n						<p>A wonderful serenity has taken possession of my entire soul, like these sweet mornings of spring which I enjoy with my whole heart. I am alone, and feel the...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast/episode-10-season-finale/\"> Play Episode</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-82-2\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast-player/82/episode-10-season-finale.mp3?_=2\" /><a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast-player/82/episode-10-season-finale.mp3\">https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast-player/82/episode-10-season-finale.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast-download/82/episode-10-season-finale.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Episode 10: Season Finale \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast-download/82/episode-10-season-finale.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Episode 10: Season Finale \" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Play in new window</a> | Duration: 02:16</p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast/episode-9-building-an-audience/\">\n					<img width=\"800\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-9.jpg\" alt=\"\" loading=\"lazy\" srcset=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-9.jpg 800w, https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-9-300x188.jpg 300w, https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-9-768x480.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast/episode-9-building-an-audience/\">\nEpisode 9: Building an Audience</a></h2>\n					July 24, 2019\n					<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/author/satchmo/\">Admin</a>\n							Entrepreneurship						\n					02:16\n					<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast/episode-9-building-an-audience/#respond\">0 Comments</a>\n						<p>A wonderful serenity has taken possession of my entire soul, like these sweet mornings of spring which I enjoy with my whole heart. I am alone, and feel the...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast/episode-9-building-an-audience/\"> Play Episode</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-79-3\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast-player/79/episode-9-building-an-audience.mp3?_=3\" /><a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast-player/79/episode-9-building-an-audience.mp3\">https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast-player/79/episode-9-building-an-audience.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast-download/79/episode-9-building-an-audience.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Episode 9: Building an Audience \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast-download/79/episode-9-building-an-audience.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Episode 9: Building an Audience \" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Play in new window</a> | Duration: 02:16</p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast/episode-8-audio-software-for-podcasters/\">\n					<img width=\"800\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-8.jpg\" alt=\"\" loading=\"lazy\" srcset=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-8.jpg 800w, https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-8-300x188.jpg 300w, https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-8-768x480.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast/episode-8-audio-software-for-podcasters/\">\nEpisode 8: Audio Software for Podcasters</a></h2>\n					July 24, 2019\n					<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/author/satchmo/\">Admin</a>\n							Media, Tech						\n					02:16\n					<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast/episode-8-audio-software-for-podcasters/#respond\">0 Comments</a>\n						<p>A wonderful serenity has taken possession of my entire soul, like these sweet mornings of spring which I enjoy with my whole heart. I am alone, and feel the...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast/episode-8-audio-software-for-podcasters/\"> Play Episode</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-70-4\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast-player/70/episode-8-audio-software-for-podcasters.mp3?_=4\" /><a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast-player/70/episode-8-audio-software-for-podcasters.mp3\">https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast-player/70/episode-8-audio-software-for-podcasters.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast-download/70/episode-8-audio-software-for-podcasters.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Episode 8: Audio Software for Podcasters \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast-download/70/episode-8-audio-software-for-podcasters.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Episode 8: Audio Software for Podcasters \" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Play in new window</a> | Duration: 02:16</p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast/episode-7-best-mics-for-podcasting/\">\n					<img width=\"800\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-7.jpg\" alt=\"\" loading=\"lazy\" srcset=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-7.jpg 800w, https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-7-300x188.jpg 300w, https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-7-768x480.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast/episode-7-best-mics-for-podcasting/\">\nEpisode 7: Best Mics for Podcasting</a></h2>\n					July 24, 2019\n					<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/author/satchmo/\">Admin</a>\n							Tech, Tutorials						\n					02:16\n					<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast/episode-7-best-mics-for-podcasting/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n						<p>A wonderful serenity has taken possession of my entire soul, like these sweet mornings of spring which I enjoy with my whole heart. I am alone, and feel the...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast/episode-7-best-mics-for-podcasting/\"> Play Episode</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-67-5\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast-player/67/episode-7-best-mics-for-podcasting.mp3?_=5\" /><a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast-player/67/episode-7-best-mics-for-podcasting.mp3\">https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast-player/67/episode-7-best-mics-for-podcasting.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast-download/67/episode-7-best-mics-for-podcasting.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Episode 7: Best Mics for Podcasting \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast-download/67/episode-7-best-mics-for-podcasting.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Episode 7: Best Mics for Podcasting \" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Play in new window</a> | Duration: 02:16</p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast/episode-6-soundcloud-example/\">\n					<img width=\"800\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-6.jpg\" alt=\"\" loading=\"lazy\" srcset=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-6.jpg 800w, https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-6-300x188.jpg 300w, https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-6-768x480.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast/episode-6-soundcloud-example/\">\nEpisode 6: SoundCloud Example</a></h2>\n					July 24, 2019\n					<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/author/satchmo/\">Admin</a>\n							Media, Tutorials						\n					<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast/episode-6-soundcloud-example/#respond\">0 Comments</a>\n						<p>A wonderful serenity has taken possession of my entire soul, like these sweet mornings of spring which I enjoy with my whole heart. I am alone, and feel the...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast/episode-6-soundcloud-example/\"> Play Episode</a>\n					<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"150\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/261000171&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true\"></iframe>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast/episode-5-mixcloud-example/\">\n					<img width=\"800\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-2.jpg\" alt=\"\" loading=\"lazy\" srcset=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-2.jpg 800w, https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-2-300x188.jpg 300w, https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-2-768x480.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast/episode-5-mixcloud-example/\">\nEpisode 5: MixCloud Example</a></h2>\n					July 24, 2019\n					<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/author/satchmo/\">Admin</a>\n							Media						\n					<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast/episode-5-mixcloud-example/#respond\">0 Comments</a>\n						<p>A wonderful serenity has taken possession of my entire soul, like these sweet mornings of spring which I enjoy with my whole heart. 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As I lie close to the earth, a thousand unknown plants.</p>		\n										<img src=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/wp-content/uploads/elementor/thumbs/guest-2-nb872339vf3o49vpj76jc5vbq718tnt467py1v4low-oijgwgupnl4eggfiik9px6li2wg40rpikjvycehqtc.jpg\" title=\"guest-2-nb872339vf3o49vpj76jc5vbq718tnt467py1v4low\" alt=\"guest-2-nb872339vf3o49vpj76jc5vbq718tnt467py1v4low\" />											\n			<h2>Earn Palmer</h2>		\n			Drummer		\n		<p style=\"text-align: center;\">I throw myself down among the tall grass by the trickling stream. 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(879,1,'2012-01-05 19:17:59','2012-01-06 00:17:59','','On Tap in Edinburgh','On Tap in Edinburgh © Mark Peacock','inherit','open','open','','dsc_8571','','','2012-01-05 19:17:59','2012-01-06 00:17:59','',880,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/DSC_85711.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(880,1,'2012-01-05 23:00:52','2012-01-06 05:00:52','[caption id=\"attachment_879\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"207\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/DSC_85711.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-879\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/DSC_85711-207x300.jpg\" alt=\"On Tap in Edinburgh © Mark Peacock\" width=\"207\" height=\"300\" /></a> On Tap in Edinburgh © Mark Peacock[/caption]\n<p>Finishing up my annual 2-week travel sabbatical in an unseasonably warm <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Chicago\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Chicago</a>. In this episode, a listener asks about if and when to use travel <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Compression stockings\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compression_stockings\" rel=\"wikipedia\">compression socks</a>, we discern the popularity of in-flight Wi-Fi service from Gogo\'s <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Initial public offering\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initial_public_offering\" rel=\"wikipedia\">IPO</a> filing, and dissect a recent article on the best airports for tech users.  We look at the new wave of social media dining apps such as <a href=\"http://untappd.com\">Untappd</a> which helps you drink beer socially, how they\'re taking advantage of smartphone cameras and location services. We wrap up with a look at how airline alliances are changing the frequent flier\'s experience. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_96.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<p> </p>\n<hr />\n<p>Here are the transcript from TravelCommons podcast #96:</p>\n<ul>\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n<li>Happy New Year to everyone! Returning to work after my 2-week sabbatical from travel in unseasonably warm Chicagoland.  I was out in Phoenix for the first two weeks of December, where it was only 10-15 degrees warmer than Chicago.  Then I did a quick up-and-back to DC and was home for good by the evening of the 16<sup>th</sup>.  Though we didn’t have a white Christmas, I did have an amazing run of on-time and even early arrivals at ORD – a pleasant change from past December travel odysseys.</li>\n<li>Indeed, my trips at the beginning of December were some of the easiest, most pleasant I’ve had in a while – combination of mild weather and light crowds made travel a breeze – short security lines, non-cranky TSA screeners, plenty of overhead space, and the reappearance of that rarities of rarities – an empty middle seat.</li>\n<li>It feels like from the Tues or Weds after Thanksgiving to the week before Christmas is a bit of tourist dead zone and so the only ones traveling are the professional road warriors trying to close those last few deals, tie up those remaining loose ends before everyone and everything shuts down for the holidays.</li>\n<li>Or it’s frequent fliers doing one last <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Frequent-flyer program\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequent-flyer_program\" rel=\"wikipedia\">mileage run</a> to get them to the next status level.  I didn’t need to make any mileage runs per se, but I did need those last two Phoenix trips to re-up my Hilton Diamond status and to get me back on United’s red carpet with 1K status.</li>\n<li>Making 1K -- or more importantly, getting the systemwide upgrades that come with United’s top status was very timely.  I’m heading over to <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Beijing\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beijing\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Beijing</a> in January and being able to confirm an upgrade on United’s 14-hr Chicago-to-Beijing flight – which was one of the best Christmas presents I received…</li>\n<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://www.nimbitmusic.com/saurabbhargava\">Exit</a></em> by Saurab Bhargava</li>\n</ul>\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<ul>\n<li>All the bridge music on this episode from Saurab Bhargava’s new album Chromatique.  Saurab is a friend and long time TravelCommons listener. I’m happy to feature his music. That cut is Exit, which interestingly enough is the first cut on the album.  Here\'s a <a href=\"http://www.nimbitmusic.com/saurabbhargava/#music/chromatique\">link</a> to where you can buy them.</li>\n<li>Tony White wrote in to ask about travel compression socks…\n<ul>\n<li>I am not sure if you covered this topic or not.  Do you have a preference of a minimum amount of hours of travel you choose to wear travel socks?</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n<li>Tony, thanks for the question. No, I haven\'t covered this topic before -- because I’ve never used travel socks.  <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Compression stockings\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compression_stockings\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Compression socks</a> squeeze the feet and calves – to improve circulation, which helps fight feet swelling and <a href=\"http://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/health/health-topics/topics/dvt/\">deep vein thrombosis</a> – blood clots in the lower legs.  When I’ve flown business class on long flights, I haven’t felt much swelling – even on the 16-17 hour NYC to J’burg flight.  I think the lie-flat or near-flat seats reduce the distance between head and feet and so minimize the blood pooling in the lower legs.  Even in coach, I haven\'t felt the need for them on an 8-hour flight to London or Honolulu. However, on a flight back from Hong Kong last year, I wasn\'t able to score an upgrade.  During the 15 hours in coach I definitely felt swelling in my calves.  It was a full flight, so I couldn\'t lift my legs up for any length of time. Indeed, I saw a couple of guys lying on the floor in front of the exit row with their legs in the air.  On my upcoming trip to Beijing, I mentioned that I scored an upgrade to business class on the way out, but my upgrade for the flight back is still waitlisted.  If that second upgrade doesn’t come through this week, I think I\'ll be doing some After Christmas shopping for compression socks.</li>\n<li>Two days before Christmas, <a href=\"http://gogoair.com/\">Gogo</a>, the dominant in-flight <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Wi-Fi\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi-Fi\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Wi-Fi</a> provider, <a href=\"http://venturebeat.com/2011/12/23/gogo-ipo/\">filed paperwork</a> with the SEC for a $100 million IPO.  The filing provided some interesting stats.  Gogo sells Wi-Fi on 4,000 flights a day on 9 out of the 10 North American airlines that offer Wi-Fi, though Delta represents 45% and bankrupt American 18% of their volume.  Gogo is available on over 1,100 planes, which they say is 85 percent of all Wi-Fi-enabled planes in North America, and they’re signed up to add another 525 soon. Impressive on the face of it, but if you start <a href=\"http://www.splatf.com/2011/12/gogo-ipo-filing/\">tumbling the numbers</a>, you quickly find that only 3-4% of passengers are buying – which syncs up with my experience.  We’ve talked about this in past episodes – while in-flight Wi-Fi has good use cases, especially when you don’t want to go radio-silent for 3-4 hours in the middle of the day, it’s a niche offering.  I’ve used it maybe half-a-dozen times in 2011.  From my anecdotal observations – looking over people’s shoulders walking to and from the aft toilets – most people are enjoying the unconnected time to watch a movie, read an e-book, or play Angry Birds (amazing how long that streak has been going).  Doesn’t seem that most folks are willing to pay $10-12 a flight to update their Facebook status.</li>\n<li>A <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"PC World (magazine)\" href=\"http://www.pcworld.com\" rel=\"homepage\">PCWorld</a> article on the <a href=\"http://www.pcworld.com/article/246001/20_best_us_airports_for_tech_travelers.html\">best airports for tech users</a> ranks the 40busiest US airports on outlet availability, speed of Wi-Fi service (either free or paid), and strength of cellular signal – a good set of <a href=\"http://www.pcworld.com/article/246181/best_airports_for_tech_users_how_the_40_busiest_us_airports_stack_up.html\">basic tech criteria</a>.  DFW ranks #1 – it wasn’t #1 on any single category, but earned above average marks across the board.  ORD, my usual hangout, ranked #34 out of 40, which I think is about right.  Finding an available outlet at a gate is like a grown-up Easter Egg hunt – complete with crawling around and looking under chairs. Everyone wants to board with a full battery pack, especially iPhone users. Apple still hasn’t gotten iOS 5 battery life back to where it needs to be.  And for me, cellular signal is much more important than Wi-Fi service because I tend to use my iDevices much more than my laptop in airports.  At ORD, the AT&amp;T 3G service is unbelievably bad.  I’ll have 4 or 5 bars on my iPhone but can’t pull anything – e-mail, web pages, nothing!  Which is the reason I travel with a Verizon 4G hotspot.  After I’ve gotten tired of watching the “Checking for Mail” circle impotently spin, I fire up the hotspot and – Bam! – I’ve got mail.</li>\n<li>But I dunno, hitting #1 for having visible electrical outlets and decent data signal seems damning with faint praise.  To really be a top tech airport, I think you need to have something like Qantas’s <a href=\"http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204296804577123004175940104.html\">set up</a> at Sydney airport – using RFID technology to make check-in, bag check, and plane boarding 5-second events.  I posted a link to the <a href=\"http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204296804577123004175940104.html\">WSJ article</a> on the TravelCommons Facebook page and Lisa Besso commented, saying that it’s a great system.  I’d be willing to suffer through ORD’s lousy AT&amp;T service is United did something like this.</li>\n<li>Early in December, when my family was trying to get their Christmas shopping done, they started bugging me for gift ideas. Sitting in my room in the Scottsdale Hilton Garden Inn (which, by the way, isn’t a bad place), paging through the <a href=\"http://usatoday.com\">USAToday</a>, listening to a podcast on my wireless Motorola headset, I thought a wireless speaker would be nice.  Now I realize that a lot of alarm clocks in hotel rooms have plugs that let you play your iDevice through their speakers, but the quality is marginal at best (except for those few hotels that stock iHome alarm clocks) and you’re stuck in the bedroom – not great if you’re in something like an Embassy or Doubletree Suites.  I asked the Twitter-verse for suggestions and ended up with a Jawbone <a href=\"http://jawbone.com/charitywater\">Jambox</a> under the tree.  My wife said she bought the special edition yellow one so that I wouldn’t miss it when packing up, though the fact that Jawbone donates $50 from each purchase to <a href=\"http://www.charitywater.org/\">charity:water</a> didn’t hurt.  The Jambox isn’t cheap, but it puts out a lot of sound from a small package and has the easiest Bluetooth pairing I’ve seen.  Again, not cheap, but I recommend it.</li>\n<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://www.nimbitmusic.com/saurabbhargava\">Yours in Mine</a> </em>by Saurab Bhargava</li>\n</ul>\n<p><strong>Dining With Social Media</strong></p>\n<ul>\n<li>Finding interesting places to eat is always a challenge for frequent travelers. When you’re traveling to the same place a lot – like I do to Scottsdale – it’s easy to fall into a rut, going to the same places near the office or the hotel every trip.</li>\n<li>When I started traveling, way before Al Gore invented the Internet, you’d rely on recommendations – from folks in the local office, the front desk clerk, a cab driver, a bartender, whomever you ran into.  Or maybe you pulled a top restaurant list out of the local paper or a guidebook.  I remember one project in SF in the early ‘90’s.  The project partner had a list of the top 100 restaurants in SF.  Don’t know where he got it, but it was a Bible to him.  We started at #1 for the project kick-off dinner and started working our way through the list.</li>\n<li>And so here we are, 20 years and billions of dollars of venture capital investment later, and we still rely on personal recommendations.  But on steroids.  The first wave of food social media was powered by the multiplier effect -- you weren’t limited to people you physically meet; you could tap the expertise and passion of a broad group of diners and foodies for broad set of recommendations. <a href=\"http://chowhound.chow.com/boards\">Chowhound</a>, a food discussion board I’ve mentioned in <a title=\"Podcast #22 – Other Side of the Ticket Counter; Finding Local Food\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/11/13/podcast-22-other-side-of-the-ticket-counter-finding-local-food/\">past</a> <a title=\"Podcast #41 – Full to the Brim, What’s the One Thing…?\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2006/06/30/podcast-41-full-to-the-brim-whats-the-one-thing/\">episodes</a>, is a perfect example of that.  I’m still a heavy user.  On my second trip to Phoenix last month, I was on my own for dinner every night.  Around 5 every night, I’ve hit the Phoenix board on Chowhound and start paging through the entries until I found a restaurant that hit my tastebuds.  One night I ended up eating a green chile pork stew in a post Scottsdale place; the next night I had a bowl of pho at a Vietnamese strip mall in Mesa.</li>\n<li>But if the first wave was discussion board-based, the current wave is smartphone-based, using the GPS and camera to build on the personal recommendations</li>\n<li>Those of you following my Twitter feed may notice the occasional tweet that I’ve earned a badge from Untappd. Untappd is a social media app for beer drinkers, or should I say people who enjoy drinking good beer.  Instead of checking in locations on FourSquare, I check in my beer on <a href=\"http://untappd.com/\">Untappd</a>.  It keeps track of the beers I drink and where I’m drinking them, allows friends to see what I’m drinking, and awards badges for “achievements” like checking in 200 unique beers or drinking a stout on Nov 3<sup>rd</sup>, what someone designated <a href=\"http://www.stoutday.com/\">International Stout Day</a>.</li>\n<li>The whole check-in thing gets me out of my hotel room to search out local beers wherever I’m traveling.  On that same trip to Phoenix, I found Papago Brewery in a Scottsdale strip mall and tried their El Robusto Porter. It wasn’t the best beer I’ve had, but it was something different.</li>\n<li>But when I’m on the road, the best use of Untappd for me is discovering bars with interesting beer selections. One night in New York a couple months back, I was wandering around Midtown looking for a good beer bar.  Standing in some ersatz Irish bar, I fired up Untappd; it used the iPhone GPS to display nearby check-ins.  Paging down, I saw interesting beers being checked in at place called the <a href=\"http://www.rattlenhumbarnyc.com/\">Rattle and Hum</a>. A couple of clicks and I have it on the Maps app –it’s about a 10 block walk.  It was a pretty nondescript place.  Indeed, I walked right past it the first time.  I go inside – it’s jammed and has a great beer selection.  A great find courtesy of a dozen people I’ve never met, and through GPS I quickly found it.</li>\n<li>Another app I use is <a href=\"http://foodspotting.com/\">Foodspotting</a>.  It also uses the iPhone GPS.  But rather than just showing a list of near-by restaurants, it cycles through pictures of dishes from those restaurants uploaded by diners.  Reading recommendations and menus are helpful in choosing a restaurant. Actually seeing the dishes takes a whole lot of the guesswork out.  My favorite use case is to park my car in a restaurant-rich neighborhood – I’ve done this in old town Scottsdale and in downtown Bethesda, MD – fire up Foodspotting and start cycling through the pictures.  Pretty quick, I get a sense of what place near-by is best matching my hunger pangs, and then map it with a couple of clicks – or screen presses, I guess.</li>\n<li>I’d like to personally thank all the venture capital firms that have invested billions of dollars over the years in all of this to help me quickly vector in on the perfect cheeseburger.</li>\n<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://www.nimbitmusic.com/saurabbhargava\">Through The Line</a> </em>by Saurab Bhargava</li>\n</ul>\n<p><strong>Frequent Flier Alliances</strong></p>\n<ul>\n<li>I mentioned earlier that I’d returned to 1K status on United; returning to the red boarding carpet at the United gates.  I also keep the 100% mileage matching – getting a bonus mile for each mile flown.  The 2012 changes to United’s awards program appear to reduce the bonus match for the mid-tier Premiere Exec’s –down to 50 or 70% depending on which of the new mid-tiers you hit.</li>\n<li>The interesting thing is – I didn’t fly that much on United last year – less than a dozen flights.  Just enough status miles to make Premiere – United’s entry-level status tier, which you can get the same benefits – free luggage, early boarding – free for a year by signing up for United’s Visa card.</li>\n<li>I earned most of the 100,000 qualifying miles on US Air and Lufthansa.  So I really didn’t earn 1K on United as much as I earned it on the Star Alliance.  Not that this is anything new – some chunk of my 2.5 million lifetime American Advantage miles are from British Airways.  However, with airlines rationalizing/reducing their number of seats; more tightly coordinating flight schedules and code sharing with their alliance partners, these partnerships – Star Alliance, OneWorld, and SkyTeam – become more of a way of life for frequent travelers, especially in those critical areas of status recognition, mileage credit, and mileage redemption.</li>\n<li>It’s not a simple situation.  There are core alliance members – United, Lufthansa, US Air in Star Alliance; Delta and AirFrance in SkyTeam; American and BA in OneWorld.  And then there are the “other” partners, and these can move around.  Aer Lingus, for example, was part of the OneWorld alliance with American, but left in 2007 to go independent, and is now matched up with JetBlue and United (but not Continental), while Virgin Atlantic is matched up with Continental, but not United.  There are promiscuous partners – Hawaiian Airlines and Jet Airways seem to be on everyone’s list – while others like Southwest remain single or assemble their own little group like Emirates.</li>\n<li>International travelers been stringing these beads for 20+ years to assemble their itineraries, but to have to do this domestically is a newer thing.  Because United and US Air are both Star Alliance partners, United has cut back their Chicago-Phoenix service, relying instead on code-sharing with US Air. I book the flight directly with US Air instead – one less step to traverse when something goes wrong – but give them my United Mileage Plus number instead of a Dividend Miles number (do I have one of those?). I still get to pre-board and, most importantly, concentrate my miles to maximize my status level.</li>\n<li>The downside? US Air doesn’t take the free drink coupons United sends out to its 1K members.  If they could get that redemption thing integrated, then it would truly be a seamless partnership</li>\n</ul>\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<ul>\n<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #96</li>\n<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n<li>As I mentioned earlier, all the bridge music on this episode from Saurab Bhargava’s new album Chromatique.  The tracks were <em>Exit</em>, <em>Yours In Mine</em>, and <em>Through The Line</em>.  Here\'s a <a href=\"http://www.nimbitmusic.com/saurabbhargava/#music/chromatique\">link</a> where you can buy the songs or the entire album.</li>\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_96.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #96 — Eating and Drinking with Social Media; Frequent Flier Alliances','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-96-dining-with-social-media-frequent-flier-alliances','','','2021-09-28 07:31:24','2021-09-28 12:31:24','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=880',0,'post','',2),
(913,1,'2012-03-03 14:37:49','2012-03-03 20:37:49','[caption id=\"attachment_925\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"225\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/image1.jpeg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-925\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/image1-225x300.jpeg\" alt=\"Tiny White Fish in Chinese Soup\" width=\"225\" height=\"300\" /></a> Here\'s Looking At You © Mark Peacock[/caption]\n\nLots of travel has kept me away from the mic -- <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Beijing\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beijing\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener wikipedia\">Beijing</a>, London, <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Vienna\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vienna\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener wikipedia\">Vienna</a>, Phoenix, New York, and New Orleans. Big difference in airline load factor between international and domestic flights. The international flights were at 30-50% capacity while the domestic flights were booked solid. These trips allowed me to compare the different treatment US airlines get in international airports. This was my first trip to China; it made quite an impression. This string of travel has formed a strong opinion that the thermostat is the most important piece of hotel technology. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_97.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #97:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Bless me listeners for I have sinned.  It’s been 8 weeks since my last podcast.  What would be the appropriate penance?  Two Our Fathers, three Hail Marys, sitting next to a mother and lap child on next Tuesday’s 3-1/2 hr flight to Phoenix, and giving up snarky TSA tweets for Lent?  That would be harsh – especially the TSA thing.</li>\n 	<li>I have been doing quite a bit of travel since the last episode.  10 days in Beijing, 3 days in London, 2 days in Vienna, a week in Phoenix, and then the back end of last week in <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"New York City\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener wikipedia\">New York.</a> I hung around Chicago last week, and then was down in New Orleans this week.  March has me in back Phoenix, then Brussels, back in New York, and then down to <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"San Juan, Puerto Rico\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Juan%2C_Puerto_Rico\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener wikipedia\">San Juan, PR</a> for spring break.  In the first quarter of the year – I will have traveled 11 out of the 13 weeks.  That’s probably my most intense run since 3-4 years ago when I traveled every week from the beginning of September – Labor Day – until Christmas week.</li>\n 	<li>The domestic flights have been jampacked while the International flights have been relatively open.  My flight over to Beijing last month, business class was about half full and coach was less than that.  I had the two-side – window and aisle seat – of a United Triple 7 to myself.  It was an upgraded one – with lie-flat seats and big 22-inch monitors. I had both monitors displaying the flight map at different levels of zoom as we went straight north from Chicago. I saw a lot of frozen Ontario.</li>\n 	<li>The flight back from Vienna, by way of London, I didn’t upgrade to Business.  I didn’t need to sleep; I had my iPad fully charged and loaded with content, so Coach was fine.  Business was full anyhow, but Coach was two-thirds empty. I ended up with more room than I would’ve had in Business.  People were sacked out across the middle rows.  I had a two-side to myself, so spread out, did a little work, and then mucked around on my iPad.</li>\n 	<li>It was a rude crash to Earth, though, on my flights in and out of LGA.  I’m 1K on United, but was 15<sup>th</sup> in line for the one remaining upgrade. I felt lucky to get an exit row middle seat. I think even the lap kids had status.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Wanna luv you</em> by <a href=\"http://www.henta.co.uk/\">Henta Ellis</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>In the<a title=\"Podcast #96 — Eating and Drinking with Social Media; Frequent Flier Alliances\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/01/05/podcast-96-dining-with-social-media-frequent-flier-alliances/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> last episode</a>, I talked about the Jawbone Jambox wireless speaker I got for Christmas.  It got a good bit of use in my Beijing hotel room. I was there for 8 days. It only had 2 English-language TV stations – CNN and <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"BBC World News\" href=\"http://www.bbcworldnews.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"homepage noopener\">BBC World News</a>.  You can only watch the 30-minute news rolls just so many times.  I powered through most of my podcast backlog, a few new albums, and a couple of documentaries I’d loaded up before heading over.  Good quality sound and much less awkward than sitting around wearing my Bose headphones.</li>\n 	<li>In <a title=\"Podcast #33 – Listener Mailbag, What’s in My Briefcase?\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2006/02/18/podcast-33-listener-mailbag-whats-in-my-briefcase/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">past episodes</a>, I’ve talked about the “slum” terminals in big airports – the terminal where the non-hub airlines have their couple of gates.  At ORD, United has Terminal 1, American Terminal 3, separated by Terminal 2, the “slum” terminal where US Air, Delta, JetBlue.  In PHX, USAir and Southwest split the renovated shopping mall-like Terminal 4, while everyone else slums it in Terminals 2 and 3.</li>\n 	<li>When I fly home from Europe on US carriers, I feel a bit of the same “slum” treatment.  For what I’m sure are security reasons, the US carrier gates are all seem to be inconveniently located at the end of the longest concourse where there are no services – no restaurants, no shops, no bars.  It’s often a hunt for a restroom.  At <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"London Heathrow Airport\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Heathrow_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener wikipedia\">Heathrow Terminal 2</a>, they tell you it’s a 20-minute walk from security to these gates. No dawdling in duty free.</li>\n 	<li>In Beijing, though, it was a very different story.  The United flights to ORD, SFO, and IAD all left from gates conveniently located in the center of the concourse – a 5-minute walk at most from the restaurants and shops.  Nor was there the extra security screening at the gate that you typically go through in European airports.  I just walked out of the bar and right onto the plane.</li>\n 	<li>In Vienna, I was experienced a different twist.  I was flying to Heathrow on BMI, but somehow ended up in seemed to be a slum satellite terminal entirely devoted to Russian flights.  It was, once again, at the end of the terminal, and down a set of stairs, complete with a smoking room the size of 4 phone booths, in which at one point I counted 7 guys.  It was the only smoking room I saw in the Vienna airport – which may be the reason it and its Russian clientele got stuffed in the slum terminal.  But that still doesn’t explain why my LHR flight ended up there – unless BMI got a smokin’ deal on gate fees…</li>\n 	<li>We’ve had kind of a discussion thread across a few episodes on the TSA’s Global Entry program – pay $100 (which many travel companies like Amex are reimbursing for top tier customers), give the TSA your life story and a set of finger prints, and you skip the US immigration lines for a set of kiosks over in the corner.  It’s been a huge time saver for me and a number of TravelCommons listeners.</li>\n 	<li>So imagine my surprise – returning to Chicago from Vienna by way of Heathrow – I see 5-10 people queued for the Global Entry kiosks and no waiting for a live immigration agent.  I had filled out the customs card on the flight, so I walked up to an agent.  He processed me, saw the GE sticker on my passport and asked why I didn’t use a kiosk.  I pointed over to the line.  “Yup,” he said, “you knew that was going to happen eventually”</li>\n 	<li>Bob Fennerty commented on Facebook\n<ul>\n 	<li>Maybe the model will flip someday: Global Entry will be free and instead of paying to use a kiosk you\'ll pay to be processed by an agent. I always fill out the customs card on the plane so that I can choose to use GE or not. I probably skip the kiosks every fifth or sixth arrival.</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>And if I can slip one last TSA comment in before I try to give it up for Lent, what’s with the incredible waste of machinery at most TSA checkpoints?  On my last trip out of PHX, the TSA lines was 15 minutes – while 4 of 6 lanes of screening equipment sat idle.  Same thing in ORD a week ago – a 15-minute wait in the status line while 4 lanes of adjacent equipment was unmanned.  The problem?  The full body scanners.  Not only does the full body scanner take longer – instead of the second it takes to walk through the metal detector, you have to stand with your arms raised for 5-7 seconds, then wait another 5-10 seconds for the remote screener to radio the “OK” to the gate keeper who then opens the gate to let you out. 10-20 seconds per person instead of the 1-2 seconds it takes for a walk-through metal detector – that math isn’t difficult.</li>\n 	<li>And then add to that the additional staff the body scanner requires – the remote screener, the gate keeper, the one at the front keeping everyone queued… and you see the double effect – not only does the body scanner slow down the two lanes running through it, it also consumes staff that might be manning 1 or 2 of those idle lanes.  I don’t think a little more efficiency and a little less line time is too much to ask from an agency that spent over $8 billion last year.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a question, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is <a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a> -- use the Voice Memo app on your iPhone or something like Virtual Recorder on your Android phone to record and send in an audio comment – or iMovie if you want to send in some video; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em>Snub-Nosed Aardvark</em> by <a href=\"http://podcast.penmachine.com/\">Derek K. Miller</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>First Trip to Beijing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>My first trip in 2012 was a big one from Chicago to Beijing – just short of 14 hours each way on United’s direct Chicago-Beijing flight.  The timing on the flight over was a bit goofy – I left at noon on Tuesday and landed in Beijing around 4:30 Weds afternoon.  I had a hard time figuring out when I was supposed to sleep.  As I mentioned at the start of the show, the flight was a polar route – straight north from Chicago, over Ontario, Alaska, and then down over Siberia.  I did manage to take an afternoon nap, but pretty much putzed around for 14 hours.  I looked out the window a lot after we crossed the Arctic Circle looking to see some Northern Lights – no luck.  Did some work, listened to podcasts, watched a couple of episodes of a BBC documentary on the history of Beijing that I’d ripped down to my iPad.</li>\n 	<li>After 14 hours in a dry metal tube, it was refreshing to walk out into a spacious, modern, clean airport.  As you would expect since the international terminal – Terminal 3 – opened right before the 2008 Summer Olympics.  And it’s big – with more space than all 5 of London Heathrow’s terminals combined.</li>\n 	<li>This was kind of an underlying observation during the whole trip – with more than 1.3 billion people – a lot of things just <em>have</em> to be big in China. While I knew this intellectually before the trip, it didn’t really hit me until I was there.  20 million people in Beijing, and it’s smaller than Shanghai. A local guy I was working with said that he was from a small town about an hour west of Beijing.  “And how many people live in your town?” I asked.  “About a million,” he answered.  And he said this with a straight face.\n\n[caption id=\"attachment_927\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"225\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/photo-1-e13307957324511.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-927\" title=\"Beijing Morning\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/photo-1-e13307957324511-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"225\" height=\"300\" /></a> On A Clear Day You Can See Across the Street © Mark Peacock[/caption]</li>\n 	<li>The other thing I thought I was prepared for, but really wasn’t, was the pollution.  We all remember the warnings before the Summer Olympics – about how the pollution was going to bring the marathoners to their knees.  And then nothing really happened. Well, the day after we arrived, the first day of business, we walked out of the office building and down the block to a restaurant for lunch.  Halfway down the block, I could feel the itching in the back of my throat.  Then my eyes started burning.  By the end of the day, I had a low-grade headache.  And this was just the first day.</li>\n 	<li>Not that it got any better.  We started joking that on a clear day, you could see across the street.  Looking up at the sky, we had no problem looking directly into the sun; one guy got a nice photo with his iPhone.  I was running a pollution headache about every other day. I started looking forward to my flight home</li>\n 	<li>The food was very good – if you like Chinese food, which I do.  We ate at a lot of different restaurants, all of it good.  But at just about every meal, there was one dish that made you go “Hmmm….”</li>\n 	<li>The first night we ate at the hotel.  We had just arrived a couple of hours earlier; were a bit out of it from the time change and the long flight; and so were just looking for a beer and a bit of food – more to keep us awake to try and adjust to the time more than actual hunger. The wait staff didn’t speak much English, but they had a picture menu, so we that helped us do “point &amp; shoot” ordering.  We’ll take one of those and those and those and those – and 4 beers.  The waiter went away, and then came back with a colleague – who could speak a bit of English. “I’m sorry,” she said, “ but we’re out of the pickled donkey meat appetizer you chose, but we can substitute the specially spiced donkey meat instead.”  And then she walked off.  And brought back the specially spiced donkey meat.  In the next couple of days, we learned that donkey meat is a Beijing specialty.  Shanghai? No donkey meat.  But Beijing, you can get donkey meat. Guess we lucked out on our first meal.</li>\n 	<li>It was always something. Like when they split the head of the Peking duck and served it on a plate so you could pick at the brains. Or gave me a cup the fish soup with slimy water lily stems and small albino fish staring up at me. Or at the hot pot restaurant where what I though was brown tofu was actually some sort of pressed loaf of duck blood.  And, at just about every meal, there was a plate of jellyfish.</li>\n 	<li>But when I wanted to share pictures of this food with friends on Facebook, I ran smack up against the Great Firewall of China. Logged into the hotel’s Wi-Fi, I could Skype back home, run e-mail, do most everything – except access Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.  All blocked, but not with a big “Do Not Go Here/Turn Back” error page. It’s like those sites don’t exist – you get a blank web page and you watch it churn and churn and churn, waiting for a reply, until either you give up and move on, or the browser times out.</li>\n 	<li>For me, it wasn’t that tough to get around.  I just fired up our corporate Cisco VPN client, nailed up a secure connection to our Scottsdale data center, and bingo, I had a nice tunnel through the Great Firewall. I updated my Facebook and Twitter statuses. Posted a picture of the albino fish soup to Facebook; I was social again. I was also able to download content in iTunes that had been unavailable before – I guess for copyright reasons – things like podcasts from the BBC. Coming onto the Internet from our Arizona data center with a US IP address, everything was back to normal.</li>\n 	<li>Before I left, I had been pleasantly surprised to find that AT&amp;T’s international data plan included China.  With this trip and a European trip 2 weeks after, I had bought a 125 MB “bucket of data” for $50 just in case.  On the ground in Beijing, trying to find my way around, 3G connectivity was no problem. But what really surprised me was that I was able to connect to Facebook and Twitter with my iPhone.  For some reason, the Great Firewall had missed mobile data.</li>\n 	<li>But even with my social networks reestablished, after 8 days in Beijing, I was out of eyedrops and ibuprofen; I was kinda tired of jellyfish. And with all the Beijingers heading back to their “small towns” for the Lunar New Year festivities, it was also time for me to head home</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em>Baja Taxi</em> by <a href=\"http://www.brain-buckit.com/\">Brain Buckit</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Most Important Hotel Technology</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>On my Beijing trip, I spent just short of 28 hours on United Triple 7s – a little more than a day.  I spent 8 days in my hotel though, so no matter how good or bad the United flights were, it’s the hotel that would make or break the trip.</li>\n 	<li>I stayed in a nice hotel – it was in the north part of the city, right by the Olympic Village.  I could see the Bird’s Nest stadium lit up orange every night. I upgraded my room for an extra $10-15/night so I had a nice sitting area – a couch, chair, a little coffee table – or I guess in China, it would be a tea table.  Some extra space so I wouldn’t have to sit on my bed the whole time.</li>\n 	<li>We’ve talked in a <a title=\"Podcast #85 — Importance of Hotel Bathrooms; Maximizing Miles\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2010/11/30/podcast-85-importance-of-hotel-bathrooms-maximizing-miles/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">past episode</a> about how the importance of the hotel bathroom is often overlooked.  Not in this room – it was modern, clean, spacious, and the shower had good water pressure.</li>\n 	<li>But as we’ve talked, a lot of the talk has been about new hotel technology. La Quinta, a US bargain chain, is making noise about their rollout of flat screen HDTVs that let you plug your gaming or iDevices into them. Higher-end hotels are loaning out iPads during your stay.</li>\n 	<li>After my 8 days in Beijing, though, I decided that the single most important technology in my hotel room is neither the flat screen TV nor my Jawbone Jambox speaker – it was the thermostat.  For the first 5 days, everything worked fine – my room was a comfortable 21 degrees C or 70 degrees F.  Then one night, my thermostat decided I was too cold.  After a lousy night’s sleep, I woke up to 25 degrees C or 77 degrees F.  I pushed every button on that thermostat, turned it off and on, even downloaded the manual from the Internet and actually read it, but no luck. And, of course, the hotel front desk and engineering staff was of no use.  They came up and pushed the same buttons I did – and got the same results.</li>\n 	<li>Their suggestion – open a window.  Which would’ve been a reasonable one if the Beijing air wasn’t so polluted.  As it was, with the thermostat turned off, the outside air began to leak into the room. I could taste the pollution in my mouth when I walked into my room.</li>\n 	<li>Maybe I’m a wimp, but after 3 days of this, I would’ve happily traded the flat screen TV and its 2 English-language channels for a working thermostat.</li>\n 	<li>It’s pretty common sense – first and foremost I want my hotel room to be comfortable. It kinda goes back to Maslow’s hierarchy – you have to meet my basic physiological needs – the right room temperature, a good night’s sleep, a decent shower – before I can begin to think about the self-actualizing potential of half-a-dozen channels of high-def sports programming.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #97</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from the <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/\">Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_97.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #97 — 1st Trip to Beijing; Most Important Hotel Technology','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-97-first-trip-to-beijing-most-important-hotel-technology','','','2021-09-28 07:34:51','2021-09-28 12:34:51','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=913',0,'post','',0),
(925,1,'2012-03-03 12:22:10','2012-03-03 17:22:10','','Albino Fish Soup','Albino Fish Soup © Mark Peacock','inherit','open','open','','image','','','2012-03-03 12:22:10','2012-03-03 17:22:10','',913,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/image1.jpeg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(927,1,'2012-03-03 12:28:31','2012-03-03 17:28:31','','Beijing Morning','On A Clear Day You Can See Across the Street © Mark Peacock','inherit','open','open','','photo-1','','','2012-03-03 12:28:31','2012-03-03 17:28:31','',913,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/photo-1-e13307957324511.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(931,1,'2012-04-21 16:02:28','2012-04-21 21:02:28','[caption id=\"attachment_941\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\" caption=\"Any Way for Breakfast © Mark Peacock\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/IMG_1159.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-941\" title=\"IMG_1159\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/IMG_1159-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a>[/caption]\n\nRecent surveys by<a href=\"http://www.gadling.com/2012/02/02/tripadvisor-survey-reveals-wifi-is-a-travelers-top-amenity/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> TripAdvisor</a> and <a href=\"http://travel.usatoday.com/hotels/post/2012/04/survey-reveals-hotels-guests-want-wifi-over-everything-else/666250/1\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Hotels.com</a> report that the most popular hotel amenity is free WiFi. If they both didn\'t misplace a decimal point, then they surveyed the wrong travelers. &nbsp;Experienced travelers know that the most important amenity is the free hotel breakfast.\n\nNow I\'m not denying that the growth of mobile devices -- smartphones, tablets, laptops -- has made network access vital. And with everyone posting experiences and photos on <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"http://twitter.com/#!/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Twitter</a>, Foursquare, Instagram, <a href=\"http://www.tripadvisor.com/members/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">TripAdvisor</a>,... network access is important to every guest -- business travelers <em>and</em> vacationing families. But frequent travelers have learned that free hotel WiFi is a tease -- reasonably fast at 1pm when no one is in the hotel; an exercise in frustration at 9pm when you\'re trying to Skype with your kids or download tomorrow\'s presentation. &nbsp;Most of us long ago ponied up the extra $40-50/month to tether our laptops to our smartphones or bought a separate mobile WiFI hotspot (preferably from someone other than our smartphone carrier). So free WiFi as the most important hotel amenity? Not so much. For me, a good breakfast is much more important.\n\nGrowing up, we all heard that breakfast is the most important meal of the day, but it\'s also is the easiest to skip when you\'re on the road. A 2011 <a href=\"http://articles.nydailynews.com/2011-10-17/entertainment/30311618_1_important-meal-breakfast-skipping-time-or-appetite\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">survey</a> estmated that 31 million Americans skipped breakfast while two university studies found that eating breakfast reduced overeating throughout the day and subsequent weight gain.\n\nWhich is all well and good, but for me the free hotel breakfast is about convenience. Unless you\'re in a dense urban area like Manhattan or the Chicago Loop or Central London, your hotel is likely centered in a large parking lot off a busy intersection. &nbsp;Running around the corner for a quick breakfast sandwich probably isn\'t an option. And I\'m not interested in dropping $20 on the breakfast buffet, not for a 10-minute bite. &nbsp;I typically just want an egg, a couple of slices of bacon and a cup of coffee while I cool down from 30 minutes on the elliptical trainer. Grabbing that in the hotel makes it easy; saves one stop on the drive into the office. And it let\'s me brush my teeth <em>after</em>&nbsp;breakfast for a fresh start to the day.','Best Hotel Amenity? Free Breakfast','','publish','closed','closed','','best-hotel-amenity-free-breakfast','','','2021-09-28 07:35:38','2021-09-28 12:35:38','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=931',0,'post','',2),
(941,1,'2012-04-21 15:38:50','2012-04-21 15:38:50','Dueling breakfast signs at Columbus Circle, NYC','IMG_1159','Any Way for Breakfast','inherit','open','open','','img_1159','','','2012-04-21 15:38:50','2012-04-21 15:38:50','',931,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/IMG_1159.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(949,1,'2012-05-01 16:37:01','2012-05-01 21:37:01','[caption id=\"attachment_952\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"200\" caption=\"Tweeting Apologies © Mark Peacock\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/photo.png\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-952\" title=\"AA Tweets &quot;I\'m Sorry&quot;\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/photo-200x300.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"200\" height=\"300\"></a>[/caption]\n\n<a href=\"http://aa.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">American Airlines</a> has been a bit more forward over the past month in letting me know they care about me.&nbsp; A phone conversation, replies to my Tweets – I haven’t had this level of attention from AA in the prior 27 years and 2.4 million miles that I’ve flown them.&nbsp; However, I’m not sure this new effort is having its intended effect.\n\nThe reason for the change is obvious.&nbsp; American is going through Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings and trying to fend off an <a href=\"http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304811304577365744001720940.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">end-around acquisition</a> by US Airways.&nbsp; In the midst of all this turmoil, they need to secure their most important assets, including their high-volume customers.\n\nA few weeks back, a guy called saying he was from American’s executive office. He wanted to talk to me about my recent flight experiences. “How are we treating you?” he asked. &nbsp;Poor guy. &nbsp;A week earlier, I was on an AA flight returning from spring break in Puerto Rico.&nbsp; Checking in at the kiosk, I found that AA had moved my family and me from row 14 to row 31, the last row on the plane, where we spent 3 hours enjoying the pleasant smell of the lavatories.\n\n“Did anyone offer to help you with re-seating?” he asked. No, I checked in at the self-service kiosk and could see that the flight was full. &nbsp;And I didn’t feel like queuing for 30 minutes so that one of the three gate agents could tell me there’s nothing they can do.&nbsp; The guy was quiet for a moment. “Sorry about that,” he said and offered me some 500-mile upgrades to make up for it.\n\nI’d actually forgotten about that flight experience until the guy called.&nbsp; It wasn’t out of the ordinary, and isn’t unique to American.&nbsp; It happens all the time when equipment is swapped in these days of packed airplanes -- though perhaps a bit more often with American given the age of their <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"McDonnell Douglas MD-80\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_MD-80\" rel=\"wikipedia noopener\" target=\"_blank\">MD-80s</a>.&nbsp; But instead of making me think “How nice of American to ask”, the discussion reminded me of just how lousy that flight home was, and how it ended a great vacation on a down note.\n\nI applaud AA’s willingness to reach out, but I’m not sure that “Sorry about that” is the most effective theme for a customer retention campaign.','American Airlines Reaches Out to Apologize... Again and Again','','publish','closed','closed','','american-airlines-reaches-out-to-apologize-again-and-again','','','2021-09-28 07:37:39','2021-09-28 12:37:39','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=949',0,'post','',2),
(952,1,'2012-05-01 15:57:53','2012-05-01 20:57:53','','AA Tweets \"I\'m Sorry\"','Tweeting Apologies © Mark Peacock','inherit','open','open','','photo','','','2012-05-01 15:57:53','2012-05-01 20:57:53','',949,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/photo.png',0,'attachment','image/png',0),
(961,1,'2012-05-20 20:07:25','2012-05-21 01:07:25','<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/tumblr_lxpxhjKkrS1qgelrio1_500.jpeg\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-969\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/tumblr_lxpxhjKkrS1qgelrio1_500-300x176.jpeg\" alt=\"The Great Train Robbery Movie Poster\" width=\"300\" height=\"176\" /></a>\nA backpack stolen from the train to the airport -- or more specifically, passports inside the stolen backpack -- unexpectedly extends a beer-tasting weekend in Brussels.  During my recent international trips, I find that Apple\'s FaceTime and iMessage aren\'t working reliably -- could be because of hotel WiFi bandwidth constraints.  TSA\'s PreCheck expedited security screening feels like you\'ve passed through a time warp and landed back in 1999. Walking the floor of the National Restaurant Association\'s annual trade show, it looks like restaurants are banking on their customers carrying smartphones and want to use them for wait list paging, bar tabs, and payments. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_98.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #98:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>It was 7 years ago this month that I recorded the<a title=\"First TravelCommons Podcast\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/05/15/first-travelcommons-podcast/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> first TravelCommons podcast</a> in the bathroom of the Wardman Park Marriott in Northwest Washington DC on May 15, 2005. If I were just a little bit better at right-to-left planning I would’ve had this be episode 100.</li>\n 	<li>I was in DC a couple of weeks ago, staying in Chevy Chase this time, a couple of stops further up the <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Line_(Washington_Metro)\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Red Line</a>, because the Wardman Park was sold out. But getting off at the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Woodley Park, Washington, D.C.\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodley_Park%2C_Washington%2C_D.C.\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener wikipedia\">Woodley Park</a> Metro stop to walk over to <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Adams Morgan\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adams_Morgan\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener wikipedia\">Adams Morgan</a> reminded me of how long I’ve been doing this. Long time listeners will remember when this was a weekly and then a biweekly podcast.  In that first year, I did 39 episodes. Quite a difference to this year when I’m working to get them out bimonthly</li>\n 	<li>Not for lack of travel, though – or maybe because of it.  I got some personal travel in – a long weekend in Brussels to drink some beer – OK, a lot of beer – with my son, and then a week in Puerto Rico with my wife, daughter, and some friends.  And business travel to Phoenix, Florida, New York, DC (which I mentioned), San Francisco, and a couple trips to Dallas.  So less international travel than before the last episode; instead flying domestically during the huge smear of Spring Break family vacations that the month of March has become.</li>\n 	<li>Other than jam-full planes, though, I don’t remember being too annoyed with the families. Except perhaps in<a href=\"http://www.flylcpa.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> Ft Myers, FL</a> where Spring Break families plus full body scanners plus no status line made for a long wait.</li>\n 	<li>I don’t know if the parents are more vigilant or I’m more self-absorbed, but, other than Ft Myers, it felt less painful than past Spring Breaks. Perhaps the spate of airlines booting off families with unruly kids has led to some throwback parenting – a quick nip of brandy at the gate before pre-boarding. Just a nip, though, ‘cause it couldn’t be more than a 3 oz bottle to make it past security.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/duckett/23334\"><em>Another Girl</em></a> by duckett</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Speaking of throwbacks, on one of my flights down to Dallas, I had what could only be called a throwback security experience in the TSA <a href=\"http://www.tsa.gov/what_we_do/escreening.shtm\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">PreCheck</a> line. I walked up to the status-only line in ORD Terminal 3. There’s usually someone at the entry point looking at boarding passes, checking for status. But this time, she had a desk and a barcode reader like the TSA use at the ID check. She scanned my boarding pass and waved me over to the left. I walked past a PreCheck sign, but it really didn’t register – for morning flights, I don’t get my first cup of coffee until I’m on the other side of security.  The line moved quickly. As I started to run my drill – take off the shoes, drop the jacket from my shoulders, pull out the laptop and iPad – the TSA person told me – and every other person in the PreCheck line – to stop. Put your bags through the Xray, leave your shoes and jacket on, walk through the metal detector and move along.  It was <a href=\"https://twitter.com/#!/mpeacock/status/194393555677097984\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">too easy</a>.  I felt like I was back in 1999/2000 – the turn of the century; a nostalgia moment.</li>\n</ul>\n[caption id=\"attachment_968\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"225\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/IMG_1119.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-968\" title=\"TSA-Safe Hot Sauce\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/IMG_1119-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"225\" height=\"300\" /></a> TSA-Safe Hot Sauce © Mark Peacock[/caption]\n<ul>\n 	<li>Walking through <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Old San Juan, Puerto Rico\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_San_Juan%2C_Puerto_Rico\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener wikipedia\">Old San Juan</a>, I walked through one of those gourmet condiment shops – the kind that sells hot sauces and mustard and the like. This one was called “Spicy Caribbee”. What caught my eye, though, was the package of three bottles in a one-quart plastic bag.  The shelf tag had a picture of a plane and said “Onboard friendly. Meets TSA 3 oz size limit”. Just brilliant. I can’t tell you how many times I pass up buying things like that because I’m doing carry-on.  As we were doing in Puerto Rico. But my wife bought the 3-pack as a gift for her brother. The TSA guy at San Juan airport gave it a second look as it came out of the X-ray machine, but let it pass. If you didn’t see the picture on Twitter or Facebook, I’ll post it in the show notes.</li>\n 	<li>Apple has been launching a new data service with each iPhone release – <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"FaceTime\" href=\"http://www.apple.com/iphone/features/facetime.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"homepage noopener\">FaceTime</a> video calling with iOS 4; iMessage, a replacement for SMS in <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"IOS\" href=\"http://www.apple.com/ios\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"homepage noopener\">iOS 5</a>. They work pretty well in the US, but they really don’t add that much value here – I have an unlimited family texting plan and am usually not gone long enough to have a burning need for video calling. When I’m overseas – in Europe or Asia – that’s when I really need these products to work – shifting calls and texts from expensive roaming to less expensive data – hotel or office WiFi, or even AT&amp;T’s reasonably priced buckets of international data. But I’m not finding it that reliable – Beiing, Vienna, London,…  I dunno. These Apple data services just don’t feel completely baked in the middle.</li>\n 	<li>Trolling through the Apple support sites, the consensus seems to be that FaceTime requires 100-150 kbps of network bandwidth up <em>and</em> down to work. For most hotel WiFi that I’ve seen – and measured using <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Speedtest.net\" href=\"http://www.speedtest.net/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"homepage noopener\">Speedtest</a>.net – getting the 100-150 kbps download speed shouldn’t be a big problem, but getting that on the upload site – could be a bit dicey. Most broadband is designed to be asymmetrical – it assumes that you’ll be downloading a lot more than you’ll upload. But video chat services like FaceTime and Skype don\'t fit that assumption – you’re sending as much as you’re receiving.</li>\n 	<li>With this in mind, I paid extra for the high bandwidth WiFi at the Brussels Marriott when I was there in March with my son. I figured we’d be FaceTiming or Skype-ing back to my wife and daughter in the US, so I ponied up the extra 4 euro for the 1 Mbps service. But it Skype was still lagging and stuttering when we’d use it in the evening. Firing up Speedtest, I quickly saw why – we were only getting 256 kbps – the basic service, not the upgrade I’d paid for. Calling down to the front desk, I got the typical runaround – oh, we’re sorry we don’t know anything about the Internet service. Here’s the number of the vendor help desk….  I’ve been down this 3-hr rat hole before. I skipped it, went out for another beer, and skipped the meaningless upgrade the next day.</li>\n 	<li>One of the things I did like about the Brussels Marriott’s WiFi service was that my payment covered three simultaneous connections -- in my case, my iPad, my iPhone, and my son’s iPhone. It was, from my experience, a rare acknowledgement to today’s reality – that just about every traveler has a bunch of devices that all need Internet access to completely do their jobs.  The Best Western in Brussels wanted 10 euro a day for each device.</li>\n 	<li>And with everyone posting experiences and photos on <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Twitter</a>, Foursquare, Instagram, TripAdvisor,… you could say that multi-device network access is more important to vacationing families than business travelers.  In the US, this isn’t a problem for me because I travel with a Verizon 4G mobile hotspot. Plug it in (because the battery life is just this side of miserable) and 5 devices are on-line. And, more often than not, at much faster speeds than hotel WiFi, free or not.</li>\n 	<li>Traveling internationally, the Verizon hotspot is a nice paperweight. Some folks I know carry their own mini wireless access point to extend their room’s wired Ethernet.  Apple’s AirPort has been a popular one.  Rather than carry an extra piece of equipment, I use my MacBook Air for the same purpose. Most Windows 7 PCs will do it to.  It takes a couple of steps – enabling Internet sharing and the like – as is well-documented on the web.  You are, however, back to being dependent on the hotel’s bandwidth.</li>\n 	<li>When I was in China, where I used this trick, I could see the hotel network speed crash at around 6:30 every morning. I don’t know if it was all the guests waking up and checking e-mail or the hotel was sending their overnight financials back to the home office, but Skype calls home would pixelate, lag, and then just give up. Luckily, I never really got onto local Beijing time and was up at 4:30, 5:00 every morning. Sometimes it good to have a bit of jet lag.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a question, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is <a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a> -- use the Voice Memo app on your iPhone or something like Virtual Recorder on your Android phone to record and send in an audio comment – or iMovie if you want to send in some video; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/flatwound/14476\"><em>The Long Goodbye</em></a> by John Pazden</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Airport Train Robbery</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>I have to be honest with you. I have been putting off writing this segment for over a month. I’ve written blog posts on the web site about <a title=\"Best Hotel Amenity? Free Breakfast\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/04/21/best-hotel-amenity-free-breakfast/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">free hotel breakfasts</a> and how American Airlines is suddenly<a title=\"American Airlines Reaches Out to Apologize… Again and Again\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/05/01/american-airlines-reaches-out-to-apologize-again-and-again/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> increasing their customer outreach</a>, posted more stuff on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">TravelCommons Facebook page</a>… Just procrastinating because I really don’t want to write this segment, but I know I need to.</li>\n 	<li>Let’s start out with stipulating something – I was stupid. Now that’s not the hard thing to write.  I own up to do doing stupid things on a regularly scheduled basis.  The procrastination comes from how deeply embarrassed I am by my stupid act. Here I am – supposedly an experienced world traveler, seen/done most things many times over, gives advice to others – making the rookie-est of rookie mistakes.  The shame and anger and more shame that burbled up every time I started <em>thinking</em> about writing this made me push it away</li>\n 	<li>Early Sunday morning in Brussels.  My son and I finish our coffee in the Starbucks in the train station, unplug our variety of mobile devices, and head down the stairs to catch the train to the airport for our flight back to Chicago. We’d been in Belgium for 3 days eating and drinking beer.  Mostly drinking beer.  The train is a little late, but that’s OK because this is an earlier train than we’d intended to take. We’ll get to the airport in plenty of time.</li>\n 	<li>My son and I each have a rolling suitcase and a backpack – no need to check luggage for a 3-day beer drinking expedition.  I put his suitcase on the rack overhead.  The car got crowded as the train made more stops.  I put my backpack in the rack also. I was reading the Sports section of the USAToday on my iPad, catching up on the first two rounds of the NCAA basketball tournament, trying to figure out how badly my bracket had been blown up by some of the upsets.</li>\n 	<li>The train pulls into the airport station. I reach up to pull our bags out of the rack. I see my son’s suitcase. I don’t see my backpack.  Instant shot of panic. I look down – was I mistaken, did I not put it up there? I look around – did someone pull it down by mistake?  I walk over the seats to scan the people queued in the aisle – can I catch the thief?  I try to ask the train conductors. I run off the train, scanning passengers as they stream off the platform.</li>\n 	<li>No luck. My backpack is gone. And so is my Nikon camera, my Jawbone Jambox speaker, my Bose headphones, my United Airlines drink coupons, my Moleskine travel journal with notes from vacations over the last 6 years, and our passports.</li>\n 	<li>So let’s recap the key elements of my stupidity in some sort of time order… putting our passports in the backpack instead of my coat pocket; putting the more easily grabbed piece of luggage in the overhead rack; having my nose stuck in my iPad instead of paying attention to my surroundings.  All things I knew then and have diligently avoided before.</li>\n 	<li>I eventually go upstairs to the United ticket desk and confirm what I already knew – we can’t get back into the US without passports, so we weren’t going home today. The ticket agent was as helpful as she could be – pointed me to the police station in the airport so I could file a report and rebooked us without any hassle even though we were on rewards tickets.</li>\n 	<li>We walked down the terminal to the police station. We only waited a couple of minutes.  The officer was a great guy.  Took my statement, quickly created the report – it was a painless 15 minutes. “We get 10-12 of these a day,” he said. Guess I’m not alone in my stupidity.</li>\n 	<li>While he was typing up the report, I called the embassy and got through to a live person. Not quite sure where this live person was, but she put me through to the on-call duty officer who, again, was very helpful.  Police report – good that I was getting it; it would be necessary for the replacement passport.  He would have our names on the embassy admissions list for tomorrow morning, and told me where we could get passport pictures taken on a Sunday afternoon.</li>\n 	<li>I hit Booking.com site on my iPhone and booked the Best Western right by the train station and not far from the US Embassy.  With all that done, there was nothing left to do at the airport.  We headed back down to the train station and went back to Brussels.</li>\n 	<li>Monday morning we packed again, hoping that we’d be able to get our passports in time to catch the 11am flight to Chicago or the 11:30 to DC. We got to the embassy 20 minutes before it opened and were the first in line by 3 minutes. A pleasant security guard had us queue a couple hundred yards away from the door until opening time. People in line were either replacing stolen passports (again, not alone in my stupidity) or applying for visas. We walked to the security gatehouse at 8am. Good thing the duty officer had put our names on the “admit” list. They screened us one family at a time – everything X-rayed, but no full body scanners.  Backpacks, briefcases, luggage all stayed outside as did all electronics – no mobile phones, iPads, laptops. Luckily, I had printed everything out at the hotel.  They seemed to call the numbers quickly, though the folks for visas seemed to move through quicker. We watched the clock. We had to leave no later than 10:30 to have a shot at the 11:30 flight.</li>\n 	<li>Our number was called. We went into a small room – my son and I on one side of bullet proof glass, the consular officer on the other.  He was a good guy. He asked us what happened; walked through our replacement application – he was nicely probing, checking that our facts aligned. He gently jammed me (rightfully so) about taking better care of the replacement passports and told us he’d have us out shortly. I looked at the clock – we had a shot to make the flight to DC.</li>\n 	<li>We went back to the main room and waited. And waited. And waited.  Watching the clock, I saw our chance to get home slowly dissolve. We waited an hour for our replacement passports. We walked in at 8am and walked out at 11am. Not bad turnaround time, but not good enough to get us home that day.</li>\n 	<li>It could’ve been much worse. Everyone I dealt with was very pleasant and helpful. My son and I took advantage of our extra time to sample just a few more Belgian beers. I had a very nice cassoulet for lunch on Monday that took a bit of the sting out of not making the DC flight.</li>\n 	<li>But added up, my rookie mistake – paying more attention to the USAToday than my backpack -- cost me about $2,000 in stolen goods, 2 days additional room and board, and expedited passport fees.  As my dad always said, in life, there are no cheap lessons.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/28792\"><em>Slinky Blues</em></a> by Admiral Bob</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Restaurants Want Your Smartphone</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Earlier this month, I spent a Sunday afternoon walking the floor of the National Restaurant Association’s <a href=\"http://www.restaurant.org/show/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">annual show</a> in Chicago’s McCormick Place convention center. If you need reminding of how big the restaurant business is in the US, this show is <em>huge</em>.  There’s everything from a shrimp purveyor from the Mississippi Gulf Coast handing out samples to a commercial pot and pan seller with one of the <em>Top Chef</em> contestants looking lonely in their booth.</li>\n 	<li>I went with a vague idea of checking out new breakfast food trends, perhaps for a follow-up to my blog post about free breakfast being the best hotel amenity.  But as I started wandering (and sampling) around, I found myself in the technology corner of the show. It felt a little like the nerd ghetto, stuffed in the most remote corner of the smallest show floor.</li>\n 	<li>The most obvious trend was iPad menu – replacing the simple, cheap printed menu that can be tossed, dropped, and used as a coaster with a $400 piece of computer hardware. This trend had an accompanying trend – a slew of vendors selling all shapes of metal to lock down these now very expensive menus.</li>\n 	<li>What was more interesting to me were the offerings that replaced pagers, punch cards, bar tabs, and credit cards with smartphones.</li>\n 	<li>The pager one has always seemed a no-brainer to me – replacing those light-up, vibrating pagers that tell you your table is ready with a text message.  Systems with 15 pagers can run $1-2,000 and replacements for the pagers that walk off run around $100 apiece. Replace that with text messages sent from a low-end smartphone at the hostess station – the cost savings are obvious. The offerings I saw weren’t quite so DIY – they combined waiting lists, wait time tracking, and text messaging into a single iPad app (of course).</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://tabbedout.com/\">TabbedOut</a> is an interesting app, basically extending the restaurant or bar’s order and cash register system to your smartphone. Download the app, load it with your credit cards and you pay your bar tab from your phone – with the de rigour integration to Facebook, Foursquare and Twitter.</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://www.thelevelup.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">LevelUp</a> is another smartphone payment app. It’s kinda like the Starbucks app – link the app to a card – the Starbucks app links to one or more of your Starbucks cards; LevelUp to a credit card – when you’re ready to pay, the app generates a bar code or QR code for the cashier to scan and you’re good to go. I use Starbucks app all the time to buy a coffee after I work out – don’t have to carry cash or a Starbucks card. LevelUp looks to be as convenient, but they don’t have the coverage yet – I’ve only seen them at a couple of food trucks.</li>\n 	<li>This push, moving pagers, bar tabs, credit cards – the assortment of physical bits and pieces that restaurants handle – into the virtual realm makes sense as more people carry smartphones.  It assumes, though, that everyone can grab enough bandwidth for these transactions to happen. Which may explain another trend I saw on the floor – lots of booths peddling low maintenance ways for restaurants to offer WiFi to their customers</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #98</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from the <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">ccMixter</a></li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_98.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #98 — Stolen Luggage & Passports; Restaurants Want Your Smartphone','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-98-stolen-luggage-restaurants-want-your-smartphone','','','2021-09-28 07:39:22','2021-09-28 12:39:22','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=961',0,'post','',1),
(968,1,'2012-05-20 15:48:40','2012-05-20 20:48:40','','TSA-Safe Hot Sauce','TSA-Safe Hot Sauce © Mark Peacock','inherit','open','open','','img_1119','','','2012-05-20 15:48:40','2012-05-20 20:48:40','',961,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/IMG_1119.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(969,1,'2012-05-20 15:51:19','2012-05-20 20:51:19','','The Great Train Robbery Movie Poster','','inherit','open','open','','tumblr_lxpxhjkkrs1qgelrio1_500','','','2012-05-20 15:51:19','2012-05-20 20:51:19','',961,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/tumblr_lxpxhjKkrS1qgelrio1_500.jpeg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(983,1,'2012-06-16 11:34:14','2012-06-16 16:34:14','[caption id=\"attachment_984\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"188\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/tipping.png\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-984\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/tipping-188x300.png\" alt=\"Tipping Guide from Hospitality Management Schools webstie\" width=\"188\" height=\"300\"></a> Tipping Guide from Hospitality Management Schools webstie[/caption]\n\nFor a simple calculation that can be performed on a four-function calculator with buttons to spare, determining the right tip seems mystify a large portion of the traveling public. &nbsp; Searching Apple\'s App Store for \"tip calculator\" returns almost 600 apps for the iPhone. &nbsp;The Hospitality Management Schools\' web site just published a comprehensive tipping <a href=\"http://www.hospitalitymanagementschools.org/tipping\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">guide</a>, providing a nice range of standard tip amounts that should help folks avoid some awkward moments.\n\nThere is a surprising amount of emotion wrapped up in determining a tip. You want to appropriately acknowledge the service someone has just given you, but that then gets combined with the image you want to portray. &nbsp;The waiter was really rude to me, but I don\'t want to seem mean, but I can\'t feel like I\'ve let him get away with being rude, but I don\'t want a confrontation.... &nbsp;It\'s an internal dialogue that gets replayed again and again as the pen hovers over the blank \"Tip\" line on the credit card receipt.\n\nI think I\'m a decent tipper -- I roughly calculate 15% of the post-tax check amount in my head and then round it up a dollar or two. &nbsp;I tip more generously to people who spend more time with me. &nbsp;I eat a lot of meals alone at restaurant bars and so appreciate a bit of conversation. &nbsp;If a bartender takes time to chat with me while cleaning his glasses, gives me a reason not to shovel down my food or stare vacantly at the always-present ESPN SportCenter behind the bar, the tip calculation starts at 20%.\n\nI do a lousy job of tipping hotel maids -- lousy meaning I usually don\'t. &nbsp;I think it\'s because I never see them. &nbsp;I\'m usually in and out of my room in single night -- used one towel, shed some briefcase papers in the garbage can, and have checked out before the maid cart hits the floor. &nbsp;I\'m thinking more about finding the nearest Starbucks than&nbsp;about&nbsp;leaving a couple of bucks behind on the dresser. &nbsp;The times I do tip maids is when I\'ve been working all day in my room -- and have to move out of the way so they can do their job. &nbsp;Seeing them make the bed, straighten my toiletries, empty my garbage reminds me that they\'re doing just as much as the considerate bartender to make me feel at home. &nbsp;It\'s the personal interaction that drives the desire to tip -- and the embarrassment of not tipping.','How Much Do You Want to Tip?','','publish','closed','closed','','how-much-do-you-want-to-tip','','','2021-09-28 07:40:01','2021-09-28 12:40:01','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=983',0,'post','',1),
(984,1,'2012-06-16 10:15:01','2012-06-16 15:15:01','','Tipping Guide','Tipping Guide from Hospitality Management Schools webstie','inherit','open','open','','tipping','','','2012-06-16 10:15:01','2012-06-16 15:15:01','',983,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/tipping.png',0,'attachment','image/png',0),
(995,1,'2012-06-25 21:23:23','2012-06-26 02:23:23','[caption id=\"attachment_1002\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/4373298709_b408072134_b.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1002\" title=\"Thanks for flying with us\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/4373298709_b408072134_b-300x225.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\" /></a> Thanks for flying with us © Chris Freeland / Flickr[/caption]\n\nUnited Airlines\' CFO garnered some less-than-desired attention last month when he said that \"certain groups\" in the Mileage Plus program were \"over-entitled\".  United is the most recent airline to work on \"realigning benefits\" -- downgrading their elite fliers, especially those in the lower status tiers. We talk about how that impacts frequent flier strategies. We also talk about adjustments needed when frequent travelers come off the road -- how to find time to yourself. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_99.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #99:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Been off the road more than I’ve been on it since the <a title=\"Podcast #98 — Stolen Luggage &amp; Passports; Restaurants Want Your Smartphone\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/05/20/podcast-98-stolen-luggage-restaurants-want-your-smartphone/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">last episode</a>.  Just another trip to Dallas allowing me to take advantage again of the TSA’s <a href=\"http://www.tsa.gov/what_we_do/escreening.shtm\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">PreCheck</a> line. Getting envious and puzzled looks from other American Airlines elite fliers, getting waved through the special gate, tossing my bags on the X-Ray conveyer belt, sauntering through the metal detector, and then on my way to the gate. A 45-second exercise while they’re taking off their jackets, shoes, belts; emptying their pockets of coins, gum wrappers, business cards; pulling out their laptops, iPads, Kindles, 1-quart baggie of liquid toiletries; holding their arms up in the full-body scanner, waiting behind the tape until someone radios the “OK”; then reassembling their bags and getting re-dressed – belt, shoes, jacket, making sure nothing’s left behind before heading to the gate.</li>\n 	<li>And this is in the status line.  I’m seriously thinking of limiting my travels to only those places with TSA PreCheck lines…</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/Kirkoid/31109\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><em>Leviathan</em></a> by Kirkoid</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>While my podcasting cadence has slowed, I’ve written a few more blog posts of late.  In one, I disagreed with some surveys that called free WiFi the most important hotel amenity.  I <a title=\"Best Hotel Amenity? Free Breakfast\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/04/21/best-hotel-amenity-free-breakfast/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">made the case</a> for free breakfast.  First, it’s a great convenience.  Unless you’re staying downtown in a city, like in London or New York or San Francisco, getting breakfast outside of the hotel means involves a car ride.  Which usually then translates into Starbucks – and I’m a big fan of the spinach feta cheese wrap – or McDonald’s – where I’ll fall back to <strong>1 </strong>breakfast burrito no matter how many times they try to sell me two – or Dunkin Donuts where they inevitably give me a hard time about walking in with a cup of Starbucks coffee.  And, as Rich Fraser puts it, a great way to stretch your per diem dollars…\n<ul>\n 	<li>“Can’t beat it on value, although you have to get quite creative when it comes to those reconstituted eggs. Various combinations of cheese, ham, and hot sauce make them much more palatable. That, some yogurt, a cup of oatmeal and a piece of fruit, and I’m good until lunch without snacking. Just have to avoid the biscuits and gravy at all costs!”</li>\n</ul>\n[caption id=\"attachment_1009\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/IMG_1145.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1009\" title=\"Free Hotel Coffee\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/IMG_1145-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Free Hotel Coffee[/caption]</li>\n 	<li>Leo Vegoda, however is suspicious of the whole “free” thing\n<ul>\n 	<li>I would prefer to have good Internet access that I pay for or a good breakfast that I pay for than something free, which will inevitably be of lower quality. After all, on a business trip, sustenance and network access are reasonable business expenses. That being said, I think the best “amenity” I want at a hotel is a fantastic concierge. A superb concierge is much better than a quick search on yelp.com and will help make your stay in a city far more fulfilling.</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Thanks to both Rich and Leo for leaving their comments on the TravelCommons web site.</li>\n 	<li>Scott Drake pinged me on Twitter – “Just heard the first 2 minutes of <a title=\"Podcast #97 — 1st Trip to Beijing; Most Important Hotel Technology\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/03/03/podcast-97-first-trip-to-beijing-most-important-hotel-technology/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">episode #97</a>”, he wrote, which was about my first trip to Beijing in January. “You could taste the pollution.  Yes!  People look at me like I\'m crazy when I say that!  Glad I\'m not alone.” Oh no, you’re not alone.  The other 3 guys with me on that trip thought the same thing – you could taste it when you breathed in and when you coughed it back out. Don’t know which I enjoyed more on our Saturday trip out to the Great Wall – the breathtaking views or the fact that you could take a breath without coughing…</li>\n 	<li>In the <a title=\"Podcast #98 — Stolen Luggage &amp; Passports; Restaurants Want Your Smartphone\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/05/20/podcast-98-stolen-luggage-restaurants-want-your-smartphone/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">last episode</a>, I talked about restaurants pushing their own sort of BYOD – bring your own device – agenda on customers; taking advantage of customers’ smartphones to do things that restaurant-provided devices like pagers or credit card machines used to.  Not that it’s a bad thing; it actually makes a lot of sense.  I tried LevelUp, one of the mobile payment apps I mentioned, last week at a food truck – Duck n’ Roll – in downtown Chicago. I’m not sure the truck took cash.  The owner had an iPhone with a Square credit card reader and also accepted LevelUp.  I started the app on my iPhone – I had already run through the set-up routine, linking it to one of my credit cards.  It displayed a QR code that the truck owner read with the camera on her iPhone.  She pressed a couple of buttons and, boom, we were done.  While she got me my miso short rib bahn mi sandwich, the receipt showed up in my e-mail.  Much easier that paying with a credit card – or even cash.</li>\n 	<li>\n\n[caption id=\"attachment_1011\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"224\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/x2_6bbbfa1.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1011\" title=\"Setting up the cots at Camp O\'Hare...\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/x2_6bbbfa1-224x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"224\" height=\"300\" /></a> Setting up the cots at Camp O\'Hare...[/caption]\n\nAs we get into summer, we get into thunderstorm season, and in the middle of the US, tornado season.  Which reminds me of an incident about this time last year in O’Hare.  I was connecting through O’Hare on my way from a customer meeting in London to a conference in Austin, TX.  No direct flights there. My theory is – if I have to connect through a US airport, I might as well do it through O’Hare. I live 25 minutes from the airport. If things go bad, I can always sleep in my own bed.  It doesn’t work for everyone – check the shownotes for a picture of someone setting themselves up in “Camp O’Hare” for the night – but it does for me.</li>\n 	<li>Anyhow, I arrive from Heathrow early, breeze through Immigration, no problems getting through the TSA in Terminal 3, board my American flight to Austin…  The pilot says that a front is moving in and he’s going to try and get us out before it hits.  Hmmm, I’ve never seen anyone sprint out of O’Hare before – it’s just too big and too crowded.</li>\n 	<li>And it didn’t happen this day.  The front came hit and started rocking that MD-80 like nothing I’ve ever experienced.  We evacuated the plane.  People in the back of the plane began to panic.  “Get moving,” they yelled – or a cleaned-up version of what they yelled.</li>\n 	<li>Sprinting out of the shaking jet bridge back into Terminal 3, we were told “ah, you guys should stay away from the windows” which is a tough order in a concourse with windows on each side. People congregated around the McDonalds and a couple of bars – only windows on one side – and waited for the front to blow through.</li>\n 	<li>Over in Terminal 1 – the United terminal – they moved everyone down into the tunnel between the two concourses.  Much safer and, for those who’ve connected on United through O’Hare, you know it’s much more entertaining with the ceiling neon lights chasing themselves down the tunnel. Though I would guess the soothing New Age music would get on your nerves after a while.</li>\n 	<li>Of course, after all this entertainment, I still needed to get to Austin.  After the front blew through, they reopened the runways and started to untangle the delays – flights trying to get in so they could unload and leave again. After two hours of hemming and hawing, American admitted that our MD-80 was damaged by the jet bridge banging on the rockin’-and-rollin’ airplane during the worst of the winds. No surprise there.</li>\n 	<li>And there were no other flights left to take us to Austin because American had waited so long to cancel. No problem there – I just caught a cab home and slept in my own bed. I was surprised that the first available flight the next day was at 3 in the afternoon. Given I was due to fly back the following morning, that would’ve given me about 12 hours in Austin – 6 of which I would’ve been asleep. I decided to skip it.  But here’s the kicker – American charged me a $150 change fee to cancel my ticket and use it later.  Really?  Weather, they said. No, it was a damaged airplane because your gate agent didn’t pull back the jet bridge.  Weather, they said.  I didn’t fly American for another 6 months.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a question, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is <a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a> -- use the Voice Memo app on your iPhone or something like Virtual Recorder on your Android phone to record and send in an audio comment – or iMovie if you want to send in some video; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/Wired_Ant/36862\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">My Flaming Heart</a> </em>by Wired Ant</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Downgrading Elite Fliers</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Last month, United’s CFO <a href=\"http://travel.usatoday.com/alliance/flights/boardingarea/post/2012/05/Frequently-Flying---United-CFO-Certain-elites-were-over-entitled/697189/1\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">said this</a> about their Mileage Plus program\n<ul>\n 	<li>We had certain groups in this program that were over-entitled if you will. And now we’ve re-aligned the benefits of that program with what the customers and program participants are actually providing to the program, it’s a good change going forward.</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Let’s parse that statement.  The first sentence – certain groups, which I assume means elite Mileage Plus members, were “over-entitled”.  Even if it’s true, you’d think the CFO would be smart enough to follow one of the golden rules of sales – “If it feels good, don’t say it.”  Coming off the industry-worst performance in on-time arrivals and baggage complaints, who would think it’s a good idea to insult a loyal subset of customers – those who bore the brunt of your lousy performance?</li>\n 	<li>The second sentence – we’ve “re-aligned the benefits” with what those customer are providing.  In other words, we were giving those customers too much value for the revenue they were providing us – so we’ve taken away some of what we were giving them so as to balance things out.</li>\n 	<li>In other words, downgrading elite fliers.  United is just the most recent – and probably the most egregious example of late.  Using the Continental merger as cover, United took away probably the most valuable perk from the lowest status level – free advanced booking of Economy Plus seats, seats with extended legroom.  And <a href=\"http://www.flyerguide.com/wiki/index.php/Elite_Levels_(UA)\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">added a new status level</a> – Platinum – at the 75,000-mile level – effectively devaluing their mid-tier status -- Platinum Exec – now “Gold”.  There were other tweaks – none of them positive – but that’s to be expected from an industry that continues to nickel-and-dime its customers for every last bit of revenue it can.</li>\n 	<li>And it’s not just United.  <a href=\"http://www.flyerguide.com/wiki/index.php/SkyMiles_Elite_Levels\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Delta</a> recently reduced the number of free bags its lowest status level fliers can check – from two to one. One more sign that the 25,000-mile status fliers don’t mean that much to the airlines – they really don’t get much more recognition than the guys paying $95/year for an airline credit card.</li>\n 	<li>Which makes sense if you look at the numbers.  When American Airlines started the Advantage program in 1981, it was a loyalty rewards program meant to give frequent fliers a reason to stick with American as deregulation commoditized the industry -- increasing flight choices and lower fares from new competitors.</li>\n 	<li>Today, it’s a major revenue source – a line of business is <a href=\"http://travel.nytimes.com/2012/06/10/travel/have-elite-fliers-been-downgraded.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">estimated to have added $7 billion</a> to the top line of North American carriers last year</li>\n 	<li>For a frequent traveler, these downgrades drive a change in strategy. It used to be that you would always want to concentrate as much of your travel as you could on a single airline in order to hit some level of status because even the bottom tier – the 25,000-mile level, American’s Advantage Gold, United’s Premiere, Delta’s Silver Medallion -- had value.  Today, since you can pretty much buy the bottom tier privileges for a $95 credit card fee (and even there, you can usually get the first year free), it only makes sense to concentrate if you think you can hit the 50,000-mile tier – American’s Advantage Platinum or Delta’s Gold Medallion.  The reduced rewards for bottom-tier status aren’t worth the hassles of twisting your schedule – or paying $50 extra – to fly a single airline.</li>\n 	<li>And the airlines are probably OK with this. The act of flying passengers is probably the least profitable part of an airline nowadays, while selling frequent flier miles to credit card companies is the most profitable. Airlines are shifting from rewarding their most loyal customers to the most profitable.  United’s top-top tier – Global Services – has always been for their highest-spending customers, not their highest-mileage ones.  In some ways, this makes life a bit easier.  Instead of working to earn special treatment, now you can just buy it.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/mika/24945\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Fall to pieces - Silence</a> </em>by mika</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Finding Time When Off The Road</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>I’ve been off the road for 3 weeks now.  Not out of the ordinary for most people. But for me, this is the longest stretch I’ve been home in over a year.  And as always, there’s a bit of an adjustment.</li>\n 	<li>And that’s not to imply that adjustment is negative. I’ve increased the mileage I’ve put on my bike by an order of magnitude. Rather than getting 1, maybe 2 rides a week if I really push it – get up early on a Sunday – I’m getting 3 or 4 a week -- and more mileage because I don’t feel pressure to get off the road so I can do other things.</li>\n 	<li>Indeed, that’s probably the biggest change – the release from the pressure to pack a week’s worth of errands, to do’s, and family time into a 2-3 day window.</li>\n 	<li>Which kinda dovetails into another adjustment – finding alone time. When you travel, there’s plenty of alone time – even when you’re surrounded by people – in TSA queues, in boarding lines, in a center seat on a full plane.  And eating dinner solo at a bar and channel surfing in your hotel room at night.  These are certainly not the highlights of travel, but they do offer you time alone – to think, to listen to music (and podcasts), to read, or just to stare off into space.</li>\n 	<li>Coming off the road, you’re still geared to maximize family or friend or significant other time – even if it means watching lousy TV shows or playing Scrabble.  It’s takes some adjustment to figure out how and where you’ll grab/recreate that alone time – figuring out which lousy TV show you don’t have to watch, where you go off to read or listen to music.</li>\n 	<li>Sunday nights are a good time for me.  When I’m traveling, Sunday night after dinner is pretty much lost.  I lose that last bit of the weekend to getting ready for my Monday morning flight out of ORD – ordering a cab, checking into the flight, packing, checking/topping off the charges on the myriad of electronic devices I seem to now require for travel….  Since my family is used to me disappearing into my home office after Sunday dinner, I’ve kept it up – but I’m reading or writing instead of packing.  It’s that little bit of alone time.</li>\n 	<li>Of course the real adjustment is having to pay for my morning Starbucks stop.  It’s then that you really appreciate the power of the expense report…</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #99</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from the <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">ccMixter</a></li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_99.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #99 — Downgrading Elite Fliers; Finding Time Off the Road','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-99-downgrading-elite-fliers-finding-time-off-the-road','','','2021-09-28 18:29:59','2021-09-28 23:29:59','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=995',0,'post','',1),
(1002,1,'2012-06-25 13:24:03','2012-06-25 18:24:03','','Thanks for flying with us','Thanks for flying with us © Chris Freeland / Flickr','inherit','open','open','','4373298709_b408072134_b','','','2012-06-25 13:24:03','2012-06-25 18:24:03','',995,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/4373298709_b408072134_b.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(1009,1,'2012-06-25 14:29:30','2012-06-25 19:29:30','','Free Hotel Coffee','','inherit','open','open','','img_1145','','','2012-06-25 14:29:30','2012-06-25 19:29:30','',995,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/IMG_1145.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(1011,1,'2012-06-25 15:12:08','2012-06-25 20:12:08','','Setting up the cots at Camp O\'Hare...','Setting up the cots at Camp O\'Hare...','inherit','open','open','','x2_6bbbfa1','','','2012-06-25 15:12:08','2012-06-25 20:12:08','',995,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/x2_6bbbfa1.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(1021,1,'2012-07-13 08:35:49','2012-07-13 13:35:49','[caption id=\"attachment_1023\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"217\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Drive-South-Google-Maps-1.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1023\" title=\"Drive South - Google Maps\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Drive-South-Google-Maps-1-217x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"217\" height=\"300\"></a> A Drive South[/caption]\n\nI\'ve been planning a solo road trip to see some old friends. Driving south on I-65 from Chicago to Louisville, Nashville, and Mobile, and then across Alabama and Mississippi Gulf coasts -- the western half of the Redneck Riviera – then up I-55 to Memphis, and then back home to Chicago. It\'s a 2,000-mile loop of humidity and&nbsp;barbecue.\n\nI &nbsp;decided to try some of the new social trip planning web services. &nbsp;My trip itinerary is very loose -- no hotel reservations; any time commitments of the am/pm type, as in \"I\'ll be in Mobile sometime Saturday night\". &nbsp;I\'ve had good <a title=\"Podcast #96 — Eating and Drinking with Social Media; Frequent Flier Alliances\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/01/05/podcast-96-dining-with-social-media-frequent-flier-alliances/\">experiences</a> using social media apps like <a href=\"http://untappd.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Untappd</a> and <a href=\"http://www.foodspotting.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Foodspotting</a>&nbsp;to find good restaurants or beer bars in new cities, but have never used them to plan a whole trip.\n\nThe first service I tried was&nbsp;<a href=\"http://tripl.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Tripl</a>, but quickly found out it wasn\'t a front-end planning tool. &nbsp;It seems more of a back-end trip recap service. Tripl aggregates Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, and Tripit posts into a \"travel story\" infograph. It\'s an interesting way to keep track of your social network\'s travels, but wasn\'t what I needed.\n\nI next tried <a href=\"http://trippy.com\">Trippy</a>. &nbsp;It bills itself as the \"place for you to collect and share travel ideas\" and to \"get a \'friend-sourced\' itinerary\". Seemed like the perfect tool. &nbsp;I struggled with it though, perhaps because it tries to use too many social media concepts. &nbsp;You can follow travel personalities (Anthony Bourdain) or semi-celebrities (Jason Mraz) a la <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Twitter</a>. You can browse picture tiles of locations and pin them to a board a la <a href=\"http://pinterest.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Pinterest</a>. Or you can create a trip and search for hotels/restaurants/activities to add to your itinerary. Since I\'m not a Pinterest user, the whole board thing confused me; I think in trip itineraries. Once I found the trip planning function, I was good to go.\n\nHowever, the functionality&nbsp;I really wanted to try -- \"friend-sourced\" itineraries, or at least ideas -- was what I quickly turned off because Trippy seemed to post&nbsp;<em>every</em> click to my Facebook feed. As I was clicking away trying to figure out Trippy, my wife yelled from the other room \"Who are all these people and places you\'re liking?\". &nbsp;I popped over to my Facebook News Feed page. &nbsp;Nothing from Trippy. &nbsp;I scrolled down and clicked on the \"Activity Log\" link. &nbsp;There was a couple of pages of posts that Trippy had spewed across my feed. &nbsp;I quickly flipped over to \"App Settings\" and deleted Trippy. &nbsp;Looking at the Trippy account settings, it had checked \"Allow trippy to post to my Facebook timeline\" by default, but there was nowhere that it described just how chatty it would be.\n\nAfter this, I decided to go old school. &nbsp;I hit Google with the \"Top things to do in...\" search phrase, and searched the travel section archives of the <a href=\"http://travel.nytimes.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">New York Times</a> and <a href=\"http://www.chicagotribune.com/travel/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Chicago Tribune</a>. When I found something interesting, I hit the \"Clip to Evernote\" <a href=\"http://evernote.com/webclipper/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">button</a> at the top of my Chrome browser and saved the article into my Drive South notebook in <a href=\"http://evernote.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Evernote</a>. &nbsp;I didn\'t abandon social media completely. &nbsp;I asked for suggestions on Twitter and received back some good suggestion. And my \"Top things\" searches pointed me to TripAdvisor\'s <a href=\"http://www.tripadvisor.com/Attractions-g30709-Activities-Mobile_Alabama.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">suggestions</a>.\n\nMaybe after a couple more iterations, these apps will be useful. &nbsp;But until then, I\'m still clipping articles from newspapers and magazines. &nbsp;The only thing that seems to have changed in two generations of travel planning is replacing my mother\'s physical scissors for Evernote\'s virtual ones.','Social Trip Planning Not Quite Ready...','','private','closed','closed','','social-trip-planning-not-quite-ready','','','2024-06-02 10:32:41','2024-06-02 15:32:41','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=1021',0,'post','',0),
(1023,1,'2012-07-12 10:08:20','2012-07-12 15:08:20','','Drive South - Google Maps','A Drive South','inherit','open','open','','drive-south-google-maps-1','','','2012-07-12 10:08:20','2012-07-12 15:08:20','',1021,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Drive-South-Google-Maps-1.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(1034,1,'2012-07-31 15:56:18','2012-07-31 20:56:18','[caption id=\"attachment_1039\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/399422_3361993820725_821625873_n.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1039\" title=\"Stax Museum Marquee-Memphis\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/399422_3361993820725_821625873_n-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> One of the stops on my Drive South...[/caption]\n\nBack in the TravelCommons studios after a 2,100-mile drive through the Mid-South. We genuflect quickly to the milestone episode number and then move onto the topics at hand -- best piece of hardware schwag from Google I/O 2012, a slightly icky subway ride from downtown San Francisco to SFO, a grab bag of observations from my southern road trip, and why I find myself breaking up with American Airlines after almost 30 years of travel. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_100.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #100:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Well, here we are at a milestone episode number -- number 100 -- 7 years and a couple of months after I started. It took me 1½ years to do 50 podcasts... and then another 5½ to do 50 more.  Looks like my podcast productivity is exponentially decaying...</li>\n 	<li>But you people still keep hanging around! I do appreciate the kind words that you’ve sent along via FaceBook and Twitter. I am glad that so many of you find this podcast interesting/entertaining. It’s that more than anything else that keeps me plugging away.</li>\n 	<li>Changes on the job front have kept me off the road for business travel, but I’ve managed to fill a couple of the weeks since the last episode with some personal travel.</li>\n 	<li>At the end of June, the family and I headed off to San Francisco.  My son scored an academic ticket to the big geek-a-palooza Google I/O. I think this year’s event sold out in 20 minutes and there were a very limited number of discounted academic tickets, so getting one was a bit like getting one of the golden tickets in <em><a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Willy Wonka &amp; the Chocolate Factory\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willy_Wonka_%26_the_Chocolate_Factory\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"wikipedia noopener noreferrer\">Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory</a></em>.  So while my son watched videos of guys skydiving with Google virtual reality glasses, and dove into the intricacies of Google Maps APIs and the latest whizzy things that Chrome does, my wife, daughter and I did San Francisco tourist stuff -- rode bikes across the Golden Gate Bridge, rode cable cars, hang out in hipster coffee joints -- the sort of stuff that I’ve never quite found time to do in the 10-15 years that I’ve been going to SF for business.</li>\n 	<li>\n\n[caption id=\"attachment_1042\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/564585_3384869592605_665394828_n.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1042\" title=\"I-65 Between Louisville and Nashville\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/564585_3384869592605_665394828_n-300x225.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\" /></a> I-65 From Louisville to Nashville[/caption]\n\nAnd then last week, I decided to do a little trip on my own -- a 2,100-mile loop through the South.  I ran I-65 from top to bottom -- from its start in northern Indiana down to Louisville, Nashville, and <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Mobile, Alabama\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile%2C_Alabama\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"wikipedia noopener noreferrer\">Mobile, AL</a>; across the Mississippi Gulf Coast on US-90 to New Orleans, up I-55 to Memphis, up US-51 to Dyersburg, then across I-155 to <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Sikeston, Missouri\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sikeston%2C_Missouri\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"wikipedia noopener noreferrer\">Sikeston, MO</a>, and then finally up I-57 back to Chicago.  But more about that later in the show.</li>\n 	<li>I have noticed though that whenever I travel for leisure, I don’t travel quite as sharp -- I don’t feel as tightly wrapped, as “in the zone” as I do when I travel for business. On my flight out to SFO, I hit a new level of bad planning, of “non-preparedness.”  I had to reach for the SkyMall catalog before the plane even left the taxiway...</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/stefsax/7785\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Awel</a> </em>by Stefsax</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>I wrote a <a title=\"How Much Do You Want to Tip?\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/06/16/how-much-do-you-want-to-tip/\">blog post</a> last month about tipping. I received a link to a nice infographic from somebody from Hospitalitymangementschools.org -- a web site that I still can’t quite figure out what it is. It seems like a legit web site with information about the hospitality management industry, but there’s no contact information -- just a web submissions form, and the domain name is held in proxy by GoDaddy.  I dunno -- it feels just a little fishy.</li>\n 	<li>Anyhow, the tipping guide infographic was good, if a little wonky on the iPhone, and seemed to offer reasonable advice.  There is a surprising amount of emotion wrapped up in figuring out a tip amount. You want to appropriately acknowledge the service someone has just given you, and that then gets combined with the image you want to portray -- am I a nice generous person, am I a sharp you-won’t-get-anything-by-me person?</li>\n 	<li>Looking at on my own tipping, I think I do well when dealing with a service person face-to-face -- a waiter, a car valet, a hotel bellhop -- but not so well with tipping people I don’t see -- like a hotel maid.</li>\n 	<li>Rich Fraser is in the same place -- both about not tipping cleaning staff and feeling slightly “off” about that\n<ul>\n 	<li>I agree with your take on tipping the housekeeping staff. I’m probably totally off base, but I always considered housekeeping to be a service inherent to my stay. I get that service whether I ask for it or not, as opposed to the bellhop, bartender or concierge, which are optional services.</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>And that’s just dealing with the US. Don’t get me started about international tipping -- which countries it’s an insult to tip, it’s an insult not to tip, which countries you just round the tab up....</li>\n 	<li>One of the highlights of our SF trip was, at the end of each day, seeing what schwag my son hauled back from<a href=\"http://www.techradar.com/news/computing/google-io-2012-top-moments-1086645\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"> Google I/O</a>. These developer sessions have become quite the giveaway spree as companies try to recruit independent developers to their platforms. Microsoft gave away Windows 8 tablets at its last conference, but Google is the one that goes the deepest. Over two days, my son got an unlocked Samsung Galaxy Nexus phone, a Chromebox, the Google Nexus Q media streaming device slash bocce ball stand-in, and a Nexus 7 tablet.  $1,200 of hardware for a $300 academic ticket.  No wonder it sold out in 20 minutes.</li>\n 	<li>The <a href=\"https://play.google.com/store/devices/details?id=nexus_7_8gb\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Nexus 7 tablet</a> was the highlight of the schwag bag.  $200 for the 8 GB model, it directly competes with the Kindle Fire and blows it out of the water. It runs the latest Android version-- 4.1 or Jelly Bean as the droid-heads call it -- while the Fire sits at a custom version of 2.3 or Gingerbread. In those intervening versions, Google has smoothed off a lot of Android’s sharp edges and has significantly improved performance. For the first time, I could see an Android tablet being a real competitor to the iPad.</li>\n 	<li>I also like the 7-inch form factor. Steve Jobs is famous for dismissing anything less than the iPad’s piece-of-paper size. I was surprised, though, how much easier I found reading and web-browsing on this much lighter device. And since most of what I use a tablet for is media consumption -- rather than as an executive laptop replacement -- I’m thinking I may downsize my next tablet. I’ll see if the rumored iPad “mini” appears and then, if not, I may head down the Google route too.</li>\n 	<li>\n\n[caption id=\"attachment_1048\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/IMG_1311.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1048\" title=\"Powell St BART Station\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/IMG_1311-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Can\'t See the Dirt if Everything is Blurry[/caption]\n\nAnd continuing on my periodic trains-to-airports thread, when leaving San Francisco, I took BART -- Bay Area Rapid Transit -- from downtown -- we were staying at the St Francis in Union Square -- to SFO for my flight home. It was a Sunday -- the last Sunday in June -- and a nice sunny, warm day -- a rare event in SF -- which brought out in full force the standard SF mix of street performers, cup rattlers, and tourists.  Getting through this melange with my rolling bag was my first challenge.  Once I got down to the station and in front of the fare machine, I got a bit of sticker shock -- it was $8.25 to get to the airport. Sure, you pay a lot more for London’s Heathrow Express, but it’s a private train company with just one stope.  The BART fare is one of the bigger numbers I’ve hit for a subway system -- Chicago is a flat-rate $2.25 from the Loop to O’Hare; Washington’s Metro is $3 from downtown to Reagan National. Sure, $8.25 is cheaper than a $40 cab ride, but still...</li>\n 	<li>And that sticker shock only sinks in deeper when you get on the train and see how beat-to-hell they are.  They’re the same style trains as the Metro, but they’re in much worse shape. Who thought it was a good idea to put cloth seats on a public transit train?  I wished I had a plastic sheet to sit on.  And I made a bee line to a restroom once I hit SFO to I could wash my hands -- it was just that disgusting.  I’m back to taxis when next in SF.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a question, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- use the Voice Memo app on your iPhone or something like Virtual Recorder on your Android phone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/williams-dusty/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Steam Train</a> </em>by John Williams</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Drive South -- A Southern Road Trip</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>\n\n[caption id=\"attachment_1040\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"226\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/311522_3384921793910_1477911803_n.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1040\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/311522_3384921793910_1477911803_n-226x300.jpg\" alt=\"My &quot;Great Circle&quot; Route Through the Mid-South\" width=\"226\" height=\"300\" /></a> My \"Great Circle\" Route Through the Mid-South[/caption]\n\nAs I mentioned at the top of the show, I did a “great circle” road trip of the Mid-South earlier this month -- me, a full-up old 30 GB click-wheel iPod, a list of restaurants and bars, and a suitcase of nothing more than shorts and polo shirts all loaded up into my Saab convertible.  I started off by running I-65 from top to bottom -- from the Indiana Toll Road to Mobile, AL, with stops in Louisville, Nashville, and Birmingham.  I jogged over to the state line to Florida, passing the huge rebuilt version of the Florabama Bar &amp; Grill, for a weekend on the Gulf at Perdido Key.</li>\n 	<li>I then drove across the Mississippi Gulf Coast, past the re-built casinos in Biloxi, and then past the not-so-rebuilt towns of Gulfport and Pass Christian.  Here we are 7 years after the eye of Hurricane Katrina made landfall at Bay St Louis, MS and the vacant lots along the coastal road - US-90 -- far outnumber the rebuilt homes.  Indeed, the For Sale signs on vacant lots -- many of them hand-made with “Make me an offer” scrawled across the front” -- outnumber the rebuilt homes.</li>\n 	<li>I eventually ended up on I-10 and drove into New Orleans for dinner, reloaded on beignets and chicory coffee the next morning, and headed up I-55 with a lunch stop in Jackson, MS before landing in Memphis for a couple of days.  The final leg was Memphis to Sikeston, MO and then up I-57 back home to Chicago.  A 2,100-mile loop through what many people consider “fly-over” country.</li>\n 	<li>The first reaction that most folks have to this itinerary is -- Why? It’s certainly not on anyone’s top 10 scenic drives list. But it’s always been on my list of trips to-do -- to stop off on “drive thru” cities and spend a little time exploring, even if only for a couple of hours. And to do a bit of a nostalgia tour -- visit places I lived 25-30 years ago.  And to catch up with old friends -- physically rather than just over Facebook. But while I’ve been thinking about it for a while, it’s always been on the “B” list -- always getting bumped by something else.  Well, as I hinted at the start of the show, my professional situation has changed, providing me a bit of a summer sabbatical.  With a suddenly open schedule and nothing else planned, it’s the perfect time to work into that next tier of things to do.</li>\n 	<li>I took a week to do this great circle route -- not too fast, but not dawdling either. I had a great time. And came away with a few observations...</li>\n 	<li>First, that drive is not as boring as you might fear.  Now, I don’t want to sugar-coat it -- I-65 through northern Indiana and I-57 through Illinois are brutally mind-numbing -- flat unending fields of corn and soybeans, the monotony of which is occasionally broken by a unending rows of wind generators (they’re just too huge to be called windmills).  But past that, the landscape does have character.  The low-lying clouds tight against the hills, resting in the valleys in Southern Kentucky.  Driving long causeways over the marshes and bayous heading south into Mobile on I-65 or coming north out of New Orleans on I-55.  The red clay of any turned over ground in Alabama.  The forests of Southern Mississippi.  It’s certainly not the Big Sur Coastal drive, but it’s not (except for Illinois and Indiana) hundreds of miles of sameness.</li>\n 	<li>Second, with all that windshield time, I finally found a good use case for Apple’s Siri. I’ve seen the Samuel L Jackson and Zooey Deschanel commercials, but have never gotten Siri to be more than an annoyance -- I can always find something faster myself than repeating my question 3 times.  But with both hands on the wheel and my eyes on the road, Siri was very good at reading and replying to the daily flow of text messages.  The results of “Read new message” was unintelligible only once, and given my sister’s tendency for random punctuation and abbreviations, it was understandable.  Siri’s still not the virtual assistant Apple keeps pitching her as, but she does have her uses on a long drive.</li>\n 	<li>\n\n[caption id=\"attachment_1041\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"225\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/382380_3350829861633_1849689155_n.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1041\" title=\"The Ham Bar Menu\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/382380_3350829861633_1849689155_n-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"225\" height=\"300\" /></a> Today\'s Selections at the Ham Bar[/caption]\n\nThird, there’s good local food and beer everywhere.  Call it the “Brooklyn-ization” of America, but every decent sized city I visited had its own hipster neighborhoods with restaurants serving local artisan foods and local craft beers.  Louisville has its unfortunately named <a href=\"http://www.chicagotribune.com/travel/sc-trav-0327-louisville-kentucky-20120327,0,6168490.story\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">NuLu</a> neighborhood, Memphis the better-named <a href=\"http://cooperyoung.biz/night-out/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Cooper Young</a> at the intersection of Cooper St and Young Ave, and New Orleans has the Bywater district a good bit away from the French Quarter.</li>\n 	<li>You expect good food in New Orleans, but I had very good food and beer in every other place I stopped.  An example of that Southern local focus is restaurants using country ham in place of prosciutto -- which makes sense if you think of prosciutto as just another kind of air-dried ham -- but from Italy instead of Virginia.  At the<a href=\"http://www.garageonmarket.com\"> Garage Bar</a> in Louisville, they had a ham bar with a choice of country hams from farms in Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee.  At the <a href=\"http://thebeautyshoprestaurant.anotherroadsideattractioncatering.com/\">Beauty Shop</a> in Memphis -- a great Twitter recommendation from @denrael -- country ham, cantaloupe, and an arugula salad made a great appetizer on a hot day.  I also hit on a string of locally sour brown ales at breweries in <a href=\"http://www.atgbrewery.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Louisville</a> and <a href=\"http://www.avondalebrewing.com/taproom.php\">Birmingham</a>. Definitely not lawnmower beers and as good as any I had in Brussels last spring. Finding these restaurants and breweries had the side benefit of taking me out of the normal tourist spots -- leaving behind the French Quarter and Beale Street.  Just look for art galleries, record stores, tattoo parlors, and people in skinny pants riding bicycles without helmets.</li>\n 	<li>Another observation -- waiting for the last minute to book a hotel room with Priceline’s Negotiator app works -- sometimes.  I’ve never used Priceline’s “opaque” pricing before -- naming my price for an unnamed hotel room. If I’m traveling on business or with my family, I typically want things nailed down a bit tighter. I have a much lower appetite for risk; am willing to pay more money to insure a good experience. But on this trip, I’m by myself and am only looking for a clean bed and decent water pressure for the morning’s shower.  Seemed like the right time to give Bill Shatner a try.</li>\n 	<li>My first try was Friday night around 7pm in Louisville.  Sitting in the Garage Bar after my serving of Kentucky country ham, I fired up the iPhone, got a sense of that the going rate at reasonable hotels was in the $75-110 range, and then bid $50 for a 3-star place near the airport. “Whoa, that’s a low bid” said a pop-up screen on the Priceline app.  Yup, that’s the idea.  After working through a few screens, I had a great room at a very nice Holiday Inn.  I ran the same play Sunday night driving into New Orleans and got a room at the Marriott on Canal St for $60.</li>\n 	<li>\n\n[caption id=\"attachment_1044\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"225\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/IMG_1368-e1343753854622.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1044\" title=\"Monday Special at Chimneyville Smokehouse, Jackson, MS\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/IMG_1368-e1343753854622-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"225\" height=\"300\" /></a> Hoping Vegetables Cut The Pork Fat[/caption]\n\nBut during the week while in Memphis, no luck. No one bit on my lowball bids and I ended up in a very substandard Hampton Inn and not so clean Comfort Inn.  Apparently there was some Little League tournament in town.  Don’t know others’ experiences, but the risk-reward trade-off with Priceline bidding is real. Which confirmed my initial instinct -- useful tool when traveling by myself with no rigid itinerary, but not so much for family or business travel.</li>\n 	<li>And finally, if I do this trip again, I’m packing some statins, some Mevacor.  After my fourth straight day of barbecue, I could feel the pork fat thicken my blood.  Not that that kept me from ordering one last slab of ribs on the drive home...</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music --<a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/rompaey-mozaic/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"> <em>Bubbly</em></a> by Ruben van Rompaey</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Breaking Up with American Airlines</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>My relationship with American Airlines began June 1985 when I flew from Chicago to Dallas to start my first job out of school.  And now here I am, 27 years and about 2.5 million miles later and I’m feeling just done with them.</li>\n 	<li>I wasn’t always like that. It’s easy enough to fly American out of DFW -- indeed, it damn close to impossible not to.  But I went out of my way to fly American after I left Dallas -- first back in Chicago, and then in Philadelphia.  Not too tough in Chicago; ORD is another AA hub. But sticking with them while flying out of US Air’s Philly fortress hub -- that took some commitment.</li>\n</ul>\n[caption id=\"attachment_952\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"200\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/photo.png\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-952\" title=\"AA Tweets &quot;I\'m Sorry&quot;\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/photo-200x300.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"200\" height=\"300\" /></a> Tweeting Apologies[/caption]\n<ul>\n 	<li>Over the past, say, 5 years, though, things have changed.  American’s competitors declared bankruptcy, cleaned up their balance sheets and bought new planes.  Lousy if you’re an investor with stock, an executive with options, or a creditor taking a haircut on loans, but for a customer it works out. American seemed proud of not going bankrupt, but as their planes got older and dingier, and fuel prices got higher, something had to give.</li>\n 	<li>And give it has, not just renegotiating plane leases. At a time you’d think American would want to take extra care of customers, their service taken a dive. And they’ve gotten more aggressive with add-on luggage and seating fees.  And now combining older frequent flyer miles that had no expiration date with those that expire in 18 months. For me, it’s not a big number; it’s the change in attitude; the final break in what I thought I could expect from American.</li>\n 	<li>Will I stop flying American? No, unless they go completely under. Or worse, merge with USAir. They’ll keep a big hub out of ORD and I have lifetime Platinum status with them -- unless that too becomes a casualty of their new “take away” mentality.  What will stop, though, is giving American the benefit of the doubt, of having them be my “default” choice.  After 27 years, they’re just another uncomfortable plane seat.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #100</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from the <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">ccMixter</a> web site and from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Magnatune</a></li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_100.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #100 — Southern Road Trip; Breaking Up with American Airlines','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-100-southern-road-trip-breaking-up-with-american-airlines','','','2022-03-24 13:46:51','2022-03-24 18:46:51','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=1034',0,'post','',1),
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INSERT INTO `wp_posts` VALUES
(1068,1,'2012-08-14 20:20:16','2012-08-15 01:20:16','[caption id=\"attachment_1069\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/IMG_1380.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1069\" title=\"Elvis Statue in Memphis\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/IMG_1380-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Young Elvis Before Too Many Peanut Butter &amp; Banana Sandwiches[/caption]\n\nOn my <a title=\"Podcast #100 — Southern Road Trip; Breaking Up with American Airlines\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/07/31/podcast-100-southern-road-trip-breaking-up-with-american-airlines/\">Drive South</a>, I ate and drank my way down I-65 and back up I-55. I had excellent meals throughout my trip -- something you expect in New Orleans, but might find a bit more surprising in Louisville or Nashville if you haven\'t been paying attention.  Every city I visited had neighborhoods with restaurants serving local artisan food and local craft beers. (Here\'s a Flickr <a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/travelcommons/sets/72157631067493698/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">photo set</a> of some of my better pictures).\n\nThe chefs, bartenders, and owners with whom I talked were all on top of the latest food trends in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and London. Indeed, many had worked in the top restaurants in those cities for 5-10 years and were bringing those experiences and ways of thinking about food back home with them.  But rather than just recreating Chicago dishes, they\'re twisting them to fit their new homes -- replacing prosciutto with country ham, topping a bit crispy chicken skin with dots of Wonder Bread purée, and aging sour brown ales in bourbon casks.  If you\'re heading south, here are the places I recommend you search out:\n\n<strong>Nashville</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://thecatbirdseatrestaurant.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Catbird Seat</a> - In most restaurants, the chef\'s table is a 6-top in the corner of the kitchen were the diners watch their food being prepared and, if they\'re lucky, get to exchange a couple of words with the chef. At Catbird Seat, the entire restaurant is a chef\'s table -- a bar that wraps around the cooking stations. There are no waiters -- the food is served and explained by the chefs. And, as should be expected from chefs who worked at places like <a href=\"http://www.theworlds50best.com/awards/1-50-winners/alinea/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Alinea</a> and <a href=\"http://frenchlaundry.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">French Laundry</a>, an explanation from the chef of all the flavors on the plate helps your appreciation of what\'s been set before you. At $100 for 9 courses and $40 for the (recommended) wine pairing, it\'s not a cheap meal, but it\'s every bit on par with the best restaurants in New York (here\'s a recent NY Times <a href=\"http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/13/now-dining-the-catbird-seat-in-nashville/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">write-up</a>), Chicago, and San Francisco.  If you like imaginative fine cuisine, don\'t miss it.  Show up early enough to have a cocktail in <a href=\"http://www.cntraveler.com/daily-traveler/2011/12/If-You-Have-One-Drink-in-Nashville\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Patterson House</a>, the speakeasy looking bar that\'s in the same building.</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://yazoobrew.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Yazoo Brewing Company</a> - Tucked away at the edge of the <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gulch_(Nashville)\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Gulch</a> neighborhood, Yazoo Brewing has a good-sized taproom serving a nice variety of craft beers. I can be a bit of a hop-head, so I like their <a href=\"http://yazoobrew.com/our-beers/hopproject.php\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Hop Project</a>, but their <a href=\"http://yazoobrew.com/our-beers/dos-perros.php\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Dos Perros</a> surprised me as did the Rye Saison they were serving in the taproom.\n\n[caption id=\"attachment_1041\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"150\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/382380_3350829861633_1849689155_n.jpg\"><img class=\"size-thumbnail wp-image-1041\" title=\"The Ham Bar Menu\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/382380_3350829861633_1849689155_n-150x150.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"150\" height=\"150\" /></a> Today\'s Selections at the Ham Bar[/caption]</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Louisville</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://www.garageonmarket.com/site/\">Garage Bar</a> - The people and tables spill out of this re-purposed gas station into the unfortunately named <a href=\"http://eastmarketdistrict.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">NuLu</a> neighborhood in a way that pulls you off the sidewalk into the melee.  The night I was there, a band was playing under what used to be the gas pump awning while on the other side of the patio, a bunch of people jumped out of seats to take their picture with the neighborhood tortoise that was (slowly) moving through. The ham bar offered a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/382380_3350829861633_1849689155_n.jpg\">selection</a> of country ham from Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee (a good-sized portion for $5), good craft beer and, because you\'re in Kentucky, craft bourbons.</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://www.atgbrewery.com/\">Against The Grain</a> - It\'s a brewpub attached to Louisville\'s minor league baseball park on the Ohio River, about a 10 minute walk from the NuLu area. They have a great beer selection, but when they described the sour brown ale, I was sold.  My time in Belgium has given me a soft spot for sour beers.  The bartender couldn\'t understand my excitement. \"That\'s the only beer we make that I have to spit out\".</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/theholygrale/\">Holy Grale</a>- Housed in a former Unitarian Church in the Highlands\' neighborhood, Holy Grale is a cozy (tight?) gastropub with a great selection of local and Belgian beers and the right kind of bar food (brats, pork belly, poutine) to soak it up.\n\n[caption id=\"attachment_1079\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"150\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/IMG_1345.jpg\"><img class=\"size-thumbnail wp-image-1079\" title=\"IMG_1345\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/IMG_1345-150x150.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"150\" height=\"150\" /></a> Nice Set of Tanks at Avondale Brewing Company[/caption]</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Birmingham, Alabama</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://www.avondalebrewing.com/index-full.php\">Avondale Brewing Company</a> - Finding this place took me off the beaten path to Birmingham\'s Avondale neighborhood. The neighborhood looks like it\'s trying to gentrify with a few hip storefronts, but Avondale Brewing seems to attract most of the crowds. The taproom was full early Saturday afternoon, but the beer was worth waiting my turn -- another sour brown ale...</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>New Orleans</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://maurepasfoods.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Maurepas Foods</a> -  I didn\'t plan on visiting New Orleans. I\'d intended to stay on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, but as they still try to rebuild after Katrina\'s direct hit, there isn\'t much other than the casinos in Biloxi.  Remembering a conversation two nights prior with the guy sitting next to me at Holy Grale in Louisville, I skipped my usual haunts in the Arts/Warehouse District and headed over to the <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bywater,_New_Orleans\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Bywater</a> neighborhood. I parked near Maurepas Foods, looked at the menu, and walked in. It\'s a neighborhood place, but not a dive. The bartender offered me the Sunday night tasting menu complete with paired cocktails, but I wasn\'t that hungry. I had a sausage and squid sandwich -- sounds awful but tasted great.  They have a good cocktail and craft beer selection that matches up well with their menu. It\'s a nice break from the usual French Quarter drill.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Memphis</strong>\n\n[caption id=\"attachment_1083\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"150\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/IMG_1381-e1344996846435.jpg\"><img class=\"size-thumbnail wp-image-1083\" title=\"2 Piece Dark Meat Plate At Gus\'s\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/IMG_1381-e1344996846435-150x150.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"150\" height=\"150\" /></a> 2 Piece Dark Meat Plate At Gus\'s[/caption]\n<ul>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://thebeautyshoprestaurant.anotherroadsideattractioncatering.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Beauty Shop</a> - In an old beauty shop in the midtown Cooper Young neighborhood, Beauty Shop is run by a Memphis art student who went to New York, learned to cook, and then brought her training home. Has a hip vibe and menu.</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://www.southofbeale.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">South of Beale</a> - A good downtown gastropub in the <a href=\"http://southmainmemphis.net/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">South Main</a> district -- walking distance from Beale Street but a nice place to get away from the noise and crowds. A duck patty melt and rabbit sausage sandwich are on the menu that\'s a step up from typical pub grub, and there\'s a good selection of Southern craft beers and whiskey.</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://travel.usatoday.com/destinations/great-american-bites/story/2011/07/Great-American-Bites-Guss-World-Famous-Fried-Chicken-in-Memphis/49517608/1\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Gus\'s World Famous Fried Chicken</a> - Not every meal on my trip was at posh hipster places. Gus\'s is about as unhip as you can get, but they\'ve perfected fried chicken. Crispy (but not overly) outside, moist inside -- if it\'s not \"world famous\", it deserves to be. The sides are serviceable, but no one cares because it\'s all about the chicken. Gus\'s is a small place on a marginal block, so pick your time -- don\'t go during lunch rush, but don\'t wait until the sun goes down. But do go...</li>\n</ul>','Food and Drink Highlights from My Drive South','','private','closed','closed','','food-and-drink-highlights-from-my-drive-south','','','2026-03-07 09:10:50','2026-03-07 15:10:50','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=1068',0,'post','',1),
(1069,1,'2012-08-14 17:34:56','2012-08-14 22:34:56','','Elvis Statue in Memphis','','inherit','open','open','','img_1380','','','2012-08-14 17:34:56','2012-08-14 22:34:56','',1068,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/IMG_1380.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(1079,1,'2012-08-14 20:23:29','2012-08-15 01:23:29','','Nice Set of Tanks at Avondale Brewing Company','Nice Set of Tanks at Avondale Brewing Company ','inherit','open','open','','img_1345','','','2012-08-14 20:23:29','2012-08-15 01:23:29','',1068,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/IMG_1345.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(1083,1,'2012-08-14 21:12:13','2012-08-15 02:12:13','','2 Piece Dark Meat Plate At Gus\'s','2 Piece Dark Meat Plate At Gus\'s','inherit','open','open','','img_1381','','','2012-08-14 21:12:13','2012-08-15 02:12:13','',1068,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/IMG_1381-e1344996846435.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(1095,1,'2012-09-24 10:17:41','2012-09-24 15:17:41','A long layover can be an impromptu vacation or a mind-numbing marathon of CNN Airport Network shows. Inspired by my own 5-hour layover <a title=\"Video #2 – One City, Five Hours: Frankfurt\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/05/01/video-2-one-city-five-hours-frankfurt/\">excursion</a> through Frankfurt, I grabbed my iPhone and shot what I\'d recommend you do and see on a long layover at O\'Hare Airport.\n\nUsing foot power and a one-day unlimited <a href=\"http://faremedia.chicago-card.com/store/main.aspx?DepartmentId=34\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">pass</a> on Chicago\'s<a href=\"http://www.transitchicago.com/riding_cta/airports.aspx\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> \'L\"</a> (subway/metro), this tour hits:\n<ul>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://chicago.cubs.mlb.com/chc/ballpark/index.jsp\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Wrigley Field</a></li>\n 	<li>Chicago hot dogs at the <a href=\"http://www.wienercircle.net/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Wieners Circle</a></li>\n 	<li>Lincoln Park, Old Town, and Wicker Park/Bucktown neighborhoods</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://explorechicago.org/city/en/millennium.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Millennium&nbsp;Park</a></li>\n 	<li>the Loop (Chicago\'s business district)</li>\n</ul>\n<div><iframe width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"https://www.youtube.com/embed/fAOsuSoV7b4\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"autoplay; encrypted-media\" allowfullscreen=\"\"></iframe></div>\nHere\'s a map highlighting each stop on the tour:\n\n<iframe src=\"https://maps.google.com/maps/ms?msa=0&amp;msid=212647958930931165546.0004ca28d6953e133cf86&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;t=m&amp;ll=41.908154,-87.677765&amp;spn=0.089427,0.145912&amp;z=12&amp;output=embed\" width=\"425\" height=\"350\" frameborder=\"0\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\"></iframe>\n<small>View <a style=\"color: #0000ff; text-align: left;\" href=\"https://maps.google.com/maps/ms?msa=0&amp;msid=212647958930931165546.0004ca28d6953e133cf86&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;t=m&amp;ll=41.908154,-87.677765&amp;spn=0.089427,0.145912&amp;z=12&amp;source=embed\">ORD Layover Excursion</a> in a larger map</small>\n\n&nbsp;\n\nSome ideas on how you can customize this tour...\n<ul>\n 	<li>If you\'re coming in from <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Chicago Midway International Airport\" href=\"http://www.flychicago.com/midway/MidwayHomepage.shtm\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"homepage noopener\">Midway Airport</a>, take the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Orange Line (Chicago Transit Authority)\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange_Line_%28Chicago_Transit_Authority%29\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"wikipedia noopener\">CTA Orange Line</a> to the Loop\'s <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Clark/Lake (CTA station)\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clark/Lake_%28CTA_station%29\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"wikipedia noopener\">Clark/Lake</a> Exit to pick up the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Brown Line (Chicago Transit Authority)\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_Line_%28Chicago_Transit_Authority%29\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"wikipedia noopener\">Brown Line</a> north. Midway is closer to the Loop, so you can shave 40-60 minutes off the itinerary</li>\n 	<li>You can save about 30 minutes by taking a taxi to Wrigley Field from O\'Hare. You can then pick up the itinerary heading south from the Addison \'L\' stop</li>\n 	<li>If you\'re interested in high-end shopping, take a left (east) at North Ave (instead of the suggested right), right (south) on State Pkwy, bear left at Rush St, and then turn left (east) on Oak St. Shop along here to Michigan Ave and head south (right). Get a beer/glass of wine at the <a href=\"http://www.signatureroom.com/Signature-Lounge/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">bar</a> on the 96th floor of the John Hancock building and enjoy the view. When you\'re finished, take a taxi to <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Richard J. Daley Center\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_J._Daley_Center\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"wikipedia noopener\">Daley Plaza</a> and pick up the itinerary there.</li>\n 	<li>If you want to go to the top of the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Willis Tower\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willis_Tower\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"wikipedia noopener\">Sears Tower</a> (no Chicagoan calls it the Willis Tower), keep heading across the Loop (west) on Adams after the Art Institute. Take a left (south) on Franklin one block to Jackson for the entrance to the SkyDeck.</li>\n</ul>\n<div>If you have any other suggestions or your experience doing this tour, please leave a comment here.</div>','Video  - ORD Layover Excursion: a 6-Hour Tour of Chicago','','publish','closed','closed','','video-3-ord-layover-excursion-a-6-hour-tour-of-chicago','','','2021-09-28 18:37:07','2021-09-28 23:37:07','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=1095',0,'post','',4),
(1119,1,'2012-10-25 22:40:25','2012-10-26 03:40:25','[caption id=\"attachment_1128\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"225\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/2012-08-03-21.17.30.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1128\" title=\"Bolton\'s Spicy Chicken, Nashville\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/2012-08-03-21.17.30-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"225\" height=\"300\" /></a> Search for Nashville Hot Chicken Led to Interesting Neighborhoods[/caption]\n\nBack in the TravelCommons studios after a couple months of summer break. We open up with thoughts about skipping rental cars, sharing listener comments on the Chicago Layover Excursion <a title=\"Video #3 – ORD Layover Excursion: a 6-Hour Tour of Chicago\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/09/24/video-3-ord-layover-excursion-a-6-hour-tour-of-chicago/\">video</a>, and the current state of American Airlines -- great new airplanes, deteriorating on-time stats. <a href=\"http://www.crunchbase.com/person/michael-komarnitsky\">Michael Komarnitsky</a>, the founder and CEO of GoMiles, talks about why he sold his company to <a href=\"https://traxo.com/\">Traxo</a> and where he sees the mileage tracking industry going. We wrap with my thoughts about how I break through the frequent traveler \"travel bubble\" by looking for local artisanal food and craft beers. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_101.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #101:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago. Back after a couple of month hiatus. The Episode 100 celebrations ran a little long...</li>\n 	<li>Last week, Jeremy Phillips tweeted “Listening to Travel Commons by <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> episode 100 while en route ATL -&gt; SEA. I kind of miss the bathroom acoustics but love the podcast.” Jeremy, I was thinking of recording at least the intro to this episode in one of the studio bathrooms, but thought that would be a bit too contrived. I will see, though, if I can get my act together enough for the next episode to do a bit of throw-back recording from a hotel bathroom.</li>\n 	<li>Not a lot of travel since the last episode -- two flights to San Francisco and a day trip to Atlanta -- though my arrivals in each place had some interesting twists. For all these trips, I had car service arranged to pick me up from the airport and to take me back. The cost and hassles of car rental seem to be on an upward spiral. We’ve talked in past episodes about costs -- not so much the rental cost itself, but all the add-on fees, surcharges, and taxes. In an Oct 2009 <a title=\"Skipping the Rental Car\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2009/10/25/skipping-the-rental-car/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">blog post</a> about skipping rental cars, I looked at my receipts from rentals in LA, SF, Seattle, and Philadelphia and found that add-on charges increased my final bill 27-51%. I don’t think those percentages have gone down in the intervening 3 years.</li>\n 	<li>The hassles of car rental are just as off-putting -- airports are reclaiming close-in car rental sites to expand parking, pushing the rental companies further out. I’ve timed trips at Phoenix and BWI -- 30 minutes to get from the terminal to the rental cars.</li>\n 	<li>So, with all that, I have little problem justifying the cost of a car to haul me between the airport and my locations. But even hire cars are not without their hassles. In ATL, it took me three phone calls -- to the driver and the car service -- to figure out where to meet the car. Unlike, say , ORD or LGA, there are different places you can “surface” from the gates and terminals. Apparently I followed the wrong “Ground Transportation” signs and ended up at the wrong end of the airport. No big problem -- maybe a 10-minute delay.</li>\n 	<li>My last trip to SF was a bit more problematic. I text the driver “I’m here” and “Here’s the door I’m at” -- not a big opportunity for location confusion at SFO Terminal 3. I’m standing there -- a couple of cars pull up, a guy gets in one, a woman in another. 5 minutes go by, where’s the car that said he was a minute away. Turns out that the guy who got into one of those cars got into mine. He told the driver his name which, to the non-native English speaking driver, sounded like Peacock and off they went. Except when I’m still texting him -- confusing when he thinks I’m in the back seat. Somewhere on the 101 South, the driver and the passenger figure out the mix-up. The car comes back to SFO, picks me up, leaving my doppelganger -- whose last name sounds nothing like Peacock -- wandering aimless on the sidewalk looking for his long-gone car.</li>\n 	<li>All reinforcing the feeling that there’s just nothing about travel nowadays that “just works”...</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://www.musicalley.com/music/listeners/artistdetails.php?BandHash=5176b75737dbc595f7509067fbe080ad\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Science vs. Romance</a> </em>by Rilo Kiley</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>For those not following the various TravelCommons sites -- <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Facebook</a>, the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">web site</a> (I don’t do Pinterest because, well, I’m a guy, and I don’t do Tumblr because I’m over 25 years old) -- a couple of pointers to some content that didn’t make it into the iTunes feed.</li>\n 	<li>First, I did follow through on the threat/promise I made at the end of the last episode -- to do my own <a title=\"Video #3 – ORD Layover Excursion: a 6-Hour Tour of Chicago\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/09/24/video-3-ord-layover-excursion-a-6-hour-tour-of-chicago/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Chicago version</a> of the One City, Five Hours sprint tours that United used to do in their Hemispheres magazine. Last year, I did the Frankfurt tour while on a long layover between Mumbai and Chicago.  I video’d my results; it’s on the TravelCommons site as “<a title=\"Video #2 – One City, Five Hours: Frankfurt\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/05/01/video-2-one-city-five-hours-frankfurt/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Video #2</a>”. I had such a great time following that tour -- seeing new areas of Frankfurt rather than flipping through my iPad in the United lounge -- that I wanted to offer up a similar tour of Chicago to people with long layovers -- whether planned or not.</li>\n 	<li>While the Frankfurt video was a one-day affair -- shot on my iPhone and edited in iMovie on the flight home, the Chicago video turned out to be a lot more work. Of course I had to create the tour rather than following someone else’s. And the constraints of the format -- start and end at ORD, 5 hours long (which I failed; mine clocked in just over 6),  using in only public transit, and trying to show something other than the usual photo op sites -- made for some tough choices.</li>\n 	<li>Also, I wanted to provide detailed transit and walking directions -- showing street signs at crossings, building a detailed Google trip map for the show notes -- because that was my one frustration with United’s Frankfurt <a href=\"http://www.hemispheresmagazine.com/2010/03/01/one-city-five-hours-frankfurt/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">article</a> -- I kept getting lost which cut into my already limited time budget.</li>\n 	<li>I posted on the TravelCommons site and Facebook page about a month ago. I didn’t push it through the iTunes feed because I thought it would be too big of a download and wouldn’t be of interest to everyone.</li>\n 	<li>The TravelCommons Facebook community had some good things to say. Lisa Besso’s comment voiced a common theme --\n<ul>\n 	<li>“Wouldn\'t it be great to have these for all major hubs where we all spend too much time?”</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>I got to thinking about this... If you think through the top 10 US hubs -- ATL, ORD, DFW, DEN, PHX, MSP, IAH, DTW, EWR, SFO -- how many of these could you do a 5-hour city/neighborhood tour without needing a rental car.\n<ul>\n 	<li>San Francisco is an obvious one</li>\n 	<li>Newark - take the PATH train to downtown Manhattan and walk up thru TriBeCa and Greenwich Village</li>\n 	<li>Atlanta - Downtown and Buckhead via Marta?</li>\n 	<li>Denver - You’ve landed in the middle of a buffalo herd. Maybe catch a bus to LoDo?</li>\n 	<li>And after that, my voice trails off. Anybody else have any ideas?</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Bob Fenerty and Robby Smith also left comments -- both compared the ORD video to Anthony Bourdain’s “Layover” series. Bob said\n<ul>\n 	<li>“Very fun; like watching an amateur version of ‘The Layover’”</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Robby liked it because you could knock it off in an afternoon, unlike Bourdain’s 2-3 day layover.</li>\n 	<li>If you haven’t seen it already, go to the TravelCommons web site or Facebook page, check it out and leave some comments. I created a new “Video” category on the site -- you can find it on the right-hand nav bar if you want to quickly find last year’s Frankfurt video. And send along your thoughts on other layover tours if you have them.</li>\n 	<li>Another <a title=\"Food and Drink Highlights from My Drive South\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/08/14/food-and-drink-highlights-from-my-drive-south/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">blog post</a> follows up on the topic in the last episode about my “great circle” through the Mid South -- I-65 from Chicago to the Gulf Coast, across US-90 and then back up I-55 and 57. Listeners who follow my social media natterings on Twitter and Untappd had seen my food and beer comments along the tour and asked for a summary, which I posted on the site in August -- a city-by-city listing of the restaurants and bars I thought were the best -- along with a link to a Flickr <a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/travelcommons/sets/72157631067493698/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">photo set</a>, pulling together some of my better shots, though probably a bit overdone with Instagram filters. If you’re visiting Nashville, Louisville, Memphis soon, check that out.</li>\n 	<li>And finally, a follow-up on episode 100’s other topic -- breaking up with American Airline, I dunno, it’s 1 step forward and 2 steps back. One of my biggest complaints in that rant was the age of AA’s fleet -- the MD-80’s that have been around for 25-30 years -- they’re small, dingy, uncomfortable, and in my experience, more and more prone to maintenance delays. Last month, I flew on a new American 737-800 -- what a great plane! Huge luggage bins, some styling cues from the 787 Dreamliner, and regular electrical outlets in coach. Such a huge upgrade from the MD-80s -- especially the ones picked up with the TWA merger -- those are the worst. So, good forward movement with the planes -- which then gets completely offset (and more) by seats on their old planes coming loose and disgruntled pilots causing flight delays through a work-to-rule campaign. New planes are great, but I have to be able to depend upon them. So I’m completely off American until they get all of this cleared up.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a question, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- use the Voice Memo app on your iPhone or something like Virtual Recorder on your Android phone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://www.musicalley.com/music/listeners/artistdetails.php?BandHash=0e46bba4178825d4602555f523958a28\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Voodoo Dub</a> </em>by Cyrusfx</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Future of Mileage Tracking Tools</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Two years ago, in episode 85, I talked to Michael Komarnitsky, the founder and CEO of GoMiles, about his year-old mileage/awards points tracking service. Last month, Michael sold GoMiles to Traxo, a trip aggregation/travel management site. I caught up with him last week to get his thoughts on where the mileage/awards tracking market is going. I first asked him to remind us what GoMiles did for the traveler...</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music --<a href=\"http://www.nimbitmusic.com/saurabbhargava\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><em>Not Enough (Inside You, Part 2)</em></a> by Saurab Bhargava</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Bursting the Travel Bubble with Local Food and Craft Beer</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>As I mentioned earlier, those who follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"http://untappd.com/user/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Untappd</a> (a sort of FourSquare for beer nerds), see a lot of posts and pictures of food and beer. Though I guess it shouldn’t be surprising -- I think travel, food, and alcohol (beer, wine, scotch,...) naturally go together; if you’re interested in one, you’re interested in them all. It’s all about being interested in exploring cultures. One of the main reasons we travel (voluntarily, that is) is to experience other people, other cultures. And if you want to get deeper into a culture, it’s much easier to eat and drink with them than to marry them.  Not to say marrying is a bad thing, just a bit more permanent -- or perhaps that’s the old-school Catholic in me talking...</li>\n 	<li>In <a title=\"Podcast #90 — More Comfortable Traveling in India; Tipping Towards Android?\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/05/22/podcast-90-more-comfortable-traveling-in-india-tipping-towards-android/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">past</a> <a title=\"Podcast #83 – Business Travel in India; iPad vs. Netbook\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2010/05/28/podcast-83-business-travel-in-india-ipad-vs-netbook/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">episodes</a>, we’ve talked about how frequent travelers often <a title=\"Up in the Air — Captures Life in the “Travel Bubble”\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2009/12/15/up-in-the-air-captures-life-in-the-travel-bubble/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">float</a> above the day-to-day activities, the reality of the cities their visiting in a “travel bubble” -- kinda like Glenda the Good Witch in “Wicked”. In <a title=\"Podcast #64 – Escaping the Travel Bubble; Mark’s Travel Tips\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2008/04/29/podcast-64-escaping-the-travel-bubble-marks-travel-tips/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">one</a> of those episodes, I talked about how I like using public transportation, skipping the airport limos or private car services as a way to pop that bubble.</li>\n 	<li>But in my trips this summer to SF and through the Mid-South, the search for local food and beer popped the travel bubble, and it was a helluva lot more fun than wrestling with a fare card machine in Brooklyn\n\n[caption id=\"attachment_1124\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/IMG_1281.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1124\" title=\"San Francisco Farmers\' Market\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/IMG_1281-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> San Francisco Farmers\' Market Near UN Plaza[/caption]</li>\n 	<li>Now this is more than just skipping restaurant chains for local joints. Searching out a SF farmers market took me through the Tenderloin district and had me dodging cup-shaking panhandlers much further up Market St than I’d been before. Searching for Nashville hot chicken took me way off the usual Broadway tourist drag, to Bolton’s, a squat cinder block building in what felt like a bit of a sketch section of East Nashville for some very good and very spicy fried chicken. We ate under a wheezing air conditioner as a steady stream of neighborhood folk banged the screen door, ordering the Friday hot chicken and catching up with the owner.</li>\n 	<li>Hunting down local beers has been just as rewarding. Walking from SF’s Union Square to the edge of the SoMa neighborhood to find the <a href=\"http://www.citybeerstore.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">City Beer Store</a> took me a good bit out of the tourist zone. I ended up drinking local Magnolia beer, talking with a group of guys who were stopping off for one on their way to the bus stop. Following Google Maps off I-65 in Birmingham, AL, I found myself parking in what looked like a neighborhood trying hard to re-develop so I could try a beer at <a href=\"http://www.avondalebrewing.com/index-full.php\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Avondale Brewing</a>.</li>\n 	<li>I keep a running list of web clippings in Evernote of the restaurants, beer/wine bars, breweries I want to visit. I have folders for the cities I visit often or plan to visit soon. I also use social media -- in <a title=\"Podcast #96 — Eating and Drinking with Social Media; Frequent Flier Alliances\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/01/05/podcast-96-dining-with-social-media-frequent-flier-alliances/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">episode #96</a>, I talked about how I use Untappd, <a href=\"http://www.foodspotting.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Foodspotting</a> and Chowhound -- as well as asking the Twitter-verse for ideas.\n\n[caption id=\"attachment_1125\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/2012-07-14-14.08.12.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1125\" title=\"Mash Tanks at Avondale Brewing\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/2012-07-14-14.08.12-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Mash Tanks at Avondale Brewing, Birmingham, AL[/caption]</li>\n 	<li>But that’s just so I have a starting point for my searches. Searching new places forces me to break that travel bubble wall between visitor (me) and residents. In Louisville, I headed over to the Louisville Beer Store in the downtown NuLu district. Drinking a couple of beers and talking to the owner, he said I had to visit his other place, the <a href=\"http://holygralelouisville.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Holy Grale</a>, an old church converted to a beer bar. While there, talking to some folks at the bar, a guy told me I had to visit New Orleans’<a href=\"http://http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bywater,_New_Orleans\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"> Bywater</a> District if I wanted to latest in good local non-tourist food there. Three days later, I was driving into New Orleans. Have been there many times, but never heard of the Bywater District. A little web searching on the iPhone and I found my way there, ending up having dinner at the bar of <a href=\"http://maurepasfoods.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Maurepas Foods</a>, a very local place with very good food.</li>\n 	<li>Frequent travelers tend toward a rhythm, a pattern that allows them to quickly and efficiently navigate the hassles of today’s travel experience. There’s a thin line, though, between, efficiency and a rut, and the travel bubble straddles that line. It takes some effort to pop that bubble; good food and beer can help...</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #101</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://music.mevio.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Mevio’s Music Alley</a> and from <a href=\"http://www.saurabbhargava.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Saurab Bhargava</a>’s album <em>Chromatique</em></li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_101.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #101 — Future of Mileage Tracking Tools; Searching for Local Food and Craft Beer','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-101-future-of-mileage-tracking-tools-searching-for-local-food-and-craft-beer','','','2021-09-28 18:39:46','2021-09-28 23:39:46','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=1119',0,'post','',2),
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(1128,1,'2012-10-24 20:44:52','2012-10-25 01:44:52','','Bolton\'s Spicy Chicken, Nashville','Search for Nashville Hot Chicken Led to Interesting Neighborhoods','inherit','open','open','','2012-08-03-21-17-30','','','2012-10-24 20:44:52','2012-10-25 01:44:52','',1119,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/2012-08-03-21.17.30.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(1151,1,'2012-11-29 17:12:18','2012-11-29 23:12:18','[caption id=\"attachment_1153\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/2012-11-07-17.29.10.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1153\" title=\"Nor\'easter Snow in NYC\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/2012-11-07-17.29.10-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> What Better Way to Test Travel Management Apps than a Nor\'easter in New York?[/caption]\n\nTraveling to New York earlier this month, I missed Hurricane Sandy but took the full brunt of the follow-up nor\'easter that the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"The Weather Channel\" href=\"http://www.weather.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"homepage noopener noreferrer\">Weather Channel</a> helpfully named Athena. The travel havoc wreaked by the wind and snow was a perfect setting for a side-by-side comparison of the free versions of the leading trip management apps -- <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"TripIt\" href=\"http://www.tripit.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"homepage noopener noreferrer\">TripIt</a>, <a href=\"http://tripcase.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">TripCase</a>, <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"WorldMate\" href=\"http://www.worldmate.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"homepage noopener noreferrer\">WorldMate</a>, and<a href=\"http://kayak.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"> Kayak</a>. Looking at three use cases, pulling together travel plans into a single itinerary, sharing that itinerary with others, and flight tracking when bad weather hits, TripCase came out on top. I also talk about the TSA\'s latest scanner debacle and the changes since I took listeners on a tour of my briefcase in <a title=\"Podcast #33 – Listener Mailbag, What’s in My Briefcase?\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2006/02/18/podcast-33-listener-mailbag-whats-in-my-briefcase/\">Episode 33</a> back in 2006. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_102.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #102:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago after an uneventful Thanksgiving Day weekend. Uneventful for me at least because I was able to hold fast to my rule of no travel during the Thanksgiving holiday. I woke up last Weds, the day before Thanksgiving, to see nothing but grey out my windows. <a href=\"http://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/flights/2012/11/21/dense-fog-snarls-chicago-flights-ahead-of-thanksgiving/1719885/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Heavy fog</a> hit Chicago. Not a normal event. But, with a nod to Murphy, if it was going to happen, why not on the busiest travel day of the year? About 1,500 flights were delayed or cancelled. Ugh...</li>\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">Earlier in the month, though, I did get slightly winged by the weather gods. I traveled to New York the week after, what is it Hurricane or Superstorm Sandy? I thought it was a Category 1 <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Sandy\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">hurricane</a> when it hit New Jersey. What’s with all the superstorm stuff? What is a <a href=\"http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/576b3276-21bc-11e2-b5d2-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2DZrTfhqW\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">superstorm</a>? Anyways, I land at <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"LaGuardia Airport\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaGuardia_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"wikipedia noopener noreferrer\">LaGuardia</a> the following Tuesday morning. I’m expecting a real hassle getting into midtown, but no, to my very pleasant surprise, there were loads of cabs and no queues. Talking to a colleague later in the day, he’d flown into Newark the night before and waited two hours for a car. Timing with these travel things is everything -- often better to be lucky than smart.</li>\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">And pretty soon I thought I’d used mine up in the cab line because, while I’d dodged Superstorm Sandy, I had just landed 18 hours in front of the follow-up nor’easter that the Weather Channel decided to name Winter Storm <a href=\"http://www.weather.com/news/winter/storms/2012/athena\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Athena</a>. OK, now we have hurricanes, superstorms, and winter storms all with names. Go figure. All I know is that I land in perfect weather on Tuesday morning and by Weds afternoon, I’m watching snow blow sideways on Central Park South.</li>\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">Of course, in this age of airlines maxing out seat occupancy, they start pre-emptively cancelling flights the day before Athena hits. Tues night, American and United were already canceling flights from Weds afternoon to Thurs morning -- United a bit more cautiously starting their cancellations at Weds noon while American, perhaps trying to squeeze out a bit more revenue, waited until 2.</li>\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">Actually, my luck was holding. I wasn’t scheduled to fly back until Thurs at 3. So, if this nor’easter hits when it’s supposed to, and moves through as fast as it’s supposed to, I could come out of this OK. On Weds, I kept looking out the windows of the conference hotel. About 3 -- a bit ahead of schedule -- I started to see snow fly. And by 5 when I walked out of the conference to meet a friend for a beer, it was a full-on blizzard. It was a sloppy walk back to my hotel -- seems that nobody in Manhattan owns a snow shovel. But looking out the hotel window Thurs morning, it was clear sidewalks and sunny skies. My flight out of LGA was delayed 40 minutes, which even on a good day qualifies as on time for a LGA-ORD flight. Lucky, ‘cause I couldn’t have planned it better if I’d tried...</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Mo Shang</em> by Soli</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">Got some good comments on the <a title=\"Video #3 – ORD Layover Excursion: a 6-Hour Tour of Chicago\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/09/24/video-3-ord-layover-excursion-a-6-hour-tour-of-chicago/\">ORD layover video</a>. Jeanette Irwin left a comment on the website asking\n<ul>\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">“I\'ve often wanted to take advantage of long layovers by making a quick trip into the city the airport in, but have never been able to figure out what to do with my luggage (if I can help it, I don\'t check my bag, but bring it on the plane with me). Do you have this issues as well, Mark? If so, what do you do about it?”</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">Jeanette, I think any experienced traveler is going to have this issue because we all pretty much break out in hives and a cold sweat at the idea of checking a bag. However, with increased airport security post-9/11, short-term luggage checks are scarce if not extinct in the US and increasingly expensive in places like Heathrow. I’ll grit my teeth and check my bag if I know I’m doing a layover tour (I did this for my <a title=\"Video #2 – One City, Five Hours: Frankfurt\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/05/01/video-2-one-city-five-hours-frankfurt/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Frankfurt sprint</a>). If it’s a more spontaneous excursion, I’ll try to check my bag at an airport hotel or a hotel near my first stop. I’m usually successful. I just tell them I’m checking in later and my room isn’t ready, but I also generously tip at the front end -- to the guy taking my luggage -- to help grease the skids.</li>\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">Gary Learned and Steve Frick gave answers to the question I posed in the last episode -- how many of  the top 10 US hubs -- ATL, ORD, DFW, DEN, PHX, MSP, IAH, DTW, EWR, SFO -- could you do a 5-hour city/neighborhood tour through without needing a rental car? After checking off the easy ones -- ORD, EWR (New York) and SFO -- I asked for thoughts on the rest.</li>\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\"><a href=\"http://twitter.com/Denrael\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Gary Learned</a>weighed in on MSP via Twitter --\n<ul>\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">You can take the light rail into downtown Minneapolis or over to Mall of America</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">And then once you get to downtown Minneapolis, you never have to come outside -- you just wander building to building through the 8 miles of human habitrails called the Skyway. Some people go <a href=\"http://www.vita.mn/116353724.html?page=all\">weeks</a> in the winter without venturing outside.</li>\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">Steve Frick said\n<ul>\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">“You could Marta up to downtown Atlanta, there\'s plenty to do in a 5 hour time span”</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">Steve must’ve followed the link to the TravelCommons Flickr page in last episode’s show notes because he also commented\n<ul>\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">“I was looking at your Flickr pictures, take a look back at your My Briefcase picture from 2006 technology certainly has evolved in the last 7 years”\n\n[caption id=\"attachment_1155\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"320\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/102434287_e1770f7622_n.jpg\"><img class=\"size-full wp-image-1155\" title=\"My Briefcase circa 2006\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/102434287_e1770f7622_n.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"320\" height=\"212\" /></a> My Briefcase circa 2006[/caption]</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">I did go back and look at that <a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/travelcommons/102434287/in/photostream/\">picture</a>. It’s the first picture in the TravelCommons’ Flickr photostream -- from February 2006. It accompanies an audio tour through my briefcase that was in <a title=\"Podcast #33 – Listener Mailbag, What’s in My Briefcase?\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2006/02/18/podcast-33-listener-mailbag-whats-in-my-briefcase/\">Episode #33</a></li>\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">Yes, using a Bluetooth dongle to push photos from my Motorola clamshell phone to my ThinkPad. That was cutting edge pre-smartphone stuff. The U2 clickwheel iPod also has a bit of a vintage feel, though when I heard “Vertigo” on the radio the other day, it didn’t seem that old. Some things haven’t changed though. I still record my podcasts on that little iRiver -- much to my chagrin. I still use Pilot G2 gel pens, and I still carry a tin of wintergreen Altoids to get rid of that plane nap taste in my mouth. I think about half the stuff in my briefcase has stayed the same since 2006.</li>\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">One of the things that has changed since ‘06 is the creation of a whole new class of travel electronics -- the tablet. The iPad and the Kindle are the two defining devices in that category. Just before Thanksgiving, I picked up a Google Nexus 7 tablet -- the competitor to the Kindle Fire and iPad Mini. The WiFi-only version has been out since the summer, but I waited to buy until they released a version with cellular data and I’d seen Apple’s 7-inch offering. I’ll do a full review in a later episode -- after I’ve had a chance to travel with the Nexus 7 for a bit, but after a week-and-a-half of use, I really like it. The hardware is nicely put together, the price is right -- about $260 cheaper than a similarly kitted-out iPad Mini, and the latest version of Android -- 4.2 or “Jelly Bean” -- is hugely better than the first tablet version of Android -- 3.0 or “Honeycomb”. Very positive first impression.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a question, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- use the Voice Memo app on your iPhone or something like Easy Voice Recorder on your Android phone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em>You’re the Big Sky</em> by Derek K. Miller</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Trip Management App Comparison</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">Back in the golden age of travel, when everyone dressed up to fly (or at least showered and shaved), flight attendants still had their pensions and so were more pleasant, first class food was served on china with real silverware, and there was leg room in coach, frequent travelers used travel agencies to book their travel. Before you left on your trip, they’d send you actual physical plane tickets and a printed itinerary that consolidated your flight, hotel, and car rental reservations onto a single page. They usually gave you 3 copies of the itinerary -- one for your admin, one for your spouse, and one for you.</li>\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">In today’s DIY (do it yourself) age of travel, where people are searching and booking their own travel a la carte -- using Hipmunk for flights, Orbitz for hotels, and booking a car directly with Avis -- and then want to share these plans with 450 of their geographically distributed “friends”, there is a need to update those paper itineraries with something a bit more interactive -- that leverages the billions of dollars of mobile stuff we’ve bought over the past few years -- certainly since I took that picture of my briefcase in 2006.</li>\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">I’ve used a number of these travel management applications -- <a href=\"http://tripit.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">TripIt</a>, <a href=\"http://tripcase.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">TripCase</a>, <a href=\"http://worldmate.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">WorldMate</a> -- since I got my first iPhone, but had never really compared them to one another. I eventually settled on TripIt for no other reason than the travel management software my company used, Concur Solutions, bought them and integrated them into their offering. It’s been awhile, so I thought it a good time to give them all another spin.</li>\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">I used my Winter Storm Athena New York trip on United and an upcoming SLC ski trip on Southwest as test beds. I loaded the free versions of TripIt, TripCase, WorldMate and <a href=\"http://kayak.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Kayak</a> apps on my iPhone 5 and Samsung Galaxy tablet running the most recent version of Android -- Jelly Bean. Kayak wasn’t in my initial pass of apps -- I think of them more as meta search than travel management, but Gary Learned pointed me to them via Twitter and I added them to the mix. Adding to the fun, I ran the Flight Track Pro and United Airline apps on my iPhone and used the Passbook app new to iOS 6 to hold my United boarding passes. I was fully apped-up and ready to go.</li>\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">All the apps hit the base use case of aggregating trip information and effectively displaying it on the screen of a smartphone or tablet. Everyone correctly parsed the United and Southwest confirmation e-mails and noted the Vegas stopover on the return leg of the Southwest trip with TripIt, WorldMate and Kayak expliciting calling out its 40-min length.</li>\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">Most apps also have some ways of automatically ingesting your travel plans. If your business uses Concur, you can have it send all your itineraries to TripIt. TripCase, owned by the Sabre travel system, can automatically pick up trips made by a travel agent in Sabre. I assume WorldMate will soon have something similar with Carlson Wagonlit. And though I didn’t try it, I’d guess that Kayak automatically loads trips you make through them. You can also authorize TripIt to scan your GMail account several times a day for confirmation e-mails.</li>\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">If aggregation is the first use case, sharing itineraries is the second. Now, in this day and age, people immediately translate that into social media posting -- Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn -- but there are different levels of sharing needed. I might want to post to Facebook and LinkedIn that I’m planning a New York trip, trolling for some serendipitous beer drinking, but not so sure I want to widely broadcast flight and hotel details. However, someone scheduling my meetings or meeting me at the airport (not to mention my wife), not only do they need all those details, they could probably use delay/reschedule updates also.</li>\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">Everyone handles what I’d call the base social media sharing -- publishing to Facebook and LinkedIn, though it didn’t appear that WorldMate pushed to Facebook automatically. I like TripIt’s two pushes -- “I’m planning a trip” when I book the trip and then “I’m leaving” the day before departure. Kayak’s pushes bothered me -- they were URL links to the itinerary, which makes way too much information available. TripCase and Kayak could push to Twitter; TripIt couldn’t, but could push to enterprise apps like Salesforce Chatter and Yammer.</li>\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">TripIt, TripCase, and Kayak all published web calendar feeds you can pull into Outlook or Google Calendar, which would allow your spouse or assistant to get regular updates of your detailed travel plans. WorldMate calendar sync isn’t available in their free product.</li>\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">Which is a nice-to-have, but basic gut-level e-mailing of itineraries is key. And I gotta tell you that I was a little surprised at the results. You’d think this would be easy. And for WorldMate and TripCase it was -- click on the Share button and they quickly shot out a one-page e-mail with all the trip details in a nice table. I was surprised, though, that TripCase was the only one where I could, as a global default, set up an e-mail address (my wife’s in my case) to automatically receive all my trip updates. However, to do so, she had to become a TripCase user. Not quite what I had in mind.</li>\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">Kayak and TripIt sent out e-mails with web links to the information. Clicking through Kayak’s got to a nice clean display of the itinerary. TripIt, though, made you sign-up as a TripIt user before you could see the travel details. Way too much work if I need to quickly share my travel plans with a colleague.</li>\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">So far, everyone was able to aggregate travel plans, with some apps having a convenience edge if you book through their partners -- Concur for TripIt, Sabre for TripCase, Kayak for... Kayak. TripIt and TripCase do the best with social media publishing, though TripIt wins if you’re a Yammer or Chatter user. TripCase and WorldMate win itinerary e-mailing, which TripIt epicly failed.</li>\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">So that’s mostly pre-trip stuff. The final use case is while you’re on the trip and something happens -- what airlines euphemistically call “irregular ops”. The sorts of things that happen when you’re traveling through LGA in the midst of, say, a winter nor’easter big enough to get it’s own name from the Weather Channel.  Flights are delayed, gates change...</li>\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">Since I was only using the free versions, TripIt and WorldMate didn’t help. You have to upgrade to their paid versions for updates and flight status. Having said that, WorldMate Gold is $10/yr while TripIt Pro is $49. Not huge numbers, especially WorldMate’s. Somewhere along the line, I’d bought Flight Track Pro for my iPhone. It’s a $10 app, but I gotta think it was cheaper when I bought it. Anyhow, it syncs with TripIt, so I was kinda getting updates from TripIt that way. In the same way, WorldMate’s free app provides a nice deep link into Flightstats.com from the trip page -- two clicks, no typing, and you get real time flight info for your flight. Not as good as a push notification, but it’s something.</li>\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">From free services, I got the best notifications from TripCase and Kayak -- TripCase through iPhone notifications, Kayak via e-mail. And both of them were faster than the airline -- United, in this case. I couldn’t even get gate information updated on my United boarding pass in Passbook, and trying to get push notifications from their app is a random walk through a bunch of screens. Though it’s a paid app, Flight Track Pro did a great job of pushing gate change and delay notifications to my iPhone, and the app does a nice job of displaying current weather, which can give you a sense of how much trouble you’re in.</li>\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">TripCase wins the the notification use case with timely gate change and departure time push notifications. Kayak does a good job with their e-mails, but I think a native smartphone app should be able to push notifications to the screen.</li>\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">Sorting this all down, TripCase wins as the best free smartphone app.  It was at the tops of all three use cases -- itinerary building and sharing, and real-time flight status updates. However, it doesn’t have a tablet-specific app -- it just scales up the smartphone app.  Which looks awful on my 10-in Samsung Galaxy Tab. WorldMate, Kayak and TripIt have good iPad apps, but only TripIt and Kayak have apps specifically for Android tablets. I like the TripIt screen widget better than Kayak’s, so I’ll give the Android tablet win to TripIt.</li>\n 	<li>This was a good exercise. As a long-time TripIt user, this kinda surprised me. But after Angry Birds, travel management is probably the most important app a frequent traveler uses. Let me know your thoughts -- Twitter, Facebook, E-mail, Web Site Comments, Carrier Pigeon -- all the usual comms channels are open...</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music --<em>Sliding into Slumber Land</em> by Little Stevie and the Fatratz</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>TSA Scanner Shuffle</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">And just when you thought I’d make it through a podcast without a TSA item, here it is -- my favorite topic, full-body scanners. We’ve talked many, many times about the full-body scanners used in US airports. For the sake of long-time listeners, I won’t summarize my rants. Suffice it to say, I’m not a big fan.\n\n[caption id=\"attachment_1156\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"251\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/tsascannerpic.png\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1156\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/tsascannerpic-251x300.png\" alt=\"TSA Backscatter Scanner Sample Images\" width=\"251\" height=\"300\" /></a> TSA Backscatter Scanner Sample Images[/caption]</li>\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">Now, there are two kinds of full body scanners -- backscatter that use X-rays to produce the near naked images we’ve seen in newspaper articles and millimeter wave machines that produce more generic stick figures. A few months ago, the TSA started swapping backscatter for millimeter wave machines at high-volume airports like Logan, LAX, and ORD to speed up security lines. Though you still have to pull everything out of your pockets, the processing time for millimeter wave machines -- from scan to “all-clear” -- is, in my experience, at least half that of backscatter. The slower backscatter machines were said to be redeployed to smaller, lower-volume airports.</li>\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">However, just before officials testified before Congress two weeks ago, the TSA announced that these 91 backscatter machines worth $14 million were actually <a href=\"http://homeland.house.gov/sites/homeland.house.gov/files/11-15-12%20Rogers%20Open_0.pdf\">bound</a> for a Texas storage warehouse. Space constraints in the smaller airports and <a href=\"http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/11/rapiscan-fraudulent-tests/\">suspicions</a> of manipulated test results by the backscatter manufacturer around new privacy software are to blame. Of course, this is the second multi-million dollar mistake the TSA has made with passenger screening technology. If you traveled through SFO in the mid-2000’s, you might have walked through a Puffer machine. It worked well in the lab, but completely failed when it faced the muck that floats around a real-world airport. The TSA spent <a href=\"http://www.homelandsecuritynewswire.com/tsa-puffer-machines-pulled-service\">$30 million</a> on 94 Puffers, deployed less than half of them, and pulled the last ones out of airports in 2010.</li>\n 	<li>No wonder the Congressional subcommittee chairman said during the hearing that he is “<a href=\"http://youtu.be/8fWPVYV_N9k\">really aggravated</a>” by the situation, saying that the country is “really struggling with some tough budgetary decisions and it’s … really hard to understand how this happens.” It doesn’t matter if you’re a Republican or a Democrat. You just have to be disgusted with the waste. It reinforces the sense that the TSA has never been much more than a real expensive piece of security theater. As the US shambles toward the brink of a fiscal cliff and has to make hard decisions about raising taxes and cutting entitlements, we can no longer afford to let the TSA take another $14 or 30 million away from schools or Medicare or out of taxpayers pockets. It’s a money pit we need to walk away from. And now I’ll tuck my soapbox away... until the next episode.</li>\n 	<li>Frequent travelers tend toward a rhythm, a pattern that allows them to quickly and efficiently navigate the hassles of today’s travel experience. There’s a thin line, though, between, efficiency and a rut, and the travel bubble straddles that line. It takes some effort to pop that bubble; good food and beer can help...</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #102</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://music.mevio.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Mevio’s Music Alley</a></li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_102.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #102 — Trip Management App Comparison; TSA Scanner Shuffle','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-102-trip-management-app-comparison-tsa-scanner-shuffle','','','2021-09-28 18:41:30','2021-09-28 23:41:30','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=1151',0,'post','',0),
(1153,1,'2012-11-28 20:52:19','2012-11-29 02:52:19','','Nor\'easter Snow in NYC','Nor\'easter - Perfect Test Bed for Travel Management Apps','inherit','open','open','','2012-11-07-17-29-10','','','2012-11-28 20:52:19','2012-11-29 02:52:19','',1151,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/2012-11-07-17.29.10.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(1155,1,'2012-11-28 21:01:07','2012-11-29 03:01:07','','My Briefcase circa 2006','My Briefcase circa 2006','inherit','open','open','','102434287_e1770f7622_n','','','2012-11-28 21:01:07','2012-11-29 03:01:07','',1151,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/102434287_e1770f7622_n.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(1156,1,'2012-11-28 21:03:01','2012-11-29 03:03:01','','TSA Backscatter Scanner Images','TSA Backscatter Scanner Sample Images','inherit','open','open','','tsascannerpic','','','2012-11-28 21:03:01','2012-11-29 03:03:01','',1151,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/tsascannerpic.png',0,'attachment','image/png',0),
(1169,1,'2012-12-11 11:05:22','2012-12-11 17:05:22','[caption id=\"attachment_1170\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/Logos.png\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1170\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/Logos-300x150.png\" alt=\"Trip Management App Logos\" width=\"300\" height=\"150\"></a> The Usual Suspects[/caption]\n\nIn the last <a title=\"Podcast #102 — Trip Management App Comparison; TSA Scanner Shuffle\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/11/29/podcast-102-trip-management-app-comparison-tsa-scanner-shuffle/\">podcast</a>, I did a side-by-side comparison of the free versions of the leading trip management apps. In an <a href=\"http://www.tnooz.com/2012/12/11/tcritic/managing-travel-itineraries-easier-said-then-done-even-with-digital-tools/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">article</a> on the <a href=\"http://www.tnooz.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Tnooz</a> website, I dug deeper, expanding my comparison to the free and paid versions of <a href=\"http://tripit.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">TripIt</a>, <a href=\"http://tripcase.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">TripCase</a>, and <a href=\"http://worldmate.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">WorldMate</a>. My conclusions didn\'t change much.\n<blockquote><strong>THE TCRITIC TAKE: TripCase for smartphone only; WorldMate Gold for iPhone + iPad</strong>\n\nIf you only use a smartphone, the free TripCase app is the best choice. It was in the top of all three scenarios: itinerary building and sharing, and real-time flight status updates. However, it doesn’t have a tablet-specific app, just scaled up the smartphone app. iPad users should pay the $9.90/year for WorldMate Gold’s universal (iPhone + iPad) app. There’s nothing in TripIt Pro that justifies it’s $49/year price tag. The handful of Android tablet users should just accept the scaled-up TripCase app and hope for better treatment in 2013</blockquote>\nClick <a href=\"http://www.tnooz.com/2012/12/11/tcritic/managing-travel-itineraries-easier-said-then-done-even-with-digital-tools/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">here</a> to read the full article.','Managing travel itineraries -- Digging Deeper into Trip Management Apps','','private','closed','closed','','managing-travel-itineraries-digging-deeper-into-trip-management-apps','','','2024-06-02 10:32:53','2024-06-02 15:32:53','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=1169',0,'post','',0),
(1170,1,'2012-12-11 10:57:17','2012-12-11 16:57:17','','Trip Management App Logos','The Usual Suspects','inherit','open','open','','logos','','','2012-12-11 10:57:17','2012-12-11 16:57:17','',1169,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/Logos.png',0,'attachment','image/png',0),
(1177,1,'2013-01-08 21:03:51','2013-01-09 03:03:51','[caption id=\"attachment_1178\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"200\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/cn_image.size_.heads-in-beds-jacob-tomsky-cover.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1178\" title=\"Heads in Beds Cover\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/cn_image.size_.heads-in-beds-jacob-tomsky-cover-200x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"200\" height=\"300\"></a> Heads in Beds by Jacob Tomsky[/caption]\n\nI read Jacob Tomsky\'s&nbsp;<em><a href=\"http://jacobtomsky.com/\">Heads in Beds: A Reckless Memoir of Hotels, Hustles, and So-Called Hospitality</a></em> during my Christmas ski vacation in <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Park City, Utah\" href=\"http://www.parkcity.org/\" rel=\"homepage noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Park City, UT</a>. It\'s a fun, easy read. Just looking at the cover, you can tell that Tomsky wants to give us the hotel version of <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Anthony Bourdain\" href=\"http://www.anthonybourdain.com/\" rel=\"homepage noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Anthony Bourdain</a>\'s&nbsp;<em><a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Kitchen Confidential\" href=\"http://www.amazon.com/Kitchen-Confidential-Anthony-Bourdain/dp/0747590117%3FSubscriptionId%3D0G81C5DAZ03ZR9WH9X82%26tag%3Dzemanta-20%26linkCode%3Dxm2%26camp%3D2025%26creative%3D165953%26creativeASIN%3D0747590117\" rel=\"amazon noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Kitchen Confidential</a></em> -- the flawed insider with a heart of gold giving us a snarky behind-the-scenes tour.\n\nTomsky\'s story has two very distinct parts. The first third of the book tells us how Tomsky fell into the hospitality industry and began to make it a career. A degree in philosophy in <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"New Orleans\" href=\"http://www.nola.gov\" rel=\"homepage noopener\" target=\"_blank\">New Orleans</a> wasn\'t generating any meaningful employment, so he took a job as a parking valet. Working hard and being earnest (he cleans up well, doesn\'t try to kill his co-workers), he gets promoted to front desk agent and then into management at a new luxury hotel. The second part of the book is set in a gone-to-seed Manhattan hotel where Tomsky reluctantly lands, broke after 9 months touring through Europe and 3 months searching for a publishing job in New York.\n\nThe New Orleans story is certainly the sunnier of the two parts; a young man finding his niche in the world and working his way up. It also gives a more interesting behind-the-scenes view if you\'re interested in how big hotels really work. &nbsp;Tomsky does a great job of describing the amount of planning and effort it takes for a Ritz Carlton or Four Seasons to provide their levels of hospitality. I wished this part lasted longer.\n\nThe Manhattan story seems less about the hotel business and more about Tomsky abandoning, bit by bit, the Ritz level of service he was so proud of, becoming more focused on hustling tips than helping guests. As he slides down that slippery slope, the snark level increases... as does a sense of self-loathing. The big confrontation scene with the evil manager is less of a climax and more of a&nbsp;denouement.\n\nMuch of the press coverage of <em>Heads in Beds</em> has focused on the insider advice Tomsky dishes in the book\'s&nbsp;appendices --&nbsp;“Things a Guest Should Never Say,” “Things a Guest Should Never Do,” “Things Every Guest Must Know\".&nbsp;&nbsp;It\'s all pretty common-sense, distilling down to: 1) Don\'t be a jerk to the staff; 2) Tip everyone well; 3) Staff can and will screw you over if you don\'t follow the first two points.\n\n<em>Heads in Beds</em> is no <em>Kitchen Confidential</em>, but it\'s a fun read and a good story told with heart. Recommended.','\"Heads In Beds\" Review -- The Story Behind The Front Desk','','publish','closed','closed','','heads-in-beds-review-the-story-behind-the-front-desk','','','2021-09-28 18:43:50','2021-09-28 23:43:50','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=1177',0,'post','',1),
(1178,1,'2013-01-08 18:46:38','2013-01-09 00:46:38','','Heads in Beds Cover','Heads in Beds by Jacob Tomsky','inherit','open','open','','cn_image-size-heads-in-beds-jacob-tomsky-cover','','','2013-01-08 18:46:38','2013-01-09 00:46:38','',1177,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/cn_image.size_.heads-in-beds-jacob-tomsky-cover.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(1191,1,'2013-01-24 21:49:29','2013-01-25 03:49:29','[caption id=\"attachment_1195\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"245\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/DSC00565.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1195\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/DSC00565-245x300.jpg\" alt=\"Twin or King-Size Lily Pad?\" width=\"245\" height=\"300\" /></a> Twin or King-Size Lily Pad?[/caption]\n\nDoing a bit more travel since the last episode, so have more to talk about. First business trip of the year started out great, but quickly deteriorated as weather delays forced me to make quick changes. I update my trip management app recommendations after TripCase released the latest rev of their app, and talk about good mass transit experiences in <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Portland, Oregon\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portland%2C_Oregon\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener wikipedia\">Portland, OR</a> and <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Park City, Utah\" href=\"http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=40.6594444444,-111.499722222&amp;spn=0.1,0.1&amp;q=40.6594444444,-111.499722222 (Park%20City%2C%20Utah)&amp;t=h\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"geolocation noopener\">Park City, UT</a>. A new behind-the-scenes book on the hotel industry shows how important people are to the travel experience. And the explosion of tablet form factors makes me re-think why I carry a tablet -- comparing Apple\'s <a href=\"http://www.apple.com/ipad-mini/overview/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">iPad Mini</a> to Google\'s <a href=\"http://www.google.com/nexus/7/\">Nexus 7</a>.  Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_103.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #103:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>\n\n[caption id=\"attachment_1200\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/2013-01-21-21.06.25.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1200\" title=\"2013-01-21 21.06.25\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/2013-01-21-21.06.25-300x225.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\" /></a> Great Welcome Basket at Hotel Monaco[/caption]\n\nComing to you from the Hotel Monaco in downtown Portland, OR. It’s been a long time since I’ve broken out the mobile recording kit. And for Jeremy Philips, who back in October, tweeted “I kind of miss the bathroom acoustics...”...</li>\n 	<li>I am back on the road again with a mix of business and leisure. Flew into SLC on Southwest for a week-and-a-half Christmas ski vacation in Park City. First time I’ve skied Utah. It was nice, but cold. I’d say the last 5 years of skiing has been over Spring Break in Colorado. I’d forgotten how cold Christmas skiing is. It’d be 8 or 9 degrees when we hit the slopes, rising to maybe 15 in the afternoon.</li>\n 	<li>My first business trip of the year was last week to <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Hartford, Connecticut\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hartford%2C_Connecticut\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener wikipedia\">Hartford, CT</a>. I used to fly through there a lot 10-12 years ago. The airport was a dump back then. I was hoping that they’d freshened it up a bit -- at least replaced the carpet. The day started great -- United upgraded me to first class (milking the last month of 1K status for all it’s worth) and I got waved into the TSA PreCheck line. I felt so lucky, as the <a href=\"http://youtu.be/QgWzIl57bow\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">old Mary Chapin Carpenter tune</a> goes, I bought a couple of lottery tickets at the first kiosk I saw.</li>\n 	<li> An hour later though, it all started to break up -- go pear-shaped as my friends in the UK would say. As airlines have taken seats/capacity out of the system, secondary airports like Hartford have been the ones to lose service. For me, booking this flight at the last minute, there were no direct flights available, so I had to connect. Big risk; breaking my cardinal rule of flying. But I didn’t have another choice. So what do you do? I picked a smaller airport -- CLE -- to connect thru in hopes of avoiding air traffic control delays. My connection time was over an hour, just in case my first flight was delayed. And I scheduled myself to arrive almost 3 hours before my meeting, building in buffer for delays coming out of CLE.</li>\n 	<li>My first two strategies worked -- CLE was clear, no delays; and my inbound flight from ORD arrived 15 minutes early. When I turned my phone on after touching down in CLE, <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"TripIt\" href=\"http://www.tripit.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"homepage noopener\">TripIt</a> and <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"WorldMate\" href=\"http://www.worldmate.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"homepage noopener\">WorldMate</a> both told me my <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Bradley International Airport\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bradley_International_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener wikipedia\">BDL</a> flight was 40 minutes delayed. Annoying but not fatal because of all the backend buffer I’d allowed.</li>\n 	<li>I went straight to the gate to get the story -- why the delay? The plane was 2 hrs late leaving CLE because of fog in <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Philadelphia International Airport\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philadelphia_International_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener wikipedia\">PHL</a>, and is so now is late getting back to CLE for the BDL flight. Hmmm, this is starting to feel uncomfortable. I lived in PHL for 4 years and I know what a nightmare that airport is. Is the plane on its way back yet? No, it hasn’t landed at PHL yet.  Double hmmm... The departure time has slipped 10 minutes since I touched down. Not a good sign, but still not fatal. I sit down and run some e-mail.</li>\n 	<li>Departure time slips another 15 minutes. I talk to the gate agent again. Has the flight left PHL? No, but it looks like it has pushed back. I start checking other options. Nothing else to BDL. I reach back for those 8th grade map skills -- what about Providence, Boston, Albany, White Plains?</li>\n 	<li>There’s a flight out to PVD. I pull up Google Maps -- 90 mile drive from there to my meeting. I look at the arrival time, 45 minutes for taxi, getting off the plane, walking down the terminal, and getting to the car rental place. Would get me to my meeting with 30 minutes to spare. I draw a line in the sand -- if the plane for the BDL flight isn’t in the air 5 minutes before the PVD flight starts boarding, I’m switching. The United gate agents were very helpful. They called ahead to the PVD gate, they gave me updates what was going on in PHL... But when I hit my decision time, the plane was still on the ground in PHL and speed-walked to the PVD flight.</li>\n 	<li>And as you might have guessed, I didn’t match a single number on my lottery tickets...</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Beneath the Skin</em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/birdy-alter/\">Jerry Berlongieri</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>OK, we’ll leave the tile reverb behind for the rest of the podcast. Listening back to some of the old episodes, a little of that goes a long way...</li>\n 	<li>At the beginning of December, I expanded last episode’s trip management app bake-off into an <a href=\"http://www.tnooz.com/2012/12/11/tcritic/managing-travel-itineraries-easier-said-then-done-even-with-digital-tools/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">article</a> for Tnooz, a travel industry website focused on travel technology. In<a title=\"Podcast #102 — Trip Management App Comparison; TSA Scanner Shuffle\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/11/29/podcast-102-trip-management-app-comparison-tsa-scanner-shuffle/\"> episode #102</a>, I compared the free versions of TripIt, TripCase, WorldMate, and Kayak. The Tnooz article has the same use cases, but drops Kayak for the paid versions of TripIt and WorldMate. The recommendations didn’t change that much -- use the free version of TripCase, but for $10, the WorldMate app is not a bad deal either.</li>\n 	<li>\n\n[caption id=\"attachment_1170\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/Logos.png\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1170\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/Logos-300x150.png\" alt=\"Trip Management App Logos\" width=\"300\" height=\"150\" /></a> The Usual Suspects[/caption]\n\nAnd then, just to show that no good deed goes unpunished, TripCase launched a completely revised version of their app and website a week after my Tnooz review. Using it during my SLC and BDL (or should I say PVD) trip, I’m revising my opinion southward. The new interface is fine. I’m not sure that it’s better as much as it’s just different -- I picked up the new navigation pretty quickly. But I noticed that I wasn’t getting the normal iPhone notifications -- I was getting e-mails instead, which you’ll remember from my evaluation in the last episode is definitely inferior to native iOS or Android notifications. And I can’t find in the app or the website how to re-enable them. The paid version of WorldMate does a good job of native notifications. TripCase also seems to have hidden where to manage social media notifications -- where to turn on/off trip postings to Facebook and LinkedIn. I have to say that, after this redesign, my recommended solution is a bit muddier. I’d say it’s a combination of the free version of TripIt to push Facebook and LinkedIn notifications, and the $10 <a href=\"http://worldmate.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">WorldMate</a> Gold for managing the day of travel.</li>\n 	<li>I had a chuckle a couple of weeks back. I was doing my weekly check-up on the TravelCommons site -- going thru the comments caught up in the Spam filter (you wouldn’t believe some of that stuff) and looking at some of the traffic stats like inbound links. I saw a new link, or at least one I didn’t recognize, from FlyerTalk, the frequent flyer forum. Following it back, it was a <a href=\"http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/travel-technology/544219-your-favourite-podcasts-7.html\">topic</a> that was started in April 2006 asking for travel podcast suggestions. I was very pleasantly surprised to see TravelCommons listed in the first response. We get bumped in 2007 and again in 2009 with listeners recommending the podcast. Then, what I would guess to be a former listener commented “The content of the Travel Commons podcast is interesting, but the guy\'s voice is monotone and metronomically slow.” OK, I’ll take that as a half vote. But then Bob Fenerty jumped in with “I can see that perspective, but I find Mark\'s voice soothing and reassuring”. Thanks for the help, Bob. I think the stint in the ‘70’s I did in contemporary Christian radio in Memphis -- “You’re listening to the Voice of 1590” -- has permanently crippled my ability to be vocally exciting...</li>\n 	<li>As longtime listeners like Bob will recall, one of my more nerdy travel hobbies is taking mass transit to the airport. I don’t know why -- maybe it’s some weird twist on trainspotting. But even after getting my passport stolen on the train back to Brussels airport last year, I still like to try these things out. I have three criteria for good mass transit to the airport -- it\'s gotta be clean, frequent, and cheap. Washington\'s Metro hits all three while SF\'s BART misses on all of them</li>\n 	<li>Portland\'s <a href=\"http://trimet.org/schedules/maxredline.htm\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">MAX Red Line</a> from the airport also hits all three. Clean, reasonably modern trains, though they\'re more like light rail trams, so not the fastest things. They run every 15 minutes, so good frequency. And at $2.50 for a ride downtown, they\'re an order of magnitude cheaper than a cab. Unless you don\'t buy a ticket. Halfway into my ride Monday night, three fare checkers step into my car checking tickets. I had mine, but the woman next to me didn\'t. She said that she skipped the fare machine to run to make the train. The fare checker didn\'t have much sympathy. She ended up with a ticket and a court date. He told her that if she had a clean record, she\'d probably get away with a $60 fine and a day of community service. Wow! All that to save 15 minutes...</li>\n 	<li>I also had a good experience with the free bus system in Park City UT during our ski holiday there. We took a cab to and from SLC, but once in Park City, we relied on the bus system to get everywhere -- to/from the ski areas (Park City and The Canyons), town center for dinners on the very cold nights.... Clean buses, extensive routes, good frequency, and free. I’m told it’s funded by a piece of the local sales tax. It was certainly a money saver -- no rental car, gas or parking costs -- and very convenient.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a question, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- use the Voice Memo app on your iPhone or something like Easy Voice Recorder on your Android phone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em>Bulletproof</em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/musicinside-forces/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Music Inside</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Hospitality Is Personal</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>I read Jacob Tomsky’s <a href=\"http://jacobtomsky.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Heads in Beds: A Reckless Memoir of Hotels, Hustles, and So-Called Hospitality</em></a> while in Park City. It’s a fun, easy read. Just looking at the cover, you can tell that Tomsky wants to give us the hotel version of Anthony Bourdain‘s <em>Kitchen Confidential</em>— the flawed insider with a heart of gold giving us a snarky behind-the-scenes tour.\n\n[caption id=\"attachment_1178\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"200\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/cn_image.size_.heads-in-beds-jacob-tomsky-cover.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1178\" title=\"Heads in Beds Cover\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/cn_image.size_.heads-in-beds-jacob-tomsky-cover-200x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"200\" height=\"300\" /></a> Heads in Beds by Jacob Tomsky[/caption]</li>\n 	<li>This tour has two very distinct parts. The first third of the book tells us how Tomsky fell into the hospitality industry and began to make it a career. He finds that having a philosophy degree in New Orleans isn\'t an easy way to get a job, and so he takes a job as a parking valet at a new luxury hotel. Working hard and being earnest (which in his case means that he cleans up well and doesn’t try to kill his co-workers), he gets promoted to front desk agent and then into management. The second part of the book is set in a gone-to-seed Manhattan hotel where Tomsky lands, very reluctantly, broke after 9 months touring through Europe and 3 months searching for a publishing job in New York.</li>\n 	<li>The New Orleans story is certainly the sunnier of the two; a young man finding his niche in the world and working his way up. Tomsky does a great job of describing the amount of planning and effort it takes for a Ritz Carlton or Four Seasons to provide their levels of hospitality. And the biggest target for that effort doesn\'t seem to be the guests, but instead the front line employees. Tomsky talks again and again about how amazed the valets and maids are when they\'re treated to a pre-opening reception with an open bar, that  the general manager knows each of their names.... Little things, but things that translate into self-respect, pride in their jobs, pride in their hotel, which then translates into a drive to give the best service possible to each guest.</li>\n 	<li>If the New Orleans story is about a man on his way up, the Manhattan story is about Tomsky abandoning, bit by bit, the Ritz level of service he was so proud of, becoming more focused on hustling tips than helping guests. As he slides down that slippery slope, the snark level increases… as does a sense of self-loathing. Everyone in the hotel is out for themselves -- the managers, the bellmen, the front desk clerks -- running their hustles not to serve their guests, but to maximize their tips. Which certainly leads to great service for <em>some</em> guests -- but only those liberally spreading $20 bills around the lobby. And again, the tone is set at the top, but in this case, the general manager isn\'t trying to deliver the best service; he\'s trying to deliver the most money into his and the owner\'s till as quickly and easily as possible.  An example that prompts each worker to do the same.</li>\n 	<li>I\'m not sure if Tomsky meant to show this, but his tale clearly illustrates something we talk about often on TravelCommons -- that, in spite of all the technology being injected into the travel experience, the most important bit of the experience is still delivered by people -- hospitality is personal. And the two parts of Tomsky\'s story show how hard it is to build a team that prides itself on delivering great hospitality, and how easy it is to build a cynical team that\'s doesn\'t care.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music --<em>Hurt Me So I Can Walk Away </em>by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/joy-float/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Michael Joy</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Tablets, Phablets, and Other Devices</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>One of the most popular pieces of technology being carried by travelers nowadays is a tablet. Walk down the aisle of a plane or a train and you\'ll half to two-thirds of the passengers looking intently into one of these flat pieces of glass.</li>\n 	<li>It started with people carrying Kindles, and then you saw iPads propped up against seat backs, but now it\'s all kinds. I saw my first Microsoft Surface table in the wild (i.e., not in a Microsoft store) a few weeks ago walking through a food court in LGA. It was sorta royalish baby blue, complete with the snapon keyboard. An older guy sitting next to me on the plane on Monday was working on a Samsung Galaxy Note. The 5-1/4 inch screen looked huge compared to my iPhone 5. He had it a couple of weeks and really likes it. The key for him is having enough screen size to run e-mail in a large font so he doesn\'t have to pull out his reading glasses, but it\'s small enough to fit in his suit coat pocket. The only thing that feels a bit funny, he said, is using it to make a phone call. That big slab of glass feels like it\'s covering half his face.</li>\n 	<li>I\'ve been running a Google Nexus 7 for 3-4 months now. The 7-in screen size puts it between the pocket-sized Galaxy Note and a full-sized iPad. I had run iPads since they first came out -- the 1, the 2, the next one after that (the iPad without a number). Like everyone, I thought they were phenomenal devices. But as I traveled with it, I had more trouble trying to figure out how the iPad uniquely justified it weight in my travel kit. I had colleagues who tried using them in place of laptops and as electronic notebooks. It worked just OK for them -- the iPad\'s e-mail client and calendar app just don\'t have the same power as Outlook, and the notes they took with a stylus looked like a kindergartener\'s scrawl with a black crayon. Some guys carried bluetooth keyboards, but that seemed like more hassle than it was worth. And then, I found myself getting frustrated with the iPad\'s \"sandboxing\" -- certain files are opened with certain apps; you can\'t get to the file system like you can on a PC if you need to do something more than an app will let you. It\'s a great model that works for 80% of population, but was way too constraining for me. For what I do, an iPad isn\'t going to replace a laptop.</li>\n 	<li>As a \"media consumption device\"? iPads are great for watching movies but most of my \"media consumption\" is reading and I found the full-sized iPad too heavy -- both in my hand and in my bag -- to be a good e-reader.</li>\n 	<li>The laptop/iPad combo had too much overlap, so I started looking at 7-in tablets. I skipped the Kindle -- I wanted to do more than just e-read; I don\'t have a big investment in the Amazon eco-system, and didn\'t want to get locked in further. So I looked at the iPad Mini and the Google Nexus 7. I gravitated toward the Mini -- I have a bunch of iPad apps, <em>am</em> deeply invested in the iTunes eco-system... But pricing out equivalent Minis and Nexus 7s, the Mini was almost twice as expensive and, try as I might, I couldn\'t justify that delta.</li>\n 	<li>The Nexus 7 works fine for what I want -- a lot of reading -- with the WSJ and USA Today apps, work documents that I cloud-sync from my laptop with DropBox, -- watch the occasional movie or video podcast, run Android photo editing apps like Instagram and Snapseed,.... I\'ve even done some Google Hangouts on it.</li>\n 	<li>One thing I haven\'t done is try to make a phone call on it. that\'s a lot of glass to lay across my cheek.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #103</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Magnatune</a></li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_103.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #103 — Hospitality is Personal; Tablets Everywhere','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-103-hospitality-is-personal-tablets-everywhere','','','2021-09-28 18:45:24','2021-09-28 23:45:24','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=1191',0,'post','',0),
(1195,1,'2013-01-25 21:44:39','2013-01-26 03:44:39','','DSC00565','Twin or King-Size Lily Pad?','inherit','open','open','','dsc00565','','','2013-01-25 21:44:39','2013-01-26 03:44:39','',1191,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/DSC00565.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(1200,1,'2013-01-25 22:06:50','2013-01-26 04:06:50','','2013-01-21 21.06.25','Great Welcome Basket at Hotel Monaco','inherit','open','open','','2013-01-21-21-06-25','','','2013-01-25 22:06:50','2013-01-26 04:06:50','',1191,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/2013-01-21-21.06.25.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(1214,1,'2013-03-06 13:41:24','2013-03-06 19:41:24','<a href=\"http://thisweekintravel.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">This Week in Travel</a> hosts Jen Leo and Chris Christensen invited me to this week\'s <a href=\"http://amateurtraveler.com/corey-taratuta-and-mark-peacock-travel-news-podcast/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">episode</a> along with Corey Taratuta of the <a href=\"http://irishfireside.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Irish Fireside podcast</a>. Though it took us a second time to get all the Google Hangout technology to work, we had a good time. We start with a rundown of this week\'s travel news headlines. Corey then talks about <a href=\"http://www.thegatheringireland.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">The Gathering</a>, this year\'s big tourist program in Ireland, which reminds me of my favorite Ireland travel moment -- finding a laundromat next door to a pub in <a href=\"http://www.corkcity.ie/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Cork</a>. I also talk about the explosion of tablet sizes and form factors, a topic also covered in <a title=\"Podcast #103 — Hospitality is Personal; Tablets Everywhere\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2013/01/24/podcast-103-hospitality-is-personal-tablets-everywhere/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">TravelCommons #103</a>. And just to be clear, I did <em>not</em> choose the thumbnail for the YouTube preview.\n\n[youtube]http://youtu.be/aeeJpUpk7v8[/youtube]','Once More With Feeling...','','private','closed','closed','','once-more-with-feeling','','\nhttp://amateurtraveler.com/corey-taratuta-and-mark-peacock-travel-news-podcast/','2024-06-02 10:36:28','2024-06-02 15:36:28','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=1214',0,'post','',0),
(1227,1,'2013-03-19 23:53:20','2013-03-20 04:53:20','[caption id=\"attachment_1233\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"299\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/images.jpg\"><img class=\"size-full wp-image-1233\" title=\"Felix Baumgartner Losing United 1K Status (Redbull via YouTube)\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/images.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"299\" height=\"168\" /></a> Felix Baumgartner Losing United 1K Status (Redbull via YouTube)[/caption]\n\nTravel has been a bit less glamorous since I\'ve fallen from the top tier status, especially when I\'m doing \"stupid\" travel -- up-&amp;-backs across the continent in 48 hours. One of my recent flights was on a new United 737-900; the interior is a significant step up. Prepping for a vacation in Spain, I find it\'s easier and cheaper to get an unlocked phone to use with a local <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Subscriber identity module\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subscriber_identity_module\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"wikipedia noopener noreferrer\">SIM card</a>. And it wouldn\'t be a proper TravelCommons episode without a TSA story -- the fight over the new knife rules misses the point. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_104.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.<!--more-->\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #104:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago. I was trying to get this written in time to do the show from the bathroom of the Vintage Plaza hotel in downtown Portland, or perhaps from the hottub that I found on the balcony of my room, but that just didn\'t come to pass.</li>\n 	<li>I’ve been on the road more than not since the last episode -- a couple of days in New York, 18 hours in Detroit, but mostly in Portland, OR. 4 trips since the last episode. So I\'ve experienced the full range of Portland weather -- 38 degrees and drizzle all the way to 58 degrees and drizzle. But I’m nowhere near close to tasting the full range of Oregon beers, no matter how hard I try. And the listeners who are friends on Untappd have seen how hard I\'ve been trying. My face has scrolled across the top of the digital menu at Bailey’s Taproom a few too many times.</li>\n 	<li>And though I joke about the weather (and who doesn\'t -- even the natives apologize) I enjoy flying in Portland, taking the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"MAX Light Rail\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAX_Light_Rail\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"wikipedia noopener noreferrer\">Max light rail</a> into the city center, and having a 10 min morning walk from the hotel to the office. No rental car, no traffic. There is the occasional street person, but they\'re much more polite than, say, the SF or Phila homeless.</li>\n 	<li>One of those Portland trips was in the midst of what I call “stupid” travel -- when I get committed to back-to-back meetings thousands of miles apart. I think I told the story a couple of years back when I did Chicago to London to Denver in two days. That was probably the stupidest trip I\'ve done. This one wasn\'t as bad -- Chicago to Portland to Detroit and then back to Chicago in two days.</li>\n 	<li>It went OK, as well as can be expected, right up until the last day. I had a breakfast meeting in lovely scenic <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Livonia, Michigan\" href=\"http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=42.4011111111,-83.3711111111&amp;spn=0.1,0.1&amp;q=42.4011111111,-83.3711111111 (Livonia%2C%20Michigan)&amp;t=h\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"geolocation noopener noreferrer\">Livonia, Michigan</a> -- a western suburb of Detroit -- that has the redeeming value of not being very far from the airport. Good thing because it started dumping snow that morning. Not a big problem. I called Amex Travel -- there’s an earlier flight to Chicago with seats available. I book it to the airport. Once there, I go up to the kiosk to change my flight, but it tells me that there’s no flight available. Hmmm... I walk up and down the concourse trying to find the right line to change my ticket. I have no status on Delta, so I can’t get into any of the Medallion lines. I’m not flying first class or internationally so I don’t qualify for those lines. I finally walk through an empty line that is for self-service baggage drop. Can you help me? She points to the kiosk -- you can make all your changes there. But I can’t. She shrugs and turns away. I’m trying to play nice and follow the rules, which has gotten me into a black hole bounded by poorly programmed kiosks and indifferent employees. Luckily, the baggage claim woman’s shrug is not shared by all of her co-workers. On another lap of the terminal, looking perplexed and annoyed, a couple of red-jacketed Delta employees stop me. I tell them my story and they take me directly to the front of a Medallion line and I’m taken care of. I thank them all multiple times and head to the gate.</li>\n 	<li>The flight is delayed 30 minutes because the inbound plane is late. Not surprising given the snow. No big deal. We finally board the plane. And wait. Now I know that deicing at Detroit Metro isn\'t done at the gate -- it’s done mid-field -- so I know we’re not waiting for the goop truck. Hmm... 30 minutes later, a maintenance guy shows up with a screwdriver to replace the latch on an overhead bin in first class that was stuck shut. Then we wait 20 minutes for the paperwork to clear, and then we head to deicing. I eventually got home 30 minutes earlier than if I had just stayed on my original flight. That’s the definition of stupid travel.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://ghosts.nin.com/main/home\"><em>7 Ghosts I</em></a> by <a title=\"Nine Inch Nails\" href=\"http://www.nin.com/\" rel=\"homepage\">Nine Inch Nails</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>A couple of Sundays ago, Chris Christensen of the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Amateur Traveler\" href=\"http://amateurtraveler.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"homepage noopener noreferrer\">Amateur Traveler</a> podcast pinged me on Google Talk. “What to be a guest on <a href=\"http://thisweekintravel.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">This Week in Travel</a> with Jen Leo and me?” “Sure, when?” “Now” And then an invite to a Google Hangout popped up. Oh, video! I had just finished working out. I grabbed a baseball cap before I clicked into the Hangout. It was a lot of fun -- Chris, Jen and another guest -- Corey Taratuta of the <a href=\"http://www.irishfireside.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Irish Fireside</a> podcast. After about an hour, we wrapped it up, but then when Chris went to save the Hangout, he couldn\'t find the button. He looked all over the console. Turns out he had set up the Hangout as private instead of public. So no recording and probably the smallest audience of This Week in Travel ever. The next night, Chris pinged me again -- Are you free? I have it set up correctly this time. And so we all popped back in. We started with a rundown of the week’s travel news headlines. Corey then talked about <a href=\"http://www.thegatheringireland.com/\">The Gathering</a>, which is not the latest teen vampire book, but instead is this year’s big tourist program in Ireland. Which reminded me of my favorite Ireland travel moment — running low on clean clothes during a post-graduate tour of Ireland, I found a laundromat next door to a pub in <a href=\"http://www.corkcity.ie/\">Cork</a>. And it was run by two very nice Irish women who took pity on me. They took care of my laundry while I had a couple of pints of Murphy’s stout. And yes, I did tip them. It’s a good fun. I have a <a title=\"Once More With Feeling…\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2013/03/06/once-more-with-feeling/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">link</a> to the YouTube video on the TravelCommons site. I’ll also put a link to the <a href=\"https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/134-that-feeling-deja-vu-corey/id327760888?i=135011815&amp;mt=2\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">audio podcast</a> in the show notes.</li>\n 	<li>In the<a title=\"Podcast #103 — Hospitality is Personal; Tablets Everywhere\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2013/01/24/podcast-103-hospitality-is-personal-tablets-everywhere/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"> last episode</a>, I talked about a post in a FlyerTalk thread that said “The content of the Travel Commons podcast is interesting, but the guy\'s voice is monotone and metronomically slow”. I said that it was probably from a former listener. Well, not true. The person, who asked me not to use their name, dropped me a note last week saying\n<ul>\n 	<li>“I’m still very much a regular listener and enjoy your podcasts! I’m Irish but living in China.</li>\n 	<li>“It’s tough for a single podcaster to inject variety and drama into his voice. By definition it ends being an unspontaneous scripted monologue. That’s why it’s always easier to listen to an ‘interview’ format or a ‘two friends chatting’ format”</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>This is spot-on and the point was driven home to me again being one of four voices in “This Week in Travel”. And being part of four folks chatting, you’re not responsible for all the content. Trying to write 20-some odd minutes of interesting content is the main reason for the longish gaps between episodes. But, thanks for the note and I’m glad to hear that I’ve kept it interesting enough to keep you subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>I’m heading out to Madrid and Barcelona at the end of this week for Spring Break with my wife and daughter. We have some tours set up -- a market tour in Madrid suggested by Craig Martin from the <a href=\"http://indietravelpodcast.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Indie Travel</a> podcast and a wine tour in Priorat (my favorite Spanish wines) -- so I figured it would be handy to have a local Spanish phone number. I’ll often do this when we’re somewhere for more than a week -- bring an unlocked phone and buy a local SIM card. When we visited Cape Town, the pre-paid SIMs were sold at the checkout line next to the register -- gum, breath mints, SIM cards -- just another impulse buy. There were two or three brands. I was flipping through them trying to figure out which one to buy when the guy behind me in line tapped me on the shoulder -- “You looking to buy a SIM card?” Uh, yeah. “Don’t buy any of these. None of the numbers are good. I have better ones in my car.” Uh, OK.... So we bought our groceries and I followed the guy out to the parking lot. He opened his trunk and had about 50 SIM card packages. He started thumbing through them “Nah..., Nah..., Ah! Here’s a good number.” I honestly couldn\'t tell the difference between this one and the one I was looking at in the grocery store, but whatever. I gave him some rand, put the SIM into the <a href=\"http://www.motorola.com/mdirect/demos/how2_v551/V551G.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Motorola V551</a> that for some reason Cingular had shipped unlocked, and booked a table for dinner down the road. Very handy.</li>\n 	<li>I still have that V551 in a plastic bin, buried under a bunch of other semi-obsolete electronics that I keep thinking I’ll have use for, but no, it’s time has passed. When we’re in Spain, I’ll perhaps want to make a couple of calls, but will be more likely to be sending texts or getting directions or looking at a map or posting pictures -- not something that 7-8 year phone is going to handle. Looking around a unlocked smartphones, the market is getting a lot better. Google’s Nexus 4; BLU Products just announced a new Life series that looks good. Tempting, but I pulled out my old iPhone 4 outta my desk drawer and filled out AT&amp;T’s on-line unlock request. They spun on it a couple of days and then sent me an e-mail saying that I’d been approved. But then I needed to find a non-AT&amp;T microSIM to finish the unlock. I tried to cut down the Simple SIM that I’d used to unlock my iPhone 3G, but I must of clipped a contact because it didn\'t work. Then I saw a T-Mobile offer -- $1 dollar to have a microSIM shipped to my house. Done. It showed up a couple of days later. I dropped it into the 4, synced it to iTunes and it told me I was unlocked. I’ll buy a local SIM when I hit the ground in Madrid. However, unlike Cape Town, I understand that I need to register with my passport to buy one. Doesn\'t sound like I’ll be riffling through some guy’s trunk.</li>\n 	<li>And finally, we\'ve talked in the past about old planes. I talked about how I avoid flying American’s MD-80s. I ended up on Delta’s version on one leg of my Portland-Detroit flight. Must\'ve been an old Northwest plane because the interior looked like one of their renovated DC-9s, the predecessor to the MD-80. Quite a change when I walked onto a brand new United 737-900 on Monday for a flight back out to Portland. I think it still had a bit of that new plane smell. It had mood lighting and regular electrical plugs a la Virgin America; the push-up/sloping-up overhead bins a la 777. The air vents were some goofy leaf-like construct that took me a minute to figure out. But what caught my eye was what was missing -- there were no video screens anywhere. Was this a new trend -- was United cutting weight and maintenance costs, acknowledging the trend of passengers bringing their own entertainment devices? Uh, no. As we were pushing back, the flight attendant apologized for the lack of video. She said that the plane was so new, it hadn\'t yet had a chance to be retrofitted for in-flight entertainment yet. So much for trend spotting.</li>\n 	<li>But hey, If you spot a trend, or have a question, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- use the Voice Memo app on your iPhone or something like Easy Voice Recorder on your Android phone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">@mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em>Stupid Now</em> by <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/music/listeners/artistdetails.php?BandHash=be2a489f478e6d5335652fc8925eee03\">Bob Mould</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Status Free Fall</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>A couple of episodes ago, I talked about how my summer travel sabbatical was going to significantly impact frequent traveler statuses. I was reminded of that on Sunday, St Patrick’s Day, when I was playing <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pogues\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">The Pogues</a> and the song “If I should Fall from Grace with God”. For a couple of years, I was Global Services on United -- the top of the top of the Mileage Plus heap. It was rare I didn\'t get an upgrade. And when I consciously chose to sit in coach -- like when I was flying with my family -- flight attendants would come back, ask me why I was in the back, and then bring me free drinks from first class, which would generate quite a hairball of emotions with my wife -- some tangled mess of amusement and disgust.</li>\n 	<li>When I fell out of that rarefied air to just plain 1K, it was a bit of an adjustment -- where did all the kissing up go? But this year’s fall was going to be steeper -- from 1K to Premiere Silver, the lowest level of status. I was close to keeping Gold -- I probably should\'ve done a mileage run to the West Coast -- but the holidays crept up on me faster than I thought. United graciously offered a couple of times to sell me the 3 or 4 segments I needed for $650. I passed. And so I dropped to Silver on Feb 1. Just in time for me to start these Chicago-Portland hauls where United has the only convenient direct flights available. I get dropped down one boarding group -- from 1 to 2 -- which hasn\'t been a big deal. I haven’t had a problem finding overhead space. The bigger pain is not being able to pre-book Economy Plus seats for free. For all of United’s faults, the extra legroom of Economy Plus has always kept me coming back. But as Silver, I can’t book Economy Plus from free like I could as 1K. Now I either pay for it, or wait 24 hours before flight time when I can book it for free. I haven’t had a problem yet, but the ORD-PDX flights don’t seem to be the highest volume legs. Not a huge issue -- more of a discomfort than anything -- but when you’re spending 8-9 hours a week -- or more -- in a plane seat, a couple of extra inches starts to matter.</li>\n 	<li>It’s interesting, though, to compare United’s approach to the approach taken by hotel brands. I’d been Marriott top tier -- Platinum -- for many years -- earning it the hard way by spending 75 nights in the Ren Cen Marriott in downtown Detroit, a property legendary in its awfulness. When I changed jobs three years ago, Hilton properties were much more convenient to my offices and so I switched. That first year I made Hilton’s top tier -- Diamond -- and certainly didn\'t re-qualify for Marriott Platinum. But Marriott didn\'t drop me. They soft landed me, dropping me one status level a year. I appreciated that, and it kept me staying with them, even if not as frequently. And this year, Hilton kept me at Diamond even though I didn\'t meet their thresholds. I’m sure they’ll start to drop me next year, but they too will keep some business.</li>\n 	<li>And these programs are businesses. What started out as a way keep passengers loyalty in the early scary days of airline deregulation has turned into a cash-generating business in its own right. In 2010, it was estimated that Citibank paid American more than $1 billion for miles it distributed to AAdvantage credit card holders. Makes sense then that one of the first things American did when it filed for Chapter 11 was to tell everyone that their miles were safe. Employee pensions may take a haircut, but not AAdvantage balances.</li>\n 	<li>Now it’s one thing to be “de-statused” because I didn\'t thresholds, but it’s a whole other thing to get crammed down a peg because they make a new level above you. Now, this has been going on for a while. At the beginning of American’s AAdvantage program -- the original frequent flyer program -- there was only one status level -- Gold. And then they added a new level, Platinum. And then Executive Platinum as ways to further differentiate level of frequent fliers, and give them a new “brass ring” to chase. Kinda the original “gamification” play, but with early boarding instead of badges as the reward. Of course, if you’re just hitting the top of the old structure, you’re now down a peg when the new level gets created.</li>\n 	<li>Which you can understand for the annual award levels, but what about if it’s associated with a lifetime status award. United Million Mile fliers used to receive lifetime Premier Executive status -- the middle status akin to American’s Platinum level. Both these levels would earn 100% mileage bonuses -- earn 2 miles for each mile flown. American is still that way, but when United merged with Continental, Premier Exec became Premier Gold, the mileage bonus was reduced to 50% and a new level, Premier Platinum was inserted above it. If you’d invested dollars and time hitting a million miles on United, the return on that investment just got cut in half. And, of course, someone sued. And last month, the judge <a href=\"http://skift.com/2013/02/01/million-milers-frequent-flier-lawsuit-against-united-to-continue/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">rejected</a> United’s bid to throw the case out, saying “the court finds it plausible that defendant (United) had a contract with Million Miler members which differed from the contract they had with other Mileage Plus members.”</li>\n 	<li>So I guess if you\'ve been around long enough, even the airlines have to bring you in for a soft landing.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music --<em>When Irish Eyes are Burning</em> by <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/music/listeners/artistdetails.php?BandHash=a45aaee36685b61a392acf793155e127\">the Ike Reilly Assassination</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>TSA Knife Fight</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>The TSA’s announcement that they’ll allow small non-locking knives and various pieces of sports equipment past airport security checkpoints seemed to be executed with the agency’s typical obliviousness. They didn’t warn or try to pre-sell the idea to folks that have a stake in the decision -- airlines, flight attendants, even air marshals. Instead, they just dropped an announcement and expected everyone to just go along. Are they surprised that everyone is questioning their judgement? Remember, this is the one federal agency that’s more despised than the IRS.</li>\n 	<li>Even if the TSA’s threat analysis is correct, what good does it do to announce this change? I can’t remember the last time I was in a TSA line and heard someone say “Dammit, I should be allowed to take my pen knife (or hockey stick) on a plane!” People complain about taking their shoes off, they complain about having to dump their water out, but no one complains about having to leave their knife behind. And yet this is the issue the TSA decides to make a stand on. Sheer brilliance</li>\n 	<li>The sports equipment change -- that doesn’t make any sense to me. But the pen knife thing -- the better approach would’ve been to change the policy and not announce it. Anybody who’s observant has noticed that the TSA has eased up on semi-liquid toiletries. While you still can’t bring a full-sized bottle of shampoo onto a flight (and really, who needs to? Hotels provide an unlimited amount of toiletries and if you’re staying in a vacation rental, you’re going to the grocery store once you arrive, so buy it there), I haven’t had a screener pull out my hair stuff or a travel-sized toothpaste in years. They’re still technically forbidden and the screeners can still see them, but they’re rightly focused on more dangerous things. A more practical TSA would let their screeners ignore pen knives and leave it at that.</li>\n 	<li>The September 11th attacks changed many things -- including how passengers react to a terrorist attack. Before September 11th, the counsel to passengers was always to be passive, not to put yourselves in harms way. You’re just a bargaining chip. Let the professionals negotiate with the terrorists -- give them money, safe passage -- and odds were, you’ll get out OK. The attempted attacks after September 11th -- the shoe bomber, the underwear bomber -- were all subdued by the passengers around them. Nowadays, even unruly drunks get jumped and zip-tied by their fellow passengers. In this environment, I just don’t see someone taking down a 767 with the knife on a corkscrew.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917626811171154.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #104</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://nin.com/\">Nine Inch Nails</a> and the <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/\">Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_104.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #104 — Status Free Fall; TSA Knife Fight','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-104-status-free-fall-tsa-knife-fight','','','2021-08-29 16:22:00','2021-08-29 21:22:00','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=1227',0,'post','',0),
(1233,1,'2013-03-17 21:38:37','2013-03-18 02:38:37','','Felix Baumgartner Losing United 1K Status (Redbull via YouTube)','Felix Baumgartner Losing United 1K Status (Redbull via YouTube)','inherit','open','open','','images','','','2013-03-17 21:38:37','2013-03-18 02:38:37','',1227,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/images.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(1245,1,'2013-05-30 20:21:10','2013-05-31 01:21:10','[caption id=\"attachment_1252\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"224\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/2013-03-27-18.38.36.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1252\" title=\"Stickers Covering a Restaurant Window in Barcelona\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/2013-03-27-18.38.36-224x300.jpg\" alt=\"Stickers Covering a Restaurant Window in Barcelona\" width=\"224\" height=\"300\"></a> Should we look it up in TripAdvisor or chance it and walk through the door?[/caption]\n\nBeen traveling non-stop since the last episode. One destination was a family Spring Break vacation split between Madrid and Barcelona. I talk about our experiences with booking a vacation rental and how I\'ve learned to give up complete spontaneity and enjoy a couple of guided tours. &nbsp;I also do a <em>mea culpa</em> for bitch-tweeting about flight delays, but don\'t think the airlines\' response to my tweets represents an effective social media strategy. Instead, I highly recommend the flight tracking website <a href=\"http://flightaware.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Flightaware</a>. And I end with some thoughts about the resurgence of the hotel lobby. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_105.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n<hr>\n\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #105:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you from TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago. No, I did not fall off the face of the earth, though I have felt like I’ve been clinging to the edge at times. I started writing this episode in April, and then work got in the way and it slipped to May.</li>\n 	<li>I’ve been on the road every week since the last episode, though that hasn’t been as bad as it sounds. Two days after I posted the last episode, I headed out to Spain with the family for Spring Break -- 10 days split between Madrid and Barcelona. The weather wasn’t great until the last couple of days -- it was mostly rainy and about 10 degrees colder than we’d packed for -- but it beat the occasional snow showers that were in Chicago then..</li>\n 	<li>Coming back, I headed back out to Portland to wrap things up out there and then started traveling to New Orleans weekly. I did have a day trip to Cleveland, which gave me a quick reminder that there are worse places to be traveling to than Portland and New Orleans. And though it may not seem so, the weather is pretty similar -- Portland is 58 degrees and rain; New Orleans is 78 degrees and rain. Though the New Orleans rain does seem to have a bit more “umph” behind it.</li>\n 	<li>But it hasn’t been Gulf storms that have delayed my two of my flights home by over two hours. The delay on my American flight was caused by rain -- Chicago was being pounded by 5-7 inches of rain that day, rivers and roads were flooding. My only complaint was that American showed on-time until an hour before departure. Given all the delays at ORD, you can’t tell me they didn’t know way earlier in the day that there was going to be a delay. Instead, I had to sit around MSY -- which is a surprisingly dumpy airport -- for another 2 ½ hours.</li>\n 	<li>The 2 ½ delay on United two weeks later had a much weaker excuse. The plane started the day in Denver where it was delayed by a spring snowstorm and the delays just cascaded through the day -- Denver, St Louis, Chicago, New Orleans, and back to Chicago. United couldn’t scrounge up a plane somewhere to stop the cascade? Well, perhaps United could, but United doesn’t run the Chicago-New Orleans service. It’s run by GoJet, a 8-9 year old regional jet company that subs for United and Delta. United has 706 jets, GoJet has 66. Kinda explains the day-long cascade.</li>\n 	<li>United started sending delay notices earlier in the day than American -- but they all came with the caveat that you still needed to be at the gate at the original time just in case. A 1 hr delay cascaded into 2. Felt a bit like Groundhog Day. The only consolation was that the food choices are much better in MSY Terminal D. I had a nice boudin blanc and a big Abita beer. My waitress told me that I could take my beer to the gate if I wanted to. I looked at the plastic cup -- of course, it’s New Orleans, why wouldn’t I get served in a go cup. She said most people did that; made them feel more comfortable that they wouldn’t miss their flight; but make sure you finish it before you get on the plane. Right about then I got another delay notice from United. The waitress was looking to close out. I packed up my kit and headed out to the gate with a fresh beer. You can never be too careful.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music --&nbsp;<em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/media/files/DJBLUE/11541\">Hear Me</a></em>&nbsp;by DJ Blue</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>I have to fess up to something that those of you who follow me on Twitter already know -- I’m one of those who bitch-tweets about flight delays. I get frustrated and instead of taking out on the gate agents -- which we all know is wrong -- I whine to the Twitter-sphere, which means I take it out on all my followers. I recognize that this too is wrong. People don’t follow me to get a whinge-stream, so I’m working hard to stop. I think I’ll need to carry a stress ball this summer.</li>\n 	<li>In my flight delay bitch-tweets, I typically “at name” the airline -- United and American in these past weeks -- which nowadays generates a tweet back within a couple of minutes. I guess this is nice, but it’s typically meaningless. &nbsp;The usual response asks me to direct message -- DM -- them with my confirmation number which I used to do, hoping that they could do something that the gate agent couldn’t -- though I’m not sure what that could be given that the gate agent is right in front of me and the Tweet wranglers are probably in Manila or Chennai. &nbsp;Maybe a bit more information or deeper insight into the cause of the delay, a better forecast of the actual departure time rather than the rolling 60 minute delay that never ends? Nope, none of that. Just multiple versions of “we’re really sorry”, which actually is more frustrating than if they didn’t respond. I know they’re trying, but I’m not sure that this is an effective social media strategy</li>\n 	<li>Trying to work my way through all these flight delays, I found the <a href=\"http://flightaware.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Flightaware</a> web site invaluable. It provides real-time flight tracking information, which is critical if you’re trying to figure out how real the posted flight delay is. Before I found Flightaware, my usual drill would be to work my way up to the gate agent, smile, and ask nicely if the inbound flight was in the air yet. If they had time (a growing rarity), they’d look it up -- “nope, still loading” which means the posted delay is going to grow -- they’re always too optimistic; they don’t want you pestering them to transfer your ticket to another carrier. Flightaware has all that information. Put in the flight number and it gives current status and scheduled arrival time. Hasn’t left yet? Hit the “inbound flight” link and now you get the information you used to have to beg the flight agent for -- is the inbound equipment in the air and when it’s scheduled to arrive. Keep hitting that inbound flight link and you can page back through the day to figure out when your schedule came off the rails. That’s how I found out that my United MSY-ORD flight delay started that morning in Denver. Highly recommended.</li>\n 	<li>A couple of weeks back, I walked up to American’s status security line in ORD for one of my flights down to MSY and noticed they’d completely reconfigured it. They quadrupled the amount of line space for PreCheck people. Basically, they just swapped the PreCheck and non-PreCheck line space. Tells you how many people are willing to trade privacy for convenience. And I’m enthusiastically one of them.</li>\n 	<li>Though you can get caught short when having to go back to a non-PreCheck airport. For a while, I was doing nothing but PreCheck airports -- ORD, PDX, CLE. &nbsp;On my first flight back from MSY, I completely booted it -- left my laptop in my backpack, left stuff in my pockets going through the full body scanner... I was a mess. Luckily, it was the middle of the day and hardly anybody going through the security line, so my cluelessness didn’t really hassle anyone. I apologized to the TSA screeners. I told them that this was my first non-PreCheck line in over a month. They got it. They said they were hoping that PreCheck shows up there soon. Even the TSA folks like PreCheck.</li>\n 	<li>The mail bag filled up nicely since the last episode, though given the gap between show, folks probably forgot they’d written in. Nick Gassman, a long time listener, listens to podcasts while he swims -- cuts the boredom he says -- and he recently caught up with the <a title=\"Podcast #103 — Hospitality is Personal; Tablets Everywhere\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2013/01/24/podcast-103-hospitality-is-personal-tablets-everywhere/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">episode 103</a>&nbsp;from January. Commenting on the segment about all the different sizes of tablets hitting the market, Nick writes:\n<ul>\n 	<li>“I don’t see the problem making calls on large phones or tablets. It\'s so easy and cheap to pair a bluetooth headset to make a call. You also see people at airports making facetime calls on iPads, and I Skype on the Nexus. The issue seems to be with holding it to your head, rather than using it for calls.”</li>\n 	<li>“I was interested in your reviews of apps. Do you use any airline apps? How about for checking in and boarding passes, and have you used Apple\'s Passbook at all.”</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Actually, I was all the airline apps -- United, American, Southwest, Delta -- mainly because, with a couple of design cycles behind them, it now seems easier/quicker to check in on the apps than the web site. And I do use Apple’s Passbook to store the boarding passes. I like the quick access from the iPhone lock screen -- one swipe and I’m laying my boarding pass on the TSA reader.</li>\n 	<li>Dan Gradwohl corrected my assumption in the<a title=\"Podcast #104 — Status Free Fall; TSA Knife Fight\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2013/03/19/podcast-104-status-free-fall-tsa-knife-fight/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> last episode</a>&nbsp;that a Delta MD-80 out of MSP was an old hushkitted Northwest DC-9 that I used to hate when I lived in the Detroit area. He writes:\n<ul>\n 	<li>“Northwest\'s MD80s were retired in 2000 and the DC9s fly out of ATL, there\'s none in MSP. &nbsp;So, I suspect that you were on a former Delta MD88 which are very reliable, I\'m on them all the time.”</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>And he adds:\n<ul>\n 	<li>“I totally agree with you on the TSA\'s new knife policy, just adopt it and don\'t make a big rollout with it. &nbsp;Nobody is going to take down a 767 with a pen knife!”</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Ken Okel wrote in to ask about any recent experiences with CATSA -- the Canadian version of the TSA. He’s heading up there -- probably around now -- to do some training. I think the last time I flew out of Canada was when my wife and I spent a long weekend in Toronto, and we woke up to the CBC talking about a second outbreak of SARS in Canada. I think that news crowded out any observations about airport security. But if any of you have some thoughts to pass along to Ken, I’ll put a link to<a href=\"www.kenokel.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> his web site</a> in the show notes.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any travel observations, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. &nbsp;The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music --&nbsp;<em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/media/files/savoyard/10743\">Madrugada</a></em>&nbsp;by Savoyard</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Traveling in Spain</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>At the end of March, my wife, daughter, and I met up with another family from the Chicago area for Spring Break in Madrid and Barcelona. The weather was slightly marginal -- we were carrying umbrellas as a defensive measure for all but the last day or so in Barcelona -- but we had a great time and are looking forward to going back again. Now I’m not going to tell you what to see -- I’ll leave that to my friend Chris Christensen and his <a href=\"http://amateurtraveler.com/tag/spain+audio-travel-podcast/\">Amateur Traveler Podcast</a>. Instead, I want to talk a bit about how we did it.</li>\n 	<li>It started way before we left when we started looking for accommodations. A few years ago, the search for a place to stay would’ve been very similar to the search for flights -- look at the awards points balances for each chain -- Marriott, Hilton, Starwood -- and start cycling through their websites. We still did a little of that -- our flight from Chicago to Madrid had us overnighting at Heathrow, so we burned through some frequent sleeper points at the Heathrow Marriott. But for the past few vacations, we moved from hotel rooms to vacation rentals.</li>\n 	<li>Once you move, as a family, from one to two hotel rooms, the economics for vacation rentals starts making sense, even without factoring in the savings from being able to make your own coffee or meals. And there’s the non-price benefits of things like having more than one room so you don’t have to spend all your time sitting on your bed.</li>\n 	<li>However, booking a vacation rental place still isn’t quite a seamless experience. We’d booked what looked to be a great place in the Gothic quarter of Barcelona, right next to the Picasso Museum. Once we arrived, we were to call this number and someone would meet us at the property with a key. Seemed easy enough, but you can probably tell by the tone of my voice that it didn’t quite work out that way. We get off the train from Madrid, ring the number. Oh no, we no long handle that property, &nbsp;you need to ring this number. OK, we ring that number. Do you have the confirmation number from our e-mail? No, that can’t be it, all of our confirmation numbers start with the letter Z. You get the drift. Took us 30 minutes, half a dozen phone calls, and me beginning to raise my voice before we finally got through to the owner who apologized profusely, saying that he’d told the vacation rental company 6 months ago that he’d dropped that property manager. Not a smooth “check-in” experience. 20 minutes later, he meets us at the apartment -- a great place that fit two families. But now one last hurdle -- to pay. We knew when confirming the rental that he wanted to be paid in cash. It\'s Spain, what can you say? So the past three days, the adults had been maxing out their ATM withdrawal limits to amass enough cash. Would’ve been a bit easier -- and safer -- if he’d taken a credit card, or at least PayPal.</li>\n 	<li>Before leaving we also decided to book a few “cornerstone” activities -- a market food tour in Madrid, a cooking class in Barcelona, a wine tour in Priorat. This is a big change for me. I used to run as far as possible from any sort of structure in my vacations. One of the best trips we took was driving through Tuscany without an itinerary or reservations, just a Michelin Red Guide (this was pre-Internet) which we pulled out to find a hotel in whichever town we decided to stay that afternoon. But when we went to Vietnam a few years back, I pre-booked the whole trip -- you needed to -- and include some private tours -- a drive through Saigon, some temple trips, a night on a junk on Halong Bay. I found that instead of feeling like I was choking off spontaneity, I felt like we got to see things we wouldn’t have found on our own. And that it also got us up the learning curve quicker -- having someone show us kinda the structure of a city rather than us piecing it together on our own.</li>\n 	<li>So along those lines, I booked a food tour of Madrid’s markets on our first evening in Madrid. It solved a few problems. It helped keep up awake that first night -- always a key to fighting jet lag. It had us walking through some of the neighborhoods of central Madrid, so we started to get our bearings. And it fed us, so we didn’t have to figure out a restaurant our first night. But if the vacation rental industry is a bit unstructured, the local tour operator business is a complete shot-in-the-dark. TripAdvisor can be some help in avoid bad operators, but I think it’s lousy for search and discovery. I ended up using the same method I used for finding people in Vietnam -- e-mails to everyone I knew who might know something about Spain. A former employee who now distributes Spanish wine in Chicago connected me with a wine tour outfit run by an American and a French woman. And Craig Martin of the Indie Travel Podcast pointed me in the direction of an American woman who lives in Madrid doing food tours. Lauren took us through two food markets, did a comparative tasting of Iberian hams, and got me drinking Spanish sweet vermouth which I would’ve never ordered on my own. A couple of days worth of experiences in what could\'ve been a wasted night. I’ll put a link to Craig’s<a href=\"http://indietravelpodcast.com/spain/eat-drink-madrid/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> interview</a> with Lauren in the shownotes, as well as links to the<a href=\"http://madridfoodtour.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> food tour</a> and <a href=\"http://www.nisowinetours.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">wine tour</a> web sites.</li>\n 	<li>All this coordination requires communication which, in this day and age, assumes a mobile phone. Which can get expensive fast if you’re roaming on your US plan. Just working my way through all the calls for the Barcelona rental would’ve been $100. Again, I did a bit of pre-work, which in this case involved getting AT&amp;T to unlock my old iPhone 4. Once on the ground in Madrid, my first stop was to a mobile phone store to buy a pre-paid SIM card. We were staying just off Puerto del Sol, a popular shopping locale that had just about every mobile carrier represented with a shop. I went to the <a href=\"http://en.orange.es/mobile-service-plans/pay-as-you-go-plans/delfin-2/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Orange</a> store -- the first one I hit and also carrier recommended by Craig Martin. For 15 euros, I got a card and a weekly plan that included 50 text messages and free data. And the Orange guy clipped down the full-sized SIM so it would fit in my iPhone.</li>\n 	<li>20 years ago, going over to Europe would mean a booking hotels via Telex, calling up friends for tour advice, and making sure we were in a decent-sized town by mid-morning so we could cash our travelers checks. Today doesn\'t feel too incredibly different.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music --&nbsp;<em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/media/files/djlang59/10579\">Crazy Love</a></em>&nbsp;by DJ Lang</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Return of the Hotel Lobby?</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>I remember, many years ago, being dropped off by a taxi at what purported to be The Royalton Hotel in New York. The Royalton was the latest hip, cool, and edgy hotel from Ian Schrager, and a colleague had insisted we stay there. I get out of the cab; it’s late and it’s raining. The place doesn’t look like a hotel -- I guess that was the point -- it wouldn’t have been hip, cool or edgy if it looked like an Embassy Suites. There’s a little plaque to the right of the door that says “Royalton”, so I trust the cabbie and trundle up the stairs. I walk in the door. It’s dark, there’s some bass-heavy house music thumping, and the couches in front of me are full of people drinking and general pre-hook up positioning. I check the address again. Nope, this should be the right place. I see a woman at a desk at the other end of the room. Perhaps the front desk? I trundle down. Nope, she’s the hostess. I had passed the front desk -- it was tucked into the wall halfway back to the door.</li>\n 	<li>The Royalton was kinda emblematic of the idea that the traditional hotel lobby was a waste of expensive floor space, a revenue dead zone. So you saw places like the Royalton convert their lobbies into nightclubs while budget chains downsized them to a couple of chairs across from the check-in desk.</li>\n 	<li>But soon after hotel were downsizing their lobbies, companies were downsizing their real estate. Companies like IBM kicked people out of their offices, told them to telecommute and saved millions in real estate cost. However, for all the advances in instant messaging and desktop video conferencing, people still want to meet face-to-face. But if you’re both working out of home, where do you do it?</li>\n 	<li>Starbucks was, and really still is the default answer for the casual/quick fly-by meeting. But as they’ve shut down underperforming stores and shrunk the footprint on others, Starbucks are becoming less ideal. And at some point, you get tired of shouting above the din of the steam milk frother.</li>\n 	<li>Which got me thinking again about hotel lobbies. In Portland, I was staying in the Hotel Monaco downtown and I really enjoyed their lobby. It isn’t an extension of their restaurant or of their front desk. It is its own space, with couches and chairs that aren’t bolted to the floor, so you can slide them around and have a conversation with someone. I like the lobby at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York for the same reason. The furniture is not all pointed outward to watch the passing parade of people; it’s arrayed so you can talk with someone face-to-face.</li>\n 	<li>Some of the newer Marriott Courtyards seem to be re-investing in lobbies, but with big screens showing the weather forecast and news headlines and a row of PCs, I’m not sure if they’re trying to provide a conversation place or a different take at a Kinko’s.</li>\n 	<li>But then again, the last Marriott Courtyard I was in had a Starbucks in the lobby, so perhaps we’ve just taken this whole meeting place search thing in one big circle.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917626811171154.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\"><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #105</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from&nbsp;<a href=\"http://ccmixter.org\">ccMixter</a></li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_105.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #105 — Traveling in Spain; Return of the Hotel Lobby?','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-105-traveling-in-spain-return-of-the-hotel-lobby','','','2021-05-05 19:35:33','2021-05-06 00:35:33','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=1245',0,'post','',0),
(1252,1,'2013-05-30 21:49:47','2013-05-31 02:49:47','','Stickers Covering a Restaurant Window in Barcelona','Should we look it up in TripAdvisor or chance it and walk through the door?','inherit','open','open','','2013-03-27-18-38-36','','','2013-05-30 21:49:47','2013-05-31 02:49:47','',1245,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/2013-03-27-18.38.36.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(1265,1,'2013-09-06 16:59:49','2013-09-06 21:59:49','[caption id=\"attachment_1273\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/IMG_2455.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-1273 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/IMG_2455-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Morning-Prince Canal, Jordaan\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> Quiet Sunday Morning Before the Tour Boats Invade the Prinsengracht[/caption]\n\nBack in front of the mic after summer vacation, I\'ve continued the heavy travel schedule -- New Orleans mostly with a week in Amsterdam for a family vacation. I talk about the exposure of staying in a houseboat on an Amsterdam canal and run through my personal \"Best of\" list. Flying out of the Gulf Coast in the summer with its afternoon thunderstorms has forced me to become a weather geek. I run through the weather apps I religiously use. Bad weather also caught up with me in Europe, but Lufthansa did a great job of taking care of us. I\'m still in love with TSA\'s PreCheck. I may make Southwest\'s A-List once PreCheck comes to <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Chicago Midway International Airport\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Midway_International_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener wikipedia noreferrer\">Chicago-Midway airport</a>. And we wrap with restaurant trends seen at this year\'s National Restaurant Association show. All this and more &nbsp;at the&nbsp;<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_106.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n<hr>\n\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #106:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Back in the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago. I sorta took the summer off -- working, biking, reading, drinking beer. Nothing really exciting, which meant, I guess, that I didn\'t have anything new to podcast about.</li>\n 	<li>Which doesn\'t mean I haven\'t been traveling. I\'ve been in the air almost every week since the last episode -- New Orleans mostly, with a few trips to Houston, and a week in Amsterdam for a family vacation.</li>\n 	<li>The New Orleans trips have taught me a key life lesson -- don’t try to fly out of the Gulf Coast after 4:30pm in the summer. New Orleans in the summer is 91 degrees and 91% humidity. And so you sit in the airport terminal and watch the line of thunderstorms cross the runway at about 4pm -- just bucketing down rain with lightning strikes that keep the ground crews inside. That’s about the time you walk over and get another beer ‘cause you’re going to be there for a while.</li>\n 	<li>Of course, it could be worse. You could be on one of the planes that managed to land right before the squall line hit. You’re sitting on a plane that’s pulled up to the gate, but you can get off because there’s no one to pull the jet bridge up because of the lighting. You get the same wait, but no beer.</li>\n 	<li>So if you don’t want to torture yourself, you don’t fly out late afternoon, but the other problem is that, after 7pm, MSY is a ghost town. The last flight that will get me to Chicago -- even with a connection, leaves at 6:30. Save for the odd SW hop to Houston, there’s nothing going.</li>\n 	<li>So, if I have a late afternoon meeting, I have to stay overnight. And then head over to the French Quarter, or the Garden District, or the Bywater district for a cocktail and some fresh oysters, maybe a bit of gumbo or cochon… OK, so maybe the lack of late night flights home isn\'t so bad after all.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music --&nbsp;<em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/djlang59/37792\">Drops of H2O (The Filtered Water Treatment)</a></em>&nbsp;by J Lang</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>So all this dodging summer Gulf storms has made weather apps join airline and trip mgmt apps in the critical travel apps folder on my <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"iPhone\" href=\"http://www.apple.com/iphone\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"homepage noopener noreferrer\">iPhone</a> and Nexus 7. Actually, it starts on my laptop where I have <a href=\"http://weatherspark.com/#!dashboard;a=USA/LA/New_Orleans\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">WeatherSpark </a>on an open tab at all times. In one browser window, I get radar, temperature and precipitation forecasts. On my iPhone, it’s <a href=\"http://forecast.io/#/f/40.7142,-74.0064\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Forecast</a> and the rebuilt Yahoo Weather apps which really represent two ends of the design spectrum. Forecast has very minimal aesthetic -- lot of white space; focused quickly giving you what it thinks most people want to know -- what’s the forecast for the next hour; and the next 24 hours. Tapping and reveals current weather conditions -- humidity, pressure, wind; another tap the 7 day forecast; tap one of those days drills down to its hourly temperature and precip forecast. Yahoo Weather is less tappy -- you start with current conditions and a big picture from Flickr and then scroll down for forecasts and a radar map. On my Nexus 7, <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Skymotion\" href=\"http://skymotion.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"homepage noopener noreferrer\">SkyMotion</a> is focused on short-term forecasting -- it gives me current conditions and a forecast as far ahead as it can see (No Rain for the next 115 min) and then counts down the next forecast -- I have mine set to update every 5 minutes. I tend to triangulate across all of them for sort of a consensus forecast, but that’s because, in trying to get home at a reasonable time every week, I\'ve become a bit obsessive about the weather.</li>\n 	<li>Maps, of course, are the critical travel app. And I don\'t know about you guys, but for me Apple Maps is still lousy. I hadn\'t used Apple Maps ever since Google launched their IOS Maps app, but a few weeks back, landing at ORD, I was in a rush to get directions and travel time to a meeting. The address was in the appt so I just clicked on it and it popped up Apple Maps. A couple of clicks and I had directions, or so I thought. As I skimmed the turns, I thought \"This can\'t be right\". I looked at the address in the pin -- it was Michigan Ave in <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Evanston, Illinois\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evanston%2C_Illinois\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener wikipedia noreferrer\">Evanston, IL</a> not Chicago -- even though the address on the appointment included Chicago. So I manually edited the address, specifically typing in Chicago and hit Return. But Apple still wanted to send me to Evanston. I re-opened the appointment, copied the address, pasted it into Google Maps and I headed to Chicago.</li>\n 	<li>Playing around later that day, I found that Apple Maps just isn\'t as smart as Google Maps about my location. Standing in the Loop, I put a street address into Google Maps -- 525 Monroe -- and Google assumes that, since I\'m in standing in downtown Chicago, I want to find 525 W Monroe in Chicago. Apple Maps will tell me \"Address not found\" if I don\'t specify Chicago. Remember when this whole debacle started -- Tim Cook said Maps would get better the more people used it. I haven\'t seen it, but thanks to Google, I\'m not too worried.</li>\n 	<li>In the last <a title=\"Podcast #105 — Traveling in Spain; Return of the Hotel Lobby?\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2013/05/30/podcast-105-traveling-in-spain-return-of-the-hotel-lobby/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">two</a> <a title=\"Podcast #104 — Status Free Fall; TSA Knife Fight\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2013/03/19/podcast-104-status-free-fall-tsa-knife-fight/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">episodes</a>, I talked about, when traveling internationally, buying a SIM card in country to save on voice and data roaming charges. In Amsterdam, the story was no different. After landing in <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amsterdam_Airport_Schiphol\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Schiphol</a>, I searched out the <a href=\"http://www.lebara.nl/?isoCode=en_GB\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Lebara Mobile</a> booth in the shadow of the Burger King. It wasn\'t the biggest booth, so it took me a bit. But once I found it, it took the guy all of 5 minutes to get my unlocked AT&amp;T iPhone 4 registered on the KPN network. For €20 (about $26) I got 1 GB of data, unlimited texts, and enough voice minutes to make a half-dozen restaurant reservations. Compare that to $30 for 120 MB of international data. &nbsp;The web site <a href=\"http://prepaidwithdata.wikia.com/\">http://prepaidwithdata.wikia.com</a> is a great site to prepaid plan comparisons. Should be a top bookmark for any international traveler.</li>\n 	<li>The Saturday we flew back from Amsterdam was the one day of bad weather -- rain and low clouds. I’d booked our flights using United miles, so while the flight over from Chicago was a non-stop United flight, the flight back was on Lufthansa with a connection through Frankfurt. We got to Schiphol a bit early, and seeing delays, we tried to get on an earlier flight to Frankfurt. We weren\'t the only ones with idea; the flight was full. “No worries,” said the counter agent, “your flight is only delayed 20 minutes. You’ll still have an hour to make your connection.” 45 minutes later, the delay is now an hour. “No worries,” the gate agent said, “you’ll still have 20 minutes to make your connection.” I study her face for signs of irony or sarcasm, but I don’t detect any. Boarding time comes and goes and we’re still in the gate area. The fuel truck is MIA and we can’t board while the plane is being fueled. I’d already talked to United. The connection we will now miss is the last flight to the US from Frankfurt and there’s no room on any nearby United flights to the US until Monday. I figure there’s a better chance of us getting to the US from Frankfurt, Lufthansa’s main hub, than Schiphol. We board the flight knowing we’ll be overnighting in Frankfurt.</li>\n 	<li>On approach to Frankfurt, the flight attendant reads off all the connecting flights -- the gates for the connections that are still make-able, and the rebookings for those that weren\'t -- more information than I typically hear on a delayed flight into ORD. According to this, we were rebooked on the next morning’s flight to ORD, which was great news because United said it was booked up. We head over to Lufthansa’s customer service desk. Not much of a line. The agent quickly finds us in the system, looks at me, my wife and my two kids and says, “So you’ll need two or four rooms this evening?” “Two will be fine,” I tell him. He gives us vouchers for two rooms at an airport hotel, which includes €20 a piece for dinner, and also includes breakfast. All on Lufthansa. And remember, we were flying on award miles. Now think about this for a minute. If this was the US, we would’ve been told “It’s weather. Not our fault. You’re on your own.” And re-booking on award miles? I think we would’ve ranked lower than non-revenue employees. All of this, plus the really nice service in coach on the way back to Chicago has my wife telling me -- the next time we book flights with United miles, avoid them; book all the legs on Lufthansa.</li>\n 	<li>One thing United does do right, though, is TSA PreCheck. As I’ve said in previous podcasts, PreCheck is wonderful thing -- keep your shoes and belt on, keep your liquids and PC in your bag, stroll through the metal detector; no full body irradiation, everybody -- the passengers and the TSA agents -- are happy and smiling, there’s a rainbow over the exit of the X-ray machine, and a sparkly unicorn happily gives you your bags at the end. OK, I exaggerate -- but just a bit. Anyhow, TSA PreCheck is a wonderful thing and United does a good job of it in ORD and IAH. American, though, seems to have its challenges. Their PreCheck line at ORD can get very long -- not quite sure why -- and now somehow, they’ve screwed up my PreCheck status because on my last 3 flights to New Orleans, I’ve been shunted over to the regular status line. Missing the unicorns and rainbows, I called up American. Yes, I know that PreCheck is not guaranteed and that randomly I’ll have to go through the regular line -- it’s happened before, but not three trips in a row. I got shunted between Customer Service and the Platinum Desk -- don’t understand it; everything looks fine. A Twitter conversation with American earlier this week asked that I compare the name on my AAdvantage account with my Global Entry account. I also looked at my United account. Both Global Entry and United have my middle name spelled out; my American account just has my middle initial. I updated my American account -- we’ll see if this solves the problem.</li>\n 	<li>On a recent flight down to New Orleans, I took Southwest out of MDW. No PreCheck there. And with all the families and leisure travelers who use MDW, and the way security is configured -- everyone funnels into a single massive multi-lane security checkpoint -- I avoid MDW at all costs. So during this rare flight through, I asked a TSA guy when they’d be getting PreCheck. “End of the year,” he said. “They’ve been reconfiguring a bunch of lanes on the right hand side to handle it.” Well, now. I had just spent 20 minutes getting through security vs. what is usually 5 minutes in United’s ORD PreCheck line. I might be a lot more accepting of a Southwest flight with PreCheck. &nbsp;Provided that Southwest doesn’t do PreCheck just for its A List members.</li>\n 	<li>And finally, I had a nice social media serendipity moment last month. I was at the Oak Park Microbrew and Food Review. I think this was the 6th year was on, but the first time I’d gone. It was a spur of the moment thing, so I was by myself. I was checking in my first couple of beers on Untappd, which is something like beer geek Foursquare. And up pops a comment on one of my check-ins -- “Come find me, I’m in a Red Hat Linux hat”. Another <a href=\"http://www.untappd.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Untappd </a>friend, and long time podcast listener Rob Auch was there too. It wasn’t too crowded yet, so we managed to find each other fairly quickly, and then hung out for an hour or so tasting beer together. It’s kinda fun when the virtual world intersects the real world.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any travel observations, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. &nbsp;The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music --&nbsp;<em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/Zapac/26047\">Test Drive</a></em>&nbsp;by Zapac</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Summer Vacation in Amsterdam</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>I\'ve been burning through the award miles recently -- I drained the American bank for a spring break trip to Spain, so it was United’s turn for summer vacation. Since my daughter got to choose the spring break location, my son got the choice for summer. We could only carve out a week, so Asia was out which nixed his usual choice of Japan. Let’s look at Europe “but”, I said as he was opening his mouth, “not Russia. I might be interested in St Petersburg as part of a Baltic thing, but for the rest of Russia, no thanks. You can do that on your own dime.” “Fine,” he said, “then Amsterdam”.</li>\n 	<li>Really? Why? “I dunno; just a place I want to go.” OK. Actually, as I thought about it, I got more interested in it. I’ve done a good bit of work around Amsterdam -- in Haarlem, Utrecht. I’ve flown in and out of Schiphol a bunch of times, but save for one windy afternoon, never really spent any time in the city itself. This could be fun.</li>\n 	<li>As I mentioned in the <a title=\"Podcast #105 — Traveling in Spain; Return of the Hotel Lobby?\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2013/05/30/podcast-105-traveling-in-spain-return-of-the-hotel-lobby/\">last episode</a>, we’ve pretty much converted from hotel rooms to vacation rentals for our family vacations. For about the same price as two hotel rooms, we get that and more -- a kitchen, living room -- places to sit and hang out other than beds and concierge lounges. We also like to shop in local markets. And with a kitchen, this is a lot more fun. We get to buy and try things rather than just doing grocery tourism.</li>\n 	<li>Normally, this works out very well. But the end of July was warmer than normal in Europe. We had expected weather in the mid-70’s -- we got high 80’s during the day and maybe dipping into the mid-70’s at night. Wouldn’t be bad if we were staying at a hotel with air conditioning, but we had decided to do something a bit more local -- we rented a houseboat on the Prince’s Canal. Which didn’t come with air conditioning -- nor great cross-ventilation since you’re kinda down below street -- and breeze level in the canals.</li>\n 	<li>The first morning in the houseboat, I woke up and headed to the kitchen to figure out the Nespresso coffee machine. I opened the canal side door and windows to let in the morning breeze and started rummaging around for the coffee capsules. I heard a noise behind me; I turned and saw one of those big canal tour boats passing within a couple feet of our houseboat; full of tourists, wielding cameras, many pointed through our open door, looking straight at me in my boxers. I waved -- really, what else could I do? -- pressed the Brew button on the Nespresso, and headed back to the bedroom for a t-shirt and a pair of shorts. A bit of a shock at first, it became a game for us the rest of the trip. Now purposely walking around in the most colorful boxers my son and I could find; pointing our cameras back at the tour boats. The tour boat traffic on the Canal was heavy -- I posted a Vine video on my Twitter feed of passing tour boats &nbsp;-- but that was part of the fun. We would hang out on the little porch at the end of the day, eating some cheese, drinking a beer. It felt like we were part of the Amsterdam vibe, not just observing it.</li>\n 	<li>One of the best days of the week, though, was spent turning the tables -- piloting ourselves through the canals and peeping into the other houseboats. Social media serendipity hit again, this time through Twitter -- by way of Untappd, again. Arnoud Heijnis, a long-time TravelCommons listener, follows me on Twitter. Untappd pushes beer drinking badges to Twitter. Arnoud sees the Weiss beer badge I earned from a check-in at some canal-side bar and shoots me a great e-mail with a fantastic list of suggestions. The one that immediately catches my eye is renting a boat for your own canal tour. I get on line, book a boat, hit the grocery store from some snacks and walk to the rental place in Westerpark. We hop in an aluminum boat with an electric outboard motor, lay on the bottom of the boat to clear what we’re told is the lowest canal bridge in Amsterdam, and then go out for a 3-hr cruise. Bopping around the canals, dodging the big tour boats -- it was a great time.</li>\n 	<li>We also spent a couple of days being part of the bicycling culture in Amsterdam. I think it’s impossible to say you’ve truly visited Amsterdam without renting a bike and spending the day cycling around. I’ve spent time in Portland, OR, Seattle, and Boulder, CO -- three of the top US biking cities in US -- and they pale compared to Amsterdam. Until you get in the midst of it, you can’t really appreciate that bicycles are on the top of the Amsterdam transit pyramid -- cyclists, then motorists, then pedestrians.The bicycle lanes near the Central Station are the craziest -- a mosh pit of cyclists and foreign pedestrians coming out of the train station sprinting for their lives across car and bike lines, chased by honking horns and ringing bells. But get outside town a bit, as we did biking up to Marken Island, and it settles down a lot. And it’s pretty easy cycling -- except for bridges, the country is pancake flat.</li>\n 	<li>Other tips?\n<ul>\n 	<li>I already mentioned hitting the Lebara stand in Schiphol for the “€20 for a gig of mobile data” plan</li>\n 	<li>The train into Amsterdam from Schiphol is dead simple -- take it if you’re staying in the city, but be ready -- it’s so dead simple that it gets crowded.</li>\n 	<li>The family and I loved the Van Gogh Museum -- it’s rare to be able to trace an artist’s development in such detail. But understand that a lot of other people love it too. Go on-line and book a specific date and time for your visit. It’s a lot shorter wait.</li>\n 	<li>Skip the new “Heineken Experience”. It’s just not worth the money. Hit <a href=\"http://www.brouwerijhetij.nl/homepage/zomerblond-6/\">Brouwerij \'t IJ</a> on one of your bike rides. Drink better beer outside under a windmill. Or hit <a href=\"http://www.arendsnest.nl/\">Proeflokaal Arendsnest</a> in the Jordaan district for their selection of Dutch microbrews</li>\n 	<li>We stayed in the Jordaan district and definitely recommend it. We hit the <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noordermarkt\">Noordermarkt</a> farmers’ market on Saturday to stock the houseboat kitchen, shopped down <a href=\"http://www.iamsterdam.com/en-GB/experience/about-amsterdam/areas/featured-areas/haarlemmerstraat-haarlemmerdijk\">Haarlemmerstraat </a>, stopped in at the neighborhood restaurants and bars. We found it the right mix of happening but not too raucous -- which, from walking down the Damrak or around the Red Light district, seem to put us in the minority.</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music --&nbsp;<em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/Pitx/19513\">Black Rainbow</a></em>&nbsp;by Pitx</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Restaurant Trends</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>This week’s trip to Atlanta will make it 9 straight weeks that I’ve been on travel. So not only do I get to know airports, and airplanes, and hotels, but also restaurants. And for the past couple of years, I’ve attended the<a href=\"http://www.restaurant.org/Home\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"> National Restaurant Association</a>\'s’ <a href=\"http://show.restaurant.org/Home\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">annual show</a> in Chicago to walk the floor and see what trends we can expect to see when we’re eating on the road.</li>\n 	<li>In <a title=\"Podcast #98 — Stolen Luggage &amp; Passports; Restaurants Want Your Smartphone\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/05/20/podcast-98-stolen-luggage-restaurants-want-your-smartphone/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">episode #98</a>, I talked about last year’s show, where technology seemed to be the trend -- mobile apps to let you pay your tab, iPad digital menus, smartphones replacing pagers for queued-up guests,.... This year there was still a technology bent -- yet more permutations on digital menus (though this time featuring cheaper Android tablets as well as iPads) and a whole lot of social apps -- seems everyone wants me to check-in, upload pictures, and leave comments (good ones, I assume) on their site. I gotta tell you, though, I sorta full up with social networks. Personally, I have zero interest in donating free content to yet another social network. &nbsp;Twitter, Facebook, Untappd, Foodspotting, TripAdvisor, and now a friend just talked me into Yelp. That’s it -- I’m over-socialed.</li>\n 	<li>Luckily this year’s NRA floor -- remember, I said Restaurant, not Rifle Association -- had, well maybe not new food trends, but some clearer, perhaps more consensus trends. Two that jumped out at me were Mediterranean and Japanese foods. Now, I know, how new is Mediterranean? But if in years past, Mediterranean was a label used to push more expensive Italian food, I felt like I saw more of the Mediterranean this year -- specifically, more of the Eastern Mediterranean -- Greek, Turkish, Lebanese. Different, interesting flavors -- sumac, pomegranate, tahini; less basil, more oregano; less pork, more lamb. Nothing against Italian -- I love it -- but anything that brings more flavor choices, I’m all for.</li>\n 	<li>Japanese flavors also had a big presence this year. But not sushi -- although someone was demoing a very cool automatic sushi maker. Instead, it was about the broader spectrum of Japanese flavors -- noodles, green teas, and umami -- the newest basic taste -- sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and now umami -- sort of a meaty, savory taste that is at the core of many Japanese flavors. Japanese noodles seem to be all the rage now -- ramen, udon, soba, …. On the floor of the show, a Japanese company had an entire automated noodle making assembly line running. Watching those big fat udon noodle roll off made me hungry.</li>\n 	<li>Anything that adds variety is a great thing. I remember some years back traveling every week to <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_John,_New_Brunswick\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">St John, NB</a>. I won’t bore you with the hassles of getting there from Chicago -- suffice it to say that, with no customs in St John airport, it wasn’t a simple trip. St John is a nice town, but the choices were a bit limited. Monday night, we’d have salmon -- very fresh, very good. Tuesday, we’d have mussels -- over from nearby Prince Edward’s Island, again very fresh, very good. Wednesday, we’d have a hamburger -- less fresh, but washed down with fresh Moosehead beer from next door Nova Scotia. Thursday -- well, it was back to the salmon -- still fresh, perhaps a little less good.</li>\n 	<li>I’m certainly not having that problem on my weekly commutes to New Orleans, but for those travelers heading to less culinarily interesting destinations, I hope the variety I saw on the floor of the Restaurant show reaches you real soon.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #106</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from&nbsp;<a href=\"http://ccmixter.org\">ccMixter</a></li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_106.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #106 — Summer Vacation in Amsterdam; Restaurant Trends','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-106-summer-vacation-in-amsterdam-restaurant-trends','','','2023-08-23 18:44:43','2023-08-23 23:44:43','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=1265',0,'post','',3),
(1273,1,'2013-09-03 21:36:17','2013-09-04 02:36:17','','Morning-Prince Canal, Jordaan','','inherit','open','open','','img_2455','','','2013-09-03 21:36:17','2013-09-04 02:36:17','',1265,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/IMG_2455.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(1284,1,'2013-11-12 22:08:44','2013-11-13 04:08:44','Here\'s a 3-minute summary of what I liked best during my Spring 2013 visit to Madrid, Spain.\n\n<iframe width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"https://www.youtube.com/embed/49lo9vDLHjY\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"autoplay; encrypted-media\" allowfullscreen=\"\"></iframe>\n\nSome of the places mentioned include\n<ul>\n 	<li><a title=\"Reina Sofia Museum\" href=\"http://www.museoreinasofia.es/en\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Reina Sofia museum</a></li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plaza_Mayor,_Madrid\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Plaza Mayor</a></li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://www.mercadodesanmiguel.es/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Mercado de San Miguel</a></li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://www.mercadoantonmartin.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Mercado de Antón Martín</a></li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://viandasdesalamanca.es/home/web/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Viandas de Salamanca</a></li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malasa%C3%B1a\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Malasaña District</a></li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://fabricamaravillas.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Fábrica Maravillas</a></li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://madridfoodtour.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Madrid Food Tour</a></li>\n</ul>','Video - What to do in Madrid... in 180 Seconds','','publish','closed','closed','','video-what-to-do-in-madrid-in-180-seconds','','','2021-03-28 15:50:25','2021-03-28 20:50:25','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=1284',0,'post','',2),
(1289,1,'2013-12-19 13:18:54','2013-12-19 19:18:54','[caption id=\"attachment_1291\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/2013-12-10-07.55.43.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1291\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/2013-12-10-07.55.43-300x225.jpg\" alt=\"Tough travel day when the deicing fluid freezes\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\"></a> Tough travel day when the deicing fluid freezes[/caption]\n\nSnow, ice, and cold temperatures have hit North America a lot earlier this year. With the crush of Christmas/New Years travel starting this weekend, here\'s the TravelCommons\' top holiday travel tips...\n<ol>\n 	<li><strong style=\"line-height: 1.5em;\">Fly Direct</strong><span style=\"line-height: 1.5em;\"> -- This is the top tip every time I put this list together. Holiday travel stacks up problems -- &nbsp;high passenger load factors combined with winter weather disruptions almost guarantees late arrivals and missed connections. Pay the extra $100 for a direct flight.</span></li>\n 	<li><strong>Skip the Tight Connection</strong> -- If you can\'t fly direct, give yourself enough time to survive a late inbound flight. Take the 90- or 120-minute connection. Worst case is you get to try some great <a href=\"http://www.rickbayless.com/restaurants/tortas.html\">Mexican food</a> in O\'Hare or <a href=\"http://ilovememphisblog.com/2012/04/eat-airport-barbecue/\">barbecue</a> in Memphis.</li>\n 	<li><strong>Catch the Early Flight&nbsp;</strong>--&nbsp;Delays stack up as the day wears on.&nbsp; As your airplane goes from airport to airport, the probability of it getting stuck increases. &nbsp;Overnight, airlines have a chance to recover – late planes finally get their destinations and operations groups can reassign planes.&nbsp; So while the last flight out can be a crap shoot, I\'ve rarely hit a delay on the first flight out.</li>\n 	<li><strong>Use Multiple Flight Tracking Apps</strong> -- Use your smartphone to keep track of gate changes and flight delays. Sign up for text notifications from your airline when you book your ticket. However, &nbsp;I\'ve often experienced long delays with the airlines\' services or changes that were never sent out. So I also use <a href=\"http://tripit.com\">TripIt</a>, <a href=\"http://worldmate.com\">WorldMate</a>, and <a href=\"http://flightaware.com\">FlightAware</a>. It means multiple notices, but it also means I don\'t miss anything.</li>\n 	<li><strong>Use Twitter as a Concierge Service</strong> -- Most airlines have social media teams monitoring Twitter. Before you leave, find and follow your airline\'s Twitter customer service account. \"At naming\" them in a Tweet (e.g., \"<a dir=\"ltr\" href=\"https://twitter.com/united\">@united</a> what\'s happening with UA 4286 MSY-ORD that it\'s 1:45 hr delayed?\") usually gets a response in a couple of minutes. Following them allows you to exchange personal information such as record locator numbers via direct message (DM). It\'s usually faster than queuing up for a frazzled gate agent and the results can be better.</li>\n 	<li><strong>Carry On your Luggage</strong> -- Unless you\'re heading to the slopes for Christmas, everyone in your travel party should be able to fit into a carry-on sized bag. You can save $25/bag and increase the probability of having clean clothes at your destination. If you’re seating area 3 or higher, odds are there’s no overhead bin space for you. Let the agent gate-check the bag for you. You won’t have to pay a checked bag fee and it’s very unlikely that they’ll lose your bag – it’s only traveling a couple hundred feet from the jet bridge to the luggage hold.</li>\n 	<li><strong>Spread Clothes Across All Bags</strong> -- If you have to check your bags, split everyone\'s clothes across all the bags. It\'s rare for an airline to lose&nbsp;<em>all</em> of your checked bags.</li>\n 	<li><strong>Buy Status for 1 Person</strong> -- Airlines will sell you anything, including one-off access to the special security lines and early boarding calls normally earned by flying 25,000 miles. The airlines will tell you that everyone in your travel party needs to pony up for status. In practice though, if the lead adult\'s boarding pass shows priority/premiere access, the overworked minimum-wage airport staffers guarding the status security lanes will let the family tag along. And at the gate, I\'ve never seen a family split up across boarding groups.</li>\n 	<li><strong>Know Your Geography&nbsp;</strong>-- Knowing alternatives to your destination airport gives you more flexibility dealing with cancelled flights or missed connections. In New York, the&nbsp;LaGuardia&nbsp;to Newark pivot is&nbsp;easy, but others aren\'t so obvious.&nbsp; Everyone knows that Chicago has two airports – O\'Hare and Midway.&nbsp; But what about Milwaukee\'s Mitchell Field 80 miles north? &nbsp;If PHL is in trouble, how many folks think about Harrisburg or BWI?&nbsp; Or Sacramento as an alternative to SFO?&nbsp; I think about alternatives in two rings – within 60 miles – SNA and LGB for LAX; and then within 100-120 miles, which now picks up Palm Springs and San Diego for LAX.&nbsp; Someone will drive a couple of hours to pick you up if it means getting you to Christmas dinner on time.</li>\n 	<li><strong>But above all, be realistic&nbsp;</strong> -- It\'s gonna be a zoo.&nbsp;Steel yourself; get your inner karma tuned for it. Pack a snack and a book, and practice deep cleansing breaths.</li>\n</ol>','Top 10 Holiday Travel Tips','','publish','closed','closed','','top-10-holiday-travel-tips','','\nhttp://ilovememphisblog.com/2012/04/eat-airport-barbecue/','2021-09-28 18:51:13','2021-09-28 23:51:13','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=1289',0,'post','',0),
(1291,1,'2013-12-19 11:45:35','2013-12-19 17:45:35','','2013-12-10 07.55.43','Tough travel day when the deicing fluid freezes','inherit','open','open','','2013-12-10-07-55-43','','','2013-12-19 11:45:35','2013-12-19 17:45:35','',1289,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/2013-12-10-07.55.43.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(1305,1,'2014-01-29 21:46:31','2014-01-30 03:46:31','[caption id=\"attachment_1309\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/2013-11-04-07.32.55-2.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1309\" title=\"Another Monday, another plane...\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/2013-11-04-07.32.55-2-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Another Monday, another plane...[/caption]\n\nBrushing aside the cobwebs to make my way back into the TravelCommons studios, we talk about the growing importance of TripAdvisor hotel reviews and the checklist I walk through when writing a review. I also continue to gush about the TSA\'s PreCheck program, even if this autumn\'s rapid expansion seems a bit rough-&amp;-ready at times. A listener lists out the critical travel apps on his Android smartphone and I talk about being stalked by an airline on Twitter.  All this and more  at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_107.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #107:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Brushing aside the cobwebs to make my way back into the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago. It’s been a while -- September -- since the last episode. But I didn’t completely abandoned TravelCommons. In November, I put together a quick video with recommendations from my spring trip to Madrid, and last month updated my list of <a title=\"Top 10 Holiday Travel Tips\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2013/12/19/top-10-holiday-travel-tips/\">holiday travel tips</a>, a post I do every other year.</li>\n 	<li>The video -- <a title=\"Video – What to do in Madrid… in 180 Seconds\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2013/11/12/video-what-to-do-in-madrid-in-180-seconds/\">What to do in Madrid… in 180 Seconds</a>, yes, the title bows to the gods of Search Engine Optimization -- is a quick rundown -- 3 minutes for the math-challenged -- of what I enjoyed most in Madrid. Seeing Guernica, walking through the markets, finding a microbrewery run by a Michigan ex-pat, and eating in restaurants. It’s a bit different from the podcast -- about a destination (Madrid) rather than the journey -- and video rather than audio which are the reasons I didn’t push it out on the RSS/iTunes feed. I’ll probably do another one for New Orleans sometime soon. I figure I ought to have something to say since I’ve been traveling there since last April.</li>\n 	<li>Doing the Madrid video reminded me, though, why I don’t do more videos. They take a <em>huge</em> amount of time. It easily took me 90 minutes of production time for each minute of video. And that doesn’t count the original content creation -- taking the pictures, thinking through the content, writing the voiceover. My wife gave me a GoPro Hero camera for Christmas. Maybe I’ll clamp that onto the handlebars of a rental bike and pedal through New Orleans. Maybe that’ll make things go a bit faster. Or be a bit more exciting if I ride into some of the more interesting parts of town</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Planetenstaaten</em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/weigl-landwater/\">Philipp Weigl</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>A couple of good comments from the TravelCommons website I’ve been saving up since October. In the <a title=\"Podcast #106 — Summer Vacation in Amsterdam; Restaurant Trends\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2013/09/06/podcast-106-summer-vacation-in-amsterdam-restaurant-trends/\">last podcast</a>, I walked through the current load of weather and mapping tools I’m using on my iPhone and Google Tablet. Rich Fraser had the following comment:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Thing that struck me during the episode (and you’ve mentioned before) is how our tools have evolved over the years. Here is what I am using on my Android smartphone.</li>\n 	<li>For maps, it’s Google Maps, although their latest release hasn’t been the most user friendly compared to the replaced version. Nice thing about it is that it leverages your other Google searches in other devices. For example, the Map that I created on my laptop is now accessible on my smart phone.</li>\n 	<li>For flight information, it’s FlightAware all the way. I have learned of flight delays on FlightAware before the airline posted them. In most cases you can find out where your connecting equipment is coming from, so that even if the flight you’re on is running behind, you can also find out if the connection will be delayed. That is huge peace of mind. That said, all of the airlines’ mobile apps have gotten much better at relaying flight information than even a year ago.</li>\n 	<li>For weather, it’s largely a matter of taste. I am a pilot myself, and there is an app called Aviation Weather that gives me the plain text Terminal Area Forecast for airports I am flying to. It’s a good way of predicting delays at places like Newark or O’Hare.</li>\n 	<li>For traveling as long as I (we) have, you have to admit that with all the information at one’s fingertips has removed most of the stress from traveling.</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Thanks, Rich. I was bouncing between FlightAware and FlightStats, but have settled on FlightAware just because of that connecting equipment information. When I have a flight that posts a delay, my first question is always “Is the inbound plane in the air?” because until it is, the estimated departure they post isn’t much better than a finger in the air. Once it’s on the way, though, I’ve found the departure estimate might slip another 15-20 minutes, but it’s usually pretty good. United’s iPhone app does this also. And given United’s recent on-time performance, it’s one of the more useful part of the app.</li>\n 	<li>The reason I was talking about those apps in the last episode was because trying to fly out of the Gulf Coast during summer makes you a weather geek just out of self-defense. Lori Humm, another long time TravelCommons listener who travels in and out of the Southeast had these thoughts:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Hi Mark! I’m still doing the gulf coast run, moving between Baton Rouge, LA and Jackson, MS so I concur with your summertime travel warning. However, as I also want to get home on Thursday night and staying over would get me home Friday noon, I have just learned to be patient and where possible work the Delta Diamond line for my backup flights. The one drawback is in Jackson, the Delta side of the terminal (they have two security access points; the airport is one long building) has no restaurant or bar! I often remark to TSA about the cruel joke that is putting a Starbucks right at the entry to security</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Back in September, I waited out an 5½ hr delay on my United flight from New Orleans to Chicago. The only saving grace was that United sent me a delay notice before I left for the airport. The e-mail said my flight was delayed 2¾ hours but that I still needed to be at the gate for the original departure time. Doesn’t that kinda defeat the purpose of the delay notice? Having spent more than my fair share of time in the MSY bars, I stayed in town, walked down to the Hyatt next to the Superdome. The ground floor restaurant <a href=\"http://www.borgnerestaurant.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Borgne </a>is part of the John Besh empire -- the guy must have a dozen restaurants in New Orleans and I think I’ve eaten at damn close to all of them. I sat at the bar and worked my way through the $5 tapas menu -- crispy turkey necks, duck liver crostini -- and good beer. I wasn’t leaving until the inbound flight left the ground at ORD. The topper of it all was -- when I finally hit the ground in Chicago and turned on my phone, the first e-mail I received was from United, asking me to “Tell us about your trip.” Now that was a survey I couldn’t wait to fill out.</li>\n 	<li>We’ve talked in <a title=\"Podcast #105 — Traveling in Spain; Return of the Hotel Lobby?\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2013/05/30/podcast-105-traveling-in-spain-return-of-the-hotel-lobby/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">past episodes</a> about how airlines have really amped up their social media presence especially on Twitter. In my <a title=\"Top 10 Holiday Travel Tips\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2013/12/19/top-10-holiday-travel-tips/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Top Holiday Travel Tips</a> post last month, Tip #5 is “Use Twitter as a Concierge Service”. “At naming” an airline in a tweet -- something like “@united what’s happening with UA 4286 MSY-ORD that it’s 1:45 hr delayed?” usually gets a response in a couple of minutes. Not always helpful, but there’ve been times when I’ve gotten information that the gate agent didn’t. It can get a little creepy though. At one point during that epic 5½ hr delay, I tweeted out “Burning off a 4-hr @united delay in @chefjohnbesh \'s Borgne restaurant. Much better than MSY food” and included a picture of the tapas menu I was working my way through. A couple of minutes later, United comes back with “@mpeacock We know delays aren\'t fun, but it looks like you found a great place to grab a bite and relax from your picture.” There’s no place to hide with social media.</li>\n 	<li>Way back in April of 2012, I wrote a TravelCommons <a title=\"Best Hotel Amenity? Free Breakfast\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/04/21/best-hotel-amenity-free-breakfast/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">post</a> disagreeing with surveys from TripAdvisor and Hotels.com saying the most popular hotel amenity is free WiFi. In my mind, it is a free breakfast. It’s a great convenience -- swinging by the concierge lounge to quickly grab an egg, a couple of slices of bacon and a cup of coffee while I cool down from 30 minutes on the elliptical. So I haven’t been thrilled when the Renaissance Hotels -- where I usually stay when I’m in New Orleans -- closed their lounges and moved the free breakfast to their main restaurants. I understand it from an operational point-of-view -- it’s more efficient to serve statused guests off the regular buffet than to have to schlep pans of eggs and bacon up to some lounge at the top of the hotel. But while my eggs and bacon are probably fresher, it’s not as convenient. I can’t just swing through the lounge, grab my breakfast and bolt. A hostess now needs to seat me, I wait for a server to bring coffee, and then I wait again to sign a zero dollar check. It’s more efficient for the hotel, but not for me. Kinda feels like the hospitality concept kinda got lost in translation.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any travel observations, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/yoria-suerte/\"><em>Suerte Mijo</em></a> by Arthur Yoria</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Getting Serious About Hotel Reviews</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>It’s no secret that reviews are a big thing in travel. Scads of studies show on-line reviews are usually second or third in importance, ranking right behind personal recommendations from a friend.</li>\n 	<li>TripAdvisor remains the biggest player, accounting for 32% of hotel reviews in North America according to a <a href=\"http://www.trustyou.com/2013-global-year-in-review-annual-reports-show-trends-in-hotel-reviews-2-10348.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">study</a> released this week. Other OTAs (online travel agents) -- Priceline, Expedia, Booking.com -- have added reviews with varying degrees of success.</li>\n 	<li>It’s easy to see this behavior first-hand. Many of my colleagues will scan TripAdvisor before booking a new hotel. And my wife scours it before booking our vacation rentals. If you think about it, TripAdvisor replaced the other side of a travel agent that the OTAs missed. Expedia, Orbitz automated price searching and booking, but couldn’t replace the advice a good travel agent could give, the information she collected when she followed up with her customers -- “So how was that Marriott?”, “What did you like best in Madrid?”</li>\n 	<li>I have a TripAdvisor account and occasionally contribute reviews -- mostly hotels, though I have done a couple of restaurants in resort locations and some activities (like the Madrid food tour that I mentioned in a past episode). My first couple of reviews were typical -- I talked about how nice the desk staff was, or got overly indignant about some incident; the kind of reviews I filter out when I’m scanning a property’s page.</li>\n 	<li>C’mon, I can do better than this. I mean, I’ve been in consulting for 22 year; I’ve been doing a travel podcast for almost 9 year. So over a couple of beers one night I got to thinking about what’s important to me when I stay at a hotel. Since we’ve moved pretty much to rental properties for vacations, my hotel stays are just me, solo, on business. Taking safety and general cleanliness as table stakes (though there have been those times when they were sadly missing), the things I tick through when thinking about how many stars to award are:\n<ul>\n 	<li>The bathroom -- We talked about this in an earlier episode. It might be the most important part of the hotel room. I look for good water pressure and enough counter space for my toiletries -- I really hate having to put my toiletries on the toilet lid like I did last week at the Sheraton in New Orleans.</li>\n 	<li>Room size -- Is there enough room for a chair -- other than the desk chair? A comfortable chair where I can read or watch TV so I don’t have to sit on the bed all the time</li>\n 	<li>Workout room -- Here’s where I see a lot of variation -- from a couple of treadmills stuff in a dank room to a full blown fitness center.</li>\n 	<li>Location -- Am I within walking distance of restaurants, good bars, interesting things to see?</li>\n 	<li>Service quality -- Not just a welcoming front desk -- though that’s important, most places are training for that and have it down. How about the service quality in the restaurant, or if they keep the workout room stocked with water and towels?</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>That’s a bit better. Or at least I think so. Though when I decide I’m going to review a hotel, my visit is a bit different. I’m not cruising through the lobby on auto-pilot. I’ve got my list; I’m a bit more aware. Is that a lipstick stain on my water glass? Do the hallway carpets look a bit more beat-up than usual? It changes things. I have a responsibility to observe. And it probably affects my satisfaction with that hotel, paying attention to things I might normally let slide by.</li>\n 	<li>And I don’t seem to be alone in this, at least according to the <a href=\"http://www.trustyou.com/2013-global-year-in-review-annual-reports-show-trends-in-hotel-reviews-2-10348.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">TrustYou survey</a>. They found that hotels got fewer five-star reviews than a year ago. Their hypothesis -- As travelers read and use reviews more, their expectations of hotel service change -- toward what they’re reading in the reviews. They become more discerning consumers of hospitality services.</li>\n 	<li>Which isn’t so bad, until it goes too far -- like it has with the explosion of food bloggers. If I see some guy setting up a tripod to photograph a particularly clever lobby check-in kiosk… that’s the day I delete my TripAdvisor account..</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>One</em> by <a title=\"Cargo Cult\'s Alchemy Album\" href=\"http://www.magnatune.com/artists/albums/cargo-alchemy/hifi_play\">Cargo Cult</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>TSA Gets Something Right!</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>OK, I know that I’ve been fixated on PreCheck over the past couple of episodes, but I really think it’s one of the best things the very maligned agency has ever done. A year or so ago, a survey found it had the worst public perception of any part of the federal government -- lower even than the IRS, which is pretty amazing if you think about it. Expanding the PreCheck program could help pull the TSA out of the cellar.</li>\n 	<li>Going through the PreCheck lane is like traveling in pre-9/11 days -- no shouting, no pulling everything out of your bag, no emptying your pockets, no taking off your shoes, no full body scanner…. Indeed, just about everything you hate about the TSA goes away. The screening is quick, the TSA staff is nice -- it’s like flying in the last millenium, in the 1990’s.</li>\n 	<li>Of course, the reason you get to saunter through the checkpoints unmolested is that you’ve given up $100 and a chunk of privacy. I was in the first batch of TSA PreCheck people because I’d already gone through the Global Entry program. Global Entry is the US Customs and Border Patrol’s program to reduce the hassles of US immigration lines. In return for a background check, an hour-long interview, and fingerprints, you get to use a kiosk rather than queuing up for an immigration agent when returning to the US from international travel. In an encouraging display of common sense, I guess the TSA figured that, since their Border Patrol brethren had already screened, interviewed and approved me for a light once-over at the border, I’m probably low-risk for blowing up an airplane.</li>\n 	<li>Since the fall, the TSA has been rapidly expanding PreCheck -- adding lanes at existing airports like ORD and DFW and expanding to it to airports, targeting for 100 in total. I was pretty thrilled when they showed up at places like PDX and MSY. I’m happy to say that I can’t remember the last domestic airport I flew through that didn’t have PreCheck. The expansion has looked a bit rough-&amp;-ready in some places though. Lori Humm wrote about PreCheck in Jackson, MS:\n<ul>\n 	<li>In Jackson, they don’t have a body scanner – they still have the metal detector – and if you are pre-check, they hand you a plastic card that allows you to to bypass the procedures, even though you are in the same line as everyone. This process is laughable as it just serves to confuse the large number of leisure travelers in line. It also holds up the line because the TSA agent is explaining the process every single time.</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>I had a similar experience in New Orleans last week. In the New Orleans airport, none of the three concourses are connected -- kinda like LaGuardia in that way. Concourse B which has Southwest and Concourse D which has United and Delta have multiple TSA lanes and separate PreCheck lines. In Concourse C which has American, I’ve only ever seen one security lane running (though they have equipment for more) and there’s no PreCheck. So last Weds, I was ready for the full stripdown. But then the guy checking my license and boarding pass gave me a manila square of paper -- actually, it looked like they’d cut up a manila folder -- with “Pre” and a checkmark handwritten on it with a Sharpie. I got in line and showed it to the guy running the body scanner. I had to pull out my laptop, but got to leave my shoes and belt on and walk through the metal detector. Everyone else had to strip down for the body scanner. It felt very ad hoc, but I was happy not to have to pull everything off and out.</li>\n 	<li>If the additional lanes feels a bit loose at times, the expansion to non-Global Entry flyers is interesting also. When my wife and I checked in for a November flight from PDX to ORD, both boarding passes had TSA PreCheck printed on them. My wife had never gotten that before. She hadn’t applied for anything. It just showed up. We were wondering if there was some mistake. We both walked into the PreCheck lane. The screener put her boarding pass on the electronic reader and there it was, the three beeps that say PreCheck Approved. Off she went through the PreCheck lane.</li>\n 	<li>The TSA has said it’s randomly selecting regular passengers who, as a TSA spokesperson described it, “show up clean.” “The more information you give us about yourself, the more likely you will be selected,” she said. Again, that privacy/convenience trade-off. This might give some people pause But since the Edward Snowden affair has showed us we’ve already given up most of our privacy to another federal SA agency -- the NSA, we might as well get something back for it from the TSA.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #106</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Magnatune</a></li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_107.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #107 — Serious About Hotel Reviews; TSA Gets Something Right!','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-107-serious-about-hotel-reviews-tsa-gets-something-right','','','2021-09-28 18:52:43','2021-09-28 23:52:43','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=1305',0,'post','',1),
(1309,1,'2014-01-29 23:31:33','2014-01-30 05:31:33','','Another Monday, another plane...','','inherit','open','open','','2013-11-04-07-32-55-2','','','2014-01-29 23:31:33','2014-01-30 05:31:33','',1305,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/2013-11-04-07.32.55-2.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(1323,1,'2014-04-21 17:03:49','2014-04-21 22:03:49','[caption id=\"attachment_1324\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"198\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/2014-04-06-12.11.37.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1324\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/2014-04-06-12.11.37-198x300.jpg\" alt=\"Please, make it stop!\" width=\"198\" height=\"300\" /></a> Please, make it stop![/caption]\n\nWe look back on a brutal travel winter with stories about how driving instead of flying probably wasn\'t the best idea, and a completely awful United flight that ended up with a drive -- but not by choice. I also talk about my recent trip to Beijing, China and my plans for a round-the-world-in-8-days itinerary to India and Manila.  All this and more  at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_108.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #108:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommon studios outside of Chicago where, just as I’ve gotten my body reset onto Central Daylight Time after a week-&amp;-a-half in Beijing, I’m getting geared up to flip am for pm again, heading over to India and the Philippines at the end of the month. This one will be quicker though -- 2 days in transit, 3 days in India, another day in transit, a day in Manila, and then traveling home. So, I’m guessing that my body clock won’t completely make the 12-hour flip. I dunno, maybe I’ll only make it as far as the <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawaii%E2%80%93Aleutian_Time_Zone\">Hawaiian-Aleutian Time Zone</a> before I head back home.</li>\n 	<li>We were in Beijing at the beginning of the month. My son is in Beijing for a semester abroad, so my wife, daughter and I headed over during my daughter’s Spring Break. 14-hour direct flight over from O’Hare and a quick 11.5-hour flight back thanks to some favorable winds. It’s a 13-hour time difference, we left around 8 Thurs night and touched down around 11 Fri night. We picked up the day we lost on the way back though. We left Beijing at 10am and touched down at 9:30am -- the same day.  Got home, looked at my watch, and saw that I’d been up for 18 hours and it wasn’t even noon yet. It made for a very long day.</li>\n 	<li>\n\n[caption id=\"attachment_1328\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/2014-04-07-10.12.09crop.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1328\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/2014-04-07-10.12.09crop-300x221.jpg\" alt=\"ObaMao messenger bag bought at Silk Market\" width=\"300\" height=\"221\" /></a> ObaMao messenger bag bought at Silk Market[/caption]\n\nIf you follow me on Twitter --<a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> -- you saw a few things -- a Vine video of my street food lunch, a microbrewery I found deep in the hutongs, and my prize purchase, a messenger bag with a picture of “<a href=\"http://www.chinahush.com/2009/11/15/china-bans-obamao-t-shirt-during-obamas-presidential-visit/\">ObaMao</a>” -- Barack Obama in a Red Guards’ cap and uniform. I heard these were swept off the streets during <a href=\"http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2014/03/23/obamao-souvenirs-difficult-to-find-during-first-ladys-visit/\">Michele Obama’s trip</a> in March, but they were back out in full force when we were shopping. Check out the show notes for a pic of my bag.</li>\n 	<li><span style=\"line-height: 1.5em;\">The China trip broke what has been a pretty regular commute to New Orleans. I’ve made 10 trips down this year. A bit monotonous, but I keep reminding myself that there are worse places to spend time -- especially when we were sitting outside last week at some little seafood joint working our way through a 6-pack of Abita Amber and 7-8 lbs of boiled crawfish. Beats working in places where Buffalo Wild Wings qualifies as haute cuisine. And it’s in the same time zone as Chicago. Though sometimes it doesn’t feel like it. Like when I’m staying in one of the Canal St hotels, and folks come rolling in from the French Quarter at 2 or 3 or 4 in the morning. Maybe they’ve ended up in the Hawaiian-Aleutian Time Zone too.</span></li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/seldon-circles/\"><em>Making Circles</em></a> by the Seldon Plan</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Received some great listener comments since the last episode. After so many episodes of asking people to “Send a text or audio file”, I received an audio comment from long-time TravelCommons listener Lori Humm. Lori sent this to me back in February, using some windshield time during her drive between Baton Rouge and Jackson, MS to tell us about how she tried to ju-jitsu winter flight delays by driving...</li>\n 	<li>If you remember back, February was a tough weather month in what has been a very tough winter -- at least for those of us who live east of the Rocky Mountains in North America. I can imagine a lot of travelers had to make that decision. I did a bit later in Feb while on a trip to Lexington, KY. I was doing a day trip -- flying down-and-back -- from Chicago. It was a rare warm day, a nice break from the Polar Vortex. However, we all know there’s no free lunch. And on this day, with the mild temperatures came some howling winds. While I was in my afternoon meeting, I felt my phone vibrating in my jacket pocket. It kept going off -- message after message. I looked at the clock -- 2 hours before my flight home. I didn’t want to be rude and pull my phone out, but looking out the window at the trees flailing, I guessed it wasn’t United being overenthusiastic about wishing me a good flight. When I finished the meeting, I saw that I was right. United had cancelled my flight -- the last flight out of Lexington -- and rebooked me on the first flight out the next morning. I didn’t have clothes or toiletries for an overnight stay, but I did have a rental car. I popped open Google Maps -- 6 hrs from the parking lot I was standing in to my house. That felt right on the edge. I looked at the weather forecast -- they were predicting high winds into tomorrow. Could they get the plane in for that early morning flight? Screw it, I decided to drive. The drive started out nice through Kentucky and into southern Ohio. I was pretty. I even found a Dairy Queen on a gas stop. Things started to deteriorate as I headed north, though. Rain was bucketing down in Indy; like someone was on the roof pouring a bucket of water onto my windshield. The wipers couldn’t keep up. People were  pulling off under overpasses. I kept going. North of Indy on I-65, the huge winds were spinning up tornados. My wife would call me “Are you OK? Looking over at the southbound side, I saw a huge wreck -- probably some wind gust blew a semi into someone else. Traffic was stopped -- I counted a 7-mile back up. There but for the grace of God go I. Uhh, not so fast. 30 minutes later, traffic in front of me stops. I pull up Google Maps and Waze. I don’t see anything on Google, but Waze shows a line of red. Somebody tipped over on this side of the median. While looking at Waze trying to figure out what was happening, a box popped up recommending a reroute. What the hell, I followed it. It took me off on the next exit, ran me down a few 2-line roads, and after 10 minutes put me back on a clear I-65 on the other side of the wreck. Critical piece of travel technology. I eventually got home around 12:30/1am, a bit ragged but happy to be home. The next morning, I couldn’t help myself. I had to look at that early morning flight. Was it delayed? Did I make the right decision? Pulling up the United app, it did indeed go off -- on-time, landing at ORD 5 minutes early</li>\n 	<li>Steve Frick, another long-time listener, left a comment on the website adding to a couple of conversations we’ve been having over the past couple of episodes --\n<ul>\n 	<li>As far as travel apps I still like TripIt just for the fact that it organizes and places everything in my Google calendar. I have also been using Google Now when I arrive it lets me know what’s going on locally. I’ve been an UrbanSpoon contributor for years and have just this past week starting adding reviews to Yelp, we’ll see how it goes.</li>\n 	<li>As far “What’s Important When I Stay At A Hotel” we just recently had this discussion around the office. Breakfast is very important, I spent two mornings this week eating powdered eggs at a Fairfield Inn, not a great way to start my day. A decent workout area is something I also look for, I get really aggravated with treadmill belts that slip and causes me to wrench my back. I also use the <a href=\"http://fitdeck.com/\">FitDeck app</a> for working out in my room; <a href=\"http://runkeeper.com/\">Runkeeper</a> is another great app for tracking. Finally, I want the desk to have a clear view of the TV, yes nerdy, but it’s important.</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>I’m also a big Google Now fan. I replicate my company Outlook calendar to my Google calendar. I like how it’ll recognize that I’m flying out of, say, MSY, and then through Google Maps look at traffic on the best routing and suggest when I should leave. OK, a little creepy, but still handy.</li>\n 	<li>Jeffrey Brown left a message on the TravelCommons’ FaceBook page --\n<ul>\n 	<li>Hi Mark. I\'m a longtime listener and this is my first message to you. I know you do everything possible to avoid carrying a TSA baggie. So I looked at my own, and I\'m really catering only 3 things that I must have on my trips - toothpaste, deodorant, and shaving cream.</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Jeff, There are some easy ways to avoid liquids. At the start of the liquid ban, I switched from toothpaste to toothpowder. You can typically find it in the patchouli/crunchy granola aisles of Whole Foods.  I don\'t use shaving cream. Instead, I carry a shaving brush and lather up using the bar of soap that\'s usually provided in the bathroom. I typically use a solid stick deodorant. When the liquid ban first started, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2006/08/15/debating-states-of-matter-with-the-tsa/\">some TSA screeners</a> were very strict about any sort of semi-solid like a stick deodorant. I recounted one such encounter in an earlier episode. Nowadays, they seem to have loosened up. I never get any hassle about my stick. And with PreCheck, the whole baggie thing goes away because you don’t have to pull anything out of your bag when you go through the PreCheck lanes.</li>\n 	<li>I mentioned a bit earlier that if you follow me on Twitter, you saw some pictures from my trip to China. But since the Great Firewall <a href=\"http://whatblocked.com/\">blocks</a> Twitter access -- as well as a number of other more critical sites (at least to me) like Dropbox and Evernote, I investigated VPN services before I left. VPNs -- Virtual Private Networks -- tunnel through the Great Firewall by wrapping your Internet traffic in encryption and then popping out onto the public Internet from servers outside of China -- like in Hong Kong or LA. There are a bunch of them out there. I used ExpressVPN. It was $12 for a month. And not only did it allow me to Tweet, when I popped out via a US server, to the Internet, it looked like I was in the US, which allowed me to watch NCAA March Madness games that CBS was streaming. Hitting the CBS site without the VPN gave me a “Video not available in your region” error. Flip on the VPN and I was waking up early or staying up late way too many days. Some of the other tech I noticed in China:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Walking around and riding the subways, I noticed a lot of people using the Samsung Galaxy Notes -- the big 6-inch “phablet” -- kind of a tweener phone/tablet. A lot more than I’ve seen in the US. Which, perhaps, explains the rumors of a phablet-sized iPhone.</li>\n 	<li>There’s a lot of available WiFi in bars and restaurants. Most of it was password-protected -- like how you should be configured at home --  and then the password is posted on the wall somewhere. The only portal style protections -- what you see more of in the US -- were in big chain hotels and in Starbucks.</li>\n 	<li>And one of my best purchases was a 3-in-one USB phone charge dongle. It has a 30-pin iPod/iPhone 4 connector; an iPhone 5 Lightning connector; and a mini-USB for pretty much everything else. No more fishing around for the right cable. And it’ll charge 2 or 3 devices at once. I love it. I also love how much faster electronics charge overseas when plugged straight into the 220v socket without a voltage converter. Now back home, I’m trying to figure out how I can piggyback a powerstrip off my clothes dryer outlet.</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">And if you have any travel observations, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/eliyahu-wind/\">Oh Yeah</a></em> by Eliyahu Sills</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>My Worst Travel Experiences</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>So let me just spool out this story. Back in February, on one of my weekly trips down to New Orleans, I caught the last United flight out Sunday night because of a Monday morning meeting. As typical, it was a United Express flight -- a regional jet. And because the pilot was late arriving, it was about 30 minutes late leaving which is becoming as close to on-time as you’re going to get from United Express.</li>\n 	<li>I’m catnapping a bit. I’m kinda of aware of some commotion in the back of the plane. I hear the flight attendant ask if there’s a doctor on-board. A bit later, around midnight, the captain keys his mic and says we have a medical emergency and will be landing in Jackson, MS. Great. My first thought -- couldn’t we have hung on for 30 more minutes and made it to New Orleans? Quickly followed by -- Don’t want anyone to die just so I’m not inconvenienced. Just make it quick, OK?</li>\n 	<li>The plane lands. The airport is closed so it takes them a bit to rustle up (a) some stairs; (b) security guards to make sure no other passenger escapes into the secure area of the airport. About 30 minutes later, the paramedics come on and escort the sick passenger off the plane. She can walk but looked like she was have breathing problems at altitude. The pilot comes on again, apologizes for the inconvenience, says that he’s working with his ops center to figure out how much fuel they need to take on for the flight to New Orleans.</li>\n 	<li>I nap a little more. The pilot is speaking again. It’s 1:30am. Uh, we’ve figured out how much fuel we need but because we don’t normally fly to this airport, we don’t have a relationship with the fuel provider, so we’re trying to figure out how to pay.</li>\n 	<li>2am -- still figuring out how to pay. 3am -- we’ve found hotels for you tonight and will fly you to New Orleans tomorrow morning. Now just trying to find buses to get you to the hotel. We trundle out of the plane, through the deserted terminal and into baggage claim to collect our luggage. And wait for the bus. 4am -- no bus yet, but they’ve decided to bus us down to New Orleans -- a 3-hr ride. 4:30am -- Bus finally arrives. It’s a nice motor coach. I figure out how to recline my seat a bit so I can nap a bit. 6am -- I wake up feeling the bus decelerate. I look at my watch. Huh? We’re not there yet. The driver keys his mic. It’s time for his break. After just 90 minutes of driving?. 8am -- I’m finally at New Orleans airport.</li>\n 	<li>Well, that was fun. And as I told that story to friends, family, and colleagues over the next few days, I said “This was one of my worst travel experiences.” “<em>One of the worst?</em>” was the common reply. “What could be worse?” I couldn’t think of any right then, but I wasn’t sure there wasn’t.</li>\n 	<li>And as I thought more about it, short of surviving a plane crash or being on that Carnival “poop cruise” stranded in the Caribbean, can there really be a worst travel experience? This trip was probably the worst in-transit experience, though there was that flight from Cleveland to O’Hare that I’ve talked about on a <a title=\"TravelCommons Podcast #3\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/05/29/travelcommons-podcast-3/\">previous episode</a>, where a drunk guy fought with the flight attendant to open the rear door while we were at 20,000 ft, and then sat down behind me, talking to me, and all the time I was waiting for him to puke over my shoulder. While a shorter experience, it was a bit more worrisome at the time.</li>\n 	<li>Probably as frustrating was a Detroit to San Francisco trip I took a number of years ago. The outbound flight was delayed and delayed. I kept looking at my watch. This was the morning flight out so I could make an afternoon meeting. I was flying right back to Detroit that evening so I could make some other commitments. Finally, the flight was so delayed, I wouldn’t be able to make the meeting. I stood up to get off the plane. Nope, we can’t let you off; we’re about to push back. We pushed back. And now waited on the tarmac. And I steamed. We landed in SFO just before boarding was called for my return flight. I got off the plane, walked down two gates, and boarded my flight home.</li>\n 	<li>Or the trip to Brussels where the backpack with our passports was stolen from the train luggage rack right above me. Another bad trip I talked about on an <a title=\"Podcast #98 — Stolen Luggage &amp; Passports; Restaurants Want Your Smartphone\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/05/20/podcast-98-stolen-luggage-restaurants-want-your-smartphone/\">earlier episode</a>. That one also left me hugely frustrated, cursing my own stupidity the next two days we spent in Brussels waiting for replacement passports.</li>\n 	<li>Which one was the worst? I’m not really sure. But since none of them has left me physically or emotionally scarred (at least not that I can tell), I’m not sure I have to figure it out. Nor do I think I want do, because then I’d have the answer to my mother’s saying, “If this is the worst thing that’s ever happened to you…”</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #108</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Magnatune</a></li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_108.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #108 — Worst Travel Experiences Ever','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-108-worst-travel-experiences-ever','','\nhttp://www.chinahush.com/2009/11/15/china-bans-obamao-t-shirt-during-obamas-presidential-visit/','2021-09-28 18:54:18','2021-09-28 23:54:18','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=1323',0,'post','',0),
(1324,1,'2014-04-22 06:03:16','2014-04-22 11:03:16','','Yelling Man Beijing Art District','Please, make it stop!','inherit','open','open','','2014-04-06-12-11-37','','','2014-04-22 06:03:16','2014-04-22 11:03:16','',1323,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/2014-04-06-12.11.37.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(1328,1,'2014-04-22 10:32:11','2014-04-22 15:32:11','','2014-04-07 10.12.09crop','ObaMao messenger bag bought at Silk Market','inherit','open','open','','2014-04-07-10-12-09crop','','','2014-04-22 10:32:11','2014-04-22 15:32:11','',1323,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/2014-04-07-10.12.09crop.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(1342,1,'2014-06-08 16:57:04','2014-06-08 21:57:04','','Manila Umbrella Sign','I confess... I\'m carrying a concealed Totes','inherit','open','open','','2014-05-02-17-52-56','','','2014-06-08 16:57:04','2014-06-08 21:57:04','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/2014-05-02-17.52.56.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(1353,1,'2014-06-07 17:01:40','2014-06-07 22:01:40','[caption id=\"attachment_1342\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"225\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/2014-05-02-17.52.56.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1342\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/2014-05-02-17.52.56-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"I confess... I\'m carrying a concealed Totes\" width=\"225\" height=\"300\" /></a> Yes, I\'m carrying a concealed Totes[/caption]\n\nJust when I\'d reset my body clock after a trip to Beijing, I headed off for an 8-day around-the-world itinerary. It was 44 hours of flight time, setting a new personal record for stupid travel. I learned a few new things along the way -- Singapore Air flight attendants get grumpy when you don\'t let them serve you, and Manila Airport considers a Totes umbrella as lethal as a box cutter.  We also talk about the reason Beijing has scored second to last in taxi service, the difference between United and Delta Twitter service, the secret to buying Bose headphones, and my switch from an iPhone to Android. All this and more  at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_109.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #109:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago. I’m back at my normal commute -- Chicago to New Orleans with the odd stop in Memphis --  after a couple of big Asian trips in April and May. I talked a bit about my Beijing trip in the last episode, and then at the beginning of this month, I flew around the world in 8 days -- some flash travel for meetings in Bangalore and Manila.</li>\n 	<li>As you can imagine, it took me a couple of weeks to recover from that trip. That amount of airtime -- I added up 44 hours in the air -- was a push, even for me, and I’ll regularly do up-and-backs between Chicago and San Francisco, and you may remember a while back when I talked about doing an up-and-back to London -- leaving Chicago on the overnight flight to Heathrow, showering and changing in the airline club, taking a car out to Reading for a lunch meeting, then heading back to Heathrow in time for the afternoon flight to Denver. That trip had been my most stupid piece of travel -- until this one.  This one, I think aged me in dog years.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em>Stinky Dog</em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/musicinside-forces/\">Music Inside</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Back in December, in my Top 10 Travel Tips article, I talked about using Twitter as a concierge service. I suggested “at naming” them in a tweet, which I found tends to generate a response in a couple of minutes. However, in the 5 months since I made that recommendation, I’ve seen the quality and usefulness of that response degrade almost exponentially. “At naming” United almost inevitably results in some cut-and-pasted pre-approved apology -- “Sorry, we hate delays as much as you do” or “Our apologies for the delay in your travel. Safety is our utmost  priority”, My frustrated response  -- “Oh stop! If you were concerned about safety, you\'d spend more on preventative maintenance to avoid these delays in the first place” -- generated nothing but silence.</li>\n 	<li>Delta’s Twitter account, on the other hand, did quickly solve a problem that I couldn’t figure out elsewhere. I mentioned in an earlier episode that I hated having to fly Delta because I couldn’t get Pre-Check. Facing another Delta flight out of New Orleans, I thought I try one more time to fix it. I found what I thought was the right Delta Twitter handle -- @DeltaAssist -- and tweeted them the message “How do I get my Global Traveler # associated with my Delta profile so I can get PreCheck for my MSY-DTW flight tomorrow?” A couple of minutes later, I got a reply “Please DM me your info and I’ll proceed”. Within 10 minutes, it was done. When I checked in 30 minutes later on the Delta app, there was the Pre- Check symbol on the boarding pass. So perhaps the usefulness decay is airline-specific, perhaps with some direct connection with United’s low score on the latest JD Powers’ customer satisfaction survey. Perhaps.</li>\n 	<li>As I have mentioned many times on this podcast, Bose noise-canceling headphones are the mark of a true road warrior. Sure, you seem some new Gen Y analyst types sporting Beats or maybe some audiophile wearing some big Sennheiser cans. But still, by and far, Bose is still number 1. But they’re expensive -- $300 and never on sale, not even in the Bose outlet stores. And so, about once every six months, I have this conversation with a seatmate -- “Do you like your Bose?” “Yup, I think they’re great” “Yeah, I’d love to get a pair, but they’re so damn expensive” -- also most word-for-word, every 6 months, right down to the “damn” in front of “expensive”. And here’s what I tell them -- No one ever buys Bose headphones with cash. Nobody. That\'s what Membership Miles are for. If you’re traveling for business, odds are you have a corporate Amex card on which you’re racking up Membership Miles for plane tickets and hotel bills, and you never quite know what to do with them. What you do is splurge on travel luxuries for yourself like Bose headphones. They\'re for your miles; you suffered to earn them. Go on, get a little something that will make that middle seat a bit more bearable. But whatever you do, don’t tell your spouse about them. They’ll want to buy something sensible for the house. First, buy the Bose. After than, maybe one of those road warrior Tumi carryons...</li>\n 	<li>And one last travel technology bit...finally, as I’ve threatened for many episodes, I ditched my iPhone 5 for an HTC One Android phone. I just got completely fed up with the lousy, unpredictable battery life on the iPhone 5 after upgrading to iOS 7. Maybe iOS 8 Apple announced this week will fix things, but I waited as long as I could. I got tired of being psychotic about battery life -- about making sure I topped off my battery before boarding a plane, watching the battery meter drop 10% in the time it took to taxi from the runway to the gate -- just not being able to be away from a charging cable for more than 2 hours.</li>\n 	<li>And one last travel technology bit...finally, as I’ve threatened for many episodes, I ditched my iPhone 5 for an HTC One Android phone. I just got completely fed up with the lousy, unpredictable battery life on the iPhone 5 after upgrading to iOS 7. Maybe iOS 8 Apple announced this week will fix things, but I waited as long as I could. I got tired of being psychotic about battery life -- about making sure I topped off my battery before boarding a plane, watching the battery meter drop 10% in the time it took to taxi from the runway to the gate -- just not being able to be away from a charging cable for more than 2 hours.</li>\n 	<li>Now I’m not a stranger to Android. I’ve used a Google Nexus 7 for a couple of years and a Samsung tablet before that, so I’m comfortable with Android. Indeed, I’ve said on past episodes that I prefer Android tablets to iPads because I can do more with them -- get to the directory structure, attach files to e-mails. For me, Android tablets are closer to a PC replacement than iPads. But phones are different -- using it to talk and text is more important than editing a document. I had been on iOS since the iPhone 3G, so this is a bit change -- Android hides settings in different places than iOS, so it’s been a learning experience. The same with the mail and calendar apps, though with Android, there’s more of a choice. I have 4 mail apps on my phone now, figuring out which one I like the best, and then I’ll blow away the other three. I gotta say though that I\'m very happy to be rid of that lousy iPhone podcasting app.</li>\n 	<li>But the most important thing is battery life. I’m no longer waiting ‘til the last minute to board my plane, trying to push that iPhone battery meter up one last percentage point. And with the bigger screen -- 5-inches vs. 4 on the iPhone 5 -- I find myself reading more stuff on my phone and leaving my tablet in my backpack more often. I’m still tweaking things, but am very satisfied with the change.</li>\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">And if you have any travel observations, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">Bridge Music — <em>Locovenido</em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/falik-dreams/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Falik</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong> \'Round the World in 8 Days</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>I think it’s a given that your mind is more of a barrier to doing something than your body. I always surprise myself when, once I’ve pushed through what I thought was a major barrier, how normal or ordinary it seems on the other side. I do that with road biking all the time -- thinking a 50-mile ride, or a 100-km or 100-mile ride is a big deal… until I do it.</li>\n 	<li>Flight times are that way too. Early in my career, I remember thinking that the 3-4 hours from Chicago to California was huge, and that the 14 hrs it would take to fly to Tokyo was inconceivable. But then I flew 7 hrs to London; 10 hrs from Europe to South Africa. Then a big jump, 17 hours from New York to Joburg every 6 weeks for a project. With that experience under my belt, that 14 hr flight time to Tokyo -- or to India or China -- was no longer unthinkable, just long.</li>\n 	<li>So when project requirements and the May Day holiday forced me to compress trips to India and Manila into a single week, I gulped but thought “What the hell?”  Cutting HG Wells’ time by an order of magnitude, my itinerary took me around the world in 8 days -- Chicago to Newark to Delhi to Bangalore to Singapore to Manila to Tokyo to Chicago. 44 hrs of flight time -- that’s in-the-air time. Doesn’t count wait time or layover time. That 44 hrs at 39,000 ft in a week.</li>\n 	<li>I left Chicago Saturday afternoon; touched down in Delhi Sunday night. I was fine on Monday and Tuesday. There wasn’t much down time -- we meeting people pretty much straight through from 7am breakfast to dinners ending at 11 at night. I think people would’ve followed me into the toilet if I didn’t give them a stern look. Wednesday, we hit the wall but because of the impending May Day holiday shutdown, we couldn’t stop. So we doubled down on caffeine consumption and pushed through.</li>\n 	<li>Because we had a break on Thursday, May 1. While everyone was celebrating the workers’ holiday, we hopped Singapore Air to Manila. SingAir is always at the top of any list of the best business class cabins. Unfortunately, I can’t opine on that, because I think I slept all but 45 minutes of the 7-8 hours I spent there. Which I think really frustrated the flight attendants. They kept trying to give me food and drinks whenever I opened my eyes. I would just ask for more water and then go back to sleep.</li>\n 	<li>All my Manila to Chicago flight options connected through Tokyo. I could’ve flown United, but I’m on a bit of a United strike right now -- I’m just not happy with how many delays and cancellations I’ve taken from them -- so I decided to try a new airline and flew ANA -- All Nippon Airways. I’d never flown a Japanese airline before, so it would be something new. And since they were one of the first airlines to buy a 787 Dreamliner, I was hoping to one of those would show up on my route. No luck on that, it was Triple 7’s on both legs. But what was fun was mealtime. The menu has two sides -- a Japanese menu and “International” menu -- American and European food. I figured I should go Japanese -- eat as local as possible at 39,000 ft -- and so was a little disconcerted when I saw most of the Japanese passengers ordering the International menu, but hey….  It turned out fine for me, though. Half the value of airplane meals, especially on long-haul flights, is the distraction; the entertainment value. A good business class meal service should keep you occupied for at least an hour -- between perusing the menu, choosing a wine, have the meal coursed out, then the dessert trolley, then the liquor trolley. The Japanese meal was the best ever at that. Every tray they put down in front of me had at 6-8 different little cups or boxes of food on it, none of which I recognized, and I eat Japanese food pretty regularly on the road. So they’d put the tray down, I’d look at it, then I’d look through the menu and try to match each line on the menu with a box or cup in front of me. And not all of them were easy -- “oh, <i>that’s</i> the custard with the snow crab…”. Which was great, because the menu matching kept me even more occupied than normal. Lotsa fun. And the food was pretty good too.</li>\n 	<li>Of course, when you travel to a new country, there’s always something that can trip you up. I’ve traveled to India a number of times over the past 3-4 years, so I know some of its eccentricities, like needing a physical print out of your itinerary to even get into an airport terminal, and the separate men and women’s security lines because every passenger gets wanded and patted down after walking through the metal detector. It makes TSA PreCheck seem like a morning walk that’s been momentarily interrupted by a couple of nice mall cops.</li>\n 	<li>But the Philippines were new. We landed in Manila at 11pm Thursday night. Immigration was a bit of a goat rodeo, and the ride to the hotel felt like we were passing through some just-this-side-of-dodgy parts of LA. Much more “normal” than our first night in Delhi. The way out was where the bumps showed up. First is the exit tax -- they like to call it an “airport fee” but you can’t leave until you pay it, so it feels like an exit tax. It was 500 pesos -- about $14 -- in cash. Not a big thing -- if you know about it ahead of time. Which I almost didn’t. We were having some beers before dinner Friday night and somebody asked a question about the Manila airport. I don’t remember the question, but none of us knew the answer, so, of course, we all whipped out our smartphones and revved up Google. Somewhere on one of the web pages I was scanning, I saw a comment about the exit tax. Whoa! We ran over to the concierge. Yup, it’s true. I have 750 pesos on me from an earlier trip to the ATM, so I was good. The other guys had no Filipino currency, but got the front desk clerk to give them cash and charge the 500 pesos to their room. Crisis averted.</li>\n 	<li>The thing that <i>did</i> catch me, though, was the sign at the check-in desk Saturday morning saying portable umbrellas were prohibited in carry-ons. Wait, what? I’ve carried this bag on three-quarters of the way around the world and now I have to check it because I have a 10-in Totes umbrella in the front pocket? Did these guys watch too much Batman when they were kids and now are having flashbacks to when the Penguin used a machine gun umbrella? And this in a country where it dumps rain every afternoon, so you really need an umbrella! But from the look on the agent’s face, I could tell -- Yes, it’s for real, and No, I don’t agree with it either. So, I reluctantly checked my bag and headed off to security… Where none of the security screeners seem to be paying much attention to any other security signage. In spite of signs to the contrary, I’m waved off from taking my PC out or taking my blazer off. Could I have sneaked my lethal Totes through? Probably. But I just wanted to get on the plane so I could go back to sleep.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em>Just Don’t</em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/liebig-severed/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Lie Big</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong> Beijing Mass Transit</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>One of the things I didn’t get to in the last episode when talking about my April trip to Beijing was to report out on mass transit. It’s been an on-going thread in the TravelCommons podcast, probably for the past couple of years, about getting around cities -- did videos for Frankfurt and Chicago, and have talked about Portland, San Francisco, Amsterdam… So let’s add Beijing to the mix.</li>\n 	<li>We got to the other side of customs in Beijing Airport late -- 10:30, 11:00pm local time after a 14-hr flight. We saw signs for an Airport Express, but since it was late, we couldn’t figure out the particulars of the Airport Express -- most importantly, where it would drop us in relation to our hotel -- and the cab fare was only about US$15, we headed toward the taxi line.</li>\n 	<li>Which offered its own kind of challenges. The line overflowed the regular switchback corral and past a sign that said “60 minute wait from here.” Great. And then there were what they call “black cabs”, non-licensed guys, walking up and down the back end of the line soliciting rides. But when I saw the locals blowing them off, I did the same. A couple of times, the airport police walked down the line, and the black cab guys ran off -- literally -- though we did see a couple of guys melt into the line, standing behind a concrete pillar out of the cops’ line of sight. In the end, it wasn’t that bad, 20 minutes and we were at the front of the line.</li>\n 	<li>Which then meant we could get our first experience with the hassle of dealing with Beijing cab drivers. They’re picky and incredibly argumentative. And, of course, since they’re arguing in Chinese, a language I don’t speak, it can be a challenge to actually get going. At the airport, the cab rank people waved me toward a cab. I had printed out the directions -- in Chinese -- of the Marriott from their website, complete with a small map. I showed it to the cab driver. He took the paper, looked a bit puzzled, showed it to another guy, who then tried to wave me over to his car -- a black cab -- while my assigned cab driver wandered away. I went back to the cab rank guy, showed <i>him</i> the directions. He then started yelling at the cab driver, which finally got the cab driver to start loading our bags into the cab.</li>\n 	<li>This scene would be repeated almost every time we caught a cab from the hotel. We would have the concierge book us a table at a restaurant, write the address and directions out in Chinese characters, we’d show it to the cab driver, who would then look puzzled and start arguing with the doormen. One time, I had to pull up Google Maps and do a bit of a pantomime with the cab driver -- here’s where we want to go -- before he would head off.</li>\n 	<li>The only thing that was worse than this was trying to hail a cab in town. Cabs would have their “available” sign showing in their window but wave me off when I tried to hail them. It would usually take 3-5 attempts, before one stopped. But then about half of those wouldn’t want to take us where we wanted to go. I tell you, I’ve had better luck getting a cab from mid-town Manhattan to LGA in the rain during rush hour than I had getting a taxi in Beijing. So it made perfect sense when I read TripAdvisor’s <a href=\"http://www.multivu.com/mnr/70425525-tokyo-tops-tripadvisor-world-city-survey-amongst-global-travelers\">survey</a> a couple of weeks ago saying that Beijing was second only to Moscow as the worst city for taxi service.</li>\n 	<li>Which really made us appreciate how great the Beijing subway is. It’s cheap, clean, modern, station announcements in Chinese and English -- leftover from the 2008 Summer Olympics? --- we took it all the time. The only downside -- it’s jammed. You think the London Tube at rush hour is crowded; the Chicago Red Line during a Cubs home game? Subway riding in Beijing is a full contact sport. But with 25 million people in the city, I’m not sure I should be surprised. I think I sat down in a subway car once in all the rides I took. But even crowded, it’s a great system. Except maybe for having to pass your bag through an X-ray machine before entering the station. But at least the Chinese didn’t want to take away my umbrella.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #109</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Magnatune</a></li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_109.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #109 — \'Round the World in 8 Days; Beijing Mass Transit','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-109-round-the-world-in-8-days-beijing-mass-transit-2','','','2021-09-28 18:57:08','2021-09-28 23:57:08','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=1353',0,'post','',4),
(1359,1,'2014-08-12 21:16:56','2014-08-13 02:16:56','[caption id=\"attachment_1364\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/pic-r-1402317187245.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1364\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/pic-r-1402317187245-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Plane is here; no mechanics in sight. Do I feel lucky?\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Plane is here; no mechanics in sight. Do I feel lucky?[/caption]\n\nEven though the weather hasn\'t been bad this summer, I\'ve endured a rash of flight cancellations. Digging deeper, it\'s been regional jets operated by small airline \"partners\" that\'s causing me grief. Service to mid-sized cities has moved to regional jets, making travel to these cities more problematic. Traveling to China or India can catch US travelers by surprise with their visa requirements. We also talk about how fast airlines respond to Twitter messages, airport \"wall huggers\", carry-on luggage throwback, and I haven\'t flipped through a Skymall magazine in months. All this and more  at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_110.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #110:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you from the Sheraton Hotel on Canal St in New Orleans. I have a room looking over the French Quarter. It’s a big convention hotel -- not my usual choice. But the price is good, it has a great gym and I’m about 5 stays away from making Starwood Platinum, so what the heck.</li>\n 	<li>I’m back to my usual commute -- Chicago to New Orleans -- after taking a quick jaunt out to LA last week. It is that time of year on the Gulf Coast when the weather gets a bit monotonous -- high of 91 degrees with a chance of afternoon thunderstorms. Repeat until Labor Day. But the thunderstorms are tending to be earlier than last year when they seemed to roll in about 4:30 -- right about the time when the inbound plane for my flight back to Chicago would be scheduled to arrive. While my flights home still aren’t arriving on time, I haven’t hit the big 2-4 hour downpour delays I would get last year. Not killing as much time in the airport bars, but I always appreciate New Orleans airport letting me to take me beer to the gate.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em>Gargantua</em> by Admiral Bob (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/46361 Ft: My Free Mickey, Martijn de Boer</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Flying through LAX last week reminded me of what a dump that airport is -- or I guess I should say key parts of it. Flying out of there last Thursday morning, it took me a half-hour in the Hertz bus to get to the United terminal -- P7 -- because of access road traffic which is driven by this odd concept of a bunch of little terminals arranged in a U around short term parking garages. No problem is you’re flying Southwest in P1; really lousy if you’re going out American in P5 or United in P6 or P7. Annoying, but it gets really dumpy when you get inside. There’s not enough room in each of the little terminals to properly handle post-9/11 security, so small security stations are dotted over the terminals with lines snaking down the corridors. Given that LAX is a major gateway to international traffic from Asia, it’s fair to compare LAX to Singapore and Beijing -- much newer airports, yes, but the LAX experience ends up looking like the 4th circle of Hell comparatively. Can’t be a great thing for the US tourism industry.</li>\n 	<li>In the <a title=\"Podcast #109 — ‘Round the World in 8 Days; Beijing Mass Transit\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/06/07/podcast-109-round-the-world-in-8-days-beijing-mass-transit-2/\">last episode</a>, I updated my thoughts on using Twitter as a concierge service, or at least another way into airlines’ customer service groups. A couple of weeks back, the Wall Street Journal had a good <a href=\"http://online.wsj.com/articles/airlines-take-to-twitter-to-keep-world-informed-1406125253\">article</a> about airlines’ use of Twitter. They had an interesting graphic showing the differences in response times between airlines. American Airlines was the top, responding to 80% of customer queries within 15 minutes and 99% within an hour. KLM, which has made a big push into social media, was much lower, responding to 12% within 15 minutes, 64% within an hour, taking a full day to get up to 99%. Of course, as we talked about last time, it’s one thing to quickly press the button on a canned responses like United’s ubiquitous “No one dislikes delays more than us”, it’s a whole other thing to do something meaningful. Check out the detailed show notes on the TravelCommons web site for a link to the article.</li>\n 	<li>Also in the <a title=\"Podcast #109 — ‘Round the World in 8 Days; Beijing Mass Transit\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/06/07/podcast-109-round-the-world-in-8-days-beijing-mass-transit-2/\">last episode</a>, I mentioned my big technology switch -- from my iPhone 5 to an HTC One. The main reason for the switch was battery life. I got tired of being psychotic about battery life -- stalking airport gate areas for an outlet so I could top off my battery before getting on the plane. Last month, Samsung Mobile captured that hassle perfectly in a <a href=\"youtu.be/mzMUTrTYD9s%20\">video</a> about “wall huggers”. It’s on YouTube -- I put the <a href=\"youtu.be/mzMUTrTYD9s%20\">link</a> in the show notes. Check it out. It’s painfully close to my reality with the iPhone. But not with the HTC One. The battery life is great, even with the larger screen.</li>\n 	<li>One thing that has bitten me recently with that change is the Android version of American Airlines’ app. I always use the phone apps for boarding passes -- one less piece of paper to keep track of, one less line to stand in if I couldn’t print it at home. I’ve never had a problem until a couple of months ago. I was boarding a flight to New Orleans, put my phone on the reader, heard the beep, the gate agent waved me through, and I sat in my seat. A bit later during the boarding process, I looked at my screen again and saw that the app had refreshed and no longer showed a seat number on the boarding pass. Hmmm, that doesn’t seem good. And I was right. Somehow, my boarding must not have registered and so, 10 minutes before the flight, they flushed me as a no-show and gave my seat to a stand-by passenger. Unfortunately for her, I was in my seat, but because I didn’t have a paper boarding pass, I couldn’t prove that it was my seat. Lucky for me, the gate agent remembered me -- it was a small regional jet --and said “Oh, this happens a lot”. I kept the seat, but the flight was delayed about 15 minutes while they figured it all out. I never had that happen with American’s iPhone app, but then again, it hasn’t happened since on the Android app. Maybe they fixed in in out of the updates they pushed out, but I usually grab a paper boarding pass on American when I have the time.</li>\n 	<li>And I don’t know about you all, but I haven\'t looked at Skymall or any of the other seat back pocket air magazines since the FAA allowed use of tablets &amp; smartphones during takeoffs and landings. I always have a book or two on my tablet -- right now I’m pounding through “The War that Ended Peace”, Margaret MacMillian’s history of the lead up to World War I. I also download the daily edition of the Chicago Tribune -- they have an HTML5 web app that shows you each page of the physical paper; you then tap an article to read it. The app is pretty good, sometimes a bit fiddly, but it lets you download the content for offline reading -- perfect for a flight. The Wall Street Journal’s Android app used to let you do the same thing and so I’d read that too, but earlier this year they “upgraded” the app and took away the ability to download a day’s paper. Still trying to think how they qualified that as an upgrade.</li>\n 	<li>I saw a guy come onto a flight last week with a hanging suit bag. Wow! That was a throwback. Even the flight attendant looked at him kinda funny when he asked to hang it in the front closet. Which was a very typical thing -- in the ‘90’s. You’d angle for early boarding so you had a chance for hanging space in the front closet. You see guys pushing all the bags to one end so he could fit his in -- not even really needing to hang it; just staying put from the pressure of the other bags. The whole business casual trend expanded the fight -- moving it out of the front galley to the entire plane aisle with rolling bags. I can’t remember the last time I used a hanging bag. I have my cleaners fold my shirts so they’re easy to pack, and then I use them (with their cardboard inserts) to cushion the folds of my slacks so they don’t wrinkle. Even on those rare occasions when I wear a suit, I fold it and put it in my rolling bag. It’s certainly a lot easier on the shoulder and back. And just a lot less awkward. I could never figure out a really good way to carry gym shoes in my hanging bag.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any travel experiences -- technology or otherwise, or just general observations, thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons\">Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em>A Foolish Game</em> by Zep Hurme (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/zep_hurme/46448</li>\n</ul>\n<strong> Regional Jets Are Ruining My Life</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>One Wednesday afternoon in June, I had a particularly difficult time getting from Memphis to New Orleans. First, I felt my phone vibrate with multiple text messages while I was refueling my rental car at a particularly dicey gas station just north of the airport. I had a pretty good idea what was up -- United and TripIt were simultaneously notifying me that my flight was cancelled. I got on the phone to Amex. They were able to jam me onto a full US Air flight to Charlotte with a connection back to New Orleans. Bit of a zig zag, but OK. I returned the rental car. Just as I pulled my boarding pass out of the kiosk, I saw them update my flight -- 2 hr maintenance delay. Which would mean I’d miss the connection. I go up to the desk. Two agents -- one from USAir, one from American (I’m seeing the New American form right in front of me) -- bang on their terminal for a couple of minutes. “OK, we’ll put you in first class to DFW where you’ll connect to New Orleans” Great -- better routing with an upgrade to boot! I get to the gate. A colleague calls me. As we’re talking, I see them post a 2 hr delay -- weather in Texas -- which means I’d have 15 min for my connection if everything worked perfectly. Which it wasn’t going to because a delay with a round number -- like 2 hrs -- means they have no idea when the plane will actually leave</li>\n 	<li>That’s it! I give! Three airlines fail me in the span of 60 minutes. I can take a hint. I wasn’t meant to fly to New Orleans today. However, I did need to get there. So I fired up Google Maps. 5½ hour drive. Fine. I have nothing else going on tonight. I load the Hertz app, book a car, and walk back out of the terminal.</li>\n 	<li>I drive to the river front to get a decent dinner -- the food quality in Memphis airport, like the flight selection, have cratered since Delta shut down its hub operations there. While eating at the bar, I get the text from American -- the DFW flight cancelled. Now there’s a surprise.</li>\n 	<li>The drive to New Orleans to simple, straightforward -- and dull. I-55 south through Mississippi, into Louisiana until it dead ends into I-10. Take a left. You’re in New Orleans. At least that was the plan. South of Jackson, traffic comes to a complete halt. People are getting out of their cars -- never a good sign. I get out, look around an 18-wheeler and see a 10-ft column of fire. This is not a good sign. I-55 here is 2 lanes each way with a narrow shoulder. They’re not squeezing us past that. Eventually, after making an 8-point turn, I join a line of cars heading the back north along the shoulder -- one tire on the pavement, one tire in the wet red clay. After 10 minutes, I get to a gravel crossover that I don’t think will bottom out my rental Ford. I hit the frontage road, bypass the burning car, get back on a now empty I-55 and eventually pull into my hotel at 2am. Another glorious day of travel that I’m sure will inspire envy in all my Facebook friends.</li>\n 	<li>Now Memphis seems to be an extreme example -- a woman on my project is commuting weekly from New York and she’s yet to have an on-time, no-drama journey. Indeed, she’s spent a Thursday night in every Midwest hub city. But as airlines close hub operations in mid-size cities like Memphis and Cleveland, replacing mainline service with regional jets from smaller operators you’ve never heard -- ExpressJet or Endeavour Air -- getting to and from these cities just sucks.</li>\n 	<li>At first, I thought it was a United problem. After all, they’d canceled my flight down to New Orleans day before, and then the next week, they delayed my flight to Columbus, OH 2 hours because the flight before it was late getting off the gate, and then once our plane got to the gate, it needed to have a wheel bearing fixed before it could travel on. I mean, at some point, why does United bother posting actual departure and arrival times? Why not just post an AM or a PM and shoot for that? It’s not too far from what they’re doing now.</li>\n 	<li>But as I looked at the flights that were really screwing up my life, they weren’t the main United or American or Delta flights, they were the regional jets. My United flights to and from LAX last week were fine. But if I’d been flying a regional jet, I would’ve had a problem on the return leg. The original plane had a mechanical issue -- remember, this is United -- but they were able to get a replacement, so we left LAX on time and even got into ORD early. If it had been United Express by, say, GoJet, I would’ve been scrambling after yet another cancelled flight because they don’t have spare jets.</li>\n 	<li>I’m 5,000 miles away from hitting a million miles on United (I have over 2.5 million on American), but sitting at the bar that night in Memphis having dinner before my ill-fated drive, I tweeted out of pure frustration -- “Really @united? Two cancelled flights in two days? I\'ll never hit 1M miles when you cancel every flight I\'m on…” To which, of course, they pressed the button on reply #76 -- “No one dislikes flight cancellations more than we do. Do you need help with rebooking? Thanks.” My response the next morning -- “Unless you too had to drive 5+ hrs and get to your destination at 2am, you can\'t hate flight cancellations more than me…” No response… except from Dan, a longtime TravelCommons listener who chimed in -- “Sounds like an upcoming podcast topic”. Indeed it is, Dan. Some good had to come of it...</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em>Melt Away</em> by Kara Square (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/mindmapthat/46605</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Visas Hassles</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Over the past couple of episodes I’ve been talking about my Asian travels -- to India and China -- which has forced me to become knowledgeable about something that doesn’t often affect US travelers -- visas.</li>\n 	<li>When US travelers decide to cross their border, if they have a passport, they’re typically good to go. When I checked Wikipedia yesterday, US passport holders <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_requirements_for_United_States_citizens\">can visit</a> 174 countries without having to buy a visa in advance, tied at the top of the “travel freedom” ranking with Germany, Sweden, United Kingdom, and Finland.</li>\n 	<li>But this seemed to be the year for visas for me. My son doing a semester abroad in China, then us visiting him in the Spring, and then me going to India on business a couple of months ago. I just slipped out of another trip to China -- business this time, but I figured I’d risk it since my tourist visa is valid until next Spring.</li>\n 	<li>If you live in a major city -- New York, DC, LA, Chicago -- it’s not too bad because most of the big visa-requiring countries have consulates there. Otherwise, you’re mailing your passport away, or paying extra for a courier service. And paying to fly to the consulate for an interview if you don’t have a plain vanilla visa application -- like anyone of Pakistani descent applying for an Indian visa.</li>\n 	<li>But even walking to the consulates, like I can do in Chicago, is not always so straightforward. Research is important. Hitting the consulate web site, know their hours and what paperwork they require. Our visit for my son’s Chinese student visa was amazingly smooth. We had all the paperwork, had it organized, knew the consulate closed for lunch, so we showed up early. Boom, boom, boom -- we were in and out in 30 minutes. Four days later, we went back, paid, and picked up his passport with his visa.</li>\n 	<li>Getting visas for our visit to Beijing in March was less smooth. There was a little hiccup in the application. Their website said we needed proof of a return flight and hotel reservations. I had all that, all organized. But what wasn’t clear on the website was that I needed a copy for each visa. I’d printed out one copy of the hotel reservation for the one room that the three of us were staying in. I needed three copies -- one for each application. I’m not the first one who’d made that mistake. The woman pointed to the copying machine. Luckily, I had a pocket full of change.</li>\n 	<li>Picking them up was also a bit more of a hassle. First, because it was Spring Break season, there were a number of teachers picking up batches of passports for school trips. I think the guy two positions in front of me had 50 passports. A minor inconvenience -- until their credit card machine broke. The web site was adamant -- no personal checks, no cash accepted; just credit cards or cashier’s checks. And how many people know where to get a cashiers check anymore. So everything came to a screeching halt. “We’ll take cash if you have it,” one of the women said. But I didn’t bring any because it’s $140 a head -- $420 for all of us. I look at my watch -- it’s just about closing time. I ask the guard, “Will you let me back in if I make a run down to the ATM for some cash?” “Make it quick,” he said. I sprint down, around the corner, tap out the cash machine, and sprint back up. The guard lets me back in even though he’d locked the doors for the day. Everyone’s sorta milling around, not knowing what to do. The guy who had been in front of me was there to pick up 10 visas. No way he was coming up with $1,400 in cash quickly. I politely make my way to the window. “Cash?” I ask, giving her the fresh stack of ATM 20’s. She counts them twice, gives me my passports and I’m on my way.</li>\n 	<li>But this was nothing compared to the cluster that was the Indian visa process. Which was a real surprise to me because four years ago, when I went for my last Indian visa, it was the pinnacle of efficiency -- I dropped everything off at 8am and at 5pm received a text that my passport was ready for pickup. Impressive. Phenomenal. I used to rave about it. Not so much any more.</li>\n 	<li>But based on last time, I thought this would be simple. I put all the documents together and, because I was traveling, had my wife take it downtown for me. “No worries,” I said, “Drop it off, do some shopping, grab lunch, and it should be done”. 10am my wife calls me -- “They need your flight reservations”. “I haven’t made them yet,” I told her, “They specifically say on their website not to book flights until you get the visa.” “Hold on,” she said and talked to the clerk. “Yeah, I guess things have changed. She’ll hold onto your application until you e-mail her your flight info. Oh, and she’s going to charge you another $30 for an expedite fee.” “Wait,” I said, “according to the website, I’m OK on their deadlines -- I shouldn’t need them to expedite.” “Hold on,” she said again. “Yeah, I guess those deadlines have changed too.” Unfortunately, I was only able to get a 1 year visa. If this visa expires before my next trip, I think I’ll send one of my staff in my place. I think I need to introduce some other Americans to the fine art of applying for visas.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #110</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/\">cc:Mixter</a></li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_110.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #110 — Regional Jets Ruining My Life; Visa Hassles','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-110-regional-jets-ruining-my-life-visa-hassles','','','2021-09-28 18:58:44','2021-09-28 23:58:44','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=1359',0,'post','',0),
(1364,1,'2014-08-12 15:06:32','2014-08-12 20:06:32','','pic-r-1402317187245','Plane is here; no mechanics in sight. Do I feel lucky?','inherit','open','open','','pic-r-1402317187245','','','2014-08-12 15:06:32','2014-08-12 20:06:32','',1359,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/pic-r-1402317187245.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(1380,1,'2014-10-12 16:40:15','2014-10-12 21:40:15','[caption id=\"attachment_1387\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/IMG_0002.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1387\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/IMG_0002-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Just a little snug for the next 14 hours...\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> It\'ll be a bit snug for the next 14 hours...[/caption]\n\nI tried to hold back, but I just couldn\'t. I <em>have</em> to finally weigh in on the seatback recline wars. I\'m stunned at the number of people who convert a couple of inches of seat movement into some sort of Manichean morality play. From that you can probably guess where I come out on this. On a much lighter side, I talk about finally taking Atlanta\'s MARTA subway from the airport and tagging on some beer hunting to some Midwest business travel. All this and more  at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_111.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #111:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL having, through nothing other than sheer blind luck, dodged the cancellations caused by fire and attempted suicide at the <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Air_Route_Traffic_Control_Center\">Air Route Traffic Control Center</a> in Aurora, IL. Wasn’t that a heck of a story. A guy living outside Chicago tips over the edge after being told he’s getting transferred to Hawaii. It usually happens the other way around, especially after last winter.</li>\n 	<li>And it’s still a mess. Kinda helped me with my decision to drive to Indianapolis last Friday. Indy is right on the cusp of the fly-vs-drive break point -- about 180 miles from Chicago but it’s straight, flat, and most of it has a 70 mph speed limit. Also pushed me to take a break from ORD this week. Aurora’s supposed to be back online Oct 13 which is the next airline ticket I have, so I hope someone is cracking the whip over there.</li>\n 	<li>This episode should sound better than the last one. I did some eBay shopping and significantly upgraded my recording rig. I’d been recording with an iRiver MP3 recorder/player and little condenser mic since the beginning of this podcast. Unfortunately, iRiver didn’t feel like upgrading the drivers from Windows XP to Windows 7 or 8, and when my last XP machine was converted to a VMWare image, it just got to be a hassle pulling the audio off of it. So I applied a firmware upgrade that was supposed to make it look like a regular jump drive, which it did, but it also reduced the gain, the volume on my mic to almost nothing. After struggling with it for a bit, I finally gave up. The last episode was recorded on my HTC One with a significant amount of massaging in Adobe Audition. But now, I think I’ve got something that’ll work. We’ll see how this goes.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/beyond7-revelations/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Miss America</em></a> by Beyond 7</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Regular listeners know that I always like to check out rapid transit to and from airports. On a trip to Atlanta last month, I finally decided to buck up and try <a href=\"http://www.itsmarta.com/\">MARTA</a>. I’ve flown into Atlanta for years, but always rented a car because I never did work in Atlanta, always some place between 10 o’clock and 2 o’clock on the I-285 beltway. Which is always lovely because the airport sits at 6 o’clock -- directly opposite of where I normally need to be. So my usual MO is to rent a car and grind it out through the traffic -- either straight up the city or around the beltway -- which is why I try very hard to avoid meetings in Atlanta. So anyway, on this particular Thursday, I caught the 6am flight from ORD, hitting Atlanta right at the tail end of the morning rush. I guess I was being a bit passive aggressive on this trip, but I didn’t book a rental car. I just didn’t want to deal with the traffic. I had planned on taking a cab, but walking past the MARTA station in the airport, I plugged the office address into Google Maps and hit the Transit button, and found it was a straight shot up the Red Line and then a 5 minute walk from the station. For a $2.50 fare, it seemed worth a shot. And it was. The toughest part was trying to figure out which station exit to use so that I got on the correct side of the six-lane divided street I needed to walk along. I got it wrong the first time. I was pleasantly surprised, though, to find sidewalks -- not a common amenity in office park land. The lone pedestrian sprinting across a couple of intersections to avoid turning cars, I got to my destination without fighting traffic and more than an order of magnitude cheaper than cab fare.</li>\n 	<li>I got an interesting reaction from people when I told them about my morning’s MARTA journey. “Well that’s adventuresome” and “What time were you on? Rush hour? That’s OK. I wouldn’t try that after dark though” I never felt unsafe or uncomfortable during my ride. But then again, I never felt unsafe on train rides in Brussels -- until my backpack was stolen. I never felt unsafe on DC’s Metro system -- until the day a woman reached across the aisle, tapped my arm and strongly suggested that I put my iPad away. But I dunno, MARTA seemed as safe as the Metro system or the L in Chicago. And it was a damn sight cleaner than BART in San Francisco. I’ll take it again when I have to go back down to Atlanta in two weeks.</li>\n 	<li>Especially after I sprung the dollar for the Breeze card, which is the contactless/touch card that MARTA now requires you to buy instead of issuing the little paper cards like New York or DC. The fare machine concierge assured me “It’s good for 10 years!” Yes, provided I remember to bring it with me next time. These things are starting to stack up. I have a London Oyster card in some desk drawer; I forgot how much that card cost me. Chicago’s <a href=\"https://www.ventrachicago.com/\">Ventra </a>card cost $5(!) which they say will be put back on the card if I register it -- which I did but didn’t see any $5 credit. Maybe all these new cards are great for regular riders, but for the minority like me -- the occasional rider -- it’s a bit of a pain; more cost, more confusion, and a growing stack of plastic in my desk drawer. The Chicago system theoretically lets you use the NFC capabilities of newer Android phones like my HTC One to tap and pay with Google Wallet. I’m planning to check that out the next time I take the L. Would’ve been nice to know before I sprung the $5, but I’ll look harder for that when I’m in a new city. Of course, we could always go back to the cash box, like they still have on the New Orleans streetcars. But there I’m find myself fishing around for a quarter to drop the exact change into the cash box. For all the whining, it’s still better than renting a car.</li>\n 	<li>In <a title=\"Podcast #107 — Serious About Hotel Reviews; TSA Gets Something Right!\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/01/29/podcast-107-serious-about-hotel-reviews-tsa-gets-something-right/\">episode #107</a> earlier this year, I talked about the checklist I run through when I decide to review a hotel on TripAdvisor -- the bathroom, room size, workout room, location, service quality. And it’s that last one -- service quality -- that I really see the difference. It’s not at the front desk. Hotels have their training and employee selection programs nailed. It’s been a long time since I’ve been treated with anything less than enthusiastic hospitality. No, where it falls down is the back of the house. The latest example was a couple of weeks ago. I check in around 5:30. Walking up to my room, I see dirty room service dishes -- the little ketchup and mustard bottles suggest it was the remnants of a burger. I get ready to turn around -- I bet they gave me an occupied room by mistake. But nope, my key worked and the room was clean and empty. Hmmm… I call down to the front desk to tell them about the dishes. The very nice woman who just checked me in greeted me by name and apologize profusely, saying she’d send someone up right away. I walk out for dinner. I come back a couple hours later -- dishes are still there. I go out a bit later to grab a beer -- dishes are still there. I come back -- yup, the burger carcass is still there. Now I’m thinking, what else is lying around. I call back down to the nice woman. I’ll be checking out tomorrow morning.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any travel experiences -- thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons\">Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/westexit-extra/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>On Condition of Anonymity</em></a> by the West Exit</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Last Word (Hopefully) On Seatback Recline Wars</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>I’ve resisted doing this topic, but how can I claim to be doing a podcast that gives the “voice of the traveler” and is “more about the journey than the destination” and not take some cut at whole seatback recline option explosion? Because it seems like no one else -- hard core traveler or rank amateur -- has kept their thoughts to themselves. The sheer amount of time and words -- physical or cyber -- devoted to this topic has been amazing.</li>\n 	<li>Let’s separate the specific from the general. First, let’s recap the incident that lit the fuse. A guy on his last leg home from Moscow, sitting in United’s Economy Plus, uses a Knee Defender to keep the woman in front of him from reclining her seat so he can get some work done on his laptop. She flags down the flight attendant about her seemingly malfunctioning seat, the flight attendant notices the Knee Defender and tells the guy to take it off. He does, and the woman slams her seat back to full recline. When she goes to the rest room, he pushes her seat back up and puts his Knee Defender back in. She comes back, pissed that she can’t recline her seat, tosses her glass of Sprite at him. The pilot makes an unscheduled landing to them both off the plane where, surprisingly, neither of them are rung up on charges.</li>\n 	<li>So the first thing to say is -- yes, these are two grown adults -- which is head-shakingly amazing. This would be out-of-bounds behavior at a ball park or a rock concert, let alone in a packed metal tube hurtling along at 600 mph at 36,000 feet. Now, that being said and in no way forgiving the woman, the guy was definitely the bigger pinhead in this escapade.</li>\n 	<li>The guy is 6’-1” -- about my size so I’ve got a pretty good frame of reference. Sitting in United’s Economy Plus, he had a extra 3-4 inches over the folks in the back of the plane. It’s roomy as coach seats go. When I’m flying United, I’ll regularly choose an E+ middle seat over a regular E aisle seat. From first hand experience, I call bull on his premise that he needed to use the Knee Defender to work on his laptop -- unless he has an undisclosed medical condition requiring him to type with completely extended arms, or his arms are long enough so he can tie his shoes without bending over.</li>\n 	<li>And moving from the specific case to the general discussion (argument?) about the morality of seat reclines, why does this guy (or anybody) think their right to work on a flight trumps another passenger’s right to comfort? I got it -- lots of people need those 2, 3, 4 hours to crank out stuff. But likewise, when I’m catching a 6:30am flight out Monday morning, I need to an hour or two of sleep to make it through the end of the day. And I don’t know of anyone who can sleep without reclining their seat. Which again get me to the question -- what’s with people casting this as some sort of Manichean morality play -- sitting straight up -- Good (morally upright?); space-hogging slouching recliners -- pure Evil.</li>\n 	<li>Of course, there are ways around this -- they just cost money. If you need the extra space to work -- or sleep -- then pay the extra money for a seat in something like United’s Economy Plus or American’s Main Cabin Extra -- or flight them enough to earn status and you get it for free. As I said earlier, I regularly give up shoulder space for leg room. Unfortunately, it’s a choice I have to make more often than I like, booking flights at the last minute in this age of high plane utilization. Need more space, get more status or buy a more expensive ticket that will get you to the top of the queue for an upgrade. Or just buy the 1st class ticket you need the space.</li>\n 	<li>But that’s not the story we want to hear -- we want more space than we’re willing to pay for. Airlines are pushing seats closer together because travelers shop purely on price -- a seat is a commodity. Years ago, American Airlines tried to differentiate themselves on legroom, pulling out rows of seats to increase pitch. I would fly those planes whenever I could. Unfortunately for American, I was in the small minority. They got their clocks cleaned and eventually had to put those rows back in. Most travelers don’t pay attention to seat pitch. They just click on the cheapest fare and then bitch about the lack of space.</li>\n 	<li>Don’t want to pay for the extra space, then do what our guy did when he had to get home after his unscheduled connection in Chicago. He flew Spirit. Their seats don’t recline.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/solace-medusa/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Subtle Vice</a> </em>by Solace</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Sneaking In Some Craft Beer Tourism</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>As regular podcast listeners <a title=\"Podcast #101 — Future of Mileage Tracking Tools; Searching for Local Food and Craft Beer\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/10/25/podcast-101-future-of-mileage-tracking-tools-searching-for-local-food-and-craft-beer/\">know</a>, I’m pretty much all-in with the US craft brew explosion. I was drinking Sierra Nevada in the ‘80’s while\n\n[caption id=\"attachment_1388\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/2012-10-11-16.11.25.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1388\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/2012-10-11-16.11.25-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Patron Saint of Craft Brewers\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Patron Saint of Craft Brewers[/caption]\n\nskiing at Lake Tahoe, got deep into Belgian beers in the early ‘90’s when I would travel to Brussels a half-dozen times a year while selling to the pharmaceutical industry, started homebrewing in the mid ‘90’s, and have just continued onward.</li>\n 	<li>The listeners who I’m friends with on <a href=\"https://untappd.com/\">Untappd</a> can see that I’ve checked in over 2,200 unique beers. It’s a passion that one could arguably say has tipped over a bit to obsession. So when I had a couple of Midwest trips recently -- I mentioned the Indy run, but also had a couple days in St Louis in September -- rather than bolting out of town immediately after my meetings, I did a bit of craft beer tourism, hitting some of the local microbreweries. In St Louis, where I had a bit more time, I hit <a href=\"http://urbanchestnut.com/home\">Urban Chestnut</a> for a dunkelweiss and a board full of knockwurst, stewed apples, cabbage, and pumpernickel bread -- which I managed to consume during a conference call with the judicious use of the mute button. I had some great sour beers at <a href=\"http://www.perennialbeer.com/\">Perennial Ales</a>, and then at <a href=\"http://www.thecivillife.com/\">Civil Life Brewing</a>, a very English pub-like place (not in the ersatz way of Union Jacks and Tube signs hanging around, but in the true sense of a pub -- a cozy local place) I had yet more encased meat -- a Hungarian bratwurst this time. Which was very pleasant change considering everything I’d eaten over the prior 48 hours had been from the Airport Marriott.</li>\n 	<li>In Indianapolis, I only had time for one stop and as it turned out, my meeting was 8 minutes away from<a href=\"http://www.sunkingbrewing.com/\"> Sun King Brewing</a>. I followed the line of growler-toting folks into the brewery. No taproom, but they gave me tickets and bottle caps good for 6 small samples. They had a Friday sale on growlers, but I’m already long in glassware, and when’s the next time I’m gonna be in Indy? Instead, I bought a couple of 4-packs of the beers I liked best. Since I drove, I didn’t have to make that decision -- is the beer good enough to justify checking luggage?</li>\n 	<li>Nowadays most hotel bars will have at least one decent craft beer on tap or available in bottles. The St Louis Airport Marriott had a nice selection with about 4 local draft handles including a <a href=\"http://schlafly.com/\">Schlafly </a>pumpkin beer -- not my favorite style, but you gotta give them props for giving it a tap. The Sheraton on Canal St in New Orleans has stepped up its game -- adding 1-2 more local taps in addition to the ubiquitous Abita tap. But on that 4th or 5th week in the same hotel -- or more; I just made Starwood Platinum at the Canal St Sheraton -- even those additional taps start to get boring. Luckily, some of the upscale grocery stores like Whole Foods are also tapped into the craft beer trend and sell single beers. On my first day in New Orleans, I tend to swing by <a href=\"https://shop.rouses.com/\">Rouse’s</a>, kind of a local version of Whole Foods, grab a couple of good beers and take them back to the Sheraton. The first time I did this, though, I had a problem -- there wasn’t a bottle opener in the room; these craft beers don’t typically come in twist-offs. I’m rummaging around, but nothing. It kinda pulled me up short -- when did hotels stop stocking their rooms with bottle openers? I go down to the front desk. They’re pretty puzzled too -- they start rummaging around their drawers. “Maybe you can borrow one from the bar?” Ever since, I always pack a bottle opener in my backpack. Just another thing to keep in the travel kit.</li>\n 	<li>Some airports are serving up great beer. I found two microbrewery joints at BWI, and I always try to swing by the <a href=\"http://www.greatlakesbrewing.com/home\">Great Lakes Brewery</a> spot in CLE. But in my last trip through ATL, a bartender saw me struggling with her Bud/Coors/Sam Adams draft selection. “Go down to the end of the terminal,” she said, “there’s a new craft beer bar just opened up” Great! I wheel my bag down the terminal but pull up short of the bar. This new beer bar is a smoking bar! That’s right -- I’m in the South. I watch the cigarette smoke billow out under the door. I turn around a walk away. Even an obsession has its limits.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #111</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>The bridge music is from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Magnatune</a>, the <em>we are not evil</em> label. <em>Miss America</em> by Beyond 7, <em>On Condition of Anonymity</em> by the West End, and <em>Subtle Vice</em> by Solace. You can find these and more at <a href=\"http://magnatune.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">magnatunes.com</a>.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_111.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #111 — Seatback Recline Wars; Craft Beer Tourism','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-111-seatback-recline-wars-craft-beer-tourism','','','2021-09-28 19:00:21','2021-09-29 00:00:21','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=1380',0,'post','',0),
(1387,1,'2014-10-12 10:57:01','2014-10-12 15:57:01','No leg room in AA ORD-PEK flight','Not Much Legroom','Just a little snug for the next 14 hours...','inherit','open','open','','img_0002','','','2014-10-12 10:57:01','2014-10-12 15:57:01','',1380,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/IMG_0002.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(1388,1,'2014-10-12 11:00:09','2014-10-12 16:00:09','Sculpture in 3 Floyds\' parking lot, Munster, IN','Patron Saint of Craft Brewers','Patron Saint of Craft Brewers','inherit','open','open','','2012-10-11-16-11-25','','','2014-10-12 11:00:09','2014-10-12 16:00:09','',1380,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/2012-10-11-16.11.25.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(1398,1,'2014-11-22 18:10:01','2014-11-23 00:10:01','[caption id=\"attachment_1402\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"225\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/IMG_0159.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1402\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/IMG_0159-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"That\'s Gonna Make for a Long Walk\" width=\"225\" height=\"300\" /></a> Need More Taxes To Fix This[/caption]\n\nHere\'s a new episode to keep you occupied if you’re stuck in a line somewhere while traveling Thanksgiving week. There are tips for the non-frequent traveler on how to avoid major airport faux pas and a review of how travel taxes will soak you when you get to your destination. We also talk about a high-tech suitcase that\'s blown through its Indiegogo funding campaign, hackers emptying out Hilton Honors accounts, and an overseas WiFi session that emptied out someone\'s wallet.  You can listen to all this and more using the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_112.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n<!--more-->\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #112:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside Chicago, IL. Giving you something new to listen to if you’re stuck in a line somewhere while traveling Thanksgiving week. Don’t look for me, though. I got home Weds night and won’t be traveling again until the crowds clear out.</li>\n 	<li>I was going to open up this episode with kind of a joke sponsorship, something like -- “Brought to you by People Express, thanking Spirit Airlines for making people nostalgic for us and Newark’s North Terminal”. For anyone old enough to have flown People Express in the early ‘80’s, I thought it would be a bit of a chuckle.</li>\n 	<li>But last week, walking through New Orleans airport, I saw a People Express counter. Wait, what? Turns out that some group picked up the name for a new <a href=\"https://www.flypex.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">airline</a> hubbing out of Newport News airport in southern Virginia. Service started this summer only to stop three months later after a ground truck hit one of their two planes. They were supposed to relaunch last month, but that didn’t happen. And then last month, Newport News airport <a href=\"http://wtkr.com/2014/11/18/whats-next-for-peoplexpress/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">evicted</a> them for failure to turn over the Passenger Facility Charge that People Express collected on ticket sales over the summer.</li>\n 	<li>So maybe my fake promo should go the other way, with Spirit thanking the new People Express for letting Spirit say to their passengers “Hey, you could do worse…”</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Zapac/25046\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><i>You are (funky mix)</i></a> by Zapac</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>A couple of comments from the last episode…</li>\n 	<li>On the TravelCommons’ Facebook <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">page</a>, Steve Frick said “Listened to your latest episode last week flying into Atlanta. As walked down Concourse A, I saw TAP,  the craft beer bar you mentioned...it looked like an aquarium full of smokers”. I rummaged around the file folders of my mobile phone and found a picture of that bar which I posted on Facebook under Steve’s post. He nailed it. I couldn’t have come up with a better description.</li>\n 	<li>Following up on the description of my first MARTA ride from ATL up north, Dan Gradwohl sent a note pointing to the website <a href=\"http://toandfromtheairport.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">toandfromtheairport.com</a>. He just returned from 5 weeks in the Balkans and said used the website for all those trips, and has used it to plan upcoming trips to Panama City (the one in Panama, not on the Redneck Riviera) and Santiago, Chile. I’d used it a couple of years ago when looking at rapid transit from Beijing airport into the city (I ended up punting and taking a cab, an adventure in its own right that I describe in episode #109). It’s a great resource, but, as you can imagine, tough to keep updated. Looking at the page for ORD, the train section doesn’t reflect the recent surcharge for L rides originating at ORD, and the taxi section doesn’t describe the logistical differences between getting a cab into the city (just get into the cab rank) vs. one to the suburbs -- which involves calling one of the cab companies, getting an assigned number, and then waiting one lane over, unless you want to pay meter-&amp;-a-half to one of the city cabs -- Welcome to Chicago.  I sent a note a week ago to the site owner, Steve Pells, with these updates but haven’t seen them reflected yet on the site.</li>\n 	<li>Turning to my <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Twitter</a> notifications, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/chris2x\">Chris Christensen</a> of the Amateur Traveler podcast sent a quick Twitter message on last episode’s seat recline rant -- “I agree with your assessment of the knee defender story, I am 6\' 3\" and can work on a laptop in <a href=\"https://twitter.com/united\">United</a>\'s Economy Plus seats”</li>\n 	<li>Last month, Arnoud Heijnis pointed me to the <a href=\"http://design-milk.com/bluesmart-smart-carry-luggage/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Bluesmart carry-on bag</a>, the roller board with its own app, allowing you to track it, lock it, and getting notifications when it moves out of range from you. It rocketed past its $50,000 Indiegogo fundraising goal. The last time I checked, they had $1.1M in pledges. The crowdfunding closes Mon, Nov 24. Their Indiegogo <a href=\"https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/bluesmart-world-s-first-smart-connected-carry-on\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">page</a> is really good -- nice video, good description of the product, timeline laying out the steps between now and their July shipping date. They definitely hit that sweet spot of travel technology lust. Arnoud and I traded tweets on whether or not to pull the trigger. Arnoud makes a good point about wanted to see how the inside is laid out -- there’s no picture of that on the Indiegogo page. I’m in the market for a new suitcase anyways. But can I wait until July? I’ll probably pull the trigger this weekend before it closes.</li>\n 	<li>As I continue to prattle on about the wonders and benefits of TSA PreCheck, I came up with a new one early Monday morning -- since I don’t have to take my shoes off, I don’t have to risk waking my wife up by turning on the light to make sure I don’t pick a pair of socks with a hole in it. Yeah, it’s a nit, but it’s one less little thing to spike my morning. And I do have to give the TSA credit for adapting to its popularity. Monday morning in ORD’s Terminal 1 -- the United terminal -- definitely rush hour with all the consultants flying out to their client sites -- they had 4 lanes of PreCheck, shuttling the non-PreCheck Premiere fliers to another line nearby. It could’ve been ugly, but I was through in 5 minutes. I’ve bashed the TSA enough; I also want to give credit where credit is due.</li>\n 	<li>Don’t know if you caught the <a href=\"http://www.tnooz.com/article/ongoing-hiltons-loyalty-program-hackers-continue-selling-account-access/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">news</a> at the beginning of the month that the Hilton HHonors program was hit by hackers. After getting replacement credit cards sent to me after the Target and then the Home Depot breaches, I gotta say that I’ve become a bit complacent about these announcements. Hilton had weak security, allowing the use of a 4-digit PIN instead of a strong password, allowing is suspected to be a brute force attack -- not a problem with just 4 numbers. Once in, the hackers drained the accounts, most of them swapping points for gift cards, or selling the points on hacker forums for pennies on the equivalent dollar, though there were a couple of cases of thieves redeeming the points for nights -- one victim found that 250,000 of his points had been used to buy $1200 worth of nights at low-end Hilton brands along the East Coast. Hilton hasn’t said how many points they’ve had to reimburse.  Many people treat their award points accounts like savings accounts for travel -- banking miles or frequent sleeper points for a summer vacation. But until recently, airlines and hotels haven’t secured them with anything close to bank-like security. Hilton and Delta allowed 4-digit PINs (Delta is switching over to strong passwords), United still allows 6-character passwords. But it’s changing. Before Delta’s switch, I noticed American and Marriott forcing the use of slightly stronger 8-character passwords. And Hilton has now added a captcha to slow down brute force attacks. It’s certainly not banking-style 2-factor authentication, but it’s a start. Another good start would be to change all my travel site passwords to something other than ABC123.</li>\n 	<li>There was another <a href=\"http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/11/18/passenger-stuck-with-1171-wi-fi-bill-on-singapore-airlines-flight/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">story</a> I tweeted out this week involving in-flight WiFi. Some guy racked up an almost $1,200 bill checking e-mail and downloading PPT files on his LHR-SIN flight -- $29 for the initial 30 MB and over $1,100 in overage fees. The guy gets the e-mail receipt and is probably stunned. Then, this being the age of social media, he appears to have immediately created a little picture with his receipt and an Sing Air plane and posted it on Twitter with the first word in all caps -- Gouged! And then put together a blog post. The guy, Jeremy Gutsche, bills himself as Innovation Expert, Author, Keynote Speaker &amp; Chief Trend Hunter (CEO) at TrendHunter.com. If he’s that hip to trends, you’d expect him to know how expensive in-flight overseas internet connectivity is. The WiFi provider, OnAir, says he has to pay the bill saying that the process for purchasing its services is “entirely transparent.” Passengers can choose to end their sessions when they reach a certain price limit, a graphic shows data consumption at all times and users can disconnect whenever they want. Gutsche said he only sent some e-mail, uploaded a 4 MB PPT file and looked at 155 web pages. OnAir said “To consume several hundred megabytes during one flight takes much more than basic email viewing, for example downloading heavy attachments, cloud access and using Skype”. I think the cloud access might be the culprit. While I love having all my documents sync’d to the cloud -- to get at them from any device and for backup -- I’ve found that it can quickly chew up bandwidth. When I first got my Verizon WiFi hot spot, I found myself easily chewing through 6-10 GB and just couldn’t figure it out. Until I remembered that I had my 2 GB Outlook archive pst file set to sync to Microsoft’s OneDrive. Now, when I switch over to the hot spot, I kill off the OneDrive sync app. No more nagging e-mails from Verizon. Would’ve been a much more expensive lesson at 35,000 ft.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any travel experiences -- technology or otherwise, or just general observations, thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/35879\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><i>Two Guitars</i></a> by Admiral Bob</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Holiday Airport Etiquette Refresher</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Unless you’ve been catatonic for the last week, you know that we’re creeping up to the busiest travel day of the year -- Travelgeddon as one local TV reporter called it, causing me to do an Elvis and throw something large at the hotel TV set (luckily today’s flat screens are much more resilient than tubes of Elvis’ day). Yes, the Wednesday before Thanksgiving is nigh.</li>\n 	<li>I also know this because, right around this time the TravelCommons mailbox gets filled with helpful story ideas from PR firms along the lines of this one from Energy Water -- “The day before Thanksgiving is the busiest travel day of the year—between the kids, pets and luggage holiday travel can be a hassle. These 6 travel must-haves take the stress out of traveling to see family and loved ones.”</li>\n 	<li>Top on the list, Energy Water, of course --which seems to be another twist on caffeinated water. Go ahead, give it to the kids and see how popular you are with your seat mates in the back of a Spirit Airlines plane. #2 -- noise cancelling headphones. Always a popular item, especially when surrounded by kids hyped up on Energy Water. #3 -- Therapeutic eye mask. Hmmm, I don’t see too many of those on my flight. #4 -- Portable power charger. One of those batteries-in-a-box things with a couple of USB ports at the end. I’d move this above the eye mask. Very handy, especially around holiday time when families will be huddling around airport electrical outlets the same way the forefathers would huddle around a fire while out on the hunt. #5 Packing cubes. Nah, never used them. They take up space that could be used for other clothes. #6 -- Portable UV germ sanitizer. Probably a bit more popular in these Ebola-paranoid times. Instead of swabbing everything down with hand sanitizer (which I’ve seen people do on airplanes), you just wave the UV wand over it. I dunno seems a bit too easy. I think I’d want to see some efficacy data before putting money down.</li>\n 	<li>So while there are tons of  “bring this” lists running around, I haven’t seen an advice list of what’s really the problem during holiday travel -- airport etiquette. It’s not just the crowds; it’s the crowds of, well what some might call “clueless” travelers. I think “amateur” is certainly a nicer and probably more accurate term. So for those amateur travelers, or folks who’ve been off the road for a bit and need a refresher, here’s a list of key etiquette tips, that from my recent travel observations, need to be said...</li>\n 	<li>Let’s start at the front of the airport -- the security line. The TSA is pushing PreCheck so you may get lucky and find it on your boarding pass. Or, a TSA person may randomly pull you out of the regular line and send you over to PreCheck. It’s your lucky day! Don’t spoil it, though, by not knowing the PreCheck rules. Put your phone away and read the signs -- don’t take off your shoes, don’t pull your liquids out, keep your jacket on, …. Read the signs and don’t slow it down for everyone else.</li>\n 	<li>If getting to your gate involves a moving platform or an escalator, stand to the right because people are walking -- usually quickly -- on the left. Traveling with others, you’ll naturally want to stand abreast, but then you’re blocking everyone else. Don’t do it unless you want to get run over.</li>\n 	<li>When you hit the airport Starbucks for your pre-flight coffee, remember that this isn’t your neighborhood Starbucks run by friendly Starbucks-trained baristas. It’s run by Sodexo Marriott that don’t care quite so much about coffee training. And they’re not quite as efficient. And there are usually a lot of people behind you in line. Keep your order to 3 adjectives or less. Tall skim latte is good. The half-decaf 3-pump no-foam vente vanilla latte -- not so much.</li>\n 	<li>Queuing up at the gate, don’t try to cheat on the boarding. Everyone’s looking at each others boarding passes, and airlines are telling their agents to get more strict. On almost every flight, I’ve seen the boarding agent direct someone over to the wall of shame to wait for their boarding group to be called. Don’t embarrass your family. Wait your turn.</li>\n 	<li>And if you’re using an electronic boarding pass on your smartphone, turn off auto-rotate. If you don’t, odds are that your screen will start oscillating between portrait and landscape while you’re trying to get it on the reader. Those readers are picky enough; you’ll delay the boarding line and quickly earn the enmity of your seatmates -- even before you sit shoulder-to-shoulder with them for 2-4 hours.</li>\n 	<li>And finally, and this is a big one, don’t put your small bag in the overhead. I don’t care if you checked a bag, don’t be that person who puts a purse or a briefcase in the overhead. Show a little holiday spirit -- put ‘em under the seat in front of you and leave space for one more roller board for the poor urchins in Groups 3, 4 or 5. When that person’s bag doesn’t get dropped on a tight connection through DFW, and they’re able to sit down to Thanksgiving dinner in something other than day-old sweats, they’ll thank you.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djlang59/22228\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Garden Of The Forking</em></a><em> </em>by J.Lang</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Travel Tax Pile-Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>I ought to title this episode “Mark’s Rant” ‘cause I’m rolling right from “Hey you, once-a-year traveler, get outta my airport” to “Hey you, politician, get outta my wallet.”</li>\n 	<li>Looking at my last couple of hotel bills in New Orleans -- room tax state, room tax city, occupancy tax, convention and visitors bureau assessment -- it adds 15% to my room rate; just a bit more than the regular New Orleans sales tax rate of 9%.</li>\n 	<li>Last year, a trade association -- the Global Business Travel Association -- put out a list of the top 10 worst cities for what they called “discriminatory travel taxes” -- those specifically on travel services (hotels, rental cars) above and beyond general sales taxes. New Orleans didn’t make the cut. Top on the list -- Portland, OR at $23/day in extra travel taxes. Boston is second at $19/day, with those welcoming Midwest cities of Indianapolis, Minneapolis, and Chicago rounding out the top 5.</li>\n 	<li>We all know why this happens -- ‘cause travelers don’t vote, at least in the places where they get charged these travel taxes. So for local politicians, raising the hotel or rental car tax generates much less blowback than a property tax bump. For example, of the 150 largest US cities, 120 of them have some sort of dedicated tax on hotel rooms. And there’s real money there -- $487 million of travel taxes in 2012 for New York City; $240 million for San Francisco. For hotel taxes, St Louis, surprisingly, has the highest rate -- 22%, with the average being about 13.5%. SFO has the highest rental car tax rate -- 24%; the average is 12.8%</li>\n 	<li>Of course, on top of these taxes, they stack additional line items. New Orleans’ hotel tax is 13%, just below the average. But then they tack on a dollar for city occupancy tax and another $2.50 to fund the convention and visitors bureau, which bumps up an average 13% tax rate to that 15% rate. I gotta say, though, that these add-ons pale in comparison to the 14% tourism tax that I got pegged with the last time I was up in Napa.</li>\n 	<li>Rental cars, though, are the worst. In one of my rare TravelCommons blog <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2009/10/25/skipping-the-rental-car/#more-176\">posts</a>, I looked at a string of 4 rental car receipts and saw taxes and state surcharges and airport facility charges increased my final bill by 27-51%!</li>\n 	<li>What do you do about it? Well, with rental cars, I work my damndest to skip them. In New Orleans, I pick hotels that let me walk to and from my client’s office -- skip the rental car fees <i>and</i> get exercise. A two-fer, ‘cause given the food in New Orleans, I need all the exercise I can get. Hotels -- it’s a bit tougher. You might think about using Airbnb, but that loophole is getting closed. Starting last month, Airbnb is collecting San Francisco’s 14% hotel tax and is getting squeezed by most other cities. And Couchsurfing, at least for business trips, is, for me, not worth the hassle.</li>\n 	<li>So whenever I pass the tourist kiosk in New Orleans airport, I always make sure I take something, even if I don’t really need it -- because I’m gonna be paying for it whether I take it or not.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #112</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_112.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #112 — Holiday Airport Etiquette; Travel Tax Pile-Up','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-112-holiday-airport-etiquette-travel-tax-pile-up','','','2021-09-28 19:01:15','2021-09-29 00:01:15','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=1398',0,'post','',0),
(1402,1,'2014-11-21 16:37:55','2014-11-21 22:37:55','','IMG_0159','That\'s Gonna Make for a Long Walk','inherit','open','open','','img_0159','','','2014-11-21 16:37:55','2014-11-21 22:37:55','',1398,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/IMG_0159.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(1410,1,'2014-12-22 10:04:27','2014-12-22 16:04:27','[caption id=\"attachment_1412\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/IMG_2794.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1412\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/IMG_2794-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Don\'t rub it in that you\'re going some place warm for Christmas\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> Don\'t rub it in that you\'re going some place warm for Christmas[/caption]\n\nComing into the holiday travel season, every travel news outlet publishes their <a title=\"Top 10 Holiday Travel Tips\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2013/12/19/top-10-holiday-travel-tips/\">top travel tips</a>. Rather than repeat the typical \"pack light\" and \"give yourself extra time\" nostrums, I decided to create an advice list of what’s really the problem during holiday travel -- airport etiquette.\n\nThe challenge of holiday travel isn\'t necessarily the crowds; it’s the crowds of what some road warriors might call “clueless” travelers. I think “amateur” is certainly a more charitable and probably more accurate term. So for those amateur travelers or for those who\'ve been off the road for a bit and need a refresher, here’s a list of etiquette tips that some holiday time reinforcement...\n<ul>\n 	<li>Let\'s start&nbsp;at the front of the airport with the security line. The TSA is pushing <a href=\"http://www.tsa.gov/tsa-precheck/frequently-asked-questions\">PreCheck</a>. You may get it on your boarding pass or&nbsp;a TSA person may randomly pull you out of the regular line and route&nbsp;you to the PreCheck line. It’s your lucky day! Don’t spoil it, though, by not knowing the PreCheck rules. Put your phone away and read the signs -- don’t take off your shoes, don’t pull your liquids out, keep your jacket on, …. Read the signs and don’t slow it down for everyone else.</li>\n 	<li>If getting to your gate involves a moving platform or an escalator, stand to the right because people are walking -- usually quickly -- on the left. Traveling with others, you’ll naturally want to stand abreast, but then you’re blocking everyone else. Don’t do it unless you want to get run over.</li>\n 	<li>When you hit the airport Starbucks for your pre-flight coffee, remember that this isn’t your neighborhood Starbucks run by friendly Starbucks-trained baristas. It’s run by Sodexo which doesn’t care quite as&nbsp;much about coffee training. And they’re not quite as efficient. And there are usually a lot of people behind you in line. Keep your order to 3 adjectives or less. Tall skim latte is good. The half-decaf 3-pump no-foam vente vanilla latte -- not so much.</li>\n 	<li>While queuing at the gate, don’t try to cheat on the boarding. Everyone’s looking at each others boarding passes, and airlines are telling their agents to get more strict. On almost every flight, I’ve seen the boarding agent direct someone over to the wall of shame to wait for their boarding group to be called. Don’t embarrass your family. Wait your turn.</li>\n 	<li>And if you’re using an electronic boarding pass on your smartphone, turn off auto-rotate. If you don’t, odds are that your screen will start oscillating between portrait and landscape while you’re trying to get it on the electronic reader. You’ll delay the boarding line and quickly earn the enmity of your seatmates -- even before you sit shoulder-to-shoulder with them for 2-4 hours.</li>\n 	<li>And finally, and this is a big one, don’t put your small bag in the overhead. I don’t care if you checked a bag. Don’t be that person who puts a purse or a briefcase in the overhead. Show a little holiday spirit -- put ‘em under the seat in front of you and leave space for one more roller board for the poor urchins in Groups 3, 4 or 5. When that person’s bag doesn’t get dropped on a tight connection through DFW, and they’re able to sit down to Thanksgiving dinner in something other than day-old sweats, they’ll thank you.</li>\n</ul>','Travel Tips — Holiday Airport Etiquette','','publish','closed','closed','','travel-tips-holiday-airport-etiquette','','','2021-09-28 19:01:50','2021-09-29 00:01:50','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=1410',0,'post','',0),
(1412,1,'2014-12-22 09:57:45','2014-12-22 15:57:45','','IMG_2794','Don\'t rub it in that you\'re going some place warm for Christmas','inherit','open','open','','img_2794','','','2014-12-22 09:57:45','2014-12-22 15:57:45','',1410,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/IMG_2794.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(1416,1,'2015-01-27 13:01:04','2015-01-27 18:01:04','[caption id=\"attachment_1418\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/IMG_2430.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1418\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/IMG_2430-300x214.jpg\" alt=\"Authentically lacking seating\" width=\"300\" height=\"214\" /></a> Authentically lacking seating...[/caption]\n\nCan frequent travelers just write off 2014? We all knew we were abused by the airlines with high prices and lousy service. I guess it\'s somewhat comforting to know that <a href=\"http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-best-and-worst-airlines-1421254623\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">analysis</a> of 2014\'s data proves us right. I\'m not sure there\'s much more we can do than enjoy the little things and hope 2015 is better. Once we get to where we\'re going, the restaurant food has gotten a lot better and with trends toward local sourcing and flavors, a lot more interesting.  We also talk about a couple pieces of hotel industry news -- hoping that IHG\'s acquisition of Kimpton doesn\'t screw up the \"anti-chain\", and continued puzzlement as to why Marriott wanted to <a href=\"http://www.wsj.com/articles/fcc-warns-hotels-others-not-to-block-personal-wi-fi-1422406537\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">block</a> your WiFi hot spots. You can listen to all this and more using the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_113.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking below.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #113:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you from the San Antonio Northwest Marriott in San Antonio, TX.  Doing a quick down-and-back after the flight cancellations caused by the New York snopocalypse that wasn’t blew up my travel plans for the beginning of this week.</li>\n 	<li>I tried to get a podcast done over the Christmas holiday, but the eating and drinking and then the sleeping got in the way. Funny how that works. But after my traditional 2 week hiatus from travel, my first trip of the new year -- on Monday the 5th -- started about right -- with an hour departure delay out of ORD. I couldn’t complain too much, though. The plane was there; the crew was there. We were just waiting on the fuel truck which the morning’s sub-zero temperature had slowed down a bit. Frustrating, but understandable. Walking down the jetway, the cold just took my breath away -- even in a heavy coat. I can imagine the guys running the fuel trucks needed more than a few warming breaks.</li>\n 	<li>I was heading down to New Orleans, though were the temps were about 50 degrees higher than Chicago’s single digits</li>\n 	<li>It is that time of year that you think a bit more <i>strategically</i> about your travel choices -- if you can. A bit more interested in making sales calls in Phoenix or San Antonio rather than, say, Minneapolis; preferring United’s Houston hub over Denver for transcontinental connections.</li>\n 	<li>Or vectoring through airports with good places to pass the time in case of delays. I’ve been connecting through Nashville recently on Southwest and stumbled across an outpost of Tootsie’s, the well-known downtown music joint, as I was walking through Concourse C -- complete with live music. And then in the middle of Concourse C -- near the walk-by Yazoo City Brewery stand -- is another stage with live music.</li>\n 	<li>Of course, you can have too much of a good thing. Like back in mid-November, United had a piano player in ORD at gate C17 playing Christmas tunes -- a 5-tune repertoire that got old real quick during a 45-min flight delay...</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/rompaey-eastern2/\"><em>Indian Blossom</em></a> by Ruben van Rompaey</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Spelunking through my Twitter feed…</li>\n 	<li>A couple of weeks before Christmas, I had to swing through New York on a last minute trip and, being near the holidays, the rates were absurd. It was a struggle to get a decent room for less than $300/night. It just amazes me, because I had paid less than $100/night earlier that week in New Orleans. Anyhow, I ended up at a Kimpton Hotel -- 70 Park Avenue -- in the Murray Hill neighborhood of Manhattan. I’ve been a big fan of the Kimpton chain since I set up camp for 3 months in the Hotel Monaco in downtown Portland a couple of years ago. Kimpton’s schtick is to be sort of an “anti-chain” -- embracing the quirks of each locale, each building rather than trying to replicate a standard brand experience; what Marriott has done with the refreshed Courtyards -- same furniture, same lobby, same footprint in each property. Kimpton makes a big point of being pet-friendly. In Portland, just about every morning I was there, the elevator would open and a dog would walk in (with their owner). Most were reasonably sized, but there were a couple of times some sort of bull mastiff walked in and made for tight quarters. Not a normal experience at your typical Starwood property. Another notable Kimpton quirk is their leopard print bathrobes. Again, a bit different from the typical white terry numbers you get elsewhere. Walking into my room at 70 Park, it was laid out on the bed. I posted a picture to Twitter -- and it drew quite the set of comments. They also have some fun loyalty perks, like “Raid the Minibar”. I got into New York late, so the $30 credit 70 Park gave me came in very handy -- especially since it was one of the better stocked mini-bars I’ve seen in a while. My only beef is that Kimpton isn’t in many of the place I’ve been going -- New Orleans, Memphis,.... I’m lifetime platinum on Marriott and platinum on Starwood, but I always look to stay at a Kimpton property when there’s one available.</li>\n 	<li>So I was very concerned the next week when I saw the <a href=\"http://travelcodex.com/2014/12/ihg-acquires-kimpton-hopefully-wont-screw/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">announcement</a> that IHG -- the Holiday Inn people -- bought Kimpton. One of the blandest hotel chains in existence buys one of the quirkiest. I think the last Crowne Plaza I stayed in was 6 years ago in Joburg, SA.  IHG’s last attempt to be hip was the Indigo chain. How many of you have stayed there? I’m gonna be keeping my eyes on this deal. I hope they don’t screw up Kimpton.</li>\n 	<li>I’m glad Marriott is<a href=\"http://www.wsj.com/articles/fcc-warns-hotels-others-not-to-block-personal-wi-fi-1422406537\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> giving up</a> their misguided attempt to get FCC approval to block individual WiFi hotspots. It’s kinda weird. I can’t figure out why they want to so obviously poke their customers. And it can’t be that much of a revenue thing because they’re giving away WiFi to just about everyone -- I’ve been getting it free for a while as an upper tier Rewards member as have everyone at the lower end brands like Residence Inn and Courtyard, and as of the middle of this month, so do all Marriott Rewards members at their Marriott brand. Which seems to be a trend. Kimpton does the same thing. Indeed, if you hit the Kimpton WiFi log on screen and aren’t a member of their Karma program, you’re taken to an enrollment screen.</li>\n 	<li>Which is important because hotel loyalty programs seem to be losing their grip. In a recent Google study, an increasing number of business travelers say that hotel loyalty programs have <i>less </i>impact on the travel planning this year than last year. The same study also found that most business travelers would switch programs for better perks. Given that free WiFi is one of the most popular perks with frequent travelers, what Kimpton is doing makes sense -- and what Marriott tried to do just doesn’t.</li>\n 	<li>Now, Marriott’s stated reason -- it’s all about security, wanted to protect their guests from rogue WiFi hotspots. Very buzzword-compliant -- cybersecurity is hot right now. And of course, travelers do need to be careful about which WiFi access points they connect to. Sweden’s Pirate Party pulled a <a href=\"http://www.thelocal.se/20150114/young-pirate-hacks-into-top-security-conference\">cute prank</a> earlier this month highlighting this. They set up an access point named “Open Guest” at a Swedish conference and over 100 delegates -- government officials, journalists, security experts -- connected to it, using it for e-mail, web browsing, Skype, eBay, …. just about everything. The Pirate Party logged all the traffic. Are people that gullible -- or cheap -- or both? Even more of a reason to use your own hotspot.</li>\n 	<li>The Monday before Christmas, I wrote up the <a title=\"Travel Tips — Holiday Airport Etiquette\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/12/22/travel-tips-holiday-airport-etiquette/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">holiday airport etiquette tips</a> from the last episode as a stand-alone blog post. It seemed like a timely post going into the holiday travel season. It was a pretty popular post. Rob, a long time TravelCommons listener and Untappd friend, gave it a nice re-tweet -- “A bit brusque, but the best travel tips I\'ve read this year”. And he was right. I didn’t sugar coat it a lot -- just venting a bit from what I typically see -- gumming up the PreCheck line, the Starbucks line, the concourse hallways. Probably not the best holiday spirit.</li>\n 	<li>But what I thought was in the holiday spirit was a sign I saw on the bell stand of the Minneapolis Marriott -- “Br-r-r-r!! It’s cold out! We have warm coats to lend you, available upon request. Please see your friendly bell staff person. Thank you, and stay warm!” I asked one of the bell men how often people take them up on their offer. “Oh, a lot,” he said. Really? What part of “You’re coming to Minnesota in December so dress warmly” do people not get? He just shrugged and gave me that “Minnesota nice” smile.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any travel experiences -- technology or otherwise, or just general observations, thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://www.magnatune.com/artists/albums/williams-long/\"><em>Afternoon in the Sun</em></a> by John Williams</li>\n</ul>\n<b>2014 Was A Bad Year To Fly</b>\n<ul>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/PJ-BZ531_MIDSEA_16U_20150114114822.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-1421 size-large\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/PJ-BZ531_MIDSEA_16U_20150114114822-1024x448.jpg\" alt=\"PJ-BZ531_MIDSEA_16U_20150114114822\" width=\"640\" height=\"280\" /></a>A couple of weeks ago, the Wall Street Journal <a href=\"http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-best-and-worst-airlines-1421254623\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">posted</a> its 2014 airline scorecard. Now, every travel columnist seems to do one of these, but I liked the Journal’s. I apologize to my international listeners, but this scorecard is just focused on the US. And indeed, just the US majors -- Spirit and Hawaiian aren’t in the mix, though Frontier, Alaska, and Virgin America are. I posted the scorecard graphic on the TravelCommons Facebook page when it came out; I’ll also put it in the show notes. It scores the carriers across 7 operational measures -- on-time arrivals, cancelled flights, extreme delays, 2-hr tarmac delays, mishandled baggage, involuntary bumping, complaints -- and then generates an overall rank. The top 3 were Alaska, Virgin America, and Delta. The variability across the 7 operational measures for these top performers was interesting. Alaska, the top overall, had the best scores for on-time arrivals, extreme delays, and complaints, but were 5th out of 8 in mishandled baggage. United, on the other hand, was more consistently the worst airline -- ranking last (8th) in 4 measures and 7th in the other 3.</li>\n 	<li>Which kinda doesn’t surprise me because their customer service just kept getting worse in a sort of cavalierly indifferent sort of way. I get to LaGuardia early one afternoon and want to move up to an earlier flight that’s wide open. That’ll cost you $75 -- to move from a full flight to an empty flight. Or the guy who plopped down next to me in the middle seat one day. He originally had aisle seat. Then United upgraded him to First Class. But then, oops, the First Class passenger showed up, so the guy had to go back to coach -- except they’d already given away his aisle seat and all that was left was this middle seat. So there he was stuck -- with nothing but some shrugged shoulders and a mumbled “Sorry”. You’d think they could’ve given him a couple hundred frequent flyer points, or a drink coupon. Even the most basic restaurant will comp you a dessert if things aren’t right.</li>\n 	<li>It was entertaining, then, in a twisted sort of way, when I got an e-mail from United the following week offering to upgrade me from Premiere Gold to Platinum for $2,600. With these sorts of scores, you think they’d be paying me -- or at least making it something closer to an impulse purchase. But then again, they’re probably looking at my other choices in Chicago -- American with an overall score of 7 or Southwest, scoring 5 out of 8. Chicago hub airlines are kinda like Chicago football and baseball teams -- fighting it out for the cellar -- except without the silver lining of high draft picks.</li>\n 	<li>If you really think about it, 2014 was an awful year to fly. The airlines finally got market discipline; through acquisitions -- Delta buying Northwest, United buying Continental, American buying US Airways (or was that the other way around) -- they got the oligopoly working which pushed up prices and utilization -- high fares and crowded planes. Add to that the consistent ratcheting down for the base level of services -- unbundling -- charging an increasing amount for bags, change fees, pets, children traveling alone, decent seats.</li>\n 	<li>All this while the actual experience got worse. The Wall Street Journal article gives data to prove what we already knew -- we’re paying more for less. US airlines cancelled 66,000 more flights in 2014 than in 2013 and lost or delayed 2.1 million bags, a 17% increase. Which explains the 26% increase in complaints filed with the US Dept of Transportation. Not surprising, then, that American’s CEO <a href=\"http://skift.com/2015/01/27/american-airlines-ceo-awkwardly-explains-why-fares-arent-going-down/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">told</a> financial analysts and press during Tues’ Q4 earnings call “We are not asking our customers to be happy with anything.”</li>\n 	<li>We can always hope that 2014 will turn out to be the bottom. That the newer planes the major carriers are buying will mean fewer mechanical delays and fewer cancellations. That more profitable airlines will stop demanding givebacks from their employees, which would mean much more pleasant flight attendants and pilots, and more enthusiastically productive mechanics and baggage handlers.</li>\n 	<li>Until then, I’ll be try to be happy with the little things -- the unexpected first-class upgrade on my United flight down to San Antonio. The nearly empty mid-day flight from New Orleans to Chicago. The flight attendant told us we could change seats when we wanted, but nobody moved. We each had our own rows. The early arrival into Nashville that changed a tight connection into a leisurely stroll with time to catch a beer between gates. I’ll enjoy these little things, hoping that the bigger things get better in 2015.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/westexit-modern/\"><em>Arsenal</em></a> is by The West Exit</li>\n</ul>\n<b>Restaurant Trends Go Local</b>\n<ul>\n 	<li>So while the trip to where you’re going has gotten more miserable, odds are the food is a lot better once you get there. Every year I go to the National Restaurant Show looking at dining trends because frequent travelers have to eat and it’s typically in a restaurant.</li>\n 	<li>One of the interesting trends, though, is the expansion of what a restaurant is. At the most recent NRA show -- that’s National Restaurant, not Rifle, Association -- there was a good-sized section devoted to food trucks. And depending on where you’re traveling, you’ll see more and more of them in the wild. Of course, food trucks are old hat in places like Manhattan and Center City Philadelphia. And in Portland, I’m not sure you can really call them food trucks -- the ones set up in downtown parking lots don’t look like they’ve moved in years. But elsewhere, they’ll touch down outside of office building or universities around lunch time and offer up some very cool/innovative and often locally-unique food that’s provides some nice variety.</li>\n 	<li>Which ties into another big trend -- the shift to local -- locally-sourced fish, meat , vegetables; locally-made beer or spirits, house-made pickles and charcuterie, …. Which is kind of a throwback. If you think about the 70’s and the 80’s, big franchise chains expanded in the US and then globally, pushing out standard menus with the same dishes everywhere. Now the good side of this was it took the guess work and the risk out of picking a place to eat. No surprises -- which is both good and bad. If you stopped at a Kentucky Fried Chicken along the road or took a client out to a Morton’s Steak House, you knew what you were going to get and you could reasonably expect a certain level of quality. But you weren’t going to discover anything new; get anything unique to where you were visiting. That’s OK when food is fuel -- I want to stop being hungry. It isn’t when food becomes something more -- an experience, an expression of place, which it is now with these hyper-local trends. Yes, when overdone, it can feel like you’ve somehow slipped into a bad <i>Portlandia</i> episode, but when done right, it can make you happy you gutted out the lousy flight to get there.</li>\n 	<li>One trend I keep hearing about, but I don’t really see much in travels, is using tablets and smartphones to replace menus and servers and checks. Every year at the NRA show, there are rows and rows of vendors showing iPad menus and smartphone apps that allow diners to order, split the tab, and pay without seeing a waiter or a bartender. I’ve seen these in the wild exactly twice -- an iPad wine list at Restaurant Revolution in New Orleans. And it was actually kind of intrusive -- lighting up the face of the reader in an otherwise lower lit dining room. And at a restaurant/bar in MSP where the bartender reached over to do the ordering for me. Now this is different from alternative payment methods -- touch-and-pay with Apple Pay or using a bar code on the Starbucks app. Those are just different ways to end the transaction. What I don’t see, in spite of 2-3 years of trend hype, is a move in a restaurant to self-service ordering or paying.</li>\n 	<li>Indeed, if anything, I see a move to <i>more</i> interaction with service staff with seemingly more folks taking full meals at the bar -- your server, the bartender, is never further than 6 ft from you and, on a slower night, is good for a little conversation. I guess if I’m coming to a place for local cuisine made from local produce, I’m not sure why I’d want to skip talking to the local people.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #113</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a title=\"Magnatune\" href=\"http://magnatune.com/\">Magnatune</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_113.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #113 — 2014 was a Bad Year to Fly; Restaurants Go Local','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-113-2014-was-a-bad-year-to-fly-restaurant-trends-go-local','','\nhttp://travelcodex.com/2014/12/ihg-acquires-kimpton-hopefully-wont-screw/','2021-09-28 19:02:37','2021-09-29 00:02:37','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=1416',0,'post','',0),
(1418,1,'2015-01-29 09:43:54','2015-01-29 15:43:54','','IMG_2430','Authentically lacking seating','inherit','open','open','','img_2430','','','2015-01-29 09:43:54','2015-01-29 15:43:54','',1416,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/IMG_2430.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(1421,1,'2015-01-29 10:01:00','2015-01-29 16:01:00','','PJ-BZ531_MIDSEA_16U_20150114114822','','inherit','open','open','','pj-bz531_midsea_16u_20150114114822','','','2015-01-29 10:01:00','2015-01-29 16:01:00','',1416,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/PJ-BZ531_MIDSEA_16U_20150114114822.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(1429,1,'2015-03-18 22:46:32','2015-03-19 03:46:32','[caption id=\"attachment_1433\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/2014_01_19_12_55.jpeg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1433\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/2014_01_19_12_55-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"Is Our Plane Behind That?\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Is Our Plane Behind That?[/caption]\n\nRecorded at the JW Marriott in New Orleans together with a GoPro <a title=\"Podcast #114 Uncut — The LoFi Video Version\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/03/20/podcast-114-uncut-the-lofi-video-version/\">video</a> capturing all the unedited bits. We go deep in a comparison of public transit and drive times to US airports, shed a tear for SkyMall magazine, and marvel at the stack of lost Android tablets at American Airlines\' ORD lost-and-found. We talk about what has been an awful start to the travel year in the US east of the Rocky Mountains, and wrap up with some observations about how hotel perks have become more important than points. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_114.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #114:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Which made me happy to head to ORD when I was flying south -- mostly to New Orleans, but the flight to Phoenix made me really smile. I think it was 15 degrees when I left Chicago and about 70 degrees when I landed. I spent at much time as possible outside, trying to resolve what I figured had to be a Vitamin D deficiency. I did get a chuckle on my last night there. I was sitting outside at a bar, must’ve been the low 60’s and they had the heat lamps on.</li>\n 	<li>I also flew through Memphis this past month. The flight selection in and out of there just gets worse. That airport is becoming a ghost town since Delta dismantled the hub that Northwest had there. Indeed, they have a 2-year project to shrink the airport -- demolish half the A and C concourses, mothball what remains, and consolidate everyone into the B concourse. Kinda surprising when some airports are at capacity with people sprawling on the floor, there are other airports with concourses that could double for bowling alleys. How much does the economy have to improve for it make sense for the airlines to start adding back some capacity?</li>\n 	<li>This coming week has me tempting the travel gods, hoping for better weather, with two up-and-backs to the East Coast -- a day trip to Newark and an overnight to Philadelphia. Perhaps a precautionary sacrifice is in order, but what? Maybe a sacrificial offering -- I dowse my travel size tube of Crest toothpaste with the extra bottle of Dewar’s</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>10p Mix</em> by <a href=\"http://www.last.fm/music/Amplifico\">amplifico</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Spelunking through my Twitter feed…</li>\n 	<li>Another thing that made me smile on my flight down to PHX last month wasn’t that I scored a 1st Class upgrade on American -- it was that the upgrade let me hear a woman ask, as she walks on the plane, to be reseated away from the plane’s WiFi access point because she’s allergic to WiFi.  Just when you think you’ve heard everything on a airplane… This seems absurd in just so many ways. Like, how did she make it through the terminal without going into anaphylactic shock? Run a WiFi analyzer app on your phone or tablet the next time you’re in an airport and you’ll see that we’re wading through a sea of WiFi signals. And what about the passengers sitting all around her -- because nobody remembers to shut off the WiFi on their laptops or tablets. And I guess she didn’t stop off at Starbucks on the way to ORD. As it was, the flight attendants just looked at one another -- like they (or anyone) would know exactly where the GoGo access point was located on a 737, and like they’d want to rejuggle seats on a 737 completely full of families heading out on Spring Break. They just mumbled “We’ll ask someone” and gently pushed her down the aisle.</li>\n 	<li>Taking mass transit to and from the airport is a running theme (fixation?) here at TravelCommons, so I immediately clicked through a tweet from Nate Silver’s 538 blog that went geekily deep on that, <a href=\"http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/planes-trains-and-taxis-when-to-take-public-transit-from-the-airport/\">comparing </a>public transit and driving times from the airport to downtown for the 40 busiest US airports. Only in Minneapolis, Honolulu, and Chicago (both ORD and MDW) is public transit quicker than taking a cab. If open the range a bit -- saying anything within 5 minutes is a toss-up, the list gets a lot longer -- Washington Reagan, Atlanta, San Diego, San Francisco, Austin. Open it to 10 minutes, which could be worth it given the cost difference, brings in Boston, Charlotte, Seattle, San Francisco but from OAK this time, and New York’s JFK. A number of these work because they’re close-in airports -- Chicago Midway, Washington Reagan. Others because the highway traffic is so bad -- most notably O’Hare and JFK. The list is ranked by public transit time and for the top 15 -- plus JFK which is #30 -- public transit times are reasonable enough to make the cost-convenience trade-off compelling. Some of the airports below that line that I know -- New Orleans, Orange County Calif, Detroit -- I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a public transit sign in those place. PDX jumped out at me. I <a title=\"Podcast #103 — Hospitality is Personal; Tablets Everywhere\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2013/01/24/podcast-103-hospitality-is-personal-tablets-everywhere/\">talked </a>about taking that airport light rail in an earlier episode. It’s a nice service, but it takes a while -- it makes a lot of intermediate stops -- and so it doesn’t compare well to a cab ride that takes half the time. Of course the gold standard is London’s Heathrow Express  -- a 15-minute straight shot from Paddington Station vs. an hour cab ride. But that’s not a real apples-to-apples comparison -- a Heathrow Express ticket is £21.50 (over $30) vs. $5 for ORD or $7.50 for JFK. The better comparison might be the £5.70 ($8.50) ride on the Tube’s Piccadilly Line that takes 50-60 minutes, which would fit in at the bottom of the top 15 US list.</li>\n 	<li>Waiting out an unbelievably long delay on a United ORD-DEN flight, I ran through all of my reading material -- electronic versions of the Wall Street Journal and NY Times, physical version of the Chicago Tribune, my Feedly newsreader stream, multiple refreshes of Twitter -- and so had to dive into the seatback pocket, the emptiness of which reminded me of SkyMall magazine’s bankruptcy at the end of January. SkyMall was always good for at least 15 minutes of entertainment, along the lines of “who in the world would buy that?” -- the zombie statue crawling out of your garden, the kickboard suitcase, the NFL wine shoe holder…. until last Christmas, when a friend bought my present out of SkyMall -- a 6-bottle leather wine holder for my bicycle. Stunning. I can’t wait for the snow to melt to try it. I only fly Delta when I absolutely have to (like to ATL or MEM) so I didn’t notice when they canned SkyMall back in Nov -- “We saw a decline in customer use,” they said. Yup, every electronic thing I read prior to reaching for SkyMall -- the WSJ, NYT, Feedly, Twitter; I could add Facebook; if I was younger I could add Tumblr. I think the minute the FAA allowed us to keep tablets on during take-off and landing, SkyMall was a dead man walking...</li>\n 	<li>And speaking of tablets, last month I thought I’d left my Google Nexus 7 behind on one of my American flights home from New Orleans. It was one in what seemed to be a stream of stuff I’d lost on the road -- a couple of pairs of sunglasses, earbuds, and now this. I went to the American’s lost-and-found in ORD. The woman came out with a stack of 10-12 7-inch Android tablets -- Lenovo’s, Samsung’s, but not mine. I could see she had a similar sized stack of iPad Mini’s. Looks like this happens a lot. I think the move from solid to mesh seat back pockets is a good thing. But that weekend, as I continued to steal my wife’s Nexus 7, I realized how much I used that tablet. So Sunday night, I hopped on Amazon and found a refurb 8-inch Samsung Galaxy Tab Pro for $200. Sold. I bought it on my son’s Prime account for cheap next day shipping. It’s a nice piece of kit -- bright screen, quick performance, which was a very pleasant change because after Google pushed the latest Android update (Lollipop) to my Nexus 7, its performance cratered to the point of nearly being unusable. It was nice not having a 2-3 second lag between screen touch and reaction. That following week, as I was adjusting my backpack contents -- notebook, Bose headphones, and now my Samsung tablet, I was having problems getting things to fit. I reached in to move some stuff around -- and found my Nexus 7. I hadn’t left in a seat-back pocket. I’d just lost it in my backpack. I gotta get a non-black case next time.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Emily C</em> by Fiasco</li>\n</ul>\n<b>Awful Winter Travel</b>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Now that the US snow cover appears to be retreating -- though Boston did get some more snow last weekend -- I’m hoping that we can bid farewell to what was a really lousy start to the year -- at least from a travel perspective. It kinda caught me by surprise because the start of the winter season -- end of Nov and through December -- wasn’t bad at all. But January started to have it’s problems, and then February -- it was 4 weeks of travel hell for just about everywhere in the US east of the Rockies. Cold, Snow, Ice, Wind -- kinda the 4 winter horsemen of the travel apocalypse.</li>\n 	<li>Every week seemed to have yet another disruption. I think it started with the Snopocalypse that wasn’t in New York and New Jersey. Mayors, governors closing offices, schools, roads, towns on the forecast of massive/huge/historic (they started to run out of adjectives) snowfall -- only to see, what, 4-6 inches? But everyone had flights delayed, cancelled -- it seemed to take the next couple of days before everyone got back in the traces. Only to have a real snow storm blow them back the next week. I had a string of I think 3 Mondays of flight cancellations. I’d get on a weekly conference call and half of everybody was not where they were supposed to be -- cancelled flights, diverted flights, working from home,.... One colleague trying to fly from Ft Myers, FL to Memphis (for work obviously) on Delta. Lands at ATL only to find they’d cancelled his MEM flight due to an ice storm. “When can I get there?” “We don’t know”. He turned around and went back home for the week. His clients couldn’t get to their offices for 3 days.</li>\n 	<li>As I mentioned in the <a title=\"Podcast #113 — 2014 was a Bad Year to Fly; Restaurant Trends Go Local\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/01/27/podcast-113-2014-was-a-bad-year-to-fly-restaurant-trends-go-local/\">last podcast</a>, I tried to be a bit more strategic in my travel -- picking some warm spots when I could, avoiding known trouble spots. I cringed whenever I had to fly to the East Coast, but sometimes I got lucky -- I hit San Antonio on a 70 degree day. The day after I left, it dropped down to 40. I managed to wrangle a half-week in Phoenix in mid-February. Mid-70’s and sunny -- I was outside every minute I could. Flying home, it was 77 degrees when I left PHX; -2 degrees when I landed at ORD. I thought I was going to shatter when I walked onto the jet bridge.</li>\n 	<li>I think the pinnacle was when the Delta jet slid off the LaGuardia runway, hit a fence, and came within yards of dumping into Jamaica Bay. Landing at any of those small, near-in airports -- LaGuardia, Washington Reagan, Chicago Midway -- are like putting down on an aircraft carrier, not a lot of room for error. Add snow or ice -- I’m surprised it doesn’t happen more often. Luckily, this one wasn’t fatal -- not like the Air Florida crash out of what was then Washington National on a snowy January, or the Southwest 737 that slid off the end of a Midway runway, through a fence and into a street intersection, crushing a car waiting at the red light, killing a small boy. This was just more inconvenience -- closing LGA for 7 hours, taking a big chunk of capacity out of what is already the most crowded/overtaxed airspace in the country. A friend trying to fly home to New York that afternoon boarded her flight, it pushed back, only to pull back in after it was cancelled. It was just one more delay, one more cancellation. I was a little luckier. Even though I was flying from Memphis to Chicago, some piece of my flight -- the plane, the crew -- got caught up in that East Coast mess. But thanks to the wonders of mobile message updates, I was able to track the delays from the relative comfort of a Mexican bar in East Memphis. One margarita with an high-school buddy turned to two turned to dinner with his wife joining us. I, unlike so many others, got home that night and had something other than bad airport food to show for it.</li>\n 	<li>The next week -- yet another delay on my New Orleans-Chicago flight. Late inbound aircraft. But why? ORD and MSY were fine; all the weather was again in the East. No one knew, not even the pilot. When we finally boarded the flight, he keyed the mic and said, “I’m awfully sorry about this delay. I wish I could tell you why, but I have no idea. The plane arrived Chicago on time from San Antonio and then just sat there. I wish I could tell you why.”</li>\n 	<li>I dunno -- maybe they lost it behind a snow drift.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em>Keep Your Motor Running</em> by Dave Hole</li>\n</ul>\n<b>Hospitality Beats Points</b>\n<ul>\n 	<li>One morning in some concierge lounge in some Marriott or Sheraton that I can’t quite place, I opened my umpteenth warming dish, looked in at yet another pond of runny scrambled eggs and wondered “Really? How difficult is it to properly cook institutional egg mix?”</li>\n 	<li>Just about every poll of statused hotel travelers rank free WiFi and free breakfast as the top amenities, the ones that keep travelers working to maintain status. But when you actually use those amenities, they’re often not so great -- slow WiFi (even the “enhanced speeds” that Marriott promises their gold and platinum members), semi-liquid scrambled eggs and stacks of over-cooked bacon.</li>\n 	<li>Which is a problem, because just about every hotel chain in the past couple of years has raised the number of points needed for a room and also created a new top tier for the best/most popular properties -- added, say, a Category 6 so they could charge even more points for that Maui property -- devaluing that big point balance -- your vacation savings account -- that you “road warriored” so hard to build.</li>\n 	<li>So if the points aren’t worth as much anymore, what keeps travelers loyal to a brand, what keeps you staying in, say, a Marriott 75 nights or 25 stays in a Westin to make top-tier platinum? It should be those amenities -- but how loyalty are those scrambled eggs worth? They’re convenient, but don’t differentiate much.</li>\n 	<li>Some places are ditching the whole lounge idea. I’ve been in some Renaissance hotels and Marriott Autograph hotels that serve the free breakfast in their restaurant -- there’s the standard-looking buffet, but if you have the time, you can order anything off the menu. Blows my diet a bit, but beats 4 mornings straight of scrambled eggs.</li>\n 	<li>I have noticed, though, that I’m being offered more specialty perks at places that I’m staying a lot. The Sheraton on Canal St in New Orleans will occasionally offer me basketball tickets -- the Pelicans are actually doing well this year -- and had some special grandstand deals to watch the Mardi Gras parades in front of the hotel. I didn’t take them up on either of their offers -- I had other commitments -- but it was nice to get the offer.</li>\n 	<li>I call it the “Cheers” effect -- you want to go where everyone knows your name. When you’re away from home, you want someone to smile and ask how you’re doing. And it’s not just hotels. The morning barista crew at the Starbucks on Canal St and St Charles fire up a spinach feta wrap when they see me walk through the door, even when it’s been a couple of weeks since my last visit.</li>\n 	<li>Of course, there is a fine line that can be crossed. Like a friend of mine, she received Christmas presents from a front desk clerk for years (!) after about an 18-month gig that had her weekly at the Trumbull CT Marriott. Or when I first started traveling for business, I was commuting between Dallas and Chicago, passing through the DFW Admirals Club every Monday morning. After about 3 months, one of the agents who’d I’d gotten to know asked me if I’d like to meet her daughter. Awkward. But in what I still think is one of my best moments, I asked her “Do you really want your daughter dating someone who travels as much as I do?” She thought for a moment, “No, not really”. Awkwardness averted, and we went on to have a nice friendship until I moved back to Chicago a year later.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #114</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://musicalley.com\">Music Alley</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_114.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #114 — Public Transit to Airports, Requiem for SkyMall, Awful Winter Travel','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-114-public-transit-to-airports-requiem-for-skymall-awful-winter-travel','','','2021-09-28 19:04:09','2021-09-29 00:04:09','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=1429',0,'post','',0),
(1433,1,'2015-03-19 17:06:26','2015-03-19 22:06:26','','2014_01_19_12_55','Is Our Plane Behind That?','inherit','open','open','','2014_01_19_12_55','','','2015-03-19 17:06:26','2015-03-19 22:06:26','',1429,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/2014_01_19_12_55.jpeg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(1435,1,'2015-03-20 08:17:15','2015-03-20 13:17:15','I finally found a way to produce a video version of the podcast without a huge amount of post-production work. I put my GoPro camera on top of my Zoom H4n recorder and hit Record.\n\n<iframe width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"https://www.youtube.com/embed/c0Puq669A5M\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"autoplay; encrypted-media\" allowfullscreen=\"\"></iframe>','Podcast #114 Uncut — The LoFi Video Version','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-114-uncut-the-lofi-video-version','','','2021-03-28 15:47:19','2021-03-28 20:47:19','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=1435',0,'post','',0),
(1450,1,'2015-04-20 20:47:51','2015-04-21 01:47:51','','Podcast-Only RSS','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-only-rss','','','2015-04-20 20:47:51','2015-04-21 01:47:51','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?post_type=simple_link&#038;p=1450',0,'simple_link','',0),
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(1452,1,'2015-04-20 20:50:37','2015-04-21 01:50:37','','Apple Podcasts','','publish','closed','closed','','subscribe-thru-itunes','','','2020-09-28 18:53:59','2020-09-28 23:53:59','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?post_type=simple_link&#038;p=1452',0,'simple_link','',0),
(1453,1,'2015-04-20 20:50:37','2015-04-21 01:50:37','','Subscribe thru iTunes','','inherit','open','open','','1452-revision-v1','','','2015-04-20 20:50:37','2015-04-21 01:50:37','',1452,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=1453',0,'revision','',0),
(1457,1,'2015-04-21 15:40:41','2015-04-21 20:40:41','[caption id=\"attachment_543\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/taxi-sign1.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-543\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/taxi-sign1-300x210.jpg\" alt=\"Warning in a St Louis Taxi\" width=\"300\" height=\"210\" /></a> Warning in a St Louis Taxi[/caption]\r\n\r\nI skipped the Midwest\'s \"snow-pocalypse\" by flying to <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Phoenix, Arizona\" href=\"http://www.phoenix.gov/\" rel=\"homepage\">Phoenix</a> where it was unseasonably cold -- in the 20\'s and 30\'s F -- but without snow. It\'s been a cold winter and I came down with some nasty bug while visiting <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Dallas\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dallas\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Dallas</a>, which reminded me how miserable it is to be sick while traveling. Before my whining, though, I give a quick status on my New Year\'s travel resolutions, my observations on the status of the TSA\'s full body scanning program, and my struggles trying to use Avatron\'s Air Display app to turn my <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"iPad\" href=\"http://www.apple.com/ipad/\" rel=\"homepage\">iPad</a> into a second display for my MacBook Air.  Gary Learned suggests a headset that can defeat overhead PA announcements at airports, and I go through my briefcase -- how I\'ve changed what I carry for business travel over the past 5 years. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_87.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n[audio:travelcommons_87.mp3]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript from TravelCommons podcast #87:\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Chicago\" href=\"http://www.cityofchicago.org/\" rel=\"homepage\">Chicago, IL</a>.  I managed to skip this week’s “snopocalypse” -- the 20+ inches of snow that fell here Tuesday and Wednesday.  Instead, I flew down to Phoenix on Tuesday morning – though not without a couple of glitches courtesy of American Airlines – and came back Friday evening.  And yes, I did feel a bit guilty skipping out on the shoveling in the wind and cold, but that’s what kids are for.</li>\r\n	<li>It has been a cold winter so far.  I was in Dallas a couple of weeks ago where it was rainy, in the low 30’s and the wind was blowing a steady 20 mph – OK, no snow, but not any better than Chicago.  And then even this week in Phoenix – the temperatures were in the 30’s, getting into the 20’s at night.  Yes it was colder in Chicago and elsewhere, but still – where’s that global warming when you really need it.</li>\r\n	<li>Earlier in January, Phoenix was much nicer – sunny and in the 60’s.  The first couple of days I was there, I was running on autopilot a bit – for lunch, I’d dash out of the office, hop in my rental car and drive the quarter-mile north to the shopping area with the sandwich shops and a Whole Foods.  Driving back the second day, I thought, “What the hell am I doing?  It’s 20 degrees back home!”  The next day, I took an hour for lunch, walked to the Whole Foods, bought myself a cup of soup, sat outside in the sun and ate it, and then walked back to the office.</li>\r\n	<li>Which kind of reminds me of the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/01/01/new-years-travel-resolutions/\" target=\"_blank\">New Years resolutions</a> I posted on the TravelCommons site on the first of the year.  #3 was “Take More Quick Breaks” – along the lines of “take advantage of the travel because it sure takes advantage of you…” In the post, I mentioned the afternoons I took to hike up Squaw Peak in Phoenix or walk along the beach in <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Naples, Florida\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naples%2C_Florida\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Naples, FL</a>.  Walking along a road to lunch seems a bit of a pathetic reach, but the spirit is there – if you’re traveling from snow to sun for work, don’t forget to grab a couple of rays for yourself.</li>\r\n	<li>Actually, I did a bit better than that – I went to the BCS college football championship game while in Phoenix, and to a Mavs-Lakers basketball game while in Dallas – something for each week.</li>\r\n	<li>As for my other resolutions?  “Plan Further Ahead” because airline load factors/seat utilization is moving up again?  I’m doing OK with that – I’m booking out 2-3 weeks in advance, which is a huge improvement for me.</li>\r\n	<li>“Repack My Briefcase?” – check out the “What’s in my bag” segment a bit later.</li>\r\n	<li>“Take More Pictures?” – just a marginal improvement – I don’t count taking pictures with my <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"iPhone\" href=\"http://www.apple.com/iphone\" rel=\"homepage\">iPhone</a> of bullet points on whiteboards</li>\r\n	<li>And the toughest one – “Be nicer to TSA agents?”  I was doing better because, at least over the past few trips, they’ve been nicer to me.  I hadn’t been groped or irradiated on my first couple of trips, which will tend to have a positive impact on anyone’s disposition.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/music/listeners/artistdetails.php?BandHash=f81ac4222ffce06bc8c3c7c3ae01a7fd\" target=\"_blank\">Shine</a></em> by Hungry Lucy</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>The TSA full body scan controversy that was white-hot during the Thanksgiving weekend seems to have cooled quite a bit.  The TSA will <a href=\"http://www.politicsdaily.com/2010/11/22/poll-public-backs-full-body-scans-but-split-on-pat-downs/\" target=\"_self\">say</a> that this is proof the American public supports its program of full body scans or AIT – Advanced Imaging Technology – as they like to call it, and the “enhanced pat-down” as the TSA likes to call it, or the full body grope as the rest of us experience it.</li>\r\n	<li>I think instead it’s that the TSA has pulled way back on their use of these invasive techniques.  I hadn’t been hit with a full-body scanner or a grope-down from the beginning of December until last week.  When the TSA dropped the scanners into ORD in July, they had <em>everyone</em> go through them, which doubled the screening time – at least.  Then through the Christmas travel season, it seemed that the machines were off more than they were on, and even when they were on, they weren’t not on every security lane, so it was pretty easy to avoid them unless you’re going thru a small security checkpoint – which is how they last caught me in DFW.</li>\r\n	<li>They also seem to be have slowed the rollout.  I haven’t seen them crop up in any new places.  Terminal 2 in PHX, for example, is still a TSA porn-free zone.  Not that I’m complaining.  Nice to be able to just move through security without having to hold my hands above my head.  And remember when we used to complain about taking our shoes off…</li>\r\n	<li>However, on my last two trips out of ORD, I was fully irradiated.  Again, it was going through a small checkpoint – the status-only checkpoint in Terminal 3, where American lives.</li>\r\n	<li>Though the TSA will say that the full-body scan doesn’t take much longer than the metal detector, they’re just flat wrong.  The actual scan – the amount of time you have your arms above your head – is only a few seconds longer than walking through the metal detector, the entire screening process takes much longer.</li>\r\n	<li>I’m beginning to consider the locations of these full-body scanners when I book flights.  In ORD, it seems easier to avoid them in Terminal 1 than Terminal 3, so my next flight down to Florida I’ve switched over to United. Not completely driven by full-body scanners, but it’s definitely a factor.</li>\r\n	<li>And continuing my thread about my MacBook Air.  You’ll remember that one of the reasons I chose the 11-inch model was the TSA said it could stay in your briefcase – kinda like a bit iPad.  However, when you briefcase – or backpack – stacks your iPad on top of your MacBook Air, be prepared to pull one of them out.  Talking to a very pleasant TSA X-ray machine operator in ORD, he told me that when they stack up, they get too thick to properly scan.  Makes sense.  I’ve since moved my iPad to a difference section in my backpack – put some papers and magazines between the iPad and the MBA to provide a bit more separation and haven’t had a problem since.</li>\r\n	<li>A number of folks have asked me why I carry both the iPad and a laptop – and I haven’t been able to come up with a real compelling reason.  As I’ve said before, I like reading on an iPad and writing on a laptop, but does that justify the extra weight and re-packing hassle of the iPad?  I was wishy-washy on that right up to last week when I thought I’d found my killer app for the iPad – Avatron’s <a href=\"http://avatron.com/apps/air-display\" target=\"_blank\">Air Display</a>, which turns the iPad into a secondary display for the MacBook when they’re on the same WiFi network.</li>\r\n	<li>Now here’s a reason.  While I can work on the smaller screen of my 11-inch MBA (or the 10.6-inch HP netbook before that), having a second display certainly makes it easier to “spread out”.  I have two 22-inch monitors on my Windows desktop box at home and love it.  I eagerly dropped the $10 for the Air Display app and fired it up…</li>\r\n	<li>And was disappointed.  It didn’t work in the office.  OK, our network guys must have it locked down.  Not surprised.  I get back to the Hilton and fire it up – again, no luck.  At home, doesn’t work when associated with my Apple Airport Express, but does – just once – when associated with the access point that’s built into the big AT&amp;T U-verse modem/router thing in the basement.  The only access point I can get Air Display to regularly work on is when I use my Verizon Droid 2 as a 3G hot spot.  That’s a bit of a kludge.</li>\r\n	<li>When it does work, it’s great – the few times that’s happened.  I’ve been hanging around Avatron’s support forums for about a week now, but haven’t found a solution yet.  Great concept; real spotty execution.  If they can get this to work, my iPad is no longer a heavy Kindle – it’s a real productivity tool.</li>\r\n	<li>And following up on my thoughts in the last episode about some of the hassles of the “digital nomad” work style when it comes to finding a quiet place for a conference call, Gary Learned sent in some thoughts…</li>\r\n	<li>Gary Learned audio clip</li>\r\n	<li>Gary, thanks for that suggestion.  I’m hitting Amazon looking for that earpiece right now,</li>\r\n	<li>And finally, the Gogo in-flight wireless guys have got a new giveaway as they continue to push awareness of their product.  For February, Gogo is adding Facebook to their set of free sites. After the plane gets above 10,000 ft, fire up your laptop or smartphone and associate with the “gogoinflight” wireless network.  Open your browser and you’ll get the GoGo sign-on page.  On the bottom of the page, you’ll see a set of free web sites – typically the dot com site for the airline you’re flying, a weather site, ….  And now, Facebook.  Nice to know that you can stay socially connected at 35,000 feet.</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a question, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is <a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a> -- use the Voice Memo app on your iPhone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the Facebook page with GoGo’s free service -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at T/C.com</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Beggarstown</em> by Hollow Horse</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Sick on the Road</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>No, that’s not sick <em>of</em> the road – though that happens at times too.</li>\r\n	<li>As I mentioned earlier, I was in Dallas a couple weeks ago – when it was just cold and windy; no snow or ice – and scored an invite to a vendor’s suite at the Mavs-Lakers basketball game.  Definitely a premiere game.  I went with a couple of guys from the office.</li>\r\n	<li>It was a good game – Mavs were down at halftime but came back to beat the Lakers by 10.  During the second half, though, I started to feel a tickle in the back of my throat.  I couldn’t stop coughing – couldn’t seem to “finish up” a cough – and the beer and salsa were beginning to feel a little rough going down.</li>\r\n	<li>Back in the hotel room, I just couldn’t get warm.  I went to bed, but soon started shivering. The thermostat was just above my head.  I kept pushing the Up button until I heard the heater kick in.  After a while, I finally got warm enough to sleep comfortably.  The next morning I looked at the temperature setting – it was at 78°.</li>\r\n	<li>It didn’t get much better the rest of the day.  I drug myself through a full day of meetings and got on a United Express regional jet for my flight home that night.  Again, I couldn’t get warm.  Since United Express seems to have followed American in pulling blankets and pillows from its planes, I swaddled myself in my tweed jacket and overcoat, and tried not to cough on the person in the window seat.</li>\r\n	<li>Now, as being sick on the road goes, this wasn’t that bad.  I’ve gotten food poisoning a couple of times, severely pulled muscles, flown with sinus infections that made my head feel like it was going to split in two during descent…</li>\r\n	<li>But it did remind me how miserable it is to be sick on the road.  For the most part, you’re alone.  Though you may have co-workers who will try to help you a bit, when they go home to their families, you’re going home to an empty hotel room and are going to have to fend for yourself.</li>\r\n	<li>And it’s not just that you’re lacking a spouse or child to help you out – bring you a blanket or a cup of tea.  You need to find a pharmacy, perhaps a doctor.  But even then, it can still be a struggle. When I was last in Paris, I tweaked my knee pretty bad and needed some ibuprofen for the pain and swelling.  The hotel concierge pointed me in the direction of a pharmacy a couple of blocks away.  Walking/limping in, I knew I couldn’t ask for Advil or Motrin – those US name brands don’t exist in France.  So I asked for ibuprofen – the generic name of the active ingredient.  Ibuprofen is ibuprofen, I thought.</li>\r\n	<li>“Ibuprofen, s’il vous plaît” I asked.  The pharmacist cocked an eyebrow and looked at me.  “Ibuprofen, s’il vous plaît”, I said again.  Now the other eyebrow arched.  I fought the urge to say it again, only louder.  What was I missing?  Perhaps my throbbing knee was effecting my pronunciation.  I looked around on the counter; grabbed a pen and flipped over some advertising flyer.  I-b-u-p-r-o-f-e-n, I wrote.</li>\r\n	<li>“Oh, EE-bu-pro-fen” the pharmacist said, and gave me the container of tablets I had needed since I got up that morning.  Flipping French, I thought, and limped back to my hotel.</li>\r\n	<li>So what do you do?  Certainly “not getting sick” is the best approach – get enough sleep on the road – often tough to do in strange beds and with full schedules.  I find that the old saw – wash your hands for a full 20 seconds and do it often – has significantly reduced the number of colds I pick up, even when I’m flying a lot.</li>\r\n	<li>Packing a well-stocked medicine cabinet helps a bit – allergy medicine, cold tablets, throat lozenges, ee-buprofen tablets, ….  For domestic travel, at least, you’re not trying to cure the sickness; just stave off the symptoms long enough so that you can get home and into the hands of your regular care-givers.</li>\r\n	<li>International travel is a bit dicier.  I know some travelers who have medical jet/air ambulance insurance so that they have a quick way to get back home if something catastrophic happens.</li>\r\n	<li>While I haven’t done that yet, I am looking for a medical phrase book before my next trip to Europe, complete with pronunciation guides for common drugs.  Ibuprofen, ee-buprofen – geez…</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music --<a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/music/listeners/artistdetails.php?BandHash=a3aaebb5e412ef546d1bddd6c9b4b4ed\" target=\"_blank\"> <em>Love Survives</em></a> by Lovespirals</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>What\'s in My Bag?</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>One of the<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/01/01/new-years-travel-resolutions/\" target=\"_blank\"> New Year’s Travel Resolutions</a> that I posted on the TravelCommons site on Jan 1<sup>st</sup> was to “unpack and repack my briefcase”.</li>\r\n	<li>Steve Frick, a long time TravelCommons listener, wrote the next day “did that this weekend. 3 pairs of headphones, approx 2 lbs of loose change, 50+ business cards and at least 15 hotel room keys. No wonder my laptop bag was so heavy.”</li>\r\n	<li>Five years ago – February 2006 – in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2006/02/18/podcast-33-listener-mailbag-whats-in-my-briefcase/\" target=\"_blank\">episode #33</a>, I did a bit of an audio tour through my briefcase</li>\r\n	<li>&lt;audio clip&gt;</li>\r\n	<li>The <a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/travelcommons/102434287/\" target=\"_blank\">picture</a> of this de-constructed travel kit is the first picture of the TravelCommons Flickr photostream</li>\r\n	<li>Five years later, some (and surprisingly only some) of the contents have changed, but the goal is the same – optimizing the trade-off between weight and having everything I need.  There’s always that desire to have everything you could possibly need – to make your briefcase into the road warrior version of Batman’s utility belt, letting you amaze your traveling companions by pulling out just the right thing to solve any travel problem.</li>\r\n	<li>So you’re always prepared, but you’re always trailing up the rear – either because you’ve got the heaviest bag or because the TSA is always pulling your bag for secondary screening because all that stuff makes them suspicious.</li>\r\n	<li>And so back to that balancing act – what do I need all the time (and so would be a pain to be without) vs. what can I buy or borrow for the one or two times I need it?</li>\r\n	<li>The technology has changed quite a bit, as you would guess, in 5 years.  It’s kinda fun looking back.  I’ve traded an IBM ThinkPad for a MacBook Air; a Motorola flip phone and U2-themed iPod Classic replaced by an iPhone; and an Aliph Jawbone 2 Bluetooth headset bumping the Motorola H710.  No need for the Microsoft travel mouse or Bluetooth dongle with the MacBook. Also, my vendor-supplied thumb drives have been upgraded – from 512 MB to 4 GB.</li>\r\n	<li>I replaced the Swiss Army briefcase – I called it a “poor man’s Tumi” in the podcast – with a backpack. And, of course, the TSA’s liquid ban stopped me from carrying on little bottles of hand lotion. I now grab them from every hotel and leave them scattered around conference rooms and rental cars</li>\r\n	<li>What’s stayed the same?  The Moleskine notebook, the selection of pens, the pink semi-transparent folder for expense receipts, a bottle with ibuprofen and zyrtec tablets, the iRiver MP3 player and recorder that I use to record these podcasts, and, most importantly, a tin of wintergreen Altoids to counter dry mouth when I fall asleep in flight – a pretty common occurrence.</li>\r\n	<li>What’s new?  An iPad, an extra battery for my iPhone, an AT&amp;T USB cellular modem which lets me skip paying for slow hotel WiFi, a set of Motorola Bluetooth stereo headphones that I use when I work out, a couple of Tazo green tea bags because in-flight coffee is just horrid, an inhaler to make it easier to breathe when I catch a cold (good advice from a “doc in the box” in San Mateo after being laid low in the SFO Marriott by bronchitis), and a Verizon Droid 2 for the too many times that AT&amp;T’s coverage sucks.</li>\r\n	<li>The iPad let me ditch the printed reports I used to carry – I hated reading them on a computer screen, but don’t mind it on the iPad.  The iBooks and Kindle apps also let me leave physical books at home.  I also tossed the 3 business card holders I’d accumulated – my backpack has a pocket just for business cards.  And do we really need business cards anymore?  Unless you’re regularly meeting with Asian businessmen, business card exchanges are getting rarer and rarer.</li>\r\n	<li>So I <em>think</em> I’m traveling lighter.  But it might be a push – what I’ve dropped in paper I think I’ve made up in device chargers.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids99176268.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #87</li>\r\n	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://musicalley.com\" target=\"_blank\">Music Alley</a></li>\r\n	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or MP3 file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to @mpeacock on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/153475331351358\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_87.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #87 -- Sick on the Road; What\'s in My Briefcase?','','inherit','open','open','','531-revision-v1','','','2015-04-21 15:40:41','2015-04-21 20:40:41','',531,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/04/21/531-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1458,1,'2015-04-21 15:44:53','2015-04-21 20:44:53','[caption id=\"attachment_1195\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"245\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/DSC00565.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1195\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/DSC00565-245x300.jpg\" alt=\"Twin or King-Size Lily Pad?\" width=\"245\" height=\"300\" /></a> Twin or King-Size Lily Pad?[/caption]\r\n\r\nDoing a bit more travel since the last episode, so have more to talk about. First business trip of the year started out great, but quickly deteriorated as weather delays forced me to make quick changes. I update my trip management app recommendations after TripCase released the latest rev of their app, and talk about good mass transit experiences in <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Portland, Oregon\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portland%2C_Oregon\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Portland, OR</a> and <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Park City, Utah\" href=\"http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=40.6594444444,-111.499722222&amp;spn=0.1,0.1&amp;q=40.6594444444,-111.499722222 (Park%20City%2C%20Utah)&amp;t=h\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"geolocation\">Park City, UT</a>. A new behind-the-scenes book on the hotel industry shows how important people are to the travel experience. And the explosion of tablet form factors makes me re-think why I carry a tablet -- comparing Apple\'s <a href=\"http://www.apple.com/ipad-mini/overview/\" target=\"_blank\">iPad Mini</a> to Google\'s <a href=\"http://www.google.com/nexus/7/\">Nexus 7</a>.  Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_103.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_103.mp3\"]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #103:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_1200\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/2013-01-21-21.06.25.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1200\" title=\"2013-01-21 21.06.25\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/2013-01-21-21.06.25-300x225.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\" /></a> Great Welcome Basket at Hotel Monaco[/caption]\r\n\r\nComing to you from the Hotel Monaco in downtown Portland, OR. It’s been a long time since I’ve broken out the mobile recording kit. And for Jeremy Philips, who back in October, tweeted “I kind of miss the bathroom acoustics...”...</li>\r\n	<li>I am back on the road again with a mix of business and leisure. Flew into SLC on Southwest for a week-and-a-half Christmas ski vacation in Park City. First time I’ve skied Utah. It was nice, but cold. I’d say the last 5 years of skiing has been over Spring Break in Colorado. I’d forgotten how cold Christmas skiing is. It’d be 8 or 9 degrees when we hit the slopes, rising to maybe 15 in the afternoon.</li>\r\n	<li>My first business trip of the year was last week to <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Hartford, Connecticut\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hartford%2C_Connecticut\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Hartford, CT</a>. I used to fly through there a lot 10-12 years ago. The airport was a dump back then. I was hoping that they’d freshened it up a bit -- at least replaced the carpet. The day started great -- United upgraded me to first class (milking the last month of 1K status for all it’s worth) and I got waved into the TSA PreCheck line. I felt so lucky, as the <a href=\"http://youtu.be/QgWzIl57bow\" target=\"_blank\">old Mary Chapin Carpenter tune</a> goes, I bought a couple of lottery tickets at the first kiosk I saw.</li>\r\n	<li> An hour later though, it all started to break up -- go pear-shaped as my friends in the UK would say. As airlines have taken seats/capacity out of the system, secondary airports like Hartford have been the ones to lose service. For me, booking this flight at the last minute, there were no direct flights available, so I had to connect. Big risk; breaking my cardinal rule of flying. But I didn’t have another choice. So what do you do? I picked a smaller airport -- CLE -- to connect thru in hopes of avoiding air traffic control delays. My connection time was over an hour, just in case my first flight was delayed. And I scheduled myself to arrive almost 3 hours before my meeting, building in buffer for delays coming out of CLE.</li>\r\n	<li>My first two strategies worked -- CLE was clear, no delays; and my inbound flight from ORD arrived 15 minutes early. When I turned my phone on after touching down in CLE, <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"TripIt\" href=\"http://www.tripit.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"homepage\">TripIt</a> and <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"WorldMate\" href=\"http://www.worldmate.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"homepage\">WorldMate</a> both told me my <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Bradley International Airport\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bradley_International_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"wikipedia\">BDL</a> flight was 40 minutes delayed. Annoying but not fatal because of all the backend buffer I’d allowed.</li>\r\n	<li>I went straight to the gate to get the story -- why the delay? The plane was 2 hrs late leaving CLE because of fog in <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Philadelphia International Airport\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philadelphia_International_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"wikipedia\">PHL</a>, and is so now is late getting back to CLE for the BDL flight. Hmmm, this is starting to feel uncomfortable. I lived in PHL for 4 years and I know what a nightmare that airport is. Is the plane on its way back yet? No, it hasn’t landed at PHL yet.  Double hmmm... The departure time has slipped 10 minutes since I touched down. Not a good sign, but still not fatal. I sit down and run some e-mail.</li>\r\n	<li>Departure time slips another 15 minutes. I talk to the gate agent again. Has the flight left PHL? No, but it looks like it has pushed back. I start checking other options. Nothing else to BDL. I reach back for those 8th grade map skills -- what about Providence, Boston, Albany, White Plains?</li>\r\n	<li>There’s a flight out to PVD. I pull up Google Maps -- 90 mile drive from there to my meeting. I look at the arrival time, 45 minutes for taxi, getting off the plane, walking down the terminal, and getting to the car rental place. Would get me to my meeting with 30 minutes to spare. I draw a line in the sand -- if the plane for the BDL flight isn’t in the air 5 minutes before the PVD flight starts boarding, I’m switching. The United gate agents were very helpful. They called ahead to the PVD gate, they gave me updates what was going on in PHL... But when I hit my decision time, the plane was still on the ground in PHL and speed-walked to the PVD flight.</li>\r\n	<li>And as you might have guessed, I didn’t match a single number on my lottery tickets...</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Beneath the Skin</em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/birdy-alter/\">Jerry Berlongieri</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>OK, we’ll leave the tile reverb behind for the rest of the podcast. Listening back to some of the old episodes, a little of that goes a long way...</li>\r\n	<li>At the beginning of December, I expanded last episode’s trip management app bake-off into an <a href=\"http://www.tnooz.com/2012/12/11/tcritic/managing-travel-itineraries-easier-said-then-done-even-with-digital-tools/\" target=\"_blank\">article</a> for Tnooz, a travel industry website focused on travel technology. In<a title=\"Podcast #102 — Trip Management App Comparison; TSA Scanner Shuffle\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/11/29/podcast-102-trip-management-app-comparison-tsa-scanner-shuffle/\"> episode #102</a>, I compared the free versions of TripIt, TripCase, WorldMate, and Kayak. The Tnooz article has the same use cases, but drops Kayak for the paid versions of TripIt and WorldMate. The recommendations didn’t change that much -- use the free version of TripCase, but for $10, the WorldMate app is not a bad deal either.</li>\r\n	<li>\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_1170\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/Logos.png\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1170\" title=\"Trip Management App Logos\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/Logos-300x149.png\" alt=\"Trip Management App Logos\" width=\"300\" height=\"149\" /></a> The Usual Suspects[/caption]\r\n\r\nAnd then, just to show that no good deed goes unpunished, TripCase launched a completely revised version of their app and website a week after my Tnooz review. Using it during my SLC and BDL (or should I say PVD) trip, I’m revising my opinion southward. The new interface is fine. I’m not sure that it’s better as much as it’s just different -- I picked up the new navigation pretty quickly. But I noticed that I wasn’t getting the normal iPhone notifications -- I was getting e-mails instead, which you’ll remember from my evaluation in the last episode is definitely inferior to native iOS or Android notifications. And I can’t find in the app or the website how to re-enable them. The paid version of WorldMate does a good job of native notifications. TripCase also seems to have hidden where to manage social media notifications -- where to turn on/off trip postings to Facebook and LinkedIn. I have to say that, after this redesign, my recommended solution is a bit muddier. I’d say it’s a combination of the free version of TripIt to push Facebook and LinkedIn notifications, and the $10 <a href=\"http://worldmate.com\" target=\"_blank\">WorldMate</a> Gold for managing the day of travel.</li>\r\n	<li>I had a chuckle a couple of weeks back. I was doing my weekly check-up on the TravelCommons site -- going thru the comments caught up in the Spam filter (you wouldn’t believe some of that stuff) and looking at some of the traffic stats like inbound links. I saw a new link, or at least one I didn’t recognize, from FlyerTalk, the frequent flyer forum. Following it back, it was a <a href=\"http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/travel-technology/544219-your-favourite-podcasts-7.html\">topic</a> that was started in April 2006 asking for travel podcast suggestions. I was very pleasantly surprised to see TravelCommons listed in the first response. We get bumped in 2007 and again in 2009 with listeners recommending the podcast. Then, what I would guess to be a former listener commented “The content of the Travel Commons podcast is interesting, but the guy\'s voice is monotone and metronomically slow.” OK, I’ll take that as a half vote. But then Bob Fenerty jumped in with “I can see that perspective, but I find Mark\'s voice soothing and reassuring”. Thanks for the help, Bob. I think the stint in the ‘70’s I did in contemporary Christian radio in Memphis -- “You’re listening to the Voice of 1590” -- has permanently crippled my ability to be vocally exciting...</li>\r\n	<li>As longtime listeners like Bob will recall, one of my more nerdy travel hobbies is taking mass transit to the airport. I don’t know why -- maybe it’s some weird twist on trainspotting. But even after getting my passport stolen on the train back to Brussels airport last year, I still like to try these things out. I have three criteria for good mass transit to the airport -- it\'s gotta be clean, frequent, and cheap. Washington\'s Metro hits all three while SF\'s BART misses on all of them</li>\r\n	<li>Portland\'s <a href=\"http://trimet.org/schedules/maxredline.htm\" target=\"_blank\">MAX Red Line</a> from the airport also hits all three. Clean, reasonably modern trains, though they\'re more like light rail trams, so not the fastest things. They run every 15 minutes, so good frequency. And at $2.50 for a ride downtown, they\'re an order of magnitude cheaper than a cab. Unless you don\'t buy a ticket. Halfway into my ride Monday night, three fare checkers step into my car checking tickets. I had mine, but the woman next to me didn\'t. She said that she skipped the fare machine to run to make the train. The fare checker didn\'t have much sympathy. She ended up with a ticket and a court date. He told her that if she had a clean record, she\'d probably get away with a $60 fine and a day of community service. Wow! All that to save 15 minutes...</li>\r\n	<li>I also had a good experience with the free bus system in Park City UT during our ski holiday there. We took a cab to and from SLC, but once in Park City, we relied on the bus system to get everywhere -- to/from the ski areas (Park City and The Canyons), town center for dinners on the very cold nights.... Clean buses, extensive routes, good frequency, and free. I’m told it’s funded by a piece of the local sales tax. It was certainly a money saver -- no rental car, gas or parking costs -- and very convenient.</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a question, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- use the Voice Memo app on your iPhone or something like Easy Voice Recorder on your Android phone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music -- <em>Bulletproof</em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/musicinside-forces/\" target=\"_blank\">Music Inside</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Hospitality Is Personal</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>I read Jacob Tomsky’s <a href=\"http://jacobtomsky.com/\" target=\"_blank\"><em>Heads in Beds: A Reckless Memoir of Hotels, Hustles, and So-Called Hospitality</em></a> while in Park City. It’s a fun, easy read. Just looking at the cover, you can tell that Tomsky wants to give us the hotel version of Anthony Bourdain‘s <em>Kitchen Confidential</em>— the flawed insider with a heart of gold giving us a snarky behind-the-scenes tour.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_1178\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"200\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/cn_image.size_.heads-in-beds-jacob-tomsky-cover.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1178\" title=\"Heads in Beds Cover\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/cn_image.size_.heads-in-beds-jacob-tomsky-cover-200x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"200\" height=\"300\" /></a> Heads in Beds by Jacob Tomsky[/caption]</li>\r\n	<li>This tour has two very distinct parts. The first third of the book tells us how Tomsky fell into the hospitality industry and began to make it a career. He finds that having a philosophy degree in New Orleans isn\'t an easy way to get a job, and so he takes a job as a parking valet at a new luxury hotel. Working hard and being earnest (which in his case means that he cleans up well and doesn’t try to kill his co-workers), he gets promoted to front desk agent and then into management. The second part of the book is set in a gone-to-seed Manhattan hotel where Tomsky lands, very reluctantly, broke after 9 months touring through Europe and 3 months searching for a publishing job in New York.</li>\r\n	<li>The New Orleans story is certainly the sunnier of the two; a young man finding his niche in the world and working his way up. Tomsky does a great job of describing the amount of planning and effort it takes for a Ritz Carlton or Four Seasons to provide their levels of hospitality. And the biggest target for that effort doesn\'t seem to be the guests, but instead the front line employees. Tomsky talks again and again about how amazed the valets and maids are when they\'re treated to a pre-opening reception with an open bar, that  the general manager knows each of their names.... Little things, but things that translate into self-respect, pride in their jobs, pride in their hotel, which then translates into a drive to give the best service possible to each guest.</li>\r\n	<li>If the New Orleans story is about a man on his way up, the Manhattan story is about Tomsky abandoning, bit by bit, the Ritz level of service he was so proud of, becoming more focused on hustling tips than helping guests. As he slides down that slippery slope, the snark level increases… as does a sense of self-loathing. Everyone in the hotel is out for themselves -- the managers, the bellmen, the front desk clerks -- running their hustles not to serve their guests, but to maximize their tips. Which certainly leads to great service for <em>some</em> guests -- but only those liberally spreading $20 bills around the lobby. And again, the tone is set at the top, but in this case, the general manager isn\'t trying to deliver the best service; he\'s trying to deliver the most money into his and the owner\'s till as quickly and easily as possible.  An example that prompts each worker to do the same.</li>\r\n	<li>I\'m not sure if Tomsky meant to show this, but his tale clearly illustrates something we talk about often on TravelCommons -- that, in spite of all the technology being injected into the travel experience, the most important bit of the experience is still delivered by people -- hospitality is personal. And the two parts of Tomsky\'s story show how hard it is to build a team that prides itself on delivering great hospitality, and how easy it is to build a cynical team that\'s doesn\'t care.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music --<em>Hurt Me So I Can Walk Away </em>by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/joy-float/\" target=\"_blank\">Michael Joy</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Tablets, Phablets, and Other Devices</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>One of the most popular pieces of technology being carried by travelers nowadays is a tablet. Walk down the aisle of a plane or a train and you\'ll half to two-thirds of the passengers looking intently into one of these flat pieces of glass.</li>\r\n	<li>It started with people carrying Kindles, and then you saw iPads propped up against seat backs, but now it\'s all kinds. I saw my first Microsoft Surface table in the wild (i.e., not in a Microsoft store) a few weeks ago walking through a food court in LGA. It was sorta royalish baby blue, complete with the snapon keyboard. An older guy sitting next to me on the plane on Monday was working on a Samsung Galaxy Note. The 5-1/4 inch screen looked huge compared to my iPhone 5. He had it a couple of weeks and really likes it. The key for him is having enough screen size to run e-mail in a large font so he doesn\'t have to pull out his reading glasses, but it\'s small enough to fit in his suit coat pocket. The only thing that feels a bit funny, he said, is using it to make a phone call. That big slab of glass feels like it\'s covering half his face.</li>\r\n	<li>I\'ve been running a Google Nexus 7 for 3-4 months now. The 7-in screen size puts it between the pocket-sized Galaxy Note and a full-sized iPad. I had run iPads since they first came out -- the 1, the 2, the next one after that (the iPad without a number). Like everyone, I thought they were phenomenal devices. But as I traveled with it, I had more trouble trying to figure out how the iPad uniquely justified it weight in my travel kit. I had colleagues who tried using them in place of laptops and as electronic notebooks. It worked just OK for them -- the iPad\'s e-mail client and calendar app just don\'t have the same power as Outlook, and the notes they took with a stylus looked like a kindergartener\'s scrawl with a black crayon. Some guys carried bluetooth keyboards, but that seemed like more hassle than it was worth. And then, I found myself getting frustrated with the iPad\'s \"sandboxing\" -- certain files are opened with certain apps; you can\'t get to the file system like you can on a PC if you need to do something more than an app will let you. It\'s a great model that works for 80% of population, but was way too constraining for me. For what I do, an iPad isn\'t going to replace a laptop.</li>\r\n	<li>As a \"media consumption device\"? iPads are great for watching movies but most of my \"media consumption\" is reading and I found the full-sized iPad too heavy -- both in my hand and in my bag -- to be a good e-reader.</li>\r\n	<li>The laptop/iPad combo had too much overlap, so I started looking at 7-in tablets. I skipped the Kindle -- I wanted to do more than just e-read; I don\'t have a big investment in the Amazon eco-system, and didn\'t want to get locked in further. So I looked at the iPad Mini and the Google Nexus 7. I gravitated toward the Mini -- I have a bunch of iPad apps, <em>am</em> deeply invested in the iTunes eco-system... But pricing out equivalent Minis and Nexus 7s, the Mini was almost twice as expensive and, try as I might, I couldn\'t justify that delta.</li>\r\n	<li>The Nexus 7 works fine for what I want -- a lot of reading -- with the WSJ and USA Today apps, work documents that I cloud-sync from my laptop with DropBox, -- watch the occasional movie or video podcast, run Android photo editing apps like Instagram and Snapseed,.... I\'ve even done some Google Hangouts on it.</li>\r\n	<li>One thing I haven\'t done is try to make a phone call on it. that\'s a lot of glass to lay across my cheek.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917626811171154.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #103</li>\r\n	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Magnatune</a></li>\r\n	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_103.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #103 — Hospitality is Personal; Tablets Everywhere','','inherit','open','open','','1191-revision-v1','','','2015-04-21 15:44:53','2015-04-21 20:44:53','',1191,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/04/21/1191-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1459,1,'2015-04-21 15:46:21','2015-04-21 20:46:21','[caption id=\"attachment_1170\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/Logos.png\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1170\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/Logos-300x150.png\" alt=\"Trip Management App Logos\" width=\"300\" height=\"150\" /></a> The Usual Suspects[/caption]\r\n\r\nIn the last <a title=\"Podcast #102 — Trip Management App Comparison; TSA Scanner Shuffle\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/11/29/podcast-102-trip-management-app-comparison-tsa-scanner-shuffle/\">podcast</a>, I did a side-by-side comparison of the free versions of the leading trip management apps. In an <a href=\"http://www.tnooz.com/2012/12/11/tcritic/managing-travel-itineraries-easier-said-then-done-even-with-digital-tools/\" target=\"_blank\">article</a> on the <a href=\"http://www.tnooz.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Tnooz</a> website, I dug deeper, expanding my comparison to the free and paid versions of <a href=\"http://tripit.com\" target=\"_blank\">TripIt</a>, <a href=\"http://tripcase.com\" target=\"_blank\">TripCase</a>, and <a href=\"http://worldmate.com\" target=\"_blank\">WorldMate</a>. My conclusions didn\'t change much.\r\n<blockquote><strong>THE TCRITIC TAKE: TripCase for smartphone only; WorldMate Gold for iPhone + iPad</strong>\r\n\r\nIf you only use a smartphone, the free TripCase app is the best choice. It was in the top of all three scenarios: itinerary building and sharing, and real-time flight status updates. However, it doesn’t have a tablet-specific app, just scaled up the smartphone app. iPad users should pay the $9.90/year for WorldMate Gold’s universal (iPhone + iPad) app. There’s nothing in TripIt Pro that justifies it’s $49/year price tag. The handful of Android tablet users should just accept the scaled-up TripCase app and hope for better treatment in 2013</blockquote>\r\nClick <a href=\"http://www.tnooz.com/2012/12/11/tcritic/managing-travel-itineraries-easier-said-then-done-even-with-digital-tools/\" target=\"_blank\">here</a> to read the full article.','Managing travel itineraries -- Digging Deeper into Trip Management Apps','','inherit','open','open','','1169-revision-v1','','','2015-04-21 15:46:21','2015-04-21 20:46:21','',1169,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/04/21/1169-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1460,1,'2015-04-21 15:47:45','2015-04-21 20:47:45','[caption id=\"attachment_984\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"188\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/tipping.png\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-984\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/tipping-188x300.png\" alt=\"Tipping Guide from Hospitality Management Schools webstie\" width=\"188\" height=\"300\" /></a> Tipping Guide from Hospitality Management Schools webstie[/caption]\r\n\r\nFor a simple calculation that can be performed on a four-function calculator with buttons to spare, determining the right tip seems mystify a large portion of the traveling public.   Searching Apple\'s App Store for \"tip calculator\" returns almost 600 apps for the iPhone.  The Hospitality Management Schools\' web site just published a comprehensive tipping <a href=\"http://www.hospitalitymanagementschools.org/tipping\" target=\"_blank\">guide</a>, providing a nice range of standard tip amounts that should help folks avoid some awkward moments.\r\n\r\nThere is a surprising amount of emotion wrapped up in determining a tip. You want to appropriately acknowledge the service someone has just given you, but that then gets combined with the image you want to portray.  The waiter was really rude to me, but I don\'t want to seem mean, but I can\'t feel like I\'ve let him get away with being rude, but I don\'t want a confrontation....  It\'s an internal dialogue that gets replayed again and again as the pen hovers over the blank \"Tip\" line on the credit card receipt.\r\n\r\nI think I\'m a decent tipper -- I roughly calculate 15% of the post-tax check amount in my head and then round it up a dollar or two.  I tip more generously to people who spend more time with me.  I eat a lot of meals alone at restaurant bars and so appreciate a bit of conversation.  If a bartender takes time to chat with me while cleaning his glasses, gives me a reason not to shovel down my food or stare vacantly at the always-present ESPN SportCenter behind the bar, the tip calculation starts at 20%.\r\n\r\nI do a lousy job of tipping hotel maids -- lousy meaning I usually don\'t.  I think it\'s because I never see them.  I\'m usually in and out of my room in single night -- used one towel, shed some briefcase papers in the garbage can, and have checked out before the maid cart hits the floor.  I\'m thinking more about finding the nearest Starbucks than about leaving a couple of bucks behind on the dresser.  The times I do tip maids is when I\'ve been working all day in my room -- and have to move out of the way so they can do their job.  Seeing them make the bed, straighten my toiletries, empty my garbage reminds me that they\'re doing just as much as the considerate bartender to make me feel at home.  It\'s the personal interaction that drives the desire to tip -- and the embarrassment of not tipping.','How Much Do You Want to Tip?','','inherit','open','open','','983-revision-v1','','','2015-04-21 15:47:45','2015-04-21 20:47:45','',983,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/04/21/983-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1461,1,'2015-04-21 15:48:55','2015-04-21 20:48:55','<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/tumblr_lxpxhjKkrS1qgelrio1_500.jpeg\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-969\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/tumblr_lxpxhjKkrS1qgelrio1_500-300x176.jpeg\" alt=\"The Great Train Robbery Movie Poster\" width=\"300\" height=\"176\" /></a>\r\nA backpack stolen from the train to the airport -- or more specifically, passports inside the stolen backpack -- unexpectedly extends a beer-tasting weekend in Brussels.  During my recent international trips, I find that Apple\'s FaceTime and iMessage aren\'t working reliably -- could be because of hotel WiFi bandwidth constraints.  TSA\'s PreCheck expedited security screening feels like you\'ve passed through a time warp and landed back in 1999. Walking the floor of the National Restaurant Association\'s annual trade show, it looks like restaurants are banking on their customers carrying smartphones and want to use them for wait list paging, bar tabs, and payments. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_98.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n[audio:travelcommons_98.mp3]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #98:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>It was 7 years ago this month that I recorded the<a title=\"First TravelCommons Podcast\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/05/15/first-travelcommons-podcast/\" target=\"_blank\"> first TravelCommons podcast</a> in the bathroom of the Wardman Park Marriott in Northwest Washington DC on May 15, 2005. If I were just a little bit better at right-to-left planning I would’ve had this be episode 100.</li>\r\n	<li>I was in DC a couple of weeks ago, staying in Chevy Chase this time, a couple of stops further up the <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Line_(Washington_Metro)\" target=\"_blank\">Red Line</a>, because the Wardman Park was sold out. But getting off at the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Woodley Park, Washington, D.C.\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodley_Park%2C_Washington%2C_D.C.\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Woodley Park</a> Metro stop to walk over to <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Adams Morgan\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adams_Morgan\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Adams Morgan</a> reminded me of how long I’ve been doing this. Long time listeners will remember when this was a weekly and then a biweekly podcast.  In that first year, I did 39 episodes. Quite a difference to this year when I’m working to get them out bimonthly</li>\r\n	<li>Not for lack of travel, though – or maybe because of it.  I got some personal travel in – a long weekend in Brussels to drink some beer – OK, a lot of beer – with my son, and then a week in Puerto Rico with my wife, daughter, and some friends.  And business travel to Phoenix, Florida, New York, DC (which I mentioned), San Francisco, and a couple trips to Dallas.  So less international travel than before the last episode; instead flying domestically during the huge smear of Spring Break family vacations that the month of March has become.</li>\r\n	<li>Other than jam-full planes, though, I don’t remember being too annoyed with the families. Except perhaps in<a href=\"http://www.flylcpa.com/\" target=\"_blank\"> Ft Myers, FL</a> where Spring Break families plus full body scanners plus no status line made for a long wait.</li>\r\n	<li>I don’t know if the parents are more vigilant or I’m more self-absorbed, but, other than Ft Myers, it felt less painful than past Spring Breaks. Perhaps the spate of airlines booting off families with unruly kids has led to some throwback parenting – a quick nip of brandy at the gate before pre-boarding. Just a nip, though, ‘cause it couldn’t be more than a 3 oz bottle to make it past security.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/duckett/23334\"><em>Another Girl</em></a> by duckett</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Speaking of throwbacks, on one of my flights down to Dallas, I had what could only be called a throwback security experience in the TSA <a href=\"http://www.tsa.gov/what_we_do/escreening.shtm\" target=\"_blank\">PreCheck</a> line. I walked up to the status-only line in ORD Terminal 3. There’s usually someone at the entry point looking at boarding passes, checking for status. But this time, she had a desk and a barcode reader like the TSA use at the ID check. She scanned my boarding pass and waved me over to the left. I walked past a PreCheck sign, but it really didn’t register – for morning flights, I don’t get my first cup of coffee until I’m on the other side of security.  The line moved quickly. As I started to run my drill – take off the shoes, drop the jacket from my shoulders, pull out the laptop and iPad – the TSA person told me – and every other person in the PreCheck line – to stop. Put your bags through the Xray, leave your shoes and jacket on, walk through the metal detector and move along.  It was <a href=\"https://twitter.com/#!/mpeacock/status/194393555677097984\" target=\"_blank\">too easy</a>.  I felt like I was back in 1999/2000 – the turn of the century; a nostalgia moment.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_968\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"225\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/IMG_1119.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-968\" title=\"TSA-Safe Hot Sauce\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/IMG_1119-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"225\" height=\"300\" /></a> TSA-Safe Hot Sauce © Mark Peacock[/caption]\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Walking through <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Old San Juan, Puerto Rico\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_San_Juan%2C_Puerto_Rico\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Old San Juan</a>, I walked through one of those gourmet condiment shops – the kind that sells hot sauces and mustard and the like. This one was called “Spicy Caribbee”. What caught my eye, though, was the package of three bottles in a one-quart plastic bag.  The shelf tag had a picture of a plane and said “Onboard friendly. Meets TSA 3 oz size limit”. Just brilliant. I can’t tell you how many times I pass up buying things like that because I’m doing carry-on.  As we were doing in Puerto Rico. But my wife bought the 3-pack as a gift for her brother. The TSA guy at San Juan airport gave it a second look as it came out of the X-ray machine, but let it pass. If you didn’t see the picture on Twitter or Facebook, I’ll post it in the show notes.</li>\r\n	<li>Apple has been launching a new data service with each iPhone release – <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"FaceTime\" href=\"http://www.apple.com/iphone/features/facetime.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"homepage\">FaceTime</a> video calling with iOS 4; iMessage, a replacement for SMS in <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"IOS\" href=\"http://www.apple.com/ios\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"homepage\">iOS 5</a>. They work pretty well in the US, but they really don’t add that much value here – I have an unlimited family texting plan and am usually not gone long enough to have a burning need for video calling. When I’m overseas – in Europe or Asia – that’s when I really need these products to work – shifting calls and texts from expensive roaming to less expensive data – hotel or office WiFi, or even AT&amp;T’s reasonably priced buckets of international data. But I’m not finding it that reliable – Beiing, Vienna, London,…  I dunno. These Apple data services just don’t feel completely baked in the middle.</li>\r\n	<li>Trolling through the Apple support sites, the consensus seems to be that FaceTime requires 100-150 kbps of network bandwidth up <em>and</em> down to work. For most hotel WiFi that I’ve seen – and measured using <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Speedtest.net\" href=\"http://www.speedtest.net/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"homepage\">Speedtest</a>.net – getting the 100-150 kbps download speed shouldn’t be a big problem, but getting that on the upload site – could be a bit dicey. Most broadband is designed to be asymmetrical – it assumes that you’ll be downloading a lot more than you’ll upload. But video chat services like FaceTime and Skype don\'t fit that assumption – you’re sending as much as you’re receiving.</li>\r\n	<li>With this in mind, I paid extra for the high bandwidth WiFi at the Brussels Marriott when I was there in March with my son. I figured we’d be FaceTiming or Skype-ing back to my wife and daughter in the US, so I ponied up the extra 4 euro for the 1 Mbps service. But it Skype was still lagging and stuttering when we’d use it in the evening. Firing up Speedtest, I quickly saw why – we were only getting 256 kbps – the basic service, not the upgrade I’d paid for. Calling down to the front desk, I got the typical runaround – oh, we’re sorry we don’t know anything about the Internet service. Here’s the number of the vendor help desk….  I’ve been down this 3-hr rat hole before. I skipped it, went out for another beer, and skipped the meaningless upgrade the next day.</li>\r\n	<li>One of the things I did like about the Brussels Marriott’s WiFi service was that my payment covered three simultaneous connections -- in my case, my iPad, my iPhone, and my son’s iPhone. It was, from my experience, a rare acknowledgement to today’s reality – that just about every traveler has a bunch of devices that all need Internet access to completely do their jobs.  The Best Western in Brussels wanted 10 euro a day for each device.</li>\r\n	<li>And with everyone posting experiences and photos on <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">Twitter</a>, Foursquare, Instagram, TripAdvisor,… you could say that multi-device network access is more important to vacationing families than business travelers.  In the US, this isn’t a problem for me because I travel with a Verizon 4G mobile hotspot. Plug it in (because the battery life is just this side of miserable) and 5 devices are on-line. And, more often than not, at much faster speeds than hotel WiFi, free or not.</li>\r\n	<li>Traveling internationally, the Verizon hotspot is a nice paperweight. Some folks I know carry their own mini wireless access point to extend their room’s wired Ethernet.  Apple’s AirPort has been a popular one.  Rather than carry an extra piece of equipment, I use my MacBook Air for the same purpose. Most Windows 7 PCs will do it to.  It takes a couple of steps – enabling Internet sharing and the like – as is well-documented on the web.  You are, however, back to being dependent on the hotel’s bandwidth.</li>\r\n	<li>When I was in China, where I used this trick, I could see the hotel network speed crash at around 6:30 every morning. I don’t know if it was all the guests waking up and checking e-mail or the hotel was sending their overnight financials back to the home office, but Skype calls home would pixelate, lag, and then just give up. Luckily, I never really got onto local Beijing time and was up at 4:30, 5:00 every morning. Sometimes it good to have a bit of jet lag.</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a question, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is <a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a> -- use the Voice Memo app on your iPhone or something like Virtual Recorder on your Android phone to record and send in an audio comment – or iMovie if you want to send in some video; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music -- <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/flatwound/14476\"><em>The Long Goodbye</em></a> by John Pazden</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Airport Train Robbery</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>I have to be honest with you. I have been putting off writing this segment for over a month. I’ve written blog posts on the web site about <a title=\"Best Hotel Amenity? Free Breakfast\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/04/21/best-hotel-amenity-free-breakfast/\" target=\"_blank\">free hotel breakfasts</a> and how American Airlines is suddenly<a title=\"American Airlines Reaches Out to Apologize… Again and Again\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/05/01/american-airlines-reaches-out-to-apologize-again-and-again/\" target=\"_blank\"> increasing their customer outreach</a>, posted more stuff on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\">TravelCommons Facebook page</a>… Just procrastinating because I really don’t want to write this segment, but I know I need to.</li>\r\n	<li>Let’s start out with stipulating something – I was stupid. Now that’s not the hard thing to write.  I own up to do doing stupid things on a regularly scheduled basis.  The procrastination comes from how deeply embarrassed I am by my stupid act. Here I am – supposedly an experienced world traveler, seen/done most things many times over, gives advice to others – making the rookie-est of rookie mistakes.  The shame and anger and more shame that burbled up every time I started <em>thinking</em> about writing this made me push it away</li>\r\n	<li>Early Sunday morning in Brussels.  My son and I finish our coffee in the Starbucks in the train station, unplug our variety of mobile devices, and head down the stairs to catch the train to the airport for our flight back to Chicago. We’d been in Belgium for 3 days eating and drinking beer.  Mostly drinking beer.  The train is a little late, but that’s OK because this is an earlier train than we’d intended to take. We’ll get to the airport in plenty of time.</li>\r\n	<li>My son and I each have a rolling suitcase and a backpack – no need to check luggage for a 3-day beer drinking expedition.  I put his suitcase on the rack overhead.  The car got crowded as the train made more stops.  I put my backpack in the rack also. I was reading the Sports section of the USAToday on my iPad, catching up on the first two rounds of the NCAA basketball tournament, trying to figure out how badly my bracket had been blown up by some of the upsets.</li>\r\n	<li>The train pulls into the airport station. I reach up to pull our bags out of the rack. I see my son’s suitcase. I don’t see my backpack.  Instant shot of panic. I look down – was I mistaken, did I not put it up there? I look around – did someone pull it down by mistake?  I walk over the seats to scan the people queued in the aisle – can I catch the thief?  I try to ask the train conductors. I run off the train, scanning passengers as they stream off the platform.</li>\r\n	<li>No luck. My backpack is gone. And so is my Nikon camera, my Jawbone Jambox speaker, my Bose headphones, my United Airlines drink coupons, my Moleskine travel journal with notes from vacations over the last 6 years, and our passports.</li>\r\n	<li>So let’s recap the key elements of my stupidity in some sort of time order… putting our passports in the backpack instead of my coat pocket; putting the more easily grabbed piece of luggage in the overhead rack; having my nose stuck in my iPad instead of paying attention to my surroundings.  All things I knew then and have diligently avoided before.</li>\r\n	<li>I eventually go upstairs to the United ticket desk and confirm what I already knew – we can’t get back into the US without passports, so we weren’t going home today. The ticket agent was as helpful as she could be – pointed me to the police station in the airport so I could file a report and rebooked us without any hassle even though we were on rewards tickets.</li>\r\n	<li>We walked down the terminal to the police station. We only waited a couple of minutes.  The officer was a great guy.  Took my statement, quickly created the report – it was a painless 15 minutes. “We get 10-12 of these a day,” he said. Guess I’m not alone in my stupidity.</li>\r\n	<li>While he was typing up the report, I called the embassy and got through to a live person. Not quite sure where this live person was, but she put me through to the on-call duty officer who, again, was very helpful.  Police report – good that I was getting it; it would be necessary for the replacement passport.  He would have our names on the embassy admissions list for tomorrow morning, and told me where we could get passport pictures taken on a Sunday afternoon.</li>\r\n	<li>I hit Booking.com site on my iPhone and booked the Best Western right by the train station and not far from the US Embassy.  With all that done, there was nothing left to do at the airport.  We headed back down to the train station and went back to Brussels.</li>\r\n	<li>Monday morning we packed again, hoping that we’d be able to get our passports in time to catch the 11am flight to Chicago or the 11:30 to DC. We got to the embassy 20 minutes before it opened and were the first in line by 3 minutes. A pleasant security guard had us queue a couple hundred yards away from the door until opening time. People in line were either replacing stolen passports (again, not alone in my stupidity) or applying for visas. We walked to the security gatehouse at 8am. Good thing the duty officer had put our names on the “admit” list. They screened us one family at a time – everything X-rayed, but no full body scanners.  Backpacks, briefcases, luggage all stayed outside as did all electronics – no mobile phones, iPads, laptops. Luckily, I had printed everything out at the hotel.  They seemed to call the numbers quickly, though the folks for visas seemed to move through quicker. We watched the clock. We had to leave no later than 10:30 to have a shot at the 11:30 flight.</li>\r\n	<li>Our number was called. We went into a small room – my son and I on one side of bullet proof glass, the consular officer on the other.  He was a good guy. He asked us what happened; walked through our replacement application – he was nicely probing, checking that our facts aligned. He gently jammed me (rightfully so) about taking better care of the replacement passports and told us he’d have us out shortly. I looked at the clock – we had a shot to make the flight to DC.</li>\r\n	<li>We went back to the main room and waited. And waited. And waited.  Watching the clock, I saw our chance to get home slowly dissolve. We waited an hour for our replacement passports. We walked in at 8am and walked out at 11am. Not bad turnaround time, but not good enough to get us home that day.</li>\r\n	<li>It could’ve been much worse. Everyone I dealt with was very pleasant and helpful. My son and I took advantage of our extra time to sample just a few more Belgian beers. I had a very nice cassoulet for lunch on Monday that took a bit of the sting out of not making the DC flight.</li>\r\n	<li>But added up, my rookie mistake – paying more attention to the USAToday than my backpack -- cost me about $2,000 in stolen goods, 2 days additional room and board, and expedited passport fees.  As my dad always said, in life, there are no cheap lessons.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music -- <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/28792\"><em>Slinky Blues</em></a> by Admiral Bob</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Restaurants Want Your Smartphone</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Earlier this month, I spent a Sunday afternoon walking the floor of the National Restaurant Association’s <a href=\"http://www.restaurant.org/show/\" target=\"_blank\">annual show</a> in Chicago’s McCormick Place convention center. If you need reminding of how big the restaurant business is in the US, this show is <em>huge</em>.  There’s everything from a shrimp purveyor from the Mississippi Gulf Coast handing out samples to a commercial pot and pan seller with one of the <em>Top Chef</em> contestants looking lonely in their booth.</li>\r\n	<li>I went with a vague idea of checking out new breakfast food trends, perhaps for a follow-up to my blog post about free breakfast being the best hotel amenity.  But as I started wandering (and sampling) around, I found myself in the technology corner of the show. It felt a little like the nerd ghetto, stuffed in the most remote corner of the smallest show floor.</li>\r\n	<li>The most obvious trend was iPad menu – replacing the simple, cheap printed menu that can be tossed, dropped, and used as a coaster with a $400 piece of computer hardware. This trend had an accompanying trend – a slew of vendors selling all shapes of metal to lock down these now very expensive menus.</li>\r\n	<li>What was more interesting to me were the offerings that replaced pagers, punch cards, bar tabs, and credit cards with smartphones.</li>\r\n	<li>The pager one has always seemed a no-brainer to me – replacing those light-up, vibrating pagers that tell you your table is ready with a text message.  Systems with 15 pagers can run $1-2,000 and replacements for the pagers that walk off run around $100 apiece. Replace that with text messages sent from a low-end smartphone at the hostess station – the cost savings are obvious. The offerings I saw weren’t quite so DIY – they combined waiting lists, wait time tracking, and text messaging into a single iPad app (of course).</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"http://tabbedout.com/\">TabbedOut</a> is an interesting app, basically extending the restaurant or bar’s order and cash register system to your smartphone. Download the app, load it with your credit cards and you pay your bar tab from your phone – with the de rigour integration to Facebook, Foursquare and Twitter.</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://www.thelevelup.com/\" target=\"_blank\">LevelUp</a> is another smartphone payment app. It’s kinda like the Starbucks app – link the app to a card – the Starbucks app links to one or more of your Starbucks cards; LevelUp to a credit card – when you’re ready to pay, the app generates a bar code or QR code for the cashier to scan and you’re good to go. I use Starbucks app all the time to buy a coffee after I work out – don’t have to carry cash or a Starbucks card. LevelUp looks to be as convenient, but they don’t have the coverage yet – I’ve only seen them at a couple of food trucks.</li>\r\n	<li>This push, moving pagers, bar tabs, credit cards – the assortment of physical bits and pieces that restaurants handle – into the virtual realm makes sense as more people carry smartphones.  It assumes, though, that everyone can grab enough bandwidth for these transactions to happen. Which may explain another trend I saw on the floor – lots of booths peddling low maintenance ways for restaurants to offer WiFi to their customers</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917626811171154.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #98</li>\r\n	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from the <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/\" target=\"_blank\">ccMixter</a></li>\r\n	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_98.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #98 — Stolen Luggage & Passports; Restaurants Want Your Smartphone','','inherit','open','open','','961-revision-v1','','','2015-04-21 15:48:55','2015-04-21 20:48:55','',961,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/04/21/961-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1462,1,'2015-04-21 15:51:10','2015-04-21 20:51:10','[caption id=\"attachment_925\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"225\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/image1.jpeg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-925\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/image1-225x300.jpeg\" alt=\"Tiny White Fish in Chinese Soup\" width=\"225\" height=\"300\" /></a> Here\'s Looking At You © Mark Peacock[/caption]\r\n\r\nLots of travel has kept me away from the mic -- <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Beijing\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beijing\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Beijing</a>, London, <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Vienna\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vienna\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Vienna</a>, Phoenix, New York, and New Orleans. Big difference in airline load factor between international and domestic flights. The international flights were at 30-50% capacity while the domestic flights were booked solid. These trips allowed me to compare the different treatment US airlines get in international airports. This was my first trip to China; it made quite an impression. This string of travel has formed a strong opinion that the thermostat is the most important piece of hotel technology. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_97.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n[audio:travelcommons_97.mp3]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #97:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Bless me listeners for I have sinned.  It’s been 8 weeks since my last podcast.  What would be the appropriate penance?  Two Our Fathers, three Hail Marys, sitting next to a mother and lap child on next Tuesday’s 3-1/2 hr flight to Phoenix, and giving up snarky TSA tweets for Lent?  That would be harsh – especially the TSA thing.</li>\r\n	<li>I have been doing quite a bit of travel since the last episode.  10 days in Beijing, 3 days in London, 2 days in Vienna, a week in Phoenix, and then the back end of last week in <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"New York City\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"wikipedia\">New York.</a> I hung around Chicago last week, and then was down in New Orleans this week.  March has me in back Phoenix, then Brussels, back in New York, and then down to <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"San Juan, Puerto Rico\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Juan%2C_Puerto_Rico\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"wikipedia\">San Juan, PR</a> for spring break.  In the first quarter of the year – I will have traveled 11 out of the 13 weeks.  That’s probably my most intense run since 3-4 years ago when I traveled every week from the beginning of September – Labor Day – until Christmas week.</li>\r\n	<li>The domestic flights have been jampacked while the International flights have been relatively open.  My flight over to Beijing last month, business class was about half full and coach was less than that.  I had the two-side – window and aisle seat – of a United Triple 7 to myself.  It was an upgraded one – with lie-flat seats and big 22-inch monitors. I had both monitors displaying the flight map at different levels of zoom as we went straight north from Chicago. I saw a lot of frozen Ontario.</li>\r\n	<li>The flight back from Vienna, by way of London, I didn’t upgrade to Business.  I didn’t need to sleep; I had my iPad fully charged and loaded with content, so Coach was fine.  Business was full anyhow, but Coach was two-thirds empty. I ended up with more room than I would’ve had in Business.  People were sacked out across the middle rows.  I had a two-side to myself, so spread out, did a little work, and then mucked around on my iPad.</li>\r\n	<li>It was a rude crash to Earth, though, on my flights in and out of LGA.  I’m 1K on United, but was 15<sup>th</sup> in line for the one remaining upgrade. I felt lucky to get an exit row middle seat. I think even the lap kids had status.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Wanna luv you</em> by <a href=\"http://www.henta.co.uk/\">Henta Ellis</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>In the<a title=\"Podcast #96 — Eating and Drinking with Social Media; Frequent Flier Alliances\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/01/05/podcast-96-dining-with-social-media-frequent-flier-alliances/\" target=\"_blank\"> last episode</a>, I talked about the Jawbone Jambox wireless speaker I got for Christmas.  It got a good bit of use in my Beijing hotel room. I was there for 8 days. It only had 2 English-language TV stations – CNN and <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"BBC World News\" href=\"http://www.bbcworldnews.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"homepage\">BBC World News</a>.  You can only watch the 30-minute news rolls just so many times.  I powered through most of my podcast backlog, a few new albums, and a couple of documentaries I’d loaded up before heading over.  Good quality sound and much less awkward than sitting around wearing my Bose headphones.</li>\r\n	<li>In <a title=\"Podcast #33 – Listener Mailbag, What’s in My Briefcase?\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2006/02/18/podcast-33-listener-mailbag-whats-in-my-briefcase/\" target=\"_blank\">past episodes</a>, I’ve talked about the “slum” terminals in big airports – the terminal where the non-hub airlines have their couple of gates.  At ORD, United has Terminal 1, American Terminal 3, separated by Terminal 2, the “slum” terminal where US Air, Delta, JetBlue.  In PHX, USAir and Southwest split the renovated shopping mall-like Terminal 4, while everyone else slums it in Terminals 2 and 3.</li>\r\n	<li>When I fly home from Europe on US carriers, I feel a bit of the same “slum” treatment.  For what I’m sure are security reasons, the US carrier gates are all seem to be inconveniently located at the end of the longest concourse where there are no services – no restaurants, no shops, no bars.  It’s often a hunt for a restroom.  At <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"London Heathrow Airport\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Heathrow_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Heathrow Terminal 2</a>, they tell you it’s a 20-minute walk from security to these gates. No dawdling in duty free.</li>\r\n	<li>In Beijing, though, it was a very different story.  The United flights to ORD, SFO, and IAD all left from gates conveniently located in the center of the concourse – a 5-minute walk at most from the restaurants and shops.  Nor was there the extra security screening at the gate that you typically go through in European airports.  I just walked out of the bar and right onto the plane.</li>\r\n	<li>In Vienna, I was experienced a different twist.  I was flying to Heathrow on BMI, but somehow ended up in seemed to be a slum satellite terminal entirely devoted to Russian flights.  It was, once again, at the end of the terminal, and down a set of stairs, complete with a smoking room the size of 4 phone booths, in which at one point I counted 7 guys.  It was the only smoking room I saw in the Vienna airport – which may be the reason it and its Russian clientele got stuffed in the slum terminal.  But that still doesn’t explain why my LHR flight ended up there – unless BMI got a smokin’ deal on gate fees…</li>\r\n	<li>We’ve had kind of a discussion thread across a few episodes on the TSA’s Global Entry program – pay $100 (which many travel companies like Amex are reimbursing for top tier customers), give the TSA your life story and a set of finger prints, and you skip the US immigration lines for a set of kiosks over in the corner.  It’s been a huge time saver for me and a number of TravelCommons listeners.</li>\r\n	<li>So imagine my surprise – returning to Chicago from Vienna by way of Heathrow – I see 5-10 people queued for the Global Entry kiosks and no waiting for a live immigration agent.  I had filled out the customs card on the flight, so I walked up to an agent.  He processed me, saw the GE sticker on my passport and asked why I didn’t use a kiosk.  I pointed over to the line.  “Yup,” he said, “you knew that was going to happen eventually”</li>\r\n	<li>Bob Fennerty commented on Facebook\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Maybe the model will flip someday: Global Entry will be free and instead of paying to use a kiosk you\'ll pay to be processed by an agent. I always fill out the customs card on the plane so that I can choose to use GE or not. I probably skip the kiosks every fifth or sixth arrival.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>And if I can slip one last TSA comment in before I try to give it up for Lent, what’s with the incredible waste of machinery at most TSA checkpoints?  On my last trip out of PHX, the TSA lines was 15 minutes – while 4 of 6 lanes of screening equipment sat idle.  Same thing in ORD a week ago – a 15-minute wait in the status line while 4 lanes of adjacent equipment was unmanned.  The problem?  The full body scanners.  Not only does the full body scanner take longer – instead of the second it takes to walk through the metal detector, you have to stand with your arms raised for 5-7 seconds, then wait another 5-10 seconds for the remote screener to radio the “OK” to the gate keeper who then opens the gate to let you out. 10-20 seconds per person instead of the 1-2 seconds it takes for a walk-through metal detector – that math isn’t difficult.</li>\r\n	<li>And then add to that the additional staff the body scanner requires – the remote screener, the gate keeper, the one at the front keeping everyone queued… and you see the double effect – not only does the body scanner slow down the two lanes running through it, it also consumes staff that might be manning 1 or 2 of those idle lanes.  I don’t think a little more efficiency and a little less line time is too much to ask from an agency that spent over $8 billion last year.</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a question, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is <a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a> -- use the Voice Memo app on your iPhone or something like Virtual Recorder on your Android phone to record and send in an audio comment – or iMovie if you want to send in some video; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music -- <em>Snub-Nosed Aardvark</em> by <a href=\"http://podcast.penmachine.com/\">Derek K. Miller</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>First Trip to Beijing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>My first trip in 2012 was a big one from Chicago to Beijing – just short of 14 hours each way on United’s direct Chicago-Beijing flight.  The timing on the flight over was a bit goofy – I left at noon on Tuesday and landed in Beijing around 4:30 Weds afternoon.  I had a hard time figuring out when I was supposed to sleep.  As I mentioned at the start of the show, the flight was a polar route – straight north from Chicago, over Ontario, Alaska, and then down over Siberia.  I did manage to take an afternoon nap, but pretty much putzed around for 14 hours.  I looked out the window a lot after we crossed the Arctic Circle looking to see some Northern Lights – no luck.  Did some work, listened to podcasts, watched a couple of episodes of a BBC documentary on the history of Beijing that I’d ripped down to my iPad.</li>\r\n	<li>After 14 hours in a dry metal tube, it was refreshing to walk out into a spacious, modern, clean airport.  As you would expect since the international terminal – Terminal 3 – opened right before the 2008 Summer Olympics.  And it’s big – with more space than all 5 of London Heathrow’s terminals combined.</li>\r\n	<li>This was kind of an underlying observation during the whole trip – with more than 1.3 billion people – a lot of things just <em>have</em> to be big in China. While I knew this intellectually before the trip, it didn’t really hit me until I was there.  20 million people in Beijing, and it’s smaller than Shanghai. A local guy I was working with said that he was from a small town about an hour west of Beijing.  “And how many people live in your town?” I asked.  “About a million,” he answered.  And he said this with a straight face.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_927\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"225\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/photo-1-e13307957324511.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-927\" title=\"Beijing Morning\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/photo-1-e13307957324511-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"225\" height=\"300\" /></a> On A Clear Day You Can See Across the Street © Mark Peacock[/caption]</li>\r\n	<li>The other thing I thought I was prepared for, but really wasn’t, was the pollution.  We all remember the warnings before the Summer Olympics – about how the pollution was going to bring the marathoners to their knees.  And then nothing really happened. Well, the day after we arrived, the first day of business, we walked out of the office building and down the block to a restaurant for lunch.  Halfway down the block, I could feel the itching in the back of my throat.  Then my eyes started burning.  By the end of the day, I had a low-grade headache.  And this was just the first day.</li>\r\n	<li>Not that it got any better.  We started joking that on a clear day, you could see across the street.  Looking up at the sky, we had no problem looking directly into the sun; one guy got a nice photo with his iPhone.  I was running a pollution headache about every other day. I started looking forward to my flight home</li>\r\n	<li>The food was very good – if you like Chinese food, which I do.  We ate at a lot of different restaurants, all of it good.  But at just about every meal, there was one dish that made you go “Hmmm….”</li>\r\n	<li>The first night we ate at the hotel.  We had just arrived a couple of hours earlier; were a bit out of it from the time change and the long flight; and so were just looking for a beer and a bit of food – more to keep us awake to try and adjust to the time more than actual hunger. The wait staff didn’t speak much English, but they had a picture menu, so we that helped us do “point &amp; shoot” ordering.  We’ll take one of those and those and those and those – and 4 beers.  The waiter went away, and then came back with a colleague – who could speak a bit of English. “I’m sorry,” she said, “ but we’re out of the pickled donkey meat appetizer you chose, but we can substitute the specially spiced donkey meat instead.”  And then she walked off.  And brought back the specially spiced donkey meat.  In the next couple of days, we learned that donkey meat is a Beijing specialty.  Shanghai? No donkey meat.  But Beijing, you can get donkey meat. Guess we lucked out on our first meal.</li>\r\n	<li>It was always something. Like when they split the head of the Peking duck and served it on a plate so you could pick at the brains. Or gave me a cup the fish soup with slimy water lily stems and small albino fish staring up at me. Or at the hot pot restaurant where what I though was brown tofu was actually some sort of pressed loaf of duck blood.  And, at just about every meal, there was a plate of jellyfish.</li>\r\n	<li>But when I wanted to share pictures of this food with friends on Facebook, I ran smack up against the Great Firewall of China. Logged into the hotel’s Wi-Fi, I could Skype back home, run e-mail, do most everything – except access Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.  All blocked, but not with a big “Do Not Go Here/Turn Back” error page. It’s like those sites don’t exist – you get a blank web page and you watch it churn and churn and churn, waiting for a reply, until either you give up and move on, or the browser times out.</li>\r\n	<li>For me, it wasn’t that tough to get around.  I just fired up our corporate Cisco VPN client, nailed up a secure connection to our Scottsdale data center, and bingo, I had a nice tunnel through the Great Firewall. I updated my Facebook and Twitter statuses. Posted a picture of the albino fish soup to Facebook; I was social again. I was also able to download content in iTunes that had been unavailable before – I guess for copyright reasons – things like podcasts from the BBC. Coming onto the Internet from our Arizona data center with a US IP address, everything was back to normal.</li>\r\n	<li>Before I left, I had been pleasantly surprised to find that AT&amp;T’s international data plan included China.  With this trip and a European trip 2 weeks after, I had bought a 125 MB “bucket of data” for $50 just in case.  On the ground in Beijing, trying to find my way around, 3G connectivity was no problem. But what really surprised me was that I was able to connect to Facebook and Twitter with my iPhone.  For some reason, the Great Firewall had missed mobile data.</li>\r\n	<li>But even with my social networks reestablished, after 8 days in Beijing, I was out of eyedrops and ibuprofen; I was kinda tired of jellyfish. And with all the Beijingers heading back to their “small towns” for the Lunar New Year festivities, it was also time for me to head home</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music -- <em>Baja Taxi</em> by <a href=\"http://www.brain-buckit.com/\">Brain Buckit</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Most Important Hotel Technology</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>On my Beijing trip, I spent just short of 28 hours on United Triple 7s – a little more than a day.  I spent 8 days in my hotel though, so no matter how good or bad the United flights were, it’s the hotel that would make or break the trip.</li>\r\n	<li>I stayed in a nice hotel – it was in the north part of the city, right by the Olympic Village.  I could see the Bird’s Nest stadium lit up orange every night. I upgraded my room for an extra $10-15/night so I had a nice sitting area – a couch, chair, a little coffee table – or I guess in China, it would be a tea table.  Some extra space so I wouldn’t have to sit on my bed the whole time.</li>\r\n	<li>We’ve talked in a <a title=\"Podcast #85 — Importance of Hotel Bathrooms; Maximizing Miles\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2010/11/30/podcast-85-importance-of-hotel-bathrooms-maximizing-miles/\" target=\"_blank\">past episode</a> about how the importance of the hotel bathroom is often overlooked.  Not in this room – it was modern, clean, spacious, and the shower had good water pressure.</li>\r\n	<li>But as we’ve talked, a lot of the talk has been about new hotel technology. La Quinta, a US bargain chain, is making noise about their rollout of flat screen HDTVs that let you plug your gaming or iDevices into them. Higher-end hotels are loaning out iPads during your stay.</li>\r\n	<li>After my 8 days in Beijing, though, I decided that the single most important technology in my hotel room is neither the flat screen TV nor my Jawbone Jambox speaker – it was the thermostat.  For the first 5 days, everything worked fine – my room was a comfortable 21 degrees C or 70 degrees F.  Then one night, my thermostat decided I was too cold.  After a lousy night’s sleep, I woke up to 25 degrees C or 77 degrees F.  I pushed every button on that thermostat, turned it off and on, even downloaded the manual from the Internet and actually read it, but no luck. And, of course, the hotel front desk and engineering staff was of no use.  They came up and pushed the same buttons I did – and got the same results.</li>\r\n	<li>Their suggestion – open a window.  Which would’ve been a reasonable one if the Beijing air wasn’t so polluted.  As it was, with the thermostat turned off, the outside air began to leak into the room. I could taste the pollution in my mouth when I walked into my room.</li>\r\n	<li>Maybe I’m a wimp, but after 3 days of this, I would’ve happily traded the flat screen TV and its 2 English-language channels for a working thermostat.</li>\r\n	<li>It’s pretty common sense – first and foremost I want my hotel room to be comfortable. It kinda goes back to Maslow’s hierarchy – you have to meet my basic physiological needs – the right room temperature, a good night’s sleep, a decent shower – before I can begin to think about the self-actualizing potential of half-a-dozen channels of high-def sports programming.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917626811171154.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #97</li>\r\n	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from the <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/\">Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\r\n	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_97.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #97 — 1st Trip to Beijing; Most Important Hotel Technology','','inherit','open','open','','913-revision-v1','','','2015-04-21 15:51:10','2015-04-21 20:51:10','',913,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/04/21/913-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1463,1,'2015-04-21 15:52:40','2015-04-21 20:52:40','[caption id=\"attachment_879\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"207\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/DSC_85711.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-879\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/DSC_85711-207x300.jpg\" alt=\"On Tap in Edinburgh © Mark Peacock\" width=\"207\" height=\"300\" /></a> On Tap in Edinburgh © Mark Peacock[/caption]\r\n\r\nFinishing up my annual 2-week travel sabbatical in an unseasonably warm <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Chicago\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Chicago</a>. In this episode, a listener asks about if and when to use travel <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Compression stockings\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compression_stockings\" rel=\"wikipedia\">compression socks</a>, we discern the popularity of in-flight Wi-Fi service from Gogo\'s <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Initial public offering\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initial_public_offering\" rel=\"wikipedia\">IPO</a> filing, and dissect a recent article on the best airports for tech users.  We look at the new wave of social media dining apps such as <a href=\"http://untappd.com\">Untappd</a> which helps you drink beer socially, how they\'re taking advantage of smartphone cameras and location services. We wrap up with a look at how airline alliances are changing the frequent flier\'s experience. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_96.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n[audio:travelcommons_96.mp3]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript from TravelCommons podcast #96:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Happy New Year to everyone! Returning to work after my 2-week sabbatical from travel in unseasonably warm Chicagoland.  I was out in Phoenix for the first two weeks of December, where it was only 10-15 degrees warmer than Chicago.  Then I did a quick up-and-back to DC and was home for good by the evening of the 16<sup>th</sup>.  Though we didn’t have a white Christmas, I did have an amazing run of on-time and even early arrivals at ORD – a pleasant change from past December travel odysseys.</li>\r\n	<li>Indeed, my trips at the beginning of December were some of the easiest, most pleasant I’ve had in a while – combination of mild weather and light crowds made travel a breeze – short security lines, non-cranky TSA screeners, plenty of overhead space, and the reappearance of that rarities of rarities – an empty middle seat.</li>\r\n	<li>It feels like from the Tues or Weds after Thanksgiving to the week before Christmas is a bit of tourist dead zone and so the only ones traveling are the professional road warriors trying to close those last few deals, tie up those remaining loose ends before everyone and everything shuts down for the holidays.</li>\r\n	<li>Or it’s frequent fliers doing one last <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Frequent-flyer program\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequent-flyer_program\" rel=\"wikipedia\">mileage run</a> to get them to the next status level.  I didn’t need to make any mileage runs per se, but I did need those last two Phoenix trips to re-up my Hilton Diamond status and to get me back on United’s red carpet with 1K status.</li>\r\n	<li>Making 1K -- or more importantly, getting the systemwide upgrades that come with United’s top status was very timely.  I’m heading over to <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Beijing\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beijing\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Beijing</a> in January and being able to confirm an upgrade on United’s 14-hr Chicago-to-Beijing flight – which was one of the best Christmas presents I received…</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://www.nimbitmusic.com/saurabbhargava\">Exit</a></em> by Saurab Bhargava</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>All the bridge music on this episode from Saurab Bhargava’s new album Chromatique.  Saurab is a friend and long time TravelCommons listener. I’m happy to feature his music. That cut is Exit, which interestingly enough is the first cut on the album.  Here\'s a <a href=\"http://www.nimbitmusic.com/saurabbhargava/#music/chromatique\">link</a> to where you can buy them.</li>\r\n	<li>Tony White wrote in to ask about travel compression socks…\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>I am not sure if you covered this topic or not.  Do you have a preference of a minimum amount of hours of travel you choose to wear travel socks?</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>Tony, thanks for the question. No, I haven\'t covered this topic before -- because I’ve never used travel socks.  <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Compression stockings\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compression_stockings\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Compression socks</a> squeeze the feet and calves – to improve circulation, which helps fight feet swelling and <a href=\"http://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/health/health-topics/topics/dvt/\">deep vein thrombosis</a> – blood clots in the lower legs.  When I’ve flown business class on long flights, I haven’t felt much swelling – even on the 16-17 hour NYC to J’burg flight.  I think the lie-flat or near-flat seats reduce the distance between head and feet and so minimize the blood pooling in the lower legs.  Even in coach, I haven\'t felt the need for them on an 8-hour flight to London or Honolulu. However, on a flight back from Hong Kong last year, I wasn\'t able to score an upgrade.  During the 15 hours in coach I definitely felt swelling in my calves.  It was a full flight, so I couldn\'t lift my legs up for any length of time. Indeed, I saw a couple of guys lying on the floor in front of the exit row with their legs in the air.  On my upcoming trip to Beijing, I mentioned that I scored an upgrade to business class on the way out, but my upgrade for the flight back is still waitlisted.  If that second upgrade doesn’t come through this week, I think I\'ll be doing some After Christmas shopping for compression socks.</li>\r\n	<li>Two days before Christmas, <a href=\"http://gogoair.com/\">Gogo</a>, the dominant in-flight <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Wi-Fi\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi-Fi\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Wi-Fi</a> provider, <a href=\"http://venturebeat.com/2011/12/23/gogo-ipo/\">filed paperwork</a> with the SEC for a $100 million IPO.  The filing provided some interesting stats.  Gogo sells Wi-Fi on 4,000 flights a day on 9 out of the 10 North American airlines that offer Wi-Fi, though Delta represents 45% and bankrupt American 18% of their volume.  Gogo is available on over 1,100 planes, which they say is 85 percent of all Wi-Fi-enabled planes in North America, and they’re signed up to add another 525 soon. Impressive on the face of it, but if you start <a href=\"http://www.splatf.com/2011/12/gogo-ipo-filing/\">tumbling the numbers</a>, you quickly find that only 3-4% of passengers are buying – which syncs up with my experience.  We’ve talked about this in past episodes – while in-flight Wi-Fi has good use cases, especially when you don’t want to go radio-silent for 3-4 hours in the middle of the day, it’s a niche offering.  I’ve used it maybe half-a-dozen times in 2011.  From my anecdotal observations – looking over people’s shoulders walking to and from the aft toilets – most people are enjoying the unconnected time to watch a movie, read an e-book, or play Angry Birds (amazing how long that streak has been going).  Doesn’t seem that most folks are willing to pay $10-12 a flight to update their Facebook status.</li>\r\n	<li>A <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"PC World (magazine)\" href=\"http://www.pcworld.com\" rel=\"homepage\">PCWorld</a> article on the <a href=\"http://www.pcworld.com/article/246001/20_best_us_airports_for_tech_travelers.html\">best airports for tech users</a> ranks the 40busiest US airports on outlet availability, speed of Wi-Fi service (either free or paid), and strength of cellular signal – a good set of <a href=\"http://www.pcworld.com/article/246181/best_airports_for_tech_users_how_the_40_busiest_us_airports_stack_up.html\">basic tech criteria</a>.  DFW ranks #1 – it wasn’t #1 on any single category, but earned above average marks across the board.  ORD, my usual hangout, ranked #34 out of 40, which I think is about right.  Finding an available outlet at a gate is like a grown-up Easter Egg hunt – complete with crawling around and looking under chairs. Everyone wants to board with a full battery pack, especially iPhone users. Apple still hasn’t gotten iOS 5 battery life back to where it needs to be.  And for me, cellular signal is much more important than Wi-Fi service because I tend to use my iDevices much more than my laptop in airports.  At ORD, the AT&amp;T 3G service is unbelievably bad.  I’ll have 4 or 5 bars on my iPhone but can’t pull anything – e-mail, web pages, nothing!  Which is the reason I travel with a Verizon 4G hotspot.  After I’ve gotten tired of watching the “Checking for Mail” circle impotently spin, I fire up the hotspot and – Bam! – I’ve got mail.</li>\r\n	<li>But I dunno, hitting #1 for having visible electrical outlets and decent data signal seems damning with faint praise.  To really be a top tech airport, I think you need to have something like Qantas’s <a href=\"http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204296804577123004175940104.html\">set up</a> at Sydney airport – using RFID technology to make check-in, bag check, and plane boarding 5-second events.  I posted a link to the <a href=\"http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204296804577123004175940104.html\">WSJ article</a> on the TravelCommons Facebook page and Lisa Besso commented, saying that it’s a great system.  I’d be willing to suffer through ORD’s lousy AT&amp;T service is United did something like this.</li>\r\n	<li>Early in December, when my family was trying to get their Christmas shopping done, they started bugging me for gift ideas. Sitting in my room in the Scottsdale Hilton Garden Inn (which, by the way, isn’t a bad place), paging through the <a href=\"http://usatoday.com\">USAToday</a>, listening to a podcast on my wireless Motorola headset, I thought a wireless speaker would be nice.  Now I realize that a lot of alarm clocks in hotel rooms have plugs that let you play your iDevice through their speakers, but the quality is marginal at best (except for those few hotels that stock iHome alarm clocks) and you’re stuck in the bedroom – not great if you’re in something like an Embassy or Doubletree Suites.  I asked the Twitter-verse for suggestions and ended up with a Jawbone <a href=\"http://jawbone.com/charitywater\">Jambox</a> under the tree.  My wife said she bought the special edition yellow one so that I wouldn’t miss it when packing up, though the fact that Jawbone donates $50 from each purchase to <a href=\"http://www.charitywater.org/\">charity:water</a> didn’t hurt.  The Jambox isn’t cheap, but it puts out a lot of sound from a small package and has the easiest Bluetooth pairing I’ve seen.  Again, not cheap, but I recommend it.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://www.nimbitmusic.com/saurabbhargava\">Yours in Mine</a> </em>by Saurab Bhargava</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Dining With Social Media</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Finding interesting places to eat is always a challenge for frequent travelers. When you’re traveling to the same place a lot – like I do to Scottsdale – it’s easy to fall into a rut, going to the same places near the office or the hotel every trip.</li>\r\n	<li>When I started traveling, way before Al Gore invented the Internet, you’d rely on recommendations – from folks in the local office, the front desk clerk, a cab driver, a bartender, whomever you ran into.  Or maybe you pulled a top restaurant list out of the local paper or a guidebook.  I remember one project in SF in the early ‘90’s.  The project partner had a list of the top 100 restaurants in SF.  Don’t know where he got it, but it was a Bible to him.  We started at #1 for the project kick-off dinner and started working our way through the list.</li>\r\n	<li>And so here we are, 20 years and billions of dollars of venture capital investment later, and we still rely on personal recommendations.  But on steroids.  The first wave of food social media was powered by the multiplier effect -- you weren’t limited to people you physically meet; you could tap the expertise and passion of a broad group of diners and foodies for broad set of recommendations. <a href=\"http://chowhound.chow.com/boards\">Chowhound</a>, a food discussion board I’ve mentioned in <a title=\"Podcast #22 – Other Side of the Ticket Counter; Finding Local Food\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/11/13/podcast-22-other-side-of-the-ticket-counter-finding-local-food/\">past</a> <a title=\"Podcast #41 – Full to the Brim, What’s the One Thing…?\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2006/06/30/podcast-41-full-to-the-brim-whats-the-one-thing/\">episodes</a>, is a perfect example of that.  I’m still a heavy user.  On my second trip to Phoenix last month, I was on my own for dinner every night.  Around 5 every night, I’ve hit the Phoenix board on Chowhound and start paging through the entries until I found a restaurant that hit my tastebuds.  One night I ended up eating a green chile pork stew in a post Scottsdale place; the next night I had a bowl of pho at a Vietnamese strip mall in Mesa.</li>\r\n	<li>But if the first wave was discussion board-based, the current wave is smartphone-based, using the GPS and camera to build on the personal recommendations</li>\r\n	<li>Those of you following my Twitter feed may notice the occasional tweet that I’ve earned a badge from Untappd. Untappd is a social media app for beer drinkers, or should I say people who enjoy drinking good beer.  Instead of checking in locations on FourSquare, I check in my beer on <a href=\"http://untappd.com/\">Untappd</a>.  It keeps track of the beers I drink and where I’m drinking them, allows friends to see what I’m drinking, and awards badges for “achievements” like checking in 200 unique beers or drinking a stout on Nov 3<sup>rd</sup>, what someone designated <a href=\"http://www.stoutday.com/\">International Stout Day</a>.</li>\r\n	<li>The whole check-in thing gets me out of my hotel room to search out local beers wherever I’m traveling.  On that same trip to Phoenix, I found Papago Brewery in a Scottsdale strip mall and tried their El Robusto Porter. It wasn’t the best beer I’ve had, but it was something different.</li>\r\n	<li>But when I’m on the road, the best use of Untappd for me is discovering bars with interesting beer selections. One night in New York a couple months back, I was wandering around Midtown looking for a good beer bar.  Standing in some ersatz Irish bar, I fired up Untappd; it used the iPhone GPS to display nearby check-ins.  Paging down, I saw interesting beers being checked in at place called the <a href=\"http://www.rattlenhumbarnyc.com/\">Rattle and Hum</a>. A couple of clicks and I have it on the Maps app –it’s about a 10 block walk.  It was a pretty nondescript place.  Indeed, I walked right past it the first time.  I go inside – it’s jammed and has a great beer selection.  A great find courtesy of a dozen people I’ve never met, and through GPS I quickly found it.</li>\r\n	<li>Another app I use is <a href=\"http://foodspotting.com/\">Foodspotting</a>.  It also uses the iPhone GPS.  But rather than just showing a list of near-by restaurants, it cycles through pictures of dishes from those restaurants uploaded by diners.  Reading recommendations and menus are helpful in choosing a restaurant. Actually seeing the dishes takes a whole lot of the guesswork out.  My favorite use case is to park my car in a restaurant-rich neighborhood – I’ve done this in old town Scottsdale and in downtown Bethesda, MD – fire up Foodspotting and start cycling through the pictures.  Pretty quick, I get a sense of what place near-by is best matching my hunger pangs, and then map it with a couple of clicks – or screen presses, I guess.</li>\r\n	<li>I’d like to personally thank all the venture capital firms that have invested billions of dollars over the years in all of this to help me quickly vector in on the perfect cheeseburger.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://www.nimbitmusic.com/saurabbhargava\">Through The Line</a> </em>by Saurab Bhargava</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Frequent Flier Alliances</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>I mentioned earlier that I’d returned to 1K status on United; returning to the red boarding carpet at the United gates.  I also keep the 100% mileage matching – getting a bonus mile for each mile flown.  The 2012 changes to United’s awards program appear to reduce the bonus match for the mid-tier Premiere Exec’s –down to 50 or 70% depending on which of the new mid-tiers you hit.</li>\r\n	<li>The interesting thing is – I didn’t fly that much on United last year – less than a dozen flights.  Just enough status miles to make Premiere – United’s entry-level status tier, which you can get the same benefits – free luggage, early boarding – free for a year by signing up for United’s Visa card.</li>\r\n	<li>I earned most of the 100,000 qualifying miles on US Air and Lufthansa.  So I really didn’t earn 1K on United as much as I earned it on the Star Alliance.  Not that this is anything new – some chunk of my 2.5 million lifetime American Advantage miles are from British Airways.  However, with airlines rationalizing/reducing their number of seats; more tightly coordinating flight schedules and code sharing with their alliance partners, these partnerships – Star Alliance, OneWorld, and SkyTeam – become more of a way of life for frequent travelers, especially in those critical areas of status recognition, mileage credit, and mileage redemption.</li>\r\n	<li>It’s not a simple situation.  There are core alliance members – United, Lufthansa, US Air in Star Alliance; Delta and AirFrance in SkyTeam; American and BA in OneWorld.  And then there are the “other” partners, and these can move around.  Aer Lingus, for example, was part of the OneWorld alliance with American, but left in 2007 to go independent, and is now matched up with JetBlue and United (but not Continental), while Virgin Atlantic is matched up with Continental, but not United.  There are promiscuous partners – Hawaiian Airlines and Jet Airways seem to be on everyone’s list – while others like Southwest remain single or assemble their own little group like Emirates.</li>\r\n	<li>International travelers been stringing these beads for 20+ years to assemble their itineraries, but to have to do this domestically is a newer thing.  Because United and US Air are both Star Alliance partners, United has cut back their Chicago-Phoenix service, relying instead on code-sharing with US Air. I book the flight directly with US Air instead – one less step to traverse when something goes wrong – but give them my United Mileage Plus number instead of a Dividend Miles number (do I have one of those?). I still get to pre-board and, most importantly, concentrate my miles to maximize my status level.</li>\r\n	<li>The downside? US Air doesn’t take the free drink coupons United sends out to its 1K members.  If they could get that redemption thing integrated, then it would truly be a seamless partnership</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids991762681117115.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #96</li>\r\n	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n	<li>As I mentioned earlier, all the bridge music on this episode from Saurab Bhargava’s new album Chromatique.  The tracks were <em>Exit</em>, <em>Yours In Mine</em>, and <em>Through The Line</em>.  Here\'s a <a href=\"http://www.nimbitmusic.com/saurabbhargava/#music/chromatique\">link</a> where you can buy the songs or the entire album.</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_96.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #96 — Eating and Drinking with Social Media; Frequent Flier Alliances','','inherit','open','open','','880-revision-v1','','','2015-04-21 15:52:40','2015-04-21 20:52:40','',880,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/04/21/880-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1464,1,'2015-04-21 15:53:31','2015-04-21 20:53:31','[caption id=\"attachment_862\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/708473504_18da6d5b07_z1.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-862\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/708473504_18da6d5b07_z1-300x225.jpg\" alt=\"Standing in Line! © Lance Smith / Flickr\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\" /></a> Standing in Line! © Lance Smith / Flickr[/caption]\r\n\r\nOnce again skipping the mayhem of the busiest travel week of the year, though it\'s getting more difficult as the Thanksgiving travel crush seems to start earlier each year. Good listener comments about last episode\'s story of a rare prop plane flight sitting next to a \"passenger of size\"; then my own thoughts on <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"US Airways\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_Airways\" rel=\"wikipedia\">USAir</a>\'s completely inadequate <a href=\"http://overheadbin.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/11/23/8980390-flier-displaced-by-obese-seatmate-forced-to-stand\" target=\"_blank\">response</a> to the passenger forced to stand on a 7-hour flight because a \"passenger of size\" overflowed into his seat.  I update my holiday travel tips -- drive or train for trips less than 350 miles, pay extra to fly direct, catch the first flight out, and bone up on your geography so you know all the alternative airports. Watching news reports of the hassles of Black Friday shopping make me wonder why people would go through the hassles to fly airlines like Spirit Air. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_95.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n[audio:travelcommons_95.mp3]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript from TravelCommons podcast #95:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Looking back over the past 5 years of Thanksgiving week episodes, I always say the same thing -- Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studio outside of <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Chicago\" href=\"http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=41.8819444444,-87.6277777778&amp;spn=0.1,0.1&amp;q=41.8819444444,-87.6277777778 (Chicago)&amp;t=h\" rel=\"geolocation\">Chicago, Illinois</a> during the one week a year I refuse to travel… But it’s true.  Let the families have the airports for this week. It doesn’t make sense for anyone to travel on business Thanksgiving week anyways.  At best, you get 2 days of business – Monday and Tuesday – because Wednesday is a complete waste – and even then, nobody’s head is really in the game.</li>\r\n	<li>Indeed, Thanksgiving week has become even more worthless for business over the past few years. With more school districts throwing in the towel and closing down for the entire week, what was a four-day extended weekend has now become a full 9-day extravaganza.</li>\r\n	<li>Which then pushes back the travel crush even further.  An <a href=\"http://www.chicagotribune.com/classified/automotive/traffic/ct-met-getting-around-1121-20111121,0,2606142.column\">article</a> in the Chicago Tribune earlier this week said that Air Transport Association forecasted that the Friday before Thanksgiving would replace the Wednesday before as the busiest outbound travel day.  Made me glad that I’d returned from Dallas a day early – the Thursday before – missing the crush.</li>\r\n	<li>Over the last 5 years, there’s only one year – <a title=\"Podcast #80 – Holiday Travel Tips; Frequent Flyer Documentary\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2009/11/23/podcast-80-holiday-travel-tips-frequent-flyer-documentary/\">2009</a> – that I traveled on Thanksgiving week.  A client called a meeting in Philadelphia on the Monday before Thanksgiving. Really? Really. It’s called a power play.</li>\r\n	<li>I had them schedule the meeting first thing Monday morning.  I flew in on the last flight Sunday night, took the meeting on an intravenous coffee drip, and then flew back home after lunch.  It was a 16-hour up-&amp;-back, getting me through security in Philadelphia airport just as the tide of strollers and Hello Kitty roller boards was starting to build…</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/seldon-circles/\"><em>Making Circles</em></a> by the Seldon Plan</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Rich Fraser posted this on the TravelCommons website, commenting on my lack of appreciation for the smaller things of travel…\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Mark, you gotta get to more airports.  As a domestic road warrior, I\'ve flown into some of the smallest airports with commercial service on a wide variety of turboprop planes.  Whether it\'s Mesaba (Delta) with their <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Saab 340\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saab_340\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Saab 340s</a> or Horizon (Alaska) with their Q800s, just about every regional carrier has turboprops in their fleet.  Up until their demise 3 years ago, <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Midwest Connect\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midwest_Connect\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Midwest Connect</a> was using the Beech B1900D, a 19 seat flying minivan that did not require a flight attendant.  It remains the only plane that I could guarantee I could fall asleep in.</li>\r\n	<li>You big time international guys may look down and scoff at the small birds, but as a private pilot myself, I rather enjoy flying in a type that is closer to what I pilot.  It feeds the fantasy that I could possibly jump into the cockpit and take over just in case the crew had the fish for dinner.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>Rich has me pegged.  I self-select out of smaller airports.  I’d rather drive 2 hrs from a major airport with more service than fly into a thinly-served smaller one. A few years back, I had a client in <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Huntsville, Alabama\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huntsville%2C_Alabama\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Huntsville, Alabama</a>.  Every visit, I flew Southwest from Chicago to Nashville and then drove the 120 miles down I-65 to Huntsville.  I liked the control it gave me – much more than depending on the one Delta flight a day between O’Hare and Huntsville.</li>\r\n	<li>But as Rich will certainly remind me, you don’t always have that luxury.  I was doing some work in <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Sioux City, Iowa\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sioux_City%2C_Iowa\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Sioux City, IA</a> – which, of course, is most memorable for its three-letter airport code SUX.  I ended up on a 25-seat <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"United Express\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Express\" rel=\"wikipedia\">United Express</a> prop plane that had an intermediate stop in <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Waterloo, Iowa\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterloo%2C_Iowa\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Waterloo, IA</a>.  After half the passengers deplaned in Waterloo, the flight attendant came on, looked at everyone left and said, “you, you, and you – you need move to a seat behind the wing”.  We got up and shifted back, but I can tell you that we weren’t completely comfortable with the eyeball method of weight distribution.</li>\r\n	<li>And continuing that thought about weight distribution, Linda Martin of the <a href=\"http://indietravelpodcast.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Indie Travel Podcast</a> sent this in a few days ago, commenting on my experience sitting next to a “person of size” on my 2-hr prop plane flight from <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Grand Junction, Colorado\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Junction%2C_Colorado\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Grand Junction, CO</a> to Phoenix…\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Your comments on people of size got me thinking about <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Air New Zealand\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_New_Zealand\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Air New Zealand</a>\'s trans-Tasman and Pacific system, which was introduced a year or so ago; I think to compete against the budget carriers.</li>\r\n	<li>There are four levels of ticket: 1. \"Seat\" which is just a seat, no checked bag, no food, 2. \"Seat + bag\": a checked bag but no food, 3. \"The Works\": a checked bag, a meal and extra entertainment, 4. \"Works Deluxe\": all of the above, an extra checked bag and priority boarding, and a guaranteed empty seat beside you. Since the planes are single-aisle with three seats on either side, this means that you\'ll be on the aisle or the window with the centre seat empty.</li>\r\n	<li>I think it\'s a great system because it gives the consumer the choice to have a full-service or more-budget flight. But it\'s also great for larger passengers, because in buying the most expensive ticket (which is still cheap) they can get a seat-and-a-half for a lot less than the cost of two seats, meaning everyone is more comfortable. Plus it\'s a regular option off the seat menu, so there\'s no stigma attached to choosing it.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>Linda, thanks for sending that in.  I agree that the Air New Zealand approach is a smart one if they can get the price points to work. Study after study has shown that, far away, the main driver of flyer satisfaction is an empty middle seat. Think about it – every time the middle seat occupant shows up, he/she apologize to their seatmates – “Sorry but I’m in the middle”.  No one wants the seat, and no one wants it filled next to them. If Air New Zealand can make enough money off the “Works Deluxe” tickets, they’re in the bonus round – more revenue, satisfied customers, and not just those “of size”</li>\r\n	<li>Because this size thing just keeps being an issue.  The latest story surfaced earlier this week when a USAir passenger Arthur Berkowitz told the <a href=\"http://www.elliott.org/blog/forced-to-stand-for-a-seven-hour-flight/\">story</a> of his experience on a July flight from Anchorage, AK to Philadelphia to Chris Elliott, a traveler advocate blogger. It was a full flight except for one middle seat, into which a 400-lb passenger tried to fit himself. He apologized, but with his size, he took up his seat and half the seats on each side of him. Not only could Berkowitz not put his armrest down, he couldn’t fasten his seatbelt. He ended up standing most of the 7-hr flight.</li>\r\n	<li>Berkowitz rightfully complained to USAir, not only about the discomfort of having to stand for 7 hours, but also about the safety issues – the inability to use his seatbelt.  USAir offered him a $200 voucher to compensate – on an $800 ticket.  Berkowitz said, and I think rightly, that’s not enough. Their <a href=\"http://overheadbin.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/11/23/8980390-flier-displaced-by-obese-seatmate-forced-to-stand\">response</a> -- \"We have attempted to address this customer’s service concerns.  The way to ensure you have space available next to you — whether you are a person of size, or you would simply like to ensure you have more personal space to relax on a long flight — is to purchase that additional seat, or First Class, in advance.”  So to make sure I can put my armrest down, to make sure I can use my seatbelt, to make sure I’m not crowded out of the seat I paid for, I should buy an additional seat or upgrade to First Class?  When I first read this, I was dumbfounded.  But then I reminded myself – it’s USAir. Then it all made sense.</li>\r\n	<li>And to wrap on a more attractive note, commenting on last episode’s Hot Flight Attendant segment, Sak writes\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>I recently flew Copa Airlines Colombia between Medellin (MDE) and Panama City (PTY) and flight attendants were still young and hot. Of course, different country and labor laws and in Colombia is normal to discriminate by age.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>There you go, hot flight attendant <em>and</em> Star Alliance miles.  Who could ask for more?</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a question, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is <a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a> -- use the Voice Memo app on your iPhone or something like Virtual Recorder on your Android phone to record and send in an audio comment – or iMovie if you want to send in some video; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/eliyahu-wind/\">Oh Yeah</a></em> by Eliyahu Sills</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Holiday Travel Tips</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Looking back over those past 5 years of Thanksgiving episodes and then listening to Craig and Linda Martin’s recent holiday travel tips <a href=\"http://indietravelpodcast.com/usa/holiday-travel/\" target=\"_blank\">episode</a> on their Indie Travel Podcast reminded me that it’s been a couple of years since I’ve done my own holiday <a title=\"Winter Travel Tips — Things to Remember When The Snow Starts Flying\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/01/16/winter-travel-tips-things-to-remember-when-the-snow-starts-flying/\" target=\"_blank\">travel</a> <a title=\"Podcast #80 – Holiday Travel Tips; Frequent Flyer Documentary\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2009/11/23/podcast-80-holiday-travel-tips-frequent-flyer-documentary/\" target=\"_blank\">tips</a>, so here’s my updated Road Warrior 201 tips for traveling between now and the New Year.</li>\r\n	<li>Holiday travel generates a real miasma of emotions for frequent travelers.  You’re traveling because (theoretically) you want to – you <em>want</em> to visit those in-laws, don’t you? – not because have to to stay employed. You’re out of your comfort zone, out of your travel groove because you’re not solo-ing; you’re traveling with your family.  You gotta move slower through the airport; can’t react as easily to flight interruptions (are you <em>really</em> going to try stand-by with your wife and two young children?). It’s like Superman dragging along kryptonite – other than early boarding privileges, you’re just another traveler slugging it out with the rest of the teeming mass of travelers.</li>\r\n	<li>Add to this that airplane load factors – how full they’re packing the planes – have been at historic heights for at least 6 months and that, at least in the Northern Hemisphere, it’s winter, making weather disruptions a near certainty…</li>\r\n	<li>Well now, <em>that</em> paints an attractive picture.  So how do you survive this?</li>\r\n	<li>The first question might be – do you really need to fly?  We’ve talked about the fly-vs.-drive breakeven point in a <a title=\"Podcast #45 – Waiting for Luggage, Enjoying Travel\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2006/09/20/podcast-45-waiting-for-luggage-enjoying-travel/\" target=\"_blank\">couple </a>of <a title=\"Podcast #23 – Fly or Drive; Scenes from The Hotel Bar\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/11/20/podcast-23-fly-or-drive-scenes-from-the-hotel-bar/\" target=\"_blank\">past</a> <a title=\"Podcast #85 — Importance of Hotel Bathrooms; Maximizing Miles\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2010/11/30/podcast-85-importance-of-hotel-bathrooms-maximizing-miles/\" target=\"_blank\">episodes</a>.  Now driving in the winter isn’t all sweetness and light either – especially across stretches of I-70 through Kansas or up the Jersey Turnpike, but depending on how you value your time and the state of repair of your car, I think the breakeven point has got to be at least 350 miles.  And if you’re in certain parts of the US – the East Coast, between Chicago and New Orleans, along some bits of the West Coast – take the train. Amtrak’s on-time record is never a thing of beauty either, but it’s always going to be better than Newark or LaGuardia in December.</li>\r\n	<li>That’s all well and good, but you’re going from Philly to San Francisco.  You’ve got to grit your teeth and fly.  First, fly direct.  I know I say this every time, but it’s a foundational strategy – limit the points of failure in an overloaded system.  Expecting airlines already operating at capacity to ferry even more passengers between airports operating at or over capacity during marginal weather – and to do this all on schedule? Suck it up, pay the extra $100 and have a fighting chance of getting to your family on time with your sanity and your luggage in hand.</li>\r\n	<li>Next, catch the earliest flight you can.  Again, it’s about avoiding congestion. Delays stack up as the day wears on.  As your airplane goes from airport to airport, the probability of it getting stuck increases.  If it gets stuck too long, the probability of it getting canceled increases. Overnight, airlines have a chance to recover – late planes finally get their destinations and operations groups can reassign planes.  So while the last flight out can be a crap shoot, I’ve rarely hit a delay on the first flight out.</li>\r\n	<li>And the final tip, bone up on your geography – know your alternative airports. A couple of weeks ago, I got stuck in a rolling delay due to fog in LaGuardia. After two hours, I finally gave up my 1<sup>st</sup> Class upgrade for a middle coach seat to Newark – no matter how nice the seat, it has to get me where I’m going.  If LGA is jacked up, EWR – no matter how much I hate that airport – is the next best thing.</li>\r\n	<li>Knowing your alternatives – and their dominant carriers – is a key piece of knowledge when trying to pivot away from a delay or cancelled flight. Now, the LGA-EWR pivot is easy, but others aren’t so obvious.  Everyone knows that Chicago has two airports – ORD and MDW.  But Milwaukee is only 80 miles north, but not an alternative that it top of mind to everyone.  If PHL is in trouble, how many folks think about Harrisburg or BWI?  Or SAC as an alternative to SFO?  I tend to think about alternatives in two rings – within 60 miles – SNA and LGB for LAX; and then within 100-120 miles, which now picks up Palm Springs and San Diego for LAX.  Someone will drive a couple of hours to pick you up if it means getting you to Christmas dinner on time.</li>\r\n	<li>But, above all, be realistic – it’s going to be a zoo. Give yourself extra time. Figure out how much time it’ll take and add another 50%. At worst, you’ll have some extra time to watch the planes take off. But it’ll allow you to breathe a bit easier when the snow begins to fall.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music --<em> <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/liquid-seventythree/\" target=\"_blank\">Is That Called Love</a> </em></em>by Liquid Zen</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Bad Spirit In The Air</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>My undergraduate <a href=\"http://www.cua.edu\" target=\"_blank\">degree</a> is in chemical engineering, which means I had to take too many math courses to allow time for course like psychology or sociology.  Every once in a while, I feel this gap.  Like a few months ago when I walked past a huge line tailing out of a small shop in downtown Chicago. “What’s this for?” I asked.  “Waiting for a free cupcake,” a couple of line standers answered. 20 minutes in line for a $2 cupcake says your time is worth $6/hour.  Minimum wage is $7.25/hr. Huh?</li>\r\n	<li>I kinda have the same feeling about Black Friday – is your time worth so little that you’re willing to camp out in front of a WalMart for a half-price Wii game?  There’s something more emotional than rational about getting a “deal”</li>\r\n	<li>Which must be the reason that <a href=\"http://www.spirit.com\" target=\"_blank\">Spirit Airlines</a> is still in business.  They advertise “low low prices”, but don’t tell you about all the add-on <a href=\"http://www.spirit.com/OptionalFees.aspx\" target=\"_blank\">fees </a>– like the $34 fee for the convenience of booking the flight on-line rather than going down to the airport and queuing up for a ticket agent, but then you will be charged $5 to have that ticket agent print out a boarding pass for you. The Dept of Transportation fined them earlier this week $50,000 neglecting to reveal this full bill of fare.</li>\r\n	<li>And it doesn’t stop there.  Want to reserve a seat? It’ll cost you, depending on the seat, betwee $1 and $50. Want to fly with luggage?  It’ll cost you $18-$38 for a checked bag or $20-$45 for a carryon bag.  Don’t worry, though.  They assure you that you won’t be charged for carrying on “reading material”.</li>\r\n	<li>Once you’re on board, Spirit sports the<a href=\"http://www.seatguru.com/airlines/Spirit_Airlines/Spirit_Airlines_Airbus_A320.php\" target=\"_blank\"> least amount</a> of seat space of any US domestic airline – 28” seat pitch with non-reclining seats.  Like everyone else, Spirit charges for meals, but <strong><em>unlike</em></strong> everyone else, Spirit will charge you $3 for a glass of water.</li>\r\n	<li>So at what point does one’s self-respect kick in and say “enough” -- my time, my comfort, is worth more than this. Certainly for me it happened a long time ago. Spirit flies some of my regular routes – Chicago to LGA or to Ft Myers, FL – but I never consider them.  Indeed, they just annoy me – their fares which are artificially low because they don’t disclose/include all their fees crowd out the fares of other carriers, making me work to get to a true low cost fare.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids991762681117111.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #95</li>\r\n	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from the <a href=\"http://magnatune.com\" target=\"_blank\">Magnatune </a>site</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_95.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #95 — Holiday Travel Tips; Bad Spirit In The Air','','inherit','open','open','','851-revision-v1','','','2015-04-21 15:53:31','2015-04-21 20:53:31','',851,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/04/21/851-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1465,1,'2015-04-21 15:54:31','2015-04-21 20:54:31','[caption id=\"attachment_840\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"146\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/4275897174_f7c83887ab_z11.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-840\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/4275897174_f7c83887ab_z11-146x300.jpg\" alt=\"Chuck the Flight Attendant © hello jenny / Flickr\" width=\"146\" height=\"300\" /></a> Chuck the Flight Attendant © hello jenny / Flickr[/caption]\r\n\r\nIt\'s been a while since the last podcast. Contrary to what you might have thought, I haven\'t <a href=\"http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=podfade\" target=\"_blank\">podfaded </a>-- at least, not quite yet.  A flight out of Grand Junction, CO gave me a throw-back moment -- a flight in a prop plane. Sitting next to a huge guy on a very small plane got me thinking about how to deal with row mates -- row mates \"of size\" and row mates who like to chat. I talk about how the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Global Entry\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Entry\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Global Entry</a> program saved me from a huge line at ORD and comment on the now-infamous TSA exhortation to \"Get Your Freak On Girl\". We close with an economics lesson -- what\'s happened to all the hot flight attendants. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_94.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n[audio:travelcommons_94.mp3]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript from TravelCommons podcast #94:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Looking at the calendar, it has been a while since my last podcast. I\'ve kept meaning to do a new episode, but then something – usually work – gets in my way. Also, I am absolutely the least efficient/most distractable writer I know. Probably contributes to the problem.</li>\r\n	<li>Anyway, I\'ve been bouncing around a bit since the last episode – London, Dallas, Milwaukee, Orlando, Phoenix a couple of times, and a biking trip in <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Moab, Utah\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moab%2C_Utah\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Moab, Utah</a>.</li>\r\n	<li>The biking trip did challenge my packing skills – how to pack for a 4-day biking trip followed by 3 days of work in Phoenix, all in a carry-on roller bag.  Luckily, biking gear isn\'t that bulky – except for the shoes. And in Moab, a non-faded pair of jeans is considered high fashion, so the after-hours clothing count was pretty low also.</li>\r\n	<li>To get to Moab, I flew in and out of <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Grand Junction, Colorado\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Junction%2C_Colorado\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Grand Junction, CO</a> on the first prop planes – a Mesaba <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Bombardier Dash 8\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombardier_Dash_8\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Dash 8</a> – that I’ve flown in a long time.  I thought regional jets had replaced all of these things years ago.  Knowing that I’d be flying down to Phoenix on a commuter plane made my post-bike packing a bit easier. I could expand my rollerboard a bit because I wouldn’t have to fit it in an overhead; I’d be gatechecking it at plane side.</li>\r\n	<li>So I was a bit surprised when the gate agent was encouraging people to carry on.  Really?  When was the last time you heard that?  Usually the gate agents are prowling the boarding area looking for oversized carryons to gate check. Indeed, with sold-out planes being the norm, more gate agents are announcing that everyone in the last boarding group will have to gate check their carryons – not even letting them get on the plane to try. I wonder if it’s a marketing ploy for the new airline credit cards that offer advanced boarding along with a mile for every dollar spent.</li>\r\n	<li>Well, expanded out, my bag wasn\'t going to fit in a normal sized carryon bin, let alone the shrunken vestigial one on a Dash 8, so I grabbed a gate check tag and left it plane side like I always do.  I did, though, ask the woman there about what I thought was an odd request – why ask people to carry on? “’Cause we’re weight-restricted” she said, “and carryons don’t count.” So a 20-lb bag counts against the weight restriction when it’s in the cargo hold below the passengers’ feet, but not when it’s shoved above the passengers’ heads?  She just shrugged and pointed me toward the stairs.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/hisboyelroy/430\" target=\"_blank\">Revolve</a> mix</em> by His Boy Elroy</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>We\'ve talked in past episodes about row mates; seat neighbors.</li>\r\n	<li>Well, once I got on board that Dash 8 in Grand Junction, I found that my row mate was <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Larry the Cable Guy\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_the_Cable_Guy\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Larry The Cable Guy</a>’s overweight twin – or perhaps the more appropriate way would be to say “a passenger of size”.  Whatever way you want put it, there was no way I was getting the armrest down between Larry and me.  Hell, I couldn\'t even see the armrest. I didn’t make a big deal out of it – I had the aisle I could lean into to, and Larry kept his arms forward to try to minimize the spill over. But it still was an uncomfortable 2 hours. Pressing up against Larry for that entire time, I could feel (literally) the justification for making “passengers of size” buy two seats if they can’t fit into one.</li>\r\n	<li>But then there was this huge guy on my DFW-ORD flight. Standing in the aisle for 5 min stashing his stuff, holding up the entire boarding process. |Not that he could\'ve stepped out of the aisle – he was too big for that. But then he got offended when people tried to squeeze around him as the flight attendants started banging on about the need for everyone to get seated so we could leave on time.</li>\r\n	<li>I’m not a tiny guy myself. But, in spite of what the spokesperson for the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance\" href=\"http://www.naafa.org\" rel=\"homepage\">National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance</a> says, it’s not about rights.  It’s about being polite and living with the choice you\'ve made – or purchased. For a given price, you’ve bought a seat of known dimensions in smallish metal tube that you’ll share with 50-200 other people all trying to get in and out of said tube in as short a time period as possible. If you can’t sit comfortably with the armrest down, then buy the seat next to you, or buy a first class seat (or at least an upgrade) on planes that offer it (certainly wasn\'t an option provided Larry on that Dash-8).  If you don’t want to be rushed during boarding, check your bags and wait ‘til last call – or charter your own jet.  But don’t get huffy at the rest of us.</li>\r\n	<li>While I was waiting to start my trip to Moab, I had a bit of dwell time in ORD so I did a little test.  I fired up my Verizon 4G Hot Spot and ran the Speed Test Chrome app on my MacBook Air – a smokin’12.3 megabits per sec down, 15 Mbps up. I then fired up the Speed Test app on my AT&amp;T iPhone 4 – 0.3 Mbps down, 0.05 Mbps up. I don’t know what’s wrong with the AT&amp;T data service in ORD, but it’s just pathetic.</li>\r\n	<li>A year ago – in<a title=\"Podcast #85 — Importance of Hotel Bathrooms; Maximizing Miles\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2010/11/30/podcast-85-importance-of-hotel-bathrooms-maximizing-miles/\" target=\"_blank\"> episode 85</a> to be exact – I interviewed <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Michael Komarnitsky\" href=\"http://www.crunchbase.com/person/michael-komarnitsky\" rel=\"crunchbase\">Michael Komarnitsky</a>, founder and chief executive of <a href=\"http://gomiles.com/\" target=\"_blank\">GoMiles</a>, a mileage tracking and management website.  Earlier this month, AA and SWA went gunning for Michael and other mileage-management sites, serving them “cease-&amp;-desist” letters claiming security and terms of use violations.  What it’s really about, I think, is not wanting travelers to have tools to be “more efficient” in how they cash in miles or frequent sleeper points. Miles are a big money-maker for airlines – they pull in millions selling them to credit card companies and the like.  They’re even more profitable when they expire unused.  Sites like <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"GoMiles\" href=\"http://www.crunchbase.com/company/gomiles\" rel=\"crunchbase\">GoMiles</a> make it easier to keep track of your miles, including expiration dates. I’ll put links to our <a title=\"Podcast #85 — Importance of Hotel Bathrooms; Maximizing Miles\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2010/11/30/podcast-85-importance-of-hotel-bathrooms-maximizing-miles/\" target=\"_blank\">interview </a>with Michael and a <a href=\"http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204774604576627142338884936.html\" target=\"_blank\">WSJ article</a> in the show notes.</li>\r\n	<li>In the<a title=\"Podcast #93 — Travel Stories from September 11th; Traveling with a Google Chromebook\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/09/09/podcast-93-%e2%80%94-travel-stories-from-september-11th-traveling-with-a-google-chromebook/\" target=\"_blank\"> last episode</a>, I was getting ready to head over to London, and was looking forward to testing out the Global Entry lane, seeing if it cut my re-entry time at passport control.  Coming back into ORD, it was a huge time/frustration saver. The US citizen line at passport control was longer than I\'ve ever seen it – all the cattle-pen switchback lanes were full and then the line stretched out another 50-75 yards into the terminal walkway. I walked up, showed the line marshal the “CPB” Global Entry sticker on the back of my passport and was waved through to a row of 6 Global Entry kiosks.</li>\r\n	<li>It took me two tries to get a valid 4-fingerprint reading, but I was through in 5 minutes. Was definitely worth the couple of hours I invested back in July.</li>\r\n	<li>Robby Smith wrote this on the TravelCommons Facebook wall –\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>I now have 3 data points for Global Entry in the last 3 months.  My average time in Immigration is about 20 seconds. Customs just takes receipt from the GE kiosk and say Welcome Home. IAH has a separate Customs arrival lane for GE only.  I know the GE program is only about 18 months old or so but I should have done this the day it came out. At $100 for 5 years, it would be ridiculous for me not to have it. Finally a Gov program that works and makes life better.</li>\r\n	<li>BTW; United Mileage Plus 1K and GSM now get this as a free benefit of status.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>Robby, thanks for that.  I agree that it’s a great program – the one thing the Dept of Homeland Security has done to make travel a little easier.  And more programs are picking up the $100 fee.  It’s now a benefit of Amex’s Platinum card.</li>\r\n	<li>And of course, the podcast wouldn’t be complete without a TSA item.  Every once in a while, on those rare occasions that I check luggage, I’ll find a card from the TSA politely letting me know they’ve opened my luggage and searched through it. Sometimes they re-pack things nicely, other times they leave a wadded up mess.  For one woman earlier this month, they left her a more personal note, printing “Get Your Freak On Girl” along the margin of the standard TSA card.  Prompted, she guessed, by the screener’s discovery of what she described in a tweet was a “personal” item – battery powered.  She was stunned, but kept a sense of humor about it. Given recent arrests of TSA agents stealing from screened luggage, she’s lucky the screener just left the note.  There’s a link to an<a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.forbes.com%2Fsites%2Fkashmirhill%2F2011%2F10%2F24%2Ftsa-officer-advises-passenger-to-get-her-freak-on%2F&amp;h=iAQHCGNplAQHy0Sz1-fzFBuZQC14G7hsgZZIeEhj3mbR1jQ\" target=\"_blank\"> article</a> on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\">TravelCommons Facebook wall</a>, and I’ll also put it in the show notes.</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a question, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is <a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a> -- use the Voice Memo app on your iPhone or something like Virtual Recorder on your Android phone to record and send in an audio comment – or iMovie if you want to send in some video; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/#!/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at travelcommons.com.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/septahelix/34050\" target=\"_blank\">Earth Soda</a></em> by septahelix</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Plane Conversation Etiquette or The Risks of Talking to Your Seatmate</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Humans love/need to put order to the randomness around them, and one of the most common ways to do it is the “There are two kinds of people in the world” construct – Those who like durian or mushrooms or Brussels sprouts or ferrets and those who don’t.  In travel, the classic split is between fliers who want to talk to their row mates and those who want to be left alone.</li>\r\n	<li>You can see it when you walk on the plane – the people who sit down and immediately power up the Bose noise-canceling headsets and those who are looking all around</li>\r\n	<li>I saw the ultimate example of a talker on the same DFW-ORD flight (yes, it was one of those flights…). The guy in the row in front of me talked for 45 min straight, seemingly without taking a breath – he must’ve been an amateur didgeridoo player trained in circular breathing. He started before takeoff.  Sitting in the center seat, he swiveled his head like an oscillating fan, equally torturing both row mates. I was half expecting him to swivel his head all the way around “Exorcist-style” and include me in his life story.</li>\r\n	<li>Four of us in the two rows behind him traded glances as we watched him in a mix of amazement (equal parts how long he could talk and how clueless he was of what he was doing), horror (at the mental anguish he was inflicting on his row mates) and relief (glad we weren’t sitting in that row). We started a little pool – 5 bucks a piece – would he stop or be told to shut up, and when would that happen. I figured he’d eventually run out of gas – if his row mates hadn’t plugged in their iPods by now, they were going to let him go.  The guy across the aisle from me won the pot, though, because I underestimated how long this guy would talk.</li>\r\n	<li>As you might have guessed, I’m not generally a talker. If you end up next to me on a plane, it’s pretty certain that the only conversation we’ll have is when you ask me to get up from my aisle seat to let you go to the toilet.</li>\r\n	<li>I use plane flights as my alone time – I mostly nap, then read, maybe do a bit of e-mail or play solitaire on my iPhone while listening to podcasts. As I’ve mentioned in past episodes, I rarely use in-flight Wi-Fi.  I enjoy that little bit of unwired isolation.</li>\r\n	<li>I do think I miss out on things, though.  On a flight down to Phoenix, USAir screwed up my reservation, lost my advance seat assignment, which dropped me in a center seat.  I was sitting in my seat, not looking forward to the next 3.5 hours. Getting up to let in the older woman who had the window seat, she said to me “I really don’t care for window seats.” “I’ll slide over if you want this center seat instead,” I offered.  She gladly took it.  I got into my usual position – plugged in, eyes closed, waiting for takeoff – my own little world. Only after I was walking down the terminal in PHX did I think – that’s a bit odd about not wanting the window; I should’ve asked her for the back story.</li>\r\n	<li>I’m not like I’m a complete social hermit. Eating at the bar in a restaurant while on the road, I’ll strike up a conversation with the bartender or the guy sitting next to me. At dinner last night at a restaurant with communal tables, I got the thumbnail life story of the couple sitting next to me, even traded splashes of pinot noir for an impromptu wine tasting.</li>\r\n	<li>So what’s different?  Well, in that bar or in that restaurant, if things get a little weird, a little uncomfortable, or a little boring, I can always excuse myself and walk away.  Not easily done in a metal tube 35,000 ft in the air. While I might be kinda curious about a person, I’m not <em>that</em> curious to risk being pinned against the wall of a plane for three hours…</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music --<em> <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/scottaltham/20747\">Hear Us Now</a></em> by scottaltham</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Decline of Hot Flight Attendants</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li><a href=\"http://www.theatlantic.com/megan-mcardle/\" target=\"_blank\">Megan McArdle</a> of the <a href=\"http://www.theatlantic.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Atlantic</a> magazine has become one of my favorite bloggers. I’m sympatico with her call-it “wet libertarianism”. Could be because we both graduated from University of Chicago’s business school where a sort of cold-blooded economic theory pervades everything.</li>\r\n	<li>Anyhow, a recent article of hers caught my eye – “<a href=\"http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/10/the-declining-hotness-of-flight-attendants/246610/\" target=\"_blank\">The Declining Hotness of Flight Attendants</a>”. The TV show <em>Pan Am</em> – set in the ‘60’s, a Mad Men in the air knock-off, has let to a string of “then vs. now” articles, comparing the “Clipper Class” era to today “Greyhound Bus” level of service.  Another blogger, Glen Whitman, had written a <em>Pan Am</em>-inspired post on the “<a href=\"http://agoraphilia.blogspot.com/2011/10/pan-am-and-economics-of-hot-flight.html\" target=\"_blank\">Economics of Hot Flight Attendants</a>”. His thesis – prior to deregulation, with the Civil Aeronautics Board setting prices for flight routes, airlines could only compete on service. Since in the ‘60’s and ‘70’s, most fliers were male salarymen, airlines would pay more for attractive flight attendants to differentiate their service.  After 1978, airlines found competing on price overwhelmed differences in service and so out went any rationale for the hot flight attendant salary premium.</li>\r\n	<li>McArdle’s response – “As a libertarianish economics blogger, I would love if this story were true.  But I\'m skeptical.”  And then she goes outlines a more plausible scenario – the combination of union representation, anti-discrimination laws and, as she puts it, “feminist shaming”, allowed the flight attendant population to age, resulting in “a workforce composed mostly of older and not particularly attractive people.  Mirroring the larger American workforce”</li>\r\n	<li>Reminded me of when Virgin Atlantic started flight into Chicago. I was running a dot-com consultancy at the time (like 75% of the working population, or so it seemed) and was flying to London twice a month. I quickly became a Virgin Atlantic regular. The flights were much better than United or American or BA. The planes were new, the food was good, and yes, they had hot flight attendants.  On a flight back to Chicago, one of the flight attendants asked me for suggestions on things to do on her layover. She told me that she was bidding on different runs every month so that she could “see the world” since she, like other the other flight attendants, was on a 36-month non-renewable contract.  No danger of declining hotness at Virgin.</li>\r\n	<li>Now, all that being said, it’s wasn’t the “hotness” of the Virgin flight attendants that mattered (though in and of itself, it wasn’t a bad thing), it was their attitude – lack of cynicism, sarcasm, surliness.  This was still new and exciting to them – unlike the 25-year veteran flight attendants at United or American. The Virgin flight attendants would be serving passengers throughout the flight, rather than racing the meal carts through the aisles and then hiding in the galleys. When asked to describe meal choices, I would receive a polite explanation, rather than the “Does this look like a restaurant” reply I received from a Northwest flight attendant.</li>\r\n	<li>We won’t ever get back to the Pan Am Clipper Class days, what’s called the “Golden Age” of travel.  I’m OK with that.  I’d be happy for just some pleasant attitudes in today’s flying buses.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids99176268111711.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #94</li>\r\n	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from the <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/\" target=\"_blank\">ccMixter</a> site</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_94.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #94 — Plane Conversation Etiquette; Decline of Hot Flight Attendants','','inherit','open','open','','832-revision-v1','','','2015-04-21 15:54:31','2015-04-21 20:54:31','',832,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/04/21/832-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1466,1,'2015-04-21 15:55:17','2015-04-21 20:55:17','[caption id=\"attachment_827\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/071.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-827\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/071-300x202.jpg\" alt=\"Downtown Brooklyn. People return to Brooklyn over the Manhattan Bridge still in shock, after fleeing from the attack on the World Trade Center. © Joseph Rodríguez\" width=\"300\" height=\"202\" /></a> Downtown Brooklyn. People return to Brooklyn over the Manhattan Bridge still in shock, after fleeing from the attack on the World Trade Center. © Joseph Rodríguez[/caption]\r\n\r\nComing up to the 10th anniversary of the September 11th terrorist attacks, I repeat a segment from the September 2005 <a title=\"Podcast #14 – September 11th Travel Stories; Writing a Great Travel Song\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/09/14/podcast-14-september-11th-travel-stories-writing-a-great-travel-song/\" target=\"_blank\">episode</a> that tells the stories of travelers trying to get back home when all planes were grounded and all US borders were closed after the attacks. Also, we finish up the two-part review of new Google technology with observations after taking a Samsung Chromebook on the road for a month this summer. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_93.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n[audio:travelcommons_93.mp3]','Podcast #93 — Travel Stories from September 11th; Traveling with a Google Chromebook','','inherit','open','open','','825-revision-v1','','','2015-04-21 15:55:17','2015-04-21 20:55:17','',825,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/04/21/825-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1467,1,'2015-04-21 15:56:08','2015-04-21 20:56:08','[caption id=\"attachment_821\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/ipad-galaxy1.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-821\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/ipad-galaxy1-300x225.jpg\" alt=\"Apple iPad 2 and Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\" /></a> Tablet Wars[/caption]\r\n\r\nI walked out of the <a title=\"Google I/O 2011\" href=\"http://www.google.com/events/io/2011/index-live.html\" target=\"_blank\">Google I/O</a> developers conference in May with a pre-release version of <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Samsung Group\" href=\"http://www.samsung.com/\" rel=\"homepage\">Samsung</a>\'s challenger to the iPad -- the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Samsung Galaxy Tab\" href=\"http://galaxytab.samsungmobile.com/\" rel=\"homepage\">Galaxy Tab</a> 10.1.  Rather than put it up for sale on eBay like many attendees, I decided to take it on the road with me.  I\'ve been traveling the last two months with both the Galaxy and an <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"iPad\" href=\"http://www.apple.com/ipad/\" rel=\"homepage\">iPad 2</a>, including a real pressure test -- two weeks in the UK without a laptop. Before Apple <a title=\"Apple yet again pushes for EU ban of Samsung Galaxy tablets, phones\" href=\"http://venturebeat.com/2011/08/19/apple-yet-again-pushes-for-eu-ban-of-samsung-galaxy-tablets-phones/\" target=\"_blank\">blocks</a> Galaxy sales in any more countries, here are my hands-on impressions.\r\n\r\nBoth tablets are nice pieces of hardware.  A Google search will provide no end of detailed comparisons of the hardware specs.   But in the real world, it\'s a push.  The screen sizes are a bit different (the Galaxy has a bit more of an HD aspect ratio while the iPad’s dimensions are more like a sheet of paper), the Samsung is a few ounces lighter than the iPad, and the buttons are in different places.  There\'s no real difference -- they feel the same, both screens are beautiful, and their response times are great.\r\n\r\nAs you would expect, the iPad has a better selection of apps; the tablet version of Android (code named \"Honeycomb\") just launched while the iPad has been out for over a year.  However, for apps that I use, the difference isn\'t as significant as the raw iPad-vs.-Honeycomb numbers suggest.  Most of the apps that I use regularly -- Evernote, Kindle, USAToday, Pandora, Dropbox, Skype, Concur expense reporting, Angry Birds -- are all available for Android.\r\n\r\nEvernote and USAToday are the only Android tablet-specific ones (and are nicely done), but the others work fine.  The holes seem to be slowly filling in, but the coverage is uneven.  WebEx just released an Android app that runs on phones and tablets.  The Financial Times app looks great on the Samsung, but the apps from the Wall Street Journal and the Economist only run on the phone versions of Android (2.2 and 2.3, or \"Froyo\" and \"Gingerbread\" in Google\'s dessert-themed code names) and won\'t install on Honeycomb. Understandable for a 2½-month-old product, but still a problem for real-world users.\r\n\r\nComparing Apple’s <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"IOS (Apple)\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOS_%28Apple%29\" rel=\"wikipedia\">iOS</a> vs. Google’s <a title=\"Wikipedia entry on Android OS\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(operating_system)\" target=\"_blank\">Android</a> and each system\'s built-in applications (e.g., browser, e-mail) seems to be less of a “better-worse” judgement and more a debate between two design philosophies.  The Apple experience is a locked-down one -- there’s only one place to get apps, the screen layout not very customizable, there’s no independent access to the file system, and it\'s tethered to iTunes (though this is expected to go away with the next release of iOS). This isn\'t necessarily bad -- it\'s a much more secure approach, most people never change the default settings on their technology and there’s a lot to be said for not letting users screw things up beyond recovery. It’s Apple’s point of view. It’s a valid one, but it does have some impact.\r\n\r\nWhile in the UK with just the iPad and Galaxy Tab, I wanted to replace my Facebook profile picture with one taken that afternoon in the Glengoyne Distillery. My daughter had taken the picture with my iPhone. Plunking around the Facebook iPhone app, I couldn’t find a way to change my profile. So I e-mailed the photo from my iPhone to my Gmail account.  Logging onto the Facebook site from the iPad Safari browser, I couldn’t save the picture from the Mail app to a place where the browser could access it. Opening up Gmail on the Samsung tablet, I could save the picture to the folder of my choice and then upload the picture from that folder to the Facebook site through the Android browser. Perhaps less safe, but I got done what I wanted.\r\n\r\nIt’s a little thing, but it illustrates why I found relying solely with the Android system -- being without my <a title=\"MacBook Air\" href=\"http://www.apple.com/macbookair/\" target=\"_blank\">MacBook Air</a>-- easier than the iPad. The Android design philosophy is to give the users much greater control over their experience.  Which means I can spelunk around the file system, tweak the technical operations, create truly horrid screen designs, and view Flash-based web sites to my heart’s content.\r\n\r\nI like Android\'s widgets -- the ability to look at the screen and see new e-mails, Tweets, the temperature without having to open an app. But for enterprise users, the iPad does a much better job of sync\'ing mail, contacts, and calendars with the corporate-standard Microsoft Exchange infrastructure. It\'s interesting that my daughter who’s starting high school this year tends to pick up the Samsung tablet more than the iPad. It probably has to do with the fact that she has an <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Android (operating system)\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_%28operating_system%29\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Android phone</a>, but she seems to prefer the Google experience.\r\n\r\nThe iPad 2 is definitely a more polished experience.  It feels 1-2 releases ahead of the Android tablet -- which it is.  The Samsung tablet, though, keeps right up with Apple in hardware and fit-and-finish, and Android gives the advanced user the ability to customize it to his/her specific needs.  Final recommendation -- at the same price, I recommend casual/non-technical users to buy the iPad 2; there are no sharp edges on which they could cut a finger. But if you like to pop the hood on your technology, you won’t go wrong with the Samsung.\r\n<div class=\"zemanta-pixie\" style=\"margin-top: 10px; height: 15px;\"><img class=\"zemanta-pixie-img\" style=\"border: none; float: right;\" src=\"http://img.zemanta.com/pixy.gif?x-id=a6fa3e5a-f086-4119-b970-8dd36cc1d883\" alt=\"\" /></div>','iPad 2 vs. Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 -- Hands-On Impressions','','inherit','open','open','','811-revision-v1','','','2015-04-21 15:56:08','2015-04-21 20:56:08','',811,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/04/21/811-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1468,1,'2015-04-21 15:56:55','2015-04-21 20:56:55','[caption id=\"attachment_789\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"250\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/3300827223_3bea6ba1ff1.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-789\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/3300827223_3bea6ba1ff1-250x300.jpg\" alt=\"Train Crash at Montparnasse 1895\" width=\"250\" height=\"300\" /></a> Train Crash at Montparnasse 1895[/caption]\r\n\r\nInto the summer travel rhythm with a mix of vacation and business travel. Using an Apple iPad 2 and Samsung\'s new Galaxy Tab 10.1 Android tablet during this mix gave me enough real world experience to make some recommendations. A couple of recent web links describe this podcast as \"not as upbeat as others\" which is true, but because it focuses on traveling, not destinations. Perhaps this non-chipper attitude is partially explained by a recent study placing 4 US airline companies in the top 8 most hated companies in America. And a listener suggests ways to reduce roaming voice and data costs. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_92.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n[audio:travelcommons_92.mp3]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript from TravelCommons podcast #92:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Travel since the last podcast has been pretty evenly split between personal and business travel.  First couple of weeks was summer vacation in the UK -- the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Lake District\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_District\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Lake District</a>, Scotland, and a couple of days in London.  Had phenomenal weather the whole time we were there -- one afternoon of rain, and the rest of the time was warm and sunny.  Almost too warm for the clothes we packed. And everyone was amazed.  All the bed &amp; breakfast owners were marveling at the weather. “It’s luvly,” said our landlady in Edinburgh, “Last week it was hailing”. Lucky us because we certainly didn’t pack for that.</li>\r\n	<li>Just to make sure I didn\'t forget we were on vacation, we stayed at bed &amp; breakfasts the whole time -- until we hit London, when I made the reservations. Actually, when I think about it, it’s not <em>all</em> that different from the service I get in the concierge lounges at big hotels. Breakfast comes with the room -- though the full cooked breakfast, complete with black puddling in England and haggis in Scotland, was a bit heartier than the continental breakfasts I normally get in concierge lounges.  And there’s a bit of nice chit-chat when we walk in, though the B&amp;B owners are typically a bit older/more <em>seasoned</em> that the typical lounge staff.  The main differences -- most hotels I stay in don’t have dogs living there, and they prefer credit cards over cash.</li>\r\n	<li>Of course, back in the US, the weather’s been sweltering.  I was in South Florida a couple weeks ago and it was <em>cooler</em> there than Chicago.  But that wasn’t good enough, so last week, I was down in Phoenix, where it was hitting 105-107 degrees during the day and wasn’t getting below 100 any time while I was awake.</li>\r\n	<li>Tough weather to take advantage of the convertible red Mustang that Avis was nice enough to upgrade me to.</li>\r\n	<li>Wednesday night after dinner, though, I decided I just <em>had</em> to drop the top.  The dashboard said the external temperature was 102 -- and it felt it when I dropped that top.  Soon, though, I found that the key to driving top-down in 102 degrees is the pretty much the same as driving top-down in 55 degree weather. Set the fan to High and remember to have the knob set to A/C.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music -- <em>Crazy Love-The Alex &amp; Lang mix</em> by <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/djlang59/10579\">J.Lang</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Let’s take a run through the comment bag.</li>\r\n	<li>Sarah, who’s been a listener since 2006, posted a comment on the website on <a title=\"Podcast #85 — Importance of Hotel Bathrooms; Maximizing Miles\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2010/11/30/podcast-85-importance-of-hotel-bathrooms-maximizing-miles/\" target=\"_blank\">episode #85</a> (!) -- she says “I was playing catch up after all my driving trips this past two months.” In that episode, I talked about how the hotel industry seems to be focused on spiffing up their lobbies and putting whizzy new technology in the rooms, and that they were making a mistake ignoring what I think is critical to the hotel experience -- the bathroom.  Sarah says “I say ‘heck yeah’ to the bathroom being one of the most important parts of a stay.  I ended in a bed and breakfast in the middle of nowhere, with no wifi.  And the bathroom made me want to tell everyone about it. It had a hot tub and a beautifully large bathroom. But even though I knew no one who was going to the area, I wanted to tell everyone about it. It\'s the <a href=\"http://www.innatnewberlin.com/\">Inn in New Berlin, PA</a> (in case you care).”</li>\r\n	<li>Sarah, thanks for the note -- and thanks for the pointer to the Inn in New Berlin.  I do think we look for luxurious touches in hotels. And it doesn’t have to be anything big.  The first thing my wife looks for in a hotel room is to see if there are robes in the bathroom.  It’s a helluva lot cheaper than a tricked-out media panel, and it makes a much bigger impression.</li>\r\n	<li>Sarah’s comment about wanting to tell everyone about her find reminded me of some stats I saw a few days ago.  It said on average 24% of a hotel guests first heard about it from a friend or family member; 16% from a review site like <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"TripAdvisor\" href=\"http://www.tripadvisor.com\" rel=\"homepage\">TripAdvisor</a>. I would guess that if anyone could calculate the cost of creating an enthusiastic recommender like Sarah -- it would turn out to be a lot cheaper to do it with a great bathroom than a posh new lobby.</li>\r\n	<li>Fast forwarding to <a title=\"Podcast #90 — More Comfortable Traveling in India; Tipping Towards Android?\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/05/22/podcast-90-more-comfortable-traveling-in-india-tipping-towards-android/\" target=\"_blank\">episode #90</a>, Andrew Gill left a comment on the TravelCommons Facebook wall\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Thanks for podcast #90, it\'s great to hear how 170 degrees isn\'t as comfortable as fully flat when my company has a different approach to travel. UK to Australia in Economy has to be tried</li>\r\n	<li>You talked about using large chunks of roaming data in a recent trip and I\'ve a couple of hints to share.</li>\r\n	<li>Google Maps is great but try <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/offlinemaps\">City Maps 2Go</a>. I\'ve been using it for over a year having tried other off-line mapping products. It uses the built in compass so I don\'t have to walk a block either way to figure out if I\'m going in the right direction.</li>\r\n	<li>I\'ve also become a real convert to local SIM cards. Now this may not be perfect for a business trip, but I had two weeks in Chile in January and my iPhone bill was $500, compare this to two weeks in Australia using the AU$2 a day plan from Optus and my bill was $22. In Australia I didn\'t worry about when I used my phone or finding the next hotspot, because I had unlimited calls, SMS and internet usage all for AU$2 a day.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>Thanks Andrew.  Sorry about the whinging on 10 degrees of seat recline. I paid for it on my flight over to Manchester last month -- 8 hrs of suffering in coach in a packed American Airlines 757. Even United gives you free beer in coach, but not American.</li>\r\n	<li>Thanks for the tip on City Maps 2 Go.  I looked at it for our UK vacation and since we were spending most of our time in the hinterlands -- the Lake District, the Isle of Arran, around Loch Lomond, it wasn’t going to give us enough coverage.  I found, though, a great app from Phil Endecott called “UK Map”.  For $11 you get all the Ordnance Survey maps, 2D and 3D views, combined with OpenStreetMap.org info downloaded so you can use it off line.  It’s a universal app so I have it on my iPhone and iPad.  If you’re touring the UK, I highly recommend it.  I may end up back in Madrid in a couple of months.  If I do, I’ll be downloading its map from City Maps 2 Go.</li>\r\n	<li>I did find an unexpected but valuable benefit from my Starbucks obsession. I have a couple of Starbucks gift cards that I’ve registered.  I kinda did it on a whim.  They send me a card for a free drink after every 15 coffees I buy.  I don’t use them -- it would be wasted on a tall coffee or cappuccino.  I give ‘em to my kids who use them for venti frappuccinos.  But anyways, while in London, I found that my US <a href=\"https://www.starbucks.com/card\" target=\"_blank\">Starbucks Rewards</a> credentials gave me free WiFi in UK Starbucks. Since I was limiting my mobile data usage and there’s a Starbucks about every 200 ft in London, it was very handy.</li>\r\n	<li>\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"372\"]<img class=\" \" title=\"How big, exactly, is Starbucks’ new ‘Trenta’ size?\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/web0118-starbuckstrenta12.jpgw620amph706\" alt=\"\" width=\"372\" height=\"424\" /> How big, exactly, is Starbucks’ new ‘Trenta’ size?[/caption]\r\n\r\nSpeaking of Starbucks, when I was flying out of ORD last week, one of the Starbucks in Terminal 3 advertised “trenta is here” -- Starbucks’ new “BigGulp” serving size. I thought about this while waiting in line to order my tall bold coffee.  Should they really be selling the trenta in airports?  I mean, does it make sense to sell someone 31 fluid ounces of a beverage right before they will be strapped into a seat for the next 2-4 hours?  And odds are that the person ordering a trenta will be in the window seat.  Meaning that he/she’s rousting two people at least twice during the flight to drain that trenta.</li>\r\n	<li>And then, reacting to my comments about Ryanair in the <a title=\"Podcast #91 — Can’t Patch Planes Forever; Saving Customers With A Personal Touch\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/06/18/podcast-91-cant-patch-planes-forever-saving-customers-with-a-personal-touch/\" target=\"_blank\">last episode</a>, Leo Vegoda wrote\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>What you say about Ryanair reminds me of how Irish comedian Andrew Maxwell described them: ‘Ryanair is what flying would be like if it was illegal’. I think that says it all.”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>That is perfect -- and I think perfectly describes Ryanair and Spirit and all that ilk.</li>\r\n	<li>And it shouldn\'t be too surprising then that 4 of the top 8 most hated companies in America are airlines.  The latest <a href=\"http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/07/the-19-most-hated-companies-in-america/241344/\" target=\"_blank\">American Customer Satisfaction Index</a> has American Airlines at #8, United at #7, US Airways at #6, Delta Airlines at #2(!), beat out by just 2 points for #1 by Potomac Electric utility.  Impressive results all around.</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a question, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is <a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a> -- use the Voice Memo app on your iPhone or something like Virtual Recorder on your Android phone to record and send in an audio comment – or iMovie if you want to send in some video; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at travelcommons.com.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music -- <em>August (Reggae Rework)</em> by <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/elB/16075\">el-B</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>The Not-So-Upbeat Traveler</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>This podcast is a hobby, not a business, for me -- as if you couldn’t tell that from my haphazard posting schedule. So, I don’t obsess over podcast or website statistics, how many downloads, how many page views, all the stuff that real web business live and breathe and monitor on a real-time basis. I do, though, check in every couple of days to make sure everything’s running, clean the spam bin, and to look at site stats to see if anyone is coming by.</li>\r\n	<li>I didn’t do any of this while on vacation, but when I got back and checked in, I saw that I’d gotten flooded with visits the first week in July.  Following the source links, I found most of the traffic came in from StumbleUpon, while another bit came from a recent post by Chris Christensen on his <em><a href=\"http://amateurtraveler.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Amateur Traveler</a></em> blog.</li>\r\n	<li>The StumbleUpon pointer was from “sher1lock,” a “woman from Ontario”.  She recommended episode #88, where I reported from the floor of the Travel Goods show and talked about losing elite status. Her comment -- “A neat travel site. Not as upbeat as some.”</li>\r\n	<li>Which actually lined up very nicely with Chris’ <a href=\"http://amateurtraveler.com/2011/06/30/where-is-the-darker-side-of-travel/\">post</a>.  Titled “Where is the Darker Side of Travel?”, Chris was responding to a listener’s letter that suggested his Amateur Traveler Podcast sugar-coats the travel experience a bit; the listener challenged Chris to “bring attention to the darker side of travel”. Chris gave a good, straight up response that boiled down to -- “Guilty as charged; I’m an optimistic guy” and “If you want a podcast about travel from the point of view of how bad can be, listen to Mark Peacock’s <em>Travel Commons</em>. Mark is a friend and fellow podcaster but I describe his show as the anti-Amateur Traveler.”</li>\r\n	<li>OK, so I’m not always the cheeriest guy about travel, but I didn\'t think I was a complete “Debbie Downer”.  But, because I talk about more about the journey -- the act of transiting, travel as a verb -- rather than being a tourist -- what you are when you get to your destination, my travel stories are going to naturally follow what we all think is the dramatic decline in the travel experience -- airplanes as flying cattle cars, beat-up high-mileage rental cars, ....  Any podcast whose major characters are <a href=\"http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/07/the-19-most-hated-companies-in-america/241344/\" target=\"_blank\">4 of the top 8 most hated companies in America</a> just isn\'t going to be “as upbeat as some.”</li>\r\n	<li>I have varying degrees of success in being cheery about my travels.  It’s always easier to be chipper when there’s something new in the mix -- new destination, new air carrier, new plane,...  <a title=\"Podcast #90 — More Comfortable Traveling in India; Tipping Towards Android?\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/05/22/podcast-90-more-comfortable-traveling-in-india-tipping-towards-android/\" target=\"_blank\">A couple podcasts ago</a>, when I talked about flying to Madrid on USAir -- the USAir service was definitely a 9-hour drag, but it couldn’t dull the excitement of a new destination. But this last trip to Phoenix? Going to the same place for the umpteenth time, on American, on old MD-80’s (one of which -- with a 1983 birth date -- treated me to yet another 2 hour delay), to temperatures in the 100’s every day.  I had to drag myself to the airport. The best thing about the trip -- a toss-up between  the convertible Mustang from Avis and the Tempe In-n-Out Burger where I killed some of that 2-hour delay.</li>\r\n	<li>But then again, who really enjoys their commute to work?  Most of the times, that’s what my travel is -- a commute to work.  Some people drive 45 minutes to work; I fly 3 hours.  And just like you should avoid road rage, I try to avoid travel rage. Specifically, when my commute goes wrong, I try to limit the collateral damage.</li>\r\n	<li>First off, I try not to call anybody. There’s just nothing to be gained from talking to family or colleagues live.\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>“I’m going to be late coming home/getting to the office.  American/United/Southwest/Joe’s Cattle Car decided to skip preventative maintenance this month in order to make payroll and so I’m waiting out a maintenance decision.  The delay’s going to be either 30 minutes or 3 hours -- depends on whether duct tape can fix the problem.”</li>\r\n	<li>“Oh, that’s too bad.  I’m sorry to hear that”</li>\r\n	<li>“Not half as sorry as I am to be living it”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>See?  That’s just not a good exchange for anyone. I’m not feeling any better, and worse yet, I’ve passed along my frustration, my lousy day to a completely innocent bystander.  Best to rely on e-mail or text messages. Just make sure you immediately delete the inevitable frowny face emoticon from your significant other. Leaving it fester in your inbox will just lead to bad things.</li>\r\n	<li>Same goes with airline gate agents and hotel clerks. They didn\'t overbook the hotel or break the plane.  On a good day, these folks are just barely breaking minimum wage.  They’re just trying to get on the other side of 8 hours.  Unless they’re pre-emptively snotty to me -- they take an attitude before I even open my mouth -- I give them a pass.</li>\r\n	<li>So we\'ve identified a lot of people who <em>aren\'t</em> responsible for botching up my commute.  Who is, then? Who can I dump this rage on? Well, that’s the challenge.  When you’re driving down the freeway and a guy cuts you off, you see the culprit. You can yell, you glare, you can flip him off.  You vent and, if you’re a normal person, you move on.</li>\r\n	<li>Airlines, hotels, car rentals -- you’ll never see the person that made your morning miserable. You can’t find them to flip them off; they don’t even know you exist. They’re sitting inside some operations center combining the output of some linear revenue optimization programs with the weather forecast and sending out e-mails that will complete jack up my day.  Nothing personal -- I’m just collateral damage.</li>\r\n	<li>Without that outlet, though; that ability to vent directly to the culprit, the frustration festers. The undisciplined take it out on innocent workers. The introverts mutter to themselves under their breaths.  The majority of us, though, inhale, exhale and then make for closest repository of the three cure-alls for travel frustration -- fat, salt, and beer.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music --<em> I Will Writhe</em> by <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/26739\">SackJo22</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Tablet Wars: Apple iPad 2 vs. Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Regular listeners know that, over the past couple of years, I’ve migrated to an all Apple technology kit -- the 11-in MacBook Air, an iPhone 4, and an iPad 2. This isn’t a religious sort of fanboy thing -- the desktop unit that I create this podcast on is a custom-built dual monitor Windows 7 64-bit rig with 3 hard drives and a Blu-Ray DVD burner.</li>\r\n	<li>Attending <a href=\"http://www.google.com/events/io/2011/index-live.html\" target=\"_blank\">Google I/O</a> earlier this summer, I received a <a href=\"http://www.samsung.com/global/microsite/galaxytab/10.1/index.html\" target=\"_blank\">Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1</a> with the <a href=\"http://www.engadget.com/2011/01/06/googles-android-3-0-honeycomb-for-tablets-a-guided-tour-of-the/\" target=\"_blank\">Honeycomb </a>tablet version of Android -- I think Honeycomb translates to version number 3.1 for non-Google-ites -- and a <a href=\"http://www.samsung.com/us/computer/chromebook\" target=\"_blank\">Samsung Chromebook</a>. During the summer I’ve been traveling with both the Google and Apple kit -- a significant increase in carry-on weight, but the only way I know to truly compare equipment is live in the field.  I’ll compare the tablets this episode and talk about my Chromebook experiences next time.</li>\r\n	<li>Not only did I carry both tablets for business over the past couple of months, I also took them both with me on vacation to the UK, leaving my laptop at home -- a real pressure test.</li>\r\n	<li>To cut to the chase -- which do I like better? -- it’s a real toss-up.  Both tablets are nice pieces of hardware -- the screen sizes are a bit different (the Galaxy has a bit more of an HD aspect ratio while the iPad’s dimensions are more like a sheet of paper) and the Samsung is a few ounces lighter than the iPad, but in the real world -- it’s a push.  They feels the same, both screens are beautiful, and their response times are great.</li>\r\n	<li>As you would expect, the iPad has a better selection of apps -- the Android tablet just launched this summer while the iPad has been out for over a year.  However, for apps that I use, the delta isn’t as huge as the raw number of apps -- iPad vs. Honeycomb -- would suggest.  Apps that I use regularly -- Evernote, Kindle, Pandora, Dropbox, Skype, Concur expense reporting, Angry Birds -- are all available for Android.  The Evernote app is the only tablet-specific one -- and it’s really nice -- but the others work fine.  The only MIA apps that have any real impact on me are WebEx and GoTo Meeting. I think the tablet form is the best way to watch an on-line presentation and so I do miss those apps.</li>\r\n	<li>The operating system -- Apple’s iOS vs. Google’s Android and the accompanying apps -- the comparison seems to be less of a “better-worse” and more a difference in philosophies.  The Apple experience is pretty much locked down -- there’s only one place to get apps, the screen layout not very customizable, there’s no independent access to the file system. Now that’s not necessarily bad -- most people never change the default settings on their technology and there’s a lot to be said for not letting users screw things up beyond recovery. It’s Apple’s point of view. It’s a valid one, but it does have some impact.</li>\r\n	<li>When we were in the UK with only the two tablets, I wanted to replace my Facebook profile picture with one taken that afternoon in the <a href=\"http://www.glengoyne.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Glengoyne Distillery</a> near Loch Lomond.  My daughter had taken the picture with my iPhone. Plunking around the Facebook app, I couldn’t find a way to change my profile. So I e-mailed the photo from my iPhone to my Gmail account.  Logging onto the Facebook site on the iPad Safari browser, I couldn’t save the picture from the Mail app to a place where the browser could access it -- for security reasons, all the apps seem to exist within their own sandboxes.  Opening up Gmail on the Samsung tablet, I could save the picture to the folder of my choice, and then upload the picture from that folder to the Facebook site through the Android browser.</li>\r\n	<li>It’s a little thing, but it illustrates why I found working solely with the Android system -- being without my PC -- easier than the iPad. The Android design philosophy is to give the users much greater control over their experience.  Which means I can spelunk around the file system, tweak the technical operations, create truly horrid screen designs, and view Flash-based web sites to my heart’s content</li>\r\n	<li>I also found it interesting that my daughter who’s starting high school this year, tends to pick up the Samsung tablet over the iPad. A lot of it probably has to do with the fact that she has an Android phone, but she seemed to prefer the Google experience.</li>\r\n	<li>So as I said at the top, it’s a toss-up.  I think the iPad is a more polished experience.  It feels 1-2 releases ahead of the Android tablet -- which it is.  The Samsung tablet, though, keeps right up with Apple in hardware and fit-and-finish, and Android lets the advanced user customize it better to his/her specific needs.  Final recommendation -- at the same price, I’d recommend the casual/non-technical user go with the iPad, but if you like to pop the hood on your technology, you won’t go wrong with the Samsung.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids991762681117.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #92</li>\r\n	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from the <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/\" target=\"_blank\">ccMixter</a> site</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_92.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #92 — Not-So-Upbeat Traveler; iPad 2 vs. Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1','','inherit','open','open','','785-revision-v1','','','2015-04-21 15:56:55','2015-04-21 20:56:55','',785,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/04/21/785-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1469,1,'2015-04-21 15:57:40','2015-04-21 20:57:40','[caption id=\"attachment_769\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/1366292835_a40fb811f8_z1.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-769\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/1366292835_a40fb811f8_z1-300x197.jpg\" alt=\"Let\'s seeeeeeeeeeeeeee ....\" width=\"300\" height=\"197\" /></a> Let\'s seeeeeeeeeeeeeee .... © Stefan Sonntag / Flickr[/caption]\r\n\r\nWas off the road for two weeks for my kids\' graduations, but now back in the security lines with a mix of domestic and international travel. Listener suggestions include dining at local music clubs to avoid the \"eating alone\" stigma, and using mini-USB hubs to power your gadgets without carrying a basketful of international plug adapters. I\'m impressed by how a couple of <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Transportation Security Administration\" href=\"http://www.tsa.gov\" rel=\"homepage\">TSA</a> screeners deal with a silly carry-on. I\'m not impressed though by how American Airline\'s old MD-80\'s keep delaying my travels. And, after a lousy Avis rental return experience, an employee reaches out and wins me back. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_91.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n[audio:travelcommons_91.mp3]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript from TravelCommons podcast #91:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>I’ve actually been in town more than not since the last <a title=\"Podcast #90 — More Comfortable Traveling in India; Tipping Towards Android?\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/05/22/podcast-90-more-comfortable-traveling-in-india-tipping-towards-android/\" target=\"_blank\">episode</a>.  Both my kids had graduations – my son from high school, my daughter from middle school. I decided it would be a good thing to be around for those.</li>\r\n	<li>Of course, nothing comes for free, so my packed travel schedule in May was “paying forward” for two weeks off the road in at the beginning of June.  And then I was back at it last week – back down to Phoenix for triple digit highs, 105° F every afternoon. Yes, I know that it’s a dry heat, but then again, so is an oven.  Then out to London for a customer meeting – out tomorrow night -- Sunday night (I hate flying out Sunday nights – blows your entire weekend), back Tuesday afternoon – but then instead of heading home, I’ll pick up a flight down to Austin, TX for the last two days of a travel technology conference.</li>\r\n	<li>Then home, and then back to the UK -- but this time combining leisure and business.  We fly from Chicago to Manchester – on an American 757 which I have to say I’m dreading – head over for an afternoon in my dad’s hometown Southport – kinda halfway between Liverpool and Blackpool on the Irish Sea – then up to the Lake District for a couple of days of hiking, drive around the west coast of Scotland for a couple of days, head over to Edinburgh for a couple of days, take the train down to London, and then I’ll work in London for a few days while the rest of the family sightsees around. Looking at my <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"TripIt\" href=\"http://www.tripit.com\" rel=\"homepage\">TripIt</a> page, I have no other travel planned – an oversight that I’m sure will be fixed soon.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Robert Fenerty left a good suggestion at the TravelCommons website on the “Table for One; Eating Alone” <a title=\"Table for One: Eating Alone on the Road\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/05/12/table-for-one-eating-alone-on-the-road/\" target=\"_blank\">blog post </a>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>“When I\'m on the road, I seek out live jazz. I can sit at a table for 90 minutes, order food and wine, and relax. In Chicago, I visit Bandera, where the servers don\'t hover and the private little booths reduce the \"look at that guy\" factor to a bare minimum. In Europe, jazz is easier to find than in most U.S. cities, but if you find the hip part of town and you can usually find jazz. But don\'t ask the concierge at your hotel, because they don\'t know what jazz is.”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>That’s a great suggestion – find a live music club, linger, and enjoy yourself.  Because, really, how often do you get to do that at home – especially if you have kids.  I always enjoy taking out-of-town guests to blues clubs in Chicago.  My favorite is B.L.U.E.S – a small place in the North Side Lincoln Park neighborhood.  On the weekends, the place is packed, but during the weekdays, you can get a seat at the bar, comfortably drink a couple of beers – sometimes with the band during breaks– and enjoy the music without the scrum of the weekend crowds.  And I guess that that’s the other great thing about Robert’s suggestion – you’re going during the week – no crowds to get between you and appreciating the music.  Great idea!</li>\r\n	<li>Steve Soechtig, a long time TravelCommons listener posted this suggestion after last month’s <a title=\"Podcast #90 — More Comfortable Traveling in India; Tipping Towards Android?\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/05/22/podcast-90-more-comfortable-traveling-in-india-tipping-towards-android/\" target=\"_blank\">epsisode </a>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>“Loved the post and particularly the idea of bringing a small power strip plus a voltage adapter for devices.  That\'s clever.</li>\r\n	<li>I\'d throw one more thing out there, as a benefit to Apple.  The interchangeable external power adapter allows me to plug my Macbook into EU, UK, and AUS power outlets (so far), and I have a micro 4 port USB adapter that I plug into the laptop - effectively giving me charging for the mobile, the iPad (yes, I still travel with both), and the headset.  Just a thought, as the USB adapter is probably 4\" x 1/2\" by 1/4\".  Very small.</li>\r\n	<li>Only other comment I\'d make is \"<a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"US Airways\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_Airways\" rel=\"wikipedia\">USAir</a>?  Are you crazy???\"</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>Thanks Steve.  I like the idea of the 4-port USB hub for charging. I’ve been looking for a power strip that has both outlets and USB ports, but have yet to find one. Your solution sounds more compact than mine. The only reason I might stay with the power strip is that 220v play – everything just seems to charge so much faster when you move from 110v here in the US to 220v overseas.</li>\r\n	<li>And US Air? Momentary lapse of judgment.  Will never happen again. Sympathies to listeners in Charlotte, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, and Phoenix.</li>\r\n	<li>And, on a complete sidetrack, speaking of power strips, I have to tell you that I was hugely impressed during last month’s Google IO conference in San Francisco’s Moscone Center -- every 3<sup>rd</sup> seat had a power strip zip-tied to the chair leg.  Talk about customer service; talk about catering to your audience’s most primal needs…</li>\r\n	<li>However, I do think that I’ve just about hit my limit on electronic gadgets. On my trip to Phoenix this past week, I brought all my portable gadgets – my iPhone 4, my iPad 2, my Motorola Droid 2, and my new Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 running Android 3.1 – because I needed to load our new mobile apps for booth demos at the trade show.  Along with my MacBook Air and my Motorola wireless Bluetooth headphones for my morning workouts and my Jabra Bluetooth headset, I felt like spent all my time charging devices.  The power strip in my office was completely full all the time, as was my travel power strip and most of the outlets in my hotel room.  I kinda felt like the gadget version of Mr Creosote from <em><a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Monty Python\'s The Meaning of Life\" href=\"http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/monty_pythons_the_meaning_of_life\" rel=\"rottentomatoes\">Monty Python and the Meaning of Life</a></em> – one more gadget, just a small wafer of a device, and I’d take down the power grid for all of Arizona</li>\r\n	<li>OK, now God only knows that there’s no love lost between me and the TSA, and I make no bones about it on this podcast.  And, for their part, the TSA usually does a great job of providing fodder for my mill. Last month’s YouTube video of a TSA agent patting down an infant was only the latest of a long line of headshakers.</li>\r\n	<li>However, to give credit where credit is due, many TSA agents are thoughtful, pragmatic people, not on a power trip, and just trying to get to the other end of the day while keeping some sort of grip on their job, their pay check, and their sanity.  I saw a couple of these sorts of guys in ORD earlier this week when having to make an overnight trip to Dallas.</li>\r\n	<li>The X-Ray reader saw something odd, so one of the screeners did a manual search of this one guy’s bag. The screener pulls out an 18 inch long, 1 inch diameter metal rod wrapped in brown paper. The screener says “I’m sorry but you can’t carry this on. It can be used as a weapon”, and then swings it once, as if to punctuate what is a completely obvious point to the rest of us in line. Remember, we’re in the status line – the frequent traveler line. The guy looks surprised. The rest of us looking at him like “Really? This think is 100x more dangerous than a police baton. What the hell were you thinking trying to check this on?”</li>\r\n	<li>The screener calmly and professionally explained that he could either go back out and check his bag or leave his 5-lb metal baton behind.  He left it behind. Two of the screeners swung it a couple of time and said the same thing those of us in line did –“You really thought you could carry that on? Really?”</li>\r\n	<li>Reminds me of the Oklahoma man arrested at ORD for trying to carry a loaded gun. Said he thought he needed it for self-defense in Chicago. Again, really? Reading stories like these reminds me to be a bit more patient with the TSA guy at the front telling/yelling at everyone to empty their pockets before going through the metal detector. In spite of 10 years of going through this drill, there are still clueless idiots out there who either don’t think the rules apply to them – or just don’t think – period.</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a question, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is <a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a> -- use the Voice Memo app on your iPhone or something like Virtual Recorder on your Android phone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at travelcommons.com.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Can\'t Patch Planes Forever</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>In the last <a title=\"Podcast #90 — More Comfortable Traveling in India; Tipping Towards Android?\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/05/22/podcast-90-more-comfortable-traveling-in-india-tipping-towards-android/\" target=\"_blank\">episode</a>, I talked about the differences in the business class experience between airlines, that the commodity view of air travel – a seat on one airline flying from Point A to Point B is the same, is interchangeable with any other airline flying that route – is just wrong. There are real differences between airline services – the question is how much you’re willing to pay.</li>\r\n	<li>While taxiing out of Madrid last month, I saw three Ryanair planes at adjacent gates. Ryanair always makes me shake my head. Who places such a low value on their time and general well-being that they’re willing to put up with an airline that makes it clear they think very little of their customers? Spirit Airlines in the US strikes me the same way – we’ll give you lower prices, but you’ll pay for it – financially and psychically -- in so many other ways. Obviously a lot of people are willing to accept a lot for a low-price ticket – or a lot of people don’t know how to calculate the full cost of their experience.</li>\r\n	<li>Taking yet another maintenance delay on an American Airlines MD-80 last month drove this point home to me again.  5-7 years ago, when many of the US airlines were declaring bankruptcy to clean up their balance sheets – United, Continental, Northwest – American was proud that it stayed out of Chapter 11 and didn’t wipe out its stockholders – many of which were, of course, the executive management team. There was a price for that, though.  To conserve cash, they delayed buying new planes – a new Boeing 737 can cost $50-70 million depending on your negotiating skills. But today, the airline is still flying planes from the mid to late-80’s – when I first started flying American. When you’re boarding one of those MD-80’s, look on the left-hand side of the door opening. There’s a small metal plate – on it is stamped the date the plane was manufactured.  I look at it every time. I see lots of 1988s, ‘89’s, ‘92’s and nothing much after that.</li>\r\n	<li>So here we are in 2011 – is it any wonder I’m seeing a lot of maintenance delays? Flipping through my calendar, 75% of my recent flights on American MD-80’s have been delayed.  Flights on their new 737-800’s have been fine; the record on the MD-80’s has been horrid.  Last month’s flight from ORD to Ft Myers, FL is a typical example.  They board the plane. Departure time approaches and it’s eerily quiet – none of the “please take your seats, we need to leave” hectoring from the flight attendants. Then the captain keys his mike. I know what he’s going to say before he says it – “We saw something on the pre-flight walkaround and are having maintenance come out to look at it.”  This is an instant 30-minute delay, probably longer, with a 50% chance of them taking the plane out of service.</li>\r\n	<li>Now mind you, this was a 7:25am flight; the plane had been sitting at the gate for a while – it didn’t just arrive – so why is maintenance only just coming out <em>now</em>, at <em>departure time</em>?  And why didn’t someone do a walkaround earlier?  With these old MD-80’s, you’d think you’d want to get a jump on it.</li>\r\n	<li>This time, the delay was an hour and 15 minutes, which is right at about the average I’ve been experiencing.  Some have been shorter – when they just need to “re-boot” the plane – and some have been longer – when they need to go back to the hanger and find another plane.  But this flight was a bit of a tipping point for me – after this flight, I started paying attention to equipment on American flights.  Every American MD-80 flight I looked at, I added an hour to the flight time.  If American isn’t going to do something to about their MD-80 delays – like spend more on preventative maintenance – then I’ll do something myself, like manually adjusting their flight times to factor in expected maintenance delays.</li>\r\n	<li>Doing this, the American MD-80 flights start to look like connecting flights – they take a lot longer than competitors’ flights and there’s more risk – cancellations from mechanicals look the same as missing a connection. As I’ve said in past episodes, I’ve done some rough calculus on the value of my time and I’m willing to pay $200 more for a direct flight to avoid the risk of missing a connection. I’m now at the same place with American MD-80 flights – it makes sense to pay $200 more for a flight that I have more confidence will get me to where I need to be on time.  Indeed, I did just this when booking next week’s trip to Austin, TX.  I paid $150 more to fly back to Chicago on United rather than an American MD-80.</li>\r\n	<li>Now I’m not arguing about the need to fix planes before flying.  Like every other passenger, I want to get to my destination safely.  But I also want to get there <em>on time</em>.  I do <em>a lot</em> of flying.  The cumulative amount of time spent waiting for American to fix their old planes – I’ll never get that time back.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Saving Customers With A Personal Touch</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>On my prior trip to Phoenix – in May, when the highs were only 90° F – I had a lousy rental return experience with Avis. Parking the car in the return lot, I counted 20 people waiting to be checked in – and 2 Avis check-in people.  I didn\'t have that much time to wait – especially with how far away PHX put the consolidated car rental facility -- so I left the keys in the car and headed for the bus.  I like the way Avis immediately sends an electronic receipt, so I knew I wasn’t missing much except the wait.  While in the terminal wolfing down a salad before my flight, the electronic receipt hit my iPhone. I quickly glanced at it, and then looked at it much harder. The Avis employee who checked in my rental marked the fuel as empty even though I filled it up on my way to the airport, leaving the fuel gauge solidly on F.  I immediately called the number on the receipt and was routed to some customer service agent who asked me to fax the gas pump receipt.  Tough to do in PHX Terminal 3, so I told him that I would have it done the following Monday.  Time passed and I heard nothing from Avis.</li>\r\n	<li>Except an e-mail asking me to click through to a survey about my last rental. How timely. I ignore a lot of these requests – they usually ask way too many questions – but this one, I was more than willing to invest some time.  As you might guess, my scores tended to the low side.  Asked for specifics, I wrote that there was an empty Coke can in the car when I picked it up and that they had charged me to refill a completely full gas tank.</li>\r\n	<li>I have to tell you that I was surprised when, a couple weeks later, I received an e-mail from Michael Wu, production manager for Avis at PHX.  It was a very nice personal note – not some rote thing – thanking me for filling out the survey.  He said –\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>“I sincerely apologize that the inside of the vehicle being dirty with a coke soda can in the back seat and that this was left unnoticed and was not clean correctly before your rental. I will be following this matter up with the agent who cleaned the vehicle and the driver that is responsible for parking the vehicle on the readyline. I also want to apologize for the vehicles and not living up to your expectations.”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>OK, appreciate that, I wrote him in a reply, “but have to tell you that the empty Coke can in the back seat wasn\'t the worst part of my rental experience.  It was the car return.”  And then I went on to describe the incorrect fuel charge and lack of any remedial action.  “The result,” I ended my note with, “is that Avis made an unearned $12.99 on this rental, but has lost my business going forward.  I\'m currently in SW Florida driving a Hertz rental car, and will be back in Phoenix in mid-June and have reserved a Hertz car for that trip rather than an Avis car.”</li>\r\n	<li>I admit that it felt good to send that note to a real person, not just in a “Do you have anything else to tell us” comment box on a web survey. Mr Wu didn’t let me down.  Two days later, he came back with a follow-up\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>“I’m truly sorry that you were put into such a bad situation and went through all the trouble trying to get this resolved, without any resolution or follow up.</li>\r\n	<li>“I will personally adjust the fuel charge and a little extra for all the inconvenience. I will also forward this to proper management so that they are aware about issues in returns and the follow up.</li>\r\n	<li>I will also like to extend to you, a personal offer for the next time you happen to rent from Avis. Just need you to e-mail me your reservation number for Avis and I’ll personally make sure your vehicle is clean (coke can free) and ready for you. I will also add a free upgrade and money off coupons for all your trouble.</li>\r\n	<li>Once again I sincerely apologize and hopeful for the opportunity to better serve your car rental need in the near future.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>And the following week, the credit showed up on my Amex.  Now I <em>have</em> to rent from Avis the next time I’m in PHX. Mr Wu goes out of his way to fix the problem, follows up twice, and offers to take care of my next rental personally.</li>\r\n	<li>I’ve always said that, at its core, the travel experience is a person-to-person one. No matter how much cost-cutting technology companies put in the middle – kiosks, mobile check-ins – the moments we remember are how we’re treated by other people.  A flight attendant with a snarky retort to your question; a gate agent who went out of her way to re-book you off a cancelled flight – these are what we remember. And so I have to rent my next car not from Mr Wu – who just happens to work for Avis.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917626811141.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #91</li>\r\n	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from me -- an the GarageBand app on my iPad2</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_91.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #91 -- Can\'t Patch Planes Forever; Saving Customers With A Personal Touch','','inherit','open','open','','770-revision-v1','','','2015-04-21 15:57:40','2015-04-21 20:57:40','',770,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/04/21/770-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1470,1,'2015-04-21 15:58:27','2015-04-21 20:58:27','[caption id=\"attachment_760\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"225\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/IMG_01371-e13062031715791.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-760\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/IMG_01371-e13062031715791-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"Security Sign\" width=\"225\" height=\"300\" /></a> A Polite Intrusion © Mark Peacock[/caption]\r\n\r\nLots of business travel this month -- UK, India, Germany, Phoenix, <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"San Francisco\" href=\"http://www.sfgov.org/\" rel=\"homepage\">San Francisco</a>, and Madrid -- so there\'s a lot to talk about. The international travel lets me compare business class seats -- there\'s a wide range of experiences even within the same airline. While in India, a listener asks my advice on adjusting for jetlag on Asian flights. I was surprised at the amount of data my <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"iPhone\" href=\"http://www.apple.com/iphone\" rel=\"homepage\">iPhone</a> consumed while I was in Europe but I finally found the culprit. I found myself much more comfortable traveling in India the second time around. And, walking away from the Google IO conference with a new Samsung Android \"Honeycomb\" tablet, my <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"iPad\" href=\"http://www.apple.com/ipad/\" rel=\"homepage\">iPad</a> fixation starts to loosen. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_90.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n[audio:travelcommons_90.mp3]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript from TravelCommons podcast #90:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>It’s been another full-contact month of travel.  I was out for a 2-week stint through the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"United Kingdom\" href=\"http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=51.5,-0.116666666667&amp;spn=10.0,10.0&amp;q=51.5,-0.116666666667 (United%20Kingdom)&amp;t=h\" rel=\"geolocation\">UK</a>, <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"India\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/India\" rel=\"wikipedia\">India</a>, Germany, then a quick jog out to Phoenix, a week to San Francisco for the big <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Google I/O\" href=\"http://code.google.com/events/io/\" rel=\"homepage\">Google IO conference</a>, and now, just returned from a 3-day trip to <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Madrid\" href=\"http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=40.3833333333,-3.71666666667&amp;spn=0.1,0.1&amp;q=40.3833333333,-3.71666666667 (Madrid)&amp;t=h\" rel=\"geolocation\">Madrid</a></li>\r\n	<li>I got lots of comments about the Madrid trip – “Ooh, you so lucky”, “I’d love to go to Spain” – most of these coming from my wife.  Unfortunately, my Madrid trip was just another business trip sandwiched between two 8-hour plane flights.  Left at 4:30pm Tuesday, arrived 6:30am Weds, cabbed to the hotel, showered, changed, caught up on e-mail, met the rest of the team in the lobby, spent the afternoon in a customer conference room, went back to the hotel room to catch up on e-mail and conference calls, went out to dinner with the customer, back to the hotel room for more e-mail and calls, sleep 5 hours, back in the conference room for a full day of meetings, dinner, e-mail, conference calls, 4 hours of sleep, cab back to the airport Friday morning to catch a 9:30am flight home.</li>\r\n	<li>Most of my time in Madrid was spent in a conference room without windows – so it could’ve been anywhere, really. The one bit of Madrid that I had was on our last night where, instead of going to a restaurant for dinner, we did a bit of a bar crawl on the street behind our hotel – a glass of rioja, some tapas, then onto the next bar.  It was good fun, but I was out and about more in San Francisco the week before.</li>\r\n	<li>I had kinda the opposite in <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Mumbai\" href=\"http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=18.975,72.8258333333&amp;spn=0.1,0.1&amp;q=18.975,72.8258333333 (Mumbai)&amp;t=h\" rel=\"geolocation\">Mumbai</a>, where I experienced perhaps more of the local culture than I wanted. My last day was in <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Pune\" href=\"http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=18.4736111111,73.7977777778&amp;spn=0.1,0.1&amp;q=18.4736111111,73.7977777778 (Pune)&amp;t=h\" rel=\"geolocation\">Pune</a> and then I was to be driven to <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chhatrapati_Shivaji_International_Airport\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Mumbai Airport</a> – a 3-4 hour drive depending on Pune and Mumbai traffic. No one told me the length of the drive until after I was India and couldn’t change my flight. My colleague’s flight left at 10pm, mine left at 2:45am. I figured I hop the same car and just hang out and nap at the airport.  The drive between Pune and Mumbai was great – cruised down a 6 lane divided toll road across some mountain range.</li>\r\n	<li>Walking into the terminal, the security guard stopped me, saying that I couldn’t get in until 4 hours before departure time.  So what to do – the cab driver is gone, and I’d purposely left myself with only a handful of rupees. I wandered around in front of the terminals, watching travelers pay their taxis, say “good-bye” and “I’m back” to their families. I played a bit of coliform roulette grabbing a bite from a food stall. Then, in my wanderings, I found the waiting area.  For 60 rupees – about a buck and a half – I could sit in air conditioning, ride the airport’s free WiFi, and use a men’s room – a bargain at twice the price.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Flight</em> by <a href=\"http://www.freshmusic.co.za/\">Ga\'inja</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Tony White dropped me a very germane question while I was in India\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>“I enjoy listening to your show every month and I put the knowledge to good use.  I have a question regarding jetlag and long flights to Asia and or Australia from the US.  I am traveling on my first business trip to Asia and Australia in July.  I have never traveled to Asia for business only for pleasure.  How do I prepare for traveling to Asia regarding the jetlag and time change?  My first meeting will be in less than 24 hours of arriving to Asia.  Do you have a routine to prepare for those long trips?  Do you sleep on the flight or do you stay awake to try to adjust to the time change?</li>\r\n	<li>“Thank you for the podcast and taking the time to ask these questions.”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>I\'ve always time zone adjustments to Europe and Asia differently.  Going to Europe, I set my watch on European time the minute I sit down on the plane and then force myself onto that schedule -- eating quickly and then putting on the eye shades and <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Bose headphones\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bose_headphones\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Bose headphones</a> for sleep.</li>\r\n	<li>Asia, though, is a whole different matter.  With the long flight times (14-15 hrs between ORD and India or China) and 10-12 hr time differences, I honestly don\'t even try to figure out what the destination time is.  I just go with the flow -- eat, sleep, read, repeat until landing.  I find that the flights are long enough to get enough sleep that I\'m rested enough when I hit the ground to work right away.  On this last trip to India, I hit Bangalore at midnight and was fine for an 8am breakfast meeting the next morning.</li>\r\n	<li>Everyone reacts differently.  I find that it\'s easy for me to push through -- perhaps taking a 1-hr nap before I go out to dinner the first day.  I do usually sleep poorly for the first 3 nights, but then am fine afterwards.  Everybody’s body clock is different, though. If there’s one thing I’ve learned over years of travel – you can only push your body just so far. Sleep is probably the most underrated and willingly ignored health tonic in existence.</li>\r\n	<li>And speaking of sleeping in flight, my recent travels have given me experience a number of business class seats over the past few months. Haven’t done any of the top carriers – like Singapore Air – so it haven’t had a life changing experience…  It’s been more for a search for 5 hours of sleep before the next meeting. The difference, though, has been surprising. The best seat on a United flight to London – 22-inch flat screen, complete lay-flat seat,….  The United flight to Frankfurt was a big step down – little 5-inch screen, almost flat seat.  Though it may not seem much, there’s a big difference between 170-degree and 180-degree seat recline. Your bed is 180.  At 170, you have your knees locked trying not to slip down in the seat. Not the ideal sleeping position.</li>\r\n	<li>The USAir seat from Charlotte to Madrid is probably at the bottom.  A narrow seat, no screen – instead they had some metal prongs that held a 7-inch Archos table that the flight attendant said was always wonky – volume magically went up and down, music would play while watching a movie, no real-time flight map to show position or ETA….  And the food and wine were marginal at best. Yes, it was still better than coach but that comparison isn’t going to get me on another USAir overseas flight.</li>\r\n	<li>While in the UK, I was amazed at the amount of cellular data my iPhone consumed.  I had remembered to add the 100 MB international data option to my AT&amp;T plan before I left.  I then reset the usage counters before I hit Birmingham so I didn’t overshoot. I was OK in Birmingham, but in London, I say I was consuming 20 MB in a day!  I wasn’t downloading any music or podcasts over 3G – I saved that for the hotel WiFi.  I started paying a bit more attention to my usage.</li>\r\n	<li>The difference between Birmingham and London was that I was walking to all my London appointments and was using Google Maps to find my way around town. Resetting the usage counters again, I’d see 5 MB every time I started up Maps. I needed to find some paper maps or figure out another way to work this. I “tuned” my usage a bit – opening up Google Maps in the morning while on the hotel WiFi and then scrolling to all the places I’d visit that day, trying to load up as much of the map data as I could in memory.  I worked pretty well and kept me from blowing past the 100 MB line.  But at $200 for the 100 MB of data, I think before my summer vacation driving through Scotland and the Lake District, I’ll blow the $50 on a GPS app that comes complete with its own maps – pre-downloaded.</li>\r\n	<li>I do like the way that all my electronics charge up at warp speed when I’m overseas. Most electronics chargers will handle 110 and 220 volts – the only exception I’ve found is my kids’ Nintendo DS charger – so I don’t bring a voltage converter when I travel, just a plug adapter.  I carry a small power strip, use one plug adapter, and then plug my array of charging devices into the strip. And plugged into a 220v socket, it’s a quick charge.</li>\r\n	<li>In<a title=\"Podcast #88 — New Travel Goodies; Losing Elite Status\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/03/13/podcast-88-new-travel-goodies-losing-status/\" target=\"_blank\"> episode #88</a>, I interviewed Chris Truelove at the 2011 Travel Goods show about his company Back2You.com, which helps travelers retrieve lost items.  Hopping in a taxi on the way to London Docklands airport, the driver gave me an AT&amp;T phone that an earlier fare had left behind.  He was trying to figure out how to find the owner’s information so he could return it. I wasn’t familiar with the model, but it wasn’t locked, so I started poking around. Calling the phone wouldn’t help – it would only ring in my hand – so I flipped through the contact list.  No ICE entry – “in case of emergency” – but I did find Mom’s Cell and Dad’s Cell, so I tried to call them – international calls were blocked; not surprised. Then tried to text them – those bounced too. I played around for 20 minutes, but no luck. Now, if it had one of Chris’s bag tags, I would’ve been able to send a quick text and his company would’ve sent a text to the owner. Glad I have one of his stickers on my iPhone and cameras.</li>\r\n	<li>It was my first time flying out of London Docklands – so much more convenient than Heathrow.  I was staying near Tower Bridge and flying off to Frankfurt.  It was a 20-minute cab ride – as opposed to at least double that to Heathrow, or taking a cab to Paddington Station to then catch the Heathrow Express.  No check-in line, short security line, free WiFi, and generally just a more relaxed atmosphere than the Heathrow insanity.  It is a small airport, though. I was on a Lufthansa A319, which looked like the biggest plane they were flying out of there.  Felt like the pilot has us backed up to the end of the runway, then he locked the brakes, revved the engines ‘til the plane started to shake, popped the brake release, and off we roared like one of the Bonneville Salt Flats rocket cars.  He rotated up right at the last moment, it seemed, going nose up just as the Thames appeared beneath us.  Definitely woke me up. Recommended over Heathrow if you’re hopping over to the continent.</li>\r\n	<li>And finally, if you haven’t seen it already, head over to the TravelCommons website or the FaceBook page and look for <a title=\"Video #2 – One City, Five Hours: Frankfurt\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/05/01/video-2-%e2%80%93-one-city-five-hours-frankfurt/\" target=\"_blank\">Video #2</a> – One City, Five Hours: Frankfurt. I had a 6-hr layover in Frankfurt on my way home from India. Rather than sit in the Lufthansa club all day, I ran through the 5-hour tourist sprint <a href=\"http://www.hemispheresmagazine.com/2010/03/01/one-city-five-hours-frankfurt/\" target=\"_blank\">itinerary</a> from United Airlines\' Hemispheres in-flight magazine. The prior weekend – in Kerala on the southwest coast of India – one of my hosts showed us how he was taking and editing videos all on his iPhone 4. Which led me to videoing the Frankfurt sprint on my iPhone 4. I then pulled over to my MacBook Air and edited on the flight to ORD. It’s no where near as polished as my Vietnam video, but it’s a fun piece all the same.</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a question, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is <a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a> -- use the Voice Memo app on your iPhone or something like Virtual Recorder on your Android phone to record and send in an audio comment – or iMovie if you want to send in some video; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at travelcommons.com.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Rocky Road</em> by <a href=\"http://www.kcentricity.com/\">KCentric</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>More Comfortable Traveling in India</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>At the end of April, I did my second annual trip to India.  I changed some things up – rather than doing the 15-hour non-stop from ORD to Delhi, I stopped off in Europe – for meeting in the UK on the way over; for the extended layover that I videoed on the way back.  This meant that I could skip Delhi and stay in the southern part of India – Bangalore, Chennai, Kerala. That made things a bit more temperate – 80’s instead of the 100’s in Delhi that I got to experience my last trip.</li>\r\n	<li>And I found myself a bit more comfortable with India. Until my last day, driving through Mumbai to the airport, I didn’t see the abject poverty that I saw last year in Delhi.  I didn’t feel the need to cling to my “travel bubble” quite as tightly as I did on my first visit, which I talked about in <a title=\"Podcast #83 – Business Travel in India; iPad vs. Netbook\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2010/05/28/podcast-83-business-travel-in-india-ipad-vs-netbook/\" target=\"_blank\">episode #83</a>.</li>\r\n	<li>It started with some of the planning – choosing and booking my own hotels in Bangalore, arranging many of my internal flights. Seems petty, but on my first visit, my vendors organized everything.  I just arrived and was taken from place to place.  Now, planning, doing some research, and then making sure I had ways to get from Point A to Point B made me a more active participant in this trip – not just a passenger.</li>\r\n	<li>I was also ready for some of the uniquely Indian travel rituals.  Like the <a href=\"http://www.indiatravelite.com/feature/indiancustoms.htm\" target=\"_blank\">welcoming ceremony</a> at each hotel – usually a combination of arati – an oil candle circled in front of you followed by a tilak – the red thumb mark applied between your eyebrows.</li>\r\n	<li>And like Indian security at airports. At Cochin airport in Kerala, we started counting the security checks.  The first one was just to get into the airport – either a printed itinerary or a printed boarding pass (I never saw anyone use a boarding pass on a smart phone) and ID. Learning my lesson from last year, I printed out all my itineraries <em>before</em> I left for India. Now through the front door, we walked 200 ft and hit another security check – looking at the same papers – before we could get to the check-in desk. We then took an immediate left and put our bags on the X-ray machine.  After coming out the other end, a guy taped the suitcase’s zipper tabs together and sent us off another couple hundred feet to the check-in desk.</li>\r\n	<li>Checked in, we head over to the security line. Our boarding passes are checked going into the queue.  We head to the Men’s security line.  The Ladies’ line is off to the side with a curtained pat-down area.  We put our carry-on bags through the X-ray machine, but get to keep our shoes on.  We queue up in front of the metal detector.  We walk through and then onto a wooden step where a security guard wands and pats us down. It’s the same whether you set off the metal detector or not. I’m not quite sure why they have the metal detector there other than to help form the line.</li>\r\n	<li>After the patdown, the guard stamps my boarding pass, proving that I’ve been patted down. I pick up my carry-on. It too has been stamped – on a blank address tag – to prove that it’s been x-rayed.</li>\r\n	<li>At boarding, the gate agent scans our boarding pass while another security guard looks for the security stamps on the boarding passes and the carry-on luggage tag.  No stamps and back you go.  We get on a bus that travels all of 500 ft and drops us at our plane. Another security guard checks our boarding pass and then we’re allowed to climb the steps and enter the plane – after 7 separate security checks. I had 5 flights in 7 days I was in India. I got pretty comfortable with the drill.</li>\r\n	<li>But this trip, I was a lot more comfortable just walking down the street. Maybe because in Cochin in Kerala, there are enough European tourists that I’m not the only white guy. But then, walking through a huge crowd after a IPL cricket match on Monday night in Chennai, I wasn’t uncomfortable – or any more so than walking through the crowd after, say, a University of Michigan football game.</li>\r\n	<li>A little more familiar, a little less alien.  I wasn’t clinging to my travel bubble quite so hard.  And so when I hit Mumbai airport and couldn’t get inside for 4 hours, it didn’t make me uncomfortable.  Annoyed, yes, but not uncomfortable.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Wilderness Dance</em> by <a href=\"http://www.snarkyavenger.com/\">DJ Squirrel King</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Travel Tech -- Tipping Towards Android?</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Me and 5,000 other Google IO attendees walked out of Moscone West in SF with some great schwag, specifically a pre-release version of Samsung’s 10.1-inch Galaxy Android tablet.  It’s a nice piece of work – slightly longer, slightly narrower, and slightly lighter than the iPad2.  No neat Smart Cover, but the screen is nice. The setup was easy – just logged in with my Gmail ID and it automatically loaded all the apps I have on my Droid2.  I was carrying it around with me all conference – as was everyone else – and found that I really liked it.</li>\r\n	<li>There are definitely a few rough edges that you’d expect with a pre-release model – like plugging in the power cord makes it think you’re trying to sync it with your PC and so doesn’t appear to let you use it and charge it at the same time – but the tablet version of Android – version 3.0 or “Honeycomb” if you’re into Google’s dessert naming scheme – is pretty stable.  The Android browser locked up and crashed a couple of times on me – but then again, so does my iPad Safari browser.  And the Android browser runs Flash so I can use it on all the restaurant web sites that won’t display on the iPad.  By the way, I agree that they should all swap out Flash for HTML 5, but until then, I would still like to be able to read their menus.  Can’t do it on the iPad.</li>\r\n	<li>But it makes no sense to carry around two tablets. Indeed, people keep asking me why I carry a MacBook Air <em>and</em> an iPad.  So right now, I’m traveling with the iPad2 – more out of habit than anything else – but find myself using the Samsung Android tablet around the house more and more.</li>\r\n	<li>The bonus prize from the conference – I’d call it the <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagniappe\" target=\"_blank\">lagniappe</a> if Google IO was held in New Orleans – was the Samsung Verizon 4G hot spot they tossed in because the Samsungs they gave us are WiFi only tablets.  I had been playing around with it in SF, but not so much because the city is blanketed in WiFi. However, sitting on the plane this week in Charlotte, waiting to head out to Madrid – long story about why I took this connection, or actually short, it saved me $3,000.  Anyhow, sitting on kind of a beat-up US Air 767 trying to pull the last bit of e-mail onto my iPad before take off and I was getting nothing, in spite of seeing a full house of 3G bars.  On a whim, I pulled out the Samsung hot spot out of my bag, fired it up and it connected immediately.  On another whim, I fired up the Speedtest.net app.  I got 13 Mbps download and 5 Mbps upload speeds – phenomenal.  Trying it in just now in the TravelCommons studios outside Chicago, I got 7.4 down and 7 up – compared to 2.7 down and 0.9 up on AT&amp;T 3G.</li>\r\n	<li>Not to pile onto AT&amp;T – ‘cause that’s a bit of a fish-in-a-barrel shooting exercise – but if the next iPhone iteration doesn’t have 4G, now that might be enough to push me to hug the little green guy.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids991762681113.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #90</li>\r\n	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from the <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/\">Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\r\n	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_90.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #90 -- More Comfortable Traveling in India; Tipping Towards Android?','','inherit','open','open','','755-revision-v1','','','2015-04-21 15:58:27','2015-04-21 20:58:27','',755,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/04/21/755-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1471,1,'2015-04-21 15:59:09','2015-04-21 20:59:09','[caption id=\"attachment_619\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/3080840638_1e4963b285_z1.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-619\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/3080840638_1e4963b285_z1-300x200.jpg\" alt=\"Woman eating alone\" width=\"300\" height=\"200\" /></a> Eating alone at O\'Brian\'s Deli. © Ron Tamondong / Flickr[/caption]\r\n\r\nDinner time on my last visit to Philadelphia  and I was sitting at the bar of <a href=\"http://www.tintorestaurant.com/menu.html\" target=\"_blank\">Tinto</a>, a Spanish restaurant in <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Philadelphia\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/pennsylvania/philadelphia\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\">Philadelphia</a>. My dinner was a couple of plates of <a href=\" http://www.spain.info/en_US/reportajes/las_tapas_sabores_de_lujo_para_todos_los_paladares.html\" target=\"_blank\">tapas</a> -- one of grilled octopus, another of sautéed wild mushrooms and caramelized shallots. I put in the order for mushrooms and shallots immediately after the couple two stools down got theirs. The smell was phenomenal. I had a couple of good glasses of Spanish red wine and 60-second bursts of conversation with the bartender about her favorite wines and how business was going in given the economy. General chitchat.\r\n\r\nIt was a great meal and a nice way to spend a couple of hours on my own outside of my hotel room, both important things for a frequent business traveler. And it got me to thinking about what makes for a good place for a solo traveler to eat on the road.\r\n\r\nFor many guys, this question doesn\'t take much thought. The sports bar concept might as well have been created for the solo guy traveler.  It has everything a guy needs: a good burger, large glasses of <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Coors Light\" href=\"http://www.coorslight.com\" rel=\"homepage\">Coors Light</a>, and walls of TV screens showing all <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Espn\" target=\"_blank\">ESPN</a> all the time – ESPN, ESPN-2, <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"ESPN3\" href=\"http://www.espn3.com\" rel=\"homepage\">ESPN-3</a>, ESPN-U, ESPN News…. But, while I like a good burger as much as the next guy (though I’ll chase it with something a bit more interesting than Coors Light), a regular diet of them is an express train to the angioplasty table.\r\n\r\nSo, outside the sports bar genre, what makes for a good dinner place for a solo traveler? Taking “good food” and “cleanliness” as table stakes, there are three things that come to mind:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li><strong>Availability. </strong>Can you get in at a reasonable time? While on the road, I don’t start thinking about dinner until, at the most, a couple of hours before I’m ready to eat.  Any place with a month or even a day waiting list for a seat doesn’t make the cut. I’m usually working all day and have more work to do in the evening, so I have a tight dining window – I’m trying to eat somewhere between 6 and 7pm.  At Tinto in Philly, I walked in – 7pm Thursday night – and was seated right away. In <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"San Francisco\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/san-francisco\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\">San Francisco</a> the week before, I had a 7:30pm reservation at the<a href=\"http://www.slanteddoor.com/\" target=\"_blank\"> Slanted Door</a>, a well-known pan-Asian restaurant, wasn\'t seated until 8:15, didn’t get out until 9:30, and still had documents to review before I could go to bed. It didn’t make for a relaxing meal.</li>\r\n	<li><strong>Small plates. </strong>I like variety; I like to try multiple things on a menu. However, a solo diner ordering a standard sized starter and main course will end up with way too much food. So, you either lose out on variety by only ordering one dish, or you feel guilty for leaving behind a bunch of uneaten food. Or, probably most typically, you eat it all anyhow en route to the 20 extra pounds that many frequent travelers find themselves carrying. Small plates – either small servings like tapas or sushi, or the option to scale down an entrée portion – are the way to solve this problem.</li>\r\n	<li><strong>Bar seating. </strong>When you’re eating by yourself, nothing puts an exclamation point on it like sitting alone at a table for 2… or 4. You sit there, staring ahead, or perhaps reading, or perhaps playing BrickBreaker on your BlackBerry until your food arrives. Then you wolf it down, because there’s really nothing else to do at the table, and then you pay up and leave. A pretty soulless transaction. Skip the \"table for one\" experience completely. Eating at the bar gives you some shot at human interaction, be it with the bartender or some of the people sitting beside you. The bartender is usually good for 3 or 4 dialog exchanges. And though it’s a bit riskier, there’s always the chance for a bit of a conversation with the other bar patrons. I\'m seeing more restaurants move this bar seating vibe down to table height with communal seating tables – long tables at which they seat multiple parties.  <a href=\"http://thepublicanrestaurant.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Publican</a> and <a href=\"http://www.avecrestaurant.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Avec</a> in Chicago and<a href=\"http://www.clydecommon.com/\" target=\"_blank\"> Clyde Common</a> in Portland are places where I’ve seen this.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\nNow, if restaurants would build their web sites in something other than Flash so that I can read their menus on my iPhone…\r\n<div class=\"zemanta-pixie\" style=\"margin-top: 10px; height: 15px;\"><a class=\"zemanta-pixie-a\" title=\"Enhanced by Zemanta\" href=\"http://www.zemanta.com/?px\"><img class=\"zemanta-pixie-img\" style=\"border: none; float: right;\" src=\"http://img.zemanta.com/zemified_e.png?x-id=19b317ae-98b5-4f3a-b212-5868973d62fb\" alt=\"Enhanced by Zemanta\" /></a></div>','Table for One: Eating Alone on the Road','','inherit','open','open','','617-revision-v1','','','2015-04-21 15:59:09','2015-04-21 20:59:09','',617,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/04/21/617-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1472,1,'2015-04-21 16:00:06','2015-04-21 21:00:06','[caption id=\"attachment_594\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/3717874334_4b20cc0037_o1.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-594\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/3717874334_4b20cc0037_o1-300x225.jpg\" alt=\"Danish Train © Hunter Desportes\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\" /></a> Danish Train © Hunter Desportes[/caption]\r\n\r\nMy business-vacation combo trip to <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"London\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/england/london\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\">London</a>, <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Paris\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/france/paris\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\">Paris</a>, and <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Venice\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/italy/venice\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\">Venice</a> provides the source for most of this episode\'s content. Wanting to pack light, I had to figure out how to pack for 10 days, 3 cities, two business meetings and a week\'s vacation in a single carry-on bag. After landing in London, I skipped the airports and used trains for all my intra-European travel, not boarding another flight until we were heading home from Venice -- though not before having to wrestle through a randomly rebooting kiosk. I also talk about toothpaste tablets -- another way to avoid liquid in your carry-on, and a great restaurant in O\'Hare\'s Terminal 1. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_89.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n[audio:travelcommons_89.mp3]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript from TravelCommons podcast #89:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Coming to you yet again from the TravelCommons studios. I know, I’m getting a bit bored with it too.  I tried to record this last week in the Doubletree Suites in <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Naples\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/florida/naples\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\">Naples, FL</a>, but couldn’t get everything written in time. I even downloaded Garageband for my <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"iPad\" href=\"http://www.apple.com/ipad/\" rel=\"homepage\">iPad 2</a>, but found that it has a time limit on its recordings – too short for the podcast, unless I wanted to be doing a lot more editing and stitching.</li>\r\n	<li>I’ve racked up a bit of mileage since the last episode – doing my usual runs to Phoenix – where I did catch my first spring training baseball game, the White Sox and the Giants sitting on the lawn on a beautiful afternoon -- and to Naples, FL.  There were also some new runs to London, Paris, and then to Milan on my way to a vacation rendezvous with the family in Venice.</li>\r\n	<li>It was kinda fun to meet up with my wife and daughter in a new city.  I’d taken the train over from Milan and got to our hotel first, so I was sitting on the patio drinking a cappuccino when they pulled up in their water taxi. I saw them coming down the canal and waved to them, but they didn’t see me until they were right at the hotel.  Indeed, my daughter took a picture of the hotel as they were coming up to it, and if you look closely, you can see me in the corner, waving from my table.  It’s pretty funny.</li>\r\n	<li>It doesn’t slow down going forward.  I’m off to the UK, and then, the last week of April in India, bouncing across the usual suspects – Bangalore, Pune, and Chennai – with a weekend in the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Kerala Backwaters\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/india/sights/river/kerala-backwaters\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\">Kerala backwaters</a>.  I get back, take a week to adjust to Central Time, and then head out to San Francisco for the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Google I/O\" href=\"http://code.google.com/events/io/2010/\" rel=\"homepage\">Google I/O conference</a>.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Planetenstaaten </em>by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/weigl-landwater/\" target=\"_blank\">Phillip Weigl</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Nobody sent in an audio comment this month, so you’re stuck with the sound of my voice all the way through.</li>\r\n	<li>So let’s get the obligatory <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Transportation Security Administration\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_Security_Administration\" rel=\"wikipedia\">TSA</a> rant out of the way.  When I saw the <a href=\"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3sH1GaO_nw&amp;feature=player_embedded\" target=\"_blank\">video</a> of the TSA doing a “grope-down” of a 6-yr old girl in <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"New Orleans Airport\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Orleans_Airport\" rel=\"wikipedia\">New Orleans airport</a> I wasn’t shocked, I wasn’t outraged – I just shook my head at the mindless stupidity of it, numb to yet another of the endless stream of senseless TSA acts. When the screener is executing the grope-down while being filmed by the parent and, off-camera, the supervisor agrees with the action, and then in a follow-up statement, the TSA says “Yup, the screener did the right thing” -- this incident is a proof point that it’s not stupid acts of individual screeners.  The TSA as an organization is fundamentally broken; it’s developed a culture that can’t use common sense. The only successful thing the TSA has done is replaced the IRS as the most reviled part of the federal government.</li>\r\n	<li>OK, glad to get that out of the way.  Let talk about something more fun.  In the <a title=\"Podcast #88 — New Travel Goodies; Losing Elite Status\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/03/13/podcast-88-new-travel-goodies-losing-status/\" target=\"_blank\">last episode</a>, I talked about stuff that caught my eye at last month’s Travel Goods show.  One thing I forgot to mention was <a href=\"http://www.archtekinc.com/product_info.php?products_id=52&amp;osCsid=eb7322cb97f95ed64391f31ae19e1297\" target=\"_blank\">Archtek Toothpaste Tablets</a>. Now I’ve talked in the past about switching from toothpaste to toothpowder some years ago to avoid the liquid ban, and then keeping it to avoid having to pull out a baggie full of toiletries at the screening point.  Archtek has a different spin.  You put one tablet in your mouth, chew it up, and then start brushing. I was a little skeptical at first.  Indeed, I had to remind myself not to swallow – it felt like a chewable vitamin.  But once I started brushing, it foamed up way more than any tooth powder I’ve used.  If you can find Archtek Toothpaste Tablets, buy ‘em.  Definitely recommended.</li>\r\n	<li>Also in the <a title=\"Podcast #88 — New Travel Goodies; Losing Elite Status\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/03/13/podcast-88-new-travel-goodies-losing-status/\" target=\"_blank\">last episode</a>, I talked about dropping status, specifically how United didn’t soft-land me from 1K status – they dropped me all the way from 1K to Premiere.  This had a big impact on accruing mileage – 1K’s get a 100% mileage bonus while Premieres only get 25%.  Another big impact is who you get routed to within United’s customer service network.  1K’s talk to United employees in corporate headquarters near O’Hare.  They’re the most experienced and best trained customer service agents.  The Premiere desk – when I had to change an award ticket to accommodate my London trip, I found out it’s in Cebu City in the Philippines.  It wasn’t a major problem – the agents were pleasant, spoke understandable English, and were able to make the changes that I needed.  But again, it was a bit of a jarring experience and reminded me once again of the little niceties status brings.</li>\r\n	<li>A point that was brought home to my 17-yr old son when he traveled without me on his German Club trip to Germany, Switzerland, and Austria – while the rest of us were in Venice.  Picking him up at the airport, he said, “I hate traveling without you, Dad.  I treated just like a peon.”  I’ll take that.  As any parent will tell you, it’s nice to wanted by your teenager – even if it’s just for pre-boarding and access to airport clubs.</li>\r\n	<li>So, in three groups -- my son, my wife and daughter, and me -- left for Europe out of O’Hare’s Terminal 1.  And all of us made time to stop off in Rick Bayless’ new Mexican tortas -- sandwich -- place <a href=\"http://www.rickbayless.com/news/view?articleID=171\" target=\"_blank\">Frontera Tortas</a> in the front concourse, Concourse B.  Bayless is one of the most famous chefs in Chicago – he won the first season of Bravo TV’s <em>Top Chef Masters</em> contest and runs Barack and Michelle Obama’s favorite date-night restaurant Topolobampo. I’ve eaten at his Frontera Grill since it opened in the mid-80’s and have yet to have a bad meal. So when he opened Frontera Torta, I had to try it.  The lines can be long, but the food is great.  I had the cochinita pibil torta – pulled pork and pickled red onions with a habanero salsa on the side.  Good thing – that salsa was the spiciest thing I’ve ever had in an airport anywhere.  They did warn me, though.  Anyhow, great food – good place to kill a United Airlines delay in ORD.</li>\r\n	<li>When I was flying out to London on United, I found it easier to check in with the self-service kiosks even though I was flying business class.  The line for business class check-in was at least 5 deep, but there were a half-dozen open kiosks.  I fired one up, put my passport on the scanner, and within a couple of minutes, was on my way to the security line.</li>\r\n	<li>It was not that easy, though, on the flight back.  We were flying Lufthansa back by way of Munich. After catching a water taxi from our hotel – much cooler, and much longer than the water taxis to and from Logan Airport in Boston – I queued up for the kiosk. It was taking the people in front of my much longer than a couple of minutes.   But, they looked like tourists.  Finally, I worked my way to the front of the line – not exactly a linear process in Italy.  I started checking in.  The workflow wasn’t as straight forward/as well-designed as the United kiosk, but that wasn’t the problem.  It was that the kiosk kept re-starting/re-booting halfway through the check-in and the passport scanner was very fiddly.  It took me at least 15 minutes to get my wife, daughter, and me checked in.  There wasn’t another alternative.  There were only 2 desk agents but they were just checking luggage for those who had checked in with the kiosk – and they had no interest in coming out from behind their desk to figure out the rebooting kiosks. I don’t mind self service – when it works.</li>\r\n	<li>And finally, going all the way back to <a title=\"Podcast #86 — Fun with Layovers; Story Behind the Closing Tune\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2010/12/26/podcast-86-fun-with-layovers-story-behind-closing-tune/\" target=\"_blank\">episode 86</a>, from last December… Prompted by a question from a listener, Betty Boyd, about the podcast’s closing song, <em>Pictures of You</em> by the Scottish band Evangeline, I dipped into the archives and played an interview with the band’s manager that gave some back story on the song.  A couple of days ago, the song’s writer dropped this comment on the TravelCommons website:</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</ul>\r\n\"Hi Mark. I’m John Naismith songwriter with the former band Evangeline, I’m so glad you enjoy the song <em>Pictures of You</em>, it’s also good to know that people like Becky from Carolina can identify with the song because that was the intent when writing it, life on the road is hard and leaving your family behind is hard! Anyway, a million thanks to you for using this song for so long I wish you and your show all the best for the future.Love and friendship from Scotland.\"\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>John, thanks for stopping by the site and leaving the comment.  And also, thanks for letting me use your song. It has always been, in my mind, the perfect song for the frequent traveler.</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a question, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is <a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a> -- use the Voice Memo app on your iPhone or something like Virtual Recorder on your Android phone to record and send in an audio comment like Lori or Gary in last month’s episode; send a <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">Twitter</a> message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/153475331351358\" target=\"_blank\">Facebook</a> page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/yoria-suerte/\" target=\"_blank\">Suerte Mijo</a> </em>by Arthur Yoria</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Trains Instead of Planes</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>My Spring Break vacation plans for Venice, Italy got munged up a bit when a customer in London demanded my presence the Wednesday afternoon before we were to fly out from Chicago.  Doing a one-day up-and back to London didn’t make any sense – though, as long-time listeners will recall from <a title=\"Podcast #70 – Packing a Suit, Videoconference over Travel, Watching Winter Flight Delays\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2008/12/23/podcast-70-packing-a-suit-videoconference-over-travel-watching-winter-flight-delays/\" target=\"_blank\">episode #70</a>, that hasn’t stopped in the past.  So instead, I visited staff in our Kew office on Thursday, a customer in Paris on Friday, and then vectored through Milan on Saturday to meet up with my family in Venice Sunday morning.</li>\r\n	<li>Since I wasn’t on a tight schedule, I decided to skip the airports and do all these legs on the train.  No lines, no grope-downs – just glide from center city to center city.  In past episodes, I’ve talked about my preference for Amtrak’s Acela when traveling the northeast corridor from New York to Washington, so I decided to try the same thing in Europe.</li>\r\n	<li>Last month, I tweeted a link to a <a href=\"http://www.tnooz.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/silverrail1.jpg\" target=\"_blank\">graph </a>showing that, in Europe, rail is becoming the preferred method of transport when trip time drops below 3 hours.  Indeed, before digging the Chunnel – the Channel Tunnel, London to Paris was one of the world’s busiest air routes.  But now, air travel has dropped to <a href=\"http://www.tnooz.com/2011/03/21/news/how-rail-is-evolving-and-why-travel-websites-need-to-be-ready/\" target=\"_blank\">less than 20%</a>. Since I needed to get from London to Paris on Thursday afternoon, I decided to start my train journey with the Eurostar.</li>\r\n	<li>It wasn’t cheap – premium economy was $250.  I couldn’t in my mind justify the $400 business class ticket.  Rolling my bag through St Pancras station in London felt a bit like an airport experience – queue up, waive your boarding pass in front of a reader, put your bags through the X-ray machine, walk through the metal detector, go through passport control (you go through French immigration in London, kinda like going through US immigration in Toronto airport)… but it was definitely a bit more laid-back -- nothing like the full-on insanity that is Heathrow.</li>\r\n	<li>It was at boarding time that I really felt the difference.  No calling out groups, no jockeying around the jet bridge door – we just walked up the ramp and found our car.  And pulling out, no PA announcements scolding us to immediately take our seats, no flight attendants giving us the once over to make sure we’d turned off our cell phones – people were still wandering around, and I was cranking on a document when I noticed out of the corner of my eye the platform slipping away.</li>\r\n	<li>The journey under the English Channel – I guess I was surprised at how uneventful it was.  Indeed, I was in the toilet when we entered the Chunnel.  No announcement, no ear-popping from going down – just a 15-20 minute journey though a dark tunnel and  “pop” you’re up in France.  I don’t know what I was expecting, but I guess I thought there’d be a bit more to it.</li>\r\n	<li>Saturday’s ride on the TGV – France’s high-speed train -- from Paris to Milan was a good bit different. The price was good bit lower -- $150 for business class. The ride was longer – 7 hrs instead of 2.  But the scenery was much better – up over the Alps instead of a tunnel under the ocean.</li>\r\n	<li>Being a Saturday, it was more families, less business – kinda like my Southwest flight this week back from Ft Myers, FL.  In some ways, it was worse.  Once the kids were seated on the Southwest flight, they stayed there, buckled in.  On the TGV, the entire car became the playground for this one toddler – he kept racing down the aisle from one end of the car to the other.  This went on for hours because the train ride was more than twice as long as the Ft Myers flight.</li>\r\n	<li>All that being said, I enjoyed this train ride too – it was an easy cab ride from my hotel to Gard du Nord, there was no security on boarding, it was able to get up and buy a beer whenever I wanted – provided I could dodge the running kid. I was really glad I brought an extra battery for the Bose headphones and had something to look at out the window.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/uniontrade-everyday/\" target=\"_blank\"><em>Violent and Beautiful</em> </a>by the Union Trade</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Travel Challenge -- Fitting Two Weeks into One Carry-On</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>The night before I left on my European trip, I tweeted and posted on the TravelCommons Facebook page – “Today\'s travel challenge -- How to pack for 10 days, 3 cities, two business meetings and a week\'s vacation in a single carry-on bag.”</li>\r\n	<li>Lori Humm wrote “My number one travel rule: pack light and buy what you need when you get there” while Allan Marko commented “Depends on how often you want to do laundry on vacation”.  Chris Webb tweeted back asking to know how it all came out.</li>\r\n	<li>Actually, it wasn’t as tough as I thought it might be.  The challenge was packing for business and for tourism without looking out of place in either.  Lucky for me I was only covering one climate – European spring, and I’d be vacationing among Italians – probably the best dressers in Europe.</li>\r\n	<li>My packing strategy always starts with a single color family, and usually that’s black.  Black jacket, olive and tan slacks, an assortment of shirts, a red pattern tie if absolutely necessary and I’m good for a week.</li>\r\n	<li>But what about the second week.  When I would do two-week stretches in South Africa, I would pack a week’s worth of clothes, send my shirts to the cleaners on the weekend, and stomp on my understuff and socks while I was in the shower.</li>\r\n	<li>For this trip, though, I took a different tack.  I kept the color wheel on black, but left my workout gear at home.  I figured we’d be walking all over Venice, so that would give me enough exercise.  Gym shoes take up a huge amount of space, which I filled with a couple of sweaters and another week of socks and understuff.  With a week’s worth of shirts, but two weeks of undershirts, I figured I could get two days out of each shirt – I didn’t think I’d be sweating too much in London and Paris in March. And most of the extra undershirts and socks were on their last legs.  I left a trail of Jockey t-shirts from London to Paris to Milan, making room for some souvenir Carnivale masks for next year’s Mardi Gras party.</li>\r\n	<li>It ended up working well for me.  I didn’t return with one clean piece of clothing, but didn’t have to do any laundry for the two weeks.  I’m not sure I can use the same strategy for next week’s trip to India though.  With a forecast of 90 degrees and 90% humidity, that “no sweat” assumption just doesn’t seem realistic.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917626811.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #89</li>\r\n	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Magnatune</a></li>\r\n	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or MP3 file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/153475331351358\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_89.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #89 -- Trains Over Planes; Fit 2 Weeks in 1 Carry-On','','inherit','open','open','','590-revision-v1','','','2015-04-21 16:00:06','2015-04-21 21:00:06','',590,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/04/21/590-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1473,1,'2015-04-21 16:01:16','2015-04-21 21:01:16','[caption id=\"attachment_584\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/536019393_e9101f64b0_o1.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-584\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/536019393_e9101f64b0_o1-300x219.jpg\" alt=\"Passage between Kintetsu and JR stations, in Namba, Osaka\" width=\"300\" height=\"219\" /></a> Passage between Kintetsu and JR stations, in Namba, Osaka[/caption]\r\n\r\nOne of my annual <a title=\"New Year’s Travel Resolutions\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/01/01/new-years-travel-resolutions/\">New Year\'s travel resolutions</a> is to \"unpack and repack my briefcase.\" Some people re-do their closets; I do my briefcase.  I\'m always amazed at the stuff that accumulates over the year. Why did I think I needed a half-dozen pens, two sets of earphones, $5 of loose change in three different currencies, and two handfuls of USB flash drives?\r\n\r\nThere’s always a desire to carry everything you could possibly need while on the road, turning your briefcase into the road warrior\'s version of <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Batman\'s utility belt\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batman%27s_utility_belt\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Batman’s utility belt</a>, letting you amaze your traveling companions by pulling out just the right thing to solve any travel problem. But while you’re always prepared, you’re always lagging behind – either because you\'ve got the heaviest bag or the TSA is pulling your bag for secondary screening because all your stuff makes them suspicious.\r\n\r\nIn <a title=\"Podcast #33 – Listener Mailbag, What’s in My Briefcase?\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2006/02/18/podcast-33-listener-mailbag-whats-in-my-briefcase/\">episode #33</a> in February 2006, I did an audio tour through my briefcase.  Five years later, some (and surprisingly only some) of the contents have changed, but the goal remains the same: optimize the trade-off between weight and having everything you need. To make it easy, travel gear and accessories in my carry on bag fall into these categories:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li><strong>Personal Computer</strong> Most business travelers are knowledge workers. And the laptop is to us what a framing hammer is to a carpenter; the laptop is our main tool of the trade. However, many business travelers carry a sledgehammer of a laptop: 17-inch screen, DVD player and the fastest processor. This, along with a couple of extra batteries to keep it breathing between New York and San Francisco. But how much heavy lifting do we do when we\'re on the road? Most of my time is spent running e-mails, web research and some light document editing. My Travel PC needs to be purpose-\"spec’d\" for what’s important to a frequent traveler — light weight, long battery life, and reasonable processing power (in that order). And it leaves behind what’s not — optical drives, super-fast processors and video cards, big hard drives, and large monitors.</li>\r\n	<li><strong>Communications</strong> The maturation of the smartphone is probably the best thing that\'s happened to business travelers since the creation of frequent flier programs. The ability to talk without finding a pay phone and to send/receive data without hunting down an analog line has made business travel simpler and easier.  After you get comfortable with constant connectivity, you depend upon it. So now I carry an AT&amp;T <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"iPhone\" href=\"http://www.apple.com/iphone\" rel=\"homepage\">iPhone</a> 4 <em>and</em> a <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Motorola Droid\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_Droid\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Verizon Droid</a> 2 to counter dead spots, and an AT&amp;T cellular modem for when I\'m in underdeveloped areas where Starbucks or other wireless coffee bars do not yet exist.</li>\r\n	<li><strong>Entertainment</strong> Delays are an integral part of today\'s travel experience, so we need to carry some things to keep our minds otherwise occupied. It started with iPods, listening to music while waiting out a weather delay. Or a Nintendo for the just-out-of-college set. But in the past couple of years, the choices have exploded and the lines have blurred. I use my iPhone for a conference call and then play Battleship on it in the TSA line. Dual purpose devices let me cut down weight, making room for those hard-to-justify but just-gotta-have Bose noise-canceling headphones.</li>\r\n	<li><strong>Pens and Paper</strong> I used to carry a <em>lot</em> of paper - documents to review, analyst reports to read - because I hate reading these things on a computer screen. Now <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"iPad\" href=\"http://www.apple.com/ipad/\" rel=\"homepage\">the iPad</a> is another double-duty device that lets me jettison all of that, slashing dead-tree bulk and weight from my bag. I also tossed the 3 business card holders I’d accumulated. Do we really need business cards anymore? Unless you’re regularly meeting with Asian businessmen, business card exchanges are getting rarer and rarer. I still carry a couple of pens and a <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Moleskine\" href=\"http://www.moleskine.com/\" rel=\"homepage\">Moleskine notebook</a> because ... well, just because.</li>\r\n	<li><strong>Medicine</strong> Trying to find a pharmacy in a strange place can be painful. I don\'t want to carry an entire medicine cabinet, but I don\'t want to search the local strip malls every time I need some ibuprofen or allergy medicine.</li>\r\n	<li><strong>Food</strong> This is not about turning my briefcase into a flying picnic basket. Instead, it\'s a few small task-specific items such as a tin of wintergreen Altoids to cure the dry mouth I get when I fall asleep in flight, and a couple of Tazo green tea bags and tubes of Starbucks Via coffee powder because I think most in-flight coffee is awful.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\nGoing through this, I <em>think</em> I’m traveling lighter and smarter. But it might be a push. I think may need a fifth category called \"Power chargers.\"\r\n<div class=\"zemanta-pixie\" style=\"margin-top: 10px; height: 15px;\"><img class=\"zemanta-pixie-img\" style=\"border: none; float: right;\" src=\"http://img.zemanta.com/pixy.gif?x-id=9efcb271-495b-4834-9628-1289594c99ff\" alt=\"\" /></div>','What\'s in My Bag: Traveling Light But Prepared','','inherit','open','open','','582-revision-v1','','','2015-04-21 16:01:16','2015-04-21 21:01:16','',582,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/04/21/582-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1474,1,'2015-04-21 16:02:13','2015-04-21 21:02:13','[caption id=\"attachment_565\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"215\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/Frequent-Flyer-Cards1.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-565\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/Frequent-Flyer-Cards1-215x300.jpg\" alt=\"Full House, Platinum over 1K\" width=\"215\" height=\"300\" /></a> Full House, Platinum over 1K[/caption]\r\n\r\nI\'m getting ready for a stint of international travel -- a couple trips to the UK, a vacation to Venice, and then bouncing around southern India. I visited the <a href=\"http://www.travel-goods.org/the-travel-goods-show/\">2011 Travel Goods show</a> in Chicago for a preview of the new travel goodies I\'d be seeing in the shops this spring.  Wading through a front room stacked with luggage, I hit the gadget room with the interesting stuff and interviewed some of the company owners. I also talk about the growing number of wireless <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Wi-Fi\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi-Fi\" rel=\"wikipedia\">WiFi</a> hotspots I\'m seeing in hotels, and about the different ways Marriott and United Airlines dropped my frequent flier/frequent sleeper status after my traveling patterns changed.  Also, a listener tells us about a good <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Air France\" href=\"http://www.airfrance.com\" rel=\"homepage\">Air France</a> experience re-routing around an East Coast snow storm, and an audio comment about being sick on the road. Listen through to the end of the podcast for how to enter the latest TravelCommons contest. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_88.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n[audio:travelcommons_88.mp3]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript from TravelCommons podcast #88:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Coming to you yet again from the TravelCommons studios. I just can’t seem to get my act together enough to have everything written in time to record from a hotel room, though if there’s going to be an April episode, I’ll need to.  The beginning of April finds me in Venice, wrapping up the Spring Break I discussed in an earlier episode.  I then get a week at home with some family coming in, then down to Florida for a week, then to the UK, and then, the last week of April in India, bouncing across the usual suspects – Bangalore, Pune, and Chennai – with a weekend in the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Kerala backwaters\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerala_backwaters\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Kerala backwaters</a>.</li>\r\n	<li>Not that March has been quiet.  I’m just back from a trip to New York earlier this week and then head down to Phoenix next week. I’m hoping to catch a Spring Training ball game while I’m down there.  I\'ve been working off and on in Phoenix since the mid-‘90’s and have never been to a Spring Training game.  Every year I say I’m going to carve out time, and every year something comes up.  This year, though.  This will be the year.  Again working on that New Year’s travel resolution about taking more quick breaks.  The fact that I’m still thinking about a New Year’s resolution has to be breaking some sort of rule.</li>\r\n	<li>Stay with me ‘til the end of this episode – either the preferred way by listening or the ADD way by scrubbing – for a quick TravelCommons contest.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Keep Your Motor Running</em> by Dave Hole</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>OK, let’s see what bits and bobs I have been keeping track of on Evernote, and Twitter, and Facebook…</li>\r\n	<li>For everyone who watched all the way to the end of the <a title=\"Video #1 – Impressions of Vietnam\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2010/09/06/video-1-impressions-of-vietnam/\">Vietnam video</a> back in September – and for those of you who haven’t, it’s still available on the web site, on the iTunes feed, and on the TravelCommons Facebook page – there’s a picture, a head shot of me, with a boa – the large snake, not the feathered thing -- draped around my neck.  You can plainly see the receding graying hair. So it caught me up short when a United gate agent looked at my boarding pass, and then at me, and said “You look too young to have a <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"United Airlines\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Mileage Plus</a> number this low.”  It worked – I gave her one of those customer service “attaboys’ they always send to their status fliers.  It reminded me of my last trip to India when the immigration agent looked at me a couple of times and said that I looked much younger than my passport photo.  Either I’ve unknowingly picked up the ability to cloud men’s minds or that picture of Dorian Grey I picked up at a garage sale actually works.</li>\r\n	<li>We’ve talked in past episodes about how for frequent travelers, the cost of wireless data plans can quickly pay for themselves in avoided hotel WiFi charges – 3-4 nights in a month -- if you tend to stay in hotels that still charge for wireless or don’t have precious metal status at chains like Hilton or Marriott.  Anyhow, I’ve seen over the past few months a growing number of wireless hotspots when I pop open my laptop in my hotel room.  I see in the network browser at least 2-3 Verizon hotspots, a Sprint, and every once in a while, a Virgin hotspot.  I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised – most Android phones have 3G hotspot capabilities built in.  I guess it’s the power I’m more surprised about.  If I’m seeing 5 or 6 of these, they’re broadcasting farther than just the adjacent room.  And while most have security enabled, there’s always 1 or 2 running naked.  And this will only increase after AT&amp;T iPhones get hotspot capability with iOS 4.3.  With only 11 channels in the US implementation of WiFi, there’s gonna be some congestion in the air soon.</li>\r\n	<li>Some good comments also came into the web site, the e-mail box and Twitter since the last episode…</li>\r\n	<li>Andre – who describes himself as a “long-time listener from Germany” – left this comment on the Winter Travel Tips post\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Wanted to share a positive experience with an airline call center when I was travelling to the US in January. I flew Air France on the international legs – Stuttgart to Paris-DeGaulle to JFK and back, and used United miles for the domestic portion to Florida – JFK to Washington-Dulles to Miami.</li>\r\n	<li>As my departure approached, so did a massive snowstorm. Just as I finished packing my luggage the night before departure, Air France e-mailed me that my flight out of Kennedy was canceled.  Indeed, AF kept all 4 of their JFK flights in Paris to keep their schedule from getting screwed up. I called the AF call center. I said that I\'m currently in Miami and asked if there was flight to Paris out of here or DC. After waiting on hold for a while the agent transferred me to a special Delta help desk, warning me that I might have to pay extra to fly out of MIA. Next agent told me the same, but she had to talk to AF in Paris anyways.</li>\r\n	<li>After another wait, she came back, totally astonished that AF, not only accepted the re-routing, but also did that free of charge. I guess they were just happy to have one less passenger standing around in New York.</li>\r\n	<li>So, there are still moments where you think that you are a valued customer and they care about you.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>Andre, thanks for that story.  This was a tough winter in the US.  I have a friend from Detroit who was in Boston one week and supposed to be in New York the next.  One of those storms blew through, cancelled his flight, and his next available flight home was the following Monday, when he was supposed to be flying back to New York.  He just hung around Boston for the weekend, bought some new underwear, and then caught Amtrak down to New York Monday morning – much less stressful.</li>\r\n	<li>Peter Zurich sent in a note about the running thread on the TSA’s full body scanners, specifically about my observation in the last episode about the partial roll out of the scanners.  What good was it to scan 100% of the passengers in ORD’s Terminal 1 last Monday morning – pushing security lines down the concourse, and yet have no scanners at all in alternative airports like Ft Myers, FL.  In this same vein, Peter writes\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>I am all onboard for security, but what we have now is security theatre that is just another meaningless escalation from x-ray to liquid ban to shoes off.  We joked about what a good thing it was that Richard Reid, the shoe bomber, didn’t have it in his underwear, and of course, that’s the next thing that happens, and we get the naked scanners.  On and on it goes…</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>Yes, Peter, and so it does.  One thing the housing market meltdown has done is make people less mobile – they can’t easily get out of their houses to move to another city for a new job.  The number of people flying every week to their jobs is growing.  Making this work requires smooth predictable travel – something the TSA seems to have no interest in facilitating.</li>\r\n	<li>And finally, yet another audio comment – I love these – this time from Lori Humm, another long-time TravelCommons listener, about a time when she was sick while on the road</li>\r\n	<li>Lori Humm audio clip</li>\r\n	<li>Lori, thanks for that story.  Makes me feel a bit of a whiner -- Type A flu definitely tops my cold I whined about in the last episode.</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a question, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is <a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a> -- use the Voice Memo app on your iPhone or something like Virtual Recorder on your Android phone to record and send in an audio comment like Lori or Gary in last month’s episode; send a <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">Twitter</a> message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/153475331351358\" target=\"_blank\">Facebook</a> page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Baja Taxi</em> by Brian Buckit</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>New Travel Goodies</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Chris Truelove, another long time TravelCommons listener from the UK, dropped me a line a couple of weeks back, saying that he would be in Chicago for the 2011 Travel Goods show to launch the latest version of his luggage locator tag business. I had mentioned his globalbagtag.com business some episodes ago, and now he’s launching a new line – back2you.com.</li>\r\n	<li>Always looking for some podcast content – as well as the opportunity to meet a listener – I headed down on Sunday afternoon.</li>\r\n	<li>McCormick Center in Chicago is one of the world’s largest exhibition spaces, so finding the show took a little bit.  Walking in, it was luggage as far as I could see.  There were lots of colors on display.  Everybody – well, except for Tumi – was looking to make a break from black.  I couldn’t discern a clear alternative, though – was red the new black or was beige.  I did see a surprising number of hardshell rolling bags and in all sorts of wild prints.  Perhaps those are more targeted at the recreational market – can’t say I saw a lot of cheetah-print hardshell bags being put in the overhead on my morning flight to New York last week.</li>\r\n	<li>In spite of all the colors, my eyes began to glaze over – you can only look at so many suitcases before sleep – or boredom – begins to wash over you.  Then I walked into the back room and things got much more interesting.  Rather than 2-story luggage displays, in here were smaller booths filled with all sorts of travel gadgets.  Even the bags back here had interesting twists. Powerbag showed backpacks and briefcases with built-in batteries, complete with built-in iPhone and USB cords to keep your phones and iPods topped off while walking down the concourse.  And a company called Runnur (<a href=\"http://gorunnur.com/\">http://gorunnur.com/</a>) was selling a fanny pack reengineered into something like a bandolier, slinging everything across one shoulder instead of resting on your back-side.</li>\r\n	<li>It was here that I found Chris and so, using the Voice Memo app on my iPhone, I asked him to tell me about Back2You (<a href=\"http://back2you.com/\">http://back2you.com/</a>)</li>\r\n	<li>Back2You interview\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_577\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"150\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/DSC_7791-copy11.jpg\"><img class=\"size-thumbnail wp-image-577\" title=\"Back2You Tag\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/DSC_7791-copy-150x150.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"150\" height=\"150\" /></a> Back2You Bag Tag[/caption]</li>\r\n	<li>Thanks Chris.  Those tags could come in handy on my upcoming trips to Italy, the UK, and India where I won’t be in any single place more than a couple of days.</li>\r\n	<li>Walking around the back room, I found some other interesting products</li>\r\n	<li>TuGo interview</li>\r\n	<li>I’ll post a picture in the show notes.  I tried TuGo (<a href=\"http://goodtugo.com/\">http://goodtugo.com/</a>)  out last Monday morning in ORD.  It got it on my bag in less than a minute, put my coffee in there, then put my backpack on top of my bag and it worked like a charm.  Not sure if the problem it’s solving is worth the space it takes up in my bag, but it definitely works.</li>\r\n	<li>One of the themes in the back room seemed to be comfort – as the seat pitch – the distance between rows – shrink and planes get more crowded, people are looking to buy a little something to make the journey more bearable.</li>\r\n	<li>Kuhi Comfort interview\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_576\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"150\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/DSC_7788-copy11.jpg\"><img class=\"size-thumbnail wp-image-576\" title=\"TuGo Cupholder\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/DSC_7788-copy-150x150.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"150\" height=\"150\" /></a> TuGo Cupholder[/caption]</li>\r\n	<li>I tried the Kuhi Comfort (<a href=\"http://www.kuhicomfort.com/\">http://www.kuhicomfort.com/</a>).  It was more comfortable than the typical neck pillow. I’m not sure about the pouch for aromatherapy. I like a little lavender oil as much as the next person, but in coach, where you’re less than a foot from the other passenger’s head – one person’s relaxing aromatherapy is the next person’s eye watering stench…</li>\r\n	<li>The other theme I picked up was hygiene.  There were a handful of booths selling bed bug powders and plastic barriers.  The booth across from Chris Truelove’s --Shelves to Go (<a href=\"http://www.shelvestogo.net\" target=\"_blank\">http://www.shelvestogo.net</a>) was selling a packable shelving system – lifts straight out of your bag and hangs on the closet rod – avoiding, as the brochure says, “the risk of possible exposure to dirt and insect infestation” from putting your close in the hotel dresser  -- I’ll put a picture in the show notes.</li>\r\n	<li>And then there was this new twist on the lowly wipe</li>\r\n	<li>Paper Shower (<a href=\"http://papershower.com/\">http://papershower.com/</a>) interview</li>\r\n	<li>So there you go, no end of stuff to make your travel life a bit easier, and your bag a bit heavier.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_579\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"150\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/DSC_7790-copy11.jpg\"><img class=\"size-thumbnail wp-image-579\" title=\"Shelves to Go\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/DSC_7790-copy-150x150.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"150\" height=\"150\" /></a> Shelves to Go[/caption]</li>\r\n	<li>I’ll put URLs and any pictures I have of these products in the show notes.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Emily C</em> by Fiasco</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Losing Status</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Back in <a title=\"Podcast #82 – Changing My Travel; New Mileage Programs in a New Year\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2010/02/20/podcast-82-changing-my-travel-new-mileage-programs-in-a-new-year/\">episode 82</a>, I talked about how my job switch – moving from consulting to being the CIO of a technology company – was changing the way I travel, and how the new destinations were shaking up my frequent traveler program status.</li>\r\n	<li>It all sorted out in mid-January.  Because of our office locations, I switched from Marriott – where I’d been top-tier Platinum status for at least 7 years – to Hilton for no other reason than sheer convenience.  I hit top tier Hilton – Diamond; gem stones rather than precious metals for Hilton – in December.  And, oddly enough, still haven’t received a new card or welcome packet.  Every other program – you hit a major tier and there are all sorts of thank you letters and program brochures showing up on your doorstep.  Hilton – nothing.</li>\r\n	<li>As interesting, though was Marriott’s reaction.  I don’t think I stayed enough nights to qualify for any status, but they “soft landed” me.  They dropped me one level down – to Gold, which still gets you free WiFi and free breakfast in the concierge lounge – and an offer to let me buy back my Platinum status for 40,000 points.  Nice approach.  If I thought I’d be staying at more Marriotts this year, I’d have considered the buy back, but I appreciated the soft landing and have stayed at a couple of Marriott since them.</li>\r\n	<li>United Airlines – not as nice.  No soft landing here.  I dropped two tiers – from 1K to Premiere, which is the status level I’d qualified for by the end of the year.  As I mentioned in<a title=\"Podcast #84 – End of Year Status Calculus; TSA Porn\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2010/10/30/podcast-84-end-of-year-status-calculus-tsa-porn/\"> episode 84</a>, when I saw in October that I would miss American’s Exec Platinum by about 10,000 miles, I flipped over to United to preserve a minimum level of status.  Which is exactly what I received.  Like Marriott, though, I received an offer to buy back my 1K status, but the price was a bit steeper -- $999 plus flying 35,000 qualifying miles in the first quarter 0f 2011.  Neither of those made any sense.</li>\r\n	<li>I’ll probably go back to my old ways – splitting my mileage between United and American and keeping mid-tier status – Premiere Exec -- on United because, with monthly flights to Dallas and Fort Myers, FL where United has little to none non-stop service, there’s no way I’ll make 1K.</li>\r\n	<li>Friends who left consulting used to joke that first January was one of their most conflicted times – down because they lost status and were now traveling with the peons; but happy with what it represented – that they were spending a lot more time with their families.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids991762681.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #88</li>\r\n	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://musicalley.com\" target=\"_blank\">Music Alley</a></li>\r\n	<li>And now for the contest.  In the past, I\'ve run some quick contests to drive iTunes reviews.  This time, I – like every podcaster – am looking to drive Facebook “likes” – there’s got to be a better noun than that – “followers” on Twitter may be a bit creepy, but at least it’s not pathetic.  But, that’s the lingo, so I’ll have to go with it.  Go to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/153475331351358\">Facebook</a> page – there’s link in the shownotes and a badge above the fold on the first page of the web site – “like” it, and leave a comment.  The best comment, funniest or most insightful as judged by me, wins 2 drink coupons on United Airlines.  I look forward to some good stuff</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or MP3 file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/153475331351358\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_88.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #88 -- New Travel Goodies; Losing Elite Status','','inherit','open','open','','554-revision-v1','','','2015-04-21 16:02:13','2015-04-21 21:02:13','',554,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/04/21/554-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1475,1,'2015-04-21 16:03:01','2015-04-21 21:03:01','[caption id=\"attachment_499\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/514658906_24223535241.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-499\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/514658906_24223535241-300x194.jpg\" alt=\"Amtrak train rolls into Winter Park, USA by Rohan Travellin\" width=\"300\" height=\"194\" /></a> Amtrak train rolls into Winter Park, USA by Rohan Travellin[/caption]\r\n\r\nLast week\'s winter storms in the <a href=\"http://www.ctpost.com/news/article/State-survives-storm-that-buried-state-953587.php\" target=\"_blank\">Northeast</a> and the <a href=\"http://www.usatoday.com/weather/storms/winter/2011-01-10-storm10_ST_N.htm\" target=\"_blank\">South</a> resulted in <a href=\"http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2011/0112/As-winter-storm-blasts-Northeast-70-percent-of-US-now-coated-in-snow\">70 percent</a> of the US being covered in snow -- shutting down airports across the region, canceling thousands of flights and trains.  So it seems like a good time to recap some of the travel tips we\'ve covered in past episodes of TravelCommons.\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li><strong>Fly Direct </strong>-- This is one of the most sacred frequent traveler rules. Even if you\'re connecting through Houston, an intermediate stop adds one more point of failure, one more opportunity for the airlines to screw up</li>\r\n	<li><strong>Skip the Tight Connection</strong> -- If you can\'t fly direct, step away from any connection that\'s less than 60 minutes.  Yes, we usually want to get to our destination in the shortest possible time, but accepting a connection of 1 hour or less…. Think about it – a 15-minute delay on your flight into a big hub like <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27hare_Airport\" target=\"_blank\">Chicago</a> or <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denver_International_Airport\" target=\"_blank\">Denver</a> or <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detroit_Metropolitan_Wayne_County_Airport\" target=\"_blank\">Detroit</a> (as good as on-time in the winter for most airlines) and you’re sprinting across terminals and concourses just to beat the closing door.  A 1-hr connection is just asking for a stress attack and/or an overnight stay at the airport branch of the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Bates Motel\" href=\"http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092622/\" rel=\"imdb\">Bates Motel</a>.</li>\r\n	<li><strong>Connect Through a Fun City</strong> -- Again, if you can\'t fly direct, connect through a place you might want to visit.  On those rare occasions where I’m forced to take a connection, I look at the flight choices and think – where would I not mind being stuck?</li>\r\n	<li><strong>Keep your Confirmation Numbers Handy</strong> -- When you’re talking to a gate agent or on the phone to a service rep, nothing signals that you’re an experienced traveler like offering up that confirmation number. I typically put my confirmation numbers in the Outlook appointment that then syncs to my <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"iPhone\" href=\"http://www.crunchbase.com/product/iphone\" rel=\"crunchbase\">iPhone</a>.  I put the airline confirmation number in the subject line right after the flight number, and then put the hotel and rental reservation numbers in the notes of the appointment.  One click and it’s all there.  You may have use different technologies, but have a system that gets you quickly to your confirmation numbers without having to sift through a pile of paper.</li>\r\n	<li><strong>Take the Phone Tree Path Less Traveled</strong> -- If you have to call an airline or hotel and you don’t have a Platinum or Premiere status number to call, choose the unpopular path on the phone tree.  Travel companies don’t staff their customer service centers for peak loads – like the day when a Chicago blizzard cancels 400 flights.  It’s too expensive. So on those days, you’ll wait forever for an agent if you’ve followed the typical path down the phone tree.  On those days, choose the “Spanish” or “International Travel” option because everyone else is choosing English and domestic travel.  Once you connect with someone, they’ll take care of you.  They all work on the same systems in the same service centers.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<div class=\"zemanta-pixie\" style=\"margin-top: 10px; height: 15px;\"><img class=\"zemanta-pixie-img\" style=\"border: none; float: right;\" src=\"http://img.zemanta.com/pixy.gif?x-id=cb058eaa-6005-4de0-be7b-4442f090db53\" alt=\"\" /></div>','Winter Travel Tips -- Things to Remember When The Snow Starts Flying','','inherit','open','open','','500-revision-v1','','','2015-04-21 16:03:01','2015-04-21 21:03:01','',500,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/04/21/500-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1476,1,'2015-04-21 16:03:41','2015-04-21 21:03:41','[caption id=\"attachment_528\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/5314961468_c424e091a81.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-528\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/5314961468_c424e091a81-300x224.jpg\" alt=\"View from my new office atop Squaw Peak\" width=\"300\" height=\"224\" /></a> View from my new office atop Squaw Peak[/caption]\r\n\r\nFinishing up the year in front of a warm fire in the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago after a couple of warm-up trips to <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Phoenix, Arizona\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix%2C_Arizona\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Phoenix</a>.  I carved myself out an mini-vacation during one of the trips and worked at the summit of <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Squaw Peak\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squaw_Peak\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Squaw Peak</a> for part of an afternoon. My <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"MacBook Air\" href=\"http://www.apple.com/macbookair\" rel=\"homepage\">MacBook Air</a> -- my perfect travel PC -- turned itself into a good-looking brushed metal brick on my last day in Phoenix, forcing an unplanned stop at the Scottsdale <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Apple Store\" href=\"http://www.apple.com/retail\" rel=\"homepage\">Apple Store</a> before my flight home.  Trying to get some work done while I waited reminded me of the difficulty of finding a quiet spot for a phone call while living on the road.  Missed connections caused by recent snow storms reminded me of ways you can have a little fun when stranded -- if you embrace the adventure of it.  Responding to a couple of listener questions on the closing song (<a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><em>Pictures of You</em></a> by Evangeline), I replay the song\'s back story as related by the band\'s manager.  Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_86.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n[audio:travelcommons_86.mp3]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript from TravelCommons podcast #86:\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Coming to you once again from the TravelCommons studios, wrapping up the year in the white icebox that is Chicago this winter.  And it’s a cold one.  Not as bad as what they’re getting in Minneapolis-St Paul – watching the video of the Metrodome’s ceiling collapse was pretty amazing – nor what New York is getting tonight, but I think I read that this has been something like the 7<sup>th</sup> coldest December on record.  So I can tell you that I wasn’t too upset when my travel plans had me in Phoenix two out of the last three weeks.</li>\r\n	<li>Packing for my last trip, I promised myself that, somewhere in the 4 days that I was in Phoenix, I’d find a couple of hours to get out of the office and go hike up <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Camelback Mountain\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camelback_Mountain\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Camelback Mountain</a>.  It was 12 degrees in Chicago when I was packing and the forecast for Phoenix was 70’s and 80’s all week.  I’ve always said that if you don’t take at least a little something for yourself from even business travel, you’ll hate your life.</li>\r\n	<li>So I start looking for my opening.  Monday, nope – inbound travel days are usually jam packed and American Airlines just added to it – making it like an overstuffed carryon – with a 2-hr maintenance delay, complete with swapping out planes.  Makes me misty for the days when preventative maintenance meant more than…</li>\r\n	<li>Tuesday goes by, Wednesday morning I think – ah, I’ll do it on Thursday before I fly home – but I stop myself.  My Weds afternoon isn’t that full.  I push some stuff around and, presto, there’s my couple of hours.  I race back to the hotel, change, look at the map – hmmm, Camelback might be a bit too far of a drive, especially if I hit traffic.  But Squaw Peak looks doable.  And so off I raced. After 1.2 miles, 1,200 vertical feet, and 19 ounces of Propel sports drink, I was at the top.  It’s a pretty view – with the hills to the north and the city to the south.  I sat for a bit, caught my breath, and then looked at my <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"iPhone\" href=\"http://www.apple.com/iphone\" rel=\"homepage\">iPhone</a>.  Hmm, full bars.  Started running e-mail and turned the summit into my office for the next 30 minutes – reading a couple of documents, cranking out some quick notes while watching the planes and birds fly by.  I took a photo at the summit, which I <em>later</em> posted to the TravelCommons Facebook page and Twitter feed if you’d like to take a look at my new office.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/swivel-deep/\"><em>Arlos Auto Parts and Salvation</em></a> by Swivel Neck Jones</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>In the last <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2010/11/30/podcast-85-importance-of-hotel-bathrooms-maximizing-miles/\" target=\"_blank\">episode</a> and in a prior TravelCommons <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2010/11/15/two-weeks-with-a-macbook-air/\" target=\"_blank\">post</a> I sang the praises of my 11-inch MacBook Air as the perfect travel PC.  Which, of course, meant I had tempted the technology gods who, in response last week, reached out from their Valhalla data center and smote the little unibody of brushed metal – bricking it on my last day in Scottsdale.  I opened the lid – no instant on.  I pressed the power button, no instant on.  I held the power button for 5 seconds, 15 seconds, 5 minutes, nothing but a dead screen.</li>\r\n	<li>If this happened on any other laptop, my first course of action would’ve been to drop the battery to try and reset the power management.  But, that ain’t happening with a MacBook Air, so after stabbing the Power button another half-dozen times, I gave up and headed over to the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Genius Bar\" href=\"http://apple.com/retail/geniusbar\" rel=\"homepage\">Genius Bar</a> at the Scottsdale Apple Store.</li>\r\n	<li>Since our company allows Macs but doesn’t provide help desk support – the Development teams use Macs and stooping to call a Help Desk would be the furthest thing from their minds – the Genius Bar is the defacto help desk.  Since it was near lunch time, I stopped off at <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Smashburger\" href=\"http://www.smashburger.com\" rel=\"homepage\">Smashburger</a>.  A TravelCommons listener – I forget who – had replied to one of my <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"In-N-Out Burger\" href=\"http://www.in-n-out.com/\" rel=\"homepage\">In-N-Out Burger</a> tweets, asking if I’d tried Smashburger.  It was a god burger – not quite the mystique or ambiance of In-N-Out – but a good burger.</li>\r\n	<li>One thing that I should’ve done while waiting for my Smashburger was book a time at the Genius Bar. Walking into the Apple Store, the hipster with an iPhone told me it’d be a 30-minute wait.  I checked my watch – I had enough time before my flight back home.  Right at the 30-minute mark, a guy walked over to me, opened my Mac, punched the power button a couple of times to no avail and said “Wow” and took it into the back room.  OK, it’s a bit better than having some guy in India tell me to restart my PC a half-dozen times, but still… I look at my watch again.  How long before I have to fetch this guy and dash to the airport?</li>\r\n	<li>Not long as it turns out.  5 minutes later, the guy comes back with my now-working Mac.  My initial diagnosis was right – it was the battery, or the PMU – power management unit?  Since you can’t drop the battery, there’s a multi-finger key sequence – hold down the shift, control, option, and command keys with your left hand and then hit the power key with your right.  I wrote it down so I could “self-serve” next time.  Not sure if the whole experience was any better than hanging on hold for a help desk.  I am paying more attention, though, to the location of Apple stores.</li>\r\n	<li>Now, the 30-minute wait wasn’t a complete loss.  Though my Mac was dead, my iPad and iPhone were fine.  So while I was waiting for my Genius to arrive, I was running e-mail and reading documents on my iPad.  Not a complete loss, but it wouldn’t have worked if I had needed to talk to someone, if I’ve had a conference call.</li>\r\n	<li>And that is a big problem with the “digital nomad” work style – no office, working out of Starbucks and airport clubs and the like – there’s no good place to take a conference call.  You can IM, e-mail, and text all you want, but once you need to open that voice channel, it’s a very different story.  Nobody wants to be the guy flooding the conference bridge with overhead Muzak or the signature sound of a barista steaming a pitcher of milk.  Airports are no better.  If they don’t have an Admirals or Red Carpet Club – or if I’m flying Southwest – then the hunt is on for a spot not under a PA speaker and away from the aisles with the beeping carts.  And you think the hunt for a working electrical outlet is tough.  I’m forever trolling through the new issues of Skymall magazine looking for a real-life “cone of silence” like they had in <em>Get Smart</em>.  I wonder if the Brookstone in ORD T3 has one?</li>\r\n	<li>In the last episode, we talked about the bathroom being one of the most important rooms in a hotel.  For me, the workout room is another important place. I stayed in the <a href=\"http://www.theashtonhotel.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Ashton Hotel</a> in downtown Fort Worth earlier this month.  Nice place – a boutique hotel in a historical building right near Sundance Square and a great beer bar – the Flying Saucer.  But would I recommend it to friends?  Hmmm… I don’t think so, because the workout room is so limited?  Or lame.  A small room in the basement with a couple of treadmills and an elliptical – with a stand up fan pointed at them.</li>\r\n	<li>That might be good for a 1-night stay, but I was there for 3.  I, like many frequent travelers, depend upon hotel fitness rooms to stay in some semblance of shape.  A couple of treadmills stuffed in a closet just doesn’t cut it anymore.</li>\r\n	<li>And finally, I just want to remind everyone that Google’s Christmas <a href=\"http://www.freeholidaywifi.com/\" target=\"_blank\">present</a> of free Gogo in-flight WiFi on Delta, AirTran, and Virgin America airlines is still on. It runs through Jan 2.  Perfect way to post your family Christmas pics on the flight how.</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a question, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a></span>, you can send me a <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">Twitter message</a> at mpeacock, or you can post them on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/153475331351358\" target=\"_blank\">Facebook page</a> or the web site at travelcommons.com.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/fuzz-messy/\"><em>Smiling Perspective</em></a> by General Fuzz</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Fun With Layovers</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>One of the most sacred frequent traveler rules is <em>Fly Direct</em>.  Be it winter with snow or summer with thunderstorms, adding that intermediate stop adds one more point of failure, one more opportunity for the airlines to screw up.</li>\r\n	<li>And while many connecting flights are cheaper than direct ones, for a true comparison, you have to factor in the potential costs of a delay – hotel room (because the airlines won’t pay for weather delays), meals, replacement clothes and toiletries for misrouted luggage…  In an episode last year, I calculated the cost – the breakeven premium between a direct and connecting flight -- to be $100-150.</li>\r\n	<li>But, with the right frame of mind – an “adventuring” frame of mind as one person put it – you can actually manufacture something good out of a connection.</li>\r\n	<li>The first requirement is to step away from the 1-hour connection.  Yes, we usually want to get to our destination in the shortest possible time, but accepting a connection of 1 hour or less…. Think about it – a 15-minute delay on your inbound flight – which is as good as on-time for most airlines – and you’re sprinting through the terminal (remember when we used to call it “OJ-ing” it – that was a long time ago) and probably having to check your carry-one.  A 1-hr connection is just asking for a stress attack and/or an overnight stay at the airport branch of the Bates Motel.</li>\r\n	<li>The second requirement is to connect through some place you might want to visit.  On those rare occasions where I’m forced to take a connection, I look at the flight choices and think – where would I not mind being stuck?</li>\r\n	<li>OK, sounds a bit odd, but think about it.  I’m flying from Phoenix to Ft Myers, FL – zero direct flight – no surprise there.  So where do I want to connect through – Miami, Dallas, Houston, O’Hare, Atlanta?  The total flight duration for any of these connections is within 90 minutes of each other.  For me, it’s an easy choice – I go through Chicago.  If I get stranded, I sleep in my own bed.  If I get delayed, I call up my wife and we grab dinner.</li>\r\n	<li>Traveling with my family to Cape Town, South Africa, I chose the connection through Frankfurt because I knew the airport wasn’t too far out of town.  We landed after the overnight flight from Chicago, passed through Customs and headed straight for a cab that took us to downtown to Romer Square.  We had lunch, I had a beer, and then we walked around downtown for 4 hours – a quick sightseeing excursion between our overnight flights.</li>\r\n	<li>Some years back, my parents flew from Denver to Paducah, KY to visit my aunt and grandmother.  Again, no direct flights so they connected through ORD.  And, as you can guess, on the way home, their commuter flight was late out of Paducah and they missed a tight connection.  My dad called me from the airport.  It was New Year’s Eve night and we were having 3 or 4 couples over.  “Get your luggage and book the flight out tomorrow,” I told him, “you can help me cook dinner.” Completely unplanned.  I picked them up, brought them home, threw an apron at my dad, and we had a great time.</li>\r\n	<li>Planning ahead for these possibilities is key, though.  Last week, friends and longtime TravelCommons listeners Allan Marko and Chris Chufo got caught at ORD when a snow storm caused the crew for their flight to JAX to time out.  That was a bad night – some 1,500 flights were cancelled between ORD and MDW.  The United customer service line stretched all the way down Concourse C.  A frequent traveler, Allan immediately rang United’s Premiere Exec line and got seats on the next day’s flight to JAX, then found a room at a nearby Hilton Garden Inn and stepped out of line to go to bed.</li>\r\n	<li>But without luggage.  United didn’t even try to give it back.  And because they had to check one bag anyhow with presents, they decided not to carry on – avoid the battle for carry-on space on full planes because they had time – no need to power directly from the flight to a meeting.  But now, though they had a hotel room, they had no change of clothes and just the toiletries they could scrounge from the Hilton.</li>\r\n	<li>A small inconvenience, though.  Since their flight didn’t leave ‘til 7:30 the next night, I shuffled my calendar around, picked them at the Hilton and took them into Chicago for lunch.  We ate at <a href=\"http://longmanandeagle.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Longman &amp; Eagle</a>, a Logan Square gastro-pub that picked up a Michelin star last month – Chris and I had wild boar sloppy joes while Allan had the pork belly BLT, and then ran down a couple of blocks to a brew pub, <a href=\"http://revbrew.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Revolution Brewery</a>, where they picked up some fresh t-shirts and I refilled a growler with a <a href=\"http://beeradvocate.com/beer/style/140\" target=\"_blank\">double India Pale Ale</a> – though we thought hard about it, we just couldn’t figure out a way they could get a 64 oz jug of beer through security.  By 5, they were back at ORD, fed, beered up, and ready to try again.</li>\r\n	<li>It’s all about attitude. Do you lean into it – figure out how to get everything you can out of it – or do you back away? On her extended journey to JAX, Chris Chufo kept chanting a mantra -- “It’s an adventure” – and came out smiling at the end</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/atek-phoenix/\"><em>Goa Life</em></a> by Ambient Teknology</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>From the Archives – Story Behind The Closing Song</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>I’ve received a couple of requests over the past months for information on the closing song – the tune that wraps each episode of TravelCommons.</li>\r\n	<li>Earlier this month, Becky Boyd wrote – “I can\'t find the name of the song you use at the end of the show by lyrics.  It is so appropriate to me and my husband.  We relocated from California to South Carolina, then purchased a vacation home back in California.  We often find ourselves on different coasts from each other.”</li>\r\n	<li>The song is <em>Pictures of You,</em> done by a now-defunct country band from Glasgow, Scotland called Evangeline – which is now confused on the Internet with a defunct country band from New Orleans called Evangeline.  Probably explains why Becky couldn’t find the song through its lyrics.</li>\r\n	<li>Back in 2005, though, the Scottish Evangeline was playing festivals in the UK.  I found them through the Tartan Podcast which, as the name kinda hints at, covered the Scottish music scene.  It too is defunct.  This story is starting to get a bit lonely.</li>\r\n	<li>Anyhow, after hearing the song, I sent a note to the band’s manager Willie Evans asking for a couple of words – a bit of back story on the song.  Here’s his response.</li>\r\n	<li>Five years on, I still think it’s a great song about life on the road.  If you like it, <a href=\"http://itunes.apple.com/us/album/hard-way/id75388292\" target=\"_blank\">iTunes</a> or <a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/Hard-Way/dp/B000QQW5D8/ref=sr_1_cc_2?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1293560032&amp;sr=1-2-catcorr\" target=\"_blank\">Amazon</a> are probably the best places to pick to it up.  Given the on-line confusion between the bands, I’ll post links in the show notes at travelcommons.com and on the TravelCommons Facebook page.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids99176264.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #86</li>\r\n	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\">Magnatune</a></li>\r\n	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or MP3 file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to @mpeacock on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/153475331351358\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_86.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #86 -- Fun with Layovers; Story Behind the Closing Tune','','inherit','open','open','','435-revision-v1','','','2015-04-21 16:03:41','2015-04-21 21:03:41','',435,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/04/21/435-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1477,1,'2015-04-21 16:04:27','2015-04-21 21:04:27','[caption id=\"attachment_491\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/MacBookAir1.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-491\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/MacBookAir1-300x225.jpg\" alt=\"My MacBook Air on the desk of the Hyatt Grand Cypress in Orlando\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\" /></a> My MacBook Air on the desk of the Hyatt Grand Cypress in Orlando[/caption]\r\n\r\nI\'ve been working with my 11-inch MacBook Air for two weeks -- time to walk through my initial impressions. First, though, it\'s important that I lay out what in technology-land is called my <em>use case</em> -- what I need my MacBook Air to do. If you don\'t understand my expectations, my conclusions might not make sense to you.\r\n\r\nI\'ve been looking for a Travel PC since the beginning of the year when I changed jobs and had to give back my Lenovo <a href=\"http://www.notebookreview.com/default.asp?newsID=3765\">ThinkPad X61</a>. With a 12-inch screen, a full-sized keyboard, a battery that would last from Chicago to LA, and weighing only 3½ pounds, it was the perfect Travel PC for me. Some might look at those specs and think <em>\"What a wimpy machine!\"</em>, but that\'s why it\'s important to know the use case.\r\n\r\nMy Travel PC is not my primary computer.  My primary rig is a big custom-built Windows 7 box that\'s spread across and under the desktop in my home office, complete with a quad-core AMD processor, 2 21-inch monitors, 3 500-GB hard drives, a Blu-Ray DVD burner, and a combo sub-woofer/foot rest.  If I want to do video editing or play with After Effects or have a serious Photoshop session, my desktop is purpose-built for it.\r\n\r\nWhich allows my Travel PC to be purpose-\"spec\'d\" for what\'s important to a frequent traveler -- light weight, long battery life, and reasonable processing power (in that order) -- and leaving behind what\'s not -- optical drives, superfast processors and video cards, big hard drives, and large monitors.  For the past 5 months, my Travel PC was an HP netbook, which I compared to my iPad in an <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2010/05/17/ipad-vs-netbook-first-impressions/\">earlier blog post</a>.  It worked pretty well, though the 10-inch screen was a bit tight for comfortably working in Outlook, and the Atom processor choked whenever my boss rang through to me on a video call (which is surprisingly often). Looking for the next step up from the netbook, there weren\'t many machines that met my Travel PC spec.\r\n\r\nAnd then Apple announced their new MacBook Air.  The specs are perfect.  And it is a very cool looking machine -- something my old ThinkPad X61 was definitely <em>not</em>.  But is there enough substance under that brushed aluminum unibody?  The answer is <em>\"yes\"</em>, provided you\'re willing to upgrade off the base package.\r\n\r\nThe solid state disk drive makes the MacBook Air <em>fast</em>.  Small applications like Cisco\'s VPN client instantly <em>appear</em>.  And when you open the lid, the MacBook Air instantly wakes up -- much quicker than any PC coming out of Sleep mode.  Such performance reminds us how artificial many of the tech web site benchmarks are. Though many reviews have commented on the Air\'s under-powered processor, for most knowledge workers who spend their time in e-mail, Office, and a few web apps like Salesforce.com, memory and disk speed are at least as important as CPU speed.\r\n\r\nHowever, for most corporate users, the 64 GB drive that comes standard with the 11-inch MacBook Air just isn\'t big enough -- because you\'re going to need at least 30 GBs for a Windows image.  Though Apples seem to be popping up everywhere, Microsoft still owns the world. On a Mac, the easiest way to do things like resetting network passwords or editing Microsoft <a href=\"http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/visio/\">Visio</a> diagrams is to run a virtual Windows 7 session.  I tested <a href=\"http://www.parallels.com/products/desktop/\">Parallels</a> and VMWare\'s <a href=\"http://www.vmware.com/products/fusion/\">Fusion</a> virtualization products. After a week of using them both, I didn\'t have a clear favorite, so I went with the cheaper one -- VMWare\'s Fusion.\r\n\r\nThe other add-on you\'ll need is the USB Ethernet adapter.  Contrary to Apple\'s view of the world, many companies (especially those in the defense and financial services industries) frown on the use of wireless networks.  Even at my company, I needed to \"jack in\" to the network to configure my MacBook Air for wireless access.  You probably won\'t need the Ethernet adapter often, but when you do...\r\n\r\nI\'m surprised how much I like the Multi-Touch trackpad.  I\'ve always hated the \"mushpads\" on PCs.  I usually turn them off and use the ThinkPad-like pointer on the keyboard (which I love) or an external mouse.  However, after watching the Help video a couple of times and practicing the different 1-, 2-, 3-, and 4-finger trackpad swipes, I\'ve grown to like this trackpad enough to leave my wireless mouse at home.\r\n\r\nAfter two weeks of hands-on-the-keyboard experience with my MacBook Air, it is the best Travel PC yet.  It\'s over a pound lighter than my ThinkPad X61. The screen, though smaller, is brighter and easier to read.  The battery life takes me to the West Coast with power to spare.  The solid state drive makes it applications <em>snap</em> onto the screen.  It instantly wakes up when I open the lid, making it easy to dash off a quick e-mail before the airplane door closes.  But the feature that cements it as the best Travel PC yet -- the TSA says that it can stay in my backpack during security screening.','Two Weeks with a MacBook Air','','inherit','open','open','','379-revision-v1','','','2015-04-21 16:04:27','2015-04-21 21:04:27','',379,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/04/21/379-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1478,1,'2015-04-22 15:25:27','2015-04-22 20:25:27','[caption id=\"attachment_1483\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/102434287_e1770f7622_z-01.jpeg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1483\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/102434287_e1770f7622_z-01-300x199.jpeg\" alt=\"My Briefcase – Feb 2006\" width=\"300\" height=\"199\"></a> My Briefcase – Feb 2006[/caption]\n\nIt\'s spring cleaning time, which for me means it\'s time to wade through my briefcase. Within&nbsp;every frequent traveler is the desire to carry everything you could possibly need on the road -- to make your briefcase into the road warrior version of <a title=\"Batman\'s utility belt - Wikipedia\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batman%27s_utility_belt\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Batman\'s utility belt</a>, letting you amaze your travel companions by pulling out just the right thing to solve any travel problem. Great for the ego; tough on the back. You\'re always prepared, but you\'re always dragging up the rear because you\'re schlepping the heaviest bag or TSA is pulling you for secondary screening because all your wires make them suspicious.\n\nYou need to hit the right balance between weight and need -- what do I need all the time vs. what can I buy or borrow for the couple of times I may need it?\n\n[caption id=\"attachment_1485\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"271\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/DSC_5150-01.jpeg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1485\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/DSC_5150-01-271x300.jpeg\" alt=\"My Briefcase – Apr 2015\" width=\"271\" height=\"300\"></a> My Briefcase – Apr 2015[/caption]\n\nTechnology makes up most of the&nbsp;weight. Looking back over my briefcase dissections&nbsp;in <a title=\"Podcast #33 – Listener Mailbag, What’s in My Briefcase?\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2006/02/18/podcast-33-listener-mailbag-whats-in-my-briefcase/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">2006</a> and <a title=\"Podcast #87 — Sick on the Road; What’s in My Briefcase?\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/02/06/podcast-87-sick-on-the-road-whats-in-my-briefcase/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">2011</a>, there\'s always a laptop &nbsp;-- going from a 3.6 lb 12-in <a href=\"http://www.engadget.com/products/ibm/thinkpad/x31/specs/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">ThinkPad</a> in 2006, to a 2.4 lb 11-in <a href=\"https://support.apple.com/kb/SP631?locale=en_US\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">MacBook Air</a> in 2011, to a 2.8 lb 12.5-in<a href=\"http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/x-series/x240/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> ThinkPad</a> today. An iPad appeared in the 2011 walkthrough. It replaced books, magazines, and printed out documents, but it couldn\'t replace the laptop. In 2015, the full-sized iPad has been bumped&nbsp;by a smaller Samsung Galaxy Tab Pro -- an inch smaller and half the weight. I use it to read and watch videos, though when I force myself to leave my laptop home on vacation, the <a href=\"https://products.office.com/en-us/mobile/office-android-tablet\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Microsoft Office for Android tablet</a> apps let me sneak in some document reviews while the family sleeps. A Verizon WiFi hot spot pays for itself when I\'m trying to pump out that one last e-mail in the airport or sidestepping overloaded hotel WiFi.\n\nAnd there\'s always been a phone, but here we&nbsp;can see a bit more evolutionary progress -- from a Motorola V551 flip-phone to a iPhone 4 to an&nbsp;HTC One. The iPhone let me ditch the U2-themed iPod that was in the 2006 briefcase while the front-facing speakers on the HTC One made a&nbsp;Jawbone Jambox redundant.\n\nNothing has replaced my&nbsp;Bose noise cancelling headphones, though. No self-respecting frequent traveler is seen on a plane without them -- even if they\'re not plugged into anything. After I wore out the original QC-2\'s, I upgraded to the QC-15\'s. The old DJ in me prefers the over-the-ear models.\n\nWhat\'s stayed the same? Mostly the non-technology things -- the <a href=\"http://www.moleskine.com/us/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Moleskine </a>notebook, a&nbsp;random selection of pens, the semi-transparent folder for the few expense receipts that don\'t get e-mailed to me, a bottle of <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibuprofen\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">ibuprofen</a> and <a href=\"https://www.zyrtec.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Zyrtec</a>&nbsp;tablets and, perhaps most importantly, a tin of <a href=\"http://www.wrigleyshop.com/Altoids-Wintergreen-Mints/dp/B000FKL0EU?childAsin=B000FKL0EU&amp;filter=off#.VTfzliFViko\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">wintergreen Altoids</a>&nbsp;to counter dry mouth when I fall asleep in a plane -- a very common occurrence.\n\nThe newest addition to my briefcase? A bottle opener. I just don\'t understand why have hotels taken bottle openers out of the rooms right when the craft beer revolution made them a critical necessity.','What\'s In My Briefcase – 2015?','','publish','closed','closed','','whats-in-my-briefcase-2015','','','2021-09-28 19:04:51','2021-09-29 00:04:51','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=1478',0,'post','',2),
(1479,1,'2015-04-22 14:08:39','2015-04-22 19:08:39','It\'s spring cleaning time, which for me means it\'s time to wade through my briefcase. In every frequent traveler, there\'s always the desire to carry everything you could possibly need -- to make your briefcase into the road warrior version of <a title=\"Batman\'s utility belt - Wikipedia\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batman%27s_utility_belt\" target=\"_blank\">Batman\'s utility belt</a>, letting you amaze your travel companions by pulling out just the right thing to solve any travel problem. Great for the ego; tough on the back. You\'re always prepared, but you\'re always dragging up the rear, because you\'re schlepping the heaviest bag or TSA is pulling you for secondary screening because all your wires make them suspicious.\r\n\r\nYou need to hit the right balance between weight and need -- what do I need all the time vs. what can I buy or borrow for the couple of times I may need it?\r\n\r\nTechnology makes up most of that weight. Looking back over my briefcase dissections in <a title=\"Podcast #33 – Listener Mailbag, What’s in My Briefcase?\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2006/02/18/podcast-33-listener-mailbag-whats-in-my-briefcase/\" target=\"_blank\">2006</a> and <a title=\"Podcast #87 — Sick on the Road; What’s in My Briefcase?\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/02/06/podcast-87-sick-on-the-road-whats-in-my-briefcase/\" target=\"_blank\">2011</a>, there\'s always a laptop  -- going from a 3.6 lb 12-in <a href=\"http://www.engadget.com/products/ibm/thinkpad/x31/specs/\" target=\"_blank\">ThinkPad</a> in 2006, to a 2.4 lb 11-in <a href=\"https://support.apple.com/kb/SP631?locale=en_US\" target=\"_blank\">MacBook Air</a> in 2011, to a 2.8 lb 12.5-in<a href=\"http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/x-series/x240/\" target=\"_blank\"> ThinkPad</a> today. An iPad appeared in the 2011 walkthrough. It replaced books, magazines, and printed out documents, but it couldn\'t replace the laptop. In 2015, the full-sized iPad has been replaced by a smaller Samsung Galaxy Tab Pro -- an inch smaller and half the weight. I use it to read and watch videos, though when I force myself to leave my laptop home on vacation, the <a href=\"https://products.office.com/en-us/mobile/office-android-tablet\" target=\"_blank\">Microsoft Office for Android tablet</a> apps let me sneak in some document reviews while the family sleeps. A Verizon WiFi hot spot pays for itself when trying to pump out that one last e-mail in the airport or sidestepping overloaded hotel WiFi.\r\n\r\nThere\'s always been a phone, but here you can see a bit more evolutionary progress -- from a Motorola V551 flip-phone to a iPhone 4 to my HTC One. The iPhone let me ditch the U2-themed iPod that was in the 2006 briefcase while the speakers on the HTC One made the Jawbone Jambox redundant.\r\n\r\nNothing has replaced the Bose noise cancelling headphones, though. No self-respecting frequent traveler is seen on a plane without them. After I wore out the original QC-2\'s, I upgraded to the QC-15\'s. The old DJ in me prefers the over-the-ear models.','What\'s In My Briefcase -- 2015?','','inherit','open','open','','1478-revision-v1','','','2015-04-22 14:08:39','2015-04-22 19:08:39','',1478,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/04/22/1478-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1480,1,'2015-04-22 14:17:53','2015-04-22 19:17:53','It\'s spring cleaning time, which for me means it\'s time to wade through my briefcase. In every frequent traveler, there\'s always the desire to carry everything you could possibly need -- to make your briefcase into the road warrior version of <a title=\"Batman\'s utility belt - Wikipedia\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batman%27s_utility_belt\" target=\"_blank\">Batman\'s utility belt</a>, letting you amaze your travel companions by pulling out just the right thing to solve any travel problem. Great for the ego; tough on the back. You\'re always prepared, but you\'re always dragging up the rear, because you\'re schlepping the heaviest bag or TSA is pulling you for secondary screening because all your wires make them suspicious.\r\n\r\nYou need to hit the right balance between weight and need -- what do I need all the time vs. what can I buy or borrow for the couple of times I may need it?\r\n\r\nTechnology makes up most of that weight. Looking back over my briefcase dissections in <a title=\"Podcast #33 – Listener Mailbag, What’s in My Briefcase?\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2006/02/18/podcast-33-listener-mailbag-whats-in-my-briefcase/\" target=\"_blank\">2006</a> and <a title=\"Podcast #87 — Sick on the Road; What’s in My Briefcase?\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/02/06/podcast-87-sick-on-the-road-whats-in-my-briefcase/\" target=\"_blank\">2011</a>, there\'s always a laptop  -- going from a 3.6 lb 12-in <a href=\"http://www.engadget.com/products/ibm/thinkpad/x31/specs/\" target=\"_blank\">ThinkPad</a> in 2006, to a 2.4 lb 11-in <a href=\"https://support.apple.com/kb/SP631?locale=en_US\" target=\"_blank\">MacBook Air</a> in 2011, to a 2.8 lb 12.5-in<a href=\"http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/x-series/x240/\" target=\"_blank\"> ThinkPad</a> today. An iPad appeared in the 2011 walkthrough. It replaced books, magazines, and printed out documents, but it couldn\'t replace the laptop. In 2015, the full-sized iPad has been replaced by a smaller Samsung Galaxy Tab Pro -- an inch smaller and half the weight. I use it to read and watch videos, though when I force myself to leave my laptop home on vacation, the <a href=\"https://products.office.com/en-us/mobile/office-android-tablet\" target=\"_blank\">Microsoft Office for Android tablet</a> apps let me sneak in some document reviews while the family sleeps. A Verizon WiFi hot spot pays for itself when trying to pump out that one last e-mail in the airport or sidestepping overloaded hotel WiFi.\r\n\r\nThere\'s always been a phone, but here you can see a bit more evolutionary progress -- from a Motorola V551 flip-phone to a iPhone 4 to my HTC One. The iPhone let me ditch the U2-themed iPod that was in the 2006 briefcase while the speakers on the HTC One made the Jawbone Jambox redundant.\r\n\r\nNothing has replaced the Bose noise cancelling headphones, though. No self-respecting frequent traveler is seen on a plane without them -- even if they\'re not plugged into anything. After I wore out the original QC-2\'s, I upgraded to the QC-15\'s. The old DJ in me prefers the over-the-ear models.\r\n\r\nWhat\'s stayed the same? Mostly the non-technology things -- the Moleskine notebook, the random selection of pens, the semi-transparent folder for the few expense receipts that don\'t get e-mailed to me, a bottle of <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibuprofen\" target=\"_blank\">ibuprofen</a> and <a href=\"https://www.zyrtec.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Zyrtec</a> tablets and, perhaps most importantly, a tin of <a href=\"http://www.wrigleyshop.com/Altoids-Wintergreen-Mints/dp/B000FKL0EU?childAsin=B000FKL0EU&amp;filter=off#.VTfzliFViko\" target=\"_blank\">wintergreen Altoids</a> to counter dry mouth when I fall asleep in a plane -- a very common occurrence.','What\'s In My Briefcase -- 2015?','','inherit','open','open','','1478-revision-v1','','','2015-04-22 14:17:53','2015-04-22 19:17:53','',1478,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/04/22/1478-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1481,1,'2015-04-22 14:20:40','2015-04-22 19:20:40','It\'s spring cleaning time, which for me means it\'s time to wade through my briefcase. In every frequent traveler, there\'s always the desire to carry everything you could possibly need -- to make your briefcase into the road warrior version of <a title=\"Batman\'s utility belt - Wikipedia\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batman%27s_utility_belt\" target=\"_blank\">Batman\'s utility belt</a>, letting you amaze your travel companions by pulling out just the right thing to solve any travel problem. Great for the ego; tough on the back. You\'re always prepared, but you\'re always dragging up the rear, because you\'re schlepping the heaviest bag or TSA is pulling you for secondary screening because all your wires make them suspicious.\r\n\r\nYou need to hit the right balance between weight and need -- what do I need all the time vs. what can I buy or borrow for the couple of times I may need it?\r\n\r\nTechnology makes up most of that weight. Looking back over my briefcase dissections in <a title=\"Podcast #33 – Listener Mailbag, What’s in My Briefcase?\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2006/02/18/podcast-33-listener-mailbag-whats-in-my-briefcase/\" target=\"_blank\">2006</a> and <a title=\"Podcast #87 — Sick on the Road; What’s in My Briefcase?\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/02/06/podcast-87-sick-on-the-road-whats-in-my-briefcase/\" target=\"_blank\">2011</a>, there\'s always a laptop  -- going from a 3.6 lb 12-in <a href=\"http://www.engadget.com/products/ibm/thinkpad/x31/specs/\" target=\"_blank\">ThinkPad</a> in 2006, to a 2.4 lb 11-in <a href=\"https://support.apple.com/kb/SP631?locale=en_US\" target=\"_blank\">MacBook Air</a> in 2011, to a 2.8 lb 12.5-in<a href=\"http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/x-series/x240/\" target=\"_blank\"> ThinkPad</a> today. An iPad appeared in the 2011 walkthrough. It replaced books, magazines, and printed out documents, but it couldn\'t replace the laptop. In 2015, the full-sized iPad has been replaced by a smaller Samsung Galaxy Tab Pro -- an inch smaller and half the weight. I use it to read and watch videos, though when I force myself to leave my laptop home on vacation, the <a href=\"https://products.office.com/en-us/mobile/office-android-tablet\" target=\"_blank\">Microsoft Office for Android tablet</a> apps let me sneak in some document reviews while the family sleeps. A Verizon WiFi hot spot pays for itself when trying to pump out that one last e-mail in the airport or sidestepping overloaded hotel WiFi.\r\n\r\nThere\'s always been a phone, but here you can see a bit more evolutionary progress -- from a Motorola V551 flip-phone to a iPhone 4 to my HTC One. The iPhone let me ditch the U2-themed iPod that was in the 2006 briefcase while the speakers on the HTC One made the Jawbone Jambox redundant.\r\n\r\nNothing has replaced the Bose noise cancelling headphones, though. No self-respecting frequent traveler is seen on a plane without them -- even if they\'re not plugged into anything. After I wore out the original QC-2\'s, I upgraded to the QC-15\'s. The old DJ in me prefers the over-the-ear models.\r\n\r\nWhat\'s stayed the same? Mostly the non-technology things -- the Moleskine notebook, the random selection of pens, the semi-transparent folder for the few expense receipts that don\'t get e-mailed to me, a bottle of <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibuprofen\" target=\"_blank\">ibuprofen</a> and <a href=\"https://www.zyrtec.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Zyrtec</a> tablets and, perhaps most importantly, a tin of <a href=\"http://www.wrigleyshop.com/Altoids-Wintergreen-Mints/dp/B000FKL0EU?childAsin=B000FKL0EU&amp;filter=off#.VTfzliFViko\" target=\"_blank\">wintergreen Altoids</a> to counter dry mouth when I fall asleep in a plane -- a very common occurrence.\r\n\r\nThe newest addition to my briefcase? A bottle opener. I just don\'t understand why have hotels taken bottle openers out of the rooms right when the craft beer revolution made them a critical necessity.','What\'s In My Briefcase -- 2015?','','inherit','open','open','','1478-revision-v1','','','2015-04-22 14:20:40','2015-04-22 19:20:40','',1478,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/04/22/1478-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1483,1,'2015-04-22 14:30:34','2015-04-22 19:30:34','','My Briefcase – Feb 2006','My Briefcase – Feb 2006','inherit','open','open','','102434287_e1770f7622_z-01','','','2015-04-22 14:42:18','2015-04-22 19:42:18','',1478,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/102434287_e1770f7622_z-01.jpeg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(1484,1,'2015-04-22 14:42:37','2015-04-22 19:42:37','[caption id=\"attachment_1483\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/102434287_e1770f7622_z-01.jpeg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1483\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/102434287_e1770f7622_z-01-300x199.jpeg\" alt=\"My Briefcase – Feb 2006\" width=\"300\" height=\"199\" /></a> My Briefcase – Feb 2006[/caption]\r\n\r\nIt\'s spring cleaning time, which for me means it\'s time to wade through my briefcase. In every frequent traveler, there\'s always the desire to carry everything you could possibly need -- to make your briefcase into the road warrior version of <a title=\"Batman\'s utility belt - Wikipedia\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batman%27s_utility_belt\" target=\"_blank\">Batman\'s utility belt</a>, letting you amaze your travel companions by pulling out just the right thing to solve any travel problem. Great for the ego; tough on the back. You\'re always prepared, but you\'re always dragging up the rear, because you\'re schlepping the heaviest bag or TSA is pulling you for secondary screening because all your wires make them suspicious.\r\n\r\nYou need to hit the right balance between weight and need -- what do I need all the time vs. what can I buy or borrow for the couple of times I may need it?\r\n\r\nTechnology makes up most of that weight. Looking back over my briefcase dissections in <a title=\"Podcast #33 – Listener Mailbag, What’s in My Briefcase?\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2006/02/18/podcast-33-listener-mailbag-whats-in-my-briefcase/\" target=\"_blank\">2006</a> and <a title=\"Podcast #87 — Sick on the Road; What’s in My Briefcase?\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/02/06/podcast-87-sick-on-the-road-whats-in-my-briefcase/\" target=\"_blank\">2011</a>, there\'s always a laptop  -- going from a 3.6 lb 12-in <a href=\"http://www.engadget.com/products/ibm/thinkpad/x31/specs/\" target=\"_blank\">ThinkPad</a> in 2006, to a 2.4 lb 11-in <a href=\"https://support.apple.com/kb/SP631?locale=en_US\" target=\"_blank\">MacBook Air</a> in 2011, to a 2.8 lb 12.5-in<a href=\"http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/x-series/x240/\" target=\"_blank\"> ThinkPad</a> today. An iPad appeared in the 2011 walkthrough. It replaced books, magazines, and printed out documents, but it couldn\'t replace the laptop. In 2015, the full-sized iPad has been replaced by a smaller Samsung Galaxy Tab Pro -- an inch smaller and half the weight. I use it to read and watch videos, though when I force myself to leave my laptop home on vacation, the <a href=\"https://products.office.com/en-us/mobile/office-android-tablet\" target=\"_blank\">Microsoft Office for Android tablet</a> apps let me sneak in some document reviews while the family sleeps. A Verizon WiFi hot spot pays for itself when trying to pump out that one last e-mail in the airport or sidestepping overloaded hotel WiFi.\r\n\r\nThere\'s always been a phone, but here you can see a bit more evolutionary progress -- from a Motorola V551 flip-phone to a iPhone 4 to my HTC One. The iPhone let me ditch the U2-themed iPod that was in the 2006 briefcase while the speakers on the HTC One made the Jawbone Jambox redundant.\r\n\r\nNothing has replaced the Bose noise cancelling headphones, though. No self-respecting frequent traveler is seen on a plane without them -- even if they\'re not plugged into anything. After I wore out the original QC-2\'s, I upgraded to the QC-15\'s. The old DJ in me prefers the over-the-ear models.\r\n\r\nWhat\'s stayed the same? Mostly the non-technology things -- the Moleskine notebook, the random selection of pens, the semi-transparent folder for the few expense receipts that don\'t get e-mailed to me, a bottle of <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibuprofen\" target=\"_blank\">ibuprofen</a> and <a href=\"https://www.zyrtec.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Zyrtec</a> tablets and, perhaps most importantly, a tin of <a href=\"http://www.wrigleyshop.com/Altoids-Wintergreen-Mints/dp/B000FKL0EU?childAsin=B000FKL0EU&amp;filter=off#.VTfzliFViko\" target=\"_blank\">wintergreen Altoids</a> to counter dry mouth when I fall asleep in a plane -- a very common occurrence.\r\n\r\nThe newest addition to my briefcase? A bottle opener. I just don\'t understand why have hotels taken bottle openers out of the rooms right when the craft beer revolution made them a critical necessity.','What\'s In My Briefcase – 2015?','','inherit','open','open','','1478-revision-v1','','','2015-04-22 14:42:37','2015-04-22 19:42:37','',1478,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/04/22/1478-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1485,1,'2015-04-22 15:19:01','2015-04-22 20:19:01','','DSC_5150-01','My Briefcase – Apr 2015','inherit','open','open','','dsc_5150-01','','','2015-04-22 15:19:25','2015-04-22 20:19:25','',1478,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/DSC_5150-01.jpeg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(1486,1,'2015-04-22 15:21:49','2015-04-22 20:21:49','[caption id=\"attachment_1483\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/102434287_e1770f7622_z-01.jpeg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1483\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/102434287_e1770f7622_z-01-300x199.jpeg\" alt=\"My Briefcase – Feb 2006\" width=\"300\" height=\"199\" /></a> My Briefcase – Feb 2006[/caption]\r\n\r\nIt\'s spring cleaning time, which for me means it\'s time to wade through my briefcase. Within every frequent traveler is the desire to carry everything you could possibly need on the road -- to make your briefcase into the road warrior version of <a title=\"Batman\'s utility belt - Wikipedia\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batman%27s_utility_belt\" target=\"_blank\">Batman\'s utility belt</a>, letting you amaze your travel companions by pulling out just the right thing to solve any travel problem. Great for the ego; tough on the back. You\'re always prepared, but you\'re always dragging up the rear because you\'re schlepping the heaviest bag or TSA is pulling you for secondary screening because all your wires make them suspicious.\r\n\r\nYou need to hit the right balance between weight and need -- what do I need all the time vs. what can I buy or borrow for the couple of times I may need it?\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_1485\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"271\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/DSC_5150-01.jpeg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1485\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/DSC_5150-01-271x300.jpeg\" alt=\"My Briefcase – Apr 2015\" width=\"271\" height=\"300\" /></a> My Briefcase – Apr 2015[/caption]\r\n\r\nTechnology makes up most of that weight. Looking back over my briefcase dissections in <a title=\"Podcast #33 – Listener Mailbag, What’s in My Briefcase?\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2006/02/18/podcast-33-listener-mailbag-whats-in-my-briefcase/\" target=\"_blank\">2006</a> and <a title=\"Podcast #87 — Sick on the Road; What’s in My Briefcase?\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/02/06/podcast-87-sick-on-the-road-whats-in-my-briefcase/\" target=\"_blank\">2011</a>, there\'s always a laptop  -- going from a 3.6 lb 12-in <a href=\"http://www.engadget.com/products/ibm/thinkpad/x31/specs/\" target=\"_blank\">ThinkPad</a> in 2006, to a 2.4 lb 11-in <a href=\"https://support.apple.com/kb/SP631?locale=en_US\" target=\"_blank\">MacBook Air</a> in 2011, to a 2.8 lb 12.5-in<a href=\"http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/x-series/x240/\" target=\"_blank\"> ThinkPad</a> today. An iPad appeared in the 2011 walkthrough. It replaced books, magazines, and printed out documents, but it couldn\'t replace the laptop. In 2015, the full-sized iPad has been replaced by a smaller Samsung Galaxy Tab Pro -- an inch smaller and half the weight. I use it to read and watch videos, though when I force myself to leave my laptop home on vacation, the <a href=\"https://products.office.com/en-us/mobile/office-android-tablet\" target=\"_blank\">Microsoft Office for Android tablet</a> apps let me sneak in some document reviews while the family sleeps. A Verizon WiFi hot spot pays for itself when trying to pump out that one last e-mail in the airport or sidestepping overloaded hotel WiFi.\r\n\r\nThere\'s always been a phone, but here you can see a bit more evolutionary progress -- from a Motorola V551 flip-phone to a iPhone 4 to my HTC One. The iPhone let me ditch the U2-themed iPod that was in the 2006 briefcase while the speakers on the HTC One made the Jawbone Jambox redundant.\r\n\r\nNothing has replaced the Bose noise cancelling headphones, though. No self-respecting frequent traveler is seen on a plane without them -- even if they\'re not plugged into anything. After I wore out the original QC-2\'s, I upgraded to the QC-15\'s. The old DJ in me prefers the over-the-ear models.\r\n\r\nWhat\'s stayed the same? Mostly the non-technology things -- the Moleskine notebook, the random selection of pens, the semi-transparent folder for the few expense receipts that don\'t get e-mailed to me, a bottle of <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibuprofen\" target=\"_blank\">ibuprofen</a> and <a href=\"https://www.zyrtec.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Zyrtec</a> tablets and, perhaps most importantly, a tin of <a href=\"http://www.wrigleyshop.com/Altoids-Wintergreen-Mints/dp/B000FKL0EU?childAsin=B000FKL0EU&amp;filter=off#.VTfzliFViko\" target=\"_blank\">wintergreen Altoids</a> to counter dry mouth when I fall asleep in a plane -- a very common occurrence.\r\n\r\nThe newest addition to my briefcase? A bottle opener. I just don\'t understand why have hotels taken bottle openers out of the rooms right when the craft beer revolution made them a critical necessity.','What\'s In My Briefcase – 2015?','','inherit','open','open','','1478-revision-v1','','','2015-04-22 15:21:49','2015-04-22 20:21:49','',1478,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/04/22/1478-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1487,1,'2015-04-22 15:25:27','2015-04-22 20:25:27','[caption id=\"attachment_1483\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/102434287_e1770f7622_z-01.jpeg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1483\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/102434287_e1770f7622_z-01-300x199.jpeg\" alt=\"My Briefcase – Feb 2006\" width=\"300\" height=\"199\" /></a> My Briefcase – Feb 2006[/caption]\r\n\r\nIt\'s spring cleaning time, which for me means it\'s time to wade through my briefcase. Within every frequent traveler is the desire to carry everything you could possibly need on the road -- to make your briefcase into the road warrior version of <a title=\"Batman\'s utility belt - Wikipedia\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batman%27s_utility_belt\" target=\"_blank\">Batman\'s utility belt</a>, letting you amaze your travel companions by pulling out just the right thing to solve any travel problem. Great for the ego; tough on the back. You\'re always prepared, but you\'re always dragging up the rear because you\'re schlepping the heaviest bag or TSA is pulling you for secondary screening because all your wires make them suspicious.\r\n\r\nYou need to hit the right balance between weight and need -- what do I need all the time vs. what can I buy or borrow for the couple of times I may need it?\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_1485\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"271\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/DSC_5150-01.jpeg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1485\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/DSC_5150-01-271x300.jpeg\" alt=\"My Briefcase – Apr 2015\" width=\"271\" height=\"300\" /></a> My Briefcase – Apr 2015[/caption]\r\n\r\nTechnology makes up most of the weight. Looking back over my briefcase dissections in <a title=\"Podcast #33 – Listener Mailbag, What’s in My Briefcase?\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2006/02/18/podcast-33-listener-mailbag-whats-in-my-briefcase/\" target=\"_blank\">2006</a> and <a title=\"Podcast #87 — Sick on the Road; What’s in My Briefcase?\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/02/06/podcast-87-sick-on-the-road-whats-in-my-briefcase/\" target=\"_blank\">2011</a>, there\'s always a laptop  -- going from a 3.6 lb 12-in <a href=\"http://www.engadget.com/products/ibm/thinkpad/x31/specs/\" target=\"_blank\">ThinkPad</a> in 2006, to a 2.4 lb 11-in <a href=\"https://support.apple.com/kb/SP631?locale=en_US\" target=\"_blank\">MacBook Air</a> in 2011, to a 2.8 lb 12.5-in<a href=\"http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/x-series/x240/\" target=\"_blank\"> ThinkPad</a> today. An iPad appeared in the 2011 walkthrough. It replaced books, magazines, and printed out documents, but it couldn\'t replace the laptop. In 2015, the full-sized iPad has been bumped by a smaller Samsung Galaxy Tab Pro -- an inch smaller and half the weight. I use it to read and watch videos, though when I force myself to leave my laptop home on vacation, the <a href=\"https://products.office.com/en-us/mobile/office-android-tablet\" target=\"_blank\">Microsoft Office for Android tablet</a> apps let me sneak in some document reviews while the family sleeps. A Verizon WiFi hot spot pays for itself when I\'m trying to pump out that one last e-mail in the airport or sidestepping overloaded hotel WiFi.\r\n\r\nAnd there\'s always been a phone, but here we can see a bit more evolutionary progress -- from a Motorola V551 flip-phone to a iPhone 4 to an HTC One. The iPhone let me ditch the U2-themed iPod that was in the 2006 briefcase while the front-facing speakers on the HTC One made a Jawbone Jambox redundant.\r\n\r\nNothing has replaced my Bose noise cancelling headphones, though. No self-respecting frequent traveler is seen on a plane without them -- even if they\'re not plugged into anything. After I wore out the original QC-2\'s, I upgraded to the QC-15\'s. The old DJ in me prefers the over-the-ear models.\r\n\r\nWhat\'s stayed the same? Mostly the non-technology things -- the <a href=\"http://www.moleskine.com/us/\" target=\"_blank\">Moleskine </a>notebook, a random selection of pens, the semi-transparent folder for the few expense receipts that don\'t get e-mailed to me, a bottle of <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibuprofen\" target=\"_blank\">ibuprofen</a> and <a href=\"https://www.zyrtec.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Zyrtec</a> tablets and, perhaps most importantly, a tin of <a href=\"http://www.wrigleyshop.com/Altoids-Wintergreen-Mints/dp/B000FKL0EU?childAsin=B000FKL0EU&amp;filter=off#.VTfzliFViko\" target=\"_blank\">wintergreen Altoids</a> to counter dry mouth when I fall asleep in a plane -- a very common occurrence.\r\n\r\nThe newest addition to my briefcase? A bottle opener. I just don\'t understand why have hotels taken bottle openers out of the rooms right when the craft beer revolution made them a critical necessity.','What\'s In My Briefcase – 2015?','','inherit','open','open','','1478-revision-v1','','','2015-04-22 15:25:27','2015-04-22 20:25:27','',1478,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/04/22/1478-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1489,1,'2015-05-12 09:59:55','2015-05-12 14:59:55','Here\'s the first TravelCommons podcast. Recorded in the Wardman Park Marriott in Washington, DC, I talk about Hungarian prostitutes, \"Puff the Magic Dragon\" security portals, and the 5 Boro Bike Ride in New York. Here\'s the <a href=\"./podcast/travelcommons-2005-05-14.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the file.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_1.mp3\"][audio:travelcommons_1.mp3]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the shownotes from first TravelCommons podcast:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <em>Warmth</em> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>A podcast about the first-hand travel experiences of a road warrior</li>\r\n	<li>Recording in the bathroom of the Wardman Park Marriott in Northwest DC</li>\r\n	<li>Bad but typical experiences flying from O\'Hare to LaGuardia and then LaGuardia to Reagan National</li>\r\n	<li>Hungarian roadside prostitutes</li>\r\n	<li>New airport security \"sniffer\" screening machines</li>\r\n	<li>New York City\'s 5 Boro Bike Ride</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/21561359@N00/103092939/\"><strong>Direct Link</strong></a> to a cameraphone picture of the ride\'s start</li>\r\n	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"./podcast/travelcommons-2005-05-14.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','First TravelCommons Podcast','','inherit','open','open','','263-revision-v1','','','2015-05-12 09:59:55','2015-05-12 14:59:55','',263,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/05/12/263-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1490,1,'2015-05-12 10:02:03','2015-05-12 15:02:03','Here\'s the first TravelCommons podcast. Recorded in the Wardman Park Marriott in Washington, DC, I talk about Hungarian prostitutes, \"Puff the Magic Dragon\" security portals, and the 5 Boro Bike Ride in New York. Here\'s the <a href=\"./podcast/travelcommons-2005-05-14.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the file.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons-2005-05-14.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the shownotes from first TravelCommons podcast:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <em>Warmth</em> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>A podcast about the first-hand travel experiences of a road warrior</li>\r\n	<li>Recording in the bathroom of the Wardman Park Marriott in Northwest DC</li>\r\n	<li>Bad but typical experiences flying from O\'Hare to LaGuardia and then LaGuardia to Reagan National</li>\r\n	<li>Hungarian roadside prostitutes</li>\r\n	<li>New airport security \"sniffer\" screening machines</li>\r\n	<li>New York City\'s 5 Boro Bike Ride</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/21561359@N00/103092939/\"><strong>Direct Link</strong></a> to a cameraphone picture of the ride\'s start</li>\r\n	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"./podcast/travelcommons-2005-05-14.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','First TravelCommons Podcast','','inherit','open','open','','263-revision-v1','','','2015-05-12 10:02:03','2015-05-12 15:02:03','',263,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/05/12/263-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1491,1,'2015-05-12 11:43:25','2015-05-12 16:43:25','The TravelCommons podcast is back on the East Coast in Boston.  Recorded in the bathroom of the Residence Inn in Charlestown, I talk about the tight summer travel market, strategies for eating alone without looking like a loser, and more Classic Travel Stories -- fun on Air Canada.  Also, e-mail and audio comments from listeners.  Here\'s a <a href=\"./podcast/travelcommons_7.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_7.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n<hr /> Here are the shownotes for TravelCommons podcast #7:\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <em>Warmth</em> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Recording in the bathroom of the Residence Inn in Charlestown, Mass</li>\r\n	<li>A great dinner in Boston\'s North End at Mamma Maria (<em><a href=\"http://www.mammamaria.com\">www.mammamaria.com</a></em>)</li>\r\n	<li>Any hotel suggestions for my vacation in Geneva, Switzerland or Albertville, France?</li>\r\n	<li>The first day of the new podcasting functionality in iTunes  is sending lots of new subscribers</li>\r\n	<li>The summer travel season is upon us and it\'s going to be a crowded one</li>\r\n	<li>Audio comment from Steve Frick of <a href=\"http://fricksworld.blogspot.com\">Frick\'s World</a></li>\r\n	<li>Strategies for dining alone on the road</li>\r\n	<li>Classic Travel Stories -- a trio of stories from Air Canada plane rides</li>\r\n	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"./podcast/travelcommons_7.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>','Podcast #7 - Eating Alone; Classic Travel Stories','','inherit','open','open','','10-revision-v1','','','2015-05-12 11:43:25','2015-05-12 16:43:25','',10,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/05/12/10-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1492,1,'2015-05-12 11:50:19','2015-05-12 16:50:19','This week\'s TravelCommons podcast is an \"odds-\'n\'-ends\" podcast, following up on items from previous podcasts and answering questions from web boards and e-mails.  I follow-up on last week\'s Sean Penn sighting and read the reply I received from the TSA in response to my complaint about Chicago Midway airport.  Responding to a topic request on the Podcast Alley comment board, I give my thoughts about frequent flier programs.  Answering some e-mail questions, I describe my convoluted podcast recording workflow.  Here\'s a <a href=\"./podcast/travelcommons_6.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_6.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n<hr /> Here are the shownotes for TravelCommons podcast #6:\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <em>Warmth</em> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Recording in my living room in suburban Chicago</li>\r\n	<li>Follow-up on my Sean Penn SFO sighting</li>\r\n	<li>Received a response from the TSA to my Chicago Midway complaint</li>\r\n	<li>TSA screeners laughing it up after seeing Roberta Flack</li>\r\n	<li>Responding to a topic request on the Podcast Alley comment board regarding frequent flier programs</li>\r\n	<li>Answering e-mail questions on how I record my podcast</li>\r\n	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"./podcast/travelcommons_6.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>','Podcast #6 - The TSA Talks Back','','inherit','open','open','','9-revision-v1','','','2015-05-12 11:50:19','2015-05-12 16:50:19','',9,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/05/12/9-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1493,1,'2015-05-12 12:00:19','2015-05-12 17:00:19','[caption id=\"attachment_492\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/times-square-confetti1.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-492\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/times-square-confetti1-300x225.jpg\" alt=\"Times Square in a Confetti Shower by Carol Tsang\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\" /></a> Times Square in a Confetti Shower by Carol Tsang[/caption]\r\n\r\nI\'ve never been a big <a href=\"http://www.buzzfeed.com/melismashable/the-best-new-years-resolutions-for-2011\" target=\"_blank\">New Year\'s Resolution</a> guy.  Mine seem to have a 3-week half-life -- they don\'t even last to February.  However, in the spirit of \"<em>The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results\"</em> (a quote which has been attributed to <a href=\"http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Benjamin_Franklin\" target=\"_blank\">Benjamin Franklin</a> and <a href=\"http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein\" target=\"_blank\">Albert Einstein</a>), here are the resolutions I\'ll be taking into the O\'Hare TSA security line with me next week:\r\n<ol>\r\n	<li><strong>Plan Further Ahead</strong> -- If for no other reason than to avoid frustration.  The travel industry is recovering after two tough years.  2010 ended with US domestic airlines pushing through <a href=\"http://www.marketwatch.com/story/airfares-rise-more-hikes-likely-on-the-way-2010-12-29\" target=\"_blank\">two price increases</a> and data showing business travel bookings <a href=\"http://press.pegs.com/News-Releases/The-Pegasus-View-November-2010-Corporate-Booking-Volumes-Set-New-Growth-Record-of-30-6-Over-2009-13e.aspx\" target=\"_blank\">increasing 30%</a>.  Booking my travel earlier may not save me any more money, but at least I\'ll have a better shot at a plane seat and hotel bed.</li>\r\n	<li><strong>Unpack/Repack My Briefcase</strong> -- I keep putting more things into my briefcase, but rarely pull things out.  Do I really need 5 pens or a half-dozen <a href=\"http://www.starbucksstore.com/products/shprodde.asp?SKU=647324\" target=\"_blank\">Tazo Zen</a> teabags? When I add the <a href=\"http://www.motorola.com/Consumers/US-EN/Consumer-Product-and-Services/Mobile+Phone+Accessories/Headsets/Motorola-S10-HD-US-EN\">Bluetooth headphones</a> I got for Christmas, do I need to keep the two pair that are already there?  I only slightly comforted that I\'m not alone in this <a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/groups/whats_in_your_bag/\" target=\"_blank\">OCD</a>.</li>\r\n	<li><strong>Take More Quick Breaks</strong> -- In 2010, I took just three quick breaks during business trips -- a <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=1380114434979\" target=\"_blank\">walk</a> along the beach in Naples, FL a hike up Phoenix\'s <a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/travelcommons/5314961468/\" target=\"_blank\">Squaw Peak</a>, and a side trip to see the Taj Mahal while in <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/album.php?fbid=153481218017436&amp;id=153475331351358&amp;aid=33880\" target=\"_blank\">India</a>.  I have to grab a bit more time for myself -- maybe a bit more advanced planning (see #1) will help.</li>\r\n	<li><strong>Take more pictures</strong> -- In 2008, I made a resolution to take at least one picture a day.  A simple enough resolution -- it lasted 3 days.  Maybe I need more inspiration (see #3).  And to carry a <em>real</em> camera with me more often.</li>\r\n	<li><strong>Be nicer to TSA agents</strong> -- Repeat to the mantra -- <em>They\'re just doing their job</em>, <em>they\'re just doing their job</em>.  Even when they\'re feeling me up.</li>\r\n</ol>\r\n<div class=\"zemanta-pixie\" style=\"margin-top: 10px; height: 15px;\"><img class=\"zemanta-pixie-img\" style=\"border: none; float: right;\" src=\"http://img.zemanta.com/pixy.gif?x-id=c86501bb-338f-4af3-b047-fb57c335a5d7\" alt=\"\" /></div>','New Year\'s Travel Resolutions','','inherit','open','open','','447-revision-v1','','','2015-05-12 12:00:19','2015-05-12 17:00:19','',447,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/05/12/447-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1494,1,'2015-05-12 12:16:37','2015-05-12 17:16:37','Recorded in the Seattle Marriott Waterfront, this special 4th-year anniversary edition collates the best bits from four years of TravelCommons podcasts.  Starting with the \"hotel medley\" -- the roll call of all the hotels that have served as TravelCommons\' recording studios, we move on to excerpts from stories about the TSA, Bose headphones, memories of better airplane food, the hassles of travel, and some of the most entertaining sights I\'ve seen in the last four years.  Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_74.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_74.mp3\"]','Podcast #74 - Looking Back Over Four Years of TravelCommons','','inherit','open','open','','124-revision-v1','','','2015-05-12 12:16:37','2015-05-12 17:16:37','',124,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/05/12/124-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1495,1,'2015-05-12 13:37:07','2015-05-12 18:37:07','[caption id=\"attachment_1418\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/IMG_2430.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1418\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/IMG_2430-300x214.jpg\" alt=\"Authentically lacking seating\" width=\"300\" height=\"214\" /></a> Authentically lacking seating...[/caption]\n\nCan frequent travelers just write off 2014? We all knew we were abused by the airlines with high prices and lousy service. I guess it\'s somewhat comforting to know that <a href=\"http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-best-and-worst-airlines-1421254623\" target=\"_blank\">analysis</a> of 2014\'s data proves us right. I\'m not sure there\'s much more we can do than enjoy the little things and hope 2015 is better. Once we get to where we\'re going, the restaurant food has gotten a lot better and with trends toward local sourcing and flavors, a lot more interesting.  We also talk about a couple pieces of hotel industry news -- hoping that IHG\'s acquisition of Kimpton doesn\'t screw up the \"anti-chain\", and continued puzzlement as to why Marriott wanted to <a href=\"http://www.wsj.com/articles/fcc-warns-hotels-others-not-to-block-personal-wi-fi-1422406537\" target=\"_blank\">block</a> your WiFi hot spots. You can listen to all this and more using the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_113.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/188523416\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\n\n<!--more-->\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #113:\n<ul>\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n	<li>Coming to you from the San Antonio Northwest Marriott in San Antonio, TX.  Doing a quick down-and-back after the flight cancellations caused by the New York snopocalypse that wasn’t blew up my travel plans for the beginning of this week.</li>\n	<li>I tried to get a podcast done over the Christmas holiday, but the eating and drinking and then the sleeping got in the way. Funny how that works. But after my traditional 2 week hiatus from travel, my first trip of the new year -- on Monday the 5th -- started about right -- with an hour departure delay out of ORD. I couldn’t complain too much, though. The plane was there; the crew was there. We were just waiting on the fuel truck which the morning’s sub-zero temperature had slowed down a bit. Frustrating, but understandable. Walking down the jetway, the cold just took my breath away -- even in a heavy coat. I can imagine the guys running the fuel trucks needed more than a few warming breaks.</li>\n	<li>I was heading down to New Orleans, though were the temps were about 50 degrees higher than Chicago’s single digits</li>\n	<li>It is that time of year that you think a bit more <i>strategically</i> about your travel choices -- if you can. A bit more interested in making sales calls in Phoenix or San Antonio rather than, say, Minneapolis; preferring United’s Houston hub over Denver for transcontinental connections.</li>\n	<li>Or vectoring through airports with good places to pass the time in case of delays. I’ve been connecting through Nashville recently on Southwest and stumbled across an outpost of Tootsie’s, the well-known downtown music joint, as I was walking through Concourse C -- complete with live music. And then in the middle of Concourse C -- near the walk-by Yazoo City Brewery stand -- is another stage with live music.</li>\n	<li>Of course, you can have too much of a good thing. Like back in mid-November, United had a piano player in ORD at gate C17 playing Christmas tunes -- a 5-tune repertoire that got old real quick during a 45-min flight delay...</li>\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/rompaey-eastern2/\"><em>Indian Blossom</em></a> by Ruben van Rompaey</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n	<li>Spelunking through my Twitter feed…</li>\n	<li>A couple of weeks before Christmas, I had to swing through New York on a last minute trip and, being near the holidays, the rates were absurd. It was a struggle to get a decent room for less than $300/night. It just amazes me, because I had paid less than $100/night earlier that week in New Orleans. Anyhow, I ended up at a Kimpton Hotel -- 70 Park Avenue -- in the Murray Hill neighborhood of Manhattan. I’ve been a big fan of the Kimpton chain since I set up camp for 3 months in the Hotel Monaco in downtown Portland a couple of years ago. Kimpton’s schtick is to be sort of an “anti-chain” -- embracing the quirks of each locale, each building rather than trying to replicate a standard brand experience; what Marriott has done with the refreshed Courtyards -- same furniture, same lobby, same footprint in each property. Kimpton makes a big point of being pet-friendly. In Portland, just about every morning I was there, the elevator would open and a dog would walk in (with their owner). Most were reasonably sized, but there were a couple of times some sort of bull mastiff walked in and made for tight quarters. Not a normal experience at your typical Starwood property. Another notable Kimpton quirk is their leopard print bathrobes. Again, a bit different from the typical white terry numbers you get elsewhere. Walking into my room at 70 Park, it was laid out on the bed. I posted a picture to Twitter -- and it drew quite the set of comments. They also have some fun loyalty perks, like “Raid the Minibar”. I got into New York late, so the $30 credit 70 Park gave me came in very handy -- especially since it was one of the better stocked mini-bars I’ve seen in a while. My only beef is that Kimpton isn’t in many of the place I’ve been going -- New Orleans, Memphis,.... I’m lifetime platinum on Marriott and platinum on Starwood, but I always look to stay at a Kimpton property when there’s one available.</li>\n	<li>So I was very concerned the next week when I saw the <a href=\"http://travelcodex.com/2014/12/ihg-acquires-kimpton-hopefully-wont-screw/\" target=\"_blank\">announcement</a> that IHG -- the Holiday Inn people -- bought Kimpton. One of the blandest hotel chains in existence buys one of the quirkiest. I think the last Crowne Plaza I stayed in was 6 years ago in Joburg, SA.  IHG’s last attempt to be hip was the Indigo chain. How many of you have stayed there? I’m gonna be keeping my eyes on this deal. I hope they don’t screw up Kimpton.</li>\n	<li>I’m glad Marriott is<a href=\"http://www.wsj.com/articles/fcc-warns-hotels-others-not-to-block-personal-wi-fi-1422406537\" target=\"_blank\"> giving up</a> their misguided attempt to get FCC approval to block individual WiFi hotspots. It’s kinda weird. I can’t figure out why they want to so obviously poke their customers. And it can’t be that much of a revenue thing because they’re giving away WiFi to just about everyone -- I’ve been getting it free for a while as an upper tier Rewards member as have everyone at the lower end brands like Residence Inn and Courtyard, and as of the middle of this month, so do all Marriott Rewards members at their Marriott brand. Which seems to be a trend. Kimpton does the same thing. Indeed, if you hit the Kimpton WiFi log on screen and aren’t a member of their Karma program, you’re taken to an enrollment screen.</li>\n	<li>Which is important because hotel loyalty programs seem to be losing their grip. In a recent Google study, an increasing number of business travelers say that hotel loyalty programs have <i>less </i>impact on the travel planning this year than last year. The same study also found that most business travelers would switch programs for better perks. Given that free WiFi is one of the most popular perks with frequent travelers, what Kimpton is doing makes sense -- and what Marriott tried to do just doesn’t.</li>\n	<li>Now, Marriott’s stated reason -- it’s all about security, wanted to protect their guests from rogue WiFi hotspots. Very buzzword-compliant -- cybersecurity is hot right now. And of course, travelers do need to be careful about which WiFi access points they connect to. Sweden’s Pirate Party pulled a <a href=\"http://www.thelocal.se/20150114/young-pirate-hacks-into-top-security-conference\">cute prank</a> earlier this month highlighting this. They set up an access point named “Open Guest” at a Swedish conference and over 100 delegates -- government officials, journalists, security experts -- connected to it, using it for e-mail, web browsing, Skype, eBay, …. just about everything. The Pirate Party logged all the traffic. Are people that gullible -- or cheap -- or both? Even more of a reason to use your own hotspot.</li>\n	<li>The Monday before Christmas, I wrote up the <a title=\"Travel Tips — Holiday Airport Etiquette\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/12/22/travel-tips-holiday-airport-etiquette/\" target=\"_blank\">holiday airport etiquette tips</a> from the last episode as a stand-alone blog post. It seemed like a timely post going into the holiday travel season. It was a pretty popular post. Rob, a long time TravelCommons listener and Untappd friend, gave it a nice re-tweet -- “A bit brusque, but the best travel tips I\'ve read this year”. And he was right. I didn’t sugar coat it a lot -- just venting a bit from what I typically see -- gumming up the PreCheck line, the Starbucks line, the concourse hallways. Probably not the best holiday spirit.</li>\n	<li>But what I thought was in the holiday spirit was a sign I saw on the bell stand of the Minneapolis Marriott -- “Br-r-r-r!! It’s cold out! We have warm coats to lend you, available upon request. Please see your friendly bell staff person. Thank you, and stay warm!” I asked one of the bell men how often people take them up on their offer. “Oh, a lot,” he said. Really? What part of “You’re coming to Minnesota in December so dress warmly” do people not get? He just shrugged and gave me that “Minnesota nice” smile.</li>\n	<li>And if you have any travel experiences -- technology or otherwise, or just general observations, thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://www.magnatune.com/artists/albums/williams-long/\"><em>Afternoon in the Sun</em></a> by John Williams</li>\n</ul>\n<b>2014 Was A Bad Year To Fly</b>\n<ul>\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/PJ-BZ531_MIDSEA_16U_20150114114822.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-1421 size-large\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/PJ-BZ531_MIDSEA_16U_20150114114822-1024x448.jpg\" alt=\"PJ-BZ531_MIDSEA_16U_20150114114822\" width=\"640\" height=\"280\" /></a>A couple of weeks ago, the Wall Street Journal <a href=\"http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-best-and-worst-airlines-1421254623\" target=\"_blank\">posted</a> its 2014 airline scorecard. Now, every travel columnist seems to do one of these, but I liked the Journal’s. I apologize to my international listeners, but this scorecard is just focused on the US. And indeed, just the US majors -- Spirit and Hawaiian aren’t in the mix, though Frontier, Alaska, and Virgin America are. I posted the scorecard graphic on the TravelCommons Facebook page when it came out; I’ll also put it in the show notes. It scores the carriers across 7 operational measures -- on-time arrivals, cancelled flights, extreme delays, 2-hr tarmac delays, mishandled baggage, involuntary bumping, complaints -- and then generates an overall rank. The top 3 were Alaska, Virgin America, and Delta. The variability across the 7 operational measures for these top performers was interesting. Alaska, the top overall, had the best scores for on-time arrivals, extreme delays, and complaints, but were 5th out of 8 in mishandled baggage. United, on the other hand, was more consistently the worst airline -- ranking last (8th) in 4 measures and 7th in the other 3.</li>\n	<li>Which kinda doesn’t surprise me because their customer service just kept getting worse in a sort of cavalierly indifferent sort of way. I get to LaGuardia early one afternoon and want to move up to an earlier flight that’s wide open. That’ll cost you $75 -- to move from a full flight to an empty flight. Or the guy who plopped down next to me in the middle seat one day. He originally had aisle seat. Then United upgraded him to First Class. But then, oops, the First Class passenger showed up, so the guy had to go back to coach -- except they’d already given away his aisle seat and all that was left was this middle seat. So there he was stuck -- with nothing but some shrugged shoulders and a mumbled “Sorry”. You’d think they could’ve given him a couple hundred frequent flyer points, or a drink coupon. Even the most basic restaurant will comp you a dessert if things aren’t right.</li>\n	<li>It was entertaining, then, in a twisted sort of way, when I got an e-mail from United the following week offering to upgrade me from Premiere Gold to Platinum for $2,600. With these sorts of scores, you think they’d be paying me -- or at least making it something closer to an impulse purchase. But then again, they’re probably looking at my other choices in Chicago -- American with an overall score of 7 or Southwest, scoring 5 out of 8. Chicago hub airlines are kinda like Chicago football and baseball teams -- fighting it out for the cellar -- except without the silver lining of high draft picks.</li>\n	<li>If you really think about it, 2014 was an awful year to fly. The airlines finally got market discipline; through acquisitions -- Delta buying Northwest, United buying Continental, American buying US Airways (or was that the other way around) -- they got the oligopoly working which pushed up prices and utilization -- high fares and crowded planes. Add to that the consistent ratcheting down for the base level of services -- unbundling -- charging an increasing amount for bags, change fees, pets, children traveling alone, decent seats.</li>\n	<li>All this while the actual experience got worse. The Wall Street Journal article gives data to prove what we already knew -- we’re paying more for less. US airlines cancelled 66,000 more flights in 2014 than in 2013 and lost or delayed 2.1 million bags, a 17% increase. Which explains the 26% increase in complaints filed with the US Dept of Transportation. Not surprising, then, that American’s CEO <a href=\"http://skift.com/2015/01/27/american-airlines-ceo-awkwardly-explains-why-fares-arent-going-down/\" target=\"_blank\">told</a> financial analysts and press during Tues’ Q4 earnings call “We are not asking our customers to be happy with anything.”</li>\n	<li>We can always hope that 2014 will turn out to be the bottom. That the newer planes the major carriers are buying will mean fewer mechanical delays and fewer cancellations. That more profitable airlines will stop demanding givebacks from their employees, which would mean much more pleasant flight attendants and pilots, and more enthusiastically productive mechanics and baggage handlers.</li>\n	<li>Until then, I’ll be try to be happy with the little things -- the unexpected first-class upgrade on my United flight down to San Antonio. The nearly empty mid-day flight from New Orleans to Chicago. The flight attendant told us we could change seats when we wanted, but nobody moved. We each had our own rows. The early arrival into Nashville that changed a tight connection into a leisurely stroll with time to catch a beer between gates. I’ll enjoy these little things, hoping that the bigger things get better in 2015.</li>\n	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/westexit-modern/\"><em>Arsenal</em></a> is by The West Exit</li>\n</ul>\n<b>Restaurant Trends Go Local</b>\n<ul>\n	<li>So while the trip to where you’re going has gotten more miserable, odds are the food is a lot better once you get there. Every year I go to the National Restaurant Show looking at dining trends because frequent travelers have to eat and it’s typically in a restaurant.</li>\n	<li>One of the interesting trends, though, is the expansion of what a restaurant is. At the most recent NRA show -- that’s National Restaurant, not Rifle, Association -- there was a good-sized section devoted to food trucks. And depending on where you’re traveling, you’ll see more and more of them in the wild. Of course, food trucks are old hat in places like Manhattan and Center City Philadelphia. And in Portland, I’m not sure you can really call them food trucks -- the ones set up in downtown parking lots don’t look like they’ve moved in years. But elsewhere, they’ll touch down outside of office building or universities around lunch time and offer up some very cool/innovative and often locally-unique food that’s provides some nice variety.</li>\n	<li>Which ties into another big trend -- the shift to local -- locally-sourced fish, meat , vegetables; locally-made beer or spirits, house-made pickles and charcuterie, …. Which is kind of a throwback. If you think about the 70’s and the 80’s, big franchise chains expanded in the US and then globally, pushing out standard menus with the same dishes everywhere. Now the good side of this was it took the guess work and the risk out of picking a place to eat. No surprises -- which is both good and bad. If you stopped at a Kentucky Fried Chicken along the road or took a client out to a Morton’s Steak House, you knew what you were going to get and you could reasonably expect a certain level of quality. But you weren’t going to discover anything new; get anything unique to where you were visiting. That’s OK when food is fuel -- I want to stop being hungry. It isn’t when food becomes something more -- an experience, an expression of place, which it is now with these hyper-local trends. Yes, when overdone, it can feel like you’ve somehow slipped into a bad <i>Portlandia</i> episode, but when done right, it can make you happy you gutted out the lousy flight to get there.</li>\n	<li>One trend I keep hearing about, but I don’t really see much in travels, is using tablets and smartphones to replace menus and servers and checks. Every year at the NRA show, there are rows and rows of vendors showing iPad menus and smartphone apps that allow diners to order, split the tab, and pay without seeing a waiter or a bartender. I’ve seen these in the wild exactly twice -- an iPad wine list at Restaurant Revolution in New Orleans. And it was actually kind of intrusive -- lighting up the face of the reader in an otherwise lower lit dining room. And at a restaurant/bar in MSP where the bartender reached over to do the ordering for me. Now this is different from alternative payment methods -- touch-and-pay with Apple Pay or using a bar code on the Starbucks app. Those are just different ways to end the transaction. What I don’t see, in spite of 2-3 years of trend hype, is a move in a restaurant to self-service ordering or paying.</li>\n	<li>Indeed, if anything, I see a move to <i>more</i> interaction with service staff with seemingly more folks taking full meals at the bar -- your server, the bartender, is never further than 6 ft from you and, on a slower night, is good for a little conversation. I guess if I’m coming to a place for local cuisine made from local produce, I’m not sure why I’d want to skip talking to the local people.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917626811171154.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #113</li>\n	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n	<li>Bridge music from <a title=\"Magnatune\" href=\"http://magnatune.com/\">Magnatune</a></li>\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_113.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #113 — 2014 was a Bad Year to Fly; Restaurant Trends Go Local','','inherit','open','open','','1416-revision-v1','','','2015-05-12 13:37:07','2015-05-12 18:37:07','',1416,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/05/12/1416-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1496,1,'2015-05-12 13:38:31','2015-05-12 18:38:31','Gearing up for the 3rd anniversary of TravelCommons next month, here\'s a link to the first \"greatest hits\" episode -- the <em>Best of TravelCommons 2005</em>.  Listening to it again after a couple of years, the medley of hotel bathrooms is a chuckle, but the the travel story excerpts is what makes this episode worth listening to again.  Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_27.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_27.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr /> Here are the show notes from the <em>Best of TravelCommons 2005:</em>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Home for Christmas week, recover from a tough 4 weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas</li>\r\n	<li>Thanks to everyone who has left, or tried to leave, a review on the TravelCommons page of iTunes</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img alt=\"icon\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>Medley of TravelCommons Hotel Bathroom studios</li>\r\n	<li>from T/C #5 - Why I record in bathrooms</li>\r\n	<li>Medley of TSA rants</li>\r\n	<li>from T/C #5-7 - Sean Penn comments</li>\r\n	<li>from T/C #7 -  Steve Frick of <a href=\"http://fricksworld.blogspot.com\">Frick\'s World</a> is a little uncomfortable recording in the bathroom</li>\r\n	<li>from T/C #14 - Willie Evans from the Scots Band <a href=\"http://www.evangeline.org.uk/\"><strong>Evangeline</strong></a> talks about writing a travel song</li>\r\n	<li>from T/C #17 - My kids\' view of travel</li>\r\n	<li>from T/C #20 - Allan Marko tells a story about rapid airplane repair</li>\r\n	<li>from T/C #3 - Flyers from Cleveland to Chicago looking for an early exit</li>\r\n	<li>from T/C #11 - Packing light leaves no margin for error</li>\r\n	<li>from T/C #23 - Patrons at the hotel bar drinking shots</li>\r\n	<li>from T/C #19 - Different colors in Bologna, Italy</li>\r\n	<li>from T/C #13 - Imaginative way to sleep on red-eyes</li>\r\n	<li>from T/C #21 - Decisions on vacation photos</li>\r\n	<li>from T/C #4 - Disappointed web search</li>\r\n	<li>from T/C #24 - Fun with Rental Cars</li>\r\n	<li>from T/C #7 - Air sickness without the bag</li>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=78941.463233963&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a><img alt=\"icon\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\" /> to <em>Ramblin\' Man</em> by the Allman Brothers Band</li>\r\n	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_27.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Flash from the Past - Best of 2005','','inherit','open','open','','98-revision-v1','','','2015-05-12 13:38:31','2015-05-12 18:38:31','',98,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/05/12/98-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1497,1,'2015-05-12 13:49:40','2015-05-12 18:49:40','Recorded in the Courtyard <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Copley Square\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/boston/sights/square/copley-square\">Copley Square</a> in Boston, this special edition pulls the best of the first year of TravelCommons.  Starting with the \"bathroom medley\" -- the roll call of all the hotel bathrooms that have served as TravelCommons\' recording studios, we move on to excerpts from stories on topics such as the TSA, unusual activities in airport departure lounges, scary hotel rooms, and ranting cab drivers.  Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_40.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_40.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #40:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Recorded at the Copley Place Courtyard in <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Boston\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/boston\">Boston, MA</a></li>\r\n	<li>Spent a few flights listening through the past 13 hours of TravelCommons episodes to select the \"greatest hits\" from the first year</li>\r\n	<li>from T/C #1 - Why listen to this podcast?</li>\r\n	<li>from T/C #33 - Listener feedback says that TravelCommons covers both the fun and the dreary bits of travel</li>\r\n	<li>Medley of TravelCommons hotel bathroom studios</li>\r\n	<li>from T/C #15 - Bad night at the Oakland Coliseum Days Inn</li>\r\n	<li>from T/C #13 - Listener story about nighttime noises in a Korean hotel room</li>\r\n	<li>from T/C #8 - Nervous night at the Golden Eagle Motel in <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Niles, Michigan\" rel=\"geolocation\" href=\"http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=41.8302777778,-86.2508333333&amp;spn=0.1,0.1&amp;q=41.8302777778,-86.2508333333 (Niles%2C%20Michigan)&amp;t=h\">Niles, Michigan</a></li>\r\n	<li>Medley of TSA rants</li>\r\n	<li>from T/C #37 - Episode of <em>Fame</em> breaks out in O\'Hare</li>\r\n	<li>from T/C #20 - Allan Marko tells a story about rapid airplane repair</li>\r\n	<li>from T/C #18 - Pants problems</li>\r\n	<li>from T/C #16 - A chatty seat mate</li>\r\n	<li>from T/C #15 - <em>Skymall</em> magazine as a last resort</li>\r\n	<li>from T/C #7 - Air sickness without the bag</li>\r\n	<li>from T/C #34 - Behind shuffling snowbirds in Tampa</li>\r\n	<li>from T/C #14 - Raging parking generalissimo at LAX</li>\r\n	<li>from T/C #16 - Tactics for dealing with raging cab drivers</li>\r\n	<li>from T/C #24 - Fun with rental cars</li>\r\n	<li>from T/C #19 - Midnight car talk at the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Taco Bell\" rel=\"wikipedia\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taco_Bell\">Taco Bell</a> drive-thru</li>\r\n	<li>from T/C #9 - Downshifting to leisure travel</li>\r\n	<li>from T/C #17 - My kids\' view of travel</li>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_40.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<div class=\"zemanta-pixie\" style=\"margin-top: 10px; height: 15px;\"><img class=\"zemanta-pixie-img\" style=\"border: none; float: right;\" src=\"http://img.zemanta.com/pixy.gif?x-id=2d76b40c-90c6-4fb0-8236-1149cc9835d2\" alt=\"\" /></div>','Podcast #40 - Looking Back Over The First Year','','inherit','open','open','','42-revision-v1','','','2015-05-12 13:49:40','2015-05-12 18:49:40','',42,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/05/12/42-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1498,1,'2015-05-12 14:30:02','2015-05-12 19:30:02','[caption id=\"attachment_1195\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"245\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/DSC00565.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1195\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/DSC00565-245x300.jpg\" alt=\"Twin or King-Size Lily Pad?\" width=\"245\" height=\"300\" /></a> Twin or King-Size Lily Pad?[/caption]\r\n\r\nDoing a bit more travel since the last episode, so have more to talk about. First business trip of the year started out great, but quickly deteriorated as weather delays forced me to make quick changes. I update my trip management app recommendations after TripCase released the latest rev of their app, and talk about good mass transit experiences in <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Portland, Oregon\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portland%2C_Oregon\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Portland, OR</a> and <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Park City, Utah\" href=\"http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=40.6594444444,-111.499722222&amp;spn=0.1,0.1&amp;q=40.6594444444,-111.499722222 (Park%20City%2C%20Utah)&amp;t=h\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"geolocation\">Park City, UT</a>. A new behind-the-scenes book on the hotel industry shows how important people are to the travel experience. And the explosion of tablet form factors makes me re-think why I carry a tablet -- comparing Apple\'s <a href=\"http://www.apple.com/ipad-mini/overview/\" target=\"_blank\">iPad Mini</a> to Google\'s <a href=\"http://www.google.com/nexus/7/\">Nexus 7</a>.  Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_103.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_103.mp3\"]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #103:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_1200\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/2013-01-21-21.06.25.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1200\" title=\"2013-01-21 21.06.25\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/2013-01-21-21.06.25-300x225.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\" /></a> Great Welcome Basket at Hotel Monaco[/caption]\r\n\r\nComing to you from the Hotel Monaco in downtown Portland, OR. It’s been a long time since I’ve broken out the mobile recording kit. And for Jeremy Philips, who back in October, tweeted “I kind of miss the bathroom acoustics...”...</li>\r\n	<li>I am back on the road again with a mix of business and leisure. Flew into SLC on Southwest for a week-and-a-half Christmas ski vacation in Park City. First time I’ve skied Utah. It was nice, but cold. I’d say the last 5 years of skiing has been over Spring Break in Colorado. I’d forgotten how cold Christmas skiing is. It’d be 8 or 9 degrees when we hit the slopes, rising to maybe 15 in the afternoon.</li>\r\n	<li>My first business trip of the year was last week to <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Hartford, Connecticut\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hartford%2C_Connecticut\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Hartford, CT</a>. I used to fly through there a lot 10-12 years ago. The airport was a dump back then. I was hoping that they’d freshened it up a bit -- at least replaced the carpet. The day started great -- United upgraded me to first class (milking the last month of 1K status for all it’s worth) and I got waved into the TSA PreCheck line. I felt so lucky, as the <a href=\"http://youtu.be/QgWzIl57bow\" target=\"_blank\">old Mary Chapin Carpenter tune</a> goes, I bought a couple of lottery tickets at the first kiosk I saw.</li>\r\n	<li> An hour later though, it all started to break up -- go pear-shaped as my friends in the UK would say. As airlines have taken seats/capacity out of the system, secondary airports like Hartford have been the ones to lose service. For me, booking this flight at the last minute, there were no direct flights available, so I had to connect. Big risk; breaking my cardinal rule of flying. But I didn’t have another choice. So what do you do? I picked a smaller airport -- CLE -- to connect thru in hopes of avoiding air traffic control delays. My connection time was over an hour, just in case my first flight was delayed. And I scheduled myself to arrive almost 3 hours before my meeting, building in buffer for delays coming out of CLE.</li>\r\n	<li>My first two strategies worked -- CLE was clear, no delays; and my inbound flight from ORD arrived 15 minutes early. When I turned my phone on after touching down in CLE, <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"TripIt\" href=\"http://www.tripit.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"homepage\">TripIt</a> and <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"WorldMate\" href=\"http://www.worldmate.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"homepage\">WorldMate</a> both told me my <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Bradley International Airport\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bradley_International_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"wikipedia\">BDL</a> flight was 40 minutes delayed. Annoying but not fatal because of all the backend buffer I’d allowed.</li>\r\n	<li>I went straight to the gate to get the story -- why the delay? The plane was 2 hrs late leaving CLE because of fog in <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Philadelphia International Airport\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philadelphia_International_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"wikipedia\">PHL</a>, and is so now is late getting back to CLE for the BDL flight. Hmmm, this is starting to feel uncomfortable. I lived in PHL for 4 years and I know what a nightmare that airport is. Is the plane on its way back yet? No, it hasn’t landed at PHL yet.  Double hmmm... The departure time has slipped 10 minutes since I touched down. Not a good sign, but still not fatal. I sit down and run some e-mail.</li>\r\n	<li>Departure time slips another 15 minutes. I talk to the gate agent again. Has the flight left PHL? No, but it looks like it has pushed back. I start checking other options. Nothing else to BDL. I reach back for those 8th grade map skills -- what about Providence, Boston, Albany, White Plains?</li>\r\n	<li>There’s a flight out to PVD. I pull up Google Maps -- 90 mile drive from there to my meeting. I look at the arrival time, 45 minutes for taxi, getting off the plane, walking down the terminal, and getting to the car rental place. Would get me to my meeting with 30 minutes to spare. I draw a line in the sand -- if the plane for the BDL flight isn’t in the air 5 minutes before the PVD flight starts boarding, I’m switching. The United gate agents were very helpful. They called ahead to the PVD gate, they gave me updates what was going on in PHL... But when I hit my decision time, the plane was still on the ground in PHL and speed-walked to the PVD flight.</li>\r\n	<li>And as you might have guessed, I didn’t match a single number on my lottery tickets...</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Beneath the Skin</em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/birdy-alter/\">Jerry Berlongieri</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>OK, we’ll leave the tile reverb behind for the rest of the podcast. Listening back to some of the old episodes, a little of that goes a long way...</li>\r\n	<li>At the beginning of December, I expanded last episode’s trip management app bake-off into an <a href=\"http://www.tnooz.com/2012/12/11/tcritic/managing-travel-itineraries-easier-said-then-done-even-with-digital-tools/\" target=\"_blank\">article</a> for Tnooz, a travel industry website focused on travel technology. In<a title=\"Podcast #102 — Trip Management App Comparison; TSA Scanner Shuffle\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/11/29/podcast-102-trip-management-app-comparison-tsa-scanner-shuffle/\"> episode #102</a>, I compared the free versions of TripIt, TripCase, WorldMate, and Kayak. The Tnooz article has the same use cases, but drops Kayak for the paid versions of TripIt and WorldMate. The recommendations didn’t change that much -- use the free version of TripCase, but for $10, the WorldMate app is not a bad deal either.</li>\r\n	<li>\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_1170\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/Logos.png\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1170\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/Logos-300x150.png\" alt=\"Trip Management App Logos\" width=\"300\" height=\"150\" /></a> The Usual Suspects[/caption]\r\n\r\nAnd then, just to show that no good deed goes unpunished, TripCase launched a completely revised version of their app and website a week after my Tnooz review. Using it during my SLC and BDL (or should I say PVD) trip, I’m revising my opinion southward. The new interface is fine. I’m not sure that it’s better as much as it’s just different -- I picked up the new navigation pretty quickly. But I noticed that I wasn’t getting the normal iPhone notifications -- I was getting e-mails instead, which you’ll remember from my evaluation in the last episode is definitely inferior to native iOS or Android notifications. And I can’t find in the app or the website how to re-enable them. The paid version of WorldMate does a good job of native notifications. TripCase also seems to have hidden where to manage social media notifications -- where to turn on/off trip postings to Facebook and LinkedIn. I have to say that, after this redesign, my recommended solution is a bit muddier. I’d say it’s a combination of the free version of TripIt to push Facebook and LinkedIn notifications, and the $10 <a href=\"http://worldmate.com\" target=\"_blank\">WorldMate</a> Gold for managing the day of travel.</li>\r\n	<li>I had a chuckle a couple of weeks back. I was doing my weekly check-up on the TravelCommons site -- going thru the comments caught up in the Spam filter (you wouldn’t believe some of that stuff) and looking at some of the traffic stats like inbound links. I saw a new link, or at least one I didn’t recognize, from FlyerTalk, the frequent flyer forum. Following it back, it was a <a href=\"http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/travel-technology/544219-your-favourite-podcasts-7.html\">topic</a> that was started in April 2006 asking for travel podcast suggestions. I was very pleasantly surprised to see TravelCommons listed in the first response. We get bumped in 2007 and again in 2009 with listeners recommending the podcast. Then, what I would guess to be a former listener commented “The content of the Travel Commons podcast is interesting, but the guy\'s voice is monotone and metronomically slow.” OK, I’ll take that as a half vote. But then Bob Fenerty jumped in with “I can see that perspective, but I find Mark\'s voice soothing and reassuring”. Thanks for the help, Bob. I think the stint in the ‘70’s I did in contemporary Christian radio in Memphis -- “You’re listening to the Voice of 1590” -- has permanently crippled my ability to be vocally exciting...</li>\r\n	<li>As longtime listeners like Bob will recall, one of my more nerdy travel hobbies is taking mass transit to the airport. I don’t know why -- maybe it’s some weird twist on trainspotting. But even after getting my passport stolen on the train back to Brussels airport last year, I still like to try these things out. I have three criteria for good mass transit to the airport -- it\'s gotta be clean, frequent, and cheap. Washington\'s Metro hits all three while SF\'s BART misses on all of them</li>\r\n	<li>Portland\'s <a href=\"http://trimet.org/schedules/maxredline.htm\" target=\"_blank\">MAX Red Line</a> from the airport also hits all three. Clean, reasonably modern trains, though they\'re more like light rail trams, so not the fastest things. They run every 15 minutes, so good frequency. And at $2.50 for a ride downtown, they\'re an order of magnitude cheaper than a cab. Unless you don\'t buy a ticket. Halfway into my ride Monday night, three fare checkers step into my car checking tickets. I had mine, but the woman next to me didn\'t. She said that she skipped the fare machine to run to make the train. The fare checker didn\'t have much sympathy. She ended up with a ticket and a court date. He told her that if she had a clean record, she\'d probably get away with a $60 fine and a day of community service. Wow! All that to save 15 minutes...</li>\r\n	<li>I also had a good experience with the free bus system in Park City UT during our ski holiday there. We took a cab to and from SLC, but once in Park City, we relied on the bus system to get everywhere -- to/from the ski areas (Park City and The Canyons), town center for dinners on the very cold nights.... Clean buses, extensive routes, good frequency, and free. I’m told it’s funded by a piece of the local sales tax. It was certainly a money saver -- no rental car, gas or parking costs -- and very convenient.</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a question, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- use the Voice Memo app on your iPhone or something like Easy Voice Recorder on your Android phone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music -- <em>Bulletproof</em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/musicinside-forces/\" target=\"_blank\">Music Inside</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Hospitality Is Personal</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>I read Jacob Tomsky’s <a href=\"http://jacobtomsky.com/\" target=\"_blank\"><em>Heads in Beds: A Reckless Memoir of Hotels, Hustles, and So-Called Hospitality</em></a> while in Park City. It’s a fun, easy read. Just looking at the cover, you can tell that Tomsky wants to give us the hotel version of Anthony Bourdain‘s <em>Kitchen Confidential</em>— the flawed insider with a heart of gold giving us a snarky behind-the-scenes tour.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_1178\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"200\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/cn_image.size_.heads-in-beds-jacob-tomsky-cover.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1178\" title=\"Heads in Beds Cover\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/cn_image.size_.heads-in-beds-jacob-tomsky-cover-200x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"200\" height=\"300\" /></a> Heads in Beds by Jacob Tomsky[/caption]</li>\r\n	<li>This tour has two very distinct parts. The first third of the book tells us how Tomsky fell into the hospitality industry and began to make it a career. He finds that having a philosophy degree in New Orleans isn\'t an easy way to get a job, and so he takes a job as a parking valet at a new luxury hotel. Working hard and being earnest (which in his case means that he cleans up well and doesn’t try to kill his co-workers), he gets promoted to front desk agent and then into management. The second part of the book is set in a gone-to-seed Manhattan hotel where Tomsky lands, very reluctantly, broke after 9 months touring through Europe and 3 months searching for a publishing job in New York.</li>\r\n	<li>The New Orleans story is certainly the sunnier of the two; a young man finding his niche in the world and working his way up. Tomsky does a great job of describing the amount of planning and effort it takes for a Ritz Carlton or Four Seasons to provide their levels of hospitality. And the biggest target for that effort doesn\'t seem to be the guests, but instead the front line employees. Tomsky talks again and again about how amazed the valets and maids are when they\'re treated to a pre-opening reception with an open bar, that  the general manager knows each of their names.... Little things, but things that translate into self-respect, pride in their jobs, pride in their hotel, which then translates into a drive to give the best service possible to each guest.</li>\r\n	<li>If the New Orleans story is about a man on his way up, the Manhattan story is about Tomsky abandoning, bit by bit, the Ritz level of service he was so proud of, becoming more focused on hustling tips than helping guests. As he slides down that slippery slope, the snark level increases… as does a sense of self-loathing. Everyone in the hotel is out for themselves -- the managers, the bellmen, the front desk clerks -- running their hustles not to serve their guests, but to maximize their tips. Which certainly leads to great service for <em>some</em> guests -- but only those liberally spreading $20 bills around the lobby. And again, the tone is set at the top, but in this case, the general manager isn\'t trying to deliver the best service; he\'s trying to deliver the most money into his and the owner\'s till as quickly and easily as possible.  An example that prompts each worker to do the same.</li>\r\n	<li>I\'m not sure if Tomsky meant to show this, but his tale clearly illustrates something we talk about often on TravelCommons -- that, in spite of all the technology being injected into the travel experience, the most important bit of the experience is still delivered by people -- hospitality is personal. And the two parts of Tomsky\'s story show how hard it is to build a team that prides itself on delivering great hospitality, and how easy it is to build a cynical team that\'s doesn\'t care.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music --<em>Hurt Me So I Can Walk Away </em>by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/joy-float/\" target=\"_blank\">Michael Joy</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Tablets, Phablets, and Other Devices</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>One of the most popular pieces of technology being carried by travelers nowadays is a tablet. Walk down the aisle of a plane or a train and you\'ll half to two-thirds of the passengers looking intently into one of these flat pieces of glass.</li>\r\n	<li>It started with people carrying Kindles, and then you saw iPads propped up against seat backs, but now it\'s all kinds. I saw my first Microsoft Surface table in the wild (i.e., not in a Microsoft store) a few weeks ago walking through a food court in LGA. It was sorta royalish baby blue, complete with the snapon keyboard. An older guy sitting next to me on the plane on Monday was working on a Samsung Galaxy Note. The 5-1/4 inch screen looked huge compared to my iPhone 5. He had it a couple of weeks and really likes it. The key for him is having enough screen size to run e-mail in a large font so he doesn\'t have to pull out his reading glasses, but it\'s small enough to fit in his suit coat pocket. The only thing that feels a bit funny, he said, is using it to make a phone call. That big slab of glass feels like it\'s covering half his face.</li>\r\n	<li>I\'ve been running a Google Nexus 7 for 3-4 months now. The 7-in screen size puts it between the pocket-sized Galaxy Note and a full-sized iPad. I had run iPads since they first came out -- the 1, the 2, the next one after that (the iPad without a number). Like everyone, I thought they were phenomenal devices. But as I traveled with it, I had more trouble trying to figure out how the iPad uniquely justified it weight in my travel kit. I had colleagues who tried using them in place of laptops and as electronic notebooks. It worked just OK for them -- the iPad\'s e-mail client and calendar app just don\'t have the same power as Outlook, and the notes they took with a stylus looked like a kindergartener\'s scrawl with a black crayon. Some guys carried bluetooth keyboards, but that seemed like more hassle than it was worth. And then, I found myself getting frustrated with the iPad\'s \"sandboxing\" -- certain files are opened with certain apps; you can\'t get to the file system like you can on a PC if you need to do something more than an app will let you. It\'s a great model that works for 80% of population, but was way too constraining for me. For what I do, an iPad isn\'t going to replace a laptop.</li>\r\n	<li>As a \"media consumption device\"? iPads are great for watching movies but most of my \"media consumption\" is reading and I found the full-sized iPad too heavy -- both in my hand and in my bag -- to be a good e-reader.</li>\r\n	<li>The laptop/iPad combo had too much overlap, so I started looking at 7-in tablets. I skipped the Kindle -- I wanted to do more than just e-read; I don\'t have a big investment in the Amazon eco-system, and didn\'t want to get locked in further. So I looked at the iPad Mini and the Google Nexus 7. I gravitated toward the Mini -- I have a bunch of iPad apps, <em>am</em> deeply invested in the iTunes eco-system... But pricing out equivalent Minis and Nexus 7s, the Mini was almost twice as expensive and, try as I might, I couldn\'t justify that delta.</li>\r\n	<li>The Nexus 7 works fine for what I want -- a lot of reading -- with the WSJ and USA Today apps, work documents that I cloud-sync from my laptop with DropBox, -- watch the occasional movie or video podcast, run Android photo editing apps like Instagram and Snapseed,.... I\'ve even done some Google Hangouts on it.</li>\r\n	<li>One thing I haven\'t done is try to make a phone call on it. that\'s a lot of glass to lay across my cheek.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917626811171154.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #103</li>\r\n	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Magnatune</a></li>\r\n	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_103.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #103 — Hospitality is Personal; Tablets Everywhere','','inherit','open','open','','1191-revision-v1','','','2015-05-12 14:30:02','2015-05-12 19:30:02','',1191,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/05/12/1191-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1499,1,'2015-05-12 14:32:16','2015-05-12 19:32:16','[caption id=\"attachment_1153\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/2012-11-07-17.29.10.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1153\" title=\"Nor\'easter Snow in NYC\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/2012-11-07-17.29.10-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> What Better Way to Test Travel Management Apps than a Nor\'easter in New York?[/caption]\r\n\r\nTraveling to New York earlier this month, I missed Hurricane Sandy but took the full brunt of the follow-up nor\'easter that the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"The Weather Channel\" href=\"http://www.weather.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"homepage\">Weather Channel</a> helpfully named Athena. The travel havoc wreaked by the wind and snow was a perfect setting for a side-by-side comparison of the free versions of the leading trip management apps -- <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"TripIt\" href=\"http://www.tripit.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"homepage\">TripIt</a>, <a href=\"http://tripcase.com\" target=\"_blank\">TripCase</a>, <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"WorldMate\" href=\"http://www.worldmate.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"homepage\">WorldMate</a>, and<a href=\"http://kayak.com\" target=\"_blank\"> Kayak</a>. Looking at three use cases, pulling together travel plans into a single itinerary, sharing that itinerary with others, and flight tracking when bad weather hits, TripCase came out on top. I also talk about the TSA\'s latest scanner debacle and the changes since I took listeners on a tour of my briefcase in <a title=\"Podcast #33 – Listener Mailbag, What’s in My Briefcase?\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2006/02/18/podcast-33-listener-mailbag-whats-in-my-briefcase/\">Episode 33</a> back in 2006. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_102.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n[audio:travelcommons_102.mp3]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #102:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago after an uneventful Thanksgiving Day weekend. Uneventful for me at least because I was able to hold fast to my rule of no travel during the Thanksgiving holiday. I woke up last Weds, the day before Thanksgiving, to see nothing but grey out my windows. <a href=\"http://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/flights/2012/11/21/dense-fog-snarls-chicago-flights-ahead-of-thanksgiving/1719885/\" target=\"_blank\">Heavy fog</a> hit Chicago. Not a normal event. But, with a nod to Murphy, if it was going to happen, why not on the busiest travel day of the year? About 1,500 flights were delayed or cancelled. Ugh...</li>\r\n	<li dir=\"ltr\">Earlier in the month, though, I did get slightly winged by the weather gods. I traveled to New York the week after, what is it Hurricane or Superstorm Sandy? I thought it was a Category 1 <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Sandy\" target=\"_blank\">hurricane</a> when it hit New Jersey. What’s with all the superstorm stuff? What is a <a href=\"http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/576b3276-21bc-11e2-b5d2-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2DZrTfhqW\" target=\"_blank\">superstorm</a>? Anyways, I land at <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"LaGuardia Airport\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaGuardia_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"wikipedia\">LaGuardia</a> the following Tuesday morning. I’m expecting a real hassle getting into midtown, but no, to my very pleasant surprise, there were loads of cabs and no queues. Talking to a colleague later in the day, he’d flown into Newark the night before and waited two hours for a car. Timing with these travel things is everything -- often better to be lucky than smart.</li>\r\n	<li dir=\"ltr\">And pretty soon I thought I’d used mine up in the cab line because, while I’d dodged Superstorm Sandy, I had just landed 18 hours in front of the follow-up nor’easter that the Weather Channel decided to name Winter Storm <a href=\"http://www.weather.com/news/winter/storms/2012/athena\" target=\"_blank\">Athena</a>. OK, now we have hurricanes, superstorms, and winter storms all with names. Go figure. All I know is that I land in perfect weather on Tuesday morning and by Weds afternoon, I’m watching snow blow sideways on Central Park South.</li>\r\n	<li dir=\"ltr\">Of course, in this age of airlines maxing out seat occupancy, they start pre-emptively cancelling flights the day before Athena hits. Tues night, American and United were already canceling flights from Weds afternoon to Thurs morning -- United a bit more cautiously starting their cancellations at Weds noon while American, perhaps trying to squeeze out a bit more revenue, waited until 2.</li>\r\n	<li dir=\"ltr\">Actually, my luck was holding. I wasn’t scheduled to fly back until Thurs at 3. So, if this nor’easter hits when it’s supposed to, and moves through as fast as it’s supposed to, I could come out of this OK. On Weds, I kept looking out the windows of the conference hotel. About 3 -- a bit ahead of schedule -- I started to see snow fly. And by 5 when I walked out of the conference to meet a friend for a beer, it was a full-on blizzard. It was a sloppy walk back to my hotel -- seems that nobody in Manhattan owns a snow shovel. But looking out the hotel window Thurs morning, it was clear sidewalks and sunny skies. My flight out of LGA was delayed 40 minutes, which even on a good day qualifies as on time for a LGA-ORD flight. Lucky, ‘cause I couldn’t have planned it better if I’d tried...</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Mo Shang</em> by Soli</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li dir=\"ltr\">Got some good comments on the <a title=\"Video #3 – ORD Layover Excursion: a 6-Hour Tour of Chicago\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/09/24/video-3-ord-layover-excursion-a-6-hour-tour-of-chicago/\">ORD layover video</a>. Jeanette Irwin left a comment on the website asking\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li dir=\"ltr\">“I\'ve often wanted to take advantage of long layovers by making a quick trip into the city the airport in, but have never been able to figure out what to do with my luggage (if I can help it, I don\'t check my bag, but bring it on the plane with me). Do you have this issues as well, Mark? If so, what do you do about it?”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li dir=\"ltr\">Jeanette, I think any experienced traveler is going to have this issue because we all pretty much break out in hives and a cold sweat at the idea of checking a bag. However, with increased airport security post-9/11, short-term luggage checks are scarce if not extinct in the US and increasingly expensive in places like Heathrow. I’ll grit my teeth and check my bag if I know I’m doing a layover tour (I did this for my <a title=\"Video #2 – One City, Five Hours: Frankfurt\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/05/01/video-2-one-city-five-hours-frankfurt/\" target=\"_blank\">Frankfurt sprint</a>). If it’s a more spontaneous excursion, I’ll try to check my bag at an airport hotel or a hotel near my first stop. I’m usually successful. I just tell them I’m checking in later and my room isn’t ready, but I also generously tip at the front end -- to the guy taking my luggage -- to help grease the skids.</li>\r\n	<li dir=\"ltr\">Gary Learned and Steve Frick gave answers to the question I posed in the last episode -- how many of  the top 10 US hubs -- ATL, ORD, DFW, DEN, PHX, MSP, IAH, DTW, EWR, SFO -- could you do a 5-hour city/neighborhood tour through without needing a rental car? After checking off the easy ones -- ORD, EWR (New York) and SFO -- I asked for thoughts on the rest.</li>\r\n	<li dir=\"ltr\"><a href=\"http://twitter.com/Denrael\" target=\"_blank\">Gary Learned</a>weighed in on MSP via Twitter --\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li dir=\"ltr\">You can take the light rail into downtown Minneapolis or over to Mall of America</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li dir=\"ltr\">And then once you get to downtown Minneapolis, you never have to come outside -- you just wander building to building through the 8 miles of human habitrails called the Skyway. Some people go <a href=\"http://www.vita.mn/116353724.html?page=all\">weeks</a> in the winter without venturing outside.</li>\r\n	<li dir=\"ltr\">Steve Frick said\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li dir=\"ltr\">“You could Marta up to downtown Atlanta, there\'s plenty to do in a 5 hour time span”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li dir=\"ltr\">Steve must’ve followed the link to the TravelCommons Flickr page in last episode’s show notes because he also commented\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li dir=\"ltr\">“I was looking at your Flickr pictures, take a look back at your My Briefcase picture from 2006 technology certainly has evolved in the last 7 years”\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_1155\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"320\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/102434287_e1770f7622_n.jpg\"><img class=\"size-full wp-image-1155\" title=\"My Briefcase circa 2006\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/102434287_e1770f7622_n.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"320\" height=\"212\" /></a> My Briefcase circa 2006[/caption]</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li dir=\"ltr\">I did go back and look at that <a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/travelcommons/102434287/in/photostream/\">picture</a>. It’s the first picture in the TravelCommons’ Flickr photostream -- from February 2006. It accompanies an audio tour through my briefcase that was in <a title=\"Podcast #33 – Listener Mailbag, What’s in My Briefcase?\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2006/02/18/podcast-33-listener-mailbag-whats-in-my-briefcase/\">Episode #33</a></li>\r\n	<li dir=\"ltr\">Yes, using a Bluetooth dongle to push photos from my Motorola clamshell phone to my ThinkPad. That was cutting edge pre-smartphone stuff. The U2 clickwheel iPod also has a bit of a vintage feel, though when I heard “Vertigo” on the radio the other day, it didn’t seem that old. Some things haven’t changed though. I still record my podcasts on that little iRiver -- much to my chagrin. I still use Pilot G2 gel pens, and I still carry a tin of wintergreen Altoids to get rid of that plane nap taste in my mouth. I think about half the stuff in my briefcase has stayed the same since 2006.</li>\r\n	<li dir=\"ltr\">One of the things that has changed since ‘06 is the creation of a whole new class of travel electronics -- the tablet. The iPad and the Kindle are the two defining devices in that category. Just before Thanksgiving, I picked up a Google Nexus 7 tablet -- the competitor to the Kindle Fire and iPad Mini. The WiFi-only version has been out since the summer, but I waited to buy until they released a version with cellular data and I’d seen Apple’s 7-inch offering. I’ll do a full review in a later episode -- after I’ve had a chance to travel with the Nexus 7 for a bit, but after a week-and-a-half of use, I really like it. The hardware is nicely put together, the price is right -- about $260 cheaper than a similarly kitted-out iPad Mini, and the latest version of Android -- 4.2 or “Jelly Bean” -- is hugely better than the first tablet version of Android -- 3.0 or “Honeycomb”. Very positive first impression.</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a question, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- use the Voice Memo app on your iPhone or something like Easy Voice Recorder on your Android phone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music -- <em>You’re the Big Sky</em> by Derek K. Miller</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Trip Management App Comparison</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li dir=\"ltr\">Back in the golden age of travel, when everyone dressed up to fly (or at least showered and shaved), flight attendants still had their pensions and so were more pleasant, first class food was served on china with real silverware, and there was leg room in coach, frequent travelers used travel agencies to book their travel. Before you left on your trip, they’d send you actual physical plane tickets and a printed itinerary that consolidated your flight, hotel, and car rental reservations onto a single page. They usually gave you 3 copies of the itinerary -- one for your admin, one for your spouse, and one for you.</li>\r\n	<li dir=\"ltr\">In today’s DIY (do it yourself) age of travel, where people are searching and booking their own travel a la carte -- using Hipmunk for flights, Orbitz for hotels, and booking a car directly with Avis -- and then want to share these plans with 450 of their geographically distributed “friends”, there is a need to update those paper itineraries with something a bit more interactive -- that leverages the billions of dollars of mobile stuff we’ve bought over the past few years -- certainly since I took that picture of my briefcase in 2006.</li>\r\n	<li dir=\"ltr\">I’ve used a number of these travel management applications -- <a href=\"http://tripit.com\" target=\"_blank\">TripIt</a>, <a href=\"http://tripcase.com\" target=\"_blank\">TripCase</a>, <a href=\"http://worldmate.com\" target=\"_blank\">WorldMate</a> -- since I got my first iPhone, but had never really compared them to one another. I eventually settled on TripIt for no other reason than the travel management software my company used, Concur Solutions, bought them and integrated them into their offering. It’s been awhile, so I thought it a good time to give them all another spin.</li>\r\n	<li dir=\"ltr\">I used my Winter Storm Athena New York trip on United and an upcoming SLC ski trip on Southwest as test beds. I loaded the free versions of TripIt, TripCase, WorldMate and <a href=\"http://kayak.com\" target=\"_blank\">Kayak</a> apps on my iPhone 5 and Samsung Galaxy tablet running the most recent version of Android -- Jelly Bean. Kayak wasn’t in my initial pass of apps -- I think of them more as meta search than travel management, but Gary Learned pointed me to them via Twitter and I added them to the mix. Adding to the fun, I ran the Flight Track Pro and United Airline apps on my iPhone and used the Passbook app new to iOS 6 to hold my United boarding passes. I was fully apped-up and ready to go.</li>\r\n	<li dir=\"ltr\">All the apps hit the base use case of aggregating trip information and effectively displaying it on the screen of a smartphone or tablet. Everyone correctly parsed the United and Southwest confirmation e-mails and noted the Vegas stopover on the return leg of the Southwest trip with TripIt, WorldMate and Kayak expliciting calling out its 40-min length.</li>\r\n	<li dir=\"ltr\">Most apps also have some ways of automatically ingesting your travel plans. If your business uses Concur, you can have it send all your itineraries to TripIt. TripCase, owned by the Sabre travel system, can automatically pick up trips made by a travel agent in Sabre. I assume WorldMate will soon have something similar with Carlson Wagonlit. And though I didn’t try it, I’d guess that Kayak automatically loads trips you make through them. You can also authorize TripIt to scan your GMail account several times a day for confirmation e-mails.</li>\r\n	<li dir=\"ltr\">If aggregation is the first use case, sharing itineraries is the second. Now, in this day and age, people immediately translate that into social media posting -- Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn -- but there are different levels of sharing needed. I might want to post to Facebook and LinkedIn that I’m planning a New York trip, trolling for some serendipitous beer drinking, but not so sure I want to widely broadcast flight and hotel details. However, someone scheduling my meetings or meeting me at the airport (not to mention my wife), not only do they need all those details, they could probably use delay/reschedule updates also.</li>\r\n	<li dir=\"ltr\">Everyone handles what I’d call the base social media sharing -- publishing to Facebook and LinkedIn, though it didn’t appear that WorldMate pushed to Facebook automatically. I like TripIt’s two pushes -- “I’m planning a trip” when I book the trip and then “I’m leaving” the day before departure. Kayak’s pushes bothered me -- they were URL links to the itinerary, which makes way too much information available. TripCase and Kayak could push to Twitter; TripIt couldn’t, but could push to enterprise apps like Salesforce Chatter and Yammer.</li>\r\n	<li dir=\"ltr\">TripIt, TripCase, and Kayak all published web calendar feeds you can pull into Outlook or Google Calendar, which would allow your spouse or assistant to get regular updates of your detailed travel plans. WorldMate calendar sync isn’t available in their free product.</li>\r\n	<li dir=\"ltr\">Which is a nice-to-have, but basic gut-level e-mailing of itineraries is key. And I gotta tell you that I was a little surprised at the results. You’d think this would be easy. And for WorldMate and TripCase it was -- click on the Share button and they quickly shot out a one-page e-mail with all the trip details in a nice table. I was surprised, though, that TripCase was the only one where I could, as a global default, set up an e-mail address (my wife’s in my case) to automatically receive all my trip updates. However, to do so, she had to become a TripCase user. Not quite what I had in mind.</li>\r\n	<li dir=\"ltr\">Kayak and TripIt sent out e-mails with web links to the information. Clicking through Kayak’s got to a nice clean display of the itinerary. TripIt, though, made you sign-up as a TripIt user before you could see the travel details. Way too much work if I need to quickly share my travel plans with a colleague.</li>\r\n	<li dir=\"ltr\">So far, everyone was able to aggregate travel plans, with some apps having a convenience edge if you book through their partners -- Concur for TripIt, Sabre for TripCase, Kayak for... Kayak. TripIt and TripCase do the best with social media publishing, though TripIt wins if you’re a Yammer or Chatter user. TripCase and WorldMate win itinerary e-mailing, which TripIt epicly failed.</li>\r\n	<li dir=\"ltr\">So that’s mostly pre-trip stuff. The final use case is while you’re on the trip and something happens -- what airlines euphemistically call “irregular ops”. The sorts of things that happen when you’re traveling through LGA in the midst of, say, a winter nor’easter big enough to get it’s own name from the Weather Channel.  Flights are delayed, gates change...</li>\r\n	<li dir=\"ltr\">Since I was only using the free versions, TripIt and WorldMate didn’t help. You have to upgrade to their paid versions for updates and flight status. Having said that, WorldMate Gold is $10/yr while TripIt Pro is $49. Not huge numbers, especially WorldMate’s. Somewhere along the line, I’d bought Flight Track Pro for my iPhone. It’s a $10 app, but I gotta think it was cheaper when I bought it. Anyhow, it syncs with TripIt, so I was kinda getting updates from TripIt that way. In the same way, WorldMate’s free app provides a nice deep link into Flightstats.com from the trip page -- two clicks, no typing, and you get real time flight info for your flight. Not as good as a push notification, but it’s something.</li>\r\n	<li dir=\"ltr\">From free services, I got the best notifications from TripCase and Kayak -- TripCase through iPhone notifications, Kayak via e-mail. And both of them were faster than the airline -- United, in this case. I couldn’t even get gate information updated on my United boarding pass in Passbook, and trying to get push notifications from their app is a random walk through a bunch of screens. Though it’s a paid app, Flight Track Pro did a great job of pushing gate change and delay notifications to my iPhone, and the app does a nice job of displaying current weather, which can give you a sense of how much trouble you’re in.</li>\r\n	<li dir=\"ltr\">TripCase wins the the notification use case with timely gate change and departure time push notifications. Kayak does a good job with their e-mails, but I think a native smartphone app should be able to push notifications to the screen.</li>\r\n	<li dir=\"ltr\">Sorting this all down, TripCase wins as the best free smartphone app.  It was at the tops of all three use cases -- itinerary building and sharing, and real-time flight status updates. However, it doesn’t have a tablet-specific app -- it just scales up the smartphone app.  Which looks awful on my 10-in Samsung Galaxy Tab. WorldMate, Kayak and TripIt have good iPad apps, but only TripIt and Kayak have apps specifically for Android tablets. I like the TripIt screen widget better than Kayak’s, so I’ll give the Android tablet win to TripIt.</li>\r\n	<li>This was a good exercise. As a long-time TripIt user, this kinda surprised me. But after Angry Birds, travel management is probably the most important app a frequent traveler uses. Let me know your thoughts -- Twitter, Facebook, E-mail, Web Site Comments, Carrier Pigeon -- all the usual comms channels are open...</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music --<em>Sliding into Slumber Land</em> by Little Stevie and the Fatratz</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<strong>TSA Scanner Shuffle</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li dir=\"ltr\">And just when you thought I’d make it through a podcast without a TSA item, here it is -- my favorite topic, full-body scanners. We’ve talked many, many times about the full-body scanners used in US airports. For the sake of long-time listeners, I won’t summarize my rants. Suffice it to say, I’m not a big fan.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_1156\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"251\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/tsascannerpic.png\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1156\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/tsascannerpic-251x300.png\" alt=\"TSA Backscatter Scanner Sample Images\" width=\"251\" height=\"300\" /></a> TSA Backscatter Scanner Sample Images[/caption]</li>\r\n	<li dir=\"ltr\">Now, there are two kinds of full body scanners -- backscatter that use X-rays to produce the near naked images we’ve seen in newspaper articles and millimeter wave machines that produce more generic stick figures. A few months ago, the TSA started swapping backscatter for millimeter wave machines at high-volume airports like Logan, LAX, and ORD to speed up security lines. Though you still have to pull everything out of your pockets, the processing time for millimeter wave machines -- from scan to “all-clear” -- is, in my experience, at least half that of backscatter. The slower backscatter machines were said to be redeployed to smaller, lower-volume airports.</li>\r\n	<li dir=\"ltr\">However, just before officials testified before Congress two weeks ago, the TSA announced that these 91 backscatter machines worth $14 million were actually <a href=\"http://homeland.house.gov/sites/homeland.house.gov/files/11-15-12%20Rogers%20Open_0.pdf\">bound</a> for a Texas storage warehouse. Space constraints in the smaller airports and <a href=\"http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/11/rapiscan-fraudulent-tests/\">suspicions</a> of manipulated test results by the backscatter manufacturer around new privacy software are to blame. Of course, this is the second multi-million dollar mistake the TSA has made with passenger screening technology. If you traveled through SFO in the mid-2000’s, you might have walked through a Puffer machine. It worked well in the lab, but completely failed when it faced the muck that floats around a real-world airport. The TSA spent <a href=\"http://www.homelandsecuritynewswire.com/tsa-puffer-machines-pulled-service\">$30 million</a> on 94 Puffers, deployed less than half of them, and pulled the last ones out of airports in 2010.</li>\r\n	<li>No wonder the Congressional subcommittee chairman said during the hearing that he is “<a href=\"http://youtu.be/8fWPVYV_N9k\">really aggravated</a>” by the situation, saying that the country is “really struggling with some tough budgetary decisions and it’s … really hard to understand how this happens.” It doesn’t matter if you’re a Republican or a Democrat. You just have to be disgusted with the waste. It reinforces the sense that the TSA has never been much more than a real expensive piece of security theater. As the US shambles toward the brink of a fiscal cliff and has to make hard decisions about raising taxes and cutting entitlements, we can no longer afford to let the TSA take another $14 or 30 million away from schools or Medicare or out of taxpayers pockets. It’s a money pit we need to walk away from. And now I’ll tuck my soapbox away... until the next episode.</li>\r\n	<li>Frequent travelers tend toward a rhythm, a pattern that allows them to quickly and efficiently navigate the hassles of today’s travel experience. There’s a thin line, though, between, efficiency and a rut, and the travel bubble straddles that line. It takes some effort to pop that bubble; good food and beer can help...</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917626811171154.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #102</li>\r\n	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://music.mevio.com\" target=\"_blank\">Mevio’s Music Alley</a></li>\r\n	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_102.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #102 — Trip Management App Comparison; TSA Scanner Shuffle','','inherit','open','open','','1151-revision-v1','','','2015-05-12 14:32:16','2015-05-12 19:32:16','',1151,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/05/12/1151-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1501,1,'2015-05-12 14:36:49','2015-05-12 19:36:49','[caption id=\"attachment_1039\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/399422_3361993820725_821625873_n.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1039\" title=\"Stax Museum Marquee-Memphis\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/399422_3361993820725_821625873_n-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> One of the stops on my Drive South...[/caption]\r\n\r\nBack in the TravelCommons studios after a 2,100-mile drive through the Mid-South. We genuflect quickly to the milestone episode number and then move onto the topics at hand -- best piece of hardware schwag from Google I/O 2012, a slightly icky subway ride from downtown San Francisco to SFO, a grab bag of observations from my southern road trip, and why I find myself breaking up with American Airlines after almost 30 years of travel. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_100.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n[audio:travelcommons_100.mp3]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #100:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Well, here we are at a milestone episode number -- number 100 -- 7 years and a couple of months after I started. It took me 1½ years to do 50 podcasts... and then another 5½ to do 50 more.  Looks like my podcast productivity is exponentially decaying...</li>\r\n	<li>But you people still keep hanging around! I do appreciate the kind words that you’ve sent along via FaceBook and Twitter. I am glad that so many of you find this podcast interesting/entertaining. It’s that more than anything else that keeps me plugging away.</li>\r\n	<li>Changes on the job front have kept me off the road for business travel, but I’ve managed to fill a couple of the weeks since the last episode with some personal travel.</li>\r\n	<li>At the end of June, the family and I headed off to San Francisco.  My son scored an academic ticket to the big geek-a-palooza Google I/O. I think this year’s event sold out in 20 minutes and there were a very limited number of discounted academic tickets, so getting one was a bit like getting one of the golden tickets in <em><a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Willy Wonka &amp; the Chocolate Factory\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willy_Wonka_%26_the_Chocolate_Factory\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory</a></em>.  So while my son watched videos of guys skydiving with Google virtual reality glasses, and dove into the intricacies of Google Maps APIs and the latest whizzy things that Chrome does, my wife, daughter and I did San Francisco tourist stuff -- rode bikes across the Golden Gate Bridge, rode cable cars, hang out in hipster coffee joints -- the sort of stuff that I’ve never quite found time to do in the 10-15 years that I’ve been going to SF for business.</li>\r\n	<li>\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_1042\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/564585_3384869592605_665394828_n.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1042\" title=\"I-65 Between Louisville and Nashville\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/564585_3384869592605_665394828_n-300x225.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\" /></a> I-65 From Louisville to Nashville[/caption]\r\n\r\nAnd then last week, I decided to do a little trip on my own -- a 2,100-mile loop through the South.  I ran I-65 from top to bottom -- from its start in northern Indiana down to Louisville, Nashville, and <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Mobile, Alabama\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile%2C_Alabama\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Mobile, AL</a>; across the Mississippi Gulf Coast on US-90 to New Orleans, up I-55 to Memphis, up US-51 to Dyersburg, then across I-155 to <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Sikeston, Missouri\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sikeston%2C_Missouri\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Sikeston, MO</a>, and then finally up I-57 back to Chicago.  But more about that later in the show.</li>\r\n	<li>I have noticed though that whenever I travel for leisure, I don’t travel quite as sharp -- I don’t feel as tightly wrapped, as “in the zone” as I do when I travel for business. On my flight out to SFO, I hit a new level of bad planning, of “non-preparedness.”  I had to reach for the SkyMall catalog before the plane even left the taxiway...</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/stefsax/7785\" target=\"_blank\">Awel</a> </em>by Stefsax</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>I wrote a <a title=\"How Much Do You Want to Tip?\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/06/16/how-much-do-you-want-to-tip/\">blog post</a> last month about tipping. I received a link to a nice infographic from somebody from Hospitalitymangementschools.org -- a web site that I still can’t quite figure out what it is. It seems like a legit web site with information about the hospitality management industry, but there’s no contact information -- just a web submissions form, and the domain name is held in proxy by GoDaddy.  I dunno -- it feels just a little fishy.</li>\r\n	<li>Anyhow, the tipping guide infographic was good, if a little wonky on the iPhone, and seemed to offer reasonable advice.  There is a surprising amount of emotion wrapped up in figuring out a tip amount. You want to appropriately acknowledge the service someone has just given you, and that then gets combined with the image you want to portray -- am I a nice generous person, am I a sharp you-won’t-get-anything-by-me person?</li>\r\n	<li>Looking at on my own tipping, I think I do well when dealing with a service person face-to-face -- a waiter, a car valet, a hotel bellhop -- but not so well with tipping people I don’t see -- like a hotel maid.</li>\r\n	<li>Rich Fraser is in the same place -- both about not tipping cleaning staff and feeling slightly “off” about that\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>I agree with your take on tipping the housekeeping staff. I’m probably totally off base, but I always considered housekeeping to be a service inherent to my stay. I get that service whether I ask for it or not, as opposed to the bellhop, bartender or concierge, which are optional services.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>And that’s just dealing with the US. Don’t get me started about international tipping -- which countries it’s an insult to tip, it’s an insult not to tip, which countries you just round the tab up....</li>\r\n	<li>One of the highlights of our SF trip was, at the end of each day, seeing what schwag my son hauled back from<a href=\"http://www.techradar.com/news/computing/google-io-2012-top-moments-1086645\" target=\"_blank\"> Google I/O</a>. These developer sessions have become quite the giveaway spree as companies try to recruit independent developers to their platforms. Microsoft gave away Windows 8 tablets at its last conference, but Google is the one that goes the deepest. Over two days, my son got an unlocked Samsung Galaxy Nexus phone, a Chromebox, the Google Nexus Q media streaming device slash bocce ball stand-in, and a Nexus 7 tablet.  $1,200 of hardware for a $300 academic ticket.  No wonder it sold out in 20 minutes.</li>\r\n	<li>The <a href=\"https://play.google.com/store/devices/details?id=nexus_7_8gb\" target=\"_blank\">Nexus 7 tablet</a> was the highlight of the schwag bag.  $200 for the 8 GB model, it directly competes with the Kindle Fire and blows it out of the water. It runs the latest Android version-- 4.1 or Jelly Bean as the droid-heads call it -- while the Fire sits at a custom version of 2.3 or Gingerbread. In those intervening versions, Google has smoothed off a lot of Android’s sharp edges and has significantly improved performance. For the first time, I could see an Android tablet being a real competitor to the iPad.</li>\r\n	<li>I also like the 7-inch form factor. Steve Jobs is famous for dismissing anything less than the iPad’s piece-of-paper size. I was surprised, though, how much easier I found reading and web-browsing on this much lighter device. And since most of what I use a tablet for is media consumption -- rather than as an executive laptop replacement -- I’m thinking I may downsize my next tablet. I’ll see if the rumored iPad “mini” appears and then, if not, I may head down the Google route too.</li>\r\n	<li>\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_1048\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/IMG_1311.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1048\" title=\"Powell St BART Station\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/IMG_1311-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Can\'t See the Dirt if Everything is Blurry[/caption]\r\n\r\nAnd continuing on my periodic trains-to-airports thread, when leaving San Francisco, I took BART -- Bay Area Rapid Transit -- from downtown -- we were staying at the St Francis in Union Square -- to SFO for my flight home. It was a Sunday -- the last Sunday in June -- and a nice sunny, warm day -- a rare event in SF -- which brought out in full force the standard SF mix of street performers, cup rattlers, and tourists.  Getting through this melange with my rolling bag was my first challenge.  Once I got down to the station and in front of the fare machine, I got a bit of sticker shock -- it was $8.25 to get to the airport. Sure, you pay a lot more for London’s Heathrow Express, but it’s a private train company with just one stope.  The BART fare is one of the bigger numbers I’ve hit for a subway system -- Chicago is a flat-rate $2.25 from the Loop to O’Hare; Washington’s Metro is $3 from downtown to Reagan National. Sure, $8.25 is cheaper than a $40 cab ride, but still...</li>\r\n	<li>And that sticker shock only sinks in deeper when you get on the train and see how beat-to-hell they are.  They’re the same style trains as the Metro, but they’re in much worse shape. Who thought it was a good idea to put cloth seats on a public transit train?  I wished I had a plastic sheet to sit on.  And I made a bee line to a restroom once I hit SFO to I could wash my hands -- it was just that disgusting.  I’m back to taxis when next in SF.</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a question, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- use the Voice Memo app on your iPhone or something like Virtual Recorder on your Android phone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/williams-dusty/\" target=\"_blank\">Steam Train</a> </em>by John Williams</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Drive South -- A Southern Road Trip</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_1040\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"226\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/311522_3384921793910_1477911803_n.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1040\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/311522_3384921793910_1477911803_n-226x300.jpg\" alt=\"My &quot;Great Circle&quot; Route Through the Mid-South\" width=\"226\" height=\"300\" /></a> My \"Great Circle\" Route Through the Mid-South[/caption]\r\n\r\nAs I mentioned at the top of the show, I did a “great circle” road trip of the Mid-South earlier this month -- me, a full-up old 30 GB click-wheel iPod, a list of restaurants and bars, and a suitcase of nothing more than shorts and polo shirts all loaded up into my Saab convertible.  I started off by running I-65 from top to bottom -- from the Indiana Toll Road to Mobile, AL, with stops in Louisville, Nashville, and Birmingham.  I jogged over to the state line to Florida, passing the huge rebuilt version of the Florabama Bar &amp; Grill, for a weekend on the Gulf at Perdido Key.</li>\r\n	<li>I then drove across the Mississippi Gulf Coast, past the re-built casinos in Biloxi, and then past the not-so-rebuilt towns of Gulfport and Pass Christian.  Here we are 7 years after the eye of Hurricane Katrina made landfall at Bay St Louis, MS and the vacant lots along the coastal road - US-90 -- far outnumber the rebuilt homes.  Indeed, the For Sale signs on vacant lots -- many of them hand-made with “Make me an offer” scrawled across the front” -- outnumber the rebuilt homes.</li>\r\n	<li>I eventually ended up on I-10 and drove into New Orleans for dinner, reloaded on beignets and chicory coffee the next morning, and headed up I-55 with a lunch stop in Jackson, MS before landing in Memphis for a couple of days.  The final leg was Memphis to Sikeston, MO and then up I-57 back home to Chicago.  A 2,100-mile loop through what many people consider “fly-over” country.</li>\r\n	<li>The first reaction that most folks have to this itinerary is -- Why? It’s certainly not on anyone’s top 10 scenic drives list. But it’s always been on my list of trips to-do -- to stop off on “drive thru” cities and spend a little time exploring, even if only for a couple of hours. And to do a bit of a nostalgia tour -- visit places I lived 25-30 years ago.  And to catch up with old friends -- physically rather than just over Facebook. But while I’ve been thinking about it for a while, it’s always been on the “B” list -- always getting bumped by something else.  Well, as I hinted at the start of the show, my professional situation has changed, providing me a bit of a summer sabbatical.  With a suddenly open schedule and nothing else planned, it’s the perfect time to work into that next tier of things to do.</li>\r\n	<li>I took a week to do this great circle route -- not too fast, but not dawdling either. I had a great time. And came away with a few observations...</li>\r\n	<li>First, that drive is not as boring as you might fear.  Now, I don’t want to sugar-coat it -- I-65 through northern Indiana and I-57 through Illinois are brutally mind-numbing -- flat unending fields of corn and soybeans, the monotony of which is occasionally broken by a unending rows of wind generators (they’re just too huge to be called windmills).  But past that, the landscape does have character.  The low-lying clouds tight against the hills, resting in the valleys in Southern Kentucky.  Driving long causeways over the marshes and bayous heading south into Mobile on I-65 or coming north out of New Orleans on I-55.  The red clay of any turned over ground in Alabama.  The forests of Southern Mississippi.  It’s certainly not the Big Sur Coastal drive, but it’s not (except for Illinois and Indiana) hundreds of miles of sameness.</li>\r\n	<li>Second, with all that windshield time, I finally found a good use case for Apple’s Siri. I’ve seen the Samuel L Jackson and Zooey Deschanel commercials, but have never gotten Siri to be more than an annoyance -- I can always find something faster myself than repeating my question 3 times.  But with both hands on the wheel and my eyes on the road, Siri was very good at reading and replying to the daily flow of text messages.  The results of “Read new message” was unintelligible only once, and given my sister’s tendency for random punctuation and abbreviations, it was understandable.  Siri’s still not the virtual assistant Apple keeps pitching her as, but she does have her uses on a long drive.</li>\r\n	<li>\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_1041\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"225\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/382380_3350829861633_1849689155_n.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1041\" title=\"The Ham Bar Menu\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/382380_3350829861633_1849689155_n-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"225\" height=\"300\" /></a> Today\'s Selections at the Ham Bar[/caption]\r\n\r\nThird, there’s good local food and beer everywhere.  Call it the “Brooklyn-ization” of America, but every decent sized city I visited had its own hipster neighborhoods with restaurants serving local artisan foods and local craft beers.  Louisville has its unfortunately named <a href=\"http://www.chicagotribune.com/travel/sc-trav-0327-louisville-kentucky-20120327,0,6168490.story\" target=\"_blank\">NuLu</a> neighborhood, Memphis the better-named <a href=\"http://cooperyoung.biz/night-out/\" target=\"_blank\">Cooper Young</a> at the intersection of Cooper St and Young Ave, and New Orleans has the Bywater district a good bit away from the French Quarter.</li>\r\n	<li>You expect good food in New Orleans, but I had very good food and beer in every other place I stopped.  An example of that Southern local focus is restaurants using country ham in place of prosciutto -- which makes sense if you think of proscuitto as just another kind of air-dried ham -- but from Italy instead of Virginia.  At the<a href=\"http://www.garageonmarket.com\"> Garage Bar</a> in Louisville, they had a ham bar with a choice of f country hams from farms in Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee.  At the <a href=\"http://thebeautyshoprestaurant.anotherroadsideattractioncatering.com/\">Beauty Shop</a> in Memphis -- a great Twitter recommendation from @denrael -- country ham, cantaloupe, and an arugula salad made a great appetizer on a hot day.  I also hit on a string of locally sour brown ales at breweries in <a href=\"http://www.atgbrewery.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Louisville</a> and <a href=\"http://www.avondalebrewing.com/taproom.php\">Birmingham</a>. Definitely not lawnmower beers and as good as any I had in Brussels last spring. Finding these restaurants and breweries had the side benefit of taking me out of the normal tourist spots -- leaving behind the French Quarter and Beale Street.  Just look for art galleries, record stores, tattoo parlors, and people in skinny pants riding bicycles without helmets.</li>\r\n	<li>Another observation -- waiting for the last minute to book a hotel room with Priceline’s Negotiator app works -- sometimes.  I’ve never used Priceline’s “opaque” pricing before -- naming my price for an unnamed hotel room. If I’m traveling on business or with my family, I typically want things nailed down a bit tighter. I have a much lower appetite for risk; am willing to pay more money to insure a good experience. But on this trip, I’m by myself and am only looking for a clean bed and decent water pressure for the morning’s shower.  Seemed like the right time to give Bill Shatner a try.</li>\r\n	<li>My first try was Friday night around 7pm in Louisville.  Sitting in the Garage Bar after my serving of Kentucky country ham, I fired up the iPhone, got a sense of that the going rate at reasonable hotels was in the $75-110 range, and then bid $50 for a 3-star place near the airport. “Whoa, that’s a low bid” said a pop-up screen on the Priceline app.  Yup, that’s the idea.  After working through a few screens, I had a great room at a very nice Holiday Inn.  I ran the same play Sunday night driving into New Orleans and got a room at the Marriott on Canal St for $60.</li>\r\n	<li>\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_1044\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"225\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/IMG_1368-e1343753854622.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1044\" title=\"Monday Special at Chimneyville Smokehouse, Jackson, MS\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/IMG_1368-e1343753854622-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"225\" height=\"300\" /></a> Hoping Vegetables Cut The Pork Fat[/caption]\r\n\r\nBut during the week while in Memphis, no luck. No one bit on my lowball bids and I ended up in a very substandard Hampton Inn and not so clean Comfort Inn.  Apparently there was some Little League tournament in town.  Don’t know others’ experiences, but the risk-reward trade-off with Priceline bidding is real. Which confirmed my initial instinct -- useful tool when traveling by myself with no rigid itinerary, but not so much for family or business travel.</li>\r\n	<li>And finally, if I do this trip again, I’m packing some statins, some Mevacor.  After my fourth straight day of barbecue, I could feel the pork fat thicken my blood.  Not that that kept me from ordering one last slab of ribs on the drive home...</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music --<a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/rompaey-mozaic/\" target=\"_blank\"> <em>Bubbly</em></a> by Ruben van Rompaey</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Breaking Up with American Airlines</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>My relationship with American Airlines began June 1985 when I flew from Chicago to Dallas to start my first job out of school.  And now here I am, 27 years and about 2.5 million miles later and I’m feeling just done with them.</li>\r\n	<li>I wasn’t always like that. It’s easy enough to fly American out of DFW -- indeed, it damn close to impossible not to.  But I went out of my way to fly American after I left Dallas -- first back in Chicago, and then in Philadelphia.  Not too tough in Chicago; ORD is another AA hub. But sticking with them while flying out of US Air’s Philly fortress hub -- that took some commitment.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_952\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"200\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/photo.png\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-952\" title=\"AA Tweets &quot;I\'m Sorry&quot;\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/photo-200x300.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"200\" height=\"300\" /></a> Tweeting Apologies[/caption]\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Over the past, say, 5 years, though, things have changed.  American’s competitors declared bankruptcy, cleaned up their balance sheets and bought new planes.  Lousy if you’re an investor with stock, an executive with options, or a creditor taking a haircut on loans, but for a customer it works out. American seemed proud of not going bankrupt, but as their planes got older and dingier, and fuel prices got higher, something had to give.</li>\r\n	<li>And give it has, not just renegotiating plane leases. At a time you’d think American would want to take extra care of customers, their service taken a dive. And they’ve gotten more aggressive with add-on luggage and seating fees.  And now combining older frequent flyer miles that had no expiration date with those that expire in 18 months. For me, it’s not a big number; it’s the change in attitude; the final break in what I thought I could expect from American.</li>\r\n	<li>Will I stop flying American? No, unless they go completely under. Or worse, merge with USAir. They’ll keep a big hub out of ORD and I have lifetime Platinum status with them -- unless that too becomes a casualty of their new “take away” mentality.  What will stop, though, is giving American the benefit of the doubt, of having them be my “default” choice.  After 27 years, they’re just another uncomfortable plane seat.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917626811171154.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #100</li>\r\n	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from the <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/\" target=\"_blank\">ccMixter</a> web site and from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Magnatune</a></li>\r\n	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_100.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #100 — Southern Road Trip; Breaking Up with American Airlines','','inherit','open','open','','1034-revision-v1','','','2015-05-12 14:36:49','2015-05-12 19:36:49','',1034,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/05/12/1034-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1502,1,'2015-05-12 15:02:31','2015-05-12 20:02:31','','web0118-starbuckstrenta12','How big, exactly, is Starbucks’ new ‘Trenta’ size?','inherit','open','open','','web0118-starbuckstrenta12','','','2015-05-12 15:02:42','2015-05-12 20:02:42','',785,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/web0118-starbuckstrenta12.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(1504,1,'2015-05-12 15:03:18','2015-05-12 20:03:18','[caption id=\"attachment_789\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"250\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/3300827223_3bea6ba1ff1.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-789\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/3300827223_3bea6ba1ff1-250x300.jpg\" alt=\"Train Crash at Montparnasse 1895\" width=\"250\" height=\"300\" /></a> Train Crash at Montparnasse 1895[/caption]\r\n\r\nInto the summer travel rhythm with a mix of vacation and business travel. Using an Apple iPad 2 and Samsung\'s new Galaxy Tab 10.1 Android tablet during this mix gave me enough real world experience to make some recommendations. A couple of recent web links describe this podcast as \"not as upbeat as others\" which is true, but because it focuses on traveling, not destinations. Perhaps this non-chipper attitude is partially explained by a recent study placing 4 US airline companies in the top 8 most hated companies in America. And a listener suggests ways to reduce roaming voice and data costs. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_92.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n[audio:travelcommons_92.mp3]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript from TravelCommons podcast #92:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Travel since the last podcast has been pretty evenly split between personal and business travel.  First couple of weeks was summer vacation in the UK -- the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Lake District\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_District\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Lake District</a>, Scotland, and a couple of days in London.  Had phenomenal weather the whole time we were there -- one afternoon of rain, and the rest of the time was warm and sunny.  Almost too warm for the clothes we packed. And everyone was amazed.  All the bed &amp; breakfast owners were marveling at the weather. “It’s luvly,” said our landlady in Edinburgh, “Last week it was hailing”. Lucky us because we certainly didn’t pack for that.</li>\r\n	<li>Just to make sure I didn\'t forget we were on vacation, we stayed at bed &amp; breakfasts the whole time -- until we hit London, when I made the reservations. Actually, when I think about it, it’s not <em>all</em> that different from the service I get in the concierge lounges at big hotels. Breakfast comes with the room -- though the full cooked breakfast, complete with black puddling in England and haggis in Scotland, was a bit heartier than the continental breakfasts I normally get in concierge lounges.  And there’s a bit of nice chit-chat when we walk in, though the B&amp;B owners are typically a bit older/more <em>seasoned</em> that the typical lounge staff.  The main differences -- most hotels I stay in don’t have dogs living there, and they prefer credit cards over cash.</li>\r\n	<li>Of course, back in the US, the weather’s been sweltering.  I was in South Florida a couple weeks ago and it was <em>cooler</em> there than Chicago.  But that wasn’t good enough, so last week, I was down in Phoenix, where it was hitting 105-107 degrees during the day and wasn’t getting below 100 any time while I was awake.</li>\r\n	<li>Tough weather to take advantage of the convertible red Mustang that Avis was nice enough to upgrade me to.</li>\r\n	<li>Wednesday night after dinner, though, I decided I just <em>had</em> to drop the top.  The dashboard said the external temperature was 102 -- and it felt it when I dropped that top.  Soon, though, I found that the key to driving top-down in 102 degrees is the pretty much the same as driving top-down in 55 degree weather. Set the fan to High and remember to have the knob set to A/C.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music -- <em>Crazy Love-The Alex &amp; Lang mix</em> by <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/djlang59/10579\">J.Lang</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Let’s take a run through the comment bag.</li>\r\n	<li>Sarah, who’s been a listener since 2006, posted a comment on the website on <a title=\"Podcast #85 — Importance of Hotel Bathrooms; Maximizing Miles\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2010/11/30/podcast-85-importance-of-hotel-bathrooms-maximizing-miles/\" target=\"_blank\">episode #85</a> (!) -- she says “I was playing catch up after all my driving trips this past two months.” In that episode, I talked about how the hotel industry seems to be focused on spiffing up their lobbies and putting whizzy new technology in the rooms, and that they were making a mistake ignoring what I think is critical to the hotel experience -- the bathroom.  Sarah says “I say ‘heck yeah’ to the bathroom being one of the most important parts of a stay.  I ended in a bed and breakfast in the middle of nowhere, with no wifi.  And the bathroom made me want to tell everyone about it. It had a hot tub and a beautifully large bathroom. But even though I knew no one who was going to the area, I wanted to tell everyone about it. It\'s the <a href=\"http://www.innatnewberlin.com/\">Inn in New Berlin, PA</a> (in case you care).”</li>\r\n	<li>Sarah, thanks for the note -- and thanks for the pointer to the Inn in New Berlin.  I do think we look for luxurious touches in hotels. And it doesn’t have to be anything big.  The first thing my wife looks for in a hotel room is to see if there are robes in the bathroom.  It’s a helluva lot cheaper than a tricked-out media panel, and it makes a much bigger impression.</li>\r\n	<li>Sarah’s comment about wanting to tell everyone about her find reminded me of some stats I saw a few days ago.  It said on average 24% of a hotel guests first heard about it from a friend or family member; 16% from a review site like <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"TripAdvisor\" href=\"http://www.tripadvisor.com\" rel=\"homepage\">TripAdvisor</a>. I would guess that if anyone could calculate the cost of creating an enthusiastic recommender like Sarah -- it would turn out to be a lot cheaper to do it with a great bathroom than a posh new lobby.</li>\r\n	<li>Fast forwarding to <a title=\"Podcast #90 — More Comfortable Traveling in India; Tipping Towards Android?\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/05/22/podcast-90-more-comfortable-traveling-in-india-tipping-towards-android/\" target=\"_blank\">episode #90</a>, Andrew Gill left a comment on the TravelCommons Facebook wall\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Thanks for podcast #90, it\'s great to hear how 170 degrees isn\'t as comfortable as fully flat when my company has a different approach to travel. UK to Australia in Economy has to be tried</li>\r\n	<li>You talked about using large chunks of roaming data in a recent trip and I\'ve a couple of hints to share.</li>\r\n	<li>Google Maps is great but try <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/offlinemaps\">City Maps 2Go</a>. I\'ve been using it for over a year having tried other off-line mapping products. It uses the built in compass so I don\'t have to walk a block either way to figure out if I\'m going in the right direction.</li>\r\n	<li>I\'ve also become a real convert to local SIM cards. Now this may not be perfect for a business trip, but I had two weeks in Chile in January and my iPhone bill was $500, compare this to two weeks in Australia using the AU$2 a day plan from Optus and my bill was $22. In Australia I didn\'t worry about when I used my phone or finding the next hotspot, because I had unlimited calls, SMS and internet usage all for AU$2 a day.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>Thanks Andrew.  Sorry about the whinging on 10 degrees of seat recline. I paid for it on my flight over to Manchester last month -- 8 hrs of suffering in coach in a packed American Airlines 757. Even United gives you free beer in coach, but not American.</li>\r\n	<li>Thanks for the tip on City Maps 2 Go.  I looked at it for our UK vacation and since we were spending most of our time in the hinterlands -- the Lake District, the Isle of Arran, around Loch Lomond, it wasn’t going to give us enough coverage.  I found, though, a great app from Phil Endecott called “UK Map”.  For $11 you get all the Ordnance Survey maps, 2D and 3D views, combined with OpenStreetMap.org info downloaded so you can use it off line.  It’s a universal app so I have it on my iPhone and iPad.  If you’re touring the UK, I highly recommend it.  I may end up back in Madrid in a couple of months.  If I do, I’ll be downloading its map from City Maps 2 Go.</li>\r\n	<li>I did find an unexpected but valuable benefit from my Starbucks obsession. I have a couple of Starbucks gift cards that I’ve registered.  I kinda did it on a whim.  They send me a card for a free drink after every 15 coffees I buy.  I don’t use them -- it would be wasted on a tall coffee or cappuccino.  I give ‘em to my kids who use them for venti frappuccinos.  But anyways, while in London, I found that my US <a href=\"https://www.starbucks.com/card\" target=\"_blank\">Starbucks Rewards</a> credentials gave me free WiFi in UK Starbucks. Since I was limiting my mobile data usage and there’s a Starbucks about every 200 ft in London, it was very handy.</li>\r\n	<li>\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_1502\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"263\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/web0118-starbuckstrenta12.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1502\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/web0118-starbuckstrenta12-263x300.jpg\" alt=\"How big, exactly, is Starbucks’ new ‘Trenta’ size?\" width=\"263\" height=\"300\" /></a> How big, exactly, is Starbucks’ new ‘Trenta’ size?[/caption]\r\n\r\nSpeaking of Starbucks, when I was flying out of ORD last week, one of the Starbucks in Terminal 3 advertised “trenta is here” -- Starbucks’ new “BigGulp” serving size. I thought about this while waiting in line to order my tall bold coffee.  Should they really be selling the trenta in airports?  I mean, does it make sense to sell someone 31 fluid ounces of a beverage right before they will be strapped into a seat for the next 2-4 hours?  And odds are that the person ordering a trenta will be in the window seat.  Meaning that he/she’s rousting two people at least twice during the flight to drain that trenta.</li>\r\n	<li>And then, reacting to my comments about Ryanair in the <a title=\"Podcast #91 — Can’t Patch Planes Forever; Saving Customers With A Personal Touch\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/06/18/podcast-91-cant-patch-planes-forever-saving-customers-with-a-personal-touch/\" target=\"_blank\">last episode</a>, Leo Vegoda wrote\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>What you say about Ryanair reminds me of how Irish comedian Andrew Maxwell described them: ‘Ryanair is what flying would be like if it was illegal’. I think that says it all.”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>That is perfect -- and I think perfectly describes Ryanair and Spirit and all that ilk.</li>\r\n	<li>And it shouldn\'t be too surprising then that 4 of the top 8 most hated companies in America are airlines.  The latest <a href=\"http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/07/the-19-most-hated-companies-in-america/241344/\" target=\"_blank\">American Customer Satisfaction Index</a> has American Airlines at #8, United at #7, US Airways at #6, Delta Airlines at #2(!), beat out by just 2 points for #1 by Potomac Electric utility.  Impressive results all around.</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a question, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is <a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a> -- use the Voice Memo app on your iPhone or something like Virtual Recorder on your Android phone to record and send in an audio comment – or iMovie if you want to send in some video; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at travelcommons.com.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music -- <em>August (Reggae Rework)</em> by <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/elB/16075\">el-B</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>The Not-So-Upbeat Traveler</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>This podcast is a hobby, not a business, for me -- as if you couldn’t tell that from my haphazard posting schedule. So, I don’t obsess over podcast or website statistics, how many downloads, how many page views, all the stuff that real web business live and breathe and monitor on a real-time basis. I do, though, check in every couple of days to make sure everything’s running, clean the spam bin, and to look at site stats to see if anyone is coming by.</li>\r\n	<li>I didn’t do any of this while on vacation, but when I got back and checked in, I saw that I’d gotten flooded with visits the first week in July.  Following the source links, I found most of the traffic came in from StumbleUpon, while another bit came from a recent post by Chris Christensen on his <em><a href=\"http://amateurtraveler.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Amateur Traveler</a></em> blog.</li>\r\n	<li>The StumbleUpon pointer was from “sher1lock,” a “woman from Ontario”.  She recommended episode #88, where I reported from the floor of the Travel Goods show and talked about losing elite status. Her comment -- “A neat travel site. Not as upbeat as some.”</li>\r\n	<li>Which actually lined up very nicely with Chris’ <a href=\"http://amateurtraveler.com/2011/06/30/where-is-the-darker-side-of-travel/\">post</a>.  Titled “Where is the Darker Side of Travel?”, Chris was responding to a listener’s letter that suggested his Amateur Traveler Podcast sugar-coats the travel experience a bit; the listener challenged Chris to “bring attention to the darker side of travel”. Chris gave a good, straight up response that boiled down to -- “Guilty as charged; I’m an optimistic guy” and “If you want a podcast about travel from the point of view of how bad can be, listen to Mark Peacock’s <em>Travel Commons</em>. Mark is a friend and fellow podcaster but I describe his show as the anti-Amateur Traveler.”</li>\r\n	<li>OK, so I’m not always the cheeriest guy about travel, but I didn\'t think I was a complete “Debbie Downer”.  But, because I talk about more about the journey -- the act of transiting, travel as a verb -- rather than being a tourist -- what you are when you get to your destination, my travel stories are going to naturally follow what we all think is the dramatic decline in the travel experience -- airplanes as flying cattle cars, beat-up high-mileage rental cars, ....  Any podcast whose major characters are <a href=\"http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/07/the-19-most-hated-companies-in-america/241344/\" target=\"_blank\">4 of the top 8 most hated companies in America</a> just isn\'t going to be “as upbeat as some.”</li>\r\n	<li>I have varying degrees of success in being cheery about my travels.  It’s always easier to be chipper when there’s something new in the mix -- new destination, new air carrier, new plane,...  <a title=\"Podcast #90 — More Comfortable Traveling in India; Tipping Towards Android?\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/05/22/podcast-90-more-comfortable-traveling-in-india-tipping-towards-android/\" target=\"_blank\">A couple podcasts ago</a>, when I talked about flying to Madrid on USAir -- the USAir service was definitely a 9-hour drag, but it couldn’t dull the excitement of a new destination. But this last trip to Phoenix? Going to the same place for the umpteenth time, on American, on old MD-80’s (one of which -- with a 1983 birth date -- treated me to yet another 2 hour delay), to temperatures in the 100’s every day.  I had to drag myself to the airport. The best thing about the trip -- a toss-up between  the convertible Mustang from Avis and the Tempe In-n-Out Burger where I killed some of that 2-hour delay.</li>\r\n	<li>But then again, who really enjoys their commute to work?  Most of the times, that’s what my travel is -- a commute to work.  Some people drive 45 minutes to work; I fly 3 hours.  And just like you should avoid road rage, I try to avoid travel rage. Specifically, when my commute goes wrong, I try to limit the collateral damage.</li>\r\n	<li>First off, I try not to call anybody. There’s just nothing to be gained from talking to family or colleagues live.\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>“I’m going to be late coming home/getting to the office.  American/United/Southwest/Joe’s Cattle Car decided to skip preventative maintenance this month in order to make payroll and so I’m waiting out a maintenance decision.  The delay’s going to be either 30 minutes or 3 hours -- depends on whether duct tape can fix the problem.”</li>\r\n	<li>“Oh, that’s too bad.  I’m sorry to hear that”</li>\r\n	<li>“Not half as sorry as I am to be living it”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>See?  That’s just not a good exchange for anyone. I’m not feeling any better, and worse yet, I’ve passed along my frustration, my lousy day to a completely innocent bystander.  Best to rely on e-mail or text messages. Just make sure you immediately delete the inevitable frowny face emoticon from your significant other. Leaving it fester in your inbox will just lead to bad things.</li>\r\n	<li>Same goes with airline gate agents and hotel clerks. They didn\'t overbook the hotel or break the plane.  On a good day, these folks are just barely breaking minimum wage.  They’re just trying to get on the other side of 8 hours.  Unless they’re pre-emptively snotty to me -- they take an attitude before I even open my mouth -- I give them a pass.</li>\r\n	<li>So we\'ve identified a lot of people who <em>aren\'t</em> responsible for botching up my commute.  Who is, then? Who can I dump this rage on? Well, that’s the challenge.  When you’re driving down the freeway and a guy cuts you off, you see the culprit. You can yell, you glare, you can flip him off.  You vent and, if you’re a normal person, you move on.</li>\r\n	<li>Airlines, hotels, car rentals -- you’ll never see the person that made your morning miserable. You can’t find them to flip them off; they don’t even know you exist. They’re sitting inside some operations center combining the output of some linear revenue optimization programs with the weather forecast and sending out e-mails that will complete jack up my day.  Nothing personal -- I’m just collateral damage.</li>\r\n	<li>Without that outlet, though; that ability to vent directly to the culprit, the frustration festers. The undisciplined take it out on innocent workers. The introverts mutter to themselves under their breaths.  The majority of us, though, inhale, exhale and then make for closest repository of the three cure-alls for travel frustration -- fat, salt, and beer.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music --<em> I Will Writhe</em> by <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/26739\">SackJo22</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Tablet Wars: Apple iPad 2 vs. Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Regular listeners know that, over the past couple of years, I’ve migrated to an all Apple technology kit -- the 11-in MacBook Air, an iPhone 4, and an iPad 2. This isn’t a religious sort of fanboy thing -- the desktop unit that I create this podcast on is a custom-built dual monitor Windows 7 64-bit rig with 3 hard drives and a Blu-Ray DVD burner.</li>\r\n	<li>Attending <a href=\"http://www.google.com/events/io/2011/index-live.html\" target=\"_blank\">Google I/O</a> earlier this summer, I received a <a href=\"http://www.samsung.com/global/microsite/galaxytab/10.1/index.html\" target=\"_blank\">Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1</a> with the <a href=\"http://www.engadget.com/2011/01/06/googles-android-3-0-honeycomb-for-tablets-a-guided-tour-of-the/\" target=\"_blank\">Honeycomb </a>tablet version of Android -- I think Honeycomb translates to version number 3.1 for non-Google-ites -- and a <a href=\"http://www.samsung.com/us/computer/chromebook\" target=\"_blank\">Samsung Chromebook</a>. During the summer I’ve been traveling with both the Google and Apple kit -- a significant increase in carry-on weight, but the only way I know to truly compare equipment is live in the field.  I’ll compare the tablets this episode and talk about my Chromebook experiences next time.</li>\r\n	<li>Not only did I carry both tablets for business over the past couple of months, I also took them both with me on vacation to the UK, leaving my laptop at home -- a real pressure test.</li>\r\n	<li>To cut to the chase -- which do I like better? -- it’s a real toss-up.  Both tablets are nice pieces of hardware -- the screen sizes are a bit different (the Galaxy has a bit more of an HD aspect ratio while the iPad’s dimensions are more like a sheet of paper) and the Samsung is a few ounces lighter than the iPad, but in the real world -- it’s a push.  They feels the same, both screens are beautiful, and their response times are great.</li>\r\n	<li>As you would expect, the iPad has a better selection of apps -- the Android tablet just launched this summer while the iPad has been out for over a year.  However, for apps that I use, the delta isn’t as huge as the raw number of apps -- iPad vs. Honeycomb -- would suggest.  Apps that I use regularly -- Evernote, Kindle, Pandora, Dropbox, Skype, Concur expense reporting, Angry Birds -- are all available for Android.  The Evernote app is the only tablet-specific one -- and it’s really nice -- but the others work fine.  The only MIA apps that have any real impact on me are WebEx and GoTo Meeting. I think the tablet form is the best way to watch an on-line presentation and so I do miss those apps.</li>\r\n	<li>The operating system -- Apple’s iOS vs. Google’s Android and the accompanying apps -- the comparison seems to be less of a “better-worse” and more a difference in philosophies.  The Apple experience is pretty much locked down -- there’s only one place to get apps, the screen layout not very customizable, there’s no independent access to the file system. Now that’s not necessarily bad -- most people never change the default settings on their technology and there’s a lot to be said for not letting users screw things up beyond recovery. It’s Apple’s point of view. It’s a valid one, but it does have some impact.</li>\r\n	<li>When we were in the UK with only the two tablets, I wanted to replace my Facebook profile picture with one taken that afternoon in the <a href=\"http://www.glengoyne.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Glengoyne Distillery</a> near Loch Lomond.  My daughter had taken the picture with my iPhone. Plunking around the Facebook app, I couldn’t find a way to change my profile. So I e-mailed the photo from my iPhone to my Gmail account.  Logging onto the Facebook site on the iPad Safari browser, I couldn’t save the picture from the Mail app to a place where the browser could access it -- for security reasons, all the apps seem to exist within their own sandboxes.  Opening up Gmail on the Samsung tablet, I could save the picture to the folder of my choice, and then upload the picture from that folder to the Facebook site through the Android browser.</li>\r\n	<li>It’s a little thing, but it illustrates why I found working solely with the Android system -- being without my PC -- easier than the iPad. The Android design philosophy is to give the users much greater control over their experience.  Which means I can spelunk around the file system, tweak the technical operations, create truly horrid screen designs, and view Flash-based web sites to my heart’s content</li>\r\n	<li>I also found it interesting that my daughter who’s starting high school this year, tends to pick up the Samsung tablet over the iPad. A lot of it probably has to do with the fact that she has an Android phone, but she seemed to prefer the Google experience.</li>\r\n	<li>So as I said at the top, it’s a toss-up.  I think the iPad is a more polished experience.  It feels 1-2 releases ahead of the Android tablet -- which it is.  The Samsung tablet, though, keeps right up with Apple in hardware and fit-and-finish, and Android lets the advanced user customize it better to his/her specific needs.  Final recommendation -- at the same price, I’d recommend the casual/non-technical user go with the iPad, but if you like to pop the hood on your technology, you won’t go wrong with the Samsung.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids991762681117.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #92</li>\r\n	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from the <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/\" target=\"_blank\">ccMixter</a> site</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_92.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #92 — Not-So-Upbeat Traveler; iPad 2 vs. Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1','','inherit','open','open','','785-revision-v1','','','2015-05-12 15:03:18','2015-05-12 20:03:18','',785,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/05/12/785-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1505,1,'2015-05-14 06:06:05','2015-05-14 11:06:05','[caption id=\"attachment_1508\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"228\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/2014-06-01-15.20.55-e1431490750219.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1508\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/2014-06-01-15.20.55-e1431490750219-228x300.jpg\" alt=\"Been on Duty for 10 Years...\" width=\"228\" height=\"300\" /></a> Been on Duty for 10 Years...[/caption]\n\nHard to believe that I\'ve been prattling along for 10 years. Looking back, I see that I\'ve become less of a TSA-hater, but am still pretty clear-eyed about the tediousness of the frequent travel experience. It\'s tough to pack 10 years into a 30-min episode, but I think I\'ve cherry-picked some good snippets. Before that, I talk about spending Semana Santa (Holy Week) in southern Spain and \"smart luggage.\" The listener mailbag continues the conversation about mass transit to airports. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_115.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #115:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, so no video “uncut” version like I did last episode from New Orleans. No maid service in the TravelCommons studio to tidy up before the podcast.</li>\n 	<li>We’re deep in the bipolar weather roller coaster that is Spring in the Midwest -- 70’s one day, 40’s the next; bright sun at 10 in the morning, pissing down rain at noon. Which is as good an explanation as any why Chicago’s two airports, O’Hare and Midway, own the basement of the DOT’s on-time departures ranking.</li>\n 	<li>My travel has been a bit more interesting since the last episode. Did a few of my normal runs down to New Orleans, but broke the pattern a bit with travel to Denver and Charlotte. And even one of the runs down to New Orleans broke the usual down-Monday-back-Thursday routine. At the beginning of April, I flew down Thursday night with my wife and daughter, met up with friends for the French Quarter Fest weekend. It’s one of my favorite music festivals. Free music from local bands; stages and food stands spread around the Quarter -- a bit lower key than the 460,000 people who descended on the Fair Grounds for Jazz Fest a few weeks back.</li>\n 	<li>The big trip, though, was a couple of weeks prior to that when we went to Andalucia -- southern Spain -- for Spring Break and found ourselves there during Semana Santa -- Holy Week. Cordoba, Granada, Sevilla, the hill town of Ronda. Processions (plural) almost every night. My wife said it was like the Tour de France for Catholics. And as a Catholic, I couldn’t argue -- it was pretty full contact. I posted a <a href=\"https://vine.co/v/OL66AUgHwwi\">Vine video</a> of a Granada procession to my <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter feed</a> and then a couple of minutes of GoPro footage from the last Holy Thursday procession in Sevilla on the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons\">Facebook</a> page and <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\">YouTube channel</a>. It was close to midnight, after which I think they took an hour break and then started up the Good Friday processions. We went to bed. When we went out the next morning around 8:30 to grab some breakfast -- our usual of cafe con leche and tomato bread topped with jamón iberico -- the restaurant was jammed with people who just finished a procession. It just kept going.</li>\n 	<li>And so do we. I drained my United account for a trip next month to Japan, and then in September, we’re heading over to Scotland so my daughter can start at the <a href=\"http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/\">University of St Andrews</a>, so I should have enough content to keep TravelCommons rolling into an 11th year.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/download_track.php?id=6E494292C6B4E14E784F04400EB2C54CE135E29730530171C5F931345CAA3733A93C8CF03BBFAC71CD59B5710E25327F\" rel=\"nofollow\">All Around</a></em> by <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=AEF14840F87CD6C39BE8918AF693E89C276517530C9606BA2CB20418C6A8B4CB\" rel=\"nofollow\">Jel</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Before we get into the meat of things, just a quick pointer to let everyone know that TravelCommons is available on the Stitcher radio smartphone app as well as on <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>. Since iTunes started handling podcasts -- June 2005, right around episodes <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/06/19/podcast-6-the-tsa-talks-back/\">6</a> or <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/06/29/podcast-7-eating-alone-classic-travel-stories/\">7</a> -- it dominated the TravelCommons download stats. Now it’s only responsible for a third of the downloads.</li>\n 	<li>Rummaging through the mailbag…</li>\n 	<li>Back last November in episode <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/11/22/podcast-112-holiday-airport-etiquette-travel-tax-pile-up/\">112</a>, Dan Gradwohl sent me a pointer to the website <a href=\"http://www.toandfromtheairport.com/\">To and From The Airport</a>, a collation of airport transit options. In that episode, I talked about reviewing the ORD listing and sending in a few updates. Toward the end of March, I received a note thanking me for my contribution and apologizing for the delay. Whatever issues were happening there now seem to have passed; it appears the site is back to being actively maintained.</li>\n 	<li>Tom Brown, a longtime TravelCommons listener, sent a note following up on last episode’s riff on Nate Silver’s <a href=\"http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/planes-trains-and-taxis-when-to-take-public-transit-from-the-airport/\">538 blog post</a> about mass transit times to major US airports. He wrote:\n<ul>\n 	<li>You noted London as the gold standard of public transport out of the airport. I would put it at bronze at best.  Decaying infrastructure, not so comfortable trains and destination not so friendly to business traveler in London doesn\'t help its ranking. Singapore is the best in my opinion with Hong Kong 2nd. Tokyo even ranks above London to me.</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Tom, thanks for that, expanding our sample size. My past trips thru Hong Kong and Singapore were family vacations - late arrivals from the US, tired kids, too much luggage - and so opted for taxis instead on mass transit. I missed the opportunity to add those trains to my personal sample, but I did end up with one of the wackiest cab rides while in HK. It was kind of a hoarder cab -- newspapers filling the trunk, tchotchkes all over the dashboard and hanging from the roof. I don’t know how we got 4 people and 4 bags into that cab. As I mentioned earlier, we’ll be flying in and out of Narita at the back half of June and given the distance and cab fares, we’ll take the Tokyo train at least once.</li>\n 	<li>Our Spring Break trip to Andalucia started with a flight into Madrid airport. Our plans had us landing in Madrid, then making the 20-min schlep in from Terminal 4 (could they have put that terminal any further out?) and then heading downtown to catch the high-speed Renfe train to Córdoba. After I booked the tickets on-line (a process made infinitely easier than 2 years ago now that Renfe accepts PayPal) I was pleasantly surprised to stumble across a TripAdvisor post saying that the tickets included a free train ride down to the Puerta Atocha train station. It wasn\'t the fastest ride - a local train that made 4-5 stops before Atocha - but it was clean and not beat up. And since we were headed downtown during Friday rush hour, it took the same 30 min that Google Maps estimated for the cab.</li>\n 	<li>And continuing on the transit theme, Nick Gassman sent a note about comments I made in episode <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/10/12/podcast-111-seatback-recline-wars-craft-beer-tourism/\">111</a> about the proliferation of pre-paid cards for subway and mass transit systems. Nick says about the London Underground:\n<ul>\n 	<li>You can use your own contactless payment card (Visa, Amex etc) without having to buy an Oyster card, and get the same rates. You can register the card if you wish, to track spend.</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>The link to the Tube web page is similar to the Chicago L page -- it feels a bit ambiguous, probably because the contactless technology is still a bit young, a bit ambiguous itself. Both London and Chicago say they’ll also work with NFC mobile phones -- like the latest Samsung Galaxies, the HTC Ones, and the iPhone 6. I think I’ve just got to get over to an L station and give it a try. But it’s probably not the kind of experiment I want to try and debug during rush hour when there’s a couple hundred hard-core commuters storming the 3-4 tap through gates. Seems like more of a midday or weekend morning thing.</li>\n 	<li>Reaching back again to episode <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/11/22/podcast-112-holiday-airport-etiquette-travel-tax-pile-up/\">112 </a>where I talked about funding the Indiegogo campaign for the Bluesmart carry-on bag, what they call “The First Smart, Connected Luggage” complete with a smartphone app that acts as a digital lock, a scale, tracks location, and sounds an alarm if your smart bag wanders off. They’ve gotten huge press; they blew thru the funding goal by 3800%. But now they have to deliver the bag. They’ve been doing a good job of pushing out <a href=\"https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/bluesmart-world-s-first-smart-connected-carry-on#activity\">updates </a>and seem to be sticking to their August ship date. Which would be good for them because competitors are starting to move into this space. I tweeted out a link to an Engadget story last week about Samsung and Samsonite partnering up on a line of smart suitcases with functionality that sounds very similar to Bluesmart’s. Then I received a press release in the TravelCommons e-mail box from Planet Traveler <a href=\"http://www.planettravelerusa.com/preorder\">announcing</a> a Kickstarter campaign for the Space Case 1 line of smart luggage which will have all the functionality of the Bluesmart bag <i>plus</i> fingerprint unlock <i>and</i> Bluetooth speakers. As if the gate areas aren’t noisy enough.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/download_track.php?id=A1F44F3B330BFBBD5C7863108B61B09977CADC67705C23C5AECA03FC6F2C0320A93C8CF03BBFAC71CD59B5710E25327F\" rel=\"nofollow\">La Tra (basephunk mix)</a></em> by <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/label.php?id=3AF558B2D658A22FFF10B13F9D87237D276517530C9606BA2CB20418C6A8B4CB\" rel=\"nofollow\">Omar Sosa</a></li>\n</ul>\n<b>A Decade of TravelCommons</b>\n<ul>\n 	<li>It was ten  years ago <i>today </i>that I recorded the first T/C podcast in the bathroom of the Wardman Park Marriott in NW Washington, DC</li>\n 	<li>[tc1-opening &amp; 1]</li>\n 	<li>It was an interesting mix of topics…\n<ul>\n 	<li>TSA problems in ORD, LGA and DCA, the first of many TSA rants over the years;</li>\n 	<li>The first sighting of a “puffer” security screening machine, don’t know if you ever walked through one of those, but we also talked about their multi-million dollar demise in an episode a some years later;</li>\n 	<li>Hungarian roadside prostitutes -- a topic that I don’t believe I’ve revisited</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>And it was the first in a long string of what one listener referred to as a “pottycast” -- using the tile of hotel bathrooms as a poor man’s reverb chamber</li>\n 	<li>[tc74-hotel medley]</li>\n 	<li>Listening to that, I now understand why I have lifetime Marriott Platinum status.</li>\n 	<li>One of the more noticeable changes over the years has been about the TSA. Early podcasts railed against the TSA -- the security theatre, the shoe carnival, liquid bans, and of course, the power trips</li>\n 	<li>[tc45-finding tooth powder]</li>\n 	<li>But with some much needed customer service training and, most importantly, the introduction of PreCheck, the TSA isn’t the podcast pinata it had been for the first 4-5 years -- especially when compared to airport security in places like India</li>\n 	<li>[tc109-mall cop, umbrella]</li>\n 	<li>Travel technology has been one constant through the TravelCommons decade</li>\n 	<li>[tc87-briefcase]</li>\n 	<li>[tc91-too much technology]</li>\n 	<li>And while I’ve cycled through a number of phones, tablets, and laptops, the Bose noise-cancelling headphones remain the official headphones of the TravelCommons podcast</li>\n 	<li>[tc48-bose lust]</li>\n 	<li>Food has also been a common theme…</li>\n 	<li>[tc97-food]</li>\n 	<li>Never one to be accused of being a travel industry cheerleader…</li>\n 	<li>[tc92-not-so-upbeat]</li>\n 	<li>But I always try, if only partially successfully, to maintain some perspective</li>\n 	<li>[t61-zen]</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #115</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>Links to 3 prior anniversary episodes\n<ul>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/12/27/podcast-27-best-of-2005/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Episode 27</a> -- Best of 2005</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2006/06/13/podcast-40-looking-back-over-the-first-year/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Episode 40</a> -- Looking Back Over the First Year</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2009/05/14/podcast-74-looking-back-over-four-years-of-travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Episode 74</a> -- Looking Back Over Four Years</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from the <a href=\"http://promonet.iodalliance.com/\">IODA Promonet</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_115.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #115 — A Decade of TravelCommons','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-115-a-decade-of-travelcommons','','','2021-09-28 19:07:25','2021-09-29 00:07:25','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=1505',0,'post','',1),
(1506,1,'2015-05-12 22:04:18','2015-05-13 03:04:18','Recorded at the JW Marriott in New Orleans together with a GoPro <a title=\"Podcast #114 Uncut — The LoFi Video Version\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/03/20/podcast-114-uncut-the-lofi-video-version/\">video</a> capturing all the unedited bits. We go deep in a comparison of public transit and drive times to US airports, shed a tear for SkyMall magazine, and marvel at the stack of lost Android tablets at American Airlines\' ORD lost-and-found. We talk about what has been an awful start to the travel year in the US east of the Rocky Mountains, and wrap up with some observations about how hotel perks have become more important than points. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_115.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/196973214\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #115:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Which made me happy to head to ORD when I was flying south -- mostly to New Orleans, but the flight to Phoenix made me really smile. I think it was 15 degrees when I left Chicago and about 70 degrees when I landed. I spent at much time as possible outside, trying to resolve what I figured had to be a Vitamin D deficiency. I did get a chuckle on my last night there. I was sitting outside at a bar, must’ve been the low 60’s and they had the heat lamps on.</li>\r\n	<li>I also flew through Memphis this past month. The flight selection in and out of there just gets worse. That airport is becoming a ghost town since Delta dismantled the hub that Northwest had there. Indeed, they have a 2-year project to shrink the airport -- demolish half the A and C concourses, mothball what remains, and consolidate everyone into the B concourse. Kinda surprising when some airports are at capacity with people sprawling on the floor, there are other airports with concourses that could double for bowling alleys. How much does the economy have to improve for it make sense for the airlines to start adding back some capacity?</li>\r\n	<li>This coming week has me tempting the travel gods, hoping for better weather, with two up-and-backs to the East Coast -- a day trip to Newark and an overnight to Philadelphia. Perhaps a precautionary sacrifice is in order, but what? Maybe a sacrificial offering -- I dowse my travel size tube of Crest toothpaste with the extra bottle of Dewar’s</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>10p Mix</em> by <a href=\"http://www.last.fm/music/Amplifico\">amplifico</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Spelunking through my Twitter feed…</li>\r\n	<li>Another thing that made me smile on my flight down to PHX last month wasn’t that I scored a 1st Class upgrade on American -- it was that the upgrade let me hear a woman ask, as she walks on the plane, to be reseated away from the plane’s WiFi access point because she’s allergic to WiFi.  Just when you think you’ve heard everything on a airplane… This seems absurd in just so many ways. Like, how did she make it through the terminal without going into anaphylactic shock? Run a WiFi analyzer app on your phone or tablet the next time you’re in an airport and you’ll see that we’re wading through a sea of WiFi signals. And what about the passengers sitting all around her -- because nobody remembers to shut off the WiFi on their laptops or tablets. And I guess she didn’t stop off at Starbucks on the way to ORD. As it was, the flight attendants just looked at one another -- like they (or anyone) would know exactly where the GoGo access point was located on a 737, and like they’d want to rejuggle seats on a 737 completely full of families heading out on Spring Break. They just mumbled “We’ll ask someone” and gently pushed her down the aisle.</li>\r\n	<li>Taking mass transit to and from the airport is a running theme (fixation?) here at TravelCommons, so I immediately clicked through a tweet from Nate Silver’s 538 blog that went geekily deep on that, <a href=\"http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/planes-trains-and-taxis-when-to-take-public-transit-from-the-airport/\">comparing </a>public transit and driving times from the airport to downtown for the 40 busiest US airports. Only in Minneapolis, Honolulu, and Chicago (both ORD and MDW) is public transit quicker than taking a cab. If open the range a bit -- saying anything within 5 minutes is a toss-up, the list gets a lot longer -- Washington Reagan, Atlanta, San Diego, San Francisco, Austin. Open it to 10 minutes, which could be worth it given the cost difference, brings in Boston, Charlotte, Seattle, San Francisco but from OAK this time, and New York’s JFK. A number of these work because they’re close-in airports -- Chicago Midway, Washington Reagan. Others because the highway traffic is so bad -- most notably O’Hare and JFK. The list is ranked by public transit time and for the top 15 -- plus JFK which is #30 -- public transit times are reasonable enough to make the cost-convenience trade-off compelling. Some of the airports below that line that I know -- New Orleans, Orange County Calif, Detroit -- I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a public transit sign in those place. PDX jumped out at me. I <a title=\"Podcast #103 — Hospitality is Personal; Tablets Everywhere\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2013/01/24/podcast-103-hospitality-is-personal-tablets-everywhere/\">talked </a>about taking that airport light rail in an earlier episode. It’s a nice service, but it takes a while -- it makes a lot of intermediate stops -- and so it doesn’t compare well to a cab ride that takes half the time. Of course the gold standard is London’s Heathrow Express  -- a 15-minute straight shot from Paddington Station vs. an hour cab ride. But that’s not a real apples-to-apples comparison -- a Heathrow Express ticket is £21.50 (over $30) vs. $5 for ORD or $7.50 for JFK. The better comparison might be the £5.70 ($8.50) ride on the Tube’s Piccadilly Line that takes 50-60 minutes, which would fit in at the bottom of the top 15 US list.</li>\r\n	<li>Waiting out an unbelievably long delay on a United ORD-DEN flight, I ran through all of my reading material -- electronic versions of the Wall Street Journal and NY Times, physical version of the Chicago Tribune, my Feedly newsreader stream, multiple refreshes of Twitter -- and so had to dive into the seatback pocket, the emptiness of which reminded me of SkyMall magazine’s bankruptcy at the end of January. SkyMall was always good for at least 15 minutes of entertainment, along the lines of “who in the world would buy that?” -- the zombie statue crawling out of your garden, the kickboard suitcase, the NFL wine shoe holder…. until last Christmas, when a friend bought my present out of SkyMall -- a 6-bottle leather wine holder for my bicycle. Stunning. I can’t wait for the snow to melt to try it. I only fly Delta when I absolutely have to (like to ATL or MEM) so I didn’t notice when they canned SkyMall back in Nov -- “We saw a decline in customer use,” they said. Yup, every electronic thing I read prior to reaching for SkyMall -- the WSJ, NYT, Feedly, Twitter; I could add Facebook; if I was younger I could add Tumblr. I think the minute the FAA allowed us to keep tablets on during take-off and landing, SkyMall was a dead man walking...</li>\r\n	<li>And speaking of tablets, last month I thought I’d left my Google Nexus 7 behind on one of my American flights home from New Orleans. It was one in what seemed to be a stream of stuff I’d lost on the road -- a couple of pairs of sunglasses, earbuds, and now this. I went to the American’s lost-and-found in ORD. The woman came out with a stack of 10-12 7-inch Android tablets -- Lenovo’s, Samsung’s, but not mine. I could see she had a similar sized stack of iPad Mini’s. Looks like this happens a lot. I think the move from solid to mesh seat back pockets is a good thing. But that weekend, as I continued to steal my wife’s Nexus 7, I realized how much I used that tablet. So Sunday night, I hopped on Amazon and found a refurb 8-inch Samsung Galaxy Tab Pro for $200. Sold. I bought it on my son’s Prime account for cheap next day shipping. It’s a nice piece of kit -- bright screen, quick performance, which was a very pleasant change because after Google pushed the latest Android update (Lollipop) to my Nexus 7, its performance cratered to the point of nearly being unusable. It was nice not having a 2-3 second lag between screen touch and reaction. That following week, as I was adjusting my backpack contents -- notebook, Bose headphones, and now my Samsung tablet, I was having problems getting things to fit. I reached in to move some stuff around -- and found my Nexus 7. I hadn’t left in a seat-back pocket. I’d just lost it in my backpack. I gotta get a non-black case next time.</li>\r\n	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Emily C</em> by Fiasco</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Awful Winter Travel</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Now that the US snow cover appears to be retreating -- though Boston did get some more snow last weekend -- I’m hoping that we can bid farewell to what was a really lousy start to the year -- at least from a travel perspective. It kinda caught me by surprise because the start of the winter season -- end of Nov and through December -- wasn’t bad at all. But January started to have it’s problems, and then February -- it was 4 weeks of travel hell for just about everywhere in the US east of the Rockies. Cold, Snow, Ice, Wind -- kinda the 4 winter horsemen of the travel apocalypse.</li>\r\n	<li>Every week seemed to have yet another disruption. I think it started with the Snopocalypse that wasn’t in New York and New Jersey. Mayors, governors closing offices, schools, roads, towns on the forecast of massive/huge/historic (they started to run out of adjectives) snowfall -- only to see, what, 4-6 inches? But everyone had flights delayed, cancelled -- it seemed to take the next couple of days before everyone got back in the traces. Only to have a real snow storm blow them back the next week. I had a string of I think 3 Mondays of flight cancellations. I’d get on a weekly conference call and half of everybody was not where they were supposed to be -- cancelled flights, diverted flights, working from home,.... One colleague trying to fly from Ft Myers, FL to Memphis (for work obviously) on Delta. Lands at ATL only to find they’d cancelled his MEM flight due to an ice storm. “When can I get there?” “We don’t know”. He turned around and went back home for the week. His clients couldn’t get to their offices for 3 days.</li>\r\n	<li>As I mentioned in the <a title=\"Podcast #113 — 2014 was a Bad Year to Fly; Restaurant Trends Go Local\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/01/27/podcast-113-2014-was-a-bad-year-to-fly-restaurant-trends-go-local/\">last podcast</a>, I tried to be a bit more strategic in my travel -- picking some warm spots when I could, avoiding known trouble spots. I cringed whenever I had to fly to the East Coast, but sometimes I got lucky -- I hit San Antonio on a 70 degree day. The day after I left, it dropped down to 40. I managed to wrangle a half-week in Phoenix in mid-February. Mid-70’s and sunny -- I was outside every minute I could. Flying home, it was 77 degrees when I left PHX; -2 degrees when I landed at ORD. I thought I was going to shatter when I walked onto the jet bridge.</li>\r\n	<li>I think the pinnacle was when the Delta jet slid off the LaGuardia runway, hit a fence, and came within yards of dumping into Jamaica Bay. Landing at any of those small, near-in airports -- LaGuardia, Washington Reagan, Chicago Midway -- are like putting down on an aircraft carrier, not a lot of room for error. Add snow or ice -- I’m surprised it doesn’t happen more often. Luckily, this one wasn’t fatal -- not like the Air Florida crash out of what was then Washington National on a snowy January, or the Southwest 737 that slid off the end of a Midway runway, through a fence and into a street intersection, crushing a car waiting at the red light, killing a small boy. This was just more inconvenience -- closing LGA for 7 hours, taking a big chunk of capacity out of what is already the most crowded/overtaxed airspace in the country. A friend trying to fly home to New York that afternoon boarded her flight, it pushed back, only to pull back in after it was cancelled. It was just one more delay, one more cancellation. I was a little luckier. Even though I was flying from Memphis to Chicago, some piece of my flight -- the plane, the crew -- got caught up in that East Coast mess. But thanks to the wonders of mobile message updates, I was able to track the delays from the relative comfort of a Mexican bar in East Memphis. One margarita with an high-school buddy turned to two turned to dinner with his wife joining us. I, unlike so many others, got home that night and had something other than bad airport food to show for it.</li>\r\n	<li>The next week -- yet another delay on my New Orleans-Chicago flight. Late inbound aircraft. But why? ORD and MSY were fine; all the weather was again in the East. No one knew, not even the pilot. When we finally boarded the flight, he keyed the mic and said, “I’m awfully sorry about this delay. I wish I could tell you why, but I have no idea. The plane arrived Chicago on time from San Antonio and then just sat there. I wish I could tell you why.”</li>\r\n	<li>I dunno -- maybe they lost it behind a snow drift.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music — <em>Keep Your Motor Running</em> by Dave Hole</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Hospitality Beats Points</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>One morning in some concierge lounge in some Marriott or Sheraton that I can’t quite place, I opened my umpteenth warming dish, looked in at yet another pond of runny scrambled eggs and wondered “Really? How difficult is it to properly cook institutional egg mix?”</li>\r\n	<li>Just about every poll of statused hotel travelers rank free WiFi and free breakfast as the top amenities, the ones that keep travelers working to maintain status. But when you actually use those amenities, they’re often not so great -- slow WiFi (even the “enhanced speeds” that Marriott promises their gold and platinum members), semi-liquid scrambled eggs and stacks of over-cooked bacon.</li>\r\n	<li>Which is a problem, because just about every hotel chain in the past couple of years has raised the number of points needed for a room and also created a new top tier for the best/most popular properties -- added, say, a Category 6 so they could charge even more points for that Maui property -- devaluing that big point balance -- your vacation savings account -- that you “road warriored” so hard to build.</li>\r\n	<li>So if the points aren’t worth as much anymore, what keeps travelers loyal to a brand, what keeps you staying in, say, a Marriott 75 nights or 25 stays in a Westin to make top-tier platinum? It should be those amenities -- but how loyalty are those scrambled eggs worth? They’re convenient, but don’t differentiate much.</li>\r\n	<li>Some places are ditching the whole lounge idea. I’ve been in some Renaissance hotels and Marriott Autograph hotels that serve the free breakfast in their restaurant -- there’s the standard-looking buffet, but if you have the time, you can order anything off the menu. Blows my diet a bit, but beats 4 mornings straight of scrambled eggs.</li>\r\n	<li>I have noticed, though, that I’m being offered more specialty perks at places that I’m staying a lot. The Sheraton on Canal St in New Orleans will occasionally offer me basketball tickets -- the Pelicans are actually doing well this year -- and had some special grandstand deals to watch the Mardi Gras parades in front of the hotel. I didn’t take them up on either of their offers -- I had other commitments -- but it was nice to get the offer.</li>\r\n	<li>I call it the “Cheers” effect -- you want to go where everyone knows your name. When you’re away from home, you want someone to smile and ask how you’re doing. And it’s not just hotels. The morning barista crew at the Starbucks on Canal St and St Charles fire up a spinach feta wrap when they see me walk through the door, even when it’s been a couple of weeks since my last visit.</li>\r\n	<li>Of course, there is a fine line that can be crossed. Like a friend of mine, she received Christmas presents from a front desk clerk for years (!) after about an 18-month gig that had her weekly at the Trumbull CT Marriott. Or when I first started traveling for business, I was commuting between Dallas and Chicago, passing through the DFW Admirals Club every Monday morning. After about 3 months, one of the agents who’d I’d gotten to know asked me if I’d like to meet her daughter. Awkward. But in what I still think is one of my best moments, I asked her “Do you really want your daughter dating someone who travels as much as I do?” She thought for a moment, “No, not really”. Awkwardness averted, and we went on to have a nice friendship until I moved back to Chicago a year later.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917626811171154.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #115</li>\r\n	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://musicalley.com\">Music Alley</a></li>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_115.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #115 — A Decade of TravelCommons','','inherit','open','open','','1505-revision-v1','','','2015-05-12 22:04:18','2015-05-13 03:04:18','',1505,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/05/12/1505-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1507,1,'2015-05-12 23:09:00','2015-05-13 04:09:00','Recorded at the JW Marriott in New Orleans together with a GoPro <a title=\"Podcast #114 Uncut — The LoFi Video Version\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/03/20/podcast-114-uncut-the-lofi-video-version/\">video</a> capturing all the unedited bits. We go deep in a comparison of public transit and drive times to US airports, shed a tear for SkyMall magazine, and marvel at the stack of lost Android tablets at American Airlines\' ORD lost-and-found. We talk about what has been an awful start to the travel year in the US east of the Rocky Mountains, and wrap up with some observations about how hotel perks have become more important than points. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_115.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/196973214\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #115:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, so no video “uncut” version like I did last episode from New Orleans. No maid service in the TravelCommons studio to tidy up before the podcast.</li>\r\n	<li>We’re deep in the bipolar weather roller coaster that is Spring in the Midwest -- 70’s one day, 40’s the next; bright sun at 10 in the morning, pissing down rain at noon. Which is as good an explanation as any why Chicago’s two airports, O’Hare and Midway, own the basement of the DOT’s on-time departures ranking.</li>\r\n	<li>My travel has been a bit more interesting since the last episode. Did a few of my normal runs down to New Orleans, but broke the pattern a bit with travel to Denver and Charlotte. And even one of the runs down to New Orleans broke the usual down-Monday-back-Thursday routine. At the beginning of April, I flew down Thursday night with my wife and daughter, met up with friends for the French Quarter Fest weekend. It’s one of my favorite music festivals. Free music from local bands; stages and food stands spread around the Quarter -- a bit lower key than the 460,000 people who descended on the Fair Grounds for Jazz Fest a few weeks back.</li>\r\n	<li>The big trip, though, was a couple of weeks prior to that when we went to Andalucia -- southern Spain -- for Spring Break and found ourselves there during Semana Santa -- Holy Week. Cordoba, Granada, Sevilla, the hill town of Ronda. Processions (plural) almost every night. My wife said it was like the Tour de France for Catholics. And as a Catholic, I couldn’t argue -- it was pretty full contact. I posted a <a href=\"https://vine.co/v/OL66AUgHwwi\">Vine video</a> of a Granada procession to my <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter feed</a> and then a couple of minutes of GoPro footage from the last Holy Thursday procession in Sevilla on the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons\">Facebook</a> page and <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\">YouTube channel</a>. It was close to midnight, after which I think they took an hour break and then started up the Good Friday processions. We went to bed. When we went out the next morning around 8:30 to grab some breakfast -- our usual of cafe con leche and tomato bread topped with jamón iberico -- the restaurant was jammed with people who just finished a procession. It just kept going.</li>\r\n	<li>And so do we. I drained my United account for a trip next month to Japan, and then in September, we’re heading over to Scotland so my daughter can start at the <a href=\"http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/\">University of St Andrews</a>, so I should have enough content to keep TravelCommons rolling into an 11th year.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>10p Mix</em> by <a href=\"http://www.last.fm/music/Amplifico\">amplifico</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Before we get into the meat of things, just a quick pointer to let everyone know that TravelCommons is available on the Stitcher radio smartphone app as well as on <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>. Since iTunes started handling podcasts -- June 2005, right around episodes <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/06/19/podcast-6-the-tsa-talks-back/\">6</a> or <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/06/29/podcast-7-eating-alone-classic-travel-stories/\">7</a> -- it dominated the TravelCommons download stats. Now it’s only responsible for a third of the downloads.</li>\r\n	<li>Rummaging through the mailbag…</li>\r\n	<li>Back last November in episode <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/11/22/podcast-112-holiday-airport-etiquette-travel-tax-pile-up/\">112</a>, Dan Gradwohl sent me a pointer to the website <a href=\"http://www.toandfromtheairport.com/\">To and From The Airport</a>, a collation of airport transit options. In that episode, I talked about reviewing the ORD listing and sending in a few updates. Toward the end of March, I received a note thanking me for my contribution and apologizing for the delay. Whatever issues were happening there now seem to have passed; it appears the site is back to being actively maintained.</li>\r\n	<li>Tom Brown, a longtime TravelCommons listener, sent a note following up on last episode’s riff on Nate Silver’s <a href=\"http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/planes-trains-and-taxis-when-to-take-public-transit-from-the-airport/\">538 blog post</a> about mass transit times to major US airports. He wrote:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>You noted London as the gold standard of public transport out of the airport. I would put it at bronze at best.  Decaying infrastructure, not so comfortable trains and destination not so friendly to business traveler in London doesn\'t help its ranking. Singapore is the best in my opinion with Hong Kong 2nd. Tokyo even ranks above London to me.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>Tom, thanks for that, expanding our sample size. My past trips thru Hong Kong and Singapore were family vacations - late arrivals from the US, tired kids, too much luggage - and so opted for taxis instead on mass transit. I missed the opportunity to add those trains to my personal sample, but I did end up with one of the wackiest cab rides while in HK. It was kind of a hoarder cab -- newspapers filling the trunk, tchotchkes all over the dashboard and hanging from the roof. I don’t know how we got 4 people and 4 bags into that cab. As I mentioned earlier, we’ll be flying in and out of Narita at the back half of June and given the distance and cab fares, we’ll take the Tokyo train at least once.</li>\r\n	<li>Our Spring Break trip to Andalucia started with a flight into Madrid airport. Our plans had us landing in Madrid, then making the 20-min schlep in from Terminal 4 (could they have put that terminal any further out?) and then heading downtown to catch the high-speed Renfe train to Córdoba. After I booked the tickets on-line (a process made infinitely easier than 2 years ago now that Renfe accepts PayPal) I was pleasantly surprised to stumble across a TripAdvisor post saying that the tickets included a free train ride down to the Puerta Atocha train station. It wasn\'t the fastest ride - a local train that made 4-5 stops before Atocha - but it was clean and not beat up. And since we were headed downtown during Friday rush hour, it took the same 30 min that Google Maps estimated for the cab.</li>\r\n	<li>And continuing on the transit theme, Nick Gassman sent a note about comments I made in episode <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/10/12/podcast-111-seatback-recline-wars-craft-beer-tourism/\">111</a> about the proliferation of pre-paid cards for subway and mass transit systems. Nick says about the London Underground:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>You can use your own contactless payment card (Visa, Amex etc) without having to buy an Oyster card, and get the same rates. You can register the card if you wish, to track spend.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>The link to the Tube web page is similar to the Chicago L page -- it feels a bit ambiguous, probably because the contactless technology is still a bit young, a bit ambiguous itself. Both London and Chicago say they’ll also work with NFC mobile phones -- like the latest Samsung Galaxies, the HTC Ones, and the iPhone 6. I think I’ve just got to get over to an L station and give it a try. But it’s probably not the kind of experiment I want to try and debug during rush hour when there’s a couple hundred hard-core commuters storming the 3-4 tap through gates. Seems like more of a midday or weekend morning thing.</li>\r\n	<li>Reaching back again to episode <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/11/22/podcast-112-holiday-airport-etiquette-travel-tax-pile-up/\">112 </a>where I talked about funding the Indiegogo campaign for the Bluesmart carry-on bag, what they call “The First Smart, Connected Luggage” complete with a smartphone app that acts as a digital lock, a scale, tracks location, and sounds an alarm if your smart bag wanders off. They’ve gotten huge press; they blew thru the funding goal by 3800%. But now they have to deliver the bag. They’ve been doing a good job of pushing out <a href=\"https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/bluesmart-world-s-first-smart-connected-carry-on#activity\">updates </a>and seem to be sticking to their August ship date. Which would be good for them because competitors are starting to move into this space. I tweeted out a link to an Engadget story last week about Samsung and Samsonite partnering up on a line of smart suitcases with functionality that sounds very similar to Bluesmart’s. Then I received a press release in the TravelCommons e-mail box from Planet Traveler <a href=\"http://www.planettravelerusa.com/preorder\">announcing</a> a Kickstarter campaign for the Space Case 1 line of smart luggage which will have all the functionality of the Bluesmart bag <i>plus</i> fingerprint unlock <i>and</i> Bluetooth speakers. As if the gate areas aren’t noisy enough.</li>\r\n	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\">Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Emily C</em> by Fiasco</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<b>A Decade of TravelCommons</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>It was four years ago <i>today </i>that I recorded the first T/C podcast in the bathroom of the Wardman Park Marriott in NW Washington, DC</li>\r\n	<li>[tc1-opening &amp; 1]</li>\r\n	<li>It was an interesting mix of topics…\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>TSA problems in ORD, LGA and DCA, the first of many TSA rants over the years;</li>\r\n	<li>The first sighting of a “puffer” security screening machine, don’t know if you ever walked through one of those, but we also talked about their multi-million dollar demise in an episode a some years later;</li>\r\n	<li>Hungarian roadside prostitutes -- a topic that I don’t believe I’ve revisited</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>And it was the first in a long string of what one listener referred to as a “pottycast” -- using the tile of hotel bathrooms as a poor man’s reverb chamber</li>\r\n	<li>[tc74-hotel medley]</li>\r\n	<li>Listening to that, I now understand why I have lifetime Marriott Platinum status.</li>\r\n	<li>One of the more noticeable changes over the years has been about the TSA. Early podcasts railed against the TSA -- the security theatre, the shoe carnival, liquid bans, and of course, the power trips</li>\r\n	<li>[tc45-finding tooth powder]</li>\r\n	<li>But with some much needed customer service training and, most importantly, the introduction of PreCheck, the TSA isn’t the podcast pinata it had been for the first 4-5 years -- especially when compared to airport security in places like India</li>\r\n	<li>[tc109-mall cop, umbrella]</li>\r\n	<li>Travel technology has been one constant through the TravelCommons decade</li>\r\n	<li>[tc87-briefcase]</li>\r\n	<li>[tc91-too much technology]</li>\r\n	<li>And while I’ve cycled through a number of phones, tablets, and laptops, the Bose noise-cancelling headphones remain the official headphones of the TravelCommons podcast</li>\r\n	<li>[tc48-bose lust]</li>\r\n	<li>Food has also been a common theme…</li>\r\n	<li>[tc97-food]</li>\r\n	<li>[tc59-past menus]</li>\r\n	<li>Never one to be accused of being a travel industry cheerleader…</li>\r\n	<li>[tc92-not-so-upbeat]</li>\r\n	<li>But I always try, if only partially successfully, to maintain some perspective</li>\r\n	<li>[t61-zen]</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917626811171154.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #115</li>\r\n	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n	<li>Links to 3 prior anniversary episodes\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/12/27/podcast-27-best-of-2005/\" target=\"_blank\">Episode 27</a> -- Best of 2005</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2006/06/13/podcast-40-looking-back-over-the-first-year/\" target=\"_blank\">Episode 40</a> -- Looking Back Over the First Year</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2009/05/14/podcast-74-looking-back-over-four-years-of-travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Episode 74</a> -- Looking Back Over Four Years</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://musicalley.com\">Music Alley</a></li>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_115.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #115 — A Decade of TravelCommons','','inherit','open','open','','1505-revision-v1','','','2015-05-12 23:09:00','2015-05-13 04:09:00','',1505,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/05/12/1505-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1508,1,'2015-05-12 23:17:42','2015-05-13 04:17:42','','2014-06-01 15.20.55','Been on Duty for 10 Years...','inherit','open','open','','2014-06-01-15-20-55','','','2015-05-12 23:19:37','2015-05-13 04:19:37','',1505,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/2014-06-01-15.20.55.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(1509,1,'2015-05-12 23:20:18','2015-05-13 04:20:18','[caption id=\"attachment_1508\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"228\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/2014-06-01-15.20.55-e1431490750219.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1508\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/2014-06-01-15.20.55-e1431490750219-228x300.jpg\" alt=\"Been on Duty for 10 Years...\" width=\"228\" height=\"300\" /></a> Been on Duty for 10 Years...[/caption]\r\n\r\nRecorded at the JW Marriott in New Orleans together with a GoPro <a title=\"Podcast #114 Uncut — The LoFi Video Version\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/03/20/podcast-114-uncut-the-lofi-video-version/\">video</a> capturing all the unedited bits. We go deep in a comparison of public transit and drive times to US airports, shed a tear for SkyMall magazine, and marvel at the stack of lost Android tablets at American Airlines\' ORD lost-and-found. We talk about what has been an awful start to the travel year in the US east of the Rocky Mountains, and wrap up with some observations about how hotel perks have become more important than points. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_115.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/196973214\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #115:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, so no video “uncut” version like I did last episode from New Orleans. No maid service in the TravelCommons studio to tidy up before the podcast.</li>\r\n	<li>We’re deep in the bipolar weather roller coaster that is Spring in the Midwest -- 70’s one day, 40’s the next; bright sun at 10 in the morning, pissing down rain at noon. Which is as good an explanation as any why Chicago’s two airports, O’Hare and Midway, own the basement of the DOT’s on-time departures ranking.</li>\r\n	<li>My travel has been a bit more interesting since the last episode. Did a few of my normal runs down to New Orleans, but broke the pattern a bit with travel to Denver and Charlotte. And even one of the runs down to New Orleans broke the usual down-Monday-back-Thursday routine. At the beginning of April, I flew down Thursday night with my wife and daughter, met up with friends for the French Quarter Fest weekend. It’s one of my favorite music festivals. Free music from local bands; stages and food stands spread around the Quarter -- a bit lower key than the 460,000 people who descended on the Fair Grounds for Jazz Fest a few weeks back.</li>\r\n	<li>The big trip, though, was a couple of weeks prior to that when we went to Andalucia -- southern Spain -- for Spring Break and found ourselves there during Semana Santa -- Holy Week. Cordoba, Granada, Sevilla, the hill town of Ronda. Processions (plural) almost every night. My wife said it was like the Tour de France for Catholics. And as a Catholic, I couldn’t argue -- it was pretty full contact. I posted a <a href=\"https://vine.co/v/OL66AUgHwwi\">Vine video</a> of a Granada procession to my <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter feed</a> and then a couple of minutes of GoPro footage from the last Holy Thursday procession in Sevilla on the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons\">Facebook</a> page and <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\">YouTube channel</a>. It was close to midnight, after which I think they took an hour break and then started up the Good Friday processions. We went to bed. When we went out the next morning around 8:30 to grab some breakfast -- our usual of cafe con leche and tomato bread topped with jamón iberico -- the restaurant was jammed with people who just finished a procession. It just kept going.</li>\r\n	<li>And so do we. I drained my United account for a trip next month to Japan, and then in September, we’re heading over to Scotland so my daughter can start at the <a href=\"http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/\">University of St Andrews</a>, so I should have enough content to keep TravelCommons rolling into an 11th year.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>10p Mix</em> by <a href=\"http://www.last.fm/music/Amplifico\">amplifico</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Before we get into the meat of things, just a quick pointer to let everyone know that TravelCommons is available on the Stitcher radio smartphone app as well as on <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>. Since iTunes started handling podcasts -- June 2005, right around episodes <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/06/19/podcast-6-the-tsa-talks-back/\">6</a> or <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/06/29/podcast-7-eating-alone-classic-travel-stories/\">7</a> -- it dominated the TravelCommons download stats. Now it’s only responsible for a third of the downloads.</li>\r\n	<li>Rummaging through the mailbag…</li>\r\n	<li>Back last November in episode <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/11/22/podcast-112-holiday-airport-etiquette-travel-tax-pile-up/\">112</a>, Dan Gradwohl sent me a pointer to the website <a href=\"http://www.toandfromtheairport.com/\">To and From The Airport</a>, a collation of airport transit options. In that episode, I talked about reviewing the ORD listing and sending in a few updates. Toward the end of March, I received a note thanking me for my contribution and apologizing for the delay. Whatever issues were happening there now seem to have passed; it appears the site is back to being actively maintained.</li>\r\n	<li>Tom Brown, a longtime TravelCommons listener, sent a note following up on last episode’s riff on Nate Silver’s <a href=\"http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/planes-trains-and-taxis-when-to-take-public-transit-from-the-airport/\">538 blog post</a> about mass transit times to major US airports. He wrote:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>You noted London as the gold standard of public transport out of the airport. I would put it at bronze at best.  Decaying infrastructure, not so comfortable trains and destination not so friendly to business traveler in London doesn\'t help its ranking. Singapore is the best in my opinion with Hong Kong 2nd. Tokyo even ranks above London to me.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>Tom, thanks for that, expanding our sample size. My past trips thru Hong Kong and Singapore were family vacations - late arrivals from the US, tired kids, too much luggage - and so opted for taxis instead on mass transit. I missed the opportunity to add those trains to my personal sample, but I did end up with one of the wackiest cab rides while in HK. It was kind of a hoarder cab -- newspapers filling the trunk, tchotchkes all over the dashboard and hanging from the roof. I don’t know how we got 4 people and 4 bags into that cab. As I mentioned earlier, we’ll be flying in and out of Narita at the back half of June and given the distance and cab fares, we’ll take the Tokyo train at least once.</li>\r\n	<li>Our Spring Break trip to Andalucia started with a flight into Madrid airport. Our plans had us landing in Madrid, then making the 20-min schlep in from Terminal 4 (could they have put that terminal any further out?) and then heading downtown to catch the high-speed Renfe train to Córdoba. After I booked the tickets on-line (a process made infinitely easier than 2 years ago now that Renfe accepts PayPal) I was pleasantly surprised to stumble across a TripAdvisor post saying that the tickets included a free train ride down to the Puerta Atocha train station. It wasn\'t the fastest ride - a local train that made 4-5 stops before Atocha - but it was clean and not beat up. And since we were headed downtown during Friday rush hour, it took the same 30 min that Google Maps estimated for the cab.</li>\r\n	<li>And continuing on the transit theme, Nick Gassman sent a note about comments I made in episode <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/10/12/podcast-111-seatback-recline-wars-craft-beer-tourism/\">111</a> about the proliferation of pre-paid cards for subway and mass transit systems. Nick says about the London Underground:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>You can use your own contactless payment card (Visa, Amex etc) without having to buy an Oyster card, and get the same rates. You can register the card if you wish, to track spend.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>The link to the Tube web page is similar to the Chicago L page -- it feels a bit ambiguous, probably because the contactless technology is still a bit young, a bit ambiguous itself. Both London and Chicago say they’ll also work with NFC mobile phones -- like the latest Samsung Galaxies, the HTC Ones, and the iPhone 6. I think I’ve just got to get over to an L station and give it a try. But it’s probably not the kind of experiment I want to try and debug during rush hour when there’s a couple hundred hard-core commuters storming the 3-4 tap through gates. Seems like more of a midday or weekend morning thing.</li>\r\n	<li>Reaching back again to episode <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/11/22/podcast-112-holiday-airport-etiquette-travel-tax-pile-up/\">112 </a>where I talked about funding the Indiegogo campaign for the Bluesmart carry-on bag, what they call “The First Smart, Connected Luggage” complete with a smartphone app that acts as a digital lock, a scale, tracks location, and sounds an alarm if your smart bag wanders off. They’ve gotten huge press; they blew thru the funding goal by 3800%. But now they have to deliver the bag. They’ve been doing a good job of pushing out <a href=\"https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/bluesmart-world-s-first-smart-connected-carry-on#activity\">updates </a>and seem to be sticking to their August ship date. Which would be good for them because competitors are starting to move into this space. I tweeted out a link to an Engadget story last week about Samsung and Samsonite partnering up on a line of smart suitcases with functionality that sounds very similar to Bluesmart’s. Then I received a press release in the TravelCommons e-mail box from Planet Traveler <a href=\"http://www.planettravelerusa.com/preorder\">announcing</a> a Kickstarter campaign for the Space Case 1 line of smart luggage which will have all the functionality of the Bluesmart bag <i>plus</i> fingerprint unlock <i>and</i> Bluetooth speakers. As if the gate areas aren’t noisy enough.</li>\r\n	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\">Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Emily C</em> by Fiasco</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<b>A Decade of TravelCommons</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>It was four years ago <i>today </i>that I recorded the first T/C podcast in the bathroom of the Wardman Park Marriott in NW Washington, DC</li>\r\n	<li>[tc1-opening &amp; 1]</li>\r\n	<li>It was an interesting mix of topics…\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>TSA problems in ORD, LGA and DCA, the first of many TSA rants over the years;</li>\r\n	<li>The first sighting of a “puffer” security screening machine, don’t know if you ever walked through one of those, but we also talked about their multi-million dollar demise in an episode a some years later;</li>\r\n	<li>Hungarian roadside prostitutes -- a topic that I don’t believe I’ve revisited</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>And it was the first in a long string of what one listener referred to as a “pottycast” -- using the tile of hotel bathrooms as a poor man’s reverb chamber</li>\r\n	<li>[tc74-hotel medley]</li>\r\n	<li>Listening to that, I now understand why I have lifetime Marriott Platinum status.</li>\r\n	<li>One of the more noticeable changes over the years has been about the TSA. Early podcasts railed against the TSA -- the security theatre, the shoe carnival, liquid bans, and of course, the power trips</li>\r\n	<li>[tc45-finding tooth powder]</li>\r\n	<li>But with some much needed customer service training and, most importantly, the introduction of PreCheck, the TSA isn’t the podcast pinata it had been for the first 4-5 years -- especially when compared to airport security in places like India</li>\r\n	<li>[tc109-mall cop, umbrella]</li>\r\n	<li>Travel technology has been one constant through the TravelCommons decade</li>\r\n	<li>[tc87-briefcase]</li>\r\n	<li>[tc91-too much technology]</li>\r\n	<li>And while I’ve cycled through a number of phones, tablets, and laptops, the Bose noise-cancelling headphones remain the official headphones of the TravelCommons podcast</li>\r\n	<li>[tc48-bose lust]</li>\r\n	<li>Food has also been a common theme…</li>\r\n	<li>[tc97-food]</li>\r\n	<li>[tc59-past menus]</li>\r\n	<li>Never one to be accused of being a travel industry cheerleader…</li>\r\n	<li>[tc92-not-so-upbeat]</li>\r\n	<li>But I always try, if only partially successfully, to maintain some perspective</li>\r\n	<li>[t61-zen]</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917626811171154.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #115</li>\r\n	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n	<li>Links to 3 prior anniversary episodes\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/12/27/podcast-27-best-of-2005/\" target=\"_blank\">Episode 27</a> -- Best of 2005</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2006/06/13/podcast-40-looking-back-over-the-first-year/\" target=\"_blank\">Episode 40</a> -- Looking Back Over the First Year</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2009/05/14/podcast-74-looking-back-over-four-years-of-travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Episode 74</a> -- Looking Back Over Four Years</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://musicalley.com\">Music Alley</a></li>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_115.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #115 — A Decade of TravelCommons','','inherit','open','open','','1505-revision-v1','','','2015-05-12 23:20:18','2015-05-13 04:20:18','',1505,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/05/12/1505-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1510,1,'2015-05-13 07:43:50','2015-05-13 12:43:50','[caption id=\"attachment_1433\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/2014_01_19_12_55.jpeg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1433\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/2014_01_19_12_55-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"Is Our Plane Behind That?\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Is Our Plane Behind That?[/caption]\n\nRecorded at the JW Marriott in New Orleans together with a GoPro <a title=\"Podcast #114 Uncut — The LoFi Video Version\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/03/20/podcast-114-uncut-the-lofi-video-version/\">video</a> capturing all the unedited bits. We go deep in a comparison of public transit and drive times to US airports, shed a tear for SkyMall magazine, and marvel at the stack of lost Android tablets at American Airlines\' ORD lost-and-found. We talk about what has been an awful start to the travel year in the US east of the Rocky Mountains, and wrap up with some observations about how hotel perks have become more important than points. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_114.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/196973214\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\n\n<!--more-->\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #114:\n<ul>\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n	<li>Which made me happy to head to ORD when I was flying south -- mostly to New Orleans, but the flight to Phoenix made me really smile. I think it was 15 degrees when I left Chicago and about 70 degrees when I landed. I spent at much time as possible outside, trying to resolve what I figured had to be a Vitamin D deficiency. I did get a chuckle on my last night there. I was sitting outside at a bar, must’ve been the low 60’s and they had the heat lamps on.</li>\n	<li>I also flew through Memphis this past month. The flight selection in and out of there just gets worse. That airport is becoming a ghost town since Delta dismantled the hub that Northwest had there. Indeed, they have a 2-year project to shrink the airport -- demolish half the A and C concourses, mothball what remains, and consolidate everyone into the B concourse. Kinda surprising when some airports are at capacity with people sprawling on the floor, there are other airports with concourses that could double for bowling alleys. How much does the economy have to improve for it make sense for the airlines to start adding back some capacity?</li>\n	<li>This coming week has me tempting the travel gods, hoping for better weather, with two up-and-backs to the East Coast -- a day trip to Newark and an overnight to Philadelphia. Perhaps a precautionary sacrifice is in order, but what? Maybe a sacrificial offering -- I dowse my travel size tube of Crest toothpaste with the extra bottle of Dewar’s</li>\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>10p Mix</em> by <a href=\"http://www.last.fm/music/Amplifico\">amplifico</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n	<li>Spelunking through my Twitter feed…</li>\n	<li>Another thing that made me smile on my flight down to PHX last month wasn’t that I scored a 1st Class upgrade on American -- it was that the upgrade let me hear a woman ask, as she walks on the plane, to be reseated away from the plane’s WiFi access point because she’s allergic to WiFi.  Just when you think you’ve heard everything on a airplane… This seems absurd in just so many ways. Like, how did she make it through the terminal without going into anaphylactic shock? Run a WiFi analyzer app on your phone or tablet the next time you’re in an airport and you’ll see that we’re wading through a sea of WiFi signals. And what about the passengers sitting all around her -- because nobody remembers to shut off the WiFi on their laptops or tablets. And I guess she didn’t stop off at Starbucks on the way to ORD. As it was, the flight attendants just looked at one another -- like they (or anyone) would know exactly where the GoGo access point was located on a 737, and like they’d want to rejuggle seats on a 737 completely full of families heading out on Spring Break. They just mumbled “We’ll ask someone” and gently pushed her down the aisle.</li>\n	<li>Taking mass transit to and from the airport is a running theme (fixation?) here at TravelCommons, so I immediately clicked through a tweet from Nate Silver’s 538 blog that went geekily deep on that, <a href=\"http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/planes-trains-and-taxis-when-to-take-public-transit-from-the-airport/\">comparing </a>public transit and driving times from the airport to downtown for the 40 busiest US airports. Only in Minneapolis, Honolulu, and Chicago (both ORD and MDW) is public transit quicker than taking a cab. If open the range a bit -- saying anything within 5 minutes is a toss-up, the list gets a lot longer -- Washington Reagan, Atlanta, San Diego, San Francisco, Austin. Open it to 10 minutes, which could be worth it given the cost difference, brings in Boston, Charlotte, Seattle, San Francisco but from OAK this time, and New York’s JFK. A number of these work because they’re close-in airports -- Chicago Midway, Washington Reagan. Others because the highway traffic is so bad -- most notably O’Hare and JFK. The list is ranked by public transit time and for the top 15 -- plus JFK which is #30 -- public transit times are reasonable enough to make the cost-convenience trade-off compelling. Some of the airports below that line that I know -- New Orleans, Orange County Calif, Detroit -- I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a public transit sign in those place. PDX jumped out at me. I <a title=\"Podcast #103 — Hospitality is Personal; Tablets Everywhere\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2013/01/24/podcast-103-hospitality-is-personal-tablets-everywhere/\">talked </a>about taking that airport light rail in an earlier episode. It’s a nice service, but it takes a while -- it makes a lot of intermediate stops -- and so it doesn’t compare well to a cab ride that takes half the time. Of course the gold standard is London’s Heathrow Express  -- a 15-minute straight shot from Paddington Station vs. an hour cab ride. But that’s not a real apples-to-apples comparison -- a Heathrow Express ticket is £21.50 (over $30) vs. $5 for ORD or $7.50 for JFK. The better comparison might be the £5.70 ($8.50) ride on the Tube’s Piccadilly Line that takes 50-60 minutes, which would fit in at the bottom of the top 15 US list.</li>\n	<li>Waiting out an unbelievably long delay on a United ORD-DEN flight, I ran through all of my reading material -- electronic versions of the Wall Street Journal and NY Times, physical version of the Chicago Tribune, my Feedly newsreader stream, multiple refreshes of Twitter -- and so had to dive into the seatback pocket, the emptiness of which reminded me of SkyMall magazine’s bankruptcy at the end of January. SkyMall was always good for at least 15 minutes of entertainment, along the lines of “who in the world would buy that?” -- the zombie statue crawling out of your garden, the kickboard suitcase, the NFL wine shoe holder…. until last Christmas, when a friend bought my present out of SkyMall -- a 6-bottle leather wine holder for my bicycle. Stunning. I can’t wait for the snow to melt to try it. I only fly Delta when I absolutely have to (like to ATL or MEM) so I didn’t notice when they canned SkyMall back in Nov -- “We saw a decline in customer use,” they said. Yup, every electronic thing I read prior to reaching for SkyMall -- the WSJ, NYT, Feedly, Twitter; I could add Facebook; if I was younger I could add Tumblr. I think the minute the FAA allowed us to keep tablets on during take-off and landing, SkyMall was a dead man walking...</li>\n	<li>And speaking of tablets, last month I thought I’d left my Google Nexus 7 behind on one of my American flights home from New Orleans. It was one in what seemed to be a stream of stuff I’d lost on the road -- a couple of pairs of sunglasses, earbuds, and now this. I went to the American’s lost-and-found in ORD. The woman came out with a stack of 10-12 7-inch Android tablets -- Lenovo’s, Samsung’s, but not mine. I could see she had a similar sized stack of iPad Mini’s. Looks like this happens a lot. I think the move from solid to mesh seat back pockets is a good thing. But that weekend, as I continued to steal my wife’s Nexus 7, I realized how much I used that tablet. So Sunday night, I hopped on Amazon and found a refurb 8-inch Samsung Galaxy Tab Pro for $200. Sold. I bought it on my son’s Prime account for cheap next day shipping. It’s a nice piece of kit -- bright screen, quick performance, which was a very pleasant change because after Google pushed the latest Android update (Lollipop) to my Nexus 7, its performance cratered to the point of nearly being unusable. It was nice not having a 2-3 second lag between screen touch and reaction. That following week, as I was adjusting my backpack contents -- notebook, Bose headphones, and now my Samsung tablet, I was having problems getting things to fit. I reached in to move some stuff around -- and found my Nexus 7. I hadn’t left in a seat-back pocket. I’d just lost it in my backpack. I gotta get a non-black case next time.</li>\n	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Emily C</em> by Fiasco</li>\n</ul>\n<b>Awful Winter Travel</b>\n<ul>\n	<li>Now that the US snow cover appears to be retreating -- though Boston did get some more snow last weekend -- I’m hoping that we can bid farewell to what was a really lousy start to the year -- at least from a travel perspective. It kinda caught me by surprise because the start of the winter season -- end of Nov and through December -- wasn’t bad at all. But January started to have it’s problems, and then February -- it was 4 weeks of travel hell for just about everywhere in the US east of the Rockies. Cold, Snow, Ice, Wind -- kinda the 4 winter horsemen of the travel apocalypse.</li>\n	<li>Every week seemed to have yet another disruption. I think it started with the Snopocalypse that wasn’t in New York and New Jersey. Mayors, governors closing offices, schools, roads, towns on the forecast of massive/huge/historic (they started to run out of adjectives) snowfall -- only to see, what, 4-6 inches? But everyone had flights delayed, cancelled -- it seemed to take the next couple of days before everyone got back in the traces. Only to have a real snow storm blow them back the next week. I had a string of I think 3 Mondays of flight cancellations. I’d get on a weekly conference call and half of everybody was not where they were supposed to be -- cancelled flights, diverted flights, working from home,.... One colleague trying to fly from Ft Myers, FL to Memphis (for work obviously) on Delta. Lands at ATL only to find they’d cancelled his MEM flight due to an ice storm. “When can I get there?” “We don’t know”. He turned around and went back home for the week. His clients couldn’t get to their offices for 3 days.</li>\n	<li>As I mentioned in the <a title=\"Podcast #113 — 2014 was a Bad Year to Fly; Restaurant Trends Go Local\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/01/27/podcast-113-2014-was-a-bad-year-to-fly-restaurant-trends-go-local/\">last podcast</a>, I tried to be a bit more strategic in my travel -- picking some warm spots when I could, avoiding known trouble spots. I cringed whenever I had to fly to the East Coast, but sometimes I got lucky -- I hit San Antonio on a 70 degree day. The day after I left, it dropped down to 40. I managed to wrangle a half-week in Phoenix in mid-February. Mid-70’s and sunny -- I was outside every minute I could. Flying home, it was 77 degrees when I left PHX; -2 degrees when I landed at ORD. I thought I was going to shatter when I walked onto the jet bridge.</li>\n	<li>I think the pinnacle was when the Delta jet slid off the LaGuardia runway, hit a fence, and came within yards of dumping into Jamaica Bay. Landing at any of those small, near-in airports -- LaGuardia, Washington Reagan, Chicago Midway -- are like putting down on an aircraft carrier, not a lot of room for error. Add snow or ice -- I’m surprised it doesn’t happen more often. Luckily, this one wasn’t fatal -- not like the Air Florida crash out of what was then Washington National on a snowy January, or the Southwest 737 that slid off the end of a Midway runway, through a fence and into a street intersection, crushing a car waiting at the red light, killing a small boy. This was just more inconvenience -- closing LGA for 7 hours, taking a big chunk of capacity out of what is already the most crowded/overtaxed airspace in the country. A friend trying to fly home to New York that afternoon boarded her flight, it pushed back, only to pull back in after it was cancelled. It was just one more delay, one more cancellation. I was a little luckier. Even though I was flying from Memphis to Chicago, some piece of my flight -- the plane, the crew -- got caught up in that East Coast mess. But thanks to the wonders of mobile message updates, I was able to track the delays from the relative comfort of a Mexican bar in East Memphis. One margarita with an high-school buddy turned to two turned to dinner with his wife joining us. I, unlike so many others, got home that night and had something other than bad airport food to show for it.</li>\n	<li>The next week -- yet another delay on my New Orleans-Chicago flight. Late inbound aircraft. But why? ORD and MSY were fine; all the weather was again in the East. No one knew, not even the pilot. When we finally boarded the flight, he keyed the mic and said, “I’m awfully sorry about this delay. I wish I could tell you why, but I have no idea. The plane arrived Chicago on time from San Antonio and then just sat there. I wish I could tell you why.”</li>\n	<li>I dunno -- maybe they lost it behind a snow drift.</li>\n	<li>Bridge Music — <em>Keep Your Motor Running</em> by Dave Hole</li>\n</ul>\n<b>Hospitality Beats Points</b>\n<ul>\n	<li>One morning in some concierge lounge in some Marriott or Sheraton that I can’t quite place, I opened my umpteenth warming dish, looked in at yet another pond of runny scrambled eggs and wondered “Really? How difficult is it to properly cook institutional egg mix?”</li>\n	<li>Just about every poll of statused hotel travelers rank free WiFi and free breakfast as the top amenities, the ones that keep travelers working to maintain status. But when you actually use those amenities, they’re often not so great -- slow WiFi (even the “enhanced speeds” that Marriott promises their gold and platinum members), semi-liquid scrambled eggs and stacks of over-cooked bacon.</li>\n	<li>Which is a problem, because just about every hotel chain in the past couple of years has raised the number of points needed for a room and also created a new top tier for the best/most popular properties -- added, say, a Category 6 so they could charge even more points for that Maui property -- devaluing that big point balance -- your vacation savings account -- that you “road warriored” so hard to build.</li>\n	<li>So if the points aren’t worth as much anymore, what keeps travelers loyal to a brand, what keeps you staying in, say, a Marriott 75 nights or 25 stays in a Westin to make top-tier platinum? It should be those amenities -- but how loyalty are those scrambled eggs worth? They’re convenient, but don’t differentiate much.</li>\n	<li>Some places are ditching the whole lounge idea. I’ve been in some Renaissance hotels and Marriott Autograph hotels that serve the free breakfast in their restaurant -- there’s the standard-looking buffet, but if you have the time, you can order anything off the menu. Blows my diet a bit, but beats 4 mornings straight of scrambled eggs.</li>\n	<li>I have noticed, though, that I’m being offered more specialty perks at places that I’m staying a lot. The Sheraton on Canal St in New Orleans will occasionally offer me basketball tickets -- the Pelicans are actually doing well this year -- and had some special grandstand deals to watch the Mardi Gras parades in front of the hotel. I didn’t take them up on either of their offers -- I had other commitments -- but it was nice to get the offer.</li>\n	<li>I call it the “Cheers” effect -- you want to go where everyone knows your name. When you’re away from home, you want someone to smile and ask how you’re doing. And it’s not just hotels. The morning barista crew at the Starbucks on Canal St and St Charles fire up a spinach feta wrap when they see me walk through the door, even when it’s been a couple of weeks since my last visit.</li>\n	<li>Of course, there is a fine line that can be crossed. Like a friend of mine, she received Christmas presents from a front desk clerk for years (!) after about an 18-month gig that had her weekly at the Trumbull CT Marriott. Or when I first started traveling for business, I was commuting between Dallas and Chicago, passing through the DFW Admirals Club every Monday morning. After about 3 months, one of the agents who’d I’d gotten to know asked me if I’d like to meet her daughter. Awkward. But in what I still think is one of my best moments, I asked her “Do you really want your daughter dating someone who travels as much as I do?” She thought for a moment, “No, not really”. Awkwardness averted, and we went on to have a nice friendship until I moved back to Chicago a year later.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917626811171154.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #114</li>\n	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://musicalley.com\">Music Alley</a></li>\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_114.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #114 — Public Transit to Airports, Requiem for SkyMall, Awful Winter Travel','','inherit','open','open','','1429-revision-v1','','','2015-05-13 07:43:50','2015-05-13 12:43:50','',1429,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/05/13/1429-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1511,1,'2015-05-13 07:44:13','2015-05-13 12:44:13','I finally found a way to produce a video version of the podcast without a huge amount of post-production work. I put my GoPro camera on top of my Zoom H4n recorder and hit Record.\n\n[youtube]https://youtu.be/c0Puq669A5M[/youtube]','Podcast #114 Uncut — The LoFi Video Version','','inherit','open','open','','1435-revision-v1','','','2015-05-13 07:44:13','2015-05-13 12:44:13','',1435,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/05/13/1435-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1512,1,'2015-05-13 13:05:33','2015-05-13 18:05:33','[caption id=\"attachment_1508\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"228\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/2014-06-01-15.20.55-e1431490750219.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1508\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/2014-06-01-15.20.55-e1431490750219-228x300.jpg\" alt=\"Been on Duty for 10 Years...\" width=\"228\" height=\"300\" /></a> Been on Duty for 10 Years...[/caption]\r\n\r\nRecorded at the JW Marriott in New Orleans together with a GoPro <a title=\"Podcast #114 Uncut — The LoFi Video Version\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/03/20/podcast-114-uncut-the-lofi-video-version/\">video</a> capturing all the unedited bits. We go deep in a comparison of public transit and drive times to US airports, shed a tear for SkyMall magazine, and marvel at the stack of lost Android tablets at American Airlines\' ORD lost-and-found. We talk about what has been an awful start to the travel year in the US east of the Rocky Mountains, and wrap up with some observations about how hotel perks have become more important than points. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_115.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/196973214\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #115:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, so no video “uncut” version like I did last episode from New Orleans. No maid service in the TravelCommons studio to tidy up before the podcast.</li>\r\n	<li>We’re deep in the bipolar weather roller coaster that is Spring in the Midwest -- 70’s one day, 40’s the next; bright sun at 10 in the morning, pissing down rain at noon. Which is as good an explanation as any why Chicago’s two airports, O’Hare and Midway, own the basement of the DOT’s on-time departures ranking.</li>\r\n	<li>My travel has been a bit more interesting since the last episode. Did a few of my normal runs down to New Orleans, but broke the pattern a bit with travel to Denver and Charlotte. And even one of the runs down to New Orleans broke the usual down-Monday-back-Thursday routine. At the beginning of April, I flew down Thursday night with my wife and daughter, met up with friends for the French Quarter Fest weekend. It’s one of my favorite music festivals. Free music from local bands; stages and food stands spread around the Quarter -- a bit lower key than the 460,000 people who descended on the Fair Grounds for Jazz Fest a few weeks back.</li>\r\n	<li>The big trip, though, was a couple of weeks prior to that when we went to Andalucia -- southern Spain -- for Spring Break and found ourselves there during Semana Santa -- Holy Week. Cordoba, Granada, Sevilla, the hill town of Ronda. Processions (plural) almost every night. My wife said it was like the Tour de France for Catholics. And as a Catholic, I couldn’t argue -- it was pretty full contact. I posted a <a href=\"https://vine.co/v/OL66AUgHwwi\">Vine video</a> of a Granada procession to my <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter feed</a> and then a couple of minutes of GoPro footage from the last Holy Thursday procession in Sevilla on the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons\">Facebook</a> page and <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\">YouTube channel</a>. It was close to midnight, after which I think they took an hour break and then started up the Good Friday processions. We went to bed. When we went out the next morning around 8:30 to grab some breakfast -- our usual of cafe con leche and tomato bread topped with jamón iberico -- the restaurant was jammed with people who just finished a procession. It just kept going.</li>\r\n	<li>And so do we. I drained my United account for a trip next month to Japan, and then in September, we’re heading over to Scotland so my daughter can start at the <a href=\"http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/\">University of St Andrews</a>, so I should have enough content to keep TravelCommons rolling into an 11th year.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/download_track.php?id=6E494292C6B4E14E784F04400EB2C54CE135E29730530171C5F931345CAA3733A93C8CF03BBFAC71CD59B5710E25327F\" rel=\"nofollow\">All Around</a></em> by <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=AEF14840F87CD6C39BE8918AF693E89C276517530C9606BA2CB20418C6A8B4CB\" rel=\"nofollow\">Jel</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Before we get into the meat of things, just a quick pointer to let everyone know that TravelCommons is available on the Stitcher radio smartphone app as well as on <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>. Since iTunes started handling podcasts -- June 2005, right around episodes <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/06/19/podcast-6-the-tsa-talks-back/\">6</a> or <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/06/29/podcast-7-eating-alone-classic-travel-stories/\">7</a> -- it dominated the TravelCommons download stats. Now it’s only responsible for a third of the downloads.</li>\r\n	<li>Rummaging through the mailbag…</li>\r\n	<li>Back last November in episode <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/11/22/podcast-112-holiday-airport-etiquette-travel-tax-pile-up/\">112</a>, Dan Gradwohl sent me a pointer to the website <a href=\"http://www.toandfromtheairport.com/\">To and From The Airport</a>, a collation of airport transit options. In that episode, I talked about reviewing the ORD listing and sending in a few updates. Toward the end of March, I received a note thanking me for my contribution and apologizing for the delay. Whatever issues were happening there now seem to have passed; it appears the site is back to being actively maintained.</li>\r\n	<li>Tom Brown, a longtime TravelCommons listener, sent a note following up on last episode’s riff on Nate Silver’s <a href=\"http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/planes-trains-and-taxis-when-to-take-public-transit-from-the-airport/\">538 blog post</a> about mass transit times to major US airports. He wrote:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>You noted London as the gold standard of public transport out of the airport. I would put it at bronze at best.  Decaying infrastructure, not so comfortable trains and destination not so friendly to business traveler in London doesn\'t help its ranking. Singapore is the best in my opinion with Hong Kong 2nd. Tokyo even ranks above London to me.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>Tom, thanks for that, expanding our sample size. My past trips thru Hong Kong and Singapore were family vacations - late arrivals from the US, tired kids, too much luggage - and so opted for taxis instead on mass transit. I missed the opportunity to add those trains to my personal sample, but I did end up with one of the wackiest cab rides while in HK. It was kind of a hoarder cab -- newspapers filling the trunk, tchotchkes all over the dashboard and hanging from the roof. I don’t know how we got 4 people and 4 bags into that cab. As I mentioned earlier, we’ll be flying in and out of Narita at the back half of June and given the distance and cab fares, we’ll take the Tokyo train at least once.</li>\r\n	<li>Our Spring Break trip to Andalucia started with a flight into Madrid airport. Our plans had us landing in Madrid, then making the 20-min schlep in from Terminal 4 (could they have put that terminal any further out?) and then heading downtown to catch the high-speed Renfe train to Córdoba. After I booked the tickets on-line (a process made infinitely easier than 2 years ago now that Renfe accepts PayPal) I was pleasantly surprised to stumble across a TripAdvisor post saying that the tickets included a free train ride down to the Puerta Atocha train station. It wasn\'t the fastest ride - a local train that made 4-5 stops before Atocha - but it was clean and not beat up. And since we were headed downtown during Friday rush hour, it took the same 30 min that Google Maps estimated for the cab.</li>\r\n	<li>And continuing on the transit theme, Nick Gassman sent a note about comments I made in episode <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/10/12/podcast-111-seatback-recline-wars-craft-beer-tourism/\">111</a> about the proliferation of pre-paid cards for subway and mass transit systems. Nick says about the London Underground:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>You can use your own contactless payment card (Visa, Amex etc) without having to buy an Oyster card, and get the same rates. You can register the card if you wish, to track spend.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>The link to the Tube web page is similar to the Chicago L page -- it feels a bit ambiguous, probably because the contactless technology is still a bit young, a bit ambiguous itself. Both London and Chicago say they’ll also work with NFC mobile phones -- like the latest Samsung Galaxies, the HTC Ones, and the iPhone 6. I think I’ve just got to get over to an L station and give it a try. But it’s probably not the kind of experiment I want to try and debug during rush hour when there’s a couple hundred hard-core commuters storming the 3-4 tap through gates. Seems like more of a midday or weekend morning thing.</li>\r\n	<li>Reaching back again to episode <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/11/22/podcast-112-holiday-airport-etiquette-travel-tax-pile-up/\">112 </a>where I talked about funding the Indiegogo campaign for the Bluesmart carry-on bag, what they call “The First Smart, Connected Luggage” complete with a smartphone app that acts as a digital lock, a scale, tracks location, and sounds an alarm if your smart bag wanders off. They’ve gotten huge press; they blew thru the funding goal by 3800%. But now they have to deliver the bag. They’ve been doing a good job of pushing out <a href=\"https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/bluesmart-world-s-first-smart-connected-carry-on#activity\">updates </a>and seem to be sticking to their August ship date. Which would be good for them because competitors are starting to move into this space. I tweeted out a link to an Engadget story last week about Samsung and Samsonite partnering up on a line of smart suitcases with functionality that sounds very similar to Bluesmart’s. Then I received a press release in the TravelCommons e-mail box from Planet Traveler <a href=\"http://www.planettravelerusa.com/preorder\">announcing</a> a Kickstarter campaign for the Space Case 1 line of smart luggage which will have all the functionality of the Bluesmart bag <i>plus</i> fingerprint unlock <i>and</i> Bluetooth speakers. As if the gate areas aren’t noisy enough.</li>\r\n	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\">Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/download_track.php?id=A1F44F3B330BFBBD5C7863108B61B09977CADC67705C23C5AECA03FC6F2C0320A93C8CF03BBFAC71CD59B5710E25327F\" rel=\"nofollow\">La Tra (basephunk mix)</a></em> by <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/label.php?id=3AF558B2D658A22FFF10B13F9D87237D276517530C9606BA2CB20418C6A8B4CB\" rel=\"nofollow\">Omar Sosa</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<b>A Decade of TravelCommons</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>It was four years ago <i>today </i>that I recorded the first T/C podcast in the bathroom of the Wardman Park Marriott in NW Washington, DC</li>\r\n	<li>[tc1-opening &amp; 1]</li>\r\n	<li>It was an interesting mix of topics…\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>TSA problems in ORD, LGA and DCA, the first of many TSA rants over the years;</li>\r\n	<li>The first sighting of a “puffer” security screening machine, don’t know if you ever walked through one of those, but we also talked about their multi-million dollar demise in an episode a some years later;</li>\r\n	<li>Hungarian roadside prostitutes -- a topic that I don’t believe I’ve revisited</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>And it was the first in a long string of what one listener referred to as a “pottycast” -- using the tile of hotel bathrooms as a poor man’s reverb chamber</li>\r\n	<li>[tc74-hotel medley]</li>\r\n	<li>Listening to that, I now understand why I have lifetime Marriott Platinum status.</li>\r\n	<li>One of the more noticeable changes over the years has been about the TSA. Early podcasts railed against the TSA -- the security theatre, the shoe carnival, liquid bans, and of course, the power trips</li>\r\n	<li>[tc45-finding tooth powder]</li>\r\n	<li>But with some much needed customer service training and, most importantly, the introduction of PreCheck, the TSA isn’t the podcast pinata it had been for the first 4-5 years -- especially when compared to airport security in places like India</li>\r\n	<li>[tc109-mall cop, umbrella]</li>\r\n	<li>Travel technology has been one constant through the TravelCommons decade</li>\r\n	<li>[tc87-briefcase]</li>\r\n	<li>[tc91-too much technology]</li>\r\n	<li>And while I’ve cycled through a number of phones, tablets, and laptops, the Bose noise-cancelling headphones remain the official headphones of the TravelCommons podcast</li>\r\n	<li>[tc48-bose lust]</li>\r\n	<li>Food has also been a common theme…</li>\r\n	<li>[tc97-food]</li>\r\n	<li>[tc59-past menus]</li>\r\n	<li>Never one to be accused of being a travel industry cheerleader…</li>\r\n	<li>[tc92-not-so-upbeat]</li>\r\n	<li>But I always try, if only partially successfully, to maintain some perspective</li>\r\n	<li>[t61-zen]</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917626811171154.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #115</li>\r\n	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n	<li>Links to 3 prior anniversary episodes\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/12/27/podcast-27-best-of-2005/\" target=\"_blank\">Episode 27</a> -- Best of 2005</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2006/06/13/podcast-40-looking-back-over-the-first-year/\" target=\"_blank\">Episode 40</a> -- Looking Back Over the First Year</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2009/05/14/podcast-74-looking-back-over-four-years-of-travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Episode 74</a> -- Looking Back Over Four Years</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from the <a href=\"http://promonet.iodalliance.com/\">IODA Promonet</a></li>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_115.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #115 — A Decade of TravelCommons','','inherit','open','open','','1505-revision-v1','','','2015-05-13 13:05:33','2015-05-13 18:05:33','',1505,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/05/13/1505-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1513,1,'2015-05-13 13:41:19','2015-05-13 18:41:19','[caption id=\"attachment_1508\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"228\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/2014-06-01-15.20.55-e1431490750219.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1508\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/2014-06-01-15.20.55-e1431490750219-228x300.jpg\" alt=\"Been on Duty for 10 Years...\" width=\"228\" height=\"300\" /></a> Been on Duty for 10 Years...[/caption]\r\n\r\nRecorded at the JW Marriott in New Orleans together with a GoPro <a title=\"Podcast #114 Uncut — The LoFi Video Version\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/03/20/podcast-114-uncut-the-lofi-video-version/\">video</a> capturing all the unedited bits. We go deep in a comparison of public transit and drive times to US airports, shed a tear for SkyMall magazine, and marvel at the stack of lost Android tablets at American Airlines\' ORD lost-and-found. We talk about what has been an awful start to the travel year in the US east of the Rocky Mountains, and wrap up with some observations about how hotel perks have become more important than points. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_115.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/196973214\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #115:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, so no video “uncut” version like I did last episode from New Orleans. No maid service in the TravelCommons studio to tidy up before the podcast.</li>\r\n	<li>We’re deep in the bipolar weather roller coaster that is Spring in the Midwest -- 70’s one day, 40’s the next; bright sun at 10 in the morning, pissing down rain at noon. Which is as good an explanation as any why Chicago’s two airports, O’Hare and Midway, own the basement of the DOT’s on-time departures ranking.</li>\r\n	<li>My travel has been a bit more interesting since the last episode. Did a few of my normal runs down to New Orleans, but broke the pattern a bit with travel to Denver and Charlotte. And even one of the runs down to New Orleans broke the usual down-Monday-back-Thursday routine. At the beginning of April, I flew down Thursday night with my wife and daughter, met up with friends for the French Quarter Fest weekend. It’s one of my favorite music festivals. Free music from local bands; stages and food stands spread around the Quarter -- a bit lower key than the 460,000 people who descended on the Fair Grounds for Jazz Fest a few weeks back.</li>\r\n	<li>The big trip, though, was a couple of weeks prior to that when we went to Andalucia -- southern Spain -- for Spring Break and found ourselves there during Semana Santa -- Holy Week. Cordoba, Granada, Sevilla, the hill town of Ronda. Processions (plural) almost every night. My wife said it was like the Tour de France for Catholics. And as a Catholic, I couldn’t argue -- it was pretty full contact. I posted a <a href=\"https://vine.co/v/OL66AUgHwwi\">Vine video</a> of a Granada procession to my <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter feed</a> and then a couple of minutes of GoPro footage from the last Holy Thursday procession in Sevilla on the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons\">Facebook</a> page and <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\">YouTube channel</a>. It was close to midnight, after which I think they took an hour break and then started up the Good Friday processions. We went to bed. When we went out the next morning around 8:30 to grab some breakfast -- our usual of cafe con leche and tomato bread topped with jamón iberico -- the restaurant was jammed with people who just finished a procession. It just kept going.</li>\r\n	<li>And so do we. I drained my United account for a trip next month to Japan, and then in September, we’re heading over to Scotland so my daughter can start at the <a href=\"http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/\">University of St Andrews</a>, so I should have enough content to keep TravelCommons rolling into an 11th year.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/download_track.php?id=6E494292C6B4E14E784F04400EB2C54CE135E29730530171C5F931345CAA3733A93C8CF03BBFAC71CD59B5710E25327F\" rel=\"nofollow\">All Around</a></em> by <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=AEF14840F87CD6C39BE8918AF693E89C276517530C9606BA2CB20418C6A8B4CB\" rel=\"nofollow\">Jel</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Before we get into the meat of things, just a quick pointer to let everyone know that TravelCommons is available on the Stitcher radio smartphone app as well as on <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>. Since iTunes started handling podcasts -- June 2005, right around episodes <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/06/19/podcast-6-the-tsa-talks-back/\">6</a> or <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/06/29/podcast-7-eating-alone-classic-travel-stories/\">7</a> -- it dominated the TravelCommons download stats. Now it’s only responsible for a third of the downloads.</li>\r\n	<li>Rummaging through the mailbag…</li>\r\n	<li>Back last November in episode <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/11/22/podcast-112-holiday-airport-etiquette-travel-tax-pile-up/\">112</a>, Dan Gradwohl sent me a pointer to the website <a href=\"http://www.toandfromtheairport.com/\">To and From The Airport</a>, a collation of airport transit options. In that episode, I talked about reviewing the ORD listing and sending in a few updates. Toward the end of March, I received a note thanking me for my contribution and apologizing for the delay. Whatever issues were happening there now seem to have passed; it appears the site is back to being actively maintained.</li>\r\n	<li>Tom Brown, a longtime TravelCommons listener, sent a note following up on last episode’s riff on Nate Silver’s <a href=\"http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/planes-trains-and-taxis-when-to-take-public-transit-from-the-airport/\">538 blog post</a> about mass transit times to major US airports. He wrote:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>You noted London as the gold standard of public transport out of the airport. I would put it at bronze at best.  Decaying infrastructure, not so comfortable trains and destination not so friendly to business traveler in London doesn\'t help its ranking. Singapore is the best in my opinion with Hong Kong 2nd. Tokyo even ranks above London to me.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>Tom, thanks for that, expanding our sample size. My past trips thru Hong Kong and Singapore were family vacations - late arrivals from the US, tired kids, too much luggage - and so opted for taxis instead on mass transit. I missed the opportunity to add those trains to my personal sample, but I did end up with one of the wackiest cab rides while in HK. It was kind of a hoarder cab -- newspapers filling the trunk, tchotchkes all over the dashboard and hanging from the roof. I don’t know how we got 4 people and 4 bags into that cab. As I mentioned earlier, we’ll be flying in and out of Narita at the back half of June and given the distance and cab fares, we’ll take the Tokyo train at least once.</li>\r\n	<li>Our Spring Break trip to Andalucia started with a flight into Madrid airport. Our plans had us landing in Madrid, then making the 20-min schlep in from Terminal 4 (could they have put that terminal any further out?) and then heading downtown to catch the high-speed Renfe train to Córdoba. After I booked the tickets on-line (a process made infinitely easier than 2 years ago now that Renfe accepts PayPal) I was pleasantly surprised to stumble across a TripAdvisor post saying that the tickets included a free train ride down to the Puerta Atocha train station. It wasn\'t the fastest ride - a local train that made 4-5 stops before Atocha - but it was clean and not beat up. And since we were headed downtown during Friday rush hour, it took the same 30 min that Google Maps estimated for the cab.</li>\r\n	<li>And continuing on the transit theme, Nick Gassman sent a note about comments I made in episode <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/10/12/podcast-111-seatback-recline-wars-craft-beer-tourism/\">111</a> about the proliferation of pre-paid cards for subway and mass transit systems. Nick says about the London Underground:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>You can use your own contactless payment card (Visa, Amex etc) without having to buy an Oyster card, and get the same rates. You can register the card if you wish, to track spend.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>The link to the Tube web page is similar to the Chicago L page -- it feels a bit ambiguous, probably because the contactless technology is still a bit young, a bit ambiguous itself. Both London and Chicago say they’ll also work with NFC mobile phones -- like the latest Samsung Galaxies, the HTC Ones, and the iPhone 6. I think I’ve just got to get over to an L station and give it a try. But it’s probably not the kind of experiment I want to try and debug during rush hour when there’s a couple hundred hard-core commuters storming the 3-4 tap through gates. Seems like more of a midday or weekend morning thing.</li>\r\n	<li>Reaching back again to episode <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/11/22/podcast-112-holiday-airport-etiquette-travel-tax-pile-up/\">112 </a>where I talked about funding the Indiegogo campaign for the Bluesmart carry-on bag, what they call “The First Smart, Connected Luggage” complete with a smartphone app that acts as a digital lock, a scale, tracks location, and sounds an alarm if your smart bag wanders off. They’ve gotten huge press; they blew thru the funding goal by 3800%. But now they have to deliver the bag. They’ve been doing a good job of pushing out <a href=\"https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/bluesmart-world-s-first-smart-connected-carry-on#activity\">updates </a>and seem to be sticking to their August ship date. Which would be good for them because competitors are starting to move into this space. I tweeted out a link to an Engadget story last week about Samsung and Samsonite partnering up on a line of smart suitcases with functionality that sounds very similar to Bluesmart’s. Then I received a press release in the TravelCommons e-mail box from Planet Traveler <a href=\"http://www.planettravelerusa.com/preorder\">announcing</a> a Kickstarter campaign for the Space Case 1 line of smart luggage which will have all the functionality of the Bluesmart bag <i>plus</i> fingerprint unlock <i>and</i> Bluetooth speakers. As if the gate areas aren’t noisy enough.</li>\r\n	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\">Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/download_track.php?id=A1F44F3B330BFBBD5C7863108B61B09977CADC67705C23C5AECA03FC6F2C0320A93C8CF03BBFAC71CD59B5710E25327F\" rel=\"nofollow\">La Tra (basephunk mix)</a></em> by <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/label.php?id=3AF558B2D658A22FFF10B13F9D87237D276517530C9606BA2CB20418C6A8B4CB\" rel=\"nofollow\">Omar Sosa</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<b>A Decade of TravelCommons</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>It was ten  years ago <i>today </i>that I recorded the first T/C podcast in the bathroom of the Wardman Park Marriott in NW Washington, DC</li>\r\n	<li>[tc1-opening &amp; 1]</li>\r\n	<li>It was an interesting mix of topics…\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>TSA problems in ORD, LGA and DCA, the first of many TSA rants over the years;</li>\r\n	<li>The first sighting of a “puffer” security screening machine, don’t know if you ever walked through one of those, but we also talked about their multi-million dollar demise in an episode a some years later;</li>\r\n	<li>Hungarian roadside prostitutes -- a topic that I don’t believe I’ve revisited</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>And it was the first in a long string of what one listener referred to as a “pottycast” -- using the tile of hotel bathrooms as a poor man’s reverb chamber</li>\r\n	<li>[tc74-hotel medley]</li>\r\n	<li>Listening to that, I now understand why I have lifetime Marriott Platinum status.</li>\r\n	<li>One of the more noticeable changes over the years has been about the TSA. Early podcasts railed against the TSA -- the security theatre, the shoe carnival, liquid bans, and of course, the power trips</li>\r\n	<li>[tc45-finding tooth powder]</li>\r\n	<li>But with some much needed customer service training and, most importantly, the introduction of PreCheck, the TSA isn’t the podcast pinata it had been for the first 4-5 years -- especially when compared to airport security in places like India</li>\r\n	<li>[tc109-mall cop, umbrella]</li>\r\n	<li>Travel technology has been one constant through the TravelCommons decade</li>\r\n	<li>[tc87-briefcase]</li>\r\n	<li>[tc91-too much technology]</li>\r\n	<li>And while I’ve cycled through a number of phones, tablets, and laptops, the Bose noise-cancelling headphones remain the official headphones of the TravelCommons podcast</li>\r\n	<li>[tc48-bose lust]</li>\r\n	<li>Food has also been a common theme…</li>\r\n	<li>[tc97-food]</li>\r\n	<li>Never one to be accused of being a travel industry cheerleader…</li>\r\n	<li>[tc92-not-so-upbeat]</li>\r\n	<li>But I always try, if only partially successfully, to maintain some perspective</li>\r\n	<li>[t61-zen]</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917626811171154.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #115</li>\r\n	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n	<li>Links to 3 prior anniversary episodes\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/12/27/podcast-27-best-of-2005/\" target=\"_blank\">Episode 27</a> -- Best of 2005</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2006/06/13/podcast-40-looking-back-over-the-first-year/\" target=\"_blank\">Episode 40</a> -- Looking Back Over the First Year</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2009/05/14/podcast-74-looking-back-over-four-years-of-travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Episode 74</a> -- Looking Back Over Four Years</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from the <a href=\"http://promonet.iodalliance.com/\">IODA Promonet</a></li>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_115.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #115 — A Decade of TravelCommons','','inherit','open','open','','1505-revision-v1','','','2015-05-13 13:41:19','2015-05-13 18:41:19','',1505,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/05/13/1505-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1514,1,'2015-05-13 15:16:42','2015-05-13 20:16:42','[caption id=\"attachment_1342\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"225\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/2014-05-02-17.52.56.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1342\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/2014-05-02-17.52.56-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"I confess... I\'m carrying a concealed Totes\" width=\"225\" height=\"300\" /></a> Yes, I\'m carrying a concealed Totes[/caption]\r\n\r\nJust when I\'d reset my body clock after a trip to Beijing, I headed off for an 8-day around-the-world itinerary. It was 44 hours of flight time, setting a new personal record for stupid travel. I learned a few new things along the way -- Singapore Air flight attendants get grumpy when you don\'t let them serve you, and Manila Airport considers a Totes umbrella as lethal as a box cutter.  We also talk about the reason Beijing has scored second to last in taxi service, the difference between United and Delta Twitter service, the secret to buying Bose headphones, and my switch from an iPhone to Android. All this and more  at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_109.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below. [sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_109.mp3\"]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #109:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago. I’m back at my normal commute -- Chicago to New Orleans with the odd stop in Memphis --  after a couple of big Asian trips in April and May. I talked a bit about my Beijing trip in the last episode, and then at the beginning of this month, I flew around the world in 8 days -- some flash travel for meetings in Bangalore and Manila.</li>\r\n	<li>As you can imagine, it took me a couple of weeks to recover from that trip. That amount of airtime -- I added up 44 hours in the air -- was a push, even for me, and I’ll regularly do up-and-backs between Chicago and San Francisco, and you may remember a while back when I talked about doing an up-and-back to London -- leaving Chicago on the overnight flight to Heathrow, showering and changing in the airline club, taking a car out to Reading for a lunch meeting, then heading back to Heathrow in time for the afternoon flight to Denver. That trip had been my most stupid piece of travel -- until this one.  This one, I think aged me in dog years.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music — <em>Stinky Dog</em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/musicinside-forces/\">Music Inside</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Back in December, in my Top 10 Travel Tips article, I talked about using Twitter as a concierge service. I suggested “at naming” them in a tweet, which I found tends to generate a response in a couple of minutes. However, in the 5 months since I made that recommendation, I’ve seen the quality and usefulness of that response degrade almost exponentially. “At naming” United almost inevitably results in some cut-and-pasted pre-approved apology -- “Sorry, we hate delays as much as you do” or “Our apologies for the delay in your travel. Safety is our utmost  priority”, My frustrated response  -- “Oh stop! If you were concerned about safety, you\'d spend more on preventative maintenance to avoid these delays in the first place” -- generated nothing but silence.</li>\r\n	<li>Delta’s Twitter account, on the other hand, did quickly solve a problem that I couldn’t figure out elsewhere. I mentioned in an earlier episode that I hated having to fly Delta because I couldn’t get Pre-Check. Facing another Delta flight out of New Orleans, I thought I try one more time to fix it. I found what I thought was the right Delta Twitter handle -- @DeltaAssist -- and tweeted them the message “How do I get my Global Traveler # associated with my Delta profile so I can get PreCheck for my MSY-DTW flight tomorrow?” A couple of minutes later, I got a reply “Please DM me your info and I’ll proceed”. Within 10 minutes, it was done. When I checked in 30 minutes later on the Delta app, there was the Pre- Check symbol on the boarding pass. So perhaps the usefulness decay is airline-specific, perhaps with some direct connection with United’s low score on the latest JD Powers’ customer satisfaction survey. Perhaps.</li>\r\n	<li>As I have mentioned many times on this podcast, Bose noise-canceling headphones are the mark of a true road warrior. Sure, you seem some new Gen Y analyst types sporting Beats or maybe some audiophile wearing some big Sennheiser cans. But still, by and far, Bose is still number 1. But they’re expensive -- $300 and never on sale, not even in the Bose outlet stores. And so, about once every six months, I have this conversation with a seatmate -- “Do you like your Bose?” “Yup, I think they’re great” “Yeah, I’d love to get a pair, but they’re so damn expensive” -- also most word-for-word, every 6 months, right down to the “damn” in front of “expensive”. And here’s what I tell them -- No one ever buys Bose headphones with cash. Nobody. That\'s what Membership Miles are for. If you’re traveling for business, odds are you have a corporate Amex card on which you’re racking up Membership Miles for plane tickets and hotel bills, and you never quite know what to do with them. What you do is splurge on travel luxuries for yourself like Bose headphones. They\'re for your miles; you suffered to earn them. Go on, get a little something that will make that middle seat a bit more bearable. But whatever you do, don’t tell your spouse about them. They’ll want to buy something sensible for the house. First, buy the Bose. After than, maybe one of those road warrior Tumi carryons...</li>\r\n	<li>And one last travel technology bit...finally, as I’ve threatened for many episodes, I ditched my iPhone 5 for an HTC One Android phone. I just got completely fed up with the lousy, unpredictable battery life on the iPhone 5 after upgrading to iOS 7. Maybe iOS 8 Apple announced this week will fix things, but I waited as long as I could. I got tired of being psychotic about battery life -- about making sure I topped off my battery before boarding a plane, watching the battery meter drop 10% in the time it took to taxi from the runway to the gate -- just not being able to be away from a charging cable for more than 2 hours.</li>\r\n	<li>And one last travel technology bit...finally, as I’ve threatened for many episodes, I ditched my iPhone 5 for an HTC One Android phone. I just got completely fed up with the lousy, unpredictable battery life on the iPhone 5 after upgrading to iOS 7. Maybe iOS 8 Apple announced this week will fix things, but I waited as long as I could. I got tired of being psychotic about battery life -- about making sure I topped off my battery before boarding a plane, watching the battery meter drop 10% in the time it took to taxi from the runway to the gate -- just not being able to be away from a charging cable for more than 2 hours.</li>\r\n	<li>Now I’m not a stranger to Android. I’ve used a Google Nexus 7 for a couple of years and a Samsung tablet before that, so I’m comfortable with Android. Indeed, I’ve said on past episodes that I prefer Android tablets to iPads because I can do more with them -- get to the directory structure, attach files to e-mails. For me, Android tablets are closer to a PC replacement than iPads. But phones are different -- using it to talk and text is more important than editing a document. I had been on iOS since the iPhone 3G, so this is a bit change -- Android hides settings in different places than iOS, so it’s been a learning experience. The same with the mail and calendar apps, though with Android, there’s more of a choice. I have 4 mail apps on my phone now, figuring out which one I like the best, and then I’ll blow away the other three. I gotta say though that I\'m very happy to be rid of that lousy iPhone podcasting app.</li>\r\n	<li>But the most important thing is battery life. I’m no longer waiting ‘til the last minute to board my plane, trying to push that iPhone battery meter up one last percentage point. And with the bigger screen -- 5-inches vs. 4 on the iPhone 5 -- I find myself reading more stuff on my phone and leaving my tablet in my backpack more often. I’m still tweaking things, but am very satisfied with the change.</li>\r\n	<li dir=\"ltr\">And if you have any travel observations, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n	<li dir=\"ltr\">Bridge Music — <em>Locovenido</em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/falik-dreams/\" target=\"_blank\">Falik</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong> \'Round the World in 8 Days</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>I think it’s a given that your mind is more of a barrier to doing something than your body. I always surprise myself when, once I’ve pushed through what I thought was a major barrier, how normal or ordinary it seems on the other side. I do that with road biking all the time -- thinking a 50-mile ride, or a 100-km or 100-mile ride is a big deal… until I do it.</li>\r\n	<li>Flight times are that way too. Early in my career, I remember thinking that the 3-4 hours from Chicago to California was huge, and that the 14 hrs it would take to fly to Tokyo was inconceivable. But then I flew 7 hrs to London; 10 hrs from Europe to South Africa. Then a big jump, 17 hours from New York to Joburg every 6 weeks for a project. With that experience under my belt, that 14 hr flight time to Tokyo -- or to India or China -- was no longer unthinkable, just long.</li>\r\n	<li>So when project requirements and the May Day holiday forced me to compress trips to India and Manila into a single week, I gulped but thought “What the hell?”  Cutting HG Wells’ time by an order of magnitude, my itinerary took me around the world in 8 days -- Chicago to Newark to Delhi to Bangalore to Singapore to Manila to Tokyo to Chicago. 44 hrs of flight time -- that’s in-the-air time. Doesn’t count wait time or layover time. That 44 hrs at 39,000 ft in a week.</li>\r\n	<li>I left Chicago Saturday afternoon; touched down in Delhi Sunday night. I was fine on Monday and Tuesday. There wasn’t much down time -- we meeting people pretty much straight through from 7am breakfast to dinners ending at 11 at night. I think people would’ve followed me into the toilet if I didn’t give them a stern look. Wednesday, we hit the wall but because of the impending May Day holiday shutdown, we couldn’t stop. So we doubled down on caffeine consumption and pushed through.</li>\r\n	<li>Because we had a break on Thursday, May 1. While everyone was celebrating the workers’ holiday, we hopped Singapore Air to Manila. SingAir is always at the top of any list of the best business class cabins. Unfortunately, I can’t opine on that, because I think I slept all but 45 minutes of the 7-8 hours I spent there. Which I think really frustrated the flight attendants. They kept trying to give me food and drinks whenever I opened my eyes. I would just ask for more water and then go back to sleep.</li>\r\n	<li>All my Manila to Chicago flight options connected through Tokyo. I could’ve flown United, but I’m on a bit of a United strike right now -- I’m just not happy with how many delays and cancellations I’ve taken from them -- so I decided to try a new airline and flew ANA -- All Nippon Airways. I’d never flown a Japanese airline before, so it would be something new. And since they were one of the first airlines to buy a 787 Dreamliner, I was hoping to one of those would show up on my route. No luck on that, it was Triple 7’s on both legs. But what was fun was mealtime. The menu has two sides -- a Japanese menu and “International” menu -- American and European food. I figured I should go Japanese -- eat as local as possible at 39,000 ft -- and so was a little disconcerted when I saw most of the Japanese passengers ordering the International menu, but hey….  It turned out fine for me, though. Half the value of airplane meals, especially on long-haul flights, is the distraction; the entertainment value. A good business class meal service should keep you occupied for at least an hour -- between perusing the menu, choosing a wine, have the meal coursed out, then the dessert trolley, then the liquor trolley. The Japanese meal was the best ever at that. Every tray they put down in front of me had at 6-8 different little cups or boxes of food on it, none of which I recognized, and I eat Japanese food pretty regularly on the road. So they’d put the tray down, I’d look at it, then I’d look through the menu and try to match each line on the menu with a box or cup in front of me. And not all of them were easy -- “oh, <i>that’s</i> the custard with the snow crab…”. Which was great, because the menu matching kept me even more occupied than normal. Lotsa fun. And the food was pretty good too.</li>\r\n	<li>Of course, when you travel to a new country, there’s always something that can trip you up. I’ve traveled to India a number of times over the past 3-4 years, so I know some of its eccentricities, like needing a physical print out of your itinerary to even get into an airport terminal, and the separate men and women’s security lines because every passenger gets wanded and patted down after walking through the metal detector. It makes TSA PreCheck seem like a morning walk that’s been momentarily interrupted by a couple of nice mall cops.</li>\r\n	<li>But the Philippines were new. We landed in Manila at 11pm Thursday night. Immigration was a bit of a goat rodeo, and the ride to the hotel felt like we were passing through some just-this-side-of-dodgy parts of LA. Much more “normal” than our first night in Delhi. The way out was where the bumps showed up. First is the exit tax -- they like to call it an “airport fee” but you can’t leave until you pay it, so it feels like an exit tax. It was 500 pesos -- about $14 -- in cash. Not a big thing -- if you know about it ahead of time. Which I almost didn’t. We were having some beers before dinner Friday night and somebody asked a question about the Manila airport. I don’t remember the question, but none of us knew the answer, so, of course, we all whipped out our smartphones and revved up Google. Somewhere on one of the web pages I was scanning, I saw a comment about the exit tax. Whoa! We ran over to the concierge. Yup, it’s true. I have 750 pesos on me from an earlier trip to the ATM, so I was good. The other guys had no Filipino currency, but got the front desk clerk to give them cash and charge the 500 pesos to their room. Crisis averted.</li>\r\n	<li>The thing that <i>did</i> catch me, though, was the sign at the check-in desk Saturday morning saying portable umbrellas were prohibited in carry-ons. Wait, what? I’ve carried this bag on three-quarters of the way around the world and now I have to check it because I have a 10-in Totes umbrella in the front pocket? Did these guys watch too much Batman when they were kids and now are having flashbacks to when the Penguin used a machine gun umbrella? And this in a country where it dumps rain every afternoon, so you really need an umbrella! But from the look on the agent’s face, I could tell -- Yes, it’s for real, and No, I don’t agree with it either. So, I reluctantly checked my bag and headed off to security… Where none of the security screeners seem to be paying much attention to any other security signage. In spite of signs to the contrary, I’m waved off from taking my PC out or taking my blazer off. Could I have sneaked my lethal Totes through? Probably. But I just wanted to get on the plane so I could go back to sleep.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music — <em>Just Don’t</em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/liebig-severed/\" target=\"_blank\">Lie Big</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong> Beijing Mass Transit</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>One of the things I didn’t get to in the last episode when talking about my April trip to Beijing was to report out on mass transit. It’s been an on-going thread in the TravelCommons podcast, probably for the past couple of years, about getting around cities -- did videos for Frankfurt and Chicago, and have talked about Portland, San Francisco, Amsterdam… So let’s add Beijing to the mix.</li>\r\n	<li>We got to the other side of customs in Beijing Airport late -- 10:30, 11:00pm local time after a 14-hr flight. We saw signs for an Airport Express, but since it was late, we couldn’t figure out the particulars of the Airport Express -- most importantly, where it would drop us in relation to our hotel -- and the cab fare was only about US$15, we headed toward the taxi line.</li>\r\n	<li>Which offered its own kind of challenges. The line overflowed the regular switchback corral and past a sign that said “60 minute wait from here.” Great. And then there were what they call “black cabs”, non-licensed guys, walking up and down the back end of the line soliciting rides. But when I saw the locals blowing them off, I did the same. A couple of times, the airport police walked down the line, and the black cab guys ran off -- literally -- though we did see a couple of guys melt into the line, standing behind a concrete pillar out of the cops’ line of sight. In the end, it wasn’t that bad, 20 minutes and we were at the front of the line.</li>\r\n	<li>Which then meant we could get our first experience with the hassle of dealing with Beijing cab drivers. They’re picky and incredibly argumentative. And, of course, since they’re arguing in Chinese, a language I don’t speak, it can be a challenge to actually get going. At the airport, the cab rank people waved me toward a cab. I had printed out the directions -- in Chinese -- of the Marriott from their website, complete with a small map. I showed it to the cab driver. He took the paper, looked a bit puzzled, showed it to another guy, who then tried to wave me over to his car -- a black cab -- while my assigned cab driver wandered away. I went back to the cab rank guy, showed <i>him</i> the directions. He then started yelling at the cab driver, which finally got the cab driver to start loading our bags into the cab.</li>\r\n	<li>This scene would be repeated almost every time we caught a cab from the hotel. We would have the concierge book us a table at a restaurant, write the address and directions out in Chinese characters, we’d show it to the cab driver, who would then look puzzled and start arguing with the doormen. One time, I had to pull up Google Maps and do a bit of a pantomime with the cab driver -- here’s where we want to go -- before he would head off.</li>\r\n	<li>The only thing that was worse than this was trying to hail a cab in town. Cabs would have their “available” sign showing in their window but wave me off when I tried to hail them. It would usually take 3-5 attempts, before one stopped. But then about half of those wouldn’t want to take us where we wanted to go. I tell you, I’ve had better luck getting a cab from mid-town Manhattan to LGA in the rain during rush hour than I had getting a taxi in Beijing. So it made perfect sense when I read TripAdvisor’s <a href=\"http://www.multivu.com/mnr/70425525-tokyo-tops-tripadvisor-world-city-survey-amongst-global-travelers\">survey</a> a couple of weeks ago saying that Beijing was second only to Moscow as the worst city for taxi service.</li>\r\n	<li>Which really made us appreciate how great the Beijing subway is. It’s cheap, clean, modern, station announcements in Chinese and English -- leftover from the 2008 Summer Olympics? --- we took it all the time. The only downside -- it’s jammed. You think the London Tube at rush hour is crowded; the Chicago Red Line during a Cubs home game? Subway riding in Beijing is a full contact sport. But with 25 million people in the city, I’m not sure I should be surprised. I think I sat down in a subway car once in all the rides I took. But even crowded, it’s a great system. Except maybe for having to pass your bag through an X-ray machine before entering the station. But at least the Chinese didn’t want to take away my umbrella.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917626811171154.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #109</li>\r\n	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Magnatune</a></li>\r\n	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_109.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #109 — \'Round the World in 8 Days; Beijing Mass Transit','','inherit','open','open','','1353-revision-v1','','','2015-05-13 15:16:42','2015-05-13 20:16:42','',1353,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/05/13/1353-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0);
INSERT INTO `wp_posts` VALUES
(1515,1,'2015-05-13 15:35:15','2015-05-13 20:35:15','[caption id=\"attachment_1508\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"228\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/2014-06-01-15.20.55-e1431490750219.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1508\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/2014-06-01-15.20.55-e1431490750219-228x300.jpg\" alt=\"Been on Duty for 10 Years...\" width=\"228\" height=\"300\" /></a> Been on Duty for 10 Years...[/caption]\r\n\r\nRecorded at the JW Marriott in New Orleans together with a GoPro <a title=\"Podcast #114 Uncut — The LoFi Video Version\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/03/20/podcast-114-uncut-the-lofi-video-version/\">video</a> capturing all the unedited bits. We go deep in a comparison of public transit and drive times to US airports, shed a tear for SkyMall magazine, and marvel at the stack of lost Android tablets at American Airlines\' ORD lost-and-found. We talk about what has been an awful start to the travel year in the US east of the Rocky Mountains, and wrap up with some observations about how hotel perks have become more important than points. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_115.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/205337138\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #115:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, so no video “uncut” version like I did last episode from New Orleans. No maid service in the TravelCommons studio to tidy up before the podcast.</li>\r\n	<li>We’re deep in the bipolar weather roller coaster that is Spring in the Midwest -- 70’s one day, 40’s the next; bright sun at 10 in the morning, pissing down rain at noon. Which is as good an explanation as any why Chicago’s two airports, O’Hare and Midway, own the basement of the DOT’s on-time departures ranking.</li>\r\n	<li>My travel has been a bit more interesting since the last episode. Did a few of my normal runs down to New Orleans, but broke the pattern a bit with travel to Denver and Charlotte. And even one of the runs down to New Orleans broke the usual down-Monday-back-Thursday routine. At the beginning of April, I flew down Thursday night with my wife and daughter, met up with friends for the French Quarter Fest weekend. It’s one of my favorite music festivals. Free music from local bands; stages and food stands spread around the Quarter -- a bit lower key than the 460,000 people who descended on the Fair Grounds for Jazz Fest a few weeks back.</li>\r\n	<li>The big trip, though, was a couple of weeks prior to that when we went to Andalucia -- southern Spain -- for Spring Break and found ourselves there during Semana Santa -- Holy Week. Cordoba, Granada, Sevilla, the hill town of Ronda. Processions (plural) almost every night. My wife said it was like the Tour de France for Catholics. And as a Catholic, I couldn’t argue -- it was pretty full contact. I posted a <a href=\"https://vine.co/v/OL66AUgHwwi\">Vine video</a> of a Granada procession to my <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter feed</a> and then a couple of minutes of GoPro footage from the last Holy Thursday procession in Sevilla on the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons\">Facebook</a> page and <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\">YouTube channel</a>. It was close to midnight, after which I think they took an hour break and then started up the Good Friday processions. We went to bed. When we went out the next morning around 8:30 to grab some breakfast -- our usual of cafe con leche and tomato bread topped with jamón iberico -- the restaurant was jammed with people who just finished a procession. It just kept going.</li>\r\n	<li>And so do we. I drained my United account for a trip next month to Japan, and then in September, we’re heading over to Scotland so my daughter can start at the <a href=\"http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/\">University of St Andrews</a>, so I should have enough content to keep TravelCommons rolling into an 11th year.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/download_track.php?id=6E494292C6B4E14E784F04400EB2C54CE135E29730530171C5F931345CAA3733A93C8CF03BBFAC71CD59B5710E25327F\" rel=\"nofollow\">All Around</a></em> by <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=AEF14840F87CD6C39BE8918AF693E89C276517530C9606BA2CB20418C6A8B4CB\" rel=\"nofollow\">Jel</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Before we get into the meat of things, just a quick pointer to let everyone know that TravelCommons is available on the Stitcher radio smartphone app as well as on <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>. Since iTunes started handling podcasts -- June 2005, right around episodes <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/06/19/podcast-6-the-tsa-talks-back/\">6</a> or <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/06/29/podcast-7-eating-alone-classic-travel-stories/\">7</a> -- it dominated the TravelCommons download stats. Now it’s only responsible for a third of the downloads.</li>\r\n	<li>Rummaging through the mailbag…</li>\r\n	<li>Back last November in episode <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/11/22/podcast-112-holiday-airport-etiquette-travel-tax-pile-up/\">112</a>, Dan Gradwohl sent me a pointer to the website <a href=\"http://www.toandfromtheairport.com/\">To and From The Airport</a>, a collation of airport transit options. In that episode, I talked about reviewing the ORD listing and sending in a few updates. Toward the end of March, I received a note thanking me for my contribution and apologizing for the delay. Whatever issues were happening there now seem to have passed; it appears the site is back to being actively maintained.</li>\r\n	<li>Tom Brown, a longtime TravelCommons listener, sent a note following up on last episode’s riff on Nate Silver’s <a href=\"http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/planes-trains-and-taxis-when-to-take-public-transit-from-the-airport/\">538 blog post</a> about mass transit times to major US airports. He wrote:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>You noted London as the gold standard of public transport out of the airport. I would put it at bronze at best.  Decaying infrastructure, not so comfortable trains and destination not so friendly to business traveler in London doesn\'t help its ranking. Singapore is the best in my opinion with Hong Kong 2nd. Tokyo even ranks above London to me.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>Tom, thanks for that, expanding our sample size. My past trips thru Hong Kong and Singapore were family vacations - late arrivals from the US, tired kids, too much luggage - and so opted for taxis instead on mass transit. I missed the opportunity to add those trains to my personal sample, but I did end up with one of the wackiest cab rides while in HK. It was kind of a hoarder cab -- newspapers filling the trunk, tchotchkes all over the dashboard and hanging from the roof. I don’t know how we got 4 people and 4 bags into that cab. As I mentioned earlier, we’ll be flying in and out of Narita at the back half of June and given the distance and cab fares, we’ll take the Tokyo train at least once.</li>\r\n	<li>Our Spring Break trip to Andalucia started with a flight into Madrid airport. Our plans had us landing in Madrid, then making the 20-min schlep in from Terminal 4 (could they have put that terminal any further out?) and then heading downtown to catch the high-speed Renfe train to Córdoba. After I booked the tickets on-line (a process made infinitely easier than 2 years ago now that Renfe accepts PayPal) I was pleasantly surprised to stumble across a TripAdvisor post saying that the tickets included a free train ride down to the Puerta Atocha train station. It wasn\'t the fastest ride - a local train that made 4-5 stops before Atocha - but it was clean and not beat up. And since we were headed downtown during Friday rush hour, it took the same 30 min that Google Maps estimated for the cab.</li>\r\n	<li>And continuing on the transit theme, Nick Gassman sent a note about comments I made in episode <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/10/12/podcast-111-seatback-recline-wars-craft-beer-tourism/\">111</a> about the proliferation of pre-paid cards for subway and mass transit systems. Nick says about the London Underground:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>You can use your own contactless payment card (Visa, Amex etc) without having to buy an Oyster card, and get the same rates. You can register the card if you wish, to track spend.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>The link to the Tube web page is similar to the Chicago L page -- it feels a bit ambiguous, probably because the contactless technology is still a bit young, a bit ambiguous itself. Both London and Chicago say they’ll also work with NFC mobile phones -- like the latest Samsung Galaxies, the HTC Ones, and the iPhone 6. I think I’ve just got to get over to an L station and give it a try. But it’s probably not the kind of experiment I want to try and debug during rush hour when there’s a couple hundred hard-core commuters storming the 3-4 tap through gates. Seems like more of a midday or weekend morning thing.</li>\r\n	<li>Reaching back again to episode <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/11/22/podcast-112-holiday-airport-etiquette-travel-tax-pile-up/\">112 </a>where I talked about funding the Indiegogo campaign for the Bluesmart carry-on bag, what they call “The First Smart, Connected Luggage” complete with a smartphone app that acts as a digital lock, a scale, tracks location, and sounds an alarm if your smart bag wanders off. They’ve gotten huge press; they blew thru the funding goal by 3800%. But now they have to deliver the bag. They’ve been doing a good job of pushing out <a href=\"https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/bluesmart-world-s-first-smart-connected-carry-on#activity\">updates </a>and seem to be sticking to their August ship date. Which would be good for them because competitors are starting to move into this space. I tweeted out a link to an Engadget story last week about Samsung and Samsonite partnering up on a line of smart suitcases with functionality that sounds very similar to Bluesmart’s. Then I received a press release in the TravelCommons e-mail box from Planet Traveler <a href=\"http://www.planettravelerusa.com/preorder\">announcing</a> a Kickstarter campaign for the Space Case 1 line of smart luggage which will have all the functionality of the Bluesmart bag <i>plus</i> fingerprint unlock <i>and</i> Bluetooth speakers. As if the gate areas aren’t noisy enough.</li>\r\n	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\">Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/download_track.php?id=A1F44F3B330BFBBD5C7863108B61B09977CADC67705C23C5AECA03FC6F2C0320A93C8CF03BBFAC71CD59B5710E25327F\" rel=\"nofollow\">La Tra (basephunk mix)</a></em> by <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/label.php?id=3AF558B2D658A22FFF10B13F9D87237D276517530C9606BA2CB20418C6A8B4CB\" rel=\"nofollow\">Omar Sosa</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<b>A Decade of TravelCommons</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>It was ten  years ago <i>today </i>that I recorded the first T/C podcast in the bathroom of the Wardman Park Marriott in NW Washington, DC</li>\r\n	<li>[tc1-opening &amp; 1]</li>\r\n	<li>It was an interesting mix of topics…\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>TSA problems in ORD, LGA and DCA, the first of many TSA rants over the years;</li>\r\n	<li>The first sighting of a “puffer” security screening machine, don’t know if you ever walked through one of those, but we also talked about their multi-million dollar demise in an episode a some years later;</li>\r\n	<li>Hungarian roadside prostitutes -- a topic that I don’t believe I’ve revisited</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>And it was the first in a long string of what one listener referred to as a “pottycast” -- using the tile of hotel bathrooms as a poor man’s reverb chamber</li>\r\n	<li>[tc74-hotel medley]</li>\r\n	<li>Listening to that, I now understand why I have lifetime Marriott Platinum status.</li>\r\n	<li>One of the more noticeable changes over the years has been about the TSA. Early podcasts railed against the TSA -- the security theatre, the shoe carnival, liquid bans, and of course, the power trips</li>\r\n	<li>[tc45-finding tooth powder]</li>\r\n	<li>But with some much needed customer service training and, most importantly, the introduction of PreCheck, the TSA isn’t the podcast pinata it had been for the first 4-5 years -- especially when compared to airport security in places like India</li>\r\n	<li>[tc109-mall cop, umbrella]</li>\r\n	<li>Travel technology has been one constant through the TravelCommons decade</li>\r\n	<li>[tc87-briefcase]</li>\r\n	<li>[tc91-too much technology]</li>\r\n	<li>And while I’ve cycled through a number of phones, tablets, and laptops, the Bose noise-cancelling headphones remain the official headphones of the TravelCommons podcast</li>\r\n	<li>[tc48-bose lust]</li>\r\n	<li>Food has also been a common theme…</li>\r\n	<li>[tc97-food]</li>\r\n	<li>Never one to be accused of being a travel industry cheerleader…</li>\r\n	<li>[tc92-not-so-upbeat]</li>\r\n	<li>But I always try, if only partially successfully, to maintain some perspective</li>\r\n	<li>[t61-zen]</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917626811171154.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #115</li>\r\n	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n	<li>Links to 3 prior anniversary episodes\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/12/27/podcast-27-best-of-2005/\" target=\"_blank\">Episode 27</a> -- Best of 2005</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2006/06/13/podcast-40-looking-back-over-the-first-year/\" target=\"_blank\">Episode 40</a> -- Looking Back Over the First Year</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2009/05/14/podcast-74-looking-back-over-four-years-of-travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Episode 74</a> -- Looking Back Over Four Years</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from the <a href=\"http://promonet.iodalliance.com/\">IODA Promonet</a></li>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_115.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #115 — A Decade of TravelCommons','','inherit','open','open','','1505-revision-v1','','','2015-05-13 15:35:15','2015-05-13 20:35:15','',1505,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/05/13/1505-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1516,1,'2015-05-13 17:00:16','2015-05-13 22:00:16','[caption id=\"attachment_1508\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"228\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/2014-06-01-15.20.55-e1431490750219.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1508\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/2014-06-01-15.20.55-e1431490750219-228x300.jpg\" alt=\"Been on Duty for 10 Years...\" width=\"228\" height=\"300\" /></a> Been on Duty for 10 Years...[/caption]\r\n\r\nHard to believe that I\'ve been prattling along for 10 years. Looking back, I see that I\'ve become less of a TSA-hater, but am still pretty clear-eyed about the tediousness of the frequent travel experience. It\'s tough to pack 10 years into a 30-min episode, but I think I\'ve cherry-picked some good snippets. Before that, I talk about spending Semana Santa (Holy Week) in southern Spain, and the listener mailbag continues the conversation about mass transit to airports. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_115.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/205337138\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #115:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, so no video “uncut” version like I did last episode from New Orleans. No maid service in the TravelCommons studio to tidy up before the podcast.</li>\r\n	<li>We’re deep in the bipolar weather roller coaster that is Spring in the Midwest -- 70’s one day, 40’s the next; bright sun at 10 in the morning, pissing down rain at noon. Which is as good an explanation as any why Chicago’s two airports, O’Hare and Midway, own the basement of the DOT’s on-time departures ranking.</li>\r\n	<li>My travel has been a bit more interesting since the last episode. Did a few of my normal runs down to New Orleans, but broke the pattern a bit with travel to Denver and Charlotte. And even one of the runs down to New Orleans broke the usual down-Monday-back-Thursday routine. At the beginning of April, I flew down Thursday night with my wife and daughter, met up with friends for the French Quarter Fest weekend. It’s one of my favorite music festivals. Free music from local bands; stages and food stands spread around the Quarter -- a bit lower key than the 460,000 people who descended on the Fair Grounds for Jazz Fest a few weeks back.</li>\r\n	<li>The big trip, though, was a couple of weeks prior to that when we went to Andalucia -- southern Spain -- for Spring Break and found ourselves there during Semana Santa -- Holy Week. Cordoba, Granada, Sevilla, the hill town of Ronda. Processions (plural) almost every night. My wife said it was like the Tour de France for Catholics. And as a Catholic, I couldn’t argue -- it was pretty full contact. I posted a <a href=\"https://vine.co/v/OL66AUgHwwi\">Vine video</a> of a Granada procession to my <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter feed</a> and then a couple of minutes of GoPro footage from the last Holy Thursday procession in Sevilla on the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons\">Facebook</a> page and <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\">YouTube channel</a>. It was close to midnight, after which I think they took an hour break and then started up the Good Friday processions. We went to bed. When we went out the next morning around 8:30 to grab some breakfast -- our usual of cafe con leche and tomato bread topped with jamón iberico -- the restaurant was jammed with people who just finished a procession. It just kept going.</li>\r\n	<li>And so do we. I drained my United account for a trip next month to Japan, and then in September, we’re heading over to Scotland so my daughter can start at the <a href=\"http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/\">University of St Andrews</a>, so I should have enough content to keep TravelCommons rolling into an 11th year.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/download_track.php?id=6E494292C6B4E14E784F04400EB2C54CE135E29730530171C5F931345CAA3733A93C8CF03BBFAC71CD59B5710E25327F\" rel=\"nofollow\">All Around</a></em> by <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=AEF14840F87CD6C39BE8918AF693E89C276517530C9606BA2CB20418C6A8B4CB\" rel=\"nofollow\">Jel</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Before we get into the meat of things, just a quick pointer to let everyone know that TravelCommons is available on the Stitcher radio smartphone app as well as on <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>. Since iTunes started handling podcasts -- June 2005, right around episodes <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/06/19/podcast-6-the-tsa-talks-back/\">6</a> or <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/06/29/podcast-7-eating-alone-classic-travel-stories/\">7</a> -- it dominated the TravelCommons download stats. Now it’s only responsible for a third of the downloads.</li>\r\n	<li>Rummaging through the mailbag…</li>\r\n	<li>Back last November in episode <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/11/22/podcast-112-holiday-airport-etiquette-travel-tax-pile-up/\">112</a>, Dan Gradwohl sent me a pointer to the website <a href=\"http://www.toandfromtheairport.com/\">To and From The Airport</a>, a collation of airport transit options. In that episode, I talked about reviewing the ORD listing and sending in a few updates. Toward the end of March, I received a note thanking me for my contribution and apologizing for the delay. Whatever issues were happening there now seem to have passed; it appears the site is back to being actively maintained.</li>\r\n	<li>Tom Brown, a longtime TravelCommons listener, sent a note following up on last episode’s riff on Nate Silver’s <a href=\"http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/planes-trains-and-taxis-when-to-take-public-transit-from-the-airport/\">538 blog post</a> about mass transit times to major US airports. He wrote:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>You noted London as the gold standard of public transport out of the airport. I would put it at bronze at best.  Decaying infrastructure, not so comfortable trains and destination not so friendly to business traveler in London doesn\'t help its ranking. Singapore is the best in my opinion with Hong Kong 2nd. Tokyo even ranks above London to me.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>Tom, thanks for that, expanding our sample size. My past trips thru Hong Kong and Singapore were family vacations - late arrivals from the US, tired kids, too much luggage - and so opted for taxis instead on mass transit. I missed the opportunity to add those trains to my personal sample, but I did end up with one of the wackiest cab rides while in HK. It was kind of a hoarder cab -- newspapers filling the trunk, tchotchkes all over the dashboard and hanging from the roof. I don’t know how we got 4 people and 4 bags into that cab. As I mentioned earlier, we’ll be flying in and out of Narita at the back half of June and given the distance and cab fares, we’ll take the Tokyo train at least once.</li>\r\n	<li>Our Spring Break trip to Andalucia started with a flight into Madrid airport. Our plans had us landing in Madrid, then making the 20-min schlep in from Terminal 4 (could they have put that terminal any further out?) and then heading downtown to catch the high-speed Renfe train to Córdoba. After I booked the tickets on-line (a process made infinitely easier than 2 years ago now that Renfe accepts PayPal) I was pleasantly surprised to stumble across a TripAdvisor post saying that the tickets included a free train ride down to the Puerta Atocha train station. It wasn\'t the fastest ride - a local train that made 4-5 stops before Atocha - but it was clean and not beat up. And since we were headed downtown during Friday rush hour, it took the same 30 min that Google Maps estimated for the cab.</li>\r\n	<li>And continuing on the transit theme, Nick Gassman sent a note about comments I made in episode <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/10/12/podcast-111-seatback-recline-wars-craft-beer-tourism/\">111</a> about the proliferation of pre-paid cards for subway and mass transit systems. Nick says about the London Underground:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>You can use your own contactless payment card (Visa, Amex etc) without having to buy an Oyster card, and get the same rates. You can register the card if you wish, to track spend.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>The link to the Tube web page is similar to the Chicago L page -- it feels a bit ambiguous, probably because the contactless technology is still a bit young, a bit ambiguous itself. Both London and Chicago say they’ll also work with NFC mobile phones -- like the latest Samsung Galaxies, the HTC Ones, and the iPhone 6. I think I’ve just got to get over to an L station and give it a try. But it’s probably not the kind of experiment I want to try and debug during rush hour when there’s a couple hundred hard-core commuters storming the 3-4 tap through gates. Seems like more of a midday or weekend morning thing.</li>\r\n	<li>Reaching back again to episode <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/11/22/podcast-112-holiday-airport-etiquette-travel-tax-pile-up/\">112 </a>where I talked about funding the Indiegogo campaign for the Bluesmart carry-on bag, what they call “The First Smart, Connected Luggage” complete with a smartphone app that acts as a digital lock, a scale, tracks location, and sounds an alarm if your smart bag wanders off. They’ve gotten huge press; they blew thru the funding goal by 3800%. But now they have to deliver the bag. They’ve been doing a good job of pushing out <a href=\"https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/bluesmart-world-s-first-smart-connected-carry-on#activity\">updates </a>and seem to be sticking to their August ship date. Which would be good for them because competitors are starting to move into this space. I tweeted out a link to an Engadget story last week about Samsung and Samsonite partnering up on a line of smart suitcases with functionality that sounds very similar to Bluesmart’s. Then I received a press release in the TravelCommons e-mail box from Planet Traveler <a href=\"http://www.planettravelerusa.com/preorder\">announcing</a> a Kickstarter campaign for the Space Case 1 line of smart luggage which will have all the functionality of the Bluesmart bag <i>plus</i> fingerprint unlock <i>and</i> Bluetooth speakers. As if the gate areas aren’t noisy enough.</li>\r\n	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\">Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/download_track.php?id=A1F44F3B330BFBBD5C7863108B61B09977CADC67705C23C5AECA03FC6F2C0320A93C8CF03BBFAC71CD59B5710E25327F\" rel=\"nofollow\">La Tra (basephunk mix)</a></em> by <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/label.php?id=3AF558B2D658A22FFF10B13F9D87237D276517530C9606BA2CB20418C6A8B4CB\" rel=\"nofollow\">Omar Sosa</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<b>A Decade of TravelCommons</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>It was ten  years ago <i>today </i>that I recorded the first T/C podcast in the bathroom of the Wardman Park Marriott in NW Washington, DC</li>\r\n	<li>[tc1-opening &amp; 1]</li>\r\n	<li>It was an interesting mix of topics…\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>TSA problems in ORD, LGA and DCA, the first of many TSA rants over the years;</li>\r\n	<li>The first sighting of a “puffer” security screening machine, don’t know if you ever walked through one of those, but we also talked about their multi-million dollar demise in an episode a some years later;</li>\r\n	<li>Hungarian roadside prostitutes -- a topic that I don’t believe I’ve revisited</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>And it was the first in a long string of what one listener referred to as a “pottycast” -- using the tile of hotel bathrooms as a poor man’s reverb chamber</li>\r\n	<li>[tc74-hotel medley]</li>\r\n	<li>Listening to that, I now understand why I have lifetime Marriott Platinum status.</li>\r\n	<li>One of the more noticeable changes over the years has been about the TSA. Early podcasts railed against the TSA -- the security theatre, the shoe carnival, liquid bans, and of course, the power trips</li>\r\n	<li>[tc45-finding tooth powder]</li>\r\n	<li>But with some much needed customer service training and, most importantly, the introduction of PreCheck, the TSA isn’t the podcast pinata it had been for the first 4-5 years -- especially when compared to airport security in places like India</li>\r\n	<li>[tc109-mall cop, umbrella]</li>\r\n	<li>Travel technology has been one constant through the TravelCommons decade</li>\r\n	<li>[tc87-briefcase]</li>\r\n	<li>[tc91-too much technology]</li>\r\n	<li>And while I’ve cycled through a number of phones, tablets, and laptops, the Bose noise-cancelling headphones remain the official headphones of the TravelCommons podcast</li>\r\n	<li>[tc48-bose lust]</li>\r\n	<li>Food has also been a common theme…</li>\r\n	<li>[tc97-food]</li>\r\n	<li>Never one to be accused of being a travel industry cheerleader…</li>\r\n	<li>[tc92-not-so-upbeat]</li>\r\n	<li>But I always try, if only partially successfully, to maintain some perspective</li>\r\n	<li>[t61-zen]</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917626811171154.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #115</li>\r\n	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n	<li>Links to 3 prior anniversary episodes\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/12/27/podcast-27-best-of-2005/\" target=\"_blank\">Episode 27</a> -- Best of 2005</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2006/06/13/podcast-40-looking-back-over-the-first-year/\" target=\"_blank\">Episode 40</a> -- Looking Back Over the First Year</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2009/05/14/podcast-74-looking-back-over-four-years-of-travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Episode 74</a> -- Looking Back Over Four Years</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from the <a href=\"http://promonet.iodalliance.com/\">IODA Promonet</a></li>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_115.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #115 — A Decade of TravelCommons','','inherit','open','open','','1505-revision-v1','','','2015-05-13 17:00:16','2015-05-13 22:00:16','',1505,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/05/13/1505-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1517,1,'2015-05-13 17:03:20','2015-05-13 22:03:20','[caption id=\"attachment_1508\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"228\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/2014-06-01-15.20.55-e1431490750219.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1508\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/2014-06-01-15.20.55-e1431490750219-228x300.jpg\" alt=\"Been on Duty for 10 Years...\" width=\"228\" height=\"300\" /></a> Been on Duty for 10 Years...[/caption]\r\n\r\nHard to believe that I\'ve been prattling along for 10 years. Looking back, I see that I\'ve become less of a TSA-hater, but am still pretty clear-eyed about the tediousness of the frequent travel experience. It\'s tough to pack 10 years into a 30-min episode, but I think I\'ve cherry-picked some good snippets. Before that, I talk about spending Semana Santa (Holy Week) in southern Spain and \"smart luggage.\" The listener mailbag continues the conversation about mass transit to airports. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_115.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/205337138\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #115:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, so no video “uncut” version like I did last episode from New Orleans. No maid service in the TravelCommons studio to tidy up before the podcast.</li>\r\n	<li>We’re deep in the bipolar weather roller coaster that is Spring in the Midwest -- 70’s one day, 40’s the next; bright sun at 10 in the morning, pissing down rain at noon. Which is as good an explanation as any why Chicago’s two airports, O’Hare and Midway, own the basement of the DOT’s on-time departures ranking.</li>\r\n	<li>My travel has been a bit more interesting since the last episode. Did a few of my normal runs down to New Orleans, but broke the pattern a bit with travel to Denver and Charlotte. And even one of the runs down to New Orleans broke the usual down-Monday-back-Thursday routine. At the beginning of April, I flew down Thursday night with my wife and daughter, met up with friends for the French Quarter Fest weekend. It’s one of my favorite music festivals. Free music from local bands; stages and food stands spread around the Quarter -- a bit lower key than the 460,000 people who descended on the Fair Grounds for Jazz Fest a few weeks back.</li>\r\n	<li>The big trip, though, was a couple of weeks prior to that when we went to Andalucia -- southern Spain -- for Spring Break and found ourselves there during Semana Santa -- Holy Week. Cordoba, Granada, Sevilla, the hill town of Ronda. Processions (plural) almost every night. My wife said it was like the Tour de France for Catholics. And as a Catholic, I couldn’t argue -- it was pretty full contact. I posted a <a href=\"https://vine.co/v/OL66AUgHwwi\">Vine video</a> of a Granada procession to my <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter feed</a> and then a couple of minutes of GoPro footage from the last Holy Thursday procession in Sevilla on the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons\">Facebook</a> page and <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\">YouTube channel</a>. It was close to midnight, after which I think they took an hour break and then started up the Good Friday processions. We went to bed. When we went out the next morning around 8:30 to grab some breakfast -- our usual of cafe con leche and tomato bread topped with jamón iberico -- the restaurant was jammed with people who just finished a procession. It just kept going.</li>\r\n	<li>And so do we. I drained my United account for a trip next month to Japan, and then in September, we’re heading over to Scotland so my daughter can start at the <a href=\"http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/\">University of St Andrews</a>, so I should have enough content to keep TravelCommons rolling into an 11th year.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/download_track.php?id=6E494292C6B4E14E784F04400EB2C54CE135E29730530171C5F931345CAA3733A93C8CF03BBFAC71CD59B5710E25327F\" rel=\"nofollow\">All Around</a></em> by <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=AEF14840F87CD6C39BE8918AF693E89C276517530C9606BA2CB20418C6A8B4CB\" rel=\"nofollow\">Jel</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Before we get into the meat of things, just a quick pointer to let everyone know that TravelCommons is available on the Stitcher radio smartphone app as well as on <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>. Since iTunes started handling podcasts -- June 2005, right around episodes <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/06/19/podcast-6-the-tsa-talks-back/\">6</a> or <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/06/29/podcast-7-eating-alone-classic-travel-stories/\">7</a> -- it dominated the TravelCommons download stats. Now it’s only responsible for a third of the downloads.</li>\r\n	<li>Rummaging through the mailbag…</li>\r\n	<li>Back last November in episode <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/11/22/podcast-112-holiday-airport-etiquette-travel-tax-pile-up/\">112</a>, Dan Gradwohl sent me a pointer to the website <a href=\"http://www.toandfromtheairport.com/\">To and From The Airport</a>, a collation of airport transit options. In that episode, I talked about reviewing the ORD listing and sending in a few updates. Toward the end of March, I received a note thanking me for my contribution and apologizing for the delay. Whatever issues were happening there now seem to have passed; it appears the site is back to being actively maintained.</li>\r\n	<li>Tom Brown, a longtime TravelCommons listener, sent a note following up on last episode’s riff on Nate Silver’s <a href=\"http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/planes-trains-and-taxis-when-to-take-public-transit-from-the-airport/\">538 blog post</a> about mass transit times to major US airports. He wrote:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>You noted London as the gold standard of public transport out of the airport. I would put it at bronze at best.  Decaying infrastructure, not so comfortable trains and destination not so friendly to business traveler in London doesn\'t help its ranking. Singapore is the best in my opinion with Hong Kong 2nd. Tokyo even ranks above London to me.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>Tom, thanks for that, expanding our sample size. My past trips thru Hong Kong and Singapore were family vacations - late arrivals from the US, tired kids, too much luggage - and so opted for taxis instead on mass transit. I missed the opportunity to add those trains to my personal sample, but I did end up with one of the wackiest cab rides while in HK. It was kind of a hoarder cab -- newspapers filling the trunk, tchotchkes all over the dashboard and hanging from the roof. I don’t know how we got 4 people and 4 bags into that cab. As I mentioned earlier, we’ll be flying in and out of Narita at the back half of June and given the distance and cab fares, we’ll take the Tokyo train at least once.</li>\r\n	<li>Our Spring Break trip to Andalucia started with a flight into Madrid airport. Our plans had us landing in Madrid, then making the 20-min schlep in from Terminal 4 (could they have put that terminal any further out?) and then heading downtown to catch the high-speed Renfe train to Córdoba. After I booked the tickets on-line (a process made infinitely easier than 2 years ago now that Renfe accepts PayPal) I was pleasantly surprised to stumble across a TripAdvisor post saying that the tickets included a free train ride down to the Puerta Atocha train station. It wasn\'t the fastest ride - a local train that made 4-5 stops before Atocha - but it was clean and not beat up. And since we were headed downtown during Friday rush hour, it took the same 30 min that Google Maps estimated for the cab.</li>\r\n	<li>And continuing on the transit theme, Nick Gassman sent a note about comments I made in episode <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/10/12/podcast-111-seatback-recline-wars-craft-beer-tourism/\">111</a> about the proliferation of pre-paid cards for subway and mass transit systems. Nick says about the London Underground:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>You can use your own contactless payment card (Visa, Amex etc) without having to buy an Oyster card, and get the same rates. You can register the card if you wish, to track spend.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>The link to the Tube web page is similar to the Chicago L page -- it feels a bit ambiguous, probably because the contactless technology is still a bit young, a bit ambiguous itself. Both London and Chicago say they’ll also work with NFC mobile phones -- like the latest Samsung Galaxies, the HTC Ones, and the iPhone 6. I think I’ve just got to get over to an L station and give it a try. But it’s probably not the kind of experiment I want to try and debug during rush hour when there’s a couple hundred hard-core commuters storming the 3-4 tap through gates. Seems like more of a midday or weekend morning thing.</li>\r\n	<li>Reaching back again to episode <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/11/22/podcast-112-holiday-airport-etiquette-travel-tax-pile-up/\">112 </a>where I talked about funding the Indiegogo campaign for the Bluesmart carry-on bag, what they call “The First Smart, Connected Luggage” complete with a smartphone app that acts as a digital lock, a scale, tracks location, and sounds an alarm if your smart bag wanders off. They’ve gotten huge press; they blew thru the funding goal by 3800%. But now they have to deliver the bag. They’ve been doing a good job of pushing out <a href=\"https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/bluesmart-world-s-first-smart-connected-carry-on#activity\">updates </a>and seem to be sticking to their August ship date. Which would be good for them because competitors are starting to move into this space. I tweeted out a link to an Engadget story last week about Samsung and Samsonite partnering up on a line of smart suitcases with functionality that sounds very similar to Bluesmart’s. Then I received a press release in the TravelCommons e-mail box from Planet Traveler <a href=\"http://www.planettravelerusa.com/preorder\">announcing</a> a Kickstarter campaign for the Space Case 1 line of smart luggage which will have all the functionality of the Bluesmart bag <i>plus</i> fingerprint unlock <i>and</i> Bluetooth speakers. As if the gate areas aren’t noisy enough.</li>\r\n	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\">Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/download_track.php?id=A1F44F3B330BFBBD5C7863108B61B09977CADC67705C23C5AECA03FC6F2C0320A93C8CF03BBFAC71CD59B5710E25327F\" rel=\"nofollow\">La Tra (basephunk mix)</a></em> by <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/label.php?id=3AF558B2D658A22FFF10B13F9D87237D276517530C9606BA2CB20418C6A8B4CB\" rel=\"nofollow\">Omar Sosa</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<b>A Decade of TravelCommons</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>It was ten  years ago <i>today </i>that I recorded the first T/C podcast in the bathroom of the Wardman Park Marriott in NW Washington, DC</li>\r\n	<li>[tc1-opening &amp; 1]</li>\r\n	<li>It was an interesting mix of topics…\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>TSA problems in ORD, LGA and DCA, the first of many TSA rants over the years;</li>\r\n	<li>The first sighting of a “puffer” security screening machine, don’t know if you ever walked through one of those, but we also talked about their multi-million dollar demise in an episode a some years later;</li>\r\n	<li>Hungarian roadside prostitutes -- a topic that I don’t believe I’ve revisited</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>And it was the first in a long string of what one listener referred to as a “pottycast” -- using the tile of hotel bathrooms as a poor man’s reverb chamber</li>\r\n	<li>[tc74-hotel medley]</li>\r\n	<li>Listening to that, I now understand why I have lifetime Marriott Platinum status.</li>\r\n	<li>One of the more noticeable changes over the years has been about the TSA. Early podcasts railed against the TSA -- the security theatre, the shoe carnival, liquid bans, and of course, the power trips</li>\r\n	<li>[tc45-finding tooth powder]</li>\r\n	<li>But with some much needed customer service training and, most importantly, the introduction of PreCheck, the TSA isn’t the podcast pinata it had been for the first 4-5 years -- especially when compared to airport security in places like India</li>\r\n	<li>[tc109-mall cop, umbrella]</li>\r\n	<li>Travel technology has been one constant through the TravelCommons decade</li>\r\n	<li>[tc87-briefcase]</li>\r\n	<li>[tc91-too much technology]</li>\r\n	<li>And while I’ve cycled through a number of phones, tablets, and laptops, the Bose noise-cancelling headphones remain the official headphones of the TravelCommons podcast</li>\r\n	<li>[tc48-bose lust]</li>\r\n	<li>Food has also been a common theme…</li>\r\n	<li>[tc97-food]</li>\r\n	<li>Never one to be accused of being a travel industry cheerleader…</li>\r\n	<li>[tc92-not-so-upbeat]</li>\r\n	<li>But I always try, if only partially successfully, to maintain some perspective</li>\r\n	<li>[t61-zen]</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917626811171154.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #115</li>\r\n	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n	<li>Links to 3 prior anniversary episodes\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/12/27/podcast-27-best-of-2005/\" target=\"_blank\">Episode 27</a> -- Best of 2005</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2006/06/13/podcast-40-looking-back-over-the-first-year/\" target=\"_blank\">Episode 40</a> -- Looking Back Over the First Year</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2009/05/14/podcast-74-looking-back-over-four-years-of-travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Episode 74</a> -- Looking Back Over Four Years</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from the <a href=\"http://promonet.iodalliance.com/\">IODA Promonet</a></li>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_115.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #115 — A Decade of TravelCommons','','inherit','open','open','','1505-revision-v1','','','2015-05-13 17:03:20','2015-05-13 22:03:20','',1505,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/05/13/1505-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1518,1,'2015-05-13 17:37:19','2015-05-13 22:37:19','[caption id=\"attachment_1508\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"228\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/2014-06-01-15.20.55-e1431490750219.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1508\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/2014-06-01-15.20.55-e1431490750219-228x300.jpg\" alt=\"Been on Duty for 10 Years...\" width=\"228\" height=\"300\" /></a> Been on Duty for 10 Years...[/caption]\r\n\r\nHard to believe that I\'ve been prattling along for 10 years. Looking back, I see that I\'ve become less of a TSA-hater, but am still pretty clear-eyed about the tediousness of the frequent travel experience. It\'s tough to pack 10 years into a 30-min episode, but I think I\'ve cherry-picked some good snippets. Before that, I talk about spending Semana Santa (Holy Week) in southern Spain and \"smart luggage.\" The listener mailbag continues the conversation about mass transit to airports. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_115.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/205337138\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #115:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, so no video “uncut” version like I did last episode from New Orleans. No maid service in the TravelCommons studio to tidy up before the podcast.</li>\r\n	<li>We’re deep in the bipolar weather roller coaster that is Spring in the Midwest -- 70’s one day, 40’s the next; bright sun at 10 in the morning, pissing down rain at noon. Which is as good an explanation as any why Chicago’s two airports, O’Hare and Midway, own the basement of the DOT’s on-time departures ranking.</li>\r\n	<li>My travel has been a bit more interesting since the last episode. Did a few of my normal runs down to New Orleans, but broke the pattern a bit with travel to Denver and Charlotte. And even one of the runs down to New Orleans broke the usual down-Monday-back-Thursday routine. At the beginning of April, I flew down Thursday night with my wife and daughter, met up with friends for the French Quarter Fest weekend. It’s one of my favorite music festivals. Free music from local bands; stages and food stands spread around the Quarter -- a bit lower key than the 460,000 people who descended on the Fair Grounds for Jazz Fest a few weeks back.</li>\r\n	<li>The big trip, though, was a couple of weeks prior to that when we went to Andalucia -- southern Spain -- for Spring Break and found ourselves there during Semana Santa -- Holy Week. Cordoba, Granada, Sevilla, the hill town of Ronda. Processions (plural) almost every night. My wife said it was like the Tour de France for Catholics. And as a Catholic, I couldn’t argue -- it was pretty full contact. I posted a <a href=\"https://vine.co/v/OL66AUgHwwi\">Vine video</a> of a Granada procession to my <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter feed</a> and then a couple of minutes of GoPro footage from the last Holy Thursday procession in Sevilla on the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons\">Facebook</a> page and <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\">YouTube channel</a>. It was close to midnight, after which I think they took an hour break and then started up the Good Friday processions. We went to bed. When we went out the next morning around 8:30 to grab some breakfast -- our usual of cafe con leche and tomato bread topped with jamón iberico -- the restaurant was jammed with people who just finished a procession. It just kept going.</li>\r\n[vine url=\"https://vine.co/v/hKUJUmPBeur\" height=32\" width=320 type=\"simple\"]\r\n[vine url=\"https://vine.co/v/OL66AUgHwwi\" height=480 width=480 type=\"postcard\"]\r\n	<li>And so do we. I drained my United account for a trip next month to Japan, and then in September, we’re heading over to Scotland so my daughter can start at the <a href=\"http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/\">University of St Andrews</a>, so I should have enough content to keep TravelCommons rolling into an 11th year.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/download_track.php?id=6E494292C6B4E14E784F04400EB2C54CE135E29730530171C5F931345CAA3733A93C8CF03BBFAC71CD59B5710E25327F\" rel=\"nofollow\">All Around</a></em> by <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=AEF14840F87CD6C39BE8918AF693E89C276517530C9606BA2CB20418C6A8B4CB\" rel=\"nofollow\">Jel</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Before we get into the meat of things, just a quick pointer to let everyone know that TravelCommons is available on the Stitcher radio smartphone app as well as on <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>. Since iTunes started handling podcasts -- June 2005, right around episodes <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/06/19/podcast-6-the-tsa-talks-back/\">6</a> or <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/06/29/podcast-7-eating-alone-classic-travel-stories/\">7</a> -- it dominated the TravelCommons download stats. Now it’s only responsible for a third of the downloads.</li>\r\n	<li>Rummaging through the mailbag…</li>\r\n	<li>Back last November in episode <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/11/22/podcast-112-holiday-airport-etiquette-travel-tax-pile-up/\">112</a>, Dan Gradwohl sent me a pointer to the website <a href=\"http://www.toandfromtheairport.com/\">To and From The Airport</a>, a collation of airport transit options. In that episode, I talked about reviewing the ORD listing and sending in a few updates. Toward the end of March, I received a note thanking me for my contribution and apologizing for the delay. Whatever issues were happening there now seem to have passed; it appears the site is back to being actively maintained.</li>\r\n	<li>Tom Brown, a longtime TravelCommons listener, sent a note following up on last episode’s riff on Nate Silver’s <a href=\"http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/planes-trains-and-taxis-when-to-take-public-transit-from-the-airport/\">538 blog post</a> about mass transit times to major US airports. He wrote:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>You noted London as the gold standard of public transport out of the airport. I would put it at bronze at best.  Decaying infrastructure, not so comfortable trains and destination not so friendly to business traveler in London doesn\'t help its ranking. Singapore is the best in my opinion with Hong Kong 2nd. Tokyo even ranks above London to me.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>Tom, thanks for that, expanding our sample size. My past trips thru Hong Kong and Singapore were family vacations - late arrivals from the US, tired kids, too much luggage - and so opted for taxis instead on mass transit. I missed the opportunity to add those trains to my personal sample, but I did end up with one of the wackiest cab rides while in HK. It was kind of a hoarder cab -- newspapers filling the trunk, tchotchkes all over the dashboard and hanging from the roof. I don’t know how we got 4 people and 4 bags into that cab. As I mentioned earlier, we’ll be flying in and out of Narita at the back half of June and given the distance and cab fares, we’ll take the Tokyo train at least once.</li>\r\n	<li>Our Spring Break trip to Andalucia started with a flight into Madrid airport. Our plans had us landing in Madrid, then making the 20-min schlep in from Terminal 4 (could they have put that terminal any further out?) and then heading downtown to catch the high-speed Renfe train to Córdoba. After I booked the tickets on-line (a process made infinitely easier than 2 years ago now that Renfe accepts PayPal) I was pleasantly surprised to stumble across a TripAdvisor post saying that the tickets included a free train ride down to the Puerta Atocha train station. It wasn\'t the fastest ride - a local train that made 4-5 stops before Atocha - but it was clean and not beat up. And since we were headed downtown during Friday rush hour, it took the same 30 min that Google Maps estimated for the cab.</li>\r\n	<li>And continuing on the transit theme, Nick Gassman sent a note about comments I made in episode <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/10/12/podcast-111-seatback-recline-wars-craft-beer-tourism/\">111</a> about the proliferation of pre-paid cards for subway and mass transit systems. Nick says about the London Underground:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>You can use your own contactless payment card (Visa, Amex etc) without having to buy an Oyster card, and get the same rates. You can register the card if you wish, to track spend.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>The link to the Tube web page is similar to the Chicago L page -- it feels a bit ambiguous, probably because the contactless technology is still a bit young, a bit ambiguous itself. Both London and Chicago say they’ll also work with NFC mobile phones -- like the latest Samsung Galaxies, the HTC Ones, and the iPhone 6. I think I’ve just got to get over to an L station and give it a try. But it’s probably not the kind of experiment I want to try and debug during rush hour when there’s a couple hundred hard-core commuters storming the 3-4 tap through gates. Seems like more of a midday or weekend morning thing.</li>\r\n	<li>Reaching back again to episode <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/11/22/podcast-112-holiday-airport-etiquette-travel-tax-pile-up/\">112 </a>where I talked about funding the Indiegogo campaign for the Bluesmart carry-on bag, what they call “The First Smart, Connected Luggage” complete with a smartphone app that acts as a digital lock, a scale, tracks location, and sounds an alarm if your smart bag wanders off. They’ve gotten huge press; they blew thru the funding goal by 3800%. But now they have to deliver the bag. They’ve been doing a good job of pushing out <a href=\"https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/bluesmart-world-s-first-smart-connected-carry-on#activity\">updates </a>and seem to be sticking to their August ship date. Which would be good for them because competitors are starting to move into this space. I tweeted out a link to an Engadget story last week about Samsung and Samsonite partnering up on a line of smart suitcases with functionality that sounds very similar to Bluesmart’s. Then I received a press release in the TravelCommons e-mail box from Planet Traveler <a href=\"http://www.planettravelerusa.com/preorder\">announcing</a> a Kickstarter campaign for the Space Case 1 line of smart luggage which will have all the functionality of the Bluesmart bag <i>plus</i> fingerprint unlock <i>and</i> Bluetooth speakers. As if the gate areas aren’t noisy enough.</li>\r\n	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\">Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/download_track.php?id=A1F44F3B330BFBBD5C7863108B61B09977CADC67705C23C5AECA03FC6F2C0320A93C8CF03BBFAC71CD59B5710E25327F\" rel=\"nofollow\">La Tra (basephunk mix)</a></em> by <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/label.php?id=3AF558B2D658A22FFF10B13F9D87237D276517530C9606BA2CB20418C6A8B4CB\" rel=\"nofollow\">Omar Sosa</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<b>A Decade of TravelCommons</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>It was ten  years ago <i>today </i>that I recorded the first T/C podcast in the bathroom of the Wardman Park Marriott in NW Washington, DC</li>\r\n	<li>[tc1-opening &amp; 1]</li>\r\n	<li>It was an interesting mix of topics…\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>TSA problems in ORD, LGA and DCA, the first of many TSA rants over the years;</li>\r\n	<li>The first sighting of a “puffer” security screening machine, don’t know if you ever walked through one of those, but we also talked about their multi-million dollar demise in an episode a some years later;</li>\r\n	<li>Hungarian roadside prostitutes -- a topic that I don’t believe I’ve revisited</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>And it was the first in a long string of what one listener referred to as a “pottycast” -- using the tile of hotel bathrooms as a poor man’s reverb chamber</li>\r\n	<li>[tc74-hotel medley]</li>\r\n	<li>Listening to that, I now understand why I have lifetime Marriott Platinum status.</li>\r\n	<li>One of the more noticeable changes over the years has been about the TSA. Early podcasts railed against the TSA -- the security theatre, the shoe carnival, liquid bans, and of course, the power trips</li>\r\n	<li>[tc45-finding tooth powder]</li>\r\n	<li>But with some much needed customer service training and, most importantly, the introduction of PreCheck, the TSA isn’t the podcast pinata it had been for the first 4-5 years -- especially when compared to airport security in places like India</li>\r\n	<li>[tc109-mall cop, umbrella]</li>\r\n	<li>Travel technology has been one constant through the TravelCommons decade</li>\r\n	<li>[tc87-briefcase]</li>\r\n	<li>[tc91-too much technology]</li>\r\n	<li>And while I’ve cycled through a number of phones, tablets, and laptops, the Bose noise-cancelling headphones remain the official headphones of the TravelCommons podcast</li>\r\n	<li>[tc48-bose lust]</li>\r\n	<li>Food has also been a common theme…</li>\r\n	<li>[tc97-food]</li>\r\n	<li>Never one to be accused of being a travel industry cheerleader…</li>\r\n	<li>[tc92-not-so-upbeat]</li>\r\n	<li>But I always try, if only partially successfully, to maintain some perspective</li>\r\n	<li>[t61-zen]</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917626811171154.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #115</li>\r\n	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n	<li>Links to 3 prior anniversary episodes\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/12/27/podcast-27-best-of-2005/\" target=\"_blank\">Episode 27</a> -- Best of 2005</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2006/06/13/podcast-40-looking-back-over-the-first-year/\" target=\"_blank\">Episode 40</a> -- Looking Back Over the First Year</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2009/05/14/podcast-74-looking-back-over-four-years-of-travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Episode 74</a> -- Looking Back Over Four Years</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from the <a href=\"http://promonet.iodalliance.com/\">IODA Promonet</a></li>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_115.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #115 — A Decade of TravelCommons','','inherit','open','open','','1505-revision-v1','','','2015-05-13 17:37:19','2015-05-13 22:37:19','',1505,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/05/13/1505-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1519,1,'2015-05-13 17:38:27','2015-05-13 22:38:27','[caption id=\"attachment_1508\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"228\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/2014-06-01-15.20.55-e1431490750219.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1508\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/2014-06-01-15.20.55-e1431490750219-228x300.jpg\" alt=\"Been on Duty for 10 Years...\" width=\"228\" height=\"300\" /></a> Been on Duty for 10 Years...[/caption]\r\n\r\nHard to believe that I\'ve been prattling along for 10 years. Looking back, I see that I\'ve become less of a TSA-hater, but am still pretty clear-eyed about the tediousness of the frequent travel experience. It\'s tough to pack 10 years into a 30-min episode, but I think I\'ve cherry-picked some good snippets. Before that, I talk about spending Semana Santa (Holy Week) in southern Spain and \"smart luggage.\" The listener mailbag continues the conversation about mass transit to airports. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_115.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/205337138\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #115:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, so no video “uncut” version like I did last episode from New Orleans. No maid service in the TravelCommons studio to tidy up before the podcast.</li>\r\n	<li>We’re deep in the bipolar weather roller coaster that is Spring in the Midwest -- 70’s one day, 40’s the next; bright sun at 10 in the morning, pissing down rain at noon. Which is as good an explanation as any why Chicago’s two airports, O’Hare and Midway, own the basement of the DOT’s on-time departures ranking.</li>\r\n	<li>My travel has been a bit more interesting since the last episode. Did a few of my normal runs down to New Orleans, but broke the pattern a bit with travel to Denver and Charlotte. And even one of the runs down to New Orleans broke the usual down-Monday-back-Thursday routine. At the beginning of April, I flew down Thursday night with my wife and daughter, met up with friends for the French Quarter Fest weekend. It’s one of my favorite music festivals. Free music from local bands; stages and food stands spread around the Quarter -- a bit lower key than the 460,000 people who descended on the Fair Grounds for Jazz Fest a few weeks back.</li>\r\n	<li>The big trip, though, was a couple of weeks prior to that when we went to Andalucia -- southern Spain -- for Spring Break and found ourselves there during Semana Santa -- Holy Week. Cordoba, Granada, Sevilla, the hill town of Ronda. Processions (plural) almost every night. My wife said it was like the Tour de France for Catholics. And as a Catholic, I couldn’t argue -- it was pretty full contact. I posted a <a href=\"https://vine.co/v/OL66AUgHwwi\">Vine video</a> of a Granada procession to my <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter feed</a> and then a couple of minutes of GoPro footage from the last Holy Thursday procession in Sevilla on the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons\">Facebook</a> page and <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\">YouTube channel</a>. It was close to midnight, after which I think they took an hour break and then started up the Good Friday processions. We went to bed. When we went out the next morning around 8:30 to grab some breakfast -- our usual of cafe con leche and tomato bread topped with jamón iberico -- the restaurant was jammed with people who just finished a procession. It just kept going.</li>\r\n[vine url=\"https://vine.co/v/OL66AUgHwwi\" height=480 width=480 type=\"postcard\"]\r\n	<li>And so do we. I drained my United account for a trip next month to Japan, and then in September, we’re heading over to Scotland so my daughter can start at the <a href=\"http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/\">University of St Andrews</a>, so I should have enough content to keep TravelCommons rolling into an 11th year.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/download_track.php?id=6E494292C6B4E14E784F04400EB2C54CE135E29730530171C5F931345CAA3733A93C8CF03BBFAC71CD59B5710E25327F\" rel=\"nofollow\">All Around</a></em> by <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=AEF14840F87CD6C39BE8918AF693E89C276517530C9606BA2CB20418C6A8B4CB\" rel=\"nofollow\">Jel</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Before we get into the meat of things, just a quick pointer to let everyone know that TravelCommons is available on the Stitcher radio smartphone app as well as on <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>. Since iTunes started handling podcasts -- June 2005, right around episodes <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/06/19/podcast-6-the-tsa-talks-back/\">6</a> or <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/06/29/podcast-7-eating-alone-classic-travel-stories/\">7</a> -- it dominated the TravelCommons download stats. Now it’s only responsible for a third of the downloads.</li>\r\n	<li>Rummaging through the mailbag…</li>\r\n	<li>Back last November in episode <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/11/22/podcast-112-holiday-airport-etiquette-travel-tax-pile-up/\">112</a>, Dan Gradwohl sent me a pointer to the website <a href=\"http://www.toandfromtheairport.com/\">To and From The Airport</a>, a collation of airport transit options. In that episode, I talked about reviewing the ORD listing and sending in a few updates. Toward the end of March, I received a note thanking me for my contribution and apologizing for the delay. Whatever issues were happening there now seem to have passed; it appears the site is back to being actively maintained.</li>\r\n	<li>Tom Brown, a longtime TravelCommons listener, sent a note following up on last episode’s riff on Nate Silver’s <a href=\"http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/planes-trains-and-taxis-when-to-take-public-transit-from-the-airport/\">538 blog post</a> about mass transit times to major US airports. He wrote:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>You noted London as the gold standard of public transport out of the airport. I would put it at bronze at best.  Decaying infrastructure, not so comfortable trains and destination not so friendly to business traveler in London doesn\'t help its ranking. Singapore is the best in my opinion with Hong Kong 2nd. Tokyo even ranks above London to me.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>Tom, thanks for that, expanding our sample size. My past trips thru Hong Kong and Singapore were family vacations - late arrivals from the US, tired kids, too much luggage - and so opted for taxis instead on mass transit. I missed the opportunity to add those trains to my personal sample, but I did end up with one of the wackiest cab rides while in HK. It was kind of a hoarder cab -- newspapers filling the trunk, tchotchkes all over the dashboard and hanging from the roof. I don’t know how we got 4 people and 4 bags into that cab. As I mentioned earlier, we’ll be flying in and out of Narita at the back half of June and given the distance and cab fares, we’ll take the Tokyo train at least once.</li>\r\n	<li>Our Spring Break trip to Andalucia started with a flight into Madrid airport. Our plans had us landing in Madrid, then making the 20-min schlep in from Terminal 4 (could they have put that terminal any further out?) and then heading downtown to catch the high-speed Renfe train to Córdoba. After I booked the tickets on-line (a process made infinitely easier than 2 years ago now that Renfe accepts PayPal) I was pleasantly surprised to stumble across a TripAdvisor post saying that the tickets included a free train ride down to the Puerta Atocha train station. It wasn\'t the fastest ride - a local train that made 4-5 stops before Atocha - but it was clean and not beat up. And since we were headed downtown during Friday rush hour, it took the same 30 min that Google Maps estimated for the cab.</li>\r\n	<li>And continuing on the transit theme, Nick Gassman sent a note about comments I made in episode <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/10/12/podcast-111-seatback-recline-wars-craft-beer-tourism/\">111</a> about the proliferation of pre-paid cards for subway and mass transit systems. Nick says about the London Underground:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>You can use your own contactless payment card (Visa, Amex etc) without having to buy an Oyster card, and get the same rates. You can register the card if you wish, to track spend.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>The link to the Tube web page is similar to the Chicago L page -- it feels a bit ambiguous, probably because the contactless technology is still a bit young, a bit ambiguous itself. Both London and Chicago say they’ll also work with NFC mobile phones -- like the latest Samsung Galaxies, the HTC Ones, and the iPhone 6. I think I’ve just got to get over to an L station and give it a try. But it’s probably not the kind of experiment I want to try and debug during rush hour when there’s a couple hundred hard-core commuters storming the 3-4 tap through gates. Seems like more of a midday or weekend morning thing.</li>\r\n	<li>Reaching back again to episode <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/11/22/podcast-112-holiday-airport-etiquette-travel-tax-pile-up/\">112 </a>where I talked about funding the Indiegogo campaign for the Bluesmart carry-on bag, what they call “The First Smart, Connected Luggage” complete with a smartphone app that acts as a digital lock, a scale, tracks location, and sounds an alarm if your smart bag wanders off. They’ve gotten huge press; they blew thru the funding goal by 3800%. But now they have to deliver the bag. They’ve been doing a good job of pushing out <a href=\"https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/bluesmart-world-s-first-smart-connected-carry-on#activity\">updates </a>and seem to be sticking to their August ship date. Which would be good for them because competitors are starting to move into this space. I tweeted out a link to an Engadget story last week about Samsung and Samsonite partnering up on a line of smart suitcases with functionality that sounds very similar to Bluesmart’s. Then I received a press release in the TravelCommons e-mail box from Planet Traveler <a href=\"http://www.planettravelerusa.com/preorder\">announcing</a> a Kickstarter campaign for the Space Case 1 line of smart luggage which will have all the functionality of the Bluesmart bag <i>plus</i> fingerprint unlock <i>and</i> Bluetooth speakers. As if the gate areas aren’t noisy enough.</li>\r\n	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\">Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/download_track.php?id=A1F44F3B330BFBBD5C7863108B61B09977CADC67705C23C5AECA03FC6F2C0320A93C8CF03BBFAC71CD59B5710E25327F\" rel=\"nofollow\">La Tra (basephunk mix)</a></em> by <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/label.php?id=3AF558B2D658A22FFF10B13F9D87237D276517530C9606BA2CB20418C6A8B4CB\" rel=\"nofollow\">Omar Sosa</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<b>A Decade of TravelCommons</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>It was ten  years ago <i>today </i>that I recorded the first T/C podcast in the bathroom of the Wardman Park Marriott in NW Washington, DC</li>\r\n	<li>[tc1-opening &amp; 1]</li>\r\n	<li>It was an interesting mix of topics…\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>TSA problems in ORD, LGA and DCA, the first of many TSA rants over the years;</li>\r\n	<li>The first sighting of a “puffer” security screening machine, don’t know if you ever walked through one of those, but we also talked about their multi-million dollar demise in an episode a some years later;</li>\r\n	<li>Hungarian roadside prostitutes -- a topic that I don’t believe I’ve revisited</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>And it was the first in a long string of what one listener referred to as a “pottycast” -- using the tile of hotel bathrooms as a poor man’s reverb chamber</li>\r\n	<li>[tc74-hotel medley]</li>\r\n	<li>Listening to that, I now understand why I have lifetime Marriott Platinum status.</li>\r\n	<li>One of the more noticeable changes over the years has been about the TSA. Early podcasts railed against the TSA -- the security theatre, the shoe carnival, liquid bans, and of course, the power trips</li>\r\n	<li>[tc45-finding tooth powder]</li>\r\n	<li>But with some much needed customer service training and, most importantly, the introduction of PreCheck, the TSA isn’t the podcast pinata it had been for the first 4-5 years -- especially when compared to airport security in places like India</li>\r\n	<li>[tc109-mall cop, umbrella]</li>\r\n	<li>Travel technology has been one constant through the TravelCommons decade</li>\r\n	<li>[tc87-briefcase]</li>\r\n	<li>[tc91-too much technology]</li>\r\n	<li>And while I’ve cycled through a number of phones, tablets, and laptops, the Bose noise-cancelling headphones remain the official headphones of the TravelCommons podcast</li>\r\n	<li>[tc48-bose lust]</li>\r\n	<li>Food has also been a common theme…</li>\r\n	<li>[tc97-food]</li>\r\n	<li>Never one to be accused of being a travel industry cheerleader…</li>\r\n	<li>[tc92-not-so-upbeat]</li>\r\n	<li>But I always try, if only partially successfully, to maintain some perspective</li>\r\n	<li>[t61-zen]</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917626811171154.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #115</li>\r\n	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n	<li>Links to 3 prior anniversary episodes\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/12/27/podcast-27-best-of-2005/\" target=\"_blank\">Episode 27</a> -- Best of 2005</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2006/06/13/podcast-40-looking-back-over-the-first-year/\" target=\"_blank\">Episode 40</a> -- Looking Back Over the First Year</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2009/05/14/podcast-74-looking-back-over-four-years-of-travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Episode 74</a> -- Looking Back Over Four Years</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from the <a href=\"http://promonet.iodalliance.com/\">IODA Promonet</a></li>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_115.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #115 — A Decade of TravelCommons','','inherit','open','open','','1505-revision-v1','','','2015-05-13 17:38:27','2015-05-13 22:38:27','',1505,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/05/13/1505-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1520,1,'2015-05-14 06:09:02','2015-05-14 11:09:02','[caption id=\"attachment_1508\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"228\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/2014-06-01-15.20.55-e1431490750219.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1508\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/2014-06-01-15.20.55-e1431490750219-228x300.jpg\" alt=\"Been on Duty for 10 Years...\" width=\"228\" height=\"300\" /></a> Been on Duty for 10 Years...[/caption]\r\n\r\nHard to believe that I\'ve been prattling along for 10 years. Looking back, I see that I\'ve become less of a TSA-hater, but am still pretty clear-eyed about the tediousness of the frequent travel experience. It\'s tough to pack 10 years into a 30-min episode, but I think I\'ve cherry-picked some good snippets. Before that, I talk about spending Semana Santa (Holy Week) in southern Spain and \"smart luggage.\" The listener mailbag continues the conversation about mass transit to airports. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_115.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/205337138\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #115:\r\n<ul>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, so no video “uncut” version like I did last episode from New Orleans. No maid service in the TravelCommons studio to tidy up before the podcast.</li>\r\n	<li>We’re deep in the bipolar weather roller coaster that is Spring in the Midwest -- 70’s one day, 40’s the next; bright sun at 10 in the morning, pissing down rain at noon. Which is as good an explanation as any why Chicago’s two airports, O’Hare and Midway, own the basement of the DOT’s on-time departures ranking.</li>\r\n	<li>My travel has been a bit more interesting since the last episode. Did a few of my normal runs down to New Orleans, but broke the pattern a bit with travel to Denver and Charlotte. And even one of the runs down to New Orleans broke the usual down-Monday-back-Thursday routine. At the beginning of April, I flew down Thursday night with my wife and daughter, met up with friends for the French Quarter Fest weekend. It’s one of my favorite music festivals. Free music from local bands; stages and food stands spread around the Quarter -- a bit lower key than the 460,000 people who descended on the Fair Grounds for Jazz Fest a few weeks back.</li>\r\n	<li>The big trip, though, was a couple of weeks prior to that when we went to Andalucia -- southern Spain -- for Spring Break and found ourselves there during Semana Santa -- Holy Week. Cordoba, Granada, Sevilla, the hill town of Ronda. Processions (plural) almost every night. My wife said it was like the Tour de France for Catholics. And as a Catholic, I couldn’t argue -- it was pretty full contact. I posted a <a href=\"https://vine.co/v/OL66AUgHwwi\">Vine video</a> of a Granada procession to my <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter feed</a> and then a couple of minutes of GoPro footage from the last Holy Thursday procession in Sevilla on the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons\">Facebook</a> page and <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\">YouTube channel</a>. It was close to midnight, after which I think they took an hour break and then started up the Good Friday processions. We went to bed. When we went out the next morning around 8:30 to grab some breakfast -- our usual of cafe con leche and tomato bread topped with jamón iberico -- the restaurant was jammed with people who just finished a procession. It just kept going.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</ul>\r\n[vine url=\"https://vine.co/v/OL66AUgHwwi\" height=480 width=480 type=\"postcard\"]\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>And so do we. I drained my United account for a trip next month to Japan, and then in September, we’re heading over to Scotland so my daughter can start at the <a href=\"http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/\">University of St Andrews</a>, so I should have enough content to keep TravelCommons rolling into an 11th year.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/download_track.php?id=6E494292C6B4E14E784F04400EB2C54CE135E29730530171C5F931345CAA3733A93C8CF03BBFAC71CD59B5710E25327F\" rel=\"nofollow\">All Around</a></em> by <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=AEF14840F87CD6C39BE8918AF693E89C276517530C9606BA2CB20418C6A8B4CB\" rel=\"nofollow\">Jel</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Before we get into the meat of things, just a quick pointer to let everyone know that TravelCommons is available on the Stitcher radio smartphone app as well as on <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>. Since iTunes started handling podcasts -- June 2005, right around episodes <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/06/19/podcast-6-the-tsa-talks-back/\">6</a> or <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/06/29/podcast-7-eating-alone-classic-travel-stories/\">7</a> -- it dominated the TravelCommons download stats. Now it’s only responsible for a third of the downloads.</li>\r\n	<li>Rummaging through the mailbag…</li>\r\n	<li>Back last November in episode <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/11/22/podcast-112-holiday-airport-etiquette-travel-tax-pile-up/\">112</a>, Dan Gradwohl sent me a pointer to the website <a href=\"http://www.toandfromtheairport.com/\">To and From The Airport</a>, a collation of airport transit options. In that episode, I talked about reviewing the ORD listing and sending in a few updates. Toward the end of March, I received a note thanking me for my contribution and apologizing for the delay. Whatever issues were happening there now seem to have passed; it appears the site is back to being actively maintained.</li>\r\n	<li>Tom Brown, a longtime TravelCommons listener, sent a note following up on last episode’s riff on Nate Silver’s <a href=\"http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/planes-trains-and-taxis-when-to-take-public-transit-from-the-airport/\">538 blog post</a> about mass transit times to major US airports. He wrote:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>You noted London as the gold standard of public transport out of the airport. I would put it at bronze at best.  Decaying infrastructure, not so comfortable trains and destination not so friendly to business traveler in London doesn\'t help its ranking. Singapore is the best in my opinion with Hong Kong 2nd. Tokyo even ranks above London to me.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>Tom, thanks for that, expanding our sample size. My past trips thru Hong Kong and Singapore were family vacations - late arrivals from the US, tired kids, too much luggage - and so opted for taxis instead on mass transit. I missed the opportunity to add those trains to my personal sample, but I did end up with one of the wackiest cab rides while in HK. It was kind of a hoarder cab -- newspapers filling the trunk, tchotchkes all over the dashboard and hanging from the roof. I don’t know how we got 4 people and 4 bags into that cab. As I mentioned earlier, we’ll be flying in and out of Narita at the back half of June and given the distance and cab fares, we’ll take the Tokyo train at least once.</li>\r\n	<li>Our Spring Break trip to Andalucia started with a flight into Madrid airport. Our plans had us landing in Madrid, then making the 20-min schlep in from Terminal 4 (could they have put that terminal any further out?) and then heading downtown to catch the high-speed Renfe train to Córdoba. After I booked the tickets on-line (a process made infinitely easier than 2 years ago now that Renfe accepts PayPal) I was pleasantly surprised to stumble across a TripAdvisor post saying that the tickets included a free train ride down to the Puerta Atocha train station. It wasn\'t the fastest ride - a local train that made 4-5 stops before Atocha - but it was clean and not beat up. And since we were headed downtown during Friday rush hour, it took the same 30 min that Google Maps estimated for the cab.</li>\r\n	<li>And continuing on the transit theme, Nick Gassman sent a note about comments I made in episode <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/10/12/podcast-111-seatback-recline-wars-craft-beer-tourism/\">111</a> about the proliferation of pre-paid cards for subway and mass transit systems. Nick says about the London Underground:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>You can use your own contactless payment card (Visa, Amex etc) without having to buy an Oyster card, and get the same rates. You can register the card if you wish, to track spend.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>The link to the Tube web page is similar to the Chicago L page -- it feels a bit ambiguous, probably because the contactless technology is still a bit young, a bit ambiguous itself. Both London and Chicago say they’ll also work with NFC mobile phones -- like the latest Samsung Galaxies, the HTC Ones, and the iPhone 6. I think I’ve just got to get over to an L station and give it a try. But it’s probably not the kind of experiment I want to try and debug during rush hour when there’s a couple hundred hard-core commuters storming the 3-4 tap through gates. Seems like more of a midday or weekend morning thing.</li>\r\n	<li>Reaching back again to episode <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/11/22/podcast-112-holiday-airport-etiquette-travel-tax-pile-up/\">112 </a>where I talked about funding the Indiegogo campaign for the Bluesmart carry-on bag, what they call “The First Smart, Connected Luggage” complete with a smartphone app that acts as a digital lock, a scale, tracks location, and sounds an alarm if your smart bag wanders off. They’ve gotten huge press; they blew thru the funding goal by 3800%. But now they have to deliver the bag. They’ve been doing a good job of pushing out <a href=\"https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/bluesmart-world-s-first-smart-connected-carry-on#activity\">updates </a>and seem to be sticking to their August ship date. Which would be good for them because competitors are starting to move into this space. I tweeted out a link to an Engadget story last week about Samsung and Samsonite partnering up on a line of smart suitcases with functionality that sounds very similar to Bluesmart’s. Then I received a press release in the TravelCommons e-mail box from Planet Traveler <a href=\"http://www.planettravelerusa.com/preorder\">announcing</a> a Kickstarter campaign for the Space Case 1 line of smart luggage which will have all the functionality of the Bluesmart bag <i>plus</i> fingerprint unlock <i>and</i> Bluetooth speakers. As if the gate areas aren’t noisy enough.</li>\r\n	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\">Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/download_track.php?id=A1F44F3B330BFBBD5C7863108B61B09977CADC67705C23C5AECA03FC6F2C0320A93C8CF03BBFAC71CD59B5710E25327F\" rel=\"nofollow\">La Tra (basephunk mix)</a></em> by <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/label.php?id=3AF558B2D658A22FFF10B13F9D87237D276517530C9606BA2CB20418C6A8B4CB\" rel=\"nofollow\">Omar Sosa</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<b>A Decade of TravelCommons</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>It was ten  years ago <i>today </i>that I recorded the first T/C podcast in the bathroom of the Wardman Park Marriott in NW Washington, DC</li>\r\n	<li>[tc1-opening &amp; 1]</li>\r\n	<li>It was an interesting mix of topics…\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>TSA problems in ORD, LGA and DCA, the first of many TSA rants over the years;</li>\r\n	<li>The first sighting of a “puffer” security screening machine, don’t know if you ever walked through one of those, but we also talked about their multi-million dollar demise in an episode a some years later;</li>\r\n	<li>Hungarian roadside prostitutes -- a topic that I don’t believe I’ve revisited</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>And it was the first in a long string of what one listener referred to as a “pottycast” -- using the tile of hotel bathrooms as a poor man’s reverb chamber</li>\r\n	<li>[tc74-hotel medley]</li>\r\n	<li>Listening to that, I now understand why I have lifetime Marriott Platinum status.</li>\r\n	<li>One of the more noticeable changes over the years has been about the TSA. Early podcasts railed against the TSA -- the security theatre, the shoe carnival, liquid bans, and of course, the power trips</li>\r\n	<li>[tc45-finding tooth powder]</li>\r\n	<li>But with some much needed customer service training and, most importantly, the introduction of PreCheck, the TSA isn’t the podcast pinata it had been for the first 4-5 years -- especially when compared to airport security in places like India</li>\r\n	<li>[tc109-mall cop, umbrella]</li>\r\n	<li>Travel technology has been one constant through the TravelCommons decade</li>\r\n	<li>[tc87-briefcase]</li>\r\n	<li>[tc91-too much technology]</li>\r\n	<li>And while I’ve cycled through a number of phones, tablets, and laptops, the Bose noise-cancelling headphones remain the official headphones of the TravelCommons podcast</li>\r\n	<li>[tc48-bose lust]</li>\r\n	<li>Food has also been a common theme…</li>\r\n	<li>[tc97-food]</li>\r\n	<li>Never one to be accused of being a travel industry cheerleader…</li>\r\n	<li>[tc92-not-so-upbeat]</li>\r\n	<li>But I always try, if only partially successfully, to maintain some perspective</li>\r\n	<li>[t61-zen]</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917626811171154.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #115</li>\r\n	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n	<li>Links to 3 prior anniversary episodes\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/12/27/podcast-27-best-of-2005/\" target=\"_blank\">Episode 27</a> -- Best of 2005</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2006/06/13/podcast-40-looking-back-over-the-first-year/\" target=\"_blank\">Episode 40</a> -- Looking Back Over the First Year</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2009/05/14/podcast-74-looking-back-over-four-years-of-travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Episode 74</a> -- Looking Back Over Four Years</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from the <a href=\"http://promonet.iodalliance.com/\">IODA Promonet</a></li>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_115.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #115 — A Decade of TravelCommons','','inherit','open','open','','1505-revision-v1','','','2015-05-14 06:09:02','2015-05-14 11:09:02','',1505,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/05/14/1505-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1525,1,'2015-06-29 22:51:15','2015-06-30 03:51:15','[caption id=\"attachment_1412\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/IMG_2794.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1412\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/IMG_2794-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Don\'t rub it in that you\'re going some place warm for Christmas\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Don\'t rub it in that you\'re going some place warm for Christmas[/caption]\r\n\r\nComing into the holiday travel season, every travel news outlet publishes their <a title=\"Top 10 Holiday Travel Tips\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2013/12/19/top-10-holiday-travel-tips/\">top travel tips</a>. Rather than repeat the typical \"pack light\" and \"give yourself extra time\" nostrums, I decided to create an advice list of what’s really the problem during holiday travel -- airport etiquette.\r\n\r\nThe challenge of holiday travel isn\'t necessarily the crowds; it’s the crowds of what some road warriors might call “clueless” travelers. I think “amateur” is certainly a more charitable and probably more accurate term. So for those amateur travelers or for those who\'ve been off the road for a bit and need a refresher, here’s a list of etiquette tips that some holiday time reinforcement...\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Let\'s start at the front of the airport with the security line. The TSA is pushing <a href=\"http://www.tsa.gov/tsa-precheck/frequently-asked-questions\">PreCheck</a>. You may get it on your boarding pass or a TSA person may randomly pull you out of the regular line and route you to the PreCheck line. It’s your lucky day! Don’t spoil it, though, by not knowing the PreCheck rules. Put your phone away and read the signs -- don’t take off your shoes, don’t pull your liquids out, keep your jacket on, …. Read the signs and don’t slow it down for everyone else.</li>\r\n	<li>If getting to your gate involves a moving platform or an escalator, stand to the right because people are walking -- usually quickly -- on the left. Traveling with others, you’ll naturally want to stand abreast, but then you’re blocking everyone else. Don’t do it unless you want to get run over.</li>\r\n	<li>When you hit the airport Starbucks for your pre-flight coffee, remember that this isn’t your neighborhood Starbucks run by friendly Starbucks-trained baristas. It’s run by Sodexo which doesn’t care quite as much about coffee training. And they’re not quite as efficient. And there are usually a lot of people behind you in line. Keep your order to 3 adjectives or less. Tall skim latte is good. The half-decaf 3-pump no-foam vente vanilla latte -- not so much.</li>\r\n	<li>While queuing at the gate, don’t try to cheat on the boarding. Everyone’s looking at each others boarding passes, and airlines are telling their agents to get more strict. On almost every flight, I’ve seen the boarding agent direct someone over to the wall of shame to wait for their boarding group to be called. Don’t embarrass your family. Wait your turn.</li>\r\n	<li>And if you’re using an electronic boarding pass on your smartphone, turn off auto-rotate. If you don’t, odds are that your screen will start oscillating between portrait and landscape while you’re trying to get it on the electronic reader. You’ll delay the boarding line and quickly earn the enmity of your seatmates -- even before you sit shoulder-to-shoulder with them for 2-4 hours.</li>\r\n	<li>And finally, and this is a big one, don’t put your small bag in the overhead. I don’t care if you checked a bag. Don’t be that person who puts a purse or a briefcase in the overhead. Show a little holiday spirit -- put ‘em under the seat in front of you and leave space for one more roller board for the poor urchins in Groups 3, 4 or 5. When that person’s bag doesn’t get dropped on a tight connection through DFW, and they’re able to sit down to Thanksgiving dinner in something other than day-old sweats, they’ll thank you.</li>\r\n</ul>','Travel Tips — Holiday Airport Etiquette','','inherit','open','open','','1410-revision-v1','','','2015-06-29 22:51:15','2015-06-30 03:51:15','',1410,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/06/29/1410-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1526,1,'2015-06-29 22:53:00','2015-06-30 03:53:00','[caption id=\"attachment_1364\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/pic-r-1402317187245.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1364\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/pic-r-1402317187245-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Plane is here; no mechanics in sight. Do I feel lucky?\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Plane is here; no mechanics in sight. Do I feel lucky?[/caption]\r\n\r\nEven though the weather hasn\'t been bad this summer, I\'ve endured a rash of flight cancellations. Digging deeper, it\'s been regional jets operated by small airline \"partners\" that\'s causing me grief. Service to mid-sized cities has moved to regional jets, making travel to these cities more problematic. Traveling to China or India can catch US travelers by surprise with their visa requirements. We also talk about how fast airlines respond to Twitter messages, airport \"wall huggers\", carry-on luggage throwback, and I haven\'t flipped through a Skymall magazine in months. All this and more  at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_110.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below. [soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/162908093\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #110:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Coming to you from the Sheraton Hotel on Canal St in New Orleans. I have a room looking over the French Quarter. It’s a big convention hotel -- not my usual choice. But the price is good, it has a great gym and I’m about 5 stays away from making Starwood Platinum, so what the heck.</li>\r\n	<li>I’m back to my usual commute -- Chicago to New Orleans -- after taking a quick jaunt out to LA last week. It is that time of year on the Gulf Coast when the weather gets a bit monotonous -- high of 91 degrees with a chance of afternoon thunderstorms. Repeat until Labor Day. But the thunderstorms are tending to be earlier than last year when they seemed to roll in about 4:30 -- right about the time when the inbound plane for my flight back to Chicago would be scheduled to arrive. While my flights home still aren’t arriving on time, I haven’t hit the big 2-4 hour downpour delays I would get last year. Not killing as much time in the airport bars, but I always appreciate New Orleans airport letting me to take me beer to the gate.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music — <em>Stinky Dog</em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/musicinside-forces/\">Music Inside</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Flying through LAX last week reminded me of what a dump that airport is -- or I guess I should say key parts of it. Flying out of there last Thursday morning, it took me a half-hour in the Hertz bus to get to the United terminal -- P7 -- because of access road traffic which is driven by this odd concept of a bunch of little terminals arranged in a U around short term parking garages. No problem is you’re flying Southwest in P1; really lousy if you’re going out American in P5 or United in P6 or P7. Annoying, but it gets really dumpy when you get inside. There’s not enough room in each of the little terminals to properly handle post-9/11 security, so small security stations are dotted over the terminals with lines snaking down the corridors. Given that LAX is a major gateway to international traffic from Asia, it’s fair to compare LAX to Singapore and Beijing -- much newer airports, yes, but the LAX experience ends up looking like the 4th circle of Hell comparatively. Can’t be a great thing for the US tourism industry.</li>\r\n	<li>In the <a title=\"Podcast #109 — ‘Round the World in 8 Days; Beijing Mass Transit\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/06/07/podcast-109-round-the-world-in-8-days-beijing-mass-transit-2/\">last episode</a>, I updated my thoughts on using Twitter as a concierge service, or at least another way into airlines’ customer service groups. A couple of weeks back, the Wall Street Journal had a good <a href=\"http://online.wsj.com/articles/airlines-take-to-twitter-to-keep-world-informed-1406125253\">article</a> about airlines’ use of Twitter. They had an interesting graphic showing the differences in response times between airlines. American Airlines was the top, responding to 80% of customer queries within 15 minutes and 99% within an hour. KLM, which has made a big push into social media, was much lower, responding to 12% within 15 minutes, 64% within an hour, taking a full day to get up to 99%. Of course, as we talked about last time, it’s one thing to quickly press the button on a canned responses like United’s ubiquitous “No one dislikes delays more than us”, it’s a whole other thing to do something meaningful. Check out the detailed show notes on the TravelCommons web site for a link to the article.</li>\r\n	<li>Also in the <a title=\"Podcast #109 — ‘Round the World in 8 Days; Beijing Mass Transit\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/06/07/podcast-109-round-the-world-in-8-days-beijing-mass-transit-2/\">last episode</a>, I mentioned my big technology switch -- from my iPhone 5 to an HTC One. The main reason for the switch was battery life. I got tired of being psychotic about battery life -- stalking airport gate areas for an outlet so I could top off my battery before getting on the plane. Last month, Samsung Mobile captured that hassle perfectly in a <a href=\"youtu.be/mzMUTrTYD9s%20\">video</a> about “wall huggers”. It’s on YouTube -- I put the <a href=\"youtu.be/mzMUTrTYD9s%20\">link</a> in the show notes. Check it out. It’s painfully close to my reality with the iPhone. But not with the HTC One. The battery life is great, even with the larger screen.</li>\r\n	<li>One thing that has bitten me recently with that change is the Android version of American Airlines’ app. I always use the phone apps for boarding passes -- one less piece of paper to keep track of, one less line to stand in if I couldn’t print it at home. I’ve never had a problem until a couple of months ago. I was boarding a flight to New Orleans, put my phone on the reader, heard the beep, the gate agent waved me through, and I sat in my seat. A bit later during the boarding process, I looked at my screen again and saw that the app had refreshed and no longer showed a seat number on the boarding pass. Hmmm, that doesn’t seem good. And I was right. Somehow, my boarding must not have registered and so, 10 minutes before the flight, they flushed me as a no-show and gave my seat to a stand-by passenger. Unfortunately for her, I was in my seat, but because I didn’t have a paper boarding pass, I couldn’t prove that it was my seat. Lucky for me, the gate agent remembered me -- it was a small regional jet --and said “Oh, this happens a lot”. I kept the seat, but the flight was delayed about 15 minutes while they figured it all out. I never had that happen with American’s iPhone app, but then again, it hasn’t happened since on the Android app. Maybe they fixed in in out of the updates they pushed out, but I usually grab a paper boarding pass on American when I have the time.</li>\r\n	<li>And I don’t know about you all, but I haven\'t looked at Skymall or any of the other seat back pocket air magazines since the FAA allowed use of tablets &amp; smartphones during takeoffs and landings. I always have a book or two on my tablet -- right now I’m pounding through “The War that Ended Peace”, Margaret MacMillian’s history of the lead up to World War I. I also download the daily edition of the Chicago Tribune -- they have an HTML5 web app that shows you each page of the physical paper; you then tap an article to read it. The app is pretty good, sometimes a bit fiddly, but it lets you download the content for offline reading -- perfect for a flight. The Wall Street Journal’s Android app used to let you do the same thing and so I’d read that too, but earlier this year they “upgraded” the app and took away the ability to download a day’s paper. Still trying to think how they qualified that as an upgrade.</li>\r\n	<li>I saw a guy come onto a flight last week with a hanging suit bag. Wow! That was a throwback. Even the flight attendant looked at him kinda funny when he asked to hang it in the front closet. Which was a very typical thing -- in the ‘90’s. You’d angle for early boarding so you had a chance for hanging space in the front closet. You see guys pushing all the bags to one end so he could fit his in -- not even really needing to hang it; just staying put from the pressure of the other bags. The whole business casual trend expanded the fight -- moving it out of the front galley to the entire plane aisle with rolling bags. I can’t remember the last time I used a hanging bag. I have my cleaners fold my shirts so they’re easy to pack, and then I use them (with their cardboard inserts) to cushion the folds of my slacks so they don’t wrinkle. Even on those rare occasions when I wear a suit, I fold it and put it in my rolling bag. It’s certainly a lot easier on the shoulder and back. And just a lot less awkward. I could never figure out a really good way to carry gym shoes in my hanging bag.</li>\r\n	<li>And if you have any travel experiences -- technology or otherwise, or just general observations, thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons\">Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music — <em>Locovenido</em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/falik-dreams/\" target=\"_blank\">Falik</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong> Regional Jets Are Ruining My Life</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>One Wednesday afternoon in June, I had a particularly difficult time getting from Memphis to New Orleans. First, I felt my phone vibrate with multiple text messages while I was refueling my rental car at a particularly dicey gas station just north of the airport. I had a pretty good idea what was up -- United and TripIt were simultaneously notifying me that my flight was cancelled. I got on the phone to Amex. They were able to jam me onto a full US Air flight to Charlotte with a connection back to New Orleans. Bit of a zig zag, but OK. I returned the rental car. Just as I pulled my boarding pass out of the kiosk, I saw them update my flight -- 2 hr maintenance delay. Which would mean I’d miss the connection. I go up to the desk. Two agents -- one from USAir, one from American (I’m seeing the New American form right in front of me) -- bang on their terminal for a couple of minutes. “OK, we’ll put you in first class to DFW where you’ll connect to New Orleans” Great -- better routing with an upgrade to boot! I get to the gate. A colleague calls me. As we’re talking, I see them post a 2 hr delay -- weather in Texas -- which means I’d have 15 min for my connection if everything worked perfectly. Which it wasn’t going to because a delay with a round number -- like 2 hrs -- means they have no idea when the plane will actually leave</li>\r\n	<li>That’s it! I give! Three airlines fail me in the span of 60 minutes. I can take a hint. I wasn’t meant to fly to New Orleans today. However, I did need to get there. So I fired up Google Maps. 5½ hour drive. Fine. I have nothing else going on tonight. I load the Hertz app, book a car, and walk back out of the terminal.</li>\r\n	<li>I drive to the river front to get a decent dinner -- the food quality in Memphis airport, like the flight selection, have cratered since Delta shut down its hub operations there. While eating at the bar, I get the text from American -- the DFW flight cancelled. Now there’s a surprise.</li>\r\n	<li>The drive to New Orleans to simple, straightforward -- and dull. I-55 south through Mississippi, into Louisiana until it dead ends into I-10. Take a left. You’re in New Orleans. At least that was the plan. South of Jackson, traffic comes to a complete halt. People are getting out of their cars -- never a good sign. I get out, look around an 18-wheeler and see a 10-ft column of fire. This is not a good sign. I-55 here is 2 lanes each way with a narrow shoulder. They’re not squeezing us past that. Eventually, after making an 8-point turn, I join a line of cars heading the back north along the shoulder -- one tire on the pavement, one tire in the wet red clay. After 10 minutes, I get to a gravel crossover that I don’t think will bottom out my rental Ford. I hit the frontage road, bypass the burning car, get back on a now empty I-55 and eventually pull into my hotel at 2am. Another glorious day of travel that I’m sure will inspire envy in all my Facebook friends.</li>\r\n	<li>Now Memphis seems to be an extreme example -- a woman on my project is commuting weekly from New York and she’s yet to have an on-time, no-drama journey. Indeed, she’s spent a Thursday night in every Midwest hub city. But as airlines close hub operations in mid-size cities like Memphis and Cleveland, replacing mainline service with regional jets from smaller operators you’ve never heard -- ExpressJet or Endeavour Air -- getting to and from these cities just sucks.</li>\r\n	<li>At first, I thought it was a United problem. After all, they’d canceled my flight down to New Orleans day before, and then the next week, they delayed my flight to Columbus, OH 2 hours because the flight before it was late getting off the gate, and then once our plane got to the gate, it needed to have a wheel bearing fixed before it could travel on. I mean, at some point, why does United bother posting actual departure and arrival times? Why not just post an AM or a PM and shoot for that? It’s not too far from what they’re doing now.</li>\r\n	<li>But as I looked at the flights that were really screwing up my life, they weren’t the main United or American or Delta flights, they were the regional jets. My United flights to and from LAX last week were fine. But if I’d been flying a regional jet, I would’ve had a problem on the return leg. The original plane had a mechanical issue -- remember, this is United -- but they were able to get a replacement, so we left LAX on time and even got into ORD early. If it had been United Express by, say, GoJet, I would’ve been scrambling after yet another cancelled flight because they don’t have spare jets.</li>\r\n	<li>I’m 5,000 miles away from hitting a million miles on United (I have over 2.5 million on American), but sitting at the bar that night in Memphis having dinner before my ill-fated drive, I tweeted out of pure frustration -- “Really @united? Two cancelled flights in two days? I\'ll never hit 1M miles when you cancel every flight I\'m on…” To which, of course, they pressed the button on reply #76 -- “No one dislikes flight cancellations more than we do. Do you need help with rebooking? Thanks.” My response the next morning -- “Unless you too had to drive 5+ hrs and get to your destination at 2am, you can\'t hate flight cancellations more than me…” No response… except from Dan, a longtime TravelCommons listener who chimed in -- “Sounds like an upcoming podcast topic”. Indeed it is, Dan. Some good had to come of it...</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music — <em>Just Don’t</em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/liebig-severed/\" target=\"_blank\">Lie Big</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Visas Hassles</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Over the past couple of episodes I’ve been talking about my Asian travels -- to India and China -- which has forced me to become knowledgeable about something that doesn’t often affect US travelers -- visas.</li>\r\n	<li>When US travelers decide to cross their border, if they have a passport, they’re typically good to go. When I checked Wikipedia yesterday, US passport holders <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_requirements_for_United_States_citizens\">can visit</a> 174 countries without having to buy a visa in advance, tied at the top of the “travel freedom” ranking with Germany, Sweden, United Kingdom, and Finland.</li>\r\n	<li>But this seemed to be the year for visas for me. My son doing a semester abroad in China, then us visiting him in the Spring, and then me going to India on business a couple of months ago. I just slipped out of another trip to China -- business this time, but I figured I’d risk it since my tourist visa is valid until next Spring.</li>\r\n	<li>If you live in a major city -- New York, DC, LA, Chicago -- it’s not too bad because most of the big visa-requiring countries have consulates there. Otherwise, you’re mailing your passport away, or paying extra for a courier service. And paying to fly to the consulate for an interview if you don’t have a plain vanilla visa application -- like anyone of Pakistani descent applying for an Indian visa.</li>\r\n	<li>But even walking to the consulates, like I can do in Chicago, is not always so straightforward. Research is important. Hitting the consulate web site, know their hours and what paperwork they require. Our visit for my son’s Chinese student visa was amazingly smooth. We had all the paperwork, had it organized, knew the consulate closed for lunch, so we showed up early. Boom, boom, boom -- we were in and out in 30 minutes. Four days later, we went back, paid, and picked up his passport with his visa.</li>\r\n	<li>Getting visas for our visit to Beijing in March was less smooth. There was a little hiccup in the application. Their website said we needed proof of a return flight and hotel reservations. I had all that, all organized. But what wasn’t clear on the website was that I needed a copy for each visa. I’d printed out one copy of the hotel reservation for the one room that the three of us were staying in. I needed three copies -- one for each application. I’m not the first one who’d made that mistake. The woman pointed to the copying machine. Luckily, I had a pocket full of change.</li>\r\n	<li>Picking them up was also a bit more of a hassle. First, because it was Spring Break season, there were a number of teachers picking up batches of passports for school trips. I think the guy two positions in front of me had 50 passports. A minor inconvenience -- until their credit card machine broke. The web site was adamant -- no personal checks, no cash accepted; just credit cards or cashier’s checks. And how many people know where to get a cashiers check anymore. So everything came to a screeching halt. “We’ll take cash if you have it,” one of the women said. But I didn’t bring any because it’s $140 a head -- $420 for all of us. I look at my watch -- it’s just about closing time. I ask the guard, “Will you let me back in if I make a run down to the ATM for some cash?” “Make it quick,” he said. I sprint down, around the corner, tap out the cash machine, and sprint back up. The guard lets me back in even though he’d locked the doors for the day. Everyone’s sorta milling around, not knowing what to do. The guy who had been in front of me was there to pick up 10 visas. No way he was coming up with $1,400 in cash quickly. I politely make my way to the window. “Cash?” I ask, giving her the fresh stack of ATM 20’s. She counts them twice, gives me my passports and I’m on my way.</li>\r\n	<li>But this was nothing compared to the cluster that was the Indian visa process. Which was a real surprise to me because four years ago, when I went for my last Indian visa, it was the pinnacle of efficiency -- I dropped everything off at 8am and at 5pm received a text that my passport was ready for pickup. Impressive. Phenomenal. I used to rave about it. Not so much any more.</li>\r\n	<li>But based on last time, I thought this would be simple. I put all the documents together and, because I was traveling, had my wife take it downtown for me. “No worries,” I said, “Drop it off, do some shopping, grab lunch, and it should be done”. 10am my wife calls me -- “They need your flight reservations”. “I haven’t made them yet,” I told her, “They specifically say on their website not to book flights until you get the visa.” “Hold on,” she said and talked to the clerk. “Yeah, I guess things have changed. She’ll hold onto your application until you e-mail her your flight info. Oh, and she’s going to charge you another $30 for an expedite fee.” “Wait,” I said, “according to the website, I’m OK on their deadlines -- I shouldn’t need them to expedite.” “Hold on,” she said again. “Yeah, I guess those deadlines have changed too.” Unfortunately, I was only able to get a 1 year visa. If this visa expires before my next trip, I think I’ll send one of my staff in my place. I think I need to introduce some other Americans to the fine art of applying for visas.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917626811171154.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #110</li>\r\n	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org\">ccMixter</a></li>\r\n	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_110.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #110 — Regional Jets Ruining My Life; Visa Hassles','','inherit','open','open','','1359-revision-v1','','','2015-06-29 22:53:00','2015-06-30 03:53:00','',1359,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/06/29/1359-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1527,1,'2015-06-29 22:55:31','2015-06-30 03:55:31','[caption id=\"attachment_1309\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/2013-11-04-07.32.55-2.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1309\" title=\"Another Monday, another plane...\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/2013-11-04-07.32.55-2-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Another Monday, another plane...[/caption]\r\n\r\nBrushing aside the cobwebs to make my way back into the TravelCommons studios, we talk about the growing importance of TripAdvisor hotel reviews and the checklist I walk through when writing a review. I also continue to gush about the TSA\'s PreCheck program, even if this autumn\'s rapid expansion seems a bit rough-&amp;-ready at times. A listener lists out the critical travel apps on his Android smartphone and I talk about being stalked by an airline on Twitter.  All this and more  at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_107.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_107.mp3\"] <!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #107:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Brushing aside the cobwebs to make my way back into the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago. It’s been a while -- September -- since the last episode. But I didn’t completely abandoned TravelCommons. In November, I put together a quick video with recommendations from my spring trip to Madrid, and last month updated my list of <a title=\"Top 10 Holiday Travel Tips\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2013/12/19/top-10-holiday-travel-tips/\">holiday travel tips</a>, a post I do every other year.</li>\r\n	<li>The video -- <a title=\"Video – What to do in Madrid… in 180 Seconds\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2013/11/12/video-what-to-do-in-madrid-in-180-seconds/\">What to do in Madrid… in 180 Seconds</a>, yes, the title bows to the gods of Search Engine Optimization -- is a quick rundown -- 3 minutes for the math-challenged -- of what I enjoyed most in Madrid. Seeing Guernica, walking through the markets, finding a microbrewery run by a Michigan ex-pat, and eating in restaurants. It’s a bit different from the podcast -- about a destination (Madrid) rather than the journey -- and video rather than audio which are the reasons I didn’t push it out on the RSS/iTunes feed. I’ll probably do another one for New Orleans sometime soon. I figure I ought to have something to say since I’ve been traveling there since last April.</li>\r\n	<li>Doing the Madrid video reminded me, though, why I don’t do more videos. They take a <em>huge</em> amount of time. It easily took me 90 minutes of production time for each minute of video. And that doesn’t count the original content creation -- taking the pictures, thinking through the content, writing the voiceover. My wife gave me a GoPro Hero camera for Christmas. Maybe I’ll clamp that onto the handlebars of a rental bike and pedal through New Orleans. Maybe that’ll make things go a bit faster. Or be a bit more exciting if I ride into some of the more interesting parts of town</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Planetenstaaten</em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/weigl-landwater/\">Philipp Weigl</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>A couple of good comments from the TravelCommons website I’ve been saving up since October. In the <a title=\"Podcast #106 — Summer Vacation in Amsterdam; Restaurant Trends\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2013/09/06/podcast-106-summer-vacation-in-amsterdam-restaurant-trends/\">last podcast</a>, I walked through the current load of weather and mapping tools I’m using on my iPhone and Google Tablet. Rich Fraser had the following comment:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Thing that struck me during the episode (and you’ve mentioned before) is how our tools have evolved over the years. Here is what I am using on my Android smartphone.</li>\r\n	<li>For maps, it’s Google Maps, although their latest release hasn’t been the most user friendly compared to the replaced version. Nice thing about it is that it leverages your other Google searches in other devices. For example, the Map that I created on my laptop is now accessible on my smart phone.</li>\r\n	<li>For flight information, it’s FlightAware all the way. I have learned of flight delays on FlightAware before the airline posted them. In most cases you can find out where your connecting equipment is coming from, so that even if the flight you’re on is running behind, you can also find out if the connection will be delayed. That is huge peace of mind. That said, all of the airlines’ mobile apps have gotten much better at relaying flight information than even a year ago.</li>\r\n	<li>For weather, it’s largely a matter of taste. I am a pilot myself, and there is an app called Aviation Weather that gives me the plain text Terminal Area Forecast for airports I am flying to. It’s a good way of predicting delays at places like Newark or O’Hare.</li>\r\n	<li>For traveling as long as I (we) have, you have to admit that with all the information at one’s fingertips has removed most of the stress from traveling.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>Thanks, Rich. I was bouncing between FlightAware and FlightStats, but have settled on FlightAware just because of that connecting equipment information. When I have a flight that posts a delay, my first question is always “Is the inbound plane in the air?” because until it is, the estimated departure they post isn’t much better than a finger in the air. Once it’s on the way, though, I’ve found the departure estimate might slip another 15-20 minutes, but it’s usually pretty good. United’s iPhone app does this also. And given United’s recent on-time performance, it’s one of the more useful part of the app.</li>\r\n	<li>The reason I was talking about those apps in the last episode was because trying to fly out of the Gulf Coast during summer makes you a weather geek just out of self-defense. Lori Humm, another long time TravelCommons listener who travels in and out of the Southeast had these thoughts:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Hi Mark! I’m still doing the gulf coast run, moving between Baton Rouge, LA and Jackson, MS so I concur with your summertime travel warning. However, as I also want to get home on Thursday night and staying over would get me home Friday noon, I have just learned to be patient and where possible work the Delta Diamond line for my backup flights. The one drawback is in Jackson, the Delta side of the terminal (they have two security access points; the airport is one long building) has no restaurant or bar! I often remark to TSA about the cruel joke that is putting a Starbucks right at the entry to security</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>Back in September, I waited out an 5½ hr delay on my United flight from New Orleans to Chicago. The only saving grace was that United sent me a delay notice before I left for the airport. The e-mail said my flight was delayed 2¾ hours but that I still needed to be at the gate for the original departure time. Doesn’t that kinda defeat the purpose of the delay notice? Having spent more than my fair share of time in the MSY bars, I stayed in town, walked down to the Hyatt next to the Superdome. The ground floor restaurant <a href=\"http://www.borgnerestaurant.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Borgne </a>is part of the John Besh empire -- the guy must have a dozen restaurants in New Orleans and I think I’ve eaten at damn close to all of them. I sat at the bar and worked my way through the $5 tapas menu -- crispy turkey necks, duck liver crostini -- and good beer. I wasn’t leaving until the inbound flight left the ground at ORD. The topper of it all was -- when I finally hit the ground in Chicago and turned on my phone, the first e-mail I received was from United, asking me to “Tell us about your trip.” Now that was a survey I couldn’t wait to fill out.</li>\r\n	<li>We’ve talked in <a title=\"Podcast #105 — Traveling in Spain; Return of the Hotel Lobby?\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2013/05/30/podcast-105-traveling-in-spain-return-of-the-hotel-lobby/\" target=\"_blank\">past episodes</a> about how airlines have really amped up their social media presence especially on Twitter. In my <a title=\"Top 10 Holiday Travel Tips\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2013/12/19/top-10-holiday-travel-tips/\" target=\"_blank\">Top Holiday Travel Tips</a> post last month, Tip #5 is “Use Twitter as a Concierge Service”. “At naming” an airline in a tweet -- something like “@united what’s happening with UA 4286 MSY-ORD that it’s 1:45 hr delayed?” usually gets a response in a couple of minutes. Not always helpful, but there’ve been times when I’ve gotten information that the gate agent didn’t. It can get a little creepy though. At one point during that epic 5½ hr delay, I tweeted out “Burning off a 4-hr @united delay in @chefjohnbesh \'s Borgne restaurant. Much better than MSY food” and included a picture of the tapas menu I was working my way through. A couple of minutes later, United comes back with “@mpeacock We know delays aren\'t fun, but it looks like you found a great place to grab a bite and relax from your picture.” There’s no place to hide with social media.</li>\r\n	<li>Way back in April of 2012, I wrote a TravelCommons <a title=\"Best Hotel Amenity? Free Breakfast\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/04/21/best-hotel-amenity-free-breakfast/\" target=\"_blank\">post</a> disagreeing with surveys from TripAdvisor and Hotels.com saying the most popular hotel amenity is free WiFi. In my mind, it is a free breakfast. It’s a great convenience -- swinging by the concierge lounge to quickly grab an egg, a couple of slices of bacon and a cup of coffee while I cool down from 30 minutes on the elliptical. So I haven’t been thrilled when the Renaissance Hotels -- where I usually stay when I’m in New Orleans -- closed their lounges and moved the free breakfast to their main restaurants. I understand it from an operational point-of-view -- it’s more efficient to serve statused guests off the regular buffet than to have to schlep pans of eggs and bacon up to some lounge at the top of the hotel. But while my eggs and bacon are probably fresher, it’s not as convenient. I can’t just swing through the lounge, grab my breakfast and bolt. A hostess now needs to seat me, I wait for a server to bring coffee, and then I wait again to sign a zero dollar check. It’s more efficient for the hotel, but not for me. Kinda feels like the hospitality concept kinda got lost in translation.</li>\r\n	<li>And if you have any travel observations, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/yoria-suerte/\"><em>Suerte Mijo</em></a> by Arthur Yoria</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Getting Serious About Hotel Reviews</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>It’s no secret that reviews are a big thing in travel. Scads of studies show on-line reviews are usually second or third in importance, ranking right behind personal recommendations from a friend.</li>\r\n	<li>TripAdvisor remains the biggest player, accounting for 32% of hotel reviews in North America according to a <a href=\"http://www.trustyou.com/2013-global-year-in-review-annual-reports-show-trends-in-hotel-reviews-2-10348.html\" target=\"_blank\">study</a> released this week. Other OTAs (online travel agents) -- Priceline, Expedia, Booking.com -- have added reviews with varying degrees of success.</li>\r\n	<li>It’s easy to see this behavior first-hand. Many of my colleagues will scan TripAdvisor before booking a new hotel. And my wife scours it before booking our vacation rentals. If you think about it, TripAdvisor replaced the other side of a travel agent that the OTAs missed. Expedia, Orbitz automated price searching and booking, but couldn’t replace the advice a good travel agent could give, the information she collected when she followed up with her customers -- “So how was that Marriott?”, “What did you like best in Madrid?”</li>\r\n	<li>I have a TripAdvisor account and occasionally contribute reviews -- mostly hotels, though I have done a couple of restaurants in resort locations and some activities (like the Madrid food tour that I mentioned in a past episode). My first couple of reviews were typical -- I talked about how nice the desk staff was, or got overly indignant about some incident; the kind of reviews I filter out when I’m scanning a property’s page.</li>\r\n	<li>C’mon, I can do better than this. I mean, I’ve been in consulting for 22 year; I’ve been doing a travel podcast for almost 9 year. So over a couple of beers one night I got to thinking about what’s important to me when I stay at a hotel. Since we’ve moved pretty much to rental properties for vacations, my hotel stays are just me, solo, on business. Taking safety and general cleanliness as table stakes (though there have been those times when they were sadly missing), the things I tick through when thinking about how many stars to award are:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>The bathroom -- We talked about this in an earlier episode. It might be the most important part of the hotel room. I look for good water pressure and enough counter space for my toiletries -- I really hate having to put my toiletries on the toilet lid like I did last week at the Sheraton in New Orleans.</li>\r\n	<li>Room size -- Is there enough room for a chair -- other than the desk chair? A comfortable chair where I can read or watch TV so I don’t have to sit on the bed all the time</li>\r\n	<li>Workout room -- Here’s where I see a lot of variation -- from a couple of treadmills stuff in a dank room to a full blown fitness center.</li>\r\n	<li>Location -- Am I within walking distance of restaurants, good bars, interesting things to see?</li>\r\n	<li>Service quality -- Not just a welcoming front desk -- though that’s important, most places are training for that and have it down. How about the service quality in the restaurant, or if they keep the workout room stocked with water and towels?</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>That’s a bit better. Or at least I think so. Though when I decide I’m going to review a hotel, my visit is a bit different. I’m not cruising through the lobby on auto-pilot. I’ve got my list; I’m a bit more aware. Is that a lipstick stain on my water glass? Do the hallway carpets look a bit more beat-up than usual? It changes things. I have a responsibility to observe. And it probably affects my satisfaction with that hotel, paying attention to things I might normally let slide by.</li>\r\n	<li>And I don’t seem to be alone in this, at least according to the <a href=\"http://www.trustyou.com/2013-global-year-in-review-annual-reports-show-trends-in-hotel-reviews-2-10348.html\" target=\"_blank\">TrustYou survey</a>. They found that hotels got fewer five-star reviews than a year ago. Their hypothesis -- As travelers read and use reviews more, their expectations of hotel service change -- toward what they’re reading in the reviews. They become more discerning consumers of hospitality services.</li>\r\n	<li>Which isn’t so bad, until it goes too far -- like it has with the explosion of food bloggers. If I see some guy setting up a tripod to photograph a particularly clever lobby check-in kiosk… that’s the day I delete my TripAdvisor account..</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>One</em> by <a title=\"Cargo Cult\'s Alchemy Album\" href=\"http://www.magnatune.com/artists/albums/cargo-alchemy/hifi_play\">Cargo Cult</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>TSA Gets Something Right!</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>OK, I know that I’ve been fixated on PreCheck over the past couple of episodes, but I really think it’s one of the best things the very maligned agency has ever done. A year or so ago, a survey found it had the worst public perception of any part of the federal government -- lower even than the IRS, which is pretty amazing if you think about it. Expanding the PreCheck program could help pull the TSA out of the cellar.</li>\r\n	<li>Going through the PreCheck lane is like traveling in pre-9/11 days -- no shouting, no pulling everything out of your bag, no emptying your pockets, no taking off your shoes, no full body scanner…. Indeed, just about everything you hate about the TSA goes away. The screening is quick, the TSA staff is nice -- it’s like flying in the last millenium, in the 1990’s.</li>\r\n	<li>Of course, the reason you get to saunter through the checkpoints unmolested is that you’ve given up $100 and a chunk of privacy. I was in the first batch of TSA PreCheck people because I’d already gone through the Global Entry program. Global Entry is the US Customs and Border Patrol’s program to reduce the hassles of US immigration lines. In return for a background check, an hour-long interview, and fingerprints, you get to use a kiosk rather than queuing up for an immigration agent when returning to the US from international travel. In an encouraging display of common sense, I guess the TSA figured that, since their Border Patrol brethren had already screened, interviewed and approved me for a light once-over at the border, I’m probably low-risk for blowing up an airplane.</li>\r\n	<li>Since the fall, the TSA has been rapidly expanding PreCheck -- adding lanes at existing airports like ORD and DFW and expanding to it to airports, targeting for 100 in total. I was pretty thrilled when they showed up at places like PDX and MSY. I’m happy to say that I can’t remember the last domestic airport I flew through that didn’t have PreCheck. The expansion has looked a bit rough-&amp;-ready in some places though. Lori Humm wrote about PreCheck in Jackson, MS:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>In Jackson, they don’t have a body scanner – they still have the metal detector – and if you are pre-check, they hand you a plastic card that allows you to to bypass the procedures, even though you are in the same line as everyone. This process is laughable as it just serves to confuse the large number of leisure travelers in line. It also holds up the line because the TSA agent is explaining the process every single time.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>I had a similar experience in New Orleans last week. In the New Orleans airport, none of the three concourses are connected -- kinda like LaGuardia in that way. Concourse B which has Southwest and Concourse D which has United and Delta have multiple TSA lanes and separate PreCheck lines. In Concourse C which has American, I’ve only ever seen one security lane running (though they have equipment for more) and there’s no PreCheck. So last Weds, I was ready for the full stripdown. But then the guy checking my license and boarding pass gave me a manila square of paper -- actually, it looked like they’d cut up a manila folder -- with “Pre” and a checkmark handwritten on it with a Sharpie. I got in line and showed it to the guy running the body scanner. I had to pull out my laptop, but got to leave my shoes and belt on and walk through the metal detector. Everyone else had to strip down for the body scanner. It felt very ad hoc, but I was happy not to have to pull everything off and out.</li>\r\n	<li>If the additional lanes feels a bit loose at times, the expansion to non-Global Entry flyers is interesting also. When my wife and I checked in for a November flight from PDX to ORD, both boarding passes had TSA PreCheck printed on them. My wife had never gotten that before. She hadn’t applied for anything. It just showed up. We were wondering if there was some mistake. We both walked into the PreCheck lane. The screener put her boarding pass on the electronic reader and there it was, the three beeps that say PreCheck Approved. Off she went through the PreCheck lane.</li>\r\n	<li>The TSA has said it’s randomly selecting regular passengers who, as a TSA spokesperson described it, “show up clean.” “The more information you give us about yourself, the more likely you will be selected,” she said. Again, that privacy/convenience trade-off. This might give some people pause But since the Edward Snowden affair has showed us we’ve already given up most of our privacy to another federal SA agency -- the NSA, we might as well get something back for it from the TSA.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917626811171154.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #106</li>\r\n	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Magnatune</a></li>\r\n	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_107.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #107 — Serious About Hotel Reviews; TSA Gets Something Right!','','inherit','open','open','','1305-revision-v1','','','2015-06-29 22:55:31','2015-06-30 03:55:31','',1305,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/06/29/1305-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1528,1,'2015-06-29 22:56:12','2015-06-30 03:56:12','[caption id=\"attachment_1291\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/2013-12-10-07.55.43.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1291\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/2013-12-10-07.55.43-300x225.jpg\" alt=\"Tough travel day when the deicing fluid freezes\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\" /></a> Tough travel day when the deicing fluid freezes[/caption]\r\n\r\nSnow, ice, and cold temperatures have hit North America a lot earlier this year. With the crush of Christmas/New Years travel starting this weekend, here\'s the TravelCommons\' top holiday travel tips...\r\n<ol>\r\n	<li><strong style=\"line-height: 1.5em;\">Fly Direct</strong><span style=\"line-height: 1.5em;\"> -- This is the top tip every time I put this list together. Holiday travel stacks up problems --  high passenger load factors combined with winter weather disruptions almost guarantees late arrivals and missed connections. Pay the extra $100 for a direct flight.</span></li>\r\n	<li><strong>Skip the Tight Connection</strong> -- If you can\'t fly direct, give yourself enough time to survive a late inbound flight. Take the 90- or 120-minute connection. Worst case is you get to try some great <a href=\"http://www.rickbayless.com/restaurants/tortas.html\">Mexican food</a> in O\'Hare or <a href=\"http://ilovememphisblog.com/2012/04/eat-airport-barbecue/\">barbecue</a> in Memphis.</li>\r\n	<li><strong>Catch the Early Flight </strong>-- Delays stack up as the day wears on.  As your airplane goes from airport to airport, the probability of it getting stuck increases.  Overnight, airlines have a chance to recover – late planes finally get their destinations and operations groups can reassign planes.  So while the last flight out can be a crap shoot, I\'ve rarely hit a delay on the first flight out.</li>\r\n	<li><strong>Use Multiple Flight Tracking Apps</strong> -- Use your smartphone to keep track of gate changes and flight delays. Sign up for text notifications from your airline when you book your ticket. However,  I\'ve often experienced long delays with the airlines\' services or changes that were never sent out. So I also use <a href=\"http://tripit.com\">TripIt</a>, <a href=\"http://worldmate.com\">WorldMate</a>, and <a href=\"http://flightaware.com\">FlightAware</a>. It means multiple notices, but it also means I don\'t miss anything.</li>\r\n	<li><strong>Use Twitter as a Concierge Service</strong> -- Most airlines have social media teams monitoring Twitter. Before you leave, find and follow your airline\'s Twitter customer service account. \"At naming\" them in a Tweet (e.g., \"<a dir=\"ltr\" href=\"https://twitter.com/united\">@united</a> what\'s happening with UA 4286 MSY-ORD that it\'s 1:45 hr delayed?\") usually gets a response in a couple of minutes. Following them allows you to exchange personal information such as record locator numbers via direct message (DM). It\'s usually faster than queuing up for a frazzled gate agent and the results can be better.</li>\r\n	<li><strong>Carry On your Luggage</strong> -- Unless you\'re heading to the slopes for Christmas, everyone in your travel party should be able to fit into a carry-on sized bag. You can save $25/bag and increase the probability of having clean clothes at your destination. If you’re seating area 3 or higher, odds are there’s no overhead bin space for you. Let the agent gate-check the bag for you. You won’t have to pay a checked bag fee and it’s very unlikely that they’ll lose your bag – it’s only traveling a couple hundred feet from the jet bridge to the luggage hold.</li>\r\n	<li><strong>Spread Clothes Across All Bags</strong> -- If you have to check your bags, split everyone\'s clothes across all the bags. It\'s rare for an airline to lose <em>all</em> of your checked bags.</li>\r\n	<li><strong>Buy Status for 1 Person</strong> -- Airlines will sell you anything, including one-off access to the special security lines and early boarding calls normally earned by flying 25,000 miles. The airlines will tell you that everyone in your travel party needs to pony up for status. In practice though, if the lead adult\'s boarding pass shows priority/premiere access, the overworked minimum-wage airport staffers guarding the status security lanes will let the family tag along. And at the gate, I\'ve never seen a family split up across boarding groups.</li>\r\n	<li><strong>Know Your Geography </strong>-- Knowing alternatives to your destination airport gives you more flexibility dealing with cancelled flights or missed connections. In New York, the LaGuardia to Newark pivot is easy, but others aren\'t so obvious.  Everyone knows that Chicago has two airports – O\'Hare and Midway.  But what about Milwaukee\'s Mitchell Field 80 miles north?  If PHL is in trouble, how many folks think about Harrisburg or BWI?  Or Sacramento as an alternative to SFO?  I think about alternatives in two rings – within 60 miles – SNA and LGB for LAX; and then within 100-120 miles, which now picks up Palm Springs and San Diego for LAX.  Someone will drive a couple of hours to pick you up if it means getting you to Christmas dinner on time.</li>\r\n	<li><strong>But above all, be realistic </strong> -- It\'s gonna be a zoo. Steel yourself; get your inner karma tuned for it. Pack a snack and a book, and practice deep cleansing breaths.</li>\r\n</ol>','Top 10 Holiday Travel Tips','','inherit','open','open','','1289-revision-v1','','','2015-06-29 22:56:12','2015-06-30 03:56:12','',1289,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/06/29/1289-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1531,1,'2015-08-26 23:01:51','2015-08-27 04:01:51','[caption id=\"attachment_1532\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/DSC_5744.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1532\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/DSC_5744-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Lost Without Translation\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Lost Without Translation[/caption]\n\nBack behind the microphone after an extended summer break highlighted by a two-week family vacation in Japan. We talk about traveling in Japan. It was a fantastic time, though we were lost without translation at times. But with the US dollar buying 124 yen, it was the right time to go. We also talk about frustration in using frequent flier miles, trends toward prettier and higher tech luggage, and a connoisseur of scrambled eggs. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_116.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #116:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, after a <i>long </i>absence. Let’s call it summer vacation. And there was a nice bit of vacation there -- 2 weeks in Japan with the family. People would ask me “Have you been to Japan before?” Never outside of Narita. Which I translated to an answer of “Mostly no” before my trip, and updated to a plain “No” after my trip. But more on that later.</li>\n 	<li>Over the years, I’ve gotten into the habit of leaving the country if I want a real vacation. I find the disconnection process works much better I’m more than 5  time zones removed from home. Europe is 6 or 7 hours ahead -- pretty good. But the 14 hour difference between Chicago and Tokyo -- that’s real separation.</li>\n 	<li>You can’t unplug for 2 weeks for free, though. It takes a bit of planning, and in my case, a good bit of travel -- both before and after the trip.</li>\n 	<li>The 6 business days before my flight to Tokyo had me in Nashville, Detroit, Dallas, and the day before I left, Denver. I flew out Sunday night, flew home Monday night, and then left for Japan Tuesday noon. Coming back, we hit ORD 3:30 Sunday afternoon only to find myself back there 15 hours later for the first flight back out to Denver Monday morning. I was just happy that it was a short week for the 4th of July holiday.</li>\n 	<li>Since then, I’ve been keeping up the Denver-Dallas triangulation with the occasional random jump to somewhere like Detroit. I’ll probably keep it up through August since the beginning of September will have me out of the country again -- to Edinburgh, helping my daughter settle in at <a href=\"http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/\">University of St Andrews</a>. After that, I may just sleep until October.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://ghosts.nin.com/main/home\"><em>3 Ghosts I</em></a> by <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Nine Inch Nails\" href=\"http://www.nin.com/\" rel=\"homepage\">Nine Inch Nails</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>So that was the start of the <a href=\"https://blog.stackexchange.com/2015/06/stack-exchange-podcast-65-the-word-has-two-meanings-you-see/\">Stack Exchange Podcast</a> where Joel Spolsky goes pretty much non-linear over his attempt to use frequent flier miles.</li>\n 	<li>Any attempt to use frequent flier miles will be a frustrating exercise. My recent attempts to do <i>anything</i>with the 300,000 BA Avios miles is own personal exercise in masochism. But, to be honest, I’ve had pretty good luck this year, getting 2 flights down to New Orleans on Southwest, 4 direct flights from and from Tokyo with UA Mileage Plus and 3 flights between ORD and Edinburgh on American. Now, it wasn’t a complete cakewalk -- on SW, my wife and daughter took a 6am flight back on Monday, on UA, we had to come home a couple of days earlier than we had originally planned while on AA it’s a day later. But flexibility has always been a requirement to use frequent flyer miles. And those minor shifts are a whole lot better than my exercise with BA which only offered me one day in the entire month of September that I could use Avios miles to get to Edinburgh. I’m not sure there’s a more useless awards program.</li>\n 	<li>When I first started looking for Chicago to Edinburgh flights, I went straight to Hipmunk.com. It has been my go-to flight search tool for a while now. It’s easy -- it defaults to flight search, unlike Expedia’s push for bundled deals or Orbitz pushing hotels. And graphical display -- bars for each flight showing flight duration spread across the day -- makes it very easy to focus on the flights you’re most interested in. But when searching for Edinburgh flights, I spotted something new -- right under the red Virgin Atlantic bar was a purple one labeled “Mystery”. Kinda like Priceline’s unnamed hotels you bid for. But I’d never seen what the travel industry calls “opaque pricing” on Hipmunk before. Of course, it wasn’t really that opaque. Clicking on the bar revealed the flight details -- a 4:40pm departure with an hour connection in Madrid. Hmmm, let’s see. Only Iberia flies from ORD to MAD. Doing a quick search, I found the times did indeed match Iberia flight number 345 -- which Hipmunk only slightly masked as Mystery Airline #345. Must’ve been an experiment, because I haven’t seen it since, but I did get a good chuckle out of it.</li>\n 	<li>A colleague who I met up with on one of my Detroit trips flew Spirit Airline for the first time and <i>didn’t</i> get much of a chuckle. It was a last-minute meeting. He was flying in from Kansas City and, following the rules by using the mandated American Express Travel website to book his flight, he saw a Spirit flight that was significantly less than other carriers. Being a good corporate citizen, he booked it. He showed up at the ticket counter to get his boarding pass. “You gonna carry that one?” the Spirit agent asked him, pointing to his suitcase. “Of course,” he said. “That’ll cost you $55. And that briefcase doesn’t look like it’ll fit under the seat, so that’s another $55.” Pretty quickly, the price difference that led him to book Spirit disappeared in the smoke of carryon charges. Some might say it’s his fault for not knowing Spirit’s uniquely aggressive add-on fee structure -- what Spirit calls “bundling”. But I’d say it’s Amex’s fault -- for displaying Spirit’s base fare (without carryon fees) in the same ways as they display Delta’s or Southwest’s. And then marking those higher, but more inclusive, fares as being “out of policy” because they’re higher, and requiring additional steps to justify booking them. More power to Spirit to differentiate themselves with a unique fee structure, but Amex and the like need to do their job and let business travelers know what they’re in for when they book those low fares.</li>\n 	<li>Rich Fraser did saw my PreCheck frustration spill over to Twitter.\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" lang=\"en\">\n<p dir=\"ltr\" lang=\"en\">Folks, it\'s a *metal* detector! Large chunks of metal in your pocket - cell phones, car keys, $5 worth of quarters - *will* set it off</p>\n— Mark Peacock (@mpeacock) <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/623113695426670592\">July 20, 2015</a></blockquote>\n<script src=\"//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js\" async=\"\" charset=\"utf-8\"></script>I don’t know if it’s summer travel amateurs hitting the PreCheck lottery, but I’ve been stunned at the number of people who look amazed when the metal detector alarms when they try to walk through with a slug of metal in their pockets. Mobile phone, big electronic key fobs, two fistfuls of change… I mean, what part of “metal detector” do they not get? It’s doing it’s job! But people will stand there, dumbfounded, they can’t stroll through wearing the quarter-pound of metal and electronics that is an iPhone. I hate to be a snob, but I beginning to think they need to split PreCheck between the veterans who paid for it and the occasional random selectees. To which Rich mentioned that it’s not so occasional for him -- he’s gotten Pre on 3 of his last 4 trips. So, he says, why pay for it? Hey, as long as he remembers to take his mobile phone and car keys out of his pocket, I say, more power to him.</li>\n 	<li>I’ve probably mentioned this before, but I think one of the absolute best airport restaurants is Rick Bayless’ <a href=\"http://www.rickbayless.com/restaurants/tortas-frontera/\">Torta Frontera</a> in the American, United and International terminals at ORD. The tortas, the Mexican sandwiches, are fantastic -- great local ingredients and made-to-order. Being made-to-order is key to the great taste and texture, but it’s 10 minutes from the time you order and at ORD rush hour, you can stand in line for 10 minutes before you get to the counter. Great restaurant -- and popular. So I was cautiously excited last week when I saw they had a new ordering app. I was catching an evening flight to DTW and decided to check out the app. I downloaded and set up the app after parking in the deck -- created an account and loaded a credit card. Then, while in the PreCheck line, I scrolled through the menu and loaded the shopping cart with a Cubana, my favorite torta. I was going to hit the Order Now button, but the TSA guys were a little too efficient, waving 3 of us forward at once. So, I hit Order a couple of minutes later on the other side of the X-Ray machine. I quickly received an e-mail “Thanks for your order, we’ll let you know when it’s ready”. That’s it. No ETA, no typical wait time. Hmmm… I walk down to the T3 Tortas -- longest line I’ve seen. Hmmm…  Just then, I get a second e-mail -- 7 minutes after the first -- “You order will be ready at 5:43pm” -- 10 minutes from now. OK, not bad given this line. I walk to the rest room, browse the bookstore across the hall, and put myself in front of the order pick-up station at 5:43pm. About a minute later, the woman calls out “Anybody order on-line?” Two of us step up. “Mark?” I reach out and take my bag. The pre-order worked well, though next time, I’ll let the TSA guy wait for a minute while I hit the Order button a bit sooner.</li>\n 	<li>All the way back in April 2012, I wrote a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/04/21/best-hotel-amenity-free-breakfast/\">blog post</a> about free breakfast being the best hotel amenity.  (I had to do a good bit of scrolling on the TravelCommons website to find it -- I’ll save you that with a link in the show notes). It’s still true, even though, it’s, as I wrote back then, it’s more about convenience than food quality -- especially when you’re grabbing that breakfast in the concierge lounge of a Marriott or Sheraton or Westin. And it kinda turns you into a connoisseur of scrambled eggs. A buddy and I got into this conversation a few weeks back -- comparing the quality of scrambled eggs across hotels we’ve stayed at.  We concluded that the most typical consistency was firm, almost quiche like. We liked them with a bit of cheese mixed in to give them a bit of flavor (neither of us are vegan). Every once in a great while, you get great scrambled eggs -- soft curds, slightly moist. But you definitely don’t want them runny -- there’s nothing more disgusting at 6am than tilting back that warming tray clamshell lid and seeing scrambled eggs sitting in a pool of yellowish liquid. We’ll go for hard dry over swimming in yellow eggs every morning. But hard dry bacon, now that’s just wrong</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/buy_album.php?id=08E508A6096F11910641E13331B70EED6DFA5BB929282F731E19BBAFA8F08FFD686BD99DD86BA0D5E844DD5536E1AEFB\" rel=\"nofollow\"><em>Ghost Hardware</em></a> by Burial</li>\n</ul>\n<b>Traveling Thru Japan</b>\n<ul>\n 	<li>The family and I have done a fair bit of travel in Asia -- Thailand, Singapore, Vietnam, Hong Kong, China -- which left two big holes -- Japan and Korea. We filled one of them this summer when we spent two weeks visiting Tokyo, Kyoto, and Osaka. Japan had always been on our list to visit, but its reputation for high prices always gave us an excuse to put it off and go some place where we could stretch our dollars further. But with the dollar buying ¥124 and then scoring 4 direct ORD-NRT tickets on United Mileage Plus awards, this seemed the time.</li>\n 	<li>Now as long time listeners know, this won’t be a travelog, a list of things to see in Tokyo or Kyoto -- I leave that to friends like Chris Christensen of the <a href=\"http://asia.amateurtraveler.com/tag/japan/\">Amateur Travelers podcast</a>. Since I always say that this podcast is more about the journey than the destination, let’s talk about travel in Japan.</li>\n 	<li>As my family and I tend to do on our trips, our only trips to the airport were coming and going to the US. Everything else was on train. Which in Japan works very well. My wife bought us 2-week Japan Rail (JR) passes before we left. It wasn’t a small number for the 4 of us, but they paid off over our trip -- allowing us unlimited use of the high-speed bullet trains, even to reserve seats for a bit more relaxed boarding.</li>\n 	<li>We broke the passes in on the Narita Express, the hour ride from the airport to Tokyo Station. I’m not sure they could’ve put Narita any further out. Given the distance, everyone takes the train or a bus. The train was fine, kinda like the Heathrow Express but without the TV screens. It worked with a minimum amount of fuss -- which was a good thing after a 12-hour flight.</li>\n 	<li>We really hammered the JR passes to train among Tokyo, Kyoto, and Osaka, all less than 3-hour trips. Some of the stations were huge and there were times when we had to lean in to thread through the crowds of commuters. But the signage was pretty good and the trains absolutely met their reputation for timeliness (if only airlines in the US were half as timely…). And while JR would roll a food cart while on the rails, we got a bit more into the Japanese train culture and stocked up at the train station food courts before we left -- bento boxes, rice cakes, and of course, train beers -- Kirin tall boys usually. And if we didn’t have time to hit the food court, we could always grab something from the vending machines -- which were positioned about every 20 feet on the train platform. The vending machine thing in Japan is intense -- but convenient.</li>\n 	<li>We didn’t just train point-to-point between the major stations. A lot of times it was a smaller train to the main station, then the high-speed train, then connecting to again to a smaller train. The HyperDia smartphone app came highly recommended and the free version was great when planning out these connecting journeys -- both inter-city and within Tokyo where a trip across town might span a couple of rail companies, say Tokyo Metro to a JR train. It also displays the fare, which is very handy, avoiding the need to try and decipher the rate table while in front of the fare machine with a queue building behind you. The public transit tab on Google Maps also worked surprisingly well.</li>\n 	<li>Being able to use these apps when you really need them requires mobile data for your phone. You don’t want to be trying to search for an open WiFi access point before figuring out which train you’re connecting to. Which, in Japan, like so many things, isn’t exactly straightforward. As a tourist, you can only buy data SIMs; no voice capabilities. One of my go-to websites -- the aptly, but somewhat awkwardly named <a href=\"http://prepaid-data-sim-card.wikia.com/wiki/Japan\">Prepaid Data SIM Card Wiki</a> -- came through again. Before we left, I ordered a b-mobile SIM to be delivered to our first hotel -- the Marriott Courtyard in the Ginza District -- and then I bought another -- Japan Travel SIM -- from the Tourist Information Center at Tokyo Station. The lack of local voice wasn’t a huge inconvenience for us -- we were communicating via e-mail with hotels and apartment rentals -- but it still seemed a little weird.</li>\n 	<li>The one thing that pulled me up short was the limited amount of signage in the Latin alphabet. I’m OK with the Japanese names when phonetically rendered in Latin characters, but I’m not so hot on reading kanji or kana. We wrestled with this our first morning in Tokyo at the Tsukiji Fish Market. My wife had a list of sushi restaurant recommendations -- all of which were Japanese names in Latin script; all the restaurant signs were in kanji. And then at a Kyoto ramen restaurant, where you buy tickets for your food from a machine and then hand them across the counter to the cook, having only kanji on the machine buttons without pictures, made ordering a bit of a challenge. It got me thinking back to my trip last year to Beijing -- I didn’t recall having the same level of challenge there.</li>\n 	<li>What made this all work is that just about all of the Japanese people we ran into were the nicest, the most welcoming people. I was constantly struck at how many people would strike up a conversation -- asking where we’re from, helping us with Ramen machines, shouting “Welcome to Japan” while riding by on a bike, volunteering to walk us across train stations to help us with connections. I’m not sure I’ve experienced that consistent level of engagement from random strangers anywhere else. Of course, some of it could get a slightly embarrassing, like the group of middle school kids who wanted a picture with me. Or my daughter who regularly would get tagged by Japanese girls for pictures. We had that experience often in Beijing, but there, when we were often the lone white people, it was understandable. Having that same thing happen in Japan -- more Westernized, more white people wandering around -- that surprised us. In Arashiyama, a pretty touristy area on the west side of Kyoto, we were flagged down by 3 middle school teachers who video’d us answering their question about why we chose to visit this town. They told us that they taught English and wanted to show their classes native English speakers. OK, makes sense, but with all videos on YouTube, I wasn’t quite sure why they wanted a video of us.</li>\n 	<li>But that being said, except for the signage, Japan was one of the easier countries we’ve traveled in. And maybe, with a couple more revs of Google Translate, even that barrier will get smoothed away.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a title=\"MP3 Download\" href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/download_track.php?id=0E74C6FEB7390D18D02B4B399668093172F6C8CC66DDC09D90A3BF7DDA436823CFAC859AE2B2C73E46A278A4950E1030\">Lonely Dog Blues</a></em> by <a title=\"Tobin James\' Web Site\" href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/label.php?id=2A3449F03E7B8462FF74407B60F0C4B0A30A0CBE880C61DE37E3B342387F0643\">Tobin James</a></li>\n</ul>\n<b>Luggage Trends</b>\n<ul>\n 	<li>I think it was when I was grabbing our luggage off the carousel in ORD, returning from Spain with our luggage full of wine and olive oil. I picked up my wife’s red bag and was struck at how tatty the fabric had become. I set it down in front of her and said “That’s become embarrassing. I’m not sure I can travel with that bag again”</li>\n 	<li>Now it’s not that I have a styling bag. It’s stock Swiss Army black roller still bearing Vietnamese customs stickers from 2008. I had retired it in favor of a grey Samsonite bag, but had to pull it back out when the Samsonite’s wheels got wonky -- the rubber wore off and the wheels splayed out after 2.5 years of pulling it across New Orleans sidewalks.</li>\n 	<li>I’m seeing more hardshell rollers in non-black colors -- burgundy, yellow, floral prints, Disney characters…. They look nice; but that just may be because they look different -- they catch my eye because of what they’re not -- not a black ballistic nylon roller bag. My recently deceased Samsonite was non-black -- grey rather than floral, but still non-black. And after 3-4 months of my travel schedule, it started to look less non-black. Smudges from grease on overhead bin hinges, muck from taxi trunks, muddy water from New Orleans gutters, spilled coffee... That’s why I can’t have nice luggage.</li>\n 	<li>We’ve talked about the impending trend of “smart luggage” in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/11/22/podcast-112-holiday-airport-etiquette-travel-tax-pile-up/\">past</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/05/14/podcast-115-a-decade-of-travelcommons/\">episodes</a>. Bluesmart has been the poster child for this. They crushed their Indiegogo campaign last year, and 2 weeks ago announced they’re in volume production, targeting initial deliveries in late September. “Control your suitcase from the app” is one of their tag lines. Digital lock, digital scale, battery charger, location tracking, proximity alerts. It spoke to my inner travel propeller head, so I did the Indiegogo thing. When it shows up, I’ll be sure to tell you all about it.</li>\n 	<li>Bluesmart is at the top of the Google searches for “smart luggage”, but there are a growing list of followers with similar feature lists. Location tracking is an interesting one. I can count the number of times my luggage has been lost on one hand and have change left over, but when it happens, it can be catastrophic. I remember BA lost a bag on my way over to a 2-week “city-a-day” trip -- today London, tomorrow Stockholm, Friday in Zurich. My bag was always one stop behind me. So I get the importance of location tracking. At the high end, Bluesmart and others are equipping their bags with GPS and cellular modems to enable “global tracking”. At a much simpler level, travelers like long-time TC listener Mika Pyyhkala are using Bluetooth key fobs like the Pally Smartfinder to check if their bag made it onto their plane.</li>\n 	<li>I can see it being useful at the other end. Look at the app -- bag’s not off the plane yet. I have time to stop off at the restroom -- or better yet, the bar.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #116</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://iodapromonet.com/index.php\">IODA Promonet</a></li>\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_116.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #116 — Traveling Thru Japan; Luggage Trends','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-116-traveling-thru-japan-luggage-trends','','','2021-09-28 19:08:32','2021-09-29 00:08:32','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=1531',0,'post','',0),
(1532,1,'2015-08-26 21:36:04','2015-08-27 02:36:04','','DSC_5744','Lost Without Translation','inherit','open','open','','dsc_5744','','','2015-08-26 21:36:43','2015-08-27 02:36:43','',1531,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/DSC_5744.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(1533,1,'2015-08-26 21:48:02','2015-08-27 02:48:02','[caption id=\"attachment_1532\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/DSC_5744.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1532\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/DSC_5744-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Lost Without Translation\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Lost Without Translation[/caption]\r\n\r\nRecorded at the JW Marriott in New Orleans together with a GoPro <a title=\"Podcast #114 Uncut — The LoFi Video Version\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/03/20/podcast-114-uncut-the-lofi-video-version/\">video</a> capturing all the unedited bits. We go deep in a comparison of public transit and drive times to US airports, shed a tear for SkyMall magazine, and marvel at the stack of lost Android tablets at American Airlines\' ORD lost-and-found. We talk about what has been an awful start to the travel year in the US east of the Rocky Mountains, and wrap up with some observations about how hotel perks have become more important than points. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_116.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/196973214\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #116:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Which made me happy to head to ORD when I was flying south -- mostly to New Orleans, but the flight to Phoenix made me really smile. I think it was 15 degrees when I left Chicago and about 70 degrees when I landed. I spent at much time as possible outside, trying to resolve what I figured had to be a Vitamin D deficiency. I did get a chuckle on my last night there. I was sitting outside at a bar, must’ve been the low 60’s and they had the heat lamps on.</li>\r\n	<li>I also flew through Memphis this past month. The flight selection in and out of there just gets worse. That airport is becoming a ghost town since Delta dismantled the hub that Northwest had there. Indeed, they have a 2-year project to shrink the airport -- demolish half the A and C concourses, mothball what remains, and consolidate everyone into the B concourse. Kinda surprising when some airports are at capacity with people sprawling on the floor, there are other airports with concourses that could double for bowling alleys. How much does the economy have to improve for it make sense for the airlines to start adding back some capacity?</li>\r\n	<li>This coming week has me tempting the travel gods, hoping for better weather, with two up-and-backs to the East Coast -- a day trip to Newark and an overnight to Philadelphia. Perhaps a precautionary sacrifice is in order, but what? Maybe a sacrificial offering -- I dowse my travel size tube of Crest toothpaste with the extra bottle of Dewar’s</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://ghosts.nin.com/main/home\"><em>3 Ghosts I</em></a> by <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Nine Inch Nails\" href=\"http://www.nin.com/\" rel=\"homepage\">Nine Inch Nails</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Spelunking through my Twitter feed…</li>\r\n	<li>Another thing that made me smile on my flight down to PHX last month wasn’t that I scored a 1st Class upgrade on American -- it was that the upgrade let me hear a woman ask, as she walks on the plane, to be reseated away from the plane’s WiFi access point because she’s allergic to WiFi.  Just when you think you’ve heard everything on a airplane… This seems absurd in just so many ways. Like, how did she make it through the terminal without going into anaphylactic shock? Run a WiFi analyzer app on your phone or tablet the next time you’re in an airport and you’ll see that we’re wading through a sea of WiFi signals. And what about the passengers sitting all around her -- because nobody remembers to shut off the WiFi on their laptops or tablets. And I guess she didn’t stop off at Starbucks on the way to ORD. As it was, the flight attendants just looked at one another -- like they (or anyone) would know exactly where the GoGo access point was located on a 737, and like they’d want to rejuggle seats on a 737 completely full of families heading out on Spring Break. They just mumbled “We’ll ask someone” and gently pushed her down the aisle.</li>\r\n	<li>Taking mass transit to and from the airport is a running theme (fixation?) here at TravelCommons, so I immediately clicked through a tweet from Nate Silver’s 538 blog that went geekily deep on that, <a href=\"http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/planes-trains-and-taxis-when-to-take-public-transit-from-the-airport/\">comparing </a>public transit and driving times from the airport to downtown for the 40 busiest US airports. Only in Minneapolis, Honolulu, and Chicago (both ORD and MDW) is public transit quicker than taking a cab. If open the range a bit -- saying anything within 5 minutes is a toss-up, the list gets a lot longer -- Washington Reagan, Atlanta, San Diego, San Francisco, Austin. Open it to 10 minutes, which could be worth it given the cost difference, brings in Boston, Charlotte, Seattle, San Francisco but from OAK this time, and New York’s JFK. A number of these work because they’re close-in airports -- Chicago Midway, Washington Reagan. Others because the highway traffic is so bad -- most notably O’Hare and JFK. The list is ranked by public transit time and for the top 15 -- plus JFK which is #30 -- public transit times are reasonable enough to make the cost-convenience trade-off compelling. Some of the airports below that line that I know -- New Orleans, Orange County Calif, Detroit -- I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a public transit sign in those place. PDX jumped out at me. I <a title=\"Podcast #103 — Hospitality is Personal; Tablets Everywhere\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2013/01/24/podcast-103-hospitality-is-personal-tablets-everywhere/\">talked </a>about taking that airport light rail in an earlier episode. It’s a nice service, but it takes a while -- it makes a lot of intermediate stops -- and so it doesn’t compare well to a cab ride that takes half the time. Of course the gold standard is London’s Heathrow Express  -- a 15-minute straight shot from Paddington Station vs. an hour cab ride. But that’s not a real apples-to-apples comparison -- a Heathrow Express ticket is £21.50 (over $30) vs. $5 for ORD or $7.50 for JFK. The better comparison might be the £5.70 ($8.50) ride on the Tube’s Piccadilly Line that takes 50-60 minutes, which would fit in at the bottom of the top 15 US list.</li>\r\n	<li>Waiting out an unbelievably long delay on a United ORD-DEN flight, I ran through all of my reading material -- electronic versions of the Wall Street Journal and NY Times, physical version of the Chicago Tribune, my Feedly newsreader stream, multiple refreshes of Twitter -- and so had to dive into the seatback pocket, the emptiness of which reminded me of SkyMall magazine’s bankruptcy at the end of January. SkyMall was always good for at least 15 minutes of entertainment, along the lines of “who in the world would buy that?” -- the zombie statue crawling out of your garden, the kickboard suitcase, the NFL wine shoe holder…. until last Christmas, when a friend bought my present out of SkyMall -- a 6-bottle leather wine holder for my bicycle. Stunning. I can’t wait for the snow to melt to try it. I only fly Delta when I absolutely have to (like to ATL or MEM) so I didn’t notice when they canned SkyMall back in Nov -- “We saw a decline in customer use,” they said. Yup, every electronic thing I read prior to reaching for SkyMall -- the WSJ, NYT, Feedly, Twitter; I could add Facebook; if I was younger I could add Tumblr. I think the minute the FAA allowed us to keep tablets on during take-off and landing, SkyMall was a dead man walking...</li>\r\n	<li>And speaking of tablets, last month I thought I’d left my Google Nexus 7 behind on one of my American flights home from New Orleans. It was one in what seemed to be a stream of stuff I’d lost on the road -- a couple of pairs of sunglasses, earbuds, and now this. I went to the American’s lost-and-found in ORD. The woman came out with a stack of 10-12 7-inch Android tablets -- Lenovo’s, Samsung’s, but not mine. I could see she had a similar sized stack of iPad Mini’s. Looks like this happens a lot. I think the move from solid to mesh seat back pockets is a good thing. But that weekend, as I continued to steal my wife’s Nexus 7, I realized how much I used that tablet. So Sunday night, I hopped on Amazon and found a refurb 8-inch Samsung Galaxy Tab Pro for $200. Sold. I bought it on my son’s Prime account for cheap next day shipping. It’s a nice piece of kit -- bright screen, quick performance, which was a very pleasant change because after Google pushed the latest Android update (Lollipop) to my Nexus 7, its performance cratered to the point of nearly being unusable. It was nice not having a 2-3 second lag between screen touch and reaction. That following week, as I was adjusting my backpack contents -- notebook, Bose headphones, and now my Samsung tablet, I was having problems getting things to fit. I reached in to move some stuff around -- and found my Nexus 7. I hadn’t left in a seat-back pocket. I’d just lost it in my backpack. I gotta get a non-black case next time.</li>\r\n	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/buy_album.php?id=08E508A6096F11910641E13331B70EED6DFA5BB929282F731E19BBAFA8F08FFD686BD99DD86BA0D5E844DD5536E1AEFB\" rel=\"nofollow\"><em>Ghost Hardware</em></a> by Burial</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Awful Winter Travel</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Now that the US snow cover appears to be retreating -- though Boston did get some more snow last weekend -- I’m hoping that we can bid farewell to what was a really lousy start to the year -- at least from a travel perspective. It kinda caught me by surprise because the start of the winter season -- end of Nov and through December -- wasn’t bad at all. But January started to have it’s problems, and then February -- it was 4 weeks of travel hell for just about everywhere in the US east of the Rockies. Cold, Snow, Ice, Wind -- kinda the 4 winter horsemen of the travel apocalypse.</li>\r\n	<li>Every week seemed to have yet another disruption. I think it started with the Snopocalypse that wasn’t in New York and New Jersey. Mayors, governors closing offices, schools, roads, towns on the forecast of massive/huge/historic (they started to run out of adjectives) snowfall -- only to see, what, 4-6 inches? But everyone had flights delayed, cancelled -- it seemed to take the next couple of days before everyone got back in the traces. Only to have a real snow storm blow them back the next week. I had a string of I think 3 Mondays of flight cancellations. I’d get on a weekly conference call and half of everybody was not where they were supposed to be -- cancelled flights, diverted flights, working from home,.... One colleague trying to fly from Ft Myers, FL to Memphis (for work obviously) on Delta. Lands at ATL only to find they’d cancelled his MEM flight due to an ice storm. “When can I get there?” “We don’t know”. He turned around and went back home for the week. His clients couldn’t get to their offices for 3 days.</li>\r\n	<li>As I mentioned in the <a title=\"Podcast #113 — 2014 was a Bad Year to Fly; Restaurant Trends Go Local\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/01/27/podcast-113-2014-was-a-bad-year-to-fly-restaurant-trends-go-local/\">last podcast</a>, I tried to be a bit more strategic in my travel -- picking some warm spots when I could, avoiding known trouble spots. I cringed whenever I had to fly to the East Coast, but sometimes I got lucky -- I hit San Antonio on a 70 degree day. The day after I left, it dropped down to 40. I managed to wrangle a half-week in Phoenix in mid-February. Mid-70’s and sunny -- I was outside every minute I could. Flying home, it was 77 degrees when I left PHX; -2 degrees when I landed at ORD. I thought I was going to shatter when I walked onto the jet bridge.</li>\r\n	<li>I think the pinnacle was when the Delta jet slid off the LaGuardia runway, hit a fence, and came within yards of dumping into Jamaica Bay. Landing at any of those small, near-in airports -- LaGuardia, Washington Reagan, Chicago Midway -- are like putting down on an aircraft carrier, not a lot of room for error. Add snow or ice -- I’m surprised it doesn’t happen more often. Luckily, this one wasn’t fatal -- not like the Air Florida crash out of what was then Washington National on a snowy January, or the Southwest 737 that slid off the end of a Midway runway, through a fence and into a street intersection, crushing a car waiting at the red light, killing a small boy. This was just more inconvenience -- closing LGA for 7 hours, taking a big chunk of capacity out of what is already the most crowded/overtaxed airspace in the country. A friend trying to fly home to New York that afternoon boarded her flight, it pushed back, only to pull back in after it was cancelled. It was just one more delay, one more cancellation. I was a little luckier. Even though I was flying from Memphis to Chicago, some piece of my flight -- the plane, the crew -- got caught up in that East Coast mess. But thanks to the wonders of mobile message updates, I was able to track the delays from the relative comfort of a Mexican bar in East Memphis. One margarita with an high-school buddy turned to two turned to dinner with his wife joining us. I, unlike so many others, got home that night and had something other than bad airport food to show for it.</li>\r\n	<li>The next week -- yet another delay on my New Orleans-Chicago flight. Late inbound aircraft. But why? ORD and MSY were fine; all the weather was again in the East. No one knew, not even the pilot. When we finally boarded the flight, he keyed the mic and said, “I’m awfully sorry about this delay. I wish I could tell you why, but I have no idea. The plane arrived Chicago on time from San Antonio and then just sat there. I wish I could tell you why.”</li>\r\n	<li>I dunno -- maybe they lost it behind a snow drift.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a title=\"MP3 Download\" href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/download_track.php?id=0E74C6FEB7390D18D02B4B399668093172F6C8CC66DDC09D90A3BF7DDA436823CFAC859AE2B2C73E46A278A4950E1030\">Lonely Dog Blues</a></em> by <a title=\"Tobin James\' Web Site\" href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/label.php?id=2A3449F03E7B8462FF74407B60F0C4B0A30A0CBE880C61DE37E3B342387F0643\">Tobin James</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Hospitality Beats Points</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>One morning in some concierge lounge in some Marriott or Sheraton that I can’t quite place, I opened my umpteenth warming dish, looked in at yet another pond of runny scrambled eggs and wondered “Really? How difficult is it to properly cook institutional egg mix?”</li>\r\n	<li>Just about every poll of statused hotel travelers rank free WiFi and free breakfast as the top amenities, the ones that keep travelers working to maintain status. But when you actually use those amenities, they’re often not so great -- slow WiFi (even the “enhanced speeds” that Marriott promises their gold and platinum members), semi-liquid scrambled eggs and stacks of over-cooked bacon.</li>\r\n	<li>Which is a problem, because just about every hotel chain in the past couple of years has raised the number of points needed for a room and also created a new top tier for the best/most popular properties -- added, say, a Category 6 so they could charge even more points for that Maui property -- devaluing that big point balance -- your vacation savings account -- that you “road warriored” so hard to build.</li>\r\n	<li>So if the points aren’t worth as much anymore, what keeps travelers loyal to a brand, what keeps you staying in, say, a Marriott 75 nights or 25 stays in a Westin to make top-tier platinum? It should be those amenities -- but how loyalty are those scrambled eggs worth? They’re convenient, but don’t differentiate much.</li>\r\n	<li>Some places are ditching the whole lounge idea. I’ve been in some Renaissance hotels and Marriott Autograph hotels that serve the free breakfast in their restaurant -- there’s the standard-looking buffet, but if you have the time, you can order anything off the menu. Blows my diet a bit, but beats 4 mornings straight of scrambled eggs.</li>\r\n	<li>I have noticed, though, that I’m being offered more specialty perks at places that I’m staying a lot. The Sheraton on Canal St in New Orleans will occasionally offer me basketball tickets -- the Pelicans are actually doing well this year -- and had some special grandstand deals to watch the Mardi Gras parades in front of the hotel. I didn’t take them up on either of their offers -- I had other commitments -- but it was nice to get the offer.</li>\r\n	<li>I call it the “Cheers” effect -- you want to go where everyone knows your name. When you’re away from home, you want someone to smile and ask how you’re doing. And it’s not just hotels. The morning barista crew at the Starbucks on Canal St and St Charles fire up a spinach feta wrap when they see me walk through the door, even when it’s been a couple of weeks since my last visit.</li>\r\n	<li>Of course, there is a fine line that can be crossed. Like a friend of mine, she received Christmas presents from a front desk clerk for years (!) after about an 18-month gig that had her weekly at the Trumbull CT Marriott. Or when I first started traveling for business, I was commuting between Dallas and Chicago, passing through the DFW Admirals Club every Monday morning. After about 3 months, one of the agents who’d I’d gotten to know asked me if I’d like to meet her daughter. Awkward. But in what I still think is one of my best moments, I asked her “Do you really want your daughter dating someone who travels as much as I do?” She thought for a moment, “No, not really”. Awkwardness averted, and we went on to have a nice friendship until I moved back to Chicago a year later.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917626811171154.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #116</li>\r\n	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://iodapromonet.com/index.php\">IODA Promonet</a></li>\r\n	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_116.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #116 — Traveling Thru Japan; Luggage Trends','','inherit','open','open','','1531-revision-v1','','','2015-08-26 21:48:02','2015-08-27 02:48:02','',1531,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/08/26/1531-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1534,1,'2015-08-26 21:56:21','2015-08-27 02:56:21','[caption id=\"attachment_1532\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/DSC_5744.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1532\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/DSC_5744-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Lost Without Translation\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Lost Without Translation[/caption]\r\n\r\nRecorded at the JW Marriott in New Orleans together with a GoPro <a title=\"Podcast #114 Uncut — The LoFi Video Version\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/03/20/podcast-114-uncut-the-lofi-video-version/\">video</a> capturing all the unedited bits. We go deep in a comparison of public transit and drive times to US airports, shed a tear for SkyMall magazine, and marvel at the stack of lost Android tablets at American Airlines\' ORD lost-and-found. We talk about what has been an awful start to the travel year in the US east of the Rocky Mountains, and wrap up with some observations about how hotel perks have become more important than points. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_116.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/196973214\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #116:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, after a <i>long</i>absence. Let’s call it summer vacation. And there was a nice bit of vacation there -- 2 weeks in Japan with the family. People would ask me “Have you been to Japan before?” Never outside of Narita. Which I translated to an answer of “Mostly no” before my trip, and updated to a plain “No” after my trip. But more on that later.</li>\r\n	<li>Over the years, I’ve gotten into the habit of leaving the country if I want a real vacation. I find the disconnection process works much better I’m more than 5  time zones removed from home. Europe is 6 or 7 hours ahead -- pretty good. But the 14 hour difference between Chicago and Tokyo -- that’s real separation.</li>\r\n	<li>You can’t unplug for 2 weeks for free, though. It takes a bit of planning, and in my case, a good bit of travel -- both before and after the trip.</li>\r\n	<li>The 6 business days before my flight to Tokyo had me in Nashville, Detroit, Dallas, and the day before I left, Denver. I flew out Sunday night, flew home Monday night, and then left for Japan Tuesday noon. Coming back, we hit ORD 3:30 Sunday afternoon only to find myself back there 15 hours later for the first flight back out to Denver Monday morning. I was just happy that it was a short week for the 4th of July holiday.</li>\r\n	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Since then, I’ve been keeping up the Denver-Dallas triangulation with the occasional random jump to somewhere like Detroit. I’ll probably keep it up through August since the beginning of September will have me out of the country again -- to Edinburgh, helping my daughter settle in at </span><a href=\"http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">University of St Andrews</span></a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">. After that, I may just sleep until October.</span></li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://ghosts.nin.com/main/home\"><em>3 Ghosts I</em></a> by <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Nine Inch Nails\" href=\"http://www.nin.com/\" rel=\"homepage\">Nine Inch Nails</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Spelunking through my Twitter feed…</li>\r\n	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">So that was the start of the <a href=\"https://blog.stackexchange.com/2015/06/stack-exchange-podcast-65-the-word-has-two-meanings-you-see/\">Stack Exchange Podcast</a> where Joel Spolsky goes pretty much non-linear over his attempt to use frequent flier miles…</span></li>\r\n	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Any attempt to use frequent flier miles will be a frustrating exercise. My recent attempts to do </span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">anything</span></i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> with the 300,000 BA Avios miles is own personal exercise in masochism. But, to be honest, I’ve had pretty good luck this year, getting 2 flights down to New Orleans on Southwest, 4 direct flights from and from Tokyo with UA Mileage Plus and 3 flights between ORD and Edinburgh on American. Now, it wasn’t a complete cakewalk -- on SW, my wife and daughter took a 6am flight back on Monday, on UA, we had to come home a couple of days earlier than we had originally planned while on AA it’s a day later. But flexibility has always been a requirement to use frequent flyer miles. And those minor shifts are a whole lot better than my exercise with BA which only offered me one day in the entire month of September that I could use Avios miles to get to Edinburgh. I’m not sure there’s a more useless awards program.</span></li>\r\n	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">When I first started looking for Chicago to Edinburgh flights, I went straight to Hipmunk.com. It has been my go-to flight search tool for a while now. It’s easy -- it defaults to flight search, unlike Expedia’s push for bundled deals or Orbitz pushing hotels. And graphical display -- bars for each flight showing flight duration spread across the day -- makes it very easy to focus on the flights you’re most interested in. But when searching for Edinburgh flights, I spotted something new -- right under the red Virgin Atlantic bar was a purple one labeled “Mystery”. Kinda like Priceline’s unnamed hotels you bid for. But I’d never seen what the travel industry calls “opaque pricing” on Hipmunk before. Of course, it wasn’t really that opaque. Clicking on the bar revealed the flight details -- a 4:40pm departure with an hour connection in Madrid. Hmmm, let’s see. Only Iberia flies from ORD to MAD. Doing a quick search, I found the times did indeed match Iberia flight number 345 -- which Hipmunk only slightly masked as Mystery Airline #345. Must’ve been an experiment, because I haven’t seen it since, but I did get a good chuckle out of it.</span></li>\r\n	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">A colleague who I met up with on one of my Detroit trips flew Spirit Airline for the first time and </span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">didn’t</span></i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> get much of a chuckle. It was a last-minute meeting. He was flying in from Kansas City and, following the rules by using the mandated American Express Travel website to book his flight, he saw a Spirit flight that was significantly less than other carriers. Being a good corporate citizen, he booked it. He showed up at the ticket counter to get his boarding pass. “You gonna carry that one?” the Spirit agent asked him, pointing to his suitcase. “Of course,” he said. “That’ll cost you $55. And that briefcase doesn’t look like it’ll fit under the seat, so that’s another $55.” Pretty quickly, the price difference that led him to book Spirit disappeared in the smoke of carryon charges. Some might say it’s his fault for not knowing Spirit’s uniquely aggressive add-on fee structure -- what Spirit calls “bundling”. But I’d say it’s Amex’s fault -- for displaying Spirit’s base fare (without carryon fees) in the same ways as they display Delta’s or Southwest’s. And then marking those higher, but more inclusive, fares as being “out of policy” because they’re higher, and requiring additional steps to justify booking them. More power to Spirit to differentiate themselves with a unique fee structure, but Amex and the like need to do their job and let business travelers know what they’re in for when they book those low fares.</span></li>\r\n	<li>\r\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" lang=\"en\">\r\n<p dir=\"ltr\" lang=\"en\">Folks, it\'s a *metal* detector! Large chunks of metal in your pocket - cell phones, car keys, $5 worth of quarters - *will* set it off</p>\r\n— Mark Peacock (@mpeacock) <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/623113695426670592\">July 20, 2015</a></blockquote>\r\n<script src=\"//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js\" async=\"\" charset=\"utf-8\"></script>Rich Fraser did saw my PreCheck frustration spill over to Twitter. I don’t know if it’s summer travel amateurs hitting the PreCheck lottery, but I’ve been stunned at the number of people who look amazed when the metal detector alarms when they try to walk through with a slug of metal in their pockets. Mobile phone, big electronic key fobs, two fistfuls of change… I mean, what part of “metal detector” do they not get? It’s doing it’s job! But people will stand there, dumbfounded, they can’t stroll through wearing the quarter-pound of metal and electronics that is an iPhone. I hate to be a snob, but I beginning to think they need to split PreCheck between the veterans who paid for it and the occasional random selectees. To which Rich mentioned that it’s not so occasional for him -- he’s gotten Pre on 3 of his last 4 trips. So, he says, why pay for it? Hey, as long as he remembers to take his mobile phone and car keys out of his pocket, I say, more power to him.</li>\r\n	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I’ve probably mentioned this before, but I think one of the absolute best airport restaurants is Rick Bayless’ </span><a href=\"http://www.rickbayless.com/restaurants/tortas-frontera/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Torta Frontera</span></a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> in the American, United and International terminals at ORD. The tortas, the Mexican sandwiches, are fantastic -- great local ingredients and made-to-order. Being made-to-order is key to the great taste and texture, but it’s 10 minutes from the time you order and at ORD rush hour, you can stand in line for 10 minutes before you get to the counter. Great restaurant -- and popular. So I was cautiously excited last week when I saw they had a new ordering app. I was catching an evening flight to DTW and decided to check out the app. I downloaded and set up the app after parking in the deck -- created an account and loaded a credit card. Then, while in the PreCheck line, I scrolled through the menu and loaded the shopping cart with a Cubana, my favorite torta. I was going to hit the Order Now button, but the TSA guys were a little too efficient, waving 3 of us forward at once. So, I hit Order a couple of minutes later on the other side of the X-Ray machine. I quickly received an e-mail “Thanks for your order, we’ll let you know when it’s ready”. That’s it. No ETA, no typical wait time. Hmmm… I walk down to the T3 Tortas -- longest line I’ve seen. Hmmm…  Just then, I get a second e-mail -- 7 minutes after the first -- “You order will be ready at 5:43pm” -- 10 minutes from now. OK, not bad given this line. I walk to the rest room, browse the bookstore across the hall, and put myself in front of the order pick-up station at 5:43pm. About a minute later, the woman calls out “Anybody order on-line?” Two of us step up. “Mark?” I reach out and take my bag. The pre-order worked well, though next time, I’ll let the TSA guy wait for a minute while I hit the Order button a bit sooner.</span></li>\r\n	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">All the way back in April 2012, I wrote a </span><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/04/21/best-hotel-amenity-free-breakfast/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">blog post</span></a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> about free breakfast being the best hotel amenity.  (I had to do a good bit of scrolling on the TravelCommons website to find it -- I’ll save you that with a link in the show notes). It’s still true, even though, it’s, as I wrote back then, it’s more about convenience than food quality -- especially when you’re grabbing that breakfast in the concierge lounge of a Marriott or Sheraton or Westin. And it kinda turns you into a connoisseur of scrambled eggs. A buddy and I got into this conversation a few weeks back -- comparing the quality of scrambled eggs across hotels we’ve stayed at.  We concluded that the most typical consistency was firm, almost quiche like. We liked them with a bit of cheese mixed in to give them a bit of flavor (neither of us are vegan). Every once in a great while, you get great scrambled eggs -- soft curds, slightly moist. But you definitely don’t want them runny -- there’s nothing more disgusting at 6am than tilting back that warming tray clamshell lid and seeing scrambled eggs sitting in a pool of yellowish liquid. We’ll go for hard dry over swimming in yellow eggs every morning. But hard dry bacon, now that’s just wrong</span></li>\r\n	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/buy_album.php?id=08E508A6096F11910641E13331B70EED6DFA5BB929282F731E19BBAFA8F08FFD686BD99DD86BA0D5E844DD5536E1AEFB\" rel=\"nofollow\"><em>Ghost Hardware</em></a> by Burial</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Awful Winter Travel</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Now that the US snow cover appears to be retreating -- though Boston did get some more snow last weekend -- I’m hoping that we can bid farewell to what was a really lousy start to the year -- at least from a travel perspective. It kinda caught me by surprise because the start of the winter season -- end of Nov and through December -- wasn’t bad at all. But January started to have it’s problems, and then February -- it was 4 weeks of travel hell for just about everywhere in the US east of the Rockies. Cold, Snow, Ice, Wind -- kinda the 4 winter horsemen of the travel apocalypse.</li>\r\n	<li>Every week seemed to have yet another disruption. I think it started with the Snopocalypse that wasn’t in New York and New Jersey. Mayors, governors closing offices, schools, roads, towns on the forecast of massive/huge/historic (they started to run out of adjectives) snowfall -- only to see, what, 4-6 inches? But everyone had flights delayed, cancelled -- it seemed to take the next couple of days before everyone got back in the traces. Only to have a real snow storm blow them back the next week. I had a string of I think 3 Mondays of flight cancellations. I’d get on a weekly conference call and half of everybody was not where they were supposed to be -- cancelled flights, diverted flights, working from home,.... One colleague trying to fly from Ft Myers, FL to Memphis (for work obviously) on Delta. Lands at ATL only to find they’d cancelled his MEM flight due to an ice storm. “When can I get there?” “We don’t know”. He turned around and went back home for the week. His clients couldn’t get to their offices for 3 days.</li>\r\n	<li>As I mentioned in the <a title=\"Podcast #113 — 2014 was a Bad Year to Fly; Restaurant Trends Go Local\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/01/27/podcast-113-2014-was-a-bad-year-to-fly-restaurant-trends-go-local/\">last podcast</a>, I tried to be a bit more strategic in my travel -- picking some warm spots when I could, avoiding known trouble spots. I cringed whenever I had to fly to the East Coast, but sometimes I got lucky -- I hit San Antonio on a 70 degree day. The day after I left, it dropped down to 40. I managed to wrangle a half-week in Phoenix in mid-February. Mid-70’s and sunny -- I was outside every minute I could. Flying home, it was 77 degrees when I left PHX; -2 degrees when I landed at ORD. I thought I was going to shatter when I walked onto the jet bridge.</li>\r\n	<li>I think the pinnacle was when the Delta jet slid off the LaGuardia runway, hit a fence, and came within yards of dumping into Jamaica Bay. Landing at any of those small, near-in airports -- LaGuardia, Washington Reagan, Chicago Midway -- are like putting down on an aircraft carrier, not a lot of room for error. Add snow or ice -- I’m surprised it doesn’t happen more often. Luckily, this one wasn’t fatal -- not like the Air Florida crash out of what was then Washington National on a snowy January, or the Southwest 737 that slid off the end of a Midway runway, through a fence and into a street intersection, crushing a car waiting at the red light, killing a small boy. This was just more inconvenience -- closing LGA for 7 hours, taking a big chunk of capacity out of what is already the most crowded/overtaxed airspace in the country. A friend trying to fly home to New York that afternoon boarded her flight, it pushed back, only to pull back in after it was cancelled. It was just one more delay, one more cancellation. I was a little luckier. Even though I was flying from Memphis to Chicago, some piece of my flight -- the plane, the crew -- got caught up in that East Coast mess. But thanks to the wonders of mobile message updates, I was able to track the delays from the relative comfort of a Mexican bar in East Memphis. One margarita with an high-school buddy turned to two turned to dinner with his wife joining us. I, unlike so many others, got home that night and had something other than bad airport food to show for it.</li>\r\n	<li>The next week -- yet another delay on my New Orleans-Chicago flight. Late inbound aircraft. But why? ORD and MSY were fine; all the weather was again in the East. No one knew, not even the pilot. When we finally boarded the flight, he keyed the mic and said, “I’m awfully sorry about this delay. I wish I could tell you why, but I have no idea. The plane arrived Chicago on time from San Antonio and then just sat there. I wish I could tell you why.”</li>\r\n	<li>I dunno -- maybe they lost it behind a snow drift.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a title=\"MP3 Download\" href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/download_track.php?id=0E74C6FEB7390D18D02B4B399668093172F6C8CC66DDC09D90A3BF7DDA436823CFAC859AE2B2C73E46A278A4950E1030\">Lonely Dog Blues</a></em> by <a title=\"Tobin James\' Web Site\" href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/label.php?id=2A3449F03E7B8462FF74407B60F0C4B0A30A0CBE880C61DE37E3B342387F0643\">Tobin James</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Hospitality Beats Points</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>One morning in some concierge lounge in some Marriott or Sheraton that I can’t quite place, I opened my umpteenth warming dish, looked in at yet another pond of runny scrambled eggs and wondered “Really? How difficult is it to properly cook institutional egg mix?”</li>\r\n	<li>Just about every poll of statused hotel travelers rank free WiFi and free breakfast as the top amenities, the ones that keep travelers working to maintain status. But when you actually use those amenities, they’re often not so great -- slow WiFi (even the “enhanced speeds” that Marriott promises their gold and platinum members), semi-liquid scrambled eggs and stacks of over-cooked bacon.</li>\r\n	<li>Which is a problem, because just about every hotel chain in the past couple of years has raised the number of points needed for a room and also created a new top tier for the best/most popular properties -- added, say, a Category 6 so they could charge even more points for that Maui property -- devaluing that big point balance -- your vacation savings account -- that you “road warriored” so hard to build.</li>\r\n	<li>So if the points aren’t worth as much anymore, what keeps travelers loyal to a brand, what keeps you staying in, say, a Marriott 75 nights or 25 stays in a Westin to make top-tier platinum? It should be those amenities -- but how loyalty are those scrambled eggs worth? They’re convenient, but don’t differentiate much.</li>\r\n	<li>Some places are ditching the whole lounge idea. I’ve been in some Renaissance hotels and Marriott Autograph hotels that serve the free breakfast in their restaurant -- there’s the standard-looking buffet, but if you have the time, you can order anything off the menu. Blows my diet a bit, but beats 4 mornings straight of scrambled eggs.</li>\r\n	<li>I have noticed, though, that I’m being offered more specialty perks at places that I’m staying a lot. The Sheraton on Canal St in New Orleans will occasionally offer me basketball tickets -- the Pelicans are actually doing well this year -- and had some special grandstand deals to watch the Mardi Gras parades in front of the hotel. I didn’t take them up on either of their offers -- I had other commitments -- but it was nice to get the offer.</li>\r\n	<li>I call it the “Cheers” effect -- you want to go where everyone knows your name. When you’re away from home, you want someone to smile and ask how you’re doing. And it’s not just hotels. The morning barista crew at the Starbucks on Canal St and St Charles fire up a spinach feta wrap when they see me walk through the door, even when it’s been a couple of weeks since my last visit.</li>\r\n	<li>Of course, there is a fine line that can be crossed. Like a friend of mine, she received Christmas presents from a front desk clerk for years (!) after about an 18-month gig that had her weekly at the Trumbull CT Marriott. Or when I first started traveling for business, I was commuting between Dallas and Chicago, passing through the DFW Admirals Club every Monday morning. After about 3 months, one of the agents who’d I’d gotten to know asked me if I’d like to meet her daughter. Awkward. But in what I still think is one of my best moments, I asked her “Do you really want your daughter dating someone who travels as much as I do?” She thought for a moment, “No, not really”. Awkwardness averted, and we went on to have a nice friendship until I moved back to Chicago a year later.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917626811171154.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #116</li>\r\n	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://iodapromonet.com/index.php\">IODA Promonet</a></li>\r\n	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_116.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #116 — Traveling Thru Japan; Luggage Trends','','inherit','open','open','','1531-revision-v1','','','2015-08-26 21:56:21','2015-08-27 02:56:21','',1531,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/08/26/1531-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1535,1,'2015-08-26 22:01:23','2015-08-27 03:01:23','[caption id=\"attachment_1532\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/DSC_5744.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1532\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/DSC_5744-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Lost Without Translation\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Lost Without Translation[/caption]\r\n\r\nRecorded at the JW Marriott in New Orleans together with a GoPro <a title=\"Podcast #114 Uncut — The LoFi Video Version\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/03/20/podcast-114-uncut-the-lofi-video-version/\">video</a> capturing all the unedited bits. We go deep in a comparison of public transit and drive times to US airports, shed a tear for SkyMall magazine, and marvel at the stack of lost Android tablets at American Airlines\' ORD lost-and-found. We talk about what has been an awful start to the travel year in the US east of the Rocky Mountains, and wrap up with some observations about how hotel perks have become more important than points. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_116.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/196973214\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #116:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, after a <i>long</i>absence. Let’s call it summer vacation. And there was a nice bit of vacation there -- 2 weeks in Japan with the family. People would ask me “Have you been to Japan before?” Never outside of Narita. Which I translated to an answer of “Mostly no” before my trip, and updated to a plain “No” after my trip. But more on that later.</li>\r\n	<li>Over the years, I’ve gotten into the habit of leaving the country if I want a real vacation. I find the disconnection process works much better I’m more than 5  time zones removed from home. Europe is 6 or 7 hours ahead -- pretty good. But the 14 hour difference between Chicago and Tokyo -- that’s real separation.</li>\r\n	<li>You can’t unplug for 2 weeks for free, though. It takes a bit of planning, and in my case, a good bit of travel -- both before and after the trip.</li>\r\n	<li>The 6 business days before my flight to Tokyo had me in Nashville, Detroit, Dallas, and the day before I left, Denver. I flew out Sunday night, flew home Monday night, and then left for Japan Tuesday noon. Coming back, we hit ORD 3:30 Sunday afternoon only to find myself back there 15 hours later for the first flight back out to Denver Monday morning. I was just happy that it was a short week for the 4th of July holiday.</li>\r\n	<li>Since then, I’ve been keeping up the Denver-Dallas triangulation with the occasional random jump to somewhere like Detroit. I’ll probably keep it up through August since the beginning of September will have me out of the country again -- to Edinburgh, helping my daughter settle in at <a href=\"http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/\">University of St Andrews</a>. After that, I may just sleep until October.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://ghosts.nin.com/main/home\"><em>3 Ghosts I</em></a> by <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Nine Inch Nails\" href=\"http://www.nin.com/\" rel=\"homepage\">Nine Inch Nails</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Spelunking through my Twitter feed…</li>\r\n	<li>So that was the start of the <a href=\"https://blog.stackexchange.com/2015/06/stack-exchange-podcast-65-the-word-has-two-meanings-you-see/\">Stack Exchange Podcast</a> where Joel Spolsky goes pretty much non-linear over his attempt to use frequent flier miles.</li>\r\n	<li>Any attempt to use frequent flier miles will be a frustrating exercise. My recent attempts to do <i>anything</i>with the 300,000 BA Avios miles is own personal exercise in masochism. But, to be honest, I’ve had pretty good luck this year, getting 2 flights down to New Orleans on Southwest, 4 direct flights from and from Tokyo with UA Mileage Plus and 3 flights between ORD and Edinburgh on American. Now, it wasn’t a complete cakewalk -- on SW, my wife and daughter took a 6am flight back on Monday, on UA, we had to come home a couple of days earlier than we had originally planned while on AA it’s a day later. But flexibility has always been a requirement to use frequent flyer miles. And those minor shifts are a whole lot better than my exercise with BA which only offered me one day in the entire month of September that I could use Avios miles to get to Edinburgh. I’m not sure there’s a more useless awards program.</li>\r\n	<li>When I first started looking for Chicago to Edinburgh flights, I went straight to Hipmunk.com. It has been my go-to flight search tool for a while now. It’s easy -- it defaults to flight search, unlike Expedia’s push for bundled deals or Orbitz pushing hotels. And graphical display -- bars for each flight showing flight duration spread across the day -- makes it very easy to focus on the flights you’re most interested in. But when searching for Edinburgh flights, I spotted something new -- right under the red Virgin Atlantic bar was a purple one labeled “Mystery”. Kinda like Priceline’s unnamed hotels you bid for. But I’d never seen what the travel industry calls “opaque pricing” on Hipmunk before. Of course, it wasn’t really that opaque. Clicking on the bar revealed the flight details -- a 4:40pm departure with an hour connection in Madrid. Hmmm, let’s see. Only Iberia flies from ORD to MAD. Doing a quick search, I found the times did indeed match Iberia flight number 345 -- which Hipmunk only slightly masked as Mystery Airline #345. Must’ve been an experiment, because I haven’t seen it since, but I did get a good chuckle out of it.</li>\r\n	<li>A colleague who I met up with on one of my Detroit trips flew Spirit Airline for the first time and <i>didn’t</i> get much of a chuckle. It was a last-minute meeting. He was flying in from Kansas City and, following the rules by using the mandated American Express Travel website to book his flight, he saw a Spirit flight that was significantly less than other carriers. Being a good corporate citizen, he booked it. He showed up at the ticket counter to get his boarding pass. “You gonna carry that one?” the Spirit agent asked him, pointing to his suitcase. “Of course,” he said. “That’ll cost you $55. And that briefcase doesn’t look like it’ll fit under the seat, so that’s another $55.” Pretty quickly, the price difference that led him to book Spirit disappeared in the smoke of carryon charges. Some might say it’s his fault for not knowing Spirit’s uniquely aggressive add-on fee structure -- what Spirit calls “bundling”. But I’d say it’s Amex’s fault -- for displaying Spirit’s base fare (without carryon fees) in the same ways as they display Delta’s or Southwest’s. And then marking those higher, but more inclusive, fares as being “out of policy” because they’re higher, and requiring additional steps to justify booking them. More power to Spirit to differentiate themselves with a unique fee structure, but Amex and the like need to do their job and let business travelers know what they’re in for when they book those low fares.</li>\r\n	<li>\r\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" lang=\"en\">\r\n<p dir=\"ltr\" lang=\"en\">Folks, it\'s a *metal* detector! Large chunks of metal in your pocket - cell phones, car keys, $5 worth of quarters - *will* set it off</p>\r\n— Mark Peacock (@mpeacock) <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/623113695426670592\">July 20, 2015</a></blockquote>\r\n<script src=\"//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js\" async=\"\" charset=\"utf-8\"></script>Rich Fraser did saw my PreCheck frustration spill over to Twitter. I don’t know if it’s summer travel amateurs hitting the PreCheck lottery, but I’ve been stunned at the number of people who look amazed when the metal detector alarms when they try to walk through with a slug of metal in their pockets. Mobile phone, big electronic key fobs, two fistfuls of change… I mean, what part of “metal detector” do they not get? It’s doing it’s job! But people will stand there, dumbfounded, they can’t stroll through wearing the quarter-pound of metal and electronics that is an iPhone. I hate to be a snob, but I beginning to think they need to split PreCheck between the veterans who paid for it and the occasional random selectees. To which Rich mentioned that it’s not so occasional for him -- he’s gotten Pre on 3 of his last 4 trips. So, he says, why pay for it? Hey, as long as he remembers to take his mobile phone and car keys out of his pocket, I say, more power to him.</li>\r\n	<li>I’ve probably mentioned this before, but I think one of the absolute best airport restaurants is Rick Bayless’ <a href=\"http://www.rickbayless.com/restaurants/tortas-frontera/\">Torta Frontera</a> in the American, United and International terminals at ORD. The tortas, the Mexican sandwiches, are fantastic -- great local ingredients and made-to-order. Being made-to-order is key to the great taste and texture, but it’s 10 minutes from the time you order and at ORD rush hour, you can stand in line for 10 minutes before you get to the counter. Great restaurant -- and popular. So I was cautiously excited last week when I saw they had a new ordering app. I was catching an evening flight to DTW and decided to check out the app. I downloaded and set up the app after parking in the deck -- created an account and loaded a credit card. Then, while in the PreCheck line, I scrolled through the menu and loaded the shopping cart with a Cubana, my favorite torta. I was going to hit the Order Now button, but the TSA guys were a little too efficient, waving 3 of us forward at once. So, I hit Order a couple of minutes later on the other side of the X-Ray machine. I quickly received an e-mail “Thanks for your order, we’ll let you know when it’s ready”. That’s it. No ETA, no typical wait time. Hmmm… I walk down to the T3 Tortas -- longest line I’ve seen. Hmmm…  Just then, I get a second e-mail -- 7 minutes after the first -- “You order will be ready at 5:43pm” -- 10 minutes from now. OK, not bad given this line. I walk to the rest room, browse the bookstore across the hall, and put myself in front of the order pick-up station at 5:43pm. About a minute later, the woman calls out “Anybody order on-line?” Two of us step up. “Mark?” I reach out and take my bag. The pre-order worked well, though next time, I’ll let the TSA guy wait for a minute while I hit the Order button a bit sooner.</li>\r\n	<li>All the way back in April 2012, I wrote a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/04/21/best-hotel-amenity-free-breakfast/\">blog post</a> about free breakfast being the best hotel amenity.  (I had to do a good bit of scrolling on the TravelCommons website to find it -- I’ll save you that with a link in the show notes). It’s still true, even though, it’s, as I wrote back then, it’s more about convenience than food quality -- especially when you’re grabbing that breakfast in the concierge lounge of a Marriott or Sheraton or Westin. And it kinda turns you into a connoisseur of scrambled eggs. A buddy and I got into this conversation a few weeks back -- comparing the quality of scrambled eggs across hotels we’ve stayed at.  We concluded that the most typical consistency was firm, almost quiche like. We liked them with a bit of cheese mixed in to give them a bit of flavor (neither of us are vegan). Every once in a great while, you get great scrambled eggs -- soft curds, slightly moist. But you definitely don’t want them runny -- there’s nothing more disgusting at 6am than tilting back that warming tray clamshell lid and seeing scrambled eggs sitting in a pool of yellowish liquid. We’ll go for hard dry over swimming in yellow eggs every morning. But hard dry bacon, now that’s just wrong</li>\r\n	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/buy_album.php?id=08E508A6096F11910641E13331B70EED6DFA5BB929282F731E19BBAFA8F08FFD686BD99DD86BA0D5E844DD5536E1AEFB\" rel=\"nofollow\"><em>Ghost Hardware</em></a> by Burial</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Awful Winter Travel</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Now that the US snow cover appears to be retreating -- though Boston did get some more snow last weekend -- I’m hoping that we can bid farewell to what was a really lousy start to the year -- at least from a travel perspective. It kinda caught me by surprise because the start of the winter season -- end of Nov and through December -- wasn’t bad at all. But January started to have it’s problems, and then February -- it was 4 weeks of travel hell for just about everywhere in the US east of the Rockies. Cold, Snow, Ice, Wind -- kinda the 4 winter horsemen of the travel apocalypse.</li>\r\n	<li>Every week seemed to have yet another disruption. I think it started with the Snopocalypse that wasn’t in New York and New Jersey. Mayors, governors closing offices, schools, roads, towns on the forecast of massive/huge/historic (they started to run out of adjectives) snowfall -- only to see, what, 4-6 inches? But everyone had flights delayed, cancelled -- it seemed to take the next couple of days before everyone got back in the traces. Only to have a real snow storm blow them back the next week. I had a string of I think 3 Mondays of flight cancellations. I’d get on a weekly conference call and half of everybody was not where they were supposed to be -- cancelled flights, diverted flights, working from home,.... One colleague trying to fly from Ft Myers, FL to Memphis (for work obviously) on Delta. Lands at ATL only to find they’d cancelled his MEM flight due to an ice storm. “When can I get there?” “We don’t know”. He turned around and went back home for the week. His clients couldn’t get to their offices for 3 days.</li>\r\n	<li>As I mentioned in the <a title=\"Podcast #113 — 2014 was a Bad Year to Fly; Restaurant Trends Go Local\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/01/27/podcast-113-2014-was-a-bad-year-to-fly-restaurant-trends-go-local/\">last podcast</a>, I tried to be a bit more strategic in my travel -- picking some warm spots when I could, avoiding known trouble spots. I cringed whenever I had to fly to the East Coast, but sometimes I got lucky -- I hit San Antonio on a 70 degree day. The day after I left, it dropped down to 40. I managed to wrangle a half-week in Phoenix in mid-February. Mid-70’s and sunny -- I was outside every minute I could. Flying home, it was 77 degrees when I left PHX; -2 degrees when I landed at ORD. I thought I was going to shatter when I walked onto the jet bridge.</li>\r\n	<li>I think the pinnacle was when the Delta jet slid off the LaGuardia runway, hit a fence, and came within yards of dumping into Jamaica Bay. Landing at any of those small, near-in airports -- LaGuardia, Washington Reagan, Chicago Midway -- are like putting down on an aircraft carrier, not a lot of room for error. Add snow or ice -- I’m surprised it doesn’t happen more often. Luckily, this one wasn’t fatal -- not like the Air Florida crash out of what was then Washington National on a snowy January, or the Southwest 737 that slid off the end of a Midway runway, through a fence and into a street intersection, crushing a car waiting at the red light, killing a small boy. This was just more inconvenience -- closing LGA for 7 hours, taking a big chunk of capacity out of what is already the most crowded/overtaxed airspace in the country. A friend trying to fly home to New York that afternoon boarded her flight, it pushed back, only to pull back in after it was cancelled. It was just one more delay, one more cancellation. I was a little luckier. Even though I was flying from Memphis to Chicago, some piece of my flight -- the plane, the crew -- got caught up in that East Coast mess. But thanks to the wonders of mobile message updates, I was able to track the delays from the relative comfort of a Mexican bar in East Memphis. One margarita with an high-school buddy turned to two turned to dinner with his wife joining us. I, unlike so many others, got home that night and had something other than bad airport food to show for it.</li>\r\n	<li>The next week -- yet another delay on my New Orleans-Chicago flight. Late inbound aircraft. But why? ORD and MSY were fine; all the weather was again in the East. No one knew, not even the pilot. When we finally boarded the flight, he keyed the mic and said, “I’m awfully sorry about this delay. I wish I could tell you why, but I have no idea. The plane arrived Chicago on time from San Antonio and then just sat there. I wish I could tell you why.”</li>\r\n	<li>I dunno -- maybe they lost it behind a snow drift.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a title=\"MP3 Download\" href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/download_track.php?id=0E74C6FEB7390D18D02B4B399668093172F6C8CC66DDC09D90A3BF7DDA436823CFAC859AE2B2C73E46A278A4950E1030\">Lonely Dog Blues</a></em> by <a title=\"Tobin James\' Web Site\" href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/label.php?id=2A3449F03E7B8462FF74407B60F0C4B0A30A0CBE880C61DE37E3B342387F0643\">Tobin James</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Hospitality Beats Points</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>One morning in some concierge lounge in some Marriott or Sheraton that I can’t quite place, I opened my umpteenth warming dish, looked in at yet another pond of runny scrambled eggs and wondered “Really? How difficult is it to properly cook institutional egg mix?”</li>\r\n	<li>Just about every poll of statused hotel travelers rank free WiFi and free breakfast as the top amenities, the ones that keep travelers working to maintain status. But when you actually use those amenities, they’re often not so great -- slow WiFi (even the “enhanced speeds” that Marriott promises their gold and platinum members), semi-liquid scrambled eggs and stacks of over-cooked bacon.</li>\r\n	<li>Which is a problem, because just about every hotel chain in the past couple of years has raised the number of points needed for a room and also created a new top tier for the best/most popular properties -- added, say, a Category 6 so they could charge even more points for that Maui property -- devaluing that big point balance -- your vacation savings account -- that you “road warriored” so hard to build.</li>\r\n	<li>So if the points aren’t worth as much anymore, what keeps travelers loyal to a brand, what keeps you staying in, say, a Marriott 75 nights or 25 stays in a Westin to make top-tier platinum? It should be those amenities -- but how loyalty are those scrambled eggs worth? They’re convenient, but don’t differentiate much.</li>\r\n	<li>Some places are ditching the whole lounge idea. I’ve been in some Renaissance hotels and Marriott Autograph hotels that serve the free breakfast in their restaurant -- there’s the standard-looking buffet, but if you have the time, you can order anything off the menu. Blows my diet a bit, but beats 4 mornings straight of scrambled eggs.</li>\r\n	<li>I have noticed, though, that I’m being offered more specialty perks at places that I’m staying a lot. The Sheraton on Canal St in New Orleans will occasionally offer me basketball tickets -- the Pelicans are actually doing well this year -- and had some special grandstand deals to watch the Mardi Gras parades in front of the hotel. I didn’t take them up on either of their offers -- I had other commitments -- but it was nice to get the offer.</li>\r\n	<li>I call it the “Cheers” effect -- you want to go where everyone knows your name. When you’re away from home, you want someone to smile and ask how you’re doing. And it’s not just hotels. The morning barista crew at the Starbucks on Canal St and St Charles fire up a spinach feta wrap when they see me walk through the door, even when it’s been a couple of weeks since my last visit.</li>\r\n	<li>Of course, there is a fine line that can be crossed. Like a friend of mine, she received Christmas presents from a front desk clerk for years (!) after about an 18-month gig that had her weekly at the Trumbull CT Marriott. Or when I first started traveling for business, I was commuting between Dallas and Chicago, passing through the DFW Admirals Club every Monday morning. After about 3 months, one of the agents who’d I’d gotten to know asked me if I’d like to meet her daughter. Awkward. But in what I still think is one of my best moments, I asked her “Do you really want your daughter dating someone who travels as much as I do?” She thought for a moment, “No, not really”. Awkwardness averted, and we went on to have a nice friendship until I moved back to Chicago a year later.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917626811171154.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #116</li>\r\n	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://iodapromonet.com/index.php\">IODA Promonet</a></li>\r\n	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_116.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #116 — Traveling Thru Japan; Luggage Trends','','inherit','open','open','','1531-revision-v1','','','2015-08-26 22:01:23','2015-08-27 03:01:23','',1531,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/08/26/1531-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1536,1,'2015-08-26 22:06:12','2015-08-27 03:06:12','[caption id=\"attachment_1532\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/DSC_5744.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1532\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/DSC_5744-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Lost Without Translation\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Lost Without Translation[/caption]\r\n\r\nRecorded at the JW Marriott in New Orleans together with a GoPro <a title=\"Podcast #114 Uncut — The LoFi Video Version\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/03/20/podcast-114-uncut-the-lofi-video-version/\">video</a> capturing all the unedited bits. We go deep in a comparison of public transit and drive times to US airports, shed a tear for SkyMall magazine, and marvel at the stack of lost Android tablets at American Airlines\' ORD lost-and-found. We talk about what has been an awful start to the travel year in the US east of the Rocky Mountains, and wrap up with some observations about how hotel perks have become more important than points. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_116.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/196973214\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #116:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, after a <i>long</i>absence. Let’s call it summer vacation. And there was a nice bit of vacation there -- 2 weeks in Japan with the family. People would ask me “Have you been to Japan before?” Never outside of Narita. Which I translated to an answer of “Mostly no” before my trip, and updated to a plain “No” after my trip. But more on that later.</li>\r\n	<li>Over the years, I’ve gotten into the habit of leaving the country if I want a real vacation. I find the disconnection process works much better I’m more than 5  time zones removed from home. Europe is 6 or 7 hours ahead -- pretty good. But the 14 hour difference between Chicago and Tokyo -- that’s real separation.</li>\r\n	<li>You can’t unplug for 2 weeks for free, though. It takes a bit of planning, and in my case, a good bit of travel -- both before and after the trip.</li>\r\n	<li>The 6 business days before my flight to Tokyo had me in Nashville, Detroit, Dallas, and the day before I left, Denver. I flew out Sunday night, flew home Monday night, and then left for Japan Tuesday noon. Coming back, we hit ORD 3:30 Sunday afternoon only to find myself back there 15 hours later for the first flight back out to Denver Monday morning. I was just happy that it was a short week for the 4th of July holiday.</li>\r\n	<li>Since then, I’ve been keeping up the Denver-Dallas triangulation with the occasional random jump to somewhere like Detroit. I’ll probably keep it up through August since the beginning of September will have me out of the country again -- to Edinburgh, helping my daughter settle in at <a href=\"http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/\">University of St Andrews</a>. After that, I may just sleep until October.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://ghosts.nin.com/main/home\"><em>3 Ghosts I</em></a> by <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Nine Inch Nails\" href=\"http://www.nin.com/\" rel=\"homepage\">Nine Inch Nails</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Spelunking through my Twitter feed…</li>\r\n	<li>So that was the start of the <a href=\"https://blog.stackexchange.com/2015/06/stack-exchange-podcast-65-the-word-has-two-meanings-you-see/\">Stack Exchange Podcast</a> where Joel Spolsky goes pretty much non-linear over his attempt to use frequent flier miles.</li>\r\n	<li>Any attempt to use frequent flier miles will be a frustrating exercise. My recent attempts to do <i>anything</i>with the 300,000 BA Avios miles is own personal exercise in masochism. But, to be honest, I’ve had pretty good luck this year, getting 2 flights down to New Orleans on Southwest, 4 direct flights from and from Tokyo with UA Mileage Plus and 3 flights between ORD and Edinburgh on American. Now, it wasn’t a complete cakewalk -- on SW, my wife and daughter took a 6am flight back on Monday, on UA, we had to come home a couple of days earlier than we had originally planned while on AA it’s a day later. But flexibility has always been a requirement to use frequent flyer miles. And those minor shifts are a whole lot better than my exercise with BA which only offered me one day in the entire month of September that I could use Avios miles to get to Edinburgh. I’m not sure there’s a more useless awards program.</li>\r\n	<li>When I first started looking for Chicago to Edinburgh flights, I went straight to Hipmunk.com. It has been my go-to flight search tool for a while now. It’s easy -- it defaults to flight search, unlike Expedia’s push for bundled deals or Orbitz pushing hotels. And graphical display -- bars for each flight showing flight duration spread across the day -- makes it very easy to focus on the flights you’re most interested in. But when searching for Edinburgh flights, I spotted something new -- right under the red Virgin Atlantic bar was a purple one labeled “Mystery”. Kinda like Priceline’s unnamed hotels you bid for. But I’d never seen what the travel industry calls “opaque pricing” on Hipmunk before. Of course, it wasn’t really that opaque. Clicking on the bar revealed the flight details -- a 4:40pm departure with an hour connection in Madrid. Hmmm, let’s see. Only Iberia flies from ORD to MAD. Doing a quick search, I found the times did indeed match Iberia flight number 345 -- which Hipmunk only slightly masked as Mystery Airline #345. Must’ve been an experiment, because I haven’t seen it since, but I did get a good chuckle out of it.</li>\r\n	<li>A colleague who I met up with on one of my Detroit trips flew Spirit Airline for the first time and <i>didn’t</i> get much of a chuckle. It was a last-minute meeting. He was flying in from Kansas City and, following the rules by using the mandated American Express Travel website to book his flight, he saw a Spirit flight that was significantly less than other carriers. Being a good corporate citizen, he booked it. He showed up at the ticket counter to get his boarding pass. “You gonna carry that one?” the Spirit agent asked him, pointing to his suitcase. “Of course,” he said. “That’ll cost you $55. And that briefcase doesn’t look like it’ll fit under the seat, so that’s another $55.” Pretty quickly, the price difference that led him to book Spirit disappeared in the smoke of carryon charges. Some might say it’s his fault for not knowing Spirit’s uniquely aggressive add-on fee structure -- what Spirit calls “bundling”. But I’d say it’s Amex’s fault -- for displaying Spirit’s base fare (without carryon fees) in the same ways as they display Delta’s or Southwest’s. And then marking those higher, but more inclusive, fares as being “out of policy” because they’re higher, and requiring additional steps to justify booking them. More power to Spirit to differentiate themselves with a unique fee structure, but Amex and the like need to do their job and let business travelers know what they’re in for when they book those low fares.</li>\r\n	<li>\r\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" lang=\"en\">\r\n<p dir=\"ltr\" lang=\"en\">Folks, it\'s a *metal* detector! Large chunks of metal in your pocket - cell phones, car keys, $5 worth of quarters - *will* set it off</p>\r\n— Mark Peacock (@mpeacock) <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/623113695426670592\">July 20, 2015</a></blockquote>\r\n<script src=\"//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js\" async=\"\" charset=\"utf-8\"></script>Rich Fraser did saw my PreCheck frustration spill over to Twitter. I don’t know if it’s summer travel amateurs hitting the PreCheck lottery, but I’ve been stunned at the number of people who look amazed when the metal detector alarms when they try to walk through with a slug of metal in their pockets. Mobile phone, big electronic key fobs, two fistfuls of change… I mean, what part of “metal detector” do they not get? It’s doing it’s job! But people will stand there, dumbfounded, they can’t stroll through wearing the quarter-pound of metal and electronics that is an iPhone. I hate to be a snob, but I beginning to think they need to split PreCheck between the veterans who paid for it and the occasional random selectees. To which Rich mentioned that it’s not so occasional for him -- he’s gotten Pre on 3 of his last 4 trips. So, he says, why pay for it? Hey, as long as he remembers to take his mobile phone and car keys out of his pocket, I say, more power to him.</li>\r\n	<li>I’ve probably mentioned this before, but I think one of the absolute best airport restaurants is Rick Bayless’ <a href=\"http://www.rickbayless.com/restaurants/tortas-frontera/\">Torta Frontera</a> in the American, United and International terminals at ORD. The tortas, the Mexican sandwiches, are fantastic -- great local ingredients and made-to-order. Being made-to-order is key to the great taste and texture, but it’s 10 minutes from the time you order and at ORD rush hour, you can stand in line for 10 minutes before you get to the counter. Great restaurant -- and popular. So I was cautiously excited last week when I saw they had a new ordering app. I was catching an evening flight to DTW and decided to check out the app. I downloaded and set up the app after parking in the deck -- created an account and loaded a credit card. Then, while in the PreCheck line, I scrolled through the menu and loaded the shopping cart with a Cubana, my favorite torta. I was going to hit the Order Now button, but the TSA guys were a little too efficient, waving 3 of us forward at once. So, I hit Order a couple of minutes later on the other side of the X-Ray machine. I quickly received an e-mail “Thanks for your order, we’ll let you know when it’s ready”. That’s it. No ETA, no typical wait time. Hmmm… I walk down to the T3 Tortas -- longest line I’ve seen. Hmmm…  Just then, I get a second e-mail -- 7 minutes after the first -- “You order will be ready at 5:43pm” -- 10 minutes from now. OK, not bad given this line. I walk to the rest room, browse the bookstore across the hall, and put myself in front of the order pick-up station at 5:43pm. About a minute later, the woman calls out “Anybody order on-line?” Two of us step up. “Mark?” I reach out and take my bag. The pre-order worked well, though next time, I’ll let the TSA guy wait for a minute while I hit the Order button a bit sooner.</li>\r\n	<li>All the way back in April 2012, I wrote a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/04/21/best-hotel-amenity-free-breakfast/\">blog post</a> about free breakfast being the best hotel amenity.  (I had to do a good bit of scrolling on the TravelCommons website to find it -- I’ll save you that with a link in the show notes). It’s still true, even though, it’s, as I wrote back then, it’s more about convenience than food quality -- especially when you’re grabbing that breakfast in the concierge lounge of a Marriott or Sheraton or Westin. And it kinda turns you into a connoisseur of scrambled eggs. A buddy and I got into this conversation a few weeks back -- comparing the quality of scrambled eggs across hotels we’ve stayed at.  We concluded that the most typical consistency was firm, almost quiche like. We liked them with a bit of cheese mixed in to give them a bit of flavor (neither of us are vegan). Every once in a great while, you get great scrambled eggs -- soft curds, slightly moist. But you definitely don’t want them runny -- there’s nothing more disgusting at 6am than tilting back that warming tray clamshell lid and seeing scrambled eggs sitting in a pool of yellowish liquid. We’ll go for hard dry over swimming in yellow eggs every morning. But hard dry bacon, now that’s just wrong</li>\r\n	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/buy_album.php?id=08E508A6096F11910641E13331B70EED6DFA5BB929282F731E19BBAFA8F08FFD686BD99DD86BA0D5E844DD5536E1AEFB\" rel=\"nofollow\"><em>Ghost Hardware</em></a> by Burial</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Traveling Thru Japan</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>The family and I have done a fair bit of travel in Asia -- Thailand, Singapore, Vietnam, Hong Kong, China -- which left two big holes -- Japan and Korea. We filled one of them this summer when we spent two weeks visiting Tokyo, Kyoto, and Osaka. Japan had always been on our list to visit, but its reputation for high prices always gave us an excuse to put it off and go some place where we could stretch our dollars further. But with the dollar buying ¥124 and then scoring 4 direct ORD-NRT tickets on United Mileage Plus awards, this seemed the time.</li>\r\n	<li>Now as long time listeners know, this won’t be a travelog, a list of things to see in Tokyo or Kyoto -- I leave that to friends like Chris Christensen of the <a href=\"http://asia.amateurtraveler.com/tag/japan/\">Amateur Travelers podcast</a>. Since I always say that this podcast is more about the journey than the destination, let’s talk about travel in Japan.</li>\r\n	<li>As my family and I tend to do on our trips, our only trips to the airport were coming and going to the US. Everything else was on train. Which in Japan works very well. My wife bought us 2-week Japan Rail (JR) passes before we left. It wasn’t a small number for the 4 of us, but they paid off over our trip -- allowing us unlimited use of the high-speed bullet trains, even to reserve seats for a bit more relaxed boarding.</li>\r\n	<li>We broke the passes in on the Narita Express, the hour ride from the airport to Tokyo Station. I’m not sure they could’ve put Narita any further out. Given the distance, everyone takes the train or a bus. The train was fine, kinda like the Heathrow Express but without the TV screens. It worked with a minimum amount of fuss -- which was a good thing after a 12-hour flight.</li>\r\n	<li>We really hammered the JR passes to train among Tokyo, Kyoto, and Osaka, all less than 3-hour trips. Some of the stations were huge and there were times when we had to lean in to thread through the crowds of commuters. But the signage was pretty good and the trains absolutely met their reputation for timeliness (if only airlines in the US were half as timely…). And while JR would roll a food cart while on the rails, we got a bit more into the Japanese train culture and stocked up at the train station food courts before we left -- bento boxes, rice cakes, and of course, train beers -- Kirin tall boys usually. And if we didn’t have time to hit the food court, we could always grab something from the vending machines -- which were positioned about every 20 feet on the train platform. The vending machine thing in Japan is intense -- but convenient.</li>\r\n	<li>We didn’t just train point-to-point between the major stations. A lot of times it was a smaller train to the main station, then the high-speed train, then connecting to again to a smaller train. The HyperDia smartphone app came highly recommended and the free version was great when planning out these connecting journeys -- both inter-city and within Tokyo where a trip across town might span a couple of rail companies, say Tokyo Metro to a JR train. It also displays the fare, which is very handy, avoiding the need to try and decipher the rate table while in front of the fare machine with a queue building behind you. The public transit tab on Google Maps also worked surprisingly well.</li>\r\n	<li>Being able to use these apps when you really need them requires mobile data for your phone. You don’t want to be trying to search for an open WiFi access point before figuring out which train you’re connecting to. Which, in Japan, like so many things, isn’t exactly straightforward. As a tourist, you can only buy data SIMs; no voice capabilities. One of my go-to websites -- the aptly, but somewhat awkwardly named <a href=\"http://prepaid-data-sim-card.wikia.com/wiki/Japan\">Prepaid Data SIM Card Wiki</a> -- came through again. Before we left, I ordered a b-mobile SIM to be delivered to our first hotel -- the Marriott Courtyard in the Ginza District -- and then I bought another -- Japan Travel SIM -- from the Tourist Information Center at Tokyo Station. The lack of local voice wasn’t a huge inconvenience for us -- we were communicating via e-mail with hotels and apartment rentals -- but it still seemed a little weird.</li>\r\n	<li>The one thing that pulled me up short was the limited amount of signage in the Latin alphabet. I’m OK with the Japanese names when phonetically rendered in Latin characters, but I’m not so hot on reading kanji or kana. We wrestled with this our first morning in Tokyo at the Tsukiji Fish Market. My wife had a list of sushi restaurant recommendations -- all of which were Japanese names in Latin script; all the restaurant signs were in kanji. And then at a Kyoto ramen restaurant, where you buy tickets for your food from a machine and then hand them across the counter to the cook, having only kanji on the machine buttons without pictures, made ordering a bit of a challenge. It got me thinking back to my trip last year to Beijing -- I didn’t recall having the same level of challenge there.</li>\r\n	<li>What made this all work is that just about all of the Japanese people we ran into were the nicest, the most welcoming people. I was constantly struck at how many people would strike up a conversation -- asking where we’re from, helping us with Ramen machines, shouting “Welcome to Japan” while riding by on a bike, volunteering to walk us across train stations to help us with connections. I’m not sure I’ve experienced that consistent level of engagement from random strangers anywhere else. Of course, some of it could get a slightly embarrassing, like the group of middle school kids who wanted a picture with me. Or my daughter who regularly would get tagged by Japanese girls for pictures. We had that experience often in Beijing, but there, when we were often the lone white people, it was understandable. Having that same thing happen in Japan -- more Westernized, more white people wandering around -- that surprised us. In Arashiyama, a pretty touristy area on the west side of Kyoto, we were flagged down by 3 middle school teachers who video’d us answering their question about why we chose to visit this town. They told us that they taught English and wanted to show their classes native English speakers. OK, makes sense, but with all videos on YouTube, I wasn’t quite sure why they wanted a video of us.</li>\r\n	<li>But that being said, except for the signage, Japan was one of the easier countries we’ve traveled in. And maybe, with a couple more revs of Google Translate, even that barrier will get smoothed away.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a title=\"MP3 Download\" href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/download_track.php?id=0E74C6FEB7390D18D02B4B399668093172F6C8CC66DDC09D90A3BF7DDA436823CFAC859AE2B2C73E46A278A4950E1030\">Lonely Dog Blues</a></em> by <a title=\"Tobin James\' Web Site\" href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/label.php?id=2A3449F03E7B8462FF74407B60F0C4B0A30A0CBE880C61DE37E3B342387F0643\">Tobin James</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Hospitality Beats Points</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>One morning in some concierge lounge in some Marriott or Sheraton that I can’t quite place, I opened my umpteenth warming dish, looked in at yet another pond of runny scrambled eggs and wondered “Really? How difficult is it to properly cook institutional egg mix?”</li>\r\n	<li>Just about every poll of statused hotel travelers rank free WiFi and free breakfast as the top amenities, the ones that keep travelers working to maintain status. But when you actually use those amenities, they’re often not so great -- slow WiFi (even the “enhanced speeds” that Marriott promises their gold and platinum members), semi-liquid scrambled eggs and stacks of over-cooked bacon.</li>\r\n	<li>Which is a problem, because just about every hotel chain in the past couple of years has raised the number of points needed for a room and also created a new top tier for the best/most popular properties -- added, say, a Category 6 so they could charge even more points for that Maui property -- devaluing that big point balance -- your vacation savings account -- that you “road warriored” so hard to build.</li>\r\n	<li>So if the points aren’t worth as much anymore, what keeps travelers loyal to a brand, what keeps you staying in, say, a Marriott 75 nights or 25 stays in a Westin to make top-tier platinum? It should be those amenities -- but how loyalty are those scrambled eggs worth? They’re convenient, but don’t differentiate much.</li>\r\n	<li>Some places are ditching the whole lounge idea. I’ve been in some Renaissance hotels and Marriott Autograph hotels that serve the free breakfast in their restaurant -- there’s the standard-looking buffet, but if you have the time, you can order anything off the menu. Blows my diet a bit, but beats 4 mornings straight of scrambled eggs.</li>\r\n	<li>I have noticed, though, that I’m being offered more specialty perks at places that I’m staying a lot. The Sheraton on Canal St in New Orleans will occasionally offer me basketball tickets -- the Pelicans are actually doing well this year -- and had some special grandstand deals to watch the Mardi Gras parades in front of the hotel. I didn’t take them up on either of their offers -- I had other commitments -- but it was nice to get the offer.</li>\r\n	<li>I call it the “Cheers” effect -- you want to go where everyone knows your name. When you’re away from home, you want someone to smile and ask how you’re doing. And it’s not just hotels. The morning barista crew at the Starbucks on Canal St and St Charles fire up a spinach feta wrap when they see me walk through the door, even when it’s been a couple of weeks since my last visit.</li>\r\n	<li>Of course, there is a fine line that can be crossed. Like a friend of mine, she received Christmas presents from a front desk clerk for years (!) after about an 18-month gig that had her weekly at the Trumbull CT Marriott. Or when I first started traveling for business, I was commuting between Dallas and Chicago, passing through the DFW Admirals Club every Monday morning. After about 3 months, one of the agents who’d I’d gotten to know asked me if I’d like to meet her daughter. Awkward. But in what I still think is one of my best moments, I asked her “Do you really want your daughter dating someone who travels as much as I do?” She thought for a moment, “No, not really”. Awkwardness averted, and we went on to have a nice friendship until I moved back to Chicago a year later.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917626811171154.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #116</li>\r\n	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://iodapromonet.com/index.php\">IODA Promonet</a></li>\r\n	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_116.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #116 — Traveling Thru Japan; Luggage Trends','','inherit','open','open','','1531-revision-v1','','','2015-08-26 22:06:12','2015-08-27 03:06:12','',1531,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/08/26/1531-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1537,1,'2015-08-26 22:52:56','2015-08-27 03:52:56','[caption id=\"attachment_1532\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/DSC_5744.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1532\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/DSC_5744-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Lost Without Translation\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Lost Without Translation[/caption]\r\n\r\nBack behind the microphone after an extended summer break highlighted by a two-week family vacation in Japan. We talk about traveling in Japan. It was a fantastic time, though we were lost without translation at times. But with the US dollar buying 124 yen, it was the right time to go. We also talk about frustration in using frequent flier miles, prettier and higher tech luggage, and a connoisseur of scrambled eggs. [soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/196973214\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #116:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, after a <i>long </i>absence. Let’s call it summer vacation. And there was a nice bit of vacation there -- 2 weeks in Japan with the family. People would ask me “Have you been to Japan before?” Never outside of Narita. Which I translated to an answer of “Mostly no” before my trip, and updated to a plain “No” after my trip. But more on that later.</li>\r\n	<li>Over the years, I’ve gotten into the habit of leaving the country if I want a real vacation. I find the disconnection process works much better I’m more than 5  time zones removed from home. Europe is 6 or 7 hours ahead -- pretty good. But the 14 hour difference between Chicago and Tokyo -- that’s real separation.</li>\r\n	<li>You can’t unplug for 2 weeks for free, though. It takes a bit of planning, and in my case, a good bit of travel -- both before and after the trip.</li>\r\n	<li>The 6 business days before my flight to Tokyo had me in Nashville, Detroit, Dallas, and the day before I left, Denver. I flew out Sunday night, flew home Monday night, and then left for Japan Tuesday noon. Coming back, we hit ORD 3:30 Sunday afternoon only to find myself back there 15 hours later for the first flight back out to Denver Monday morning. I was just happy that it was a short week for the 4th of July holiday.</li>\r\n	<li>Since then, I’ve been keeping up the Denver-Dallas triangulation with the occasional random jump to somewhere like Detroit. I’ll probably keep it up through August since the beginning of September will have me out of the country again -- to Edinburgh, helping my daughter settle in at <a href=\"http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/\">University of St Andrews</a>. After that, I may just sleep until October.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://ghosts.nin.com/main/home\"><em>3 Ghosts I</em></a> by <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Nine Inch Nails\" href=\"http://www.nin.com/\" rel=\"homepage\">Nine Inch Nails</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>So that was the start of the <a href=\"https://blog.stackexchange.com/2015/06/stack-exchange-podcast-65-the-word-has-two-meanings-you-see/\">Stack Exchange Podcast</a> where Joel Spolsky goes pretty much non-linear over his attempt to use frequent flier miles.</li>\r\n	<li>Any attempt to use frequent flier miles will be a frustrating exercise. My recent attempts to do <i>anything</i>with the 300,000 BA Avios miles is own personal exercise in masochism. But, to be honest, I’ve had pretty good luck this year, getting 2 flights down to New Orleans on Southwest, 4 direct flights from and from Tokyo with UA Mileage Plus and 3 flights between ORD and Edinburgh on American. Now, it wasn’t a complete cakewalk -- on SW, my wife and daughter took a 6am flight back on Monday, on UA, we had to come home a couple of days earlier than we had originally planned while on AA it’s a day later. But flexibility has always been a requirement to use frequent flyer miles. And those minor shifts are a whole lot better than my exercise with BA which only offered me one day in the entire month of September that I could use Avios miles to get to Edinburgh. I’m not sure there’s a more useless awards program.</li>\r\n	<li>When I first started looking for Chicago to Edinburgh flights, I went straight to Hipmunk.com. It has been my go-to flight search tool for a while now. It’s easy -- it defaults to flight search, unlike Expedia’s push for bundled deals or Orbitz pushing hotels. And graphical display -- bars for each flight showing flight duration spread across the day -- makes it very easy to focus on the flights you’re most interested in. But when searching for Edinburgh flights, I spotted something new -- right under the red Virgin Atlantic bar was a purple one labeled “Mystery”. Kinda like Priceline’s unnamed hotels you bid for. But I’d never seen what the travel industry calls “opaque pricing” on Hipmunk before. Of course, it wasn’t really that opaque. Clicking on the bar revealed the flight details -- a 4:40pm departure with an hour connection in Madrid. Hmmm, let’s see. Only Iberia flies from ORD to MAD. Doing a quick search, I found the times did indeed match Iberia flight number 345 -- which Hipmunk only slightly masked as Mystery Airline #345. Must’ve been an experiment, because I haven’t seen it since, but I did get a good chuckle out of it.</li>\r\n	<li>A colleague who I met up with on one of my Detroit trips flew Spirit Airline for the first time and <i>didn’t</i> get much of a chuckle. It was a last-minute meeting. He was flying in from Kansas City and, following the rules by using the mandated American Express Travel website to book his flight, he saw a Spirit flight that was significantly less than other carriers. Being a good corporate citizen, he booked it. He showed up at the ticket counter to get his boarding pass. “You gonna carry that one?” the Spirit agent asked him, pointing to his suitcase. “Of course,” he said. “That’ll cost you $55. And that briefcase doesn’t look like it’ll fit under the seat, so that’s another $55.” Pretty quickly, the price difference that led him to book Spirit disappeared in the smoke of carryon charges. Some might say it’s his fault for not knowing Spirit’s uniquely aggressive add-on fee structure -- what Spirit calls “bundling”. But I’d say it’s Amex’s fault -- for displaying Spirit’s base fare (without carryon fees) in the same ways as they display Delta’s or Southwest’s. And then marking those higher, but more inclusive, fares as being “out of policy” because they’re higher, and requiring additional steps to justify booking them. More power to Spirit to differentiate themselves with a unique fee structure, but Amex and the like need to do their job and let business travelers know what they’re in for when they book those low fares.</li>\r\n	<li>Rich Fraser did saw my PreCheck frustration spill over to Twitter.\r\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" lang=\"en\">\r\n<p dir=\"ltr\" lang=\"en\">Folks, it\'s a *metal* detector! Large chunks of metal in your pocket - cell phones, car keys, $5 worth of quarters - *will* set it off</p>\r\n— Mark Peacock (@mpeacock) <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/623113695426670592\">July 20, 2015</a></blockquote>\r\n<script src=\"//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js\" async=\"\" charset=\"utf-8\"></script>I don’t know if it’s summer travel amateurs hitting the PreCheck lottery, but I’ve been stunned at the number of people who look amazed when the metal detector alarms when they try to walk through with a slug of metal in their pockets. Mobile phone, big electronic key fobs, two fistfuls of change… I mean, what part of “metal detector” do they not get? It’s doing it’s job! But people will stand there, dumbfounded, they can’t stroll through wearing the quarter-pound of metal and electronics that is an iPhone. I hate to be a snob, but I beginning to think they need to split PreCheck between the veterans who paid for it and the occasional random selectees. To which Rich mentioned that it’s not so occasional for him -- he’s gotten Pre on 3 of his last 4 trips. So, he says, why pay for it? Hey, as long as he remembers to take his mobile phone and car keys out of his pocket, I say, more power to him.</li>\r\n	<li>I’ve probably mentioned this before, but I think one of the absolute best airport restaurants is Rick Bayless’ <a href=\"http://www.rickbayless.com/restaurants/tortas-frontera/\">Torta Frontera</a> in the American, United and International terminals at ORD. The tortas, the Mexican sandwiches, are fantastic -- great local ingredients and made-to-order. Being made-to-order is key to the great taste and texture, but it’s 10 minutes from the time you order and at ORD rush hour, you can stand in line for 10 minutes before you get to the counter. Great restaurant -- and popular. So I was cautiously excited last week when I saw they had a new ordering app. I was catching an evening flight to DTW and decided to check out the app. I downloaded and set up the app after parking in the deck -- created an account and loaded a credit card. Then, while in the PreCheck line, I scrolled through the menu and loaded the shopping cart with a Cubana, my favorite torta. I was going to hit the Order Now button, but the TSA guys were a little too efficient, waving 3 of us forward at once. So, I hit Order a couple of minutes later on the other side of the X-Ray machine. I quickly received an e-mail “Thanks for your order, we’ll let you know when it’s ready”. That’s it. No ETA, no typical wait time. Hmmm… I walk down to the T3 Tortas -- longest line I’ve seen. Hmmm…  Just then, I get a second e-mail -- 7 minutes after the first -- “You order will be ready at 5:43pm” -- 10 minutes from now. OK, not bad given this line. I walk to the rest room, browse the bookstore across the hall, and put myself in front of the order pick-up station at 5:43pm. About a minute later, the woman calls out “Anybody order on-line?” Two of us step up. “Mark?” I reach out and take my bag. The pre-order worked well, though next time, I’ll let the TSA guy wait for a minute while I hit the Order button a bit sooner.</li>\r\n	<li>All the way back in April 2012, I wrote a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/04/21/best-hotel-amenity-free-breakfast/\">blog post</a> about free breakfast being the best hotel amenity.  (I had to do a good bit of scrolling on the TravelCommons website to find it -- I’ll save you that with a link in the show notes). It’s still true, even though, it’s, as I wrote back then, it’s more about convenience than food quality -- especially when you’re grabbing that breakfast in the concierge lounge of a Marriott or Sheraton or Westin. And it kinda turns you into a connoisseur of scrambled eggs. A buddy and I got into this conversation a few weeks back -- comparing the quality of scrambled eggs across hotels we’ve stayed at.  We concluded that the most typical consistency was firm, almost quiche like. We liked them with a bit of cheese mixed in to give them a bit of flavor (neither of us are vegan). Every once in a great while, you get great scrambled eggs -- soft curds, slightly moist. But you definitely don’t want them runny -- there’s nothing more disgusting at 6am than tilting back that warming tray clamshell lid and seeing scrambled eggs sitting in a pool of yellowish liquid. We’ll go for hard dry over swimming in yellow eggs every morning. But hard dry bacon, now that’s just wrong</li>\r\n	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/buy_album.php?id=08E508A6096F11910641E13331B70EED6DFA5BB929282F731E19BBAFA8F08FFD686BD99DD86BA0D5E844DD5536E1AEFB\" rel=\"nofollow\"><em>Ghost Hardware</em></a> by Burial</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Traveling Thru Japan</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>The family and I have done a fair bit of travel in Asia -- Thailand, Singapore, Vietnam, Hong Kong, China -- which left two big holes -- Japan and Korea. We filled one of them this summer when we spent two weeks visiting Tokyo, Kyoto, and Osaka. Japan had always been on our list to visit, but its reputation for high prices always gave us an excuse to put it off and go some place where we could stretch our dollars further. But with the dollar buying ¥124 and then scoring 4 direct ORD-NRT tickets on United Mileage Plus awards, this seemed the time.</li>\r\n	<li>Now as long time listeners know, this won’t be a travelog, a list of things to see in Tokyo or Kyoto -- I leave that to friends like Chris Christensen of the <a href=\"http://asia.amateurtraveler.com/tag/japan/\">Amateur Travelers podcast</a>. Since I always say that this podcast is more about the journey than the destination, let’s talk about travel in Japan.</li>\r\n	<li>As my family and I tend to do on our trips, our only trips to the airport were coming and going to the US. Everything else was on train. Which in Japan works very well. My wife bought us 2-week Japan Rail (JR) passes before we left. It wasn’t a small number for the 4 of us, but they paid off over our trip -- allowing us unlimited use of the high-speed bullet trains, even to reserve seats for a bit more relaxed boarding.</li>\r\n	<li>We broke the passes in on the Narita Express, the hour ride from the airport to Tokyo Station. I’m not sure they could’ve put Narita any further out. Given the distance, everyone takes the train or a bus. The train was fine, kinda like the Heathrow Express but without the TV screens. It worked with a minimum amount of fuss -- which was a good thing after a 12-hour flight.</li>\r\n	<li>We really hammered the JR passes to train among Tokyo, Kyoto, and Osaka, all less than 3-hour trips. Some of the stations were huge and there were times when we had to lean in to thread through the crowds of commuters. But the signage was pretty good and the trains absolutely met their reputation for timeliness (if only airlines in the US were half as timely…). And while JR would roll a food cart while on the rails, we got a bit more into the Japanese train culture and stocked up at the train station food courts before we left -- bento boxes, rice cakes, and of course, train beers -- Kirin tall boys usually. And if we didn’t have time to hit the food court, we could always grab something from the vending machines -- which were positioned about every 20 feet on the train platform. The vending machine thing in Japan is intense -- but convenient.</li>\r\n	<li>We didn’t just train point-to-point between the major stations. A lot of times it was a smaller train to the main station, then the high-speed train, then connecting to again to a smaller train. The HyperDia smartphone app came highly recommended and the free version was great when planning out these connecting journeys -- both inter-city and within Tokyo where a trip across town might span a couple of rail companies, say Tokyo Metro to a JR train. It also displays the fare, which is very handy, avoiding the need to try and decipher the rate table while in front of the fare machine with a queue building behind you. The public transit tab on Google Maps also worked surprisingly well.</li>\r\n	<li>Being able to use these apps when you really need them requires mobile data for your phone. You don’t want to be trying to search for an open WiFi access point before figuring out which train you’re connecting to. Which, in Japan, like so many things, isn’t exactly straightforward. As a tourist, you can only buy data SIMs; no voice capabilities. One of my go-to websites -- the aptly, but somewhat awkwardly named <a href=\"http://prepaid-data-sim-card.wikia.com/wiki/Japan\">Prepaid Data SIM Card Wiki</a> -- came through again. Before we left, I ordered a b-mobile SIM to be delivered to our first hotel -- the Marriott Courtyard in the Ginza District -- and then I bought another -- Japan Travel SIM -- from the Tourist Information Center at Tokyo Station. The lack of local voice wasn’t a huge inconvenience for us -- we were communicating via e-mail with hotels and apartment rentals -- but it still seemed a little weird.</li>\r\n	<li>The one thing that pulled me up short was the limited amount of signage in the Latin alphabet. I’m OK with the Japanese names when phonetically rendered in Latin characters, but I’m not so hot on reading kanji or kana. We wrestled with this our first morning in Tokyo at the Tsukiji Fish Market. My wife had a list of sushi restaurant recommendations -- all of which were Japanese names in Latin script; all the restaurant signs were in kanji. And then at a Kyoto ramen restaurant, where you buy tickets for your food from a machine and then hand them across the counter to the cook, having only kanji on the machine buttons without pictures, made ordering a bit of a challenge. It got me thinking back to my trip last year to Beijing -- I didn’t recall having the same level of challenge there.</li>\r\n	<li>What made this all work is that just about all of the Japanese people we ran into were the nicest, the most welcoming people. I was constantly struck at how many people would strike up a conversation -- asking where we’re from, helping us with Ramen machines, shouting “Welcome to Japan” while riding by on a bike, volunteering to walk us across train stations to help us with connections. I’m not sure I’ve experienced that consistent level of engagement from random strangers anywhere else. Of course, some of it could get a slightly embarrassing, like the group of middle school kids who wanted a picture with me. Or my daughter who regularly would get tagged by Japanese girls for pictures. We had that experience often in Beijing, but there, when we were often the lone white people, it was understandable. Having that same thing happen in Japan -- more Westernized, more white people wandering around -- that surprised us. In Arashiyama, a pretty touristy area on the west side of Kyoto, we were flagged down by 3 middle school teachers who video’d us answering their question about why we chose to visit this town. They told us that they taught English and wanted to show their classes native English speakers. OK, makes sense, but with all videos on YouTube, I wasn’t quite sure why they wanted a video of us.</li>\r\n	<li>But that being said, except for the signage, Japan was one of the easier countries we’ve traveled in. And maybe, with a couple more revs of Google Translate, even that barrier will get smoothed away.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a title=\"MP3 Download\" href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/download_track.php?id=0E74C6FEB7390D18D02B4B399668093172F6C8CC66DDC09D90A3BF7DDA436823CFAC859AE2B2C73E46A278A4950E1030\">Lonely Dog Blues</a></em> by <a title=\"Tobin James\' Web Site\" href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/label.php?id=2A3449F03E7B8462FF74407B60F0C4B0A30A0CBE880C61DE37E3B342387F0643\">Tobin James</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Luggage Trends</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>I think it was when I was grabbing our luggage off the carousel in ORD, returning from Spain with our luggage full of wine and olive oil. I picked up my wife’s red bag and was struck at how tatty the fabric had become. I set it down in front of her and said “That’s become embarrassing. I’m not sure I can travel with that bag again”</li>\r\n	<li>Now it’s not that I have a styling bag. It’s stock Swiss Army black roller still bearing Vietnamese customs stickers from 2008. I had retired it in favor of a grey Samsonite bag, but had to pull it back out when the Samsonite’s wheels got wonky -- the rubber wore off and the wheels splayed out after 2.5 years of pulling it across New Orleans sidewalks.</li>\r\n	<li>I’m seeing more hardshell rollers in non-black colors -- burgundy, yellow, floral prints, Disney characters…. They look nice; but that just may be because they look different -- they catch my eye because of what they’re not -- not a black ballistic nylon roller bag. My recently deceased Samsonite was non-black -- grey rather than floral, but still non-black. And after 3-4 months of my travel schedule, it started to look less non-black. Smudges from grease on overhead bin hinges, muck from taxi trunks, muddy water from New Orleans gutters, spilled coffee... That’s why I can’t have nice luggage.</li>\r\n	<li>We’ve talked about the impending trend of “smart luggage” in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/11/22/podcast-112-holiday-airport-etiquette-travel-tax-pile-up/\">past</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/05/14/podcast-115-a-decade-of-travelcommons/\">episodes</a>. Bluesmart has been the poster child for this. They crushed their Indiegogo campaign last year, and 2 weeks ago announced they’re in volume production, targeting initial deliveries in late September. “Control your suitcase from the app” is one of their tag lines. Digital lock, digital scale, battery charger, location tracking, proximity alerts. It spoke to my inner travel propeller head, so I did the Indiegogo thing. When it shows up, I’ll be sure to tell you all about it.</li>\r\n	<li>Bluesmart is at the top of the Google searches for “smart luggage”, but there are a growing list of followers with similar feature lists. Location tracking is an interesting one. I can count the number of times my luggage has been lost on one hand and have change left over, but when it happens, it can be catastrophic. I remember BA lost a bag on my way over to a 2-week “city-a-day” trip -- today London, tomorrow Stockholm, Friday in Zurich. My bag was always one stop behind me. So I get the importance of location tracking. At the high end, Bluesmart and others are equipping their bags with GPS and cellular modems to enable “global tracking”. At a much simpler level, travelers like long-time TC listener Mika Pyyhkala are using Bluetooth key fobs like the Pally Smartfinder to check if their bag made it onto their plane.</li>\r\n	<li>I can see it being useful at the other end. Look at the app -- bag’s not off the plane yet. I have time to stop off at the restroom -- or better yet, the bar.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917626811171154.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #116</li>\r\n	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://iodapromonet.com/index.php\">IODA Promonet</a></li>\r\n	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_116.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #116 — Traveling Thru Japan; Luggage Trends','','inherit','open','open','','1531-revision-v1','','','2015-08-26 22:52:56','2015-08-27 03:52:56','',1531,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/08/26/1531-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1538,1,'2015-08-26 22:58:52','2015-08-27 03:58:52','[caption id=\"attachment_1532\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/DSC_5744.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1532\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/DSC_5744-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Lost Without Translation\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Lost Without Translation[/caption]\r\n\r\nBack behind the microphone after an extended summer break highlighted by a two-week family vacation in Japan. We talk about traveling in Japan. It was a fantastic time, though we were lost without translation at times. But with the US dollar buying 124 yen, it was the right time to go. We also talk about frustration in using frequent flier miles, trends toward prettier and higher tech luggage, and a connoisseur of scrambled eggs. [soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/221084023\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #116:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, after a <i>long </i>absence. Let’s call it summer vacation. And there was a nice bit of vacation there -- 2 weeks in Japan with the family. People would ask me “Have you been to Japan before?” Never outside of Narita. Which I translated to an answer of “Mostly no” before my trip, and updated to a plain “No” after my trip. But more on that later.</li>\r\n	<li>Over the years, I’ve gotten into the habit of leaving the country if I want a real vacation. I find the disconnection process works much better I’m more than 5  time zones removed from home. Europe is 6 or 7 hours ahead -- pretty good. But the 14 hour difference between Chicago and Tokyo -- that’s real separation.</li>\r\n	<li>You can’t unplug for 2 weeks for free, though. It takes a bit of planning, and in my case, a good bit of travel -- both before and after the trip.</li>\r\n	<li>The 6 business days before my flight to Tokyo had me in Nashville, Detroit, Dallas, and the day before I left, Denver. I flew out Sunday night, flew home Monday night, and then left for Japan Tuesday noon. Coming back, we hit ORD 3:30 Sunday afternoon only to find myself back there 15 hours later for the first flight back out to Denver Monday morning. I was just happy that it was a short week for the 4th of July holiday.</li>\r\n	<li>Since then, I’ve been keeping up the Denver-Dallas triangulation with the occasional random jump to somewhere like Detroit. I’ll probably keep it up through August since the beginning of September will have me out of the country again -- to Edinburgh, helping my daughter settle in at <a href=\"http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/\">University of St Andrews</a>. After that, I may just sleep until October.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://ghosts.nin.com/main/home\"><em>3 Ghosts I</em></a> by <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Nine Inch Nails\" href=\"http://www.nin.com/\" rel=\"homepage\">Nine Inch Nails</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>So that was the start of the <a href=\"https://blog.stackexchange.com/2015/06/stack-exchange-podcast-65-the-word-has-two-meanings-you-see/\">Stack Exchange Podcast</a> where Joel Spolsky goes pretty much non-linear over his attempt to use frequent flier miles.</li>\r\n	<li>Any attempt to use frequent flier miles will be a frustrating exercise. My recent attempts to do <i>anything</i>with the 300,000 BA Avios miles is own personal exercise in masochism. But, to be honest, I’ve had pretty good luck this year, getting 2 flights down to New Orleans on Southwest, 4 direct flights from and from Tokyo with UA Mileage Plus and 3 flights between ORD and Edinburgh on American. Now, it wasn’t a complete cakewalk -- on SW, my wife and daughter took a 6am flight back on Monday, on UA, we had to come home a couple of days earlier than we had originally planned while on AA it’s a day later. But flexibility has always been a requirement to use frequent flyer miles. And those minor shifts are a whole lot better than my exercise with BA which only offered me one day in the entire month of September that I could use Avios miles to get to Edinburgh. I’m not sure there’s a more useless awards program.</li>\r\n	<li>When I first started looking for Chicago to Edinburgh flights, I went straight to Hipmunk.com. It has been my go-to flight search tool for a while now. It’s easy -- it defaults to flight search, unlike Expedia’s push for bundled deals or Orbitz pushing hotels. And graphical display -- bars for each flight showing flight duration spread across the day -- makes it very easy to focus on the flights you’re most interested in. But when searching for Edinburgh flights, I spotted something new -- right under the red Virgin Atlantic bar was a purple one labeled “Mystery”. Kinda like Priceline’s unnamed hotels you bid for. But I’d never seen what the travel industry calls “opaque pricing” on Hipmunk before. Of course, it wasn’t really that opaque. Clicking on the bar revealed the flight details -- a 4:40pm departure with an hour connection in Madrid. Hmmm, let’s see. Only Iberia flies from ORD to MAD. Doing a quick search, I found the times did indeed match Iberia flight number 345 -- which Hipmunk only slightly masked as Mystery Airline #345. Must’ve been an experiment, because I haven’t seen it since, but I did get a good chuckle out of it.</li>\r\n	<li>A colleague who I met up with on one of my Detroit trips flew Spirit Airline for the first time and <i>didn’t</i> get much of a chuckle. It was a last-minute meeting. He was flying in from Kansas City and, following the rules by using the mandated American Express Travel website to book his flight, he saw a Spirit flight that was significantly less than other carriers. Being a good corporate citizen, he booked it. He showed up at the ticket counter to get his boarding pass. “You gonna carry that one?” the Spirit agent asked him, pointing to his suitcase. “Of course,” he said. “That’ll cost you $55. And that briefcase doesn’t look like it’ll fit under the seat, so that’s another $55.” Pretty quickly, the price difference that led him to book Spirit disappeared in the smoke of carryon charges. Some might say it’s his fault for not knowing Spirit’s uniquely aggressive add-on fee structure -- what Spirit calls “bundling”. But I’d say it’s Amex’s fault -- for displaying Spirit’s base fare (without carryon fees) in the same ways as they display Delta’s or Southwest’s. And then marking those higher, but more inclusive, fares as being “out of policy” because they’re higher, and requiring additional steps to justify booking them. More power to Spirit to differentiate themselves with a unique fee structure, but Amex and the like need to do their job and let business travelers know what they’re in for when they book those low fares.</li>\r\n	<li>Rich Fraser did saw my PreCheck frustration spill over to Twitter.\r\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" lang=\"en\">\r\n<p dir=\"ltr\" lang=\"en\">Folks, it\'s a *metal* detector! Large chunks of metal in your pocket - cell phones, car keys, $5 worth of quarters - *will* set it off</p>\r\n— Mark Peacock (@mpeacock) <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/623113695426670592\">July 20, 2015</a></blockquote>\r\n<script src=\"//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js\" async=\"\" charset=\"utf-8\"></script>I don’t know if it’s summer travel amateurs hitting the PreCheck lottery, but I’ve been stunned at the number of people who look amazed when the metal detector alarms when they try to walk through with a slug of metal in their pockets. Mobile phone, big electronic key fobs, two fistfuls of change… I mean, what part of “metal detector” do they not get? It’s doing it’s job! But people will stand there, dumbfounded, they can’t stroll through wearing the quarter-pound of metal and electronics that is an iPhone. I hate to be a snob, but I beginning to think they need to split PreCheck between the veterans who paid for it and the occasional random selectees. To which Rich mentioned that it’s not so occasional for him -- he’s gotten Pre on 3 of his last 4 trips. So, he says, why pay for it? Hey, as long as he remembers to take his mobile phone and car keys out of his pocket, I say, more power to him.</li>\r\n	<li>I’ve probably mentioned this before, but I think one of the absolute best airport restaurants is Rick Bayless’ <a href=\"http://www.rickbayless.com/restaurants/tortas-frontera/\">Torta Frontera</a> in the American, United and International terminals at ORD. The tortas, the Mexican sandwiches, are fantastic -- great local ingredients and made-to-order. Being made-to-order is key to the great taste and texture, but it’s 10 minutes from the time you order and at ORD rush hour, you can stand in line for 10 minutes before you get to the counter. Great restaurant -- and popular. So I was cautiously excited last week when I saw they had a new ordering app. I was catching an evening flight to DTW and decided to check out the app. I downloaded and set up the app after parking in the deck -- created an account and loaded a credit card. Then, while in the PreCheck line, I scrolled through the menu and loaded the shopping cart with a Cubana, my favorite torta. I was going to hit the Order Now button, but the TSA guys were a little too efficient, waving 3 of us forward at once. So, I hit Order a couple of minutes later on the other side of the X-Ray machine. I quickly received an e-mail “Thanks for your order, we’ll let you know when it’s ready”. That’s it. No ETA, no typical wait time. Hmmm… I walk down to the T3 Tortas -- longest line I’ve seen. Hmmm…  Just then, I get a second e-mail -- 7 minutes after the first -- “You order will be ready at 5:43pm” -- 10 minutes from now. OK, not bad given this line. I walk to the rest room, browse the bookstore across the hall, and put myself in front of the order pick-up station at 5:43pm. About a minute later, the woman calls out “Anybody order on-line?” Two of us step up. “Mark?” I reach out and take my bag. The pre-order worked well, though next time, I’ll let the TSA guy wait for a minute while I hit the Order button a bit sooner.</li>\r\n	<li>All the way back in April 2012, I wrote a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/04/21/best-hotel-amenity-free-breakfast/\">blog post</a> about free breakfast being the best hotel amenity.  (I had to do a good bit of scrolling on the TravelCommons website to find it -- I’ll save you that with a link in the show notes). It’s still true, even though, it’s, as I wrote back then, it’s more about convenience than food quality -- especially when you’re grabbing that breakfast in the concierge lounge of a Marriott or Sheraton or Westin. And it kinda turns you into a connoisseur of scrambled eggs. A buddy and I got into this conversation a few weeks back -- comparing the quality of scrambled eggs across hotels we’ve stayed at.  We concluded that the most typical consistency was firm, almost quiche like. We liked them with a bit of cheese mixed in to give them a bit of flavor (neither of us are vegan). Every once in a great while, you get great scrambled eggs -- soft curds, slightly moist. But you definitely don’t want them runny -- there’s nothing more disgusting at 6am than tilting back that warming tray clamshell lid and seeing scrambled eggs sitting in a pool of yellowish liquid. We’ll go for hard dry over swimming in yellow eggs every morning. But hard dry bacon, now that’s just wrong</li>\r\n	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/buy_album.php?id=08E508A6096F11910641E13331B70EED6DFA5BB929282F731E19BBAFA8F08FFD686BD99DD86BA0D5E844DD5536E1AEFB\" rel=\"nofollow\"><em>Ghost Hardware</em></a> by Burial</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Traveling Thru Japan</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>The family and I have done a fair bit of travel in Asia -- Thailand, Singapore, Vietnam, Hong Kong, China -- which left two big holes -- Japan and Korea. We filled one of them this summer when we spent two weeks visiting Tokyo, Kyoto, and Osaka. Japan had always been on our list to visit, but its reputation for high prices always gave us an excuse to put it off and go some place where we could stretch our dollars further. But with the dollar buying ¥124 and then scoring 4 direct ORD-NRT tickets on United Mileage Plus awards, this seemed the time.</li>\r\n	<li>Now as long time listeners know, this won’t be a travelog, a list of things to see in Tokyo or Kyoto -- I leave that to friends like Chris Christensen of the <a href=\"http://asia.amateurtraveler.com/tag/japan/\">Amateur Travelers podcast</a>. Since I always say that this podcast is more about the journey than the destination, let’s talk about travel in Japan.</li>\r\n	<li>As my family and I tend to do on our trips, our only trips to the airport were coming and going to the US. Everything else was on train. Which in Japan works very well. My wife bought us 2-week Japan Rail (JR) passes before we left. It wasn’t a small number for the 4 of us, but they paid off over our trip -- allowing us unlimited use of the high-speed bullet trains, even to reserve seats for a bit more relaxed boarding.</li>\r\n	<li>We broke the passes in on the Narita Express, the hour ride from the airport to Tokyo Station. I’m not sure they could’ve put Narita any further out. Given the distance, everyone takes the train or a bus. The train was fine, kinda like the Heathrow Express but without the TV screens. It worked with a minimum amount of fuss -- which was a good thing after a 12-hour flight.</li>\r\n	<li>We really hammered the JR passes to train among Tokyo, Kyoto, and Osaka, all less than 3-hour trips. Some of the stations were huge and there were times when we had to lean in to thread through the crowds of commuters. But the signage was pretty good and the trains absolutely met their reputation for timeliness (if only airlines in the US were half as timely…). And while JR would roll a food cart while on the rails, we got a bit more into the Japanese train culture and stocked up at the train station food courts before we left -- bento boxes, rice cakes, and of course, train beers -- Kirin tall boys usually. And if we didn’t have time to hit the food court, we could always grab something from the vending machines -- which were positioned about every 20 feet on the train platform. The vending machine thing in Japan is intense -- but convenient.</li>\r\n	<li>We didn’t just train point-to-point between the major stations. A lot of times it was a smaller train to the main station, then the high-speed train, then connecting to again to a smaller train. The HyperDia smartphone app came highly recommended and the free version was great when planning out these connecting journeys -- both inter-city and within Tokyo where a trip across town might span a couple of rail companies, say Tokyo Metro to a JR train. It also displays the fare, which is very handy, avoiding the need to try and decipher the rate table while in front of the fare machine with a queue building behind you. The public transit tab on Google Maps also worked surprisingly well.</li>\r\n	<li>Being able to use these apps when you really need them requires mobile data for your phone. You don’t want to be trying to search for an open WiFi access point before figuring out which train you’re connecting to. Which, in Japan, like so many things, isn’t exactly straightforward. As a tourist, you can only buy data SIMs; no voice capabilities. One of my go-to websites -- the aptly, but somewhat awkwardly named <a href=\"http://prepaid-data-sim-card.wikia.com/wiki/Japan\">Prepaid Data SIM Card Wiki</a> -- came through again. Before we left, I ordered a b-mobile SIM to be delivered to our first hotel -- the Marriott Courtyard in the Ginza District -- and then I bought another -- Japan Travel SIM -- from the Tourist Information Center at Tokyo Station. The lack of local voice wasn’t a huge inconvenience for us -- we were communicating via e-mail with hotels and apartment rentals -- but it still seemed a little weird.</li>\r\n	<li>The one thing that pulled me up short was the limited amount of signage in the Latin alphabet. I’m OK with the Japanese names when phonetically rendered in Latin characters, but I’m not so hot on reading kanji or kana. We wrestled with this our first morning in Tokyo at the Tsukiji Fish Market. My wife had a list of sushi restaurant recommendations -- all of which were Japanese names in Latin script; all the restaurant signs were in kanji. And then at a Kyoto ramen restaurant, where you buy tickets for your food from a machine and then hand them across the counter to the cook, having only kanji on the machine buttons without pictures, made ordering a bit of a challenge. It got me thinking back to my trip last year to Beijing -- I didn’t recall having the same level of challenge there.</li>\r\n	<li>What made this all work is that just about all of the Japanese people we ran into were the nicest, the most welcoming people. I was constantly struck at how many people would strike up a conversation -- asking where we’re from, helping us with Ramen machines, shouting “Welcome to Japan” while riding by on a bike, volunteering to walk us across train stations to help us with connections. I’m not sure I’ve experienced that consistent level of engagement from random strangers anywhere else. Of course, some of it could get a slightly embarrassing, like the group of middle school kids who wanted a picture with me. Or my daughter who regularly would get tagged by Japanese girls for pictures. We had that experience often in Beijing, but there, when we were often the lone white people, it was understandable. Having that same thing happen in Japan -- more Westernized, more white people wandering around -- that surprised us. In Arashiyama, a pretty touristy area on the west side of Kyoto, we were flagged down by 3 middle school teachers who video’d us answering their question about why we chose to visit this town. They told us that they taught English and wanted to show their classes native English speakers. OK, makes sense, but with all videos on YouTube, I wasn’t quite sure why they wanted a video of us.</li>\r\n	<li>But that being said, except for the signage, Japan was one of the easier countries we’ve traveled in. And maybe, with a couple more revs of Google Translate, even that barrier will get smoothed away.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a title=\"MP3 Download\" href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/download_track.php?id=0E74C6FEB7390D18D02B4B399668093172F6C8CC66DDC09D90A3BF7DDA436823CFAC859AE2B2C73E46A278A4950E1030\">Lonely Dog Blues</a></em> by <a title=\"Tobin James\' Web Site\" href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/label.php?id=2A3449F03E7B8462FF74407B60F0C4B0A30A0CBE880C61DE37E3B342387F0643\">Tobin James</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Luggage Trends</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>I think it was when I was grabbing our luggage off the carousel in ORD, returning from Spain with our luggage full of wine and olive oil. I picked up my wife’s red bag and was struck at how tatty the fabric had become. I set it down in front of her and said “That’s become embarrassing. I’m not sure I can travel with that bag again”</li>\r\n	<li>Now it’s not that I have a styling bag. It’s stock Swiss Army black roller still bearing Vietnamese customs stickers from 2008. I had retired it in favor of a grey Samsonite bag, but had to pull it back out when the Samsonite’s wheels got wonky -- the rubber wore off and the wheels splayed out after 2.5 years of pulling it across New Orleans sidewalks.</li>\r\n	<li>I’m seeing more hardshell rollers in non-black colors -- burgundy, yellow, floral prints, Disney characters…. They look nice; but that just may be because they look different -- they catch my eye because of what they’re not -- not a black ballistic nylon roller bag. My recently deceased Samsonite was non-black -- grey rather than floral, but still non-black. And after 3-4 months of my travel schedule, it started to look less non-black. Smudges from grease on overhead bin hinges, muck from taxi trunks, muddy water from New Orleans gutters, spilled coffee... That’s why I can’t have nice luggage.</li>\r\n	<li>We’ve talked about the impending trend of “smart luggage” in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/11/22/podcast-112-holiday-airport-etiquette-travel-tax-pile-up/\">past</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/05/14/podcast-115-a-decade-of-travelcommons/\">episodes</a>. Bluesmart has been the poster child for this. They crushed their Indiegogo campaign last year, and 2 weeks ago announced they’re in volume production, targeting initial deliveries in late September. “Control your suitcase from the app” is one of their tag lines. Digital lock, digital scale, battery charger, location tracking, proximity alerts. It spoke to my inner travel propeller head, so I did the Indiegogo thing. When it shows up, I’ll be sure to tell you all about it.</li>\r\n	<li>Bluesmart is at the top of the Google searches for “smart luggage”, but there are a growing list of followers with similar feature lists. Location tracking is an interesting one. I can count the number of times my luggage has been lost on one hand and have change left over, but when it happens, it can be catastrophic. I remember BA lost a bag on my way over to a 2-week “city-a-day” trip -- today London, tomorrow Stockholm, Friday in Zurich. My bag was always one stop behind me. So I get the importance of location tracking. At the high end, Bluesmart and others are equipping their bags with GPS and cellular modems to enable “global tracking”. At a much simpler level, travelers like long-time TC listener Mika Pyyhkala are using Bluetooth key fobs like the Pally Smartfinder to check if their bag made it onto their plane.</li>\r\n	<li>I can see it being useful at the other end. Look at the app -- bag’s not off the plane yet. I have time to stop off at the restroom -- or better yet, the bar.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917626811171154.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #116</li>\r\n	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://iodapromonet.com/index.php\">IODA Promonet</a></li>\r\n	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_116.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #116 — Traveling Thru Japan; Luggage Trends','','inherit','open','open','','1531-revision-v1','','','2015-08-26 22:58:52','2015-08-27 03:58:52','',1531,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/08/26/1531-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1539,1,'2015-08-26 23:01:29','2015-08-27 04:01:29','[caption id=\"attachment_1532\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/DSC_5744.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1532\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/DSC_5744-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Lost Without Translation\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Lost Without Translation[/caption]\r\n\r\nBack behind the microphone after an extended summer break highlighted by a two-week family vacation in Japan. We talk about traveling in Japan. It was a fantastic time, though we were lost without translation at times. But with the US dollar buying 124 yen, it was the right time to go. We also talk about frustration in using frequent flier miles, trends toward prettier and higher tech luggage, and a connoisseur of scrambled eggs. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_116.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/221084023\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #116:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, after a <i>long </i>absence. Let’s call it summer vacation. And there was a nice bit of vacation there -- 2 weeks in Japan with the family. People would ask me “Have you been to Japan before?” Never outside of Narita. Which I translated to an answer of “Mostly no” before my trip, and updated to a plain “No” after my trip. But more on that later.</li>\r\n	<li>Over the years, I’ve gotten into the habit of leaving the country if I want a real vacation. I find the disconnection process works much better I’m more than 5  time zones removed from home. Europe is 6 or 7 hours ahead -- pretty good. But the 14 hour difference between Chicago and Tokyo -- that’s real separation.</li>\r\n	<li>You can’t unplug for 2 weeks for free, though. It takes a bit of planning, and in my case, a good bit of travel -- both before and after the trip.</li>\r\n	<li>The 6 business days before my flight to Tokyo had me in Nashville, Detroit, Dallas, and the day before I left, Denver. I flew out Sunday night, flew home Monday night, and then left for Japan Tuesday noon. Coming back, we hit ORD 3:30 Sunday afternoon only to find myself back there 15 hours later for the first flight back out to Denver Monday morning. I was just happy that it was a short week for the 4th of July holiday.</li>\r\n	<li>Since then, I’ve been keeping up the Denver-Dallas triangulation with the occasional random jump to somewhere like Detroit. I’ll probably keep it up through August since the beginning of September will have me out of the country again -- to Edinburgh, helping my daughter settle in at <a href=\"http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/\">University of St Andrews</a>. After that, I may just sleep until October.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://ghosts.nin.com/main/home\"><em>3 Ghosts I</em></a> by <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Nine Inch Nails\" href=\"http://www.nin.com/\" rel=\"homepage\">Nine Inch Nails</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>So that was the start of the <a href=\"https://blog.stackexchange.com/2015/06/stack-exchange-podcast-65-the-word-has-two-meanings-you-see/\">Stack Exchange Podcast</a> where Joel Spolsky goes pretty much non-linear over his attempt to use frequent flier miles.</li>\r\n	<li>Any attempt to use frequent flier miles will be a frustrating exercise. My recent attempts to do <i>anything</i>with the 300,000 BA Avios miles is own personal exercise in masochism. But, to be honest, I’ve had pretty good luck this year, getting 2 flights down to New Orleans on Southwest, 4 direct flights from and from Tokyo with UA Mileage Plus and 3 flights between ORD and Edinburgh on American. Now, it wasn’t a complete cakewalk -- on SW, my wife and daughter took a 6am flight back on Monday, on UA, we had to come home a couple of days earlier than we had originally planned while on AA it’s a day later. But flexibility has always been a requirement to use frequent flyer miles. And those minor shifts are a whole lot better than my exercise with BA which only offered me one day in the entire month of September that I could use Avios miles to get to Edinburgh. I’m not sure there’s a more useless awards program.</li>\r\n	<li>When I first started looking for Chicago to Edinburgh flights, I went straight to Hipmunk.com. It has been my go-to flight search tool for a while now. It’s easy -- it defaults to flight search, unlike Expedia’s push for bundled deals or Orbitz pushing hotels. And graphical display -- bars for each flight showing flight duration spread across the day -- makes it very easy to focus on the flights you’re most interested in. But when searching for Edinburgh flights, I spotted something new -- right under the red Virgin Atlantic bar was a purple one labeled “Mystery”. Kinda like Priceline’s unnamed hotels you bid for. But I’d never seen what the travel industry calls “opaque pricing” on Hipmunk before. Of course, it wasn’t really that opaque. Clicking on the bar revealed the flight details -- a 4:40pm departure with an hour connection in Madrid. Hmmm, let’s see. Only Iberia flies from ORD to MAD. Doing a quick search, I found the times did indeed match Iberia flight number 345 -- which Hipmunk only slightly masked as Mystery Airline #345. Must’ve been an experiment, because I haven’t seen it since, but I did get a good chuckle out of it.</li>\r\n	<li>A colleague who I met up with on one of my Detroit trips flew Spirit Airline for the first time and <i>didn’t</i> get much of a chuckle. It was a last-minute meeting. He was flying in from Kansas City and, following the rules by using the mandated American Express Travel website to book his flight, he saw a Spirit flight that was significantly less than other carriers. Being a good corporate citizen, he booked it. He showed up at the ticket counter to get his boarding pass. “You gonna carry that one?” the Spirit agent asked him, pointing to his suitcase. “Of course,” he said. “That’ll cost you $55. And that briefcase doesn’t look like it’ll fit under the seat, so that’s another $55.” Pretty quickly, the price difference that led him to book Spirit disappeared in the smoke of carryon charges. Some might say it’s his fault for not knowing Spirit’s uniquely aggressive add-on fee structure -- what Spirit calls “bundling”. But I’d say it’s Amex’s fault -- for displaying Spirit’s base fare (without carryon fees) in the same ways as they display Delta’s or Southwest’s. And then marking those higher, but more inclusive, fares as being “out of policy” because they’re higher, and requiring additional steps to justify booking them. More power to Spirit to differentiate themselves with a unique fee structure, but Amex and the like need to do their job and let business travelers know what they’re in for when they book those low fares.</li>\r\n	<li>Rich Fraser did saw my PreCheck frustration spill over to Twitter.\r\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" lang=\"en\">\r\n<p dir=\"ltr\" lang=\"en\">Folks, it\'s a *metal* detector! Large chunks of metal in your pocket - cell phones, car keys, $5 worth of quarters - *will* set it off</p>\r\n— Mark Peacock (@mpeacock) <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/623113695426670592\">July 20, 2015</a></blockquote>\r\n<script src=\"//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js\" async=\"\" charset=\"utf-8\"></script>I don’t know if it’s summer travel amateurs hitting the PreCheck lottery, but I’ve been stunned at the number of people who look amazed when the metal detector alarms when they try to walk through with a slug of metal in their pockets. Mobile phone, big electronic key fobs, two fistfuls of change… I mean, what part of “metal detector” do they not get? It’s doing it’s job! But people will stand there, dumbfounded, they can’t stroll through wearing the quarter-pound of metal and electronics that is an iPhone. I hate to be a snob, but I beginning to think they need to split PreCheck between the veterans who paid for it and the occasional random selectees. To which Rich mentioned that it’s not so occasional for him -- he’s gotten Pre on 3 of his last 4 trips. So, he says, why pay for it? Hey, as long as he remembers to take his mobile phone and car keys out of his pocket, I say, more power to him.</li>\r\n	<li>I’ve probably mentioned this before, but I think one of the absolute best airport restaurants is Rick Bayless’ <a href=\"http://www.rickbayless.com/restaurants/tortas-frontera/\">Torta Frontera</a> in the American, United and International terminals at ORD. The tortas, the Mexican sandwiches, are fantastic -- great local ingredients and made-to-order. Being made-to-order is key to the great taste and texture, but it’s 10 minutes from the time you order and at ORD rush hour, you can stand in line for 10 minutes before you get to the counter. Great restaurant -- and popular. So I was cautiously excited last week when I saw they had a new ordering app. I was catching an evening flight to DTW and decided to check out the app. I downloaded and set up the app after parking in the deck -- created an account and loaded a credit card. Then, while in the PreCheck line, I scrolled through the menu and loaded the shopping cart with a Cubana, my favorite torta. I was going to hit the Order Now button, but the TSA guys were a little too efficient, waving 3 of us forward at once. So, I hit Order a couple of minutes later on the other side of the X-Ray machine. I quickly received an e-mail “Thanks for your order, we’ll let you know when it’s ready”. That’s it. No ETA, no typical wait time. Hmmm… I walk down to the T3 Tortas -- longest line I’ve seen. Hmmm…  Just then, I get a second e-mail -- 7 minutes after the first -- “You order will be ready at 5:43pm” -- 10 minutes from now. OK, not bad given this line. I walk to the rest room, browse the bookstore across the hall, and put myself in front of the order pick-up station at 5:43pm. About a minute later, the woman calls out “Anybody order on-line?” Two of us step up. “Mark?” I reach out and take my bag. The pre-order worked well, though next time, I’ll let the TSA guy wait for a minute while I hit the Order button a bit sooner.</li>\r\n	<li>All the way back in April 2012, I wrote a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/04/21/best-hotel-amenity-free-breakfast/\">blog post</a> about free breakfast being the best hotel amenity.  (I had to do a good bit of scrolling on the TravelCommons website to find it -- I’ll save you that with a link in the show notes). It’s still true, even though, it’s, as I wrote back then, it’s more about convenience than food quality -- especially when you’re grabbing that breakfast in the concierge lounge of a Marriott or Sheraton or Westin. And it kinda turns you into a connoisseur of scrambled eggs. A buddy and I got into this conversation a few weeks back -- comparing the quality of scrambled eggs across hotels we’ve stayed at.  We concluded that the most typical consistency was firm, almost quiche like. We liked them with a bit of cheese mixed in to give them a bit of flavor (neither of us are vegan). Every once in a great while, you get great scrambled eggs -- soft curds, slightly moist. But you definitely don’t want them runny -- there’s nothing more disgusting at 6am than tilting back that warming tray clamshell lid and seeing scrambled eggs sitting in a pool of yellowish liquid. We’ll go for hard dry over swimming in yellow eggs every morning. But hard dry bacon, now that’s just wrong</li>\r\n	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/buy_album.php?id=08E508A6096F11910641E13331B70EED6DFA5BB929282F731E19BBAFA8F08FFD686BD99DD86BA0D5E844DD5536E1AEFB\" rel=\"nofollow\"><em>Ghost Hardware</em></a> by Burial</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Traveling Thru Japan</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>The family and I have done a fair bit of travel in Asia -- Thailand, Singapore, Vietnam, Hong Kong, China -- which left two big holes -- Japan and Korea. We filled one of them this summer when we spent two weeks visiting Tokyo, Kyoto, and Osaka. Japan had always been on our list to visit, but its reputation for high prices always gave us an excuse to put it off and go some place where we could stretch our dollars further. But with the dollar buying ¥124 and then scoring 4 direct ORD-NRT tickets on United Mileage Plus awards, this seemed the time.</li>\r\n	<li>Now as long time listeners know, this won’t be a travelog, a list of things to see in Tokyo or Kyoto -- I leave that to friends like Chris Christensen of the <a href=\"http://asia.amateurtraveler.com/tag/japan/\">Amateur Travelers podcast</a>. Since I always say that this podcast is more about the journey than the destination, let’s talk about travel in Japan.</li>\r\n	<li>As my family and I tend to do on our trips, our only trips to the airport were coming and going to the US. Everything else was on train. Which in Japan works very well. My wife bought us 2-week Japan Rail (JR) passes before we left. It wasn’t a small number for the 4 of us, but they paid off over our trip -- allowing us unlimited use of the high-speed bullet trains, even to reserve seats for a bit more relaxed boarding.</li>\r\n	<li>We broke the passes in on the Narita Express, the hour ride from the airport to Tokyo Station. I’m not sure they could’ve put Narita any further out. Given the distance, everyone takes the train or a bus. The train was fine, kinda like the Heathrow Express but without the TV screens. It worked with a minimum amount of fuss -- which was a good thing after a 12-hour flight.</li>\r\n	<li>We really hammered the JR passes to train among Tokyo, Kyoto, and Osaka, all less than 3-hour trips. Some of the stations were huge and there were times when we had to lean in to thread through the crowds of commuters. But the signage was pretty good and the trains absolutely met their reputation for timeliness (if only airlines in the US were half as timely…). And while JR would roll a food cart while on the rails, we got a bit more into the Japanese train culture and stocked up at the train station food courts before we left -- bento boxes, rice cakes, and of course, train beers -- Kirin tall boys usually. And if we didn’t have time to hit the food court, we could always grab something from the vending machines -- which were positioned about every 20 feet on the train platform. The vending machine thing in Japan is intense -- but convenient.</li>\r\n	<li>We didn’t just train point-to-point between the major stations. A lot of times it was a smaller train to the main station, then the high-speed train, then connecting to again to a smaller train. The HyperDia smartphone app came highly recommended and the free version was great when planning out these connecting journeys -- both inter-city and within Tokyo where a trip across town might span a couple of rail companies, say Tokyo Metro to a JR train. It also displays the fare, which is very handy, avoiding the need to try and decipher the rate table while in front of the fare machine with a queue building behind you. The public transit tab on Google Maps also worked surprisingly well.</li>\r\n	<li>Being able to use these apps when you really need them requires mobile data for your phone. You don’t want to be trying to search for an open WiFi access point before figuring out which train you’re connecting to. Which, in Japan, like so many things, isn’t exactly straightforward. As a tourist, you can only buy data SIMs; no voice capabilities. One of my go-to websites -- the aptly, but somewhat awkwardly named <a href=\"http://prepaid-data-sim-card.wikia.com/wiki/Japan\">Prepaid Data SIM Card Wiki</a> -- came through again. Before we left, I ordered a b-mobile SIM to be delivered to our first hotel -- the Marriott Courtyard in the Ginza District -- and then I bought another -- Japan Travel SIM -- from the Tourist Information Center at Tokyo Station. The lack of local voice wasn’t a huge inconvenience for us -- we were communicating via e-mail with hotels and apartment rentals -- but it still seemed a little weird.</li>\r\n	<li>The one thing that pulled me up short was the limited amount of signage in the Latin alphabet. I’m OK with the Japanese names when phonetically rendered in Latin characters, but I’m not so hot on reading kanji or kana. We wrestled with this our first morning in Tokyo at the Tsukiji Fish Market. My wife had a list of sushi restaurant recommendations -- all of which were Japanese names in Latin script; all the restaurant signs were in kanji. And then at a Kyoto ramen restaurant, where you buy tickets for your food from a machine and then hand them across the counter to the cook, having only kanji on the machine buttons without pictures, made ordering a bit of a challenge. It got me thinking back to my trip last year to Beijing -- I didn’t recall having the same level of challenge there.</li>\r\n	<li>What made this all work is that just about all of the Japanese people we ran into were the nicest, the most welcoming people. I was constantly struck at how many people would strike up a conversation -- asking where we’re from, helping us with Ramen machines, shouting “Welcome to Japan” while riding by on a bike, volunteering to walk us across train stations to help us with connections. I’m not sure I’ve experienced that consistent level of engagement from random strangers anywhere else. Of course, some of it could get a slightly embarrassing, like the group of middle school kids who wanted a picture with me. Or my daughter who regularly would get tagged by Japanese girls for pictures. We had that experience often in Beijing, but there, when we were often the lone white people, it was understandable. Having that same thing happen in Japan -- more Westernized, more white people wandering around -- that surprised us. In Arashiyama, a pretty touristy area on the west side of Kyoto, we were flagged down by 3 middle school teachers who video’d us answering their question about why we chose to visit this town. They told us that they taught English and wanted to show their classes native English speakers. OK, makes sense, but with all videos on YouTube, I wasn’t quite sure why they wanted a video of us.</li>\r\n	<li>But that being said, except for the signage, Japan was one of the easier countries we’ve traveled in. And maybe, with a couple more revs of Google Translate, even that barrier will get smoothed away.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a title=\"MP3 Download\" href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/download_track.php?id=0E74C6FEB7390D18D02B4B399668093172F6C8CC66DDC09D90A3BF7DDA436823CFAC859AE2B2C73E46A278A4950E1030\">Lonely Dog Blues</a></em> by <a title=\"Tobin James\' Web Site\" href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/label.php?id=2A3449F03E7B8462FF74407B60F0C4B0A30A0CBE880C61DE37E3B342387F0643\">Tobin James</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Luggage Trends</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>I think it was when I was grabbing our luggage off the carousel in ORD, returning from Spain with our luggage full of wine and olive oil. I picked up my wife’s red bag and was struck at how tatty the fabric had become. I set it down in front of her and said “That’s become embarrassing. I’m not sure I can travel with that bag again”</li>\r\n	<li>Now it’s not that I have a styling bag. It’s stock Swiss Army black roller still bearing Vietnamese customs stickers from 2008. I had retired it in favor of a grey Samsonite bag, but had to pull it back out when the Samsonite’s wheels got wonky -- the rubber wore off and the wheels splayed out after 2.5 years of pulling it across New Orleans sidewalks.</li>\r\n	<li>I’m seeing more hardshell rollers in non-black colors -- burgundy, yellow, floral prints, Disney characters…. They look nice; but that just may be because they look different -- they catch my eye because of what they’re not -- not a black ballistic nylon roller bag. My recently deceased Samsonite was non-black -- grey rather than floral, but still non-black. And after 3-4 months of my travel schedule, it started to look less non-black. Smudges from grease on overhead bin hinges, muck from taxi trunks, muddy water from New Orleans gutters, spilled coffee... That’s why I can’t have nice luggage.</li>\r\n	<li>We’ve talked about the impending trend of “smart luggage” in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/11/22/podcast-112-holiday-airport-etiquette-travel-tax-pile-up/\">past</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/05/14/podcast-115-a-decade-of-travelcommons/\">episodes</a>. Bluesmart has been the poster child for this. They crushed their Indiegogo campaign last year, and 2 weeks ago announced they’re in volume production, targeting initial deliveries in late September. “Control your suitcase from the app” is one of their tag lines. Digital lock, digital scale, battery charger, location tracking, proximity alerts. It spoke to my inner travel propeller head, so I did the Indiegogo thing. When it shows up, I’ll be sure to tell you all about it.</li>\r\n	<li>Bluesmart is at the top of the Google searches for “smart luggage”, but there are a growing list of followers with similar feature lists. Location tracking is an interesting one. I can count the number of times my luggage has been lost on one hand and have change left over, but when it happens, it can be catastrophic. I remember BA lost a bag on my way over to a 2-week “city-a-day” trip -- today London, tomorrow Stockholm, Friday in Zurich. My bag was always one stop behind me. So I get the importance of location tracking. At the high end, Bluesmart and others are equipping their bags with GPS and cellular modems to enable “global tracking”. At a much simpler level, travelers like long-time TC listener Mika Pyyhkala are using Bluetooth key fobs like the Pally Smartfinder to check if their bag made it onto their plane.</li>\r\n	<li>I can see it being useful at the other end. Look at the app -- bag’s not off the plane yet. I have time to stop off at the restroom -- or better yet, the bar.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917626811171154.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #116</li>\r\n	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://iodapromonet.com/index.php\">IODA Promonet</a></li>\r\n	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_116.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #116 — Traveling Thru Japan; Luggage Trends','','inherit','open','open','','1531-revision-v1','','','2015-08-26 23:01:29','2015-08-27 04:01:29','',1531,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/08/26/1531-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1540,1,'2015-08-26 23:04:05','2015-08-27 04:04:05','[caption id=\"attachment_1364\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/pic-r-1402317187245.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1364\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/pic-r-1402317187245-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Plane is here; no mechanics in sight. Do I feel lucky?\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Plane is here; no mechanics in sight. Do I feel lucky?[/caption]\r\n\r\nEven though the weather hasn\'t been bad this summer, I\'ve endured a rash of flight cancellations. Digging deeper, it\'s been regional jets operated by small airline \"partners\" that\'s causing me grief. Service to mid-sized cities has moved to regional jets, making travel to these cities more problematic. Traveling to China or India can catch US travelers by surprise with their visa requirements. We also talk about how fast airlines respond to Twitter messages, airport \"wall huggers\", carry-on luggage throwback, and I haven\'t flipped through a Skymall magazine in months. All this and more  at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_110.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below. [sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_110.mp3\"]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #110:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Coming to you from the Sheraton Hotel on Canal St in New Orleans. I have a room looking over the French Quarter. It’s a big convention hotel -- not my usual choice. But the price is good, it has a great gym and I’m about 5 stays away from making Starwood Platinum, so what the heck.</li>\r\n	<li>I’m back to my usual commute -- Chicago to New Orleans -- after taking a quick jaunt out to LA last week. It is that time of year on the Gulf Coast when the weather gets a bit monotonous -- high of 91 degrees with a chance of afternoon thunderstorms. Repeat until Labor Day. But the thunderstorms are tending to be earlier than last year when they seemed to roll in about 4:30 -- right about the time when the inbound plane for my flight back to Chicago would be scheduled to arrive. While my flights home still aren’t arriving on time, I haven’t hit the big 2-4 hour downpour delays I would get last year. Not killing as much time in the airport bars, but I always appreciate New Orleans airport letting me to take me beer to the gate.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music — <em>Stinky Dog</em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/musicinside-forces/\">Music Inside</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Flying through LAX last week reminded me of what a dump that airport is -- or I guess I should say key parts of it. Flying out of there last Thursday morning, it took me a half-hour in the Hertz bus to get to the United terminal -- P7 -- because of access road traffic which is driven by this odd concept of a bunch of little terminals arranged in a U around short term parking garages. No problem is you’re flying Southwest in P1; really lousy if you’re going out American in P5 or United in P6 or P7. Annoying, but it gets really dumpy when you get inside. There’s not enough room in each of the little terminals to properly handle post-9/11 security, so small security stations are dotted over the terminals with lines snaking down the corridors. Given that LAX is a major gateway to international traffic from Asia, it’s fair to compare LAX to Singapore and Beijing -- much newer airports, yes, but the LAX experience ends up looking like the 4th circle of Hell comparatively. Can’t be a great thing for the US tourism industry.</li>\r\n	<li>In the <a title=\"Podcast #109 — ‘Round the World in 8 Days; Beijing Mass Transit\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/06/07/podcast-109-round-the-world-in-8-days-beijing-mass-transit-2/\">last episode</a>, I updated my thoughts on using Twitter as a concierge service, or at least another way into airlines’ customer service groups. A couple of weeks back, the Wall Street Journal had a good <a href=\"http://online.wsj.com/articles/airlines-take-to-twitter-to-keep-world-informed-1406125253\">article</a> about airlines’ use of Twitter. They had an interesting graphic showing the differences in response times between airlines. American Airlines was the top, responding to 80% of customer queries within 15 minutes and 99% within an hour. KLM, which has made a big push into social media, was much lower, responding to 12% within 15 minutes, 64% within an hour, taking a full day to get up to 99%. Of course, as we talked about last time, it’s one thing to quickly press the button on a canned responses like United’s ubiquitous “No one dislikes delays more than us”, it’s a whole other thing to do something meaningful. Check out the detailed show notes on the TravelCommons web site for a link to the article.</li>\r\n	<li>Also in the <a title=\"Podcast #109 — ‘Round the World in 8 Days; Beijing Mass Transit\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/06/07/podcast-109-round-the-world-in-8-days-beijing-mass-transit-2/\">last episode</a>, I mentioned my big technology switch -- from my iPhone 5 to an HTC One. The main reason for the switch was battery life. I got tired of being psychotic about battery life -- stalking airport gate areas for an outlet so I could top off my battery before getting on the plane. Last month, Samsung Mobile captured that hassle perfectly in a <a href=\"youtu.be/mzMUTrTYD9s%20\">video</a> about “wall huggers”. It’s on YouTube -- I put the <a href=\"youtu.be/mzMUTrTYD9s%20\">link</a> in the show notes. Check it out. It’s painfully close to my reality with the iPhone. But not with the HTC One. The battery life is great, even with the larger screen.</li>\r\n	<li>One thing that has bitten me recently with that change is the Android version of American Airlines’ app. I always use the phone apps for boarding passes -- one less piece of paper to keep track of, one less line to stand in if I couldn’t print it at home. I’ve never had a problem until a couple of months ago. I was boarding a flight to New Orleans, put my phone on the reader, heard the beep, the gate agent waved me through, and I sat in my seat. A bit later during the boarding process, I looked at my screen again and saw that the app had refreshed and no longer showed a seat number on the boarding pass. Hmmm, that doesn’t seem good. And I was right. Somehow, my boarding must not have registered and so, 10 minutes before the flight, they flushed me as a no-show and gave my seat to a stand-by passenger. Unfortunately for her, I was in my seat, but because I didn’t have a paper boarding pass, I couldn’t prove that it was my seat. Lucky for me, the gate agent remembered me -- it was a small regional jet --and said “Oh, this happens a lot”. I kept the seat, but the flight was delayed about 15 minutes while they figured it all out. I never had that happen with American’s iPhone app, but then again, it hasn’t happened since on the Android app. Maybe they fixed in in out of the updates they pushed out, but I usually grab a paper boarding pass on American when I have the time.</li>\r\n	<li>And I don’t know about you all, but I haven\'t looked at Skymall or any of the other seat back pocket air magazines since the FAA allowed use of tablets &amp; smartphones during takeoffs and landings. I always have a book or two on my tablet -- right now I’m pounding through “The War that Ended Peace”, Margaret MacMillian’s history of the lead up to World War I. I also download the daily edition of the Chicago Tribune -- they have an HTML5 web app that shows you each page of the physical paper; you then tap an article to read it. The app is pretty good, sometimes a bit fiddly, but it lets you download the content for offline reading -- perfect for a flight. The Wall Street Journal’s Android app used to let you do the same thing and so I’d read that too, but earlier this year they “upgraded” the app and took away the ability to download a day’s paper. Still trying to think how they qualified that as an upgrade.</li>\r\n	<li>I saw a guy come onto a flight last week with a hanging suit bag. Wow! That was a throwback. Even the flight attendant looked at him kinda funny when he asked to hang it in the front closet. Which was a very typical thing -- in the ‘90’s. You’d angle for early boarding so you had a chance for hanging space in the front closet. You see guys pushing all the bags to one end so he could fit his in -- not even really needing to hang it; just staying put from the pressure of the other bags. The whole business casual trend expanded the fight -- moving it out of the front galley to the entire plane aisle with rolling bags. I can’t remember the last time I used a hanging bag. I have my cleaners fold my shirts so they’re easy to pack, and then I use them (with their cardboard inserts) to cushion the folds of my slacks so they don’t wrinkle. Even on those rare occasions when I wear a suit, I fold it and put it in my rolling bag. It’s certainly a lot easier on the shoulder and back. And just a lot less awkward. I could never figure out a really good way to carry gym shoes in my hanging bag.</li>\r\n	<li>And if you have any travel experiences -- technology or otherwise, or just general observations, thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons\">Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music — <em>Locovenido</em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/falik-dreams/\" target=\"_blank\">Falik</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong> Regional Jets Are Ruining My Life</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>One Wednesday afternoon in June, I had a particularly difficult time getting from Memphis to New Orleans. First, I felt my phone vibrate with multiple text messages while I was refueling my rental car at a particularly dicey gas station just north of the airport. I had a pretty good idea what was up -- United and TripIt were simultaneously notifying me that my flight was cancelled. I got on the phone to Amex. They were able to jam me onto a full US Air flight to Charlotte with a connection back to New Orleans. Bit of a zig zag, but OK. I returned the rental car. Just as I pulled my boarding pass out of the kiosk, I saw them update my flight -- 2 hr maintenance delay. Which would mean I’d miss the connection. I go up to the desk. Two agents -- one from USAir, one from American (I’m seeing the New American form right in front of me) -- bang on their terminal for a couple of minutes. “OK, we’ll put you in first class to DFW where you’ll connect to New Orleans” Great -- better routing with an upgrade to boot! I get to the gate. A colleague calls me. As we’re talking, I see them post a 2 hr delay -- weather in Texas -- which means I’d have 15 min for my connection if everything worked perfectly. Which it wasn’t going to because a delay with a round number -- like 2 hrs -- means they have no idea when the plane will actually leave</li>\r\n	<li>That’s it! I give! Three airlines fail me in the span of 60 minutes. I can take a hint. I wasn’t meant to fly to New Orleans today. However, I did need to get there. So I fired up Google Maps. 5½ hour drive. Fine. I have nothing else going on tonight. I load the Hertz app, book a car, and walk back out of the terminal.</li>\r\n	<li>I drive to the river front to get a decent dinner -- the food quality in Memphis airport, like the flight selection, have cratered since Delta shut down its hub operations there. While eating at the bar, I get the text from American -- the DFW flight cancelled. Now there’s a surprise.</li>\r\n	<li>The drive to New Orleans to simple, straightforward -- and dull. I-55 south through Mississippi, into Louisiana until it dead ends into I-10. Take a left. You’re in New Orleans. At least that was the plan. South of Jackson, traffic comes to a complete halt. People are getting out of their cars -- never a good sign. I get out, look around an 18-wheeler and see a 10-ft column of fire. This is not a good sign. I-55 here is 2 lanes each way with a narrow shoulder. They’re not squeezing us past that. Eventually, after making an 8-point turn, I join a line of cars heading the back north along the shoulder -- one tire on the pavement, one tire in the wet red clay. After 10 minutes, I get to a gravel crossover that I don’t think will bottom out my rental Ford. I hit the frontage road, bypass the burning car, get back on a now empty I-55 and eventually pull into my hotel at 2am. Another glorious day of travel that I’m sure will inspire envy in all my Facebook friends.</li>\r\n	<li>Now Memphis seems to be an extreme example -- a woman on my project is commuting weekly from New York and she’s yet to have an on-time, no-drama journey. Indeed, she’s spent a Thursday night in every Midwest hub city. But as airlines close hub operations in mid-size cities like Memphis and Cleveland, replacing mainline service with regional jets from smaller operators you’ve never heard -- ExpressJet or Endeavour Air -- getting to and from these cities just sucks.</li>\r\n	<li>At first, I thought it was a United problem. After all, they’d canceled my flight down to New Orleans day before, and then the next week, they delayed my flight to Columbus, OH 2 hours because the flight before it was late getting off the gate, and then once our plane got to the gate, it needed to have a wheel bearing fixed before it could travel on. I mean, at some point, why does United bother posting actual departure and arrival times? Why not just post an AM or a PM and shoot for that? It’s not too far from what they’re doing now.</li>\r\n	<li>But as I looked at the flights that were really screwing up my life, they weren’t the main United or American or Delta flights, they were the regional jets. My United flights to and from LAX last week were fine. But if I’d been flying a regional jet, I would’ve had a problem on the return leg. The original plane had a mechanical issue -- remember, this is United -- but they were able to get a replacement, so we left LAX on time and even got into ORD early. If it had been United Express by, say, GoJet, I would’ve been scrambling after yet another cancelled flight because they don’t have spare jets.</li>\r\n	<li>I’m 5,000 miles away from hitting a million miles on United (I have over 2.5 million on American), but sitting at the bar that night in Memphis having dinner before my ill-fated drive, I tweeted out of pure frustration -- “Really @united? Two cancelled flights in two days? I\'ll never hit 1M miles when you cancel every flight I\'m on…” To which, of course, they pressed the button on reply #76 -- “No one dislikes flight cancellations more than we do. Do you need help with rebooking? Thanks.” My response the next morning -- “Unless you too had to drive 5+ hrs and get to your destination at 2am, you can\'t hate flight cancellations more than me…” No response… except from Dan, a longtime TravelCommons listener who chimed in -- “Sounds like an upcoming podcast topic”. Indeed it is, Dan. Some good had to come of it...</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music — <em>Just Don’t</em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/liebig-severed/\" target=\"_blank\">Lie Big</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Visas Hassles</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Over the past couple of episodes I’ve been talking about my Asian travels -- to India and China -- which has forced me to become knowledgeable about something that doesn’t often affect US travelers -- visas.</li>\r\n	<li>When US travelers decide to cross their border, if they have a passport, they’re typically good to go. When I checked Wikipedia yesterday, US passport holders <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_requirements_for_United_States_citizens\">can visit</a> 174 countries without having to buy a visa in advance, tied at the top of the “travel freedom” ranking with Germany, Sweden, United Kingdom, and Finland.</li>\r\n	<li>But this seemed to be the year for visas for me. My son doing a semester abroad in China, then us visiting him in the Spring, and then me going to India on business a couple of months ago. I just slipped out of another trip to China -- business this time, but I figured I’d risk it since my tourist visa is valid until next Spring.</li>\r\n	<li>If you live in a major city -- New York, DC, LA, Chicago -- it’s not too bad because most of the big visa-requiring countries have consulates there. Otherwise, you’re mailing your passport away, or paying extra for a courier service. And paying to fly to the consulate for an interview if you don’t have a plain vanilla visa application -- like anyone of Pakistani descent applying for an Indian visa.</li>\r\n	<li>But even walking to the consulates, like I can do in Chicago, is not always so straightforward. Research is important. Hitting the consulate web site, know their hours and what paperwork they require. Our visit for my son’s Chinese student visa was amazingly smooth. We had all the paperwork, had it organized, knew the consulate closed for lunch, so we showed up early. Boom, boom, boom -- we were in and out in 30 minutes. Four days later, we went back, paid, and picked up his passport with his visa.</li>\r\n	<li>Getting visas for our visit to Beijing in March was less smooth. There was a little hiccup in the application. Their website said we needed proof of a return flight and hotel reservations. I had all that, all organized. But what wasn’t clear on the website was that I needed a copy for each visa. I’d printed out one copy of the hotel reservation for the one room that the three of us were staying in. I needed three copies -- one for each application. I’m not the first one who’d made that mistake. The woman pointed to the copying machine. Luckily, I had a pocket full of change.</li>\r\n	<li>Picking them up was also a bit more of a hassle. First, because it was Spring Break season, there were a number of teachers picking up batches of passports for school trips. I think the guy two positions in front of me had 50 passports. A minor inconvenience -- until their credit card machine broke. The web site was adamant -- no personal checks, no cash accepted; just credit cards or cashier’s checks. And how many people know where to get a cashiers check anymore. So everything came to a screeching halt. “We’ll take cash if you have it,” one of the women said. But I didn’t bring any because it’s $140 a head -- $420 for all of us. I look at my watch -- it’s just about closing time. I ask the guard, “Will you let me back in if I make a run down to the ATM for some cash?” “Make it quick,” he said. I sprint down, around the corner, tap out the cash machine, and sprint back up. The guard lets me back in even though he’d locked the doors for the day. Everyone’s sorta milling around, not knowing what to do. The guy who had been in front of me was there to pick up 10 visas. No way he was coming up with $1,400 in cash quickly. I politely make my way to the window. “Cash?” I ask, giving her the fresh stack of ATM 20’s. She counts them twice, gives me my passports and I’m on my way.</li>\r\n	<li>But this was nothing compared to the cluster that was the Indian visa process. Which was a real surprise to me because four years ago, when I went for my last Indian visa, it was the pinnacle of efficiency -- I dropped everything off at 8am and at 5pm received a text that my passport was ready for pickup. Impressive. Phenomenal. I used to rave about it. Not so much any more.</li>\r\n	<li>But based on last time, I thought this would be simple. I put all the documents together and, because I was traveling, had my wife take it downtown for me. “No worries,” I said, “Drop it off, do some shopping, grab lunch, and it should be done”. 10am my wife calls me -- “They need your flight reservations”. “I haven’t made them yet,” I told her, “They specifically say on their website not to book flights until you get the visa.” “Hold on,” she said and talked to the clerk. “Yeah, I guess things have changed. She’ll hold onto your application until you e-mail her your flight info. Oh, and she’s going to charge you another $30 for an expedite fee.” “Wait,” I said, “according to the website, I’m OK on their deadlines -- I shouldn’t need them to expedite.” “Hold on,” she said again. “Yeah, I guess those deadlines have changed too.” Unfortunately, I was only able to get a 1 year visa. If this visa expires before my next trip, I think I’ll send one of my staff in my place. I think I need to introduce some other Americans to the fine art of applying for visas.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917626811171154.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #110</li>\r\n	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org\">ccMixter</a></li>\r\n	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_110.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #110 — Regional Jets Ruining My Life; Visa Hassles','','inherit','open','open','','1359-revision-v1','','','2015-08-26 23:04:05','2015-08-27 04:04:05','',1359,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/08/26/1359-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1542,1,'2015-10-11 22:18:06','2015-10-12 03:18:06','[caption id=\"attachment_1554\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/2015-09-03-15.12.36.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1554\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/2015-09-03-15.12.36-300x200.jpg\" alt=\"Did The Pope Have This Problem?\" width=\"300\" height=\"200\"></a> Did The Pope Have This Problem?[/caption]\n\nApologies in advance because this is pretty much a stream-of-consciousness episode, with semi-strung together thoughts&nbsp;about eggs, car rentals, seeing the Pope, travel food, and stuff from my September trip to Scotland. &nbsp;I talk about how handy I found the new <a href=\"https://revolut.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Revolut</a> service for&nbsp;spending and sending money in Europe; recent good and bad experiences with <a href=\"https://www.hertz.com/rentacar/emember/join/overview.do?learnMore=presidentsCircle\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Hertz </a>and other car rentals; most bad experience with <a href=\"http://britishairways.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">British Airways</a>;&nbsp;and how true-to-life&nbsp;the <a href=\"https://youtu.be/2JqRXLQYF9o\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Doritos Super Bowl commercial</a> portrays the Southwest boarding experience. &nbsp;All this and more at the&nbsp;<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_117.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n<!--more-->\n\n<hr>\n\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #117:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you from TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. I was trying to do this from the Bally’s Casino in Las Vegas where I was earlier in the week, but it just didn’t work out. I was there for business, not pleasure, but I always feel that I should stay in a casino hotel when in Vegas. I dunno, staying in a Westin or Marriott up by the convention center just doesn’t feel Vegas. When I was here last year for a business convention I stayed in the MGM Grand. Years ago, though, when I’d do regular booth duty at technology shows, I would always stay at Mandalay Bay, which I really liked.</li>\n 	<li>The more I know about hotels, the more I’m impressed by Vegas hotel operations. Caesars, the MGM Grand, Mandalay Bay -- they’re huge mini-cities -- orders of magnitude bigger than couple-hundred room hotels I’d stay at in Denver or New Orleans. And yet the service, the execution is almost always way better than those smaller hotels. If you’re any sort of an operations nerd, you gotta give ‘em a nod. Though on the other hand, when you head to the gym at 6am and pass by the old guy dragging on a cigarette playing the quarter slots, it kinda makes you wish they were a little less good...</li>\n 	<li>As I mentioned in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/08/26/podcast-116-traveling-thru-japan-luggage-trends/\">the last episode</a>, the big travel for me was at the beginning of September when we were in Scotland for 2 weeks getting my daughter situated at Univ of St Andrews. Now while I say “getting my daughter situated,” there were equal parts getting my wife situated with the idea of her youngest child being an ocean away -- a big difference from when my son was 90 minutes up the road in Milwaukee.</li>\n 	<li>The following week’s travel had a nice difficulty factor. Weds morning, I flew from Chicago to DC for the papal Mass on the campus of my alma mater, Catholic University of America, and then back to Detroit that evening for meetings first thing Thursday morning. The difficulty factor was my luggage. No back packs, no selfie sticks, so certainly no roller bags were getting through the security checkpoints. Finding a checked luggage place is a real challenge anymore. I thought about checking my bag into my DCA-DTW flight, but I was too early -- 8 hours prior to flight time max. There is a checked baggage place at Union Station -- DC’s train station -- which is conveniently located a couple of stops south of Catholic on the Metro Red Line.</li>\n 	<li>Freed of my baggage, I emerged from the Brookland Metro Stop to an unbelievable combination of people and fencing. Incredibly long lines of people corralled in by what had to be miles of fences. I was lucky; I somehow got into a quick security line -- only 45 minutes. After finding my seating section, the gates were closed and we were sealed in our sections until the Pope arrived and did a couple of laps around campus in the Popemobile. After Mass started, they opened up the gates again. Which was great, because while the music and the liturgy were top notch, I wasn’t queuing up for communion with 25,000 other folks. After the homily, I was one of the trickle of folks making an early exit to beat the rush. I had a flight to catch. I’m sure the Pope understood.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>One Day</em> by <a href=\"http://www.hollowhorse.co.uk/\">Hollow Horse</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>OK, just as a warning, this section is going to ramble on for a while. I have a random walk of comments/opinions that I just can’t seem to synthesize into &nbsp;coherent topics. So here it goes...</li>\n 	<li>First stop in the mail bag, I was pleasantly surprised to receive this audio comment from Linda Martin of the Indie Travel Podcast\n<ul>\n 	<li>Linda, thanks for that. The thing with eggs -- you can tell I’ve thought about this way too much -- it’s a trade-off between good eggs and time. It takes time for a cooked-to-order egg, but in the morning, I don’t often have that time. Usually, I’ve worked out; I’m cooling down during breakfast, then hitting the shower and off to work. When I stayed in one of the Renaissance Hotels in New Orleans, they didn’t have a separate executive lounge. Breakfast was served in the restaurant. They had the typical lounge buffet set up, but you could also order off the menu, which I think I did once in a dozen stays. It was a nice egg, but it took an extra 10 min that usually wasn’t in my morning schedule. Definitely a 1st World problem</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Lisa Walls wrote on the TravelCommons Facebook Wall\n<ul>\n 	<li>“Hey Mark, I love your podcast, especially the comments on food and craft beers. Other than the Altoids, do you carry any food in your briefcase, such as protein bars? I am always looking for something that is shelf stable that tastes good and travels well.”</li>\n 	<li>Lisa, thanks for the note. I usually keep 1-2 KIND bars in the bottom of my bag. The fruit-&amp;-nut ones seem to hold up to weeks of getting crushed by my PC power supply. They’re also not too sweet the way some other granola and power bars are.</li>\n 	<li>I know I’m about to lose any foodie cred I may have built up over the years, but I gotta say that, for me, the McDonald\'s grilled chicken Snack Wraps are just about the right amount of food to cover a 2-hour flight. They’re quick to buy, and compact to bring on board and eat. I find it tough to manage a salad while sitting in a center seat.</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>I’m not sure if I mentioned this last episode, but I’m flying Southwest on this week’s Vegas-Denver-Chicago trip to click over A-list status. It kinda crept up on me -- I don’t typically fly SW enough to make status, but apparently I have this year. As near as I can tell, this means I won’t have to pay the $12.50 Early Bird fee or be staring at my Southwest app exactly 24 hours before flight time in order to get a decent boarding position. Which, as we all know, is critical on Southwest since there’s no assigned seating. An A or early B boarding group number is necessary for an aisle seat. On my Vegas flight, hitting the “Check In” button maybe 2 seconds after the 24-hour window got me B 7, so I got an aisle seat in the back half of the plane. It was a full flight, so after that, I was living last year’s Super Bowl Doritos commercial -- looking down, trying to avoid eye contact with potentially bad seat mates while looking friendly to attract good ones. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://youtu.be/2JqRXLQYF9o\">link</a> to the commercial. It’s spot on.</li>\n 	<li>In the last episode, I talked about travel amateurs clogging up the PreCheck lanes. These would be people getting PreCheck as part of the TSA’s “Managed Inclusion” program, where they randomly shunt travelers over to PreCheck to balance screening line loads. This to the utter frustration of travelers who paid $85 for PreCheck screening or $100 for Global Entry. You might recall long-time listener Rich Fraser saying he was getting PreCheck about 75% of the time so why should he pay? But now the TSA says they’re throttling back on “Managed Inclusion”, driven at least in part by the publicity generated by auditors finding that travelers on various watch lists were being given PreCheck. I’ve certainly noticed the length of PreCheck lines dropping.</li>\n 	<li>Also in the last episode, I talked about luggage trends. One trend that sorta hit the cutting room floor is the move to fully rotating twirly wheels. Certainly handy in getting your luggage down a tight airplane aisle, but to my eye, most of them look a bit tinier, a bit flimsier than the standard roller-blade style wheel partially embedded in the back of the suitcase. The twirly wheels don’t seem rugged enough to survive getting pulled down Manhattan sidewalks or some of the ruts in New Orleans. And to allow full rotation, the wheels stick out of the bottom of the suitcase making the bag longer. This tripped up my wife on our flight from EDI to LHR. The BA gate agent asked my wife to put her bag in the luggage sizer. It would’ve fit -- except for the twirly wheels. Now we have to gate check it -- which means standing off to the side of the gate pulling some stuff out, transferring it into her shoulder bag. Understandable -- until we get on the plane and see it’s a half-full 767 and there are fully empty luggage bins. Really? So as is my wont, I vented my frustration on Twitter rather than any BA employees. BA’s social media department responded pretty quickly saying they needed to check all luggage to be fair to all passengers. But how would allowing a bag that was, at most, an inch over-long because of its twirly wheels on a half-full flight with empty overheads cheat any other passengers? It’s an over-officiousness that just doesn’t make sense. And it’s the reason I avoid BA now whenever possible. Which is a real shame, because back in the early ‘90’s when I was doing a lot of travel to Europe, I prefered BA. But that was 20 years ago and, it seems, a different BA.</li>\n 	<li>There is another reason I avoid BA -- officiousness <i>and</i> Heathrow. Again, another thing I loved in the ‘90’s, I now avoid whenever possible. Heathrow is a complete nightmare. You land, you trundle along through corridors, down escalators, into a bus, get a tour of the Heathrow back alleys, stop at another terminal, fight through security again, and then end up in the midst of a packed retail space where you wander through the shops because there’s no place to sit. It’s gotten to the point that I’ll fly the extra hour to connect through Frankfurt or Amsterdam just to avoid Heathrow. We were doing this St Andrews trip on AA miles. We were fine on the way out -- ORD-JFK-EDI all on AA. But coming back, it was EDI-LHR-ORD with the first leg on BA. Just ugh! I still keep thinking about how to get something out of my 300K BA Avios miles. Maybe I’ll make my daughter fly BA.</li>\n 	<li>On a brighter note, I tried a new financial service during this trip and it worked really well. It’s called Revolut -- as in Revolution cut a bit short. It’s a FinTech start up based in the UK that gives you a virtual and real debit card with really great exchange rates. As with all the cool start-ups nowadays, everything is done through a smartphone app -- which, to stow the snark for a second, makes a lot of sense for any travel app. I opened an account before I left and funded it with $200 from my regular ATM/debit card. I could then convert my dollars to pounds or euros at what appeared to be just about the market rate -- there didn’t seem to be a lot of margin taken on the buy or sell sides. I also instantly had a virtual debit card with which I could use those new pounds or euros to buy things on the web -- like train tickets or top up a phone card. I then requested a physical version of my card, which took about a week to show up from the UK. Now I had a proper European chip-&amp;-pin card that I could use at an ATM or, say, the self-serve checkout line at Tesco’s without waiting for a clerk to take my signed receipt. It only hiccuped one at the Costa coffee shop in St Andrews; I still don’t know why. Poking around a bit more, I found that I could send pounds to my daughter’s RBS account with a day or so lag. Now, none of this functionality is necessarily new, though being able to do it all through a slick smartphone app is very handy. The real innovation is the cost. Funding my Revolut account from my debit card cost me less than 1% -- less than $2 for the $200 transfer, which is cheaper than most non-network ATM fees. After that, no transaction fees to move money between currencies or to withdraw. Compare that to hitting a foreign ATM with your US card. My personal bank is very reasonable, only charging me Visa’s 1% transaction fee, but many big banks will hit you with a $5 non-network fee on top of any transaction fees. And then transferring money to my daughter’s account -- wire transfers can cost $25-30. Revolut has well-packaged functionality delivered at the lowest costs I’ve seen. I don’t know how long they’ll keep this price point, but right now, it’s the best deal I’ve seen for money needed for international travel. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://revolut.com/\">link</a> to the Revolut web site.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. &nbsp;The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Clear My Head</em> by <a href=\"http://www.thefiasco.net/\">FIASCO</a></li>\n</ul>\n<b>Random Thoughts about Car Rentals</b>\n<ul>\n 	<li>I guess I could’ve cut two or three comments out of the last segment and labeled them “Random Comments about My Scotland Trip” but that just seems entire too gratuitous. But I have been collecting car rental experiences in my TravelCommons Evernote drop file and I think I now have enough for make up a topic -- or at least what might marginally pass for a topic</li>\n 	<li>As I’ve mentioned in past episodes, I really don’t like to rent cars. I much prefer to use rail or a cab in from the airport and then walk to where ever I need to go. That works well in New York or Chicago or San Francisco, not so much in Denver or Detroit. So I’ve been renting a lot of cars over the past 6 months.</li>\n 	<li>So many in fact that Hertz bumped my status up to President\'s Circle. Not quite sure that gets me, but it sounds status-y. Though right after my congratulatory e-mail, I found a dumpy Toyota Corolla in my Hertz Gold spot, so maybe it’s not anything special.</li>\n 	<li>But in times like those -- when I get assigned the 45,000-mile Toyota with crumbs still in the driver seat, or a Ford F-150 king cab pick up truck in Boston (?) -- I’ve come to love Hertz Gold Choice. If you rent a mid-size or above -- and for our corporate rate, the price of a compact and mid-size are the same -- you can go to the Choice aisle and take one of those cars instead. I left the dumpy Toyota and took a new Nissan instead.</li>\n 	<li>I have started to make note of differences in service <i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">and</span></i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> attitude across locations. I never rent from Hertz at Detroit airport anymore. I’ve yet to get a non-dumpy car there and the attitude is not great. Though I think Hertz’s Newark station is the worst. A recent example -- a colleague was driving his car toward the lot exit when a low tire pressure alarm lit up. So he asked the guy at the exit gate where he could get some air to top off the tire. “Try a gas station,” the attendant told him. That was helpful.</span></li>\n 	<li>I’ve had challenges with car rental web sites -- Hertz, Avis -- when my pick-up or drop off time didn’t match the hours of the office I selected. I get the error notice and then when I go back to try another site or time, these websites will randomly select another date or location. I had this happen to me in Edinburgh on the second car we rented. We were training from Lockerbie back to Edinburgh where we’d done 4 days of biking while our daughter was going through freshman orientation. I’d booked a car on Hertz’s web site to pick up at the train station and drop off at EDI 5 days later. It took me 5 tries to get it right -- each time I re-started, it reset the pick-up location from Waverly Station to EDI. And each time I’d correct it. Except, it seems, the last time. When we arrived in Waverly, there was no car. I looked at the res -- pick up at EDI. Ugh. Not the end of the world -- we could’ve taken the new light rail out to EDI, but it was aggravating. I searched through the Hertz.co.uk website for a phone number -- that itself being a little extra helping of aggravation -- and called the res center. The woman on the other end was inordinately calm and helpful. 3 minutes later, she’d moved my pick-up to Waverly. I thanked her -- a lot. I should’ve booked with her instead of the website.</li>\n 	<li>We rented our first car in Edinburgh from Enterprise. It was a great car -- a Fiat 500 L. All the bags fit easily in the hatchback. Nice nav, nice sound system, clean.... &nbsp;Drove to a near-by shopping mall -- grabbed a coffee at Starbucks and phone SIMs at the ee store. Next stop, IKEA to buy things we didn’t pack -- like towels and hangers. Coming off the motorway, through a traffic circle, the clutch crapped out. I’d put it in gear, let out the clutch pedal, nothing. 3 hours later after Enterprise, the auto club and Fiat scrummed about who was supposed to pick up the car, the tow truck dropped us back off at EDI where the Enterprise folks apologized profusely and gave us an even nicer Nissan. A couple of weeks, I noticed the Pope used a Fiat 500L to drive from Andrews Airforce Base to the Vatican Embassy. The next day, though, he was in a Jeep Popemobile. I could sympathize.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a title=\"MP3 Download\" href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/download_track.php?id=0E74C6FEB7390D18D02B4B399668093172F6C8CC66DDC09D90A3BF7DDA436823CFAC859AE2B2C73E46A278A4950E1030\">Lonely Dog Blues</a></em> by <a title=\"Tobin James\' Web Site\" href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/label.php?id=2A3449F03E7B8462FF74407B60F0C4B0A30A0CBE880C61DE37E3B342387F0643\">Tobin James</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #117</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/\">Podshow Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_117.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #117 — Random Thoughts About Eggs, Scotland & Car Rentals','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-117-random-thoughts-about-eggs-scotland-car-rentals','','','2021-10-28 17:31:46','2021-10-28 22:31:46','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=1542',0,'post','',3),
(1543,1,'2015-10-11 19:00:38','2015-10-12 00:00:38','Back behind the microphone after an extended summer break highlighted by a two-week family vacation in Japan. We talk about traveling in Japan. It was a fantastic time, though we were lost without translation at times. But with the US dollar buying 124 yen, it was the right time to go. We also talk about frustration in using frequent flier miles, trends toward prettier and higher tech luggage, and a connoisseur of scrambled eggs. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_117.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/221084023\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #117:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, after a <i>long </i>absence. Let’s call it summer vacation. And there was a nice bit of vacation there -- 2 weeks in Japan with the family. People would ask me “Have you been to Japan before?” Never outside of Narita. Which I translated to an answer of “Mostly no” before my trip, and updated to a plain “No” after my trip. But more on that later.</li>\r\n	<li>Over the years, I’ve gotten into the habit of leaving the country if I want a real vacation. I find the disconnection process works much better I’m more than 5  time zones removed from home. Europe is 6 or 7 hours ahead -- pretty good. But the 14 hour difference between Chicago and Tokyo -- that’s real separation.</li>\r\n	<li>You can’t unplug for 2 weeks for free, though. It takes a bit of planning, and in my case, a good bit of travel -- both before and after the trip.</li>\r\n	<li>The 6 business days before my flight to Tokyo had me in Nashville, Detroit, Dallas, and the day before I left, Denver. I flew out Sunday night, flew home Monday night, and then left for Japan Tuesday noon. Coming back, we hit ORD 3:30 Sunday afternoon only to find myself back there 15 hours later for the first flight back out to Denver Monday morning. I was just happy that it was a short week for the 4th of July holiday.</li>\r\n	<li>Since then, I’ve been keeping up the Denver-Dallas triangulation with the occasional random jump to somewhere like Detroit. I’ll probably keep it up through August since the beginning of September will have me out of the country again -- to Edinburgh, helping my daughter settle in at <a href=\"http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/\">University of St Andrews</a>. After that, I may just sleep until October.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://ghosts.nin.com/main/home\"><em>3 Ghosts I</em></a> by <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Nine Inch Nails\" href=\"http://www.nin.com/\" rel=\"homepage\">Nine Inch Nails</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>So that was the start of the <a href=\"https://blog.stackexchange.com/2015/06/stack-exchange-podcast-65-the-word-has-two-meanings-you-see/\">Stack Exchange Podcast</a> where Joel Spolsky goes pretty much non-linear over his attempt to use frequent flier miles.</li>\r\n	<li>Any attempt to use frequent flier miles will be a frustrating exercise. My recent attempts to do <i>anything</i>with the 300,000 BA Avios miles is own personal exercise in masochism. But, to be honest, I’ve had pretty good luck this year, getting 2 flights down to New Orleans on Southwest, 4 direct flights from and from Tokyo with UA Mileage Plus and 3 flights between ORD and Edinburgh on American. Now, it wasn’t a complete cakewalk -- on SW, my wife and daughter took a 6am flight back on Monday, on UA, we had to come home a couple of days earlier than we had originally planned while on AA it’s a day later. But flexibility has always been a requirement to use frequent flyer miles. And those minor shifts are a whole lot better than my exercise with BA which only offered me one day in the entire month of September that I could use Avios miles to get to Edinburgh. I’m not sure there’s a more useless awards program.</li>\r\n	<li>When I first started looking for Chicago to Edinburgh flights, I went straight to Hipmunk.com. It has been my go-to flight search tool for a while now. It’s easy -- it defaults to flight search, unlike Expedia’s push for bundled deals or Orbitz pushing hotels. And graphical display -- bars for each flight showing flight duration spread across the day -- makes it very easy to focus on the flights you’re most interested in. But when searching for Edinburgh flights, I spotted something new -- right under the red Virgin Atlantic bar was a purple one labeled “Mystery”. Kinda like Priceline’s unnamed hotels you bid for. But I’d never seen what the travel industry calls “opaque pricing” on Hipmunk before. Of course, it wasn’t really that opaque. Clicking on the bar revealed the flight details -- a 4:40pm departure with an hour connection in Madrid. Hmmm, let’s see. Only Iberia flies from ORD to MAD. Doing a quick search, I found the times did indeed match Iberia flight number 345 -- which Hipmunk only slightly masked as Mystery Airline #345. Must’ve been an experiment, because I haven’t seen it since, but I did get a good chuckle out of it.</li>\r\n	<li>A colleague who I met up with on one of my Detroit trips flew Spirit Airline for the first time and <i>didn’t</i> get much of a chuckle. It was a last-minute meeting. He was flying in from Kansas City and, following the rules by using the mandated American Express Travel website to book his flight, he saw a Spirit flight that was significantly less than other carriers. Being a good corporate citizen, he booked it. He showed up at the ticket counter to get his boarding pass. “You gonna carry that one?” the Spirit agent asked him, pointing to his suitcase. “Of course,” he said. “That’ll cost you $55. And that briefcase doesn’t look like it’ll fit under the seat, so that’s another $55.” Pretty quickly, the price difference that led him to book Spirit disappeared in the smoke of carryon charges. Some might say it’s his fault for not knowing Spirit’s uniquely aggressive add-on fee structure -- what Spirit calls “bundling”. But I’d say it’s Amex’s fault -- for displaying Spirit’s base fare (without carryon fees) in the same ways as they display Delta’s or Southwest’s. And then marking those higher, but more inclusive, fares as being “out of policy” because they’re higher, and requiring additional steps to justify booking them. More power to Spirit to differentiate themselves with a unique fee structure, but Amex and the like need to do their job and let business travelers know what they’re in for when they book those low fares.</li>\r\n	<li>Rich Fraser did saw my PreCheck frustration spill over to Twitter.\r\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" lang=\"en\">\r\n<p dir=\"ltr\" lang=\"en\">Folks, it\'s a *metal* detector! Large chunks of metal in your pocket - cell phones, car keys, $5 worth of quarters - *will* set it off</p>\r\n— Mark Peacock (@mpeacock) <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/623113695426670592\">July 20, 2015</a></blockquote>\r\n<script src=\"//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js\" async=\"\" charset=\"utf-8\"></script>I don’t know if it’s summer travel amateurs hitting the PreCheck lottery, but I’ve been stunned at the number of people who look amazed when the metal detector alarms when they try to walk through with a slug of metal in their pockets. Mobile phone, big electronic key fobs, two fistfuls of change… I mean, what part of “metal detector” do they not get? It’s doing it’s job! But people will stand there, dumbfounded, they can’t stroll through wearing the quarter-pound of metal and electronics that is an iPhone. I hate to be a snob, but I beginning to think they need to split PreCheck between the veterans who paid for it and the occasional random selectees. To which Rich mentioned that it’s not so occasional for him -- he’s gotten Pre on 3 of his last 4 trips. So, he says, why pay for it? Hey, as long as he remembers to take his mobile phone and car keys out of his pocket, I say, more power to him.</li>\r\n	<li>I’ve probably mentioned this before, but I think one of the absolute best airport restaurants is Rick Bayless’ <a href=\"http://www.rickbayless.com/restaurants/tortas-frontera/\">Torta Frontera</a> in the American, United and International terminals at ORD. The tortas, the Mexican sandwiches, are fantastic -- great local ingredients and made-to-order. Being made-to-order is key to the great taste and texture, but it’s 10 minutes from the time you order and at ORD rush hour, you can stand in line for 10 minutes before you get to the counter. Great restaurant -- and popular. So I was cautiously excited last week when I saw they had a new ordering app. I was catching an evening flight to DTW and decided to check out the app. I downloaded and set up the app after parking in the deck -- created an account and loaded a credit card. Then, while in the PreCheck line, I scrolled through the menu and loaded the shopping cart with a Cubana, my favorite torta. I was going to hit the Order Now button, but the TSA guys were a little too efficient, waving 3 of us forward at once. So, I hit Order a couple of minutes later on the other side of the X-Ray machine. I quickly received an e-mail “Thanks for your order, we’ll let you know when it’s ready”. That’s it. No ETA, no typical wait time. Hmmm… I walk down to the T3 Tortas -- longest line I’ve seen. Hmmm…  Just then, I get a second e-mail -- 7 minutes after the first -- “You order will be ready at 5:43pm” -- 10 minutes from now. OK, not bad given this line. I walk to the rest room, browse the bookstore across the hall, and put myself in front of the order pick-up station at 5:43pm. About a minute later, the woman calls out “Anybody order on-line?” Two of us step up. “Mark?” I reach out and take my bag. The pre-order worked well, though next time, I’ll let the TSA guy wait for a minute while I hit the Order button a bit sooner.</li>\r\n	<li>All the way back in April 2012, I wrote a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/04/21/best-hotel-amenity-free-breakfast/\">blog post</a> about free breakfast being the best hotel amenity.  (I had to do a good bit of scrolling on the TravelCommons website to find it -- I’ll save you that with a link in the show notes). It’s still true, even though, it’s, as I wrote back then, it’s more about convenience than food quality -- especially when you’re grabbing that breakfast in the concierge lounge of a Marriott or Sheraton or Westin. And it kinda turns you into a connoisseur of scrambled eggs. A buddy and I got into this conversation a few weeks back -- comparing the quality of scrambled eggs across hotels we’ve stayed at.  We concluded that the most typical consistency was firm, almost quiche like. We liked them with a bit of cheese mixed in to give them a bit of flavor (neither of us are vegan). Every once in a great while, you get great scrambled eggs -- soft curds, slightly moist. But you definitely don’t want them runny -- there’s nothing more disgusting at 6am than tilting back that warming tray clamshell lid and seeing scrambled eggs sitting in a pool of yellowish liquid. We’ll go for hard dry over swimming in yellow eggs every morning. But hard dry bacon, now that’s just wrong</li>\r\n	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/buy_album.php?id=08E508A6096F11910641E13331B70EED6DFA5BB929282F731E19BBAFA8F08FFD686BD99DD86BA0D5E844DD5536E1AEFB\" rel=\"nofollow\"><em>Ghost Hardware</em></a> by Burial</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Traveling Thru Japan</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>The family and I have done a fair bit of travel in Asia -- Thailand, Singapore, Vietnam, Hong Kong, China -- which left two big holes -- Japan and Korea. We filled one of them this summer when we spent two weeks visiting Tokyo, Kyoto, and Osaka. Japan had always been on our list to visit, but its reputation for high prices always gave us an excuse to put it off and go some place where we could stretch our dollars further. But with the dollar buying ¥124 and then scoring 4 direct ORD-NRT tickets on United Mileage Plus awards, this seemed the time.</li>\r\n	<li>Now as long time listeners know, this won’t be a travelog, a list of things to see in Tokyo or Kyoto -- I leave that to friends like Chris Christensen of the <a href=\"http://asia.amateurtraveler.com/tag/japan/\">Amateur Travelers podcast</a>. Since I always say that this podcast is more about the journey than the destination, let’s talk about travel in Japan.</li>\r\n	<li>As my family and I tend to do on our trips, our only trips to the airport were coming and going to the US. Everything else was on train. Which in Japan works very well. My wife bought us 2-week Japan Rail (JR) passes before we left. It wasn’t a small number for the 4 of us, but they paid off over our trip -- allowing us unlimited use of the high-speed bullet trains, even to reserve seats for a bit more relaxed boarding.</li>\r\n	<li>We broke the passes in on the Narita Express, the hour ride from the airport to Tokyo Station. I’m not sure they could’ve put Narita any further out. Given the distance, everyone takes the train or a bus. The train was fine, kinda like the Heathrow Express but without the TV screens. It worked with a minimum amount of fuss -- which was a good thing after a 12-hour flight.</li>\r\n	<li>We really hammered the JR passes to train among Tokyo, Kyoto, and Osaka, all less than 3-hour trips. Some of the stations were huge and there were times when we had to lean in to thread through the crowds of commuters. But the signage was pretty good and the trains absolutely met their reputation for timeliness (if only airlines in the US were half as timely…). And while JR would roll a food cart while on the rails, we got a bit more into the Japanese train culture and stocked up at the train station food courts before we left -- bento boxes, rice cakes, and of course, train beers -- Kirin tall boys usually. And if we didn’t have time to hit the food court, we could always grab something from the vending machines -- which were positioned about every 20 feet on the train platform. The vending machine thing in Japan is intense -- but convenient.</li>\r\n	<li>We didn’t just train point-to-point between the major stations. A lot of times it was a smaller train to the main station, then the high-speed train, then connecting to again to a smaller train. The HyperDia smartphone app came highly recommended and the free version was great when planning out these connecting journeys -- both inter-city and within Tokyo where a trip across town might span a couple of rail companies, say Tokyo Metro to a JR train. It also displays the fare, which is very handy, avoiding the need to try and decipher the rate table while in front of the fare machine with a queue building behind you. The public transit tab on Google Maps also worked surprisingly well.</li>\r\n	<li>Being able to use these apps when you really need them requires mobile data for your phone. You don’t want to be trying to search for an open WiFi access point before figuring out which train you’re connecting to. Which, in Japan, like so many things, isn’t exactly straightforward. As a tourist, you can only buy data SIMs; no voice capabilities. One of my go-to websites -- the aptly, but somewhat awkwardly named <a href=\"http://prepaid-data-sim-card.wikia.com/wiki/Japan\">Prepaid Data SIM Card Wiki</a> -- came through again. Before we left, I ordered a b-mobile SIM to be delivered to our first hotel -- the Marriott Courtyard in the Ginza District -- and then I bought another -- Japan Travel SIM -- from the Tourist Information Center at Tokyo Station. The lack of local voice wasn’t a huge inconvenience for us -- we were communicating via e-mail with hotels and apartment rentals -- but it still seemed a little weird.</li>\r\n	<li>The one thing that pulled me up short was the limited amount of signage in the Latin alphabet. I’m OK with the Japanese names when phonetically rendered in Latin characters, but I’m not so hot on reading kanji or kana. We wrestled with this our first morning in Tokyo at the Tsukiji Fish Market. My wife had a list of sushi restaurant recommendations -- all of which were Japanese names in Latin script; all the restaurant signs were in kanji. And then at a Kyoto ramen restaurant, where you buy tickets for your food from a machine and then hand them across the counter to the cook, having only kanji on the machine buttons without pictures, made ordering a bit of a challenge. It got me thinking back to my trip last year to Beijing -- I didn’t recall having the same level of challenge there.</li>\r\n	<li>What made this all work is that just about all of the Japanese people we ran into were the nicest, the most welcoming people. I was constantly struck at how many people would strike up a conversation -- asking where we’re from, helping us with Ramen machines, shouting “Welcome to Japan” while riding by on a bike, volunteering to walk us across train stations to help us with connections. I’m not sure I’ve experienced that consistent level of engagement from random strangers anywhere else. Of course, some of it could get a slightly embarrassing, like the group of middle school kids who wanted a picture with me. Or my daughter who regularly would get tagged by Japanese girls for pictures. We had that experience often in Beijing, but there, when we were often the lone white people, it was understandable. Having that same thing happen in Japan -- more Westernized, more white people wandering around -- that surprised us. In Arashiyama, a pretty touristy area on the west side of Kyoto, we were flagged down by 3 middle school teachers who video’d us answering their question about why we chose to visit this town. They told us that they taught English and wanted to show their classes native English speakers. OK, makes sense, but with all videos on YouTube, I wasn’t quite sure why they wanted a video of us.</li>\r\n	<li>But that being said, except for the signage, Japan was one of the easier countries we’ve traveled in. And maybe, with a couple more revs of Google Translate, even that barrier will get smoothed away.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a title=\"MP3 Download\" href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/download_track.php?id=0E74C6FEB7390D18D02B4B399668093172F6C8CC66DDC09D90A3BF7DDA436823CFAC859AE2B2C73E46A278A4950E1030\">Lonely Dog Blues</a></em> by <a title=\"Tobin James\' Web Site\" href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/label.php?id=2A3449F03E7B8462FF74407B60F0C4B0A30A0CBE880C61DE37E3B342387F0643\">Tobin James</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Luggage Trends</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>I think it was when I was grabbing our luggage off the carousel in ORD, returning from Spain with our luggage full of wine and olive oil. I picked up my wife’s red bag and was struck at how tatty the fabric had become. I set it down in front of her and said “That’s become embarrassing. I’m not sure I can travel with that bag again”</li>\r\n	<li>Now it’s not that I have a styling bag. It’s stock Swiss Army black roller still bearing Vietnamese customs stickers from 2008. I had retired it in favor of a grey Samsonite bag, but had to pull it back out when the Samsonite’s wheels got wonky -- the rubber wore off and the wheels splayed out after 2.5 years of pulling it across New Orleans sidewalks.</li>\r\n	<li>I’m seeing more hardshell rollers in non-black colors -- burgundy, yellow, floral prints, Disney characters…. They look nice; but that just may be because they look different -- they catch my eye because of what they’re not -- not a black ballistic nylon roller bag. My recently deceased Samsonite was non-black -- grey rather than floral, but still non-black. And after 3-4 months of my travel schedule, it started to look less non-black. Smudges from grease on overhead bin hinges, muck from taxi trunks, muddy water from New Orleans gutters, spilled coffee... That’s why I can’t have nice luggage.</li>\r\n	<li>We’ve talked about the impending trend of “smart luggage” in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/11/22/podcast-112-holiday-airport-etiquette-travel-tax-pile-up/\">past</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/05/14/podcast-115-a-decade-of-travelcommons/\">episodes</a>. Bluesmart has been the poster child for this. They crushed their Indiegogo campaign last year, and 2 weeks ago announced they’re in volume production, targeting initial deliveries in late September. “Control your suitcase from the app” is one of their tag lines. Digital lock, digital scale, battery charger, location tracking, proximity alerts. It spoke to my inner travel propeller head, so I did the Indiegogo thing. When it shows up, I’ll be sure to tell you all about it.</li>\r\n	<li>Bluesmart is at the top of the Google searches for “smart luggage”, but there are a growing list of followers with similar feature lists. Location tracking is an interesting one. I can count the number of times my luggage has been lost on one hand and have change left over, but when it happens, it can be catastrophic. I remember BA lost a bag on my way over to a 2-week “city-a-day” trip -- today London, tomorrow Stockholm, Friday in Zurich. My bag was always one stop behind me. So I get the importance of location tracking. At the high end, Bluesmart and others are equipping their bags with GPS and cellular modems to enable “global tracking”. At a much simpler level, travelers like long-time TC listener Mika Pyyhkala are using Bluetooth key fobs like the Pally Smartfinder to check if their bag made it onto their plane.</li>\r\n	<li>I can see it being useful at the other end. Look at the app -- bag’s not off the plane yet. I have time to stop off at the restroom -- or better yet, the bar.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917626811171154.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #117</li>\r\n	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://iodapromonet.com/index.php\">IODA Promonet</a></li>\r\n	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_117.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #117 — Random Thoughts About Eggs, Scotland & Car Rentals','','inherit','open','open','','1542-revision-v1','','','2015-10-11 19:00:38','2015-10-12 00:00:38','',1542,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/10/11/1542-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1544,1,'2015-10-11 19:05:05','2015-10-12 00:05:05','Back behind the microphone after an extended summer break highlighted by a two-week family vacation in Japan. We talk about traveling in Japan. It was a fantastic time, though we were lost without translation at times. But with the US dollar buying 124 yen, it was the right time to go. We also talk about frustration in using frequent flier miles, trends toward prettier and higher tech luggage, and a connoisseur of scrambled eggs. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_117.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/221084023\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #117:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>I guess I could’ve cut two or three comments out of the last segment and labeled them “Random Comments about My Scotland Trip” but that just seems entire too gratuitous. But I have been collecting car rental experiences in my TravelCommons Evernote drop file and I think I now have enough for make up a topic -- or at least what might marginally pass for a topic</li>\r\n	<li>As I’ve mentioned in past episodes, I really don’t like to rent cars. I much prefer to use rail or a cab in from the airport and then walk to where ever I need to go. That works well in New York or Chicago or San Francisco, not so much in Denver or Detroit. So I’ve been renting a lot of cars over the past 6 months.</li>\r\n	<li>So many in fact that Hertz bumped my status up to President\'s Circle. Not quite sure that gets me, but it sounds status-y. Though right after my congratulatory e-mail, I found a dumpy Toyota Corolla in my Hertz Gold spot, so maybe it’s not anything special.</li>\r\n	<li>But in times like those -- when I get assigned the 45,000-mile Toyota with crumbs still in the driver seat, or a Ford F-150 king cab pick up truck in Boston (?) -- I’ve come to love Hertz Gold Choice. If you rent a mid-size or above -- and for our corporate rate, the price of a compact and mid-size are the same -- you can go to the Choice aisle and take one of those cars instead. I left the dumpy Toyota and took a new Nissan instead.</li>\r\n	<li>I have started to make note of differences in service </span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">and</span></i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> attitude across locations. I never rent from Hertz at Detroit airport anymore. I’ve yet to get a non-dumpy car there and the attitude is not great. Though I think Hertz’s Newark station is the worst. A recent example -- a colleague was driving his car toward the lot exit when a low tire pressure alarm lit up. So he asked the guy at the exit gate where he could get some air to top off the tire. “Try a gas station,” the attendant told him. That was helpful.</li>\r\n	<li>I’ve had challenges with car rental web sites -- Hertz, Avis -- when my pick-up or drop off time didn’t match the hours of the office I selected. I get the error notice and then when I go back to try another site or time, these websites will randomly select another date or location. I had this happen to me in Edinburgh on the second car we rented. We were training from Lockerbie back to Edinburgh where we’d done 4 days of biking while our daughter was going through freshman orientation. I’d booked a car on Hertz’s web site to pick up at the train station and drop off at EDI 5 days later. It took me 5 tries to get it right -- each time I re-started, it reset the pick-up location from Waverly Station to EDI. And each time I’d correct it. Except, it seems, the last time. When we arrived in Waverly, there was no car. I looked at the res -- pick up at EDI. Ugh. Not the end of the world -- we could’ve taken the new light rail out to EDI, but it was aggravating. I searched through the Hertz.co.uk website for a phone number -- that itself being a little extra helping of aggravation -- and called the res center. The woman on the other end was inordinately calm and helpful. 3 minutes later, she’d moved my pick-up to Waverly. I thanked her -- a lot. I should’ve booked with her instead of the website.</li>\r\n	<li>We rented our first car in Edinburgh from Enterprise. It was a great car -- a Fiat 500 L. All the bags fit easily in the hatchback. Nice nav, nice sound system, clean....  Drove to a near-by shopping mall -- grabbed a coffee at Starbucks and phone SIMs at the ee store. Next stop, IKEA to buy things we didn’t pack -- like towels and hangers. Coming off the motorway, through a traffic circle, the clutch crapped out. I’d put it in gear, let out the clutch pedal, nothing. 3 hours later after Enterprise, the auto club and Fiat scrummed about who was supposed to pick up the car, the tow truck dropped us back off at EDI where the Enterprise folks apologized profusely and gave us an even nicer Nissan. A couple of weeks, I noticed the Pope used a Fiat 500L to drive from Andrews Airforce Base to the Vatican Embassy. The next day, though, he was in a Jeep Popemobile. I could sympathize.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://ghosts.nin.com/main/home\"><em>3 Ghosts I</em></a> by <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Nine Inch Nails\" href=\"http://www.nin.com/\" rel=\"homepage\">Nine Inch Nails</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>So that was the start of the <a href=\"https://blog.stackexchange.com/2015/06/stack-exchange-podcast-65-the-word-has-two-meanings-you-see/\">Stack Exchange Podcast</a> where Joel Spolsky goes pretty much non-linear over his attempt to use frequent flier miles.</li>\r\n	<li>Any attempt to use frequent flier miles will be a frustrating exercise. My recent attempts to do <i>anything</i>with the 300,000 BA Avios miles is own personal exercise in masochism. But, to be honest, I’ve had pretty good luck this year, getting 2 flights down to New Orleans on Southwest, 4 direct flights from and from Tokyo with UA Mileage Plus and 3 flights between ORD and Edinburgh on American. Now, it wasn’t a complete cakewalk -- on SW, my wife and daughter took a 6am flight back on Monday, on UA, we had to come home a couple of days earlier than we had originally planned while on AA it’s a day later. But flexibility has always been a requirement to use frequent flyer miles. And those minor shifts are a whole lot better than my exercise with BA which only offered me one day in the entire month of September that I could use Avios miles to get to Edinburgh. I’m not sure there’s a more useless awards program.</li>\r\n	<li>When I first started looking for Chicago to Edinburgh flights, I went straight to Hipmunk.com. It has been my go-to flight search tool for a while now. It’s easy -- it defaults to flight search, unlike Expedia’s push for bundled deals or Orbitz pushing hotels. And graphical display -- bars for each flight showing flight duration spread across the day -- makes it very easy to focus on the flights you’re most interested in. But when searching for Edinburgh flights, I spotted something new -- right under the red Virgin Atlantic bar was a purple one labeled “Mystery”. Kinda like Priceline’s unnamed hotels you bid for. But I’d never seen what the travel industry calls “opaque pricing” on Hipmunk before. Of course, it wasn’t really that opaque. Clicking on the bar revealed the flight details -- a 4:40pm departure with an hour connection in Madrid. Hmmm, let’s see. Only Iberia flies from ORD to MAD. Doing a quick search, I found the times did indeed match Iberia flight number 345 -- which Hipmunk only slightly masked as Mystery Airline #345. Must’ve been an experiment, because I haven’t seen it since, but I did get a good chuckle out of it.</li>\r\n	<li>A colleague who I met up with on one of my Detroit trips flew Spirit Airline for the first time and <i>didn’t</i> get much of a chuckle. It was a last-minute meeting. He was flying in from Kansas City and, following the rules by using the mandated American Express Travel website to book his flight, he saw a Spirit flight that was significantly less than other carriers. Being a good corporate citizen, he booked it. He showed up at the ticket counter to get his boarding pass. “You gonna carry that one?” the Spirit agent asked him, pointing to his suitcase. “Of course,” he said. “That’ll cost you $55. And that briefcase doesn’t look like it’ll fit under the seat, so that’s another $55.” Pretty quickly, the price difference that led him to book Spirit disappeared in the smoke of carryon charges. Some might say it’s his fault for not knowing Spirit’s uniquely aggressive add-on fee structure -- what Spirit calls “bundling”. But I’d say it’s Amex’s fault -- for displaying Spirit’s base fare (without carryon fees) in the same ways as they display Delta’s or Southwest’s. And then marking those higher, but more inclusive, fares as being “out of policy” because they’re higher, and requiring additional steps to justify booking them. More power to Spirit to differentiate themselves with a unique fee structure, but Amex and the like need to do their job and let business travelers know what they’re in for when they book those low fares.</li>\r\n	<li>Rich Fraser did saw my PreCheck frustration spill over to Twitter.\r\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" lang=\"en\">\r\n<p dir=\"ltr\" lang=\"en\">Folks, it\'s a *metal* detector! Large chunks of metal in your pocket - cell phones, car keys, $5 worth of quarters - *will* set it off</p>\r\n— Mark Peacock (@mpeacock) <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/623113695426670592\">July 20, 2015</a></blockquote>\r\n<script src=\"//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js\" async=\"\" charset=\"utf-8\"></script>I don’t know if it’s summer travel amateurs hitting the PreCheck lottery, but I’ve been stunned at the number of people who look amazed when the metal detector alarms when they try to walk through with a slug of metal in their pockets. Mobile phone, big electronic key fobs, two fistfuls of change… I mean, what part of “metal detector” do they not get? It’s doing it’s job! But people will stand there, dumbfounded, they can’t stroll through wearing the quarter-pound of metal and electronics that is an iPhone. I hate to be a snob, but I beginning to think they need to split PreCheck between the veterans who paid for it and the occasional random selectees. To which Rich mentioned that it’s not so occasional for him -- he’s gotten Pre on 3 of his last 4 trips. So, he says, why pay for it? Hey, as long as he remembers to take his mobile phone and car keys out of his pocket, I say, more power to him.</li>\r\n	<li>I’ve probably mentioned this before, but I think one of the absolute best airport restaurants is Rick Bayless’ <a href=\"http://www.rickbayless.com/restaurants/tortas-frontera/\">Torta Frontera</a> in the American, United and International terminals at ORD. The tortas, the Mexican sandwiches, are fantastic -- great local ingredients and made-to-order. Being made-to-order is key to the great taste and texture, but it’s 10 minutes from the time you order and at ORD rush hour, you can stand in line for 10 minutes before you get to the counter. Great restaurant -- and popular. So I was cautiously excited last week when I saw they had a new ordering app. I was catching an evening flight to DTW and decided to check out the app. I downloaded and set up the app after parking in the deck -- created an account and loaded a credit card. Then, while in the PreCheck line, I scrolled through the menu and loaded the shopping cart with a Cubana, my favorite torta. I was going to hit the Order Now button, but the TSA guys were a little too efficient, waving 3 of us forward at once. So, I hit Order a couple of minutes later on the other side of the X-Ray machine. I quickly received an e-mail “Thanks for your order, we’ll let you know when it’s ready”. That’s it. No ETA, no typical wait time. Hmmm… I walk down to the T3 Tortas -- longest line I’ve seen. Hmmm…  Just then, I get a second e-mail -- 7 minutes after the first -- “You order will be ready at 5:43pm” -- 10 minutes from now. OK, not bad given this line. I walk to the rest room, browse the bookstore across the hall, and put myself in front of the order pick-up station at 5:43pm. About a minute later, the woman calls out “Anybody order on-line?” Two of us step up. “Mark?” I reach out and take my bag. The pre-order worked well, though next time, I’ll let the TSA guy wait for a minute while I hit the Order button a bit sooner.</li>\r\n	<li>All the way back in April 2012, I wrote a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/04/21/best-hotel-amenity-free-breakfast/\">blog post</a> about free breakfast being the best hotel amenity.  (I had to do a good bit of scrolling on the TravelCommons website to find it -- I’ll save you that with a link in the show notes). It’s still true, even though, it’s, as I wrote back then, it’s more about convenience than food quality -- especially when you’re grabbing that breakfast in the concierge lounge of a Marriott or Sheraton or Westin. And it kinda turns you into a connoisseur of scrambled eggs. A buddy and I got into this conversation a few weeks back -- comparing the quality of scrambled eggs across hotels we’ve stayed at.  We concluded that the most typical consistency was firm, almost quiche like. We liked them with a bit of cheese mixed in to give them a bit of flavor (neither of us are vegan). Every once in a great while, you get great scrambled eggs -- soft curds, slightly moist. But you definitely don’t want them runny -- there’s nothing more disgusting at 6am than tilting back that warming tray clamshell lid and seeing scrambled eggs sitting in a pool of yellowish liquid. We’ll go for hard dry over swimming in yellow eggs every morning. But hard dry bacon, now that’s just wrong</li>\r\n	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/buy_album.php?id=08E508A6096F11910641E13331B70EED6DFA5BB929282F731E19BBAFA8F08FFD686BD99DD86BA0D5E844DD5536E1AEFB\" rel=\"nofollow\"><em>Ghost Hardware</em></a> by Burial</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Traveling Thru Japan</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>The family and I have done a fair bit of travel in Asia -- Thailand, Singapore, Vietnam, Hong Kong, China -- which left two big holes -- Japan and Korea. We filled one of them this summer when we spent two weeks visiting Tokyo, Kyoto, and Osaka. Japan had always been on our list to visit, but its reputation for high prices always gave us an excuse to put it off and go some place where we could stretch our dollars further. But with the dollar buying ¥124 and then scoring 4 direct ORD-NRT tickets on United Mileage Plus awards, this seemed the time.</li>\r\n	<li>Now as long time listeners know, this won’t be a travelog, a list of things to see in Tokyo or Kyoto -- I leave that to friends like Chris Christensen of the <a href=\"http://asia.amateurtraveler.com/tag/japan/\">Amateur Travelers podcast</a>. Since I always say that this podcast is more about the journey than the destination, let’s talk about travel in Japan.</li>\r\n	<li>As my family and I tend to do on our trips, our only trips to the airport were coming and going to the US. Everything else was on train. Which in Japan works very well. My wife bought us 2-week Japan Rail (JR) passes before we left. It wasn’t a small number for the 4 of us, but they paid off over our trip -- allowing us unlimited use of the high-speed bullet trains, even to reserve seats for a bit more relaxed boarding.</li>\r\n	<li>We broke the passes in on the Narita Express, the hour ride from the airport to Tokyo Station. I’m not sure they could’ve put Narita any further out. Given the distance, everyone takes the train or a bus. The train was fine, kinda like the Heathrow Express but without the TV screens. It worked with a minimum amount of fuss -- which was a good thing after a 12-hour flight.</li>\r\n	<li>We really hammered the JR passes to train among Tokyo, Kyoto, and Osaka, all less than 3-hour trips. Some of the stations were huge and there were times when we had to lean in to thread through the crowds of commuters. But the signage was pretty good and the trains absolutely met their reputation for timeliness (if only airlines in the US were half as timely…). And while JR would roll a food cart while on the rails, we got a bit more into the Japanese train culture and stocked up at the train station food courts before we left -- bento boxes, rice cakes, and of course, train beers -- Kirin tall boys usually. And if we didn’t have time to hit the food court, we could always grab something from the vending machines -- which were positioned about every 20 feet on the train platform. The vending machine thing in Japan is intense -- but convenient.</li>\r\n	<li>We didn’t just train point-to-point between the major stations. A lot of times it was a smaller train to the main station, then the high-speed train, then connecting to again to a smaller train. The HyperDia smartphone app came highly recommended and the free version was great when planning out these connecting journeys -- both inter-city and within Tokyo where a trip across town might span a couple of rail companies, say Tokyo Metro to a JR train. It also displays the fare, which is very handy, avoiding the need to try and decipher the rate table while in front of the fare machine with a queue building behind you. The public transit tab on Google Maps also worked surprisingly well.</li>\r\n	<li>Being able to use these apps when you really need them requires mobile data for your phone. You don’t want to be trying to search for an open WiFi access point before figuring out which train you’re connecting to. Which, in Japan, like so many things, isn’t exactly straightforward. As a tourist, you can only buy data SIMs; no voice capabilities. One of my go-to websites -- the aptly, but somewhat awkwardly named <a href=\"http://prepaid-data-sim-card.wikia.com/wiki/Japan\">Prepaid Data SIM Card Wiki</a> -- came through again. Before we left, I ordered a b-mobile SIM to be delivered to our first hotel -- the Marriott Courtyard in the Ginza District -- and then I bought another -- Japan Travel SIM -- from the Tourist Information Center at Tokyo Station. The lack of local voice wasn’t a huge inconvenience for us -- we were communicating via e-mail with hotels and apartment rentals -- but it still seemed a little weird.</li>\r\n	<li>The one thing that pulled me up short was the limited amount of signage in the Latin alphabet. I’m OK with the Japanese names when phonetically rendered in Latin characters, but I’m not so hot on reading kanji or kana. We wrestled with this our first morning in Tokyo at the Tsukiji Fish Market. My wife had a list of sushi restaurant recommendations -- all of which were Japanese names in Latin script; all the restaurant signs were in kanji. And then at a Kyoto ramen restaurant, where you buy tickets for your food from a machine and then hand them across the counter to the cook, having only kanji on the machine buttons without pictures, made ordering a bit of a challenge. It got me thinking back to my trip last year to Beijing -- I didn’t recall having the same level of challenge there.</li>\r\n	<li>What made this all work is that just about all of the Japanese people we ran into were the nicest, the most welcoming people. I was constantly struck at how many people would strike up a conversation -- asking where we’re from, helping us with Ramen machines, shouting “Welcome to Japan” while riding by on a bike, volunteering to walk us across train stations to help us with connections. I’m not sure I’ve experienced that consistent level of engagement from random strangers anywhere else. Of course, some of it could get a slightly embarrassing, like the group of middle school kids who wanted a picture with me. Or my daughter who regularly would get tagged by Japanese girls for pictures. We had that experience often in Beijing, but there, when we were often the lone white people, it was understandable. Having that same thing happen in Japan -- more Westernized, more white people wandering around -- that surprised us. In Arashiyama, a pretty touristy area on the west side of Kyoto, we were flagged down by 3 middle school teachers who video’d us answering their question about why we chose to visit this town. They told us that they taught English and wanted to show their classes native English speakers. OK, makes sense, but with all videos on YouTube, I wasn’t quite sure why they wanted a video of us.</li>\r\n	<li>But that being said, except for the signage, Japan was one of the easier countries we’ve traveled in. And maybe, with a couple more revs of Google Translate, even that barrier will get smoothed away.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a title=\"MP3 Download\" href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/download_track.php?id=0E74C6FEB7390D18D02B4B399668093172F6C8CC66DDC09D90A3BF7DDA436823CFAC859AE2B2C73E46A278A4950E1030\">Lonely Dog Blues</a></em> by <a title=\"Tobin James\' Web Site\" href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/label.php?id=2A3449F03E7B8462FF74407B60F0C4B0A30A0CBE880C61DE37E3B342387F0643\">Tobin James</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Luggage Trends</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>I think it was when I was grabbing our luggage off the carousel in ORD, returning from Spain with our luggage full of wine and olive oil. I picked up my wife’s red bag and was struck at how tatty the fabric had become. I set it down in front of her and said “That’s become embarrassing. I’m not sure I can travel with that bag again”</li>\r\n	<li>Now it’s not that I have a styling bag. It’s stock Swiss Army black roller still bearing Vietnamese customs stickers from 2008. I had retired it in favor of a grey Samsonite bag, but had to pull it back out when the Samsonite’s wheels got wonky -- the rubber wore off and the wheels splayed out after 2.5 years of pulling it across New Orleans sidewalks.</li>\r\n	<li>I’m seeing more hardshell rollers in non-black colors -- burgundy, yellow, floral prints, Disney characters…. They look nice; but that just may be because they look different -- they catch my eye because of what they’re not -- not a black ballistic nylon roller bag. My recently deceased Samsonite was non-black -- grey rather than floral, but still non-black. And after 3-4 months of my travel schedule, it started to look less non-black. Smudges from grease on overhead bin hinges, muck from taxi trunks, muddy water from New Orleans gutters, spilled coffee... That’s why I can’t have nice luggage.</li>\r\n	<li>We’ve talked about the impending trend of “smart luggage” in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/11/22/podcast-112-holiday-airport-etiquette-travel-tax-pile-up/\">past</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/05/14/podcast-115-a-decade-of-travelcommons/\">episodes</a>. Bluesmart has been the poster child for this. They crushed their Indiegogo campaign last year, and 2 weeks ago announced they’re in volume production, targeting initial deliveries in late September. “Control your suitcase from the app” is one of their tag lines. Digital lock, digital scale, battery charger, location tracking, proximity alerts. It spoke to my inner travel propeller head, so I did the Indiegogo thing. When it shows up, I’ll be sure to tell you all about it.</li>\r\n	<li>Bluesmart is at the top of the Google searches for “smart luggage”, but there are a growing list of followers with similar feature lists. Location tracking is an interesting one. I can count the number of times my luggage has been lost on one hand and have change left over, but when it happens, it can be catastrophic. I remember BA lost a bag on my way over to a 2-week “city-a-day” trip -- today London, tomorrow Stockholm, Friday in Zurich. My bag was always one stop behind me. So I get the importance of location tracking. At the high end, Bluesmart and others are equipping their bags with GPS and cellular modems to enable “global tracking”. At a much simpler level, travelers like long-time TC listener Mika Pyyhkala are using Bluetooth key fobs like the Pally Smartfinder to check if their bag made it onto their plane.</li>\r\n	<li>I can see it being useful at the other end. Look at the app -- bag’s not off the plane yet. I have time to stop off at the restroom -- or better yet, the bar.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917626811171154.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #117</li>\r\n	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://iodapromonet.com/index.php\">IODA Promonet</a></li>\r\n	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_117.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #117 — Random Thoughts About Eggs, Scotland & Car Rentals','','inherit','open','open','','1542-revision-v1','','','2015-10-11 19:05:05','2015-10-12 00:05:05','',1542,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/10/11/1542-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1546,1,'2015-10-11 19:19:13','2015-10-12 00:19:13','Back behind the microphone after an extended summer break highlighted by a two-week family vacation in Japan. We talk about traveling in Japan. It was a fantastic time, though we were lost without translation at times. But with the US dollar buying 124 yen, it was the right time to go. We also talk about frustration in using frequent flier miles, trends toward prettier and higher tech luggage, and a connoisseur of scrambled eggs. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_117.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/221084023\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #117:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Coming to you from TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. I was trying to do this from the Bally’s Casino in Las Vegas where I was earlier in the week, but it just didn’t work out. I was there for business, not pleasure, but I always feel that I should stay in a casino hotel when in Vegas. I dunno, staying in a Westin or Marriott up by the convention center just doesn’t feel Vegas. When I was here last year for a business convention I stayed in the MGM Grand. Years ago, though, when I’d do regular booth duty at technology shows, I would always stay at Mandalay Bay, which I really liked.</li>\r\n	<li>The more I know about hotels, the more I’m impressed by Vegas hotel operations. Caesars, the MGM Grand, Mandalay Bay -- they’re hugh mini-cities -- orders of magnitude bigger than couple-hundred room hotels I’d stay at in Denver or New Orleans. And yet the service, the execution is almost always way better than those smaller hotels. If you’re any sort of an operations nerd, you gotta give ‘em a nod. Though on the other hand, when you head to the gym at 6am and pass by the old guy dragging on a cigarette playing the quarter slots, it kinda makes you wish they were a little less good...</li>\r\n	<li>As I mentioned in the last episode, the big travel for me was at the beginning of September when we were in Scotland for 2 weeks getting my daughter situated at Univ of St Andrews. Now while I say “getting my daughter situated,” there were equal parts getting my wife situated with the idea of her youngest child being an ocean away -- a big difference from when my son was 90 minutes up the road in Milwaukee.</li>\r\n	<li>The following week’s travel had a nice difficulty factor. Weds morning, I flew from Chicago to DC for the papal Mass on the campus of my alma mater, Catholic University of America, and then back to Detroit that evening for meetings first thing Thursday morning. The difficulty factor was my luggage. No back packs, no selfie sticks, so certainly no roller bags were getting through the security checkpoints. Finding a checked luggage place is a real challenge anymore. I thought about checking my bag into my DCA-DTW flight, but I was too early -- 8 hours prior to flight time max. There is a checked baggage place at Union Station -- DC’s train station -- which is conveniently located a couple of stops south of Catholic on the Metro Red Line.</li>\r\n	<li>Freed of my baggage, I emerged from the Brookland Metro Stop to an unbelievable combination of people and fencing. Incredibly long lines of people corralled in by what had to be miles of fences. I was lucky; I somehow got into a quick security line -- only 45 minutes. After finding my seating section, the gates were closed and we were sealed in our sections until the Pope arrived and did a couple of laps around campus in the Popemobile. After Mass started, they opened up the gates again. Which was great, because while the music and the liturgy were top notch, I wasn’t queuing up for communion with 25,000 other folks. After the homily, I was one of the trickle of folks making an early exit to beat the rush. I had a flight to catch. I’m sure the Pope understood.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://ghosts.nin.com/main/home\"><em>3 Ghosts I</em></a> by <a title=\"Nine Inch Nails\" href=\"http://www.nin.com/\" rel=\"homepage\">Nine Inch Nails</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>So that was the start of the <a href=\"https://blog.stackexchange.com/2015/06/stack-exchange-podcast-65-the-word-has-two-meanings-you-see/\">Stack Exchange Podcast</a> where Joel Spolsky goes pretty much non-linear over his attempt to use frequent flier miles.</li>\r\n	<li>Any attempt to use frequent flier miles will be a frustrating exercise. My recent attempts to do <i>anything</i>with the 300,000 BA Avios miles is own personal exercise in masochism. But, to be honest, I’ve had pretty good luck this year, getting 2 flights down to New Orleans on Southwest, 4 direct flights from and from Tokyo with UA Mileage Plus and 3 flights between ORD and Edinburgh on American. Now, it wasn’t a complete cakewalk -- on SW, my wife and daughter took a 6am flight back on Monday, on UA, we had to come home a couple of days earlier than we had originally planned while on AA it’s a day later. But flexibility has always been a requirement to use frequent flyer miles. And those minor shifts are a whole lot better than my exercise with BA which only offered me one day in the entire month of September that I could use Avios miles to get to Edinburgh. I’m not sure there’s a more useless awards program.</li>\r\n	<li>When I first started looking for Chicago to Edinburgh flights, I went straight to Hipmunk.com. It has been my go-to flight search tool for a while now. It’s easy -- it defaults to flight search, unlike Expedia’s push for bundled deals or Orbitz pushing hotels. And graphical display -- bars for each flight showing flight duration spread across the day -- makes it very easy to focus on the flights you’re most interested in. But when searching for Edinburgh flights, I spotted something new -- right under the red Virgin Atlantic bar was a purple one labeled “Mystery”. Kinda like Priceline’s unnamed hotels you bid for. But I’d never seen what the travel industry calls “opaque pricing” on Hipmunk before. Of course, it wasn’t really that opaque. Clicking on the bar revealed the flight details -- a 4:40pm departure with an hour connection in Madrid. Hmmm, let’s see. Only Iberia flies from ORD to MAD. Doing a quick search, I found the times did indeed match Iberia flight number 345 -- which Hipmunk only slightly masked as Mystery Airline #345. Must’ve been an experiment, because I haven’t seen it since, but I did get a good chuckle out of it.</li>\r\n	<li>A colleague who I met up with on one of my Detroit trips flew Spirit Airline for the first time and <i>didn’t</i> get much of a chuckle. It was a last-minute meeting. He was flying in from Kansas City and, following the rules by using the mandated American Express Travel website to book his flight, he saw a Spirit flight that was significantly less than other carriers. Being a good corporate citizen, he booked it. He showed up at the ticket counter to get his boarding pass. “You gonna carry that one?” the Spirit agent asked him, pointing to his suitcase. “Of course,” he said. “That’ll cost you $55. And that briefcase doesn’t look like it’ll fit under the seat, so that’s another $55.” Pretty quickly, the price difference that led him to book Spirit disappeared in the smoke of carryon charges. Some might say it’s his fault for not knowing Spirit’s uniquely aggressive add-on fee structure -- what Spirit calls “bundling”. But I’d say it’s Amex’s fault -- for displaying Spirit’s base fare (without carryon fees) in the same ways as they display Delta’s or Southwest’s. And then marking those higher, but more inclusive, fares as being “out of policy” because they’re higher, and requiring additional steps to justify booking them. More power to Spirit to differentiate themselves with a unique fee structure, but Amex and the like need to do their job and let business travelers know what they’re in for when they book those low fares.</li>\r\n	<li>Rich Fraser did saw my PreCheck frustration spill over to Twitter.\r\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" lang=\"en\">\r\n<p dir=\"ltr\" lang=\"en\">Folks, it\'s a *metal* detector! Large chunks of metal in your pocket - cell phones, car keys, $5 worth of quarters - *will* set it off</p>\r\n— Mark Peacock (@mpeacock) <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/623113695426670592\">July 20, 2015</a></blockquote>\r\n<script src=\"//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js\" async=\"\" charset=\"utf-8\"></script>I don’t know if it’s summer travel amateurs hitting the PreCheck lottery, but I’ve been stunned at the number of people who look amazed when the metal detector alarms when they try to walk through with a slug of metal in their pockets. Mobile phone, big electronic key fobs, two fistfuls of change… I mean, what part of “metal detector” do they not get? It’s doing it’s job! But people will stand there, dumbfounded, they can’t stroll through wearing the quarter-pound of metal and electronics that is an iPhone. I hate to be a snob, but I beginning to think they need to split PreCheck between the veterans who paid for it and the occasional random selectees. To which Rich mentioned that it’s not so occasional for him -- he’s gotten Pre on 3 of his last 4 trips. So, he says, why pay for it? Hey, as long as he remembers to take his mobile phone and car keys out of his pocket, I say, more power to him.</li>\r\n	<li>I’ve probably mentioned this before, but I think one of the absolute best airport restaurants is Rick Bayless’ <a href=\"http://www.rickbayless.com/restaurants/tortas-frontera/\">Torta Frontera</a> in the American, United and International terminals at ORD. The tortas, the Mexican sandwiches, are fantastic -- great local ingredients and made-to-order. Being made-to-order is key to the great taste and texture, but it’s 10 minutes from the time you order and at ORD rush hour, you can stand in line for 10 minutes before you get to the counter. Great restaurant -- and popular. So I was cautiously excited last week when I saw they had a new ordering app. I was catching an evening flight to DTW and decided to check out the app. I downloaded and set up the app after parking in the deck -- created an account and loaded a credit card. Then, while in the PreCheck line, I scrolled through the menu and loaded the shopping cart with a Cubana, my favorite torta. I was going to hit the Order Now button, but the TSA guys were a little too efficient, waving 3 of us forward at once. So, I hit Order a couple of minutes later on the other side of the X-Ray machine. I quickly received an e-mail “Thanks for your order, we’ll let you know when it’s ready”. That’s it. No ETA, no typical wait time. Hmmm… I walk down to the T3 Tortas -- longest line I’ve seen. Hmmm…  Just then, I get a second e-mail -- 7 minutes after the first -- “You order will be ready at 5:43pm” -- 10 minutes from now. OK, not bad given this line. I walk to the rest room, browse the bookstore across the hall, and put myself in front of the order pick-up station at 5:43pm. About a minute later, the woman calls out “Anybody order on-line?” Two of us step up. “Mark?” I reach out and take my bag. The pre-order worked well, though next time, I’ll let the TSA guy wait for a minute while I hit the Order button a bit sooner.</li>\r\n	<li>All the way back in April 2012, I wrote a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/04/21/best-hotel-amenity-free-breakfast/\">blog post</a> about free breakfast being the best hotel amenity.  (I had to do a good bit of scrolling on the TravelCommons website to find it -- I’ll save you that with a link in the show notes). It’s still true, even though, it’s, as I wrote back then, it’s more about convenience than food quality -- especially when you’re grabbing that breakfast in the concierge lounge of a Marriott or Sheraton or Westin. And it kinda turns you into a connoisseur of scrambled eggs. A buddy and I got into this conversation a few weeks back -- comparing the quality of scrambled eggs across hotels we’ve stayed at.  We concluded that the most typical consistency was firm, almost quiche like. We liked them with a bit of cheese mixed in to give them a bit of flavor (neither of us are vegan). Every once in a great while, you get great scrambled eggs -- soft curds, slightly moist. But you definitely don’t want them runny -- there’s nothing more disgusting at 6am than tilting back that warming tray clamshell lid and seeing scrambled eggs sitting in a pool of yellowish liquid. We’ll go for hard dry over swimming in yellow eggs every morning. But hard dry bacon, now that’s just wrong</li>\r\n	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/buy_album.php?id=08E508A6096F11910641E13331B70EED6DFA5BB929282F731E19BBAFA8F08FFD686BD99DD86BA0D5E844DD5536E1AEFB\" rel=\"nofollow\"><em>Ghost Hardware</em></a> by Burial</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Random Thoughts about Car Rentals</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>I guess I could’ve cut two or three comments out of the last segment and labeled them “Random Comments about My Scotland Trip” but that just seems entire too gratuitous. But I have been collecting car rental experiences in my TravelCommons Evernote drop file and I think I now have enough for make up a topic -- or at least what might marginally pass for a topic</li>\r\n	<li>As I’ve mentioned in past episodes, I really don’t like to rent cars. I much prefer to use rail or a cab in from the airport and then walk to where ever I need to go. That works well in New York or Chicago or San Francisco, not so much in Denver or Detroit. So I’ve been renting a lot of cars over the past 6 months.</li>\r\n	<li>So many in fact that Hertz bumped my status up to President\'s Circle. Not quite sure that gets me, but it sounds status-y. Though right after my congratulatory e-mail, I found a dumpy Toyota Corolla in my Hertz Gold spot, so maybe it’s not anything special.</li>\r\n	<li>But in times like those -- when I get assigned the 45,000-mile Toyota with crumbs still in the driver seat, or a Ford F-150 king cab pick up truck in Boston (?) -- I’ve come to love Hertz Gold Choice. If you rent a mid-size or above -- and for our corporate rate, the price of a compact and mid-size are the same -- you can go to the Choice aisle and take one of those cars instead. I left the dumpy Toyota and took a new Nissan instead.</li>\r\n	<li>I have started to make note of differences in service <i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">and</span></i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> attitude across locations. I never rent from Hertz at Detroit airport anymore. I’ve yet to get a non-dumpy car there and the attitude is not great. Though I think Hertz’s Newark station is the worst. A recent example -- a colleague was driving his car toward the lot exit when a low tire pressure alarm lit up. So he asked the guy at the exit gate where he could get some air to top off the tire. “Try a gas station,” the attendant told him. That was helpful.</span></li>\r\n	<li>I’ve had challenges with car rental web sites -- Hertz, Avis -- when my pick-up or drop off time didn’t match the hours of the office I selected. I get the error notice and then when I go back to try another site or time, these websites will randomly select another date or location. I had this happen to me in Edinburgh on the second car we rented. We were training from Lockerbie back to Edinburgh where we’d done 4 days of biking while our daughter was going through freshman orientation. I’d booked a car on Hertz’s web site to pick up at the train station and drop off at EDI 5 days later. It took me 5 tries to get it right -- each time I re-started, it reset the pick-up location from Waverly Station to EDI. And each time I’d correct it. Except, it seems, the last time. When we arrived in Waverly, there was no car. I looked at the res -- pick up at EDI. Ugh. Not the end of the world -- we could’ve taken the new light rail out to EDI, but it was aggravating. I searched through the Hertz.co.uk website for a phone number -- that itself being a little extra helping of aggravation -- and called the res center. The woman on the other end was inordinately calm and helpful. 3 minutes later, she’d moved my pick-up to Waverly. I thanked her -- a lot. I should’ve booked with her instead of the website.</li>\r\n	<li>We rented our first car in Edinburgh from Enterprise. It was a great car -- a Fiat 500 L. All the bags fit easily in the hatchback. Nice nav, nice sound system, clean....  Drove to a near-by shopping mall -- grabbed a coffee at Starbucks and phone SIMs at the ee store. Next stop, IKEA to buy things we didn’t pack -- like towels and hangers. Coming off the motorway, through a traffic circle, the clutch crapped out. I’d put it in gear, let out the clutch pedal, nothing. 3 hours later after Enterprise, the auto club and Fiat scrummed about who was supposed to pick up the car, the tow truck dropped us back off at EDI where the Enterprise folks apologized profusely and gave us an even nicer Nissan. A couple of weeks, I noticed the Pope used a Fiat 500L to drive from Andrews Airforce Base to the Vatican Embassy. The next day, though, he was in a Jeep Popemobile. I could sympathize.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a title=\"MP3 Download\" href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/download_track.php?id=0E74C6FEB7390D18D02B4B399668093172F6C8CC66DDC09D90A3BF7DDA436823CFAC859AE2B2C73E46A278A4950E1030\">Lonely Dog Blues</a></em> by <a title=\"Tobin James\' Web Site\" href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/label.php?id=2A3449F03E7B8462FF74407B60F0C4B0A30A0CBE880C61DE37E3B342387F0643\">Tobin James</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917626811171154.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #117</li>\r\n	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://iodapromonet.com/index.php\">IODA Promonet</a></li>\r\n	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_117.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #117 — Random Thoughts About Eggs, Scotland & Car Rentals','','inherit','open','open','','1542-revision-v1','','','2015-10-11 19:19:13','2015-10-12 00:19:13','',1542,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/10/11/1542-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1547,1,'2015-10-11 21:24:46','2015-10-12 02:24:46','Back behind the microphone after an extended summer break highlighted by a two-week family vacation in Japan. We talk about traveling in Japan. It was a fantastic time, though we were lost without translation at times. But with the US dollar buying 124 yen, it was the right time to go. We also talk about frustration in using frequent flier miles, trends toward prettier and higher tech luggage, and a connoisseur of scrambled eggs. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_117.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/221084023\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #117:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Coming to you from TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. I was trying to do this from the Bally’s Casino in Las Vegas where I was earlier in the week, but it just didn’t work out. I was there for business, not pleasure, but I always feel that I should stay in a casino hotel when in Vegas. I dunno, staying in a Westin or Marriott up by the convention center just doesn’t feel Vegas. When I was here last year for a business convention I stayed in the MGM Grand. Years ago, though, when I’d do regular booth duty at technology shows, I would always stay at Mandalay Bay, which I really liked.</li>\r\n	<li>The more I know about hotels, the more I’m impressed by Vegas hotel operations. Caesars, the MGM Grand, Mandalay Bay -- they’re huge mini-cities -- orders of magnitude bigger than couple-hundred room hotels I’d stay at in Denver or New Orleans. And yet the service, the execution is almost always way better than those smaller hotels. If you’re any sort of an operations nerd, you gotta give ‘em a nod. Though on the other hand, when you head to the gym at 6am and pass by the old guy dragging on a cigarette playing the quarter slots, it kinda makes you wish they were a little less good...</li>\r\n	<li>As I mentioned in the last episode, the big travel for me was at the beginning of September when we were in Scotland for 2 weeks getting my daughter situated at Univ of St Andrews. Now while I say “getting my daughter situated,” there were equal parts getting my wife situated with the idea of her youngest child being an ocean away -- a big difference from when my son was 90 minutes up the road in Milwaukee.</li>\r\n	<li>The following week’s travel had a nice difficulty factor. Weds morning, I flew from Chicago to DC for the papal Mass on the campus of my alma mater, Catholic University of America, and then back to Detroit that evening for meetings first thing Thursday morning. The difficulty factor was my luggage. No back packs, no selfie sticks, so certainly no roller bags were getting through the security checkpoints. Finding a checked luggage place is a real challenge anymore. I thought about checking my bag into my DCA-DTW flight, but I was too early -- 8 hours prior to flight time max. There is a checked baggage place at Union Station -- DC’s train station -- which is conveniently located a couple of stops south of Catholic on the Metro Red Line.</li>\r\n	<li>Freed of my baggage, I emerged from the Brookland Metro Stop to an unbelievable combination of people and fencing. Incredibly long lines of people corralled in by what had to be miles of fences. I was lucky; I somehow got into a quick security line -- only 45 minutes. After finding my seating section, the gates were closed and we were sealed in our sections until the Pope arrived and did a couple of laps around campus in the Popemobile. After Mass started, they opened up the gates again. Which was great, because while the music and the liturgy were top notch, I wasn’t queuing up for communion with 25,000 other folks. After the homily, I was one of the trickle of folks making an early exit to beat the rush. I had a flight to catch. I’m sure the Pope understood.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>One Day</em> by <a href=\"http://www.hollowhorse.co.uk/\">Hollow Horse</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>OK, just as a warning, this section is going to ramble on for a while. I have a random walk of comments/opinions that I just can’t seem to synthesize into  coherent topics. So here it goes...</li>\r\n	<li>First stop in the mail bag, I was pleasantly surprised to receive this audio comment from Linda Martin of the Indie Travel Podcast\r\n<ul>&lt;li\"&gt;Linda, thanks for that. The thing with eggs -- you can tell I’ve thought about this way too much -- it’s a trade-off between good eggs and time. It takes time for a cooked-to-order egg, but in the morning, I don’t often have that time. Usually, I’ve worked out; I’m cooling down during breakfast, then hitting the shower and off to work. When I stayed in one of the Renaissance Hotels in New Orleans, they didn’t have a separate executive lounge. Breakfast was served in the restaurant. They had the typical lounge buffet set up, but you could also order off the menu, which I think I did once in a dozen stays. It was a nice egg, but it took an extra 10 min that usually wasn’t in my morning schedule. Definitely a 1st World problem</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>Lisa Walls wrote on the TravelCommons Facebook Wall\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>“Hey Mark, I love your podcast, especially the comments on food and craft beers. Other than the Altoids, do you carry any food in your briefcase, such as protein bars? I am always looking for something that is shelf stable that tastes good and travels well.”</li>\r\n	<li>Lisa, thanks for the note. I usually keep 1-2 KIND bars in the bottom of my bag. The fruit-&amp;-nut ones seem to hold up to weeks of getting crushed by my PC power supply. They’re also not too sweet the way some other granola and power bars are.</li>\r\n	<li>I know I’m about to lose any foodie cred I may have built up over the years, but I gotta say that, for me, the McDonald\'s grilled chicken Snack Wraps are just about the right amount of food to cover a 2-hour flight. They’re quick to buy, and compact to bring on board and eat. I find it tough to manage a salad while sitting in a center seat.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>I’m not sure if I mentioned this last episode, but I’m flying Southwest on this week’s Vegas-Denver-Chicago trip to click over A-list status. It kinda crept up on me -- I don’t typically fly SW enough to make status, but apparently I have this year. As near as I can tell, this means I won’t have to pay the $12.50 Early Bird fee or be staring at my Southwest app exactly 24 hours before flight time in order to get a decent boarding position. Which, as we all know, is critical on Southwest since there’s no assigned seating. An A or early B boarding group number is necessary for an aisle seat. On my Vegas flight, hitting the “Check In” button maybe 2 seconds after the 24-hour window got me B 7, so I got an aisle seat in the back half of the plane. It was a full flight, so after that, I was living last year’s Super Bowl Doritos commercial -- looking down, trying to avoid eye contact with potentially bad seat mates while looking friendly to attract good ones. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://youtu.be/2JqRXLQYF9o\">link</a> to the commercial. It’s spot on.</li>\r\n	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In the last episode, I talked about travel amateurs clogging up the PreCheck lanes. These would be people getting PreCheck as part of the TSA’s “Managed Inclusion” program, where they randomly shunt travelers over to PreCheck to balance screening line loads. This to the utter frustration of travelers who paid $85 for PreCheck screening or $100 for Global Entry. You might recall long-time listener Rich Fraser saying he was getting PreCheck about 75% of the time so why should he pay? But now the TSA says they’re throttling back on “Managed Inclusion”, driven at least in part by the publicity generated by auditors finding that travelers on various watch lists were being given PreCheck. I’ve certainly noticed the length of PreCheck lines dropping. </span></li>\r\n	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Also in the last episode, I talked about luggage trends. One trend that sorta hit the cutting room floor is the move to fully rotating twirly wheels. Certainly handy in getting your luggage down a tight airplane aisle, but to my eye, most of them look a bit tinier, a bit flimsier than the standard roller-blade style wheel partially embedded in the back of the suitcase. The twirly wheels don’t seem rugged enough to survive getting pulled down Manhattan sidewalks or some of the ruts in New Orleans. And to allow full rotation, the wheels stick out of the bottom of the suitcase making the bag longer. This tripped up my wife on our flight from EDI to LHR. The BA gate agent asked my wife to put her bag in the luggage sizer. It would’ve fit -- except for the twirly wheels. Now we have to gate check it -- which means standing off to the side of the gate pulling some stuff out, transferring it into her shoulder bag. Understandable -- until we get on the plane and see it’s a half-full 767 and there are fully empty luggage bins. Really? So as is my wont, I vented my frustration on Twitter rather than any BA employees. BA’s social media department responded pretty quickly saying they needed to check all luggage to be fair to all passengers. But how would allowing a bag that was, at most, an inch over-long because of its twirly wheels on a half-full flight with empty overheads cheat any other passengers? It’s an over-officiousness that just doesn’t make sense. And it’s the reason I avoid BA now whenever possible. Which is a real shame, because back in the early ‘90’s when I was doing a lot of travel to Europe, I prefered BA. But that was 20 years ago and, it seems, a different BA.</span></li>\r\n	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">There is another reason I avoid BA -- officiousness </span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">and</span></i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> Heathrow. Again, another thing I loved in the ‘90’s, I now avoid whenever possible. Heathrow is a complete nightmare. You land, you trundle along through corridors, down escalators, into a bus, get a tour of the Heathrow back alleys, stop at another terminal, fight through security again, and then end up in the midst of a packed retail space where you wander through the shops because there’s no place to sit. It’s gotten to the point that I’ll fly the extra hour to connect through Frankfurt or Amsterdam just to avoid Heathrow. We were doing this St Andrews trip on AA miles. We were fine on the way out -- ORD-JFK-EDI all on AA. But coming back, it was EDI-LHR-ORD with the first leg on BA. Just ugh! I still keep thinking about how to get something out of my 300K BA Avios miles. Maybe I’ll make my daughter fly BA.</span></li>\r\n	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">On a brighter note, I tried a new financial service during this trip and it worked really well. It’s called Revolut -- as in Revolution cut a bit short. It’s a FinTech start up based in the UK that gives you a virtual and real debit card with really great exchange rates. As with all the cool start-ups nowadays, everything is done through a smartphone app -- which, to stow the snark for a second, makes a lot of sense for any travel app. I opened an account before I left and funded it with $200 from my regular ATM/debit card. I could then convert my dollars to pounds or euros at what appeared to be just about the market rate -- there didn’t seem to be a lot of margin taken on the buy or sell sides. I also instantly had a virtual debit card with which I could use those new pounds or euros to buy things on the web -- like train tickets or top up a phone card. I then requested a physical version of my card, which took about a week to show up from the UK. Now I had a proper European chip-&amp;-pin card that I could use at an ATM or, say, the self-serve checkout line at Tesco’s without waiting for a clerk to take my signed receipt. It only hiccuped one at the Costa coffee shop in St Andrews; I still don’t know why. Poking around a bit more, I found that I could send pounds to my daughter’s RBS account with a day or so lag. Now, none of this functionality is necessarily new, though being able to do it all through a slick smartphone app is very handy. The real innovation is the cost. Funding my Revolut account from my debit card cost me less than 1% -- less than $2 for the $200 transfer, which is cheaper than most non-network ATM fees. After that, no transaction fees to move money between currencies or to withdraw. Compare that to hitting a foreign ATM with your US card. My personal bank is very reasonable, only charging me Visa’s 1% transaction fee, but many big banks will hit you with a $5 non-network fee on top of any transaction fees. And then transferring money to my daughter’s account -- wire transfers can cost $25-30. Revolut has well-packaged functionality delivered at the lowest costs I’ve seen. I don’t know how long they’ll keep this price point, but right now, it’s the best deal I’ve seen for money needed for international travel. I’ll post a link in the show notes</span></li>\r\n	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com. </span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\nOK, just as a warning, this section is going to ramble on for a while. I have a random walk of comments/opinions that I just can’t seem to synthesize into coherent topics. So here it goes...\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>First stop in the mail bag, I was pleasantly surprised to receive this audio comment from Linda Martin of the Indie Travel Podcast -</li>\r\n	<li>Linda, thanks for that. The thing with eggs -- you can tell I’ve thought about this way too much -- it’s a trade-off between good eggs and time. It takes time for a cooked-to-order egg, but in the morning, I don’t often have that time. Usually, I’ve worked out; I’m cooling down during breakfast, then hitting the shower and off to work. When I stayed in one of the Renaissance Hotels in New Orleans, they didn’t have a separate executive lounge. Breakfast was served in the restaurant. They had the typical lounge buffet set up, but you could also order off the menu, which I think I did once in a dozen stays. It was a nice egg, but it took an extra 10 min that usually wasn’t in my morning schedule. Definitely a 1st World problem\r\nLisa Walls wrote on the TravelCommons Facebook Wall\r\n“Hey Mark, I love your podcast, especially the comments on food and craft beers. Other than the Altoids, do you carry any food in your briefcase, such as protein bars? I am always looking for something that is shelf stable that tastes good and travels well.”\r\nLisa, thanks for the note. I usually keep 1-2 KIND bars in the bottom of my bag. The fruit-&amp;-nut ones seem to hold up to weeks of getting crushed by my PC power supply. They’re also not too sweet the way some other granola and power bars are.\r\nI know I’m about to lose any foodie cred I may have built up over the years, but I gotta say that, for me, the McDonald\'s grilled chicken Snack Wraps are just about the right amount of food to cover a 2-hour flight. They’re quick to buy, and compact to bring on board and eat. I find it tough to manage a salad while sitting in a center seat.\r\nI’m not sure if I mentioned this last episode, but I’m flying Southwest on this week’s Vegas-Denver-Chicago trip to click over A-list status. It kinda crept up on me -- I don’t typically fly SW enough to make status, but apparently I have this year. As near as I can tell, this means I won’t have to pay the $12.50 Early Bird fee or be staring at my Southwest app exactly 24 hours before flight time in order to get a decent boarding position. Which, as we all know, is critical on Southwest since there’s no assigned seating. An A or early B boarding group number is necessary for an aisle seat. On my Vegas flight, hitting the “Check In” button maybe 2 seconds after the 24-hour window got me B 7, so I got an aisle seat in the back half of the plane. It was a full flight, so after that, I was living last year’s Super Bowl Doritos commercial -- looking down, trying to avoid eye contact with potentially bad seat mates while looking friendly to attract good ones. I’ll post a link to the commercial in the show notes. It’s spot on.\r\nIn the last episode, I talked about travel amateurs clogging up the PreCheck lanes. These would be people getting PreCheck as part of the TSA’s “Managed Inclusion” program, where they randomly shunt travelers over to PreCheck to balance screening line loads. This to the utter frustration of travelers who paid $85 for PreCheck screening or $100 for Global Entry. You might recall long-time listener Rich Fraser saying he was getting PreCheck about 75% of the time so why should he pay? But now the TSA says they’re throttling back on “Managed Inclusion”, driven at least in part by the publicity generated by auditors finding that travelers on various watch lists were being given PreCheck. I’ve certainly noticed the length of PreCheck lines dropping.\r\nAlso in the last episode, I talked about luggage trends. One trend that sorta hit the cutting room floor is the move to fully rotating twirly wheels. Certainly handy in getting your luggage down a tight airplane aisle, but to my eye, most of them look a bit tinier, a bit flimsier than the standard roller-blade style wheel partially embedded in the back of the suitcase. The twirly wheels don’t seem rugged enough to survive getting pulled down Manhattan sidewalks or some of the ruts in New Orleans. And to allow full rotation, the wheels stick out of the bottom of the suitcase making the bag longer. This tripped up my wife on our flight from EDI to LHR. The BA gate agent asked my wife to put her bag in the luggage sizer. It would’ve fit -- except for the twirly wheels. Now we have to gate check it -- which means standing off to the side of the gate pulling some stuff out, transferring it into her shoulder bag. Understandable -- until we get on the plane and see it’s a half-full 767 and there are fully empty luggage bins. Really? So as is my wont, I vented my frustration on Twitter rather than any BA employees. BA’s social media department responded pretty quickly saying they needed to check all luggage to be fair to all passengers. But how would allowing a bag that was, at most, an inch over-long because of its twirly wheels on a half-full flight with empty overheads cheat any other passengers? It’s an over-officiousness that just doesn’t make sense. And it’s the reason I avoid BA now whenever possible. Which is a real shame, because back in the early ‘90’s when I was doing a lot of travel to Europe, I prefered BA. But that was 20 years ago and, it seems, a different BA.\r\nThere is another reason I avoid BA -- officiousness and Heathrow. Again, another thing I loved in the ‘90’s, I now avoid whenever possible. Heathrow is a complete nightmare. You land, you trundle along through corridors, down escalators, into a bus, get a tour of the Heathrow back alleys, stop at another terminal, fight through security again, and then end up in the midst of a packed retail space where you wander through the shops because there’s no place to sit. It’s gotten to the point that I’ll fly the extra hour to connect through Frankfurt or Amsterdam just to avoid Heathrow. We were doing this St Andrews trip on AA miles. We were fine on the way out -- ORD-JFK-EDI all on AA. But coming back, it was EDI-LHR-ORD with the first leg on BA. Just ugh! I still keep thinking about how to get something out of my 300K BA Avios miles. Maybe I’ll make my daughter fly BA.\r\nOn a brighter note, I tried a new financial service during this trip and it worked really well. It’s called Revolut -- as in Revolution cut a bit short. It’s a FinTech start up based in the UK that gives you a virtual and real debit card with really great exchange rates. As with all the cool start-ups nowadays, everything is done through a smartphone app -- which, to stow the snark for a second, makes a lot of sense for any travel app. I opened an account before I left and funded it with $200 from my regular ATM/debit card. I could then convert my dollars to pounds or euros at what appeared to be just about the market rate -- there didn’t seem to be a lot of margin taken on the buy or sell sides. I also instantly had a virtual debit card with which I could use those new pounds or euros to buy things on the web -- like train tickets or top up a phone card. I then requested a physical version of my card, which took about a week to show up from the UK. Now I had a proper European chip-&amp;-pin card that I could use at an ATM or, say, the self-serve checkout line at Tesco’s without waiting for a clerk to take my signed receipt. It only hiccuped one at the Costa coffee shop in St Andrews; I still don’t know why. Poking around a bit more, I found that I could send pounds to my daughter’s RBS account with a day or so lag. Now, none of this functionality is necessarily new, though being able to do it all through a slick smartphone app is very handy. The real innovation is the cost. Funding my Revolut account from my debit card cost me less than 1% -- less than $2 for the $200 transfer, which is cheaper than most non-network ATM fees. After that, no transaction fees to move money between currencies or to withdraw. Compare that to hitting a foreign ATM with your US card. My personal bank is very reasonable, only charging me Visa’s 1% transaction fee, but many big banks will hit you with a $5 non-network fee on top of any transaction fees. And then transferring money to my daughter’s account -- wire transfers can cost $25-30. Revolut has well-packaged functionality delivered at the lowest costs I’ve seen. I don’t know how long they’ll keep this price point, but right now, it’s the best deal I’ve seen for money needed for international travel. I’ll post a link in the show notes\r\nAnd if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/buy_album.php?id=08E508A6096F11910641E13331B70EED6DFA5BB929282F731E19BBAFA8F08FFD686BD99DD86BA0D5E844DD5536E1AEFB\" rel=\"nofollow\"><em>Ghost Hardware</em></a> by Burial</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<b>Random Thoughts about Car Rentals</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>I guess I could’ve cut two or three comments out of the last segment and labeled them “Random Comments about My Scotland Trip” but that just seems entire too gratuitous. But I have been collecting car rental experiences in my TravelCommons Evernote drop file and I think I now have enough for make up a topic -- or at least what might marginally pass for a topic</li>\r\n	<li>As I’ve mentioned in past episodes, I really don’t like to rent cars. I much prefer to use rail or a cab in from the airport and then walk to where ever I need to go. That works well in New York or Chicago or San Francisco, not so much in Denver or Detroit. So I’ve been renting a lot of cars over the past 6 months.</li>\r\n	<li>So many in fact that Hertz bumped my status up to President\'s Circle. Not quite sure that gets me, but it sounds status-y. Though right after my congratulatory e-mail, I found a dumpy Toyota Corolla in my Hertz Gold spot, so maybe it’s not anything special.</li>\r\n	<li>But in times like those -- when I get assigned the 45,000-mile Toyota with crumbs still in the driver seat, or a Ford F-150 king cab pick up truck in Boston (?) -- I’ve come to love Hertz Gold Choice. If you rent a mid-size or above -- and for our corporate rate, the price of a compact and mid-size are the same -- you can go to the Choice aisle and take one of those cars instead. I left the dumpy Toyota and took a new Nissan instead.</li>\r\n	<li>I have started to make note of differences in service <i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">and</span></i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> attitude across locations. I never rent from Hertz at Detroit airport anymore. I’ve yet to get a non-dumpy car there and the attitude is not great. Though I think Hertz’s Newark station is the worst. A recent example -- a colleague was driving his car toward the lot exit when a low tire pressure alarm lit up. So he asked the guy at the exit gate where he could get some air to top off the tire. “Try a gas station,” the attendant told him. That was helpful.</span></li>\r\n	<li>I’ve had challenges with car rental web sites -- Hertz, Avis -- when my pick-up or drop off time didn’t match the hours of the office I selected. I get the error notice and then when I go back to try another site or time, these websites will randomly select another date or location. I had this happen to me in Edinburgh on the second car we rented. We were training from Lockerbie back to Edinburgh where we’d done 4 days of biking while our daughter was going through freshman orientation. I’d booked a car on Hertz’s web site to pick up at the train station and drop off at EDI 5 days later. It took me 5 tries to get it right -- each time I re-started, it reset the pick-up location from Waverly Station to EDI. And each time I’d correct it. Except, it seems, the last time. When we arrived in Waverly, there was no car. I looked at the res -- pick up at EDI. Ugh. Not the end of the world -- we could’ve taken the new light rail out to EDI, but it was aggravating. I searched through the Hertz.co.uk website for a phone number -- that itself being a little extra helping of aggravation -- and called the res center. The woman on the other end was inordinately calm and helpful. 3 minutes later, she’d moved my pick-up to Waverly. I thanked her -- a lot. I should’ve booked with her instead of the website.</li>\r\n	<li>We rented our first car in Edinburgh from Enterprise. It was a great car -- a Fiat 500 L. All the bags fit easily in the hatchback. Nice nav, nice sound system, clean....  Drove to a near-by shopping mall -- grabbed a coffee at Starbucks and phone SIMs at the ee store. Next stop, IKEA to buy things we didn’t pack -- like towels and hangers. Coming off the motorway, through a traffic circle, the clutch crapped out. I’d put it in gear, let out the clutch pedal, nothing. 3 hours later after Enterprise, the auto club and Fiat scrummed about who was supposed to pick up the car, the tow truck dropped us back off at EDI where the Enterprise folks apologized profusely and gave us an even nicer Nissan. A couple of weeks, I noticed the Pope used a Fiat 500L to drive from Andrews Airforce Base to the Vatican Embassy. The next day, though, he was in a Jeep Popemobile. I could sympathize.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a title=\"MP3 Download\" href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/download_track.php?id=0E74C6FEB7390D18D02B4B399668093172F6C8CC66DDC09D90A3BF7DDA436823CFAC859AE2B2C73E46A278A4950E1030\">Lonely Dog Blues</a></em> by <a title=\"Tobin James\' Web Site\" href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/label.php?id=2A3449F03E7B8462FF74407B60F0C4B0A30A0CBE880C61DE37E3B342387F0643\">Tobin James</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917626811171154.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #117</li>\r\n	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://iodapromonet.com/index.php\">IODA Promonet</a></li>\r\n	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_117.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #117 — Random Thoughts About Eggs, Scotland & Car Rentals','','inherit','open','open','','1542-revision-v1','','','2015-10-11 21:24:46','2015-10-12 02:24:46','',1542,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/10/11/1542-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1548,1,'2015-10-11 21:28:52','2015-10-12 02:28:52','Back behind the microphone after an extended summer break highlighted by a two-week family vacation in Japan. We talk about traveling in Japan. It was a fantastic time, though we were lost without translation at times. But with the US dollar buying 124 yen, it was the right time to go. We also talk about frustration in using frequent flier miles, trends toward prettier and higher tech luggage, and a connoisseur of scrambled eggs. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_117.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/221084023\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #117:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Coming to you from TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. I was trying to do this from the Bally’s Casino in Las Vegas where I was earlier in the week, but it just didn’t work out. I was there for business, not pleasure, but I always feel that I should stay in a casino hotel when in Vegas. I dunno, staying in a Westin or Marriott up by the convention center just doesn’t feel Vegas. When I was here last year for a business convention I stayed in the MGM Grand. Years ago, though, when I’d do regular booth duty at technology shows, I would always stay at Mandalay Bay, which I really liked.</li>\r\n	<li>The more I know about hotels, the more I’m impressed by Vegas hotel operations. Caesars, the MGM Grand, Mandalay Bay -- they’re huge mini-cities -- orders of magnitude bigger than couple-hundred room hotels I’d stay at in Denver or New Orleans. And yet the service, the execution is almost always way better than those smaller hotels. If you’re any sort of an operations nerd, you gotta give ‘em a nod. Though on the other hand, when you head to the gym at 6am and pass by the old guy dragging on a cigarette playing the quarter slots, it kinda makes you wish they were a little less good...</li>\r\n	<li>As I mentioned in the last episode, the big travel for me was at the beginning of September when we were in Scotland for 2 weeks getting my daughter situated at Univ of St Andrews. Now while I say “getting my daughter situated,” there were equal parts getting my wife situated with the idea of her youngest child being an ocean away -- a big difference from when my son was 90 minutes up the road in Milwaukee.</li>\r\n	<li>The following week’s travel had a nice difficulty factor. Weds morning, I flew from Chicago to DC for the papal Mass on the campus of my alma mater, Catholic University of America, and then back to Detroit that evening for meetings first thing Thursday morning. The difficulty factor was my luggage. No back packs, no selfie sticks, so certainly no roller bags were getting through the security checkpoints. Finding a checked luggage place is a real challenge anymore. I thought about checking my bag into my DCA-DTW flight, but I was too early -- 8 hours prior to flight time max. There is a checked baggage place at Union Station -- DC’s train station -- which is conveniently located a couple of stops south of Catholic on the Metro Red Line.</li>\r\n	<li>Freed of my baggage, I emerged from the Brookland Metro Stop to an unbelievable combination of people and fencing. Incredibly long lines of people corralled in by what had to be miles of fences. I was lucky; I somehow got into a quick security line -- only 45 minutes. After finding my seating section, the gates were closed and we were sealed in our sections until the Pope arrived and did a couple of laps around campus in the Popemobile. After Mass started, they opened up the gates again. Which was great, because while the music and the liturgy were top notch, I wasn’t queuing up for communion with 25,000 other folks. After the homily, I was one of the trickle of folks making an early exit to beat the rush. I had a flight to catch. I’m sure the Pope understood.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>One Day</em> by <a href=\"http://www.hollowhorse.co.uk/\">Hollow Horse</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>OK, just as a warning, this section is going to ramble on for a while. I have a random walk of comments/opinions that I just can’t seem to synthesize into  coherent topics. So here it goes...</li>\r\n	<li>First stop in the mail bag, I was pleasantly surprised to receive this audio comment from Linda Martin of the Indie Travel Podcast\r\n<ul>&lt;li\"&gt;Linda, thanks for that. The thing with eggs -- you can tell I’ve thought about this way too much -- it’s a trade-off between good eggs and time. It takes time for a cooked-to-order egg, but in the morning, I don’t often have that time. Usually, I’ve worked out; I’m cooling down during breakfast, then hitting the shower and off to work. When I stayed in one of the Renaissance Hotels in New Orleans, they didn’t have a separate executive lounge. Breakfast was served in the restaurant. They had the typical lounge buffet set up, but you could also order off the menu, which I think I did once in a dozen stays. It was a nice egg, but it took an extra 10 min that usually wasn’t in my morning schedule. Definitely a 1st World problem</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>Lisa Walls wrote on the TravelCommons Facebook Wall\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>“Hey Mark, I love your podcast, especially the comments on food and craft beers. Other than the Altoids, do you carry any food in your briefcase, such as protein bars? I am always looking for something that is shelf stable that tastes good and travels well.”</li>\r\n	<li>Lisa, thanks for the note. I usually keep 1-2 KIND bars in the bottom of my bag. The fruit-&amp;-nut ones seem to hold up to weeks of getting crushed by my PC power supply. They’re also not too sweet the way some other granola and power bars are.</li>\r\n	<li>I know I’m about to lose any foodie cred I may have built up over the years, but I gotta say that, for me, the McDonald\'s grilled chicken Snack Wraps are just about the right amount of food to cover a 2-hour flight. They’re quick to buy, and compact to bring on board and eat. I find it tough to manage a salad while sitting in a center seat.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>I’m not sure if I mentioned this last episode, but I’m flying Southwest on this week’s Vegas-Denver-Chicago trip to click over A-list status. It kinda crept up on me -- I don’t typically fly SW enough to make status, but apparently I have this year. As near as I can tell, this means I won’t have to pay the $12.50 Early Bird fee or be staring at my Southwest app exactly 24 hours before flight time in order to get a decent boarding position. Which, as we all know, is critical on Southwest since there’s no assigned seating. An A or early B boarding group number is necessary for an aisle seat. On my Vegas flight, hitting the “Check In” button maybe 2 seconds after the 24-hour window got me B 7, so I got an aisle seat in the back half of the plane. It was a full flight, so after that, I was living last year’s Super Bowl Doritos commercial -- looking down, trying to avoid eye contact with potentially bad seat mates while looking friendly to attract good ones. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://youtu.be/2JqRXLQYF9o\">link</a> to the commercial. It’s spot on.</li>\r\n	<li>In the last episode, I talked about travel amateurs clogging up the PreCheck lanes. These would be people getting PreCheck as part of the TSA’s “Managed Inclusion” program, where they randomly shunt travelers over to PreCheck to balance screening line loads. This to the utter frustration of travelers who paid $85 for PreCheck screening or $100 for Global Entry. You might recall long-time listener Rich Fraser saying he was getting PreCheck about 75% of the time so why should he pay? But now the TSA says they’re throttling back on “Managed Inclusion”, driven at least in part by the publicity generated by auditors finding that travelers on various watch lists were being given PreCheck. I’ve certainly noticed the length of PreCheck lines dropping.</li>\r\n	<li>Also in the last episode, I talked about luggage trends. One trend that sorta hit the cutting room floor is the move to fully rotating twirly wheels. Certainly handy in getting your luggage down a tight airplane aisle, but to my eye, most of them look a bit tinier, a bit flimsier than the standard roller-blade style wheel partially embedded in the back of the suitcase. The twirly wheels don’t seem rugged enough to survive getting pulled down Manhattan sidewalks or some of the ruts in New Orleans. And to allow full rotation, the wheels stick out of the bottom of the suitcase making the bag longer. This tripped up my wife on our flight from EDI to LHR. The BA gate agent asked my wife to put her bag in the luggage sizer. It would’ve fit -- except for the twirly wheels. Now we have to gate check it -- which means standing off to the side of the gate pulling some stuff out, transferring it into her shoulder bag. Understandable -- until we get on the plane and see it’s a half-full 767 and there are fully empty luggage bins. Really? So as is my wont, I vented my frustration on Twitter rather than any BA employees. BA’s social media department responded pretty quickly saying they needed to check all luggage to be fair to all passengers. But how would allowing a bag that was, at most, an inch over-long because of its twirly wheels on a half-full flight with empty overheads cheat any other passengers? It’s an over-officiousness that just doesn’t make sense. And it’s the reason I avoid BA now whenever possible. Which is a real shame, because back in the early ‘90’s when I was doing a lot of travel to Europe, I prefered BA. But that was 20 years ago and, it seems, a different BA.</li>\r\n	<li>There is another reason I avoid BA -- officiousness <i>and</i> Heathrow. Again, another thing I loved in the ‘90’s, I now avoid whenever possible. Heathrow is a complete nightmare. You land, you trundle along through corridors, down escalators, into a bus, get a tour of the Heathrow back alleys, stop at another terminal, fight through security again, and then end up in the midst of a packed retail space where you wander through the shops because there’s no place to sit. It’s gotten to the point that I’ll fly the extra hour to connect through Frankfurt or Amsterdam just to avoid Heathrow. We were doing this St Andrews trip on AA miles. We were fine on the way out -- ORD-JFK-EDI all on AA. But coming back, it was EDI-LHR-ORD with the first leg on BA. Just ugh! I still keep thinking about how to get something out of my 300K BA Avios miles. Maybe I’ll make my daughter fly BA.</li>\r\n	<li>On a brighter note, I tried a new financial service during this trip and it worked really well. It’s called Revolut -- as in Revolution cut a bit short. It’s a FinTech start up based in the UK that gives you a virtual and real debit card with really great exchange rates. As with all the cool start-ups nowadays, everything is done through a smartphone app -- which, to stow the snark for a second, makes a lot of sense for any travel app. I opened an account before I left and funded it with $200 from my regular ATM/debit card. I could then convert my dollars to pounds or euros at what appeared to be just about the market rate -- there didn’t seem to be a lot of margin taken on the buy or sell sides. I also instantly had a virtual debit card with which I could use those new pounds or euros to buy things on the web -- like train tickets or top up a phone card. I then requested a physical version of my card, which took about a week to show up from the UK. Now I had a proper European chip-&amp;-pin card that I could use at an ATM or, say, the self-serve checkout line at Tesco’s without waiting for a clerk to take my signed receipt. It only hiccuped one at the Costa coffee shop in St Andrews; I still don’t know why. Poking around a bit more, I found that I could send pounds to my daughter’s RBS account with a day or so lag. Now, none of this functionality is necessarily new, though being able to do it all through a slick smartphone app is very handy. The real innovation is the cost. Funding my Revolut account from my debit card cost me less than 1% -- less than $2 for the $200 transfer, which is cheaper than most non-network ATM fees. After that, no transaction fees to move money between currencies or to withdraw. Compare that to hitting a foreign ATM with your US card. My personal bank is very reasonable, only charging me Visa’s 1% transaction fee, but many big banks will hit you with a $5 non-network fee on top of any transaction fees. And then transferring money to my daughter’s account -- wire transfers can cost $25-30. Revolut has well-packaged functionality delivered at the lowest costs I’ve seen. I don’t know how long they’ll keep this price point, but right now, it’s the best deal I’ve seen for money needed for international travel. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://revolut.com/\">link</a> to the Revolut web site.</li>\r\n	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Clear My Head</em> by <a href=\"http://www.thefiasco.net/\">FIASCO</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<b>Random Thoughts about Car Rentals</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>I guess I could’ve cut two or three comments out of the last segment and labeled them “Random Comments about My Scotland Trip” but that just seems entire too gratuitous. But I have been collecting car rental experiences in my TravelCommons Evernote drop file and I think I now have enough for make up a topic -- or at least what might marginally pass for a topic</li>\r\n	<li>As I’ve mentioned in past episodes, I really don’t like to rent cars. I much prefer to use rail or a cab in from the airport and then walk to where ever I need to go. That works well in New York or Chicago or San Francisco, not so much in Denver or Detroit. So I’ve been renting a lot of cars over the past 6 months.</li>\r\n	<li>So many in fact that Hertz bumped my status up to President\'s Circle. Not quite sure that gets me, but it sounds status-y. Though right after my congratulatory e-mail, I found a dumpy Toyota Corolla in my Hertz Gold spot, so maybe it’s not anything special.</li>\r\n	<li>But in times like those -- when I get assigned the 45,000-mile Toyota with crumbs still in the driver seat, or a Ford F-150 king cab pick up truck in Boston (?) -- I’ve come to love Hertz Gold Choice. If you rent a mid-size or above -- and for our corporate rate, the price of a compact and mid-size are the same -- you can go to the Choice aisle and take one of those cars instead. I left the dumpy Toyota and took a new Nissan instead.</li>\r\n	<li>I have started to make note of differences in service <i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">and</span></i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> attitude across locations. I never rent from Hertz at Detroit airport anymore. I’ve yet to get a non-dumpy car there and the attitude is not great. Though I think Hertz’s Newark station is the worst. A recent example -- a colleague was driving his car toward the lot exit when a low tire pressure alarm lit up. So he asked the guy at the exit gate where he could get some air to top off the tire. “Try a gas station,” the attendant told him. That was helpful.</span></li>\r\n	<li>I’ve had challenges with car rental web sites -- Hertz, Avis -- when my pick-up or drop off time didn’t match the hours of the office I selected. I get the error notice and then when I go back to try another site or time, these websites will randomly select another date or location. I had this happen to me in Edinburgh on the second car we rented. We were training from Lockerbie back to Edinburgh where we’d done 4 days of biking while our daughter was going through freshman orientation. I’d booked a car on Hertz’s web site to pick up at the train station and drop off at EDI 5 days later. It took me 5 tries to get it right -- each time I re-started, it reset the pick-up location from Waverly Station to EDI. And each time I’d correct it. Except, it seems, the last time. When we arrived in Waverly, there was no car. I looked at the res -- pick up at EDI. Ugh. Not the end of the world -- we could’ve taken the new light rail out to EDI, but it was aggravating. I searched through the Hertz.co.uk website for a phone number -- that itself being a little extra helping of aggravation -- and called the res center. The woman on the other end was inordinately calm and helpful. 3 minutes later, she’d moved my pick-up to Waverly. I thanked her -- a lot. I should’ve booked with her instead of the website.</li>\r\n	<li>We rented our first car in Edinburgh from Enterprise. It was a great car -- a Fiat 500 L. All the bags fit easily in the hatchback. Nice nav, nice sound system, clean....  Drove to a near-by shopping mall -- grabbed a coffee at Starbucks and phone SIMs at the ee store. Next stop, IKEA to buy things we didn’t pack -- like towels and hangers. Coming off the motorway, through a traffic circle, the clutch crapped out. I’d put it in gear, let out the clutch pedal, nothing. 3 hours later after Enterprise, the auto club and Fiat scrummed about who was supposed to pick up the car, the tow truck dropped us back off at EDI where the Enterprise folks apologized profusely and gave us an even nicer Nissan. A couple of weeks, I noticed the Pope used a Fiat 500L to drive from Andrews Airforce Base to the Vatican Embassy. The next day, though, he was in a Jeep Popemobile. I could sympathize.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a title=\"MP3 Download\" href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/download_track.php?id=0E74C6FEB7390D18D02B4B399668093172F6C8CC66DDC09D90A3BF7DDA436823CFAC859AE2B2C73E46A278A4950E1030\">Lonely Dog Blues</a></em> by <a title=\"Tobin James\' Web Site\" href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/label.php?id=2A3449F03E7B8462FF74407B60F0C4B0A30A0CBE880C61DE37E3B342387F0643\">Tobin James</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917626811171154.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #117</li>\r\n	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://iodapromonet.com/index.php\">IODA Promonet</a></li>\r\n	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_117.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #117 — Random Thoughts About Eggs, Scotland & Car Rentals','','inherit','open','open','','1542-revision-v1','','','2015-10-11 21:28:52','2015-10-12 02:28:52','',1542,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/10/11/1542-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1549,1,'2015-10-11 21:32:37','2015-10-12 02:32:37','Back behind the microphone after an extended summer break highlighted by a two-week family vacation in Japan. We talk about traveling in Japan. It was a fantastic time, though we were lost without translation at times. But with the US dollar buying 124 yen, it was the right time to go. We also talk about frustration in using frequent flier miles, trends toward prettier and higher tech luggage, and a connoisseur of scrambled eggs. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_117.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/221084023\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #117:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Coming to you from TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. I was trying to do this from the Bally’s Casino in Las Vegas where I was earlier in the week, but it just didn’t work out. I was there for business, not pleasure, but I always feel that I should stay in a casino hotel when in Vegas. I dunno, staying in a Westin or Marriott up by the convention center just doesn’t feel Vegas. When I was here last year for a business convention I stayed in the MGM Grand. Years ago, though, when I’d do regular booth duty at technology shows, I would always stay at Mandalay Bay, which I really liked.</li>\r\n	<li>The more I know about hotels, the more I’m impressed by Vegas hotel operations. Caesars, the MGM Grand, Mandalay Bay -- they’re huge mini-cities -- orders of magnitude bigger than couple-hundred room hotels I’d stay at in Denver or New Orleans. And yet the service, the execution is almost always way better than those smaller hotels. If you’re any sort of an operations nerd, you gotta give ‘em a nod. Though on the other hand, when you head to the gym at 6am and pass by the old guy dragging on a cigarette playing the quarter slots, it kinda makes you wish they were a little less good...</li>\r\n	<li>As I mentioned in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/08/26/podcast-116-traveling-thru-japan-luggage-trends/\">the last episode</a>, the big travel for me was at the beginning of September when we were in Scotland for 2 weeks getting my daughter situated at Univ of St Andrews. Now while I say “getting my daughter situated,” there were equal parts getting my wife situated with the idea of her youngest child being an ocean away -- a big difference from when my son was 90 minutes up the road in Milwaukee.</li>\r\n	<li>The following week’s travel had a nice difficulty factor. Weds morning, I flew from Chicago to DC for the papal Mass on the campus of my alma mater, Catholic University of America, and then back to Detroit that evening for meetings first thing Thursday morning. The difficulty factor was my luggage. No back packs, no selfie sticks, so certainly no roller bags were getting through the security checkpoints. Finding a checked luggage place is a real challenge anymore. I thought about checking my bag into my DCA-DTW flight, but I was too early -- 8 hours prior to flight time max. There is a checked baggage place at Union Station -- DC’s train station -- which is conveniently located a couple of stops south of Catholic on the Metro Red Line.</li>\r\n	<li>Freed of my baggage, I emerged from the Brookland Metro Stop to an unbelievable combination of people and fencing. Incredibly long lines of people corralled in by what had to be miles of fences. I was lucky; I somehow got into a quick security line -- only 45 minutes. After finding my seating section, the gates were closed and we were sealed in our sections until the Pope arrived and did a couple of laps around campus in the Popemobile. After Mass started, they opened up the gates again. Which was great, because while the music and the liturgy were top notch, I wasn’t queuing up for communion with 25,000 other folks. After the homily, I was one of the trickle of folks making an early exit to beat the rush. I had a flight to catch. I’m sure the Pope understood.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>One Day</em> by <a href=\"http://www.hollowhorse.co.uk/\">Hollow Horse</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>OK, just as a warning, this section is going to ramble on for a while. I have a random walk of comments/opinions that I just can’t seem to synthesize into  coherent topics. So here it goes...</li>\r\n	<li>First stop in the mail bag, I was pleasantly surprised to receive this audio comment from Linda Martin of the Indie Travel Podcast\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Linda, thanks for that. The thing with eggs -- you can tell I’ve thought about this way too much -- it’s a trade-off between good eggs and time. It takes time for a cooked-to-order egg, but in the morning, I don’t often have that time. Usually, I’ve worked out; I’m cooling down during breakfast, then hitting the shower and off to work. When I stayed in one of the Renaissance Hotels in New Orleans, they didn’t have a separate executive lounge. Breakfast was served in the restaurant. They had the typical lounge buffet set up, but you could also order off the menu, which I think I did once in a dozen stays. It was a nice egg, but it took an extra 10 min that usually wasn’t in my morning schedule. Definitely a 1st World problem</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>Lisa Walls wrote on the TravelCommons Facebook Wall\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>“Hey Mark, I love your podcast, especially the comments on food and craft beers. Other than the Altoids, do you carry any food in your briefcase, such as protein bars? I am always looking for something that is shelf stable that tastes good and travels well.”</li>\r\n	<li>Lisa, thanks for the note. I usually keep 1-2 KIND bars in the bottom of my bag. The fruit-&amp;-nut ones seem to hold up to weeks of getting crushed by my PC power supply. They’re also not too sweet the way some other granola and power bars are.</li>\r\n	<li>I know I’m about to lose any foodie cred I may have built up over the years, but I gotta say that, for me, the McDonald\'s grilled chicken Snack Wraps are just about the right amount of food to cover a 2-hour flight. They’re quick to buy, and compact to bring on board and eat. I find it tough to manage a salad while sitting in a center seat.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>I’m not sure if I mentioned this last episode, but I’m flying Southwest on this week’s Vegas-Denver-Chicago trip to click over A-list status. It kinda crept up on me -- I don’t typically fly SW enough to make status, but apparently I have this year. As near as I can tell, this means I won’t have to pay the $12.50 Early Bird fee or be staring at my Southwest app exactly 24 hours before flight time in order to get a decent boarding position. Which, as we all know, is critical on Southwest since there’s no assigned seating. An A or early B boarding group number is necessary for an aisle seat. On my Vegas flight, hitting the “Check In” button maybe 2 seconds after the 24-hour window got me B 7, so I got an aisle seat in the back half of the plane. It was a full flight, so after that, I was living last year’s Super Bowl Doritos commercial -- looking down, trying to avoid eye contact with potentially bad seat mates while looking friendly to attract good ones. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://youtu.be/2JqRXLQYF9o\">link</a> to the commercial. It’s spot on.</li>\r\n	<li>In the last episode, I talked about travel amateurs clogging up the PreCheck lanes. These would be people getting PreCheck as part of the TSA’s “Managed Inclusion” program, where they randomly shunt travelers over to PreCheck to balance screening line loads. This to the utter frustration of travelers who paid $85 for PreCheck screening or $100 for Global Entry. You might recall long-time listener Rich Fraser saying he was getting PreCheck about 75% of the time so why should he pay? But now the TSA says they’re throttling back on “Managed Inclusion”, driven at least in part by the publicity generated by auditors finding that travelers on various watch lists were being given PreCheck. I’ve certainly noticed the length of PreCheck lines dropping.</li>\r\n	<li>Also in the last episode, I talked about luggage trends. One trend that sorta hit the cutting room floor is the move to fully rotating twirly wheels. Certainly handy in getting your luggage down a tight airplane aisle, but to my eye, most of them look a bit tinier, a bit flimsier than the standard roller-blade style wheel partially embedded in the back of the suitcase. The twirly wheels don’t seem rugged enough to survive getting pulled down Manhattan sidewalks or some of the ruts in New Orleans. And to allow full rotation, the wheels stick out of the bottom of the suitcase making the bag longer. This tripped up my wife on our flight from EDI to LHR. The BA gate agent asked my wife to put her bag in the luggage sizer. It would’ve fit -- except for the twirly wheels. Now we have to gate check it -- which means standing off to the side of the gate pulling some stuff out, transferring it into her shoulder bag. Understandable -- until we get on the plane and see it’s a half-full 767 and there are fully empty luggage bins. Really? So as is my wont, I vented my frustration on Twitter rather than any BA employees. BA’s social media department responded pretty quickly saying they needed to check all luggage to be fair to all passengers. But how would allowing a bag that was, at most, an inch over-long because of its twirly wheels on a half-full flight with empty overheads cheat any other passengers? It’s an over-officiousness that just doesn’t make sense. And it’s the reason I avoid BA now whenever possible. Which is a real shame, because back in the early ‘90’s when I was doing a lot of travel to Europe, I prefered BA. But that was 20 years ago and, it seems, a different BA.</li>\r\n	<li>There is another reason I avoid BA -- officiousness <i>and</i> Heathrow. Again, another thing I loved in the ‘90’s, I now avoid whenever possible. Heathrow is a complete nightmare. You land, you trundle along through corridors, down escalators, into a bus, get a tour of the Heathrow back alleys, stop at another terminal, fight through security again, and then end up in the midst of a packed retail space where you wander through the shops because there’s no place to sit. It’s gotten to the point that I’ll fly the extra hour to connect through Frankfurt or Amsterdam just to avoid Heathrow. We were doing this St Andrews trip on AA miles. We were fine on the way out -- ORD-JFK-EDI all on AA. But coming back, it was EDI-LHR-ORD with the first leg on BA. Just ugh! I still keep thinking about how to get something out of my 300K BA Avios miles. Maybe I’ll make my daughter fly BA.</li>\r\n	<li>On a brighter note, I tried a new financial service during this trip and it worked really well. It’s called Revolut -- as in Revolution cut a bit short. It’s a FinTech start up based in the UK that gives you a virtual and real debit card with really great exchange rates. As with all the cool start-ups nowadays, everything is done through a smartphone app -- which, to stow the snark for a second, makes a lot of sense for any travel app. I opened an account before I left and funded it with $200 from my regular ATM/debit card. I could then convert my dollars to pounds or euros at what appeared to be just about the market rate -- there didn’t seem to be a lot of margin taken on the buy or sell sides. I also instantly had a virtual debit card with which I could use those new pounds or euros to buy things on the web -- like train tickets or top up a phone card. I then requested a physical version of my card, which took about a week to show up from the UK. Now I had a proper European chip-&amp;-pin card that I could use at an ATM or, say, the self-serve checkout line at Tesco’s without waiting for a clerk to take my signed receipt. It only hiccuped one at the Costa coffee shop in St Andrews; I still don’t know why. Poking around a bit more, I found that I could send pounds to my daughter’s RBS account with a day or so lag. Now, none of this functionality is necessarily new, though being able to do it all through a slick smartphone app is very handy. The real innovation is the cost. Funding my Revolut account from my debit card cost me less than 1% -- less than $2 for the $200 transfer, which is cheaper than most non-network ATM fees. After that, no transaction fees to move money between currencies or to withdraw. Compare that to hitting a foreign ATM with your US card. My personal bank is very reasonable, only charging me Visa’s 1% transaction fee, but many big banks will hit you with a $5 non-network fee on top of any transaction fees. And then transferring money to my daughter’s account -- wire transfers can cost $25-30. Revolut has well-packaged functionality delivered at the lowest costs I’ve seen. I don’t know how long they’ll keep this price point, but right now, it’s the best deal I’ve seen for money needed for international travel. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://revolut.com/\">link</a> to the Revolut web site.</li>\r\n	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Clear My Head</em> by <a href=\"http://www.thefiasco.net/\">FIASCO</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Random Thoughts about Car Rentals</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>I guess I could’ve cut two or three comments out of the last segment and labeled them “Random Comments about My Scotland Trip” but that just seems entire too gratuitous. But I have been collecting car rental experiences in my TravelCommons Evernote drop file and I think I now have enough for make up a topic -- or at least what might marginally pass for a topic</li>\r\n	<li>As I’ve mentioned in past episodes, I really don’t like to rent cars. I much prefer to use rail or a cab in from the airport and then walk to where ever I need to go. That works well in New York or Chicago or San Francisco, not so much in Denver or Detroit. So I’ve been renting a lot of cars over the past 6 months.</li>\r\n	<li>So many in fact that Hertz bumped my status up to President\'s Circle. Not quite sure that gets me, but it sounds status-y. Though right after my congratulatory e-mail, I found a dumpy Toyota Corolla in my Hertz Gold spot, so maybe it’s not anything special.</li>\r\n	<li>But in times like those -- when I get assigned the 45,000-mile Toyota with crumbs still in the driver seat, or a Ford F-150 king cab pick up truck in Boston (?) -- I’ve come to love Hertz Gold Choice. If you rent a mid-size or above -- and for our corporate rate, the price of a compact and mid-size are the same -- you can go to the Choice aisle and take one of those cars instead. I left the dumpy Toyota and took a new Nissan instead.</li>\r\n	<li>I have started to make note of differences in service <i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">and</span></i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> attitude across locations. I never rent from Hertz at Detroit airport anymore. I’ve yet to get a non-dumpy car there and the attitude is not great. Though I think Hertz’s Newark station is the worst. A recent example -- a colleague was driving his car toward the lot exit when a low tire pressure alarm lit up. So he asked the guy at the exit gate where he could get some air to top off the tire. “Try a gas station,” the attendant told him. That was helpful.</span></li>\r\n	<li>I’ve had challenges with car rental web sites -- Hertz, Avis -- when my pick-up or drop off time didn’t match the hours of the office I selected. I get the error notice and then when I go back to try another site or time, these websites will randomly select another date or location. I had this happen to me in Edinburgh on the second car we rented. We were training from Lockerbie back to Edinburgh where we’d done 4 days of biking while our daughter was going through freshman orientation. I’d booked a car on Hertz’s web site to pick up at the train station and drop off at EDI 5 days later. It took me 5 tries to get it right -- each time I re-started, it reset the pick-up location from Waverly Station to EDI. And each time I’d correct it. Except, it seems, the last time. When we arrived in Waverly, there was no car. I looked at the res -- pick up at EDI. Ugh. Not the end of the world -- we could’ve taken the new light rail out to EDI, but it was aggravating. I searched through the Hertz.co.uk website for a phone number -- that itself being a little extra helping of aggravation -- and called the res center. The woman on the other end was inordinately calm and helpful. 3 minutes later, she’d moved my pick-up to Waverly. I thanked her -- a lot. I should’ve booked with her instead of the website.</li>\r\n	<li>We rented our first car in Edinburgh from Enterprise. It was a great car -- a Fiat 500 L. All the bags fit easily in the hatchback. Nice nav, nice sound system, clean....  Drove to a near-by shopping mall -- grabbed a coffee at Starbucks and phone SIMs at the ee store. Next stop, IKEA to buy things we didn’t pack -- like towels and hangers. Coming off the motorway, through a traffic circle, the clutch crapped out. I’d put it in gear, let out the clutch pedal, nothing. 3 hours later after Enterprise, the auto club and Fiat scrummed about who was supposed to pick up the car, the tow truck dropped us back off at EDI where the Enterprise folks apologized profusely and gave us an even nicer Nissan. A couple of weeks, I noticed the Pope used a Fiat 500L to drive from Andrews Airforce Base to the Vatican Embassy. The next day, though, he was in a Jeep Popemobile. I could sympathize.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a title=\"MP3 Download\" href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/download_track.php?id=0E74C6FEB7390D18D02B4B399668093172F6C8CC66DDC09D90A3BF7DDA436823CFAC859AE2B2C73E46A278A4950E1030\">Lonely Dog Blues</a></em> by <a title=\"Tobin James\' Web Site\" href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/label.php?id=2A3449F03E7B8462FF74407B60F0C4B0A30A0CBE880C61DE37E3B342387F0643\">Tobin James</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917626811171154.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #117</li>\r\n	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/\">Podshow Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\r\n	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_117.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #117 — Random Thoughts About Eggs, Scotland & Car Rentals','','inherit','open','open','','1542-revision-v1','','','2015-10-11 21:32:37','2015-10-12 02:32:37','',1542,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/10/11/1542-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1550,1,'2015-10-11 21:34:24','2015-10-12 02:34:24','[caption id=\"attachment_1387\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/IMG_0002.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1387\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/IMG_0002-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Just a little snug for the next 14 hours...\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> It\'ll be a bit snug for the next 14 hours...[/caption]\r\n\r\nI tried to hold back, but I just couldn\'t. I <em>have</em> to finally weigh in on the seatback recline wars. I\'m stunned at the number of people who convert a couple of inches of seat movement into some sort of Manichean morality play. From that you can probably guess where I come out on this. On a much lighter side, I talk about finally taking Atlanta\'s MARTA subway from the airport and tagging on some beer hunting to some Midwest business travel. All this and more  at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_111.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below. [sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_111.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #111:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL having, through nothing other than sheer blind luck, dodged the cancellations caused by fire and attempted suicide at the <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Air_Route_Traffic_Control_Center\">Air Route Traffic Control Center</a> in Aurora, IL. Wasn’t that a heck of a story. A guy living outside Chicago tips over the edge after being told he’s getting transferred to Hawaii. It usually happens the other way around, especially after last winter.</li>\r\n	<li>And it’s still a mess. Kinda helped me with my decision to drive to Indianapolis last Friday. Indy is right on the cusp of the fly-vs-drive break point -- about 180 miles from Chicago but it’s straight, flat, and most of it has a 70 mph speed limit. Also pushed me to take a break from ORD this week. Aurora’s supposed to be back online Oct 13 which is the next airline ticket I have, so I hope someone is cracking the whip over there.</li>\r\n	<li>This episode should sound better than the last one. I did some eBay shopping and significantly upgraded my recording rig. I’d been recording with an iRiver MP3 recorder/player and little condenser mic since the beginning of this podcast. Unfortunately, iRiver didn’t feel like upgrading the drivers from Windows XP to Windows 7 or 8, and when my last XP machine was converted to a VMWare image, it just got to be a hassle pulling the audio off of it. So I applied a firmware upgrade that was supposed to make it look like a regular jump drive, which it did, but it also reduced the gain, the volume on my mic to almost nothing. After struggling with it for a bit, I finally gave up. The last episode was recorded on my HTC One with a significant amount of massaging in Adobe Audition. But now, I think I’ve got something that’ll work. We’ll see how this goes.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/beyond7-revelations/\" target=\"_blank\"><em>Miss America</em></a> by Beyond 7</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Regular listeners know that I always like to check out rapid transit to and from airports. On a trip to Atlanta last month, I finally decided to buck up and try <a href=\"http://www.itsmarta.com/\">MARTA</a>. I’ve flown into Atlanta for years, but always rented a car because I never did work in Atlanta, always some place between 10 o’clock and 2 o’clock on the I-285 beltway. Which is always lovely because the airport sits at 6 o’clock -- directly opposite of where I normally need to be. So my usual MO is to rent a car and grind it out through the traffic -- either straight up the city or around the beltway -- which is why I try very hard to avoid meetings in Atlanta. So anyway, on this particular Thursday, I caught the 6am flight from ORD, hitting Atlanta right at the tail end of the morning rush. I guess I was being a bit passive aggressive on this trip, but I didn’t book a rental car. I just didn’t want to deal with the traffic. I had planned on taking a cab, but walking past the MARTA station in the airport, I plugged the office address into Google Maps and hit the Transit button, and found it was a straight shot up the Red Line and then a 5 minute walk from the station. For a $2.50 fare, it seemed worth a shot. And it was. The toughest part was trying to figure out which station exit to use so that I got on the correct side of the six-lane divided street I needed to walk along. I got it wrong the first time. I was pleasantly surprised, though, to find sidewalks -- not a common amenity in office park land. The lone pedestrian sprinting across a couple of intersections to avoid turning cars, I got to my destination without fighting traffic and more than an order of magnitude cheaper than cab fare.</li>\r\n	<li>I got an interesting reaction from people when I told them about my morning’s MARTA journey. “Well that’s adventuresome” and “What time were you on? Rush hour? That’s OK. I wouldn’t try that after dark though” I never felt unsafe or uncomfortable during my ride. But then again, I never felt unsafe on train rides in Brussels -- until my backpack was stolen. I never felt unsafe on DC’s Metro system -- until the day a woman reached across the aisle, tapped my arm and strongly suggested that I put my iPad away. But I dunno, MARTA seemed as safe as the Metro system or the L in Chicago. And it was a damn sight cleaner than BART in San Francisco. I’ll take it again when I have to go back down to Atlanta in two weeks.</li>\r\n	<li>Especially after I sprung the dollar for the Breeze card, which is the contactless/touch card that MARTA now requires you to buy instead of issuing the little paper cards like New York or DC. The fare machine concierge assured me “It’s good for 10 years!” Yes, provided I remember to bring it with me next time. These things are starting to stack up. I have a London Oyster card in some desk drawer; I forgot how much that card cost me. Chicago’s <a href=\"https://www.ventrachicago.com/\">Ventra </a>card cost $5(!) which they say will be put back on the card if I register it -- which I did but didn’t see any $5 credit. Maybe all these new cards are great for regular riders, but for the minority like me -- the occasional rider -- it’s a bit of a pain; more cost, more confusion, and a growing stack of plastic in my desk drawer. The Chicago system theoretically lets you use the NFC capabilities of newer Android phones like my HTC One to tap and pay with Google Wallet. I’m planning to check that out the next time I take the L. Would’ve been nice to know before I sprung the $5, but I’ll look harder for that when I’m in a new city. Of course, we could always go back to the cash box, like they still have on the New Orleans streetcars. But there I’m find myself fishing around for a quarter to drop the exact change into the cash box. For all the whining, it’s still better than renting a car.</li>\r\n	<li>In <a title=\"Podcast #107 — Serious About Hotel Reviews; TSA Gets Something Right!\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/01/29/podcast-107-serious-about-hotel-reviews-tsa-gets-something-right/\">episode #107</a> earlier this year, I talked about the checklist I run through when I decide to review a hotel on TripAdvisor -- the bathroom, room size, workout room, location, service quality. And it’s that last one -- service quality -- that I really see the difference. It’s not at the front desk. Hotels have their training and employee selection programs nailed. It’s been a long time since I’ve been treated with anything less than enthusiastic hospitality. No, where it falls down is the back of the house. The latest example was a couple of weeks ago. I check in around 5:30. Walking up to my room, I see dirty room service dishes -- the little ketchup and mustard bottles suggest it was the remnants of a burger. I get ready to turn around -- I bet they gave me an occupied room by mistake. But nope, my key worked and the room was clean and empty. Hmmm… I call down to the front desk to tell them about the dishes. The very nice woman who just checked me in greeted me by name and apologize profusely, saying she’d send someone up right away. I walk out for dinner. I come back a couple hours later -- dishes are still there. I go out a bit later to grab a beer -- dishes are still there. I come back -- yup, the burger carcass is still there. Now I’m thinking, what else is lying around. I call back down to the nice woman. I’ll be checking out tomorrow morning.</li>\r\n	<li>And if you have any travel experiences -- thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons\">Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/westexit-extra/\" target=\"_blank\"><em>On Condition of Anonymity</em></a> by the West Exit</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Last Word (Hopefully) On Seatback Recline Wars</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>I’ve resisted doing this topic, but how can I claim to be doing a podcast that gives the “voice of the traveler” and is “more about the journey than the destination” and not take some cut at whole seatback recline option explosion? Because it seems like no one else -- hard core traveler or rank amateur -- has kept their thoughts to themselves. The sheer amount of time and words -- physical or cyber -- devoted to this topic has been amazing.</li>\r\n	<li>Let’s separate the specific from the general. First, let’s recap the incident that lit the fuse. A guy on his last leg home from Moscow, sitting in United’s Economy Plus, uses a Knee Defender to keep the woman in front of him from reclining her seat so he can get some work done on his laptop. She flags down the flight attendant about her seemingly malfunctioning seat, the flight attendant notices the Knee Defender and tells the guy to take it off. He does, and the woman slams her seat back to full recline. When she goes to the rest room, he pushes her seat back up and puts his Knee Defender back in. She comes back, pissed that she can’t recline her seat, tosses her glass of Sprite at him. The pilot makes an unscheduled landing to them both off the plane where, surprisingly, neither of them are rung up on charges.</li>\r\n	<li>So the first thing to say is -- yes, these are two grown adults -- which is head-shakingly amazing. This would be out-of-bounds behavior at a ball park or a rock concert, let alone in a packed metal tube hurtling along at 600 mph at 36,000 feet. Now, that being said and in no way forgiving the woman, the guy was definitely the bigger pinhead in this escapade.</li>\r\n	<li>The guy is 6’-1” -- about my size so I’ve got a pretty good frame of reference. Sitting in United’s Economy Plus, he had a extra 3-4 inches over the folks in the back of the plane. It’s roomy as coach seats go. When I’m flying United, I’ll regularly choose an E+ middle seat over a regular E aisle seat. From first hand experience, I call bull on his premise that he needed to use the Knee Defender to work on his laptop -- unless he has an undisclosed medical condition requiring him to type with completely extended arms, or his arms are long enough so he can tie his shoes without bending over.</li>\r\n	<li>And moving from the specific case to the general discussion (argument?) about the morality of seat reclines, why does this guy (or anybody) think their right to work on a flight trumps another passenger’s right to comfort? I got it -- lots of people need those 2, 3, 4 hours to crank out stuff. But likewise, when I’m catching a 6:30am flight out Monday morning, I need to an hour or two of sleep to make it through the end of the day. And I don’t know of anyone who can sleep without reclining their seat. Which again get me to the question -- what’s with people casting this as some sort of Manichean morality play -- sitting straight up -- Good (morally upright?); space-hogging slouching recliners -- pure Evil.</li>\r\n	<li>Of course, there are ways around this -- they just cost money. If you need the extra space to work -- or sleep -- then pay the extra money for a seat in something like United’s Economy Plus or American’s Main Cabin Extra -- or flight them enough to earn status and you get it for free. As I said earlier, I regularly give up shoulder space for leg room. Unfortunately, it’s a choice I have to make more often than I like, booking flights at the last minute in this age of high plane utilization. Need more space, get more status or buy a more expensive ticket that will get you to the top of the queue for an upgrade. Or just buy the 1st class ticket you need the space.</li>\r\n	<li>But that’s not the story we want to hear -- we want more space than we’re willing to pay for. Airlines are pushing seats closer together because travelers shop purely on price -- a seat is a commodity. Years ago, American Airlines tried to differentiate themselves on legroom, pulling out rows of seats to increase pitch. I would fly those planes whenever I could. Unfortunately for American, I was in the small minority. They got their clocks cleaned and eventually had to put those rows back in. Most travelers don’t pay attention to seat pitch. They just click on the cheapest fare and then bitch about the lack of space.</li>\r\n	<li>Don’t want to pay for the extra space, then do what our guy did when he had to get home after his unscheduled connection in Chicago. He flew Spirit. Their seats don’t recline.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/solace-medusa/\" target=\"_blank\">Subtle Vice</a> </em>by Solace</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Sneaking In Some Craft Beer Tourism</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>As regular podcast listeners <a title=\"Podcast #101 — Future of Mileage Tracking Tools; Searching for Local Food and Craft Beer\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/10/25/podcast-101-future-of-mileage-tracking-tools-searching-for-local-food-and-craft-beer/\">know</a>, I’m pretty much all-in with the US craft brew explosion. I was drinking Sierra Nevada in the ‘80’s while\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_1388\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/2012-10-11-16.11.25.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1388\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/2012-10-11-16.11.25-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Patron Saint of Craft Brewers\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Patron Saint of Craft Brewers[/caption]\r\n\r\nskiing at Lake Tahoe, got deep into Belgian beers in the early ‘90’s when I would travel to Brussels a half-dozen times a year while selling to the pharmaceutical industry, started homebrewing in the mid ‘90’s, and have just continued onward.</li>\r\n	<li>The listeners who I’m friends with on <a href=\"https://untappd.com/\">Untappd</a> can see that I’ve checked in over 2,200 unique beers. It’s a passion that one could arguably say has tipped over a bit to obsession. So when I had a couple of Midwest trips recently -- I mentioned the Indy run, but also had a couple days in St Louis in September -- rather than bolting out of town immediately after my meetings, I did a bit of craft beer tourism, hitting some of the local microbreweries. In St Louis, where I had a bit more time, I hit <a href=\"http://urbanchestnut.com/home\">Urban Chestnut</a> for a dunkelweiss and a board full of knockwurst, stewed apples, cabbage, and pumpernickel bread -- which I managed to consume during a conference call with the judicious use of the mute button. I had some great sour beers at <a href=\"http://www.perennialbeer.com/\">Perennial Ales</a>, and then at <a href=\"http://www.thecivillife.com/\">Civil Life Brewing</a>, a very English pub-like place (not in the ersatz way of Union Jacks and Tube signs hanging around, but in the true sense of a pub -- a cozy local place) I had yet more encased meat -- a Hungarian bratwurst this time. Which was very pleasant change considering everything I’d eaten over the prior 48 hours had been from the Airport Marriott.</li>\r\n	<li>In Indianapolis, I only had time for one stop and as it turned out, my meeting was 8 minutes away from<a href=\"http://www.sunkingbrewing.com/\"> Sun King Brewing</a>. I followed the line of growler-toting folks into the brewery. No taproom, but they gave me tickets and bottle caps good for 6 small samples. They had a Friday sale on growlers, but I’m already long in glassware, and when’s the next time I’m gonna be in Indy? Instead, I bought a couple of 4-packs of the beers I liked best. Since I drove, I didn’t have to make that decision -- is the beer good enough to justify checking luggage?</li>\r\n	<li>Nowadays most hotel bars will have at least one decent craft beer on tap or available in bottles. The St Louis Airport Marriott had a nice selection with about 4 local draft handles including a <a href=\"http://schlafly.com/\">Schlafly </a>pumpkin beer -- not my favorite style, but you gotta give them props for giving it a tap. The Sheraton on Canal St in New Orleans has stepped up its game -- adding 1-2 more local taps in addition to the ubiquitous Abita tap. But on that 4th or 5th week in the same hotel -- or more; I just made Starwood Platinum at the Canal St Sheraton -- even those additional taps start to get boring. Luckily, some of the upscale grocery stores like Whole Foods are also tapped into the craft beer trend and sell single beers. On my first day in New Orleans, I tend to swing by <a href=\"https://shop.rouses.com/\">Rouse’s</a>, kind of a local version of Whole Foods, grab a couple of good beers and take them back to the Sheraton. The first time I did this, though, I had a problem -- there wasn’t a bottle opener in the room; these craft beers don’t typically come in twist-offs. I’m rummaging around, but nothing. It kinda pulled me up short -- when did hotels stop stocking their rooms with bottle openers? I go down to the front desk. They’re pretty puzzled too -- they start rummaging around their drawers. “Maybe you can borrow one from the bar?” Ever since, I always pack a bottle opener in my backpack. Just another thing to keep in the travel kit.</li>\r\n	<li>Some airports are serving up great beer. I found two microbrewery joints at BWI, and I always try to swing by the <a href=\"http://www.greatlakesbrewing.com/home\">Great Lakes Brewery</a> spot in CLE. But in my last trip through ATL, a bartender saw me struggling with her Bud/Coors/Sam Adams draft selection. “Go down to the end of the terminal,” she said, “there’s a new craft beer bar just opened up” Great! I wheel my bag down the terminal but pull up short of the bar. This new beer bar is a smoking bar! That’s right -- I’m in the South. I watch the cigarette smoke billow out under the door. I turn around a walk away. Even an obsession has its limits.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917626811171154.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #111</li>\r\n	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n	<li>The bridge music is from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com\" target=\"_blank\">Magnatune</a>, the <em>we are not evil</em> label. <em>Miss America</em> by Beyond 7, <em>On Condition of Anonymity</em> by the West End, and <em>Subtle Vice</em> by Solace. You can find these and more at <a href=\"http://magnatune.com\" target=\"_blank\">magnatunes.com</a>.</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_111.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #111 — Seatback Recline Wars; Craft Beer Tourism','','inherit','open','open','','1380-revision-v1','','','2015-10-11 21:34:24','2015-10-12 02:34:24','',1380,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/10/11/1380-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1551,1,'2015-10-11 21:35:52','2015-10-12 02:35:52','[caption id=\"attachment_1402\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"225\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/IMG_0159.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1402\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/IMG_0159-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"That\'s Gonna Make for a Long Walk\" width=\"225\" height=\"300\" /></a> Need More Taxes To Fix This[/caption]\r\n\r\nHere\'s a new episode to keep you occupied if you’re stuck in a line somewhere while traveling Thanksgiving week. There are tips for the non-frequent traveler on how to avoid major airport faux pas and a review of how travel taxes will soak you when you get to your destination. We also talk about a high-tech suitcase that\'s blown through its Indiegogo funding campaign, hackers emptying out Hilton Honors accounts, and an overseas WiFi session that emptied out someone\'s wallet.  You can listen to all this and more using the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_112.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below. [soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/178190843\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #112:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside Chicago, IL. Giving you something new to listen to if you’re stuck in a line somewhere while traveling Thanksgiving week. Don’t look for me, though. I got home Weds night and won’t be traveling again until the crowds clear out.</li>\r\n	<li>I was going to open up this episode with kind of a joke sponsorship, something like -- “Brought to you by People Express, thanking Spirit Airlines for making people nostalgic for us and Newark’s North Terminal”. For anyone old enough to have flown People Express in the early ‘80’s, I thought it would be a bit of a chuckle.</li>\r\n	<li>But last week, walking through New Orleans airport, I saw a People Express counter. Wait, what? Turns out that some group picked up the name for a new <a href=\"https://www.flypex.com/\" target=\"_blank\">airline</a> hubbing out of Newport News airport in southern Virginia. Service started this summer only to stop three months later after a ground truck hit one of their two planes. They were supposed to relaunch last month, but that didn’t happen. And then last month, Newport News airport <a href=\"http://wtkr.com/2014/11/18/whats-next-for-peoplexpress/\" target=\"_blank\">evicted</a> them for failure to turn over the Passenger Facility Charge that People Express collected on ticket sales over the summer.</li>\r\n	<li>So maybe my fake promo should go the other way, with Spirit thanking the new People Express for letting Spirit say to their passengers “Hey, you could do worse…”</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Zapac/25046\" target=\"_blank\"><i>You are (funky mix)</i></a> by Zapac</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>A couple of comments from the last episode…</li>\r\n	<li>On the TravelCommons’ Facebook <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\">page</a>, Steve Frick said “Listened to your latest episode last week flying into Atlanta. As walked down Concourse A, I saw TAP,  the craft beer bar you mentioned...it looked like an aquarium full of smokers”. I rummaged around the file folders of my mobile phone and found a picture of that bar which I posted on Facebook under Steve’s post. He nailed it. I couldn’t have come up with a better description.</li>\r\n	<li>Following up on the description of my first MARTA ride from ATL up north, Dan Gradwohl sent a note pointing to the website <a href=\"http://toandfromtheairport.com\" target=\"_blank\">toandfromtheairport.com</a>. He just returned from 5 weeks in the Balkans and said used the website for all those trips, and has used it to plan upcoming trips to Panama City (the one in Panama, not on the Redneck Riviera) and Santiago, Chile. I’d used it a couple of years ago when looking at rapid transit from Beijing airport into the city (I ended up punting and taking a cab, an adventure in its own right that I describe in episode #109). It’s a great resource, but, as you can imagine, tough to keep updated. Looking at the page for ORD, the train section doesn’t reflect the recent surcharge for L rides originating at ORD, and the taxi section doesn’t describe the logistical differences between getting a cab into the city (just get into the cab rank) vs. one to the suburbs -- which involves calling one of the cab companies, getting an assigned number, and then waiting one lane over, unless you want to pay meter-&amp;-a-half to one of the city cabs -- Welcome to Chicago.  I sent a note a week ago to the site owner, Steve Pells, with these updates but haven’t seen them reflected yet on the site.</li>\r\n	<li>Turning to my <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">Twitter</a> notifications, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/chris2x\">Chris Christensen</a> of the Amateur Traveler podcast sent a quick Twitter message on last episode’s seat recline rant -- “I agree with your assessment of the knee defender story, I am 6\' 3\" and can work on a laptop in <a href=\"https://twitter.com/united\">United</a>\'s Economy Plus seats”</li>\r\n	<li>Last month, Arnoud Heijnis pointed me to the <a href=\"http://design-milk.com/bluesmart-smart-carry-luggage/\" target=\"_blank\">Bluesmart carry-on bag</a>, the roller board with its own app, allowing you to track it, lock it, and getting notifications when it moves out of range from you. It rocketed past its $50,000 Indiegogo fundraising goal. The last time I checked, they had $1.1M in pledges. The crowdfunding closes Mon, Nov 24. Their Indiegogo <a href=\"https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/bluesmart-world-s-first-smart-connected-carry-on\" target=\"_blank\">page</a> is really good -- nice video, good description of the product, timeline laying out the steps between now and their July shipping date. They definitely hit that sweet spot of travel technology lust. Arnoud and I traded tweets on whether or not to pull the trigger. Arnoud makes a good point about wanted to see how the inside is laid out -- there’s no picture of that on the Indiegogo page. I’m in the market for a new suitcase anyways. But can I wait until July? I’ll probably pull the trigger this weekend before it closes.</li>\r\n	<li>As I continue to prattle on about the wonders and benefits of TSA PreCheck, I came up with a new one early Monday morning -- since I don’t have to take my shoes off, I don’t have to risk waking my wife up by turning on the light to make sure I don’t pick a pair of socks with a hole in it. Yeah, it’s a nit, but it’s one less little thing to spike my morning. And I do have to give the TSA credit for adapting to its popularity. Monday morning in ORD’s Terminal 1 -- the United terminal -- definitely rush hour with all the consultants flying out to their client sites -- they had 4 lanes of PreCheck, shuttling the non-PreCheck Premiere fliers to another line nearby. It could’ve been ugly, but I was through in 5 minutes. I’ve bashed the TSA enough; I also want to give credit where credit is due.</li>\r\n	<li>Don’t know if you caught the <a href=\"http://www.tnooz.com/article/ongoing-hiltons-loyalty-program-hackers-continue-selling-account-access/\" target=\"_blank\">news</a> at the beginning of the month that the Hilton HHonors program was hit by hackers. After getting replacement credit cards sent to me after the Target and then the Home Depot breaches, I gotta say that I’ve become a bit complacent about these announcements. Hilton had weak security, allowing the use of a 4-digit PIN instead of a strong password, allowing is suspected to be a brute force attack -- not a problem with just 4 numbers. Once in, the hackers drained the accounts, most of them swapping points for gift cards, or selling the points on hacker forums for pennies on the equivalent dollar, though there were a couple of cases of thieves redeeming the points for nights -- one victim found that 250,000 of his points had been used to buy $1200 worth of nights at low-end Hilton brands along the East Coast. Hilton hasn’t said how many points they’ve had to reimburse.  Many people treat their award points accounts like savings accounts for travel -- banking miles or frequent sleeper points for a summer vacation. But until recently, airlines and hotels haven’t secured them with anything close to bank-like security. Hilton and Delta allowed 4-digit PINs (Delta is switching over to strong passwords), United still allows 6-character passwords. But it’s changing. Before Delta’s switch, I noticed American and Marriott forcing the use of slightly stronger 8-character passwords. And Hilton has now added a captcha to slow down brute force attacks. It’s certainly not banking-style 2-factor authentication, but it’s a start. Another good start would be to change all my travel site passwords to something other than ABC123.</li>\r\n	<li>There was another <a href=\"http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/11/18/passenger-stuck-with-1171-wi-fi-bill-on-singapore-airlines-flight/\" target=\"_blank\">story</a> I tweeted out this week involving in-flight WiFi. Some guy racked up an almost $1,200 bill checking e-mail and downloading PPT files on his LHR-SIN flight -- $29 for the initial 30 MB and over $1,100 in overage fees. The guy gets the e-mail receipt and is probably stunned. Then, this being the age of social media, he appears to have immediately created a little picture with his receipt and an Sing Air plane and posted it on Twitter with the first word in all caps -- Gouged! And then put together a blog post. The guy, Jeremy Gutsche, bills himself as Innovation Expert, Author, Keynote Speaker &amp; Chief Trend Hunter (CEO) at TrendHunter.com. If he’s that hip to trends, you’d expect him to know how expensive in-flight overseas internet connectivity is. The WiFi provider, OnAir, says he has to pay the bill saying that the process for purchasing its services is “entirely transparent.” Passengers can choose to end their sessions when they reach a certain price limit, a graphic shows data consumption at all times and users can disconnect whenever they want. Gutsche said he only sent some e-mail, uploaded a 4 MB PPT file and looked at 155 web pages. OnAir said “To consume several hundred megabytes during one flight takes much more than basic email viewing, for example downloading heavy attachments, cloud access and using Skype”. I think the cloud access might be the culprit. While I love having all my documents sync’d to the cloud -- to get at them from any device and for backup -- I’ve found that it can quickly chew up bandwidth. When I first got my Verizon WiFi hot spot, I found myself easily chewing through 6-10 GB and just couldn’t figure it out. Until I remembered that I had my 2 GB Outlook archive pst file set to sync to Microsoft’s OneDrive. Now, when I switch over to the hot spot, I kill off the OneDrive sync app. No more nagging e-mails from Verizon. Would’ve been a much more expensive lesson at 35,000 ft.</li>\r\n	<li>And if you have any travel experiences -- technology or otherwise, or just general observations, thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/35879\" target=\"_blank\"><i>Two Guitars</i></a> by Admiral Bob</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Holiday Airport Etiquette Refresher</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Unless you’ve been catatonic for the last week, you know that we’re creeping up to the busiest travel day of the year -- Travelgeddon as one local TV reporter called it, causing me to do an Elvis and throw something large at the hotel TV set (luckily today’s flat screens are much more resilient than tubes of Elvis’ day). Yes, the Wednesday before Thanksgiving is nigh.</li>\r\n	<li>I also know this because, right around this time the TravelCommons mailbox gets filled with helpful story ideas from PR firms along the lines of this one from Energy Water -- “The day before Thanksgiving is the busiest travel day of the year—between the kids, pets and luggage holiday travel can be a hassle. These 6 travel must-haves take the stress out of traveling to see family and loved ones.”</li>\r\n	<li>Top on the list, Energy Water, of course --which seems to be another twist on caffeinated water. Go ahead, give it to the kids and see how popular you are with your seat mates in the back of a Spirit Airlines plane. #2 -- noise cancelling headphones. Always a popular item, especially when surrounded by kids hyped up on Energy Water. #3 -- Therapeutic eye mask. Hmmm, I don’t see too many of those on my flight. #4 -- Portable power charger. One of those batteries-in-a-box things with a couple of USB ports at the end. I’d move this above the eye mask. Very handy, especially around holiday time when families will be huddling around airport electrical outlets the same way the forefathers would huddle around a fire while out on the hunt. #5 Packing cubes. Nah, never used them. They take up space that could be used for other clothes. #6 -- Portable UV germ sanitizer. Probably a bit more popular in these Ebola-paranoid times. Instead of swabbing everything down with hand sanitizer (which I’ve seen people do on airplanes), you just wave the UV wand over it. I dunno seems a bit too easy. I think I’d want to see some efficacy data before putting money down.</li>\r\n	<li>So while there are tons of  “bring this” lists running around, I haven’t seen an advice list of what’s really the problem during holiday travel -- airport etiquette. It’s not just the crowds; it’s the crowds of, well what some might call “clueless” travelers. I think “amateur” is certainly a nicer and probably more accurate term. So for those amateur travelers, or folks who’ve been off the road for a bit and need a refresher, here’s a list of key etiquette tips, that from my recent travel observations, need to be said...</li>\r\n	<li>Let’s start at the front of the airport -- the security line. The TSA is pushing PreCheck so you may get lucky and find it on your boarding pass. Or, a TSA person may randomly pull you out of the regular line and send you over to PreCheck. It’s your lucky day! Don’t spoil it, though, by not knowing the PreCheck rules. Put your phone away and read the signs -- don’t take off your shoes, don’t pull your liquids out, keep your jacket on, …. Read the signs and don’t slow it down for everyone else.</li>\r\n	<li>If getting to your gate involves a moving platform or an escalator, stand to the right because people are walking -- usually quickly -- on the left. Traveling with others, you’ll naturally want to stand abreast, but then you’re blocking everyone else. Don’t do it unless you want to get run over.</li>\r\n	<li>When you hit the airport Starbucks for your pre-flight coffee, remember that this isn’t your neighborhood Starbucks run by friendly Starbucks-trained baristas. It’s run by Sodexo Marriott that don’t care quite so much about coffee training. And they’re not quite as efficient. And there are usually a lot of people behind you in line. Keep your order to 3 adjectives or less. Tall skim latte is good. The half-decaf 3-pump no-foam vente vanilla latte -- not so much.</li>\r\n	<li>Queuing up at the gate, don’t try to cheat on the boarding. Everyone’s looking at each others boarding passes, and airlines are telling their agents to get more strict. On almost every flight, I’ve seen the boarding agent direct someone over to the wall of shame to wait for their boarding group to be called. Don’t embarrass your family. Wait your turn.</li>\r\n	<li>And if you’re using an electronic boarding pass on your smartphone, turn off auto-rotate. If you don’t, odds are that your screen will start oscillating between portrait and landscape while you’re trying to get it on the reader. Those readers are picky enough; you’ll delay the boarding line and quickly earn the enmity of your seatmates -- even before you sit shoulder-to-shoulder with them for 2-4 hours.</li>\r\n	<li>And finally, and this is a big one, don’t put your small bag in the overhead. I don’t care if you checked a bag, don’t be that person who puts a purse or a briefcase in the overhead. Show a little holiday spirit -- put ‘em under the seat in front of you and leave space for one more roller board for the poor urchins in Groups 3, 4 or 5. When that person’s bag doesn’t get dropped on a tight connection through DFW, and they’re able to sit down to Thanksgiving dinner in something other than day-old sweats, they’ll thank you.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djlang59/22228\" target=\"_blank\"><em>Garden Of The Forking</em></a><em> </em>by J.Lang</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Travel Tax Pile-Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>I ought to title this episode “Mark’s Rant” ‘cause I’m rolling right from “Hey you, once-a-year traveler, get outta my airport” to “Hey you, politician, get outta my wallet.”</li>\r\n	<li>Looking at my last couple of hotel bills in New Orleans -- room tax state, room tax city, occupancy tax, convention and visitors bureau assessment -- it adds 15% to my room rate; just a bit more than the regular New Orleans sales tax rate of 9%.</li>\r\n	<li>Last year, a trade association -- the Global Business Travel Association -- put out a list of the top 10 worst cities for what they called “discriminatory travel taxes” -- those specifically on travel services (hotels, rental cars) above and beyond general sales taxes. New Orleans didn’t make the cut. Top on the list -- Portland, OR at $23/day in extra travel taxes. Boston is second at $19/day, with those welcoming Midwest cities of Indianapolis, Minneapolis, and Chicago rounding out the top 5.</li>\r\n	<li>We all know why this happens -- ‘cause travelers don’t vote, at least in the places where they get charged these travel taxes. So for local politicians, raising the hotel or rental car tax generates much less blowback than a property tax bump. For example, of the 150 largest US cities, 120 of them have some sort of dedicated tax on hotel rooms. And there’s real money there -- $487 million of travel taxes in 2012 for New York City; $240 million for San Francisco. For hotel taxes, St Louis, surprisingly, has the highest rate -- 22%, with the average being about 13.5%. SFO has the highest rental car tax rate -- 24%; the average is 12.8%</li>\r\n	<li>Of course, on top of these taxes, they stack additional line items. New Orleans’ hotel tax is 13%, just below the average. But then they tack on a dollar for city occupancy tax and another $2.50 to fund the convention and visitors bureau, which bumps up an average 13% tax rate to that 15% rate. I gotta say, though, that these add-ons pale in comparison to the 14% tourism tax that I got pegged with the last time I was up in Napa.</li>\r\n	<li>Rental cars, though, are the worst. In one of my rare TravelCommons blog <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2009/10/25/skipping-the-rental-car/#more-176\">posts</a>, I looked at a string of 4 rental car receipts and saw taxes and state surcharges and airport facility charges increased my final bill by 27-51%!</li>\r\n	<li>What do you do about it? Well, with rental cars, I work my damndest to skip them. In New Orleans, I pick hotels that let me walk to and from my client’s office -- skip the rental car fees <i>and</i> get exercise. A two-fer, ‘cause given the food in New Orleans, I need all the exercise I can get. Hotels -- it’s a bit tougher. You might think about using Airbnb, but that loophole is getting closed. Starting last month, Airbnb is collecting San Francisco’s 14% hotel tax and is getting squeezed by most other cities. And Couchsurfing, at least for business trips, is, for me, not worth the hassle.</li>\r\n	<li>So whenever I pass the tourist kiosk in New Orleans airport, I always make sure I take something, even if I don’t really need it -- because I’m gonna be paying for it whether I take it or not.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917626811171154.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #112</li>\r\n	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_112.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #112 — Holiday Airport Etiquette; Travel Tax Pile-Up','','inherit','open','open','','1398-revision-v1','','','2015-10-11 21:35:52','2015-10-12 02:35:52','',1398,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/10/11/1398-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1552,1,'2015-10-11 22:00:12','2015-10-12 03:00:12','Back behind the microphone after an extended summer break highlighted by a two-week family vacation in Japan. We talk about traveling in Japan. It was a fantastic time, though we were lost without translation at times. But with the US dollar buying 124 yen, it was the right time to go. We also talk about frustration in using frequent flier miles, trends toward prettier and higher tech luggage, and a connoisseur of scrambled eggs. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_117.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/227996070\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #117:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Coming to you from TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. I was trying to do this from the Bally’s Casino in Las Vegas where I was earlier in the week, but it just didn’t work out. I was there for business, not pleasure, but I always feel that I should stay in a casino hotel when in Vegas. I dunno, staying in a Westin or Marriott up by the convention center just doesn’t feel Vegas. When I was here last year for a business convention I stayed in the MGM Grand. Years ago, though, when I’d do regular booth duty at technology shows, I would always stay at Mandalay Bay, which I really liked.</li>\r\n	<li>The more I know about hotels, the more I’m impressed by Vegas hotel operations. Caesars, the MGM Grand, Mandalay Bay -- they’re huge mini-cities -- orders of magnitude bigger than couple-hundred room hotels I’d stay at in Denver or New Orleans. And yet the service, the execution is almost always way better than those smaller hotels. If you’re any sort of an operations nerd, you gotta give ‘em a nod. Though on the other hand, when you head to the gym at 6am and pass by the old guy dragging on a cigarette playing the quarter slots, it kinda makes you wish they were a little less good...</li>\r\n	<li>As I mentioned in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/08/26/podcast-116-traveling-thru-japan-luggage-trends/\">the last episode</a>, the big travel for me was at the beginning of September when we were in Scotland for 2 weeks getting my daughter situated at Univ of St Andrews. Now while I say “getting my daughter situated,” there were equal parts getting my wife situated with the idea of her youngest child being an ocean away -- a big difference from when my son was 90 minutes up the road in Milwaukee.</li>\r\n	<li>The following week’s travel had a nice difficulty factor. Weds morning, I flew from Chicago to DC for the papal Mass on the campus of my alma mater, Catholic University of America, and then back to Detroit that evening for meetings first thing Thursday morning. The difficulty factor was my luggage. No back packs, no selfie sticks, so certainly no roller bags were getting through the security checkpoints. Finding a checked luggage place is a real challenge anymore. I thought about checking my bag into my DCA-DTW flight, but I was too early -- 8 hours prior to flight time max. There is a checked baggage place at Union Station -- DC’s train station -- which is conveniently located a couple of stops south of Catholic on the Metro Red Line.</li>\r\n	<li>Freed of my baggage, I emerged from the Brookland Metro Stop to an unbelievable combination of people and fencing. Incredibly long lines of people corralled in by what had to be miles of fences. I was lucky; I somehow got into a quick security line -- only 45 minutes. After finding my seating section, the gates were closed and we were sealed in our sections until the Pope arrived and did a couple of laps around campus in the Popemobile. After Mass started, they opened up the gates again. Which was great, because while the music and the liturgy were top notch, I wasn’t queuing up for communion with 25,000 other folks. After the homily, I was one of the trickle of folks making an early exit to beat the rush. I had a flight to catch. I’m sure the Pope understood.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>One Day</em> by <a href=\"http://www.hollowhorse.co.uk/\">Hollow Horse</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>OK, just as a warning, this section is going to ramble on for a while. I have a random walk of comments/opinions that I just can’t seem to synthesize into  coherent topics. So here it goes...</li>\r\n	<li>First stop in the mail bag, I was pleasantly surprised to receive this audio comment from Linda Martin of the Indie Travel Podcast\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Linda, thanks for that. The thing with eggs -- you can tell I’ve thought about this way too much -- it’s a trade-off between good eggs and time. It takes time for a cooked-to-order egg, but in the morning, I don’t often have that time. Usually, I’ve worked out; I’m cooling down during breakfast, then hitting the shower and off to work. When I stayed in one of the Renaissance Hotels in New Orleans, they didn’t have a separate executive lounge. Breakfast was served in the restaurant. They had the typical lounge buffet set up, but you could also order off the menu, which I think I did once in a dozen stays. It was a nice egg, but it took an extra 10 min that usually wasn’t in my morning schedule. Definitely a 1st World problem</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>Lisa Walls wrote on the TravelCommons Facebook Wall\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>“Hey Mark, I love your podcast, especially the comments on food and craft beers. Other than the Altoids, do you carry any food in your briefcase, such as protein bars? I am always looking for something that is shelf stable that tastes good and travels well.”</li>\r\n	<li>Lisa, thanks for the note. I usually keep 1-2 KIND bars in the bottom of my bag. The fruit-&amp;-nut ones seem to hold up to weeks of getting crushed by my PC power supply. They’re also not too sweet the way some other granola and power bars are.</li>\r\n	<li>I know I’m about to lose any foodie cred I may have built up over the years, but I gotta say that, for me, the McDonald\'s grilled chicken Snack Wraps are just about the right amount of food to cover a 2-hour flight. They’re quick to buy, and compact to bring on board and eat. I find it tough to manage a salad while sitting in a center seat.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>I’m not sure if I mentioned this last episode, but I’m flying Southwest on this week’s Vegas-Denver-Chicago trip to click over A-list status. It kinda crept up on me -- I don’t typically fly SW enough to make status, but apparently I have this year. As near as I can tell, this means I won’t have to pay the $12.50 Early Bird fee or be staring at my Southwest app exactly 24 hours before flight time in order to get a decent boarding position. Which, as we all know, is critical on Southwest since there’s no assigned seating. An A or early B boarding group number is necessary for an aisle seat. On my Vegas flight, hitting the “Check In” button maybe 2 seconds after the 24-hour window got me B 7, so I got an aisle seat in the back half of the plane. It was a full flight, so after that, I was living last year’s Super Bowl Doritos commercial -- looking down, trying to avoid eye contact with potentially bad seat mates while looking friendly to attract good ones. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://youtu.be/2JqRXLQYF9o\">link</a> to the commercial. It’s spot on.</li>\r\n	<li>In the last episode, I talked about travel amateurs clogging up the PreCheck lanes. These would be people getting PreCheck as part of the TSA’s “Managed Inclusion” program, where they randomly shunt travelers over to PreCheck to balance screening line loads. This to the utter frustration of travelers who paid $85 for PreCheck screening or $100 for Global Entry. You might recall long-time listener Rich Fraser saying he was getting PreCheck about 75% of the time so why should he pay? But now the TSA says they’re throttling back on “Managed Inclusion”, driven at least in part by the publicity generated by auditors finding that travelers on various watch lists were being given PreCheck. I’ve certainly noticed the length of PreCheck lines dropping.</li>\r\n	<li>Also in the last episode, I talked about luggage trends. One trend that sorta hit the cutting room floor is the move to fully rotating twirly wheels. Certainly handy in getting your luggage down a tight airplane aisle, but to my eye, most of them look a bit tinier, a bit flimsier than the standard roller-blade style wheel partially embedded in the back of the suitcase. The twirly wheels don’t seem rugged enough to survive getting pulled down Manhattan sidewalks or some of the ruts in New Orleans. And to allow full rotation, the wheels stick out of the bottom of the suitcase making the bag longer. This tripped up my wife on our flight from EDI to LHR. The BA gate agent asked my wife to put her bag in the luggage sizer. It would’ve fit -- except for the twirly wheels. Now we have to gate check it -- which means standing off to the side of the gate pulling some stuff out, transferring it into her shoulder bag. Understandable -- until we get on the plane and see it’s a half-full 767 and there are fully empty luggage bins. Really? So as is my wont, I vented my frustration on Twitter rather than any BA employees. BA’s social media department responded pretty quickly saying they needed to check all luggage to be fair to all passengers. But how would allowing a bag that was, at most, an inch over-long because of its twirly wheels on a half-full flight with empty overheads cheat any other passengers? It’s an over-officiousness that just doesn’t make sense. And it’s the reason I avoid BA now whenever possible. Which is a real shame, because back in the early ‘90’s when I was doing a lot of travel to Europe, I prefered BA. But that was 20 years ago and, it seems, a different BA.</li>\r\n	<li>There is another reason I avoid BA -- officiousness <i>and</i> Heathrow. Again, another thing I loved in the ‘90’s, I now avoid whenever possible. Heathrow is a complete nightmare. You land, you trundle along through corridors, down escalators, into a bus, get a tour of the Heathrow back alleys, stop at another terminal, fight through security again, and then end up in the midst of a packed retail space where you wander through the shops because there’s no place to sit. It’s gotten to the point that I’ll fly the extra hour to connect through Frankfurt or Amsterdam just to avoid Heathrow. We were doing this St Andrews trip on AA miles. We were fine on the way out -- ORD-JFK-EDI all on AA. But coming back, it was EDI-LHR-ORD with the first leg on BA. Just ugh! I still keep thinking about how to get something out of my 300K BA Avios miles. Maybe I’ll make my daughter fly BA.</li>\r\n	<li>On a brighter note, I tried a new financial service during this trip and it worked really well. It’s called Revolut -- as in Revolution cut a bit short. It’s a FinTech start up based in the UK that gives you a virtual and real debit card with really great exchange rates. As with all the cool start-ups nowadays, everything is done through a smartphone app -- which, to stow the snark for a second, makes a lot of sense for any travel app. I opened an account before I left and funded it with $200 from my regular ATM/debit card. I could then convert my dollars to pounds or euros at what appeared to be just about the market rate -- there didn’t seem to be a lot of margin taken on the buy or sell sides. I also instantly had a virtual debit card with which I could use those new pounds or euros to buy things on the web -- like train tickets or top up a phone card. I then requested a physical version of my card, which took about a week to show up from the UK. Now I had a proper European chip-&amp;-pin card that I could use at an ATM or, say, the self-serve checkout line at Tesco’s without waiting for a clerk to take my signed receipt. It only hiccuped one at the Costa coffee shop in St Andrews; I still don’t know why. Poking around a bit more, I found that I could send pounds to my daughter’s RBS account with a day or so lag. Now, none of this functionality is necessarily new, though being able to do it all through a slick smartphone app is very handy. The real innovation is the cost. Funding my Revolut account from my debit card cost me less than 1% -- less than $2 for the $200 transfer, which is cheaper than most non-network ATM fees. After that, no transaction fees to move money between currencies or to withdraw. Compare that to hitting a foreign ATM with your US card. My personal bank is very reasonable, only charging me Visa’s 1% transaction fee, but many big banks will hit you with a $5 non-network fee on top of any transaction fees. And then transferring money to my daughter’s account -- wire transfers can cost $25-30. Revolut has well-packaged functionality delivered at the lowest costs I’ve seen. I don’t know how long they’ll keep this price point, but right now, it’s the best deal I’ve seen for money needed for international travel. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://revolut.com/\">link</a> to the Revolut web site.</li>\r\n	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Clear My Head</em> by <a href=\"http://www.thefiasco.net/\">FIASCO</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Random Thoughts about Car Rentals</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>I guess I could’ve cut two or three comments out of the last segment and labeled them “Random Comments about My Scotland Trip” but that just seems entire too gratuitous. But I have been collecting car rental experiences in my TravelCommons Evernote drop file and I think I now have enough for make up a topic -- or at least what might marginally pass for a topic</li>\r\n	<li>As I’ve mentioned in past episodes, I really don’t like to rent cars. I much prefer to use rail or a cab in from the airport and then walk to where ever I need to go. That works well in New York or Chicago or San Francisco, not so much in Denver or Detroit. So I’ve been renting a lot of cars over the past 6 months.</li>\r\n	<li>So many in fact that Hertz bumped my status up to President\'s Circle. Not quite sure that gets me, but it sounds status-y. Though right after my congratulatory e-mail, I found a dumpy Toyota Corolla in my Hertz Gold spot, so maybe it’s not anything special.</li>\r\n	<li>But in times like those -- when I get assigned the 45,000-mile Toyota with crumbs still in the driver seat, or a Ford F-150 king cab pick up truck in Boston (?) -- I’ve come to love Hertz Gold Choice. If you rent a mid-size or above -- and for our corporate rate, the price of a compact and mid-size are the same -- you can go to the Choice aisle and take one of those cars instead. I left the dumpy Toyota and took a new Nissan instead.</li>\r\n	<li>I have started to make note of differences in service <i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">and</span></i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> attitude across locations. I never rent from Hertz at Detroit airport anymore. I’ve yet to get a non-dumpy car there and the attitude is not great. Though I think Hertz’s Newark station is the worst. A recent example -- a colleague was driving his car toward the lot exit when a low tire pressure alarm lit up. So he asked the guy at the exit gate where he could get some air to top off the tire. “Try a gas station,” the attendant told him. That was helpful.</span></li>\r\n	<li>I’ve had challenges with car rental web sites -- Hertz, Avis -- when my pick-up or drop off time didn’t match the hours of the office I selected. I get the error notice and then when I go back to try another site or time, these websites will randomly select another date or location. I had this happen to me in Edinburgh on the second car we rented. We were training from Lockerbie back to Edinburgh where we’d done 4 days of biking while our daughter was going through freshman orientation. I’d booked a car on Hertz’s web site to pick up at the train station and drop off at EDI 5 days later. It took me 5 tries to get it right -- each time I re-started, it reset the pick-up location from Waverly Station to EDI. And each time I’d correct it. Except, it seems, the last time. When we arrived in Waverly, there was no car. I looked at the res -- pick up at EDI. Ugh. Not the end of the world -- we could’ve taken the new light rail out to EDI, but it was aggravating. I searched through the Hertz.co.uk website for a phone number -- that itself being a little extra helping of aggravation -- and called the res center. The woman on the other end was inordinately calm and helpful. 3 minutes later, she’d moved my pick-up to Waverly. I thanked her -- a lot. I should’ve booked with her instead of the website.</li>\r\n	<li>We rented our first car in Edinburgh from Enterprise. It was a great car -- a Fiat 500 L. All the bags fit easily in the hatchback. Nice nav, nice sound system, clean....  Drove to a near-by shopping mall -- grabbed a coffee at Starbucks and phone SIMs at the ee store. Next stop, IKEA to buy things we didn’t pack -- like towels and hangers. Coming off the motorway, through a traffic circle, the clutch crapped out. I’d put it in gear, let out the clutch pedal, nothing. 3 hours later after Enterprise, the auto club and Fiat scrummed about who was supposed to pick up the car, the tow truck dropped us back off at EDI where the Enterprise folks apologized profusely and gave us an even nicer Nissan. A couple of weeks, I noticed the Pope used a Fiat 500L to drive from Andrews Airforce Base to the Vatican Embassy. The next day, though, he was in a Jeep Popemobile. I could sympathize.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a title=\"MP3 Download\" href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/download_track.php?id=0E74C6FEB7390D18D02B4B399668093172F6C8CC66DDC09D90A3BF7DDA436823CFAC859AE2B2C73E46A278A4950E1030\">Lonely Dog Blues</a></em> by <a title=\"Tobin James\' Web Site\" href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/label.php?id=2A3449F03E7B8462FF74407B60F0C4B0A30A0CBE880C61DE37E3B342387F0643\">Tobin James</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917626811171154.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #117</li>\r\n	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/\">Podshow Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\r\n	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_117.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #117 — Random Thoughts About Eggs, Scotland & Car Rentals','','inherit','open','open','','1542-revision-v1','','','2015-10-11 22:00:12','2015-10-12 03:00:12','',1542,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/10/11/1542-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1553,1,'2015-10-11 22:16:33','2015-10-12 03:16:33','Apologies in advance because this is pretty much a stream-of-consciousness episode, with semi-strung together thoughts about eggs, car rentals, seeing the Pope, travel food, and stuff from my September trip to Scotland.  I talk about how handy I found the new <a href=\"https://revolut.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Revolut</a> service for spending and sending money in Europe; recent good and bad experiences with <a href=\"https://www.hertz.com/rentacar/emember/join/overview.do?learnMore=presidentsCircle\" target=\"_blank\">Hertz </a>and other car rentals; most bad experience with <a href=\"http://britishairways.com\" target=\"_blank\">British Airways</a>; and how true-to-life the <a href=\"https://youtu.be/2JqRXLQYF9o\" target=\"_blank\">Doritos Super Bowl commercial</a> portrays the Southwest boarding experience.  All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_117.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/227996070\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #117:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Coming to you from TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. I was trying to do this from the Bally’s Casino in Las Vegas where I was earlier in the week, but it just didn’t work out. I was there for business, not pleasure, but I always feel that I should stay in a casino hotel when in Vegas. I dunno, staying in a Westin or Marriott up by the convention center just doesn’t feel Vegas. When I was here last year for a business convention I stayed in the MGM Grand. Years ago, though, when I’d do regular booth duty at technology shows, I would always stay at Mandalay Bay, which I really liked.</li>\r\n	<li>The more I know about hotels, the more I’m impressed by Vegas hotel operations. Caesars, the MGM Grand, Mandalay Bay -- they’re huge mini-cities -- orders of magnitude bigger than couple-hundred room hotels I’d stay at in Denver or New Orleans. And yet the service, the execution is almost always way better than those smaller hotels. If you’re any sort of an operations nerd, you gotta give ‘em a nod. Though on the other hand, when you head to the gym at 6am and pass by the old guy dragging on a cigarette playing the quarter slots, it kinda makes you wish they were a little less good...</li>\r\n	<li>As I mentioned in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/08/26/podcast-116-traveling-thru-japan-luggage-trends/\">the last episode</a>, the big travel for me was at the beginning of September when we were in Scotland for 2 weeks getting my daughter situated at Univ of St Andrews. Now while I say “getting my daughter situated,” there were equal parts getting my wife situated with the idea of her youngest child being an ocean away -- a big difference from when my son was 90 minutes up the road in Milwaukee.</li>\r\n	<li>The following week’s travel had a nice difficulty factor. Weds morning, I flew from Chicago to DC for the papal Mass on the campus of my alma mater, Catholic University of America, and then back to Detroit that evening for meetings first thing Thursday morning. The difficulty factor was my luggage. No back packs, no selfie sticks, so certainly no roller bags were getting through the security checkpoints. Finding a checked luggage place is a real challenge anymore. I thought about checking my bag into my DCA-DTW flight, but I was too early -- 8 hours prior to flight time max. There is a checked baggage place at Union Station -- DC’s train station -- which is conveniently located a couple of stops south of Catholic on the Metro Red Line.</li>\r\n	<li>Freed of my baggage, I emerged from the Brookland Metro Stop to an unbelievable combination of people and fencing. Incredibly long lines of people corralled in by what had to be miles of fences. I was lucky; I somehow got into a quick security line -- only 45 minutes. After finding my seating section, the gates were closed and we were sealed in our sections until the Pope arrived and did a couple of laps around campus in the Popemobile. After Mass started, they opened up the gates again. Which was great, because while the music and the liturgy were top notch, I wasn’t queuing up for communion with 25,000 other folks. After the homily, I was one of the trickle of folks making an early exit to beat the rush. I had a flight to catch. I’m sure the Pope understood.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>One Day</em> by <a href=\"http://www.hollowhorse.co.uk/\">Hollow Horse</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>OK, just as a warning, this section is going to ramble on for a while. I have a random walk of comments/opinions that I just can’t seem to synthesize into  coherent topics. So here it goes...</li>\r\n	<li>First stop in the mail bag, I was pleasantly surprised to receive this audio comment from Linda Martin of the Indie Travel Podcast\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Linda, thanks for that. The thing with eggs -- you can tell I’ve thought about this way too much -- it’s a trade-off between good eggs and time. It takes time for a cooked-to-order egg, but in the morning, I don’t often have that time. Usually, I’ve worked out; I’m cooling down during breakfast, then hitting the shower and off to work. When I stayed in one of the Renaissance Hotels in New Orleans, they didn’t have a separate executive lounge. Breakfast was served in the restaurant. They had the typical lounge buffet set up, but you could also order off the menu, which I think I did once in a dozen stays. It was a nice egg, but it took an extra 10 min that usually wasn’t in my morning schedule. Definitely a 1st World problem</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>Lisa Walls wrote on the TravelCommons Facebook Wall\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>“Hey Mark, I love your podcast, especially the comments on food and craft beers. Other than the Altoids, do you carry any food in your briefcase, such as protein bars? I am always looking for something that is shelf stable that tastes good and travels well.”</li>\r\n	<li>Lisa, thanks for the note. I usually keep 1-2 KIND bars in the bottom of my bag. The fruit-&amp;-nut ones seem to hold up to weeks of getting crushed by my PC power supply. They’re also not too sweet the way some other granola and power bars are.</li>\r\n	<li>I know I’m about to lose any foodie cred I may have built up over the years, but I gotta say that, for me, the McDonald\'s grilled chicken Snack Wraps are just about the right amount of food to cover a 2-hour flight. They’re quick to buy, and compact to bring on board and eat. I find it tough to manage a salad while sitting in a center seat.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>I’m not sure if I mentioned this last episode, but I’m flying Southwest on this week’s Vegas-Denver-Chicago trip to click over A-list status. It kinda crept up on me -- I don’t typically fly SW enough to make status, but apparently I have this year. As near as I can tell, this means I won’t have to pay the $12.50 Early Bird fee or be staring at my Southwest app exactly 24 hours before flight time in order to get a decent boarding position. Which, as we all know, is critical on Southwest since there’s no assigned seating. An A or early B boarding group number is necessary for an aisle seat. On my Vegas flight, hitting the “Check In” button maybe 2 seconds after the 24-hour window got me B 7, so I got an aisle seat in the back half of the plane. It was a full flight, so after that, I was living last year’s Super Bowl Doritos commercial -- looking down, trying to avoid eye contact with potentially bad seat mates while looking friendly to attract good ones. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://youtu.be/2JqRXLQYF9o\">link</a> to the commercial. It’s spot on.</li>\r\n	<li>In the last episode, I talked about travel amateurs clogging up the PreCheck lanes. These would be people getting PreCheck as part of the TSA’s “Managed Inclusion” program, where they randomly shunt travelers over to PreCheck to balance screening line loads. This to the utter frustration of travelers who paid $85 for PreCheck screening or $100 for Global Entry. You might recall long-time listener Rich Fraser saying he was getting PreCheck about 75% of the time so why should he pay? But now the TSA says they’re throttling back on “Managed Inclusion”, driven at least in part by the publicity generated by auditors finding that travelers on various watch lists were being given PreCheck. I’ve certainly noticed the length of PreCheck lines dropping.</li>\r\n	<li>Also in the last episode, I talked about luggage trends. One trend that sorta hit the cutting room floor is the move to fully rotating twirly wheels. Certainly handy in getting your luggage down a tight airplane aisle, but to my eye, most of them look a bit tinier, a bit flimsier than the standard roller-blade style wheel partially embedded in the back of the suitcase. The twirly wheels don’t seem rugged enough to survive getting pulled down Manhattan sidewalks or some of the ruts in New Orleans. And to allow full rotation, the wheels stick out of the bottom of the suitcase making the bag longer. This tripped up my wife on our flight from EDI to LHR. The BA gate agent asked my wife to put her bag in the luggage sizer. It would’ve fit -- except for the twirly wheels. Now we have to gate check it -- which means standing off to the side of the gate pulling some stuff out, transferring it into her shoulder bag. Understandable -- until we get on the plane and see it’s a half-full 767 and there are fully empty luggage bins. Really? So as is my wont, I vented my frustration on Twitter rather than any BA employees. BA’s social media department responded pretty quickly saying they needed to check all luggage to be fair to all passengers. But how would allowing a bag that was, at most, an inch over-long because of its twirly wheels on a half-full flight with empty overheads cheat any other passengers? It’s an over-officiousness that just doesn’t make sense. And it’s the reason I avoid BA now whenever possible. Which is a real shame, because back in the early ‘90’s when I was doing a lot of travel to Europe, I prefered BA. But that was 20 years ago and, it seems, a different BA.</li>\r\n	<li>There is another reason I avoid BA -- officiousness <i>and</i> Heathrow. Again, another thing I loved in the ‘90’s, I now avoid whenever possible. Heathrow is a complete nightmare. You land, you trundle along through corridors, down escalators, into a bus, get a tour of the Heathrow back alleys, stop at another terminal, fight through security again, and then end up in the midst of a packed retail space where you wander through the shops because there’s no place to sit. It’s gotten to the point that I’ll fly the extra hour to connect through Frankfurt or Amsterdam just to avoid Heathrow. We were doing this St Andrews trip on AA miles. We were fine on the way out -- ORD-JFK-EDI all on AA. But coming back, it was EDI-LHR-ORD with the first leg on BA. Just ugh! I still keep thinking about how to get something out of my 300K BA Avios miles. Maybe I’ll make my daughter fly BA.</li>\r\n	<li>On a brighter note, I tried a new financial service during this trip and it worked really well. It’s called Revolut -- as in Revolution cut a bit short. It’s a FinTech start up based in the UK that gives you a virtual and real debit card with really great exchange rates. As with all the cool start-ups nowadays, everything is done through a smartphone app -- which, to stow the snark for a second, makes a lot of sense for any travel app. I opened an account before I left and funded it with $200 from my regular ATM/debit card. I could then convert my dollars to pounds or euros at what appeared to be just about the market rate -- there didn’t seem to be a lot of margin taken on the buy or sell sides. I also instantly had a virtual debit card with which I could use those new pounds or euros to buy things on the web -- like train tickets or top up a phone card. I then requested a physical version of my card, which took about a week to show up from the UK. Now I had a proper European chip-&amp;-pin card that I could use at an ATM or, say, the self-serve checkout line at Tesco’s without waiting for a clerk to take my signed receipt. It only hiccuped one at the Costa coffee shop in St Andrews; I still don’t know why. Poking around a bit more, I found that I could send pounds to my daughter’s RBS account with a day or so lag. Now, none of this functionality is necessarily new, though being able to do it all through a slick smartphone app is very handy. The real innovation is the cost. Funding my Revolut account from my debit card cost me less than 1% -- less than $2 for the $200 transfer, which is cheaper than most non-network ATM fees. After that, no transaction fees to move money between currencies or to withdraw. Compare that to hitting a foreign ATM with your US card. My personal bank is very reasonable, only charging me Visa’s 1% transaction fee, but many big banks will hit you with a $5 non-network fee on top of any transaction fees. And then transferring money to my daughter’s account -- wire transfers can cost $25-30. Revolut has well-packaged functionality delivered at the lowest costs I’ve seen. I don’t know how long they’ll keep this price point, but right now, it’s the best deal I’ve seen for money needed for international travel. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://revolut.com/\">link</a> to the Revolut web site.</li>\r\n	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Clear My Head</em> by <a href=\"http://www.thefiasco.net/\">FIASCO</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Random Thoughts about Car Rentals</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>I guess I could’ve cut two or three comments out of the last segment and labeled them “Random Comments about My Scotland Trip” but that just seems entire too gratuitous. But I have been collecting car rental experiences in my TravelCommons Evernote drop file and I think I now have enough for make up a topic -- or at least what might marginally pass for a topic</li>\r\n	<li>As I’ve mentioned in past episodes, I really don’t like to rent cars. I much prefer to use rail or a cab in from the airport and then walk to where ever I need to go. That works well in New York or Chicago or San Francisco, not so much in Denver or Detroit. So I’ve been renting a lot of cars over the past 6 months.</li>\r\n	<li>So many in fact that Hertz bumped my status up to President\'s Circle. Not quite sure that gets me, but it sounds status-y. Though right after my congratulatory e-mail, I found a dumpy Toyota Corolla in my Hertz Gold spot, so maybe it’s not anything special.</li>\r\n	<li>But in times like those -- when I get assigned the 45,000-mile Toyota with crumbs still in the driver seat, or a Ford F-150 king cab pick up truck in Boston (?) -- I’ve come to love Hertz Gold Choice. If you rent a mid-size or above -- and for our corporate rate, the price of a compact and mid-size are the same -- you can go to the Choice aisle and take one of those cars instead. I left the dumpy Toyota and took a new Nissan instead.</li>\r\n	<li>I have started to make note of differences in service <i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">and</span></i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> attitude across locations. I never rent from Hertz at Detroit airport anymore. I’ve yet to get a non-dumpy car there and the attitude is not great. Though I think Hertz’s Newark station is the worst. A recent example -- a colleague was driving his car toward the lot exit when a low tire pressure alarm lit up. So he asked the guy at the exit gate where he could get some air to top off the tire. “Try a gas station,” the attendant told him. That was helpful.</span></li>\r\n	<li>I’ve had challenges with car rental web sites -- Hertz, Avis -- when my pick-up or drop off time didn’t match the hours of the office I selected. I get the error notice and then when I go back to try another site or time, these websites will randomly select another date or location. I had this happen to me in Edinburgh on the second car we rented. We were training from Lockerbie back to Edinburgh where we’d done 4 days of biking while our daughter was going through freshman orientation. I’d booked a car on Hertz’s web site to pick up at the train station and drop off at EDI 5 days later. It took me 5 tries to get it right -- each time I re-started, it reset the pick-up location from Waverly Station to EDI. And each time I’d correct it. Except, it seems, the last time. When we arrived in Waverly, there was no car. I looked at the res -- pick up at EDI. Ugh. Not the end of the world -- we could’ve taken the new light rail out to EDI, but it was aggravating. I searched through the Hertz.co.uk website for a phone number -- that itself being a little extra helping of aggravation -- and called the res center. The woman on the other end was inordinately calm and helpful. 3 minutes later, she’d moved my pick-up to Waverly. I thanked her -- a lot. I should’ve booked with her instead of the website.</li>\r\n	<li>We rented our first car in Edinburgh from Enterprise. It was a great car -- a Fiat 500 L. All the bags fit easily in the hatchback. Nice nav, nice sound system, clean....  Drove to a near-by shopping mall -- grabbed a coffee at Starbucks and phone SIMs at the ee store. Next stop, IKEA to buy things we didn’t pack -- like towels and hangers. Coming off the motorway, through a traffic circle, the clutch crapped out. I’d put it in gear, let out the clutch pedal, nothing. 3 hours later after Enterprise, the auto club and Fiat scrummed about who was supposed to pick up the car, the tow truck dropped us back off at EDI where the Enterprise folks apologized profusely and gave us an even nicer Nissan. A couple of weeks, I noticed the Pope used a Fiat 500L to drive from Andrews Airforce Base to the Vatican Embassy. The next day, though, he was in a Jeep Popemobile. I could sympathize.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a title=\"MP3 Download\" href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/download_track.php?id=0E74C6FEB7390D18D02B4B399668093172F6C8CC66DDC09D90A3BF7DDA436823CFAC859AE2B2C73E46A278A4950E1030\">Lonely Dog Blues</a></em> by <a title=\"Tobin James\' Web Site\" href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/label.php?id=2A3449F03E7B8462FF74407B60F0C4B0A30A0CBE880C61DE37E3B342387F0643\">Tobin James</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917626811171154.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #117</li>\r\n	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/\">Podshow Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\r\n	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_117.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #117 — Random Thoughts About Eggs, Scotland & Car Rentals','','inherit','open','open','','1542-revision-v1','','','2015-10-11 22:16:33','2015-10-12 03:16:33','',1542,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/10/11/1542-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1554,1,'2015-10-11 22:16:58','2015-10-12 03:16:58','','2015-09-03 15.12.36','Did The Pope Have This Problem?','inherit','open','open','','2015-09-03-15-12-36','','','2015-10-11 22:17:17','2015-10-12 03:17:17','',1542,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/2015-09-03-15.12.36.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(1555,1,'2015-10-11 22:17:28','2015-10-12 03:17:28','[caption id=\"attachment_1554\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/2015-09-03-15.12.36.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1554\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/2015-09-03-15.12.36-300x200.jpg\" alt=\"Did The Pope Have This Problem?\" width=\"300\" height=\"200\" /></a> Did The Pope Have This Problem?[/caption]\r\n\r\nApologies in advance because this is pretty much a stream-of-consciousness episode, with semi-strung together thoughts about eggs, car rentals, seeing the Pope, travel food, and stuff from my September trip to Scotland.  I talk about how handy I found the new <a href=\"https://revolut.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Revolut</a> service for spending and sending money in Europe; recent good and bad experiences with <a href=\"https://www.hertz.com/rentacar/emember/join/overview.do?learnMore=presidentsCircle\" target=\"_blank\">Hertz </a>and other car rentals; most bad experience with <a href=\"http://britishairways.com\" target=\"_blank\">British Airways</a>; and how true-to-life the <a href=\"https://youtu.be/2JqRXLQYF9o\" target=\"_blank\">Doritos Super Bowl commercial</a> portrays the Southwest boarding experience.  All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_117.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/227996070\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #117:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Coming to you from TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. I was trying to do this from the Bally’s Casino in Las Vegas where I was earlier in the week, but it just didn’t work out. I was there for business, not pleasure, but I always feel that I should stay in a casino hotel when in Vegas. I dunno, staying in a Westin or Marriott up by the convention center just doesn’t feel Vegas. When I was here last year for a business convention I stayed in the MGM Grand. Years ago, though, when I’d do regular booth duty at technology shows, I would always stay at Mandalay Bay, which I really liked.</li>\r\n	<li>The more I know about hotels, the more I’m impressed by Vegas hotel operations. Caesars, the MGM Grand, Mandalay Bay -- they’re huge mini-cities -- orders of magnitude bigger than couple-hundred room hotels I’d stay at in Denver or New Orleans. And yet the service, the execution is almost always way better than those smaller hotels. If you’re any sort of an operations nerd, you gotta give ‘em a nod. Though on the other hand, when you head to the gym at 6am and pass by the old guy dragging on a cigarette playing the quarter slots, it kinda makes you wish they were a little less good...</li>\r\n	<li>As I mentioned in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/08/26/podcast-116-traveling-thru-japan-luggage-trends/\">the last episode</a>, the big travel for me was at the beginning of September when we were in Scotland for 2 weeks getting my daughter situated at Univ of St Andrews. Now while I say “getting my daughter situated,” there were equal parts getting my wife situated with the idea of her youngest child being an ocean away -- a big difference from when my son was 90 minutes up the road in Milwaukee.</li>\r\n	<li>The following week’s travel had a nice difficulty factor. Weds morning, I flew from Chicago to DC for the papal Mass on the campus of my alma mater, Catholic University of America, and then back to Detroit that evening for meetings first thing Thursday morning. The difficulty factor was my luggage. No back packs, no selfie sticks, so certainly no roller bags were getting through the security checkpoints. Finding a checked luggage place is a real challenge anymore. I thought about checking my bag into my DCA-DTW flight, but I was too early -- 8 hours prior to flight time max. There is a checked baggage place at Union Station -- DC’s train station -- which is conveniently located a couple of stops south of Catholic on the Metro Red Line.</li>\r\n	<li>Freed of my baggage, I emerged from the Brookland Metro Stop to an unbelievable combination of people and fencing. Incredibly long lines of people corralled in by what had to be miles of fences. I was lucky; I somehow got into a quick security line -- only 45 minutes. After finding my seating section, the gates were closed and we were sealed in our sections until the Pope arrived and did a couple of laps around campus in the Popemobile. After Mass started, they opened up the gates again. Which was great, because while the music and the liturgy were top notch, I wasn’t queuing up for communion with 25,000 other folks. After the homily, I was one of the trickle of folks making an early exit to beat the rush. I had a flight to catch. I’m sure the Pope understood.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>One Day</em> by <a href=\"http://www.hollowhorse.co.uk/\">Hollow Horse</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>OK, just as a warning, this section is going to ramble on for a while. I have a random walk of comments/opinions that I just can’t seem to synthesize into  coherent topics. So here it goes...</li>\r\n	<li>First stop in the mail bag, I was pleasantly surprised to receive this audio comment from Linda Martin of the Indie Travel Podcast\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Linda, thanks for that. The thing with eggs -- you can tell I’ve thought about this way too much -- it’s a trade-off between good eggs and time. It takes time for a cooked-to-order egg, but in the morning, I don’t often have that time. Usually, I’ve worked out; I’m cooling down during breakfast, then hitting the shower and off to work. When I stayed in one of the Renaissance Hotels in New Orleans, they didn’t have a separate executive lounge. Breakfast was served in the restaurant. They had the typical lounge buffet set up, but you could also order off the menu, which I think I did once in a dozen stays. It was a nice egg, but it took an extra 10 min that usually wasn’t in my morning schedule. Definitely a 1st World problem</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>Lisa Walls wrote on the TravelCommons Facebook Wall\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>“Hey Mark, I love your podcast, especially the comments on food and craft beers. Other than the Altoids, do you carry any food in your briefcase, such as protein bars? I am always looking for something that is shelf stable that tastes good and travels well.”</li>\r\n	<li>Lisa, thanks for the note. I usually keep 1-2 KIND bars in the bottom of my bag. The fruit-&amp;-nut ones seem to hold up to weeks of getting crushed by my PC power supply. They’re also not too sweet the way some other granola and power bars are.</li>\r\n	<li>I know I’m about to lose any foodie cred I may have built up over the years, but I gotta say that, for me, the McDonald\'s grilled chicken Snack Wraps are just about the right amount of food to cover a 2-hour flight. They’re quick to buy, and compact to bring on board and eat. I find it tough to manage a salad while sitting in a center seat.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>I’m not sure if I mentioned this last episode, but I’m flying Southwest on this week’s Vegas-Denver-Chicago trip to click over A-list status. It kinda crept up on me -- I don’t typically fly SW enough to make status, but apparently I have this year. As near as I can tell, this means I won’t have to pay the $12.50 Early Bird fee or be staring at my Southwest app exactly 24 hours before flight time in order to get a decent boarding position. Which, as we all know, is critical on Southwest since there’s no assigned seating. An A or early B boarding group number is necessary for an aisle seat. On my Vegas flight, hitting the “Check In” button maybe 2 seconds after the 24-hour window got me B 7, so I got an aisle seat in the back half of the plane. It was a full flight, so after that, I was living last year’s Super Bowl Doritos commercial -- looking down, trying to avoid eye contact with potentially bad seat mates while looking friendly to attract good ones. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://youtu.be/2JqRXLQYF9o\">link</a> to the commercial. It’s spot on.</li>\r\n	<li>In the last episode, I talked about travel amateurs clogging up the PreCheck lanes. These would be people getting PreCheck as part of the TSA’s “Managed Inclusion” program, where they randomly shunt travelers over to PreCheck to balance screening line loads. This to the utter frustration of travelers who paid $85 for PreCheck screening or $100 for Global Entry. You might recall long-time listener Rich Fraser saying he was getting PreCheck about 75% of the time so why should he pay? But now the TSA says they’re throttling back on “Managed Inclusion”, driven at least in part by the publicity generated by auditors finding that travelers on various watch lists were being given PreCheck. I’ve certainly noticed the length of PreCheck lines dropping.</li>\r\n	<li>Also in the last episode, I talked about luggage trends. One trend that sorta hit the cutting room floor is the move to fully rotating twirly wheels. Certainly handy in getting your luggage down a tight airplane aisle, but to my eye, most of them look a bit tinier, a bit flimsier than the standard roller-blade style wheel partially embedded in the back of the suitcase. The twirly wheels don’t seem rugged enough to survive getting pulled down Manhattan sidewalks or some of the ruts in New Orleans. And to allow full rotation, the wheels stick out of the bottom of the suitcase making the bag longer. This tripped up my wife on our flight from EDI to LHR. The BA gate agent asked my wife to put her bag in the luggage sizer. It would’ve fit -- except for the twirly wheels. Now we have to gate check it -- which means standing off to the side of the gate pulling some stuff out, transferring it into her shoulder bag. Understandable -- until we get on the plane and see it’s a half-full 767 and there are fully empty luggage bins. Really? So as is my wont, I vented my frustration on Twitter rather than any BA employees. BA’s social media department responded pretty quickly saying they needed to check all luggage to be fair to all passengers. But how would allowing a bag that was, at most, an inch over-long because of its twirly wheels on a half-full flight with empty overheads cheat any other passengers? It’s an over-officiousness that just doesn’t make sense. And it’s the reason I avoid BA now whenever possible. Which is a real shame, because back in the early ‘90’s when I was doing a lot of travel to Europe, I prefered BA. But that was 20 years ago and, it seems, a different BA.</li>\r\n	<li>There is another reason I avoid BA -- officiousness <i>and</i> Heathrow. Again, another thing I loved in the ‘90’s, I now avoid whenever possible. Heathrow is a complete nightmare. You land, you trundle along through corridors, down escalators, into a bus, get a tour of the Heathrow back alleys, stop at another terminal, fight through security again, and then end up in the midst of a packed retail space where you wander through the shops because there’s no place to sit. It’s gotten to the point that I’ll fly the extra hour to connect through Frankfurt or Amsterdam just to avoid Heathrow. We were doing this St Andrews trip on AA miles. We were fine on the way out -- ORD-JFK-EDI all on AA. But coming back, it was EDI-LHR-ORD with the first leg on BA. Just ugh! I still keep thinking about how to get something out of my 300K BA Avios miles. Maybe I’ll make my daughter fly BA.</li>\r\n	<li>On a brighter note, I tried a new financial service during this trip and it worked really well. It’s called Revolut -- as in Revolution cut a bit short. It’s a FinTech start up based in the UK that gives you a virtual and real debit card with really great exchange rates. As with all the cool start-ups nowadays, everything is done through a smartphone app -- which, to stow the snark for a second, makes a lot of sense for any travel app. I opened an account before I left and funded it with $200 from my regular ATM/debit card. I could then convert my dollars to pounds or euros at what appeared to be just about the market rate -- there didn’t seem to be a lot of margin taken on the buy or sell sides. I also instantly had a virtual debit card with which I could use those new pounds or euros to buy things on the web -- like train tickets or top up a phone card. I then requested a physical version of my card, which took about a week to show up from the UK. Now I had a proper European chip-&amp;-pin card that I could use at an ATM or, say, the self-serve checkout line at Tesco’s without waiting for a clerk to take my signed receipt. It only hiccuped one at the Costa coffee shop in St Andrews; I still don’t know why. Poking around a bit more, I found that I could send pounds to my daughter’s RBS account with a day or so lag. Now, none of this functionality is necessarily new, though being able to do it all through a slick smartphone app is very handy. The real innovation is the cost. Funding my Revolut account from my debit card cost me less than 1% -- less than $2 for the $200 transfer, which is cheaper than most non-network ATM fees. After that, no transaction fees to move money between currencies or to withdraw. Compare that to hitting a foreign ATM with your US card. My personal bank is very reasonable, only charging me Visa’s 1% transaction fee, but many big banks will hit you with a $5 non-network fee on top of any transaction fees. And then transferring money to my daughter’s account -- wire transfers can cost $25-30. Revolut has well-packaged functionality delivered at the lowest costs I’ve seen. I don’t know how long they’ll keep this price point, but right now, it’s the best deal I’ve seen for money needed for international travel. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://revolut.com/\">link</a> to the Revolut web site.</li>\r\n	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Clear My Head</em> by <a href=\"http://www.thefiasco.net/\">FIASCO</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Random Thoughts about Car Rentals</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>I guess I could’ve cut two or three comments out of the last segment and labeled them “Random Comments about My Scotland Trip” but that just seems entire too gratuitous. But I have been collecting car rental experiences in my TravelCommons Evernote drop file and I think I now have enough for make up a topic -- or at least what might marginally pass for a topic</li>\r\n	<li>As I’ve mentioned in past episodes, I really don’t like to rent cars. I much prefer to use rail or a cab in from the airport and then walk to where ever I need to go. That works well in New York or Chicago or San Francisco, not so much in Denver or Detroit. So I’ve been renting a lot of cars over the past 6 months.</li>\r\n	<li>So many in fact that Hertz bumped my status up to President\'s Circle. Not quite sure that gets me, but it sounds status-y. Though right after my congratulatory e-mail, I found a dumpy Toyota Corolla in my Hertz Gold spot, so maybe it’s not anything special.</li>\r\n	<li>But in times like those -- when I get assigned the 45,000-mile Toyota with crumbs still in the driver seat, or a Ford F-150 king cab pick up truck in Boston (?) -- I’ve come to love Hertz Gold Choice. If you rent a mid-size or above -- and for our corporate rate, the price of a compact and mid-size are the same -- you can go to the Choice aisle and take one of those cars instead. I left the dumpy Toyota and took a new Nissan instead.</li>\r\n	<li>I have started to make note of differences in service <i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">and</span></i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> attitude across locations. I never rent from Hertz at Detroit airport anymore. I’ve yet to get a non-dumpy car there and the attitude is not great. Though I think Hertz’s Newark station is the worst. A recent example -- a colleague was driving his car toward the lot exit when a low tire pressure alarm lit up. So he asked the guy at the exit gate where he could get some air to top off the tire. “Try a gas station,” the attendant told him. That was helpful.</span></li>\r\n	<li>I’ve had challenges with car rental web sites -- Hertz, Avis -- when my pick-up or drop off time didn’t match the hours of the office I selected. I get the error notice and then when I go back to try another site or time, these websites will randomly select another date or location. I had this happen to me in Edinburgh on the second car we rented. We were training from Lockerbie back to Edinburgh where we’d done 4 days of biking while our daughter was going through freshman orientation. I’d booked a car on Hertz’s web site to pick up at the train station and drop off at EDI 5 days later. It took me 5 tries to get it right -- each time I re-started, it reset the pick-up location from Waverly Station to EDI. And each time I’d correct it. Except, it seems, the last time. When we arrived in Waverly, there was no car. I looked at the res -- pick up at EDI. Ugh. Not the end of the world -- we could’ve taken the new light rail out to EDI, but it was aggravating. I searched through the Hertz.co.uk website for a phone number -- that itself being a little extra helping of aggravation -- and called the res center. The woman on the other end was inordinately calm and helpful. 3 minutes later, she’d moved my pick-up to Waverly. I thanked her -- a lot. I should’ve booked with her instead of the website.</li>\r\n	<li>We rented our first car in Edinburgh from Enterprise. It was a great car -- a Fiat 500 L. All the bags fit easily in the hatchback. Nice nav, nice sound system, clean....  Drove to a near-by shopping mall -- grabbed a coffee at Starbucks and phone SIMs at the ee store. Next stop, IKEA to buy things we didn’t pack -- like towels and hangers. Coming off the motorway, through a traffic circle, the clutch crapped out. I’d put it in gear, let out the clutch pedal, nothing. 3 hours later after Enterprise, the auto club and Fiat scrummed about who was supposed to pick up the car, the tow truck dropped us back off at EDI where the Enterprise folks apologized profusely and gave us an even nicer Nissan. A couple of weeks, I noticed the Pope used a Fiat 500L to drive from Andrews Airforce Base to the Vatican Embassy. The next day, though, he was in a Jeep Popemobile. I could sympathize.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a title=\"MP3 Download\" href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/download_track.php?id=0E74C6FEB7390D18D02B4B399668093172F6C8CC66DDC09D90A3BF7DDA436823CFAC859AE2B2C73E46A278A4950E1030\">Lonely Dog Blues</a></em> by <a title=\"Tobin James\' Web Site\" href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/label.php?id=2A3449F03E7B8462FF74407B60F0C4B0A30A0CBE880C61DE37E3B342387F0643\">Tobin James</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917626811171154.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #117</li>\r\n	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/\">Podshow Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\r\n	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_117.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #117 — Random Thoughts About Eggs, Scotland & Car Rentals','','inherit','open','open','','1542-revision-v1','','','2015-10-11 22:17:28','2015-10-12 03:17:28','',1542,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/10/11/1542-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1557,1,'2015-10-22 22:13:51','2015-10-23 03:13:51','','travelcommons_logo','','inherit','open','closed','','travelcommons_logo','','','2015-10-22 22:13:51','2015-10-23 03:13:51','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/travelcommons_logo.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(1558,1,'2015-10-22 22:14:00','2015-10-23 03:14:00','https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/cropped-travelcommons_logo.jpg','cropped-travelcommons_logo.jpg','','inherit','open','closed','','cropped-travelcommons_logo-jpg','','','2015-10-22 22:14:00','2015-10-23 03:14:00','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/cropped-travelcommons_logo.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(1561,1,'2015-11-08 19:43:09','2015-11-09 00:43:09','[caption id=\"attachment_1573\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/DSC_4956.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1573\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/DSC_4956-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"This hotel door could use some work\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> This hotel door could use some work[/caption]\n\nA bit less of a random walk than the last episode, we talk about safety, physical safety, when traveling. While we sometimes put ourselves in the midst of dodgy surroundings, we usually feel safe when we retreat back into the \"travel bubble\" What about when the bubble is no longer safe? Smartphones are the frequent traveler\'s most important tool. So when an upgrade to my HTC One killed its usefulness, I found myself heading back to Apple.  All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_118.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #118:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, less than a month since the last episode. There’s a shocker. It’s been one of my lighter travel months. No international travel, no up-and-backs across the US. Indeed, there were a couple of weeks where I didn’t even pack a bag -- just did day trips to Detroit and Atlanta. There is something liberating about that -- just carrying a briefcase or backpack. I guess that would’ve been the ideal situation to check out Spirit Airlines, but I don’t hate myself that much.</li>\n 	<li>No rush to get to the gate for the start of boarding. Stroll up, sit down and then  stay seated while the agent works through the cadence of status boarding groups -- really important customers, kinda important customers, fake important customers, and then everyone else. No roller board meant no need for the boarding scrum. I just waited for last call and walked on board. Kinda reminded me of the days when I first started flying when, rather than racing to be first on the plane, we’d see who could be last -- how late you could show up and still get on the plane. My boss won when he talked his way past an agent, got onto the jet bridge, knocked on the plane door, which the crew opened and let him on. I don’t think I’ll push it quite that far.</li>\n 	<li>A few of this month’s trips have been in and out of Boston Logan Airport. And for as much stick as I give United Airlines -- broken planes, late flights, just general lousy service -- I have to give them credit for their <a href=\"http://newsroom.united.com/2014-04-28-New-United-Concourse-at-Boston-Logan-Offers-Customers-Modern-Streamlined-Airport-Experience\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">gate area</a> at Logan. Parts of it look like a hip hotel lounge -- cool hanging lights, non-bench seating. There’s stand-up/high-top counter space for laptops with lots of plugs. And even the self-serve boarding gates -- with modern subway-style turnstiles that scan your boarding pass before letting you in -- worked well. It’s probably one of the nicest gate areas I’ve been in in a long time. Nice job, United!</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Paint the Sky</em> by Hans Atom (c) 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/hansatom/50718 Ft: Miss Judged</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>I got a good bit of commentary from the last episode, so thank everyone very much.</li>\n 	<li>Rob Cheshire posted this comment on the web site:\n<ul>\n 	<li>“In defense of British Airways, you stepped into the middle of their new hand-luggage policy roll-out, which is designed to reign-in the amount of cabin baggage, which had really gotten out of hand. They are being strict across the board, on elite members, as well as everyone else, and it is definitely having a positive impact on bin-space, as well as minimising the amount of messing around (checking the last few wheelie bags that can’t be stowed) that the cabin crew have to take care of in the minutes prior to push-back.”</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Rob, thanks for that. One thing I did like BA’s luggage approach was tagging the second bag meant to go underseat -- in my case, a backpack -- with a bright yellow tag to keep people from putting 2 bags overhead. There is not much that’s ruder in plane travel than early boarders -- status fliers -- maximizing their leg space at the expense of the rest the plane. Tagging that second bag makes it easy for flight attendants or later boarders to call out bin hogging. I’d love to see that move across the Atlantic.</li>\n 	<li>Andrew Gill left a comment on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page building on my thoughts about using the new Revolut debit card during my September trip to Scotland. Andrew said:\n<ul>\n 	<li>“The piece of Revolut was interesting. I\'ve just spent six months living and working in The Philipines. I was lucky to be involved in the pilot of Supercard from <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/TravelexUK/?hc_location=ufi\">Travelex UK</a> (<a href=\"https://supercard.io/\">https://supercard.io/</a>). It\'s a physical card, complete with chip and pin, that can be used in retail stores and for online purchases too.</li>\n 	<li>“The card is free, and transactions are processed at the Visa Europe Exchange rate, with no foreign exchange fees or commission added on, but the *killer* feature is it\'s linked to an existing debit or credit card so there\'s no need to pre-load money onto the card. transactions are processed in my home currency, so again, there are no foreign exchange fees or commission added on</li>\n 	<li>“The pilot program has closed now, so fingers crossed, it comes out of pilot and into general release</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Andrew, thanks for that pointer. I agree that being able to link the Travelex Supercard back to a debit or credit card is very useful vs. the Revolut model which is more like a pre-paid debit card. Looking at the Supercard website, it looks like the pilot was only for UK card holders. Hopefully, they’ll be able to expand their geographic footprint when they fully launch the card. Interesting that Revolut is also a UK-based company. Seems like London is a hotspot for these fintech companies. Last week, I was talking to a guy who moved from London to Chicago to start up the US operations for a different London-based fintech company -- more based on lending than payments. He said that HSBC looked hard at buying Revolut because they were doing something HSBC couldn’t even given their global reach and scale. Between Revolut and Supercard, and big banks like Chase dropping foreign exchange fees on their credit cards, the money hassles of international travel keep going down. It’s a far cry from having to cash an American Express travelers check at the airport exchange desk so you could get a cab to your hotel.</li>\n 	<li>In an<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/01/29/podcast-107-serious-about-hotel-reviews-tsa-gets-something-right/\"> earlier episode</a>, I talked about evaluation criteria for my TripAdvisor reviews -- the bathroom, room size, workout room, location, service quality. I decided during one of my trips last month that I’m adding a new criterion -- accessible bedside electrical outlets. Most frequent travelers I know use their phone or tablet as an alarm, eliminating the need to discern operating instructions for each hotel’s unique brand of clock radio. Most hotels have figured this out and provide outlets on the nightstand -- in wall, along the side of the nightstand, on the lamp base…. But last month, I hit one of those knuckle draggers -- a hotel in Vegas. I practically had to disassemble one of the beds to find an outlet hidden behind it. Luckily, I carry long power cords.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Perfect Stranger</em> by stellarartwars (c) 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/stellarartwars/45510 Ft: TheDice</li>\n</ul>\n<b>Danger Within The Travel Bubble</b>\n<ul>\n 	<li>In the last episode, I talked about attending the <a href=\"http://popeindc.cua.edu/the-papal-mass/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Papal Mass</a> at <a href=\"http://www.cua.edu/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Catholic University</a> in northeast DC which has never been one of the nicer sections of DC. I had taken the Metro up from the airport and would be getting back on it to catch my evening flight to Detroit. The Brookland stop at Catholic isn’t a big stop and I figured it would get overwhelmed at the end of the Mass by the 25,000 people there. I started thinking of alternatives. Getting a cab or an Uber would probably be just as tough, so my best alternative would be to walk down to the next stop south on the Red Line -- Rhode Island Ave. From my days in DC, I remember that neighborhood being a particularly rough one. That would not be a pleasant walk. I decided to skip Communion and leave the Pope early to beat the crowds at the Brookland stop.</li>\n 	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Most of the times when we talk about travel security, we talk about airport security or digital security, but not often about physical security. Yet very often, travel drops in unfamiliar settings -- usually by our own choice -- where we could unknowingly wander into a very unsafe situation</span></li>\n 	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I did exactly this some years ago when visiting Cape Town, South Africa. I was shopping through some craft stalls set up in a park and just kept wandering along. I kinda looking at the buildings, up and around… Oh, and I have my big Nikon SLR slung over my shoulder. Not sure I could’ve looked any more like a tourist unless I was wearing a big “Don’t Mess With Texas” t-shirt and a Dallas Cowboys baseball cap. At some point, I finally regain some situational awareness -- and, from my university years living in Northeast DC and on the Southside of Chicago, realize that I’m not in the best neighborhood right now. I move to the middle of the street -- so I don’t get jumped from a doorway -- and walk, with purpose now, back the way I came.</span></li>\n 	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I did a little better this spring in New Orleans. I was standing on St Charles St in the Garden District watching a Mardi Gras parade. After a while, I got a bad feeling about the atmosphere around me. Nothing that I could put my finger on, but enough to make me give up a prime spot on the parade round and walk up the street a bit. In the next morning’s paper, I read there had been a gun fight at that spot about 30 minutes after I’d left.</span></li>\n 	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">There have been other times in Joburg, Bangalore, Guadalajara, but considering how much I travel, they’re rare events -- I’ve wandered all through Madrid, Beijing, Tokyo, Edinburgh, Saigon and never felt unsafe -- but they get your attention. But then again, that’s outside the “travel bubble”. We’ve talked about that in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2008/04/29/podcast-64-escaping-the-travel-bubble-marks-travel-tips/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">past episodes</a>, how travelers can often seem to float above the places they visit unless they make the effort to “pop” the travel bubble and engage.</span></li>\n 	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">When those outside problems penetrate our bubble, now that’s more disturbing. Like the time some years back when I was visiting Rio -- years before the World Cup. I was checking in with a colleague who had done a lot of business there. He saw my room was on the second floor. “No, that won’t do,” he said, “we need to get you on a double-digit floor. At least 10 if not higher” “Why?” I asked. “Because,” he explained, “when the smash-and-grab gangs break in, they start on the first floor and work their way up until their bags are full. The higher you are, the more likely they’ll fill up before they get to you.” The logic was brutally impeccable. And this from a guy still sporting a couple of bruises from an earlier mugging on Copacabana Beach.</span></li>\n 	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Or a few years ago, when another colleague had to take a taxi to connect between Delhi’s domestic and international terminal -- before the latest renovation. He’d forgotten to print out his international itinerary, so they wouldn’t let him on the transfer bus (I’ve talked about, in prior episodes, the need to have a printed flight itinerary in India). He couldn’t find anyone in the terminal to print one out for him so he walked out to the cab rank. He piles his bags into and on top of a taxi and off he goes -- to some out-of-the-way place under a highway overpass where the cab driver and a friend shake him down for most of his money and his watch -- they leave him with his luggage and enough money for cab fare to the international terminal. A polite mugging; no bruises with this one.</span></li>\n 	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">My most disturbing bubble burst happened in the US -- in a Westin in Connecticut. A friend checked in and, since the hotel was oversold, was given one of those rooms that’s a conference room with a bathroom. They rolled out the tables and rolled in a bed for him. The next morning, as he’s getting dressed, he’s missing his watch, his ring, and the money and credit cards from his wallet -- all which were next to him on the nightstand. As he put it together, someone had broken into the room -- he saw that the conference room’s double doors had enough of a gap between them that you could open the lock by slipping a credit card or room key through the gap -- and they had stood next to him going through his stuff on the night stand. He’s lucky he’s a sound sleeper.</span></li>\n 	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">And I consider myself lucky. I don’t lock myself away in the hotel. I make an effort to step outside the travel bubble -- to engage -- and after 30 years of heavy travel, other than <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/05/20/podcast-98-stolen-luggage-restaurants-want-your-smartphone/\">having my camera and passport stolen</a>, I’m really no worse the wear. Certainly no bruises to show for it. I’m not sure I’d do it any other way. Though I do pay more attention to hotel door construction than I used to.</span></li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Foolish Game</em> by copperhead (c) 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/copperhead/46390 Ft: Snowflake,Sackjo22</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Switching Back to Apple</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>After your government ID, the smartphone is probably the most important thing you travel with. And while I quickly whip out my ID a few times a trip to prove my identity  -- to the TSA agent, to hotel clerks, to car rental check out folks, I use my smartphone constantly -- maybe too constantly. Be that as it may, the smartphone is <i>the</i> critical tool for today’s frequent traveler. A carpenter has his framing hammer, the auto mechanic his Snap-On wrench -- for the road warrior, it’s the smart phone.</li>\n 	<li>And so it wasn’t without a good bit of thought that I bit the bullet a few weeks ago and switched back to Apple; dumping my HTC One for a new iPhone 6S. I wasn’t thrilled to do it; I put it off for at least a month. And in the end, it was more a frustration with hardware -- with the slouching-toward-bankruptcy mess that HTC has become than it was excitement for the latest iThing.</li>\n 	<li>Which I guess is the pattern for me. My first smartphone was an iPhone 3G and I’d had just about every iPhone model up to the 5. And it was the frustration with its truly horrid battery life that led me to the HTC. The cause this time was the lousy performance of my HTC One after they pushed their Android upgrade -- “Lollipop” -- at the beginning of this year. It just trashed the phone -- the lag was awful. The hardware components have the specs to handle the new version; it’s just that HTC’s implementation of it is crap. Now, it’s not like Apple nails their OS upgrades every time. The IOS 8 release didn’t exactly cover them in glory. But at least they worked to resolve the problem by iterating through releases in a fairly timely manner. After the initial “Lollipop” release, Google iterated through updates  -- I think ver 5.1.1 is the most recent -- and I’m waited for HTC to use that as an opportunity to clean up their 5.0 mess. They would say on Twitter “It’s coming, just wait”, And then “Oh, we’ll just skip 5.1 and give you 6.0 by the end of the year”. That was it. I’d suffered through 6 months of lousy performance and now they were saying I would have at least 3 more -- not that I have any reason to think that the near-bankrupt company has gotten any better at software estimating.</li>\n 	<li>I don’t think that either Apple’s or Google’s operating systems are inherently better than the other. I’ve used them both. They both work. There are things I like about each of them, and since they seem to be stealing/emulating (?) each other’s best features, they’re more or less converging on each other.</li>\n 	<li>For me, the difference is the hardware -- which is what is actually in our hands each day. I’ve always thought Apple is a better hardware company than a software one. I loved my MacBook Air, but was very “meh” about OS X. It’s really the Android equipment manufacturers that are pushing me away. It seems that most of the Android hardware innovation is at the large end -- large screen sizes -- 5 ½ inches and up -- which is way bigger than what want. And then there are the delays in Android upgrades as each manufacturer gooses Google’s release -- my 18-month old Samsung tablet is still on version 4.4 “Kit Kat”, now two version levels down, with no update in sight, let alone any security patches. With mobile devices becoming more vital, that foot dragging on upgrades and security patching very uncomfortable.</li>\n 	<li>I was holding out for Google’s updated Nexus line, reading all rumor articles with spec leaks and blurred pictures. The 6P was too big for me, but the 5X -- I could do a 5.2-in screen with fast updates and patches. But then, when they unveiled the 5X, it topped it out at 32 GB with no expansion slots. For me, that is just too tight for my music, podcasts, pictures, video. So that’s it, I walked into the Apple store and bought a 64GB unlocked GSM 6S on their new upgrade plan -- new phone comes out, I trade mine in. It’s like leasing a car -- some people like the newest model. It’s all about the hardware.</li>\n 	<li>Now if I can just keep iTunes from crashing on my Windows 10 box...</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #118</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_118.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #118 — Danger In the Travel Bubble; Switching Back to Apple','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-118-danger-in-the-travel-bubble-switching-back-to-apple','','\nhttp://popeindc.cua.edu/the-papal-mass/','2021-09-29 08:08:16','2021-09-29 13:08:16','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=1561',0,'post','',0),
(1562,1,'2015-11-08 16:12:29','2015-11-08 21:12:29','[caption id=\"attachment_1554\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/2015-09-03-15.12.36.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1554\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/2015-09-03-15.12.36-300x200.jpg\" alt=\"Did The Pope Have This Problem?\" width=\"300\" height=\"200\" /></a> Did The Pope Have This Problem?[/caption]\r\n\r\nApologies in advance because this is pretty much a stream-of-consciousness episode, with semi-strung together thoughts about eggs, car rentals, seeing the Pope, travel food, and stuff from my September trip to Scotland.  I talk about how handy I found the new <a href=\"https://revolut.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Revolut</a> service for spending and sending money in Europe; recent good and bad experiences with <a href=\"https://www.hertz.com/rentacar/emember/join/overview.do?learnMore=presidentsCircle\" target=\"_blank\">Hertz </a>and other car rentals; most bad experience with <a href=\"http://britishairways.com\" target=\"_blank\">British Airways</a>; and how true-to-life the <a href=\"https://youtu.be/2JqRXLQYF9o\" target=\"_blank\">Doritos Super Bowl commercial</a> portrays the Southwest boarding experience.  All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_118.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/227996070\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #118:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Coming to you from TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. I was trying to do this from the Bally’s Casino in Las Vegas where I was earlier in the week, but it just didn’t work out. I was there for business, not pleasure, but I always feel that I should stay in a casino hotel when in Vegas. I dunno, staying in a Westin or Marriott up by the convention center just doesn’t feel Vegas. When I was here last year for a business convention I stayed in the MGM Grand. Years ago, though, when I’d do regular booth duty at technology shows, I would always stay at Mandalay Bay, which I really liked.</li>\r\n	<li>The more I know about hotels, the more I’m impressed by Vegas hotel operations. Caesars, the MGM Grand, Mandalay Bay -- they’re huge mini-cities -- orders of magnitude bigger than couple-hundred room hotels I’d stay at in Denver or New Orleans. And yet the service, the execution is almost always way better than those smaller hotels. If you’re any sort of an operations nerd, you gotta give ‘em a nod. Though on the other hand, when you head to the gym at 6am and pass by the old guy dragging on a cigarette playing the quarter slots, it kinda makes you wish they were a little less good...</li>\r\n	<li>As I mentioned in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/08/26/podcast-116-traveling-thru-japan-luggage-trends/\">the last episode</a>, the big travel for me was at the beginning of September when we were in Scotland for 2 weeks getting my daughter situated at Univ of St Andrews. Now while I say “getting my daughter situated,” there were equal parts getting my wife situated with the idea of her youngest child being an ocean away -- a big difference from when my son was 90 minutes up the road in Milwaukee.</li>\r\n	<li>The following week’s travel had a nice difficulty factor. Weds morning, I flew from Chicago to DC for the papal Mass on the campus of my alma mater, Catholic University of America, and then back to Detroit that evening for meetings first thing Thursday morning. The difficulty factor was my luggage. No back packs, no selfie sticks, so certainly no roller bags were getting through the security checkpoints. Finding a checked luggage place is a real challenge anymore. I thought about checking my bag into my DCA-DTW flight, but I was too early -- 8 hours prior to flight time max. There is a checked baggage place at Union Station -- DC’s train station -- which is conveniently located a couple of stops south of Catholic on the Metro Red Line.</li>\r\n	<li>Freed of my baggage, I emerged from the Brookland Metro Stop to an unbelievable combination of people and fencing. Incredibly long lines of people corralled in by what had to be miles of fences. I was lucky; I somehow got into a quick security line -- only 45 minutes. After finding my seating section, the gates were closed and we were sealed in our sections until the Pope arrived and did a couple of laps around campus in the Popemobile. After Mass started, they opened up the gates again. Which was great, because while the music and the liturgy were top notch, I wasn’t queuing up for communion with 25,000 other folks. After the homily, I was one of the trickle of folks making an early exit to beat the rush. I had a flight to catch. I’m sure the Pope understood.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>One Day</em> by <a href=\"http://www.hollowhorse.co.uk/\">Hollow Horse</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>OK, just as a warning, this section is going to ramble on for a while. I have a random walk of comments/opinions that I just can’t seem to synthesize into  coherent topics. So here it goes...</li>\r\n	<li>First stop in the mail bag, I was pleasantly surprised to receive this audio comment from Linda Martin of the Indie Travel Podcast\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Linda, thanks for that. The thing with eggs -- you can tell I’ve thought about this way too much -- it’s a trade-off between good eggs and time. It takes time for a cooked-to-order egg, but in the morning, I don’t often have that time. Usually, I’ve worked out; I’m cooling down during breakfast, then hitting the shower and off to work. When I stayed in one of the Renaissance Hotels in New Orleans, they didn’t have a separate executive lounge. Breakfast was served in the restaurant. They had the typical lounge buffet set up, but you could also order off the menu, which I think I did once in a dozen stays. It was a nice egg, but it took an extra 10 min that usually wasn’t in my morning schedule. Definitely a 1st World problem</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>Lisa Walls wrote on the TravelCommons Facebook Wall\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>“Hey Mark, I love your podcast, especially the comments on food and craft beers. Other than the Altoids, do you carry any food in your briefcase, such as protein bars? I am always looking for something that is shelf stable that tastes good and travels well.”</li>\r\n	<li>Lisa, thanks for the note. I usually keep 1-2 KIND bars in the bottom of my bag. The fruit-&amp;-nut ones seem to hold up to weeks of getting crushed by my PC power supply. They’re also not too sweet the way some other granola and power bars are.</li>\r\n	<li>I know I’m about to lose any foodie cred I may have built up over the years, but I gotta say that, for me, the McDonald\'s grilled chicken Snack Wraps are just about the right amount of food to cover a 2-hour flight. They’re quick to buy, and compact to bring on board and eat. I find it tough to manage a salad while sitting in a center seat.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>I’m not sure if I mentioned this last episode, but I’m flying Southwest on this week’s Vegas-Denver-Chicago trip to click over A-list status. It kinda crept up on me -- I don’t typically fly SW enough to make status, but apparently I have this year. As near as I can tell, this means I won’t have to pay the $12.50 Early Bird fee or be staring at my Southwest app exactly 24 hours before flight time in order to get a decent boarding position. Which, as we all know, is critical on Southwest since there’s no assigned seating. An A or early B boarding group number is necessary for an aisle seat. On my Vegas flight, hitting the “Check In” button maybe 2 seconds after the 24-hour window got me B 7, so I got an aisle seat in the back half of the plane. It was a full flight, so after that, I was living last year’s Super Bowl Doritos commercial -- looking down, trying to avoid eye contact with potentially bad seat mates while looking friendly to attract good ones. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://youtu.be/2JqRXLQYF9o\">link</a> to the commercial. It’s spot on.</li>\r\n	<li>In the last episode, I talked about travel amateurs clogging up the PreCheck lanes. These would be people getting PreCheck as part of the TSA’s “Managed Inclusion” program, where they randomly shunt travelers over to PreCheck to balance screening line loads. This to the utter frustration of travelers who paid $85 for PreCheck screening or $100 for Global Entry. You might recall long-time listener Rich Fraser saying he was getting PreCheck about 75% of the time so why should he pay? But now the TSA says they’re throttling back on “Managed Inclusion”, driven at least in part by the publicity generated by auditors finding that travelers on various watch lists were being given PreCheck. I’ve certainly noticed the length of PreCheck lines dropping.</li>\r\n	<li>Also in the last episode, I talked about luggage trends. One trend that sorta hit the cutting room floor is the move to fully rotating twirly wheels. Certainly handy in getting your luggage down a tight airplane aisle, but to my eye, most of them look a bit tinier, a bit flimsier than the standard roller-blade style wheel partially embedded in the back of the suitcase. The twirly wheels don’t seem rugged enough to survive getting pulled down Manhattan sidewalks or some of the ruts in New Orleans. And to allow full rotation, the wheels stick out of the bottom of the suitcase making the bag longer. This tripped up my wife on our flight from EDI to LHR. The BA gate agent asked my wife to put her bag in the luggage sizer. It would’ve fit -- except for the twirly wheels. Now we have to gate check it -- which means standing off to the side of the gate pulling some stuff out, transferring it into her shoulder bag. Understandable -- until we get on the plane and see it’s a half-full 767 and there are fully empty luggage bins. Really? So as is my wont, I vented my frustration on Twitter rather than any BA employees. BA’s social media department responded pretty quickly saying they needed to check all luggage to be fair to all passengers. But how would allowing a bag that was, at most, an inch over-long because of its twirly wheels on a half-full flight with empty overheads cheat any other passengers? It’s an over-officiousness that just doesn’t make sense. And it’s the reason I avoid BA now whenever possible. Which is a real shame, because back in the early ‘90’s when I was doing a lot of travel to Europe, I prefered BA. But that was 20 years ago and, it seems, a different BA.</li>\r\n	<li>There is another reason I avoid BA -- officiousness <i>and</i> Heathrow. Again, another thing I loved in the ‘90’s, I now avoid whenever possible. Heathrow is a complete nightmare. You land, you trundle along through corridors, down escalators, into a bus, get a tour of the Heathrow back alleys, stop at another terminal, fight through security again, and then end up in the midst of a packed retail space where you wander through the shops because there’s no place to sit. It’s gotten to the point that I’ll fly the extra hour to connect through Frankfurt or Amsterdam just to avoid Heathrow. We were doing this St Andrews trip on AA miles. We were fine on the way out -- ORD-JFK-EDI all on AA. But coming back, it was EDI-LHR-ORD with the first leg on BA. Just ugh! I still keep thinking about how to get something out of my 300K BA Avios miles. Maybe I’ll make my daughter fly BA.</li>\r\n	<li>On a brighter note, I tried a new financial service during this trip and it worked really well. It’s called Revolut -- as in Revolution cut a bit short. It’s a FinTech start up based in the UK that gives you a virtual and real debit card with really great exchange rates. As with all the cool start-ups nowadays, everything is done through a smartphone app -- which, to stow the snark for a second, makes a lot of sense for any travel app. I opened an account before I left and funded it with $200 from my regular ATM/debit card. I could then convert my dollars to pounds or euros at what appeared to be just about the market rate -- there didn’t seem to be a lot of margin taken on the buy or sell sides. I also instantly had a virtual debit card with which I could use those new pounds or euros to buy things on the web -- like train tickets or top up a phone card. I then requested a physical version of my card, which took about a week to show up from the UK. Now I had a proper European chip-&amp;-pin card that I could use at an ATM or, say, the self-serve checkout line at Tesco’s without waiting for a clerk to take my signed receipt. It only hiccuped one at the Costa coffee shop in St Andrews; I still don’t know why. Poking around a bit more, I found that I could send pounds to my daughter’s RBS account with a day or so lag. Now, none of this functionality is necessarily new, though being able to do it all through a slick smartphone app is very handy. The real innovation is the cost. Funding my Revolut account from my debit card cost me less than 1% -- less than $2 for the $200 transfer, which is cheaper than most non-network ATM fees. After that, no transaction fees to move money between currencies or to withdraw. Compare that to hitting a foreign ATM with your US card. My personal bank is very reasonable, only charging me Visa’s 1% transaction fee, but many big banks will hit you with a $5 non-network fee on top of any transaction fees. And then transferring money to my daughter’s account -- wire transfers can cost $25-30. Revolut has well-packaged functionality delivered at the lowest costs I’ve seen. I don’t know how long they’ll keep this price point, but right now, it’s the best deal I’ve seen for money needed for international travel. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://revolut.com/\">link</a> to the Revolut web site.</li>\r\n	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Clear My Head</em> by <a href=\"http://www.thefiasco.net/\">FIASCO</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Random Thoughts about Car Rentals</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>I guess I could’ve cut two or three comments out of the last segment and labeled them “Random Comments about My Scotland Trip” but that just seems entire too gratuitous. But I have been collecting car rental experiences in my TravelCommons Evernote drop file and I think I now have enough for make up a topic -- or at least what might marginally pass for a topic</li>\r\n	<li>As I’ve mentioned in past episodes, I really don’t like to rent cars. I much prefer to use rail or a cab in from the airport and then walk to where ever I need to go. That works well in New York or Chicago or San Francisco, not so much in Denver or Detroit. So I’ve been renting a lot of cars over the past 6 months.</li>\r\n	<li>So many in fact that Hertz bumped my status up to President\'s Circle. Not quite sure that gets me, but it sounds status-y. Though right after my congratulatory e-mail, I found a dumpy Toyota Corolla in my Hertz Gold spot, so maybe it’s not anything special.</li>\r\n	<li>But in times like those -- when I get assigned the 45,000-mile Toyota with crumbs still in the driver seat, or a Ford F-150 king cab pick up truck in Boston (?) -- I’ve come to love Hertz Gold Choice. If you rent a mid-size or above -- and for our corporate rate, the price of a compact and mid-size are the same -- you can go to the Choice aisle and take one of those cars instead. I left the dumpy Toyota and took a new Nissan instead.</li>\r\n	<li>I have started to make note of differences in service <i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">and</span></i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> attitude across locations. I never rent from Hertz at Detroit airport anymore. I’ve yet to get a non-dumpy car there and the attitude is not great. Though I think Hertz’s Newark station is the worst. A recent example -- a colleague was driving his car toward the lot exit when a low tire pressure alarm lit up. So he asked the guy at the exit gate where he could get some air to top off the tire. “Try a gas station,” the attendant told him. That was helpful.</span></li>\r\n	<li>I’ve had challenges with car rental web sites -- Hertz, Avis -- when my pick-up or drop off time didn’t match the hours of the office I selected. I get the error notice and then when I go back to try another site or time, these websites will randomly select another date or location. I had this happen to me in Edinburgh on the second car we rented. We were training from Lockerbie back to Edinburgh where we’d done 4 days of biking while our daughter was going through freshman orientation. I’d booked a car on Hertz’s web site to pick up at the train station and drop off at EDI 5 days later. It took me 5 tries to get it right -- each time I re-started, it reset the pick-up location from Waverly Station to EDI. And each time I’d correct it. Except, it seems, the last time. When we arrived in Waverly, there was no car. I looked at the res -- pick up at EDI. Ugh. Not the end of the world -- we could’ve taken the new light rail out to EDI, but it was aggravating. I searched through the Hertz.co.uk website for a phone number -- that itself being a little extra helping of aggravation -- and called the res center. The woman on the other end was inordinately calm and helpful. 3 minutes later, she’d moved my pick-up to Waverly. I thanked her -- a lot. I should’ve booked with her instead of the website.</li>\r\n	<li>We rented our first car in Edinburgh from Enterprise. It was a great car -- a Fiat 500 L. All the bags fit easily in the hatchback. Nice nav, nice sound system, clean....  Drove to a near-by shopping mall -- grabbed a coffee at Starbucks and phone SIMs at the ee store. Next stop, IKEA to buy things we didn’t pack -- like towels and hangers. Coming off the motorway, through a traffic circle, the clutch crapped out. I’d put it in gear, let out the clutch pedal, nothing. 3 hours later after Enterprise, the auto club and Fiat scrummed about who was supposed to pick up the car, the tow truck dropped us back off at EDI where the Enterprise folks apologized profusely and gave us an even nicer Nissan. A couple of weeks, I noticed the Pope used a Fiat 500L to drive from Andrews Airforce Base to the Vatican Embassy. The next day, though, he was in a Jeep Popemobile. I could sympathize.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a title=\"MP3 Download\" href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/download_track.php?id=0E74C6FEB7390D18D02B4B399668093172F6C8CC66DDC09D90A3BF7DDA436823CFAC859AE2B2C73E46A278A4950E1030\">Lonely Dog Blues</a></em> by <a title=\"Tobin James\' Web Site\" href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/label.php?id=2A3449F03E7B8462FF74407B60F0C4B0A30A0CBE880C61DE37E3B342387F0643\">Tobin James</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917626811171154.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #118</li>\r\n	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/\">Podshow Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\r\n	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_118.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #118 — Danger Inside the Travel Bubble; Switching Back to Apple','','inherit','closed','closed','','1561-revision-v1','','','2015-11-08 16:12:29','2015-11-08 21:12:29','',1561,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/11/08/1561-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1563,1,'2015-11-08 16:18:32','2015-11-08 21:18:32','[caption id=\"attachment_1554\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/2015-09-03-15.12.36.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1554\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/2015-09-03-15.12.36-300x200.jpg\" alt=\"Did The Pope Have This Problem?\" width=\"300\" height=\"200\" /></a> Did The Pope Have This Problem?[/caption]\r\n\r\nApologies in advance because this is pretty much a stream-of-consciousness episode, with semi-strung together thoughts about eggs, car rentals, seeing the Pope, travel food, and stuff from my September trip to Scotland.  I talk about how handy I found the new <a href=\"https://revolut.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Revolut</a> service for spending and sending money in Europe; recent good and bad experiences with <a href=\"https://www.hertz.com/rentacar/emember/join/overview.do?learnMore=presidentsCircle\" target=\"_blank\">Hertz </a>and other car rentals; most bad experience with <a href=\"http://britishairways.com\" target=\"_blank\">British Airways</a>; and how true-to-life the <a href=\"https://youtu.be/2JqRXLQYF9o\" target=\"_blank\">Doritos Super Bowl commercial</a> portrays the Southwest boarding experience.  All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_118.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/227996070\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #118:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Coming to you from TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. I was trying to do this from the Bally’s Casino in Las Vegas where I was earlier in the week, but it just didn’t work out. I was there for business, not pleasure, but I always feel that I should stay in a casino hotel when in Vegas. I dunno, staying in a Westin or Marriott up by the convention center just doesn’t feel Vegas. When I was here last year for a business convention I stayed in the MGM Grand. Years ago, though, when I’d do regular booth duty at technology shows, I would always stay at Mandalay Bay, which I really liked.</li>\r\n	<li>The more I know about hotels, the more I’m impressed by Vegas hotel operations. Caesars, the MGM Grand, Mandalay Bay -- they’re huge mini-cities -- orders of magnitude bigger than couple-hundred room hotels I’d stay at in Denver or New Orleans. And yet the service, the execution is almost always way better than those smaller hotels. If you’re any sort of an operations nerd, you gotta give ‘em a nod. Though on the other hand, when you head to the gym at 6am and pass by the old guy dragging on a cigarette playing the quarter slots, it kinda makes you wish they were a little less good...</li>\r\n	<li>As I mentioned in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/08/26/podcast-116-traveling-thru-japan-luggage-trends/\">the last episode</a>, the big travel for me was at the beginning of September when we were in Scotland for 2 weeks getting my daughter situated at Univ of St Andrews. Now while I say “getting my daughter situated,” there were equal parts getting my wife situated with the idea of her youngest child being an ocean away -- a big difference from when my son was 90 minutes up the road in Milwaukee.</li>\r\n	<li>The following week’s travel had a nice difficulty factor. Weds morning, I flew from Chicago to DC for the papal Mass on the campus of my alma mater, Catholic University of America, and then back to Detroit that evening for meetings first thing Thursday morning. The difficulty factor was my luggage. No back packs, no selfie sticks, so certainly no roller bags were getting through the security checkpoints. Finding a checked luggage place is a real challenge anymore. I thought about checking my bag into my DCA-DTW flight, but I was too early -- 8 hours prior to flight time max. There is a checked baggage place at Union Station -- DC’s train station -- which is conveniently located a couple of stops south of Catholic on the Metro Red Line.</li>\r\n	<li>Freed of my baggage, I emerged from the Brookland Metro Stop to an unbelievable combination of people and fencing. Incredibly long lines of people corralled in by what had to be miles of fences. I was lucky; I somehow got into a quick security line -- only 45 minutes. After finding my seating section, the gates were closed and we were sealed in our sections until the Pope arrived and did a couple of laps around campus in the Popemobile. After Mass started, they opened up the gates again. Which was great, because while the music and the liturgy were top notch, I wasn’t queuing up for communion with 25,000 other folks. After the homily, I was one of the trickle of folks making an early exit to beat the rush. I had a flight to catch. I’m sure the Pope understood.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>One Day</em> by <a href=\"http://www.hollowhorse.co.uk/\">Hollow Horse</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>OK, just as a warning, this section is going to ramble on for a while. I have a random walk of comments/opinions that I just can’t seem to synthesize into  coherent topics. So here it goes...</li>\r\n	<li>First stop in the mail bag, I was pleasantly surprised to receive this audio comment from Linda Martin of the Indie Travel Podcast\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Linda, thanks for that. The thing with eggs -- you can tell I’ve thought about this way too much -- it’s a trade-off between good eggs and time. It takes time for a cooked-to-order egg, but in the morning, I don’t often have that time. Usually, I’ve worked out; I’m cooling down during breakfast, then hitting the shower and off to work. When I stayed in one of the Renaissance Hotels in New Orleans, they didn’t have a separate executive lounge. Breakfast was served in the restaurant. They had the typical lounge buffet set up, but you could also order off the menu, which I think I did once in a dozen stays. It was a nice egg, but it took an extra 10 min that usually wasn’t in my morning schedule. Definitely a 1st World problem</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>Lisa Walls wrote on the TravelCommons Facebook Wall\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>“Hey Mark, I love your podcast, especially the comments on food and craft beers. Other than the Altoids, do you carry any food in your briefcase, such as protein bars? I am always looking for something that is shelf stable that tastes good and travels well.”</li>\r\n	<li>Lisa, thanks for the note. I usually keep 1-2 KIND bars in the bottom of my bag. The fruit-&amp;-nut ones seem to hold up to weeks of getting crushed by my PC power supply. They’re also not too sweet the way some other granola and power bars are.</li>\r\n	<li>I know I’m about to lose any foodie cred I may have built up over the years, but I gotta say that, for me, the McDonald\'s grilled chicken Snack Wraps are just about the right amount of food to cover a 2-hour flight. They’re quick to buy, and compact to bring on board and eat. I find it tough to manage a salad while sitting in a center seat.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>I’m not sure if I mentioned this last episode, but I’m flying Southwest on this week’s Vegas-Denver-Chicago trip to click over A-list status. It kinda crept up on me -- I don’t typically fly SW enough to make status, but apparently I have this year. As near as I can tell, this means I won’t have to pay the $12.50 Early Bird fee or be staring at my Southwest app exactly 24 hours before flight time in order to get a decent boarding position. Which, as we all know, is critical on Southwest since there’s no assigned seating. An A or early B boarding group number is necessary for an aisle seat. On my Vegas flight, hitting the “Check In” button maybe 2 seconds after the 24-hour window got me B 7, so I got an aisle seat in the back half of the plane. It was a full flight, so after that, I was living last year’s Super Bowl Doritos commercial -- looking down, trying to avoid eye contact with potentially bad seat mates while looking friendly to attract good ones. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://youtu.be/2JqRXLQYF9o\">link</a> to the commercial. It’s spot on.</li>\r\n	<li>In the last episode, I talked about travel amateurs clogging up the PreCheck lanes. These would be people getting PreCheck as part of the TSA’s “Managed Inclusion” program, where they randomly shunt travelers over to PreCheck to balance screening line loads. This to the utter frustration of travelers who paid $85 for PreCheck screening or $100 for Global Entry. You might recall long-time listener Rich Fraser saying he was getting PreCheck about 75% of the time so why should he pay? But now the TSA says they’re throttling back on “Managed Inclusion”, driven at least in part by the publicity generated by auditors finding that travelers on various watch lists were being given PreCheck. I’ve certainly noticed the length of PreCheck lines dropping.</li>\r\n	<li>Also in the last episode, I talked about luggage trends. One trend that sorta hit the cutting room floor is the move to fully rotating twirly wheels. Certainly handy in getting your luggage down a tight airplane aisle, but to my eye, most of them look a bit tinier, a bit flimsier than the standard roller-blade style wheel partially embedded in the back of the suitcase. The twirly wheels don’t seem rugged enough to survive getting pulled down Manhattan sidewalks or some of the ruts in New Orleans. And to allow full rotation, the wheels stick out of the bottom of the suitcase making the bag longer. This tripped up my wife on our flight from EDI to LHR. The BA gate agent asked my wife to put her bag in the luggage sizer. It would’ve fit -- except for the twirly wheels. Now we have to gate check it -- which means standing off to the side of the gate pulling some stuff out, transferring it into her shoulder bag. Understandable -- until we get on the plane and see it’s a half-full 767 and there are fully empty luggage bins. Really? So as is my wont, I vented my frustration on Twitter rather than any BA employees. BA’s social media department responded pretty quickly saying they needed to check all luggage to be fair to all passengers. But how would allowing a bag that was, at most, an inch over-long because of its twirly wheels on a half-full flight with empty overheads cheat any other passengers? It’s an over-officiousness that just doesn’t make sense. And it’s the reason I avoid BA now whenever possible. Which is a real shame, because back in the early ‘90’s when I was doing a lot of travel to Europe, I prefered BA. But that was 20 years ago and, it seems, a different BA.</li>\r\n	<li>There is another reason I avoid BA -- officiousness <i>and</i> Heathrow. Again, another thing I loved in the ‘90’s, I now avoid whenever possible. Heathrow is a complete nightmare. You land, you trundle along through corridors, down escalators, into a bus, get a tour of the Heathrow back alleys, stop at another terminal, fight through security again, and then end up in the midst of a packed retail space where you wander through the shops because there’s no place to sit. It’s gotten to the point that I’ll fly the extra hour to connect through Frankfurt or Amsterdam just to avoid Heathrow. We were doing this St Andrews trip on AA miles. We were fine on the way out -- ORD-JFK-EDI all on AA. But coming back, it was EDI-LHR-ORD with the first leg on BA. Just ugh! I still keep thinking about how to get something out of my 300K BA Avios miles. Maybe I’ll make my daughter fly BA.</li>\r\n	<li>On a brighter note, I tried a new financial service during this trip and it worked really well. It’s called Revolut -- as in Revolution cut a bit short. It’s a FinTech start up based in the UK that gives you a virtual and real debit card with really great exchange rates. As with all the cool start-ups nowadays, everything is done through a smartphone app -- which, to stow the snark for a second, makes a lot of sense for any travel app. I opened an account before I left and funded it with $200 from my regular ATM/debit card. I could then convert my dollars to pounds or euros at what appeared to be just about the market rate -- there didn’t seem to be a lot of margin taken on the buy or sell sides. I also instantly had a virtual debit card with which I could use those new pounds or euros to buy things on the web -- like train tickets or top up a phone card. I then requested a physical version of my card, which took about a week to show up from the UK. Now I had a proper European chip-&amp;-pin card that I could use at an ATM or, say, the self-serve checkout line at Tesco’s without waiting for a clerk to take my signed receipt. It only hiccuped one at the Costa coffee shop in St Andrews; I still don’t know why. Poking around a bit more, I found that I could send pounds to my daughter’s RBS account with a day or so lag. Now, none of this functionality is necessarily new, though being able to do it all through a slick smartphone app is very handy. The real innovation is the cost. Funding my Revolut account from my debit card cost me less than 1% -- less than $2 for the $200 transfer, which is cheaper than most non-network ATM fees. After that, no transaction fees to move money between currencies or to withdraw. Compare that to hitting a foreign ATM with your US card. My personal bank is very reasonable, only charging me Visa’s 1% transaction fee, but many big banks will hit you with a $5 non-network fee on top of any transaction fees. And then transferring money to my daughter’s account -- wire transfers can cost $25-30. Revolut has well-packaged functionality delivered at the lowest costs I’ve seen. I don’t know how long they’ll keep this price point, but right now, it’s the best deal I’ve seen for money needed for international travel. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://revolut.com/\">link</a> to the Revolut web site.</li>\r\n	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Clear My Head</em> by <a href=\"http://www.thefiasco.net/\">FIASCO</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Random Thoughts about Car Rentals</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>I guess I could’ve cut two or three comments out of the last segment and labeled them “Random Comments about My Scotland Trip” but that just seems entire too gratuitous. But I have been collecting car rental experiences in my TravelCommons Evernote drop file and I think I now have enough for make up a topic -- or at least what might marginally pass for a topic</li>\r\n	<li>As I’ve mentioned in past episodes, I really don’t like to rent cars. I much prefer to use rail or a cab in from the airport and then walk to where ever I need to go. That works well in New York or Chicago or San Francisco, not so much in Denver or Detroit. So I’ve been renting a lot of cars over the past 6 months.</li>\r\n	<li>So many in fact that Hertz bumped my status up to President\'s Circle. Not quite sure that gets me, but it sounds status-y. Though right after my congratulatory e-mail, I found a dumpy Toyota Corolla in my Hertz Gold spot, so maybe it’s not anything special.</li>\r\n	<li>But in times like those -- when I get assigned the 45,000-mile Toyota with crumbs still in the driver seat, or a Ford F-150 king cab pick up truck in Boston (?) -- I’ve come to love Hertz Gold Choice. If you rent a mid-size or above -- and for our corporate rate, the price of a compact and mid-size are the same -- you can go to the Choice aisle and take one of those cars instead. I left the dumpy Toyota and took a new Nissan instead.</li>\r\n	<li>I have started to make note of differences in service <i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">and</span></i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> attitude across locations. I never rent from Hertz at Detroit airport anymore. I’ve yet to get a non-dumpy car there and the attitude is not great. Though I think Hertz’s Newark station is the worst. A recent example -- a colleague was driving his car toward the lot exit when a low tire pressure alarm lit up. So he asked the guy at the exit gate where he could get some air to top off the tire. “Try a gas station,” the attendant told him. That was helpful.</span></li>\r\n	<li>I’ve had challenges with car rental web sites -- Hertz, Avis -- when my pick-up or drop off time didn’t match the hours of the office I selected. I get the error notice and then when I go back to try another site or time, these websites will randomly select another date or location. I had this happen to me in Edinburgh on the second car we rented. We were training from Lockerbie back to Edinburgh where we’d done 4 days of biking while our daughter was going through freshman orientation. I’d booked a car on Hertz’s web site to pick up at the train station and drop off at EDI 5 days later. It took me 5 tries to get it right -- each time I re-started, it reset the pick-up location from Waverly Station to EDI. And each time I’d correct it. Except, it seems, the last time. When we arrived in Waverly, there was no car. I looked at the res -- pick up at EDI. Ugh. Not the end of the world -- we could’ve taken the new light rail out to EDI, but it was aggravating. I searched through the Hertz.co.uk website for a phone number -- that itself being a little extra helping of aggravation -- and called the res center. The woman on the other end was inordinately calm and helpful. 3 minutes later, she’d moved my pick-up to Waverly. I thanked her -- a lot. I should’ve booked with her instead of the website.</li>\r\n	<li>We rented our first car in Edinburgh from Enterprise. It was a great car -- a Fiat 500 L. All the bags fit easily in the hatchback. Nice nav, nice sound system, clean....  Drove to a near-by shopping mall -- grabbed a coffee at Starbucks and phone SIMs at the ee store. Next stop, IKEA to buy things we didn’t pack -- like towels and hangers. Coming off the motorway, through a traffic circle, the clutch crapped out. I’d put it in gear, let out the clutch pedal, nothing. 3 hours later after Enterprise, the auto club and Fiat scrummed about who was supposed to pick up the car, the tow truck dropped us back off at EDI where the Enterprise folks apologized profusely and gave us an even nicer Nissan. A couple of weeks, I noticed the Pope used a Fiat 500L to drive from Andrews Airforce Base to the Vatican Embassy. The next day, though, he was in a Jeep Popemobile. I could sympathize.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a title=\"MP3 Download\" href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/download_track.php?id=0E74C6FEB7390D18D02B4B399668093172F6C8CC66DDC09D90A3BF7DDA436823CFAC859AE2B2C73E46A278A4950E1030\">Lonely Dog Blues</a></em> by <a title=\"Tobin James\' Web Site\" href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/label.php?id=2A3449F03E7B8462FF74407B60F0C4B0A30A0CBE880C61DE37E3B342387F0643\">Tobin James</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917626811171154.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #118</li>\r\n	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/\">Podshow Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\r\n	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_118.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #118 — Danger Within the Travel Bubble; Switching Back to Apple','','inherit','closed','closed','','1561-revision-v1','','','2015-11-08 16:18:32','2015-11-08 21:18:32','',1561,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/11/08/1561-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1564,1,'2015-11-08 17:46:47','2015-11-08 22:46:47','[caption id=\"attachment_1554\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/2015-09-03-15.12.36.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1554\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/2015-09-03-15.12.36-300x200.jpg\" alt=\"Did The Pope Have This Problem?\" width=\"300\" height=\"200\" /></a> Did The Pope Have This Problem?[/caption]\r\n\r\nApologies in advance because this is pretty much a stream-of-consciousness episode, with semi-strung together thoughts about eggs, car rentals, seeing the Pope, travel food, and stuff from my September trip to Scotland.  I talk about how handy I found the new <a href=\"https://revolut.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Revolut</a> service for spending and sending money in Europe; recent good and bad experiences with <a href=\"https://www.hertz.com/rentacar/emember/join/overview.do?learnMore=presidentsCircle\" target=\"_blank\">Hertz </a>and other car rentals; most bad experience with <a href=\"http://britishairways.com\" target=\"_blank\">British Airways</a>; and how true-to-life the <a href=\"https://youtu.be/2JqRXLQYF9o\" target=\"_blank\">Doritos Super Bowl commercial</a> portrays the Southwest boarding experience.  All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_118.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/227996070\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #118:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, less than a month since the last episode. There’s a shocker. It’s been one of my lighter travel months. No international travel, no up-and-backs across the US. Indeed, there were a couple of weeks where I didn’t even pack a bag -- just did day trips to Detroit and Atlanta. There is something liberating about that -- just carrying a briefcase or backpack. I guess that would’ve been the ideal situation to check out Spirit Airlines, but I don’t hate myself that much.</li>\r\n	<li>No rush to get to the gate for the start of boarding. Stroll up, sit down and then  stay seated while the agent works through the cadence of status boarding groups -- really important customers, kinda important customers, fake important customers, and then everyone else. No roller board meant no need for the boarding scrum. I just waited for last call and walked on board. Kinda reminded me of the days when I first started flying when, rather than racing to be first on the plane, we’d see who could be last -- how late you could show up and still get on the plane. My boss won when he talked his way past an agent, got onto the jet bridge, knocked on the plane door, which the crew opened and let him on. I don’t think I’ll push it quite that far.</li>\r\n	<li>A few of this month’s trips have been in and out of Boston Logan Airport. And for as much stick as I give United Airlines -- broken planes, late flights, just general lousy service -- I have to give them credit for their gate area at Logan. Parts of it look like a hip hotel lounge -- cool hanging lights, non-bench seating. There’s stand-up/high-top counter space for laptops with lots of plugs. And even the self-serve boarding gates -- with modern subway-style turnstiles that scan your boarding pass before letting you in -- worked well. It’s probably one of the nicest gate areas I’ve been in in a long time. Nice job, United!</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>One Day</em> by <a href=\"http://www.hollowhorse.co.uk/\">Hollow Horse</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>OK, just as a warning, this section is going to ramble on for a while. I have a random walk of comments/opinions that I just can’t seem to synthesize into  coherent topics. So here it goes...</li>\r\n	<li>First stop in the mail bag, I was pleasantly surprised to receive this audio comment from Linda Martin of the Indie Travel Podcast\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Linda, thanks for that. The thing with eggs -- you can tell I’ve thought about this way too much -- it’s a trade-off between good eggs and time. It takes time for a cooked-to-order egg, but in the morning, I don’t often have that time. Usually, I’ve worked out; I’m cooling down during breakfast, then hitting the shower and off to work. When I stayed in one of the Renaissance Hotels in New Orleans, they didn’t have a separate executive lounge. Breakfast was served in the restaurant. They had the typical lounge buffet set up, but you could also order off the menu, which I think I did once in a dozen stays. It was a nice egg, but it took an extra 10 min that usually wasn’t in my morning schedule. Definitely a 1st World problem</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>Lisa Walls wrote on the TravelCommons Facebook Wall\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>“Hey Mark, I love your podcast, especially the comments on food and craft beers. Other than the Altoids, do you carry any food in your briefcase, such as protein bars? I am always looking for something that is shelf stable that tastes good and travels well.”</li>\r\n	<li>Lisa, thanks for the note. I usually keep 1-2 KIND bars in the bottom of my bag. The fruit-&amp;-nut ones seem to hold up to weeks of getting crushed by my PC power supply. They’re also not too sweet the way some other granola and power bars are.</li>\r\n	<li>I know I’m about to lose any foodie cred I may have built up over the years, but I gotta say that, for me, the McDonald\'s grilled chicken Snack Wraps are just about the right amount of food to cover a 2-hour flight. They’re quick to buy, and compact to bring on board and eat. I find it tough to manage a salad while sitting in a center seat.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>I’m not sure if I mentioned this last episode, but I’m flying Southwest on this week’s Vegas-Denver-Chicago trip to click over A-list status. It kinda crept up on me -- I don’t typically fly SW enough to make status, but apparently I have this year. As near as I can tell, this means I won’t have to pay the $12.50 Early Bird fee or be staring at my Southwest app exactly 24 hours before flight time in order to get a decent boarding position. Which, as we all know, is critical on Southwest since there’s no assigned seating. An A or early B boarding group number is necessary for an aisle seat. On my Vegas flight, hitting the “Check In” button maybe 2 seconds after the 24-hour window got me B 7, so I got an aisle seat in the back half of the plane. It was a full flight, so after that, I was living last year’s Super Bowl Doritos commercial -- looking down, trying to avoid eye contact with potentially bad seat mates while looking friendly to attract good ones. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://youtu.be/2JqRXLQYF9o\">link</a> to the commercial. It’s spot on.</li>\r\n	<li>In the last episode, I talked about travel amateurs clogging up the PreCheck lanes. These would be people getting PreCheck as part of the TSA’s “Managed Inclusion” program, where they randomly shunt travelers over to PreCheck to balance screening line loads. This to the utter frustration of travelers who paid $85 for PreCheck screening or $100 for Global Entry. You might recall long-time listener Rich Fraser saying he was getting PreCheck about 75% of the time so why should he pay? But now the TSA says they’re throttling back on “Managed Inclusion”, driven at least in part by the publicity generated by auditors finding that travelers on various watch lists were being given PreCheck. I’ve certainly noticed the length of PreCheck lines dropping.</li>\r\n	<li>Also in the last episode, I talked about luggage trends. One trend that sorta hit the cutting room floor is the move to fully rotating twirly wheels. Certainly handy in getting your luggage down a tight airplane aisle, but to my eye, most of them look a bit tinier, a bit flimsier than the standard roller-blade style wheel partially embedded in the back of the suitcase. The twirly wheels don’t seem rugged enough to survive getting pulled down Manhattan sidewalks or some of the ruts in New Orleans. And to allow full rotation, the wheels stick out of the bottom of the suitcase making the bag longer. This tripped up my wife on our flight from EDI to LHR. The BA gate agent asked my wife to put her bag in the luggage sizer. It would’ve fit -- except for the twirly wheels. Now we have to gate check it -- which means standing off to the side of the gate pulling some stuff out, transferring it into her shoulder bag. Understandable -- until we get on the plane and see it’s a half-full 767 and there are fully empty luggage bins. Really? So as is my wont, I vented my frustration on Twitter rather than any BA employees. BA’s social media department responded pretty quickly saying they needed to check all luggage to be fair to all passengers. But how would allowing a bag that was, at most, an inch over-long because of its twirly wheels on a half-full flight with empty overheads cheat any other passengers? It’s an over-officiousness that just doesn’t make sense. And it’s the reason I avoid BA now whenever possible. Which is a real shame, because back in the early ‘90’s when I was doing a lot of travel to Europe, I prefered BA. But that was 20 years ago and, it seems, a different BA.</li>\r\n	<li>There is another reason I avoid BA -- officiousness <i>and</i> Heathrow. Again, another thing I loved in the ‘90’s, I now avoid whenever possible. Heathrow is a complete nightmare. You land, you trundle along through corridors, down escalators, into a bus, get a tour of the Heathrow back alleys, stop at another terminal, fight through security again, and then end up in the midst of a packed retail space where you wander through the shops because there’s no place to sit. It’s gotten to the point that I’ll fly the extra hour to connect through Frankfurt or Amsterdam just to avoid Heathrow. We were doing this St Andrews trip on AA miles. We were fine on the way out -- ORD-JFK-EDI all on AA. But coming back, it was EDI-LHR-ORD with the first leg on BA. Just ugh! I still keep thinking about how to get something out of my 300K BA Avios miles. Maybe I’ll make my daughter fly BA.</li>\r\n	<li>On a brighter note, I tried a new financial service during this trip and it worked really well. It’s called Revolut -- as in Revolution cut a bit short. It’s a FinTech start up based in the UK that gives you a virtual and real debit card with really great exchange rates. As with all the cool start-ups nowadays, everything is done through a smartphone app -- which, to stow the snark for a second, makes a lot of sense for any travel app. I opened an account before I left and funded it with $200 from my regular ATM/debit card. I could then convert my dollars to pounds or euros at what appeared to be just about the market rate -- there didn’t seem to be a lot of margin taken on the buy or sell sides. I also instantly had a virtual debit card with which I could use those new pounds or euros to buy things on the web -- like train tickets or top up a phone card. I then requested a physical version of my card, which took about a week to show up from the UK. Now I had a proper European chip-&amp;-pin card that I could use at an ATM or, say, the self-serve checkout line at Tesco’s without waiting for a clerk to take my signed receipt. It only hiccuped one at the Costa coffee shop in St Andrews; I still don’t know why. Poking around a bit more, I found that I could send pounds to my daughter’s RBS account with a day or so lag. Now, none of this functionality is necessarily new, though being able to do it all through a slick smartphone app is very handy. The real innovation is the cost. Funding my Revolut account from my debit card cost me less than 1% -- less than $2 for the $200 transfer, which is cheaper than most non-network ATM fees. After that, no transaction fees to move money between currencies or to withdraw. Compare that to hitting a foreign ATM with your US card. My personal bank is very reasonable, only charging me Visa’s 1% transaction fee, but many big banks will hit you with a $5 non-network fee on top of any transaction fees. And then transferring money to my daughter’s account -- wire transfers can cost $25-30. Revolut has well-packaged functionality delivered at the lowest costs I’ve seen. I don’t know how long they’ll keep this price point, but right now, it’s the best deal I’ve seen for money needed for international travel. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://revolut.com/\">link</a> to the Revolut web site.</li>\r\n	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Clear My Head</em> by <a href=\"http://www.thefiasco.net/\">FIASCO</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Random Thoughts about Car Rentals</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>I guess I could’ve cut two or three comments out of the last segment and labeled them “Random Comments about My Scotland Trip” but that just seems entire too gratuitous. But I have been collecting car rental experiences in my TravelCommons Evernote drop file and I think I now have enough for make up a topic -- or at least what might marginally pass for a topic</li>\r\n	<li>As I’ve mentioned in past episodes, I really don’t like to rent cars. I much prefer to use rail or a cab in from the airport and then walk to where ever I need to go. That works well in New York or Chicago or San Francisco, not so much in Denver or Detroit. So I’ve been renting a lot of cars over the past 6 months.</li>\r\n	<li>So many in fact that Hertz bumped my status up to President\'s Circle. Not quite sure that gets me, but it sounds status-y. Though right after my congratulatory e-mail, I found a dumpy Toyota Corolla in my Hertz Gold spot, so maybe it’s not anything special.</li>\r\n	<li>But in times like those -- when I get assigned the 45,000-mile Toyota with crumbs still in the driver seat, or a Ford F-150 king cab pick up truck in Boston (?) -- I’ve come to love Hertz Gold Choice. If you rent a mid-size or above -- and for our corporate rate, the price of a compact and mid-size are the same -- you can go to the Choice aisle and take one of those cars instead. I left the dumpy Toyota and took a new Nissan instead.</li>\r\n	<li>I have started to make note of differences in service <i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">and</span></i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> attitude across locations. I never rent from Hertz at Detroit airport anymore. I’ve yet to get a non-dumpy car there and the attitude is not great. Though I think Hertz’s Newark station is the worst. A recent example -- a colleague was driving his car toward the lot exit when a low tire pressure alarm lit up. So he asked the guy at the exit gate where he could get some air to top off the tire. “Try a gas station,” the attendant told him. That was helpful.</span></li>\r\n	<li>I’ve had challenges with car rental web sites -- Hertz, Avis -- when my pick-up or drop off time didn’t match the hours of the office I selected. I get the error notice and then when I go back to try another site or time, these websites will randomly select another date or location. I had this happen to me in Edinburgh on the second car we rented. We were training from Lockerbie back to Edinburgh where we’d done 4 days of biking while our daughter was going through freshman orientation. I’d booked a car on Hertz’s web site to pick up at the train station and drop off at EDI 5 days later. It took me 5 tries to get it right -- each time I re-started, it reset the pick-up location from Waverly Station to EDI. And each time I’d correct it. Except, it seems, the last time. When we arrived in Waverly, there was no car. I looked at the res -- pick up at EDI. Ugh. Not the end of the world -- we could’ve taken the new light rail out to EDI, but it was aggravating. I searched through the Hertz.co.uk website for a phone number -- that itself being a little extra helping of aggravation -- and called the res center. The woman on the other end was inordinately calm and helpful. 3 minutes later, she’d moved my pick-up to Waverly. I thanked her -- a lot. I should’ve booked with her instead of the website.</li>\r\n	<li>We rented our first car in Edinburgh from Enterprise. It was a great car -- a Fiat 500 L. All the bags fit easily in the hatchback. Nice nav, nice sound system, clean....  Drove to a near-by shopping mall -- grabbed a coffee at Starbucks and phone SIMs at the ee store. Next stop, IKEA to buy things we didn’t pack -- like towels and hangers. Coming off the motorway, through a traffic circle, the clutch crapped out. I’d put it in gear, let out the clutch pedal, nothing. 3 hours later after Enterprise, the auto club and Fiat scrummed about who was supposed to pick up the car, the tow truck dropped us back off at EDI where the Enterprise folks apologized profusely and gave us an even nicer Nissan. A couple of weeks, I noticed the Pope used a Fiat 500L to drive from Andrews Airforce Base to the Vatican Embassy. The next day, though, he was in a Jeep Popemobile. I could sympathize.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a title=\"MP3 Download\" href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/download_track.php?id=0E74C6FEB7390D18D02B4B399668093172F6C8CC66DDC09D90A3BF7DDA436823CFAC859AE2B2C73E46A278A4950E1030\">Lonely Dog Blues</a></em> by <a title=\"Tobin James\' Web Site\" href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/label.php?id=2A3449F03E7B8462FF74407B60F0C4B0A30A0CBE880C61DE37E3B342387F0643\">Tobin James</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917626811171154.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #118</li>\r\n	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/\">Podshow Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\r\n	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_118.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #118 — Danger Within the Travel Bubble; Switching Back to Apple','','inherit','closed','closed','','1561-revision-v1','','','2015-11-08 17:46:47','2015-11-08 22:46:47','',1561,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/11/08/1561-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1565,1,'2015-11-08 17:49:30','2015-11-08 22:49:30','[caption id=\"attachment_1554\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/2015-09-03-15.12.36.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1554\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/2015-09-03-15.12.36-300x200.jpg\" alt=\"Did The Pope Have This Problem?\" width=\"300\" height=\"200\" /></a> Did The Pope Have This Problem?[/caption]\r\n\r\nApologies in advance because this is pretty much a stream-of-consciousness episode, with semi-strung together thoughts about eggs, car rentals, seeing the Pope, travel food, and stuff from my September trip to Scotland.  I talk about how handy I found the new <a href=\"https://revolut.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Revolut</a> service for spending and sending money in Europe; recent good and bad experiences with <a href=\"https://www.hertz.com/rentacar/emember/join/overview.do?learnMore=presidentsCircle\" target=\"_blank\">Hertz </a>and other car rentals; most bad experience with <a href=\"http://britishairways.com\" target=\"_blank\">British Airways</a>; and how true-to-life the <a href=\"https://youtu.be/2JqRXLQYF9o\" target=\"_blank\">Doritos Super Bowl commercial</a> portrays the Southwest boarding experience.  All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_118.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/227996070\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #118:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, less than a month since the last episode. There’s a shocker. It’s been one of my lighter travel months. No international travel, no up-and-backs across the US. Indeed, there were a couple of weeks where I didn’t even pack a bag -- just did day trips to Detroit and Atlanta. There is something liberating about that -- just carrying a briefcase or backpack. I guess that would’ve been the ideal situation to check out Spirit Airlines, but I don’t hate myself that much.</li>\r\n	<li>No rush to get to the gate for the start of boarding. Stroll up, sit down and then  stay seated while the agent works through the cadence of status boarding groups -- really important customers, kinda important customers, fake important customers, and then everyone else. No roller board meant no need for the boarding scrum. I just waited for last call and walked on board. Kinda reminded me of the days when I first started flying when, rather than racing to be first on the plane, we’d see who could be last -- how late you could show up and still get on the plane. My boss won when he talked his way past an agent, got onto the jet bridge, knocked on the plane door, which the crew opened and let him on. I don’t think I’ll push it quite that far.</li>\r\n	<li>A few of this month’s trips have been in and out of Boston Logan Airport. And for as much stick as I give United Airlines -- broken planes, late flights, just general lousy service -- I have to give them credit for their <a href=\"http://newsroom.united.com/2014-04-28-New-United-Concourse-at-Boston-Logan-Offers-Customers-Modern-Streamlined-Airport-Experience\" target=\"_blank\">gate area</a> at Logan. Parts of it look like a hip hotel lounge -- cool hanging lights, non-bench seating. There’s stand-up/high-top counter space for laptops with lots of plugs. And even the self-serve boarding gates -- with modern subway-style turnstiles that scan your boarding pass before letting you in -- worked well. It’s probably one of the nicest gate areas I’ve been in in a long time. Nice job, United!</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>One Day</em> by <a href=\"http://www.hollowhorse.co.uk/\">Hollow Horse</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>OK, just as a warning, this section is going to ramble on for a while. I have a random walk of comments/opinions that I just can’t seem to synthesize into  coherent topics. So here it goes...</li>\r\n	<li>First stop in the mail bag, I was pleasantly surprised to receive this audio comment from Linda Martin of the Indie Travel Podcast\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Linda, thanks for that. The thing with eggs -- you can tell I’ve thought about this way too much -- it’s a trade-off between good eggs and time. It takes time for a cooked-to-order egg, but in the morning, I don’t often have that time. Usually, I’ve worked out; I’m cooling down during breakfast, then hitting the shower and off to work. When I stayed in one of the Renaissance Hotels in New Orleans, they didn’t have a separate executive lounge. Breakfast was served in the restaurant. They had the typical lounge buffet set up, but you could also order off the menu, which I think I did once in a dozen stays. It was a nice egg, but it took an extra 10 min that usually wasn’t in my morning schedule. Definitely a 1st World problem</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>Lisa Walls wrote on the TravelCommons Facebook Wall\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>“Hey Mark, I love your podcast, especially the comments on food and craft beers. Other than the Altoids, do you carry any food in your briefcase, such as protein bars? I am always looking for something that is shelf stable that tastes good and travels well.”</li>\r\n	<li>Lisa, thanks for the note. I usually keep 1-2 KIND bars in the bottom of my bag. The fruit-&amp;-nut ones seem to hold up to weeks of getting crushed by my PC power supply. They’re also not too sweet the way some other granola and power bars are.</li>\r\n	<li>I know I’m about to lose any foodie cred I may have built up over the years, but I gotta say that, for me, the McDonald\'s grilled chicken Snack Wraps are just about the right amount of food to cover a 2-hour flight. They’re quick to buy, and compact to bring on board and eat. I find it tough to manage a salad while sitting in a center seat.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>I’m not sure if I mentioned this last episode, but I’m flying Southwest on this week’s Vegas-Denver-Chicago trip to click over A-list status. It kinda crept up on me -- I don’t typically fly SW enough to make status, but apparently I have this year. As near as I can tell, this means I won’t have to pay the $12.50 Early Bird fee or be staring at my Southwest app exactly 24 hours before flight time in order to get a decent boarding position. Which, as we all know, is critical on Southwest since there’s no assigned seating. An A or early B boarding group number is necessary for an aisle seat. On my Vegas flight, hitting the “Check In” button maybe 2 seconds after the 24-hour window got me B 7, so I got an aisle seat in the back half of the plane. It was a full flight, so after that, I was living last year’s Super Bowl Doritos commercial -- looking down, trying to avoid eye contact with potentially bad seat mates while looking friendly to attract good ones. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://youtu.be/2JqRXLQYF9o\">link</a> to the commercial. It’s spot on.</li>\r\n	<li>In the last episode, I talked about travel amateurs clogging up the PreCheck lanes. These would be people getting PreCheck as part of the TSA’s “Managed Inclusion” program, where they randomly shunt travelers over to PreCheck to balance screening line loads. This to the utter frustration of travelers who paid $85 for PreCheck screening or $100 for Global Entry. You might recall long-time listener Rich Fraser saying he was getting PreCheck about 75% of the time so why should he pay? But now the TSA says they’re throttling back on “Managed Inclusion”, driven at least in part by the publicity generated by auditors finding that travelers on various watch lists were being given PreCheck. I’ve certainly noticed the length of PreCheck lines dropping.</li>\r\n	<li>Also in the last episode, I talked about luggage trends. One trend that sorta hit the cutting room floor is the move to fully rotating twirly wheels. Certainly handy in getting your luggage down a tight airplane aisle, but to my eye, most of them look a bit tinier, a bit flimsier than the standard roller-blade style wheel partially embedded in the back of the suitcase. The twirly wheels don’t seem rugged enough to survive getting pulled down Manhattan sidewalks or some of the ruts in New Orleans. And to allow full rotation, the wheels stick out of the bottom of the suitcase making the bag longer. This tripped up my wife on our flight from EDI to LHR. The BA gate agent asked my wife to put her bag in the luggage sizer. It would’ve fit -- except for the twirly wheels. Now we have to gate check it -- which means standing off to the side of the gate pulling some stuff out, transferring it into her shoulder bag. Understandable -- until we get on the plane and see it’s a half-full 767 and there are fully empty luggage bins. Really? So as is my wont, I vented my frustration on Twitter rather than any BA employees. BA’s social media department responded pretty quickly saying they needed to check all luggage to be fair to all passengers. But how would allowing a bag that was, at most, an inch over-long because of its twirly wheels on a half-full flight with empty overheads cheat any other passengers? It’s an over-officiousness that just doesn’t make sense. And it’s the reason I avoid BA now whenever possible. Which is a real shame, because back in the early ‘90’s when I was doing a lot of travel to Europe, I prefered BA. But that was 20 years ago and, it seems, a different BA.</li>\r\n	<li>There is another reason I avoid BA -- officiousness <i>and</i> Heathrow. Again, another thing I loved in the ‘90’s, I now avoid whenever possible. Heathrow is a complete nightmare. You land, you trundle along through corridors, down escalators, into a bus, get a tour of the Heathrow back alleys, stop at another terminal, fight through security again, and then end up in the midst of a packed retail space where you wander through the shops because there’s no place to sit. It’s gotten to the point that I’ll fly the extra hour to connect through Frankfurt or Amsterdam just to avoid Heathrow. We were doing this St Andrews trip on AA miles. We were fine on the way out -- ORD-JFK-EDI all on AA. But coming back, it was EDI-LHR-ORD with the first leg on BA. Just ugh! I still keep thinking about how to get something out of my 300K BA Avios miles. Maybe I’ll make my daughter fly BA.</li>\r\n	<li>On a brighter note, I tried a new financial service during this trip and it worked really well. It’s called Revolut -- as in Revolution cut a bit short. It’s a FinTech start up based in the UK that gives you a virtual and real debit card with really great exchange rates. As with all the cool start-ups nowadays, everything is done through a smartphone app -- which, to stow the snark for a second, makes a lot of sense for any travel app. I opened an account before I left and funded it with $200 from my regular ATM/debit card. I could then convert my dollars to pounds or euros at what appeared to be just about the market rate -- there didn’t seem to be a lot of margin taken on the buy or sell sides. I also instantly had a virtual debit card with which I could use those new pounds or euros to buy things on the web -- like train tickets or top up a phone card. I then requested a physical version of my card, which took about a week to show up from the UK. Now I had a proper European chip-&amp;-pin card that I could use at an ATM or, say, the self-serve checkout line at Tesco’s without waiting for a clerk to take my signed receipt. It only hiccuped one at the Costa coffee shop in St Andrews; I still don’t know why. Poking around a bit more, I found that I could send pounds to my daughter’s RBS account with a day or so lag. Now, none of this functionality is necessarily new, though being able to do it all through a slick smartphone app is very handy. The real innovation is the cost. Funding my Revolut account from my debit card cost me less than 1% -- less than $2 for the $200 transfer, which is cheaper than most non-network ATM fees. After that, no transaction fees to move money between currencies or to withdraw. Compare that to hitting a foreign ATM with your US card. My personal bank is very reasonable, only charging me Visa’s 1% transaction fee, but many big banks will hit you with a $5 non-network fee on top of any transaction fees. And then transferring money to my daughter’s account -- wire transfers can cost $25-30. Revolut has well-packaged functionality delivered at the lowest costs I’ve seen. I don’t know how long they’ll keep this price point, but right now, it’s the best deal I’ve seen for money needed for international travel. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://revolut.com/\">link</a> to the Revolut web site.</li>\r\n	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Clear My Head</em> by <a href=\"http://www.thefiasco.net/\">FIASCO</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Random Thoughts about Car Rentals</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>I guess I could’ve cut two or three comments out of the last segment and labeled them “Random Comments about My Scotland Trip” but that just seems entire too gratuitous. But I have been collecting car rental experiences in my TravelCommons Evernote drop file and I think I now have enough for make up a topic -- or at least what might marginally pass for a topic</li>\r\n	<li>As I’ve mentioned in past episodes, I really don’t like to rent cars. I much prefer to use rail or a cab in from the airport and then walk to where ever I need to go. That works well in New York or Chicago or San Francisco, not so much in Denver or Detroit. So I’ve been renting a lot of cars over the past 6 months.</li>\r\n	<li>So many in fact that Hertz bumped my status up to President\'s Circle. Not quite sure that gets me, but it sounds status-y. Though right after my congratulatory e-mail, I found a dumpy Toyota Corolla in my Hertz Gold spot, so maybe it’s not anything special.</li>\r\n	<li>But in times like those -- when I get assigned the 45,000-mile Toyota with crumbs still in the driver seat, or a Ford F-150 king cab pick up truck in Boston (?) -- I’ve come to love Hertz Gold Choice. If you rent a mid-size or above -- and for our corporate rate, the price of a compact and mid-size are the same -- you can go to the Choice aisle and take one of those cars instead. I left the dumpy Toyota and took a new Nissan instead.</li>\r\n	<li>I have started to make note of differences in service <i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">and</span></i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> attitude across locations. I never rent from Hertz at Detroit airport anymore. I’ve yet to get a non-dumpy car there and the attitude is not great. Though I think Hertz’s Newark station is the worst. A recent example -- a colleague was driving his car toward the lot exit when a low tire pressure alarm lit up. So he asked the guy at the exit gate where he could get some air to top off the tire. “Try a gas station,” the attendant told him. That was helpful.</span></li>\r\n	<li>I’ve had challenges with car rental web sites -- Hertz, Avis -- when my pick-up or drop off time didn’t match the hours of the office I selected. I get the error notice and then when I go back to try another site or time, these websites will randomly select another date or location. I had this happen to me in Edinburgh on the second car we rented. We were training from Lockerbie back to Edinburgh where we’d done 4 days of biking while our daughter was going through freshman orientation. I’d booked a car on Hertz’s web site to pick up at the train station and drop off at EDI 5 days later. It took me 5 tries to get it right -- each time I re-started, it reset the pick-up location from Waverly Station to EDI. And each time I’d correct it. Except, it seems, the last time. When we arrived in Waverly, there was no car. I looked at the res -- pick up at EDI. Ugh. Not the end of the world -- we could’ve taken the new light rail out to EDI, but it was aggravating. I searched through the Hertz.co.uk website for a phone number -- that itself being a little extra helping of aggravation -- and called the res center. The woman on the other end was inordinately calm and helpful. 3 minutes later, she’d moved my pick-up to Waverly. I thanked her -- a lot. I should’ve booked with her instead of the website.</li>\r\n	<li>We rented our first car in Edinburgh from Enterprise. It was a great car -- a Fiat 500 L. All the bags fit easily in the hatchback. Nice nav, nice sound system, clean....  Drove to a near-by shopping mall -- grabbed a coffee at Starbucks and phone SIMs at the ee store. Next stop, IKEA to buy things we didn’t pack -- like towels and hangers. Coming off the motorway, through a traffic circle, the clutch crapped out. I’d put it in gear, let out the clutch pedal, nothing. 3 hours later after Enterprise, the auto club and Fiat scrummed about who was supposed to pick up the car, the tow truck dropped us back off at EDI where the Enterprise folks apologized profusely and gave us an even nicer Nissan. A couple of weeks, I noticed the Pope used a Fiat 500L to drive from Andrews Airforce Base to the Vatican Embassy. The next day, though, he was in a Jeep Popemobile. I could sympathize.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a title=\"MP3 Download\" href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/download_track.php?id=0E74C6FEB7390D18D02B4B399668093172F6C8CC66DDC09D90A3BF7DDA436823CFAC859AE2B2C73E46A278A4950E1030\">Lonely Dog Blues</a></em> by <a title=\"Tobin James\' Web Site\" href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/label.php?id=2A3449F03E7B8462FF74407B60F0C4B0A30A0CBE880C61DE37E3B342387F0643\">Tobin James</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917626811171154.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #118</li>\r\n	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/\">Podshow Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\r\n	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_118.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #118 — Danger Within the Travel Bubble; Switching Back to Apple','','inherit','closed','closed','','1561-revision-v1','','','2015-11-08 17:49:30','2015-11-08 22:49:30','',1561,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/11/08/1561-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1566,1,'2015-11-08 17:54:54','2015-11-08 22:54:54','[caption id=\"attachment_1554\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/2015-09-03-15.12.36.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1554\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/2015-09-03-15.12.36-300x200.jpg\" alt=\"Did The Pope Have This Problem?\" width=\"300\" height=\"200\" /></a> Did The Pope Have This Problem?[/caption]\r\n\r\nApologies in advance because this is pretty much a stream-of-consciousness episode, with semi-strung together thoughts about eggs, car rentals, seeing the Pope, travel food, and stuff from my September trip to Scotland.  I talk about how handy I found the new <a href=\"https://revolut.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Revolut</a> service for spending and sending money in Europe; recent good and bad experiences with <a href=\"https://www.hertz.com/rentacar/emember/join/overview.do?learnMore=presidentsCircle\" target=\"_blank\">Hertz </a>and other car rentals; most bad experience with <a href=\"http://britishairways.com\" target=\"_blank\">British Airways</a>; and how true-to-life the <a href=\"https://youtu.be/2JqRXLQYF9o\" target=\"_blank\">Doritos Super Bowl commercial</a> portrays the Southwest boarding experience.  All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_118.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/227996070\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #118:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, less than a month since the last episode. There’s a shocker. It’s been one of my lighter travel months. No international travel, no up-and-backs across the US. Indeed, there were a couple of weeks where I didn’t even pack a bag -- just did day trips to Detroit and Atlanta. There is something liberating about that -- just carrying a briefcase or backpack. I guess that would’ve been the ideal situation to check out Spirit Airlines, but I don’t hate myself that much.</li>\r\n	<li>No rush to get to the gate for the start of boarding. Stroll up, sit down and then  stay seated while the agent works through the cadence of status boarding groups -- really important customers, kinda important customers, fake important customers, and then everyone else. No roller board meant no need for the boarding scrum. I just waited for last call and walked on board. Kinda reminded me of the days when I first started flying when, rather than racing to be first on the plane, we’d see who could be last -- how late you could show up and still get on the plane. My boss won when he talked his way past an agent, got onto the jet bridge, knocked on the plane door, which the crew opened and let him on. I don’t think I’ll push it quite that far.</li>\r\n	<li>A few of this month’s trips have been in and out of Boston Logan Airport. And for as much stick as I give United Airlines -- broken planes, late flights, just general lousy service -- I have to give them credit for their <a href=\"http://newsroom.united.com/2014-04-28-New-United-Concourse-at-Boston-Logan-Offers-Customers-Modern-Streamlined-Airport-Experience\" target=\"_blank\">gate area</a> at Logan. Parts of it look like a hip hotel lounge -- cool hanging lights, non-bench seating. There’s stand-up/high-top counter space for laptops with lots of plugs. And even the self-serve boarding gates -- with modern subway-style turnstiles that scan your boarding pass before letting you in -- worked well. It’s probably one of the nicest gate areas I’ve been in in a long time. Nice job, United!</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>One Day</em> by <a href=\"http://www.hollowhorse.co.uk/\">Hollow Horse</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>I got a good bit of commentary from the last episode, so thank everyone very much.</li>\r\n	<li>Rob Cheshire posted this comment on the web site:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>“In defense of British Airways, you stepped into the middle of their new hand-luggage policy roll-out, which is designed to reign-in the amount of cabin baggage, which had really gotten out of hand. They are being strict across the board, on elite members, as well as everyone else, and it is definitely having a positive impact on bin-space, as well as minimising the amount of messing around (checking the last few wheelie bags that can’t be stowed) that the cabin crew have to take care of in the minutes prior to push-back.”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Rob, thanks for that. One thing I did like BA’s luggage approach was tagging the second bag meant to go underseat -- in my case, a backpack -- with a bright yellow tag to keep people from putting 2 bags overhead. There is not much that’s ruder in plane travel than early boarders -- status fliers -- maximizing their leg space at the expense of the rest the plane. Tagging that second bag makes it easy for flight attendants or later boarders to call out bin hogging. I’d love to see that move across the Atlantic.</span></li>\r\n	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Andrew Gill left a comment on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page building on my thoughts about using the new Revolut debit card during my September trip to Scotland. Andrew said:</span>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">“The piece of Revolut was interesting. I\'ve just spent six months living and working in The Philipines. I was lucky to be involved in the pilot of Supercard from </span><a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/TravelexUK/?hc_location=ufi\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Travelex UK</span></a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> (</span><a href=\"https://supercard.io/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">https://supercard.io/</span></a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">). It\'s a physical card, complete with chip and pin, that can be used in retail stores and for online purchases too.</span></li>\r\n	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">“The card is free, and transactions are processed at the Visa Europe Exchange rate, with no foreign exchange fees or commission added on, but the *killer* feature is it\'s linked to an existing debit or credit card so there\'s no need to pre-load money onto the card. transactions are processed in my home currency, so again, there are no foreign exchange fees or commission added on</span></li>\r\n	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">“The pilot program has closed now, so fingers crossed, it comes out of pilot and into general release</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Andrew, thanks for that pointer. I agree that being able to link the Travelex Supercard back to a debit or credit card is very useful vs. the Revolut model which is more like a pre-paid debit card. Looking at the Supercard website, it looks like the pilot was only for UK card holders. Hopefully, they’ll be able to expand their geographic footprint when they fully launch the card. Interesting that Revolut is also a UK-based company. Seems like London is a hotspot for these fintech companies. Last week, I was talking to a guy who moved from London to Chicago to start up the US operations for a different London-based fintech company -- more based on lending than payments. He said that HSBC looked hard at buying Revolut because they were doing something HSBC couldn’t even given their global reach and scale. Between Revolut and Supercard, and big banks like Chase dropping foreign exchange fees on their credit cards, the money hassles of international travel keep going down. It’s a far cry from having to cash an American Express travelers check at the airport exchange desk so you could get a cab to your hotel.</span></li>\r\n	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In an </span><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/01/29/podcast-107-serious-about-hotel-reviews-tsa-gets-something-right/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">earlier episode</span></a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, I talked about evaluation criteria for my TripAdvisor reviews -- the bathroom, room size, workout room, location, service quality. I decided during one of my trips last month that I’m adding a new criterion -- accessible bedside electrical outlets. Most frequent travelers I know use their phone or tablet as an alarm, eliminating the need to discern operating instructions for each hotel’s unique brand of clock radio. Most hotels have figured this out and provide outlets on the nightstand -- in wall, along the side of the nightstand, on the lamp base…. But last month, I hit one of those knuckle draggers -- a hotel in Vegas. I practically had to disassemble one of the beds to find an outlet hidden behind it. Luckily, I carry long power cords.</span></li>\r\n	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Clear My Head</em> by <a href=\"http://www.thefiasco.net/\">FIASCO</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Random Thoughts about Car Rentals</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>I guess I could’ve cut two or three comments out of the last segment and labeled them “Random Comments about My Scotland Trip” but that just seems entire too gratuitous. But I have been collecting car rental experiences in my TravelCommons Evernote drop file and I think I now have enough for make up a topic -- or at least what might marginally pass for a topic</li>\r\n	<li>As I’ve mentioned in past episodes, I really don’t like to rent cars. I much prefer to use rail or a cab in from the airport and then walk to where ever I need to go. That works well in New York or Chicago or San Francisco, not so much in Denver or Detroit. So I’ve been renting a lot of cars over the past 6 months.</li>\r\n	<li>So many in fact that Hertz bumped my status up to President\'s Circle. Not quite sure that gets me, but it sounds status-y. Though right after my congratulatory e-mail, I found a dumpy Toyota Corolla in my Hertz Gold spot, so maybe it’s not anything special.</li>\r\n	<li>But in times like those -- when I get assigned the 45,000-mile Toyota with crumbs still in the driver seat, or a Ford F-150 king cab pick up truck in Boston (?) -- I’ve come to love Hertz Gold Choice. If you rent a mid-size or above -- and for our corporate rate, the price of a compact and mid-size are the same -- you can go to the Choice aisle and take one of those cars instead. I left the dumpy Toyota and took a new Nissan instead.</li>\r\n	<li>I have started to make note of differences in service <i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">and</span></i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> attitude across locations. I never rent from Hertz at Detroit airport anymore. I’ve yet to get a non-dumpy car there and the attitude is not great. Though I think Hertz’s Newark station is the worst. A recent example -- a colleague was driving his car toward the lot exit when a low tire pressure alarm lit up. So he asked the guy at the exit gate where he could get some air to top off the tire. “Try a gas station,” the attendant told him. That was helpful.</span></li>\r\n	<li>I’ve had challenges with car rental web sites -- Hertz, Avis -- when my pick-up or drop off time didn’t match the hours of the office I selected. I get the error notice and then when I go back to try another site or time, these websites will randomly select another date or location. I had this happen to me in Edinburgh on the second car we rented. We were training from Lockerbie back to Edinburgh where we’d done 4 days of biking while our daughter was going through freshman orientation. I’d booked a car on Hertz’s web site to pick up at the train station and drop off at EDI 5 days later. It took me 5 tries to get it right -- each time I re-started, it reset the pick-up location from Waverly Station to EDI. And each time I’d correct it. Except, it seems, the last time. When we arrived in Waverly, there was no car. I looked at the res -- pick up at EDI. Ugh. Not the end of the world -- we could’ve taken the new light rail out to EDI, but it was aggravating. I searched through the Hertz.co.uk website for a phone number -- that itself being a little extra helping of aggravation -- and called the res center. The woman on the other end was inordinately calm and helpful. 3 minutes later, she’d moved my pick-up to Waverly. I thanked her -- a lot. I should’ve booked with her instead of the website.</li>\r\n	<li>We rented our first car in Edinburgh from Enterprise. It was a great car -- a Fiat 500 L. All the bags fit easily in the hatchback. Nice nav, nice sound system, clean....  Drove to a near-by shopping mall -- grabbed a coffee at Starbucks and phone SIMs at the ee store. Next stop, IKEA to buy things we didn’t pack -- like towels and hangers. Coming off the motorway, through a traffic circle, the clutch crapped out. I’d put it in gear, let out the clutch pedal, nothing. 3 hours later after Enterprise, the auto club and Fiat scrummed about who was supposed to pick up the car, the tow truck dropped us back off at EDI where the Enterprise folks apologized profusely and gave us an even nicer Nissan. A couple of weeks, I noticed the Pope used a Fiat 500L to drive from Andrews Airforce Base to the Vatican Embassy. The next day, though, he was in a Jeep Popemobile. I could sympathize.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a title=\"MP3 Download\" href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/download_track.php?id=0E74C6FEB7390D18D02B4B399668093172F6C8CC66DDC09D90A3BF7DDA436823CFAC859AE2B2C73E46A278A4950E1030\">Lonely Dog Blues</a></em> by <a title=\"Tobin James\' Web Site\" href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/label.php?id=2A3449F03E7B8462FF74407B60F0C4B0A30A0CBE880C61DE37E3B342387F0643\">Tobin James</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917626811171154.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #118</li>\r\n	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/\">Podshow Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\r\n	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_118.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #118 — Danger Within the Travel Bubble; Switching Back to Apple','','inherit','closed','closed','','1561-revision-v1','','','2015-11-08 17:54:54','2015-11-08 22:54:54','',1561,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/11/08/1561-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1567,1,'2015-11-08 18:08:37','2015-11-08 23:08:37','[caption id=\"attachment_1554\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/2015-09-03-15.12.36.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1554\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/2015-09-03-15.12.36-300x200.jpg\" alt=\"Did The Pope Have This Problem?\" width=\"300\" height=\"200\" /></a> Did The Pope Have This Problem?[/caption]\r\n\r\nApologies in advance because this is pretty much a stream-of-consciousness episode, with semi-strung together thoughts about eggs, car rentals, seeing the Pope, travel food, and stuff from my September trip to Scotland.  I talk about how handy I found the new <a href=\"https://revolut.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Revolut</a> service for spending and sending money in Europe; recent good and bad experiences with <a href=\"https://www.hertz.com/rentacar/emember/join/overview.do?learnMore=presidentsCircle\" target=\"_blank\">Hertz </a>and other car rentals; most bad experience with <a href=\"http://britishairways.com\" target=\"_blank\">British Airways</a>; and how true-to-life the <a href=\"https://youtu.be/2JqRXLQYF9o\" target=\"_blank\">Doritos Super Bowl commercial</a> portrays the Southwest boarding experience.  All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_118.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/227996070\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #118:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, less than a month since the last episode. There’s a shocker. It’s been one of my lighter travel months. No international travel, no up-and-backs across the US. Indeed, there were a couple of weeks where I didn’t even pack a bag -- just did day trips to Detroit and Atlanta. There is something liberating about that -- just carrying a briefcase or backpack. I guess that would’ve been the ideal situation to check out Spirit Airlines, but I don’t hate myself that much.</li>\r\n	<li>No rush to get to the gate for the start of boarding. Stroll up, sit down and then  stay seated while the agent works through the cadence of status boarding groups -- really important customers, kinda important customers, fake important customers, and then everyone else. No roller board meant no need for the boarding scrum. I just waited for last call and walked on board. Kinda reminded me of the days when I first started flying when, rather than racing to be first on the plane, we’d see who could be last -- how late you could show up and still get on the plane. My boss won when he talked his way past an agent, got onto the jet bridge, knocked on the plane door, which the crew opened and let him on. I don’t think I’ll push it quite that far.</li>\r\n	<li>A few of this month’s trips have been in and out of Boston Logan Airport. And for as much stick as I give United Airlines -- broken planes, late flights, just general lousy service -- I have to give them credit for their <a href=\"http://newsroom.united.com/2014-04-28-New-United-Concourse-at-Boston-Logan-Offers-Customers-Modern-Streamlined-Airport-Experience\" target=\"_blank\">gate area</a> at Logan. Parts of it look like a hip hotel lounge -- cool hanging lights, non-bench seating. There’s stand-up/high-top counter space for laptops with lots of plugs. And even the self-serve boarding gates -- with modern subway-style turnstiles that scan your boarding pass before letting you in -- worked well. It’s probably one of the nicest gate areas I’ve been in in a long time. Nice job, United!</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>One Day</em> by <a href=\"http://www.hollowhorse.co.uk/\">Hollow Horse</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>I got a good bit of commentary from the last episode, so thank everyone very much.</li>\r\n	<li>Rob Cheshire posted this comment on the web site:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>“In defense of British Airways, you stepped into the middle of their new hand-luggage policy roll-out, which is designed to reign-in the amount of cabin baggage, which had really gotten out of hand. They are being strict across the board, on elite members, as well as everyone else, and it is definitely having a positive impact on bin-space, as well as minimising the amount of messing around (checking the last few wheelie bags that can’t be stowed) that the cabin crew have to take care of in the minutes prior to push-back.”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>Rob, thanks for that. One thing I did like BA’s luggage approach was tagging the second bag meant to go underseat -- in my case, a backpack -- with a bright yellow tag to keep people from putting 2 bags overhead. There is not much that’s ruder in plane travel than early boarders -- status fliers -- maximizing their leg space at the expense of the rest the plane. Tagging that second bag makes it easy for flight attendants or later boarders to call out bin hogging. I’d love to see that move across the Atlantic.</li>\r\n	<li>Andrew Gill left a comment on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page building on my thoughts about using the new Revolut debit card during my September trip to Scotland. Andrew said:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>“The piece of Revolut was interesting. I\'ve just spent six months living and working in The Philipines. I was lucky to be involved in the pilot of Supercard from <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/TravelexUK/?hc_location=ufi\">Travelex UK</a> (<a href=\"https://supercard.io/\">https://supercard.io/</a>). It\'s a physical card, complete with chip and pin, that can be used in retail stores and for online purchases too.</li>\r\n	<li>“The card is free, and transactions are processed at the Visa Europe Exchange rate, with no foreign exchange fees or commission added on, but the *killer* feature is it\'s linked to an existing debit or credit card so there\'s no need to pre-load money onto the card. transactions are processed in my home currency, so again, there are no foreign exchange fees or commission added on</li>\r\n	<li>“The pilot program has closed now, so fingers crossed, it comes out of pilot and into general release</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>Andrew, thanks for that pointer. I agree that being able to link the Travelex Supercard back to a debit or credit card is very useful vs. the Revolut model which is more like a pre-paid debit card. Looking at the Supercard website, it looks like the pilot was only for UK card holders. Hopefully, they’ll be able to expand their geographic footprint when they fully launch the card. Interesting that Revolut is also a UK-based company. Seems like London is a hotspot for these fintech companies. Last week, I was talking to a guy who moved from London to Chicago to start up the US operations for a different London-based fintech company -- more based on lending than payments. He said that HSBC looked hard at buying Revolut because they were doing something HSBC couldn’t even given their global reach and scale. Between Revolut and Supercard, and big banks like Chase dropping foreign exchange fees on their credit cards, the money hassles of international travel keep going down. It’s a far cry from having to cash an American Express travelers check at the airport exchange desk so you could get a cab to your hotel.</li>\r\n	<li>In an<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/01/29/podcast-107-serious-about-hotel-reviews-tsa-gets-something-right/\"> earlier episode</a>, I talked about evaluation criteria for my TripAdvisor reviews -- the bathroom, room size, workout room, location, service quality. I decided during one of my trips last month that I’m adding a new criterion -- accessible bedside electrical outlets. Most frequent travelers I know use their phone or tablet as an alarm, eliminating the need to discern operating instructions for each hotel’s unique brand of clock radio. Most hotels have figured this out and provide outlets on the nightstand -- in wall, along the side of the nightstand, on the lamp base…. But last month, I hit one of those knuckle draggers -- a hotel in Vegas. I practically had to disassemble one of the beds to find an outlet hidden behind it. Luckily, I carry long power cords.</li>\r\n	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Clear My Head</em> by <a href=\"http://www.thefiasco.net/\">FIASCO</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Danger Within The Travel Bubble</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>In the last episode, I talked about attending the <a href=\"http://popeindc.cua.edu/the-papal-mass/\" target=\"_blank\">Papal Mass</a> at <a href=\"http://www.cua.edu/\" target=\"_blank\">Catholic University</a> in northeast DC which has never been one of the nicer sections of DC. I had taken the Metro up from the airport and would be getting back on it to catch my evening flight to Detroit. The Brookland stop at Catholic isn’t a big stop and I figured it would get overwhelmed at the end of the Mass by the 25,000 people there. I started thinking of alternatives. Getting a cab or an Uber would probably be just as tough, so my best alternative would be to walk down to the next stop south on the Red Line -- Rhode Island Ave. From my days in DC, I remember that neighborhood being a particularly rough one. That would not be a pleasant walk. I decided to skip Communion and leave the Pope early to beat the crowds at the Brookland stop.</li>\r\n	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Most of the times when we talk about travel security, we talk about airport security or digital security, but not often about physical security. Yet very often, travel drops in unfamiliar settings -- usually by our own choice -- where we could unknowingly wander into a very unsafe situation</span></li>\r\n	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I did exactly this some years ago when visiting Cape Town, South Africa. I was shopping through some craft stalls set up in a park and just kept wandering along. I kinda looking at the buildings, up and around… Oh, and I have my big Nikon SLR slung over my shoulder. Not sure I could’ve looked any more like a tourist unless I was wearing a big “Don’t Mess With Texas” t-shirt and a Dallas Cowboys baseball cap. At some point, I finally regain some situational awareness -- and, from my university years living in Northeast DC and on the Southside of Chicago, realize that I’m not in the best neighborhood right now. I move to the middle of the street -- so I don’t get jumped from a doorway -- and walk, with purpose now, back the way I came.</span></li>\r\n	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I did a little better this spring in New Orleans. I was standing on St Charles St in the Garden District watching a Mardi Gras parade. After a while, I got a bad feeling about the atmosphere around me. Nothing that I could put my finger on, but enough to make me give up a prime spot on the parade round and walk up the street a bit. In the next morning’s paper, I read there had been a gun fight at that spot about 30 minutes after I’d left.</span></li>\r\n	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">There have been other times in Joburg, Bangalore, Guadalajara, but considering how much I travel, they’re rare events -- I’ve wandered all through Madrid, Beijing, Tokyo, Edinburgh, Saigon and never felt unsafe -- but they get your attention. But then again, that’s outside the “travel bubble”. We’ve talked about that in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2008/04/29/podcast-64-escaping-the-travel-bubble-marks-travel-tips/\" target=\"_blank\">past episodes</a>, how travelers can often seem to float above the places they visit unless they make the effort to “pop” the travel bubble and engage.</span></li>\r\n	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">When those outside problems penetrate our bubble, now that’s more disturbing. Like the time some years back when I was visiting Rio -- years before the World Cup. I was checking in with a colleague who had done a lot of business there. He saw my room was on the second floor. “No, that won’t do,” he said, “we need to get you on a double-digit floor. At least 10 if not higher” “Why?” I asked. “Because,” he explained, “when the smash-and-grab gangs break in, they start on the first floor and work their way up until their bags are full. The higher you are, the more likely they’ll fill up before they get to you.” The logic was brutally impeccable. And this from a guy still sporting a couple of bruises from an earlier mugging on Copacabana Beach.</span></li>\r\n	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Or a few years ago, when another colleague had to take a taxi to connect between Delhi’s domestic and international terminal -- before the latest renovation. He’d forgotten to print out his international itinerary, so they wouldn’t let him on the transfer bus (I’ve talked about, in prior episodes, the need to have a printed flight itinerary in India). He couldn’t find anyone in the terminal to print one out for him so he walked out to the cab rank. He piles his bags into and on top of a taxi and off he goes -- to some out-of-the-way place under a highway overpass where the cab driver and a friend shake him down for most of his money and his watch -- they leave him with his luggage and enough money for cab fare to the international terminal. A polite mugging; no bruises with this one.</span></li>\r\n	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">My most disturbing bubble burst happened in the US -- in a Westin in Connecticut. A friend checked in and, since the hotel was oversold, was given one of those rooms that’s a conference room with a bathroom. They rolled out the tables and rolled in a bed for him. The next morning, as he’s getting dressed, he’s missing his watch, his ring, and the money and credit cards from his wallet -- all which were next to him on the nightstand. As he put it together, someone had broken into the room -- he saw that the conference room’s double doors had enough of a gap between them that you could open the lock by slipping a credit card or room key through the gap -- and they had stood next to him going through his stuff on the night stand. He’s lucky he’s a sound sleeper.</span></li>\r\n	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">And I consider myself lucky. I don’t lock myself away in the hotel. I make an effort to step outside the travel bubble -- to engage -- and after 30 years of heavy travel, other than having my camera and passport stolen, I’m really no worse the wear. Certainly no bruises to show for it. I’m not sure I’d do it any other way. Though I do pay more attention to hotel door construction than I used to.</span></li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a title=\"MP3 Download\" href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/download_track.php?id=0E74C6FEB7390D18D02B4B399668093172F6C8CC66DDC09D90A3BF7DDA436823CFAC859AE2B2C73E46A278A4950E1030\">Lonely Dog Blues</a></em> by <a title=\"Tobin James\' Web Site\" href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/label.php?id=2A3449F03E7B8462FF74407B60F0C4B0A30A0CBE880C61DE37E3B342387F0643\">Tobin James</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917626811171154.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #118</li>\r\n	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/\">Podshow Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\r\n	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_118.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #118 — Danger Within the Travel Bubble; Switching Back to Apple','','inherit','closed','closed','','1561-revision-v1','','','2015-11-08 18:08:37','2015-11-08 23:08:37','',1561,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/11/08/1561-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1568,1,'2015-11-08 18:10:14','2015-11-08 23:10:14','[caption id=\"attachment_1554\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/2015-09-03-15.12.36.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1554\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/2015-09-03-15.12.36-300x200.jpg\" alt=\"Did The Pope Have This Problem?\" width=\"300\" height=\"200\" /></a> Did The Pope Have This Problem?[/caption]\r\n\r\nApologies in advance because this is pretty much a stream-of-consciousness episode, with semi-strung together thoughts about eggs, car rentals, seeing the Pope, travel food, and stuff from my September trip to Scotland.  I talk about how handy I found the new <a href=\"https://revolut.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Revolut</a> service for spending and sending money in Europe; recent good and bad experiences with <a href=\"https://www.hertz.com/rentacar/emember/join/overview.do?learnMore=presidentsCircle\" target=\"_blank\">Hertz </a>and other car rentals; most bad experience with <a href=\"http://britishairways.com\" target=\"_blank\">British Airways</a>; and how true-to-life the <a href=\"https://youtu.be/2JqRXLQYF9o\" target=\"_blank\">Doritos Super Bowl commercial</a> portrays the Southwest boarding experience.  All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_118.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/227996070\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #118:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, less than a month since the last episode. There’s a shocker. It’s been one of my lighter travel months. No international travel, no up-and-backs across the US. Indeed, there were a couple of weeks where I didn’t even pack a bag -- just did day trips to Detroit and Atlanta. There is something liberating about that -- just carrying a briefcase or backpack. I guess that would’ve been the ideal situation to check out Spirit Airlines, but I don’t hate myself that much.</li>\r\n	<li>No rush to get to the gate for the start of boarding. Stroll up, sit down and then  stay seated while the agent works through the cadence of status boarding groups -- really important customers, kinda important customers, fake important customers, and then everyone else. No roller board meant no need for the boarding scrum. I just waited for last call and walked on board. Kinda reminded me of the days when I first started flying when, rather than racing to be first on the plane, we’d see who could be last -- how late you could show up and still get on the plane. My boss won when he talked his way past an agent, got onto the jet bridge, knocked on the plane door, which the crew opened and let him on. I don’t think I’ll push it quite that far.</li>\r\n	<li>A few of this month’s trips have been in and out of Boston Logan Airport. And for as much stick as I give United Airlines -- broken planes, late flights, just general lousy service -- I have to give them credit for their <a href=\"http://newsroom.united.com/2014-04-28-New-United-Concourse-at-Boston-Logan-Offers-Customers-Modern-Streamlined-Airport-Experience\" target=\"_blank\">gate area</a> at Logan. Parts of it look like a hip hotel lounge -- cool hanging lights, non-bench seating. There’s stand-up/high-top counter space for laptops with lots of plugs. And even the self-serve boarding gates -- with modern subway-style turnstiles that scan your boarding pass before letting you in -- worked well. It’s probably one of the nicest gate areas I’ve been in in a long time. Nice job, United!</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>One Day</em> by <a href=\"http://www.hollowhorse.co.uk/\">Hollow Horse</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>I got a good bit of commentary from the last episode, so thank everyone very much.</li>\r\n	<li>Rob Cheshire posted this comment on the web site:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>“In defense of British Airways, you stepped into the middle of their new hand-luggage policy roll-out, which is designed to reign-in the amount of cabin baggage, which had really gotten out of hand. They are being strict across the board, on elite members, as well as everyone else, and it is definitely having a positive impact on bin-space, as well as minimising the amount of messing around (checking the last few wheelie bags that can’t be stowed) that the cabin crew have to take care of in the minutes prior to push-back.”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>Rob, thanks for that. One thing I did like BA’s luggage approach was tagging the second bag meant to go underseat -- in my case, a backpack -- with a bright yellow tag to keep people from putting 2 bags overhead. There is not much that’s ruder in plane travel than early boarders -- status fliers -- maximizing their leg space at the expense of the rest the plane. Tagging that second bag makes it easy for flight attendants or later boarders to call out bin hogging. I’d love to see that move across the Atlantic.</li>\r\n	<li>Andrew Gill left a comment on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page building on my thoughts about using the new Revolut debit card during my September trip to Scotland. Andrew said:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>“The piece of Revolut was interesting. I\'ve just spent six months living and working in The Philipines. I was lucky to be involved in the pilot of Supercard from <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/TravelexUK/?hc_location=ufi\">Travelex UK</a> (<a href=\"https://supercard.io/\">https://supercard.io/</a>). It\'s a physical card, complete with chip and pin, that can be used in retail stores and for online purchases too.</li>\r\n	<li>“The card is free, and transactions are processed at the Visa Europe Exchange rate, with no foreign exchange fees or commission added on, but the *killer* feature is it\'s linked to an existing debit or credit card so there\'s no need to pre-load money onto the card. transactions are processed in my home currency, so again, there are no foreign exchange fees or commission added on</li>\r\n	<li>“The pilot program has closed now, so fingers crossed, it comes out of pilot and into general release</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>Andrew, thanks for that pointer. I agree that being able to link the Travelex Supercard back to a debit or credit card is very useful vs. the Revolut model which is more like a pre-paid debit card. Looking at the Supercard website, it looks like the pilot was only for UK card holders. Hopefully, they’ll be able to expand their geographic footprint when they fully launch the card. Interesting that Revolut is also a UK-based company. Seems like London is a hotspot for these fintech companies. Last week, I was talking to a guy who moved from London to Chicago to start up the US operations for a different London-based fintech company -- more based on lending than payments. He said that HSBC looked hard at buying Revolut because they were doing something HSBC couldn’t even given their global reach and scale. Between Revolut and Supercard, and big banks like Chase dropping foreign exchange fees on their credit cards, the money hassles of international travel keep going down. It’s a far cry from having to cash an American Express travelers check at the airport exchange desk so you could get a cab to your hotel.</li>\r\n	<li>In an<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/01/29/podcast-107-serious-about-hotel-reviews-tsa-gets-something-right/\"> earlier episode</a>, I talked about evaluation criteria for my TripAdvisor reviews -- the bathroom, room size, workout room, location, service quality. I decided during one of my trips last month that I’m adding a new criterion -- accessible bedside electrical outlets. Most frequent travelers I know use their phone or tablet as an alarm, eliminating the need to discern operating instructions for each hotel’s unique brand of clock radio. Most hotels have figured this out and provide outlets on the nightstand -- in wall, along the side of the nightstand, on the lamp base…. But last month, I hit one of those knuckle draggers -- a hotel in Vegas. I practically had to disassemble one of the beds to find an outlet hidden behind it. Luckily, I carry long power cords.</li>\r\n	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Clear My Head</em> by <a href=\"http://www.thefiasco.net/\">FIASCO</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Danger Within The Travel Bubble</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>In the last episode, I talked about attending the <a href=\"http://popeindc.cua.edu/the-papal-mass/\" target=\"_blank\">Papal Mass</a> at <a href=\"http://www.cua.edu/\" target=\"_blank\">Catholic University</a> in northeast DC which has never been one of the nicer sections of DC. I had taken the Metro up from the airport and would be getting back on it to catch my evening flight to Detroit. The Brookland stop at Catholic isn’t a big stop and I figured it would get overwhelmed at the end of the Mass by the 25,000 people there. I started thinking of alternatives. Getting a cab or an Uber would probably be just as tough, so my best alternative would be to walk down to the next stop south on the Red Line -- Rhode Island Ave. From my days in DC, I remember that neighborhood being a particularly rough one. That would not be a pleasant walk. I decided to skip Communion and leave the Pope early to beat the crowds at the Brookland stop.</li>\r\n	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Most of the times when we talk about travel security, we talk about airport security or digital security, but not often about physical security. Yet very often, travel drops in unfamiliar settings -- usually by our own choice -- where we could unknowingly wander into a very unsafe situation</span></li>\r\n	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I did exactly this some years ago when visiting Cape Town, South Africa. I was shopping through some craft stalls set up in a park and just kept wandering along. I kinda looking at the buildings, up and around… Oh, and I have my big Nikon SLR slung over my shoulder. Not sure I could’ve looked any more like a tourist unless I was wearing a big “Don’t Mess With Texas” t-shirt and a Dallas Cowboys baseball cap. At some point, I finally regain some situational awareness -- and, from my university years living in Northeast DC and on the Southside of Chicago, realize that I’m not in the best neighborhood right now. I move to the middle of the street -- so I don’t get jumped from a doorway -- and walk, with purpose now, back the way I came.</span></li>\r\n	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I did a little better this spring in New Orleans. I was standing on St Charles St in the Garden District watching a Mardi Gras parade. After a while, I got a bad feeling about the atmosphere around me. Nothing that I could put my finger on, but enough to make me give up a prime spot on the parade round and walk up the street a bit. In the next morning’s paper, I read there had been a gun fight at that spot about 30 minutes after I’d left.</span></li>\r\n	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">There have been other times in Joburg, Bangalore, Guadalajara, but considering how much I travel, they’re rare events -- I’ve wandered all through Madrid, Beijing, Tokyo, Edinburgh, Saigon and never felt unsafe -- but they get your attention. But then again, that’s outside the “travel bubble”. We’ve talked about that in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2008/04/29/podcast-64-escaping-the-travel-bubble-marks-travel-tips/\" target=\"_blank\">past episodes</a>, how travelers can often seem to float above the places they visit unless they make the effort to “pop” the travel bubble and engage.</span></li>\r\n	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">When those outside problems penetrate our bubble, now that’s more disturbing. Like the time some years back when I was visiting Rio -- years before the World Cup. I was checking in with a colleague who had done a lot of business there. He saw my room was on the second floor. “No, that won’t do,” he said, “we need to get you on a double-digit floor. At least 10 if not higher” “Why?” I asked. “Because,” he explained, “when the smash-and-grab gangs break in, they start on the first floor and work their way up until their bags are full. The higher you are, the more likely they’ll fill up before they get to you.” The logic was brutally impeccable. And this from a guy still sporting a couple of bruises from an earlier mugging on Copacabana Beach.</span></li>\r\n	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Or a few years ago, when another colleague had to take a taxi to connect between Delhi’s domestic and international terminal -- before the latest renovation. He’d forgotten to print out his international itinerary, so they wouldn’t let him on the transfer bus (I’ve talked about, in prior episodes, the need to have a printed flight itinerary in India). He couldn’t find anyone in the terminal to print one out for him so he walked out to the cab rank. He piles his bags into and on top of a taxi and off he goes -- to some out-of-the-way place under a highway overpass where the cab driver and a friend shake him down for most of his money and his watch -- they leave him with his luggage and enough money for cab fare to the international terminal. A polite mugging; no bruises with this one.</span></li>\r\n	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">My most disturbing bubble burst happened in the US -- in a Westin in Connecticut. A friend checked in and, since the hotel was oversold, was given one of those rooms that’s a conference room with a bathroom. They rolled out the tables and rolled in a bed for him. The next morning, as he’s getting dressed, he’s missing his watch, his ring, and the money and credit cards from his wallet -- all which were next to him on the nightstand. As he put it together, someone had broken into the room -- he saw that the conference room’s double doors had enough of a gap between them that you could open the lock by slipping a credit card or room key through the gap -- and they had stood next to him going through his stuff on the night stand. He’s lucky he’s a sound sleeper.</span></li>\r\n	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">And I consider myself lucky. I don’t lock myself away in the hotel. I make an effort to step outside the travel bubble -- to engage -- and after 30 years of heavy travel, other than <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/05/20/podcast-98-stolen-luggage-restaurants-want-your-smartphone/\">having my camera and passport stolen</a>, I’m really no worse the wear. Certainly no bruises to show for it. I’m not sure I’d do it any other way. Though I do pay more attention to hotel door construction than I used to.</span></li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a title=\"MP3 Download\" href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/download_track.php?id=0E74C6FEB7390D18D02B4B399668093172F6C8CC66DDC09D90A3BF7DDA436823CFAC859AE2B2C73E46A278A4950E1030\">Lonely Dog Blues</a></em> by <a title=\"Tobin James\' Web Site\" href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/label.php?id=2A3449F03E7B8462FF74407B60F0C4B0A30A0CBE880C61DE37E3B342387F0643\">Tobin James</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917626811171154.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #118</li>\r\n	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/\">Podshow Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\r\n	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_118.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #118 — Danger Within the Travel Bubble; Switching Back to Apple','','inherit','closed','closed','','1561-revision-v1','','','2015-11-08 18:10:14','2015-11-08 23:10:14','',1561,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/11/08/1561-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1569,1,'2015-11-08 18:13:38','2015-11-08 23:13:38','[caption id=\"attachment_1554\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/2015-09-03-15.12.36.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1554\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/2015-09-03-15.12.36-300x200.jpg\" alt=\"Did The Pope Have This Problem?\" width=\"300\" height=\"200\" /></a> Did The Pope Have This Problem?[/caption]\r\n\r\nApologies in advance because this is pretty much a stream-of-consciousness episode, with semi-strung together thoughts about eggs, car rentals, seeing the Pope, travel food, and stuff from my September trip to Scotland.  I talk about how handy I found the new <a href=\"https://revolut.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Revolut</a> service for spending and sending money in Europe; recent good and bad experiences with <a href=\"https://www.hertz.com/rentacar/emember/join/overview.do?learnMore=presidentsCircle\" target=\"_blank\">Hertz </a>and other car rentals; most bad experience with <a href=\"http://britishairways.com\" target=\"_blank\">British Airways</a>; and how true-to-life the <a href=\"https://youtu.be/2JqRXLQYF9o\" target=\"_blank\">Doritos Super Bowl commercial</a> portrays the Southwest boarding experience.  All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_118.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/227996070\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #118:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, less than a month since the last episode. There’s a shocker. It’s been one of my lighter travel months. No international travel, no up-and-backs across the US. Indeed, there were a couple of weeks where I didn’t even pack a bag -- just did day trips to Detroit and Atlanta. There is something liberating about that -- just carrying a briefcase or backpack. I guess that would’ve been the ideal situation to check out Spirit Airlines, but I don’t hate myself that much.</li>\r\n	<li>No rush to get to the gate for the start of boarding. Stroll up, sit down and then  stay seated while the agent works through the cadence of status boarding groups -- really important customers, kinda important customers, fake important customers, and then everyone else. No roller board meant no need for the boarding scrum. I just waited for last call and walked on board. Kinda reminded me of the days when I first started flying when, rather than racing to be first on the plane, we’d see who could be last -- how late you could show up and still get on the plane. My boss won when he talked his way past an agent, got onto the jet bridge, knocked on the plane door, which the crew opened and let him on. I don’t think I’ll push it quite that far.</li>\r\n	<li>A few of this month’s trips have been in and out of Boston Logan Airport. And for as much stick as I give United Airlines -- broken planes, late flights, just general lousy service -- I have to give them credit for their <a href=\"http://newsroom.united.com/2014-04-28-New-United-Concourse-at-Boston-Logan-Offers-Customers-Modern-Streamlined-Airport-Experience\" target=\"_blank\">gate area</a> at Logan. Parts of it look like a hip hotel lounge -- cool hanging lights, non-bench seating. There’s stand-up/high-top counter space for laptops with lots of plugs. And even the self-serve boarding gates -- with modern subway-style turnstiles that scan your boarding pass before letting you in -- worked well. It’s probably one of the nicest gate areas I’ve been in in a long time. Nice job, United!</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>One Day</em> by <a href=\"http://www.hollowhorse.co.uk/\">Hollow Horse</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>I got a good bit of commentary from the last episode, so thank everyone very much.</li>\r\n	<li>Rob Cheshire posted this comment on the web site:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>“In defense of British Airways, you stepped into the middle of their new hand-luggage policy roll-out, which is designed to reign-in the amount of cabin baggage, which had really gotten out of hand. They are being strict across the board, on elite members, as well as everyone else, and it is definitely having a positive impact on bin-space, as well as minimising the amount of messing around (checking the last few wheelie bags that can’t be stowed) that the cabin crew have to take care of in the minutes prior to push-back.”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>Rob, thanks for that. One thing I did like BA’s luggage approach was tagging the second bag meant to go underseat -- in my case, a backpack -- with a bright yellow tag to keep people from putting 2 bags overhead. There is not much that’s ruder in plane travel than early boarders -- status fliers -- maximizing their leg space at the expense of the rest the plane. Tagging that second bag makes it easy for flight attendants or later boarders to call out bin hogging. I’d love to see that move across the Atlantic.</li>\r\n	<li>Andrew Gill left a comment on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page building on my thoughts about using the new Revolut debit card during my September trip to Scotland. Andrew said:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>“The piece of Revolut was interesting. I\'ve just spent six months living and working in The Philipines. I was lucky to be involved in the pilot of Supercard from <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/TravelexUK/?hc_location=ufi\">Travelex UK</a> (<a href=\"https://supercard.io/\">https://supercard.io/</a>). It\'s a physical card, complete with chip and pin, that can be used in retail stores and for online purchases too.</li>\r\n	<li>“The card is free, and transactions are processed at the Visa Europe Exchange rate, with no foreign exchange fees or commission added on, but the *killer* feature is it\'s linked to an existing debit or credit card so there\'s no need to pre-load money onto the card. transactions are processed in my home currency, so again, there are no foreign exchange fees or commission added on</li>\r\n	<li>“The pilot program has closed now, so fingers crossed, it comes out of pilot and into general release</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>Andrew, thanks for that pointer. I agree that being able to link the Travelex Supercard back to a debit or credit card is very useful vs. the Revolut model which is more like a pre-paid debit card. Looking at the Supercard website, it looks like the pilot was only for UK card holders. Hopefully, they’ll be able to expand their geographic footprint when they fully launch the card. Interesting that Revolut is also a UK-based company. Seems like London is a hotspot for these fintech companies. Last week, I was talking to a guy who moved from London to Chicago to start up the US operations for a different London-based fintech company -- more based on lending than payments. He said that HSBC looked hard at buying Revolut because they were doing something HSBC couldn’t even given their global reach and scale. Between Revolut and Supercard, and big banks like Chase dropping foreign exchange fees on their credit cards, the money hassles of international travel keep going down. It’s a far cry from having to cash an American Express travelers check at the airport exchange desk so you could get a cab to your hotel.</li>\r\n	<li>In an<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/01/29/podcast-107-serious-about-hotel-reviews-tsa-gets-something-right/\"> earlier episode</a>, I talked about evaluation criteria for my TripAdvisor reviews -- the bathroom, room size, workout room, location, service quality. I decided during one of my trips last month that I’m adding a new criterion -- accessible bedside electrical outlets. Most frequent travelers I know use their phone or tablet as an alarm, eliminating the need to discern operating instructions for each hotel’s unique brand of clock radio. Most hotels have figured this out and provide outlets on the nightstand -- in wall, along the side of the nightstand, on the lamp base…. But last month, I hit one of those knuckle draggers -- a hotel in Vegas. I practically had to disassemble one of the beds to find an outlet hidden behind it. Luckily, I carry long power cords.</li>\r\n	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Clear My Head</em> by <a href=\"http://www.thefiasco.net/\">FIASCO</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Danger Within The Travel Bubble</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>In the last episode, I talked about attending the <a href=\"http://popeindc.cua.edu/the-papal-mass/\" target=\"_blank\">Papal Mass</a> at <a href=\"http://www.cua.edu/\" target=\"_blank\">Catholic University</a> in northeast DC which has never been one of the nicer sections of DC. I had taken the Metro up from the airport and would be getting back on it to catch my evening flight to Detroit. The Brookland stop at Catholic isn’t a big stop and I figured it would get overwhelmed at the end of the Mass by the 25,000 people there. I started thinking of alternatives. Getting a cab or an Uber would probably be just as tough, so my best alternative would be to walk down to the next stop south on the Red Line -- Rhode Island Ave. From my days in DC, I remember that neighborhood being a particularly rough one. That would not be a pleasant walk. I decided to skip Communion and leave the Pope early to beat the crowds at the Brookland stop.</li>\r\n	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Most of the times when we talk about travel security, we talk about airport security or digital security, but not often about physical security. Yet very often, travel drops in unfamiliar settings -- usually by our own choice -- where we could unknowingly wander into a very unsafe situation</span></li>\r\n	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I did exactly this some years ago when visiting Cape Town, South Africa. I was shopping through some craft stalls set up in a park and just kept wandering along. I kinda looking at the buildings, up and around… Oh, and I have my big Nikon SLR slung over my shoulder. Not sure I could’ve looked any more like a tourist unless I was wearing a big “Don’t Mess With Texas” t-shirt and a Dallas Cowboys baseball cap. At some point, I finally regain some situational awareness -- and, from my university years living in Northeast DC and on the Southside of Chicago, realize that I’m not in the best neighborhood right now. I move to the middle of the street -- so I don’t get jumped from a doorway -- and walk, with purpose now, back the way I came.</span></li>\r\n	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I did a little better this spring in New Orleans. I was standing on St Charles St in the Garden District watching a Mardi Gras parade. After a while, I got a bad feeling about the atmosphere around me. Nothing that I could put my finger on, but enough to make me give up a prime spot on the parade round and walk up the street a bit. In the next morning’s paper, I read there had been a gun fight at that spot about 30 minutes after I’d left.</span></li>\r\n	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">There have been other times in Joburg, Bangalore, Guadalajara, but considering how much I travel, they’re rare events -- I’ve wandered all through Madrid, Beijing, Tokyo, Edinburgh, Saigon and never felt unsafe -- but they get your attention. But then again, that’s outside the “travel bubble”. We’ve talked about that in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2008/04/29/podcast-64-escaping-the-travel-bubble-marks-travel-tips/\" target=\"_blank\">past episodes</a>, how travelers can often seem to float above the places they visit unless they make the effort to “pop” the travel bubble and engage.</span></li>\r\n	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">When those outside problems penetrate our bubble, now that’s more disturbing. Like the time some years back when I was visiting Rio -- years before the World Cup. I was checking in with a colleague who had done a lot of business there. He saw my room was on the second floor. “No, that won’t do,” he said, “we need to get you on a double-digit floor. At least 10 if not higher” “Why?” I asked. “Because,” he explained, “when the smash-and-grab gangs break in, they start on the first floor and work their way up until their bags are full. The higher you are, the more likely they’ll fill up before they get to you.” The logic was brutally impeccable. And this from a guy still sporting a couple of bruises from an earlier mugging on Copacabana Beach.</span></li>\r\n	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Or a few years ago, when another colleague had to take a taxi to connect between Delhi’s domestic and international terminal -- before the latest renovation. He’d forgotten to print out his international itinerary, so they wouldn’t let him on the transfer bus (I’ve talked about, in prior episodes, the need to have a printed flight itinerary in India). He couldn’t find anyone in the terminal to print one out for him so he walked out to the cab rank. He piles his bags into and on top of a taxi and off he goes -- to some out-of-the-way place under a highway overpass where the cab driver and a friend shake him down for most of his money and his watch -- they leave him with his luggage and enough money for cab fare to the international terminal. A polite mugging; no bruises with this one.</span></li>\r\n	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">My most disturbing bubble burst happened in the US -- in a Westin in Connecticut. A friend checked in and, since the hotel was oversold, was given one of those rooms that’s a conference room with a bathroom. They rolled out the tables and rolled in a bed for him. The next morning, as he’s getting dressed, he’s missing his watch, his ring, and the money and credit cards from his wallet -- all which were next to him on the nightstand. As he put it together, someone had broken into the room -- he saw that the conference room’s double doors had enough of a gap between them that you could open the lock by slipping a credit card or room key through the gap -- and they had stood next to him going through his stuff on the night stand. He’s lucky he’s a sound sleeper.</span></li>\r\n	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">And I consider myself lucky. I don’t lock myself away in the hotel. I make an effort to step outside the travel bubble -- to engage -- and after 30 years of heavy travel, other than <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/05/20/podcast-98-stolen-luggage-restaurants-want-your-smartphone/\">having my camera and passport stolen</a>, I’m really no worse the wear. Certainly no bruises to show for it. I’m not sure I’d do it any other way. Though I do pay more attention to hotel door construction than I used to.</span></li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a title=\"MP3 Download\" href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/download_track.php?id=0E74C6FEB7390D18D02B4B399668093172F6C8CC66DDC09D90A3BF7DDA436823CFAC859AE2B2C73E46A278A4950E1030\">Lonely Dog Blues</a></em> by <a title=\"Tobin James\' Web Site\" href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/label.php?id=2A3449F03E7B8462FF74407B60F0C4B0A30A0CBE880C61DE37E3B342387F0643\">Tobin James</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Switching Back to Apple</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">After your government ID, the smartphone is probably the most important thing you travel with. And while I quickly whip out my ID a few times a trip to prove my identity  -- to the TSA agent, to hotel clerks, to car rental check out folks, I use my smartphone constantly -- maybe too constantly. Be that as it may, the smartphone is </span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">the </span></i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">critical tool for today’s frequent traveler. A carpenter has his framing hammer, the auto mechanic his Snap-On wrench -- for the road warrior, it’s the smart phone.</span></li>\r\n	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">And so it wasn’t without a good bit of thought that I bit the bullet a few weeks ago and switched back to Apple; dumping my HTC One for a new iPhone 6S. I wasn’t thrilled to do it; I put it off for at least a month. And in the end, it was more a frustration with hardware -- with the slouching-toward-bankruptcy mess that HTC has become than it was excitement for the latest iThing. </span></li>\r\n	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Which I guess is the pattern for me. My first smartphone was an iPhone 3G and I’d had just about every iPhone model up to the 5. And it was the frustration with its truly horrid battery life that led me to the HTC. The cause this time was the lousy performance of my HTC One after they pushed their Android upgrade -- “Lollipop” -- at the beginning of this year. It just trashed the phone -- the lag was awful. The hardware components have the specs to handle the new version; it’s just that HTC’s implementation of it is crap. Now, it’s not like Apple nails their OS upgrades every time. The IOS 8 release didn’t exactly cover them in glory. But at least they worked to resolve the problem by iterating through releases in a fairly timely manner. After the initial “Lollipop” release, Google iterated through updates  -- I think ver 5.1.1 is the most recent -- and I’m waited for HTC to use that as an opportunity to clean up their 5.0 mess. They would say on Twitter “It’s coming, just wait”, And then “Oh, we’ll just skip 5.1 and give you 6.0 by the end of the year”. That was it. I’d suffered through 6 months of lousy performance and now they were saying I would have at least 3 more -- not that I have any reason to think that the near-bankrupt company has gotten any better at software estimating.</span></li>\r\n	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I don’t think that either Apple’s or Google’s operating systems are inherently better than the other. I’ve used them both. They both work. There are things I like about each of them, and since they seem to be stealing/emulating (?) each other’s best features, they’re more or less converging on each other. </span></li>\r\n	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">For me, the difference is the hardware -- which is what is actually in our hands each day. I’ve always thought Apple is a better hardware company than a software one. I loved my MacBook Air, but was very “meh” about OS X. It’s really the Android equipment manufacturers that are pushing me away. It seems that most of the Android hardware innovation is at the large end -- large screen sizes -- 5 ½ inches and up -- which is way bigger than what want. And then there are the delays in Android upgrades as each manufacturer gooses Google’s release -- my 18-month old Samsung tablet is still on version 4.4 “Kit Kat”, now two version levels down, with no update in sight, let alone any security patches. With mobile devices becoming more vital, that foot dragging on upgrades and security patching very uncomfortable. </span></li>\r\n	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I was holding out for Google’s updated Nexus line, reading all rumor articles with spec leaks and blurred pictures. The 6P was too big for me, but the 5X -- I could do a 5.2-in screen with fast updates and patches. But then, when they unveiled the 5X, it topped it out at 32 GB with no expansion slots. For me, that is just too tight for my music, podcasts, pictures, video. So that’s it, I walked into the Apple store and bought a 64GB unlocked GSM 6S on their new upgrade plan -- new phone comes out, I trade mine in. It’s like leasing a car -- some people like the newest model. It’s all about the hardware.</span></li>\r\n	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Now if I can just keep iTunes from crashing on my Windows 10 box...</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #118</li>\r\n	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/\">Podshow Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\r\n	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_118.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #118 — Danger Within the Travel Bubble; Switching Back to Apple','','inherit','closed','closed','','1561-revision-v1','','','2015-11-08 18:13:38','2015-11-08 23:13:38','',1561,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/11/08/1561-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1570,1,'2015-11-08 18:16:20','2015-11-08 23:16:20','[caption id=\"attachment_1554\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/2015-09-03-15.12.36.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1554\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/2015-09-03-15.12.36-300x200.jpg\" alt=\"Did The Pope Have This Problem?\" width=\"300\" height=\"200\" /></a> Did The Pope Have This Problem?[/caption]\r\n\r\nApologies in advance because this is pretty much a stream-of-consciousness episode, with semi-strung together thoughts about eggs, car rentals, seeing the Pope, travel food, and stuff from my September trip to Scotland.  I talk about how handy I found the new <a href=\"https://revolut.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Revolut</a> service for spending and sending money in Europe; recent good and bad experiences with <a href=\"https://www.hertz.com/rentacar/emember/join/overview.do?learnMore=presidentsCircle\" target=\"_blank\">Hertz </a>and other car rentals; most bad experience with <a href=\"http://britishairways.com\" target=\"_blank\">British Airways</a>; and how true-to-life the <a href=\"https://youtu.be/2JqRXLQYF9o\" target=\"_blank\">Doritos Super Bowl commercial</a> portrays the Southwest boarding experience.  All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_118.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/227996070\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #118:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, less than a month since the last episode. There’s a shocker. It’s been one of my lighter travel months. No international travel, no up-and-backs across the US. Indeed, there were a couple of weeks where I didn’t even pack a bag -- just did day trips to Detroit and Atlanta. There is something liberating about that -- just carrying a briefcase or backpack. I guess that would’ve been the ideal situation to check out Spirit Airlines, but I don’t hate myself that much.</li>\r\n	<li>No rush to get to the gate for the start of boarding. Stroll up, sit down and then  stay seated while the agent works through the cadence of status boarding groups -- really important customers, kinda important customers, fake important customers, and then everyone else. No roller board meant no need for the boarding scrum. I just waited for last call and walked on board. Kinda reminded me of the days when I first started flying when, rather than racing to be first on the plane, we’d see who could be last -- how late you could show up and still get on the plane. My boss won when he talked his way past an agent, got onto the jet bridge, knocked on the plane door, which the crew opened and let him on. I don’t think I’ll push it quite that far.</li>\r\n	<li>A few of this month’s trips have been in and out of Boston Logan Airport. And for as much stick as I give United Airlines -- broken planes, late flights, just general lousy service -- I have to give them credit for their <a href=\"http://newsroom.united.com/2014-04-28-New-United-Concourse-at-Boston-Logan-Offers-Customers-Modern-Streamlined-Airport-Experience\" target=\"_blank\">gate area</a> at Logan. Parts of it look like a hip hotel lounge -- cool hanging lights, non-bench seating. There’s stand-up/high-top counter space for laptops with lots of plugs. And even the self-serve boarding gates -- with modern subway-style turnstiles that scan your boarding pass before letting you in -- worked well. It’s probably one of the nicest gate areas I’ve been in in a long time. Nice job, United!</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>One Day</em> by <a href=\"http://www.hollowhorse.co.uk/\">Hollow Horse</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>I got a good bit of commentary from the last episode, so thank everyone very much.</li>\r\n	<li>Rob Cheshire posted this comment on the web site:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>“In defense of British Airways, you stepped into the middle of their new hand-luggage policy roll-out, which is designed to reign-in the amount of cabin baggage, which had really gotten out of hand. They are being strict across the board, on elite members, as well as everyone else, and it is definitely having a positive impact on bin-space, as well as minimising the amount of messing around (checking the last few wheelie bags that can’t be stowed) that the cabin crew have to take care of in the minutes prior to push-back.”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>Rob, thanks for that. One thing I did like BA’s luggage approach was tagging the second bag meant to go underseat -- in my case, a backpack -- with a bright yellow tag to keep people from putting 2 bags overhead. There is not much that’s ruder in plane travel than early boarders -- status fliers -- maximizing their leg space at the expense of the rest the plane. Tagging that second bag makes it easy for flight attendants or later boarders to call out bin hogging. I’d love to see that move across the Atlantic.</li>\r\n	<li>Andrew Gill left a comment on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page building on my thoughts about using the new Revolut debit card during my September trip to Scotland. Andrew said:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>“The piece of Revolut was interesting. I\'ve just spent six months living and working in The Philipines. I was lucky to be involved in the pilot of Supercard from <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/TravelexUK/?hc_location=ufi\">Travelex UK</a> (<a href=\"https://supercard.io/\">https://supercard.io/</a>). It\'s a physical card, complete with chip and pin, that can be used in retail stores and for online purchases too.</li>\r\n	<li>“The card is free, and transactions are processed at the Visa Europe Exchange rate, with no foreign exchange fees or commission added on, but the *killer* feature is it\'s linked to an existing debit or credit card so there\'s no need to pre-load money onto the card. transactions are processed in my home currency, so again, there are no foreign exchange fees or commission added on</li>\r\n	<li>“The pilot program has closed now, so fingers crossed, it comes out of pilot and into general release</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>Andrew, thanks for that pointer. I agree that being able to link the Travelex Supercard back to a debit or credit card is very useful vs. the Revolut model which is more like a pre-paid debit card. Looking at the Supercard website, it looks like the pilot was only for UK card holders. Hopefully, they’ll be able to expand their geographic footprint when they fully launch the card. Interesting that Revolut is also a UK-based company. Seems like London is a hotspot for these fintech companies. Last week, I was talking to a guy who moved from London to Chicago to start up the US operations for a different London-based fintech company -- more based on lending than payments. He said that HSBC looked hard at buying Revolut because they were doing something HSBC couldn’t even given their global reach and scale. Between Revolut and Supercard, and big banks like Chase dropping foreign exchange fees on their credit cards, the money hassles of international travel keep going down. It’s a far cry from having to cash an American Express travelers check at the airport exchange desk so you could get a cab to your hotel.</li>\r\n	<li>In an<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/01/29/podcast-107-serious-about-hotel-reviews-tsa-gets-something-right/\"> earlier episode</a>, I talked about evaluation criteria for my TripAdvisor reviews -- the bathroom, room size, workout room, location, service quality. I decided during one of my trips last month that I’m adding a new criterion -- accessible bedside electrical outlets. Most frequent travelers I know use their phone or tablet as an alarm, eliminating the need to discern operating instructions for each hotel’s unique brand of clock radio. Most hotels have figured this out and provide outlets on the nightstand -- in wall, along the side of the nightstand, on the lamp base…. But last month, I hit one of those knuckle draggers -- a hotel in Vegas. I practically had to disassemble one of the beds to find an outlet hidden behind it. Luckily, I carry long power cords.</li>\r\n	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Clear My Head</em> by <a href=\"http://www.thefiasco.net/\">FIASCO</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Danger Within The Travel Bubble</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>In the last episode, I talked about attending the <a href=\"http://popeindc.cua.edu/the-papal-mass/\" target=\"_blank\">Papal Mass</a> at <a href=\"http://www.cua.edu/\" target=\"_blank\">Catholic University</a> in northeast DC which has never been one of the nicer sections of DC. I had taken the Metro up from the airport and would be getting back on it to catch my evening flight to Detroit. The Brookland stop at Catholic isn’t a big stop and I figured it would get overwhelmed at the end of the Mass by the 25,000 people there. I started thinking of alternatives. Getting a cab or an Uber would probably be just as tough, so my best alternative would be to walk down to the next stop south on the Red Line -- Rhode Island Ave. From my days in DC, I remember that neighborhood being a particularly rough one. That would not be a pleasant walk. I decided to skip Communion and leave the Pope early to beat the crowds at the Brookland stop.</li>\r\n	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Most of the times when we talk about travel security, we talk about airport security or digital security, but not often about physical security. Yet very often, travel drops in unfamiliar settings -- usually by our own choice -- where we could unknowingly wander into a very unsafe situation</span></li>\r\n	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I did exactly this some years ago when visiting Cape Town, South Africa. I was shopping through some craft stalls set up in a park and just kept wandering along. I kinda looking at the buildings, up and around… Oh, and I have my big Nikon SLR slung over my shoulder. Not sure I could’ve looked any more like a tourist unless I was wearing a big “Don’t Mess With Texas” t-shirt and a Dallas Cowboys baseball cap. At some point, I finally regain some situational awareness -- and, from my university years living in Northeast DC and on the Southside of Chicago, realize that I’m not in the best neighborhood right now. I move to the middle of the street -- so I don’t get jumped from a doorway -- and walk, with purpose now, back the way I came.</span></li>\r\n	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I did a little better this spring in New Orleans. I was standing on St Charles St in the Garden District watching a Mardi Gras parade. After a while, I got a bad feeling about the atmosphere around me. Nothing that I could put my finger on, but enough to make me give up a prime spot on the parade round and walk up the street a bit. In the next morning’s paper, I read there had been a gun fight at that spot about 30 minutes after I’d left.</span></li>\r\n	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">There have been other times in Joburg, Bangalore, Guadalajara, but considering how much I travel, they’re rare events -- I’ve wandered all through Madrid, Beijing, Tokyo, Edinburgh, Saigon and never felt unsafe -- but they get your attention. But then again, that’s outside the “travel bubble”. We’ve talked about that in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2008/04/29/podcast-64-escaping-the-travel-bubble-marks-travel-tips/\" target=\"_blank\">past episodes</a>, how travelers can often seem to float above the places they visit unless they make the effort to “pop” the travel bubble and engage.</span></li>\r\n	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">When those outside problems penetrate our bubble, now that’s more disturbing. Like the time some years back when I was visiting Rio -- years before the World Cup. I was checking in with a colleague who had done a lot of business there. He saw my room was on the second floor. “No, that won’t do,” he said, “we need to get you on a double-digit floor. At least 10 if not higher” “Why?” I asked. “Because,” he explained, “when the smash-and-grab gangs break in, they start on the first floor and work their way up until their bags are full. The higher you are, the more likely they’ll fill up before they get to you.” The logic was brutally impeccable. And this from a guy still sporting a couple of bruises from an earlier mugging on Copacabana Beach.</span></li>\r\n	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Or a few years ago, when another colleague had to take a taxi to connect between Delhi’s domestic and international terminal -- before the latest renovation. He’d forgotten to print out his international itinerary, so they wouldn’t let him on the transfer bus (I’ve talked about, in prior episodes, the need to have a printed flight itinerary in India). He couldn’t find anyone in the terminal to print one out for him so he walked out to the cab rank. He piles his bags into and on top of a taxi and off he goes -- to some out-of-the-way place under a highway overpass where the cab driver and a friend shake him down for most of his money and his watch -- they leave him with his luggage and enough money for cab fare to the international terminal. A polite mugging; no bruises with this one.</span></li>\r\n	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">My most disturbing bubble burst happened in the US -- in a Westin in Connecticut. A friend checked in and, since the hotel was oversold, was given one of those rooms that’s a conference room with a bathroom. They rolled out the tables and rolled in a bed for him. The next morning, as he’s getting dressed, he’s missing his watch, his ring, and the money and credit cards from his wallet -- all which were next to him on the nightstand. As he put it together, someone had broken into the room -- he saw that the conference room’s double doors had enough of a gap between them that you could open the lock by slipping a credit card or room key through the gap -- and they had stood next to him going through his stuff on the night stand. He’s lucky he’s a sound sleeper.</span></li>\r\n	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">And I consider myself lucky. I don’t lock myself away in the hotel. I make an effort to step outside the travel bubble -- to engage -- and after 30 years of heavy travel, other than <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/05/20/podcast-98-stolen-luggage-restaurants-want-your-smartphone/\">having my camera and passport stolen</a>, I’m really no worse the wear. Certainly no bruises to show for it. I’m not sure I’d do it any other way. Though I do pay more attention to hotel door construction than I used to.</span></li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a title=\"MP3 Download\" href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/download_track.php?id=0E74C6FEB7390D18D02B4B399668093172F6C8CC66DDC09D90A3BF7DDA436823CFAC859AE2B2C73E46A278A4950E1030\">Lonely Dog Blues</a></em> by <a title=\"Tobin James\' Web Site\" href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/label.php?id=2A3449F03E7B8462FF74407B60F0C4B0A30A0CBE880C61DE37E3B342387F0643\">Tobin James</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Switching Back to Apple</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>After your government ID, the smartphone is probably the most important thing you travel with. And while I quickly whip out my ID a few times a trip to prove my identity  -- to the TSA agent, to hotel clerks, to car rental check out folks, I use my smartphone constantly -- maybe too constantly. Be that as it may, the smartphone is <i>the</i> critical tool for today’s frequent traveler. A carpenter has his framing hammer, the auto mechanic his Snap-On wrench -- for the road warrior, it’s the smart phone.</li>\r\n	<li>And so it wasn’t without a good bit of thought that I bit the bullet a few weeks ago and switched back to Apple; dumping my HTC One for a new iPhone 6S. I wasn’t thrilled to do it; I put it off for at least a month. And in the end, it was more a frustration with hardware -- with the slouching-toward-bankruptcy mess that HTC has become than it was excitement for the latest iThing.</li>\r\n	<li>Which I guess is the pattern for me. My first smartphone was an iPhone 3G and I’d had just about every iPhone model up to the 5. And it was the frustration with its truly horrid battery life that led me to the HTC. The cause this time was the lousy performance of my HTC One after they pushed their Android upgrade -- “Lollipop” -- at the beginning of this year. It just trashed the phone -- the lag was awful. The hardware components have the specs to handle the new version; it’s just that HTC’s implementation of it is crap. Now, it’s not like Apple nails their OS upgrades every time. The IOS 8 release didn’t exactly cover them in glory. But at least they worked to resolve the problem by iterating through releases in a fairly timely manner. After the initial “Lollipop” release, Google iterated through updates  -- I think ver 5.1.1 is the most recent -- and I’m waited for HTC to use that as an opportunity to clean up their 5.0 mess. They would say on Twitter “It’s coming, just wait”, And then “Oh, we’ll just skip 5.1 and give you 6.0 by the end of the year”. That was it. I’d suffered through 6 months of lousy performance and now they were saying I would have at least 3 more -- not that I have any reason to think that the near-bankrupt company has gotten any better at software estimating.</li>\r\n	<li>I don’t think that either Apple’s or Google’s operating systems are inherently better than the other. I’ve used them both. They both work. There are things I like about each of them, and since they seem to be stealing/emulating (?) each other’s best features, they’re more or less converging on each other.</li>\r\n	<li>For me, the difference is the hardware -- which is what is actually in our hands each day. I’ve always thought Apple is a better hardware company than a software one. I loved my MacBook Air, but was very “meh” about OS X. It’s really the Android equipment manufacturers that are pushing me away. It seems that most of the Android hardware innovation is at the large end -- large screen sizes -- 5 ½ inches and up -- which is way bigger than what want. And then there are the delays in Android upgrades as each manufacturer gooses Google’s release -- my 18-month old Samsung tablet is still on version 4.4 “Kit Kat”, now two version levels down, with no update in sight, let alone any security patches. With mobile devices becoming more vital, that foot dragging on upgrades and security patching very uncomfortable.</li>\r\n	<li>I was holding out for Google’s updated Nexus line, reading all rumor articles with spec leaks and blurred pictures. The 6P was too big for me, but the 5X -- I could do a 5.2-in screen with fast updates and patches. But then, when they unveiled the 5X, it topped it out at 32 GB with no expansion slots. For me, that is just too tight for my music, podcasts, pictures, video. So that’s it, I walked into the Apple store and bought a 64GB unlocked GSM 6S on their new upgrade plan -- new phone comes out, I trade mine in. It’s like leasing a car -- some people like the newest model. It’s all about the hardware.</li>\r\n	<li>Now if I can just keep iTunes from crashing on my Windows 10 box...</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #118</li>\r\n	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/\">Podshow Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\r\n	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_118.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #118 — Danger Within the Travel Bubble; Switching Back to Apple','','inherit','closed','closed','','1561-revision-v1','','','2015-11-08 18:16:20','2015-11-08 23:16:20','',1561,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/11/08/1561-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1571,1,'2015-11-08 18:28:12','2015-11-08 23:28:12','Apologies in advance because this is pretty much a stream-of-consciousness episode, with semi-strung together thoughts about eggs, car rentals, seeing the Pope, travel food, and stuff from my September trip to Scotland.  I talk about how handy I found the new <a href=\"https://revolut.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Revolut</a> service for spending and sending money in Europe; recent good and bad experiences with <a href=\"https://www.hertz.com/rentacar/emember/join/overview.do?learnMore=presidentsCircle\" target=\"_blank\">Hertz </a>and other car rentals; most bad experience with <a href=\"http://britishairways.com\" target=\"_blank\">British Airways</a>; and how true-to-life the <a href=\"https://youtu.be/2JqRXLQYF9o\" target=\"_blank\">Doritos Super Bowl commercial</a> portrays the Southwest boarding experience.  All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_118.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/227996070\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #118:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, less than a month since the last episode. There’s a shocker. It’s been one of my lighter travel months. No international travel, no up-and-backs across the US. Indeed, there were a couple of weeks where I didn’t even pack a bag -- just did day trips to Detroit and Atlanta. There is something liberating about that -- just carrying a briefcase or backpack. I guess that would’ve been the ideal situation to check out Spirit Airlines, but I don’t hate myself that much.</li>\r\n	<li>No rush to get to the gate for the start of boarding. Stroll up, sit down and then  stay seated while the agent works through the cadence of status boarding groups -- really important customers, kinda important customers, fake important customers, and then everyone else. No roller board meant no need for the boarding scrum. I just waited for last call and walked on board. Kinda reminded me of the days when I first started flying when, rather than racing to be first on the plane, we’d see who could be last -- how late you could show up and still get on the plane. My boss won when he talked his way past an agent, got onto the jet bridge, knocked on the plane door, which the crew opened and let him on. I don’t think I’ll push it quite that far.</li>\r\n	<li>A few of this month’s trips have been in and out of Boston Logan Airport. And for as much stick as I give United Airlines -- broken planes, late flights, just general lousy service -- I have to give them credit for their <a href=\"http://newsroom.united.com/2014-04-28-New-United-Concourse-at-Boston-Logan-Offers-Customers-Modern-Streamlined-Airport-Experience\" target=\"_blank\">gate area</a> at Logan. Parts of it look like a hip hotel lounge -- cool hanging lights, non-bench seating. There’s stand-up/high-top counter space for laptops with lots of plugs. And even the self-serve boarding gates -- with modern subway-style turnstiles that scan your boarding pass before letting you in -- worked well. It’s probably one of the nicest gate areas I’ve been in in a long time. Nice job, United!</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>One Day</em> by <a href=\"http://www.hollowhorse.co.uk/\">Hollow Horse</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>I got a good bit of commentary from the last episode, so thank everyone very much.</li>\r\n	<li>Rob Cheshire posted this comment on the web site:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>“In defense of British Airways, you stepped into the middle of their new hand-luggage policy roll-out, which is designed to reign-in the amount of cabin baggage, which had really gotten out of hand. They are being strict across the board, on elite members, as well as everyone else, and it is definitely having a positive impact on bin-space, as well as minimising the amount of messing around (checking the last few wheelie bags that can’t be stowed) that the cabin crew have to take care of in the minutes prior to push-back.”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>Rob, thanks for that. One thing I did like BA’s luggage approach was tagging the second bag meant to go underseat -- in my case, a backpack -- with a bright yellow tag to keep people from putting 2 bags overhead. There is not much that’s ruder in plane travel than early boarders -- status fliers -- maximizing their leg space at the expense of the rest the plane. Tagging that second bag makes it easy for flight attendants or later boarders to call out bin hogging. I’d love to see that move across the Atlantic.</li>\r\n	<li>Andrew Gill left a comment on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page building on my thoughts about using the new Revolut debit card during my September trip to Scotland. Andrew said:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>“The piece of Revolut was interesting. I\'ve just spent six months living and working in The Philipines. I was lucky to be involved in the pilot of Supercard from <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/TravelexUK/?hc_location=ufi\">Travelex UK</a> (<a href=\"https://supercard.io/\">https://supercard.io/</a>). It\'s a physical card, complete with chip and pin, that can be used in retail stores and for online purchases too.</li>\r\n	<li>“The card is free, and transactions are processed at the Visa Europe Exchange rate, with no foreign exchange fees or commission added on, but the *killer* feature is it\'s linked to an existing debit or credit card so there\'s no need to pre-load money onto the card. transactions are processed in my home currency, so again, there are no foreign exchange fees or commission added on</li>\r\n	<li>“The pilot program has closed now, so fingers crossed, it comes out of pilot and into general release</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>Andrew, thanks for that pointer. I agree that being able to link the Travelex Supercard back to a debit or credit card is very useful vs. the Revolut model which is more like a pre-paid debit card. Looking at the Supercard website, it looks like the pilot was only for UK card holders. Hopefully, they’ll be able to expand their geographic footprint when they fully launch the card. Interesting that Revolut is also a UK-based company. Seems like London is a hotspot for these fintech companies. Last week, I was talking to a guy who moved from London to Chicago to start up the US operations for a different London-based fintech company -- more based on lending than payments. He said that HSBC looked hard at buying Revolut because they were doing something HSBC couldn’t even given their global reach and scale. Between Revolut and Supercard, and big banks like Chase dropping foreign exchange fees on their credit cards, the money hassles of international travel keep going down. It’s a far cry from having to cash an American Express travelers check at the airport exchange desk so you could get a cab to your hotel.</li>\r\n	<li>In an<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/01/29/podcast-107-serious-about-hotel-reviews-tsa-gets-something-right/\"> earlier episode</a>, I talked about evaluation criteria for my TripAdvisor reviews -- the bathroom, room size, workout room, location, service quality. I decided during one of my trips last month that I’m adding a new criterion -- accessible bedside electrical outlets. Most frequent travelers I know use their phone or tablet as an alarm, eliminating the need to discern operating instructions for each hotel’s unique brand of clock radio. Most hotels have figured this out and provide outlets on the nightstand -- in wall, along the side of the nightstand, on the lamp base…. But last month, I hit one of those knuckle draggers -- a hotel in Vegas. I practically had to disassemble one of the beds to find an outlet hidden behind it. Luckily, I carry long power cords.</li>\r\n	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Clear My Head</em> by <a href=\"http://www.thefiasco.net/\">FIASCO</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Danger Within The Travel Bubble</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>In the last episode, I talked about attending the <a href=\"http://popeindc.cua.edu/the-papal-mass/\" target=\"_blank\">Papal Mass</a> at <a href=\"http://www.cua.edu/\" target=\"_blank\">Catholic University</a> in northeast DC which has never been one of the nicer sections of DC. I had taken the Metro up from the airport and would be getting back on it to catch my evening flight to Detroit. The Brookland stop at Catholic isn’t a big stop and I figured it would get overwhelmed at the end of the Mass by the 25,000 people there. I started thinking of alternatives. Getting a cab or an Uber would probably be just as tough, so my best alternative would be to walk down to the next stop south on the Red Line -- Rhode Island Ave. From my days in DC, I remember that neighborhood being a particularly rough one. That would not be a pleasant walk. I decided to skip Communion and leave the Pope early to beat the crowds at the Brookland stop.</li>\r\n	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Most of the times when we talk about travel security, we talk about airport security or digital security, but not often about physical security. Yet very often, travel drops in unfamiliar settings -- usually by our own choice -- where we could unknowingly wander into a very unsafe situation</span></li>\r\n	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I did exactly this some years ago when visiting Cape Town, South Africa. I was shopping through some craft stalls set up in a park and just kept wandering along. I kinda looking at the buildings, up and around… Oh, and I have my big Nikon SLR slung over my shoulder. Not sure I could’ve looked any more like a tourist unless I was wearing a big “Don’t Mess With Texas” t-shirt and a Dallas Cowboys baseball cap. At some point, I finally regain some situational awareness -- and, from my university years living in Northeast DC and on the Southside of Chicago, realize that I’m not in the best neighborhood right now. I move to the middle of the street -- so I don’t get jumped from a doorway -- and walk, with purpose now, back the way I came.</span></li>\r\n	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I did a little better this spring in New Orleans. I was standing on St Charles St in the Garden District watching a Mardi Gras parade. After a while, I got a bad feeling about the atmosphere around me. Nothing that I could put my finger on, but enough to make me give up a prime spot on the parade round and walk up the street a bit. In the next morning’s paper, I read there had been a gun fight at that spot about 30 minutes after I’d left.</span></li>\r\n	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">There have been other times in Joburg, Bangalore, Guadalajara, but considering how much I travel, they’re rare events -- I’ve wandered all through Madrid, Beijing, Tokyo, Edinburgh, Saigon and never felt unsafe -- but they get your attention. But then again, that’s outside the “travel bubble”. We’ve talked about that in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2008/04/29/podcast-64-escaping-the-travel-bubble-marks-travel-tips/\" target=\"_blank\">past episodes</a>, how travelers can often seem to float above the places they visit unless they make the effort to “pop” the travel bubble and engage.</span></li>\r\n	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">When those outside problems penetrate our bubble, now that’s more disturbing. Like the time some years back when I was visiting Rio -- years before the World Cup. I was checking in with a colleague who had done a lot of business there. He saw my room was on the second floor. “No, that won’t do,” he said, “we need to get you on a double-digit floor. At least 10 if not higher” “Why?” I asked. “Because,” he explained, “when the smash-and-grab gangs break in, they start on the first floor and work their way up until their bags are full. The higher you are, the more likely they’ll fill up before they get to you.” The logic was brutally impeccable. And this from a guy still sporting a couple of bruises from an earlier mugging on Copacabana Beach.</span></li>\r\n	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Or a few years ago, when another colleague had to take a taxi to connect between Delhi’s domestic and international terminal -- before the latest renovation. He’d forgotten to print out his international itinerary, so they wouldn’t let him on the transfer bus (I’ve talked about, in prior episodes, the need to have a printed flight itinerary in India). He couldn’t find anyone in the terminal to print one out for him so he walked out to the cab rank. He piles his bags into and on top of a taxi and off he goes -- to some out-of-the-way place under a highway overpass where the cab driver and a friend shake him down for most of his money and his watch -- they leave him with his luggage and enough money for cab fare to the international terminal. A polite mugging; no bruises with this one.</span></li>\r\n	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">My most disturbing bubble burst happened in the US -- in a Westin in Connecticut. A friend checked in and, since the hotel was oversold, was given one of those rooms that’s a conference room with a bathroom. They rolled out the tables and rolled in a bed for him. The next morning, as he’s getting dressed, he’s missing his watch, his ring, and the money and credit cards from his wallet -- all which were next to him on the nightstand. As he put it together, someone had broken into the room -- he saw that the conference room’s double doors had enough of a gap between them that you could open the lock by slipping a credit card or room key through the gap -- and they had stood next to him going through his stuff on the night stand. He’s lucky he’s a sound sleeper.</span></li>\r\n	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">And I consider myself lucky. I don’t lock myself away in the hotel. I make an effort to step outside the travel bubble -- to engage -- and after 30 years of heavy travel, other than <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/05/20/podcast-98-stolen-luggage-restaurants-want-your-smartphone/\">having my camera and passport stolen</a>, I’m really no worse the wear. Certainly no bruises to show for it. I’m not sure I’d do it any other way. Though I do pay more attention to hotel door construction than I used to.</span></li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a title=\"MP3 Download\" href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/download_track.php?id=0E74C6FEB7390D18D02B4B399668093172F6C8CC66DDC09D90A3BF7DDA436823CFAC859AE2B2C73E46A278A4950E1030\">Lonely Dog Blues</a></em> by <a title=\"Tobin James\' Web Site\" href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/label.php?id=2A3449F03E7B8462FF74407B60F0C4B0A30A0CBE880C61DE37E3B342387F0643\">Tobin James</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Switching Back to Apple</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>After your government ID, the smartphone is probably the most important thing you travel with. And while I quickly whip out my ID a few times a trip to prove my identity  -- to the TSA agent, to hotel clerks, to car rental check out folks, I use my smartphone constantly -- maybe too constantly. Be that as it may, the smartphone is <i>the</i> critical tool for today’s frequent traveler. A carpenter has his framing hammer, the auto mechanic his Snap-On wrench -- for the road warrior, it’s the smart phone.</li>\r\n	<li>And so it wasn’t without a good bit of thought that I bit the bullet a few weeks ago and switched back to Apple; dumping my HTC One for a new iPhone 6S. I wasn’t thrilled to do it; I put it off for at least a month. And in the end, it was more a frustration with hardware -- with the slouching-toward-bankruptcy mess that HTC has become than it was excitement for the latest iThing.</li>\r\n	<li>Which I guess is the pattern for me. My first smartphone was an iPhone 3G and I’d had just about every iPhone model up to the 5. And it was the frustration with its truly horrid battery life that led me to the HTC. The cause this time was the lousy performance of my HTC One after they pushed their Android upgrade -- “Lollipop” -- at the beginning of this year. It just trashed the phone -- the lag was awful. The hardware components have the specs to handle the new version; it’s just that HTC’s implementation of it is crap. Now, it’s not like Apple nails their OS upgrades every time. The IOS 8 release didn’t exactly cover them in glory. But at least they worked to resolve the problem by iterating through releases in a fairly timely manner. After the initial “Lollipop” release, Google iterated through updates  -- I think ver 5.1.1 is the most recent -- and I’m waited for HTC to use that as an opportunity to clean up their 5.0 mess. They would say on Twitter “It’s coming, just wait”, And then “Oh, we’ll just skip 5.1 and give you 6.0 by the end of the year”. That was it. I’d suffered through 6 months of lousy performance and now they were saying I would have at least 3 more -- not that I have any reason to think that the near-bankrupt company has gotten any better at software estimating.</li>\r\n	<li>I don’t think that either Apple’s or Google’s operating systems are inherently better than the other. I’ve used them both. They both work. There are things I like about each of them, and since they seem to be stealing/emulating (?) each other’s best features, they’re more or less converging on each other.</li>\r\n	<li>For me, the difference is the hardware -- which is what is actually in our hands each day. I’ve always thought Apple is a better hardware company than a software one. I loved my MacBook Air, but was very “meh” about OS X. It’s really the Android equipment manufacturers that are pushing me away. It seems that most of the Android hardware innovation is at the large end -- large screen sizes -- 5 ½ inches and up -- which is way bigger than what want. And then there are the delays in Android upgrades as each manufacturer gooses Google’s release -- my 18-month old Samsung tablet is still on version 4.4 “Kit Kat”, now two version levels down, with no update in sight, let alone any security patches. With mobile devices becoming more vital, that foot dragging on upgrades and security patching very uncomfortable.</li>\r\n	<li>I was holding out for Google’s updated Nexus line, reading all rumor articles with spec leaks and blurred pictures. The 6P was too big for me, but the 5X -- I could do a 5.2-in screen with fast updates and patches. But then, when they unveiled the 5X, it topped it out at 32 GB with no expansion slots. For me, that is just too tight for my music, podcasts, pictures, video. So that’s it, I walked into the Apple store and bought a 64GB unlocked GSM 6S on their new upgrade plan -- new phone comes out, I trade mine in. It’s like leasing a car -- some people like the newest model. It’s all about the hardware.</li>\r\n	<li>Now if I can just keep iTunes from crashing on my Windows 10 box...</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #118</li>\r\n	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/\">Podshow Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\r\n	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_118.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #118 — Danger Within the Travel Bubble; Switching Back to Apple','','inherit','closed','closed','','1561-revision-v1','','','2015-11-08 18:28:12','2015-11-08 23:28:12','',1561,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/11/08/1561-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1572,1,'2015-11-08 19:00:19','2015-11-09 00:00:19','[caption id=\"attachment_1402\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"225\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/IMG_0159.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1402\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/IMG_0159-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"That\'s Gonna Make for a Long Walk\" width=\"225\" height=\"300\" /></a> Need More Taxes To Fix This[/caption]\r\n\r\nHere\'s a new episode to keep you occupied if you’re stuck in a line somewhere while traveling Thanksgiving week. There are tips for the non-frequent traveler on how to avoid major airport faux pas and a review of how travel taxes will soak you when you get to your destination. We also talk about a high-tech suitcase that\'s blown through its Indiegogo funding campaign, hackers emptying out Hilton Honors accounts, and an overseas WiFi session that emptied out someone\'s wallet.  You can listen to all this and more using the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_112.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below. [sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_112.mp3\"]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #112:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside Chicago, IL. Giving you something new to listen to if you’re stuck in a line somewhere while traveling Thanksgiving week. Don’t look for me, though. I got home Weds night and won’t be traveling again until the crowds clear out.</li>\r\n	<li>I was going to open up this episode with kind of a joke sponsorship, something like -- “Brought to you by People Express, thanking Spirit Airlines for making people nostalgic for us and Newark’s North Terminal”. For anyone old enough to have flown People Express in the early ‘80’s, I thought it would be a bit of a chuckle.</li>\r\n	<li>But last week, walking through New Orleans airport, I saw a People Express counter. Wait, what? Turns out that some group picked up the name for a new <a href=\"https://www.flypex.com/\" target=\"_blank\">airline</a> hubbing out of Newport News airport in southern Virginia. Service started this summer only to stop three months later after a ground truck hit one of their two planes. They were supposed to relaunch last month, but that didn’t happen. And then last month, Newport News airport <a href=\"http://wtkr.com/2014/11/18/whats-next-for-peoplexpress/\" target=\"_blank\">evicted</a> them for failure to turn over the Passenger Facility Charge that People Express collected on ticket sales over the summer.</li>\r\n	<li>So maybe my fake promo should go the other way, with Spirit thanking the new People Express for letting Spirit say to their passengers “Hey, you could do worse…”</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Zapac/25046\" target=\"_blank\"><i>You are (funky mix)</i></a> by Zapac</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>A couple of comments from the last episode…</li>\r\n	<li>On the TravelCommons’ Facebook <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\">page</a>, Steve Frick said “Listened to your latest episode last week flying into Atlanta. As walked down Concourse A, I saw TAP,  the craft beer bar you mentioned...it looked like an aquarium full of smokers”. I rummaged around the file folders of my mobile phone and found a picture of that bar which I posted on Facebook under Steve’s post. He nailed it. I couldn’t have come up with a better description.</li>\r\n	<li>Following up on the description of my first MARTA ride from ATL up north, Dan Gradwohl sent a note pointing to the website <a href=\"http://toandfromtheairport.com\" target=\"_blank\">toandfromtheairport.com</a>. He just returned from 5 weeks in the Balkans and said used the website for all those trips, and has used it to plan upcoming trips to Panama City (the one in Panama, not on the Redneck Riviera) and Santiago, Chile. I’d used it a couple of years ago when looking at rapid transit from Beijing airport into the city (I ended up punting and taking a cab, an adventure in its own right that I describe in episode #109). It’s a great resource, but, as you can imagine, tough to keep updated. Looking at the page for ORD, the train section doesn’t reflect the recent surcharge for L rides originating at ORD, and the taxi section doesn’t describe the logistical differences between getting a cab into the city (just get into the cab rank) vs. one to the suburbs -- which involves calling one of the cab companies, getting an assigned number, and then waiting one lane over, unless you want to pay meter-&amp;-a-half to one of the city cabs -- Welcome to Chicago.  I sent a note a week ago to the site owner, Steve Pells, with these updates but haven’t seen them reflected yet on the site.</li>\r\n	<li>Turning to my <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">Twitter</a> notifications, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/chris2x\">Chris Christensen</a> of the Amateur Traveler podcast sent a quick Twitter message on last episode’s seat recline rant -- “I agree with your assessment of the knee defender story, I am 6\' 3\" and can work on a laptop in <a href=\"https://twitter.com/united\">United</a>\'s Economy Plus seats”</li>\r\n	<li>Last month, Arnoud Heijnis pointed me to the <a href=\"http://design-milk.com/bluesmart-smart-carry-luggage/\" target=\"_blank\">Bluesmart carry-on bag</a>, the roller board with its own app, allowing you to track it, lock it, and getting notifications when it moves out of range from you. It rocketed past its $50,000 Indiegogo fundraising goal. The last time I checked, they had $1.1M in pledges. The crowdfunding closes Mon, Nov 24. Their Indiegogo <a href=\"https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/bluesmart-world-s-first-smart-connected-carry-on\" target=\"_blank\">page</a> is really good -- nice video, good description of the product, timeline laying out the steps between now and their July shipping date. They definitely hit that sweet spot of travel technology lust. Arnoud and I traded tweets on whether or not to pull the trigger. Arnoud makes a good point about wanted to see how the inside is laid out -- there’s no picture of that on the Indiegogo page. I’m in the market for a new suitcase anyways. But can I wait until July? I’ll probably pull the trigger this weekend before it closes.</li>\r\n	<li>As I continue to prattle on about the wonders and benefits of TSA PreCheck, I came up with a new one early Monday morning -- since I don’t have to take my shoes off, I don’t have to risk waking my wife up by turning on the light to make sure I don’t pick a pair of socks with a hole in it. Yeah, it’s a nit, but it’s one less little thing to spike my morning. And I do have to give the TSA credit for adapting to its popularity. Monday morning in ORD’s Terminal 1 -- the United terminal -- definitely rush hour with all the consultants flying out to their client sites -- they had 4 lanes of PreCheck, shuttling the non-PreCheck Premiere fliers to another line nearby. It could’ve been ugly, but I was through in 5 minutes. I’ve bashed the TSA enough; I also want to give credit where credit is due.</li>\r\n	<li>Don’t know if you caught the <a href=\"http://www.tnooz.com/article/ongoing-hiltons-loyalty-program-hackers-continue-selling-account-access/\" target=\"_blank\">news</a> at the beginning of the month that the Hilton HHonors program was hit by hackers. After getting replacement credit cards sent to me after the Target and then the Home Depot breaches, I gotta say that I’ve become a bit complacent about these announcements. Hilton had weak security, allowing the use of a 4-digit PIN instead of a strong password, allowing is suspected to be a brute force attack -- not a problem with just 4 numbers. Once in, the hackers drained the accounts, most of them swapping points for gift cards, or selling the points on hacker forums for pennies on the equivalent dollar, though there were a couple of cases of thieves redeeming the points for nights -- one victim found that 250,000 of his points had been used to buy $1200 worth of nights at low-end Hilton brands along the East Coast. Hilton hasn’t said how many points they’ve had to reimburse.  Many people treat their award points accounts like savings accounts for travel -- banking miles or frequent sleeper points for a summer vacation. But until recently, airlines and hotels haven’t secured them with anything close to bank-like security. Hilton and Delta allowed 4-digit PINs (Delta is switching over to strong passwords), United still allows 6-character passwords. But it’s changing. Before Delta’s switch, I noticed American and Marriott forcing the use of slightly stronger 8-character passwords. And Hilton has now added a captcha to slow down brute force attacks. It’s certainly not banking-style 2-factor authentication, but it’s a start. Another good start would be to change all my travel site passwords to something other than ABC123.</li>\r\n	<li>There was another <a href=\"http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/11/18/passenger-stuck-with-1171-wi-fi-bill-on-singapore-airlines-flight/\" target=\"_blank\">story</a> I tweeted out this week involving in-flight WiFi. Some guy racked up an almost $1,200 bill checking e-mail and downloading PPT files on his LHR-SIN flight -- $29 for the initial 30 MB and over $1,100 in overage fees. The guy gets the e-mail receipt and is probably stunned. Then, this being the age of social media, he appears to have immediately created a little picture with his receipt and an Sing Air plane and posted it on Twitter with the first word in all caps -- Gouged! And then put together a blog post. The guy, Jeremy Gutsche, bills himself as Innovation Expert, Author, Keynote Speaker &amp; Chief Trend Hunter (CEO) at TrendHunter.com. If he’s that hip to trends, you’d expect him to know how expensive in-flight overseas internet connectivity is. The WiFi provider, OnAir, says he has to pay the bill saying that the process for purchasing its services is “entirely transparent.” Passengers can choose to end their sessions when they reach a certain price limit, a graphic shows data consumption at all times and users can disconnect whenever they want. Gutsche said he only sent some e-mail, uploaded a 4 MB PPT file and looked at 155 web pages. OnAir said “To consume several hundred megabytes during one flight takes much more than basic email viewing, for example downloading heavy attachments, cloud access and using Skype”. I think the cloud access might be the culprit. While I love having all my documents sync’d to the cloud -- to get at them from any device and for backup -- I’ve found that it can quickly chew up bandwidth. When I first got my Verizon WiFi hot spot, I found myself easily chewing through 6-10 GB and just couldn’t figure it out. Until I remembered that I had my 2 GB Outlook archive pst file set to sync to Microsoft’s OneDrive. Now, when I switch over to the hot spot, I kill off the OneDrive sync app. No more nagging e-mails from Verizon. Would’ve been a much more expensive lesson at 35,000 ft.</li>\r\n	<li>And if you have any travel experiences -- technology or otherwise, or just general observations, thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/35879\" target=\"_blank\"><i>Two Guitars</i></a> by Admiral Bob</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Holiday Airport Etiquette Refresher</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Unless you’ve been catatonic for the last week, you know that we’re creeping up to the busiest travel day of the year -- Travelgeddon as one local TV reporter called it, causing me to do an Elvis and throw something large at the hotel TV set (luckily today’s flat screens are much more resilient than tubes of Elvis’ day). Yes, the Wednesday before Thanksgiving is nigh.</li>\r\n	<li>I also know this because, right around this time the TravelCommons mailbox gets filled with helpful story ideas from PR firms along the lines of this one from Energy Water -- “The day before Thanksgiving is the busiest travel day of the year—between the kids, pets and luggage holiday travel can be a hassle. These 6 travel must-haves take the stress out of traveling to see family and loved ones.”</li>\r\n	<li>Top on the list, Energy Water, of course --which seems to be another twist on caffeinated water. Go ahead, give it to the kids and see how popular you are with your seat mates in the back of a Spirit Airlines plane. #2 -- noise cancelling headphones. Always a popular item, especially when surrounded by kids hyped up on Energy Water. #3 -- Therapeutic eye mask. Hmmm, I don’t see too many of those on my flight. #4 -- Portable power charger. One of those batteries-in-a-box things with a couple of USB ports at the end. I’d move this above the eye mask. Very handy, especially around holiday time when families will be huddling around airport electrical outlets the same way the forefathers would huddle around a fire while out on the hunt. #5 Packing cubes. Nah, never used them. They take up space that could be used for other clothes. #6 -- Portable UV germ sanitizer. Probably a bit more popular in these Ebola-paranoid times. Instead of swabbing everything down with hand sanitizer (which I’ve seen people do on airplanes), you just wave the UV wand over it. I dunno seems a bit too easy. I think I’d want to see some efficacy data before putting money down.</li>\r\n	<li>So while there are tons of  “bring this” lists running around, I haven’t seen an advice list of what’s really the problem during holiday travel -- airport etiquette. It’s not just the crowds; it’s the crowds of, well what some might call “clueless” travelers. I think “amateur” is certainly a nicer and probably more accurate term. So for those amateur travelers, or folks who’ve been off the road for a bit and need a refresher, here’s a list of key etiquette tips, that from my recent travel observations, need to be said...</li>\r\n	<li>Let’s start at the front of the airport -- the security line. The TSA is pushing PreCheck so you may get lucky and find it on your boarding pass. Or, a TSA person may randomly pull you out of the regular line and send you over to PreCheck. It’s your lucky day! Don’t spoil it, though, by not knowing the PreCheck rules. Put your phone away and read the signs -- don’t take off your shoes, don’t pull your liquids out, keep your jacket on, …. Read the signs and don’t slow it down for everyone else.</li>\r\n	<li>If getting to your gate involves a moving platform or an escalator, stand to the right because people are walking -- usually quickly -- on the left. Traveling with others, you’ll naturally want to stand abreast, but then you’re blocking everyone else. Don’t do it unless you want to get run over.</li>\r\n	<li>When you hit the airport Starbucks for your pre-flight coffee, remember that this isn’t your neighborhood Starbucks run by friendly Starbucks-trained baristas. It’s run by Sodexo Marriott that don’t care quite so much about coffee training. And they’re not quite as efficient. And there are usually a lot of people behind you in line. Keep your order to 3 adjectives or less. Tall skim latte is good. The half-decaf 3-pump no-foam vente vanilla latte -- not so much.</li>\r\n	<li>Queuing up at the gate, don’t try to cheat on the boarding. Everyone’s looking at each others boarding passes, and airlines are telling their agents to get more strict. On almost every flight, I’ve seen the boarding agent direct someone over to the wall of shame to wait for their boarding group to be called. Don’t embarrass your family. Wait your turn.</li>\r\n	<li>And if you’re using an electronic boarding pass on your smartphone, turn off auto-rotate. If you don’t, odds are that your screen will start oscillating between portrait and landscape while you’re trying to get it on the reader. Those readers are picky enough; you’ll delay the boarding line and quickly earn the enmity of your seatmates -- even before you sit shoulder-to-shoulder with them for 2-4 hours.</li>\r\n	<li>And finally, and this is a big one, don’t put your small bag in the overhead. I don’t care if you checked a bag, don’t be that person who puts a purse or a briefcase in the overhead. Show a little holiday spirit -- put ‘em under the seat in front of you and leave space for one more roller board for the poor urchins in Groups 3, 4 or 5. When that person’s bag doesn’t get dropped on a tight connection through DFW, and they’re able to sit down to Thanksgiving dinner in something other than day-old sweats, they’ll thank you.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djlang59/22228\" target=\"_blank\"><em>Garden Of The Forking</em></a><em> </em>by J.Lang</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Travel Tax Pile-Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>I ought to title this episode “Mark’s Rant” ‘cause I’m rolling right from “Hey you, once-a-year traveler, get outta my airport” to “Hey you, politician, get outta my wallet.”</li>\r\n	<li>Looking at my last couple of hotel bills in New Orleans -- room tax state, room tax city, occupancy tax, convention and visitors bureau assessment -- it adds 15% to my room rate; just a bit more than the regular New Orleans sales tax rate of 9%.</li>\r\n	<li>Last year, a trade association -- the Global Business Travel Association -- put out a list of the top 10 worst cities for what they called “discriminatory travel taxes” -- those specifically on travel services (hotels, rental cars) above and beyond general sales taxes. New Orleans didn’t make the cut. Top on the list -- Portland, OR at $23/day in extra travel taxes. Boston is second at $19/day, with those welcoming Midwest cities of Indianapolis, Minneapolis, and Chicago rounding out the top 5.</li>\r\n	<li>We all know why this happens -- ‘cause travelers don’t vote, at least in the places where they get charged these travel taxes. So for local politicians, raising the hotel or rental car tax generates much less blowback than a property tax bump. For example, of the 150 largest US cities, 120 of them have some sort of dedicated tax on hotel rooms. And there’s real money there -- $487 million of travel taxes in 2012 for New York City; $240 million for San Francisco. For hotel taxes, St Louis, surprisingly, has the highest rate -- 22%, with the average being about 13.5%. SFO has the highest rental car tax rate -- 24%; the average is 12.8%</li>\r\n	<li>Of course, on top of these taxes, they stack additional line items. New Orleans’ hotel tax is 13%, just below the average. But then they tack on a dollar for city occupancy tax and another $2.50 to fund the convention and visitors bureau, which bumps up an average 13% tax rate to that 15% rate. I gotta say, though, that these add-ons pale in comparison to the 14% tourism tax that I got pegged with the last time I was up in Napa.</li>\r\n	<li>Rental cars, though, are the worst. In one of my rare TravelCommons blog <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2009/10/25/skipping-the-rental-car/#more-176\">posts</a>, I looked at a string of 4 rental car receipts and saw taxes and state surcharges and airport facility charges increased my final bill by 27-51%!</li>\r\n	<li>What do you do about it? Well, with rental cars, I work my damndest to skip them. In New Orleans, I pick hotels that let me walk to and from my client’s office -- skip the rental car fees <i>and</i> get exercise. A two-fer, ‘cause given the food in New Orleans, I need all the exercise I can get. Hotels -- it’s a bit tougher. You might think about using Airbnb, but that loophole is getting closed. Starting last month, Airbnb is collecting San Francisco’s 14% hotel tax and is getting squeezed by most other cities. And Couchsurfing, at least for business trips, is, for me, not worth the hassle.</li>\r\n	<li>So whenever I pass the tourist kiosk in New Orleans airport, I always make sure I take something, even if I don’t really need it -- because I’m gonna be paying for it whether I take it or not.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917626811171154.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #112</li>\r\n	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_112.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #112 — Holiday Airport Etiquette; Travel Tax Pile-Up','','inherit','closed','closed','','1398-revision-v1','','','2015-11-08 19:00:19','2015-11-09 00:00:19','',1398,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/11/08/1398-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1573,1,'2015-11-08 19:05:57','2015-11-09 00:05:57','','DSC_4956','This hotel door could use some work','inherit','open','closed','','dsc_4956','','','2015-11-08 19:11:52','2015-11-09 00:11:52','',1561,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/DSC_4956.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(1574,1,'2015-11-08 19:12:05','2015-11-09 00:12:05','[caption id=\"attachment_1573\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/DSC_4956.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/DSC_4956-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"This hotel door could use some work\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-1573\" /></a> This hotel door could use some work[/caption]Apologies in advance because this is pretty much a stream-of-consciousness episode, with semi-strung together thoughts about eggs, car rentals, seeing the Pope, travel food, and stuff from my September trip to Scotland.  I talk about how handy I found the new <a href=\"https://revolut.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Revolut</a> service for spending and sending money in Europe; recent good and bad experiences with <a href=\"https://www.hertz.com/rentacar/emember/join/overview.do?learnMore=presidentsCircle\" target=\"_blank\">Hertz </a>and other car rentals; most bad experience with <a href=\"http://britishairways.com\" target=\"_blank\">British Airways</a>; and how true-to-life the <a href=\"https://youtu.be/2JqRXLQYF9o\" target=\"_blank\">Doritos Super Bowl commercial</a> portrays the Southwest boarding experience.  All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_118.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/227996070\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #118:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, less than a month since the last episode. There’s a shocker. It’s been one of my lighter travel months. No international travel, no up-and-backs across the US. Indeed, there were a couple of weeks where I didn’t even pack a bag -- just did day trips to Detroit and Atlanta. There is something liberating about that -- just carrying a briefcase or backpack. I guess that would’ve been the ideal situation to check out Spirit Airlines, but I don’t hate myself that much.</li>\r\n	<li>No rush to get to the gate for the start of boarding. Stroll up, sit down and then  stay seated while the agent works through the cadence of status boarding groups -- really important customers, kinda important customers, fake important customers, and then everyone else. No roller board meant no need for the boarding scrum. I just waited for last call and walked on board. Kinda reminded me of the days when I first started flying when, rather than racing to be first on the plane, we’d see who could be last -- how late you could show up and still get on the plane. My boss won when he talked his way past an agent, got onto the jet bridge, knocked on the plane door, which the crew opened and let him on. I don’t think I’ll push it quite that far.</li>\r\n	<li>A few of this month’s trips have been in and out of Boston Logan Airport. And for as much stick as I give United Airlines -- broken planes, late flights, just general lousy service -- I have to give them credit for their <a href=\"http://newsroom.united.com/2014-04-28-New-United-Concourse-at-Boston-Logan-Offers-Customers-Modern-Streamlined-Airport-Experience\" target=\"_blank\">gate area</a> at Logan. Parts of it look like a hip hotel lounge -- cool hanging lights, non-bench seating. There’s stand-up/high-top counter space for laptops with lots of plugs. And even the self-serve boarding gates -- with modern subway-style turnstiles that scan your boarding pass before letting you in -- worked well. It’s probably one of the nicest gate areas I’ve been in in a long time. Nice job, United!</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>One Day</em> by <a href=\"http://www.hollowhorse.co.uk/\">Hollow Horse</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>I got a good bit of commentary from the last episode, so thank everyone very much.</li>\r\n	<li>Rob Cheshire posted this comment on the web site:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>“In defense of British Airways, you stepped into the middle of their new hand-luggage policy roll-out, which is designed to reign-in the amount of cabin baggage, which had really gotten out of hand. They are being strict across the board, on elite members, as well as everyone else, and it is definitely having a positive impact on bin-space, as well as minimising the amount of messing around (checking the last few wheelie bags that can’t be stowed) that the cabin crew have to take care of in the minutes prior to push-back.”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>Rob, thanks for that. One thing I did like BA’s luggage approach was tagging the second bag meant to go underseat -- in my case, a backpack -- with a bright yellow tag to keep people from putting 2 bags overhead. There is not much that’s ruder in plane travel than early boarders -- status fliers -- maximizing their leg space at the expense of the rest the plane. Tagging that second bag makes it easy for flight attendants or later boarders to call out bin hogging. I’d love to see that move across the Atlantic.</li>\r\n	<li>Andrew Gill left a comment on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page building on my thoughts about using the new Revolut debit card during my September trip to Scotland. Andrew said:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>“The piece of Revolut was interesting. I\'ve just spent six months living and working in The Philipines. I was lucky to be involved in the pilot of Supercard from <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/TravelexUK/?hc_location=ufi\">Travelex UK</a> (<a href=\"https://supercard.io/\">https://supercard.io/</a>). It\'s a physical card, complete with chip and pin, that can be used in retail stores and for online purchases too.</li>\r\n	<li>“The card is free, and transactions are processed at the Visa Europe Exchange rate, with no foreign exchange fees or commission added on, but the *killer* feature is it\'s linked to an existing debit or credit card so there\'s no need to pre-load money onto the card. transactions are processed in my home currency, so again, there are no foreign exchange fees or commission added on</li>\r\n	<li>“The pilot program has closed now, so fingers crossed, it comes out of pilot and into general release</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>Andrew, thanks for that pointer. I agree that being able to link the Travelex Supercard back to a debit or credit card is very useful vs. the Revolut model which is more like a pre-paid debit card. Looking at the Supercard website, it looks like the pilot was only for UK card holders. Hopefully, they’ll be able to expand their geographic footprint when they fully launch the card. Interesting that Revolut is also a UK-based company. Seems like London is a hotspot for these fintech companies. Last week, I was talking to a guy who moved from London to Chicago to start up the US operations for a different London-based fintech company -- more based on lending than payments. He said that HSBC looked hard at buying Revolut because they were doing something HSBC couldn’t even given their global reach and scale. Between Revolut and Supercard, and big banks like Chase dropping foreign exchange fees on their credit cards, the money hassles of international travel keep going down. It’s a far cry from having to cash an American Express travelers check at the airport exchange desk so you could get a cab to your hotel.</li>\r\n	<li>In an<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/01/29/podcast-107-serious-about-hotel-reviews-tsa-gets-something-right/\"> earlier episode</a>, I talked about evaluation criteria for my TripAdvisor reviews -- the bathroom, room size, workout room, location, service quality. I decided during one of my trips last month that I’m adding a new criterion -- accessible bedside electrical outlets. Most frequent travelers I know use their phone or tablet as an alarm, eliminating the need to discern operating instructions for each hotel’s unique brand of clock radio. Most hotels have figured this out and provide outlets on the nightstand -- in wall, along the side of the nightstand, on the lamp base…. But last month, I hit one of those knuckle draggers -- a hotel in Vegas. I practically had to disassemble one of the beds to find an outlet hidden behind it. Luckily, I carry long power cords.</li>\r\n	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Clear My Head</em> by <a href=\"http://www.thefiasco.net/\">FIASCO</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Danger Within The Travel Bubble</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>In the last episode, I talked about attending the <a href=\"http://popeindc.cua.edu/the-papal-mass/\" target=\"_blank\">Papal Mass</a> at <a href=\"http://www.cua.edu/\" target=\"_blank\">Catholic University</a> in northeast DC which has never been one of the nicer sections of DC. I had taken the Metro up from the airport and would be getting back on it to catch my evening flight to Detroit. The Brookland stop at Catholic isn’t a big stop and I figured it would get overwhelmed at the end of the Mass by the 25,000 people there. I started thinking of alternatives. Getting a cab or an Uber would probably be just as tough, so my best alternative would be to walk down to the next stop south on the Red Line -- Rhode Island Ave. From my days in DC, I remember that neighborhood being a particularly rough one. That would not be a pleasant walk. I decided to skip Communion and leave the Pope early to beat the crowds at the Brookland stop.</li>\r\n	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Most of the times when we talk about travel security, we talk about airport security or digital security, but not often about physical security. Yet very often, travel drops in unfamiliar settings -- usually by our own choice -- where we could unknowingly wander into a very unsafe situation</span></li>\r\n	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I did exactly this some years ago when visiting Cape Town, South Africa. I was shopping through some craft stalls set up in a park and just kept wandering along. I kinda looking at the buildings, up and around… Oh, and I have my big Nikon SLR slung over my shoulder. Not sure I could’ve looked any more like a tourist unless I was wearing a big “Don’t Mess With Texas” t-shirt and a Dallas Cowboys baseball cap. At some point, I finally regain some situational awareness -- and, from my university years living in Northeast DC and on the Southside of Chicago, realize that I’m not in the best neighborhood right now. I move to the middle of the street -- so I don’t get jumped from a doorway -- and walk, with purpose now, back the way I came.</span></li>\r\n	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I did a little better this spring in New Orleans. I was standing on St Charles St in the Garden District watching a Mardi Gras parade. After a while, I got a bad feeling about the atmosphere around me. Nothing that I could put my finger on, but enough to make me give up a prime spot on the parade round and walk up the street a bit. In the next morning’s paper, I read there had been a gun fight at that spot about 30 minutes after I’d left.</span></li>\r\n	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">There have been other times in Joburg, Bangalore, Guadalajara, but considering how much I travel, they’re rare events -- I’ve wandered all through Madrid, Beijing, Tokyo, Edinburgh, Saigon and never felt unsafe -- but they get your attention. But then again, that’s outside the “travel bubble”. We’ve talked about that in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2008/04/29/podcast-64-escaping-the-travel-bubble-marks-travel-tips/\" target=\"_blank\">past episodes</a>, how travelers can often seem to float above the places they visit unless they make the effort to “pop” the travel bubble and engage.</span></li>\r\n	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">When those outside problems penetrate our bubble, now that’s more disturbing. Like the time some years back when I was visiting Rio -- years before the World Cup. I was checking in with a colleague who had done a lot of business there. He saw my room was on the second floor. “No, that won’t do,” he said, “we need to get you on a double-digit floor. At least 10 if not higher” “Why?” I asked. “Because,” he explained, “when the smash-and-grab gangs break in, they start on the first floor and work their way up until their bags are full. The higher you are, the more likely they’ll fill up before they get to you.” The logic was brutally impeccable. And this from a guy still sporting a couple of bruises from an earlier mugging on Copacabana Beach.</span></li>\r\n	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Or a few years ago, when another colleague had to take a taxi to connect between Delhi’s domestic and international terminal -- before the latest renovation. He’d forgotten to print out his international itinerary, so they wouldn’t let him on the transfer bus (I’ve talked about, in prior episodes, the need to have a printed flight itinerary in India). He couldn’t find anyone in the terminal to print one out for him so he walked out to the cab rank. He piles his bags into and on top of a taxi and off he goes -- to some out-of-the-way place under a highway overpass where the cab driver and a friend shake him down for most of his money and his watch -- they leave him with his luggage and enough money for cab fare to the international terminal. A polite mugging; no bruises with this one.</span></li>\r\n	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">My most disturbing bubble burst happened in the US -- in a Westin in Connecticut. A friend checked in and, since the hotel was oversold, was given one of those rooms that’s a conference room with a bathroom. They rolled out the tables and rolled in a bed for him. The next morning, as he’s getting dressed, he’s missing his watch, his ring, and the money and credit cards from his wallet -- all which were next to him on the nightstand. As he put it together, someone had broken into the room -- he saw that the conference room’s double doors had enough of a gap between them that you could open the lock by slipping a credit card or room key through the gap -- and they had stood next to him going through his stuff on the night stand. He’s lucky he’s a sound sleeper.</span></li>\r\n	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">And I consider myself lucky. I don’t lock myself away in the hotel. I make an effort to step outside the travel bubble -- to engage -- and after 30 years of heavy travel, other than <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/05/20/podcast-98-stolen-luggage-restaurants-want-your-smartphone/\">having my camera and passport stolen</a>, I’m really no worse the wear. Certainly no bruises to show for it. I’m not sure I’d do it any other way. Though I do pay more attention to hotel door construction than I used to.</span></li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a title=\"MP3 Download\" href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/download_track.php?id=0E74C6FEB7390D18D02B4B399668093172F6C8CC66DDC09D90A3BF7DDA436823CFAC859AE2B2C73E46A278A4950E1030\">Lonely Dog Blues</a></em> by <a title=\"Tobin James\' Web Site\" href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/label.php?id=2A3449F03E7B8462FF74407B60F0C4B0A30A0CBE880C61DE37E3B342387F0643\">Tobin James</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Switching Back to Apple</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>After your government ID, the smartphone is probably the most important thing you travel with. And while I quickly whip out my ID a few times a trip to prove my identity  -- to the TSA agent, to hotel clerks, to car rental check out folks, I use my smartphone constantly -- maybe too constantly. Be that as it may, the smartphone is <i>the</i> critical tool for today’s frequent traveler. A carpenter has his framing hammer, the auto mechanic his Snap-On wrench -- for the road warrior, it’s the smart phone.</li>\r\n	<li>And so it wasn’t without a good bit of thought that I bit the bullet a few weeks ago and switched back to Apple; dumping my HTC One for a new iPhone 6S. I wasn’t thrilled to do it; I put it off for at least a month. And in the end, it was more a frustration with hardware -- with the slouching-toward-bankruptcy mess that HTC has become than it was excitement for the latest iThing.</li>\r\n	<li>Which I guess is the pattern for me. My first smartphone was an iPhone 3G and I’d had just about every iPhone model up to the 5. And it was the frustration with its truly horrid battery life that led me to the HTC. The cause this time was the lousy performance of my HTC One after they pushed their Android upgrade -- “Lollipop” -- at the beginning of this year. It just trashed the phone -- the lag was awful. The hardware components have the specs to handle the new version; it’s just that HTC’s implementation of it is crap. Now, it’s not like Apple nails their OS upgrades every time. The IOS 8 release didn’t exactly cover them in glory. But at least they worked to resolve the problem by iterating through releases in a fairly timely manner. After the initial “Lollipop” release, Google iterated through updates  -- I think ver 5.1.1 is the most recent -- and I’m waited for HTC to use that as an opportunity to clean up their 5.0 mess. They would say on Twitter “It’s coming, just wait”, And then “Oh, we’ll just skip 5.1 and give you 6.0 by the end of the year”. That was it. I’d suffered through 6 months of lousy performance and now they were saying I would have at least 3 more -- not that I have any reason to think that the near-bankrupt company has gotten any better at software estimating.</li>\r\n	<li>I don’t think that either Apple’s or Google’s operating systems are inherently better than the other. I’ve used them both. They both work. There are things I like about each of them, and since they seem to be stealing/emulating (?) each other’s best features, they’re more or less converging on each other.</li>\r\n	<li>For me, the difference is the hardware -- which is what is actually in our hands each day. I’ve always thought Apple is a better hardware company than a software one. I loved my MacBook Air, but was very “meh” about OS X. It’s really the Android equipment manufacturers that are pushing me away. It seems that most of the Android hardware innovation is at the large end -- large screen sizes -- 5 ½ inches and up -- which is way bigger than what want. And then there are the delays in Android upgrades as each manufacturer gooses Google’s release -- my 18-month old Samsung tablet is still on version 4.4 “Kit Kat”, now two version levels down, with no update in sight, let alone any security patches. With mobile devices becoming more vital, that foot dragging on upgrades and security patching very uncomfortable.</li>\r\n	<li>I was holding out for Google’s updated Nexus line, reading all rumor articles with spec leaks and blurred pictures. The 6P was too big for me, but the 5X -- I could do a 5.2-in screen with fast updates and patches. But then, when they unveiled the 5X, it topped it out at 32 GB with no expansion slots. For me, that is just too tight for my music, podcasts, pictures, video. So that’s it, I walked into the Apple store and bought a 64GB unlocked GSM 6S on their new upgrade plan -- new phone comes out, I trade mine in. It’s like leasing a car -- some people like the newest model. It’s all about the hardware.</li>\r\n	<li>Now if I can just keep iTunes from crashing on my Windows 10 box...</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #118</li>\r\n	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/\">Podshow Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\r\n	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_118.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #118 — Danger Within the Travel Bubble; Switching Back to Apple','','inherit','closed','closed','','1561-revision-v1','','','2015-11-08 19:12:05','2015-11-09 00:12:05','',1561,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/11/08/1561-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1575,1,'2015-11-08 19:34:20','2015-11-09 00:34:20','[caption id=\"attachment_1573\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/DSC_4956.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1573\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/DSC_4956-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"This hotel door could use some work\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> This hotel door could use some work[/caption]\r\n\r\nA bit less of a random walk than the last episode, we talk about safety, physical safety, when traveling. While we sometimes put ourselves in the midst of dodgy surroundings, we usually feel safe when we retreat back into the \"travel bubble\" What about when the bubble is no longer safe? Smartphones are the frequent traveler\'s most important tool. So when an upgrade to my HTC One killed its usefulness, I found myself heading back to Apple.  All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_118.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/232191753\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #118:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, less than a month since the last episode. There’s a shocker. It’s been one of my lighter travel months. No international travel, no up-and-backs across the US. Indeed, there were a couple of weeks where I didn’t even pack a bag -- just did day trips to Detroit and Atlanta. There is something liberating about that -- just carrying a briefcase or backpack. I guess that would’ve been the ideal situation to check out Spirit Airlines, but I don’t hate myself that much.</li>\r\n	<li>No rush to get to the gate for the start of boarding. Stroll up, sit down and then  stay seated while the agent works through the cadence of status boarding groups -- really important customers, kinda important customers, fake important customers, and then everyone else. No roller board meant no need for the boarding scrum. I just waited for last call and walked on board. Kinda reminded me of the days when I first started flying when, rather than racing to be first on the plane, we’d see who could be last -- how late you could show up and still get on the plane. My boss won when he talked his way past an agent, got onto the jet bridge, knocked on the plane door, which the crew opened and let him on. I don’t think I’ll push it quite that far.</li>\r\n	<li>A few of this month’s trips have been in and out of Boston Logan Airport. And for as much stick as I give United Airlines -- broken planes, late flights, just general lousy service -- I have to give them credit for their <a href=\"http://newsroom.united.com/2014-04-28-New-United-Concourse-at-Boston-Logan-Offers-Customers-Modern-Streamlined-Airport-Experience\" target=\"_blank\">gate area</a> at Logan. Parts of it look like a hip hotel lounge -- cool hanging lights, non-bench seating. There’s stand-up/high-top counter space for laptops with lots of plugs. And even the self-serve boarding gates -- with modern subway-style turnstiles that scan your boarding pass before letting you in -- worked well. It’s probably one of the nicest gate areas I’ve been in in a long time. Nice job, United!</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>One Day</em> by <a href=\"http://www.hollowhorse.co.uk/\">Hollow Horse</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>I got a good bit of commentary from the last episode, so thank everyone very much.</li>\r\n	<li>Rob Cheshire posted this comment on the web site:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>“In defense of British Airways, you stepped into the middle of their new hand-luggage policy roll-out, which is designed to reign-in the amount of cabin baggage, which had really gotten out of hand. They are being strict across the board, on elite members, as well as everyone else, and it is definitely having a positive impact on bin-space, as well as minimising the amount of messing around (checking the last few wheelie bags that can’t be stowed) that the cabin crew have to take care of in the minutes prior to push-back.”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>Rob, thanks for that. One thing I did like BA’s luggage approach was tagging the second bag meant to go underseat -- in my case, a backpack -- with a bright yellow tag to keep people from putting 2 bags overhead. There is not much that’s ruder in plane travel than early boarders -- status fliers -- maximizing their leg space at the expense of the rest the plane. Tagging that second bag makes it easy for flight attendants or later boarders to call out bin hogging. I’d love to see that move across the Atlantic.</li>\r\n	<li>Andrew Gill left a comment on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page building on my thoughts about using the new Revolut debit card during my September trip to Scotland. Andrew said:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>“The piece of Revolut was interesting. I\'ve just spent six months living and working in The Philipines. I was lucky to be involved in the pilot of Supercard from <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/TravelexUK/?hc_location=ufi\">Travelex UK</a> (<a href=\"https://supercard.io/\">https://supercard.io/</a>). It\'s a physical card, complete with chip and pin, that can be used in retail stores and for online purchases too.</li>\r\n	<li>“The card is free, and transactions are processed at the Visa Europe Exchange rate, with no foreign exchange fees or commission added on, but the *killer* feature is it\'s linked to an existing debit or credit card so there\'s no need to pre-load money onto the card. transactions are processed in my home currency, so again, there are no foreign exchange fees or commission added on</li>\r\n	<li>“The pilot program has closed now, so fingers crossed, it comes out of pilot and into general release</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>Andrew, thanks for that pointer. I agree that being able to link the Travelex Supercard back to a debit or credit card is very useful vs. the Revolut model which is more like a pre-paid debit card. Looking at the Supercard website, it looks like the pilot was only for UK card holders. Hopefully, they’ll be able to expand their geographic footprint when they fully launch the card. Interesting that Revolut is also a UK-based company. Seems like London is a hotspot for these fintech companies. Last week, I was talking to a guy who moved from London to Chicago to start up the US operations for a different London-based fintech company -- more based on lending than payments. He said that HSBC looked hard at buying Revolut because they were doing something HSBC couldn’t even given their global reach and scale. Between Revolut and Supercard, and big banks like Chase dropping foreign exchange fees on their credit cards, the money hassles of international travel keep going down. It’s a far cry from having to cash an American Express travelers check at the airport exchange desk so you could get a cab to your hotel.</li>\r\n	<li>In an<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/01/29/podcast-107-serious-about-hotel-reviews-tsa-gets-something-right/\"> earlier episode</a>, I talked about evaluation criteria for my TripAdvisor reviews -- the bathroom, room size, workout room, location, service quality. I decided during one of my trips last month that I’m adding a new criterion -- accessible bedside electrical outlets. Most frequent travelers I know use their phone or tablet as an alarm, eliminating the need to discern operating instructions for each hotel’s unique brand of clock radio. Most hotels have figured this out and provide outlets on the nightstand -- in wall, along the side of the nightstand, on the lamp base…. But last month, I hit one of those knuckle draggers -- a hotel in Vegas. I practically had to disassemble one of the beds to find an outlet hidden behind it. Luckily, I carry long power cords.</li>\r\n	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Clear My Head</em> by <a href=\"http://www.thefiasco.net/\">FIASCO</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Danger Within The Travel Bubble</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>In the last episode, I talked about attending the <a href=\"http://popeindc.cua.edu/the-papal-mass/\" target=\"_blank\">Papal Mass</a> at <a href=\"http://www.cua.edu/\" target=\"_blank\">Catholic University</a> in northeast DC which has never been one of the nicer sections of DC. I had taken the Metro up from the airport and would be getting back on it to catch my evening flight to Detroit. The Brookland stop at Catholic isn’t a big stop and I figured it would get overwhelmed at the end of the Mass by the 25,000 people there. I started thinking of alternatives. Getting a cab or an Uber would probably be just as tough, so my best alternative would be to walk down to the next stop south on the Red Line -- Rhode Island Ave. From my days in DC, I remember that neighborhood being a particularly rough one. That would not be a pleasant walk. I decided to skip Communion and leave the Pope early to beat the crowds at the Brookland stop.</li>\r\n	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Most of the times when we talk about travel security, we talk about airport security or digital security, but not often about physical security. Yet very often, travel drops in unfamiliar settings -- usually by our own choice -- where we could unknowingly wander into a very unsafe situation</span></li>\r\n	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I did exactly this some years ago when visiting Cape Town, South Africa. I was shopping through some craft stalls set up in a park and just kept wandering along. I kinda looking at the buildings, up and around… Oh, and I have my big Nikon SLR slung over my shoulder. Not sure I could’ve looked any more like a tourist unless I was wearing a big “Don’t Mess With Texas” t-shirt and a Dallas Cowboys baseball cap. At some point, I finally regain some situational awareness -- and, from my university years living in Northeast DC and on the Southside of Chicago, realize that I’m not in the best neighborhood right now. I move to the middle of the street -- so I don’t get jumped from a doorway -- and walk, with purpose now, back the way I came.</span></li>\r\n	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I did a little better this spring in New Orleans. I was standing on St Charles St in the Garden District watching a Mardi Gras parade. After a while, I got a bad feeling about the atmosphere around me. Nothing that I could put my finger on, but enough to make me give up a prime spot on the parade round and walk up the street a bit. In the next morning’s paper, I read there had been a gun fight at that spot about 30 minutes after I’d left.</span></li>\r\n	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">There have been other times in Joburg, Bangalore, Guadalajara, but considering how much I travel, they’re rare events -- I’ve wandered all through Madrid, Beijing, Tokyo, Edinburgh, Saigon and never felt unsafe -- but they get your attention. But then again, that’s outside the “travel bubble”. We’ve talked about that in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2008/04/29/podcast-64-escaping-the-travel-bubble-marks-travel-tips/\" target=\"_blank\">past episodes</a>, how travelers can often seem to float above the places they visit unless they make the effort to “pop” the travel bubble and engage.</span></li>\r\n	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">When those outside problems penetrate our bubble, now that’s more disturbing. Like the time some years back when I was visiting Rio -- years before the World Cup. I was checking in with a colleague who had done a lot of business there. He saw my room was on the second floor. “No, that won’t do,” he said, “we need to get you on a double-digit floor. At least 10 if not higher” “Why?” I asked. “Because,” he explained, “when the smash-and-grab gangs break in, they start on the first floor and work their way up until their bags are full. The higher you are, the more likely they’ll fill up before they get to you.” The logic was brutally impeccable. And this from a guy still sporting a couple of bruises from an earlier mugging on Copacabana Beach.</span></li>\r\n	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Or a few years ago, when another colleague had to take a taxi to connect between Delhi’s domestic and international terminal -- before the latest renovation. He’d forgotten to print out his international itinerary, so they wouldn’t let him on the transfer bus (I’ve talked about, in prior episodes, the need to have a printed flight itinerary in India). He couldn’t find anyone in the terminal to print one out for him so he walked out to the cab rank. He piles his bags into and on top of a taxi and off he goes -- to some out-of-the-way place under a highway overpass where the cab driver and a friend shake him down for most of his money and his watch -- they leave him with his luggage and enough money for cab fare to the international terminal. A polite mugging; no bruises with this one.</span></li>\r\n	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">My most disturbing bubble burst happened in the US -- in a Westin in Connecticut. A friend checked in and, since the hotel was oversold, was given one of those rooms that’s a conference room with a bathroom. They rolled out the tables and rolled in a bed for him. The next morning, as he’s getting dressed, he’s missing his watch, his ring, and the money and credit cards from his wallet -- all which were next to him on the nightstand. As he put it together, someone had broken into the room -- he saw that the conference room’s double doors had enough of a gap between them that you could open the lock by slipping a credit card or room key through the gap -- and they had stood next to him going through his stuff on the night stand. He’s lucky he’s a sound sleeper.</span></li>\r\n	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">And I consider myself lucky. I don’t lock myself away in the hotel. I make an effort to step outside the travel bubble -- to engage -- and after 30 years of heavy travel, other than <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/05/20/podcast-98-stolen-luggage-restaurants-want-your-smartphone/\">having my camera and passport stolen</a>, I’m really no worse the wear. Certainly no bruises to show for it. I’m not sure I’d do it any other way. Though I do pay more attention to hotel door construction than I used to.</span></li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a title=\"MP3 Download\" href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/download_track.php?id=0E74C6FEB7390D18D02B4B399668093172F6C8CC66DDC09D90A3BF7DDA436823CFAC859AE2B2C73E46A278A4950E1030\">Lonely Dog Blues</a></em> by <a title=\"Tobin James\' Web Site\" href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/label.php?id=2A3449F03E7B8462FF74407B60F0C4B0A30A0CBE880C61DE37E3B342387F0643\">Tobin James</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Switching Back to Apple</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>After your government ID, the smartphone is probably the most important thing you travel with. And while I quickly whip out my ID a few times a trip to prove my identity  -- to the TSA agent, to hotel clerks, to car rental check out folks, I use my smartphone constantly -- maybe too constantly. Be that as it may, the smartphone is <i>the</i> critical tool for today’s frequent traveler. A carpenter has his framing hammer, the auto mechanic his Snap-On wrench -- for the road warrior, it’s the smart phone.</li>\r\n	<li>And so it wasn’t without a good bit of thought that I bit the bullet a few weeks ago and switched back to Apple; dumping my HTC One for a new iPhone 6S. I wasn’t thrilled to do it; I put it off for at least a month. And in the end, it was more a frustration with hardware -- with the slouching-toward-bankruptcy mess that HTC has become than it was excitement for the latest iThing.</li>\r\n	<li>Which I guess is the pattern for me. My first smartphone was an iPhone 3G and I’d had just about every iPhone model up to the 5. And it was the frustration with its truly horrid battery life that led me to the HTC. The cause this time was the lousy performance of my HTC One after they pushed their Android upgrade -- “Lollipop” -- at the beginning of this year. It just trashed the phone -- the lag was awful. The hardware components have the specs to handle the new version; it’s just that HTC’s implementation of it is crap. Now, it’s not like Apple nails their OS upgrades every time. The IOS 8 release didn’t exactly cover them in glory. But at least they worked to resolve the problem by iterating through releases in a fairly timely manner. After the initial “Lollipop” release, Google iterated through updates  -- I think ver 5.1.1 is the most recent -- and I’m waited for HTC to use that as an opportunity to clean up their 5.0 mess. They would say on Twitter “It’s coming, just wait”, And then “Oh, we’ll just skip 5.1 and give you 6.0 by the end of the year”. That was it. I’d suffered through 6 months of lousy performance and now they were saying I would have at least 3 more -- not that I have any reason to think that the near-bankrupt company has gotten any better at software estimating.</li>\r\n	<li>I don’t think that either Apple’s or Google’s operating systems are inherently better than the other. I’ve used them both. They both work. There are things I like about each of them, and since they seem to be stealing/emulating (?) each other’s best features, they’re more or less converging on each other.</li>\r\n	<li>For me, the difference is the hardware -- which is what is actually in our hands each day. I’ve always thought Apple is a better hardware company than a software one. I loved my MacBook Air, but was very “meh” about OS X. It’s really the Android equipment manufacturers that are pushing me away. It seems that most of the Android hardware innovation is at the large end -- large screen sizes -- 5 ½ inches and up -- which is way bigger than what want. And then there are the delays in Android upgrades as each manufacturer gooses Google’s release -- my 18-month old Samsung tablet is still on version 4.4 “Kit Kat”, now two version levels down, with no update in sight, let alone any security patches. With mobile devices becoming more vital, that foot dragging on upgrades and security patching very uncomfortable.</li>\r\n	<li>I was holding out for Google’s updated Nexus line, reading all rumor articles with spec leaks and blurred pictures. The 6P was too big for me, but the 5X -- I could do a 5.2-in screen with fast updates and patches. But then, when they unveiled the 5X, it topped it out at 32 GB with no expansion slots. For me, that is just too tight for my music, podcasts, pictures, video. So that’s it, I walked into the Apple store and bought a 64GB unlocked GSM 6S on their new upgrade plan -- new phone comes out, I trade mine in. It’s like leasing a car -- some people like the newest model. It’s all about the hardware.</li>\r\n	<li>Now if I can just keep iTunes from crashing on my Windows 10 box...</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #118</li>\r\n	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/\">Podshow Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\r\n	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_118.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #118 — Danger In the Travel Bubble; Switching Back to Apple','','inherit','closed','closed','','1561-revision-v1','','','2015-11-08 19:34:20','2015-11-09 00:34:20','',1561,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/11/08/1561-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1576,1,'2015-11-08 19:43:09','2015-11-09 00:43:09','[caption id=\"attachment_1573\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/DSC_4956.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1573\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/DSC_4956-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"This hotel door could use some work\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> This hotel door could use some work[/caption]\r\n\r\nA bit less of a random walk than the last episode, we talk about safety, physical safety, when traveling. While we sometimes put ourselves in the midst of dodgy surroundings, we usually feel safe when we retreat back into the \"travel bubble\" What about when the bubble is no longer safe? Smartphones are the frequent traveler\'s most important tool. So when an upgrade to my HTC One killed its usefulness, I found myself heading back to Apple.  All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_118.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/232191753\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #118:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, less than a month since the last episode. There’s a shocker. It’s been one of my lighter travel months. No international travel, no up-and-backs across the US. Indeed, there were a couple of weeks where I didn’t even pack a bag -- just did day trips to Detroit and Atlanta. There is something liberating about that -- just carrying a briefcase or backpack. I guess that would’ve been the ideal situation to check out Spirit Airlines, but I don’t hate myself that much.</li>\r\n	<li>No rush to get to the gate for the start of boarding. Stroll up, sit down and then  stay seated while the agent works through the cadence of status boarding groups -- really important customers, kinda important customers, fake important customers, and then everyone else. No roller board meant no need for the boarding scrum. I just waited for last call and walked on board. Kinda reminded me of the days when I first started flying when, rather than racing to be first on the plane, we’d see who could be last -- how late you could show up and still get on the plane. My boss won when he talked his way past an agent, got onto the jet bridge, knocked on the plane door, which the crew opened and let him on. I don’t think I’ll push it quite that far.</li>\r\n	<li>A few of this month’s trips have been in and out of Boston Logan Airport. And for as much stick as I give United Airlines -- broken planes, late flights, just general lousy service -- I have to give them credit for their <a href=\"http://newsroom.united.com/2014-04-28-New-United-Concourse-at-Boston-Logan-Offers-Customers-Modern-Streamlined-Airport-Experience\" target=\"_blank\">gate area</a> at Logan. Parts of it look like a hip hotel lounge -- cool hanging lights, non-bench seating. There’s stand-up/high-top counter space for laptops with lots of plugs. And even the self-serve boarding gates -- with modern subway-style turnstiles that scan your boarding pass before letting you in -- worked well. It’s probably one of the nicest gate areas I’ve been in in a long time. Nice job, United!</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Paint the Sky</em> by Hans Atom (c) 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/hansatom/50718 Ft: Miss Judged</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>I got a good bit of commentary from the last episode, so thank everyone very much.</li>\r\n	<li>Rob Cheshire posted this comment on the web site:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>“In defense of British Airways, you stepped into the middle of their new hand-luggage policy roll-out, which is designed to reign-in the amount of cabin baggage, which had really gotten out of hand. They are being strict across the board, on elite members, as well as everyone else, and it is definitely having a positive impact on bin-space, as well as minimising the amount of messing around (checking the last few wheelie bags that can’t be stowed) that the cabin crew have to take care of in the minutes prior to push-back.”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>Rob, thanks for that. One thing I did like BA’s luggage approach was tagging the second bag meant to go underseat -- in my case, a backpack -- with a bright yellow tag to keep people from putting 2 bags overhead. There is not much that’s ruder in plane travel than early boarders -- status fliers -- maximizing their leg space at the expense of the rest the plane. Tagging that second bag makes it easy for flight attendants or later boarders to call out bin hogging. I’d love to see that move across the Atlantic.</li>\r\n	<li>Andrew Gill left a comment on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page building on my thoughts about using the new Revolut debit card during my September trip to Scotland. Andrew said:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>“The piece of Revolut was interesting. I\'ve just spent six months living and working in The Philipines. I was lucky to be involved in the pilot of Supercard from <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/TravelexUK/?hc_location=ufi\">Travelex UK</a> (<a href=\"https://supercard.io/\">https://supercard.io/</a>). It\'s a physical card, complete with chip and pin, that can be used in retail stores and for online purchases too.</li>\r\n	<li>“The card is free, and transactions are processed at the Visa Europe Exchange rate, with no foreign exchange fees or commission added on, but the *killer* feature is it\'s linked to an existing debit or credit card so there\'s no need to pre-load money onto the card. transactions are processed in my home currency, so again, there are no foreign exchange fees or commission added on</li>\r\n	<li>“The pilot program has closed now, so fingers crossed, it comes out of pilot and into general release</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>Andrew, thanks for that pointer. I agree that being able to link the Travelex Supercard back to a debit or credit card is very useful vs. the Revolut model which is more like a pre-paid debit card. Looking at the Supercard website, it looks like the pilot was only for UK card holders. Hopefully, they’ll be able to expand their geographic footprint when they fully launch the card. Interesting that Revolut is also a UK-based company. Seems like London is a hotspot for these fintech companies. Last week, I was talking to a guy who moved from London to Chicago to start up the US operations for a different London-based fintech company -- more based on lending than payments. He said that HSBC looked hard at buying Revolut because they were doing something HSBC couldn’t even given their global reach and scale. Between Revolut and Supercard, and big banks like Chase dropping foreign exchange fees on their credit cards, the money hassles of international travel keep going down. It’s a far cry from having to cash an American Express travelers check at the airport exchange desk so you could get a cab to your hotel.</li>\r\n	<li>In an<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/01/29/podcast-107-serious-about-hotel-reviews-tsa-gets-something-right/\"> earlier episode</a>, I talked about evaluation criteria for my TripAdvisor reviews -- the bathroom, room size, workout room, location, service quality. I decided during one of my trips last month that I’m adding a new criterion -- accessible bedside electrical outlets. Most frequent travelers I know use their phone or tablet as an alarm, eliminating the need to discern operating instructions for each hotel’s unique brand of clock radio. Most hotels have figured this out and provide outlets on the nightstand -- in wall, along the side of the nightstand, on the lamp base…. But last month, I hit one of those knuckle draggers -- a hotel in Vegas. I practically had to disassemble one of the beds to find an outlet hidden behind it. Luckily, I carry long power cords.</li>\r\n	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Perfect Stranger</em> by stellarartwars (c) 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/stellarartwars/45510 Ft: TheDice</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Danger Within The Travel Bubble</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>In the last episode, I talked about attending the <a href=\"http://popeindc.cua.edu/the-papal-mass/\" target=\"_blank\">Papal Mass</a> at <a href=\"http://www.cua.edu/\" target=\"_blank\">Catholic University</a> in northeast DC which has never been one of the nicer sections of DC. I had taken the Metro up from the airport and would be getting back on it to catch my evening flight to Detroit. The Brookland stop at Catholic isn’t a big stop and I figured it would get overwhelmed at the end of the Mass by the 25,000 people there. I started thinking of alternatives. Getting a cab or an Uber would probably be just as tough, so my best alternative would be to walk down to the next stop south on the Red Line -- Rhode Island Ave. From my days in DC, I remember that neighborhood being a particularly rough one. That would not be a pleasant walk. I decided to skip Communion and leave the Pope early to beat the crowds at the Brookland stop.</li>\r\n	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Most of the times when we talk about travel security, we talk about airport security or digital security, but not often about physical security. Yet very often, travel drops in unfamiliar settings -- usually by our own choice -- where we could unknowingly wander into a very unsafe situation</span></li>\r\n	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I did exactly this some years ago when visiting Cape Town, South Africa. I was shopping through some craft stalls set up in a park and just kept wandering along. I kinda looking at the buildings, up and around… Oh, and I have my big Nikon SLR slung over my shoulder. Not sure I could’ve looked any more like a tourist unless I was wearing a big “Don’t Mess With Texas” t-shirt and a Dallas Cowboys baseball cap. At some point, I finally regain some situational awareness -- and, from my university years living in Northeast DC and on the Southside of Chicago, realize that I’m not in the best neighborhood right now. I move to the middle of the street -- so I don’t get jumped from a doorway -- and walk, with purpose now, back the way I came.</span></li>\r\n	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I did a little better this spring in New Orleans. I was standing on St Charles St in the Garden District watching a Mardi Gras parade. After a while, I got a bad feeling about the atmosphere around me. Nothing that I could put my finger on, but enough to make me give up a prime spot on the parade round and walk up the street a bit. In the next morning’s paper, I read there had been a gun fight at that spot about 30 minutes after I’d left.</span></li>\r\n	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">There have been other times in Joburg, Bangalore, Guadalajara, but considering how much I travel, they’re rare events -- I’ve wandered all through Madrid, Beijing, Tokyo, Edinburgh, Saigon and never felt unsafe -- but they get your attention. But then again, that’s outside the “travel bubble”. We’ve talked about that in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2008/04/29/podcast-64-escaping-the-travel-bubble-marks-travel-tips/\" target=\"_blank\">past episodes</a>, how travelers can often seem to float above the places they visit unless they make the effort to “pop” the travel bubble and engage.</span></li>\r\n	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">When those outside problems penetrate our bubble, now that’s more disturbing. Like the time some years back when I was visiting Rio -- years before the World Cup. I was checking in with a colleague who had done a lot of business there. He saw my room was on the second floor. “No, that won’t do,” he said, “we need to get you on a double-digit floor. At least 10 if not higher” “Why?” I asked. “Because,” he explained, “when the smash-and-grab gangs break in, they start on the first floor and work their way up until their bags are full. The higher you are, the more likely they’ll fill up before they get to you.” The logic was brutally impeccable. And this from a guy still sporting a couple of bruises from an earlier mugging on Copacabana Beach.</span></li>\r\n	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Or a few years ago, when another colleague had to take a taxi to connect between Delhi’s domestic and international terminal -- before the latest renovation. He’d forgotten to print out his international itinerary, so they wouldn’t let him on the transfer bus (I’ve talked about, in prior episodes, the need to have a printed flight itinerary in India). He couldn’t find anyone in the terminal to print one out for him so he walked out to the cab rank. He piles his bags into and on top of a taxi and off he goes -- to some out-of-the-way place under a highway overpass where the cab driver and a friend shake him down for most of his money and his watch -- they leave him with his luggage and enough money for cab fare to the international terminal. A polite mugging; no bruises with this one.</span></li>\r\n	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">My most disturbing bubble burst happened in the US -- in a Westin in Connecticut. A friend checked in and, since the hotel was oversold, was given one of those rooms that’s a conference room with a bathroom. They rolled out the tables and rolled in a bed for him. The next morning, as he’s getting dressed, he’s missing his watch, his ring, and the money and credit cards from his wallet -- all which were next to him on the nightstand. As he put it together, someone had broken into the room -- he saw that the conference room’s double doors had enough of a gap between them that you could open the lock by slipping a credit card or room key through the gap -- and they had stood next to him going through his stuff on the night stand. He’s lucky he’s a sound sleeper.</span></li>\r\n	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">And I consider myself lucky. I don’t lock myself away in the hotel. I make an effort to step outside the travel bubble -- to engage -- and after 30 years of heavy travel, other than <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/05/20/podcast-98-stolen-luggage-restaurants-want-your-smartphone/\">having my camera and passport stolen</a>, I’m really no worse the wear. Certainly no bruises to show for it. I’m not sure I’d do it any other way. Though I do pay more attention to hotel door construction than I used to.</span></li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Foolish Game</em> by copperhead (c) 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/copperhead/46390 Ft: Snowflake,Sackjo22</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Switching Back to Apple</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>After your government ID, the smartphone is probably the most important thing you travel with. And while I quickly whip out my ID a few times a trip to prove my identity  -- to the TSA agent, to hotel clerks, to car rental check out folks, I use my smartphone constantly -- maybe too constantly. Be that as it may, the smartphone is <i>the</i> critical tool for today’s frequent traveler. A carpenter has his framing hammer, the auto mechanic his Snap-On wrench -- for the road warrior, it’s the smart phone.</li>\r\n	<li>And so it wasn’t without a good bit of thought that I bit the bullet a few weeks ago and switched back to Apple; dumping my HTC One for a new iPhone 6S. I wasn’t thrilled to do it; I put it off for at least a month. And in the end, it was more a frustration with hardware -- with the slouching-toward-bankruptcy mess that HTC has become than it was excitement for the latest iThing.</li>\r\n	<li>Which I guess is the pattern for me. My first smartphone was an iPhone 3G and I’d had just about every iPhone model up to the 5. And it was the frustration with its truly horrid battery life that led me to the HTC. The cause this time was the lousy performance of my HTC One after they pushed their Android upgrade -- “Lollipop” -- at the beginning of this year. It just trashed the phone -- the lag was awful. The hardware components have the specs to handle the new version; it’s just that HTC’s implementation of it is crap. Now, it’s not like Apple nails their OS upgrades every time. The IOS 8 release didn’t exactly cover them in glory. But at least they worked to resolve the problem by iterating through releases in a fairly timely manner. After the initial “Lollipop” release, Google iterated through updates  -- I think ver 5.1.1 is the most recent -- and I’m waited for HTC to use that as an opportunity to clean up their 5.0 mess. They would say on Twitter “It’s coming, just wait”, And then “Oh, we’ll just skip 5.1 and give you 6.0 by the end of the year”. That was it. I’d suffered through 6 months of lousy performance and now they were saying I would have at least 3 more -- not that I have any reason to think that the near-bankrupt company has gotten any better at software estimating.</li>\r\n	<li>I don’t think that either Apple’s or Google’s operating systems are inherently better than the other. I’ve used them both. They both work. There are things I like about each of them, and since they seem to be stealing/emulating (?) each other’s best features, they’re more or less converging on each other.</li>\r\n	<li>For me, the difference is the hardware -- which is what is actually in our hands each day. I’ve always thought Apple is a better hardware company than a software one. I loved my MacBook Air, but was very “meh” about OS X. It’s really the Android equipment manufacturers that are pushing me away. It seems that most of the Android hardware innovation is at the large end -- large screen sizes -- 5 ½ inches and up -- which is way bigger than what want. And then there are the delays in Android upgrades as each manufacturer gooses Google’s release -- my 18-month old Samsung tablet is still on version 4.4 “Kit Kat”, now two version levels down, with no update in sight, let alone any security patches. With mobile devices becoming more vital, that foot dragging on upgrades and security patching very uncomfortable.</li>\r\n	<li>I was holding out for Google’s updated Nexus line, reading all rumor articles with spec leaks and blurred pictures. The 6P was too big for me, but the 5X -- I could do a 5.2-in screen with fast updates and patches. But then, when they unveiled the 5X, it topped it out at 32 GB with no expansion slots. For me, that is just too tight for my music, podcasts, pictures, video. So that’s it, I walked into the Apple store and bought a 64GB unlocked GSM 6S on their new upgrade plan -- new phone comes out, I trade mine in. It’s like leasing a car -- some people like the newest model. It’s all about the hardware.</li>\r\n	<li>Now if I can just keep iTunes from crashing on my Windows 10 box...</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #118</li>\r\n	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/\">Podshow Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\r\n	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_118.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #118 — Danger In the Travel Bubble; Switching Back to Apple','','inherit','closed','closed','','1561-revision-v1','','','2015-11-08 19:43:09','2015-11-09 00:43:09','',1561,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/11/08/1561-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1579,1,'2015-12-20 20:00:08','2015-12-21 01:00:08','[caption id=\"attachment_1585\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/calvin_PC.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1585\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/calvin_PC-300x172.jpg\" alt=\"Cat-based cyber-security solution\" width=\"300\" height=\"172\"></a> Cat-based cyber-security solution[/caption]\n\nHere\'s a little something to keep you entertained while you navigate the holiday airport lines. We talk about digital security on the road -- what\'s the right balance between hassle and hack? We also dig into JD Power\'s latest <a href=\"http://www.jdpower.com/press-releases/2015-north-america-airport-satisfaction-study\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">airport satisfaction survey</a>. They report a tick up in traveler experience and, for the most part, I think they have it right. We also cover Spirit Airlines\' growth and the planned expansion of US immigration pre-clearance. All this and more at the&nbsp;<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_119.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n<hr>\n\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #119:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, cranking out one last episode to keep you occupied while you navigate the holiday security lines while trying to get to -- or away from family. Myself, I’m settling for the Christmas break after doing a day trip yesterday to Philadelphia. I’m taking a break from O’Hare until January.</li>\n 	<li>No really remarkable travel since the last episode, just trips to Cleveland, Vegas, and Boston. When I was flying out of Vegas last week, I hit the <a href=\"http://thecenturionlounge.com/location/LAS\">Amex Centurion Lounge</a> for a couple of conference calls before boarding. It’s free entry with a Platinum Card, and so far and beyond any Admirals Club or Sky Club or United Club. It’s not quite as hip/a bit more button-down than Virgin Atlantic’s Upper Lounge in Heathrow, but the comfort, the free buffet and open bar just are just as good. Highly recommended. I just wish there were more of them.</li>\n 	<li>When I’m flying into Boston, I’m actually heading out 45 minutes west, close to Worcester. Now that’s a 45 minute drive out I-90 when I land at 9 or 10 in the morning. When I land at 5 in the evening, it’s a whole different story. I touch down at Logan, flip out of airplane mode and immediately open Waze. How bad is the traffic? How about <i>an hour</i> and 45 minute drive? Not looking forward to that parking lot, so I threaded my way over to Chelsea. Found a great little microbrewery complete with real live Boston Irish patrons and sample 1, 2, 4 of their beers. Then I walked up a couple of blocks to a Central American joint underneath a highway overpass. Had a great plate of food for less than $10. &nbsp;I’ve spent a few dinner times wandering around nearby neighborhoods -- Charlestown, the Seaport District as well as Chelsea -- waiting for Waze to tell me when I-90’s traffic tantrum had subsided.</li>\n 	<li>Probably the biggest travel event this week wasn’t mine but my daughter’s. It’s her first solo flight -- returning from her first semester at Univ of St Andrews, flying Aer Lingus from Edinburgh to Chicago by way of Dublin. It’s a big adjustment in a couple of ways. First, of course, she has to figure out a new airport by herself. She’s never been through Dublin before, but I thought a smaller airport would be a better first solo than trying to navigate the start of holiday traffic at Heathrow. But she does now have to pay attention to what’s going on rather than just following in my slipstream. The second adjustment is a bit more of a First World problem -- flying as as plain old passenger, a villager, rather than tagging along with me through the Gold or Platinum baggage check lines and pre-boarding. It’s a tough come-down, but I did soften the blow a little bit. I paid her Global Entry fee as a going away gift.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- Dive Deep (Loveshadow remix) by spinningmerkaba (c) 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial &nbsp;(3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/50488 Ft: Loveshadow</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Not really any commentary on the last episode, though Ian Morgan swung by the Facebook page with adding to the support about British Airways’ stricter carry-on policy\n<ul>\n 	<li>“Just listened to your October episode! Picked up your post about BA hand luggage. They have just changed their policy on this to clamp down. I agree it is frustrating especially on lightly loaded widebody aircraft. However, as a regular BA traveller I have lost count of the number of times BA flights have been delayed whilst cabin crew offload hand luggage, especially since BA introduced \"hand baggage only\" fares. Before the change, I never saw BA using the size gauges - these days they use them much more frequently. It\'s part of the steady decline of BA from a full service airline to a low cost carriers. Just be grateful that you got a 767 instead of an A321 with new \'spacesaver\' seats with a 29\" seat pitch!!</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Ian, I think you’ve nailed it -- the descent of full-service carriers into the low-cost, low-service ring of travel hell created by Ryan Air and Spirit Airlines. &nbsp;I’ve talked about this before -- a frequent traveler can’t fathom why someone would subject themselves to the hassles that Ryan and Spirit travelers endure. A recent <a href=\"http://www.chicagobusiness.com/article/20151205/ISSUE01/312059993/can-you-guess-whats-the-third-biggest-airline-at-ohare\">Crain’s Chicago article</a> about Spirit said just over half -- 58 % -- of their flights into ORD arrived on time in the first 9 months of this year. I fly at least 3 weeks out of 4. American Airlines’ 79% on-time percentage into ORD is only just acceptable; I’d go postal at 58%. But yet Spirit is now the 3rd largest airline at ORD after United and American. Working out of just two shared gates, it’s bigger than Delta. But then I remembered <a href=\"http://qz.com/533501/half-of-american-airlines-revenue-came-from-13-of-its-customers/\">some comments</a> made by the president of American Airlines during an analysts call right around the time American was doing the final merger of res systems with US Air. He said that half of American’s revenue last year came from the 87% of its customers that only flew them once. 50% of American’s revenue came from passengers that see air travel as a commodity and are looking for the lowest cost carriage between two points. And so for 50% of their revenue, American isn’t competing against United or Delta, they’re competing with Spirit. &nbsp;It explains Delta’s Spirit-like Basic Economy offering, and the expectation that American and United will follow in 2016. And, I assume BA’s “hand baggage” fees that Ian mentions. The challenge, though, is how do you compete for the 87% of your passengers buying a commodity while also serving the remaining 13% of your passengers, who contribute the other 50% of your revenue, and value the little things like a seat that reclines a bit and a flight that arrives on time -- all in the same plane? Spirit doesn’t have that problem because they’ll never get that 13%. American, BA, Delta have the tougher problem.</li>\n 	<li>Connecting through Dublin airport, my daughter cleared US immigration and customs in there in Ireland and then just popped out at the one domestic baggage claim in ORD’s Terminal 5 -- the International Terminal. Kinda similar to what they’ve been doing at Toronto’s Pearson Airport since forever -- or at least the 90’s when I was flying through there weekly. But there, American’s YYZ-ORD flight would land in Terminal 3, just like a flight from, say, Buffalo, and you’d make your connection or just walk out to the cab line. Handy for the regular traveler, but if you’ve dropped the $100 Global Entry fee, immigration lines at, say, ORD, aren’t any worse than they are in Toronto or Dublin. Indeed, my daughter was bummed that she went through US Preclearance so soon, because food and shopping choices on the US side of Preclearance were a lot thinner than on the Irish side. And I think that’ll be the problem if the TSA follows through on their announced expansion of Preclearance -- from what is mostly Canadian, Irish, and Caribbean airports to 10 much larger airports, including Tokyo, Amsterdam, Madrid, London Heathrow. If you’re flying US carriers out of European airports, you’re already being put into a de facto American ghetto -- typically flying out of the most remote gates, with the longest walks from security and airport lounges, and the fewest food and shopping amenities. Walling it off to create the secured facilities to support Preclearance just formalizes it. &nbsp;The DHS secretary calls it a “win-win” for travelers. I think it’s just squeezing the balloon -- making wait time go down in the US, but go up in places like Narita and Heathrow. It’s one thing to miss a connection in ORD due to immigration delays. Odds are there’s another flight you can catch within a couple of hours. It’s a whole other thing if you miss that once a day flight home from, say, Amsterdam.</li>\n 	<li>Thanks to El Niño, it’s been a warm start to the winter -- at least in North America. But soon enough, the temps will drop and the winter coats will start competing with carry-ons for overhead bin space. Last winter, while de-planing (what a weird verb construction!), someone handed me my black overcoat -- it was wedged in front of their suitcase. I threw it over my arm as I stepped out into the aisle, grabbed my carry-on, and hoofed it out of the plane, power-walking toward the cab line. It wasn’t until I stepped outside that I stopped to put my coat on and… it wasn’t my coat. I should’ve checked when it was handed to me, but I didn’t want to be that guy who stops <i>in the aisle</i> to put his jacket on. I went to Lost &amp; Found. The clerk called the gate, where the guy with my coat was standing, trying to find his coat. We got lucky. It took us about 10 minutes to sort everything out. He came down to Lost &amp; Found to swap coats. If it had been warmer out, like this week, I might not have put my coat on at all and gotten home for noticing the switch. Black bags, black coats. Love that black hides a lot of sins -- scuffs, dirt, extra pounds. Don’t love its ubiquity on an airplane. Keep your eyes on your stuff in these holiday crowds. Don’t want “Lost” to be the new black.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. &nbsp;The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- Absolutely Clear (ft Jeris &amp; Goldfish) by SackJo22 (c) 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/45578 Ft: Jeris, Goldfish</li>\n</ul>\n<b>Digital Security On The Road</b>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Digital security, cyber security. I don’t know about you, but I’ve kinda hit security breach fatigue. On Thursday, yet another company announced a credit card breach. <a href=\"http://krebsonsecurity.com/2015/12/banks-card-breach-at-landrys-restaurants/\">This time</a> it’s Landry’s who runs Bubba Gumps and Morton’s Steakhouse and another 15 or so restaurant brands. I don’t frequent Landry’s brands that much, so I’m hoping that this breach doesn’t mean I have to replace one of my credit cards and again have to go through the goat rodeo of changing account numbers for all my autobills. But it still does reinforce that feeling the cyber security is not a matter of “if” but “when”</li>\n 	<li>But even if it’s a matter of “when”, I’d still like to postpone the “when” as long as possible. And traveling -- certainly during the holidays -- there’s a lot of opportunity to bring on the “when” if you’re not just a bit thoughtful. There’s also a balance between inconvenience -- the cost of being more digitally secure -- and the probability of being “breached” (can I say that without having to flag this as “explicit” in iTunes?).</li>\n 	<li>You could always go “old school” -- like 10 years ago when there was damn little public WiFi, no iPhones -- nothing to keep us entertained as we shuffled through the TSA lines other than trading snarky remarks with other line sufferers. Or you could go the “burner” route -- using disposable phones and a temporary PC, which is what many business travelers to China still do -- doing a complete wipe of their phones and PCs before and after each visit because they just expect to get hacked no matter what anti-virus and other safety precautions they take. But if all you’re doing is going from, say, San Francisco to Boston to see your family, these seem a bit “overkill” -- definitely not balancing the cost-benefit trade-off. I’m fairly lazy about this stuff, but there are a few precautions I do take.</li>\n 	<li>First, I never do any financial stuff over public WiFi -- no checking my bank account or credit card activity over an airport or Starbucks WiFi, or a hotel network at all -- whether WiFi or jacked into an Ethernet port. Even if the URL is showing https -- a encrypted web connection -- there’s just too many ways those networks or web sites can be misconfigured. Some folks will tell you to use a VPN. I used one in China, but it seems a bit too much in the US. If I have to do some banking, I’ll use my iPhone over the mobile carrier network -- AT&amp;T in the US, Orange when I was in Spain, .... I know it’s not perfect, but, as the cyber security guys like to say, it “reduces the attack surface” at what is considered one of the most vulnerable points.</li>\n 	<li>I rarely use hotel PCs -- the ones set up in lobbies or the concierge lounges. I mean, if I have a smartphone, a tablet, and a PC, why do I need to use a public PC that’s open to anyone loading up a key-logger that’ll capture anything you type -- including logins and passwords. If I do, for some odd reason, need to use one, I never log into anything. Maybe just search for a restaurant, but that’s about it.</li>\n 	<li>I always make sure that I’ve configured my phone and PC e-mail clients to use encrypted communications between servers -- using IMAP and SMTP over SSL (<i>&gt;now</i> we’re talking security because we used more acronyms than words in that last sentence) for my own mail servers; GMail does it automatically for you. But I don’t encrypt the message itself -- no PGP or signed MIME. There’s nothing in my e-mails that is <i>that</i> confidential to go through that hassle.</li>\n 	<li>I have recently, though, turned on two-factor authentication for every service that offers it -- GMail, some of my financial accounts, Dropbox, …. I resisted it for a long time -- again, thought it was more hassle than it was worth. But then I started getting some odd password reset e-mail requests -- that I didn’t request.</li>\n 	<li>I go back and forth on using smartphone or printed boarding passes. Smartphone boarding passes are quicker -- you can get it while in the cab to the airport rather than queueing up for a kiosk -- but I’ve had more than a few times when my boarding pass disappeared from the app during an extended flight delay. Printed boarding passes are easier to scan at the gate -- especially when juggling a backpack, a hot coffee, and a winter coat -- but there’s recently been a <a href=\"http://www.economist.com/blogs/gulliver/2015/10/security-check\">bit</a> of a <a href=\"http://krebsonsecurity.com/2015/10/whats-in-a-boarding-pass-barcode-a-lot/#more-31317\">stir</a> about the amount of personal information someone could pull out of the bar codes. Maybe I’m not paranoid enough, but that one feels a bit of a stretch. I do whatever’s the most convenient -- usually the smartphone route. But when I do print out a boarding pass, I keep it in my jacket pocket -- just to be sure.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- Drops of H2O ( The Filtered Water Treatment ) by J.Lang (c) 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/djlang59/37792 Ft: Airtone</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>US Airports Getting Better?</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>While I poked at London Heathrow a couple of <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/10/11/podcast-117-random-thoughts-about-eggs-scotland-car-rentals/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">episodes</a> back, it’s an article of faith among international travelers that North American airports pale in comparison to airports in Asia/Pac -- anyone flying from Beijing or Singapore to LAX needs a light sedative to cushion the shock -- and pretty much trail behind most European airports too. But JD Power, in their <a href=\"http://www.jdpower.com/press-releases/2015-north-america-airport-satisfaction-study\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">airport satisfaction survey</a> released last week, said that things are getting better. Not hugely better -- a 5-8% increase in their satisfaction score, but any improvement is good news.</li>\n 	<li>Power <a href=\"http://www.jdpower.com/ratings/study/North-America-Airport-Satisfaction-Study/763ENG/Large-Airports/1617\">rated</a> large- and medium-sized North American airports -- 60 US airports and Toronto Pearson, Calgary, Montreal, and Vancouver. They surveyed travelers around 6 attributes of their airport experience. In order of importance, they are: the state of the airport facilities themselves, how easy it is to get to the airport, security, baggage claim, the check-in experience, and available food and shopping. A frequent traveler might re-shuffle the order -- maybe drop baggage claim and the check-in experience to the bottom because we rarely check a bag -- but I think it’s a good list.</li>\n 	<li>And I think some of Power’s conclusions line up with things I’m seeing on the road. Like improvements in terminal facilities. In the last episode, I gave United a shout-out for the upgrade of their gate space in Boston Logan. I also think San Francisco’s complete rebuild of Terminal 2 is excellent and stands up to any airport in Asia or Europe.</li>\n 	<li>Power found what is a pretty logical connection between satisfaction and the time you spend in lines. As I said earlier, I rarely deal with check-in lines, but I think the TSA’s rollout of Precheck has provided a quantum level improvement in the security experience -- though at times, it feels like its popularity is on the verge of overwhelming it and sliding back. But even for those in the regular lines, I’ve seen TSA folks working hard to re-balance lines -- especially at ORD.</li>\n 	<li>Power split their ratings between large and medium airports. Their winning large airport is Portland, Oregon. I’ve done a bit of flying into PDX and while I wouldn’t have, unprompted, chosen it as the top large airport, I don’t argue with their conclusion. It’s a nice facility; easy mass transit (a TravelCommons’ fixation) via the MAX light rail; I disagree with its top marks for security check, but in how many other airports can I buy a growler of craft beer to go? The bottom four -- those I could’ve ticked off with missing a beat -- LaGuardia, Newark, LAX, and O’Hare. Old terminals, awkward layouts, leaking roofs, lousy food. Interesting they’re also the major airports for the US’s largest cities.</li>\n 	<li>The medium airport winner was a tie between Dallas’ downtown Love Field and Fort Myers’ Southwest Florida. This one, I dunno. I’ve used both of these airports a lot. Love has gone through a good sized facelift and I haven’t been through it since they finished, so I may be working off out-of-date impressions, but even though it’s close to downtown, it’s a pain to get to. Now Fort Myers is easy to get to -- and I love the short walk to the rental car facility -- but security screening can back way up and the food choice isn’t great. From my personal experience, I’d give top marks to Nashville. I mean, how can you go wrong with live music -- good live music -- as you’re walking down the terminal.</li>\n 	<li>Power’s most obvious finding is that dissatisfied customers are very vocal. Those who rate overall satisfaction 1 (on a 10-point scale) make an average of 13 negative comments about their experience. Anyone who follows me on Twitter knows how true that is.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #119</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_119.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #119 — Digital Security On The Road; US Airports Getting Better?','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-119-digital-security-on-the-road-us-airports-getting-better','','','2021-09-29 08:08:56','2021-09-29 13:08:56','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=1579',0,'post','',0),
(1580,1,'2015-12-21 10:37:38','2015-12-21 15:37:38','A bit less of a random walk than the last episode, we talk about safety, physical safety, when traveling. While we sometimes put ourselves in the midst of dodgy surroundings, we usually feel safe when we retreat back into the \"travel bubble\" What about when the bubble is no longer safe? Smartphones are the frequent traveler\'s most important tool. So when an upgrade to my HTC One killed its usefulness, I found myself heading back to Apple.  All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_119.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/232191753\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #119:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, cranking out one last episode to keep you occupied while you navigate the holiday security lines while trying to get to -- or away from family. Myself, I’m settling for the Christmas break after doing a day trip yesterday to Philadelphia. I’m taking a break from O’Hare until January.</li>\r\n	<li>No really remarkable travel since the last episode, just trips to Cleveland, Vegas, and Boston. When I was flying out of Vegas last week, I hit the <a href=\"http://thecenturionlounge.com/location/LAS\">Amex Centurion Lounge</a> for a couple of conference calls before boarding. It’s free entry with a Platinum Card, and so far and beyond any Admirals Club or Sky Club or United Club. It’s not quite as hip/a bit more button-down than Virgin Atlantic’s Upper Lounge in Heathrow, but the comfort, the free buffet and open bar just are just as good. Highly recommended. I just wish there were more of them.</li>\r\n	<li>When I’m flying into Boston, I’m actually heading out 45 minutes west, close to Worcester. Now that’s a 45 minute drive out I-90 when I land at 9 or 10 in the morning. When I land at 5 in the evening, it’s a whole different story. I touch down at Logan, flip out of airplane mode and immediately open Waze. How bad is the traffic? How about <i>an hour</i> and 45 minute drive? Not looking forward to that parking lot, so I threaded my way over to Chelsea. Found a great little microbrewery complete with real live Boston Irish patrons and sample 1, 2, 4 of their beers. Then I walked up a couple of blocks to a Central American joint underneath a highway overpass. Had a great plate of food for less than $10.  I’ve spent a few dinner times wandering around nearby neighborhoods -- Charlestown, the Seaport District as well as Chelsea -- waiting for Waze to tell me when I-90’s traffic tantrum had subsided.</li>\r\n	<li>Probably the biggest travel event this week wasn’t mine but my daughter’s. It’s her first solo flight -- returning from her first semester at Univ of St Andrews, flying Aer Lingus from Edinburgh to Chicago by way of Dublin. It’s a big adjustment in a couple of ways. First, of course, she has to figure out a new airport by herself. She’s never been through Dublin before, but I thought a smaller airport would be a better first solo than trying to navigate the start of holiday traffic at Heathrow. But she does now have to pay attention to what’s going on rather than just following in my slipstream. The second adjustment is a bit more of a First World problem -- flying as as plain old passenger, a villager, rather than tagging along with me through the Gold or Platinum baggage check lines and pre-boarding. It’s a tough come-down, but I did soften the blow a little bit. I paid her Global Entry fee as a going away gift.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Paint the Sky</em> by Hans Atom (c) 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/hansatom/50718 Ft: Miss Judged</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>I got a good bit of commentary from the last episode, so thank everyone very much.</li>\r\n	<li>Rob Cheshire posted this comment on the web site:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>“In defense of British Airways, you stepped into the middle of their new hand-luggage policy roll-out, which is designed to reign-in the amount of cabin baggage, which had really gotten out of hand. They are being strict across the board, on elite members, as well as everyone else, and it is definitely having a positive impact on bin-space, as well as minimising the amount of messing around (checking the last few wheelie bags that can’t be stowed) that the cabin crew have to take care of in the minutes prior to push-back.”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>Rob, thanks for that. One thing I did like BA’s luggage approach was tagging the second bag meant to go underseat -- in my case, a backpack -- with a bright yellow tag to keep people from putting 2 bags overhead. There is not much that’s ruder in plane travel than early boarders -- status fliers -- maximizing their leg space at the expense of the rest the plane. Tagging that second bag makes it easy for flight attendants or later boarders to call out bin hogging. I’d love to see that move across the Atlantic.</li>\r\n	<li>Andrew Gill left a comment on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page building on my thoughts about using the new Revolut debit card during my September trip to Scotland. Andrew said:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>“The piece of Revolut was interesting. I\'ve just spent six months living and working in The Philipines. I was lucky to be involved in the pilot of Supercard from <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/TravelexUK/?hc_location=ufi\">Travelex UK</a> (<a href=\"https://supercard.io/\">https://supercard.io/</a>). It\'s a physical card, complete with chip and pin, that can be used in retail stores and for online purchases too.</li>\r\n	<li>“The card is free, and transactions are processed at the Visa Europe Exchange rate, with no foreign exchange fees or commission added on, but the *killer* feature is it\'s linked to an existing debit or credit card so there\'s no need to pre-load money onto the card. transactions are processed in my home currency, so again, there are no foreign exchange fees or commission added on</li>\r\n	<li>“The pilot program has closed now, so fingers crossed, it comes out of pilot and into general release</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>Andrew, thanks for that pointer. I agree that being able to link the Travelex Supercard back to a debit or credit card is very useful vs. the Revolut model which is more like a pre-paid debit card. Looking at the Supercard website, it looks like the pilot was only for UK card holders. Hopefully, they’ll be able to expand their geographic footprint when they fully launch the card. Interesting that Revolut is also a UK-based company. Seems like London is a hotspot for these fintech companies. Last week, I was talking to a guy who moved from London to Chicago to start up the US operations for a different London-based fintech company -- more based on lending than payments. He said that HSBC looked hard at buying Revolut because they were doing something HSBC couldn’t even given their global reach and scale. Between Revolut and Supercard, and big banks like Chase dropping foreign exchange fees on their credit cards, the money hassles of international travel keep going down. It’s a far cry from having to cash an American Express travelers check at the airport exchange desk so you could get a cab to your hotel.</li>\r\n	<li>In an<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/01/29/podcast-107-serious-about-hotel-reviews-tsa-gets-something-right/\"> earlier episode</a>, I talked about evaluation criteria for my TripAdvisor reviews -- the bathroom, room size, workout room, location, service quality. I decided during one of my trips last month that I’m adding a new criterion -- accessible bedside electrical outlets. Most frequent travelers I know use their phone or tablet as an alarm, eliminating the need to discern operating instructions for each hotel’s unique brand of clock radio. Most hotels have figured this out and provide outlets on the nightstand -- in wall, along the side of the nightstand, on the lamp base…. But last month, I hit one of those knuckle draggers -- a hotel in Vegas. I practically had to disassemble one of the beds to find an outlet hidden behind it. Luckily, I carry long power cords.</li>\r\n	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Perfect Stranger</em> by stellarartwars (c) 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/stellarartwars/45510 Ft: TheDice</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Danger Within The Travel Bubble</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>In the last episode, I talked about attending the <a href=\"http://popeindc.cua.edu/the-papal-mass/\" target=\"_blank\">Papal Mass</a> at <a href=\"http://www.cua.edu/\" target=\"_blank\">Catholic University</a> in northeast DC which has never been one of the nicer sections of DC. I had taken the Metro up from the airport and would be getting back on it to catch my evening flight to Detroit. The Brookland stop at Catholic isn’t a big stop and I figured it would get overwhelmed at the end of the Mass by the 25,000 people there. I started thinking of alternatives. Getting a cab or an Uber would probably be just as tough, so my best alternative would be to walk down to the next stop south on the Red Line -- Rhode Island Ave. From my days in DC, I remember that neighborhood being a particularly rough one. That would not be a pleasant walk. I decided to skip Communion and leave the Pope early to beat the crowds at the Brookland stop.</li>\r\n	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Most of the times when we talk about travel security, we talk about airport security or digital security, but not often about physical security. Yet very often, travel drops in unfamiliar settings -- usually by our own choice -- where we could unknowingly wander into a very unsafe situation</span></li>\r\n	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I did exactly this some years ago when visiting Cape Town, South Africa. I was shopping through some craft stalls set up in a park and just kept wandering along. I kinda looking at the buildings, up and around… Oh, and I have my big Nikon SLR slung over my shoulder. Not sure I could’ve looked any more like a tourist unless I was wearing a big “Don’t Mess With Texas” t-shirt and a Dallas Cowboys baseball cap. At some point, I finally regain some situational awareness -- and, from my university years living in Northeast DC and on the Southside of Chicago, realize that I’m not in the best neighborhood right now. I move to the middle of the street -- so I don’t get jumped from a doorway -- and walk, with purpose now, back the way I came.</span></li>\r\n	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I did a little better this spring in New Orleans. I was standing on St Charles St in the Garden District watching a Mardi Gras parade. After a while, I got a bad feeling about the atmosphere around me. Nothing that I could put my finger on, but enough to make me give up a prime spot on the parade round and walk up the street a bit. In the next morning’s paper, I read there had been a gun fight at that spot about 30 minutes after I’d left.</span></li>\r\n	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">There have been other times in Joburg, Bangalore, Guadalajara, but considering how much I travel, they’re rare events -- I’ve wandered all through Madrid, Beijing, Tokyo, Edinburgh, Saigon and never felt unsafe -- but they get your attention. But then again, that’s outside the “travel bubble”. We’ve talked about that in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2008/04/29/podcast-64-escaping-the-travel-bubble-marks-travel-tips/\" target=\"_blank\">past episodes</a>, how travelers can often seem to float above the places they visit unless they make the effort to “pop” the travel bubble and engage.</span></li>\r\n	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">When those outside problems penetrate our bubble, now that’s more disturbing. Like the time some years back when I was visiting Rio -- years before the World Cup. I was checking in with a colleague who had done a lot of business there. He saw my room was on the second floor. “No, that won’t do,” he said, “we need to get you on a double-digit floor. At least 10 if not higher” “Why?” I asked. “Because,” he explained, “when the smash-and-grab gangs break in, they start on the first floor and work their way up until their bags are full. The higher you are, the more likely they’ll fill up before they get to you.” The logic was brutally impeccable. And this from a guy still sporting a couple of bruises from an earlier mugging on Copacabana Beach.</span></li>\r\n	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Or a few years ago, when another colleague had to take a taxi to connect between Delhi’s domestic and international terminal -- before the latest renovation. He’d forgotten to print out his international itinerary, so they wouldn’t let him on the transfer bus (I’ve talked about, in prior episodes, the need to have a printed flight itinerary in India). He couldn’t find anyone in the terminal to print one out for him so he walked out to the cab rank. He piles his bags into and on top of a taxi and off he goes -- to some out-of-the-way place under a highway overpass where the cab driver and a friend shake him down for most of his money and his watch -- they leave him with his luggage and enough money for cab fare to the international terminal. A polite mugging; no bruises with this one.</span></li>\r\n	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">My most disturbing bubble burst happened in the US -- in a Westin in Connecticut. A friend checked in and, since the hotel was oversold, was given one of those rooms that’s a conference room with a bathroom. They rolled out the tables and rolled in a bed for him. The next morning, as he’s getting dressed, he’s missing his watch, his ring, and the money and credit cards from his wallet -- all which were next to him on the nightstand. As he put it together, someone had broken into the room -- he saw that the conference room’s double doors had enough of a gap between them that you could open the lock by slipping a credit card or room key through the gap -- and they had stood next to him going through his stuff on the night stand. He’s lucky he’s a sound sleeper.</span></li>\r\n	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">And I consider myself lucky. I don’t lock myself away in the hotel. I make an effort to step outside the travel bubble -- to engage -- and after 30 years of heavy travel, other than <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/05/20/podcast-98-stolen-luggage-restaurants-want-your-smartphone/\">having my camera and passport stolen</a>, I’m really no worse the wear. Certainly no bruises to show for it. I’m not sure I’d do it any other way. Though I do pay more attention to hotel door construction than I used to.</span></li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Foolish Game</em> by copperhead (c) 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/copperhead/46390 Ft: Snowflake,Sackjo22</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Switching Back to Apple</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>After your government ID, the smartphone is probably the most important thing you travel with. And while I quickly whip out my ID a few times a trip to prove my identity  -- to the TSA agent, to hotel clerks, to car rental check out folks, I use my smartphone constantly -- maybe too constantly. Be that as it may, the smartphone is <i>the</i> critical tool for today’s frequent traveler. A carpenter has his framing hammer, the auto mechanic his Snap-On wrench -- for the road warrior, it’s the smart phone.</li>\r\n	<li>And so it wasn’t without a good bit of thought that I bit the bullet a few weeks ago and switched back to Apple; dumping my HTC One for a new iPhone 6S. I wasn’t thrilled to do it; I put it off for at least a month. And in the end, it was more a frustration with hardware -- with the slouching-toward-bankruptcy mess that HTC has become than it was excitement for the latest iThing.</li>\r\n	<li>Which I guess is the pattern for me. My first smartphone was an iPhone 3G and I’d had just about every iPhone model up to the 5. And it was the frustration with its truly horrid battery life that led me to the HTC. The cause this time was the lousy performance of my HTC One after they pushed their Android upgrade -- “Lollipop” -- at the beginning of this year. It just trashed the phone -- the lag was awful. The hardware components have the specs to handle the new version; it’s just that HTC’s implementation of it is crap. Now, it’s not like Apple nails their OS upgrades every time. The IOS 8 release didn’t exactly cover them in glory. But at least they worked to resolve the problem by iterating through releases in a fairly timely manner. After the initial “Lollipop” release, Google iterated through updates  -- I think ver 5.1.1 is the most recent -- and I’m waited for HTC to use that as an opportunity to clean up their 5.0 mess. They would say on Twitter “It’s coming, just wait”, And then “Oh, we’ll just skip 5.1 and give you 6.0 by the end of the year”. That was it. I’d suffered through 6 months of lousy performance and now they were saying I would have at least 3 more -- not that I have any reason to think that the near-bankrupt company has gotten any better at software estimating.</li>\r\n	<li>I don’t think that either Apple’s or Google’s operating systems are inherently better than the other. I’ve used them both. They both work. There are things I like about each of them, and since they seem to be stealing/emulating (?) each other’s best features, they’re more or less converging on each other.</li>\r\n	<li>For me, the difference is the hardware -- which is what is actually in our hands each day. I’ve always thought Apple is a better hardware company than a software one. I loved my MacBook Air, but was very “meh” about OS X. It’s really the Android equipment manufacturers that are pushing me away. It seems that most of the Android hardware innovation is at the large end -- large screen sizes -- 5 ½ inches and up -- which is way bigger than what want. And then there are the delays in Android upgrades as each manufacturer gooses Google’s release -- my 18-month old Samsung tablet is still on version 4.4 “Kit Kat”, now two version levels down, with no update in sight, let alone any security patches. With mobile devices becoming more vital, that foot dragging on upgrades and security patching very uncomfortable.</li>\r\n	<li>I was holding out for Google’s updated Nexus line, reading all rumor articles with spec leaks and blurred pictures. The 6P was too big for me, but the 5X -- I could do a 5.2-in screen with fast updates and patches. But then, when they unveiled the 5X, it topped it out at 32 GB with no expansion slots. For me, that is just too tight for my music, podcasts, pictures, video. So that’s it, I walked into the Apple store and bought a 64GB unlocked GSM 6S on their new upgrade plan -- new phone comes out, I trade mine in. It’s like leasing a car -- some people like the newest model. It’s all about the hardware.</li>\r\n	<li>Now if I can just keep iTunes from crashing on my Windows 10 box...</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #119</li>\r\n	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/\">Podshow Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\r\n	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_119.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #119 — xxx','','inherit','closed','closed','','1579-revision-v1','','','2015-12-21 10:37:38','2015-12-21 15:37:38','',1579,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/12/21/1579-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1581,1,'2015-12-21 10:46:23','2015-12-21 15:46:23','A bit less of a random walk than the last episode, we talk about safety, physical safety, when traveling. While we sometimes put ourselves in the midst of dodgy surroundings, we usually feel safe when we retreat back into the \"travel bubble\" What about when the bubble is no longer safe? Smartphones are the frequent traveler\'s most important tool. So when an upgrade to my HTC One killed its usefulness, I found myself heading back to Apple.  All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_119.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/232191753\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #119:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, cranking out one last episode to keep you occupied while you navigate the holiday security lines while trying to get to -- or away from family. Myself, I’m settling for the Christmas break after doing a day trip yesterday to Philadelphia. I’m taking a break from O’Hare until January.</li>\r\n	<li>No really remarkable travel since the last episode, just trips to Cleveland, Vegas, and Boston. When I was flying out of Vegas last week, I hit the <a href=\"http://thecenturionlounge.com/location/LAS\">Amex Centurion Lounge</a> for a couple of conference calls before boarding. It’s free entry with a Platinum Card, and so far and beyond any Admirals Club or Sky Club or United Club. It’s not quite as hip/a bit more button-down than Virgin Atlantic’s Upper Lounge in Heathrow, but the comfort, the free buffet and open bar just are just as good. Highly recommended. I just wish there were more of them.</li>\r\n	<li>When I’m flying into Boston, I’m actually heading out 45 minutes west, close to Worcester. Now that’s a 45 minute drive out I-90 when I land at 9 or 10 in the morning. When I land at 5 in the evening, it’s a whole different story. I touch down at Logan, flip out of airplane mode and immediately open Waze. How bad is the traffic? How about <i>an hour</i> and 45 minute drive? Not looking forward to that parking lot, so I threaded my way over to Chelsea. Found a great little microbrewery complete with real live Boston Irish patrons and sample 1, 2, 4 of their beers. Then I walked up a couple of blocks to a Central American joint underneath a highway overpass. Had a great plate of food for less than $10.  I’ve spent a few dinner times wandering around nearby neighborhoods -- Charlestown, the Seaport District as well as Chelsea -- waiting for Waze to tell me when I-90’s traffic tantrum had subsided.</li>\r\n	<li>Probably the biggest travel event this week wasn’t mine but my daughter’s. It’s her first solo flight -- returning from her first semester at Univ of St Andrews, flying Aer Lingus from Edinburgh to Chicago by way of Dublin. It’s a big adjustment in a couple of ways. First, of course, she has to figure out a new airport by herself. She’s never been through Dublin before, but I thought a smaller airport would be a better first solo than trying to navigate the start of holiday traffic at Heathrow. But she does now have to pay attention to what’s going on rather than just following in my slipstream. The second adjustment is a bit more of a First World problem -- flying as as plain old passenger, a villager, rather than tagging along with me through the Gold or Platinum baggage check lines and pre-boarding. It’s a tough come-down, but I did soften the blow a little bit. I paid her Global Entry fee as a going away gift.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Paint the Sky</em> by Hans Atom (c) 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/hansatom/50718 Ft: Miss Judged</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Not really any commentary on the last episode, though Ian Morgan swung by the Facebook page with adding to the support about British Airways’ stricter carry-on policy\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>“Just listened to your October episode! Picked up your post about BA hand luggage. They have just changed their policy on this to clamp down. I agree it is frustrating especially on lightly loaded widebody aircraft. However, as a regular BA traveller I have lost count of the number of times BA flights have been delayed whilst cabin crew offload hand luggage, especially since BA introduced \"hand baggage only\" fares. Before the change, I never saw BA using the size gauges - these days they use them much more frequently. It\'s part of the steady decline of BA from a full service airline to a low cost carriers. Just be grateful that you got a 767 instead of an A321 with new \'spacesaver\' seats with a 29\" seat pitch!!</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>Ian, I think you’ve nailed it -- the descent of full-service carriers into the low-cost, low-service ring of travel hell created by Ryan Air and Spirit Airlines.  I’ve talked about this before -- a frequent traveler can’t fathom why someone would subject themselves to the hassles that Ryan and Spirit travelers endure. A recent <a href=\"http://www.chicagobusiness.com/article/20151205/ISSUE01/312059993/can-you-guess-whats-the-third-biggest-airline-at-ohare\">Crain’s Chicago article</a> about Spirit said just over half -- 58 % -- of their flights into ORD arrived on time in the first 9 months of this year. I fly at least 3 weeks out of 4. American Airlines’ 79% on-time percentage into ORD is only just acceptable; I’d go postal at 58%. But yet Spirit is now the 3rd largest airline at ORD after United and American. Working out of just two shared gates, it’s bigger than Delta. But then I remembered <a href=\"http://qz.com/533501/half-of-american-airlines-revenue-came-from-13-of-its-customers/\">some comments</a> made by the president of American Airlines during an analysts call right around the time American was doing the final merger of res systems with US Air. He said that half of American’s revenue last year came from the 87% of its customers that only flew them once. 50% of American’s revenue came from passengers that see air travel as a commodity and are looking for the lowest cost carriage between two points. And so for 50% of their revenue, American isn’t competing against United or Delta, they’re competing with Spirit.  It explains Delta’s Spirit-like Basic Economy offering, and the expectation that American and United will follow in 2016. And, I assume BA’s “hand baggage” fees that Ian mentions. The challenge, though, is how do you compete for the 87% of your passengers buying a commodity while also serving the remaining 13% of your passengers, who contribute the other 50% of your revenue, and value the little things like a seat that reclines a bit and a flight that arrives on time -- all in the same plane? Spirit doesn’t have that problem because they’ll never get that 13%. American, BA, Delta have the tougher problem.</li>\r\n	<li>Connecting through Dublin airport, my daughter cleared US immigration and customs in there in Ireland and then just popped out at the one domestic baggage claim in ORD’s Terminal 5 -- the International Terminal. Kinda similar to what they’ve been doing at Toronto’s Pearson Airport since forever -- or at least the 90’s when I was flying through there weekly. But there, American’s YYZ-ORD flight would land in Terminal 3, just like a flight from, say, Buffalo, and you’d make your connection or just walk out to the cab line. Handy for the regular traveler, but if you’ve dropped the $100 Global Entry fee, immigration lines at, say, ORD, aren’t any worse than they are in Toronto or Dublin. Indeed, my daughter was bummed that she went through US Preclearance so soon, because food and shopping choices on the US side of Preclearance were a lot thinner than on the Irish side. And I think that’ll be the problem if the TSA follows through on their announced expansion of Preclearance -- from what is mostly Canadian, Irish, and Caribbean airports to 10 much larger airports, including Tokyo, Amsterdam, Madrid, London Heathrow. If you’re flying US carriers out of European airports, you’re already being put into a de facto American ghetto -- typically flying out of the most remote gates, with the longest walks from security and airport lounges, and the fewest food and shopping amenities. Walling it off to create the secured facilities to support Preclearance just formalizes it.  The DHS secretary calls it a “win-win” for travelers. I think it’s just squeezing the balloon -- making wait time go down in the US, but go up in places like Narita and Heathrow. It’s one thing to miss a connection in ORD due to immigration delays. Odds are there’s another flight you can catch within a couple of hours. It’s a whole other thing if you miss that once a day flight home from, say, Amsterdam.</li>\r\n	<li>Thanks to El Niño, it’s been a warm start to the winter -- at least in North America. But soon enough, the temps will drop and the winter coats will start competing with carry-ons for overhead bin space. Last winter, while de-planing (what a weird verb construction!), someone handed me my black overcoat -- it was wedged in front of their suitcase. I threw it over my arm as I stepped out into the aisle, grabbed my carry-on, and hoofed it out of the plane, power-walking toward the cab line. It wasn’t until I stepped outside that I stopped to put my coat on and… it wasn’t my coat. I should’ve checked when it was handed to me, but I didn’t want to be that guy who stops <i>in the aisle</i> to put his jacket on. I went to Lost &amp; Found. The clerk called the gate, where the guy with my coat was standing, trying to find his coat. We got lucky. It took us about 10 minutes to sort everything out. He came down to Lost &amp; Found to swap coats. If it had been warmer out, like this week, I might not have put my coat on at all and gotten home for noticing the switch. Black bags, black coats. Love that black hides a lot of sins -- scuffs, dirt, extra pounds. Don’t love its ubiquity on an airplane. Keep your eyes on your stuff in these holiday crowds. Don’t want “Lost” to be the new black.</li>\r\n	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Perfect Stranger</em> by stellarartwars (c) 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/stellarartwars/45510 Ft: TheDice</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Danger Within The Travel Bubble</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>In the last episode, I talked about attending the <a href=\"http://popeindc.cua.edu/the-papal-mass/\" target=\"_blank\">Papal Mass</a> at <a href=\"http://www.cua.edu/\" target=\"_blank\">Catholic University</a> in northeast DC which has never been one of the nicer sections of DC. I had taken the Metro up from the airport and would be getting back on it to catch my evening flight to Detroit. The Brookland stop at Catholic isn’t a big stop and I figured it would get overwhelmed at the end of the Mass by the 25,000 people there. I started thinking of alternatives. Getting a cab or an Uber would probably be just as tough, so my best alternative would be to walk down to the next stop south on the Red Line -- Rhode Island Ave. From my days in DC, I remember that neighborhood being a particularly rough one. That would not be a pleasant walk. I decided to skip Communion and leave the Pope early to beat the crowds at the Brookland stop.</li>\r\n	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Most of the times when we talk about travel security, we talk about airport security or digital security, but not often about physical security. Yet very often, travel drops in unfamiliar settings -- usually by our own choice -- where we could unknowingly wander into a very unsafe situation</span></li>\r\n	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I did exactly this some years ago when visiting Cape Town, South Africa. I was shopping through some craft stalls set up in a park and just kept wandering along. I kinda looking at the buildings, up and around… Oh, and I have my big Nikon SLR slung over my shoulder. Not sure I could’ve looked any more like a tourist unless I was wearing a big “Don’t Mess With Texas” t-shirt and a Dallas Cowboys baseball cap. At some point, I finally regain some situational awareness -- and, from my university years living in Northeast DC and on the Southside of Chicago, realize that I’m not in the best neighborhood right now. I move to the middle of the street -- so I don’t get jumped from a doorway -- and walk, with purpose now, back the way I came.</span></li>\r\n	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I did a little better this spring in New Orleans. I was standing on St Charles St in the Garden District watching a Mardi Gras parade. After a while, I got a bad feeling about the atmosphere around me. Nothing that I could put my finger on, but enough to make me give up a prime spot on the parade round and walk up the street a bit. In the next morning’s paper, I read there had been a gun fight at that spot about 30 minutes after I’d left.</span></li>\r\n	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">There have been other times in Joburg, Bangalore, Guadalajara, but considering how much I travel, they’re rare events -- I’ve wandered all through Madrid, Beijing, Tokyo, Edinburgh, Saigon and never felt unsafe -- but they get your attention. But then again, that’s outside the “travel bubble”. We’ve talked about that in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2008/04/29/podcast-64-escaping-the-travel-bubble-marks-travel-tips/\" target=\"_blank\">past episodes</a>, how travelers can often seem to float above the places they visit unless they make the effort to “pop” the travel bubble and engage.</span></li>\r\n	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">When those outside problems penetrate our bubble, now that’s more disturbing. Like the time some years back when I was visiting Rio -- years before the World Cup. I was checking in with a colleague who had done a lot of business there. He saw my room was on the second floor. “No, that won’t do,” he said, “we need to get you on a double-digit floor. At least 10 if not higher” “Why?” I asked. “Because,” he explained, “when the smash-and-grab gangs break in, they start on the first floor and work their way up until their bags are full. The higher you are, the more likely they’ll fill up before they get to you.” The logic was brutally impeccable. And this from a guy still sporting a couple of bruises from an earlier mugging on Copacabana Beach.</span></li>\r\n	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Or a few years ago, when another colleague had to take a taxi to connect between Delhi’s domestic and international terminal -- before the latest renovation. He’d forgotten to print out his international itinerary, so they wouldn’t let him on the transfer bus (I’ve talked about, in prior episodes, the need to have a printed flight itinerary in India). He couldn’t find anyone in the terminal to print one out for him so he walked out to the cab rank. He piles his bags into and on top of a taxi and off he goes -- to some out-of-the-way place under a highway overpass where the cab driver and a friend shake him down for most of his money and his watch -- they leave him with his luggage and enough money for cab fare to the international terminal. A polite mugging; no bruises with this one.</span></li>\r\n	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">My most disturbing bubble burst happened in the US -- in a Westin in Connecticut. A friend checked in and, since the hotel was oversold, was given one of those rooms that’s a conference room with a bathroom. They rolled out the tables and rolled in a bed for him. The next morning, as he’s getting dressed, he’s missing his watch, his ring, and the money and credit cards from his wallet -- all which were next to him on the nightstand. As he put it together, someone had broken into the room -- he saw that the conference room’s double doors had enough of a gap between them that you could open the lock by slipping a credit card or room key through the gap -- and they had stood next to him going through his stuff on the night stand. He’s lucky he’s a sound sleeper.</span></li>\r\n	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">And I consider myself lucky. I don’t lock myself away in the hotel. I make an effort to step outside the travel bubble -- to engage -- and after 30 years of heavy travel, other than <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/05/20/podcast-98-stolen-luggage-restaurants-want-your-smartphone/\">having my camera and passport stolen</a>, I’m really no worse the wear. Certainly no bruises to show for it. I’m not sure I’d do it any other way. Though I do pay more attention to hotel door construction than I used to.</span></li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Foolish Game</em> by copperhead (c) 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/copperhead/46390 Ft: Snowflake,Sackjo22</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Switching Back to Apple</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>After your government ID, the smartphone is probably the most important thing you travel with. And while I quickly whip out my ID a few times a trip to prove my identity  -- to the TSA agent, to hotel clerks, to car rental check out folks, I use my smartphone constantly -- maybe too constantly. Be that as it may, the smartphone is <i>the</i> critical tool for today’s frequent traveler. A carpenter has his framing hammer, the auto mechanic his Snap-On wrench -- for the road warrior, it’s the smart phone.</li>\r\n	<li>And so it wasn’t without a good bit of thought that I bit the bullet a few weeks ago and switched back to Apple; dumping my HTC One for a new iPhone 6S. I wasn’t thrilled to do it; I put it off for at least a month. And in the end, it was more a frustration with hardware -- with the slouching-toward-bankruptcy mess that HTC has become than it was excitement for the latest iThing.</li>\r\n	<li>Which I guess is the pattern for me. My first smartphone was an iPhone 3G and I’d had just about every iPhone model up to the 5. And it was the frustration with its truly horrid battery life that led me to the HTC. The cause this time was the lousy performance of my HTC One after they pushed their Android upgrade -- “Lollipop” -- at the beginning of this year. It just trashed the phone -- the lag was awful. The hardware components have the specs to handle the new version; it’s just that HTC’s implementation of it is crap. Now, it’s not like Apple nails their OS upgrades every time. The IOS 8 release didn’t exactly cover them in glory. But at least they worked to resolve the problem by iterating through releases in a fairly timely manner. After the initial “Lollipop” release, Google iterated through updates  -- I think ver 5.1.1 is the most recent -- and I’m waited for HTC to use that as an opportunity to clean up their 5.0 mess. They would say on Twitter “It’s coming, just wait”, And then “Oh, we’ll just skip 5.1 and give you 6.0 by the end of the year”. That was it. I’d suffered through 6 months of lousy performance and now they were saying I would have at least 3 more -- not that I have any reason to think that the near-bankrupt company has gotten any better at software estimating.</li>\r\n	<li>I don’t think that either Apple’s or Google’s operating systems are inherently better than the other. I’ve used them both. They both work. There are things I like about each of them, and since they seem to be stealing/emulating (?) each other’s best features, they’re more or less converging on each other.</li>\r\n	<li>For me, the difference is the hardware -- which is what is actually in our hands each day. I’ve always thought Apple is a better hardware company than a software one. I loved my MacBook Air, but was very “meh” about OS X. It’s really the Android equipment manufacturers that are pushing me away. It seems that most of the Android hardware innovation is at the large end -- large screen sizes -- 5 ½ inches and up -- which is way bigger than what want. And then there are the delays in Android upgrades as each manufacturer gooses Google’s release -- my 18-month old Samsung tablet is still on version 4.4 “Kit Kat”, now two version levels down, with no update in sight, let alone any security patches. With mobile devices becoming more vital, that foot dragging on upgrades and security patching very uncomfortable.</li>\r\n	<li>I was holding out for Google’s updated Nexus line, reading all rumor articles with spec leaks and blurred pictures. The 6P was too big for me, but the 5X -- I could do a 5.2-in screen with fast updates and patches. But then, when they unveiled the 5X, it topped it out at 32 GB with no expansion slots. For me, that is just too tight for my music, podcasts, pictures, video. So that’s it, I walked into the Apple store and bought a 64GB unlocked GSM 6S on their new upgrade plan -- new phone comes out, I trade mine in. It’s like leasing a car -- some people like the newest model. It’s all about the hardware.</li>\r\n	<li>Now if I can just keep iTunes from crashing on my Windows 10 box...</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #119</li>\r\n	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/\">Podshow Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\r\n	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_119.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #119 — xxx','','inherit','closed','closed','','1579-revision-v1','','','2015-12-21 10:46:23','2015-12-21 15:46:23','',1579,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/12/21/1579-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0);
INSERT INTO `wp_posts` VALUES
(1582,1,'2015-12-21 10:46:49','2015-12-21 15:46:49','A bit less of a random walk than the last episode, we talk about safety, physical safety, when traveling. While we sometimes put ourselves in the midst of dodgy surroundings, we usually feel safe when we retreat back into the \"travel bubble\" What about when the bubble is no longer safe? Smartphones are the frequent traveler\'s most important tool. So when an upgrade to my HTC One killed its usefulness, I found myself heading back to Apple.  All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_119.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/232191753\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #119:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, cranking out one last episode to keep you occupied while you navigate the holiday security lines while trying to get to -- or away from family. Myself, I’m settling for the Christmas break after doing a day trip yesterday to Philadelphia. I’m taking a break from O’Hare until January.</li>\r\n	<li>No really remarkable travel since the last episode, just trips to Cleveland, Vegas, and Boston. When I was flying out of Vegas last week, I hit the <a href=\"http://thecenturionlounge.com/location/LAS\">Amex Centurion Lounge</a> for a couple of conference calls before boarding. It’s free entry with a Platinum Card, and so far and beyond any Admirals Club or Sky Club or United Club. It’s not quite as hip/a bit more button-down than Virgin Atlantic’s Upper Lounge in Heathrow, but the comfort, the free buffet and open bar just are just as good. Highly recommended. I just wish there were more of them.</li>\r\n	<li>When I’m flying into Boston, I’m actually heading out 45 minutes west, close to Worcester. Now that’s a 45 minute drive out I-90 when I land at 9 or 10 in the morning. When I land at 5 in the evening, it’s a whole different story. I touch down at Logan, flip out of airplane mode and immediately open Waze. How bad is the traffic? How about <i>an hour</i> and 45 minute drive? Not looking forward to that parking lot, so I threaded my way over to Chelsea. Found a great little microbrewery complete with real live Boston Irish patrons and sample 1, 2, 4 of their beers. Then I walked up a couple of blocks to a Central American joint underneath a highway overpass. Had a great plate of food for less than $10.  I’ve spent a few dinner times wandering around nearby neighborhoods -- Charlestown, the Seaport District as well as Chelsea -- waiting for Waze to tell me when I-90’s traffic tantrum had subsided.</li>\r\n	<li>Probably the biggest travel event this week wasn’t mine but my daughter’s. It’s her first solo flight -- returning from her first semester at Univ of St Andrews, flying Aer Lingus from Edinburgh to Chicago by way of Dublin. It’s a big adjustment in a couple of ways. First, of course, she has to figure out a new airport by herself. She’s never been through Dublin before, but I thought a smaller airport would be a better first solo than trying to navigate the start of holiday traffic at Heathrow. But she does now have to pay attention to what’s going on rather than just following in my slipstream. The second adjustment is a bit more of a First World problem -- flying as as plain old passenger, a villager, rather than tagging along with me through the Gold or Platinum baggage check lines and pre-boarding. It’s a tough come-down, but I did soften the blow a little bit. I paid her Global Entry fee as a going away gift.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Paint the Sky</em> by Hans Atom (c) 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/hansatom/50718 Ft: Miss Judged</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Not really any commentary on the last episode, though Ian Morgan swung by the Facebook page with adding to the support about British Airways’ stricter carry-on policy\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>“Just listened to your October episode! Picked up your post about BA hand luggage. They have just changed their policy on this to clamp down. I agree it is frustrating especially on lightly loaded widebody aircraft. However, as a regular BA traveller I have lost count of the number of times BA flights have been delayed whilst cabin crew offload hand luggage, especially since BA introduced \"hand baggage only\" fares. Before the change, I never saw BA using the size gauges - these days they use them much more frequently. It\'s part of the steady decline of BA from a full service airline to a low cost carriers. Just be grateful that you got a 767 instead of an A321 with new \'spacesaver\' seats with a 29\" seat pitch!!</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>Ian, I think you’ve nailed it -- the descent of full-service carriers into the low-cost, low-service ring of travel hell created by Ryan Air and Spirit Airlines.  I’ve talked about this before -- a frequent traveler can’t fathom why someone would subject themselves to the hassles that Ryan and Spirit travelers endure. A recent <a href=\"http://www.chicagobusiness.com/article/20151205/ISSUE01/312059993/can-you-guess-whats-the-third-biggest-airline-at-ohare\">Crain’s Chicago article</a> about Spirit said just over half -- 58 % -- of their flights into ORD arrived on time in the first 9 months of this year. I fly at least 3 weeks out of 4. American Airlines’ 79% on-time percentage into ORD is only just acceptable; I’d go postal at 58%. But yet Spirit is now the 3rd largest airline at ORD after United and American. Working out of just two shared gates, it’s bigger than Delta. But then I remembered <a href=\"http://qz.com/533501/half-of-american-airlines-revenue-came-from-13-of-its-customers/\">some comments</a> made by the president of American Airlines during an analysts call right around the time American was doing the final merger of res systems with US Air. He said that half of American’s revenue last year came from the 87% of its customers that only flew them once. 50% of American’s revenue came from passengers that see air travel as a commodity and are looking for the lowest cost carriage between two points. And so for 50% of their revenue, American isn’t competing against United or Delta, they’re competing with Spirit.  It explains Delta’s Spirit-like Basic Economy offering, and the expectation that American and United will follow in 2016. And, I assume BA’s “hand baggage” fees that Ian mentions. The challenge, though, is how do you compete for the 87% of your passengers buying a commodity while also serving the remaining 13% of your passengers, who contribute the other 50% of your revenue, and value the little things like a seat that reclines a bit and a flight that arrives on time -- all in the same plane? Spirit doesn’t have that problem because they’ll never get that 13%. American, BA, Delta have the tougher problem.</li>\r\n	<li>Connecting through Dublin airport, my daughter cleared US immigration and customs in there in Ireland and then just popped out at the one domestic baggage claim in ORD’s Terminal 5 -- the International Terminal. Kinda similar to what they’ve been doing at Toronto’s Pearson Airport since forever -- or at least the 90’s when I was flying through there weekly. But there, American’s YYZ-ORD flight would land in Terminal 3, just like a flight from, say, Buffalo, and you’d make your connection or just walk out to the cab line. Handy for the regular traveler, but if you’ve dropped the $100 Global Entry fee, immigration lines at, say, ORD, aren’t any worse than they are in Toronto or Dublin. Indeed, my daughter was bummed that she went through US Preclearance so soon, because food and shopping choices on the US side of Preclearance were a lot thinner than on the Irish side. And I think that’ll be the problem if the TSA follows through on their announced expansion of Preclearance -- from what is mostly Canadian, Irish, and Caribbean airports to 10 much larger airports, including Tokyo, Amsterdam, Madrid, London Heathrow. If you’re flying US carriers out of European airports, you’re already being put into a de facto American ghetto -- typically flying out of the most remote gates, with the longest walks from security and airport lounges, and the fewest food and shopping amenities. Walling it off to create the secured facilities to support Preclearance just formalizes it.  The DHS secretary calls it a “win-win” for travelers. I think it’s just squeezing the balloon -- making wait time go down in the US, but go up in places like Narita and Heathrow. It’s one thing to miss a connection in ORD due to immigration delays. Odds are there’s another flight you can catch within a couple of hours. It’s a whole other thing if you miss that once a day flight home from, say, Amsterdam.</li>\r\n	<li>Thanks to El Niño, it’s been a warm start to the winter -- at least in North America. But soon enough, the temps will drop and the winter coats will start competing with carry-ons for overhead bin space. Last winter, while de-planing (what a weird verb construction!), someone handed me my black overcoat -- it was wedged in front of their suitcase. I threw it over my arm as I stepped out into the aisle, grabbed my carry-on, and hoofed it out of the plane, power-walking toward the cab line. It wasn’t until I stepped outside that I stopped to put my coat on and… it wasn’t my coat. I should’ve checked when it was handed to me, but I didn’t want to be that guy who stops <i>in the aisle</i> to put his jacket on. I went to Lost &amp; Found. The clerk called the gate, where the guy with my coat was standing, trying to find his coat. We got lucky. It took us about 10 minutes to sort everything out. He came down to Lost &amp; Found to swap coats. If it had been warmer out, like this week, I might not have put my coat on at all and gotten home for noticing the switch. Black bags, black coats. Love that black hides a lot of sins -- scuffs, dirt, extra pounds. Don’t love its ubiquity on an airplane. Keep your eyes on your stuff in these holiday crowds. Don’t want “Lost” to be the new black.</li>\r\n	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Perfect Stranger</em> by stellarartwars (c) 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/stellarartwars/45510 Ft: TheDice</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Digital Security On The Road</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>In the last episode, I talked about attending the <a href=\"http://popeindc.cua.edu/the-papal-mass/\" target=\"_blank\">Papal Mass</a> at <a href=\"http://www.cua.edu/\" target=\"_blank\">Catholic University</a> in northeast DC which has never been one of the nicer sections of DC. I had taken the Metro up from the airport and would be getting back on it to catch my evening flight to Detroit. The Brookland stop at Catholic isn’t a big stop and I figured it would get overwhelmed at the end of the Mass by the 25,000 people there. I started thinking of alternatives. Getting a cab or an Uber would probably be just as tough, so my best alternative would be to walk down to the next stop south on the Red Line -- Rhode Island Ave. From my days in DC, I remember that neighborhood being a particularly rough one. That would not be a pleasant walk. I decided to skip Communion and leave the Pope early to beat the crowds at the Brookland stop.</li>\r\n	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Most of the times when we talk about travel security, we talk about airport security or digital security, but not often about physical security. Yet very often, travel drops in unfamiliar settings -- usually by our own choice -- where we could unknowingly wander into a very unsafe situation</span></li>\r\n	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I did exactly this some years ago when visiting Cape Town, South Africa. I was shopping through some craft stalls set up in a park and just kept wandering along. I kinda looking at the buildings, up and around… Oh, and I have my big Nikon SLR slung over my shoulder. Not sure I could’ve looked any more like a tourist unless I was wearing a big “Don’t Mess With Texas” t-shirt and a Dallas Cowboys baseball cap. At some point, I finally regain some situational awareness -- and, from my university years living in Northeast DC and on the Southside of Chicago, realize that I’m not in the best neighborhood right now. I move to the middle of the street -- so I don’t get jumped from a doorway -- and walk, with purpose now, back the way I came.</span></li>\r\n	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I did a little better this spring in New Orleans. I was standing on St Charles St in the Garden District watching a Mardi Gras parade. After a while, I got a bad feeling about the atmosphere around me. Nothing that I could put my finger on, but enough to make me give up a prime spot on the parade round and walk up the street a bit. In the next morning’s paper, I read there had been a gun fight at that spot about 30 minutes after I’d left.</span></li>\r\n	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">There have been other times in Joburg, Bangalore, Guadalajara, but considering how much I travel, they’re rare events -- I’ve wandered all through Madrid, Beijing, Tokyo, Edinburgh, Saigon and never felt unsafe -- but they get your attention. But then again, that’s outside the “travel bubble”. We’ve talked about that in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2008/04/29/podcast-64-escaping-the-travel-bubble-marks-travel-tips/\" target=\"_blank\">past episodes</a>, how travelers can often seem to float above the places they visit unless they make the effort to “pop” the travel bubble and engage.</span></li>\r\n	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">When those outside problems penetrate our bubble, now that’s more disturbing. Like the time some years back when I was visiting Rio -- years before the World Cup. I was checking in with a colleague who had done a lot of business there. He saw my room was on the second floor. “No, that won’t do,” he said, “we need to get you on a double-digit floor. At least 10 if not higher” “Why?” I asked. “Because,” he explained, “when the smash-and-grab gangs break in, they start on the first floor and work their way up until their bags are full. The higher you are, the more likely they’ll fill up before they get to you.” The logic was brutally impeccable. And this from a guy still sporting a couple of bruises from an earlier mugging on Copacabana Beach.</span></li>\r\n	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Or a few years ago, when another colleague had to take a taxi to connect between Delhi’s domestic and international terminal -- before the latest renovation. He’d forgotten to print out his international itinerary, so they wouldn’t let him on the transfer bus (I’ve talked about, in prior episodes, the need to have a printed flight itinerary in India). He couldn’t find anyone in the terminal to print one out for him so he walked out to the cab rank. He piles his bags into and on top of a taxi and off he goes -- to some out-of-the-way place under a highway overpass where the cab driver and a friend shake him down for most of his money and his watch -- they leave him with his luggage and enough money for cab fare to the international terminal. A polite mugging; no bruises with this one.</span></li>\r\n	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">My most disturbing bubble burst happened in the US -- in a Westin in Connecticut. A friend checked in and, since the hotel was oversold, was given one of those rooms that’s a conference room with a bathroom. They rolled out the tables and rolled in a bed for him. The next morning, as he’s getting dressed, he’s missing his watch, his ring, and the money and credit cards from his wallet -- all which were next to him on the nightstand. As he put it together, someone had broken into the room -- he saw that the conference room’s double doors had enough of a gap between them that you could open the lock by slipping a credit card or room key through the gap -- and they had stood next to him going through his stuff on the night stand. He’s lucky he’s a sound sleeper.</span></li>\r\n	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">And I consider myself lucky. I don’t lock myself away in the hotel. I make an effort to step outside the travel bubble -- to engage -- and after 30 years of heavy travel, other than <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/05/20/podcast-98-stolen-luggage-restaurants-want-your-smartphone/\">having my camera and passport stolen</a>, I’m really no worse the wear. Certainly no bruises to show for it. I’m not sure I’d do it any other way. Though I do pay more attention to hotel door construction than I used to.</span></li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Foolish Game</em> by copperhead (c) 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/copperhead/46390 Ft: Snowflake,Sackjo22</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Switching Back to Apple</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>After your government ID, the smartphone is probably the most important thing you travel with. And while I quickly whip out my ID a few times a trip to prove my identity  -- to the TSA agent, to hotel clerks, to car rental check out folks, I use my smartphone constantly -- maybe too constantly. Be that as it may, the smartphone is <i>the</i> critical tool for today’s frequent traveler. A carpenter has his framing hammer, the auto mechanic his Snap-On wrench -- for the road warrior, it’s the smart phone.</li>\r\n	<li>And so it wasn’t without a good bit of thought that I bit the bullet a few weeks ago and switched back to Apple; dumping my HTC One for a new iPhone 6S. I wasn’t thrilled to do it; I put it off for at least a month. And in the end, it was more a frustration with hardware -- with the slouching-toward-bankruptcy mess that HTC has become than it was excitement for the latest iThing.</li>\r\n	<li>Which I guess is the pattern for me. My first smartphone was an iPhone 3G and I’d had just about every iPhone model up to the 5. And it was the frustration with its truly horrid battery life that led me to the HTC. The cause this time was the lousy performance of my HTC One after they pushed their Android upgrade -- “Lollipop” -- at the beginning of this year. It just trashed the phone -- the lag was awful. The hardware components have the specs to handle the new version; it’s just that HTC’s implementation of it is crap. Now, it’s not like Apple nails their OS upgrades every time. The IOS 8 release didn’t exactly cover them in glory. But at least they worked to resolve the problem by iterating through releases in a fairly timely manner. After the initial “Lollipop” release, Google iterated through updates  -- I think ver 5.1.1 is the most recent -- and I’m waited for HTC to use that as an opportunity to clean up their 5.0 mess. They would say on Twitter “It’s coming, just wait”, And then “Oh, we’ll just skip 5.1 and give you 6.0 by the end of the year”. That was it. I’d suffered through 6 months of lousy performance and now they were saying I would have at least 3 more -- not that I have any reason to think that the near-bankrupt company has gotten any better at software estimating.</li>\r\n	<li>I don’t think that either Apple’s or Google’s operating systems are inherently better than the other. I’ve used them both. They both work. There are things I like about each of them, and since they seem to be stealing/emulating (?) each other’s best features, they’re more or less converging on each other.</li>\r\n	<li>For me, the difference is the hardware -- which is what is actually in our hands each day. I’ve always thought Apple is a better hardware company than a software one. I loved my MacBook Air, but was very “meh” about OS X. It’s really the Android equipment manufacturers that are pushing me away. It seems that most of the Android hardware innovation is at the large end -- large screen sizes -- 5 ½ inches and up -- which is way bigger than what want. And then there are the delays in Android upgrades as each manufacturer gooses Google’s release -- my 18-month old Samsung tablet is still on version 4.4 “Kit Kat”, now two version levels down, with no update in sight, let alone any security patches. With mobile devices becoming more vital, that foot dragging on upgrades and security patching very uncomfortable.</li>\r\n	<li>I was holding out for Google’s updated Nexus line, reading all rumor articles with spec leaks and blurred pictures. The 6P was too big for me, but the 5X -- I could do a 5.2-in screen with fast updates and patches. But then, when they unveiled the 5X, it topped it out at 32 GB with no expansion slots. For me, that is just too tight for my music, podcasts, pictures, video. So that’s it, I walked into the Apple store and bought a 64GB unlocked GSM 6S on their new upgrade plan -- new phone comes out, I trade mine in. It’s like leasing a car -- some people like the newest model. It’s all about the hardware.</li>\r\n	<li>Now if I can just keep iTunes from crashing on my Windows 10 box...</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #119</li>\r\n	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/\">Podshow Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\r\n	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_119.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #119 — xxx','','inherit','closed','closed','','1579-revision-v1','','','2015-12-21 10:46:49','2015-12-21 15:46:49','',1579,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/12/21/1579-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1583,1,'2015-12-21 11:01:55','2015-12-21 16:01:55','A bit less of a random walk than the last episode, we talk about safety, physical safety, when traveling. While we sometimes put ourselves in the midst of dodgy surroundings, we usually feel safe when we retreat back into the \"travel bubble\" What about when the bubble is no longer safe? Smartphones are the frequent traveler\'s most important tool. So when an upgrade to my HTC One killed its usefulness, I found myself heading back to Apple.  All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_119.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/232191753\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #119:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, cranking out one last episode to keep you occupied while you navigate the holiday security lines while trying to get to -- or away from family. Myself, I’m settling for the Christmas break after doing a day trip yesterday to Philadelphia. I’m taking a break from O’Hare until January.</li>\r\n	<li>No really remarkable travel since the last episode, just trips to Cleveland, Vegas, and Boston. When I was flying out of Vegas last week, I hit the <a href=\"http://thecenturionlounge.com/location/LAS\">Amex Centurion Lounge</a> for a couple of conference calls before boarding. It’s free entry with a Platinum Card, and so far and beyond any Admirals Club or Sky Club or United Club. It’s not quite as hip/a bit more button-down than Virgin Atlantic’s Upper Lounge in Heathrow, but the comfort, the free buffet and open bar just are just as good. Highly recommended. I just wish there were more of them.</li>\r\n	<li>When I’m flying into Boston, I’m actually heading out 45 minutes west, close to Worcester. Now that’s a 45 minute drive out I-90 when I land at 9 or 10 in the morning. When I land at 5 in the evening, it’s a whole different story. I touch down at Logan, flip out of airplane mode and immediately open Waze. How bad is the traffic? How about <i>an hour</i> and 45 minute drive? Not looking forward to that parking lot, so I threaded my way over to Chelsea. Found a great little microbrewery complete with real live Boston Irish patrons and sample 1, 2, 4 of their beers. Then I walked up a couple of blocks to a Central American joint underneath a highway overpass. Had a great plate of food for less than $10.  I’ve spent a few dinner times wandering around nearby neighborhoods -- Charlestown, the Seaport District as well as Chelsea -- waiting for Waze to tell me when I-90’s traffic tantrum had subsided.</li>\r\n	<li>Probably the biggest travel event this week wasn’t mine but my daughter’s. It’s her first solo flight -- returning from her first semester at Univ of St Andrews, flying Aer Lingus from Edinburgh to Chicago by way of Dublin. It’s a big adjustment in a couple of ways. First, of course, she has to figure out a new airport by herself. She’s never been through Dublin before, but I thought a smaller airport would be a better first solo than trying to navigate the start of holiday traffic at Heathrow. But she does now have to pay attention to what’s going on rather than just following in my slipstream. The second adjustment is a bit more of a First World problem -- flying as as plain old passenger, a villager, rather than tagging along with me through the Gold or Platinum baggage check lines and pre-boarding. It’s a tough come-down, but I did soften the blow a little bit. I paid her Global Entry fee as a going away gift.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Paint the Sky</em> by Hans Atom (c) 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/hansatom/50718 Ft: Miss Judged</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Not really any commentary on the last episode, though Ian Morgan swung by the Facebook page with adding to the support about British Airways’ stricter carry-on policy\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>“Just listened to your October episode! Picked up your post about BA hand luggage. They have just changed their policy on this to clamp down. I agree it is frustrating especially on lightly loaded widebody aircraft. However, as a regular BA traveller I have lost count of the number of times BA flights have been delayed whilst cabin crew offload hand luggage, especially since BA introduced \"hand baggage only\" fares. Before the change, I never saw BA using the size gauges - these days they use them much more frequently. It\'s part of the steady decline of BA from a full service airline to a low cost carriers. Just be grateful that you got a 767 instead of an A321 with new \'spacesaver\' seats with a 29\" seat pitch!!</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>Ian, I think you’ve nailed it -- the descent of full-service carriers into the low-cost, low-service ring of travel hell created by Ryan Air and Spirit Airlines.  I’ve talked about this before -- a frequent traveler can’t fathom why someone would subject themselves to the hassles that Ryan and Spirit travelers endure. A recent <a href=\"http://www.chicagobusiness.com/article/20151205/ISSUE01/312059993/can-you-guess-whats-the-third-biggest-airline-at-ohare\">Crain’s Chicago article</a> about Spirit said just over half -- 58 % -- of their flights into ORD arrived on time in the first 9 months of this year. I fly at least 3 weeks out of 4. American Airlines’ 79% on-time percentage into ORD is only just acceptable; I’d go postal at 58%. But yet Spirit is now the 3rd largest airline at ORD after United and American. Working out of just two shared gates, it’s bigger than Delta. But then I remembered <a href=\"http://qz.com/533501/half-of-american-airlines-revenue-came-from-13-of-its-customers/\">some comments</a> made by the president of American Airlines during an analysts call right around the time American was doing the final merger of res systems with US Air. He said that half of American’s revenue last year came from the 87% of its customers that only flew them once. 50% of American’s revenue came from passengers that see air travel as a commodity and are looking for the lowest cost carriage between two points. And so for 50% of their revenue, American isn’t competing against United or Delta, they’re competing with Spirit.  It explains Delta’s Spirit-like Basic Economy offering, and the expectation that American and United will follow in 2016. And, I assume BA’s “hand baggage” fees that Ian mentions. The challenge, though, is how do you compete for the 87% of your passengers buying a commodity while also serving the remaining 13% of your passengers, who contribute the other 50% of your revenue, and value the little things like a seat that reclines a bit and a flight that arrives on time -- all in the same plane? Spirit doesn’t have that problem because they’ll never get that 13%. American, BA, Delta have the tougher problem.</li>\r\n	<li>Connecting through Dublin airport, my daughter cleared US immigration and customs in there in Ireland and then just popped out at the one domestic baggage claim in ORD’s Terminal 5 -- the International Terminal. Kinda similar to what they’ve been doing at Toronto’s Pearson Airport since forever -- or at least the 90’s when I was flying through there weekly. But there, American’s YYZ-ORD flight would land in Terminal 3, just like a flight from, say, Buffalo, and you’d make your connection or just walk out to the cab line. Handy for the regular traveler, but if you’ve dropped the $100 Global Entry fee, immigration lines at, say, ORD, aren’t any worse than they are in Toronto or Dublin. Indeed, my daughter was bummed that she went through US Preclearance so soon, because food and shopping choices on the US side of Preclearance were a lot thinner than on the Irish side. And I think that’ll be the problem if the TSA follows through on their announced expansion of Preclearance -- from what is mostly Canadian, Irish, and Caribbean airports to 10 much larger airports, including Tokyo, Amsterdam, Madrid, London Heathrow. If you’re flying US carriers out of European airports, you’re already being put into a de facto American ghetto -- typically flying out of the most remote gates, with the longest walks from security and airport lounges, and the fewest food and shopping amenities. Walling it off to create the secured facilities to support Preclearance just formalizes it.  The DHS secretary calls it a “win-win” for travelers. I think it’s just squeezing the balloon -- making wait time go down in the US, but go up in places like Narita and Heathrow. It’s one thing to miss a connection in ORD due to immigration delays. Odds are there’s another flight you can catch within a couple of hours. It’s a whole other thing if you miss that once a day flight home from, say, Amsterdam.</li>\r\n	<li>Thanks to El Niño, it’s been a warm start to the winter -- at least in North America. But soon enough, the temps will drop and the winter coats will start competing with carry-ons for overhead bin space. Last winter, while de-planing (what a weird verb construction!), someone handed me my black overcoat -- it was wedged in front of their suitcase. I threw it over my arm as I stepped out into the aisle, grabbed my carry-on, and hoofed it out of the plane, power-walking toward the cab line. It wasn’t until I stepped outside that I stopped to put my coat on and… it wasn’t my coat. I should’ve checked when it was handed to me, but I didn’t want to be that guy who stops <i>in the aisle</i> to put his jacket on. I went to Lost &amp; Found. The clerk called the gate, where the guy with my coat was standing, trying to find his coat. We got lucky. It took us about 10 minutes to sort everything out. He came down to Lost &amp; Found to swap coats. If it had been warmer out, like this week, I might not have put my coat on at all and gotten home for noticing the switch. Black bags, black coats. Love that black hides a lot of sins -- scuffs, dirt, extra pounds. Don’t love its ubiquity on an airplane. Keep your eyes on your stuff in these holiday crowds. Don’t want “Lost” to be the new black.</li>\r\n	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Perfect Stranger</em> by stellarartwars (c) 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/stellarartwars/45510 Ft: TheDice</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Digital Security On The Road</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Digital security, cyber security. I don’t know about you, but I’ve kinda hit security breach fatigue. On Thursday, yet another company announced a credit card breach. <a href=\"http://krebsonsecurity.com/2015/12/banks-card-breach-at-landrys-restaurants/\">This time</a> it’s Landry’s who runs Bubba Gumps and Morton’s Steakhouse and another 15 or so restaurant brands. I don’t frequent Landry’s brands that much, so I’m hoping that this breach doesn’t mean I have to replace one of my credit cards and again have to go through the goat rodeo of changing account numbers for all my autobills. But it still does reinforce that feeling the cyber security is not a matter of “if” but “when”</li>\r\n	<li>But even if it’s a matter of “when”, I’d still like to postpone the “when” as long as possible. And traveling -- certainly during the holidays -- there’s a lot of opportunity to bring on the “when” if you’re not just a bit thoughtful. There’s also a balance between inconvenience -- the cost of being more digitally secure -- and the probability of being “breached” (can I say that without having to flag this as “explicit” in iTunes?).</li>\r\n	<li>You could always go “old school” -- like 10 years ago when there was damn little public WiFi, no iPhones -- nothing to keep us entertained as we shuffled through the TSA lines other than trading snarky remarks with other line sufferers. Or you could go the “burner” route -- using disposable phones and a temporary PC, which is what many business travelers to China still do -- doing a complete wipe of their phones and PCs before and after each visit because they just expect to get hacked no matter what anti-virus and other safety precautions they take. But if all you’re doing is going from, say, San Francisco to Boston to see your family, these seem a bit “overkill” -- definitely not balancing the cost-benefit trade-off. I’m fairly lazy about this stuff, but there are a few precautions I do take.</li>\r\n	<li>First, I never do any financial stuff over public WiFi -- no checking my bank account or credit card activity over an airport or Starbucks WiFi, or a hotel network at all -- whether WiFi or jacked into an Ethernet port. Even if the URL is showing https -- a encrypted web connection -- there’s just too many ways those networks or web sites can be misconfigured. Some folks will tell you to use a VPN. I used one in China, but it seems a bit too much in the US. If I have to do some banking, I’ll use my iPhone over the mobile carrier network -- AT&amp;T in the US, Orange when I was in Spain, .... I know it’s not perfect, but, as the cyber security guys like to say, it “reduces the attack surface” at what is considered one of the most vulnerable points.</li>\r\n	<li>I rarely use hotel PCs -- the ones set up in lobbies or the concierge lounges. I mean, if I have a smartphone, a tablet, and a PC, why do I need to use a public PC that’s open to anyone loading up a key-logger that’ll capture anything you type -- including logins and passwords. If I do, for some odd reason, need to use one, I never log into anything. Maybe just search for a restaurant, but that’s about it.</li>\r\n	<li>I always make sure that I’ve configured my phone and PC e-mail clients to use encrypted communications between servers -- using IMAP and SMTP over SSL (<i>&gt;now</i> we’re talking security because we used more acronyms than words in that last sentence) for my own mail servers; GMail does it automatically for you. But I don’t encrypt the message itself -- no PGP or signed MIME. There’s nothing in my e-mails that is <i>that</i> confidential to go through that hassle.</li>\r\n	<li>I have recently, though, turned on two-factor authentication for every service that offers it -- GMail, some of my financial accounts, Dropbox, …. I resisted it for a long time -- again, thought it was more hassle than it was worth. But then I started getting some odd password reset e-mail requests -- that I didn’t request.</li>\r\n	<li>I go back and forth on using smartphone or printed boarding passes. Smartphone boarding passes are quicker -- you can get it while in the cab to the airport rather than queueing up for a kiosk -- but I’ve had more than a few times when my boarding pass disappeared from the app during an extended flight delay. Printed boarding passes are easier to scan at the gate -- especially when juggling a backpack, a hot coffee, and a winter coat -- but there’s recently been a <a href=\"http://www.economist.com/blogs/gulliver/2015/10/security-check\">bit</a> of a <a href=\"http://krebsonsecurity.com/2015/10/whats-in-a-boarding-pass-barcode-a-lot/#more-31317\">stir</a> about the amount of personal information someone could pull out of the bar codes. Maybe I’m not paranoid enough, but that one feels a bit of a stretch. I do whatever’s the most convenient -- usually the smartphone route. But when I do print out a boarding pass, I keep it in my jacket pocket -- just to be sure.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Foolish Game</em> by copperhead (c) 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/copperhead/46390 Ft: Snowflake,Sackjo22</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Switching Back to Apple</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>After your government ID, the smartphone is probably the most important thing you travel with. And while I quickly whip out my ID a few times a trip to prove my identity  -- to the TSA agent, to hotel clerks, to car rental check out folks, I use my smartphone constantly -- maybe too constantly. Be that as it may, the smartphone is <i>the</i> critical tool for today’s frequent traveler. A carpenter has his framing hammer, the auto mechanic his Snap-On wrench -- for the road warrior, it’s the smart phone.</li>\r\n	<li>And so it wasn’t without a good bit of thought that I bit the bullet a few weeks ago and switched back to Apple; dumping my HTC One for a new iPhone 6S. I wasn’t thrilled to do it; I put it off for at least a month. And in the end, it was more a frustration with hardware -- with the slouching-toward-bankruptcy mess that HTC has become than it was excitement for the latest iThing.</li>\r\n	<li>Which I guess is the pattern for me. My first smartphone was an iPhone 3G and I’d had just about every iPhone model up to the 5. And it was the frustration with its truly horrid battery life that led me to the HTC. The cause this time was the lousy performance of my HTC One after they pushed their Android upgrade -- “Lollipop” -- at the beginning of this year. It just trashed the phone -- the lag was awful. The hardware components have the specs to handle the new version; it’s just that HTC’s implementation of it is crap. Now, it’s not like Apple nails their OS upgrades every time. The IOS 8 release didn’t exactly cover them in glory. But at least they worked to resolve the problem by iterating through releases in a fairly timely manner. After the initial “Lollipop” release, Google iterated through updates  -- I think ver 5.1.1 is the most recent -- and I’m waited for HTC to use that as an opportunity to clean up their 5.0 mess. They would say on Twitter “It’s coming, just wait”, And then “Oh, we’ll just skip 5.1 and give you 6.0 by the end of the year”. That was it. I’d suffered through 6 months of lousy performance and now they were saying I would have at least 3 more -- not that I have any reason to think that the near-bankrupt company has gotten any better at software estimating.</li>\r\n	<li>I don’t think that either Apple’s or Google’s operating systems are inherently better than the other. I’ve used them both. They both work. There are things I like about each of them, and since they seem to be stealing/emulating (?) each other’s best features, they’re more or less converging on each other.</li>\r\n	<li>For me, the difference is the hardware -- which is what is actually in our hands each day. I’ve always thought Apple is a better hardware company than a software one. I loved my MacBook Air, but was very “meh” about OS X. It’s really the Android equipment manufacturers that are pushing me away. It seems that most of the Android hardware innovation is at the large end -- large screen sizes -- 5 ½ inches and up -- which is way bigger than what want. And then there are the delays in Android upgrades as each manufacturer gooses Google’s release -- my 18-month old Samsung tablet is still on version 4.4 “Kit Kat”, now two version levels down, with no update in sight, let alone any security patches. With mobile devices becoming more vital, that foot dragging on upgrades and security patching very uncomfortable.</li>\r\n	<li>I was holding out for Google’s updated Nexus line, reading all rumor articles with spec leaks and blurred pictures. The 6P was too big for me, but the 5X -- I could do a 5.2-in screen with fast updates and patches. But then, when they unveiled the 5X, it topped it out at 32 GB with no expansion slots. For me, that is just too tight for my music, podcasts, pictures, video. So that’s it, I walked into the Apple store and bought a 64GB unlocked GSM 6S on their new upgrade plan -- new phone comes out, I trade mine in. It’s like leasing a car -- some people like the newest model. It’s all about the hardware.</li>\r\n	<li>Now if I can just keep iTunes from crashing on my Windows 10 box...</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #119</li>\r\n	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/\">Podshow Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\r\n	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_119.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #119 — xxx','','inherit','closed','closed','','1579-revision-v1','','','2015-12-21 11:01:55','2015-12-21 16:01:55','',1579,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/12/21/1579-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1584,1,'2015-12-21 14:23:53','2015-12-21 19:23:53','A bit less of a random walk than the last episode, we talk about safety, physical safety, when traveling. While we sometimes put ourselves in the midst of dodgy surroundings, we usually feel safe when we retreat back into the \"travel bubble\" What about when the bubble is no longer safe? Smartphones are the frequent traveler\'s most important tool. So when an upgrade to my HTC One killed its usefulness, I found myself heading back to Apple.  All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_119.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/232191753\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #119:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, cranking out one last episode to keep you occupied while you navigate the holiday security lines while trying to get to -- or away from family. Myself, I’m settling for the Christmas break after doing a day trip yesterday to Philadelphia. I’m taking a break from O’Hare until January.</li>\r\n	<li>No really remarkable travel since the last episode, just trips to Cleveland, Vegas, and Boston. When I was flying out of Vegas last week, I hit the <a href=\"http://thecenturionlounge.com/location/LAS\">Amex Centurion Lounge</a> for a couple of conference calls before boarding. It’s free entry with a Platinum Card, and so far and beyond any Admirals Club or Sky Club or United Club. It’s not quite as hip/a bit more button-down than Virgin Atlantic’s Upper Lounge in Heathrow, but the comfort, the free buffet and open bar just are just as good. Highly recommended. I just wish there were more of them.</li>\r\n	<li>When I’m flying into Boston, I’m actually heading out 45 minutes west, close to Worcester. Now that’s a 45 minute drive out I-90 when I land at 9 or 10 in the morning. When I land at 5 in the evening, it’s a whole different story. I touch down at Logan, flip out of airplane mode and immediately open Waze. How bad is the traffic? How about <i>an hour</i> and 45 minute drive? Not looking forward to that parking lot, so I threaded my way over to Chelsea. Found a great little microbrewery complete with real live Boston Irish patrons and sample 1, 2, 4 of their beers. Then I walked up a couple of blocks to a Central American joint underneath a highway overpass. Had a great plate of food for less than $10.  I’ve spent a few dinner times wandering around nearby neighborhoods -- Charlestown, the Seaport District as well as Chelsea -- waiting for Waze to tell me when I-90’s traffic tantrum had subsided.</li>\r\n	<li>Probably the biggest travel event this week wasn’t mine but my daughter’s. It’s her first solo flight -- returning from her first semester at Univ of St Andrews, flying Aer Lingus from Edinburgh to Chicago by way of Dublin. It’s a big adjustment in a couple of ways. First, of course, she has to figure out a new airport by herself. She’s never been through Dublin before, but I thought a smaller airport would be a better first solo than trying to navigate the start of holiday traffic at Heathrow. But she does now have to pay attention to what’s going on rather than just following in my slipstream. The second adjustment is a bit more of a First World problem -- flying as as plain old passenger, a villager, rather than tagging along with me through the Gold or Platinum baggage check lines and pre-boarding. It’s a tough come-down, but I did soften the blow a little bit. I paid her Global Entry fee as a going away gift.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Paint the Sky</em> by Hans Atom (c) 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/hansatom/50718 Ft: Miss Judged</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Not really any commentary on the last episode, though Ian Morgan swung by the Facebook page with adding to the support about British Airways’ stricter carry-on policy\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>“Just listened to your October episode! Picked up your post about BA hand luggage. They have just changed their policy on this to clamp down. I agree it is frustrating especially on lightly loaded widebody aircraft. However, as a regular BA traveller I have lost count of the number of times BA flights have been delayed whilst cabin crew offload hand luggage, especially since BA introduced \"hand baggage only\" fares. Before the change, I never saw BA using the size gauges - these days they use them much more frequently. It\'s part of the steady decline of BA from a full service airline to a low cost carriers. Just be grateful that you got a 767 instead of an A321 with new \'spacesaver\' seats with a 29\" seat pitch!!</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>Ian, I think you’ve nailed it -- the descent of full-service carriers into the low-cost, low-service ring of travel hell created by Ryan Air and Spirit Airlines.  I’ve talked about this before -- a frequent traveler can’t fathom why someone would subject themselves to the hassles that Ryan and Spirit travelers endure. A recent <a href=\"http://www.chicagobusiness.com/article/20151205/ISSUE01/312059993/can-you-guess-whats-the-third-biggest-airline-at-ohare\">Crain’s Chicago article</a> about Spirit said just over half -- 58 % -- of their flights into ORD arrived on time in the first 9 months of this year. I fly at least 3 weeks out of 4. American Airlines’ 79% on-time percentage into ORD is only just acceptable; I’d go postal at 58%. But yet Spirit is now the 3rd largest airline at ORD after United and American. Working out of just two shared gates, it’s bigger than Delta. But then I remembered <a href=\"http://qz.com/533501/half-of-american-airlines-revenue-came-from-13-of-its-customers/\">some comments</a> made by the president of American Airlines during an analysts call right around the time American was doing the final merger of res systems with US Air. He said that half of American’s revenue last year came from the 87% of its customers that only flew them once. 50% of American’s revenue came from passengers that see air travel as a commodity and are looking for the lowest cost carriage between two points. And so for 50% of their revenue, American isn’t competing against United or Delta, they’re competing with Spirit.  It explains Delta’s Spirit-like Basic Economy offering, and the expectation that American and United will follow in 2016. And, I assume BA’s “hand baggage” fees that Ian mentions. The challenge, though, is how do you compete for the 87% of your passengers buying a commodity while also serving the remaining 13% of your passengers, who contribute the other 50% of your revenue, and value the little things like a seat that reclines a bit and a flight that arrives on time -- all in the same plane? Spirit doesn’t have that problem because they’ll never get that 13%. American, BA, Delta have the tougher problem.</li>\r\n	<li>Connecting through Dublin airport, my daughter cleared US immigration and customs in there in Ireland and then just popped out at the one domestic baggage claim in ORD’s Terminal 5 -- the International Terminal. Kinda similar to what they’ve been doing at Toronto’s Pearson Airport since forever -- or at least the 90’s when I was flying through there weekly. But there, American’s YYZ-ORD flight would land in Terminal 3, just like a flight from, say, Buffalo, and you’d make your connection or just walk out to the cab line. Handy for the regular traveler, but if you’ve dropped the $100 Global Entry fee, immigration lines at, say, ORD, aren’t any worse than they are in Toronto or Dublin. Indeed, my daughter was bummed that she went through US Preclearance so soon, because food and shopping choices on the US side of Preclearance were a lot thinner than on the Irish side. And I think that’ll be the problem if the TSA follows through on their announced expansion of Preclearance -- from what is mostly Canadian, Irish, and Caribbean airports to 10 much larger airports, including Tokyo, Amsterdam, Madrid, London Heathrow. If you’re flying US carriers out of European airports, you’re already being put into a de facto American ghetto -- typically flying out of the most remote gates, with the longest walks from security and airport lounges, and the fewest food and shopping amenities. Walling it off to create the secured facilities to support Preclearance just formalizes it.  The DHS secretary calls it a “win-win” for travelers. I think it’s just squeezing the balloon -- making wait time go down in the US, but go up in places like Narita and Heathrow. It’s one thing to miss a connection in ORD due to immigration delays. Odds are there’s another flight you can catch within a couple of hours. It’s a whole other thing if you miss that once a day flight home from, say, Amsterdam.</li>\r\n	<li>Thanks to El Niño, it’s been a warm start to the winter -- at least in North America. But soon enough, the temps will drop and the winter coats will start competing with carry-ons for overhead bin space. Last winter, while de-planing (what a weird verb construction!), someone handed me my black overcoat -- it was wedged in front of their suitcase. I threw it over my arm as I stepped out into the aisle, grabbed my carry-on, and hoofed it out of the plane, power-walking toward the cab line. It wasn’t until I stepped outside that I stopped to put my coat on and… it wasn’t my coat. I should’ve checked when it was handed to me, but I didn’t want to be that guy who stops <i>in the aisle</i> to put his jacket on. I went to Lost &amp; Found. The clerk called the gate, where the guy with my coat was standing, trying to find his coat. We got lucky. It took us about 10 minutes to sort everything out. He came down to Lost &amp; Found to swap coats. If it had been warmer out, like this week, I might not have put my coat on at all and gotten home for noticing the switch. Black bags, black coats. Love that black hides a lot of sins -- scuffs, dirt, extra pounds. Don’t love its ubiquity on an airplane. Keep your eyes on your stuff in these holiday crowds. Don’t want “Lost” to be the new black.</li>\r\n	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Perfect Stranger</em> by stellarartwars (c) 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/stellarartwars/45510 Ft: TheDice</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Digital Security On The Road</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Digital security, cyber security. I don’t know about you, but I’ve kinda hit security breach fatigue. On Thursday, yet another company announced a credit card breach. <a href=\"http://krebsonsecurity.com/2015/12/banks-card-breach-at-landrys-restaurants/\">This time</a> it’s Landry’s who runs Bubba Gumps and Morton’s Steakhouse and another 15 or so restaurant brands. I don’t frequent Landry’s brands that much, so I’m hoping that this breach doesn’t mean I have to replace one of my credit cards and again have to go through the goat rodeo of changing account numbers for all my autobills. But it still does reinforce that feeling the cyber security is not a matter of “if” but “when”</li>\r\n	<li>But even if it’s a matter of “when”, I’d still like to postpone the “when” as long as possible. And traveling -- certainly during the holidays -- there’s a lot of opportunity to bring on the “when” if you’re not just a bit thoughtful. There’s also a balance between inconvenience -- the cost of being more digitally secure -- and the probability of being “breached” (can I say that without having to flag this as “explicit” in iTunes?).</li>\r\n	<li>You could always go “old school” -- like 10 years ago when there was damn little public WiFi, no iPhones -- nothing to keep us entertained as we shuffled through the TSA lines other than trading snarky remarks with other line sufferers. Or you could go the “burner” route -- using disposable phones and a temporary PC, which is what many business travelers to China still do -- doing a complete wipe of their phones and PCs before and after each visit because they just expect to get hacked no matter what anti-virus and other safety precautions they take. But if all you’re doing is going from, say, San Francisco to Boston to see your family, these seem a bit “overkill” -- definitely not balancing the cost-benefit trade-off. I’m fairly lazy about this stuff, but there are a few precautions I do take.</li>\r\n	<li>First, I never do any financial stuff over public WiFi -- no checking my bank account or credit card activity over an airport or Starbucks WiFi, or a hotel network at all -- whether WiFi or jacked into an Ethernet port. Even if the URL is showing https -- a encrypted web connection -- there’s just too many ways those networks or web sites can be misconfigured. Some folks will tell you to use a VPN. I used one in China, but it seems a bit too much in the US. If I have to do some banking, I’ll use my iPhone over the mobile carrier network -- AT&amp;T in the US, Orange when I was in Spain, .... I know it’s not perfect, but, as the cyber security guys like to say, it “reduces the attack surface” at what is considered one of the most vulnerable points.</li>\r\n	<li>I rarely use hotel PCs -- the ones set up in lobbies or the concierge lounges. I mean, if I have a smartphone, a tablet, and a PC, why do I need to use a public PC that’s open to anyone loading up a key-logger that’ll capture anything you type -- including logins and passwords. If I do, for some odd reason, need to use one, I never log into anything. Maybe just search for a restaurant, but that’s about it.</li>\r\n	<li>I always make sure that I’ve configured my phone and PC e-mail clients to use encrypted communications between servers -- using IMAP and SMTP over SSL (<i>&gt;now</i> we’re talking security because we used more acronyms than words in that last sentence) for my own mail servers; GMail does it automatically for you. But I don’t encrypt the message itself -- no PGP or signed MIME. There’s nothing in my e-mails that is <i>that</i> confidential to go through that hassle.</li>\r\n	<li>I have recently, though, turned on two-factor authentication for every service that offers it -- GMail, some of my financial accounts, Dropbox, …. I resisted it for a long time -- again, thought it was more hassle than it was worth. But then I started getting some odd password reset e-mail requests -- that I didn’t request.</li>\r\n	<li>I go back and forth on using smartphone or printed boarding passes. Smartphone boarding passes are quicker -- you can get it while in the cab to the airport rather than queueing up for a kiosk -- but I’ve had more than a few times when my boarding pass disappeared from the app during an extended flight delay. Printed boarding passes are easier to scan at the gate -- especially when juggling a backpack, a hot coffee, and a winter coat -- but there’s recently been a <a href=\"http://www.economist.com/blogs/gulliver/2015/10/security-check\">bit</a> of a <a href=\"http://krebsonsecurity.com/2015/10/whats-in-a-boarding-pass-barcode-a-lot/#more-31317\">stir</a> about the amount of personal information someone could pull out of the bar codes. Maybe I’m not paranoid enough, but that one feels a bit of a stretch. I do whatever’s the most convenient -- usually the smartphone route. But when I do print out a boarding pass, I keep it in my jacket pocket -- just to be sure.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Foolish Game</em> by copperhead (c) 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/copperhead/46390 Ft: Snowflake,Sackjo22</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>US Airports Getting Better?</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>While I poked at London Heathrow a couple of <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/10/11/podcast-117-random-thoughts-about-eggs-scotland-car-rentals/\" target=\"_blank\">episodes</a> back, it’s an article of faith among international travelers that North American airports pale in comparison to airports in Asia/Pac -- anyone flying from Beijing or Singapore to LAX needs a light sedative to cushion the shock -- and pretty much trail behind most European airports too. But JD Power, in their <a href=\"http://www.jdpower.com/press-releases/2015-north-america-airport-satisfaction-study\" target=\"_blank\">airport satisfaction survey</a> released last week, said that things are getting better. Not hugely better -- a 5-8% increase in their satisfaction score, but any improvement is good news.</li>\r\n	<li>Power <a href=\"http://www.jdpower.com/ratings/study/North-America-Airport-Satisfaction-Study/763ENG/Large-Airports/1617\">rated</a> large- and medium-sized North American airports -- 60 US airports and Toronto Pearson, Calgary, Montreal, and Vancouver. They surveyed travelers around 6 attributes of their airport experience. In order of importance, they are: the state of the airport facilities themselves, how easy it is to get to the airport, security, baggage claim, the check-in experience, and available food and shopping. A frequent traveler might re-shuffle the order -- maybe drop baggage claim and the check-in experience to the bottom because we rarely check a bag -- but I think it’s a good list.</li>\r\n	<li>And I think some of Power’s conclusions line up with things I’m seeing on the road. Like improvements in terminal facilities. In the last episode, I gave United a shout-out for the upgrade of their gate space in Boston Logan. I also think San Francisco’s complete rebuild of Terminal 2 is excellent and stands up to any airport in Asia or Europe.</li>\r\n	<li>Power found what is a pretty logical connection between satisfaction and the time you spend in lines. As I said earlier, I rarely deal with check-in lines, but I think the TSA’s rollout of Precheck has provided a quantum level improvement in the security experience -- though at times, it feels like its popularity is on the verge of overwhelming it and sliding back. But even for those in the regular lines, I’ve seen TSA folks working hard to re-balance lines -- especially at ORD.</li>\r\n	<li>Power split their ratings between large and medium airports. Their winning large airport is Portland, Oregon. I’ve done a bit of flying into PDX and while I wouldn’t have, unprompted, chosen it as the top large airport, I don’t argue with their conclusion. It’s a nice facility; easy mass transit (a TravelCommons’ fixation) via the MAX light rail; I disagree with its top marks for security check, but in how many other airports can I buy a growler of craft beer to go? The bottom four -- those I could’ve ticked off with missing a beat -- LaGuardia, Newark, LAX, and O’Hare. Old terminals, awkward layouts, leaking roofs, lousy food. Interesting they’re also the major airports for the US’s largest cities.</li>\r\n	<li>The medium airport winner was a tie between Dallas’ downtown Love Field and Fort Myers’ Southwest Florida. This one, I dunno. I’ve used both of these airports a lot. Love has gone through a good sized facelift and I haven’t been through it since they finished, so I may be working off out-of-date impressions, but even though it’s close to downtown, it’s a pain to get to. Now Fort Myers is easy to get to -- and I love the short walk to the rental car facility -- but security screening can back way up and the food choice isn’t great. From my personal experience, I’d give top marks to Nashville. I mean, how can you go wrong with live music -- good live music -- as you’re walking down the terminal.</li>\r\n	<li>Power’s most obvious finding is that dissatisfied customers are very vocal. Those who rate overall satisfaction 1 (on a 10-point scale) make an average of 13 negative comments about their experience. Anyone who follows me on Twitter knows how true that is.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #119</li>\r\n	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/\">Podshow Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\r\n	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_119.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #119 — Digital Security On The Road; US Airports Getting Better?','','inherit','closed','closed','','1579-revision-v1','','','2015-12-21 14:23:53','2015-12-21 19:23:53','',1579,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/12/21/1579-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1585,1,'2015-12-21 14:38:10','2015-12-21 19:38:10','','calvin_PC','High-performance cat-based cyber-security solution','inherit','open','closed','','calvin_pc','','','2015-12-21 14:39:39','2015-12-21 19:39:39','',1579,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/calvin_PC.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(1586,1,'2015-12-21 14:38:41','2015-12-21 19:38:41','[caption id=\"attachment_1585\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/calvin_PC.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1585\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/calvin_PC-300x172.jpg\" alt=\"Cat-based cyber-security solution\" width=\"300\" height=\"172\" /></a> Cat-based cyber-security solution[/caption]\r\n\r\nA bit less of a random walk than the last episode, we talk about safety, physical safety, when traveling. While we sometimes put ourselves in the midst of dodgy surroundings, we usually feel safe when we retreat back into the \"travel bubble\" What about when the bubble is no longer safe? Smartphones are the frequent traveler\'s most important tool. So when an upgrade to my HTC One killed its usefulness, I found myself heading back to Apple.  All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_119.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/232191753\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #119:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, cranking out one last episode to keep you occupied while you navigate the holiday security lines while trying to get to -- or away from family. Myself, I’m settling for the Christmas break after doing a day trip yesterday to Philadelphia. I’m taking a break from O’Hare until January.</li>\r\n	<li>No really remarkable travel since the last episode, just trips to Cleveland, Vegas, and Boston. When I was flying out of Vegas last week, I hit the <a href=\"http://thecenturionlounge.com/location/LAS\">Amex Centurion Lounge</a> for a couple of conference calls before boarding. It’s free entry with a Platinum Card, and so far and beyond any Admirals Club or Sky Club or United Club. It’s not quite as hip/a bit more button-down than Virgin Atlantic’s Upper Lounge in Heathrow, but the comfort, the free buffet and open bar just are just as good. Highly recommended. I just wish there were more of them.</li>\r\n	<li>When I’m flying into Boston, I’m actually heading out 45 minutes west, close to Worcester. Now that’s a 45 minute drive out I-90 when I land at 9 or 10 in the morning. When I land at 5 in the evening, it’s a whole different story. I touch down at Logan, flip out of airplane mode and immediately open Waze. How bad is the traffic? How about <i>an hour</i> and 45 minute drive? Not looking forward to that parking lot, so I threaded my way over to Chelsea. Found a great little microbrewery complete with real live Boston Irish patrons and sample 1, 2, 4 of their beers. Then I walked up a couple of blocks to a Central American joint underneath a highway overpass. Had a great plate of food for less than $10.  I’ve spent a few dinner times wandering around nearby neighborhoods -- Charlestown, the Seaport District as well as Chelsea -- waiting for Waze to tell me when I-90’s traffic tantrum had subsided.</li>\r\n	<li>Probably the biggest travel event this week wasn’t mine but my daughter’s. It’s her first solo flight -- returning from her first semester at Univ of St Andrews, flying Aer Lingus from Edinburgh to Chicago by way of Dublin. It’s a big adjustment in a couple of ways. First, of course, she has to figure out a new airport by herself. She’s never been through Dublin before, but I thought a smaller airport would be a better first solo than trying to navigate the start of holiday traffic at Heathrow. But she does now have to pay attention to what’s going on rather than just following in my slipstream. The second adjustment is a bit more of a First World problem -- flying as as plain old passenger, a villager, rather than tagging along with me through the Gold or Platinum baggage check lines and pre-boarding. It’s a tough come-down, but I did soften the blow a little bit. I paid her Global Entry fee as a going away gift.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Paint the Sky</em> by Hans Atom (c) 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/hansatom/50718 Ft: Miss Judged</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Not really any commentary on the last episode, though Ian Morgan swung by the Facebook page with adding to the support about British Airways’ stricter carry-on policy\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>“Just listened to your October episode! Picked up your post about BA hand luggage. They have just changed their policy on this to clamp down. I agree it is frustrating especially on lightly loaded widebody aircraft. However, as a regular BA traveller I have lost count of the number of times BA flights have been delayed whilst cabin crew offload hand luggage, especially since BA introduced \"hand baggage only\" fares. Before the change, I never saw BA using the size gauges - these days they use them much more frequently. It\'s part of the steady decline of BA from a full service airline to a low cost carriers. Just be grateful that you got a 767 instead of an A321 with new \'spacesaver\' seats with a 29\" seat pitch!!</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>Ian, I think you’ve nailed it -- the descent of full-service carriers into the low-cost, low-service ring of travel hell created by Ryan Air and Spirit Airlines.  I’ve talked about this before -- a frequent traveler can’t fathom why someone would subject themselves to the hassles that Ryan and Spirit travelers endure. A recent <a href=\"http://www.chicagobusiness.com/article/20151205/ISSUE01/312059993/can-you-guess-whats-the-third-biggest-airline-at-ohare\">Crain’s Chicago article</a> about Spirit said just over half -- 58 % -- of their flights into ORD arrived on time in the first 9 months of this year. I fly at least 3 weeks out of 4. American Airlines’ 79% on-time percentage into ORD is only just acceptable; I’d go postal at 58%. But yet Spirit is now the 3rd largest airline at ORD after United and American. Working out of just two shared gates, it’s bigger than Delta. But then I remembered <a href=\"http://qz.com/533501/half-of-american-airlines-revenue-came-from-13-of-its-customers/\">some comments</a> made by the president of American Airlines during an analysts call right around the time American was doing the final merger of res systems with US Air. He said that half of American’s revenue last year came from the 87% of its customers that only flew them once. 50% of American’s revenue came from passengers that see air travel as a commodity and are looking for the lowest cost carriage between two points. And so for 50% of their revenue, American isn’t competing against United or Delta, they’re competing with Spirit.  It explains Delta’s Spirit-like Basic Economy offering, and the expectation that American and United will follow in 2016. And, I assume BA’s “hand baggage” fees that Ian mentions. The challenge, though, is how do you compete for the 87% of your passengers buying a commodity while also serving the remaining 13% of your passengers, who contribute the other 50% of your revenue, and value the little things like a seat that reclines a bit and a flight that arrives on time -- all in the same plane? Spirit doesn’t have that problem because they’ll never get that 13%. American, BA, Delta have the tougher problem.</li>\r\n	<li>Connecting through Dublin airport, my daughter cleared US immigration and customs in there in Ireland and then just popped out at the one domestic baggage claim in ORD’s Terminal 5 -- the International Terminal. Kinda similar to what they’ve been doing at Toronto’s Pearson Airport since forever -- or at least the 90’s when I was flying through there weekly. But there, American’s YYZ-ORD flight would land in Terminal 3, just like a flight from, say, Buffalo, and you’d make your connection or just walk out to the cab line. Handy for the regular traveler, but if you’ve dropped the $100 Global Entry fee, immigration lines at, say, ORD, aren’t any worse than they are in Toronto or Dublin. Indeed, my daughter was bummed that she went through US Preclearance so soon, because food and shopping choices on the US side of Preclearance were a lot thinner than on the Irish side. And I think that’ll be the problem if the TSA follows through on their announced expansion of Preclearance -- from what is mostly Canadian, Irish, and Caribbean airports to 10 much larger airports, including Tokyo, Amsterdam, Madrid, London Heathrow. If you’re flying US carriers out of European airports, you’re already being put into a de facto American ghetto -- typically flying out of the most remote gates, with the longest walks from security and airport lounges, and the fewest food and shopping amenities. Walling it off to create the secured facilities to support Preclearance just formalizes it.  The DHS secretary calls it a “win-win” for travelers. I think it’s just squeezing the balloon -- making wait time go down in the US, but go up in places like Narita and Heathrow. It’s one thing to miss a connection in ORD due to immigration delays. Odds are there’s another flight you can catch within a couple of hours. It’s a whole other thing if you miss that once a day flight home from, say, Amsterdam.</li>\r\n	<li>Thanks to El Niño, it’s been a warm start to the winter -- at least in North America. But soon enough, the temps will drop and the winter coats will start competing with carry-ons for overhead bin space. Last winter, while de-planing (what a weird verb construction!), someone handed me my black overcoat -- it was wedged in front of their suitcase. I threw it over my arm as I stepped out into the aisle, grabbed my carry-on, and hoofed it out of the plane, power-walking toward the cab line. It wasn’t until I stepped outside that I stopped to put my coat on and… it wasn’t my coat. I should’ve checked when it was handed to me, but I didn’t want to be that guy who stops <i>in the aisle</i> to put his jacket on. I went to Lost &amp; Found. The clerk called the gate, where the guy with my coat was standing, trying to find his coat. We got lucky. It took us about 10 minutes to sort everything out. He came down to Lost &amp; Found to swap coats. If it had been warmer out, like this week, I might not have put my coat on at all and gotten home for noticing the switch. Black bags, black coats. Love that black hides a lot of sins -- scuffs, dirt, extra pounds. Don’t love its ubiquity on an airplane. Keep your eyes on your stuff in these holiday crowds. Don’t want “Lost” to be the new black.</li>\r\n	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Perfect Stranger</em> by stellarartwars (c) 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/stellarartwars/45510 Ft: TheDice</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Digital Security On The Road</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Digital security, cyber security. I don’t know about you, but I’ve kinda hit security breach fatigue. On Thursday, yet another company announced a credit card breach. <a href=\"http://krebsonsecurity.com/2015/12/banks-card-breach-at-landrys-restaurants/\">This time</a> it’s Landry’s who runs Bubba Gumps and Morton’s Steakhouse and another 15 or so restaurant brands. I don’t frequent Landry’s brands that much, so I’m hoping that this breach doesn’t mean I have to replace one of my credit cards and again have to go through the goat rodeo of changing account numbers for all my autobills. But it still does reinforce that feeling the cyber security is not a matter of “if” but “when”</li>\r\n	<li>But even if it’s a matter of “when”, I’d still like to postpone the “when” as long as possible. And traveling -- certainly during the holidays -- there’s a lot of opportunity to bring on the “when” if you’re not just a bit thoughtful. There’s also a balance between inconvenience -- the cost of being more digitally secure -- and the probability of being “breached” (can I say that without having to flag this as “explicit” in iTunes?).</li>\r\n	<li>You could always go “old school” -- like 10 years ago when there was damn little public WiFi, no iPhones -- nothing to keep us entertained as we shuffled through the TSA lines other than trading snarky remarks with other line sufferers. Or you could go the “burner” route -- using disposable phones and a temporary PC, which is what many business travelers to China still do -- doing a complete wipe of their phones and PCs before and after each visit because they just expect to get hacked no matter what anti-virus and other safety precautions they take. But if all you’re doing is going from, say, San Francisco to Boston to see your family, these seem a bit “overkill” -- definitely not balancing the cost-benefit trade-off. I’m fairly lazy about this stuff, but there are a few precautions I do take.</li>\r\n	<li>First, I never do any financial stuff over public WiFi -- no checking my bank account or credit card activity over an airport or Starbucks WiFi, or a hotel network at all -- whether WiFi or jacked into an Ethernet port. Even if the URL is showing https -- a encrypted web connection -- there’s just too many ways those networks or web sites can be misconfigured. Some folks will tell you to use a VPN. I used one in China, but it seems a bit too much in the US. If I have to do some banking, I’ll use my iPhone over the mobile carrier network -- AT&amp;T in the US, Orange when I was in Spain, .... I know it’s not perfect, but, as the cyber security guys like to say, it “reduces the attack surface” at what is considered one of the most vulnerable points.</li>\r\n	<li>I rarely use hotel PCs -- the ones set up in lobbies or the concierge lounges. I mean, if I have a smartphone, a tablet, and a PC, why do I need to use a public PC that’s open to anyone loading up a key-logger that’ll capture anything you type -- including logins and passwords. If I do, for some odd reason, need to use one, I never log into anything. Maybe just search for a restaurant, but that’s about it.</li>\r\n	<li>I always make sure that I’ve configured my phone and PC e-mail clients to use encrypted communications between servers -- using IMAP and SMTP over SSL (<i>&gt;now</i> we’re talking security because we used more acronyms than words in that last sentence) for my own mail servers; GMail does it automatically for you. But I don’t encrypt the message itself -- no PGP or signed MIME. There’s nothing in my e-mails that is <i>that</i> confidential to go through that hassle.</li>\r\n	<li>I have recently, though, turned on two-factor authentication for every service that offers it -- GMail, some of my financial accounts, Dropbox, …. I resisted it for a long time -- again, thought it was more hassle than it was worth. But then I started getting some odd password reset e-mail requests -- that I didn’t request.</li>\r\n	<li>I go back and forth on using smartphone or printed boarding passes. Smartphone boarding passes are quicker -- you can get it while in the cab to the airport rather than queueing up for a kiosk -- but I’ve had more than a few times when my boarding pass disappeared from the app during an extended flight delay. Printed boarding passes are easier to scan at the gate -- especially when juggling a backpack, a hot coffee, and a winter coat -- but there’s recently been a <a href=\"http://www.economist.com/blogs/gulliver/2015/10/security-check\">bit</a> of a <a href=\"http://krebsonsecurity.com/2015/10/whats-in-a-boarding-pass-barcode-a-lot/#more-31317\">stir</a> about the amount of personal information someone could pull out of the bar codes. Maybe I’m not paranoid enough, but that one feels a bit of a stretch. I do whatever’s the most convenient -- usually the smartphone route. But when I do print out a boarding pass, I keep it in my jacket pocket -- just to be sure.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Foolish Game</em> by copperhead (c) 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/copperhead/46390 Ft: Snowflake,Sackjo22</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>US Airports Getting Better?</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>While I poked at London Heathrow a couple of <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/10/11/podcast-117-random-thoughts-about-eggs-scotland-car-rentals/\" target=\"_blank\">episodes</a> back, it’s an article of faith among international travelers that North American airports pale in comparison to airports in Asia/Pac -- anyone flying from Beijing or Singapore to LAX needs a light sedative to cushion the shock -- and pretty much trail behind most European airports too. But JD Power, in their <a href=\"http://www.jdpower.com/press-releases/2015-north-america-airport-satisfaction-study\" target=\"_blank\">airport satisfaction survey</a> released last week, said that things are getting better. Not hugely better -- a 5-8% increase in their satisfaction score, but any improvement is good news.</li>\r\n	<li>Power <a href=\"http://www.jdpower.com/ratings/study/North-America-Airport-Satisfaction-Study/763ENG/Large-Airports/1617\">rated</a> large- and medium-sized North American airports -- 60 US airports and Toronto Pearson, Calgary, Montreal, and Vancouver. They surveyed travelers around 6 attributes of their airport experience. In order of importance, they are: the state of the airport facilities themselves, how easy it is to get to the airport, security, baggage claim, the check-in experience, and available food and shopping. A frequent traveler might re-shuffle the order -- maybe drop baggage claim and the check-in experience to the bottom because we rarely check a bag -- but I think it’s a good list.</li>\r\n	<li>And I think some of Power’s conclusions line up with things I’m seeing on the road. Like improvements in terminal facilities. In the last episode, I gave United a shout-out for the upgrade of their gate space in Boston Logan. I also think San Francisco’s complete rebuild of Terminal 2 is excellent and stands up to any airport in Asia or Europe.</li>\r\n	<li>Power found what is a pretty logical connection between satisfaction and the time you spend in lines. As I said earlier, I rarely deal with check-in lines, but I think the TSA’s rollout of Precheck has provided a quantum level improvement in the security experience -- though at times, it feels like its popularity is on the verge of overwhelming it and sliding back. But even for those in the regular lines, I’ve seen TSA folks working hard to re-balance lines -- especially at ORD.</li>\r\n	<li>Power split their ratings between large and medium airports. Their winning large airport is Portland, Oregon. I’ve done a bit of flying into PDX and while I wouldn’t have, unprompted, chosen it as the top large airport, I don’t argue with their conclusion. It’s a nice facility; easy mass transit (a TravelCommons’ fixation) via the MAX light rail; I disagree with its top marks for security check, but in how many other airports can I buy a growler of craft beer to go? The bottom four -- those I could’ve ticked off with missing a beat -- LaGuardia, Newark, LAX, and O’Hare. Old terminals, awkward layouts, leaking roofs, lousy food. Interesting they’re also the major airports for the US’s largest cities.</li>\r\n	<li>The medium airport winner was a tie between Dallas’ downtown Love Field and Fort Myers’ Southwest Florida. This one, I dunno. I’ve used both of these airports a lot. Love has gone through a good sized facelift and I haven’t been through it since they finished, so I may be working off out-of-date impressions, but even though it’s close to downtown, it’s a pain to get to. Now Fort Myers is easy to get to -- and I love the short walk to the rental car facility -- but security screening can back way up and the food choice isn’t great. From my personal experience, I’d give top marks to Nashville. I mean, how can you go wrong with live music -- good live music -- as you’re walking down the terminal.</li>\r\n	<li>Power’s most obvious finding is that dissatisfied customers are very vocal. Those who rate overall satisfaction 1 (on a 10-point scale) make an average of 13 negative comments about their experience. Anyone who follows me on Twitter knows how true that is.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #119</li>\r\n	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/\">Podshow Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\r\n	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_119.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #119 — Digital Security On The Road; US Airports Getting Better?','','inherit','closed','closed','','1579-revision-v1','','','2015-12-21 14:38:41','2015-12-21 19:38:41','',1579,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/12/21/1579-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1587,1,'2015-12-21 14:58:45','2015-12-21 19:58:45','[caption id=\"attachment_1585\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/calvin_PC.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1585\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/calvin_PC-300x172.jpg\" alt=\"Cat-based cyber-security solution\" width=\"300\" height=\"172\" /></a> Cat-based cyber-security solution[/caption]\r\n\r\nHere\'s a little something to keep you entertained while you navigate the holiday airport lines. We talk about digital security on the road -- what\'s the right balance between hassle and hack? We also dig into JD Power\'s latest airport satisfaction survey. They report a tick up in traveler experience and, for the most part, I think they have it right. We also cover Spirit Airlines\' growth and the planned expansion of US immigration pre-clearance. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_119.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/232191753\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #119:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, cranking out one last episode to keep you occupied while you navigate the holiday security lines while trying to get to -- or away from family. Myself, I’m settling for the Christmas break after doing a day trip yesterday to Philadelphia. I’m taking a break from O’Hare until January.</li>\r\n	<li>No really remarkable travel since the last episode, just trips to Cleveland, Vegas, and Boston. When I was flying out of Vegas last week, I hit the <a href=\"http://thecenturionlounge.com/location/LAS\">Amex Centurion Lounge</a> for a couple of conference calls before boarding. It’s free entry with a Platinum Card, and so far and beyond any Admirals Club or Sky Club or United Club. It’s not quite as hip/a bit more button-down than Virgin Atlantic’s Upper Lounge in Heathrow, but the comfort, the free buffet and open bar just are just as good. Highly recommended. I just wish there were more of them.</li>\r\n	<li>When I’m flying into Boston, I’m actually heading out 45 minutes west, close to Worcester. Now that’s a 45 minute drive out I-90 when I land at 9 or 10 in the morning. When I land at 5 in the evening, it’s a whole different story. I touch down at Logan, flip out of airplane mode and immediately open Waze. How bad is the traffic? How about <i>an hour</i> and 45 minute drive? Not looking forward to that parking lot, so I threaded my way over to Chelsea. Found a great little microbrewery complete with real live Boston Irish patrons and sample 1, 2, 4 of their beers. Then I walked up a couple of blocks to a Central American joint underneath a highway overpass. Had a great plate of food for less than $10.  I’ve spent a few dinner times wandering around nearby neighborhoods -- Charlestown, the Seaport District as well as Chelsea -- waiting for Waze to tell me when I-90’s traffic tantrum had subsided.</li>\r\n	<li>Probably the biggest travel event this week wasn’t mine but my daughter’s. It’s her first solo flight -- returning from her first semester at Univ of St Andrews, flying Aer Lingus from Edinburgh to Chicago by way of Dublin. It’s a big adjustment in a couple of ways. First, of course, she has to figure out a new airport by herself. She’s never been through Dublin before, but I thought a smaller airport would be a better first solo than trying to navigate the start of holiday traffic at Heathrow. But she does now have to pay attention to what’s going on rather than just following in my slipstream. The second adjustment is a bit more of a First World problem -- flying as as plain old passenger, a villager, rather than tagging along with me through the Gold or Platinum baggage check lines and pre-boarding. It’s a tough come-down, but I did soften the blow a little bit. I paid her Global Entry fee as a going away gift.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Paint the Sky</em> by Hans Atom (c) 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/hansatom/50718 Ft: Miss Judged</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Not really any commentary on the last episode, though Ian Morgan swung by the Facebook page with adding to the support about British Airways’ stricter carry-on policy\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>“Just listened to your October episode! Picked up your post about BA hand luggage. They have just changed their policy on this to clamp down. I agree it is frustrating especially on lightly loaded widebody aircraft. However, as a regular BA traveller I have lost count of the number of times BA flights have been delayed whilst cabin crew offload hand luggage, especially since BA introduced \"hand baggage only\" fares. Before the change, I never saw BA using the size gauges - these days they use them much more frequently. It\'s part of the steady decline of BA from a full service airline to a low cost carriers. Just be grateful that you got a 767 instead of an A321 with new \'spacesaver\' seats with a 29\" seat pitch!!</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>Ian, I think you’ve nailed it -- the descent of full-service carriers into the low-cost, low-service ring of travel hell created by Ryan Air and Spirit Airlines.  I’ve talked about this before -- a frequent traveler can’t fathom why someone would subject themselves to the hassles that Ryan and Spirit travelers endure. A recent <a href=\"http://www.chicagobusiness.com/article/20151205/ISSUE01/312059993/can-you-guess-whats-the-third-biggest-airline-at-ohare\">Crain’s Chicago article</a> about Spirit said just over half -- 58 % -- of their flights into ORD arrived on time in the first 9 months of this year. I fly at least 3 weeks out of 4. American Airlines’ 79% on-time percentage into ORD is only just acceptable; I’d go postal at 58%. But yet Spirit is now the 3rd largest airline at ORD after United and American. Working out of just two shared gates, it’s bigger than Delta. But then I remembered <a href=\"http://qz.com/533501/half-of-american-airlines-revenue-came-from-13-of-its-customers/\">some comments</a> made by the president of American Airlines during an analysts call right around the time American was doing the final merger of res systems with US Air. He said that half of American’s revenue last year came from the 87% of its customers that only flew them once. 50% of American’s revenue came from passengers that see air travel as a commodity and are looking for the lowest cost carriage between two points. And so for 50% of their revenue, American isn’t competing against United or Delta, they’re competing with Spirit.  It explains Delta’s Spirit-like Basic Economy offering, and the expectation that American and United will follow in 2016. And, I assume BA’s “hand baggage” fees that Ian mentions. The challenge, though, is how do you compete for the 87% of your passengers buying a commodity while also serving the remaining 13% of your passengers, who contribute the other 50% of your revenue, and value the little things like a seat that reclines a bit and a flight that arrives on time -- all in the same plane? Spirit doesn’t have that problem because they’ll never get that 13%. American, BA, Delta have the tougher problem.</li>\r\n	<li>Connecting through Dublin airport, my daughter cleared US immigration and customs in there in Ireland and then just popped out at the one domestic baggage claim in ORD’s Terminal 5 -- the International Terminal. Kinda similar to what they’ve been doing at Toronto’s Pearson Airport since forever -- or at least the 90’s when I was flying through there weekly. But there, American’s YYZ-ORD flight would land in Terminal 3, just like a flight from, say, Buffalo, and you’d make your connection or just walk out to the cab line. Handy for the regular traveler, but if you’ve dropped the $100 Global Entry fee, immigration lines at, say, ORD, aren’t any worse than they are in Toronto or Dublin. Indeed, my daughter was bummed that she went through US Preclearance so soon, because food and shopping choices on the US side of Preclearance were a lot thinner than on the Irish side. And I think that’ll be the problem if the TSA follows through on their announced expansion of Preclearance -- from what is mostly Canadian, Irish, and Caribbean airports to 10 much larger airports, including Tokyo, Amsterdam, Madrid, London Heathrow. If you’re flying US carriers out of European airports, you’re already being put into a de facto American ghetto -- typically flying out of the most remote gates, with the longest walks from security and airport lounges, and the fewest food and shopping amenities. Walling it off to create the secured facilities to support Preclearance just formalizes it.  The DHS secretary calls it a “win-win” for travelers. I think it’s just squeezing the balloon -- making wait time go down in the US, but go up in places like Narita and Heathrow. It’s one thing to miss a connection in ORD due to immigration delays. Odds are there’s another flight you can catch within a couple of hours. It’s a whole other thing if you miss that once a day flight home from, say, Amsterdam.</li>\r\n	<li>Thanks to El Niño, it’s been a warm start to the winter -- at least in North America. But soon enough, the temps will drop and the winter coats will start competing with carry-ons for overhead bin space. Last winter, while de-planing (what a weird verb construction!), someone handed me my black overcoat -- it was wedged in front of their suitcase. I threw it over my arm as I stepped out into the aisle, grabbed my carry-on, and hoofed it out of the plane, power-walking toward the cab line. It wasn’t until I stepped outside that I stopped to put my coat on and… it wasn’t my coat. I should’ve checked when it was handed to me, but I didn’t want to be that guy who stops <i>in the aisle</i> to put his jacket on. I went to Lost &amp; Found. The clerk called the gate, where the guy with my coat was standing, trying to find his coat. We got lucky. It took us about 10 minutes to sort everything out. He came down to Lost &amp; Found to swap coats. If it had been warmer out, like this week, I might not have put my coat on at all and gotten home for noticing the switch. Black bags, black coats. Love that black hides a lot of sins -- scuffs, dirt, extra pounds. Don’t love its ubiquity on an airplane. Keep your eyes on your stuff in these holiday crowds. Don’t want “Lost” to be the new black.</li>\r\n	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Perfect Stranger</em> by stellarartwars (c) 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/stellarartwars/45510 Ft: TheDice</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Digital Security On The Road</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Digital security, cyber security. I don’t know about you, but I’ve kinda hit security breach fatigue. On Thursday, yet another company announced a credit card breach. <a href=\"http://krebsonsecurity.com/2015/12/banks-card-breach-at-landrys-restaurants/\">This time</a> it’s Landry’s who runs Bubba Gumps and Morton’s Steakhouse and another 15 or so restaurant brands. I don’t frequent Landry’s brands that much, so I’m hoping that this breach doesn’t mean I have to replace one of my credit cards and again have to go through the goat rodeo of changing account numbers for all my autobills. But it still does reinforce that feeling the cyber security is not a matter of “if” but “when”</li>\r\n	<li>But even if it’s a matter of “when”, I’d still like to postpone the “when” as long as possible. And traveling -- certainly during the holidays -- there’s a lot of opportunity to bring on the “when” if you’re not just a bit thoughtful. There’s also a balance between inconvenience -- the cost of being more digitally secure -- and the probability of being “breached” (can I say that without having to flag this as “explicit” in iTunes?).</li>\r\n	<li>You could always go “old school” -- like 10 years ago when there was damn little public WiFi, no iPhones -- nothing to keep us entertained as we shuffled through the TSA lines other than trading snarky remarks with other line sufferers. Or you could go the “burner” route -- using disposable phones and a temporary PC, which is what many business travelers to China still do -- doing a complete wipe of their phones and PCs before and after each visit because they just expect to get hacked no matter what anti-virus and other safety precautions they take. But if all you’re doing is going from, say, San Francisco to Boston to see your family, these seem a bit “overkill” -- definitely not balancing the cost-benefit trade-off. I’m fairly lazy about this stuff, but there are a few precautions I do take.</li>\r\n	<li>First, I never do any financial stuff over public WiFi -- no checking my bank account or credit card activity over an airport or Starbucks WiFi, or a hotel network at all -- whether WiFi or jacked into an Ethernet port. Even if the URL is showing https -- a encrypted web connection -- there’s just too many ways those networks or web sites can be misconfigured. Some folks will tell you to use a VPN. I used one in China, but it seems a bit too much in the US. If I have to do some banking, I’ll use my iPhone over the mobile carrier network -- AT&amp;T in the US, Orange when I was in Spain, .... I know it’s not perfect, but, as the cyber security guys like to say, it “reduces the attack surface” at what is considered one of the most vulnerable points.</li>\r\n	<li>I rarely use hotel PCs -- the ones set up in lobbies or the concierge lounges. I mean, if I have a smartphone, a tablet, and a PC, why do I need to use a public PC that’s open to anyone loading up a key-logger that’ll capture anything you type -- including logins and passwords. If I do, for some odd reason, need to use one, I never log into anything. Maybe just search for a restaurant, but that’s about it.</li>\r\n	<li>I always make sure that I’ve configured my phone and PC e-mail clients to use encrypted communications between servers -- using IMAP and SMTP over SSL (<i>&gt;now</i> we’re talking security because we used more acronyms than words in that last sentence) for my own mail servers; GMail does it automatically for you. But I don’t encrypt the message itself -- no PGP or signed MIME. There’s nothing in my e-mails that is <i>that</i> confidential to go through that hassle.</li>\r\n	<li>I have recently, though, turned on two-factor authentication for every service that offers it -- GMail, some of my financial accounts, Dropbox, …. I resisted it for a long time -- again, thought it was more hassle than it was worth. But then I started getting some odd password reset e-mail requests -- that I didn’t request.</li>\r\n	<li>I go back and forth on using smartphone or printed boarding passes. Smartphone boarding passes are quicker -- you can get it while in the cab to the airport rather than queueing up for a kiosk -- but I’ve had more than a few times when my boarding pass disappeared from the app during an extended flight delay. Printed boarding passes are easier to scan at the gate -- especially when juggling a backpack, a hot coffee, and a winter coat -- but there’s recently been a <a href=\"http://www.economist.com/blogs/gulliver/2015/10/security-check\">bit</a> of a <a href=\"http://krebsonsecurity.com/2015/10/whats-in-a-boarding-pass-barcode-a-lot/#more-31317\">stir</a> about the amount of personal information someone could pull out of the bar codes. Maybe I’m not paranoid enough, but that one feels a bit of a stretch. I do whatever’s the most convenient -- usually the smartphone route. But when I do print out a boarding pass, I keep it in my jacket pocket -- just to be sure.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Foolish Game</em> by copperhead (c) 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/copperhead/46390 Ft: Snowflake,Sackjo22</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>US Airports Getting Better?</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>While I poked at London Heathrow a couple of <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/10/11/podcast-117-random-thoughts-about-eggs-scotland-car-rentals/\" target=\"_blank\">episodes</a> back, it’s an article of faith among international travelers that North American airports pale in comparison to airports in Asia/Pac -- anyone flying from Beijing or Singapore to LAX needs a light sedative to cushion the shock -- and pretty much trail behind most European airports too. But JD Power, in their <a href=\"http://www.jdpower.com/press-releases/2015-north-america-airport-satisfaction-study\" target=\"_blank\">airport satisfaction survey</a> released last week, said that things are getting better. Not hugely better -- a 5-8% increase in their satisfaction score, but any improvement is good news.</li>\r\n	<li>Power <a href=\"http://www.jdpower.com/ratings/study/North-America-Airport-Satisfaction-Study/763ENG/Large-Airports/1617\">rated</a> large- and medium-sized North American airports -- 60 US airports and Toronto Pearson, Calgary, Montreal, and Vancouver. They surveyed travelers around 6 attributes of their airport experience. In order of importance, they are: the state of the airport facilities themselves, how easy it is to get to the airport, security, baggage claim, the check-in experience, and available food and shopping. A frequent traveler might re-shuffle the order -- maybe drop baggage claim and the check-in experience to the bottom because we rarely check a bag -- but I think it’s a good list.</li>\r\n	<li>And I think some of Power’s conclusions line up with things I’m seeing on the road. Like improvements in terminal facilities. In the last episode, I gave United a shout-out for the upgrade of their gate space in Boston Logan. I also think San Francisco’s complete rebuild of Terminal 2 is excellent and stands up to any airport in Asia or Europe.</li>\r\n	<li>Power found what is a pretty logical connection between satisfaction and the time you spend in lines. As I said earlier, I rarely deal with check-in lines, but I think the TSA’s rollout of Precheck has provided a quantum level improvement in the security experience -- though at times, it feels like its popularity is on the verge of overwhelming it and sliding back. But even for those in the regular lines, I’ve seen TSA folks working hard to re-balance lines -- especially at ORD.</li>\r\n	<li>Power split their ratings between large and medium airports. Their winning large airport is Portland, Oregon. I’ve done a bit of flying into PDX and while I wouldn’t have, unprompted, chosen it as the top large airport, I don’t argue with their conclusion. It’s a nice facility; easy mass transit (a TravelCommons’ fixation) via the MAX light rail; I disagree with its top marks for security check, but in how many other airports can I buy a growler of craft beer to go? The bottom four -- those I could’ve ticked off with missing a beat -- LaGuardia, Newark, LAX, and O’Hare. Old terminals, awkward layouts, leaking roofs, lousy food. Interesting they’re also the major airports for the US’s largest cities.</li>\r\n	<li>The medium airport winner was a tie between Dallas’ downtown Love Field and Fort Myers’ Southwest Florida. This one, I dunno. I’ve used both of these airports a lot. Love has gone through a good sized facelift and I haven’t been through it since they finished, so I may be working off out-of-date impressions, but even though it’s close to downtown, it’s a pain to get to. Now Fort Myers is easy to get to -- and I love the short walk to the rental car facility -- but security screening can back way up and the food choice isn’t great. From my personal experience, I’d give top marks to Nashville. I mean, how can you go wrong with live music -- good live music -- as you’re walking down the terminal.</li>\r\n	<li>Power’s most obvious finding is that dissatisfied customers are very vocal. Those who rate overall satisfaction 1 (on a 10-point scale) make an average of 13 negative comments about their experience. Anyone who follows me on Twitter knows how true that is.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #119</li>\r\n	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/\">Podshow Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\r\n	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_119.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #119 — Digital Security On The Road; US Airports Getting Better?','','inherit','closed','closed','','1579-revision-v1','','','2015-12-21 14:58:45','2015-12-21 19:58:45','',1579,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/12/21/1579-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1589,1,'2015-12-21 18:16:56','2015-12-21 23:16:56','[caption id=\"attachment_1585\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/calvin_PC.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1585\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/calvin_PC-300x172.jpg\" alt=\"Cat-based cyber-security solution\" width=\"300\" height=\"172\" /></a> Cat-based cyber-security solution[/caption]\r\n\r\nHere\'s a little something to keep you entertained while you navigate the holiday airport lines. We talk about digital security on the road -- what\'s the right balance between hassle and hack? We also dig into JD Power\'s latest airport satisfaction survey. They report a tick up in traveler experience and, for the most part, I think they have it right. We also cover Spirit Airlines\' growth and the planned expansion of US immigration pre-clearance. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_119.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/232191753\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #119:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, cranking out one last episode to keep you occupied while you navigate the holiday security lines while trying to get to -- or away from family. Myself, I’m settling for the Christmas break after doing a day trip yesterday to Philadelphia. I’m taking a break from O’Hare until January.</li>\r\n	<li>No really remarkable travel since the last episode, just trips to Cleveland, Vegas, and Boston. When I was flying out of Vegas last week, I hit the <a href=\"http://thecenturionlounge.com/location/LAS\">Amex Centurion Lounge</a> for a couple of conference calls before boarding. It’s free entry with a Platinum Card, and so far and beyond any Admirals Club or Sky Club or United Club. It’s not quite as hip/a bit more button-down than Virgin Atlantic’s Upper Lounge in Heathrow, but the comfort, the free buffet and open bar just are just as good. Highly recommended. I just wish there were more of them.</li>\r\n	<li>When I’m flying into Boston, I’m actually heading out 45 minutes west, close to Worcester. Now that’s a 45 minute drive out I-90 when I land at 9 or 10 in the morning. When I land at 5 in the evening, it’s a whole different story. I touch down at Logan, flip out of airplane mode and immediately open Waze. How bad is the traffic? How about <i>an hour</i> and 45 minute drive? Not looking forward to that parking lot, so I threaded my way over to Chelsea. Found a great little microbrewery complete with real live Boston Irish patrons and sample 1, 2, 4 of their beers. Then I walked up a couple of blocks to a Central American joint underneath a highway overpass. Had a great plate of food for less than $10.  I’ve spent a few dinner times wandering around nearby neighborhoods -- Charlestown, the Seaport District as well as Chelsea -- waiting for Waze to tell me when I-90’s traffic tantrum had subsided.</li>\r\n	<li>Probably the biggest travel event this week wasn’t mine but my daughter’s. It’s her first solo flight -- returning from her first semester at Univ of St Andrews, flying Aer Lingus from Edinburgh to Chicago by way of Dublin. It’s a big adjustment in a couple of ways. First, of course, she has to figure out a new airport by herself. She’s never been through Dublin before, but I thought a smaller airport would be a better first solo than trying to navigate the start of holiday traffic at Heathrow. But she does now have to pay attention to what’s going on rather than just following in my slipstream. The second adjustment is a bit more of a First World problem -- flying as as plain old passenger, a villager, rather than tagging along with me through the Gold or Platinum baggage check lines and pre-boarding. It’s a tough come-down, but I did soften the blow a little bit. I paid her Global Entry fee as a going away gift.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Paint the Sky</em> by Hans Atom (c) 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/hansatom/50718 Ft: Miss Judged</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Not really any commentary on the last episode, though Ian Morgan swung by the Facebook page with adding to the support about British Airways’ stricter carry-on policy\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>“Just listened to your October episode! Picked up your post about BA hand luggage. They have just changed their policy on this to clamp down. I agree it is frustrating especially on lightly loaded widebody aircraft. However, as a regular BA traveller I have lost count of the number of times BA flights have been delayed whilst cabin crew offload hand luggage, especially since BA introduced \"hand baggage only\" fares. Before the change, I never saw BA using the size gauges - these days they use them much more frequently. It\'s part of the steady decline of BA from a full service airline to a low cost carriers. Just be grateful that you got a 767 instead of an A321 with new \'spacesaver\' seats with a 29\" seat pitch!!</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>Ian, I think you’ve nailed it -- the descent of full-service carriers into the low-cost, low-service ring of travel hell created by Ryan Air and Spirit Airlines.  I’ve talked about this before -- a frequent traveler can’t fathom why someone would subject themselves to the hassles that Ryan and Spirit travelers endure. A recent <a href=\"http://www.chicagobusiness.com/article/20151205/ISSUE01/312059993/can-you-guess-whats-the-third-biggest-airline-at-ohare\">Crain’s Chicago article</a> about Spirit said just over half -- 58 % -- of their flights into ORD arrived on time in the first 9 months of this year. I fly at least 3 weeks out of 4. American Airlines’ 79% on-time percentage into ORD is only just acceptable; I’d go postal at 58%. But yet Spirit is now the 3rd largest airline at ORD after United and American. Working out of just two shared gates, it’s bigger than Delta. But then I remembered <a href=\"http://qz.com/533501/half-of-american-airlines-revenue-came-from-13-of-its-customers/\">some comments</a> made by the president of American Airlines during an analysts call right around the time American was doing the final merger of res systems with US Air. He said that half of American’s revenue last year came from the 87% of its customers that only flew them once. 50% of American’s revenue came from passengers that see air travel as a commodity and are looking for the lowest cost carriage between two points. And so for 50% of their revenue, American isn’t competing against United or Delta, they’re competing with Spirit.  It explains Delta’s Spirit-like Basic Economy offering, and the expectation that American and United will follow in 2016. And, I assume BA’s “hand baggage” fees that Ian mentions. The challenge, though, is how do you compete for the 87% of your passengers buying a commodity while also serving the remaining 13% of your passengers, who contribute the other 50% of your revenue, and value the little things like a seat that reclines a bit and a flight that arrives on time -- all in the same plane? Spirit doesn’t have that problem because they’ll never get that 13%. American, BA, Delta have the tougher problem.</li>\r\n	<li>Connecting through Dublin airport, my daughter cleared US immigration and customs in there in Ireland and then just popped out at the one domestic baggage claim in ORD’s Terminal 5 -- the International Terminal. Kinda similar to what they’ve been doing at Toronto’s Pearson Airport since forever -- or at least the 90’s when I was flying through there weekly. But there, American’s YYZ-ORD flight would land in Terminal 3, just like a flight from, say, Buffalo, and you’d make your connection or just walk out to the cab line. Handy for the regular traveler, but if you’ve dropped the $100 Global Entry fee, immigration lines at, say, ORD, aren’t any worse than they are in Toronto or Dublin. Indeed, my daughter was bummed that she went through US Preclearance so soon, because food and shopping choices on the US side of Preclearance were a lot thinner than on the Irish side. And I think that’ll be the problem if the TSA follows through on their announced expansion of Preclearance -- from what is mostly Canadian, Irish, and Caribbean airports to 10 much larger airports, including Tokyo, Amsterdam, Madrid, London Heathrow. If you’re flying US carriers out of European airports, you’re already being put into a de facto American ghetto -- typically flying out of the most remote gates, with the longest walks from security and airport lounges, and the fewest food and shopping amenities. Walling it off to create the secured facilities to support Preclearance just formalizes it.  The DHS secretary calls it a “win-win” for travelers. I think it’s just squeezing the balloon -- making wait time go down in the US, but go up in places like Narita and Heathrow. It’s one thing to miss a connection in ORD due to immigration delays. Odds are there’s another flight you can catch within a couple of hours. It’s a whole other thing if you miss that once a day flight home from, say, Amsterdam.</li>\r\n	<li>Thanks to El Niño, it’s been a warm start to the winter -- at least in North America. But soon enough, the temps will drop and the winter coats will start competing with carry-ons for overhead bin space. Last winter, while de-planing (what a weird verb construction!), someone handed me my black overcoat -- it was wedged in front of their suitcase. I threw it over my arm as I stepped out into the aisle, grabbed my carry-on, and hoofed it out of the plane, power-walking toward the cab line. It wasn’t until I stepped outside that I stopped to put my coat on and… it wasn’t my coat. I should’ve checked when it was handed to me, but I didn’t want to be that guy who stops <i>in the aisle</i> to put his jacket on. I went to Lost &amp; Found. The clerk called the gate, where the guy with my coat was standing, trying to find his coat. We got lucky. It took us about 10 minutes to sort everything out. He came down to Lost &amp; Found to swap coats. If it had been warmer out, like this week, I might not have put my coat on at all and gotten home for noticing the switch. Black bags, black coats. Love that black hides a lot of sins -- scuffs, dirt, extra pounds. Don’t love its ubiquity on an airplane. Keep your eyes on your stuff in these holiday crowds. Don’t want “Lost” to be the new black.</li>\r\n	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- Absolutely Clear (ft Jeris &amp; Goldfish) by SackJo22 (c) 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/45578 Ft: Jeris, Goldfish</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Digital Security On The Road</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Digital security, cyber security. I don’t know about you, but I’ve kinda hit security breach fatigue. On Thursday, yet another company announced a credit card breach. <a href=\"http://krebsonsecurity.com/2015/12/banks-card-breach-at-landrys-restaurants/\">This time</a> it’s Landry’s who runs Bubba Gumps and Morton’s Steakhouse and another 15 or so restaurant brands. I don’t frequent Landry’s brands that much, so I’m hoping that this breach doesn’t mean I have to replace one of my credit cards and again have to go through the goat rodeo of changing account numbers for all my autobills. But it still does reinforce that feeling the cyber security is not a matter of “if” but “when”</li>\r\n	<li>But even if it’s a matter of “when”, I’d still like to postpone the “when” as long as possible. And traveling -- certainly during the holidays -- there’s a lot of opportunity to bring on the “when” if you’re not just a bit thoughtful. There’s also a balance between inconvenience -- the cost of being more digitally secure -- and the probability of being “breached” (can I say that without having to flag this as “explicit” in iTunes?).</li>\r\n	<li>You could always go “old school” -- like 10 years ago when there was damn little public WiFi, no iPhones -- nothing to keep us entertained as we shuffled through the TSA lines other than trading snarky remarks with other line sufferers. Or you could go the “burner” route -- using disposable phones and a temporary PC, which is what many business travelers to China still do -- doing a complete wipe of their phones and PCs before and after each visit because they just expect to get hacked no matter what anti-virus and other safety precautions they take. But if all you’re doing is going from, say, San Francisco to Boston to see your family, these seem a bit “overkill” -- definitely not balancing the cost-benefit trade-off. I’m fairly lazy about this stuff, but there are a few precautions I do take.</li>\r\n	<li>First, I never do any financial stuff over public WiFi -- no checking my bank account or credit card activity over an airport or Starbucks WiFi, or a hotel network at all -- whether WiFi or jacked into an Ethernet port. Even if the URL is showing https -- a encrypted web connection -- there’s just too many ways those networks or web sites can be misconfigured. Some folks will tell you to use a VPN. I used one in China, but it seems a bit too much in the US. If I have to do some banking, I’ll use my iPhone over the mobile carrier network -- AT&amp;T in the US, Orange when I was in Spain, .... I know it’s not perfect, but, as the cyber security guys like to say, it “reduces the attack surface” at what is considered one of the most vulnerable points.</li>\r\n	<li>I rarely use hotel PCs -- the ones set up in lobbies or the concierge lounges. I mean, if I have a smartphone, a tablet, and a PC, why do I need to use a public PC that’s open to anyone loading up a key-logger that’ll capture anything you type -- including logins and passwords. If I do, for some odd reason, need to use one, I never log into anything. Maybe just search for a restaurant, but that’s about it.</li>\r\n	<li>I always make sure that I’ve configured my phone and PC e-mail clients to use encrypted communications between servers -- using IMAP and SMTP over SSL (<i>&gt;now</i> we’re talking security because we used more acronyms than words in that last sentence) for my own mail servers; GMail does it automatically for you. But I don’t encrypt the message itself -- no PGP or signed MIME. There’s nothing in my e-mails that is <i>that</i> confidential to go through that hassle.</li>\r\n	<li>I have recently, though, turned on two-factor authentication for every service that offers it -- GMail, some of my financial accounts, Dropbox, …. I resisted it for a long time -- again, thought it was more hassle than it was worth. But then I started getting some odd password reset e-mail requests -- that I didn’t request.</li>\r\n	<li>I go back and forth on using smartphone or printed boarding passes. Smartphone boarding passes are quicker -- you can get it while in the cab to the airport rather than queueing up for a kiosk -- but I’ve had more than a few times when my boarding pass disappeared from the app during an extended flight delay. Printed boarding passes are easier to scan at the gate -- especially when juggling a backpack, a hot coffee, and a winter coat -- but there’s recently been a <a href=\"http://www.economist.com/blogs/gulliver/2015/10/security-check\">bit</a> of a <a href=\"http://krebsonsecurity.com/2015/10/whats-in-a-boarding-pass-barcode-a-lot/#more-31317\">stir</a> about the amount of personal information someone could pull out of the bar codes. Maybe I’m not paranoid enough, but that one feels a bit of a stretch. I do whatever’s the most convenient -- usually the smartphone route. But when I do print out a boarding pass, I keep it in my jacket pocket -- just to be sure.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- Drops of H2O ( The Filtered Water Treatment ) by J.Lang (c) 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/djlang59/37792 Ft: Airtone</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>US Airports Getting Better?</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>While I poked at London Heathrow a couple of <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/10/11/podcast-117-random-thoughts-about-eggs-scotland-car-rentals/\" target=\"_blank\">episodes</a> back, it’s an article of faith among international travelers that North American airports pale in comparison to airports in Asia/Pac -- anyone flying from Beijing or Singapore to LAX needs a light sedative to cushion the shock -- and pretty much trail behind most European airports too. But JD Power, in their <a href=\"http://www.jdpower.com/press-releases/2015-north-america-airport-satisfaction-study\" target=\"_blank\">airport satisfaction survey</a> released last week, said that things are getting better. Not hugely better -- a 5-8% increase in their satisfaction score, but any improvement is good news.</li>\r\n	<li>Power <a href=\"http://www.jdpower.com/ratings/study/North-America-Airport-Satisfaction-Study/763ENG/Large-Airports/1617\">rated</a> large- and medium-sized North American airports -- 60 US airports and Toronto Pearson, Calgary, Montreal, and Vancouver. They surveyed travelers around 6 attributes of their airport experience. In order of importance, they are: the state of the airport facilities themselves, how easy it is to get to the airport, security, baggage claim, the check-in experience, and available food and shopping. A frequent traveler might re-shuffle the order -- maybe drop baggage claim and the check-in experience to the bottom because we rarely check a bag -- but I think it’s a good list.</li>\r\n	<li>And I think some of Power’s conclusions line up with things I’m seeing on the road. Like improvements in terminal facilities. In the last episode, I gave United a shout-out for the upgrade of their gate space in Boston Logan. I also think San Francisco’s complete rebuild of Terminal 2 is excellent and stands up to any airport in Asia or Europe.</li>\r\n	<li>Power found what is a pretty logical connection between satisfaction and the time you spend in lines. As I said earlier, I rarely deal with check-in lines, but I think the TSA’s rollout of Precheck has provided a quantum level improvement in the security experience -- though at times, it feels like its popularity is on the verge of overwhelming it and sliding back. But even for those in the regular lines, I’ve seen TSA folks working hard to re-balance lines -- especially at ORD.</li>\r\n	<li>Power split their ratings between large and medium airports. Their winning large airport is Portland, Oregon. I’ve done a bit of flying into PDX and while I wouldn’t have, unprompted, chosen it as the top large airport, I don’t argue with their conclusion. It’s a nice facility; easy mass transit (a TravelCommons’ fixation) via the MAX light rail; I disagree with its top marks for security check, but in how many other airports can I buy a growler of craft beer to go? The bottom four -- those I could’ve ticked off with missing a beat -- LaGuardia, Newark, LAX, and O’Hare. Old terminals, awkward layouts, leaking roofs, lousy food. Interesting they’re also the major airports for the US’s largest cities.</li>\r\n	<li>The medium airport winner was a tie between Dallas’ downtown Love Field and Fort Myers’ Southwest Florida. This one, I dunno. I’ve used both of these airports a lot. Love has gone through a good sized facelift and I haven’t been through it since they finished, so I may be working off out-of-date impressions, but even though it’s close to downtown, it’s a pain to get to. Now Fort Myers is easy to get to -- and I love the short walk to the rental car facility -- but security screening can back way up and the food choice isn’t great. From my personal experience, I’d give top marks to Nashville. I mean, how can you go wrong with live music -- good live music -- as you’re walking down the terminal.</li>\r\n	<li>Power’s most obvious finding is that dissatisfied customers are very vocal. Those who rate overall satisfaction 1 (on a 10-point scale) make an average of 13 negative comments about their experience. Anyone who follows me on Twitter knows how true that is.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #119</li>\r\n	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/\">Podshow Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\r\n	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_119.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #119 — Digital Security On The Road; US Airports Getting Better?','','inherit','closed','closed','','1579-revision-v1','','','2015-12-21 18:16:56','2015-12-21 23:16:56','',1579,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/12/21/1579-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1590,1,'2015-12-21 18:21:45','2015-12-21 23:21:45','[caption id=\"attachment_1585\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/calvin_PC.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1585\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/calvin_PC-300x172.jpg\" alt=\"Cat-based cyber-security solution\" width=\"300\" height=\"172\" /></a> Cat-based cyber-security solution[/caption]\r\n\r\nHere\'s a little something to keep you entertained while you navigate the holiday airport lines. We talk about digital security on the road -- what\'s the right balance between hassle and hack? We also dig into JD Power\'s latest airport satisfaction survey. They report a tick up in traveler experience and, for the most part, I think they have it right. We also cover Spirit Airlines\' growth and the planned expansion of US immigration pre-clearance. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_119.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/232191753\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #119:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, cranking out one last episode to keep you occupied while you navigate the holiday security lines while trying to get to -- or away from family. Myself, I’m settling for the Christmas break after doing a day trip yesterday to Philadelphia. I’m taking a break from O’Hare until January.</li>\r\n	<li>No really remarkable travel since the last episode, just trips to Cleveland, Vegas, and Boston. When I was flying out of Vegas last week, I hit the <a href=\"http://thecenturionlounge.com/location/LAS\">Amex Centurion Lounge</a> for a couple of conference calls before boarding. It’s free entry with a Platinum Card, and so far and beyond any Admirals Club or Sky Club or United Club. It’s not quite as hip/a bit more button-down than Virgin Atlantic’s Upper Lounge in Heathrow, but the comfort, the free buffet and open bar just are just as good. Highly recommended. I just wish there were more of them.</li>\r\n	<li>When I’m flying into Boston, I’m actually heading out 45 minutes west, close to Worcester. Now that’s a 45 minute drive out I-90 when I land at 9 or 10 in the morning. When I land at 5 in the evening, it’s a whole different story. I touch down at Logan, flip out of airplane mode and immediately open Waze. How bad is the traffic? How about <i>an hour</i> and 45 minute drive? Not looking forward to that parking lot, so I threaded my way over to Chelsea. Found a great little microbrewery complete with real live Boston Irish patrons and sample 1, 2, 4 of their beers. Then I walked up a couple of blocks to a Central American joint underneath a highway overpass. Had a great plate of food for less than $10.  I’ve spent a few dinner times wandering around nearby neighborhoods -- Charlestown, the Seaport District as well as Chelsea -- waiting for Waze to tell me when I-90’s traffic tantrum had subsided.</li>\r\n	<li>Probably the biggest travel event this week wasn’t mine but my daughter’s. It’s her first solo flight -- returning from her first semester at Univ of St Andrews, flying Aer Lingus from Edinburgh to Chicago by way of Dublin. It’s a big adjustment in a couple of ways. First, of course, she has to figure out a new airport by herself. She’s never been through Dublin before, but I thought a smaller airport would be a better first solo than trying to navigate the start of holiday traffic at Heathrow. But she does now have to pay attention to what’s going on rather than just following in my slipstream. The second adjustment is a bit more of a First World problem -- flying as as plain old passenger, a villager, rather than tagging along with me through the Gold or Platinum baggage check lines and pre-boarding. It’s a tough come-down, but I did soften the blow a little bit. I paid her Global Entry fee as a going away gift.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- Dive Deep (Loveshadow remix) by spinningmerkaba (c) 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/50488 Ft: Loveshadow</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Not really any commentary on the last episode, though Ian Morgan swung by the Facebook page with adding to the support about British Airways’ stricter carry-on policy\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>“Just listened to your October episode! Picked up your post about BA hand luggage. They have just changed their policy on this to clamp down. I agree it is frustrating especially on lightly loaded widebody aircraft. However, as a regular BA traveller I have lost count of the number of times BA flights have been delayed whilst cabin crew offload hand luggage, especially since BA introduced \"hand baggage only\" fares. Before the change, I never saw BA using the size gauges - these days they use them much more frequently. It\'s part of the steady decline of BA from a full service airline to a low cost carriers. Just be grateful that you got a 767 instead of an A321 with new \'spacesaver\' seats with a 29\" seat pitch!!</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>Ian, I think you’ve nailed it -- the descent of full-service carriers into the low-cost, low-service ring of travel hell created by Ryan Air and Spirit Airlines.  I’ve talked about this before -- a frequent traveler can’t fathom why someone would subject themselves to the hassles that Ryan and Spirit travelers endure. A recent <a href=\"http://www.chicagobusiness.com/article/20151205/ISSUE01/312059993/can-you-guess-whats-the-third-biggest-airline-at-ohare\">Crain’s Chicago article</a> about Spirit said just over half -- 58 % -- of their flights into ORD arrived on time in the first 9 months of this year. I fly at least 3 weeks out of 4. American Airlines’ 79% on-time percentage into ORD is only just acceptable; I’d go postal at 58%. But yet Spirit is now the 3rd largest airline at ORD after United and American. Working out of just two shared gates, it’s bigger than Delta. But then I remembered <a href=\"http://qz.com/533501/half-of-american-airlines-revenue-came-from-13-of-its-customers/\">some comments</a> made by the president of American Airlines during an analysts call right around the time American was doing the final merger of res systems with US Air. He said that half of American’s revenue last year came from the 87% of its customers that only flew them once. 50% of American’s revenue came from passengers that see air travel as a commodity and are looking for the lowest cost carriage between two points. And so for 50% of their revenue, American isn’t competing against United or Delta, they’re competing with Spirit.  It explains Delta’s Spirit-like Basic Economy offering, and the expectation that American and United will follow in 2016. And, I assume BA’s “hand baggage” fees that Ian mentions. The challenge, though, is how do you compete for the 87% of your passengers buying a commodity while also serving the remaining 13% of your passengers, who contribute the other 50% of your revenue, and value the little things like a seat that reclines a bit and a flight that arrives on time -- all in the same plane? Spirit doesn’t have that problem because they’ll never get that 13%. American, BA, Delta have the tougher problem.</li>\r\n	<li>Connecting through Dublin airport, my daughter cleared US immigration and customs in there in Ireland and then just popped out at the one domestic baggage claim in ORD’s Terminal 5 -- the International Terminal. Kinda similar to what they’ve been doing at Toronto’s Pearson Airport since forever -- or at least the 90’s when I was flying through there weekly. But there, American’s YYZ-ORD flight would land in Terminal 3, just like a flight from, say, Buffalo, and you’d make your connection or just walk out to the cab line. Handy for the regular traveler, but if you’ve dropped the $100 Global Entry fee, immigration lines at, say, ORD, aren’t any worse than they are in Toronto or Dublin. Indeed, my daughter was bummed that she went through US Preclearance so soon, because food and shopping choices on the US side of Preclearance were a lot thinner than on the Irish side. And I think that’ll be the problem if the TSA follows through on their announced expansion of Preclearance -- from what is mostly Canadian, Irish, and Caribbean airports to 10 much larger airports, including Tokyo, Amsterdam, Madrid, London Heathrow. If you’re flying US carriers out of European airports, you’re already being put into a de facto American ghetto -- typically flying out of the most remote gates, with the longest walks from security and airport lounges, and the fewest food and shopping amenities. Walling it off to create the secured facilities to support Preclearance just formalizes it.  The DHS secretary calls it a “win-win” for travelers. I think it’s just squeezing the balloon -- making wait time go down in the US, but go up in places like Narita and Heathrow. It’s one thing to miss a connection in ORD due to immigration delays. Odds are there’s another flight you can catch within a couple of hours. It’s a whole other thing if you miss that once a day flight home from, say, Amsterdam.</li>\r\n	<li>Thanks to El Niño, it’s been a warm start to the winter -- at least in North America. But soon enough, the temps will drop and the winter coats will start competing with carry-ons for overhead bin space. Last winter, while de-planing (what a weird verb construction!), someone handed me my black overcoat -- it was wedged in front of their suitcase. I threw it over my arm as I stepped out into the aisle, grabbed my carry-on, and hoofed it out of the plane, power-walking toward the cab line. It wasn’t until I stepped outside that I stopped to put my coat on and… it wasn’t my coat. I should’ve checked when it was handed to me, but I didn’t want to be that guy who stops <i>in the aisle</i> to put his jacket on. I went to Lost &amp; Found. The clerk called the gate, where the guy with my coat was standing, trying to find his coat. We got lucky. It took us about 10 minutes to sort everything out. He came down to Lost &amp; Found to swap coats. If it had been warmer out, like this week, I might not have put my coat on at all and gotten home for noticing the switch. Black bags, black coats. Love that black hides a lot of sins -- scuffs, dirt, extra pounds. Don’t love its ubiquity on an airplane. Keep your eyes on your stuff in these holiday crowds. Don’t want “Lost” to be the new black.</li>\r\n	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- Absolutely Clear (ft Jeris &amp; Goldfish) by SackJo22 (c) 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/45578 Ft: Jeris, Goldfish</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Digital Security On The Road</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Digital security, cyber security. I don’t know about you, but I’ve kinda hit security breach fatigue. On Thursday, yet another company announced a credit card breach. <a href=\"http://krebsonsecurity.com/2015/12/banks-card-breach-at-landrys-restaurants/\">This time</a> it’s Landry’s who runs Bubba Gumps and Morton’s Steakhouse and another 15 or so restaurant brands. I don’t frequent Landry’s brands that much, so I’m hoping that this breach doesn’t mean I have to replace one of my credit cards and again have to go through the goat rodeo of changing account numbers for all my autobills. But it still does reinforce that feeling the cyber security is not a matter of “if” but “when”</li>\r\n	<li>But even if it’s a matter of “when”, I’d still like to postpone the “when” as long as possible. And traveling -- certainly during the holidays -- there’s a lot of opportunity to bring on the “when” if you’re not just a bit thoughtful. There’s also a balance between inconvenience -- the cost of being more digitally secure -- and the probability of being “breached” (can I say that without having to flag this as “explicit” in iTunes?).</li>\r\n	<li>You could always go “old school” -- like 10 years ago when there was damn little public WiFi, no iPhones -- nothing to keep us entertained as we shuffled through the TSA lines other than trading snarky remarks with other line sufferers. Or you could go the “burner” route -- using disposable phones and a temporary PC, which is what many business travelers to China still do -- doing a complete wipe of their phones and PCs before and after each visit because they just expect to get hacked no matter what anti-virus and other safety precautions they take. But if all you’re doing is going from, say, San Francisco to Boston to see your family, these seem a bit “overkill” -- definitely not balancing the cost-benefit trade-off. I’m fairly lazy about this stuff, but there are a few precautions I do take.</li>\r\n	<li>First, I never do any financial stuff over public WiFi -- no checking my bank account or credit card activity over an airport or Starbucks WiFi, or a hotel network at all -- whether WiFi or jacked into an Ethernet port. Even if the URL is showing https -- a encrypted web connection -- there’s just too many ways those networks or web sites can be misconfigured. Some folks will tell you to use a VPN. I used one in China, but it seems a bit too much in the US. If I have to do some banking, I’ll use my iPhone over the mobile carrier network -- AT&amp;T in the US, Orange when I was in Spain, .... I know it’s not perfect, but, as the cyber security guys like to say, it “reduces the attack surface” at what is considered one of the most vulnerable points.</li>\r\n	<li>I rarely use hotel PCs -- the ones set up in lobbies or the concierge lounges. I mean, if I have a smartphone, a tablet, and a PC, why do I need to use a public PC that’s open to anyone loading up a key-logger that’ll capture anything you type -- including logins and passwords. If I do, for some odd reason, need to use one, I never log into anything. Maybe just search for a restaurant, but that’s about it.</li>\r\n	<li>I always make sure that I’ve configured my phone and PC e-mail clients to use encrypted communications between servers -- using IMAP and SMTP over SSL (<i>&gt;now</i> we’re talking security because we used more acronyms than words in that last sentence) for my own mail servers; GMail does it automatically for you. But I don’t encrypt the message itself -- no PGP or signed MIME. There’s nothing in my e-mails that is <i>that</i> confidential to go through that hassle.</li>\r\n	<li>I have recently, though, turned on two-factor authentication for every service that offers it -- GMail, some of my financial accounts, Dropbox, …. I resisted it for a long time -- again, thought it was more hassle than it was worth. But then I started getting some odd password reset e-mail requests -- that I didn’t request.</li>\r\n	<li>I go back and forth on using smartphone or printed boarding passes. Smartphone boarding passes are quicker -- you can get it while in the cab to the airport rather than queueing up for a kiosk -- but I’ve had more than a few times when my boarding pass disappeared from the app during an extended flight delay. Printed boarding passes are easier to scan at the gate -- especially when juggling a backpack, a hot coffee, and a winter coat -- but there’s recently been a <a href=\"http://www.economist.com/blogs/gulliver/2015/10/security-check\">bit</a> of a <a href=\"http://krebsonsecurity.com/2015/10/whats-in-a-boarding-pass-barcode-a-lot/#more-31317\">stir</a> about the amount of personal information someone could pull out of the bar codes. Maybe I’m not paranoid enough, but that one feels a bit of a stretch. I do whatever’s the most convenient -- usually the smartphone route. But when I do print out a boarding pass, I keep it in my jacket pocket -- just to be sure.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- Drops of H2O ( The Filtered Water Treatment ) by J.Lang (c) 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/djlang59/37792 Ft: Airtone</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>US Airports Getting Better?</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>While I poked at London Heathrow a couple of <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/10/11/podcast-117-random-thoughts-about-eggs-scotland-car-rentals/\" target=\"_blank\">episodes</a> back, it’s an article of faith among international travelers that North American airports pale in comparison to airports in Asia/Pac -- anyone flying from Beijing or Singapore to LAX needs a light sedative to cushion the shock -- and pretty much trail behind most European airports too. But JD Power, in their <a href=\"http://www.jdpower.com/press-releases/2015-north-america-airport-satisfaction-study\" target=\"_blank\">airport satisfaction survey</a> released last week, said that things are getting better. Not hugely better -- a 5-8% increase in their satisfaction score, but any improvement is good news.</li>\r\n	<li>Power <a href=\"http://www.jdpower.com/ratings/study/North-America-Airport-Satisfaction-Study/763ENG/Large-Airports/1617\">rated</a> large- and medium-sized North American airports -- 60 US airports and Toronto Pearson, Calgary, Montreal, and Vancouver. They surveyed travelers around 6 attributes of their airport experience. In order of importance, they are: the state of the airport facilities themselves, how easy it is to get to the airport, security, baggage claim, the check-in experience, and available food and shopping. A frequent traveler might re-shuffle the order -- maybe drop baggage claim and the check-in experience to the bottom because we rarely check a bag -- but I think it’s a good list.</li>\r\n	<li>And I think some of Power’s conclusions line up with things I’m seeing on the road. Like improvements in terminal facilities. In the last episode, I gave United a shout-out for the upgrade of their gate space in Boston Logan. I also think San Francisco’s complete rebuild of Terminal 2 is excellent and stands up to any airport in Asia or Europe.</li>\r\n	<li>Power found what is a pretty logical connection between satisfaction and the time you spend in lines. As I said earlier, I rarely deal with check-in lines, but I think the TSA’s rollout of Precheck has provided a quantum level improvement in the security experience -- though at times, it feels like its popularity is on the verge of overwhelming it and sliding back. But even for those in the regular lines, I’ve seen TSA folks working hard to re-balance lines -- especially at ORD.</li>\r\n	<li>Power split their ratings between large and medium airports. Their winning large airport is Portland, Oregon. I’ve done a bit of flying into PDX and while I wouldn’t have, unprompted, chosen it as the top large airport, I don’t argue with their conclusion. It’s a nice facility; easy mass transit (a TravelCommons’ fixation) via the MAX light rail; I disagree with its top marks for security check, but in how many other airports can I buy a growler of craft beer to go? The bottom four -- those I could’ve ticked off with missing a beat -- LaGuardia, Newark, LAX, and O’Hare. Old terminals, awkward layouts, leaking roofs, lousy food. Interesting they’re also the major airports for the US’s largest cities.</li>\r\n	<li>The medium airport winner was a tie between Dallas’ downtown Love Field and Fort Myers’ Southwest Florida. This one, I dunno. I’ve used both of these airports a lot. Love has gone through a good sized facelift and I haven’t been through it since they finished, so I may be working off out-of-date impressions, but even though it’s close to downtown, it’s a pain to get to. Now Fort Myers is easy to get to -- and I love the short walk to the rental car facility -- but security screening can back way up and the food choice isn’t great. From my personal experience, I’d give top marks to Nashville. I mean, how can you go wrong with live music -- good live music -- as you’re walking down the terminal.</li>\r\n	<li>Power’s most obvious finding is that dissatisfied customers are very vocal. Those who rate overall satisfaction 1 (on a 10-point scale) make an average of 13 negative comments about their experience. Anyone who follows me on Twitter knows how true that is.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #119</li>\r\n	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/\">Podshow Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\r\n	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_119.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #119 — Digital Security On The Road; US Airports Getting Better?','','inherit','closed','closed','','1579-revision-v1','','','2015-12-21 18:21:45','2015-12-21 23:21:45','',1579,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/12/21/1579-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1591,1,'2015-12-21 20:11:48','2015-12-22 01:11:48','[caption id=\"attachment_1585\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/calvin_PC.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1585\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/calvin_PC-300x172.jpg\" alt=\"Cat-based cyber-security solution\" width=\"300\" height=\"172\" /></a> Cat-based cyber-security solution[/caption]\r\n\r\nHere\'s a little something to keep you entertained while you navigate the holiday airport lines. We talk about digital security on the road -- what\'s the right balance between hassle and hack? We also dig into JD Power\'s latest airport satisfaction survey. They report a tick up in traveler experience and, for the most part, I think they have it right. We also cover Spirit Airlines\' growth and the planned expansion of US immigration pre-clearance. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_119.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/238595273\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #119:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, cranking out one last episode to keep you occupied while you navigate the holiday security lines while trying to get to -- or away from family. Myself, I’m settling for the Christmas break after doing a day trip yesterday to Philadelphia. I’m taking a break from O’Hare until January.</li>\r\n	<li>No really remarkable travel since the last episode, just trips to Cleveland, Vegas, and Boston. When I was flying out of Vegas last week, I hit the <a href=\"http://thecenturionlounge.com/location/LAS\">Amex Centurion Lounge</a> for a couple of conference calls before boarding. It’s free entry with a Platinum Card, and so far and beyond any Admirals Club or Sky Club or United Club. It’s not quite as hip/a bit more button-down than Virgin Atlantic’s Upper Lounge in Heathrow, but the comfort, the free buffet and open bar just are just as good. Highly recommended. I just wish there were more of them.</li>\r\n	<li>When I’m flying into Boston, I’m actually heading out 45 minutes west, close to Worcester. Now that’s a 45 minute drive out I-90 when I land at 9 or 10 in the morning. When I land at 5 in the evening, it’s a whole different story. I touch down at Logan, flip out of airplane mode and immediately open Waze. How bad is the traffic? How about <i>an hour</i> and 45 minute drive? Not looking forward to that parking lot, so I threaded my way over to Chelsea. Found a great little microbrewery complete with real live Boston Irish patrons and sample 1, 2, 4 of their beers. Then I walked up a couple of blocks to a Central American joint underneath a highway overpass. Had a great plate of food for less than $10.  I’ve spent a few dinner times wandering around nearby neighborhoods -- Charlestown, the Seaport District as well as Chelsea -- waiting for Waze to tell me when I-90’s traffic tantrum had subsided.</li>\r\n	<li>Probably the biggest travel event this week wasn’t mine but my daughter’s. It’s her first solo flight -- returning from her first semester at Univ of St Andrews, flying Aer Lingus from Edinburgh to Chicago by way of Dublin. It’s a big adjustment in a couple of ways. First, of course, she has to figure out a new airport by herself. She’s never been through Dublin before, but I thought a smaller airport would be a better first solo than trying to navigate the start of holiday traffic at Heathrow. But she does now have to pay attention to what’s going on rather than just following in my slipstream. The second adjustment is a bit more of a First World problem -- flying as as plain old passenger, a villager, rather than tagging along with me through the Gold or Platinum baggage check lines and pre-boarding. It’s a tough come-down, but I did soften the blow a little bit. I paid her Global Entry fee as a going away gift.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- Dive Deep (Loveshadow remix) by spinningmerkaba (c) 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/50488 Ft: Loveshadow</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Not really any commentary on the last episode, though Ian Morgan swung by the Facebook page with adding to the support about British Airways’ stricter carry-on policy\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>“Just listened to your October episode! Picked up your post about BA hand luggage. They have just changed their policy on this to clamp down. I agree it is frustrating especially on lightly loaded widebody aircraft. However, as a regular BA traveller I have lost count of the number of times BA flights have been delayed whilst cabin crew offload hand luggage, especially since BA introduced \"hand baggage only\" fares. Before the change, I never saw BA using the size gauges - these days they use them much more frequently. It\'s part of the steady decline of BA from a full service airline to a low cost carriers. Just be grateful that you got a 767 instead of an A321 with new \'spacesaver\' seats with a 29\" seat pitch!!</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>Ian, I think you’ve nailed it -- the descent of full-service carriers into the low-cost, low-service ring of travel hell created by Ryan Air and Spirit Airlines.  I’ve talked about this before -- a frequent traveler can’t fathom why someone would subject themselves to the hassles that Ryan and Spirit travelers endure. A recent <a href=\"http://www.chicagobusiness.com/article/20151205/ISSUE01/312059993/can-you-guess-whats-the-third-biggest-airline-at-ohare\">Crain’s Chicago article</a> about Spirit said just over half -- 58 % -- of their flights into ORD arrived on time in the first 9 months of this year. I fly at least 3 weeks out of 4. American Airlines’ 79% on-time percentage into ORD is only just acceptable; I’d go postal at 58%. But yet Spirit is now the 3rd largest airline at ORD after United and American. Working out of just two shared gates, it’s bigger than Delta. But then I remembered <a href=\"http://qz.com/533501/half-of-american-airlines-revenue-came-from-13-of-its-customers/\">some comments</a> made by the president of American Airlines during an analysts call right around the time American was doing the final merger of res systems with US Air. He said that half of American’s revenue last year came from the 87% of its customers that only flew them once. 50% of American’s revenue came from passengers that see air travel as a commodity and are looking for the lowest cost carriage between two points. And so for 50% of their revenue, American isn’t competing against United or Delta, they’re competing with Spirit.  It explains Delta’s Spirit-like Basic Economy offering, and the expectation that American and United will follow in 2016. And, I assume BA’s “hand baggage” fees that Ian mentions. The challenge, though, is how do you compete for the 87% of your passengers buying a commodity while also serving the remaining 13% of your passengers, who contribute the other 50% of your revenue, and value the little things like a seat that reclines a bit and a flight that arrives on time -- all in the same plane? Spirit doesn’t have that problem because they’ll never get that 13%. American, BA, Delta have the tougher problem.</li>\r\n	<li>Connecting through Dublin airport, my daughter cleared US immigration and customs in there in Ireland and then just popped out at the one domestic baggage claim in ORD’s Terminal 5 -- the International Terminal. Kinda similar to what they’ve been doing at Toronto’s Pearson Airport since forever -- or at least the 90’s when I was flying through there weekly. But there, American’s YYZ-ORD flight would land in Terminal 3, just like a flight from, say, Buffalo, and you’d make your connection or just walk out to the cab line. Handy for the regular traveler, but if you’ve dropped the $100 Global Entry fee, immigration lines at, say, ORD, aren’t any worse than they are in Toronto or Dublin. Indeed, my daughter was bummed that she went through US Preclearance so soon, because food and shopping choices on the US side of Preclearance were a lot thinner than on the Irish side. And I think that’ll be the problem if the TSA follows through on their announced expansion of Preclearance -- from what is mostly Canadian, Irish, and Caribbean airports to 10 much larger airports, including Tokyo, Amsterdam, Madrid, London Heathrow. If you’re flying US carriers out of European airports, you’re already being put into a de facto American ghetto -- typically flying out of the most remote gates, with the longest walks from security and airport lounges, and the fewest food and shopping amenities. Walling it off to create the secured facilities to support Preclearance just formalizes it.  The DHS secretary calls it a “win-win” for travelers. I think it’s just squeezing the balloon -- making wait time go down in the US, but go up in places like Narita and Heathrow. It’s one thing to miss a connection in ORD due to immigration delays. Odds are there’s another flight you can catch within a couple of hours. It’s a whole other thing if you miss that once a day flight home from, say, Amsterdam.</li>\r\n	<li>Thanks to El Niño, it’s been a warm start to the winter -- at least in North America. But soon enough, the temps will drop and the winter coats will start competing with carry-ons for overhead bin space. Last winter, while de-planing (what a weird verb construction!), someone handed me my black overcoat -- it was wedged in front of their suitcase. I threw it over my arm as I stepped out into the aisle, grabbed my carry-on, and hoofed it out of the plane, power-walking toward the cab line. It wasn’t until I stepped outside that I stopped to put my coat on and… it wasn’t my coat. I should’ve checked when it was handed to me, but I didn’t want to be that guy who stops <i>in the aisle</i> to put his jacket on. I went to Lost &amp; Found. The clerk called the gate, where the guy with my coat was standing, trying to find his coat. We got lucky. It took us about 10 minutes to sort everything out. He came down to Lost &amp; Found to swap coats. If it had been warmer out, like this week, I might not have put my coat on at all and gotten home for noticing the switch. Black bags, black coats. Love that black hides a lot of sins -- scuffs, dirt, extra pounds. Don’t love its ubiquity on an airplane. Keep your eyes on your stuff in these holiday crowds. Don’t want “Lost” to be the new black.</li>\r\n	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- Absolutely Clear (ft Jeris &amp; Goldfish) by SackJo22 (c) 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/45578 Ft: Jeris, Goldfish</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Digital Security On The Road</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Digital security, cyber security. I don’t know about you, but I’ve kinda hit security breach fatigue. On Thursday, yet another company announced a credit card breach. <a href=\"http://krebsonsecurity.com/2015/12/banks-card-breach-at-landrys-restaurants/\">This time</a> it’s Landry’s who runs Bubba Gumps and Morton’s Steakhouse and another 15 or so restaurant brands. I don’t frequent Landry’s brands that much, so I’m hoping that this breach doesn’t mean I have to replace one of my credit cards and again have to go through the goat rodeo of changing account numbers for all my autobills. But it still does reinforce that feeling the cyber security is not a matter of “if” but “when”</li>\r\n	<li>But even if it’s a matter of “when”, I’d still like to postpone the “when” as long as possible. And traveling -- certainly during the holidays -- there’s a lot of opportunity to bring on the “when” if you’re not just a bit thoughtful. There’s also a balance between inconvenience -- the cost of being more digitally secure -- and the probability of being “breached” (can I say that without having to flag this as “explicit” in iTunes?).</li>\r\n	<li>You could always go “old school” -- like 10 years ago when there was damn little public WiFi, no iPhones -- nothing to keep us entertained as we shuffled through the TSA lines other than trading snarky remarks with other line sufferers. Or you could go the “burner” route -- using disposable phones and a temporary PC, which is what many business travelers to China still do -- doing a complete wipe of their phones and PCs before and after each visit because they just expect to get hacked no matter what anti-virus and other safety precautions they take. But if all you’re doing is going from, say, San Francisco to Boston to see your family, these seem a bit “overkill” -- definitely not balancing the cost-benefit trade-off. I’m fairly lazy about this stuff, but there are a few precautions I do take.</li>\r\n	<li>First, I never do any financial stuff over public WiFi -- no checking my bank account or credit card activity over an airport or Starbucks WiFi, or a hotel network at all -- whether WiFi or jacked into an Ethernet port. Even if the URL is showing https -- a encrypted web connection -- there’s just too many ways those networks or web sites can be misconfigured. Some folks will tell you to use a VPN. I used one in China, but it seems a bit too much in the US. If I have to do some banking, I’ll use my iPhone over the mobile carrier network -- AT&amp;T in the US, Orange when I was in Spain, .... I know it’s not perfect, but, as the cyber security guys like to say, it “reduces the attack surface” at what is considered one of the most vulnerable points.</li>\r\n	<li>I rarely use hotel PCs -- the ones set up in lobbies or the concierge lounges. I mean, if I have a smartphone, a tablet, and a PC, why do I need to use a public PC that’s open to anyone loading up a key-logger that’ll capture anything you type -- including logins and passwords. If I do, for some odd reason, need to use one, I never log into anything. Maybe just search for a restaurant, but that’s about it.</li>\r\n	<li>I always make sure that I’ve configured my phone and PC e-mail clients to use encrypted communications between servers -- using IMAP and SMTP over SSL (<i>&gt;now</i> we’re talking security because we used more acronyms than words in that last sentence) for my own mail servers; GMail does it automatically for you. But I don’t encrypt the message itself -- no PGP or signed MIME. There’s nothing in my e-mails that is <i>that</i> confidential to go through that hassle.</li>\r\n	<li>I have recently, though, turned on two-factor authentication for every service that offers it -- GMail, some of my financial accounts, Dropbox, …. I resisted it for a long time -- again, thought it was more hassle than it was worth. But then I started getting some odd password reset e-mail requests -- that I didn’t request.</li>\r\n	<li>I go back and forth on using smartphone or printed boarding passes. Smartphone boarding passes are quicker -- you can get it while in the cab to the airport rather than queueing up for a kiosk -- but I’ve had more than a few times when my boarding pass disappeared from the app during an extended flight delay. Printed boarding passes are easier to scan at the gate -- especially when juggling a backpack, a hot coffee, and a winter coat -- but there’s recently been a <a href=\"http://www.economist.com/blogs/gulliver/2015/10/security-check\">bit</a> of a <a href=\"http://krebsonsecurity.com/2015/10/whats-in-a-boarding-pass-barcode-a-lot/#more-31317\">stir</a> about the amount of personal information someone could pull out of the bar codes. Maybe I’m not paranoid enough, but that one feels a bit of a stretch. I do whatever’s the most convenient -- usually the smartphone route. But when I do print out a boarding pass, I keep it in my jacket pocket -- just to be sure.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- Drops of H2O ( The Filtered Water Treatment ) by J.Lang (c) 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/djlang59/37792 Ft: Airtone</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>US Airports Getting Better?</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>While I poked at London Heathrow a couple of <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/10/11/podcast-117-random-thoughts-about-eggs-scotland-car-rentals/\" target=\"_blank\">episodes</a> back, it’s an article of faith among international travelers that North American airports pale in comparison to airports in Asia/Pac -- anyone flying from Beijing or Singapore to LAX needs a light sedative to cushion the shock -- and pretty much trail behind most European airports too. But JD Power, in their <a href=\"http://www.jdpower.com/press-releases/2015-north-america-airport-satisfaction-study\" target=\"_blank\">airport satisfaction survey</a> released last week, said that things are getting better. Not hugely better -- a 5-8% increase in their satisfaction score, but any improvement is good news.</li>\r\n	<li>Power <a href=\"http://www.jdpower.com/ratings/study/North-America-Airport-Satisfaction-Study/763ENG/Large-Airports/1617\">rated</a> large- and medium-sized North American airports -- 60 US airports and Toronto Pearson, Calgary, Montreal, and Vancouver. They surveyed travelers around 6 attributes of their airport experience. In order of importance, they are: the state of the airport facilities themselves, how easy it is to get to the airport, security, baggage claim, the check-in experience, and available food and shopping. A frequent traveler might re-shuffle the order -- maybe drop baggage claim and the check-in experience to the bottom because we rarely check a bag -- but I think it’s a good list.</li>\r\n	<li>And I think some of Power’s conclusions line up with things I’m seeing on the road. Like improvements in terminal facilities. In the last episode, I gave United a shout-out for the upgrade of their gate space in Boston Logan. I also think San Francisco’s complete rebuild of Terminal 2 is excellent and stands up to any airport in Asia or Europe.</li>\r\n	<li>Power found what is a pretty logical connection between satisfaction and the time you spend in lines. As I said earlier, I rarely deal with check-in lines, but I think the TSA’s rollout of Precheck has provided a quantum level improvement in the security experience -- though at times, it feels like its popularity is on the verge of overwhelming it and sliding back. But even for those in the regular lines, I’ve seen TSA folks working hard to re-balance lines -- especially at ORD.</li>\r\n	<li>Power split their ratings between large and medium airports. Their winning large airport is Portland, Oregon. I’ve done a bit of flying into PDX and while I wouldn’t have, unprompted, chosen it as the top large airport, I don’t argue with their conclusion. It’s a nice facility; easy mass transit (a TravelCommons’ fixation) via the MAX light rail; I disagree with its top marks for security check, but in how many other airports can I buy a growler of craft beer to go? The bottom four -- those I could’ve ticked off with missing a beat -- LaGuardia, Newark, LAX, and O’Hare. Old terminals, awkward layouts, leaking roofs, lousy food. Interesting they’re also the major airports for the US’s largest cities.</li>\r\n	<li>The medium airport winner was a tie between Dallas’ downtown Love Field and Fort Myers’ Southwest Florida. This one, I dunno. I’ve used both of these airports a lot. Love has gone through a good sized facelift and I haven’t been through it since they finished, so I may be working off out-of-date impressions, but even though it’s close to downtown, it’s a pain to get to. Now Fort Myers is easy to get to -- and I love the short walk to the rental car facility -- but security screening can back way up and the food choice isn’t great. From my personal experience, I’d give top marks to Nashville. I mean, how can you go wrong with live music -- good live music -- as you’re walking down the terminal.</li>\r\n	<li>Power’s most obvious finding is that dissatisfied customers are very vocal. Those who rate overall satisfaction 1 (on a 10-point scale) make an average of 13 negative comments about their experience. Anyone who follows me on Twitter knows how true that is.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #119</li>\r\n	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/\">Podshow Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\r\n	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_119.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #119 — Digital Security On The Road; US Airports Getting Better?','','inherit','closed','closed','','1579-revision-v1','','','2015-12-21 20:11:48','2015-12-22 01:11:48','',1579,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/12/21/1579-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1592,1,'2015-12-21 20:18:18','2015-12-22 01:18:18','[caption id=\"attachment_1418\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/IMG_2430.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1418\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/IMG_2430-300x214.jpg\" alt=\"Authentically lacking seating\" width=\"300\" height=\"214\" /></a> Authentically lacking seating...[/caption]\r\n\r\nCan frequent travelers just write off 2014? We all knew we were abused by the airlines with high prices and lousy service. I guess it\'s somewhat comforting to know that <a href=\"http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-best-and-worst-airlines-1421254623\" target=\"_blank\">analysis</a> of 2014\'s data proves us right. I\'m not sure there\'s much more we can do than enjoy the little things and hope 2015 is better. Once we get to where we\'re going, the restaurant food has gotten a lot better and with trends toward local sourcing and flavors, a lot more interesting.  We also talk about a couple pieces of hotel industry news -- hoping that IHG\'s acquisition of Kimpton doesn\'t screw up the \"anti-chain\", and continued puzzlement as to why Marriott wanted to <a href=\"http://www.wsj.com/articles/fcc-warns-hotels-others-not-to-block-personal-wi-fi-1422406537\" target=\"_blank\">block</a> your WiFi hot spots. You can listen to all this and more using the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_113.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking below.[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_113.mp3\"]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #113:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Coming to you from the San Antonio Northwest Marriott in San Antonio, TX.  Doing a quick down-and-back after the flight cancellations caused by the New York snopocalypse that wasn’t blew up my travel plans for the beginning of this week.</li>\r\n	<li>I tried to get a podcast done over the Christmas holiday, but the eating and drinking and then the sleeping got in the way. Funny how that works. But after my traditional 2 week hiatus from travel, my first trip of the new year -- on Monday the 5th -- started about right -- with an hour departure delay out of ORD. I couldn’t complain too much, though. The plane was there; the crew was there. We were just waiting on the fuel truck which the morning’s sub-zero temperature had slowed down a bit. Frustrating, but understandable. Walking down the jetway, the cold just took my breath away -- even in a heavy coat. I can imagine the guys running the fuel trucks needed more than a few warming breaks.</li>\r\n	<li>I was heading down to New Orleans, though were the temps were about 50 degrees higher than Chicago’s single digits</li>\r\n	<li>It is that time of year that you think a bit more <i>strategically</i> about your travel choices -- if you can. A bit more interested in making sales calls in Phoenix or San Antonio rather than, say, Minneapolis; preferring United’s Houston hub over Denver for transcontinental connections.</li>\r\n	<li>Or vectoring through airports with good places to pass the time in case of delays. I’ve been connecting through Nashville recently on Southwest and stumbled across an outpost of Tootsie’s, the well-known downtown music joint, as I was walking through Concourse C -- complete with live music. And then in the middle of Concourse C -- near the walk-by Yazoo City Brewery stand -- is another stage with live music.</li>\r\n	<li>Of course, you can have too much of a good thing. Like back in mid-November, United had a piano player in ORD at gate C17 playing Christmas tunes -- a 5-tune repertoire that got old real quick during a 45-min flight delay...</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/rompaey-eastern2/\"><em>Indian Blossom</em></a> by Ruben van Rompaey</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Spelunking through my Twitter feed…</li>\r\n	<li>A couple of weeks before Christmas, I had to swing through New York on a last minute trip and, being near the holidays, the rates were absurd. It was a struggle to get a decent room for less than $300/night. It just amazes me, because I had paid less than $100/night earlier that week in New Orleans. Anyhow, I ended up at a Kimpton Hotel -- 70 Park Avenue -- in the Murray Hill neighborhood of Manhattan. I’ve been a big fan of the Kimpton chain since I set up camp for 3 months in the Hotel Monaco in downtown Portland a couple of years ago. Kimpton’s schtick is to be sort of an “anti-chain” -- embracing the quirks of each locale, each building rather than trying to replicate a standard brand experience; what Marriott has done with the refreshed Courtyards -- same furniture, same lobby, same footprint in each property. Kimpton makes a big point of being pet-friendly. In Portland, just about every morning I was there, the elevator would open and a dog would walk in (with their owner). Most were reasonably sized, but there were a couple of times some sort of bull mastiff walked in and made for tight quarters. Not a normal experience at your typical Starwood property. Another notable Kimpton quirk is their leopard print bathrobes. Again, a bit different from the typical white terry numbers you get elsewhere. Walking into my room at 70 Park, it was laid out on the bed. I posted a picture to Twitter -- and it drew quite the set of comments. They also have some fun loyalty perks, like “Raid the Minibar”. I got into New York late, so the $30 credit 70 Park gave me came in very handy -- especially since it was one of the better stocked mini-bars I’ve seen in a while. My only beef is that Kimpton isn’t in many of the place I’ve been going -- New Orleans, Memphis,.... I’m lifetime platinum on Marriott and platinum on Starwood, but I always look to stay at a Kimpton property when there’s one available.</li>\r\n	<li>So I was very concerned the next week when I saw the <a href=\"http://travelcodex.com/2014/12/ihg-acquires-kimpton-hopefully-wont-screw/\" target=\"_blank\">announcement</a> that IHG -- the Holiday Inn people -- bought Kimpton. One of the blandest hotel chains in existence buys one of the quirkiest. I think the last Crowne Plaza I stayed in was 6 years ago in Joburg, SA.  IHG’s last attempt to be hip was the Indigo chain. How many of you have stayed there? I’m gonna be keeping my eyes on this deal. I hope they don’t screw up Kimpton.</li>\r\n	<li>I’m glad Marriott is<a href=\"http://www.wsj.com/articles/fcc-warns-hotels-others-not-to-block-personal-wi-fi-1422406537\" target=\"_blank\"> giving up</a> their misguided attempt to get FCC approval to block individual WiFi hotspots. It’s kinda weird. I can’t figure out why they want to so obviously poke their customers. And it can’t be that much of a revenue thing because they’re giving away WiFi to just about everyone -- I’ve been getting it free for a while as an upper tier Rewards member as have everyone at the lower end brands like Residence Inn and Courtyard, and as of the middle of this month, so do all Marriott Rewards members at their Marriott brand. Which seems to be a trend. Kimpton does the same thing. Indeed, if you hit the Kimpton WiFi log on screen and aren’t a member of their Karma program, you’re taken to an enrollment screen.</li>\r\n	<li>Which is important because hotel loyalty programs seem to be losing their grip. In a recent Google study, an increasing number of business travelers say that hotel loyalty programs have <i>less </i>impact on the travel planning this year than last year. The same study also found that most business travelers would switch programs for better perks. Given that free WiFi is one of the most popular perks with frequent travelers, what Kimpton is doing makes sense -- and what Marriott tried to do just doesn’t.</li>\r\n	<li>Now, Marriott’s stated reason -- it’s all about security, wanted to protect their guests from rogue WiFi hotspots. Very buzzword-compliant -- cybersecurity is hot right now. And of course, travelers do need to be careful about which WiFi access points they connect to. Sweden’s Pirate Party pulled a <a href=\"http://www.thelocal.se/20150114/young-pirate-hacks-into-top-security-conference\">cute prank</a> earlier this month highlighting this. They set up an access point named “Open Guest” at a Swedish conference and over 100 delegates -- government officials, journalists, security experts -- connected to it, using it for e-mail, web browsing, Skype, eBay, …. just about everything. The Pirate Party logged all the traffic. Are people that gullible -- or cheap -- or both? Even more of a reason to use your own hotspot.</li>\r\n	<li>The Monday before Christmas, I wrote up the <a title=\"Travel Tips — Holiday Airport Etiquette\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/12/22/travel-tips-holiday-airport-etiquette/\" target=\"_blank\">holiday airport etiquette tips</a> from the last episode as a stand-alone blog post. It seemed like a timely post going into the holiday travel season. It was a pretty popular post. Rob, a long time TravelCommons listener and Untappd friend, gave it a nice re-tweet -- “A bit brusque, but the best travel tips I\'ve read this year”. And he was right. I didn’t sugar coat it a lot -- just venting a bit from what I typically see -- gumming up the PreCheck line, the Starbucks line, the concourse hallways. Probably not the best holiday spirit.</li>\r\n	<li>But what I thought was in the holiday spirit was a sign I saw on the bell stand of the Minneapolis Marriott -- “Br-r-r-r!! It’s cold out! We have warm coats to lend you, available upon request. Please see your friendly bell staff person. Thank you, and stay warm!” I asked one of the bell men how often people take them up on their offer. “Oh, a lot,” he said. Really? What part of “You’re coming to Minnesota in December so dress warmly” do people not get? He just shrugged and gave me that “Minnesota nice” smile.</li>\r\n	<li>And if you have any travel experiences -- technology or otherwise, or just general observations, thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://www.magnatune.com/artists/albums/williams-long/\"><em>Afternoon in the Sun</em></a> by John Williams</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>2014 Was A Bad Year To Fly</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/PJ-BZ531_MIDSEA_16U_20150114114822.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-1421 size-large\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/PJ-BZ531_MIDSEA_16U_20150114114822-1024x448.jpg\" alt=\"PJ-BZ531_MIDSEA_16U_20150114114822\" width=\"640\" height=\"280\" /></a>A couple of weeks ago, the Wall Street Journal <a href=\"http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-best-and-worst-airlines-1421254623\" target=\"_blank\">posted</a> its 2014 airline scorecard. Now, every travel columnist seems to do one of these, but I liked the Journal’s. I apologize to my international listeners, but this scorecard is just focused on the US. And indeed, just the US majors -- Spirit and Hawaiian aren’t in the mix, though Frontier, Alaska, and Virgin America are. I posted the scorecard graphic on the TravelCommons Facebook page when it came out; I’ll also put it in the show notes. It scores the carriers across 7 operational measures -- on-time arrivals, cancelled flights, extreme delays, 2-hr tarmac delays, mishandled baggage, involuntary bumping, complaints -- and then generates an overall rank. The top 3 were Alaska, Virgin America, and Delta. The variability across the 7 operational measures for these top performers was interesting. Alaska, the top overall, had the best scores for on-time arrivals, extreme delays, and complaints, but were 5th out of 8 in mishandled baggage. United, on the other hand, was more consistently the worst airline -- ranking last (8th) in 4 measures and 7th in the other 3.</li>\r\n	<li>Which kinda doesn’t surprise me because their customer service just kept getting worse in a sort of cavalierly indifferent sort of way. I get to LaGuardia early one afternoon and want to move up to an earlier flight that’s wide open. That’ll cost you $75 -- to move from a full flight to an empty flight. Or the guy who plopped down next to me in the middle seat one day. He originally had aisle seat. Then United upgraded him to First Class. But then, oops, the First Class passenger showed up, so the guy had to go back to coach -- except they’d already given away his aisle seat and all that was left was this middle seat. So there he was stuck -- with nothing but some shrugged shoulders and a mumbled “Sorry”. You’d think they could’ve given him a couple hundred frequent flyer points, or a drink coupon. Even the most basic restaurant will comp you a dessert if things aren’t right.</li>\r\n	<li>It was entertaining, then, in a twisted sort of way, when I got an e-mail from United the following week offering to upgrade me from Premiere Gold to Platinum for $2,600. With these sorts of scores, you think they’d be paying me -- or at least making it something closer to an impulse purchase. But then again, they’re probably looking at my other choices in Chicago -- American with an overall score of 7 or Southwest, scoring 5 out of 8. Chicago hub airlines are kinda like Chicago football and baseball teams -- fighting it out for the cellar -- except without the silver lining of high draft picks.</li>\r\n	<li>If you really think about it, 2014 was an awful year to fly. The airlines finally got market discipline; through acquisitions -- Delta buying Northwest, United buying Continental, American buying US Airways (or was that the other way around) -- they got the oligopoly working which pushed up prices and utilization -- high fares and crowded planes. Add to that the consistent ratcheting down for the base level of services -- unbundling -- charging an increasing amount for bags, change fees, pets, children traveling alone, decent seats.</li>\r\n	<li>All this while the actual experience got worse. The Wall Street Journal article gives data to prove what we already knew -- we’re paying more for less. US airlines cancelled 66,000 more flights in 2014 than in 2013 and lost or delayed 2.1 million bags, a 17% increase. Which explains the 26% increase in complaints filed with the US Dept of Transportation. Not surprising, then, that American’s CEO <a href=\"http://skift.com/2015/01/27/american-airlines-ceo-awkwardly-explains-why-fares-arent-going-down/\" target=\"_blank\">told</a> financial analysts and press during Tues’ Q4 earnings call “We are not asking our customers to be happy with anything.”</li>\r\n	<li>We can always hope that 2014 will turn out to be the bottom. That the newer planes the major carriers are buying will mean fewer mechanical delays and fewer cancellations. That more profitable airlines will stop demanding givebacks from their employees, which would mean much more pleasant flight attendants and pilots, and more enthusiastically productive mechanics and baggage handlers.</li>\r\n	<li>Until then, I’ll be try to be happy with the little things -- the unexpected first-class upgrade on my United flight down to San Antonio. The nearly empty mid-day flight from New Orleans to Chicago. The flight attendant told us we could change seats when we wanted, but nobody moved. We each had our own rows. The early arrival into Nashville that changed a tight connection into a leisurely stroll with time to catch a beer between gates. I’ll enjoy these little things, hoping that the bigger things get better in 2015.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/westexit-modern/\"><em>Arsenal</em></a> is by The West Exit</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Restaurant Trends Go Local</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>So while the trip to where you’re going has gotten more miserable, odds are the food is a lot better once you get there. Every year I go to the National Restaurant Show looking at dining trends because frequent travelers have to eat and it’s typically in a restaurant.</li>\r\n	<li>One of the interesting trends, though, is the expansion of what a restaurant is. At the most recent NRA show -- that’s National Restaurant, not Rifle, Association -- there was a good-sized section devoted to food trucks. And depending on where you’re traveling, you’ll see more and more of them in the wild. Of course, food trucks are old hat in places like Manhattan and Center City Philadelphia. And in Portland, I’m not sure you can really call them food trucks -- the ones set up in downtown parking lots don’t look like they’ve moved in years. But elsewhere, they’ll touch down outside of office building or universities around lunch time and offer up some very cool/innovative and often locally-unique food that’s provides some nice variety.</li>\r\n	<li>Which ties into another big trend -- the shift to local -- locally-sourced fish, meat , vegetables; locally-made beer or spirits, house-made pickles and charcuterie, …. Which is kind of a throwback. If you think about the 70’s and the 80’s, big franchise chains expanded in the US and then globally, pushing out standard menus with the same dishes everywhere. Now the good side of this was it took the guess work and the risk out of picking a place to eat. No surprises -- which is both good and bad. If you stopped at a Kentucky Fried Chicken along the road or took a client out to a Morton’s Steak House, you knew what you were going to get and you could reasonably expect a certain level of quality. But you weren’t going to discover anything new; get anything unique to where you were visiting. That’s OK when food is fuel -- I want to stop being hungry. It isn’t when food becomes something more -- an experience, an expression of place, which it is now with these hyper-local trends. Yes, when overdone, it can feel like you’ve somehow slipped into a bad <i>Portlandia</i> episode, but when done right, it can make you happy you gutted out the lousy flight to get there.</li>\r\n	<li>One trend I keep hearing about, but I don’t really see much in travels, is using tablets and smartphones to replace menus and servers and checks. Every year at the NRA show, there are rows and rows of vendors showing iPad menus and smartphone apps that allow diners to order, split the tab, and pay without seeing a waiter or a bartender. I’ve seen these in the wild exactly twice -- an iPad wine list at Restaurant Revolution in New Orleans. And it was actually kind of intrusive -- lighting up the face of the reader in an otherwise lower lit dining room. And at a restaurant/bar in MSP where the bartender reached over to do the ordering for me. Now this is different from alternative payment methods -- touch-and-pay with Apple Pay or using a bar code on the Starbucks app. Those are just different ways to end the transaction. What I don’t see, in spite of 2-3 years of trend hype, is a move in a restaurant to self-service ordering or paying.</li>\r\n	<li>Indeed, if anything, I see a move to <i>more</i> interaction with service staff with seemingly more folks taking full meals at the bar -- your server, the bartender, is never further than 6 ft from you and, on a slower night, is good for a little conversation. I guess if I’m coming to a place for local cuisine made from local produce, I’m not sure why I’d want to skip talking to the local people.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917626811171154.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #113</li>\r\n	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from <a title=\"Magnatune\" href=\"http://magnatune.com/\">Magnatune</a></li>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_113.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #113 — 2014 was a Bad Year to Fly; Restaurant Trends Go Local','','inherit','closed','closed','','1416-revision-v1','','','2015-12-21 20:18:18','2015-12-22 01:18:18','',1416,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/12/21/1416-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1593,1,'2015-12-21 20:19:51','2015-12-22 01:19:51','[caption id=\"attachment_1585\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/calvin_PC.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1585\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/calvin_PC-300x172.jpg\" alt=\"Cat-based cyber-security solution\" width=\"300\" height=\"172\" /></a> Cat-based cyber-security solution[/caption]\r\n\r\nHere\'s a little something to keep you entertained while you navigate the holiday airport lines. We talk about digital security on the road -- what\'s the right balance between hassle and hack? We also dig into JD Power\'s latest <a href=\"http://www.jdpower.com/press-releases/2015-north-america-airport-satisfaction-study\" target=\"_blank\">airport satisfaction survey</a>. They report a tick up in traveler experience and, for the most part, I think they have it right. We also cover Spirit Airlines\' growth and the planned expansion of US immigration pre-clearance. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_119.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/238595273\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #119:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, cranking out one last episode to keep you occupied while you navigate the holiday security lines while trying to get to -- or away from family. Myself, I’m settling for the Christmas break after doing a day trip yesterday to Philadelphia. I’m taking a break from O’Hare until January.</li>\r\n	<li>No really remarkable travel since the last episode, just trips to Cleveland, Vegas, and Boston. When I was flying out of Vegas last week, I hit the <a href=\"http://thecenturionlounge.com/location/LAS\">Amex Centurion Lounge</a> for a couple of conference calls before boarding. It’s free entry with a Platinum Card, and so far and beyond any Admirals Club or Sky Club or United Club. It’s not quite as hip/a bit more button-down than Virgin Atlantic’s Upper Lounge in Heathrow, but the comfort, the free buffet and open bar just are just as good. Highly recommended. I just wish there were more of them.</li>\r\n	<li>When I’m flying into Boston, I’m actually heading out 45 minutes west, close to Worcester. Now that’s a 45 minute drive out I-90 when I land at 9 or 10 in the morning. When I land at 5 in the evening, it’s a whole different story. I touch down at Logan, flip out of airplane mode and immediately open Waze. How bad is the traffic? How about <i>an hour</i> and 45 minute drive? Not looking forward to that parking lot, so I threaded my way over to Chelsea. Found a great little microbrewery complete with real live Boston Irish patrons and sample 1, 2, 4 of their beers. Then I walked up a couple of blocks to a Central American joint underneath a highway overpass. Had a great plate of food for less than $10.  I’ve spent a few dinner times wandering around nearby neighborhoods -- Charlestown, the Seaport District as well as Chelsea -- waiting for Waze to tell me when I-90’s traffic tantrum had subsided.</li>\r\n	<li>Probably the biggest travel event this week wasn’t mine but my daughter’s. It’s her first solo flight -- returning from her first semester at Univ of St Andrews, flying Aer Lingus from Edinburgh to Chicago by way of Dublin. It’s a big adjustment in a couple of ways. First, of course, she has to figure out a new airport by herself. She’s never been through Dublin before, but I thought a smaller airport would be a better first solo than trying to navigate the start of holiday traffic at Heathrow. But she does now have to pay attention to what’s going on rather than just following in my slipstream. The second adjustment is a bit more of a First World problem -- flying as as plain old passenger, a villager, rather than tagging along with me through the Gold or Platinum baggage check lines and pre-boarding. It’s a tough come-down, but I did soften the blow a little bit. I paid her Global Entry fee as a going away gift.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- Dive Deep (Loveshadow remix) by spinningmerkaba (c) 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/50488 Ft: Loveshadow</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Not really any commentary on the last episode, though Ian Morgan swung by the Facebook page with adding to the support about British Airways’ stricter carry-on policy\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>“Just listened to your October episode! Picked up your post about BA hand luggage. They have just changed their policy on this to clamp down. I agree it is frustrating especially on lightly loaded widebody aircraft. However, as a regular BA traveller I have lost count of the number of times BA flights have been delayed whilst cabin crew offload hand luggage, especially since BA introduced \"hand baggage only\" fares. Before the change, I never saw BA using the size gauges - these days they use them much more frequently. It\'s part of the steady decline of BA from a full service airline to a low cost carriers. Just be grateful that you got a 767 instead of an A321 with new \'spacesaver\' seats with a 29\" seat pitch!!</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>Ian, I think you’ve nailed it -- the descent of full-service carriers into the low-cost, low-service ring of travel hell created by Ryan Air and Spirit Airlines.  I’ve talked about this before -- a frequent traveler can’t fathom why someone would subject themselves to the hassles that Ryan and Spirit travelers endure. A recent <a href=\"http://www.chicagobusiness.com/article/20151205/ISSUE01/312059993/can-you-guess-whats-the-third-biggest-airline-at-ohare\">Crain’s Chicago article</a> about Spirit said just over half -- 58 % -- of their flights into ORD arrived on time in the first 9 months of this year. I fly at least 3 weeks out of 4. American Airlines’ 79% on-time percentage into ORD is only just acceptable; I’d go postal at 58%. But yet Spirit is now the 3rd largest airline at ORD after United and American. Working out of just two shared gates, it’s bigger than Delta. But then I remembered <a href=\"http://qz.com/533501/half-of-american-airlines-revenue-came-from-13-of-its-customers/\">some comments</a> made by the president of American Airlines during an analysts call right around the time American was doing the final merger of res systems with US Air. He said that half of American’s revenue last year came from the 87% of its customers that only flew them once. 50% of American’s revenue came from passengers that see air travel as a commodity and are looking for the lowest cost carriage between two points. And so for 50% of their revenue, American isn’t competing against United or Delta, they’re competing with Spirit.  It explains Delta’s Spirit-like Basic Economy offering, and the expectation that American and United will follow in 2016. And, I assume BA’s “hand baggage” fees that Ian mentions. The challenge, though, is how do you compete for the 87% of your passengers buying a commodity while also serving the remaining 13% of your passengers, who contribute the other 50% of your revenue, and value the little things like a seat that reclines a bit and a flight that arrives on time -- all in the same plane? Spirit doesn’t have that problem because they’ll never get that 13%. American, BA, Delta have the tougher problem.</li>\r\n	<li>Connecting through Dublin airport, my daughter cleared US immigration and customs in there in Ireland and then just popped out at the one domestic baggage claim in ORD’s Terminal 5 -- the International Terminal. Kinda similar to what they’ve been doing at Toronto’s Pearson Airport since forever -- or at least the 90’s when I was flying through there weekly. But there, American’s YYZ-ORD flight would land in Terminal 3, just like a flight from, say, Buffalo, and you’d make your connection or just walk out to the cab line. Handy for the regular traveler, but if you’ve dropped the $100 Global Entry fee, immigration lines at, say, ORD, aren’t any worse than they are in Toronto or Dublin. Indeed, my daughter was bummed that she went through US Preclearance so soon, because food and shopping choices on the US side of Preclearance were a lot thinner than on the Irish side. And I think that’ll be the problem if the TSA follows through on their announced expansion of Preclearance -- from what is mostly Canadian, Irish, and Caribbean airports to 10 much larger airports, including Tokyo, Amsterdam, Madrid, London Heathrow. If you’re flying US carriers out of European airports, you’re already being put into a de facto American ghetto -- typically flying out of the most remote gates, with the longest walks from security and airport lounges, and the fewest food and shopping amenities. Walling it off to create the secured facilities to support Preclearance just formalizes it.  The DHS secretary calls it a “win-win” for travelers. I think it’s just squeezing the balloon -- making wait time go down in the US, but go up in places like Narita and Heathrow. It’s one thing to miss a connection in ORD due to immigration delays. Odds are there’s another flight you can catch within a couple of hours. It’s a whole other thing if you miss that once a day flight home from, say, Amsterdam.</li>\r\n	<li>Thanks to El Niño, it’s been a warm start to the winter -- at least in North America. But soon enough, the temps will drop and the winter coats will start competing with carry-ons for overhead bin space. Last winter, while de-planing (what a weird verb construction!), someone handed me my black overcoat -- it was wedged in front of their suitcase. I threw it over my arm as I stepped out into the aisle, grabbed my carry-on, and hoofed it out of the plane, power-walking toward the cab line. It wasn’t until I stepped outside that I stopped to put my coat on and… it wasn’t my coat. I should’ve checked when it was handed to me, but I didn’t want to be that guy who stops <i>in the aisle</i> to put his jacket on. I went to Lost &amp; Found. The clerk called the gate, where the guy with my coat was standing, trying to find his coat. We got lucky. It took us about 10 minutes to sort everything out. He came down to Lost &amp; Found to swap coats. If it had been warmer out, like this week, I might not have put my coat on at all and gotten home for noticing the switch. Black bags, black coats. Love that black hides a lot of sins -- scuffs, dirt, extra pounds. Don’t love its ubiquity on an airplane. Keep your eyes on your stuff in these holiday crowds. Don’t want “Lost” to be the new black.</li>\r\n	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- Absolutely Clear (ft Jeris &amp; Goldfish) by SackJo22 (c) 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/45578 Ft: Jeris, Goldfish</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Digital Security On The Road</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Digital security, cyber security. I don’t know about you, but I’ve kinda hit security breach fatigue. On Thursday, yet another company announced a credit card breach. <a href=\"http://krebsonsecurity.com/2015/12/banks-card-breach-at-landrys-restaurants/\">This time</a> it’s Landry’s who runs Bubba Gumps and Morton’s Steakhouse and another 15 or so restaurant brands. I don’t frequent Landry’s brands that much, so I’m hoping that this breach doesn’t mean I have to replace one of my credit cards and again have to go through the goat rodeo of changing account numbers for all my autobills. But it still does reinforce that feeling the cyber security is not a matter of “if” but “when”</li>\r\n	<li>But even if it’s a matter of “when”, I’d still like to postpone the “when” as long as possible. And traveling -- certainly during the holidays -- there’s a lot of opportunity to bring on the “when” if you’re not just a bit thoughtful. There’s also a balance between inconvenience -- the cost of being more digitally secure -- and the probability of being “breached” (can I say that without having to flag this as “explicit” in iTunes?).</li>\r\n	<li>You could always go “old school” -- like 10 years ago when there was damn little public WiFi, no iPhones -- nothing to keep us entertained as we shuffled through the TSA lines other than trading snarky remarks with other line sufferers. Or you could go the “burner” route -- using disposable phones and a temporary PC, which is what many business travelers to China still do -- doing a complete wipe of their phones and PCs before and after each visit because they just expect to get hacked no matter what anti-virus and other safety precautions they take. But if all you’re doing is going from, say, San Francisco to Boston to see your family, these seem a bit “overkill” -- definitely not balancing the cost-benefit trade-off. I’m fairly lazy about this stuff, but there are a few precautions I do take.</li>\r\n	<li>First, I never do any financial stuff over public WiFi -- no checking my bank account or credit card activity over an airport or Starbucks WiFi, or a hotel network at all -- whether WiFi or jacked into an Ethernet port. Even if the URL is showing https -- a encrypted web connection -- there’s just too many ways those networks or web sites can be misconfigured. Some folks will tell you to use a VPN. I used one in China, but it seems a bit too much in the US. If I have to do some banking, I’ll use my iPhone over the mobile carrier network -- AT&amp;T in the US, Orange when I was in Spain, .... I know it’s not perfect, but, as the cyber security guys like to say, it “reduces the attack surface” at what is considered one of the most vulnerable points.</li>\r\n	<li>I rarely use hotel PCs -- the ones set up in lobbies or the concierge lounges. I mean, if I have a smartphone, a tablet, and a PC, why do I need to use a public PC that’s open to anyone loading up a key-logger that’ll capture anything you type -- including logins and passwords. If I do, for some odd reason, need to use one, I never log into anything. Maybe just search for a restaurant, but that’s about it.</li>\r\n	<li>I always make sure that I’ve configured my phone and PC e-mail clients to use encrypted communications between servers -- using IMAP and SMTP over SSL (<i>&gt;now</i> we’re talking security because we used more acronyms than words in that last sentence) for my own mail servers; GMail does it automatically for you. But I don’t encrypt the message itself -- no PGP or signed MIME. There’s nothing in my e-mails that is <i>that</i> confidential to go through that hassle.</li>\r\n	<li>I have recently, though, turned on two-factor authentication for every service that offers it -- GMail, some of my financial accounts, Dropbox, …. I resisted it for a long time -- again, thought it was more hassle than it was worth. But then I started getting some odd password reset e-mail requests -- that I didn’t request.</li>\r\n	<li>I go back and forth on using smartphone or printed boarding passes. Smartphone boarding passes are quicker -- you can get it while in the cab to the airport rather than queueing up for a kiosk -- but I’ve had more than a few times when my boarding pass disappeared from the app during an extended flight delay. Printed boarding passes are easier to scan at the gate -- especially when juggling a backpack, a hot coffee, and a winter coat -- but there’s recently been a <a href=\"http://www.economist.com/blogs/gulliver/2015/10/security-check\">bit</a> of a <a href=\"http://krebsonsecurity.com/2015/10/whats-in-a-boarding-pass-barcode-a-lot/#more-31317\">stir</a> about the amount of personal information someone could pull out of the bar codes. Maybe I’m not paranoid enough, but that one feels a bit of a stretch. I do whatever’s the most convenient -- usually the smartphone route. But when I do print out a boarding pass, I keep it in my jacket pocket -- just to be sure.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- Drops of H2O ( The Filtered Water Treatment ) by J.Lang (c) 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/djlang59/37792 Ft: Airtone</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>US Airports Getting Better?</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>While I poked at London Heathrow a couple of <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/10/11/podcast-117-random-thoughts-about-eggs-scotland-car-rentals/\" target=\"_blank\">episodes</a> back, it’s an article of faith among international travelers that North American airports pale in comparison to airports in Asia/Pac -- anyone flying from Beijing or Singapore to LAX needs a light sedative to cushion the shock -- and pretty much trail behind most European airports too. But JD Power, in their <a href=\"http://www.jdpower.com/press-releases/2015-north-america-airport-satisfaction-study\" target=\"_blank\">airport satisfaction survey</a> released last week, said that things are getting better. Not hugely better -- a 5-8% increase in their satisfaction score, but any improvement is good news.</li>\r\n	<li>Power <a href=\"http://www.jdpower.com/ratings/study/North-America-Airport-Satisfaction-Study/763ENG/Large-Airports/1617\">rated</a> large- and medium-sized North American airports -- 60 US airports and Toronto Pearson, Calgary, Montreal, and Vancouver. They surveyed travelers around 6 attributes of their airport experience. In order of importance, they are: the state of the airport facilities themselves, how easy it is to get to the airport, security, baggage claim, the check-in experience, and available food and shopping. A frequent traveler might re-shuffle the order -- maybe drop baggage claim and the check-in experience to the bottom because we rarely check a bag -- but I think it’s a good list.</li>\r\n	<li>And I think some of Power’s conclusions line up with things I’m seeing on the road. Like improvements in terminal facilities. In the last episode, I gave United a shout-out for the upgrade of their gate space in Boston Logan. I also think San Francisco’s complete rebuild of Terminal 2 is excellent and stands up to any airport in Asia or Europe.</li>\r\n	<li>Power found what is a pretty logical connection between satisfaction and the time you spend in lines. As I said earlier, I rarely deal with check-in lines, but I think the TSA’s rollout of Precheck has provided a quantum level improvement in the security experience -- though at times, it feels like its popularity is on the verge of overwhelming it and sliding back. But even for those in the regular lines, I’ve seen TSA folks working hard to re-balance lines -- especially at ORD.</li>\r\n	<li>Power split their ratings between large and medium airports. Their winning large airport is Portland, Oregon. I’ve done a bit of flying into PDX and while I wouldn’t have, unprompted, chosen it as the top large airport, I don’t argue with their conclusion. It’s a nice facility; easy mass transit (a TravelCommons’ fixation) via the MAX light rail; I disagree with its top marks for security check, but in how many other airports can I buy a growler of craft beer to go? The bottom four -- those I could’ve ticked off with missing a beat -- LaGuardia, Newark, LAX, and O’Hare. Old terminals, awkward layouts, leaking roofs, lousy food. Interesting they’re also the major airports for the US’s largest cities.</li>\r\n	<li>The medium airport winner was a tie between Dallas’ downtown Love Field and Fort Myers’ Southwest Florida. This one, I dunno. I’ve used both of these airports a lot. Love has gone through a good sized facelift and I haven’t been through it since they finished, so I may be working off out-of-date impressions, but even though it’s close to downtown, it’s a pain to get to. Now Fort Myers is easy to get to -- and I love the short walk to the rental car facility -- but security screening can back way up and the food choice isn’t great. From my personal experience, I’d give top marks to Nashville. I mean, how can you go wrong with live music -- good live music -- as you’re walking down the terminal.</li>\r\n	<li>Power’s most obvious finding is that dissatisfied customers are very vocal. Those who rate overall satisfaction 1 (on a 10-point scale) make an average of 13 negative comments about their experience. Anyone who follows me on Twitter knows how true that is.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #119</li>\r\n	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/\">Podshow Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\r\n	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_119.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #119 — Digital Security On The Road; US Airports Getting Better?','','inherit','closed','closed','','1579-revision-v1','','','2015-12-21 20:19:51','2015-12-22 01:19:51','',1579,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/12/21/1579-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1597,1,'2016-03-13 09:22:26','2016-03-13 14:22:26','[caption id=\"attachment_862\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/708473504_18da6d5b07_z1.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-862\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/708473504_18da6d5b07_z1-300x225.jpg\" alt=\"Standing in Line! © Lance Smith / Flickr\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\" /></a> Standing in Line! © Lance Smith / Flickr[/caption]\r\n\r\nOnce again skipping the mayhem of the busiest travel week of the year, though it\'s getting more difficult as the Thanksgiving travel crush seems to start earlier each year. Good listener comments about last episode\'s story of a rare prop plane flight sitting next to a \"passenger of size\"; then my own thoughts on <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"US Airways\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_Airways\" rel=\"wikipedia\">USAir</a>\'s completely inadequate <a href=\"http://overheadbin.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/11/23/8980390-flier-displaced-by-obese-seatmate-forced-to-stand\" target=\"_blank\">response</a> to the passenger forced to stand on a 7-hour flight because a \"passenger of size\" overflowed into his seat.  I update my holiday travel tips -- drive or train for trips less than 350 miles, pay extra to fly direct, catch the first flight out, and bone up on your geography so you know all the alternative airports. Watching news reports of the hassles of Black Friday shopping make me wonder why people would go through the hassles to fly airlines like Spirit Air. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_95.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_95.mp3\"]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript from TravelCommons podcast #95:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Looking back over the past 5 years of Thanksgiving week episodes, I always say the same thing -- Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studio outside of <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Chicago\" href=\"http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=41.8819444444,-87.6277777778&amp;spn=0.1,0.1&amp;q=41.8819444444,-87.6277777778 (Chicago)&amp;t=h\" rel=\"geolocation\">Chicago, Illinois</a> during the one week a year I refuse to travel… But it’s true.  Let the families have the airports for this week. It doesn’t make sense for anyone to travel on business Thanksgiving week anyways.  At best, you get 2 days of business – Monday and Tuesday – because Wednesday is a complete waste – and even then, nobody’s head is really in the game.</li>\r\n	<li>Indeed, Thanksgiving week has become even more worthless for business over the past few years. With more school districts throwing in the towel and closing down for the entire week, what was a four-day extended weekend has now become a full 9-day extravaganza.</li>\r\n	<li>Which then pushes back the travel crush even further.  An <a href=\"http://www.chicagotribune.com/classified/automotive/traffic/ct-met-getting-around-1121-20111121,0,2606142.column\">article</a> in the Chicago Tribune earlier this week said that Air Transport Association forecasted that the Friday before Thanksgiving would replace the Wednesday before as the busiest outbound travel day.  Made me glad that I’d returned from Dallas a day early – the Thursday before – missing the crush.</li>\r\n	<li>Over the last 5 years, there’s only one year – <a title=\"Podcast #80 – Holiday Travel Tips; Frequent Flyer Documentary\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2009/11/23/podcast-80-holiday-travel-tips-frequent-flyer-documentary/\">2009</a> – that I traveled on Thanksgiving week.  A client called a meeting in Philadelphia on the Monday before Thanksgiving. Really? Really. It’s called a power play.</li>\r\n	<li>I had them schedule the meeting first thing Monday morning.  I flew in on the last flight Sunday night, took the meeting on an intravenous coffee drip, and then flew back home after lunch.  It was a 16-hour up-&amp;-back, getting me through security in Philadelphia airport just as the tide of strollers and Hello Kitty roller boards was starting to build…</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/seldon-circles/\"><em>Making Circles</em></a> by the Seldon Plan</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Rich Fraser posted this on the TravelCommons website, commenting on my lack of appreciation for the smaller things of travel…\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Mark, you gotta get to more airports.  As a domestic road warrior, I\'ve flown into some of the smallest airports with commercial service on a wide variety of turboprop planes.  Whether it\'s Mesaba (Delta) with their <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Saab 340\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saab_340\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Saab 340s</a> or Horizon (Alaska) with their Q800s, just about every regional carrier has turboprops in their fleet.  Up until their demise 3 years ago, <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Midwest Connect\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midwest_Connect\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Midwest Connect</a> was using the Beech B1900D, a 19 seat flying minivan that did not require a flight attendant.  It remains the only plane that I could guarantee I could fall asleep in.</li>\r\n	<li>You big time international guys may look down and scoff at the small birds, but as a private pilot myself, I rather enjoy flying in a type that is closer to what I pilot.  It feeds the fantasy that I could possibly jump into the cockpit and take over just in case the crew had the fish for dinner.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>Rich has me pegged.  I self-select out of smaller airports.  I’d rather drive 2 hrs from a major airport with more service than fly into a thinly-served smaller one. A few years back, I had a client in <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Huntsville, Alabama\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huntsville%2C_Alabama\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Huntsville, Alabama</a>.  Every visit, I flew Southwest from Chicago to Nashville and then drove the 120 miles down I-65 to Huntsville.  I liked the control it gave me – much more than depending on the one Delta flight a day between O’Hare and Huntsville.</li>\r\n	<li>But as Rich will certainly remind me, you don’t always have that luxury.  I was doing some work in <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Sioux City, Iowa\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sioux_City%2C_Iowa\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Sioux City, IA</a> – which, of course, is most memorable for its three-letter airport code SUX.  I ended up on a 25-seat <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"United Express\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Express\" rel=\"wikipedia\">United Express</a> prop plane that had an intermediate stop in <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Waterloo, Iowa\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterloo%2C_Iowa\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Waterloo, IA</a>.  After half the passengers deplaned in Waterloo, the flight attendant came on, looked at everyone left and said, “you, you, and you – you need move to a seat behind the wing”.  We got up and shifted back, but I can tell you that we weren’t completely comfortable with the eyeball method of weight distribution.</li>\r\n	<li>And continuing that thought about weight distribution, Linda Martin of the <a href=\"http://indietravelpodcast.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Indie Travel Podcast</a> sent this in a few days ago, commenting on my experience sitting next to a “person of size” on my 2-hr prop plane flight from <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Grand Junction, Colorado\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Junction%2C_Colorado\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Grand Junction, CO</a> to Phoenix…\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Your comments on people of size got me thinking about <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Air New Zealand\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_New_Zealand\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Air New Zealand</a>\'s trans-Tasman and Pacific system, which was introduced a year or so ago; I think to compete against the budget carriers.</li>\r\n	<li>There are four levels of ticket: 1. \"Seat\" which is just a seat, no checked bag, no food, 2. \"Seat + bag\": a checked bag but no food, 3. \"The Works\": a checked bag, a meal and extra entertainment, 4. \"Works Deluxe\": all of the above, an extra checked bag and priority boarding, and a guaranteed empty seat beside you. Since the planes are single-aisle with three seats on either side, this means that you\'ll be on the aisle or the window with the centre seat empty.</li>\r\n	<li>I think it\'s a great system because it gives the consumer the choice to have a full-service or more-budget flight. But it\'s also great for larger passengers, because in buying the most expensive ticket (which is still cheap) they can get a seat-and-a-half for a lot less than the cost of two seats, meaning everyone is more comfortable. Plus it\'s a regular option off the seat menu, so there\'s no stigma attached to choosing it.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>Linda, thanks for sending that in.  I agree that the Air New Zealand approach is a smart one if they can get the price points to work. Study after study has shown that, far away, the main driver of flyer satisfaction is an empty middle seat. Think about it – every time the middle seat occupant shows up, he/she apologize to their seatmates – “Sorry but I’m in the middle”.  No one wants the seat, and no one wants it filled next to them. If Air New Zealand can make enough money off the “Works Deluxe” tickets, they’re in the bonus round – more revenue, satisfied customers, and not just those “of size”</li>\r\n	<li>Because this size thing just keeps being an issue.  The latest story surfaced earlier this week when a USAir passenger Arthur Berkowitz told the <a href=\"http://www.elliott.org/blog/forced-to-stand-for-a-seven-hour-flight/\">story</a> of his experience on a July flight from Anchorage, AK to Philadelphia to Chris Elliott, a traveler advocate blogger. It was a full flight except for one middle seat, into which a 400-lb passenger tried to fit himself. He apologized, but with his size, he took up his seat and half the seats on each side of him. Not only could Berkowitz not put his armrest down, he couldn’t fasten his seatbelt. He ended up standing most of the 7-hr flight.</li>\r\n	<li>Berkowitz rightfully complained to USAir, not only about the discomfort of having to stand for 7 hours, but also about the safety issues – the inability to use his seatbelt.  USAir offered him a $200 voucher to compensate – on an $800 ticket.  Berkowitz said, and I think rightly, that’s not enough. Their <a href=\"http://overheadbin.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/11/23/8980390-flier-displaced-by-obese-seatmate-forced-to-stand\">response</a> -- \"We have attempted to address this customer’s service concerns.  The way to ensure you have space available next to you — whether you are a person of size, or you would simply like to ensure you have more personal space to relax on a long flight — is to purchase that additional seat, or First Class, in advance.”  So to make sure I can put my armrest down, to make sure I can use my seatbelt, to make sure I’m not crowded out of the seat I paid for, I should buy an additional seat or upgrade to First Class?  When I first read this, I was dumbfounded.  But then I reminded myself – it’s USAir. Then it all made sense.</li>\r\n	<li>And to wrap on a more attractive note, commenting on last episode’s Hot Flight Attendant segment, Sak writes\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>I recently flew Copa Airlines Colombia between Medellin (MDE) and Panama City (PTY) and flight attendants were still young and hot. Of course, different country and labor laws and in Colombia is normal to discriminate by age.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>There you go, hot flight attendant <em>and</em> Star Alliance miles.  Who could ask for more?</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a question, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is <a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a> -- use the Voice Memo app on your iPhone or something like Virtual Recorder on your Android phone to record and send in an audio comment – or iMovie if you want to send in some video; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/eliyahu-wind/\">Oh Yeah</a></em> by Eliyahu Sills</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Holiday Travel Tips</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Looking back over those past 5 years of Thanksgiving episodes and then listening to Craig and Linda Martin’s recent holiday travel tips <a href=\"http://indietravelpodcast.com/usa/holiday-travel/\" target=\"_blank\">episode</a> on their Indie Travel Podcast reminded me that it’s been a couple of years since I’ve done my own holiday <a title=\"Winter Travel Tips — Things to Remember When The Snow Starts Flying\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/01/16/winter-travel-tips-things-to-remember-when-the-snow-starts-flying/\" target=\"_blank\">travel</a> <a title=\"Podcast #80 – Holiday Travel Tips; Frequent Flyer Documentary\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2009/11/23/podcast-80-holiday-travel-tips-frequent-flyer-documentary/\" target=\"_blank\">tips</a>, so here’s my updated Road Warrior 201 tips for traveling between now and the New Year.</li>\r\n	<li>Holiday travel generates a real miasma of emotions for frequent travelers.  You’re traveling because (theoretically) you want to – you <em>want</em> to visit those in-laws, don’t you? – not because have to to stay employed. You’re out of your comfort zone, out of your travel groove because you’re not solo-ing; you’re traveling with your family.  You gotta move slower through the airport; can’t react as easily to flight interruptions (are you <em>really</em> going to try stand-by with your wife and two young children?). It’s like Superman dragging along kryptonite – other than early boarding privileges, you’re just another traveler slugging it out with the rest of the teeming mass of travelers.</li>\r\n	<li>Add to this that airplane load factors – how full they’re packing the planes – have been at historic heights for at least 6 months and that, at least in the Northern Hemisphere, it’s winter, making weather disruptions a near certainty…</li>\r\n	<li>Well now, <em>that</em> paints an attractive picture.  So how do you survive this?</li>\r\n	<li>The first question might be – do you really need to fly?  We’ve talked about the fly-vs.-drive breakeven point in a <a title=\"Podcast #45 – Waiting for Luggage, Enjoying Travel\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2006/09/20/podcast-45-waiting-for-luggage-enjoying-travel/\" target=\"_blank\">couple </a>of <a title=\"Podcast #23 – Fly or Drive; Scenes from The Hotel Bar\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/11/20/podcast-23-fly-or-drive-scenes-from-the-hotel-bar/\" target=\"_blank\">past</a> <a title=\"Podcast #85 — Importance of Hotel Bathrooms; Maximizing Miles\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2010/11/30/podcast-85-importance-of-hotel-bathrooms-maximizing-miles/\" target=\"_blank\">episodes</a>.  Now driving in the winter isn’t all sweetness and light either – especially across stretches of I-70 through Kansas or up the Jersey Turnpike, but depending on how you value your time and the state of repair of your car, I think the breakeven point has got to be at least 350 miles.  And if you’re in certain parts of the US – the East Coast, between Chicago and New Orleans, along some bits of the West Coast – take the train. Amtrak’s on-time record is never a thing of beauty either, but it’s always going to be better than Newark or LaGuardia in December.</li>\r\n	<li>That’s all well and good, but you’re going from Philly to San Francisco.  You’ve got to grit your teeth and fly.  First, fly direct.  I know I say this every time, but it’s a foundational strategy – limit the points of failure in an overloaded system.  Expecting airlines already operating at capacity to ferry even more passengers between airports operating at or over capacity during marginal weather – and to do this all on schedule? Suck it up, pay the extra $100 and have a fighting chance of getting to your family on time with your sanity and your luggage in hand.</li>\r\n	<li>Next, catch the earliest flight you can.  Again, it’s about avoiding congestion. Delays stack up as the day wears on.  As your airplane goes from airport to airport, the probability of it getting stuck increases.  If it gets stuck too long, the probability of it getting canceled increases. Overnight, airlines have a chance to recover – late planes finally get their destinations and operations groups can reassign planes.  So while the last flight out can be a crap shoot, I’ve rarely hit a delay on the first flight out.</li>\r\n	<li>And the final tip, bone up on your geography – know your alternative airports. A couple of weeks ago, I got stuck in a rolling delay due to fog in LaGuardia. After two hours, I finally gave up my 1<sup>st</sup> Class upgrade for a middle coach seat to Newark – no matter how nice the seat, it has to get me where I’m going.  If LGA is jacked up, EWR – no matter how much I hate that airport – is the next best thing.</li>\r\n	<li>Knowing your alternatives – and their dominant carriers – is a key piece of knowledge when trying to pivot away from a delay or cancelled flight. Now, the LGA-EWR pivot is easy, but others aren’t so obvious.  Everyone knows that Chicago has two airports – ORD and MDW.  But Milwaukee is only 80 miles north, but not an alternative that it top of mind to everyone.  If PHL is in trouble, how many folks think about Harrisburg or BWI?  Or SAC as an alternative to SFO?  I tend to think about alternatives in two rings – within 60 miles – SNA and LGB for LAX; and then within 100-120 miles, which now picks up Palm Springs and San Diego for LAX.  Someone will drive a couple of hours to pick you up if it means getting you to Christmas dinner on time.</li>\r\n	<li>But, above all, be realistic – it’s going to be a zoo. Give yourself extra time. Figure out how much time it’ll take and add another 50%. At worst, you’ll have some extra time to watch the planes take off. But it’ll allow you to breathe a bit easier when the snow begins to fall.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music --<em> <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/liquid-seventythree/\" target=\"_blank\">Is That Called Love</a> </em></em>by Liquid Zen</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Bad Spirit In The Air</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>My undergraduate <a href=\"http://www.cua.edu\" target=\"_blank\">degree</a> is in chemical engineering, which means I had to take too many math courses to allow time for course like psychology or sociology.  Every once in a while, I feel this gap.  Like a few months ago when I walked past a huge line tailing out of a small shop in downtown Chicago. “What’s this for?” I asked.  “Waiting for a free cupcake,” a couple of line standers answered. 20 minutes in line for a $2 cupcake says your time is worth $6/hour.  Minimum wage is $7.25/hr. Huh?</li>\r\n	<li>I kinda have the same feeling about Black Friday – is your time worth so little that you’re willing to camp out in front of a WalMart for a half-price Wii game?  There’s something more emotional than rational about getting a “deal”</li>\r\n	<li>Which must be the reason that <a href=\"http://www.spirit.com\" target=\"_blank\">Spirit Airlines</a> is still in business.  They advertise “low low prices”, but don’t tell you about all the add-on <a href=\"http://www.spirit.com/OptionalFees.aspx\" target=\"_blank\">fees </a>– like the $34 fee for the convenience of booking the flight on-line rather than going down to the airport and queuing up for a ticket agent, but then you will be charged $5 to have that ticket agent print out a boarding pass for you. The Dept of Transportation fined them earlier this week $50,000 neglecting to reveal this full bill of fare.</li>\r\n	<li>And it doesn’t stop there.  Want to reserve a seat? It’ll cost you, depending on the seat, betwee $1 and $50. Want to fly with luggage?  It’ll cost you $18-$38 for a checked bag or $20-$45 for a carryon bag.  Don’t worry, though.  They assure you that you won’t be charged for carrying on “reading material”.</li>\r\n	<li>Once you’re on board, Spirit sports the<a href=\"http://www.seatguru.com/airlines/Spirit_Airlines/Spirit_Airlines_Airbus_A320.php\" target=\"_blank\"> least amount</a> of seat space of any US domestic airline – 28” seat pitch with non-reclining seats.  Like everyone else, Spirit charges for meals, but <strong><em>unlike</em></strong> everyone else, Spirit will charge you $3 for a glass of water.</li>\r\n	<li>So at what point does one’s self-respect kick in and say “enough” -- my time, my comfort, is worth more than this. Certainly for me it happened a long time ago. Spirit flies some of my regular routes – Chicago to LGA or to Ft Myers, FL – but I never consider them.  Indeed, they just annoy me – their fares which are artificially low because they don’t disclose/include all their fees crowd out the fares of other carriers, making me work to get to a true low cost fare.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids991762681117111.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #95</li>\r\n	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from the <a href=\"http://magnatune.com\" target=\"_blank\">Magnatune </a>site</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_95.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #95 — Holiday Travel Tips; Bad Spirit In The Air','','inherit','closed','closed','','851-revision-v1','','','2016-03-13 09:22:26','2016-03-13 14:22:26','',851,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/13/851-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1598,1,'2016-03-12 11:26:37','2016-03-12 16:26:37','[caption id=\"attachment_1603\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/IMG_0266-01.jpeg\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-1603\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1603\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/IMG_0266-01-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"Just a Few Guidebooks....\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Just a Few Guidebooks....[/caption]\n\nWhere do guidebooks fit in the world of apps, review websites, social media, and podcasts? Planning for a trip to Iceland got me thinking about how to make sense of the explosion of travel tips. And then, after giving my thoughts about my new <a href=\"http://bluesmart.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Bluesmart </a>\"smart connected suitcase\", I talk about how idiosyncratic frequent travelers are about packing strategies and their choice of suitcases. There\'s also follow-up about foreign exchange apps, and listener comments about digital travel security and Spirit Airlines\' growth. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_120.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #120:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, after a much longer-than-intended break. Looking back at the Google Docs revision history for this episode, I started it on Feb 2, so I had the best of intentions. But I’ve been traveling almost non-stop since then. At which point you might reasonably say “But you have all that time in airports and hotels to write” -- which should be the case, but I find that I have to remove all possible distractions before I can write. Hence my lack of a journalism career.</li>\n 	<li>So instead, I keep jotting down ideas in Evernote, feeling like I’m making progress, but not ever buckling down to actually write an episode. Until last Weds, when Dan Gradwohl sent me an e-mail with the subject line “Mark, where’s the next TravelCommons?”, asking in a very nice way -- when are you getting off your duff? I snarled back at Dan a bit -- more at frustration with myself than anything he wrote. But it got the intended result. So, I dedicate this episode to Dan.</li>\n 	<li>The travel that got in the way wasn’t anything exotic -- just the usual bouncing around -- New Orleans, Vegas, Atlanta, Boston, New Jersey. But it was the tail end of 7 weeks of straight travel -- which is right about the time I hit my fun quotient. My patience dives and my bitch tweeting climbs. Of course, the fact that my American Airlines flights were hitting a 50% on-time rate didn’t help. I think I finally tipped over when I found my EWR-ORD flight was an ancient AA MD-80. Trying to wedge my bag long ways into the short overhead bin on the AB side was a complete throwback to when I first started traveling for business -- in 1985, on American Airlines, out of DFW, on MD-80s. 30 years later, I find myself on the same plane -- with less legroom and no peanuts.</li>\n 	<li>I am gearing up for some fun travel in March, though. Trying out Iceland Air’s new Chicago-to-Reykjavik service with my son, and then trying out Iceland’s budget carrier Wow Air to meet up with my wife and daughter in Spain. I’m hoping it all works fine, but I’m preparing myself to having to call a couple of audibles.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/seldon-circles/\"><em>Making Circles</em></a> by the Seldon Plan</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Peter Zurich sent a great note, adding onto the digital security topic in<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/12/20/podcast-119-digital-security-on-the-road-us-airports-getting-better/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> the last episode</a>\n<ul>\n 	<li>“Your suggestion to switch to cellular network as opposed to airport wifi is okay but it is becoming easy to obtain technology to set up a rogue cell site that will silently capture traffic -- your data will be caught and you will be none the wiser.</li>\n 	<li>“Thus, in my opinion, it is still very important to only use HTPS encrypted web sites and I would still add on the VPN if you have one available. Bottom line when using any website where you need your password to access sensitive information, make sure the computer is trusted (no public access/borrowed/loaner computers) and make sure the website is HTTPS. If using Outlook or other applications than the web browser you should be on your company\'s VPN.</li>\n 	<li>“Second thing, people should be aware that tearing a 2-D barcode in half doesn\'t necessarily render it undecipherable. 2D barcodes have a configurable level of redundancy built-in so that even if part (or possibly most) of the barcode is missing/unreadable it can still be decoded. My personal policy is once we have confirmed our FF miles have posted, the BP\'s go in the shredder.”</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Peter, thanks for these. Last week’s <a href=\"http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/columnist/2016/02/24/got-hacked-my-mac-while-writing-story/80844720/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">story </a>about the USA Today columnist whose e-mail was hacked while he used Gogo’s WiFi service on an American Airlines flight demonstrates again the potential dangers of using public WiFi. It takes a bit of spelunking through the columnist’s Twitter feed to figure out how that happened -- he was using an Earthlink e-mail service that didn’t encrypt traffic back to the mail server. Technical listeners would be right in saying “Well, there you go. What did you expect doing plain-text comms over public WiFi?” Indeed, when we talked about this in the last episode, I specifically called out the need to encrypt e-mail protocols -- POP, IMAP, SMTP -- over SSL. But that’s not the default configuration for many e-mail clients, including Outlook and, the last time I checked, the iPhone mail client. You have to go poking around in the settings, changing ports. I know how to do it -- but it’s nothing my wife would. Building on Peter’s suggestion, probably the easiest thing to do is use a web e-mail client like GMail over https -- when the green lock shows in the browser address bar. Next easiest is to set up your e-mail client to encrypt its traffic. Most e-mail providers have instructions on their sites. Perhaps the fiddliest, but the most secure is to install and use a VPN. If your company device comes with one already installed, then it’s easy -- though remember VPN web traffic is usually tracked just like it is in your office. If it’s your own device, then you’re probably going to want to buy a service. They’re not overly expensive -- $3-8/month. I use ExpressVPN, which is on the pricer side, but their VPN client is easy to install and use. And it has the side benefit of letting me watch NCAA March Madness video streams when I’m overseas. In March, I’ll be trying out a hardware-based VPN solution -- <a href=\"http://www.homingsystems.com/alwayshome-duo\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">AlwaysHome</a>, which sets up a VPN with matching USB dongles. Could be an easier solution. I’ll report back in the next episode.</li>\n 	<li>Dan Gradwohl, before he poked me into action, had a “Hmm…” reaction to a comment in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/12/20/podcast-119-digital-security-on-the-road-us-airports-getting-better/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">the last episode</a> about Spirit Airlines passing Delta as the 3rd largest at Chicago O’Hare. Looking at January schedules, he found Spirit had 29 daily departures to Delta’s 52. Would seem like Delta is still larger. However, the Crain’s Chicago article said Spirit carried more passengers than Delta -- which could be since some of Delta’s 52 departures were co-branded smaller regional jets. This is not a new thing. For a long time, O’Hare continued to claim the title of World’s Busiest Airport based on <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_world%27s_busiest_airports_by_aircraft_movements#2014_statistics\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">number of takeoffs/landings</a> (which it reclaimed in 2014) after Atlanta Hartsfield passed it on total passengers handled. Using that <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_world%27s_busiest_airports_by_passenger_traffic#2015_statistics\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">stat</a>, ORD is the 4th largest after ATL, Beijing, and Dubai. All that being said, Spirit is ramping up hard in the Chicago market, hiring new flight attendants ahead of plane deliveries, and pushing the city for more gate space. And Delta and American are rolling out new Economy Basic fares to fight them. Might not be too long before Spirit passes Delta on both measures.</li>\n 	<li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/10/11/podcast-117-random-thoughts-about-eggs-scotland-car-rentals/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Episode #117</a>, I talked -- raved, actually -- about a FinTech company called <a href=\"https://revolut.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Revolut</a>. It offered a convenient and low-cost way to exchange, transfer, and access money internationally. I started using it last September when my daughter started up at University of St Andrews. I used it to convert and push money to her UK bank account, and used the Revolut chip-&amp;-pin debit card to avoid the hassle of US chip-&amp;-signature credit cards. Last week, though, the low-cost component of their value prop disappeared -- at least for US customers, when they added a 3% fee when you added money/”topped up” your Revolut account with a US debit card. They said they were passing through the fees they were being charged, a claim I don’t doubt. However, it started me looking for cheaper foreign exchange options. Which lead me down quite the rabbit hole -- sorting through the differences in transaction costs and exchange rates quickly led to an Excel modelling session, which is just how I want to spend a Saturday morning. If you look at <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">my Twitter feed</a>, there’s a string of tweets walking through my analysis, but for my case, TransferWise, another UK FinTech startup, and Xoom, owned by PayPal, were much cheaper than Revolut after considering their new 3% fee. I expect that I’ll still use the Revolut card a bit when in Europe -- at self-service check-outs or gas pumps -- but nowhere near the volume I was using it before last week. But, I’m glad to have options and do a bit of math so avoid a $50 bank wire fee or Western Union’s 7% premium from market exchange rates.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/eliyahu-wind/\">Oh Yeah</a></em> by Eliyahu Sills</li>\n</ul>\n<b>Where Do Guidebooks Fit In?</b>\n<ul>\n 	<li>As I mentioned in the opening, my son and I are hitting Iceland in a couple of weeks for a 4-day weekend. We’ve never been before, so I needed to figure out what to do and where to stay. Right about then, someone from what I used to know as Dorling Kindersley -- now shortened to DK -- pinged me about the February relaunch of <a href=\"http://www.dk.com/us/travel/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">DK’s Eyewitness Travel Top 10 Guides</a> -- one of the first 10 is for Iceland. It started me thinking about where guidebooks fit in these days of in the world of apps (Yelp, Foursquare, Untappd), podcasts (Amateur Traveler, Indie Travel Podcast), websites (TripAdvisor), newspaper articles (NYTimes’ <a href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/22/travel/36-hours-in-reykjavik.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">36 Hours in Reykjavik</a>) and friends’ social media posts on Facebook and Instagram.</li>\n 	<li>When I want to torture my kids, I do the “when I was young…” thing. But going back to our honeymoon 25 years ago (this November -- need to get on that planning!), I cashed in a slug of British Airways miles to fly us first class to Pisa for a touring holiday in Tuscany. The only plans I had made were to rent a car (a Fiat Panda) and book our first night’s room (via Telex) in Lucca. We ran the rest of the vacation off of a set of Michelin guides -- the red one to find hotels and restaurants and the green one to figure out what to see. Between those and reading “A Room With A View”, we were set. We exchanged American Express travelers checks at the bank for lira, took pictures on Kodak and Fuji film, navigated using a paper maps… Whoops, got off track a bit there. I think my kids are somewhere screaming “Stop!”</li>\n 	<li>I think like everybody, I start with a Google search -- “What to do in Iceland in March”, limit the results to the last 2 years and start clicking. Lots of articles from UK papers (I think because of Wow Air, the Icelandic version of Spirit or EasyJet, flying into London Gatwick) which I clip over to Evernote using their nifty little Chrome extension. Then I narrow the search down to specific interests -- like “Iceland craft beer” and a few more article get sync’d to Evernote. I stack up a bunch of facts -- a sort of <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointillism\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">pointillist </a>view of what to do in Iceland.</li>\n 	<li>Every survey about how people go about travel planning will tell you that personal recommendations are the far and away the most important source of travel planning information. Which makes sense -- you know the person, how their interests, ways of travel align with yours. We have good friends that we’ll take restaurant recommendations from, but not hotels. We share the same tastes in interesting food, but they like to stay in hotels with nice pools. We’re tend to stay a bit more “closer to ground” -- choosing vacation rentals over the Westin resort.</li>\n 	<li>And once people find that you travel a lot and to different/interesting places, you get hit up -- a lot -- for recommendations. Friend and long-time T/C listener Allan Marko curates a set of notes for his favorite European cities, places like Paris, that he regularly e-mails out. After a couple of visits to Spain, I’ve taken it to the next level of geekdom -- embedding my recommendations on a Google Map page and sending out the URL. For this trip, a friend from work sent me the itinerary she and her family did last summer. Not sure that she and her husband would be search out craft beer bars with 2 young kids in tow, but I did take her recommendation for the Hotel Geysir at the top of the Golden Circle route, and hitting the Blue Lagoon on the way back to the airport.</li>\n 	<li>I like The NY Times’ 36 Hours and United Airlines’ 3 Perfect Days series. They’re focused on the long weekend getaway -- if you have a limited amount of time, here’s what to do. These are the sorts of articles we used to rip out of the Sunday travel section of the local newspaper or a travel magazine and stash in a travel folder. The Internet has shifted that behavior just a bit -- we now search for them when we right when we need them. Perhaps more for travel planning than for inspiration, but they serve the same purpose as the green Michelin guide did for our honeymoon -- a curated list of things you ought to see.</li>\n 	<li>The DK Top 10 Iceland guide seems to fit into this “hit the highlights” mode -- top 10 highlights by region and by thing (top 10 churches, waterfalls, volcanoes, bars, cheap restaurants…), 2-day and 7-day itineraries, which is nice because the 36 Hours in Reykjavik article I pulled up was from 2013, maybe on the ragged edge of up-to-dateness. And the DK guide has everything nicely packaged, which I remember from the Dorling Kindersley books of old -- all the lists in one place wrapped in a sturdy cover that has fold-out maps in the front (Iceland) and the back (downtown Reykjavik) -- which is handy if you didn’t plan ahead and cache Google Maps data before leaving the hotel wi-fi bubble.</li>\n 	<li>There’s another kind of guidebook that I’ll use, though I couldn’t find one for Iceland. They’re less about lists and more about stories -- think Bill Bryson’s <em>Notes from a Small Island</em> about the UK, or more recently, <em><a href=\"http://roadsandkingdoms.com/store/rice-noodle-fish-book/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Rice Noodle Fish</a></em> an Anthony Bourdain book by Matt Goulding (whatever that means) about Japan. I read those more before I travel than packing them in my bag. They’re about context/texture -- kinda like what “Room With A View” was for us about Florence 25 years ago -- that prepare rather than guide you, and maybe give you a bit more appreciation when you’re running through those Top 10 Highlights lists.</li>\n 	<li>Maybe it comes down to the kind of reader you are -- are you someone that likes things more tangible than electronic. Do you like to flip pages rather than screens? The Kindle cannibalized a good-sized chunk of the demand for physical books, but didn’t replace it. Just like overall book market, recent numbers show the demand for physical guide books has stabilized albeit at a lower level. I sorta split the difference. I like paging through my Evernote virtual travel folder when I’m back at the room, but like to have a physical map and list when I’m out walking during the day. Maybe that physicality keeps me more engaged with where I am. Or at least looking up and forward, which should help keep me avoid that new travelers’ epidemic -- Death by GPS.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music --<em> <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/liquid-seventythree/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Is That Called Love</a> </em></em>by Liquid Zen</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>I Hate Shopping for Suitcases</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>I’ve been traveling for a few months now with the <a href=\"http://bluesmart.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Bluesmart </a>suitcase. I’ve mentioned it in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/08/26/podcast-116-traveling-thru-japan-luggage-trends/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">a past episode</a> when I pre-ordered it through their Indiegogo campaign. And now that they’re shipping, they’re making a lot of Top Traveler Gadget lists.</li>\n 	<li>It claims to be the first piece of “smart” luggage to hit the market. It pairs with my iPhone through Bluetooth. It automatically locks when I step away from it and then unlocks itself when I return. It has a built-in battery to power itself and charge personal electronics through a couple of USB ports. It also periodically sends out its location when I can then check through the iPhone app. And it has a cool front light that glows blue when it’s paired with my phone.</li>\n 	<li>Aside from all the electronics, it’s a hard-shell wheelie bag with nice-sized wheels that roll easily -- sometimes too easily. It fits perfectly into American’s and United’s luggage sizers -- at least the ones in Boston Logan airport. (Some blogger who reviewed the bag raised a bit of a ruckus saying that the bag dimensions on the website were too big for carry-on. I guess he doesn’t travel enough to go an airport and check it out himself). The iPhone app is getting better -- Bluesmart is doing a nice job of reving the app frequently to stomp bugs, though the location alerts -- “You’re leaving me behind” are still a bit wonky.</li>\n 	<li>All in all, it’s a nice enough bag. I had been thinking about getting something a bit smaller for 1-2 night trips and this fits the bill. I’m kinda “meh” on all the electronics. The large battery is fine, but I already carry a recharger in my backpack that will top up my iPhone or tablet a couple of times -- good enough and more accessible in-flight. The location functionality seems to work only when I press the button to “wake up” the bag -- which means I’m right beside my bag and know its location. And since it’s the perfect carry-on size, it’s usually right above me in the plane cabin. So it’s a nice enough hard-shell wheelie bag with a couple of bells and whistles that don’t necessarily wow me.</li>\n 	<li>Which shouldn’t be interpreted as a knock against Bluesmart. I’m sure there are a number of travelers who love every one of those bells and whistles. It’s not so much a criticism about Bluesmart as it is how personal and idiosyncratic frequent travelers are about suitcases. It’s gotta fit your packing strategies, which are also very idiosyncratic. Some people love compartments to help them structure their packing. Me? I’m all about the flexibility of a single open space -- I build my own structure with shoes and different kinds of clothes depending on the trip. And even though I see more and more hard-shell bags -- and now own one, I’m not completely sold on it. I still like the ability to bulge when I need to. And the two- vs. four-wheel thing. Pushing a 4-wheel through the airport seems easier on my wrist, but sometimes they roll too easily and won’t stay put. It’s the reason I’ve been walking around with a ripped backpack for 4 months -- I really hate shopping for travel bags. And am very happy that leather wallets last a really long time.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #120</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/\">Podshow Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_120.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #120 — Where Do Guidebooks Fit In? I Hate Shopping for Suitcases','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-120-where-do-guidebooks-fit-in-i-hate-shopping-for-suitcases','','','2021-09-29 08:09:56','2021-09-29 13:09:56','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=1598',0,'post','',3),
(1599,1,'2016-03-13 10:30:55','2016-03-13 15:30:55','Here\'s a little something to keep you entertained while you navigate the holiday airport lines. We talk about digital security on the road -- what\'s the right balance between hassle and hack? We also dig into JD Power\'s latest <a href=\"http://www.jdpower.com/press-releases/2015-north-america-airport-satisfaction-study\" target=\"_blank\">airport satisfaction survey</a>. They report a tick up in traveler experience and, for the most part, I think they have it right. We also cover Spirit Airlines\' growth and the planned expansion of US immigration pre-clearance. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_120.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/238595273\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #120:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, after a much longer-than-intended break. Looking back at the Google Docs revision history for this episode, I started it on Feb 2, so I had the best of intentions. But I’ve been traveling almost non-stop since then. At which point you might reasonably say “But you have all that time in airports and hotels to write” -- which should be the case, but I find that I have to remove all possible distractions before I can write. Hence my lack of a journalism career.</li>\r\n	<li>So instead, I keep jotting down ideas in Evernote, feeling like I’m making progress, but not ever buckling down to actually write an episode. Until last Weds, when Dan Gradwohl sent me an e-mail with the subject line “Mark, where’s the next TravelCommons?”, asking in a very nice way -- when are you getting off your duff? I snarled back at Dan a bit -- more at frustration with myself than anything he wrote. But it got the intended result. So, I dedicate this episode to Dan.</li>\r\n	<li>The travel that got in the way wasn’t anything exotic -- just the usual bouncing around -- New Orleans, Vegas, Atlanta, Boston, New Jersey. But it was the tail end of 7 weeks of straight travel -- which is right about the time I hit my fun quotient. My patience dives and my bitch tweeting climbs. Of course, the fact that my American Airlines flights were hitting a 50% on-time rate didn’t help. I think I finally tipped over when I found my EWR-ORD flight was an ancient AA MD-80. Trying to wedge my bag long ways into the short overhead bin on the AB side was a complete throwback to when I first started traveling for business -- in 1985, on American Airlines, out of DFW, on MD-80s. 30 years later, I find myself on the same plane -- with less legroom and no peanuts.</li>\r\n	<li>I am gearing up for some fun travel in March, though. Trying out Iceland Air’s new Chicago-to-Reykjavik service with my son, and then trying out Iceland’s budget carrier Wow Air to meet up with my wife and daughter in Spain. I’m hoping it all works fine, but I’m preparing myself to having to call a couple of audibles.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/seldon-circles/\"><em>Making Circles</em></a> by the Seldon Plan</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Peter Zurich sent a great note, adding onto the digital security topic in<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/12/20/podcast-119-digital-security-on-the-road-us-airports-getting-better/\" target=\"_blank\"> the last episode</a>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>“Your suggestion to switch to cellular network as opposed to airport wifi is okay but it is becoming easy to obtain technology to set up a rogue cell site that will silently capture traffic -- your data will be caught and you will be none the wiser.</li>\r\n	<li>“Thus, in my opinion, it is still very important to only use HTPS encrypted web sites and I would still add on the VPN if you have one available. Bottom line when using any website where you need your password to access sensitive information, make sure the computer is trusted (no public access/borrowed/loaner computers) and make sure the website is HTTPS. If using Outlook or other applications than the web browser you should be on your company\'s VPN.</li>\r\n	<li>“Second thing, people should be aware that tearing a 2-D barcode in half doesn\'t necessarily render it undecipherable. 2D barcodes have a configurable level of redundancy built-in so that even if part (or possibly most) of the barcode is missing/unreadable it can still be decoded. My personal policy is once we have confirmed our FF miles have posted, the BP\'s go in the shredder.”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>Peter, thanks for these. Last week’s <a href=\"http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/columnist/2016/02/24/got-hacked-my-mac-while-writing-story/80844720/\" target=\"_blank\">story </a>about the USA Today columnist whose e-mail was hacked while he used Gogo’s WiFi service on an American Airlines flight demonstrates again the potential dangers of using public WiFi. It takes a bit of spelunking through the columnist’s Twitter feed to figure out how that happened -- he was using an Earthlink e-mail service that didn’t encrypt traffic back to the mail server. Technical listeners would be right in saying “Well, there you go. What did you expect doing plain-text comms over public WiFi?” Indeed, when we talked about this in the last episode, I specifically called out the need to encrypt e-mail protocols -- POP, IMAP, SMTP -- over SSL. But that’s not the default configuration for many e-mail clients, including Outlook and, the last time I checked, the iPhone mail client. You have to go poking around in the settings, changing ports. I know how to do it -- but it’s nothing my wife would. Building on Peter’s suggestion, probably the easiest thing to do is use a web e-mail client like GMail over https -- when the green lock shows in the browser address bar. Next easiest is to set up your e-mail client to encrypt its traffic. Most e-mail providers have instructions on their sites. Perhaps the fiddliest, but the most secure is to install and use a VPN. If your company device comes with one already installed, then it’s easy -- though remember VPN web traffic is usually tracked just like it is in your office. If it’s your own device, then you’re probably going to want to buy a service. They’re not overly expensive -- $3-8/month. I use ExpressVPN, which is on the pricer side, but their VPN client is easy to install and use. And it has the side benefit of letting me watch NCAA March Madness video streams when I’m overseas. In March, I’ll be trying out a hardware-based VPN solution -- <a href=\"http://www.homingsystems.com/alwayshome-duo\" target=\"_blank\">AlwaysHome</a>, which sets up a VPN with matching USB dongles. Could be an easier solution. I’ll report back in the next episode.</li>\r\n	<li>Dan Gradwohl, before he poked me into action, had a “Hmm…” reaction to a comment in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/12/20/podcast-119-digital-security-on-the-road-us-airports-getting-better/\" target=\"_blank\">the last episode</a> about Spirit Airlines passing Delta as the 3rd largest at Chicago O’Hare. Looking at January schedules, he found Spirit had 29 daily departures to Delta’s 52. Would seem like Delta is still larger. However, the Crain’s Chicago article said Spirit carried more passengers than Delta -- which could be since some of Delta’s 52 departures were co-branded smaller regional jets. This is not a new thing. For a long time, O’Hare continued to claim the title of World’s Busiest Airport based on <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_world%27s_busiest_airports_by_aircraft_movements#2014_statistics\" target=\"_blank\">number of takeoffs/landings</a> (which it reclaimed in 2014) after Atlanta Hartsfield passed it on total passengers handled. Using that <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_world%27s_busiest_airports_by_passenger_traffic#2015_statistics\" target=\"_blank\">stat</a>, ORD is the 4th largest after ATL, Beijing, and Dubai. All that being said, Spirit is ramping up hard in the Chicago market, hiring new flight attendants ahead of plane deliveries, and pushing the city for more gate space. And Delta and American are rolling out new Economy Basic fares to fight them. Might not be too long before Spirit passes Delta on both measures.</li>\r\n	<li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/10/11/podcast-117-random-thoughts-about-eggs-scotland-car-rentals/\" target=\"_blank\">Episode #117</a>, I talked -- raved, actually -- about a FinTech company called <a href=\"https://revolut.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Revolut</a>. It offered a convenient and low-cost way to exchange, transfer, and access money internationally. I started using it last September when my daughter started up at University of St Andrews. I used it to convert and push money to her UK bank account, and used the Revolut chip-&amp;-pin debit card to avoid the hassle of US chip-&amp;-signature credit cards. Last week, though, the low-cost component of their value prop disappeared -- at least for US customers, when they added a 3% fee when you added money/”topped up” your Revolut account with a US debit card. They said they were passing through the fees they were being charged, a claim I don’t doubt. However, it started me looking for cheaper foreign exchange options. Which lead me down quite the rabbit hole -- sorting through the differences in transaction costs and exchange rates quickly led to an Excel modelling session, which is just how I want to spend a Saturday morning. If you look at <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">my Twitter feed</a>, there’s a string of tweets walking through my analysis, but for my case, TransferWise, another UK FinTech startup, and Xoom, owned by PayPal, were much cheaper than Revolut after considering their new 3% fee. I expect that I’ll still use the Revolut card a bit when in Europe -- at self-service check-outs or gas pumps -- but nowhere near the volume I was using it before last week. But, I’m glad to have options and do a bit of math so avoid a $50 bank wire fee or Western Union’s 7% premium from market exchange rates.</li>\r\n	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/eliyahu-wind/\">Oh Yeah</a></em> by Eliyahu Sills</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Digital Security On The Road</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Digital security, cyber security. I don’t know about you, but I’ve kinda hit security breach fatigue. On Thursday, yet another company announced a credit card breach. <a href=\"http://krebsonsecurity.com/2015/12/banks-card-breach-at-landrys-restaurants/\">This time</a> it’s Landry’s who runs Bubba Gumps and Morton’s Steakhouse and another 15 or so restaurant brands. I don’t frequent Landry’s brands that much, so I’m hoping that this breach doesn’t mean I have to replace one of my credit cards and again have to go through the goat rodeo of changing account numbers for all my autobills. But it still does reinforce that feeling the cyber security is not a matter of “if” but “when”</li>\r\n	<li>But even if it’s a matter of “when”, I’d still like to postpone the “when” as long as possible. And traveling -- certainly during the holidays -- there’s a lot of opportunity to bring on the “when” if you’re not just a bit thoughtful. There’s also a balance between inconvenience -- the cost of being more digitally secure -- and the probability of being “breached” (can I say that without having to flag this as “explicit” in iTunes?).</li>\r\n	<li>You could always go “old school” -- like 10 years ago when there was damn little public WiFi, no iPhones -- nothing to keep us entertained as we shuffled through the TSA lines other than trading snarky remarks with other line sufferers. Or you could go the “burner” route -- using disposable phones and a temporary PC, which is what many business travelers to China still do -- doing a complete wipe of their phones and PCs before and after each visit because they just expect to get hacked no matter what anti-virus and other safety precautions they take. But if all you’re doing is going from, say, San Francisco to Boston to see your family, these seem a bit “overkill” -- definitely not balancing the cost-benefit trade-off. I’m fairly lazy about this stuff, but there are a few precautions I do take.</li>\r\n	<li>First, I never do any financial stuff over public WiFi -- no checking my bank account or credit card activity over an airport or Starbucks WiFi, or a hotel network at all -- whether WiFi or jacked into an Ethernet port. Even if the URL is showing https -- a encrypted web connection -- there’s just too many ways those networks or web sites can be misconfigured. Some folks will tell you to use a VPN. I used one in China, but it seems a bit too much in the US. If I have to do some banking, I’ll use my iPhone over the mobile carrier network -- AT&amp;T in the US, Orange when I was in Spain, .... I know it’s not perfect, but, as the cyber security guys like to say, it “reduces the attack surface” at what is considered one of the most vulnerable points.</li>\r\n	<li>I rarely use hotel PCs -- the ones set up in lobbies or the concierge lounges. I mean, if I have a smartphone, a tablet, and a PC, why do I need to use a public PC that’s open to anyone loading up a key-logger that’ll capture anything you type -- including logins and passwords. If I do, for some odd reason, need to use one, I never log into anything. Maybe just search for a restaurant, but that’s about it.</li>\r\n	<li>I always make sure that I’ve configured my phone and PC e-mail clients to use encrypted communications between servers -- using IMAP and SMTP over SSL (<i>&gt;now</i> we’re talking security because we used more acronyms than words in that last sentence) for my own mail servers; GMail does it automatically for you. But I don’t encrypt the message itself -- no PGP or signed MIME. There’s nothing in my e-mails that is <i>that</i> confidential to go through that hassle.</li>\r\n	<li>I have recently, though, turned on two-factor authentication for every service that offers it -- GMail, some of my financial accounts, Dropbox, …. I resisted it for a long time -- again, thought it was more hassle than it was worth. But then I started getting some odd password reset e-mail requests -- that I didn’t request.</li>\r\n	<li>I go back and forth on using smartphone or printed boarding passes. Smartphone boarding passes are quicker -- you can get it while in the cab to the airport rather than queueing up for a kiosk -- but I’ve had more than a few times when my boarding pass disappeared from the app during an extended flight delay. Printed boarding passes are easier to scan at the gate -- especially when juggling a backpack, a hot coffee, and a winter coat -- but there’s recently been a <a href=\"http://www.economist.com/blogs/gulliver/2015/10/security-check\">bit</a> of a <a href=\"http://krebsonsecurity.com/2015/10/whats-in-a-boarding-pass-barcode-a-lot/#more-31317\">stir</a> about the amount of personal information someone could pull out of the bar codes. Maybe I’m not paranoid enough, but that one feels a bit of a stretch. I do whatever’s the most convenient -- usually the smartphone route. But when I do print out a boarding pass, I keep it in my jacket pocket -- just to be sure.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- Drops of H2O ( The Filtered Water Treatment ) by J.Lang (c) 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/djlang59/37792 Ft: Airtone</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>US Airports Getting Better?</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>While I poked at London Heathrow a couple of <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/10/11/podcast-117-random-thoughts-about-eggs-scotland-car-rentals/\" target=\"_blank\">episodes</a> back, it’s an article of faith among international travelers that North American airports pale in comparison to airports in Asia/Pac -- anyone flying from Beijing or Singapore to LAX needs a light sedative to cushion the shock -- and pretty much trail behind most European airports too. But JD Power, in their <a href=\"http://www.jdpower.com/press-releases/2015-north-america-airport-satisfaction-study\" target=\"_blank\">airport satisfaction survey</a> released last week, said that things are getting better. Not hugely better -- a 5-8% increase in their satisfaction score, but any improvement is good news.</li>\r\n	<li>Power <a href=\"http://www.jdpower.com/ratings/study/North-America-Airport-Satisfaction-Study/763ENG/Large-Airports/1617\">rated</a> large- and medium-sized North American airports -- 60 US airports and Toronto Pearson, Calgary, Montreal, and Vancouver. They surveyed travelers around 6 attributes of their airport experience. In order of importance, they are: the state of the airport facilities themselves, how easy it is to get to the airport, security, baggage claim, the check-in experience, and available food and shopping. A frequent traveler might re-shuffle the order -- maybe drop baggage claim and the check-in experience to the bottom because we rarely check a bag -- but I think it’s a good list.</li>\r\n	<li>And I think some of Power’s conclusions line up with things I’m seeing on the road. Like improvements in terminal facilities. In the last episode, I gave United a shout-out for the upgrade of their gate space in Boston Logan. I also think San Francisco’s complete rebuild of Terminal 2 is excellent and stands up to any airport in Asia or Europe.</li>\r\n	<li>Power found what is a pretty logical connection between satisfaction and the time you spend in lines. As I said earlier, I rarely deal with check-in lines, but I think the TSA’s rollout of Precheck has provided a quantum level improvement in the security experience -- though at times, it feels like its popularity is on the verge of overwhelming it and sliding back. But even for those in the regular lines, I’ve seen TSA folks working hard to re-balance lines -- especially at ORD.</li>\r\n	<li>Power split their ratings between large and medium airports. Their winning large airport is Portland, Oregon. I’ve done a bit of flying into PDX and while I wouldn’t have, unprompted, chosen it as the top large airport, I don’t argue with their conclusion. It’s a nice facility; easy mass transit (a TravelCommons’ fixation) via the MAX light rail; I disagree with its top marks for security check, but in how many other airports can I buy a growler of craft beer to go? The bottom four -- those I could’ve ticked off with missing a beat -- LaGuardia, Newark, LAX, and O’Hare. Old terminals, awkward layouts, leaking roofs, lousy food. Interesting they’re also the major airports for the US’s largest cities.</li>\r\n	<li>The medium airport winner was a tie between Dallas’ downtown Love Field and Fort Myers’ Southwest Florida. This one, I dunno. I’ve used both of these airports a lot. Love has gone through a good sized facelift and I haven’t been through it since they finished, so I may be working off out-of-date impressions, but even though it’s close to downtown, it’s a pain to get to. Now Fort Myers is easy to get to -- and I love the short walk to the rental car facility -- but security screening can back way up and the food choice isn’t great. From my personal experience, I’d give top marks to Nashville. I mean, how can you go wrong with live music -- good live music -- as you’re walking down the terminal.</li>\r\n	<li>Power’s most obvious finding is that dissatisfied customers are very vocal. Those who rate overall satisfaction 1 (on a 10-point scale) make an average of 13 negative comments about their experience. Anyone who follows me on Twitter knows how true that is.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #120</li>\r\n	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/\">Podshow Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\r\n	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_119.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #120 — Where Do Guidebooks Fit? I Hate Shopping for Suitcases','','inherit','closed','closed','','1598-revision-v1','','','2016-03-13 10:30:55','2016-03-13 15:30:55','',1598,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/13/1598-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1600,1,'2016-03-13 10:38:00','2016-03-13 15:38:00','Here\'s a little something to keep you entertained while you navigate the holiday airport lines. We talk about digital security on the road -- what\'s the right balance between hassle and hack? We also dig into JD Power\'s latest <a href=\"http://www.jdpower.com/press-releases/2015-north-america-airport-satisfaction-study\" target=\"_blank\">airport satisfaction survey</a>. They report a tick up in traveler experience and, for the most part, I think they have it right. We also cover Spirit Airlines\' growth and the planned expansion of US immigration pre-clearance. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_120.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/238595273\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #120:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, after a much longer-than-intended break. Looking back at the Google Docs revision history for this episode, I started it on Feb 2, so I had the best of intentions. But I’ve been traveling almost non-stop since then. At which point you might reasonably say “But you have all that time in airports and hotels to write” -- which should be the case, but I find that I have to remove all possible distractions before I can write. Hence my lack of a journalism career.</li>\r\n	<li>So instead, I keep jotting down ideas in Evernote, feeling like I’m making progress, but not ever buckling down to actually write an episode. Until last Weds, when Dan Gradwohl sent me an e-mail with the subject line “Mark, where’s the next TravelCommons?”, asking in a very nice way -- when are you getting off your duff? I snarled back at Dan a bit -- more at frustration with myself than anything he wrote. But it got the intended result. So, I dedicate this episode to Dan.</li>\r\n	<li>The travel that got in the way wasn’t anything exotic -- just the usual bouncing around -- New Orleans, Vegas, Atlanta, Boston, New Jersey. But it was the tail end of 7 weeks of straight travel -- which is right about the time I hit my fun quotient. My patience dives and my bitch tweeting climbs. Of course, the fact that my American Airlines flights were hitting a 50% on-time rate didn’t help. I think I finally tipped over when I found my EWR-ORD flight was an ancient AA MD-80. Trying to wedge my bag long ways into the short overhead bin on the AB side was a complete throwback to when I first started traveling for business -- in 1985, on American Airlines, out of DFW, on MD-80s. 30 years later, I find myself on the same plane -- with less legroom and no peanuts.</li>\r\n	<li>I am gearing up for some fun travel in March, though. Trying out Iceland Air’s new Chicago-to-Reykjavik service with my son, and then trying out Iceland’s budget carrier Wow Air to meet up with my wife and daughter in Spain. I’m hoping it all works fine, but I’m preparing myself to having to call a couple of audibles.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/seldon-circles/\"><em>Making Circles</em></a> by the Seldon Plan</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Peter Zurich sent a great note, adding onto the digital security topic in<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/12/20/podcast-119-digital-security-on-the-road-us-airports-getting-better/\" target=\"_blank\"> the last episode</a>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>“Your suggestion to switch to cellular network as opposed to airport wifi is okay but it is becoming easy to obtain technology to set up a rogue cell site that will silently capture traffic -- your data will be caught and you will be none the wiser.</li>\r\n	<li>“Thus, in my opinion, it is still very important to only use HTPS encrypted web sites and I would still add on the VPN if you have one available. Bottom line when using any website where you need your password to access sensitive information, make sure the computer is trusted (no public access/borrowed/loaner computers) and make sure the website is HTTPS. If using Outlook or other applications than the web browser you should be on your company\'s VPN.</li>\r\n	<li>“Second thing, people should be aware that tearing a 2-D barcode in half doesn\'t necessarily render it undecipherable. 2D barcodes have a configurable level of redundancy built-in so that even if part (or possibly most) of the barcode is missing/unreadable it can still be decoded. My personal policy is once we have confirmed our FF miles have posted, the BP\'s go in the shredder.”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>Peter, thanks for these. Last week’s <a href=\"http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/columnist/2016/02/24/got-hacked-my-mac-while-writing-story/80844720/\" target=\"_blank\">story </a>about the USA Today columnist whose e-mail was hacked while he used Gogo’s WiFi service on an American Airlines flight demonstrates again the potential dangers of using public WiFi. It takes a bit of spelunking through the columnist’s Twitter feed to figure out how that happened -- he was using an Earthlink e-mail service that didn’t encrypt traffic back to the mail server. Technical listeners would be right in saying “Well, there you go. What did you expect doing plain-text comms over public WiFi?” Indeed, when we talked about this in the last episode, I specifically called out the need to encrypt e-mail protocols -- POP, IMAP, SMTP -- over SSL. But that’s not the default configuration for many e-mail clients, including Outlook and, the last time I checked, the iPhone mail client. You have to go poking around in the settings, changing ports. I know how to do it -- but it’s nothing my wife would. Building on Peter’s suggestion, probably the easiest thing to do is use a web e-mail client like GMail over https -- when the green lock shows in the browser address bar. Next easiest is to set up your e-mail client to encrypt its traffic. Most e-mail providers have instructions on their sites. Perhaps the fiddliest, but the most secure is to install and use a VPN. If your company device comes with one already installed, then it’s easy -- though remember VPN web traffic is usually tracked just like it is in your office. If it’s your own device, then you’re probably going to want to buy a service. They’re not overly expensive -- $3-8/month. I use ExpressVPN, which is on the pricer side, but their VPN client is easy to install and use. And it has the side benefit of letting me watch NCAA March Madness video streams when I’m overseas. In March, I’ll be trying out a hardware-based VPN solution -- <a href=\"http://www.homingsystems.com/alwayshome-duo\" target=\"_blank\">AlwaysHome</a>, which sets up a VPN with matching USB dongles. Could be an easier solution. I’ll report back in the next episode.</li>\r\n	<li>Dan Gradwohl, before he poked me into action, had a “Hmm…” reaction to a comment in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/12/20/podcast-119-digital-security-on-the-road-us-airports-getting-better/\" target=\"_blank\">the last episode</a> about Spirit Airlines passing Delta as the 3rd largest at Chicago O’Hare. Looking at January schedules, he found Spirit had 29 daily departures to Delta’s 52. Would seem like Delta is still larger. However, the Crain’s Chicago article said Spirit carried more passengers than Delta -- which could be since some of Delta’s 52 departures were co-branded smaller regional jets. This is not a new thing. For a long time, O’Hare continued to claim the title of World’s Busiest Airport based on <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_world%27s_busiest_airports_by_aircraft_movements#2014_statistics\" target=\"_blank\">number of takeoffs/landings</a> (which it reclaimed in 2014) after Atlanta Hartsfield passed it on total passengers handled. Using that <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_world%27s_busiest_airports_by_passenger_traffic#2015_statistics\" target=\"_blank\">stat</a>, ORD is the 4th largest after ATL, Beijing, and Dubai. All that being said, Spirit is ramping up hard in the Chicago market, hiring new flight attendants ahead of plane deliveries, and pushing the city for more gate space. And Delta and American are rolling out new Economy Basic fares to fight them. Might not be too long before Spirit passes Delta on both measures.</li>\r\n	<li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/10/11/podcast-117-random-thoughts-about-eggs-scotland-car-rentals/\" target=\"_blank\">Episode #117</a>, I talked -- raved, actually -- about a FinTech company called <a href=\"https://revolut.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Revolut</a>. It offered a convenient and low-cost way to exchange, transfer, and access money internationally. I started using it last September when my daughter started up at University of St Andrews. I used it to convert and push money to her UK bank account, and used the Revolut chip-&amp;-pin debit card to avoid the hassle of US chip-&amp;-signature credit cards. Last week, though, the low-cost component of their value prop disappeared -- at least for US customers, when they added a 3% fee when you added money/”topped up” your Revolut account with a US debit card. They said they were passing through the fees they were being charged, a claim I don’t doubt. However, it started me looking for cheaper foreign exchange options. Which lead me down quite the rabbit hole -- sorting through the differences in transaction costs and exchange rates quickly led to an Excel modelling session, which is just how I want to spend a Saturday morning. If you look at <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">my Twitter feed</a>, there’s a string of tweets walking through my analysis, but for my case, TransferWise, another UK FinTech startup, and Xoom, owned by PayPal, were much cheaper than Revolut after considering their new 3% fee. I expect that I’ll still use the Revolut card a bit when in Europe -- at self-service check-outs or gas pumps -- but nowhere near the volume I was using it before last week. But, I’m glad to have options and do a bit of math so avoid a $50 bank wire fee or Western Union’s 7% premium from market exchange rates.</li>\r\n	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/eliyahu-wind/\">Oh Yeah</a></em> by Eliyahu Sills</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Where Do Guidebooks Fit In?</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>As I mentioned in the opening, my son and I are hitting Iceland in a couple of weeks for a 4-day weekend. We’ve never been before, so I needed to figure out what to do and where to stay. Right about then, someone from what I used to know as Dorling Kindersley -- now shortened to DK -- pinged me about the February relaunch of <a href=\"http://www.dk.com/us/travel/\" target=\"_blank\">DK’s Eyewitness Travel Top 10 Guides</a> -- one of the first 10 is for Iceland. It started me thinking about where guidebooks fit in these days of in the world of apps (Yelp, Foursquare, Untappd), podcasts (Amateur Traveler, Indie Travel Podcast), websites (TripAdvisor), newspaper articles (NYTimes’ <a href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/22/travel/36-hours-in-reykjavik.html\" target=\"_blank\">36 Hours in Reykjavik</a>) and friends’ social media posts on Facebook and Instagram.</li>\r\n	<li>When I want to torture my kids, I do the “when I was young…” thing. But going back to our honeymoon 25 years ago (this November -- need to get on that planning!), I cashed in a slug of British Airways miles to fly us first class to Pisa for a touring holiday in Tuscany. The only plans I had made were to rent a car (a Fiat Panda) and book our first night’s room (via Telex) in Lucca. We ran the rest of the vacation off of a set of Michelin guides -- the red one to find hotels and restaurants and the green one to figure out what to see. Between those and reading “A Room With A View”, we were set. We exchanged American Express travelers checks at the bank for lira, took pictures on Kodak and Fuji film, navigated using a paper maps… Whoops, got off track a bit there. I think my kids are somewhere screaming “Stop!”</li>\r\n	<li>I think like everybody, I start with a Google search -- “What to do in Iceland in March”, limit the results to the last 2 years and start clicking. Lots of articles from UK papers (I think because of Wow Air, the Icelandic version of Spirit or EasyJet, flying into London Gatwick) which I clip over to Evernote using their nifty little Chrome extension. Then I narrow the search down to specific interests -- like “Iceland craft beer” and a few more article get sync’d to Evernote. I stack up a bunch of facts -- a sort of <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointillism\" target=\"_blank\">pointillist </a>view of what to do in Iceland.</li>\r\n	<li>Every survey about how people go about travel planning will tell you that personal recommendations are the far and away the most important source of travel planning information. Which makes sense -- you know the person, how their interests, ways of travel align with yours. We have good friends that we’ll take restaurant recommendations from, but not hotels. We share the same tastes in interesting food, but they like to stay in hotels with nice pools. We’re tend to stay a bit more “closer to ground” -- choosing vacation rentals over the Westin resort.</li>\r\n	<li>And once people find that you travel a lot and to different/interesting places, you get hit up -- a lot -- for recommendations. Friend and long-time T/C listener Allan Marko curates a set of notes for his favorite European cities, places like Paris, that he regularly e-mails out. After a couple of visits to Spain, I’ve taken it to the next level of geekdom -- embedding my recommendations on a Google Map page and sending out the URL. For this trip, a friend from work sent me the itinerary she and her family did last summer. Not sure that she and her husband would be search out craft beer bars with 2 young kids in tow, but I did take her recommendation for the Hotel Geysir at the top of the Golden Circle route, and hitting the Blue Lagoon on the way back to the airport.</li>\r\n	<li>I like The NY Times’ 36 Hours and United Airlines’ 3 Perfect Days series. They’re focused on the long weekend getaway -- if you have a limited amount of time, here’s what to do. These are the sorts of articles we used to rip out of the Sunday travel section of the local newspaper or a travel magazine and stash in a travel folder. The Internet has shifted that behavior just a bit -- we now search for them when we right when we need them. Perhaps more for travel planning than for inspiration, but they serve the same purpose as the green Michelin guide did for our honeymoon -- a curated list of things you ought to see.</li>\r\n	<li>The DK Top 10 Iceland guide seems to fit into this “hit the highlights” mode -- top 10 highlights by region and by thing (top 10 churches, waterfalls, volcanoes, bars, cheap restaurants…), 2-day and 7-day itineraries, which is nice because the 36 Hours in Reykjavik article I pulled up was from 2013, maybe on the ragged edge of up-to-dateness. And the DK guide has everything nicely packaged, which I remember from the Dorling Kindersley books of old -- all the lists in one place wrapped in a sturdy cover that has fold-out maps in the front (Iceland) and the back (downtown Reykjavik) -- which is handy if you didn’t plan ahead and cache Google Maps data before leaving the hotel wi-fi bubble.</li>\r\n	<li>There’s another kind of guidebook that I’ll use, though I couldn’t find one for Iceland. They’re less about lists and more about stories -- think Bill Bryson’s “Notes from a Small Island” about the UK, or more recently, “Rice Noodle Fish” an Anthony Bourdain book by Matt Goulding (whatever that means) about Japan. I read those more before I travel than packing them in my bag. They’re about context/texture -- kinda like what “Room With A View” was for us about Florence 25 years ago -- that prepare rather than guide you, and maybe give you a bit more appreciation when you’re running through those Top 10 Highlights lists.</li>\r\n	<li>Maybe it comes down to the kind of reader you are -- are you someone that likes things more tangible than electronic. Do you like to flip pages rather than screens? The Kindle cannibalized a good-sized chunk of the demand for physical books, but didn’t replace it. Just like overall book market, recent numbers show the demand for physical guide books has stabilized albeit at a lower level. I sorta split the difference. I like paging through my Evernote virtual travel folder when I’m back at the room, but like to have a physical map and list when I’m out walking during the day. Maybe that physicality keeps me more engaged with where I am. Or at least looking up and forward, which should help keep me avoid that new travelers’ epidemic -- Death by GPS.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music --<em> <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/liquid-seventythree/\" target=\"_blank\">Is That Called Love</a> </em></em>by Liquid Zen</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>US Airports Getting Better?</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>While I poked at London Heathrow a couple of <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/10/11/podcast-117-random-thoughts-about-eggs-scotland-car-rentals/\" target=\"_blank\">episodes</a> back, it’s an article of faith among international travelers that North American airports pale in comparison to airports in Asia/Pac -- anyone flying from Beijing or Singapore to LAX needs a light sedative to cushion the shock -- and pretty much trail behind most European airports too. But JD Power, in their <a href=\"http://www.jdpower.com/press-releases/2015-north-america-airport-satisfaction-study\" target=\"_blank\">airport satisfaction survey</a> released last week, said that things are getting better. Not hugely better -- a 5-8% increase in their satisfaction score, but any improvement is good news.</li>\r\n	<li>Power <a href=\"http://www.jdpower.com/ratings/study/North-America-Airport-Satisfaction-Study/763ENG/Large-Airports/1617\">rated</a> large- and medium-sized North American airports -- 60 US airports and Toronto Pearson, Calgary, Montreal, and Vancouver. They surveyed travelers around 6 attributes of their airport experience. In order of importance, they are: the state of the airport facilities themselves, how easy it is to get to the airport, security, baggage claim, the check-in experience, and available food and shopping. A frequent traveler might re-shuffle the order -- maybe drop baggage claim and the check-in experience to the bottom because we rarely check a bag -- but I think it’s a good list.</li>\r\n	<li>And I think some of Power’s conclusions line up with things I’m seeing on the road. Like improvements in terminal facilities. In the last episode, I gave United a shout-out for the upgrade of their gate space in Boston Logan. I also think San Francisco’s complete rebuild of Terminal 2 is excellent and stands up to any airport in Asia or Europe.</li>\r\n	<li>Power found what is a pretty logical connection between satisfaction and the time you spend in lines. As I said earlier, I rarely deal with check-in lines, but I think the TSA’s rollout of Precheck has provided a quantum level improvement in the security experience -- though at times, it feels like its popularity is on the verge of overwhelming it and sliding back. But even for those in the regular lines, I’ve seen TSA folks working hard to re-balance lines -- especially at ORD.</li>\r\n	<li>Power split their ratings between large and medium airports. Their winning large airport is Portland, Oregon. I’ve done a bit of flying into PDX and while I wouldn’t have, unprompted, chosen it as the top large airport, I don’t argue with their conclusion. It’s a nice facility; easy mass transit (a TravelCommons’ fixation) via the MAX light rail; I disagree with its top marks for security check, but in how many other airports can I buy a growler of craft beer to go? The bottom four -- those I could’ve ticked off with missing a beat -- LaGuardia, Newark, LAX, and O’Hare. Old terminals, awkward layouts, leaking roofs, lousy food. Interesting they’re also the major airports for the US’s largest cities.</li>\r\n	<li>The medium airport winner was a tie between Dallas’ downtown Love Field and Fort Myers’ Southwest Florida. This one, I dunno. I’ve used both of these airports a lot. Love has gone through a good sized facelift and I haven’t been through it since they finished, so I may be working off out-of-date impressions, but even though it’s close to downtown, it’s a pain to get to. Now Fort Myers is easy to get to -- and I love the short walk to the rental car facility -- but security screening can back way up and the food choice isn’t great. From my personal experience, I’d give top marks to Nashville. I mean, how can you go wrong with live music -- good live music -- as you’re walking down the terminal.</li>\r\n	<li>Power’s most obvious finding is that dissatisfied customers are very vocal. Those who rate overall satisfaction 1 (on a 10-point scale) make an average of 13 negative comments about their experience. Anyone who follows me on Twitter knows how true that is.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #120</li>\r\n	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/\">Podshow Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\r\n	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_119.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #120 — Where Do Guidebooks Fit In? I Hate Shopping for Suitcases','','inherit','closed','closed','','1598-revision-v1','','','2016-03-13 10:38:00','2016-03-13 15:38:00','',1598,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/13/1598-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1601,1,'2016-03-13 10:38:57','2016-03-13 15:38:57','Here\'s a little something to keep you entertained while you navigate the holiday airport lines. We talk about digital security on the road -- what\'s the right balance between hassle and hack? We also dig into JD Power\'s latest <a href=\"http://www.jdpower.com/press-releases/2015-north-america-airport-satisfaction-study\" target=\"_blank\">airport satisfaction survey</a>. They report a tick up in traveler experience and, for the most part, I think they have it right. We also cover Spirit Airlines\' growth and the planned expansion of US immigration pre-clearance. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_120.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/238595273\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #120:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, after a much longer-than-intended break. Looking back at the Google Docs revision history for this episode, I started it on Feb 2, so I had the best of intentions. But I’ve been traveling almost non-stop since then. At which point you might reasonably say “But you have all that time in airports and hotels to write” -- which should be the case, but I find that I have to remove all possible distractions before I can write. Hence my lack of a journalism career.</li>\r\n	<li>So instead, I keep jotting down ideas in Evernote, feeling like I’m making progress, but not ever buckling down to actually write an episode. Until last Weds, when Dan Gradwohl sent me an e-mail with the subject line “Mark, where’s the next TravelCommons?”, asking in a very nice way -- when are you getting off your duff? I snarled back at Dan a bit -- more at frustration with myself than anything he wrote. But it got the intended result. So, I dedicate this episode to Dan.</li>\r\n	<li>The travel that got in the way wasn’t anything exotic -- just the usual bouncing around -- New Orleans, Vegas, Atlanta, Boston, New Jersey. But it was the tail end of 7 weeks of straight travel -- which is right about the time I hit my fun quotient. My patience dives and my bitch tweeting climbs. Of course, the fact that my American Airlines flights were hitting a 50% on-time rate didn’t help. I think I finally tipped over when I found my EWR-ORD flight was an ancient AA MD-80. Trying to wedge my bag long ways into the short overhead bin on the AB side was a complete throwback to when I first started traveling for business -- in 1985, on American Airlines, out of DFW, on MD-80s. 30 years later, I find myself on the same plane -- with less legroom and no peanuts.</li>\r\n	<li>I am gearing up for some fun travel in March, though. Trying out Iceland Air’s new Chicago-to-Reykjavik service with my son, and then trying out Iceland’s budget carrier Wow Air to meet up with my wife and daughter in Spain. I’m hoping it all works fine, but I’m preparing myself to having to call a couple of audibles.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/seldon-circles/\"><em>Making Circles</em></a> by the Seldon Plan</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Peter Zurich sent a great note, adding onto the digital security topic in<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/12/20/podcast-119-digital-security-on-the-road-us-airports-getting-better/\" target=\"_blank\"> the last episode</a>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>“Your suggestion to switch to cellular network as opposed to airport wifi is okay but it is becoming easy to obtain technology to set up a rogue cell site that will silently capture traffic -- your data will be caught and you will be none the wiser.</li>\r\n	<li>“Thus, in my opinion, it is still very important to only use HTPS encrypted web sites and I would still add on the VPN if you have one available. Bottom line when using any website where you need your password to access sensitive information, make sure the computer is trusted (no public access/borrowed/loaner computers) and make sure the website is HTTPS. If using Outlook or other applications than the web browser you should be on your company\'s VPN.</li>\r\n	<li>“Second thing, people should be aware that tearing a 2-D barcode in half doesn\'t necessarily render it undecipherable. 2D barcodes have a configurable level of redundancy built-in so that even if part (or possibly most) of the barcode is missing/unreadable it can still be decoded. My personal policy is once we have confirmed our FF miles have posted, the BP\'s go in the shredder.”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>Peter, thanks for these. Last week’s <a href=\"http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/columnist/2016/02/24/got-hacked-my-mac-while-writing-story/80844720/\" target=\"_blank\">story </a>about the USA Today columnist whose e-mail was hacked while he used Gogo’s WiFi service on an American Airlines flight demonstrates again the potential dangers of using public WiFi. It takes a bit of spelunking through the columnist’s Twitter feed to figure out how that happened -- he was using an Earthlink e-mail service that didn’t encrypt traffic back to the mail server. Technical listeners would be right in saying “Well, there you go. What did you expect doing plain-text comms over public WiFi?” Indeed, when we talked about this in the last episode, I specifically called out the need to encrypt e-mail protocols -- POP, IMAP, SMTP -- over SSL. But that’s not the default configuration for many e-mail clients, including Outlook and, the last time I checked, the iPhone mail client. You have to go poking around in the settings, changing ports. I know how to do it -- but it’s nothing my wife would. Building on Peter’s suggestion, probably the easiest thing to do is use a web e-mail client like GMail over https -- when the green lock shows in the browser address bar. Next easiest is to set up your e-mail client to encrypt its traffic. Most e-mail providers have instructions on their sites. Perhaps the fiddliest, but the most secure is to install and use a VPN. If your company device comes with one already installed, then it’s easy -- though remember VPN web traffic is usually tracked just like it is in your office. If it’s your own device, then you’re probably going to want to buy a service. They’re not overly expensive -- $3-8/month. I use ExpressVPN, which is on the pricer side, but their VPN client is easy to install and use. And it has the side benefit of letting me watch NCAA March Madness video streams when I’m overseas. In March, I’ll be trying out a hardware-based VPN solution -- <a href=\"http://www.homingsystems.com/alwayshome-duo\" target=\"_blank\">AlwaysHome</a>, which sets up a VPN with matching USB dongles. Could be an easier solution. I’ll report back in the next episode.</li>\r\n	<li>Dan Gradwohl, before he poked me into action, had a “Hmm…” reaction to a comment in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/12/20/podcast-119-digital-security-on-the-road-us-airports-getting-better/\" target=\"_blank\">the last episode</a> about Spirit Airlines passing Delta as the 3rd largest at Chicago O’Hare. Looking at January schedules, he found Spirit had 29 daily departures to Delta’s 52. Would seem like Delta is still larger. However, the Crain’s Chicago article said Spirit carried more passengers than Delta -- which could be since some of Delta’s 52 departures were co-branded smaller regional jets. This is not a new thing. For a long time, O’Hare continued to claim the title of World’s Busiest Airport based on <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_world%27s_busiest_airports_by_aircraft_movements#2014_statistics\" target=\"_blank\">number of takeoffs/landings</a> (which it reclaimed in 2014) after Atlanta Hartsfield passed it on total passengers handled. Using that <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_world%27s_busiest_airports_by_passenger_traffic#2015_statistics\" target=\"_blank\">stat</a>, ORD is the 4th largest after ATL, Beijing, and Dubai. All that being said, Spirit is ramping up hard in the Chicago market, hiring new flight attendants ahead of plane deliveries, and pushing the city for more gate space. And Delta and American are rolling out new Economy Basic fares to fight them. Might not be too long before Spirit passes Delta on both measures.</li>\r\n	<li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/10/11/podcast-117-random-thoughts-about-eggs-scotland-car-rentals/\" target=\"_blank\">Episode #117</a>, I talked -- raved, actually -- about a FinTech company called <a href=\"https://revolut.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Revolut</a>. It offered a convenient and low-cost way to exchange, transfer, and access money internationally. I started using it last September when my daughter started up at University of St Andrews. I used it to convert and push money to her UK bank account, and used the Revolut chip-&amp;-pin debit card to avoid the hassle of US chip-&amp;-signature credit cards. Last week, though, the low-cost component of their value prop disappeared -- at least for US customers, when they added a 3% fee when you added money/”topped up” your Revolut account with a US debit card. They said they were passing through the fees they were being charged, a claim I don’t doubt. However, it started me looking for cheaper foreign exchange options. Which lead me down quite the rabbit hole -- sorting through the differences in transaction costs and exchange rates quickly led to an Excel modelling session, which is just how I want to spend a Saturday morning. If you look at <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">my Twitter feed</a>, there’s a string of tweets walking through my analysis, but for my case, TransferWise, another UK FinTech startup, and Xoom, owned by PayPal, were much cheaper than Revolut after considering their new 3% fee. I expect that I’ll still use the Revolut card a bit when in Europe -- at self-service check-outs or gas pumps -- but nowhere near the volume I was using it before last week. But, I’m glad to have options and do a bit of math so avoid a $50 bank wire fee or Western Union’s 7% premium from market exchange rates.</li>\r\n	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/eliyahu-wind/\">Oh Yeah</a></em> by Eliyahu Sills</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Where Do Guidebooks Fit In?</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>As I mentioned in the opening, my son and I are hitting Iceland in a couple of weeks for a 4-day weekend. We’ve never been before, so I needed to figure out what to do and where to stay. Right about then, someone from what I used to know as Dorling Kindersley -- now shortened to DK -- pinged me about the February relaunch of <a href=\"http://www.dk.com/us/travel/\" target=\"_blank\">DK’s Eyewitness Travel Top 10 Guides</a> -- one of the first 10 is for Iceland. It started me thinking about where guidebooks fit in these days of in the world of apps (Yelp, Foursquare, Untappd), podcasts (Amateur Traveler, Indie Travel Podcast), websites (TripAdvisor), newspaper articles (NYTimes’ <a href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/22/travel/36-hours-in-reykjavik.html\" target=\"_blank\">36 Hours in Reykjavik</a>) and friends’ social media posts on Facebook and Instagram.</li>\r\n	<li>When I want to torture my kids, I do the “when I was young…” thing. But going back to our honeymoon 25 years ago (this November -- need to get on that planning!), I cashed in a slug of British Airways miles to fly us first class to Pisa for a touring holiday in Tuscany. The only plans I had made were to rent a car (a Fiat Panda) and book our first night’s room (via Telex) in Lucca. We ran the rest of the vacation off of a set of Michelin guides -- the red one to find hotels and restaurants and the green one to figure out what to see. Between those and reading “A Room With A View”, we were set. We exchanged American Express travelers checks at the bank for lira, took pictures on Kodak and Fuji film, navigated using a paper maps… Whoops, got off track a bit there. I think my kids are somewhere screaming “Stop!”</li>\r\n	<li>I think like everybody, I start with a Google search -- “What to do in Iceland in March”, limit the results to the last 2 years and start clicking. Lots of articles from UK papers (I think because of Wow Air, the Icelandic version of Spirit or EasyJet, flying into London Gatwick) which I clip over to Evernote using their nifty little Chrome extension. Then I narrow the search down to specific interests -- like “Iceland craft beer” and a few more article get sync’d to Evernote. I stack up a bunch of facts -- a sort of <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointillism\" target=\"_blank\">pointillist </a>view of what to do in Iceland.</li>\r\n	<li>Every survey about how people go about travel planning will tell you that personal recommendations are the far and away the most important source of travel planning information. Which makes sense -- you know the person, how their interests, ways of travel align with yours. We have good friends that we’ll take restaurant recommendations from, but not hotels. We share the same tastes in interesting food, but they like to stay in hotels with nice pools. We’re tend to stay a bit more “closer to ground” -- choosing vacation rentals over the Westin resort.</li>\r\n	<li>And once people find that you travel a lot and to different/interesting places, you get hit up -- a lot -- for recommendations. Friend and long-time T/C listener Allan Marko curates a set of notes for his favorite European cities, places like Paris, that he regularly e-mails out. After a couple of visits to Spain, I’ve taken it to the next level of geekdom -- embedding my recommendations on a Google Map page and sending out the URL. For this trip, a friend from work sent me the itinerary she and her family did last summer. Not sure that she and her husband would be search out craft beer bars with 2 young kids in tow, but I did take her recommendation for the Hotel Geysir at the top of the Golden Circle route, and hitting the Blue Lagoon on the way back to the airport.</li>\r\n	<li>I like The NY Times’ 36 Hours and United Airlines’ 3 Perfect Days series. They’re focused on the long weekend getaway -- if you have a limited amount of time, here’s what to do. These are the sorts of articles we used to rip out of the Sunday travel section of the local newspaper or a travel magazine and stash in a travel folder. The Internet has shifted that behavior just a bit -- we now search for them when we right when we need them. Perhaps more for travel planning than for inspiration, but they serve the same purpose as the green Michelin guide did for our honeymoon -- a curated list of things you ought to see.</li>\r\n	<li>The DK Top 10 Iceland guide seems to fit into this “hit the highlights” mode -- top 10 highlights by region and by thing (top 10 churches, waterfalls, volcanoes, bars, cheap restaurants…), 2-day and 7-day itineraries, which is nice because the 36 Hours in Reykjavik article I pulled up was from 2013, maybe on the ragged edge of up-to-dateness. And the DK guide has everything nicely packaged, which I remember from the Dorling Kindersley books of old -- all the lists in one place wrapped in a sturdy cover that has fold-out maps in the front (Iceland) and the back (downtown Reykjavik) -- which is handy if you didn’t plan ahead and cache Google Maps data before leaving the hotel wi-fi bubble.</li>\r\n	<li>There’s another kind of guidebook that I’ll use, though I couldn’t find one for Iceland. They’re less about lists and more about stories -- think Bill Bryson’s “Notes from a Small Island” about the UK, or more recently, “Rice Noodle Fish” an Anthony Bourdain book by Matt Goulding (whatever that means) about Japan. I read those more before I travel than packing them in my bag. They’re about context/texture -- kinda like what “Room With A View” was for us about Florence 25 years ago -- that prepare rather than guide you, and maybe give you a bit more appreciation when you’re running through those Top 10 Highlights lists.</li>\r\n	<li>Maybe it comes down to the kind of reader you are -- are you someone that likes things more tangible than electronic. Do you like to flip pages rather than screens? The Kindle cannibalized a good-sized chunk of the demand for physical books, but didn’t replace it. Just like overall book market, recent numbers show the demand for physical guide books has stabilized albeit at a lower level. I sorta split the difference. I like paging through my Evernote virtual travel folder when I’m back at the room, but like to have a physical map and list when I’m out walking during the day. Maybe that physicality keeps me more engaged with where I am. Or at least looking up and forward, which should help keep me avoid that new travelers’ epidemic -- Death by GPS.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music --<em> <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/liquid-seventythree/\" target=\"_blank\">Is That Called Love</a> </em></em>by Liquid Zen</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>I Hate Shopping for Suitcases</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>While I poked at London Heathrow a couple of <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/10/11/podcast-117-random-thoughts-about-eggs-scotland-car-rentals/\" target=\"_blank\">episodes</a> back, it’s an article of faith among international travelers that North American airports pale in comparison to airports in Asia/Pac -- anyone flying from Beijing or Singapore to LAX needs a light sedative to cushion the shock -- and pretty much trail behind most European airports too. But JD Power, in their <a href=\"http://www.jdpower.com/press-releases/2015-north-america-airport-satisfaction-study\" target=\"_blank\">airport satisfaction survey</a> released last week, said that things are getting better. Not hugely better -- a 5-8% increase in their satisfaction score, but any improvement is good news.</li>\r\n	<li>Power <a href=\"http://www.jdpower.com/ratings/study/North-America-Airport-Satisfaction-Study/763ENG/Large-Airports/1617\">rated</a> large- and medium-sized North American airports -- 60 US airports and Toronto Pearson, Calgary, Montreal, and Vancouver. They surveyed travelers around 6 attributes of their airport experience. In order of importance, they are: the state of the airport facilities themselves, how easy it is to get to the airport, security, baggage claim, the check-in experience, and available food and shopping. A frequent traveler might re-shuffle the order -- maybe drop baggage claim and the check-in experience to the bottom because we rarely check a bag -- but I think it’s a good list.</li>\r\n	<li>And I think some of Power’s conclusions line up with things I’m seeing on the road. Like improvements in terminal facilities. In the last episode, I gave United a shout-out for the upgrade of their gate space in Boston Logan. I also think San Francisco’s complete rebuild of Terminal 2 is excellent and stands up to any airport in Asia or Europe.</li>\r\n	<li>Power found what is a pretty logical connection between satisfaction and the time you spend in lines. As I said earlier, I rarely deal with check-in lines, but I think the TSA’s rollout of Precheck has provided a quantum level improvement in the security experience -- though at times, it feels like its popularity is on the verge of overwhelming it and sliding back. But even for those in the regular lines, I’ve seen TSA folks working hard to re-balance lines -- especially at ORD.</li>\r\n	<li>Power split their ratings between large and medium airports. Their winning large airport is Portland, Oregon. I’ve done a bit of flying into PDX and while I wouldn’t have, unprompted, chosen it as the top large airport, I don’t argue with their conclusion. It’s a nice facility; easy mass transit (a TravelCommons’ fixation) via the MAX light rail; I disagree with its top marks for security check, but in how many other airports can I buy a growler of craft beer to go? The bottom four -- those I could’ve ticked off with missing a beat -- LaGuardia, Newark, LAX, and O’Hare. Old terminals, awkward layouts, leaking roofs, lousy food. Interesting they’re also the major airports for the US’s largest cities.</li>\r\n	<li>The medium airport winner was a tie between Dallas’ downtown Love Field and Fort Myers’ Southwest Florida. This one, I dunno. I’ve used both of these airports a lot. Love has gone through a good sized facelift and I haven’t been through it since they finished, so I may be working off out-of-date impressions, but even though it’s close to downtown, it’s a pain to get to. Now Fort Myers is easy to get to -- and I love the short walk to the rental car facility -- but security screening can back way up and the food choice isn’t great. From my personal experience, I’d give top marks to Nashville. I mean, how can you go wrong with live music -- good live music -- as you’re walking down the terminal.</li>\r\n	<li>Power’s most obvious finding is that dissatisfied customers are very vocal. Those who rate overall satisfaction 1 (on a 10-point scale) make an average of 13 negative comments about their experience. Anyone who follows me on Twitter knows how true that is.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #120</li>\r\n	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/\">Podshow Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\r\n	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_119.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #120 — Where Do Guidebooks Fit In? I Hate Shopping for Suitcases','','inherit','closed','closed','','1598-revision-v1','','','2016-03-13 10:38:57','2016-03-13 15:38:57','',1598,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/13/1598-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1602,1,'2016-03-13 10:43:49','2016-03-13 15:43:49','Here\'s a little something to keep you entertained while you navigate the holiday airport lines. We talk about digital security on the road -- what\'s the right balance between hassle and hack? We also dig into JD Power\'s latest <a href=\"http://www.jdpower.com/press-releases/2015-north-america-airport-satisfaction-study\" target=\"_blank\">airport satisfaction survey</a>. They report a tick up in traveler experience and, for the most part, I think they have it right. We also cover Spirit Airlines\' growth and the planned expansion of US immigration pre-clearance. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_120.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/238595273\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #120:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, after a much longer-than-intended break. Looking back at the Google Docs revision history for this episode, I started it on Feb 2, so I had the best of intentions. But I’ve been traveling almost non-stop since then. At which point you might reasonably say “But you have all that time in airports and hotels to write” -- which should be the case, but I find that I have to remove all possible distractions before I can write. Hence my lack of a journalism career.</li>\r\n	<li>So instead, I keep jotting down ideas in Evernote, feeling like I’m making progress, but not ever buckling down to actually write an episode. Until last Weds, when Dan Gradwohl sent me an e-mail with the subject line “Mark, where’s the next TravelCommons?”, asking in a very nice way -- when are you getting off your duff? I snarled back at Dan a bit -- more at frustration with myself than anything he wrote. But it got the intended result. So, I dedicate this episode to Dan.</li>\r\n	<li>The travel that got in the way wasn’t anything exotic -- just the usual bouncing around -- New Orleans, Vegas, Atlanta, Boston, New Jersey. But it was the tail end of 7 weeks of straight travel -- which is right about the time I hit my fun quotient. My patience dives and my bitch tweeting climbs. Of course, the fact that my American Airlines flights were hitting a 50% on-time rate didn’t help. I think I finally tipped over when I found my EWR-ORD flight was an ancient AA MD-80. Trying to wedge my bag long ways into the short overhead bin on the AB side was a complete throwback to when I first started traveling for business -- in 1985, on American Airlines, out of DFW, on MD-80s. 30 years later, I find myself on the same plane -- with less legroom and no peanuts.</li>\r\n	<li>I am gearing up for some fun travel in March, though. Trying out Iceland Air’s new Chicago-to-Reykjavik service with my son, and then trying out Iceland’s budget carrier Wow Air to meet up with my wife and daughter in Spain. I’m hoping it all works fine, but I’m preparing myself to having to call a couple of audibles.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/seldon-circles/\"><em>Making Circles</em></a> by the Seldon Plan</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Peter Zurich sent a great note, adding onto the digital security topic in<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/12/20/podcast-119-digital-security-on-the-road-us-airports-getting-better/\" target=\"_blank\"> the last episode</a>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>“Your suggestion to switch to cellular network as opposed to airport wifi is okay but it is becoming easy to obtain technology to set up a rogue cell site that will silently capture traffic -- your data will be caught and you will be none the wiser.</li>\r\n	<li>“Thus, in my opinion, it is still very important to only use HTPS encrypted web sites and I would still add on the VPN if you have one available. Bottom line when using any website where you need your password to access sensitive information, make sure the computer is trusted (no public access/borrowed/loaner computers) and make sure the website is HTTPS. If using Outlook or other applications than the web browser you should be on your company\'s VPN.</li>\r\n	<li>“Second thing, people should be aware that tearing a 2-D barcode in half doesn\'t necessarily render it undecipherable. 2D barcodes have a configurable level of redundancy built-in so that even if part (or possibly most) of the barcode is missing/unreadable it can still be decoded. My personal policy is once we have confirmed our FF miles have posted, the BP\'s go in the shredder.”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>Peter, thanks for these. Last week’s <a href=\"http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/columnist/2016/02/24/got-hacked-my-mac-while-writing-story/80844720/\" target=\"_blank\">story </a>about the USA Today columnist whose e-mail was hacked while he used Gogo’s WiFi service on an American Airlines flight demonstrates again the potential dangers of using public WiFi. It takes a bit of spelunking through the columnist’s Twitter feed to figure out how that happened -- he was using an Earthlink e-mail service that didn’t encrypt traffic back to the mail server. Technical listeners would be right in saying “Well, there you go. What did you expect doing plain-text comms over public WiFi?” Indeed, when we talked about this in the last episode, I specifically called out the need to encrypt e-mail protocols -- POP, IMAP, SMTP -- over SSL. But that’s not the default configuration for many e-mail clients, including Outlook and, the last time I checked, the iPhone mail client. You have to go poking around in the settings, changing ports. I know how to do it -- but it’s nothing my wife would. Building on Peter’s suggestion, probably the easiest thing to do is use a web e-mail client like GMail over https -- when the green lock shows in the browser address bar. Next easiest is to set up your e-mail client to encrypt its traffic. Most e-mail providers have instructions on their sites. Perhaps the fiddliest, but the most secure is to install and use a VPN. If your company device comes with one already installed, then it’s easy -- though remember VPN web traffic is usually tracked just like it is in your office. If it’s your own device, then you’re probably going to want to buy a service. They’re not overly expensive -- $3-8/month. I use ExpressVPN, which is on the pricer side, but their VPN client is easy to install and use. And it has the side benefit of letting me watch NCAA March Madness video streams when I’m overseas. In March, I’ll be trying out a hardware-based VPN solution -- <a href=\"http://www.homingsystems.com/alwayshome-duo\" target=\"_blank\">AlwaysHome</a>, which sets up a VPN with matching USB dongles. Could be an easier solution. I’ll report back in the next episode.</li>\r\n	<li>Dan Gradwohl, before he poked me into action, had a “Hmm…” reaction to a comment in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/12/20/podcast-119-digital-security-on-the-road-us-airports-getting-better/\" target=\"_blank\">the last episode</a> about Spirit Airlines passing Delta as the 3rd largest at Chicago O’Hare. Looking at January schedules, he found Spirit had 29 daily departures to Delta’s 52. Would seem like Delta is still larger. However, the Crain’s Chicago article said Spirit carried more passengers than Delta -- which could be since some of Delta’s 52 departures were co-branded smaller regional jets. This is not a new thing. For a long time, O’Hare continued to claim the title of World’s Busiest Airport based on <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_world%27s_busiest_airports_by_aircraft_movements#2014_statistics\" target=\"_blank\">number of takeoffs/landings</a> (which it reclaimed in 2014) after Atlanta Hartsfield passed it on total passengers handled. Using that <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_world%27s_busiest_airports_by_passenger_traffic#2015_statistics\" target=\"_blank\">stat</a>, ORD is the 4th largest after ATL, Beijing, and Dubai. All that being said, Spirit is ramping up hard in the Chicago market, hiring new flight attendants ahead of plane deliveries, and pushing the city for more gate space. And Delta and American are rolling out new Economy Basic fares to fight them. Might not be too long before Spirit passes Delta on both measures.</li>\r\n	<li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/10/11/podcast-117-random-thoughts-about-eggs-scotland-car-rentals/\" target=\"_blank\">Episode #117</a>, I talked -- raved, actually -- about a FinTech company called <a href=\"https://revolut.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Revolut</a>. It offered a convenient and low-cost way to exchange, transfer, and access money internationally. I started using it last September when my daughter started up at University of St Andrews. I used it to convert and push money to her UK bank account, and used the Revolut chip-&amp;-pin debit card to avoid the hassle of US chip-&amp;-signature credit cards. Last week, though, the low-cost component of their value prop disappeared -- at least for US customers, when they added a 3% fee when you added money/”topped up” your Revolut account with a US debit card. They said they were passing through the fees they were being charged, a claim I don’t doubt. However, it started me looking for cheaper foreign exchange options. Which lead me down quite the rabbit hole -- sorting through the differences in transaction costs and exchange rates quickly led to an Excel modelling session, which is just how I want to spend a Saturday morning. If you look at <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">my Twitter feed</a>, there’s a string of tweets walking through my analysis, but for my case, TransferWise, another UK FinTech startup, and Xoom, owned by PayPal, were much cheaper than Revolut after considering their new 3% fee. I expect that I’ll still use the Revolut card a bit when in Europe -- at self-service check-outs or gas pumps -- but nowhere near the volume I was using it before last week. But, I’m glad to have options and do a bit of math so avoid a $50 bank wire fee or Western Union’s 7% premium from market exchange rates.</li>\r\n	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/eliyahu-wind/\">Oh Yeah</a></em> by Eliyahu Sills</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Where Do Guidebooks Fit In?</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>As I mentioned in the opening, my son and I are hitting Iceland in a couple of weeks for a 4-day weekend. We’ve never been before, so I needed to figure out what to do and where to stay. Right about then, someone from what I used to know as Dorling Kindersley -- now shortened to DK -- pinged me about the February relaunch of <a href=\"http://www.dk.com/us/travel/\" target=\"_blank\">DK’s Eyewitness Travel Top 10 Guides</a> -- one of the first 10 is for Iceland. It started me thinking about where guidebooks fit in these days of in the world of apps (Yelp, Foursquare, Untappd), podcasts (Amateur Traveler, Indie Travel Podcast), websites (TripAdvisor), newspaper articles (NYTimes’ <a href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/22/travel/36-hours-in-reykjavik.html\" target=\"_blank\">36 Hours in Reykjavik</a>) and friends’ social media posts on Facebook and Instagram.</li>\r\n	<li>When I want to torture my kids, I do the “when I was young…” thing. But going back to our honeymoon 25 years ago (this November -- need to get on that planning!), I cashed in a slug of British Airways miles to fly us first class to Pisa for a touring holiday in Tuscany. The only plans I had made were to rent a car (a Fiat Panda) and book our first night’s room (via Telex) in Lucca. We ran the rest of the vacation off of a set of Michelin guides -- the red one to find hotels and restaurants and the green one to figure out what to see. Between those and reading “A Room With A View”, we were set. We exchanged American Express travelers checks at the bank for lira, took pictures on Kodak and Fuji film, navigated using a paper maps… Whoops, got off track a bit there. I think my kids are somewhere screaming “Stop!”</li>\r\n	<li>I think like everybody, I start with a Google search -- “What to do in Iceland in March”, limit the results to the last 2 years and start clicking. Lots of articles from UK papers (I think because of Wow Air, the Icelandic version of Spirit or EasyJet, flying into London Gatwick) which I clip over to Evernote using their nifty little Chrome extension. Then I narrow the search down to specific interests -- like “Iceland craft beer” and a few more article get sync’d to Evernote. I stack up a bunch of facts -- a sort of <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointillism\" target=\"_blank\">pointillist </a>view of what to do in Iceland.</li>\r\n	<li>Every survey about how people go about travel planning will tell you that personal recommendations are the far and away the most important source of travel planning information. Which makes sense -- you know the person, how their interests, ways of travel align with yours. We have good friends that we’ll take restaurant recommendations from, but not hotels. We share the same tastes in interesting food, but they like to stay in hotels with nice pools. We’re tend to stay a bit more “closer to ground” -- choosing vacation rentals over the Westin resort.</li>\r\n	<li>And once people find that you travel a lot and to different/interesting places, you get hit up -- a lot -- for recommendations. Friend and long-time T/C listener Allan Marko curates a set of notes for his favorite European cities, places like Paris, that he regularly e-mails out. After a couple of visits to Spain, I’ve taken it to the next level of geekdom -- embedding my recommendations on a Google Map page and sending out the URL. For this trip, a friend from work sent me the itinerary she and her family did last summer. Not sure that she and her husband would be search out craft beer bars with 2 young kids in tow, but I did take her recommendation for the Hotel Geysir at the top of the Golden Circle route, and hitting the Blue Lagoon on the way back to the airport.</li>\r\n	<li>I like The NY Times’ 36 Hours and United Airlines’ 3 Perfect Days series. They’re focused on the long weekend getaway -- if you have a limited amount of time, here’s what to do. These are the sorts of articles we used to rip out of the Sunday travel section of the local newspaper or a travel magazine and stash in a travel folder. The Internet has shifted that behavior just a bit -- we now search for them when we right when we need them. Perhaps more for travel planning than for inspiration, but they serve the same purpose as the green Michelin guide did for our honeymoon -- a curated list of things you ought to see.</li>\r\n	<li>The DK Top 10 Iceland guide seems to fit into this “hit the highlights” mode -- top 10 highlights by region and by thing (top 10 churches, waterfalls, volcanoes, bars, cheap restaurants…), 2-day and 7-day itineraries, which is nice because the 36 Hours in Reykjavik article I pulled up was from 2013, maybe on the ragged edge of up-to-dateness. And the DK guide has everything nicely packaged, which I remember from the Dorling Kindersley books of old -- all the lists in one place wrapped in a sturdy cover that has fold-out maps in the front (Iceland) and the back (downtown Reykjavik) -- which is handy if you didn’t plan ahead and cache Google Maps data before leaving the hotel wi-fi bubble.</li>\r\n	<li>There’s another kind of guidebook that I’ll use, though I couldn’t find one for Iceland. They’re less about lists and more about stories -- think Bill Bryson’s “Notes from a Small Island” about the UK, or more recently, “Rice Noodle Fish” an Anthony Bourdain book by Matt Goulding (whatever that means) about Japan. I read those more before I travel than packing them in my bag. They’re about context/texture -- kinda like what “Room With A View” was for us about Florence 25 years ago -- that prepare rather than guide you, and maybe give you a bit more appreciation when you’re running through those Top 10 Highlights lists.</li>\r\n	<li>Maybe it comes down to the kind of reader you are -- are you someone that likes things more tangible than electronic. Do you like to flip pages rather than screens? The Kindle cannibalized a good-sized chunk of the demand for physical books, but didn’t replace it. Just like overall book market, recent numbers show the demand for physical guide books has stabilized albeit at a lower level. I sorta split the difference. I like paging through my Evernote virtual travel folder when I’m back at the room, but like to have a physical map and list when I’m out walking during the day. Maybe that physicality keeps me more engaged with where I am. Or at least looking up and forward, which should help keep me avoid that new travelers’ epidemic -- Death by GPS.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music --<em> <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/liquid-seventythree/\" target=\"_blank\">Is That Called Love</a> </em></em>by Liquid Zen</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>I Hate Shopping for Suitcases</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>I’ve been traveling for a few months now with the <a href=\"http://bluesmart.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Bluesmart </a>suitcase. I’ve mentioned it in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/08/26/podcast-116-traveling-thru-japan-luggage-trends/\" target=\"_blank\">a past episode</a> when I pre-ordered it through their Indiegogo campaign. And now that they’re shipping, they’re making a lot of Top Traveler Gadget lists.</li>\r\n	<li>It claims to be the first piece of “smart” luggage to hit the market. It pairs with my iPhone through Bluetooth. It automatically locks when I step away from it and then unlocks itself when I return. It has a built-in battery to power itself and charge personal electronics through a couple of USB ports. It also periodically sends out its location when I can then check through the iPhone app. And it has a cool front light that glows blue when it’s paired with my phone.</li>\r\n	<li>Aside from all the electronics, it’s a hard-shell wheelie bag with nice-sized wheels that roll easily -- sometimes too easily. It fits perfectly into American’s and United’s luggage sizers -- at least the ones in Boston Logan airport. (Some blogger who reviewed the bag raised a bit of a ruckus saying that the bag dimensions on the website were too big for carry-on. I guess he doesn’t travel enough to go an airport and check it out himself). The iPhone app is getting better -- Bluesmart is doing a nice job of reving the app frequently to stomp bugs, though the location alerts -- “You’re leaving me behind” are still a bit wonky.</li>\r\n	<li>All in all, it’s a nice enough bag. I had been thinking about getting something a bit smaller for 1-2 night trips and this fits the bill. I’m kinda “meh” on all the electronics. The large battery is fine, but I already carry a recharger in my backpack that will top up my iPhone or tablet a couple of times -- good enough and more accessible in-flight. The location functionality seems to work only when I press the button to “wake up” the bag -- which means I’m right beside my bag and know its location. And since it’s the perfect carry-on size, it’s usually right above me in the plane cabin. So it’s a nice enough hard-shell wheelie bag with a couple of bells and whistles that don’t necessarily wow me.</li>\r\n	<li>Which shouldn’t be interpreted as a knock against Bluesmart. I’m sure there are a number of travelers who love every one of those bells and whistles. It’s not so much a criticism about Bluesmart as it is how personal and idiosyncratic frequent travelers are about suitcases. It’s gotta fit your packing strategies, which are also very idiosyncratic. Some people love compartments to help them structure their packing. Me? I’m all about the flexibility of a single open space -- I build my own structure with shoes and different kinds of clothes depending on the trip. And even though I see more and more hard-shell bags -- and now own one, I’m not completely sold on it. I still like the ability to bulge when I need to. And the two- vs. four-wheel thing. Pushing a 4-wheel through the airport seems easier on my wrist, but sometimes they roll too easily and won’t stay put. It’s the reason I’ve been walking around with a ripped backpack for 4 months -- I really hate shopping for travel bags. And am very happy that leather wallets last a really long time.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #120</li>\r\n	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/\">Podshow Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\r\n	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_119.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #120 — Where Do Guidebooks Fit In? I Hate Shopping for Suitcases','','inherit','closed','closed','','1598-revision-v1','','','2016-03-13 10:43:49','2016-03-13 15:43:49','',1598,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/13/1598-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1603,1,'2016-03-13 10:51:58','2016-03-13 15:51:58','','IMG_0266-01','Just a Few Guidebooks....','inherit','open','closed','','img_0266-01','','','2016-03-13 10:52:36','2016-03-13 15:52:36','',1598,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/IMG_0266-01.jpeg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(1604,1,'2016-03-13 10:52:56','2016-03-13 15:52:56','[caption id=\"attachment_1603\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/IMG_0266-01.jpeg\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-1603\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1603\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/IMG_0266-01-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"Just a Few Guidebooks....\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Just a Few Guidebooks....[/caption]\r\n\r\nHere\'s a little something to keep you entertained while you navigate the holiday airport lines. We talk about digital security on the road -- what\'s the right balance between hassle and hack? We also dig into JD Power\'s latest <a href=\"http://www.jdpower.com/press-releases/2015-north-america-airport-satisfaction-study\" target=\"_blank\">airport satisfaction survey</a>. They report a tick up in traveler experience and, for the most part, I think they have it right. We also cover Spirit Airlines\' growth and the planned expansion of US immigration pre-clearance. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_120.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/238595273\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #120:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, after a much longer-than-intended break. Looking back at the Google Docs revision history for this episode, I started it on Feb 2, so I had the best of intentions. But I’ve been traveling almost non-stop since then. At which point you might reasonably say “But you have all that time in airports and hotels to write” -- which should be the case, but I find that I have to remove all possible distractions before I can write. Hence my lack of a journalism career.</li>\r\n	<li>So instead, I keep jotting down ideas in Evernote, feeling like I’m making progress, but not ever buckling down to actually write an episode. Until last Weds, when Dan Gradwohl sent me an e-mail with the subject line “Mark, where’s the next TravelCommons?”, asking in a very nice way -- when are you getting off your duff? I snarled back at Dan a bit -- more at frustration with myself than anything he wrote. But it got the intended result. So, I dedicate this episode to Dan.</li>\r\n	<li>The travel that got in the way wasn’t anything exotic -- just the usual bouncing around -- New Orleans, Vegas, Atlanta, Boston, New Jersey. But it was the tail end of 7 weeks of straight travel -- which is right about the time I hit my fun quotient. My patience dives and my bitch tweeting climbs. Of course, the fact that my American Airlines flights were hitting a 50% on-time rate didn’t help. I think I finally tipped over when I found my EWR-ORD flight was an ancient AA MD-80. Trying to wedge my bag long ways into the short overhead bin on the AB side was a complete throwback to when I first started traveling for business -- in 1985, on American Airlines, out of DFW, on MD-80s. 30 years later, I find myself on the same plane -- with less legroom and no peanuts.</li>\r\n	<li>I am gearing up for some fun travel in March, though. Trying out Iceland Air’s new Chicago-to-Reykjavik service with my son, and then trying out Iceland’s budget carrier Wow Air to meet up with my wife and daughter in Spain. I’m hoping it all works fine, but I’m preparing myself to having to call a couple of audibles.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/seldon-circles/\"><em>Making Circles</em></a> by the Seldon Plan</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Peter Zurich sent a great note, adding onto the digital security topic in<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/12/20/podcast-119-digital-security-on-the-road-us-airports-getting-better/\" target=\"_blank\"> the last episode</a>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>“Your suggestion to switch to cellular network as opposed to airport wifi is okay but it is becoming easy to obtain technology to set up a rogue cell site that will silently capture traffic -- your data will be caught and you will be none the wiser.</li>\r\n	<li>“Thus, in my opinion, it is still very important to only use HTPS encrypted web sites and I would still add on the VPN if you have one available. Bottom line when using any website where you need your password to access sensitive information, make sure the computer is trusted (no public access/borrowed/loaner computers) and make sure the website is HTTPS. If using Outlook or other applications than the web browser you should be on your company\'s VPN.</li>\r\n	<li>“Second thing, people should be aware that tearing a 2-D barcode in half doesn\'t necessarily render it undecipherable. 2D barcodes have a configurable level of redundancy built-in so that even if part (or possibly most) of the barcode is missing/unreadable it can still be decoded. My personal policy is once we have confirmed our FF miles have posted, the BP\'s go in the shredder.”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>Peter, thanks for these. Last week’s <a href=\"http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/columnist/2016/02/24/got-hacked-my-mac-while-writing-story/80844720/\" target=\"_blank\">story </a>about the USA Today columnist whose e-mail was hacked while he used Gogo’s WiFi service on an American Airlines flight demonstrates again the potential dangers of using public WiFi. It takes a bit of spelunking through the columnist’s Twitter feed to figure out how that happened -- he was using an Earthlink e-mail service that didn’t encrypt traffic back to the mail server. Technical listeners would be right in saying “Well, there you go. What did you expect doing plain-text comms over public WiFi?” Indeed, when we talked about this in the last episode, I specifically called out the need to encrypt e-mail protocols -- POP, IMAP, SMTP -- over SSL. But that’s not the default configuration for many e-mail clients, including Outlook and, the last time I checked, the iPhone mail client. You have to go poking around in the settings, changing ports. I know how to do it -- but it’s nothing my wife would. Building on Peter’s suggestion, probably the easiest thing to do is use a web e-mail client like GMail over https -- when the green lock shows in the browser address bar. Next easiest is to set up your e-mail client to encrypt its traffic. Most e-mail providers have instructions on their sites. Perhaps the fiddliest, but the most secure is to install and use a VPN. If your company device comes with one already installed, then it’s easy -- though remember VPN web traffic is usually tracked just like it is in your office. If it’s your own device, then you’re probably going to want to buy a service. They’re not overly expensive -- $3-8/month. I use ExpressVPN, which is on the pricer side, but their VPN client is easy to install and use. And it has the side benefit of letting me watch NCAA March Madness video streams when I’m overseas. In March, I’ll be trying out a hardware-based VPN solution -- <a href=\"http://www.homingsystems.com/alwayshome-duo\" target=\"_blank\">AlwaysHome</a>, which sets up a VPN with matching USB dongles. Could be an easier solution. I’ll report back in the next episode.</li>\r\n	<li>Dan Gradwohl, before he poked me into action, had a “Hmm…” reaction to a comment in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/12/20/podcast-119-digital-security-on-the-road-us-airports-getting-better/\" target=\"_blank\">the last episode</a> about Spirit Airlines passing Delta as the 3rd largest at Chicago O’Hare. Looking at January schedules, he found Spirit had 29 daily departures to Delta’s 52. Would seem like Delta is still larger. However, the Crain’s Chicago article said Spirit carried more passengers than Delta -- which could be since some of Delta’s 52 departures were co-branded smaller regional jets. This is not a new thing. For a long time, O’Hare continued to claim the title of World’s Busiest Airport based on <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_world%27s_busiest_airports_by_aircraft_movements#2014_statistics\" target=\"_blank\">number of takeoffs/landings</a> (which it reclaimed in 2014) after Atlanta Hartsfield passed it on total passengers handled. Using that <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_world%27s_busiest_airports_by_passenger_traffic#2015_statistics\" target=\"_blank\">stat</a>, ORD is the 4th largest after ATL, Beijing, and Dubai. All that being said, Spirit is ramping up hard in the Chicago market, hiring new flight attendants ahead of plane deliveries, and pushing the city for more gate space. And Delta and American are rolling out new Economy Basic fares to fight them. Might not be too long before Spirit passes Delta on both measures.</li>\r\n	<li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/10/11/podcast-117-random-thoughts-about-eggs-scotland-car-rentals/\" target=\"_blank\">Episode #117</a>, I talked -- raved, actually -- about a FinTech company called <a href=\"https://revolut.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Revolut</a>. It offered a convenient and low-cost way to exchange, transfer, and access money internationally. I started using it last September when my daughter started up at University of St Andrews. I used it to convert and push money to her UK bank account, and used the Revolut chip-&amp;-pin debit card to avoid the hassle of US chip-&amp;-signature credit cards. Last week, though, the low-cost component of their value prop disappeared -- at least for US customers, when they added a 3% fee when you added money/”topped up” your Revolut account with a US debit card. They said they were passing through the fees they were being charged, a claim I don’t doubt. However, it started me looking for cheaper foreign exchange options. Which lead me down quite the rabbit hole -- sorting through the differences in transaction costs and exchange rates quickly led to an Excel modelling session, which is just how I want to spend a Saturday morning. If you look at <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">my Twitter feed</a>, there’s a string of tweets walking through my analysis, but for my case, TransferWise, another UK FinTech startup, and Xoom, owned by PayPal, were much cheaper than Revolut after considering their new 3% fee. I expect that I’ll still use the Revolut card a bit when in Europe -- at self-service check-outs or gas pumps -- but nowhere near the volume I was using it before last week. But, I’m glad to have options and do a bit of math so avoid a $50 bank wire fee or Western Union’s 7% premium from market exchange rates.</li>\r\n	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/eliyahu-wind/\">Oh Yeah</a></em> by Eliyahu Sills</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Where Do Guidebooks Fit In?</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>As I mentioned in the opening, my son and I are hitting Iceland in a couple of weeks for a 4-day weekend. We’ve never been before, so I needed to figure out what to do and where to stay. Right about then, someone from what I used to know as Dorling Kindersley -- now shortened to DK -- pinged me about the February relaunch of <a href=\"http://www.dk.com/us/travel/\" target=\"_blank\">DK’s Eyewitness Travel Top 10 Guides</a> -- one of the first 10 is for Iceland. It started me thinking about where guidebooks fit in these days of in the world of apps (Yelp, Foursquare, Untappd), podcasts (Amateur Traveler, Indie Travel Podcast), websites (TripAdvisor), newspaper articles (NYTimes’ <a href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/22/travel/36-hours-in-reykjavik.html\" target=\"_blank\">36 Hours in Reykjavik</a>) and friends’ social media posts on Facebook and Instagram.</li>\r\n	<li>When I want to torture my kids, I do the “when I was young…” thing. But going back to our honeymoon 25 years ago (this November -- need to get on that planning!), I cashed in a slug of British Airways miles to fly us first class to Pisa for a touring holiday in Tuscany. The only plans I had made were to rent a car (a Fiat Panda) and book our first night’s room (via Telex) in Lucca. We ran the rest of the vacation off of a set of Michelin guides -- the red one to find hotels and restaurants and the green one to figure out what to see. Between those and reading “A Room With A View”, we were set. We exchanged American Express travelers checks at the bank for lira, took pictures on Kodak and Fuji film, navigated using a paper maps… Whoops, got off track a bit there. I think my kids are somewhere screaming “Stop!”</li>\r\n	<li>I think like everybody, I start with a Google search -- “What to do in Iceland in March”, limit the results to the last 2 years and start clicking. Lots of articles from UK papers (I think because of Wow Air, the Icelandic version of Spirit or EasyJet, flying into London Gatwick) which I clip over to Evernote using their nifty little Chrome extension. Then I narrow the search down to specific interests -- like “Iceland craft beer” and a few more article get sync’d to Evernote. I stack up a bunch of facts -- a sort of <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointillism\" target=\"_blank\">pointillist </a>view of what to do in Iceland.</li>\r\n	<li>Every survey about how people go about travel planning will tell you that personal recommendations are the far and away the most important source of travel planning information. Which makes sense -- you know the person, how their interests, ways of travel align with yours. We have good friends that we’ll take restaurant recommendations from, but not hotels. We share the same tastes in interesting food, but they like to stay in hotels with nice pools. We’re tend to stay a bit more “closer to ground” -- choosing vacation rentals over the Westin resort.</li>\r\n	<li>And once people find that you travel a lot and to different/interesting places, you get hit up -- a lot -- for recommendations. Friend and long-time T/C listener Allan Marko curates a set of notes for his favorite European cities, places like Paris, that he regularly e-mails out. After a couple of visits to Spain, I’ve taken it to the next level of geekdom -- embedding my recommendations on a Google Map page and sending out the URL. For this trip, a friend from work sent me the itinerary she and her family did last summer. Not sure that she and her husband would be search out craft beer bars with 2 young kids in tow, but I did take her recommendation for the Hotel Geysir at the top of the Golden Circle route, and hitting the Blue Lagoon on the way back to the airport.</li>\r\n	<li>I like The NY Times’ 36 Hours and United Airlines’ 3 Perfect Days series. They’re focused on the long weekend getaway -- if you have a limited amount of time, here’s what to do. These are the sorts of articles we used to rip out of the Sunday travel section of the local newspaper or a travel magazine and stash in a travel folder. The Internet has shifted that behavior just a bit -- we now search for them when we right when we need them. Perhaps more for travel planning than for inspiration, but they serve the same purpose as the green Michelin guide did for our honeymoon -- a curated list of things you ought to see.</li>\r\n	<li>The DK Top 10 Iceland guide seems to fit into this “hit the highlights” mode -- top 10 highlights by region and by thing (top 10 churches, waterfalls, volcanoes, bars, cheap restaurants…), 2-day and 7-day itineraries, which is nice because the 36 Hours in Reykjavik article I pulled up was from 2013, maybe on the ragged edge of up-to-dateness. And the DK guide has everything nicely packaged, which I remember from the Dorling Kindersley books of old -- all the lists in one place wrapped in a sturdy cover that has fold-out maps in the front (Iceland) and the back (downtown Reykjavik) -- which is handy if you didn’t plan ahead and cache Google Maps data before leaving the hotel wi-fi bubble.</li>\r\n	<li>There’s another kind of guidebook that I’ll use, though I couldn’t find one for Iceland. They’re less about lists and more about stories -- think Bill Bryson’s “Notes from a Small Island” about the UK, or more recently, “Rice Noodle Fish” an Anthony Bourdain book by Matt Goulding (whatever that means) about Japan. I read those more before I travel than packing them in my bag. They’re about context/texture -- kinda like what “Room With A View” was for us about Florence 25 years ago -- that prepare rather than guide you, and maybe give you a bit more appreciation when you’re running through those Top 10 Highlights lists.</li>\r\n	<li>Maybe it comes down to the kind of reader you are -- are you someone that likes things more tangible than electronic. Do you like to flip pages rather than screens? The Kindle cannibalized a good-sized chunk of the demand for physical books, but didn’t replace it. Just like overall book market, recent numbers show the demand for physical guide books has stabilized albeit at a lower level. I sorta split the difference. I like paging through my Evernote virtual travel folder when I’m back at the room, but like to have a physical map and list when I’m out walking during the day. Maybe that physicality keeps me more engaged with where I am. Or at least looking up and forward, which should help keep me avoid that new travelers’ epidemic -- Death by GPS.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music --<em> <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/liquid-seventythree/\" target=\"_blank\">Is That Called Love</a> </em></em>by Liquid Zen</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>I Hate Shopping for Suitcases</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>I’ve been traveling for a few months now with the <a href=\"http://bluesmart.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Bluesmart </a>suitcase. I’ve mentioned it in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/08/26/podcast-116-traveling-thru-japan-luggage-trends/\" target=\"_blank\">a past episode</a> when I pre-ordered it through their Indiegogo campaign. And now that they’re shipping, they’re making a lot of Top Traveler Gadget lists.</li>\r\n	<li>It claims to be the first piece of “smart” luggage to hit the market. It pairs with my iPhone through Bluetooth. It automatically locks when I step away from it and then unlocks itself when I return. It has a built-in battery to power itself and charge personal electronics through a couple of USB ports. It also periodically sends out its location when I can then check through the iPhone app. And it has a cool front light that glows blue when it’s paired with my phone.</li>\r\n	<li>Aside from all the electronics, it’s a hard-shell wheelie bag with nice-sized wheels that roll easily -- sometimes too easily. It fits perfectly into American’s and United’s luggage sizers -- at least the ones in Boston Logan airport. (Some blogger who reviewed the bag raised a bit of a ruckus saying that the bag dimensions on the website were too big for carry-on. I guess he doesn’t travel enough to go an airport and check it out himself). The iPhone app is getting better -- Bluesmart is doing a nice job of reving the app frequently to stomp bugs, though the location alerts -- “You’re leaving me behind” are still a bit wonky.</li>\r\n	<li>All in all, it’s a nice enough bag. I had been thinking about getting something a bit smaller for 1-2 night trips and this fits the bill. I’m kinda “meh” on all the electronics. The large battery is fine, but I already carry a recharger in my backpack that will top up my iPhone or tablet a couple of times -- good enough and more accessible in-flight. The location functionality seems to work only when I press the button to “wake up” the bag -- which means I’m right beside my bag and know its location. And since it’s the perfect carry-on size, it’s usually right above me in the plane cabin. So it’s a nice enough hard-shell wheelie bag with a couple of bells and whistles that don’t necessarily wow me.</li>\r\n	<li>Which shouldn’t be interpreted as a knock against Bluesmart. I’m sure there are a number of travelers who love every one of those bells and whistles. It’s not so much a criticism about Bluesmart as it is how personal and idiosyncratic frequent travelers are about suitcases. It’s gotta fit your packing strategies, which are also very idiosyncratic. Some people love compartments to help them structure their packing. Me? I’m all about the flexibility of a single open space -- I build my own structure with shoes and different kinds of clothes depending on the trip. And even though I see more and more hard-shell bags -- and now own one, I’m not completely sold on it. I still like the ability to bulge when I need to. And the two- vs. four-wheel thing. Pushing a 4-wheel through the airport seems easier on my wrist, but sometimes they roll too easily and won’t stay put. It’s the reason I’ve been walking around with a ripped backpack for 4 months -- I really hate shopping for travel bags. And am very happy that leather wallets last a really long time.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #120</li>\r\n	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/\">Podshow Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\r\n	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_119.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #120 — Where Do Guidebooks Fit In? I Hate Shopping for Suitcases','','inherit','closed','closed','','1598-revision-v1','','','2016-03-13 10:52:56','2016-03-13 15:52:56','',1598,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/13/1598-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1605,1,'2016-03-13 10:55:24','2016-03-13 15:55:24','[caption id=\"attachment_1433\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/2014_01_19_12_55.jpeg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1433\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/2014_01_19_12_55-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"Is Our Plane Behind That?\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Is Our Plane Behind That?[/caption]\r\n\r\nRecorded at the JW Marriott in New Orleans together with a GoPro <a title=\"Podcast #114 Uncut — The LoFi Video Version\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/03/20/podcast-114-uncut-the-lofi-video-version/\">video</a> capturing all the unedited bits. We go deep in a comparison of public transit and drive times to US airports, shed a tear for SkyMall magazine, and marvel at the stack of lost Android tablets at American Airlines\' ORD lost-and-found. We talk about what has been an awful start to the travel year in the US east of the Rocky Mountains, and wrap up with some observations about how hotel perks have become more important than points. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_114.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_114.mp3\"]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #114:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Which made me happy to head to ORD when I was flying south -- mostly to New Orleans, but the flight to Phoenix made me really smile. I think it was 15 degrees when I left Chicago and about 70 degrees when I landed. I spent at much time as possible outside, trying to resolve what I figured had to be a Vitamin D deficiency. I did get a chuckle on my last night there. I was sitting outside at a bar, must’ve been the low 60’s and they had the heat lamps on.</li>\r\n	<li>I also flew through Memphis this past month. The flight selection in and out of there just gets worse. That airport is becoming a ghost town since Delta dismantled the hub that Northwest had there. Indeed, they have a 2-year project to shrink the airport -- demolish half the A and C concourses, mothball what remains, and consolidate everyone into the B concourse. Kinda surprising when some airports are at capacity with people sprawling on the floor, there are other airports with concourses that could double for bowling alleys. How much does the economy have to improve for it make sense for the airlines to start adding back some capacity?</li>\r\n	<li>This coming week has me tempting the travel gods, hoping for better weather, with two up-and-backs to the East Coast -- a day trip to Newark and an overnight to Philadelphia. Perhaps a precautionary sacrifice is in order, but what? Maybe a sacrificial offering -- I dowse my travel size tube of Crest toothpaste with the extra bottle of Dewar’s</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>10p Mix</em> by <a href=\"http://www.last.fm/music/Amplifico\">amplifico</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Spelunking through my Twitter feed…</li>\r\n	<li>Another thing that made me smile on my flight down to PHX last month wasn’t that I scored a 1st Class upgrade on American -- it was that the upgrade let me hear a woman ask, as she walks on the plane, to be reseated away from the plane’s WiFi access point because she’s allergic to WiFi.  Just when you think you’ve heard everything on a airplane… This seems absurd in just so many ways. Like, how did she make it through the terminal without going into anaphylactic shock? Run a WiFi analyzer app on your phone or tablet the next time you’re in an airport and you’ll see that we’re wading through a sea of WiFi signals. And what about the passengers sitting all around her -- because nobody remembers to shut off the WiFi on their laptops or tablets. And I guess she didn’t stop off at Starbucks on the way to ORD. As it was, the flight attendants just looked at one another -- like they (or anyone) would know exactly where the GoGo access point was located on a 737, and like they’d want to rejuggle seats on a 737 completely full of families heading out on Spring Break. They just mumbled “We’ll ask someone” and gently pushed her down the aisle.</li>\r\n	<li>Taking mass transit to and from the airport is a running theme (fixation?) here at TravelCommons, so I immediately clicked through a tweet from Nate Silver’s 538 blog that went geekily deep on that, <a href=\"http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/planes-trains-and-taxis-when-to-take-public-transit-from-the-airport/\">comparing </a>public transit and driving times from the airport to downtown for the 40 busiest US airports. Only in Minneapolis, Honolulu, and Chicago (both ORD and MDW) is public transit quicker than taking a cab. If open the range a bit -- saying anything within 5 minutes is a toss-up, the list gets a lot longer -- Washington Reagan, Atlanta, San Diego, San Francisco, Austin. Open it to 10 minutes, which could be worth it given the cost difference, brings in Boston, Charlotte, Seattle, San Francisco but from OAK this time, and New York’s JFK. A number of these work because they’re close-in airports -- Chicago Midway, Washington Reagan. Others because the highway traffic is so bad -- most notably O’Hare and JFK. The list is ranked by public transit time and for the top 15 -- plus JFK which is #30 -- public transit times are reasonable enough to make the cost-convenience trade-off compelling. Some of the airports below that line that I know -- New Orleans, Orange County Calif, Detroit -- I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a public transit sign in those place. PDX jumped out at me. I <a title=\"Podcast #103 — Hospitality is Personal; Tablets Everywhere\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2013/01/24/podcast-103-hospitality-is-personal-tablets-everywhere/\">talked </a>about taking that airport light rail in an earlier episode. It’s a nice service, but it takes a while -- it makes a lot of intermediate stops -- and so it doesn’t compare well to a cab ride that takes half the time. Of course the gold standard is London’s Heathrow Express  -- a 15-minute straight shot from Paddington Station vs. an hour cab ride. But that’s not a real apples-to-apples comparison -- a Heathrow Express ticket is £21.50 (over $30) vs. $5 for ORD or $7.50 for JFK. The better comparison might be the £5.70 ($8.50) ride on the Tube’s Piccadilly Line that takes 50-60 minutes, which would fit in at the bottom of the top 15 US list.</li>\r\n	<li>Waiting out an unbelievably long delay on a United ORD-DEN flight, I ran through all of my reading material -- electronic versions of the Wall Street Journal and NY Times, physical version of the Chicago Tribune, my Feedly newsreader stream, multiple refreshes of Twitter -- and so had to dive into the seatback pocket, the emptiness of which reminded me of SkyMall magazine’s bankruptcy at the end of January. SkyMall was always good for at least 15 minutes of entertainment, along the lines of “who in the world would buy that?” -- the zombie statue crawling out of your garden, the kickboard suitcase, the NFL wine shoe holder…. until last Christmas, when a friend bought my present out of SkyMall -- a 6-bottle leather wine holder for my bicycle. Stunning. I can’t wait for the snow to melt to try it. I only fly Delta when I absolutely have to (like to ATL or MEM) so I didn’t notice when they canned SkyMall back in Nov -- “We saw a decline in customer use,” they said. Yup, every electronic thing I read prior to reaching for SkyMall -- the WSJ, NYT, Feedly, Twitter; I could add Facebook; if I was younger I could add Tumblr. I think the minute the FAA allowed us to keep tablets on during take-off and landing, SkyMall was a dead man walking...</li>\r\n	<li>And speaking of tablets, last month I thought I’d left my Google Nexus 7 behind on one of my American flights home from New Orleans. It was one in what seemed to be a stream of stuff I’d lost on the road -- a couple of pairs of sunglasses, earbuds, and now this. I went to the American’s lost-and-found in ORD. The woman came out with a stack of 10-12 7-inch Android tablets -- Lenovo’s, Samsung’s, but not mine. I could see she had a similar sized stack of iPad Mini’s. Looks like this happens a lot. I think the move from solid to mesh seat back pockets is a good thing. But that weekend, as I continued to steal my wife’s Nexus 7, I realized how much I used that tablet. So Sunday night, I hopped on Amazon and found a refurb 8-inch Samsung Galaxy Tab Pro for $200. Sold. I bought it on my son’s Prime account for cheap next day shipping. It’s a nice piece of kit -- bright screen, quick performance, which was a very pleasant change because after Google pushed the latest Android update (Lollipop) to my Nexus 7, its performance cratered to the point of nearly being unusable. It was nice not having a 2-3 second lag between screen touch and reaction. That following week, as I was adjusting my backpack contents -- notebook, Bose headphones, and now my Samsung tablet, I was having problems getting things to fit. I reached in to move some stuff around -- and found my Nexus 7. I hadn’t left in a seat-back pocket. I’d just lost it in my backpack. I gotta get a non-black case next time.</li>\r\n	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Emily C</em> by Fiasco</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Awful Winter Travel</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Now that the US snow cover appears to be retreating -- though Boston did get some more snow last weekend -- I’m hoping that we can bid farewell to what was a really lousy start to the year -- at least from a travel perspective. It kinda caught me by surprise because the start of the winter season -- end of Nov and through December -- wasn’t bad at all. But January started to have it’s problems, and then February -- it was 4 weeks of travel hell for just about everywhere in the US east of the Rockies. Cold, Snow, Ice, Wind -- kinda the 4 winter horsemen of the travel apocalypse.</li>\r\n	<li>Every week seemed to have yet another disruption. I think it started with the Snopocalypse that wasn’t in New York and New Jersey. Mayors, governors closing offices, schools, roads, towns on the forecast of massive/huge/historic (they started to run out of adjectives) snowfall -- only to see, what, 4-6 inches? But everyone had flights delayed, cancelled -- it seemed to take the next couple of days before everyone got back in the traces. Only to have a real snow storm blow them back the next week. I had a string of I think 3 Mondays of flight cancellations. I’d get on a weekly conference call and half of everybody was not where they were supposed to be -- cancelled flights, diverted flights, working from home,.... One colleague trying to fly from Ft Myers, FL to Memphis (for work obviously) on Delta. Lands at ATL only to find they’d cancelled his MEM flight due to an ice storm. “When can I get there?” “We don’t know”. He turned around and went back home for the week. His clients couldn’t get to their offices for 3 days.</li>\r\n	<li>As I mentioned in the <a title=\"Podcast #113 — 2014 was a Bad Year to Fly; Restaurant Trends Go Local\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/01/27/podcast-113-2014-was-a-bad-year-to-fly-restaurant-trends-go-local/\">last podcast</a>, I tried to be a bit more strategic in my travel -- picking some warm spots when I could, avoiding known trouble spots. I cringed whenever I had to fly to the East Coast, but sometimes I got lucky -- I hit San Antonio on a 70 degree day. The day after I left, it dropped down to 40. I managed to wrangle a half-week in Phoenix in mid-February. Mid-70’s and sunny -- I was outside every minute I could. Flying home, it was 77 degrees when I left PHX; -2 degrees when I landed at ORD. I thought I was going to shatter when I walked onto the jet bridge.</li>\r\n	<li>I think the pinnacle was when the Delta jet slid off the LaGuardia runway, hit a fence, and came within yards of dumping into Jamaica Bay. Landing at any of those small, near-in airports -- LaGuardia, Washington Reagan, Chicago Midway -- are like putting down on an aircraft carrier, not a lot of room for error. Add snow or ice -- I’m surprised it doesn’t happen more often. Luckily, this one wasn’t fatal -- not like the Air Florida crash out of what was then Washington National on a snowy January, or the Southwest 737 that slid off the end of a Midway runway, through a fence and into a street intersection, crushing a car waiting at the red light, killing a small boy. This was just more inconvenience -- closing LGA for 7 hours, taking a big chunk of capacity out of what is already the most crowded/overtaxed airspace in the country. A friend trying to fly home to New York that afternoon boarded her flight, it pushed back, only to pull back in after it was cancelled. It was just one more delay, one more cancellation. I was a little luckier. Even though I was flying from Memphis to Chicago, some piece of my flight -- the plane, the crew -- got caught up in that East Coast mess. But thanks to the wonders of mobile message updates, I was able to track the delays from the relative comfort of a Mexican bar in East Memphis. One margarita with an high-school buddy turned to two turned to dinner with his wife joining us. I, unlike so many others, got home that night and had something other than bad airport food to show for it.</li>\r\n	<li>The next week -- yet another delay on my New Orleans-Chicago flight. Late inbound aircraft. But why? ORD and MSY were fine; all the weather was again in the East. No one knew, not even the pilot. When we finally boarded the flight, he keyed the mic and said, “I’m awfully sorry about this delay. I wish I could tell you why, but I have no idea. The plane arrived Chicago on time from San Antonio and then just sat there. I wish I could tell you why.”</li>\r\n	<li>I dunno -- maybe they lost it behind a snow drift.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music — <em>Keep Your Motor Running</em> by Dave Hole</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Hospitality Beats Points</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>One morning in some concierge lounge in some Marriott or Sheraton that I can’t quite place, I opened my umpteenth warming dish, looked in at yet another pond of runny scrambled eggs and wondered “Really? How difficult is it to properly cook institutional egg mix?”</li>\r\n	<li>Just about every poll of statused hotel travelers rank free WiFi and free breakfast as the top amenities, the ones that keep travelers working to maintain status. But when you actually use those amenities, they’re often not so great -- slow WiFi (even the “enhanced speeds” that Marriott promises their gold and platinum members), semi-liquid scrambled eggs and stacks of over-cooked bacon.</li>\r\n	<li>Which is a problem, because just about every hotel chain in the past couple of years has raised the number of points needed for a room and also created a new top tier for the best/most popular properties -- added, say, a Category 6 so they could charge even more points for that Maui property -- devaluing that big point balance -- your vacation savings account -- that you “road warriored” so hard to build.</li>\r\n	<li>So if the points aren’t worth as much anymore, what keeps travelers loyal to a brand, what keeps you staying in, say, a Marriott 75 nights or 25 stays in a Westin to make top-tier platinum? It should be those amenities -- but how loyalty are those scrambled eggs worth? They’re convenient, but don’t differentiate much.</li>\r\n	<li>Some places are ditching the whole lounge idea. I’ve been in some Renaissance hotels and Marriott Autograph hotels that serve the free breakfast in their restaurant -- there’s the standard-looking buffet, but if you have the time, you can order anything off the menu. Blows my diet a bit, but beats 4 mornings straight of scrambled eggs.</li>\r\n	<li>I have noticed, though, that I’m being offered more specialty perks at places that I’m staying a lot. The Sheraton on Canal St in New Orleans will occasionally offer me basketball tickets -- the Pelicans are actually doing well this year -- and had some special grandstand deals to watch the Mardi Gras parades in front of the hotel. I didn’t take them up on either of their offers -- I had other commitments -- but it was nice to get the offer.</li>\r\n	<li>I call it the “Cheers” effect -- you want to go where everyone knows your name. When you’re away from home, you want someone to smile and ask how you’re doing. And it’s not just hotels. The morning barista crew at the Starbucks on Canal St and St Charles fire up a spinach feta wrap when they see me walk through the door, even when it’s been a couple of weeks since my last visit.</li>\r\n	<li>Of course, there is a fine line that can be crossed. Like a friend of mine, she received Christmas presents from a front desk clerk for years (!) after about an 18-month gig that had her weekly at the Trumbull CT Marriott. Or when I first started traveling for business, I was commuting between Dallas and Chicago, passing through the DFW Admirals Club every Monday morning. After about 3 months, one of the agents who’d I’d gotten to know asked me if I’d like to meet her daughter. Awkward. But in what I still think is one of my best moments, I asked her “Do you really want your daughter dating someone who travels as much as I do?” She thought for a moment, “No, not really”. Awkwardness averted, and we went on to have a nice friendship until I moved back to Chicago a year later.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917626811171154.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #114</li>\r\n	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://musicalley.com\">Music Alley</a></li>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_114.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #114 — Public Transit to Airports, Requiem for SkyMall, Awful Winter Travel','','inherit','closed','closed','','1429-revision-v1','','','2016-03-13 10:55:24','2016-03-13 15:55:24','',1429,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/13/1429-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1606,1,'2016-03-13 11:04:56','2016-03-13 16:04:56','[caption id=\"attachment_1603\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/IMG_0266-01.jpeg\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-1603\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1603\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/IMG_0266-01-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"Just a Few Guidebooks....\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Just a Few Guidebooks....[/caption]\r\n\r\nWhere do guidebooks fit in the world of apps, review websites, social media, and podcasts? Planning for a trip to Iceland got me thinking about how I make sense of the explosion of travel tips. And then, after giving my thoughts about my new <a href=\"http://bluesmart.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Bluesmart </a>\"smart connected suitcase\", I talk about how idiosyncratic frequent travelers are about packing strategies and their choice of suitcases. There\'s also follow-up about foreign exchange apps, and listener comments about digital travel security and Spirit Airlines\' growth. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_120.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/238595273\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #120:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, after a much longer-than-intended break. Looking back at the Google Docs revision history for this episode, I started it on Feb 2, so I had the best of intentions. But I’ve been traveling almost non-stop since then. At which point you might reasonably say “But you have all that time in airports and hotels to write” -- which should be the case, but I find that I have to remove all possible distractions before I can write. Hence my lack of a journalism career.</li>\r\n	<li>So instead, I keep jotting down ideas in Evernote, feeling like I’m making progress, but not ever buckling down to actually write an episode. Until last Weds, when Dan Gradwohl sent me an e-mail with the subject line “Mark, where’s the next TravelCommons?”, asking in a very nice way -- when are you getting off your duff? I snarled back at Dan a bit -- more at frustration with myself than anything he wrote. But it got the intended result. So, I dedicate this episode to Dan.</li>\r\n	<li>The travel that got in the way wasn’t anything exotic -- just the usual bouncing around -- New Orleans, Vegas, Atlanta, Boston, New Jersey. But it was the tail end of 7 weeks of straight travel -- which is right about the time I hit my fun quotient. My patience dives and my bitch tweeting climbs. Of course, the fact that my American Airlines flights were hitting a 50% on-time rate didn’t help. I think I finally tipped over when I found my EWR-ORD flight was an ancient AA MD-80. Trying to wedge my bag long ways into the short overhead bin on the AB side was a complete throwback to when I first started traveling for business -- in 1985, on American Airlines, out of DFW, on MD-80s. 30 years later, I find myself on the same plane -- with less legroom and no peanuts.</li>\r\n	<li>I am gearing up for some fun travel in March, though. Trying out Iceland Air’s new Chicago-to-Reykjavik service with my son, and then trying out Iceland’s budget carrier Wow Air to meet up with my wife and daughter in Spain. I’m hoping it all works fine, but I’m preparing myself to having to call a couple of audibles.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/seldon-circles/\"><em>Making Circles</em></a> by the Seldon Plan</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Peter Zurich sent a great note, adding onto the digital security topic in<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/12/20/podcast-119-digital-security-on-the-road-us-airports-getting-better/\" target=\"_blank\"> the last episode</a>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>“Your suggestion to switch to cellular network as opposed to airport wifi is okay but it is becoming easy to obtain technology to set up a rogue cell site that will silently capture traffic -- your data will be caught and you will be none the wiser.</li>\r\n	<li>“Thus, in my opinion, it is still very important to only use HTPS encrypted web sites and I would still add on the VPN if you have one available. Bottom line when using any website where you need your password to access sensitive information, make sure the computer is trusted (no public access/borrowed/loaner computers) and make sure the website is HTTPS. If using Outlook or other applications than the web browser you should be on your company\'s VPN.</li>\r\n	<li>“Second thing, people should be aware that tearing a 2-D barcode in half doesn\'t necessarily render it undecipherable. 2D barcodes have a configurable level of redundancy built-in so that even if part (or possibly most) of the barcode is missing/unreadable it can still be decoded. My personal policy is once we have confirmed our FF miles have posted, the BP\'s go in the shredder.”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>Peter, thanks for these. Last week’s <a href=\"http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/columnist/2016/02/24/got-hacked-my-mac-while-writing-story/80844720/\" target=\"_blank\">story </a>about the USA Today columnist whose e-mail was hacked while he used Gogo’s WiFi service on an American Airlines flight demonstrates again the potential dangers of using public WiFi. It takes a bit of spelunking through the columnist’s Twitter feed to figure out how that happened -- he was using an Earthlink e-mail service that didn’t encrypt traffic back to the mail server. Technical listeners would be right in saying “Well, there you go. What did you expect doing plain-text comms over public WiFi?” Indeed, when we talked about this in the last episode, I specifically called out the need to encrypt e-mail protocols -- POP, IMAP, SMTP -- over SSL. But that’s not the default configuration for many e-mail clients, including Outlook and, the last time I checked, the iPhone mail client. You have to go poking around in the settings, changing ports. I know how to do it -- but it’s nothing my wife would. Building on Peter’s suggestion, probably the easiest thing to do is use a web e-mail client like GMail over https -- when the green lock shows in the browser address bar. Next easiest is to set up your e-mail client to encrypt its traffic. Most e-mail providers have instructions on their sites. Perhaps the fiddliest, but the most secure is to install and use a VPN. If your company device comes with one already installed, then it’s easy -- though remember VPN web traffic is usually tracked just like it is in your office. If it’s your own device, then you’re probably going to want to buy a service. They’re not overly expensive -- $3-8/month. I use ExpressVPN, which is on the pricer side, but their VPN client is easy to install and use. And it has the side benefit of letting me watch NCAA March Madness video streams when I’m overseas. In March, I’ll be trying out a hardware-based VPN solution -- <a href=\"http://www.homingsystems.com/alwayshome-duo\" target=\"_blank\">AlwaysHome</a>, which sets up a VPN with matching USB dongles. Could be an easier solution. I’ll report back in the next episode.</li>\r\n	<li>Dan Gradwohl, before he poked me into action, had a “Hmm…” reaction to a comment in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/12/20/podcast-119-digital-security-on-the-road-us-airports-getting-better/\" target=\"_blank\">the last episode</a> about Spirit Airlines passing Delta as the 3rd largest at Chicago O’Hare. Looking at January schedules, he found Spirit had 29 daily departures to Delta’s 52. Would seem like Delta is still larger. However, the Crain’s Chicago article said Spirit carried more passengers than Delta -- which could be since some of Delta’s 52 departures were co-branded smaller regional jets. This is not a new thing. For a long time, O’Hare continued to claim the title of World’s Busiest Airport based on <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_world%27s_busiest_airports_by_aircraft_movements#2014_statistics\" target=\"_blank\">number of takeoffs/landings</a> (which it reclaimed in 2014) after Atlanta Hartsfield passed it on total passengers handled. Using that <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_world%27s_busiest_airports_by_passenger_traffic#2015_statistics\" target=\"_blank\">stat</a>, ORD is the 4th largest after ATL, Beijing, and Dubai. All that being said, Spirit is ramping up hard in the Chicago market, hiring new flight attendants ahead of plane deliveries, and pushing the city for more gate space. And Delta and American are rolling out new Economy Basic fares to fight them. Might not be too long before Spirit passes Delta on both measures.</li>\r\n	<li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/10/11/podcast-117-random-thoughts-about-eggs-scotland-car-rentals/\" target=\"_blank\">Episode #117</a>, I talked -- raved, actually -- about a FinTech company called <a href=\"https://revolut.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Revolut</a>. It offered a convenient and low-cost way to exchange, transfer, and access money internationally. I started using it last September when my daughter started up at University of St Andrews. I used it to convert and push money to her UK bank account, and used the Revolut chip-&amp;-pin debit card to avoid the hassle of US chip-&amp;-signature credit cards. Last week, though, the low-cost component of their value prop disappeared -- at least for US customers, when they added a 3% fee when you added money/”topped up” your Revolut account with a US debit card. They said they were passing through the fees they were being charged, a claim I don’t doubt. However, it started me looking for cheaper foreign exchange options. Which lead me down quite the rabbit hole -- sorting through the differences in transaction costs and exchange rates quickly led to an Excel modelling session, which is just how I want to spend a Saturday morning. If you look at <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">my Twitter feed</a>, there’s a string of tweets walking through my analysis, but for my case, TransferWise, another UK FinTech startup, and Xoom, owned by PayPal, were much cheaper than Revolut after considering their new 3% fee. I expect that I’ll still use the Revolut card a bit when in Europe -- at self-service check-outs or gas pumps -- but nowhere near the volume I was using it before last week. But, I’m glad to have options and do a bit of math so avoid a $50 bank wire fee or Western Union’s 7% premium from market exchange rates.</li>\r\n	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/eliyahu-wind/\">Oh Yeah</a></em> by Eliyahu Sills</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Where Do Guidebooks Fit In?</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>As I mentioned in the opening, my son and I are hitting Iceland in a couple of weeks for a 4-day weekend. We’ve never been before, so I needed to figure out what to do and where to stay. Right about then, someone from what I used to know as Dorling Kindersley -- now shortened to DK -- pinged me about the February relaunch of <a href=\"http://www.dk.com/us/travel/\" target=\"_blank\">DK’s Eyewitness Travel Top 10 Guides</a> -- one of the first 10 is for Iceland. It started me thinking about where guidebooks fit in these days of in the world of apps (Yelp, Foursquare, Untappd), podcasts (Amateur Traveler, Indie Travel Podcast), websites (TripAdvisor), newspaper articles (NYTimes’ <a href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/22/travel/36-hours-in-reykjavik.html\" target=\"_blank\">36 Hours in Reykjavik</a>) and friends’ social media posts on Facebook and Instagram.</li>\r\n	<li>When I want to torture my kids, I do the “when I was young…” thing. But going back to our honeymoon 25 years ago (this November -- need to get on that planning!), I cashed in a slug of British Airways miles to fly us first class to Pisa for a touring holiday in Tuscany. The only plans I had made were to rent a car (a Fiat Panda) and book our first night’s room (via Telex) in Lucca. We ran the rest of the vacation off of a set of Michelin guides -- the red one to find hotels and restaurants and the green one to figure out what to see. Between those and reading “A Room With A View”, we were set. We exchanged American Express travelers checks at the bank for lira, took pictures on Kodak and Fuji film, navigated using a paper maps… Whoops, got off track a bit there. I think my kids are somewhere screaming “Stop!”</li>\r\n	<li>I think like everybody, I start with a Google search -- “What to do in Iceland in March”, limit the results to the last 2 years and start clicking. Lots of articles from UK papers (I think because of Wow Air, the Icelandic version of Spirit or EasyJet, flying into London Gatwick) which I clip over to Evernote using their nifty little Chrome extension. Then I narrow the search down to specific interests -- like “Iceland craft beer” and a few more article get sync’d to Evernote. I stack up a bunch of facts -- a sort of <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointillism\" target=\"_blank\">pointillist </a>view of what to do in Iceland.</li>\r\n	<li>Every survey about how people go about travel planning will tell you that personal recommendations are the far and away the most important source of travel planning information. Which makes sense -- you know the person, how their interests, ways of travel align with yours. We have good friends that we’ll take restaurant recommendations from, but not hotels. We share the same tastes in interesting food, but they like to stay in hotels with nice pools. We’re tend to stay a bit more “closer to ground” -- choosing vacation rentals over the Westin resort.</li>\r\n	<li>And once people find that you travel a lot and to different/interesting places, you get hit up -- a lot -- for recommendations. Friend and long-time T/C listener Allan Marko curates a set of notes for his favorite European cities, places like Paris, that he regularly e-mails out. After a couple of visits to Spain, I’ve taken it to the next level of geekdom -- embedding my recommendations on a Google Map page and sending out the URL. For this trip, a friend from work sent me the itinerary she and her family did last summer. Not sure that she and her husband would be search out craft beer bars with 2 young kids in tow, but I did take her recommendation for the Hotel Geysir at the top of the Golden Circle route, and hitting the Blue Lagoon on the way back to the airport.</li>\r\n	<li>I like The NY Times’ 36 Hours and United Airlines’ 3 Perfect Days series. They’re focused on the long weekend getaway -- if you have a limited amount of time, here’s what to do. These are the sorts of articles we used to rip out of the Sunday travel section of the local newspaper or a travel magazine and stash in a travel folder. The Internet has shifted that behavior just a bit -- we now search for them when we right when we need them. Perhaps more for travel planning than for inspiration, but they serve the same purpose as the green Michelin guide did for our honeymoon -- a curated list of things you ought to see.</li>\r\n	<li>The DK Top 10 Iceland guide seems to fit into this “hit the highlights” mode -- top 10 highlights by region and by thing (top 10 churches, waterfalls, volcanoes, bars, cheap restaurants…), 2-day and 7-day itineraries, which is nice because the 36 Hours in Reykjavik article I pulled up was from 2013, maybe on the ragged edge of up-to-dateness. And the DK guide has everything nicely packaged, which I remember from the Dorling Kindersley books of old -- all the lists in one place wrapped in a sturdy cover that has fold-out maps in the front (Iceland) and the back (downtown Reykjavik) -- which is handy if you didn’t plan ahead and cache Google Maps data before leaving the hotel wi-fi bubble.</li>\r\n	<li>There’s another kind of guidebook that I’ll use, though I couldn’t find one for Iceland. They’re less about lists and more about stories -- think Bill Bryson’s “Notes from a Small Island” about the UK, or more recently, “Rice Noodle Fish” an Anthony Bourdain book by Matt Goulding (whatever that means) about Japan. I read those more before I travel than packing them in my bag. They’re about context/texture -- kinda like what “Room With A View” was for us about Florence 25 years ago -- that prepare rather than guide you, and maybe give you a bit more appreciation when you’re running through those Top 10 Highlights lists.</li>\r\n	<li>Maybe it comes down to the kind of reader you are -- are you someone that likes things more tangible than electronic. Do you like to flip pages rather than screens? The Kindle cannibalized a good-sized chunk of the demand for physical books, but didn’t replace it. Just like overall book market, recent numbers show the demand for physical guide books has stabilized albeit at a lower level. I sorta split the difference. I like paging through my Evernote virtual travel folder when I’m back at the room, but like to have a physical map and list when I’m out walking during the day. Maybe that physicality keeps me more engaged with where I am. Or at least looking up and forward, which should help keep me avoid that new travelers’ epidemic -- Death by GPS.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music --<em> <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/liquid-seventythree/\" target=\"_blank\">Is That Called Love</a> </em></em>by Liquid Zen</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>I Hate Shopping for Suitcases</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>I’ve been traveling for a few months now with the <a href=\"http://bluesmart.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Bluesmart </a>suitcase. I’ve mentioned it in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/08/26/podcast-116-traveling-thru-japan-luggage-trends/\" target=\"_blank\">a past episode</a> when I pre-ordered it through their Indiegogo campaign. And now that they’re shipping, they’re making a lot of Top Traveler Gadget lists.</li>\r\n	<li>It claims to be the first piece of “smart” luggage to hit the market. It pairs with my iPhone through Bluetooth. It automatically locks when I step away from it and then unlocks itself when I return. It has a built-in battery to power itself and charge personal electronics through a couple of USB ports. It also periodically sends out its location when I can then check through the iPhone app. And it has a cool front light that glows blue when it’s paired with my phone.</li>\r\n	<li>Aside from all the electronics, it’s a hard-shell wheelie bag with nice-sized wheels that roll easily -- sometimes too easily. It fits perfectly into American’s and United’s luggage sizers -- at least the ones in Boston Logan airport. (Some blogger who reviewed the bag raised a bit of a ruckus saying that the bag dimensions on the website were too big for carry-on. I guess he doesn’t travel enough to go an airport and check it out himself). The iPhone app is getting better -- Bluesmart is doing a nice job of reving the app frequently to stomp bugs, though the location alerts -- “You’re leaving me behind” are still a bit wonky.</li>\r\n	<li>All in all, it’s a nice enough bag. I had been thinking about getting something a bit smaller for 1-2 night trips and this fits the bill. I’m kinda “meh” on all the electronics. The large battery is fine, but I already carry a recharger in my backpack that will top up my iPhone or tablet a couple of times -- good enough and more accessible in-flight. The location functionality seems to work only when I press the button to “wake up” the bag -- which means I’m right beside my bag and know its location. And since it’s the perfect carry-on size, it’s usually right above me in the plane cabin. So it’s a nice enough hard-shell wheelie bag with a couple of bells and whistles that don’t necessarily wow me.</li>\r\n	<li>Which shouldn’t be interpreted as a knock against Bluesmart. I’m sure there are a number of travelers who love every one of those bells and whistles. It’s not so much a criticism about Bluesmart as it is how personal and idiosyncratic frequent travelers are about suitcases. It’s gotta fit your packing strategies, which are also very idiosyncratic. Some people love compartments to help them structure their packing. Me? I’m all about the flexibility of a single open space -- I build my own structure with shoes and different kinds of clothes depending on the trip. And even though I see more and more hard-shell bags -- and now own one, I’m not completely sold on it. I still like the ability to bulge when I need to. And the two- vs. four-wheel thing. Pushing a 4-wheel through the airport seems easier on my wrist, but sometimes they roll too easily and won’t stay put. It’s the reason I’ve been walking around with a ripped backpack for 4 months -- I really hate shopping for travel bags. And am very happy that leather wallets last a really long time.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #120</li>\r\n	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/\">Podshow Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\r\n	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_119.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #120 — Where Do Guidebooks Fit In? I Hate Shopping for Suitcases','','inherit','closed','closed','','1598-revision-v1','','','2016-03-13 11:04:56','2016-03-13 16:04:56','',1598,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/13/1598-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1607,1,'2016-03-13 11:26:36','2016-03-13 16:26:36','[caption id=\"attachment_1603\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/IMG_0266-01.jpeg\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-1603\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1603\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/IMG_0266-01-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"Just a Few Guidebooks....\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Just a Few Guidebooks....[/caption]\r\n\r\nWhere do guidebooks fit in the world of apps, review websites, social media, and podcasts? Planning for a trip to Iceland got me thinking about how I make sense of the explosion of travel tips. And then, after giving my thoughts about my new <a href=\"http://bluesmart.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Bluesmart </a>\"smart connected suitcase\", I talk about how idiosyncratic frequent travelers are about packing strategies and their choice of suitcases. There\'s also follow-up about foreign exchange apps, and listener comments about digital travel security and Spirit Airlines\' growth. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_120.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/251667522\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #120:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, after a much longer-than-intended break. Looking back at the Google Docs revision history for this episode, I started it on Feb 2, so I had the best of intentions. But I’ve been traveling almost non-stop since then. At which point you might reasonably say “But you have all that time in airports and hotels to write” -- which should be the case, but I find that I have to remove all possible distractions before I can write. Hence my lack of a journalism career.</li>\r\n	<li>So instead, I keep jotting down ideas in Evernote, feeling like I’m making progress, but not ever buckling down to actually write an episode. Until last Weds, when Dan Gradwohl sent me an e-mail with the subject line “Mark, where’s the next TravelCommons?”, asking in a very nice way -- when are you getting off your duff? I snarled back at Dan a bit -- more at frustration with myself than anything he wrote. But it got the intended result. So, I dedicate this episode to Dan.</li>\r\n	<li>The travel that got in the way wasn’t anything exotic -- just the usual bouncing around -- New Orleans, Vegas, Atlanta, Boston, New Jersey. But it was the tail end of 7 weeks of straight travel -- which is right about the time I hit my fun quotient. My patience dives and my bitch tweeting climbs. Of course, the fact that my American Airlines flights were hitting a 50% on-time rate didn’t help. I think I finally tipped over when I found my EWR-ORD flight was an ancient AA MD-80. Trying to wedge my bag long ways into the short overhead bin on the AB side was a complete throwback to when I first started traveling for business -- in 1985, on American Airlines, out of DFW, on MD-80s. 30 years later, I find myself on the same plane -- with less legroom and no peanuts.</li>\r\n	<li>I am gearing up for some fun travel in March, though. Trying out Iceland Air’s new Chicago-to-Reykjavik service with my son, and then trying out Iceland’s budget carrier Wow Air to meet up with my wife and daughter in Spain. I’m hoping it all works fine, but I’m preparing myself to having to call a couple of audibles.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/seldon-circles/\"><em>Making Circles</em></a> by the Seldon Plan</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Peter Zurich sent a great note, adding onto the digital security topic in<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/12/20/podcast-119-digital-security-on-the-road-us-airports-getting-better/\" target=\"_blank\"> the last episode</a>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>“Your suggestion to switch to cellular network as opposed to airport wifi is okay but it is becoming easy to obtain technology to set up a rogue cell site that will silently capture traffic -- your data will be caught and you will be none the wiser.</li>\r\n	<li>“Thus, in my opinion, it is still very important to only use HTPS encrypted web sites and I would still add on the VPN if you have one available. Bottom line when using any website where you need your password to access sensitive information, make sure the computer is trusted (no public access/borrowed/loaner computers) and make sure the website is HTTPS. If using Outlook or other applications than the web browser you should be on your company\'s VPN.</li>\r\n	<li>“Second thing, people should be aware that tearing a 2-D barcode in half doesn\'t necessarily render it undecipherable. 2D barcodes have a configurable level of redundancy built-in so that even if part (or possibly most) of the barcode is missing/unreadable it can still be decoded. My personal policy is once we have confirmed our FF miles have posted, the BP\'s go in the shredder.”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>Peter, thanks for these. Last week’s <a href=\"http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/columnist/2016/02/24/got-hacked-my-mac-while-writing-story/80844720/\" target=\"_blank\">story </a>about the USA Today columnist whose e-mail was hacked while he used Gogo’s WiFi service on an American Airlines flight demonstrates again the potential dangers of using public WiFi. It takes a bit of spelunking through the columnist’s Twitter feed to figure out how that happened -- he was using an Earthlink e-mail service that didn’t encrypt traffic back to the mail server. Technical listeners would be right in saying “Well, there you go. What did you expect doing plain-text comms over public WiFi?” Indeed, when we talked about this in the last episode, I specifically called out the need to encrypt e-mail protocols -- POP, IMAP, SMTP -- over SSL. But that’s not the default configuration for many e-mail clients, including Outlook and, the last time I checked, the iPhone mail client. You have to go poking around in the settings, changing ports. I know how to do it -- but it’s nothing my wife would. Building on Peter’s suggestion, probably the easiest thing to do is use a web e-mail client like GMail over https -- when the green lock shows in the browser address bar. Next easiest is to set up your e-mail client to encrypt its traffic. Most e-mail providers have instructions on their sites. Perhaps the fiddliest, but the most secure is to install and use a VPN. If your company device comes with one already installed, then it’s easy -- though remember VPN web traffic is usually tracked just like it is in your office. If it’s your own device, then you’re probably going to want to buy a service. They’re not overly expensive -- $3-8/month. I use ExpressVPN, which is on the pricer side, but their VPN client is easy to install and use. And it has the side benefit of letting me watch NCAA March Madness video streams when I’m overseas. In March, I’ll be trying out a hardware-based VPN solution -- <a href=\"http://www.homingsystems.com/alwayshome-duo\" target=\"_blank\">AlwaysHome</a>, which sets up a VPN with matching USB dongles. Could be an easier solution. I’ll report back in the next episode.</li>\r\n	<li>Dan Gradwohl, before he poked me into action, had a “Hmm…” reaction to a comment in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/12/20/podcast-119-digital-security-on-the-road-us-airports-getting-better/\" target=\"_blank\">the last episode</a> about Spirit Airlines passing Delta as the 3rd largest at Chicago O’Hare. Looking at January schedules, he found Spirit had 29 daily departures to Delta’s 52. Would seem like Delta is still larger. However, the Crain’s Chicago article said Spirit carried more passengers than Delta -- which could be since some of Delta’s 52 departures were co-branded smaller regional jets. This is not a new thing. For a long time, O’Hare continued to claim the title of World’s Busiest Airport based on <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_world%27s_busiest_airports_by_aircraft_movements#2014_statistics\" target=\"_blank\">number of takeoffs/landings</a> (which it reclaimed in 2014) after Atlanta Hartsfield passed it on total passengers handled. Using that <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_world%27s_busiest_airports_by_passenger_traffic#2015_statistics\" target=\"_blank\">stat</a>, ORD is the 4th largest after ATL, Beijing, and Dubai. All that being said, Spirit is ramping up hard in the Chicago market, hiring new flight attendants ahead of plane deliveries, and pushing the city for more gate space. And Delta and American are rolling out new Economy Basic fares to fight them. Might not be too long before Spirit passes Delta on both measures.</li>\r\n	<li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/10/11/podcast-117-random-thoughts-about-eggs-scotland-car-rentals/\" target=\"_blank\">Episode #117</a>, I talked -- raved, actually -- about a FinTech company called <a href=\"https://revolut.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Revolut</a>. It offered a convenient and low-cost way to exchange, transfer, and access money internationally. I started using it last September when my daughter started up at University of St Andrews. I used it to convert and push money to her UK bank account, and used the Revolut chip-&amp;-pin debit card to avoid the hassle of US chip-&amp;-signature credit cards. Last week, though, the low-cost component of their value prop disappeared -- at least for US customers, when they added a 3% fee when you added money/”topped up” your Revolut account with a US debit card. They said they were passing through the fees they were being charged, a claim I don’t doubt. However, it started me looking for cheaper foreign exchange options. Which lead me down quite the rabbit hole -- sorting through the differences in transaction costs and exchange rates quickly led to an Excel modelling session, which is just how I want to spend a Saturday morning. If you look at <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">my Twitter feed</a>, there’s a string of tweets walking through my analysis, but for my case, TransferWise, another UK FinTech startup, and Xoom, owned by PayPal, were much cheaper than Revolut after considering their new 3% fee. I expect that I’ll still use the Revolut card a bit when in Europe -- at self-service check-outs or gas pumps -- but nowhere near the volume I was using it before last week. But, I’m glad to have options and do a bit of math so avoid a $50 bank wire fee or Western Union’s 7% premium from market exchange rates.</li>\r\n	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/eliyahu-wind/\">Oh Yeah</a></em> by Eliyahu Sills</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Where Do Guidebooks Fit In?</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>As I mentioned in the opening, my son and I are hitting Iceland in a couple of weeks for a 4-day weekend. We’ve never been before, so I needed to figure out what to do and where to stay. Right about then, someone from what I used to know as Dorling Kindersley -- now shortened to DK -- pinged me about the February relaunch of <a href=\"http://www.dk.com/us/travel/\" target=\"_blank\">DK’s Eyewitness Travel Top 10 Guides</a> -- one of the first 10 is for Iceland. It started me thinking about where guidebooks fit in these days of in the world of apps (Yelp, Foursquare, Untappd), podcasts (Amateur Traveler, Indie Travel Podcast), websites (TripAdvisor), newspaper articles (NYTimes’ <a href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/22/travel/36-hours-in-reykjavik.html\" target=\"_blank\">36 Hours in Reykjavik</a>) and friends’ social media posts on Facebook and Instagram.</li>\r\n	<li>When I want to torture my kids, I do the “when I was young…” thing. But going back to our honeymoon 25 years ago (this November -- need to get on that planning!), I cashed in a slug of British Airways miles to fly us first class to Pisa for a touring holiday in Tuscany. The only plans I had made were to rent a car (a Fiat Panda) and book our first night’s room (via Telex) in Lucca. We ran the rest of the vacation off of a set of Michelin guides -- the red one to find hotels and restaurants and the green one to figure out what to see. Between those and reading “A Room With A View”, we were set. We exchanged American Express travelers checks at the bank for lira, took pictures on Kodak and Fuji film, navigated using a paper maps… Whoops, got off track a bit there. I think my kids are somewhere screaming “Stop!”</li>\r\n	<li>I think like everybody, I start with a Google search -- “What to do in Iceland in March”, limit the results to the last 2 years and start clicking. Lots of articles from UK papers (I think because of Wow Air, the Icelandic version of Spirit or EasyJet, flying into London Gatwick) which I clip over to Evernote using their nifty little Chrome extension. Then I narrow the search down to specific interests -- like “Iceland craft beer” and a few more article get sync’d to Evernote. I stack up a bunch of facts -- a sort of <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointillism\" target=\"_blank\">pointillist </a>view of what to do in Iceland.</li>\r\n	<li>Every survey about how people go about travel planning will tell you that personal recommendations are the far and away the most important source of travel planning information. Which makes sense -- you know the person, how their interests, ways of travel align with yours. We have good friends that we’ll take restaurant recommendations from, but not hotels. We share the same tastes in interesting food, but they like to stay in hotels with nice pools. We’re tend to stay a bit more “closer to ground” -- choosing vacation rentals over the Westin resort.</li>\r\n	<li>And once people find that you travel a lot and to different/interesting places, you get hit up -- a lot -- for recommendations. Friend and long-time T/C listener Allan Marko curates a set of notes for his favorite European cities, places like Paris, that he regularly e-mails out. After a couple of visits to Spain, I’ve taken it to the next level of geekdom -- embedding my recommendations on a Google Map page and sending out the URL. For this trip, a friend from work sent me the itinerary she and her family did last summer. Not sure that she and her husband would be search out craft beer bars with 2 young kids in tow, but I did take her recommendation for the Hotel Geysir at the top of the Golden Circle route, and hitting the Blue Lagoon on the way back to the airport.</li>\r\n	<li>I like The NY Times’ 36 Hours and United Airlines’ 3 Perfect Days series. They’re focused on the long weekend getaway -- if you have a limited amount of time, here’s what to do. These are the sorts of articles we used to rip out of the Sunday travel section of the local newspaper or a travel magazine and stash in a travel folder. The Internet has shifted that behavior just a bit -- we now search for them when we right when we need them. Perhaps more for travel planning than for inspiration, but they serve the same purpose as the green Michelin guide did for our honeymoon -- a curated list of things you ought to see.</li>\r\n	<li>The DK Top 10 Iceland guide seems to fit into this “hit the highlights” mode -- top 10 highlights by region and by thing (top 10 churches, waterfalls, volcanoes, bars, cheap restaurants…), 2-day and 7-day itineraries, which is nice because the 36 Hours in Reykjavik article I pulled up was from 2013, maybe on the ragged edge of up-to-dateness. And the DK guide has everything nicely packaged, which I remember from the Dorling Kindersley books of old -- all the lists in one place wrapped in a sturdy cover that has fold-out maps in the front (Iceland) and the back (downtown Reykjavik) -- which is handy if you didn’t plan ahead and cache Google Maps data before leaving the hotel wi-fi bubble.</li>\r\n	<li>There’s another kind of guidebook that I’ll use, though I couldn’t find one for Iceland. They’re less about lists and more about stories -- think Bill Bryson’s “Notes from a Small Island” about the UK, or more recently, “Rice Noodle Fish” an Anthony Bourdain book by Matt Goulding (whatever that means) about Japan. I read those more before I travel than packing them in my bag. They’re about context/texture -- kinda like what “Room With A View” was for us about Florence 25 years ago -- that prepare rather than guide you, and maybe give you a bit more appreciation when you’re running through those Top 10 Highlights lists.</li>\r\n	<li>Maybe it comes down to the kind of reader you are -- are you someone that likes things more tangible than electronic. Do you like to flip pages rather than screens? The Kindle cannibalized a good-sized chunk of the demand for physical books, but didn’t replace it. Just like overall book market, recent numbers show the demand for physical guide books has stabilized albeit at a lower level. I sorta split the difference. I like paging through my Evernote virtual travel folder when I’m back at the room, but like to have a physical map and list when I’m out walking during the day. Maybe that physicality keeps me more engaged with where I am. Or at least looking up and forward, which should help keep me avoid that new travelers’ epidemic -- Death by GPS.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music --<em> <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/liquid-seventythree/\" target=\"_blank\">Is That Called Love</a> </em></em>by Liquid Zen</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>I Hate Shopping for Suitcases</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>I’ve been traveling for a few months now with the <a href=\"http://bluesmart.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Bluesmart </a>suitcase. I’ve mentioned it in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/08/26/podcast-116-traveling-thru-japan-luggage-trends/\" target=\"_blank\">a past episode</a> when I pre-ordered it through their Indiegogo campaign. And now that they’re shipping, they’re making a lot of Top Traveler Gadget lists.</li>\r\n	<li>It claims to be the first piece of “smart” luggage to hit the market. It pairs with my iPhone through Bluetooth. It automatically locks when I step away from it and then unlocks itself when I return. It has a built-in battery to power itself and charge personal electronics through a couple of USB ports. It also periodically sends out its location when I can then check through the iPhone app. And it has a cool front light that glows blue when it’s paired with my phone.</li>\r\n	<li>Aside from all the electronics, it’s a hard-shell wheelie bag with nice-sized wheels that roll easily -- sometimes too easily. It fits perfectly into American’s and United’s luggage sizers -- at least the ones in Boston Logan airport. (Some blogger who reviewed the bag raised a bit of a ruckus saying that the bag dimensions on the website were too big for carry-on. I guess he doesn’t travel enough to go an airport and check it out himself). The iPhone app is getting better -- Bluesmart is doing a nice job of reving the app frequently to stomp bugs, though the location alerts -- “You’re leaving me behind” are still a bit wonky.</li>\r\n	<li>All in all, it’s a nice enough bag. I had been thinking about getting something a bit smaller for 1-2 night trips and this fits the bill. I’m kinda “meh” on all the electronics. The large battery is fine, but I already carry a recharger in my backpack that will top up my iPhone or tablet a couple of times -- good enough and more accessible in-flight. The location functionality seems to work only when I press the button to “wake up” the bag -- which means I’m right beside my bag and know its location. And since it’s the perfect carry-on size, it’s usually right above me in the plane cabin. So it’s a nice enough hard-shell wheelie bag with a couple of bells and whistles that don’t necessarily wow me.</li>\r\n	<li>Which shouldn’t be interpreted as a knock against Bluesmart. I’m sure there are a number of travelers who love every one of those bells and whistles. It’s not so much a criticism about Bluesmart as it is how personal and idiosyncratic frequent travelers are about suitcases. It’s gotta fit your packing strategies, which are also very idiosyncratic. Some people love compartments to help them structure their packing. Me? I’m all about the flexibility of a single open space -- I build my own structure with shoes and different kinds of clothes depending on the trip. And even though I see more and more hard-shell bags -- and now own one, I’m not completely sold on it. I still like the ability to bulge when I need to. And the two- vs. four-wheel thing. Pushing a 4-wheel through the airport seems easier on my wrist, but sometimes they roll too easily and won’t stay put. It’s the reason I’ve been walking around with a ripped backpack for 4 months -- I really hate shopping for travel bags. And am very happy that leather wallets last a really long time.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #120</li>\r\n	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/\">Podshow Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\r\n	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_119.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #120 — Where Do Guidebooks Fit In? I Hate Shopping for Suitcases','','inherit','closed','closed','','1598-revision-v1','','','2016-03-13 11:26:36','2016-03-13 16:26:36','',1598,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/13/1598-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1608,1,'2016-03-13 11:29:49','2016-03-13 16:29:49','[caption id=\"attachment_1603\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/IMG_0266-01.jpeg\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-1603\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1603\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/IMG_0266-01-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"Just a Few Guidebooks....\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Just a Few Guidebooks....[/caption]\r\n\r\nWhere do guidebooks fit in the world of apps, review websites, social media, and podcasts? Planning for a trip to Iceland got me thinking about how I make sense of the explosion of travel tips. And then, after giving my thoughts about my new <a href=\"http://bluesmart.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Bluesmart </a>\"smart connected suitcase\", I talk about how idiosyncratic frequent travelers are about packing strategies and their choice of suitcases. There\'s also follow-up about foreign exchange apps, and listener comments about digital travel security and Spirit Airlines\' growth. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_120.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/251667522\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #120:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, after a much longer-than-intended break. Looking back at the Google Docs revision history for this episode, I started it on Feb 2, so I had the best of intentions. But I’ve been traveling almost non-stop since then. At which point you might reasonably say “But you have all that time in airports and hotels to write” -- which should be the case, but I find that I have to remove all possible distractions before I can write. Hence my lack of a journalism career.</li>\r\n	<li>So instead, I keep jotting down ideas in Evernote, feeling like I’m making progress, but not ever buckling down to actually write an episode. Until last Weds, when Dan Gradwohl sent me an e-mail with the subject line “Mark, where’s the next TravelCommons?”, asking in a very nice way -- when are you getting off your duff? I snarled back at Dan a bit -- more at frustration with myself than anything he wrote. But it got the intended result. So, I dedicate this episode to Dan.</li>\r\n	<li>The travel that got in the way wasn’t anything exotic -- just the usual bouncing around -- New Orleans, Vegas, Atlanta, Boston, New Jersey. But it was the tail end of 7 weeks of straight travel -- which is right about the time I hit my fun quotient. My patience dives and my bitch tweeting climbs. Of course, the fact that my American Airlines flights were hitting a 50% on-time rate didn’t help. I think I finally tipped over when I found my EWR-ORD flight was an ancient AA MD-80. Trying to wedge my bag long ways into the short overhead bin on the AB side was a complete throwback to when I first started traveling for business -- in 1985, on American Airlines, out of DFW, on MD-80s. 30 years later, I find myself on the same plane -- with less legroom and no peanuts.</li>\r\n	<li>I am gearing up for some fun travel in March, though. Trying out Iceland Air’s new Chicago-to-Reykjavik service with my son, and then trying out Iceland’s budget carrier Wow Air to meet up with my wife and daughter in Spain. I’m hoping it all works fine, but I’m preparing myself to having to call a couple of audibles.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/seldon-circles/\"><em>Making Circles</em></a> by the Seldon Plan</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Peter Zurich sent a great note, adding onto the digital security topic in<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/12/20/podcast-119-digital-security-on-the-road-us-airports-getting-better/\" target=\"_blank\"> the last episode</a>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>“Your suggestion to switch to cellular network as opposed to airport wifi is okay but it is becoming easy to obtain technology to set up a rogue cell site that will silently capture traffic -- your data will be caught and you will be none the wiser.</li>\r\n	<li>“Thus, in my opinion, it is still very important to only use HTPS encrypted web sites and I would still add on the VPN if you have one available. Bottom line when using any website where you need your password to access sensitive information, make sure the computer is trusted (no public access/borrowed/loaner computers) and make sure the website is HTTPS. If using Outlook or other applications than the web browser you should be on your company\'s VPN.</li>\r\n	<li>“Second thing, people should be aware that tearing a 2-D barcode in half doesn\'t necessarily render it undecipherable. 2D barcodes have a configurable level of redundancy built-in so that even if part (or possibly most) of the barcode is missing/unreadable it can still be decoded. My personal policy is once we have confirmed our FF miles have posted, the BP\'s go in the shredder.”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>Peter, thanks for these. Last week’s <a href=\"http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/columnist/2016/02/24/got-hacked-my-mac-while-writing-story/80844720/\" target=\"_blank\">story </a>about the USA Today columnist whose e-mail was hacked while he used Gogo’s WiFi service on an American Airlines flight demonstrates again the potential dangers of using public WiFi. It takes a bit of spelunking through the columnist’s Twitter feed to figure out how that happened -- he was using an Earthlink e-mail service that didn’t encrypt traffic back to the mail server. Technical listeners would be right in saying “Well, there you go. What did you expect doing plain-text comms over public WiFi?” Indeed, when we talked about this in the last episode, I specifically called out the need to encrypt e-mail protocols -- POP, IMAP, SMTP -- over SSL. But that’s not the default configuration for many e-mail clients, including Outlook and, the last time I checked, the iPhone mail client. You have to go poking around in the settings, changing ports. I know how to do it -- but it’s nothing my wife would. Building on Peter’s suggestion, probably the easiest thing to do is use a web e-mail client like GMail over https -- when the green lock shows in the browser address bar. Next easiest is to set up your e-mail client to encrypt its traffic. Most e-mail providers have instructions on their sites. Perhaps the fiddliest, but the most secure is to install and use a VPN. If your company device comes with one already installed, then it’s easy -- though remember VPN web traffic is usually tracked just like it is in your office. If it’s your own device, then you’re probably going to want to buy a service. They’re not overly expensive -- $3-8/month. I use <a href=\"https://www.expressvpn.com/\" target=\"_blank\">ExpressVPN</a>, which is on the pricer side, but their VPN client is easy to install and use. And it has the side benefit of letting me watch NCAA March Madness video streams when I’m overseas. In March, I’ll be trying out a hardware-based VPN solution -- <a href=\"http://www.homingsystems.com/alwayshome-duo\" target=\"_blank\">AlwaysHome</a>, which sets up a VPN with matching USB dongles. Could be an easier solution. I’ll report back in the next episode.</li>\r\n	<li>Dan Gradwohl, before he poked me into action, had a “Hmm…” reaction to a comment in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/12/20/podcast-119-digital-security-on-the-road-us-airports-getting-better/\" target=\"_blank\">the last episode</a> about Spirit Airlines passing Delta as the 3rd largest at Chicago O’Hare. Looking at January schedules, he found Spirit had 29 daily departures to Delta’s 52. Would seem like Delta is still larger. However, the Crain’s Chicago article said Spirit carried more passengers than Delta -- which could be since some of Delta’s 52 departures were co-branded smaller regional jets. This is not a new thing. For a long time, O’Hare continued to claim the title of World’s Busiest Airport based on <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_world%27s_busiest_airports_by_aircraft_movements#2014_statistics\" target=\"_blank\">number of takeoffs/landings</a> (which it reclaimed in 2014) after Atlanta Hartsfield passed it on total passengers handled. Using that <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_world%27s_busiest_airports_by_passenger_traffic#2015_statistics\" target=\"_blank\">stat</a>, ORD is the 4th largest after ATL, Beijing, and Dubai. All that being said, Spirit is ramping up hard in the Chicago market, hiring new flight attendants ahead of plane deliveries, and pushing the city for more gate space. And Delta and American are rolling out new Economy Basic fares to fight them. Might not be too long before Spirit passes Delta on both measures.</li>\r\n	<li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/10/11/podcast-117-random-thoughts-about-eggs-scotland-car-rentals/\" target=\"_blank\">Episode #117</a>, I talked -- raved, actually -- about a FinTech company called <a href=\"https://revolut.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Revolut</a>. It offered a convenient and low-cost way to exchange, transfer, and access money internationally. I started using it last September when my daughter started up at University of St Andrews. I used it to convert and push money to her UK bank account, and used the Revolut chip-&amp;-pin debit card to avoid the hassle of US chip-&amp;-signature credit cards. Last week, though, the low-cost component of their value prop disappeared -- at least for US customers, when they added a 3% fee when you added money/”topped up” your Revolut account with a US debit card. They said they were passing through the fees they were being charged, a claim I don’t doubt. However, it started me looking for cheaper foreign exchange options. Which lead me down quite the rabbit hole -- sorting through the differences in transaction costs and exchange rates quickly led to an Excel modelling session, which is just how I want to spend a Saturday morning. If you look at <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">my Twitter feed</a>, there’s a string of tweets walking through my analysis, but for my case, TransferWise, another UK FinTech startup, and Xoom, owned by PayPal, were much cheaper than Revolut after considering their new 3% fee. I expect that I’ll still use the Revolut card a bit when in Europe -- at self-service check-outs or gas pumps -- but nowhere near the volume I was using it before last week. But, I’m glad to have options and do a bit of math so avoid a $50 bank wire fee or Western Union’s 7% premium from market exchange rates.</li>\r\n	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/eliyahu-wind/\">Oh Yeah</a></em> by Eliyahu Sills</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Where Do Guidebooks Fit In?</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>As I mentioned in the opening, my son and I are hitting Iceland in a couple of weeks for a 4-day weekend. We’ve never been before, so I needed to figure out what to do and where to stay. Right about then, someone from what I used to know as Dorling Kindersley -- now shortened to DK -- pinged me about the February relaunch of <a href=\"http://www.dk.com/us/travel/\" target=\"_blank\">DK’s Eyewitness Travel Top 10 Guides</a> -- one of the first 10 is for Iceland. It started me thinking about where guidebooks fit in these days of in the world of apps (Yelp, Foursquare, Untappd), podcasts (Amateur Traveler, Indie Travel Podcast), websites (TripAdvisor), newspaper articles (NYTimes’ <a href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/22/travel/36-hours-in-reykjavik.html\" target=\"_blank\">36 Hours in Reykjavik</a>) and friends’ social media posts on Facebook and Instagram.</li>\r\n	<li>When I want to torture my kids, I do the “when I was young…” thing. But going back to our honeymoon 25 years ago (this November -- need to get on that planning!), I cashed in a slug of British Airways miles to fly us first class to Pisa for a touring holiday in Tuscany. The only plans I had made were to rent a car (a Fiat Panda) and book our first night’s room (via Telex) in Lucca. We ran the rest of the vacation off of a set of Michelin guides -- the red one to find hotels and restaurants and the green one to figure out what to see. Between those and reading “A Room With A View”, we were set. We exchanged American Express travelers checks at the bank for lira, took pictures on Kodak and Fuji film, navigated using a paper maps… Whoops, got off track a bit there. I think my kids are somewhere screaming “Stop!”</li>\r\n	<li>I think like everybody, I start with a Google search -- “What to do in Iceland in March”, limit the results to the last 2 years and start clicking. Lots of articles from UK papers (I think because of Wow Air, the Icelandic version of Spirit or EasyJet, flying into London Gatwick) which I clip over to Evernote using their nifty little Chrome extension. Then I narrow the search down to specific interests -- like “Iceland craft beer” and a few more article get sync’d to Evernote. I stack up a bunch of facts -- a sort of <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointillism\" target=\"_blank\">pointillist </a>view of what to do in Iceland.</li>\r\n	<li>Every survey about how people go about travel planning will tell you that personal recommendations are the far and away the most important source of travel planning information. Which makes sense -- you know the person, how their interests, ways of travel align with yours. We have good friends that we’ll take restaurant recommendations from, but not hotels. We share the same tastes in interesting food, but they like to stay in hotels with nice pools. We’re tend to stay a bit more “closer to ground” -- choosing vacation rentals over the Westin resort.</li>\r\n	<li>And once people find that you travel a lot and to different/interesting places, you get hit up -- a lot -- for recommendations. Friend and long-time T/C listener Allan Marko curates a set of notes for his favorite European cities, places like Paris, that he regularly e-mails out. After a couple of visits to Spain, I’ve taken it to the next level of geekdom -- embedding my recommendations on a Google Map page and sending out the URL. For this trip, a friend from work sent me the itinerary she and her family did last summer. Not sure that she and her husband would be search out craft beer bars with 2 young kids in tow, but I did take her recommendation for the Hotel Geysir at the top of the Golden Circle route, and hitting the Blue Lagoon on the way back to the airport.</li>\r\n	<li>I like The NY Times’ 36 Hours and United Airlines’ 3 Perfect Days series. They’re focused on the long weekend getaway -- if you have a limited amount of time, here’s what to do. These are the sorts of articles we used to rip out of the Sunday travel section of the local newspaper or a travel magazine and stash in a travel folder. The Internet has shifted that behavior just a bit -- we now search for them when we right when we need them. Perhaps more for travel planning than for inspiration, but they serve the same purpose as the green Michelin guide did for our honeymoon -- a curated list of things you ought to see.</li>\r\n	<li>The DK Top 10 Iceland guide seems to fit into this “hit the highlights” mode -- top 10 highlights by region and by thing (top 10 churches, waterfalls, volcanoes, bars, cheap restaurants…), 2-day and 7-day itineraries, which is nice because the 36 Hours in Reykjavik article I pulled up was from 2013, maybe on the ragged edge of up-to-dateness. And the DK guide has everything nicely packaged, which I remember from the Dorling Kindersley books of old -- all the lists in one place wrapped in a sturdy cover that has fold-out maps in the front (Iceland) and the back (downtown Reykjavik) -- which is handy if you didn’t plan ahead and cache Google Maps data before leaving the hotel wi-fi bubble.</li>\r\n	<li>There’s another kind of guidebook that I’ll use, though I couldn’t find one for Iceland. They’re less about lists and more about stories -- think Bill Bryson’s “Notes from a Small Island” about the UK, or more recently, “Rice Noodle Fish” an Anthony Bourdain book by Matt Goulding (whatever that means) about Japan. I read those more before I travel than packing them in my bag. They’re about context/texture -- kinda like what “Room With A View” was for us about Florence 25 years ago -- that prepare rather than guide you, and maybe give you a bit more appreciation when you’re running through those Top 10 Highlights lists.</li>\r\n	<li>Maybe it comes down to the kind of reader you are -- are you someone that likes things more tangible than electronic. Do you like to flip pages rather than screens? The Kindle cannibalized a good-sized chunk of the demand for physical books, but didn’t replace it. Just like overall book market, recent numbers show the demand for physical guide books has stabilized albeit at a lower level. I sorta split the difference. I like paging through my Evernote virtual travel folder when I’m back at the room, but like to have a physical map and list when I’m out walking during the day. Maybe that physicality keeps me more engaged with where I am. Or at least looking up and forward, which should help keep me avoid that new travelers’ epidemic -- Death by GPS.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music --<em> <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/liquid-seventythree/\" target=\"_blank\">Is That Called Love</a> </em></em>by Liquid Zen</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>I Hate Shopping for Suitcases</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>I’ve been traveling for a few months now with the <a href=\"http://bluesmart.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Bluesmart </a>suitcase. I’ve mentioned it in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/08/26/podcast-116-traveling-thru-japan-luggage-trends/\" target=\"_blank\">a past episode</a> when I pre-ordered it through their Indiegogo campaign. And now that they’re shipping, they’re making a lot of Top Traveler Gadget lists.</li>\r\n	<li>It claims to be the first piece of “smart” luggage to hit the market. It pairs with my iPhone through Bluetooth. It automatically locks when I step away from it and then unlocks itself when I return. It has a built-in battery to power itself and charge personal electronics through a couple of USB ports. It also periodically sends out its location when I can then check through the iPhone app. And it has a cool front light that glows blue when it’s paired with my phone.</li>\r\n	<li>Aside from all the electronics, it’s a hard-shell wheelie bag with nice-sized wheels that roll easily -- sometimes too easily. It fits perfectly into American’s and United’s luggage sizers -- at least the ones in Boston Logan airport. (Some blogger who reviewed the bag raised a bit of a ruckus saying that the bag dimensions on the website were too big for carry-on. I guess he doesn’t travel enough to go an airport and check it out himself). The iPhone app is getting better -- Bluesmart is doing a nice job of reving the app frequently to stomp bugs, though the location alerts -- “You’re leaving me behind” are still a bit wonky.</li>\r\n	<li>All in all, it’s a nice enough bag. I had been thinking about getting something a bit smaller for 1-2 night trips and this fits the bill. I’m kinda “meh” on all the electronics. The large battery is fine, but I already carry a recharger in my backpack that will top up my iPhone or tablet a couple of times -- good enough and more accessible in-flight. The location functionality seems to work only when I press the button to “wake up” the bag -- which means I’m right beside my bag and know its location. And since it’s the perfect carry-on size, it’s usually right above me in the plane cabin. So it’s a nice enough hard-shell wheelie bag with a couple of bells and whistles that don’t necessarily wow me.</li>\r\n	<li>Which shouldn’t be interpreted as a knock against Bluesmart. I’m sure there are a number of travelers who love every one of those bells and whistles. It’s not so much a criticism about Bluesmart as it is how personal and idiosyncratic frequent travelers are about suitcases. It’s gotta fit your packing strategies, which are also very idiosyncratic. Some people love compartments to help them structure their packing. Me? I’m all about the flexibility of a single open space -- I build my own structure with shoes and different kinds of clothes depending on the trip. And even though I see more and more hard-shell bags -- and now own one, I’m not completely sold on it. I still like the ability to bulge when I need to. And the two- vs. four-wheel thing. Pushing a 4-wheel through the airport seems easier on my wrist, but sometimes they roll too easily and won’t stay put. It’s the reason I’ve been walking around with a ripped backpack for 4 months -- I really hate shopping for travel bags. And am very happy that leather wallets last a really long time.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #120</li>\r\n	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/\">Podshow Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\r\n	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_119.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #120 — Where Do Guidebooks Fit In? I Hate Shopping for Suitcases','','inherit','closed','closed','','1598-revision-v1','','','2016-03-13 11:29:49','2016-03-13 16:29:49','',1598,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/13/1598-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1609,1,'2016-03-13 11:38:46','2016-03-13 16:38:46','[caption id=\"attachment_1603\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/IMG_0266-01.jpeg\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-1603\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1603\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/IMG_0266-01-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"Just a Few Guidebooks....\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Just a Few Guidebooks....[/caption]\r\n\r\nWhere do guidebooks fit in the world of apps, review websites, social media, and podcasts? Planning for a trip to Iceland got me thinking about how I make sense of the explosion of travel tips. And then, after giving my thoughts about my new <a href=\"http://bluesmart.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Bluesmart </a>\"smart connected suitcase\", I talk about how idiosyncratic frequent travelers are about packing strategies and their choice of suitcases. There\'s also follow-up about foreign exchange apps, and listener comments about digital travel security and Spirit Airlines\' growth. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_120.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/251667522\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #120:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, after a much longer-than-intended break. Looking back at the Google Docs revision history for this episode, I started it on Feb 2, so I had the best of intentions. But I’ve been traveling almost non-stop since then. At which point you might reasonably say “But you have all that time in airports and hotels to write” -- which should be the case, but I find that I have to remove all possible distractions before I can write. Hence my lack of a journalism career.</li>\r\n	<li>So instead, I keep jotting down ideas in Evernote, feeling like I’m making progress, but not ever buckling down to actually write an episode. Until last Weds, when Dan Gradwohl sent me an e-mail with the subject line “Mark, where’s the next TravelCommons?”, asking in a very nice way -- when are you getting off your duff? I snarled back at Dan a bit -- more at frustration with myself than anything he wrote. But it got the intended result. So, I dedicate this episode to Dan.</li>\r\n	<li>The travel that got in the way wasn’t anything exotic -- just the usual bouncing around -- New Orleans, Vegas, Atlanta, Boston, New Jersey. But it was the tail end of 7 weeks of straight travel -- which is right about the time I hit my fun quotient. My patience dives and my bitch tweeting climbs. Of course, the fact that my American Airlines flights were hitting a 50% on-time rate didn’t help. I think I finally tipped over when I found my EWR-ORD flight was an ancient AA MD-80. Trying to wedge my bag long ways into the short overhead bin on the AB side was a complete throwback to when I first started traveling for business -- in 1985, on American Airlines, out of DFW, on MD-80s. 30 years later, I find myself on the same plane -- with less legroom and no peanuts.</li>\r\n	<li>I am gearing up for some fun travel in March, though. Trying out Iceland Air’s new Chicago-to-Reykjavik service with my son, and then trying out Iceland’s budget carrier Wow Air to meet up with my wife and daughter in Spain. I’m hoping it all works fine, but I’m preparing myself to having to call a couple of audibles.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/seldon-circles/\"><em>Making Circles</em></a> by the Seldon Plan</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Peter Zurich sent a great note, adding onto the digital security topic in<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/12/20/podcast-119-digital-security-on-the-road-us-airports-getting-better/\" target=\"_blank\"> the last episode</a>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>“Your suggestion to switch to cellular network as opposed to airport wifi is okay but it is becoming easy to obtain technology to set up a rogue cell site that will silently capture traffic -- your data will be caught and you will be none the wiser.</li>\r\n	<li>“Thus, in my opinion, it is still very important to only use HTPS encrypted web sites and I would still add on the VPN if you have one available. Bottom line when using any website where you need your password to access sensitive information, make sure the computer is trusted (no public access/borrowed/loaner computers) and make sure the website is HTTPS. If using Outlook or other applications than the web browser you should be on your company\'s VPN.</li>\r\n	<li>“Second thing, people should be aware that tearing a 2-D barcode in half doesn\'t necessarily render it undecipherable. 2D barcodes have a configurable level of redundancy built-in so that even if part (or possibly most) of the barcode is missing/unreadable it can still be decoded. My personal policy is once we have confirmed our FF miles have posted, the BP\'s go in the shredder.”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>Peter, thanks for these. Last week’s <a href=\"http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/columnist/2016/02/24/got-hacked-my-mac-while-writing-story/80844720/\" target=\"_blank\">story </a>about the USA Today columnist whose e-mail was hacked while he used Gogo’s WiFi service on an American Airlines flight demonstrates again the potential dangers of using public WiFi. It takes a bit of spelunking through the columnist’s Twitter feed to figure out how that happened -- he was using an Earthlink e-mail service that didn’t encrypt traffic back to the mail server. Technical listeners would be right in saying “Well, there you go. What did you expect doing plain-text comms over public WiFi?” Indeed, when we talked about this in the last episode, I specifically called out the need to encrypt e-mail protocols -- POP, IMAP, SMTP -- over SSL. But that’s not the default configuration for many e-mail clients, including Outlook and, the last time I checked, the iPhone mail client. You have to go poking around in the settings, changing ports. I know how to do it -- but it’s nothing my wife would. Building on Peter’s suggestion, probably the easiest thing to do is use a web e-mail client like GMail over https -- when the green lock shows in the browser address bar. Next easiest is to set up your e-mail client to encrypt its traffic. Most e-mail providers have instructions on their sites. Perhaps the fiddliest, but the most secure is to install and use a VPN. If your company device comes with one already installed, then it’s easy -- though remember VPN web traffic is usually tracked just like it is in your office. If it’s your own device, then you’re probably going to want to buy a service. They’re not overly expensive -- $3-8/month. I use <a href=\"https://www.expressvpn.com/\" target=\"_blank\">ExpressVPN</a>, which is on the pricer side, but their VPN client is easy to install and use. And it has the side benefit of letting me watch NCAA March Madness video streams when I’m overseas. In March, I’ll be trying out a hardware-based VPN solution -- <a href=\"http://www.homingsystems.com/alwayshome-duo\" target=\"_blank\">AlwaysHome</a>, which sets up a VPN with matching USB dongles. Could be an easier solution. I’ll report back in the next episode.</li>\r\n	<li>Dan Gradwohl, before he poked me into action, had a “Hmm…” reaction to a comment in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/12/20/podcast-119-digital-security-on-the-road-us-airports-getting-better/\" target=\"_blank\">the last episode</a> about Spirit Airlines passing Delta as the 3rd largest at Chicago O’Hare. Looking at January schedules, he found Spirit had 29 daily departures to Delta’s 52. Would seem like Delta is still larger. However, the Crain’s Chicago article said Spirit carried more passengers than Delta -- which could be since some of Delta’s 52 departures were co-branded smaller regional jets. This is not a new thing. For a long time, O’Hare continued to claim the title of World’s Busiest Airport based on <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_world%27s_busiest_airports_by_aircraft_movements#2014_statistics\" target=\"_blank\">number of takeoffs/landings</a> (which it reclaimed in 2014) after Atlanta Hartsfield passed it on total passengers handled. Using that <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_world%27s_busiest_airports_by_passenger_traffic#2015_statistics\" target=\"_blank\">stat</a>, ORD is the 4th largest after ATL, Beijing, and Dubai. All that being said, Spirit is ramping up hard in the Chicago market, hiring new flight attendants ahead of plane deliveries, and pushing the city for more gate space. And Delta and American are rolling out new Economy Basic fares to fight them. Might not be too long before Spirit passes Delta on both measures.</li>\r\n	<li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/10/11/podcast-117-random-thoughts-about-eggs-scotland-car-rentals/\" target=\"_blank\">Episode #117</a>, I talked -- raved, actually -- about a FinTech company called <a href=\"https://revolut.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Revolut</a>. It offered a convenient and low-cost way to exchange, transfer, and access money internationally. I started using it last September when my daughter started up at University of St Andrews. I used it to convert and push money to her UK bank account, and used the Revolut chip-&amp;-pin debit card to avoid the hassle of US chip-&amp;-signature credit cards. Last week, though, the low-cost component of their value prop disappeared -- at least for US customers, when they added a 3% fee when you added money/”topped up” your Revolut account with a US debit card. They said they were passing through the fees they were being charged, a claim I don’t doubt. However, it started me looking for cheaper foreign exchange options. Which lead me down quite the rabbit hole -- sorting through the differences in transaction costs and exchange rates quickly led to an Excel modelling session, which is just how I want to spend a Saturday morning. If you look at <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">my Twitter feed</a>, there’s a string of tweets walking through my analysis, but for my case, TransferWise, another UK FinTech startup, and Xoom, owned by PayPal, were much cheaper than Revolut after considering their new 3% fee. I expect that I’ll still use the Revolut card a bit when in Europe -- at self-service check-outs or gas pumps -- but nowhere near the volume I was using it before last week. But, I’m glad to have options and do a bit of math so avoid a $50 bank wire fee or Western Union’s 7% premium from market exchange rates.</li>\r\n	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/eliyahu-wind/\">Oh Yeah</a></em> by Eliyahu Sills</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Where Do Guidebooks Fit In?</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>As I mentioned in the opening, my son and I are hitting Iceland in a couple of weeks for a 4-day weekend. We’ve never been before, so I needed to figure out what to do and where to stay. Right about then, someone from what I used to know as Dorling Kindersley -- now shortened to DK -- pinged me about the February relaunch of <a href=\"http://www.dk.com/us/travel/\" target=\"_blank\">DK’s Eyewitness Travel Top 10 Guides</a> -- one of the first 10 is for Iceland. It started me thinking about where guidebooks fit in these days of in the world of apps (Yelp, Foursquare, Untappd), podcasts (Amateur Traveler, Indie Travel Podcast), websites (TripAdvisor), newspaper articles (NYTimes’ <a href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/22/travel/36-hours-in-reykjavik.html\" target=\"_blank\">36 Hours in Reykjavik</a>) and friends’ social media posts on Facebook and Instagram.</li>\r\n	<li>When I want to torture my kids, I do the “when I was young…” thing. But going back to our honeymoon 25 years ago (this November -- need to get on that planning!), I cashed in a slug of British Airways miles to fly us first class to Pisa for a touring holiday in Tuscany. The only plans I had made were to rent a car (a Fiat Panda) and book our first night’s room (via Telex) in Lucca. We ran the rest of the vacation off of a set of Michelin guides -- the red one to find hotels and restaurants and the green one to figure out what to see. Between those and reading “A Room With A View”, we were set. We exchanged American Express travelers checks at the bank for lira, took pictures on Kodak and Fuji film, navigated using a paper maps… Whoops, got off track a bit there. I think my kids are somewhere screaming “Stop!”</li>\r\n	<li>I think like everybody, I start with a Google search -- “What to do in Iceland in March”, limit the results to the last 2 years and start clicking. Lots of articles from UK papers (I think because of Wow Air, the Icelandic version of Spirit or EasyJet, flying into London Gatwick) which I clip over to Evernote using their nifty little Chrome extension. Then I narrow the search down to specific interests -- like “Iceland craft beer” and a few more article get sync’d to Evernote. I stack up a bunch of facts -- a sort of <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointillism\" target=\"_blank\">pointillist </a>view of what to do in Iceland.</li>\r\n	<li>Every survey about how people go about travel planning will tell you that personal recommendations are the far and away the most important source of travel planning information. Which makes sense -- you know the person, how their interests, ways of travel align with yours. We have good friends that we’ll take restaurant recommendations from, but not hotels. We share the same tastes in interesting food, but they like to stay in hotels with nice pools. We’re tend to stay a bit more “closer to ground” -- choosing vacation rentals over the Westin resort.</li>\r\n	<li>And once people find that you travel a lot and to different/interesting places, you get hit up -- a lot -- for recommendations. Friend and long-time T/C listener Allan Marko curates a set of notes for his favorite European cities, places like Paris, that he regularly e-mails out. After a couple of visits to Spain, I’ve taken it to the next level of geekdom -- embedding my recommendations on a Google Map page and sending out the URL. For this trip, a friend from work sent me the itinerary she and her family did last summer. Not sure that she and her husband would be search out craft beer bars with 2 young kids in tow, but I did take her recommendation for the Hotel Geysir at the top of the Golden Circle route, and hitting the Blue Lagoon on the way back to the airport.</li>\r\n	<li>I like The NY Times’ 36 Hours and United Airlines’ 3 Perfect Days series. They’re focused on the long weekend getaway -- if you have a limited amount of time, here’s what to do. These are the sorts of articles we used to rip out of the Sunday travel section of the local newspaper or a travel magazine and stash in a travel folder. The Internet has shifted that behavior just a bit -- we now search for them when we right when we need them. Perhaps more for travel planning than for inspiration, but they serve the same purpose as the green Michelin guide did for our honeymoon -- a curated list of things you ought to see.</li>\r\n	<li>The DK Top 10 Iceland guide seems to fit into this “hit the highlights” mode -- top 10 highlights by region and by thing (top 10 churches, waterfalls, volcanoes, bars, cheap restaurants…), 2-day and 7-day itineraries, which is nice because the 36 Hours in Reykjavik article I pulled up was from 2013, maybe on the ragged edge of up-to-dateness. And the DK guide has everything nicely packaged, which I remember from the Dorling Kindersley books of old -- all the lists in one place wrapped in a sturdy cover that has fold-out maps in the front (Iceland) and the back (downtown Reykjavik) -- which is handy if you didn’t plan ahead and cache Google Maps data before leaving the hotel wi-fi bubble.</li>\r\n	<li>There’s another kind of guidebook that I’ll use, though I couldn’t find one for Iceland. They’re less about lists and more about stories -- think Bill Bryson’s <em>Notes from a Small Island</em> about the UK, or more recently, <em><a href=\"http://roadsandkingdoms.com/store/rice-noodle-fish-book/\" target=\"_blank\">Rice Noodle Fish</a></em> an Anthony Bourdain book by Matt Goulding (whatever that means) about Japan. I read those more before I travel than packing them in my bag. They’re about context/texture -- kinda like what “Room With A View” was for us about Florence 25 years ago -- that prepare rather than guide you, and maybe give you a bit more appreciation when you’re running through those Top 10 Highlights lists.</li>\r\n	<li>Maybe it comes down to the kind of reader you are -- are you someone that likes things more tangible than electronic. Do you like to flip pages rather than screens? The Kindle cannibalized a good-sized chunk of the demand for physical books, but didn’t replace it. Just like overall book market, recent numbers show the demand for physical guide books has stabilized albeit at a lower level. I sorta split the difference. I like paging through my Evernote virtual travel folder when I’m back at the room, but like to have a physical map and list when I’m out walking during the day. Maybe that physicality keeps me more engaged with where I am. Or at least looking up and forward, which should help keep me avoid that new travelers’ epidemic -- Death by GPS.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music --<em> <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/liquid-seventythree/\" target=\"_blank\">Is That Called Love</a> </em></em>by Liquid Zen</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>I Hate Shopping for Suitcases</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>I’ve been traveling for a few months now with the <a href=\"http://bluesmart.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Bluesmart </a>suitcase. I’ve mentioned it in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/08/26/podcast-116-traveling-thru-japan-luggage-trends/\" target=\"_blank\">a past episode</a> when I pre-ordered it through their Indiegogo campaign. And now that they’re shipping, they’re making a lot of Top Traveler Gadget lists.</li>\r\n	<li>It claims to be the first piece of “smart” luggage to hit the market. It pairs with my iPhone through Bluetooth. It automatically locks when I step away from it and then unlocks itself when I return. It has a built-in battery to power itself and charge personal electronics through a couple of USB ports. It also periodically sends out its location when I can then check through the iPhone app. And it has a cool front light that glows blue when it’s paired with my phone.</li>\r\n	<li>Aside from all the electronics, it’s a hard-shell wheelie bag with nice-sized wheels that roll easily -- sometimes too easily. It fits perfectly into American’s and United’s luggage sizers -- at least the ones in Boston Logan airport. (Some blogger who reviewed the bag raised a bit of a ruckus saying that the bag dimensions on the website were too big for carry-on. I guess he doesn’t travel enough to go an airport and check it out himself). The iPhone app is getting better -- Bluesmart is doing a nice job of reving the app frequently to stomp bugs, though the location alerts -- “You’re leaving me behind” are still a bit wonky.</li>\r\n	<li>All in all, it’s a nice enough bag. I had been thinking about getting something a bit smaller for 1-2 night trips and this fits the bill. I’m kinda “meh” on all the electronics. The large battery is fine, but I already carry a recharger in my backpack that will top up my iPhone or tablet a couple of times -- good enough and more accessible in-flight. The location functionality seems to work only when I press the button to “wake up” the bag -- which means I’m right beside my bag and know its location. And since it’s the perfect carry-on size, it’s usually right above me in the plane cabin. So it’s a nice enough hard-shell wheelie bag with a couple of bells and whistles that don’t necessarily wow me.</li>\r\n	<li>Which shouldn’t be interpreted as a knock against Bluesmart. I’m sure there are a number of travelers who love every one of those bells and whistles. It’s not so much a criticism about Bluesmart as it is how personal and idiosyncratic frequent travelers are about suitcases. It’s gotta fit your packing strategies, which are also very idiosyncratic. Some people love compartments to help them structure their packing. Me? I’m all about the flexibility of a single open space -- I build my own structure with shoes and different kinds of clothes depending on the trip. And even though I see more and more hard-shell bags -- and now own one, I’m not completely sold on it. I still like the ability to bulge when I need to. And the two- vs. four-wheel thing. Pushing a 4-wheel through the airport seems easier on my wrist, but sometimes they roll too easily and won’t stay put. It’s the reason I’ve been walking around with a ripped backpack for 4 months -- I really hate shopping for travel bags. And am very happy that leather wallets last a really long time.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #120</li>\r\n	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/\">Podshow Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\r\n	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_119.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #120 — Where Do Guidebooks Fit In? I Hate Shopping for Suitcases','','inherit','closed','closed','','1598-revision-v1','','','2016-03-13 11:38:46','2016-03-13 16:38:46','',1598,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/13/1598-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1611,1,'2016-03-13 11:45:21','2016-03-13 16:45:21','[caption id=\"attachment_1603\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/IMG_0266-01.jpeg\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-1603\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1603\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/IMG_0266-01-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"Just a Few Guidebooks....\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Just a Few Guidebooks....[/caption]\r\n\r\nWhere do guidebooks fit in the world of apps, review websites, social media, and podcasts? Planning for a trip to Iceland got me thinking about how to make sense of the explosion of travel tips. And then, after giving my thoughts about my new <a href=\"http://bluesmart.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Bluesmart </a>\"smart connected suitcase\", I talk about how idiosyncratic frequent travelers are about packing strategies and their choice of suitcases. There\'s also follow-up about foreign exchange apps, and listener comments about digital travel security and Spirit Airlines\' growth. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_120.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/251667522\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #120:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, after a much longer-than-intended break. Looking back at the Google Docs revision history for this episode, I started it on Feb 2, so I had the best of intentions. But I’ve been traveling almost non-stop since then. At which point you might reasonably say “But you have all that time in airports and hotels to write” -- which should be the case, but I find that I have to remove all possible distractions before I can write. Hence my lack of a journalism career.</li>\r\n	<li>So instead, I keep jotting down ideas in Evernote, feeling like I’m making progress, but not ever buckling down to actually write an episode. Until last Weds, when Dan Gradwohl sent me an e-mail with the subject line “Mark, where’s the next TravelCommons?”, asking in a very nice way -- when are you getting off your duff? I snarled back at Dan a bit -- more at frustration with myself than anything he wrote. But it got the intended result. So, I dedicate this episode to Dan.</li>\r\n	<li>The travel that got in the way wasn’t anything exotic -- just the usual bouncing around -- New Orleans, Vegas, Atlanta, Boston, New Jersey. But it was the tail end of 7 weeks of straight travel -- which is right about the time I hit my fun quotient. My patience dives and my bitch tweeting climbs. Of course, the fact that my American Airlines flights were hitting a 50% on-time rate didn’t help. I think I finally tipped over when I found my EWR-ORD flight was an ancient AA MD-80. Trying to wedge my bag long ways into the short overhead bin on the AB side was a complete throwback to when I first started traveling for business -- in 1985, on American Airlines, out of DFW, on MD-80s. 30 years later, I find myself on the same plane -- with less legroom and no peanuts.</li>\r\n	<li>I am gearing up for some fun travel in March, though. Trying out Iceland Air’s new Chicago-to-Reykjavik service with my son, and then trying out Iceland’s budget carrier Wow Air to meet up with my wife and daughter in Spain. I’m hoping it all works fine, but I’m preparing myself to having to call a couple of audibles.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/seldon-circles/\"><em>Making Circles</em></a> by the Seldon Plan</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Peter Zurich sent a great note, adding onto the digital security topic in<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/12/20/podcast-119-digital-security-on-the-road-us-airports-getting-better/\" target=\"_blank\"> the last episode</a>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>“Your suggestion to switch to cellular network as opposed to airport wifi is okay but it is becoming easy to obtain technology to set up a rogue cell site that will silently capture traffic -- your data will be caught and you will be none the wiser.</li>\r\n	<li>“Thus, in my opinion, it is still very important to only use HTPS encrypted web sites and I would still add on the VPN if you have one available. Bottom line when using any website where you need your password to access sensitive information, make sure the computer is trusted (no public access/borrowed/loaner computers) and make sure the website is HTTPS. If using Outlook or other applications than the web browser you should be on your company\'s VPN.</li>\r\n	<li>“Second thing, people should be aware that tearing a 2-D barcode in half doesn\'t necessarily render it undecipherable. 2D barcodes have a configurable level of redundancy built-in so that even if part (or possibly most) of the barcode is missing/unreadable it can still be decoded. My personal policy is once we have confirmed our FF miles have posted, the BP\'s go in the shredder.”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>Peter, thanks for these. Last week’s <a href=\"http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/columnist/2016/02/24/got-hacked-my-mac-while-writing-story/80844720/\" target=\"_blank\">story </a>about the USA Today columnist whose e-mail was hacked while he used Gogo’s WiFi service on an American Airlines flight demonstrates again the potential dangers of using public WiFi. It takes a bit of spelunking through the columnist’s Twitter feed to figure out how that happened -- he was using an Earthlink e-mail service that didn’t encrypt traffic back to the mail server. Technical listeners would be right in saying “Well, there you go. What did you expect doing plain-text comms over public WiFi?” Indeed, when we talked about this in the last episode, I specifically called out the need to encrypt e-mail protocols -- POP, IMAP, SMTP -- over SSL. But that’s not the default configuration for many e-mail clients, including Outlook and, the last time I checked, the iPhone mail client. You have to go poking around in the settings, changing ports. I know how to do it -- but it’s nothing my wife would. Building on Peter’s suggestion, probably the easiest thing to do is use a web e-mail client like GMail over https -- when the green lock shows in the browser address bar. Next easiest is to set up your e-mail client to encrypt its traffic. Most e-mail providers have instructions on their sites. Perhaps the fiddliest, but the most secure is to install and use a VPN. If your company device comes with one already installed, then it’s easy -- though remember VPN web traffic is usually tracked just like it is in your office. If it’s your own device, then you’re probably going to want to buy a service. They’re not overly expensive -- $3-8/month. I use <a href=\"https://www.expressvpn.com/\" target=\"_blank\">ExpressVPN</a>, which is on the pricer side, but their VPN client is easy to install and use. And it has the side benefit of letting me watch NCAA March Madness video streams when I’m overseas. In March, I’ll be trying out a hardware-based VPN solution -- <a href=\"http://www.homingsystems.com/alwayshome-duo\" target=\"_blank\">AlwaysHome</a>, which sets up a VPN with matching USB dongles. Could be an easier solution. I’ll report back in the next episode.</li>\r\n	<li>Dan Gradwohl, before he poked me into action, had a “Hmm…” reaction to a comment in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/12/20/podcast-119-digital-security-on-the-road-us-airports-getting-better/\" target=\"_blank\">the last episode</a> about Spirit Airlines passing Delta as the 3rd largest at Chicago O’Hare. Looking at January schedules, he found Spirit had 29 daily departures to Delta’s 52. Would seem like Delta is still larger. However, the Crain’s Chicago article said Spirit carried more passengers than Delta -- which could be since some of Delta’s 52 departures were co-branded smaller regional jets. This is not a new thing. For a long time, O’Hare continued to claim the title of World’s Busiest Airport based on <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_world%27s_busiest_airports_by_aircraft_movements#2014_statistics\" target=\"_blank\">number of takeoffs/landings</a> (which it reclaimed in 2014) after Atlanta Hartsfield passed it on total passengers handled. Using that <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_world%27s_busiest_airports_by_passenger_traffic#2015_statistics\" target=\"_blank\">stat</a>, ORD is the 4th largest after ATL, Beijing, and Dubai. All that being said, Spirit is ramping up hard in the Chicago market, hiring new flight attendants ahead of plane deliveries, and pushing the city for more gate space. And Delta and American are rolling out new Economy Basic fares to fight them. Might not be too long before Spirit passes Delta on both measures.</li>\r\n	<li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/10/11/podcast-117-random-thoughts-about-eggs-scotland-car-rentals/\" target=\"_blank\">Episode #117</a>, I talked -- raved, actually -- about a FinTech company called <a href=\"https://revolut.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Revolut</a>. It offered a convenient and low-cost way to exchange, transfer, and access money internationally. I started using it last September when my daughter started up at University of St Andrews. I used it to convert and push money to her UK bank account, and used the Revolut chip-&amp;-pin debit card to avoid the hassle of US chip-&amp;-signature credit cards. Last week, though, the low-cost component of their value prop disappeared -- at least for US customers, when they added a 3% fee when you added money/”topped up” your Revolut account with a US debit card. They said they were passing through the fees they were being charged, a claim I don’t doubt. However, it started me looking for cheaper foreign exchange options. Which lead me down quite the rabbit hole -- sorting through the differences in transaction costs and exchange rates quickly led to an Excel modelling session, which is just how I want to spend a Saturday morning. If you look at <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">my Twitter feed</a>, there’s a string of tweets walking through my analysis, but for my case, TransferWise, another UK FinTech startup, and Xoom, owned by PayPal, were much cheaper than Revolut after considering their new 3% fee. I expect that I’ll still use the Revolut card a bit when in Europe -- at self-service check-outs or gas pumps -- but nowhere near the volume I was using it before last week. But, I’m glad to have options and do a bit of math so avoid a $50 bank wire fee or Western Union’s 7% premium from market exchange rates.</li>\r\n	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/eliyahu-wind/\">Oh Yeah</a></em> by Eliyahu Sills</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Where Do Guidebooks Fit In?</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>As I mentioned in the opening, my son and I are hitting Iceland in a couple of weeks for a 4-day weekend. We’ve never been before, so I needed to figure out what to do and where to stay. Right about then, someone from what I used to know as Dorling Kindersley -- now shortened to DK -- pinged me about the February relaunch of <a href=\"http://www.dk.com/us/travel/\" target=\"_blank\">DK’s Eyewitness Travel Top 10 Guides</a> -- one of the first 10 is for Iceland. It started me thinking about where guidebooks fit in these days of in the world of apps (Yelp, Foursquare, Untappd), podcasts (Amateur Traveler, Indie Travel Podcast), websites (TripAdvisor), newspaper articles (NYTimes’ <a href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/22/travel/36-hours-in-reykjavik.html\" target=\"_blank\">36 Hours in Reykjavik</a>) and friends’ social media posts on Facebook and Instagram.</li>\r\n	<li>When I want to torture my kids, I do the “when I was young…” thing. But going back to our honeymoon 25 years ago (this November -- need to get on that planning!), I cashed in a slug of British Airways miles to fly us first class to Pisa for a touring holiday in Tuscany. The only plans I had made were to rent a car (a Fiat Panda) and book our first night’s room (via Telex) in Lucca. We ran the rest of the vacation off of a set of Michelin guides -- the red one to find hotels and restaurants and the green one to figure out what to see. Between those and reading “A Room With A View”, we were set. We exchanged American Express travelers checks at the bank for lira, took pictures on Kodak and Fuji film, navigated using a paper maps… Whoops, got off track a bit there. I think my kids are somewhere screaming “Stop!”</li>\r\n	<li>I think like everybody, I start with a Google search -- “What to do in Iceland in March”, limit the results to the last 2 years and start clicking. Lots of articles from UK papers (I think because of Wow Air, the Icelandic version of Spirit or EasyJet, flying into London Gatwick) which I clip over to Evernote using their nifty little Chrome extension. Then I narrow the search down to specific interests -- like “Iceland craft beer” and a few more article get sync’d to Evernote. I stack up a bunch of facts -- a sort of <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointillism\" target=\"_blank\">pointillist </a>view of what to do in Iceland.</li>\r\n	<li>Every survey about how people go about travel planning will tell you that personal recommendations are the far and away the most important source of travel planning information. Which makes sense -- you know the person, how their interests, ways of travel align with yours. We have good friends that we’ll take restaurant recommendations from, but not hotels. We share the same tastes in interesting food, but they like to stay in hotels with nice pools. We’re tend to stay a bit more “closer to ground” -- choosing vacation rentals over the Westin resort.</li>\r\n	<li>And once people find that you travel a lot and to different/interesting places, you get hit up -- a lot -- for recommendations. Friend and long-time T/C listener Allan Marko curates a set of notes for his favorite European cities, places like Paris, that he regularly e-mails out. After a couple of visits to Spain, I’ve taken it to the next level of geekdom -- embedding my recommendations on a Google Map page and sending out the URL. For this trip, a friend from work sent me the itinerary she and her family did last summer. Not sure that she and her husband would be search out craft beer bars with 2 young kids in tow, but I did take her recommendation for the Hotel Geysir at the top of the Golden Circle route, and hitting the Blue Lagoon on the way back to the airport.</li>\r\n	<li>I like The NY Times’ 36 Hours and United Airlines’ 3 Perfect Days series. They’re focused on the long weekend getaway -- if you have a limited amount of time, here’s what to do. These are the sorts of articles we used to rip out of the Sunday travel section of the local newspaper or a travel magazine and stash in a travel folder. The Internet has shifted that behavior just a bit -- we now search for them when we right when we need them. Perhaps more for travel planning than for inspiration, but they serve the same purpose as the green Michelin guide did for our honeymoon -- a curated list of things you ought to see.</li>\r\n	<li>The DK Top 10 Iceland guide seems to fit into this “hit the highlights” mode -- top 10 highlights by region and by thing (top 10 churches, waterfalls, volcanoes, bars, cheap restaurants…), 2-day and 7-day itineraries, which is nice because the 36 Hours in Reykjavik article I pulled up was from 2013, maybe on the ragged edge of up-to-dateness. And the DK guide has everything nicely packaged, which I remember from the Dorling Kindersley books of old -- all the lists in one place wrapped in a sturdy cover that has fold-out maps in the front (Iceland) and the back (downtown Reykjavik) -- which is handy if you didn’t plan ahead and cache Google Maps data before leaving the hotel wi-fi bubble.</li>\r\n	<li>There’s another kind of guidebook that I’ll use, though I couldn’t find one for Iceland. They’re less about lists and more about stories -- think Bill Bryson’s <em>Notes from a Small Island</em> about the UK, or more recently, <em><a href=\"http://roadsandkingdoms.com/store/rice-noodle-fish-book/\" target=\"_blank\">Rice Noodle Fish</a></em> an Anthony Bourdain book by Matt Goulding (whatever that means) about Japan. I read those more before I travel than packing them in my bag. They’re about context/texture -- kinda like what “Room With A View” was for us about Florence 25 years ago -- that prepare rather than guide you, and maybe give you a bit more appreciation when you’re running through those Top 10 Highlights lists.</li>\r\n	<li>Maybe it comes down to the kind of reader you are -- are you someone that likes things more tangible than electronic. Do you like to flip pages rather than screens? The Kindle cannibalized a good-sized chunk of the demand for physical books, but didn’t replace it. Just like overall book market, recent numbers show the demand for physical guide books has stabilized albeit at a lower level. I sorta split the difference. I like paging through my Evernote virtual travel folder when I’m back at the room, but like to have a physical map and list when I’m out walking during the day. Maybe that physicality keeps me more engaged with where I am. Or at least looking up and forward, which should help keep me avoid that new travelers’ epidemic -- Death by GPS.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music --<em> <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/liquid-seventythree/\" target=\"_blank\">Is That Called Love</a> </em></em>by Liquid Zen</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>I Hate Shopping for Suitcases</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>I’ve been traveling for a few months now with the <a href=\"http://bluesmart.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Bluesmart </a>suitcase. I’ve mentioned it in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/08/26/podcast-116-traveling-thru-japan-luggage-trends/\" target=\"_blank\">a past episode</a> when I pre-ordered it through their Indiegogo campaign. And now that they’re shipping, they’re making a lot of Top Traveler Gadget lists.</li>\r\n	<li>It claims to be the first piece of “smart” luggage to hit the market. It pairs with my iPhone through Bluetooth. It automatically locks when I step away from it and then unlocks itself when I return. It has a built-in battery to power itself and charge personal electronics through a couple of USB ports. It also periodically sends out its location when I can then check through the iPhone app. And it has a cool front light that glows blue when it’s paired with my phone.</li>\r\n	<li>Aside from all the electronics, it’s a hard-shell wheelie bag with nice-sized wheels that roll easily -- sometimes too easily. It fits perfectly into American’s and United’s luggage sizers -- at least the ones in Boston Logan airport. (Some blogger who reviewed the bag raised a bit of a ruckus saying that the bag dimensions on the website were too big for carry-on. I guess he doesn’t travel enough to go an airport and check it out himself). The iPhone app is getting better -- Bluesmart is doing a nice job of reving the app frequently to stomp bugs, though the location alerts -- “You’re leaving me behind” are still a bit wonky.</li>\r\n	<li>All in all, it’s a nice enough bag. I had been thinking about getting something a bit smaller for 1-2 night trips and this fits the bill. I’m kinda “meh” on all the electronics. The large battery is fine, but I already carry a recharger in my backpack that will top up my iPhone or tablet a couple of times -- good enough and more accessible in-flight. The location functionality seems to work only when I press the button to “wake up” the bag -- which means I’m right beside my bag and know its location. And since it’s the perfect carry-on size, it’s usually right above me in the plane cabin. So it’s a nice enough hard-shell wheelie bag with a couple of bells and whistles that don’t necessarily wow me.</li>\r\n	<li>Which shouldn’t be interpreted as a knock against Bluesmart. I’m sure there are a number of travelers who love every one of those bells and whistles. It’s not so much a criticism about Bluesmart as it is how personal and idiosyncratic frequent travelers are about suitcases. It’s gotta fit your packing strategies, which are also very idiosyncratic. Some people love compartments to help them structure their packing. Me? I’m all about the flexibility of a single open space -- I build my own structure with shoes and different kinds of clothes depending on the trip. And even though I see more and more hard-shell bags -- and now own one, I’m not completely sold on it. I still like the ability to bulge when I need to. And the two- vs. four-wheel thing. Pushing a 4-wheel through the airport seems easier on my wrist, but sometimes they roll too easily and won’t stay put. It’s the reason I’ve been walking around with a ripped backpack for 4 months -- I really hate shopping for travel bags. And am very happy that leather wallets last a really long time.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #120</li>\r\n	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/\">Podshow Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\r\n	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_119.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #120 — Where Do Guidebooks Fit In? I Hate Shopping for Suitcases','','inherit','closed','closed','','1598-revision-v1','','','2016-03-13 11:45:21','2016-03-13 16:45:21','',1598,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/13/1598-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1613,1,'2016-03-13 18:21:10','2016-03-13 23:21:10','Recorded in the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"San Francisco International Airport\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_International_Airport\" rel=\"wikipedia\">San Francisco Airport</a> Marriott, a recent city-a-day business trip through Europe allowed me to do a first-hand comparison of the European air travel experience to the much maligned state of US air travel. We also update our thoughts on the state of mobile computing devices. Is it possible to travel \"PC-less\" yet, or are we still one release away from leaving the laptop at home? Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_56.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_56.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #56:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Recorded in SFO Marriott</li>\r\n	<li>July and August have been heavy travel months</li>\r\n	<li>Did Chicago\'s <a href=\"http://www.lateride.org/\">overnight bike ride</a> right before climbing on a plane for a city-a-day tour through Europe</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/download_track.php?id=CA84300ED431C297088FF88D72A178B3D5A6B8ADCC7B952E1A4A1E350BD450FA5840BD211C5180D7202C34D61CFFBC4F\" rel=\"nofollow\">Moving Forward</a></em> by <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=648F3E2C7F183297592F9B075C410E264C51054653F2D7CB016C2A94677CF9DF\" rel=\"nofollow\">Bitter:Sweet</a></li>\r\n	<li>Alan Lew of the <a href=\"http://www.TravelGeography.info\">Geography for Travelers podcast</a> recounts sightings of TSA agents in <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Hong Kong\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/china/hong-kong\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\">Hong Kong</a></li>\r\n	<li>Alan added pictures out his hotel room windows in Kuala Lumpur and <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Guǎngzhōu\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/china/guangdong/guangzhou\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\">Guangzhou, China</a> to Flickr\'s <a href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/tags/viewfromhere/\">View From Here</a> photo stream. I added pictures out the windows of the Hilton Mainz and Paris Renaissance</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/download_track.php?id=B8FFD43EC56896775929CB3DCD2B1F2E5F6B3B0BE67F3AC30ED9588E915A88C55840BD211C5180D7202C34D61CFFBC4F\" rel=\"nofollow\">Scratch To Win</a></em> by <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=A540ACB4AF73C6EBAFA90EADEE4601D809748717F2419A98FB85DC7BD8639229\" rel=\"nofollow\">Ticklah</a></li>\r\n	<li>The poor state of the US air travel experience is the travel topic <em>de jure</em> this summer</li>\r\n	<li>My city-a-day business trip through Europe last month gave me a first-hand comparison of between the European and US air travel experiences</li>\r\n	<li>Spent more time in lines in European airports but had much fewer flight delays once on the plane</li>\r\n	<li>European gate agents and security screeners less polite than in the US, but airplanes were in better shape and the in-flight service much nicer</li>\r\n	<li>All in all, the European experience was better, but not by the margin I had expected</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/download_track.php?id=CA84300ED431C297088FF88D72A178B3D5A6B8ADCC7B952E1A4A1E350BD450FA5840BD211C5180D7202C34D61CFFBC4F\" rel=\"nofollow\">Une Rose Noire</a></em> by <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=39CD9773095D43710560ACD6950AC8F009748717F2419A98FB85DC7BD8639229\" rel=\"nofollow\">Paul Cargnello</a></li>\r\n	<li>Ed Vawter\'s latest episode of the <a href=\"http://www.qdinformation.com/searching/2007/07/09/searching-the-internet-episode-017-mobile-searching/\"><em>Searching the Internet</em> podcast</a> focuses on mobile search sites</li>\r\n	<li>My T-Mobile GSM Blackberry allows me to go PC-less if I only need to track e-mail</li>\r\n	<li>The Google Maps application for the Blackberry was very handy for finding a Paris restaurant recommended by a friend</li>\r\n	<li>Apple\'s iPhone can almost, but not quite, replace a PC</li>\r\n	<li>The high probability of a long flight delay means you want to bring along a device on which you can do real work -- a PC</li>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917624.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://promonet.iodalliance.com\">IODA Promonet</a></li>\r\n	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_56.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<div class=\"zemanta-pixie\" style=\"margin-top: 10px; height: 15px;\"><img class=\"zemanta-pixie-img\" style=\"border: none; float: right;\" src=\"http://img.zemanta.com/pixy.gif?x-id=8c33f4db-54cd-4be0-bca1-eb934f29838b\" alt=\"\" /></div>','Podcast #56 - Lines Around the World; Shedding Some Electronic Weight','','inherit','closed','closed','','78-revision-v1','','','2016-03-13 18:21:10','2016-03-13 23:21:10','',78,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/13/78-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1615,1,'2016-05-30 22:32:57','2016-05-31 03:32:57','[caption id=\"attachment_1616\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"225\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/IMAG0569_1.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1616\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/IMAG0569_1-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"This should be interesting...\" width=\"225\" height=\"300\"></a> This should be interesting...[/caption]\n\nAfter two vacations to Europe and some full-contact business travel in-between, I found my way back into the TravelCommons studios. I talk about these recent trips -- the awful timeliness of an <a href=\"http://aa.com\">American Airlines</a>\' regional jet partner, an incredible string of lost luggage, a meaningless baggage strip tease with <a href=\"http://wowair.us\">Wow Air</a>, and being surprised to still find some quirks when using ATMs and credit cards in Europe. And it wouldn\'t be a travel podcast if I didn\'t weigh in on the TSA\'s \"line-mageddon\" -- their <a href=\"http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-tsa-airport-security-lines-met-0517-20160516-story.html\">meltdown at O\'Hare</a>. All this and more at the&nbsp;<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_121.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n<hr>\n\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #121:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you once again from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, after rewriting an episode I’d hoped to get done 3 weeks ago. I’d even posted on the TravelCommons Facebook wall on May 1st about having a new episode next weekend -- a post I’ve since deleted. Seems to be a trend with me. I get started on a new episode, but then it gets elbowed aside by other things -- like work. Maybe if I could just figure out a way to monetize this thing…</li>\n 	<li>I had hoped to record this episode halfway between two European trips. As I mentioned in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/12/podcast-120-where-do-guidebooks-fit-in-i-hate-shopping-for-suitcases/\">the last episode</a>, I had a weird Spring Break itinerary in April right before Easter -- Chicago to Reykjavik, Iceland for a 4-day long weekend with my son, and then, as he headed back to Chicago, I flew down to Spain to meet my wife and daughter and some friends for a week in Andalucia. As you can imagine, packing for that trip in a 22-inch carry on required equal amounts of editing and physical force. And then in mid-May, we all headed over to Portugal for a week. The excuse being that we needed to shove all my daughter’s belongings into storage after her first year at university in Scotland, but decided that Portugal would have better food and wine than Scotland. So we headed to Lisbon as a family, and then my wife and daughter flew back up to St Andrews to do all the packing stuff. I think I came out of this pretty good.</li>\n 	<li>Where this episode got shoved off the rails was the week before I left for Portugal. We all know that vacations aren’t free -- that we pay for them the week before we leave and the week after. I was blissfully in denial of this immutable law, thinking that I could write, record, produce, and post this episode then. Cramming two weeks of business travel into 4 days (we were leaving for Lisbon Friday afternoon), that week’s travel itinerary was New Jersey on Monday, Boston on Tuesday, New Orleans on Wednesday, and Atlanta on Thursday. Across four airlines -- United ORD-EWR-BOS, JetBlue BOS-MSY, Southwest MSY-ATL, and American ATL-ORD -- I racked up about 2:30 hrs in flight delays with JetBlue being the only carrier without a black mark.</li>\n 	<li>Over April and May, what’s been particularly awful has been my run on one of American Airline’s regional jet partners Skywest. One Monday in April, Skywest lost voice and data connectivity at its Dallas dispatch center causing a ground stop of its planes. After two hours of hanging around the Admirals Club, watching my Newark departure time get pushed out every 30 minutes, I called Amex to get switched over to a real American plane flying into LGA. It added about 45 minutes to my drive after I landed, but at least I got there, especially since Skywest ended up canceling my original Newark flight. The next Monday, I ended up on another Skywest American flight; this time to Charlottesville, VA. Again, another 1+ hr delay. This time it was plane maintenance. Then that Friday, I get a text after lunch -- my flight home was delayed over 2 hours. That was it. Three Skywest flights in a row that couldn’t get close to on-schedule. I called Amex again. Got on a United flight out of Richmond. After an hour-and-a-half drag race down I-64, I landed at ORD, drove home, ate dinner with my wife, and had a couple of glasses of wine before my original Skywest plane finally made it to Chicago.</li>\n 	<li>Now I’m not an airline ops expert, but when the women behind the desks in the Admirals Club tell you about SkyWest “They’re not our favorite”, you might think about finding a new partner.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://cyberset.cc/artists2.php?tr_release_id=104\"><em>Heaven</em></a> by <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=A951998E6011FA9B2D22387EB3CAC0B5EB05A36360E7FDA122C8D7A5C140F8DC\" rel=\"nofollow\">Electric Skychurch</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Steve Frick asked in a comment on the TravelCommons website about how I use Evernote. In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/12/podcast-120-where-do-guidebooks-fit-in-i-hate-shopping-for-suitcases/\">the last episode</a>, I talked about how I use it to in my vacation travel planning. I used to store all sorts of things in Evernote — scanned receipts, recipes, etc. Now I mostly just use it to store on-line travel articles using its Web Clipper Chrome extension which I really like. A couple of days ago, I was reading a 36 Hours in Philadelphia article in the NYTimes. I clicked the little elephant head on the Chrome bar and now I have it saved, and synced across all my devices. I know a bunch of folks who are big OneNote users. I’ve been thinking of looking at it, but it’s pretty low on the priority list since I’m good in Evernote’s free tier.</li>\n 	<li>Peter Zurich sent in <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEyFH-a-XoQ\">a link</a> to an Onion YouTube video about the Franz Kafka Airport in Prague. Now, the Onion is talented/notorious for writing absurd articles in a straight voice that’s just close enough to the truth to make people accept that it is true. This video is well done. Anyone who read Kafka in high school or college will get a kick out of it, and remind you how close to Kafka-esque absurdity the modern travel experience gets. And it did make me look up the Prague airport -- did they really name it after Kafka? As great as that would be, the airport has been called Václav Havel Airport Prague since 2012 in honor of the Czech’s former president and leader of the Velvet Revolution.</li>\n 	<li>Dan Gradwohl dropped me a note regarding the “I Hate Shopping for a Suitcase” topic in the last episode where I talked about my difficulties in replacing my worn backpack.\n<ul>\n 	<li>As for the backpack search, Sara feels your pain as she searched long and hard for a new backpack before settling on a Gregory for her upcoming trip on The Camino in northern Spain. Of course, her backpack needs differ from yours! For baggage, she uses the REI Tech Beast and loves it. She\'s had it for 8 years, still going strong with 100,000+ miles per year easily on it. She has not found an overhead bin it does not fit in, from a CR9/170 to an A380/744.</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Dan, thanks for that. I just got a couple of REI coupons in the mail. I’ll have to go check out the Tech Beast</li>\n 	<li>In that same segment, I talked about my “smart” luggage bag from<a href=\"http://bluesmart.com/\"> Bluesmart</a>. I think I summarized my review as “meh” -- nice enough bag, but all the electronics felt more like a gimmick than something I needed. I’m going to backtrack a bit on that -- specifically with regards to its location finder capability. The bag has a GPS and global SIM card and through a deal with Telefonica transmits its location periodically which you can see on the smartphone app. As I mentioned in the last episode, the Bluesmart is the perfect carry-on size, it’s usually right above me in the plane cabin, so the location finder isn’t that valuable. Except recently, I’ve been flying regional jets a lot where I’ve had to gate check (“valet”) my bag. Normally I don’t worry about this -- I’ve never had an airline lose my bag in the couple of hundred feet between the jetway and the plane. But one on of these recent Skywest flights, it was taking my bag a long time to show up at the gate after arriving. Hmmm, I pulled out my iPhone, hit the Location button on the Bluesmart app, and it showed me that my bag had updated its location a couple of minutes prior and was indeed here. A few minutes later, it showed up in the last tranche of bags heaved up into the jet bridge. Not critical functionality, but it moves up from “meh” to “kinda handy”.</li>\n 	<li>Which I guess would’ve been handy but not necessarily useful in the string of bad luggage karma that my daughter and her friends have experienced over the past couple of month. My daughter’s luggage has been lost on 3 out of 4 trips -- Air Brussels lost it between EDI and MAD through BRU, KLM lost it on her return through AMS, and then AirFrance lost it between LIS and EDI through DeGaulle. And a friend of her had Ibera lose a bag between Seville and MAD. How does that happen? You have to really work hard to lose anything in an airport the size of Seville. And it’s not that my daughter wanted to check her bag. She wanted to carry on, But she has this short light blue roller bag that seems to pull gate agent eyes toward it. I gotta get her something more nondescript, like a black hardshell roller.</li>\n 	<li>But the thing that will catch you in Europe is that carry-on bags often have a weight limit as well as a size limit. Checking in for my <a href=\"http://wowair.us/\">Wow Air</a> flight from Reykjavik to London, I arrived 2 hrs before check in to see what appeared to be a stationary check in line of a couple of hundred people. Reykjavik is Wow’s hub and, near as I could see, they have 4 agents checking people in with luggage. I hadn’t wanted to check my luggage since I had a weird connection in London en route to Madrid -- no interlining between Wow and Ibera, so I would have to claim luggage in Gatwick, pass through Customs, and then recheck the bag with Iberia. And checking in with carry on was a separate and much shorter line. My bag fit -- snuggly -- in the sizer, so I figured I was good to go. No so fast. Wow also has a 7kg/15 lbs weight limit for carryons! Not even Spirit Airlines pulls that stunt. So I take my bag off the scale, pull some clothes out, zip it back up, and put it back on the scale. Not enough, the agent says. I do this 3 or 4 more times. The agent finally takes pity -- or gets tired of me -- and gives me the approval tag to put on my bag (saying “You shall pass” -- Wow Air definitely pushes the “we’re quirky” image). I walk about 10 feet with my tagged bag and armful of clothes, open my bag and put my clothes back in. When I got on the plane, a brand new Airbus A321, my carry on fit perfectly in the overhead bin, just like it does for every other Airbus A321, A320, and A319 I fly in the US and Europe. So I’m not quite sure what the Wow agent and I accomplished with that baggage strip tease, but I got what I wanted -- my bag right above me rather than trundling around Keflavik airport for the next couple of days.</li>\n 	<li>In the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/12/20/podcast-119-digital-security-on-the-road-us-airports-getting-better/\">last</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/12/podcast-120-where-do-guidebooks-fit-in-i-hate-shopping-for-suitcases/\">couple </a>of episodes, I’ve talked about the <a href=\"https://revolut.com/\">Revolut</a> card which is a Mastercard pre-paid debit card with some very nice foreign exchange functionality. I loved this card when it first came out -- first when I was traveling in the UK and then cheaply transfer money to my daughter studying in Scotland. Then I went very cold when they blew up the “cheaply” component , when they added a 3% fee when you added money/”topped up” your Revolut account using a US debit card. This episode, I’ve warmed up a bit. First, I discovered a way to bypass that 3% debit charge --I topped up my account in Euros with my US debit card. This avoids the 3% charge from Revolut, though the app does note that you’re not using the right currency with your card and asks you if you really mean to do this. My bank charges me less than 1% for the conversion, and though the exchange rate isn’t as good as Revolut’s, it’s not bad enough to cost-justify the 3% charge that USD top-ups attract. So, we’re back to a reasonably priced conversion -- in a roundabout way.</li>\n 	<li>Which is good because, for some reason, my US ATM card never worked the whole time I was in Iceland. And I could never figure out why. I traded notes with my bank. They weren’t denying anything; they weren’t ever seeing the transaction show up at their end. I dunno, maybe it’s some residual wonkiness left over from their banking meltdown. I can’t remember the last time I had problems like that. Which, before I left for Iceland, made me wonder if I still needed to carry a wad of backup USD with me on this trip -- given how ubiquitous and seamless ATMs are nowadays. I still didn’t need the Jacksons though because my Revolut card had no problem pulling krona from any ATM. In Portugal, I did hit a couple of different quirks. First, the train and Lisbon subway ticket machines don’t accept pre-paid debit cards which left me scrambling for exact change a surprising number of times. Second, a number of shops only accepted Visa cards, which blocked out Revolut’s MasterCard-based card. I used to see this more often in the past -- shops only accepted cards on one network -- Visa or MasterCard, and often didn’t take American Express -- which has led me to always carry one of each card, but I thought the need for that backup had also faded. So I guess I’ll keep carrying a fist full of credit cards and USD for at least a couple more years.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Rocky Road</em> by <a href=\"http://www.kcentricity.com/\">KCentric</a></li>\n</ul>\n<b>TSA Lines</b>\n<ul>\n 	<li>For much of March and April, I’d been traveling in and out of Newark pretty much every week which, I have to say, if you’re using Terminal A, is the worst airport in the country. Now, I know that Terminal B in LaGuardia gives it a good run with the ceiling tarps drained by garden hoses into trash cans in the middle of the terminal, but the TSA security set up in Newark Terminal A beats that. They’ve split the corridor, the hallway down to gates in two -- the right side has the TSA stations, the left side the line for passengers waiting to be screened and the walkway for exiting passengers. The screening line is usually a bit of a cluster -- you can never quite tell which screening station you’re waiting for -- maybe #3 or should I scoot around to get in the line for #4. The really special feature of this configuration -- what wins it the prize -- is that you often have to wait in line to leave the terminal. Yup, more than a few times there’s a TSA agent holding up a line of departing passengers because of some confusion in the screening lines. It’s just awful.</li>\n 	<li>I just missed the TSA’s line-mageddon in O’Hare (I flew out the Friday before) where 450 American Airlines passengers got to experience Camp O’Hare cots after missing their flights because of 2-3 hour long TSA screening lines. But you could see it coming. My wife had spend 45 minutes in line in March, and the Monday morning rush hour had become a jumble of lines extending the length of the concourse. With summer travel volumes starting to build, it was a matter of when, not if, the whole thing imploded. And if I could tell this from my weekly flight out of ORD, you know the TSA folks on the ground knew it and were dreading it. So why didn’t they get in front of this instead of waiting until after the meltdown and the screaming headlines to replace management and add staff.</li>\n 	<li>Wading through recriminations about incompetence, baggage fees, gross misforecasting of PreCheck sign-ups, and the general <a href=\"http://www.travelandleisure.com/travel-tips/travel-warnings/tsa-blames-passengers\">cluelessness of infrequent fliers</a>, I think a couple of economists get to the real answer in an <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/737290917220995075\">article</a> in Sunday’s New York Times -- “the TSA has been acting as if there were no cost to tying people up for hours in security lines. In effect, all that time on line is “free” to the T.S.A.” “This glaring omission creates perverse incentives for government agencies. Cutting staff improves an agency’s bottom line, while wasting citizens’ time has little material consequence for it aside from expressions of annoyance and outrage in tweets and (newspaper) articles”</li>\n 	<li>I think that pretty much nails it. I retweeted a <a href=\"http://qz.com/659461/tsa-is-our-no-1-problem-right-now-long-security-lines-are-frustrating-us-airlines-too/\">link </a>to a Quartz article with a pretty self-explanatory graph. Air traveller volume has increased more than 10% over the past 12 months while the number of TSA screeners has decreased by more than that. Everyone knew this train wreck was coming, but there was no incentive to fix it -- until the wreck happened and the volume of complaints and outrage became impossible to ignore.</li>\n 	<li>In the immediate term, the spectacle of those 450 filled cots at ORD spurred some good action -- Congress let the TSA move some money around to hire more personnel, the TSA head of security got sacked, lines at ORD have shrunk, and a lot more people are ponying up the $85 for PreCheck (which is causing a whole other set of lines that I’m not going into).\nIn the short to medium term, maybe some new technology will help -- automating checkpoints like they do in London Heathrow, posting real-time wait times so travelers can “self-balance” security lines.</li>\n 	<li>But not until the TSA explicitly considers the value of travelers time will we get to some semblance of realistic balance between the cost and risk of travel.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #121</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_121.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #121 — TSA Lines, My Luggage is Where?','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-121-tsa-lines-my-luggage-is-where','','','2023-02-27 18:28:26','2023-02-27 23:28:26','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=1615',0,'post','',0),
(1616,1,'2016-05-30 22:31:55','2016-05-31 03:31:55','','IMAG0569_1','This should be interesting...','inherit','open','closed','','imag0569_1','','','2016-05-30 22:32:46','2016-05-31 03:32:46','',1615,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/IMAG0569_1.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(1617,1,'2016-05-30 22:32:57','2016-05-31 03:32:57','[caption id=\"attachment_1616\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"225\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/IMAG0569_1.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1616\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/IMAG0569_1-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"This should be interesting...\" width=\"225\" height=\"300\" /></a> This should be interesting...[/caption]\r\n\r\nWhere do guidebooks fit in the world of apps, review websites, social media, and podcasts? Planning for a trip to Iceland got me thinking about how to make sense of the explosion of travel tips. And then, after giving my thoughts about my new <a href=\"http://bluesmart.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Bluesmart </a>\"smart connected suitcase\", I talk about how idiosyncratic frequent travelers are about packing strategies and their choice of suitcases. There\'s also follow-up about foreign exchange apps, and listener comments about digital travel security and Spirit Airlines\' growth. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_120.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/251667522\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #121:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, after a much longer-than-intended break. Looking back at the Google Docs revision history for this episode, I started it on Feb 2, so I had the best of intentions. But I’ve been traveling almost non-stop since then. At which point you might reasonably say “But you have all that time in airports and hotels to write” -- which should be the case, but I find that I have to remove all possible distractions before I can write. Hence my lack of a journalism career.</li>\r\n 	<li>So instead, I keep jotting down ideas in Evernote, feeling like I’m making progress, but not ever buckling down to actually write an episode. Until last Weds, when Dan Gradwohl sent me an e-mail with the subject line “Mark, where’s the next TravelCommons?”, asking in a very nice way -- when are you getting off your duff? I snarled back at Dan a bit -- more at frustration with myself than anything he wrote. But it got the intended result. So, I dedicate this episode to Dan.</li>\r\n 	<li>The travel that got in the way wasn’t anything exotic -- just the usual bouncing around -- New Orleans, Vegas, Atlanta, Boston, New Jersey. But it was the tail end of 7 weeks of straight travel -- which is right about the time I hit my fun quotient. My patience dives and my bitch tweeting climbs. Of course, the fact that my American Airlines flights were hitting a 50% on-time rate didn’t help. I think I finally tipped over when I found my EWR-ORD flight was an ancient AA MD-80. Trying to wedge my bag long ways into the short overhead bin on the AB side was a complete throwback to when I first started traveling for business -- in 1985, on American Airlines, out of DFW, on MD-80s. 30 years later, I find myself on the same plane -- with less legroom and no peanuts.</li>\r\n 	<li>I am gearing up for some fun travel in March, though. Trying out Iceland Air’s new Chicago-to-Reykjavik service with my son, and then trying out Iceland’s budget carrier Wow Air to meet up with my wife and daughter in Spain. I’m hoping it all works fine, but I’m preparing myself to having to call a couple of audibles.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://cyberset.cc/artists2.php?tr_release_id=104\"><em>Heaven</em></a> by <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=A951998E6011FA9B2D22387EB3CAC0B5EB05A36360E7FDA122C8D7A5C140F8DC\" rel=\"nofollow\">Electric Skychurch</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Peter Zurich sent a great note, adding onto the digital security topic in<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/12/20/podcast-119-digital-security-on-the-road-us-airports-getting-better/\" target=\"_blank\"> the last episode</a>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>“Your suggestion to switch to cellular network as opposed to airport wifi is okay but it is becoming easy to obtain technology to set up a rogue cell site that will silently capture traffic -- your data will be caught and you will be none the wiser.</li>\r\n 	<li>“Thus, in my opinion, it is still very important to only use HTPS encrypted web sites and I would still add on the VPN if you have one available. Bottom line when using any website where you need your password to access sensitive information, make sure the computer is trusted (no public access/borrowed/loaner computers) and make sure the website is HTTPS. If using Outlook or other applications than the web browser you should be on your company\'s VPN.</li>\r\n 	<li>“Second thing, people should be aware that tearing a 2-D barcode in half doesn\'t necessarily render it undecipherable. 2D barcodes have a configurable level of redundancy built-in so that even if part (or possibly most) of the barcode is missing/unreadable it can still be decoded. My personal policy is once we have confirmed our FF miles have posted, the BP\'s go in the shredder.”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Peter, thanks for these. Last week’s <a href=\"http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/columnist/2016/02/24/got-hacked-my-mac-while-writing-story/80844720/\" target=\"_blank\">story </a>about the USA Today columnist whose e-mail was hacked while he used Gogo’s WiFi service on an American Airlines flight demonstrates again the potential dangers of using public WiFi. It takes a bit of spelunking through the columnist’s Twitter feed to figure out how that happened -- he was using an Earthlink e-mail service that didn’t encrypt traffic back to the mail server. Technical listeners would be right in saying “Well, there you go. What did you expect doing plain-text comms over public WiFi?” Indeed, when we talked about this in the last episode, I specifically called out the need to encrypt e-mail protocols -- POP, IMAP, SMTP -- over SSL. But that’s not the default configuration for many e-mail clients, including Outlook and, the last time I checked, the iPhone mail client. You have to go poking around in the settings, changing ports. I know how to do it -- but it’s nothing my wife would. Building on Peter’s suggestion, probably the easiest thing to do is use a web e-mail client like GMail over https -- when the green lock shows in the browser address bar. Next easiest is to set up your e-mail client to encrypt its traffic. Most e-mail providers have instructions on their sites. Perhaps the fiddliest, but the most secure is to install and use a VPN. If your company device comes with one already installed, then it’s easy -- though remember VPN web traffic is usually tracked just like it is in your office. If it’s your own device, then you’re probably going to want to buy a service. They’re not overly expensive -- $3-8/month. I use <a href=\"https://www.expressvpn.com/\" target=\"_blank\">ExpressVPN</a>, which is on the pricer side, but their VPN client is easy to install and use. And it has the side benefit of letting me watch NCAA March Madness video streams when I’m overseas. In March, I’ll be trying out a hardware-based VPN solution -- <a href=\"http://www.homingsystems.com/alwayshome-duo\" target=\"_blank\">AlwaysHome</a>, which sets up a VPN with matching USB dongles. Could be an easier solution. I’ll report back in the next episode.</li>\r\n 	<li>Dan Gradwohl, before he poked me into action, had a “Hmm…” reaction to a comment in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/12/20/podcast-119-digital-security-on-the-road-us-airports-getting-better/\" target=\"_blank\">the last episode</a> about Spirit Airlines passing Delta as the 3rd largest at Chicago O’Hare. Looking at January schedules, he found Spirit had 29 daily departures to Delta’s 52. Would seem like Delta is still larger. However, the Crain’s Chicago article said Spirit carried more passengers than Delta -- which could be since some of Delta’s 52 departures were co-branded smaller regional jets. This is not a new thing. For a long time, O’Hare continued to claim the title of World’s Busiest Airport based on <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_world%27s_busiest_airports_by_aircraft_movements#2014_statistics\" target=\"_blank\">number of takeoffs/landings</a> (which it reclaimed in 2014) after Atlanta Hartsfield passed it on total passengers handled. Using that <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_world%27s_busiest_airports_by_passenger_traffic#2015_statistics\" target=\"_blank\">stat</a>, ORD is the 4th largest after ATL, Beijing, and Dubai. All that being said, Spirit is ramping up hard in the Chicago market, hiring new flight attendants ahead of plane deliveries, and pushing the city for more gate space. And Delta and American are rolling out new Economy Basic fares to fight them. Might not be too long before Spirit passes Delta on both measures.</li>\r\n 	<li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/10/11/podcast-117-random-thoughts-about-eggs-scotland-car-rentals/\" target=\"_blank\">Episode #117</a>, I talked -- raved, actually -- about a FinTech company called <a href=\"https://revolut.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Revolut</a>. It offered a convenient and low-cost way to exchange, transfer, and access money internationally. I started using it last September when my daughter started up at University of St Andrews. I used it to convert and push money to her UK bank account, and used the Revolut chip-&amp;-pin debit card to avoid the hassle of US chip-&amp;-signature credit cards. Last week, though, the low-cost component of their value prop disappeared -- at least for US customers, when they added a 3% fee when you added money/”topped up” your Revolut account with a US debit card. They said they were passing through the fees they were being charged, a claim I don’t doubt. However, it started me looking for cheaper foreign exchange options. Which lead me down quite the rabbit hole -- sorting through the differences in transaction costs and exchange rates quickly led to an Excel modelling session, which is just how I want to spend a Saturday morning. If you look at <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">my Twitter feed</a>, there’s a string of tweets walking through my analysis, but for my case, TransferWise, another UK FinTech startup, and Xoom, owned by PayPal, were much cheaper than Revolut after considering their new 3% fee. I expect that I’ll still use the Revolut card a bit when in Europe -- at self-service check-outs or gas pumps -- but nowhere near the volume I was using it before last week. But, I’m glad to have options and do a bit of math so avoid a $50 bank wire fee or Western Union’s 7% premium from market exchange rates.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Rocky Road</em> by <a href=\"http://www.kcentricity.com/\">KCentric</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Where Do Guidebooks Fit In?</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>As I mentioned in the opening, my son and I are hitting Iceland in a couple of weeks for a 4-day weekend. We’ve never been before, so I needed to figure out what to do and where to stay. Right about then, someone from what I used to know as Dorling Kindersley -- now shortened to DK -- pinged me about the February relaunch of <a href=\"http://www.dk.com/us/travel/\" target=\"_blank\">DK’s Eyewitness Travel Top 10 Guides</a> -- one of the first 10 is for Iceland. It started me thinking about where guidebooks fit in these days of in the world of apps (Yelp, Foursquare, Untappd), podcasts (Amateur Traveler, Indie Travel Podcast), websites (TripAdvisor), newspaper articles (NYTimes’ <a href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/22/travel/36-hours-in-reykjavik.html\" target=\"_blank\">36 Hours in Reykjavik</a>) and friends’ social media posts on Facebook and Instagram.</li>\r\n 	<li>When I want to torture my kids, I do the “when I was young…” thing. But going back to our honeymoon 25 years ago (this November -- need to get on that planning!), I cashed in a slug of British Airways miles to fly us first class to Pisa for a touring holiday in Tuscany. The only plans I had made were to rent a car (a Fiat Panda) and book our first night’s room (via Telex) in Lucca. We ran the rest of the vacation off of a set of Michelin guides -- the red one to find hotels and restaurants and the green one to figure out what to see. Between those and reading “A Room With A View”, we were set. We exchanged American Express travelers checks at the bank for lira, took pictures on Kodak and Fuji film, navigated using a paper maps… Whoops, got off track a bit there. I think my kids are somewhere screaming “Stop!”</li>\r\n 	<li>I think like everybody, I start with a Google search -- “What to do in Iceland in March”, limit the results to the last 2 years and start clicking. Lots of articles from UK papers (I think because of Wow Air, the Icelandic version of Spirit or EasyJet, flying into London Gatwick) which I clip over to Evernote using their nifty little Chrome extension. Then I narrow the search down to specific interests -- like “Iceland craft beer” and a few more article get sync’d to Evernote. I stack up a bunch of facts -- a sort of <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointillism\" target=\"_blank\">pointillist </a>view of what to do in Iceland.</li>\r\n 	<li>Every survey about how people go about travel planning will tell you that personal recommendations are the far and away the most important source of travel planning information. Which makes sense -- you know the person, how their interests, ways of travel align with yours. We have good friends that we’ll take restaurant recommendations from, but not hotels. We share the same tastes in interesting food, but they like to stay in hotels with nice pools. We’re tend to stay a bit more “closer to ground” -- choosing vacation rentals over the Westin resort.</li>\r\n 	<li>And once people find that you travel a lot and to different/interesting places, you get hit up -- a lot -- for recommendations. Friend and long-time T/C listener Allan Marko curates a set of notes for his favorite European cities, places like Paris, that he regularly e-mails out. After a couple of visits to Spain, I’ve taken it to the next level of geekdom -- embedding my recommendations on a Google Map page and sending out the URL. For this trip, a friend from work sent me the itinerary she and her family did last summer. Not sure that she and her husband would be search out craft beer bars with 2 young kids in tow, but I did take her recommendation for the Hotel Geysir at the top of the Golden Circle route, and hitting the Blue Lagoon on the way back to the airport.</li>\r\n 	<li>I like The NY Times’ 36 Hours and United Airlines’ 3 Perfect Days series. They’re focused on the long weekend getaway -- if you have a limited amount of time, here’s what to do. These are the sorts of articles we used to rip out of the Sunday travel section of the local newspaper or a travel magazine and stash in a travel folder. The Internet has shifted that behavior just a bit -- we now search for them when we right when we need them. Perhaps more for travel planning than for inspiration, but they serve the same purpose as the green Michelin guide did for our honeymoon -- a curated list of things you ought to see.</li>\r\n 	<li>The DK Top 10 Iceland guide seems to fit into this “hit the highlights” mode -- top 10 highlights by region and by thing (top 10 churches, waterfalls, volcanoes, bars, cheap restaurants…), 2-day and 7-day itineraries, which is nice because the 36 Hours in Reykjavik article I pulled up was from 2013, maybe on the ragged edge of up-to-dateness. And the DK guide has everything nicely packaged, which I remember from the Dorling Kindersley books of old -- all the lists in one place wrapped in a sturdy cover that has fold-out maps in the front (Iceland) and the back (downtown Reykjavik) -- which is handy if you didn’t plan ahead and cache Google Maps data before leaving the hotel wi-fi bubble.</li>\r\n 	<li>There’s another kind of guidebook that I’ll use, though I couldn’t find one for Iceland. They’re less about lists and more about stories -- think Bill Bryson’s <em>Notes from a Small Island</em> about the UK, or more recently, <em><a href=\"http://roadsandkingdoms.com/store/rice-noodle-fish-book/\" target=\"_blank\">Rice Noodle Fish</a></em> an Anthony Bourdain book by Matt Goulding (whatever that means) about Japan. I read those more before I travel than packing them in my bag. They’re about context/texture -- kinda like what “Room With A View” was for us about Florence 25 years ago -- that prepare rather than guide you, and maybe give you a bit more appreciation when you’re running through those Top 10 Highlights lists.</li>\r\n 	<li>Maybe it comes down to the kind of reader you are -- are you someone that likes things more tangible than electronic. Do you like to flip pages rather than screens? The Kindle cannibalized a good-sized chunk of the demand for physical books, but didn’t replace it. Just like overall book market, recent numbers show the demand for physical guide books has stabilized albeit at a lower level. I sorta split the difference. I like paging through my Evernote virtual travel folder when I’m back at the room, but like to have a physical map and list when I’m out walking during the day. Maybe that physicality keeps me more engaged with where I am. Or at least looking up and forward, which should help keep me avoid that new travelers’ epidemic -- Death by GPS.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music --<em> <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/liquid-seventythree/\" target=\"_blank\">Is That Called Love</a> </em></em>by Liquid Zen</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>I Hate Shopping for Suitcases</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I’ve been traveling for a few months now with the <a href=\"http://bluesmart.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Bluesmart </a>suitcase. I’ve mentioned it in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/08/26/podcast-116-traveling-thru-japan-luggage-trends/\" target=\"_blank\">a past episode</a> when I pre-ordered it through their Indiegogo campaign. And now that they’re shipping, they’re making a lot of Top Traveler Gadget lists.</li>\r\n 	<li>It claims to be the first piece of “smart” luggage to hit the market. It pairs with my iPhone through Bluetooth. It automatically locks when I step away from it and then unlocks itself when I return. It has a built-in battery to power itself and charge personal electronics through a couple of USB ports. It also periodically sends out its location when I can then check through the iPhone app. And it has a cool front light that glows blue when it’s paired with my phone.</li>\r\n 	<li>Aside from all the electronics, it’s a hard-shell wheelie bag with nice-sized wheels that roll easily -- sometimes too easily. It fits perfectly into American’s and United’s luggage sizers -- at least the ones in Boston Logan airport. (Some blogger who reviewed the bag raised a bit of a ruckus saying that the bag dimensions on the website were too big for carry-on. I guess he doesn’t travel enough to go an airport and check it out himself). The iPhone app is getting better -- Bluesmart is doing a nice job of reving the app frequently to stomp bugs, though the location alerts -- “You’re leaving me behind” are still a bit wonky.</li>\r\n 	<li>All in all, it’s a nice enough bag. I had been thinking about getting something a bit smaller for 1-2 night trips and this fits the bill. I’m kinda “meh” on all the electronics. The large battery is fine, but I already carry a recharger in my backpack that will top up my iPhone or tablet a couple of times -- good enough and more accessible in-flight. The location functionality seems to work only when I press the button to “wake up” the bag -- which means I’m right beside my bag and know its location. And since it’s the perfect carry-on size, it’s usually right above me in the plane cabin. So it’s a nice enough hard-shell wheelie bag with a couple of bells and whistles that don’t necessarily wow me.</li>\r\n 	<li>Which shouldn’t be interpreted as a knock against Bluesmart. I’m sure there are a number of travelers who love every one of those bells and whistles. It’s not so much a criticism about Bluesmart as it is how personal and idiosyncratic frequent travelers are about suitcases. It’s gotta fit your packing strategies, which are also very idiosyncratic. Some people love compartments to help them structure their packing. Me? I’m all about the flexibility of a single open space -- I build my own structure with shoes and different kinds of clothes depending on the trip. And even though I see more and more hard-shell bags -- and now own one, I’m not completely sold on it. I still like the ability to bulge when I need to. And the two- vs. four-wheel thing. Pushing a 4-wheel through the airport seems easier on my wrist, but sometimes they roll too easily and won’t stay put. It’s the reason I’ve been walking around with a ripped backpack for 4 months -- I really hate shopping for travel bags. And am very happy that leather wallets last a really long time.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #120</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/\">Podshow Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_119.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #121','','inherit','closed','closed','','1615-revision-v1','','','2016-05-30 22:32:57','2016-05-31 03:32:57','',1615,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/05/30/1615-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1618,1,'2016-05-30 22:35:07','2016-05-31 03:35:07','[caption id=\"attachment_1616\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"225\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/IMAG0569_1.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1616\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/IMAG0569_1-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"This should be interesting...\" width=\"225\" height=\"300\" /></a> This should be interesting...[/caption]\r\n\r\nWhere do guidebooks fit in the world of apps, review websites, social media, and podcasts? Planning for a trip to Iceland got me thinking about how to make sense of the explosion of travel tips. And then, after giving my thoughts about my new <a href=\"http://bluesmart.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Bluesmart </a>\"smart connected suitcase\", I talk about how idiosyncratic frequent travelers are about packing strategies and their choice of suitcases. There\'s also follow-up about foreign exchange apps, and listener comments about digital travel security and Spirit Airlines\' growth. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_121.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/251667522\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #121:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, after a much longer-than-intended break. Looking back at the Google Docs revision history for this episode, I started it on Feb 2, so I had the best of intentions. But I’ve been traveling almost non-stop since then. At which point you might reasonably say “But you have all that time in airports and hotels to write” -- which should be the case, but I find that I have to remove all possible distractions before I can write. Hence my lack of a journalism career.</li>\r\n 	<li>So instead, I keep jotting down ideas in Evernote, feeling like I’m making progress, but not ever buckling down to actually write an episode. Until last Weds, when Dan Gradwohl sent me an e-mail with the subject line “Mark, where’s the next TravelCommons?”, asking in a very nice way -- when are you getting off your duff? I snarled back at Dan a bit -- more at frustration with myself than anything he wrote. But it got the intended result. So, I dedicate this episode to Dan.</li>\r\n 	<li>The travel that got in the way wasn’t anything exotic -- just the usual bouncing around -- New Orleans, Vegas, Atlanta, Boston, New Jersey. But it was the tail end of 7 weeks of straight travel -- which is right about the time I hit my fun quotient. My patience dives and my bitch tweeting climbs. Of course, the fact that my American Airlines flights were hitting a 50% on-time rate didn’t help. I think I finally tipped over when I found my EWR-ORD flight was an ancient AA MD-80. Trying to wedge my bag long ways into the short overhead bin on the AB side was a complete throwback to when I first started traveling for business -- in 1985, on American Airlines, out of DFW, on MD-80s. 30 years later, I find myself on the same plane -- with less legroom and no peanuts.</li>\r\n 	<li>I am gearing up for some fun travel in March, though. Trying out Iceland Air’s new Chicago-to-Reykjavik service with my son, and then trying out Iceland’s budget carrier Wow Air to meet up with my wife and daughter in Spain. I’m hoping it all works fine, but I’m preparing myself to having to call a couple of audibles.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://cyberset.cc/artists2.php?tr_release_id=104\"><em>Heaven</em></a> by <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=A951998E6011FA9B2D22387EB3CAC0B5EB05A36360E7FDA122C8D7A5C140F8DC\" rel=\"nofollow\">Electric Skychurch</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Peter Zurich sent a great note, adding onto the digital security topic in<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/12/20/podcast-119-digital-security-on-the-road-us-airports-getting-better/\" target=\"_blank\"> the last episode</a>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>“Your suggestion to switch to cellular network as opposed to airport wifi is okay but it is becoming easy to obtain technology to set up a rogue cell site that will silently capture traffic -- your data will be caught and you will be none the wiser.</li>\r\n 	<li>“Thus, in my opinion, it is still very important to only use HTPS encrypted web sites and I would still add on the VPN if you have one available. Bottom line when using any website where you need your password to access sensitive information, make sure the computer is trusted (no public access/borrowed/loaner computers) and make sure the website is HTTPS. If using Outlook or other applications than the web browser you should be on your company\'s VPN.</li>\r\n 	<li>“Second thing, people should be aware that tearing a 2-D barcode in half doesn\'t necessarily render it undecipherable. 2D barcodes have a configurable level of redundancy built-in so that even if part (or possibly most) of the barcode is missing/unreadable it can still be decoded. My personal policy is once we have confirmed our FF miles have posted, the BP\'s go in the shredder.”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Peter, thanks for these. Last week’s <a href=\"http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/columnist/2016/02/24/got-hacked-my-mac-while-writing-story/80844720/\" target=\"_blank\">story </a>about the USA Today columnist whose e-mail was hacked while he used Gogo’s WiFi service on an American Airlines flight demonstrates again the potential dangers of using public WiFi. It takes a bit of spelunking through the columnist’s Twitter feed to figure out how that happened -- he was using an Earthlink e-mail service that didn’t encrypt traffic back to the mail server. Technical listeners would be right in saying “Well, there you go. What did you expect doing plain-text comms over public WiFi?” Indeed, when we talked about this in the last episode, I specifically called out the need to encrypt e-mail protocols -- POP, IMAP, SMTP -- over SSL. But that’s not the default configuration for many e-mail clients, including Outlook and, the last time I checked, the iPhone mail client. You have to go poking around in the settings, changing ports. I know how to do it -- but it’s nothing my wife would. Building on Peter’s suggestion, probably the easiest thing to do is use a web e-mail client like GMail over https -- when the green lock shows in the browser address bar. Next easiest is to set up your e-mail client to encrypt its traffic. Most e-mail providers have instructions on their sites. Perhaps the fiddliest, but the most secure is to install and use a VPN. If your company device comes with one already installed, then it’s easy -- though remember VPN web traffic is usually tracked just like it is in your office. If it’s your own device, then you’re probably going to want to buy a service. They’re not overly expensive -- $3-8/month. I use <a href=\"https://www.expressvpn.com/\" target=\"_blank\">ExpressVPN</a>, which is on the pricer side, but their VPN client is easy to install and use. And it has the side benefit of letting me watch NCAA March Madness video streams when I’m overseas. In March, I’ll be trying out a hardware-based VPN solution -- <a href=\"http://www.homingsystems.com/alwayshome-duo\" target=\"_blank\">AlwaysHome</a>, which sets up a VPN with matching USB dongles. Could be an easier solution. I’ll report back in the next episode.</li>\r\n 	<li>Dan Gradwohl, before he poked me into action, had a “Hmm…” reaction to a comment in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/12/20/podcast-119-digital-security-on-the-road-us-airports-getting-better/\" target=\"_blank\">the last episode</a> about Spirit Airlines passing Delta as the 3rd largest at Chicago O’Hare. Looking at January schedules, he found Spirit had 29 daily departures to Delta’s 52. Would seem like Delta is still larger. However, the Crain’s Chicago article said Spirit carried more passengers than Delta -- which could be since some of Delta’s 52 departures were co-branded smaller regional jets. This is not a new thing. For a long time, O’Hare continued to claim the title of World’s Busiest Airport based on <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_world%27s_busiest_airports_by_aircraft_movements#2014_statistics\" target=\"_blank\">number of takeoffs/landings</a> (which it reclaimed in 2014) after Atlanta Hartsfield passed it on total passengers handled. Using that <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_world%27s_busiest_airports_by_passenger_traffic#2015_statistics\" target=\"_blank\">stat</a>, ORD is the 4th largest after ATL, Beijing, and Dubai. All that being said, Spirit is ramping up hard in the Chicago market, hiring new flight attendants ahead of plane deliveries, and pushing the city for more gate space. And Delta and American are rolling out new Economy Basic fares to fight them. Might not be too long before Spirit passes Delta on both measures.</li>\r\n 	<li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/10/11/podcast-117-random-thoughts-about-eggs-scotland-car-rentals/\" target=\"_blank\">Episode #117</a>, I talked -- raved, actually -- about a FinTech company called <a href=\"https://revolut.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Revolut</a>. It offered a convenient and low-cost way to exchange, transfer, and access money internationally. I started using it last September when my daughter started up at University of St Andrews. I used it to convert and push money to her UK bank account, and used the Revolut chip-&amp;-pin debit card to avoid the hassle of US chip-&amp;-signature credit cards. Last week, though, the low-cost component of their value prop disappeared -- at least for US customers, when they added a 3% fee when you added money/”topped up” your Revolut account with a US debit card. They said they were passing through the fees they were being charged, a claim I don’t doubt. However, it started me looking for cheaper foreign exchange options. Which lead me down quite the rabbit hole -- sorting through the differences in transaction costs and exchange rates quickly led to an Excel modelling session, which is just how I want to spend a Saturday morning. If you look at <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">my Twitter feed</a>, there’s a string of tweets walking through my analysis, but for my case, TransferWise, another UK FinTech startup, and Xoom, owned by PayPal, were much cheaper than Revolut after considering their new 3% fee. I expect that I’ll still use the Revolut card a bit when in Europe -- at self-service check-outs or gas pumps -- but nowhere near the volume I was using it before last week. But, I’m glad to have options and do a bit of math so avoid a $50 bank wire fee or Western Union’s 7% premium from market exchange rates.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Rocky Road</em> by <a href=\"http://www.kcentricity.com/\">KCentric</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Where Do Guidebooks Fit In?</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>As I mentioned in the opening, my son and I are hitting Iceland in a couple of weeks for a 4-day weekend. We’ve never been before, so I needed to figure out what to do and where to stay. Right about then, someone from what I used to know as Dorling Kindersley -- now shortened to DK -- pinged me about the February relaunch of <a href=\"http://www.dk.com/us/travel/\" target=\"_blank\">DK’s Eyewitness Travel Top 10 Guides</a> -- one of the first 10 is for Iceland. It started me thinking about where guidebooks fit in these days of in the world of apps (Yelp, Foursquare, Untappd), podcasts (Amateur Traveler, Indie Travel Podcast), websites (TripAdvisor), newspaper articles (NYTimes’ <a href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/22/travel/36-hours-in-reykjavik.html\" target=\"_blank\">36 Hours in Reykjavik</a>) and friends’ social media posts on Facebook and Instagram.</li>\r\n 	<li>When I want to torture my kids, I do the “when I was young…” thing. But going back to our honeymoon 25 years ago (this November -- need to get on that planning!), I cashed in a slug of British Airways miles to fly us first class to Pisa for a touring holiday in Tuscany. The only plans I had made were to rent a car (a Fiat Panda) and book our first night’s room (via Telex) in Lucca. We ran the rest of the vacation off of a set of Michelin guides -- the red one to find hotels and restaurants and the green one to figure out what to see. Between those and reading “A Room With A View”, we were set. We exchanged American Express travelers checks at the bank for lira, took pictures on Kodak and Fuji film, navigated using a paper maps… Whoops, got off track a bit there. I think my kids are somewhere screaming “Stop!”</li>\r\n 	<li>I think like everybody, I start with a Google search -- “What to do in Iceland in March”, limit the results to the last 2 years and start clicking. Lots of articles from UK papers (I think because of Wow Air, the Icelandic version of Spirit or EasyJet, flying into London Gatwick) which I clip over to Evernote using their nifty little Chrome extension. Then I narrow the search down to specific interests -- like “Iceland craft beer” and a few more article get sync’d to Evernote. I stack up a bunch of facts -- a sort of <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointillism\" target=\"_blank\">pointillist </a>view of what to do in Iceland.</li>\r\n 	<li>Every survey about how people go about travel planning will tell you that personal recommendations are the far and away the most important source of travel planning information. Which makes sense -- you know the person, how their interests, ways of travel align with yours. We have good friends that we’ll take restaurant recommendations from, but not hotels. We share the same tastes in interesting food, but they like to stay in hotels with nice pools. We’re tend to stay a bit more “closer to ground” -- choosing vacation rentals over the Westin resort.</li>\r\n 	<li>And once people find that you travel a lot and to different/interesting places, you get hit up -- a lot -- for recommendations. Friend and long-time T/C listener Allan Marko curates a set of notes for his favorite European cities, places like Paris, that he regularly e-mails out. After a couple of visits to Spain, I’ve taken it to the next level of geekdom -- embedding my recommendations on a Google Map page and sending out the URL. For this trip, a friend from work sent me the itinerary she and her family did last summer. Not sure that she and her husband would be search out craft beer bars with 2 young kids in tow, but I did take her recommendation for the Hotel Geysir at the top of the Golden Circle route, and hitting the Blue Lagoon on the way back to the airport.</li>\r\n 	<li>I like The NY Times’ 36 Hours and United Airlines’ 3 Perfect Days series. They’re focused on the long weekend getaway -- if you have a limited amount of time, here’s what to do. These are the sorts of articles we used to rip out of the Sunday travel section of the local newspaper or a travel magazine and stash in a travel folder. The Internet has shifted that behavior just a bit -- we now search for them when we right when we need them. Perhaps more for travel planning than for inspiration, but they serve the same purpose as the green Michelin guide did for our honeymoon -- a curated list of things you ought to see.</li>\r\n 	<li>The DK Top 10 Iceland guide seems to fit into this “hit the highlights” mode -- top 10 highlights by region and by thing (top 10 churches, waterfalls, volcanoes, bars, cheap restaurants…), 2-day and 7-day itineraries, which is nice because the 36 Hours in Reykjavik article I pulled up was from 2013, maybe on the ragged edge of up-to-dateness. And the DK guide has everything nicely packaged, which I remember from the Dorling Kindersley books of old -- all the lists in one place wrapped in a sturdy cover that has fold-out maps in the front (Iceland) and the back (downtown Reykjavik) -- which is handy if you didn’t plan ahead and cache Google Maps data before leaving the hotel wi-fi bubble.</li>\r\n 	<li>There’s another kind of guidebook that I’ll use, though I couldn’t find one for Iceland. They’re less about lists and more about stories -- think Bill Bryson’s <em>Notes from a Small Island</em> about the UK, or more recently, <em><a href=\"http://roadsandkingdoms.com/store/rice-noodle-fish-book/\" target=\"_blank\">Rice Noodle Fish</a></em> an Anthony Bourdain book by Matt Goulding (whatever that means) about Japan. I read those more before I travel than packing them in my bag. They’re about context/texture -- kinda like what “Room With A View” was for us about Florence 25 years ago -- that prepare rather than guide you, and maybe give you a bit more appreciation when you’re running through those Top 10 Highlights lists.</li>\r\n 	<li>Maybe it comes down to the kind of reader you are -- are you someone that likes things more tangible than electronic. Do you like to flip pages rather than screens? The Kindle cannibalized a good-sized chunk of the demand for physical books, but didn’t replace it. Just like overall book market, recent numbers show the demand for physical guide books has stabilized albeit at a lower level. I sorta split the difference. I like paging through my Evernote virtual travel folder when I’m back at the room, but like to have a physical map and list when I’m out walking during the day. Maybe that physicality keeps me more engaged with where I am. Or at least looking up and forward, which should help keep me avoid that new travelers’ epidemic -- Death by GPS.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music --<em> <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/liquid-seventythree/\" target=\"_blank\">Is That Called Love</a> </em></em>by Liquid Zen</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>I Hate Shopping for Suitcases</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I’ve been traveling for a few months now with the <a href=\"http://bluesmart.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Bluesmart </a>suitcase. I’ve mentioned it in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/08/26/podcast-116-traveling-thru-japan-luggage-trends/\" target=\"_blank\">a past episode</a> when I pre-ordered it through their Indiegogo campaign. And now that they’re shipping, they’re making a lot of Top Traveler Gadget lists.</li>\r\n 	<li>It claims to be the first piece of “smart” luggage to hit the market. It pairs with my iPhone through Bluetooth. It automatically locks when I step away from it and then unlocks itself when I return. It has a built-in battery to power itself and charge personal electronics through a couple of USB ports. It also periodically sends out its location when I can then check through the iPhone app. And it has a cool front light that glows blue when it’s paired with my phone.</li>\r\n 	<li>Aside from all the electronics, it’s a hard-shell wheelie bag with nice-sized wheels that roll easily -- sometimes too easily. It fits perfectly into American’s and United’s luggage sizers -- at least the ones in Boston Logan airport. (Some blogger who reviewed the bag raised a bit of a ruckus saying that the bag dimensions on the website were too big for carry-on. I guess he doesn’t travel enough to go an airport and check it out himself). The iPhone app is getting better -- Bluesmart is doing a nice job of reving the app frequently to stomp bugs, though the location alerts -- “You’re leaving me behind” are still a bit wonky.</li>\r\n 	<li>All in all, it’s a nice enough bag. I had been thinking about getting something a bit smaller for 1-2 night trips and this fits the bill. I’m kinda “meh” on all the electronics. The large battery is fine, but I already carry a recharger in my backpack that will top up my iPhone or tablet a couple of times -- good enough and more accessible in-flight. The location functionality seems to work only when I press the button to “wake up” the bag -- which means I’m right beside my bag and know its location. And since it’s the perfect carry-on size, it’s usually right above me in the plane cabin. So it’s a nice enough hard-shell wheelie bag with a couple of bells and whistles that don’t necessarily wow me.</li>\r\n 	<li>Which shouldn’t be interpreted as a knock against Bluesmart. I’m sure there are a number of travelers who love every one of those bells and whistles. It’s not so much a criticism about Bluesmart as it is how personal and idiosyncratic frequent travelers are about suitcases. It’s gotta fit your packing strategies, which are also very idiosyncratic. Some people love compartments to help them structure their packing. Me? I’m all about the flexibility of a single open space -- I build my own structure with shoes and different kinds of clothes depending on the trip. And even though I see more and more hard-shell bags -- and now own one, I’m not completely sold on it. I still like the ability to bulge when I need to. And the two- vs. four-wheel thing. Pushing a 4-wheel through the airport seems easier on my wrist, but sometimes they roll too easily and won’t stay put. It’s the reason I’ve been walking around with a ripped backpack for 4 months -- I really hate shopping for travel bags. And am very happy that leather wallets last a really long time.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #120</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/\">Podshow Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_121.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #121','','inherit','closed','closed','','1615-revision-v1','','','2016-05-30 22:35:07','2016-05-31 03:35:07','',1615,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/05/30/1615-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1619,1,'2016-05-30 22:35:50','2016-05-31 03:35:50','[caption id=\"attachment_1603\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/IMG_0266-01.jpeg\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-1603\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1603\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/IMG_0266-01-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"Just a Few Guidebooks....\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Just a Few Guidebooks....[/caption]\r\n\r\nWhere do guidebooks fit in the world of apps, review websites, social media, and podcasts? Planning for a trip to Iceland got me thinking about how to make sense of the explosion of travel tips. And then, after giving my thoughts about my new <a href=\"http://bluesmart.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Bluesmart </a>\"smart connected suitcase\", I talk about how idiosyncratic frequent travelers are about packing strategies and their choice of suitcases. There\'s also follow-up about foreign exchange apps, and listener comments about digital travel security and Spirit Airlines\' growth. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_120.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/251667522\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #120:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, after a much longer-than-intended break. Looking back at the Google Docs revision history for this episode, I started it on Feb 2, so I had the best of intentions. But I’ve been traveling almost non-stop since then. At which point you might reasonably say “But you have all that time in airports and hotels to write” -- which should be the case, but I find that I have to remove all possible distractions before I can write. Hence my lack of a journalism career.</li>\r\n	<li>So instead, I keep jotting down ideas in Evernote, feeling like I’m making progress, but not ever buckling down to actually write an episode. Until last Weds, when Dan Gradwohl sent me an e-mail with the subject line “Mark, where’s the next TravelCommons?”, asking in a very nice way -- when are you getting off your duff? I snarled back at Dan a bit -- more at frustration with myself than anything he wrote. But it got the intended result. So, I dedicate this episode to Dan.</li>\r\n	<li>The travel that got in the way wasn’t anything exotic -- just the usual bouncing around -- New Orleans, Vegas, Atlanta, Boston, New Jersey. But it was the tail end of 7 weeks of straight travel -- which is right about the time I hit my fun quotient. My patience dives and my bitch tweeting climbs. Of course, the fact that my American Airlines flights were hitting a 50% on-time rate didn’t help. I think I finally tipped over when I found my EWR-ORD flight was an ancient AA MD-80. Trying to wedge my bag long ways into the short overhead bin on the AB side was a complete throwback to when I first started traveling for business -- in 1985, on American Airlines, out of DFW, on MD-80s. 30 years later, I find myself on the same plane -- with less legroom and no peanuts.</li>\r\n	<li>I am gearing up for some fun travel in March, though. Trying out Iceland Air’s new Chicago-to-Reykjavik service with my son, and then trying out Iceland’s budget carrier Wow Air to meet up with my wife and daughter in Spain. I’m hoping it all works fine, but I’m preparing myself to having to call a couple of audibles.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/seldon-circles/\"><em>Making Circles</em></a> by the Seldon Plan</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Peter Zurich sent a great note, adding onto the digital security topic in<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/12/20/podcast-119-digital-security-on-the-road-us-airports-getting-better/\" target=\"_blank\"> the last episode</a>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>“Your suggestion to switch to cellular network as opposed to airport wifi is okay but it is becoming easy to obtain technology to set up a rogue cell site that will silently capture traffic -- your data will be caught and you will be none the wiser.</li>\r\n	<li>“Thus, in my opinion, it is still very important to only use HTPS encrypted web sites and I would still add on the VPN if you have one available. Bottom line when using any website where you need your password to access sensitive information, make sure the computer is trusted (no public access/borrowed/loaner computers) and make sure the website is HTTPS. If using Outlook or other applications than the web browser you should be on your company\'s VPN.</li>\r\n	<li>“Second thing, people should be aware that tearing a 2-D barcode in half doesn\'t necessarily render it undecipherable. 2D barcodes have a configurable level of redundancy built-in so that even if part (or possibly most) of the barcode is missing/unreadable it can still be decoded. My personal policy is once we have confirmed our FF miles have posted, the BP\'s go in the shredder.”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>Peter, thanks for these. Last week’s <a href=\"http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/columnist/2016/02/24/got-hacked-my-mac-while-writing-story/80844720/\" target=\"_blank\">story </a>about the USA Today columnist whose e-mail was hacked while he used Gogo’s WiFi service on an American Airlines flight demonstrates again the potential dangers of using public WiFi. It takes a bit of spelunking through the columnist’s Twitter feed to figure out how that happened -- he was using an Earthlink e-mail service that didn’t encrypt traffic back to the mail server. Technical listeners would be right in saying “Well, there you go. What did you expect doing plain-text comms over public WiFi?” Indeed, when we talked about this in the last episode, I specifically called out the need to encrypt e-mail protocols -- POP, IMAP, SMTP -- over SSL. But that’s not the default configuration for many e-mail clients, including Outlook and, the last time I checked, the iPhone mail client. You have to go poking around in the settings, changing ports. I know how to do it -- but it’s nothing my wife would. Building on Peter’s suggestion, probably the easiest thing to do is use a web e-mail client like GMail over https -- when the green lock shows in the browser address bar. Next easiest is to set up your e-mail client to encrypt its traffic. Most e-mail providers have instructions on their sites. Perhaps the fiddliest, but the most secure is to install and use a VPN. If your company device comes with one already installed, then it’s easy -- though remember VPN web traffic is usually tracked just like it is in your office. If it’s your own device, then you’re probably going to want to buy a service. They’re not overly expensive -- $3-8/month. I use <a href=\"https://www.expressvpn.com/\" target=\"_blank\">ExpressVPN</a>, which is on the pricer side, but their VPN client is easy to install and use. And it has the side benefit of letting me watch NCAA March Madness video streams when I’m overseas. In March, I’ll be trying out a hardware-based VPN solution -- <a href=\"http://www.homingsystems.com/alwayshome-duo\" target=\"_blank\">AlwaysHome</a>, which sets up a VPN with matching USB dongles. Could be an easier solution. I’ll report back in the next episode.</li>\r\n	<li>Dan Gradwohl, before he poked me into action, had a “Hmm…” reaction to a comment in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/12/20/podcast-119-digital-security-on-the-road-us-airports-getting-better/\" target=\"_blank\">the last episode</a> about Spirit Airlines passing Delta as the 3rd largest at Chicago O’Hare. Looking at January schedules, he found Spirit had 29 daily departures to Delta’s 52. Would seem like Delta is still larger. However, the Crain’s Chicago article said Spirit carried more passengers than Delta -- which could be since some of Delta’s 52 departures were co-branded smaller regional jets. This is not a new thing. For a long time, O’Hare continued to claim the title of World’s Busiest Airport based on <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_world%27s_busiest_airports_by_aircraft_movements#2014_statistics\" target=\"_blank\">number of takeoffs/landings</a> (which it reclaimed in 2014) after Atlanta Hartsfield passed it on total passengers handled. Using that <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_world%27s_busiest_airports_by_passenger_traffic#2015_statistics\" target=\"_blank\">stat</a>, ORD is the 4th largest after ATL, Beijing, and Dubai. All that being said, Spirit is ramping up hard in the Chicago market, hiring new flight attendants ahead of plane deliveries, and pushing the city for more gate space. And Delta and American are rolling out new Economy Basic fares to fight them. Might not be too long before Spirit passes Delta on both measures.</li>\r\n	<li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/10/11/podcast-117-random-thoughts-about-eggs-scotland-car-rentals/\" target=\"_blank\">Episode #117</a>, I talked -- raved, actually -- about a FinTech company called <a href=\"https://revolut.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Revolut</a>. It offered a convenient and low-cost way to exchange, transfer, and access money internationally. I started using it last September when my daughter started up at University of St Andrews. I used it to convert and push money to her UK bank account, and used the Revolut chip-&amp;-pin debit card to avoid the hassle of US chip-&amp;-signature credit cards. Last week, though, the low-cost component of their value prop disappeared -- at least for US customers, when they added a 3% fee when you added money/”topped up” your Revolut account with a US debit card. They said they were passing through the fees they were being charged, a claim I don’t doubt. However, it started me looking for cheaper foreign exchange options. Which lead me down quite the rabbit hole -- sorting through the differences in transaction costs and exchange rates quickly led to an Excel modelling session, which is just how I want to spend a Saturday morning. If you look at <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">my Twitter feed</a>, there’s a string of tweets walking through my analysis, but for my case, TransferWise, another UK FinTech startup, and Xoom, owned by PayPal, were much cheaper than Revolut after considering their new 3% fee. I expect that I’ll still use the Revolut card a bit when in Europe -- at self-service check-outs or gas pumps -- but nowhere near the volume I was using it before last week. But, I’m glad to have options and do a bit of math so avoid a $50 bank wire fee or Western Union’s 7% premium from market exchange rates.</li>\r\n	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/eliyahu-wind/\">Oh Yeah</a></em> by Eliyahu Sills</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Where Do Guidebooks Fit In?</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>As I mentioned in the opening, my son and I are hitting Iceland in a couple of weeks for a 4-day weekend. We’ve never been before, so I needed to figure out what to do and where to stay. Right about then, someone from what I used to know as Dorling Kindersley -- now shortened to DK -- pinged me about the February relaunch of <a href=\"http://www.dk.com/us/travel/\" target=\"_blank\">DK’s Eyewitness Travel Top 10 Guides</a> -- one of the first 10 is for Iceland. It started me thinking about where guidebooks fit in these days of in the world of apps (Yelp, Foursquare, Untappd), podcasts (Amateur Traveler, Indie Travel Podcast), websites (TripAdvisor), newspaper articles (NYTimes’ <a href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/22/travel/36-hours-in-reykjavik.html\" target=\"_blank\">36 Hours in Reykjavik</a>) and friends’ social media posts on Facebook and Instagram.</li>\r\n	<li>When I want to torture my kids, I do the “when I was young…” thing. But going back to our honeymoon 25 years ago (this November -- need to get on that planning!), I cashed in a slug of British Airways miles to fly us first class to Pisa for a touring holiday in Tuscany. The only plans I had made were to rent a car (a Fiat Panda) and book our first night’s room (via Telex) in Lucca. We ran the rest of the vacation off of a set of Michelin guides -- the red one to find hotels and restaurants and the green one to figure out what to see. Between those and reading “A Room With A View”, we were set. We exchanged American Express travelers checks at the bank for lira, took pictures on Kodak and Fuji film, navigated using a paper maps… Whoops, got off track a bit there. I think my kids are somewhere screaming “Stop!”</li>\r\n	<li>I think like everybody, I start with a Google search -- “What to do in Iceland in March”, limit the results to the last 2 years and start clicking. Lots of articles from UK papers (I think because of Wow Air, the Icelandic version of Spirit or EasyJet, flying into London Gatwick) which I clip over to Evernote using their nifty little Chrome extension. Then I narrow the search down to specific interests -- like “Iceland craft beer” and a few more article get sync’d to Evernote. I stack up a bunch of facts -- a sort of <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointillism\" target=\"_blank\">pointillist </a>view of what to do in Iceland.</li>\r\n	<li>Every survey about how people go about travel planning will tell you that personal recommendations are the far and away the most important source of travel planning information. Which makes sense -- you know the person, how their interests, ways of travel align with yours. We have good friends that we’ll take restaurant recommendations from, but not hotels. We share the same tastes in interesting food, but they like to stay in hotels with nice pools. We’re tend to stay a bit more “closer to ground” -- choosing vacation rentals over the Westin resort.</li>\r\n	<li>And once people find that you travel a lot and to different/interesting places, you get hit up -- a lot -- for recommendations. Friend and long-time T/C listener Allan Marko curates a set of notes for his favorite European cities, places like Paris, that he regularly e-mails out. After a couple of visits to Spain, I’ve taken it to the next level of geekdom -- embedding my recommendations on a Google Map page and sending out the URL. For this trip, a friend from work sent me the itinerary she and her family did last summer. Not sure that she and her husband would be search out craft beer bars with 2 young kids in tow, but I did take her recommendation for the Hotel Geysir at the top of the Golden Circle route, and hitting the Blue Lagoon on the way back to the airport.</li>\r\n	<li>I like The NY Times’ 36 Hours and United Airlines’ 3 Perfect Days series. They’re focused on the long weekend getaway -- if you have a limited amount of time, here’s what to do. These are the sorts of articles we used to rip out of the Sunday travel section of the local newspaper or a travel magazine and stash in a travel folder. The Internet has shifted that behavior just a bit -- we now search for them when we right when we need them. Perhaps more for travel planning than for inspiration, but they serve the same purpose as the green Michelin guide did for our honeymoon -- a curated list of things you ought to see.</li>\r\n	<li>The DK Top 10 Iceland guide seems to fit into this “hit the highlights” mode -- top 10 highlights by region and by thing (top 10 churches, waterfalls, volcanoes, bars, cheap restaurants…), 2-day and 7-day itineraries, which is nice because the 36 Hours in Reykjavik article I pulled up was from 2013, maybe on the ragged edge of up-to-dateness. And the DK guide has everything nicely packaged, which I remember from the Dorling Kindersley books of old -- all the lists in one place wrapped in a sturdy cover that has fold-out maps in the front (Iceland) and the back (downtown Reykjavik) -- which is handy if you didn’t plan ahead and cache Google Maps data before leaving the hotel wi-fi bubble.</li>\r\n	<li>There’s another kind of guidebook that I’ll use, though I couldn’t find one for Iceland. They’re less about lists and more about stories -- think Bill Bryson’s <em>Notes from a Small Island</em> about the UK, or more recently, <em><a href=\"http://roadsandkingdoms.com/store/rice-noodle-fish-book/\" target=\"_blank\">Rice Noodle Fish</a></em> an Anthony Bourdain book by Matt Goulding (whatever that means) about Japan. I read those more before I travel than packing them in my bag. They’re about context/texture -- kinda like what “Room With A View” was for us about Florence 25 years ago -- that prepare rather than guide you, and maybe give you a bit more appreciation when you’re running through those Top 10 Highlights lists.</li>\r\n	<li>Maybe it comes down to the kind of reader you are -- are you someone that likes things more tangible than electronic. Do you like to flip pages rather than screens? The Kindle cannibalized a good-sized chunk of the demand for physical books, but didn’t replace it. Just like overall book market, recent numbers show the demand for physical guide books has stabilized albeit at a lower level. I sorta split the difference. I like paging through my Evernote virtual travel folder when I’m back at the room, but like to have a physical map and list when I’m out walking during the day. Maybe that physicality keeps me more engaged with where I am. Or at least looking up and forward, which should help keep me avoid that new travelers’ epidemic -- Death by GPS.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music --<em> <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/liquid-seventythree/\" target=\"_blank\">Is That Called Love</a> </em></em>by Liquid Zen</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>I Hate Shopping for Suitcases</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>I’ve been traveling for a few months now with the <a href=\"http://bluesmart.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Bluesmart </a>suitcase. I’ve mentioned it in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/08/26/podcast-116-traveling-thru-japan-luggage-trends/\" target=\"_blank\">a past episode</a> when I pre-ordered it through their Indiegogo campaign. And now that they’re shipping, they’re making a lot of Top Traveler Gadget lists.</li>\r\n	<li>It claims to be the first piece of “smart” luggage to hit the market. It pairs with my iPhone through Bluetooth. It automatically locks when I step away from it and then unlocks itself when I return. It has a built-in battery to power itself and charge personal electronics through a couple of USB ports. It also periodically sends out its location when I can then check through the iPhone app. And it has a cool front light that glows blue when it’s paired with my phone.</li>\r\n	<li>Aside from all the electronics, it’s a hard-shell wheelie bag with nice-sized wheels that roll easily -- sometimes too easily. It fits perfectly into American’s and United’s luggage sizers -- at least the ones in Boston Logan airport. (Some blogger who reviewed the bag raised a bit of a ruckus saying that the bag dimensions on the website were too big for carry-on. I guess he doesn’t travel enough to go an airport and check it out himself). The iPhone app is getting better -- Bluesmart is doing a nice job of reving the app frequently to stomp bugs, though the location alerts -- “You’re leaving me behind” are still a bit wonky.</li>\r\n	<li>All in all, it’s a nice enough bag. I had been thinking about getting something a bit smaller for 1-2 night trips and this fits the bill. I’m kinda “meh” on all the electronics. The large battery is fine, but I already carry a recharger in my backpack that will top up my iPhone or tablet a couple of times -- good enough and more accessible in-flight. The location functionality seems to work only when I press the button to “wake up” the bag -- which means I’m right beside my bag and know its location. And since it’s the perfect carry-on size, it’s usually right above me in the plane cabin. So it’s a nice enough hard-shell wheelie bag with a couple of bells and whistles that don’t necessarily wow me.</li>\r\n	<li>Which shouldn’t be interpreted as a knock against Bluesmart. I’m sure there are a number of travelers who love every one of those bells and whistles. It’s not so much a criticism about Bluesmart as it is how personal and idiosyncratic frequent travelers are about suitcases. It’s gotta fit your packing strategies, which are also very idiosyncratic. Some people love compartments to help them structure their packing. Me? I’m all about the flexibility of a single open space -- I build my own structure with shoes and different kinds of clothes depending on the trip. And even though I see more and more hard-shell bags -- and now own one, I’m not completely sold on it. I still like the ability to bulge when I need to. And the two- vs. four-wheel thing. Pushing a 4-wheel through the airport seems easier on my wrist, but sometimes they roll too easily and won’t stay put. It’s the reason I’ve been walking around with a ripped backpack for 4 months -- I really hate shopping for travel bags. And am very happy that leather wallets last a really long time.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #120</li>\r\n	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/\">Podshow Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\r\n	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_120.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #120 — Where Do Guidebooks Fit In? I Hate Shopping for Suitcases','','inherit','closed','closed','','1598-revision-v1','','','2016-05-30 22:35:50','2016-05-31 03:35:50','',1598,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/05/30/1598-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1620,1,'2016-05-31 07:13:59','2016-05-31 12:13:59','[caption id=\"attachment_1616\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"225\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/IMAG0569_1.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1616\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/IMAG0569_1-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"This should be interesting...\" width=\"225\" height=\"300\" /></a> This should be interesting...[/caption]\r\n\r\nWhere do guidebooks fit in the world of apps, review websites, social media, and podcasts? Planning for a trip to Iceland got me thinking about how to make sense of the explosion of travel tips. And then, after giving my thoughts about my new <a href=\"http://bluesmart.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Bluesmart </a>\"smart connected suitcase\", I talk about how idiosyncratic frequent travelers are about packing strategies and their choice of suitcases. There\'s also follow-up about foreign exchange apps, and listener comments about digital travel security and Spirit Airlines\' growth. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_121.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/251667522\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #121:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Coming to you once again from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, after rewriting an episode I’d hoped to get done 3 weeks ago. I’d even posted on the TravelCommons Facebook wall on May 1st about having a new episode next weekend -- a post I’ve since deleted. Seems to be a trend with me. I get started on a new episode, but then it gets elbowed aside by other things -- like work. Maybe if I could just figure out a way to monetize this thing…  </li>\r\n	<li>I had hoped to record this episode halfway between two European trips. As I mentioned in the last episode, I had a weird Spring Break itinerary in April right before Easter -- Chicago to Reykjavik, Iceland for a 4-day long weekend with my son, and then, as he headed back to Chicago, I flew down to Spain to meet my wife and daughter and some friends for a week in Andalucia. As you can imagine, packing for that trip in a 22-inch carry on required equal amounts of editing and physical force. And then in mid-May, we all headed over to Portugal for a week. The excuse being that we needed to shove all my daughter’s belongings into storage after her first year at university in Scotland, but decided that Portugal would have better food and wine than Scotland. So we headed to Lisbon as a family, and then my wife and daughter are flew back up to St Andrews to do all the packing stuff. I think I came out of this pretty good.</li>\r\n	<li>Where this episode got shoved off the rails was the week before I left for Portugal. We all know that vacations aren’t free -- that we pay for them the week before we leave and the week after. I was blissfully in denial of this immutable law, thinking that I could write, record, produce, and post this episode then. Cramming two weeks of business travel into 4 days (we were leaving for Lisbon Friday afternoon), that week’s travel itinerary was New Jersey on Monday, Boston on Tuesday, New Orleans on Wednesday, and Atlanta on Thursday. Across four airlines -- United ORD-EWR-BOS, JetBlue BOS-MSY, Southwest MSY-ATL, and American ATL-ORD -- I racked up about 2:30 hrs in flight delays with JetBlue being the only carrier without a black mark.</li>\r\n	<li>Over April and May, what’s been particularly awful has been my run on one of American Airline’s regional jet partners Skywest. One Monday in April,  Skywest lost voice and data connectivity at its Dallas dispatch center causing a ground stop of its planes. After two hours of hanging around the Admirals Club, watching my Newark departure time get pushed out every 30 minutes, I called Amex to get switched over to a real American plane flying into LGA. It added about 45 minutes to my drive after I landed, but at least I got there, especially since Skywest ended up canceling my original Newark flight. The next Monday, I ended up on another Skywest American flight; this time to Charlottesville, VA. Again, another 1+ hr delay. This time it was plane maintenance. Then that Friday, I get a text after lunch -- my flight home was delayed over 2 hours. That was it. Three Skywest flights in a row that couldn’t get close to on-schedule. I called Amex again. Got on a United flight out of Richmond. After an hour-and-a-half drag race down I-64, I landed at ORD, drove home, ate dinner with my wife, and had a couple of glasses of wine before my original Skywest plane finally made it to Chicago.</li>\r\n	<li>Now I’m not a airline ops expert, but when the women behind the desks in the Admirals Club tell you about SkyWest “They’re not our favorite”, you might think about finding a new partner.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://cyberset.cc/artists2.php?tr_release_id=104\"><em>Heaven</em></a> by <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=A951998E6011FA9B2D22387EB3CAC0B5EB05A36360E7FDA122C8D7A5C140F8DC\" rel=\"nofollow\">Electric Skychurch</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Peter Zurich sent a great note, adding onto the digital security topic in<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/12/20/podcast-119-digital-security-on-the-road-us-airports-getting-better/\" target=\"_blank\"> the last episode</a>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>“Your suggestion to switch to cellular network as opposed to airport wifi is okay but it is becoming easy to obtain technology to set up a rogue cell site that will silently capture traffic -- your data will be caught and you will be none the wiser.</li>\r\n 	<li>“Thus, in my opinion, it is still very important to only use HTPS encrypted web sites and I would still add on the VPN if you have one available. Bottom line when using any website where you need your password to access sensitive information, make sure the computer is trusted (no public access/borrowed/loaner computers) and make sure the website is HTTPS. If using Outlook or other applications than the web browser you should be on your company\'s VPN.</li>\r\n 	<li>“Second thing, people should be aware that tearing a 2-D barcode in half doesn\'t necessarily render it undecipherable. 2D barcodes have a configurable level of redundancy built-in so that even if part (or possibly most) of the barcode is missing/unreadable it can still be decoded. My personal policy is once we have confirmed our FF miles have posted, the BP\'s go in the shredder.”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Peter, thanks for these. Last week’s <a href=\"http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/columnist/2016/02/24/got-hacked-my-mac-while-writing-story/80844720/\" target=\"_blank\">story </a>about the USA Today columnist whose e-mail was hacked while he used Gogo’s WiFi service on an American Airlines flight demonstrates again the potential dangers of using public WiFi. It takes a bit of spelunking through the columnist’s Twitter feed to figure out how that happened -- he was using an Earthlink e-mail service that didn’t encrypt traffic back to the mail server. Technical listeners would be right in saying “Well, there you go. What did you expect doing plain-text comms over public WiFi?” Indeed, when we talked about this in the last episode, I specifically called out the need to encrypt e-mail protocols -- POP, IMAP, SMTP -- over SSL. But that’s not the default configuration for many e-mail clients, including Outlook and, the last time I checked, the iPhone mail client. You have to go poking around in the settings, changing ports. I know how to do it -- but it’s nothing my wife would. Building on Peter’s suggestion, probably the easiest thing to do is use a web e-mail client like GMail over https -- when the green lock shows in the browser address bar. Next easiest is to set up your e-mail client to encrypt its traffic. Most e-mail providers have instructions on their sites. Perhaps the fiddliest, but the most secure is to install and use a VPN. If your company device comes with one already installed, then it’s easy -- though remember VPN web traffic is usually tracked just like it is in your office. If it’s your own device, then you’re probably going to want to buy a service. They’re not overly expensive -- $3-8/month. I use <a href=\"https://www.expressvpn.com/\" target=\"_blank\">ExpressVPN</a>, which is on the pricer side, but their VPN client is easy to install and use. And it has the side benefit of letting me watch NCAA March Madness video streams when I’m overseas. In March, I’ll be trying out a hardware-based VPN solution -- <a href=\"http://www.homingsystems.com/alwayshome-duo\" target=\"_blank\">AlwaysHome</a>, which sets up a VPN with matching USB dongles. Could be an easier solution. I’ll report back in the next episode.</li>\r\n 	<li>Dan Gradwohl, before he poked me into action, had a “Hmm…” reaction to a comment in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/12/20/podcast-119-digital-security-on-the-road-us-airports-getting-better/\" target=\"_blank\">the last episode</a> about Spirit Airlines passing Delta as the 3rd largest at Chicago O’Hare. Looking at January schedules, he found Spirit had 29 daily departures to Delta’s 52. Would seem like Delta is still larger. However, the Crain’s Chicago article said Spirit carried more passengers than Delta -- which could be since some of Delta’s 52 departures were co-branded smaller regional jets. This is not a new thing. For a long time, O’Hare continued to claim the title of World’s Busiest Airport based on <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_world%27s_busiest_airports_by_aircraft_movements#2014_statistics\" target=\"_blank\">number of takeoffs/landings</a> (which it reclaimed in 2014) after Atlanta Hartsfield passed it on total passengers handled. Using that <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_world%27s_busiest_airports_by_passenger_traffic#2015_statistics\" target=\"_blank\">stat</a>, ORD is the 4th largest after ATL, Beijing, and Dubai. All that being said, Spirit is ramping up hard in the Chicago market, hiring new flight attendants ahead of plane deliveries, and pushing the city for more gate space. And Delta and American are rolling out new Economy Basic fares to fight them. Might not be too long before Spirit passes Delta on both measures.</li>\r\n 	<li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/10/11/podcast-117-random-thoughts-about-eggs-scotland-car-rentals/\" target=\"_blank\">Episode #117</a>, I talked -- raved, actually -- about a FinTech company called <a href=\"https://revolut.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Revolut</a>. It offered a convenient and low-cost way to exchange, transfer, and access money internationally. I started using it last September when my daughter started up at University of St Andrews. I used it to convert and push money to her UK bank account, and used the Revolut chip-&amp;-pin debit card to avoid the hassle of US chip-&amp;-signature credit cards. Last week, though, the low-cost component of their value prop disappeared -- at least for US customers, when they added a 3% fee when you added money/”topped up” your Revolut account with a US debit card. They said they were passing through the fees they were being charged, a claim I don’t doubt. However, it started me looking for cheaper foreign exchange options. Which lead me down quite the rabbit hole -- sorting through the differences in transaction costs and exchange rates quickly led to an Excel modelling session, which is just how I want to spend a Saturday morning. If you look at <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">my Twitter feed</a>, there’s a string of tweets walking through my analysis, but for my case, TransferWise, another UK FinTech startup, and Xoom, owned by PayPal, were much cheaper than Revolut after considering their new 3% fee. I expect that I’ll still use the Revolut card a bit when in Europe -- at self-service check-outs or gas pumps -- but nowhere near the volume I was using it before last week. But, I’m glad to have options and do a bit of math so avoid a $50 bank wire fee or Western Union’s 7% premium from market exchange rates.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Rocky Road</em> by <a href=\"http://www.kcentricity.com/\">KCentric</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Where Do Guidebooks Fit In?</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>As I mentioned in the opening, my son and I are hitting Iceland in a couple of weeks for a 4-day weekend. We’ve never been before, so I needed to figure out what to do and where to stay. Right about then, someone from what I used to know as Dorling Kindersley -- now shortened to DK -- pinged me about the February relaunch of <a href=\"http://www.dk.com/us/travel/\" target=\"_blank\">DK’s Eyewitness Travel Top 10 Guides</a> -- one of the first 10 is for Iceland. It started me thinking about where guidebooks fit in these days of in the world of apps (Yelp, Foursquare, Untappd), podcasts (Amateur Traveler, Indie Travel Podcast), websites (TripAdvisor), newspaper articles (NYTimes’ <a href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/22/travel/36-hours-in-reykjavik.html\" target=\"_blank\">36 Hours in Reykjavik</a>) and friends’ social media posts on Facebook and Instagram.</li>\r\n 	<li>When I want to torture my kids, I do the “when I was young…” thing. But going back to our honeymoon 25 years ago (this November -- need to get on that planning!), I cashed in a slug of British Airways miles to fly us first class to Pisa for a touring holiday in Tuscany. The only plans I had made were to rent a car (a Fiat Panda) and book our first night’s room (via Telex) in Lucca. We ran the rest of the vacation off of a set of Michelin guides -- the red one to find hotels and restaurants and the green one to figure out what to see. Between those and reading “A Room With A View”, we were set. We exchanged American Express travelers checks at the bank for lira, took pictures on Kodak and Fuji film, navigated using a paper maps… Whoops, got off track a bit there. I think my kids are somewhere screaming “Stop!”</li>\r\n 	<li>I think like everybody, I start with a Google search -- “What to do in Iceland in March”, limit the results to the last 2 years and start clicking. Lots of articles from UK papers (I think because of Wow Air, the Icelandic version of Spirit or EasyJet, flying into London Gatwick) which I clip over to Evernote using their nifty little Chrome extension. Then I narrow the search down to specific interests -- like “Iceland craft beer” and a few more article get sync’d to Evernote. I stack up a bunch of facts -- a sort of <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointillism\" target=\"_blank\">pointillist </a>view of what to do in Iceland.</li>\r\n 	<li>Every survey about how people go about travel planning will tell you that personal recommendations are the far and away the most important source of travel planning information. Which makes sense -- you know the person, how their interests, ways of travel align with yours. We have good friends that we’ll take restaurant recommendations from, but not hotels. We share the same tastes in interesting food, but they like to stay in hotels with nice pools. We’re tend to stay a bit more “closer to ground” -- choosing vacation rentals over the Westin resort.</li>\r\n 	<li>And once people find that you travel a lot and to different/interesting places, you get hit up -- a lot -- for recommendations. Friend and long-time T/C listener Allan Marko curates a set of notes for his favorite European cities, places like Paris, that he regularly e-mails out. After a couple of visits to Spain, I’ve taken it to the next level of geekdom -- embedding my recommendations on a Google Map page and sending out the URL. For this trip, a friend from work sent me the itinerary she and her family did last summer. Not sure that she and her husband would be search out craft beer bars with 2 young kids in tow, but I did take her recommendation for the Hotel Geysir at the top of the Golden Circle route, and hitting the Blue Lagoon on the way back to the airport.</li>\r\n 	<li>I like The NY Times’ 36 Hours and United Airlines’ 3 Perfect Days series. They’re focused on the long weekend getaway -- if you have a limited amount of time, here’s what to do. These are the sorts of articles we used to rip out of the Sunday travel section of the local newspaper or a travel magazine and stash in a travel folder. The Internet has shifted that behavior just a bit -- we now search for them when we right when we need them. Perhaps more for travel planning than for inspiration, but they serve the same purpose as the green Michelin guide did for our honeymoon -- a curated list of things you ought to see.</li>\r\n 	<li>The DK Top 10 Iceland guide seems to fit into this “hit the highlights” mode -- top 10 highlights by region and by thing (top 10 churches, waterfalls, volcanoes, bars, cheap restaurants…), 2-day and 7-day itineraries, which is nice because the 36 Hours in Reykjavik article I pulled up was from 2013, maybe on the ragged edge of up-to-dateness. And the DK guide has everything nicely packaged, which I remember from the Dorling Kindersley books of old -- all the lists in one place wrapped in a sturdy cover that has fold-out maps in the front (Iceland) and the back (downtown Reykjavik) -- which is handy if you didn’t plan ahead and cache Google Maps data before leaving the hotel wi-fi bubble.</li>\r\n 	<li>There’s another kind of guidebook that I’ll use, though I couldn’t find one for Iceland. They’re less about lists and more about stories -- think Bill Bryson’s <em>Notes from a Small Island</em> about the UK, or more recently, <em><a href=\"http://roadsandkingdoms.com/store/rice-noodle-fish-book/\" target=\"_blank\">Rice Noodle Fish</a></em> an Anthony Bourdain book by Matt Goulding (whatever that means) about Japan. I read those more before I travel than packing them in my bag. They’re about context/texture -- kinda like what “Room With A View” was for us about Florence 25 years ago -- that prepare rather than guide you, and maybe give you a bit more appreciation when you’re running through those Top 10 Highlights lists.</li>\r\n 	<li>Maybe it comes down to the kind of reader you are -- are you someone that likes things more tangible than electronic. Do you like to flip pages rather than screens? The Kindle cannibalized a good-sized chunk of the demand for physical books, but didn’t replace it. Just like overall book market, recent numbers show the demand for physical guide books has stabilized albeit at a lower level. I sorta split the difference. I like paging through my Evernote virtual travel folder when I’m back at the room, but like to have a physical map and list when I’m out walking during the day. Maybe that physicality keeps me more engaged with where I am. Or at least looking up and forward, which should help keep me avoid that new travelers’ epidemic -- Death by GPS.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music --<em> <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/liquid-seventythree/\" target=\"_blank\">Is That Called Love</a> </em></em>by Liquid Zen</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>I Hate Shopping for Suitcases</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I’ve been traveling for a few months now with the <a href=\"http://bluesmart.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Bluesmart </a>suitcase. I’ve mentioned it in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/08/26/podcast-116-traveling-thru-japan-luggage-trends/\" target=\"_blank\">a past episode</a> when I pre-ordered it through their Indiegogo campaign. And now that they’re shipping, they’re making a lot of Top Traveler Gadget lists.</li>\r\n 	<li>It claims to be the first piece of “smart” luggage to hit the market. It pairs with my iPhone through Bluetooth. It automatically locks when I step away from it and then unlocks itself when I return. It has a built-in battery to power itself and charge personal electronics through a couple of USB ports. It also periodically sends out its location when I can then check through the iPhone app. And it has a cool front light that glows blue when it’s paired with my phone.</li>\r\n 	<li>Aside from all the electronics, it’s a hard-shell wheelie bag with nice-sized wheels that roll easily -- sometimes too easily. It fits perfectly into American’s and United’s luggage sizers -- at least the ones in Boston Logan airport. (Some blogger who reviewed the bag raised a bit of a ruckus saying that the bag dimensions on the website were too big for carry-on. I guess he doesn’t travel enough to go an airport and check it out himself). The iPhone app is getting better -- Bluesmart is doing a nice job of reving the app frequently to stomp bugs, though the location alerts -- “You’re leaving me behind” are still a bit wonky.</li>\r\n 	<li>All in all, it’s a nice enough bag. I had been thinking about getting something a bit smaller for 1-2 night trips and this fits the bill. I’m kinda “meh” on all the electronics. The large battery is fine, but I already carry a recharger in my backpack that will top up my iPhone or tablet a couple of times -- good enough and more accessible in-flight. The location functionality seems to work only when I press the button to “wake up” the bag -- which means I’m right beside my bag and know its location. And since it’s the perfect carry-on size, it’s usually right above me in the plane cabin. So it’s a nice enough hard-shell wheelie bag with a couple of bells and whistles that don’t necessarily wow me.</li>\r\n 	<li>Which shouldn’t be interpreted as a knock against Bluesmart. I’m sure there are a number of travelers who love every one of those bells and whistles. It’s not so much a criticism about Bluesmart as it is how personal and idiosyncratic frequent travelers are about suitcases. It’s gotta fit your packing strategies, which are also very idiosyncratic. Some people love compartments to help them structure their packing. Me? I’m all about the flexibility of a single open space -- I build my own structure with shoes and different kinds of clothes depending on the trip. And even though I see more and more hard-shell bags -- and now own one, I’m not completely sold on it. I still like the ability to bulge when I need to. And the two- vs. four-wheel thing. Pushing a 4-wheel through the airport seems easier on my wrist, but sometimes they roll too easily and won’t stay put. It’s the reason I’ve been walking around with a ripped backpack for 4 months -- I really hate shopping for travel bags. And am very happy that leather wallets last a really long time.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #120</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/\">Podshow Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_121.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #121','','inherit','closed','closed','','1615-revision-v1','','','2016-05-31 07:13:59','2016-05-31 12:13:59','',1615,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/05/31/1615-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1621,1,'2016-05-31 07:27:18','2016-05-31 12:27:18','[caption id=\"attachment_1616\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"225\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/IMAG0569_1.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1616\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/IMAG0569_1-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"This should be interesting...\" width=\"225\" height=\"300\" /></a> This should be interesting...[/caption]\r\n\r\nWhere do guidebooks fit in the world of apps, review websites, social media, and podcasts? Planning for a trip to Iceland got me thinking about how to make sense of the explosion of travel tips. And then, after giving my thoughts about my new <a href=\"http://bluesmart.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Bluesmart </a>\"smart connected suitcase\", I talk about how idiosyncratic frequent travelers are about packing strategies and their choice of suitcases. There\'s also follow-up about foreign exchange apps, and listener comments about digital travel security and Spirit Airlines\' growth. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_121.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/251667522\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #121:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you once again from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, after rewriting an episode I’d hoped to get done 3 weeks ago. I’d even posted on the TravelCommons Facebook wall on May 1st about having a new episode next weekend -- a post I’ve since deleted. Seems to be a trend with me. I get started on a new episode, but then it gets elbowed aside by other things -- like work. Maybe if I could just figure out a way to monetize this thing…</li>\r\n 	<li>I had hoped to record this episode halfway between two European trips. As I mentioned in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/12/podcast-120-where-do-guidebooks-fit-in-i-hate-shopping-for-suitcases/\">the last episode</a>, I had a weird Spring Break itinerary in April right before Easter -- Chicago to Reykjavik, Iceland for a 4-day long weekend with my son, and then, as he headed back to Chicago, I flew down to Spain to meet my wife and daughter and some friends for a week in Andalucia. As you can imagine, packing for that trip in a 22-inch carry on required equal amounts of editing and physical force. And then in mid-May, we all headed over to Portugal for a week. The excuse being that we needed to shove all my daughter’s belongings into storage after her first year at university in Scotland, but decided that Portugal would have better food and wine than Scotland. So we headed to Lisbon as a family, and then my wife and daughter are flew back up to St Andrews to do all the packing stuff. I think I came out of this pretty good.</li>\r\n 	<li>Where this episode got shoved off the rails was the week before I left for Portugal. We all know that vacations aren’t free -- that we pay for them the week before we leave and the week after. I was blissfully in denial of this immutable law, thinking that I could write, record, produce, and post this episode then. Cramming two weeks of business travel into 4 days (we were leaving for Lisbon Friday afternoon), that week’s travel itinerary was New Jersey on Monday, Boston on Tuesday, New Orleans on Wednesday, and Atlanta on Thursday. Across four airlines -- United ORD-EWR-BOS, JetBlue BOS-MSY, Southwest MSY-ATL, and American ATL-ORD -- I racked up about 2:30 hrs in flight delays with JetBlue being the only carrier without a black mark.</li>\r\n 	<li>Over April and May, what’s been particularly awful has been my run on one of American Airline’s regional jet partners Skywest. One Monday in April, Skywest lost voice and data connectivity at its Dallas dispatch center causing a ground stop of its planes. After two hours of hanging around the Admirals Club, watching my Newark departure time get pushed out every 30 minutes, I called Amex to get switched over to a real American plane flying into LGA. It added about 45 minutes to my drive after I landed, but at least I got there, especially since Skywest ended up canceling my original Newark flight. The next Monday, I ended up on another Skywest American flight; this time to Charlottesville, VA. Again, another 1+ hr delay. This time it was plane maintenance. Then that Friday, I get a text after lunch -- my flight home was delayed over 2 hours. That was it. Three Skywest flights in a row that couldn’t get close to on-schedule. I called Amex again. Got on a United flight out of Richmond. After an hour-and-a-half drag race down I-64, I landed at ORD, drove home, ate dinner with my wife, and had a couple of glasses of wine before my original Skywest plane finally made it to Chicago.</li>\r\n 	<li>Now I’m not a airline ops expert, but when the women behind the desks in the Admirals Club tell you about SkyWest “They’re not our favorite”, you might think about finding a new partner.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://cyberset.cc/artists2.php?tr_release_id=104\"><em>Heaven</em></a> by <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=A951998E6011FA9B2D22387EB3CAC0B5EB05A36360E7FDA122C8D7A5C140F8DC\" rel=\"nofollow\">Electric Skychurch</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Steve Frick asked in a comment on the TravelCommons website about how I use Evernote. In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/12/podcast-120-where-do-guidebooks-fit-in-i-hate-shopping-for-suitcases/\">the last episode</a>, I talked about how I use it to in my vacation travel planning. I used to store all sorts of things in Evernote — scanned receipts, recipes, etc. Now I mostly just use it to store on-line travel articles using its Web Clipper Chrome extension which I really like. A couple of days ago, I was reading a 36 Hours in Philadelphia article in the NYTimes. I clicked the little elephant head on the Chrome bar and now I have it saved, and synced across all my devices. I know a bunch of folks who are big OneNote users. I’ve been thinking of looking at it, but it’s pretty low on the priority list since I’m good in Evernote’s free tier.</li>\r\n 	<li>Peter Zurich sent in <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEyFH-a-XoQ\">a link</a> to an Onion YouTube video about the Franz Kafka Airport in Prague. Now, the Onion is talented/notorious for writing absurd articles in a straight voice that’s just close enough to the truth to make people accept that it is true. This video is well done. Anyone who read Kafka in high school or college will get a kick out of it, and remind you how close to Kafka-esque absurdity the modern travel experience gets. And it did make me look up the Prague airport -- did they really name it after Kafka? As great as that would be, the airport has been called Václav Havel Airport Prague since 2012 in honor of the Czech’s former president and leader of the Velvet Revolution.</li>\r\n 	<li>Dan Gradwohl dropped me a note regarding the “I Hate Shopping for a Suitcase” topic in the last episode where I talked about my difficulties in replacing my worn backpack.\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>As for the backpack search, Sara feels your pain as she searched long and hard for a new backpack before settling on a Gregory for her upcoming trip on The Camino in northern Spain. Of course, her backpack needs differ from yours! For baggage, she uses the REI Tech Beast and loves it. She\'s had it for 8 years, still going strong with 100,000+ miles per year easily on it. She has not found an overhead bin it does not fit in, from a CR9/170 to an A380/744.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Dan, thanks for that. I just got a couple of REI coupons in the mail. I’ll have to go check out the Tech Beast</li>\r\n 	<li>In that same segment, I talked about my “smart” luggage bag from<a href=\"http://bluesmart.com/\"> Bluesmart</a>. I think I summarized my review as “meh” -- nice enough bag, but all the electronics felt more like a gimmick than something I needed. I’m going to backtrack a bit on that -- specifically with regards to its location finder capability. The bag has a GPS and global SIM card and through a deal with Telefonica transmits its location periodically which you can see on the smartphone app. As I mentioned in the last episode, the Bluesmart is the perfect carry-on size, it’s usually right above me in the plane cabin, so the location finder isn’t that valuable. Except recently, I’ve been flying regional jets a lot where I’ve had to gate check (“valet”) my bag. Normally I don’t worry about this -- I’ve never had an airline lose my bag in the couple of hundred feet between the jetway and the plane. But one on of these recent Skywest flights, it was taking my bag a long time to show up at the gate after arriving. Hmmm, I pulled out my iPhone, hit the Location button on the Bluesmart app, and it showed me that my bag had updated its location a couple of minutes prior and was indeed here. A few minutes later, it showed up in the last tranche of bags heaved up into the jet bridge. Not critical functionality, but it moves up from “meh” to “kinda handy”.</li>\r\n 	<li>Which I guess would’ve been handy but not necessarily useful in the string of bad luggage karma that my daughter and her friends have experienced over the past couple of month. My daughter’s luggage has been lost on 3 out of 4 trips -- Air Brussels lost it between EDI and MAD through BRU, KLM lost it on her return through AMS, and then AirFrance lost it between LIS and EDI through DeGaulle. And a friend of her had Ibera lose a bag between Seville and MAD. How does that happen? You have to really work hard to lose anything in an airport the size of Seville. And it’s not that my daughter wanted to check her bag. She wanted to carry on, But she has this short light blue roller bag that seems to pull gate agent eyes toward it. I gotta get her something more nondescript, like a black hardshell roller.</li>\r\n 	<li>But the thing that will catch you in Europe is that carry-on bags often have a weight limit as well as a size limit. Checking in for my <a href=\"http://wowair.us/\">Wow Air</a> flight from Reykjavik to London, I arrived 2 hrs before check in to see what appeared to be a stationary check in line of a couple of hundred people. Reykjavik is Wow’s hub and, near as I could see, they have 4 agents checking people in with luggage. I hadn’t wanted to check my luggage since I had a weird connection in London en route to Madrid -- no interlining between Wow and Ibera, so I would have to claim luggage in Gatwick, pass through Customs, and then recheck the bag with Iberia. And checking in with carry on was a separate and much shorter line. My bag fit -- snuggly -- in the sizer, so I figured I was good to go. No so fast. Wow also has a 7kg/15 lbs weight limit for carryons! Not even Spirit Airlines pulls that stunt. So I take my bag off the scale, pull some clothes out, zip it back up, and put it back on the scale. Not enough, the agent says. I do this 3 or 4 more times. The agent finally takes pity -- or gets tired of me -- and gives me the approval tag to put on my bag (saying “You shall pass” -- Wow Air definitely pushes the “we’re quirky” image). I walk about 10 feet with my tagged bag and armful of clothes, open my bag and put my clothes back in. When I got on the plane, a brand new Airbus A321, my carry on fit perfectly in the overhead bin, just like it does for every other Airbus A321, A320, and A319 I fly in the US and Europe. So I’m not quite sure what the Wow agent and I accomplished with that baggage strip tease, but I got what I wanted -- my bag right above me rather than trundling around Keflavik airport for the next couple of days.</li>\r\n 	<li>In the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/12/20/podcast-119-digital-security-on-the-road-us-airports-getting-better/\">last</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/12/podcast-120-where-do-guidebooks-fit-in-i-hate-shopping-for-suitcases/\">couple </a>of episodes, I’ve talked about the <a href=\"https://revolut.com/\">Revolut</a> card which is a Mastercard pre-paid debit card with some very nice foreign exchange functionality. I loved this card when it first came out -- first when I was traveling in the UK and then cheaply transfer money to my daughter studying in Scotland. Then I went very cold when they blew up the “cheaply” component , when they added a 3% fee when you added money/”topped up” your Revolut account using a US debit card. This episode, I’ve warmed up a bit. First, I discovered a way to bypass that 3% debit charge --I topped up my account in Euros with my US debit card. This avoids the 3% charge from Revolut, though the app does note that you’re not using the right currency with your card and asks you if you really mean to do this. My bank charges me less than 1% for the conversion, and though the exchange rate isn’t as good as Revolut’s, it’s not bad enough to cost-justify the 3% charge that USD top-ups attract. So, we’re back to a reasonably priced conversion -- in a roundabout way.</li>\r\n 	<li>Which is good because, for some reason, my US ATM card never worked the whole time I was in Iceland. And I could never figure out why. I traded notes with my bank. They weren’t denying anything; they weren’t ever seeing the transaction show up at their end. I dunno, maybe it’s some residual wonkiness left over from their banking meltdown. I can’t remember the last time I had problems like that. Which, before I left for Iceland, made me wonder if I still needed to carry a wad of backup USD with me on this trip -- given how ubiquitous and seamless ATMs are nowadays. I still didn’t need the Jacksons though because my Revolut card had no problem pulling krona from any ATM. In Portugal, I did hit a couple of different quirks. First, the train and Lisbon subway ticket machines don’t accept pre-paid debit cards which left me scrambling for exact change a surprising number of times. Second, a number of shops only accepted Visa cards, which blocked out Revolut’s MasterCard-based card. I used to see this more often in the past -- shops only accepted cards on one network -- Visa or MasterCard, and often didn’t take American Express -- which has led me to always carry one of each card, but I thought the need for that backup had also faded. So I guess I’ll keep carrying a fist full of credit cards and USD for at least a couple more years.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Rocky Road</em> by <a href=\"http://www.kcentricity.com/\">KCentric</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Where Do Guidebooks Fit In?</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>As I mentioned in the opening, my son and I are hitting Iceland in a couple of weeks for a 4-day weekend. We’ve never been before, so I needed to figure out what to do and where to stay. Right about then, someone from what I used to know as Dorling Kindersley -- now shortened to DK -- pinged me about the February relaunch of <a href=\"http://www.dk.com/us/travel/\" target=\"_blank\">DK’s Eyewitness Travel Top 10 Guides</a> -- one of the first 10 is for Iceland. It started me thinking about where guidebooks fit in these days of in the world of apps (Yelp, Foursquare, Untappd), podcasts (Amateur Traveler, Indie Travel Podcast), websites (TripAdvisor), newspaper articles (NYTimes’ <a href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/22/travel/36-hours-in-reykjavik.html\" target=\"_blank\">36 Hours in Reykjavik</a>) and friends’ social media posts on Facebook and Instagram.</li>\r\n 	<li>When I want to torture my kids, I do the “when I was young…” thing. But going back to our honeymoon 25 years ago (this November -- need to get on that planning!), I cashed in a slug of British Airways miles to fly us first class to Pisa for a touring holiday in Tuscany. The only plans I had made were to rent a car (a Fiat Panda) and book our first night’s room (via Telex) in Lucca. We ran the rest of the vacation off of a set of Michelin guides -- the red one to find hotels and restaurants and the green one to figure out what to see. Between those and reading “A Room With A View”, we were set. We exchanged American Express travelers checks at the bank for lira, took pictures on Kodak and Fuji film, navigated using a paper maps… Whoops, got off track a bit there. I think my kids are somewhere screaming “Stop!”</li>\r\n 	<li>I think like everybody, I start with a Google search -- “What to do in Iceland in March”, limit the results to the last 2 years and start clicking. Lots of articles from UK papers (I think because of Wow Air, the Icelandic version of Spirit or EasyJet, flying into London Gatwick) which I clip over to Evernote using their nifty little Chrome extension. Then I narrow the search down to specific interests -- like “Iceland craft beer” and a few more article get sync’d to Evernote. I stack up a bunch of facts -- a sort of <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointillism\" target=\"_blank\">pointillist </a>view of what to do in Iceland.</li>\r\n 	<li>Every survey about how people go about travel planning will tell you that personal recommendations are the far and away the most important source of travel planning information. Which makes sense -- you know the person, how their interests, ways of travel align with yours. We have good friends that we’ll take restaurant recommendations from, but not hotels. We share the same tastes in interesting food, but they like to stay in hotels with nice pools. We’re tend to stay a bit more “closer to ground” -- choosing vacation rentals over the Westin resort.</li>\r\n 	<li>And once people find that you travel a lot and to different/interesting places, you get hit up -- a lot -- for recommendations. Friend and long-time T/C listener Allan Marko curates a set of notes for his favorite European cities, places like Paris, that he regularly e-mails out. After a couple of visits to Spain, I’ve taken it to the next level of geekdom -- embedding my recommendations on a Google Map page and sending out the URL. For this trip, a friend from work sent me the itinerary she and her family did last summer. Not sure that she and her husband would be search out craft beer bars with 2 young kids in tow, but I did take her recommendation for the Hotel Geysir at the top of the Golden Circle route, and hitting the Blue Lagoon on the way back to the airport.</li>\r\n 	<li>I like The NY Times’ 36 Hours and United Airlines’ 3 Perfect Days series. They’re focused on the long weekend getaway -- if you have a limited amount of time, here’s what to do. These are the sorts of articles we used to rip out of the Sunday travel section of the local newspaper or a travel magazine and stash in a travel folder. The Internet has shifted that behavior just a bit -- we now search for them when we right when we need them. Perhaps more for travel planning than for inspiration, but they serve the same purpose as the green Michelin guide did for our honeymoon -- a curated list of things you ought to see.</li>\r\n 	<li>The DK Top 10 Iceland guide seems to fit into this “hit the highlights” mode -- top 10 highlights by region and by thing (top 10 churches, waterfalls, volcanoes, bars, cheap restaurants…), 2-day and 7-day itineraries, which is nice because the 36 Hours in Reykjavik article I pulled up was from 2013, maybe on the ragged edge of up-to-dateness. And the DK guide has everything nicely packaged, which I remember from the Dorling Kindersley books of old -- all the lists in one place wrapped in a sturdy cover that has fold-out maps in the front (Iceland) and the back (downtown Reykjavik) -- which is handy if you didn’t plan ahead and cache Google Maps data before leaving the hotel wi-fi bubble.</li>\r\n 	<li>There’s another kind of guidebook that I’ll use, though I couldn’t find one for Iceland. They’re less about lists and more about stories -- think Bill Bryson’s <em>Notes from a Small Island</em> about the UK, or more recently, <em><a href=\"http://roadsandkingdoms.com/store/rice-noodle-fish-book/\" target=\"_blank\">Rice Noodle Fish</a></em> an Anthony Bourdain book by Matt Goulding (whatever that means) about Japan. I read those more before I travel than packing them in my bag. They’re about context/texture -- kinda like what “Room With A View” was for us about Florence 25 years ago -- that prepare rather than guide you, and maybe give you a bit more appreciation when you’re running through those Top 10 Highlights lists.</li>\r\n 	<li>Maybe it comes down to the kind of reader you are -- are you someone that likes things more tangible than electronic. Do you like to flip pages rather than screens? The Kindle cannibalized a good-sized chunk of the demand for physical books, but didn’t replace it. Just like overall book market, recent numbers show the demand for physical guide books has stabilized albeit at a lower level. I sorta split the difference. I like paging through my Evernote virtual travel folder when I’m back at the room, but like to have a physical map and list when I’m out walking during the day. Maybe that physicality keeps me more engaged with where I am. Or at least looking up and forward, which should help keep me avoid that new travelers’ epidemic -- Death by GPS.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music --<em> <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/liquid-seventythree/\" target=\"_blank\">Is That Called Love</a> </em></em>by Liquid Zen</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>I Hate Shopping for Suitcases</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I’ve been traveling for a few months now with the <a href=\"http://bluesmart.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Bluesmart </a>suitcase. I’ve mentioned it in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/08/26/podcast-116-traveling-thru-japan-luggage-trends/\" target=\"_blank\">a past episode</a> when I pre-ordered it through their Indiegogo campaign. And now that they’re shipping, they’re making a lot of Top Traveler Gadget lists.</li>\r\n 	<li>It claims to be the first piece of “smart” luggage to hit the market. It pairs with my iPhone through Bluetooth. It automatically locks when I step away from it and then unlocks itself when I return. It has a built-in battery to power itself and charge personal electronics through a couple of USB ports. It also periodically sends out its location when I can then check through the iPhone app. And it has a cool front light that glows blue when it’s paired with my phone.</li>\r\n 	<li>Aside from all the electronics, it’s a hard-shell wheelie bag with nice-sized wheels that roll easily -- sometimes too easily. It fits perfectly into American’s and United’s luggage sizers -- at least the ones in Boston Logan airport. (Some blogger who reviewed the bag raised a bit of a ruckus saying that the bag dimensions on the website were too big for carry-on. I guess he doesn’t travel enough to go an airport and check it out himself). The iPhone app is getting better -- Bluesmart is doing a nice job of reving the app frequently to stomp bugs, though the location alerts -- “You’re leaving me behind” are still a bit wonky.</li>\r\n 	<li>All in all, it’s a nice enough bag. I had been thinking about getting something a bit smaller for 1-2 night trips and this fits the bill. I’m kinda “meh” on all the electronics. The large battery is fine, but I already carry a recharger in my backpack that will top up my iPhone or tablet a couple of times -- good enough and more accessible in-flight. The location functionality seems to work only when I press the button to “wake up” the bag -- which means I’m right beside my bag and know its location. And since it’s the perfect carry-on size, it’s usually right above me in the plane cabin. So it’s a nice enough hard-shell wheelie bag with a couple of bells and whistles that don’t necessarily wow me.</li>\r\n 	<li>Which shouldn’t be interpreted as a knock against Bluesmart. I’m sure there are a number of travelers who love every one of those bells and whistles. It’s not so much a criticism about Bluesmart as it is how personal and idiosyncratic frequent travelers are about suitcases. It’s gotta fit your packing strategies, which are also very idiosyncratic. Some people love compartments to help them structure their packing. Me? I’m all about the flexibility of a single open space -- I build my own structure with shoes and different kinds of clothes depending on the trip. And even though I see more and more hard-shell bags -- and now own one, I’m not completely sold on it. I still like the ability to bulge when I need to. And the two- vs. four-wheel thing. Pushing a 4-wheel through the airport seems easier on my wrist, but sometimes they roll too easily and won’t stay put. It’s the reason I’ve been walking around with a ripped backpack for 4 months -- I really hate shopping for travel bags. And am very happy that leather wallets last a really long time.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #120</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/\">Podshow Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_121.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #121','','inherit','closed','closed','','1615-revision-v1','','','2016-05-31 07:27:18','2016-05-31 12:27:18','',1615,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/05/31/1615-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1622,1,'2016-05-31 07:31:26','2016-05-31 12:31:26','[caption id=\"attachment_1616\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"225\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/IMAG0569_1.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1616\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/IMAG0569_1-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"This should be interesting...\" width=\"225\" height=\"300\" /></a> This should be interesting...[/caption]\r\n\r\nWhere do guidebooks fit in the world of apps, review websites, social media, and podcasts? Planning for a trip to Iceland got me thinking about how to make sense of the explosion of travel tips. And then, after giving my thoughts about my new <a href=\"http://bluesmart.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Bluesmart </a>\"smart connected suitcase\", I talk about how idiosyncratic frequent travelers are about packing strategies and their choice of suitcases. There\'s also follow-up about foreign exchange apps, and listener comments about digital travel security and Spirit Airlines\' growth. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_121.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/251667522\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #121:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you once again from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, after rewriting an episode I’d hoped to get done 3 weeks ago. I’d even posted on the TravelCommons Facebook wall on May 1st about having a new episode next weekend -- a post I’ve since deleted. Seems to be a trend with me. I get started on a new episode, but then it gets elbowed aside by other things -- like work. Maybe if I could just figure out a way to monetize this thing…</li>\r\n 	<li>I had hoped to record this episode halfway between two European trips. As I mentioned in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/12/podcast-120-where-do-guidebooks-fit-in-i-hate-shopping-for-suitcases/\">the last episode</a>, I had a weird Spring Break itinerary in April right before Easter -- Chicago to Reykjavik, Iceland for a 4-day long weekend with my son, and then, as he headed back to Chicago, I flew down to Spain to meet my wife and daughter and some friends for a week in Andalucia. As you can imagine, packing for that trip in a 22-inch carry on required equal amounts of editing and physical force. And then in mid-May, we all headed over to Portugal for a week. The excuse being that we needed to shove all my daughter’s belongings into storage after her first year at university in Scotland, but decided that Portugal would have better food and wine than Scotland. So we headed to Lisbon as a family, and then my wife and daughter are flew back up to St Andrews to do all the packing stuff. I think I came out of this pretty good.</li>\r\n 	<li>Where this episode got shoved off the rails was the week before I left for Portugal. We all know that vacations aren’t free -- that we pay for them the week before we leave and the week after. I was blissfully in denial of this immutable law, thinking that I could write, record, produce, and post this episode then. Cramming two weeks of business travel into 4 days (we were leaving for Lisbon Friday afternoon), that week’s travel itinerary was New Jersey on Monday, Boston on Tuesday, New Orleans on Wednesday, and Atlanta on Thursday. Across four airlines -- United ORD-EWR-BOS, JetBlue BOS-MSY, Southwest MSY-ATL, and American ATL-ORD -- I racked up about 2:30 hrs in flight delays with JetBlue being the only carrier without a black mark.</li>\r\n 	<li>Over April and May, what’s been particularly awful has been my run on one of American Airline’s regional jet partners Skywest. One Monday in April, Skywest lost voice and data connectivity at its Dallas dispatch center causing a ground stop of its planes. After two hours of hanging around the Admirals Club, watching my Newark departure time get pushed out every 30 minutes, I called Amex to get switched over to a real American plane flying into LGA. It added about 45 minutes to my drive after I landed, but at least I got there, especially since Skywest ended up canceling my original Newark flight. The next Monday, I ended up on another Skywest American flight; this time to Charlottesville, VA. Again, another 1+ hr delay. This time it was plane maintenance. Then that Friday, I get a text after lunch -- my flight home was delayed over 2 hours. That was it. Three Skywest flights in a row that couldn’t get close to on-schedule. I called Amex again. Got on a United flight out of Richmond. After an hour-and-a-half drag race down I-64, I landed at ORD, drove home, ate dinner with my wife, and had a couple of glasses of wine before my original Skywest plane finally made it to Chicago.</li>\r\n 	<li>Now I’m not a airline ops expert, but when the women behind the desks in the Admirals Club tell you about SkyWest “They’re not our favorite”, you might think about finding a new partner.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://cyberset.cc/artists2.php?tr_release_id=104\"><em>Heaven</em></a> by <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=A951998E6011FA9B2D22387EB3CAC0B5EB05A36360E7FDA122C8D7A5C140F8DC\" rel=\"nofollow\">Electric Skychurch</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Steve Frick asked in a comment on the TravelCommons website about how I use Evernote. In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/12/podcast-120-where-do-guidebooks-fit-in-i-hate-shopping-for-suitcases/\">the last episode</a>, I talked about how I use it to in my vacation travel planning. I used to store all sorts of things in Evernote — scanned receipts, recipes, etc. Now I mostly just use it to store on-line travel articles using its Web Clipper Chrome extension which I really like. A couple of days ago, I was reading a 36 Hours in Philadelphia article in the NYTimes. I clicked the little elephant head on the Chrome bar and now I have it saved, and synced across all my devices. I know a bunch of folks who are big OneNote users. I’ve been thinking of looking at it, but it’s pretty low on the priority list since I’m good in Evernote’s free tier.</li>\r\n 	<li>Peter Zurich sent in <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEyFH-a-XoQ\">a link</a> to an Onion YouTube video about the Franz Kafka Airport in Prague. Now, the Onion is talented/notorious for writing absurd articles in a straight voice that’s just close enough to the truth to make people accept that it is true. This video is well done. Anyone who read Kafka in high school or college will get a kick out of it, and remind you how close to Kafka-esque absurdity the modern travel experience gets. And it did make me look up the Prague airport -- did they really name it after Kafka? As great as that would be, the airport has been called Václav Havel Airport Prague since 2012 in honor of the Czech’s former president and leader of the Velvet Revolution.</li>\r\n 	<li>Dan Gradwohl dropped me a note regarding the “I Hate Shopping for a Suitcase” topic in the last episode where I talked about my difficulties in replacing my worn backpack.\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>As for the backpack search, Sara feels your pain as she searched long and hard for a new backpack before settling on a Gregory for her upcoming trip on The Camino in northern Spain. Of course, her backpack needs differ from yours! For baggage, she uses the REI Tech Beast and loves it. She\'s had it for 8 years, still going strong with 100,000+ miles per year easily on it. She has not found an overhead bin it does not fit in, from a CR9/170 to an A380/744.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Dan, thanks for that. I just got a couple of REI coupons in the mail. I’ll have to go check out the Tech Beast</li>\r\n 	<li>In that same segment, I talked about my “smart” luggage bag from<a href=\"http://bluesmart.com/\"> Bluesmart</a>. I think I summarized my review as “meh” -- nice enough bag, but all the electronics felt more like a gimmick than something I needed. I’m going to backtrack a bit on that -- specifically with regards to its location finder capability. The bag has a GPS and global SIM card and through a deal with Telefonica transmits its location periodically which you can see on the smartphone app. As I mentioned in the last episode, the Bluesmart is the perfect carry-on size, it’s usually right above me in the plane cabin, so the location finder isn’t that valuable. Except recently, I’ve been flying regional jets a lot where I’ve had to gate check (“valet”) my bag. Normally I don’t worry about this -- I’ve never had an airline lose my bag in the couple of hundred feet between the jetway and the plane. But one on of these recent Skywest flights, it was taking my bag a long time to show up at the gate after arriving. Hmmm, I pulled out my iPhone, hit the Location button on the Bluesmart app, and it showed me that my bag had updated its location a couple of minutes prior and was indeed here. A few minutes later, it showed up in the last tranche of bags heaved up into the jet bridge. Not critical functionality, but it moves up from “meh” to “kinda handy”.</li>\r\n 	<li>Which I guess would’ve been handy but not necessarily useful in the string of bad luggage karma that my daughter and her friends have experienced over the past couple of month. My daughter’s luggage has been lost on 3 out of 4 trips -- Air Brussels lost it between EDI and MAD through BRU, KLM lost it on her return through AMS, and then AirFrance lost it between LIS and EDI through DeGaulle. And a friend of her had Ibera lose a bag between Seville and MAD. How does that happen? You have to really work hard to lose anything in an airport the size of Seville. And it’s not that my daughter wanted to check her bag. She wanted to carry on, But she has this short light blue roller bag that seems to pull gate agent eyes toward it. I gotta get her something more nondescript, like a black hardshell roller.</li>\r\n 	<li>But the thing that will catch you in Europe is that carry-on bags often have a weight limit as well as a size limit. Checking in for my <a href=\"http://wowair.us/\">Wow Air</a> flight from Reykjavik to London, I arrived 2 hrs before check in to see what appeared to be a stationary check in line of a couple of hundred people. Reykjavik is Wow’s hub and, near as I could see, they have 4 agents checking people in with luggage. I hadn’t wanted to check my luggage since I had a weird connection in London en route to Madrid -- no interlining between Wow and Ibera, so I would have to claim luggage in Gatwick, pass through Customs, and then recheck the bag with Iberia. And checking in with carry on was a separate and much shorter line. My bag fit -- snuggly -- in the sizer, so I figured I was good to go. No so fast. Wow also has a 7kg/15 lbs weight limit for carryons! Not even Spirit Airlines pulls that stunt. So I take my bag off the scale, pull some clothes out, zip it back up, and put it back on the scale. Not enough, the agent says. I do this 3 or 4 more times. The agent finally takes pity -- or gets tired of me -- and gives me the approval tag to put on my bag (saying “You shall pass” -- Wow Air definitely pushes the “we’re quirky” image). I walk about 10 feet with my tagged bag and armful of clothes, open my bag and put my clothes back in. When I got on the plane, a brand new Airbus A321, my carry on fit perfectly in the overhead bin, just like it does for every other Airbus A321, A320, and A319 I fly in the US and Europe. So I’m not quite sure what the Wow agent and I accomplished with that baggage strip tease, but I got what I wanted -- my bag right above me rather than trundling around Keflavik airport for the next couple of days.</li>\r\n 	<li>In the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/12/20/podcast-119-digital-security-on-the-road-us-airports-getting-better/\">last</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/12/podcast-120-where-do-guidebooks-fit-in-i-hate-shopping-for-suitcases/\">couple </a>of episodes, I’ve talked about the <a href=\"https://revolut.com/\">Revolut</a> card which is a Mastercard pre-paid debit card with some very nice foreign exchange functionality. I loved this card when it first came out -- first when I was traveling in the UK and then cheaply transfer money to my daughter studying in Scotland. Then I went very cold when they blew up the “cheaply” component , when they added a 3% fee when you added money/”topped up” your Revolut account using a US debit card. This episode, I’ve warmed up a bit. First, I discovered a way to bypass that 3% debit charge --I topped up my account in Euros with my US debit card. This avoids the 3% charge from Revolut, though the app does note that you’re not using the right currency with your card and asks you if you really mean to do this. My bank charges me less than 1% for the conversion, and though the exchange rate isn’t as good as Revolut’s, it’s not bad enough to cost-justify the 3% charge that USD top-ups attract. So, we’re back to a reasonably priced conversion -- in a roundabout way.</li>\r\n 	<li>Which is good because, for some reason, my US ATM card never worked the whole time I was in Iceland. And I could never figure out why. I traded notes with my bank. They weren’t denying anything; they weren’t ever seeing the transaction show up at their end. I dunno, maybe it’s some residual wonkiness left over from their banking meltdown. I can’t remember the last time I had problems like that. Which, before I left for Iceland, made me wonder if I still needed to carry a wad of backup USD with me on this trip -- given how ubiquitous and seamless ATMs are nowadays. I still didn’t need the Jacksons though because my Revolut card had no problem pulling krona from any ATM. In Portugal, I did hit a couple of different quirks. First, the train and Lisbon subway ticket machines don’t accept pre-paid debit cards which left me scrambling for exact change a surprising number of times. Second, a number of shops only accepted Visa cards, which blocked out Revolut’s MasterCard-based card. I used to see this more often in the past -- shops only accepted cards on one network -- Visa or MasterCard, and often didn’t take American Express -- which has led me to always carry one of each card, but I thought the need for that backup had also faded. So I guess I’ll keep carrying a fist full of credit cards and USD for at least a couple more years.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Rocky Road</em> by <a href=\"http://www.kcentricity.com/\">KCentric</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>TSA Lines</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>For much of March and April, I’d been traveling in and out of Newark pretty much every week which, I have to say, if you’re using Terminal A, is the worst airport in the country. Now, I know that Terminal B in LaGuardia gives it a good run with the ceiling tarps drained by garden hoses into trash cans in the middle of the terminal, but the TSA security set up in Newark Terminal A beats that. They’ve split the corridor, the hallway down to gates in two -- the right side has the TSA stations, the left side the line for passengers waiting to be screened and the walkway for exiting passengers. The screening line is usually a bit of a cluster -- you can never quite tell which screening station you’re waiting for -- maybe #3 or should I scoot around to get in the line for #4. The really special feature of this configuration -- what wins it the prize -- is that you often have to wait in line to leave the terminal. Yup, more than a few times there’s a TSA agent holding up a line of departing passengers because of some confusion in the screening lines. It’s just awful.</li>\r\n 	<li>I just missed the TSA’s line-mageddon in O’Hare (I flew out the Friday before) where 450 American Airlines passengers got to experience Camp O’Hare cots after missing their flights because of 2-3 hour long TSA screening lines. But you could see it coming. My wife had spend 45 minutes in line in March, and the Monday morning rush hour had become a jumble of lines extending the length of the concourse. With summer travel volumes starting to build, it was a matter of when, not if, the whole thing imploded. And if I could tell this from my weekly flight out of ORD, you know the TSA folks on the ground knew it and were dreading it. So why didn’t they get in front of this instead of waiting until after the meltdown and the screaming headlines to replace management and add staff.</li>\r\n 	<li>Wading through recriminations about incompetence, baggage fees, gross misforecasting of PreCheck sign-ups, and the general <a href=\"http://www.travelandleisure.com/travel-tips/travel-warnings/tsa-blames-passengers\">cluelessness of infrequent fliers</a>, I think a couple of economists get to the real answer in an <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/737290917220995075\">article</a> in Sunday’s New York Times -- “the TSA has been acting as if there were no cost to tying people up for hours in security lines. In effect, all that time on line is “free” to the T.S.A.” “This glaring omission creates perverse incentives for government agencies. Cutting staff improves an agency’s bottom line, while wasting citizens’ time has little material consequence for it aside from expressions of annoyance and outrage in tweets and (newspaper) articles”</li>\r\n 	<li>I think that pretty much nails it. I retweeted a <a href=\"http://qz.com/659461/tsa-is-our-no-1-problem-right-now-long-security-lines-are-frustrating-us-airlines-too/\">link </a>to a Quartz article with a pretty self-explanatory graph. Air traveller volume has increased more than 10% over the past 12 months while the number of TSA screeners has decreased by more than that. Everyone knew this train wreck was coming, but there was no incentive to fix it -- until the wreck happened and the volume of complaints and outrage became impossible to ignore.</li>\r\n 	<li>In the immediate term, the spectacle of those 450 filled cots at ORD spurred some good action -- Congress let the TSA move some money around to hire more personnel, the TSA head of security got sacked, lines at ORD have shrunk, and a lot more people are ponying up the $85 for PreCheck (which is causing a whole other set of lines that I’m not going into).\r\nIn the short to medium term, maybe some new technology will help -- automating checkpoints like they do in London Heathrow, posting real-time wait times so travelers can “self-balance” security lines.</li>\r\n 	<li>But not until the TSA explicitly considers the value of travelers time will we get to some semblance of realistic balance between the cost and risk of travel.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #121</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_121.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #121','','inherit','closed','closed','','1615-revision-v1','','','2016-05-31 07:31:26','2016-05-31 12:31:26','',1615,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/05/31/1615-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1623,1,'2016-05-31 07:46:54','2016-05-31 12:46:54','[caption id=\"attachment_1616\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"225\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/IMAG0569_1.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1616\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/IMAG0569_1-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"This should be interesting...\" width=\"225\" height=\"300\" /></a> This should be interesting...[/caption]\r\n\r\nAfter two vacations to Europe and some full-contact business travel in-between, I found my way back into the TravelCommons studios. I talk about these recent trips -- the awful timeliness of an <a href=\"http://aa.com\">American Airlines</a>\' regional jet partner, an incredible string of lost luggage, a meaningless baggage strip tease with <a href=\"http://wowair.us\">Wow Air</a>, and being surprised to still find some quirks when using ATMs and credit cards in Europe. And it wouldn\'t be a travel podcast if I didn\'t weigh in on the TSA\'s \"line-mageddon\" -- their <a href=\"http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-tsa-airport-security-lines-met-0517-20160516-story.html\">meltdown at O\'Hare</a>. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_121.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/251667522\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #121:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you once again from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, after rewriting an episode I’d hoped to get done 3 weeks ago. I’d even posted on the TravelCommons Facebook wall on May 1st about having a new episode next weekend -- a post I’ve since deleted. Seems to be a trend with me. I get started on a new episode, but then it gets elbowed aside by other things -- like work. Maybe if I could just figure out a way to monetize this thing…</li>\r\n 	<li>I had hoped to record this episode halfway between two European trips. As I mentioned in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/12/podcast-120-where-do-guidebooks-fit-in-i-hate-shopping-for-suitcases/\">the last episode</a>, I had a weird Spring Break itinerary in April right before Easter -- Chicago to Reykjavik, Iceland for a 4-day long weekend with my son, and then, as he headed back to Chicago, I flew down to Spain to meet my wife and daughter and some friends for a week in Andalucia. As you can imagine, packing for that trip in a 22-inch carry on required equal amounts of editing and physical force. And then in mid-May, we all headed over to Portugal for a week. The excuse being that we needed to shove all my daughter’s belongings into storage after her first year at university in Scotland, but decided that Portugal would have better food and wine than Scotland. So we headed to Lisbon as a family, and then my wife and daughter are flew back up to St Andrews to do all the packing stuff. I think I came out of this pretty good.</li>\r\n 	<li>Where this episode got shoved off the rails was the week before I left for Portugal. We all know that vacations aren’t free -- that we pay for them the week before we leave and the week after. I was blissfully in denial of this immutable law, thinking that I could write, record, produce, and post this episode then. Cramming two weeks of business travel into 4 days (we were leaving for Lisbon Friday afternoon), that week’s travel itinerary was New Jersey on Monday, Boston on Tuesday, New Orleans on Wednesday, and Atlanta on Thursday. Across four airlines -- United ORD-EWR-BOS, JetBlue BOS-MSY, Southwest MSY-ATL, and American ATL-ORD -- I racked up about 2:30 hrs in flight delays with JetBlue being the only carrier without a black mark.</li>\r\n 	<li>Over April and May, what’s been particularly awful has been my run on one of American Airline’s regional jet partners Skywest. One Monday in April, Skywest lost voice and data connectivity at its Dallas dispatch center causing a ground stop of its planes. After two hours of hanging around the Admirals Club, watching my Newark departure time get pushed out every 30 minutes, I called Amex to get switched over to a real American plane flying into LGA. It added about 45 minutes to my drive after I landed, but at least I got there, especially since Skywest ended up canceling my original Newark flight. The next Monday, I ended up on another Skywest American flight; this time to Charlottesville, VA. Again, another 1+ hr delay. This time it was plane maintenance. Then that Friday, I get a text after lunch -- my flight home was delayed over 2 hours. That was it. Three Skywest flights in a row that couldn’t get close to on-schedule. I called Amex again. Got on a United flight out of Richmond. After an hour-and-a-half drag race down I-64, I landed at ORD, drove home, ate dinner with my wife, and had a couple of glasses of wine before my original Skywest plane finally made it to Chicago.</li>\r\n 	<li>Now I’m not a airline ops expert, but when the women behind the desks in the Admirals Club tell you about SkyWest “They’re not our favorite”, you might think about finding a new partner.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://cyberset.cc/artists2.php?tr_release_id=104\"><em>Heaven</em></a> by <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=A951998E6011FA9B2D22387EB3CAC0B5EB05A36360E7FDA122C8D7A5C140F8DC\" rel=\"nofollow\">Electric Skychurch</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Steve Frick asked in a comment on the TravelCommons website about how I use Evernote. In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/12/podcast-120-where-do-guidebooks-fit-in-i-hate-shopping-for-suitcases/\">the last episode</a>, I talked about how I use it to in my vacation travel planning. I used to store all sorts of things in Evernote — scanned receipts, recipes, etc. Now I mostly just use it to store on-line travel articles using its Web Clipper Chrome extension which I really like. A couple of days ago, I was reading a 36 Hours in Philadelphia article in the NYTimes. I clicked the little elephant head on the Chrome bar and now I have it saved, and synced across all my devices. I know a bunch of folks who are big OneNote users. I’ve been thinking of looking at it, but it’s pretty low on the priority list since I’m good in Evernote’s free tier.</li>\r\n 	<li>Peter Zurich sent in <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEyFH-a-XoQ\">a link</a> to an Onion YouTube video about the Franz Kafka Airport in Prague. Now, the Onion is talented/notorious for writing absurd articles in a straight voice that’s just close enough to the truth to make people accept that it is true. This video is well done. Anyone who read Kafka in high school or college will get a kick out of it, and remind you how close to Kafka-esque absurdity the modern travel experience gets. And it did make me look up the Prague airport -- did they really name it after Kafka? As great as that would be, the airport has been called Václav Havel Airport Prague since 2012 in honor of the Czech’s former president and leader of the Velvet Revolution.</li>\r\n 	<li>Dan Gradwohl dropped me a note regarding the “I Hate Shopping for a Suitcase” topic in the last episode where I talked about my difficulties in replacing my worn backpack.\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>As for the backpack search, Sara feels your pain as she searched long and hard for a new backpack before settling on a Gregory for her upcoming trip on The Camino in northern Spain. Of course, her backpack needs differ from yours! For baggage, she uses the REI Tech Beast and loves it. She\'s had it for 8 years, still going strong with 100,000+ miles per year easily on it. She has not found an overhead bin it does not fit in, from a CR9/170 to an A380/744.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Dan, thanks for that. I just got a couple of REI coupons in the mail. I’ll have to go check out the Tech Beast</li>\r\n 	<li>In that same segment, I talked about my “smart” luggage bag from<a href=\"http://bluesmart.com/\"> Bluesmart</a>. I think I summarized my review as “meh” -- nice enough bag, but all the electronics felt more like a gimmick than something I needed. I’m going to backtrack a bit on that -- specifically with regards to its location finder capability. The bag has a GPS and global SIM card and through a deal with Telefonica transmits its location periodically which you can see on the smartphone app. As I mentioned in the last episode, the Bluesmart is the perfect carry-on size, it’s usually right above me in the plane cabin, so the location finder isn’t that valuable. Except recently, I’ve been flying regional jets a lot where I’ve had to gate check (“valet”) my bag. Normally I don’t worry about this -- I’ve never had an airline lose my bag in the couple of hundred feet between the jetway and the plane. But one on of these recent Skywest flights, it was taking my bag a long time to show up at the gate after arriving. Hmmm, I pulled out my iPhone, hit the Location button on the Bluesmart app, and it showed me that my bag had updated its location a couple of minutes prior and was indeed here. A few minutes later, it showed up in the last tranche of bags heaved up into the jet bridge. Not critical functionality, but it moves up from “meh” to “kinda handy”.</li>\r\n 	<li>Which I guess would’ve been handy but not necessarily useful in the string of bad luggage karma that my daughter and her friends have experienced over the past couple of month. My daughter’s luggage has been lost on 3 out of 4 trips -- Air Brussels lost it between EDI and MAD through BRU, KLM lost it on her return through AMS, and then AirFrance lost it between LIS and EDI through DeGaulle. And a friend of her had Ibera lose a bag between Seville and MAD. How does that happen? You have to really work hard to lose anything in an airport the size of Seville. And it’s not that my daughter wanted to check her bag. She wanted to carry on, But she has this short light blue roller bag that seems to pull gate agent eyes toward it. I gotta get her something more nondescript, like a black hardshell roller.</li>\r\n 	<li>But the thing that will catch you in Europe is that carry-on bags often have a weight limit as well as a size limit. Checking in for my <a href=\"http://wowair.us/\">Wow Air</a> flight from Reykjavik to London, I arrived 2 hrs before check in to see what appeared to be a stationary check in line of a couple of hundred people. Reykjavik is Wow’s hub and, near as I could see, they have 4 agents checking people in with luggage. I hadn’t wanted to check my luggage since I had a weird connection in London en route to Madrid -- no interlining between Wow and Ibera, so I would have to claim luggage in Gatwick, pass through Customs, and then recheck the bag with Iberia. And checking in with carry on was a separate and much shorter line. My bag fit -- snuggly -- in the sizer, so I figured I was good to go. No so fast. Wow also has a 7kg/15 lbs weight limit for carryons! Not even Spirit Airlines pulls that stunt. So I take my bag off the scale, pull some clothes out, zip it back up, and put it back on the scale. Not enough, the agent says. I do this 3 or 4 more times. The agent finally takes pity -- or gets tired of me -- and gives me the approval tag to put on my bag (saying “You shall pass” -- Wow Air definitely pushes the “we’re quirky” image). I walk about 10 feet with my tagged bag and armful of clothes, open my bag and put my clothes back in. When I got on the plane, a brand new Airbus A321, my carry on fit perfectly in the overhead bin, just like it does for every other Airbus A321, A320, and A319 I fly in the US and Europe. So I’m not quite sure what the Wow agent and I accomplished with that baggage strip tease, but I got what I wanted -- my bag right above me rather than trundling around Keflavik airport for the next couple of days.</li>\r\n 	<li>In the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/12/20/podcast-119-digital-security-on-the-road-us-airports-getting-better/\">last</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/12/podcast-120-where-do-guidebooks-fit-in-i-hate-shopping-for-suitcases/\">couple </a>of episodes, I’ve talked about the <a href=\"https://revolut.com/\">Revolut</a> card which is a Mastercard pre-paid debit card with some very nice foreign exchange functionality. I loved this card when it first came out -- first when I was traveling in the UK and then cheaply transfer money to my daughter studying in Scotland. Then I went very cold when they blew up the “cheaply” component , when they added a 3% fee when you added money/”topped up” your Revolut account using a US debit card. This episode, I’ve warmed up a bit. First, I discovered a way to bypass that 3% debit charge --I topped up my account in Euros with my US debit card. This avoids the 3% charge from Revolut, though the app does note that you’re not using the right currency with your card and asks you if you really mean to do this. My bank charges me less than 1% for the conversion, and though the exchange rate isn’t as good as Revolut’s, it’s not bad enough to cost-justify the 3% charge that USD top-ups attract. So, we’re back to a reasonably priced conversion -- in a roundabout way.</li>\r\n 	<li>Which is good because, for some reason, my US ATM card never worked the whole time I was in Iceland. And I could never figure out why. I traded notes with my bank. They weren’t denying anything; they weren’t ever seeing the transaction show up at their end. I dunno, maybe it’s some residual wonkiness left over from their banking meltdown. I can’t remember the last time I had problems like that. Which, before I left for Iceland, made me wonder if I still needed to carry a wad of backup USD with me on this trip -- given how ubiquitous and seamless ATMs are nowadays. I still didn’t need the Jacksons though because my Revolut card had no problem pulling krona from any ATM. In Portugal, I did hit a couple of different quirks. First, the train and Lisbon subway ticket machines don’t accept pre-paid debit cards which left me scrambling for exact change a surprising number of times. Second, a number of shops only accepted Visa cards, which blocked out Revolut’s MasterCard-based card. I used to see this more often in the past -- shops only accepted cards on one network -- Visa or MasterCard, and often didn’t take American Express -- which has led me to always carry one of each card, but I thought the need for that backup had also faded. So I guess I’ll keep carrying a fist full of credit cards and USD for at least a couple more years.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Rocky Road</em> by <a href=\"http://www.kcentricity.com/\">KCentric</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>TSA Lines</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>For much of March and April, I’d been traveling in and out of Newark pretty much every week which, I have to say, if you’re using Terminal A, is the worst airport in the country. Now, I know that Terminal B in LaGuardia gives it a good run with the ceiling tarps drained by garden hoses into trash cans in the middle of the terminal, but the TSA security set up in Newark Terminal A beats that. They’ve split the corridor, the hallway down to gates in two -- the right side has the TSA stations, the left side the line for passengers waiting to be screened and the walkway for exiting passengers. The screening line is usually a bit of a cluster -- you can never quite tell which screening station you’re waiting for -- maybe #3 or should I scoot around to get in the line for #4. The really special feature of this configuration -- what wins it the prize -- is that you often have to wait in line to leave the terminal. Yup, more than a few times there’s a TSA agent holding up a line of departing passengers because of some confusion in the screening lines. It’s just awful.</li>\r\n 	<li>I just missed the TSA’s line-mageddon in O’Hare (I flew out the Friday before) where 450 American Airlines passengers got to experience Camp O’Hare cots after missing their flights because of 2-3 hour long TSA screening lines. But you could see it coming. My wife had spend 45 minutes in line in March, and the Monday morning rush hour had become a jumble of lines extending the length of the concourse. With summer travel volumes starting to build, it was a matter of when, not if, the whole thing imploded. And if I could tell this from my weekly flight out of ORD, you know the TSA folks on the ground knew it and were dreading it. So why didn’t they get in front of this instead of waiting until after the meltdown and the screaming headlines to replace management and add staff.</li>\r\n 	<li>Wading through recriminations about incompetence, baggage fees, gross misforecasting of PreCheck sign-ups, and the general <a href=\"http://www.travelandleisure.com/travel-tips/travel-warnings/tsa-blames-passengers\">cluelessness of infrequent fliers</a>, I think a couple of economists get to the real answer in an <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/737290917220995075\">article</a> in Sunday’s New York Times -- “the TSA has been acting as if there were no cost to tying people up for hours in security lines. In effect, all that time on line is “free” to the T.S.A.” “This glaring omission creates perverse incentives for government agencies. Cutting staff improves an agency’s bottom line, while wasting citizens’ time has little material consequence for it aside from expressions of annoyance and outrage in tweets and (newspaper) articles”</li>\r\n 	<li>I think that pretty much nails it. I retweeted a <a href=\"http://qz.com/659461/tsa-is-our-no-1-problem-right-now-long-security-lines-are-frustrating-us-airlines-too/\">link </a>to a Quartz article with a pretty self-explanatory graph. Air traveller volume has increased more than 10% over the past 12 months while the number of TSA screeners has decreased by more than that. Everyone knew this train wreck was coming, but there was no incentive to fix it -- until the wreck happened and the volume of complaints and outrage became impossible to ignore.</li>\r\n 	<li>In the immediate term, the spectacle of those 450 filled cots at ORD spurred some good action -- Congress let the TSA move some money around to hire more personnel, the TSA head of security got sacked, lines at ORD have shrunk, and a lot more people are ponying up the $85 for PreCheck (which is causing a whole other set of lines that I’m not going into).\r\nIn the short to medium term, maybe some new technology will help -- automating checkpoints like they do in London Heathrow, posting real-time wait times so travelers can “self-balance” security lines.</li>\r\n 	<li>But not until the TSA explicitly considers the value of travelers time will we get to some semblance of realistic balance between the cost and risk of travel.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #121</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_121.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #121 — TSA Lines, My Luggage is Where?','','inherit','closed','closed','','1615-revision-v1','','','2016-05-31 07:46:54','2016-05-31 12:46:54','',1615,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/05/31/1615-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1624,1,'2016-05-31 08:02:13','2016-05-31 13:02:13','[caption id=\"attachment_1508\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"228\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/2014-06-01-15.20.55-e1431490750219.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1508\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/2014-06-01-15.20.55-e1431490750219-228x300.jpg\" alt=\"Been on Duty for 10 Years...\" width=\"228\" height=\"300\" /></a> Been on Duty for 10 Years...[/caption]\r\n\r\nHard to believe that I\'ve been prattling along for 10 years. Looking back, I see that I\'ve become less of a TSA-hater, but am still pretty clear-eyed about the tediousness of the frequent travel experience. It\'s tough to pack 10 years into a 30-min episode, but I think I\'ve cherry-picked some good snippets. Before that, I talk about spending Semana Santa (Holy Week) in southern Spain and \"smart luggage.\" The listener mailbag continues the conversation about mass transit to airports. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_115.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_115.mp3\"]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #115:\r\n<ul>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, so no video “uncut” version like I did last episode from New Orleans. No maid service in the TravelCommons studio to tidy up before the podcast.</li>\r\n 	<li>We’re deep in the bipolar weather roller coaster that is Spring in the Midwest -- 70’s one day, 40’s the next; bright sun at 10 in the morning, pissing down rain at noon. Which is as good an explanation as any why Chicago’s two airports, O’Hare and Midway, own the basement of the DOT’s on-time departures ranking.</li>\r\n 	<li>My travel has been a bit more interesting since the last episode. Did a few of my normal runs down to New Orleans, but broke the pattern a bit with travel to Denver and Charlotte. And even one of the runs down to New Orleans broke the usual down-Monday-back-Thursday routine. At the beginning of April, I flew down Thursday night with my wife and daughter, met up with friends for the French Quarter Fest weekend. It’s one of my favorite music festivals. Free music from local bands; stages and food stands spread around the Quarter -- a bit lower key than the 460,000 people who descended on the Fair Grounds for Jazz Fest a few weeks back.</li>\r\n 	<li>The big trip, though, was a couple of weeks prior to that when we went to Andalucia -- southern Spain -- for Spring Break and found ourselves there during Semana Santa -- Holy Week. Cordoba, Granada, Sevilla, the hill town of Ronda. Processions (plural) almost every night. My wife said it was like the Tour de France for Catholics. And as a Catholic, I couldn’t argue -- it was pretty full contact. I posted a <a href=\"https://vine.co/v/OL66AUgHwwi\">Vine video</a> of a Granada procession to my <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter feed</a> and then a couple of minutes of GoPro footage from the last Holy Thursday procession in Sevilla on the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons\">Facebook</a> page and <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\">YouTube channel</a>. It was close to midnight, after which I think they took an hour break and then started up the Good Friday processions. We went to bed. When we went out the next morning around 8:30 to grab some breakfast -- our usual of cafe con leche and tomato bread topped with jamón iberico -- the restaurant was jammed with people who just finished a procession. It just kept going.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</ul>\r\n[vine url=\"https://vine.co/v/OL66AUgHwwi\" height=480 width=480 type=\"postcard\"]\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>And so do we. I drained my United account for a trip next month to Japan, and then in September, we’re heading over to Scotland so my daughter can start at the <a href=\"http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/\">University of St Andrews</a>, so I should have enough content to keep TravelCommons rolling into an 11th year.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/download_track.php?id=6E494292C6B4E14E784F04400EB2C54CE135E29730530171C5F931345CAA3733A93C8CF03BBFAC71CD59B5710E25327F\" rel=\"nofollow\">All Around</a></em> by <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=AEF14840F87CD6C39BE8918AF693E89C276517530C9606BA2CB20418C6A8B4CB\" rel=\"nofollow\">Jel</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Before we get into the meat of things, just a quick pointer to let everyone know that TravelCommons is available on the Stitcher radio smartphone app as well as on <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>. Since iTunes started handling podcasts -- June 2005, right around episodes <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/06/19/podcast-6-the-tsa-talks-back/\">6</a> or <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/06/29/podcast-7-eating-alone-classic-travel-stories/\">7</a> -- it dominated the TravelCommons download stats. Now it’s only responsible for a third of the downloads.</li>\r\n 	<li>Rummaging through the mailbag…</li>\r\n 	<li>Back last November in episode <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/11/22/podcast-112-holiday-airport-etiquette-travel-tax-pile-up/\">112</a>, Dan Gradwohl sent me a pointer to the website <a href=\"http://www.toandfromtheairport.com/\">To and From The Airport</a>, a collation of airport transit options. In that episode, I talked about reviewing the ORD listing and sending in a few updates. Toward the end of March, I received a note thanking me for my contribution and apologizing for the delay. Whatever issues were happening there now seem to have passed; it appears the site is back to being actively maintained.</li>\r\n 	<li>Tom Brown, a longtime TravelCommons listener, sent a note following up on last episode’s riff on Nate Silver’s <a href=\"http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/planes-trains-and-taxis-when-to-take-public-transit-from-the-airport/\">538 blog post</a> about mass transit times to major US airports. He wrote:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>You noted London as the gold standard of public transport out of the airport. I would put it at bronze at best.  Decaying infrastructure, not so comfortable trains and destination not so friendly to business traveler in London doesn\'t help its ranking. Singapore is the best in my opinion with Hong Kong 2nd. Tokyo even ranks above London to me.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Tom, thanks for that, expanding our sample size. My past trips thru Hong Kong and Singapore were family vacations - late arrivals from the US, tired kids, too much luggage - and so opted for taxis instead on mass transit. I missed the opportunity to add those trains to my personal sample, but I did end up with one of the wackiest cab rides while in HK. It was kind of a hoarder cab -- newspapers filling the trunk, tchotchkes all over the dashboard and hanging from the roof. I don’t know how we got 4 people and 4 bags into that cab. As I mentioned earlier, we’ll be flying in and out of Narita at the back half of June and given the distance and cab fares, we’ll take the Tokyo train at least once.</li>\r\n 	<li>Our Spring Break trip to Andalucia started with a flight into Madrid airport. Our plans had us landing in Madrid, then making the 20-min schlep in from Terminal 4 (could they have put that terminal any further out?) and then heading downtown to catch the high-speed Renfe train to Córdoba. After I booked the tickets on-line (a process made infinitely easier than 2 years ago now that Renfe accepts PayPal) I was pleasantly surprised to stumble across a TripAdvisor post saying that the tickets included a free train ride down to the Puerta Atocha train station. It wasn\'t the fastest ride - a local train that made 4-5 stops before Atocha - but it was clean and not beat up. And since we were headed downtown during Friday rush hour, it took the same 30 min that Google Maps estimated for the cab.</li>\r\n 	<li>And continuing on the transit theme, Nick Gassman sent a note about comments I made in episode <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/10/12/podcast-111-seatback-recline-wars-craft-beer-tourism/\">111</a> about the proliferation of pre-paid cards for subway and mass transit systems. Nick says about the London Underground:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>You can use your own contactless payment card (Visa, Amex etc) without having to buy an Oyster card, and get the same rates. You can register the card if you wish, to track spend.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>The link to the Tube web page is similar to the Chicago L page -- it feels a bit ambiguous, probably because the contactless technology is still a bit young, a bit ambiguous itself. Both London and Chicago say they’ll also work with NFC mobile phones -- like the latest Samsung Galaxies, the HTC Ones, and the iPhone 6. I think I’ve just got to get over to an L station and give it a try. But it’s probably not the kind of experiment I want to try and debug during rush hour when there’s a couple hundred hard-core commuters storming the 3-4 tap through gates. Seems like more of a midday or weekend morning thing.</li>\r\n 	<li>Reaching back again to episode <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/11/22/podcast-112-holiday-airport-etiquette-travel-tax-pile-up/\">112 </a>where I talked about funding the Indiegogo campaign for the Bluesmart carry-on bag, what they call “The First Smart, Connected Luggage” complete with a smartphone app that acts as a digital lock, a scale, tracks location, and sounds an alarm if your smart bag wanders off. They’ve gotten huge press; they blew thru the funding goal by 3800%. But now they have to deliver the bag. They’ve been doing a good job of pushing out <a href=\"https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/bluesmart-world-s-first-smart-connected-carry-on#activity\">updates </a>and seem to be sticking to their August ship date. Which would be good for them because competitors are starting to move into this space. I tweeted out a link to an Engadget story last week about Samsung and Samsonite partnering up on a line of smart suitcases with functionality that sounds very similar to Bluesmart’s. Then I received a press release in the TravelCommons e-mail box from Planet Traveler <a href=\"http://www.planettravelerusa.com/preorder\">announcing</a> a Kickstarter campaign for the Space Case 1 line of smart luggage which will have all the functionality of the Bluesmart bag <i>plus</i> fingerprint unlock <i>and</i> Bluetooth speakers. As if the gate areas aren’t noisy enough.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\">Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/download_track.php?id=A1F44F3B330BFBBD5C7863108B61B09977CADC67705C23C5AECA03FC6F2C0320A93C8CF03BBFAC71CD59B5710E25327F\" rel=\"nofollow\">La Tra (basephunk mix)</a></em> by <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/label.php?id=3AF558B2D658A22FFF10B13F9D87237D276517530C9606BA2CB20418C6A8B4CB\" rel=\"nofollow\">Omar Sosa</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<b>A Decade of TravelCommons</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>It was ten  years ago <i>today </i>that I recorded the first T/C podcast in the bathroom of the Wardman Park Marriott in NW Washington, DC</li>\r\n 	<li>[tc1-opening &amp; 1]</li>\r\n 	<li>It was an interesting mix of topics…\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>TSA problems in ORD, LGA and DCA, the first of many TSA rants over the years;</li>\r\n 	<li>The first sighting of a “puffer” security screening machine, don’t know if you ever walked through one of those, but we also talked about their multi-million dollar demise in an episode a some years later;</li>\r\n 	<li>Hungarian roadside prostitutes -- a topic that I don’t believe I’ve revisited</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>And it was the first in a long string of what one listener referred to as a “pottycast” -- using the tile of hotel bathrooms as a poor man’s reverb chamber</li>\r\n 	<li>[tc74-hotel medley]</li>\r\n 	<li>Listening to that, I now understand why I have lifetime Marriott Platinum status.</li>\r\n 	<li>One of the more noticeable changes over the years has been about the TSA. Early podcasts railed against the TSA -- the security theatre, the shoe carnival, liquid bans, and of course, the power trips</li>\r\n 	<li>[tc45-finding tooth powder]</li>\r\n 	<li>But with some much needed customer service training and, most importantly, the introduction of PreCheck, the TSA isn’t the podcast pinata it had been for the first 4-5 years -- especially when compared to airport security in places like India</li>\r\n 	<li>[tc109-mall cop, umbrella]</li>\r\n 	<li>Travel technology has been one constant through the TravelCommons decade</li>\r\n 	<li>[tc87-briefcase]</li>\r\n 	<li>[tc91-too much technology]</li>\r\n 	<li>And while I’ve cycled through a number of phones, tablets, and laptops, the Bose noise-cancelling headphones remain the official headphones of the TravelCommons podcast</li>\r\n 	<li>[tc48-bose lust]</li>\r\n 	<li>Food has also been a common theme…</li>\r\n 	<li>[tc97-food]</li>\r\n 	<li>Never one to be accused of being a travel industry cheerleader…</li>\r\n 	<li>[tc92-not-so-upbeat]</li>\r\n 	<li>But I always try, if only partially successfully, to maintain some perspective</li>\r\n 	<li>[t61-zen]</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917626811171154.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #115</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>Links to 3 prior anniversary episodes\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/12/27/podcast-27-best-of-2005/\" target=\"_blank\">Episode 27</a> -- Best of 2005</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2006/06/13/podcast-40-looking-back-over-the-first-year/\" target=\"_blank\">Episode 40</a> -- Looking Back Over the First Year</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2009/05/14/podcast-74-looking-back-over-four-years-of-travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Episode 74</a> -- Looking Back Over Four Years</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from the <a href=\"http://promonet.iodalliance.com/\">IODA Promonet</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_115.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #115 — A Decade of TravelCommons','','inherit','closed','closed','','1505-revision-v1','','','2016-05-31 08:02:13','2016-05-31 13:02:13','',1505,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/05/31/1505-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1625,1,'2016-05-31 08:10:36','2016-05-31 13:10:36','[caption id=\"attachment_1616\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"225\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/IMAG0569_1.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1616\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/IMAG0569_1-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"This should be interesting...\" width=\"225\" height=\"300\" /></a> This should be interesting...[/caption]\r\n\r\nAfter two vacations to Europe and some full-contact business travel in-between, I found my way back into the TravelCommons studios. I talk about these recent trips -- the awful timeliness of an <a href=\"http://aa.com\">American Airlines</a>\' regional jet partner, an incredible string of lost luggage, a meaningless baggage strip tease with <a href=\"http://wowair.us\">Wow Air</a>, and being surprised to still find some quirks when using ATMs and credit cards in Europe. And it wouldn\'t be a travel podcast if I didn\'t weigh in on the TSA\'s \"line-mageddon\" -- their <a href=\"http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-tsa-airport-security-lines-met-0517-20160516-story.html\">meltdown at O\'Hare</a>. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_121.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/266764229\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #121:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you once again from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, after rewriting an episode I’d hoped to get done 3 weeks ago. I’d even posted on the TravelCommons Facebook wall on May 1st about having a new episode next weekend -- a post I’ve since deleted. Seems to be a trend with me. I get started on a new episode, but then it gets elbowed aside by other things -- like work. Maybe if I could just figure out a way to monetize this thing…</li>\r\n 	<li>I had hoped to record this episode halfway between two European trips. As I mentioned in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/12/podcast-120-where-do-guidebooks-fit-in-i-hate-shopping-for-suitcases/\">the last episode</a>, I had a weird Spring Break itinerary in April right before Easter -- Chicago to Reykjavik, Iceland for a 4-day long weekend with my son, and then, as he headed back to Chicago, I flew down to Spain to meet my wife and daughter and some friends for a week in Andalucia. As you can imagine, packing for that trip in a 22-inch carry on required equal amounts of editing and physical force. And then in mid-May, we all headed over to Portugal for a week. The excuse being that we needed to shove all my daughter’s belongings into storage after her first year at university in Scotland, but decided that Portugal would have better food and wine than Scotland. So we headed to Lisbon as a family, and then my wife and daughter are flew back up to St Andrews to do all the packing stuff. I think I came out of this pretty good.</li>\r\n 	<li>Where this episode got shoved off the rails was the week before I left for Portugal. We all know that vacations aren’t free -- that we pay for them the week before we leave and the week after. I was blissfully in denial of this immutable law, thinking that I could write, record, produce, and post this episode then. Cramming two weeks of business travel into 4 days (we were leaving for Lisbon Friday afternoon), that week’s travel itinerary was New Jersey on Monday, Boston on Tuesday, New Orleans on Wednesday, and Atlanta on Thursday. Across four airlines -- United ORD-EWR-BOS, JetBlue BOS-MSY, Southwest MSY-ATL, and American ATL-ORD -- I racked up about 2:30 hrs in flight delays with JetBlue being the only carrier without a black mark.</li>\r\n 	<li>Over April and May, what’s been particularly awful has been my run on one of American Airline’s regional jet partners Skywest. One Monday in April, Skywest lost voice and data connectivity at its Dallas dispatch center causing a ground stop of its planes. After two hours of hanging around the Admirals Club, watching my Newark departure time get pushed out every 30 minutes, I called Amex to get switched over to a real American plane flying into LGA. It added about 45 minutes to my drive after I landed, but at least I got there, especially since Skywest ended up canceling my original Newark flight. The next Monday, I ended up on another Skywest American flight; this time to Charlottesville, VA. Again, another 1+ hr delay. This time it was plane maintenance. Then that Friday, I get a text after lunch -- my flight home was delayed over 2 hours. That was it. Three Skywest flights in a row that couldn’t get close to on-schedule. I called Amex again. Got on a United flight out of Richmond. After an hour-and-a-half drag race down I-64, I landed at ORD, drove home, ate dinner with my wife, and had a couple of glasses of wine before my original Skywest plane finally made it to Chicago.</li>\r\n 	<li>Now I’m not a airline ops expert, but when the women behind the desks in the Admirals Club tell you about SkyWest “They’re not our favorite”, you might think about finding a new partner.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://cyberset.cc/artists2.php?tr_release_id=104\"><em>Heaven</em></a> by <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=A951998E6011FA9B2D22387EB3CAC0B5EB05A36360E7FDA122C8D7A5C140F8DC\" rel=\"nofollow\">Electric Skychurch</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Steve Frick asked in a comment on the TravelCommons website about how I use Evernote. In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/12/podcast-120-where-do-guidebooks-fit-in-i-hate-shopping-for-suitcases/\">the last episode</a>, I talked about how I use it to in my vacation travel planning. I used to store all sorts of things in Evernote — scanned receipts, recipes, etc. Now I mostly just use it to store on-line travel articles using its Web Clipper Chrome extension which I really like. A couple of days ago, I was reading a 36 Hours in Philadelphia article in the NYTimes. I clicked the little elephant head on the Chrome bar and now I have it saved, and synced across all my devices. I know a bunch of folks who are big OneNote users. I’ve been thinking of looking at it, but it’s pretty low on the priority list since I’m good in Evernote’s free tier.</li>\r\n 	<li>Peter Zurich sent in <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEyFH-a-XoQ\">a link</a> to an Onion YouTube video about the Franz Kafka Airport in Prague. Now, the Onion is talented/notorious for writing absurd articles in a straight voice that’s just close enough to the truth to make people accept that it is true. This video is well done. Anyone who read Kafka in high school or college will get a kick out of it, and remind you how close to Kafka-esque absurdity the modern travel experience gets. And it did make me look up the Prague airport -- did they really name it after Kafka? As great as that would be, the airport has been called Václav Havel Airport Prague since 2012 in honor of the Czech’s former president and leader of the Velvet Revolution.</li>\r\n 	<li>Dan Gradwohl dropped me a note regarding the “I Hate Shopping for a Suitcase” topic in the last episode where I talked about my difficulties in replacing my worn backpack.\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>As for the backpack search, Sara feels your pain as she searched long and hard for a new backpack before settling on a Gregory for her upcoming trip on The Camino in northern Spain. Of course, her backpack needs differ from yours! For baggage, she uses the REI Tech Beast and loves it. She\'s had it for 8 years, still going strong with 100,000+ miles per year easily on it. She has not found an overhead bin it does not fit in, from a CR9/170 to an A380/744.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Dan, thanks for that. I just got a couple of REI coupons in the mail. I’ll have to go check out the Tech Beast</li>\r\n 	<li>In that same segment, I talked about my “smart” luggage bag from<a href=\"http://bluesmart.com/\"> Bluesmart</a>. I think I summarized my review as “meh” -- nice enough bag, but all the electronics felt more like a gimmick than something I needed. I’m going to backtrack a bit on that -- specifically with regards to its location finder capability. The bag has a GPS and global SIM card and through a deal with Telefonica transmits its location periodically which you can see on the smartphone app. As I mentioned in the last episode, the Bluesmart is the perfect carry-on size, it’s usually right above me in the plane cabin, so the location finder isn’t that valuable. Except recently, I’ve been flying regional jets a lot where I’ve had to gate check (“valet”) my bag. Normally I don’t worry about this -- I’ve never had an airline lose my bag in the couple of hundred feet between the jetway and the plane. But one on of these recent Skywest flights, it was taking my bag a long time to show up at the gate after arriving. Hmmm, I pulled out my iPhone, hit the Location button on the Bluesmart app, and it showed me that my bag had updated its location a couple of minutes prior and was indeed here. A few minutes later, it showed up in the last tranche of bags heaved up into the jet bridge. Not critical functionality, but it moves up from “meh” to “kinda handy”.</li>\r\n 	<li>Which I guess would’ve been handy but not necessarily useful in the string of bad luggage karma that my daughter and her friends have experienced over the past couple of month. My daughter’s luggage has been lost on 3 out of 4 trips -- Air Brussels lost it between EDI and MAD through BRU, KLM lost it on her return through AMS, and then AirFrance lost it between LIS and EDI through DeGaulle. And a friend of her had Ibera lose a bag between Seville and MAD. How does that happen? You have to really work hard to lose anything in an airport the size of Seville. And it’s not that my daughter wanted to check her bag. She wanted to carry on, But she has this short light blue roller bag that seems to pull gate agent eyes toward it. I gotta get her something more nondescript, like a black hardshell roller.</li>\r\n 	<li>But the thing that will catch you in Europe is that carry-on bags often have a weight limit as well as a size limit. Checking in for my <a href=\"http://wowair.us/\">Wow Air</a> flight from Reykjavik to London, I arrived 2 hrs before check in to see what appeared to be a stationary check in line of a couple of hundred people. Reykjavik is Wow’s hub and, near as I could see, they have 4 agents checking people in with luggage. I hadn’t wanted to check my luggage since I had a weird connection in London en route to Madrid -- no interlining between Wow and Ibera, so I would have to claim luggage in Gatwick, pass through Customs, and then recheck the bag with Iberia. And checking in with carry on was a separate and much shorter line. My bag fit -- snuggly -- in the sizer, so I figured I was good to go. No so fast. Wow also has a 7kg/15 lbs weight limit for carryons! Not even Spirit Airlines pulls that stunt. So I take my bag off the scale, pull some clothes out, zip it back up, and put it back on the scale. Not enough, the agent says. I do this 3 or 4 more times. The agent finally takes pity -- or gets tired of me -- and gives me the approval tag to put on my bag (saying “You shall pass” -- Wow Air definitely pushes the “we’re quirky” image). I walk about 10 feet with my tagged bag and armful of clothes, open my bag and put my clothes back in. When I got on the plane, a brand new Airbus A321, my carry on fit perfectly in the overhead bin, just like it does for every other Airbus A321, A320, and A319 I fly in the US and Europe. So I’m not quite sure what the Wow agent and I accomplished with that baggage strip tease, but I got what I wanted -- my bag right above me rather than trundling around Keflavik airport for the next couple of days.</li>\r\n 	<li>In the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/12/20/podcast-119-digital-security-on-the-road-us-airports-getting-better/\">last</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/12/podcast-120-where-do-guidebooks-fit-in-i-hate-shopping-for-suitcases/\">couple </a>of episodes, I’ve talked about the <a href=\"https://revolut.com/\">Revolut</a> card which is a Mastercard pre-paid debit card with some very nice foreign exchange functionality. I loved this card when it first came out -- first when I was traveling in the UK and then cheaply transfer money to my daughter studying in Scotland. Then I went very cold when they blew up the “cheaply” component , when they added a 3% fee when you added money/”topped up” your Revolut account using a US debit card. This episode, I’ve warmed up a bit. First, I discovered a way to bypass that 3% debit charge --I topped up my account in Euros with my US debit card. This avoids the 3% charge from Revolut, though the app does note that you’re not using the right currency with your card and asks you if you really mean to do this. My bank charges me less than 1% for the conversion, and though the exchange rate isn’t as good as Revolut’s, it’s not bad enough to cost-justify the 3% charge that USD top-ups attract. So, we’re back to a reasonably priced conversion -- in a roundabout way.</li>\r\n 	<li>Which is good because, for some reason, my US ATM card never worked the whole time I was in Iceland. And I could never figure out why. I traded notes with my bank. They weren’t denying anything; they weren’t ever seeing the transaction show up at their end. I dunno, maybe it’s some residual wonkiness left over from their banking meltdown. I can’t remember the last time I had problems like that. Which, before I left for Iceland, made me wonder if I still needed to carry a wad of backup USD with me on this trip -- given how ubiquitous and seamless ATMs are nowadays. I still didn’t need the Jacksons though because my Revolut card had no problem pulling krona from any ATM. In Portugal, I did hit a couple of different quirks. First, the train and Lisbon subway ticket machines don’t accept pre-paid debit cards which left me scrambling for exact change a surprising number of times. Second, a number of shops only accepted Visa cards, which blocked out Revolut’s MasterCard-based card. I used to see this more often in the past -- shops only accepted cards on one network -- Visa or MasterCard, and often didn’t take American Express -- which has led me to always carry one of each card, but I thought the need for that backup had also faded. So I guess I’ll keep carrying a fist full of credit cards and USD for at least a couple more years.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Rocky Road</em> by <a href=\"http://www.kcentricity.com/\">KCentric</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>TSA Lines</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>For much of March and April, I’d been traveling in and out of Newark pretty much every week which, I have to say, if you’re using Terminal A, is the worst airport in the country. Now, I know that Terminal B in LaGuardia gives it a good run with the ceiling tarps drained by garden hoses into trash cans in the middle of the terminal, but the TSA security set up in Newark Terminal A beats that. They’ve split the corridor, the hallway down to gates in two -- the right side has the TSA stations, the left side the line for passengers waiting to be screened and the walkway for exiting passengers. The screening line is usually a bit of a cluster -- you can never quite tell which screening station you’re waiting for -- maybe #3 or should I scoot around to get in the line for #4. The really special feature of this configuration -- what wins it the prize -- is that you often have to wait in line to leave the terminal. Yup, more than a few times there’s a TSA agent holding up a line of departing passengers because of some confusion in the screening lines. It’s just awful.</li>\r\n 	<li>I just missed the TSA’s line-mageddon in O’Hare (I flew out the Friday before) where 450 American Airlines passengers got to experience Camp O’Hare cots after missing their flights because of 2-3 hour long TSA screening lines. But you could see it coming. My wife had spend 45 minutes in line in March, and the Monday morning rush hour had become a jumble of lines extending the length of the concourse. With summer travel volumes starting to build, it was a matter of when, not if, the whole thing imploded. And if I could tell this from my weekly flight out of ORD, you know the TSA folks on the ground knew it and were dreading it. So why didn’t they get in front of this instead of waiting until after the meltdown and the screaming headlines to replace management and add staff.</li>\r\n 	<li>Wading through recriminations about incompetence, baggage fees, gross misforecasting of PreCheck sign-ups, and the general <a href=\"http://www.travelandleisure.com/travel-tips/travel-warnings/tsa-blames-passengers\">cluelessness of infrequent fliers</a>, I think a couple of economists get to the real answer in an <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/737290917220995075\">article</a> in Sunday’s New York Times -- “the TSA has been acting as if there were no cost to tying people up for hours in security lines. In effect, all that time on line is “free” to the T.S.A.” “This glaring omission creates perverse incentives for government agencies. Cutting staff improves an agency’s bottom line, while wasting citizens’ time has little material consequence for it aside from expressions of annoyance and outrage in tweets and (newspaper) articles”</li>\r\n 	<li>I think that pretty much nails it. I retweeted a <a href=\"http://qz.com/659461/tsa-is-our-no-1-problem-right-now-long-security-lines-are-frustrating-us-airlines-too/\">link </a>to a Quartz article with a pretty self-explanatory graph. Air traveller volume has increased more than 10% over the past 12 months while the number of TSA screeners has decreased by more than that. Everyone knew this train wreck was coming, but there was no incentive to fix it -- until the wreck happened and the volume of complaints and outrage became impossible to ignore.</li>\r\n 	<li>In the immediate term, the spectacle of those 450 filled cots at ORD spurred some good action -- Congress let the TSA move some money around to hire more personnel, the TSA head of security got sacked, lines at ORD have shrunk, and a lot more people are ponying up the $85 for PreCheck (which is causing a whole other set of lines that I’m not going into).\r\nIn the short to medium term, maybe some new technology will help -- automating checkpoints like they do in London Heathrow, posting real-time wait times so travelers can “self-balance” security lines.</li>\r\n 	<li>But not until the TSA explicitly considers the value of travelers time will we get to some semblance of realistic balance between the cost and risk of travel.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #121</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_121.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #121 — TSA Lines, My Luggage is Where?','','inherit','closed','closed','','1615-revision-v1','','','2016-05-31 08:10:36','2016-05-31 13:10:36','',1615,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/05/31/1615-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1627,1,'2016-07-01 22:02:04','2016-07-02 03:02:04','<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/tumblr_lxpxhjKkrS1qgelrio1_500.jpeg\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-969\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/tumblr_lxpxhjKkrS1qgelrio1_500-300x176.jpeg\" alt=\"The Great Train Robbery Movie Poster\" width=\"300\" height=\"176\" /></a>\r\nA backpack stolen from the train to the airport -- or more specifically, passports inside the stolen backpack -- unexpectedly extends a beer-tasting weekend in Brussels.  During my recent international trips, I find that Apple\'s FaceTime and iMessage aren\'t working reliably -- could be because of hotel WiFi bandwidth constraints.  TSA\'s PreCheck expedited security screening feels like you\'ve passed through a time warp and landed back in 1999. Walking the floor of the National Restaurant Association\'s annual trade show, it looks like restaurants are banking on their customers carrying smartphones and want to use them for wait list paging, bar tabs, and payments. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_98.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_98.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #98:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>It was 7 years ago this month that I recorded the<a title=\"First TravelCommons Podcast\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/05/15/first-travelcommons-podcast/\" target=\"_blank\"> first TravelCommons podcast</a> in the bathroom of the Wardman Park Marriott in Northwest Washington DC on May 15, 2005. If I were just a little bit better at right-to-left planning I would’ve had this be episode 100.</li>\r\n 	<li>I was in DC a couple of weeks ago, staying in Chevy Chase this time, a couple of stops further up the <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Line_(Washington_Metro)\" target=\"_blank\">Red Line</a>, because the Wardman Park was sold out. But getting off at the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Woodley Park, Washington, D.C.\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodley_Park%2C_Washington%2C_D.C.\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Woodley Park</a> Metro stop to walk over to <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Adams Morgan\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adams_Morgan\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Adams Morgan</a> reminded me of how long I’ve been doing this. Long time listeners will remember when this was a weekly and then a biweekly podcast.  In that first year, I did 39 episodes. Quite a difference to this year when I’m working to get them out bimonthly</li>\r\n 	<li>Not for lack of travel, though – or maybe because of it.  I got some personal travel in – a long weekend in Brussels to drink some beer – OK, a lot of beer – with my son, and then a week in Puerto Rico with my wife, daughter, and some friends.  And business travel to Phoenix, Florida, New York, DC (which I mentioned), San Francisco, and a couple trips to Dallas.  So less international travel than before the last episode; instead flying domestically during the huge smear of Spring Break family vacations that the month of March has become.</li>\r\n 	<li>Other than jam-full planes, though, I don’t remember being too annoyed with the families. Except perhaps in<a href=\"http://www.flylcpa.com/\" target=\"_blank\"> Ft Myers, FL</a> where Spring Break families plus full body scanners plus no status line made for a long wait.</li>\r\n 	<li>I don’t know if the parents are more vigilant or I’m more self-absorbed, but, other than Ft Myers, it felt less painful than past Spring Breaks. Perhaps the spate of airlines booting off families with unruly kids has led to some throwback parenting – a quick nip of brandy at the gate before pre-boarding. Just a nip, though, ‘cause it couldn’t be more than a 3 oz bottle to make it past security.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/duckett/23334\"><em>Another Girl</em></a> by duckett</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Speaking of throwbacks, on one of my flights down to Dallas, I had what could only be called a throwback security experience in the TSA <a href=\"http://www.tsa.gov/what_we_do/escreening.shtm\" target=\"_blank\">PreCheck</a> line. I walked up to the status-only line in ORD Terminal 3. There’s usually someone at the entry point looking at boarding passes, checking for status. But this time, she had a desk and a barcode reader like the TSA use at the ID check. She scanned my boarding pass and waved me over to the left. I walked past a PreCheck sign, but it really didn’t register – for morning flights, I don’t get my first cup of coffee until I’m on the other side of security.  The line moved quickly. As I started to run my drill – take off the shoes, drop the jacket from my shoulders, pull out the laptop and iPad – the TSA person told me – and every other person in the PreCheck line – to stop. Put your bags through the Xray, leave your shoes and jacket on, walk through the metal detector and move along.  It was <a href=\"https://twitter.com/#!/mpeacock/status/194393555677097984\" target=\"_blank\">too easy</a>.  I felt like I was back in 1999/2000 – the turn of the century; a nostalgia moment.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_968\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"225\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/IMG_1119.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-968\" title=\"TSA-Safe Hot Sauce\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/IMG_1119-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"225\" height=\"300\" /></a> TSA-Safe Hot Sauce © Mark Peacock[/caption]\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Walking through <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Old San Juan, Puerto Rico\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_San_Juan%2C_Puerto_Rico\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Old San Juan</a>, I walked through one of those gourmet condiment shops – the kind that sells hot sauces and mustard and the like. This one was called “Spicy Caribbee”. What caught my eye, though, was the package of three bottles in a one-quart plastic bag.  The shelf tag had a picture of a plane and said “Onboard friendly. Meets TSA 3 oz size limit”. Just brilliant. I can’t tell you how many times I pass up buying things like that because I’m doing carry-on.  As we were doing in Puerto Rico. But my wife bought the 3-pack as a gift for her brother. The TSA guy at San Juan airport gave it a second look as it came out of the X-ray machine, but let it pass. If you didn’t see the picture on Twitter or Facebook, I’ll post it in the show notes.</li>\r\n 	<li>Apple has been launching a new data service with each iPhone release – <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"FaceTime\" href=\"http://www.apple.com/iphone/features/facetime.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"homepage\">FaceTime</a> video calling with iOS 4; iMessage, a replacement for SMS in <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"IOS\" href=\"http://www.apple.com/ios\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"homepage\">iOS 5</a>. They work pretty well in the US, but they really don’t add that much value here – I have an unlimited family texting plan and am usually not gone long enough to have a burning need for video calling. When I’m overseas – in Europe or Asia – that’s when I really need these products to work – shifting calls and texts from expensive roaming to less expensive data – hotel or office WiFi, or even AT&amp;T’s reasonably priced buckets of international data. But I’m not finding it that reliable – Beiing, Vienna, London,…  I dunno. These Apple data services just don’t feel completely baked in the middle.</li>\r\n 	<li>Trolling through the Apple support sites, the consensus seems to be that FaceTime requires 100-150 kbps of network bandwidth up <em>and</em> down to work. For most hotel WiFi that I’ve seen – and measured using <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Speedtest.net\" href=\"http://www.speedtest.net/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"homepage\">Speedtest</a>.net – getting the 100-150 kbps download speed shouldn’t be a big problem, but getting that on the upload site – could be a bit dicey. Most broadband is designed to be asymmetrical – it assumes that you’ll be downloading a lot more than you’ll upload. But video chat services like FaceTime and Skype don\'t fit that assumption – you’re sending as much as you’re receiving.</li>\r\n 	<li>With this in mind, I paid extra for the high bandwidth WiFi at the Brussels Marriott when I was there in March with my son. I figured we’d be FaceTiming or Skype-ing back to my wife and daughter in the US, so I ponied up the extra 4 euro for the 1 Mbps service. But it Skype was still lagging and stuttering when we’d use it in the evening. Firing up Speedtest, I quickly saw why – we were only getting 256 kbps – the basic service, not the upgrade I’d paid for. Calling down to the front desk, I got the typical runaround – oh, we’re sorry we don’t know anything about the Internet service. Here’s the number of the vendor help desk….  I’ve been down this 3-hr rat hole before. I skipped it, went out for another beer, and skipped the meaningless upgrade the next day.</li>\r\n 	<li>One of the things I did like about the Brussels Marriott’s WiFi service was that my payment covered three simultaneous connections -- in my case, my iPad, my iPhone, and my son’s iPhone. It was, from my experience, a rare acknowledgement to today’s reality – that just about every traveler has a bunch of devices that all need Internet access to completely do their jobs.  The Best Western in Brussels wanted 10 euro a day for each device.</li>\r\n 	<li>And with everyone posting experiences and photos on <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">Twitter</a>, Foursquare, Instagram, TripAdvisor,… you could say that multi-device network access is more important to vacationing families than business travelers.  In the US, this isn’t a problem for me because I travel with a Verizon 4G mobile hotspot. Plug it in (because the battery life is just this side of miserable) and 5 devices are on-line. And, more often than not, at much faster speeds than hotel WiFi, free or not.</li>\r\n 	<li>Traveling internationally, the Verizon hotspot is a nice paperweight. Some folks I know carry their own mini wireless access point to extend their room’s wired Ethernet.  Apple’s AirPort has been a popular one.  Rather than carry an extra piece of equipment, I use my MacBook Air for the same purpose. Most Windows 7 PCs will do it to.  It takes a couple of steps – enabling Internet sharing and the like – as is well-documented on the web.  You are, however, back to being dependent on the hotel’s bandwidth.</li>\r\n 	<li>When I was in China, where I used this trick, I could see the hotel network speed crash at around 6:30 every morning. I don’t know if it was all the guests waking up and checking e-mail or the hotel was sending their overnight financials back to the home office, but Skype calls home would pixelate, lag, and then just give up. Luckily, I never really got onto local Beijing time and was up at 4:30, 5:00 every morning. Sometimes it good to have a bit of jet lag.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a question, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is <a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a> -- use the Voice Memo app on your iPhone or something like Virtual Recorder on your Android phone to record and send in an audio comment – or iMovie if you want to send in some video; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/flatwound/14476\"><em>The Long Goodbye</em></a> by John Pazden</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Airport Train Robbery</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I have to be honest with you. I have been putting off writing this segment for over a month. I’ve written blog posts on the web site about <a title=\"Best Hotel Amenity? Free Breakfast\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/04/21/best-hotel-amenity-free-breakfast/\" target=\"_blank\">free hotel breakfasts</a> and how American Airlines is suddenly<a title=\"American Airlines Reaches Out to Apologize… Again and Again\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/05/01/american-airlines-reaches-out-to-apologize-again-and-again/\" target=\"_blank\"> increasing their customer outreach</a>, posted more stuff on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\">TravelCommons Facebook page</a>… Just procrastinating because I really don’t want to write this segment, but I know I need to.</li>\r\n 	<li>Let’s start out with stipulating something – I was stupid. Now that’s not the hard thing to write.  I own up to do doing stupid things on a regularly scheduled basis.  The procrastination comes from how deeply embarrassed I am by my stupid act. Here I am – supposedly an experienced world traveler, seen/done most things many times over, gives advice to others – making the rookie-est of rookie mistakes.  The shame and anger and more shame that burbled up every time I started <em>thinking</em> about writing this made me push it away</li>\r\n 	<li>Early Sunday morning in Brussels.  My son and I finish our coffee in the Starbucks in the train station, unplug our variety of mobile devices, and head down the stairs to catch the train to the airport for our flight back to Chicago. We’d been in Belgium for 3 days eating and drinking beer.  Mostly drinking beer.  The train is a little late, but that’s OK because this is an earlier train than we’d intended to take. We’ll get to the airport in plenty of time.</li>\r\n 	<li>My son and I each have a rolling suitcase and a backpack – no need to check luggage for a 3-day beer drinking expedition.  I put his suitcase on the rack overhead.  The car got crowded as the train made more stops.  I put my backpack in the rack also. I was reading the Sports section of the USAToday on my iPad, catching up on the first two rounds of the NCAA basketball tournament, trying to figure out how badly my bracket had been blown up by some of the upsets.</li>\r\n 	<li>The train pulls into the airport station. I reach up to pull our bags out of the rack. I see my son’s suitcase. I don’t see my backpack.  Instant shot of panic. I look down – was I mistaken, did I not put it up there? I look around – did someone pull it down by mistake?  I walk over the seats to scan the people queued in the aisle – can I catch the thief?  I try to ask the train conductors. I run off the train, scanning passengers as they stream off the platform.</li>\r\n 	<li>No luck. My backpack is gone. And so is my Nikon camera, my Jawbone Jambox speaker, my Bose headphones, my United Airlines drink coupons, my Moleskine travel journal with notes from vacations over the last 6 years, and our passports.</li>\r\n 	<li>So let’s recap the key elements of my stupidity in some sort of time order… putting our passports in the backpack instead of my coat pocket; putting the more easily grabbed piece of luggage in the overhead rack; having my nose stuck in my iPad instead of paying attention to my surroundings.  All things I knew then and have diligently avoided before.</li>\r\n 	<li>I eventually go upstairs to the United ticket desk and confirm what I already knew – we can’t get back into the US without passports, so we weren’t going home today. The ticket agent was as helpful as she could be – pointed me to the police station in the airport so I could file a report and rebooked us without any hassle even though we were on rewards tickets.</li>\r\n 	<li>We walked down the terminal to the police station. We only waited a couple of minutes.  The officer was a great guy.  Took my statement, quickly created the report – it was a painless 15 minutes. “We get 10-12 of these a day,” he said. Guess I’m not alone in my stupidity.</li>\r\n 	<li>While he was typing up the report, I called the embassy and got through to a live person. Not quite sure where this live person was, but she put me through to the on-call duty officer who, again, was very helpful.  Police report – good that I was getting it; it would be necessary for the replacement passport.  He would have our names on the embassy admissions list for tomorrow morning, and told me where we could get passport pictures taken on a Sunday afternoon.</li>\r\n 	<li>I hit Booking.com site on my iPhone and booked the Best Western right by the train station and not far from the US Embassy.  With all that done, there was nothing left to do at the airport.  We headed back down to the train station and went back to Brussels.</li>\r\n 	<li>Monday morning we packed again, hoping that we’d be able to get our passports in time to catch the 11am flight to Chicago or the 11:30 to DC. We got to the embassy 20 minutes before it opened and were the first in line by 3 minutes. A pleasant security guard had us queue a couple hundred yards away from the door until opening time. People in line were either replacing stolen passports (again, not alone in my stupidity) or applying for visas. We walked to the security gatehouse at 8am. Good thing the duty officer had put our names on the “admit” list. They screened us one family at a time – everything X-rayed, but no full body scanners.  Backpacks, briefcases, luggage all stayed outside as did all electronics – no mobile phones, iPads, laptops. Luckily, I had printed everything out at the hotel.  They seemed to call the numbers quickly, though the folks for visas seemed to move through quicker. We watched the clock. We had to leave no later than 10:30 to have a shot at the 11:30 flight.</li>\r\n 	<li>Our number was called. We went into a small room – my son and I on one side of bullet proof glass, the consular officer on the other.  He was a good guy. He asked us what happened; walked through our replacement application – he was nicely probing, checking that our facts aligned. He gently jammed me (rightfully so) about taking better care of the replacement passports and told us he’d have us out shortly. I looked at the clock – we had a shot to make the flight to DC.</li>\r\n 	<li>We went back to the main room and waited. And waited. And waited.  Watching the clock, I saw our chance to get home slowly dissolve. We waited an hour for our replacement passports. We walked in at 8am and walked out at 11am. Not bad turnaround time, but not good enough to get us home that day.</li>\r\n 	<li>It could’ve been much worse. Everyone I dealt with was very pleasant and helpful. My son and I took advantage of our extra time to sample just a few more Belgian beers. I had a very nice cassoulet for lunch on Monday that took a bit of the sting out of not making the DC flight.</li>\r\n 	<li>But added up, my rookie mistake – paying more attention to the USAToday than my backpack -- cost me about $2,000 in stolen goods, 2 days additional room and board, and expedited passport fees.  As my dad always said, in life, there are no cheap lessons.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/28792\"><em>Slinky Blues</em></a> by Admiral Bob</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Restaurants Want Your Smartphone</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Earlier this month, I spent a Sunday afternoon walking the floor of the National Restaurant Association’s <a href=\"http://www.restaurant.org/show/\" target=\"_blank\">annual show</a> in Chicago’s McCormick Place convention center. If you need reminding of how big the restaurant business is in the US, this show is <em>huge</em>.  There’s everything from a shrimp purveyor from the Mississippi Gulf Coast handing out samples to a commercial pot and pan seller with one of the <em>Top Chef</em> contestants looking lonely in their booth.</li>\r\n 	<li>I went with a vague idea of checking out new breakfast food trends, perhaps for a follow-up to my blog post about free breakfast being the best hotel amenity.  But as I started wandering (and sampling) around, I found myself in the technology corner of the show. It felt a little like the nerd ghetto, stuffed in the most remote corner of the smallest show floor.</li>\r\n 	<li>The most obvious trend was iPad menu – replacing the simple, cheap printed menu that can be tossed, dropped, and used as a coaster with a $400 piece of computer hardware. This trend had an accompanying trend – a slew of vendors selling all shapes of metal to lock down these now very expensive menus.</li>\r\n 	<li>What was more interesting to me were the offerings that replaced pagers, punch cards, bar tabs, and credit cards with smartphones.</li>\r\n 	<li>The pager one has always seemed a no-brainer to me – replacing those light-up, vibrating pagers that tell you your table is ready with a text message.  Systems with 15 pagers can run $1-2,000 and replacements for the pagers that walk off run around $100 apiece. Replace that with text messages sent from a low-end smartphone at the hostess station – the cost savings are obvious. The offerings I saw weren’t quite so DIY – they combined waiting lists, wait time tracking, and text messaging into a single iPad app (of course).</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"http://tabbedout.com/\">TabbedOut</a> is an interesting app, basically extending the restaurant or bar’s order and cash register system to your smartphone. Download the app, load it with your credit cards and you pay your bar tab from your phone – with the de rigour integration to Facebook, Foursquare and Twitter.</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://www.thelevelup.com/\" target=\"_blank\">LevelUp</a> is another smartphone payment app. It’s kinda like the Starbucks app – link the app to a card – the Starbucks app links to one or more of your Starbucks cards; LevelUp to a credit card – when you’re ready to pay, the app generates a bar code or QR code for the cashier to scan and you’re good to go. I use Starbucks app all the time to buy a coffee after I work out – don’t have to carry cash or a Starbucks card. LevelUp looks to be as convenient, but they don’t have the coverage yet – I’ve only seen them at a couple of food trucks.</li>\r\n 	<li>This push, moving pagers, bar tabs, credit cards – the assortment of physical bits and pieces that restaurants handle – into the virtual realm makes sense as more people carry smartphones.  It assumes, though, that everyone can grab enough bandwidth for these transactions to happen. Which may explain another trend I saw on the floor – lots of booths peddling low maintenance ways for restaurants to offer WiFi to their customers</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917626811171154.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #98</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from the <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/\" target=\"_blank\">ccMixter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_98.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #98 — Stolen Luggage & Passports; Restaurants Want Your Smartphone','','inherit','closed','closed','','961-revision-v1','','','2016-07-01 22:02:04','2016-07-02 03:02:04','',961,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/07/01/961-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1628,1,'2016-07-02 13:05:54','2016-07-02 18:05:54','[caption id=\"attachment_925\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"225\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/image1.jpeg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-925\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/image1-225x300.jpeg\" alt=\"Tiny White Fish in Chinese Soup\" width=\"225\" height=\"300\" /></a> Here\'s Looking At You © Mark Peacock[/caption]\r\n\r\nLots of travel has kept me away from the mic -- <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Beijing\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beijing\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Beijing</a>, London, <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Vienna\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vienna\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Vienna</a>, Phoenix, New York, and New Orleans. Big difference in airline load factor between international and domestic flights. The international flights were at 30-50% capacity while the domestic flights were booked solid. These trips allowed me to compare the different treatment US airlines get in international airports. This was my first trip to China; it made quite an impression. This string of travel has formed a strong opinion that the thermostat is the most important piece of hotel technology. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_97.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_97.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #97:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Bless me listeners for I have sinned.  It’s been 8 weeks since my last podcast.  What would be the appropriate penance?  Two Our Fathers, three Hail Marys, sitting next to a mother and lap child on next Tuesday’s 3-1/2 hr flight to Phoenix, and giving up snarky TSA tweets for Lent?  That would be harsh – especially the TSA thing.</li>\r\n	<li>I have been doing quite a bit of travel since the last episode.  10 days in Beijing, 3 days in London, 2 days in Vienna, a week in Phoenix, and then the back end of last week in <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"New York City\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"wikipedia\">New York.</a> I hung around Chicago last week, and then was down in New Orleans this week.  March has me in back Phoenix, then Brussels, back in New York, and then down to <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"San Juan, Puerto Rico\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Juan%2C_Puerto_Rico\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"wikipedia\">San Juan, PR</a> for spring break.  In the first quarter of the year – I will have traveled 11 out of the 13 weeks.  That’s probably my most intense run since 3-4 years ago when I traveled every week from the beginning of September – Labor Day – until Christmas week.</li>\r\n	<li>The domestic flights have been jampacked while the International flights have been relatively open.  My flight over to Beijing last month, business class was about half full and coach was less than that.  I had the two-side – window and aisle seat – of a United Triple 7 to myself.  It was an upgraded one – with lie-flat seats and big 22-inch monitors. I had both monitors displaying the flight map at different levels of zoom as we went straight north from Chicago. I saw a lot of frozen Ontario.</li>\r\n	<li>The flight back from Vienna, by way of London, I didn’t upgrade to Business.  I didn’t need to sleep; I had my iPad fully charged and loaded with content, so Coach was fine.  Business was full anyhow, but Coach was two-thirds empty. I ended up with more room than I would’ve had in Business.  People were sacked out across the middle rows.  I had a two-side to myself, so spread out, did a little work, and then mucked around on my iPad.</li>\r\n	<li>It was a rude crash to Earth, though, on my flights in and out of LGA.  I’m 1K on United, but was 15<sup>th</sup> in line for the one remaining upgrade. I felt lucky to get an exit row middle seat. I think even the lap kids had status.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Wanna luv you</em> by <a href=\"http://www.henta.co.uk/\">Henta Ellis</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>In the<a title=\"Podcast #96 — Eating and Drinking with Social Media; Frequent Flier Alliances\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/01/05/podcast-96-dining-with-social-media-frequent-flier-alliances/\" target=\"_blank\"> last episode</a>, I talked about the Jawbone Jambox wireless speaker I got for Christmas.  It got a good bit of use in my Beijing hotel room. I was there for 8 days. It only had 2 English-language TV stations – CNN and <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"BBC World News\" href=\"http://www.bbcworldnews.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"homepage\">BBC World News</a>.  You can only watch the 30-minute news rolls just so many times.  I powered through most of my podcast backlog, a few new albums, and a couple of documentaries I’d loaded up before heading over.  Good quality sound and much less awkward than sitting around wearing my Bose headphones.</li>\r\n	<li>In <a title=\"Podcast #33 – Listener Mailbag, What’s in My Briefcase?\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2006/02/18/podcast-33-listener-mailbag-whats-in-my-briefcase/\" target=\"_blank\">past episodes</a>, I’ve talked about the “slum” terminals in big airports – the terminal where the non-hub airlines have their couple of gates.  At ORD, United has Terminal 1, American Terminal 3, separated by Terminal 2, the “slum” terminal where US Air, Delta, JetBlue.  In PHX, USAir and Southwest split the renovated shopping mall-like Terminal 4, while everyone else slums it in Terminals 2 and 3.</li>\r\n	<li>When I fly home from Europe on US carriers, I feel a bit of the same “slum” treatment.  For what I’m sure are security reasons, the US carrier gates are all seem to be inconveniently located at the end of the longest concourse where there are no services – no restaurants, no shops, no bars.  It’s often a hunt for a restroom.  At <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"London Heathrow Airport\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Heathrow_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Heathrow Terminal 2</a>, they tell you it’s a 20-minute walk from security to these gates. No dawdling in duty free.</li>\r\n	<li>In Beijing, though, it was a very different story.  The United flights to ORD, SFO, and IAD all left from gates conveniently located in the center of the concourse – a 5-minute walk at most from the restaurants and shops.  Nor was there the extra security screening at the gate that you typically go through in European airports.  I just walked out of the bar and right onto the plane.</li>\r\n	<li>In Vienna, I was experienced a different twist.  I was flying to Heathrow on BMI, but somehow ended up in seemed to be a slum satellite terminal entirely devoted to Russian flights.  It was, once again, at the end of the terminal, and down a set of stairs, complete with a smoking room the size of 4 phone booths, in which at one point I counted 7 guys.  It was the only smoking room I saw in the Vienna airport – which may be the reason it and its Russian clientele got stuffed in the slum terminal.  But that still doesn’t explain why my LHR flight ended up there – unless BMI got a smokin’ deal on gate fees…</li>\r\n	<li>We’ve had kind of a discussion thread across a few episodes on the TSA’s Global Entry program – pay $100 (which many travel companies like Amex are reimbursing for top tier customers), give the TSA your life story and a set of finger prints, and you skip the US immigration lines for a set of kiosks over in the corner.  It’s been a huge time saver for me and a number of TravelCommons listeners.</li>\r\n	<li>So imagine my surprise – returning to Chicago from Vienna by way of Heathrow – I see 5-10 people queued for the Global Entry kiosks and no waiting for a live immigration agent.  I had filled out the customs card on the flight, so I walked up to an agent.  He processed me, saw the GE sticker on my passport and asked why I didn’t use a kiosk.  I pointed over to the line.  “Yup,” he said, “you knew that was going to happen eventually”</li>\r\n	<li>Bob Fennerty commented on Facebook\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Maybe the model will flip someday: Global Entry will be free and instead of paying to use a kiosk you\'ll pay to be processed by an agent. I always fill out the customs card on the plane so that I can choose to use GE or not. I probably skip the kiosks every fifth or sixth arrival.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>And if I can slip one last TSA comment in before I try to give it up for Lent, what’s with the incredible waste of machinery at most TSA checkpoints?  On my last trip out of PHX, the TSA lines was 15 minutes – while 4 of 6 lanes of screening equipment sat idle.  Same thing in ORD a week ago – a 15-minute wait in the status line while 4 lanes of adjacent equipment was unmanned.  The problem?  The full body scanners.  Not only does the full body scanner take longer – instead of the second it takes to walk through the metal detector, you have to stand with your arms raised for 5-7 seconds, then wait another 5-10 seconds for the remote screener to radio the “OK” to the gate keeper who then opens the gate to let you out. 10-20 seconds per person instead of the 1-2 seconds it takes for a walk-through metal detector – that math isn’t difficult.</li>\r\n	<li>And then add to that the additional staff the body scanner requires – the remote screener, the gate keeper, the one at the front keeping everyone queued… and you see the double effect – not only does the body scanner slow down the two lanes running through it, it also consumes staff that might be manning 1 or 2 of those idle lanes.  I don’t think a little more efficiency and a little less line time is too much to ask from an agency that spent over $8 billion last year.</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a question, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is <a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a> -- use the Voice Memo app on your iPhone or something like Virtual Recorder on your Android phone to record and send in an audio comment – or iMovie if you want to send in some video; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music -- <em>Snub-Nosed Aardvark</em> by <a href=\"http://podcast.penmachine.com/\">Derek K. Miller</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>First Trip to Beijing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>My first trip in 2012 was a big one from Chicago to Beijing – just short of 14 hours each way on United’s direct Chicago-Beijing flight.  The timing on the flight over was a bit goofy – I left at noon on Tuesday and landed in Beijing around 4:30 Weds afternoon.  I had a hard time figuring out when I was supposed to sleep.  As I mentioned at the start of the show, the flight was a polar route – straight north from Chicago, over Ontario, Alaska, and then down over Siberia.  I did manage to take an afternoon nap, but pretty much putzed around for 14 hours.  I looked out the window a lot after we crossed the Arctic Circle looking to see some Northern Lights – no luck.  Did some work, listened to podcasts, watched a couple of episodes of a BBC documentary on the history of Beijing that I’d ripped down to my iPad.</li>\r\n	<li>After 14 hours in a dry metal tube, it was refreshing to walk out into a spacious, modern, clean airport.  As you would expect since the international terminal – Terminal 3 – opened right before the 2008 Summer Olympics.  And it’s big – with more space than all 5 of London Heathrow’s terminals combined.</li>\r\n	<li>This was kind of an underlying observation during the whole trip – with more than 1.3 billion people – a lot of things just <em>have</em> to be big in China. While I knew this intellectually before the trip, it didn’t really hit me until I was there.  20 million people in Beijing, and it’s smaller than Shanghai. A local guy I was working with said that he was from a small town about an hour west of Beijing.  “And how many people live in your town?” I asked.  “About a million,” he answered.  And he said this with a straight face.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_927\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"225\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/photo-1-e13307957324511.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-927\" title=\"Beijing Morning\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/photo-1-e13307957324511-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"225\" height=\"300\" /></a> On A Clear Day You Can See Across the Street © Mark Peacock[/caption]</li>\r\n	<li>The other thing I thought I was prepared for, but really wasn’t, was the pollution.  We all remember the warnings before the Summer Olympics – about how the pollution was going to bring the marathoners to their knees.  And then nothing really happened. Well, the day after we arrived, the first day of business, we walked out of the office building and down the block to a restaurant for lunch.  Halfway down the block, I could feel the itching in the back of my throat.  Then my eyes started burning.  By the end of the day, I had a low-grade headache.  And this was just the first day.</li>\r\n	<li>Not that it got any better.  We started joking that on a clear day, you could see across the street.  Looking up at the sky, we had no problem looking directly into the sun; one guy got a nice photo with his iPhone.  I was running a pollution headache about every other day. I started looking forward to my flight home</li>\r\n	<li>The food was very good – if you like Chinese food, which I do.  We ate at a lot of different restaurants, all of it good.  But at just about every meal, there was one dish that made you go “Hmmm….”</li>\r\n	<li>The first night we ate at the hotel.  We had just arrived a couple of hours earlier; were a bit out of it from the time change and the long flight; and so were just looking for a beer and a bit of food – more to keep us awake to try and adjust to the time more than actual hunger. The wait staff didn’t speak much English, but they had a picture menu, so we that helped us do “point &amp; shoot” ordering.  We’ll take one of those and those and those and those – and 4 beers.  The waiter went away, and then came back with a colleague – who could speak a bit of English. “I’m sorry,” she said, “ but we’re out of the pickled donkey meat appetizer you chose, but we can substitute the specially spiced donkey meat instead.”  And then she walked off.  And brought back the specially spiced donkey meat.  In the next couple of days, we learned that donkey meat is a Beijing specialty.  Shanghai? No donkey meat.  But Beijing, you can get donkey meat. Guess we lucked out on our first meal.</li>\r\n	<li>It was always something. Like when they split the head of the Peking duck and served it on a plate so you could pick at the brains. Or gave me a cup the fish soup with slimy water lily stems and small albino fish staring up at me. Or at the hot pot restaurant where what I though was brown tofu was actually some sort of pressed loaf of duck blood.  And, at just about every meal, there was a plate of jellyfish.</li>\r\n	<li>But when I wanted to share pictures of this food with friends on Facebook, I ran smack up against the Great Firewall of China. Logged into the hotel’s Wi-Fi, I could Skype back home, run e-mail, do most everything – except access Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.  All blocked, but not with a big “Do Not Go Here/Turn Back” error page. It’s like those sites don’t exist – you get a blank web page and you watch it churn and churn and churn, waiting for a reply, until either you give up and move on, or the browser times out.</li>\r\n	<li>For me, it wasn’t that tough to get around.  I just fired up our corporate Cisco VPN client, nailed up a secure connection to our Scottsdale data center, and bingo, I had a nice tunnel through the Great Firewall. I updated my Facebook and Twitter statuses. Posted a picture of the albino fish soup to Facebook; I was social again. I was also able to download content in iTunes that had been unavailable before – I guess for copyright reasons – things like podcasts from the BBC. Coming onto the Internet from our Arizona data center with a US IP address, everything was back to normal.</li>\r\n	<li>Before I left, I had been pleasantly surprised to find that AT&amp;T’s international data plan included China.  With this trip and a European trip 2 weeks after, I had bought a 125 MB “bucket of data” for $50 just in case.  On the ground in Beijing, trying to find my way around, 3G connectivity was no problem. But what really surprised me was that I was able to connect to Facebook and Twitter with my iPhone.  For some reason, the Great Firewall had missed mobile data.</li>\r\n	<li>But even with my social networks reestablished, after 8 days in Beijing, I was out of eyedrops and ibuprofen; I was kinda tired of jellyfish. And with all the Beijingers heading back to their “small towns” for the Lunar New Year festivities, it was also time for me to head home</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music -- <em>Baja Taxi</em> by <a href=\"http://www.brain-buckit.com/\">Brain Buckit</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Most Important Hotel Technology</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>On my Beijing trip, I spent just short of 28 hours on United Triple 7s – a little more than a day.  I spent 8 days in my hotel though, so no matter how good or bad the United flights were, it’s the hotel that would make or break the trip.</li>\r\n	<li>I stayed in a nice hotel – it was in the north part of the city, right by the Olympic Village.  I could see the Bird’s Nest stadium lit up orange every night. I upgraded my room for an extra $10-15/night so I had a nice sitting area – a couch, chair, a little coffee table – or I guess in China, it would be a tea table.  Some extra space so I wouldn’t have to sit on my bed the whole time.</li>\r\n	<li>We’ve talked in a <a title=\"Podcast #85 — Importance of Hotel Bathrooms; Maximizing Miles\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2010/11/30/podcast-85-importance-of-hotel-bathrooms-maximizing-miles/\" target=\"_blank\">past episode</a> about how the importance of the hotel bathroom is often overlooked.  Not in this room – it was modern, clean, spacious, and the shower had good water pressure.</li>\r\n	<li>But as we’ve talked, a lot of the talk has been about new hotel technology. La Quinta, a US bargain chain, is making noise about their rollout of flat screen HDTVs that let you plug your gaming or iDevices into them. Higher-end hotels are loaning out iPads during your stay.</li>\r\n	<li>After my 8 days in Beijing, though, I decided that the single most important technology in my hotel room is neither the flat screen TV nor my Jawbone Jambox speaker – it was the thermostat.  For the first 5 days, everything worked fine – my room was a comfortable 21 degrees C or 70 degrees F.  Then one night, my thermostat decided I was too cold.  After a lousy night’s sleep, I woke up to 25 degrees C or 77 degrees F.  I pushed every button on that thermostat, turned it off and on, even downloaded the manual from the Internet and actually read it, but no luck. And, of course, the hotel front desk and engineering staff was of no use.  They came up and pushed the same buttons I did – and got the same results.</li>\r\n	<li>Their suggestion – open a window.  Which would’ve been a reasonable one if the Beijing air wasn’t so polluted.  As it was, with the thermostat turned off, the outside air began to leak into the room. I could taste the pollution in my mouth when I walked into my room.</li>\r\n	<li>Maybe I’m a wimp, but after 3 days of this, I would’ve happily traded the flat screen TV and its 2 English-language channels for a working thermostat.</li>\r\n	<li>It’s pretty common sense – first and foremost I want my hotel room to be comfortable. It kinda goes back to Maslow’s hierarchy – you have to meet my basic physiological needs – the right room temperature, a good night’s sleep, a decent shower – before I can begin to think about the self-actualizing potential of half-a-dozen channels of high-def sports programming.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917626811171154.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #97</li>\r\n	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from the <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/\">Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\r\n	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_97.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #97 — 1st Trip to Beijing; Most Important Hotel Technology','','inherit','closed','closed','','913-revision-v1','','','2016-07-02 13:05:54','2016-07-02 18:05:54','',913,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/07/02/913-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1629,1,'2016-07-07 22:45:32','2016-07-08 03:45:32','[caption id=\"attachment_1632\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/IMG_0324.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1632\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/IMG_0324-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Spring Break in Iceland\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> Spring Break in Iceland[/caption]\n\nWatching Iceland makes its Cinderella run in the Euro 2016 soccer tourney got me thinking back to my March trip there. It is one of the hot travel destinations -- maybe too hot? Could be, but the descriptor I keep coming back to is \"dramatic.\" And it seems that on every trip I make out of the country, I get surprised by the amount of data my iPhone consumes -- in spite of flipping every Settings switch I can find. All this and more at the&nbsp;<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_122.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n<hr>\n\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #122:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you once again from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, on a week off of the road. I hate to say “a rare week”, but looking at my calendar, it is. For the first half of the year -- 26 weeks -- I didn’t get in an airplane during 2 of them. This week, the first of the second half of the year, is my 3rd non-travel week. Now absolutely some of them are self-inflicted -- 2 to be exact -- one week in Spain and one in Portugal. That’s an intense travel schedule, even for me. I usually find a way to take a break at least once every 6 weeks, but it just hasn’t worked out that way this year so far. Sometimes you control your schedule, while other times it controls you. I’m definitely been on the wrong end of the leash since January.</li>\n 	<li>Since the last episode, I’ve been traveling pretty much exclusively between Chicago and Charlottesville, VA. Now Charlottesville is a nice town, but it’s a pain to get to every week. The first direct flight from Chicago leaves around 11:30am, landing around 2pm -- not exactly convenient for the business traveler. Other earlier options are to fly into Washington-Dulles and drive for 2 hrs, or fly into Richmond and drive an hour and a half. What I’ve found myself doing for the past couple of weeks is flying in Sunday night -- which I absolutely hate -- on direct flight that leaves Chicago around 9:45pm, lands in Charlottesville around half past midnight and puts me into my hotel around 1am. There just doesn’t seem to be an easy way around this one.</li>\n 	<li>At least the flights back home are convenient -- 3:15 and 6:30pm. And it’s not a crowded airport. I think last week was the longest TSA line I hit -- 3 people were in front of me.</li>\n 	<li>And as I start to think about a September trip to Scotland to take our daughter back to University, I’m taking advantage of the post-Brexit exchange rate to stock my Revolut account with some much cheaper pounds. Though it’ll be another week on the road, I’ll be significantly upgrading my Scotch choices.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/hisboyelroy/430\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Revolve</a> mix</em> by His Boy Elroy</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Last week’s attack at Istanbul’s Ataturk airport begs the same question as March’s Brussels bombings -- does more airport security actually make us safer or just move the target around? I said in the<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/05/30/podcast-121-tsa-lines-my-luggage-is-where/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"> last episode</a> that the long TSA lines on the land side of security caused by stricter TSA inspections weren’t making the traveler any safer. Instead, they were make us less safe/more vulnerable to a Brussels or Istanbul-style attack. And while the TSA has fixed (at least for now) some of the worst lines, the issue is going to pop up again. And someone is going to suggest -- again -- that they move the security perimeter back -- say, checking itineraries and IDs at the terminal door like they do in India? The justification will be that a little bit more inconvenience is more than worth the price of safety. But, if they don’t staff it right (which was and will alway be the core problem), all you’ve done is just move the target -- the line of passengers -- out by another 1,000 feet. It’s less about location and more about execution. And given the TSA’s track record of execution over the past 15 years, I’m not optimistic that they’ll get to the right answer.</li>\n 	<li>I got a e-mail a few weeks ago that my 5-year Global Entry membership expires on my birthday this December. I don’t know exactly when Customs and Border Patrol started Global Entry, but 5 years ago, I was one of the early adopters. Back then, there weren’t that many interview centers. I was lucky that Chicago had one, but I had colleagues in Phoenix who had to fly up to Las Vegas for interviews. The renew process was pretty easy. I logged into GOES -- Global Online Enrollment Systems -- clicked the blue Renew Membership button and then cycled through all the profile screens -- but this time the screens were pre-populated so I only had to make updates. In my case, it was updating my job history for my current job and, the toughest part, entering all the countries I’d visited in the past 5 years. Normally, this would be pretty simple -- thumb through your passport pages and write down the country stamps. However, back in 2012, my backpack with my passport was stolen while on the train from Brussels city center to the airport -- a fun time I recount in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/05/20/podcast-98-stolen-luggage-restaurants-want-your-smartphone/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">episode 98</a>. Luckily, I do a decent job of cataloging travel pics. Flipping through 2011 reminded me that we’d visited Venice that year and that I’d traveled there by train from Paris after a couple of days of customer meeting. The renewal cost is $100 -- $20/year is worth the price. Even more so when it’s free -- I charged it on my Amex Platinum card and immediately saw a $100 statement credit. Now I’m checking GOES every couple of days to see if Customs just waves my renewal through or if I have to talk again to the nice people in the bowels of ORD Terminal 5. I’m hoping that with the crush of new PreCheck applications, they’ll take the easy route.</li>\n 	<li>And as we’ve talked about before, I’m not really sure why anyone would sign up for PreCheck instead of Global Entry. Global Entry is just $15 more -- $100 instead of $85 -- the price of a beer at ORD.</li>\n 	<li>But if you’re not up for the $100 passport check line cut, Arnoud Heijnis, a long time TravelCommons listener, pinged me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> about another option -- the Mobile Passport app from US Customs and Border Patrol. I haven’t used it because I have Global Entry. My wife tried to get my son to download it before his return flight from Reykjavik, but he never got ‘round to it, and he said the early evening lines at ORD weren’t that bad. So while I don’t have any first- or second-hand experience with it, one of the tech writers at WSJ wrote up a <a href=\"http://www.wsj.com/articles/get-through-airport-customs-faster-with-this-free-app-1467221118\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">glowing review</a> of the app a few weeks back. Check out the show notes for a link to the article. And if you’ve tried the Mobile Passport, shoot me a note with your thoughts.</li>\n 	<li>During my flight back home last Weds, we were coming in on approach, you could feel the gradual descent -- slowing, descending, slowing, descending -- and then, all of a sudden, I’m pressed against the back of my seat as the plane rotates in the wrong direction -- up, that is -- and the engines roar with thrust. The experienced travelers know that the pilot had to abort the landing, but those who haven’t gone through this drill before are looking around, wondering “what the hell…?”. After about 5 minutes, the pilot came on “The plane in front of us hit a bird. They have to physically inspect the runway before another plane can land, so we had to fly around. We’ll be down in 10 minutes”. That was a nice announcement. I learned something new -- I didn’t know they had to inspect a runway after a bird strike, though it makes a lot of sense. Too often pilots or gate agents don’t take the time to explain the cause of a delay or a fly around, or don’t want to deal with the follow-up questions that may come -- and so I appreciate those that do. I remember a Southwest flight out of New Orleans. The plane lands -- it was a bit late -- but we’re not boarding right away. You could feel the impatience building in the gate area. The agent got on the PA -- “Sorry for the delay in boarding, but the plane was struck by lightning on its descent. The pilots have to do a physical inspection before we can board”. OK, that makes sense -- and just as you could feel the impatience build, it immediately drained away with that announcement. Maybe it’s because these delays weren’t the airline’s fault -- no negligence or bad judgement on American’s part for a bird strike or Southwest’s for lightning. Bit tougher to suck up when it’s the third delay in a row caused by maintenance issues -- spend some of those record profits on preventative maintenance -- or a missing crew -- maybe you should put a bit more slack in your scheduling. But as always, more transparency is better than vagueness -- even if it’s not the best story for you.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/septahelix/34050\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Earth Soda</a></em> by septahelix</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Data-Hungry Phones</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>I met up with a friend at <a href=\"http://www.empiricalbrewery.com/\">Empirical Brewing</a>, one of 3 microbreweries along Ravenswood Blvd in that Chicago northwest side neighborhood. I hadn’t seen him since he had gotten back from a trip he and his son did to Helsinki, St Petersburg, and Moscow. Among other things, he had problems getting his son’s AT&amp;T iPhone to work in Helsinki. That’s odd, I said. I’ve never had a problem with AT&amp;T’s GSM iPhones in Europe. AT&amp;T told him to reset it, which he did, after which it promptly downloaded a gig and a half of apps and data over the cellular data network. As you might guess, he’s disputing that couple of hundred dollar bill.</li>\n 	<li>I am always surprised at how much data my phone uses when I travel outside of the country. Now I’m sure that one reason for this is that it’s about the only time I look at my data usage since I’m grandfathered into one of the old AT&amp;T unlimited data plans. I don’t know how much I use, and don’t make a big effort to limit it. So when I travel overseas, I get to see my kids live their mobile lives trying to stay under a 300 MB data cap.</li>\n 	<li>International mobile data has gotten a bit cheaper. T-Mobile offers a reasonable unlimited international data plan if you can live with slower 2G-style speeds. I’m not that patient, so I tend to get the AT&amp;T 300 MB package for $60 because it also comes with free access to a decent set of wi-fi hotspots.</li>\n 	<li>Living on a data budget means thinking which apps really need mobile data -- which is not that many. So while I’m sitting on the plane waiting for everyone to board, I pull out my iPhone, go over to Settings | Cellular and start turning off cellular data access for most of my apps. I’m not quite sure why the healthcare flexible spending app or the app that came with my sous vide immersion heater ever need cellular data -- in the US or internationally. Anyhow, I spool through the last, turning most of them off and certainly that damn “Wi-Fi Assist” and then, after I’ve sent my last Snapchat, I hit “Reset Statistics” so I’ll have a clean view of how I’m burning through that 300 MB and then click over to Airplane mode.</li>\n 	<li>And then, when I land, I come out of Airplane mode, go back into Settings | Cellular and turn Roaming On, and catch up on the overnight e-mail while waiting to get off the plane. At some point that morning, I’ll look at the Current Period data usage and see that I’ve burned through, say, 75 MB of my 300 MB -- 25% of my total package -- in the first morning. Holy crap! I immediately dive back into Settings | Cellular and turn off Roaming. What happened?</li>\n 	<li>This is where, on the iPhone, you begin having to spelunk through the mess that the Settings app has become. You scroll down past all the apps you shut off from cellular access and look at the last entry -- “System Services” -- and see that it’s consumed at least half of that 75 MB. What the hell? You click through. Why has this phone used that much data on “Time &amp; Location” or “General” or “iTunes Accounts” (huh? I thought I shut off iTunes in the last screen). This is when you start to dig deep -- Settings | Privacy | Location Service and you find another list of apps -- kinda like the one you used to turn off cellular data, but this one is for accessing your location. Look, as much as I love the Tortas Frontera restaurants in ORD, I’m not sure why their app needs to pull my location information. And then you go to Settings | General | Background App Refresh for yet another list of apps where you shut off their permission to update themselves in the background. And then you go over to Settings | Mail and turn Fetch New Data to Off to keep your iPhone from constantly pinging your Exchange server.</li>\n 	<li>It’s kinda like whack-a-mole, and you’ll be sure to miss something because these phones and the apps we load on them are, for the most part, built on the assumption of ubiquitous unlimited data access. So changing that behavior, those assumptions -- to severely limit the data the phone inhales and exhales -- takes work. Which is why, if we’re going to be somewhere for more than 4-5 days, I’ll invest the hour it takes to find a phone store and $25 per phone to buy a local SIM with a gig or two of data. When I was in Iceland for 4 days in March, it didn’t seem necessary. But when then I flew down to Spain for 8 days, my first stop was the Orange store because I knew my phone couldn’t hold its breath for that long.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music --<em> <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/scottaltham/20747\">Hear Us Now</a></em> by&nbsp;scottaltham</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Dramatic Iceland</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Watching Iceland makes its Cinderella run in the Euro 2016 soccer tourney -- right up until the time they faceplanted into France last weekend -- reminded me of the trip my son and I took in March. Some reaction shots ESPN did from Reykjavik were places we had been -- saw a coffee shop we hit trying to stay awake on our first day, and a square that one of our hotels was on. Not that surprising since downtown Reykjavik isn’t that big. If I’d paid more attention to the people sitting next to me in the bars off that square, I’d have probably recognized some people in those shots too.</li>\n 	<li>Iceland is a hot tourist destination -- especially for people looking for something a bit different. And if I didn’t know already, when the Dorling Kindersley folks sent me review copies of their relaunched <a href=\"http://www.dk.com/us/travel/\">Eyewitness Travel Top 10 Guides</a>, in among the usual suspects -- New York, London, Paris, Barcelona -- was Iceland. In 2015, there were <a href=\"http://www.ferdamalastofa.is/static/files/ferdamalastofa/Frettamyndir/2016/juni/tourism_-in_iceland_in_figures_may2016.pdf\">1.3 million foreign tourists</a> in Iceland -- almost 4 times the population of 329,000 -- and a 29% increase over 2014. It’s a hot destination and getting hotter -- perhaps even to the point of overheating?</li>\n 	<li>Especially with Wow Air, a kinder and quirkier Spirit or Ryan Air, expanding the number of North American gateway cities. We ran into lots of folks who had seen ads for cheap Wow air fares and flew over for a 3 or 4 day weekend on a whim, without really thinking about what to do. We’d see folks walking up and down the downtown shopping and entertainment district in Reykjavik, and then figuring out some day trip bus rides out to the Golden Circle hot spots. And this was in March, not exactly the garden time in Iceland. But there were a lot of folks there. And so in that way, Iceland felt small.</li>\n 	<li>On our second day, we picked up a rental SUV -- a Dacia Duster, a great vehicle -- and headed out of town. Once we got out of Reykjavik’s catchment area, Iceland opened up quickly. The drama of the scenery, the spaces carved out by volcanos and glaciers -- “Land of Fire and Ice” it likes to bill itself -- make it feel much bigger. Of course, you could see this same space from the seat of a tour bus, but I was glad we rented a car. We got off the well-worn paths. Not too far, but when driving across a plain on a 2-lane highway with no traffic to speak of, the vistas did open up in front of us, which made me glad I was able to look forward and enjoy them through the expanse of the front windshield instead of looking off to the side through a motor coach window. And when we did some of the typical stops -- Þingvellir park, Gullfoss waterfall -- we could ride out the ebb and flow of the tour bus traffic, and have these spots pretty much to ourselves, even for just a little while. Or the time when we were driving toward the south coast, running through a series of rain bands -- in and out; in and out. I was starting to get annoyed until I looked out the rear view mirror and saw a huge double rainbow. I immediately pulled into a gas station and got out of the car. The landscape was wide open; we could see that rainbow from end to end. It was a phenomenal sight. And the smoked lamb sandwich we bought afterwards in the gas station wasn’t bad either.</li>\n 	<li>I struggle sometimes when asked about Iceland. Would I recommend it? Reykjavik is nice enough, but it’s a small town. I’m not a museum guy, so there was probably a day-and-a half of stuff for me to do. And Iceland is expensive. I had good fish and lamb, but it wasn’t cheap. And hotel rooms were tight in March, so I gotta figure the country is completely sold out in July and August.</li>\n 	<li>But the scenery outside of Reykjavik, I keep coming back to that word “dramatic”. I’m not sure it does it justice, but it’s all I got. If you get a car, then the trip starts to make sense.</li>\n 	<li>Well, that and the fermented shark chased with shots of brennivín -- Icelandic schnapps -- because, I dunno, how can you not?</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #122</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from the <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">ccMixter</a> site</li>\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_122.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #122 — Data-Hungry Phones; Dramatic Iceland','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-122-data-hungry-phones-dramatic-iceland','','','2021-09-22 12:48:36','2021-09-22 17:48:36','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=1629',0,'post','',0),
(1630,1,'2016-07-07 21:49:06','2016-07-08 02:49:06','Where do guidebooks fit in the world of apps, review websites, social media, and podcasts? Planning for a trip to Iceland got me thinking about how to make sense of the explosion of travel tips. And then, after giving my thoughts about my new <a href=\"http://bluesmart.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Bluesmart </a>\"smart connected suitcase\", I talk about how idiosyncratic frequent travelers are about packing strategies and their choice of suitcases. There\'s also follow-up about foreign exchange apps, and listener comments about digital travel security and Spirit Airlines\' growth. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_122.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/251667522\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #122:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you once again from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, on a week off of the road. I hate to say “a rare week”, but looking at my calendar, it is. For the first half of the year -- 26 weeks -- I didn’t get in an airplane during 2 of them. This week, the first of the second half of the year, is my 3rd non-travel week. Now absolutely some of them are self-inflicted -- 2 to be exact -- one week in Spain and one in Portugal. That’s an intense travel schedule, even for me. I usually find a way to take a break at least once every 6 weeks, but it just hasn’t worked out that way this year so far. Sometimes you control your schedule, while other times it controls you. I’m definitely been on the wrong end of the leash since January.</li>\r\n 	<li>Since the last episode, I’ve been traveling pretty much exclusively between Chicago and Charlottesville, VA. Now Charlottesville is a nice town, but it’s a pain to get to every week. The first direct flight from Chicago leaves around 11:30am, landing around 2pm -- not exactly convenient for the business traveler. Other earlier options are to fly into Washington-Dulles and drive for 2 hrs, or fly into Richmond and drive an hour and a half. What I’ve found myself doing for the past couple of weeks is flying in Sunday night -- which I absolutely hate -- on direct flight that leaves Chicago around 9:45pm, lands in Charlottesville around half past midnight and puts me into my hotel around 1am. There just doesn’t seem to be an easy way around this one.</li>\r\n 	<li>At least the flights back home are convenient -- 3:15 and 6:30pm. And it’s not a crowded airport. I think last week was the longest TSA line I hit -- 3 people were in front of me.</li>\r\n 	<li>And as I start to think about a September trip to Scotland to take our daughter back to University, I’m taking advantage of the post-Brexit exchange rate to stock my Revolut account with some much cheaper pounds. Though it’ll be another week on the road, I’ll be significantly upgrading my Scotch choices.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/seldon-circles/\"><em>Making Circles</em></a> by the Seldon Plan</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Last week’s attack at Istanbul’s Ataturk airport begs the same question as March’s Brussels bombings -- does more airport security actually make us safer or just move the target around? I said in the<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/05/30/podcast-121-tsa-lines-my-luggage-is-where/\" target=\"_blank\"> last episode</a> that the long TSA lines on the land side of security caused by stricter TSA inspections weren’t making the traveler any safer. Instead, they were make us less safe/more vulnerable to a Brussels or Istanbul-style attack. And while the TSA has fixed (at least for now) some of the worst lines, the issue is going to pop up again. And someone is going to suggest -- again -- that they move the security perimeter back -- say, checking itineraries and IDs at the terminal door like they do in India? The justification will be that a little bit more inconvenience is more than worth the price of safety. But, if they don’t staff it right (which was and will alway be the core problem), all you’ve done is just move the target -- the line of passengers -- out by another 1,000 feet. It’s less about location and more about execution. And given the TSA’s track record of execution over the past 15 years, I’m not optimistic that they’ll get to the right answer.</li>\r\n 	<li>I got a e-mail a few weeks ago that my 5-year Global Entry membership expires on my birthday this December. I don’t know exactly when Customs and Border Patrol started Global Entry, but 5 years ago, I was one of the early adopters. Back then, there weren’t that many interview centers. I was lucky that Chicago had one, but I had colleagues in Phoenix who had to fly up to Las Vegas for interviews. The renew process was pretty easy. I logged into GOES -- Global Online Enrollment Systems -- clicked the blue Renew Membership button and then cycled through all the profile screens -- but this time the screens were pre-populated so I only had to make updates. In my case, it was updating my job history for my current job and, the toughest part, entering all the countries I’d visited in the past 5 years. Normally, this would be pretty simple -- thumb through your passport pages and write down the country stamps. However, back in 2012, my backpack with my passport was stolen while on the train from Brussels city center to the airport -- a fun time I recount in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/05/20/podcast-98-stolen-luggage-restaurants-want-your-smartphone/\" target=\"_blank\">episode 98</a>. Luckily, I do a decent job of cataloging travel pics. Flipping through 2011 reminded me that we’d visited Venice that year and that I’d traveled there by train from Paris after a couple of days of customer meeting. The renewal cost is $100 -- $20/year is worth the price. Even more so when it’s free -- I charged it on my Amex Platinum card and immediately saw a $100 statement credit. Now I’m checking GOES every couple of days to see if Customs just waves my renewal through or if I have to talk again to the nice people in the bowels of ORD Terminal 5. I’m hoping that with the crush of new PreCheck applications, they’ll take the easy route.</li>\r\n 	<li>And as we’ve talked about before, I’m not really sure why anyone would sign up for PreCheck instead of Global Entry. Global Entry is just $15 more -- $100 instead of $85 -- the price of a beer at ORD.</li>\r\n 	<li>But if you’re not up for the $100 passport check line cut, Arnoud Heijnis, a long time TravelCommons listener, pinged me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> about another option -- the Mobile Passport app from US Customs and Border Patrol. I haven’t used it because I have Global Entry. My wife tried to get my son to download it before his return flight from Reykjavik, but he never got ‘round to it, and he said the early evening lines at ORD weren’t that bad. So while I don’t have any first- or second-hand experience with it, one of the tech writers at WSJ wrote up a <a href=\"http://www.wsj.com/articles/get-through-airport-customs-faster-with-this-free-app-1467221118\" target=\"_blank\">glowing review</a> of the app a few weeks back. Check out the show notes for a link to the article. And if you’ve tried the Mobile Passport, shoot me a note with your thoughts.</li>\r\n 	<li>During my flight back home last Weds, we were coming in on approach, you could feel the gradual descent -- slowing, descending, slowing, descending -- and then, all of a sudden, I’m pressed against the back of my seat as the plane rotates in the wrong direction -- up, that is -- and the engines roar with thrust. The experienced travelers know that the pilot had to abort the landing, but those who haven’t gone through this drill before are looking around, wondering “what the hell…?”. After about 5 minutes, the pilot came on “The plane in front of us hit a bird. They have to physically inspect the runway before another plane can land, so we had to fly around. We’ll be down in 10 minutes”. That was a nice announcement. I learned something new -- I didn’t know they had to inspect a runway after a bird strike, though it makes a lot of sense. Too often pilots or gate agents don’t take the time to explain the cause of a delay or a fly around, or don’t want to deal with the follow-up questions that may come -- and so I appreciate those that do. I remember a Southwest flight out of New Orleans. The plane lands -- it was a bit late -- but we’re not boarding right away. You could feel the impatience building in the gate area. The agent got on the PA -- “Sorry for the delay in boarding, but the plane was struck by lightning on its descent. The pilots have to do a physical inspection before we can board”. OK, that makes sense -- and just as you could feel the impatience build, it immediately drained away with that announcement. Maybe it’s because these delays weren’t the airline’s fault -- no negligence or bad judgement on American’s part for a bird strike or Southwest’s for lightning. Bit tougher to suck up when it’s the third delay in a row caused by maintenance issues -- spend some of those record profits on preventative maintenance -- or a missing crew -- maybe you should put a bit more slack in your scheduling. But as always, more transparency is better than vagueness -- even if it’s not the best story for you.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/eliyahu-wind/\">Oh Yeah</a></em> by Eliyahu Sills</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Data-Hungry Phones</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>As I mentioned in the opening, my son and I are hitting Iceland in a couple of weeks for a 4-day weekend. We’ve never been before, so I needed to figure out what to do and where to stay. Right about then, someone from what I used to know as Dorling Kindersley -- now shortened to DK -- pinged me about the February relaunch of <a href=\"http://www.dk.com/us/travel/\" target=\"_blank\">DK’s Eyewitness Travel Top 10 Guides</a> -- one of the first 10 is for Iceland. It started me thinking about where guidebooks fit in these days of in the world of apps (Yelp, Foursquare, Untappd), podcasts (Amateur Traveler, Indie Travel Podcast), websites (TripAdvisor), newspaper articles (NYTimes’ <a href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/22/travel/36-hours-in-reykjavik.html\" target=\"_blank\">36 Hours in Reykjavik</a>) and friends’ social media posts on Facebook and Instagram.</li>\r\n 	<li>When I want to torture my kids, I do the “when I was young…” thing. But going back to our honeymoon 25 years ago (this November -- need to get on that planning!), I cashed in a slug of British Airways miles to fly us first class to Pisa for a touring holiday in Tuscany. The only plans I had made were to rent a car (a Fiat Panda) and book our first night’s room (via Telex) in Lucca. We ran the rest of the vacation off of a set of Michelin guides -- the red one to find hotels and restaurants and the green one to figure out what to see. Between those and reading “A Room With A View”, we were set. We exchanged American Express travelers checks at the bank for lira, took pictures on Kodak and Fuji film, navigated using a paper maps… Whoops, got off track a bit there. I think my kids are somewhere screaming “Stop!”</li>\r\n 	<li>I think like everybody, I start with a Google search -- “What to do in Iceland in March”, limit the results to the last 2 years and start clicking. Lots of articles from UK papers (I think because of Wow Air, the Icelandic version of Spirit or EasyJet, flying into London Gatwick) which I clip over to Evernote using their nifty little Chrome extension. Then I narrow the search down to specific interests -- like “Iceland craft beer” and a few more article get sync’d to Evernote. I stack up a bunch of facts -- a sort of <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointillism\" target=\"_blank\">pointillist </a>view of what to do in Iceland.</li>\r\n 	<li>Every survey about how people go about travel planning will tell you that personal recommendations are the far and away the most important source of travel planning information. Which makes sense -- you know the person, how their interests, ways of travel align with yours. We have good friends that we’ll take restaurant recommendations from, but not hotels. We share the same tastes in interesting food, but they like to stay in hotels with nice pools. We’re tend to stay a bit more “closer to ground” -- choosing vacation rentals over the Westin resort.</li>\r\n 	<li>And once people find that you travel a lot and to different/interesting places, you get hit up -- a lot -- for recommendations. Friend and long-time T/C listener Allan Marko curates a set of notes for his favorite European cities, places like Paris, that he regularly e-mails out. After a couple of visits to Spain, I’ve taken it to the next level of geekdom -- embedding my recommendations on a Google Map page and sending out the URL. For this trip, a friend from work sent me the itinerary she and her family did last summer. Not sure that she and her husband would be search out craft beer bars with 2 young kids in tow, but I did take her recommendation for the Hotel Geysir at the top of the Golden Circle route, and hitting the Blue Lagoon on the way back to the airport.</li>\r\n 	<li>I like The NY Times’ 36 Hours and United Airlines’ 3 Perfect Days series. They’re focused on the long weekend getaway -- if you have a limited amount of time, here’s what to do. These are the sorts of articles we used to rip out of the Sunday travel section of the local newspaper or a travel magazine and stash in a travel folder. The Internet has shifted that behavior just a bit -- we now search for them when we right when we need them. Perhaps more for travel planning than for inspiration, but they serve the same purpose as the green Michelin guide did for our honeymoon -- a curated list of things you ought to see.</li>\r\n 	<li>The DK Top 10 Iceland guide seems to fit into this “hit the highlights” mode -- top 10 highlights by region and by thing (top 10 churches, waterfalls, volcanoes, bars, cheap restaurants…), 2-day and 7-day itineraries, which is nice because the 36 Hours in Reykjavik article I pulled up was from 2013, maybe on the ragged edge of up-to-dateness. And the DK guide has everything nicely packaged, which I remember from the Dorling Kindersley books of old -- all the lists in one place wrapped in a sturdy cover that has fold-out maps in the front (Iceland) and the back (downtown Reykjavik) -- which is handy if you didn’t plan ahead and cache Google Maps data before leaving the hotel wi-fi bubble.</li>\r\n 	<li>There’s another kind of guidebook that I’ll use, though I couldn’t find one for Iceland. They’re less about lists and more about stories -- think Bill Bryson’s <em>Notes from a Small Island</em> about the UK, or more recently, <em><a href=\"http://roadsandkingdoms.com/store/rice-noodle-fish-book/\" target=\"_blank\">Rice Noodle Fish</a></em> an Anthony Bourdain book by Matt Goulding (whatever that means) about Japan. I read those more before I travel than packing them in my bag. They’re about context/texture -- kinda like what “Room With A View” was for us about Florence 25 years ago -- that prepare rather than guide you, and maybe give you a bit more appreciation when you’re running through those Top 10 Highlights lists.</li>\r\n 	<li>Maybe it comes down to the kind of reader you are -- are you someone that likes things more tangible than electronic. Do you like to flip pages rather than screens? The Kindle cannibalized a good-sized chunk of the demand for physical books, but didn’t replace it. Just like overall book market, recent numbers show the demand for physical guide books has stabilized albeit at a lower level. I sorta split the difference. I like paging through my Evernote virtual travel folder when I’m back at the room, but like to have a physical map and list when I’m out walking during the day. Maybe that physicality keeps me more engaged with where I am. Or at least looking up and forward, which should help keep me avoid that new travelers’ epidemic -- Death by GPS.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music --<em> <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/liquid-seventythree/\" target=\"_blank\">Is That Called Love</a> </em></em>by Liquid Zen</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>I Hate Shopping for Suitcases</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I’ve been traveling for a few months now with the <a href=\"http://bluesmart.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Bluesmart </a>suitcase. I’ve mentioned it in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/08/26/podcast-116-traveling-thru-japan-luggage-trends/\" target=\"_blank\">a past episode</a> when I pre-ordered it through their Indiegogo campaign. And now that they’re shipping, they’re making a lot of Top Traveler Gadget lists.</li>\r\n 	<li>It claims to be the first piece of “smart” luggage to hit the market. It pairs with my iPhone through Bluetooth. It automatically locks when I step away from it and then unlocks itself when I return. It has a built-in battery to power itself and charge personal electronics through a couple of USB ports. It also periodically sends out its location when I can then check through the iPhone app. And it has a cool front light that glows blue when it’s paired with my phone.</li>\r\n 	<li>Aside from all the electronics, it’s a hard-shell wheelie bag with nice-sized wheels that roll easily -- sometimes too easily. It fits perfectly into American’s and United’s luggage sizers -- at least the ones in Boston Logan airport. (Some blogger who reviewed the bag raised a bit of a ruckus saying that the bag dimensions on the website were too big for carry-on. I guess he doesn’t travel enough to go an airport and check it out himself). The iPhone app is getting better -- Bluesmart is doing a nice job of reving the app frequently to stomp bugs, though the location alerts -- “You’re leaving me behind” are still a bit wonky.</li>\r\n 	<li>All in all, it’s a nice enough bag. I had been thinking about getting something a bit smaller for 1-2 night trips and this fits the bill. I’m kinda “meh” on all the electronics. The large battery is fine, but I already carry a recharger in my backpack that will top up my iPhone or tablet a couple of times -- good enough and more accessible in-flight. The location functionality seems to work only when I press the button to “wake up” the bag -- which means I’m right beside my bag and know its location. And since it’s the perfect carry-on size, it’s usually right above me in the plane cabin. So it’s a nice enough hard-shell wheelie bag with a couple of bells and whistles that don’t necessarily wow me.</li>\r\n 	<li>Which shouldn’t be interpreted as a knock against Bluesmart. I’m sure there are a number of travelers who love every one of those bells and whistles. It’s not so much a criticism about Bluesmart as it is how personal and idiosyncratic frequent travelers are about suitcases. It’s gotta fit your packing strategies, which are also very idiosyncratic. Some people love compartments to help them structure their packing. Me? I’m all about the flexibility of a single open space -- I build my own structure with shoes and different kinds of clothes depending on the trip. And even though I see more and more hard-shell bags -- and now own one, I’m not completely sold on it. I still like the ability to bulge when I need to. And the two- vs. four-wheel thing. Pushing a 4-wheel through the airport seems easier on my wrist, but sometimes they roll too easily and won’t stay put. It’s the reason I’ve been walking around with a ripped backpack for 4 months -- I really hate shopping for travel bags. And am very happy that leather wallets last a really long time.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #120</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/\">Podshow Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_122.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #121 — Data-Hungry Phones; Dramatic Iceland I Hate Shopping for Suitcases','','inherit','closed','closed','','1629-revision-v1','','','2016-07-07 21:49:06','2016-07-08 02:49:06','',1629,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/07/07/1629-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1631,1,'2016-07-07 21:56:18','2016-07-08 02:56:18','Where do guidebooks fit in the world of apps, review websites, social media, and podcasts? Planning for a trip to Iceland got me thinking about how to make sense of the explosion of travel tips. And then, after giving my thoughts about my new <a href=\"http://bluesmart.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Bluesmart </a>\"smart connected suitcase\", I talk about how idiosyncratic frequent travelers are about packing strategies and their choice of suitcases. There\'s also follow-up about foreign exchange apps, and listener comments about digital travel security and Spirit Airlines\' growth. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_122.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/251667522\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #122:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you once again from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, on a week off of the road. I hate to say “a rare week”, but looking at my calendar, it is. For the first half of the year -- 26 weeks -- I didn’t get in an airplane during 2 of them. This week, the first of the second half of the year, is my 3rd non-travel week. Now absolutely some of them are self-inflicted -- 2 to be exact -- one week in Spain and one in Portugal. That’s an intense travel schedule, even for me. I usually find a way to take a break at least once every 6 weeks, but it just hasn’t worked out that way this year so far. Sometimes you control your schedule, while other times it controls you. I’m definitely been on the wrong end of the leash since January.</li>\r\n 	<li>Since the last episode, I’ve been traveling pretty much exclusively between Chicago and Charlottesville, VA. Now Charlottesville is a nice town, but it’s a pain to get to every week. The first direct flight from Chicago leaves around 11:30am, landing around 2pm -- not exactly convenient for the business traveler. Other earlier options are to fly into Washington-Dulles and drive for 2 hrs, or fly into Richmond and drive an hour and a half. What I’ve found myself doing for the past couple of weeks is flying in Sunday night -- which I absolutely hate -- on direct flight that leaves Chicago around 9:45pm, lands in Charlottesville around half past midnight and puts me into my hotel around 1am. There just doesn’t seem to be an easy way around this one.</li>\r\n 	<li>At least the flights back home are convenient -- 3:15 and 6:30pm. And it’s not a crowded airport. I think last week was the longest TSA line I hit -- 3 people were in front of me.</li>\r\n 	<li>And as I start to think about a September trip to Scotland to take our daughter back to University, I’m taking advantage of the post-Brexit exchange rate to stock my Revolut account with some much cheaper pounds. Though it’ll be another week on the road, I’ll be significantly upgrading my Scotch choices.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/seldon-circles/\"><em>Making Circles</em></a> by the Seldon Plan</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Last week’s attack at Istanbul’s Ataturk airport begs the same question as March’s Brussels bombings -- does more airport security actually make us safer or just move the target around? I said in the<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/05/30/podcast-121-tsa-lines-my-luggage-is-where/\" target=\"_blank\"> last episode</a> that the long TSA lines on the land side of security caused by stricter TSA inspections weren’t making the traveler any safer. Instead, they were make us less safe/more vulnerable to a Brussels or Istanbul-style attack. And while the TSA has fixed (at least for now) some of the worst lines, the issue is going to pop up again. And someone is going to suggest -- again -- that they move the security perimeter back -- say, checking itineraries and IDs at the terminal door like they do in India? The justification will be that a little bit more inconvenience is more than worth the price of safety. But, if they don’t staff it right (which was and will alway be the core problem), all you’ve done is just move the target -- the line of passengers -- out by another 1,000 feet. It’s less about location and more about execution. And given the TSA’s track record of execution over the past 15 years, I’m not optimistic that they’ll get to the right answer.</li>\r\n 	<li>I got a e-mail a few weeks ago that my 5-year Global Entry membership expires on my birthday this December. I don’t know exactly when Customs and Border Patrol started Global Entry, but 5 years ago, I was one of the early adopters. Back then, there weren’t that many interview centers. I was lucky that Chicago had one, but I had colleagues in Phoenix who had to fly up to Las Vegas for interviews. The renew process was pretty easy. I logged into GOES -- Global Online Enrollment Systems -- clicked the blue Renew Membership button and then cycled through all the profile screens -- but this time the screens were pre-populated so I only had to make updates. In my case, it was updating my job history for my current job and, the toughest part, entering all the countries I’d visited in the past 5 years. Normally, this would be pretty simple -- thumb through your passport pages and write down the country stamps. However, back in 2012, my backpack with my passport was stolen while on the train from Brussels city center to the airport -- a fun time I recount in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/05/20/podcast-98-stolen-luggage-restaurants-want-your-smartphone/\" target=\"_blank\">episode 98</a>. Luckily, I do a decent job of cataloging travel pics. Flipping through 2011 reminded me that we’d visited Venice that year and that I’d traveled there by train from Paris after a couple of days of customer meeting. The renewal cost is $100 -- $20/year is worth the price. Even more so when it’s free -- I charged it on my Amex Platinum card and immediately saw a $100 statement credit. Now I’m checking GOES every couple of days to see if Customs just waves my renewal through or if I have to talk again to the nice people in the bowels of ORD Terminal 5. I’m hoping that with the crush of new PreCheck applications, they’ll take the easy route.</li>\r\n 	<li>And as we’ve talked about before, I’m not really sure why anyone would sign up for PreCheck instead of Global Entry. Global Entry is just $15 more -- $100 instead of $85 -- the price of a beer at ORD.</li>\r\n 	<li>But if you’re not up for the $100 passport check line cut, Arnoud Heijnis, a long time TravelCommons listener, pinged me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> about another option -- the Mobile Passport app from US Customs and Border Patrol. I haven’t used it because I have Global Entry. My wife tried to get my son to download it before his return flight from Reykjavik, but he never got ‘round to it, and he said the early evening lines at ORD weren’t that bad. So while I don’t have any first- or second-hand experience with it, one of the tech writers at WSJ wrote up a <a href=\"http://www.wsj.com/articles/get-through-airport-customs-faster-with-this-free-app-1467221118\" target=\"_blank\">glowing review</a> of the app a few weeks back. Check out the show notes for a link to the article. And if you’ve tried the Mobile Passport, shoot me a note with your thoughts.</li>\r\n 	<li>During my flight back home last Weds, we were coming in on approach, you could feel the gradual descent -- slowing, descending, slowing, descending -- and then, all of a sudden, I’m pressed against the back of my seat as the plane rotates in the wrong direction -- up, that is -- and the engines roar with thrust. The experienced travelers know that the pilot had to abort the landing, but those who haven’t gone through this drill before are looking around, wondering “what the hell…?”. After about 5 minutes, the pilot came on “The plane in front of us hit a bird. They have to physically inspect the runway before another plane can land, so we had to fly around. We’ll be down in 10 minutes”. That was a nice announcement. I learned something new -- I didn’t know they had to inspect a runway after a bird strike, though it makes a lot of sense. Too often pilots or gate agents don’t take the time to explain the cause of a delay or a fly around, or don’t want to deal with the follow-up questions that may come -- and so I appreciate those that do. I remember a Southwest flight out of New Orleans. The plane lands -- it was a bit late -- but we’re not boarding right away. You could feel the impatience building in the gate area. The agent got on the PA -- “Sorry for the delay in boarding, but the plane was struck by lightning on its descent. The pilots have to do a physical inspection before we can board”. OK, that makes sense -- and just as you could feel the impatience build, it immediately drained away with that announcement. Maybe it’s because these delays weren’t the airline’s fault -- no negligence or bad judgement on American’s part for a bird strike or Southwest’s for lightning. Bit tougher to suck up when it’s the third delay in a row caused by maintenance issues -- spend some of those record profits on preventative maintenance -- or a missing crew -- maybe you should put a bit more slack in your scheduling. But as always, more transparency is better than vagueness -- even if it’s not the best story for you.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/eliyahu-wind/\">Oh Yeah</a></em> by Eliyahu Sills</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Data-Hungry Phones</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I met up with a friend at <a href=\"http://www.empiricalbrewery.com/\">Empirical Brewing</a>, one of 3 microbreweries along Ravenswood Blvd in that Chicago northwest side neighborhood. I hadn’t seen him since he had gotten back from a trip he and his son did to Helsinki, St Petersburg, and Moscow. Among other things, he had problems getting his son’s AT&amp;T iPhone to work in Helsinki. That’s odd, I said. I’ve never had a problem with AT&amp;T’s GSM iPhones in Europe. AT&amp;T told him to reset it, which he did, after which it promptly downloaded a gig and a half of apps and data over the cellular data network. As you might guess, he’s disputing that couple of hundred dollar bill.</li>\r\n 	<li>I am always surprised at how much data my phone uses when I travel outside of the country. Now I’m sure that one reason for this is that it’s about the only time I look at my data usage since I’m grandfathered into one of the old AT&amp;T unlimited data plans. I don’t know how much I use, and don’t make a big effort to limit it. So when I travel overseas, I get to see my kids live their mobile lives trying to stay under a 300 MB data cap.</li>\r\n 	<li>International mobile data has gotten a bit cheaper. T-Mobile offers a reasonable unlimited international data plan if you can live with slower 2G-style speeds. I’m not that patient, so I tend to get the AT&amp;T 300 MB package for $60 because it also comes with free access to a decent set of wi-fi hotspots.</li>\r\n 	<li>Living on a data budget means thinking which apps really need mobile data -- which is not that many. So while I’m sitting on the plane waiting for everyone to board, I pull out my iPhone, go over to Settings | Cellular and start turning off cellular data access for most of my apps. I’m not quite sure why the healthcare flexible spending app or the app that came with my sous vide immersion heater ever need cellular data -- in the US or internationally. Anyhow, I spool through the last, turning most of them off and certainly that damn “Wi-Fi Assist” and then, after I’ve sent my last Snapchat, I hit “Reset Statistics” so I’ll have a clean view of how I’m burning through that 300 MB and then click over to Airplane mode.</li>\r\n 	<li>And then, when I land, I come out of Airplane mode, go back into Settings | Cellular and turn Roaming On, and catch up on the overnight e-mail while waiting to get off the plane. At some point that morning, I’ll look at the Current Period data usage and see that I’ve burned through, say, 75 MB of my 300 MB -- 25% of my total package -- in the first morning. Holy crap! I immediately dive back into Settings | Cellular and turn off Roaming. What happened?</li>\r\n 	<li>This is where, on the iPhone, you begin having to spelunk through the mess that the Settings app has become. You scroll down past all the apps you shut off from cellular access and look at the last entry -- “System Services” -- and see that it’s consumed at least half of that 75 MB. What the hell? You click through. Why has this phone used that much data on “Time &amp; Location” or “General” or “iTunes Accounts” (huh? I thought I shut off iTunes in the last screen). This is when you start to dig deep -- Settings | Privacy | Location Service and you find another list of apps -- kinda like the one you used to turn off cellular data, but this one is for accessing your location. Look, as much as I love the Tortas Frontera restaurants in ORD, I’m not sure why their app needs to pull my location information. And then you go to Settings | General | Background App Refresh for yet another list of apps where you shut off their permission to update themselves in the background. And then you go over to Settings | Mail and turn Fetch New Data to Off to keep your iPhone from constantly pinging your Exchange server.</li>\r\n 	<li>It’s kinda like whack-a-mole, and you’ll be sure to miss something because these phones and the apps we load on them are, for the most part, built on the assumption of ubiquitous unlimited data access. So changing that behavior, those assumptions -- to severely limit the data the phone inhales and exhales -- takes work. Which is why, if we’re going to be somewhere for more than 4-5 days, I’ll invest the hour it takes to find a phone store and $25 per phone to buy a local SIM with a gig or two of data. When I was in Iceland for 4 days in March, it didn’t seem necessary. But when then I flew down to Spain for 8 days, my first stop was the Orange store because I knew my phone couldn’t hold its breath for that long.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music --<em> <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/liquid-seventythree/\" target=\"_blank\">Is That Called Love</a> </em></em>by Liquid Zen</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Dramatic Iceland</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Watching Iceland makes its Cinderella run in the Euro 2016 soccer tourney -- right up until the time they faceplanted into France last weekend -- reminded me of the trip my son and I took in March. Some reaction shots ESPN did from Reykjavik were places we had been -- saw a coffee shop we hit trying to stay awake on our first day, and a square that one of our hotels was on. Not that surprising since downtown Reykjavik isn’t that big. If I’d paid more attention to the people sitting next to me in the bars off that square, I’d have probably recognized some people in those shots too.</li>\r\n 	<li>Iceland is a hot tourist destination -- especially for people looking for something a bit different. And if I didn’t know already, when the Dorling Kindersley folks sent me review copies of their relaunched <a href=\"http://www.dk.com/us/travel/\">Eyewitness Travel Top 10 Guides</a>, in among the usual suspects -- New York, London, Paris, Barcelona -- was Iceland. In 2015, there were <a href=\"http://www.ferdamalastofa.is/static/files/ferdamalastofa/Frettamyndir/2016/juni/tourism_-in_iceland_in_figures_may2016.pdf\">1.3 million foreign tourists</a> in Iceland -- almost 4 times the population of 329,000 -- and a 29% increase over 2014. It’s a hot destination and getting hotter -- perhaps even to the point of overheating?</li>\r\n 	<li>Especially with Wow Air, a kinder and quirkier Spirit or Ryan Air, expanding the number of North American gateway cities. We ran into lots of folks who had seen ads for cheap Wow air fares and flew over for a 3 or 4 day weekend on a whim, without really thinking about what to do. We’d see folks walking up and down the downtown shopping and entertainment district in Reykjavik, and then figuring out some day trip bus rides out to the Golden Circle hot spots. And this was in March, not exactly the garden time in Iceland. But there were a lot of folks there. And so in that way, Iceland felt small.</li>\r\n 	<li>On our second day, we picked up a rental SUV -- a Dacia Duster, a great vehicle -- and headed out of town. Once we got out of Reykjavik’s catchment area, Iceland opened up quickly. The drama of the scenery, the spaces carved out by volcanos and glaciers -- “Land of Fire and Ice” it likes to bill itself -- make it feel much bigger. Of course, you could see this same space from the seat of a tour bus, but I was glad we rented a car. We got off the well-worn paths. Not too far, but when driving across a plain on a 2-lane highway with no traffic to speak of, the vistas did open up in front of us, which made me glad I was able to look forward and enjoy them through the expanse of the front windshield instead of looking off to the side through a motor coach window. And when we did some of the typical stops -- Þingvellir park, Gullfoss waterfall -- we could ride out the ebb and flow of the tour bus traffic, and have these spots pretty much to ourselves, even for just a little while. Or the time when we were driving toward the south coast, running through a series of rain bands -- in and out; in and out. I was starting to get annoyed until I looked out the rear view mirror and saw a huge double rainbow. I immediately pulled into a gas station and got out of the car. The landscape was wide open; we could see that rainbow from end to end. It was a phenomenal sight. And the smoked lamb sandwich we bought afterwards in the gas station wasn’t bad either.</li>\r\n 	<li>I struggle sometimes when asked about Iceland. Would I recommend it? Reykjavik is nice enough, but it’s a small town. I’m not a museum guy, so there was probably a day-and-a half of stuff for me to do. And Iceland is expensive. I had good fish and lamb, but it wasn’t cheap. And hotel rooms were tight in March, so I gotta figure the country is completely sold out in July and August.</li>\r\n 	<li>But the scenery outside of Reykjavik, I keep coming back to that word “dramatic”. I’m not sure it does it justice, but it’s all I got. If you get a car, then the trip starts to make sense.</li>\r\n 	<li>Well, that and the fermented shark chased with shots of brennivín -- Icelandic schnapps -- because, I dunno, how can you not?</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #122</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/\">Podshow Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_122.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #121 — Data-Hungry Phones; Dramatic Iceland I Hate Shopping for Suitcases','','inherit','closed','closed','','1629-revision-v1','','','2016-07-07 21:56:18','2016-07-08 02:56:18','',1629,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/07/07/1629-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1632,1,'2016-07-07 22:36:44','2016-07-08 03:36:44','','Roadside Trees by Litli Geysir Hotel','Spring Break in Iceland','inherit','open','closed','','img_0324','','','2016-07-07 22:42:40','2016-07-08 03:42:40','',1629,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/IMG_0324.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(1633,1,'2016-07-07 22:45:32','2016-07-08 03:45:32','[caption id=\"attachment_1632\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/IMG_0324.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1632\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/IMG_0324-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Spring Break in Iceland\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Spring Break in Iceland[/caption]\r\n\r\nWhere do guidebooks fit in the world of apps, review websites, social media, and podcasts? Planning for a trip to Iceland got me thinking about how to make sense of the explosion of travel tips. And then, after giving my thoughts about my new <a href=\"http://bluesmart.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Bluesmart </a>\"smart connected suitcase\", I talk about how idiosyncratic frequent travelers are about packing strategies and their choice of suitcases. There\'s also follow-up about foreign exchange apps, and listener comments about digital travel security and Spirit Airlines\' growth. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_122.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/251667522\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #122:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you once again from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, on a week off of the road. I hate to say “a rare week”, but looking at my calendar, it is. For the first half of the year -- 26 weeks -- I didn’t get in an airplane during 2 of them. This week, the first of the second half of the year, is my 3rd non-travel week. Now absolutely some of them are self-inflicted -- 2 to be exact -- one week in Spain and one in Portugal. That’s an intense travel schedule, even for me. I usually find a way to take a break at least once every 6 weeks, but it just hasn’t worked out that way this year so far. Sometimes you control your schedule, while other times it controls you. I’m definitely been on the wrong end of the leash since January.</li>\r\n 	<li>Since the last episode, I’ve been traveling pretty much exclusively between Chicago and Charlottesville, VA. Now Charlottesville is a nice town, but it’s a pain to get to every week. The first direct flight from Chicago leaves around 11:30am, landing around 2pm -- not exactly convenient for the business traveler. Other earlier options are to fly into Washington-Dulles and drive for 2 hrs, or fly into Richmond and drive an hour and a half. What I’ve found myself doing for the past couple of weeks is flying in Sunday night -- which I absolutely hate -- on direct flight that leaves Chicago around 9:45pm, lands in Charlottesville around half past midnight and puts me into my hotel around 1am. There just doesn’t seem to be an easy way around this one.</li>\r\n 	<li>At least the flights back home are convenient -- 3:15 and 6:30pm. And it’s not a crowded airport. I think last week was the longest TSA line I hit -- 3 people were in front of me.</li>\r\n 	<li>And as I start to think about a September trip to Scotland to take our daughter back to University, I’m taking advantage of the post-Brexit exchange rate to stock my Revolut account with some much cheaper pounds. Though it’ll be another week on the road, I’ll be significantly upgrading my Scotch choices.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/seldon-circles/\"><em>Making Circles</em></a> by the Seldon Plan</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Last week’s attack at Istanbul’s Ataturk airport begs the same question as March’s Brussels bombings -- does more airport security actually make us safer or just move the target around? I said in the<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/05/30/podcast-121-tsa-lines-my-luggage-is-where/\" target=\"_blank\"> last episode</a> that the long TSA lines on the land side of security caused by stricter TSA inspections weren’t making the traveler any safer. Instead, they were make us less safe/more vulnerable to a Brussels or Istanbul-style attack. And while the TSA has fixed (at least for now) some of the worst lines, the issue is going to pop up again. And someone is going to suggest -- again -- that they move the security perimeter back -- say, checking itineraries and IDs at the terminal door like they do in India? The justification will be that a little bit more inconvenience is more than worth the price of safety. But, if they don’t staff it right (which was and will alway be the core problem), all you’ve done is just move the target -- the line of passengers -- out by another 1,000 feet. It’s less about location and more about execution. And given the TSA’s track record of execution over the past 15 years, I’m not optimistic that they’ll get to the right answer.</li>\r\n 	<li>I got a e-mail a few weeks ago that my 5-year Global Entry membership expires on my birthday this December. I don’t know exactly when Customs and Border Patrol started Global Entry, but 5 years ago, I was one of the early adopters. Back then, there weren’t that many interview centers. I was lucky that Chicago had one, but I had colleagues in Phoenix who had to fly up to Las Vegas for interviews. The renew process was pretty easy. I logged into GOES -- Global Online Enrollment Systems -- clicked the blue Renew Membership button and then cycled through all the profile screens -- but this time the screens were pre-populated so I only had to make updates. In my case, it was updating my job history for my current job and, the toughest part, entering all the countries I’d visited in the past 5 years. Normally, this would be pretty simple -- thumb through your passport pages and write down the country stamps. However, back in 2012, my backpack with my passport was stolen while on the train from Brussels city center to the airport -- a fun time I recount in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/05/20/podcast-98-stolen-luggage-restaurants-want-your-smartphone/\" target=\"_blank\">episode 98</a>. Luckily, I do a decent job of cataloging travel pics. Flipping through 2011 reminded me that we’d visited Venice that year and that I’d traveled there by train from Paris after a couple of days of customer meeting. The renewal cost is $100 -- $20/year is worth the price. Even more so when it’s free -- I charged it on my Amex Platinum card and immediately saw a $100 statement credit. Now I’m checking GOES every couple of days to see if Customs just waves my renewal through or if I have to talk again to the nice people in the bowels of ORD Terminal 5. I’m hoping that with the crush of new PreCheck applications, they’ll take the easy route.</li>\r\n 	<li>And as we’ve talked about before, I’m not really sure why anyone would sign up for PreCheck instead of Global Entry. Global Entry is just $15 more -- $100 instead of $85 -- the price of a beer at ORD.</li>\r\n 	<li>But if you’re not up for the $100 passport check line cut, Arnoud Heijnis, a long time TravelCommons listener, pinged me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> about another option -- the Mobile Passport app from US Customs and Border Patrol. I haven’t used it because I have Global Entry. My wife tried to get my son to download it before his return flight from Reykjavik, but he never got ‘round to it, and he said the early evening lines at ORD weren’t that bad. So while I don’t have any first- or second-hand experience with it, one of the tech writers at WSJ wrote up a <a href=\"http://www.wsj.com/articles/get-through-airport-customs-faster-with-this-free-app-1467221118\" target=\"_blank\">glowing review</a> of the app a few weeks back. Check out the show notes for a link to the article. And if you’ve tried the Mobile Passport, shoot me a note with your thoughts.</li>\r\n 	<li>During my flight back home last Weds, we were coming in on approach, you could feel the gradual descent -- slowing, descending, slowing, descending -- and then, all of a sudden, I’m pressed against the back of my seat as the plane rotates in the wrong direction -- up, that is -- and the engines roar with thrust. The experienced travelers know that the pilot had to abort the landing, but those who haven’t gone through this drill before are looking around, wondering “what the hell…?”. After about 5 minutes, the pilot came on “The plane in front of us hit a bird. They have to physically inspect the runway before another plane can land, so we had to fly around. We’ll be down in 10 minutes”. That was a nice announcement. I learned something new -- I didn’t know they had to inspect a runway after a bird strike, though it makes a lot of sense. Too often pilots or gate agents don’t take the time to explain the cause of a delay or a fly around, or don’t want to deal with the follow-up questions that may come -- and so I appreciate those that do. I remember a Southwest flight out of New Orleans. The plane lands -- it was a bit late -- but we’re not boarding right away. You could feel the impatience building in the gate area. The agent got on the PA -- “Sorry for the delay in boarding, but the plane was struck by lightning on its descent. The pilots have to do a physical inspection before we can board”. OK, that makes sense -- and just as you could feel the impatience build, it immediately drained away with that announcement. Maybe it’s because these delays weren’t the airline’s fault -- no negligence or bad judgement on American’s part for a bird strike or Southwest’s for lightning. Bit tougher to suck up when it’s the third delay in a row caused by maintenance issues -- spend some of those record profits on preventative maintenance -- or a missing crew -- maybe you should put a bit more slack in your scheduling. But as always, more transparency is better than vagueness -- even if it’s not the best story for you.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/eliyahu-wind/\">Oh Yeah</a></em> by Eliyahu Sills</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Data-Hungry Phones</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I met up with a friend at <a href=\"http://www.empiricalbrewery.com/\">Empirical Brewing</a>, one of 3 microbreweries along Ravenswood Blvd in that Chicago northwest side neighborhood. I hadn’t seen him since he had gotten back from a trip he and his son did to Helsinki, St Petersburg, and Moscow. Among other things, he had problems getting his son’s AT&amp;T iPhone to work in Helsinki. That’s odd, I said. I’ve never had a problem with AT&amp;T’s GSM iPhones in Europe. AT&amp;T told him to reset it, which he did, after which it promptly downloaded a gig and a half of apps and data over the cellular data network. As you might guess, he’s disputing that couple of hundred dollar bill.</li>\r\n 	<li>I am always surprised at how much data my phone uses when I travel outside of the country. Now I’m sure that one reason for this is that it’s about the only time I look at my data usage since I’m grandfathered into one of the old AT&amp;T unlimited data plans. I don’t know how much I use, and don’t make a big effort to limit it. So when I travel overseas, I get to see my kids live their mobile lives trying to stay under a 300 MB data cap.</li>\r\n 	<li>International mobile data has gotten a bit cheaper. T-Mobile offers a reasonable unlimited international data plan if you can live with slower 2G-style speeds. I’m not that patient, so I tend to get the AT&amp;T 300 MB package for $60 because it also comes with free access to a decent set of wi-fi hotspots.</li>\r\n 	<li>Living on a data budget means thinking which apps really need mobile data -- which is not that many. So while I’m sitting on the plane waiting for everyone to board, I pull out my iPhone, go over to Settings | Cellular and start turning off cellular data access for most of my apps. I’m not quite sure why the healthcare flexible spending app or the app that came with my sous vide immersion heater ever need cellular data -- in the US or internationally. Anyhow, I spool through the last, turning most of them off and certainly that damn “Wi-Fi Assist” and then, after I’ve sent my last Snapchat, I hit “Reset Statistics” so I’ll have a clean view of how I’m burning through that 300 MB and then click over to Airplane mode.</li>\r\n 	<li>And then, when I land, I come out of Airplane mode, go back into Settings | Cellular and turn Roaming On, and catch up on the overnight e-mail while waiting to get off the plane. At some point that morning, I’ll look at the Current Period data usage and see that I’ve burned through, say, 75 MB of my 300 MB -- 25% of my total package -- in the first morning. Holy crap! I immediately dive back into Settings | Cellular and turn off Roaming. What happened?</li>\r\n 	<li>This is where, on the iPhone, you begin having to spelunk through the mess that the Settings app has become. You scroll down past all the apps you shut off from cellular access and look at the last entry -- “System Services” -- and see that it’s consumed at least half of that 75 MB. What the hell? You click through. Why has this phone used that much data on “Time &amp; Location” or “General” or “iTunes Accounts” (huh? I thought I shut off iTunes in the last screen). This is when you start to dig deep -- Settings | Privacy | Location Service and you find another list of apps -- kinda like the one you used to turn off cellular data, but this one is for accessing your location. Look, as much as I love the Tortas Frontera restaurants in ORD, I’m not sure why their app needs to pull my location information. And then you go to Settings | General | Background App Refresh for yet another list of apps where you shut off their permission to update themselves in the background. And then you go over to Settings | Mail and turn Fetch New Data to Off to keep your iPhone from constantly pinging your Exchange server.</li>\r\n 	<li>It’s kinda like whack-a-mole, and you’ll be sure to miss something because these phones and the apps we load on them are, for the most part, built on the assumption of ubiquitous unlimited data access. So changing that behavior, those assumptions -- to severely limit the data the phone inhales and exhales -- takes work. Which is why, if we’re going to be somewhere for more than 4-5 days, I’ll invest the hour it takes to find a phone store and $25 per phone to buy a local SIM with a gig or two of data. When I was in Iceland for 4 days in March, it didn’t seem necessary. But when then I flew down to Spain for 8 days, my first stop was the Orange store because I knew my phone couldn’t hold its breath for that long.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music --<em> <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/liquid-seventythree/\" target=\"_blank\">Is That Called Love</a> </em></em>by Liquid Zen</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Dramatic Iceland</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Watching Iceland makes its Cinderella run in the Euro 2016 soccer tourney -- right up until the time they faceplanted into France last weekend -- reminded me of the trip my son and I took in March. Some reaction shots ESPN did from Reykjavik were places we had been -- saw a coffee shop we hit trying to stay awake on our first day, and a square that one of our hotels was on. Not that surprising since downtown Reykjavik isn’t that big. If I’d paid more attention to the people sitting next to me in the bars off that square, I’d have probably recognized some people in those shots too.</li>\r\n 	<li>Iceland is a hot tourist destination -- especially for people looking for something a bit different. And if I didn’t know already, when the Dorling Kindersley folks sent me review copies of their relaunched <a href=\"http://www.dk.com/us/travel/\">Eyewitness Travel Top 10 Guides</a>, in among the usual suspects -- New York, London, Paris, Barcelona -- was Iceland. In 2015, there were <a href=\"http://www.ferdamalastofa.is/static/files/ferdamalastofa/Frettamyndir/2016/juni/tourism_-in_iceland_in_figures_may2016.pdf\">1.3 million foreign tourists</a> in Iceland -- almost 4 times the population of 329,000 -- and a 29% increase over 2014. It’s a hot destination and getting hotter -- perhaps even to the point of overheating?</li>\r\n 	<li>Especially with Wow Air, a kinder and quirkier Spirit or Ryan Air, expanding the number of North American gateway cities. We ran into lots of folks who had seen ads for cheap Wow air fares and flew over for a 3 or 4 day weekend on a whim, without really thinking about what to do. We’d see folks walking up and down the downtown shopping and entertainment district in Reykjavik, and then figuring out some day trip bus rides out to the Golden Circle hot spots. And this was in March, not exactly the garden time in Iceland. But there were a lot of folks there. And so in that way, Iceland felt small.</li>\r\n 	<li>On our second day, we picked up a rental SUV -- a Dacia Duster, a great vehicle -- and headed out of town. Once we got out of Reykjavik’s catchment area, Iceland opened up quickly. The drama of the scenery, the spaces carved out by volcanos and glaciers -- “Land of Fire and Ice” it likes to bill itself -- make it feel much bigger. Of course, you could see this same space from the seat of a tour bus, but I was glad we rented a car. We got off the well-worn paths. Not too far, but when driving across a plain on a 2-lane highway with no traffic to speak of, the vistas did open up in front of us, which made me glad I was able to look forward and enjoy them through the expanse of the front windshield instead of looking off to the side through a motor coach window. And when we did some of the typical stops -- Þingvellir park, Gullfoss waterfall -- we could ride out the ebb and flow of the tour bus traffic, and have these spots pretty much to ourselves, even for just a little while. Or the time when we were driving toward the south coast, running through a series of rain bands -- in and out; in and out. I was starting to get annoyed until I looked out the rear view mirror and saw a huge double rainbow. I immediately pulled into a gas station and got out of the car. The landscape was wide open; we could see that rainbow from end to end. It was a phenomenal sight. And the smoked lamb sandwich we bought afterwards in the gas station wasn’t bad either.</li>\r\n 	<li>I struggle sometimes when asked about Iceland. Would I recommend it? Reykjavik is nice enough, but it’s a small town. I’m not a museum guy, so there was probably a day-and-a half of stuff for me to do. And Iceland is expensive. I had good fish and lamb, but it wasn’t cheap. And hotel rooms were tight in March, so I gotta figure the country is completely sold out in July and August.</li>\r\n 	<li>But the scenery outside of Reykjavik, I keep coming back to that word “dramatic”. I’m not sure it does it justice, but it’s all I got. If you get a car, then the trip starts to make sense.</li>\r\n 	<li>Well, that and the fermented shark chased with shots of brennivín -- Icelandic schnapps -- because, I dunno, how can you not?</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #122</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/\">Podshow Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_122.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #121 — Data-Hungry Phones; Dramatic Iceland I Hate Shopping for Suitcases','','inherit','closed','closed','','1629-revision-v1','','','2016-07-07 22:45:32','2016-07-08 03:45:32','',1629,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/07/07/1629-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1634,1,'2016-07-07 22:47:22','2016-07-08 03:47:22','[caption id=\"attachment_1632\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/IMG_0324.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1632\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/IMG_0324-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Spring Break in Iceland\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Spring Break in Iceland[/caption]\r\n\r\nWhere do guidebooks fit in the world of apps, review websites, social media, and podcasts? Planning for a trip to Iceland got me thinking about how to make sense of the explosion of travel tips. And then, after giving my thoughts about my new <a href=\"http://bluesmart.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Bluesmart </a>\"smart connected suitcase\", I talk about how idiosyncratic frequent travelers are about packing strategies and their choice of suitcases. There\'s also follow-up about foreign exchange apps, and listener comments about digital travel security and Spirit Airlines\' growth. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_122.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/251667522\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #122:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you once again from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, on a week off of the road. I hate to say “a rare week”, but looking at my calendar, it is. For the first half of the year -- 26 weeks -- I didn’t get in an airplane during 2 of them. This week, the first of the second half of the year, is my 3rd non-travel week. Now absolutely some of them are self-inflicted -- 2 to be exact -- one week in Spain and one in Portugal. That’s an intense travel schedule, even for me. I usually find a way to take a break at least once every 6 weeks, but it just hasn’t worked out that way this year so far. Sometimes you control your schedule, while other times it controls you. I’m definitely been on the wrong end of the leash since January.</li>\r\n 	<li>Since the last episode, I’ve been traveling pretty much exclusively between Chicago and Charlottesville, VA. Now Charlottesville is a nice town, but it’s a pain to get to every week. The first direct flight from Chicago leaves around 11:30am, landing around 2pm -- not exactly convenient for the business traveler. Other earlier options are to fly into Washington-Dulles and drive for 2 hrs, or fly into Richmond and drive an hour and a half. What I’ve found myself doing for the past couple of weeks is flying in Sunday night -- which I absolutely hate -- on direct flight that leaves Chicago around 9:45pm, lands in Charlottesville around half past midnight and puts me into my hotel around 1am. There just doesn’t seem to be an easy way around this one.</li>\r\n 	<li>At least the flights back home are convenient -- 3:15 and 6:30pm. And it’s not a crowded airport. I think last week was the longest TSA line I hit -- 3 people were in front of me.</li>\r\n 	<li>And as I start to think about a September trip to Scotland to take our daughter back to University, I’m taking advantage of the post-Brexit exchange rate to stock my Revolut account with some much cheaper pounds. Though it’ll be another week on the road, I’ll be significantly upgrading my Scotch choices.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/seldon-circles/\"><em>Making Circles</em></a> by the Seldon Plan</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Last week’s attack at Istanbul’s Ataturk airport begs the same question as March’s Brussels bombings -- does more airport security actually make us safer or just move the target around? I said in the<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/05/30/podcast-121-tsa-lines-my-luggage-is-where/\" target=\"_blank\"> last episode</a> that the long TSA lines on the land side of security caused by stricter TSA inspections weren’t making the traveler any safer. Instead, they were make us less safe/more vulnerable to a Brussels or Istanbul-style attack. And while the TSA has fixed (at least for now) some of the worst lines, the issue is going to pop up again. And someone is going to suggest -- again -- that they move the security perimeter back -- say, checking itineraries and IDs at the terminal door like they do in India? The justification will be that a little bit more inconvenience is more than worth the price of safety. But, if they don’t staff it right (which was and will alway be the core problem), all you’ve done is just move the target -- the line of passengers -- out by another 1,000 feet. It’s less about location and more about execution. And given the TSA’s track record of execution over the past 15 years, I’m not optimistic that they’ll get to the right answer.</li>\r\n 	<li>I got a e-mail a few weeks ago that my 5-year Global Entry membership expires on my birthday this December. I don’t know exactly when Customs and Border Patrol started Global Entry, but 5 years ago, I was one of the early adopters. Back then, there weren’t that many interview centers. I was lucky that Chicago had one, but I had colleagues in Phoenix who had to fly up to Las Vegas for interviews. The renew process was pretty easy. I logged into GOES -- Global Online Enrollment Systems -- clicked the blue Renew Membership button and then cycled through all the profile screens -- but this time the screens were pre-populated so I only had to make updates. In my case, it was updating my job history for my current job and, the toughest part, entering all the countries I’d visited in the past 5 years. Normally, this would be pretty simple -- thumb through your passport pages and write down the country stamps. However, back in 2012, my backpack with my passport was stolen while on the train from Brussels city center to the airport -- a fun time I recount in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/05/20/podcast-98-stolen-luggage-restaurants-want-your-smartphone/\" target=\"_blank\">episode 98</a>. Luckily, I do a decent job of cataloging travel pics. Flipping through 2011 reminded me that we’d visited Venice that year and that I’d traveled there by train from Paris after a couple of days of customer meeting. The renewal cost is $100 -- $20/year is worth the price. Even more so when it’s free -- I charged it on my Amex Platinum card and immediately saw a $100 statement credit. Now I’m checking GOES every couple of days to see if Customs just waves my renewal through or if I have to talk again to the nice people in the bowels of ORD Terminal 5. I’m hoping that with the crush of new PreCheck applications, they’ll take the easy route.</li>\r\n 	<li>And as we’ve talked about before, I’m not really sure why anyone would sign up for PreCheck instead of Global Entry. Global Entry is just $15 more -- $100 instead of $85 -- the price of a beer at ORD.</li>\r\n 	<li>But if you’re not up for the $100 passport check line cut, Arnoud Heijnis, a long time TravelCommons listener, pinged me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> about another option -- the Mobile Passport app from US Customs and Border Patrol. I haven’t used it because I have Global Entry. My wife tried to get my son to download it before his return flight from Reykjavik, but he never got ‘round to it, and he said the early evening lines at ORD weren’t that bad. So while I don’t have any first- or second-hand experience with it, one of the tech writers at WSJ wrote up a <a href=\"http://www.wsj.com/articles/get-through-airport-customs-faster-with-this-free-app-1467221118\" target=\"_blank\">glowing review</a> of the app a few weeks back. Check out the show notes for a link to the article. And if you’ve tried the Mobile Passport, shoot me a note with your thoughts.</li>\r\n 	<li>During my flight back home last Weds, we were coming in on approach, you could feel the gradual descent -- slowing, descending, slowing, descending -- and then, all of a sudden, I’m pressed against the back of my seat as the plane rotates in the wrong direction -- up, that is -- and the engines roar with thrust. The experienced travelers know that the pilot had to abort the landing, but those who haven’t gone through this drill before are looking around, wondering “what the hell…?”. After about 5 minutes, the pilot came on “The plane in front of us hit a bird. They have to physically inspect the runway before another plane can land, so we had to fly around. We’ll be down in 10 minutes”. That was a nice announcement. I learned something new -- I didn’t know they had to inspect a runway after a bird strike, though it makes a lot of sense. Too often pilots or gate agents don’t take the time to explain the cause of a delay or a fly around, or don’t want to deal with the follow-up questions that may come -- and so I appreciate those that do. I remember a Southwest flight out of New Orleans. The plane lands -- it was a bit late -- but we’re not boarding right away. You could feel the impatience building in the gate area. The agent got on the PA -- “Sorry for the delay in boarding, but the plane was struck by lightning on its descent. The pilots have to do a physical inspection before we can board”. OK, that makes sense -- and just as you could feel the impatience build, it immediately drained away with that announcement. Maybe it’s because these delays weren’t the airline’s fault -- no negligence or bad judgement on American’s part for a bird strike or Southwest’s for lightning. Bit tougher to suck up when it’s the third delay in a row caused by maintenance issues -- spend some of those record profits on preventative maintenance -- or a missing crew -- maybe you should put a bit more slack in your scheduling. But as always, more transparency is better than vagueness -- even if it’s not the best story for you.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/eliyahu-wind/\">Oh Yeah</a></em> by Eliyahu Sills</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Data-Hungry Phones</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I met up with a friend at <a href=\"http://www.empiricalbrewery.com/\">Empirical Brewing</a>, one of 3 microbreweries along Ravenswood Blvd in that Chicago northwest side neighborhood. I hadn’t seen him since he had gotten back from a trip he and his son did to Helsinki, St Petersburg, and Moscow. Among other things, he had problems getting his son’s AT&amp;T iPhone to work in Helsinki. That’s odd, I said. I’ve never had a problem with AT&amp;T’s GSM iPhones in Europe. AT&amp;T told him to reset it, which he did, after which it promptly downloaded a gig and a half of apps and data over the cellular data network. As you might guess, he’s disputing that couple of hundred dollar bill.</li>\r\n 	<li>I am always surprised at how much data my phone uses when I travel outside of the country. Now I’m sure that one reason for this is that it’s about the only time I look at my data usage since I’m grandfathered into one of the old AT&amp;T unlimited data plans. I don’t know how much I use, and don’t make a big effort to limit it. So when I travel overseas, I get to see my kids live their mobile lives trying to stay under a 300 MB data cap.</li>\r\n 	<li>International mobile data has gotten a bit cheaper. T-Mobile offers a reasonable unlimited international data plan if you can live with slower 2G-style speeds. I’m not that patient, so I tend to get the AT&amp;T 300 MB package for $60 because it also comes with free access to a decent set of wi-fi hotspots.</li>\r\n 	<li>Living on a data budget means thinking which apps really need mobile data -- which is not that many. So while I’m sitting on the plane waiting for everyone to board, I pull out my iPhone, go over to Settings | Cellular and start turning off cellular data access for most of my apps. I’m not quite sure why the healthcare flexible spending app or the app that came with my sous vide immersion heater ever need cellular data -- in the US or internationally. Anyhow, I spool through the last, turning most of them off and certainly that damn “Wi-Fi Assist” and then, after I’ve sent my last Snapchat, I hit “Reset Statistics” so I’ll have a clean view of how I’m burning through that 300 MB and then click over to Airplane mode.</li>\r\n 	<li>And then, when I land, I come out of Airplane mode, go back into Settings | Cellular and turn Roaming On, and catch up on the overnight e-mail while waiting to get off the plane. At some point that morning, I’ll look at the Current Period data usage and see that I’ve burned through, say, 75 MB of my 300 MB -- 25% of my total package -- in the first morning. Holy crap! I immediately dive back into Settings | Cellular and turn off Roaming. What happened?</li>\r\n 	<li>This is where, on the iPhone, you begin having to spelunk through the mess that the Settings app has become. You scroll down past all the apps you shut off from cellular access and look at the last entry -- “System Services” -- and see that it’s consumed at least half of that 75 MB. What the hell? You click through. Why has this phone used that much data on “Time &amp; Location” or “General” or “iTunes Accounts” (huh? I thought I shut off iTunes in the last screen). This is when you start to dig deep -- Settings | Privacy | Location Service and you find another list of apps -- kinda like the one you used to turn off cellular data, but this one is for accessing your location. Look, as much as I love the Tortas Frontera restaurants in ORD, I’m not sure why their app needs to pull my location information. And then you go to Settings | General | Background App Refresh for yet another list of apps where you shut off their permission to update themselves in the background. And then you go over to Settings | Mail and turn Fetch New Data to Off to keep your iPhone from constantly pinging your Exchange server.</li>\r\n 	<li>It’s kinda like whack-a-mole, and you’ll be sure to miss something because these phones and the apps we load on them are, for the most part, built on the assumption of ubiquitous unlimited data access. So changing that behavior, those assumptions -- to severely limit the data the phone inhales and exhales -- takes work. Which is why, if we’re going to be somewhere for more than 4-5 days, I’ll invest the hour it takes to find a phone store and $25 per phone to buy a local SIM with a gig or two of data. When I was in Iceland for 4 days in March, it didn’t seem necessary. But when then I flew down to Spain for 8 days, my first stop was the Orange store because I knew my phone couldn’t hold its breath for that long.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music --<em> <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/liquid-seventythree/\" target=\"_blank\">Is That Called Love</a> </em></em>by Liquid Zen</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Dramatic Iceland</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Watching Iceland makes its Cinderella run in the Euro 2016 soccer tourney -- right up until the time they faceplanted into France last weekend -- reminded me of the trip my son and I took in March. Some reaction shots ESPN did from Reykjavik were places we had been -- saw a coffee shop we hit trying to stay awake on our first day, and a square that one of our hotels was on. Not that surprising since downtown Reykjavik isn’t that big. If I’d paid more attention to the people sitting next to me in the bars off that square, I’d have probably recognized some people in those shots too.</li>\r\n 	<li>Iceland is a hot tourist destination -- especially for people looking for something a bit different. And if I didn’t know already, when the Dorling Kindersley folks sent me review copies of their relaunched <a href=\"http://www.dk.com/us/travel/\">Eyewitness Travel Top 10 Guides</a>, in among the usual suspects -- New York, London, Paris, Barcelona -- was Iceland. In 2015, there were <a href=\"http://www.ferdamalastofa.is/static/files/ferdamalastofa/Frettamyndir/2016/juni/tourism_-in_iceland_in_figures_may2016.pdf\">1.3 million foreign tourists</a> in Iceland -- almost 4 times the population of 329,000 -- and a 29% increase over 2014. It’s a hot destination and getting hotter -- perhaps even to the point of overheating?</li>\r\n 	<li>Especially with Wow Air, a kinder and quirkier Spirit or Ryan Air, expanding the number of North American gateway cities. We ran into lots of folks who had seen ads for cheap Wow air fares and flew over for a 3 or 4 day weekend on a whim, without really thinking about what to do. We’d see folks walking up and down the downtown shopping and entertainment district in Reykjavik, and then figuring out some day trip bus rides out to the Golden Circle hot spots. And this was in March, not exactly the garden time in Iceland. But there were a lot of folks there. And so in that way, Iceland felt small.</li>\r\n 	<li>On our second day, we picked up a rental SUV -- a Dacia Duster, a great vehicle -- and headed out of town. Once we got out of Reykjavik’s catchment area, Iceland opened up quickly. The drama of the scenery, the spaces carved out by volcanos and glaciers -- “Land of Fire and Ice” it likes to bill itself -- make it feel much bigger. Of course, you could see this same space from the seat of a tour bus, but I was glad we rented a car. We got off the well-worn paths. Not too far, but when driving across a plain on a 2-lane highway with no traffic to speak of, the vistas did open up in front of us, which made me glad I was able to look forward and enjoy them through the expanse of the front windshield instead of looking off to the side through a motor coach window. And when we did some of the typical stops -- Þingvellir park, Gullfoss waterfall -- we could ride out the ebb and flow of the tour bus traffic, and have these spots pretty much to ourselves, even for just a little while. Or the time when we were driving toward the south coast, running through a series of rain bands -- in and out; in and out. I was starting to get annoyed until I looked out the rear view mirror and saw a huge double rainbow. I immediately pulled into a gas station and got out of the car. The landscape was wide open; we could see that rainbow from end to end. It was a phenomenal sight. And the smoked lamb sandwich we bought afterwards in the gas station wasn’t bad either.</li>\r\n 	<li>I struggle sometimes when asked about Iceland. Would I recommend it? Reykjavik is nice enough, but it’s a small town. I’m not a museum guy, so there was probably a day-and-a half of stuff for me to do. And Iceland is expensive. I had good fish and lamb, but it wasn’t cheap. And hotel rooms were tight in March, so I gotta figure the country is completely sold out in July and August.</li>\r\n 	<li>But the scenery outside of Reykjavik, I keep coming back to that word “dramatic”. I’m not sure it does it justice, but it’s all I got. If you get a car, then the trip starts to make sense.</li>\r\n 	<li>Well, that and the fermented shark chased with shots of brennivín -- Icelandic schnapps -- because, I dunno, how can you not?</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #122</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/\">Podshow Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_122.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #121 — Data-Hungry Phones; Dramatic Iceland','','inherit','closed','closed','','1629-revision-v1','','','2016-07-07 22:47:22','2016-07-08 03:47:22','',1629,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/07/07/1629-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1635,1,'2016-07-07 22:59:31','2016-07-08 03:59:31','[caption id=\"attachment_1632\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/IMG_0324.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1632\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/IMG_0324-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Spring Break in Iceland\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Spring Break in Iceland[/caption]\r\n\r\nWatching Iceland makes its Cinderella run in the Euro 2016 soccer tourney got me thinking back to my March trip there. It is one of the hot travel destinations -- maybe too hot? Could be, but the descriptor I keep coming back to is \"dramatic.\" And it seems that on every trip I make out of the country, I get surprised by the amount of data my iPhone consumes -- in spite of flipping every Settings switch I can find. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_122.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/251667522\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #122:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you once again from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, on a week off of the road. I hate to say “a rare week”, but looking at my calendar, it is. For the first half of the year -- 26 weeks -- I didn’t get in an airplane during 2 of them. This week, the first of the second half of the year, is my 3rd non-travel week. Now absolutely some of them are self-inflicted -- 2 to be exact -- one week in Spain and one in Portugal. That’s an intense travel schedule, even for me. I usually find a way to take a break at least once every 6 weeks, but it just hasn’t worked out that way this year so far. Sometimes you control your schedule, while other times it controls you. I’m definitely been on the wrong end of the leash since January.</li>\r\n 	<li>Since the last episode, I’ve been traveling pretty much exclusively between Chicago and Charlottesville, VA. Now Charlottesville is a nice town, but it’s a pain to get to every week. The first direct flight from Chicago leaves around 11:30am, landing around 2pm -- not exactly convenient for the business traveler. Other earlier options are to fly into Washington-Dulles and drive for 2 hrs, or fly into Richmond and drive an hour and a half. What I’ve found myself doing for the past couple of weeks is flying in Sunday night -- which I absolutely hate -- on direct flight that leaves Chicago around 9:45pm, lands in Charlottesville around half past midnight and puts me into my hotel around 1am. There just doesn’t seem to be an easy way around this one.</li>\r\n 	<li>At least the flights back home are convenient -- 3:15 and 6:30pm. And it’s not a crowded airport. I think last week was the longest TSA line I hit -- 3 people were in front of me.</li>\r\n 	<li>And as I start to think about a September trip to Scotland to take our daughter back to University, I’m taking advantage of the post-Brexit exchange rate to stock my Revolut account with some much cheaper pounds. Though it’ll be another week on the road, I’ll be significantly upgrading my Scotch choices.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/seldon-circles/\"><em>Making Circles</em></a> by the Seldon Plan</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Last week’s attack at Istanbul’s Ataturk airport begs the same question as March’s Brussels bombings -- does more airport security actually make us safer or just move the target around? I said in the<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/05/30/podcast-121-tsa-lines-my-luggage-is-where/\" target=\"_blank\"> last episode</a> that the long TSA lines on the land side of security caused by stricter TSA inspections weren’t making the traveler any safer. Instead, they were make us less safe/more vulnerable to a Brussels or Istanbul-style attack. And while the TSA has fixed (at least for now) some of the worst lines, the issue is going to pop up again. And someone is going to suggest -- again -- that they move the security perimeter back -- say, checking itineraries and IDs at the terminal door like they do in India? The justification will be that a little bit more inconvenience is more than worth the price of safety. But, if they don’t staff it right (which was and will alway be the core problem), all you’ve done is just move the target -- the line of passengers -- out by another 1,000 feet. It’s less about location and more about execution. And given the TSA’s track record of execution over the past 15 years, I’m not optimistic that they’ll get to the right answer.</li>\r\n 	<li>I got a e-mail a few weeks ago that my 5-year Global Entry membership expires on my birthday this December. I don’t know exactly when Customs and Border Patrol started Global Entry, but 5 years ago, I was one of the early adopters. Back then, there weren’t that many interview centers. I was lucky that Chicago had one, but I had colleagues in Phoenix who had to fly up to Las Vegas for interviews. The renew process was pretty easy. I logged into GOES -- Global Online Enrollment Systems -- clicked the blue Renew Membership button and then cycled through all the profile screens -- but this time the screens were pre-populated so I only had to make updates. In my case, it was updating my job history for my current job and, the toughest part, entering all the countries I’d visited in the past 5 years. Normally, this would be pretty simple -- thumb through your passport pages and write down the country stamps. However, back in 2012, my backpack with my passport was stolen while on the train from Brussels city center to the airport -- a fun time I recount in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/05/20/podcast-98-stolen-luggage-restaurants-want-your-smartphone/\" target=\"_blank\">episode 98</a>. Luckily, I do a decent job of cataloging travel pics. Flipping through 2011 reminded me that we’d visited Venice that year and that I’d traveled there by train from Paris after a couple of days of customer meeting. The renewal cost is $100 -- $20/year is worth the price. Even more so when it’s free -- I charged it on my Amex Platinum card and immediately saw a $100 statement credit. Now I’m checking GOES every couple of days to see if Customs just waves my renewal through or if I have to talk again to the nice people in the bowels of ORD Terminal 5. I’m hoping that with the crush of new PreCheck applications, they’ll take the easy route.</li>\r\n 	<li>And as we’ve talked about before, I’m not really sure why anyone would sign up for PreCheck instead of Global Entry. Global Entry is just $15 more -- $100 instead of $85 -- the price of a beer at ORD.</li>\r\n 	<li>But if you’re not up for the $100 passport check line cut, Arnoud Heijnis, a long time TravelCommons listener, pinged me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> about another option -- the Mobile Passport app from US Customs and Border Patrol. I haven’t used it because I have Global Entry. My wife tried to get my son to download it before his return flight from Reykjavik, but he never got ‘round to it, and he said the early evening lines at ORD weren’t that bad. So while I don’t have any first- or second-hand experience with it, one of the tech writers at WSJ wrote up a <a href=\"http://www.wsj.com/articles/get-through-airport-customs-faster-with-this-free-app-1467221118\" target=\"_blank\">glowing review</a> of the app a few weeks back. Check out the show notes for a link to the article. And if you’ve tried the Mobile Passport, shoot me a note with your thoughts.</li>\r\n 	<li>During my flight back home last Weds, we were coming in on approach, you could feel the gradual descent -- slowing, descending, slowing, descending -- and then, all of a sudden, I’m pressed against the back of my seat as the plane rotates in the wrong direction -- up, that is -- and the engines roar with thrust. The experienced travelers know that the pilot had to abort the landing, but those who haven’t gone through this drill before are looking around, wondering “what the hell…?”. After about 5 minutes, the pilot came on “The plane in front of us hit a bird. They have to physically inspect the runway before another plane can land, so we had to fly around. We’ll be down in 10 minutes”. That was a nice announcement. I learned something new -- I didn’t know they had to inspect a runway after a bird strike, though it makes a lot of sense. Too often pilots or gate agents don’t take the time to explain the cause of a delay or a fly around, or don’t want to deal with the follow-up questions that may come -- and so I appreciate those that do. I remember a Southwest flight out of New Orleans. The plane lands -- it was a bit late -- but we’re not boarding right away. You could feel the impatience building in the gate area. The agent got on the PA -- “Sorry for the delay in boarding, but the plane was struck by lightning on its descent. The pilots have to do a physical inspection before we can board”. OK, that makes sense -- and just as you could feel the impatience build, it immediately drained away with that announcement. Maybe it’s because these delays weren’t the airline’s fault -- no negligence or bad judgement on American’s part for a bird strike or Southwest’s for lightning. Bit tougher to suck up when it’s the third delay in a row caused by maintenance issues -- spend some of those record profits on preventative maintenance -- or a missing crew -- maybe you should put a bit more slack in your scheduling. But as always, more transparency is better than vagueness -- even if it’s not the best story for you.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/eliyahu-wind/\">Oh Yeah</a></em> by Eliyahu Sills</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Data-Hungry Phones</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I met up with a friend at <a href=\"http://www.empiricalbrewery.com/\">Empirical Brewing</a>, one of 3 microbreweries along Ravenswood Blvd in that Chicago northwest side neighborhood. I hadn’t seen him since he had gotten back from a trip he and his son did to Helsinki, St Petersburg, and Moscow. Among other things, he had problems getting his son’s AT&amp;T iPhone to work in Helsinki. That’s odd, I said. I’ve never had a problem with AT&amp;T’s GSM iPhones in Europe. AT&amp;T told him to reset it, which he did, after which it promptly downloaded a gig and a half of apps and data over the cellular data network. As you might guess, he’s disputing that couple of hundred dollar bill.</li>\r\n 	<li>I am always surprised at how much data my phone uses when I travel outside of the country. Now I’m sure that one reason for this is that it’s about the only time I look at my data usage since I’m grandfathered into one of the old AT&amp;T unlimited data plans. I don’t know how much I use, and don’t make a big effort to limit it. So when I travel overseas, I get to see my kids live their mobile lives trying to stay under a 300 MB data cap.</li>\r\n 	<li>International mobile data has gotten a bit cheaper. T-Mobile offers a reasonable unlimited international data plan if you can live with slower 2G-style speeds. I’m not that patient, so I tend to get the AT&amp;T 300 MB package for $60 because it also comes with free access to a decent set of wi-fi hotspots.</li>\r\n 	<li>Living on a data budget means thinking which apps really need mobile data -- which is not that many. So while I’m sitting on the plane waiting for everyone to board, I pull out my iPhone, go over to Settings | Cellular and start turning off cellular data access for most of my apps. I’m not quite sure why the healthcare flexible spending app or the app that came with my sous vide immersion heater ever need cellular data -- in the US or internationally. Anyhow, I spool through the last, turning most of them off and certainly that damn “Wi-Fi Assist” and then, after I’ve sent my last Snapchat, I hit “Reset Statistics” so I’ll have a clean view of how I’m burning through that 300 MB and then click over to Airplane mode.</li>\r\n 	<li>And then, when I land, I come out of Airplane mode, go back into Settings | Cellular and turn Roaming On, and catch up on the overnight e-mail while waiting to get off the plane. At some point that morning, I’ll look at the Current Period data usage and see that I’ve burned through, say, 75 MB of my 300 MB -- 25% of my total package -- in the first morning. Holy crap! I immediately dive back into Settings | Cellular and turn off Roaming. What happened?</li>\r\n 	<li>This is where, on the iPhone, you begin having to spelunk through the mess that the Settings app has become. You scroll down past all the apps you shut off from cellular access and look at the last entry -- “System Services” -- and see that it’s consumed at least half of that 75 MB. What the hell? You click through. Why has this phone used that much data on “Time &amp; Location” or “General” or “iTunes Accounts” (huh? I thought I shut off iTunes in the last screen). This is when you start to dig deep -- Settings | Privacy | Location Service and you find another list of apps -- kinda like the one you used to turn off cellular data, but this one is for accessing your location. Look, as much as I love the Tortas Frontera restaurants in ORD, I’m not sure why their app needs to pull my location information. And then you go to Settings | General | Background App Refresh for yet another list of apps where you shut off their permission to update themselves in the background. And then you go over to Settings | Mail and turn Fetch New Data to Off to keep your iPhone from constantly pinging your Exchange server.</li>\r\n 	<li>It’s kinda like whack-a-mole, and you’ll be sure to miss something because these phones and the apps we load on them are, for the most part, built on the assumption of ubiquitous unlimited data access. So changing that behavior, those assumptions -- to severely limit the data the phone inhales and exhales -- takes work. Which is why, if we’re going to be somewhere for more than 4-5 days, I’ll invest the hour it takes to find a phone store and $25 per phone to buy a local SIM with a gig or two of data. When I was in Iceland for 4 days in March, it didn’t seem necessary. But when then I flew down to Spain for 8 days, my first stop was the Orange store because I knew my phone couldn’t hold its breath for that long.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music --<em> <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/liquid-seventythree/\" target=\"_blank\">Is That Called Love</a> </em></em>by Liquid Zen</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Dramatic Iceland</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Watching Iceland makes its Cinderella run in the Euro 2016 soccer tourney -- right up until the time they faceplanted into France last weekend -- reminded me of the trip my son and I took in March. Some reaction shots ESPN did from Reykjavik were places we had been -- saw a coffee shop we hit trying to stay awake on our first day, and a square that one of our hotels was on. Not that surprising since downtown Reykjavik isn’t that big. If I’d paid more attention to the people sitting next to me in the bars off that square, I’d have probably recognized some people in those shots too.</li>\r\n 	<li>Iceland is a hot tourist destination -- especially for people looking for something a bit different. And if I didn’t know already, when the Dorling Kindersley folks sent me review copies of their relaunched <a href=\"http://www.dk.com/us/travel/\">Eyewitness Travel Top 10 Guides</a>, in among the usual suspects -- New York, London, Paris, Barcelona -- was Iceland. In 2015, there were <a href=\"http://www.ferdamalastofa.is/static/files/ferdamalastofa/Frettamyndir/2016/juni/tourism_-in_iceland_in_figures_may2016.pdf\">1.3 million foreign tourists</a> in Iceland -- almost 4 times the population of 329,000 -- and a 29% increase over 2014. It’s a hot destination and getting hotter -- perhaps even to the point of overheating?</li>\r\n 	<li>Especially with Wow Air, a kinder and quirkier Spirit or Ryan Air, expanding the number of North American gateway cities. We ran into lots of folks who had seen ads for cheap Wow air fares and flew over for a 3 or 4 day weekend on a whim, without really thinking about what to do. We’d see folks walking up and down the downtown shopping and entertainment district in Reykjavik, and then figuring out some day trip bus rides out to the Golden Circle hot spots. And this was in March, not exactly the garden time in Iceland. But there were a lot of folks there. And so in that way, Iceland felt small.</li>\r\n 	<li>On our second day, we picked up a rental SUV -- a Dacia Duster, a great vehicle -- and headed out of town. Once we got out of Reykjavik’s catchment area, Iceland opened up quickly. The drama of the scenery, the spaces carved out by volcanos and glaciers -- “Land of Fire and Ice” it likes to bill itself -- make it feel much bigger. Of course, you could see this same space from the seat of a tour bus, but I was glad we rented a car. We got off the well-worn paths. Not too far, but when driving across a plain on a 2-lane highway with no traffic to speak of, the vistas did open up in front of us, which made me glad I was able to look forward and enjoy them through the expanse of the front windshield instead of looking off to the side through a motor coach window. And when we did some of the typical stops -- Þingvellir park, Gullfoss waterfall -- we could ride out the ebb and flow of the tour bus traffic, and have these spots pretty much to ourselves, even for just a little while. Or the time when we were driving toward the south coast, running through a series of rain bands -- in and out; in and out. I was starting to get annoyed until I looked out the rear view mirror and saw a huge double rainbow. I immediately pulled into a gas station and got out of the car. The landscape was wide open; we could see that rainbow from end to end. It was a phenomenal sight. And the smoked lamb sandwich we bought afterwards in the gas station wasn’t bad either.</li>\r\n 	<li>I struggle sometimes when asked about Iceland. Would I recommend it? Reykjavik is nice enough, but it’s a small town. I’m not a museum guy, so there was probably a day-and-a half of stuff for me to do. And Iceland is expensive. I had good fish and lamb, but it wasn’t cheap. And hotel rooms were tight in March, so I gotta figure the country is completely sold out in July and August.</li>\r\n 	<li>But the scenery outside of Reykjavik, I keep coming back to that word “dramatic”. I’m not sure it does it justice, but it’s all I got. If you get a car, then the trip starts to make sense.</li>\r\n 	<li>Well, that and the fermented shark chased with shots of brennivín -- Icelandic schnapps -- because, I dunno, how can you not?</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #122</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/\">Podshow Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_122.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #121 — Data-Hungry Phones; Dramatic Iceland','','inherit','closed','closed','','1629-revision-v1','','','2016-07-07 22:59:31','2016-07-08 03:59:31','',1629,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/07/07/1629-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1636,1,'2016-07-07 23:01:01','2016-07-08 04:01:01','[caption id=\"attachment_1632\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/IMG_0324.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1632\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/IMG_0324-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Spring Break in Iceland\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Spring Break in Iceland[/caption]\r\n\r\nWatching Iceland makes its Cinderella run in the Euro 2016 soccer tourney got me thinking back to my March trip there. It is one of the hot travel destinations -- maybe too hot? Could be, but the descriptor I keep coming back to is \"dramatic.\" And it seems that on every trip I make out of the country, I get surprised by the amount of data my iPhone consumes -- in spite of flipping every Settings switch I can find. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_122.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/251667522\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #122:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you once again from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, on a week off of the road. I hate to say “a rare week”, but looking at my calendar, it is. For the first half of the year -- 26 weeks -- I didn’t get in an airplane during 2 of them. This week, the first of the second half of the year, is my 3rd non-travel week. Now absolutely some of them are self-inflicted -- 2 to be exact -- one week in Spain and one in Portugal. That’s an intense travel schedule, even for me. I usually find a way to take a break at least once every 6 weeks, but it just hasn’t worked out that way this year so far. Sometimes you control your schedule, while other times it controls you. I’m definitely been on the wrong end of the leash since January.</li>\r\n 	<li>Since the last episode, I’ve been traveling pretty much exclusively between Chicago and Charlottesville, VA. Now Charlottesville is a nice town, but it’s a pain to get to every week. The first direct flight from Chicago leaves around 11:30am, landing around 2pm -- not exactly convenient for the business traveler. Other earlier options are to fly into Washington-Dulles and drive for 2 hrs, or fly into Richmond and drive an hour and a half. What I’ve found myself doing for the past couple of weeks is flying in Sunday night -- which I absolutely hate -- on direct flight that leaves Chicago around 9:45pm, lands in Charlottesville around half past midnight and puts me into my hotel around 1am. There just doesn’t seem to be an easy way around this one.</li>\r\n 	<li>At least the flights back home are convenient -- 3:15 and 6:30pm. And it’s not a crowded airport. I think last week was the longest TSA line I hit -- 3 people were in front of me.</li>\r\n 	<li>And as I start to think about a September trip to Scotland to take our daughter back to University, I’m taking advantage of the post-Brexit exchange rate to stock my Revolut account with some much cheaper pounds. Though it’ll be another week on the road, I’ll be significantly upgrading my Scotch choices.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/seldon-circles/\"><em>Making Circles</em></a> by the Seldon Plan</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Last week’s attack at Istanbul’s Ataturk airport begs the same question as March’s Brussels bombings -- does more airport security actually make us safer or just move the target around? I said in the<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/05/30/podcast-121-tsa-lines-my-luggage-is-where/\" target=\"_blank\"> last episode</a> that the long TSA lines on the land side of security caused by stricter TSA inspections weren’t making the traveler any safer. Instead, they were make us less safe/more vulnerable to a Brussels or Istanbul-style attack. And while the TSA has fixed (at least for now) some of the worst lines, the issue is going to pop up again. And someone is going to suggest -- again -- that they move the security perimeter back -- say, checking itineraries and IDs at the terminal door like they do in India? The justification will be that a little bit more inconvenience is more than worth the price of safety. But, if they don’t staff it right (which was and will alway be the core problem), all you’ve done is just move the target -- the line of passengers -- out by another 1,000 feet. It’s less about location and more about execution. And given the TSA’s track record of execution over the past 15 years, I’m not optimistic that they’ll get to the right answer.</li>\r\n 	<li>I got a e-mail a few weeks ago that my 5-year Global Entry membership expires on my birthday this December. I don’t know exactly when Customs and Border Patrol started Global Entry, but 5 years ago, I was one of the early adopters. Back then, there weren’t that many interview centers. I was lucky that Chicago had one, but I had colleagues in Phoenix who had to fly up to Las Vegas for interviews. The renew process was pretty easy. I logged into GOES -- Global Online Enrollment Systems -- clicked the blue Renew Membership button and then cycled through all the profile screens -- but this time the screens were pre-populated so I only had to make updates. In my case, it was updating my job history for my current job and, the toughest part, entering all the countries I’d visited in the past 5 years. Normally, this would be pretty simple -- thumb through your passport pages and write down the country stamps. However, back in 2012, my backpack with my passport was stolen while on the train from Brussels city center to the airport -- a fun time I recount in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/05/20/podcast-98-stolen-luggage-restaurants-want-your-smartphone/\" target=\"_blank\">episode 98</a>. Luckily, I do a decent job of cataloging travel pics. Flipping through 2011 reminded me that we’d visited Venice that year and that I’d traveled there by train from Paris after a couple of days of customer meeting. The renewal cost is $100 -- $20/year is worth the price. Even more so when it’s free -- I charged it on my Amex Platinum card and immediately saw a $100 statement credit. Now I’m checking GOES every couple of days to see if Customs just waves my renewal through or if I have to talk again to the nice people in the bowels of ORD Terminal 5. I’m hoping that with the crush of new PreCheck applications, they’ll take the easy route.</li>\r\n 	<li>And as we’ve talked about before, I’m not really sure why anyone would sign up for PreCheck instead of Global Entry. Global Entry is just $15 more -- $100 instead of $85 -- the price of a beer at ORD.</li>\r\n 	<li>But if you’re not up for the $100 passport check line cut, Arnoud Heijnis, a long time TravelCommons listener, pinged me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> about another option -- the Mobile Passport app from US Customs and Border Patrol. I haven’t used it because I have Global Entry. My wife tried to get my son to download it before his return flight from Reykjavik, but he never got ‘round to it, and he said the early evening lines at ORD weren’t that bad. So while I don’t have any first- or second-hand experience with it, one of the tech writers at WSJ wrote up a <a href=\"http://www.wsj.com/articles/get-through-airport-customs-faster-with-this-free-app-1467221118\" target=\"_blank\">glowing review</a> of the app a few weeks back. Check out the show notes for a link to the article. And if you’ve tried the Mobile Passport, shoot me a note with your thoughts.</li>\r\n 	<li>During my flight back home last Weds, we were coming in on approach, you could feel the gradual descent -- slowing, descending, slowing, descending -- and then, all of a sudden, I’m pressed against the back of my seat as the plane rotates in the wrong direction -- up, that is -- and the engines roar with thrust. The experienced travelers know that the pilot had to abort the landing, but those who haven’t gone through this drill before are looking around, wondering “what the hell…?”. After about 5 minutes, the pilot came on “The plane in front of us hit a bird. They have to physically inspect the runway before another plane can land, so we had to fly around. We’ll be down in 10 minutes”. That was a nice announcement. I learned something new -- I didn’t know they had to inspect a runway after a bird strike, though it makes a lot of sense. Too often pilots or gate agents don’t take the time to explain the cause of a delay or a fly around, or don’t want to deal with the follow-up questions that may come -- and so I appreciate those that do. I remember a Southwest flight out of New Orleans. The plane lands -- it was a bit late -- but we’re not boarding right away. You could feel the impatience building in the gate area. The agent got on the PA -- “Sorry for the delay in boarding, but the plane was struck by lightning on its descent. The pilots have to do a physical inspection before we can board”. OK, that makes sense -- and just as you could feel the impatience build, it immediately drained away with that announcement. Maybe it’s because these delays weren’t the airline’s fault -- no negligence or bad judgement on American’s part for a bird strike or Southwest’s for lightning. Bit tougher to suck up when it’s the third delay in a row caused by maintenance issues -- spend some of those record profits on preventative maintenance -- or a missing crew -- maybe you should put a bit more slack in your scheduling. But as always, more transparency is better than vagueness -- even if it’s not the best story for you.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/eliyahu-wind/\">Oh Yeah</a></em> by Eliyahu Sills</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Data-Hungry Phones</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I met up with a friend at <a href=\"http://www.empiricalbrewery.com/\">Empirical Brewing</a>, one of 3 microbreweries along Ravenswood Blvd in that Chicago northwest side neighborhood. I hadn’t seen him since he had gotten back from a trip he and his son did to Helsinki, St Petersburg, and Moscow. Among other things, he had problems getting his son’s AT&amp;T iPhone to work in Helsinki. That’s odd, I said. I’ve never had a problem with AT&amp;T’s GSM iPhones in Europe. AT&amp;T told him to reset it, which he did, after which it promptly downloaded a gig and a half of apps and data over the cellular data network. As you might guess, he’s disputing that couple of hundred dollar bill.</li>\r\n 	<li>I am always surprised at how much data my phone uses when I travel outside of the country. Now I’m sure that one reason for this is that it’s about the only time I look at my data usage since I’m grandfathered into one of the old AT&amp;T unlimited data plans. I don’t know how much I use, and don’t make a big effort to limit it. So when I travel overseas, I get to see my kids live their mobile lives trying to stay under a 300 MB data cap.</li>\r\n 	<li>International mobile data has gotten a bit cheaper. T-Mobile offers a reasonable unlimited international data plan if you can live with slower 2G-style speeds. I’m not that patient, so I tend to get the AT&amp;T 300 MB package for $60 because it also comes with free access to a decent set of wi-fi hotspots.</li>\r\n 	<li>Living on a data budget means thinking which apps really need mobile data -- which is not that many. So while I’m sitting on the plane waiting for everyone to board, I pull out my iPhone, go over to Settings | Cellular and start turning off cellular data access for most of my apps. I’m not quite sure why the healthcare flexible spending app or the app that came with my sous vide immersion heater ever need cellular data -- in the US or internationally. Anyhow, I spool through the last, turning most of them off and certainly that damn “Wi-Fi Assist” and then, after I’ve sent my last Snapchat, I hit “Reset Statistics” so I’ll have a clean view of how I’m burning through that 300 MB and then click over to Airplane mode.</li>\r\n 	<li>And then, when I land, I come out of Airplane mode, go back into Settings | Cellular and turn Roaming On, and catch up on the overnight e-mail while waiting to get off the plane. At some point that morning, I’ll look at the Current Period data usage and see that I’ve burned through, say, 75 MB of my 300 MB -- 25% of my total package -- in the first morning. Holy crap! I immediately dive back into Settings | Cellular and turn off Roaming. What happened?</li>\r\n 	<li>This is where, on the iPhone, you begin having to spelunk through the mess that the Settings app has become. You scroll down past all the apps you shut off from cellular access and look at the last entry -- “System Services” -- and see that it’s consumed at least half of that 75 MB. What the hell? You click through. Why has this phone used that much data on “Time &amp; Location” or “General” or “iTunes Accounts” (huh? I thought I shut off iTunes in the last screen). This is when you start to dig deep -- Settings | Privacy | Location Service and you find another list of apps -- kinda like the one you used to turn off cellular data, but this one is for accessing your location. Look, as much as I love the Tortas Frontera restaurants in ORD, I’m not sure why their app needs to pull my location information. And then you go to Settings | General | Background App Refresh for yet another list of apps where you shut off their permission to update themselves in the background. And then you go over to Settings | Mail and turn Fetch New Data to Off to keep your iPhone from constantly pinging your Exchange server.</li>\r\n 	<li>It’s kinda like whack-a-mole, and you’ll be sure to miss something because these phones and the apps we load on them are, for the most part, built on the assumption of ubiquitous unlimited data access. So changing that behavior, those assumptions -- to severely limit the data the phone inhales and exhales -- takes work. Which is why, if we’re going to be somewhere for more than 4-5 days, I’ll invest the hour it takes to find a phone store and $25 per phone to buy a local SIM with a gig or two of data. When I was in Iceland for 4 days in March, it didn’t seem necessary. But when then I flew down to Spain for 8 days, my first stop was the Orange store because I knew my phone couldn’t hold its breath for that long.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music --<em> <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/liquid-seventythree/\" target=\"_blank\">Is That Called Love</a> </em></em>by Liquid Zen</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Dramatic Iceland</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Watching Iceland makes its Cinderella run in the Euro 2016 soccer tourney -- right up until the time they faceplanted into France last weekend -- reminded me of the trip my son and I took in March. Some reaction shots ESPN did from Reykjavik were places we had been -- saw a coffee shop we hit trying to stay awake on our first day, and a square that one of our hotels was on. Not that surprising since downtown Reykjavik isn’t that big. If I’d paid more attention to the people sitting next to me in the bars off that square, I’d have probably recognized some people in those shots too.</li>\r\n 	<li>Iceland is a hot tourist destination -- especially for people looking for something a bit different. And if I didn’t know already, when the Dorling Kindersley folks sent me review copies of their relaunched <a href=\"http://www.dk.com/us/travel/\">Eyewitness Travel Top 10 Guides</a>, in among the usual suspects -- New York, London, Paris, Barcelona -- was Iceland. In 2015, there were <a href=\"http://www.ferdamalastofa.is/static/files/ferdamalastofa/Frettamyndir/2016/juni/tourism_-in_iceland_in_figures_may2016.pdf\">1.3 million foreign tourists</a> in Iceland -- almost 4 times the population of 329,000 -- and a 29% increase over 2014. It’s a hot destination and getting hotter -- perhaps even to the point of overheating?</li>\r\n 	<li>Especially with Wow Air, a kinder and quirkier Spirit or Ryan Air, expanding the number of North American gateway cities. We ran into lots of folks who had seen ads for cheap Wow air fares and flew over for a 3 or 4 day weekend on a whim, without really thinking about what to do. We’d see folks walking up and down the downtown shopping and entertainment district in Reykjavik, and then figuring out some day trip bus rides out to the Golden Circle hot spots. And this was in March, not exactly the garden time in Iceland. But there were a lot of folks there. And so in that way, Iceland felt small.</li>\r\n 	<li>On our second day, we picked up a rental SUV -- a Dacia Duster, a great vehicle -- and headed out of town. Once we got out of Reykjavik’s catchment area, Iceland opened up quickly. The drama of the scenery, the spaces carved out by volcanos and glaciers -- “Land of Fire and Ice” it likes to bill itself -- make it feel much bigger. Of course, you could see this same space from the seat of a tour bus, but I was glad we rented a car. We got off the well-worn paths. Not too far, but when driving across a plain on a 2-lane highway with no traffic to speak of, the vistas did open up in front of us, which made me glad I was able to look forward and enjoy them through the expanse of the front windshield instead of looking off to the side through a motor coach window. And when we did some of the typical stops -- Þingvellir park, Gullfoss waterfall -- we could ride out the ebb and flow of the tour bus traffic, and have these spots pretty much to ourselves, even for just a little while. Or the time when we were driving toward the south coast, running through a series of rain bands -- in and out; in and out. I was starting to get annoyed until I looked out the rear view mirror and saw a huge double rainbow. I immediately pulled into a gas station and got out of the car. The landscape was wide open; we could see that rainbow from end to end. It was a phenomenal sight. And the smoked lamb sandwich we bought afterwards in the gas station wasn’t bad either.</li>\r\n 	<li>I struggle sometimes when asked about Iceland. Would I recommend it? Reykjavik is nice enough, but it’s a small town. I’m not a museum guy, so there was probably a day-and-a half of stuff for me to do. And Iceland is expensive. I had good fish and lamb, but it wasn’t cheap. And hotel rooms were tight in March, so I gotta figure the country is completely sold out in July and August.</li>\r\n 	<li>But the scenery outside of Reykjavik, I keep coming back to that word “dramatic”. I’m not sure it does it justice, but it’s all I got. If you get a car, then the trip starts to make sense.</li>\r\n 	<li>Well, that and the fermented shark chased with shots of brennivín -- Icelandic schnapps -- because, I dunno, how can you not?</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #122</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/\">Podshow Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_122.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #122 — Data-Hungry Phones; Dramatic Iceland','','inherit','closed','closed','','1629-revision-v1','','','2016-07-07 23:01:01','2016-07-08 04:01:01','',1629,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/07/07/1629-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1637,1,'2016-07-09 08:23:10','2016-07-09 13:23:10','[caption id=\"attachment_840\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"146\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/4275897174_f7c83887ab_z11.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-840\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/4275897174_f7c83887ab_z11-146x300.jpg\" alt=\"Chuck the Flight Attendant © hello jenny / Flickr\" width=\"146\" height=\"300\" /></a> Chuck the Flight Attendant © hello jenny / Flickr[/caption]\r\n\r\nIt\'s been a while since the last podcast. Contrary to what you might have thought, I haven\'t <a href=\"http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=podfade\" target=\"_blank\">podfaded </a>-- at least, not quite yet.  A flight out of Grand Junction, CO gave me a throw-back moment -- a flight in a prop plane. Sitting next to a huge guy on a very small plane got me thinking about how to deal with row mates -- row mates \"of size\" and row mates who like to chat. I talk about how the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Global Entry\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Entry\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Global Entry</a> program saved me from a huge line at ORD and comment on the now-infamous TSA exhortation to \"Get Your Freak On Girl\". We close with an economics lesson -- what\'s happened to all the hot flight attendants. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_94.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_94.mp3\"]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript from TravelCommons podcast #94:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Looking at the calendar, it has been a while since my last podcast. I\'ve kept meaning to do a new episode, but then something – usually work – gets in my way. Also, I am absolutely the least efficient/most distractable writer I know. Probably contributes to the problem.</li>\r\n	<li>Anyway, I\'ve been bouncing around a bit since the last episode – London, Dallas, Milwaukee, Orlando, Phoenix a couple of times, and a biking trip in <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Moab, Utah\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moab%2C_Utah\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Moab, Utah</a>.</li>\r\n	<li>The biking trip did challenge my packing skills – how to pack for a 4-day biking trip followed by 3 days of work in Phoenix, all in a carry-on roller bag.  Luckily, biking gear isn\'t that bulky – except for the shoes. And in Moab, a non-faded pair of jeans is considered high fashion, so the after-hours clothing count was pretty low also.</li>\r\n	<li>To get to Moab, I flew in and out of <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Grand Junction, Colorado\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Junction%2C_Colorado\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Grand Junction, CO</a> on the first prop planes – a Mesaba <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Bombardier Dash 8\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombardier_Dash_8\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Dash 8</a> – that I’ve flown in a long time.  I thought regional jets had replaced all of these things years ago.  Knowing that I’d be flying down to Phoenix on a commuter plane made my post-bike packing a bit easier. I could expand my rollerboard a bit because I wouldn’t have to fit it in an overhead; I’d be gatechecking it at plane side.</li>\r\n	<li>So I was a bit surprised when the gate agent was encouraging people to carry on.  Really?  When was the last time you heard that?  Usually the gate agents are prowling the boarding area looking for oversized carryons to gate check. Indeed, with sold-out planes being the norm, more gate agents are announcing that everyone in the last boarding group will have to gate check their carryons – not even letting them get on the plane to try. I wonder if it’s a marketing ploy for the new airline credit cards that offer advanced boarding along with a mile for every dollar spent.</li>\r\n	<li>Well, expanded out, my bag wasn\'t going to fit in a normal sized carryon bin, let alone the shrunken vestigial one on a Dash 8, so I grabbed a gate check tag and left it plane side like I always do.  I did, though, ask the woman there about what I thought was an odd request – why ask people to carry on? “’Cause we’re weight-restricted” she said, “and carryons don’t count.” So a 20-lb bag counts against the weight restriction when it’s in the cargo hold below the passengers’ feet, but not when it’s shoved above the passengers’ heads?  She just shrugged and pointed me toward the stairs.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/hisboyelroy/430\" target=\"_blank\">Revolve</a> mix</em> by His Boy Elroy</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>We\'ve talked in past episodes about row mates; seat neighbors.</li>\r\n	<li>Well, once I got on board that Dash 8 in Grand Junction, I found that my row mate was <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Larry the Cable Guy\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_the_Cable_Guy\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Larry The Cable Guy</a>’s overweight twin – or perhaps the more appropriate way would be to say “a passenger of size”.  Whatever way you want put it, there was no way I was getting the armrest down between Larry and me.  Hell, I couldn\'t even see the armrest. I didn’t make a big deal out of it – I had the aisle I could lean into to, and Larry kept his arms forward to try to minimize the spill over. But it still was an uncomfortable 2 hours. Pressing up against Larry for that entire time, I could feel (literally) the justification for making “passengers of size” buy two seats if they can’t fit into one.</li>\r\n	<li>But then there was this huge guy on my DFW-ORD flight. Standing in the aisle for 5 min stashing his stuff, holding up the entire boarding process. |Not that he could\'ve stepped out of the aisle – he was too big for that. But then he got offended when people tried to squeeze around him as the flight attendants started banging on about the need for everyone to get seated so we could leave on time.</li>\r\n	<li>I’m not a tiny guy myself. But, in spite of what the spokesperson for the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance\" href=\"http://www.naafa.org\" rel=\"homepage\">National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance</a> says, it’s not about rights.  It’s about being polite and living with the choice you\'ve made – or purchased. For a given price, you’ve bought a seat of known dimensions in smallish metal tube that you’ll share with 50-200 other people all trying to get in and out of said tube in as short a time period as possible. If you can’t sit comfortably with the armrest down, then buy the seat next to you, or buy a first class seat (or at least an upgrade) on planes that offer it (certainly wasn\'t an option provided Larry on that Dash-8).  If you don’t want to be rushed during boarding, check your bags and wait ‘til last call – or charter your own jet.  But don’t get huffy at the rest of us.</li>\r\n	<li>While I was waiting to start my trip to Moab, I had a bit of dwell time in ORD so I did a little test.  I fired up my Verizon 4G Hot Spot and ran the Speed Test Chrome app on my MacBook Air – a smokin’12.3 megabits per sec down, 15 Mbps up. I then fired up the Speed Test app on my AT&amp;T iPhone 4 – 0.3 Mbps down, 0.05 Mbps up. I don’t know what’s wrong with the AT&amp;T data service in ORD, but it’s just pathetic.</li>\r\n	<li>A year ago – in<a title=\"Podcast #85 — Importance of Hotel Bathrooms; Maximizing Miles\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2010/11/30/podcast-85-importance-of-hotel-bathrooms-maximizing-miles/\" target=\"_blank\"> episode 85</a> to be exact – I interviewed <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Michael Komarnitsky\" href=\"http://www.crunchbase.com/person/michael-komarnitsky\" rel=\"crunchbase\">Michael Komarnitsky</a>, founder and chief executive of <a href=\"http://gomiles.com/\" target=\"_blank\">GoMiles</a>, a mileage tracking and management website.  Earlier this month, AA and SWA went gunning for Michael and other mileage-management sites, serving them “cease-&amp;-desist” letters claiming security and terms of use violations.  What it’s really about, I think, is not wanting travelers to have tools to be “more efficient” in how they cash in miles or frequent sleeper points. Miles are a big money-maker for airlines – they pull in millions selling them to credit card companies and the like.  They’re even more profitable when they expire unused.  Sites like <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"GoMiles\" href=\"http://www.crunchbase.com/company/gomiles\" rel=\"crunchbase\">GoMiles</a> make it easier to keep track of your miles, including expiration dates. I’ll put links to our <a title=\"Podcast #85 — Importance of Hotel Bathrooms; Maximizing Miles\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2010/11/30/podcast-85-importance-of-hotel-bathrooms-maximizing-miles/\" target=\"_blank\">interview </a>with Michael and a <a href=\"http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204774604576627142338884936.html\" target=\"_blank\">WSJ article</a> in the show notes.</li>\r\n	<li>In the<a title=\"Podcast #93 — Travel Stories from September 11th; Traveling with a Google Chromebook\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/09/09/podcast-93-%e2%80%94-travel-stories-from-september-11th-traveling-with-a-google-chromebook/\" target=\"_blank\"> last episode</a>, I was getting ready to head over to London, and was looking forward to testing out the Global Entry lane, seeing if it cut my re-entry time at passport control.  Coming back into ORD, it was a huge time/frustration saver. The US citizen line at passport control was longer than I\'ve ever seen it – all the cattle-pen switchback lanes were full and then the line stretched out another 50-75 yards into the terminal walkway. I walked up, showed the line marshal the “CPB” Global Entry sticker on the back of my passport and was waved through to a row of 6 Global Entry kiosks.</li>\r\n	<li>It took me two tries to get a valid 4-fingerprint reading, but I was through in 5 minutes. Was definitely worth the couple of hours I invested back in July.</li>\r\n	<li>Robby Smith wrote this on the TravelCommons Facebook wall –\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>I now have 3 data points for Global Entry in the last 3 months.  My average time in Immigration is about 20 seconds. Customs just takes receipt from the GE kiosk and say Welcome Home. IAH has a separate Customs arrival lane for GE only.  I know the GE program is only about 18 months old or so but I should have done this the day it came out. At $100 for 5 years, it would be ridiculous for me not to have it. Finally a Gov program that works and makes life better.</li>\r\n	<li>BTW; United Mileage Plus 1K and GSM now get this as a free benefit of status.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>Robby, thanks for that.  I agree that it’s a great program – the one thing the Dept of Homeland Security has done to make travel a little easier.  And more programs are picking up the $100 fee.  It’s now a benefit of Amex’s Platinum card.</li>\r\n	<li>And of course, the podcast wouldn’t be complete without a TSA item.  Every once in a while, on those rare occasions that I check luggage, I’ll find a card from the TSA politely letting me know they’ve opened my luggage and searched through it. Sometimes they re-pack things nicely, other times they leave a wadded up mess.  For one woman earlier this month, they left her a more personal note, printing “Get Your Freak On Girl” along the margin of the standard TSA card.  Prompted, she guessed, by the screener’s discovery of what she described in a tweet was a “personal” item – battery powered.  She was stunned, but kept a sense of humor about it. Given recent arrests of TSA agents stealing from screened luggage, she’s lucky the screener just left the note.  There’s a link to an<a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.forbes.com%2Fsites%2Fkashmirhill%2F2011%2F10%2F24%2Ftsa-officer-advises-passenger-to-get-her-freak-on%2F&amp;h=iAQHCGNplAQHy0Sz1-fzFBuZQC14G7hsgZZIeEhj3mbR1jQ\" target=\"_blank\"> article</a> on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\">TravelCommons Facebook wall</a>, and I’ll also put it in the show notes.</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a question, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is <a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a> -- use the Voice Memo app on your iPhone or something like Virtual Recorder on your Android phone to record and send in an audio comment – or iMovie if you want to send in some video; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/#!/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at travelcommons.com.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/septahelix/34050\" target=\"_blank\">Earth Soda</a></em> by septahelix</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Plane Conversation Etiquette or The Risks of Talking to Your Seatmate</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Humans love/need to put order to the randomness around them, and one of the most common ways to do it is the “There are two kinds of people in the world” construct – Those who like durian or mushrooms or Brussels sprouts or ferrets and those who don’t.  In travel, the classic split is between fliers who want to talk to their row mates and those who want to be left alone.</li>\r\n	<li>You can see it when you walk on the plane – the people who sit down and immediately power up the Bose noise-canceling headsets and those who are looking all around</li>\r\n	<li>I saw the ultimate example of a talker on the same DFW-ORD flight (yes, it was one of those flights…). The guy in the row in front of me talked for 45 min straight, seemingly without taking a breath – he must’ve been an amateur didgeridoo player trained in circular breathing. He started before takeoff.  Sitting in the center seat, he swiveled his head like an oscillating fan, equally torturing both row mates. I was half expecting him to swivel his head all the way around “Exorcist-style” and include me in his life story.</li>\r\n	<li>Four of us in the two rows behind him traded glances as we watched him in a mix of amazement (equal parts how long he could talk and how clueless he was of what he was doing), horror (at the mental anguish he was inflicting on his row mates) and relief (glad we weren’t sitting in that row). We started a little pool – 5 bucks a piece – would he stop or be told to shut up, and when would that happen. I figured he’d eventually run out of gas – if his row mates hadn’t plugged in their iPods by now, they were going to let him go.  The guy across the aisle from me won the pot, though, because I underestimated how long this guy would talk.</li>\r\n	<li>As you might have guessed, I’m not generally a talker. If you end up next to me on a plane, it’s pretty certain that the only conversation we’ll have is when you ask me to get up from my aisle seat to let you go to the toilet.</li>\r\n	<li>I use plane flights as my alone time – I mostly nap, then read, maybe do a bit of e-mail or play solitaire on my iPhone while listening to podcasts. As I’ve mentioned in past episodes, I rarely use in-flight Wi-Fi.  I enjoy that little bit of unwired isolation.</li>\r\n	<li>I do think I miss out on things, though.  On a flight down to Phoenix, USAir screwed up my reservation, lost my advance seat assignment, which dropped me in a center seat.  I was sitting in my seat, not looking forward to the next 3.5 hours. Getting up to let in the older woman who had the window seat, she said to me “I really don’t care for window seats.” “I’ll slide over if you want this center seat instead,” I offered.  She gladly took it.  I got into my usual position – plugged in, eyes closed, waiting for takeoff – my own little world. Only after I was walking down the terminal in PHX did I think – that’s a bit odd about not wanting the window; I should’ve asked her for the back story.</li>\r\n	<li>I’m not like I’m a complete social hermit. Eating at the bar in a restaurant while on the road, I’ll strike up a conversation with the bartender or the guy sitting next to me. At dinner last night at a restaurant with communal tables, I got the thumbnail life story of the couple sitting next to me, even traded splashes of pinot noir for an impromptu wine tasting.</li>\r\n	<li>So what’s different?  Well, in that bar or in that restaurant, if things get a little weird, a little uncomfortable, or a little boring, I can always excuse myself and walk away.  Not easily done in a metal tube 35,000 ft in the air. While I might be kinda curious about a person, I’m not <em>that</em> curious to risk being pinned against the wall of a plane for three hours…</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music --<em> <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/scottaltham/20747\">Hear Us Now</a></em> by scottaltham</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Decline of Hot Flight Attendants</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li><a href=\"http://www.theatlantic.com/megan-mcardle/\" target=\"_blank\">Megan McArdle</a> of the <a href=\"http://www.theatlantic.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Atlantic</a> magazine has become one of my favorite bloggers. I’m sympatico with her call-it “wet libertarianism”. Could be because we both graduated from University of Chicago’s business school where a sort of cold-blooded economic theory pervades everything.</li>\r\n	<li>Anyhow, a recent article of hers caught my eye – “<a href=\"http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/10/the-declining-hotness-of-flight-attendants/246610/\" target=\"_blank\">The Declining Hotness of Flight Attendants</a>”. The TV show <em>Pan Am</em> – set in the ‘60’s, a Mad Men in the air knock-off, has let to a string of “then vs. now” articles, comparing the “Clipper Class” era to today “Greyhound Bus” level of service.  Another blogger, Glen Whitman, had written a <em>Pan Am</em>-inspired post on the “<a href=\"http://agoraphilia.blogspot.com/2011/10/pan-am-and-economics-of-hot-flight.html\" target=\"_blank\">Economics of Hot Flight Attendants</a>”. His thesis – prior to deregulation, with the Civil Aeronautics Board setting prices for flight routes, airlines could only compete on service. Since in the ‘60’s and ‘70’s, most fliers were male salarymen, airlines would pay more for attractive flight attendants to differentiate their service.  After 1978, airlines found competing on price overwhelmed differences in service and so out went any rationale for the hot flight attendant salary premium.</li>\r\n	<li>McArdle’s response – “As a libertarianish economics blogger, I would love if this story were true.  But I\'m skeptical.”  And then she goes outlines a more plausible scenario – the combination of union representation, anti-discrimination laws and, as she puts it, “feminist shaming”, allowed the flight attendant population to age, resulting in “a workforce composed mostly of older and not particularly attractive people.  Mirroring the larger American workforce”</li>\r\n	<li>Reminded me of when Virgin Atlantic started flight into Chicago. I was running a dot-com consultancy at the time (like 75% of the working population, or so it seemed) and was flying to London twice a month. I quickly became a Virgin Atlantic regular. The flights were much better than United or American or BA. The planes were new, the food was good, and yes, they had hot flight attendants.  On a flight back to Chicago, one of the flight attendants asked me for suggestions on things to do on her layover. She told me that she was bidding on different runs every month so that she could “see the world” since she, like other the other flight attendants, was on a 36-month non-renewable contract.  No danger of declining hotness at Virgin.</li>\r\n	<li>Now, all that being said, it’s wasn’t the “hotness” of the Virgin flight attendants that mattered (though in and of itself, it wasn’t a bad thing), it was their attitude – lack of cynicism, sarcasm, surliness.  This was still new and exciting to them – unlike the 25-year veteran flight attendants at United or American. The Virgin flight attendants would be serving passengers throughout the flight, rather than racing the meal carts through the aisles and then hiding in the galleys. When asked to describe meal choices, I would receive a polite explanation, rather than the “Does this look like a restaurant” reply I received from a Northwest flight attendant.</li>\r\n	<li>We won’t ever get back to the Pan Am Clipper Class days, what’s called the “Golden Age” of travel.  I’m OK with that.  I’d be happy for just some pleasant attitudes in today’s flying buses.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids99176268111711.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #94</li>\r\n	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from the <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/\" target=\"_blank\">ccMixter</a> site</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_94.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #94 — Plane Conversation Etiquette; Decline of Hot Flight Attendants','','inherit','closed','closed','','832-revision-v1','','','2016-07-09 08:23:10','2016-07-09 13:23:10','',832,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/07/09/832-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1638,1,'2016-07-09 08:29:35','2016-07-09 13:29:35','[caption id=\"attachment_1632\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/IMG_0324.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1632\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/IMG_0324-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Spring Break in Iceland\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Spring Break in Iceland[/caption]\r\n\r\nWatching Iceland makes its Cinderella run in the Euro 2016 soccer tourney got me thinking back to my March trip there. It is one of the hot travel destinations -- maybe too hot? Could be, but the descriptor I keep coming back to is \"dramatic.\" And it seems that on every trip I make out of the country, I get surprised by the amount of data my iPhone consumes -- in spite of flipping every Settings switch I can find. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_122.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/251667522\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #122:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you once again from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, on a week off of the road. I hate to say “a rare week”, but looking at my calendar, it is. For the first half of the year -- 26 weeks -- I didn’t get in an airplane during 2 of them. This week, the first of the second half of the year, is my 3rd non-travel week. Now absolutely some of them are self-inflicted -- 2 to be exact -- one week in Spain and one in Portugal. That’s an intense travel schedule, even for me. I usually find a way to take a break at least once every 6 weeks, but it just hasn’t worked out that way this year so far. Sometimes you control your schedule, while other times it controls you. I’m definitely been on the wrong end of the leash since January.</li>\r\n 	<li>Since the last episode, I’ve been traveling pretty much exclusively between Chicago and Charlottesville, VA. Now Charlottesville is a nice town, but it’s a pain to get to every week. The first direct flight from Chicago leaves around 11:30am, landing around 2pm -- not exactly convenient for the business traveler. Other earlier options are to fly into Washington-Dulles and drive for 2 hrs, or fly into Richmond and drive an hour and a half. What I’ve found myself doing for the past couple of weeks is flying in Sunday night -- which I absolutely hate -- on direct flight that leaves Chicago around 9:45pm, lands in Charlottesville around half past midnight and puts me into my hotel around 1am. There just doesn’t seem to be an easy way around this one.</li>\r\n 	<li>At least the flights back home are convenient -- 3:15 and 6:30pm. And it’s not a crowded airport. I think last week was the longest TSA line I hit -- 3 people were in front of me.</li>\r\n 	<li>And as I start to think about a September trip to Scotland to take our daughter back to University, I’m taking advantage of the post-Brexit exchange rate to stock my Revolut account with some much cheaper pounds. Though it’ll be another week on the road, I’ll be significantly upgrading my Scotch choices.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/hisboyelroy/430\" target=\"_blank\">Revolve</a> mix</em> by His Boy Elroy</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Last week’s attack at Istanbul’s Ataturk airport begs the same question as March’s Brussels bombings -- does more airport security actually make us safer or just move the target around? I said in the<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/05/30/podcast-121-tsa-lines-my-luggage-is-where/\" target=\"_blank\"> last episode</a> that the long TSA lines on the land side of security caused by stricter TSA inspections weren’t making the traveler any safer. Instead, they were make us less safe/more vulnerable to a Brussels or Istanbul-style attack. And while the TSA has fixed (at least for now) some of the worst lines, the issue is going to pop up again. And someone is going to suggest -- again -- that they move the security perimeter back -- say, checking itineraries and IDs at the terminal door like they do in India? The justification will be that a little bit more inconvenience is more than worth the price of safety. But, if they don’t staff it right (which was and will alway be the core problem), all you’ve done is just move the target -- the line of passengers -- out by another 1,000 feet. It’s less about location and more about execution. And given the TSA’s track record of execution over the past 15 years, I’m not optimistic that they’ll get to the right answer.</li>\r\n 	<li>I got a e-mail a few weeks ago that my 5-year Global Entry membership expires on my birthday this December. I don’t know exactly when Customs and Border Patrol started Global Entry, but 5 years ago, I was one of the early adopters. Back then, there weren’t that many interview centers. I was lucky that Chicago had one, but I had colleagues in Phoenix who had to fly up to Las Vegas for interviews. The renew process was pretty easy. I logged into GOES -- Global Online Enrollment Systems -- clicked the blue Renew Membership button and then cycled through all the profile screens -- but this time the screens were pre-populated so I only had to make updates. In my case, it was updating my job history for my current job and, the toughest part, entering all the countries I’d visited in the past 5 years. Normally, this would be pretty simple -- thumb through your passport pages and write down the country stamps. However, back in 2012, my backpack with my passport was stolen while on the train from Brussels city center to the airport -- a fun time I recount in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/05/20/podcast-98-stolen-luggage-restaurants-want-your-smartphone/\" target=\"_blank\">episode 98</a>. Luckily, I do a decent job of cataloging travel pics. Flipping through 2011 reminded me that we’d visited Venice that year and that I’d traveled there by train from Paris after a couple of days of customer meeting. The renewal cost is $100 -- $20/year is worth the price. Even more so when it’s free -- I charged it on my Amex Platinum card and immediately saw a $100 statement credit. Now I’m checking GOES every couple of days to see if Customs just waves my renewal through or if I have to talk again to the nice people in the bowels of ORD Terminal 5. I’m hoping that with the crush of new PreCheck applications, they’ll take the easy route.</li>\r\n 	<li>And as we’ve talked about before, I’m not really sure why anyone would sign up for PreCheck instead of Global Entry. Global Entry is just $15 more -- $100 instead of $85 -- the price of a beer at ORD.</li>\r\n 	<li>But if you’re not up for the $100 passport check line cut, Arnoud Heijnis, a long time TravelCommons listener, pinged me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> about another option -- the Mobile Passport app from US Customs and Border Patrol. I haven’t used it because I have Global Entry. My wife tried to get my son to download it before his return flight from Reykjavik, but he never got ‘round to it, and he said the early evening lines at ORD weren’t that bad. So while I don’t have any first- or second-hand experience with it, one of the tech writers at WSJ wrote up a <a href=\"http://www.wsj.com/articles/get-through-airport-customs-faster-with-this-free-app-1467221118\" target=\"_blank\">glowing review</a> of the app a few weeks back. Check out the show notes for a link to the article. And if you’ve tried the Mobile Passport, shoot me a note with your thoughts.</li>\r\n 	<li>During my flight back home last Weds, we were coming in on approach, you could feel the gradual descent -- slowing, descending, slowing, descending -- and then, all of a sudden, I’m pressed against the back of my seat as the plane rotates in the wrong direction -- up, that is -- and the engines roar with thrust. The experienced travelers know that the pilot had to abort the landing, but those who haven’t gone through this drill before are looking around, wondering “what the hell…?”. After about 5 minutes, the pilot came on “The plane in front of us hit a bird. They have to physically inspect the runway before another plane can land, so we had to fly around. We’ll be down in 10 minutes”. That was a nice announcement. I learned something new -- I didn’t know they had to inspect a runway after a bird strike, though it makes a lot of sense. Too often pilots or gate agents don’t take the time to explain the cause of a delay or a fly around, or don’t want to deal with the follow-up questions that may come -- and so I appreciate those that do. I remember a Southwest flight out of New Orleans. The plane lands -- it was a bit late -- but we’re not boarding right away. You could feel the impatience building in the gate area. The agent got on the PA -- “Sorry for the delay in boarding, but the plane was struck by lightning on its descent. The pilots have to do a physical inspection before we can board”. OK, that makes sense -- and just as you could feel the impatience build, it immediately drained away with that announcement. Maybe it’s because these delays weren’t the airline’s fault -- no negligence or bad judgement on American’s part for a bird strike or Southwest’s for lightning. Bit tougher to suck up when it’s the third delay in a row caused by maintenance issues -- spend some of those record profits on preventative maintenance -- or a missing crew -- maybe you should put a bit more slack in your scheduling. But as always, more transparency is better than vagueness -- even if it’s not the best story for you.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/septahelix/34050\" target=\"_blank\">Earth Soda</a></em> by septahelix</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Data-Hungry Phones</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I met up with a friend at <a href=\"http://www.empiricalbrewery.com/\">Empirical Brewing</a>, one of 3 microbreweries along Ravenswood Blvd in that Chicago northwest side neighborhood. I hadn’t seen him since he had gotten back from a trip he and his son did to Helsinki, St Petersburg, and Moscow. Among other things, he had problems getting his son’s AT&amp;T iPhone to work in Helsinki. That’s odd, I said. I’ve never had a problem with AT&amp;T’s GSM iPhones in Europe. AT&amp;T told him to reset it, which he did, after which it promptly downloaded a gig and a half of apps and data over the cellular data network. As you might guess, he’s disputing that couple of hundred dollar bill.</li>\r\n 	<li>I am always surprised at how much data my phone uses when I travel outside of the country. Now I’m sure that one reason for this is that it’s about the only time I look at my data usage since I’m grandfathered into one of the old AT&amp;T unlimited data plans. I don’t know how much I use, and don’t make a big effort to limit it. So when I travel overseas, I get to see my kids live their mobile lives trying to stay under a 300 MB data cap.</li>\r\n 	<li>International mobile data has gotten a bit cheaper. T-Mobile offers a reasonable unlimited international data plan if you can live with slower 2G-style speeds. I’m not that patient, so I tend to get the AT&amp;T 300 MB package for $60 because it also comes with free access to a decent set of wi-fi hotspots.</li>\r\n 	<li>Living on a data budget means thinking which apps really need mobile data -- which is not that many. So while I’m sitting on the plane waiting for everyone to board, I pull out my iPhone, go over to Settings | Cellular and start turning off cellular data access for most of my apps. I’m not quite sure why the healthcare flexible spending app or the app that came with my sous vide immersion heater ever need cellular data -- in the US or internationally. Anyhow, I spool through the last, turning most of them off and certainly that damn “Wi-Fi Assist” and then, after I’ve sent my last Snapchat, I hit “Reset Statistics” so I’ll have a clean view of how I’m burning through that 300 MB and then click over to Airplane mode.</li>\r\n 	<li>And then, when I land, I come out of Airplane mode, go back into Settings | Cellular and turn Roaming On, and catch up on the overnight e-mail while waiting to get off the plane. At some point that morning, I’ll look at the Current Period data usage and see that I’ve burned through, say, 75 MB of my 300 MB -- 25% of my total package -- in the first morning. Holy crap! I immediately dive back into Settings | Cellular and turn off Roaming. What happened?</li>\r\n 	<li>This is where, on the iPhone, you begin having to spelunk through the mess that the Settings app has become. You scroll down past all the apps you shut off from cellular access and look at the last entry -- “System Services” -- and see that it’s consumed at least half of that 75 MB. What the hell? You click through. Why has this phone used that much data on “Time &amp; Location” or “General” or “iTunes Accounts” (huh? I thought I shut off iTunes in the last screen). This is when you start to dig deep -- Settings | Privacy | Location Service and you find another list of apps -- kinda like the one you used to turn off cellular data, but this one is for accessing your location. Look, as much as I love the Tortas Frontera restaurants in ORD, I’m not sure why their app needs to pull my location information. And then you go to Settings | General | Background App Refresh for yet another list of apps where you shut off their permission to update themselves in the background. And then you go over to Settings | Mail and turn Fetch New Data to Off to keep your iPhone from constantly pinging your Exchange server.</li>\r\n 	<li>It’s kinda like whack-a-mole, and you’ll be sure to miss something because these phones and the apps we load on them are, for the most part, built on the assumption of ubiquitous unlimited data access. So changing that behavior, those assumptions -- to severely limit the data the phone inhales and exhales -- takes work. Which is why, if we’re going to be somewhere for more than 4-5 days, I’ll invest the hour it takes to find a phone store and $25 per phone to buy a local SIM with a gig or two of data. When I was in Iceland for 4 days in March, it didn’t seem necessary. But when then I flew down to Spain for 8 days, my first stop was the Orange store because I knew my phone couldn’t hold its breath for that long.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music --<em> <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/scottaltham/20747\">Hear Us Now</a></em> by scottaltham</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Dramatic Iceland</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Watching Iceland makes its Cinderella run in the Euro 2016 soccer tourney -- right up until the time they faceplanted into France last weekend -- reminded me of the trip my son and I took in March. Some reaction shots ESPN did from Reykjavik were places we had been -- saw a coffee shop we hit trying to stay awake on our first day, and a square that one of our hotels was on. Not that surprising since downtown Reykjavik isn’t that big. If I’d paid more attention to the people sitting next to me in the bars off that square, I’d have probably recognized some people in those shots too.</li>\r\n 	<li>Iceland is a hot tourist destination -- especially for people looking for something a bit different. And if I didn’t know already, when the Dorling Kindersley folks sent me review copies of their relaunched <a href=\"http://www.dk.com/us/travel/\">Eyewitness Travel Top 10 Guides</a>, in among the usual suspects -- New York, London, Paris, Barcelona -- was Iceland. In 2015, there were <a href=\"http://www.ferdamalastofa.is/static/files/ferdamalastofa/Frettamyndir/2016/juni/tourism_-in_iceland_in_figures_may2016.pdf\">1.3 million foreign tourists</a> in Iceland -- almost 4 times the population of 329,000 -- and a 29% increase over 2014. It’s a hot destination and getting hotter -- perhaps even to the point of overheating?</li>\r\n 	<li>Especially with Wow Air, a kinder and quirkier Spirit or Ryan Air, expanding the number of North American gateway cities. We ran into lots of folks who had seen ads for cheap Wow air fares and flew over for a 3 or 4 day weekend on a whim, without really thinking about what to do. We’d see folks walking up and down the downtown shopping and entertainment district in Reykjavik, and then figuring out some day trip bus rides out to the Golden Circle hot spots. And this was in March, not exactly the garden time in Iceland. But there were a lot of folks there. And so in that way, Iceland felt small.</li>\r\n 	<li>On our second day, we picked up a rental SUV -- a Dacia Duster, a great vehicle -- and headed out of town. Once we got out of Reykjavik’s catchment area, Iceland opened up quickly. The drama of the scenery, the spaces carved out by volcanos and glaciers -- “Land of Fire and Ice” it likes to bill itself -- make it feel much bigger. Of course, you could see this same space from the seat of a tour bus, but I was glad we rented a car. We got off the well-worn paths. Not too far, but when driving across a plain on a 2-lane highway with no traffic to speak of, the vistas did open up in front of us, which made me glad I was able to look forward and enjoy them through the expanse of the front windshield instead of looking off to the side through a motor coach window. And when we did some of the typical stops -- Þingvellir park, Gullfoss waterfall -- we could ride out the ebb and flow of the tour bus traffic, and have these spots pretty much to ourselves, even for just a little while. Or the time when we were driving toward the south coast, running through a series of rain bands -- in and out; in and out. I was starting to get annoyed until I looked out the rear view mirror and saw a huge double rainbow. I immediately pulled into a gas station and got out of the car. The landscape was wide open; we could see that rainbow from end to end. It was a phenomenal sight. And the smoked lamb sandwich we bought afterwards in the gas station wasn’t bad either.</li>\r\n 	<li>I struggle sometimes when asked about Iceland. Would I recommend it? Reykjavik is nice enough, but it’s a small town. I’m not a museum guy, so there was probably a day-and-a half of stuff for me to do. And Iceland is expensive. I had good fish and lamb, but it wasn’t cheap. And hotel rooms were tight in March, so I gotta figure the country is completely sold out in July and August.</li>\r\n 	<li>But the scenery outside of Reykjavik, I keep coming back to that word “dramatic”. I’m not sure it does it justice, but it’s all I got. If you get a car, then the trip starts to make sense.</li>\r\n 	<li>Well, that and the fermented shark chased with shots of brennivín -- Icelandic schnapps -- because, I dunno, how can you not?</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #122</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from the <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/\" target=\"_blank\">ccMixter</a> site</li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_122.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #122 — Data-Hungry Phones; Dramatic Iceland','','inherit','closed','closed','','1629-revision-v1','','','2016-07-09 08:29:35','2016-07-09 13:29:35','',1629,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/07/09/1629-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0);
INSERT INTO `wp_posts` VALUES
(1640,1,'2016-07-09 09:19:36','2016-07-09 14:19:36','[caption id=\"attachment_1632\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/IMG_0324.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1632\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/IMG_0324-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Spring Break in Iceland\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Spring Break in Iceland[/caption]\r\n\r\nWatching Iceland makes its Cinderella run in the Euro 2016 soccer tourney got me thinking back to my March trip there. It is one of the hot travel destinations -- maybe too hot? Could be, but the descriptor I keep coming back to is \"dramatic.\" And it seems that on every trip I make out of the country, I get surprised by the amount of data my iPhone consumes -- in spite of flipping every Settings switch I can find. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_122.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/272882441\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #122:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you once again from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, on a week off of the road. I hate to say “a rare week”, but looking at my calendar, it is. For the first half of the year -- 26 weeks -- I didn’t get in an airplane during 2 of them. This week, the first of the second half of the year, is my 3rd non-travel week. Now absolutely some of them are self-inflicted -- 2 to be exact -- one week in Spain and one in Portugal. That’s an intense travel schedule, even for me. I usually find a way to take a break at least once every 6 weeks, but it just hasn’t worked out that way this year so far. Sometimes you control your schedule, while other times it controls you. I’m definitely been on the wrong end of the leash since January.</li>\r\n 	<li>Since the last episode, I’ve been traveling pretty much exclusively between Chicago and Charlottesville, VA. Now Charlottesville is a nice town, but it’s a pain to get to every week. The first direct flight from Chicago leaves around 11:30am, landing around 2pm -- not exactly convenient for the business traveler. Other earlier options are to fly into Washington-Dulles and drive for 2 hrs, or fly into Richmond and drive an hour and a half. What I’ve found myself doing for the past couple of weeks is flying in Sunday night -- which I absolutely hate -- on direct flight that leaves Chicago around 9:45pm, lands in Charlottesville around half past midnight and puts me into my hotel around 1am. There just doesn’t seem to be an easy way around this one.</li>\r\n 	<li>At least the flights back home are convenient -- 3:15 and 6:30pm. And it’s not a crowded airport. I think last week was the longest TSA line I hit -- 3 people were in front of me.</li>\r\n 	<li>And as I start to think about a September trip to Scotland to take our daughter back to University, I’m taking advantage of the post-Brexit exchange rate to stock my Revolut account with some much cheaper pounds. Though it’ll be another week on the road, I’ll be significantly upgrading my Scotch choices.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/hisboyelroy/430\" target=\"_blank\">Revolve</a> mix</em> by His Boy Elroy</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Last week’s attack at Istanbul’s Ataturk airport begs the same question as March’s Brussels bombings -- does more airport security actually make us safer or just move the target around? I said in the<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/05/30/podcast-121-tsa-lines-my-luggage-is-where/\" target=\"_blank\"> last episode</a> that the long TSA lines on the land side of security caused by stricter TSA inspections weren’t making the traveler any safer. Instead, they were make us less safe/more vulnerable to a Brussels or Istanbul-style attack. And while the TSA has fixed (at least for now) some of the worst lines, the issue is going to pop up again. And someone is going to suggest -- again -- that they move the security perimeter back -- say, checking itineraries and IDs at the terminal door like they do in India? The justification will be that a little bit more inconvenience is more than worth the price of safety. But, if they don’t staff it right (which was and will alway be the core problem), all you’ve done is just move the target -- the line of passengers -- out by another 1,000 feet. It’s less about location and more about execution. And given the TSA’s track record of execution over the past 15 years, I’m not optimistic that they’ll get to the right answer.</li>\r\n 	<li>I got a e-mail a few weeks ago that my 5-year Global Entry membership expires on my birthday this December. I don’t know exactly when Customs and Border Patrol started Global Entry, but 5 years ago, I was one of the early adopters. Back then, there weren’t that many interview centers. I was lucky that Chicago had one, but I had colleagues in Phoenix who had to fly up to Las Vegas for interviews. The renew process was pretty easy. I logged into GOES -- Global Online Enrollment Systems -- clicked the blue Renew Membership button and then cycled through all the profile screens -- but this time the screens were pre-populated so I only had to make updates. In my case, it was updating my job history for my current job and, the toughest part, entering all the countries I’d visited in the past 5 years. Normally, this would be pretty simple -- thumb through your passport pages and write down the country stamps. However, back in 2012, my backpack with my passport was stolen while on the train from Brussels city center to the airport -- a fun time I recount in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/05/20/podcast-98-stolen-luggage-restaurants-want-your-smartphone/\" target=\"_blank\">episode 98</a>. Luckily, I do a decent job of cataloging travel pics. Flipping through 2011 reminded me that we’d visited Venice that year and that I’d traveled there by train from Paris after a couple of days of customer meeting. The renewal cost is $100 -- $20/year is worth the price. Even more so when it’s free -- I charged it on my Amex Platinum card and immediately saw a $100 statement credit. Now I’m checking GOES every couple of days to see if Customs just waves my renewal through or if I have to talk again to the nice people in the bowels of ORD Terminal 5. I’m hoping that with the crush of new PreCheck applications, they’ll take the easy route.</li>\r\n 	<li>And as we’ve talked about before, I’m not really sure why anyone would sign up for PreCheck instead of Global Entry. Global Entry is just $15 more -- $100 instead of $85 -- the price of a beer at ORD.</li>\r\n 	<li>But if you’re not up for the $100 passport check line cut, Arnoud Heijnis, a long time TravelCommons listener, pinged me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> about another option -- the Mobile Passport app from US Customs and Border Patrol. I haven’t used it because I have Global Entry. My wife tried to get my son to download it before his return flight from Reykjavik, but he never got ‘round to it, and he said the early evening lines at ORD weren’t that bad. So while I don’t have any first- or second-hand experience with it, one of the tech writers at WSJ wrote up a <a href=\"http://www.wsj.com/articles/get-through-airport-customs-faster-with-this-free-app-1467221118\" target=\"_blank\">glowing review</a> of the app a few weeks back. Check out the show notes for a link to the article. And if you’ve tried the Mobile Passport, shoot me a note with your thoughts.</li>\r\n 	<li>During my flight back home last Weds, we were coming in on approach, you could feel the gradual descent -- slowing, descending, slowing, descending -- and then, all of a sudden, I’m pressed against the back of my seat as the plane rotates in the wrong direction -- up, that is -- and the engines roar with thrust. The experienced travelers know that the pilot had to abort the landing, but those who haven’t gone through this drill before are looking around, wondering “what the hell…?”. After about 5 minutes, the pilot came on “The plane in front of us hit a bird. They have to physically inspect the runway before another plane can land, so we had to fly around. We’ll be down in 10 minutes”. That was a nice announcement. I learned something new -- I didn’t know they had to inspect a runway after a bird strike, though it makes a lot of sense. Too often pilots or gate agents don’t take the time to explain the cause of a delay or a fly around, or don’t want to deal with the follow-up questions that may come -- and so I appreciate those that do. I remember a Southwest flight out of New Orleans. The plane lands -- it was a bit late -- but we’re not boarding right away. You could feel the impatience building in the gate area. The agent got on the PA -- “Sorry for the delay in boarding, but the plane was struck by lightning on its descent. The pilots have to do a physical inspection before we can board”. OK, that makes sense -- and just as you could feel the impatience build, it immediately drained away with that announcement. Maybe it’s because these delays weren’t the airline’s fault -- no negligence or bad judgement on American’s part for a bird strike or Southwest’s for lightning. Bit tougher to suck up when it’s the third delay in a row caused by maintenance issues -- spend some of those record profits on preventative maintenance -- or a missing crew -- maybe you should put a bit more slack in your scheduling. But as always, more transparency is better than vagueness -- even if it’s not the best story for you.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/septahelix/34050\" target=\"_blank\">Earth Soda</a></em> by septahelix</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Data-Hungry Phones</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I met up with a friend at <a href=\"http://www.empiricalbrewery.com/\">Empirical Brewing</a>, one of 3 microbreweries along Ravenswood Blvd in that Chicago northwest side neighborhood. I hadn’t seen him since he had gotten back from a trip he and his son did to Helsinki, St Petersburg, and Moscow. Among other things, he had problems getting his son’s AT&amp;T iPhone to work in Helsinki. That’s odd, I said. I’ve never had a problem with AT&amp;T’s GSM iPhones in Europe. AT&amp;T told him to reset it, which he did, after which it promptly downloaded a gig and a half of apps and data over the cellular data network. As you might guess, he’s disputing that couple of hundred dollar bill.</li>\r\n 	<li>I am always surprised at how much data my phone uses when I travel outside of the country. Now I’m sure that one reason for this is that it’s about the only time I look at my data usage since I’m grandfathered into one of the old AT&amp;T unlimited data plans. I don’t know how much I use, and don’t make a big effort to limit it. So when I travel overseas, I get to see my kids live their mobile lives trying to stay under a 300 MB data cap.</li>\r\n 	<li>International mobile data has gotten a bit cheaper. T-Mobile offers a reasonable unlimited international data plan if you can live with slower 2G-style speeds. I’m not that patient, so I tend to get the AT&amp;T 300 MB package for $60 because it also comes with free access to a decent set of wi-fi hotspots.</li>\r\n 	<li>Living on a data budget means thinking which apps really need mobile data -- which is not that many. So while I’m sitting on the plane waiting for everyone to board, I pull out my iPhone, go over to Settings | Cellular and start turning off cellular data access for most of my apps. I’m not quite sure why the healthcare flexible spending app or the app that came with my sous vide immersion heater ever need cellular data -- in the US or internationally. Anyhow, I spool through the last, turning most of them off and certainly that damn “Wi-Fi Assist” and then, after I’ve sent my last Snapchat, I hit “Reset Statistics” so I’ll have a clean view of how I’m burning through that 300 MB and then click over to Airplane mode.</li>\r\n 	<li>And then, when I land, I come out of Airplane mode, go back into Settings | Cellular and turn Roaming On, and catch up on the overnight e-mail while waiting to get off the plane. At some point that morning, I’ll look at the Current Period data usage and see that I’ve burned through, say, 75 MB of my 300 MB -- 25% of my total package -- in the first morning. Holy crap! I immediately dive back into Settings | Cellular and turn off Roaming. What happened?</li>\r\n 	<li>This is where, on the iPhone, you begin having to spelunk through the mess that the Settings app has become. You scroll down past all the apps you shut off from cellular access and look at the last entry -- “System Services” -- and see that it’s consumed at least half of that 75 MB. What the hell? You click through. Why has this phone used that much data on “Time &amp; Location” or “General” or “iTunes Accounts” (huh? I thought I shut off iTunes in the last screen). This is when you start to dig deep -- Settings | Privacy | Location Service and you find another list of apps -- kinda like the one you used to turn off cellular data, but this one is for accessing your location. Look, as much as I love the Tortas Frontera restaurants in ORD, I’m not sure why their app needs to pull my location information. And then you go to Settings | General | Background App Refresh for yet another list of apps where you shut off their permission to update themselves in the background. And then you go over to Settings | Mail and turn Fetch New Data to Off to keep your iPhone from constantly pinging your Exchange server.</li>\r\n 	<li>It’s kinda like whack-a-mole, and you’ll be sure to miss something because these phones and the apps we load on them are, for the most part, built on the assumption of ubiquitous unlimited data access. So changing that behavior, those assumptions -- to severely limit the data the phone inhales and exhales -- takes work. Which is why, if we’re going to be somewhere for more than 4-5 days, I’ll invest the hour it takes to find a phone store and $25 per phone to buy a local SIM with a gig or two of data. When I was in Iceland for 4 days in March, it didn’t seem necessary. But when then I flew down to Spain for 8 days, my first stop was the Orange store because I knew my phone couldn’t hold its breath for that long.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music --<em> <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/scottaltham/20747\">Hear Us Now</a></em> by scottaltham</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Dramatic Iceland</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Watching Iceland makes its Cinderella run in the Euro 2016 soccer tourney -- right up until the time they faceplanted into France last weekend -- reminded me of the trip my son and I took in March. Some reaction shots ESPN did from Reykjavik were places we had been -- saw a coffee shop we hit trying to stay awake on our first day, and a square that one of our hotels was on. Not that surprising since downtown Reykjavik isn’t that big. If I’d paid more attention to the people sitting next to me in the bars off that square, I’d have probably recognized some people in those shots too.</li>\r\n 	<li>Iceland is a hot tourist destination -- especially for people looking for something a bit different. And if I didn’t know already, when the Dorling Kindersley folks sent me review copies of their relaunched <a href=\"http://www.dk.com/us/travel/\">Eyewitness Travel Top 10 Guides</a>, in among the usual suspects -- New York, London, Paris, Barcelona -- was Iceland. In 2015, there were <a href=\"http://www.ferdamalastofa.is/static/files/ferdamalastofa/Frettamyndir/2016/juni/tourism_-in_iceland_in_figures_may2016.pdf\">1.3 million foreign tourists</a> in Iceland -- almost 4 times the population of 329,000 -- and a 29% increase over 2014. It’s a hot destination and getting hotter -- perhaps even to the point of overheating?</li>\r\n 	<li>Especially with Wow Air, a kinder and quirkier Spirit or Ryan Air, expanding the number of North American gateway cities. We ran into lots of folks who had seen ads for cheap Wow air fares and flew over for a 3 or 4 day weekend on a whim, without really thinking about what to do. We’d see folks walking up and down the downtown shopping and entertainment district in Reykjavik, and then figuring out some day trip bus rides out to the Golden Circle hot spots. And this was in March, not exactly the garden time in Iceland. But there were a lot of folks there. And so in that way, Iceland felt small.</li>\r\n 	<li>On our second day, we picked up a rental SUV -- a Dacia Duster, a great vehicle -- and headed out of town. Once we got out of Reykjavik’s catchment area, Iceland opened up quickly. The drama of the scenery, the spaces carved out by volcanos and glaciers -- “Land of Fire and Ice” it likes to bill itself -- make it feel much bigger. Of course, you could see this same space from the seat of a tour bus, but I was glad we rented a car. We got off the well-worn paths. Not too far, but when driving across a plain on a 2-lane highway with no traffic to speak of, the vistas did open up in front of us, which made me glad I was able to look forward and enjoy them through the expanse of the front windshield instead of looking off to the side through a motor coach window. And when we did some of the typical stops -- Þingvellir park, Gullfoss waterfall -- we could ride out the ebb and flow of the tour bus traffic, and have these spots pretty much to ourselves, even for just a little while. Or the time when we were driving toward the south coast, running through a series of rain bands -- in and out; in and out. I was starting to get annoyed until I looked out the rear view mirror and saw a huge double rainbow. I immediately pulled into a gas station and got out of the car. The landscape was wide open; we could see that rainbow from end to end. It was a phenomenal sight. And the smoked lamb sandwich we bought afterwards in the gas station wasn’t bad either.</li>\r\n 	<li>I struggle sometimes when asked about Iceland. Would I recommend it? Reykjavik is nice enough, but it’s a small town. I’m not a museum guy, so there was probably a day-and-a half of stuff for me to do. And Iceland is expensive. I had good fish and lamb, but it wasn’t cheap. And hotel rooms were tight in March, so I gotta figure the country is completely sold out in July and August.</li>\r\n 	<li>But the scenery outside of Reykjavik, I keep coming back to that word “dramatic”. I’m not sure it does it justice, but it’s all I got. If you get a car, then the trip starts to make sense.</li>\r\n 	<li>Well, that and the fermented shark chased with shots of brennivín -- Icelandic schnapps -- because, I dunno, how can you not?</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #122</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from the <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/\" target=\"_blank\">ccMixter</a> site</li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_122.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #122 — Data-Hungry Phones; Dramatic Iceland','','inherit','closed','closed','','1629-revision-v1','','','2016-07-09 09:19:36','2016-07-09 14:19:36','',1629,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/07/09/1629-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1641,1,'2016-07-09 09:38:26','2016-07-09 14:38:26','[caption id=\"attachment_1532\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/DSC_5744.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1532\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/DSC_5744-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Lost Without Translation\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Lost Without Translation[/caption]\r\n\r\nBack behind the microphone after an extended summer break highlighted by a two-week family vacation in Japan. We talk about traveling in Japan. It was a fantastic time, though we were lost without translation at times. But with the US dollar buying 124 yen, it was the right time to go. We also talk about frustration in using frequent flier miles, trends toward prettier and higher tech luggage, and a connoisseur of scrambled eggs. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_116.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_116.mp3\"]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #116:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, after a <i>long </i>absence. Let’s call it summer vacation. And there was a nice bit of vacation there -- 2 weeks in Japan with the family. People would ask me “Have you been to Japan before?” Never outside of Narita. Which I translated to an answer of “Mostly no” before my trip, and updated to a plain “No” after my trip. But more on that later.</li>\r\n 	<li>Over the years, I’ve gotten into the habit of leaving the country if I want a real vacation. I find the disconnection process works much better I’m more than 5  time zones removed from home. Europe is 6 or 7 hours ahead -- pretty good. But the 14 hour difference between Chicago and Tokyo -- that’s real separation.</li>\r\n 	<li>You can’t unplug for 2 weeks for free, though. It takes a bit of planning, and in my case, a good bit of travel -- both before and after the trip.</li>\r\n 	<li>The 6 business days before my flight to Tokyo had me in Nashville, Detroit, Dallas, and the day before I left, Denver. I flew out Sunday night, flew home Monday night, and then left for Japan Tuesday noon. Coming back, we hit ORD 3:30 Sunday afternoon only to find myself back there 15 hours later for the first flight back out to Denver Monday morning. I was just happy that it was a short week for the 4th of July holiday.</li>\r\n 	<li>Since then, I’ve been keeping up the Denver-Dallas triangulation with the occasional random jump to somewhere like Detroit. I’ll probably keep it up through August since the beginning of September will have me out of the country again -- to Edinburgh, helping my daughter settle in at <a href=\"http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/\">University of St Andrews</a>. After that, I may just sleep until October.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://ghosts.nin.com/main/home\"><em>3 Ghosts I</em></a> by <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Nine Inch Nails\" href=\"http://www.nin.com/\" rel=\"homepage\">Nine Inch Nails</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>So that was the start of the <a href=\"https://blog.stackexchange.com/2015/06/stack-exchange-podcast-65-the-word-has-two-meanings-you-see/\">Stack Exchange Podcast</a> where Joel Spolsky goes pretty much non-linear over his attempt to use frequent flier miles.</li>\r\n 	<li>Any attempt to use frequent flier miles will be a frustrating exercise. My recent attempts to do <i>anything</i>with the 300,000 BA Avios miles is own personal exercise in masochism. But, to be honest, I’ve had pretty good luck this year, getting 2 flights down to New Orleans on Southwest, 4 direct flights from and from Tokyo with UA Mileage Plus and 3 flights between ORD and Edinburgh on American. Now, it wasn’t a complete cakewalk -- on SW, my wife and daughter took a 6am flight back on Monday, on UA, we had to come home a couple of days earlier than we had originally planned while on AA it’s a day later. But flexibility has always been a requirement to use frequent flyer miles. And those minor shifts are a whole lot better than my exercise with BA which only offered me one day in the entire month of September that I could use Avios miles to get to Edinburgh. I’m not sure there’s a more useless awards program.</li>\r\n 	<li>When I first started looking for Chicago to Edinburgh flights, I went straight to Hipmunk.com. It has been my go-to flight search tool for a while now. It’s easy -- it defaults to flight search, unlike Expedia’s push for bundled deals or Orbitz pushing hotels. And graphical display -- bars for each flight showing flight duration spread across the day -- makes it very easy to focus on the flights you’re most interested in. But when searching for Edinburgh flights, I spotted something new -- right under the red Virgin Atlantic bar was a purple one labeled “Mystery”. Kinda like Priceline’s unnamed hotels you bid for. But I’d never seen what the travel industry calls “opaque pricing” on Hipmunk before. Of course, it wasn’t really that opaque. Clicking on the bar revealed the flight details -- a 4:40pm departure with an hour connection in Madrid. Hmmm, let’s see. Only Iberia flies from ORD to MAD. Doing a quick search, I found the times did indeed match Iberia flight number 345 -- which Hipmunk only slightly masked as Mystery Airline #345. Must’ve been an experiment, because I haven’t seen it since, but I did get a good chuckle out of it.</li>\r\n 	<li>A colleague who I met up with on one of my Detroit trips flew Spirit Airline for the first time and <i>didn’t</i> get much of a chuckle. It was a last-minute meeting. He was flying in from Kansas City and, following the rules by using the mandated American Express Travel website to book his flight, he saw a Spirit flight that was significantly less than other carriers. Being a good corporate citizen, he booked it. He showed up at the ticket counter to get his boarding pass. “You gonna carry that one?” the Spirit agent asked him, pointing to his suitcase. “Of course,” he said. “That’ll cost you $55. And that briefcase doesn’t look like it’ll fit under the seat, so that’s another $55.” Pretty quickly, the price difference that led him to book Spirit disappeared in the smoke of carryon charges. Some might say it’s his fault for not knowing Spirit’s uniquely aggressive add-on fee structure -- what Spirit calls “bundling”. But I’d say it’s Amex’s fault -- for displaying Spirit’s base fare (without carryon fees) in the same ways as they display Delta’s or Southwest’s. And then marking those higher, but more inclusive, fares as being “out of policy” because they’re higher, and requiring additional steps to justify booking them. More power to Spirit to differentiate themselves with a unique fee structure, but Amex and the like need to do their job and let business travelers know what they’re in for when they book those low fares.</li>\r\n 	<li>Rich Fraser did saw my PreCheck frustration spill over to Twitter.\r\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" lang=\"en\">\r\n<p dir=\"ltr\" lang=\"en\">Folks, it\'s a *metal* detector! Large chunks of metal in your pocket - cell phones, car keys, $5 worth of quarters - *will* set it off</p>\r\n— Mark Peacock (@mpeacock) <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/623113695426670592\">July 20, 2015</a></blockquote>\r\n<script src=\"//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js\" async=\"\" charset=\"utf-8\"></script>I don’t know if it’s summer travel amateurs hitting the PreCheck lottery, but I’ve been stunned at the number of people who look amazed when the metal detector alarms when they try to walk through with a slug of metal in their pockets. Mobile phone, big electronic key fobs, two fistfuls of change… I mean, what part of “metal detector” do they not get? It’s doing it’s job! But people will stand there, dumbfounded, they can’t stroll through wearing the quarter-pound of metal and electronics that is an iPhone. I hate to be a snob, but I beginning to think they need to split PreCheck between the veterans who paid for it and the occasional random selectees. To which Rich mentioned that it’s not so occasional for him -- he’s gotten Pre on 3 of his last 4 trips. So, he says, why pay for it? Hey, as long as he remembers to take his mobile phone and car keys out of his pocket, I say, more power to him.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’ve probably mentioned this before, but I think one of the absolute best airport restaurants is Rick Bayless’ <a href=\"http://www.rickbayless.com/restaurants/tortas-frontera/\">Torta Frontera</a> in the American, United and International terminals at ORD. The tortas, the Mexican sandwiches, are fantastic -- great local ingredients and made-to-order. Being made-to-order is key to the great taste and texture, but it’s 10 minutes from the time you order and at ORD rush hour, you can stand in line for 10 minutes before you get to the counter. Great restaurant -- and popular. So I was cautiously excited last week when I saw they had a new ordering app. I was catching an evening flight to DTW and decided to check out the app. I downloaded and set up the app after parking in the deck -- created an account and loaded a credit card. Then, while in the PreCheck line, I scrolled through the menu and loaded the shopping cart with a Cubana, my favorite torta. I was going to hit the Order Now button, but the TSA guys were a little too efficient, waving 3 of us forward at once. So, I hit Order a couple of minutes later on the other side of the X-Ray machine. I quickly received an e-mail “Thanks for your order, we’ll let you know when it’s ready”. That’s it. No ETA, no typical wait time. Hmmm… I walk down to the T3 Tortas -- longest line I’ve seen. Hmmm…  Just then, I get a second e-mail -- 7 minutes after the first -- “You order will be ready at 5:43pm” -- 10 minutes from now. OK, not bad given this line. I walk to the rest room, browse the bookstore across the hall, and put myself in front of the order pick-up station at 5:43pm. About a minute later, the woman calls out “Anybody order on-line?” Two of us step up. “Mark?” I reach out and take my bag. The pre-order worked well, though next time, I’ll let the TSA guy wait for a minute while I hit the Order button a bit sooner.</li>\r\n 	<li>All the way back in April 2012, I wrote a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/04/21/best-hotel-amenity-free-breakfast/\">blog post</a> about free breakfast being the best hotel amenity.  (I had to do a good bit of scrolling on the TravelCommons website to find it -- I’ll save you that with a link in the show notes). It’s still true, even though, it’s, as I wrote back then, it’s more about convenience than food quality -- especially when you’re grabbing that breakfast in the concierge lounge of a Marriott or Sheraton or Westin. And it kinda turns you into a connoisseur of scrambled eggs. A buddy and I got into this conversation a few weeks back -- comparing the quality of scrambled eggs across hotels we’ve stayed at.  We concluded that the most typical consistency was firm, almost quiche like. We liked them with a bit of cheese mixed in to give them a bit of flavor (neither of us are vegan). Every once in a great while, you get great scrambled eggs -- soft curds, slightly moist. But you definitely don’t want them runny -- there’s nothing more disgusting at 6am than tilting back that warming tray clamshell lid and seeing scrambled eggs sitting in a pool of yellowish liquid. We’ll go for hard dry over swimming in yellow eggs every morning. But hard dry bacon, now that’s just wrong</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/buy_album.php?id=08E508A6096F11910641E13331B70EED6DFA5BB929282F731E19BBAFA8F08FFD686BD99DD86BA0D5E844DD5536E1AEFB\" rel=\"nofollow\"><em>Ghost Hardware</em></a> by Burial</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Traveling Thru Japan</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>The family and I have done a fair bit of travel in Asia -- Thailand, Singapore, Vietnam, Hong Kong, China -- which left two big holes -- Japan and Korea. We filled one of them this summer when we spent two weeks visiting Tokyo, Kyoto, and Osaka. Japan had always been on our list to visit, but its reputation for high prices always gave us an excuse to put it off and go some place where we could stretch our dollars further. But with the dollar buying ¥124 and then scoring 4 direct ORD-NRT tickets on United Mileage Plus awards, this seemed the time.</li>\r\n 	<li>Now as long time listeners know, this won’t be a travelog, a list of things to see in Tokyo or Kyoto -- I leave that to friends like Chris Christensen of the <a href=\"http://asia.amateurtraveler.com/tag/japan/\">Amateur Travelers podcast</a>. Since I always say that this podcast is more about the journey than the destination, let’s talk about travel in Japan.</li>\r\n 	<li>As my family and I tend to do on our trips, our only trips to the airport were coming and going to the US. Everything else was on train. Which in Japan works very well. My wife bought us 2-week Japan Rail (JR) passes before we left. It wasn’t a small number for the 4 of us, but they paid off over our trip -- allowing us unlimited use of the high-speed bullet trains, even to reserve seats for a bit more relaxed boarding.</li>\r\n 	<li>We broke the passes in on the Narita Express, the hour ride from the airport to Tokyo Station. I’m not sure they could’ve put Narita any further out. Given the distance, everyone takes the train or a bus. The train was fine, kinda like the Heathrow Express but without the TV screens. It worked with a minimum amount of fuss -- which was a good thing after a 12-hour flight.</li>\r\n 	<li>We really hammered the JR passes to train among Tokyo, Kyoto, and Osaka, all less than 3-hour trips. Some of the stations were huge and there were times when we had to lean in to thread through the crowds of commuters. But the signage was pretty good and the trains absolutely met their reputation for timeliness (if only airlines in the US were half as timely…). And while JR would roll a food cart while on the rails, we got a bit more into the Japanese train culture and stocked up at the train station food courts before we left -- bento boxes, rice cakes, and of course, train beers -- Kirin tall boys usually. And if we didn’t have time to hit the food court, we could always grab something from the vending machines -- which were positioned about every 20 feet on the train platform. The vending machine thing in Japan is intense -- but convenient.</li>\r\n 	<li>We didn’t just train point-to-point between the major stations. A lot of times it was a smaller train to the main station, then the high-speed train, then connecting to again to a smaller train. The HyperDia smartphone app came highly recommended and the free version was great when planning out these connecting journeys -- both inter-city and within Tokyo where a trip across town might span a couple of rail companies, say Tokyo Metro to a JR train. It also displays the fare, which is very handy, avoiding the need to try and decipher the rate table while in front of the fare machine with a queue building behind you. The public transit tab on Google Maps also worked surprisingly well.</li>\r\n 	<li>Being able to use these apps when you really need them requires mobile data for your phone. You don’t want to be trying to search for an open WiFi access point before figuring out which train you’re connecting to. Which, in Japan, like so many things, isn’t exactly straightforward. As a tourist, you can only buy data SIMs; no voice capabilities. One of my go-to websites -- the aptly, but somewhat awkwardly named <a href=\"http://prepaid-data-sim-card.wikia.com/wiki/Japan\">Prepaid Data SIM Card Wiki</a> -- came through again. Before we left, I ordered a b-mobile SIM to be delivered to our first hotel -- the Marriott Courtyard in the Ginza District -- and then I bought another -- Japan Travel SIM -- from the Tourist Information Center at Tokyo Station. The lack of local voice wasn’t a huge inconvenience for us -- we were communicating via e-mail with hotels and apartment rentals -- but it still seemed a little weird.</li>\r\n 	<li>The one thing that pulled me up short was the limited amount of signage in the Latin alphabet. I’m OK with the Japanese names when phonetically rendered in Latin characters, but I’m not so hot on reading kanji or kana. We wrestled with this our first morning in Tokyo at the Tsukiji Fish Market. My wife had a list of sushi restaurant recommendations -- all of which were Japanese names in Latin script; all the restaurant signs were in kanji. And then at a Kyoto ramen restaurant, where you buy tickets for your food from a machine and then hand them across the counter to the cook, having only kanji on the machine buttons without pictures, made ordering a bit of a challenge. It got me thinking back to my trip last year to Beijing -- I didn’t recall having the same level of challenge there.</li>\r\n 	<li>What made this all work is that just about all of the Japanese people we ran into were the nicest, the most welcoming people. I was constantly struck at how many people would strike up a conversation -- asking where we’re from, helping us with Ramen machines, shouting “Welcome to Japan” while riding by on a bike, volunteering to walk us across train stations to help us with connections. I’m not sure I’ve experienced that consistent level of engagement from random strangers anywhere else. Of course, some of it could get a slightly embarrassing, like the group of middle school kids who wanted a picture with me. Or my daughter who regularly would get tagged by Japanese girls for pictures. We had that experience often in Beijing, but there, when we were often the lone white people, it was understandable. Having that same thing happen in Japan -- more Westernized, more white people wandering around -- that surprised us. In Arashiyama, a pretty touristy area on the west side of Kyoto, we were flagged down by 3 middle school teachers who video’d us answering their question about why we chose to visit this town. They told us that they taught English and wanted to show their classes native English speakers. OK, makes sense, but with all videos on YouTube, I wasn’t quite sure why they wanted a video of us.</li>\r\n 	<li>But that being said, except for the signage, Japan was one of the easier countries we’ve traveled in. And maybe, with a couple more revs of Google Translate, even that barrier will get smoothed away.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a title=\"MP3 Download\" href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/download_track.php?id=0E74C6FEB7390D18D02B4B399668093172F6C8CC66DDC09D90A3BF7DDA436823CFAC859AE2B2C73E46A278A4950E1030\">Lonely Dog Blues</a></em> by <a title=\"Tobin James\' Web Site\" href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/label.php?id=2A3449F03E7B8462FF74407B60F0C4B0A30A0CBE880C61DE37E3B342387F0643\">Tobin James</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Luggage Trends</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I think it was when I was grabbing our luggage off the carousel in ORD, returning from Spain with our luggage full of wine and olive oil. I picked up my wife’s red bag and was struck at how tatty the fabric had become. I set it down in front of her and said “That’s become embarrassing. I’m not sure I can travel with that bag again”</li>\r\n 	<li>Now it’s not that I have a styling bag. It’s stock Swiss Army black roller still bearing Vietnamese customs stickers from 2008. I had retired it in favor of a grey Samsonite bag, but had to pull it back out when the Samsonite’s wheels got wonky -- the rubber wore off and the wheels splayed out after 2.5 years of pulling it across New Orleans sidewalks.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’m seeing more hardshell rollers in non-black colors -- burgundy, yellow, floral prints, Disney characters…. They look nice; but that just may be because they look different -- they catch my eye because of what they’re not -- not a black ballistic nylon roller bag. My recently deceased Samsonite was non-black -- grey rather than floral, but still non-black. And after 3-4 months of my travel schedule, it started to look less non-black. Smudges from grease on overhead bin hinges, muck from taxi trunks, muddy water from New Orleans gutters, spilled coffee... That’s why I can’t have nice luggage.</li>\r\n 	<li>We’ve talked about the impending trend of “smart luggage” in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/11/22/podcast-112-holiday-airport-etiquette-travel-tax-pile-up/\">past</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/05/14/podcast-115-a-decade-of-travelcommons/\">episodes</a>. Bluesmart has been the poster child for this. They crushed their Indiegogo campaign last year, and 2 weeks ago announced they’re in volume production, targeting initial deliveries in late September. “Control your suitcase from the app” is one of their tag lines. Digital lock, digital scale, battery charger, location tracking, proximity alerts. It spoke to my inner travel propeller head, so I did the Indiegogo thing. When it shows up, I’ll be sure to tell you all about it.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bluesmart is at the top of the Google searches for “smart luggage”, but there are a growing list of followers with similar feature lists. Location tracking is an interesting one. I can count the number of times my luggage has been lost on one hand and have change left over, but when it happens, it can be catastrophic. I remember BA lost a bag on my way over to a 2-week “city-a-day” trip -- today London, tomorrow Stockholm, Friday in Zurich. My bag was always one stop behind me. So I get the importance of location tracking. At the high end, Bluesmart and others are equipping their bags with GPS and cellular modems to enable “global tracking”. At a much simpler level, travelers like long-time TC listener Mika Pyyhkala are using Bluetooth key fobs like the Pally Smartfinder to check if their bag made it onto their plane.</li>\r\n 	<li>I can see it being useful at the other end. Look at the app -- bag’s not off the plane yet. I have time to stop off at the restroom -- or better yet, the bar.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917626811171154.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #116</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://iodapromonet.com/index.php\">IODA Promonet</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_116.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #116 — Traveling Thru Japan; Luggage Trends','','inherit','closed','closed','','1531-revision-v1','','','2016-07-09 09:38:26','2016-07-09 14:38:26','',1531,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/07/09/1531-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1644,1,'2016-08-13 22:14:14','2016-08-14 03:14:14','[caption id=\"attachment_1654\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/IMG_0725.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1654\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/IMG_0725-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Earning Status at Camp O\'Hare\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Earning Status at Camp O\'Hare[/caption]\n\nIt\'s been a tough travel month for a large portion of the traveling public. Between Delta and Southwest system outages and two straight Thursdays of thunderstorms in the east half of the US, dealing with travel delays has been a part of this month\'s travel experience. In this episode, we think about ways to avoid delays, or at least minimize their impact. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_123.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #123:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>This episode is sponsored by HMSHost, operating the restaurants and bars in the 20 busiest airports in the US, thanking the IT staffs at Southwest and Delta for helping us hit our Q3 revenue numbers. Please use the promo code: KICKOUTTHEPLUG on our website for a 20% thank you card good at any airport.</li>\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, at the back end of what’s been kind of a tough couple of weeks of travel. On the surface, it shouldn’t have been. I wasn’t going anywhere particularly exotic -- still back and forth to Charlottesville, as well as a quick West Coast loop to Vegas and Irvine, CA. Things actually started going sideways on the Vegas to Orange County flight. This should’ve been a quick hour hop. But then Southwest’s systems tipped over and things kinda just spiraled down from there, even in Vegas. After a while, I got tired of playing the slots; the payout in the airport is lousy anyways. And the beer selection is not the greatest. I got jealous watching the Virgin America flights take off, but at least I wasn’t one of the folks sitting on the tarmac in 110 degree weather waiting for gates to clear. I think my flight ended up taking something like a 4-hour delay. I was just glad my schedule wasn’t tight; that I didn’t have a critical meeting booked that afternoon.</li>\n 	<li>The next day, Thursday, I was flying American back to O’Hare and started to get delay notices. I popped open my flight tracking apps -- <a href=\"https://flightaware.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">FlightAware</a> and <a href=\"http://www.flightstats.com/go/Home/home.do\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">FlightStats</a> and could see the problem -- an ugly line of red on the weather map running through Chicago. Being on the west side of that meant things weren’t too bad for me though. Once the thunderstorm line cleared O’Hare, the first planes they launched were heading west -- away from the storm line. I took an hour delay. Back in the office on Friday, people flying back from the East Coast were getting in at 2 or 3 in the morning, if they got out at all. I definitely dodged a bullet.</li>\n 	<li>Which found its target the next Thursday. I was back in Charlottesville and the delay notices started at 2pm for a 6:30pm flight. That’s not a good sign. Back to FlightAware and FlightStats. It was a replay of the prior Thursday, except this time I was right in the midst of it. Caught up in ORD ground stops, the equipment for my Charlottesville flight couldn’t get out east and eventually cancelled. I drove 2 hours up DC to catch the last flight out of Dulles which by that time was having its own ground stops. The Frontier flight that was supposed to leave at 9:30 finally pushed back at 1:10am. It was my turn to stagger home at 2:30am</li>\n 	<li>At first, I thought I wouldn’t fly at all this week, but then I got roped into a Tuesday morning meeting in Atlanta. Not so bad I thought -- fly down Monday night, fly back Tuesday afternoon. But then I woke up Monday morning to the news that Delta’s systems had tipped over. Another bullet dodged. I was booked on American going down and United coming back. And both those flights left on time and arrived early.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/swivel-deep/\"><em>Arlos Auto Parts and Salvation</em></a> by Swivel Neck Jones</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>So, my wish from the last episode was not granted. My Global Entry renewal was “conditionally approved” but I still have to go in for an interview. They do look busy though. I had to look 3 months out for the first availability in ORD -- I got my notice in July and my appointment is in mid-October. I hope they don’t listen to this podcast or follow me on Twitter.</li>\n 	<li>I’ve been thru Dulles twice since the last episode. I mentioned my second visit a couple of minutes ago, catching a Frontier flight out of the Z concourse gates. I had never seen any Z gates before in Dulles -- and for a good reason. They’re about a half-dozen gates stuffed in a dark hallway at the east end of terminal; the typical “slum concourse” inhabited by budget carriers. On the earlier visit, I was making a connection on United between the two midfield concourses with involved a ride on the old mobile lounges. Now, if you know the history of Dulles airport, you know that these mobile lounges were supposed to be the future of airport design, replacing the fixed gate and concourse structure with mobile gate lounges that would shuttle you out to your plane parked on the tarmac and then raise you up to the door. Not really all that different from what happens in a lot of European airports, but without the hydraulic fun ride at the end. I tweeted a picture of the lounge -- really more like a high-clearance bus --which elicited a response from Matt McCurdy with a link to a 1958 video “The Expanding Airport: A Study of Service and Convenience for Washington International” hosted on Vimeo. From the credits, it looks like it was created for the firm that designed Dulles. It’s a 9½-minute video and an absolute must-see; the disconnect between what people thought the future of travel would be and the reality almost 60 years later. Just the contrast between how the architects thought the mobile lounges would look -- couches with coffee tables and flower vases with cocktail service, and everyone in suits and dresses -- vs. my Twitter picture of people in shorts, t-shirts, and backpacks crammed in, hanging onto poles and straps -- is something. Check out the shownotes for <a href=\"https://vimeo.com/4139559\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Matt’s link to the video</a>. The mobile lounges are slowly being replaced by the new underground light rail system between the main terminal and the midfield concourses. Maybe as fewer people take them, they’ll be able to replace the poles with some nice chintz couches.</li>\n 	<li>Last month, a PR agency for Marriott invited me to a launch that was being held at the Windy City Smokeout BBQ event in Chicago. Never one to turn down free BBQ, especially on a Friday afternoon, I went. They were launching a new partnership between their TownePlace Suites brand and Weber grills, where they’re putting Weber gas grills and tools out in the common areas for use by guests. Kinda makes sense for an all-suite hotel -- families not looking to eat out every night fire up some burgers on the grill -- especially when the TownePlace folks explained that they’re targeting the mid-tier price range. It was kinda entertaining to see the young country pop tarts try to grill pizzas (and, by the way, I apply the pop tart label to both the male and female teams), but I was more interested in understanding how Marriott was positioning their suite brands -- how did TownePlace (which I’d never heard of) relate to Residence Inn and SpringHill Suites? The PR folks introduced me to a couple of brand guys who tried to lay it out for me -- TownePlace is lower priced but a bit hipper than Residence Inns, but not edgy like Moxy, their new brand targeted at Millennials. And SpringHill never made it into the discussion. I don’t know how well these micro-targets work in the reality of, say, an Orlando or a Houston. Are you really able to hit those target audiences or is it just another brand to sell to a new franchisee so the guy running the combo Courtyard-Residence Inn property a couple miles down the road doesn’t sue you? I dunno, but I got to wonder if these TownePlace properties with the new Webers are also going to provide shuttle service to the nearest Whole Foods?</li>\n 	<li>A colleague went to Defcon in Las Vegas last weekend. There’s always interesting stuff coming out of there; always enough to nurture any seed of paranoia you may have lurking in your id. It also makes me a bit more sympathetic to the corporate IT security guys trying to keep up with this stuff. “Video jacking” was the buzzed-about thing this year to keep frequent travelers on the watchout. The attack uses a smartphone’s ability to duplicate video out the micro USB or Lightning port to an HDMI TV. Nice if you want to watch videos from your phone or tablet on your larger hotel TV. A little less nice if you plug your phone into what you think is a charging station. But using these HDMI/Mobile High Definition Link cables which look very similar to straight power cables, your phone screen is duplicated on a TV screen perhaps with a person or video camera watching as you enter your PIN, work your banking apps, pull up that hidden text file with all your passwords written down. Krebs On Security has a <a href=\"http://krebsonsecurity.com/2016/08/road-warriors-beware-of-video-jacking/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">good write-up</a> on it, complete with a quick demo video. I’ll put a link in the show notes.</li>\n 	<li>We’ve talked before about how full planes and tight seats are breaking down some of the courtesies necessary to survive sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with complete strangers for 2-4 hours straight. Usually it’s not a problem; everyone gets along to go along. On one of my United flights last month, though, this broke down slightly. It started at boarding. I get to my row. There’s a guy already in the middle seat. I tell him I’m in the window. He asks my seat number. Hmmm, little odd, but I tell him, confirming that, yes I can read my boarding pass and that he’s going to have to move out to let me in. He’s a 1K who seems a bit pissed that he’s in a center seat. Perhaps he was hoping to slide over to the window, but if that’s the case, he missed the announcements asking for volunteers. This plane was packed. About 45 minutes into the flight, he looks over at me, exasperated, and says “Fine, if you want the armrest, just take it!” and then bitched about how miserable the middle seat is. Huh? I told him, “We can share it,” I said. “There’s no sharing,” he shot back. “I dunno, I can usually manage that when I’m in the middle.” He looked at me like he wanted to hit me and then thought the better of it. The remaining 2 ½ hours was less-than-comfortable as we sat within inches of each other. You may disagree, but I’m not in with this whole “the middle seat is so miserable that you’re entitled to everything else in the row” idea. I’ve sat in the middle seat a lot and don’t think it’s that bad if you’re in an exit row or, as in this case, in United’s Economy Plus where you have extra legroom. Indeed, I’ll pick those middle seats over a window seat in the back of the plane almost every time. And when I do, I don’t expect any special treatment from my row mates. I manage to arrange my elbows so we all can use the armrests -- one of us take the front half, the other the back half. But most of all, I don’t blame my row mates for my seat choice.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/fuzz-messy/\"><em>Smiling Perspective</em></a> by General Fuzz</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Can We Avoid Travel Delays?</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Peter Rukavina, a long-time T/C listener, sent me an interesting e-mail at the front part of this week\n<ul>\n 	<li>The tweet-stream of travel despair is a frequent enough occurrence as to almost be its own medium now (\"@aircanada announces 9 hour delay; help!\" etc.). I\'m an occasional practitioner myself. My question: to what extent can delays, cancellations, luggage loss, bumping, etc. be mitigated by being travel-savvy? In other words, by traveling smart, how much more control over wrenches thrown into plans do you have?</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>A pretty damned good question, especially given the tales of woe over the past month that I went through at the start of this episode which, I’ll admit, were accompanied by a couple of streams of bitch tweets. We\'ll never completely avoid travel despair -- complete system failures ought to be “black swan” events, though having 3 full outages (United, Southwest, and Delta) in 13 months suggests maybe they’re not, and flying into smaller places like Charlottesville, VA leave you with few options. But I do think there are things we can do -- the consultant in me want to call them “strategies” -- that can reduce the probability of a bad time and hopefully reduce the impact when they happen. I’ve talked about some “strategies” in earlier podcasts -- focus trips to earn airline and hotel status, don’t check luggage, fly direct, if you have to connect never book a connection less than 90 minutes -- and you’ll find most of these in travel listacles that pop up around the holidays. Knowing that Peter, as a long-time listener, has heard these before, I tried to think about some next-level “strategies”. Here are the ones that came to mind. Not an exhaustive list, but I think a decent start...</li>\n 	<li>First, avoid flying in the evenings -- Now I break this rule all the time, but think about it. Delays build during the day -- from weather, congestion, mechanicals, psychotic passengers -- because the airlines don\'t build their schedules with enough slack to allow recovery. By 4 or 5pm, the sum of these delays combines with the packed evening \"rush hour\" schedule to drive a high probability of delays. American and United’s LGA-ORD evening schedules are this in spades. Throw in a summer thunderstorm in ORD or DFW or ATL and flight ops centers start cancelling flights to catch up. If you’re on the last flight out, you can be looking at a night on the comfy-looking airport couch. Even without cancellations, delays lead to tight connections which can lead to missed luggage.</li>\n 	<li>Use flight-tracking smart phone apps -- I use apps like FlightAware to access more data than the typical gate agent can. On the Thursday that I ended up in DC, as the delay notices started coming in from American,, FlightAware showed me that my plane was on the ground in Wichita, KS, probably waiting out an ORD ground stop from thunderstorms. It still had to get to Chicago and then out to Charlottesville. Seeing parallel lines of red on the radar view, I had a pretty good sense that it wasn\'t going to happen. When I decided to head up to Dulles for the Frontier flight, I could see the flight history on FlightAware; it delayed more often than not, but rarely cancelled. That night, as ORD and IAD ground stops kept pushing the departure time, I wasn\'t too worried that it would cancel because I had seen the flight history.</li>\n 	<li>Spread clothes across checked and unchecked luggage -- If you\'ve checked luggage, I assume it\'s for a good reason (e.g., carrying a bottles of wine home from a Napa trip, needing formal wear for a wedding) and that you also have a carry-on. Put two changes of clothes and a bare set of toiletries (e.g., toothbrush) in your carry-on. Most lost luggage will catch up to you within 24-36 hours. If you\'re traveling as a family, spread everyone\'s clothes out across all the bags rather than each person having their own bag. It would be rare for the airlines to lose all the bags of an entire party. With things spread across bags, everyone is good for a couple of days even if a bag is lost. I’m always amazed that more families don’t do this.</li>\n 	<li>Know your geography -- What are your alternative airports and how far of a drive are they? This has become even more important over the past few years as the big carriers have reduced flight frequency to fill up their planes. I once had a project in the middle of Connecticut that was just about equidistant between White Plains and Hartford airports. We always flew in/out of White Plains even though it was a smaller airport because, when flights delayed/cancelled, we could just keep driving down the Hutchinson to LaGuardia. When we flew out of Hartford, it was a much longer haul to the nearest airport.</li>\n 	<li>This last one might be a bit obscure, but it’s been useful to me. If your corporate car rental agency is Hertz, always book an intermediate car so you can use Gold Choice to quickly swap cars if Hertz assigns you a real beater. Now, you can always go back to the counter, stand in line, and demand a better, cleaner, less decrepit car, but we’re trying to avoid delays. Most corporate rates that I’ve used has at most a dollar or two difference between the compact and intermediate rate. It’s cheap insurance. I’ve used Gold Choice maybe 10-20% of the time, but I’m always glad to have that option.</li>\n 	<li>So there you go,. Five ways to travel smarter. If you have a suggestion, please send it in.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/atek-phoenix/\"><em>Goa Life</em></a> by Ambient Teknology</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Coping with Travel Delays</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>During my last CIO gig, I was traveling as much, if not more, than any of my consulting gigs. I kept my Chicago residence and rotated weekly across offices in Scottsdale, Dallas, Naples, FL and Croydon, south of London. The head of my project management team started doing a bit of travel to support some system migrations and after a couple of months of the usual flight delays and other travel snafus, he asked me, “How do you deal with this all the time?” “I depend on 3 major food groups,” I told him. “Alcohol, salt, and fat.”</li>\n 	<li>I remembered that as I was killing time in Dulles with a dinner of fish and chips and a local beer, Hop Lips IPA from Dover, DE. It rang the bell on all three.</li>\n 	<li>Doing that too much, though, is how you end up quietly asking for belt extenders, so you gotta find other ways of coping.</li>\n 	<li>One bad habit that I have is bitch tweeting. I’ve confessed to that in many prior episodes, and as much as I try to stop, I find it releases my frustrations -- kinda like shouting into a bag or something -- and keeps me from popping a cork at innocent gate agents. I apologize to all my Twitter followers who have to endure that. I have downloaded a meditation app for my iPhone, but it hasn’t seemed to help.</li>\n 	<li>A more constructive thing is that I try not to show up to the airport until I have to. If I get an early notice of a delay, I push back my cab to the airport. Part of the frustration is that delays consume time. I can be more productive in my office than trying to find a place to work at a crowded gate or airport club. When I was traveling regularly to New Orleans a few years back, it seemed that half the flights back to Chicago in the summer were delayed by afternoon thunderstorms. I wouldn’t leave for the airport until I saw the inbound equipment was in the air. I got a lot more work done, and ate much better food.</li>\n 	<li>The trend of airports upgrading their amenities helps a lot. I’ve never done the neck massage thing, but, back to the alcohol food group, I’ve done a few wine flights at the Vino Volo wine bars that are popping up in more US airports, and the beer flights at microbrewery bars like Great Lakes Brewery’s place in Cleveland, Cisco Brewers’ bar in Boston Logan or the Karl Strauss bar in LAX. It’s something local that keeps you occupied for a bit. And searching them out -- because they’re inevitably in a different concourse than you -- also kills time.</li>\n 	<li>In the end, though, it is what it is. If the delay isn’t causing you to miss something important, it’s easy to kick back and read the paper. If you’re missing your kid’s parent-teacher conference, there’s not much that’s going to help your frustration. Except maybe bitch tweeting...</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #123</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\">Magnatune</a></li>\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_123.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #123 — How to Avoid Travel Delays','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-123-how-to-avoid-travel-delays','','\nhttps://vimeo.com/4139559','2021-09-29 08:12:19','2021-09-29 13:12:19','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=1644',0,'post','',0),
(1645,1,'2016-08-14 19:52:33','2016-08-15 00:52:33','Watching Iceland makes its Cinderella run in the Euro 2016 soccer tourney got me thinking back to my March trip there. It is one of the hot travel destinations -- maybe too hot? Could be, but the descriptor I keep coming back to is \"dramatic.\" And it seems that on every trip I make out of the country, I get surprised by the amount of data my iPhone consumes -- in spite of flipping every Settings switch I can find. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_123.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/272882441\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #123:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you once again from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, on a week off of the road. I hate to say “a rare week”, but looking at my calendar, it is. For the first half of the year -- 26 weeks -- I didn’t get in an airplane during 2 of them. This week, the first of the second half of the year, is my 3rd non-travel week. Now absolutely some of them are self-inflicted -- 2 to be exact -- one week in Spain and one in Portugal. That’s an intense travel schedule, even for me. I usually find a way to take a break at least once every 6 weeks, but it just hasn’t worked out that way this year so far. Sometimes you control your schedule, while other times it controls you. I’m definitely been on the wrong end of the leash since January.</li>\r\n 	<li>Since the last episode, I’ve been traveling pretty much exclusively between Chicago and Charlottesville, VA. Now Charlottesville is a nice town, but it’s a pain to get to every week. The first direct flight from Chicago leaves around 11:30am, landing around 2pm -- not exactly convenient for the business traveler. Other earlier options are to fly into Washington-Dulles and drive for 2 hrs, or fly into Richmond and drive an hour and a half. What I’ve found myself doing for the past couple of weeks is flying in Sunday night -- which I absolutely hate -- on direct flight that leaves Chicago around 9:45pm, lands in Charlottesville around half past midnight and puts me into my hotel around 1am. There just doesn’t seem to be an easy way around this one.</li>\r\n 	<li>At least the flights back home are convenient -- 3:15 and 6:30pm. And it’s not a crowded airport. I think last week was the longest TSA line I hit -- 3 people were in front of me.</li>\r\n 	<li>And as I start to think about a September trip to Scotland to take our daughter back to University, I’m taking advantage of the post-Brexit exchange rate to stock my Revolut account with some much cheaper pounds. Though it’ll be another week on the road, I’ll be significantly upgrading my Scotch choices.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/hisboyelroy/430\" target=\"_blank\">Revolve</a> mix</em> by His Boy Elroy</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Last week’s attack at Istanbul’s Ataturk airport begs the same question as March’s Brussels bombings -- does more airport security actually make us safer or just move the target around? I said in the<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/05/30/podcast-121-tsa-lines-my-luggage-is-where/\" target=\"_blank\"> last episode</a> that the long TSA lines on the land side of security caused by stricter TSA inspections weren’t making the traveler any safer. Instead, they were make us less safe/more vulnerable to a Brussels or Istanbul-style attack. And while the TSA has fixed (at least for now) some of the worst lines, the issue is going to pop up again. And someone is going to suggest -- again -- that they move the security perimeter back -- say, checking itineraries and IDs at the terminal door like they do in India? The justification will be that a little bit more inconvenience is more than worth the price of safety. But, if they don’t staff it right (which was and will alway be the core problem), all you’ve done is just move the target -- the line of passengers -- out by another 1,000 feet. It’s less about location and more about execution. And given the TSA’s track record of execution over the past 15 years, I’m not optimistic that they’ll get to the right answer.</li>\r\n 	<li>I got a e-mail a few weeks ago that my 5-year Global Entry membership expires on my birthday this December. I don’t know exactly when Customs and Border Patrol started Global Entry, but 5 years ago, I was one of the early adopters. Back then, there weren’t that many interview centers. I was lucky that Chicago had one, but I had colleagues in Phoenix who had to fly up to Las Vegas for interviews. The renew process was pretty easy. I logged into GOES -- Global Online Enrollment Systems -- clicked the blue Renew Membership button and then cycled through all the profile screens -- but this time the screens were pre-populated so I only had to make updates. In my case, it was updating my job history for my current job and, the toughest part, entering all the countries I’d visited in the past 5 years. Normally, this would be pretty simple -- thumb through your passport pages and write down the country stamps. However, back in 2012, my backpack with my passport was stolen while on the train from Brussels city center to the airport -- a fun time I recount in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/05/20/podcast-98-stolen-luggage-restaurants-want-your-smartphone/\" target=\"_blank\">episode 98</a>. Luckily, I do a decent job of cataloging travel pics. Flipping through 2011 reminded me that we’d visited Venice that year and that I’d traveled there by train from Paris after a couple of days of customer meeting. The renewal cost is $100 -- $20/year is worth the price. Even more so when it’s free -- I charged it on my Amex Platinum card and immediately saw a $100 statement credit. Now I’m checking GOES every couple of days to see if Customs just waves my renewal through or if I have to talk again to the nice people in the bowels of ORD Terminal 5. I’m hoping that with the crush of new PreCheck applications, they’ll take the easy route.</li>\r\n 	<li>And as we’ve talked about before, I’m not really sure why anyone would sign up for PreCheck instead of Global Entry. Global Entry is just $15 more -- $100 instead of $85 -- the price of a beer at ORD.</li>\r\n 	<li>But if you’re not up for the $100 passport check line cut, Arnoud Heijnis, a long time TravelCommons listener, pinged me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> about another option -- the Mobile Passport app from US Customs and Border Patrol. I haven’t used it because I have Global Entry. My wife tried to get my son to download it before his return flight from Reykjavik, but he never got ‘round to it, and he said the early evening lines at ORD weren’t that bad. So while I don’t have any first- or second-hand experience with it, one of the tech writers at WSJ wrote up a <a href=\"http://www.wsj.com/articles/get-through-airport-customs-faster-with-this-free-app-1467221118\" target=\"_blank\">glowing review</a> of the app a few weeks back. Check out the show notes for a link to the article. And if you’ve tried the Mobile Passport, shoot me a note with your thoughts.</li>\r\n 	<li>During my flight back home last Weds, we were coming in on approach, you could feel the gradual descent -- slowing, descending, slowing, descending -- and then, all of a sudden, I’m pressed against the back of my seat as the plane rotates in the wrong direction -- up, that is -- and the engines roar with thrust. The experienced travelers know that the pilot had to abort the landing, but those who haven’t gone through this drill before are looking around, wondering “what the hell…?”. After about 5 minutes, the pilot came on “The plane in front of us hit a bird. They have to physically inspect the runway before another plane can land, so we had to fly around. We’ll be down in 10 minutes”. That was a nice announcement. I learned something new -- I didn’t know they had to inspect a runway after a bird strike, though it makes a lot of sense. Too often pilots or gate agents don’t take the time to explain the cause of a delay or a fly around, or don’t want to deal with the follow-up questions that may come -- and so I appreciate those that do. I remember a Southwest flight out of New Orleans. The plane lands -- it was a bit late -- but we’re not boarding right away. You could feel the impatience building in the gate area. The agent got on the PA -- “Sorry for the delay in boarding, but the plane was struck by lightning on its descent. The pilots have to do a physical inspection before we can board”. OK, that makes sense -- and just as you could feel the impatience build, it immediately drained away with that announcement. Maybe it’s because these delays weren’t the airline’s fault -- no negligence or bad judgement on American’s part for a bird strike or Southwest’s for lightning. Bit tougher to suck up when it’s the third delay in a row caused by maintenance issues -- spend some of those record profits on preventative maintenance -- or a missing crew -- maybe you should put a bit more slack in your scheduling. But as always, more transparency is better than vagueness -- even if it’s not the best story for you.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/septahelix/34050\" target=\"_blank\">Earth Soda</a></em> by septahelix</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Data-Hungry Phones</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I met up with a friend at <a href=\"http://www.empiricalbrewery.com/\">Empirical Brewing</a>, one of 3 microbreweries along Ravenswood Blvd in that Chicago northwest side neighborhood. I hadn’t seen him since he had gotten back from a trip he and his son did to Helsinki, St Petersburg, and Moscow. Among other things, he had problems getting his son’s AT&amp;T iPhone to work in Helsinki. That’s odd, I said. I’ve never had a problem with AT&amp;T’s GSM iPhones in Europe. AT&amp;T told him to reset it, which he did, after which it promptly downloaded a gig and a half of apps and data over the cellular data network. As you might guess, he’s disputing that couple of hundred dollar bill.</li>\r\n 	<li>I am always surprised at how much data my phone uses when I travel outside of the country. Now I’m sure that one reason for this is that it’s about the only time I look at my data usage since I’m grandfathered into one of the old AT&amp;T unlimited data plans. I don’t know how much I use, and don’t make a big effort to limit it. So when I travel overseas, I get to see my kids live their mobile lives trying to stay under a 300 MB data cap.</li>\r\n 	<li>International mobile data has gotten a bit cheaper. T-Mobile offers a reasonable unlimited international data plan if you can live with slower 2G-style speeds. I’m not that patient, so I tend to get the AT&amp;T 300 MB package for $60 because it also comes with free access to a decent set of wi-fi hotspots.</li>\r\n 	<li>Living on a data budget means thinking which apps really need mobile data -- which is not that many. So while I’m sitting on the plane waiting for everyone to board, I pull out my iPhone, go over to Settings | Cellular and start turning off cellular data access for most of my apps. I’m not quite sure why the healthcare flexible spending app or the app that came with my sous vide immersion heater ever need cellular data -- in the US or internationally. Anyhow, I spool through the last, turning most of them off and certainly that damn “Wi-Fi Assist” and then, after I’ve sent my last Snapchat, I hit “Reset Statistics” so I’ll have a clean view of how I’m burning through that 300 MB and then click over to Airplane mode.</li>\r\n 	<li>And then, when I land, I come out of Airplane mode, go back into Settings | Cellular and turn Roaming On, and catch up on the overnight e-mail while waiting to get off the plane. At some point that morning, I’ll look at the Current Period data usage and see that I’ve burned through, say, 75 MB of my 300 MB -- 25% of my total package -- in the first morning. Holy crap! I immediately dive back into Settings | Cellular and turn off Roaming. What happened?</li>\r\n 	<li>This is where, on the iPhone, you begin having to spelunk through the mess that the Settings app has become. You scroll down past all the apps you shut off from cellular access and look at the last entry -- “System Services” -- and see that it’s consumed at least half of that 75 MB. What the hell? You click through. Why has this phone used that much data on “Time &amp; Location” or “General” or “iTunes Accounts” (huh? I thought I shut off iTunes in the last screen). This is when you start to dig deep -- Settings | Privacy | Location Service and you find another list of apps -- kinda like the one you used to turn off cellular data, but this one is for accessing your location. Look, as much as I love the Tortas Frontera restaurants in ORD, I’m not sure why their app needs to pull my location information. And then you go to Settings | General | Background App Refresh for yet another list of apps where you shut off their permission to update themselves in the background. And then you go over to Settings | Mail and turn Fetch New Data to Off to keep your iPhone from constantly pinging your Exchange server.</li>\r\n 	<li>It’s kinda like whack-a-mole, and you’ll be sure to miss something because these phones and the apps we load on them are, for the most part, built on the assumption of ubiquitous unlimited data access. So changing that behavior, those assumptions -- to severely limit the data the phone inhales and exhales -- takes work. Which is why, if we’re going to be somewhere for more than 4-5 days, I’ll invest the hour it takes to find a phone store and $25 per phone to buy a local SIM with a gig or two of data. When I was in Iceland for 4 days in March, it didn’t seem necessary. But when then I flew down to Spain for 8 days, my first stop was the Orange store because I knew my phone couldn’t hold its breath for that long.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music --<em> <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/scottaltham/20747\">Hear Us Now</a></em> by scottaltham</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Dramatic Iceland</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Watching Iceland makes its Cinderella run in the Euro 2016 soccer tourney -- right up until the time they faceplanted into France last weekend -- reminded me of the trip my son and I took in March. Some reaction shots ESPN did from Reykjavik were places we had been -- saw a coffee shop we hit trying to stay awake on our first day, and a square that one of our hotels was on. Not that surprising since downtown Reykjavik isn’t that big. If I’d paid more attention to the people sitting next to me in the bars off that square, I’d have probably recognized some people in those shots too.</li>\r\n 	<li>Iceland is a hot tourist destination -- especially for people looking for something a bit different. And if I didn’t know already, when the Dorling Kindersley folks sent me review copies of their relaunched <a href=\"http://www.dk.com/us/travel/\">Eyewitness Travel Top 10 Guides</a>, in among the usual suspects -- New York, London, Paris, Barcelona -- was Iceland. In 2015, there were <a href=\"http://www.ferdamalastofa.is/static/files/ferdamalastofa/Frettamyndir/2016/juni/tourism_-in_iceland_in_figures_may2016.pdf\">1.3 million foreign tourists</a> in Iceland -- almost 4 times the population of 329,000 -- and a 29% increase over 2014. It’s a hot destination and getting hotter -- perhaps even to the point of overheating?</li>\r\n 	<li>Especially with Wow Air, a kinder and quirkier Spirit or Ryan Air, expanding the number of North American gateway cities. We ran into lots of folks who had seen ads for cheap Wow air fares and flew over for a 3 or 4 day weekend on a whim, without really thinking about what to do. We’d see folks walking up and down the downtown shopping and entertainment district in Reykjavik, and then figuring out some day trip bus rides out to the Golden Circle hot spots. And this was in March, not exactly the garden time in Iceland. But there were a lot of folks there. And so in that way, Iceland felt small.</li>\r\n 	<li>On our second day, we picked up a rental SUV -- a Dacia Duster, a great vehicle -- and headed out of town. Once we got out of Reykjavik’s catchment area, Iceland opened up quickly. The drama of the scenery, the spaces carved out by volcanos and glaciers -- “Land of Fire and Ice” it likes to bill itself -- make it feel much bigger. Of course, you could see this same space from the seat of a tour bus, but I was glad we rented a car. We got off the well-worn paths. Not too far, but when driving across a plain on a 2-lane highway with no traffic to speak of, the vistas did open up in front of us, which made me glad I was able to look forward and enjoy them through the expanse of the front windshield instead of looking off to the side through a motor coach window. And when we did some of the typical stops -- Þingvellir park, Gullfoss waterfall -- we could ride out the ebb and flow of the tour bus traffic, and have these spots pretty much to ourselves, even for just a little while. Or the time when we were driving toward the south coast, running through a series of rain bands -- in and out; in and out. I was starting to get annoyed until I looked out the rear view mirror and saw a huge double rainbow. I immediately pulled into a gas station and got out of the car. The landscape was wide open; we could see that rainbow from end to end. It was a phenomenal sight. And the smoked lamb sandwich we bought afterwards in the gas station wasn’t bad either.</li>\r\n 	<li>I struggle sometimes when asked about Iceland. Would I recommend it? Reykjavik is nice enough, but it’s a small town. I’m not a museum guy, so there was probably a day-and-a half of stuff for me to do. And Iceland is expensive. I had good fish and lamb, but it wasn’t cheap. And hotel rooms were tight in March, so I gotta figure the country is completely sold out in July and August.</li>\r\n 	<li>But the scenery outside of Reykjavik, I keep coming back to that word “dramatic”. I’m not sure it does it justice, but it’s all I got. If you get a car, then the trip starts to make sense.</li>\r\n 	<li>Well, that and the fermented shark chased with shots of brennivín -- Icelandic schnapps -- because, I dunno, how can you not?</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #123</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from the <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/\" target=\"_blank\">ccMixter</a> site</li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_123.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #123 — How to Avoid Travel Delays','','inherit','closed','closed','','1644-revision-v1','','','2016-08-14 19:52:33','2016-08-15 00:52:33','',1644,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/08/14/1644-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1646,1,'2016-08-14 21:07:32','2016-08-15 02:07:32','[caption id=\"attachment_528\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/5314961468_c424e091a81.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-528\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/5314961468_c424e091a81-300x224.jpg\" alt=\"View from my new office atop Squaw Peak\" width=\"300\" height=\"224\" /></a> View from my new office atop Squaw Peak[/caption]\r\n\r\nFinishing up the year in front of a warm fire in the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago after a couple of warm-up trips to <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Phoenix, Arizona\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix%2C_Arizona\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Phoenix</a>.  I carved myself out an mini-vacation during one of the trips and worked at the summit of <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Squaw Peak\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squaw_Peak\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Squaw Peak</a> for part of an afternoon. My <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"MacBook Air\" href=\"http://www.apple.com/macbookair\" rel=\"homepage\">MacBook Air</a> -- my perfect travel PC -- turned itself into a good-looking brushed metal brick on my last day in Phoenix, forcing an unplanned stop at the Scottsdale <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Apple Store\" href=\"http://www.apple.com/retail\" rel=\"homepage\">Apple Store</a> before my flight home.  Trying to get some work done while I waited reminded me of the difficulty of finding a quiet spot for a phone call while living on the road.  Missed connections caused by recent snow storms reminded me of ways you can have a little fun when stranded -- if you embrace the adventure of it.  Responding to a couple of listener questions on the closing song (<a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><em>Pictures of You</em></a> by Evangeline), I replay the song\'s back story as related by the band\'s manager.  Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_86.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_86.mp3\"]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript from TravelCommons podcast #86:\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Coming to you once again from the TravelCommons studios, wrapping up the year in the white icebox that is Chicago this winter.  And it’s a cold one.  Not as bad as what they’re getting in Minneapolis-St Paul – watching the video of the Metrodome’s ceiling collapse was pretty amazing – nor what New York is getting tonight, but I think I read that this has been something like the 7<sup>th</sup> coldest December on record.  So I can tell you that I wasn’t too upset when my travel plans had me in Phoenix two out of the last three weeks.</li>\r\n	<li>Packing for my last trip, I promised myself that, somewhere in the 4 days that I was in Phoenix, I’d find a couple of hours to get out of the office and go hike up <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Camelback Mountain\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camelback_Mountain\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Camelback Mountain</a>.  It was 12 degrees in Chicago when I was packing and the forecast for Phoenix was 70’s and 80’s all week.  I’ve always said that if you don’t take at least a little something for yourself from even business travel, you’ll hate your life.</li>\r\n	<li>So I start looking for my opening.  Monday, nope – inbound travel days are usually jam packed and American Airlines just added to it – making it like an overstuffed carryon – with a 2-hr maintenance delay, complete with swapping out planes.  Makes me misty for the days when preventative maintenance meant more than…</li>\r\n	<li>Tuesday goes by, Wednesday morning I think – ah, I’ll do it on Thursday before I fly home – but I stop myself.  My Weds afternoon isn’t that full.  I push some stuff around and, presto, there’s my couple of hours.  I race back to the hotel, change, look at the map – hmmm, Camelback might be a bit too far of a drive, especially if I hit traffic.  But Squaw Peak looks doable.  And so off I raced. After 1.2 miles, 1,200 vertical feet, and 19 ounces of Propel sports drink, I was at the top.  It’s a pretty view – with the hills to the north and the city to the south.  I sat for a bit, caught my breath, and then looked at my <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"iPhone\" href=\"http://www.apple.com/iphone\" rel=\"homepage\">iPhone</a>.  Hmm, full bars.  Started running e-mail and turned the summit into my office for the next 30 minutes – reading a couple of documents, cranking out some quick notes while watching the planes and birds fly by.  I took a photo at the summit, which I <em>later</em> posted to the TravelCommons Facebook page and Twitter feed if you’d like to take a look at my new office.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/swivel-deep/\"><em>Arlos Auto Parts and Salvation</em></a> by Swivel Neck Jones</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>In the last <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2010/11/30/podcast-85-importance-of-hotel-bathrooms-maximizing-miles/\" target=\"_blank\">episode</a> and in a prior TravelCommons <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2010/11/15/two-weeks-with-a-macbook-air/\" target=\"_blank\">post</a> I sang the praises of my 11-inch MacBook Air as the perfect travel PC.  Which, of course, meant I had tempted the technology gods who, in response last week, reached out from their Valhalla data center and smote the little unibody of brushed metal – bricking it on my last day in Scottsdale.  I opened the lid – no instant on.  I pressed the power button, no instant on.  I held the power button for 5 seconds, 15 seconds, 5 minutes, nothing but a dead screen.</li>\r\n	<li>If this happened on any other laptop, my first course of action would’ve been to drop the battery to try and reset the power management.  But, that ain’t happening with a MacBook Air, so after stabbing the Power button another half-dozen times, I gave up and headed over to the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Genius Bar\" href=\"http://apple.com/retail/geniusbar\" rel=\"homepage\">Genius Bar</a> at the Scottsdale Apple Store.</li>\r\n	<li>Since our company allows Macs but doesn’t provide help desk support – the Development teams use Macs and stooping to call a Help Desk would be the furthest thing from their minds – the Genius Bar is the defacto help desk.  Since it was near lunch time, I stopped off at <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Smashburger\" href=\"http://www.smashburger.com\" rel=\"homepage\">Smashburger</a>.  A TravelCommons listener – I forget who – had replied to one of my <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"In-N-Out Burger\" href=\"http://www.in-n-out.com/\" rel=\"homepage\">In-N-Out Burger</a> tweets, asking if I’d tried Smashburger.  It was a god burger – not quite the mystique or ambiance of In-N-Out – but a good burger.</li>\r\n	<li>One thing that I should’ve done while waiting for my Smashburger was book a time at the Genius Bar. Walking into the Apple Store, the hipster with an iPhone told me it’d be a 30-minute wait.  I checked my watch – I had enough time before my flight back home.  Right at the 30-minute mark, a guy walked over to me, opened my Mac, punched the power button a couple of times to no avail and said “Wow” and took it into the back room.  OK, it’s a bit better than having some guy in India tell me to restart my PC a half-dozen times, but still… I look at my watch again.  How long before I have to fetch this guy and dash to the airport?</li>\r\n	<li>Not long as it turns out.  5 minutes later, the guy comes back with my now-working Mac.  My initial diagnosis was right – it was the battery, or the PMU – power management unit?  Since you can’t drop the battery, there’s a multi-finger key sequence – hold down the shift, control, option, and command keys with your left hand and then hit the power key with your right.  I wrote it down so I could “self-serve” next time.  Not sure if the whole experience was any better than hanging on hold for a help desk.  I am paying more attention, though, to the location of Apple stores.</li>\r\n	<li>Now, the 30-minute wait wasn’t a complete loss.  Though my Mac was dead, my iPad and iPhone were fine.  So while I was waiting for my Genius to arrive, I was running e-mail and reading documents on my iPad.  Not a complete loss, but it wouldn’t have worked if I had needed to talk to someone, if I’ve had a conference call.</li>\r\n	<li>And that is a big problem with the “digital nomad” work style – no office, working out of Starbucks and airport clubs and the like – there’s no good place to take a conference call.  You can IM, e-mail, and text all you want, but once you need to open that voice channel, it’s a very different story.  Nobody wants to be the guy flooding the conference bridge with overhead Muzak or the signature sound of a barista steaming a pitcher of milk.  Airports are no better.  If they don’t have an Admirals or Red Carpet Club – or if I’m flying Southwest – then the hunt is on for a spot not under a PA speaker and away from the aisles with the beeping carts.  And you think the hunt for a working electrical outlet is tough.  I’m forever trolling through the new issues of Skymall magazine looking for a real-life “cone of silence” like they had in <em>Get Smart</em>.  I wonder if the Brookstone in ORD T3 has one?</li>\r\n	<li>In the last episode, we talked about the bathroom being one of the most important rooms in a hotel.  For me, the workout room is another important place. I stayed in the <a href=\"http://www.theashtonhotel.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Ashton Hotel</a> in downtown Fort Worth earlier this month.  Nice place – a boutique hotel in a historical building right near Sundance Square and a great beer bar – the Flying Saucer.  But would I recommend it to friends?  Hmmm… I don’t think so, because the workout room is so limited?  Or lame.  A small room in the basement with a couple of treadmills and an elliptical – with a stand up fan pointed at them.</li>\r\n	<li>That might be good for a 1-night stay, but I was there for 3.  I, like many frequent travelers, depend upon hotel fitness rooms to stay in some semblance of shape.  A couple of treadmills stuffed in a closet just doesn’t cut it anymore.</li>\r\n	<li>And finally, I just want to remind everyone that Google’s Christmas <a href=\"http://www.freeholidaywifi.com/\" target=\"_blank\">present</a> of free Gogo in-flight WiFi on Delta, AirTran, and Virgin America airlines is still on. It runs through Jan 2.  Perfect way to post your family Christmas pics on the flight how.</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a question, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a></span>, you can send me a <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">Twitter message</a> at mpeacock, or you can post them on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/153475331351358\" target=\"_blank\">Facebook page</a> or the web site at travelcommons.com.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/fuzz-messy/\"><em>Smiling Perspective</em></a> by General Fuzz</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Fun With Layovers</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>One of the most sacred frequent traveler rules is <em>Fly Direct</em>.  Be it winter with snow or summer with thunderstorms, adding that intermediate stop adds one more point of failure, one more opportunity for the airlines to screw up.</li>\r\n	<li>And while many connecting flights are cheaper than direct ones, for a true comparison, you have to factor in the potential costs of a delay – hotel room (because the airlines won’t pay for weather delays), meals, replacement clothes and toiletries for misrouted luggage…  In an episode last year, I calculated the cost – the breakeven premium between a direct and connecting flight -- to be $100-150.</li>\r\n	<li>But, with the right frame of mind – an “adventuring” frame of mind as one person put it – you can actually manufacture something good out of a connection.</li>\r\n	<li>The first requirement is to step away from the 1-hour connection.  Yes, we usually want to get to our destination in the shortest possible time, but accepting a connection of 1 hour or less…. Think about it – a 15-minute delay on your inbound flight – which is as good as on-time for most airlines – and you’re sprinting through the terminal (remember when we used to call it “OJ-ing” it – that was a long time ago) and probably having to check your carry-one.  A 1-hr connection is just asking for a stress attack and/or an overnight stay at the airport branch of the Bates Motel.</li>\r\n	<li>The second requirement is to connect through some place you might want to visit.  On those rare occasions where I’m forced to take a connection, I look at the flight choices and think – where would I not mind being stuck?</li>\r\n	<li>OK, sounds a bit odd, but think about it.  I’m flying from Phoenix to Ft Myers, FL – zero direct flight – no surprise there.  So where do I want to connect through – Miami, Dallas, Houston, O’Hare, Atlanta?  The total flight duration for any of these connections is within 90 minutes of each other.  For me, it’s an easy choice – I go through Chicago.  If I get stranded, I sleep in my own bed.  If I get delayed, I call up my wife and we grab dinner.</li>\r\n	<li>Traveling with my family to Cape Town, South Africa, I chose the connection through Frankfurt because I knew the airport wasn’t too far out of town.  We landed after the overnight flight from Chicago, passed through Customs and headed straight for a cab that took us to downtown to Romer Square.  We had lunch, I had a beer, and then we walked around downtown for 4 hours – a quick sightseeing excursion between our overnight flights.</li>\r\n	<li>Some years back, my parents flew from Denver to Paducah, KY to visit my aunt and grandmother.  Again, no direct flights so they connected through ORD.  And, as you can guess, on the way home, their commuter flight was late out of Paducah and they missed a tight connection.  My dad called me from the airport.  It was New Year’s Eve night and we were having 3 or 4 couples over.  “Get your luggage and book the flight out tomorrow,” I told him, “you can help me cook dinner.” Completely unplanned.  I picked them up, brought them home, threw an apron at my dad, and we had a great time.</li>\r\n	<li>Planning ahead for these possibilities is key, though.  Last week, friends and longtime TravelCommons listeners Allan Marko and Chris Chufo got caught at ORD when a snow storm caused the crew for their flight to JAX to time out.  That was a bad night – some 1,500 flights were cancelled between ORD and MDW.  The United customer service line stretched all the way down Concourse C.  A frequent traveler, Allan immediately rang United’s Premiere Exec line and got seats on the next day’s flight to JAX, then found a room at a nearby Hilton Garden Inn and stepped out of line to go to bed.</li>\r\n	<li>But without luggage.  United didn’t even try to give it back.  And because they had to check one bag anyhow with presents, they decided not to carry on – avoid the battle for carry-on space on full planes because they had time – no need to power directly from the flight to a meeting.  But now, though they had a hotel room, they had no change of clothes and just the toiletries they could scrounge from the Hilton.</li>\r\n	<li>A small inconvenience, though.  Since their flight didn’t leave ‘til 7:30 the next night, I shuffled my calendar around, picked them at the Hilton and took them into Chicago for lunch.  We ate at <a href=\"http://longmanandeagle.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Longman &amp; Eagle</a>, a Logan Square gastro-pub that picked up a Michelin star last month – Chris and I had wild boar sloppy joes while Allan had the pork belly BLT, and then ran down a couple of blocks to a brew pub, <a href=\"http://revbrew.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Revolution Brewery</a>, where they picked up some fresh t-shirts and I refilled a growler with a <a href=\"http://beeradvocate.com/beer/style/140\" target=\"_blank\">double India Pale Ale</a> – though we thought hard about it, we just couldn’t figure out a way they could get a 64 oz jug of beer through security.  By 5, they were back at ORD, fed, beered up, and ready to try again.</li>\r\n	<li>It’s all about attitude. Do you lean into it – figure out how to get everything you can out of it – or do you back away? On her extended journey to JAX, Chris Chufo kept chanting a mantra -- “It’s an adventure” – and came out smiling at the end</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/atek-phoenix/\"><em>Goa Life</em></a> by Ambient Teknology</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>From the Archives – Story Behind The Closing Song</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>I’ve received a couple of requests over the past months for information on the closing song – the tune that wraps each episode of TravelCommons.</li>\r\n	<li>Earlier this month, Becky Boyd wrote – “I can\'t find the name of the song you use at the end of the show by lyrics.  It is so appropriate to me and my husband.  We relocated from California to South Carolina, then purchased a vacation home back in California.  We often find ourselves on different coasts from each other.”</li>\r\n	<li>The song is <em>Pictures of You,</em> done by a now-defunct country band from Glasgow, Scotland called Evangeline – which is now confused on the Internet with a defunct country band from New Orleans called Evangeline.  Probably explains why Becky couldn’t find the song through its lyrics.</li>\r\n	<li>Back in 2005, though, the Scottish Evangeline was playing festivals in the UK.  I found them through the Tartan Podcast which, as the name kinda hints at, covered the Scottish music scene.  It too is defunct.  This story is starting to get a bit lonely.</li>\r\n	<li>Anyhow, after hearing the song, I sent a note to the band’s manager Willie Evans asking for a couple of words – a bit of back story on the song.  Here’s his response.</li>\r\n	<li>Five years on, I still think it’s a great song about life on the road.  If you like it, <a href=\"http://itunes.apple.com/us/album/hard-way/id75388292\" target=\"_blank\">iTunes</a> or <a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/Hard-Way/dp/B000QQW5D8/ref=sr_1_cc_2?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1293560032&amp;sr=1-2-catcorr\" target=\"_blank\">Amazon</a> are probably the best places to pick to it up.  Given the on-line confusion between the bands, I’ll post links in the show notes at travelcommons.com and on the TravelCommons Facebook page.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids99176264.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #86</li>\r\n	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\">Magnatune</a></li>\r\n	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or MP3 file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to @mpeacock on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/153475331351358\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_86.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #86 -- Fun with Layovers; Story Behind the Closing Tune','','inherit','closed','closed','','435-revision-v1','','','2016-08-14 21:07:32','2016-08-15 02:07:32','',435,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/08/14/435-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1648,1,'2016-08-14 21:26:32','2016-08-15 02:26:32','Watching Iceland makes its Cinderella run in the Euro 2016 soccer tourney got me thinking back to my March trip there. It is one of the hot travel destinations -- maybe too hot? Could be, but the descriptor I keep coming back to is \"dramatic.\" And it seems that on every trip I make out of the country, I get surprised by the amount of data my iPhone consumes -- in spite of flipping every Settings switch I can find. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_123.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/272882441\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #123:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>This episode is sponsored by HMSHost, operating the restaurants and bars in the 20 busiest airports in the US, thanking the IT staffs at Southwest and Delta for helping us hit our Q3 revenue numbers. Please use the promo code:KICKOUTTHEPLUG on our website for a 20% thank you card good at any airport.</li>\r\n	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, at the back end of what’s been kind of a tough couple of weeks of travel. On the surface, it shouldn’t have been. I wasn’t going anywhere particularly exotic -- still back and forth to Charlottesville, as well as a quick West Coast loop to Vegas and Irvine, CA. Things actually started going sideways on the Vegas to Orange County flight. This should’ve been a quick hour hop. But then Southwest’s systems tipped over and things kinda just spiraled down from there, even in Vegas. After a while, I got tired of playing the slots; the payout in the airport is lousy anyways. And the beer selection is not the greatest. I got jealous watching the Virgin America flights take off, but at least I wasn’t one of the folks sitting on the tarmac in 110 degree weather waiting for gates to clear. I think my flight ended up taking something like a 4-hour delay. I was just glad my schedule wasn’t tight; that I didn’t have a critical meeting booked that afternoon.</li>\r\n	<li>The next day, Thursday, I was flying American back to O’Hare and started to get delay notices. I popped open my flight tracking apps -- FlightAware and FlightStats and could see the problem -- an ugly line of red on the weather map running through Chicago. Being on the west side of that meant things weren’t too bad for me though. Once the thunderstorm line cleared O’Hare, the first planes they launched were heading west -- away from the storm line. I took an hour delay. Back in the office on Friday, people flying back from the East Coast were getting in at 2 or 3 in the morning, if they got out at all. I definitely dodged a bullet.</li>\r\n	<li>Which found its target the next Thursday. I was back in Charlottesville and the delay notices started at 2pm for a 6:30pm flight. That’s not a good sign. Back to FlightAware and FlightStats. It was a replay of the prior Thursday, except this time I was right in the midst of it. Caught up in ORD ground stops, the equipment for my Charlottesville flight couldn’t get out east and eventually cancelled. I drove 2 hours up DC to catch the last flight out of Dulles which by that time was having its own ground stops. The Frontier flight that was supposed to leave at 9:30 finally pushed back at 1:10am. It was my turn to stagger home at 2:30am</li>\r\n	<li>At first, I thought I wouldn’t fly at all this week, but then I got roped into a Tuesday morning meeting in Atlanta. Not so bad I thought -- fly down Monday night, fly back Tuesday afternoon. But then I woke up Monday morning to the news that Delta’s systems had tipped over. Another bullet dodged. I was booked on American going down and United coming back. And both those flights left on time and arrived early.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/hisboyelroy/430\" target=\"_blank\">Revolve</a> mix</em> by His Boy Elroy</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Last week’s attack at Istanbul’s Ataturk airport begs the same question as March’s Brussels bombings -- does more airport security actually make us safer or just move the target around? I said in the<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/05/30/podcast-121-tsa-lines-my-luggage-is-where/\" target=\"_blank\"> last episode</a> that the long TSA lines on the land side of security caused by stricter TSA inspections weren’t making the traveler any safer. Instead, they were make us less safe/more vulnerable to a Brussels or Istanbul-style attack. And while the TSA has fixed (at least for now) some of the worst lines, the issue is going to pop up again. And someone is going to suggest -- again -- that they move the security perimeter back -- say, checking itineraries and IDs at the terminal door like they do in India? The justification will be that a little bit more inconvenience is more than worth the price of safety. But, if they don’t staff it right (which was and will alway be the core problem), all you’ve done is just move the target -- the line of passengers -- out by another 1,000 feet. It’s less about location and more about execution. And given the TSA’s track record of execution over the past 15 years, I’m not optimistic that they’ll get to the right answer.</li>\r\n 	<li>I got a e-mail a few weeks ago that my 5-year Global Entry membership expires on my birthday this December. I don’t know exactly when Customs and Border Patrol started Global Entry, but 5 years ago, I was one of the early adopters. Back then, there weren’t that many interview centers. I was lucky that Chicago had one, but I had colleagues in Phoenix who had to fly up to Las Vegas for interviews. The renew process was pretty easy. I logged into GOES -- Global Online Enrollment Systems -- clicked the blue Renew Membership button and then cycled through all the profile screens -- but this time the screens were pre-populated so I only had to make updates. In my case, it was updating my job history for my current job and, the toughest part, entering all the countries I’d visited in the past 5 years. Normally, this would be pretty simple -- thumb through your passport pages and write down the country stamps. However, back in 2012, my backpack with my passport was stolen while on the train from Brussels city center to the airport -- a fun time I recount in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/05/20/podcast-98-stolen-luggage-restaurants-want-your-smartphone/\" target=\"_blank\">episode 98</a>. Luckily, I do a decent job of cataloging travel pics. Flipping through 2011 reminded me that we’d visited Venice that year and that I’d traveled there by train from Paris after a couple of days of customer meeting. The renewal cost is $100 -- $20/year is worth the price. Even more so when it’s free -- I charged it on my Amex Platinum card and immediately saw a $100 statement credit. Now I’m checking GOES every couple of days to see if Customs just waves my renewal through or if I have to talk again to the nice people in the bowels of ORD Terminal 5. I’m hoping that with the crush of new PreCheck applications, they’ll take the easy route.</li>\r\n 	<li>And as we’ve talked about before, I’m not really sure why anyone would sign up for PreCheck instead of Global Entry. Global Entry is just $15 more -- $100 instead of $85 -- the price of a beer at ORD.</li>\r\n 	<li>But if you’re not up for the $100 passport check line cut, Arnoud Heijnis, a long time TravelCommons listener, pinged me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> about another option -- the Mobile Passport app from US Customs and Border Patrol. I haven’t used it because I have Global Entry. My wife tried to get my son to download it before his return flight from Reykjavik, but he never got ‘round to it, and he said the early evening lines at ORD weren’t that bad. So while I don’t have any first- or second-hand experience with it, one of the tech writers at WSJ wrote up a <a href=\"http://www.wsj.com/articles/get-through-airport-customs-faster-with-this-free-app-1467221118\" target=\"_blank\">glowing review</a> of the app a few weeks back. Check out the show notes for a link to the article. And if you’ve tried the Mobile Passport, shoot me a note with your thoughts.</li>\r\n 	<li>During my flight back home last Weds, we were coming in on approach, you could feel the gradual descent -- slowing, descending, slowing, descending -- and then, all of a sudden, I’m pressed against the back of my seat as the plane rotates in the wrong direction -- up, that is -- and the engines roar with thrust. The experienced travelers know that the pilot had to abort the landing, but those who haven’t gone through this drill before are looking around, wondering “what the hell…?”. After about 5 minutes, the pilot came on “The plane in front of us hit a bird. They have to physically inspect the runway before another plane can land, so we had to fly around. We’ll be down in 10 minutes”. That was a nice announcement. I learned something new -- I didn’t know they had to inspect a runway after a bird strike, though it makes a lot of sense. Too often pilots or gate agents don’t take the time to explain the cause of a delay or a fly around, or don’t want to deal with the follow-up questions that may come -- and so I appreciate those that do. I remember a Southwest flight out of New Orleans. The plane lands -- it was a bit late -- but we’re not boarding right away. You could feel the impatience building in the gate area. The agent got on the PA -- “Sorry for the delay in boarding, but the plane was struck by lightning on its descent. The pilots have to do a physical inspection before we can board”. OK, that makes sense -- and just as you could feel the impatience build, it immediately drained away with that announcement. Maybe it’s because these delays weren’t the airline’s fault -- no negligence or bad judgement on American’s part for a bird strike or Southwest’s for lightning. Bit tougher to suck up when it’s the third delay in a row caused by maintenance issues -- spend some of those record profits on preventative maintenance -- or a missing crew -- maybe you should put a bit more slack in your scheduling. But as always, more transparency is better than vagueness -- even if it’s not the best story for you.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/septahelix/34050\" target=\"_blank\">Earth Soda</a></em> by septahelix</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Data-Hungry Phones</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I met up with a friend at <a href=\"http://www.empiricalbrewery.com/\">Empirical Brewing</a>, one of 3 microbreweries along Ravenswood Blvd in that Chicago northwest side neighborhood. I hadn’t seen him since he had gotten back from a trip he and his son did to Helsinki, St Petersburg, and Moscow. Among other things, he had problems getting his son’s AT&amp;T iPhone to work in Helsinki. That’s odd, I said. I’ve never had a problem with AT&amp;T’s GSM iPhones in Europe. AT&amp;T told him to reset it, which he did, after which it promptly downloaded a gig and a half of apps and data over the cellular data network. As you might guess, he’s disputing that couple of hundred dollar bill.</li>\r\n 	<li>I am always surprised at how much data my phone uses when I travel outside of the country. Now I’m sure that one reason for this is that it’s about the only time I look at my data usage since I’m grandfathered into one of the old AT&amp;T unlimited data plans. I don’t know how much I use, and don’t make a big effort to limit it. So when I travel overseas, I get to see my kids live their mobile lives trying to stay under a 300 MB data cap.</li>\r\n 	<li>International mobile data has gotten a bit cheaper. T-Mobile offers a reasonable unlimited international data plan if you can live with slower 2G-style speeds. I’m not that patient, so I tend to get the AT&amp;T 300 MB package for $60 because it also comes with free access to a decent set of wi-fi hotspots.</li>\r\n 	<li>Living on a data budget means thinking which apps really need mobile data -- which is not that many. So while I’m sitting on the plane waiting for everyone to board, I pull out my iPhone, go over to Settings | Cellular and start turning off cellular data access for most of my apps. I’m not quite sure why the healthcare flexible spending app or the app that came with my sous vide immersion heater ever need cellular data -- in the US or internationally. Anyhow, I spool through the last, turning most of them off and certainly that damn “Wi-Fi Assist” and then, after I’ve sent my last Snapchat, I hit “Reset Statistics” so I’ll have a clean view of how I’m burning through that 300 MB and then click over to Airplane mode.</li>\r\n 	<li>And then, when I land, I come out of Airplane mode, go back into Settings | Cellular and turn Roaming On, and catch up on the overnight e-mail while waiting to get off the plane. At some point that morning, I’ll look at the Current Period data usage and see that I’ve burned through, say, 75 MB of my 300 MB -- 25% of my total package -- in the first morning. Holy crap! I immediately dive back into Settings | Cellular and turn off Roaming. What happened?</li>\r\n 	<li>This is where, on the iPhone, you begin having to spelunk through the mess that the Settings app has become. You scroll down past all the apps you shut off from cellular access and look at the last entry -- “System Services” -- and see that it’s consumed at least half of that 75 MB. What the hell? You click through. Why has this phone used that much data on “Time &amp; Location” or “General” or “iTunes Accounts” (huh? I thought I shut off iTunes in the last screen). This is when you start to dig deep -- Settings | Privacy | Location Service and you find another list of apps -- kinda like the one you used to turn off cellular data, but this one is for accessing your location. Look, as much as I love the Tortas Frontera restaurants in ORD, I’m not sure why their app needs to pull my location information. And then you go to Settings | General | Background App Refresh for yet another list of apps where you shut off their permission to update themselves in the background. And then you go over to Settings | Mail and turn Fetch New Data to Off to keep your iPhone from constantly pinging your Exchange server.</li>\r\n 	<li>It’s kinda like whack-a-mole, and you’ll be sure to miss something because these phones and the apps we load on them are, for the most part, built on the assumption of ubiquitous unlimited data access. So changing that behavior, those assumptions -- to severely limit the data the phone inhales and exhales -- takes work. Which is why, if we’re going to be somewhere for more than 4-5 days, I’ll invest the hour it takes to find a phone store and $25 per phone to buy a local SIM with a gig or two of data. When I was in Iceland for 4 days in March, it didn’t seem necessary. But when then I flew down to Spain for 8 days, my first stop was the Orange store because I knew my phone couldn’t hold its breath for that long.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music --<em> <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/scottaltham/20747\">Hear Us Now</a></em> by scottaltham</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Dramatic Iceland</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Watching Iceland makes its Cinderella run in the Euro 2016 soccer tourney -- right up until the time they faceplanted into France last weekend -- reminded me of the trip my son and I took in March. Some reaction shots ESPN did from Reykjavik were places we had been -- saw a coffee shop we hit trying to stay awake on our first day, and a square that one of our hotels was on. Not that surprising since downtown Reykjavik isn’t that big. If I’d paid more attention to the people sitting next to me in the bars off that square, I’d have probably recognized some people in those shots too.</li>\r\n 	<li>Iceland is a hot tourist destination -- especially for people looking for something a bit different. And if I didn’t know already, when the Dorling Kindersley folks sent me review copies of their relaunched <a href=\"http://www.dk.com/us/travel/\">Eyewitness Travel Top 10 Guides</a>, in among the usual suspects -- New York, London, Paris, Barcelona -- was Iceland. In 2015, there were <a href=\"http://www.ferdamalastofa.is/static/files/ferdamalastofa/Frettamyndir/2016/juni/tourism_-in_iceland_in_figures_may2016.pdf\">1.3 million foreign tourists</a> in Iceland -- almost 4 times the population of 329,000 -- and a 29% increase over 2014. It’s a hot destination and getting hotter -- perhaps even to the point of overheating?</li>\r\n 	<li>Especially with Wow Air, a kinder and quirkier Spirit or Ryan Air, expanding the number of North American gateway cities. We ran into lots of folks who had seen ads for cheap Wow air fares and flew over for a 3 or 4 day weekend on a whim, without really thinking about what to do. We’d see folks walking up and down the downtown shopping and entertainment district in Reykjavik, and then figuring out some day trip bus rides out to the Golden Circle hot spots. And this was in March, not exactly the garden time in Iceland. But there were a lot of folks there. And so in that way, Iceland felt small.</li>\r\n 	<li>On our second day, we picked up a rental SUV -- a Dacia Duster, a great vehicle -- and headed out of town. Once we got out of Reykjavik’s catchment area, Iceland opened up quickly. The drama of the scenery, the spaces carved out by volcanos and glaciers -- “Land of Fire and Ice” it likes to bill itself -- make it feel much bigger. Of course, you could see this same space from the seat of a tour bus, but I was glad we rented a car. We got off the well-worn paths. Not too far, but when driving across a plain on a 2-lane highway with no traffic to speak of, the vistas did open up in front of us, which made me glad I was able to look forward and enjoy them through the expanse of the front windshield instead of looking off to the side through a motor coach window. And when we did some of the typical stops -- Þingvellir park, Gullfoss waterfall -- we could ride out the ebb and flow of the tour bus traffic, and have these spots pretty much to ourselves, even for just a little while. Or the time when we were driving toward the south coast, running through a series of rain bands -- in and out; in and out. I was starting to get annoyed until I looked out the rear view mirror and saw a huge double rainbow. I immediately pulled into a gas station and got out of the car. The landscape was wide open; we could see that rainbow from end to end. It was a phenomenal sight. And the smoked lamb sandwich we bought afterwards in the gas station wasn’t bad either.</li>\r\n 	<li>I struggle sometimes when asked about Iceland. Would I recommend it? Reykjavik is nice enough, but it’s a small town. I’m not a museum guy, so there was probably a day-and-a half of stuff for me to do. And Iceland is expensive. I had good fish and lamb, but it wasn’t cheap. And hotel rooms were tight in March, so I gotta figure the country is completely sold out in July and August.</li>\r\n 	<li>But the scenery outside of Reykjavik, I keep coming back to that word “dramatic”. I’m not sure it does it justice, but it’s all I got. If you get a car, then the trip starts to make sense.</li>\r\n 	<li>Well, that and the fermented shark chased with shots of brennivín -- Icelandic schnapps -- because, I dunno, how can you not?</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #123</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from the <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/\" target=\"_blank\">ccMixter</a> site</li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_123.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #123 — How to Avoid Travel Delays','','inherit','closed','closed','','1644-revision-v1','','','2016-08-14 21:26:32','2016-08-15 02:26:32','',1644,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/08/14/1644-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1649,1,'2016-08-14 21:30:34','2016-08-15 02:30:34','Watching Iceland makes its Cinderella run in the Euro 2016 soccer tourney got me thinking back to my March trip there. It is one of the hot travel destinations -- maybe too hot? Could be, but the descriptor I keep coming back to is \"dramatic.\" And it seems that on every trip I make out of the country, I get surprised by the amount of data my iPhone consumes -- in spite of flipping every Settings switch I can find. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_123.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/272882441\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #123:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>This episode is sponsored by HMSHost, operating the restaurants and bars in the 20 busiest airports in the US, thanking the IT staffs at Southwest and Delta for helping us hit our Q3 revenue numbers. Please use the promo code:KICKOUTTHEPLUG on our website for a 20% thank you card good at any airport.</li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, at the back end of what’s been kind of a tough couple of weeks of travel. On the surface, it shouldn’t have been. I wasn’t going anywhere particularly exotic -- still back and forth to Charlottesville, as well as a quick West Coast loop to Vegas and Irvine, CA. Things actually started going sideways on the Vegas to Orange County flight. This should’ve been a quick hour hop. But then Southwest’s systems tipped over and things kinda just spiraled down from there, even in Vegas. After a while, I got tired of playing the slots; the payout in the airport is lousy anyways. And the beer selection is not the greatest. I got jealous watching the Virgin America flights take off, but at least I wasn’t one of the folks sitting on the tarmac in 110 degree weather waiting for gates to clear. I think my flight ended up taking something like a 4-hour delay. I was just glad my schedule wasn’t tight; that I didn’t have a critical meeting booked that afternoon.</li>\r\n 	<li>The next day, Thursday, I was flying American back to O’Hare and started to get delay notices. I popped open my flight tracking apps -- <a href=\"https://flightaware.com/\" target=\"_blank\">FlightAware</a> and <a href=\"http://www.flightstats.com/go/Home/home.do\" target=\"_blank\">FlightStats</a> and could see the problem -- an ugly line of red on the weather map running through Chicago. Being on the west side of that meant things weren’t too bad for me though. Once the thunderstorm line cleared O’Hare, the first planes they launched were heading west -- away from the storm line. I took an hour delay. Back in the office on Friday, people flying back from the East Coast were getting in at 2 or 3 in the morning, if they got out at all. I definitely dodged a bullet.</li>\r\n 	<li>Which found its target the next Thursday. I was back in Charlottesville and the delay notices started at 2pm for a 6:30pm flight. That’s not a good sign. Back to FlightAware and FlightStats. It was a replay of the prior Thursday, except this time I was right in the midst of it. Caught up in ORD ground stops, the equipment for my Charlottesville flight couldn’t get out east and eventually cancelled. I drove 2 hours up DC to catch the last flight out of Dulles which by that time was having its own ground stops. The Frontier flight that was supposed to leave at 9:30 finally pushed back at 1:10am. It was my turn to stagger home at 2:30am</li>\r\n 	<li>At first, I thought I wouldn’t fly at all this week, but then I got roped into a Tuesday morning meeting in Atlanta. Not so bad I thought -- fly down Monday night, fly back Tuesday afternoon. But then I woke up Monday morning to the news that Delta’s systems had tipped over. Another bullet dodged. I was booked on American going down and United coming back. And both those flights left on time and arrived early.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/swivel-deep/\"><em>Arlos Auto Parts and Salvation</em></a> by Swivel Neck Jones</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Last week’s attack at Istanbul’s Ataturk airport begs the same question as March’s Brussels bombings -- does more airport security actually make us safer or just move the target around? I said in the<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/07/07/podcast-122-data-hungry-phones-dramatic-iceland/\" target=\"_blank\"> last episode</a> that the long TSA lines on the land side of security caused by stricter TSA inspections weren’t making the traveler any safer. Instead, they were make us less safe/more vulnerable to a Brussels or Istanbul-style attack. And while the TSA has fixed (at least for now) some of the worst lines, the issue is going to pop up again. And someone is going to suggest -- again -- that they move the security perimeter back -- say, checking itineraries and IDs at the terminal door like they do in India? The justification will be that a little bit more inconvenience is more than worth the price of safety. But, if they don’t staff it right (which was and will alway be the core problem), all you’ve done is just move the target -- the line of passengers -- out by another 1,000 feet. It’s less about location and more about execution. And given the TSA’s track record of execution over the past 15 years, I’m not optimistic that they’ll get to the right answer.</li>\r\n 	<li>I got a e-mail a few weeks ago that my 5-year Global Entry membership expires on my birthday this December. I don’t know exactly when Customs and Border Patrol started Global Entry, but 5 years ago, I was one of the early adopters. Back then, there weren’t that many interview centers. I was lucky that Chicago had one, but I had colleagues in Phoenix who had to fly up to Las Vegas for interviews. The renew process was pretty easy. I logged into GOES -- Global Online Enrollment Systems -- clicked the blue Renew Membership button and then cycled through all the profile screens -- but this time the screens were pre-populated so I only had to make updates. In my case, it was updating my job history for my current job and, the toughest part, entering all the countries I’d visited in the past 5 years. Normally, this would be pretty simple -- thumb through your passport pages and write down the country stamps. However, back in 2012, my backpack with my passport was stolen while on the train from Brussels city center to the airport -- a fun time I recount in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/05/20/podcast-98-stolen-luggage-restaurants-want-your-smartphone/\" target=\"_blank\">episode 98</a>. Luckily, I do a decent job of cataloging travel pics. Flipping through 2011 reminded me that we’d visited Venice that year and that I’d traveled there by train from Paris after a couple of days of customer meeting. The renewal cost is $100 -- $20/year is worth the price. Even more so when it’s free -- I charged it on my Amex Platinum card and immediately saw a $100 statement credit. Now I’m checking GOES every couple of days to see if Customs just waves my renewal through or if I have to talk again to the nice people in the bowels of ORD Terminal 5. I’m hoping that with the crush of new PreCheck applications, they’ll take the easy route.</li>\r\n 	<li>And as we’ve talked about before, I’m not really sure why anyone would sign up for PreCheck instead of Global Entry. Global Entry is just $15 more -- $100 instead of $85 -- the price of a beer at ORD.</li>\r\n 	<li>But if you’re not up for the $100 passport check line cut, Arnoud Heijnis, a long time TravelCommons listener, pinged me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> about another option -- the Mobile Passport app from US Customs and Border Patrol. I haven’t used it because I have Global Entry. My wife tried to get my son to download it before his return flight from Reykjavik, but he never got ‘round to it, and he said the early evening lines at ORD weren’t that bad. So while I don’t have any first- or second-hand experience with it, one of the tech writers at WSJ wrote up a <a href=\"http://www.wsj.com/articles/get-through-airport-customs-faster-with-this-free-app-1467221118\" target=\"_blank\">glowing review</a> of the app a few weeks back. Check out the show notes for a link to the article. And if you’ve tried the Mobile Passport, shoot me a note with your thoughts.</li>\r\n 	<li>During my flight back home last Weds, we were coming in on approach, you could feel the gradual descent -- slowing, descending, slowing, descending -- and then, all of a sudden, I’m pressed against the back of my seat as the plane rotates in the wrong direction -- up, that is -- and the engines roar with thrust. The experienced travelers know that the pilot had to abort the landing, but those who haven’t gone through this drill before are looking around, wondering “what the hell…?”. After about 5 minutes, the pilot came on “The plane in front of us hit a bird. They have to physically inspect the runway before another plane can land, so we had to fly around. We’ll be down in 10 minutes”. That was a nice announcement. I learned something new -- I didn’t know they had to inspect a runway after a bird strike, though it makes a lot of sense. Too often pilots or gate agents don’t take the time to explain the cause of a delay or a fly around, or don’t want to deal with the follow-up questions that may come -- and so I appreciate those that do. I remember a Southwest flight out of New Orleans. The plane lands -- it was a bit late -- but we’re not boarding right away. You could feel the impatience building in the gate area. The agent got on the PA -- “Sorry for the delay in boarding, but the plane was struck by lightning on its descent. The pilots have to do a physical inspection before we can board”. OK, that makes sense -- and just as you could feel the impatience build, it immediately drained away with that announcement. Maybe it’s because these delays weren’t the airline’s fault -- no negligence or bad judgement on American’s part for a bird strike or Southwest’s for lightning. Bit tougher to suck up when it’s the third delay in a row caused by maintenance issues -- spend some of those record profits on preventative maintenance -- or a missing crew -- maybe you should put a bit more slack in your scheduling. But as always, more transparency is better than vagueness -- even if it’s not the best story for you.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/septahelix/34050\" target=\"_blank\">Earth Soda</a></em> by septahelix</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Data-Hungry Phones</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I met up with a friend at <a href=\"http://www.empiricalbrewery.com/\">Empirical Brewing</a>, one of 3 microbreweries along Ravenswood Blvd in that Chicago northwest side neighborhood. I hadn’t seen him since he had gotten back from a trip he and his son did to Helsinki, St Petersburg, and Moscow. Among other things, he had problems getting his son’s AT&amp;T iPhone to work in Helsinki. That’s odd, I said. I’ve never had a problem with AT&amp;T’s GSM iPhones in Europe. AT&amp;T told him to reset it, which he did, after which it promptly downloaded a gig and a half of apps and data over the cellular data network. As you might guess, he’s disputing that couple of hundred dollar bill.</li>\r\n 	<li>I am always surprised at how much data my phone uses when I travel outside of the country. Now I’m sure that one reason for this is that it’s about the only time I look at my data usage since I’m grandfathered into one of the old AT&amp;T unlimited data plans. I don’t know how much I use, and don’t make a big effort to limit it. So when I travel overseas, I get to see my kids live their mobile lives trying to stay under a 300 MB data cap.</li>\r\n 	<li>International mobile data has gotten a bit cheaper. T-Mobile offers a reasonable unlimited international data plan if you can live with slower 2G-style speeds. I’m not that patient, so I tend to get the AT&amp;T 300 MB package for $60 because it also comes with free access to a decent set of wi-fi hotspots.</li>\r\n 	<li>Living on a data budget means thinking which apps really need mobile data -- which is not that many. So while I’m sitting on the plane waiting for everyone to board, I pull out my iPhone, go over to Settings | Cellular and start turning off cellular data access for most of my apps. I’m not quite sure why the healthcare flexible spending app or the app that came with my sous vide immersion heater ever need cellular data -- in the US or internationally. Anyhow, I spool through the last, turning most of them off and certainly that damn “Wi-Fi Assist” and then, after I’ve sent my last Snapchat, I hit “Reset Statistics” so I’ll have a clean view of how I’m burning through that 300 MB and then click over to Airplane mode.</li>\r\n 	<li>And then, when I land, I come out of Airplane mode, go back into Settings | Cellular and turn Roaming On, and catch up on the overnight e-mail while waiting to get off the plane. At some point that morning, I’ll look at the Current Period data usage and see that I’ve burned through, say, 75 MB of my 300 MB -- 25% of my total package -- in the first morning. Holy crap! I immediately dive back into Settings | Cellular and turn off Roaming. What happened?</li>\r\n 	<li>This is where, on the iPhone, you begin having to spelunk through the mess that the Settings app has become. You scroll down past all the apps you shut off from cellular access and look at the last entry -- “System Services” -- and see that it’s consumed at least half of that 75 MB. What the hell? You click through. Why has this phone used that much data on “Time &amp; Location” or “General” or “iTunes Accounts” (huh? I thought I shut off iTunes in the last screen). This is when you start to dig deep -- Settings | Privacy | Location Service and you find another list of apps -- kinda like the one you used to turn off cellular data, but this one is for accessing your location. Look, as much as I love the Tortas Frontera restaurants in ORD, I’m not sure why their app needs to pull my location information. And then you go to Settings | General | Background App Refresh for yet another list of apps where you shut off their permission to update themselves in the background. And then you go over to Settings | Mail and turn Fetch New Data to Off to keep your iPhone from constantly pinging your Exchange server.</li>\r\n 	<li>It’s kinda like whack-a-mole, and you’ll be sure to miss something because these phones and the apps we load on them are, for the most part, built on the assumption of ubiquitous unlimited data access. So changing that behavior, those assumptions -- to severely limit the data the phone inhales and exhales -- takes work. Which is why, if we’re going to be somewhere for more than 4-5 days, I’ll invest the hour it takes to find a phone store and $25 per phone to buy a local SIM with a gig or two of data. When I was in Iceland for 4 days in March, it didn’t seem necessary. But when then I flew down to Spain for 8 days, my first stop was the Orange store because I knew my phone couldn’t hold its breath for that long.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music --<em> <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/scottaltham/20747\">Hear Us Now</a></em> by scottaltham</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Dramatic Iceland</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Watching Iceland makes its Cinderella run in the Euro 2016 soccer tourney -- right up until the time they faceplanted into France last weekend -- reminded me of the trip my son and I took in March. Some reaction shots ESPN did from Reykjavik were places we had been -- saw a coffee shop we hit trying to stay awake on our first day, and a square that one of our hotels was on. Not that surprising since downtown Reykjavik isn’t that big. If I’d paid more attention to the people sitting next to me in the bars off that square, I’d have probably recognized some people in those shots too.</li>\r\n 	<li>Iceland is a hot tourist destination -- especially for people looking for something a bit different. And if I didn’t know already, when the Dorling Kindersley folks sent me review copies of their relaunched <a href=\"http://www.dk.com/us/travel/\">Eyewitness Travel Top 10 Guides</a>, in among the usual suspects -- New York, London, Paris, Barcelona -- was Iceland. In 2015, there were <a href=\"http://www.ferdamalastofa.is/static/files/ferdamalastofa/Frettamyndir/2016/juni/tourism_-in_iceland_in_figures_may2016.pdf\">1.3 million foreign tourists</a> in Iceland -- almost 4 times the population of 329,000 -- and a 29% increase over 2014. It’s a hot destination and getting hotter -- perhaps even to the point of overheating?</li>\r\n 	<li>Especially with Wow Air, a kinder and quirkier Spirit or Ryan Air, expanding the number of North American gateway cities. We ran into lots of folks who had seen ads for cheap Wow air fares and flew over for a 3 or 4 day weekend on a whim, without really thinking about what to do. We’d see folks walking up and down the downtown shopping and entertainment district in Reykjavik, and then figuring out some day trip bus rides out to the Golden Circle hot spots. And this was in March, not exactly the garden time in Iceland. But there were a lot of folks there. And so in that way, Iceland felt small.</li>\r\n 	<li>On our second day, we picked up a rental SUV -- a Dacia Duster, a great vehicle -- and headed out of town. Once we got out of Reykjavik’s catchment area, Iceland opened up quickly. The drama of the scenery, the spaces carved out by volcanos and glaciers -- “Land of Fire and Ice” it likes to bill itself -- make it feel much bigger. Of course, you could see this same space from the seat of a tour bus, but I was glad we rented a car. We got off the well-worn paths. Not too far, but when driving across a plain on a 2-lane highway with no traffic to speak of, the vistas did open up in front of us, which made me glad I was able to look forward and enjoy them through the expanse of the front windshield instead of looking off to the side through a motor coach window. And when we did some of the typical stops -- Þingvellir park, Gullfoss waterfall -- we could ride out the ebb and flow of the tour bus traffic, and have these spots pretty much to ourselves, even for just a little while. Or the time when we were driving toward the south coast, running through a series of rain bands -- in and out; in and out. I was starting to get annoyed until I looked out the rear view mirror and saw a huge double rainbow. I immediately pulled into a gas station and got out of the car. The landscape was wide open; we could see that rainbow from end to end. It was a phenomenal sight. And the smoked lamb sandwich we bought afterwards in the gas station wasn’t bad either.</li>\r\n 	<li>I struggle sometimes when asked about Iceland. Would I recommend it? Reykjavik is nice enough, but it’s a small town. I’m not a museum guy, so there was probably a day-and-a half of stuff for me to do. And Iceland is expensive. I had good fish and lamb, but it wasn’t cheap. And hotel rooms were tight in March, so I gotta figure the country is completely sold out in July and August.</li>\r\n 	<li>But the scenery outside of Reykjavik, I keep coming back to that word “dramatic”. I’m not sure it does it justice, but it’s all I got. If you get a car, then the trip starts to make sense.</li>\r\n 	<li>Well, that and the fermented shark chased with shots of brennivín -- Icelandic schnapps -- because, I dunno, how can you not?</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #123</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from the <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/\" target=\"_blank\">ccMixter</a> site</li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_123.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #123 — How to Avoid Travel Delays','','inherit','closed','closed','','1644-revision-v1','','','2016-08-14 21:30:34','2016-08-15 02:30:34','',1644,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/08/14/1644-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1650,1,'2016-08-14 21:35:09','2016-08-15 02:35:09','Watching Iceland makes its Cinderella run in the Euro 2016 soccer tourney got me thinking back to my March trip there. It is one of the hot travel destinations -- maybe too hot? Could be, but the descriptor I keep coming back to is \"dramatic.\" And it seems that on every trip I make out of the country, I get surprised by the amount of data my iPhone consumes -- in spite of flipping every Settings switch I can find. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_123.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/272882441\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #123:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>This episode is sponsored by HMSHost, operating the restaurants and bars in the 20 busiest airports in the US, thanking the IT staffs at Southwest and Delta for helping us hit our Q3 revenue numbers. Please use the promo code:KICKOUTTHEPLUG on our website for a 20% thank you card good at any airport.</li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, at the back end of what’s been kind of a tough couple of weeks of travel. On the surface, it shouldn’t have been. I wasn’t going anywhere particularly exotic -- still back and forth to Charlottesville, as well as a quick West Coast loop to Vegas and Irvine, CA. Things actually started going sideways on the Vegas to Orange County flight. This should’ve been a quick hour hop. But then Southwest’s systems tipped over and things kinda just spiraled down from there, even in Vegas. After a while, I got tired of playing the slots; the payout in the airport is lousy anyways. And the beer selection is not the greatest. I got jealous watching the Virgin America flights take off, but at least I wasn’t one of the folks sitting on the tarmac in 110 degree weather waiting for gates to clear. I think my flight ended up taking something like a 4-hour delay. I was just glad my schedule wasn’t tight; that I didn’t have a critical meeting booked that afternoon.</li>\r\n 	<li>The next day, Thursday, I was flying American back to O’Hare and started to get delay notices. I popped open my flight tracking apps -- <a href=\"https://flightaware.com/\" target=\"_blank\">FlightAware</a> and <a href=\"http://www.flightstats.com/go/Home/home.do\" target=\"_blank\">FlightStats</a> and could see the problem -- an ugly line of red on the weather map running through Chicago. Being on the west side of that meant things weren’t too bad for me though. Once the thunderstorm line cleared O’Hare, the first planes they launched were heading west -- away from the storm line. I took an hour delay. Back in the office on Friday, people flying back from the East Coast were getting in at 2 or 3 in the morning, if they got out at all. I definitely dodged a bullet.</li>\r\n 	<li>Which found its target the next Thursday. I was back in Charlottesville and the delay notices started at 2pm for a 6:30pm flight. That’s not a good sign. Back to FlightAware and FlightStats. It was a replay of the prior Thursday, except this time I was right in the midst of it. Caught up in ORD ground stops, the equipment for my Charlottesville flight couldn’t get out east and eventually cancelled. I drove 2 hours up DC to catch the last flight out of Dulles which by that time was having its own ground stops. The Frontier flight that was supposed to leave at 9:30 finally pushed back at 1:10am. It was my turn to stagger home at 2:30am</li>\r\n 	<li>At first, I thought I wouldn’t fly at all this week, but then I got roped into a Tuesday morning meeting in Atlanta. Not so bad I thought -- fly down Monday night, fly back Tuesday afternoon. But then I woke up Monday morning to the news that Delta’s systems had tipped over. Another bullet dodged. I was booked on American going down and United coming back. And both those flights left on time and arrived early.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/swivel-deep/\"><em>Arlos Auto Parts and Salvation</em></a> by Swivel Neck Jones</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>So, my wish from the last episode was not granted. My Global Entry renewal was “conditionally approved” but I still have to go in for an interview. They do look busy though. I had to look 3 months out for the first availability in ORD -- I got my notice in July and my appointment is in mid-October. I hope they don’t listen to this podcast or follow me on Twitter.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’ve been thru Dulles twice since the last episode. I mentioned my second visit a couple of minutes ago, catching a Frontier flight out of the Z concourse gates. I had never seen any Z gates before in Dulles -- and for a good reason. They’re about a half-dozen gates stuffed in a dark hallway at the east end of terminal; the typical “slum concourse” inhabited by budget carriers. On the earlier visit, I was making a connection on United between the two midfield concourses with involved a ride on the old mobile lounges. Now, if you know the history of Dulles airport, you know that these mobile lounges were supposed to be the future of airport design, replacing the fixed gate and concourse structure with mobile gate lounges that would shuttle you out to your plane parked on the tarmac and then raise you up to the door. Not really all that different from what happens in a lot of European airports, but without the hydraulic fun ride at the end. I tweeted a picture of the lounge -- really more like a high-clearance bus --which elicited a response from Matt McCurdy with a link to a 1958 video “The Expanding Airport: A Study of Service and Convenience for Washington International” hosted on Vimeo. From the credits, it looks like it was created for the firm that designed Dulles. It’s a 9½-minute video and an absolute must-see; the disconnect between what people thought the future of travel would be and the reality almost 60 years later. Just the contrast between how the architects thought the mobile lounges would look -- couches with coffee tables and flower vases with cocktail service, and everyone in suits and dresses -- vs. my Twitter picture of people in shorts, t-shirts, and backpacks crammed in, hanging onto poles and straps -- is something. Check out the shownotes for <a href=\"https://vimeo.com/4139559\" target=\"_blank\">Matt’s link to the video</a>. The mobile lounges are slowly being replaced by the new underground light rail system between the main terminal and the midfield concourses. Maybe as fewer people take them, they’ll be able to replace the poles with some nice chintz couches.</li>\r\n 	<li>Last month, a PR agency for Marriott invited me to a launch that was being held at the Windy City Smokeout BBQ event in Chicago. Never one to turn down free BBQ, especially on a Friday afternoon, I went. They were launching a new partnership between their TownePlace Suites brand and Weber grills, where they’re putting Weber gas grills and tools out in the common areas for use by guests. Kinda makes sense for an all-suite hotel -- families not looking to eat out every night fire up some burgers on the grill -- especially when the TownePlace folks explained that they’re targeting the mid-tier price range. It was kinda entertaining to see the young country pop tarts try to grill pizzas (and, by the way, I apply the pop tart label to both the male and female teams), but I was more interested in understanding how Marriott was positioning their suite brands -- how did TownePlace (which I’d never heard of) relate to Residence Inn and SpringHill Suites? The PR folks introduced me to a couple of brand guys who tried to lay it out for me -- TownePlace is lower priced but a bit hipper than Residence Inns, but not edgy like Moxy, their new brand targeted at Millennials. And SpringHill never made it into the discussion. I don’t know how well these micro-targets work in the reality of, say, an Orlando or a Houston. Are you really able to hit those target audiences or is it just another brand to sell to a new franchisee so the guy running the combo Courtyard-Residence Inn property a couple miles down the road doesn’t sue you? I dunno, but I got to wonder if these TownePlace properties with the new Webers are also going to provide shuttle service to the nearest Whole Foods?</li>\r\n 	<li>A colleague went to Defcon in Las Vegas last weekend. There’s always interesting stuff coming out of there; always enough to nurture any seed of paranoia you may have lurking in your id. It also makes me a bit more sympathetic to the corporate IT security guys trying to keep up with this stuff. “Video jacking” was the buzzed-about thing this year to keep frequent travelers on the watchout. The attack uses a smartphone’s ability to duplicate video out the micro USB or Lightning port to an HDMI TV. Nice if you want to watch videos from your phone or tablet on your larger hotel TV. A little less nice if you plug your phone into what you think is a charging station. But using these HDMI/Mobile High Definition Link cables which look very similar to straight power cables, your phone screen is duplicated on a TV screen perhaps with a person or video camera watching as you enter your PIN, work your banking apps, pull up that hidden text file with all your passwords written down. Krebs On Security has a <a href=\"http://krebsonsecurity.com/2016/08/road-warriors-beware-of-video-jacking/\" target=\"_blank\">good write-up</a> on it, complete with a quick demo video. I’ll put a link in the show notes.</li>\r\n 	<li>We’ve talked before about how full planes and tight seats are breaking down some of the courtesies necessary to survive sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with complete strangers for 2-4 hours straight. Usually it’s not a problem; everyone gets along to go along. On one of my United flights last month, though, this broke down slightly. It started at boarding. I get to my row. There’s a guy already in the middle seat. I tell him I’m in the window. He asks my seat number. Hmmm, little odd, but I tell him, confirming that, yes I can read my boarding pass and that he’s going to have to move out to let me in. He’s a 1K who seems a bit pissed that he’s in a center seat. Perhaps he was hoping to slide over to the window, but if that’s the case, he missed the announcements asking for volunteers. This plane was packed. About 45 minutes into the flight, he looks over at me, exasperated, and says “Fine, if you want the armrest, just take it!” and then bitched about how miserable the middle seat is. Huh? I told him, “We can share it,” I said. “There’s no sharing,” he shot back. “I dunno, I can usually manage that when I’m in the middle.” He looked at me like he wanted to hit me and then thought the better of it. The remaining 2 ½ hours was less-than-comfortable as we sat within inches of each other. You may disagree, but I’m not in with this whole “the middle seat is so miserable that you’re entitled to everything else in the row” idea. I’ve sat in the middle seat a lot and don’t think it’s that bad if you’re in an exit row or, as in this case, in United’s Economy Plus where you have extra legroom. Indeed, I’ll pick those middle seats over a window seat in the back of the plane almost every time. And when I do, I don’t expect any special treatment from my row mates. I manage to arrange my elbows so we all can use the armrests -- one of us take the front half, the other the back half. But most of all, I don’t blame my row mates for my seat choice.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/fuzz-messy/\"><em>Smiling Perspective</em></a> by General Fuzz</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Data-Hungry Phones</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I met up with a friend at <a href=\"http://www.empiricalbrewery.com/\">Empirical Brewing</a>, one of 3 microbreweries along Ravenswood Blvd in that Chicago northwest side neighborhood. I hadn’t seen him since he had gotten back from a trip he and his son did to Helsinki, St Petersburg, and Moscow. Among other things, he had problems getting his son’s AT&amp;T iPhone to work in Helsinki. That’s odd, I said. I’ve never had a problem with AT&amp;T’s GSM iPhones in Europe. AT&amp;T told him to reset it, which he did, after which it promptly downloaded a gig and a half of apps and data over the cellular data network. As you might guess, he’s disputing that couple of hundred dollar bill.</li>\r\n 	<li>I am always surprised at how much data my phone uses when I travel outside of the country. Now I’m sure that one reason for this is that it’s about the only time I look at my data usage since I’m grandfathered into one of the old AT&amp;T unlimited data plans. I don’t know how much I use, and don’t make a big effort to limit it. So when I travel overseas, I get to see my kids live their mobile lives trying to stay under a 300 MB data cap.</li>\r\n 	<li>International mobile data has gotten a bit cheaper. T-Mobile offers a reasonable unlimited international data plan if you can live with slower 2G-style speeds. I’m not that patient, so I tend to get the AT&amp;T 300 MB package for $60 because it also comes with free access to a decent set of wi-fi hotspots.</li>\r\n 	<li>Living on a data budget means thinking which apps really need mobile data -- which is not that many. So while I’m sitting on the plane waiting for everyone to board, I pull out my iPhone, go over to Settings | Cellular and start turning off cellular data access for most of my apps. I’m not quite sure why the healthcare flexible spending app or the app that came with my sous vide immersion heater ever need cellular data -- in the US or internationally. Anyhow, I spool through the last, turning most of them off and certainly that damn “Wi-Fi Assist” and then, after I’ve sent my last Snapchat, I hit “Reset Statistics” so I’ll have a clean view of how I’m burning through that 300 MB and then click over to Airplane mode.</li>\r\n 	<li>And then, when I land, I come out of Airplane mode, go back into Settings | Cellular and turn Roaming On, and catch up on the overnight e-mail while waiting to get off the plane. At some point that morning, I’ll look at the Current Period data usage and see that I’ve burned through, say, 75 MB of my 300 MB -- 25% of my total package -- in the first morning. Holy crap! I immediately dive back into Settings | Cellular and turn off Roaming. What happened?</li>\r\n 	<li>This is where, on the iPhone, you begin having to spelunk through the mess that the Settings app has become. You scroll down past all the apps you shut off from cellular access and look at the last entry -- “System Services” -- and see that it’s consumed at least half of that 75 MB. What the hell? You click through. Why has this phone used that much data on “Time &amp; Location” or “General” or “iTunes Accounts” (huh? I thought I shut off iTunes in the last screen). This is when you start to dig deep -- Settings | Privacy | Location Service and you find another list of apps -- kinda like the one you used to turn off cellular data, but this one is for accessing your location. Look, as much as I love the Tortas Frontera restaurants in ORD, I’m not sure why their app needs to pull my location information. And then you go to Settings | General | Background App Refresh for yet another list of apps where you shut off their permission to update themselves in the background. And then you go over to Settings | Mail and turn Fetch New Data to Off to keep your iPhone from constantly pinging your Exchange server.</li>\r\n 	<li>It’s kinda like whack-a-mole, and you’ll be sure to miss something because these phones and the apps we load on them are, for the most part, built on the assumption of ubiquitous unlimited data access. So changing that behavior, those assumptions -- to severely limit the data the phone inhales and exhales -- takes work. Which is why, if we’re going to be somewhere for more than 4-5 days, I’ll invest the hour it takes to find a phone store and $25 per phone to buy a local SIM with a gig or two of data. When I was in Iceland for 4 days in March, it didn’t seem necessary. But when then I flew down to Spain for 8 days, my first stop was the Orange store because I knew my phone couldn’t hold its breath for that long.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music --<em> <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/scottaltham/20747\">Hear Us Now</a></em> by scottaltham</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Dramatic Iceland</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Watching Iceland makes its Cinderella run in the Euro 2016 soccer tourney -- right up until the time they faceplanted into France last weekend -- reminded me of the trip my son and I took in March. Some reaction shots ESPN did from Reykjavik were places we had been -- saw a coffee shop we hit trying to stay awake on our first day, and a square that one of our hotels was on. Not that surprising since downtown Reykjavik isn’t that big. If I’d paid more attention to the people sitting next to me in the bars off that square, I’d have probably recognized some people in those shots too.</li>\r\n 	<li>Iceland is a hot tourist destination -- especially for people looking for something a bit different. And if I didn’t know already, when the Dorling Kindersley folks sent me review copies of their relaunched <a href=\"http://www.dk.com/us/travel/\">Eyewitness Travel Top 10 Guides</a>, in among the usual suspects -- New York, London, Paris, Barcelona -- was Iceland. In 2015, there were <a href=\"http://www.ferdamalastofa.is/static/files/ferdamalastofa/Frettamyndir/2016/juni/tourism_-in_iceland_in_figures_may2016.pdf\">1.3 million foreign tourists</a> in Iceland -- almost 4 times the population of 329,000 -- and a 29% increase over 2014. It’s a hot destination and getting hotter -- perhaps even to the point of overheating?</li>\r\n 	<li>Especially with Wow Air, a kinder and quirkier Spirit or Ryan Air, expanding the number of North American gateway cities. We ran into lots of folks who had seen ads for cheap Wow air fares and flew over for a 3 or 4 day weekend on a whim, without really thinking about what to do. We’d see folks walking up and down the downtown shopping and entertainment district in Reykjavik, and then figuring out some day trip bus rides out to the Golden Circle hot spots. And this was in March, not exactly the garden time in Iceland. But there were a lot of folks there. And so in that way, Iceland felt small.</li>\r\n 	<li>On our second day, we picked up a rental SUV -- a Dacia Duster, a great vehicle -- and headed out of town. Once we got out of Reykjavik’s catchment area, Iceland opened up quickly. The drama of the scenery, the spaces carved out by volcanos and glaciers -- “Land of Fire and Ice” it likes to bill itself -- make it feel much bigger. Of course, you could see this same space from the seat of a tour bus, but I was glad we rented a car. We got off the well-worn paths. Not too far, but when driving across a plain on a 2-lane highway with no traffic to speak of, the vistas did open up in front of us, which made me glad I was able to look forward and enjoy them through the expanse of the front windshield instead of looking off to the side through a motor coach window. And when we did some of the typical stops -- Þingvellir park, Gullfoss waterfall -- we could ride out the ebb and flow of the tour bus traffic, and have these spots pretty much to ourselves, even for just a little while. Or the time when we were driving toward the south coast, running through a series of rain bands -- in and out; in and out. I was starting to get annoyed until I looked out the rear view mirror and saw a huge double rainbow. I immediately pulled into a gas station and got out of the car. The landscape was wide open; we could see that rainbow from end to end. It was a phenomenal sight. And the smoked lamb sandwich we bought afterwards in the gas station wasn’t bad either.</li>\r\n 	<li>I struggle sometimes when asked about Iceland. Would I recommend it? Reykjavik is nice enough, but it’s a small town. I’m not a museum guy, so there was probably a day-and-a half of stuff for me to do. And Iceland is expensive. I had good fish and lamb, but it wasn’t cheap. And hotel rooms were tight in March, so I gotta figure the country is completely sold out in July and August.</li>\r\n 	<li>But the scenery outside of Reykjavik, I keep coming back to that word “dramatic”. I’m not sure it does it justice, but it’s all I got. If you get a car, then the trip starts to make sense.</li>\r\n 	<li>Well, that and the fermented shark chased with shots of brennivín -- Icelandic schnapps -- because, I dunno, how can you not?</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #123</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from the <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/\" target=\"_blank\">ccMixter</a> site</li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_123.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #123 — How to Avoid Travel Delays','','inherit','closed','closed','','1644-revision-v1','','','2016-08-14 21:35:09','2016-08-15 02:35:09','',1644,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/08/14/1644-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1651,1,'2016-08-14 21:41:01','2016-08-15 02:41:01','Watching Iceland makes its Cinderella run in the Euro 2016 soccer tourney got me thinking back to my March trip there. It is one of the hot travel destinations -- maybe too hot? Could be, but the descriptor I keep coming back to is \"dramatic.\" And it seems that on every trip I make out of the country, I get surprised by the amount of data my iPhone consumes -- in spite of flipping every Settings switch I can find. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_123.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/272882441\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #123:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>This episode is sponsored by HMSHost, operating the restaurants and bars in the 20 busiest airports in the US, thanking the IT staffs at Southwest and Delta for helping us hit our Q3 revenue numbers. Please use the promo code:KICKOUTTHEPLUG on our website for a 20% thank you card good at any airport.</li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, at the back end of what’s been kind of a tough couple of weeks of travel. On the surface, it shouldn’t have been. I wasn’t going anywhere particularly exotic -- still back and forth to Charlottesville, as well as a quick West Coast loop to Vegas and Irvine, CA. Things actually started going sideways on the Vegas to Orange County flight. This should’ve been a quick hour hop. But then Southwest’s systems tipped over and things kinda just spiraled down from there, even in Vegas. After a while, I got tired of playing the slots; the payout in the airport is lousy anyways. And the beer selection is not the greatest. I got jealous watching the Virgin America flights take off, but at least I wasn’t one of the folks sitting on the tarmac in 110 degree weather waiting for gates to clear. I think my flight ended up taking something like a 4-hour delay. I was just glad my schedule wasn’t tight; that I didn’t have a critical meeting booked that afternoon.</li>\r\n 	<li>The next day, Thursday, I was flying American back to O’Hare and started to get delay notices. I popped open my flight tracking apps -- <a href=\"https://flightaware.com/\" target=\"_blank\">FlightAware</a> and <a href=\"http://www.flightstats.com/go/Home/home.do\" target=\"_blank\">FlightStats</a> and could see the problem -- an ugly line of red on the weather map running through Chicago. Being on the west side of that meant things weren’t too bad for me though. Once the thunderstorm line cleared O’Hare, the first planes they launched were heading west -- away from the storm line. I took an hour delay. Back in the office on Friday, people flying back from the East Coast were getting in at 2 or 3 in the morning, if they got out at all. I definitely dodged a bullet.</li>\r\n 	<li>Which found its target the next Thursday. I was back in Charlottesville and the delay notices started at 2pm for a 6:30pm flight. That’s not a good sign. Back to FlightAware and FlightStats. It was a replay of the prior Thursday, except this time I was right in the midst of it. Caught up in ORD ground stops, the equipment for my Charlottesville flight couldn’t get out east and eventually cancelled. I drove 2 hours up DC to catch the last flight out of Dulles which by that time was having its own ground stops. The Frontier flight that was supposed to leave at 9:30 finally pushed back at 1:10am. It was my turn to stagger home at 2:30am</li>\r\n 	<li>At first, I thought I wouldn’t fly at all this week, but then I got roped into a Tuesday morning meeting in Atlanta. Not so bad I thought -- fly down Monday night, fly back Tuesday afternoon. But then I woke up Monday morning to the news that Delta’s systems had tipped over. Another bullet dodged. I was booked on American going down and United coming back. And both those flights left on time and arrived early.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/swivel-deep/\"><em>Arlos Auto Parts and Salvation</em></a> by Swivel Neck Jones</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>So, my wish from the last episode was not granted. My Global Entry renewal was “conditionally approved” but I still have to go in for an interview. They do look busy though. I had to look 3 months out for the first availability in ORD -- I got my notice in July and my appointment is in mid-October. I hope they don’t listen to this podcast or follow me on Twitter.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’ve been thru Dulles twice since the last episode. I mentioned my second visit a couple of minutes ago, catching a Frontier flight out of the Z concourse gates. I had never seen any Z gates before in Dulles -- and for a good reason. They’re about a half-dozen gates stuffed in a dark hallway at the east end of terminal; the typical “slum concourse” inhabited by budget carriers. On the earlier visit, I was making a connection on United between the two midfield concourses with involved a ride on the old mobile lounges. Now, if you know the history of Dulles airport, you know that these mobile lounges were supposed to be the future of airport design, replacing the fixed gate and concourse structure with mobile gate lounges that would shuttle you out to your plane parked on the tarmac and then raise you up to the door. Not really all that different from what happens in a lot of European airports, but without the hydraulic fun ride at the end. I tweeted a picture of the lounge -- really more like a high-clearance bus --which elicited a response from Matt McCurdy with a link to a 1958 video “The Expanding Airport: A Study of Service and Convenience for Washington International” hosted on Vimeo. From the credits, it looks like it was created for the firm that designed Dulles. It’s a 9½-minute video and an absolute must-see; the disconnect between what people thought the future of travel would be and the reality almost 60 years later. Just the contrast between how the architects thought the mobile lounges would look -- couches with coffee tables and flower vases with cocktail service, and everyone in suits and dresses -- vs. my Twitter picture of people in shorts, t-shirts, and backpacks crammed in, hanging onto poles and straps -- is something. Check out the shownotes for <a href=\"https://vimeo.com/4139559\" target=\"_blank\">Matt’s link to the video</a>. The mobile lounges are slowly being replaced by the new underground light rail system between the main terminal and the midfield concourses. Maybe as fewer people take them, they’ll be able to replace the poles with some nice chintz couches.</li>\r\n 	<li>Last month, a PR agency for Marriott invited me to a launch that was being held at the Windy City Smokeout BBQ event in Chicago. Never one to turn down free BBQ, especially on a Friday afternoon, I went. They were launching a new partnership between their TownePlace Suites brand and Weber grills, where they’re putting Weber gas grills and tools out in the common areas for use by guests. Kinda makes sense for an all-suite hotel -- families not looking to eat out every night fire up some burgers on the grill -- especially when the TownePlace folks explained that they’re targeting the mid-tier price range. It was kinda entertaining to see the young country pop tarts try to grill pizzas (and, by the way, I apply the pop tart label to both the male and female teams), but I was more interested in understanding how Marriott was positioning their suite brands -- how did TownePlace (which I’d never heard of) relate to Residence Inn and SpringHill Suites? The PR folks introduced me to a couple of brand guys who tried to lay it out for me -- TownePlace is lower priced but a bit hipper than Residence Inns, but not edgy like Moxy, their new brand targeted at Millennials. And SpringHill never made it into the discussion. I don’t know how well these micro-targets work in the reality of, say, an Orlando or a Houston. Are you really able to hit those target audiences or is it just another brand to sell to a new franchisee so the guy running the combo Courtyard-Residence Inn property a couple miles down the road doesn’t sue you? I dunno, but I got to wonder if these TownePlace properties with the new Webers are also going to provide shuttle service to the nearest Whole Foods?</li>\r\n 	<li>A colleague went to Defcon in Las Vegas last weekend. There’s always interesting stuff coming out of there; always enough to nurture any seed of paranoia you may have lurking in your id. It also makes me a bit more sympathetic to the corporate IT security guys trying to keep up with this stuff. “Video jacking” was the buzzed-about thing this year to keep frequent travelers on the watchout. The attack uses a smartphone’s ability to duplicate video out the micro USB or Lightning port to an HDMI TV. Nice if you want to watch videos from your phone or tablet on your larger hotel TV. A little less nice if you plug your phone into what you think is a charging station. But using these HDMI/Mobile High Definition Link cables which look very similar to straight power cables, your phone screen is duplicated on a TV screen perhaps with a person or video camera watching as you enter your PIN, work your banking apps, pull up that hidden text file with all your passwords written down. Krebs On Security has a <a href=\"http://krebsonsecurity.com/2016/08/road-warriors-beware-of-video-jacking/\" target=\"_blank\">good write-up</a> on it, complete with a quick demo video. I’ll put a link in the show notes.</li>\r\n 	<li>We’ve talked before about how full planes and tight seats are breaking down some of the courtesies necessary to survive sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with complete strangers for 2-4 hours straight. Usually it’s not a problem; everyone gets along to go along. On one of my United flights last month, though, this broke down slightly. It started at boarding. I get to my row. There’s a guy already in the middle seat. I tell him I’m in the window. He asks my seat number. Hmmm, little odd, but I tell him, confirming that, yes I can read my boarding pass and that he’s going to have to move out to let me in. He’s a 1K who seems a bit pissed that he’s in a center seat. Perhaps he was hoping to slide over to the window, but if that’s the case, he missed the announcements asking for volunteers. This plane was packed. About 45 minutes into the flight, he looks over at me, exasperated, and says “Fine, if you want the armrest, just take it!” and then bitched about how miserable the middle seat is. Huh? I told him, “We can share it,” I said. “There’s no sharing,” he shot back. “I dunno, I can usually manage that when I’m in the middle.” He looked at me like he wanted to hit me and then thought the better of it. The remaining 2 ½ hours was less-than-comfortable as we sat within inches of each other. You may disagree, but I’m not in with this whole “the middle seat is so miserable that you’re entitled to everything else in the row” idea. I’ve sat in the middle seat a lot and don’t think it’s that bad if you’re in an exit row or, as in this case, in United’s Economy Plus where you have extra legroom. Indeed, I’ll pick those middle seats over a window seat in the back of the plane almost every time. And when I do, I don’t expect any special treatment from my row mates. I manage to arrange my elbows so we all can use the armrests -- one of us take the front half, the other the back half. But most of all, I don’t blame my row mates for my seat choice.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/fuzz-messy/\"><em>Smiling Perspective</em></a> by General Fuzz</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Can We Avoid Travel Delays?</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Peter Rukavina, a long-time T/C listener, sent me an interesting e-mail at the front part of this week\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>The tweet-stream of travel despair is a frequent enough occurrence as to almost be its own medium now (\"@aircanada announces 9 hour delay; help!\" etc.). I\'m an occasional practitioner myself. My question: to what extent can delays, cancellations, luggage loss, bumping, etc. be mitigated by being travel-savvy? In other words, by traveling smart, how much more control over wrenches thrown into plans do you have?</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>A pretty damned good question, especially given the tales of woe over the past month that I went through at the start of this episode which, I’ll admit, were accompanied by a couple of streams of bitch tweets. We\'ll never completely avoid travel despair -- complete system failures ought to be “black swan” events, though having 3 full outages (United, Southwest, and Delta) in 13 months suggests maybe they’re not, and flying into smaller places like Charlottesville, VA leave you with few options. But I do think there are things we can do -- the consultant in me want to call them “strategies” -- that can reduce the probability of a bad time and hopefully reduce the impact when they happen. I’ve talked about some “strategies” in earlier podcasts -- focus trips to earn airline and hotel status, don’t check luggage, fly direct, if you have to connect never book a connection less than 90 minutes -- and you’ll find most of these in travel listacles that pop up around the holidays. Knowing that Peter, as a long-time listener, has heard these before, I tried to think about some next-level “strategies”. Here are the ones that came to mind. Not an exhaustive list, but I think a decent start...</li>\r\n 	<li>First, avoid flying in the evenings -- Now I break this rule all the time, but think about it. Delays build during the day -- from weather, congestion, mechanicals, psychotic passengers -- because the airlines don\'t build their schedules with enough slack to allow recovery. By 4 or 5pm, the sum of these delays combines with the packed evening \"rush hour\" schedule to drive a high probability of delays. American and United’s LGA-ORD evening schedules are this in spades. Throw in a summer thunderstorm in ORD or DFW or ATL and flight ops centers start cancelling flights to catch up. If you’re on the last flight out, you can be looking at a night on the comfy-looking airport couch. Even without cancellations, delays lead to tight connections which can lead to missed luggage.</li>\r\n 	<li>Use flight-tracking smart phone apps -- I use apps like FlightAware to access more data than the typical gate agent can. On the Thursday that I ended up in DC, as the delay notices started coming in from American,, FlightAware showed me that my plane was on the ground in Wichita, KS, probably waiting out an ORD ground stop from thunderstorms. It still had to get to Chicago and then out to Charlottesville. Seeing parallel lines of red on the radar view, I had a pretty good sense that it wasn\'t going to happen. When I decided to head up to Dulles for the Frontier flight, I could see the flight history on FlightAware; it delayed more often than not, but rarely cancelled. That night, as ORD and IAD ground stops kept pushing the departure time, I wasn\'t too worried that it would cancel because I had seen the flight history.</li>\r\n 	<li>Spread clothes across checked and unchecked luggage -- If you\'ve checked luggage, I assume it\'s for a good reason (e.g., carrying a bottles of wine home from a Napa trip, needing formal wear for a wedding) and that you also have a carry-on. Put two changes of clothes and a bare set of toiletries (e.g., toothbrush) in your carry-on. Most lost luggage will catch up to you within 24-36 hours. If you\'re traveling as a family, spread everyone\'s clothes out across all the bags rather than each person having their own bag. It would be rare for the airlines to lose all the bags of an entire party. With things spread across bags, everyone is good for a couple of days even if a bag is lost. I’m always amazed that more families don’t do this.</li>\r\n 	<li>Know your geography -- What are your alternative airports and how far of a drive are they? This has become even more important over the past few years as the big carriers have reduced flight frequency to fill up their planes. I once had a project in the middle of Connecticut that was just about equidistant between White Plains and Hartford airports. We always flew in/out of White Plains even though it was a smaller airport because, when flights delayed/cancelled, we could just keep driving down the Hutchinson to LaGuardia. When we flew out of Hartford, it was a much longer haul to the nearest airport.</li>\r\n 	<li>This last one might be a bit obscure, but it’s been useful to me. If your corporate car rental agency is Hertz, always book an intermediate car so you can use Gold Choice to quickly swap cars if Hertz assigns you a real beater. Now, you can always go back to the counter, stand in line, and demand a better, cleaner, less decrepit car, but we’re trying to avoid delays. Most corporate rates that I’ve used has at most a dollar or two difference between the compact and intermediate rate. It’s cheap insurance. I’ve used Gold Choice maybe 10-20% of the time, but I’m always glad to have that option.</li>\r\n 	<li>So there you go,. Five ways to travel smarter. If you have a suggestion, please send it in.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/atek-phoenix/\"><em>Goa Life</em></a> by Ambient Teknology</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Dramatic Iceland</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Watching Iceland makes its Cinderella run in the Euro 2016 soccer tourney -- right up until the time they faceplanted into France last weekend -- reminded me of the trip my son and I took in March. Some reaction shots ESPN did from Reykjavik were places we had been -- saw a coffee shop we hit trying to stay awake on our first day, and a square that one of our hotels was on. Not that surprising since downtown Reykjavik isn’t that big. If I’d paid more attention to the people sitting next to me in the bars off that square, I’d have probably recognized some people in those shots too.</li>\r\n 	<li>Iceland is a hot tourist destination -- especially for people looking for something a bit different. And if I didn’t know already, when the Dorling Kindersley folks sent me review copies of their relaunched <a href=\"http://www.dk.com/us/travel/\">Eyewitness Travel Top 10 Guides</a>, in among the usual suspects -- New York, London, Paris, Barcelona -- was Iceland. In 2015, there were <a href=\"http://www.ferdamalastofa.is/static/files/ferdamalastofa/Frettamyndir/2016/juni/tourism_-in_iceland_in_figures_may2016.pdf\">1.3 million foreign tourists</a> in Iceland -- almost 4 times the population of 329,000 -- and a 29% increase over 2014. It’s a hot destination and getting hotter -- perhaps even to the point of overheating?</li>\r\n 	<li>Especially with Wow Air, a kinder and quirkier Spirit or Ryan Air, expanding the number of North American gateway cities. We ran into lots of folks who had seen ads for cheap Wow air fares and flew over for a 3 or 4 day weekend on a whim, without really thinking about what to do. We’d see folks walking up and down the downtown shopping and entertainment district in Reykjavik, and then figuring out some day trip bus rides out to the Golden Circle hot spots. And this was in March, not exactly the garden time in Iceland. But there were a lot of folks there. And so in that way, Iceland felt small.</li>\r\n 	<li>On our second day, we picked up a rental SUV -- a Dacia Duster, a great vehicle -- and headed out of town. Once we got out of Reykjavik’s catchment area, Iceland opened up quickly. The drama of the scenery, the spaces carved out by volcanos and glaciers -- “Land of Fire and Ice” it likes to bill itself -- make it feel much bigger. Of course, you could see this same space from the seat of a tour bus, but I was glad we rented a car. We got off the well-worn paths. Not too far, but when driving across a plain on a 2-lane highway with no traffic to speak of, the vistas did open up in front of us, which made me glad I was able to look forward and enjoy them through the expanse of the front windshield instead of looking off to the side through a motor coach window. And when we did some of the typical stops -- Þingvellir park, Gullfoss waterfall -- we could ride out the ebb and flow of the tour bus traffic, and have these spots pretty much to ourselves, even for just a little while. Or the time when we were driving toward the south coast, running through a series of rain bands -- in and out; in and out. I was starting to get annoyed until I looked out the rear view mirror and saw a huge double rainbow. I immediately pulled into a gas station and got out of the car. The landscape was wide open; we could see that rainbow from end to end. It was a phenomenal sight. And the smoked lamb sandwich we bought afterwards in the gas station wasn’t bad either.</li>\r\n 	<li>I struggle sometimes when asked about Iceland. Would I recommend it? Reykjavik is nice enough, but it’s a small town. I’m not a museum guy, so there was probably a day-and-a half of stuff for me to do. And Iceland is expensive. I had good fish and lamb, but it wasn’t cheap. And hotel rooms were tight in March, so I gotta figure the country is completely sold out in July and August.</li>\r\n 	<li>But the scenery outside of Reykjavik, I keep coming back to that word “dramatic”. I’m not sure it does it justice, but it’s all I got. If you get a car, then the trip starts to make sense.</li>\r\n 	<li>Well, that and the fermented shark chased with shots of brennivín -- Icelandic schnapps -- because, I dunno, how can you not?</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #123</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\">Magnatune</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_123.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #123 — How to Avoid Travel Delays','','inherit','closed','closed','','1644-revision-v1','','','2016-08-14 21:41:01','2016-08-15 02:41:01','',1644,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/08/14/1644-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1652,1,'2016-08-14 21:43:11','2016-08-15 02:43:11','Watching Iceland makes its Cinderella run in the Euro 2016 soccer tourney got me thinking back to my March trip there. It is one of the hot travel destinations -- maybe too hot? Could be, but the descriptor I keep coming back to is \"dramatic.\" And it seems that on every trip I make out of the country, I get surprised by the amount of data my iPhone consumes -- in spite of flipping every Settings switch I can find. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_123.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/272882441\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #123:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>This episode is sponsored by HMSHost, operating the restaurants and bars in the 20 busiest airports in the US, thanking the IT staffs at Southwest and Delta for helping us hit our Q3 revenue numbers. Please use the promo code:KICKOUTTHEPLUG on our website for a 20% thank you card good at any airport.</li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, at the back end of what’s been kind of a tough couple of weeks of travel. On the surface, it shouldn’t have been. I wasn’t going anywhere particularly exotic -- still back and forth to Charlottesville, as well as a quick West Coast loop to Vegas and Irvine, CA. Things actually started going sideways on the Vegas to Orange County flight. This should’ve been a quick hour hop. But then Southwest’s systems tipped over and things kinda just spiraled down from there, even in Vegas. After a while, I got tired of playing the slots; the payout in the airport is lousy anyways. And the beer selection is not the greatest. I got jealous watching the Virgin America flights take off, but at least I wasn’t one of the folks sitting on the tarmac in 110 degree weather waiting for gates to clear. I think my flight ended up taking something like a 4-hour delay. I was just glad my schedule wasn’t tight; that I didn’t have a critical meeting booked that afternoon.</li>\r\n 	<li>The next day, Thursday, I was flying American back to O’Hare and started to get delay notices. I popped open my flight tracking apps -- <a href=\"https://flightaware.com/\" target=\"_blank\">FlightAware</a> and <a href=\"http://www.flightstats.com/go/Home/home.do\" target=\"_blank\">FlightStats</a> and could see the problem -- an ugly line of red on the weather map running through Chicago. Being on the west side of that meant things weren’t too bad for me though. Once the thunderstorm line cleared O’Hare, the first planes they launched were heading west -- away from the storm line. I took an hour delay. Back in the office on Friday, people flying back from the East Coast were getting in at 2 or 3 in the morning, if they got out at all. I definitely dodged a bullet.</li>\r\n 	<li>Which found its target the next Thursday. I was back in Charlottesville and the delay notices started at 2pm for a 6:30pm flight. That’s not a good sign. Back to FlightAware and FlightStats. It was a replay of the prior Thursday, except this time I was right in the midst of it. Caught up in ORD ground stops, the equipment for my Charlottesville flight couldn’t get out east and eventually cancelled. I drove 2 hours up DC to catch the last flight out of Dulles which by that time was having its own ground stops. The Frontier flight that was supposed to leave at 9:30 finally pushed back at 1:10am. It was my turn to stagger home at 2:30am</li>\r\n 	<li>At first, I thought I wouldn’t fly at all this week, but then I got roped into a Tuesday morning meeting in Atlanta. Not so bad I thought -- fly down Monday night, fly back Tuesday afternoon. But then I woke up Monday morning to the news that Delta’s systems had tipped over. Another bullet dodged. I was booked on American going down and United coming back. And both those flights left on time and arrived early.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/swivel-deep/\"><em>Arlos Auto Parts and Salvation</em></a> by Swivel Neck Jones</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>So, my wish from the last episode was not granted. My Global Entry renewal was “conditionally approved” but I still have to go in for an interview. They do look busy though. I had to look 3 months out for the first availability in ORD -- I got my notice in July and my appointment is in mid-October. I hope they don’t listen to this podcast or follow me on Twitter.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’ve been thru Dulles twice since the last episode. I mentioned my second visit a couple of minutes ago, catching a Frontier flight out of the Z concourse gates. I had never seen any Z gates before in Dulles -- and for a good reason. They’re about a half-dozen gates stuffed in a dark hallway at the east end of terminal; the typical “slum concourse” inhabited by budget carriers. On the earlier visit, I was making a connection on United between the two midfield concourses with involved a ride on the old mobile lounges. Now, if you know the history of Dulles airport, you know that these mobile lounges were supposed to be the future of airport design, replacing the fixed gate and concourse structure with mobile gate lounges that would shuttle you out to your plane parked on the tarmac and then raise you up to the door. Not really all that different from what happens in a lot of European airports, but without the hydraulic fun ride at the end. I tweeted a picture of the lounge -- really more like a high-clearance bus --which elicited a response from Matt McCurdy with a link to a 1958 video “The Expanding Airport: A Study of Service and Convenience for Washington International” hosted on Vimeo. From the credits, it looks like it was created for the firm that designed Dulles. It’s a 9½-minute video and an absolute must-see; the disconnect between what people thought the future of travel would be and the reality almost 60 years later. Just the contrast between how the architects thought the mobile lounges would look -- couches with coffee tables and flower vases with cocktail service, and everyone in suits and dresses -- vs. my Twitter picture of people in shorts, t-shirts, and backpacks crammed in, hanging onto poles and straps -- is something. Check out the shownotes for <a href=\"https://vimeo.com/4139559\" target=\"_blank\">Matt’s link to the video</a>. The mobile lounges are slowly being replaced by the new underground light rail system between the main terminal and the midfield concourses. Maybe as fewer people take them, they’ll be able to replace the poles with some nice chintz couches.</li>\r\n 	<li>Last month, a PR agency for Marriott invited me to a launch that was being held at the Windy City Smokeout BBQ event in Chicago. Never one to turn down free BBQ, especially on a Friday afternoon, I went. They were launching a new partnership between their TownePlace Suites brand and Weber grills, where they’re putting Weber gas grills and tools out in the common areas for use by guests. Kinda makes sense for an all-suite hotel -- families not looking to eat out every night fire up some burgers on the grill -- especially when the TownePlace folks explained that they’re targeting the mid-tier price range. It was kinda entertaining to see the young country pop tarts try to grill pizzas (and, by the way, I apply the pop tart label to both the male and female teams), but I was more interested in understanding how Marriott was positioning their suite brands -- how did TownePlace (which I’d never heard of) relate to Residence Inn and SpringHill Suites? The PR folks introduced me to a couple of brand guys who tried to lay it out for me -- TownePlace is lower priced but a bit hipper than Residence Inns, but not edgy like Moxy, their new brand targeted at Millennials. And SpringHill never made it into the discussion. I don’t know how well these micro-targets work in the reality of, say, an Orlando or a Houston. Are you really able to hit those target audiences or is it just another brand to sell to a new franchisee so the guy running the combo Courtyard-Residence Inn property a couple miles down the road doesn’t sue you? I dunno, but I got to wonder if these TownePlace properties with the new Webers are also going to provide shuttle service to the nearest Whole Foods?</li>\r\n 	<li>A colleague went to Defcon in Las Vegas last weekend. There’s always interesting stuff coming out of there; always enough to nurture any seed of paranoia you may have lurking in your id. It also makes me a bit more sympathetic to the corporate IT security guys trying to keep up with this stuff. “Video jacking” was the buzzed-about thing this year to keep frequent travelers on the watchout. The attack uses a smartphone’s ability to duplicate video out the micro USB or Lightning port to an HDMI TV. Nice if you want to watch videos from your phone or tablet on your larger hotel TV. A little less nice if you plug your phone into what you think is a charging station. But using these HDMI/Mobile High Definition Link cables which look very similar to straight power cables, your phone screen is duplicated on a TV screen perhaps with a person or video camera watching as you enter your PIN, work your banking apps, pull up that hidden text file with all your passwords written down. Krebs On Security has a <a href=\"http://krebsonsecurity.com/2016/08/road-warriors-beware-of-video-jacking/\" target=\"_blank\">good write-up</a> on it, complete with a quick demo video. I’ll put a link in the show notes.</li>\r\n 	<li>We’ve talked before about how full planes and tight seats are breaking down some of the courtesies necessary to survive sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with complete strangers for 2-4 hours straight. Usually it’s not a problem; everyone gets along to go along. On one of my United flights last month, though, this broke down slightly. It started at boarding. I get to my row. There’s a guy already in the middle seat. I tell him I’m in the window. He asks my seat number. Hmmm, little odd, but I tell him, confirming that, yes I can read my boarding pass and that he’s going to have to move out to let me in. He’s a 1K who seems a bit pissed that he’s in a center seat. Perhaps he was hoping to slide over to the window, but if that’s the case, he missed the announcements asking for volunteers. This plane was packed. About 45 minutes into the flight, he looks over at me, exasperated, and says “Fine, if you want the armrest, just take it!” and then bitched about how miserable the middle seat is. Huh? I told him, “We can share it,” I said. “There’s no sharing,” he shot back. “I dunno, I can usually manage that when I’m in the middle.” He looked at me like he wanted to hit me and then thought the better of it. The remaining 2 ½ hours was less-than-comfortable as we sat within inches of each other. You may disagree, but I’m not in with this whole “the middle seat is so miserable that you’re entitled to everything else in the row” idea. I’ve sat in the middle seat a lot and don’t think it’s that bad if you’re in an exit row or, as in this case, in United’s Economy Plus where you have extra legroom. Indeed, I’ll pick those middle seats over a window seat in the back of the plane almost every time. And when I do, I don’t expect any special treatment from my row mates. I manage to arrange my elbows so we all can use the armrests -- one of us take the front half, the other the back half. But most of all, I don’t blame my row mates for my seat choice.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/fuzz-messy/\"><em>Smiling Perspective</em></a> by General Fuzz</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Can We Avoid Travel Delays?</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Peter Rukavina, a long-time T/C listener, sent me an interesting e-mail at the front part of this week\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>The tweet-stream of travel despair is a frequent enough occurrence as to almost be its own medium now (\"@aircanada announces 9 hour delay; help!\" etc.). I\'m an occasional practitioner myself. My question: to what extent can delays, cancellations, luggage loss, bumping, etc. be mitigated by being travel-savvy? In other words, by traveling smart, how much more control over wrenches thrown into plans do you have?</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>A pretty damned good question, especially given the tales of woe over the past month that I went through at the start of this episode which, I’ll admit, were accompanied by a couple of streams of bitch tweets. We\'ll never completely avoid travel despair -- complete system failures ought to be “black swan” events, though having 3 full outages (United, Southwest, and Delta) in 13 months suggests maybe they’re not, and flying into smaller places like Charlottesville, VA leave you with few options. But I do think there are things we can do -- the consultant in me want to call them “strategies” -- that can reduce the probability of a bad time and hopefully reduce the impact when they happen. I’ve talked about some “strategies” in earlier podcasts -- focus trips to earn airline and hotel status, don’t check luggage, fly direct, if you have to connect never book a connection less than 90 minutes -- and you’ll find most of these in travel listacles that pop up around the holidays. Knowing that Peter, as a long-time listener, has heard these before, I tried to think about some next-level “strategies”. Here are the ones that came to mind. Not an exhaustive list, but I think a decent start...</li>\r\n 	<li>First, avoid flying in the evenings -- Now I break this rule all the time, but think about it. Delays build during the day -- from weather, congestion, mechanicals, psychotic passengers -- because the airlines don\'t build their schedules with enough slack to allow recovery. By 4 or 5pm, the sum of these delays combines with the packed evening \"rush hour\" schedule to drive a high probability of delays. American and United’s LGA-ORD evening schedules are this in spades. Throw in a summer thunderstorm in ORD or DFW or ATL and flight ops centers start cancelling flights to catch up. If you’re on the last flight out, you can be looking at a night on the comfy-looking airport couch. Even without cancellations, delays lead to tight connections which can lead to missed luggage.</li>\r\n 	<li>Use flight-tracking smart phone apps -- I use apps like FlightAware to access more data than the typical gate agent can. On the Thursday that I ended up in DC, as the delay notices started coming in from American,, FlightAware showed me that my plane was on the ground in Wichita, KS, probably waiting out an ORD ground stop from thunderstorms. It still had to get to Chicago and then out to Charlottesville. Seeing parallel lines of red on the radar view, I had a pretty good sense that it wasn\'t going to happen. When I decided to head up to Dulles for the Frontier flight, I could see the flight history on FlightAware; it delayed more often than not, but rarely cancelled. That night, as ORD and IAD ground stops kept pushing the departure time, I wasn\'t too worried that it would cancel because I had seen the flight history.</li>\r\n 	<li>Spread clothes across checked and unchecked luggage -- If you\'ve checked luggage, I assume it\'s for a good reason (e.g., carrying a bottles of wine home from a Napa trip, needing formal wear for a wedding) and that you also have a carry-on. Put two changes of clothes and a bare set of toiletries (e.g., toothbrush) in your carry-on. Most lost luggage will catch up to you within 24-36 hours. If you\'re traveling as a family, spread everyone\'s clothes out across all the bags rather than each person having their own bag. It would be rare for the airlines to lose all the bags of an entire party. With things spread across bags, everyone is good for a couple of days even if a bag is lost. I’m always amazed that more families don’t do this.</li>\r\n 	<li>Know your geography -- What are your alternative airports and how far of a drive are they? This has become even more important over the past few years as the big carriers have reduced flight frequency to fill up their planes. I once had a project in the middle of Connecticut that was just about equidistant between White Plains and Hartford airports. We always flew in/out of White Plains even though it was a smaller airport because, when flights delayed/cancelled, we could just keep driving down the Hutchinson to LaGuardia. When we flew out of Hartford, it was a much longer haul to the nearest airport.</li>\r\n 	<li>This last one might be a bit obscure, but it’s been useful to me. If your corporate car rental agency is Hertz, always book an intermediate car so you can use Gold Choice to quickly swap cars if Hertz assigns you a real beater. Now, you can always go back to the counter, stand in line, and demand a better, cleaner, less decrepit car, but we’re trying to avoid delays. Most corporate rates that I’ve used has at most a dollar or two difference between the compact and intermediate rate. It’s cheap insurance. I’ve used Gold Choice maybe 10-20% of the time, but I’m always glad to have that option.</li>\r\n 	<li>So there you go,. Five ways to travel smarter. If you have a suggestion, please send it in.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/atek-phoenix/\"><em>Goa Life</em></a> by Ambient Teknology</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Coping with Travel Delays</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>During my last CIO gig, I was traveling as much, if not more, than any of my consulting gigs. I kept my Chicago residence and rotated weekly across offices in Scottsdale, Dallas, Naples, FL and Croydon, south of London. The head of my project management team started doing a bit of travel to support some system migrations and after a couple of months of the usual flight delays and other travel snafus, he asked me, “How do you deal with this all the time?” “I depend on 3 major food groups,” I told him. “Alcohol, salt, and fat.”</li>\r\n 	<li>I remembered that as I was killing time in Dulles with a dinner of fish and chips and a local beer, Hop Lips IPA from Dover, DE. It rang the bell on all three.</li>\r\n 	<li>Doing that too much, though, is how you end up quietly asking for belt extenders, so you gotta find other ways of coping.</li>\r\n 	<li>One bad habit that I have is bitch tweeting. I’ve confessed to that in many prior episodes, and as much as I try to stop, I find it releases my frustrations -- kinda like shouting into a bag or something -- and keeps me from popping a cork at innocent gate agents. I apologize to all my Twitter followers who have to endure that. I have downloaded a meditation app for my iPhone, but it hasn’t seemed to help.</li>\r\n 	<li>A more constructive thing is that I try not to show up to the airport until I have to. If I get an early notice of a delay, I push back my cab to the airport. Part of the frustration is that delays consume time. I can be more productive in my office than trying to find a place to work at a crowded gate or airport club. When I was traveling regularly to New Orleans a few years back, it seemed that half the flights back to Chicago in the summer were delayed by afternoon thunderstorms. I wouldn’t leave for the airport until I saw the inbound equipment was in the air. I got a lot more work done, and ate much better food.</li>\r\n 	<li>The trend of airports upgrading their amenities helps a lot. I’ve never done the neck massage thing, but, back to the alcohol food group, I’ve done a few wine flights at the Vino Volo wine bars that are popping up in more US airports, and the beer flights at microbrewery bars like Great Lakes Brewery’s place in Cleveland, Cisco Brewers’ bar in Boston Logan or the Karl Strauss bar in LAX. It’s something local that keeps you occupied for a bit. And searching them out -- because they’re inevitably in a different concourse than you -- also kills time.</li>\r\n 	<li>In the end, though, it is what it is. If the delay isn’t causing you to miss something important, it’s easy to kick back and read the paper. If you’re missing your kid’s parent-teacher conference, there’s not much that’s going to help your frustration. Except maybe bitch tweeting...</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #123</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\">Magnatune</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_123.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #123 — How to Avoid Travel Delays','','inherit','closed','closed','','1644-revision-v1','','','2016-08-14 21:43:11','2016-08-15 02:43:11','',1644,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/08/14/1644-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1653,1,'2016-08-14 21:54:21','2016-08-15 02:54:21','[caption id=\"attachment_1554\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/2015-09-03-15.12.36.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1554\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/2015-09-03-15.12.36-300x200.jpg\" alt=\"Did The Pope Have This Problem?\" width=\"300\" height=\"200\" /></a> Did The Pope Have This Problem?[/caption]\r\n\r\nApologies in advance because this is pretty much a stream-of-consciousness episode, with semi-strung together thoughts about eggs, car rentals, seeing the Pope, travel food, and stuff from my September trip to Scotland.  I talk about how handy I found the new <a href=\"https://revolut.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Revolut</a> service for spending and sending money in Europe; recent good and bad experiences with <a href=\"https://www.hertz.com/rentacar/emember/join/overview.do?learnMore=presidentsCircle\" target=\"_blank\">Hertz </a>and other car rentals; most bad experience with <a href=\"http://britishairways.com\" target=\"_blank\">British Airways</a>; and how true-to-life the <a href=\"https://youtu.be/2JqRXLQYF9o\" target=\"_blank\">Doritos Super Bowl commercial</a> portrays the Southwest boarding experience.  All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_117.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_117.mp3\"]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #117:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. I was trying to do this from the Bally’s Casino in Las Vegas where I was earlier in the week, but it just didn’t work out. I was there for business, not pleasure, but I always feel that I should stay in a casino hotel when in Vegas. I dunno, staying in a Westin or Marriott up by the convention center just doesn’t feel Vegas. When I was here last year for a business convention I stayed in the MGM Grand. Years ago, though, when I’d do regular booth duty at technology shows, I would always stay at Mandalay Bay, which I really liked.</li>\r\n 	<li>The more I know about hotels, the more I’m impressed by Vegas hotel operations. Caesars, the MGM Grand, Mandalay Bay -- they’re huge mini-cities -- orders of magnitude bigger than couple-hundred room hotels I’d stay at in Denver or New Orleans. And yet the service, the execution is almost always way better than those smaller hotels. If you’re any sort of an operations nerd, you gotta give ‘em a nod. Though on the other hand, when you head to the gym at 6am and pass by the old guy dragging on a cigarette playing the quarter slots, it kinda makes you wish they were a little less good...</li>\r\n 	<li>As I mentioned in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/08/26/podcast-116-traveling-thru-japan-luggage-trends/\">the last episode</a>, the big travel for me was at the beginning of September when we were in Scotland for 2 weeks getting my daughter situated at Univ of St Andrews. Now while I say “getting my daughter situated,” there were equal parts getting my wife situated with the idea of her youngest child being an ocean away -- a big difference from when my son was 90 minutes up the road in Milwaukee.</li>\r\n 	<li>The following week’s travel had a nice difficulty factor. Weds morning, I flew from Chicago to DC for the papal Mass on the campus of my alma mater, Catholic University of America, and then back to Detroit that evening for meetings first thing Thursday morning. The difficulty factor was my luggage. No back packs, no selfie sticks, so certainly no roller bags were getting through the security checkpoints. Finding a checked luggage place is a real challenge anymore. I thought about checking my bag into my DCA-DTW flight, but I was too early -- 8 hours prior to flight time max. There is a checked baggage place at Union Station -- DC’s train station -- which is conveniently located a couple of stops south of Catholic on the Metro Red Line.</li>\r\n 	<li>Freed of my baggage, I emerged from the Brookland Metro Stop to an unbelievable combination of people and fencing. Incredibly long lines of people corralled in by what had to be miles of fences. I was lucky; I somehow got into a quick security line -- only 45 minutes. After finding my seating section, the gates were closed and we were sealed in our sections until the Pope arrived and did a couple of laps around campus in the Popemobile. After Mass started, they opened up the gates again. Which was great, because while the music and the liturgy were top notch, I wasn’t queuing up for communion with 25,000 other folks. After the homily, I was one of the trickle of folks making an early exit to beat the rush. I had a flight to catch. I’m sure the Pope understood.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>One Day</em> by <a href=\"http://www.hollowhorse.co.uk/\">Hollow Horse</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>OK, just as a warning, this section is going to ramble on for a while. I have a random walk of comments/opinions that I just can’t seem to synthesize into  coherent topics. So here it goes...</li>\r\n 	<li>First stop in the mail bag, I was pleasantly surprised to receive this audio comment from Linda Martin of the Indie Travel Podcast\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Linda, thanks for that. The thing with eggs -- you can tell I’ve thought about this way too much -- it’s a trade-off between good eggs and time. It takes time for a cooked-to-order egg, but in the morning, I don’t often have that time. Usually, I’ve worked out; I’m cooling down during breakfast, then hitting the shower and off to work. When I stayed in one of the Renaissance Hotels in New Orleans, they didn’t have a separate executive lounge. Breakfast was served in the restaurant. They had the typical lounge buffet set up, but you could also order off the menu, which I think I did once in a dozen stays. It was a nice egg, but it took an extra 10 min that usually wasn’t in my morning schedule. Definitely a 1st World problem</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Lisa Walls wrote on the TravelCommons Facebook Wall\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>“Hey Mark, I love your podcast, especially the comments on food and craft beers. Other than the Altoids, do you carry any food in your briefcase, such as protein bars? I am always looking for something that is shelf stable that tastes good and travels well.”</li>\r\n 	<li>Lisa, thanks for the note. I usually keep 1-2 KIND bars in the bottom of my bag. The fruit-&amp;-nut ones seem to hold up to weeks of getting crushed by my PC power supply. They’re also not too sweet the way some other granola and power bars are.</li>\r\n 	<li>I know I’m about to lose any foodie cred I may have built up over the years, but I gotta say that, for me, the McDonald\'s grilled chicken Snack Wraps are just about the right amount of food to cover a 2-hour flight. They’re quick to buy, and compact to bring on board and eat. I find it tough to manage a salad while sitting in a center seat.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>I’m not sure if I mentioned this last episode, but I’m flying Southwest on this week’s Vegas-Denver-Chicago trip to click over A-list status. It kinda crept up on me -- I don’t typically fly SW enough to make status, but apparently I have this year. As near as I can tell, this means I won’t have to pay the $12.50 Early Bird fee or be staring at my Southwest app exactly 24 hours before flight time in order to get a decent boarding position. Which, as we all know, is critical on Southwest since there’s no assigned seating. An A or early B boarding group number is necessary for an aisle seat. On my Vegas flight, hitting the “Check In” button maybe 2 seconds after the 24-hour window got me B 7, so I got an aisle seat in the back half of the plane. It was a full flight, so after that, I was living last year’s Super Bowl Doritos commercial -- looking down, trying to avoid eye contact with potentially bad seat mates while looking friendly to attract good ones. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://youtu.be/2JqRXLQYF9o\">link</a> to the commercial. It’s spot on.</li>\r\n 	<li>In the last episode, I talked about travel amateurs clogging up the PreCheck lanes. These would be people getting PreCheck as part of the TSA’s “Managed Inclusion” program, where they randomly shunt travelers over to PreCheck to balance screening line loads. This to the utter frustration of travelers who paid $85 for PreCheck screening or $100 for Global Entry. You might recall long-time listener Rich Fraser saying he was getting PreCheck about 75% of the time so why should he pay? But now the TSA says they’re throttling back on “Managed Inclusion”, driven at least in part by the publicity generated by auditors finding that travelers on various watch lists were being given PreCheck. I’ve certainly noticed the length of PreCheck lines dropping.</li>\r\n 	<li>Also in the last episode, I talked about luggage trends. One trend that sorta hit the cutting room floor is the move to fully rotating twirly wheels. Certainly handy in getting your luggage down a tight airplane aisle, but to my eye, most of them look a bit tinier, a bit flimsier than the standard roller-blade style wheel partially embedded in the back of the suitcase. The twirly wheels don’t seem rugged enough to survive getting pulled down Manhattan sidewalks or some of the ruts in New Orleans. And to allow full rotation, the wheels stick out of the bottom of the suitcase making the bag longer. This tripped up my wife on our flight from EDI to LHR. The BA gate agent asked my wife to put her bag in the luggage sizer. It would’ve fit -- except for the twirly wheels. Now we have to gate check it -- which means standing off to the side of the gate pulling some stuff out, transferring it into her shoulder bag. Understandable -- until we get on the plane and see it’s a half-full 767 and there are fully empty luggage bins. Really? So as is my wont, I vented my frustration on Twitter rather than any BA employees. BA’s social media department responded pretty quickly saying they needed to check all luggage to be fair to all passengers. But how would allowing a bag that was, at most, an inch over-long because of its twirly wheels on a half-full flight with empty overheads cheat any other passengers? It’s an over-officiousness that just doesn’t make sense. And it’s the reason I avoid BA now whenever possible. Which is a real shame, because back in the early ‘90’s when I was doing a lot of travel to Europe, I prefered BA. But that was 20 years ago and, it seems, a different BA.</li>\r\n 	<li>There is another reason I avoid BA -- officiousness <i>and</i> Heathrow. Again, another thing I loved in the ‘90’s, I now avoid whenever possible. Heathrow is a complete nightmare. You land, you trundle along through corridors, down escalators, into a bus, get a tour of the Heathrow back alleys, stop at another terminal, fight through security again, and then end up in the midst of a packed retail space where you wander through the shops because there’s no place to sit. It’s gotten to the point that I’ll fly the extra hour to connect through Frankfurt or Amsterdam just to avoid Heathrow. We were doing this St Andrews trip on AA miles. We were fine on the way out -- ORD-JFK-EDI all on AA. But coming back, it was EDI-LHR-ORD with the first leg on BA. Just ugh! I still keep thinking about how to get something out of my 300K BA Avios miles. Maybe I’ll make my daughter fly BA.</li>\r\n 	<li>On a brighter note, I tried a new financial service during this trip and it worked really well. It’s called Revolut -- as in Revolution cut a bit short. It’s a FinTech start up based in the UK that gives you a virtual and real debit card with really great exchange rates. As with all the cool start-ups nowadays, everything is done through a smartphone app -- which, to stow the snark for a second, makes a lot of sense for any travel app. I opened an account before I left and funded it with $200 from my regular ATM/debit card. I could then convert my dollars to pounds or euros at what appeared to be just about the market rate -- there didn’t seem to be a lot of margin taken on the buy or sell sides. I also instantly had a virtual debit card with which I could use those new pounds or euros to buy things on the web -- like train tickets or top up a phone card. I then requested a physical version of my card, which took about a week to show up from the UK. Now I had a proper European chip-&amp;-pin card that I could use at an ATM or, say, the self-serve checkout line at Tesco’s without waiting for a clerk to take my signed receipt. It only hiccuped one at the Costa coffee shop in St Andrews; I still don’t know why. Poking around a bit more, I found that I could send pounds to my daughter’s RBS account with a day or so lag. Now, none of this functionality is necessarily new, though being able to do it all through a slick smartphone app is very handy. The real innovation is the cost. Funding my Revolut account from my debit card cost me less than 1% -- less than $2 for the $200 transfer, which is cheaper than most non-network ATM fees. After that, no transaction fees to move money between currencies or to withdraw. Compare that to hitting a foreign ATM with your US card. My personal bank is very reasonable, only charging me Visa’s 1% transaction fee, but many big banks will hit you with a $5 non-network fee on top of any transaction fees. And then transferring money to my daughter’s account -- wire transfers can cost $25-30. Revolut has well-packaged functionality delivered at the lowest costs I’ve seen. I don’t know how long they’ll keep this price point, but right now, it’s the best deal I’ve seen for money needed for international travel. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://revolut.com/\">link</a> to the Revolut web site.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Clear My Head</em> by <a href=\"http://www.thefiasco.net/\">FIASCO</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Random Thoughts about Car Rentals</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I guess I could’ve cut two or three comments out of the last segment and labeled them “Random Comments about My Scotland Trip” but that just seems entire too gratuitous. But I have been collecting car rental experiences in my TravelCommons Evernote drop file and I think I now have enough for make up a topic -- or at least what might marginally pass for a topic</li>\r\n 	<li>As I’ve mentioned in past episodes, I really don’t like to rent cars. I much prefer to use rail or a cab in from the airport and then walk to where ever I need to go. That works well in New York or Chicago or San Francisco, not so much in Denver or Detroit. So I’ve been renting a lot of cars over the past 6 months.</li>\r\n 	<li>So many in fact that Hertz bumped my status up to President\'s Circle. Not quite sure that gets me, but it sounds status-y. Though right after my congratulatory e-mail, I found a dumpy Toyota Corolla in my Hertz Gold spot, so maybe it’s not anything special.</li>\r\n 	<li>But in times like those -- when I get assigned the 45,000-mile Toyota with crumbs still in the driver seat, or a Ford F-150 king cab pick up truck in Boston (?) -- I’ve come to love Hertz Gold Choice. If you rent a mid-size or above -- and for our corporate rate, the price of a compact and mid-size are the same -- you can go to the Choice aisle and take one of those cars instead. I left the dumpy Toyota and took a new Nissan instead.</li>\r\n 	<li>I have started to make note of differences in service <i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">and</span></i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> attitude across locations. I never rent from Hertz at Detroit airport anymore. I’ve yet to get a non-dumpy car there and the attitude is not great. Though I think Hertz’s Newark station is the worst. A recent example -- a colleague was driving his car toward the lot exit when a low tire pressure alarm lit up. So he asked the guy at the exit gate where he could get some air to top off the tire. “Try a gas station,” the attendant told him. That was helpful.</span></li>\r\n 	<li>I’ve had challenges with car rental web sites -- Hertz, Avis -- when my pick-up or drop off time didn’t match the hours of the office I selected. I get the error notice and then when I go back to try another site or time, these websites will randomly select another date or location. I had this happen to me in Edinburgh on the second car we rented. We were training from Lockerbie back to Edinburgh where we’d done 4 days of biking while our daughter was going through freshman orientation. I’d booked a car on Hertz’s web site to pick up at the train station and drop off at EDI 5 days later. It took me 5 tries to get it right -- each time I re-started, it reset the pick-up location from Waverly Station to EDI. And each time I’d correct it. Except, it seems, the last time. When we arrived in Waverly, there was no car. I looked at the res -- pick up at EDI. Ugh. Not the end of the world -- we could’ve taken the new light rail out to EDI, but it was aggravating. I searched through the Hertz.co.uk website for a phone number -- that itself being a little extra helping of aggravation -- and called the res center. The woman on the other end was inordinately calm and helpful. 3 minutes later, she’d moved my pick-up to Waverly. I thanked her -- a lot. I should’ve booked with her instead of the website.</li>\r\n 	<li>We rented our first car in Edinburgh from Enterprise. It was a great car -- a Fiat 500 L. All the bags fit easily in the hatchback. Nice nav, nice sound system, clean....  Drove to a near-by shopping mall -- grabbed a coffee at Starbucks and phone SIMs at the ee store. Next stop, IKEA to buy things we didn’t pack -- like towels and hangers. Coming off the motorway, through a traffic circle, the clutch crapped out. I’d put it in gear, let out the clutch pedal, nothing. 3 hours later after Enterprise, the auto club and Fiat scrummed about who was supposed to pick up the car, the tow truck dropped us back off at EDI where the Enterprise folks apologized profusely and gave us an even nicer Nissan. A couple of weeks, I noticed the Pope used a Fiat 500L to drive from Andrews Airforce Base to the Vatican Embassy. The next day, though, he was in a Jeep Popemobile. I could sympathize.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a title=\"MP3 Download\" href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/download_track.php?id=0E74C6FEB7390D18D02B4B399668093172F6C8CC66DDC09D90A3BF7DDA436823CFAC859AE2B2C73E46A278A4950E1030\">Lonely Dog Blues</a></em> by <a title=\"Tobin James\' Web Site\" href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/label.php?id=2A3449F03E7B8462FF74407B60F0C4B0A30A0CBE880C61DE37E3B342387F0643\">Tobin James</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917626811171154.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #117</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/\">Podshow Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_117.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #117 — Random Thoughts About Eggs, Scotland & Car Rentals','','inherit','closed','closed','','1542-revision-v1','','','2016-08-14 21:54:21','2016-08-15 02:54:21','',1542,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/08/14/1542-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1654,1,'2016-08-14 21:57:53','2016-08-15 02:57:53','','IMG_0725','Earning Status at Camp O\'Hare','inherit','open','closed','','img_0725','','','2016-08-14 21:58:30','2016-08-15 02:58:30','',1644,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/IMG_0725.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(1655,1,'2016-08-14 22:07:03','2016-08-15 03:07:03','[caption id=\"attachment_1654\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/IMG_0725.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1654\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/IMG_0725-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Earning Status at Camp O\'Hare\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Earning Status at Camp O\'Hare[/caption]\r\n\r\nIt\'s been a tough travel month for a large portion of the traveling public. Between Delta and Southwest system outages and two straight Thursdays of thunderstorms in the east half of the US, dealing with travel delays has been a part of this month\'s travel experience. In this episode, we think about ways to avoid delays, or at least minimize their impact. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_123.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/278297669\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #123:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>This episode is sponsored by HMSHost, operating the restaurants and bars in the 20 busiest airports in the US, thanking the IT staffs at Southwest and Delta for helping us hit our Q3 revenue numbers. Please use the promo code: KICKOUTTHEPLUG on our website for a 20% thank you card good at any airport.</li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, at the back end of what’s been kind of a tough couple of weeks of travel. On the surface, it shouldn’t have been. I wasn’t going anywhere particularly exotic -- still back and forth to Charlottesville, as well as a quick West Coast loop to Vegas and Irvine, CA. Things actually started going sideways on the Vegas to Orange County flight. This should’ve been a quick hour hop. But then Southwest’s systems tipped over and things kinda just spiraled down from there, even in Vegas. After a while, I got tired of playing the slots; the payout in the airport is lousy anyways. And the beer selection is not the greatest. I got jealous watching the Virgin America flights take off, but at least I wasn’t one of the folks sitting on the tarmac in 110 degree weather waiting for gates to clear. I think my flight ended up taking something like a 4-hour delay. I was just glad my schedule wasn’t tight; that I didn’t have a critical meeting booked that afternoon.</li>\r\n 	<li>The next day, Thursday, I was flying American back to O’Hare and started to get delay notices. I popped open my flight tracking apps -- <a href=\"https://flightaware.com/\" target=\"_blank\">FlightAware</a> and <a href=\"http://www.flightstats.com/go/Home/home.do\" target=\"_blank\">FlightStats</a> and could see the problem -- an ugly line of red on the weather map running through Chicago. Being on the west side of that meant things weren’t too bad for me though. Once the thunderstorm line cleared O’Hare, the first planes they launched were heading west -- away from the storm line. I took an hour delay. Back in the office on Friday, people flying back from the East Coast were getting in at 2 or 3 in the morning, if they got out at all. I definitely dodged a bullet.</li>\r\n 	<li>Which found its target the next Thursday. I was back in Charlottesville and the delay notices started at 2pm for a 6:30pm flight. That’s not a good sign. Back to FlightAware and FlightStats. It was a replay of the prior Thursday, except this time I was right in the midst of it. Caught up in ORD ground stops, the equipment for my Charlottesville flight couldn’t get out east and eventually cancelled. I drove 2 hours up DC to catch the last flight out of Dulles which by that time was having its own ground stops. The Frontier flight that was supposed to leave at 9:30 finally pushed back at 1:10am. It was my turn to stagger home at 2:30am</li>\r\n 	<li>At first, I thought I wouldn’t fly at all this week, but then I got roped into a Tuesday morning meeting in Atlanta. Not so bad I thought -- fly down Monday night, fly back Tuesday afternoon. But then I woke up Monday morning to the news that Delta’s systems had tipped over. Another bullet dodged. I was booked on American going down and United coming back. And both those flights left on time and arrived early.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/swivel-deep/\"><em>Arlos Auto Parts and Salvation</em></a> by Swivel Neck Jones</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>So, my wish from the last episode was not granted. My Global Entry renewal was “conditionally approved” but I still have to go in for an interview. They do look busy though. I had to look 3 months out for the first availability in ORD -- I got my notice in July and my appointment is in mid-October. I hope they don’t listen to this podcast or follow me on Twitter.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’ve been thru Dulles twice since the last episode. I mentioned my second visit a couple of minutes ago, catching a Frontier flight out of the Z concourse gates. I had never seen any Z gates before in Dulles -- and for a good reason. They’re about a half-dozen gates stuffed in a dark hallway at the east end of terminal; the typical “slum concourse” inhabited by budget carriers. On the earlier visit, I was making a connection on United between the two midfield concourses with involved a ride on the old mobile lounges. Now, if you know the history of Dulles airport, you know that these mobile lounges were supposed to be the future of airport design, replacing the fixed gate and concourse structure with mobile gate lounges that would shuttle you out to your plane parked on the tarmac and then raise you up to the door. Not really all that different from what happens in a lot of European airports, but without the hydraulic fun ride at the end. I tweeted a picture of the lounge -- really more like a high-clearance bus --which elicited a response from Matt McCurdy with a link to a 1958 video “The Expanding Airport: A Study of Service and Convenience for Washington International” hosted on Vimeo. From the credits, it looks like it was created for the firm that designed Dulles. It’s a 9½-minute video and an absolute must-see; the disconnect between what people thought the future of travel would be and the reality almost 60 years later. Just the contrast between how the architects thought the mobile lounges would look -- couches with coffee tables and flower vases with cocktail service, and everyone in suits and dresses -- vs. my Twitter picture of people in shorts, t-shirts, and backpacks crammed in, hanging onto poles and straps -- is something. Check out the shownotes for <a href=\"https://vimeo.com/4139559\" target=\"_blank\">Matt’s link to the video</a>. The mobile lounges are slowly being replaced by the new underground light rail system between the main terminal and the midfield concourses. Maybe as fewer people take them, they’ll be able to replace the poles with some nice chintz couches.</li>\r\n 	<li>Last month, a PR agency for Marriott invited me to a launch that was being held at the Windy City Smokeout BBQ event in Chicago. Never one to turn down free BBQ, especially on a Friday afternoon, I went. They were launching a new partnership between their TownePlace Suites brand and Weber grills, where they’re putting Weber gas grills and tools out in the common areas for use by guests. Kinda makes sense for an all-suite hotel -- families not looking to eat out every night fire up some burgers on the grill -- especially when the TownePlace folks explained that they’re targeting the mid-tier price range. It was kinda entertaining to see the young country pop tarts try to grill pizzas (and, by the way, I apply the pop tart label to both the male and female teams), but I was more interested in understanding how Marriott was positioning their suite brands -- how did TownePlace (which I’d never heard of) relate to Residence Inn and SpringHill Suites? The PR folks introduced me to a couple of brand guys who tried to lay it out for me -- TownePlace is lower priced but a bit hipper than Residence Inns, but not edgy like Moxy, their new brand targeted at Millennials. And SpringHill never made it into the discussion. I don’t know how well these micro-targets work in the reality of, say, an Orlando or a Houston. Are you really able to hit those target audiences or is it just another brand to sell to a new franchisee so the guy running the combo Courtyard-Residence Inn property a couple miles down the road doesn’t sue you? I dunno, but I got to wonder if these TownePlace properties with the new Webers are also going to provide shuttle service to the nearest Whole Foods?</li>\r\n 	<li>A colleague went to Defcon in Las Vegas last weekend. There’s always interesting stuff coming out of there; always enough to nurture any seed of paranoia you may have lurking in your id. It also makes me a bit more sympathetic to the corporate IT security guys trying to keep up with this stuff. “Video jacking” was the buzzed-about thing this year to keep frequent travelers on the watchout. The attack uses a smartphone’s ability to duplicate video out the micro USB or Lightning port to an HDMI TV. Nice if you want to watch videos from your phone or tablet on your larger hotel TV. A little less nice if you plug your phone into what you think is a charging station. But using these HDMI/Mobile High Definition Link cables which look very similar to straight power cables, your phone screen is duplicated on a TV screen perhaps with a person or video camera watching as you enter your PIN, work your banking apps, pull up that hidden text file with all your passwords written down. Krebs On Security has a <a href=\"http://krebsonsecurity.com/2016/08/road-warriors-beware-of-video-jacking/\" target=\"_blank\">good write-up</a> on it, complete with a quick demo video. I’ll put a link in the show notes.</li>\r\n 	<li>We’ve talked before about how full planes and tight seats are breaking down some of the courtesies necessary to survive sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with complete strangers for 2-4 hours straight. Usually it’s not a problem; everyone gets along to go along. On one of my United flights last month, though, this broke down slightly. It started at boarding. I get to my row. There’s a guy already in the middle seat. I tell him I’m in the window. He asks my seat number. Hmmm, little odd, but I tell him, confirming that, yes I can read my boarding pass and that he’s going to have to move out to let me in. He’s a 1K who seems a bit pissed that he’s in a center seat. Perhaps he was hoping to slide over to the window, but if that’s the case, he missed the announcements asking for volunteers. This plane was packed. About 45 minutes into the flight, he looks over at me, exasperated, and says “Fine, if you want the armrest, just take it!” and then bitched about how miserable the middle seat is. Huh? I told him, “We can share it,” I said. “There’s no sharing,” he shot back. “I dunno, I can usually manage that when I’m in the middle.” He looked at me like he wanted to hit me and then thought the better of it. The remaining 2 ½ hours was less-than-comfortable as we sat within inches of each other. You may disagree, but I’m not in with this whole “the middle seat is so miserable that you’re entitled to everything else in the row” idea. I’ve sat in the middle seat a lot and don’t think it’s that bad if you’re in an exit row or, as in this case, in United’s Economy Plus where you have extra legroom. Indeed, I’ll pick those middle seats over a window seat in the back of the plane almost every time. And when I do, I don’t expect any special treatment from my row mates. I manage to arrange my elbows so we all can use the armrests -- one of us take the front half, the other the back half. But most of all, I don’t blame my row mates for my seat choice.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/fuzz-messy/\"><em>Smiling Perspective</em></a> by General Fuzz</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Can We Avoid Travel Delays?</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Peter Rukavina, a long-time T/C listener, sent me an interesting e-mail at the front part of this week\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>The tweet-stream of travel despair is a frequent enough occurrence as to almost be its own medium now (\"@aircanada announces 9 hour delay; help!\" etc.). I\'m an occasional practitioner myself. My question: to what extent can delays, cancellations, luggage loss, bumping, etc. be mitigated by being travel-savvy? In other words, by traveling smart, how much more control over wrenches thrown into plans do you have?</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>A pretty damned good question, especially given the tales of woe over the past month that I went through at the start of this episode which, I’ll admit, were accompanied by a couple of streams of bitch tweets. We\'ll never completely avoid travel despair -- complete system failures ought to be “black swan” events, though having 3 full outages (United, Southwest, and Delta) in 13 months suggests maybe they’re not, and flying into smaller places like Charlottesville, VA leave you with few options. But I do think there are things we can do -- the consultant in me want to call them “strategies” -- that can reduce the probability of a bad time and hopefully reduce the impact when they happen. I’ve talked about some “strategies” in earlier podcasts -- focus trips to earn airline and hotel status, don’t check luggage, fly direct, if you have to connect never book a connection less than 90 minutes -- and you’ll find most of these in travel listacles that pop up around the holidays. Knowing that Peter, as a long-time listener, has heard these before, I tried to think about some next-level “strategies”. Here are the ones that came to mind. Not an exhaustive list, but I think a decent start...</li>\r\n 	<li>First, avoid flying in the evenings -- Now I break this rule all the time, but think about it. Delays build during the day -- from weather, congestion, mechanicals, psychotic passengers -- because the airlines don\'t build their schedules with enough slack to allow recovery. By 4 or 5pm, the sum of these delays combines with the packed evening \"rush hour\" schedule to drive a high probability of delays. American and United’s LGA-ORD evening schedules are this in spades. Throw in a summer thunderstorm in ORD or DFW or ATL and flight ops centers start cancelling flights to catch up. If you’re on the last flight out, you can be looking at a night on the comfy-looking airport couch. Even without cancellations, delays lead to tight connections which can lead to missed luggage.</li>\r\n 	<li>Use flight-tracking smart phone apps -- I use apps like FlightAware to access more data than the typical gate agent can. On the Thursday that I ended up in DC, as the delay notices started coming in from American,, FlightAware showed me that my plane was on the ground in Wichita, KS, probably waiting out an ORD ground stop from thunderstorms. It still had to get to Chicago and then out to Charlottesville. Seeing parallel lines of red on the radar view, I had a pretty good sense that it wasn\'t going to happen. When I decided to head up to Dulles for the Frontier flight, I could see the flight history on FlightAware; it delayed more often than not, but rarely cancelled. That night, as ORD and IAD ground stops kept pushing the departure time, I wasn\'t too worried that it would cancel because I had seen the flight history.</li>\r\n 	<li>Spread clothes across checked and unchecked luggage -- If you\'ve checked luggage, I assume it\'s for a good reason (e.g., carrying a bottles of wine home from a Napa trip, needing formal wear for a wedding) and that you also have a carry-on. Put two changes of clothes and a bare set of toiletries (e.g., toothbrush) in your carry-on. Most lost luggage will catch up to you within 24-36 hours. If you\'re traveling as a family, spread everyone\'s clothes out across all the bags rather than each person having their own bag. It would be rare for the airlines to lose all the bags of an entire party. With things spread across bags, everyone is good for a couple of days even if a bag is lost. I’m always amazed that more families don’t do this.</li>\r\n 	<li>Know your geography -- What are your alternative airports and how far of a drive are they? This has become even more important over the past few years as the big carriers have reduced flight frequency to fill up their planes. I once had a project in the middle of Connecticut that was just about equidistant between White Plains and Hartford airports. We always flew in/out of White Plains even though it was a smaller airport because, when flights delayed/cancelled, we could just keep driving down the Hutchinson to LaGuardia. When we flew out of Hartford, it was a much longer haul to the nearest airport.</li>\r\n 	<li>This last one might be a bit obscure, but it’s been useful to me. If your corporate car rental agency is Hertz, always book an intermediate car so you can use Gold Choice to quickly swap cars if Hertz assigns you a real beater. Now, you can always go back to the counter, stand in line, and demand a better, cleaner, less decrepit car, but we’re trying to avoid delays. Most corporate rates that I’ve used has at most a dollar or two difference between the compact and intermediate rate. It’s cheap insurance. I’ve used Gold Choice maybe 10-20% of the time, but I’m always glad to have that option.</li>\r\n 	<li>So there you go,. Five ways to travel smarter. If you have a suggestion, please send it in.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/atek-phoenix/\"><em>Goa Life</em></a> by Ambient Teknology</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Coping with Travel Delays</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>During my last CIO gig, I was traveling as much, if not more, than any of my consulting gigs. I kept my Chicago residence and rotated weekly across offices in Scottsdale, Dallas, Naples, FL and Croydon, south of London. The head of my project management team started doing a bit of travel to support some system migrations and after a couple of months of the usual flight delays and other travel snafus, he asked me, “How do you deal with this all the time?” “I depend on 3 major food groups,” I told him. “Alcohol, salt, and fat.”</li>\r\n 	<li>I remembered that as I was killing time in Dulles with a dinner of fish and chips and a local beer, Hop Lips IPA from Dover, DE. It rang the bell on all three.</li>\r\n 	<li>Doing that too much, though, is how you end up quietly asking for belt extenders, so you gotta find other ways of coping.</li>\r\n 	<li>One bad habit that I have is bitch tweeting. I’ve confessed to that in many prior episodes, and as much as I try to stop, I find it releases my frustrations -- kinda like shouting into a bag or something -- and keeps me from popping a cork at innocent gate agents. I apologize to all my Twitter followers who have to endure that. I have downloaded a meditation app for my iPhone, but it hasn’t seemed to help.</li>\r\n 	<li>A more constructive thing is that I try not to show up to the airport until I have to. If I get an early notice of a delay, I push back my cab to the airport. Part of the frustration is that delays consume time. I can be more productive in my office than trying to find a place to work at a crowded gate or airport club. When I was traveling regularly to New Orleans a few years back, it seemed that half the flights back to Chicago in the summer were delayed by afternoon thunderstorms. I wouldn’t leave for the airport until I saw the inbound equipment was in the air. I got a lot more work done, and ate much better food.</li>\r\n 	<li>The trend of airports upgrading their amenities helps a lot. I’ve never done the neck massage thing, but, back to the alcohol food group, I’ve done a few wine flights at the Vino Volo wine bars that are popping up in more US airports, and the beer flights at microbrewery bars like Great Lakes Brewery’s place in Cleveland, Cisco Brewers’ bar in Boston Logan or the Karl Strauss bar in LAX. It’s something local that keeps you occupied for a bit. And searching them out -- because they’re inevitably in a different concourse than you -- also kills time.</li>\r\n 	<li>In the end, though, it is what it is. If the delay isn’t causing you to miss something important, it’s easy to kick back and read the paper. If you’re missing your kid’s parent-teacher conference, there’s not much that’s going to help your frustration. Except maybe bitch tweeting...</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #123</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\">Magnatune</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_123.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #123 — How to Avoid Travel Delays','','inherit','closed','closed','','1644-revision-v1','','','2016-08-14 22:07:03','2016-08-15 03:07:03','',1644,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/08/14/1644-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1657,1,'2016-10-01 16:42:10','2016-10-01 21:42:10','[caption id=\"attachment_1573\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/DSC_4956.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1573\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/DSC_4956-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"This hotel door could use some work\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> This hotel door could use some work[/caption]\r\n\r\nA bit less of a random walk than the last episode, we talk about safety, physical safety, when traveling. While we sometimes put ourselves in the midst of dodgy surroundings, we usually feel safe when we retreat back into the \"travel bubble\" What about when the bubble is no longer safe? Smartphones are the frequent traveler\'s most important tool. So when an upgrade to my HTC One killed its usefulness, I found myself heading back to Apple.  All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_118.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_118.mp3\"]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #118:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, less than a month since the last episode. There’s a shocker. It’s been one of my lighter travel months. No international travel, no up-and-backs across the US. Indeed, there were a couple of weeks where I didn’t even pack a bag -- just did day trips to Detroit and Atlanta. There is something liberating about that -- just carrying a briefcase or backpack. I guess that would’ve been the ideal situation to check out Spirit Airlines, but I don’t hate myself that much.</li>\r\n 	<li>No rush to get to the gate for the start of boarding. Stroll up, sit down and then  stay seated while the agent works through the cadence of status boarding groups -- really important customers, kinda important customers, fake important customers, and then everyone else. No roller board meant no need for the boarding scrum. I just waited for last call and walked on board. Kinda reminded me of the days when I first started flying when, rather than racing to be first on the plane, we’d see who could be last -- how late you could show up and still get on the plane. My boss won when he talked his way past an agent, got onto the jet bridge, knocked on the plane door, which the crew opened and let him on. I don’t think I’ll push it quite that far.</li>\r\n 	<li>A few of this month’s trips have been in and out of Boston Logan Airport. And for as much stick as I give United Airlines -- broken planes, late flights, just general lousy service -- I have to give them credit for their <a href=\"http://newsroom.united.com/2014-04-28-New-United-Concourse-at-Boston-Logan-Offers-Customers-Modern-Streamlined-Airport-Experience\" target=\"_blank\">gate area</a> at Logan. Parts of it look like a hip hotel lounge -- cool hanging lights, non-bench seating. There’s stand-up/high-top counter space for laptops with lots of plugs. And even the self-serve boarding gates -- with modern subway-style turnstiles that scan your boarding pass before letting you in -- worked well. It’s probably one of the nicest gate areas I’ve been in in a long time. Nice job, United!</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Paint the Sky</em> by Hans Atom (c) 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/hansatom/50718 Ft: Miss Judged</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I got a good bit of commentary from the last episode, so thank everyone very much.</li>\r\n 	<li>Rob Cheshire posted this comment on the web site:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>“In defense of British Airways, you stepped into the middle of their new hand-luggage policy roll-out, which is designed to reign-in the amount of cabin baggage, which had really gotten out of hand. They are being strict across the board, on elite members, as well as everyone else, and it is definitely having a positive impact on bin-space, as well as minimising the amount of messing around (checking the last few wheelie bags that can’t be stowed) that the cabin crew have to take care of in the minutes prior to push-back.”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Rob, thanks for that. One thing I did like BA’s luggage approach was tagging the second bag meant to go underseat -- in my case, a backpack -- with a bright yellow tag to keep people from putting 2 bags overhead. There is not much that’s ruder in plane travel than early boarders -- status fliers -- maximizing their leg space at the expense of the rest the plane. Tagging that second bag makes it easy for flight attendants or later boarders to call out bin hogging. I’d love to see that move across the Atlantic.</li>\r\n 	<li>Andrew Gill left a comment on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page building on my thoughts about using the new Revolut debit card during my September trip to Scotland. Andrew said:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>“The piece of Revolut was interesting. I\'ve just spent six months living and working in The Philipines. I was lucky to be involved in the pilot of Supercard from <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/TravelexUK/?hc_location=ufi\">Travelex UK</a> (<a href=\"https://supercard.io/\">https://supercard.io/</a>). It\'s a physical card, complete with chip and pin, that can be used in retail stores and for online purchases too.</li>\r\n 	<li>“The card is free, and transactions are processed at the Visa Europe Exchange rate, with no foreign exchange fees or commission added on, but the *killer* feature is it\'s linked to an existing debit or credit card so there\'s no need to pre-load money onto the card. transactions are processed in my home currency, so again, there are no foreign exchange fees or commission added on</li>\r\n 	<li>“The pilot program has closed now, so fingers crossed, it comes out of pilot and into general release</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Andrew, thanks for that pointer. I agree that being able to link the Travelex Supercard back to a debit or credit card is very useful vs. the Revolut model which is more like a pre-paid debit card. Looking at the Supercard website, it looks like the pilot was only for UK card holders. Hopefully, they’ll be able to expand their geographic footprint when they fully launch the card. Interesting that Revolut is also a UK-based company. Seems like London is a hotspot for these fintech companies. Last week, I was talking to a guy who moved from London to Chicago to start up the US operations for a different London-based fintech company -- more based on lending than payments. He said that HSBC looked hard at buying Revolut because they were doing something HSBC couldn’t even given their global reach and scale. Between Revolut and Supercard, and big banks like Chase dropping foreign exchange fees on their credit cards, the money hassles of international travel keep going down. It’s a far cry from having to cash an American Express travelers check at the airport exchange desk so you could get a cab to your hotel.</li>\r\n 	<li>In an<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/01/29/podcast-107-serious-about-hotel-reviews-tsa-gets-something-right/\"> earlier episode</a>, I talked about evaluation criteria for my TripAdvisor reviews -- the bathroom, room size, workout room, location, service quality. I decided during one of my trips last month that I’m adding a new criterion -- accessible bedside electrical outlets. Most frequent travelers I know use their phone or tablet as an alarm, eliminating the need to discern operating instructions for each hotel’s unique brand of clock radio. Most hotels have figured this out and provide outlets on the nightstand -- in wall, along the side of the nightstand, on the lamp base…. But last month, I hit one of those knuckle draggers -- a hotel in Vegas. I practically had to disassemble one of the beds to find an outlet hidden behind it. Luckily, I carry long power cords.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Perfect Stranger</em> by stellarartwars (c) 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/stellarartwars/45510 Ft: TheDice</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Danger Within The Travel Bubble</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>In the last episode, I talked about attending the <a href=\"http://popeindc.cua.edu/the-papal-mass/\" target=\"_blank\">Papal Mass</a> at <a href=\"http://www.cua.edu/\" target=\"_blank\">Catholic University</a> in northeast DC which has never been one of the nicer sections of DC. I had taken the Metro up from the airport and would be getting back on it to catch my evening flight to Detroit. The Brookland stop at Catholic isn’t a big stop and I figured it would get overwhelmed at the end of the Mass by the 25,000 people there. I started thinking of alternatives. Getting a cab or an Uber would probably be just as tough, so my best alternative would be to walk down to the next stop south on the Red Line -- Rhode Island Ave. From my days in DC, I remember that neighborhood being a particularly rough one. That would not be a pleasant walk. I decided to skip Communion and leave the Pope early to beat the crowds at the Brookland stop.</li>\r\n 	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Most of the times when we talk about travel security, we talk about airport security or digital security, but not often about physical security. Yet very often, travel drops in unfamiliar settings -- usually by our own choice -- where we could unknowingly wander into a very unsafe situation</span></li>\r\n 	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I did exactly this some years ago when visiting Cape Town, South Africa. I was shopping through some craft stalls set up in a park and just kept wandering along. I kinda looking at the buildings, up and around… Oh, and I have my big Nikon SLR slung over my shoulder. Not sure I could’ve looked any more like a tourist unless I was wearing a big “Don’t Mess With Texas” t-shirt and a Dallas Cowboys baseball cap. At some point, I finally regain some situational awareness -- and, from my university years living in Northeast DC and on the Southside of Chicago, realize that I’m not in the best neighborhood right now. I move to the middle of the street -- so I don’t get jumped from a doorway -- and walk, with purpose now, back the way I came.</span></li>\r\n 	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I did a little better this spring in New Orleans. I was standing on St Charles St in the Garden District watching a Mardi Gras parade. After a while, I got a bad feeling about the atmosphere around me. Nothing that I could put my finger on, but enough to make me give up a prime spot on the parade round and walk up the street a bit. In the next morning’s paper, I read there had been a gun fight at that spot about 30 minutes after I’d left.</span></li>\r\n 	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">There have been other times in Joburg, Bangalore, Guadalajara, but considering how much I travel, they’re rare events -- I’ve wandered all through Madrid, Beijing, Tokyo, Edinburgh, Saigon and never felt unsafe -- but they get your attention. But then again, that’s outside the “travel bubble”. We’ve talked about that in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2008/04/29/podcast-64-escaping-the-travel-bubble-marks-travel-tips/\" target=\"_blank\">past episodes</a>, how travelers can often seem to float above the places they visit unless they make the effort to “pop” the travel bubble and engage.</span></li>\r\n 	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">When those outside problems penetrate our bubble, now that’s more disturbing. Like the time some years back when I was visiting Rio -- years before the World Cup. I was checking in with a colleague who had done a lot of business there. He saw my room was on the second floor. “No, that won’t do,” he said, “we need to get you on a double-digit floor. At least 10 if not higher” “Why?” I asked. “Because,” he explained, “when the smash-and-grab gangs break in, they start on the first floor and work their way up until their bags are full. The higher you are, the more likely they’ll fill up before they get to you.” The logic was brutally impeccable. And this from a guy still sporting a couple of bruises from an earlier mugging on Copacabana Beach.</span></li>\r\n 	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Or a few years ago, when another colleague had to take a taxi to connect between Delhi’s domestic and international terminal -- before the latest renovation. He’d forgotten to print out his international itinerary, so they wouldn’t let him on the transfer bus (I’ve talked about, in prior episodes, the need to have a printed flight itinerary in India). He couldn’t find anyone in the terminal to print one out for him so he walked out to the cab rank. He piles his bags into and on top of a taxi and off he goes -- to some out-of-the-way place under a highway overpass where the cab driver and a friend shake him down for most of his money and his watch -- they leave him with his luggage and enough money for cab fare to the international terminal. A polite mugging; no bruises with this one.</span></li>\r\n 	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">My most disturbing bubble burst happened in the US -- in a Westin in Connecticut. A friend checked in and, since the hotel was oversold, was given one of those rooms that’s a conference room with a bathroom. They rolled out the tables and rolled in a bed for him. The next morning, as he’s getting dressed, he’s missing his watch, his ring, and the money and credit cards from his wallet -- all which were next to him on the nightstand. As he put it together, someone had broken into the room -- he saw that the conference room’s double doors had enough of a gap between them that you could open the lock by slipping a credit card or room key through the gap -- and they had stood next to him going through his stuff on the night stand. He’s lucky he’s a sound sleeper.</span></li>\r\n 	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">And I consider myself lucky. I don’t lock myself away in the hotel. I make an effort to step outside the travel bubble -- to engage -- and after 30 years of heavy travel, other than <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/05/20/podcast-98-stolen-luggage-restaurants-want-your-smartphone/\">having my camera and passport stolen</a>, I’m really no worse the wear. Certainly no bruises to show for it. I’m not sure I’d do it any other way. Though I do pay more attention to hotel door construction than I used to.</span></li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Foolish Game</em> by copperhead (c) 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/copperhead/46390 Ft: Snowflake,Sackjo22</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Switching Back to Apple</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>After your government ID, the smartphone is probably the most important thing you travel with. And while I quickly whip out my ID a few times a trip to prove my identity  -- to the TSA agent, to hotel clerks, to car rental check out folks, I use my smartphone constantly -- maybe too constantly. Be that as it may, the smartphone is <i>the</i> critical tool for today’s frequent traveler. A carpenter has his framing hammer, the auto mechanic his Snap-On wrench -- for the road warrior, it’s the smart phone.</li>\r\n 	<li>And so it wasn’t without a good bit of thought that I bit the bullet a few weeks ago and switched back to Apple; dumping my HTC One for a new iPhone 6S. I wasn’t thrilled to do it; I put it off for at least a month. And in the end, it was more a frustration with hardware -- with the slouching-toward-bankruptcy mess that HTC has become than it was excitement for the latest iThing.</li>\r\n 	<li>Which I guess is the pattern for me. My first smartphone was an iPhone 3G and I’d had just about every iPhone model up to the 5. And it was the frustration with its truly horrid battery life that led me to the HTC. The cause this time was the lousy performance of my HTC One after they pushed their Android upgrade -- “Lollipop” -- at the beginning of this year. It just trashed the phone -- the lag was awful. The hardware components have the specs to handle the new version; it’s just that HTC’s implementation of it is crap. Now, it’s not like Apple nails their OS upgrades every time. The IOS 8 release didn’t exactly cover them in glory. But at least they worked to resolve the problem by iterating through releases in a fairly timely manner. After the initial “Lollipop” release, Google iterated through updates  -- I think ver 5.1.1 is the most recent -- and I’m waited for HTC to use that as an opportunity to clean up their 5.0 mess. They would say on Twitter “It’s coming, just wait”, And then “Oh, we’ll just skip 5.1 and give you 6.0 by the end of the year”. That was it. I’d suffered through 6 months of lousy performance and now they were saying I would have at least 3 more -- not that I have any reason to think that the near-bankrupt company has gotten any better at software estimating.</li>\r\n 	<li>I don’t think that either Apple’s or Google’s operating systems are inherently better than the other. I’ve used them both. They both work. There are things I like about each of them, and since they seem to be stealing/emulating (?) each other’s best features, they’re more or less converging on each other.</li>\r\n 	<li>For me, the difference is the hardware -- which is what is actually in our hands each day. I’ve always thought Apple is a better hardware company than a software one. I loved my MacBook Air, but was very “meh” about OS X. It’s really the Android equipment manufacturers that are pushing me away. It seems that most of the Android hardware innovation is at the large end -- large screen sizes -- 5 ½ inches and up -- which is way bigger than what want. And then there are the delays in Android upgrades as each manufacturer gooses Google’s release -- my 18-month old Samsung tablet is still on version 4.4 “Kit Kat”, now two version levels down, with no update in sight, let alone any security patches. With mobile devices becoming more vital, that foot dragging on upgrades and security patching very uncomfortable.</li>\r\n 	<li>I was holding out for Google’s updated Nexus line, reading all rumor articles with spec leaks and blurred pictures. The 6P was too big for me, but the 5X -- I could do a 5.2-in screen with fast updates and patches. But then, when they unveiled the 5X, it topped it out at 32 GB with no expansion slots. For me, that is just too tight for my music, podcasts, pictures, video. So that’s it, I walked into the Apple store and bought a 64GB unlocked GSM 6S on their new upgrade plan -- new phone comes out, I trade mine in. It’s like leasing a car -- some people like the newest model. It’s all about the hardware.</li>\r\n 	<li>Now if I can just keep iTunes from crashing on my Windows 10 box...</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #118</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/\">Podshow Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_118.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #118 — Danger In the Travel Bubble; Switching Back to Apple','','inherit','closed','closed','','1561-revision-v1','','','2016-10-01 16:42:10','2016-10-01 21:42:10','',1561,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/10/01/1561-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1658,1,'2016-09-28 22:03:15','2016-09-29 03:03:15','[caption id=\"attachment_1660\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/5777D166-DB5F-4FAF-A0D5-84AC87F58834.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1660\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/5777D166-DB5F-4FAF-A0D5-84AC87F58834-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Empty Beer Glasses\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> I Think We\'ve Bagged Our Limit[/caption]\n\nMy son joins the podcast to talk about hunting down craft beers. I then talk about a few \"a-ha\" moments from my recent trip to Scotland, my on-going struggles with bitch tweeting, a VPN hardware product that could come in handy, and why I\'ve come to hate the Rick Steves travel juggernaut. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_124.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #124:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you from the Sheraton Hotel and Conference Center in Framingham, MA. Just back from 10 mostly beautiful sunny days in Scotland. Flew United to Edinburgh via Newark on the the way out, but on the way back, paid an extra $200 for the luxury of skipping the Immigration lines there. Given my weekly experiences in Newark’s Terminal A at the beginning of this year, I can only imagine the Immigration hall as being a mash-up of the dungeons from all the Saw movies done in that frighteningly absurd sort of way that only the TSA can pull off. Think the LAX security lines without laid-back people, with that Jersey edge. Even with the Global Entry line cut, that was not the final memory I wanted from what had been a nice trip.</li>\n 	<li>My wife and I kinda ran the same play we did last year when we dropped our daughter off at University of St Andrews. Grabbed a car -- Hertz gave us a new Nissan X-Terra -- nice car, enough space for the bags my daughter brought over with her, but would be a lumbering beast among Fiat 500s later in the week when driving some of the single lane roads in the Highlands. I like to think I’m getting better at driving in the UK -- driving on the left and shifting with my left hand. No curb bumping or wide left-hand turns this time coming out of the airport. Stopped off at the mall 5 min from the airport for a Starbucks coffee and a couple of EE SIM cards -- £15 for 2GB of data, unlimited texts and, I dunno, 500 voice minutes, which for a week, is pretty much unlimited -- $20 at the current post-Brexit bargain basement exchange rate.</li>\n 	<li>After lunch and unloading our daughter, my wife and I drove up the coast for a few days of walking -- not hiking with packs and crampons, but trail walking. We stayed the weekend in Aberdeen because… we’d never been there before. It was a nice town. Went out to the Brewdog brewery for a tour and a couple of beers and then out walking it off along a North Sea trail. We also spent time in Cairngorms National Park on Balmoral getting blown out of our jackets by gale force winds while looking for the Queen in her Range Rover, and then straight up north to the coast -- through Banff, Portsoy, and Cullen for a bit more coastal trail walking. And then back down to St Andrews for the last couple of days doing the typical stuff parents do when they visit their kid at college -- take them out to nice restaurants, buy them groceries, and in our case, say good-bye until Christmas break.</li>\n 	<li>Flying out of Edinburgh airport on Saturday morning was surprisingly not a hassle. It’s not a huge airport -- mostly seems to be mostly budget airlines -- Ryanair, easyJet -- but United and American fly a couple of 757s in, and I saw an Etihad 787 -- jealous. The ticketing/check-in area is a bit of a cluster; gives a bad first impression. But once you get up the escalator and headed toward security, it’s much nicer -- a low hassle pass through security, and good shops and restaurants.</li>\n 	<li>It always strikes me how much more automated some of the European airports have become. At Edinburgh, there’s no security person checking your ticket before security. Instead, there’s a gate and a bar code reader. You scan your boarding pass. If it’s valid, the gate drops and you walk through. There are security people watching for gate jumpers and tailgaters, but there’s about a half-dozen automated gates, so there was no queue. And then at the X-ray machines, no TSA-like person bringing tubs to the front of the line. Instead, a person points you to one of 5 loading stations, a conveyor system spits out a bin, you load it up, and push it onto the belt that feeds the X-ray machine. Again, less waiting because, instead of a single person loading their tub and putting stuff on the belt, you have 5 people in parallel. If one person is slow, it doesn’t hold up the line. Not quite sure why the TSA, with all its budget and management staff, can’t just copy this.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/48114\">Velvet Green of Mystery (Instrumental)</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Kthugha, Jeris, Martijn de Boer</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Not to turn this into a complete Caledonian podcast, but I did have a few a-ha moments from this trip -\n<ul>\n 	<li>The spread of contactless card readers at stores in the UK has spread the acceptance of Apple and Android Pay, which makes not having a chip-&amp;-pin card much less painful (remember, the US cards are chip-&amp;-signature because, I guess, we can’t be trusted to remember 2 4-digit codes). It used to be painful -- or perhaps just embarrassing -- to wait for the Tesco self-service attendant to look at me a bit confused as she gave me a receipt to be signed. Now it’s even faster than a chip-&amp;-pin card -- tap my phone on the card reader, beep, and I’m done. Now they need to replace the little mobile card readers that restaurants use...</li>\n 	<li>It’s really tough to find a good cup of brewed black coffee in Europe. Now call me a red-necked Midwesterner, but there are times that I don’t want foamed milk, I don’t want a just a swig of coffee, and I certainly don’t want that swig of coffee -- espresso -- diluted with hot water, I just want a cup of black coffee -- filter coffee as I’ve learned. Impossible to find in Spain and Portugal and many places in the UK, except at Starbucks. There have been many European mornings after a late night that I thanked God (and Howard Schultz) for their aggressive international expansion. So I was surprised and thrilled (ecstatic, really) to find an actual Portlandia-like coffee pourover place, complete with Chemexes and Hario kettles, in Aberdeen on Saturday morning. Foodstory Cafe. I found it by Googling “Hipster Aberdeen”. Yes, really. Sounds silly/absurd but it works. I’ve used that search term in many cities and more times than not been happy with the results.</li>\n 	<li>Our hotel in Aberdeen was nice, except for one thing. The tub had one of those little half wall tub screens instead of a shower curtain. There should be a YouTube video on how to shower in those, because everytime I try, I hose down the sink and everything on it. Perhaps I’m too large. Why this instead of a shower curtain?</li>\n 	<li>Sitting in a restaurant our last night in St Andrews, our waitress -- very nice person, very good service -- had just a hint of an Eastern European accent. I wanted to ask her where she’s from, but in post-Brexit Britain, it felt rude to ask that. Now that’s not a snarky comment about the results of the vote -- the tough thing about democracy is that everyone\'s vote counts and needs to be respected, not just the people who agree with us. But you can feel a change -- just a bit...</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Back in the US, I continue to struggle with my tendency to bitch tweet. On one flight, I was able to hold back during a 20 min wait for a gate on United, though I did provide “frank” feedback on the customer service survey they sent me a couple of days later. But the next week, on my third straight delayed United flight, I just couldn’t control myself. I understood when we had to return to the gate to manually start the remaining engine -- jets often taxi out using just one engine in order to save fuel, which makes perfect sense. United did a good job of finding us a gate -- not easy at ORD -- and was pretty quick with the maintenance crew. Where I lost it, though, was when it took longer to download the updated data to the plane computer than the whole return to the gate and manually start the engine bit. To the pilot’s credit, he did a good job of explaining the situation and the status, and didn’t hide in the cabin when we were de-planing.</li>\n 	<li>Marc Loehrwald, a long-time listener, sent me a note asking “Would you consider this gentlemen solving his problems with Verizon over speakerphone in the otherwise quite empty and peaceful Lounge at JFK worth bitch tweeting…?” accompanied by a picture of a guy sitting alone among couple of dozen chairs. Bitch subtweeting! I should’ve done that to the guy behind me who had his feet up on the back of my seat the entire flight from BWI to ORD. Not a kid, a guy in his mid-50’s!. Marc, you’ve taken my bitch tweeting to a whole new level!</li>\n 	<li>Over the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/12/20/podcast-119-digital-security-on-the-road-us-airports-getting-better/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">past </a>few episodes, we’ve been talking about VPNs -- virtual private networks -- as a way to improve your security when you travel. VPNs encrypt your network traffic -- always a good thing over public and hotel WiFi -- and will also “tunnel” your traffic through the Internet, making it look like you’re accessing the Internet from the VPN end-point. For corporate users, this makes you look like you’re accessing the Internet from your office, allowing you to use systems inside your corporate firewall. For many international travelers, it gives you a way to watch, say, TV shows that are licensed to Netflix in the US but not in other countries. All the VPN products I’ve used have been software-based -- my company uses a Cisco VPN, while on my last trip to China, I used ExpressVPN to tunnel under the Great Firewall and post pictures to Facebook. A company called Homing Systems used Kickstarter to launch a hardware-based VPN product called AlwaysHome. They sent me a sample to try out. It’s a pair of USB dongles. You connect one to your home router -- I have it plugged into my Uverse box. I plugged the second one into the BT router in my daughter’s flat in St Andrews. She fired up her Netflix account and was able to continue her “Criminal Minds” binge, a show not on UK Netflix, without a problem. In earlier testing, I found AlwaysHome was a bit more fiddly when it needed to connect first through a password portal -- the typical set up at a hotel. It would connect, but took a bit more work. When the connection nailed up, though, the performance was solid. <a href=\"http://www.homingsystems.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Homing Systems</a>’ web site calls it “Space Shifting”. I think that’s the right positioning. I think it’s quicker to fire up a software VPN client for a quick session at Starbucks. The AlwaysHome dongle setup seems more suited for a more sustained session. Check out the show notes for links to Homing Systems.</li>\n 	<li><em>Homing Systems sent me a AlwaysHome Duo free of charge for me to review. I was not paid for this review. The opinions expressed in this episode are my own. </em></li>\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/spinmeister/53428\">Somewhere</a> by spinmeister (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license. Ft: DJ Vadim</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Craft Beer Hunting</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>My son and I hang out in his apartment in Chicago\'s Lake View neighborhood and talk about finding good beer in out-of-the-way places</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/48915\">Like Music (cdk Mix)</a> by cdk (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/\">Attribution Share-Alike (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Phasenwandler</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>I Hate Rick Steves</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Not personally, of course. I’m sure he’s a nice guy who doesn’t kick dogs. I guess to be more precise, I hate what he’s done to some of my vacations.</li>\n 	<li>Portugal is the most recent example. Preparing for our trip, my wife read a number of Lisbon travel guides, include Rick Steves. Rick advises his Lisbon travelers to do the day trip out to Sintra, the castle-filled UNESCO World Heritage Site, on Mondays when all the Lisbon museums are closed. So Monday morning, we get up early, go across the street for our standard breakfast of coffee and pastel de nata (egg custard tarts to die for), and hit the train. Standing room only. We get off the train in Sintra. All we see are older Americans with sensible haircuts, plastic rimmed glasses, and hiking shoes. It’s like we walking through an NPR listener convention in Ann Arbor, MI. And they’re all wearing their backpacks swung around in front to protect themselves from pickpockets and thieves. Except no local could penetrate the phalanx of blue book-wielding Steve-heads. Lucky for us, most of them followed Rick’s advice to catch the bus to the top of the hill. We decided we needed to work off that egg custard, and so broke away from the blue book brigade and walked up the road.</li>\n 	<li>I don’t begrudge Rick Steves his success -- good for him; he seems to have worked hard for it. But his motto -- “Europe through the back door” -- can’t really apply anymore when he has millions of readers trying to walk through it. The same thing happened to Lonely Planet. What was once the hip, backpacker’s guide to cool spots now leads people to mainstream tourism spots just by its recommendations because it’s Amazon’s best selling travel guide series.</li>\n 	<li>I think we successfully avoided the Steve-o’s on this trip to Scotland. Aberdeen and the Northeast Highlands are nowhere to be found in Rick Steves’ Scotland, and I can’t say that I heard too many North American accents during that part of our trip -- save for the one day we drove down to Dunnottar Castle, but that’s got to be one of the main tourist draws in that part of Scotland. I heard almost as much German as I did American twang.</li>\n 	<li>I’ve tended, more and more, to use local Google searches rather than guide books. Google often surfaces more local content, and limiting the results to the past year makes sure it’s current. But even this might not be “back door” enough. The barista in the Aberdeen coffee shop that I found through my “Hipster Aberdeen” Google search did mention seeing a surprising number of Americans recently. I wonder if my “Hipster” search strategy has gone mainstream.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #124</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/\">ccMixter</a></li>\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_124.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #124 — Craft Beer Hunting; I Hate Rick Steves','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-124-craft-beer-hunting-i-hate-rick-steves','','','2021-09-29 08:13:37','2021-09-29 13:13:37','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=1658',0,'post','',2),
(1659,1,'2016-10-01 17:06:36','2016-10-01 22:06:36','[caption id=\"attachment_1654\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/IMG_0725.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1654\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/IMG_0725-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Earning Status at Camp O\'Hare\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Earning Status at Camp O\'Hare[/caption]\r\n\r\nIt\'s been a tough travel month for a large portion of the traveling public. Between Delta and Southwest system outages and two straight Thursdays of thunderstorms in the east half of the US, dealing with travel delays has been a part of this month\'s travel experience. In this episode, we think about ways to avoid delays, or at least minimize their impact. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_123.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/285624579\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #123:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>This episode is sponsored by HMSHost, operating the restaurants and bars in the 20 busiest airports in the US, thanking the IT staffs at Southwest and Delta for helping us hit our Q3 revenue numbers. Please use the promo code: KICKOUTTHEPLUG on our website for a 20% thank you card good at any airport.</li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, at the back end of what’s been kind of a tough couple of weeks of travel. On the surface, it shouldn’t have been. I wasn’t going anywhere particularly exotic -- still back and forth to Charlottesville, as well as a quick West Coast loop to Vegas and Irvine, CA. Things actually started going sideways on the Vegas to Orange County flight. This should’ve been a quick hour hop. But then Southwest’s systems tipped over and things kinda just spiraled down from there, even in Vegas. After a while, I got tired of playing the slots; the payout in the airport is lousy anyways. And the beer selection is not the greatest. I got jealous watching the Virgin America flights take off, but at least I wasn’t one of the folks sitting on the tarmac in 110 degree weather waiting for gates to clear. I think my flight ended up taking something like a 4-hour delay. I was just glad my schedule wasn’t tight; that I didn’t have a critical meeting booked that afternoon.</li>\r\n 	<li>The next day, Thursday, I was flying American back to O’Hare and started to get delay notices. I popped open my flight tracking apps -- <a href=\"https://flightaware.com/\" target=\"_blank\">FlightAware</a> and <a href=\"http://www.flightstats.com/go/Home/home.do\" target=\"_blank\">FlightStats</a> and could see the problem -- an ugly line of red on the weather map running through Chicago. Being on the west side of that meant things weren’t too bad for me though. Once the thunderstorm line cleared O’Hare, the first planes they launched were heading west -- away from the storm line. I took an hour delay. Back in the office on Friday, people flying back from the East Coast were getting in at 2 or 3 in the morning, if they got out at all. I definitely dodged a bullet.</li>\r\n 	<li>Which found its target the next Thursday. I was back in Charlottesville and the delay notices started at 2pm for a 6:30pm flight. That’s not a good sign. Back to FlightAware and FlightStats. It was a replay of the prior Thursday, except this time I was right in the midst of it. Caught up in ORD ground stops, the equipment for my Charlottesville flight couldn’t get out east and eventually cancelled. I drove 2 hours up DC to catch the last flight out of Dulles which by that time was having its own ground stops. The Frontier flight that was supposed to leave at 9:30 finally pushed back at 1:10am. It was my turn to stagger home at 2:30am</li>\r\n 	<li>At first, I thought I wouldn’t fly at all this week, but then I got roped into a Tuesday morning meeting in Atlanta. Not so bad I thought -- fly down Monday night, fly back Tuesday afternoon. But then I woke up Monday morning to the news that Delta’s systems had tipped over. Another bullet dodged. I was booked on American going down and United coming back. And both those flights left on time and arrived early.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/swivel-deep/\"><em>Arlos Auto Parts and Salvation</em></a> by Swivel Neck Jones</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>So, my wish from the last episode was not granted. My Global Entry renewal was “conditionally approved” but I still have to go in for an interview. They do look busy though. I had to look 3 months out for the first availability in ORD -- I got my notice in July and my appointment is in mid-October. I hope they don’t listen to this podcast or follow me on Twitter.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’ve been thru Dulles twice since the last episode. I mentioned my second visit a couple of minutes ago, catching a Frontier flight out of the Z concourse gates. I had never seen any Z gates before in Dulles -- and for a good reason. They’re about a half-dozen gates stuffed in a dark hallway at the east end of terminal; the typical “slum concourse” inhabited by budget carriers. On the earlier visit, I was making a connection on United between the two midfield concourses with involved a ride on the old mobile lounges. Now, if you know the history of Dulles airport, you know that these mobile lounges were supposed to be the future of airport design, replacing the fixed gate and concourse structure with mobile gate lounges that would shuttle you out to your plane parked on the tarmac and then raise you up to the door. Not really all that different from what happens in a lot of European airports, but without the hydraulic fun ride at the end. I tweeted a picture of the lounge -- really more like a high-clearance bus --which elicited a response from Matt McCurdy with a link to a 1958 video “The Expanding Airport: A Study of Service and Convenience for Washington International” hosted on Vimeo. From the credits, it looks like it was created for the firm that designed Dulles. It’s a 9½-minute video and an absolute must-see; the disconnect between what people thought the future of travel would be and the reality almost 60 years later. Just the contrast between how the architects thought the mobile lounges would look -- couches with coffee tables and flower vases with cocktail service, and everyone in suits and dresses -- vs. my Twitter picture of people in shorts, t-shirts, and backpacks crammed in, hanging onto poles and straps -- is something. Check out the shownotes for <a href=\"https://vimeo.com/4139559\" target=\"_blank\">Matt’s link to the video</a>. The mobile lounges are slowly being replaced by the new underground light rail system between the main terminal and the midfield concourses. Maybe as fewer people take them, they’ll be able to replace the poles with some nice chintz couches.</li>\r\n 	<li>Last month, a PR agency for Marriott invited me to a launch that was being held at the Windy City Smokeout BBQ event in Chicago. Never one to turn down free BBQ, especially on a Friday afternoon, I went. They were launching a new partnership between their TownePlace Suites brand and Weber grills, where they’re putting Weber gas grills and tools out in the common areas for use by guests. Kinda makes sense for an all-suite hotel -- families not looking to eat out every night fire up some burgers on the grill -- especially when the TownePlace folks explained that they’re targeting the mid-tier price range. It was kinda entertaining to see the young country pop tarts try to grill pizzas (and, by the way, I apply the pop tart label to both the male and female teams), but I was more interested in understanding how Marriott was positioning their suite brands -- how did TownePlace (which I’d never heard of) relate to Residence Inn and SpringHill Suites? The PR folks introduced me to a couple of brand guys who tried to lay it out for me -- TownePlace is lower priced but a bit hipper than Residence Inns, but not edgy like Moxy, their new brand targeted at Millennials. And SpringHill never made it into the discussion. I don’t know how well these micro-targets work in the reality of, say, an Orlando or a Houston. Are you really able to hit those target audiences or is it just another brand to sell to a new franchisee so the guy running the combo Courtyard-Residence Inn property a couple miles down the road doesn’t sue you? I dunno, but I got to wonder if these TownePlace properties with the new Webers are also going to provide shuttle service to the nearest Whole Foods?</li>\r\n 	<li>A colleague went to Defcon in Las Vegas last weekend. There’s always interesting stuff coming out of there; always enough to nurture any seed of paranoia you may have lurking in your id. It also makes me a bit more sympathetic to the corporate IT security guys trying to keep up with this stuff. “Video jacking” was the buzzed-about thing this year to keep frequent travelers on the watchout. The attack uses a smartphone’s ability to duplicate video out the micro USB or Lightning port to an HDMI TV. Nice if you want to watch videos from your phone or tablet on your larger hotel TV. A little less nice if you plug your phone into what you think is a charging station. But using these HDMI/Mobile High Definition Link cables which look very similar to straight power cables, your phone screen is duplicated on a TV screen perhaps with a person or video camera watching as you enter your PIN, work your banking apps, pull up that hidden text file with all your passwords written down. Krebs On Security has a <a href=\"http://krebsonsecurity.com/2016/08/road-warriors-beware-of-video-jacking/\" target=\"_blank\">good write-up</a> on it, complete with a quick demo video. I’ll put a link in the show notes.</li>\r\n 	<li>We’ve talked before about how full planes and tight seats are breaking down some of the courtesies necessary to survive sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with complete strangers for 2-4 hours straight. Usually it’s not a problem; everyone gets along to go along. On one of my United flights last month, though, this broke down slightly. It started at boarding. I get to my row. There’s a guy already in the middle seat. I tell him I’m in the window. He asks my seat number. Hmmm, little odd, but I tell him, confirming that, yes I can read my boarding pass and that he’s going to have to move out to let me in. He’s a 1K who seems a bit pissed that he’s in a center seat. Perhaps he was hoping to slide over to the window, but if that’s the case, he missed the announcements asking for volunteers. This plane was packed. About 45 minutes into the flight, he looks over at me, exasperated, and says “Fine, if you want the armrest, just take it!” and then bitched about how miserable the middle seat is. Huh? I told him, “We can share it,” I said. “There’s no sharing,” he shot back. “I dunno, I can usually manage that when I’m in the middle.” He looked at me like he wanted to hit me and then thought the better of it. The remaining 2 ½ hours was less-than-comfortable as we sat within inches of each other. You may disagree, but I’m not in with this whole “the middle seat is so miserable that you’re entitled to everything else in the row” idea. I’ve sat in the middle seat a lot and don’t think it’s that bad if you’re in an exit row or, as in this case, in United’s Economy Plus where you have extra legroom. Indeed, I’ll pick those middle seats over a window seat in the back of the plane almost every time. And when I do, I don’t expect any special treatment from my row mates. I manage to arrange my elbows so we all can use the armrests -- one of us take the front half, the other the back half. But most of all, I don’t blame my row mates for my seat choice.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/fuzz-messy/\"><em>Smiling Perspective</em></a> by General Fuzz</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Can We Avoid Travel Delays?</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Peter Rukavina, a long-time T/C listener, sent me an interesting e-mail at the front part of this week\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>The tweet-stream of travel despair is a frequent enough occurrence as to almost be its own medium now (\"@aircanada announces 9 hour delay; help!\" etc.). I\'m an occasional practitioner myself. My question: to what extent can delays, cancellations, luggage loss, bumping, etc. be mitigated by being travel-savvy? In other words, by traveling smart, how much more control over wrenches thrown into plans do you have?</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>A pretty damned good question, especially given the tales of woe over the past month that I went through at the start of this episode which, I’ll admit, were accompanied by a couple of streams of bitch tweets. We\'ll never completely avoid travel despair -- complete system failures ought to be “black swan” events, though having 3 full outages (United, Southwest, and Delta) in 13 months suggests maybe they’re not, and flying into smaller places like Charlottesville, VA leave you with few options. But I do think there are things we can do -- the consultant in me want to call them “strategies” -- that can reduce the probability of a bad time and hopefully reduce the impact when they happen. I’ve talked about some “strategies” in earlier podcasts -- focus trips to earn airline and hotel status, don’t check luggage, fly direct, if you have to connect never book a connection less than 90 minutes -- and you’ll find most of these in travel listacles that pop up around the holidays. Knowing that Peter, as a long-time listener, has heard these before, I tried to think about some next-level “strategies”. Here are the ones that came to mind. Not an exhaustive list, but I think a decent start...</li>\r\n 	<li>First, avoid flying in the evenings -- Now I break this rule all the time, but think about it. Delays build during the day -- from weather, congestion, mechanicals, psychotic passengers -- because the airlines don\'t build their schedules with enough slack to allow recovery. By 4 or 5pm, the sum of these delays combines with the packed evening \"rush hour\" schedule to drive a high probability of delays. American and United’s LGA-ORD evening schedules are this in spades. Throw in a summer thunderstorm in ORD or DFW or ATL and flight ops centers start cancelling flights to catch up. If you’re on the last flight out, you can be looking at a night on the comfy-looking airport couch. Even without cancellations, delays lead to tight connections which can lead to missed luggage.</li>\r\n 	<li>Use flight-tracking smart phone apps -- I use apps like FlightAware to access more data than the typical gate agent can. On the Thursday that I ended up in DC, as the delay notices started coming in from American,, FlightAware showed me that my plane was on the ground in Wichita, KS, probably waiting out an ORD ground stop from thunderstorms. It still had to get to Chicago and then out to Charlottesville. Seeing parallel lines of red on the radar view, I had a pretty good sense that it wasn\'t going to happen. When I decided to head up to Dulles for the Frontier flight, I could see the flight history on FlightAware; it delayed more often than not, but rarely cancelled. That night, as ORD and IAD ground stops kept pushing the departure time, I wasn\'t too worried that it would cancel because I had seen the flight history.</li>\r\n 	<li>Spread clothes across checked and unchecked luggage -- If you\'ve checked luggage, I assume it\'s for a good reason (e.g., carrying a bottles of wine home from a Napa trip, needing formal wear for a wedding) and that you also have a carry-on. Put two changes of clothes and a bare set of toiletries (e.g., toothbrush) in your carry-on. Most lost luggage will catch up to you within 24-36 hours. If you\'re traveling as a family, spread everyone\'s clothes out across all the bags rather than each person having their own bag. It would be rare for the airlines to lose all the bags of an entire party. With things spread across bags, everyone is good for a couple of days even if a bag is lost. I’m always amazed that more families don’t do this.</li>\r\n 	<li>Know your geography -- What are your alternative airports and how far of a drive are they? This has become even more important over the past few years as the big carriers have reduced flight frequency to fill up their planes. I once had a project in the middle of Connecticut that was just about equidistant between White Plains and Hartford airports. We always flew in/out of White Plains even though it was a smaller airport because, when flights delayed/cancelled, we could just keep driving down the Hutchinson to LaGuardia. When we flew out of Hartford, it was a much longer haul to the nearest airport.</li>\r\n 	<li>This last one might be a bit obscure, but it’s been useful to me. If your corporate car rental agency is Hertz, always book an intermediate car so you can use Gold Choice to quickly swap cars if Hertz assigns you a real beater. Now, you can always go back to the counter, stand in line, and demand a better, cleaner, less decrepit car, but we’re trying to avoid delays. Most corporate rates that I’ve used has at most a dollar or two difference between the compact and intermediate rate. It’s cheap insurance. I’ve used Gold Choice maybe 10-20% of the time, but I’m always glad to have that option.</li>\r\n 	<li>So there you go,. Five ways to travel smarter. If you have a suggestion, please send it in.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/atek-phoenix/\"><em>Goa Life</em></a> by Ambient Teknology</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Coping with Travel Delays</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>During my last CIO gig, I was traveling as much, if not more, than any of my consulting gigs. I kept my Chicago residence and rotated weekly across offices in Scottsdale, Dallas, Naples, FL and Croydon, south of London. The head of my project management team started doing a bit of travel to support some system migrations and after a couple of months of the usual flight delays and other travel snafus, he asked me, “How do you deal with this all the time?” “I depend on 3 major food groups,” I told him. “Alcohol, salt, and fat.”</li>\r\n 	<li>I remembered that as I was killing time in Dulles with a dinner of fish and chips and a local beer, Hop Lips IPA from Dover, DE. It rang the bell on all three.</li>\r\n 	<li>Doing that too much, though, is how you end up quietly asking for belt extenders, so you gotta find other ways of coping.</li>\r\n 	<li>One bad habit that I have is bitch tweeting. I’ve confessed to that in many prior episodes, and as much as I try to stop, I find it releases my frustrations -- kinda like shouting into a bag or something -- and keeps me from popping a cork at innocent gate agents. I apologize to all my Twitter followers who have to endure that. I have downloaded a meditation app for my iPhone, but it hasn’t seemed to help.</li>\r\n 	<li>A more constructive thing is that I try not to show up to the airport until I have to. If I get an early notice of a delay, I push back my cab to the airport. Part of the frustration is that delays consume time. I can be more productive in my office than trying to find a place to work at a crowded gate or airport club. When I was traveling regularly to New Orleans a few years back, it seemed that half the flights back to Chicago in the summer were delayed by afternoon thunderstorms. I wouldn’t leave for the airport until I saw the inbound equipment was in the air. I got a lot more work done, and ate much better food.</li>\r\n 	<li>The trend of airports upgrading their amenities helps a lot. I’ve never done the neck massage thing, but, back to the alcohol food group, I’ve done a few wine flights at the Vino Volo wine bars that are popping up in more US airports, and the beer flights at microbrewery bars like Great Lakes Brewery’s place in Cleveland, Cisco Brewers’ bar in Boston Logan or the Karl Strauss bar in LAX. It’s something local that keeps you occupied for a bit. And searching them out -- because they’re inevitably in a different concourse than you -- also kills time.</li>\r\n 	<li>In the end, though, it is what it is. If the delay isn’t causing you to miss something important, it’s easy to kick back and read the paper. If you’re missing your kid’s parent-teacher conference, there’s not much that’s going to help your frustration. Except maybe bitch tweeting...</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #123</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\">Magnatune</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_123.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #124 — Craft Beer Hunting; I Hate Rick Steves','','inherit','closed','closed','','1658-revision-v1','','','2016-10-01 17:06:36','2016-10-01 22:06:36','',1658,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/10/01/1658-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1660,1,'2016-10-01 17:07:14','2016-10-01 22:07:14','','5777d166-db5f-4faf-a0d5-84ac87f58834','I Think We\'ve Bagged Our Limit','inherit','open','closed','','5777d166-db5f-4faf-a0d5-84ac87f58834','','','2016-10-01 17:07:58','2016-10-01 22:07:58','',1658,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/5777D166-DB5F-4FAF-A0D5-84AC87F58834.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(1661,1,'2016-10-01 17:28:02','2016-10-01 22:28:02','[caption id=\"attachment_1660\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/5777D166-DB5F-4FAF-A0D5-84AC87F58834.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1660\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/5777D166-DB5F-4FAF-A0D5-84AC87F58834-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Empty Beer Glasses\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> I Think We\'ve Bagged Our Limit[/caption]\r\n\r\nMy son joins the podcast to talk about hunting down craft beers. I then talk about a few \"a-ha\" moments from my recent trip to Scotland, my on-going struggles with bitch tweeting, a VPN hardware product that could come in handy, and why I\'ve come to hate the Rick Steves travel juggernaut. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_124.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/285624579\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #124:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the Sheraton Hotel and Conference Center in Framingham, MA. Just back from 10 mostly beautiful sunny days in Scotland. Flew United to Edinburgh via Newark on the the way out, but on the way back, paid an extra $200 for the luxury of skipping the Immigration lines there. Given my weekly experiences in Newark’s Terminal A at the beginning of this year, I can only imagine the Immigration hall as being a mash-up of the dungeons from all the Saw movies done in that frighteningly absurd sort of way that only the TSA can pull off. Think the LAX security lines without laid-back people, with that Jersey edge. Even with the Global Entry line cut, that was not the final memory I wanted from what had been a nice trip.</li>\r\n 	<li>My wife and I kinda ran the same play we did last year when we dropped our daughter off at University of St Andrews. Grabbed a car -- Hertz gave us a new Nissan X-Terra -- nice car, enough space for the bags my daughter brought over with her, but would be a lumbering beast among Fiat 500s later in the week when driving some of the single lane roads in the Highlands. I like to think I’m getting better at driving in the UK -- driving on the left and shifting with my left hand. No curb bumping or wide left-hand turns this time coming out of the airport. Stopped off at the mall 5 min from the airport for a Starbucks coffee and a couple of EE SIM cards -- £15 for 2GB of data, unlimited texts and, I dunno, 500 voice minutes, which for a week, is pretty much unlimited -- $20 at the current post-Brexit bargain basement exchange rate.</li>\r\n 	<li>After lunch and unloading our daughter, my wife and I drove up the coast for a few days of walking -- not hiking with packs and crampons, but trail walking. We stayed the weekend in Aberdeen because… we’d never been there before. It was a nice town. Went out to the Brewdog brewery for a tour and a couple of beers and then out walking it off along a North Sea trail. We also spent time in Cairngorms National Park on Balmoral getting blown out of our jackets by gale force winds while looking for the Queen in her Range Rover, and then straight up north to the coast -- through Banff, Portsoy, and Cullen for a bit more coastal trail walking. And then back down to St Andrews for the last couple of days doing the typical stuff parents do when they visit their kid at college -- take them out to nice restaurants, buy them groceries, and in our case, say good-bye until Christmas break.</li>\r\n 	<li>Flying out of Edinburgh airport on Saturday morning was surprisingly not a hassle. It’s not a huge airport -- mostly seems to be mostly budget airlines -- Ryanair, easyJet -- but United and American fly a couple of 757s in, and I saw an Etihad 787 -- jealous. The ticketing/check-in area is a bit of a cluster; gives a bad first impression. But once you get up the escalator and headed toward security, it’s much nicer -- a low hassle pass through security, and good shops and restaurants.</li>\r\n 	<li>It always strikes me how much more automated some of the European airports have become. At Edinburgh, there’s no security person checking your ticket before security. Instead, there’s a gate and a bar code reader. You scan your boarding pass. If it’s valid, the gate drops and you walk through. There are security people watching for gate jumpers and tailgaters, but there’s about a half-dozen automated gates, so there was no queue. And then at the X-ray machines, no TSA-like person bringing tubs to the front of the line. Instead, a person points you to one of 5 loading stations, a conveyor system spits out a bin, you load it up, and push it onto the belt that feeds the X-ray machine. Again, less waiting because, instead of a single person loading their tub and putting stuff on the belt, you have 5 people in parallel. If one person is slow, it doesn’t hold up the line. Not quite sure why the TSA, with all its budget and management staff, can’t just copy this.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/48114\">Velvet Green of Mystery (Instrumental)</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Kthugha, Jeris, Martijn de Boer</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Not to turn this into a complete Caledonian podcast, but I did have a few a-ha moments from this trip -\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>The spread of contactless card readers at stores in the UK has spread the acceptance of Apple and Android Pay, which makes not having a chip-&amp;-pin card much less painful (remember, the US cards are chip-&amp;-signature because, I guess, we can’t be trusted to remember 2 4-digit codes). It used to be painful -- or perhaps just embarrassing -- to wait for the Tesco self-service attendant to look at me a bit confused as she gave me a receipt to be signed. Now it’s even faster than a chip-&amp;-pin card -- tap my phone on the card reader, beep, and I’m done. Now they need to replace the little mobile card readers that restaurants use...</li>\r\n 	<li>It’s really tough to find a good cup of brewed black coffee in Europe. Now call me a red-necked Midwesterner, but there are times that I don’t want foamed milk, I don’t want a just a swig of coffee, and I certainly don’t want that swig of coffee -- espresso -- diluted with hot water, I just want a cup of black coffee -- filter coffee as I’ve learned. Impossible to find in Spain and Portugal and many places in the UK, except at Starbucks. There have been many European mornings after a late night that I thanked God (and Howard Schultz) for their aggressive international expansion. So I was surprised and thrilled (ecstatic, really) to find an actual Portlandia-like coffee pourover place, complete with Chemexes and Hario kettles, in Aberdeen on Saturday morning. Foodstory Cafe. I found it by Googling “Hipster Aberdeen”. Yes, really. Sounds silly/absurd but it works. I’ve used that search term in many cities and more times than not been happy with the results.</li>\r\n 	<li>Our hotel in Aberdeen was nice, except for one thing. The tub had one of those little half wall tub screens instead of a shower curtain. There should be a YouTube video on how to shower in those, because everytime I try, I hose down the sink and everything on it. Perhaps I’m too large. Why this instead of a shower curtain?</li>\r\n 	<li>Sitting in a restaurant our last night in St Andrews, our waitress -- very nice person, very good service -- had just a hint of an Eastern European accent. I wanted to ask her where she’s from, but in post-Brexit Britain, it felt rude to ask that. Now that’s not a snarky comment about the results of the vote -- the tough thing about democracy is that everyone\'s vote counts and needs to be respected, not just the people who agree with us. But you can feel a change -- just a bit...</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Back in the US, I continue to struggle with my tendency to bitch tweet. On one flight, I was able to hold back during a 20 min wait for a gate on United, though I did provide “frank” feedback on the customer service survey they sent me a couple of days later. But the next week, on my third straight delayed United flight, I just couldn’t control myself. I understood when we had to return to the gate to manually start the remaining engine -- jets often taxi out using just one engine in order to save fuel, which makes perfect sense. United did a good job of finding us a gate -- not easy at ORD -- and was pretty quick with the maintenance crew. Where I lost it, though, was when it took longer to download the updated data to the plane computer than the whole return to the gate and manually start the engine bit. To the pilot’s credit, he did a good job of explaining the situation and the status, and didn’t hide in the cabin when we were de-planing.</li>\r\n 	<li>Marc Loehrwald, a long-time listener, sent me a note asking “Would you consider this gentlemen solving his problems with Verizon over speakerphone in the otherwise quite empty and peaceful Lounge at JFK worth bitch tweeting…?” accompanied by a picture of a guy sitting alone among couple of dozen chairs. Bitch subtweeting! I should’ve done that to the guy behind me who had his feet up on the back of my seat the entire flight from BWI to ORD. Not a kid, a guy in his mid-50’s!. Marc, you’ve taken my bitch tweeting to a whole new level!</li>\r\n 	<li>Over the past few episodes, we’ve been talking about VPNs -- virtual private networks -- as a way to improve your security when you travel. VPNs encrypt your network traffic -- always a good thing over public and hotel WiFi -- and will also “tunnel” your traffic through the Internet, making it look like you’re accessing the Internet from the VPN end-point. For corporate users, this makes you look like you’re accessing the Internet from your office, allowing you to use systems inside your corporate firewall. For many international travelers, it gives you a way to watch, say, TV shows that are licensed to Netflix in the US but not in other countries. All the VPN products I’ve used have been software-based -- my company uses a Cisco VPN, while on my last trip to China, I used ExpressVPN to tunnel under the Great Firewall and post pictures to Facebook. A company called Homing Systems used Kickstarter to launch a hardware-based VPN product called AlwaysHome. They sent me a sample to try out. It’s a pair of USB dongles. You connect one to your home router -- I have it plugged into my Uverse box. I plugged the second one into the BT router in my daughter’s flat in St Andrews. She fired up her Netflix account and was able to continue her “Criminal Minds” binge, a show not on UK Netflix, without a problem. In earlier testing, I found AlwaysHome was a bit more fiddly when it needed to connect first through a password portal -- the typical set up at a hotel. It would connect, but took a bit more work. When the connection nailed up, though, the performance was solid. Homing Systems’ web site calls it “Space Shifting”. I think that’s the right positioning. I think it’s quicker to fire up a software VPN client for a quick session at Starbucks. The AlwaysHome dongle setup seems more suited for a more sustained session. Check out the show notes for links to Homing Systems.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/fuzz-messy/\"><em>Smiling Perspective</em></a> by General Fuzz</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Can We Avoid Travel Delays?</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Peter Rukavina, a long-time T/C listener, sent me an interesting e-mail at the front part of this week\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>The tweet-stream of travel despair is a frequent enough occurrence as to almost be its own medium now (\"@aircanada announces 9 hour delay; help!\" etc.). I\'m an occasional practitioner myself. My question: to what extent can delays, cancellations, luggage loss, bumping, etc. be mitigated by being travel-savvy? In other words, by traveling smart, how much more control over wrenches thrown into plans do you have?</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>A pretty damned good question, especially given the tales of woe over the past month that I went through at the start of this episode which, I’ll admit, were accompanied by a couple of streams of bitch tweets. We\'ll never completely avoid travel despair -- complete system failures ought to be “black swan” events, though having 3 full outages (United, Southwest, and Delta) in 13 months suggests maybe they’re not, and flying into smaller places like Charlottesville, VA leave you with few options. But I do think there are things we can do -- the consultant in me want to call them “strategies” -- that can reduce the probability of a bad time and hopefully reduce the impact when they happen. I’ve talked about some “strategies” in earlier podcasts -- focus trips to earn airline and hotel status, don’t check luggage, fly direct, if you have to connect never book a connection less than 90 minutes -- and you’ll find most of these in travel listacles that pop up around the holidays. Knowing that Peter, as a long-time listener, has heard these before, I tried to think about some next-level “strategies”. Here are the ones that came to mind. Not an exhaustive list, but I think a decent start...</li>\r\n 	<li>First, avoid flying in the evenings -- Now I break this rule all the time, but think about it. Delays build during the day -- from weather, congestion, mechanicals, psychotic passengers -- because the airlines don\'t build their schedules with enough slack to allow recovery. By 4 or 5pm, the sum of these delays combines with the packed evening \"rush hour\" schedule to drive a high probability of delays. American and United’s LGA-ORD evening schedules are this in spades. Throw in a summer thunderstorm in ORD or DFW or ATL and flight ops centers start cancelling flights to catch up. If you’re on the last flight out, you can be looking at a night on the comfy-looking airport couch. Even without cancellations, delays lead to tight connections which can lead to missed luggage.</li>\r\n 	<li>Use flight-tracking smart phone apps -- I use apps like FlightAware to access more data than the typical gate agent can. On the Thursday that I ended up in DC, as the delay notices started coming in from American,, FlightAware showed me that my plane was on the ground in Wichita, KS, probably waiting out an ORD ground stop from thunderstorms. It still had to get to Chicago and then out to Charlottesville. Seeing parallel lines of red on the radar view, I had a pretty good sense that it wasn\'t going to happen. When I decided to head up to Dulles for the Frontier flight, I could see the flight history on FlightAware; it delayed more often than not, but rarely cancelled. That night, as ORD and IAD ground stops kept pushing the departure time, I wasn\'t too worried that it would cancel because I had seen the flight history.</li>\r\n 	<li>Spread clothes across checked and unchecked luggage -- If you\'ve checked luggage, I assume it\'s for a good reason (e.g., carrying a bottles of wine home from a Napa trip, needing formal wear for a wedding) and that you also have a carry-on. Put two changes of clothes and a bare set of toiletries (e.g., toothbrush) in your carry-on. Most lost luggage will catch up to you within 24-36 hours. If you\'re traveling as a family, spread everyone\'s clothes out across all the bags rather than each person having their own bag. It would be rare for the airlines to lose all the bags of an entire party. With things spread across bags, everyone is good for a couple of days even if a bag is lost. I’m always amazed that more families don’t do this.</li>\r\n 	<li>Know your geography -- What are your alternative airports and how far of a drive are they? This has become even more important over the past few years as the big carriers have reduced flight frequency to fill up their planes. I once had a project in the middle of Connecticut that was just about equidistant between White Plains and Hartford airports. We always flew in/out of White Plains even though it was a smaller airport because, when flights delayed/cancelled, we could just keep driving down the Hutchinson to LaGuardia. When we flew out of Hartford, it was a much longer haul to the nearest airport.</li>\r\n 	<li>This last one might be a bit obscure, but it’s been useful to me. If your corporate car rental agency is Hertz, always book an intermediate car so you can use Gold Choice to quickly swap cars if Hertz assigns you a real beater. Now, you can always go back to the counter, stand in line, and demand a better, cleaner, less decrepit car, but we’re trying to avoid delays. Most corporate rates that I’ve used has at most a dollar or two difference between the compact and intermediate rate. It’s cheap insurance. I’ve used Gold Choice maybe 10-20% of the time, but I’m always glad to have that option.</li>\r\n 	<li>So there you go,. Five ways to travel smarter. If you have a suggestion, please send it in.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/atek-phoenix/\"><em>Goa Life</em></a> by Ambient Teknology</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Coping with Travel Delays</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>During my last CIO gig, I was traveling as much, if not more, than any of my consulting gigs. I kept my Chicago residence and rotated weekly across offices in Scottsdale, Dallas, Naples, FL and Croydon, south of London. The head of my project management team started doing a bit of travel to support some system migrations and after a couple of months of the usual flight delays and other travel snafus, he asked me, “How do you deal with this all the time?” “I depend on 3 major food groups,” I told him. “Alcohol, salt, and fat.”</li>\r\n 	<li>I remembered that as I was killing time in Dulles with a dinner of fish and chips and a local beer, Hop Lips IPA from Dover, DE. It rang the bell on all three.</li>\r\n 	<li>Doing that too much, though, is how you end up quietly asking for belt extenders, so you gotta find other ways of coping.</li>\r\n 	<li>One bad habit that I have is bitch tweeting. I’ve confessed to that in many prior episodes, and as much as I try to stop, I find it releases my frustrations -- kinda like shouting into a bag or something -- and keeps me from popping a cork at innocent gate agents. I apologize to all my Twitter followers who have to endure that. I have downloaded a meditation app for my iPhone, but it hasn’t seemed to help.</li>\r\n 	<li>A more constructive thing is that I try not to show up to the airport until I have to. If I get an early notice of a delay, I push back my cab to the airport. Part of the frustration is that delays consume time. I can be more productive in my office than trying to find a place to work at a crowded gate or airport club. When I was traveling regularly to New Orleans a few years back, it seemed that half the flights back to Chicago in the summer were delayed by afternoon thunderstorms. I wouldn’t leave for the airport until I saw the inbound equipment was in the air. I got a lot more work done, and ate much better food.</li>\r\n 	<li>The trend of airports upgrading their amenities helps a lot. I’ve never done the neck massage thing, but, back to the alcohol food group, I’ve done a few wine flights at the Vino Volo wine bars that are popping up in more US airports, and the beer flights at microbrewery bars like Great Lakes Brewery’s place in Cleveland, Cisco Brewers’ bar in Boston Logan or the Karl Strauss bar in LAX. It’s something local that keeps you occupied for a bit. And searching them out -- because they’re inevitably in a different concourse than you -- also kills time.</li>\r\n 	<li>In the end, though, it is what it is. If the delay isn’t causing you to miss something important, it’s easy to kick back and read the paper. If you’re missing your kid’s parent-teacher conference, there’s not much that’s going to help your frustration. Except maybe bitch tweeting...</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #123</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\">Magnatune</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_123.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #124 — Craft Beer Hunting; I Hate Rick Steves','','inherit','closed','closed','','1658-revision-v1','','','2016-10-01 17:28:02','2016-10-01 22:28:02','',1658,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/10/01/1658-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1662,1,'2016-10-01 17:42:44','2016-10-01 22:42:44','[caption id=\"attachment_1660\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/5777D166-DB5F-4FAF-A0D5-84AC87F58834.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1660\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/5777D166-DB5F-4FAF-A0D5-84AC87F58834-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Empty Beer Glasses\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> I Think We\'ve Bagged Our Limit[/caption]\r\n\r\nMy son joins the podcast to talk about hunting down craft beers. I then talk about a few \"a-ha\" moments from my recent trip to Scotland, my on-going struggles with bitch tweeting, a VPN hardware product that could come in handy, and why I\'ve come to hate the Rick Steves travel juggernaut. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_124.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/285624579\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #124:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the Sheraton Hotel and Conference Center in Framingham, MA. Just back from 10 mostly beautiful sunny days in Scotland. Flew United to Edinburgh via Newark on the the way out, but on the way back, paid an extra $200 for the luxury of skipping the Immigration lines there. Given my weekly experiences in Newark’s Terminal A at the beginning of this year, I can only imagine the Immigration hall as being a mash-up of the dungeons from all the Saw movies done in that frighteningly absurd sort of way that only the TSA can pull off. Think the LAX security lines without laid-back people, with that Jersey edge. Even with the Global Entry line cut, that was not the final memory I wanted from what had been a nice trip.</li>\r\n 	<li>My wife and I kinda ran the same play we did last year when we dropped our daughter off at University of St Andrews. Grabbed a car -- Hertz gave us a new Nissan X-Terra -- nice car, enough space for the bags my daughter brought over with her, but would be a lumbering beast among Fiat 500s later in the week when driving some of the single lane roads in the Highlands. I like to think I’m getting better at driving in the UK -- driving on the left and shifting with my left hand. No curb bumping or wide left-hand turns this time coming out of the airport. Stopped off at the mall 5 min from the airport for a Starbucks coffee and a couple of EE SIM cards -- £15 for 2GB of data, unlimited texts and, I dunno, 500 voice minutes, which for a week, is pretty much unlimited -- $20 at the current post-Brexit bargain basement exchange rate.</li>\r\n 	<li>After lunch and unloading our daughter, my wife and I drove up the coast for a few days of walking -- not hiking with packs and crampons, but trail walking. We stayed the weekend in Aberdeen because… we’d never been there before. It was a nice town. Went out to the Brewdog brewery for a tour and a couple of beers and then out walking it off along a North Sea trail. We also spent time in Cairngorms National Park on Balmoral getting blown out of our jackets by gale force winds while looking for the Queen in her Range Rover, and then straight up north to the coast -- through Banff, Portsoy, and Cullen for a bit more coastal trail walking. And then back down to St Andrews for the last couple of days doing the typical stuff parents do when they visit their kid at college -- take them out to nice restaurants, buy them groceries, and in our case, say good-bye until Christmas break.</li>\r\n 	<li>Flying out of Edinburgh airport on Saturday morning was surprisingly not a hassle. It’s not a huge airport -- mostly seems to be mostly budget airlines -- Ryanair, easyJet -- but United and American fly a couple of 757s in, and I saw an Etihad 787 -- jealous. The ticketing/check-in area is a bit of a cluster; gives a bad first impression. But once you get up the escalator and headed toward security, it’s much nicer -- a low hassle pass through security, and good shops and restaurants.</li>\r\n 	<li>It always strikes me how much more automated some of the European airports have become. At Edinburgh, there’s no security person checking your ticket before security. Instead, there’s a gate and a bar code reader. You scan your boarding pass. If it’s valid, the gate drops and you walk through. There are security people watching for gate jumpers and tailgaters, but there’s about a half-dozen automated gates, so there was no queue. And then at the X-ray machines, no TSA-like person bringing tubs to the front of the line. Instead, a person points you to one of 5 loading stations, a conveyor system spits out a bin, you load it up, and push it onto the belt that feeds the X-ray machine. Again, less waiting because, instead of a single person loading their tub and putting stuff on the belt, you have 5 people in parallel. If one person is slow, it doesn’t hold up the line. Not quite sure why the TSA, with all its budget and management staff, can’t just copy this.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/48114\">Velvet Green of Mystery (Instrumental)</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Kthugha, Jeris, Martijn de Boer</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Not to turn this into a complete Caledonian podcast, but I did have a few a-ha moments from this trip -\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>The spread of contactless card readers at stores in the UK has spread the acceptance of Apple and Android Pay, which makes not having a chip-&amp;-pin card much less painful (remember, the US cards are chip-&amp;-signature because, I guess, we can’t be trusted to remember 2 4-digit codes). It used to be painful -- or perhaps just embarrassing -- to wait for the Tesco self-service attendant to look at me a bit confused as she gave me a receipt to be signed. Now it’s even faster than a chip-&amp;-pin card -- tap my phone on the card reader, beep, and I’m done. Now they need to replace the little mobile card readers that restaurants use...</li>\r\n 	<li>It’s really tough to find a good cup of brewed black coffee in Europe. Now call me a red-necked Midwesterner, but there are times that I don’t want foamed milk, I don’t want a just a swig of coffee, and I certainly don’t want that swig of coffee -- espresso -- diluted with hot water, I just want a cup of black coffee -- filter coffee as I’ve learned. Impossible to find in Spain and Portugal and many places in the UK, except at Starbucks. There have been many European mornings after a late night that I thanked God (and Howard Schultz) for their aggressive international expansion. So I was surprised and thrilled (ecstatic, really) to find an actual Portlandia-like coffee pourover place, complete with Chemexes and Hario kettles, in Aberdeen on Saturday morning. Foodstory Cafe. I found it by Googling “Hipster Aberdeen”. Yes, really. Sounds silly/absurd but it works. I’ve used that search term in many cities and more times than not been happy with the results.</li>\r\n 	<li>Our hotel in Aberdeen was nice, except for one thing. The tub had one of those little half wall tub screens instead of a shower curtain. There should be a YouTube video on how to shower in those, because everytime I try, I hose down the sink and everything on it. Perhaps I’m too large. Why this instead of a shower curtain?</li>\r\n 	<li>Sitting in a restaurant our last night in St Andrews, our waitress -- very nice person, very good service -- had just a hint of an Eastern European accent. I wanted to ask her where she’s from, but in post-Brexit Britain, it felt rude to ask that. Now that’s not a snarky comment about the results of the vote -- the tough thing about democracy is that everyone\'s vote counts and needs to be respected, not just the people who agree with us. But you can feel a change -- just a bit...</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Back in the US, I continue to struggle with my tendency to bitch tweet. On one flight, I was able to hold back during a 20 min wait for a gate on United, though I did provide “frank” feedback on the customer service survey they sent me a couple of days later. But the next week, on my third straight delayed United flight, I just couldn’t control myself. I understood when we had to return to the gate to manually start the remaining engine -- jets often taxi out using just one engine in order to save fuel, which makes perfect sense. United did a good job of finding us a gate -- not easy at ORD -- and was pretty quick with the maintenance crew. Where I lost it, though, was when it took longer to download the updated data to the plane computer than the whole return to the gate and manually start the engine bit. To the pilot’s credit, he did a good job of explaining the situation and the status, and didn’t hide in the cabin when we were de-planing.</li>\r\n 	<li>Marc Loehrwald, a long-time listener, sent me a note asking “Would you consider this gentlemen solving his problems with Verizon over speakerphone in the otherwise quite empty and peaceful Lounge at JFK worth bitch tweeting…?” accompanied by a picture of a guy sitting alone among couple of dozen chairs. Bitch subtweeting! I should’ve done that to the guy behind me who had his feet up on the back of my seat the entire flight from BWI to ORD. Not a kid, a guy in his mid-50’s!. Marc, you’ve taken my bitch tweeting to a whole new level!</li>\r\n 	<li>Over the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/12/20/podcast-119-digital-security-on-the-road-us-airports-getting-better/\" target=\"_blank\">past </a>few episodes, we’ve been talking about VPNs -- virtual private networks -- as a way to improve your security when you travel. VPNs encrypt your network traffic -- always a good thing over public and hotel WiFi -- and will also “tunnel” your traffic through the Internet, making it look like you’re accessing the Internet from the VPN end-point. For corporate users, this makes you look like you’re accessing the Internet from your office, allowing you to use systems inside your corporate firewall. For many international travelers, it gives you a way to watch, say, TV shows that are licensed to Netflix in the US but not in other countries. All the VPN products I’ve used have been software-based -- my company uses a Cisco VPN, while on my last trip to China, I used ExpressVPN to tunnel under the Great Firewall and post pictures to Facebook. A company called Homing Systems used Kickstarter to launch a hardware-based VPN product called AlwaysHome. They sent me a sample to try out. It’s a pair of USB dongles. You connect one to your home router -- I have it plugged into my Uverse box. I plugged the second one into the BT router in my daughter’s flat in St Andrews. She fired up her Netflix account and was able to continue her “Criminal Minds” binge, a show not on UK Netflix, without a problem. In earlier testing, I found AlwaysHome was a bit more fiddly when it needed to connect first through a password portal -- the typical set up at a hotel. It would connect, but took a bit more work. When the connection nailed up, though, the performance was solid. <a href=\"http://www.homingsystems.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Homing Systems</a>’ web site calls it “Space Shifting”. I think that’s the right positioning. I think it’s quicker to fire up a software VPN client for a quick session at Starbucks. The AlwaysHome dongle setup seems more suited for a more sustained session. Check out the show notes for links to Homing Systems.</li>\r\n 	<li><em>Homing Systems sent me a AlwaysHome Duo free of charge for me to review. I was not paid for this review. The opinions expressed in this episode are my own. </em></li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/spinmeister/53428\">Somewhere</a> by spinmeister (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license. Ft: DJ Vadim</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Craft Beer Hunting</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>My son and I hang out in his apartment in Chicago\'s Lake View neighborhood and talk about finding good beer in out-of-the-way places</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/48915\">Like Music (cdk Mix)</a> by cdk (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/\">Attribution Share-Alike (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Phasenwandler</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>I Hate Rick Steves</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Not personally, of course. I’m sure he’s a nice guy who doesn’t kick dogs. I guess to be more precise, I hate what he’s done to some of my vacations.</li>\r\n 	<li>Portugal is the most recent example. Preparing for our trip, my wife read a number of Lisbon travel guides, include Rick Steves. Rick advises his Lisbon travelers to do the day trip out to Sintra, the castle-filled UNESCO World Heritage Site, on Mondays when all the Lisbon museums are closed. So Monday morning, we get up early, go across the street for our standard breakfast of coffee and pastel de nata (egg custard tarts to die for), and hit the train. Standing room only. We get off the train in Sintra. All we see are older Americans with sensible haircuts, plastic rimmed glasses, and hiking shoes. It’s like we walking through an NPR listener convention in Ann Arbor, MI. And they’re all wearing their backpacks swung around in front to protect themselves from pickpockets and thieves. Except no local could penetrate the phalanx of blue book-wielding Steve-heads. Lucky for us, most of them followed Rick’s advice to catch the bus to the top of the hill. We decided we needed to work off that egg custard, and so broke away from the blue book brigade and walked up the road.</li>\r\n 	<li>I don’t begrudge Rick Steves his success -- good for him; he seems to have worked hard for it. But his motto -- “Europe through the back door” -- can’t really apply anymore when he has millions of readers trying to walk through it. The same thing happened to Lonely Planet. What was once the hip, backpacker’s guide to cool spots now leads people to mainstream tourism spots just by its recommendations because it’s Amazon’s best selling travel guide series.</li>\r\n 	<li>I think we successfully avoided the Steve-o’s on this trip to Scotland. Aberdeen and the Northeast Highlands are nowhere to be found in Rick Steves’ Scotland, and I can’t say that I heard too many North American accents during that part of our trip -- save for the one day we drove down to Dunnottar Castle, but that’s got to be one of the main tourist draws in that part of Scotland. I heard almost as much German as I did American twang.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’ve tended, more and more, to use local Google searches rather than guide books. Google often surfaces more local content, and limiting the results to the past year makes sure it’s current. But even this might not be “back door” enough. The barista in the Aberdeen coffee shop that I found through my “Hipster Aberdeen” Google search did mention seeing a surprising number of Americans recently. I wonder if my “Hipster” search strategy has gone mainstream.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #124</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/\">ccMixter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_124.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #124 — Craft Beer Hunting; I Hate Rick Steves','','inherit','closed','closed','','1658-revision-v1','','','2016-10-01 17:42:44','2016-10-01 22:42:44','',1658,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/10/01/1658-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1666,1,'2016-11-22 23:05:50','2016-11-23 04:05:50','[caption id=\"attachment_1667\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/IMG_0201.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1667\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/IMG_0201-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"An aggressive Uber Pool driver\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> An aggressive Uber Pool driver[/caption]\n\nBack from 10 days in Tuscany where, among other things, we thought we\'d avoid all the noise of the US presidential election. We succeeded... almost. One of my latest travel hobbies has been to quiz Uber drivers for their life stories. It makes for interesting rides to and from the airport. We also continue the ongoing thread about travel safety. This time, we talk about using Bluetooth in rental cars. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_125.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #125:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, with a new episode just in time for the TSA Thanksgiving lines. I’m once again thankful that I’m able to avoid O’Hare this week -- the busiest travel week of the year. Since the last episode, I’ve been in Boston, Baltimore, Charlottesville, Hoboken, and, for the first time, I landed at Lehigh Valley Regional Airport in Allentown, PA. I was surprised how nice an airport it is. I was expecting something smaller -- just a handful of gates -- and perhaps a bit dingier -- maybe something along the lines of White Plains, NY. But it was clean and bright with big concourses -- not a lot of people, but a lot of space.</li>\n 	<li>Then I had 3 weeks at home -- my longest non-travel streak this year. There is something relaxing about not packing and unpacking. It also makes you realize how much time you lose in the act of travel -- standing in lines, waiting for security, to board the plane, to check in to your hotel, to get a cup of coffee…. The whole time, though, I was looking forward to getting back on the road -- because my next trip was with my wife to Tuscany for our 25th anniversary, revisiting the scene of our honeymoon.</li>\n 	<li>We flew into Pisa by way of Munich, another new airport for me. But I was much less impressed by this one. Things were going fine -- nothing special in typical German airport style -- until we hit security. There were a dozen lines that were just crawling. There weren’t that many people trying to go through security -- it was 10 or 11am on a Friday -- but maybe the security union was on a work slowdown because they had to be going out of their way to work that slow. As is my wont, I bitch tweeted that out. Colin McDowell tweeted back -- “Totally agree. Slowest security of any major airport, like Gatwick in the ‘80’s. Shops must be suffering”. And the bars too. I didn’t have time for my traditional German airport breakfast beer.</li>\n 	<li>Things got better at Pisa Airport though. This was not a new airport; we had flown in here for our honeymoon. I had booked a Fiat 500 from Hertz for kinda old times sake; we’d driven a Fiat Panda 25 years ago. I was pleasantly surprised to find an Alfa Romeo in the parking slot. Definitely a move up from the Panda. And it was an automatic -- the first time I haven’t driven a stick in Europe. At first I was kinda disappointed, but later, when I was winding through the Tuscan hills and picking my way through rutted dirt roads, I was happy that the car was doing the shifting.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/buy_album.php?id=39CE51194FB95B63577FBFD7E2EC168C99277BD6CE86C10FDC39095666B5D6CF\"><em>Heaven</em></a> by <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=BB22CBFF24501120EEC6ABA18AB0A15FEB05A36360E7FDA122C8D7A5C140F8DC\" rel=\"nofollow\">Los Lonely Boys</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>A <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/08/13/podcast-123-how-to-avoid-travel-delays/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">few episodes</a> back, I complained about having to do an interview for my Global Entry renewal. I’d read online about others getting renewed without the interview, so I was a bit peeved to have to make my way past the lines at the McDonalds in the lower lever of ORD Terminal 5 yet again. But, other than the smell of fries at 9am on a Friday (I’m too old to start my weekends on Thursday nights), it was a fairly painless experience. I was ushered back less than 5 minutes after I’d arrived and had a very straight forward interview with the Customs and Border Protection agent. He was a great guy; good conversation. Asked me a couple of questions -- including one about my stolen passport -- took a new picture and a new set of fingerprints and I was done. 10 minutes later, I was making my way past the McDonalds again. As I thought about it, I had no reason to be peeved. Seems reasonable that they’d want to put an eyeball on me after 5 years.</li>\n 	<li>Jim McDonough posted a comment on the TravelCommons web site about my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/09/28/podcast-124-craft-beer-hunting-i-hate-rick-steves/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Rick Steves rant</a>. Jim writes:\n<ul>\n 	<li>My wife and I love Rick Steves (we call ourselves Rickheads) and use his books all the time. But I know what you mean about his fans overwhelming a particular place. It’s funny how many people in the States have no idea who he is, but in Europe, Rick Steves sits at the right hand of the father. Get your restaurant or hotel into his book, and you have it made</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>And while I was able to dodge the Rickheads in Aberdeen, I knew I was toast in Tuscany. Even in November, I was shoulder-to-shoulder with older, sensibly dressed, empty-nester Rickheads toting their blue bibles through Pisa, Lucca, and Florence. Only when we were staying on a farm in Chianti a couple of miles up a rutted dirt road were we free of them.</li>\n 	<li>David Glickman sent me a note recommending a more detailed guide of Scotland for my next visit:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Living just outside London I am not sure I have never read a Rick Steves Guidebook, but what I recommend getting hold of Peter Irvine’s really excellent guide ‘Scotland The Best’ before your next trip to St.Andrews. My wife and I are regular visitors to the States, and my wife travels to Madison Wi about 6 times a year through ORD so we really enjoy your podcasts. We have just returned from a trip and boy is your country now expensive to us poor post-Brexit Brits!</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>I immediately hit Amazon and ordered the new 2016 edition of <a href=\"https://www.amazon.com/Scotland-Best-Peter-Irvine/dp/0007559348/ref=dp_ob_title_bk\"><em>Scotland The Best</em></a>. Very detailed, with lots of suggestions. Looking forward to giving it a workout on my next visit. And I can imagine the US looks very expensive for pound- and euro-based tourists. The euro dropped another 5% in the week-and-a-half we’ve been back from Italy.</li>\n 	<li>About a year ago in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/10/11/podcast-117-random-thoughts-about-eggs-scotland-car-rentals/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">episode #117</a>, I first talked about Revolut, a virtual and real chip-and-pin debit card with great exchange rates. I first used it last fall on a trip to the UK. I’d transfer funds into it using my US debit card and manage conversions with a smartphone app. It was great. But note my use of the past tense. Over the past 3 months, the service has been deteriorating for US users. First, they began charging a 3% fee on fund transfers using US debit cards. I soon found that they only charged the fee if those transfers were in dollars. If I transferred funds in euros or pounds, there was no charge. Weird, but OK, it still worked. But when I tried that trick before my trips to Scotland and Italy, no dice. All US debit transfers were blocked. I suppose I could’ve tried an interbank transfer using something like TransferWise, but that’s way too much of a hassle. They say they “aim to change it ASAP” but it’s been 3 months now and no update. I have to retract my praise for Revolut and delete the app from my iPhone.</li>\n 	<li>I mentioned in the last episode, that the lack of a chip-&amp;-pin card in Scotland has become less of a hassle with the spread of contactless card readers that let me use Apple Pay on my iPhone. I didn’t find that same convenience in Italy. I didn’t see one place with a contactless reader. Other than large restaurant bills (we managed to find tables at a few Michelin starred restaurants during our stay), I paid mostly cash. It seemed much less of a hassle.</li>\n 	<li>Over the last 3-4 episodes, we had one blurb that’s talked about travel security. Last episode was VPNs, the one before that video jacking. So in this installment of <em>Travel Security</em>, I want to talk about car rentals; specifically, about when you use Bluetooth to pair your smartphone with your rental’s audio system. I do this all the time. It’s safer -- let’s me talk handsfree, avoiding wrecks and tickets. And it lets me listen to podcasts or Pandora or Spotify when I’m driving instead of fiddling around, finding a local radio station that I don’t hate. However, if you do this, you need to remember to delete your pairing when you return your car. There hasn’t been one time when I haven’t gone through and deleted 3-5 pairings before pairing my own. And if you scroll through the devices, they all have personalized names like “Timmy’s iPhone”. And most phones by default will download your contacts to the car when paired. You can turn this default behavior off in an Android phone, but I haven’t found that capabilities with iPhones. Instead, every time I pair my iPhone, I have to remember to flip the switch that prevents it. So for most people, they leave behind a profile in their rental with all of their contacts and phone numbers. That is just bad in so many ways.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://cyberset.cc/artists2.php?tr_release_id=104\"><em>Heaven</em></a> by <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=A951998E6011FA9B2D22387EB3CAC0B5EB05A36360E7FDA122C8D7A5C140F8DC\" rel=\"nofollow\">Electric Skychurch</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Uber Driver Stories</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>I find myself taking more and more Ubers as opposed to regular taxi cabs. I like cabs, I like cab drivers, but Uber is usually a better experience. Thumbing the app is so much easier than trying to hail a cab, or finding the number of the local cab company and then dealing with an often(?)/usually(?) cab dispatcher. And the condition of the car is, 9 times out of 10, vastly superior to the beat-up cab I usually get. The Baltimore cabs I’d take from the Inner Harbor to the airport were some of the worst. But then in Chicago I got picked by an Uber driver in a BMW X3 and by a spotless Mercedes SUV at EWR. Indeed, 9 times out of 10 is giving cabs way too much of the benefit of the doubt. I’ve yet to ride in an Uber that was worse than a cab.</li>\n 	<li>But the best thing about taking an Uber is driver stories. Every Uber I take, I ask the driver how he/she likes it, how long they’ve been doing it, and what else they do -- if it’s not their full time gig (which is the definite minority)</li>\n 	<li>A lotta drivers I talk with are retired. One guy in Vegas told me he was a bit lonely and bored. He wanted to get out of the house, but really had nowhere to go. He didn’t want to gamble or sit in a bar at 10 in the morning, so driving Uber gave him a reason to get off the sofa.</li>\n 	<li>A Charlottesville, VA retired fireman drives the late night weekend shift when kids from UVa are willing to pay anything (or willing to charge anything to their parents’ accounts) for a ride home from the bars. He told me he gets huge surge fares, but he’s driving ‘til 3 or 4 in the morning.</li>\n 	<li>A woman in Baltimore is a retired teacher and principal. She drives to take a break from studying for her PhD. She too gets bored sitting around the house, and she likes to drive. She told me that it was her husband who got her to sign up for Uber. She was driving him crazy around the house. Another guy, non-retired, who is studying full-time for his CFA exam -- chartered financial analyst -- does the same thing, drives during his study breaks.</li>\n 	<li>I find that many morning drivers -- the ones taking me from my hotel to a client site -- are doing a little moonlighting; fitting in a few rides before they go to work, and then again at the end of the day. I was surprised to find out that Uber drivers don’t know your destination until they accept the ride. Thinking about it, it makes sense; keeps drivers from cherry picking, say, rides to the airport. But one woman told me about accepting a ride and finding out it was to some suburb 40 minutes away -- and she only had a quarter tank.</li>\n 	<li>Of course, there’s more to ridesharing than Uber. I’ve also used Lyft. During busy times, I’ll fire them both up to see which has less of a surge charge, or a shorter wait time. Most drivers will drive for both. In my unscientific polling, most prefer Lyft but get more traffic from Uber. One driver told my wife he prefers Lyft because the Lyft riders talk more. And then he proceeded to unload his life story on my wife and her friend for the next 40 minutes as they battled traffic into Chicago.</li>\n 	<li>I’m always interested in how the gig economy is working for them. For a while, we were reading that the sharing economy, the gig economy of Uber and Airbnb was the next wave. The froth seems to have worn off of that wave, but a lot of the Uber drivers I talk to need that extra money, though often they wonder if it’s worth it. The Mercedes SUV driver who took me from EWR to Hoboken wondered if it was worth hassle of waiting for an airport fare. The only full-time driver I had was in Baltimore, and she said she makes more money delivering packages for Uber than she does delivering passengers, and the packages are much quieter and more pleasant.</li>\n 	<li>But as good as these stories are, the best one I recently heard wasn’t from an Uber driver; it was from the manager of the Chianti farm we stayed at for a couple of days during our trip to Italy. He had lived in the Chicago area for about 10 years. He got his PhD in geochemistry at Univ of Illinois and then worked at Argonne National Labs doing research. After a while, he missed his family and the countryside where he’d grown up, so he moved back to Tuscany, married, had a kid, and now manages a cattle farm with a growing sideline in agritourism. Forget driving for Uber. I want to be this guy.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://www.podsafeaudio.com/jamroom/play.php?band_id=1258&amp;song_id=4378&amp;mode=song_hifi\"><em>Shadows</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.podsafeaudio.com/jamroom/bands/1258/\">Antardhyan</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Overseas for the Election</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>My wife and I flew to Italy the Thursday night before the election. We both voted early, so we didn’t shirk our civic duties. What we did do, though, was leave behind the last blast of election ads and media coverage. I mean, the one bad thing about Game 7 of the World Series going into extra innings was that it gave more time for political ads. We were very happy to leave all that noise behind us.</li>\n 	<li>On Election Day, we had dinner in a nice restaurant in a small town that was 45 minutes of switchbacks and rutted dirt roads away from our hotel. On the way back, I think we dodged a boar and a deer as we crossed back over the ridge of hills and headed down to our hotel. We went to bed while the polls in the US were still open and didn’t really think a thing about it.</li>\n 	<li>I woke up around 7 on Weds morning; Tuesday midnight in Chicago. I glanced at my iPhone and saw a cascade of notifications from the Wall Street Journal and Chicago Tribune about the election results. The election still hadn’t been called, but by the time we sat down for breakfast, it was done. Donald Trump had won.</li>\n 	<li>The Austrian guy working the desk and the breakfast (it was a small hotel) laughed when he walked up -- “At least you guys aren’t having a do-over” The July Austrian presidential election was set aside for problems with absentee ballots and they still haven’t done the revote. “Or Spain, going through two elections without getting a government.”</li>\n 	<li>Now, TravelCommons has never had a political point-of-view and I’m not about to change that here. I have good friends on both sides of the debate. What I will say is that I, like many others, was surprised by the results given all the predictions we’d heard right up until we were wheels up at ORD. All through breakfast, we refreshed our Twitter feeds and hit the Wall Street Journal and New York Times apps, trying to catch up on the coverage we’d slept through the night before. Where the night before, we were happy not to hear about politics, now we were digging for an explanation for this upset.</li>\n 	<li>After an hour of this, and an extra cappuccino, we set the phones aside again. It was nice that we could do that -- walk away from the disbelief (and some might say panic) at the result that was spreading over the media (social and traditional), and schools, and I imagine in the workplaces. Instead, we were driving our little Alfa Romeo through some beautiful Chianti vineyards that were brilliantly yellow with the vine leaves changing colors. We stopped off at the Antinori winery for a bit of a tasting and then continued our drive to Florence. We knew we’d eventually get pulled into the post-election vortex, but we knew we were lucky -- we would be in a cone of silence for another 3 days.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #125</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://promonet.iodalliance.com\">IODA Promonet</a> and <a href=\"http://podsafeaudio.com/\">PodSafe Audio</a></li>\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_125.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #125 — Uber Driver Stories; Overseas for the Election','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-125-uber-driver-stories-overseas-for-the-election','','','2021-09-29 08:14:48','2021-09-29 13:14:48','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=1666',0,'post','',0),
(1667,1,'2016-11-22 20:24:17','2016-11-23 01:24:17','','img_0201','An aggressive Uber Pool driver','inherit','open','closed','','img_0201','','','2016-11-22 20:26:18','2016-11-23 01:26:18','',1666,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/IMG_0201.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(1668,1,'2016-11-22 20:25:44','2016-11-23 01:25:44','<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/IMG_0201.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1667\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/IMG_0201-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"An aggressive Uber Pool driver\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\n\r\nMy son joins the podcast to talk about hunting down craft beers. I then talk about a few \"a-ha\" moments from my recent trip to Scotland, my on-going struggles with bitch tweeting, a VPN hardware product that could come in handy, and why I\'ve come to hate the Rick Steves travel juggernaut. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_124.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/285624579\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #124:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the Sheraton Hotel and Conference Center in Framingham, MA. Just back from 10 mostly beautiful sunny days in Scotland. Flew United to Edinburgh via Newark on the the way out, but on the way back, paid an extra $200 for the luxury of skipping the Immigration lines there. Given my weekly experiences in Newark’s Terminal A at the beginning of this year, I can only imagine the Immigration hall as being a mash-up of the dungeons from all the Saw movies done in that frighteningly absurd sort of way that only the TSA can pull off. Think the LAX security lines without laid-back people, with that Jersey edge. Even with the Global Entry line cut, that was not the final memory I wanted from what had been a nice trip.</li>\r\n 	<li>My wife and I kinda ran the same play we did last year when we dropped our daughter off at University of St Andrews. Grabbed a car -- Hertz gave us a new Nissan X-Terra -- nice car, enough space for the bags my daughter brought over with her, but would be a lumbering beast among Fiat 500s later in the week when driving some of the single lane roads in the Highlands. I like to think I’m getting better at driving in the UK -- driving on the left and shifting with my left hand. No curb bumping or wide left-hand turns this time coming out of the airport. Stopped off at the mall 5 min from the airport for a Starbucks coffee and a couple of EE SIM cards -- £15 for 2GB of data, unlimited texts and, I dunno, 500 voice minutes, which for a week, is pretty much unlimited -- $20 at the current post-Brexit bargain basement exchange rate.</li>\r\n 	<li>After lunch and unloading our daughter, my wife and I drove up the coast for a few days of walking -- not hiking with packs and crampons, but trail walking. We stayed the weekend in Aberdeen because… we’d never been there before. It was a nice town. Went out to the Brewdog brewery for a tour and a couple of beers and then out walking it off along a North Sea trail. We also spent time in Cairngorms National Park on Balmoral getting blown out of our jackets by gale force winds while looking for the Queen in her Range Rover, and then straight up north to the coast -- through Banff, Portsoy, and Cullen for a bit more coastal trail walking. And then back down to St Andrews for the last couple of days doing the typical stuff parents do when they visit their kid at college -- take them out to nice restaurants, buy them groceries, and in our case, say good-bye until Christmas break.</li>\r\n 	<li>Flying out of Edinburgh airport on Saturday morning was surprisingly not a hassle. It’s not a huge airport -- mostly seems to be mostly budget airlines -- Ryanair, easyJet -- but United and American fly a couple of 757s in, and I saw an Etihad 787 -- jealous. The ticketing/check-in area is a bit of a cluster; gives a bad first impression. But once you get up the escalator and headed toward security, it’s much nicer -- a low hassle pass through security, and good shops and restaurants.</li>\r\n 	<li>It always strikes me how much more automated some of the European airports have become. At Edinburgh, there’s no security person checking your ticket before security. Instead, there’s a gate and a bar code reader. You scan your boarding pass. If it’s valid, the gate drops and you walk through. There are security people watching for gate jumpers and tailgaters, but there’s about a half-dozen automated gates, so there was no queue. And then at the X-ray machines, no TSA-like person bringing tubs to the front of the line. Instead, a person points you to one of 5 loading stations, a conveyor system spits out a bin, you load it up, and push it onto the belt that feeds the X-ray machine. Again, less waiting because, instead of a single person loading their tub and putting stuff on the belt, you have 5 people in parallel. If one person is slow, it doesn’t hold up the line. Not quite sure why the TSA, with all its budget and management staff, can’t just copy this.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/48114\">Velvet Green of Mystery (Instrumental)</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Kthugha, Jeris, Martijn de Boer</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Not to turn this into a complete Caledonian podcast, but I did have a few a-ha moments from this trip -\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>The spread of contactless card readers at stores in the UK has spread the acceptance of Apple and Android Pay, which makes not having a chip-&amp;-pin card much less painful (remember, the US cards are chip-&amp;-signature because, I guess, we can’t be trusted to remember 2 4-digit codes). It used to be painful -- or perhaps just embarrassing -- to wait for the Tesco self-service attendant to look at me a bit confused as she gave me a receipt to be signed. Now it’s even faster than a chip-&amp;-pin card -- tap my phone on the card reader, beep, and I’m done. Now they need to replace the little mobile card readers that restaurants use...</li>\r\n 	<li>It’s really tough to find a good cup of brewed black coffee in Europe. Now call me a red-necked Midwesterner, but there are times that I don’t want foamed milk, I don’t want a just a swig of coffee, and I certainly don’t want that swig of coffee -- espresso -- diluted with hot water, I just want a cup of black coffee -- filter coffee as I’ve learned. Impossible to find in Spain and Portugal and many places in the UK, except at Starbucks. There have been many European mornings after a late night that I thanked God (and Howard Schultz) for their aggressive international expansion. So I was surprised and thrilled (ecstatic, really) to find an actual Portlandia-like coffee pourover place, complete with Chemexes and Hario kettles, in Aberdeen on Saturday morning. Foodstory Cafe. I found it by Googling “Hipster Aberdeen”. Yes, really. Sounds silly/absurd but it works. I’ve used that search term in many cities and more times than not been happy with the results.</li>\r\n 	<li>Our hotel in Aberdeen was nice, except for one thing. The tub had one of those little half wall tub screens instead of a shower curtain. There should be a YouTube video on how to shower in those, because everytime I try, I hose down the sink and everything on it. Perhaps I’m too large. Why this instead of a shower curtain?</li>\r\n 	<li>Sitting in a restaurant our last night in St Andrews, our waitress -- very nice person, very good service -- had just a hint of an Eastern European accent. I wanted to ask her where she’s from, but in post-Brexit Britain, it felt rude to ask that. Now that’s not a snarky comment about the results of the vote -- the tough thing about democracy is that everyone\'s vote counts and needs to be respected, not just the people who agree with us. But you can feel a change -- just a bit...</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Back in the US, I continue to struggle with my tendency to bitch tweet. On one flight, I was able to hold back during a 20 min wait for a gate on United, though I did provide “frank” feedback on the customer service survey they sent me a couple of days later. But the next week, on my third straight delayed United flight, I just couldn’t control myself. I understood when we had to return to the gate to manually start the remaining engine -- jets often taxi out using just one engine in order to save fuel, which makes perfect sense. United did a good job of finding us a gate -- not easy at ORD -- and was pretty quick with the maintenance crew. Where I lost it, though, was when it took longer to download the updated data to the plane computer than the whole return to the gate and manually start the engine bit. To the pilot’s credit, he did a good job of explaining the situation and the status, and didn’t hide in the cabin when we were de-planing.</li>\r\n 	<li>Marc Loehrwald, a long-time listener, sent me a note asking “Would you consider this gentlemen solving his problems with Verizon over speakerphone in the otherwise quite empty and peaceful Lounge at JFK worth bitch tweeting…?” accompanied by a picture of a guy sitting alone among couple of dozen chairs. Bitch subtweeting! I should’ve done that to the guy behind me who had his feet up on the back of my seat the entire flight from BWI to ORD. Not a kid, a guy in his mid-50’s!. Marc, you’ve taken my bitch tweeting to a whole new level!</li>\r\n 	<li>Over the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/12/20/podcast-119-digital-security-on-the-road-us-airports-getting-better/\" target=\"_blank\">past </a>few episodes, we’ve been talking about VPNs -- virtual private networks -- as a way to improve your security when you travel. VPNs encrypt your network traffic -- always a good thing over public and hotel WiFi -- and will also “tunnel” your traffic through the Internet, making it look like you’re accessing the Internet from the VPN end-point. For corporate users, this makes you look like you’re accessing the Internet from your office, allowing you to use systems inside your corporate firewall. For many international travelers, it gives you a way to watch, say, TV shows that are licensed to Netflix in the US but not in other countries. All the VPN products I’ve used have been software-based -- my company uses a Cisco VPN, while on my last trip to China, I used ExpressVPN to tunnel under the Great Firewall and post pictures to Facebook. A company called Homing Systems used Kickstarter to launch a hardware-based VPN product called AlwaysHome. They sent me a sample to try out. It’s a pair of USB dongles. You connect one to your home router -- I have it plugged into my Uverse box. I plugged the second one into the BT router in my daughter’s flat in St Andrews. She fired up her Netflix account and was able to continue her “Criminal Minds” binge, a show not on UK Netflix, without a problem. In earlier testing, I found AlwaysHome was a bit more fiddly when it needed to connect first through a password portal -- the typical set up at a hotel. It would connect, but took a bit more work. When the connection nailed up, though, the performance was solid. <a href=\"http://www.homingsystems.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Homing Systems</a>’ web site calls it “Space Shifting”. I think that’s the right positioning. I think it’s quicker to fire up a software VPN client for a quick session at Starbucks. The AlwaysHome dongle setup seems more suited for a more sustained session. Check out the show notes for links to Homing Systems.</li>\r\n 	<li><em>Homing Systems sent me a AlwaysHome Duo free of charge for me to review. I was not paid for this review. The opinions expressed in this episode are my own. </em></li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/spinmeister/53428\">Somewhere</a> by spinmeister (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license. Ft: DJ Vadim</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Craft Beer Hunting</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>My son and I hang out in his apartment in Chicago\'s Lake View neighborhood and talk about finding good beer in out-of-the-way places</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/48915\">Like Music (cdk Mix)</a> by cdk (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/\">Attribution Share-Alike (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Phasenwandler</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>I Hate Rick Steves</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Not personally, of course. I’m sure he’s a nice guy who doesn’t kick dogs. I guess to be more precise, I hate what he’s done to some of my vacations.</li>\r\n 	<li>Portugal is the most recent example. Preparing for our trip, my wife read a number of Lisbon travel guides, include Rick Steves. Rick advises his Lisbon travelers to do the day trip out to Sintra, the castle-filled UNESCO World Heritage Site, on Mondays when all the Lisbon museums are closed. So Monday morning, we get up early, go across the street for our standard breakfast of coffee and pastel de nata (egg custard tarts to die for), and hit the train. Standing room only. We get off the train in Sintra. All we see are older Americans with sensible haircuts, plastic rimmed glasses, and hiking shoes. It’s like we walking through an NPR listener convention in Ann Arbor, MI. And they’re all wearing their backpacks swung around in front to protect themselves from pickpockets and thieves. Except no local could penetrate the phalanx of blue book-wielding Steve-heads. Lucky for us, most of them followed Rick’s advice to catch the bus to the top of the hill. We decided we needed to work off that egg custard, and so broke away from the blue book brigade and walked up the road.</li>\r\n 	<li>I don’t begrudge Rick Steves his success -- good for him; he seems to have worked hard for it. But his motto -- “Europe through the back door” -- can’t really apply anymore when he has millions of readers trying to walk through it. The same thing happened to Lonely Planet. What was once the hip, backpacker’s guide to cool spots now leads people to mainstream tourism spots just by its recommendations because it’s Amazon’s best selling travel guide series.</li>\r\n 	<li>I think we successfully avoided the Steve-o’s on this trip to Scotland. Aberdeen and the Northeast Highlands are nowhere to be found in Rick Steves’ Scotland, and I can’t say that I heard too many North American accents during that part of our trip -- save for the one day we drove down to Dunnottar Castle, but that’s got to be one of the main tourist draws in that part of Scotland. I heard almost as much German as I did American twang.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’ve tended, more and more, to use local Google searches rather than guide books. Google often surfaces more local content, and limiting the results to the past year makes sure it’s current. But even this might not be “back door” enough. The barista in the Aberdeen coffee shop that I found through my “Hipster Aberdeen” Google search did mention seeing a surprising number of Americans recently. I wonder if my “Hipster” search strategy has gone mainstream.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #124</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/\">ccMixter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_124.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #125 — Uber Driver Stories; Overseas for the Election','','inherit','closed','closed','','1666-revision-v1','','','2016-11-22 20:25:44','2016-11-23 01:25:44','',1666,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/11/22/1666-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1669,1,'2016-11-22 20:35:12','2016-11-23 01:35:12','[caption id=\"attachment_1667\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/IMG_0201.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1667\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/IMG_0201-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"An aggressive Uber Pool driver\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> An aggressive Uber Pool driver[/caption]\r\n\r\nBack from 10 days in Tuscany where, among other things, we thought we\'d avoid all the noise of the US presidential election. we succeeded... almost. One of my latest travel hobbies has been to quiz Uber drivers for their life stories. It makes for interesting rides to and from the airport.We also continue the ongoing thread about travel safety. This time, we talk about using Bluetooth in rental cars. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_125.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/285624579\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #124:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the Sheraton Hotel and Conference Center in Framingham, MA. Just back from 10 mostly beautiful sunny days in Scotland. Flew United to Edinburgh via Newark on the the way out, but on the way back, paid an extra $200 for the luxury of skipping the Immigration lines there. Given my weekly experiences in Newark’s Terminal A at the beginning of this year, I can only imagine the Immigration hall as being a mash-up of the dungeons from all the Saw movies done in that frighteningly absurd sort of way that only the TSA can pull off. Think the LAX security lines without laid-back people, with that Jersey edge. Even with the Global Entry line cut, that was not the final memory I wanted from what had been a nice trip.</li>\r\n 	<li>My wife and I kinda ran the same play we did last year when we dropped our daughter off at University of St Andrews. Grabbed a car -- Hertz gave us a new Nissan X-Terra -- nice car, enough space for the bags my daughter brought over with her, but would be a lumbering beast among Fiat 500s later in the week when driving some of the single lane roads in the Highlands. I like to think I’m getting better at driving in the UK -- driving on the left and shifting with my left hand. No curb bumping or wide left-hand turns this time coming out of the airport. Stopped off at the mall 5 min from the airport for a Starbucks coffee and a couple of EE SIM cards -- £15 for 2GB of data, unlimited texts and, I dunno, 500 voice minutes, which for a week, is pretty much unlimited -- $20 at the current post-Brexit bargain basement exchange rate.</li>\r\n 	<li>After lunch and unloading our daughter, my wife and I drove up the coast for a few days of walking -- not hiking with packs and crampons, but trail walking. We stayed the weekend in Aberdeen because… we’d never been there before. It was a nice town. Went out to the Brewdog brewery for a tour and a couple of beers and then out walking it off along a North Sea trail. We also spent time in Cairngorms National Park on Balmoral getting blown out of our jackets by gale force winds while looking for the Queen in her Range Rover, and then straight up north to the coast -- through Banff, Portsoy, and Cullen for a bit more coastal trail walking. And then back down to St Andrews for the last couple of days doing the typical stuff parents do when they visit their kid at college -- take them out to nice restaurants, buy them groceries, and in our case, say good-bye until Christmas break.</li>\r\n 	<li>Flying out of Edinburgh airport on Saturday morning was surprisingly not a hassle. It’s not a huge airport -- mostly seems to be mostly budget airlines -- Ryanair, easyJet -- but United and American fly a couple of 757s in, and I saw an Etihad 787 -- jealous. The ticketing/check-in area is a bit of a cluster; gives a bad first impression. But once you get up the escalator and headed toward security, it’s much nicer -- a low hassle pass through security, and good shops and restaurants.</li>\r\n 	<li>It always strikes me how much more automated some of the European airports have become. At Edinburgh, there’s no security person checking your ticket before security. Instead, there’s a gate and a bar code reader. You scan your boarding pass. If it’s valid, the gate drops and you walk through. There are security people watching for gate jumpers and tailgaters, but there’s about a half-dozen automated gates, so there was no queue. And then at the X-ray machines, no TSA-like person bringing tubs to the front of the line. Instead, a person points you to one of 5 loading stations, a conveyor system spits out a bin, you load it up, and push it onto the belt that feeds the X-ray machine. Again, less waiting because, instead of a single person loading their tub and putting stuff on the belt, you have 5 people in parallel. If one person is slow, it doesn’t hold up the line. Not quite sure why the TSA, with all its budget and management staff, can’t just copy this.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/48114\">Velvet Green of Mystery (Instrumental)</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Kthugha, Jeris, Martijn de Boer</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Not to turn this into a complete Caledonian podcast, but I did have a few a-ha moments from this trip -\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>The spread of contactless card readers at stores in the UK has spread the acceptance of Apple and Android Pay, which makes not having a chip-&amp;-pin card much less painful (remember, the US cards are chip-&amp;-signature because, I guess, we can’t be trusted to remember 2 4-digit codes). It used to be painful -- or perhaps just embarrassing -- to wait for the Tesco self-service attendant to look at me a bit confused as she gave me a receipt to be signed. Now it’s even faster than a chip-&amp;-pin card -- tap my phone on the card reader, beep, and I’m done. Now they need to replace the little mobile card readers that restaurants use...</li>\r\n 	<li>It’s really tough to find a good cup of brewed black coffee in Europe. Now call me a red-necked Midwesterner, but there are times that I don’t want foamed milk, I don’t want a just a swig of coffee, and I certainly don’t want that swig of coffee -- espresso -- diluted with hot water, I just want a cup of black coffee -- filter coffee as I’ve learned. Impossible to find in Spain and Portugal and many places in the UK, except at Starbucks. There have been many European mornings after a late night that I thanked God (and Howard Schultz) for their aggressive international expansion. So I was surprised and thrilled (ecstatic, really) to find an actual Portlandia-like coffee pourover place, complete with Chemexes and Hario kettles, in Aberdeen on Saturday morning. Foodstory Cafe. I found it by Googling “Hipster Aberdeen”. Yes, really. Sounds silly/absurd but it works. I’ve used that search term in many cities and more times than not been happy with the results.</li>\r\n 	<li>Our hotel in Aberdeen was nice, except for one thing. The tub had one of those little half wall tub screens instead of a shower curtain. There should be a YouTube video on how to shower in those, because everytime I try, I hose down the sink and everything on it. Perhaps I’m too large. Why this instead of a shower curtain?</li>\r\n 	<li>Sitting in a restaurant our last night in St Andrews, our waitress -- very nice person, very good service -- had just a hint of an Eastern European accent. I wanted to ask her where she’s from, but in post-Brexit Britain, it felt rude to ask that. Now that’s not a snarky comment about the results of the vote -- the tough thing about democracy is that everyone\'s vote counts and needs to be respected, not just the people who agree with us. But you can feel a change -- just a bit...</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Back in the US, I continue to struggle with my tendency to bitch tweet. On one flight, I was able to hold back during a 20 min wait for a gate on United, though I did provide “frank” feedback on the customer service survey they sent me a couple of days later. But the next week, on my third straight delayed United flight, I just couldn’t control myself. I understood when we had to return to the gate to manually start the remaining engine -- jets often taxi out using just one engine in order to save fuel, which makes perfect sense. United did a good job of finding us a gate -- not easy at ORD -- and was pretty quick with the maintenance crew. Where I lost it, though, was when it took longer to download the updated data to the plane computer than the whole return to the gate and manually start the engine bit. To the pilot’s credit, he did a good job of explaining the situation and the status, and didn’t hide in the cabin when we were de-planing.</li>\r\n 	<li>Marc Loehrwald, a long-time listener, sent me a note asking “Would you consider this gentlemen solving his problems with Verizon over speakerphone in the otherwise quite empty and peaceful Lounge at JFK worth bitch tweeting…?” accompanied by a picture of a guy sitting alone among couple of dozen chairs. Bitch subtweeting! I should’ve done that to the guy behind me who had his feet up on the back of my seat the entire flight from BWI to ORD. Not a kid, a guy in his mid-50’s!. Marc, you’ve taken my bitch tweeting to a whole new level!</li>\r\n 	<li>Over the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/12/20/podcast-119-digital-security-on-the-road-us-airports-getting-better/\" target=\"_blank\">past </a>few episodes, we’ve been talking about VPNs -- virtual private networks -- as a way to improve your security when you travel. VPNs encrypt your network traffic -- always a good thing over public and hotel WiFi -- and will also “tunnel” your traffic through the Internet, making it look like you’re accessing the Internet from the VPN end-point. For corporate users, this makes you look like you’re accessing the Internet from your office, allowing you to use systems inside your corporate firewall. For many international travelers, it gives you a way to watch, say, TV shows that are licensed to Netflix in the US but not in other countries. All the VPN products I’ve used have been software-based -- my company uses a Cisco VPN, while on my last trip to China, I used ExpressVPN to tunnel under the Great Firewall and post pictures to Facebook. A company called Homing Systems used Kickstarter to launch a hardware-based VPN product called AlwaysHome. They sent me a sample to try out. It’s a pair of USB dongles. You connect one to your home router -- I have it plugged into my Uverse box. I plugged the second one into the BT router in my daughter’s flat in St Andrews. She fired up her Netflix account and was able to continue her “Criminal Minds” binge, a show not on UK Netflix, without a problem. In earlier testing, I found AlwaysHome was a bit more fiddly when it needed to connect first through a password portal -- the typical set up at a hotel. It would connect, but took a bit more work. When the connection nailed up, though, the performance was solid. <a href=\"http://www.homingsystems.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Homing Systems</a>’ web site calls it “Space Shifting”. I think that’s the right positioning. I think it’s quicker to fire up a software VPN client for a quick session at Starbucks. The AlwaysHome dongle setup seems more suited for a more sustained session. Check out the show notes for links to Homing Systems.</li>\r\n 	<li><em>Homing Systems sent me a AlwaysHome Duo free of charge for me to review. I was not paid for this review. The opinions expressed in this episode are my own. </em></li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/spinmeister/53428\">Somewhere</a> by spinmeister (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license. Ft: DJ Vadim</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Craft Beer Hunting</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>My son and I hang out in his apartment in Chicago\'s Lake View neighborhood and talk about finding good beer in out-of-the-way places</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/48915\">Like Music (cdk Mix)</a> by cdk (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/\">Attribution Share-Alike (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Phasenwandler</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>I Hate Rick Steves</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Not personally, of course. I’m sure he’s a nice guy who doesn’t kick dogs. I guess to be more precise, I hate what he’s done to some of my vacations.</li>\r\n 	<li>Portugal is the most recent example. Preparing for our trip, my wife read a number of Lisbon travel guides, include Rick Steves. Rick advises his Lisbon travelers to do the day trip out to Sintra, the castle-filled UNESCO World Heritage Site, on Mondays when all the Lisbon museums are closed. So Monday morning, we get up early, go across the street for our standard breakfast of coffee and pastel de nata (egg custard tarts to die for), and hit the train. Standing room only. We get off the train in Sintra. All we see are older Americans with sensible haircuts, plastic rimmed glasses, and hiking shoes. It’s like we walking through an NPR listener convention in Ann Arbor, MI. And they’re all wearing their backpacks swung around in front to protect themselves from pickpockets and thieves. Except no local could penetrate the phalanx of blue book-wielding Steve-heads. Lucky for us, most of them followed Rick’s advice to catch the bus to the top of the hill. We decided we needed to work off that egg custard, and so broke away from the blue book brigade and walked up the road.</li>\r\n 	<li>I don’t begrudge Rick Steves his success -- good for him; he seems to have worked hard for it. But his motto -- “Europe through the back door” -- can’t really apply anymore when he has millions of readers trying to walk through it. The same thing happened to Lonely Planet. What was once the hip, backpacker’s guide to cool spots now leads people to mainstream tourism spots just by its recommendations because it’s Amazon’s best selling travel guide series.</li>\r\n 	<li>I think we successfully avoided the Steve-o’s on this trip to Scotland. Aberdeen and the Northeast Highlands are nowhere to be found in Rick Steves’ Scotland, and I can’t say that I heard too many North American accents during that part of our trip -- save for the one day we drove down to Dunnottar Castle, but that’s got to be one of the main tourist draws in that part of Scotland. I heard almost as much German as I did American twang.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’ve tended, more and more, to use local Google searches rather than guide books. Google often surfaces more local content, and limiting the results to the past year makes sure it’s current. But even this might not be “back door” enough. The barista in the Aberdeen coffee shop that I found through my “Hipster Aberdeen” Google search did mention seeing a surprising number of Americans recently. I wonder if my “Hipster” search strategy has gone mainstream.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #124</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/\">ccMixter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_124.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #125 — Uber Driver Stories; Overseas for the Election','','inherit','closed','closed','','1666-revision-v1','','','2016-11-22 20:35:12','2016-11-23 01:35:12','',1666,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/11/22/1666-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1670,1,'2016-11-22 22:57:50','2016-11-23 03:57:50','[caption id=\"attachment_1667\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/IMG_0201.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1667\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/IMG_0201-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"An aggressive Uber Pool driver\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> An aggressive Uber Pool driver[/caption]\r\n\r\nBack from 10 days in Tuscany where, among other things, we thought we\'d avoid all the noise of the US presidential election. We succeeded... almost. One of my latest travel hobbies has been to quiz Uber drivers for their life stories. It makes for interesting rides to and from the airport. We also continue the ongoing thread about travel safety. This time, we talk about using Bluetooth in rental cars. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_125.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/285624579\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]','Podcast #125 — Uber Driver Stories; Overseas for the Election','','inherit','closed','closed','','1666-revision-v1','','','2016-11-22 22:57:50','2016-11-23 03:57:50','',1666,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/11/22/1666-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1671,1,'2016-11-22 23:05:26','2016-11-23 04:05:26','[caption id=\"attachment_1667\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/IMG_0201.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1667\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/IMG_0201-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"An aggressive Uber Pool driver\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> An aggressive Uber Pool driver[/caption]\r\n\r\nBack from 10 days in Tuscany where, among other things, we thought we\'d avoid all the noise of the US presidential election. We succeeded... almost. One of my latest travel hobbies has been to quiz Uber drivers for their life stories. It makes for interesting rides to and from the airport. We also continue the ongoing thread about travel safety. This time, we talk about using Bluetooth in rental cars. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_125.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/294360507\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n','Podcast #125 — Uber Driver Stories; Overseas for the Election','','inherit','closed','closed','','1666-revision-v1','','','2016-11-22 23:05:26','2016-11-23 04:05:26','',1666,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/11/22/1666-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1672,1,'2016-11-22 23:07:47','2016-11-23 04:07:47','[caption id=\"attachment_1585\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/calvin_PC.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1585\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/calvin_PC-300x172.jpg\" alt=\"Cat-based cyber-security solution\" width=\"300\" height=\"172\" /></a> Cat-based cyber-security solution[/caption]\r\n\r\nHere\'s a little something to keep you entertained while you navigate the holiday airport lines. We talk about digital security on the road -- what\'s the right balance between hassle and hack? We also dig into JD Power\'s latest <a href=\"http://www.jdpower.com/press-releases/2015-north-america-airport-satisfaction-study\" target=\"_blank\">airport satisfaction survey</a>. They report a tick up in traveler experience and, for the most part, I think they have it right. We also cover Spirit Airlines\' growth and the planned expansion of US immigration pre-clearance. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_119.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_119.mp3\"]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #119:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, cranking out one last episode to keep you occupied while you navigate the holiday security lines while trying to get to -- or away from family. Myself, I’m settling for the Christmas break after doing a day trip yesterday to Philadelphia. I’m taking a break from O’Hare until January.</li>\r\n	<li>No really remarkable travel since the last episode, just trips to Cleveland, Vegas, and Boston. When I was flying out of Vegas last week, I hit the <a href=\"http://thecenturionlounge.com/location/LAS\">Amex Centurion Lounge</a> for a couple of conference calls before boarding. It’s free entry with a Platinum Card, and so far and beyond any Admirals Club or Sky Club or United Club. It’s not quite as hip/a bit more button-down than Virgin Atlantic’s Upper Lounge in Heathrow, but the comfort, the free buffet and open bar just are just as good. Highly recommended. I just wish there were more of them.</li>\r\n	<li>When I’m flying into Boston, I’m actually heading out 45 minutes west, close to Worcester. Now that’s a 45 minute drive out I-90 when I land at 9 or 10 in the morning. When I land at 5 in the evening, it’s a whole different story. I touch down at Logan, flip out of airplane mode and immediately open Waze. How bad is the traffic? How about <i>an hour</i> and 45 minute drive? Not looking forward to that parking lot, so I threaded my way over to Chelsea. Found a great little microbrewery complete with real live Boston Irish patrons and sample 1, 2, 4 of their beers. Then I walked up a couple of blocks to a Central American joint underneath a highway overpass. Had a great plate of food for less than $10.  I’ve spent a few dinner times wandering around nearby neighborhoods -- Charlestown, the Seaport District as well as Chelsea -- waiting for Waze to tell me when I-90’s traffic tantrum had subsided.</li>\r\n	<li>Probably the biggest travel event this week wasn’t mine but my daughter’s. It’s her first solo flight -- returning from her first semester at Univ of St Andrews, flying Aer Lingus from Edinburgh to Chicago by way of Dublin. It’s a big adjustment in a couple of ways. First, of course, she has to figure out a new airport by herself. She’s never been through Dublin before, but I thought a smaller airport would be a better first solo than trying to navigate the start of holiday traffic at Heathrow. But she does now have to pay attention to what’s going on rather than just following in my slipstream. The second adjustment is a bit more of a First World problem -- flying as as plain old passenger, a villager, rather than tagging along with me through the Gold or Platinum baggage check lines and pre-boarding. It’s a tough come-down, but I did soften the blow a little bit. I paid her Global Entry fee as a going away gift.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- Dive Deep (Loveshadow remix) by spinningmerkaba (c) 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/50488 Ft: Loveshadow</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Not really any commentary on the last episode, though Ian Morgan swung by the Facebook page with adding to the support about British Airways’ stricter carry-on policy\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>“Just listened to your October episode! Picked up your post about BA hand luggage. They have just changed their policy on this to clamp down. I agree it is frustrating especially on lightly loaded widebody aircraft. However, as a regular BA traveller I have lost count of the number of times BA flights have been delayed whilst cabin crew offload hand luggage, especially since BA introduced \"hand baggage only\" fares. Before the change, I never saw BA using the size gauges - these days they use them much more frequently. It\'s part of the steady decline of BA from a full service airline to a low cost carriers. Just be grateful that you got a 767 instead of an A321 with new \'spacesaver\' seats with a 29\" seat pitch!!</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>Ian, I think you’ve nailed it -- the descent of full-service carriers into the low-cost, low-service ring of travel hell created by Ryan Air and Spirit Airlines.  I’ve talked about this before -- a frequent traveler can’t fathom why someone would subject themselves to the hassles that Ryan and Spirit travelers endure. A recent <a href=\"http://www.chicagobusiness.com/article/20151205/ISSUE01/312059993/can-you-guess-whats-the-third-biggest-airline-at-ohare\">Crain’s Chicago article</a> about Spirit said just over half -- 58 % -- of their flights into ORD arrived on time in the first 9 months of this year. I fly at least 3 weeks out of 4. American Airlines’ 79% on-time percentage into ORD is only just acceptable; I’d go postal at 58%. But yet Spirit is now the 3rd largest airline at ORD after United and American. Working out of just two shared gates, it’s bigger than Delta. But then I remembered <a href=\"http://qz.com/533501/half-of-american-airlines-revenue-came-from-13-of-its-customers/\">some comments</a> made by the president of American Airlines during an analysts call right around the time American was doing the final merger of res systems with US Air. He said that half of American’s revenue last year came from the 87% of its customers that only flew them once. 50% of American’s revenue came from passengers that see air travel as a commodity and are looking for the lowest cost carriage between two points. And so for 50% of their revenue, American isn’t competing against United or Delta, they’re competing with Spirit.  It explains Delta’s Spirit-like Basic Economy offering, and the expectation that American and United will follow in 2016. And, I assume BA’s “hand baggage” fees that Ian mentions. The challenge, though, is how do you compete for the 87% of your passengers buying a commodity while also serving the remaining 13% of your passengers, who contribute the other 50% of your revenue, and value the little things like a seat that reclines a bit and a flight that arrives on time -- all in the same plane? Spirit doesn’t have that problem because they’ll never get that 13%. American, BA, Delta have the tougher problem.</li>\r\n	<li>Connecting through Dublin airport, my daughter cleared US immigration and customs in there in Ireland and then just popped out at the one domestic baggage claim in ORD’s Terminal 5 -- the International Terminal. Kinda similar to what they’ve been doing at Toronto’s Pearson Airport since forever -- or at least the 90’s when I was flying through there weekly. But there, American’s YYZ-ORD flight would land in Terminal 3, just like a flight from, say, Buffalo, and you’d make your connection or just walk out to the cab line. Handy for the regular traveler, but if you’ve dropped the $100 Global Entry fee, immigration lines at, say, ORD, aren’t any worse than they are in Toronto or Dublin. Indeed, my daughter was bummed that she went through US Preclearance so soon, because food and shopping choices on the US side of Preclearance were a lot thinner than on the Irish side. And I think that’ll be the problem if the TSA follows through on their announced expansion of Preclearance -- from what is mostly Canadian, Irish, and Caribbean airports to 10 much larger airports, including Tokyo, Amsterdam, Madrid, London Heathrow. If you’re flying US carriers out of European airports, you’re already being put into a de facto American ghetto -- typically flying out of the most remote gates, with the longest walks from security and airport lounges, and the fewest food and shopping amenities. Walling it off to create the secured facilities to support Preclearance just formalizes it.  The DHS secretary calls it a “win-win” for travelers. I think it’s just squeezing the balloon -- making wait time go down in the US, but go up in places like Narita and Heathrow. It’s one thing to miss a connection in ORD due to immigration delays. Odds are there’s another flight you can catch within a couple of hours. It’s a whole other thing if you miss that once a day flight home from, say, Amsterdam.</li>\r\n	<li>Thanks to El Niño, it’s been a warm start to the winter -- at least in North America. But soon enough, the temps will drop and the winter coats will start competing with carry-ons for overhead bin space. Last winter, while de-planing (what a weird verb construction!), someone handed me my black overcoat -- it was wedged in front of their suitcase. I threw it over my arm as I stepped out into the aisle, grabbed my carry-on, and hoofed it out of the plane, power-walking toward the cab line. It wasn’t until I stepped outside that I stopped to put my coat on and… it wasn’t my coat. I should’ve checked when it was handed to me, but I didn’t want to be that guy who stops <i>in the aisle</i> to put his jacket on. I went to Lost &amp; Found. The clerk called the gate, where the guy with my coat was standing, trying to find his coat. We got lucky. It took us about 10 minutes to sort everything out. He came down to Lost &amp; Found to swap coats. If it had been warmer out, like this week, I might not have put my coat on at all and gotten home for noticing the switch. Black bags, black coats. Love that black hides a lot of sins -- scuffs, dirt, extra pounds. Don’t love its ubiquity on an airplane. Keep your eyes on your stuff in these holiday crowds. Don’t want “Lost” to be the new black.</li>\r\n	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- Absolutely Clear (ft Jeris &amp; Goldfish) by SackJo22 (c) 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/45578 Ft: Jeris, Goldfish</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Digital Security On The Road</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Digital security, cyber security. I don’t know about you, but I’ve kinda hit security breach fatigue. On Thursday, yet another company announced a credit card breach. <a href=\"http://krebsonsecurity.com/2015/12/banks-card-breach-at-landrys-restaurants/\">This time</a> it’s Landry’s who runs Bubba Gumps and Morton’s Steakhouse and another 15 or so restaurant brands. I don’t frequent Landry’s brands that much, so I’m hoping that this breach doesn’t mean I have to replace one of my credit cards and again have to go through the goat rodeo of changing account numbers for all my autobills. But it still does reinforce that feeling the cyber security is not a matter of “if” but “when”</li>\r\n	<li>But even if it’s a matter of “when”, I’d still like to postpone the “when” as long as possible. And traveling -- certainly during the holidays -- there’s a lot of opportunity to bring on the “when” if you’re not just a bit thoughtful. There’s also a balance between inconvenience -- the cost of being more digitally secure -- and the probability of being “breached” (can I say that without having to flag this as “explicit” in iTunes?).</li>\r\n	<li>You could always go “old school” -- like 10 years ago when there was damn little public WiFi, no iPhones -- nothing to keep us entertained as we shuffled through the TSA lines other than trading snarky remarks with other line sufferers. Or you could go the “burner” route -- using disposable phones and a temporary PC, which is what many business travelers to China still do -- doing a complete wipe of their phones and PCs before and after each visit because they just expect to get hacked no matter what anti-virus and other safety precautions they take. But if all you’re doing is going from, say, San Francisco to Boston to see your family, these seem a bit “overkill” -- definitely not balancing the cost-benefit trade-off. I’m fairly lazy about this stuff, but there are a few precautions I do take.</li>\r\n	<li>First, I never do any financial stuff over public WiFi -- no checking my bank account or credit card activity over an airport or Starbucks WiFi, or a hotel network at all -- whether WiFi or jacked into an Ethernet port. Even if the URL is showing https -- a encrypted web connection -- there’s just too many ways those networks or web sites can be misconfigured. Some folks will tell you to use a VPN. I used one in China, but it seems a bit too much in the US. If I have to do some banking, I’ll use my iPhone over the mobile carrier network -- AT&amp;T in the US, Orange when I was in Spain, .... I know it’s not perfect, but, as the cyber security guys like to say, it “reduces the attack surface” at what is considered one of the most vulnerable points.</li>\r\n	<li>I rarely use hotel PCs -- the ones set up in lobbies or the concierge lounges. I mean, if I have a smartphone, a tablet, and a PC, why do I need to use a public PC that’s open to anyone loading up a key-logger that’ll capture anything you type -- including logins and passwords. If I do, for some odd reason, need to use one, I never log into anything. Maybe just search for a restaurant, but that’s about it.</li>\r\n	<li>I always make sure that I’ve configured my phone and PC e-mail clients to use encrypted communications between servers -- using IMAP and SMTP over SSL (<i>&gt;now</i> we’re talking security because we used more acronyms than words in that last sentence) for my own mail servers; GMail does it automatically for you. But I don’t encrypt the message itself -- no PGP or signed MIME. There’s nothing in my e-mails that is <i>that</i> confidential to go through that hassle.</li>\r\n	<li>I have recently, though, turned on two-factor authentication for every service that offers it -- GMail, some of my financial accounts, Dropbox, …. I resisted it for a long time -- again, thought it was more hassle than it was worth. But then I started getting some odd password reset e-mail requests -- that I didn’t request.</li>\r\n	<li>I go back and forth on using smartphone or printed boarding passes. Smartphone boarding passes are quicker -- you can get it while in the cab to the airport rather than queueing up for a kiosk -- but I’ve had more than a few times when my boarding pass disappeared from the app during an extended flight delay. Printed boarding passes are easier to scan at the gate -- especially when juggling a backpack, a hot coffee, and a winter coat -- but there’s recently been a <a href=\"http://www.economist.com/blogs/gulliver/2015/10/security-check\">bit</a> of a <a href=\"http://krebsonsecurity.com/2015/10/whats-in-a-boarding-pass-barcode-a-lot/#more-31317\">stir</a> about the amount of personal information someone could pull out of the bar codes. Maybe I’m not paranoid enough, but that one feels a bit of a stretch. I do whatever’s the most convenient -- usually the smartphone route. But when I do print out a boarding pass, I keep it in my jacket pocket -- just to be sure.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- Drops of H2O ( The Filtered Water Treatment ) by J.Lang (c) 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/djlang59/37792 Ft: Airtone</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>US Airports Getting Better?</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>While I poked at London Heathrow a couple of <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/10/11/podcast-117-random-thoughts-about-eggs-scotland-car-rentals/\" target=\"_blank\">episodes</a> back, it’s an article of faith among international travelers that North American airports pale in comparison to airports in Asia/Pac -- anyone flying from Beijing or Singapore to LAX needs a light sedative to cushion the shock -- and pretty much trail behind most European airports too. But JD Power, in their <a href=\"http://www.jdpower.com/press-releases/2015-north-america-airport-satisfaction-study\" target=\"_blank\">airport satisfaction survey</a> released last week, said that things are getting better. Not hugely better -- a 5-8% increase in their satisfaction score, but any improvement is good news.</li>\r\n	<li>Power <a href=\"http://www.jdpower.com/ratings/study/North-America-Airport-Satisfaction-Study/763ENG/Large-Airports/1617\">rated</a> large- and medium-sized North American airports -- 60 US airports and Toronto Pearson, Calgary, Montreal, and Vancouver. They surveyed travelers around 6 attributes of their airport experience. In order of importance, they are: the state of the airport facilities themselves, how easy it is to get to the airport, security, baggage claim, the check-in experience, and available food and shopping. A frequent traveler might re-shuffle the order -- maybe drop baggage claim and the check-in experience to the bottom because we rarely check a bag -- but I think it’s a good list.</li>\r\n	<li>And I think some of Power’s conclusions line up with things I’m seeing on the road. Like improvements in terminal facilities. In the last episode, I gave United a shout-out for the upgrade of their gate space in Boston Logan. I also think San Francisco’s complete rebuild of Terminal 2 is excellent and stands up to any airport in Asia or Europe.</li>\r\n	<li>Power found what is a pretty logical connection between satisfaction and the time you spend in lines. As I said earlier, I rarely deal with check-in lines, but I think the TSA’s rollout of Precheck has provided a quantum level improvement in the security experience -- though at times, it feels like its popularity is on the verge of overwhelming it and sliding back. But even for those in the regular lines, I’ve seen TSA folks working hard to re-balance lines -- especially at ORD.</li>\r\n	<li>Power split their ratings between large and medium airports. Their winning large airport is Portland, Oregon. I’ve done a bit of flying into PDX and while I wouldn’t have, unprompted, chosen it as the top large airport, I don’t argue with their conclusion. It’s a nice facility; easy mass transit (a TravelCommons’ fixation) via the MAX light rail; I disagree with its top marks for security check, but in how many other airports can I buy a growler of craft beer to go? The bottom four -- those I could’ve ticked off with missing a beat -- LaGuardia, Newark, LAX, and O’Hare. Old terminals, awkward layouts, leaking roofs, lousy food. Interesting they’re also the major airports for the US’s largest cities.</li>\r\n	<li>The medium airport winner was a tie between Dallas’ downtown Love Field and Fort Myers’ Southwest Florida. This one, I dunno. I’ve used both of these airports a lot. Love has gone through a good sized facelift and I haven’t been through it since they finished, so I may be working off out-of-date impressions, but even though it’s close to downtown, it’s a pain to get to. Now Fort Myers is easy to get to -- and I love the short walk to the rental car facility -- but security screening can back way up and the food choice isn’t great. From my personal experience, I’d give top marks to Nashville. I mean, how can you go wrong with live music -- good live music -- as you’re walking down the terminal.</li>\r\n	<li>Power’s most obvious finding is that dissatisfied customers are very vocal. Those who rate overall satisfaction 1 (on a 10-point scale) make an average of 13 negative comments about their experience. Anyone who follows me on Twitter knows how true that is.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #119</li>\r\n	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/\">Podshow Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\r\n	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_119.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #119 — Digital Security On The Road; US Airports Getting Better?','','inherit','closed','closed','','1579-revision-v1','','','2016-11-22 23:07:47','2016-11-23 04:07:47','',1579,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/11/22/1579-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1673,1,'2016-11-22 23:08:46','2016-11-23 04:08:46','[caption id=\"attachment_1667\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/IMG_0201.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1667\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/IMG_0201-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"An aggressive Uber Pool driver\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> An aggressive Uber Pool driver[/caption]\r\n\r\nBack from 10 days in Tuscany where, among other things, we thought we\'d avoid all the noise of the US presidential election. We succeeded... almost. One of my latest travel hobbies has been to quiz Uber drivers for their life stories. It makes for interesting rides to and from the airport. We also continue the ongoing thread about travel safety. This time, we talk about using Bluetooth in rental cars. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_125.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n','Podcast #125 — Uber Driver Stories; Overseas for the Election','','inherit','closed','closed','','1666-revision-v1','','','2016-11-22 23:08:46','2016-11-23 04:08:46','',1666,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/11/22/1666-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1674,1,'2016-11-22 23:09:00','2016-11-23 04:09:00','[caption id=\"attachment_1667\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/IMG_0201.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1667\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/IMG_0201-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"An aggressive Uber Pool driver\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> An aggressive Uber Pool driver[/caption]\r\n\r\nBack from 10 days in Tuscany where, among other things, we thought we\'d avoid all the noise of the US presidential election. We succeeded... almost. One of my latest travel hobbies has been to quiz Uber drivers for their life stories. It makes for interesting rides to and from the airport. We also continue the ongoing thread about travel safety. This time, we talk about using Bluetooth in rental cars. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_125.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/294360507\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n','Podcast #125 — Uber Driver Stories; Overseas for the Election','','inherit','closed','closed','','1666-revision-v1','','','2016-11-22 23:09:00','2016-11-23 04:09:00','',1666,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/11/22/1666-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1677,1,'2016-12-03 15:09:35','2016-12-03 20:09:35','[caption id=\"attachment_1660\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/5777D166-DB5F-4FAF-A0D5-84AC87F58834.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1660\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/5777D166-DB5F-4FAF-A0D5-84AC87F58834-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Empty Beer Glasses\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> I Think We\'ve Bagged Our Limit[/caption]\r\n\r\nMy son joins the podcast to talk about hunting down craft beers. I then talk about a few \"a-ha\" moments from my recent trip to Scotland, my on-going struggles with bitch tweeting, a VPN hardware product that could come in handy, and why I\'ve come to hate the Rick Steves travel juggernaut. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_124.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/285624579\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #124:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the Sheraton Hotel and Conference Center in Framingham, MA. Just back from 10 mostly beautiful sunny days in Scotland. Flew United to Edinburgh via Newark on the the way out, but on the way back, paid an extra $200 for the luxury of skipping the Immigration lines there. Given my weekly experiences in Newark’s Terminal A at the beginning of this year, I can only imagine the Immigration hall as being a mash-up of the dungeons from all the Saw movies done in that frighteningly absurd sort of way that only the TSA can pull off. Think the LAX security lines without laid-back people, with that Jersey edge. Even with the Global Entry line cut, that was not the final memory I wanted from what had been a nice trip.</li>\r\n 	<li>My wife and I kinda ran the same play we did last year when we dropped our daughter off at University of St Andrews. Grabbed a car -- Hertz gave us a new Nissan X-Terra -- nice car, enough space for the bags my daughter brought over with her, but would be a lumbering beast among Fiat 500s later in the week when driving some of the single lane roads in the Highlands. I like to think I’m getting better at driving in the UK -- driving on the left and shifting with my left hand. No curb bumping or wide left-hand turns this time coming out of the airport. Stopped off at the mall 5 min from the airport for a Starbucks coffee and a couple of EE SIM cards -- £15 for 2GB of data, unlimited texts and, I dunno, 500 voice minutes, which for a week, is pretty much unlimited -- $20 at the current post-Brexit bargain basement exchange rate.</li>\r\n 	<li>After lunch and unloading our daughter, my wife and I drove up the coast for a few days of walking -- not hiking with packs and crampons, but trail walking. We stayed the weekend in Aberdeen because… we’d never been there before. It was a nice town. Went out to the Brewdog brewery for a tour and a couple of beers and then out walking it off along a North Sea trail. We also spent time in Cairngorms National Park on Balmoral getting blown out of our jackets by gale force winds while looking for the Queen in her Range Rover, and then straight up north to the coast -- through Banff, Portsoy, and Cullen for a bit more coastal trail walking. And then back down to St Andrews for the last couple of days doing the typical stuff parents do when they visit their kid at college -- take them out to nice restaurants, buy them groceries, and in our case, say good-bye until Christmas break.</li>\r\n 	<li>Flying out of Edinburgh airport on Saturday morning was surprisingly not a hassle. It’s not a huge airport -- mostly seems to be mostly budget airlines -- Ryanair, easyJet -- but United and American fly a couple of 757s in, and I saw an Etihad 787 -- jealous. The ticketing/check-in area is a bit of a cluster; gives a bad first impression. But once you get up the escalator and headed toward security, it’s much nicer -- a low hassle pass through security, and good shops and restaurants.</li>\r\n 	<li>It always strikes me how much more automated some of the European airports have become. At Edinburgh, there’s no security person checking your ticket before security. Instead, there’s a gate and a bar code reader. You scan your boarding pass. If it’s valid, the gate drops and you walk through. There are security people watching for gate jumpers and tailgaters, but there’s about a half-dozen automated gates, so there was no queue. And then at the X-ray machines, no TSA-like person bringing tubs to the front of the line. Instead, a person points you to one of 5 loading stations, a conveyor system spits out a bin, you load it up, and push it onto the belt that feeds the X-ray machine. Again, less waiting because, instead of a single person loading their tub and putting stuff on the belt, you have 5 people in parallel. If one person is slow, it doesn’t hold up the line. Not quite sure why the TSA, with all its budget and management staff, can’t just copy this.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/48114\">Velvet Green of Mystery (Instrumental)</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Kthugha, Jeris, Martijn de Boer</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Not to turn this into a complete Caledonian podcast, but I did have a few a-ha moments from this trip -\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>The spread of contactless card readers at stores in the UK has spread the acceptance of Apple and Android Pay, which makes not having a chip-&amp;-pin card much less painful (remember, the US cards are chip-&amp;-signature because, I guess, we can’t be trusted to remember 2 4-digit codes). It used to be painful -- or perhaps just embarrassing -- to wait for the Tesco self-service attendant to look at me a bit confused as she gave me a receipt to be signed. Now it’s even faster than a chip-&amp;-pin card -- tap my phone on the card reader, beep, and I’m done. Now they need to replace the little mobile card readers that restaurants use...</li>\r\n 	<li>It’s really tough to find a good cup of brewed black coffee in Europe. Now call me a red-necked Midwesterner, but there are times that I don’t want foamed milk, I don’t want a just a swig of coffee, and I certainly don’t want that swig of coffee -- espresso -- diluted with hot water, I just want a cup of black coffee -- filter coffee as I’ve learned. Impossible to find in Spain and Portugal and many places in the UK, except at Starbucks. There have been many European mornings after a late night that I thanked God (and Howard Schultz) for their aggressive international expansion. So I was surprised and thrilled (ecstatic, really) to find an actual Portlandia-like coffee pourover place, complete with Chemexes and Hario kettles, in Aberdeen on Saturday morning. Foodstory Cafe. I found it by Googling “Hipster Aberdeen”. Yes, really. Sounds silly/absurd but it works. I’ve used that search term in many cities and more times than not been happy with the results.</li>\r\n 	<li>Our hotel in Aberdeen was nice, except for one thing. The tub had one of those little half wall tub screens instead of a shower curtain. There should be a YouTube video on how to shower in those, because everytime I try, I hose down the sink and everything on it. Perhaps I’m too large. Why this instead of a shower curtain?</li>\r\n 	<li>Sitting in a restaurant our last night in St Andrews, our waitress -- very nice person, very good service -- had just a hint of an Eastern European accent. I wanted to ask her where she’s from, but in post-Brexit Britain, it felt rude to ask that. Now that’s not a snarky comment about the results of the vote -- the tough thing about democracy is that everyone\'s vote counts and needs to be respected, not just the people who agree with us. But you can feel a change -- just a bit...</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Back in the US, I continue to struggle with my tendency to bitch tweet. On one flight, I was able to hold back during a 20 min wait for a gate on United, though I did provide “frank” feedback on the customer service survey they sent me a couple of days later. But the next week, on my third straight delayed United flight, I just couldn’t control myself. I understood when we had to return to the gate to manually start the remaining engine -- jets often taxi out using just one engine in order to save fuel, which makes perfect sense. United did a good job of finding us a gate -- not easy at ORD -- and was pretty quick with the maintenance crew. Where I lost it, though, was when it took longer to download the updated data to the plane computer than the whole return to the gate and manually start the engine bit. To the pilot’s credit, he did a good job of explaining the situation and the status, and didn’t hide in the cabin when we were de-planing.</li>\r\n 	<li>Marc Loehrwald, a long-time listener, sent me a note asking “Would you consider this gentlemen solving his problems with Verizon over speakerphone in the otherwise quite empty and peaceful Lounge at JFK worth bitch tweeting…?” accompanied by a picture of a guy sitting alone among couple of dozen chairs. Bitch subtweeting! I should’ve done that to the guy behind me who had his feet up on the back of my seat the entire flight from BWI to ORD. Not a kid, a guy in his mid-50’s!. Marc, you’ve taken my bitch tweeting to a whole new level!</li>\r\n 	<li>Over the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/12/20/podcast-119-digital-security-on-the-road-us-airports-getting-better/\" target=\"_blank\">past </a>few episodes, we’ve been talking about VPNs -- virtual private networks -- as a way to improve your security when you travel. VPNs encrypt your network traffic -- always a good thing over public and hotel WiFi -- and will also “tunnel” your traffic through the Internet, making it look like you’re accessing the Internet from the VPN end-point. For corporate users, this makes you look like you’re accessing the Internet from your office, allowing you to use systems inside your corporate firewall. For many international travelers, it gives you a way to watch, say, TV shows that are licensed to Netflix in the US but not in other countries. All the VPN products I’ve used have been software-based -- my company uses a Cisco VPN, while on my last trip to China, I used ExpressVPN to tunnel under the Great Firewall and post pictures to Facebook. A company called Homing Systems used Kickstarter to launch a hardware-based VPN product called AlwaysHome. They sent me a sample to try out. It’s a pair of USB dongles. You connect one to your home router -- I have it plugged into my Uverse box. I plugged the second one into the BT router in my daughter’s flat in St Andrews. She fired up her Netflix account and was able to continue her “Criminal Minds” binge, a show not on UK Netflix, without a problem. In earlier testing, I found AlwaysHome was a bit more fiddly when it needed to connect first through a password portal -- the typical set up at a hotel. It would connect, but took a bit more work. When the connection nailed up, though, the performance was solid. <a href=\"http://www.homingsystems.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Homing Systems</a>’ web site calls it “Space Shifting”. I think that’s the right positioning. I think it’s quicker to fire up a software VPN client for a quick session at Starbucks. The AlwaysHome dongle setup seems more suited for a more sustained session. Check out the show notes for links to Homing Systems.</li>\r\n 	<li><em>Homing Systems sent me a AlwaysHome Duo free of charge for me to review. I was not paid for this review. The opinions expressed in this episode are my own. </em></li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/spinmeister/53428\">Somewhere</a> by spinmeister (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license. Ft: DJ Vadim</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Craft Beer Hunting</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>My son and I hang out in his apartment in Chicago\'s Lake View neighborhood and talk about finding good beer in out-of-the-way places</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/48915\">Like Music (cdk Mix)</a> by cdk (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/\">Attribution Share-Alike (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Phasenwandler</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>I Hate Rick Steves</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Not personally, of course. I’m sure he’s a nice guy who doesn’t kick dogs. I guess to be more precise, I hate what he’s done to some of my vacations.</li>\r\n 	<li>Portugal is the most recent example. Preparing for our trip, my wife read a number of Lisbon travel guides, include Rick Steves. Rick advises his Lisbon travelers to do the day trip out to Sintra, the castle-filled UNESCO World Heritage Site, on Mondays when all the Lisbon museums are closed. So Monday morning, we get up early, go across the street for our standard breakfast of coffee and pastel de nata (egg custard tarts to die for), and hit the train. Standing room only. We get off the train in Sintra. All we see are older Americans with sensible haircuts, plastic rimmed glasses, and hiking shoes. It’s like we walking through an NPR listener convention in Ann Arbor, MI. And they’re all wearing their backpacks swung around in front to protect themselves from pickpockets and thieves. Except no local could penetrate the phalanx of blue book-wielding Steve-heads. Lucky for us, most of them followed Rick’s advice to catch the bus to the top of the hill. We decided we needed to work off that egg custard, and so broke away from the blue book brigade and walked up the road.</li>\r\n 	<li>I don’t begrudge Rick Steves his success -- good for him; he seems to have worked hard for it. But his motto -- “Europe through the back door” -- can’t really apply anymore when he has millions of readers trying to walk through it. The same thing happened to Lonely Planet. What was once the hip, backpacker’s guide to cool spots now leads people to mainstream tourism spots just by its recommendations because it’s Amazon’s best selling travel guide series.</li>\r\n 	<li>I think we successfully avoided the Steve-o’s on this trip to Scotland. Aberdeen and the Northeast Highlands are nowhere to be found in Rick Steves’ Scotland, and I can’t say that I heard too many North American accents during that part of our trip -- save for the one day we drove down to Dunnottar Castle, but that’s got to be one of the main tourist draws in that part of Scotland. I heard almost as much German as I did American twang.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’ve tended, more and more, to use local Google searches rather than guide books. Google often surfaces more local content, and limiting the results to the past year makes sure it’s current. But even this might not be “back door” enough. The barista in the Aberdeen coffee shop that I found through my “Hipster Aberdeen” Google search did mention seeing a surprising number of Americans recently. I wonder if my “Hipster” search strategy has gone mainstream.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #124</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/\">ccMixter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_124.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #124 — Craft Beer Hunting; I Hate Rick Steves','','inherit','closed','closed','','1658-revision-v1','','','2016-12-03 15:09:35','2016-12-03 20:09:35','',1658,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/12/03/1658-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1678,1,'2016-12-03 15:27:40','2016-12-03 20:27:40','[caption id=\"attachment_1667\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/IMG_0201.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1667\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/IMG_0201-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"An aggressive Uber Pool driver\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> An aggressive Uber Pool driver[/caption]\r\n\r\nBack from 10 days in Tuscany where, among other things, we thought we\'d avoid all the noise of the US presidential election. We succeeded... almost. One of my latest travel hobbies has been to quiz Uber drivers for their life stories. It makes for interesting rides to and from the airport. We also continue the ongoing thread about travel safety. This time, we talk about using Bluetooth in rental cars. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_125.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/294360507\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n<!--more-->\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #125:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, with a new episode just in time for the TSA Thanksgiving lines. I’m once again thankful that I’m able to avoid O’Hare this week -- the busiest travel week of the year. Since the last episode, I’ve been in Boston, Baltimore, Charlottesville, Hoboken, and, for the first time, I landed at Lehigh Valley Regional Airport in Allentown, PA. I was surprised how nice an airport it is. I was expecting something smaller -- just a handful of gates -- and perhaps a bit dingier -- maybe something along the lines of White Plains, NY. But it was clean and bright with big concourses -- not a lot of people, but a lot of space.</li>\r\n 	<li>Then I had 3 weeks at home -- my longest non-travel streak this year. There is something relaxing about not packing and unpacking. It also makes you realize how much time you lose in the act of travel -- standing in lines, waiting for security, to board the plane, to check in to your hotel, to get a cup of coffee…. The whole time, though, I was looking forward to getting back on the road -- because my next trip was with my wife to Tuscany for our 25th anniversary, revisiting the scene of our honeymoon.</li>\r\n 	<li>We flew into Pisa by way of Munich, another new airport for me. But I was much less impressed by this one. Things were going fine -- nothing special in typical German airport style -- until we hit security. There were a dozen lines that were just crawling. There weren’t that many people trying to go through security -- it was 10 or 11am on a Friday -- but maybe the security union was on a work slowdown because they had to be going out of their way to work that slow. As is my wont, I bitch tweeted that out. Colin McDowell tweeted back -- “Totally agree. Slowest security of any major airport, like Gatwick in the ‘80’s. Shops must be suffering”. And the bars too. I didn’t have time for my traditional German airport breakfast beer.</li>\r\n 	<li>Things got better at Pisa Airport though. This was not a new airport; we had flown in here for our honeymoon. I had booked a Fiat 500 from Hertz for kinda old times sake; we’d driven a Fiat Panda 25 years ago. I was pleasantly surprised to find an Alfa Romeo in the parking slot. Definitely a move up from the Panda. And it was an automatic -- the first time I haven’t driven a stick in Europe. At first I was kinda disappointed, but later, when I was winding through the Tuscan hills and picking my way through rutted dirt roads, I was happy that the car was doing the shifting.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/buy_album.php?id=39CE51194FB95B63577FBFD7E2EC168C99277BD6CE86C10FDC39095666B5D6CF\"><em>Heaven</em></a> by <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=BB22CBFF24501120EEC6ABA18AB0A15FEB05A36360E7FDA122C8D7A5C140F8DC\" rel=\"nofollow\">Los Lonely Boys</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>A <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/08/13/podcast-123-how-to-avoid-travel-delays/\" target=\"_blank\">few episodes</a> back, I complained about having to do an interview for my Global Entry renewal. I’d read online about others getting renewed without the interview, so I was a bit peeved to have to make my way past the lines at the McDonalds in the lower lever of ORD Terminal 5 yet again. But, other than the smell of fries at 9am on a Friday (I’m too old to start my weekends on Thursday nights), it was a fairly painless experience. I was ushered back less than 5 minutes after I’d arrived and had a very straight forward interview with the Customs and Border Protection agent. He was a great guy; good conversation. Asked me a couple of questions -- including one about my stolen passport -- took a new picture and a new set of fingerprints and I was done. 10 minutes later, I was making my way past the McDonalds again. As I thought about it, I had no reason to be peeved. Seems reasonable that they’d want to put an eyeball on me after 5 years.</li>\r\n 	<li>Jim McDonough posted a comment on the TravelCommons web site about my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/09/28/podcast-124-craft-beer-hunting-i-hate-rick-steves/\" target=\"_blank\">Rick Steves rant</a>. Jim writes:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>My wife and I love Rick Steves (we call ourselves Rickheads) and use his books all the time. But I know what you mean about his fans overwhelming a particular place. It’s funny how many people in the States have no idea who he is, but in Europe, Rick Steves sits at the right hand of the father. Get your restaurant or hotel into his book, and you have it made</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>And while I was able to dodge the Rickheads in Aberdeen, I knew I was toast in Tuscany. Even in November, I was shoulder-to-shoulder with older, sensibly dressed, empty-nester Rickheads toting their blue bibles through Pisa, Lucca, and Florence. Only when we were staying on a farm in Chianti a couple of miles up a rutted dirt road were we free of them.</li>\r\n 	<li>David Glickman sent me a note recommending a more detailed guide of Scotland for my next visit:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Living just outside London I am not sure I have never read a Rick Steves Guidebook, but what I recommend getting hold of Peter Irvine’s really excellent guide ‘Scotland The Best’ before your next trip to St.Andrews. My wife and I are regular visitors to the States, and my wife travels to Madison Wi about 6 times a year through ORD so we really enjoy your podcasts. We have just returned from a trip and boy is your country now expensive to us poor post-Brexit Brits!</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>I immediately hit Amazon and ordered the new 2016 edition of <a href=\"https://www.amazon.com/Scotland-Best-Peter-Irvine/dp/0007559348/ref=dp_ob_title_bk\"><em>Scotland The Best</em></a>. Very detailed, with lots of suggestions. Looking forward to giving it a workout on my next visit. And I can imagine the US looks very expensive for pound- and euro-based tourists. The euro dropped another 5% in the week-and-a-half we’ve been back from Italy.</li>\r\n 	<li>About a year ago in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/10/11/podcast-117-random-thoughts-about-eggs-scotland-car-rentals/\" target=\"_blank\">episode #117</a>, I first talked about Revolut, a virtual and real chip-and-pin debit card with great exchange rates. I first used it last fall on a trip to the UK. I’d transfer funds into it using my US debit card and manage conversions with a smartphone app. It was great. But note my use of the past tense. Over the past 3 months, the service has been deteriorating for US users. First, they began charging a 3% fee on fund transfers using US debit cards. I soon found that they only charged the fee if those transfers were in dollars. If I transferred funds in euros or pounds, there was no charge. Weird, but OK, it still worked. But when I tried that trick before my trips to Scotland and Italy, no dice. All US debit transfers were blocked. I suppose I could’ve tried an interbank transfer using something like TransferWise, but that’s way too much of a hassle. They say they “aim to change it ASAP” but it’s been 3 months now and no update. I have to retract my praise for Revolut and delete the app from my iPhone.</li>\r\n 	<li>I mentioned in the last episode, that the lack of a chip-&amp;-pin card in Scotland has become less of a hassle with the spread of contactless card readers that let me use Apple Pay on my iPhone. I didn’t find that same convenience in Italy. I didn’t see one place with a contactless reader. Other than large restaurant bills (we managed to find tables at a few Michelin starred restaurants during our stay), I paid mostly cash. It seemed much less of a hassle.</li>\r\n 	<li>Over the last 3-4 episodes, we had one blurb that’s talked about travel security. Last episode was VPNs, the one before that video jacking. So in this installment of <em>Travel Security</em>, I want to talk about car rentals; specifically, about when you use Bluetooth to pair your smartphone with your rental’s audio system. I do this all the time. It’s safer -- let’s me talk handsfree, avoiding wrecks and tickets. And it lets me listen to podcasts or Pandora or Spotify when I’m driving instead of fiddling around, finding a local radio station that I don’t hate. However, if you do this, you need to remember to delete your pairing when you return your car. There hasn’t been one time when I haven’t gone through and deleted 3-5 pairings before pairing my own. And if you scroll through the devices, they all have personalized names like “Timmy’s iPhone”. And most phones by default will download your contacts to the car when paired. You can turn this default behavior off in an Android phone, but I haven’t found that capabilities with iPhones. Instead, every time I pair my iPhone, I have to remember to flip the switch that prevents it. So for most people, they leave behind a profile in their rental with all of their contacts and phone numbers. That is just bad in so many ways.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://cyberset.cc/artists2.php?tr_release_id=104\"><em>Heaven</em></a> by <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=A951998E6011FA9B2D22387EB3CAC0B5EB05A36360E7FDA122C8D7A5C140F8DC\" rel=\"nofollow\">Electric Skychurch</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Uber Driver Stories</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I find myself taking more and more Ubers as opposed to regular taxi cabs. I like cabs, I like cab drivers, but Uber is usually a better experience. Thumbing the app is so much easier than trying to hail a cab, or finding the number of the local cab company and then dealing with an often(?)/usually(?) cab dispatcher. And the condition of the car is, 9 times out of 10, vastly superior to the beat-up cab I usually get. The Baltimore cabs I’d take from the Inner Harbor to the airport were some of the worst. But then in Chicago I got picked by an Uber driver in a BMW X3 and by a spotless Mercedes SUV at EWR. Indeed, 9 times out of 10 is giving cabs way too much of the benefit of the doubt. I’ve yet to ride in an Uber that was worse than a cab.</li>\r\n 	<li>But the best thing about taking an Uber is driver stories. Every Uber I take, I ask the driver how he/she likes it, how long they’ve been doing it, and what else they do -- if it’s not their full time gig (which is the definite minority)</li>\r\n 	<li>A lotta drivers I talk with are retired. One guy in Vegas told me he was a bit lonely and bored. He wanted to get out of the house, but really had nowhere to go. He didn’t want to gamble or sit in a bar at 10 in the morning, so driving Uber gave him a reason to get off the sofa.</li>\r\n 	<li>A Charlottesville, VA retired fireman drives the late night weekend shift when kids from UVa are willing to pay anything (or willing to charge anything to their parents’ accounts) for a ride home from the bars. He told me he gets huge surge fares, but he’s driving ‘til 3 or 4 in the morning.</li>\r\n 	<li>A woman in Baltimore is a retired teacher and principal. She drives to take a break from studying for her PhD. She too gets bored sitting around the house, and she likes to drive. She told me that it was her husband who got her to sign up for Uber. She was driving him crazy around the house. Another guy, non-retired, who is studying full-time for his CFA exam -- chartered financial analyst -- does the same thing, drives during his study breaks.</li>\r\n 	<li>I find that many morning drivers -- the ones taking me from my hotel to a client site -- are doing a little moonlighting; fitting in a few rides before they go to work, and then again at the end of the day. I was surprised to find out that Uber drivers don’t know your destination until they accept the ride. Thinking about it, it makes sense; keeps drivers from cherry picking, say, rides to the airport. But one woman told me about accepting a ride and finding out it was to some suburb 40 minutes away -- and she only had a quarter tank.</li>\r\n 	<li>Of course, there’s more to ridesharing than Uber. I’ve also used Lyft. During busy times, I’ll fire them both up to see which has less of a surge charge, or a shorter wait time. Most drivers will drive for both. In my unscientific polling, most prefer Lyft but get more traffic from Uber. One driver told my wife he prefers Lyft because the Lyft riders talk more. And then he proceeded to unload his life story on my wife and her friend for the next 40 minutes as they battled traffic into Chicago.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’m always interested in how the gig economy is working for them. For a while, we were reading that the sharing economy, the gig economy of Uber and Airbnb was the next wave. The froth seems to have worn off of that wave, but a lot of the Uber drivers I talk to need that extra money, though often they wonder if it’s worth it. The Mercedes SUV driver who took me from EWR to Hoboken wondered if it was worth hassle of waiting for an airport fare. The only full-time driver I had was in Baltimore, and she said she makes more money delivering packages for Uber than she does delivering passengers, and the packages are much quieter and more pleasant.</li>\r\n 	<li>But as good as these stories are, the best one I recently heard wasn’t from an Uber driver; it was from the manager of the Chianti farm we stayed at for a couple of days during our trip to Italy. He had lived in the Chicago area for about 10 years. He got his PhD in geochemistry at Univ of Illinois and then worked at Argonne National Labs doing research. After a while, he missed his family and the countryside where he’d grown up, so he moved back to Tuscany, married, had a kid, and now manages a cattle farm with a growing sideline in agritourism. Forget driving for Uber. I want to be this guy.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://www.podsafeaudio.com/jamroom/play.php?band_id=1258&amp;song_id=4378&amp;mode=song_hifi\"><em>Shadows</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.podsafeaudio.com/jamroom/bands/1258/\">Antardhyan</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Overseas for the Election</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>My wife and I flew to Italy the Thursday night before the election. We both voted early, so we didn’t shirk our civic duties. What we did do, though, was leave behind the last blast of election ads and media coverage. I mean, the one bad thing about Game 7 of the World Series going into extra innings was that it gave more time for political ads. We were very happy to leave all that noise behind us.</li>\r\n 	<li>On Election Day, we had dinner in a nice restaurant in a small town that was 45 minutes of switchbacks and rutted dirt roads away from our hotel. On the way back, I think we dodged a boar and a deer as we crossed back over the ridge of hills and headed down to our hotel. We went to bed while the polls in the US were still open and didn’t really think a thing about it.</li>\r\n 	<li>I woke up around 7 on Weds morning; Tuesday midnight in Chicago. I glanced at my iPhone and saw a cascade of notifications from the Wall Street Journal and Chicago Tribune about the election results. The election still hadn’t been called, but by the time we sat down for breakfast, it was done. Donald Trump had won.</li>\r\n 	<li>The Austrian guy working the desk and the breakfast (it was a small hotel) laughed when he walked up -- “At least you guys aren’t having a do-over” The July Austrian presidential election was set aside for problems with absentee ballots and they still haven’t done the revote. “Or Spain, going through two elections without getting a government.”</li>\r\n 	<li>Now, TravelCommons has never had a political point-of-view and I’m not about to change that here. I have good friends on both sides of the debate. What I will say is that I, like many others, was surprised by the results given all the predictions we’d heard right up until we were wheels up at ORD. All through breakfast, we refreshed our Twitter feeds and hit the Wall Street Journal and New York Times apps, trying to catch up on the coverage we’d slept through the night before. Where the night before, we were happy not to hear about politics, now we were digging for an explanation for this upset.</li>\r\n 	<li>After an hour of this, and an extra cappuccino, we set the phones aside again. It was nice that we could do that -- walk away from the disbelief (and some might say panic) at the result that was spreading over the media (social and traditional), and schools, and I imagine in the workplaces. Instead, we were driving our little Alfa Romeo through some beautiful Chianti vineyards that were brilliantly yellow with the vine leaves changing colors. We stopped off at the Antinori winery for a bit of a tasting and then continued our drive to Florence. We knew we’d eventually get pulled into the post-election vortex, but we knew we were lucky -- we would be in a cone of silence for another 3 days.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #125</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://promonet.iodalliance.com\">IODA Promonet</a> and <a href=\"http://podsafeaudio.com/\">PodSafe Audio</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_125.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #125 — Uber Driver Stories; Overseas for the Election','','inherit','closed','closed','','1666-revision-v1','','','2016-12-03 15:27:40','2016-12-03 20:27:40','',1666,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/12/03/1666-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1679,1,'2016-12-03 15:28:44','2016-12-03 20:28:44','Recorded in the TravelCommons studios after a 3-day Chicago-San Francisco-Boston triangulation, I left behind some torrential rains in Chicago, which flooded our basement, causing me a good bit of long-distance guilt as my wife was left cleaning up the mess solo.  We continue the thread on solid toiletries -- even with the recent relaxation of the TSA\'s no-liquids rule, it\'s less hassle to travel solid, though that tooth powder keeps fooling some screeners.  We then wrap up with some things I\'ve recently overheard in bars.  Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_46.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_46.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #46:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Recorded in the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago</li>\r\n	<li>Had yet another big 3-day triangulation -- Chicago-San Francisco-Boston</li>\r\n	<li>Heading out to London with my mother and daughter for a quick 4-day vacation</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://cyberset.cc/artists2.php?tr_release_id=104\"><em>Heaven</em></a> by <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=A951998E6011FA9B2D22387EB3CAC0B5EB05A36360E7FDA122C8D7A5C140F8DC\">Electric Skychurch</a></li>\r\n	<li>Orbitz\'s fare matrix on the web is best-in-class, but their live customer service is at the bottom of the heap</li>\r\n	<li>The Eco-Dent tooth powder keeps fooling TSA screeners</li>\r\n	<li>Staying with solid toiletries avoids the hassle of having to pull out yet another thing out of my bag for special screening</li>\r\n	<li><strong><a href=\"http://www.theonion.com/content/node/53594\">Direct Link</a></strong> to <em>The Onion</em> satire on George Bush missing his Air Force One flight</li>\r\n	<li>Stopped off at the <a href=\"http://www.portablemediaexpo.com/\">Podcast Expo</a> last week in Ontario, California.  Got to meet up with T/C contributors <a href=\"http://www.qdinformation.com/searching/\">Ed Vawter</a> and <a href=\"http://amateurtraveler.com/\">Chris Christensen</a>, and Alan Lew of the  <a href=\"http://travelgeography.blogspot.com/\"><em>Geography for Travelers</em></a> podcast.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/buy_album.php?id=DD892705BB88E6806EA6A2A4A4D1E7D699277BD6CE86C10FDC39095666B5D6CF\"><em>One Foot Down</em></a> by <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=E67629501441F8BAAFB2B0D46F36C071EB05A36360E7FDA122C8D7A5C140F8DC\">Peter Bradley Adams</a></li>\r\n	<li>Torrential rains started in Chicago right after I left for San Francisco</li>\r\n	<li>Hit the ground and was greeted by two voice messages from my wife about our flooding basement</li>\r\n	<li>While some might call it \"lucky\", it\'s actually frustrating not to be able to help solve the problems at home that always seem to come up when you\'re on the road</li>\r\n	<li>Trying to deal with the frustration and guilt over a phone line is fraught with danger</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/buy_album.php?id=39CE51194FB95B63577FBFD7E2EC168C99277BD6CE86C10FDC39095666B5D6CF\"><em>Heaven</em></a> by <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=BB22CBFF24501120EEC6ABA18AB0A15FEB05A36360E7FDA122C8D7A5C140F8DC\">Los Lonely Boys</a></li>\r\n	<li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=19\">T/C #23</a>, I did a topic \"Scenes from a hotel bar\" about what was going on at 10:30 on a Wednesday night in the Memphis Marriott\'s Blue Shoes bar.</li>\r\n	<li>Overhead some classic California-speak in the <a href=\"http://www.plumpjack.com/falstaff1.html\">Jack Falstaff</a> restaurant in San Francisco</li>\r\n	<li>Got a lesson in the pervasiveness of American culture at the <a href=\"http://www.tanumstrand.se/\">Tanumstrand Resort</a> on the west coast of Sweden</li>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids991764.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://promonet.iodalliance.com\">IODA Promonet</a></li>\r\n	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_46.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #46 - Long-Distance Guilt; Overheard in Bars','','inherit','closed','closed','','57-revision-v1','','','2016-12-03 15:28:44','2016-12-03 20:28:44','',57,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/12/03/57-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1680,1,'2016-12-03 15:29:18','2016-12-03 20:29:18','Recorded in the TravelCommons studios after a 3-day Chicago-San Francisco-Boston triangulation, I left behind some torrential rains in Chicago, which flooded our basement, causing me a good bit of long-distance guilt as my wife was left cleaning up the mess solo. We continue the thread on solid toiletries -- even with the recent relaxation of the TSA\'s no-liquids rule, it\'s less hassle to travel solid, though that tooth powder keeps fooling some screeners. We then wrap up with some things I\'ve recently overheard in bars. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_46.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_46.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #46:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Recorded in the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago</li>\r\n 	<li>Had yet another big 3-day triangulation -- Chicago-San Francisco-Boston</li>\r\n 	<li>Heading out to London with my mother and daughter for a quick 4-day vacation</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://cyberset.cc/artists2.php?tr_release_id=104\"><em>Heaven</em></a> by <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=A951998E6011FA9B2D22387EB3CAC0B5EB05A36360E7FDA122C8D7A5C140F8DC\" rel=\"nofollow\">Electric Skychurch</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Orbitz\'s fare matrix on the web is best-in-class, but their live customer service is at the bottom of the heap</li>\r\n 	<li>The Eco-Dent tooth powder keeps fooling TSA screeners</li>\r\n 	<li>Staying with solid toiletries avoids the hassle of having to pull out yet another thing out of my bag for special screening</li>\r\n 	<li><strong><a href=\"http://www.theonion.com/content/node/53594\">Direct Link</a></strong> to <em>The Onion</em> satire on George Bush missing his Air Force One flight</li>\r\n 	<li>Stopped off at the <a href=\"http://www.portablemediaexpo.com/\">Podcast Expo</a> last week in Ontario, California. Got to meet up with T/C contributors <a href=\"http://www.qdinformation.com/searching/\">Ed Vawter</a> and <a href=\"http://amateurtraveler.com/\">Chris Christensen</a>, and Alan Lew of the <a href=\"http://travelgeography.blogspot.com/\"><em>Geography for Travelers</em></a> podcast.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/buy_album.php?id=DD892705BB88E6806EA6A2A4A4D1E7D699277BD6CE86C10FDC39095666B5D6CF\" rel=\"nofollow\"><em>One Foot Down</em></a> by <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=E67629501441F8BAAFB2B0D46F36C071EB05A36360E7FDA122C8D7A5C140F8DC\" rel=\"nofollow\">Peter Bradley Adams</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Torrential rains started in Chicago right after I left for San Francisco</li>\r\n 	<li>Hit the ground and was greeted by two voice messages from my wife about our flooding basement</li>\r\n 	<li>While some might call it \"lucky\", it\'s actually frustrating not to be able to help solve the problems at home that always seem to come up when you\'re on the road</li>\r\n 	<li>Trying to deal with the frustration and guilt over a phone line is fraught with danger</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/buy_album.php?id=39CE51194FB95B63577FBFD7E2EC168C99277BD6CE86C10FDC39095666B5D6CF\"><em>Heaven</em></a> by <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=BB22CBFF24501120EEC6ABA18AB0A15FEB05A36360E7FDA122C8D7A5C140F8DC\" rel=\"nofollow\">Los Lonely Boys</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=19\">T/C #23</a>, I did a topic \"Scenes from a hotel bar\" about what was going on at 10:30 on a Wednesday night in the Memphis Marriott\'s Blue Shoes bar.</li>\r\n 	<li>Overhead some classic California-speak in the <a href=\"http://www.plumpjack.com/falstaff1.html\">Jack Falstaff</a> restaurant in San Francisco</li>\r\n 	<li>Got a lesson in the pervasiveness of American culture at the <a href=\"http://www.tanumstrand.se/\">Tanumstrand Resort</a> on the west coast of Sweden</li>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids991764.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://promonet.iodalliance.com\">IODA Promonet</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_46.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #46 - Long-Distance Guilt; Overheard in Bars','','inherit','closed','closed','','57-revision-v1','','','2016-12-03 15:29:18','2016-12-03 20:29:18','',57,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/12/03/57-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1682,1,'2016-12-12 19:49:48','2016-12-13 00:49:48','[caption id=\"attachment_1683\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/774653_521026384596249_472247542_o.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1683\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/774653_521026384596249_472247542_o-300x225.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\"></a> Green Bay Looks So Pretty This Time of Year[/caption]\n\nAs the economy recovers, so does travel volume. As you gird yourself to wade into the crowds, here are 10 tips to keep you moving over the river and through the woods...\n<ol>\n 	<li><strong>Expand Your Fly-vs.-Drive Tipping Point&nbsp;</strong>— My normal tipping&nbsp;point is 350 miles; anything less and I drive it. However, the holiday traffic changes the calculus a bit. If you fly, figure the airport logistics will add 3 hours to your in-flight time. Airlines are recommending passengers arrive 2 hours before their holiday flights, and when you arrive, all the additional people means it\'ll take you at least an hour to de-plane, collect your luggage, and get off the airport property. And that\'s if there are no delays. This increases the holiday fly-vs.-drive tipping point to at least&nbsp;500 miles.</li>\n 	<li><strong>Use Multiple Navigation Apps&nbsp;—&nbsp;</strong>If you decide to drive, use more than one maps app to help you route around traffic jams from rush hour, construction, and accidents. I personally use both <a href=\"https://www.waze.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Waze</a> and <a href=\"https://maps.google.com\">Google Maps</a> because, even though they\'re both owned by Google, they often give you different directions. I find Waze is better at redirecting you around accidents and traffic jams, but can be a bit twitchy -- sending you wandering through sub-divisions to save a minute of drive time. I tend to follow Waze but periodically check it against Google Maps.</li>\n 	<li><strong>Sign Up for TSA PreCheck&nbsp;— </strong>Gift yourself and spend the $85 on some time and hassle reduction. You won\'t get it in time for this Christmas, but it\'s good for 5 years, so you\'ll have it next Christmas.</li>\n 	<li><strong>Apply for an Airline Credit Card&nbsp;— </strong>If your credit is good enough for instant approval, getting your airline\'s credit card will get&nbsp;you entry level frequent flier status. This allows you to use the status security lines (handy if you don\'t have PreCheck) and the second boarding group which is usually good enough to let you find some overhead bin space. This typically will work for you and your family. If the lead adult’s boarding pass shows priority/premiere access, the overworked minimum-wage airport staffers guarding the status security lanes will let the family tag along. And at the gate, I’ve never seen a family split across boarding groups.</li>\n 	<li><strong>Fly Non-Stop —</strong>&nbsp;Holiday travel stacks up problems — &nbsp;high passenger load factors combined with winter weather disruptions almost guarantees late arrivals and missed connections. Even if you’re connecting through Houston, an intermediate stop adds one more point of failure, one more opportunity for the airlines to screw up. Pay the extra $100 for a non-stop flight.</li>\n 	<li><strong>Skip the Tight Connection&nbsp;—&nbsp; </strong>If you can’t fly direct, step away from any connection that’s less than 60 minutes. &nbsp;Yes, we usually want to get to our destination in the shortest possible time, but accepting a connection of 1 hour or less…. Think about it – a 15-minute delay on your flight into a big hub like <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27hare_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Chicago</a> or <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denver_International_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Denver</a> or <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detroit_Metropolitan_Wayne_County_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Detroit</a> (as good as on-time in the winter for most airlines) and you’re sprinting across terminals and concourses just to beat the closing door.&nbsp; A 1-hr connection is just asking for a stress attack and/or an overnight stay at the airport branch of the <a title=\"Bates Motel\" href=\"http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092622/\" rel=\"imdb\">Bates Motel</a>.</li>\n 	<li><strong>Research Before You Leave&nbsp;—&nbsp;</strong>You don\'t have time to be clueless. Hit the <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/travel/travel-tips\">TSA website</a>&nbsp;or the <a href=\"https://twitter.com/AskTSA/with_replies\">@AskTSA</a>&nbsp;gang on Twitter so you know what\'s allowed in your carry-on. Research the airports you\'ll be using so you know how to your gates, where the good restaurants are, or better yet, if there\'s a brewpub. Also, figure out the geography. Knowing alternatives to your destination airport gives you more flexibility dealing with cancelled flights or missed connections. In New York, the&nbsp;LaGuardia-to-Newark pivot is&nbsp;easy, but others aren’t so obvious.&nbsp; Everyone knows that Chicago has two airports – O’Hare and Midway.&nbsp; But what about Milwaukee’s Mitchell Field 80 miles north? &nbsp;If Philadelphia is in trouble, how many folks think about Harrisburg or BWI?&nbsp; Or Sacramento as an alternative to SFO?</li>\n 	<li><strong>Catch the Early Flight&nbsp;</strong>—&nbsp;Delays stack up as the day wears on.&nbsp; As your airplane goes from airport to airport, the probability of it getting stuck increases. &nbsp;Overnight, airlines have a chance to recover – late planes finally get their destinations and operations groups can reassign planes.&nbsp; So while the last flight out can be a crap shoot, I rarely hit a delay on the first flight out.</li>\n 	<li><strong>Use Multiple Flight Tracking Apps</strong> — Use your smartphone to keep track of gate changes and flight delays. Sign up for text notifications from your airline when you book your ticket. However, &nbsp;I’ve often experienced long delays with the airlines’ services or notices that were never sent out. So I also use <a href=\"http://tripit.com/\">TripIt</a>, <a href=\"http://flightaware.com/\">FlightAware</a>, and <a href=\"http://flightstats.com\">FlightStats</a>. It means multiple notices, but it also means I don’t miss anything.</li>\n 	<li><strong>Use Twitter as a Concierge Service</strong> — Most airlines have social media teams monitoring Twitter. Before you leave, find and follow your airline’s Twitter customer service account. “At naming” them in a Tweet (e.g., “<a dir=\"ltr\" href=\"https://twitter.com/united\">@united</a> what’s happening with UA 4286 MSY-ORD that it’s 1:45 hr delayed?”) usually gets a response in a couple of minutes. Following them allows you to exchange personal information such as record locator numbers via direct message (DM). It’s usually faster than queuing up for a frazzled gate agent and the results can be better.</li>\n</ol>\nBut above all, be realistic. It’s gonna be a zoo. Steel yourself; get your inner karma tuned for it. Pack a snack and a book, and practice deep cleansing breaths.','Top 10 Holiday Travel Tips','','publish','closed','closed','','top-10-holiday-travel-tips-2','','','2021-09-29 08:15:41','2021-09-29 13:15:41','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=1682',0,'post','',0),
(1683,1,'2016-12-12 18:02:40','2016-12-12 23:02:40','','774653_521026384596249_472247542_o','Green Bay Looks So Pretty This Time of Year','inherit','open','closed','','774653_521026384596249_472247542_o','','','2016-12-12 18:04:08','2016-12-12 23:04:08','',1682,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/774653_521026384596249_472247542_o.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(1684,1,'2016-12-12 18:35:53','2016-12-12 23:35:53','[caption id=\"attachment_1683\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/774653_521026384596249_472247542_o.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1683\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/774653_521026384596249_472247542_o-300x225.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\" /></a> Green Bay Looks So Pretty This Time of Year[/caption]\r\n\r\nAs the economy recovers, so does travel volume. As you gird yourself to wade into the crowds, here are some tips that I hope will keep you moving over the river and through the woods...\r\n<ol>\r\n 	<li><strong>Expand Your Fly-vs.-Drive Tipping Point </strong>— My normal tipping point is 350 miles; anything less and I drive it. However, the holiday traffic changes the calculus a bit. If you fly, figure the airport logistics will add 3 hours to your in-flight time. Airlines are recommending passengers arrive 2 hours before their holiday flights, and when you arrive, all the additional people means it\'ll take you at least an hour to de-plane, collect your luggage, and get off the airport property. And that\'s if there are no delays. I think the holiday fly-vs.-drive tipping point is at least 500 miles.</li>\r\n 	<li></li>\r\n</ol>','Top Holiday Travel Tips','','inherit','closed','closed','','1682-revision-v1','','','2016-12-12 18:35:53','2016-12-12 23:35:53','',1682,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/12/12/1682-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1685,1,'2016-12-12 19:01:21','2016-12-13 00:01:21','[caption id=\"attachment_1683\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/774653_521026384596249_472247542_o.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1683\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/774653_521026384596249_472247542_o-300x225.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\" /></a> Green Bay Looks So Pretty This Time of Year[/caption]\r\n\r\nAs the economy recovers, so does travel volume. As you gird yourself to wade into the crowds, here are some tips that I hope will keep you moving over the river and through the woods...\r\n<ol>\r\n 	<li><strong>Expand Your Fly-vs.-Drive Tipping Point </strong>— My normal tipping point is 350 miles; anything less and I drive it. However, the holiday traffic changes the calculus a bit. If you fly, figure the airport logistics will add 3 hours to your in-flight time. Airlines are recommending passengers arrive 2 hours before their holiday flights, and when you arrive, all the additional people means it\'ll take you at least an hour to de-plane, collect your luggage, and get off the airport property. And that\'s if there are no delays. I think the holiday fly-vs.-drive tipping point is at least 500 miles.If you decide to drive,</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Use Multiple Navigation Apps — </strong>Use more than one maps app to help you route around traffic jams from rush hour, construction, and accidents. I personally use both <a href=\"https://www.waze.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Waze</a> and <a href=\"https://maps.google.com\">Google Maps</a> because, even though they\'re both owned by Google, they often give you different directions. I find Waze is better at redirecting you around accidents and traffic jams, but can be a bit twitchy -- sending you wandering through sub-divisions to save a minute of drive time. I tend to follow Waze but periodically check it against Google MapsIf you decide to fly,</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Sign Up for TSA PreCheck — </strong>You won\'t get in time for this Christmas</li>\r\n</ol>','Top Holiday Travel Tips','','inherit','closed','closed','','1682-revision-v1','','','2016-12-12 19:01:21','2016-12-13 00:01:21','',1682,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/12/12/1682-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1686,1,'2016-12-12 19:04:14','2016-12-13 00:04:14','[caption id=\"attachment_1683\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/774653_521026384596249_472247542_o.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1683\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/774653_521026384596249_472247542_o-300x225.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\" /></a> Green Bay Looks So Pretty This Time of Year[/caption]\r\n\r\nAs the economy recovers, so does travel volume. As you gird yourself to wade into the crowds, here are some tips that I hope will keep you moving over the river and through the woods...\r\n<ol>\r\n 	<li><strong>Expand Your Fly-vs.-Drive Tipping Point </strong>— My normal tipping point is 350 miles; anything less and I drive it. However, the holiday traffic changes the calculus a bit. If you fly, figure the airport logistics will add 3 hours to your in-flight time. Airlines are recommending passengers arrive 2 hours before their holiday flights, and when you arrive, all the additional people means it\'ll take you at least an hour to de-plane, collect your luggage, and get off the airport property. And that\'s if there are no delays. I think the holiday fly-vs.-drive tipping point is at least 500 miles.</li>\r\n\r\nIf you decide to drive,\r\n\r\n 	<li><strong>Use Multiple Navigation Apps — </strong>Use more than one maps app to help you route around traffic jams from rush hour, construction, and accidents. I personally use both <a href=\"https://www.waze.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Waze</a> and <a href=\"https://maps.google.com\">Google Maps</a> because, even though they\'re both owned by Google, they often give you different directions. I find Waze is better at redirecting you around accidents and traffic jams, but can be a bit twitchy -- sending you wandering through sub-divisions to save a minute of drive time. I tend to follow Waze but periodically check it against Google MapsIf you decide to fly,</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Sign Up for TSA PreCheck — </strong>Give yourself You won\'t get it in time for this Christmas, but it\'s good for 5 years, so you\'ll have it next Christmas.</li>\r\n</ol>','Top Holiday Travel Tips','','inherit','closed','closed','','1682-revision-v1','','','2016-12-12 19:04:14','2016-12-13 00:04:14','',1682,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/12/12/1682-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1687,1,'2016-12-12 19:05:18','2016-12-13 00:05:18','[caption id=\"attachment_1683\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/774653_521026384596249_472247542_o.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1683\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/774653_521026384596249_472247542_o-300x225.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\" /></a> Green Bay Looks So Pretty This Time of Year[/caption]\r\n\r\nAs the economy recovers, so does travel volume. As you gird yourself to wade into the crowds, here are some tips that I hope will keep you moving over the river and through the woods...\r\n<ol>\r\n 	<li><strong>Expand Your Fly-vs.-Drive Tipping Point </strong>— My normal tipping point is 350 miles; anything less and I drive it. However, the holiday traffic changes the calculus a bit. If you fly, figure the airport logistics will add 3 hours to your in-flight time. Airlines are recommending passengers arrive 2 hours before their holiday flights, and when you arrive, all the additional people means it\'ll take you at least an hour to de-plane, collect your luggage, and get off the airport property. And that\'s if there are no delays. I think the holiday fly-vs.-drive tipping point is at least 500 miles.</li>\r\n<br>\r\n<br>\r\nIf you decide to drive,\r\n\r\n 	<li><strong>Use Multiple Navigation Apps — </strong>Use more than one maps app to help you route around traffic jams from rush hour, construction, and accidents. I personally use both <a href=\"https://www.waze.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Waze</a> and <a href=\"https://maps.google.com\">Google Maps</a> because, even though they\'re both owned by Google, they often give you different directions. I find Waze is better at redirecting you around accidents and traffic jams, but can be a bit twitchy -- sending you wandering through sub-divisions to save a minute of drive time. I tend to follow Waze but periodically check it against Google MapsIf you decide to fly,</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Sign Up for TSA PreCheck — </strong>Give yourself You won\'t get it in time for this Christmas, but it\'s good for 5 years, so you\'ll have it next Christmas.</li>\r\n</ol>','Top Holiday Travel Tips','','inherit','closed','closed','','1682-revision-v1','','','2016-12-12 19:05:18','2016-12-13 00:05:18','',1682,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/12/12/1682-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1688,1,'2016-12-12 19:13:46','2016-12-13 00:13:46','[caption id=\"attachment_1683\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/774653_521026384596249_472247542_o.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1683\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/774653_521026384596249_472247542_o-300x225.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\" /></a> Green Bay Looks So Pretty This Time of Year[/caption]\r\n\r\nAs the economy recovers, so does travel volume. As you gird yourself to wade into the crowds, here are some tips that I hope will keep you moving over the river and through the woods...\r\n<ol>\r\n 	<li><strong>Expand Your Fly-vs.-Drive Tipping Point </strong>— My normal tipping point is 350 miles; anything less and I drive it. However, the holiday traffic changes the calculus a bit. If you fly, figure the airport logistics will add 3 hours to your in-flight time. Airlines are recommending passengers arrive 2 hours before their holiday flights, and when you arrive, all the additional people means it\'ll take you at least an hour to de-plane, collect your luggage, and get off the airport property. And that\'s if there are no delays. I think the holiday fly-vs.-drive tipping point is at least 500 miles.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Use Multiple Navigation Apps — </strong>If you decide to drive, sse more than one maps app to help you route around traffic jams from rush hour, construction, and accidents. I personally use both <a href=\"https://www.waze.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Waze</a> and <a href=\"https://maps.google.com\">Google Maps</a> because, even though they\'re both owned by Google, they often give you different directions. I find Waze is better at redirecting you around accidents and traffic jams, but can be a bit twitchy -- sending you wandering through sub-divisions to save a minute of drive time. I tend to follow Waze but periodically check it against Google Maps.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Sign Up for TSA PreCheck — </strong>Gift yourself and spend the $85 on some time and hassle reduction. You won\'t get it in time for this Christmas, but it\'s good for 5 years, so you\'ll have it next Christmas.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Apply for an Airline Credit Card — </strong>If your credit is good enough for instant approval, this will get you entry level status which allows you to use the status security lines (handy if you don\'t have PreCheck) and the second boarding group which is usually good enough to let you find some overhead bin space. This typically will work for you and your family. If the lead adult’s boarding pass shows priority/premiere access, the overworked minimum-wage airport staffers guarding the status security lanes will let the family tag along. And at the gate, I’ve never seen a family split up across boarding groups.</li>\r\n 	<li></li>\r\n</ol>','Top Holiday Travel Tips','','inherit','closed','closed','','1682-revision-v1','','','2016-12-12 19:13:46','2016-12-13 00:13:46','',1682,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/12/12/1682-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1689,1,'2016-12-12 19:33:29','2016-12-13 00:33:29','[caption id=\"attachment_1683\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/774653_521026384596249_472247542_o.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1683\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/774653_521026384596249_472247542_o-300x225.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\" /></a> Green Bay Looks So Pretty This Time of Year[/caption]\r\n\r\nAs the economy recovers, so does travel volume. As you gird yourself to wade into the crowds, here are some tips that I hope will keep you moving over the river and through the woods...\r\n<ol>\r\n 	<li><strong>Expand Your Fly-vs.-Drive Tipping Point </strong>— My normal tipping point is 350 miles; anything less and I drive it. However, the holiday traffic changes the calculus a bit. If you fly, figure the airport logistics will add 3 hours to your in-flight time. Airlines are recommending passengers arrive 2 hours before their holiday flights, and when you arrive, all the additional people means it\'ll take you at least an hour to de-plane, collect your luggage, and get off the airport property. And that\'s if there are no delays. I think the holiday fly-vs.-drive tipping point is at least 500 miles.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Use Multiple Navigation Apps — </strong>If you decide to drive, use more than one maps app to help you route around traffic jams from rush hour, construction, and accidents. I personally use both <a href=\"https://www.waze.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Waze</a> and <a href=\"https://maps.google.com\">Google Maps</a> because, even though they\'re both owned by Google, they often give you different directions. I find Waze is better at redirecting you around accidents and traffic jams, but can be a bit twitchy -- sending you wandering through sub-divisions to save a minute of drive time. I tend to follow Waze but periodically check it against Google Maps.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Sign Up for TSA PreCheck — </strong>Gift yourself and spend the $85 on some time and hassle reduction. You won\'t get it in time for this Christmas, but it\'s good for 5 years, so you\'ll have it next Christmas.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Apply for an Airline Credit Card — </strong>If your credit is good enough for instant approval, this will get you entry level status which allows you to use the status security lines (handy if you don\'t have PreCheck) and the second boarding group which is usually good enough to let you find some overhead bin space. This typically will work for you and your family. If the lead adult’s boarding pass shows priority/premiere access, the overworked minimum-wage airport staffers guarding the status security lanes will let the family tag along. And at the gate, I’ve never seen a family split up across boarding groups.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Fly Direct —</strong> Holiday travel stacks up problems —  high passenger load factors combined with winter weather disruptions almost guarantees late arrivals and missed connections. Even if you’re connecting through Houston, an intermediate stop adds one more point of failure, one more opportunity for the airlines to screw up. Pay the extra $100 for a direct flight.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Skip the Tight Connection —  </strong>If you can’t fly direct, step away from any connection that’s less than 60 minutes.  Yes, we usually want to get to our destination in the shortest possible time, but accepting a connection of 1 hour or less…. Think about it – a 15-minute delay on your flight into a big hub like <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27hare_Airport\" target=\"_blank\">Chicago</a> or <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denver_International_Airport\" target=\"_blank\">Denver</a> or <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detroit_Metropolitan_Wayne_County_Airport\" target=\"_blank\">Detroit</a> (as good as on-time in the winter for most airlines) and you’re sprinting across terminals and concourses just to beat the closing door.  A 1-hr connection is just asking for a stress attack and/or an overnight stay at the airport branch of the <a title=\"Bates Motel\" href=\"http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092622/\" rel=\"imdb\">Bates Motel</a>.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Research Before You Leave — </strong>You don\'t have time to be clueless. Hit the <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/travel/travel-tips\">TSA website</a> so you know what\'s allowed in your carry-on. Research the airports you\'ll be using so you know how to your gate, where the good restaurants are, or better yet, if there\'s a brewpub. Also, figure out the geography. Knowing alternatives to your destination airport gives you more flexibility dealing with cancelled flights or missed connections. In New York, the LaGuardia-to-Newark pivot is easy, but others aren’t so obvious.  Everyone knows that Chicago has two airports – O’Hare and Midway.  But what about Milwaukee’s Mitchell Field 80 miles north?  If Philadelphia is in trouble, how many folks think about Harrisburg or BWI?  Or Sacramento as an alternative to SFO?</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Catch the Early Flight </strong>— Delays stack up as the day wears on.  As your airplane goes from airport to airport, the probability of it getting stuck increases.  Overnight, airlines have a chance to recover – late planes finally get their destinations and operations groups can reassign planes.  So while the last flight out can be a crap shoot, I’ve rarely hit a delay on the first flight out.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Use Multiple Flight Tracking Apps</strong> — Use your smartphone to keep track of gate changes and flight delays. Sign up for text notifications from your airline when you book your ticket. However,  I’ve often experienced long delays with the airlines’ services or changes that were never sent out. So I also use <a href=\"http://tripit.com/\">TripIt</a>, <a href=\"http://flightaware.com/\">FlightAware</a>, and <a href=\"http://flightstats.com\">FlightStats</a>. It means multiple notices, but it also means I don’t miss anything.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Use Twitter as a Concierge Service</strong> — Most airlines have social media teams monitoring Twitter. Before you leave, find and follow your airline’s Twitter customer service account. “At naming” them in a Tweet (e.g., “<a dir=\"ltr\" href=\"https://twitter.com/united\">@united</a> what’s happening with UA 4286 MSY-ORD that it’s 1:45 hr delayed?”) usually gets a response in a couple of minutes. Following them allows you to exchange personal information such as record locator numbers via direct message (DM). It’s usually faster than queuing up for a frazzled gate agent and the results can be better.</li>\r\n</ol>','Top Holiday Travel Tips','','inherit','closed','closed','','1682-revision-v1','','','2016-12-12 19:33:29','2016-12-13 00:33:29','',1682,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/12/12/1682-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1690,1,'2016-12-12 19:38:09','2016-12-13 00:38:09','[caption id=\"attachment_1683\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/774653_521026384596249_472247542_o.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1683\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/774653_521026384596249_472247542_o-300x225.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\" /></a> Green Bay Looks So Pretty This Time of Year[/caption]\r\n\r\nAs the economy recovers, so does travel volume. As you gird yourself to wade into the crowds, here are some tips that I hope will keep you moving over the river and through the woods...\r\n<ol>\r\n 	<li><strong>Expand Your Fly-vs.-Drive Tipping Point </strong>— My normal tipping point is 350 miles; anything less and I drive it. However, the holiday traffic changes the calculus a bit. If you fly, figure the airport logistics will add 3 hours to your in-flight time. Airlines are recommending passengers arrive 2 hours before their holiday flights, and when you arrive, all the additional people means it\'ll take you at least an hour to de-plane, collect your luggage, and get off the airport property. And that\'s if there are no delays. I think the holiday fly-vs.-drive tipping point is at least 500 miles.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Use Multiple Navigation Apps — </strong>If you decide to drive, use more than one maps app to help you route around traffic jams from rush hour, construction, and accidents. I personally use both <a href=\"https://www.waze.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Waze</a> and <a href=\"https://maps.google.com\">Google Maps</a> because, even though they\'re both owned by Google, they often give you different directions. I find Waze is better at redirecting you around accidents and traffic jams, but can be a bit twitchy -- sending you wandering through sub-divisions to save a minute of drive time. I tend to follow Waze but periodically check it against Google Maps.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Sign Up for TSA PreCheck — </strong>Gift yourself and spend the $85 on some time and hassle reduction. You won\'t get it in time for this Christmas, but it\'s good for 5 years, so you\'ll have it next Christmas.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Apply for an Airline Credit Card — </strong>If your credit is good enough for instant approval, this will get you entry level status which allows you to use the status security lines (handy if you don\'t have PreCheck) and the second boarding group which is usually good enough to let you find some overhead bin space. This typically will work for you and your family. If the lead adult’s boarding pass shows priority/premiere access, the overworked minimum-wage airport staffers guarding the status security lanes will let the family tag along. And at the gate, I’ve never seen a family split up across boarding groups.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Fly Direct —</strong> Holiday travel stacks up problems —  high passenger load factors combined with winter weather disruptions almost guarantees late arrivals and missed connections. Even if you’re connecting through Houston, an intermediate stop adds one more point of failure, one more opportunity for the airlines to screw up. Pay the extra $100 for a direct flight.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Skip the Tight Connection —  </strong>If you can’t fly direct, step away from any connection that’s less than 60 minutes.  Yes, we usually want to get to our destination in the shortest possible time, but accepting a connection of 1 hour or less…. Think about it – a 15-minute delay on your flight into a big hub like <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27hare_Airport\" target=\"_blank\">Chicago</a> or <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denver_International_Airport\" target=\"_blank\">Denver</a> or <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detroit_Metropolitan_Wayne_County_Airport\" target=\"_blank\">Detroit</a> (as good as on-time in the winter for most airlines) and you’re sprinting across terminals and concourses just to beat the closing door.  A 1-hr connection is just asking for a stress attack and/or an overnight stay at the airport branch of the <a title=\"Bates Motel\" href=\"http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092622/\" rel=\"imdb\">Bates Motel</a>.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Research Before You Leave — </strong>You don\'t have time to be clueless. Hit the <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/travel/travel-tips\">TSA website</a> or the <a href=\"https://twitter.com/AskTSA/with_replies\">@AskTSA</a> gang on Twitter so you know what\'s allowed in your carry-on. Research the airports you\'ll be using so you know how to your gate, where the good restaurants are, or better yet, if there\'s a brewpub. Also, figure out the geography. Knowing alternatives to your destination airport gives you more flexibility dealing with cancelled flights or missed connections. In New York, the LaGuardia-to-Newark pivot is easy, but others aren’t so obvious.  Everyone knows that Chicago has two airports – O’Hare and Midway.  But what about Milwaukee’s Mitchell Field 80 miles north?  If Philadelphia is in trouble, how many folks think about Harrisburg or BWI?  Or Sacramento as an alternative to SFO?</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Catch the Early Flight </strong>— Delays stack up as the day wears on.  As your airplane goes from airport to airport, the probability of it getting stuck increases.  Overnight, airlines have a chance to recover – late planes finally get their destinations and operations groups can reassign planes.  So while the last flight out can be a crap shoot, I’ve rarely hit a delay on the first flight out.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Use Multiple Flight Tracking Apps</strong> — Use your smartphone to keep track of gate changes and flight delays. Sign up for text notifications from your airline when you book your ticket. However,  I’ve often experienced long delays with the airlines’ services or changes that were never sent out. So I also use <a href=\"http://tripit.com/\">TripIt</a>, <a href=\"http://flightaware.com/\">FlightAware</a>, and <a href=\"http://flightstats.com\">FlightStats</a>. It means multiple notices, but it also means I don’t miss anything.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Use Twitter as a Concierge Service</strong> — Most airlines have social media teams monitoring Twitter. Before you leave, find and follow your airline’s Twitter customer service account. “At naming” them in a Tweet (e.g., “<a dir=\"ltr\" href=\"https://twitter.com/united\">@united</a> what’s happening with UA 4286 MSY-ORD that it’s 1:45 hr delayed?”) usually gets a response in a couple of minutes. Following them allows you to exchange personal information such as record locator numbers via direct message (DM). It’s usually faster than queuing up for a frazzled gate agent and the results can be better.</li>\r\n</ol>\r\nBut above all, be realistic. It’s gonna be a zoo. Steel yourself; get your inner karma tuned for it. Pack a snack and a book, and practice deep cleansing breaths.','Top 10 Holiday Travel Tips','','inherit','closed','closed','','1682-revision-v1','','','2016-12-12 19:38:09','2016-12-13 00:38:09','',1682,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/12/12/1682-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1691,1,'2016-12-12 19:43:37','2016-12-13 00:43:37','[caption id=\"attachment_1683\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/774653_521026384596249_472247542_o.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1683\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/774653_521026384596249_472247542_o-300x225.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\" /></a> Green Bay Looks So Pretty This Time of Year[/caption]\r\n\r\nAs the economy recovers, so does travel volume. As you gird yourself to wade into the crowds, here are 10 tips that I hope will keep you moving over the river and through the woods...\r\n<ol>\r\n 	<li><strong>Expand Your Fly-vs.-Drive Tipping Point </strong>— My normal tipping point is 350 miles; anything less and I drive it. However, the holiday traffic changes the calculus a bit. If you fly, figure the airport logistics will add 3 hours to your in-flight time. Airlines are recommending passengers arrive 2 hours before their holiday flights, and when you arrive, all the additional people means it\'ll take you at least an hour to de-plane, collect your luggage, and get off the airport property. And that\'s if there are no delays. I think the holiday fly-vs.-drive tipping point is at least 500 miles.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Use Multiple Navigation Apps — </strong>If you decide to drive, use more than one maps app to help you route around traffic jams from rush hour, construction, and accidents. I personally use both <a href=\"https://www.waze.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Waze</a> and <a href=\"https://maps.google.com\">Google Maps</a> because, even though they\'re both owned by Google, they often give you different directions. I find Waze is better at redirecting you around accidents and traffic jams, but can be a bit twitchy -- sending you wandering through sub-divisions to save a minute of drive time. I tend to follow Waze but periodically check it against Google Maps.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Sign Up for TSA PreCheck — </strong>Gift yourself and spend the $85 on some time and hassle reduction. You won\'t get it in time for this Christmas, but it\'s good for 5 years, so you\'ll have it next Christmas.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Apply for an Airline Credit Card — </strong>If your credit is good enough for instant approval, this will get you entry level status which allows you to use the status security lines (handy if you don\'t have PreCheck) and the second boarding group which is usually good enough to let you find some overhead bin space. This typically will work for you and your family. If the lead adult’s boarding pass shows priority/premiere access, the overworked minimum-wage airport staffers guarding the status security lanes will let the family tag along. And at the gate, I’ve never seen a family split up across boarding groups.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Fly Direct —</strong> Holiday travel stacks up problems —  high passenger load factors combined with winter weather disruptions almost guarantees late arrivals and missed connections. Even if you’re connecting through Houston, an intermediate stop adds one more point of failure, one more opportunity for the airlines to screw up. Pay the extra $100 for a direct flight.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Skip the Tight Connection —  </strong>If you can’t fly direct, step away from any connection that’s less than 60 minutes.  Yes, we usually want to get to our destination in the shortest possible time, but accepting a connection of 1 hour or less…. Think about it – a 15-minute delay on your flight into a big hub like <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27hare_Airport\" target=\"_blank\">Chicago</a> or <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denver_International_Airport\" target=\"_blank\">Denver</a> or <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detroit_Metropolitan_Wayne_County_Airport\" target=\"_blank\">Detroit</a> (as good as on-time in the winter for most airlines) and you’re sprinting across terminals and concourses just to beat the closing door.  A 1-hr connection is just asking for a stress attack and/or an overnight stay at the airport branch of the <a title=\"Bates Motel\" href=\"http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092622/\" rel=\"imdb\">Bates Motel</a>.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Research Before You Leave — </strong>You don\'t have time to be clueless. Hit the <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/travel/travel-tips\">TSA website</a> or the <a href=\"https://twitter.com/AskTSA/with_replies\">@AskTSA</a> gang on Twitter so you know what\'s allowed in your carry-on. Research the airports you\'ll be using so you know how to your gate, where the good restaurants are, or better yet, if there\'s a brewpub. Also, figure out the geography. Knowing alternatives to your destination airport gives you more flexibility dealing with cancelled flights or missed connections. In New York, the LaGuardia-to-Newark pivot is easy, but others aren’t so obvious.  Everyone knows that Chicago has two airports – O’Hare and Midway.  But what about Milwaukee’s Mitchell Field 80 miles north?  If Philadelphia is in trouble, how many folks think about Harrisburg or BWI?  Or Sacramento as an alternative to SFO?</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Catch the Early Flight </strong>— Delays stack up as the day wears on.  As your airplane goes from airport to airport, the probability of it getting stuck increases.  Overnight, airlines have a chance to recover – late planes finally get their destinations and operations groups can reassign planes.  So while the last flight out can be a crap shoot, I’ve rarely hit a delay on the first flight out.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Use Multiple Flight Tracking Apps</strong> — Use your smartphone to keep track of gate changes and flight delays. Sign up for text notifications from your airline when you book your ticket. However,  I’ve often experienced long delays with the airlines’ services or changes that were never sent out. So I also use <a href=\"http://tripit.com/\">TripIt</a>, <a href=\"http://flightaware.com/\">FlightAware</a>, and <a href=\"http://flightstats.com\">FlightStats</a>. It means multiple notices, but it also means I don’t miss anything.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Use Twitter as a Concierge Service</strong> — Most airlines have social media teams monitoring Twitter. Before you leave, find and follow your airline’s Twitter customer service account. “At naming” them in a Tweet (e.g., “<a dir=\"ltr\" href=\"https://twitter.com/united\">@united</a> what’s happening with UA 4286 MSY-ORD that it’s 1:45 hr delayed?”) usually gets a response in a couple of minutes. Following them allows you to exchange personal information such as record locator numbers via direct message (DM). It’s usually faster than queuing up for a frazzled gate agent and the results can be better.</li>\r\n</ol>\r\nBut above all, be realistic. It’s gonna be a zoo. Steel yourself; get your inner karma tuned for it. Pack a snack and a book, and practice deep cleansing breaths.','Top 10 Holiday Travel Tips','','inherit','closed','closed','','1682-revision-v1','','','2016-12-12 19:43:37','2016-12-13 00:43:37','',1682,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/12/12/1682-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1692,1,'2016-12-12 19:49:48','2016-12-13 00:49:48','[caption id=\"attachment_1683\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/774653_521026384596249_472247542_o.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1683\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/774653_521026384596249_472247542_o-300x225.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\" /></a> Green Bay Looks So Pretty This Time of Year[/caption]\r\n\r\nAs the economy recovers, so does travel volume. As you gird yourself to wade into the crowds, here are 10 tips to keep you moving over the river and through the woods...\r\n<ol>\r\n 	<li><strong>Expand Your Fly-vs.-Drive Tipping Point </strong>— My normal tipping point is 350 miles; anything less and I drive it. However, the holiday traffic changes the calculus a bit. If you fly, figure the airport logistics will add 3 hours to your in-flight time. Airlines are recommending passengers arrive 2 hours before their holiday flights, and when you arrive, all the additional people means it\'ll take you at least an hour to de-plane, collect your luggage, and get off the airport property. And that\'s if there are no delays. This increases the holiday fly-vs.-drive tipping point to at least 500 miles.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Use Multiple Navigation Apps — </strong>If you decide to drive, use more than one maps app to help you route around traffic jams from rush hour, construction, and accidents. I personally use both <a href=\"https://www.waze.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Waze</a> and <a href=\"https://maps.google.com\">Google Maps</a> because, even though they\'re both owned by Google, they often give you different directions. I find Waze is better at redirecting you around accidents and traffic jams, but can be a bit twitchy -- sending you wandering through sub-divisions to save a minute of drive time. I tend to follow Waze but periodically check it against Google Maps.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Sign Up for TSA PreCheck — </strong>Gift yourself and spend the $85 on some time and hassle reduction. You won\'t get it in time for this Christmas, but it\'s good for 5 years, so you\'ll have it next Christmas.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Apply for an Airline Credit Card — </strong>If your credit is good enough for instant approval, getting your airline\'s credit card will get you entry level frequent flier status. This allows you to use the status security lines (handy if you don\'t have PreCheck) and the second boarding group which is usually good enough to let you find some overhead bin space. This typically will work for you and your family. If the lead adult’s boarding pass shows priority/premiere access, the overworked minimum-wage airport staffers guarding the status security lanes will let the family tag along. And at the gate, I’ve never seen a family split across boarding groups.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Fly Direct —</strong> Holiday travel stacks up problems —  high passenger load factors combined with winter weather disruptions almost guarantees late arrivals and missed connections. Even if you’re connecting through Houston, an intermediate stop adds one more point of failure, one more opportunity for the airlines to screw up. Pay the extra $100 for a direct flight.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Skip the Tight Connection —  </strong>If you can’t fly direct, step away from any connection that’s less than 60 minutes.  Yes, we usually want to get to our destination in the shortest possible time, but accepting a connection of 1 hour or less…. Think about it – a 15-minute delay on your flight into a big hub like <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27hare_Airport\" target=\"_blank\">Chicago</a> or <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denver_International_Airport\" target=\"_blank\">Denver</a> or <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detroit_Metropolitan_Wayne_County_Airport\" target=\"_blank\">Detroit</a> (as good as on-time in the winter for most airlines) and you’re sprinting across terminals and concourses just to beat the closing door.  A 1-hr connection is just asking for a stress attack and/or an overnight stay at the airport branch of the <a title=\"Bates Motel\" href=\"http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092622/\" rel=\"imdb\">Bates Motel</a>.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Research Before You Leave — </strong>You don\'t have time to be clueless. Hit the <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/travel/travel-tips\">TSA website</a> or the <a href=\"https://twitter.com/AskTSA/with_replies\">@AskTSA</a> gang on Twitter so you know what\'s allowed in your carry-on. Research the airports you\'ll be using so you know how to your gates, where the good restaurants are, or better yet, if there\'s a brewpub. Also, figure out the geography. Knowing alternatives to your destination airport gives you more flexibility dealing with cancelled flights or missed connections. In New York, the LaGuardia-to-Newark pivot is easy, but others aren’t so obvious.  Everyone knows that Chicago has two airports – O’Hare and Midway.  But what about Milwaukee’s Mitchell Field 80 miles north?  If Philadelphia is in trouble, how many folks think about Harrisburg or BWI?  Or Sacramento as an alternative to SFO?</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Catch the Early Flight </strong>— Delays stack up as the day wears on.  As your airplane goes from airport to airport, the probability of it getting stuck increases.  Overnight, airlines have a chance to recover – late planes finally get their destinations and operations groups can reassign planes.  So while the last flight out can be a crap shoot, I rarely hit a delay on the first flight out.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Use Multiple Flight Tracking Apps</strong> — Use your smartphone to keep track of gate changes and flight delays. Sign up for text notifications from your airline when you book your ticket. However,  I’ve often experienced long delays with the airlines’ services or notices that were never sent out. So I also use <a href=\"http://tripit.com/\">TripIt</a>, <a href=\"http://flightaware.com/\">FlightAware</a>, and <a href=\"http://flightstats.com\">FlightStats</a>. It means multiple notices, but it also means I don’t miss anything.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Use Twitter as a Concierge Service</strong> — Most airlines have social media teams monitoring Twitter. Before you leave, find and follow your airline’s Twitter customer service account. “At naming” them in a Tweet (e.g., “<a dir=\"ltr\" href=\"https://twitter.com/united\">@united</a> what’s happening with UA 4286 MSY-ORD that it’s 1:45 hr delayed?”) usually gets a response in a couple of minutes. Following them allows you to exchange personal information such as record locator numbers via direct message (DM). It’s usually faster than queuing up for a frazzled gate agent and the results can be better.</li>\r\n</ol>\r\nBut above all, be realistic. It’s gonna be a zoo. Steel yourself; get your inner karma tuned for it. Pack a snack and a book, and practice deep cleansing breaths.','Top 10 Holiday Travel Tips','','inherit','closed','closed','','1682-revision-v1','','','2016-12-12 19:49:48','2016-12-13 00:49:48','',1682,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/12/12/1682-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1693,1,'2016-12-15 14:23:04','2016-12-15 19:23:04','[caption id=\"attachment_1683\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/774653_521026384596249_472247542_o.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1683\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/774653_521026384596249_472247542_o-300x225.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\" /></a> Green Bay Looks So Pretty This Time of Year[/caption]\r\n\r\nAs the economy recovers, so does travel volume. As you gird yourself to wade into the crowds, here are 10 tips to keep you moving over the river and through the woods...\r\n<ol>\r\n 	<li><strong>Expand Your Fly-vs.-Drive Tipping Point </strong>— My normal tipping point is 350 miles; anything less and I drive it. However, the holiday traffic changes the calculus a bit. If you fly, figure the airport logistics will add 3 hours to your in-flight time. Airlines are recommending passengers arrive 2 hours before their holiday flights, and when you arrive, all the additional people means it\'ll take you at least an hour to de-plane, collect your luggage, and get off the airport property. And that\'s if there are no delays. This increases the holiday fly-vs.-drive tipping point to at least 500 miles.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Use Multiple Navigation Apps — </strong>If you decide to drive, use more than one maps app to help you route around traffic jams from rush hour, construction, and accidents. I personally use both <a href=\"https://www.waze.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Waze</a> and <a href=\"https://maps.google.com\">Google Maps</a> because, even though they\'re both owned by Google, they often give you different directions. I find Waze is better at redirecting you around accidents and traffic jams, but can be a bit twitchy -- sending you wandering through sub-divisions to save a minute of drive time. I tend to follow Waze but periodically check it against Google Maps.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Sign Up for TSA PreCheck — </strong>Gift yourself and spend the $85 on some time and hassle reduction. You won\'t get it in time for this Christmas, but it\'s good for 5 years, so you\'ll have it next Christmas.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Apply for an Airline Credit Card — </strong>If your credit is good enough for instant approval, getting your airline\'s credit card will get you entry level frequent flier status. This allows you to use the status security lines (handy if you don\'t have PreCheck) and the second boarding group which is usually good enough to let you find some overhead bin space. This typically will work for you and your family. If the lead adult’s boarding pass shows priority/premiere access, the overworked minimum-wage airport staffers guarding the status security lanes will let the family tag along. And at the gate, I’ve never seen a family split across boarding groups.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Fly Non-Stop —</strong> Holiday travel stacks up problems —  high passenger load factors combined with winter weather disruptions almost guarantees late arrivals and missed connections. Even if you’re connecting through Houston, an intermediate stop adds one more point of failure, one more opportunity for the airlines to screw up. Pay the extra $100 for a direct flight.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Skip the Tight Connection —  </strong>If you can’t fly direct, step away from any connection that’s less than 60 minutes.  Yes, we usually want to get to our destination in the shortest possible time, but accepting a connection of 1 hour or less…. Think about it – a 15-minute delay on your flight into a big hub like <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27hare_Airport\" target=\"_blank\">Chicago</a> or <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denver_International_Airport\" target=\"_blank\">Denver</a> or <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detroit_Metropolitan_Wayne_County_Airport\" target=\"_blank\">Detroit</a> (as good as on-time in the winter for most airlines) and you’re sprinting across terminals and concourses just to beat the closing door.  A 1-hr connection is just asking for a stress attack and/or an overnight stay at the airport branch of the <a title=\"Bates Motel\" href=\"http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092622/\" rel=\"imdb\">Bates Motel</a>.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Research Before You Leave — </strong>You don\'t have time to be clueless. Hit the <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/travel/travel-tips\">TSA website</a> or the <a href=\"https://twitter.com/AskTSA/with_replies\">@AskTSA</a> gang on Twitter so you know what\'s allowed in your carry-on. Research the airports you\'ll be using so you know how to your gates, where the good restaurants are, or better yet, if there\'s a brewpub. Also, figure out the geography. Knowing alternatives to your destination airport gives you more flexibility dealing with cancelled flights or missed connections. In New York, the LaGuardia-to-Newark pivot is easy, but others aren’t so obvious.  Everyone knows that Chicago has two airports – O’Hare and Midway.  But what about Milwaukee’s Mitchell Field 80 miles north?  If Philadelphia is in trouble, how many folks think about Harrisburg or BWI?  Or Sacramento as an alternative to SFO?</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Catch the Early Flight </strong>— Delays stack up as the day wears on.  As your airplane goes from airport to airport, the probability of it getting stuck increases.  Overnight, airlines have a chance to recover – late planes finally get their destinations and operations groups can reassign planes.  So while the last flight out can be a crap shoot, I rarely hit a delay on the first flight out.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Use Multiple Flight Tracking Apps</strong> — Use your smartphone to keep track of gate changes and flight delays. Sign up for text notifications from your airline when you book your ticket. However,  I’ve often experienced long delays with the airlines’ services or notices that were never sent out. So I also use <a href=\"http://tripit.com/\">TripIt</a>, <a href=\"http://flightaware.com/\">FlightAware</a>, and <a href=\"http://flightstats.com\">FlightStats</a>. It means multiple notices, but it also means I don’t miss anything.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Use Twitter as a Concierge Service</strong> — Most airlines have social media teams monitoring Twitter. Before you leave, find and follow your airline’s Twitter customer service account. “At naming” them in a Tweet (e.g., “<a dir=\"ltr\" href=\"https://twitter.com/united\">@united</a> what’s happening with UA 4286 MSY-ORD that it’s 1:45 hr delayed?”) usually gets a response in a couple of minutes. Following them allows you to exchange personal information such as record locator numbers via direct message (DM). It’s usually faster than queuing up for a frazzled gate agent and the results can be better.</li>\r\n</ol>\r\nBut above all, be realistic. It’s gonna be a zoo. Steel yourself; get your inner karma tuned for it. Pack a snack and a book, and practice deep cleansing breaths.','Top 10 Holiday Travel Tips','','inherit','closed','closed','','1682-revision-v1','','','2016-12-15 14:23:04','2016-12-15 19:23:04','',1682,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/12/15/1682-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1694,1,'2016-12-15 14:32:03','2016-12-15 19:32:03','[caption id=\"attachment_1683\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/774653_521026384596249_472247542_o.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1683\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/774653_521026384596249_472247542_o-300x225.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\" /></a> Green Bay Looks So Pretty This Time of Year[/caption]\r\n\r\nAs the economy recovers, so does travel volume. As you gird yourself to wade into the crowds, here are 10 tips to keep you moving over the river and through the woods...\r\n<ol>\r\n 	<li><strong>Expand Your Fly-vs.-Drive Tipping Point </strong>— My normal tipping point is 350 miles; anything less and I drive it. However, the holiday traffic changes the calculus a bit. If you fly, figure the airport logistics will add 3 hours to your in-flight time. Airlines are recommending passengers arrive 2 hours before their holiday flights, and when you arrive, all the additional people means it\'ll take you at least an hour to de-plane, collect your luggage, and get off the airport property. And that\'s if there are no delays. This increases the holiday fly-vs.-drive tipping point to at least 500 miles.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Use Multiple Navigation Apps — </strong>If you decide to drive, use more than one maps app to help you route around traffic jams from rush hour, construction, and accidents. I personally use both <a href=\"https://www.waze.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Waze</a> and <a href=\"https://maps.google.com\">Google Maps</a> because, even though they\'re both owned by Google, they often give you different directions. I find Waze is better at redirecting you around accidents and traffic jams, but can be a bit twitchy -- sending you wandering through sub-divisions to save a minute of drive time. I tend to follow Waze but periodically check it against Google Maps.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Sign Up for TSA PreCheck — </strong>Gift yourself and spend the $85 on some time and hassle reduction. You won\'t get it in time for this Christmas, but it\'s good for 5 years, so you\'ll have it next Christmas.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Apply for an Airline Credit Card — </strong>If your credit is good enough for instant approval, getting your airline\'s credit card will get you entry level frequent flier status. This allows you to use the status security lines (handy if you don\'t have PreCheck) and the second boarding group which is usually good enough to let you find some overhead bin space. This typically will work for you and your family. If the lead adult’s boarding pass shows priority/premiere access, the overworked minimum-wage airport staffers guarding the status security lanes will let the family tag along. And at the gate, I’ve never seen a family split across boarding groups.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Fly Non-Stop —</strong> Holiday travel stacks up problems —  high passenger load factors combined with winter weather disruptions almost guarantees late arrivals and missed connections. Even if you’re connecting through Houston, an intermediate stop adds one more point of failure, one more opportunity for the airlines to screw up. Pay the extra $100 for a non-stop flight.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Skip the Tight Connection —  </strong>If you can’t fly direct, step away from any connection that’s less than 60 minutes.  Yes, we usually want to get to our destination in the shortest possible time, but accepting a connection of 1 hour or less…. Think about it – a 15-minute delay on your flight into a big hub like <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27hare_Airport\" target=\"_blank\">Chicago</a> or <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denver_International_Airport\" target=\"_blank\">Denver</a> or <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detroit_Metropolitan_Wayne_County_Airport\" target=\"_blank\">Detroit</a> (as good as on-time in the winter for most airlines) and you’re sprinting across terminals and concourses just to beat the closing door.  A 1-hr connection is just asking for a stress attack and/or an overnight stay at the airport branch of the <a title=\"Bates Motel\" href=\"http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092622/\" rel=\"imdb\">Bates Motel</a>.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Research Before You Leave — </strong>You don\'t have time to be clueless. Hit the <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/travel/travel-tips\">TSA website</a> or the <a href=\"https://twitter.com/AskTSA/with_replies\">@AskTSA</a> gang on Twitter so you know what\'s allowed in your carry-on. Research the airports you\'ll be using so you know how to your gates, where the good restaurants are, or better yet, if there\'s a brewpub. Also, figure out the geography. Knowing alternatives to your destination airport gives you more flexibility dealing with cancelled flights or missed connections. In New York, the LaGuardia-to-Newark pivot is easy, but others aren’t so obvious.  Everyone knows that Chicago has two airports – O’Hare and Midway.  But what about Milwaukee’s Mitchell Field 80 miles north?  If Philadelphia is in trouble, how many folks think about Harrisburg or BWI?  Or Sacramento as an alternative to SFO?</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Catch the Early Flight </strong>— Delays stack up as the day wears on.  As your airplane goes from airport to airport, the probability of it getting stuck increases.  Overnight, airlines have a chance to recover – late planes finally get their destinations and operations groups can reassign planes.  So while the last flight out can be a crap shoot, I rarely hit a delay on the first flight out.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Use Multiple Flight Tracking Apps</strong> — Use your smartphone to keep track of gate changes and flight delays. Sign up for text notifications from your airline when you book your ticket. However,  I’ve often experienced long delays with the airlines’ services or notices that were never sent out. So I also use <a href=\"http://tripit.com/\">TripIt</a>, <a href=\"http://flightaware.com/\">FlightAware</a>, and <a href=\"http://flightstats.com\">FlightStats</a>. It means multiple notices, but it also means I don’t miss anything.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Use Twitter as a Concierge Service</strong> — Most airlines have social media teams monitoring Twitter. Before you leave, find and follow your airline’s Twitter customer service account. “At naming” them in a Tweet (e.g., “<a dir=\"ltr\" href=\"https://twitter.com/united\">@united</a> what’s happening with UA 4286 MSY-ORD that it’s 1:45 hr delayed?”) usually gets a response in a couple of minutes. Following them allows you to exchange personal information such as record locator numbers via direct message (DM). It’s usually faster than queuing up for a frazzled gate agent and the results can be better.</li>\r\n</ol>\r\nBut above all, be realistic. It’s gonna be a zoo. Steel yourself; get your inner karma tuned for it. Pack a snack and a book, and practice deep cleansing breaths.','Top 10 Holiday Travel Tips','','inherit','closed','closed','','1682-revision-v1','','','2016-12-15 14:32:03','2016-12-15 19:32:03','',1682,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/12/15/1682-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1697,1,'2017-01-16 20:21:10','2017-01-17 01:21:10','[caption id=\"attachment_1703\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/File_000.jpeg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1703\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/File_000-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Car trunks need carry-on luggage limits too[/caption]\n\nSeems like I\'ve been doing as much driving as flying since the last episode, so I\'ve switched from apps that track flight delays to those that help me dodge traffic backups. I talk, yet again, about buying pay-as-you-go SIMs while traveling, but the need to do that may be ending. And I\'ve reshuffled my carry-on luggage as the airlines have changed their rules. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_126.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #126:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, hoping that everyone had a Merry Christmas -- or Happy Christmas if you’re on the other side of the Atlantic -- Happy Hanukkah, and a Happy New Year. I’m personally in trying a combo Dry-ish and Sugar-Free January in an attempt to drop 10 lbs of holiday weight that managed to sneak on-board -- the downside, I guess, from staying off the road for the back half of December.</li>\n 	<li>I eased back into travel mode with my usual Charlottesville trip the first workday of the New Year. I didn’t mind it too much since Charlottesville was about 20 degrees warmer than Chicago. It was nice to walk outside with just a scarf and a tweed jacket.</li>\n 	<li>Between <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/11/22/podcast-125-uber-driver-stories-overseas-for-the-election/\">the last episode</a> and my Christmas travel break, I did almost as much driving as I did flying. I drove down to Nashville the Friday after Thanksgiving to see my mother. That drive wasn’t so bad, The Sunday drive back to Chicago, though was a whole ‘nother matter. Then that next week, I had meetings in Richmond, VA, Baltimore, and Charlottesville. I didn’t even bother to look at flight schedules. I knew nonstop RIC-BWI and a BWI-CHO flights were non-existent and the 2-2.5 hour drive time was within my fly-or-drive tipping point. Neither drives were bad. The only hassle was the Hertz rental car. Since it was a one-way rental -- I was picking up in RIC and dropping off in CHO -- they gave me a beater car, an older Jeep Patriot that I think was the only car on their lot without Bluetooth, which made listening to podcasts or doing phone calls a bit less convenient.</li>\n 	<li>It did give me a chance to explore Baltimore and Charlottesville a bit more than usual, though. On my past visits, I wouldn’t bother with a rental; would just taxi in from the airport, and then walk or Uber to places. But with the beater Jeep, I could wander with a bit more range. In Baltimore, I drove around the Fells Point neighborhood, ending up in the <a href=\"http://www.thamesstreetoysterhouse.com/\">Thames St Oyster House</a>, then threading through some waterfront areas that I had been a bit hesitant to walk through. In Charlottesville, I wandered through the countryside until I found <a href=\"http://starrhill.com/\">Starr Hill Brewery</a>. Kinda empty on a rainy Weds night, which meant the bartender had time to take me through a flight of her favorite beers. Maybe I’ve found the source of a few of those holiday pounds.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/THE_CONCEPT_OF_ENERGY/55008\">ABANDONED BUTTERFLIES</a> by THE_CONCEPT_OF_ENERGY (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/\">Attribution</a> license. Ft: Doxent Zsigmond, Snowflake</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>I’ve talked a couple of times in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/09/28/podcast-124-craft-beer-hunting-i-hate-rick-steves/\">past episodes</a> about the benefits of buying a pay-as-you-go SIM when traveling internationally -- $20 for a GB of data vs. AT&amp;T’s $60 for 300 MB is easy math. The only hassle is buying the SIM. First, you have to find the phone store, which can be a bit of an Easter Egg hunt. Back in November, our first day in Italy was in Pisa. We land, get the car, and head to the city center to find the phone store. However, the easiest one to get to was closed -- at 1 in the afternoon. Luckily, the next closest one was only a 10-minute walk and it was open. This time, I’d done my research before we left, purchased the SIMs online, and had printed out vouchers with bar codes, and instructions in English and Italian. I was ready for a quick and easy transaction. And yet again, I was wrong. The clerk knew nothing about the vouchers, didn’t know how to process them, and had to call around to other shops to figure it out. And then, each of the SIMs had to be registered and activated. Over an hour later, we’re sprinting out of the shop so we can make our time slot to get into the Leaning Tower -- which we’d also pre-paid. And this was a pretty typical experience. Which was why I was really excited a telecoms industry consultant told me that the virtual SIM, or the e-SIM was getting close to launch. Apple took the first crack at this back in 2014, but it’s been a slow ramp up. The iPhone 7 I picked up back in Sept still has the classic SIM. But this guy was telling me that going SIM-less is just about possible. He said it’ll be like signing into a WiFi hotspot. The next time I land in Italy and turn on my phone, I’ll be presented with a sign-in screen where I’ll be able to select my carrier and plan, and charge it to my credit card. Now given how wonky some WiFi gateways are, I’m not sure that this is the best comparison to sell me on the service, but if it saves me a couple of hours of frustration when I’m at my most jet lagged, I’ll figure it out.</li>\n 	<li>My age odometer clicked over again last month -- which I guess is a good thing, because if it didn’t click over, I be… dead. So, unless I find that Dorian Grey portrait at a garage sale, getting older is better than the alternative. I try not to let it bother me -- with varying levels of success. One thing, though, this does frustrate me is the need to bring my glasses into hotel bathrooms with me. Because it seems just as my reading vision is deteriorating, hotels are reducing the type size on their shampoo and conditioner bottles. As they try to go upscale with their toiletries, the bottle designers are taking the regular sized fancy labels into Photoshop and shrinking them down to fit on the front of a much smaller bottle, resulting is minuscule type that I might’ve been challenged to read in my 20’s let alone now. So my drill is to wear my glasses into the bathroom, figure out which bottle is shampoo, which is conditioner, and which is soap (or shower gel as they call it), and then line them up in order on the soap dish in the shower. Then take my glasses off, turn on the water, and hope that my lined up bottles don’t fall. The Hyatt Place that I stay at in Charlottesville is one of the few that doesn’t require this drill. They have a big “1” printed on the shampoo -- it runs about ¾’s the length of the bottle -- and a big “2” printed on the conditioner. And they’re in different colors. No need for glasses there. I love that hotel.</li>\n 	<li>It’s accepted wisdom that the most disgusting place on an airplane is the seat back pocket, and it just keeps getting worse. As airlines try to tighten up their ground turns -- how long a plane is on the ground before it takes off again -- the amount of time the cabin clean-up crew has to do its job continues to shrink. I was reminded of this by a Chicago Tribune article right before Thanksgiving when many airport workers -- cabin cleaners, baggage handlers, wheelchair attendants -- threatened to strike during that busiest travel week. The reporter interviewed a cabin cleaner who recently moved to Chicago from San Juan, PR. She said her crew of four are given 7 minutes to clean the cabin; no where near enough time to clean up all the crumbs, spilled drinks, and wrappers ground into the carpet, let alone time to clear the junk people leave in the seat back pocket. \"I don\'t know what is wrong with passengers nowadays,” she said. I won’t even pull out the safety card when I’m sitting in the exit row. A buddy told me a story about flying Tunisair from Brussels to Tunis many years ago. After the meal service, when people were done eating, they just shoved their trays into the seat back pocket. I’m not sure it’s all that different today.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/snowflake/46164\">A Foolish Game</a> by snowflake (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/\">Attribution (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Admiral Bob</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Beating The Traffic</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>As I mentioned earlier, I’ve done a bunch of travel by car lately. I talked in the last episode about driving through Tuscany. I was pleasantly surprised when Hertz upgraded us to an Alfa Romeo sports car, but when we had to drive through the rutted dirt back roads outside of Greve in Chianti, I was left wanting for something with a bit more ground clearance.</li>\n 	<li>The Thanksgiving drive down to Nashville was a lot smoother. They finally finished the years of construction expanding the I-80/94 constriction point around Lake Michigan in Northwest Indiana, and the traffic from there to I-65 south flowed smoothly. We made good enough time to make a couple of beer stops -- in Columbus, IN at a new Upland Brewing restaurant, and in downtown Louisville at Against The Grain Brewing.</li>\n 	<li>The drive back would be a whole other matter -- and I knew it and dreaded it. We drove down on that Friday, sailing through downtown Indy, Louisville, and Nashville because everyone was on vacation or shopping. Driving back Sunday though, we were right in the thick of the busiest travel day in the US. And while I always avoid flying on this day, I had managed to put myself on one of the US’s main north-south interstates. It would’ve only been worse if we’d been on the East Coast driving I-95 or the Jersey Turnpike. And it was the beat-down that I’d expected. The start of the drive out of Nashville was fine, and a bit pretty, going through rolling hills up to Louisville. The traffic was steady, but flowing. But we kept picking up more traffic as we headed north. We took a break in Indy this time, stopping off at Sun King Brewing right off the interstate, and then coffee-d up at a nearby Starbucks. North of Indy was when it really hit -- more and more cars and trucks heading up to Chicago, but still just 2 lanes. And so when the inevitable accident happened -- as it did many times that Sunday -- closing down one of those lanes, cutting the already clogged road by 50%, Waze became, if not a life saver, a time saver. I was running 3 nav systems, Waze, Google Maps, and the in-dash BMW nav. All had real-time traffic, but Waze seemed to be the quickest in sensing the need for a reroute. A couple of times that Sunday, it would direct us to take the next exit after traffic had stopped, and would vector us around the bottleneck and back onto the interstate, saving us 15-20 minutes of crawling and at least 70 points of increased blood pressure. I did skip the recommended diversion through the south side of Chicago, though. Given the record number of shootings in Chicago, stop-and-go traffic didn’t seem quite the burden that it did in rural Indiana.</li>\n 	<li>The next week’s triangulation across Richmond, Baltimore, and Charlottesville found me on I-95 having to make 2 passes around Washington, DC on the Capital Beltway, always a brutal 8-lane chokepoint. Heading up from Richmond Tuesday night, Google Maps told me to take the clockwise/west route around DC while Waze told me to go east. Odd since Google owns both. A friend said that he researched this a bit and found some articles claiming that Waze’s algorithm weighs current information more than historical trends; Google Maps tips the scales the other way. I don’t know if this is true -- I haven’t been able to find anything that says this -- but I often see different rush hour recommendations. Since Waze served me well on Thanksgiving Sunday, I went east and took the counterclockwise path around. It was a rainy night, but traffic flowed better than I expected and I made it to Baltimore in time for an oyster dinner.</li>\n 	<li>In spite of juggling nav apps, I found that I was more productive driving from Richmond to Baltimore to Charlottesville than I would’ve flying. You’d think it would be the other way around, but lack of direct flights would’ve mean going up and down, connecting through Washington Dulles. And on those few minutes I might be able to work, full planes and tight seats make it seem almost anti-social to try to open a laptop. On my 3-hour drive from Baltimore to Charlottesville, though, I was able to hammer through 2 conference calls and an unhurried, wide-ranging conversation with my boss. He called me. I told him that I was having a nice drive through Virginia horse country. “Good,” he said, “I have you captive.”</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/49674\">H2O</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Having to Think about Carry-on Luggage</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>I don’t usually think a lot about packing or luggage. And sometimes I think that puts me in the minority of frequent travelers. I know guys who obsess over their Tumi bags and specific packing systems. I used a grey Samsonite roller until the New Orleans sidewalks beat the wheels out to a 30 degree splay, and then I went back to my old black Victorinox with customs stickers from Thailand and Vietnam.</li>\n 	<li>However, a few things in 2016 got me thinking about carry-ons -- my carry-on experience with Wow Air in Iceland that I talked about in an earlier episode where I had to pull out half my clothes to meet the weight restrictions; my daughter’s light blue carry-on catching the eye of seemingly every gate agent she tried to pass, being forced to check it, and then having it lost 75% of her flights in 2016; and most recently, enduring long and often cold waits on a jet bridge waiting for my “valet checked” carry-on bag when flying regional jets</li>\n 	<li>Starting from last to first, this regional jet thing kills me. It used to be that gate checking for a commuter flight wasn’t a big thing -- the bag would be waiting for you on the jet bridge before you got off the plane. Now, as regional jets have gotten larger, they put the gate checked luggage in the same hold with the regular checked luggage, the only differentiating factor being the tag they put on at the gate. I’m typically waiting around 10 minutes with 40-50 other passengers, lined up on one side of an unheated jet bridge leaning over to see if my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/File_000.png\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1708\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/File_000-169x300.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"169\" height=\"300\" /></a>bag has come up yet. It’s gotten bad. On some of the larger Embraer jets flown by JetBlue, the overhead bins are large enough for regular bags, but on most of the regionals, you’re standing in that jet bridge line. After a while, this got real old, so I scrounged around through the old luggage in the attic to find a smaller duffel for 1-2 night trips that would fit in the overhead. I found a black nylon duffel from a 2007 National Retail Foundation tech conference that was an attendee giveaway. It had all the sponsors names stenciled across it -- Oracle, Infosys. I kinda felt like a Nascar racer. But it did the job. I could squish it into the small overheads of the regional jets and so walk past the line of folks waiting for the “valets” to bring their luggage. But it still looked cheesy. So when I was in Italy in November, I kept my eye out for a nice leather bag. One rainy day in Florence - not unique on that trip -- we dove into a covered outdoor market. Wandering through the stalls, I found a beautiful leather bag for 100 euros. My wife pointed to a bag the next size up -- “Don’t you want this bigger one? It’s only 20 euros more.” Nope, that would defeat the whole purpose. I posted a picture of that bag on Twitter. Every time I walk up the ORD jet bridge when returning home from Charlottesville, I love that bag even more.</li>\n 	<li>I remember when I first started traveling, you’d never see a hard-sided carry-on. Now it seems at least 30% of the carry-ons are hard-sided. I think a lot of it is fashion -- they come in much cooler designs and colors, but there is some functionality to them. If you’re flying an airline that’s aggressively using a baggage sizer, it’s much easier to stay legal with a hard-sided bag. You can’t overstuff them to bulging like you can a soft-sided bag, and the polycarbonate shell slips much easier in and out of the metal baggage sizer. This is why I suggested to my daughter that she start using a hard-sided bag. And in a bit more muted color -- something that wouldn’t grab the gate agent’s eye.</li>\n 	<li>But if you’re working against weight limits as well as dimensions, like I was with Wow Air, you want the lightest, most stripped down bag possible. I haven’t experienced a carry-on weight limit in the US. Some US carriers post a 35 or 40 lb limit -- even Spirit is at 40 lbs -- but I’ve never seen a gate agent weigh a carry-on. The international carriers are where this comes in. Wow Air’s carry-on size dimensions are about the same as US carriers, but their weight limit is much less -- 10 kg or 22 lbs -- which seems like the consensus number for non-US carriers. In this case, you don’t want the extra weight of the hard siding. You probably don’t even want very sturdy wheels; just the lightest covering around your clothes that you can get. I know guys who’ll brag that they can fit everything they own into 2 suitcases. These guys are obviously aren’t doing carry-on.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #126</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/\">ccMixter.org</a></li>\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_126.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #126 — Beating the Traffic; Rethinking Carry-On Luggage','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-126-beating-the-traffic-rethinking-carry-on-luggage','','','2021-09-29 08:17:15','2021-09-29 13:17:15','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=1697',0,'post','',2),
(1698,1,'2017-01-16 22:52:37','2017-01-17 03:52:37','Back from 10 days in Tuscany where, among other things, we thought we\'d avoid all the noise of the US presidential election. We succeeded... almost. One of my latest travel hobbies has been to quiz Uber drivers for their life stories. It makes for interesting rides to and from the airport. We also continue the ongoing thread about travel safety. This time, we talk about using Bluetooth in rental cars. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_126.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/294360507\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n<!--more-->\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #126:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, hoping that everyone had a Merry Christmas -- or Happy Christmas if you’re on the other side of the Atlantic -- Happy Hanukkah, and a Happy New Year. I’m personally in trying a combo Dry-ish and Sugar-Free January in an attempt to drop 10 lbs of holiday weight that managed to sneak on-board -- the downside, I guess, from staying off the road for the back half of December.</li>\r\n 	<li>I eased back into travel mode with my usual Charlottesville trip the first workday of the New Year. I didn’t mind it too much since Charlottesville was about 20 degrees warmer than Chicago. It was nice to walk outside with just a scarf and a tweed jacket.</li>\r\n 	<li>Between <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/11/22/podcast-125-uber-driver-stories-overseas-for-the-election/\">the last episode</a> and my Christmas travel break, I did almost as much driving as I did flying. I drove down to Nashville the Friday after Thanksgiving to see my mother. That drive wasn’t so bad, The Sunday drive back to Chicago, though was a whole ‘nother matter. Then that next week, I had meetings in Richmond, VA, Baltimore, and Charlottesville. I didn’t even bother to look at flight schedules. I knew nonstop RIC-BWI and a BWI-CHO flights were non-existent and the 2-2.5 hour drive time was within my fly-or-drive tipping point. Neither drives were bad. The only hassle was the Hertz rental car. Since it was a one-way rental -- I was picking up in RIC and dropping off in CHO -- they gave me a beater car, an older Jeep Patriot that I think was the only car on their lot without Bluetooth, which made listening to podcasts or doing phone calls a bit less convenient.</li>\r\n 	<li>It did give me a chance to explore Baltimore and Charlottesville a bit more than usual, though. On my past visits, I wouldn’t bother with a rental; would just taxi in from the airport, and then walk or Uber to places. But with the beater Jeep, I could wander with a bit more range. In Baltimore, I drove around the Fells Point neighborhood, ending up in the <a href=\"http://www.thamesstreetoysterhouse.com/\">Thames St Oyster House</a>, then threading through some waterfront areas that I had been a bit hesitant to walk through. In Charlottesville, I wandered through the countryside until I found <a href=\"http://starrhill.com/\">Starr Hill Brewery</a>. Kinda empty on a rainy Weds night, which meant the bartender had time to take me through a flight of her favorite beers. Maybe I’ve found the source of a few of those holiday pounds.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/buy_album.php?id=39CE51194FB95B63577FBFD7E2EC168C99277BD6CE86C10FDC39095666B5D6CF\"><em>Heaven</em></a> by <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=BB22CBFF24501120EEC6ABA18AB0A15FEB05A36360E7FDA122C8D7A5C140F8DC\" rel=\"nofollow\">Los Lonely Boys</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>A <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/08/13/podcast-123-how-to-avoid-travel-delays/\" target=\"_blank\">few episodes</a> back, I complained about having to do an interview for my Global Entry renewal. I’d read online about others getting renewed without the interview, so I was a bit peeved to have to make my way past the lines at the McDonalds in the lower lever of ORD Terminal 5 yet again. But, other than the smell of fries at 9am on a Friday (I’m too old to start my weekends on Thursday nights), it was a fairly painless experience. I was ushered back less than 5 minutes after I’d arrived and had a very straight forward interview with the Customs and Border Protection agent. He was a great guy; good conversation. Asked me a couple of questions -- including one about my stolen passport -- took a new picture and a new set of fingerprints and I was done. 10 minutes later, I was making my way past the McDonalds again. As I thought about it, I had no reason to be peeved. Seems reasonable that they’d want to put an eyeball on me after 5 years.</li>\r\n 	<li>Jim McDonough posted a comment on the TravelCommons web site about my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/09/28/podcast-124-craft-beer-hunting-i-hate-rick-steves/\" target=\"_blank\">Rick Steves rant</a>. Jim writes:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>My wife and I love Rick Steves (we call ourselves Rickheads) and use his books all the time. But I know what you mean about his fans overwhelming a particular place. It’s funny how many people in the States have no idea who he is, but in Europe, Rick Steves sits at the right hand of the father. Get your restaurant or hotel into his book, and you have it made</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>And while I was able to dodge the Rickheads in Aberdeen, I knew I was toast in Tuscany. Even in November, I was shoulder-to-shoulder with older, sensibly dressed, empty-nester Rickheads toting their blue bibles through Pisa, Lucca, and Florence. Only when we were staying on a farm in Chianti a couple of miles up a rutted dirt road were we free of them.</li>\r\n 	<li>David Glickman sent me a note recommending a more detailed guide of Scotland for my next visit:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Living just outside London I am not sure I have never read a Rick Steves Guidebook, but what I recommend getting hold of Peter Irvine’s really excellent guide ‘Scotland The Best’ before your next trip to St.Andrews. My wife and I are regular visitors to the States, and my wife travels to Madison Wi about 6 times a year through ORD so we really enjoy your podcasts. We have just returned from a trip and boy is your country now expensive to us poor post-Brexit Brits!</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>I immediately hit Amazon and ordered the new 2016 edition of <a href=\"https://www.amazon.com/Scotland-Best-Peter-Irvine/dp/0007559348/ref=dp_ob_title_bk\"><em>Scotland The Best</em></a>. Very detailed, with lots of suggestions. Looking forward to giving it a workout on my next visit. And I can imagine the US looks very expensive for pound- and euro-based tourists. The euro dropped another 5% in the week-and-a-half we’ve been back from Italy.</li>\r\n 	<li>About a year ago in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/10/11/podcast-117-random-thoughts-about-eggs-scotland-car-rentals/\" target=\"_blank\">episode #117</a>, I first talked about Revolut, a virtual and real chip-and-pin debit card with great exchange rates. I first used it last fall on a trip to the UK. I’d transfer funds into it using my US debit card and manage conversions with a smartphone app. It was great. But note my use of the past tense. Over the past 3 months, the service has been deteriorating for US users. First, they began charging a 3% fee on fund transfers using US debit cards. I soon found that they only charged the fee if those transfers were in dollars. If I transferred funds in euros or pounds, there was no charge. Weird, but OK, it still worked. But when I tried that trick before my trips to Scotland and Italy, no dice. All US debit transfers were blocked. I suppose I could’ve tried an interbank transfer using something like TransferWise, but that’s way too much of a hassle. They say they “aim to change it ASAP” but it’s been 3 months now and no update. I have to retract my praise for Revolut and delete the app from my iPhone.</li>\r\n 	<li>I mentioned in the last episode, that the lack of a chip-&amp;-pin card in Scotland has become less of a hassle with the spread of contactless card readers that let me use Apple Pay on my iPhone. I didn’t find that same convenience in Italy. I didn’t see one place with a contactless reader. Other than large restaurant bills (we managed to find tables at a few Michelin starred restaurants during our stay), I paid mostly cash. It seemed much less of a hassle.</li>\r\n 	<li>Over the last 3-4 episodes, we had one blurb that’s talked about travel security. Last episode was VPNs, the one before that video jacking. So in this installment of <em>Travel Security</em>, I want to talk about car rentals; specifically, about when you use Bluetooth to pair your smartphone with your rental’s audio system. I do this all the time. It’s safer -- let’s me talk handsfree, avoiding wrecks and tickets. And it lets me listen to podcasts or Pandora or Spotify when I’m driving instead of fiddling around, finding a local radio station that I don’t hate. However, if you do this, you need to remember to delete your pairing when you return your car. There hasn’t been one time when I haven’t gone through and deleted 3-5 pairings before pairing my own. And if you scroll through the devices, they all have personalized names like “Timmy’s iPhone”. And most phones by default will download your contacts to the car when paired. You can turn this default behavior off in an Android phone, but I haven’t found that capabilities with iPhones. Instead, every time I pair my iPhone, I have to remember to flip the switch that prevents it. So for most people, they leave behind a profile in their rental with all of their contacts and phone numbers. That is just bad in so many ways.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://cyberset.cc/artists2.php?tr_release_id=104\"><em>Heaven</em></a> by <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=A951998E6011FA9B2D22387EB3CAC0B5EB05A36360E7FDA122C8D7A5C140F8DC\" rel=\"nofollow\">Electric Skychurch</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Uber Driver Stories</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I find myself taking more and more Ubers as opposed to regular taxi cabs. I like cabs, I like cab drivers, but Uber is usually a better experience. Thumbing the app is so much easier than trying to hail a cab, or finding the number of the local cab company and then dealing with an often(?)/usually(?) cab dispatcher. And the condition of the car is, 9 times out of 10, vastly superior to the beat-up cab I usually get. The Baltimore cabs I’d take from the Inner Harbor to the airport were some of the worst. But then in Chicago I got picked by an Uber driver in a BMW X3 and by a spotless Mercedes SUV at EWR. Indeed, 9 times out of 10 is giving cabs way too much of the benefit of the doubt. I’ve yet to ride in an Uber that was worse than a cab.</li>\r\n 	<li>But the best thing about taking an Uber is driver stories. Every Uber I take, I ask the driver how he/she likes it, how long they’ve been doing it, and what else they do -- if it’s not their full time gig (which is the definite minority)</li>\r\n 	<li>A lotta drivers I talk with are retired. One guy in Vegas told me he was a bit lonely and bored. He wanted to get out of the house, but really had nowhere to go. He didn’t want to gamble or sit in a bar at 10 in the morning, so driving Uber gave him a reason to get off the sofa.</li>\r\n 	<li>A Charlottesville, VA retired fireman drives the late night weekend shift when kids from UVa are willing to pay anything (or willing to charge anything to their parents’ accounts) for a ride home from the bars. He told me he gets huge surge fares, but he’s driving ‘til 3 or 4 in the morning.</li>\r\n 	<li>A woman in Baltimore is a retired teacher and principal. She drives to take a break from studying for her PhD. She too gets bored sitting around the house, and she likes to drive. She told me that it was her husband who got her to sign up for Uber. She was driving him crazy around the house. Another guy, non-retired, who is studying full-time for his CFA exam -- chartered financial analyst -- does the same thing, drives during his study breaks.</li>\r\n 	<li>I find that many morning drivers -- the ones taking me from my hotel to a client site -- are doing a little moonlighting; fitting in a few rides before they go to work, and then again at the end of the day. I was surprised to find out that Uber drivers don’t know your destination until they accept the ride. Thinking about it, it makes sense; keeps drivers from cherry picking, say, rides to the airport. But one woman told me about accepting a ride and finding out it was to some suburb 40 minutes away -- and she only had a quarter tank.</li>\r\n 	<li>Of course, there’s more to ridesharing than Uber. I’ve also used Lyft. During busy times, I’ll fire them both up to see which has less of a surge charge, or a shorter wait time. Most drivers will drive for both. In my unscientific polling, most prefer Lyft but get more traffic from Uber. One driver told my wife he prefers Lyft because the Lyft riders talk more. And then he proceeded to unload his life story on my wife and her friend for the next 40 minutes as they battled traffic into Chicago.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’m always interested in how the gig economy is working for them. For a while, we were reading that the sharing economy, the gig economy of Uber and Airbnb was the next wave. The froth seems to have worn off of that wave, but a lot of the Uber drivers I talk to need that extra money, though often they wonder if it’s worth it. The Mercedes SUV driver who took me from EWR to Hoboken wondered if it was worth hassle of waiting for an airport fare. The only full-time driver I had was in Baltimore, and she said she makes more money delivering packages for Uber than she does delivering passengers, and the packages are much quieter and more pleasant.</li>\r\n 	<li>But as good as these stories are, the best one I recently heard wasn’t from an Uber driver; it was from the manager of the Chianti farm we stayed at for a couple of days during our trip to Italy. He had lived in the Chicago area for about 10 years. He got his PhD in geochemistry at Univ of Illinois and then worked at Argonne National Labs doing research. After a while, he missed his family and the countryside where he’d grown up, so he moved back to Tuscany, married, had a kid, and now manages a cattle farm with a growing sideline in agritourism. Forget driving for Uber. I want to be this guy.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://www.podsafeaudio.com/jamroom/play.php?band_id=1258&amp;song_id=4378&amp;mode=song_hifi\"><em>Shadows</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.podsafeaudio.com/jamroom/bands/1258/\">Antardhyan</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Overseas for the Election</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>My wife and I flew to Italy the Thursday night before the election. We both voted early, so we didn’t shirk our civic duties. What we did do, though, was leave behind the last blast of election ads and media coverage. I mean, the one bad thing about Game 7 of the World Series going into extra innings was that it gave more time for political ads. We were very happy to leave all that noise behind us.</li>\r\n 	<li>On Election Day, we had dinner in a nice restaurant in a small town that was 45 minutes of switchbacks and rutted dirt roads away from our hotel. On the way back, I think we dodged a boar and a deer as we crossed back over the ridge of hills and headed down to our hotel. We went to bed while the polls in the US were still open and didn’t really think a thing about it.</li>\r\n 	<li>I woke up around 7 on Weds morning; Tuesday midnight in Chicago. I glanced at my iPhone and saw a cascade of notifications from the Wall Street Journal and Chicago Tribune about the election results. The election still hadn’t been called, but by the time we sat down for breakfast, it was done. Donald Trump had won.</li>\r\n 	<li>The Austrian guy working the desk and the breakfast (it was a small hotel) laughed when he walked up -- “At least you guys aren’t having a do-over” The July Austrian presidential election was set aside for problems with absentee ballots and they still haven’t done the revote. “Or Spain, going through two elections without getting a government.”</li>\r\n 	<li>Now, TravelCommons has never had a political point-of-view and I’m not about to change that here. I have good friends on both sides of the debate. What I will say is that I, like many others, was surprised by the results given all the predictions we’d heard right up until we were wheels up at ORD. All through breakfast, we refreshed our Twitter feeds and hit the Wall Street Journal and New York Times apps, trying to catch up on the coverage we’d slept through the night before. Where the night before, we were happy not to hear about politics, now we were digging for an explanation for this upset.</li>\r\n 	<li>After an hour of this, and an extra cappuccino, we set the phones aside again. It was nice that we could do that -- walk away from the disbelief (and some might say panic) at the result that was spreading over the media (social and traditional), and schools, and I imagine in the workplaces. Instead, we were driving our little Alfa Romeo through some beautiful Chianti vineyards that were brilliantly yellow with the vine leaves changing colors. We stopped off at the Antinori winery for a bit of a tasting and then continued our drive to Florence. We knew we’d eventually get pulled into the post-election vortex, but we knew we were lucky -- we would be in a cone of silence for another 3 days.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #126</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://promonet.iodalliance.com\">IODA Promonet</a> and <a href=\"http://podsafeaudio.com/\">PodSafe Audio</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_126.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','','','inherit','closed','closed','','1697-revision-v1','','','2017-01-16 22:52:37','2017-01-17 03:52:37','',1697,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/01/16/1697-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1699,1,'2017-01-16 22:55:51','2017-01-17 03:55:51','Back from 10 days in Tuscany where, among other things, we thought we\'d avoid all the noise of the US presidential election. We succeeded... almost. One of my latest travel hobbies has been to quiz Uber drivers for their life stories. It makes for interesting rides to and from the airport. We also continue the ongoing thread about travel safety. This time, we talk about using Bluetooth in rental cars. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_126.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/294360507\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n<!--more-->\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #126:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, hoping that everyone had a Merry Christmas -- or Happy Christmas if you’re on the other side of the Atlantic -- Happy Hanukkah, and a Happy New Year. I’m personally in trying a combo Dry-ish and Sugar-Free January in an attempt to drop 10 lbs of holiday weight that managed to sneak on-board -- the downside, I guess, from staying off the road for the back half of December.</li>\r\n 	<li>I eased back into travel mode with my usual Charlottesville trip the first workday of the New Year. I didn’t mind it too much since Charlottesville was about 20 degrees warmer than Chicago. It was nice to walk outside with just a scarf and a tweed jacket.</li>\r\n 	<li>Between <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/11/22/podcast-125-uber-driver-stories-overseas-for-the-election/\">the last episode</a> and my Christmas travel break, I did almost as much driving as I did flying. I drove down to Nashville the Friday after Thanksgiving to see my mother. That drive wasn’t so bad, The Sunday drive back to Chicago, though was a whole ‘nother matter. Then that next week, I had meetings in Richmond, VA, Baltimore, and Charlottesville. I didn’t even bother to look at flight schedules. I knew nonstop RIC-BWI and a BWI-CHO flights were non-existent and the 2-2.5 hour drive time was within my fly-or-drive tipping point. Neither drives were bad. The only hassle was the Hertz rental car. Since it was a one-way rental -- I was picking up in RIC and dropping off in CHO -- they gave me a beater car, an older Jeep Patriot that I think was the only car on their lot without Bluetooth, which made listening to podcasts or doing phone calls a bit less convenient.</li>\r\n 	<li>It did give me a chance to explore Baltimore and Charlottesville a bit more than usual, though. On my past visits, I wouldn’t bother with a rental; would just taxi in from the airport, and then walk or Uber to places. But with the beater Jeep, I could wander with a bit more range. In Baltimore, I drove around the Fells Point neighborhood, ending up in the <a href=\"http://www.thamesstreetoysterhouse.com/\">Thames St Oyster House</a>, then threading through some waterfront areas that I had been a bit hesitant to walk through. In Charlottesville, I wandered through the countryside until I found <a href=\"http://starrhill.com/\">Starr Hill Brewery</a>. Kinda empty on a rainy Weds night, which meant the bartender had time to take me through a flight of her favorite beers. Maybe I’ve found the source of a few of those holiday pounds.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/buy_album.php?id=39CE51194FB95B63577FBFD7E2EC168C99277BD6CE86C10FDC39095666B5D6CF\"><em>Heaven</em></a> by <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=BB22CBFF24501120EEC6ABA18AB0A15FEB05A36360E7FDA122C8D7A5C140F8DC\" rel=\"nofollow\">Los Lonely Boys</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I’ve talked a couple of times in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/09/28/podcast-124-craft-beer-hunting-i-hate-rick-steves/\">past episodes</a> about the benefits of buying a pay-as-you-go SIM when traveling internationally -- $20 for a GB of data vs. AT&amp;T’s $60 for 300 MB is easy math. The only hassle is buying the SIM. First, you have to find the phone store, which can be a bit of an Easter Egg hunt. Back in November, our first day in Italy was in Pisa. We land, get the car, and head to the city center to find the phone store. However, the easiest one to get to was closed -- at 1 in the afternoon. Luckily, the next closest one was only a 10-minute walk and it was open. This time, I’d done my research before we left, purchased the SIMs online, and had printed out vouchers with bar codes, and instructions in English and Italian. I was ready for a quick and easy transaction. And yet again, I was wrong. The clerk knew nothing about the vouchers, didn’t know how to process them, and had to call around to other shops to figure it out. And then, each of the SIMs had to be registered and activated. Over an hour later, we’re sprinting out of the shop so we can make our time slot to get into the Leaning Tower -- which we’d also pre-paid. And this was a pretty typical experience. Which was why I was really excited a telecoms industry consultant told me that the virtual SIM, or the e-SIM was getting close to launch. Apple took the first crack at this back in 2014, but it’s been a slow ramp up. The iPhone 7 I picked up back in Sept still has the classic SIM. But this guy was telling me that going SIM-less is just about possible. He said it’ll be like signing into a WiFi hotspot. The next time I land in Italy and turn on my phone, I’ll be presented with a sign-in screen where I’ll be able to select my carrier and plan, and charge it to my credit card. Now given how wonky some WiFi gateways are, I’m not sure that this is the best comparison to sell me on the service, but if it saves me a couple of hours of frustration when I’m at my most jet lagged, I’ll figure it out.</li>\r\n 	<li>My age odometer clicked over again last month -- which I guess is a good thing, because if it didn’t click over, I be… dead. So, unless I find that Dorian Grey portrait at a garage sale, getting older is better than the alternative. I try not to let it bother me -- with varying levels of success. One thing, though, this does frustrate me is the need to bring my glasses into hotel bathrooms with me. Because it seems just as my reading vision is deteriorating, hotels are reducing the type size on their shampoo and conditioner bottles. As they try to go upscale with their toiletries, the bottle designers are taking the regular sized fancy labels into Photoshop and shrinking them down to fit on the front of a much smaller bottle, resulting is miniscule type that I might’ve been challenged to read in my 20’s let alone now. So my drill is to wear my glasses into the bathroom, figure out which bottle is shampoo, which is conditioner, and which is soap (or shower gel as they call it), and then line them up in order on the soap dish in the shower. Then take my glasses off, turn on the water, and hope that my lined up bottles don’t fall. The Hyatt Place that I stay at in Charlottesville is one of the few that doesn’t require this drill. They have a big “1” printed on the shampoo -- it runs about ¾’s the length of the bottle -- and a big “2” printed on the conditioner. And they’re in different colors. No need for glasses there. I love that hotel.</li>\r\n 	<li>It’s accepted wisdom that the most disgusting place on an airplane is the seat back pocket, and it just keeps getting worse. As airlines try to tighten up their ground turns -- how long a plane is on the ground before it takes off again -- the amount of time the cabin clean-up crew has to do its job continues to shrink. I was reminded of this by a Chicago Tribune article right before Thanksgiving when many airport workers -- cabin cleaners, baggage handlers, wheelchair attendants -- threatened to strike during that busiest travel week. The reporter interviewed a cabin cleaner who recently moved to Chicago from San Juan, PR. She said her crew of four are given 7 minutes to clean the cabin; no where near enough time to clean up all the crumbs, spilled drinks, and wrappers ground into the carpet, let alone time to clear the junk people leave in the seat back pocket. \"I don\'t know what is wrong with passengers nowadays,” she said. I won’t even pull out the safety card when I’m sitting in the exit row. A buddy told me a story about flying Tunisair from Brussels to Tunis many years ago. After the meal service, when people were done eating, they just shoved their trays into the seat back pocket. I’m not sure it’s all that different today.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://cyberset.cc/artists2.php?tr_release_id=104\"><em>Heaven</em></a> by <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=A951998E6011FA9B2D22387EB3CAC0B5EB05A36360E7FDA122C8D7A5C140F8DC\" rel=\"nofollow\">Electric Skychurch</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Uber Driver Stories</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I find myself taking more and more Ubers as opposed to regular taxi cabs. I like cabs, I like cab drivers, but Uber is usually a better experience. Thumbing the app is so much easier than trying to hail a cab, or finding the number of the local cab company and then dealing with an often(?)/usually(?) cab dispatcher. And the condition of the car is, 9 times out of 10, vastly superior to the beat-up cab I usually get. The Baltimore cabs I’d take from the Inner Harbor to the airport were some of the worst. But then in Chicago I got picked by an Uber driver in a BMW X3 and by a spotless Mercedes SUV at EWR. Indeed, 9 times out of 10 is giving cabs way too much of the benefit of the doubt. I’ve yet to ride in an Uber that was worse than a cab.</li>\r\n 	<li>But the best thing about taking an Uber is driver stories. Every Uber I take, I ask the driver how he/she likes it, how long they’ve been doing it, and what else they do -- if it’s not their full time gig (which is the definite minority)</li>\r\n 	<li>A lotta drivers I talk with are retired. One guy in Vegas told me he was a bit lonely and bored. He wanted to get out of the house, but really had nowhere to go. He didn’t want to gamble or sit in a bar at 10 in the morning, so driving Uber gave him a reason to get off the sofa.</li>\r\n 	<li>A Charlottesville, VA retired fireman drives the late night weekend shift when kids from UVa are willing to pay anything (or willing to charge anything to their parents’ accounts) for a ride home from the bars. He told me he gets huge surge fares, but he’s driving ‘til 3 or 4 in the morning.</li>\r\n 	<li>A woman in Baltimore is a retired teacher and principal. She drives to take a break from studying for her PhD. She too gets bored sitting around the house, and she likes to drive. She told me that it was her husband who got her to sign up for Uber. She was driving him crazy around the house. Another guy, non-retired, who is studying full-time for his CFA exam -- chartered financial analyst -- does the same thing, drives during his study breaks.</li>\r\n 	<li>I find that many morning drivers -- the ones taking me from my hotel to a client site -- are doing a little moonlighting; fitting in a few rides before they go to work, and then again at the end of the day. I was surprised to find out that Uber drivers don’t know your destination until they accept the ride. Thinking about it, it makes sense; keeps drivers from cherry picking, say, rides to the airport. But one woman told me about accepting a ride and finding out it was to some suburb 40 minutes away -- and she only had a quarter tank.</li>\r\n 	<li>Of course, there’s more to ridesharing than Uber. I’ve also used Lyft. During busy times, I’ll fire them both up to see which has less of a surge charge, or a shorter wait time. Most drivers will drive for both. In my unscientific polling, most prefer Lyft but get more traffic from Uber. One driver told my wife he prefers Lyft because the Lyft riders talk more. And then he proceeded to unload his life story on my wife and her friend for the next 40 minutes as they battled traffic into Chicago.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’m always interested in how the gig economy is working for them. For a while, we were reading that the sharing economy, the gig economy of Uber and Airbnb was the next wave. The froth seems to have worn off of that wave, but a lot of the Uber drivers I talk to need that extra money, though often they wonder if it’s worth it. The Mercedes SUV driver who took me from EWR to Hoboken wondered if it was worth hassle of waiting for an airport fare. The only full-time driver I had was in Baltimore, and she said she makes more money delivering packages for Uber than she does delivering passengers, and the packages are much quieter and more pleasant.</li>\r\n 	<li>But as good as these stories are, the best one I recently heard wasn’t from an Uber driver; it was from the manager of the Chianti farm we stayed at for a couple of days during our trip to Italy. He had lived in the Chicago area for about 10 years. He got his PhD in geochemistry at Univ of Illinois and then worked at Argonne National Labs doing research. After a while, he missed his family and the countryside where he’d grown up, so he moved back to Tuscany, married, had a kid, and now manages a cattle farm with a growing sideline in agritourism. Forget driving for Uber. I want to be this guy.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://www.podsafeaudio.com/jamroom/play.php?band_id=1258&amp;song_id=4378&amp;mode=song_hifi\"><em>Shadows</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.podsafeaudio.com/jamroom/bands/1258/\">Antardhyan</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Overseas for the Election</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>My wife and I flew to Italy the Thursday night before the election. We both voted early, so we didn’t shirk our civic duties. What we did do, though, was leave behind the last blast of election ads and media coverage. I mean, the one bad thing about Game 7 of the World Series going into extra innings was that it gave more time for political ads. We were very happy to leave all that noise behind us.</li>\r\n 	<li>On Election Day, we had dinner in a nice restaurant in a small town that was 45 minutes of switchbacks and rutted dirt roads away from our hotel. On the way back, I think we dodged a boar and a deer as we crossed back over the ridge of hills and headed down to our hotel. We went to bed while the polls in the US were still open and didn’t really think a thing about it.</li>\r\n 	<li>I woke up around 7 on Weds morning; Tuesday midnight in Chicago. I glanced at my iPhone and saw a cascade of notifications from the Wall Street Journal and Chicago Tribune about the election results. The election still hadn’t been called, but by the time we sat down for breakfast, it was done. Donald Trump had won.</li>\r\n 	<li>The Austrian guy working the desk and the breakfast (it was a small hotel) laughed when he walked up -- “At least you guys aren’t having a do-over” The July Austrian presidential election was set aside for problems with absentee ballots and they still haven’t done the revote. “Or Spain, going through two elections without getting a government.”</li>\r\n 	<li>Now, TravelCommons has never had a political point-of-view and I’m not about to change that here. I have good friends on both sides of the debate. What I will say is that I, like many others, was surprised by the results given all the predictions we’d heard right up until we were wheels up at ORD. All through breakfast, we refreshed our Twitter feeds and hit the Wall Street Journal and New York Times apps, trying to catch up on the coverage we’d slept through the night before. Where the night before, we were happy not to hear about politics, now we were digging for an explanation for this upset.</li>\r\n 	<li>After an hour of this, and an extra cappuccino, we set the phones aside again. It was nice that we could do that -- walk away from the disbelief (and some might say panic) at the result that was spreading over the media (social and traditional), and schools, and I imagine in the workplaces. Instead, we were driving our little Alfa Romeo through some beautiful Chianti vineyards that were brilliantly yellow with the vine leaves changing colors. We stopped off at the Antinori winery for a bit of a tasting and then continued our drive to Florence. We knew we’d eventually get pulled into the post-election vortex, but we knew we were lucky -- we would be in a cone of silence for another 3 days.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #126</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://promonet.iodalliance.com\">IODA Promonet</a> and <a href=\"http://podsafeaudio.com/\">PodSafe Audio</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_126.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','','','inherit','closed','closed','','1697-revision-v1','','','2017-01-16 22:55:51','2017-01-17 03:55:51','',1697,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/01/16/1697-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1700,1,'2017-01-16 23:03:42','2017-01-17 04:03:42','Back from 10 days in Tuscany where, among other things, we thought we\'d avoid all the noise of the US presidential election. We succeeded... almost. One of my latest travel hobbies has been to quiz Uber drivers for their life stories. It makes for interesting rides to and from the airport. We also continue the ongoing thread about travel safety. This time, we talk about using Bluetooth in rental cars. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_126.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/294360507\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n<!--more-->\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #126:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, hoping that everyone had a Merry Christmas -- or Happy Christmas if you’re on the other side of the Atlantic -- Happy Hanukkah, and a Happy New Year. I’m personally in trying a combo Dry-ish and Sugar-Free January in an attempt to drop 10 lbs of holiday weight that managed to sneak on-board -- the downside, I guess, from staying off the road for the back half of December.</li>\r\n 	<li>I eased back into travel mode with my usual Charlottesville trip the first workday of the New Year. I didn’t mind it too much since Charlottesville was about 20 degrees warmer than Chicago. It was nice to walk outside with just a scarf and a tweed jacket.</li>\r\n 	<li>Between <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/11/22/podcast-125-uber-driver-stories-overseas-for-the-election/\">the last episode</a> and my Christmas travel break, I did almost as much driving as I did flying. I drove down to Nashville the Friday after Thanksgiving to see my mother. That drive wasn’t so bad, The Sunday drive back to Chicago, though was a whole ‘nother matter. Then that next week, I had meetings in Richmond, VA, Baltimore, and Charlottesville. I didn’t even bother to look at flight schedules. I knew nonstop RIC-BWI and a BWI-CHO flights were non-existent and the 2-2.5 hour drive time was within my fly-or-drive tipping point. Neither drives were bad. The only hassle was the Hertz rental car. Since it was a one-way rental -- I was picking up in RIC and dropping off in CHO -- they gave me a beater car, an older Jeep Patriot that I think was the only car on their lot without Bluetooth, which made listening to podcasts or doing phone calls a bit less convenient.</li>\r\n 	<li>It did give me a chance to explore Baltimore and Charlottesville a bit more than usual, though. On my past visits, I wouldn’t bother with a rental; would just taxi in from the airport, and then walk or Uber to places. But with the beater Jeep, I could wander with a bit more range. In Baltimore, I drove around the Fells Point neighborhood, ending up in the <a href=\"http://www.thamesstreetoysterhouse.com/\">Thames St Oyster House</a>, then threading through some waterfront areas that I had been a bit hesitant to walk through. In Charlottesville, I wandered through the countryside until I found <a href=\"http://starrhill.com/\">Starr Hill Brewery</a>. Kinda empty on a rainy Weds night, which meant the bartender had time to take me through a flight of her favorite beers. Maybe I’ve found the source of a few of those holiday pounds.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/buy_album.php?id=39CE51194FB95B63577FBFD7E2EC168C99277BD6CE86C10FDC39095666B5D6CF\"><em>Heaven</em></a> by <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=BB22CBFF24501120EEC6ABA18AB0A15FEB05A36360E7FDA122C8D7A5C140F8DC\" rel=\"nofollow\">Los Lonely Boys</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I’ve talked a couple of times in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/09/28/podcast-124-craft-beer-hunting-i-hate-rick-steves/\">past episodes</a> about the benefits of buying a pay-as-you-go SIM when traveling internationally -- $20 for a GB of data vs. AT&amp;T’s $60 for 300 MB is easy math. The only hassle is buying the SIM. First, you have to find the phone store, which can be a bit of an Easter Egg hunt. Back in November, our first day in Italy was in Pisa. We land, get the car, and head to the city center to find the phone store. However, the easiest one to get to was closed -- at 1 in the afternoon. Luckily, the next closest one was only a 10-minute walk and it was open. This time, I’d done my research before we left, purchased the SIMs online, and had printed out vouchers with bar codes, and instructions in English and Italian. I was ready for a quick and easy transaction. And yet again, I was wrong. The clerk knew nothing about the vouchers, didn’t know how to process them, and had to call around to other shops to figure it out. And then, each of the SIMs had to be registered and activated. Over an hour later, we’re sprinting out of the shop so we can make our time slot to get into the Leaning Tower -- which we’d also pre-paid. And this was a pretty typical experience. Which was why I was really excited a telecoms industry consultant told me that the virtual SIM, or the e-SIM was getting close to launch. Apple took the first crack at this back in 2014, but it’s been a slow ramp up. The iPhone 7 I picked up back in Sept still has the classic SIM. But this guy was telling me that going SIM-less is just about possible. He said it’ll be like signing into a WiFi hotspot. The next time I land in Italy and turn on my phone, I’ll be presented with a sign-in screen where I’ll be able to select my carrier and plan, and charge it to my credit card. Now given how wonky some WiFi gateways are, I’m not sure that this is the best comparison to sell me on the service, but if it saves me a couple of hours of frustration when I’m at my most jet lagged, I’ll figure it out.</li>\r\n 	<li>My age odometer clicked over again last month -- which I guess is a good thing, because if it didn’t click over, I be… dead. So, unless I find that Dorian Grey portrait at a garage sale, getting older is better than the alternative. I try not to let it bother me -- with varying levels of success. One thing, though, this does frustrate me is the need to bring my glasses into hotel bathrooms with me. Because it seems just as my reading vision is deteriorating, hotels are reducing the type size on their shampoo and conditioner bottles. As they try to go upscale with their toiletries, the bottle designers are taking the regular sized fancy labels into Photoshop and shrinking them down to fit on the front of a much smaller bottle, resulting is miniscule type that I might’ve been challenged to read in my 20’s let alone now. So my drill is to wear my glasses into the bathroom, figure out which bottle is shampoo, which is conditioner, and which is soap (or shower gel as they call it), and then line them up in order on the soap dish in the shower. Then take my glasses off, turn on the water, and hope that my lined up bottles don’t fall. The Hyatt Place that I stay at in Charlottesville is one of the few that doesn’t require this drill. They have a big “1” printed on the shampoo -- it runs about ¾’s the length of the bottle -- and a big “2” printed on the conditioner. And they’re in different colors. No need for glasses there. I love that hotel.</li>\r\n 	<li>It’s accepted wisdom that the most disgusting place on an airplane is the seat back pocket, and it just keeps getting worse. As airlines try to tighten up their ground turns -- how long a plane is on the ground before it takes off again -- the amount of time the cabin clean-up crew has to do its job continues to shrink. I was reminded of this by a Chicago Tribune article right before Thanksgiving when many airport workers -- cabin cleaners, baggage handlers, wheelchair attendants -- threatened to strike during that busiest travel week. The reporter interviewed a cabin cleaner who recently moved to Chicago from San Juan, PR. She said her crew of four are given 7 minutes to clean the cabin; no where near enough time to clean up all the crumbs, spilled drinks, and wrappers ground into the carpet, let alone time to clear the junk people leave in the seat back pocket. \"I don\'t know what is wrong with passengers nowadays,” she said. I won’t even pull out the safety card when I’m sitting in the exit row. A buddy told me a story about flying Tunisair from Brussels to Tunis many years ago. After the meal service, when people were done eating, they just shoved their trays into the seat back pocket. I’m not sure it’s all that different today.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://cyberset.cc/artists2.php?tr_release_id=104\"><em>Heaven</em></a> by <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=A951998E6011FA9B2D22387EB3CAC0B5EB05A36360E7FDA122C8D7A5C140F8DC\" rel=\"nofollow\">Electric Skychurch</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Beating The Traffic</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>As I mentioned earlier, I’ve done a bunch of travel by car lately. I talked in the last episode about driving through Tuscany. I was pleasantly surprised when Hertz upgraded us to an Alfa Romeo sports car, but when we had to drive through the rutted dirt back roads outside of Greve in Chianti, I was left wanting for something with a bit more ground clearance.</li>\r\n 	<li>The Thanksgiving drive down to Nashville was a lot smoother. They finally finished the years of construction expanding the I-80/94 constriction point around Lake Michigan in Northwest Indiana, and the traffic from there to I-65 south flowed smoothly. We made good enough time to make a couple of beer stops -- in Columbus, IN at a new Upland Brewing restaurant, and in downtown Louisville at Against The Grain Brewing.</li>\r\n 	<li>The drive back would be a whole other matter -- and I knew it and dreaded it. We drove down on that Friday, sailing through downtown Indy, Louisville, and Nashville because everyone was on vacation or shopping. Driving back Sunday though, we were right in the thick of the busiest travel day in the US. And while I always avoid flying on this day, I had managed to put myself on one of the US’s main north-south interstates. It would’ve only been worse if we’d been on the East Coast driving I-95 or the Jersey Turnpike. And it was the beat-down that I’d expected. The start of the drive out of Nashville was fine, and a bit pretty, going through rolling hills up to Louisville. The traffic was steady, but flowing. But we kept picking up more traffic as we headed north. We took a break in Indy this time, stopping off at Sun King Brewing right off the interstate, and then coffee-d up at a nearby Starbucks. North of Indy was when it really hit -- more and more cars and trucks heading up to Chicago, but still just 2 lanes. And so when the inevitable accident happened -- as it did many times that Sunday -- closing down one of those lanes, cutting the already clogged road by 50%, Waze became, if not a life saver, a time saver. I was running 3 nav systems, Waze, Google Maps, and the in-dash BMW nav. All had real-time traffic, but Waze seemed to be the quickest in sensing the need for a reroute. A couple of times that Sunday, it would direct us to take the next exit after traffic had stopped, and would vector us around the bottleneck and back onto the interstate, saving us 15-20 minutes of crawling and at least 70 points of increased blood pressure. I did skip the recommended diversion through the south side of Chicago, though. Given the record number of shootings in Chicago, stop-and-go traffic didn’t seem quite the burden that it did in rural Indiana.</li>\r\n 	<li>The next week’s triangulation across Richmond, Baltimore, and Charlottesville found me on I-95 having to make 2 passes around Washington, DC on the Capital Beltway, always a brutal 8-lane chokepoint. Heading up from Richmond Tuesday night, Google Maps told me to take the clockwise/west route around DC while Waze told me to go east. Odd since Google owns both. A friend said that he researched this a bit and found some articles claiming that Waze’s algorithm weighs current information more than historical trends; Google Maps tips the scales the other way. I don’t know if this is true -- I haven’t been able to find anything that says this -- but I often see different rush hour recommendations. Since Waze served me well on Thanksgiving Sunday, I went east and took the counterclockwise path around. It was a rainy night, but traffic flowed better than I expected and I made it to Baltimore in time for an oyster dinner.</li>\r\n 	<li>In spite of juggling nav apps, I found that I was more productive driving from Richmond to Baltimore to Charlottesville than I would’ve flying. You’d think it would be the other way around, but lack of direct flights would’ve mean going up and down, connecting through Washington Dulles. And on those few minutes I might be able to work, full planes and tight seats make it seem almost anti-social to try to open a laptop. On my 3-hour drive from Baltimore to Charlottesville, though, I was able to hammer through 2 conference calls and an unhurried, wide-ranging conversation with my boss. He called me. I told him that I was having a nice drive through Virginia horse country. “Good,” he said, “I have you captive.”</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://www.podsafeaudio.com/jamroom/play.php?band_id=1258&amp;song_id=4378&amp;mode=song_hifi\"><em>Shadows</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.podsafeaudio.com/jamroom/bands/1258/\">Antardhyan</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Having to Think about Carry-on Luggage</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I don’t usually think a lot about packing or luggage. And sometimes I think that puts me in the minority of frequent travelers. I know guys who obsess over their Tumi bags and specific packing systems. I used a grey Samsonite roller until the New Orleans sidewalks beat the wheels out to a 30 degree splay, and then I went back to my old black Victorinox with customs stickers from Thailand and Vietnam.</li>\r\n 	<li>However, a few things in 2016 got me thinking about carry-ons -- my carry-on experience with Wow Air in Iceland that I talked about in an earlier episode where I had to pull out half my clothes to meet the weight restrictions; my daughter’s light blue carry-on catching the eye of seemingly every gate agent she tried to pass, being forced to check it, and then having it lost 75% of her flights in 2016; and most recently, enduring long and often cold waits on a jet bridge waiting for my “valet checked” carry-on bag when flying regional jets</li>\r\n 	<li>Starting from last to first, this regional jet thing kills me. It used to be that gate checking for a commuter flight wasn’t a big thing -- the bag would be waiting for you on the jet bridge before you got off the plane. Now, as regional jets have gotten larger, they put the gate checked luggage in the same hold with the regular checked luggage, the only differentiating factor being the tag they put on at the gate. I’m typically waiting around 10 minutes with 40-50 other passengers, lined up on one side of an unheated jet bridge leaning over to see if my bag has come up yet. It’s gotten bad. On some of the larger Embraer jets flown by JetBlue, the overhead bins are large enough for regular bags, but on most of the regionals, you’re standing in that jet bridge line. After a while, this got real old, so I scrounged around through the old luggage in the attic to find a smaller duffel for 1-2 night trips that would fit in the overhead. I found a black nylon duffel from a 2007 National Retail Foundation tech conference that was an attendee giveaway. It had all the sponsors names stenciled across it -- Oracle, Infosys. I kinda felt like a Nascar racer. But it did the job. I could squish it into the small overheads of the regional jets and so walk past the line of folks waiting for the “valets” to bring their luggage. But it still looked cheesy. So when I was in Italy in November, I kept my eye out for a nice leather bag. One rainy day in Florence - not unique on that trip -- we dove into a covered outdoor market. Wandering through the stalls, I found a beautiful leather bag for 100 euros. My wife pointed to a bag the next size up -- “Don’t you want this bigger one? It’s only 20 euros more.” Nope, that would defeat the whole purpose. I posted a picture of that bag on Twitter. Every time I walk up the ORD jet bridge when returning home from Charlottesville, I love that bag even more.</li>\r\n 	<li>I remember when I first started traveling, you’d never see a hard-sided carry-on. Now it seems at least 30% of the carry-ons are hard-sided. I think a lot of it is fashion -- they come in much cooler designs and colors, but there is some functionality to them. If you’re flying an airline that’s aggressively using a baggage sizer, it’s much easier to stay legal with a hard-sided bag. You can’t overstuff them to bulging like you can a soft-sided bag, and the polycarbonate shell slips much easier in and out of the metal baggage sizer. This is why I suggested to my daughter that she start using a hard-sided bag. And in a bit more muted color -- something that wouldn’t grab the gate agent’s eye.</li>\r\n 	<li>But if you’re working against weight limits as well as dimensions, like I was with Wow Air, you want the lightest, most stripped down bag possible. I haven’t experienced a carry-on weight limit in the US. Some US carriers post a 35 or 40 lb limit -- even Spirit is at 40 lbs -- but I’ve never seen a gate agent weigh a carry-on. The international carriers are where this comes in. Wow Air’s carry-on size dimensions are about the same as US carriers, but their weight limit is much less -- 10 kg or 22 lbs -- which seems like the consensus number for non-US carriers. In this case, you don’t want the extra weight of the hard siding. You probably don’t even want very sturdy wheels; just the lightest covering around your clothes that you can get. I know guys who’ll brag that they can fit everything they own into 2 suitcases. These guys are obviously aren’t doing carry-on.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #126</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://promonet.iodalliance.com\">IODA Promonet</a> and <a href=\"http://podsafeaudio.com/\">PodSafe Audio</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_126.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','','','inherit','closed','closed','','1697-revision-v1','','','2017-01-16 23:03:42','2017-01-17 04:03:42','',1697,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/01/16/1697-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1703,1,'2017-01-16 23:32:20','2017-01-17 04:32:20','','File_000','Carefully thought-out carry-on luggage','inherit','open','closed','','file_000','','','2017-01-16 23:33:23','2017-01-17 04:33:23','',1697,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/File_000.jpeg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(1704,1,'2017-01-16 23:33:40','2017-01-17 04:33:40','[caption id=\"attachment_1703\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/File_000.jpeg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1703\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/File_000-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Carefully thought-out carry-on luggage[/caption]\r\n\r\nBack from 10 days in Tuscany where, among other things, we thought we\'d avoid all the noise of the US presidential election. We succeeded... almost. One of my latest travel hobbies has been to quiz Uber drivers for their life stories. It makes for interesting rides to and from the airport. We also continue the ongoing thread about travel safety. This time, we talk about using Bluetooth in rental cars. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_126.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/294360507\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n<!--more-->\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #126:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, hoping that everyone had a Merry Christmas -- or Happy Christmas if you’re on the other side of the Atlantic -- Happy Hanukkah, and a Happy New Year. I’m personally in trying a combo Dry-ish and Sugar-Free January in an attempt to drop 10 lbs of holiday weight that managed to sneak on-board -- the downside, I guess, from staying off the road for the back half of December.</li>\r\n 	<li>I eased back into travel mode with my usual Charlottesville trip the first workday of the New Year. I didn’t mind it too much since Charlottesville was about 20 degrees warmer than Chicago. It was nice to walk outside with just a scarf and a tweed jacket.</li>\r\n 	<li>Between <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/11/22/podcast-125-uber-driver-stories-overseas-for-the-election/\">the last episode</a> and my Christmas travel break, I did almost as much driving as I did flying. I drove down to Nashville the Friday after Thanksgiving to see my mother. That drive wasn’t so bad, The Sunday drive back to Chicago, though was a whole ‘nother matter. Then that next week, I had meetings in Richmond, VA, Baltimore, and Charlottesville. I didn’t even bother to look at flight schedules. I knew nonstop RIC-BWI and a BWI-CHO flights were non-existent and the 2-2.5 hour drive time was within my fly-or-drive tipping point. Neither drives were bad. The only hassle was the Hertz rental car. Since it was a one-way rental -- I was picking up in RIC and dropping off in CHO -- they gave me a beater car, an older Jeep Patriot that I think was the only car on their lot without Bluetooth, which made listening to podcasts or doing phone calls a bit less convenient.</li>\r\n 	<li>It did give me a chance to explore Baltimore and Charlottesville a bit more than usual, though. On my past visits, I wouldn’t bother with a rental; would just taxi in from the airport, and then walk or Uber to places. But with the beater Jeep, I could wander with a bit more range. In Baltimore, I drove around the Fells Point neighborhood, ending up in the <a href=\"http://www.thamesstreetoysterhouse.com/\">Thames St Oyster House</a>, then threading through some waterfront areas that I had been a bit hesitant to walk through. In Charlottesville, I wandered through the countryside until I found <a href=\"http://starrhill.com/\">Starr Hill Brewery</a>. Kinda empty on a rainy Weds night, which meant the bartender had time to take me through a flight of her favorite beers. Maybe I’ve found the source of a few of those holiday pounds.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/buy_album.php?id=39CE51194FB95B63577FBFD7E2EC168C99277BD6CE86C10FDC39095666B5D6CF\"><em>Heaven</em></a> by <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=BB22CBFF24501120EEC6ABA18AB0A15FEB05A36360E7FDA122C8D7A5C140F8DC\" rel=\"nofollow\">Los Lonely Boys</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I’ve talked a couple of times in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/09/28/podcast-124-craft-beer-hunting-i-hate-rick-steves/\">past episodes</a> about the benefits of buying a pay-as-you-go SIM when traveling internationally -- $20 for a GB of data vs. AT&amp;T’s $60 for 300 MB is easy math. The only hassle is buying the SIM. First, you have to find the phone store, which can be a bit of an Easter Egg hunt. Back in November, our first day in Italy was in Pisa. We land, get the car, and head to the city center to find the phone store. However, the easiest one to get to was closed -- at 1 in the afternoon. Luckily, the next closest one was only a 10-minute walk and it was open. This time, I’d done my research before we left, purchased the SIMs online, and had printed out vouchers with bar codes, and instructions in English and Italian. I was ready for a quick and easy transaction. And yet again, I was wrong. The clerk knew nothing about the vouchers, didn’t know how to process them, and had to call around to other shops to figure it out. And then, each of the SIMs had to be registered and activated. Over an hour later, we’re sprinting out of the shop so we can make our time slot to get into the Leaning Tower -- which we’d also pre-paid. And this was a pretty typical experience. Which was why I was really excited a telecoms industry consultant told me that the virtual SIM, or the e-SIM was getting close to launch. Apple took the first crack at this back in 2014, but it’s been a slow ramp up. The iPhone 7 I picked up back in Sept still has the classic SIM. But this guy was telling me that going SIM-less is just about possible. He said it’ll be like signing into a WiFi hotspot. The next time I land in Italy and turn on my phone, I’ll be presented with a sign-in screen where I’ll be able to select my carrier and plan, and charge it to my credit card. Now given how wonky some WiFi gateways are, I’m not sure that this is the best comparison to sell me on the service, but if it saves me a couple of hours of frustration when I’m at my most jet lagged, I’ll figure it out.</li>\r\n 	<li>My age odometer clicked over again last month -- which I guess is a good thing, because if it didn’t click over, I be… dead. So, unless I find that Dorian Grey portrait at a garage sale, getting older is better than the alternative. I try not to let it bother me -- with varying levels of success. One thing, though, this does frustrate me is the need to bring my glasses into hotel bathrooms with me. Because it seems just as my reading vision is deteriorating, hotels are reducing the type size on their shampoo and conditioner bottles. As they try to go upscale with their toiletries, the bottle designers are taking the regular sized fancy labels into Photoshop and shrinking them down to fit on the front of a much smaller bottle, resulting is miniscule type that I might’ve been challenged to read in my 20’s let alone now. So my drill is to wear my glasses into the bathroom, figure out which bottle is shampoo, which is conditioner, and which is soap (or shower gel as they call it), and then line them up in order on the soap dish in the shower. Then take my glasses off, turn on the water, and hope that my lined up bottles don’t fall. The Hyatt Place that I stay at in Charlottesville is one of the few that doesn’t require this drill. They have a big “1” printed on the shampoo -- it runs about ¾’s the length of the bottle -- and a big “2” printed on the conditioner. And they’re in different colors. No need for glasses there. I love that hotel.</li>\r\n 	<li>It’s accepted wisdom that the most disgusting place on an airplane is the seat back pocket, and it just keeps getting worse. As airlines try to tighten up their ground turns -- how long a plane is on the ground before it takes off again -- the amount of time the cabin clean-up crew has to do its job continues to shrink. I was reminded of this by a Chicago Tribune article right before Thanksgiving when many airport workers -- cabin cleaners, baggage handlers, wheelchair attendants -- threatened to strike during that busiest travel week. The reporter interviewed a cabin cleaner who recently moved to Chicago from San Juan, PR. She said her crew of four are given 7 minutes to clean the cabin; no where near enough time to clean up all the crumbs, spilled drinks, and wrappers ground into the carpet, let alone time to clear the junk people leave in the seat back pocket. \"I don\'t know what is wrong with passengers nowadays,” she said. I won’t even pull out the safety card when I’m sitting in the exit row. A buddy told me a story about flying Tunisair from Brussels to Tunis many years ago. After the meal service, when people were done eating, they just shoved their trays into the seat back pocket. I’m not sure it’s all that different today.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://cyberset.cc/artists2.php?tr_release_id=104\"><em>Heaven</em></a> by <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=A951998E6011FA9B2D22387EB3CAC0B5EB05A36360E7FDA122C8D7A5C140F8DC\" rel=\"nofollow\">Electric Skychurch</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Beating The Traffic</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>As I mentioned earlier, I’ve done a bunch of travel by car lately. I talked in the last episode about driving through Tuscany. I was pleasantly surprised when Hertz upgraded us to an Alfa Romeo sports car, but when we had to drive through the rutted dirt back roads outside of Greve in Chianti, I was left wanting for something with a bit more ground clearance.</li>\r\n 	<li>The Thanksgiving drive down to Nashville was a lot smoother. They finally finished the years of construction expanding the I-80/94 constriction point around Lake Michigan in Northwest Indiana, and the traffic from there to I-65 south flowed smoothly. We made good enough time to make a couple of beer stops -- in Columbus, IN at a new Upland Brewing restaurant, and in downtown Louisville at Against The Grain Brewing.</li>\r\n 	<li>The drive back would be a whole other matter -- and I knew it and dreaded it. We drove down on that Friday, sailing through downtown Indy, Louisville, and Nashville because everyone was on vacation or shopping. Driving back Sunday though, we were right in the thick of the busiest travel day in the US. And while I always avoid flying on this day, I had managed to put myself on one of the US’s main north-south interstates. It would’ve only been worse if we’d been on the East Coast driving I-95 or the Jersey Turnpike. And it was the beat-down that I’d expected. The start of the drive out of Nashville was fine, and a bit pretty, going through rolling hills up to Louisville. The traffic was steady, but flowing. But we kept picking up more traffic as we headed north. We took a break in Indy this time, stopping off at Sun King Brewing right off the interstate, and then coffee-d up at a nearby Starbucks. North of Indy was when it really hit -- more and more cars and trucks heading up to Chicago, but still just 2 lanes. And so when the inevitable accident happened -- as it did many times that Sunday -- closing down one of those lanes, cutting the already clogged road by 50%, Waze became, if not a life saver, a time saver. I was running 3 nav systems, Waze, Google Maps, and the in-dash BMW nav. All had real-time traffic, but Waze seemed to be the quickest in sensing the need for a reroute. A couple of times that Sunday, it would direct us to take the next exit after traffic had stopped, and would vector us around the bottleneck and back onto the interstate, saving us 15-20 minutes of crawling and at least 70 points of increased blood pressure. I did skip the recommended diversion through the south side of Chicago, though. Given the record number of shootings in Chicago, stop-and-go traffic didn’t seem quite the burden that it did in rural Indiana.</li>\r\n 	<li>The next week’s triangulation across Richmond, Baltimore, and Charlottesville found me on I-95 having to make 2 passes around Washington, DC on the Capital Beltway, always a brutal 8-lane chokepoint. Heading up from Richmond Tuesday night, Google Maps told me to take the clockwise/west route around DC while Waze told me to go east. Odd since Google owns both. A friend said that he researched this a bit and found some articles claiming that Waze’s algorithm weighs current information more than historical trends; Google Maps tips the scales the other way. I don’t know if this is true -- I haven’t been able to find anything that says this -- but I often see different rush hour recommendations. Since Waze served me well on Thanksgiving Sunday, I went east and took the counterclockwise path around. It was a rainy night, but traffic flowed better than I expected and I made it to Baltimore in time for an oyster dinner.</li>\r\n 	<li>In spite of juggling nav apps, I found that I was more productive driving from Richmond to Baltimore to Charlottesville than I would’ve flying. You’d think it would be the other way around, but lack of direct flights would’ve mean going up and down, connecting through Washington Dulles. And on those few minutes I might be able to work, full planes and tight seats make it seem almost anti-social to try to open a laptop. On my 3-hour drive from Baltimore to Charlottesville, though, I was able to hammer through 2 conference calls and an unhurried, wide-ranging conversation with my boss. He called me. I told him that I was having a nice drive through Virginia horse country. “Good,” he said, “I have you captive.”</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://www.podsafeaudio.com/jamroom/play.php?band_id=1258&amp;song_id=4378&amp;mode=song_hifi\"><em>Shadows</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.podsafeaudio.com/jamroom/bands/1258/\">Antardhyan</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Having to Think about Carry-on Luggage</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I don’t usually think a lot about packing or luggage. And sometimes I think that puts me in the minority of frequent travelers. I know guys who obsess over their Tumi bags and specific packing systems. I used a grey Samsonite roller until the New Orleans sidewalks beat the wheels out to a 30 degree splay, and then I went back to my old black Victorinox with customs stickers from Thailand and Vietnam.</li>\r\n 	<li>However, a few things in 2016 got me thinking about carry-ons -- my carry-on experience with Wow Air in Iceland that I talked about in an earlier episode where I had to pull out half my clothes to meet the weight restrictions; my daughter’s light blue carry-on catching the eye of seemingly every gate agent she tried to pass, being forced to check it, and then having it lost 75% of her flights in 2016; and most recently, enduring long and often cold waits on a jet bridge waiting for my “valet checked” carry-on bag when flying regional jets</li>\r\n 	<li>Starting from last to first, this regional jet thing kills me. It used to be that gate checking for a commuter flight wasn’t a big thing -- the bag would be waiting for you on the jet bridge before you got off the plane. Now, as regional jets have gotten larger, they put the gate checked luggage in the same hold with the regular checked luggage, the only differentiating factor being the tag they put on at the gate. I’m typically waiting around 10 minutes with 40-50 other passengers, lined up on one side of an unheated jet bridge leaning over to see if my bag has come up yet. It’s gotten bad. On some of the larger Embraer jets flown by JetBlue, the overhead bins are large enough for regular bags, but on most of the regionals, you’re standing in that jet bridge line. After a while, this got real old, so I scrounged around through the old luggage in the attic to find a smaller duffel for 1-2 night trips that would fit in the overhead. I found a black nylon duffel from a 2007 National Retail Foundation tech conference that was an attendee giveaway. It had all the sponsors names stenciled across it -- Oracle, Infosys. I kinda felt like a Nascar racer. But it did the job. I could squish it into the small overheads of the regional jets and so walk past the line of folks waiting for the “valets” to bring their luggage. But it still looked cheesy. So when I was in Italy in November, I kept my eye out for a nice leather bag. One rainy day in Florence - not unique on that trip -- we dove into a covered outdoor market. Wandering through the stalls, I found a beautiful leather bag for 100 euros. My wife pointed to a bag the next size up -- “Don’t you want this bigger one? It’s only 20 euros more.” Nope, that would defeat the whole purpose. I posted a picture of that bag on Twitter. Every time I walk up the ORD jet bridge when returning home from Charlottesville, I love that bag even more.</li>\r\n 	<li>I remember when I first started traveling, you’d never see a hard-sided carry-on. Now it seems at least 30% of the carry-ons are hard-sided. I think a lot of it is fashion -- they come in much cooler designs and colors, but there is some functionality to them. If you’re flying an airline that’s aggressively using a baggage sizer, it’s much easier to stay legal with a hard-sided bag. You can’t overstuff them to bulging like you can a soft-sided bag, and the polycarbonate shell slips much easier in and out of the metal baggage sizer. This is why I suggested to my daughter that she start using a hard-sided bag. And in a bit more muted color -- something that wouldn’t grab the gate agent’s eye.</li>\r\n 	<li>But if you’re working against weight limits as well as dimensions, like I was with Wow Air, you want the lightest, most stripped down bag possible. I haven’t experienced a carry-on weight limit in the US. Some US carriers post a 35 or 40 lb limit -- even Spirit is at 40 lbs -- but I’ve never seen a gate agent weigh a carry-on. The international carriers are where this comes in. Wow Air’s carry-on size dimensions are about the same as US carriers, but their weight limit is much less -- 10 kg or 22 lbs -- which seems like the consensus number for non-US carriers. In this case, you don’t want the extra weight of the hard siding. You probably don’t even want very sturdy wheels; just the lightest covering around your clothes that you can get. I know guys who’ll brag that they can fit everything they own into 2 suitcases. These guys are obviously aren’t doing carry-on.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #126</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://promonet.iodalliance.com\">IODA Promonet</a> and <a href=\"http://podsafeaudio.com/\">PodSafe Audio</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_126.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','','','inherit','closed','closed','','1697-revision-v1','','','2017-01-16 23:33:40','2017-01-17 04:33:40','',1697,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/01/16/1697-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1705,1,'2017-01-16 23:34:52','2017-01-17 04:34:52','[caption id=\"attachment_1703\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/File_000.jpeg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1703\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/File_000-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Carefully thought-out carry-on luggage[/caption]\r\n\r\nBack from 10 days in Tuscany where, among other things, we thought we\'d avoid all the noise of the US presidential election. We succeeded... almost. One of my latest travel hobbies has been to quiz Uber drivers for their life stories. It makes for interesting rides to and from the airport. We also continue the ongoing thread about travel safety. This time, we talk about using Bluetooth in rental cars. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_126.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/294360507\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n<!--more-->\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #126:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, hoping that everyone had a Merry Christmas -- or Happy Christmas if you’re on the other side of the Atlantic -- Happy Hanukkah, and a Happy New Year. I’m personally in trying a combo Dry-ish and Sugar-Free January in an attempt to drop 10 lbs of holiday weight that managed to sneak on-board -- the downside, I guess, from staying off the road for the back half of December.</li>\r\n 	<li>I eased back into travel mode with my usual Charlottesville trip the first workday of the New Year. I didn’t mind it too much since Charlottesville was about 20 degrees warmer than Chicago. It was nice to walk outside with just a scarf and a tweed jacket.</li>\r\n 	<li>Between <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/11/22/podcast-125-uber-driver-stories-overseas-for-the-election/\">the last episode</a> and my Christmas travel break, I did almost as much driving as I did flying. I drove down to Nashville the Friday after Thanksgiving to see my mother. That drive wasn’t so bad, The Sunday drive back to Chicago, though was a whole ‘nother matter. Then that next week, I had meetings in Richmond, VA, Baltimore, and Charlottesville. I didn’t even bother to look at flight schedules. I knew nonstop RIC-BWI and a BWI-CHO flights were non-existent and the 2-2.5 hour drive time was within my fly-or-drive tipping point. Neither drives were bad. The only hassle was the Hertz rental car. Since it was a one-way rental -- I was picking up in RIC and dropping off in CHO -- they gave me a beater car, an older Jeep Patriot that I think was the only car on their lot without Bluetooth, which made listening to podcasts or doing phone calls a bit less convenient.</li>\r\n 	<li>It did give me a chance to explore Baltimore and Charlottesville a bit more than usual, though. On my past visits, I wouldn’t bother with a rental; would just taxi in from the airport, and then walk or Uber to places. But with the beater Jeep, I could wander with a bit more range. In Baltimore, I drove around the Fells Point neighborhood, ending up in the <a href=\"http://www.thamesstreetoysterhouse.com/\">Thames St Oyster House</a>, then threading through some waterfront areas that I had been a bit hesitant to walk through. In Charlottesville, I wandered through the countryside until I found <a href=\"http://starrhill.com/\">Starr Hill Brewery</a>. Kinda empty on a rainy Weds night, which meant the bartender had time to take me through a flight of her favorite beers. Maybe I’ve found the source of a few of those holiday pounds.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/buy_album.php?id=39CE51194FB95B63577FBFD7E2EC168C99277BD6CE86C10FDC39095666B5D6CF\"><em>Heaven</em></a> by <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=BB22CBFF24501120EEC6ABA18AB0A15FEB05A36360E7FDA122C8D7A5C140F8DC\" rel=\"nofollow\">Los Lonely Boys</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I’ve talked a couple of times in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/09/28/podcast-124-craft-beer-hunting-i-hate-rick-steves/\">past episodes</a> about the benefits of buying a pay-as-you-go SIM when traveling internationally -- $20 for a GB of data vs. AT&amp;T’s $60 for 300 MB is easy math. The only hassle is buying the SIM. First, you have to find the phone store, which can be a bit of an Easter Egg hunt. Back in November, our first day in Italy was in Pisa. We land, get the car, and head to the city center to find the phone store. However, the easiest one to get to was closed -- at 1 in the afternoon. Luckily, the next closest one was only a 10-minute walk and it was open. This time, I’d done my research before we left, purchased the SIMs online, and had printed out vouchers with bar codes, and instructions in English and Italian. I was ready for a quick and easy transaction. And yet again, I was wrong. The clerk knew nothing about the vouchers, didn’t know how to process them, and had to call around to other shops to figure it out. And then, each of the SIMs had to be registered and activated. Over an hour later, we’re sprinting out of the shop so we can make our time slot to get into the Leaning Tower -- which we’d also pre-paid. And this was a pretty typical experience. Which was why I was really excited a telecoms industry consultant told me that the virtual SIM, or the e-SIM was getting close to launch. Apple took the first crack at this back in 2014, but it’s been a slow ramp up. The iPhone 7 I picked up back in Sept still has the classic SIM. But this guy was telling me that going SIM-less is just about possible. He said it’ll be like signing into a WiFi hotspot. The next time I land in Italy and turn on my phone, I’ll be presented with a sign-in screen where I’ll be able to select my carrier and plan, and charge it to my credit card. Now given how wonky some WiFi gateways are, I’m not sure that this is the best comparison to sell me on the service, but if it saves me a couple of hours of frustration when I’m at my most jet lagged, I’ll figure it out.</li>\r\n 	<li>My age odometer clicked over again last month -- which I guess is a good thing, because if it didn’t click over, I be… dead. So, unless I find that Dorian Grey portrait at a garage sale, getting older is better than the alternative. I try not to let it bother me -- with varying levels of success. One thing, though, this does frustrate me is the need to bring my glasses into hotel bathrooms with me. Because it seems just as my reading vision is deteriorating, hotels are reducing the type size on their shampoo and conditioner bottles. As they try to go upscale with their toiletries, the bottle designers are taking the regular sized fancy labels into Photoshop and shrinking them down to fit on the front of a much smaller bottle, resulting is miniscule type that I might’ve been challenged to read in my 20’s let alone now. So my drill is to wear my glasses into the bathroom, figure out which bottle is shampoo, which is conditioner, and which is soap (or shower gel as they call it), and then line them up in order on the soap dish in the shower. Then take my glasses off, turn on the water, and hope that my lined up bottles don’t fall. The Hyatt Place that I stay at in Charlottesville is one of the few that doesn’t require this drill. They have a big “1” printed on the shampoo -- it runs about ¾’s the length of the bottle -- and a big “2” printed on the conditioner. And they’re in different colors. No need for glasses there. I love that hotel.</li>\r\n 	<li>It’s accepted wisdom that the most disgusting place on an airplane is the seat back pocket, and it just keeps getting worse. As airlines try to tighten up their ground turns -- how long a plane is on the ground before it takes off again -- the amount of time the cabin clean-up crew has to do its job continues to shrink. I was reminded of this by a Chicago Tribune article right before Thanksgiving when many airport workers -- cabin cleaners, baggage handlers, wheelchair attendants -- threatened to strike during that busiest travel week. The reporter interviewed a cabin cleaner who recently moved to Chicago from San Juan, PR. She said her crew of four are given 7 minutes to clean the cabin; no where near enough time to clean up all the crumbs, spilled drinks, and wrappers ground into the carpet, let alone time to clear the junk people leave in the seat back pocket. \"I don\'t know what is wrong with passengers nowadays,” she said. I won’t even pull out the safety card when I’m sitting in the exit row. A buddy told me a story about flying Tunisair from Brussels to Tunis many years ago. After the meal service, when people were done eating, they just shoved their trays into the seat back pocket. I’m not sure it’s all that different today.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://cyberset.cc/artists2.php?tr_release_id=104\"><em>Heaven</em></a> by <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=A951998E6011FA9B2D22387EB3CAC0B5EB05A36360E7FDA122C8D7A5C140F8DC\" rel=\"nofollow\">Electric Skychurch</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Beating The Traffic</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>As I mentioned earlier, I’ve done a bunch of travel by car lately. I talked in the last episode about driving through Tuscany. I was pleasantly surprised when Hertz upgraded us to an Alfa Romeo sports car, but when we had to drive through the rutted dirt back roads outside of Greve in Chianti, I was left wanting for something with a bit more ground clearance.</li>\r\n 	<li>The Thanksgiving drive down to Nashville was a lot smoother. They finally finished the years of construction expanding the I-80/94 constriction point around Lake Michigan in Northwest Indiana, and the traffic from there to I-65 south flowed smoothly. We made good enough time to make a couple of beer stops -- in Columbus, IN at a new Upland Brewing restaurant, and in downtown Louisville at Against The Grain Brewing.</li>\r\n 	<li>The drive back would be a whole other matter -- and I knew it and dreaded it. We drove down on that Friday, sailing through downtown Indy, Louisville, and Nashville because everyone was on vacation or shopping. Driving back Sunday though, we were right in the thick of the busiest travel day in the US. And while I always avoid flying on this day, I had managed to put myself on one of the US’s main north-south interstates. It would’ve only been worse if we’d been on the East Coast driving I-95 or the Jersey Turnpike. And it was the beat-down that I’d expected. The start of the drive out of Nashville was fine, and a bit pretty, going through rolling hills up to Louisville. The traffic was steady, but flowing. But we kept picking up more traffic as we headed north. We took a break in Indy this time, stopping off at Sun King Brewing right off the interstate, and then coffee-d up at a nearby Starbucks. North of Indy was when it really hit -- more and more cars and trucks heading up to Chicago, but still just 2 lanes. And so when the inevitable accident happened -- as it did many times that Sunday -- closing down one of those lanes, cutting the already clogged road by 50%, Waze became, if not a life saver, a time saver. I was running 3 nav systems, Waze, Google Maps, and the in-dash BMW nav. All had real-time traffic, but Waze seemed to be the quickest in sensing the need for a reroute. A couple of times that Sunday, it would direct us to take the next exit after traffic had stopped, and would vector us around the bottleneck and back onto the interstate, saving us 15-20 minutes of crawling and at least 70 points of increased blood pressure. I did skip the recommended diversion through the south side of Chicago, though. Given the record number of shootings in Chicago, stop-and-go traffic didn’t seem quite the burden that it did in rural Indiana.</li>\r\n 	<li>The next week’s triangulation across Richmond, Baltimore, and Charlottesville found me on I-95 having to make 2 passes around Washington, DC on the Capital Beltway, always a brutal 8-lane chokepoint. Heading up from Richmond Tuesday night, Google Maps told me to take the clockwise/west route around DC while Waze told me to go east. Odd since Google owns both. A friend said that he researched this a bit and found some articles claiming that Waze’s algorithm weighs current information more than historical trends; Google Maps tips the scales the other way. I don’t know if this is true -- I haven’t been able to find anything that says this -- but I often see different rush hour recommendations. Since Waze served me well on Thanksgiving Sunday, I went east and took the counterclockwise path around. It was a rainy night, but traffic flowed better than I expected and I made it to Baltimore in time for an oyster dinner.</li>\r\n 	<li>In spite of juggling nav apps, I found that I was more productive driving from Richmond to Baltimore to Charlottesville than I would’ve flying. You’d think it would be the other way around, but lack of direct flights would’ve mean going up and down, connecting through Washington Dulles. And on those few minutes I might be able to work, full planes and tight seats make it seem almost anti-social to try to open a laptop. On my 3-hour drive from Baltimore to Charlottesville, though, I was able to hammer through 2 conference calls and an unhurried, wide-ranging conversation with my boss. He called me. I told him that I was having a nice drive through Virginia horse country. “Good,” he said, “I have you captive.”</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://www.podsafeaudio.com/jamroom/play.php?band_id=1258&amp;song_id=4378&amp;mode=song_hifi\"><em>Shadows</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.podsafeaudio.com/jamroom/bands/1258/\">Antardhyan</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Having to Think about Carry-on Luggage</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I don’t usually think a lot about packing or luggage. And sometimes I think that puts me in the minority of frequent travelers. I know guys who obsess over their Tumi bags and specific packing systems. I used a grey Samsonite roller until the New Orleans sidewalks beat the wheels out to a 30 degree splay, and then I went back to my old black Victorinox with customs stickers from Thailand and Vietnam.</li>\r\n 	<li>However, a few things in 2016 got me thinking about carry-ons -- my carry-on experience with Wow Air in Iceland that I talked about in an earlier episode where I had to pull out half my clothes to meet the weight restrictions; my daughter’s light blue carry-on catching the eye of seemingly every gate agent she tried to pass, being forced to check it, and then having it lost 75% of her flights in 2016; and most recently, enduring long and often cold waits on a jet bridge waiting for my “valet checked” carry-on bag when flying regional jets</li>\r\n 	<li>Starting from last to first, this regional jet thing kills me. It used to be that gate checking for a commuter flight wasn’t a big thing -- the bag would be waiting for you on the jet bridge before you got off the plane. Now, as regional jets have gotten larger, they put the gate checked luggage in the same hold with the regular checked luggage, the only differentiating factor being the tag they put on at the gate. I’m typically waiting around 10 minutes with 40-50 other passengers, lined up on one side of an unheated jet bridge leaning over to see if my bag has come up yet. It’s gotten bad. On some of the larger Embraer jets flown by JetBlue, the overhead bins are large enough for regular bags, but on most of the regionals, you’re standing in that jet bridge line. After a while, this got real old, so I scrounged around through the old luggage in the attic to find a smaller duffel for 1-2 night trips that would fit in the overhead. I found a black nylon duffel from a 2007 National Retail Foundation tech conference that was an attendee giveaway. It had all the sponsors names stenciled across it -- Oracle, Infosys. I kinda felt like a Nascar racer. But it did the job. I could squish it into the small overheads of the regional jets and so walk past the line of folks waiting for the “valets” to bring their luggage. But it still looked cheesy. So when I was in Italy in November, I kept my eye out for a nice leather bag. One rainy day in Florence - not unique on that trip -- we dove into a covered outdoor market. Wandering through the stalls, I found a beautiful leather bag for 100 euros. My wife pointed to a bag the next size up -- “Don’t you want this bigger one? It’s only 20 euros more.” Nope, that would defeat the whole purpose. I posted a picture of that bag on Twitter. Every time I walk up the ORD jet bridge when returning home from Charlottesville, I love that bag even more.</li>\r\n 	<li>I remember when I first started traveling, you’d never see a hard-sided carry-on. Now it seems at least 30% of the carry-ons are hard-sided. I think a lot of it is fashion -- they come in much cooler designs and colors, but there is some functionality to them. If you’re flying an airline that’s aggressively using a baggage sizer, it’s much easier to stay legal with a hard-sided bag. You can’t overstuff them to bulging like you can a soft-sided bag, and the polycarbonate shell slips much easier in and out of the metal baggage sizer. This is why I suggested to my daughter that she start using a hard-sided bag. And in a bit more muted color -- something that wouldn’t grab the gate agent’s eye.</li>\r\n 	<li>But if you’re working against weight limits as well as dimensions, like I was with Wow Air, you want the lightest, most stripped down bag possible. I haven’t experienced a carry-on weight limit in the US. Some US carriers post a 35 or 40 lb limit -- even Spirit is at 40 lbs -- but I’ve never seen a gate agent weigh a carry-on. The international carriers are where this comes in. Wow Air’s carry-on size dimensions are about the same as US carriers, but their weight limit is much less -- 10 kg or 22 lbs -- which seems like the consensus number for non-US carriers. In this case, you don’t want the extra weight of the hard siding. You probably don’t even want very sturdy wheels; just the lightest covering around your clothes that you can get. I know guys who’ll brag that they can fit everything they own into 2 suitcases. These guys are obviously aren’t doing carry-on.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #126</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://promonet.iodalliance.com\">IODA Promonet</a> and <a href=\"http://podsafeaudio.com/\">PodSafe Audio</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_126.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #126 — Beating the Traffic; Carry-On Luggage','','inherit','closed','closed','','1697-revision-v1','','','2017-01-16 23:34:52','2017-01-17 04:34:52','',1697,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/01/16/1697-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1706,1,'2017-01-16 23:40:05','2017-01-17 04:40:05','[caption id=\"attachment_1703\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/File_000.jpeg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1703\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/File_000-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Carefully thought-out carry-on luggage[/caption]\r\n\r\nBack from 10 days in Tuscany where, among other things, we thought we\'d avoid all the noise of the US presidential election. We succeeded... almost. One of my latest travel hobbies has been to quiz Uber drivers for their life stories. It makes for interesting rides to and from the airport. We also continue the ongoing thread about travel safety. This time, we talk about using Bluetooth in rental cars. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_126.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/294360507\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n<!--more-->\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #126:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, hoping that everyone had a Merry Christmas -- or Happy Christmas if you’re on the other side of the Atlantic -- Happy Hanukkah, and a Happy New Year. I’m personally in trying a combo Dry-ish and Sugar-Free January in an attempt to drop 10 lbs of holiday weight that managed to sneak on-board -- the downside, I guess, from staying off the road for the back half of December.</li>\r\n 	<li>I eased back into travel mode with my usual Charlottesville trip the first workday of the New Year. I didn’t mind it too much since Charlottesville was about 20 degrees warmer than Chicago. It was nice to walk outside with just a scarf and a tweed jacket.</li>\r\n 	<li>Between <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/11/22/podcast-125-uber-driver-stories-overseas-for-the-election/\">the last episode</a> and my Christmas travel break, I did almost as much driving as I did flying. I drove down to Nashville the Friday after Thanksgiving to see my mother. That drive wasn’t so bad, The Sunday drive back to Chicago, though was a whole ‘nother matter. Then that next week, I had meetings in Richmond, VA, Baltimore, and Charlottesville. I didn’t even bother to look at flight schedules. I knew nonstop RIC-BWI and a BWI-CHO flights were non-existent and the 2-2.5 hour drive time was within my fly-or-drive tipping point. Neither drives were bad. The only hassle was the Hertz rental car. Since it was a one-way rental -- I was picking up in RIC and dropping off in CHO -- they gave me a beater car, an older Jeep Patriot that I think was the only car on their lot without Bluetooth, which made listening to podcasts or doing phone calls a bit less convenient.</li>\r\n 	<li>It did give me a chance to explore Baltimore and Charlottesville a bit more than usual, though. On my past visits, I wouldn’t bother with a rental; would just taxi in from the airport, and then walk or Uber to places. But with the beater Jeep, I could wander with a bit more range. In Baltimore, I drove around the Fells Point neighborhood, ending up in the <a href=\"http://www.thamesstreetoysterhouse.com/\">Thames St Oyster House</a>, then threading through some waterfront areas that I had been a bit hesitant to walk through. In Charlottesville, I wandered through the countryside until I found <a href=\"http://starrhill.com/\">Starr Hill Brewery</a>. Kinda empty on a rainy Weds night, which meant the bartender had time to take me through a flight of her favorite beers. Maybe I’ve found the source of a few of those holiday pounds.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/buy_album.php?id=39CE51194FB95B63577FBFD7E2EC168C99277BD6CE86C10FDC39095666B5D6CF\"><em>Heaven</em></a> by <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=BB22CBFF24501120EEC6ABA18AB0A15FEB05A36360E7FDA122C8D7A5C140F8DC\" rel=\"nofollow\">Los Lonely Boys</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I’ve talked a couple of times in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/09/28/podcast-124-craft-beer-hunting-i-hate-rick-steves/\">past episodes</a> about the benefits of buying a pay-as-you-go SIM when traveling internationally -- $20 for a GB of data vs. AT&amp;T’s $60 for 300 MB is easy math. The only hassle is buying the SIM. First, you have to find the phone store, which can be a bit of an Easter Egg hunt. Back in November, our first day in Italy was in Pisa. We land, get the car, and head to the city center to find the phone store. However, the easiest one to get to was closed -- at 1 in the afternoon. Luckily, the next closest one was only a 10-minute walk and it was open. This time, I’d done my research before we left, purchased the SIMs online, and had printed out vouchers with bar codes, and instructions in English and Italian. I was ready for a quick and easy transaction. And yet again, I was wrong. The clerk knew nothing about the vouchers, didn’t know how to process them, and had to call around to other shops to figure it out. And then, each of the SIMs had to be registered and activated. Over an hour later, we’re sprinting out of the shop so we can make our time slot to get into the Leaning Tower -- which we’d also pre-paid. And this was a pretty typical experience. Which was why I was really excited a telecoms industry consultant told me that the virtual SIM, or the e-SIM was getting close to launch. Apple took the first crack at this back in 2014, but it’s been a slow ramp up. The iPhone 7 I picked up back in Sept still has the classic SIM. But this guy was telling me that going SIM-less is just about possible. He said it’ll be like signing into a WiFi hotspot. The next time I land in Italy and turn on my phone, I’ll be presented with a sign-in screen where I’ll be able to select my carrier and plan, and charge it to my credit card. Now given how wonky some WiFi gateways are, I’m not sure that this is the best comparison to sell me on the service, but if it saves me a couple of hours of frustration when I’m at my most jet lagged, I’ll figure it out.</li>\r\n 	<li>My age odometer clicked over again last month -- which I guess is a good thing, because if it didn’t click over, I be… dead. So, unless I find that Dorian Grey portrait at a garage sale, getting older is better than the alternative. I try not to let it bother me -- with varying levels of success. One thing, though, this does frustrate me is the need to bring my glasses into hotel bathrooms with me. Because it seems just as my reading vision is deteriorating, hotels are reducing the type size on their shampoo and conditioner bottles. As they try to go upscale with their toiletries, the bottle designers are taking the regular sized fancy labels into Photoshop and shrinking them down to fit on the front of a much smaller bottle, resulting is miniscule type that I might’ve been challenged to read in my 20’s let alone now. So my drill is to wear my glasses into the bathroom, figure out which bottle is shampoo, which is conditioner, and which is soap (or shower gel as they call it), and then line them up in order on the soap dish in the shower. Then take my glasses off, turn on the water, and hope that my lined up bottles don’t fall. The Hyatt Place that I stay at in Charlottesville is one of the few that doesn’t require this drill. They have a big “1” printed on the shampoo -- it runs about ¾’s the length of the bottle -- and a big “2” printed on the conditioner. And they’re in different colors. No need for glasses there. I love that hotel.</li>\r\n 	<li>It’s accepted wisdom that the most disgusting place on an airplane is the seat back pocket, and it just keeps getting worse. As airlines try to tighten up their ground turns -- how long a plane is on the ground before it takes off again -- the amount of time the cabin clean-up crew has to do its job continues to shrink. I was reminded of this by a Chicago Tribune article right before Thanksgiving when many airport workers -- cabin cleaners, baggage handlers, wheelchair attendants -- threatened to strike during that busiest travel week. The reporter interviewed a cabin cleaner who recently moved to Chicago from San Juan, PR. She said her crew of four are given 7 minutes to clean the cabin; no where near enough time to clean up all the crumbs, spilled drinks, and wrappers ground into the carpet, let alone time to clear the junk people leave in the seat back pocket. \"I don\'t know what is wrong with passengers nowadays,” she said. I won’t even pull out the safety card when I’m sitting in the exit row. A buddy told me a story about flying Tunisair from Brussels to Tunis many years ago. After the meal service, when people were done eating, they just shoved their trays into the seat back pocket. I’m not sure it’s all that different today.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://cyberset.cc/artists2.php?tr_release_id=104\"><em>Heaven</em></a> by <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=A951998E6011FA9B2D22387EB3CAC0B5EB05A36360E7FDA122C8D7A5C140F8DC\" rel=\"nofollow\">Electric Skychurch</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Beating The Traffic</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>As I mentioned earlier, I’ve done a bunch of travel by car lately. I talked in the last episode about driving through Tuscany. I was pleasantly surprised when Hertz upgraded us to an Alfa Romeo sports car, but when we had to drive through the rutted dirt back roads outside of Greve in Chianti, I was left wanting for something with a bit more ground clearance.</li>\r\n 	<li>The Thanksgiving drive down to Nashville was a lot smoother. They finally finished the years of construction expanding the I-80/94 constriction point around Lake Michigan in Northwest Indiana, and the traffic from there to I-65 south flowed smoothly. We made good enough time to make a couple of beer stops -- in Columbus, IN at a new Upland Brewing restaurant, and in downtown Louisville at Against The Grain Brewing.</li>\r\n 	<li>The drive back would be a whole other matter -- and I knew it and dreaded it. We drove down on that Friday, sailing through downtown Indy, Louisville, and Nashville because everyone was on vacation or shopping. Driving back Sunday though, we were right in the thick of the busiest travel day in the US. And while I always avoid flying on this day, I had managed to put myself on one of the US’s main north-south interstates. It would’ve only been worse if we’d been on the East Coast driving I-95 or the Jersey Turnpike. And it was the beat-down that I’d expected. The start of the drive out of Nashville was fine, and a bit pretty, going through rolling hills up to Louisville. The traffic was steady, but flowing. But we kept picking up more traffic as we headed north. We took a break in Indy this time, stopping off at Sun King Brewing right off the interstate, and then coffee-d up at a nearby Starbucks. North of Indy was when it really hit -- more and more cars and trucks heading up to Chicago, but still just 2 lanes. And so when the inevitable accident happened -- as it did many times that Sunday -- closing down one of those lanes, cutting the already clogged road by 50%, Waze became, if not a life saver, a time saver. I was running 3 nav systems, Waze, Google Maps, and the in-dash BMW nav. All had real-time traffic, but Waze seemed to be the quickest in sensing the need for a reroute. A couple of times that Sunday, it would direct us to take the next exit after traffic had stopped, and would vector us around the bottleneck and back onto the interstate, saving us 15-20 minutes of crawling and at least 70 points of increased blood pressure. I did skip the recommended diversion through the south side of Chicago, though. Given the record number of shootings in Chicago, stop-and-go traffic didn’t seem quite the burden that it did in rural Indiana.</li>\r\n 	<li>The next week’s triangulation across Richmond, Baltimore, and Charlottesville found me on I-95 having to make 2 passes around Washington, DC on the Capital Beltway, always a brutal 8-lane chokepoint. Heading up from Richmond Tuesday night, Google Maps told me to take the clockwise/west route around DC while Waze told me to go east. Odd since Google owns both. A friend said that he researched this a bit and found some articles claiming that Waze’s algorithm weighs current information more than historical trends; Google Maps tips the scales the other way. I don’t know if this is true -- I haven’t been able to find anything that says this -- but I often see different rush hour recommendations. Since Waze served me well on Thanksgiving Sunday, I went east and took the counterclockwise path around. It was a rainy night, but traffic flowed better than I expected and I made it to Baltimore in time for an oyster dinner.</li>\r\n 	<li>In spite of juggling nav apps, I found that I was more productive driving from Richmond to Baltimore to Charlottesville than I would’ve flying. You’d think it would be the other way around, but lack of direct flights would’ve mean going up and down, connecting through Washington Dulles. And on those few minutes I might be able to work, full planes and tight seats make it seem almost anti-social to try to open a laptop. On my 3-hour drive from Baltimore to Charlottesville, though, I was able to hammer through 2 conference calls and an unhurried, wide-ranging conversation with my boss. He called me. I told him that I was having a nice drive through Virginia horse country. “Good,” he said, “I have you captive.”</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://www.podsafeaudio.com/jamroom/play.php?band_id=1258&amp;song_id=4378&amp;mode=song_hifi\"><em>Shadows</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.podsafeaudio.com/jamroom/bands/1258/\">Antardhyan</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Having to Think about Carry-on Luggage</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I don’t usually think a lot about packing or luggage. And sometimes I think that puts me in the minority of frequent travelers. I know guys who obsess over their Tumi bags and specific packing systems. I used a grey Samsonite roller until the New Orleans sidewalks beat the wheels out to a 30 degree splay, and then I went back to my old black Victorinox with customs stickers from Thailand and Vietnam.</li>\r\n 	<li>However, a few things in 2016 got me thinking about carry-ons -- my carry-on experience with Wow Air in Iceland that I talked about in an earlier episode where I had to pull out half my clothes to meet the weight restrictions; my daughter’s light blue carry-on catching the eye of seemingly every gate agent she tried to pass, being forced to check it, and then having it lost 75% of her flights in 2016; and most recently, enduring long and often cold waits on a jet bridge waiting for my “valet checked” carry-on bag when flying regional jets</li>\r\n 	<li>Starting from last to first, this regional jet thing kills me. It used to be that gate checking for a commuter flight wasn’t a big thing -- the bag would be waiting for you on the jet bridge before you got off the plane. Now, as regional jets have gotten larger, they put the gate checked luggage in the same hold with the regular checked luggage, the only differentiating factor being the tag they put on at the gate. I’m typically waiting around 10 minutes with 40-50 other passengers, lined up on one side of an unheated jet bridge leaning over to see if my bag has come up yet. It’s gotten bad. On some of the larger Embraer jets flown by JetBlue, the overhead bins are large enough for regular bags, but on most of the regionals, you’re standing in that jet bridge line. After a while, this got real old, so I scrounged around through the old luggage in the attic to find a smaller duffel for 1-2 night trips that would fit in the overhead. I found a black nylon duffel from a 2007 National Retail Foundation tech conference that was an attendee giveaway. It had all the sponsors names stenciled across it -- Oracle, Infosys. I kinda felt like a Nascar racer. But it did the job. I could squish it into the small overheads of the regional jets and so walk past the line of folks waiting for the “valets” to bring their luggage. But it still looked cheesy. So when I was in Italy in November, I kept my eye out for a nice leather bag. One rainy day in Florence - not unique on that trip -- we dove into a covered outdoor market. Wandering through the stalls, I found a beautiful leather bag for 100 euros. My wife pointed to a bag the next size up -- “Don’t you want this bigger one? It’s only 20 euros more.” Nope, that would defeat the whole purpose. I posted a picture of that bag on Twitter. Every time I walk up the ORD jet bridge when returning home from Charlottesville, I love that bag even more.</li>\r\n 	<li>I remember when I first started traveling, you’d never see a hard-sided carry-on. Now it seems at least 30% of the carry-ons are hard-sided. I think a lot of it is fashion -- they come in much cooler designs and colors, but there is some functionality to them. If you’re flying an airline that’s aggressively using a baggage sizer, it’s much easier to stay legal with a hard-sided bag. You can’t overstuff them to bulging like you can a soft-sided bag, and the polycarbonate shell slips much easier in and out of the metal baggage sizer. This is why I suggested to my daughter that she start using a hard-sided bag. And in a bit more muted color -- something that wouldn’t grab the gate agent’s eye.</li>\r\n 	<li>But if you’re working against weight limits as well as dimensions, like I was with Wow Air, you want the lightest, most stripped down bag possible. I haven’t experienced a carry-on weight limit in the US. Some US carriers post a 35 or 40 lb limit -- even Spirit is at 40 lbs -- but I’ve never seen a gate agent weigh a carry-on. The international carriers are where this comes in. Wow Air’s carry-on size dimensions are about the same as US carriers, but their weight limit is much less -- 10 kg or 22 lbs -- which seems like the consensus number for non-US carriers. In this case, you don’t want the extra weight of the hard siding. You probably don’t even want very sturdy wheels; just the lightest covering around your clothes that you can get. I know guys who’ll brag that they can fit everything they own into 2 suitcases. These guys are obviously aren’t doing carry-on.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #126</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://promonet.iodalliance.com\">IODA Promonet</a> and <a href=\"http://podsafeaudio.com/\">PodSafe Audio</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_126.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #126 — Beating the Traffic; Rethinking Carry-On Luggage','','inherit','closed','closed','','1697-revision-v1','','','2017-01-16 23:40:05','2017-01-17 04:40:05','',1697,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/01/16/1697-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1707,1,'2017-01-16 23:42:51','2017-01-17 04:42:51','[caption id=\"attachment_1703\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/File_000.jpeg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1703\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/File_000-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Car trunks need carry-on luggage limits too[/caption]\r\n\r\nAs much driving as flying since the last episode has me Back from 10 days in Tuscany where, among other things, we thought we\'d avoid all the noise of the US presidential election. We succeeded... almost. One of my latest travel hobbies has been to quiz Uber drivers for their life stories. It makes for interesting rides to and from the airport. We also continue the ongoing thread about travel safety. This time, we talk about using Bluetooth in rental cars. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_126.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/294360507\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n<!--more-->\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #126:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, hoping that everyone had a Merry Christmas -- or Happy Christmas if you’re on the other side of the Atlantic -- Happy Hanukkah, and a Happy New Year. I’m personally in trying a combo Dry-ish and Sugar-Free January in an attempt to drop 10 lbs of holiday weight that managed to sneak on-board -- the downside, I guess, from staying off the road for the back half of December.</li>\r\n 	<li>I eased back into travel mode with my usual Charlottesville trip the first workday of the New Year. I didn’t mind it too much since Charlottesville was about 20 degrees warmer than Chicago. It was nice to walk outside with just a scarf and a tweed jacket.</li>\r\n 	<li>Between <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/11/22/podcast-125-uber-driver-stories-overseas-for-the-election/\">the last episode</a> and my Christmas travel break, I did almost as much driving as I did flying. I drove down to Nashville the Friday after Thanksgiving to see my mother. That drive wasn’t so bad, The Sunday drive back to Chicago, though was a whole ‘nother matter. Then that next week, I had meetings in Richmond, VA, Baltimore, and Charlottesville. I didn’t even bother to look at flight schedules. I knew nonstop RIC-BWI and a BWI-CHO flights were non-existent and the 2-2.5 hour drive time was within my fly-or-drive tipping point. Neither drives were bad. The only hassle was the Hertz rental car. Since it was a one-way rental -- I was picking up in RIC and dropping off in CHO -- they gave me a beater car, an older Jeep Patriot that I think was the only car on their lot without Bluetooth, which made listening to podcasts or doing phone calls a bit less convenient.</li>\r\n 	<li>It did give me a chance to explore Baltimore and Charlottesville a bit more than usual, though. On my past visits, I wouldn’t bother with a rental; would just taxi in from the airport, and then walk or Uber to places. But with the beater Jeep, I could wander with a bit more range. In Baltimore, I drove around the Fells Point neighborhood, ending up in the <a href=\"http://www.thamesstreetoysterhouse.com/\">Thames St Oyster House</a>, then threading through some waterfront areas that I had been a bit hesitant to walk through. In Charlottesville, I wandered through the countryside until I found <a href=\"http://starrhill.com/\">Starr Hill Brewery</a>. Kinda empty on a rainy Weds night, which meant the bartender had time to take me through a flight of her favorite beers. Maybe I’ve found the source of a few of those holiday pounds.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/buy_album.php?id=39CE51194FB95B63577FBFD7E2EC168C99277BD6CE86C10FDC39095666B5D6CF\"><em>Heaven</em></a> by <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=BB22CBFF24501120EEC6ABA18AB0A15FEB05A36360E7FDA122C8D7A5C140F8DC\" rel=\"nofollow\">Los Lonely Boys</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I’ve talked a couple of times in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/09/28/podcast-124-craft-beer-hunting-i-hate-rick-steves/\">past episodes</a> about the benefits of buying a pay-as-you-go SIM when traveling internationally -- $20 for a GB of data vs. AT&amp;T’s $60 for 300 MB is easy math. The only hassle is buying the SIM. First, you have to find the phone store, which can be a bit of an Easter Egg hunt. Back in November, our first day in Italy was in Pisa. We land, get the car, and head to the city center to find the phone store. However, the easiest one to get to was closed -- at 1 in the afternoon. Luckily, the next closest one was only a 10-minute walk and it was open. This time, I’d done my research before we left, purchased the SIMs online, and had printed out vouchers with bar codes, and instructions in English and Italian. I was ready for a quick and easy transaction. And yet again, I was wrong. The clerk knew nothing about the vouchers, didn’t know how to process them, and had to call around to other shops to figure it out. And then, each of the SIMs had to be registered and activated. Over an hour later, we’re sprinting out of the shop so we can make our time slot to get into the Leaning Tower -- which we’d also pre-paid. And this was a pretty typical experience. Which was why I was really excited a telecoms industry consultant told me that the virtual SIM, or the e-SIM was getting close to launch. Apple took the first crack at this back in 2014, but it’s been a slow ramp up. The iPhone 7 I picked up back in Sept still has the classic SIM. But this guy was telling me that going SIM-less is just about possible. He said it’ll be like signing into a WiFi hotspot. The next time I land in Italy and turn on my phone, I’ll be presented with a sign-in screen where I’ll be able to select my carrier and plan, and charge it to my credit card. Now given how wonky some WiFi gateways are, I’m not sure that this is the best comparison to sell me on the service, but if it saves me a couple of hours of frustration when I’m at my most jet lagged, I’ll figure it out.</li>\r\n 	<li>My age odometer clicked over again last month -- which I guess is a good thing, because if it didn’t click over, I be… dead. So, unless I find that Dorian Grey portrait at a garage sale, getting older is better than the alternative. I try not to let it bother me -- with varying levels of success. One thing, though, this does frustrate me is the need to bring my glasses into hotel bathrooms with me. Because it seems just as my reading vision is deteriorating, hotels are reducing the type size on their shampoo and conditioner bottles. As they try to go upscale with their toiletries, the bottle designers are taking the regular sized fancy labels into Photoshop and shrinking them down to fit on the front of a much smaller bottle, resulting is miniscule type that I might’ve been challenged to read in my 20’s let alone now. So my drill is to wear my glasses into the bathroom, figure out which bottle is shampoo, which is conditioner, and which is soap (or shower gel as they call it), and then line them up in order on the soap dish in the shower. Then take my glasses off, turn on the water, and hope that my lined up bottles don’t fall. The Hyatt Place that I stay at in Charlottesville is one of the few that doesn’t require this drill. They have a big “1” printed on the shampoo -- it runs about ¾’s the length of the bottle -- and a big “2” printed on the conditioner. And they’re in different colors. No need for glasses there. I love that hotel.</li>\r\n 	<li>It’s accepted wisdom that the most disgusting place on an airplane is the seat back pocket, and it just keeps getting worse. As airlines try to tighten up their ground turns -- how long a plane is on the ground before it takes off again -- the amount of time the cabin clean-up crew has to do its job continues to shrink. I was reminded of this by a Chicago Tribune article right before Thanksgiving when many airport workers -- cabin cleaners, baggage handlers, wheelchair attendants -- threatened to strike during that busiest travel week. The reporter interviewed a cabin cleaner who recently moved to Chicago from San Juan, PR. She said her crew of four are given 7 minutes to clean the cabin; no where near enough time to clean up all the crumbs, spilled drinks, and wrappers ground into the carpet, let alone time to clear the junk people leave in the seat back pocket. \"I don\'t know what is wrong with passengers nowadays,” she said. I won’t even pull out the safety card when I’m sitting in the exit row. A buddy told me a story about flying Tunisair from Brussels to Tunis many years ago. After the meal service, when people were done eating, they just shoved their trays into the seat back pocket. I’m not sure it’s all that different today.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://cyberset.cc/artists2.php?tr_release_id=104\"><em>Heaven</em></a> by <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=A951998E6011FA9B2D22387EB3CAC0B5EB05A36360E7FDA122C8D7A5C140F8DC\" rel=\"nofollow\">Electric Skychurch</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Beating The Traffic</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>As I mentioned earlier, I’ve done a bunch of travel by car lately. I talked in the last episode about driving through Tuscany. I was pleasantly surprised when Hertz upgraded us to an Alfa Romeo sports car, but when we had to drive through the rutted dirt back roads outside of Greve in Chianti, I was left wanting for something with a bit more ground clearance.</li>\r\n 	<li>The Thanksgiving drive down to Nashville was a lot smoother. They finally finished the years of construction expanding the I-80/94 constriction point around Lake Michigan in Northwest Indiana, and the traffic from there to I-65 south flowed smoothly. We made good enough time to make a couple of beer stops -- in Columbus, IN at a new Upland Brewing restaurant, and in downtown Louisville at Against The Grain Brewing.</li>\r\n 	<li>The drive back would be a whole other matter -- and I knew it and dreaded it. We drove down on that Friday, sailing through downtown Indy, Louisville, and Nashville because everyone was on vacation or shopping. Driving back Sunday though, we were right in the thick of the busiest travel day in the US. And while I always avoid flying on this day, I had managed to put myself on one of the US’s main north-south interstates. It would’ve only been worse if we’d been on the East Coast driving I-95 or the Jersey Turnpike. And it was the beat-down that I’d expected. The start of the drive out of Nashville was fine, and a bit pretty, going through rolling hills up to Louisville. The traffic was steady, but flowing. But we kept picking up more traffic as we headed north. We took a break in Indy this time, stopping off at Sun King Brewing right off the interstate, and then coffee-d up at a nearby Starbucks. North of Indy was when it really hit -- more and more cars and trucks heading up to Chicago, but still just 2 lanes. And so when the inevitable accident happened -- as it did many times that Sunday -- closing down one of those lanes, cutting the already clogged road by 50%, Waze became, if not a life saver, a time saver. I was running 3 nav systems, Waze, Google Maps, and the in-dash BMW nav. All had real-time traffic, but Waze seemed to be the quickest in sensing the need for a reroute. A couple of times that Sunday, it would direct us to take the next exit after traffic had stopped, and would vector us around the bottleneck and back onto the interstate, saving us 15-20 minutes of crawling and at least 70 points of increased blood pressure. I did skip the recommended diversion through the south side of Chicago, though. Given the record number of shootings in Chicago, stop-and-go traffic didn’t seem quite the burden that it did in rural Indiana.</li>\r\n 	<li>The next week’s triangulation across Richmond, Baltimore, and Charlottesville found me on I-95 having to make 2 passes around Washington, DC on the Capital Beltway, always a brutal 8-lane chokepoint. Heading up from Richmond Tuesday night, Google Maps told me to take the clockwise/west route around DC while Waze told me to go east. Odd since Google owns both. A friend said that he researched this a bit and found some articles claiming that Waze’s algorithm weighs current information more than historical trends; Google Maps tips the scales the other way. I don’t know if this is true -- I haven’t been able to find anything that says this -- but I often see different rush hour recommendations. Since Waze served me well on Thanksgiving Sunday, I went east and took the counterclockwise path around. It was a rainy night, but traffic flowed better than I expected and I made it to Baltimore in time for an oyster dinner.</li>\r\n 	<li>In spite of juggling nav apps, I found that I was more productive driving from Richmond to Baltimore to Charlottesville than I would’ve flying. You’d think it would be the other way around, but lack of direct flights would’ve mean going up and down, connecting through Washington Dulles. And on those few minutes I might be able to work, full planes and tight seats make it seem almost anti-social to try to open a laptop. On my 3-hour drive from Baltimore to Charlottesville, though, I was able to hammer through 2 conference calls and an unhurried, wide-ranging conversation with my boss. He called me. I told him that I was having a nice drive through Virginia horse country. “Good,” he said, “I have you captive.”</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://www.podsafeaudio.com/jamroom/play.php?band_id=1258&amp;song_id=4378&amp;mode=song_hifi\"><em>Shadows</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.podsafeaudio.com/jamroom/bands/1258/\">Antardhyan</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Having to Think about Carry-on Luggage</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I don’t usually think a lot about packing or luggage. And sometimes I think that puts me in the minority of frequent travelers. I know guys who obsess over their Tumi bags and specific packing systems. I used a grey Samsonite roller until the New Orleans sidewalks beat the wheels out to a 30 degree splay, and then I went back to my old black Victorinox with customs stickers from Thailand and Vietnam.</li>\r\n 	<li>However, a few things in 2016 got me thinking about carry-ons -- my carry-on experience with Wow Air in Iceland that I talked about in an earlier episode where I had to pull out half my clothes to meet the weight restrictions; my daughter’s light blue carry-on catching the eye of seemingly every gate agent she tried to pass, being forced to check it, and then having it lost 75% of her flights in 2016; and most recently, enduring long and often cold waits on a jet bridge waiting for my “valet checked” carry-on bag when flying regional jets</li>\r\n 	<li>Starting from last to first, this regional jet thing kills me. It used to be that gate checking for a commuter flight wasn’t a big thing -- the bag would be waiting for you on the jet bridge before you got off the plane. Now, as regional jets have gotten larger, they put the gate checked luggage in the same hold with the regular checked luggage, the only differentiating factor being the tag they put on at the gate. I’m typically waiting around 10 minutes with 40-50 other passengers, lined up on one side of an unheated jet bridge leaning over to see if my bag has come up yet. It’s gotten bad. On some of the larger Embraer jets flown by JetBlue, the overhead bins are large enough for regular bags, but on most of the regionals, you’re standing in that jet bridge line. After a while, this got real old, so I scrounged around through the old luggage in the attic to find a smaller duffel for 1-2 night trips that would fit in the overhead. I found a black nylon duffel from a 2007 National Retail Foundation tech conference that was an attendee giveaway. It had all the sponsors names stenciled across it -- Oracle, Infosys. I kinda felt like a Nascar racer. But it did the job. I could squish it into the small overheads of the regional jets and so walk past the line of folks waiting for the “valets” to bring their luggage. But it still looked cheesy. So when I was in Italy in November, I kept my eye out for a nice leather bag. One rainy day in Florence - not unique on that trip -- we dove into a covered outdoor market. Wandering through the stalls, I found a beautiful leather bag for 100 euros. My wife pointed to a bag the next size up -- “Don’t you want this bigger one? It’s only 20 euros more.” Nope, that would defeat the whole purpose. I posted a picture of that bag on Twitter. Every time I walk up the ORD jet bridge when returning home from Charlottesville, I love that bag even more.</li>\r\n 	<li>I remember when I first started traveling, you’d never see a hard-sided carry-on. Now it seems at least 30% of the carry-ons are hard-sided. I think a lot of it is fashion -- they come in much cooler designs and colors, but there is some functionality to them. If you’re flying an airline that’s aggressively using a baggage sizer, it’s much easier to stay legal with a hard-sided bag. You can’t overstuff them to bulging like you can a soft-sided bag, and the polycarbonate shell slips much easier in and out of the metal baggage sizer. This is why I suggested to my daughter that she start using a hard-sided bag. And in a bit more muted color -- something that wouldn’t grab the gate agent’s eye.</li>\r\n 	<li>But if you’re working against weight limits as well as dimensions, like I was with Wow Air, you want the lightest, most stripped down bag possible. I haven’t experienced a carry-on weight limit in the US. Some US carriers post a 35 or 40 lb limit -- even Spirit is at 40 lbs -- but I’ve never seen a gate agent weigh a carry-on. The international carriers are where this comes in. Wow Air’s carry-on size dimensions are about the same as US carriers, but their weight limit is much less -- 10 kg or 22 lbs -- which seems like the consensus number for non-US carriers. In this case, you don’t want the extra weight of the hard siding. You probably don’t even want very sturdy wheels; just the lightest covering around your clothes that you can get. I know guys who’ll brag that they can fit everything they own into 2 suitcases. These guys are obviously aren’t doing carry-on.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #126</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://promonet.iodalliance.com\">IODA Promonet</a> and <a href=\"http://podsafeaudio.com/\">PodSafe Audio</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_126.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #126 — Beating the Traffic; Rethinking Carry-On Luggage','','inherit','closed','closed','','1697-revision-v1','','','2017-01-16 23:42:51','2017-01-17 04:42:51','',1697,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/01/16/1697-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1708,1,'2017-01-17 10:08:34','2017-01-17 15:08:34','','File_000','','inherit','open','closed','','file_000-2','','','2017-01-17 10:08:34','2017-01-17 15:08:34','',1697,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/File_000.png',0,'attachment','image/png',0),
(1709,1,'2017-01-17 10:09:53','2017-01-17 15:09:53','[caption id=\"attachment_1703\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/File_000.jpeg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1703\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/File_000-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Car trunks need carry-on luggage limits too[/caption]\r\n\r\nAs much driving as flying since the last episode has me Back from 10 days in Tuscany where, among other things, we thought we\'d avoid all the noise of the US presidential election. We succeeded... almost. One of my latest travel hobbies has been to quiz Uber drivers for their life stories. It makes for interesting rides to and from the airport. We also continue the ongoing thread about travel safety. This time, we talk about using Bluetooth in rental cars. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_126.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/294360507\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n<!--more-->\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #126:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, hoping that everyone had a Merry Christmas -- or Happy Christmas if you’re on the other side of the Atlantic -- Happy Hanukkah, and a Happy New Year. I’m personally in trying a combo Dry-ish and Sugar-Free January in an attempt to drop 10 lbs of holiday weight that managed to sneak on-board -- the downside, I guess, from staying off the road for the back half of December.</li>\r\n 	<li>I eased back into travel mode with my usual Charlottesville trip the first workday of the New Year. I didn’t mind it too much since Charlottesville was about 20 degrees warmer than Chicago. It was nice to walk outside with just a scarf and a tweed jacket.</li>\r\n 	<li>Between <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/11/22/podcast-125-uber-driver-stories-overseas-for-the-election/\">the last episode</a> and my Christmas travel break, I did almost as much driving as I did flying. I drove down to Nashville the Friday after Thanksgiving to see my mother. That drive wasn’t so bad, The Sunday drive back to Chicago, though was a whole ‘nother matter. Then that next week, I had meetings in Richmond, VA, Baltimore, and Charlottesville. I didn’t even bother to look at flight schedules. I knew nonstop RIC-BWI and a BWI-CHO flights were non-existent and the 2-2.5 hour drive time was within my fly-or-drive tipping point. Neither drives were bad. The only hassle was the Hertz rental car. Since it was a one-way rental -- I was picking up in RIC and dropping off in CHO -- they gave me a beater car, an older Jeep Patriot that I think was the only car on their lot without Bluetooth, which made listening to podcasts or doing phone calls a bit less convenient.</li>\r\n 	<li>It did give me a chance to explore Baltimore and Charlottesville a bit more than usual, though. On my past visits, I wouldn’t bother with a rental; would just taxi in from the airport, and then walk or Uber to places. But with the beater Jeep, I could wander with a bit more range. In Baltimore, I drove around the Fells Point neighborhood, ending up in the <a href=\"http://www.thamesstreetoysterhouse.com/\">Thames St Oyster House</a>, then threading through some waterfront areas that I had been a bit hesitant to walk through. In Charlottesville, I wandered through the countryside until I found <a href=\"http://starrhill.com/\">Starr Hill Brewery</a>. Kinda empty on a rainy Weds night, which meant the bartender had time to take me through a flight of her favorite beers. Maybe I’ve found the source of a few of those holiday pounds.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/buy_album.php?id=39CE51194FB95B63577FBFD7E2EC168C99277BD6CE86C10FDC39095666B5D6CF\"><em>Heaven</em></a> by <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=BB22CBFF24501120EEC6ABA18AB0A15FEB05A36360E7FDA122C8D7A5C140F8DC\" rel=\"nofollow\">Los Lonely Boys</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I’ve talked a couple of times in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/09/28/podcast-124-craft-beer-hunting-i-hate-rick-steves/\">past episodes</a> about the benefits of buying a pay-as-you-go SIM when traveling internationally -- $20 for a GB of data vs. AT&amp;T’s $60 for 300 MB is easy math. The only hassle is buying the SIM. First, you have to find the phone store, which can be a bit of an Easter Egg hunt. Back in November, our first day in Italy was in Pisa. We land, get the car, and head to the city center to find the phone store. However, the easiest one to get to was closed -- at 1 in the afternoon. Luckily, the next closest one was only a 10-minute walk and it was open. This time, I’d done my research before we left, purchased the SIMs online, and had printed out vouchers with bar codes, and instructions in English and Italian. I was ready for a quick and easy transaction. And yet again, I was wrong. The clerk knew nothing about the vouchers, didn’t know how to process them, and had to call around to other shops to figure it out. And then, each of the SIMs had to be registered and activated. Over an hour later, we’re sprinting out of the shop so we can make our time slot to get into the Leaning Tower -- which we’d also pre-paid. And this was a pretty typical experience. Which was why I was really excited a telecoms industry consultant told me that the virtual SIM, or the e-SIM was getting close to launch. Apple took the first crack at this back in 2014, but it’s been a slow ramp up. The iPhone 7 I picked up back in Sept still has the classic SIM. But this guy was telling me that going SIM-less is just about possible. He said it’ll be like signing into a WiFi hotspot. The next time I land in Italy and turn on my phone, I’ll be presented with a sign-in screen where I’ll be able to select my carrier and plan, and charge it to my credit card. Now given how wonky some WiFi gateways are, I’m not sure that this is the best comparison to sell me on the service, but if it saves me a couple of hours of frustration when I’m at my most jet lagged, I’ll figure it out.</li>\r\n 	<li>My age odometer clicked over again last month -- which I guess is a good thing, because if it didn’t click over, I be… dead. So, unless I find that Dorian Grey portrait at a garage sale, getting older is better than the alternative. I try not to let it bother me -- with varying levels of success. One thing, though, this does frustrate me is the need to bring my glasses into hotel bathrooms with me. Because it seems just as my reading vision is deteriorating, hotels are reducing the type size on their shampoo and conditioner bottles. As they try to go upscale with their toiletries, the bottle designers are taking the regular sized fancy labels into Photoshop and shrinking them down to fit on the front of a much smaller bottle, resulting is minuscule type that I might’ve been challenged to read in my 20’s let alone now. So my drill is to wear my glasses into the bathroom, figure out which bottle is shampoo, which is conditioner, and which is soap (or shower gel as they call it), and then line them up in order on the soap dish in the shower. Then take my glasses off, turn on the water, and hope that my lined up bottles don’t fall. The Hyatt Place that I stay at in Charlottesville is one of the few that doesn’t require this drill. They have a big “1” printed on the shampoo -- it runs about ¾’s the length of the bottle -- and a big “2” printed on the conditioner. And they’re in different colors. No need for glasses there. I love that hotel.</li>\r\n 	<li>It’s accepted wisdom that the most disgusting place on an airplane is the seat back pocket, and it just keeps getting worse. As airlines try to tighten up their ground turns -- how long a plane is on the ground before it takes off again -- the amount of time the cabin clean-up crew has to do its job continues to shrink. I was reminded of this by a Chicago Tribune article right before Thanksgiving when many airport workers -- cabin cleaners, baggage handlers, wheelchair attendants -- threatened to strike during that busiest travel week. The reporter interviewed a cabin cleaner who recently moved to Chicago from San Juan, PR. She said her crew of four are given 7 minutes to clean the cabin; no where near enough time to clean up all the crumbs, spilled drinks, and wrappers ground into the carpet, let alone time to clear the junk people leave in the seat back pocket. \"I don\'t know what is wrong with passengers nowadays,” she said. I won’t even pull out the safety card when I’m sitting in the exit row. A buddy told me a story about flying Tunisair from Brussels to Tunis many years ago. After the meal service, when people were done eating, they just shoved their trays into the seat back pocket. I’m not sure it’s all that different today.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://cyberset.cc/artists2.php?tr_release_id=104\"><em>Heaven</em></a> by <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=A951998E6011FA9B2D22387EB3CAC0B5EB05A36360E7FDA122C8D7A5C140F8DC\" rel=\"nofollow\">Electric Skychurch</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Beating The Traffic</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>As I mentioned earlier, I’ve done a bunch of travel by car lately. I talked in the last episode about driving through Tuscany. I was pleasantly surprised when Hertz upgraded us to an Alfa Romeo sports car, but when we had to drive through the rutted dirt back roads outside of Greve in Chianti, I was left wanting for something with a bit more ground clearance.</li>\r\n 	<li>The Thanksgiving drive down to Nashville was a lot smoother. They finally finished the years of construction expanding the I-80/94 constriction point around Lake Michigan in Northwest Indiana, and the traffic from there to I-65 south flowed smoothly. We made good enough time to make a couple of beer stops -- in Columbus, IN at a new Upland Brewing restaurant, and in downtown Louisville at Against The Grain Brewing.</li>\r\n 	<li>The drive back would be a whole other matter -- and I knew it and dreaded it. We drove down on that Friday, sailing through downtown Indy, Louisville, and Nashville because everyone was on vacation or shopping. Driving back Sunday though, we were right in the thick of the busiest travel day in the US. And while I always avoid flying on this day, I had managed to put myself on one of the US’s main north-south interstates. It would’ve only been worse if we’d been on the East Coast driving I-95 or the Jersey Turnpike. And it was the beat-down that I’d expected. The start of the drive out of Nashville was fine, and a bit pretty, going through rolling hills up to Louisville. The traffic was steady, but flowing. But we kept picking up more traffic as we headed north. We took a break in Indy this time, stopping off at Sun King Brewing right off the interstate, and then coffee-d up at a nearby Starbucks. North of Indy was when it really hit -- more and more cars and trucks heading up to Chicago, but still just 2 lanes. And so when the inevitable accident happened -- as it did many times that Sunday -- closing down one of those lanes, cutting the already clogged road by 50%, Waze became, if not a life saver, a time saver. I was running 3 nav systems, Waze, Google Maps, and the in-dash BMW nav. All had real-time traffic, but Waze seemed to be the quickest in sensing the need for a reroute. A couple of times that Sunday, it would direct us to take the next exit after traffic had stopped, and would vector us around the bottleneck and back onto the interstate, saving us 15-20 minutes of crawling and at least 70 points of increased blood pressure. I did skip the recommended diversion through the south side of Chicago, though. Given the record number of shootings in Chicago, stop-and-go traffic didn’t seem quite the burden that it did in rural Indiana.</li>\r\n 	<li>The next week’s triangulation across Richmond, Baltimore, and Charlottesville found me on I-95 having to make 2 passes around Washington, DC on the Capital Beltway, always a brutal 8-lane chokepoint. Heading up from Richmond Tuesday night, Google Maps told me to take the clockwise/west route around DC while Waze told me to go east. Odd since Google owns both. A friend said that he researched this a bit and found some articles claiming that Waze’s algorithm weighs current information more than historical trends; Google Maps tips the scales the other way. I don’t know if this is true -- I haven’t been able to find anything that says this -- but I often see different rush hour recommendations. Since Waze served me well on Thanksgiving Sunday, I went east and took the counterclockwise path around. It was a rainy night, but traffic flowed better than I expected and I made it to Baltimore in time for an oyster dinner.</li>\r\n 	<li>In spite of juggling nav apps, I found that I was more productive driving from Richmond to Baltimore to Charlottesville than I would’ve flying. You’d think it would be the other way around, but lack of direct flights would’ve mean going up and down, connecting through Washington Dulles. And on those few minutes I might be able to work, full planes and tight seats make it seem almost anti-social to try to open a laptop. On my 3-hour drive from Baltimore to Charlottesville, though, I was able to hammer through 2 conference calls and an unhurried, wide-ranging conversation with my boss. He called me. I told him that I was having a nice drive through Virginia horse country. “Good,” he said, “I have you captive.”</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://www.podsafeaudio.com/jamroom/play.php?band_id=1258&amp;song_id=4378&amp;mode=song_hifi\"><em>Shadows</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.podsafeaudio.com/jamroom/bands/1258/\">Antardhyan</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Having to Think about Carry-on Luggage</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I don’t usually think a lot about packing or luggage. And sometimes I think that puts me in the minority of frequent travelers. I know guys who obsess over their Tumi bags and specific packing systems. I used a grey Samsonite roller until the New Orleans sidewalks beat the wheels out to a 30 degree splay, and then I went back to my old black Victorinox with customs stickers from Thailand and Vietnam.</li>\r\n 	<li>However, a few things in 2016 got me thinking about carry-ons -- my carry-on experience with Wow Air in Iceland that I talked about in an earlier episode where I had to pull out half my clothes to meet the weight restrictions; my daughter’s light blue carry-on catching the eye of seemingly every gate agent she tried to pass, being forced to check it, and then having it lost 75% of her flights in 2016; and most recently, enduring long and often cold waits on a jet bridge waiting for my “valet checked” carry-on bag when flying regional jets</li>\r\n 	<li>Starting from last to first, this regional jet thing kills me. It used to be that gate checking for a commuter flight wasn’t a big thing -- the bag would be waiting for you on the jet bridge before you got off the plane. Now, as regional jets have gotten larger, they put the gate checked luggage in the same hold with the regular checked luggage, the only differentiating factor being the tag they put on at the gate. I’m typically waiting around 10 minutes with 40-50 other passengers, lined up on one side of an unheated jet bridge leaning over to see if my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/File_000.png\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1708\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/File_000-169x300.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"169\" height=\"300\" /></a>bag has come up yet. It’s gotten bad. On some of the larger Embraer jets flown by JetBlue, the overhead bins are large enough for regular bags, but on most of the regionals, you’re standing in that jet bridge line. After a while, this got real old, so I scrounged around through the old luggage in the attic to find a smaller duffel for 1-2 night trips that would fit in the overhead. I found a black nylon duffel from a 2007 National Retail Foundation tech conference that was an attendee giveaway. It had all the sponsors names stenciled across it -- Oracle, Infosys. I kinda felt like a Nascar racer. But it did the job. I could squish it into the small overheads of the regional jets and so walk past the line of folks waiting for the “valets” to bring their luggage. But it still looked cheesy. So when I was in Italy in November, I kept my eye out for a nice leather bag. One rainy day in Florence - not unique on that trip -- we dove into a covered outdoor market. Wandering through the stalls, I found a beautiful leather bag for 100 euros. My wife pointed to a bag the next size up -- “Don’t you want this bigger one? It’s only 20 euros more.” Nope, that would defeat the whole purpose. I posted a picture of that bag on Twitter. Every time I walk up the ORD jet bridge when returning home from Charlottesville, I love that bag even more.</li>\r\n 	<li>I remember when I first started traveling, you’d never see a hard-sided carry-on. Now it seems at least 30% of the carry-ons are hard-sided. I think a lot of it is fashion -- they come in much cooler designs and colors, but there is some functionality to them. If you’re flying an airline that’s aggressively using a baggage sizer, it’s much easier to stay legal with a hard-sided bag. You can’t overstuff them to bulging like you can a soft-sided bag, and the polycarbonate shell slips much easier in and out of the metal baggage sizer. This is why I suggested to my daughter that she start using a hard-sided bag. And in a bit more muted color -- something that wouldn’t grab the gate agent’s eye.</li>\r\n 	<li>But if you’re working against weight limits as well as dimensions, like I was with Wow Air, you want the lightest, most stripped down bag possible. I haven’t experienced a carry-on weight limit in the US. Some US carriers post a 35 or 40 lb limit -- even Spirit is at 40 lbs -- but I’ve never seen a gate agent weigh a carry-on. The international carriers are where this comes in. Wow Air’s carry-on size dimensions are about the same as US carriers, but their weight limit is much less -- 10 kg or 22 lbs -- which seems like the consensus number for non-US carriers. In this case, you don’t want the extra weight of the hard siding. You probably don’t even want very sturdy wheels; just the lightest covering around your clothes that you can get. I know guys who’ll brag that they can fit everything they own into 2 suitcases. These guys are obviously aren’t doing carry-on.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #126</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://promonet.iodalliance.com\">IODA Promonet</a> and <a href=\"http://podsafeaudio.com/\">PodSafe Audio</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_126.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #126 — Beating the Traffic; Rethinking Carry-On Luggage','','inherit','closed','closed','','1697-revision-v1','','','2017-01-17 10:09:53','2017-01-17 15:09:53','',1697,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/01/17/1697-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1710,1,'2017-01-17 10:13:40','2017-01-17 15:13:40','[caption id=\"attachment_1703\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/File_000.jpeg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1703\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/File_000-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Car trunks need carry-on luggage limits too[/caption]\r\n\r\nSeems like I\'ve been doing as much driving as flying since the last episode, so I\'ve switched from apps that tracking flight delays to those that help me dodge traffic backups. has me Back from 10 days in Tuscany where, among other things, we thought we\'d avoid all the noise of the US presidential election. We succeeded... almost. One of my latest travel hobbies has been to quiz Uber drivers for their life stories. It makes for interesting rides to and from the airport. We also continue the ongoing thread about travel safety. This time, we talk about using Bluetooth in rental cars. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_126.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/294360507\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n<!--more-->\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #126:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, hoping that everyone had a Merry Christmas -- or Happy Christmas if you’re on the other side of the Atlantic -- Happy Hanukkah, and a Happy New Year. I’m personally in trying a combo Dry-ish and Sugar-Free January in an attempt to drop 10 lbs of holiday weight that managed to sneak on-board -- the downside, I guess, from staying off the road for the back half of December.</li>\r\n 	<li>I eased back into travel mode with my usual Charlottesville trip the first workday of the New Year. I didn’t mind it too much since Charlottesville was about 20 degrees warmer than Chicago. It was nice to walk outside with just a scarf and a tweed jacket.</li>\r\n 	<li>Between <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/11/22/podcast-125-uber-driver-stories-overseas-for-the-election/\">the last episode</a> and my Christmas travel break, I did almost as much driving as I did flying. I drove down to Nashville the Friday after Thanksgiving to see my mother. That drive wasn’t so bad, The Sunday drive back to Chicago, though was a whole ‘nother matter. Then that next week, I had meetings in Richmond, VA, Baltimore, and Charlottesville. I didn’t even bother to look at flight schedules. I knew nonstop RIC-BWI and a BWI-CHO flights were non-existent and the 2-2.5 hour drive time was within my fly-or-drive tipping point. Neither drives were bad. The only hassle was the Hertz rental car. Since it was a one-way rental -- I was picking up in RIC and dropping off in CHO -- they gave me a beater car, an older Jeep Patriot that I think was the only car on their lot without Bluetooth, which made listening to podcasts or doing phone calls a bit less convenient.</li>\r\n 	<li>It did give me a chance to explore Baltimore and Charlottesville a bit more than usual, though. On my past visits, I wouldn’t bother with a rental; would just taxi in from the airport, and then walk or Uber to places. But with the beater Jeep, I could wander with a bit more range. In Baltimore, I drove around the Fells Point neighborhood, ending up in the <a href=\"http://www.thamesstreetoysterhouse.com/\">Thames St Oyster House</a>, then threading through some waterfront areas that I had been a bit hesitant to walk through. In Charlottesville, I wandered through the countryside until I found <a href=\"http://starrhill.com/\">Starr Hill Brewery</a>. Kinda empty on a rainy Weds night, which meant the bartender had time to take me through a flight of her favorite beers. Maybe I’ve found the source of a few of those holiday pounds.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/buy_album.php?id=39CE51194FB95B63577FBFD7E2EC168C99277BD6CE86C10FDC39095666B5D6CF\"><em>Heaven</em></a> by <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=BB22CBFF24501120EEC6ABA18AB0A15FEB05A36360E7FDA122C8D7A5C140F8DC\" rel=\"nofollow\">Los Lonely Boys</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I’ve talked a couple of times in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/09/28/podcast-124-craft-beer-hunting-i-hate-rick-steves/\">past episodes</a> about the benefits of buying a pay-as-you-go SIM when traveling internationally -- $20 for a GB of data vs. AT&amp;T’s $60 for 300 MB is easy math. The only hassle is buying the SIM. First, you have to find the phone store, which can be a bit of an Easter Egg hunt. Back in November, our first day in Italy was in Pisa. We land, get the car, and head to the city center to find the phone store. However, the easiest one to get to was closed -- at 1 in the afternoon. Luckily, the next closest one was only a 10-minute walk and it was open. This time, I’d done my research before we left, purchased the SIMs online, and had printed out vouchers with bar codes, and instructions in English and Italian. I was ready for a quick and easy transaction. And yet again, I was wrong. The clerk knew nothing about the vouchers, didn’t know how to process them, and had to call around to other shops to figure it out. And then, each of the SIMs had to be registered and activated. Over an hour later, we’re sprinting out of the shop so we can make our time slot to get into the Leaning Tower -- which we’d also pre-paid. And this was a pretty typical experience. Which was why I was really excited a telecoms industry consultant told me that the virtual SIM, or the e-SIM was getting close to launch. Apple took the first crack at this back in 2014, but it’s been a slow ramp up. The iPhone 7 I picked up back in Sept still has the classic SIM. But this guy was telling me that going SIM-less is just about possible. He said it’ll be like signing into a WiFi hotspot. The next time I land in Italy and turn on my phone, I’ll be presented with a sign-in screen where I’ll be able to select my carrier and plan, and charge it to my credit card. Now given how wonky some WiFi gateways are, I’m not sure that this is the best comparison to sell me on the service, but if it saves me a couple of hours of frustration when I’m at my most jet lagged, I’ll figure it out.</li>\r\n 	<li>My age odometer clicked over again last month -- which I guess is a good thing, because if it didn’t click over, I be… dead. So, unless I find that Dorian Grey portrait at a garage sale, getting older is better than the alternative. I try not to let it bother me -- with varying levels of success. One thing, though, this does frustrate me is the need to bring my glasses into hotel bathrooms with me. Because it seems just as my reading vision is deteriorating, hotels are reducing the type size on their shampoo and conditioner bottles. As they try to go upscale with their toiletries, the bottle designers are taking the regular sized fancy labels into Photoshop and shrinking them down to fit on the front of a much smaller bottle, resulting is minuscule type that I might’ve been challenged to read in my 20’s let alone now. So my drill is to wear my glasses into the bathroom, figure out which bottle is shampoo, which is conditioner, and which is soap (or shower gel as they call it), and then line them up in order on the soap dish in the shower. Then take my glasses off, turn on the water, and hope that my lined up bottles don’t fall. The Hyatt Place that I stay at in Charlottesville is one of the few that doesn’t require this drill. They have a big “1” printed on the shampoo -- it runs about ¾’s the length of the bottle -- and a big “2” printed on the conditioner. And they’re in different colors. No need for glasses there. I love that hotel.</li>\r\n 	<li>It’s accepted wisdom that the most disgusting place on an airplane is the seat back pocket, and it just keeps getting worse. As airlines try to tighten up their ground turns -- how long a plane is on the ground before it takes off again -- the amount of time the cabin clean-up crew has to do its job continues to shrink. I was reminded of this by a Chicago Tribune article right before Thanksgiving when many airport workers -- cabin cleaners, baggage handlers, wheelchair attendants -- threatened to strike during that busiest travel week. The reporter interviewed a cabin cleaner who recently moved to Chicago from San Juan, PR. She said her crew of four are given 7 minutes to clean the cabin; no where near enough time to clean up all the crumbs, spilled drinks, and wrappers ground into the carpet, let alone time to clear the junk people leave in the seat back pocket. \"I don\'t know what is wrong with passengers nowadays,” she said. I won’t even pull out the safety card when I’m sitting in the exit row. A buddy told me a story about flying Tunisair from Brussels to Tunis many years ago. After the meal service, when people were done eating, they just shoved their trays into the seat back pocket. I’m not sure it’s all that different today.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://cyberset.cc/artists2.php?tr_release_id=104\"><em>Heaven</em></a> by <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=A951998E6011FA9B2D22387EB3CAC0B5EB05A36360E7FDA122C8D7A5C140F8DC\" rel=\"nofollow\">Electric Skychurch</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Beating The Traffic</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>As I mentioned earlier, I’ve done a bunch of travel by car lately. I talked in the last episode about driving through Tuscany. I was pleasantly surprised when Hertz upgraded us to an Alfa Romeo sports car, but when we had to drive through the rutted dirt back roads outside of Greve in Chianti, I was left wanting for something with a bit more ground clearance.</li>\r\n 	<li>The Thanksgiving drive down to Nashville was a lot smoother. They finally finished the years of construction expanding the I-80/94 constriction point around Lake Michigan in Northwest Indiana, and the traffic from there to I-65 south flowed smoothly. We made good enough time to make a couple of beer stops -- in Columbus, IN at a new Upland Brewing restaurant, and in downtown Louisville at Against The Grain Brewing.</li>\r\n 	<li>The drive back would be a whole other matter -- and I knew it and dreaded it. We drove down on that Friday, sailing through downtown Indy, Louisville, and Nashville because everyone was on vacation or shopping. Driving back Sunday though, we were right in the thick of the busiest travel day in the US. And while I always avoid flying on this day, I had managed to put myself on one of the US’s main north-south interstates. It would’ve only been worse if we’d been on the East Coast driving I-95 or the Jersey Turnpike. And it was the beat-down that I’d expected. The start of the drive out of Nashville was fine, and a bit pretty, going through rolling hills up to Louisville. The traffic was steady, but flowing. But we kept picking up more traffic as we headed north. We took a break in Indy this time, stopping off at Sun King Brewing right off the interstate, and then coffee-d up at a nearby Starbucks. North of Indy was when it really hit -- more and more cars and trucks heading up to Chicago, but still just 2 lanes. And so when the inevitable accident happened -- as it did many times that Sunday -- closing down one of those lanes, cutting the already clogged road by 50%, Waze became, if not a life saver, a time saver. I was running 3 nav systems, Waze, Google Maps, and the in-dash BMW nav. All had real-time traffic, but Waze seemed to be the quickest in sensing the need for a reroute. A couple of times that Sunday, it would direct us to take the next exit after traffic had stopped, and would vector us around the bottleneck and back onto the interstate, saving us 15-20 minutes of crawling and at least 70 points of increased blood pressure. I did skip the recommended diversion through the south side of Chicago, though. Given the record number of shootings in Chicago, stop-and-go traffic didn’t seem quite the burden that it did in rural Indiana.</li>\r\n 	<li>The next week’s triangulation across Richmond, Baltimore, and Charlottesville found me on I-95 having to make 2 passes around Washington, DC on the Capital Beltway, always a brutal 8-lane chokepoint. Heading up from Richmond Tuesday night, Google Maps told me to take the clockwise/west route around DC while Waze told me to go east. Odd since Google owns both. A friend said that he researched this a bit and found some articles claiming that Waze’s algorithm weighs current information more than historical trends; Google Maps tips the scales the other way. I don’t know if this is true -- I haven’t been able to find anything that says this -- but I often see different rush hour recommendations. Since Waze served me well on Thanksgiving Sunday, I went east and took the counterclockwise path around. It was a rainy night, but traffic flowed better than I expected and I made it to Baltimore in time for an oyster dinner.</li>\r\n 	<li>In spite of juggling nav apps, I found that I was more productive driving from Richmond to Baltimore to Charlottesville than I would’ve flying. You’d think it would be the other way around, but lack of direct flights would’ve mean going up and down, connecting through Washington Dulles. And on those few minutes I might be able to work, full planes and tight seats make it seem almost anti-social to try to open a laptop. On my 3-hour drive from Baltimore to Charlottesville, though, I was able to hammer through 2 conference calls and an unhurried, wide-ranging conversation with my boss. He called me. I told him that I was having a nice drive through Virginia horse country. “Good,” he said, “I have you captive.”</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://www.podsafeaudio.com/jamroom/play.php?band_id=1258&amp;song_id=4378&amp;mode=song_hifi\"><em>Shadows</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.podsafeaudio.com/jamroom/bands/1258/\">Antardhyan</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Having to Think about Carry-on Luggage</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I don’t usually think a lot about packing or luggage. And sometimes I think that puts me in the minority of frequent travelers. I know guys who obsess over their Tumi bags and specific packing systems. I used a grey Samsonite roller until the New Orleans sidewalks beat the wheels out to a 30 degree splay, and then I went back to my old black Victorinox with customs stickers from Thailand and Vietnam.</li>\r\n 	<li>However, a few things in 2016 got me thinking about carry-ons -- my carry-on experience with Wow Air in Iceland that I talked about in an earlier episode where I had to pull out half my clothes to meet the weight restrictions; my daughter’s light blue carry-on catching the eye of seemingly every gate agent she tried to pass, being forced to check it, and then having it lost 75% of her flights in 2016; and most recently, enduring long and often cold waits on a jet bridge waiting for my “valet checked” carry-on bag when flying regional jets</li>\r\n 	<li>Starting from last to first, this regional jet thing kills me. It used to be that gate checking for a commuter flight wasn’t a big thing -- the bag would be waiting for you on the jet bridge before you got off the plane. Now, as regional jets have gotten larger, they put the gate checked luggage in the same hold with the regular checked luggage, the only differentiating factor being the tag they put on at the gate. I’m typically waiting around 10 minutes with 40-50 other passengers, lined up on one side of an unheated jet bridge leaning over to see if my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/File_000.png\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1708\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/File_000-169x300.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"169\" height=\"300\" /></a>bag has come up yet. It’s gotten bad. On some of the larger Embraer jets flown by JetBlue, the overhead bins are large enough for regular bags, but on most of the regionals, you’re standing in that jet bridge line. After a while, this got real old, so I scrounged around through the old luggage in the attic to find a smaller duffel for 1-2 night trips that would fit in the overhead. I found a black nylon duffel from a 2007 National Retail Foundation tech conference that was an attendee giveaway. It had all the sponsors names stenciled across it -- Oracle, Infosys. I kinda felt like a Nascar racer. But it did the job. I could squish it into the small overheads of the regional jets and so walk past the line of folks waiting for the “valets” to bring their luggage. But it still looked cheesy. So when I was in Italy in November, I kept my eye out for a nice leather bag. One rainy day in Florence - not unique on that trip -- we dove into a covered outdoor market. Wandering through the stalls, I found a beautiful leather bag for 100 euros. My wife pointed to a bag the next size up -- “Don’t you want this bigger one? It’s only 20 euros more.” Nope, that would defeat the whole purpose. I posted a picture of that bag on Twitter. Every time I walk up the ORD jet bridge when returning home from Charlottesville, I love that bag even more.</li>\r\n 	<li>I remember when I first started traveling, you’d never see a hard-sided carry-on. Now it seems at least 30% of the carry-ons are hard-sided. I think a lot of it is fashion -- they come in much cooler designs and colors, but there is some functionality to them. If you’re flying an airline that’s aggressively using a baggage sizer, it’s much easier to stay legal with a hard-sided bag. You can’t overstuff them to bulging like you can a soft-sided bag, and the polycarbonate shell slips much easier in and out of the metal baggage sizer. This is why I suggested to my daughter that she start using a hard-sided bag. And in a bit more muted color -- something that wouldn’t grab the gate agent’s eye.</li>\r\n 	<li>But if you’re working against weight limits as well as dimensions, like I was with Wow Air, you want the lightest, most stripped down bag possible. I haven’t experienced a carry-on weight limit in the US. Some US carriers post a 35 or 40 lb limit -- even Spirit is at 40 lbs -- but I’ve never seen a gate agent weigh a carry-on. The international carriers are where this comes in. Wow Air’s carry-on size dimensions are about the same as US carriers, but their weight limit is much less -- 10 kg or 22 lbs -- which seems like the consensus number for non-US carriers. In this case, you don’t want the extra weight of the hard siding. You probably don’t even want very sturdy wheels; just the lightest covering around your clothes that you can get. I know guys who’ll brag that they can fit everything they own into 2 suitcases. These guys are obviously aren’t doing carry-on.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #126</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://promonet.iodalliance.com\">IODA Promonet</a> and <a href=\"http://podsafeaudio.com/\">PodSafe Audio</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_126.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #126 — Beating the Traffic; Rethinking Carry-On Luggage','','inherit','closed','closed','','1697-revision-v1','','','2017-01-17 10:13:40','2017-01-17 15:13:40','',1697,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/01/17/1697-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1711,1,'2017-01-17 18:10:12','2017-01-17 23:10:12','[caption id=\"attachment_1703\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/File_000.jpeg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1703\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/File_000-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Car trunks need carry-on luggage limits too[/caption]\r\n\r\nSeems like I\'ve been doing as much driving as flying since the last episode, so I\'ve switched from apps that track flight delays to those that help me dodge traffic backups. I talk, yet again, about buying pay-as-you-go SIMs while traveling, but the need to do that may be ending. And I\'ve reshuffled my carry-on luggage as the airlines have changed their rules. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_126.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/294360507\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n<!--more-->\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #126:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, hoping that everyone had a Merry Christmas -- or Happy Christmas if you’re on the other side of the Atlantic -- Happy Hanukkah, and a Happy New Year. I’m personally in trying a combo Dry-ish and Sugar-Free January in an attempt to drop 10 lbs of holiday weight that managed to sneak on-board -- the downside, I guess, from staying off the road for the back half of December.</li>\r\n 	<li>I eased back into travel mode with my usual Charlottesville trip the first workday of the New Year. I didn’t mind it too much since Charlottesville was about 20 degrees warmer than Chicago. It was nice to walk outside with just a scarf and a tweed jacket.</li>\r\n 	<li>Between <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/11/22/podcast-125-uber-driver-stories-overseas-for-the-election/\">the last episode</a> and my Christmas travel break, I did almost as much driving as I did flying. I drove down to Nashville the Friday after Thanksgiving to see my mother. That drive wasn’t so bad, The Sunday drive back to Chicago, though was a whole ‘nother matter. Then that next week, I had meetings in Richmond, VA, Baltimore, and Charlottesville. I didn’t even bother to look at flight schedules. I knew nonstop RIC-BWI and a BWI-CHO flights were non-existent and the 2-2.5 hour drive time was within my fly-or-drive tipping point. Neither drives were bad. The only hassle was the Hertz rental car. Since it was a one-way rental -- I was picking up in RIC and dropping off in CHO -- they gave me a beater car, an older Jeep Patriot that I think was the only car on their lot without Bluetooth, which made listening to podcasts or doing phone calls a bit less convenient.</li>\r\n 	<li>It did give me a chance to explore Baltimore and Charlottesville a bit more than usual, though. On my past visits, I wouldn’t bother with a rental; would just taxi in from the airport, and then walk or Uber to places. But with the beater Jeep, I could wander with a bit more range. In Baltimore, I drove around the Fells Point neighborhood, ending up in the <a href=\"http://www.thamesstreetoysterhouse.com/\">Thames St Oyster House</a>, then threading through some waterfront areas that I had been a bit hesitant to walk through. In Charlottesville, I wandered through the countryside until I found <a href=\"http://starrhill.com/\">Starr Hill Brewery</a>. Kinda empty on a rainy Weds night, which meant the bartender had time to take me through a flight of her favorite beers. Maybe I’ve found the source of a few of those holiday pounds.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/buy_album.php?id=39CE51194FB95B63577FBFD7E2EC168C99277BD6CE86C10FDC39095666B5D6CF\"><em>Heaven</em></a> by <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=BB22CBFF24501120EEC6ABA18AB0A15FEB05A36360E7FDA122C8D7A5C140F8DC\" rel=\"nofollow\">Los Lonely Boys</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I’ve talked a couple of times in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/09/28/podcast-124-craft-beer-hunting-i-hate-rick-steves/\">past episodes</a> about the benefits of buying a pay-as-you-go SIM when traveling internationally -- $20 for a GB of data vs. AT&amp;T’s $60 for 300 MB is easy math. The only hassle is buying the SIM. First, you have to find the phone store, which can be a bit of an Easter Egg hunt. Back in November, our first day in Italy was in Pisa. We land, get the car, and head to the city center to find the phone store. However, the easiest one to get to was closed -- at 1 in the afternoon. Luckily, the next closest one was only a 10-minute walk and it was open. This time, I’d done my research before we left, purchased the SIMs online, and had printed out vouchers with bar codes, and instructions in English and Italian. I was ready for a quick and easy transaction. And yet again, I was wrong. The clerk knew nothing about the vouchers, didn’t know how to process them, and had to call around to other shops to figure it out. And then, each of the SIMs had to be registered and activated. Over an hour later, we’re sprinting out of the shop so we can make our time slot to get into the Leaning Tower -- which we’d also pre-paid. And this was a pretty typical experience. Which was why I was really excited a telecoms industry consultant told me that the virtual SIM, or the e-SIM was getting close to launch. Apple took the first crack at this back in 2014, but it’s been a slow ramp up. The iPhone 7 I picked up back in Sept still has the classic SIM. But this guy was telling me that going SIM-less is just about possible. He said it’ll be like signing into a WiFi hotspot. The next time I land in Italy and turn on my phone, I’ll be presented with a sign-in screen where I’ll be able to select my carrier and plan, and charge it to my credit card. Now given how wonky some WiFi gateways are, I’m not sure that this is the best comparison to sell me on the service, but if it saves me a couple of hours of frustration when I’m at my most jet lagged, I’ll figure it out.</li>\r\n 	<li>My age odometer clicked over again last month -- which I guess is a good thing, because if it didn’t click over, I be… dead. So, unless I find that Dorian Grey portrait at a garage sale, getting older is better than the alternative. I try not to let it bother me -- with varying levels of success. One thing, though, this does frustrate me is the need to bring my glasses into hotel bathrooms with me. Because it seems just as my reading vision is deteriorating, hotels are reducing the type size on their shampoo and conditioner bottles. As they try to go upscale with their toiletries, the bottle designers are taking the regular sized fancy labels into Photoshop and shrinking them down to fit on the front of a much smaller bottle, resulting is minuscule type that I might’ve been challenged to read in my 20’s let alone now. So my drill is to wear my glasses into the bathroom, figure out which bottle is shampoo, which is conditioner, and which is soap (or shower gel as they call it), and then line them up in order on the soap dish in the shower. Then take my glasses off, turn on the water, and hope that my lined up bottles don’t fall. The Hyatt Place that I stay at in Charlottesville is one of the few that doesn’t require this drill. They have a big “1” printed on the shampoo -- it runs about ¾’s the length of the bottle -- and a big “2” printed on the conditioner. And they’re in different colors. No need for glasses there. I love that hotel.</li>\r\n 	<li>It’s accepted wisdom that the most disgusting place on an airplane is the seat back pocket, and it just keeps getting worse. As airlines try to tighten up their ground turns -- how long a plane is on the ground before it takes off again -- the amount of time the cabin clean-up crew has to do its job continues to shrink. I was reminded of this by a Chicago Tribune article right before Thanksgiving when many airport workers -- cabin cleaners, baggage handlers, wheelchair attendants -- threatened to strike during that busiest travel week. The reporter interviewed a cabin cleaner who recently moved to Chicago from San Juan, PR. She said her crew of four are given 7 minutes to clean the cabin; no where near enough time to clean up all the crumbs, spilled drinks, and wrappers ground into the carpet, let alone time to clear the junk people leave in the seat back pocket. \"I don\'t know what is wrong with passengers nowadays,” she said. I won’t even pull out the safety card when I’m sitting in the exit row. A buddy told me a story about flying Tunisair from Brussels to Tunis many years ago. After the meal service, when people were done eating, they just shoved their trays into the seat back pocket. I’m not sure it’s all that different today.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://cyberset.cc/artists2.php?tr_release_id=104\"><em>Heaven</em></a> by <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=A951998E6011FA9B2D22387EB3CAC0B5EB05A36360E7FDA122C8D7A5C140F8DC\" rel=\"nofollow\">Electric Skychurch</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Beating The Traffic</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>As I mentioned earlier, I’ve done a bunch of travel by car lately. I talked in the last episode about driving through Tuscany. I was pleasantly surprised when Hertz upgraded us to an Alfa Romeo sports car, but when we had to drive through the rutted dirt back roads outside of Greve in Chianti, I was left wanting for something with a bit more ground clearance.</li>\r\n 	<li>The Thanksgiving drive down to Nashville was a lot smoother. They finally finished the years of construction expanding the I-80/94 constriction point around Lake Michigan in Northwest Indiana, and the traffic from there to I-65 south flowed smoothly. We made good enough time to make a couple of beer stops -- in Columbus, IN at a new Upland Brewing restaurant, and in downtown Louisville at Against The Grain Brewing.</li>\r\n 	<li>The drive back would be a whole other matter -- and I knew it and dreaded it. We drove down on that Friday, sailing through downtown Indy, Louisville, and Nashville because everyone was on vacation or shopping. Driving back Sunday though, we were right in the thick of the busiest travel day in the US. And while I always avoid flying on this day, I had managed to put myself on one of the US’s main north-south interstates. It would’ve only been worse if we’d been on the East Coast driving I-95 or the Jersey Turnpike. And it was the beat-down that I’d expected. The start of the drive out of Nashville was fine, and a bit pretty, going through rolling hills up to Louisville. The traffic was steady, but flowing. But we kept picking up more traffic as we headed north. We took a break in Indy this time, stopping off at Sun King Brewing right off the interstate, and then coffee-d up at a nearby Starbucks. North of Indy was when it really hit -- more and more cars and trucks heading up to Chicago, but still just 2 lanes. And so when the inevitable accident happened -- as it did many times that Sunday -- closing down one of those lanes, cutting the already clogged road by 50%, Waze became, if not a life saver, a time saver. I was running 3 nav systems, Waze, Google Maps, and the in-dash BMW nav. All had real-time traffic, but Waze seemed to be the quickest in sensing the need for a reroute. A couple of times that Sunday, it would direct us to take the next exit after traffic had stopped, and would vector us around the bottleneck and back onto the interstate, saving us 15-20 minutes of crawling and at least 70 points of increased blood pressure. I did skip the recommended diversion through the south side of Chicago, though. Given the record number of shootings in Chicago, stop-and-go traffic didn’t seem quite the burden that it did in rural Indiana.</li>\r\n 	<li>The next week’s triangulation across Richmond, Baltimore, and Charlottesville found me on I-95 having to make 2 passes around Washington, DC on the Capital Beltway, always a brutal 8-lane chokepoint. Heading up from Richmond Tuesday night, Google Maps told me to take the clockwise/west route around DC while Waze told me to go east. Odd since Google owns both. A friend said that he researched this a bit and found some articles claiming that Waze’s algorithm weighs current information more than historical trends; Google Maps tips the scales the other way. I don’t know if this is true -- I haven’t been able to find anything that says this -- but I often see different rush hour recommendations. Since Waze served me well on Thanksgiving Sunday, I went east and took the counterclockwise path around. It was a rainy night, but traffic flowed better than I expected and I made it to Baltimore in time for an oyster dinner.</li>\r\n 	<li>In spite of juggling nav apps, I found that I was more productive driving from Richmond to Baltimore to Charlottesville than I would’ve flying. You’d think it would be the other way around, but lack of direct flights would’ve mean going up and down, connecting through Washington Dulles. And on those few minutes I might be able to work, full planes and tight seats make it seem almost anti-social to try to open a laptop. On my 3-hour drive from Baltimore to Charlottesville, though, I was able to hammer through 2 conference calls and an unhurried, wide-ranging conversation with my boss. He called me. I told him that I was having a nice drive through Virginia horse country. “Good,” he said, “I have you captive.”</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://www.podsafeaudio.com/jamroom/play.php?band_id=1258&amp;song_id=4378&amp;mode=song_hifi\"><em>Shadows</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.podsafeaudio.com/jamroom/bands/1258/\">Antardhyan</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Having to Think about Carry-on Luggage</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I don’t usually think a lot about packing or luggage. And sometimes I think that puts me in the minority of frequent travelers. I know guys who obsess over their Tumi bags and specific packing systems. I used a grey Samsonite roller until the New Orleans sidewalks beat the wheels out to a 30 degree splay, and then I went back to my old black Victorinox with customs stickers from Thailand and Vietnam.</li>\r\n 	<li>However, a few things in 2016 got me thinking about carry-ons -- my carry-on experience with Wow Air in Iceland that I talked about in an earlier episode where I had to pull out half my clothes to meet the weight restrictions; my daughter’s light blue carry-on catching the eye of seemingly every gate agent she tried to pass, being forced to check it, and then having it lost 75% of her flights in 2016; and most recently, enduring long and often cold waits on a jet bridge waiting for my “valet checked” carry-on bag when flying regional jets</li>\r\n 	<li>Starting from last to first, this regional jet thing kills me. It used to be that gate checking for a commuter flight wasn’t a big thing -- the bag would be waiting for you on the jet bridge before you got off the plane. Now, as regional jets have gotten larger, they put the gate checked luggage in the same hold with the regular checked luggage, the only differentiating factor being the tag they put on at the gate. I’m typically waiting around 10 minutes with 40-50 other passengers, lined up on one side of an unheated jet bridge leaning over to see if my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/File_000.png\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1708\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/File_000-169x300.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"169\" height=\"300\" /></a>bag has come up yet. It’s gotten bad. On some of the larger Embraer jets flown by JetBlue, the overhead bins are large enough for regular bags, but on most of the regionals, you’re standing in that jet bridge line. After a while, this got real old, so I scrounged around through the old luggage in the attic to find a smaller duffel for 1-2 night trips that would fit in the overhead. I found a black nylon duffel from a 2007 National Retail Foundation tech conference that was an attendee giveaway. It had all the sponsors names stenciled across it -- Oracle, Infosys. I kinda felt like a Nascar racer. But it did the job. I could squish it into the small overheads of the regional jets and so walk past the line of folks waiting for the “valets” to bring their luggage. But it still looked cheesy. So when I was in Italy in November, I kept my eye out for a nice leather bag. One rainy day in Florence - not unique on that trip -- we dove into a covered outdoor market. Wandering through the stalls, I found a beautiful leather bag for 100 euros. My wife pointed to a bag the next size up -- “Don’t you want this bigger one? It’s only 20 euros more.” Nope, that would defeat the whole purpose. I posted a picture of that bag on Twitter. Every time I walk up the ORD jet bridge when returning home from Charlottesville, I love that bag even more.</li>\r\n 	<li>I remember when I first started traveling, you’d never see a hard-sided carry-on. Now it seems at least 30% of the carry-ons are hard-sided. I think a lot of it is fashion -- they come in much cooler designs and colors, but there is some functionality to them. If you’re flying an airline that’s aggressively using a baggage sizer, it’s much easier to stay legal with a hard-sided bag. You can’t overstuff them to bulging like you can a soft-sided bag, and the polycarbonate shell slips much easier in and out of the metal baggage sizer. This is why I suggested to my daughter that she start using a hard-sided bag. And in a bit more muted color -- something that wouldn’t grab the gate agent’s eye.</li>\r\n 	<li>But if you’re working against weight limits as well as dimensions, like I was with Wow Air, you want the lightest, most stripped down bag possible. I haven’t experienced a carry-on weight limit in the US. Some US carriers post a 35 or 40 lb limit -- even Spirit is at 40 lbs -- but I’ve never seen a gate agent weigh a carry-on. The international carriers are where this comes in. Wow Air’s carry-on size dimensions are about the same as US carriers, but their weight limit is much less -- 10 kg or 22 lbs -- which seems like the consensus number for non-US carriers. In this case, you don’t want the extra weight of the hard siding. You probably don’t even want very sturdy wheels; just the lightest covering around your clothes that you can get. I know guys who’ll brag that they can fit everything they own into 2 suitcases. These guys are obviously aren’t doing carry-on.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #126</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://promonet.iodalliance.com\">IODA Promonet</a> and <a href=\"http://podsafeaudio.com/\">PodSafe Audio</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_126.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #126 — Beating the Traffic; Rethinking Carry-On Luggage','','inherit','closed','closed','','1697-revision-v1','','','2017-01-17 18:10:12','2017-01-17 23:10:12','',1697,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/01/17/1697-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1712,1,'2017-01-17 22:36:22','2017-01-18 03:36:22','[caption id=\"attachment_1703\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/File_000.jpeg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1703\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/File_000-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Car trunks need carry-on luggage limits too[/caption]\r\n\r\nSeems like I\'ve been doing as much driving as flying since the last episode, so I\'ve switched from apps that track flight delays to those that help me dodge traffic backups. I talk, yet again, about buying pay-as-you-go SIMs while traveling, but the need to do that may be ending. And I\'ve reshuffled my carry-on luggage as the airlines have changed their rules. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_126.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/294360507\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n<!--more-->\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #126:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, hoping that everyone had a Merry Christmas -- or Happy Christmas if you’re on the other side of the Atlantic -- Happy Hanukkah, and a Happy New Year. I’m personally in trying a combo Dry-ish and Sugar-Free January in an attempt to drop 10 lbs of holiday weight that managed to sneak on-board -- the downside, I guess, from staying off the road for the back half of December.</li>\r\n 	<li>I eased back into travel mode with my usual Charlottesville trip the first workday of the New Year. I didn’t mind it too much since Charlottesville was about 20 degrees warmer than Chicago. It was nice to walk outside with just a scarf and a tweed jacket.</li>\r\n 	<li>Between <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/11/22/podcast-125-uber-driver-stories-overseas-for-the-election/\">the last episode</a> and my Christmas travel break, I did almost as much driving as I did flying. I drove down to Nashville the Friday after Thanksgiving to see my mother. That drive wasn’t so bad, The Sunday drive back to Chicago, though was a whole ‘nother matter. Then that next week, I had meetings in Richmond, VA, Baltimore, and Charlottesville. I didn’t even bother to look at flight schedules. I knew nonstop RIC-BWI and a BWI-CHO flights were non-existent and the 2-2.5 hour drive time was within my fly-or-drive tipping point. Neither drives were bad. The only hassle was the Hertz rental car. Since it was a one-way rental -- I was picking up in RIC and dropping off in CHO -- they gave me a beater car, an older Jeep Patriot that I think was the only car on their lot without Bluetooth, which made listening to podcasts or doing phone calls a bit less convenient.</li>\r\n 	<li>It did give me a chance to explore Baltimore and Charlottesville a bit more than usual, though. On my past visits, I wouldn’t bother with a rental; would just taxi in from the airport, and then walk or Uber to places. But with the beater Jeep, I could wander with a bit more range. In Baltimore, I drove around the Fells Point neighborhood, ending up in the <a href=\"http://www.thamesstreetoysterhouse.com/\">Thames St Oyster House</a>, then threading through some waterfront areas that I had been a bit hesitant to walk through. In Charlottesville, I wandered through the countryside until I found <a href=\"http://starrhill.com/\">Starr Hill Brewery</a>. Kinda empty on a rainy Weds night, which meant the bartender had time to take me through a flight of her favorite beers. Maybe I’ve found the source of a few of those holiday pounds.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/THE_CONCEPT_OF_ENERGY/55008\">ABANDONED BUTTERFLIES</a> by THE_CONCEPT_OF_ENERGY (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/\">Attribution</a> license. Ft: Doxent Zsigmond, Snowflake</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I’ve talked a couple of times in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/09/28/podcast-124-craft-beer-hunting-i-hate-rick-steves/\">past episodes</a> about the benefits of buying a pay-as-you-go SIM when traveling internationally -- $20 for a GB of data vs. AT&amp;T’s $60 for 300 MB is easy math. The only hassle is buying the SIM. First, you have to find the phone store, which can be a bit of an Easter Egg hunt. Back in November, our first day in Italy was in Pisa. We land, get the car, and head to the city center to find the phone store. However, the easiest one to get to was closed -- at 1 in the afternoon. Luckily, the next closest one was only a 10-minute walk and it was open. This time, I’d done my research before we left, purchased the SIMs online, and had printed out vouchers with bar codes, and instructions in English and Italian. I was ready for a quick and easy transaction. And yet again, I was wrong. The clerk knew nothing about the vouchers, didn’t know how to process them, and had to call around to other shops to figure it out. And then, each of the SIMs had to be registered and activated. Over an hour later, we’re sprinting out of the shop so we can make our time slot to get into the Leaning Tower -- which we’d also pre-paid. And this was a pretty typical experience. Which was why I was really excited a telecoms industry consultant told me that the virtual SIM, or the e-SIM was getting close to launch. Apple took the first crack at this back in 2014, but it’s been a slow ramp up. The iPhone 7 I picked up back in Sept still has the classic SIM. But this guy was telling me that going SIM-less is just about possible. He said it’ll be like signing into a WiFi hotspot. The next time I land in Italy and turn on my phone, I’ll be presented with a sign-in screen where I’ll be able to select my carrier and plan, and charge it to my credit card. Now given how wonky some WiFi gateways are, I’m not sure that this is the best comparison to sell me on the service, but if it saves me a couple of hours of frustration when I’m at my most jet lagged, I’ll figure it out.</li>\r\n 	<li>My age odometer clicked over again last month -- which I guess is a good thing, because if it didn’t click over, I be… dead. So, unless I find that Dorian Grey portrait at a garage sale, getting older is better than the alternative. I try not to let it bother me -- with varying levels of success. One thing, though, this does frustrate me is the need to bring my glasses into hotel bathrooms with me. Because it seems just as my reading vision is deteriorating, hotels are reducing the type size on their shampoo and conditioner bottles. As they try to go upscale with their toiletries, the bottle designers are taking the regular sized fancy labels into Photoshop and shrinking them down to fit on the front of a much smaller bottle, resulting is minuscule type that I might’ve been challenged to read in my 20’s let alone now. So my drill is to wear my glasses into the bathroom, figure out which bottle is shampoo, which is conditioner, and which is soap (or shower gel as they call it), and then line them up in order on the soap dish in the shower. Then take my glasses off, turn on the water, and hope that my lined up bottles don’t fall. The Hyatt Place that I stay at in Charlottesville is one of the few that doesn’t require this drill. They have a big “1” printed on the shampoo -- it runs about ¾’s the length of the bottle -- and a big “2” printed on the conditioner. And they’re in different colors. No need for glasses there. I love that hotel.</li>\r\n 	<li>It’s accepted wisdom that the most disgusting place on an airplane is the seat back pocket, and it just keeps getting worse. As airlines try to tighten up their ground turns -- how long a plane is on the ground before it takes off again -- the amount of time the cabin clean-up crew has to do its job continues to shrink. I was reminded of this by a Chicago Tribune article right before Thanksgiving when many airport workers -- cabin cleaners, baggage handlers, wheelchair attendants -- threatened to strike during that busiest travel week. The reporter interviewed a cabin cleaner who recently moved to Chicago from San Juan, PR. She said her crew of four are given 7 minutes to clean the cabin; no where near enough time to clean up all the crumbs, spilled drinks, and wrappers ground into the carpet, let alone time to clear the junk people leave in the seat back pocket. \"I don\'t know what is wrong with passengers nowadays,” she said. I won’t even pull out the safety card when I’m sitting in the exit row. A buddy told me a story about flying Tunisair from Brussels to Tunis many years ago. After the meal service, when people were done eating, they just shoved their trays into the seat back pocket. I’m not sure it’s all that different today.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://cyberset.cc/artists2.php?tr_release_id=104\"><em>Heaven</em></a> by <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=A951998E6011FA9B2D22387EB3CAC0B5EB05A36360E7FDA122C8D7A5C140F8DC\" rel=\"nofollow\">Electric Skychurch</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Beating The Traffic</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>As I mentioned earlier, I’ve done a bunch of travel by car lately. I talked in the last episode about driving through Tuscany. I was pleasantly surprised when Hertz upgraded us to an Alfa Romeo sports car, but when we had to drive through the rutted dirt back roads outside of Greve in Chianti, I was left wanting for something with a bit more ground clearance.</li>\r\n 	<li>The Thanksgiving drive down to Nashville was a lot smoother. They finally finished the years of construction expanding the I-80/94 constriction point around Lake Michigan in Northwest Indiana, and the traffic from there to I-65 south flowed smoothly. We made good enough time to make a couple of beer stops -- in Columbus, IN at a new Upland Brewing restaurant, and in downtown Louisville at Against The Grain Brewing.</li>\r\n 	<li>The drive back would be a whole other matter -- and I knew it and dreaded it. We drove down on that Friday, sailing through downtown Indy, Louisville, and Nashville because everyone was on vacation or shopping. Driving back Sunday though, we were right in the thick of the busiest travel day in the US. And while I always avoid flying on this day, I had managed to put myself on one of the US’s main north-south interstates. It would’ve only been worse if we’d been on the East Coast driving I-95 or the Jersey Turnpike. And it was the beat-down that I’d expected. The start of the drive out of Nashville was fine, and a bit pretty, going through rolling hills up to Louisville. The traffic was steady, but flowing. But we kept picking up more traffic as we headed north. We took a break in Indy this time, stopping off at Sun King Brewing right off the interstate, and then coffee-d up at a nearby Starbucks. North of Indy was when it really hit -- more and more cars and trucks heading up to Chicago, but still just 2 lanes. And so when the inevitable accident happened -- as it did many times that Sunday -- closing down one of those lanes, cutting the already clogged road by 50%, Waze became, if not a life saver, a time saver. I was running 3 nav systems, Waze, Google Maps, and the in-dash BMW nav. All had real-time traffic, but Waze seemed to be the quickest in sensing the need for a reroute. A couple of times that Sunday, it would direct us to take the next exit after traffic had stopped, and would vector us around the bottleneck and back onto the interstate, saving us 15-20 minutes of crawling and at least 70 points of increased blood pressure. I did skip the recommended diversion through the south side of Chicago, though. Given the record number of shootings in Chicago, stop-and-go traffic didn’t seem quite the burden that it did in rural Indiana.</li>\r\n 	<li>The next week’s triangulation across Richmond, Baltimore, and Charlottesville found me on I-95 having to make 2 passes around Washington, DC on the Capital Beltway, always a brutal 8-lane chokepoint. Heading up from Richmond Tuesday night, Google Maps told me to take the clockwise/west route around DC while Waze told me to go east. Odd since Google owns both. A friend said that he researched this a bit and found some articles claiming that Waze’s algorithm weighs current information more than historical trends; Google Maps tips the scales the other way. I don’t know if this is true -- I haven’t been able to find anything that says this -- but I often see different rush hour recommendations. Since Waze served me well on Thanksgiving Sunday, I went east and took the counterclockwise path around. It was a rainy night, but traffic flowed better than I expected and I made it to Baltimore in time for an oyster dinner.</li>\r\n 	<li>In spite of juggling nav apps, I found that I was more productive driving from Richmond to Baltimore to Charlottesville than I would’ve flying. You’d think it would be the other way around, but lack of direct flights would’ve mean going up and down, connecting through Washington Dulles. And on those few minutes I might be able to work, full planes and tight seats make it seem almost anti-social to try to open a laptop. On my 3-hour drive from Baltimore to Charlottesville, though, I was able to hammer through 2 conference calls and an unhurried, wide-ranging conversation with my boss. He called me. I told him that I was having a nice drive through Virginia horse country. “Good,” he said, “I have you captive.”</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://www.podsafeaudio.com/jamroom/play.php?band_id=1258&amp;song_id=4378&amp;mode=song_hifi\"><em>Shadows</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.podsafeaudio.com/jamroom/bands/1258/\">Antardhyan</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Having to Think about Carry-on Luggage</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I don’t usually think a lot about packing or luggage. And sometimes I think that puts me in the minority of frequent travelers. I know guys who obsess over their Tumi bags and specific packing systems. I used a grey Samsonite roller until the New Orleans sidewalks beat the wheels out to a 30 degree splay, and then I went back to my old black Victorinox with customs stickers from Thailand and Vietnam.</li>\r\n 	<li>However, a few things in 2016 got me thinking about carry-ons -- my carry-on experience with Wow Air in Iceland that I talked about in an earlier episode where I had to pull out half my clothes to meet the weight restrictions; my daughter’s light blue carry-on catching the eye of seemingly every gate agent she tried to pass, being forced to check it, and then having it lost 75% of her flights in 2016; and most recently, enduring long and often cold waits on a jet bridge waiting for my “valet checked” carry-on bag when flying regional jets</li>\r\n 	<li>Starting from last to first, this regional jet thing kills me. It used to be that gate checking for a commuter flight wasn’t a big thing -- the bag would be waiting for you on the jet bridge before you got off the plane. Now, as regional jets have gotten larger, they put the gate checked luggage in the same hold with the regular checked luggage, the only differentiating factor being the tag they put on at the gate. I’m typically waiting around 10 minutes with 40-50 other passengers, lined up on one side of an unheated jet bridge leaning over to see if my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/File_000.png\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1708\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/File_000-169x300.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"169\" height=\"300\" /></a>bag has come up yet. It’s gotten bad. On some of the larger Embraer jets flown by JetBlue, the overhead bins are large enough for regular bags, but on most of the regionals, you’re standing in that jet bridge line. After a while, this got real old, so I scrounged around through the old luggage in the attic to find a smaller duffel for 1-2 night trips that would fit in the overhead. I found a black nylon duffel from a 2007 National Retail Foundation tech conference that was an attendee giveaway. It had all the sponsors names stenciled across it -- Oracle, Infosys. I kinda felt like a Nascar racer. But it did the job. I could squish it into the small overheads of the regional jets and so walk past the line of folks waiting for the “valets” to bring their luggage. But it still looked cheesy. So when I was in Italy in November, I kept my eye out for a nice leather bag. One rainy day in Florence - not unique on that trip -- we dove into a covered outdoor market. Wandering through the stalls, I found a beautiful leather bag for 100 euros. My wife pointed to a bag the next size up -- “Don’t you want this bigger one? It’s only 20 euros more.” Nope, that would defeat the whole purpose. I posted a picture of that bag on Twitter. Every time I walk up the ORD jet bridge when returning home from Charlottesville, I love that bag even more.</li>\r\n 	<li>I remember when I first started traveling, you’d never see a hard-sided carry-on. Now it seems at least 30% of the carry-ons are hard-sided. I think a lot of it is fashion -- they come in much cooler designs and colors, but there is some functionality to them. If you’re flying an airline that’s aggressively using a baggage sizer, it’s much easier to stay legal with a hard-sided bag. You can’t overstuff them to bulging like you can a soft-sided bag, and the polycarbonate shell slips much easier in and out of the metal baggage sizer. This is why I suggested to my daughter that she start using a hard-sided bag. And in a bit more muted color -- something that wouldn’t grab the gate agent’s eye.</li>\r\n 	<li>But if you’re working against weight limits as well as dimensions, like I was with Wow Air, you want the lightest, most stripped down bag possible. I haven’t experienced a carry-on weight limit in the US. Some US carriers post a 35 or 40 lb limit -- even Spirit is at 40 lbs -- but I’ve never seen a gate agent weigh a carry-on. The international carriers are where this comes in. Wow Air’s carry-on size dimensions are about the same as US carriers, but their weight limit is much less -- 10 kg or 22 lbs -- which seems like the consensus number for non-US carriers. In this case, you don’t want the extra weight of the hard siding. You probably don’t even want very sturdy wheels; just the lightest covering around your clothes that you can get. I know guys who’ll brag that they can fit everything they own into 2 suitcases. These guys are obviously aren’t doing carry-on.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #126</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/\">ccMixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_126.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #126 — Beating the Traffic; Rethinking Carry-On Luggage','','inherit','closed','closed','','1697-revision-v1','','','2017-01-17 22:36:22','2017-01-18 03:36:22','',1697,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/01/17/1697-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1713,1,'2017-01-17 23:13:47','2017-01-18 04:13:47','[caption id=\"attachment_1703\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/File_000.jpeg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1703\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/File_000-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Car trunks need carry-on luggage limits too[/caption]\r\n\r\nSeems like I\'ve been doing as much driving as flying since the last episode, so I\'ve switched from apps that track flight delays to those that help me dodge traffic backups. I talk, yet again, about buying pay-as-you-go SIMs while traveling, but the need to do that may be ending. And I\'ve reshuffled my carry-on luggage as the airlines have changed their rules. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_126.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/294360507\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n<!--more-->\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #126:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, hoping that everyone had a Merry Christmas -- or Happy Christmas if you’re on the other side of the Atlantic -- Happy Hanukkah, and a Happy New Year. I’m personally in trying a combo Dry-ish and Sugar-Free January in an attempt to drop 10 lbs of holiday weight that managed to sneak on-board -- the downside, I guess, from staying off the road for the back half of December.</li>\r\n 	<li>I eased back into travel mode with my usual Charlottesville trip the first workday of the New Year. I didn’t mind it too much since Charlottesville was about 20 degrees warmer than Chicago. It was nice to walk outside with just a scarf and a tweed jacket.</li>\r\n 	<li>Between <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/11/22/podcast-125-uber-driver-stories-overseas-for-the-election/\">the last episode</a> and my Christmas travel break, I did almost as much driving as I did flying. I drove down to Nashville the Friday after Thanksgiving to see my mother. That drive wasn’t so bad, The Sunday drive back to Chicago, though was a whole ‘nother matter. Then that next week, I had meetings in Richmond, VA, Baltimore, and Charlottesville. I didn’t even bother to look at flight schedules. I knew nonstop RIC-BWI and a BWI-CHO flights were non-existent and the 2-2.5 hour drive time was within my fly-or-drive tipping point. Neither drives were bad. The only hassle was the Hertz rental car. Since it was a one-way rental -- I was picking up in RIC and dropping off in CHO -- they gave me a beater car, an older Jeep Patriot that I think was the only car on their lot without Bluetooth, which made listening to podcasts or doing phone calls a bit less convenient.</li>\r\n 	<li>It did give me a chance to explore Baltimore and Charlottesville a bit more than usual, though. On my past visits, I wouldn’t bother with a rental; would just taxi in from the airport, and then walk or Uber to places. But with the beater Jeep, I could wander with a bit more range. In Baltimore, I drove around the Fells Point neighborhood, ending up in the <a href=\"http://www.thamesstreetoysterhouse.com/\">Thames St Oyster House</a>, then threading through some waterfront areas that I had been a bit hesitant to walk through. In Charlottesville, I wandered through the countryside until I found <a href=\"http://starrhill.com/\">Starr Hill Brewery</a>. Kinda empty on a rainy Weds night, which meant the bartender had time to take me through a flight of her favorite beers. Maybe I’ve found the source of a few of those holiday pounds.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/THE_CONCEPT_OF_ENERGY/55008\">ABANDONED BUTTERFLIES</a> by THE_CONCEPT_OF_ENERGY (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/\">Attribution</a> license. Ft: Doxent Zsigmond, Snowflake</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I’ve talked a couple of times in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/09/28/podcast-124-craft-beer-hunting-i-hate-rick-steves/\">past episodes</a> about the benefits of buying a pay-as-you-go SIM when traveling internationally -- $20 for a GB of data vs. AT&amp;T’s $60 for 300 MB is easy math. The only hassle is buying the SIM. First, you have to find the phone store, which can be a bit of an Easter Egg hunt. Back in November, our first day in Italy was in Pisa. We land, get the car, and head to the city center to find the phone store. However, the easiest one to get to was closed -- at 1 in the afternoon. Luckily, the next closest one was only a 10-minute walk and it was open. This time, I’d done my research before we left, purchased the SIMs online, and had printed out vouchers with bar codes, and instructions in English and Italian. I was ready for a quick and easy transaction. And yet again, I was wrong. The clerk knew nothing about the vouchers, didn’t know how to process them, and had to call around to other shops to figure it out. And then, each of the SIMs had to be registered and activated. Over an hour later, we’re sprinting out of the shop so we can make our time slot to get into the Leaning Tower -- which we’d also pre-paid. And this was a pretty typical experience. Which was why I was really excited a telecoms industry consultant told me that the virtual SIM, or the e-SIM was getting close to launch. Apple took the first crack at this back in 2014, but it’s been a slow ramp up. The iPhone 7 I picked up back in Sept still has the classic SIM. But this guy was telling me that going SIM-less is just about possible. He said it’ll be like signing into a WiFi hotspot. The next time I land in Italy and turn on my phone, I’ll be presented with a sign-in screen where I’ll be able to select my carrier and plan, and charge it to my credit card. Now given how wonky some WiFi gateways are, I’m not sure that this is the best comparison to sell me on the service, but if it saves me a couple of hours of frustration when I’m at my most jet lagged, I’ll figure it out.</li>\r\n 	<li>My age odometer clicked over again last month -- which I guess is a good thing, because if it didn’t click over, I be… dead. So, unless I find that Dorian Grey portrait at a garage sale, getting older is better than the alternative. I try not to let it bother me -- with varying levels of success. One thing, though, this does frustrate me is the need to bring my glasses into hotel bathrooms with me. Because it seems just as my reading vision is deteriorating, hotels are reducing the type size on their shampoo and conditioner bottles. As they try to go upscale with their toiletries, the bottle designers are taking the regular sized fancy labels into Photoshop and shrinking them down to fit on the front of a much smaller bottle, resulting is minuscule type that I might’ve been challenged to read in my 20’s let alone now. So my drill is to wear my glasses into the bathroom, figure out which bottle is shampoo, which is conditioner, and which is soap (or shower gel as they call it), and then line them up in order on the soap dish in the shower. Then take my glasses off, turn on the water, and hope that my lined up bottles don’t fall. The Hyatt Place that I stay at in Charlottesville is one of the few that doesn’t require this drill. They have a big “1” printed on the shampoo -- it runs about ¾’s the length of the bottle -- and a big “2” printed on the conditioner. And they’re in different colors. No need for glasses there. I love that hotel.</li>\r\n 	<li>It’s accepted wisdom that the most disgusting place on an airplane is the seat back pocket, and it just keeps getting worse. As airlines try to tighten up their ground turns -- how long a plane is on the ground before it takes off again -- the amount of time the cabin clean-up crew has to do its job continues to shrink. I was reminded of this by a Chicago Tribune article right before Thanksgiving when many airport workers -- cabin cleaners, baggage handlers, wheelchair attendants -- threatened to strike during that busiest travel week. The reporter interviewed a cabin cleaner who recently moved to Chicago from San Juan, PR. She said her crew of four are given 7 minutes to clean the cabin; no where near enough time to clean up all the crumbs, spilled drinks, and wrappers ground into the carpet, let alone time to clear the junk people leave in the seat back pocket. \"I don\'t know what is wrong with passengers nowadays,” she said. I won’t even pull out the safety card when I’m sitting in the exit row. A buddy told me a story about flying Tunisair from Brussels to Tunis many years ago. After the meal service, when people were done eating, they just shoved their trays into the seat back pocket. I’m not sure it’s all that different today.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/snowflake/46164\">A Foolish Game</a> by snowflake (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/\">Attribution (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Admiral Bob</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Beating The Traffic</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>As I mentioned earlier, I’ve done a bunch of travel by car lately. I talked in the last episode about driving through Tuscany. I was pleasantly surprised when Hertz upgraded us to an Alfa Romeo sports car, but when we had to drive through the rutted dirt back roads outside of Greve in Chianti, I was left wanting for something with a bit more ground clearance.</li>\r\n 	<li>The Thanksgiving drive down to Nashville was a lot smoother. They finally finished the years of construction expanding the I-80/94 constriction point around Lake Michigan in Northwest Indiana, and the traffic from there to I-65 south flowed smoothly. We made good enough time to make a couple of beer stops -- in Columbus, IN at a new Upland Brewing restaurant, and in downtown Louisville at Against The Grain Brewing.</li>\r\n 	<li>The drive back would be a whole other matter -- and I knew it and dreaded it. We drove down on that Friday, sailing through downtown Indy, Louisville, and Nashville because everyone was on vacation or shopping. Driving back Sunday though, we were right in the thick of the busiest travel day in the US. And while I always avoid flying on this day, I had managed to put myself on one of the US’s main north-south interstates. It would’ve only been worse if we’d been on the East Coast driving I-95 or the Jersey Turnpike. And it was the beat-down that I’d expected. The start of the drive out of Nashville was fine, and a bit pretty, going through rolling hills up to Louisville. The traffic was steady, but flowing. But we kept picking up more traffic as we headed north. We took a break in Indy this time, stopping off at Sun King Brewing right off the interstate, and then coffee-d up at a nearby Starbucks. North of Indy was when it really hit -- more and more cars and trucks heading up to Chicago, but still just 2 lanes. And so when the inevitable accident happened -- as it did many times that Sunday -- closing down one of those lanes, cutting the already clogged road by 50%, Waze became, if not a life saver, a time saver. I was running 3 nav systems, Waze, Google Maps, and the in-dash BMW nav. All had real-time traffic, but Waze seemed to be the quickest in sensing the need for a reroute. A couple of times that Sunday, it would direct us to take the next exit after traffic had stopped, and would vector us around the bottleneck and back onto the interstate, saving us 15-20 minutes of crawling and at least 70 points of increased blood pressure. I did skip the recommended diversion through the south side of Chicago, though. Given the record number of shootings in Chicago, stop-and-go traffic didn’t seem quite the burden that it did in rural Indiana.</li>\r\n 	<li>The next week’s triangulation across Richmond, Baltimore, and Charlottesville found me on I-95 having to make 2 passes around Washington, DC on the Capital Beltway, always a brutal 8-lane chokepoint. Heading up from Richmond Tuesday night, Google Maps told me to take the clockwise/west route around DC while Waze told me to go east. Odd since Google owns both. A friend said that he researched this a bit and found some articles claiming that Waze’s algorithm weighs current information more than historical trends; Google Maps tips the scales the other way. I don’t know if this is true -- I haven’t been able to find anything that says this -- but I often see different rush hour recommendations. Since Waze served me well on Thanksgiving Sunday, I went east and took the counterclockwise path around. It was a rainy night, but traffic flowed better than I expected and I made it to Baltimore in time for an oyster dinner.</li>\r\n 	<li>In spite of juggling nav apps, I found that I was more productive driving from Richmond to Baltimore to Charlottesville than I would’ve flying. You’d think it would be the other way around, but lack of direct flights would’ve mean going up and down, connecting through Washington Dulles. And on those few minutes I might be able to work, full planes and tight seats make it seem almost anti-social to try to open a laptop. On my 3-hour drive from Baltimore to Charlottesville, though, I was able to hammer through 2 conference calls and an unhurried, wide-ranging conversation with my boss. He called me. I told him that I was having a nice drive through Virginia horse country. “Good,” he said, “I have you captive.”</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://www.podsafeaudio.com/jamroom/play.php?band_id=1258&amp;song_id=4378&amp;mode=song_hifi\"><em>Shadows</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.podsafeaudio.com/jamroom/bands/1258/\">Antardhyan</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Having to Think about Carry-on Luggage</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I don’t usually think a lot about packing or luggage. And sometimes I think that puts me in the minority of frequent travelers. I know guys who obsess over their Tumi bags and specific packing systems. I used a grey Samsonite roller until the New Orleans sidewalks beat the wheels out to a 30 degree splay, and then I went back to my old black Victorinox with customs stickers from Thailand and Vietnam.</li>\r\n 	<li>However, a few things in 2016 got me thinking about carry-ons -- my carry-on experience with Wow Air in Iceland that I talked about in an earlier episode where I had to pull out half my clothes to meet the weight restrictions; my daughter’s light blue carry-on catching the eye of seemingly every gate agent she tried to pass, being forced to check it, and then having it lost 75% of her flights in 2016; and most recently, enduring long and often cold waits on a jet bridge waiting for my “valet checked” carry-on bag when flying regional jets</li>\r\n 	<li>Starting from last to first, this regional jet thing kills me. It used to be that gate checking for a commuter flight wasn’t a big thing -- the bag would be waiting for you on the jet bridge before you got off the plane. Now, as regional jets have gotten larger, they put the gate checked luggage in the same hold with the regular checked luggage, the only differentiating factor being the tag they put on at the gate. I’m typically waiting around 10 minutes with 40-50 other passengers, lined up on one side of an unheated jet bridge leaning over to see if my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/File_000.png\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1708\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/File_000-169x300.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"169\" height=\"300\" /></a>bag has come up yet. It’s gotten bad. On some of the larger Embraer jets flown by JetBlue, the overhead bins are large enough for regular bags, but on most of the regionals, you’re standing in that jet bridge line. After a while, this got real old, so I scrounged around through the old luggage in the attic to find a smaller duffel for 1-2 night trips that would fit in the overhead. I found a black nylon duffel from a 2007 National Retail Foundation tech conference that was an attendee giveaway. It had all the sponsors names stenciled across it -- Oracle, Infosys. I kinda felt like a Nascar racer. But it did the job. I could squish it into the small overheads of the regional jets and so walk past the line of folks waiting for the “valets” to bring their luggage. But it still looked cheesy. So when I was in Italy in November, I kept my eye out for a nice leather bag. One rainy day in Florence - not unique on that trip -- we dove into a covered outdoor market. Wandering through the stalls, I found a beautiful leather bag for 100 euros. My wife pointed to a bag the next size up -- “Don’t you want this bigger one? It’s only 20 euros more.” Nope, that would defeat the whole purpose. I posted a picture of that bag on Twitter. Every time I walk up the ORD jet bridge when returning home from Charlottesville, I love that bag even more.</li>\r\n 	<li>I remember when I first started traveling, you’d never see a hard-sided carry-on. Now it seems at least 30% of the carry-ons are hard-sided. I think a lot of it is fashion -- they come in much cooler designs and colors, but there is some functionality to them. If you’re flying an airline that’s aggressively using a baggage sizer, it’s much easier to stay legal with a hard-sided bag. You can’t overstuff them to bulging like you can a soft-sided bag, and the polycarbonate shell slips much easier in and out of the metal baggage sizer. This is why I suggested to my daughter that she start using a hard-sided bag. And in a bit more muted color -- something that wouldn’t grab the gate agent’s eye.</li>\r\n 	<li>But if you’re working against weight limits as well as dimensions, like I was with Wow Air, you want the lightest, most stripped down bag possible. I haven’t experienced a carry-on weight limit in the US. Some US carriers post a 35 or 40 lb limit -- even Spirit is at 40 lbs -- but I’ve never seen a gate agent weigh a carry-on. The international carriers are where this comes in. Wow Air’s carry-on size dimensions are about the same as US carriers, but their weight limit is much less -- 10 kg or 22 lbs -- which seems like the consensus number for non-US carriers. In this case, you don’t want the extra weight of the hard siding. You probably don’t even want very sturdy wheels; just the lightest covering around your clothes that you can get. I know guys who’ll brag that they can fit everything they own into 2 suitcases. These guys are obviously aren’t doing carry-on.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #126</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/\">ccMixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_126.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #126 — Beating the Traffic; Rethinking Carry-On Luggage','','inherit','closed','closed','','1697-revision-v1','','','2017-01-17 23:13:47','2017-01-18 04:13:47','',1697,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/01/17/1697-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1714,1,'2017-01-17 23:36:46','2017-01-18 04:36:46','[caption id=\"attachment_1703\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/File_000.jpeg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1703\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/File_000-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Car trunks need carry-on luggage limits too[/caption]\r\n\r\nSeems like I\'ve been doing as much driving as flying since the last episode, so I\'ve switched from apps that track flight delays to those that help me dodge traffic backups. I talk, yet again, about buying pay-as-you-go SIMs while traveling, but the need to do that may be ending. And I\'ve reshuffled my carry-on luggage as the airlines have changed their rules. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_126.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/294360507\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n<!--more-->\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #126:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, hoping that everyone had a Merry Christmas -- or Happy Christmas if you’re on the other side of the Atlantic -- Happy Hanukkah, and a Happy New Year. I’m personally in trying a combo Dry-ish and Sugar-Free January in an attempt to drop 10 lbs of holiday weight that managed to sneak on-board -- the downside, I guess, from staying off the road for the back half of December.</li>\r\n 	<li>I eased back into travel mode with my usual Charlottesville trip the first workday of the New Year. I didn’t mind it too much since Charlottesville was about 20 degrees warmer than Chicago. It was nice to walk outside with just a scarf and a tweed jacket.</li>\r\n 	<li>Between <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/11/22/podcast-125-uber-driver-stories-overseas-for-the-election/\">the last episode</a> and my Christmas travel break, I did almost as much driving as I did flying. I drove down to Nashville the Friday after Thanksgiving to see my mother. That drive wasn’t so bad, The Sunday drive back to Chicago, though was a whole ‘nother matter. Then that next week, I had meetings in Richmond, VA, Baltimore, and Charlottesville. I didn’t even bother to look at flight schedules. I knew nonstop RIC-BWI and a BWI-CHO flights were non-existent and the 2-2.5 hour drive time was within my fly-or-drive tipping point. Neither drives were bad. The only hassle was the Hertz rental car. Since it was a one-way rental -- I was picking up in RIC and dropping off in CHO -- they gave me a beater car, an older Jeep Patriot that I think was the only car on their lot without Bluetooth, which made listening to podcasts or doing phone calls a bit less convenient.</li>\r\n 	<li>It did give me a chance to explore Baltimore and Charlottesville a bit more than usual, though. On my past visits, I wouldn’t bother with a rental; would just taxi in from the airport, and then walk or Uber to places. But with the beater Jeep, I could wander with a bit more range. In Baltimore, I drove around the Fells Point neighborhood, ending up in the <a href=\"http://www.thamesstreetoysterhouse.com/\">Thames St Oyster House</a>, then threading through some waterfront areas that I had been a bit hesitant to walk through. In Charlottesville, I wandered through the countryside until I found <a href=\"http://starrhill.com/\">Starr Hill Brewery</a>. Kinda empty on a rainy Weds night, which meant the bartender had time to take me through a flight of her favorite beers. Maybe I’ve found the source of a few of those holiday pounds.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/THE_CONCEPT_OF_ENERGY/55008\">ABANDONED BUTTERFLIES</a> by THE_CONCEPT_OF_ENERGY (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/\">Attribution</a> license. Ft: Doxent Zsigmond, Snowflake</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I’ve talked a couple of times in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/09/28/podcast-124-craft-beer-hunting-i-hate-rick-steves/\">past episodes</a> about the benefits of buying a pay-as-you-go SIM when traveling internationally -- $20 for a GB of data vs. AT&amp;T’s $60 for 300 MB is easy math. The only hassle is buying the SIM. First, you have to find the phone store, which can be a bit of an Easter Egg hunt. Back in November, our first day in Italy was in Pisa. We land, get the car, and head to the city center to find the phone store. However, the easiest one to get to was closed -- at 1 in the afternoon. Luckily, the next closest one was only a 10-minute walk and it was open. This time, I’d done my research before we left, purchased the SIMs online, and had printed out vouchers with bar codes, and instructions in English and Italian. I was ready for a quick and easy transaction. And yet again, I was wrong. The clerk knew nothing about the vouchers, didn’t know how to process them, and had to call around to other shops to figure it out. And then, each of the SIMs had to be registered and activated. Over an hour later, we’re sprinting out of the shop so we can make our time slot to get into the Leaning Tower -- which we’d also pre-paid. And this was a pretty typical experience. Which was why I was really excited a telecoms industry consultant told me that the virtual SIM, or the e-SIM was getting close to launch. Apple took the first crack at this back in 2014, but it’s been a slow ramp up. The iPhone 7 I picked up back in Sept still has the classic SIM. But this guy was telling me that going SIM-less is just about possible. He said it’ll be like signing into a WiFi hotspot. The next time I land in Italy and turn on my phone, I’ll be presented with a sign-in screen where I’ll be able to select my carrier and plan, and charge it to my credit card. Now given how wonky some WiFi gateways are, I’m not sure that this is the best comparison to sell me on the service, but if it saves me a couple of hours of frustration when I’m at my most jet lagged, I’ll figure it out.</li>\r\n 	<li>My age odometer clicked over again last month -- which I guess is a good thing, because if it didn’t click over, I be… dead. So, unless I find that Dorian Grey portrait at a garage sale, getting older is better than the alternative. I try not to let it bother me -- with varying levels of success. One thing, though, this does frustrate me is the need to bring my glasses into hotel bathrooms with me. Because it seems just as my reading vision is deteriorating, hotels are reducing the type size on their shampoo and conditioner bottles. As they try to go upscale with their toiletries, the bottle designers are taking the regular sized fancy labels into Photoshop and shrinking them down to fit on the front of a much smaller bottle, resulting is minuscule type that I might’ve been challenged to read in my 20’s let alone now. So my drill is to wear my glasses into the bathroom, figure out which bottle is shampoo, which is conditioner, and which is soap (or shower gel as they call it), and then line them up in order on the soap dish in the shower. Then take my glasses off, turn on the water, and hope that my lined up bottles don’t fall. The Hyatt Place that I stay at in Charlottesville is one of the few that doesn’t require this drill. They have a big “1” printed on the shampoo -- it runs about ¾’s the length of the bottle -- and a big “2” printed on the conditioner. And they’re in different colors. No need for glasses there. I love that hotel.</li>\r\n 	<li>It’s accepted wisdom that the most disgusting place on an airplane is the seat back pocket, and it just keeps getting worse. As airlines try to tighten up their ground turns -- how long a plane is on the ground before it takes off again -- the amount of time the cabin clean-up crew has to do its job continues to shrink. I was reminded of this by a Chicago Tribune article right before Thanksgiving when many airport workers -- cabin cleaners, baggage handlers, wheelchair attendants -- threatened to strike during that busiest travel week. The reporter interviewed a cabin cleaner who recently moved to Chicago from San Juan, PR. She said her crew of four are given 7 minutes to clean the cabin; no where near enough time to clean up all the crumbs, spilled drinks, and wrappers ground into the carpet, let alone time to clear the junk people leave in the seat back pocket. \"I don\'t know what is wrong with passengers nowadays,” she said. I won’t even pull out the safety card when I’m sitting in the exit row. A buddy told me a story about flying Tunisair from Brussels to Tunis many years ago. After the meal service, when people were done eating, they just shoved their trays into the seat back pocket. I’m not sure it’s all that different today.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/snowflake/46164\">A Foolish Game</a> by snowflake (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/\">Attribution (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Admiral Bob</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Beating The Traffic</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>As I mentioned earlier, I’ve done a bunch of travel by car lately. I talked in the last episode about driving through Tuscany. I was pleasantly surprised when Hertz upgraded us to an Alfa Romeo sports car, but when we had to drive through the rutted dirt back roads outside of Greve in Chianti, I was left wanting for something with a bit more ground clearance.</li>\r\n 	<li>The Thanksgiving drive down to Nashville was a lot smoother. They finally finished the years of construction expanding the I-80/94 constriction point around Lake Michigan in Northwest Indiana, and the traffic from there to I-65 south flowed smoothly. We made good enough time to make a couple of beer stops -- in Columbus, IN at a new Upland Brewing restaurant, and in downtown Louisville at Against The Grain Brewing.</li>\r\n 	<li>The drive back would be a whole other matter -- and I knew it and dreaded it. We drove down on that Friday, sailing through downtown Indy, Louisville, and Nashville because everyone was on vacation or shopping. Driving back Sunday though, we were right in the thick of the busiest travel day in the US. And while I always avoid flying on this day, I had managed to put myself on one of the US’s main north-south interstates. It would’ve only been worse if we’d been on the East Coast driving I-95 or the Jersey Turnpike. And it was the beat-down that I’d expected. The start of the drive out of Nashville was fine, and a bit pretty, going through rolling hills up to Louisville. The traffic was steady, but flowing. But we kept picking up more traffic as we headed north. We took a break in Indy this time, stopping off at Sun King Brewing right off the interstate, and then coffee-d up at a nearby Starbucks. North of Indy was when it really hit -- more and more cars and trucks heading up to Chicago, but still just 2 lanes. And so when the inevitable accident happened -- as it did many times that Sunday -- closing down one of those lanes, cutting the already clogged road by 50%, Waze became, if not a life saver, a time saver. I was running 3 nav systems, Waze, Google Maps, and the in-dash BMW nav. All had real-time traffic, but Waze seemed to be the quickest in sensing the need for a reroute. A couple of times that Sunday, it would direct us to take the next exit after traffic had stopped, and would vector us around the bottleneck and back onto the interstate, saving us 15-20 minutes of crawling and at least 70 points of increased blood pressure. I did skip the recommended diversion through the south side of Chicago, though. Given the record number of shootings in Chicago, stop-and-go traffic didn’t seem quite the burden that it did in rural Indiana.</li>\r\n 	<li>The next week’s triangulation across Richmond, Baltimore, and Charlottesville found me on I-95 having to make 2 passes around Washington, DC on the Capital Beltway, always a brutal 8-lane chokepoint. Heading up from Richmond Tuesday night, Google Maps told me to take the clockwise/west route around DC while Waze told me to go east. Odd since Google owns both. A friend said that he researched this a bit and found some articles claiming that Waze’s algorithm weighs current information more than historical trends; Google Maps tips the scales the other way. I don’t know if this is true -- I haven’t been able to find anything that says this -- but I often see different rush hour recommendations. Since Waze served me well on Thanksgiving Sunday, I went east and took the counterclockwise path around. It was a rainy night, but traffic flowed better than I expected and I made it to Baltimore in time for an oyster dinner.</li>\r\n 	<li>In spite of juggling nav apps, I found that I was more productive driving from Richmond to Baltimore to Charlottesville than I would’ve flying. You’d think it would be the other way around, but lack of direct flights would’ve mean going up and down, connecting through Washington Dulles. And on those few minutes I might be able to work, full planes and tight seats make it seem almost anti-social to try to open a laptop. On my 3-hour drive from Baltimore to Charlottesville, though, I was able to hammer through 2 conference calls and an unhurried, wide-ranging conversation with my boss. He called me. I told him that I was having a nice drive through Virginia horse country. “Good,” he said, “I have you captive.”</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/49674\">H2O</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Having to Think about Carry-on Luggage</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I don’t usually think a lot about packing or luggage. And sometimes I think that puts me in the minority of frequent travelers. I know guys who obsess over their Tumi bags and specific packing systems. I used a grey Samsonite roller until the New Orleans sidewalks beat the wheels out to a 30 degree splay, and then I went back to my old black Victorinox with customs stickers from Thailand and Vietnam.</li>\r\n 	<li>However, a few things in 2016 got me thinking about carry-ons -- my carry-on experience with Wow Air in Iceland that I talked about in an earlier episode where I had to pull out half my clothes to meet the weight restrictions; my daughter’s light blue carry-on catching the eye of seemingly every gate agent she tried to pass, being forced to check it, and then having it lost 75% of her flights in 2016; and most recently, enduring long and often cold waits on a jet bridge waiting for my “valet checked” carry-on bag when flying regional jets</li>\r\n 	<li>Starting from last to first, this regional jet thing kills me. It used to be that gate checking for a commuter flight wasn’t a big thing -- the bag would be waiting for you on the jet bridge before you got off the plane. Now, as regional jets have gotten larger, they put the gate checked luggage in the same hold with the regular checked luggage, the only differentiating factor being the tag they put on at the gate. I’m typically waiting around 10 minutes with 40-50 other passengers, lined up on one side of an unheated jet bridge leaning over to see if my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/File_000.png\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1708\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/File_000-169x300.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"169\" height=\"300\" /></a>bag has come up yet. It’s gotten bad. On some of the larger Embraer jets flown by JetBlue, the overhead bins are large enough for regular bags, but on most of the regionals, you’re standing in that jet bridge line. After a while, this got real old, so I scrounged around through the old luggage in the attic to find a smaller duffel for 1-2 night trips that would fit in the overhead. I found a black nylon duffel from a 2007 National Retail Foundation tech conference that was an attendee giveaway. It had all the sponsors names stenciled across it -- Oracle, Infosys. I kinda felt like a Nascar racer. But it did the job. I could squish it into the small overheads of the regional jets and so walk past the line of folks waiting for the “valets” to bring their luggage. But it still looked cheesy. So when I was in Italy in November, I kept my eye out for a nice leather bag. One rainy day in Florence - not unique on that trip -- we dove into a covered outdoor market. Wandering through the stalls, I found a beautiful leather bag for 100 euros. My wife pointed to a bag the next size up -- “Don’t you want this bigger one? It’s only 20 euros more.” Nope, that would defeat the whole purpose. I posted a picture of that bag on Twitter. Every time I walk up the ORD jet bridge when returning home from Charlottesville, I love that bag even more.</li>\r\n 	<li>I remember when I first started traveling, you’d never see a hard-sided carry-on. Now it seems at least 30% of the carry-ons are hard-sided. I think a lot of it is fashion -- they come in much cooler designs and colors, but there is some functionality to them. If you’re flying an airline that’s aggressively using a baggage sizer, it’s much easier to stay legal with a hard-sided bag. You can’t overstuff them to bulging like you can a soft-sided bag, and the polycarbonate shell slips much easier in and out of the metal baggage sizer. This is why I suggested to my daughter that she start using a hard-sided bag. And in a bit more muted color -- something that wouldn’t grab the gate agent’s eye.</li>\r\n 	<li>But if you’re working against weight limits as well as dimensions, like I was with Wow Air, you want the lightest, most stripped down bag possible. I haven’t experienced a carry-on weight limit in the US. Some US carriers post a 35 or 40 lb limit -- even Spirit is at 40 lbs -- but I’ve never seen a gate agent weigh a carry-on. The international carriers are where this comes in. Wow Air’s carry-on size dimensions are about the same as US carriers, but their weight limit is much less -- 10 kg or 22 lbs -- which seems like the consensus number for non-US carriers. In this case, you don’t want the extra weight of the hard siding. You probably don’t even want very sturdy wheels; just the lightest covering around your clothes that you can get. I know guys who’ll brag that they can fit everything they own into 2 suitcases. These guys are obviously aren’t doing carry-on.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #126</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/\">ccMixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_126.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #126 — Beating the Traffic; Rethinking Carry-On Luggage','','inherit','closed','closed','','1697-revision-v1','','','2017-01-17 23:36:46','2017-01-18 04:36:46','',1697,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/01/17/1697-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1715,1,'2017-01-18 00:25:49','2017-01-18 05:25:49','[caption id=\"attachment_1703\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/File_000.jpeg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1703\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/File_000-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Car trunks need carry-on luggage limits too[/caption]\r\n\r\nSeems like I\'ve been doing as much driving as flying since the last episode, so I\'ve switched from apps that track flight delays to those that help me dodge traffic backups. I talk, yet again, about buying pay-as-you-go SIMs while traveling, but the need to do that may be ending. And I\'ve reshuffled my carry-on luggage as the airlines have changed their rules. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_126.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/303265164\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n<!--more-->\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #126:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, hoping that everyone had a Merry Christmas -- or Happy Christmas if you’re on the other side of the Atlantic -- Happy Hanukkah, and a Happy New Year. I’m personally in trying a combo Dry-ish and Sugar-Free January in an attempt to drop 10 lbs of holiday weight that managed to sneak on-board -- the downside, I guess, from staying off the road for the back half of December.</li>\r\n 	<li>I eased back into travel mode with my usual Charlottesville trip the first workday of the New Year. I didn’t mind it too much since Charlottesville was about 20 degrees warmer than Chicago. It was nice to walk outside with just a scarf and a tweed jacket.</li>\r\n 	<li>Between <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/11/22/podcast-125-uber-driver-stories-overseas-for-the-election/\">the last episode</a> and my Christmas travel break, I did almost as much driving as I did flying. I drove down to Nashville the Friday after Thanksgiving to see my mother. That drive wasn’t so bad, The Sunday drive back to Chicago, though was a whole ‘nother matter. Then that next week, I had meetings in Richmond, VA, Baltimore, and Charlottesville. I didn’t even bother to look at flight schedules. I knew nonstop RIC-BWI and a BWI-CHO flights were non-existent and the 2-2.5 hour drive time was within my fly-or-drive tipping point. Neither drives were bad. The only hassle was the Hertz rental car. Since it was a one-way rental -- I was picking up in RIC and dropping off in CHO -- they gave me a beater car, an older Jeep Patriot that I think was the only car on their lot without Bluetooth, which made listening to podcasts or doing phone calls a bit less convenient.</li>\r\n 	<li>It did give me a chance to explore Baltimore and Charlottesville a bit more than usual, though. On my past visits, I wouldn’t bother with a rental; would just taxi in from the airport, and then walk or Uber to places. But with the beater Jeep, I could wander with a bit more range. In Baltimore, I drove around the Fells Point neighborhood, ending up in the <a href=\"http://www.thamesstreetoysterhouse.com/\">Thames St Oyster House</a>, then threading through some waterfront areas that I had been a bit hesitant to walk through. In Charlottesville, I wandered through the countryside until I found <a href=\"http://starrhill.com/\">Starr Hill Brewery</a>. Kinda empty on a rainy Weds night, which meant the bartender had time to take me through a flight of her favorite beers. Maybe I’ve found the source of a few of those holiday pounds.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/THE_CONCEPT_OF_ENERGY/55008\">ABANDONED BUTTERFLIES</a> by THE_CONCEPT_OF_ENERGY (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/\">Attribution</a> license. Ft: Doxent Zsigmond, Snowflake</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I’ve talked a couple of times in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/09/28/podcast-124-craft-beer-hunting-i-hate-rick-steves/\">past episodes</a> about the benefits of buying a pay-as-you-go SIM when traveling internationally -- $20 for a GB of data vs. AT&amp;T’s $60 for 300 MB is easy math. The only hassle is buying the SIM. First, you have to find the phone store, which can be a bit of an Easter Egg hunt. Back in November, our first day in Italy was in Pisa. We land, get the car, and head to the city center to find the phone store. However, the easiest one to get to was closed -- at 1 in the afternoon. Luckily, the next closest one was only a 10-minute walk and it was open. This time, I’d done my research before we left, purchased the SIMs online, and had printed out vouchers with bar codes, and instructions in English and Italian. I was ready for a quick and easy transaction. And yet again, I was wrong. The clerk knew nothing about the vouchers, didn’t know how to process them, and had to call around to other shops to figure it out. And then, each of the SIMs had to be registered and activated. Over an hour later, we’re sprinting out of the shop so we can make our time slot to get into the Leaning Tower -- which we’d also pre-paid. And this was a pretty typical experience. Which was why I was really excited a telecoms industry consultant told me that the virtual SIM, or the e-SIM was getting close to launch. Apple took the first crack at this back in 2014, but it’s been a slow ramp up. The iPhone 7 I picked up back in Sept still has the classic SIM. But this guy was telling me that going SIM-less is just about possible. He said it’ll be like signing into a WiFi hotspot. The next time I land in Italy and turn on my phone, I’ll be presented with a sign-in screen where I’ll be able to select my carrier and plan, and charge it to my credit card. Now given how wonky some WiFi gateways are, I’m not sure that this is the best comparison to sell me on the service, but if it saves me a couple of hours of frustration when I’m at my most jet lagged, I’ll figure it out.</li>\r\n 	<li>My age odometer clicked over again last month -- which I guess is a good thing, because if it didn’t click over, I be… dead. So, unless I find that Dorian Grey portrait at a garage sale, getting older is better than the alternative. I try not to let it bother me -- with varying levels of success. One thing, though, this does frustrate me is the need to bring my glasses into hotel bathrooms with me. Because it seems just as my reading vision is deteriorating, hotels are reducing the type size on their shampoo and conditioner bottles. As they try to go upscale with their toiletries, the bottle designers are taking the regular sized fancy labels into Photoshop and shrinking them down to fit on the front of a much smaller bottle, resulting is minuscule type that I might’ve been challenged to read in my 20’s let alone now. So my drill is to wear my glasses into the bathroom, figure out which bottle is shampoo, which is conditioner, and which is soap (or shower gel as they call it), and then line them up in order on the soap dish in the shower. Then take my glasses off, turn on the water, and hope that my lined up bottles don’t fall. The Hyatt Place that I stay at in Charlottesville is one of the few that doesn’t require this drill. They have a big “1” printed on the shampoo -- it runs about ¾’s the length of the bottle -- and a big “2” printed on the conditioner. And they’re in different colors. No need for glasses there. I love that hotel.</li>\r\n 	<li>It’s accepted wisdom that the most disgusting place on an airplane is the seat back pocket, and it just keeps getting worse. As airlines try to tighten up their ground turns -- how long a plane is on the ground before it takes off again -- the amount of time the cabin clean-up crew has to do its job continues to shrink. I was reminded of this by a Chicago Tribune article right before Thanksgiving when many airport workers -- cabin cleaners, baggage handlers, wheelchair attendants -- threatened to strike during that busiest travel week. The reporter interviewed a cabin cleaner who recently moved to Chicago from San Juan, PR. She said her crew of four are given 7 minutes to clean the cabin; no where near enough time to clean up all the crumbs, spilled drinks, and wrappers ground into the carpet, let alone time to clear the junk people leave in the seat back pocket. \"I don\'t know what is wrong with passengers nowadays,” she said. I won’t even pull out the safety card when I’m sitting in the exit row. A buddy told me a story about flying Tunisair from Brussels to Tunis many years ago. After the meal service, when people were done eating, they just shoved their trays into the seat back pocket. I’m not sure it’s all that different today.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/snowflake/46164\">A Foolish Game</a> by snowflake (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/\">Attribution (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Admiral Bob</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Beating The Traffic</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>As I mentioned earlier, I’ve done a bunch of travel by car lately. I talked in the last episode about driving through Tuscany. I was pleasantly surprised when Hertz upgraded us to an Alfa Romeo sports car, but when we had to drive through the rutted dirt back roads outside of Greve in Chianti, I was left wanting for something with a bit more ground clearance.</li>\r\n 	<li>The Thanksgiving drive down to Nashville was a lot smoother. They finally finished the years of construction expanding the I-80/94 constriction point around Lake Michigan in Northwest Indiana, and the traffic from there to I-65 south flowed smoothly. We made good enough time to make a couple of beer stops -- in Columbus, IN at a new Upland Brewing restaurant, and in downtown Louisville at Against The Grain Brewing.</li>\r\n 	<li>The drive back would be a whole other matter -- and I knew it and dreaded it. We drove down on that Friday, sailing through downtown Indy, Louisville, and Nashville because everyone was on vacation or shopping. Driving back Sunday though, we were right in the thick of the busiest travel day in the US. And while I always avoid flying on this day, I had managed to put myself on one of the US’s main north-south interstates. It would’ve only been worse if we’d been on the East Coast driving I-95 or the Jersey Turnpike. And it was the beat-down that I’d expected. The start of the drive out of Nashville was fine, and a bit pretty, going through rolling hills up to Louisville. The traffic was steady, but flowing. But we kept picking up more traffic as we headed north. We took a break in Indy this time, stopping off at Sun King Brewing right off the interstate, and then coffee-d up at a nearby Starbucks. North of Indy was when it really hit -- more and more cars and trucks heading up to Chicago, but still just 2 lanes. And so when the inevitable accident happened -- as it did many times that Sunday -- closing down one of those lanes, cutting the already clogged road by 50%, Waze became, if not a life saver, a time saver. I was running 3 nav systems, Waze, Google Maps, and the in-dash BMW nav. All had real-time traffic, but Waze seemed to be the quickest in sensing the need for a reroute. A couple of times that Sunday, it would direct us to take the next exit after traffic had stopped, and would vector us around the bottleneck and back onto the interstate, saving us 15-20 minutes of crawling and at least 70 points of increased blood pressure. I did skip the recommended diversion through the south side of Chicago, though. Given the record number of shootings in Chicago, stop-and-go traffic didn’t seem quite the burden that it did in rural Indiana.</li>\r\n 	<li>The next week’s triangulation across Richmond, Baltimore, and Charlottesville found me on I-95 having to make 2 passes around Washington, DC on the Capital Beltway, always a brutal 8-lane chokepoint. Heading up from Richmond Tuesday night, Google Maps told me to take the clockwise/west route around DC while Waze told me to go east. Odd since Google owns both. A friend said that he researched this a bit and found some articles claiming that Waze’s algorithm weighs current information more than historical trends; Google Maps tips the scales the other way. I don’t know if this is true -- I haven’t been able to find anything that says this -- but I often see different rush hour recommendations. Since Waze served me well on Thanksgiving Sunday, I went east and took the counterclockwise path around. It was a rainy night, but traffic flowed better than I expected and I made it to Baltimore in time for an oyster dinner.</li>\r\n 	<li>In spite of juggling nav apps, I found that I was more productive driving from Richmond to Baltimore to Charlottesville than I would’ve flying. You’d think it would be the other way around, but lack of direct flights would’ve mean going up and down, connecting through Washington Dulles. And on those few minutes I might be able to work, full planes and tight seats make it seem almost anti-social to try to open a laptop. On my 3-hour drive from Baltimore to Charlottesville, though, I was able to hammer through 2 conference calls and an unhurried, wide-ranging conversation with my boss. He called me. I told him that I was having a nice drive through Virginia horse country. “Good,” he said, “I have you captive.”</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/49674\">H2O</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Having to Think about Carry-on Luggage</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I don’t usually think a lot about packing or luggage. And sometimes I think that puts me in the minority of frequent travelers. I know guys who obsess over their Tumi bags and specific packing systems. I used a grey Samsonite roller until the New Orleans sidewalks beat the wheels out to a 30 degree splay, and then I went back to my old black Victorinox with customs stickers from Thailand and Vietnam.</li>\r\n 	<li>However, a few things in 2016 got me thinking about carry-ons -- my carry-on experience with Wow Air in Iceland that I talked about in an earlier episode where I had to pull out half my clothes to meet the weight restrictions; my daughter’s light blue carry-on catching the eye of seemingly every gate agent she tried to pass, being forced to check it, and then having it lost 75% of her flights in 2016; and most recently, enduring long and often cold waits on a jet bridge waiting for my “valet checked” carry-on bag when flying regional jets</li>\r\n 	<li>Starting from last to first, this regional jet thing kills me. It used to be that gate checking for a commuter flight wasn’t a big thing -- the bag would be waiting for you on the jet bridge before you got off the plane. Now, as regional jets have gotten larger, they put the gate checked luggage in the same hold with the regular checked luggage, the only differentiating factor being the tag they put on at the gate. I’m typically waiting around 10 minutes with 40-50 other passengers, lined up on one side of an unheated jet bridge leaning over to see if my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/File_000.png\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1708\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/File_000-169x300.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"169\" height=\"300\" /></a>bag has come up yet. It’s gotten bad. On some of the larger Embraer jets flown by JetBlue, the overhead bins are large enough for regular bags, but on most of the regionals, you’re standing in that jet bridge line. After a while, this got real old, so I scrounged around through the old luggage in the attic to find a smaller duffel for 1-2 night trips that would fit in the overhead. I found a black nylon duffel from a 2007 National Retail Foundation tech conference that was an attendee giveaway. It had all the sponsors names stenciled across it -- Oracle, Infosys. I kinda felt like a Nascar racer. But it did the job. I could squish it into the small overheads of the regional jets and so walk past the line of folks waiting for the “valets” to bring their luggage. But it still looked cheesy. So when I was in Italy in November, I kept my eye out for a nice leather bag. One rainy day in Florence - not unique on that trip -- we dove into a covered outdoor market. Wandering through the stalls, I found a beautiful leather bag for 100 euros. My wife pointed to a bag the next size up -- “Don’t you want this bigger one? It’s only 20 euros more.” Nope, that would defeat the whole purpose. I posted a picture of that bag on Twitter. Every time I walk up the ORD jet bridge when returning home from Charlottesville, I love that bag even more.</li>\r\n 	<li>I remember when I first started traveling, you’d never see a hard-sided carry-on. Now it seems at least 30% of the carry-ons are hard-sided. I think a lot of it is fashion -- they come in much cooler designs and colors, but there is some functionality to them. If you’re flying an airline that’s aggressively using a baggage sizer, it’s much easier to stay legal with a hard-sided bag. You can’t overstuff them to bulging like you can a soft-sided bag, and the polycarbonate shell slips much easier in and out of the metal baggage sizer. This is why I suggested to my daughter that she start using a hard-sided bag. And in a bit more muted color -- something that wouldn’t grab the gate agent’s eye.</li>\r\n 	<li>But if you’re working against weight limits as well as dimensions, like I was with Wow Air, you want the lightest, most stripped down bag possible. I haven’t experienced a carry-on weight limit in the US. Some US carriers post a 35 or 40 lb limit -- even Spirit is at 40 lbs -- but I’ve never seen a gate agent weigh a carry-on. The international carriers are where this comes in. Wow Air’s carry-on size dimensions are about the same as US carriers, but their weight limit is much less -- 10 kg or 22 lbs -- which seems like the consensus number for non-US carriers. In this case, you don’t want the extra weight of the hard siding. You probably don’t even want very sturdy wheels; just the lightest covering around your clothes that you can get. I know guys who’ll brag that they can fit everything they own into 2 suitcases. These guys are obviously aren’t doing carry-on.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #126</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/\">ccMixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_126.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #126 — Beating the Traffic; Rethinking Carry-On Luggage','','inherit','closed','closed','','1697-revision-v1','','','2017-01-18 00:25:49','2017-01-18 05:25:49','',1697,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/01/18/1697-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1716,1,'2017-01-18 00:27:30','2017-01-18 05:27:30','[caption id=\"attachment_1603\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/IMG_0266-01.jpeg\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-1603\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1603\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/IMG_0266-01-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"Just a Few Guidebooks....\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Just a Few Guidebooks....[/caption]\r\n\r\nWhere do guidebooks fit in the world of apps, review websites, social media, and podcasts? Planning for a trip to Iceland got me thinking about how to make sense of the explosion of travel tips. And then, after giving my thoughts about my new <a href=\"http://bluesmart.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Bluesmart </a>\"smart connected suitcase\", I talk about how idiosyncratic frequent travelers are about packing strategies and their choice of suitcases. There\'s also follow-up about foreign exchange apps, and listener comments about digital travel security and Spirit Airlines\' growth. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_120.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_120.mp3\"]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #120:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, after a much longer-than-intended break. Looking back at the Google Docs revision history for this episode, I started it on Feb 2, so I had the best of intentions. But I’ve been traveling almost non-stop since then. At which point you might reasonably say “But you have all that time in airports and hotels to write” -- which should be the case, but I find that I have to remove all possible distractions before I can write. Hence my lack of a journalism career.</li>\r\n	<li>So instead, I keep jotting down ideas in Evernote, feeling like I’m making progress, but not ever buckling down to actually write an episode. Until last Weds, when Dan Gradwohl sent me an e-mail with the subject line “Mark, where’s the next TravelCommons?”, asking in a very nice way -- when are you getting off your duff? I snarled back at Dan a bit -- more at frustration with myself than anything he wrote. But it got the intended result. So, I dedicate this episode to Dan.</li>\r\n	<li>The travel that got in the way wasn’t anything exotic -- just the usual bouncing around -- New Orleans, Vegas, Atlanta, Boston, New Jersey. But it was the tail end of 7 weeks of straight travel -- which is right about the time I hit my fun quotient. My patience dives and my bitch tweeting climbs. Of course, the fact that my American Airlines flights were hitting a 50% on-time rate didn’t help. I think I finally tipped over when I found my EWR-ORD flight was an ancient AA MD-80. Trying to wedge my bag long ways into the short overhead bin on the AB side was a complete throwback to when I first started traveling for business -- in 1985, on American Airlines, out of DFW, on MD-80s. 30 years later, I find myself on the same plane -- with less legroom and no peanuts.</li>\r\n	<li>I am gearing up for some fun travel in March, though. Trying out Iceland Air’s new Chicago-to-Reykjavik service with my son, and then trying out Iceland’s budget carrier Wow Air to meet up with my wife and daughter in Spain. I’m hoping it all works fine, but I’m preparing myself to having to call a couple of audibles.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/seldon-circles/\"><em>Making Circles</em></a> by the Seldon Plan</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Peter Zurich sent a great note, adding onto the digital security topic in<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/12/20/podcast-119-digital-security-on-the-road-us-airports-getting-better/\" target=\"_blank\"> the last episode</a>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>“Your suggestion to switch to cellular network as opposed to airport wifi is okay but it is becoming easy to obtain technology to set up a rogue cell site that will silently capture traffic -- your data will be caught and you will be none the wiser.</li>\r\n	<li>“Thus, in my opinion, it is still very important to only use HTPS encrypted web sites and I would still add on the VPN if you have one available. Bottom line when using any website where you need your password to access sensitive information, make sure the computer is trusted (no public access/borrowed/loaner computers) and make sure the website is HTTPS. If using Outlook or other applications than the web browser you should be on your company\'s VPN.</li>\r\n	<li>“Second thing, people should be aware that tearing a 2-D barcode in half doesn\'t necessarily render it undecipherable. 2D barcodes have a configurable level of redundancy built-in so that even if part (or possibly most) of the barcode is missing/unreadable it can still be decoded. My personal policy is once we have confirmed our FF miles have posted, the BP\'s go in the shredder.”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>Peter, thanks for these. Last week’s <a href=\"http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/columnist/2016/02/24/got-hacked-my-mac-while-writing-story/80844720/\" target=\"_blank\">story </a>about the USA Today columnist whose e-mail was hacked while he used Gogo’s WiFi service on an American Airlines flight demonstrates again the potential dangers of using public WiFi. It takes a bit of spelunking through the columnist’s Twitter feed to figure out how that happened -- he was using an Earthlink e-mail service that didn’t encrypt traffic back to the mail server. Technical listeners would be right in saying “Well, there you go. What did you expect doing plain-text comms over public WiFi?” Indeed, when we talked about this in the last episode, I specifically called out the need to encrypt e-mail protocols -- POP, IMAP, SMTP -- over SSL. But that’s not the default configuration for many e-mail clients, including Outlook and, the last time I checked, the iPhone mail client. You have to go poking around in the settings, changing ports. I know how to do it -- but it’s nothing my wife would. Building on Peter’s suggestion, probably the easiest thing to do is use a web e-mail client like GMail over https -- when the green lock shows in the browser address bar. Next easiest is to set up your e-mail client to encrypt its traffic. Most e-mail providers have instructions on their sites. Perhaps the fiddliest, but the most secure is to install and use a VPN. If your company device comes with one already installed, then it’s easy -- though remember VPN web traffic is usually tracked just like it is in your office. If it’s your own device, then you’re probably going to want to buy a service. They’re not overly expensive -- $3-8/month. I use <a href=\"https://www.expressvpn.com/\" target=\"_blank\">ExpressVPN</a>, which is on the pricer side, but their VPN client is easy to install and use. And it has the side benefit of letting me watch NCAA March Madness video streams when I’m overseas. In March, I’ll be trying out a hardware-based VPN solution -- <a href=\"http://www.homingsystems.com/alwayshome-duo\" target=\"_blank\">AlwaysHome</a>, which sets up a VPN with matching USB dongles. Could be an easier solution. I’ll report back in the next episode.</li>\r\n	<li>Dan Gradwohl, before he poked me into action, had a “Hmm…” reaction to a comment in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/12/20/podcast-119-digital-security-on-the-road-us-airports-getting-better/\" target=\"_blank\">the last episode</a> about Spirit Airlines passing Delta as the 3rd largest at Chicago O’Hare. Looking at January schedules, he found Spirit had 29 daily departures to Delta’s 52. Would seem like Delta is still larger. However, the Crain’s Chicago article said Spirit carried more passengers than Delta -- which could be since some of Delta’s 52 departures were co-branded smaller regional jets. This is not a new thing. For a long time, O’Hare continued to claim the title of World’s Busiest Airport based on <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_world%27s_busiest_airports_by_aircraft_movements#2014_statistics\" target=\"_blank\">number of takeoffs/landings</a> (which it reclaimed in 2014) after Atlanta Hartsfield passed it on total passengers handled. Using that <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_world%27s_busiest_airports_by_passenger_traffic#2015_statistics\" target=\"_blank\">stat</a>, ORD is the 4th largest after ATL, Beijing, and Dubai. All that being said, Spirit is ramping up hard in the Chicago market, hiring new flight attendants ahead of plane deliveries, and pushing the city for more gate space. And Delta and American are rolling out new Economy Basic fares to fight them. Might not be too long before Spirit passes Delta on both measures.</li>\r\n	<li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/10/11/podcast-117-random-thoughts-about-eggs-scotland-car-rentals/\" target=\"_blank\">Episode #117</a>, I talked -- raved, actually -- about a FinTech company called <a href=\"https://revolut.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Revolut</a>. It offered a convenient and low-cost way to exchange, transfer, and access money internationally. I started using it last September when my daughter started up at University of St Andrews. I used it to convert and push money to her UK bank account, and used the Revolut chip-&amp;-pin debit card to avoid the hassle of US chip-&amp;-signature credit cards. Last week, though, the low-cost component of their value prop disappeared -- at least for US customers, when they added a 3% fee when you added money/”topped up” your Revolut account with a US debit card. They said they were passing through the fees they were being charged, a claim I don’t doubt. However, it started me looking for cheaper foreign exchange options. Which lead me down quite the rabbit hole -- sorting through the differences in transaction costs and exchange rates quickly led to an Excel modelling session, which is just how I want to spend a Saturday morning. If you look at <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">my Twitter feed</a>, there’s a string of tweets walking through my analysis, but for my case, TransferWise, another UK FinTech startup, and Xoom, owned by PayPal, were much cheaper than Revolut after considering their new 3% fee. I expect that I’ll still use the Revolut card a bit when in Europe -- at self-service check-outs or gas pumps -- but nowhere near the volume I was using it before last week. But, I’m glad to have options and do a bit of math so avoid a $50 bank wire fee or Western Union’s 7% premium from market exchange rates.</li>\r\n	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/eliyahu-wind/\">Oh Yeah</a></em> by Eliyahu Sills</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Where Do Guidebooks Fit In?</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>As I mentioned in the opening, my son and I are hitting Iceland in a couple of weeks for a 4-day weekend. We’ve never been before, so I needed to figure out what to do and where to stay. Right about then, someone from what I used to know as Dorling Kindersley -- now shortened to DK -- pinged me about the February relaunch of <a href=\"http://www.dk.com/us/travel/\" target=\"_blank\">DK’s Eyewitness Travel Top 10 Guides</a> -- one of the first 10 is for Iceland. It started me thinking about where guidebooks fit in these days of in the world of apps (Yelp, Foursquare, Untappd), podcasts (Amateur Traveler, Indie Travel Podcast), websites (TripAdvisor), newspaper articles (NYTimes’ <a href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/22/travel/36-hours-in-reykjavik.html\" target=\"_blank\">36 Hours in Reykjavik</a>) and friends’ social media posts on Facebook and Instagram.</li>\r\n	<li>When I want to torture my kids, I do the “when I was young…” thing. But going back to our honeymoon 25 years ago (this November -- need to get on that planning!), I cashed in a slug of British Airways miles to fly us first class to Pisa for a touring holiday in Tuscany. The only plans I had made were to rent a car (a Fiat Panda) and book our first night’s room (via Telex) in Lucca. We ran the rest of the vacation off of a set of Michelin guides -- the red one to find hotels and restaurants and the green one to figure out what to see. Between those and reading “A Room With A View”, we were set. We exchanged American Express travelers checks at the bank for lira, took pictures on Kodak and Fuji film, navigated using a paper maps… Whoops, got off track a bit there. I think my kids are somewhere screaming “Stop!”</li>\r\n	<li>I think like everybody, I start with a Google search -- “What to do in Iceland in March”, limit the results to the last 2 years and start clicking. Lots of articles from UK papers (I think because of Wow Air, the Icelandic version of Spirit or EasyJet, flying into London Gatwick) which I clip over to Evernote using their nifty little Chrome extension. Then I narrow the search down to specific interests -- like “Iceland craft beer” and a few more article get sync’d to Evernote. I stack up a bunch of facts -- a sort of <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointillism\" target=\"_blank\">pointillist </a>view of what to do in Iceland.</li>\r\n	<li>Every survey about how people go about travel planning will tell you that personal recommendations are the far and away the most important source of travel planning information. Which makes sense -- you know the person, how their interests, ways of travel align with yours. We have good friends that we’ll take restaurant recommendations from, but not hotels. We share the same tastes in interesting food, but they like to stay in hotels with nice pools. We’re tend to stay a bit more “closer to ground” -- choosing vacation rentals over the Westin resort.</li>\r\n	<li>And once people find that you travel a lot and to different/interesting places, you get hit up -- a lot -- for recommendations. Friend and long-time T/C listener Allan Marko curates a set of notes for his favorite European cities, places like Paris, that he regularly e-mails out. After a couple of visits to Spain, I’ve taken it to the next level of geekdom -- embedding my recommendations on a Google Map page and sending out the URL. For this trip, a friend from work sent me the itinerary she and her family did last summer. Not sure that she and her husband would be search out craft beer bars with 2 young kids in tow, but I did take her recommendation for the Hotel Geysir at the top of the Golden Circle route, and hitting the Blue Lagoon on the way back to the airport.</li>\r\n	<li>I like The NY Times’ 36 Hours and United Airlines’ 3 Perfect Days series. They’re focused on the long weekend getaway -- if you have a limited amount of time, here’s what to do. These are the sorts of articles we used to rip out of the Sunday travel section of the local newspaper or a travel magazine and stash in a travel folder. The Internet has shifted that behavior just a bit -- we now search for them when we right when we need them. Perhaps more for travel planning than for inspiration, but they serve the same purpose as the green Michelin guide did for our honeymoon -- a curated list of things you ought to see.</li>\r\n	<li>The DK Top 10 Iceland guide seems to fit into this “hit the highlights” mode -- top 10 highlights by region and by thing (top 10 churches, waterfalls, volcanoes, bars, cheap restaurants…), 2-day and 7-day itineraries, which is nice because the 36 Hours in Reykjavik article I pulled up was from 2013, maybe on the ragged edge of up-to-dateness. And the DK guide has everything nicely packaged, which I remember from the Dorling Kindersley books of old -- all the lists in one place wrapped in a sturdy cover that has fold-out maps in the front (Iceland) and the back (downtown Reykjavik) -- which is handy if you didn’t plan ahead and cache Google Maps data before leaving the hotel wi-fi bubble.</li>\r\n	<li>There’s another kind of guidebook that I’ll use, though I couldn’t find one for Iceland. They’re less about lists and more about stories -- think Bill Bryson’s <em>Notes from a Small Island</em> about the UK, or more recently, <em><a href=\"http://roadsandkingdoms.com/store/rice-noodle-fish-book/\" target=\"_blank\">Rice Noodle Fish</a></em> an Anthony Bourdain book by Matt Goulding (whatever that means) about Japan. I read those more before I travel than packing them in my bag. They’re about context/texture -- kinda like what “Room With A View” was for us about Florence 25 years ago -- that prepare rather than guide you, and maybe give you a bit more appreciation when you’re running through those Top 10 Highlights lists.</li>\r\n	<li>Maybe it comes down to the kind of reader you are -- are you someone that likes things more tangible than electronic. Do you like to flip pages rather than screens? The Kindle cannibalized a good-sized chunk of the demand for physical books, but didn’t replace it. Just like overall book market, recent numbers show the demand for physical guide books has stabilized albeit at a lower level. I sorta split the difference. I like paging through my Evernote virtual travel folder when I’m back at the room, but like to have a physical map and list when I’m out walking during the day. Maybe that physicality keeps me more engaged with where I am. Or at least looking up and forward, which should help keep me avoid that new travelers’ epidemic -- Death by GPS.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music --<em> <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/liquid-seventythree/\" target=\"_blank\">Is That Called Love</a> </em></em>by Liquid Zen</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>I Hate Shopping for Suitcases</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>I’ve been traveling for a few months now with the <a href=\"http://bluesmart.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Bluesmart </a>suitcase. I’ve mentioned it in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/08/26/podcast-116-traveling-thru-japan-luggage-trends/\" target=\"_blank\">a past episode</a> when I pre-ordered it through their Indiegogo campaign. And now that they’re shipping, they’re making a lot of Top Traveler Gadget lists.</li>\r\n	<li>It claims to be the first piece of “smart” luggage to hit the market. It pairs with my iPhone through Bluetooth. It automatically locks when I step away from it and then unlocks itself when I return. It has a built-in battery to power itself and charge personal electronics through a couple of USB ports. It also periodically sends out its location when I can then check through the iPhone app. And it has a cool front light that glows blue when it’s paired with my phone.</li>\r\n	<li>Aside from all the electronics, it’s a hard-shell wheelie bag with nice-sized wheels that roll easily -- sometimes too easily. It fits perfectly into American’s and United’s luggage sizers -- at least the ones in Boston Logan airport. (Some blogger who reviewed the bag raised a bit of a ruckus saying that the bag dimensions on the website were too big for carry-on. I guess he doesn’t travel enough to go an airport and check it out himself). The iPhone app is getting better -- Bluesmart is doing a nice job of reving the app frequently to stomp bugs, though the location alerts -- “You’re leaving me behind” are still a bit wonky.</li>\r\n	<li>All in all, it’s a nice enough bag. I had been thinking about getting something a bit smaller for 1-2 night trips and this fits the bill. I’m kinda “meh” on all the electronics. The large battery is fine, but I already carry a recharger in my backpack that will top up my iPhone or tablet a couple of times -- good enough and more accessible in-flight. The location functionality seems to work only when I press the button to “wake up” the bag -- which means I’m right beside my bag and know its location. And since it’s the perfect carry-on size, it’s usually right above me in the plane cabin. So it’s a nice enough hard-shell wheelie bag with a couple of bells and whistles that don’t necessarily wow me.</li>\r\n	<li>Which shouldn’t be interpreted as a knock against Bluesmart. I’m sure there are a number of travelers who love every one of those bells and whistles. It’s not so much a criticism about Bluesmart as it is how personal and idiosyncratic frequent travelers are about suitcases. It’s gotta fit your packing strategies, which are also very idiosyncratic. Some people love compartments to help them structure their packing. Me? I’m all about the flexibility of a single open space -- I build my own structure with shoes and different kinds of clothes depending on the trip. And even though I see more and more hard-shell bags -- and now own one, I’m not completely sold on it. I still like the ability to bulge when I need to. And the two- vs. four-wheel thing. Pushing a 4-wheel through the airport seems easier on my wrist, but sometimes they roll too easily and won’t stay put. It’s the reason I’ve been walking around with a ripped backpack for 4 months -- I really hate shopping for travel bags. And am very happy that leather wallets last a really long time.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #120</li>\r\n	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/\">Podshow Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\r\n	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_120.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #120 — Where Do Guidebooks Fit In? I Hate Shopping for Suitcases','','inherit','closed','closed','','1598-revision-v1','','','2017-01-18 00:27:30','2017-01-18 05:27:30','',1598,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/01/18/1598-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1718,1,'2017-02-20 21:39:19','2017-02-21 02:39:19','<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/logo.png\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1733\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/logo-300x67.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"67\" /></a>Thanks to the folks at <a href=\"https://nordvpn.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">NordVPN</a>, we\'re giving away a 1-year VPN subscription so that one lucky TravelCommons listener can work/play safer on the Internet.\r\n\r\nWe\'re using Rafflecopter to run the giveaway:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>You only have do one of the types of entry listed below, not all of them.</li>\r\n 	<li>Each entry type (follows, blog posts, etc) counts as 1 additional “ticket” except for an iTunes review which counts for 2 \"tickets\"</li>\r\n 	<li>I verify every winner, so if you don’t follow instructions (e.g., when you post a comment you don’t answer the question, you didn\'t actually leave an iTunes review) you will be disqualified.</li>\r\n 	<li>Due to the volume of entries I get, I am unable to verify that entries worked or “went through” properly ahead of time.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\nAnd now for the Terms &amp; Conditions:\r\n\r\n<em>Terms &amp; Conditions: The prizes for this giveaway was provided free of charge by NordVPN. Giveaway ends March 2, 2017 at 11:59 PM Central Time. Winners will be selected at random by Rafflecopter.com and verified by TravelCommons. Winner will have 72 hours to respond before prize is forfeited and a new winner is selected. TravelCommons will not be responsible for a winner\'s inability to activate the prize. No purchase necessary to enter. </em>','[Finished] NordVPN 1-Year Subscription Giveaway','','private','closed','closed','','nordvpn-1-year-subscription-giveaway','','','2024-06-02 10:30:17','2024-06-02 15:30:17','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=1718',0,'post','',1),
(1719,1,'2017-02-19 23:23:56','2017-02-20 04:23:56','Thanks to the folks at <a href=\"https://nordvpn.com/\" target=\"_blank\">NordVPN</a>, we\'re giving away a 1-year VPN subscription so that one lucky TravelCommons listener can work/play safer on the Internet.\r\n\r\nWe\'re using Rafflecopter to run the giveaway:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>You only have do one of the types of entry listed below, not all of them.</li>\r\n 	<li>Each entry type (follows, blog posts, etc) counts as 1 additional “ticket” except for an iTunes review which counts for 2 \"tickets\"</li>\r\n 	<li>I verify every winner, so if you don’t follow instructions (e.g., when you post a comment you don’t answer the question, you didn\'t actually leave an iTunes review)</li>\r\n 	<li>Due to the volume of entries I get, I am unable to verify that entries worked or “went through” properly ahead of time.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\nAnd now for the Terms &amp; Conditions:\r\n\r\n<em>Terms &amp; Conditions: The prizes for this giveaway was provided free of charge by NordVPN. Giveaway ends March 2, 2017 at 11:59 PM Central Time. Winners will be selected at random by Rafflecopter.com and verified by TravelCommons. Winner will have 72 hours to respond before prize is forfeited and a new winner is selected. TravelCommons will not be responsible for a winner\'s inability to activate the prize. No purchase necessary to enter. </em>\r\n\r\n&lt;a class=\"rcptr\" href=\"http://www.rafflecopter.com/rafl/display/865292d01/\" rel=\"nofollow\" data-raflid=\"865292d01\" data-theme=\"classic\" data-template=\"\" id=\"rcwidget_pbj64e00\"&gt;a Rafflecopter giveaway&lt;/a&gt;\r\n&lt;script src=\"https://widget-prime.rafflecopter.com/launch.js\"&gt;&lt;/script&gt;','NordVPN 1-Year Subscription Giveaway','','inherit','closed','closed','','1718-revision-v1','','','2017-02-19 23:23:56','2017-02-20 04:23:56','',1718,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/02/19/1718-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1720,1,'2017-02-19 23:26:28','2017-02-20 04:26:28','Thanks to the folks at <a href=\"https://nordvpn.com/\" target=\"_blank\">NordVPN</a>, we\'re giving away a 1-year VPN subscription so that one lucky TravelCommons listener can work/play safer on the Internet.\r\n\r\nWe\'re using Rafflecopter to run the giveaway:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>You only have do one of the types of entry listed below, not all of them.</li>\r\n 	<li>Each entry type (follows, blog posts, etc) counts as 1 additional “ticket” except for an iTunes review which counts for 2 \"tickets\"</li>\r\n 	<li>I verify every winner, so if you don’t follow instructions (e.g., when you post a comment you don’t answer the question, you didn\'t actually leave an iTunes review)</li>\r\n 	<li>Due to the volume of entries I get, I am unable to verify that entries worked or “went through” properly ahead of time.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\nAnd now for the Terms &amp; Conditions:\r\n\r\n<em>Terms &amp; Conditions: The prizes for this giveaway was provided free of charge by NordVPN. Giveaway ends March 2, 2017 at 11:59 PM Central Time. Winners will be selected at random by Rafflecopter.com and verified by TravelCommons. Winner will have 72 hours to respond before prize is forfeited and a new winner is selected. TravelCommons will not be responsible for a winner\'s inability to activate the prize. No purchase necessary to enter. </em>\r\n\r\n<a id=\"rcwidget_pbj64e00\" class=\"rcptr\" href=\"http://www.rafflecopter.com/rafl/display/865292d01/\" rel=\"nofollow\" data-raflid=\"865292d01\" data-theme=\"classic\" data-template=\"\">a Rafflecopter giveaway</a>\r\n<script src=\"https://widget-prime.rafflecopter.com/launch.js\"></script>','NordVPN 1-Year Subscription Giveaway','','inherit','closed','closed','','1718-revision-v1','','','2017-02-19 23:26:28','2017-02-20 04:26:28','',1718,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/02/19/1718-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1721,1,'2017-02-19 23:29:14','2017-02-20 04:29:14','Thanks to the folks at <a href=\"https://nordvpn.com/\" target=\"_blank\">NordVPN</a>, we\'re giving away a 1-year VPN subscription so that one lucky TravelCommons listener can work/play safer on the Internet.\r\n\r\nWe\'re using Rafflecopter to run the giveaway:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>You only have do one of the types of entry listed below, not all of them.</li>\r\n 	<li>Each entry type (follows, blog posts, etc) counts as 1 additional “ticket” except for an iTunes review which counts for 2 \"tickets\"</li>\r\n 	<li>I verify every winner, so if you don’t follow instructions (e.g., when you post a comment you don’t answer the question, you didn\'t actually leave an iTunes review) you will be disqualified.</li>\r\n 	<li>Due to the volume of entries I get, I am unable to verify that entries worked or “went through” properly ahead of time.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\nAnd now for the Terms &amp; Conditions:\r\n\r\n<em>Terms &amp; Conditions: The prizes for this giveaway was provided free of charge by NordVPN. Giveaway ends March 2, 2017 at 11:59 PM Central Time. Winners will be selected at random by Rafflecopter.com and verified by TravelCommons. Winner will have 72 hours to respond before prize is forfeited and a new winner is selected. TravelCommons will not be responsible for a winner\'s inability to activate the prize. No purchase necessary to enter. </em>\r\n\r\n<a id=\"rcwidget_pbj64e00\" class=\"rcptr\" href=\"http://www.rafflecopter.com/rafl/display/865292d01/\" rel=\"nofollow\" data-raflid=\"865292d01\" data-theme=\"classic\" data-template=\"\">a Rafflecopter giveaway</a>\r\n<script src=\"https://widget-prime.rafflecopter.com/launch.js\"></script>','NordVPN 1-Year Subscription Giveaway','','inherit','closed','closed','','1718-revision-v1','','','2017-02-19 23:29:14','2017-02-20 04:29:14','',1718,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/02/19/1718-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1722,1,'2017-02-19 23:44:24','2017-02-20 04:44:24','','IMG_0215a','Last generation digital security','inherit','open','closed','','img_0215a','','','2017-02-20 09:47:02','2017-02-20 14:47:02','',1723,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/IMG_0215a.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(1723,1,'2017-02-20 21:16:48','2017-02-21 02:16:48','[caption id=\"attachment_1722\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/IMG_0215a.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1722\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/IMG_0215a-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Last generation digital security[/caption]\n\nIn this episode, I talk again about digital security on the road, especially the use of a VPN. I review three VPN products, including <a href=\"http://nordvpn.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">NordVPN</a> which is giving away a year\'s subscription to a TravelCommons listener. I dig into the process of generating the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/12/12/top-10-holiday-travel-tips-2/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Top 10 Holiday Travel Tips</a> listicle I do every couple of year, and follow up on stories from Uber and Lyft drivers. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_127.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #127:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, in the midst of my third straight week at home. It is yet another sign of the impending apocalypse. All just can’t be right with the world - the office manager is nervous that I’m in the office for days in a row, my friends are shocked that I’m available during the week for a beer, my wife is tired of cooking dinner for me, and the cat is visibly pissed (in his own kitty way) that I’m taking up space on the couch. But, I am getting current on my doctor and dentist appointments, and I was able to get a haircut in a timely manner. Though these may seem little things, they can be a pain to get done when you’re traveling every week, and weekend appointments are a scarce commodity. Convenient, if not a bit boring.</li>\n 	<li>It also means I’ve missed 1 Delta and 2 United system outages and the associated ground-stops and cancellations, as well as getting stranded in last weekend’s East Coast winter storm. Those of you who follow me on Twitter have got to be happy about the lull in bitch tweeting.</li>\n 	<li>And I’ve also been around to provide real-time advice and counsel to my wife as she’s been planning our family spring break trip -- this year we’re skipping the Iberian Peninsula and going to Paris. I’m not sure how much she really appreciates my immediate reactions, but…. The house is awash with guidebooks -- except, of course, for Rick Steves. I pulled out the 2016 review copy of <a href=\"https://www.dk.com/us/9781465440839-top-10-paris/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">DK’s Top 10 Paris</a>, the credenza looks like my wife cleared out the local library, and we have print outs of a bunch of web pages. I dunno,I guess I’m a visual and tactile person. When I’m trying to wrap my head around a bunch of disparate data sources, I still have to go physical -- print it out and spread it out. Or maybe this is just a fancy way to say I’m old.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Javolenus/41932\">Ianiscus</a> by Javolenus (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/\">Attribution (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Wired_Ant</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Just a heads up, I’ll be announcing a new giveaway later on in this episode. And since I can’t figure out how to create MP3 chapter marks in Adobe Audition, you’ll have listen all the way through.</li>\n 	<li>Rummaging through the mailbag…\n<ul>\n 	<li>Dan Gradwohl dropped me a line agreeing with my complaint in the last episode about the small print size on most hotel shampoo and conditioner bottles. And, like me, he like Hyatt Place’s solution -- print a big “1” on the shampoo, a big “2” on the conditioner, and a big “3” on the shower gel. No need then to wear your reading glasses in the shower then. Dan also said that he “really liked” the music in the last episode. I can’t take credit for that. I outsourced the music search to my daughter Claire who was home for Winter Break. Since she received what may be the first positive comment about the music in 12 years, I asked her to to help me with this episode too.</li>\n 	<li>Long-time listener Robert Fenerty hit the TravelCommons website to comment on my pay-as-you-go SIM travails -- “Not many people are courageous enough to admit what a time sink it can be to find, purchase and setup a local SIM card. Sometimes it’s easy, the many Heathrow SIM vending machines being a great example. And Austria is a breeze. But outside of western countries, I’ve had to hand over my passport, stand in long lines, and try to explain “no, I need the one with data” to clerks whose language I don’t speak. Once I found out after leaving the store that my SIM was not properly initialized. Please go back to square one. The Verizon Travelpass is a great alternative for those 2-3 day trips. It’s often less expensive than the local SIM and it’s about as painless to enable/disable as you can imagine. Please keep up the good work, the beer tips, and the warm sentiments from the road. Your podcast has become an old friend that I have over for dinner every once in awhile.”</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Robert, thanks for that post. What a nice way of putting it -- the podcast becoming an old friend. I haven’t heard it put that way before, but it’s a huge compliment.</li>\n 	<li>Looking at SIMs for our Paris trip next month, the new upstart network provider sells their SIMs through vending machines, so I think I’ll skip the Orange phone store and give the new guys a try. I’m not a Verizon phone customer, but many of my Verizon-using friend swear by Travelpass as being dead-simple. AT&amp;T finally matched that offer last month with their International Day Pass -- $10/day and it looks about as simple. An AT&amp;T-using friend who’ll be on an Asian cruise next month plans to use it. And that seems to be a perfect use case -- he’ll be in a different country every day.</li>\n 	<li>One of things we’ll be working on before the Paris trip is not to forget anything critical when we leave for the airport. Many years ago, we get out of the cab at ORD’s International Terminal for a family trip to London. I’m pulling the bags out of the trunk ...and there’s one missing. I send my family through to check-in and boarding while I hop back into the cab to run back home. I open the front door, and there’s the forgotten bag in the middle of the hallway. We only live a 25-min drive from ORD and luckily there was no traffic, and I had status on Virgin Atlantic at the time. I made it to the gate just before boarding was called. That memory seared in our brains, we never make that mistake again… until Sept when we were heading over to Scotland. We’re in the cab and my wife asks me “Do you have my passport?” Nope, thought you had it. At least we figured this out before we hit the airport. The driver makes an illegal U-turn across the tollway media and we sprint back home to find the passport sitting on my desk. It was only a 15-min backtrack this time, so we still got to ORD in time to get a sandwich at Tortas Frontera. But it was a wake-up call -- never be complacent about stupidity.</li>\n 	<li>We were in San Francisco a few weekends back. Always an interesting time, especially with 80,000 people marching through the center of town on Saturday. We stayed at the Westin St Francis on Union Square -- decided to go old-school for the weekend. It rained most of the weekend, which emptied out the cab rank outside the St Francis, which meant we did more ride-shares and less walking. I have both Uber and Lyft on my phone, so I’d pop them both open and compare wait times and pricing. Even with the rain, the wait times rarely topped 3 min -- which is almost instantaneous in the traffic around Union Square. I was amazed at the number of animated cars swarming the area. Continuing my research from a couple of episodes ago, I’d talk with each driver about how their gig was going. I was surprised at the overwhelming preference for Lyft over Uber. Lyft pays more than Uber, they said. Many said they only take Uber rides when they think they can hit Uber’s incentive bonuses. If not, they tend to Lyft. And they said the Lyft riders tended to be nicer, more considerate. Since I was using both apps, I didn’t quite know what to make of that. Our Sunday morning driver told us he drives solely for Lyft; he quit after Uber trialed driverless cars in San Francisco. He said it was just another proof point that Uber doesn’t care about its drivers. We ended up taking mostly Lyft that weekend.</li>\n 	<li>This echoed what I’d heard from an Uber and Lyft driver in Charlottesville, VA last month. This guy was a super driver -- he’d done 85,000 miles last year. He also preferred Lyft because they paid more, but said that he gets more rides from Uber. He lives in Charlottesville, but heads over to Richmond to drive when UVa is on break. He was planning to head up to DC for inauguration weekend, figuring the surge pricing would make it worth his while. I’ve never talked to anyone who is working the system as hard as this guy.</li>\n 	<li>Back home, telling our son Andrew about all this, he came down firmly on Uber’s side, because Uber can’t cancel a ride. He’s had too many Chicago Lyft drivers cancel on him. He deleted the<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/2017-02-20-08.37.43.png\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1729\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/2017-02-20-08.37.43-169x300.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"169\" height=\"300\" /></a> Lyft app off his phone and is exclusively Uber.</li>\n 	<li>Last month, I was back flying one of my usual routes from the ‘90’s -- ORD-DTW -- complete with the original aircraft -- an AA MD-80. That 2-3 cabin configuration and the what-now-seem-like half-height overhead bins. At least it was an original American MD-80, not one of TWA ones they held onto after that merger. The AA ones are actually not a bad plane if you’re toward the front, away from the engines in the back. They seem to have more rows of extra leg room Main Cabin Extra seats than the newer A319s and 320s. At some point during the flight, my row mate looks down at my phone and asks “How are you charging your phone? There aren’t any plugs here”. She was kinda right -- no regular two-prong AC plugs. But I knew from years of flying these planes (I first started flying American in 1985 -- when these MD-80s were in their prime), that down between the seats, I’d find an old cigarette lighter outlet. And I still carry a lighter power adapter for that 10% of the time Hertz sticks me with a beater rental that doesn’t have a USB plug -- or for times like this when I’m flying AA’s beater plane.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/48914\">In Peace (Somewhere Else Mix)</a> by cdk (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/\">Attribution (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Snowflake</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Critiquing my Top 10 Travel Tips</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Every couple of years, I bow to the search engine gods at Google and create a listicle -- an awful mashup word of list and article. They’re kinda click-baity. You see them on places like Mashable -- “Top 10 Ways to Hack Your Morning Routine” or “The 10 most cringeworthy advertising fails of 2015” (I didn’t make these up). But they exist because people search for them. So in December when my last listicle has rolled off the front page of TravelCommons, I create another one titled just like the last one -- “Top 10 Holiday Travel Tips”. And how do they score? When I searched just now for “Top 10 Holiday Travel Tips”, a Google+ posting for my 2013 edition made the first page of results -- albeit the last entry -- and last December’s, the most recent, made the top of the second page. Not too bad…</li>\n 	<li>When I write each new edition, I do try to think about what are today’s top 10 rather than just blindly copy-pasting the last post, although there is a good chunk of repetition -- “Fly Non-Stop” and “Skip the Tight Connection” are as valid today as they were 12 years ago when I started this podcast.\nThough they might also seem a bit obvious to even a slightly seasoned traveler. So I also have tried to weave in a few, if not Pro Tips, then at least a next level of insight. In 2013, I suggested buying status for the lead adult in the travel party. The rationale went like this -- for $20, you can take your whole family through the status security line and early boarding because I’ve never seen a security screener or gate agent split up a family.<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/2017-02-20-08.37.58.png\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1728\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/2017-02-20-08.37.58-169x300.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"169\" height=\"300\" /></a></li>\n 	<li>I’ve also consistently recommended that people use Twitter as an alternate way into customer service, “at addressing” an airline or hotel as a way to jump what might be a long queue in front of a gate agent or front-desk clerk. I don’t think a lot of folks realize the sophistication and focus that many companies put on monitoring social media. My tweet about that American MD-80 generated a quick reply from American -- “We\'re currently working on updating our fleet, Mark…” And while not exactly travel-related, AT&amp;T has now followed up with me twice over Twitter about a cellular service problem I was having last week. I gave this advice to a friend who called me from ORD on Christmas Day. Korean Air wouldn’t let him and his family board their flight to Hanoi because they didn’t have Vietnamese visas -- a new requirement that had just hit a couple of days earlier. They couldn’t find anyone to help them. Between the “at” Tweeting and sheer persistence, they finally found a way to get on the plane.</li>\n 	<li>I used to have “bring a portable battery pack” -- like a lipstick charger -- or a small power strip on my list because of the dearth of electrical outlets in airports. One listener recommended stalking cleaning crews to find hidden outlets. But now -- finally -- with long overdue gate area refreshes, airlines are adding accessible outlets -- either in new work areas or power “pylons” sponsored by Samsung or Verizon. So while I still carry a battery pack and often find it useful, it’s fallen out of the Top 10.</li>\n 	<li>Back in 2014, I did break it up a bit. Instead of a classic “Top 10” listicle, I offered Airport Etiquette tips -- things like “when traveling with your family, don’t stroll 4 abreast down the concourse” and “the airport Starbucks isn’t like your neighborhood one; keep your coffee order to 3 adjectives or less”. That article is nowhere to be found on the Google search page.</li>\n 	<li>What is the top travel pro tip that you’re handing out to your friends? Sending one in will be part of the giveaway I’ll announce in the next topic.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music --<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/35724\">Blue Like Venus</a> by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/\">Attribution (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Admiral Bob</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Reviewing VPNs</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/12/20/podcast-119-digital-security-on-the-road-us-airports-getting-better/\">episode #119</a>, I talked about digital security on the road, and the topic has turned into a persistent thread across episodes, which makes sense given the Chinese water torture-type steady drip, drip, drip of cyber breach announcements. Frequent travelers could be considered a high risk group because, being away from their homes and offices, heavily rely on public networks -- airports, hotels, Starbucks -- to work (and play) in today’s digitized -- what, economy, society, street corner?</li>\n 	<li>VPNs -- virtual private networks -- have two main use cases for the frequent traveler -- privacy on public networks and location shifting. VPNs accomplish these by altering the routing of the network traffic in and out of your PC, tablet or smartphone. What you’re putting out onto the Internet is encrypted so eavesdroppers -- like the guy wearing the hoodie in the dark corner of the Starbucks (to truck in stereotypes) running a packet sniffer -- can’t read what you’re browsing or e-mailing. And then the VPN routes your encrypted traffic to that it looks like you’re using the Internet from a different location -- what’s called the VPN “endpoint”</li>\n 	<li>So how much privacy do you really need, and is it worth the additional hassle of using a VPN? Like everything, it depends. Being a consultant, you’ll forgive me for giving into my reflex of distilling it down to a 2x2 matrix -- on what you’re doing, and how paranoid you are. In the low paranoid/high privacy need box I put things like on-line banking and filling out your Global Entry app. Lots of personal information there that you don’t want Mr Hoodie to hoover up and post on some dark web hacking site. In the low privacy need/high paranoid box, I’d put reading Mashable listicles or browsing porn site -- embarrassing if someone posted that info on your Facebook page, but they couldn’t drain your bank account.</li>\n 	<li>The location shifting use case -- I’m in Beijing but the Internet thinks I’m in Chicago -- only really comes into play for international travelers. Like when I’m in Madrid but wanting to stream the NCAA basketball tournament, or when my daughter in Scotland wants to watch “Friends” reruns (don’t ask me why) which is only on US Netflix. I also use VPNs whenever I’m in Beijing to hit Facebook and Twitter which are blocked by the “Great Firewall of China”.</li>\n 	<li>I looked at two highly rated software VPNs -- <a href=\"https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Private Internet Access</a> (PIA) and <a href=\"https://nordvpn.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">NordVPN</a> -- and a Kickstarter hardware-based VPN, <a href=\"http://www.homingsystems.com/alwayshome-duo\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">AlwaysHome</a>, that I reviewed last fall in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/09/28/podcast-124-craft-beer-hunting-i-hate-rick-steves/\">episode #124</a>.</li>\n 	<li>PIA and NordVPN are quick to set up -- go to their website, buy a subscription (promotions change all the time, but when I’m writing this, PIA has discounted their annual subscription to $40 while NordVPN’s is at $79), download, install and run their software (VPN client), pick a VPN endpoint (which country do you want the Internet to think you’re coming from), and off you go. And the next time you access the Internet, you need to remember to start the client and pick an endpoint, unless you set the client to start automatically each time you log in.</li>\n 	<li>AlwaysHome, the hardware VPN, takes a bit more planning. You need to buy a pair of USB dongles and a service subscription (right now $180 for the dongles and a year’s service), plug one into your home router, and then take the second with you in your laptop bag.</li>\n 	<li>I tested the software VPNs on three platforms -- a Windows 10 PC hardwired into a network, a Samsung tablet running Android 6.0.1 (Marshmallow) on WiFi, and an iPhone 7 running iOS 10.2 on WiFi and AT&amp;T LTE mobile data.</li>\n 	<li>I first looked at performance -- how much speed was I giving up for the additional encryption and routing that gives me privacy? The Windows PC had the lowest penalty -- both VPNs cut upload and download speeds by about 6%. They also the same on the iPhone on WiFi, though the download penalty increased to 11%. Don’t know if this is an iOS limitation or something else. On the Samsung Android tablet on WiFi, NordVPNs download was on par with Windows PC -- about 6% on downloads -- while PIA was 25% slower on downloads. This one has to be marked down to PIA’s Android client.</li>\n 	<li>The really interesting result was on the iPhone on AT&amp;T’s LTE service. The download penalty on LTE was around 83% for both NordVPN and PIA. Must have something to do with AT&amp;T’s LTE service. And while interesting, it probably has the least practical value. Other than triple-paranoid people, I’m not sure why someone would tack a VPN onto their cellular connection.</li>\n 	<li>Accessing US Netflix from abroad is kinda the acid test for location shifting. Netflix, prompted by their content suppliers, has been the most aggressive service in blocking VPN endpoints; blocking people from outside the US streaming content that Netflix has only licenses in the US. I asked my daughter Claire, who’s at University of St Andrews in the UK, to test each VPN with her Netflix “Friends” test. PIA failed; Netflix served up its “blocked” screen. NordVPN let her log into US Netflix, though she said the connection was slow; probably the result of the lousy BT service coming into her flat over a chip shop. AlwaysHome did the best -- no Netflix blocking because it looks like she’s logging in from our house, and the best connection over the BT service because the AlwaysHome hardware lets it do accelerate network traffic in a way that the software VPNs can’t.</li>\n 	<li>I also asked Claire for her thoughts on the NordVPN and PIA software clients. She liked the NordVPN client better -- more graphic, easier to understand. The PIA client is a bit more stripped down. But she also liked that, with the AlwaysHome VPN, she didn’t have to install any software -- just connect to its WiFi.</li>\n 	<li>Sorting it all out, it you want an easy VPN solution that allows you to use Netflix when you’re overseas, go with NordVPN. If you want the cheapest solution that’s a bit more stripped down and you’re not running Android, then go with PIA. If you want the best Netflix experience from, say, a vacation rental that doesn’t require you to navigate WiFi login pages and you can plan a couple of weeks ahead, try AlwaysHome.</li>\n 	<li><em>NordVPN provided me a free month of their VPN service for testing purposes. I purchased a PIA subscription with my own money. Homing Systems sent me a AlwaysHome Duo free of charge for me to review. I was not paid for this review. The opinions expressed in this episode are my own. </em></li>\n 	<li>Now, for the giveaway. NordVPN has given me a year’s subscription to give away to one lucky TravelCommons listener. Go to the TravelCommons website and check out the top post to enter the raffle. It’ll be open for 10 days from the posting of this episode -- which, if I have my calendar math right, is March 2. Come by the website and enter for a shot to be more cyber-secure for a year. And thanks to the folks at NordVPN for this giveaway.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #127</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/\">ccMixter.org</a></li>\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_127.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #127 — Critiquing My Top 10 Travel Tips; Reviewing VPNs','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-127-critiquing-my-top-10-travel-tips-reviewing-vpns','','','2021-09-29 08:18:07','2021-09-29 13:18:07','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=1723',0,'post','',0),
(1724,1,'2017-02-20 09:08:20','2017-02-20 14:08:20','Seems like I\'ve been doing as much driving as flying since the last episode, so I\'ve switched from apps that track flight delays to those that help me dodge traffic backups. I talk, yet again, about buying pay-as-you-go SIMs while traveling, but the need to do that may be ending. And I\'ve reshuffled my carry-on luggage as the airlines have changed their rules. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_126.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/303265164\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n<!--more-->\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #126:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, hoping that everyone had a Merry Christmas -- or Happy Christmas if you’re on the other side of the Atlantic -- Happy Hanukkah, and a Happy New Year. I’m personally in trying a combo Dry-ish and Sugar-Free January in an attempt to drop 10 lbs of holiday weight that managed to sneak on-board -- the downside, I guess, from staying off the road for the back half of December.</li>\r\n 	<li>I eased back into travel mode with my usual Charlottesville trip the first workday of the New Year. I didn’t mind it too much since Charlottesville was about 20 degrees warmer than Chicago. It was nice to walk outside with just a scarf and a tweed jacket.</li>\r\n 	<li>Between <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/11/22/podcast-125-uber-driver-stories-overseas-for-the-election/\">the last episode</a> and my Christmas travel break, I did almost as much driving as I did flying. I drove down to Nashville the Friday after Thanksgiving to see my mother. That drive wasn’t so bad, The Sunday drive back to Chicago, though was a whole ‘nother matter. Then that next week, I had meetings in Richmond, VA, Baltimore, and Charlottesville. I didn’t even bother to look at flight schedules. I knew nonstop RIC-BWI and a BWI-CHO flights were non-existent and the 2-2.5 hour drive time was within my fly-or-drive tipping point. Neither drives were bad. The only hassle was the Hertz rental car. Since it was a one-way rental -- I was picking up in RIC and dropping off in CHO -- they gave me a beater car, an older Jeep Patriot that I think was the only car on their lot without Bluetooth, which made listening to podcasts or doing phone calls a bit less convenient.</li>\r\n 	<li>It did give me a chance to explore Baltimore and Charlottesville a bit more than usual, though. On my past visits, I wouldn’t bother with a rental; would just taxi in from the airport, and then walk or Uber to places. But with the beater Jeep, I could wander with a bit more range. In Baltimore, I drove around the Fells Point neighborhood, ending up in the <a href=\"http://www.thamesstreetoysterhouse.com/\">Thames St Oyster House</a>, then threading through some waterfront areas that I had been a bit hesitant to walk through. In Charlottesville, I wandered through the countryside until I found <a href=\"http://starrhill.com/\">Starr Hill Brewery</a>. Kinda empty on a rainy Weds night, which meant the bartender had time to take me through a flight of her favorite beers. Maybe I’ve found the source of a few of those holiday pounds.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/THE_CONCEPT_OF_ENERGY/55008\">ABANDONED BUTTERFLIES</a> by THE_CONCEPT_OF_ENERGY (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/\">Attribution</a> license. Ft: Doxent Zsigmond, Snowflake</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I’ve talked a couple of times in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/09/28/podcast-124-craft-beer-hunting-i-hate-rick-steves/\">past episodes</a> about the benefits of buying a pay-as-you-go SIM when traveling internationally -- $20 for a GB of data vs. AT&amp;T’s $60 for 300 MB is easy math. The only hassle is buying the SIM. First, you have to find the phone store, which can be a bit of an Easter Egg hunt. Back in November, our first day in Italy was in Pisa. We land, get the car, and head to the city center to find the phone store. However, the easiest one to get to was closed -- at 1 in the afternoon. Luckily, the next closest one was only a 10-minute walk and it was open. This time, I’d done my research before we left, purchased the SIMs online, and had printed out vouchers with bar codes, and instructions in English and Italian. I was ready for a quick and easy transaction. And yet again, I was wrong. The clerk knew nothing about the vouchers, didn’t know how to process them, and had to call around to other shops to figure it out. And then, each of the SIMs had to be registered and activated. Over an hour later, we’re sprinting out of the shop so we can make our time slot to get into the Leaning Tower -- which we’d also pre-paid. And this was a pretty typical experience. Which was why I was really excited a telecoms industry consultant told me that the virtual SIM, or the e-SIM was getting close to launch. Apple took the first crack at this back in 2014, but it’s been a slow ramp up. The iPhone 7 I picked up back in Sept still has the classic SIM. But this guy was telling me that going SIM-less is just about possible. He said it’ll be like signing into a WiFi hotspot. The next time I land in Italy and turn on my phone, I’ll be presented with a sign-in screen where I’ll be able to select my carrier and plan, and charge it to my credit card. Now given how wonky some WiFi gateways are, I’m not sure that this is the best comparison to sell me on the service, but if it saves me a couple of hours of frustration when I’m at my most jet lagged, I’ll figure it out.</li>\r\n 	<li>My age odometer clicked over again last month -- which I guess is a good thing, because if it didn’t click over, I be… dead. So, unless I find that Dorian Grey portrait at a garage sale, getting older is better than the alternative. I try not to let it bother me -- with varying levels of success. One thing, though, this does frustrate me is the need to bring my glasses into hotel bathrooms with me. Because it seems just as my reading vision is deteriorating, hotels are reducing the type size on their shampoo and conditioner bottles. As they try to go upscale with their toiletries, the bottle designers are taking the regular sized fancy labels into Photoshop and shrinking them down to fit on the front of a much smaller bottle, resulting is minuscule type that I might’ve been challenged to read in my 20’s let alone now. So my drill is to wear my glasses into the bathroom, figure out which bottle is shampoo, which is conditioner, and which is soap (or shower gel as they call it), and then line them up in order on the soap dish in the shower. Then take my glasses off, turn on the water, and hope that my lined up bottles don’t fall. The Hyatt Place that I stay at in Charlottesville is one of the few that doesn’t require this drill. They have a big “1” printed on the shampoo -- it runs about ¾’s the length of the bottle -- and a big “2” printed on the conditioner. And they’re in different colors. No need for glasses there. I love that hotel.</li>\r\n 	<li>It’s accepted wisdom that the most disgusting place on an airplane is the seat back pocket, and it just keeps getting worse. As airlines try to tighten up their ground turns -- how long a plane is on the ground before it takes off again -- the amount of time the cabin clean-up crew has to do its job continues to shrink. I was reminded of this by a Chicago Tribune article right before Thanksgiving when many airport workers -- cabin cleaners, baggage handlers, wheelchair attendants -- threatened to strike during that busiest travel week. The reporter interviewed a cabin cleaner who recently moved to Chicago from San Juan, PR. She said her crew of four are given 7 minutes to clean the cabin; no where near enough time to clean up all the crumbs, spilled drinks, and wrappers ground into the carpet, let alone time to clear the junk people leave in the seat back pocket. \"I don\'t know what is wrong with passengers nowadays,” she said. I won’t even pull out the safety card when I’m sitting in the exit row. A buddy told me a story about flying Tunisair from Brussels to Tunis many years ago. After the meal service, when people were done eating, they just shoved their trays into the seat back pocket. I’m not sure it’s all that different today.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/snowflake/46164\">A Foolish Game</a> by snowflake (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/\">Attribution (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Admiral Bob</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Beating The Traffic</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>As I mentioned earlier, I’ve done a bunch of travel by car lately. I talked in the last episode about driving through Tuscany. I was pleasantly surprised when Hertz upgraded us to an Alfa Romeo sports car, but when we had to drive through the rutted dirt back roads outside of Greve in Chianti, I was left wanting for something with a bit more ground clearance.</li>\r\n 	<li>The Thanksgiving drive down to Nashville was a lot smoother. They finally finished the years of construction expanding the I-80/94 constriction point around Lake Michigan in Northwest Indiana, and the traffic from there to I-65 south flowed smoothly. We made good enough time to make a couple of beer stops -- in Columbus, IN at a new Upland Brewing restaurant, and in downtown Louisville at Against The Grain Brewing.</li>\r\n 	<li>The drive back would be a whole other matter -- and I knew it and dreaded it. We drove down on that Friday, sailing through downtown Indy, Louisville, and Nashville because everyone was on vacation or shopping. Driving back Sunday though, we were right in the thick of the busiest travel day in the US. And while I always avoid flying on this day, I had managed to put myself on one of the US’s main north-south interstates. It would’ve only been worse if we’d been on the East Coast driving I-95 or the Jersey Turnpike. And it was the beat-down that I’d expected. The start of the drive out of Nashville was fine, and a bit pretty, going through rolling hills up to Louisville. The traffic was steady, but flowing. But we kept picking up more traffic as we headed north. We took a break in Indy this time, stopping off at Sun King Brewing right off the interstate, and then coffee-d up at a nearby Starbucks. North of Indy was when it really hit -- more and more cars and trucks heading up to Chicago, but still just 2 lanes. And so when the inevitable accident happened -- as it did many times that Sunday -- closing down one of those lanes, cutting the already clogged road by 50%, Waze became, if not a life saver, a time saver. I was running 3 nav systems, Waze, Google Maps, and the in-dash BMW nav. All had real-time traffic, but Waze seemed to be the quickest in sensing the need for a reroute. A couple of times that Sunday, it would direct us to take the next exit after traffic had stopped, and would vector us around the bottleneck and back onto the interstate, saving us 15-20 minutes of crawling and at least 70 points of increased blood pressure. I did skip the recommended diversion through the south side of Chicago, though. Given the record number of shootings in Chicago, stop-and-go traffic didn’t seem quite the burden that it did in rural Indiana.</li>\r\n 	<li>The next week’s triangulation across Richmond, Baltimore, and Charlottesville found me on I-95 having to make 2 passes around Washington, DC on the Capital Beltway, always a brutal 8-lane chokepoint. Heading up from Richmond Tuesday night, Google Maps told me to take the clockwise/west route around DC while Waze told me to go east. Odd since Google owns both. A friend said that he researched this a bit and found some articles claiming that Waze’s algorithm weighs current information more than historical trends; Google Maps tips the scales the other way. I don’t know if this is true -- I haven’t been able to find anything that says this -- but I often see different rush hour recommendations. Since Waze served me well on Thanksgiving Sunday, I went east and took the counterclockwise path around. It was a rainy night, but traffic flowed better than I expected and I made it to Baltimore in time for an oyster dinner.</li>\r\n 	<li>In spite of juggling nav apps, I found that I was more productive driving from Richmond to Baltimore to Charlottesville than I would’ve flying. You’d think it would be the other way around, but lack of direct flights would’ve mean going up and down, connecting through Washington Dulles. And on those few minutes I might be able to work, full planes and tight seats make it seem almost anti-social to try to open a laptop. On my 3-hour drive from Baltimore to Charlottesville, though, I was able to hammer through 2 conference calls and an unhurried, wide-ranging conversation with my boss. He called me. I told him that I was having a nice drive through Virginia horse country. “Good,” he said, “I have you captive.”</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/49674\">H2O</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Having to Think about Carry-on Luggage</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I don’t usually think a lot about packing or luggage. And sometimes I think that puts me in the minority of frequent travelers. I know guys who obsess over their Tumi bags and specific packing systems. I used a grey Samsonite roller until the New Orleans sidewalks beat the wheels out to a 30 degree splay, and then I went back to my old black Victorinox with customs stickers from Thailand and Vietnam.</li>\r\n 	<li>However, a few things in 2016 got me thinking about carry-ons -- my carry-on experience with Wow Air in Iceland that I talked about in an earlier episode where I had to pull out half my clothes to meet the weight restrictions; my daughter’s light blue carry-on catching the eye of seemingly every gate agent she tried to pass, being forced to check it, and then having it lost 75% of her flights in 2016; and most recently, enduring long and often cold waits on a jet bridge waiting for my “valet checked” carry-on bag when flying regional jets</li>\r\n 	<li>Starting from last to first, this regional jet thing kills me. It used to be that gate checking for a commuter flight wasn’t a big thing -- the bag would be waiting for you on the jet bridge before you got off the plane. Now, as regional jets have gotten larger, they put the gate checked luggage in the same hold with the regular checked luggage, the only differentiating factor being the tag they put on at the gate. I’m typically waiting around 10 minutes with 40-50 other passengers, lined up on one side of an unheated jet bridge leaning over to see if my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/File_000.png\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1708\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/File_000-169x300.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"169\" height=\"300\" /></a>bag has come up yet. It’s gotten bad. On some of the larger Embraer jets flown by JetBlue, the overhead bins are large enough for regular bags, but on most of the regionals, you’re standing in that jet bridge line. After a while, this got real old, so I scrounged around through the old luggage in the attic to find a smaller duffel for 1-2 night trips that would fit in the overhead. I found a black nylon duffel from a 2007 National Retail Foundation tech conference that was an attendee giveaway. It had all the sponsors names stenciled across it -- Oracle, Infosys. I kinda felt like a Nascar racer. But it did the job. I could squish it into the small overheads of the regional jets and so walk past the line of folks waiting for the “valets” to bring their luggage. But it still looked cheesy. So when I was in Italy in November, I kept my eye out for a nice leather bag. One rainy day in Florence - not unique on that trip -- we dove into a covered outdoor market. Wandering through the stalls, I found a beautiful leather bag for 100 euros. My wife pointed to a bag the next size up -- “Don’t you want this bigger one? It’s only 20 euros more.” Nope, that would defeat the whole purpose. I posted a picture of that bag on Twitter. Every time I walk up the ORD jet bridge when returning home from Charlottesville, I love that bag even more.</li>\r\n 	<li>I remember when I first started traveling, you’d never see a hard-sided carry-on. Now it seems at least 30% of the carry-ons are hard-sided. I think a lot of it is fashion -- they come in much cooler designs and colors, but there is some functionality to them. If you’re flying an airline that’s aggressively using a baggage sizer, it’s much easier to stay legal with a hard-sided bag. You can’t overstuff them to bulging like you can a soft-sided bag, and the polycarbonate shell slips much easier in and out of the metal baggage sizer. This is why I suggested to my daughter that she start using a hard-sided bag. And in a bit more muted color -- something that wouldn’t grab the gate agent’s eye.</li>\r\n 	<li>But if you’re working against weight limits as well as dimensions, like I was with Wow Air, you want the lightest, most stripped down bag possible. I haven’t experienced a carry-on weight limit in the US. Some US carriers post a 35 or 40 lb limit -- even Spirit is at 40 lbs -- but I’ve never seen a gate agent weigh a carry-on. The international carriers are where this comes in. Wow Air’s carry-on size dimensions are about the same as US carriers, but their weight limit is much less -- 10 kg or 22 lbs -- which seems like the consensus number for non-US carriers. In this case, you don’t want the extra weight of the hard siding. You probably don’t even want very sturdy wheels; just the lightest covering around your clothes that you can get. I know guys who’ll brag that they can fit everything they own into 2 suitcases. These guys are obviously aren’t doing carry-on.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #126</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/\">ccMixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_126.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #127 — Critiquing Top 10 Travel Tips; Reviewing VPNs','','inherit','closed','closed','','1723-revision-v1','','','2017-02-20 09:08:20','2017-02-20 14:08:20','',1723,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/02/20/1723-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1725,1,'2017-02-20 09:09:59','2017-02-20 14:09:59','Seems like I\'ve been doing as much driving as flying since the last episode, so I\'ve switched from apps that track flight delays to those that help me dodge traffic backups. I talk, yet again, about buying pay-as-you-go SIMs while traveling, but the need to do that may be ending. And I\'ve reshuffled my carry-on luggage as the airlines have changed their rules. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_127.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/303265164\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n<!--more-->\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #127:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, in the midst of my third straight week at home. It is yet another sign of the impending apocalypse. All just can’t be right with the world - the office manager is nervous that I’m in the office for days in a row, my friends are shocked that I’m available during the week for a beer, my wife is tired of cooking dinner for me, and the cat is visibly pissed (in his own kitty way) that I’m taking up space on the couch. But, I am getting current on my doctor and dentist appointments, and I was able to get a haircut in a timely manner. Though these may seem little things, they can be a pain to get done when you’re traveling every week, and weekend appointments are a scarce commodity. Convenient, if not a bit boring.</li>\r\n	<li>It also means I’ve missed 1 Delta and 2 United system outages and the associated ground-stops and cancellations, as well as getting stranded in last weekend’s East Coast winter storm. Those of you who follow me on Twitter have got to be happy about the lull in bitch tweeting.</li>\r\n	<li>And I’ve also been around to provide real-time advice and counsel to my wife as she’s been planning our family spring break trip -- this year we’re skipping the Iberian Peninsula and going to Paris. I’m not sure how much she really appreciates my immediate reactions, but….  The house is awash with guidebooks -- except, of course, for Rick Steves. I pulled out the 2016 review copy of DK’s Top 10 Paris, the credenza looks like my wife cleared out the local library, and we have print outs of a bunch of web pages.  I dunno,I guess I’m a visual and tactile person. When I’m trying to wrap my head around a bunch of disparate data sources, I still have to go physical -- print it out and spread it out.  Or maybe this is just a fancy way to say I’m old.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/THE_CONCEPT_OF_ENERGY/55008\">ABANDONED BUTTERFLIES</a> by THE_CONCEPT_OF_ENERGY (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/\">Attribution</a> license. Ft: Doxent Zsigmond, Snowflake</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I’ve talked a couple of times in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/09/28/podcast-124-craft-beer-hunting-i-hate-rick-steves/\">past episodes</a> about the benefits of buying a pay-as-you-go SIM when traveling internationally -- $20 for a GB of data vs. AT&amp;T’s $60 for 300 MB is easy math. The only hassle is buying the SIM. First, you have to find the phone store, which can be a bit of an Easter Egg hunt. Back in November, our first day in Italy was in Pisa. We land, get the car, and head to the city center to find the phone store. However, the easiest one to get to was closed -- at 1 in the afternoon. Luckily, the next closest one was only a 10-minute walk and it was open. This time, I’d done my research before we left, purchased the SIMs online, and had printed out vouchers with bar codes, and instructions in English and Italian. I was ready for a quick and easy transaction. And yet again, I was wrong. The clerk knew nothing about the vouchers, didn’t know how to process them, and had to call around to other shops to figure it out. And then, each of the SIMs had to be registered and activated. Over an hour later, we’re sprinting out of the shop so we can make our time slot to get into the Leaning Tower -- which we’d also pre-paid. And this was a pretty typical experience. Which was why I was really excited a telecoms industry consultant told me that the virtual SIM, or the e-SIM was getting close to launch. Apple took the first crack at this back in 2014, but it’s been a slow ramp up. The iPhone 7 I picked up back in Sept still has the classic SIM. But this guy was telling me that going SIM-less is just about possible. He said it’ll be like signing into a WiFi hotspot. The next time I land in Italy and turn on my phone, I’ll be presented with a sign-in screen where I’ll be able to select my carrier and plan, and charge it to my credit card. Now given how wonky some WiFi gateways are, I’m not sure that this is the best comparison to sell me on the service, but if it saves me a couple of hours of frustration when I’m at my most jet lagged, I’ll figure it out.</li>\r\n 	<li>My age odometer clicked over again last month -- which I guess is a good thing, because if it didn’t click over, I be… dead. So, unless I find that Dorian Grey portrait at a garage sale, getting older is better than the alternative. I try not to let it bother me -- with varying levels of success. One thing, though, this does frustrate me is the need to bring my glasses into hotel bathrooms with me. Because it seems just as my reading vision is deteriorating, hotels are reducing the type size on their shampoo and conditioner bottles. As they try to go upscale with their toiletries, the bottle designers are taking the regular sized fancy labels into Photoshop and shrinking them down to fit on the front of a much smaller bottle, resulting is minuscule type that I might’ve been challenged to read in my 20’s let alone now. So my drill is to wear my glasses into the bathroom, figure out which bottle is shampoo, which is conditioner, and which is soap (or shower gel as they call it), and then line them up in order on the soap dish in the shower. Then take my glasses off, turn on the water, and hope that my lined up bottles don’t fall. The Hyatt Place that I stay at in Charlottesville is one of the few that doesn’t require this drill. They have a big “1” printed on the shampoo -- it runs about ¾’s the length of the bottle -- and a big “2” printed on the conditioner. And they’re in different colors. No need for glasses there. I love that hotel.</li>\r\n 	<li>It’s accepted wisdom that the most disgusting place on an airplane is the seat back pocket, and it just keeps getting worse. As airlines try to tighten up their ground turns -- how long a plane is on the ground before it takes off again -- the amount of time the cabin clean-up crew has to do its job continues to shrink. I was reminded of this by a Chicago Tribune article right before Thanksgiving when many airport workers -- cabin cleaners, baggage handlers, wheelchair attendants -- threatened to strike during that busiest travel week. The reporter interviewed a cabin cleaner who recently moved to Chicago from San Juan, PR. She said her crew of four are given 7 minutes to clean the cabin; no where near enough time to clean up all the crumbs, spilled drinks, and wrappers ground into the carpet, let alone time to clear the junk people leave in the seat back pocket. \"I don\'t know what is wrong with passengers nowadays,” she said. I won’t even pull out the safety card when I’m sitting in the exit row. A buddy told me a story about flying Tunisair from Brussels to Tunis many years ago. After the meal service, when people were done eating, they just shoved their trays into the seat back pocket. I’m not sure it’s all that different today.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/snowflake/46164\">A Foolish Game</a> by snowflake (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/\">Attribution (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Admiral Bob</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Beating The Traffic</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>As I mentioned earlier, I’ve done a bunch of travel by car lately. I talked in the last episode about driving through Tuscany. I was pleasantly surprised when Hertz upgraded us to an Alfa Romeo sports car, but when we had to drive through the rutted dirt back roads outside of Greve in Chianti, I was left wanting for something with a bit more ground clearance.</li>\r\n 	<li>The Thanksgiving drive down to Nashville was a lot smoother. They finally finished the years of construction expanding the I-80/94 constriction point around Lake Michigan in Northwest Indiana, and the traffic from there to I-65 south flowed smoothly. We made good enough time to make a couple of beer stops -- in Columbus, IN at a new Upland Brewing restaurant, and in downtown Louisville at Against The Grain Brewing.</li>\r\n 	<li>The drive back would be a whole other matter -- and I knew it and dreaded it. We drove down on that Friday, sailing through downtown Indy, Louisville, and Nashville because everyone was on vacation or shopping. Driving back Sunday though, we were right in the thick of the busiest travel day in the US. And while I always avoid flying on this day, I had managed to put myself on one of the US’s main north-south interstates. It would’ve only been worse if we’d been on the East Coast driving I-95 or the Jersey Turnpike. And it was the beat-down that I’d expected. The start of the drive out of Nashville was fine, and a bit pretty, going through rolling hills up to Louisville. The traffic was steady, but flowing. But we kept picking up more traffic as we headed north. We took a break in Indy this time, stopping off at Sun King Brewing right off the interstate, and then coffee-d up at a nearby Starbucks. North of Indy was when it really hit -- more and more cars and trucks heading up to Chicago, but still just 2 lanes. And so when the inevitable accident happened -- as it did many times that Sunday -- closing down one of those lanes, cutting the already clogged road by 50%, Waze became, if not a life saver, a time saver. I was running 3 nav systems, Waze, Google Maps, and the in-dash BMW nav. All had real-time traffic, but Waze seemed to be the quickest in sensing the need for a reroute. A couple of times that Sunday, it would direct us to take the next exit after traffic had stopped, and would vector us around the bottleneck and back onto the interstate, saving us 15-20 minutes of crawling and at least 70 points of increased blood pressure. I did skip the recommended diversion through the south side of Chicago, though. Given the record number of shootings in Chicago, stop-and-go traffic didn’t seem quite the burden that it did in rural Indiana.</li>\r\n 	<li>The next week’s triangulation across Richmond, Baltimore, and Charlottesville found me on I-95 having to make 2 passes around Washington, DC on the Capital Beltway, always a brutal 8-lane chokepoint. Heading up from Richmond Tuesday night, Google Maps told me to take the clockwise/west route around DC while Waze told me to go east. Odd since Google owns both. A friend said that he researched this a bit and found some articles claiming that Waze’s algorithm weighs current information more than historical trends; Google Maps tips the scales the other way. I don’t know if this is true -- I haven’t been able to find anything that says this -- but I often see different rush hour recommendations. Since Waze served me well on Thanksgiving Sunday, I went east and took the counterclockwise path around. It was a rainy night, but traffic flowed better than I expected and I made it to Baltimore in time for an oyster dinner.</li>\r\n 	<li>In spite of juggling nav apps, I found that I was more productive driving from Richmond to Baltimore to Charlottesville than I would’ve flying. You’d think it would be the other way around, but lack of direct flights would’ve mean going up and down, connecting through Washington Dulles. And on those few minutes I might be able to work, full planes and tight seats make it seem almost anti-social to try to open a laptop. On my 3-hour drive from Baltimore to Charlottesville, though, I was able to hammer through 2 conference calls and an unhurried, wide-ranging conversation with my boss. He called me. I told him that I was having a nice drive through Virginia horse country. “Good,” he said, “I have you captive.”</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/49674\">H2O</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Having to Think about Carry-on Luggage</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I don’t usually think a lot about packing or luggage. And sometimes I think that puts me in the minority of frequent travelers. I know guys who obsess over their Tumi bags and specific packing systems. I used a grey Samsonite roller until the New Orleans sidewalks beat the wheels out to a 30 degree splay, and then I went back to my old black Victorinox with customs stickers from Thailand and Vietnam.</li>\r\n 	<li>However, a few things in 2016 got me thinking about carry-ons -- my carry-on experience with Wow Air in Iceland that I talked about in an earlier episode where I had to pull out half my clothes to meet the weight restrictions; my daughter’s light blue carry-on catching the eye of seemingly every gate agent she tried to pass, being forced to check it, and then having it lost 75% of her flights in 2016; and most recently, enduring long and often cold waits on a jet bridge waiting for my “valet checked” carry-on bag when flying regional jets</li>\r\n 	<li>Starting from last to first, this regional jet thing kills me. It used to be that gate checking for a commuter flight wasn’t a big thing -- the bag would be waiting for you on the jet bridge before you got off the plane. Now, as regional jets have gotten larger, they put the gate checked luggage in the same hold with the regular checked luggage, the only differentiating factor being the tag they put on at the gate. I’m typically waiting around 10 minutes with 40-50 other passengers, lined up on one side of an unheated jet bridge leaning over to see if my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/File_000.png\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1708\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/File_000-169x300.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"169\" height=\"300\" /></a>bag has come up yet. It’s gotten bad. On some of the larger Embraer jets flown by JetBlue, the overhead bins are large enough for regular bags, but on most of the regionals, you’re standing in that jet bridge line. After a while, this got real old, so I scrounged around through the old luggage in the attic to find a smaller duffel for 1-2 night trips that would fit in the overhead. I found a black nylon duffel from a 2007 National Retail Foundation tech conference that was an attendee giveaway. It had all the sponsors names stenciled across it -- Oracle, Infosys. I kinda felt like a Nascar racer. But it did the job. I could squish it into the small overheads of the regional jets and so walk past the line of folks waiting for the “valets” to bring their luggage. But it still looked cheesy. So when I was in Italy in November, I kept my eye out for a nice leather bag. One rainy day in Florence - not unique on that trip -- we dove into a covered outdoor market. Wandering through the stalls, I found a beautiful leather bag for 100 euros. My wife pointed to a bag the next size up -- “Don’t you want this bigger one? It’s only 20 euros more.” Nope, that would defeat the whole purpose. I posted a picture of that bag on Twitter. Every time I walk up the ORD jet bridge when returning home from Charlottesville, I love that bag even more.</li>\r\n 	<li>I remember when I first started traveling, you’d never see a hard-sided carry-on. Now it seems at least 30% of the carry-ons are hard-sided. I think a lot of it is fashion -- they come in much cooler designs and colors, but there is some functionality to them. If you’re flying an airline that’s aggressively using a baggage sizer, it’s much easier to stay legal with a hard-sided bag. You can’t overstuff them to bulging like you can a soft-sided bag, and the polycarbonate shell slips much easier in and out of the metal baggage sizer. This is why I suggested to my daughter that she start using a hard-sided bag. And in a bit more muted color -- something that wouldn’t grab the gate agent’s eye.</li>\r\n 	<li>But if you’re working against weight limits as well as dimensions, like I was with Wow Air, you want the lightest, most stripped down bag possible. I haven’t experienced a carry-on weight limit in the US. Some US carriers post a 35 or 40 lb limit -- even Spirit is at 40 lbs -- but I’ve never seen a gate agent weigh a carry-on. The international carriers are where this comes in. Wow Air’s carry-on size dimensions are about the same as US carriers, but their weight limit is much less -- 10 kg or 22 lbs -- which seems like the consensus number for non-US carriers. In this case, you don’t want the extra weight of the hard siding. You probably don’t even want very sturdy wheels; just the lightest covering around your clothes that you can get. I know guys who’ll brag that they can fit everything they own into 2 suitcases. These guys are obviously aren’t doing carry-on.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #127</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/\">ccMixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_127.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #127 — Critiquing Top 10 Travel Tips; Reviewing VPNs','','inherit','closed','closed','','1723-revision-v1','','','2017-02-20 09:09:59','2017-02-20 14:09:59','',1723,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/02/20/1723-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1726,1,'2017-02-20 09:34:35','2017-02-20 14:34:35','Seems like I\'ve been doing as much driving as flying since the last episode, so I\'ve switched from apps that track flight delays to those that help me dodge traffic backups. I talk, yet again, about buying pay-as-you-go SIMs while traveling, but the need to do that may be ending. And I\'ve reshuffled my carry-on luggage as the airlines have changed their rules. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_127.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/303265164\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n<!--more-->\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #127:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, in the midst of my third straight week at home. It is yet another sign of the impending apocalypse. All just can’t be right with the world - the office manager is nervous that I’m in the office for days in a row, my friends are shocked that I’m available during the week for a beer, my wife is tired of cooking dinner for me, and the cat is visibly pissed (in his own kitty way) that I’m taking up space on the couch. But, I am getting current on my doctor and dentist appointments, and I was able to get a haircut in a timely manner. Though these may seem little things, they can be a pain to get done when you’re traveling every week, and weekend appointments are a scarce commodity. Convenient, if not a bit boring.</li>\r\n 	<li>It also means I’ve missed 1 Delta and 2 United system outages and the associated ground-stops and cancellations, as well as getting stranded in last weekend’s East Coast winter storm. Those of you who follow me on Twitter have got to be happy about the lull in bitch tweeting.</li>\r\n 	<li>And I’ve also been around to provide real-time advice and counsel to my wife as she’s been planning our family spring break trip -- this year we’re skipping the Iberian Peninsula and going to Paris. I’m not sure how much she really appreciates my immediate reactions, but…. The house is awash with guidebooks -- except, of course, for Rick Steves. I pulled out the 2016 review copy of DK’s Top 10 Paris, the credenza looks like my wife cleared out the local library, and we have print outs of a bunch of web pages. I dunno,I guess I’m a visual and tactile person. When I’m trying to wrap my head around a bunch of disparate data sources, I still have to go physical -- print it out and spread it out. Or maybe this is just a fancy way to say I’m old.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/THE_CONCEPT_OF_ENERGY/55008\">ABANDONED BUTTERFLIES</a> by THE_CONCEPT_OF_ENERGY (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/\">Attribution</a> license. Ft: Doxent Zsigmond, Snowflake</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Just a heads up, I’ll be announcing a new giveaway later on in this episode. And since I can’t figure out how to create MP3 chapter marks in Adobe Audition, you’ll have listen all the way through.</li>\r\n 	<li>Rummaging through the mailbag…\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Dan Gradwohl dropped me a line agreeing with my complaint in the last episode about the small print size on most hotel shampoo and conditioner bottles. And, like me, he like Hyatt Place’s solution -- print a big “1” on the shampoo, a big “2” on the conditioner, and a big “3” on the shower gel. No need then to wear your reading glasses in the shower then. Dan also said that he “really liked” the music in the last episode. I can’t take credit for that. I outsourced the music search to my daughter Claire who was home for Winter Break. Since she received what may be the first positive comment about the music in 12 years, I asked her to to help me with this episode too.</li>\r\n 	<li>Long-time listener Robert Fenerty hit the TravelCommons website to comment on my pay-as-you-go SIM travails -- “Not many people are courageous enough to admit what a time sink it can be to find, purchase and setup a local SIM card. Sometimes it’s easy, the many Heathrow SIM vending machines being a great example. And Austria is a breeze. But outside of western countries, I’ve had to hand over my passport, stand in long lines, and try to explain “no, I need the one with data” to clerks whose language I don’t speak. Once I found out after leaving the store that my SIM was not properly initialized. Please go back to square one. The Verizon Travelpass is a great alternative for those 2-3 day trips. It’s often less expensive than the local SIM and it’s about as painless to enable/disable as you can imagine. Please keep up the good work, the beer tips, and the warm sentiments from the road. Your podcast has become an old friend that I have over for dinner every once in awhile.”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Robert, thanks for that post. What a nice way of putting it -- the podcast becoming an old friend. I haven’t heard it put that way before, but it’s a huge compliment.</li>\r\n 	<li>Looking at SIMs for our Paris trip next month, the new upstart network provider sells their SIMs through vending machines, so I think I’ll skip the Orange phone store and give the new guys a try. I’m not a Verizon phone customer, but many of my Verizon-using friend swear by Travelpass as being dead-simple. AT&amp;T finally matched that offer last month with their International Day Pass -- $10/day and it looks about as simple. An AT&amp;T-using friend who’ll be on an Asian cruise next month plans to use it. And that seems to be a perfect use case -- he’ll be in a different country every day.</li>\r\n 	<li>One of things we’ll be working on before the Paris trip is not to forget anything critical when we leave for the airport. Many years ago, we get out of the cab at ORD’s International Terminal for a family trip to London. I’m pulling the bags out of the trunk ...and there’s one missing. I send my family through to check-in and boarding while I hop back into the cab to run back home. I open the front door, and there’s the forgotten bag in the middle of the hallway. We only live a 25-min drive from ORD and luckily there was no traffic, and I had status on Virgin Atlantic at the time. I made it to the gate just before boarding was called. That memory seared in our brains, we never make that mistake again… until Sept when we were heading over to Scotland. We’re in the cab and my wife asks me “Do you have my passport?” Nope, thought you had it. At least we figured this out before we hit the airport. The driver makes an illegal U-turn across the tollway media and we sprint back home to find the passport sitting on my desk. It was only a 15-min backtrack this time, so we still got to ORD in time to get a sandwich at Tortas Frontera. But it was a wake-up call -- never be complacent about stupidity.</li>\r\n 	<li>We were in San Francisco a few weekends back. Always an interesting time, especially with 80,000 people marching through the center of town on Saturday. We stayed at the Westin St Francis on Union Square -- decided to go old-school for the weekend. It rained most of the weekend, which emptied out the cab rank outside the St Francis, which meant we did more ride-shares and less walking. I have both Uber and Lyft on my phone, so I’d pop them both open and compare wait times and pricing. Even with the rain, the wait times rarely topped 3 min -- which is almost instantaneous in the traffic around Union Square. I was amazed at the number of animated cars swarming the area. Continuing my research from a couple of episodes ago, I’d talk with each driver about how their gig was going. I was surprised at the overwhelming preference for Lyft over Uber. Lyft pays more than Uber, they said. Many said they only take Uber rides when they think they can hit Uber’s incentive bonuses. If not, they tend to Lyft. And they said the Lyft riders tended to be nicer, more considerate. Since I was using both apps, I didn’t quite know what to make of that. Our Sunday morning driver told us he drives solely for Uber; he quit after Uber trialed driverless cars in San Francisco. He said it was just another proof point that Uber doesn’t care about its drivers. We ended up taking mostly Lyft that weekend.</li>\r\n 	<li>This echoed what I’d heard from an Uber and Lyft driver in Charlottesville, VA last month. This guy was a super driver -- he’d done 85,000 miles last year. He also prefered Lyft because they paid more, but said that he gets more rides from Uber. He lives in Charlottesville, but heads over to Richmond to drive when UVa is on break. He was planning to head up to DC for inauguration weekend, figuring the surge pricing would make it worth his while. I’ve never talked to anyone who is working the system as hard as this guy.</li>\r\n 	<li>Back home, telling our son Andrew about all this, he came down firmly on Uber’s side, because Uber can’t cancel a ride. He’s had too many Chicago Lyft drivers cancel on him. He deleted the Lyft app off his phone and is exclusively Uber.</li>\r\n 	<li>Last month, I was back flying one of my usual routes from the ‘90’s -- ORD-DTW -- complete with the original aircraft -- an AA MD-80. That 2-3 cabin configuration and the what-now-seem-like half-height overhead bins. At least it was an original American MD-80, not one of TWA ones they held onto after that merger. The AA ones are actually not a bad plane if you’re toward the front, away from the engines in the back. They seem to have more rows of extra leg room Main Cabin Extra seats than the newer A319s and 320s. At some point during the flight, my row mate looks down at my phone and asks “How are you charging your phone? There aren’t any plugs here”. She was kinda right -- no regular two-prong AC plugs. But I knew from years of flying these planes (I first started flying American in 1985 -- when these MD-80s were in their prime), that down between the seats, I’d find an old cigarette lighter outlet. And I still carry a lighter power adapter for that 10% of the time Hertz sticks me with a beater rental that doesn’t have a USB plug -- or for times like this when I’m flying AA’s beater plane.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/snowflake/46164\">A Foolish Game</a> by snowflake (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/\">Attribution (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Admiral Bob</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Critiquing my Top 10 Travel Tips</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Every couple of years, I bow to the search engine gods at Google and create a listicle -- an awful mashup word of list and article. They’re kinda click-baity. You see them on places like Mashable -- “Top 10 Ways to Hack Your Morning Routine” or “The 10 most cringeworthy advertising fails of 2015” (I didn’t make these up). But they exist because people search for them. So in December when my last listicle has rolled off the front page of TravelCommons, I create another one titled just like the last one -- “Top 10 Holiday Travel Tips”.  And how do they score? When I searched just now for “Top 10 Holiday Travel Tips”, a Google+ posting for my 2013 edition made the first page of results -- albeit the last entry -- and last December’s, the most recent, made the top of the second page. Not too bad…</li>\r\n	<li>When I write each new edition, I do try to think about what are today’s top 10 rather than just blindly copy-pasting the last post, although there is a good chunk of repetition -- “Fly Non-Stop” and “Skip the Tight Connection” are as valid today as they were 12 years ago when I started this podcast.\r\nThough they might also seem a bit obvious to even a slightly seasoned traveler. So I also have tried to weave in a few, if not Pro Tips, then at least a next level of insight. In 2013, I suggested buying status for the lead adult in the travel party. The rationale went like this -- for $20, you can take your whole family through the status security line and early boarding because I’ve never seen a security screener or gate agent split up a family. </li>\r\n	<li>I’ve also consistently recommended that people use Twitter as an alternate way into customer service, “at addressing” an airline or hotel as a way to jump what might be a long queue in front of a gate agent or front-desk clerk. I don’t think a lot of folks realize the sophistication and focus that many companies put on monitoring social media. My tweet about that American MD-80 generated a quick reply from American -- “We\'re currently working on updating our fleet, Mark…” And while not exactly travel-related, AT&T has now followed up with me twice over Twitter about a cellular service problem I was having last week. I gave this advice to a friend who called me from ORD on Christmas Day. Korean Air wouldn’t let him and his family board their flight to Hanoi because they didn’t have Vietnamese visas -- a new requirement that had just hit a couple of days earlier. They couldn’t find anyone to help them. Between the “at” Tweeting and sheer persistence, they finally found a way to get on the plane.</li>\r\n	<li>I used to have “bring a portable battery pack” -- like a lipstick charger -- or a small power strip on my list because of the dearth of electrical outlets in airports. One listener recommended stalking cleaning crews to find hidden outlets. But now -- finally -- with long overdue gate area refreshes, airlines are adding accessible outlets -- either in new work areas or power “pylons” sponsored by Samsung or Verizon. So while I still carry a battery pack and often find it useful, it’s fallen out of the Top 10.</li>\r\n	<li>Back in 2014, I did break it up a bit. Instead of a classic “Top 10” listicle, I offered Airport Etiquette tips -- things like “when traveling with your family, don’t stroll 4 abreast down the concourse” and “the airport Starbucks isn’t like your neighborhood one; keep your coffee order to 3 adjectives or less”. That article is nowhere to be found on the Google search page.</li>\r\n	<li>What is the top travel pro tip that you’re handing out to your friends? Sending one in will be part of the giveaway I’ll announce in the next topic.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/49674\">H2O</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Reviewing VPNs</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/12/20/podcast-119-digital-security-on-the-road-us-airports-getting-better/\">episode #119</a>, I talked about digital security on the road, and the topic has turned into a persistent thread across episodes, which makes sense given the Chinese water torture-type steady drip, drip, drip of cyber breach announcements. Frequent travelers could be considered a high risk group because, being away from their homes and offices, heavily rely on public networks -- airports, hotels, Starbucks -- to work (and play) in today’s digitized -- what, economy, society, street corner?</li>\r\n	<li>VPNs -- virtual private networks -- have two main use cases for the frequent traveler -- privacy on public networks and location shifting. VPNs accomplish these by altering the routing of the network traffic in and out of your PC, tablet or smartphone. What you’re putting out onto the Internet is encrypted so eavesdroppers -- like the guy wearing the hoodie in the dark corner of the Starbucks (to truck in stereotypes) running a packet sniffer -- can’t read what you’re browsing or e-mailing. And then the VPN routes your encrypted traffic to that it looks like you’re using the Internet from a different location -- what’s called the VPN “endpoint”</li>\r\n	<li>So how much privacy do you really need, and is it worth the additional hassle of using a VPN? Like everything, it depends. Being a consultant, you’ll forgive me for giving into my reflex of distilling it down to a 2x2 matrix -- on what you’re doing, and how paranoid you are. In the low paranoid/high privacy need box I put things like on-line banking and filling out your Global Entry app. Lots of personal information there that you don’t want Mr Hoodie to hoover up and post on some dark web hacking site. In the low privacy need/high paranoid box, I’d put reading Mashable listicles or browsing porn site -- embarrassing if someone posted that info on your Facebook page, but they couldn’t drain your bank account. </li>\r\n	<li>The location shifting use case -- I’m in Beijing but the Internet thinks I’m in Chicago -- only really comes into play for international travelers. Like when I’m in Madrid but wanting to stream the NCAA basketball tournament, or when my daughter in Scotland wants to watch “Friends” reruns (don’t ask me why) which is only on US Netflix. I also use VPNs whenever I’m in Beijing to hit Facebook and Twitter which are blocked by the “Great Firewall of China”.</li>\r\n	<li>I looked at two highly rated software VPNs -- Private Internet Access (PIA) and NordVPN -- and a Kickstarter hardware-based VPN, AlwaysHome, that I reviewed last fall in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/09/28/podcast-124-craft-beer-hunting-i-hate-rick-steves/\">episode #124</a>.</li>\r\n	<li>PIA and NordVPN are quick to set up -- go to their website, buy a subscription (promotions change all the time, but when I’m writing this, PIA has discounted their annual subscription to $40 while NordVPN’s is at $79), download, install and run their software (VPN client), pick a VPN endpoint (which country do you want the Internet to think you’re coming from), and off you go. And the next time you access the Internet, you need to remember to start the client and pick an endpoint, unless you set the client to start automatically each time you log in.</li>\r\n	<li>AlwaysHome, the hardware VPN, takes a bit more planning. You need to buy a pair of USB dongles and a service subscription (right now $180 for the dongles and a year’s service), plug one into your home router, and then take the second with you in your laptop bag.</li>\r\n	<li>I tested the software VPNs on three platforms -- a Windows 10 PC hardwired into a network, a Samsung tablet running Android 6.0.1 (Marshmallow) on WiFi, and an iPhone 7 running iOS 10.2 on WiFi and AT&T LTE mobile data.</li>\r\n	<li>I first looked at performance -- how much speed was I giving up for the additional encryption and routing that gives me privacy? The Windows PC had the lowest penalty -- both VPNs cut upload and download speeds by about 6%. They also the same on the iPhone on WiFi, though the download penalty increased to 11%. Don’t know if this is an iOS limitation or something else. On the Samsung Android tablet on WiFi, NordVPNs download was on par with Windows PC -- about 6% on downloads -- while PIA was 25% slower on downloads. This one has to be marked down to PIA’s Android client.</li>\r\n	<li>The really interesting result was on the iPhone on AT&T’s LTE service. The download penalty on LTE was around 83% for both NordVPN and PIA. Must have something to do with AT&T’s LTE service. And while interesting, it probably has the least practical value. Other than triple-paranoid people, I’m not sure why someone would tack a VPN onto their cellular connection.</li>\r\n	<li>Accessing US Netflix from abroad is kinda the acid test for location shifting. Netflix, prompted by their content suppliers, has been the most aggressive service in blocking VPN endpoints; blocking people from outside the US streaming content that Netflix has only licenses in the US. I asked my daughter Claire, who’s at University of St Andrews in the UK, to test each VPN with her Netflix “Friends” test. PIA failed; Netflix served up its “blocked” screen. NordVPN let her log into US Netflix, though she said the connection was slow; probably the result of the lousy BT service coming into her flat over a chip shop. AlwaysHome did the best -- no Netflix blocking because it looks like she’s logging in from our house, and the best connection over the BT service because the AlwaysHome hardware lets it do accelerate network traffic in a way that the software VPNs can’t.</li>\r\n	<li>I also asked Claire for her thoughts on the NordVPN and PIA software clients. She liked the NordVPN client better -- more graphic, easier to understand. The PIA client is a bit more stripped down. But she also liked that, with the AlwaysHome VPN, she didn’t have to install any software -- just connect to its WiFi.</li>\r\n	<li>Sorting it all out, it you want an easy VPN solution that allows you to use Netflix when you’re overseas, go with NordVPN. If you want the cheapest solution that’s a bit more stripped down and you’re not running Android, then go with PIA. If you want the best Netflix experience from, say, a vacation rental that doesn’t require you to navigate WiFi login pages and you can plan a couple of weeks ahead, try AlwaysHome.</li>\r\n	<li>Now, for the giveaway. NordVPN has given me a year’s subscription to give away to one lucky TravelCommons listener. Go to the TravelCommons website and check out the top post to enter the raffle. It’ll be open for 10 days from the posting of this episode -- which, if I have my calendar math right, is March 2. Come by the website and enter for a shot to be more cyber-secure for a year. And thanks to the folks at NordVPN for this giveaway.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #127</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/\">ccMixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_127.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #127 — Critiquing My Top 10 Travel Tips; Reviewing VPNs','','inherit','closed','closed','','1723-revision-v1','','','2017-02-20 09:34:35','2017-02-20 14:34:35','',1723,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/02/20/1723-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0);
INSERT INTO `wp_posts` VALUES
(1727,1,'2017-02-20 09:42:03','2017-02-20 14:42:03','Seems like I\'ve been doing as much driving as flying since the last episode, so I\'ve switched from apps that track flight delays to those that help me dodge traffic backups. I talk, yet again, about buying pay-as-you-go SIMs while traveling, but the need to do that may be ending. And I\'ve reshuffled my carry-on luggage as the airlines have changed their rules. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_127.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/303265164\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n<!--more-->\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #127:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, in the midst of my third straight week at home. It is yet another sign of the impending apocalypse. All just can’t be right with the world - the office manager is nervous that I’m in the office for days in a row, my friends are shocked that I’m available during the week for a beer, my wife is tired of cooking dinner for me, and the cat is visibly pissed (in his own kitty way) that I’m taking up space on the couch. But, I am getting current on my doctor and dentist appointments, and I was able to get a haircut in a timely manner. Though these may seem little things, they can be a pain to get done when you’re traveling every week, and weekend appointments are a scarce commodity. Convenient, if not a bit boring.</li>\r\n 	<li>It also means I’ve missed 1 Delta and 2 United system outages and the associated ground-stops and cancellations, as well as getting stranded in last weekend’s East Coast winter storm. Those of you who follow me on Twitter have got to be happy about the lull in bitch tweeting.</li>\r\n 	<li>And I’ve also been around to provide real-time advice and counsel to my wife as she’s been planning our family spring break trip -- this year we’re skipping the Iberian Peninsula and going to Paris. I’m not sure how much she really appreciates my immediate reactions, but…. The house is awash with guidebooks -- except, of course, for Rick Steves. I pulled out the 2016 review copy of DK’s Top 10 Paris, the credenza looks like my wife cleared out the local library, and we have print outs of a bunch of web pages. I dunno,I guess I’m a visual and tactile person. When I’m trying to wrap my head around a bunch of disparate data sources, I still have to go physical -- print it out and spread it out. Or maybe this is just a fancy way to say I’m old.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/THE_CONCEPT_OF_ENERGY/55008\">ABANDONED BUTTERFLIES</a> by THE_CONCEPT_OF_ENERGY (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/\">Attribution</a> license. Ft: Doxent Zsigmond, Snowflake</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Just a heads up, I’ll be announcing a new giveaway later on in this episode. And since I can’t figure out how to create MP3 chapter marks in Adobe Audition, you’ll have listen all the way through.</li>\r\n 	<li>Rummaging through the mailbag…\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Dan Gradwohl dropped me a line agreeing with my complaint in the last episode about the small print size on most hotel shampoo and conditioner bottles. And, like me, he like Hyatt Place’s solution -- print a big “1” on the shampoo, a big “2” on the conditioner, and a big “3” on the shower gel. No need then to wear your reading glasses in the shower then. Dan also said that he “really liked” the music in the last episode. I can’t take credit for that. I outsourced the music search to my daughter Claire who was home for Winter Break. Since she received what may be the first positive comment about the music in 12 years, I asked her to to help me with this episode too.</li>\r\n 	<li>Long-time listener Robert Fenerty hit the TravelCommons website to comment on my pay-as-you-go SIM travails -- “Not many people are courageous enough to admit what a time sink it can be to find, purchase and setup a local SIM card. Sometimes it’s easy, the many Heathrow SIM vending machines being a great example. And Austria is a breeze. But outside of western countries, I’ve had to hand over my passport, stand in long lines, and try to explain “no, I need the one with data” to clerks whose language I don’t speak. Once I found out after leaving the store that my SIM was not properly initialized. Please go back to square one. The Verizon Travelpass is a great alternative for those 2-3 day trips. It’s often less expensive than the local SIM and it’s about as painless to enable/disable as you can imagine. Please keep up the good work, the beer tips, and the warm sentiments from the road. Your podcast has become an old friend that I have over for dinner every once in awhile.”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Robert, thanks for that post. What a nice way of putting it -- the podcast becoming an old friend. I haven’t heard it put that way before, but it’s a huge compliment.</li>\r\n 	<li>Looking at SIMs for our Paris trip next month, the new upstart network provider sells their SIMs through vending machines, so I think I’ll skip the Orange phone store and give the new guys a try. I’m not a Verizon phone customer, but many of my Verizon-using friend swear by Travelpass as being dead-simple. AT&amp;T finally matched that offer last month with their International Day Pass -- $10/day and it looks about as simple. An AT&amp;T-using friend who’ll be on an Asian cruise next month plans to use it. And that seems to be a perfect use case -- he’ll be in a different country every day.</li>\r\n 	<li>One of things we’ll be working on before the Paris trip is not to forget anything critical when we leave for the airport. Many years ago, we get out of the cab at ORD’s International Terminal for a family trip to London. I’m pulling the bags out of the trunk ...and there’s one missing. I send my family through to check-in and boarding while I hop back into the cab to run back home. I open the front door, and there’s the forgotten bag in the middle of the hallway. We only live a 25-min drive from ORD and luckily there was no traffic, and I had status on Virgin Atlantic at the time. I made it to the gate just before boarding was called. That memory seared in our brains, we never make that mistake again… until Sept when we were heading over to Scotland. We’re in the cab and my wife asks me “Do you have my passport?” Nope, thought you had it. At least we figured this out before we hit the airport. The driver makes an illegal U-turn across the tollway media and we sprint back home to find the passport sitting on my desk. It was only a 15-min backtrack this time, so we still got to ORD in time to get a sandwich at Tortas Frontera. But it was a wake-up call -- never be complacent about stupidity.</li>\r\n 	<li>We were in San Francisco a few weekends back. Always an interesting time, especially with 80,000 people marching through the center of town on Saturday. We stayed at the Westin St Francis on Union Square -- decided to go old-school for the weekend. It rained most of the weekend, which emptied out the cab rank outside the St Francis, which meant we did more ride-shares and less walking. I have both Uber and Lyft on my phone, so I’d pop them both open and compare wait times and pricing. Even with the rain, the wait times rarely topped 3 min -- which is almost instantaneous in the traffic around Union Square. I was amazed at the number of animated cars swarming the area. Continuing my research from a couple of episodes ago, I’d talk with each driver about how their gig was going. I was surprised at the overwhelming preference for Lyft over Uber. Lyft pays more than Uber, they said. Many said they only take Uber rides when they think they can hit Uber’s incentive bonuses. If not, they tend to Lyft. And they said the Lyft riders tended to be nicer, more considerate. Since I was using both apps, I didn’t quite know what to make of that. Our Sunday morning driver told us he drives solely for Uber; he quit after Uber trialed driverless cars in San Francisco. He said it was just another proof point that Uber doesn’t care about its drivers. We ended up taking mostly Lyft that weekend.</li>\r\n 	<li>This echoed what I’d heard from an Uber and Lyft driver in Charlottesville, VA last month. This guy was a super driver -- he’d done 85,000 miles last year. He also prefered Lyft because they paid more, but said that he gets more rides from Uber. He lives in Charlottesville, but heads over to Richmond to drive when UVa is on break. He was planning to head up to DC for inauguration weekend, figuring the surge pricing would make it worth his while. I’ve never talked to anyone who is working the system as hard as this guy.</li>\r\n 	<li>Back home, telling our son Andrew about all this, he came down firmly on Uber’s side, because Uber can’t cancel a ride. He’s had too many Chicago Lyft drivers cancel on him. He deleted the Lyft app off his phone and is exclusively Uber.</li>\r\n 	<li>Last month, I was back flying one of my usual routes from the ‘90’s -- ORD-DTW -- complete with the original aircraft -- an AA MD-80. That 2-3 cabin configuration and the what-now-seem-like half-height overhead bins. At least it was an original American MD-80, not one of TWA ones they held onto after that merger. The AA ones are actually not a bad plane if you’re toward the front, away from the engines in the back. They seem to have more rows of extra leg room Main Cabin Extra seats than the newer A319s and 320s. At some point during the flight, my row mate looks down at my phone and asks “How are you charging your phone? There aren’t any plugs here”. She was kinda right -- no regular two-prong AC plugs. But I knew from years of flying these planes (I first started flying American in 1985 -- when these MD-80s were in their prime), that down between the seats, I’d find an old cigarette lighter outlet. And I still carry a lighter power adapter for that 10% of the time Hertz sticks me with a beater rental that doesn’t have a USB plug -- or for times like this when I’m flying AA’s beater plane.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/snowflake/46164\">A Foolish Game</a> by snowflake (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/\">Attribution (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Admiral Bob</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Critiquing my Top 10 Travel Tips</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Every couple of years, I bow to the search engine gods at Google and create a listicle -- an awful mashup word of list and article. They’re kinda click-baity. You see them on places like Mashable -- “Top 10 Ways to Hack Your Morning Routine” or “The 10 most cringeworthy advertising fails of 2015” (I didn’t make these up). But they exist because people search for them. So in December when my last listicle has rolled off the front page of TravelCommons, I create another one titled just like the last one -- “Top 10 Holiday Travel Tips”. And how do they score? When I searched just now for “Top 10 Holiday Travel Tips”, a Google+ posting for my 2013 edition made the first page of results -- albeit the last entry -- and last December’s, the most recent, made the top of the second page. Not too bad…</li>\r\n 	<li>When I write each new edition, I do try to think about what are today’s top 10 rather than just blindly copy-pasting the last post, although there is a good chunk of repetition -- “Fly Non-Stop” and “Skip the Tight Connection” are as valid today as they were 12 years ago when I started this podcast.\r\nThough they might also seem a bit obvious to even a slightly seasoned traveler. So I also have tried to weave in a few, if not Pro Tips, then at least a next level of insight. In 2013, I suggested buying status for the lead adult in the travel party. The rationale went like this -- for $20, you can take your whole family through the status security line and early boarding because I’ve never seen a security screener or gate agent split up a family.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’ve also consistently recommended that people use Twitter as an alternate way into customer service, “at addressing” an airline or hotel as a way to jump what might be a long queue in front of a gate agent or front-desk clerk. I don’t think a lot of folks realize the sophistication and focus that many companies put on monitoring social media. My tweet about that American MD-80 generated a quick reply from American -- “We\'re currently working on updating our fleet, Mark…” And while not exactly travel-related, AT&amp;T has now followed up with me twice over Twitter about a cellular service problem I was having last week. I gave this advice to a friend who called me from ORD on Christmas Day. Korean Air wouldn’t let him and his family board their flight to Hanoi because they didn’t have Vietnamese visas -- a new requirement that had just hit a couple of days earlier. They couldn’t find anyone to help them. Between the “at” Tweeting and sheer persistence, they finally found a way to get on the plane.</li>\r\n 	<li>I used to have “bring a portable battery pack” -- like a lipstick charger -- or a small power strip on my list because of the dearth of electrical outlets in airports. One listener recommended stalking cleaning crews to find hidden outlets. But now -- finally -- with long overdue gate area refreshes, airlines are adding accessible outlets -- either in new work areas or power “pylons” sponsored by Samsung or Verizon. So while I still carry a battery pack and often find it useful, it’s fallen out of the Top 10.</li>\r\n 	<li>Back in 2014, I did break it up a bit. Instead of a classic “Top 10” listicle, I offered Airport Etiquette tips -- things like “when traveling with your family, don’t stroll 4 abreast down the concourse” and “the airport Starbucks isn’t like your neighborhood one; keep your coffee order to 3 adjectives or less”. That article is nowhere to be found on the Google search page.</li>\r\n 	<li>What is the top travel pro tip that you’re handing out to your friends? Sending one in will be part of the giveaway I’ll announce in the next topic.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/49674\">H2O</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Reviewing VPNs</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/12/20/podcast-119-digital-security-on-the-road-us-airports-getting-better/\">episode #119</a>, I talked about digital security on the road, and the topic has turned into a persistent thread across episodes, which makes sense given the Chinese water torture-type steady drip, drip, drip of cyber breach announcements. Frequent travelers could be considered a high risk group because, being away from their homes and offices, heavily rely on public networks -- airports, hotels, Starbucks -- to work (and play) in today’s digitized -- what, economy, society, street corner?</li>\r\n 	<li>VPNs -- virtual private networks -- have two main use cases for the frequent traveler -- privacy on public networks and location shifting. VPNs accomplish these by altering the routing of the network traffic in and out of your PC, tablet or smartphone. What you’re putting out onto the Internet is encrypted so eavesdroppers -- like the guy wearing the hoodie in the dark corner of the Starbucks (to truck in stereotypes) running a packet sniffer -- can’t read what you’re browsing or e-mailing. And then the VPN routes your encrypted traffic to that it looks like you’re using the Internet from a different location -- what’s called the VPN “endpoint”</li>\r\n 	<li>So how much privacy do you really need, and is it worth the additional hassle of using a VPN? Like everything, it depends. Being a consultant, you’ll forgive me for giving into my reflex of distilling it down to a 2x2 matrix -- on what you’re doing, and how paranoid you are. In the low paranoid/high privacy need box I put things like on-line banking and filling out your Global Entry app. Lots of personal information there that you don’t want Mr Hoodie to hoover up and post on some dark web hacking site. In the low privacy need/high paranoid box, I’d put reading Mashable listicles or browsing porn site -- embarrassing if someone posted that info on your Facebook page, but they couldn’t drain your bank account.</li>\r\n 	<li>The location shifting use case -- I’m in Beijing but the Internet thinks I’m in Chicago -- only really comes into play for international travelers. Like when I’m in Madrid but wanting to stream the NCAA basketball tournament, or when my daughter in Scotland wants to watch “Friends” reruns (don’t ask me why) which is only on US Netflix. I also use VPNs whenever I’m in Beijing to hit Facebook and Twitter which are blocked by the “Great Firewall of China”.</li>\r\n 	<li>I looked at two highly rated software VPNs -- <a href=\"https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Private Internet Access</a> (PIA) and <a href=\"https://nordvpn.com/\" target=\"_blank\">NordVPN</a> -- and a Kickstarter hardware-based VPN, <a href=\"http://www.homingsystems.com/alwayshome-duo\" target=\"_blank\">AlwaysHome</a>, that I reviewed last fall in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/09/28/podcast-124-craft-beer-hunting-i-hate-rick-steves/\">episode #124</a>.</li>\r\n 	<li>PIA and NordVPN are quick to set up -- go to their website, buy a subscription (promotions change all the time, but when I’m writing this, PIA has discounted their annual subscription to $40 while NordVPN’s is at $79), download, install and run their software (VPN client), pick a VPN endpoint (which country do you want the Internet to think you’re coming from), and off you go. And the next time you access the Internet, you need to remember to start the client and pick an endpoint, unless you set the client to start automatically each time you log in.</li>\r\n 	<li>AlwaysHome, the hardware VPN, takes a bit more planning. You need to buy a pair of USB dongles and a service subscription (right now $180 for the dongles and a year’s service), plug one into your home router, and then take the second with you in your laptop bag.</li>\r\n 	<li>I tested the software VPNs on three platforms -- a Windows 10 PC hardwired into a network, a Samsung tablet running Android 6.0.1 (Marshmallow) on WiFi, and an iPhone 7 running iOS 10.2 on WiFi and AT&amp;T LTE mobile data.</li>\r\n 	<li>I first looked at performance -- how much speed was I giving up for the additional encryption and routing that gives me privacy? The Windows PC had the lowest penalty -- both VPNs cut upload and download speeds by about 6%. They also the same on the iPhone on WiFi, though the download penalty increased to 11%. Don’t know if this is an iOS limitation or something else. On the Samsung Android tablet on WiFi, NordVPNs download was on par with Windows PC -- about 6% on downloads -- while PIA was 25% slower on downloads. This one has to be marked down to PIA’s Android client.</li>\r\n 	<li>The really interesting result was on the iPhone on AT&amp;T’s LTE service. The download penalty on LTE was around 83% for both NordVPN and PIA. Must have something to do with AT&amp;T’s LTE service. And while interesting, it probably has the least practical value. Other than triple-paranoid people, I’m not sure why someone would tack a VPN onto their cellular connection.</li>\r\n 	<li>Accessing US Netflix from abroad is kinda the acid test for location shifting. Netflix, prompted by their content suppliers, has been the most aggressive service in blocking VPN endpoints; blocking people from outside the US streaming content that Netflix has only licenses in the US. I asked my daughter Claire, who’s at University of St Andrews in the UK, to test each VPN with her Netflix “Friends” test. PIA failed; Netflix served up its “blocked” screen. NordVPN let her log into US Netflix, though she said the connection was slow; probably the result of the lousy BT service coming into her flat over a chip shop. AlwaysHome did the best -- no Netflix blocking because it looks like she’s logging in from our house, and the best connection over the BT service because the AlwaysHome hardware lets it do accelerate network traffic in a way that the software VPNs can’t.</li>\r\n 	<li>I also asked Claire for her thoughts on the NordVPN and PIA software clients. She liked the NordVPN client better -- more graphic, easier to understand. The PIA client is a bit more stripped down. But she also liked that, with the AlwaysHome VPN, she didn’t have to install any software -- just connect to its WiFi.</li>\r\n 	<li>Sorting it all out, it you want an easy VPN solution that allows you to use Netflix when you’re overseas, go with NordVPN. If you want the cheapest solution that’s a bit more stripped down and you’re not running Android, then go with PIA. If you want the best Netflix experience from, say, a vacation rental that doesn’t require you to navigate WiFi login pages and you can plan a couple of weeks ahead, try AlwaysHome.</li>\r\n 	<li>Now, for the giveaway. NordVPN has given me a year’s subscription to give away to one lucky TravelCommons listener. Go to the TravelCommons website and check out the top post to enter the raffle. It’ll be open for 10 days from the posting of this episode -- which, if I have my calendar math right, is March 2. Come by the website and enter for a shot to be more cyber-secure for a year. And thanks to the folks at NordVPN for this giveaway.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #127</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/\">ccMixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_127.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #127 — Critiquing My Top 10 Travel Tips; Reviewing VPNs','','inherit','closed','closed','','1723-revision-v1','','','2017-02-20 09:42:03','2017-02-20 14:42:03','',1723,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/02/20/1723-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1728,1,'2017-02-20 09:43:08','2017-02-20 14:43:08','','2017-02-20 08.37.58','','inherit','open','closed','','2017-02-20-08-37-58','','','2017-02-20 09:46:08','2017-02-20 14:46:08','',1723,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/2017-02-20-08.37.58.png',0,'attachment','image/png',0),
(1729,1,'2017-02-20 09:44:40','2017-02-20 14:44:40','','2017-02-20 08.37.43','','inherit','open','closed','','2017-02-20-08-37-43','','','2017-02-20 09:45:28','2017-02-20 14:45:28','',1723,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/2017-02-20-08.37.43.png',0,'attachment','image/png',0),
(1730,1,'2017-02-20 09:46:37','2017-02-20 14:46:37','Seems like I\'ve been doing as much driving as flying since the last episode, so I\'ve switched from apps that track flight delays to those that help me dodge traffic backups. I talk, yet again, about buying pay-as-you-go SIMs while traveling, but the need to do that may be ending. And I\'ve reshuffled my carry-on luggage as the airlines have changed their rules. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_127.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/303265164\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n<!--more-->\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #127:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, in the midst of my third straight week at home. It is yet another sign of the impending apocalypse. All just can’t be right with the world - the office manager is nervous that I’m in the office for days in a row, my friends are shocked that I’m available during the week for a beer, my wife is tired of cooking dinner for me, and the cat is visibly pissed (in his own kitty way) that I’m taking up space on the couch. But, I am getting current on my doctor and dentist appointments, and I was able to get a haircut in a timely manner. Though these may seem little things, they can be a pain to get done when you’re traveling every week, and weekend appointments are a scarce commodity. Convenient, if not a bit boring.</li>\r\n 	<li>It also means I’ve missed 1 Delta and 2 United system outages and the associated ground-stops and cancellations, as well as getting stranded in last weekend’s East Coast winter storm. Those of you who follow me on Twitter have got to be happy about the lull in bitch tweeting.</li>\r\n 	<li>And I’ve also been around to provide real-time advice and counsel to my wife as she’s been planning our family spring break trip -- this year we’re skipping the Iberian Peninsula and going to Paris. I’m not sure how much she really appreciates my immediate reactions, but…. The house is awash with guidebooks -- except, of course, for Rick Steves. I pulled out the 2016 review copy of DK’s Top 10 Paris, the credenza looks like my wife cleared out the local library, and we have print outs of a bunch of web pages. I dunno,I guess I’m a visual and tactile person. When I’m trying to wrap my head around a bunch of disparate data sources, I still have to go physical -- print it out and spread it out. Or maybe this is just a fancy way to say I’m old.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/THE_CONCEPT_OF_ENERGY/55008\">ABANDONED BUTTERFLIES</a> by THE_CONCEPT_OF_ENERGY (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/\">Attribution</a> license. Ft: Doxent Zsigmond, Snowflake</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Just a heads up, I’ll be announcing a new giveaway later on in this episode. And since I can’t figure out how to create MP3 chapter marks in Adobe Audition, you’ll have listen all the way through.</li>\r\n 	<li>Rummaging through the mailbag…\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Dan Gradwohl dropped me a line agreeing with my complaint in the last episode about the small print size on most hotel shampoo and conditioner bottles. And, like me, he like Hyatt Place’s solution -- print a big “1” on the shampoo, a big “2” on the conditioner, and a big “3” on the shower gel. No need then to wear your reading glasses in the shower then. Dan also said that he “really liked” the music in the last episode. I can’t take credit for that. I outsourced the music search to my daughter Claire who was home for Winter Break. Since she received what may be the first positive comment about the music in 12 years, I asked her to to help me with this episode too.</li>\r\n 	<li>Long-time listener Robert Fenerty hit the TravelCommons website to comment on my pay-as-you-go SIM travails -- “Not many people are courageous enough to admit what a time sink it can be to find, purchase and setup a local SIM card. Sometimes it’s easy, the many Heathrow SIM vending machines being a great example. And Austria is a breeze. But outside of western countries, I’ve had to hand over my passport, stand in long lines, and try to explain “no, I need the one with data” to clerks whose language I don’t speak. Once I found out after leaving the store that my SIM was not properly initialized. Please go back to square one. The Verizon Travelpass is a great alternative for those 2-3 day trips. It’s often less expensive than the local SIM and it’s about as painless to enable/disable as you can imagine. Please keep up the good work, the beer tips, and the warm sentiments from the road. Your podcast has become an old friend that I have over for dinner every once in awhile.”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Robert, thanks for that post. What a nice way of putting it -- the podcast becoming an old friend. I haven’t heard it put that way before, but it’s a huge compliment.</li>\r\n 	<li>Looking at SIMs for our Paris trip next month, the new upstart network provider sells their SIMs through vending machines, so I think I’ll skip the Orange phone store and give the new guys a try. I’m not a Verizon phone customer, but many of my Verizon-using friend swear by Travelpass as being dead-simple. AT&amp;T finally matched that offer last month with their International Day Pass -- $10/day and it looks about as simple. An AT&amp;T-using friend who’ll be on an Asian cruise next month plans to use it. And that seems to be a perfect use case -- he’ll be in a different country every day.</li>\r\n 	<li>One of things we’ll be working on before the Paris trip is not to forget anything critical when we leave for the airport. Many years ago, we get out of the cab at ORD’s International Terminal for a family trip to London. I’m pulling the bags out of the trunk ...and there’s one missing. I send my family through to check-in and boarding while I hop back into the cab to run back home. I open the front door, and there’s the forgotten bag in the middle of the hallway. We only live a 25-min drive from ORD and luckily there was no traffic, and I had status on Virgin Atlantic at the time. I made it to the gate just before boarding was called. That memory seared in our brains, we never make that mistake again… until Sept when we were heading over to Scotland. We’re in the cab and my wife asks me “Do you have my passport?” Nope, thought you had it. At least we figured this out before we hit the airport. The driver makes an illegal U-turn across the tollway media and we sprint back home to find the passport sitting on my desk. It was only a 15-min backtrack this time, so we still got to ORD in time to get a sandwich at Tortas Frontera. But it was a wake-up call -- never be complacent about stupidity.</li>\r\n 	<li>We were in San Francisco a few weekends back. Always an interesting time, especially with 80,000 people marching through the center of town on Saturday. We stayed at the Westin St Francis on Union Square -- decided to go old-school for the weekend. It rained most of the weekend, which emptied out the cab rank outside the St Francis, which meant we did more ride-shares and less walking. I have both Uber and Lyft on my phone, so I’d pop them both open and compare wait times and pricing. Even with the rain, the wait times rarely topped 3 min -- which is almost instantaneous in the traffic around Union Square. I was amazed at the number of animated cars swarming the area. Continuing my research from a couple of episodes ago, I’d talk with each driver about how their gig was going. I was surprised at the overwhelming preference for Lyft over Uber. Lyft pays more than Uber, they said. Many said they only take Uber rides when they think they can hit Uber’s incentive bonuses. If not, they tend to Lyft. And they said the Lyft riders tended to be nicer, more considerate. Since I was using both apps, I didn’t quite know what to make of that. Our Sunday morning driver told us he drives solely for Uber; he quit after Uber trialed driverless cars in San Francisco. He said it was just another proof point that Uber doesn’t care about its drivers. We ended up taking mostly Lyft that weekend.</li>\r\n 	<li>This echoed what I’d heard from an Uber and Lyft driver in Charlottesville, VA last month. This guy was a super driver -- he’d done 85,000 miles last year. He also prefered Lyft because they paid more, but said that he gets more rides from Uber. He lives in Charlottesville, but heads over to Richmond to drive when UVa is on break. He was planning to head up to DC for inauguration weekend, figuring the surge pricing would make it worth his while. I’ve never talked to anyone who is working the system as hard as this guy.</li>\r\n 	<li>Back home, telling our son Andrew about all this, he came down firmly on Uber’s side, because Uber can’t cancel a ride. He’s had too many Chicago Lyft drivers cancel on him. He deleted the<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/2017-02-20-08.37.43.png\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1729\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/2017-02-20-08.37.43-169x300.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"169\" height=\"300\" /></a> Lyft app off his phone and is exclusively Uber.</li>\r\n 	<li>Last month, I was back flying one of my usual routes from the ‘90’s -- ORD-DTW -- complete with the original aircraft -- an AA MD-80. That 2-3 cabin configuration and the what-now-seem-like half-height overhead bins. At least it was an original American MD-80, not one of TWA ones they held onto after that merger. The AA ones are actually not a bad plane if you’re toward the front, away from the engines in the back. They seem to have more rows of extra leg room Main Cabin Extra seats than the newer A319s and 320s. At some point during the flight, my row mate looks down at my phone and asks “How are you charging your phone? There aren’t any plugs here”. She was kinda right -- no regular two-prong AC plugs. But I knew from years of flying these planes (I first started flying American in 1985 -- when these MD-80s were in their prime), that down between the seats, I’d find an old cigarette lighter outlet. And I still carry a lighter power adapter for that 10% of the time Hertz sticks me with a beater rental that doesn’t have a USB plug -- or for times like this when I’m flying AA’s beater plane.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/snowflake/46164\">A Foolish Game</a> by snowflake (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/\">Attribution (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Admiral Bob</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Critiquing my Top 10 Travel Tips</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Every couple of years, I bow to the search engine gods at Google and create a listicle -- an awful mashup word of list and article. They’re kinda click-baity. You see them on places like Mashable -- “Top 10 Ways to Hack Your Morning Routine” or “The 10 most cringeworthy advertising fails of 2015” (I didn’t make these up). But they exist because people search for them. So in December when my last listicle has rolled off the front page of TravelCommons, I create another one titled just like the last one -- “Top 10 Holiday Travel Tips”. And how do they score? When I searched just now for “Top 10 Holiday Travel Tips”, a Google+ posting for my 2013 edition made the first page of results -- albeit the last entry -- and last December’s, the most recent, made the top of the second page. Not too bad…</li>\r\n 	<li>When I write each new edition, I do try to think about what are today’s top 10 rather than just blindly copy-pasting the last post, although there is a good chunk of repetition -- “Fly Non-Stop” and “Skip the Tight Connection” are as valid today as they were 12 years ago when I started this podcast.\r\nThough they might also seem a bit obvious to even a slightly seasoned traveler. So I also have tried to weave in a few, if not Pro Tips, then at least a next level of insight. In 2013, I suggested buying status for the lead adult in the travel party. The rationale went like this -- for $20, you can take your whole family through the status security line and early boarding because I’ve never seen a security screener or gate agent split up a family.<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/2017-02-20-08.37.58.png\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1728\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/2017-02-20-08.37.58-169x300.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"169\" height=\"300\" /></a></li>\r\n 	<li>I’ve also consistently recommended that people use Twitter as an alternate way into customer service, “at addressing” an airline or hotel as a way to jump what might be a long queue in front of a gate agent or front-desk clerk. I don’t think a lot of folks realize the sophistication and focus that many companies put on monitoring social media. My tweet about that American MD-80 generated a quick reply from American -- “We\'re currently working on updating our fleet, Mark…” And while not exactly travel-related, AT&amp;T has now followed up with me twice over Twitter about a cellular service problem I was having last week. I gave this advice to a friend who called me from ORD on Christmas Day. Korean Air wouldn’t let him and his family board their flight to Hanoi because they didn’t have Vietnamese visas -- a new requirement that had just hit a couple of days earlier. They couldn’t find anyone to help them. Between the “at” Tweeting and sheer persistence, they finally found a way to get on the plane.</li>\r\n 	<li>I used to have “bring a portable battery pack” -- like a lipstick charger -- or a small power strip on my list because of the dearth of electrical outlets in airports. One listener recommended stalking cleaning crews to find hidden outlets. But now -- finally -- with long overdue gate area refreshes, airlines are adding accessible outlets -- either in new work areas or power “pylons” sponsored by Samsung or Verizon. So while I still carry a battery pack and often find it useful, it’s fallen out of the Top 10.</li>\r\n 	<li>Back in 2014, I did break it up a bit. Instead of a classic “Top 10” listicle, I offered Airport Etiquette tips -- things like “when traveling with your family, don’t stroll 4 abreast down the concourse” and “the airport Starbucks isn’t like your neighborhood one; keep your coffee order to 3 adjectives or less”. That article is nowhere to be found on the Google search page.</li>\r\n 	<li>What is the top travel pro tip that you’re handing out to your friends? Sending one in will be part of the giveaway I’ll announce in the next topic.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/49674\">H2O</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Reviewing VPNs</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/12/20/podcast-119-digital-security-on-the-road-us-airports-getting-better/\">episode #119</a>, I talked about digital security on the road, and the topic has turned into a persistent thread across episodes, which makes sense given the Chinese water torture-type steady drip, drip, drip of cyber breach announcements. Frequent travelers could be considered a high risk group because, being away from their homes and offices, heavily rely on public networks -- airports, hotels, Starbucks -- to work (and play) in today’s digitized -- what, economy, society, street corner?</li>\r\n 	<li>VPNs -- virtual private networks -- have two main use cases for the frequent traveler -- privacy on public networks and location shifting. VPNs accomplish these by altering the routing of the network traffic in and out of your PC, tablet or smartphone. What you’re putting out onto the Internet is encrypted so eavesdroppers -- like the guy wearing the hoodie in the dark corner of the Starbucks (to truck in stereotypes) running a packet sniffer -- can’t read what you’re browsing or e-mailing. And then the VPN routes your encrypted traffic to that it looks like you’re using the Internet from a different location -- what’s called the VPN “endpoint”</li>\r\n 	<li>So how much privacy do you really need, and is it worth the additional hassle of using a VPN? Like everything, it depends. Being a consultant, you’ll forgive me for giving into my reflex of distilling it down to a 2x2 matrix -- on what you’re doing, and how paranoid you are. In the low paranoid/high privacy need box I put things like on-line banking and filling out your Global Entry app. Lots of personal information there that you don’t want Mr Hoodie to hoover up and post on some dark web hacking site. In the low privacy need/high paranoid box, I’d put reading Mashable listicles or browsing porn site -- embarrassing if someone posted that info on your Facebook page, but they couldn’t drain your bank account.</li>\r\n 	<li>The location shifting use case -- I’m in Beijing but the Internet thinks I’m in Chicago -- only really comes into play for international travelers. Like when I’m in Madrid but wanting to stream the NCAA basketball tournament, or when my daughter in Scotland wants to watch “Friends” reruns (don’t ask me why) which is only on US Netflix. I also use VPNs whenever I’m in Beijing to hit Facebook and Twitter which are blocked by the “Great Firewall of China”.</li>\r\n 	<li>I looked at two highly rated software VPNs -- <a href=\"https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Private Internet Access</a> (PIA) and <a href=\"https://nordvpn.com/\" target=\"_blank\">NordVPN</a> -- and a Kickstarter hardware-based VPN, <a href=\"http://www.homingsystems.com/alwayshome-duo\" target=\"_blank\">AlwaysHome</a>, that I reviewed last fall in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/09/28/podcast-124-craft-beer-hunting-i-hate-rick-steves/\">episode #124</a>.</li>\r\n 	<li>PIA and NordVPN are quick to set up -- go to their website, buy a subscription (promotions change all the time, but when I’m writing this, PIA has discounted their annual subscription to $40 while NordVPN’s is at $79), download, install and run their software (VPN client), pick a VPN endpoint (which country do you want the Internet to think you’re coming from), and off you go. And the next time you access the Internet, you need to remember to start the client and pick an endpoint, unless you set the client to start automatically each time you log in.</li>\r\n 	<li>AlwaysHome, the hardware VPN, takes a bit more planning. You need to buy a pair of USB dongles and a service subscription (right now $180 for the dongles and a year’s service), plug one into your home router, and then take the second with you in your laptop bag.</li>\r\n 	<li>I tested the software VPNs on three platforms -- a Windows 10 PC hardwired into a network, a Samsung tablet running Android 6.0.1 (Marshmallow) on WiFi, and an iPhone 7 running iOS 10.2 on WiFi and AT&amp;T LTE mobile data.</li>\r\n 	<li>I first looked at performance -- how much speed was I giving up for the additional encryption and routing that gives me privacy? The Windows PC had the lowest penalty -- both VPNs cut upload and download speeds by about 6%. They also the same on the iPhone on WiFi, though the download penalty increased to 11%. Don’t know if this is an iOS limitation or something else. On the Samsung Android tablet on WiFi, NordVPNs download was on par with Windows PC -- about 6% on downloads -- while PIA was 25% slower on downloads. This one has to be marked down to PIA’s Android client.</li>\r\n 	<li>The really interesting result was on the iPhone on AT&amp;T’s LTE service. The download penalty on LTE was around 83% for both NordVPN and PIA. Must have something to do with AT&amp;T’s LTE service. And while interesting, it probably has the least practical value. Other than triple-paranoid people, I’m not sure why someone would tack a VPN onto their cellular connection.</li>\r\n 	<li>Accessing US Netflix from abroad is kinda the acid test for location shifting. Netflix, prompted by their content suppliers, has been the most aggressive service in blocking VPN endpoints; blocking people from outside the US streaming content that Netflix has only licenses in the US. I asked my daughter Claire, who’s at University of St Andrews in the UK, to test each VPN with her Netflix “Friends” test. PIA failed; Netflix served up its “blocked” screen. NordVPN let her log into US Netflix, though she said the connection was slow; probably the result of the lousy BT service coming into her flat over a chip shop. AlwaysHome did the best -- no Netflix blocking because it looks like she’s logging in from our house, and the best connection over the BT service because the AlwaysHome hardware lets it do accelerate network traffic in a way that the software VPNs can’t.</li>\r\n 	<li>I also asked Claire for her thoughts on the NordVPN and PIA software clients. She liked the NordVPN client better -- more graphic, easier to understand. The PIA client is a bit more stripped down. But she also liked that, with the AlwaysHome VPN, she didn’t have to install any software -- just connect to its WiFi.</li>\r\n 	<li>Sorting it all out, it you want an easy VPN solution that allows you to use Netflix when you’re overseas, go with NordVPN. If you want the cheapest solution that’s a bit more stripped down and you’re not running Android, then go with PIA. If you want the best Netflix experience from, say, a vacation rental that doesn’t require you to navigate WiFi login pages and you can plan a couple of weeks ahead, try AlwaysHome.</li>\r\n 	<li>Now, for the giveaway. NordVPN has given me a year’s subscription to give away to one lucky TravelCommons listener. Go to the TravelCommons website and check out the top post to enter the raffle. It’ll be open for 10 days from the posting of this episode -- which, if I have my calendar math right, is March 2. Come by the website and enter for a shot to be more cyber-secure for a year. And thanks to the folks at NordVPN for this giveaway.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #127</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/\">ccMixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_127.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #127 — Critiquing My Top 10 Travel Tips; Reviewing VPNs','','inherit','closed','closed','','1723-revision-v1','','','2017-02-20 09:46:37','2017-02-20 14:46:37','',1723,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/02/20/1723-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1731,1,'2017-02-20 10:05:31','2017-02-20 15:05:31','[caption id=\"attachment_1722\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/IMG_0215a.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1722\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/IMG_0215a-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Last generation digital security[/caption]\r\n\r\nAll this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_127.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/303265164\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n<!--more-->\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #127:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, in the midst of my third straight week at home. It is yet another sign of the impending apocalypse. All just can’t be right with the world - the office manager is nervous that I’m in the office for days in a row, my friends are shocked that I’m available during the week for a beer, my wife is tired of cooking dinner for me, and the cat is visibly pissed (in his own kitty way) that I’m taking up space on the couch. But, I am getting current on my doctor and dentist appointments, and I was able to get a haircut in a timely manner. Though these may seem little things, they can be a pain to get done when you’re traveling every week, and weekend appointments are a scarce commodity. Convenient, if not a bit boring.</li>\r\n 	<li>It also means I’ve missed 1 Delta and 2 United system outages and the associated ground-stops and cancellations, as well as getting stranded in last weekend’s East Coast winter storm. Those of you who follow me on Twitter have got to be happy about the lull in bitch tweeting.</li>\r\n 	<li>And I’ve also been around to provide real-time advice and counsel to my wife as she’s been planning our family spring break trip -- this year we’re skipping the Iberian Peninsula and going to Paris. I’m not sure how much she really appreciates my immediate reactions, but…. The house is awash with guidebooks -- except, of course, for Rick Steves. I pulled out the 2016 review copy of DK’s Top 10 Paris, the credenza looks like my wife cleared out the local library, and we have print outs of a bunch of web pages. I dunno,I guess I’m a visual and tactile person. When I’m trying to wrap my head around a bunch of disparate data sources, I still have to go physical -- print it out and spread it out. Or maybe this is just a fancy way to say I’m old.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Javolenus/41932\">Ianiscus</a> by Javolenus (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/\">Attribution (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Wired_Ant</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Just a heads up, I’ll be announcing a new giveaway later on in this episode. And since I can’t figure out how to create MP3 chapter marks in Adobe Audition, you’ll have listen all the way through.</li>\r\n 	<li>Rummaging through the mailbag…\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Dan Gradwohl dropped me a line agreeing with my complaint in the last episode about the small print size on most hotel shampoo and conditioner bottles. And, like me, he like Hyatt Place’s solution -- print a big “1” on the shampoo, a big “2” on the conditioner, and a big “3” on the shower gel. No need then to wear your reading glasses in the shower then. Dan also said that he “really liked” the music in the last episode. I can’t take credit for that. I outsourced the music search to my daughter Claire who was home for Winter Break. Since she received what may be the first positive comment about the music in 12 years, I asked her to to help me with this episode too.</li>\r\n 	<li>Long-time listener Robert Fenerty hit the TravelCommons website to comment on my pay-as-you-go SIM travails -- “Not many people are courageous enough to admit what a time sink it can be to find, purchase and setup a local SIM card. Sometimes it’s easy, the many Heathrow SIM vending machines being a great example. And Austria is a breeze. But outside of western countries, I’ve had to hand over my passport, stand in long lines, and try to explain “no, I need the one with data” to clerks whose language I don’t speak. Once I found out after leaving the store that my SIM was not properly initialized. Please go back to square one. The Verizon Travelpass is a great alternative for those 2-3 day trips. It’s often less expensive than the local SIM and it’s about as painless to enable/disable as you can imagine. Please keep up the good work, the beer tips, and the warm sentiments from the road. Your podcast has become an old friend that I have over for dinner every once in awhile.”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Robert, thanks for that post. What a nice way of putting it -- the podcast becoming an old friend. I haven’t heard it put that way before, but it’s a huge compliment.</li>\r\n 	<li>Looking at SIMs for our Paris trip next month, the new upstart network provider sells their SIMs through vending machines, so I think I’ll skip the Orange phone store and give the new guys a try. I’m not a Verizon phone customer, but many of my Verizon-using friend swear by Travelpass as being dead-simple. AT&amp;T finally matched that offer last month with their International Day Pass -- $10/day and it looks about as simple. An AT&amp;T-using friend who’ll be on an Asian cruise next month plans to use it. And that seems to be a perfect use case -- he’ll be in a different country every day.</li>\r\n 	<li>One of things we’ll be working on before the Paris trip is not to forget anything critical when we leave for the airport. Many years ago, we get out of the cab at ORD’s International Terminal for a family trip to London. I’m pulling the bags out of the trunk ...and there’s one missing. I send my family through to check-in and boarding while I hop back into the cab to run back home. I open the front door, and there’s the forgotten bag in the middle of the hallway. We only live a 25-min drive from ORD and luckily there was no traffic, and I had status on Virgin Atlantic at the time. I made it to the gate just before boarding was called. That memory seared in our brains, we never make that mistake again… until Sept when we were heading over to Scotland. We’re in the cab and my wife asks me “Do you have my passport?” Nope, thought you had it. At least we figured this out before we hit the airport. The driver makes an illegal U-turn across the tollway media and we sprint back home to find the passport sitting on my desk. It was only a 15-min backtrack this time, so we still got to ORD in time to get a sandwich at Tortas Frontera. But it was a wake-up call -- never be complacent about stupidity.</li>\r\n 	<li>We were in San Francisco a few weekends back. Always an interesting time, especially with 80,000 people marching through the center of town on Saturday. We stayed at the Westin St Francis on Union Square -- decided to go old-school for the weekend. It rained most of the weekend, which emptied out the cab rank outside the St Francis, which meant we did more ride-shares and less walking. I have both Uber and Lyft on my phone, so I’d pop them both open and compare wait times and pricing. Even with the rain, the wait times rarely topped 3 min -- which is almost instantaneous in the traffic around Union Square. I was amazed at the number of animated cars swarming the area. Continuing my research from a couple of episodes ago, I’d talk with each driver about how their gig was going. I was surprised at the overwhelming preference for Lyft over Uber. Lyft pays more than Uber, they said. Many said they only take Uber rides when they think they can hit Uber’s incentive bonuses. If not, they tend to Lyft. And they said the Lyft riders tended to be nicer, more considerate. Since I was using both apps, I didn’t quite know what to make of that. Our Sunday morning driver told us he drives solely for Uber; he quit after Uber trialed driverless cars in San Francisco. He said it was just another proof point that Uber doesn’t care about its drivers. We ended up taking mostly Lyft that weekend.</li>\r\n 	<li>This echoed what I’d heard from an Uber and Lyft driver in Charlottesville, VA last month. This guy was a super driver -- he’d done 85,000 miles last year. He also prefered Lyft because they paid more, but said that he gets more rides from Uber. He lives in Charlottesville, but heads over to Richmond to drive when UVa is on break. He was planning to head up to DC for inauguration weekend, figuring the surge pricing would make it worth his while. I’ve never talked to anyone who is working the system as hard as this guy.</li>\r\n 	<li>Back home, telling our son Andrew about all this, he came down firmly on Uber’s side, because Uber can’t cancel a ride. He’s had too many Chicago Lyft drivers cancel on him. He deleted the<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/2017-02-20-08.37.43.png\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1729\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/2017-02-20-08.37.43-169x300.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"169\" height=\"300\" /></a> Lyft app off his phone and is exclusively Uber.</li>\r\n 	<li>Last month, I was back flying one of my usual routes from the ‘90’s -- ORD-DTW -- complete with the original aircraft -- an AA MD-80. That 2-3 cabin configuration and the what-now-seem-like half-height overhead bins. At least it was an original American MD-80, not one of TWA ones they held onto after that merger. The AA ones are actually not a bad plane if you’re toward the front, away from the engines in the back. They seem to have more rows of extra leg room Main Cabin Extra seats than the newer A319s and 320s. At some point during the flight, my row mate looks down at my phone and asks “How are you charging your phone? There aren’t any plugs here”. She was kinda right -- no regular two-prong AC plugs. But I knew from years of flying these planes (I first started flying American in 1985 -- when these MD-80s were in their prime), that down between the seats, I’d find an old cigarette lighter outlet. And I still carry a lighter power adapter for that 10% of the time Hertz sticks me with a beater rental that doesn’t have a USB plug -- or for times like this when I’m flying AA’s beater plane.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/48914\">In Peace (Somewhere Else Mix)</a> by cdk (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/\">Attribution (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Snowflake</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Critiquing my Top 10 Travel Tips</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Every couple of years, I bow to the search engine gods at Google and create a listicle -- an awful mashup word of list and article. They’re kinda click-baity. You see them on places like Mashable -- “Top 10 Ways to Hack Your Morning Routine” or “The 10 most cringeworthy advertising fails of 2015” (I didn’t make these up). But they exist because people search for them. So in December when my last listicle has rolled off the front page of TravelCommons, I create another one titled just like the last one -- “Top 10 Holiday Travel Tips”. And how do they score? When I searched just now for “Top 10 Holiday Travel Tips”, a Google+ posting for my 2013 edition made the first page of results -- albeit the last entry -- and last December’s, the most recent, made the top of the second page. Not too bad…</li>\r\n 	<li>When I write each new edition, I do try to think about what are today’s top 10 rather than just blindly copy-pasting the last post, although there is a good chunk of repetition -- “Fly Non-Stop” and “Skip the Tight Connection” are as valid today as they were 12 years ago when I started this podcast.\r\nThough they might also seem a bit obvious to even a slightly seasoned traveler. So I also have tried to weave in a few, if not Pro Tips, then at least a next level of insight. In 2013, I suggested buying status for the lead adult in the travel party. The rationale went like this -- for $20, you can take your whole family through the status security line and early boarding because I’ve never seen a security screener or gate agent split up a family.<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/2017-02-20-08.37.58.png\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1728\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/2017-02-20-08.37.58-169x300.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"169\" height=\"300\" /></a></li>\r\n 	<li>I’ve also consistently recommended that people use Twitter as an alternate way into customer service, “at addressing” an airline or hotel as a way to jump what might be a long queue in front of a gate agent or front-desk clerk. I don’t think a lot of folks realize the sophistication and focus that many companies put on monitoring social media. My tweet about that American MD-80 generated a quick reply from American -- “We\'re currently working on updating our fleet, Mark…” And while not exactly travel-related, AT&amp;T has now followed up with me twice over Twitter about a cellular service problem I was having last week. I gave this advice to a friend who called me from ORD on Christmas Day. Korean Air wouldn’t let him and his family board their flight to Hanoi because they didn’t have Vietnamese visas -- a new requirement that had just hit a couple of days earlier. They couldn’t find anyone to help them. Between the “at” Tweeting and sheer persistence, they finally found a way to get on the plane.</li>\r\n 	<li>I used to have “bring a portable battery pack” -- like a lipstick charger -- or a small power strip on my list because of the dearth of electrical outlets in airports. One listener recommended stalking cleaning crews to find hidden outlets. But now -- finally -- with long overdue gate area refreshes, airlines are adding accessible outlets -- either in new work areas or power “pylons” sponsored by Samsung or Verizon. So while I still carry a battery pack and often find it useful, it’s fallen out of the Top 10.</li>\r\n 	<li>Back in 2014, I did break it up a bit. Instead of a classic “Top 10” listicle, I offered Airport Etiquette tips -- things like “when traveling with your family, don’t stroll 4 abreast down the concourse” and “the airport Starbucks isn’t like your neighborhood one; keep your coffee order to 3 adjectives or less”. That article is nowhere to be found on the Google search page.</li>\r\n 	<li>What is the top travel pro tip that you’re handing out to your friends? Sending one in will be part of the giveaway I’ll announce in the next topic.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music --<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/35724\">Blue Like Venus</a> by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/\">Attribution (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Admiral Bob</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Reviewing VPNs</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/12/20/podcast-119-digital-security-on-the-road-us-airports-getting-better/\">episode #119</a>, I talked about digital security on the road, and the topic has turned into a persistent thread across episodes, which makes sense given the Chinese water torture-type steady drip, drip, drip of cyber breach announcements. Frequent travelers could be considered a high risk group because, being away from their homes and offices, heavily rely on public networks -- airports, hotels, Starbucks -- to work (and play) in today’s digitized -- what, economy, society, street corner?</li>\r\n 	<li>VPNs -- virtual private networks -- have two main use cases for the frequent traveler -- privacy on public networks and location shifting. VPNs accomplish these by altering the routing of the network traffic in and out of your PC, tablet or smartphone. What you’re putting out onto the Internet is encrypted so eavesdroppers -- like the guy wearing the hoodie in the dark corner of the Starbucks (to truck in stereotypes) running a packet sniffer -- can’t read what you’re browsing or e-mailing. And then the VPN routes your encrypted traffic to that it looks like you’re using the Internet from a different location -- what’s called the VPN “endpoint”</li>\r\n 	<li>So how much privacy do you really need, and is it worth the additional hassle of using a VPN? Like everything, it depends. Being a consultant, you’ll forgive me for giving into my reflex of distilling it down to a 2x2 matrix -- on what you’re doing, and how paranoid you are. In the low paranoid/high privacy need box I put things like on-line banking and filling out your Global Entry app. Lots of personal information there that you don’t want Mr Hoodie to hoover up and post on some dark web hacking site. In the low privacy need/high paranoid box, I’d put reading Mashable listicles or browsing porn site -- embarrassing if someone posted that info on your Facebook page, but they couldn’t drain your bank account.</li>\r\n 	<li>The location shifting use case -- I’m in Beijing but the Internet thinks I’m in Chicago -- only really comes into play for international travelers. Like when I’m in Madrid but wanting to stream the NCAA basketball tournament, or when my daughter in Scotland wants to watch “Friends” reruns (don’t ask me why) which is only on US Netflix. I also use VPNs whenever I’m in Beijing to hit Facebook and Twitter which are blocked by the “Great Firewall of China”.</li>\r\n 	<li>I looked at two highly rated software VPNs -- <a href=\"https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Private Internet Access</a> (PIA) and <a href=\"https://nordvpn.com/\" target=\"_blank\">NordVPN</a> -- and a Kickstarter hardware-based VPN, <a href=\"http://www.homingsystems.com/alwayshome-duo\" target=\"_blank\">AlwaysHome</a>, that I reviewed last fall in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/09/28/podcast-124-craft-beer-hunting-i-hate-rick-steves/\">episode #124</a>.</li>\r\n 	<li>PIA and NordVPN are quick to set up -- go to their website, buy a subscription (promotions change all the time, but when I’m writing this, PIA has discounted their annual subscription to $40 while NordVPN’s is at $79), download, install and run their software (VPN client), pick a VPN endpoint (which country do you want the Internet to think you’re coming from), and off you go. And the next time you access the Internet, you need to remember to start the client and pick an endpoint, unless you set the client to start automatically each time you log in.</li>\r\n 	<li>AlwaysHome, the hardware VPN, takes a bit more planning. You need to buy a pair of USB dongles and a service subscription (right now $180 for the dongles and a year’s service), plug one into your home router, and then take the second with you in your laptop bag.</li>\r\n 	<li>I tested the software VPNs on three platforms -- a Windows 10 PC hardwired into a network, a Samsung tablet running Android 6.0.1 (Marshmallow) on WiFi, and an iPhone 7 running iOS 10.2 on WiFi and AT&amp;T LTE mobile data.</li>\r\n 	<li>I first looked at performance -- how much speed was I giving up for the additional encryption and routing that gives me privacy? The Windows PC had the lowest penalty -- both VPNs cut upload and download speeds by about 6%. They also the same on the iPhone on WiFi, though the download penalty increased to 11%. Don’t know if this is an iOS limitation or something else. On the Samsung Android tablet on WiFi, NordVPNs download was on par with Windows PC -- about 6% on downloads -- while PIA was 25% slower on downloads. This one has to be marked down to PIA’s Android client.</li>\r\n 	<li>The really interesting result was on the iPhone on AT&amp;T’s LTE service. The download penalty on LTE was around 83% for both NordVPN and PIA. Must have something to do with AT&amp;T’s LTE service. And while interesting, it probably has the least practical value. Other than triple-paranoid people, I’m not sure why someone would tack a VPN onto their cellular connection.</li>\r\n 	<li>Accessing US Netflix from abroad is kinda the acid test for location shifting. Netflix, prompted by their content suppliers, has been the most aggressive service in blocking VPN endpoints; blocking people from outside the US streaming content that Netflix has only licenses in the US. I asked my daughter Claire, who’s at University of St Andrews in the UK, to test each VPN with her Netflix “Friends” test. PIA failed; Netflix served up its “blocked” screen. NordVPN let her log into US Netflix, though she said the connection was slow; probably the result of the lousy BT service coming into her flat over a chip shop. AlwaysHome did the best -- no Netflix blocking because it looks like she’s logging in from our house, and the best connection over the BT service because the AlwaysHome hardware lets it do accelerate network traffic in a way that the software VPNs can’t.</li>\r\n 	<li>I also asked Claire for her thoughts on the NordVPN and PIA software clients. She liked the NordVPN client better -- more graphic, easier to understand. The PIA client is a bit more stripped down. But she also liked that, with the AlwaysHome VPN, she didn’t have to install any software -- just connect to its WiFi.</li>\r\n 	<li>Sorting it all out, it you want an easy VPN solution that allows you to use Netflix when you’re overseas, go with NordVPN. If you want the cheapest solution that’s a bit more stripped down and you’re not running Android, then go with PIA. If you want the best Netflix experience from, say, a vacation rental that doesn’t require you to navigate WiFi login pages and you can plan a couple of weeks ahead, try AlwaysHome.</li>\r\n 	<li>Now, for the giveaway. NordVPN has given me a year’s subscription to give away to one lucky TravelCommons listener. Go to the TravelCommons website and check out the top post to enter the raffle. It’ll be open for 10 days from the posting of this episode -- which, if I have my calendar math right, is March 2. Come by the website and enter for a shot to be more cyber-secure for a year. And thanks to the folks at NordVPN for this giveaway.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #127</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/\">ccMixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_127.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #127 — Critiquing My Top 10 Travel Tips; Reviewing VPNs','','inherit','closed','closed','','1723-revision-v1','','','2017-02-20 10:05:31','2017-02-20 15:05:31','',1723,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/02/20/1723-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1732,1,'2017-02-20 10:15:58','2017-02-20 15:15:58','[caption id=\"attachment_1722\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/IMG_0215a.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1722\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/IMG_0215a-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Last generation digital security[/caption]\r\n\r\nIn this episode, I talk again about digital security on the road, especially the use of a VPN. I review three VPN products, including <a href=\"http://nordvpn.com\" target=\"_blank\">NordVPN</a> which is giving away a year\'s subscription to a TravelCommons listener. I dig into the process of generating the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/12/12/top-10-holiday-travel-tips-2/\" target=\"_blank\">Top 10 Holiday Travel Tips</a> listicle I do every couple of year, and follow up on stories from Uber and Lyft drivers. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_127.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/303265164\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n<!--more-->\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #127:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, in the midst of my third straight week at home. It is yet another sign of the impending apocalypse. All just can’t be right with the world - the office manager is nervous that I’m in the office for days in a row, my friends are shocked that I’m available during the week for a beer, my wife is tired of cooking dinner for me, and the cat is visibly pissed (in his own kitty way) that I’m taking up space on the couch. But, I am getting current on my doctor and dentist appointments, and I was able to get a haircut in a timely manner. Though these may seem little things, they can be a pain to get done when you’re traveling every week, and weekend appointments are a scarce commodity. Convenient, if not a bit boring.</li>\r\n 	<li>It also means I’ve missed 1 Delta and 2 United system outages and the associated ground-stops and cancellations, as well as getting stranded in last weekend’s East Coast winter storm. Those of you who follow me on Twitter have got to be happy about the lull in bitch tweeting.</li>\r\n 	<li>And I’ve also been around to provide real-time advice and counsel to my wife as she’s been planning our family spring break trip -- this year we’re skipping the Iberian Peninsula and going to Paris. I’m not sure how much she really appreciates my immediate reactions, but…. The house is awash with guidebooks -- except, of course, for Rick Steves. I pulled out the 2016 review copy of DK’s Top 10 Paris, the credenza looks like my wife cleared out the local library, and we have print outs of a bunch of web pages. I dunno,I guess I’m a visual and tactile person. When I’m trying to wrap my head around a bunch of disparate data sources, I still have to go physical -- print it out and spread it out. Or maybe this is just a fancy way to say I’m old.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Javolenus/41932\">Ianiscus</a> by Javolenus (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/\">Attribution (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Wired_Ant</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Just a heads up, I’ll be announcing a new giveaway later on in this episode. And since I can’t figure out how to create MP3 chapter marks in Adobe Audition, you’ll have listen all the way through.</li>\r\n 	<li>Rummaging through the mailbag…\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Dan Gradwohl dropped me a line agreeing with my complaint in the last episode about the small print size on most hotel shampoo and conditioner bottles. And, like me, he like Hyatt Place’s solution -- print a big “1” on the shampoo, a big “2” on the conditioner, and a big “3” on the shower gel. No need then to wear your reading glasses in the shower then. Dan also said that he “really liked” the music in the last episode. I can’t take credit for that. I outsourced the music search to my daughter Claire who was home for Winter Break. Since she received what may be the first positive comment about the music in 12 years, I asked her to to help me with this episode too.</li>\r\n 	<li>Long-time listener Robert Fenerty hit the TravelCommons website to comment on my pay-as-you-go SIM travails -- “Not many people are courageous enough to admit what a time sink it can be to find, purchase and setup a local SIM card. Sometimes it’s easy, the many Heathrow SIM vending machines being a great example. And Austria is a breeze. But outside of western countries, I’ve had to hand over my passport, stand in long lines, and try to explain “no, I need the one with data” to clerks whose language I don’t speak. Once I found out after leaving the store that my SIM was not properly initialized. Please go back to square one. The Verizon Travelpass is a great alternative for those 2-3 day trips. It’s often less expensive than the local SIM and it’s about as painless to enable/disable as you can imagine. Please keep up the good work, the beer tips, and the warm sentiments from the road. Your podcast has become an old friend that I have over for dinner every once in awhile.”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Robert, thanks for that post. What a nice way of putting it -- the podcast becoming an old friend. I haven’t heard it put that way before, but it’s a huge compliment.</li>\r\n 	<li>Looking at SIMs for our Paris trip next month, the new upstart network provider sells their SIMs through vending machines, so I think I’ll skip the Orange phone store and give the new guys a try. I’m not a Verizon phone customer, but many of my Verizon-using friend swear by Travelpass as being dead-simple. AT&amp;T finally matched that offer last month with their International Day Pass -- $10/day and it looks about as simple. An AT&amp;T-using friend who’ll be on an Asian cruise next month plans to use it. And that seems to be a perfect use case -- he’ll be in a different country every day.</li>\r\n 	<li>One of things we’ll be working on before the Paris trip is not to forget anything critical when we leave for the airport. Many years ago, we get out of the cab at ORD’s International Terminal for a family trip to London. I’m pulling the bags out of the trunk ...and there’s one missing. I send my family through to check-in and boarding while I hop back into the cab to run back home. I open the front door, and there’s the forgotten bag in the middle of the hallway. We only live a 25-min drive from ORD and luckily there was no traffic, and I had status on Virgin Atlantic at the time. I made it to the gate just before boarding was called. That memory seared in our brains, we never make that mistake again… until Sept when we were heading over to Scotland. We’re in the cab and my wife asks me “Do you have my passport?” Nope, thought you had it. At least we figured this out before we hit the airport. The driver makes an illegal U-turn across the tollway media and we sprint back home to find the passport sitting on my desk. It was only a 15-min backtrack this time, so we still got to ORD in time to get a sandwich at Tortas Frontera. But it was a wake-up call -- never be complacent about stupidity.</li>\r\n 	<li>We were in San Francisco a few weekends back. Always an interesting time, especially with 80,000 people marching through the center of town on Saturday. We stayed at the Westin St Francis on Union Square -- decided to go old-school for the weekend. It rained most of the weekend, which emptied out the cab rank outside the St Francis, which meant we did more ride-shares and less walking. I have both Uber and Lyft on my phone, so I’d pop them both open and compare wait times and pricing. Even with the rain, the wait times rarely topped 3 min -- which is almost instantaneous in the traffic around Union Square. I was amazed at the number of animated cars swarming the area. Continuing my research from a couple of episodes ago, I’d talk with each driver about how their gig was going. I was surprised at the overwhelming preference for Lyft over Uber. Lyft pays more than Uber, they said. Many said they only take Uber rides when they think they can hit Uber’s incentive bonuses. If not, they tend to Lyft. And they said the Lyft riders tended to be nicer, more considerate. Since I was using both apps, I didn’t quite know what to make of that. Our Sunday morning driver told us he drives solely for Uber; he quit after Uber trialed driverless cars in San Francisco. He said it was just another proof point that Uber doesn’t care about its drivers. We ended up taking mostly Lyft that weekend.</li>\r\n 	<li>This echoed what I’d heard from an Uber and Lyft driver in Charlottesville, VA last month. This guy was a super driver -- he’d done 85,000 miles last year. He also prefered Lyft because they paid more, but said that he gets more rides from Uber. He lives in Charlottesville, but heads over to Richmond to drive when UVa is on break. He was planning to head up to DC for inauguration weekend, figuring the surge pricing would make it worth his while. I’ve never talked to anyone who is working the system as hard as this guy.</li>\r\n 	<li>Back home, telling our son Andrew about all this, he came down firmly on Uber’s side, because Uber can’t cancel a ride. He’s had too many Chicago Lyft drivers cancel on him. He deleted the<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/2017-02-20-08.37.43.png\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1729\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/2017-02-20-08.37.43-169x300.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"169\" height=\"300\" /></a> Lyft app off his phone and is exclusively Uber.</li>\r\n 	<li>Last month, I was back flying one of my usual routes from the ‘90’s -- ORD-DTW -- complete with the original aircraft -- an AA MD-80. That 2-3 cabin configuration and the what-now-seem-like half-height overhead bins. At least it was an original American MD-80, not one of TWA ones they held onto after that merger. The AA ones are actually not a bad plane if you’re toward the front, away from the engines in the back. They seem to have more rows of extra leg room Main Cabin Extra seats than the newer A319s and 320s. At some point during the flight, my row mate looks down at my phone and asks “How are you charging your phone? There aren’t any plugs here”. She was kinda right -- no regular two-prong AC plugs. But I knew from years of flying these planes (I first started flying American in 1985 -- when these MD-80s were in their prime), that down between the seats, I’d find an old cigarette lighter outlet. And I still carry a lighter power adapter for that 10% of the time Hertz sticks me with a beater rental that doesn’t have a USB plug -- or for times like this when I’m flying AA’s beater plane.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/48914\">In Peace (Somewhere Else Mix)</a> by cdk (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/\">Attribution (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Snowflake</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Critiquing my Top 10 Travel Tips</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Every couple of years, I bow to the search engine gods at Google and create a listicle -- an awful mashup word of list and article. They’re kinda click-baity. You see them on places like Mashable -- “Top 10 Ways to Hack Your Morning Routine” or “The 10 most cringeworthy advertising fails of 2015” (I didn’t make these up). But they exist because people search for them. So in December when my last listicle has rolled off the front page of TravelCommons, I create another one titled just like the last one -- “Top 10 Holiday Travel Tips”. And how do they score? When I searched just now for “Top 10 Holiday Travel Tips”, a Google+ posting for my 2013 edition made the first page of results -- albeit the last entry -- and last December’s, the most recent, made the top of the second page. Not too bad…</li>\r\n 	<li>When I write each new edition, I do try to think about what are today’s top 10 rather than just blindly copy-pasting the last post, although there is a good chunk of repetition -- “Fly Non-Stop” and “Skip the Tight Connection” are as valid today as they were 12 years ago when I started this podcast.\r\nThough they might also seem a bit obvious to even a slightly seasoned traveler. So I also have tried to weave in a few, if not Pro Tips, then at least a next level of insight. In 2013, I suggested buying status for the lead adult in the travel party. The rationale went like this -- for $20, you can take your whole family through the status security line and early boarding because I’ve never seen a security screener or gate agent split up a family.<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/2017-02-20-08.37.58.png\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1728\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/2017-02-20-08.37.58-169x300.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"169\" height=\"300\" /></a></li>\r\n 	<li>I’ve also consistently recommended that people use Twitter as an alternate way into customer service, “at addressing” an airline or hotel as a way to jump what might be a long queue in front of a gate agent or front-desk clerk. I don’t think a lot of folks realize the sophistication and focus that many companies put on monitoring social media. My tweet about that American MD-80 generated a quick reply from American -- “We\'re currently working on updating our fleet, Mark…” And while not exactly travel-related, AT&amp;T has now followed up with me twice over Twitter about a cellular service problem I was having last week. I gave this advice to a friend who called me from ORD on Christmas Day. Korean Air wouldn’t let him and his family board their flight to Hanoi because they didn’t have Vietnamese visas -- a new requirement that had just hit a couple of days earlier. They couldn’t find anyone to help them. Between the “at” Tweeting and sheer persistence, they finally found a way to get on the plane.</li>\r\n 	<li>I used to have “bring a portable battery pack” -- like a lipstick charger -- or a small power strip on my list because of the dearth of electrical outlets in airports. One listener recommended stalking cleaning crews to find hidden outlets. But now -- finally -- with long overdue gate area refreshes, airlines are adding accessible outlets -- either in new work areas or power “pylons” sponsored by Samsung or Verizon. So while I still carry a battery pack and often find it useful, it’s fallen out of the Top 10.</li>\r\n 	<li>Back in 2014, I did break it up a bit. Instead of a classic “Top 10” listicle, I offered Airport Etiquette tips -- things like “when traveling with your family, don’t stroll 4 abreast down the concourse” and “the airport Starbucks isn’t like your neighborhood one; keep your coffee order to 3 adjectives or less”. That article is nowhere to be found on the Google search page.</li>\r\n 	<li>What is the top travel pro tip that you’re handing out to your friends? Sending one in will be part of the giveaway I’ll announce in the next topic.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music --<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/35724\">Blue Like Venus</a> by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/\">Attribution (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Admiral Bob</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Reviewing VPNs</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/12/20/podcast-119-digital-security-on-the-road-us-airports-getting-better/\">episode #119</a>, I talked about digital security on the road, and the topic has turned into a persistent thread across episodes, which makes sense given the Chinese water torture-type steady drip, drip, drip of cyber breach announcements. Frequent travelers could be considered a high risk group because, being away from their homes and offices, heavily rely on public networks -- airports, hotels, Starbucks -- to work (and play) in today’s digitized -- what, economy, society, street corner?</li>\r\n 	<li>VPNs -- virtual private networks -- have two main use cases for the frequent traveler -- privacy on public networks and location shifting. VPNs accomplish these by altering the routing of the network traffic in and out of your PC, tablet or smartphone. What you’re putting out onto the Internet is encrypted so eavesdroppers -- like the guy wearing the hoodie in the dark corner of the Starbucks (to truck in stereotypes) running a packet sniffer -- can’t read what you’re browsing or e-mailing. And then the VPN routes your encrypted traffic to that it looks like you’re using the Internet from a different location -- what’s called the VPN “endpoint”</li>\r\n 	<li>So how much privacy do you really need, and is it worth the additional hassle of using a VPN? Like everything, it depends. Being a consultant, you’ll forgive me for giving into my reflex of distilling it down to a 2x2 matrix -- on what you’re doing, and how paranoid you are. In the low paranoid/high privacy need box I put things like on-line banking and filling out your Global Entry app. Lots of personal information there that you don’t want Mr Hoodie to hoover up and post on some dark web hacking site. In the low privacy need/high paranoid box, I’d put reading Mashable listicles or browsing porn site -- embarrassing if someone posted that info on your Facebook page, but they couldn’t drain your bank account.</li>\r\n 	<li>The location shifting use case -- I’m in Beijing but the Internet thinks I’m in Chicago -- only really comes into play for international travelers. Like when I’m in Madrid but wanting to stream the NCAA basketball tournament, or when my daughter in Scotland wants to watch “Friends” reruns (don’t ask me why) which is only on US Netflix. I also use VPNs whenever I’m in Beijing to hit Facebook and Twitter which are blocked by the “Great Firewall of China”.</li>\r\n 	<li>I looked at two highly rated software VPNs -- <a href=\"https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Private Internet Access</a> (PIA) and <a href=\"https://nordvpn.com/\" target=\"_blank\">NordVPN</a> -- and a Kickstarter hardware-based VPN, <a href=\"http://www.homingsystems.com/alwayshome-duo\" target=\"_blank\">AlwaysHome</a>, that I reviewed last fall in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/09/28/podcast-124-craft-beer-hunting-i-hate-rick-steves/\">episode #124</a>.</li>\r\n 	<li>PIA and NordVPN are quick to set up -- go to their website, buy a subscription (promotions change all the time, but when I’m writing this, PIA has discounted their annual subscription to $40 while NordVPN’s is at $79), download, install and run their software (VPN client), pick a VPN endpoint (which country do you want the Internet to think you’re coming from), and off you go. And the next time you access the Internet, you need to remember to start the client and pick an endpoint, unless you set the client to start automatically each time you log in.</li>\r\n 	<li>AlwaysHome, the hardware VPN, takes a bit more planning. You need to buy a pair of USB dongles and a service subscription (right now $180 for the dongles and a year’s service), plug one into your home router, and then take the second with you in your laptop bag.</li>\r\n 	<li>I tested the software VPNs on three platforms -- a Windows 10 PC hardwired into a network, a Samsung tablet running Android 6.0.1 (Marshmallow) on WiFi, and an iPhone 7 running iOS 10.2 on WiFi and AT&amp;T LTE mobile data.</li>\r\n 	<li>I first looked at performance -- how much speed was I giving up for the additional encryption and routing that gives me privacy? The Windows PC had the lowest penalty -- both VPNs cut upload and download speeds by about 6%. They also the same on the iPhone on WiFi, though the download penalty increased to 11%. Don’t know if this is an iOS limitation or something else. On the Samsung Android tablet on WiFi, NordVPNs download was on par with Windows PC -- about 6% on downloads -- while PIA was 25% slower on downloads. This one has to be marked down to PIA’s Android client.</li>\r\n 	<li>The really interesting result was on the iPhone on AT&amp;T’s LTE service. The download penalty on LTE was around 83% for both NordVPN and PIA. Must have something to do with AT&amp;T’s LTE service. And while interesting, it probably has the least practical value. Other than triple-paranoid people, I’m not sure why someone would tack a VPN onto their cellular connection.</li>\r\n 	<li>Accessing US Netflix from abroad is kinda the acid test for location shifting. Netflix, prompted by their content suppliers, has been the most aggressive service in blocking VPN endpoints; blocking people from outside the US streaming content that Netflix has only licenses in the US. I asked my daughter Claire, who’s at University of St Andrews in the UK, to test each VPN with her Netflix “Friends” test. PIA failed; Netflix served up its “blocked” screen. NordVPN let her log into US Netflix, though she said the connection was slow; probably the result of the lousy BT service coming into her flat over a chip shop. AlwaysHome did the best -- no Netflix blocking because it looks like she’s logging in from our house, and the best connection over the BT service because the AlwaysHome hardware lets it do accelerate network traffic in a way that the software VPNs can’t.</li>\r\n 	<li>I also asked Claire for her thoughts on the NordVPN and PIA software clients. She liked the NordVPN client better -- more graphic, easier to understand. The PIA client is a bit more stripped down. But she also liked that, with the AlwaysHome VPN, she didn’t have to install any software -- just connect to its WiFi.</li>\r\n 	<li>Sorting it all out, it you want an easy VPN solution that allows you to use Netflix when you’re overseas, go with NordVPN. If you want the cheapest solution that’s a bit more stripped down and you’re not running Android, then go with PIA. If you want the best Netflix experience from, say, a vacation rental that doesn’t require you to navigate WiFi login pages and you can plan a couple of weeks ahead, try AlwaysHome.</li>\r\n 	<li>Now, for the giveaway. NordVPN has given me a year’s subscription to give away to one lucky TravelCommons listener. Go to the TravelCommons website and check out the top post to enter the raffle. It’ll be open for 10 days from the posting of this episode -- which, if I have my calendar math right, is March 2. Come by the website and enter for a shot to be more cyber-secure for a year. And thanks to the folks at NordVPN for this giveaway.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #127</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/\">ccMixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_127.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #127 — Critiquing My Top 10 Travel Tips; Reviewing VPNs','','inherit','closed','closed','','1723-revision-v1','','','2017-02-20 10:15:58','2017-02-20 15:15:58','',1723,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/02/20/1723-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1733,1,'2017-02-20 12:17:03','2017-02-20 17:17:03','','logo','','inherit','open','closed','','logo','','','2017-02-20 12:17:03','2017-02-20 17:17:03','',1718,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/logo.png',0,'attachment','image/png',0),
(1734,1,'2017-02-20 12:17:18','2017-02-20 17:17:18','<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/logo.png\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1733\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/logo-300x67.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"67\" /></a>Thanks to the folks at <a href=\"https://nordvpn.com/\" target=\"_blank\">NordVPN</a>, we\'re giving away a 1-year VPN subscription so that one lucky TravelCommons listener can work/play safer on the Internet.\r\n\r\nWe\'re using Rafflecopter to run the giveaway:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>You only have do one of the types of entry listed below, not all of them.</li>\r\n 	<li>Each entry type (follows, blog posts, etc) counts as 1 additional “ticket” except for an iTunes review which counts for 2 \"tickets\"</li>\r\n 	<li>I verify every winner, so if you don’t follow instructions (e.g., when you post a comment you don’t answer the question, you didn\'t actually leave an iTunes review) you will be disqualified.</li>\r\n 	<li>Due to the volume of entries I get, I am unable to verify that entries worked or “went through” properly ahead of time.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\nAnd now for the Terms &amp; Conditions:\r\n\r\n<em>Terms &amp; Conditions: The prizes for this giveaway was provided free of charge by NordVPN. Giveaway ends March 2, 2017 at 11:59 PM Central Time. Winners will be selected at random by Rafflecopter.com and verified by TravelCommons. Winner will have 72 hours to respond before prize is forfeited and a new winner is selected. TravelCommons will not be responsible for a winner\'s inability to activate the prize. No purchase necessary to enter. </em>\r\n\r\n<a id=\"rcwidget_pbj64e00\" class=\"rcptr\" href=\"http://www.rafflecopter.com/rafl/display/865292d01/\" rel=\"nofollow\" data-raflid=\"865292d01\" data-theme=\"classic\" data-template=\"\">a Rafflecopter giveaway</a>\r\n<script src=\"https://widget-prime.rafflecopter.com/launch.js\"></script>','NordVPN 1-Year Subscription Giveaway','','inherit','closed','closed','','1718-revision-v1','','','2017-02-20 12:17:18','2017-02-20 17:17:18','',1718,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/02/20/1718-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1735,1,'2017-02-20 19:06:19','2017-02-21 00:06:19','[caption id=\"attachment_1722\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/IMG_0215a.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1722\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/IMG_0215a-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Last generation digital security[/caption]\r\n\r\nIn this episode, I talk again about digital security on the road, especially the use of a VPN. I review three VPN products, including <a href=\"http://nordvpn.com\" target=\"_blank\">NordVPN</a> which is giving away a year\'s subscription to a TravelCommons listener. I dig into the process of generating the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/12/12/top-10-holiday-travel-tips-2/\" target=\"_blank\">Top 10 Holiday Travel Tips</a> listicle I do every couple of year, and follow up on stories from Uber and Lyft drivers. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_127.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/303265164\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n<!--more-->\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #127:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, in the midst of my third straight week at home. It is yet another sign of the impending apocalypse. All just can’t be right with the world - the office manager is nervous that I’m in the office for days in a row, my friends are shocked that I’m available during the week for a beer, my wife is tired of cooking dinner for me, and the cat is visibly pissed (in his own kitty way) that I’m taking up space on the couch. But, I am getting current on my doctor and dentist appointments, and I was able to get a haircut in a timely manner. Though these may seem little things, they can be a pain to get done when you’re traveling every week, and weekend appointments are a scarce commodity. Convenient, if not a bit boring.</li>\r\n 	<li>It also means I’ve missed 1 Delta and 2 United system outages and the associated ground-stops and cancellations, as well as getting stranded in last weekend’s East Coast winter storm. Those of you who follow me on Twitter have got to be happy about the lull in bitch tweeting.</li>\r\n 	<li>And I’ve also been around to provide real-time advice and counsel to my wife as she’s been planning our family spring break trip -- this year we’re skipping the Iberian Peninsula and going to Paris. I’m not sure how much she really appreciates my immediate reactions, but…. The house is awash with guidebooks -- except, of course, for Rick Steves. I pulled out the 2016 review copy of DK’s Top 10 Paris, the credenza looks like my wife cleared out the local library, and we have print outs of a bunch of web pages. I dunno,I guess I’m a visual and tactile person. When I’m trying to wrap my head around a bunch of disparate data sources, I still have to go physical -- print it out and spread it out. Or maybe this is just a fancy way to say I’m old.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Javolenus/41932\">Ianiscus</a> by Javolenus (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/\">Attribution (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Wired_Ant</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Just a heads up, I’ll be announcing a new giveaway later on in this episode. And since I can’t figure out how to create MP3 chapter marks in Adobe Audition, you’ll have listen all the way through.</li>\r\n 	<li>Rummaging through the mailbag…\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Dan Gradwohl dropped me a line agreeing with my complaint in the last episode about the small print size on most hotel shampoo and conditioner bottles. And, like me, he like Hyatt Place’s solution -- print a big “1” on the shampoo, a big “2” on the conditioner, and a big “3” on the shower gel. No need then to wear your reading glasses in the shower then. Dan also said that he “really liked” the music in the last episode. I can’t take credit for that. I outsourced the music search to my daughter Claire who was home for Winter Break. Since she received what may be the first positive comment about the music in 12 years, I asked her to to help me with this episode too.</li>\r\n 	<li>Long-time listener Robert Fenerty hit the TravelCommons website to comment on my pay-as-you-go SIM travails -- “Not many people are courageous enough to admit what a time sink it can be to find, purchase and setup a local SIM card. Sometimes it’s easy, the many Heathrow SIM vending machines being a great example. And Austria is a breeze. But outside of western countries, I’ve had to hand over my passport, stand in long lines, and try to explain “no, I need the one with data” to clerks whose language I don’t speak. Once I found out after leaving the store that my SIM was not properly initialized. Please go back to square one. The Verizon Travelpass is a great alternative for those 2-3 day trips. It’s often less expensive than the local SIM and it’s about as painless to enable/disable as you can imagine. Please keep up the good work, the beer tips, and the warm sentiments from the road. Your podcast has become an old friend that I have over for dinner every once in awhile.”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Robert, thanks for that post. What a nice way of putting it -- the podcast becoming an old friend. I haven’t heard it put that way before, but it’s a huge compliment.</li>\r\n 	<li>Looking at SIMs for our Paris trip next month, the new upstart network provider sells their SIMs through vending machines, so I think I’ll skip the Orange phone store and give the new guys a try. I’m not a Verizon phone customer, but many of my Verizon-using friend swear by Travelpass as being dead-simple. AT&amp;T finally matched that offer last month with their International Day Pass -- $10/day and it looks about as simple. An AT&amp;T-using friend who’ll be on an Asian cruise next month plans to use it. And that seems to be a perfect use case -- he’ll be in a different country every day.</li>\r\n 	<li>One of things we’ll be working on before the Paris trip is not to forget anything critical when we leave for the airport. Many years ago, we get out of the cab at ORD’s International Terminal for a family trip to London. I’m pulling the bags out of the trunk ...and there’s one missing. I send my family through to check-in and boarding while I hop back into the cab to run back home. I open the front door, and there’s the forgotten bag in the middle of the hallway. We only live a 25-min drive from ORD and luckily there was no traffic, and I had status on Virgin Atlantic at the time. I made it to the gate just before boarding was called. That memory seared in our brains, we never make that mistake again… until Sept when we were heading over to Scotland. We’re in the cab and my wife asks me “Do you have my passport?” Nope, thought you had it. At least we figured this out before we hit the airport. The driver makes an illegal U-turn across the tollway media and we sprint back home to find the passport sitting on my desk. It was only a 15-min backtrack this time, so we still got to ORD in time to get a sandwich at Tortas Frontera. But it was a wake-up call -- never be complacent about stupidity.</li>\r\n 	<li>We were in San Francisco a few weekends back. Always an interesting time, especially with 80,000 people marching through the center of town on Saturday. We stayed at the Westin St Francis on Union Square -- decided to go old-school for the weekend. It rained most of the weekend, which emptied out the cab rank outside the St Francis, which meant we did more ride-shares and less walking. I have both Uber and Lyft on my phone, so I’d pop them both open and compare wait times and pricing. Even with the rain, the wait times rarely topped 3 min -- which is almost instantaneous in the traffic around Union Square. I was amazed at the number of animated cars swarming the area. Continuing my research from a couple of episodes ago, I’d talk with each driver about how their gig was going. I was surprised at the overwhelming preference for Lyft over Uber. Lyft pays more than Uber, they said. Many said they only take Uber rides when they think they can hit Uber’s incentive bonuses. If not, they tend to Lyft. And they said the Lyft riders tended to be nicer, more considerate. Since I was using both apps, I didn’t quite know what to make of that. Our Sunday morning driver told us he drives solely for Lyft; he quit after Uber trialed driverless cars in San Francisco. He said it was just another proof point that Uber doesn’t care about its drivers. We ended up taking mostly Lyft that weekend.</li>\r\n 	<li>This echoed what I’d heard from an Uber and Lyft driver in Charlottesville, VA last month. This guy was a super driver -- he’d done 85,000 miles last year. He also preferred Lyft because they paid more, but said that he gets more rides from Uber. He lives in Charlottesville, but heads over to Richmond to drive when UVa is on break. He was planning to head up to DC for inauguration weekend, figuring the surge pricing would make it worth his while. I’ve never talked to anyone who is working the system as hard as this guy.</li>\r\n 	<li>Back home, telling our son Andrew about all this, he came down firmly on Uber’s side, because Uber can’t cancel a ride. He’s had too many Chicago Lyft drivers cancel on him. He deleted the<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/2017-02-20-08.37.43.png\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1729\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/2017-02-20-08.37.43-169x300.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"169\" height=\"300\" /></a> Lyft app off his phone and is exclusively Uber.</li>\r\n 	<li>Last month, I was back flying one of my usual routes from the ‘90’s -- ORD-DTW -- complete with the original aircraft -- an AA MD-80. That 2-3 cabin configuration and the what-now-seem-like half-height overhead bins. At least it was an original American MD-80, not one of TWA ones they held onto after that merger. The AA ones are actually not a bad plane if you’re toward the front, away from the engines in the back. They seem to have more rows of extra leg room Main Cabin Extra seats than the newer A319s and 320s. At some point during the flight, my row mate looks down at my phone and asks “How are you charging your phone? There aren’t any plugs here”. She was kinda right -- no regular two-prong AC plugs. But I knew from years of flying these planes (I first started flying American in 1985 -- when these MD-80s were in their prime), that down between the seats, I’d find an old cigarette lighter outlet. And I still carry a lighter power adapter for that 10% of the time Hertz sticks me with a beater rental that doesn’t have a USB plug -- or for times like this when I’m flying AA’s beater plane.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/48914\">In Peace (Somewhere Else Mix)</a> by cdk (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/\">Attribution (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Snowflake</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Critiquing my Top 10 Travel Tips</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Every couple of years, I bow to the search engine gods at Google and create a listicle -- an awful mashup word of list and article. They’re kinda click-baity. You see them on places like Mashable -- “Top 10 Ways to Hack Your Morning Routine” or “The 10 most cringeworthy advertising fails of 2015” (I didn’t make these up). But they exist because people search for them. So in December when my last listicle has rolled off the front page of TravelCommons, I create another one titled just like the last one -- “Top 10 Holiday Travel Tips”. And how do they score? When I searched just now for “Top 10 Holiday Travel Tips”, a Google+ posting for my 2013 edition made the first page of results -- albeit the last entry -- and last December’s, the most recent, made the top of the second page. Not too bad…</li>\r\n 	<li>When I write each new edition, I do try to think about what are today’s top 10 rather than just blindly copy-pasting the last post, although there is a good chunk of repetition -- “Fly Non-Stop” and “Skip the Tight Connection” are as valid today as they were 12 years ago when I started this podcast.\r\nThough they might also seem a bit obvious to even a slightly seasoned traveler. So I also have tried to weave in a few, if not Pro Tips, then at least a next level of insight. In 2013, I suggested buying status for the lead adult in the travel party. The rationale went like this -- for $20, you can take your whole family through the status security line and early boarding because I’ve never seen a security screener or gate agent split up a family.<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/2017-02-20-08.37.58.png\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1728\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/2017-02-20-08.37.58-169x300.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"169\" height=\"300\" /></a></li>\r\n 	<li>I’ve also consistently recommended that people use Twitter as an alternate way into customer service, “at addressing” an airline or hotel as a way to jump what might be a long queue in front of a gate agent or front-desk clerk. I don’t think a lot of folks realize the sophistication and focus that many companies put on monitoring social media. My tweet about that American MD-80 generated a quick reply from American -- “We\'re currently working on updating our fleet, Mark…” And while not exactly travel-related, AT&amp;T has now followed up with me twice over Twitter about a cellular service problem I was having last week. I gave this advice to a friend who called me from ORD on Christmas Day. Korean Air wouldn’t let him and his family board their flight to Hanoi because they didn’t have Vietnamese visas -- a new requirement that had just hit a couple of days earlier. They couldn’t find anyone to help them. Between the “at” Tweeting and sheer persistence, they finally found a way to get on the plane.</li>\r\n 	<li>I used to have “bring a portable battery pack” -- like a lipstick charger -- or a small power strip on my list because of the dearth of electrical outlets in airports. One listener recommended stalking cleaning crews to find hidden outlets. But now -- finally -- with long overdue gate area refreshes, airlines are adding accessible outlets -- either in new work areas or power “pylons” sponsored by Samsung or Verizon. So while I still carry a battery pack and often find it useful, it’s fallen out of the Top 10.</li>\r\n 	<li>Back in 2014, I did break it up a bit. Instead of a classic “Top 10” listicle, I offered Airport Etiquette tips -- things like “when traveling with your family, don’t stroll 4 abreast down the concourse” and “the airport Starbucks isn’t like your neighborhood one; keep your coffee order to 3 adjectives or less”. That article is nowhere to be found on the Google search page.</li>\r\n 	<li>What is the top travel pro tip that you’re handing out to your friends? Sending one in will be part of the giveaway I’ll announce in the next topic.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music --<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/35724\">Blue Like Venus</a> by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/\">Attribution (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Admiral Bob</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Reviewing VPNs</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/12/20/podcast-119-digital-security-on-the-road-us-airports-getting-better/\">episode #119</a>, I talked about digital security on the road, and the topic has turned into a persistent thread across episodes, which makes sense given the Chinese water torture-type steady drip, drip, drip of cyber breach announcements. Frequent travelers could be considered a high risk group because, being away from their homes and offices, heavily rely on public networks -- airports, hotels, Starbucks -- to work (and play) in today’s digitized -- what, economy, society, street corner?</li>\r\n 	<li>VPNs -- virtual private networks -- have two main use cases for the frequent traveler -- privacy on public networks and location shifting. VPNs accomplish these by altering the routing of the network traffic in and out of your PC, tablet or smartphone. What you’re putting out onto the Internet is encrypted so eavesdroppers -- like the guy wearing the hoodie in the dark corner of the Starbucks (to truck in stereotypes) running a packet sniffer -- can’t read what you’re browsing or e-mailing. And then the VPN routes your encrypted traffic to that it looks like you’re using the Internet from a different location -- what’s called the VPN “endpoint”</li>\r\n 	<li>So how much privacy do you really need, and is it worth the additional hassle of using a VPN? Like everything, it depends. Being a consultant, you’ll forgive me for giving into my reflex of distilling it down to a 2x2 matrix -- on what you’re doing, and how paranoid you are. In the low paranoid/high privacy need box I put things like on-line banking and filling out your Global Entry app. Lots of personal information there that you don’t want Mr Hoodie to hoover up and post on some dark web hacking site. In the low privacy need/high paranoid box, I’d put reading Mashable listicles or browsing porn site -- embarrassing if someone posted that info on your Facebook page, but they couldn’t drain your bank account.</li>\r\n 	<li>The location shifting use case -- I’m in Beijing but the Internet thinks I’m in Chicago -- only really comes into play for international travelers. Like when I’m in Madrid but wanting to stream the NCAA basketball tournament, or when my daughter in Scotland wants to watch “Friends” reruns (don’t ask me why) which is only on US Netflix. I also use VPNs whenever I’m in Beijing to hit Facebook and Twitter which are blocked by the “Great Firewall of China”.</li>\r\n 	<li>I looked at two highly rated software VPNs -- <a href=\"https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Private Internet Access</a> (PIA) and <a href=\"https://nordvpn.com/\" target=\"_blank\">NordVPN</a> -- and a Kickstarter hardware-based VPN, <a href=\"http://www.homingsystems.com/alwayshome-duo\" target=\"_blank\">AlwaysHome</a>, that I reviewed last fall in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/09/28/podcast-124-craft-beer-hunting-i-hate-rick-steves/\">episode #124</a>.</li>\r\n 	<li>PIA and NordVPN are quick to set up -- go to their website, buy a subscription (promotions change all the time, but when I’m writing this, PIA has discounted their annual subscription to $40 while NordVPN’s is at $79), download, install and run their software (VPN client), pick a VPN endpoint (which country do you want the Internet to think you’re coming from), and off you go. And the next time you access the Internet, you need to remember to start the client and pick an endpoint, unless you set the client to start automatically each time you log in.</li>\r\n 	<li>AlwaysHome, the hardware VPN, takes a bit more planning. You need to buy a pair of USB dongles and a service subscription (right now $180 for the dongles and a year’s service), plug one into your home router, and then take the second with you in your laptop bag.</li>\r\n 	<li>I tested the software VPNs on three platforms -- a Windows 10 PC hardwired into a network, a Samsung tablet running Android 6.0.1 (Marshmallow) on WiFi, and an iPhone 7 running iOS 10.2 on WiFi and AT&amp;T LTE mobile data.</li>\r\n 	<li>I first looked at performance -- how much speed was I giving up for the additional encryption and routing that gives me privacy? The Windows PC had the lowest penalty -- both VPNs cut upload and download speeds by about 6%. They also the same on the iPhone on WiFi, though the download penalty increased to 11%. Don’t know if this is an iOS limitation or something else. On the Samsung Android tablet on WiFi, NordVPNs download was on par with Windows PC -- about 6% on downloads -- while PIA was 25% slower on downloads. This one has to be marked down to PIA’s Android client.</li>\r\n 	<li>The really interesting result was on the iPhone on AT&amp;T’s LTE service. The download penalty on LTE was around 83% for both NordVPN and PIA. Must have something to do with AT&amp;T’s LTE service. And while interesting, it probably has the least practical value. Other than triple-paranoid people, I’m not sure why someone would tack a VPN onto their cellular connection.</li>\r\n 	<li>Accessing US Netflix from abroad is kinda the acid test for location shifting. Netflix, prompted by their content suppliers, has been the most aggressive service in blocking VPN endpoints; blocking people from outside the US streaming content that Netflix has only licenses in the US. I asked my daughter Claire, who’s at University of St Andrews in the UK, to test each VPN with her Netflix “Friends” test. PIA failed; Netflix served up its “blocked” screen. NordVPN let her log into US Netflix, though she said the connection was slow; probably the result of the lousy BT service coming into her flat over a chip shop. AlwaysHome did the best -- no Netflix blocking because it looks like she’s logging in from our house, and the best connection over the BT service because the AlwaysHome hardware lets it do accelerate network traffic in a way that the software VPNs can’t.</li>\r\n 	<li>I also asked Claire for her thoughts on the NordVPN and PIA software clients. She liked the NordVPN client better -- more graphic, easier to understand. The PIA client is a bit more stripped down. But she also liked that, with the AlwaysHome VPN, she didn’t have to install any software -- just connect to its WiFi.</li>\r\n 	<li>Sorting it all out, it you want an easy VPN solution that allows you to use Netflix when you’re overseas, go with NordVPN. If you want the cheapest solution that’s a bit more stripped down and you’re not running Android, then go with PIA. If you want the best Netflix experience from, say, a vacation rental that doesn’t require you to navigate WiFi login pages and you can plan a couple of weeks ahead, try AlwaysHome.</li>\r\n 	<li>Now, for the giveaway. NordVPN has given me a year’s subscription to give away to one lucky TravelCommons listener. Go to the TravelCommons website and check out the top post to enter the raffle. It’ll be open for 10 days from the posting of this episode -- which, if I have my calendar math right, is March 2. Come by the website and enter for a shot to be more cyber-secure for a year. And thanks to the folks at NordVPN for this giveaway.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #127</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/\">ccMixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_127.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #127 — Critiquing My Top 10 Travel Tips; Reviewing VPNs','','inherit','closed','closed','','1723-revision-v1','','','2017-02-20 19:06:19','2017-02-21 00:06:19','',1723,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/02/20/1723-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1736,1,'2017-02-20 20:31:07','2017-02-21 01:31:07','[caption id=\"attachment_1722\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/IMG_0215a.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1722\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/IMG_0215a-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Last generation digital security[/caption]\r\n\r\nIn this episode, I talk again about digital security on the road, especially the use of a VPN. I review three VPN products, including <a href=\"http://nordvpn.com\" target=\"_blank\">NordVPN</a> which is giving away a year\'s subscription to a TravelCommons listener. I dig into the process of generating the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/12/12/top-10-holiday-travel-tips-2/\" target=\"_blank\">Top 10 Holiday Travel Tips</a> listicle I do every couple of year, and follow up on stories from Uber and Lyft drivers. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_127.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/303265164\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n<!--more-->\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #127:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, in the midst of my third straight week at home. It is yet another sign of the impending apocalypse. All just can’t be right with the world - the office manager is nervous that I’m in the office for days in a row, my friends are shocked that I’m available during the week for a beer, my wife is tired of cooking dinner for me, and the cat is visibly pissed (in his own kitty way) that I’m taking up space on the couch. But, I am getting current on my doctor and dentist appointments, and I was able to get a haircut in a timely manner. Though these may seem little things, they can be a pain to get done when you’re traveling every week, and weekend appointments are a scarce commodity. Convenient, if not a bit boring.</li>\r\n 	<li>It also means I’ve missed 1 Delta and 2 United system outages and the associated ground-stops and cancellations, as well as getting stranded in last weekend’s East Coast winter storm. Those of you who follow me on Twitter have got to be happy about the lull in bitch tweeting.</li>\r\n 	<li>And I’ve also been around to provide real-time advice and counsel to my wife as she’s been planning our family spring break trip -- this year we’re skipping the Iberian Peninsula and going to Paris. I’m not sure how much she really appreciates my immediate reactions, but…. The house is awash with guidebooks -- except, of course, for Rick Steves. I pulled out the 2016 review copy of <a href=\"https://www.dk.com/us/9781465440839-top-10-paris/\" target=\"_blank\">DK’s Top 10 Paris</a>, the credenza looks like my wife cleared out the local library, and we have print outs of a bunch of web pages. I dunno,I guess I’m a visual and tactile person. When I’m trying to wrap my head around a bunch of disparate data sources, I still have to go physical -- print it out and spread it out. Or maybe this is just a fancy way to say I’m old.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Javolenus/41932\">Ianiscus</a> by Javolenus (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/\">Attribution (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Wired_Ant</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Just a heads up, I’ll be announcing a new giveaway later on in this episode. And since I can’t figure out how to create MP3 chapter marks in Adobe Audition, you’ll have listen all the way through.</li>\r\n 	<li>Rummaging through the mailbag…\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Dan Gradwohl dropped me a line agreeing with my complaint in the last episode about the small print size on most hotel shampoo and conditioner bottles. And, like me, he like Hyatt Place’s solution -- print a big “1” on the shampoo, a big “2” on the conditioner, and a big “3” on the shower gel. No need then to wear your reading glasses in the shower then. Dan also said that he “really liked” the music in the last episode. I can’t take credit for that. I outsourced the music search to my daughter Claire who was home for Winter Break. Since she received what may be the first positive comment about the music in 12 years, I asked her to to help me with this episode too.</li>\r\n 	<li>Long-time listener Robert Fenerty hit the TravelCommons website to comment on my pay-as-you-go SIM travails -- “Not many people are courageous enough to admit what a time sink it can be to find, purchase and setup a local SIM card. Sometimes it’s easy, the many Heathrow SIM vending machines being a great example. And Austria is a breeze. But outside of western countries, I’ve had to hand over my passport, stand in long lines, and try to explain “no, I need the one with data” to clerks whose language I don’t speak. Once I found out after leaving the store that my SIM was not properly initialized. Please go back to square one. The Verizon Travelpass is a great alternative for those 2-3 day trips. It’s often less expensive than the local SIM and it’s about as painless to enable/disable as you can imagine. Please keep up the good work, the beer tips, and the warm sentiments from the road. Your podcast has become an old friend that I have over for dinner every once in awhile.”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Robert, thanks for that post. What a nice way of putting it -- the podcast becoming an old friend. I haven’t heard it put that way before, but it’s a huge compliment.</li>\r\n 	<li>Looking at SIMs for our Paris trip next month, the new upstart network provider sells their SIMs through vending machines, so I think I’ll skip the Orange phone store and give the new guys a try. I’m not a Verizon phone customer, but many of my Verizon-using friend swear by Travelpass as being dead-simple. AT&amp;T finally matched that offer last month with their International Day Pass -- $10/day and it looks about as simple. An AT&amp;T-using friend who’ll be on an Asian cruise next month plans to use it. And that seems to be a perfect use case -- he’ll be in a different country every day.</li>\r\n 	<li>One of things we’ll be working on before the Paris trip is not to forget anything critical when we leave for the airport. Many years ago, we get out of the cab at ORD’s International Terminal for a family trip to London. I’m pulling the bags out of the trunk ...and there’s one missing. I send my family through to check-in and boarding while I hop back into the cab to run back home. I open the front door, and there’s the forgotten bag in the middle of the hallway. We only live a 25-min drive from ORD and luckily there was no traffic, and I had status on Virgin Atlantic at the time. I made it to the gate just before boarding was called. That memory seared in our brains, we never make that mistake again… until Sept when we were heading over to Scotland. We’re in the cab and my wife asks me “Do you have my passport?” Nope, thought you had it. At least we figured this out before we hit the airport. The driver makes an illegal U-turn across the tollway media and we sprint back home to find the passport sitting on my desk. It was only a 15-min backtrack this time, so we still got to ORD in time to get a sandwich at Tortas Frontera. But it was a wake-up call -- never be complacent about stupidity.</li>\r\n 	<li>We were in San Francisco a few weekends back. Always an interesting time, especially with 80,000 people marching through the center of town on Saturday. We stayed at the Westin St Francis on Union Square -- decided to go old-school for the weekend. It rained most of the weekend, which emptied out the cab rank outside the St Francis, which meant we did more ride-shares and less walking. I have both Uber and Lyft on my phone, so I’d pop them both open and compare wait times and pricing. Even with the rain, the wait times rarely topped 3 min -- which is almost instantaneous in the traffic around Union Square. I was amazed at the number of animated cars swarming the area. Continuing my research from a couple of episodes ago, I’d talk with each driver about how their gig was going. I was surprised at the overwhelming preference for Lyft over Uber. Lyft pays more than Uber, they said. Many said they only take Uber rides when they think they can hit Uber’s incentive bonuses. If not, they tend to Lyft. And they said the Lyft riders tended to be nicer, more considerate. Since I was using both apps, I didn’t quite know what to make of that. Our Sunday morning driver told us he drives solely for Lyft; he quit after Uber trialed driverless cars in San Francisco. He said it was just another proof point that Uber doesn’t care about its drivers. We ended up taking mostly Lyft that weekend.</li>\r\n 	<li>This echoed what I’d heard from an Uber and Lyft driver in Charlottesville, VA last month. This guy was a super driver -- he’d done 85,000 miles last year. He also preferred Lyft because they paid more, but said that he gets more rides from Uber. He lives in Charlottesville, but heads over to Richmond to drive when UVa is on break. He was planning to head up to DC for inauguration weekend, figuring the surge pricing would make it worth his while. I’ve never talked to anyone who is working the system as hard as this guy.</li>\r\n 	<li>Back home, telling our son Andrew about all this, he came down firmly on Uber’s side, because Uber can’t cancel a ride. He’s had too many Chicago Lyft drivers cancel on him. He deleted the<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/2017-02-20-08.37.43.png\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1729\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/2017-02-20-08.37.43-169x300.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"169\" height=\"300\" /></a> Lyft app off his phone and is exclusively Uber.</li>\r\n 	<li>Last month, I was back flying one of my usual routes from the ‘90’s -- ORD-DTW -- complete with the original aircraft -- an AA MD-80. That 2-3 cabin configuration and the what-now-seem-like half-height overhead bins. At least it was an original American MD-80, not one of TWA ones they held onto after that merger. The AA ones are actually not a bad plane if you’re toward the front, away from the engines in the back. They seem to have more rows of extra leg room Main Cabin Extra seats than the newer A319s and 320s. At some point during the flight, my row mate looks down at my phone and asks “How are you charging your phone? There aren’t any plugs here”. She was kinda right -- no regular two-prong AC plugs. But I knew from years of flying these planes (I first started flying American in 1985 -- when these MD-80s were in their prime), that down between the seats, I’d find an old cigarette lighter outlet. And I still carry a lighter power adapter for that 10% of the time Hertz sticks me with a beater rental that doesn’t have a USB plug -- or for times like this when I’m flying AA’s beater plane.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/48914\">In Peace (Somewhere Else Mix)</a> by cdk (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/\">Attribution (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Snowflake</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Critiquing my Top 10 Travel Tips</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Every couple of years, I bow to the search engine gods at Google and create a listicle -- an awful mashup word of list and article. They’re kinda click-baity. You see them on places like Mashable -- “Top 10 Ways to Hack Your Morning Routine” or “The 10 most cringeworthy advertising fails of 2015” (I didn’t make these up). But they exist because people search for them. So in December when my last listicle has rolled off the front page of TravelCommons, I create another one titled just like the last one -- “Top 10 Holiday Travel Tips”. And how do they score? When I searched just now for “Top 10 Holiday Travel Tips”, a Google+ posting for my 2013 edition made the first page of results -- albeit the last entry -- and last December’s, the most recent, made the top of the second page. Not too bad…</li>\r\n 	<li>When I write each new edition, I do try to think about what are today’s top 10 rather than just blindly copy-pasting the last post, although there is a good chunk of repetition -- “Fly Non-Stop” and “Skip the Tight Connection” are as valid today as they were 12 years ago when I started this podcast.\r\nThough they might also seem a bit obvious to even a slightly seasoned traveler. So I also have tried to weave in a few, if not Pro Tips, then at least a next level of insight. In 2013, I suggested buying status for the lead adult in the travel party. The rationale went like this -- for $20, you can take your whole family through the status security line and early boarding because I’ve never seen a security screener or gate agent split up a family.<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/2017-02-20-08.37.58.png\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1728\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/2017-02-20-08.37.58-169x300.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"169\" height=\"300\" /></a></li>\r\n 	<li>I’ve also consistently recommended that people use Twitter as an alternate way into customer service, “at addressing” an airline or hotel as a way to jump what might be a long queue in front of a gate agent or front-desk clerk. I don’t think a lot of folks realize the sophistication and focus that many companies put on monitoring social media. My tweet about that American MD-80 generated a quick reply from American -- “We\'re currently working on updating our fleet, Mark…” And while not exactly travel-related, AT&amp;T has now followed up with me twice over Twitter about a cellular service problem I was having last week. I gave this advice to a friend who called me from ORD on Christmas Day. Korean Air wouldn’t let him and his family board their flight to Hanoi because they didn’t have Vietnamese visas -- a new requirement that had just hit a couple of days earlier. They couldn’t find anyone to help them. Between the “at” Tweeting and sheer persistence, they finally found a way to get on the plane.</li>\r\n 	<li>I used to have “bring a portable battery pack” -- like a lipstick charger -- or a small power strip on my list because of the dearth of electrical outlets in airports. One listener recommended stalking cleaning crews to find hidden outlets. But now -- finally -- with long overdue gate area refreshes, airlines are adding accessible outlets -- either in new work areas or power “pylons” sponsored by Samsung or Verizon. So while I still carry a battery pack and often find it useful, it’s fallen out of the Top 10.</li>\r\n 	<li>Back in 2014, I did break it up a bit. Instead of a classic “Top 10” listicle, I offered Airport Etiquette tips -- things like “when traveling with your family, don’t stroll 4 abreast down the concourse” and “the airport Starbucks isn’t like your neighborhood one; keep your coffee order to 3 adjectives or less”. That article is nowhere to be found on the Google search page.</li>\r\n 	<li>What is the top travel pro tip that you’re handing out to your friends? Sending one in will be part of the giveaway I’ll announce in the next topic.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music --<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/35724\">Blue Like Venus</a> by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/\">Attribution (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Admiral Bob</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Reviewing VPNs</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/12/20/podcast-119-digital-security-on-the-road-us-airports-getting-better/\">episode #119</a>, I talked about digital security on the road, and the topic has turned into a persistent thread across episodes, which makes sense given the Chinese water torture-type steady drip, drip, drip of cyber breach announcements. Frequent travelers could be considered a high risk group because, being away from their homes and offices, heavily rely on public networks -- airports, hotels, Starbucks -- to work (and play) in today’s digitized -- what, economy, society, street corner?</li>\r\n 	<li>VPNs -- virtual private networks -- have two main use cases for the frequent traveler -- privacy on public networks and location shifting. VPNs accomplish these by altering the routing of the network traffic in and out of your PC, tablet or smartphone. What you’re putting out onto the Internet is encrypted so eavesdroppers -- like the guy wearing the hoodie in the dark corner of the Starbucks (to truck in stereotypes) running a packet sniffer -- can’t read what you’re browsing or e-mailing. And then the VPN routes your encrypted traffic to that it looks like you’re using the Internet from a different location -- what’s called the VPN “endpoint”</li>\r\n 	<li>So how much privacy do you really need, and is it worth the additional hassle of using a VPN? Like everything, it depends. Being a consultant, you’ll forgive me for giving into my reflex of distilling it down to a 2x2 matrix -- on what you’re doing, and how paranoid you are. In the low paranoid/high privacy need box I put things like on-line banking and filling out your Global Entry app. Lots of personal information there that you don’t want Mr Hoodie to hoover up and post on some dark web hacking site. In the low privacy need/high paranoid box, I’d put reading Mashable listicles or browsing porn site -- embarrassing if someone posted that info on your Facebook page, but they couldn’t drain your bank account.</li>\r\n 	<li>The location shifting use case -- I’m in Beijing but the Internet thinks I’m in Chicago -- only really comes into play for international travelers. Like when I’m in Madrid but wanting to stream the NCAA basketball tournament, or when my daughter in Scotland wants to watch “Friends” reruns (don’t ask me why) which is only on US Netflix. I also use VPNs whenever I’m in Beijing to hit Facebook and Twitter which are blocked by the “Great Firewall of China”.</li>\r\n 	<li>I looked at two highly rated software VPNs -- <a href=\"https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Private Internet Access</a> (PIA) and <a href=\"https://nordvpn.com/\" target=\"_blank\">NordVPN</a> -- and a Kickstarter hardware-based VPN, <a href=\"http://www.homingsystems.com/alwayshome-duo\" target=\"_blank\">AlwaysHome</a>, that I reviewed last fall in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/09/28/podcast-124-craft-beer-hunting-i-hate-rick-steves/\">episode #124</a>.</li>\r\n 	<li>PIA and NordVPN are quick to set up -- go to their website, buy a subscription (promotions change all the time, but when I’m writing this, PIA has discounted their annual subscription to $40 while NordVPN’s is at $79), download, install and run their software (VPN client), pick a VPN endpoint (which country do you want the Internet to think you’re coming from), and off you go. And the next time you access the Internet, you need to remember to start the client and pick an endpoint, unless you set the client to start automatically each time you log in.</li>\r\n 	<li>AlwaysHome, the hardware VPN, takes a bit more planning. You need to buy a pair of USB dongles and a service subscription (right now $180 for the dongles and a year’s service), plug one into your home router, and then take the second with you in your laptop bag.</li>\r\n 	<li>I tested the software VPNs on three platforms -- a Windows 10 PC hardwired into a network, a Samsung tablet running Android 6.0.1 (Marshmallow) on WiFi, and an iPhone 7 running iOS 10.2 on WiFi and AT&amp;T LTE mobile data.</li>\r\n 	<li>I first looked at performance -- how much speed was I giving up for the additional encryption and routing that gives me privacy? The Windows PC had the lowest penalty -- both VPNs cut upload and download speeds by about 6%. They also the same on the iPhone on WiFi, though the download penalty increased to 11%. Don’t know if this is an iOS limitation or something else. On the Samsung Android tablet on WiFi, NordVPNs download was on par with Windows PC -- about 6% on downloads -- while PIA was 25% slower on downloads. This one has to be marked down to PIA’s Android client.</li>\r\n 	<li>The really interesting result was on the iPhone on AT&amp;T’s LTE service. The download penalty on LTE was around 83% for both NordVPN and PIA. Must have something to do with AT&amp;T’s LTE service. And while interesting, it probably has the least practical value. Other than triple-paranoid people, I’m not sure why someone would tack a VPN onto their cellular connection.</li>\r\n 	<li>Accessing US Netflix from abroad is kinda the acid test for location shifting. Netflix, prompted by their content suppliers, has been the most aggressive service in blocking VPN endpoints; blocking people from outside the US streaming content that Netflix has only licenses in the US. I asked my daughter Claire, who’s at University of St Andrews in the UK, to test each VPN with her Netflix “Friends” test. PIA failed; Netflix served up its “blocked” screen. NordVPN let her log into US Netflix, though she said the connection was slow; probably the result of the lousy BT service coming into her flat over a chip shop. AlwaysHome did the best -- no Netflix blocking because it looks like she’s logging in from our house, and the best connection over the BT service because the AlwaysHome hardware lets it do accelerate network traffic in a way that the software VPNs can’t.</li>\r\n 	<li>I also asked Claire for her thoughts on the NordVPN and PIA software clients. She liked the NordVPN client better -- more graphic, easier to understand. The PIA client is a bit more stripped down. But she also liked that, with the AlwaysHome VPN, she didn’t have to install any software -- just connect to its WiFi.</li>\r\n 	<li>Sorting it all out, it you want an easy VPN solution that allows you to use Netflix when you’re overseas, go with NordVPN. If you want the cheapest solution that’s a bit more stripped down and you’re not running Android, then go with PIA. If you want the best Netflix experience from, say, a vacation rental that doesn’t require you to navigate WiFi login pages and you can plan a couple of weeks ahead, try AlwaysHome.</li>\r\n 	<li><em>NordVPN provided me a free month of their VPN service for testing purposes. I purchased a PIA subscription with my own money. Homing Systems sent me a AlwaysHome Duo free of charge for me to review. I was not paid for this review. The opinions expressed in this episode are my own. </em></li>\r\n 	<li>Now, for the giveaway. NordVPN has given me a year’s subscription to give away to one lucky TravelCommons listener. Go to the TravelCommons website and check out the top post to enter the raffle. It’ll be open for 10 days from the posting of this episode -- which, if I have my calendar math right, is March 2. Come by the website and enter for a shot to be more cyber-secure for a year. And thanks to the folks at NordVPN for this giveaway.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #127</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/\">ccMixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_127.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #127 — Critiquing My Top 10 Travel Tips; Reviewing VPNs','','inherit','closed','closed','','1723-revision-v1','','','2017-02-20 20:31:07','2017-02-21 01:31:07','',1723,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/02/20/1723-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1737,1,'2017-02-20 21:04:20','2017-02-21 02:04:20','[caption id=\"attachment_1616\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"225\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/IMAG0569_1.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1616\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/IMAG0569_1-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"This should be interesting...\" width=\"225\" height=\"300\" /></a> This should be interesting...[/caption]\r\n\r\nAfter two vacations to Europe and some full-contact business travel in-between, I found my way back into the TravelCommons studios. I talk about these recent trips -- the awful timeliness of an <a href=\"http://aa.com\">American Airlines</a>\' regional jet partner, an incredible string of lost luggage, a meaningless baggage strip tease with <a href=\"http://wowair.us\">Wow Air</a>, and being surprised to still find some quirks when using ATMs and credit cards in Europe. And it wouldn\'t be a travel podcast if I didn\'t weigh in on the TSA\'s \"line-mageddon\" -- their <a href=\"http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-tsa-airport-security-lines-met-0517-20160516-story.html\">meltdown at O\'Hare</a>. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_121.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_121.mp3\"]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #121:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you once again from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, after rewriting an episode I’d hoped to get done 3 weeks ago. I’d even posted on the TravelCommons Facebook wall on May 1st about having a new episode next weekend -- a post I’ve since deleted. Seems to be a trend with me. I get started on a new episode, but then it gets elbowed aside by other things -- like work. Maybe if I could just figure out a way to monetize this thing…</li>\r\n 	<li>I had hoped to record this episode halfway between two European trips. As I mentioned in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/12/podcast-120-where-do-guidebooks-fit-in-i-hate-shopping-for-suitcases/\">the last episode</a>, I had a weird Spring Break itinerary in April right before Easter -- Chicago to Reykjavik, Iceland for a 4-day long weekend with my son, and then, as he headed back to Chicago, I flew down to Spain to meet my wife and daughter and some friends for a week in Andalucia. As you can imagine, packing for that trip in a 22-inch carry on required equal amounts of editing and physical force. And then in mid-May, we all headed over to Portugal for a week. The excuse being that we needed to shove all my daughter’s belongings into storage after her first year at university in Scotland, but decided that Portugal would have better food and wine than Scotland. So we headed to Lisbon as a family, and then my wife and daughter are flew back up to St Andrews to do all the packing stuff. I think I came out of this pretty good.</li>\r\n 	<li>Where this episode got shoved off the rails was the week before I left for Portugal. We all know that vacations aren’t free -- that we pay for them the week before we leave and the week after. I was blissfully in denial of this immutable law, thinking that I could write, record, produce, and post this episode then. Cramming two weeks of business travel into 4 days (we were leaving for Lisbon Friday afternoon), that week’s travel itinerary was New Jersey on Monday, Boston on Tuesday, New Orleans on Wednesday, and Atlanta on Thursday. Across four airlines -- United ORD-EWR-BOS, JetBlue BOS-MSY, Southwest MSY-ATL, and American ATL-ORD -- I racked up about 2:30 hrs in flight delays with JetBlue being the only carrier without a black mark.</li>\r\n 	<li>Over April and May, what’s been particularly awful has been my run on one of American Airline’s regional jet partners Skywest. One Monday in April, Skywest lost voice and data connectivity at its Dallas dispatch center causing a ground stop of its planes. After two hours of hanging around the Admirals Club, watching my Newark departure time get pushed out every 30 minutes, I called Amex to get switched over to a real American plane flying into LGA. It added about 45 minutes to my drive after I landed, but at least I got there, especially since Skywest ended up canceling my original Newark flight. The next Monday, I ended up on another Skywest American flight; this time to Charlottesville, VA. Again, another 1+ hr delay. This time it was plane maintenance. Then that Friday, I get a text after lunch -- my flight home was delayed over 2 hours. That was it. Three Skywest flights in a row that couldn’t get close to on-schedule. I called Amex again. Got on a United flight out of Richmond. After an hour-and-a-half drag race down I-64, I landed at ORD, drove home, ate dinner with my wife, and had a couple of glasses of wine before my original Skywest plane finally made it to Chicago.</li>\r\n 	<li>Now I’m not a airline ops expert, but when the women behind the desks in the Admirals Club tell you about SkyWest “They’re not our favorite”, you might think about finding a new partner.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://cyberset.cc/artists2.php?tr_release_id=104\"><em>Heaven</em></a> by <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=A951998E6011FA9B2D22387EB3CAC0B5EB05A36360E7FDA122C8D7A5C140F8DC\" rel=\"nofollow\">Electric Skychurch</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Steve Frick asked in a comment on the TravelCommons website about how I use Evernote. In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/12/podcast-120-where-do-guidebooks-fit-in-i-hate-shopping-for-suitcases/\">the last episode</a>, I talked about how I use it to in my vacation travel planning. I used to store all sorts of things in Evernote — scanned receipts, recipes, etc. Now I mostly just use it to store on-line travel articles using its Web Clipper Chrome extension which I really like. A couple of days ago, I was reading a 36 Hours in Philadelphia article in the NYTimes. I clicked the little elephant head on the Chrome bar and now I have it saved, and synced across all my devices. I know a bunch of folks who are big OneNote users. I’ve been thinking of looking at it, but it’s pretty low on the priority list since I’m good in Evernote’s free tier.</li>\r\n 	<li>Peter Zurich sent in <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEyFH-a-XoQ\">a link</a> to an Onion YouTube video about the Franz Kafka Airport in Prague. Now, the Onion is talented/notorious for writing absurd articles in a straight voice that’s just close enough to the truth to make people accept that it is true. This video is well done. Anyone who read Kafka in high school or college will get a kick out of it, and remind you how close to Kafka-esque absurdity the modern travel experience gets. And it did make me look up the Prague airport -- did they really name it after Kafka? As great as that would be, the airport has been called Václav Havel Airport Prague since 2012 in honor of the Czech’s former president and leader of the Velvet Revolution.</li>\r\n 	<li>Dan Gradwohl dropped me a note regarding the “I Hate Shopping for a Suitcase” topic in the last episode where I talked about my difficulties in replacing my worn backpack.\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>As for the backpack search, Sara feels your pain as she searched long and hard for a new backpack before settling on a Gregory for her upcoming trip on The Camino in northern Spain. Of course, her backpack needs differ from yours! For baggage, she uses the REI Tech Beast and loves it. She\'s had it for 8 years, still going strong with 100,000+ miles per year easily on it. She has not found an overhead bin it does not fit in, from a CR9/170 to an A380/744.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Dan, thanks for that. I just got a couple of REI coupons in the mail. I’ll have to go check out the Tech Beast</li>\r\n 	<li>In that same segment, I talked about my “smart” luggage bag from<a href=\"http://bluesmart.com/\"> Bluesmart</a>. I think I summarized my review as “meh” -- nice enough bag, but all the electronics felt more like a gimmick than something I needed. I’m going to backtrack a bit on that -- specifically with regards to its location finder capability. The bag has a GPS and global SIM card and through a deal with Telefonica transmits its location periodically which you can see on the smartphone app. As I mentioned in the last episode, the Bluesmart is the perfect carry-on size, it’s usually right above me in the plane cabin, so the location finder isn’t that valuable. Except recently, I’ve been flying regional jets a lot where I’ve had to gate check (“valet”) my bag. Normally I don’t worry about this -- I’ve never had an airline lose my bag in the couple of hundred feet between the jetway and the plane. But one on of these recent Skywest flights, it was taking my bag a long time to show up at the gate after arriving. Hmmm, I pulled out my iPhone, hit the Location button on the Bluesmart app, and it showed me that my bag had updated its location a couple of minutes prior and was indeed here. A few minutes later, it showed up in the last tranche of bags heaved up into the jet bridge. Not critical functionality, but it moves up from “meh” to “kinda handy”.</li>\r\n 	<li>Which I guess would’ve been handy but not necessarily useful in the string of bad luggage karma that my daughter and her friends have experienced over the past couple of month. My daughter’s luggage has been lost on 3 out of 4 trips -- Air Brussels lost it between EDI and MAD through BRU, KLM lost it on her return through AMS, and then AirFrance lost it between LIS and EDI through DeGaulle. And a friend of her had Ibera lose a bag between Seville and MAD. How does that happen? You have to really work hard to lose anything in an airport the size of Seville. And it’s not that my daughter wanted to check her bag. She wanted to carry on, But she has this short light blue roller bag that seems to pull gate agent eyes toward it. I gotta get her something more nondescript, like a black hardshell roller.</li>\r\n 	<li>But the thing that will catch you in Europe is that carry-on bags often have a weight limit as well as a size limit. Checking in for my <a href=\"http://wowair.us/\">Wow Air</a> flight from Reykjavik to London, I arrived 2 hrs before check in to see what appeared to be a stationary check in line of a couple of hundred people. Reykjavik is Wow’s hub and, near as I could see, they have 4 agents checking people in with luggage. I hadn’t wanted to check my luggage since I had a weird connection in London en route to Madrid -- no interlining between Wow and Ibera, so I would have to claim luggage in Gatwick, pass through Customs, and then recheck the bag with Iberia. And checking in with carry on was a separate and much shorter line. My bag fit -- snuggly -- in the sizer, so I figured I was good to go. No so fast. Wow also has a 7kg/15 lbs weight limit for carryons! Not even Spirit Airlines pulls that stunt. So I take my bag off the scale, pull some clothes out, zip it back up, and put it back on the scale. Not enough, the agent says. I do this 3 or 4 more times. The agent finally takes pity -- or gets tired of me -- and gives me the approval tag to put on my bag (saying “You shall pass” -- Wow Air definitely pushes the “we’re quirky” image). I walk about 10 feet with my tagged bag and armful of clothes, open my bag and put my clothes back in. When I got on the plane, a brand new Airbus A321, my carry on fit perfectly in the overhead bin, just like it does for every other Airbus A321, A320, and A319 I fly in the US and Europe. So I’m not quite sure what the Wow agent and I accomplished with that baggage strip tease, but I got what I wanted -- my bag right above me rather than trundling around Keflavik airport for the next couple of days.</li>\r\n 	<li>In the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/12/20/podcast-119-digital-security-on-the-road-us-airports-getting-better/\">last</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/12/podcast-120-where-do-guidebooks-fit-in-i-hate-shopping-for-suitcases/\">couple </a>of episodes, I’ve talked about the <a href=\"https://revolut.com/\">Revolut</a> card which is a Mastercard pre-paid debit card with some very nice foreign exchange functionality. I loved this card when it first came out -- first when I was traveling in the UK and then cheaply transfer money to my daughter studying in Scotland. Then I went very cold when they blew up the “cheaply” component , when they added a 3% fee when you added money/”topped up” your Revolut account using a US debit card. This episode, I’ve warmed up a bit. First, I discovered a way to bypass that 3% debit charge --I topped up my account in Euros with my US debit card. This avoids the 3% charge from Revolut, though the app does note that you’re not using the right currency with your card and asks you if you really mean to do this. My bank charges me less than 1% for the conversion, and though the exchange rate isn’t as good as Revolut’s, it’s not bad enough to cost-justify the 3% charge that USD top-ups attract. So, we’re back to a reasonably priced conversion -- in a roundabout way.</li>\r\n 	<li>Which is good because, for some reason, my US ATM card never worked the whole time I was in Iceland. And I could never figure out why. I traded notes with my bank. They weren’t denying anything; they weren’t ever seeing the transaction show up at their end. I dunno, maybe it’s some residual wonkiness left over from their banking meltdown. I can’t remember the last time I had problems like that. Which, before I left for Iceland, made me wonder if I still needed to carry a wad of backup USD with me on this trip -- given how ubiquitous and seamless ATMs are nowadays. I still didn’t need the Jacksons though because my Revolut card had no problem pulling krona from any ATM. In Portugal, I did hit a couple of different quirks. First, the train and Lisbon subway ticket machines don’t accept pre-paid debit cards which left me scrambling for exact change a surprising number of times. Second, a number of shops only accepted Visa cards, which blocked out Revolut’s MasterCard-based card. I used to see this more often in the past -- shops only accepted cards on one network -- Visa or MasterCard, and often didn’t take American Express -- which has led me to always carry one of each card, but I thought the need for that backup had also faded. So I guess I’ll keep carrying a fist full of credit cards and USD for at least a couple more years.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Rocky Road</em> by <a href=\"http://www.kcentricity.com/\">KCentric</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>TSA Lines</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>For much of March and April, I’d been traveling in and out of Newark pretty much every week which, I have to say, if you’re using Terminal A, is the worst airport in the country. Now, I know that Terminal B in LaGuardia gives it a good run with the ceiling tarps drained by garden hoses into trash cans in the middle of the terminal, but the TSA security set up in Newark Terminal A beats that. They’ve split the corridor, the hallway down to gates in two -- the right side has the TSA stations, the left side the line for passengers waiting to be screened and the walkway for exiting passengers. The screening line is usually a bit of a cluster -- you can never quite tell which screening station you’re waiting for -- maybe #3 or should I scoot around to get in the line for #4. The really special feature of this configuration -- what wins it the prize -- is that you often have to wait in line to leave the terminal. Yup, more than a few times there’s a TSA agent holding up a line of departing passengers because of some confusion in the screening lines. It’s just awful.</li>\r\n 	<li>I just missed the TSA’s line-mageddon in O’Hare (I flew out the Friday before) where 450 American Airlines passengers got to experience Camp O’Hare cots after missing their flights because of 2-3 hour long TSA screening lines. But you could see it coming. My wife had spend 45 minutes in line in March, and the Monday morning rush hour had become a jumble of lines extending the length of the concourse. With summer travel volumes starting to build, it was a matter of when, not if, the whole thing imploded. And if I could tell this from my weekly flight out of ORD, you know the TSA folks on the ground knew it and were dreading it. So why didn’t they get in front of this instead of waiting until after the meltdown and the screaming headlines to replace management and add staff.</li>\r\n 	<li>Wading through recriminations about incompetence, baggage fees, gross misforecasting of PreCheck sign-ups, and the general <a href=\"http://www.travelandleisure.com/travel-tips/travel-warnings/tsa-blames-passengers\">cluelessness of infrequent fliers</a>, I think a couple of economists get to the real answer in an <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/737290917220995075\">article</a> in Sunday’s New York Times -- “the TSA has been acting as if there were no cost to tying people up for hours in security lines. In effect, all that time on line is “free” to the T.S.A.” “This glaring omission creates perverse incentives for government agencies. Cutting staff improves an agency’s bottom line, while wasting citizens’ time has little material consequence for it aside from expressions of annoyance and outrage in tweets and (newspaper) articles”</li>\r\n 	<li>I think that pretty much nails it. I retweeted a <a href=\"http://qz.com/659461/tsa-is-our-no-1-problem-right-now-long-security-lines-are-frustrating-us-airlines-too/\">link </a>to a Quartz article with a pretty self-explanatory graph. Air traveller volume has increased more than 10% over the past 12 months while the number of TSA screeners has decreased by more than that. Everyone knew this train wreck was coming, but there was no incentive to fix it -- until the wreck happened and the volume of complaints and outrage became impossible to ignore.</li>\r\n 	<li>In the immediate term, the spectacle of those 450 filled cots at ORD spurred some good action -- Congress let the TSA move some money around to hire more personnel, the TSA head of security got sacked, lines at ORD have shrunk, and a lot more people are ponying up the $85 for PreCheck (which is causing a whole other set of lines that I’m not going into).\r\nIn the short to medium term, maybe some new technology will help -- automating checkpoints like they do in London Heathrow, posting real-time wait times so travelers can “self-balance” security lines.</li>\r\n 	<li>But not until the TSA explicitly considers the value of travelers time will we get to some semblance of realistic balance between the cost and risk of travel.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #121</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_121.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #121 — TSA Lines, My Luggage is Where?','','inherit','closed','closed','','1615-revision-v1','','','2017-02-20 21:04:20','2017-02-21 02:04:20','',1615,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/02/20/1615-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1738,1,'2017-02-20 21:16:05','2017-02-21 02:16:05','[caption id=\"attachment_1722\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/IMG_0215a.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1722\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/IMG_0215a-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Last generation digital security[/caption]\r\n\r\nIn this episode, I talk again about digital security on the road, especially the use of a VPN. I review three VPN products, including <a href=\"http://nordvpn.com\" target=\"_blank\">NordVPN</a> which is giving away a year\'s subscription to a TravelCommons listener. I dig into the process of generating the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/12/12/top-10-holiday-travel-tips-2/\" target=\"_blank\">Top 10 Holiday Travel Tips</a> listicle I do every couple of year, and follow up on stories from Uber and Lyft drivers. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_127.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_127.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #127:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, in the midst of my third straight week at home. It is yet another sign of the impending apocalypse. All just can’t be right with the world - the office manager is nervous that I’m in the office for days in a row, my friends are shocked that I’m available during the week for a beer, my wife is tired of cooking dinner for me, and the cat is visibly pissed (in his own kitty way) that I’m taking up space on the couch. But, I am getting current on my doctor and dentist appointments, and I was able to get a haircut in a timely manner. Though these may seem little things, they can be a pain to get done when you’re traveling every week, and weekend appointments are a scarce commodity. Convenient, if not a bit boring.</li>\r\n 	<li>It also means I’ve missed 1 Delta and 2 United system outages and the associated ground-stops and cancellations, as well as getting stranded in last weekend’s East Coast winter storm. Those of you who follow me on Twitter have got to be happy about the lull in bitch tweeting.</li>\r\n 	<li>And I’ve also been around to provide real-time advice and counsel to my wife as she’s been planning our family spring break trip -- this year we’re skipping the Iberian Peninsula and going to Paris. I’m not sure how much she really appreciates my immediate reactions, but…. The house is awash with guidebooks -- except, of course, for Rick Steves. I pulled out the 2016 review copy of <a href=\"https://www.dk.com/us/9781465440839-top-10-paris/\" target=\"_blank\">DK’s Top 10 Paris</a>, the credenza looks like my wife cleared out the local library, and we have print outs of a bunch of web pages. I dunno,I guess I’m a visual and tactile person. When I’m trying to wrap my head around a bunch of disparate data sources, I still have to go physical -- print it out and spread it out. Or maybe this is just a fancy way to say I’m old.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Javolenus/41932\">Ianiscus</a> by Javolenus (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/\">Attribution (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Wired_Ant</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Just a heads up, I’ll be announcing a new giveaway later on in this episode. And since I can’t figure out how to create MP3 chapter marks in Adobe Audition, you’ll have listen all the way through.</li>\r\n 	<li>Rummaging through the mailbag…\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Dan Gradwohl dropped me a line agreeing with my complaint in the last episode about the small print size on most hotel shampoo and conditioner bottles. And, like me, he like Hyatt Place’s solution -- print a big “1” on the shampoo, a big “2” on the conditioner, and a big “3” on the shower gel. No need then to wear your reading glasses in the shower then. Dan also said that he “really liked” the music in the last episode. I can’t take credit for that. I outsourced the music search to my daughter Claire who was home for Winter Break. Since she received what may be the first positive comment about the music in 12 years, I asked her to to help me with this episode too.</li>\r\n 	<li>Long-time listener Robert Fenerty hit the TravelCommons website to comment on my pay-as-you-go SIM travails -- “Not many people are courageous enough to admit what a time sink it can be to find, purchase and setup a local SIM card. Sometimes it’s easy, the many Heathrow SIM vending machines being a great example. And Austria is a breeze. But outside of western countries, I’ve had to hand over my passport, stand in long lines, and try to explain “no, I need the one with data” to clerks whose language I don’t speak. Once I found out after leaving the store that my SIM was not properly initialized. Please go back to square one. The Verizon Travelpass is a great alternative for those 2-3 day trips. It’s often less expensive than the local SIM and it’s about as painless to enable/disable as you can imagine. Please keep up the good work, the beer tips, and the warm sentiments from the road. Your podcast has become an old friend that I have over for dinner every once in awhile.”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Robert, thanks for that post. What a nice way of putting it -- the podcast becoming an old friend. I haven’t heard it put that way before, but it’s a huge compliment.</li>\r\n 	<li>Looking at SIMs for our Paris trip next month, the new upstart network provider sells their SIMs through vending machines, so I think I’ll skip the Orange phone store and give the new guys a try. I’m not a Verizon phone customer, but many of my Verizon-using friend swear by Travelpass as being dead-simple. AT&amp;T finally matched that offer last month with their International Day Pass -- $10/day and it looks about as simple. An AT&amp;T-using friend who’ll be on an Asian cruise next month plans to use it. And that seems to be a perfect use case -- he’ll be in a different country every day.</li>\r\n 	<li>One of things we’ll be working on before the Paris trip is not to forget anything critical when we leave for the airport. Many years ago, we get out of the cab at ORD’s International Terminal for a family trip to London. I’m pulling the bags out of the trunk ...and there’s one missing. I send my family through to check-in and boarding while I hop back into the cab to run back home. I open the front door, and there’s the forgotten bag in the middle of the hallway. We only live a 25-min drive from ORD and luckily there was no traffic, and I had status on Virgin Atlantic at the time. I made it to the gate just before boarding was called. That memory seared in our brains, we never make that mistake again… until Sept when we were heading over to Scotland. We’re in the cab and my wife asks me “Do you have my passport?” Nope, thought you had it. At least we figured this out before we hit the airport. The driver makes an illegal U-turn across the tollway media and we sprint back home to find the passport sitting on my desk. It was only a 15-min backtrack this time, so we still got to ORD in time to get a sandwich at Tortas Frontera. But it was a wake-up call -- never be complacent about stupidity.</li>\r\n 	<li>We were in San Francisco a few weekends back. Always an interesting time, especially with 80,000 people marching through the center of town on Saturday. We stayed at the Westin St Francis on Union Square -- decided to go old-school for the weekend. It rained most of the weekend, which emptied out the cab rank outside the St Francis, which meant we did more ride-shares and less walking. I have both Uber and Lyft on my phone, so I’d pop them both open and compare wait times and pricing. Even with the rain, the wait times rarely topped 3 min -- which is almost instantaneous in the traffic around Union Square. I was amazed at the number of animated cars swarming the area. Continuing my research from a couple of episodes ago, I’d talk with each driver about how their gig was going. I was surprised at the overwhelming preference for Lyft over Uber. Lyft pays more than Uber, they said. Many said they only take Uber rides when they think they can hit Uber’s incentive bonuses. If not, they tend to Lyft. And they said the Lyft riders tended to be nicer, more considerate. Since I was using both apps, I didn’t quite know what to make of that. Our Sunday morning driver told us he drives solely for Lyft; he quit after Uber trialed driverless cars in San Francisco. He said it was just another proof point that Uber doesn’t care about its drivers. We ended up taking mostly Lyft that weekend.</li>\r\n 	<li>This echoed what I’d heard from an Uber and Lyft driver in Charlottesville, VA last month. This guy was a super driver -- he’d done 85,000 miles last year. He also preferred Lyft because they paid more, but said that he gets more rides from Uber. He lives in Charlottesville, but heads over to Richmond to drive when UVa is on break. He was planning to head up to DC for inauguration weekend, figuring the surge pricing would make it worth his while. I’ve never talked to anyone who is working the system as hard as this guy.</li>\r\n 	<li>Back home, telling our son Andrew about all this, he came down firmly on Uber’s side, because Uber can’t cancel a ride. He’s had too many Chicago Lyft drivers cancel on him. He deleted the<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/2017-02-20-08.37.43.png\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1729\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/2017-02-20-08.37.43-169x300.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"169\" height=\"300\" /></a> Lyft app off his phone and is exclusively Uber.</li>\r\n 	<li>Last month, I was back flying one of my usual routes from the ‘90’s -- ORD-DTW -- complete with the original aircraft -- an AA MD-80. That 2-3 cabin configuration and the what-now-seem-like half-height overhead bins. At least it was an original American MD-80, not one of TWA ones they held onto after that merger. The AA ones are actually not a bad plane if you’re toward the front, away from the engines in the back. They seem to have more rows of extra leg room Main Cabin Extra seats than the newer A319s and 320s. At some point during the flight, my row mate looks down at my phone and asks “How are you charging your phone? There aren’t any plugs here”. She was kinda right -- no regular two-prong AC plugs. But I knew from years of flying these planes (I first started flying American in 1985 -- when these MD-80s were in their prime), that down between the seats, I’d find an old cigarette lighter outlet. And I still carry a lighter power adapter for that 10% of the time Hertz sticks me with a beater rental that doesn’t have a USB plug -- or for times like this when I’m flying AA’s beater plane.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/48914\">In Peace (Somewhere Else Mix)</a> by cdk (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/\">Attribution (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Snowflake</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Critiquing my Top 10 Travel Tips</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Every couple of years, I bow to the search engine gods at Google and create a listicle -- an awful mashup word of list and article. They’re kinda click-baity. You see them on places like Mashable -- “Top 10 Ways to Hack Your Morning Routine” or “The 10 most cringeworthy advertising fails of 2015” (I didn’t make these up). But they exist because people search for them. So in December when my last listicle has rolled off the front page of TravelCommons, I create another one titled just like the last one -- “Top 10 Holiday Travel Tips”. And how do they score? When I searched just now for “Top 10 Holiday Travel Tips”, a Google+ posting for my 2013 edition made the first page of results -- albeit the last entry -- and last December’s, the most recent, made the top of the second page. Not too bad…</li>\r\n 	<li>When I write each new edition, I do try to think about what are today’s top 10 rather than just blindly copy-pasting the last post, although there is a good chunk of repetition -- “Fly Non-Stop” and “Skip the Tight Connection” are as valid today as they were 12 years ago when I started this podcast.\r\nThough they might also seem a bit obvious to even a slightly seasoned traveler. So I also have tried to weave in a few, if not Pro Tips, then at least a next level of insight. In 2013, I suggested buying status for the lead adult in the travel party. The rationale went like this -- for $20, you can take your whole family through the status security line and early boarding because I’ve never seen a security screener or gate agent split up a family.<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/2017-02-20-08.37.58.png\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1728\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/2017-02-20-08.37.58-169x300.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"169\" height=\"300\" /></a></li>\r\n 	<li>I’ve also consistently recommended that people use Twitter as an alternate way into customer service, “at addressing” an airline or hotel as a way to jump what might be a long queue in front of a gate agent or front-desk clerk. I don’t think a lot of folks realize the sophistication and focus that many companies put on monitoring social media. My tweet about that American MD-80 generated a quick reply from American -- “We\'re currently working on updating our fleet, Mark…” And while not exactly travel-related, AT&amp;T has now followed up with me twice over Twitter about a cellular service problem I was having last week. I gave this advice to a friend who called me from ORD on Christmas Day. Korean Air wouldn’t let him and his family board their flight to Hanoi because they didn’t have Vietnamese visas -- a new requirement that had just hit a couple of days earlier. They couldn’t find anyone to help them. Between the “at” Tweeting and sheer persistence, they finally found a way to get on the plane.</li>\r\n 	<li>I used to have “bring a portable battery pack” -- like a lipstick charger -- or a small power strip on my list because of the dearth of electrical outlets in airports. One listener recommended stalking cleaning crews to find hidden outlets. But now -- finally -- with long overdue gate area refreshes, airlines are adding accessible outlets -- either in new work areas or power “pylons” sponsored by Samsung or Verizon. So while I still carry a battery pack and often find it useful, it’s fallen out of the Top 10.</li>\r\n 	<li>Back in 2014, I did break it up a bit. Instead of a classic “Top 10” listicle, I offered Airport Etiquette tips -- things like “when traveling with your family, don’t stroll 4 abreast down the concourse” and “the airport Starbucks isn’t like your neighborhood one; keep your coffee order to 3 adjectives or less”. That article is nowhere to be found on the Google search page.</li>\r\n 	<li>What is the top travel pro tip that you’re handing out to your friends? Sending one in will be part of the giveaway I’ll announce in the next topic.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music --<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/35724\">Blue Like Venus</a> by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/\">Attribution (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Admiral Bob</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Reviewing VPNs</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/12/20/podcast-119-digital-security-on-the-road-us-airports-getting-better/\">episode #119</a>, I talked about digital security on the road, and the topic has turned into a persistent thread across episodes, which makes sense given the Chinese water torture-type steady drip, drip, drip of cyber breach announcements. Frequent travelers could be considered a high risk group because, being away from their homes and offices, heavily rely on public networks -- airports, hotels, Starbucks -- to work (and play) in today’s digitized -- what, economy, society, street corner?</li>\r\n 	<li>VPNs -- virtual private networks -- have two main use cases for the frequent traveler -- privacy on public networks and location shifting. VPNs accomplish these by altering the routing of the network traffic in and out of your PC, tablet or smartphone. What you’re putting out onto the Internet is encrypted so eavesdroppers -- like the guy wearing the hoodie in the dark corner of the Starbucks (to truck in stereotypes) running a packet sniffer -- can’t read what you’re browsing or e-mailing. And then the VPN routes your encrypted traffic to that it looks like you’re using the Internet from a different location -- what’s called the VPN “endpoint”</li>\r\n 	<li>So how much privacy do you really need, and is it worth the additional hassle of using a VPN? Like everything, it depends. Being a consultant, you’ll forgive me for giving into my reflex of distilling it down to a 2x2 matrix -- on what you’re doing, and how paranoid you are. In the low paranoid/high privacy need box I put things like on-line banking and filling out your Global Entry app. Lots of personal information there that you don’t want Mr Hoodie to hoover up and post on some dark web hacking site. In the low privacy need/high paranoid box, I’d put reading Mashable listicles or browsing porn site -- embarrassing if someone posted that info on your Facebook page, but they couldn’t drain your bank account.</li>\r\n 	<li>The location shifting use case -- I’m in Beijing but the Internet thinks I’m in Chicago -- only really comes into play for international travelers. Like when I’m in Madrid but wanting to stream the NCAA basketball tournament, or when my daughter in Scotland wants to watch “Friends” reruns (don’t ask me why) which is only on US Netflix. I also use VPNs whenever I’m in Beijing to hit Facebook and Twitter which are blocked by the “Great Firewall of China”.</li>\r\n 	<li>I looked at two highly rated software VPNs -- <a href=\"https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Private Internet Access</a> (PIA) and <a href=\"https://nordvpn.com/\" target=\"_blank\">NordVPN</a> -- and a Kickstarter hardware-based VPN, <a href=\"http://www.homingsystems.com/alwayshome-duo\" target=\"_blank\">AlwaysHome</a>, that I reviewed last fall in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/09/28/podcast-124-craft-beer-hunting-i-hate-rick-steves/\">episode #124</a>.</li>\r\n 	<li>PIA and NordVPN are quick to set up -- go to their website, buy a subscription (promotions change all the time, but when I’m writing this, PIA has discounted their annual subscription to $40 while NordVPN’s is at $79), download, install and run their software (VPN client), pick a VPN endpoint (which country do you want the Internet to think you’re coming from), and off you go. And the next time you access the Internet, you need to remember to start the client and pick an endpoint, unless you set the client to start automatically each time you log in.</li>\r\n 	<li>AlwaysHome, the hardware VPN, takes a bit more planning. You need to buy a pair of USB dongles and a service subscription (right now $180 for the dongles and a year’s service), plug one into your home router, and then take the second with you in your laptop bag.</li>\r\n 	<li>I tested the software VPNs on three platforms -- a Windows 10 PC hardwired into a network, a Samsung tablet running Android 6.0.1 (Marshmallow) on WiFi, and an iPhone 7 running iOS 10.2 on WiFi and AT&amp;T LTE mobile data.</li>\r\n 	<li>I first looked at performance -- how much speed was I giving up for the additional encryption and routing that gives me privacy? The Windows PC had the lowest penalty -- both VPNs cut upload and download speeds by about 6%. They also the same on the iPhone on WiFi, though the download penalty increased to 11%. Don’t know if this is an iOS limitation or something else. On the Samsung Android tablet on WiFi, NordVPNs download was on par with Windows PC -- about 6% on downloads -- while PIA was 25% slower on downloads. This one has to be marked down to PIA’s Android client.</li>\r\n 	<li>The really interesting result was on the iPhone on AT&amp;T’s LTE service. The download penalty on LTE was around 83% for both NordVPN and PIA. Must have something to do with AT&amp;T’s LTE service. And while interesting, it probably has the least practical value. Other than triple-paranoid people, I’m not sure why someone would tack a VPN onto their cellular connection.</li>\r\n 	<li>Accessing US Netflix from abroad is kinda the acid test for location shifting. Netflix, prompted by their content suppliers, has been the most aggressive service in blocking VPN endpoints; blocking people from outside the US streaming content that Netflix has only licenses in the US. I asked my daughter Claire, who’s at University of St Andrews in the UK, to test each VPN with her Netflix “Friends” test. PIA failed; Netflix served up its “blocked” screen. NordVPN let her log into US Netflix, though she said the connection was slow; probably the result of the lousy BT service coming into her flat over a chip shop. AlwaysHome did the best -- no Netflix blocking because it looks like she’s logging in from our house, and the best connection over the BT service because the AlwaysHome hardware lets it do accelerate network traffic in a way that the software VPNs can’t.</li>\r\n 	<li>I also asked Claire for her thoughts on the NordVPN and PIA software clients. She liked the NordVPN client better -- more graphic, easier to understand. The PIA client is a bit more stripped down. But she also liked that, with the AlwaysHome VPN, she didn’t have to install any software -- just connect to its WiFi.</li>\r\n 	<li>Sorting it all out, it you want an easy VPN solution that allows you to use Netflix when you’re overseas, go with NordVPN. If you want the cheapest solution that’s a bit more stripped down and you’re not running Android, then go with PIA. If you want the best Netflix experience from, say, a vacation rental that doesn’t require you to navigate WiFi login pages and you can plan a couple of weeks ahead, try AlwaysHome.</li>\r\n 	<li><em>NordVPN provided me a free month of their VPN service for testing purposes. I purchased a PIA subscription with my own money. Homing Systems sent me a AlwaysHome Duo free of charge for me to review. I was not paid for this review. The opinions expressed in this episode are my own. </em></li>\r\n 	<li>Now, for the giveaway. NordVPN has given me a year’s subscription to give away to one lucky TravelCommons listener. Go to the TravelCommons website and check out the top post to enter the raffle. It’ll be open for 10 days from the posting of this episode -- which, if I have my calendar math right, is March 2. Come by the website and enter for a shot to be more cyber-secure for a year. And thanks to the folks at NordVPN for this giveaway.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #127</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/\">ccMixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_127.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #127 — Critiquing My Top 10 Travel Tips; Reviewing VPNs','','inherit','closed','closed','','1723-revision-v1','','','2017-02-20 21:16:05','2017-02-21 02:16:05','',1723,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/02/20/1723-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1740,1,'2017-02-21 11:09:56','2017-02-21 16:09:56','[caption id=\"attachment_1722\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/IMG_0215a.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1722\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/IMG_0215a-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Last generation digital security[/caption]\r\n\r\nIn this episode, I talk again about digital security on the road, especially the use of a VPN. I review three VPN products, including <a href=\"http://nordvpn.com\" target=\"_blank\">NordVPN</a> which is giving away a year\'s subscription to a TravelCommons listener. I dig into the process of generating the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/12/12/top-10-holiday-travel-tips-2/\" target=\"_blank\">Top 10 Holiday Travel Tips</a> listicle I do every couple of year, and follow up on stories from Uber and Lyft drivers. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_127.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/308841766\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n<!--more-->\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #127:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, in the midst of my third straight week at home. It is yet another sign of the impending apocalypse. All just can’t be right with the world - the office manager is nervous that I’m in the office for days in a row, my friends are shocked that I’m available during the week for a beer, my wife is tired of cooking dinner for me, and the cat is visibly pissed (in his own kitty way) that I’m taking up space on the couch. But, I am getting current on my doctor and dentist appointments, and I was able to get a haircut in a timely manner. Though these may seem little things, they can be a pain to get done when you’re traveling every week, and weekend appointments are a scarce commodity. Convenient, if not a bit boring.</li>\r\n 	<li>It also means I’ve missed 1 Delta and 2 United system outages and the associated ground-stops and cancellations, as well as getting stranded in last weekend’s East Coast winter storm. Those of you who follow me on Twitter have got to be happy about the lull in bitch tweeting.</li>\r\n 	<li>And I’ve also been around to provide real-time advice and counsel to my wife as she’s been planning our family spring break trip -- this year we’re skipping the Iberian Peninsula and going to Paris. I’m not sure how much she really appreciates my immediate reactions, but…. The house is awash with guidebooks -- except, of course, for Rick Steves. I pulled out the 2016 review copy of <a href=\"https://www.dk.com/us/9781465440839-top-10-paris/\" target=\"_blank\">DK’s Top 10 Paris</a>, the credenza looks like my wife cleared out the local library, and we have print outs of a bunch of web pages. I dunno,I guess I’m a visual and tactile person. When I’m trying to wrap my head around a bunch of disparate data sources, I still have to go physical -- print it out and spread it out. Or maybe this is just a fancy way to say I’m old.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Javolenus/41932\">Ianiscus</a> by Javolenus (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/\">Attribution (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Wired_Ant</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Just a heads up, I’ll be announcing a new giveaway later on in this episode. And since I can’t figure out how to create MP3 chapter marks in Adobe Audition, you’ll have listen all the way through.</li>\r\n 	<li>Rummaging through the mailbag…\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Dan Gradwohl dropped me a line agreeing with my complaint in the last episode about the small print size on most hotel shampoo and conditioner bottles. And, like me, he like Hyatt Place’s solution -- print a big “1” on the shampoo, a big “2” on the conditioner, and a big “3” on the shower gel. No need then to wear your reading glasses in the shower then. Dan also said that he “really liked” the music in the last episode. I can’t take credit for that. I outsourced the music search to my daughter Claire who was home for Winter Break. Since she received what may be the first positive comment about the music in 12 years, I asked her to to help me with this episode too.</li>\r\n 	<li>Long-time listener Robert Fenerty hit the TravelCommons website to comment on my pay-as-you-go SIM travails -- “Not many people are courageous enough to admit what a time sink it can be to find, purchase and setup a local SIM card. Sometimes it’s easy, the many Heathrow SIM vending machines being a great example. And Austria is a breeze. But outside of western countries, I’ve had to hand over my passport, stand in long lines, and try to explain “no, I need the one with data” to clerks whose language I don’t speak. Once I found out after leaving the store that my SIM was not properly initialized. Please go back to square one. The Verizon Travelpass is a great alternative for those 2-3 day trips. It’s often less expensive than the local SIM and it’s about as painless to enable/disable as you can imagine. Please keep up the good work, the beer tips, and the warm sentiments from the road. Your podcast has become an old friend that I have over for dinner every once in awhile.”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Robert, thanks for that post. What a nice way of putting it -- the podcast becoming an old friend. I haven’t heard it put that way before, but it’s a huge compliment.</li>\r\n 	<li>Looking at SIMs for our Paris trip next month, the new upstart network provider sells their SIMs through vending machines, so I think I’ll skip the Orange phone store and give the new guys a try. I’m not a Verizon phone customer, but many of my Verizon-using friend swear by Travelpass as being dead-simple. AT&amp;T finally matched that offer last month with their International Day Pass -- $10/day and it looks about as simple. An AT&amp;T-using friend who’ll be on an Asian cruise next month plans to use it. And that seems to be a perfect use case -- he’ll be in a different country every day.</li>\r\n 	<li>One of things we’ll be working on before the Paris trip is not to forget anything critical when we leave for the airport. Many years ago, we get out of the cab at ORD’s International Terminal for a family trip to London. I’m pulling the bags out of the trunk ...and there’s one missing. I send my family through to check-in and boarding while I hop back into the cab to run back home. I open the front door, and there’s the forgotten bag in the middle of the hallway. We only live a 25-min drive from ORD and luckily there was no traffic, and I had status on Virgin Atlantic at the time. I made it to the gate just before boarding was called. That memory seared in our brains, we never make that mistake again… until Sept when we were heading over to Scotland. We’re in the cab and my wife asks me “Do you have my passport?” Nope, thought you had it. At least we figured this out before we hit the airport. The driver makes an illegal U-turn across the tollway media and we sprint back home to find the passport sitting on my desk. It was only a 15-min backtrack this time, so we still got to ORD in time to get a sandwich at Tortas Frontera. But it was a wake-up call -- never be complacent about stupidity.</li>\r\n 	<li>We were in San Francisco a few weekends back. Always an interesting time, especially with 80,000 people marching through the center of town on Saturday. We stayed at the Westin St Francis on Union Square -- decided to go old-school for the weekend. It rained most of the weekend, which emptied out the cab rank outside the St Francis, which meant we did more ride-shares and less walking. I have both Uber and Lyft on my phone, so I’d pop them both open and compare wait times and pricing. Even with the rain, the wait times rarely topped 3 min -- which is almost instantaneous in the traffic around Union Square. I was amazed at the number of animated cars swarming the area. Continuing my research from a couple of episodes ago, I’d talk with each driver about how their gig was going. I was surprised at the overwhelming preference for Lyft over Uber. Lyft pays more than Uber, they said. Many said they only take Uber rides when they think they can hit Uber’s incentive bonuses. If not, they tend to Lyft. And they said the Lyft riders tended to be nicer, more considerate. Since I was using both apps, I didn’t quite know what to make of that. Our Sunday morning driver told us he drives solely for Lyft; he quit after Uber trialed driverless cars in San Francisco. He said it was just another proof point that Uber doesn’t care about its drivers. We ended up taking mostly Lyft that weekend.</li>\r\n 	<li>This echoed what I’d heard from an Uber and Lyft driver in Charlottesville, VA last month. This guy was a super driver -- he’d done 85,000 miles last year. He also preferred Lyft because they paid more, but said that he gets more rides from Uber. He lives in Charlottesville, but heads over to Richmond to drive when UVa is on break. He was planning to head up to DC for inauguration weekend, figuring the surge pricing would make it worth his while. I’ve never talked to anyone who is working the system as hard as this guy.</li>\r\n 	<li>Back home, telling our son Andrew about all this, he came down firmly on Uber’s side, because Uber can’t cancel a ride. He’s had too many Chicago Lyft drivers cancel on him. He deleted the<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/2017-02-20-08.37.43.png\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1729\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/2017-02-20-08.37.43-169x300.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"169\" height=\"300\" /></a> Lyft app off his phone and is exclusively Uber.</li>\r\n 	<li>Last month, I was back flying one of my usual routes from the ‘90’s -- ORD-DTW -- complete with the original aircraft -- an AA MD-80. That 2-3 cabin configuration and the what-now-seem-like half-height overhead bins. At least it was an original American MD-80, not one of TWA ones they held onto after that merger. The AA ones are actually not a bad plane if you’re toward the front, away from the engines in the back. They seem to have more rows of extra leg room Main Cabin Extra seats than the newer A319s and 320s. At some point during the flight, my row mate looks down at my phone and asks “How are you charging your phone? There aren’t any plugs here”. She was kinda right -- no regular two-prong AC plugs. But I knew from years of flying these planes (I first started flying American in 1985 -- when these MD-80s were in their prime), that down between the seats, I’d find an old cigarette lighter outlet. And I still carry a lighter power adapter for that 10% of the time Hertz sticks me with a beater rental that doesn’t have a USB plug -- or for times like this when I’m flying AA’s beater plane.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/48914\">In Peace (Somewhere Else Mix)</a> by cdk (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/\">Attribution (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Snowflake</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Critiquing my Top 10 Travel Tips</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Every couple of years, I bow to the search engine gods at Google and create a listicle -- an awful mashup word of list and article. They’re kinda click-baity. You see them on places like Mashable -- “Top 10 Ways to Hack Your Morning Routine” or “The 10 most cringeworthy advertising fails of 2015” (I didn’t make these up). But they exist because people search for them. So in December when my last listicle has rolled off the front page of TravelCommons, I create another one titled just like the last one -- “Top 10 Holiday Travel Tips”. And how do they score? When I searched just now for “Top 10 Holiday Travel Tips”, a Google+ posting for my 2013 edition made the first page of results -- albeit the last entry -- and last December’s, the most recent, made the top of the second page. Not too bad…</li>\r\n 	<li>When I write each new edition, I do try to think about what are today’s top 10 rather than just blindly copy-pasting the last post, although there is a good chunk of repetition -- “Fly Non-Stop” and “Skip the Tight Connection” are as valid today as they were 12 years ago when I started this podcast.\r\nThough they might also seem a bit obvious to even a slightly seasoned traveler. So I also have tried to weave in a few, if not Pro Tips, then at least a next level of insight. In 2013, I suggested buying status for the lead adult in the travel party. The rationale went like this -- for $20, you can take your whole family through the status security line and early boarding because I’ve never seen a security screener or gate agent split up a family.<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/2017-02-20-08.37.58.png\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1728\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/2017-02-20-08.37.58-169x300.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"169\" height=\"300\" /></a></li>\r\n 	<li>I’ve also consistently recommended that people use Twitter as an alternate way into customer service, “at addressing” an airline or hotel as a way to jump what might be a long queue in front of a gate agent or front-desk clerk. I don’t think a lot of folks realize the sophistication and focus that many companies put on monitoring social media. My tweet about that American MD-80 generated a quick reply from American -- “We\'re currently working on updating our fleet, Mark…” And while not exactly travel-related, AT&amp;T has now followed up with me twice over Twitter about a cellular service problem I was having last week. I gave this advice to a friend who called me from ORD on Christmas Day. Korean Air wouldn’t let him and his family board their flight to Hanoi because they didn’t have Vietnamese visas -- a new requirement that had just hit a couple of days earlier. They couldn’t find anyone to help them. Between the “at” Tweeting and sheer persistence, they finally found a way to get on the plane.</li>\r\n 	<li>I used to have “bring a portable battery pack” -- like a lipstick charger -- or a small power strip on my list because of the dearth of electrical outlets in airports. One listener recommended stalking cleaning crews to find hidden outlets. But now -- finally -- with long overdue gate area refreshes, airlines are adding accessible outlets -- either in new work areas or power “pylons” sponsored by Samsung or Verizon. So while I still carry a battery pack and often find it useful, it’s fallen out of the Top 10.</li>\r\n 	<li>Back in 2014, I did break it up a bit. Instead of a classic “Top 10” listicle, I offered Airport Etiquette tips -- things like “when traveling with your family, don’t stroll 4 abreast down the concourse” and “the airport Starbucks isn’t like your neighborhood one; keep your coffee order to 3 adjectives or less”. That article is nowhere to be found on the Google search page.</li>\r\n 	<li>What is the top travel pro tip that you’re handing out to your friends? Sending one in will be part of the giveaway I’ll announce in the next topic.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music --<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/35724\">Blue Like Venus</a> by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/\">Attribution (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Admiral Bob</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Reviewing VPNs</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/12/20/podcast-119-digital-security-on-the-road-us-airports-getting-better/\">episode #119</a>, I talked about digital security on the road, and the topic has turned into a persistent thread across episodes, which makes sense given the Chinese water torture-type steady drip, drip, drip of cyber breach announcements. Frequent travelers could be considered a high risk group because, being away from their homes and offices, heavily rely on public networks -- airports, hotels, Starbucks -- to work (and play) in today’s digitized -- what, economy, society, street corner?</li>\r\n 	<li>VPNs -- virtual private networks -- have two main use cases for the frequent traveler -- privacy on public networks and location shifting. VPNs accomplish these by altering the routing of the network traffic in and out of your PC, tablet or smartphone. What you’re putting out onto the Internet is encrypted so eavesdroppers -- like the guy wearing the hoodie in the dark corner of the Starbucks (to truck in stereotypes) running a packet sniffer -- can’t read what you’re browsing or e-mailing. And then the VPN routes your encrypted traffic to that it looks like you’re using the Internet from a different location -- what’s called the VPN “endpoint”</li>\r\n 	<li>So how much privacy do you really need, and is it worth the additional hassle of using a VPN? Like everything, it depends. Being a consultant, you’ll forgive me for giving into my reflex of distilling it down to a 2x2 matrix -- on what you’re doing, and how paranoid you are. In the low paranoid/high privacy need box I put things like on-line banking and filling out your Global Entry app. Lots of personal information there that you don’t want Mr Hoodie to hoover up and post on some dark web hacking site. In the low privacy need/high paranoid box, I’d put reading Mashable listicles or browsing porn site -- embarrassing if someone posted that info on your Facebook page, but they couldn’t drain your bank account.</li>\r\n 	<li>The location shifting use case -- I’m in Beijing but the Internet thinks I’m in Chicago -- only really comes into play for international travelers. Like when I’m in Madrid but wanting to stream the NCAA basketball tournament, or when my daughter in Scotland wants to watch “Friends” reruns (don’t ask me why) which is only on US Netflix. I also use VPNs whenever I’m in Beijing to hit Facebook and Twitter which are blocked by the “Great Firewall of China”.</li>\r\n 	<li>I looked at two highly rated software VPNs -- <a href=\"https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Private Internet Access</a> (PIA) and <a href=\"https://nordvpn.com/\" target=\"_blank\">NordVPN</a> -- and a Kickstarter hardware-based VPN, <a href=\"http://www.homingsystems.com/alwayshome-duo\" target=\"_blank\">AlwaysHome</a>, that I reviewed last fall in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/09/28/podcast-124-craft-beer-hunting-i-hate-rick-steves/\">episode #124</a>.</li>\r\n 	<li>PIA and NordVPN are quick to set up -- go to their website, buy a subscription (promotions change all the time, but when I’m writing this, PIA has discounted their annual subscription to $40 while NordVPN’s is at $79), download, install and run their software (VPN client), pick a VPN endpoint (which country do you want the Internet to think you’re coming from), and off you go. And the next time you access the Internet, you need to remember to start the client and pick an endpoint, unless you set the client to start automatically each time you log in.</li>\r\n 	<li>AlwaysHome, the hardware VPN, takes a bit more planning. You need to buy a pair of USB dongles and a service subscription (right now $180 for the dongles and a year’s service), plug one into your home router, and then take the second with you in your laptop bag.</li>\r\n 	<li>I tested the software VPNs on three platforms -- a Windows 10 PC hardwired into a network, a Samsung tablet running Android 6.0.1 (Marshmallow) on WiFi, and an iPhone 7 running iOS 10.2 on WiFi and AT&amp;T LTE mobile data.</li>\r\n 	<li>I first looked at performance -- how much speed was I giving up for the additional encryption and routing that gives me privacy? The Windows PC had the lowest penalty -- both VPNs cut upload and download speeds by about 6%. They also the same on the iPhone on WiFi, though the download penalty increased to 11%. Don’t know if this is an iOS limitation or something else. On the Samsung Android tablet on WiFi, NordVPNs download was on par with Windows PC -- about 6% on downloads -- while PIA was 25% slower on downloads. This one has to be marked down to PIA’s Android client.</li>\r\n 	<li>The really interesting result was on the iPhone on AT&amp;T’s LTE service. The download penalty on LTE was around 83% for both NordVPN and PIA. Must have something to do with AT&amp;T’s LTE service. And while interesting, it probably has the least practical value. Other than triple-paranoid people, I’m not sure why someone would tack a VPN onto their cellular connection.</li>\r\n 	<li>Accessing US Netflix from abroad is kinda the acid test for location shifting. Netflix, prompted by their content suppliers, has been the most aggressive service in blocking VPN endpoints; blocking people from outside the US streaming content that Netflix has only licenses in the US. I asked my daughter Claire, who’s at University of St Andrews in the UK, to test each VPN with her Netflix “Friends” test. PIA failed; Netflix served up its “blocked” screen. NordVPN let her log into US Netflix, though she said the connection was slow; probably the result of the lousy BT service coming into her flat over a chip shop. AlwaysHome did the best -- no Netflix blocking because it looks like she’s logging in from our house, and the best connection over the BT service because the AlwaysHome hardware lets it do accelerate network traffic in a way that the software VPNs can’t.</li>\r\n 	<li>I also asked Claire for her thoughts on the NordVPN and PIA software clients. She liked the NordVPN client better -- more graphic, easier to understand. The PIA client is a bit more stripped down. But she also liked that, with the AlwaysHome VPN, she didn’t have to install any software -- just connect to its WiFi.</li>\r\n 	<li>Sorting it all out, it you want an easy VPN solution that allows you to use Netflix when you’re overseas, go with NordVPN. If you want the cheapest solution that’s a bit more stripped down and you’re not running Android, then go with PIA. If you want the best Netflix experience from, say, a vacation rental that doesn’t require you to navigate WiFi login pages and you can plan a couple of weeks ahead, try AlwaysHome.</li>\r\n 	<li><em>NordVPN provided me a free month of their VPN service for testing purposes. I purchased a PIA subscription with my own money. Homing Systems sent me a AlwaysHome Duo free of charge for me to review. I was not paid for this review. The opinions expressed in this episode are my own. </em></li>\r\n 	<li>Now, for the giveaway. NordVPN has given me a year’s subscription to give away to one lucky TravelCommons listener. Go to the TravelCommons website and check out the top post to enter the raffle. It’ll be open for 10 days from the posting of this episode -- which, if I have my calendar math right, is March 2. Come by the website and enter for a shot to be more cyber-secure for a year. And thanks to the folks at NordVPN for this giveaway.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #127</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/\">ccMixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_127.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #127 — Critiquing My Top 10 Travel Tips; Reviewing VPNs','','inherit','closed','closed','','1723-revision-v1','','','2017-02-21 11:09:56','2017-02-21 16:09:56','',1723,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/02/21/1723-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1743,1,'2017-03-04 21:23:18','2017-03-05 02:23:18','<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/logo.png\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1733\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/logo-300x67.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"67\" /></a>Thanks to the folks at <a href=\"https://nordvpn.com/\" target=\"_blank\">NordVPN</a>, we\'re giving away a 1-year VPN subscription so that one lucky TravelCommons listener can work/play safer on the Internet.\r\n\r\nWe\'re using Rafflecopter to run the giveaway:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>You only have do one of the types of entry listed below, not all of them.</li>\r\n 	<li>Each entry type (follows, blog posts, etc) counts as 1 additional “ticket” except for an iTunes review which counts for 2 \"tickets\"</li>\r\n 	<li>I verify every winner, so if you don’t follow instructions (e.g., when you post a comment you don’t answer the question, you didn\'t actually leave an iTunes review) you will be disqualified.</li>\r\n 	<li>Due to the volume of entries I get, I am unable to verify that entries worked or “went through” properly ahead of time.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\nAnd now for the Terms &amp; Conditions:\r\n\r\n<em>Terms &amp; Conditions: The prizes for this giveaway was provided free of charge by NordVPN. Giveaway ends March 2, 2017 at 11:59 PM Central Time. Winners will be selected at random by Rafflecopter.com and verified by TravelCommons. Winner will have 72 hours to respond before prize is forfeited and a new winner is selected. TravelCommons will not be responsible for a winner\'s inability to activate the prize. No purchase necessary to enter. </em>\r\n\r\n<a id=\"rcwidget_pbj64e00\" class=\"rcptr\" href=\"http://www.rafflecopter.com/rafl/display/865292d01/\" rel=\"nofollow\" data-raflid=\"865292d01\" data-theme=\"classic\" data-template=\"\">a Rafflecopter giveaway</a>\r\n<script src=\"https://widget-prime.rafflecopter.com/launch.js\"></script>','[Finished] NordVPN 1-Year Subscription Giveaway','','inherit','closed','closed','','1718-revision-v1','','','2017-03-04 21:23:18','2017-03-05 02:23:18','',1718,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/03/04/1718-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1746,1,'2017-03-31 15:36:33','2017-03-31 20:36:33','<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/logo.png\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1733\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/logo-300x67.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"67\" /></a>Thanks to the folks at <a href=\"https://nordvpn.com/\" target=\"_blank\">NordVPN</a>, we\'re giving away a 1-year VPN subscription so that one lucky TravelCommons listener can work/play safer on the Internet.\r\n\r\nWe\'re using Rafflecopter to run the giveaway:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>You only have do one of the types of entry listed below, not all of them.</li>\r\n 	<li>Each entry type (follows, blog posts, etc) counts as 1 additional “ticket” except for an iTunes review which counts for 2 \"tickets\"</li>\r\n 	<li>I verify every winner, so if you don’t follow instructions (e.g., when you post a comment you don’t answer the question, you didn\'t actually leave an iTunes review) you will be disqualified.</li>\r\n 	<li>Due to the volume of entries I get, I am unable to verify that entries worked or “went through” properly ahead of time.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\nAnd now for the Terms &amp; Conditions:\r\n\r\n<em>Terms &amp; Conditions: The prizes for this giveaway was provided free of charge by NordVPN. Giveaway ends March 2, 2017 at 11:59 PM Central Time. Winners will be selected at random by Rafflecopter.com and verified by TravelCommons. Winner will have 72 hours to respond before prize is forfeited and a new winner is selected. TravelCommons will not be responsible for a winner\'s inability to activate the prize. No purchase necessary to enter. </em>','[Finished] NordVPN 1-Year Subscription Giveaway','','inherit','closed','closed','','1718-revision-v1','','','2017-03-31 15:36:33','2017-03-31 20:36:33','',1718,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/03/31/1718-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1747,1,'2017-03-31 20:12:58','2017-04-01 01:12:58','[caption id=\"attachment_1749\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/IMG_0033.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1749\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/IMG_0033-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> One of the Four Major Food Groups[/caption]\n\nIt\'s a very Paris-centric episode; I\'m still trying to drop the weight I picked up on our 10-day stay. I talk about hunts for beer and pastry took us out of the usual Notre Dame-to-Eiffel Tower-to-Louvre tourist triangle, some of the interesting buskers we saw along the way, and my surprise at Munich Airport receiving an airport award. I also continue our on-going discussions about buying international SIM cards and ride-sharing. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_128.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #128:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, after a full month of travel. I’m not complaining though, because -- first, I had been home, off the road, for 4 weeks straight and was beginning to make the place look untidy; and then more than a week of this travel spurt was in Paris, on vacation with the family. Tough to complain about travel with your mouth full of great food and wine. And mine certainly was. I’m not even looking at a scale for another 2 weeks.</li>\n 	<li>In what’s become our usual pattern for European trips, we flew out on a Thursday night. This works out well because typically Friday is a catch-up day at work -- more about internal conference calls than client work -- so it’s easier to skip out, and then landing on a Friday, more places are open -- like rental agency offices, phone stores -- if you need them. My wife and I flew into Paris and had a 3-star Michelin lunch to chase away jet lag, while the kids met up in Edinburgh for the weekend and lived off of beer and haggis. They then hopped one of the budget carriers to CDG Sunday night and managed to figure out the train well enough to land at the doorstep of our vacation rental on Rue de Rivoli, a bridge and a couple of blocks straight up from Notre Dame. My wife has this whole vacation rental thing down to a near science. I think I need to nag her into writing it up in a post for the TravelCommons web site.</li>\n 	<li>In the travel build-up to the Paris trip, another usual pattern; this one involves a bit more stupid travel -- bouncing across multiple clients and cities, to give everyone face-time before I disappear for a week; I found myself in Miami for a couple of days. I flew American back home to Chicago Friday night, and I guess because I was going between two of their hubs, I ended up on one of American’s international 767’s. Now, I typically despise 767’s because the overhead bins are way undersized. But, it was one of the best domestic upgrades I’ve scored. First, because between First and Business class, there’s a whole lot more seat for an upgrade. And then, this 767’s business class had been upgraded, so I had my own “pod” with a lie-flat seat and a 20-something inch screen -- much bigger than the screen smaller than my hand that I tweeted from the United 767 I took from ORD to CDG. Made for a very comfortable 3-hr flight.</li>\n 	<li>But back to Paris, the trip went without a hitch -- the strong dollar made an expensive a city a little less so, the weather was great for March -- sunny, a bit brisk. I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to get around with just English. I know I’m a language sloth, and while I didn’t expect it, I was happy not to have to struggle through with my minimal French. Indeed, the only smirch on trip was at the very end. We landed at ORD after 7pm, after half of Immigration shut down. The resulting lines were insane; Security was walking planeloads of people from the other side of the international terminal to our side and to the back of our line. They were shouting for all US citizens to get stand to the left of the hallway. After about 10 minutes of this, I asked a security person about Global Entry. “Oh, go this way,” she said and pointed down an empty line. We bolted, and were out after another 5 minutes. Customs should’ve had a guy walking that line taking Global Entry applications. They would’ve made a killing.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://www.magnatune.com/artists/albums/rompaey-mozaic/\">Bubbly</a></em> by Ruben van Rompaey</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>First up, a belated Thank You to iTunes user <em>California flying</em> for the 5-star review back in January:\n<ul>\n 	<li>“As a project manager with lots of travel thrown in, I really enjoy hearing Mark’s travel tales and can very much relate to his insight and observations. It’s an easy and fun listen. Just wish it was more frequent!”</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Thanks for taking the time to write that review. I’m glad you enjoy the podcast. I am trying on the frequency. This will be 3 straight months of episodes, so we’re starting 2017 in the right way.</li>\n 	<li>In the last episode, after deconstructing my own Top 10 travel tips list, I asked for listener contributions. Dan wrote this on the TravelCommons web site\n<ul>\n 	<li>“My biggest travel tip right now to my friends is get Nexus! Not only is it great when coming or going to the US (we live in Canada), but it gets you TSA Precheck while in the US which is great to have.”</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Good tip, Dan. As a US citizen, I’m still a bit confused on the Global Entry vs. Nexus choice. But anything that lets you skip Immigration lines and keep from having to disrobe in the security line is a good thing.</li>\n 	<li>Dan Brener and Max Flight both hit the TravelCommons’ Facebook page to say they found the VPN comparison in the last episode useful. Dan said that he also uses PIA and has found that, sometimes, Netflix will let it connect -- which I mentioned is kinda the acid test for location shifting. Dan says it is a bit hit-&amp;-miss though.</li>\n 	<li>Continuing the thread from the past couple of episodes on buying pay-as-you-go-SIMs when overseas, my Paris experiences were a mixed bag. On that first Friday, between picking up the apartment keys and heading to the George V for lunch, I wanted to pick up at least one SIM so we’d have some connectivity. I walked to nearest Orange store -- about 3 blocks down Rue de Rivoli. They didn’t have any regular prepaid SIMs in stock; only the special Holiday SIM which had inter-EU calling which I didn’t need and, at 40 euros, was more than I needed to pay. This became a common refrain. Every company-owned Orange and SFR store I visited was out of prepaid SIMs. Only what appeared to be a franchised Orange store in the bottom of the big underground shopping mall at Les Halles had them, and also very friendly service. That got us through the weekend. On Monday, after another string of Orange stiff arms, we walked up to the main Free store -- which I think sells TV as well as mobile service. We walked up to a vending machine in the lobby and pretty quickly had two more SIMs; a much better buying experience except for the fact that the store was inconveniently tucked away down a bland business street north of the Champs Elysee. I’ll be glad when the eSIM gets market traction.</li>\n 	<li>And continuing another thread, this one on Uber, while I regularly use Uber and Lyft in the US, I rarely -- if ever -- use them while traveling in Europe. I got to thinking about this while in Paris when, on Saturday when heading to the airport, we chose to roll the luggage to a taxi rank rather than use Uber. It’s a couple of reasons. First, there doesn’t seem to be that much of a price difference between Uber and taxis. I first noticed this in Lisbon last spring and then again in Paris. Second, most taxis in Europe are not the beaters that many US cabs are. In the US, even at the same rate, I’ll often take Uber because the cars are in so much better shape. The cabs in Baltimore last summer were the most egregious case. There was a cab stand right outside the building I was in, but I’d still wait 5 minutes for an Uber. And third, and maybe the most nebulous (squishy?), I’m maybe a bit less comfortable getting into a ride-share in a country where I don’t know the language and am not confident that I’m solid on the customs and protocols. In the US, I know what’s right and what’s not. Even in the UK, I’m comfortable enough and don’t worry about communicating effectively with the driver. I know zero Portuguese and little more French. So I’m a bit more willing to search out a taxi stand.</li>\n 	<li>I was flipping through the online version of the UK’s Telegraph newspaper earlier this month and got clickbaited into a Top 10 Airport listicle from the 2017 Skytrax World Airport Awards. They had all the usual suspects at the top of the list -- Singapore, Seoul, Hong Kong -- but at #4, they had Munich! I was stunned because my last two experiences connecting through Munich -- last Nov en route to Pisa and this month on my way back from Paris -- were not great as my Twitter followers already know. Probably the worst thing are the lines, and how brutally slow they move. Back in episode #125, I described the security crawl when trying to connect to our Pisa flight mid-morning on a Friday. I was stunned how slow the security staff was moving. No sense of urgency as a dozen lines tailed back through the terminal. I thought a union had called for some job action. But then in March, it was a huge tailback off of passport control. I’m used to Frankfurt where you walk up, answer a question, boom-boom they stamp your passport and through you go. Not in Munich. It was that same meandering pace. Like the place was in slow motion. The same thing at the one restaurant we found in the satellite portion of Terminal 2. Four people were behind the counter. The line trying to ordering tailed back, but only one of the four was helping customers. The other three were having some conversation and doing some paperwork. So why did Skytrax rate Munich #4? Apparently, it has its own brewery, a mini-golf course, and in the winter, a Christmas market and an ice skating rink -- none of which I experienced while struggling through lines trying to make a connection. And maybe that’s the problem -- Munich is focused on being a shopping mall/entertainment center rather than being an airport. Planning a flight to Budapest in May, I was offered two connection choices -- Munich or Vienna. I didn’t even pause to think about it. choosing Vienna, even though it’s nowhere in that Skytrax list. I’m hoping they’ll work harder on getting me through the airport than grooming a mini-golf course.</li>\n 	<li>And finally, congrats to Frank Mohnhaupt for winning a year\'s subscription to NordVPN. Frank’s entry in the Rafflecopter drawing was subscribing to the TravelCommons’ SoundCloud feed. And thanks again to NordVPN for providing the giveaway prize.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/kokoon-berlin/\">How Do I Work This</a></em> by The Kokoon</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>The Hunt for Experiences</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>In Paris, that first weekend when it was just my wife and I -- the kids were hunting haggis in Edinburgh -- was spent a good chunk of the time on what I call “hunts”. We got up and out early on Saturday -- always a good way to fight jet lag -- hunting for a pastry. Not just any pastry, because in Paris, that would in no way qualify as a hunt. No, it was a specific kind of pastry -- a kugelhopf, a kind of a hat-shaped pastry. And not just any kugelhopf. We were tracking down Vandermeersch, which, according to an article my wife read in Saveur magazine, makes the best kugelhopf in Paris and usually sells out shortly after opening -- hence the early morning alarm. So off we go, using Google Maps to tell us the right combination of Metros to get us to the correct outer bit of Paris. We get there shortly after opening and had the full selection of kugelhopfs -- small, medium, large. The couple of nice middle-aged women running what was a small shop helped us to by 2 smalls -- one to eat right away; the second for Sunday morning -- and a medium for Monday morning for breakfast with the kids. We ate that small one fresh, on the street. I don’t know if it was the best kugelhopf because my sample size was (and still is) one, but it was a pretty damn good pastry and worth forgoing the snooze button the early alarm.</li>\n 	<li>Saturday afternoon, we went on my hunt -- for a microbrewery, in an even further out bit of Paris, that’s only open Saturday afternoons. And where our morning visit to Vandermeersch landed us in a seemingly upscale neighborhood where people were up early for the morning runs along the grass boulevard dividers, that afternoon, we walked up the Metro steps on the main street of a heavily North African neighborhood; definitely outside the tourist bubble. Walking across the park here -- no grass, just dirt.</li>\n 	<li>But walking into the microbrewery, off kind of a dodgy street, put us in the midst of what seemed to be the standard afternoon outing for Parisian hipster families. Mostly while families with little kids; lots of bikes and beers; everyone eating sandwiches sold by an artisanal baker who looked to be friends of the brewers (his t-shirt read (in English) “More Bakers, Less Bankers”). Nice people; great beer. But an interesting contrast with the surrounding neighborhood. Inside the brewery, I could’ve been in Brooklyn or Portland. Outside, on the main street, maybe Algiers.</li>\n 	<li>Good pastry, good beer, but the hunt -- searching out these experiences -- is as much it’s own reward. It gave us a reason, a goal, to get out of the travel bubble, off the well-trod Notre Dame-to-Eiffel Tower-to-Louvre tourist triangle. Not that we didn’t do that too -- we did -- but if that’s all we did, it would have been a bit disappointing. And that we did it on our own, rather than as part of some “Hipster Paris” tour, gives an added touch of accomplishment.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music --<em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/weigl-proof/\">Piano Circus</a></em> by Philipp Weigl</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Pop-Up Entertainment</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Toward the end of our week in Paris, heading out again from the normal tourist zone -- in search of a brew pub with my son this time; my wife and daughter were hunting Longchamps bags -- we get on the Metro to find a busker on our subway car, a tuba busker. He was an older guy wearing a slightly Tyrolean looking hat with a waist-high battery-powered speaker in front of him taped to a luggage wheelie type of cart and an orange donations can taped to the handle. The speaker played the backing track while he played the main melody on the tuba. After one song (which I can’t say that I recognized), he left the backing track playing while walking the car with his hand out for tips. I think he was on the car for 3 stops.</li>\n 	<li>On the way back, during one of the 18 stops back, another busker walked onto our car, a younger guy who turned out to be a rapping busker. He had the same speaker rig and the same cadence as the tuba player -- last guy in, stood in front of the door, powered up the back beat on the speakers, rapped out a song between stops, solicited money between the next stops, and then left the train.</li>\n 	<li>I also saw what I consider the more typical subway buskers -- playing guitar, or a double-bass in the connecting tunnels, taking advantage of the tile acoustics. A little less typical was a couple ating out an opera scene in a wider area where 2 or 3 tunnels came together. Not only were they singing opera (with tile-driven acoustics), they were acting out the scene -- the woman fleeing toward one tunnel only to have the man catch her and pull her back. It took just a moment to connect the singing to the action; to realize that this wasn’t an actual assault. It drew a bit of a crowd. I don’t know if this was real busking or just advertising an opera show, but it certainly got my attention.</li>\n 	<li>Later on, my son and I were walking in front of Notre Dame and heard another woman singing opera. It took us a minute to locate her. She had her back to a building on the north side of the plaza. It was another good acoustic location -- the echo off the building seem to amplify and project her voice across the open space in front of the cathedral. The police seem to keep a heavy presence here. We’d seen them earlier descend on a woman who was panhandling the folks standing in line to get into the cathedral. But this time, they let the woman finish up her aria before moving her along. Quite a change from Chicago’s bucket boys.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #128</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Magnatune</a></li>\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_128.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #128 — Hunt for Experiences; Pop-Up Entertainment','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-128-hunt-for-experiences-pop-up-entertainment','','','2021-09-29 08:19:42','2021-09-29 13:19:42','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=1747',0,'post','',0),
(1748,1,'2017-04-01 16:48:27','2017-04-01 21:48:27','In this episode, I talk again about digital security on the road, especially the use of a VPN. I review three VPN products, including <a href=\"http://nordvpn.com\" target=\"_blank\">NordVPN</a> which is giving away a year\'s subscription to a TravelCommons listener. I dig into the process of generating the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/12/12/top-10-holiday-travel-tips-2/\" target=\"_blank\">Top 10 Holiday Travel Tips</a> listicle I do every couple of year, and follow up on stories from Uber and Lyft drivers. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_127.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/308841766\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n<!--more-->\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #127:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, in the midst of my third straight week at home. It is yet another sign of the impending apocalypse. All just can’t be right with the world - the office manager is nervous that I’m in the office for days in a row, my friends are shocked that I’m available during the week for a beer, my wife is tired of cooking dinner for me, and the cat is visibly pissed (in his own kitty way) that I’m taking up space on the couch. But, I am getting current on my doctor and dentist appointments, and I was able to get a haircut in a timely manner. Though these may seem little things, they can be a pain to get done when you’re traveling every week, and weekend appointments are a scarce commodity. Convenient, if not a bit boring.</li>\r\n 	<li>It also means I’ve missed 1 Delta and 2 United system outages and the associated ground-stops and cancellations, as well as getting stranded in last weekend’s East Coast winter storm. Those of you who follow me on Twitter have got to be happy about the lull in bitch tweeting.</li>\r\n 	<li>And I’ve also been around to provide real-time advice and counsel to my wife as she’s been planning our family spring break trip -- this year we’re skipping the Iberian Peninsula and going to Paris. I’m not sure how much she really appreciates my immediate reactions, but…. The house is awash with guidebooks -- except, of course, for Rick Steves. I pulled out the 2016 review copy of <a href=\"https://www.dk.com/us/9781465440839-top-10-paris/\" target=\"_blank\">DK’s Top 10 Paris</a>, the credenza looks like my wife cleared out the local library, and we have print outs of a bunch of web pages. I dunno,I guess I’m a visual and tactile person. When I’m trying to wrap my head around a bunch of disparate data sources, I still have to go physical -- print it out and spread it out. Or maybe this is just a fancy way to say I’m old.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Javolenus/41932\">Ianiscus</a> by Javolenus (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/\">Attribution (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Wired_Ant</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Just a heads up, I’ll be announcing a new giveaway later on in this episode. And since I can’t figure out how to create MP3 chapter marks in Adobe Audition, you’ll have listen all the way through.</li>\r\n 	<li>Rummaging through the mailbag…\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Dan Gradwohl dropped me a line agreeing with my complaint in the last episode about the small print size on most hotel shampoo and conditioner bottles. And, like me, he like Hyatt Place’s solution -- print a big “1” on the shampoo, a big “2” on the conditioner, and a big “3” on the shower gel. No need then to wear your reading glasses in the shower then. Dan also said that he “really liked” the music in the last episode. I can’t take credit for that. I outsourced the music search to my daughter Claire who was home for Winter Break. Since she received what may be the first positive comment about the music in 12 years, I asked her to to help me with this episode too.</li>\r\n 	<li>Long-time listener Robert Fenerty hit the TravelCommons website to comment on my pay-as-you-go SIM travails -- “Not many people are courageous enough to admit what a time sink it can be to find, purchase and setup a local SIM card. Sometimes it’s easy, the many Heathrow SIM vending machines being a great example. And Austria is a breeze. But outside of western countries, I’ve had to hand over my passport, stand in long lines, and try to explain “no, I need the one with data” to clerks whose language I don’t speak. Once I found out after leaving the store that my SIM was not properly initialized. Please go back to square one. The Verizon Travelpass is a great alternative for those 2-3 day trips. It’s often less expensive than the local SIM and it’s about as painless to enable/disable as you can imagine. Please keep up the good work, the beer tips, and the warm sentiments from the road. Your podcast has become an old friend that I have over for dinner every once in awhile.”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Robert, thanks for that post. What a nice way of putting it -- the podcast becoming an old friend. I haven’t heard it put that way before, but it’s a huge compliment.</li>\r\n 	<li>Looking at SIMs for our Paris trip next month, the new upstart network provider sells their SIMs through vending machines, so I think I’ll skip the Orange phone store and give the new guys a try. I’m not a Verizon phone customer, but many of my Verizon-using friend swear by Travelpass as being dead-simple. AT&amp;T finally matched that offer last month with their International Day Pass -- $10/day and it looks about as simple. An AT&amp;T-using friend who’ll be on an Asian cruise next month plans to use it. And that seems to be a perfect use case -- he’ll be in a different country every day.</li>\r\n 	<li>One of things we’ll be working on before the Paris trip is not to forget anything critical when we leave for the airport. Many years ago, we get out of the cab at ORD’s International Terminal for a family trip to London. I’m pulling the bags out of the trunk ...and there’s one missing. I send my family through to check-in and boarding while I hop back into the cab to run back home. I open the front door, and there’s the forgotten bag in the middle of the hallway. We only live a 25-min drive from ORD and luckily there was no traffic, and I had status on Virgin Atlantic at the time. I made it to the gate just before boarding was called. That memory seared in our brains, we never make that mistake again… until Sept when we were heading over to Scotland. We’re in the cab and my wife asks me “Do you have my passport?” Nope, thought you had it. At least we figured this out before we hit the airport. The driver makes an illegal U-turn across the tollway media and we sprint back home to find the passport sitting on my desk. It was only a 15-min backtrack this time, so we still got to ORD in time to get a sandwich at Tortas Frontera. But it was a wake-up call -- never be complacent about stupidity.</li>\r\n 	<li>We were in San Francisco a few weekends back. Always an interesting time, especially with 80,000 people marching through the center of town on Saturday. We stayed at the Westin St Francis on Union Square -- decided to go old-school for the weekend. It rained most of the weekend, which emptied out the cab rank outside the St Francis, which meant we did more ride-shares and less walking. I have both Uber and Lyft on my phone, so I’d pop them both open and compare wait times and pricing. Even with the rain, the wait times rarely topped 3 min -- which is almost instantaneous in the traffic around Union Square. I was amazed at the number of animated cars swarming the area. Continuing my research from a couple of episodes ago, I’d talk with each driver about how their gig was going. I was surprised at the overwhelming preference for Lyft over Uber. Lyft pays more than Uber, they said. Many said they only take Uber rides when they think they can hit Uber’s incentive bonuses. If not, they tend to Lyft. And they said the Lyft riders tended to be nicer, more considerate. Since I was using both apps, I didn’t quite know what to make of that. Our Sunday morning driver told us he drives solely for Lyft; he quit after Uber trialed driverless cars in San Francisco. He said it was just another proof point that Uber doesn’t care about its drivers. We ended up taking mostly Lyft that weekend.</li>\r\n 	<li>This echoed what I’d heard from an Uber and Lyft driver in Charlottesville, VA last month. This guy was a super driver -- he’d done 85,000 miles last year. He also preferred Lyft because they paid more, but said that he gets more rides from Uber. He lives in Charlottesville, but heads over to Richmond to drive when UVa is on break. He was planning to head up to DC for inauguration weekend, figuring the surge pricing would make it worth his while. I’ve never talked to anyone who is working the system as hard as this guy.</li>\r\n 	<li>Back home, telling our son Andrew about all this, he came down firmly on Uber’s side, because Uber can’t cancel a ride. He’s had too many Chicago Lyft drivers cancel on him. He deleted the<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/2017-02-20-08.37.43.png\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1729\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/2017-02-20-08.37.43-169x300.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"169\" height=\"300\" /></a> Lyft app off his phone and is exclusively Uber.</li>\r\n 	<li>Last month, I was back flying one of my usual routes from the ‘90’s -- ORD-DTW -- complete with the original aircraft -- an AA MD-80. That 2-3 cabin configuration and the what-now-seem-like half-height overhead bins. At least it was an original American MD-80, not one of TWA ones they held onto after that merger. The AA ones are actually not a bad plane if you’re toward the front, away from the engines in the back. They seem to have more rows of extra leg room Main Cabin Extra seats than the newer A319s and 320s. At some point during the flight, my row mate looks down at my phone and asks “How are you charging your phone? There aren’t any plugs here”. She was kinda right -- no regular two-prong AC plugs. But I knew from years of flying these planes (I first started flying American in 1985 -- when these MD-80s were in their prime), that down between the seats, I’d find an old cigarette lighter outlet. And I still carry a lighter power adapter for that 10% of the time Hertz sticks me with a beater rental that doesn’t have a USB plug -- or for times like this when I’m flying AA’s beater plane.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/48914\">In Peace (Somewhere Else Mix)</a> by cdk (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/\">Attribution (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Snowflake</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Critiquing my Top 10 Travel Tips</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Every couple of years, I bow to the search engine gods at Google and create a listicle -- an awful mashup word of list and article. They’re kinda click-baity. You see them on places like Mashable -- “Top 10 Ways to Hack Your Morning Routine” or “The 10 most cringeworthy advertising fails of 2015” (I didn’t make these up). But they exist because people search for them. So in December when my last listicle has rolled off the front page of TravelCommons, I create another one titled just like the last one -- “Top 10 Holiday Travel Tips”. And how do they score? When I searched just now for “Top 10 Holiday Travel Tips”, a Google+ posting for my 2013 edition made the first page of results -- albeit the last entry -- and last December’s, the most recent, made the top of the second page. Not too bad…</li>\r\n 	<li>When I write each new edition, I do try to think about what are today’s top 10 rather than just blindly copy-pasting the last post, although there is a good chunk of repetition -- “Fly Non-Stop” and “Skip the Tight Connection” are as valid today as they were 12 years ago when I started this podcast.\r\nThough they might also seem a bit obvious to even a slightly seasoned traveler. So I also have tried to weave in a few, if not Pro Tips, then at least a next level of insight. In 2013, I suggested buying status for the lead adult in the travel party. The rationale went like this -- for $20, you can take your whole family through the status security line and early boarding because I’ve never seen a security screener or gate agent split up a family.<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/2017-02-20-08.37.58.png\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1728\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/2017-02-20-08.37.58-169x300.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"169\" height=\"300\" /></a></li>\r\n 	<li>I’ve also consistently recommended that people use Twitter as an alternate way into customer service, “at addressing” an airline or hotel as a way to jump what might be a long queue in front of a gate agent or front-desk clerk. I don’t think a lot of folks realize the sophistication and focus that many companies put on monitoring social media. My tweet about that American MD-80 generated a quick reply from American -- “We\'re currently working on updating our fleet, Mark…” And while not exactly travel-related, AT&amp;T has now followed up with me twice over Twitter about a cellular service problem I was having last week. I gave this advice to a friend who called me from ORD on Christmas Day. Korean Air wouldn’t let him and his family board their flight to Hanoi because they didn’t have Vietnamese visas -- a new requirement that had just hit a couple of days earlier. They couldn’t find anyone to help them. Between the “at” Tweeting and sheer persistence, they finally found a way to get on the plane.</li>\r\n 	<li>I used to have “bring a portable battery pack” -- like a lipstick charger -- or a small power strip on my list because of the dearth of electrical outlets in airports. One listener recommended stalking cleaning crews to find hidden outlets. But now -- finally -- with long overdue gate area refreshes, airlines are adding accessible outlets -- either in new work areas or power “pylons” sponsored by Samsung or Verizon. So while I still carry a battery pack and often find it useful, it’s fallen out of the Top 10.</li>\r\n 	<li>Back in 2014, I did break it up a bit. Instead of a classic “Top 10” listicle, I offered Airport Etiquette tips -- things like “when traveling with your family, don’t stroll 4 abreast down the concourse” and “the airport Starbucks isn’t like your neighborhood one; keep your coffee order to 3 adjectives or less”. That article is nowhere to be found on the Google search page.</li>\r\n 	<li>What is the top travel pro tip that you’re handing out to your friends? Sending one in will be part of the giveaway I’ll announce in the next topic.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music --<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/35724\">Blue Like Venus</a> by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/\">Attribution (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Admiral Bob</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Reviewing VPNs</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/12/20/podcast-119-digital-security-on-the-road-us-airports-getting-better/\">episode #119</a>, I talked about digital security on the road, and the topic has turned into a persistent thread across episodes, which makes sense given the Chinese water torture-type steady drip, drip, drip of cyber breach announcements. Frequent travelers could be considered a high risk group because, being away from their homes and offices, heavily rely on public networks -- airports, hotels, Starbucks -- to work (and play) in today’s digitized -- what, economy, society, street corner?</li>\r\n 	<li>VPNs -- virtual private networks -- have two main use cases for the frequent traveler -- privacy on public networks and location shifting. VPNs accomplish these by altering the routing of the network traffic in and out of your PC, tablet or smartphone. What you’re putting out onto the Internet is encrypted so eavesdroppers -- like the guy wearing the hoodie in the dark corner of the Starbucks (to truck in stereotypes) running a packet sniffer -- can’t read what you’re browsing or e-mailing. And then the VPN routes your encrypted traffic to that it looks like you’re using the Internet from a different location -- what’s called the VPN “endpoint”</li>\r\n 	<li>So how much privacy do you really need, and is it worth the additional hassle of using a VPN? Like everything, it depends. Being a consultant, you’ll forgive me for giving into my reflex of distilling it down to a 2x2 matrix -- on what you’re doing, and how paranoid you are. In the low paranoid/high privacy need box I put things like on-line banking and filling out your Global Entry app. Lots of personal information there that you don’t want Mr Hoodie to hoover up and post on some dark web hacking site. In the low privacy need/high paranoid box, I’d put reading Mashable listicles or browsing porn site -- embarrassing if someone posted that info on your Facebook page, but they couldn’t drain your bank account.</li>\r\n 	<li>The location shifting use case -- I’m in Beijing but the Internet thinks I’m in Chicago -- only really comes into play for international travelers. Like when I’m in Madrid but wanting to stream the NCAA basketball tournament, or when my daughter in Scotland wants to watch “Friends” reruns (don’t ask me why) which is only on US Netflix. I also use VPNs whenever I’m in Beijing to hit Facebook and Twitter which are blocked by the “Great Firewall of China”.</li>\r\n 	<li>I looked at two highly rated software VPNs -- <a href=\"https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Private Internet Access</a> (PIA) and <a href=\"https://nordvpn.com/\" target=\"_blank\">NordVPN</a> -- and a Kickstarter hardware-based VPN, <a href=\"http://www.homingsystems.com/alwayshome-duo\" target=\"_blank\">AlwaysHome</a>, that I reviewed last fall in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/09/28/podcast-124-craft-beer-hunting-i-hate-rick-steves/\">episode #124</a>.</li>\r\n 	<li>PIA and NordVPN are quick to set up -- go to their website, buy a subscription (promotions change all the time, but when I’m writing this, PIA has discounted their annual subscription to $40 while NordVPN’s is at $79), download, install and run their software (VPN client), pick a VPN endpoint (which country do you want the Internet to think you’re coming from), and off you go. And the next time you access the Internet, you need to remember to start the client and pick an endpoint, unless you set the client to start automatically each time you log in.</li>\r\n 	<li>AlwaysHome, the hardware VPN, takes a bit more planning. You need to buy a pair of USB dongles and a service subscription (right now $180 for the dongles and a year’s service), plug one into your home router, and then take the second with you in your laptop bag.</li>\r\n 	<li>I tested the software VPNs on three platforms -- a Windows 10 PC hardwired into a network, a Samsung tablet running Android 6.0.1 (Marshmallow) on WiFi, and an iPhone 7 running iOS 10.2 on WiFi and AT&amp;T LTE mobile data.</li>\r\n 	<li>I first looked at performance -- how much speed was I giving up for the additional encryption and routing that gives me privacy? The Windows PC had the lowest penalty -- both VPNs cut upload and download speeds by about 6%. They also the same on the iPhone on WiFi, though the download penalty increased to 11%. Don’t know if this is an iOS limitation or something else. On the Samsung Android tablet on WiFi, NordVPNs download was on par with Windows PC -- about 6% on downloads -- while PIA was 25% slower on downloads. This one has to be marked down to PIA’s Android client.</li>\r\n 	<li>The really interesting result was on the iPhone on AT&amp;T’s LTE service. The download penalty on LTE was around 83% for both NordVPN and PIA. Must have something to do with AT&amp;T’s LTE service. And while interesting, it probably has the least practical value. Other than triple-paranoid people, I’m not sure why someone would tack a VPN onto their cellular connection.</li>\r\n 	<li>Accessing US Netflix from abroad is kinda the acid test for location shifting. Netflix, prompted by their content suppliers, has been the most aggressive service in blocking VPN endpoints; blocking people from outside the US streaming content that Netflix has only licenses in the US. I asked my daughter Claire, who’s at University of St Andrews in the UK, to test each VPN with her Netflix “Friends” test. PIA failed; Netflix served up its “blocked” screen. NordVPN let her log into US Netflix, though she said the connection was slow; probably the result of the lousy BT service coming into her flat over a chip shop. AlwaysHome did the best -- no Netflix blocking because it looks like she’s logging in from our house, and the best connection over the BT service because the AlwaysHome hardware lets it do accelerate network traffic in a way that the software VPNs can’t.</li>\r\n 	<li>I also asked Claire for her thoughts on the NordVPN and PIA software clients. She liked the NordVPN client better -- more graphic, easier to understand. The PIA client is a bit more stripped down. But she also liked that, with the AlwaysHome VPN, she didn’t have to install any software -- just connect to its WiFi.</li>\r\n 	<li>Sorting it all out, it you want an easy VPN solution that allows you to use Netflix when you’re overseas, go with NordVPN. If you want the cheapest solution that’s a bit more stripped down and you’re not running Android, then go with PIA. If you want the best Netflix experience from, say, a vacation rental that doesn’t require you to navigate WiFi login pages and you can plan a couple of weeks ahead, try AlwaysHome.</li>\r\n 	<li><em>NordVPN provided me a free month of their VPN service for testing purposes. I purchased a PIA subscription with my own money. Homing Systems sent me a AlwaysHome Duo free of charge for me to review. I was not paid for this review. The opinions expressed in this episode are my own. </em></li>\r\n 	<li>Now, for the giveaway. NordVPN has given me a year’s subscription to give away to one lucky TravelCommons listener. Go to the TravelCommons website and check out the top post to enter the raffle. It’ll be open for 10 days from the posting of this episode -- which, if I have my calendar math right, is March 2. Come by the website and enter for a shot to be more cyber-secure for a year. And thanks to the folks at NordVPN for this giveaway.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #127</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/\">ccMixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_127.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #128 — Hunt for Experiences; Pop-Up Entertainment','','inherit','closed','closed','','1747-revision-v1','','','2017-04-01 16:48:27','2017-04-01 21:48:27','',1747,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/04/01/1747-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1749,1,'2017-04-01 16:49:44','2017-04-01 21:49:44','','IMG_0033','One of the Four Major Food Groups','inherit','open','closed','','img_0033','','','2017-04-01 16:50:39','2017-04-01 21:50:39','',1747,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/IMG_0033.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(1750,1,'2017-04-01 16:59:49','2017-04-01 21:59:49','[caption id=\"attachment_1749\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/IMG_0033.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1749\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/IMG_0033-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> One of the Four Major Food Groups[/caption]\r\n\r\nAll this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_128.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/308841766\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n<!--more-->\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #128:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, after a full month of travel. I’m not complaining though, because -- first, I had been home, off the road, for 4 weeks straight and was beginning to make the place look untidy; and then more than a week of this travel spurt was in Paris, on vacation with the family. Tough to complain about travel with your mouth full of great food and wine. And mine certainly was. I’m not even looking at a scale for another 2 weeks.</li>\r\n 	<li>In what’s become our usual pattern for European trips, we flew out on a Thursday night. This works out well because typically Friday is a catch-up day at work -- more about internal conference calls than client work -- so it’s easier to skip out, and then landing on a Friday, more places are open -- like rental agency offices, phone stores -- if you need them. My wife and I flew into Paris and had a 3-star Michelin lunch to chase away jet lag, while the kids met up in Edinburgh for the weekend and lived off of beer and haggis. They then hopped one of the budget carriers to CDG Sunday night and managed to figure out the train well enough to land at the doorstep of our vacation rental on Rue de Rivoli, a bridge and a couple of blocks straight up from Notre Dame. My wife has this whole vacation rental thing down to a near science. I think I need to nag her into writing it up in a post for the TravelCommons web site.</li>\r\n 	<li>In the travel build-up to the Paris trip, another usual pattern; this one involves a bit more stupid travel -- bouncing across multiple clients and cities, to give everyone face-time before I disappear for a week; I found myself in Miami for a couple of days. I flew American back home to Chicago Friday night, and I guess because I was going between two of their hubs, I ended up on one of American’s international 767’s. Now, I typically despise 767’s because the overhead bins are way undersized. But, it was one of the best domestic upgrades I’ve scored. First, because between First and Business class, there’s a whole lot more seat for an upgrade. And then, this 767’s business class had been upgraded, so I had my own “pod” with a lie-flat seat and a 20-something inch screen -- much bigger than the screen smaller than my hand that I tweeted from the United 767 I took from ORD to CDG. Made for a very comfortable 3-hr flight.</li>\r\n 	<li>But back to Paris, the trip went without a hitch -- the strong dollar made an expensive a city a little less so, the weather was great for March -- sunny, a bit brisk. I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to get around with just English. I know I’m a language sloth, and while I didn’t expect it, I was happy not to have to struggle through with my minimal French. Indeed, the only smirch on trip was at the very end. We landed at ORD after 7pm, after half of Immigration shut down. The resulting lines were insane; Security was walking planeloads of people from the other side of the international terminal to our side and to the back of our line. They were shouting for all US citizens to get stand to the left of the hallway. After about 10 minutes of this, I asked a security person about Global Entry. “Oh, go this way,” she said and pointed down an empty line. We bolted, and were out after another 5 minutes. Customs should’ve had a guy walking that line taking Global Entry applications. They would’ve made a killing.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Javolenus/41932\">Ianiscus</a> by Javolenus (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/\">Attribution (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Wired_Ant</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>First up, a belated Thank You to iTunes user <em>California flying</em> for the 5-star review back in January:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>“As a project manager with lots of travel thrown in, I really enjoy hearing Mark’s travel tales and can very much relate to his insight and observations. It’s an easy and fun listen. Just wish it was more frequent!”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Thanks for taking the time to write that review. I’m glad you enjoy the podcast. I am trying on the frequency. This will be 3 straight months of episodes, so we’re starting 2017 in the right way.</li>\r\n 	<li>In the last episode, after deconstructing my own Top 10 travel tips list, I asked for listener contributions. Dan wrote this on the TravelCommons web site\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>“My biggest travel tip right now to my friends is get Nexus! Not only is it great when coming or going to the US (we live in Canada), but it gets you TSA Precheck while in the US which is great to have.”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Good tip, Dan. As a US citizen, I’m still a bit confused on the Global Entry vs. Nexus choice. But anything that lets you skip Immigration lines and keep from having to disrobe in the security line is a good thing.</li>\r\n 	<li>Dan Brener and Max Flight both hit the TravelCommons’ Facebook page to say they found the VPN comparison in the last episode useful. Dan said that he also uses PIA and has found that, sometimes, Netflix will let it connect -- which I mentioned is kinda the acid test for location shifting. Dan says it is a bit hit-&amp;-miss though.</li>\r\n 	<li>Continuing the thread from the past couple of episodes on buying pay-as-you-go-SIMs when overseas, my Paris experiences were a mixed bag. On that first Friday, between picking up the apartment keys and heading to the George V for lunch, I wanted to pick up at least one SIM so we’d have some connectivity. I walked to nearest Orange store -- about 3 blocks down Rue de Rivoli. They didn’t have any regular prepaid SIMs in stock; only the special Holiday SIM which had inter-EU calling which I didn’t need and, at 40 euros, was more than I needed to pay. This became a common refrain. Every company-owned Orange and SFR store I visited was out of prepaid SIMs. Only what appeared to be a franchised Orange store in the bottom of the big underground shopping mall at Les Halles had them, and also very friendly service. That got us through the weekend. On Monday, after another string of Orange stiff arms, we walked up to the main Free store -- which I think sells TV as well as mobile service. We walked up to a vending machine in the lobby and pretty quickly had two more SIMs; a much better buying experience except for the fact that the store was inconveniently tucked away down a bland business street north of the Champs Elysee. I’ll be glad when the eSIM gets market traction.</li>\r\n 	<li>And continuing another thread, this one on Uber, while I regularly use Uber and Lyft in the US, I rarely -- if ever -- use them while traveling in Europe. I got to thinking about this while in Paris when, on Saturday when heading to the airport, we chose to roll the luggage to a taxi rank rather than use Uber. It’s a couple of reasons. First, there doesn’t seem to be that much of a price difference between Uber and taxis. I first noticed this in Lisbon last spring and then again in Paris. Second, most taxis in Europe are not the beaters that many US cabs are. In the US, even at the same rate, I’ll often take Uber because the cars are in so much better shape. The cabs in Baltimore last summer were the most egregious case. There was a cab stand right outside the building I was in, but I’d still wait 5 minutes for an Uber. And third, and maybe the most nebulous (squishy?), I’m maybe a bit less comfortable getting into a ride-share in a country where I don’t know the language and am not confident that I’m solid on the customs and protocols. In the US, I know what’s right and what’s not. Even in the UK, I’m comfortable enough and don’t worry about communicating effectively with the driver. I know zero Portuguese and little more French. So I’m a bit more willing to search out a taxi stand.</li>\r\n 	<li>I was flipping through the online version of the UK’s Telegraph newspaper earlier this month and got clickbaited into a Top 10 Airport listicle from the 2017 Skytrax World Airport Awards. They had all the usual suspects at the top of the list -- Singapore, Seoul, Hong Kong -- but at #4, they had Munich! I was stunned because my last two experiences connecting through Munich -- last Nov en route to Pisa and this month on my way back from Paris -- were not great as my Twitter followers already know. Probably the worst thing are the lines, and how brutally slow they move. Back in episode #125, I described the security crawl when trying to connect to our Pisa flight mid-morning on a Friday. I was stunned how slow the security staff was moving. No sense of urgency as a dozen lines tailed back through the terminal. I thought a union had called for some job action. But then in March, it was a huge tailback off of passport control. I’m used to Frankfurt where you walk up, answer a question, boom-boom they stamp your passport and through you go. Not in Munich. It was that same meandering pace. Like the place was in slow motion. The same thing at the one restaurant we found in the satellite portion of Terminal 2. Four people were behind the counter. The line trying to ordering tailed back, but only one of the four was helping customers. The other three were having some conversation and doing some paperwork. So why did Skytrax rate Munich #4? Apparently, it has its own brewery, a mini-golf course, and in the winter, a Christmas market and an ice skating rink -- none of which I experienced while struggling through lines trying to make a connection. And maybe that’s the problem -- Munich is focused on being a shopping mall/entertainment center rather than being an airport. Planning a flight to Budapest in May, I was offered two connection choices -- Munich or Vienna. I didn’t even pause to think about it. choosing Vienna, even though it’s nowhere in that Skytrax list. I’m hoping they’ll work harder on getting me through the airport than grooming a mini-golf course.</li>\r\n 	<li>And finally, congrats to Frank Mohnhaupt for winning a year\'s subscription to NordVPN. Frank’s entry in the Rafflecopter drawing was subscribing to the TravelCommons’ SoundCloud feed. And thanks again to NordVPN for providing the giveaway prize.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/48914\">In Peace (Somewhere Else Mix)</a> by cdk (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/\">Attribution (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Snowflake</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>The Hunt for Experiences</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>In Paris, that first weekend when it was just my wife and I -- the kids were hunting haggis in Edinburgh -- was spent a good chunk of the time on what I call “hunts”. We got up and out early on Saturday -- always a good way to fight jet lag -- hunting for a pastry. Not just any pastry, because in Paris, that would in no way qualify as a hunt. No, it was a specific kind of pastry -- a kugelhopf, a kind of a hat-shaped pastry. And not just any kugelhopf. We were tracking down Vandermeersch, which, according to an article my wife read in Saveur magazine, makes the best kugelhopf in Paris and usually sells out shortly after opening -- hence the early morning alarm. So off we go, using Google Maps to tell us the right combination of Metros to get us to the correct outer bit of Paris. We get there shortly after opening and had the full selection of kugelhopfs -- small, medium, large. The couple of nice middle-aged women running what was a small shop helped us to by 2 smalls -- one to eat right away; the second for Sunday morning -- and a medium for Monday morning for breakfast with the kids. We ate that small one fresh, on the street. I don’t know if it was the best kugelhopf because my sample size was (and still is) one, but it was a pretty damn good pastry and worth forgoing the snooze button the early alarm.</li>\r\n 	<li>Saturday afternoon, we went on my hunt -- for a microbrewery, in an even further out bit of Paris, that’s only open Saturday afternoons. And where our morning visit to Vandermeersch landed us in a seemingly upscale neighborhood where people were up early for the morning runs along the grass boulevard dividers, that afternoon, we walked up the Metro steps on the main street of a heavily North African neighborhood; definitely outside the tourist bubble. Walking across the park here -- no grass, just dirt.</li>\r\n 	<li>But walking into the microbrewery, off kind of a dodgy street, put us in the midst of what seemed to be the standard afternoon outing for Parisian hipster families. Mostly while families with little kids; lots of bikes and beers; everyone eating sandwiches sold by an artisanal baker who looked to be friends of the brewers (his t-shirt read (in English) “More Bakers, Less Bankers”). Nice people; great beer. But an interesting contrast with the surrounding neighborhood. Inside the brewery, I could’ve been in Brooklyn or Portland. Outside, on the main street, maybe Algiers.</li>\r\n 	<li>Good pastry, good beer, but the hunt -- searching out these experiences -- is as much it’s own reward. It gave us a reason, a goal, to get out of the travel bubble, off the well-trod Notre Dame-to-Eiffel Tower-to-Louvre tourist triangle. Not that we didn’t do that too -- we did -- but if that’s all we did, it would have been a bit disappointing. And that we did it on our own, rather than as part of some “Hipster Paris” tour, gives an added touch of accomplishment.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music --<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/35724\">Blue Like Venus</a> by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/\">Attribution (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Admiral Bob</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Pop-Up Entertainment</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Toward the end of our week in Paris, heading out again from the normal tourist zone -- in search of a brew pub with my son this time; my wife and daughter were hunting Longchamps bags -- we get on the Metro to find a busker on our subway car, a tuba busker. He was an older guy wearing a slightly Tyrolean looking hat with a waist-high battery-powered speaker in front of him taped to a luggage wheelie type of cart and an orange donations can taped to the handle. The speaker played the backing track while he played the main melody on the tuba. After one song (which I can’t say that I recognized), he left the backing track playing while walking the car with his hand out for tips. I think he was on the car for 3 stops.</li>\r\n 	<li>On the way back, during one of the 18 stops back, another busker walked onto our car, a younger guy who turned out to be a rapping busker. He had the same speaker rig and the same cadence as the tuba player -- last guy in, stood in front of the door, powered up the back beat on the speakers, rapped out a song between stops, solicited money between the next stops, and then left the train.</li>\r\n 	<li>I also saw what I consider the more typical subway buskers -- playing guitar, or a double-bass in the connecting tunnels, taking advantage of the tile acoustics. A little less typical was a couple ating out an opera scene in a wider area where 2 or 3 tunnels came together. Not only were they singing opera (with tile-driven acoustics), they were acting out the scene -- the woman fleeing toward one tunnel only to have the man catch her and pull her back. It took just a moment to connect the singing to the action; to realize that this wasn’t an actual assault. It drew a bit of a crowd. I don’t know if this was real busking or just advertising an opera show, but it certainly got my attention.</li>\r\n 	<li>Later on, my son and I were walking in front of Notre Dame and heard another woman singing opera. It took us a minute to locate her. She had her back to a building on the north side of the plaza. It was another good acoustic location -- the echo off the building seem to amplify and project her voice across the open space in front of the cathedral. The police seem to keep a heavy presence here. We’d seen them earlier descend on a woman who was panhandling the folks standing in line to get into the cathedral. But this time, they let the woman finish up her aria before moving her along. Quite a change from Chicago’s bucket boys.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #128</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/\">ccMixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_127.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #128 — Hunt for Experiences; Pop-Up Entertainment','','inherit','closed','closed','','1747-revision-v1','','','2017-04-01 16:59:49','2017-04-01 21:59:49','',1747,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/04/01/1747-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1751,1,'2017-04-01 17:07:13','2017-04-01 22:07:13','[caption id=\"attachment_1749\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/IMG_0033.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1749\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/IMG_0033-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> One of the Four Major Food Groups[/caption]\r\n\r\nAll this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_128.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/308841766\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n<!--more-->\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #128:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, after a full month of travel. I’m not complaining though, because -- first, I had been home, off the road, for 4 weeks straight and was beginning to make the place look untidy; and then more than a week of this travel spurt was in Paris, on vacation with the family. Tough to complain about travel with your mouth full of great food and wine. And mine certainly was. I’m not even looking at a scale for another 2 weeks.</li>\r\n 	<li>In what’s become our usual pattern for European trips, we flew out on a Thursday night. This works out well because typically Friday is a catch-up day at work -- more about internal conference calls than client work -- so it’s easier to skip out, and then landing on a Friday, more places are open -- like rental agency offices, phone stores -- if you need them. My wife and I flew into Paris and had a 3-star Michelin lunch to chase away jet lag, while the kids met up in Edinburgh for the weekend and lived off of beer and haggis. They then hopped one of the budget carriers to CDG Sunday night and managed to figure out the train well enough to land at the doorstep of our vacation rental on Rue de Rivoli, a bridge and a couple of blocks straight up from Notre Dame. My wife has this whole vacation rental thing down to a near science. I think I need to nag her into writing it up in a post for the TravelCommons web site.</li>\r\n 	<li>In the travel build-up to the Paris trip, another usual pattern; this one involves a bit more stupid travel -- bouncing across multiple clients and cities, to give everyone face-time before I disappear for a week; I found myself in Miami for a couple of days. I flew American back home to Chicago Friday night, and I guess because I was going between two of their hubs, I ended up on one of American’s international 767’s. Now, I typically despise 767’s because the overhead bins are way undersized. But, it was one of the best domestic upgrades I’ve scored. First, because between First and Business class, there’s a whole lot more seat for an upgrade. And then, this 767’s business class had been upgraded, so I had my own “pod” with a lie-flat seat and a 20-something inch screen -- much bigger than the screen smaller than my hand that I tweeted from the United 767 I took from ORD to CDG. Made for a very comfortable 3-hr flight.</li>\r\n 	<li>But back to Paris, the trip went without a hitch -- the strong dollar made an expensive a city a little less so, the weather was great for March -- sunny, a bit brisk. I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to get around with just English. I know I’m a language sloth, and while I didn’t expect it, I was happy not to have to struggle through with my minimal French. Indeed, the only smirch on trip was at the very end. We landed at ORD after 7pm, after half of Immigration shut down. The resulting lines were insane; Security was walking planeloads of people from the other side of the international terminal to our side and to the back of our line. They were shouting for all US citizens to get stand to the left of the hallway. After about 10 minutes of this, I asked a security person about Global Entry. “Oh, go this way,” she said and pointed down an empty line. We bolted, and were out after another 5 minutes. Customs should’ve had a guy walking that line taking Global Entry applications. They would’ve made a killing.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://www.magnatune.com/artists/albums/rompaey-mozaic/\">Bubbly</a></em> by Ruben van Rompaey</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>First up, a belated Thank You to iTunes user <em>California flying</em> for the 5-star review back in January:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>“As a project manager with lots of travel thrown in, I really enjoy hearing Mark’s travel tales and can very much relate to his insight and observations. It’s an easy and fun listen. Just wish it was more frequent!”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Thanks for taking the time to write that review. I’m glad you enjoy the podcast. I am trying on the frequency. This will be 3 straight months of episodes, so we’re starting 2017 in the right way.</li>\r\n 	<li>In the last episode, after deconstructing my own Top 10 travel tips list, I asked for listener contributions. Dan wrote this on the TravelCommons web site\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>“My biggest travel tip right now to my friends is get Nexus! Not only is it great when coming or going to the US (we live in Canada), but it gets you TSA Precheck while in the US which is great to have.”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Good tip, Dan. As a US citizen, I’m still a bit confused on the Global Entry vs. Nexus choice. But anything that lets you skip Immigration lines and keep from having to disrobe in the security line is a good thing.</li>\r\n 	<li>Dan Brener and Max Flight both hit the TravelCommons’ Facebook page to say they found the VPN comparison in the last episode useful. Dan said that he also uses PIA and has found that, sometimes, Netflix will let it connect -- which I mentioned is kinda the acid test for location shifting. Dan says it is a bit hit-&amp;-miss though.</li>\r\n 	<li>Continuing the thread from the past couple of episodes on buying pay-as-you-go-SIMs when overseas, my Paris experiences were a mixed bag. On that first Friday, between picking up the apartment keys and heading to the George V for lunch, I wanted to pick up at least one SIM so we’d have some connectivity. I walked to nearest Orange store -- about 3 blocks down Rue de Rivoli. They didn’t have any regular prepaid SIMs in stock; only the special Holiday SIM which had inter-EU calling which I didn’t need and, at 40 euros, was more than I needed to pay. This became a common refrain. Every company-owned Orange and SFR store I visited was out of prepaid SIMs. Only what appeared to be a franchised Orange store in the bottom of the big underground shopping mall at Les Halles had them, and also very friendly service. That got us through the weekend. On Monday, after another string of Orange stiff arms, we walked up to the main Free store -- which I think sells TV as well as mobile service. We walked up to a vending machine in the lobby and pretty quickly had two more SIMs; a much better buying experience except for the fact that the store was inconveniently tucked away down a bland business street north of the Champs Elysee. I’ll be glad when the eSIM gets market traction.</li>\r\n 	<li>And continuing another thread, this one on Uber, while I regularly use Uber and Lyft in the US, I rarely -- if ever -- use them while traveling in Europe. I got to thinking about this while in Paris when, on Saturday when heading to the airport, we chose to roll the luggage to a taxi rank rather than use Uber. It’s a couple of reasons. First, there doesn’t seem to be that much of a price difference between Uber and taxis. I first noticed this in Lisbon last spring and then again in Paris. Second, most taxis in Europe are not the beaters that many US cabs are. In the US, even at the same rate, I’ll often take Uber because the cars are in so much better shape. The cabs in Baltimore last summer were the most egregious case. There was a cab stand right outside the building I was in, but I’d still wait 5 minutes for an Uber. And third, and maybe the most nebulous (squishy?), I’m maybe a bit less comfortable getting into a ride-share in a country where I don’t know the language and am not confident that I’m solid on the customs and protocols. In the US, I know what’s right and what’s not. Even in the UK, I’m comfortable enough and don’t worry about communicating effectively with the driver. I know zero Portuguese and little more French. So I’m a bit more willing to search out a taxi stand.</li>\r\n 	<li>I was flipping through the online version of the UK’s Telegraph newspaper earlier this month and got clickbaited into a Top 10 Airport listicle from the 2017 Skytrax World Airport Awards. They had all the usual suspects at the top of the list -- Singapore, Seoul, Hong Kong -- but at #4, they had Munich! I was stunned because my last two experiences connecting through Munich -- last Nov en route to Pisa and this month on my way back from Paris -- were not great as my Twitter followers already know. Probably the worst thing are the lines, and how brutally slow they move. Back in episode #125, I described the security crawl when trying to connect to our Pisa flight mid-morning on a Friday. I was stunned how slow the security staff was moving. No sense of urgency as a dozen lines tailed back through the terminal. I thought a union had called for some job action. But then in March, it was a huge tailback off of passport control. I’m used to Frankfurt where you walk up, answer a question, boom-boom they stamp your passport and through you go. Not in Munich. It was that same meandering pace. Like the place was in slow motion. The same thing at the one restaurant we found in the satellite portion of Terminal 2. Four people were behind the counter. The line trying to ordering tailed back, but only one of the four was helping customers. The other three were having some conversation and doing some paperwork. So why did Skytrax rate Munich #4? Apparently, it has its own brewery, a mini-golf course, and in the winter, a Christmas market and an ice skating rink -- none of which I experienced while struggling through lines trying to make a connection. And maybe that’s the problem -- Munich is focused on being a shopping mall/entertainment center rather than being an airport. Planning a flight to Budapest in May, I was offered two connection choices -- Munich or Vienna. I didn’t even pause to think about it. choosing Vienna, even though it’s nowhere in that Skytrax list. I’m hoping they’ll work harder on getting me through the airport than grooming a mini-golf course.</li>\r\n 	<li>And finally, congrats to Frank Mohnhaupt for winning a year\'s subscription to NordVPN. Frank’s entry in the Rafflecopter drawing was subscribing to the TravelCommons’ SoundCloud feed. And thanks again to NordVPN for providing the giveaway prize.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/kokoon-berlin/\">How Do I Work This</a></em> by The Kokoon</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>The Hunt for Experiences</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>In Paris, that first weekend when it was just my wife and I -- the kids were hunting haggis in Edinburgh -- was spent a good chunk of the time on what I call “hunts”. We got up and out early on Saturday -- always a good way to fight jet lag -- hunting for a pastry. Not just any pastry, because in Paris, that would in no way qualify as a hunt. No, it was a specific kind of pastry -- a kugelhopf, a kind of a hat-shaped pastry. And not just any kugelhopf. We were tracking down Vandermeersch, which, according to an article my wife read in Saveur magazine, makes the best kugelhopf in Paris and usually sells out shortly after opening -- hence the early morning alarm. So off we go, using Google Maps to tell us the right combination of Metros to get us to the correct outer bit of Paris. We get there shortly after opening and had the full selection of kugelhopfs -- small, medium, large. The couple of nice middle-aged women running what was a small shop helped us to by 2 smalls -- one to eat right away; the second for Sunday morning -- and a medium for Monday morning for breakfast with the kids. We ate that small one fresh, on the street. I don’t know if it was the best kugelhopf because my sample size was (and still is) one, but it was a pretty damn good pastry and worth forgoing the snooze button the early alarm.</li>\r\n 	<li>Saturday afternoon, we went on my hunt -- for a microbrewery, in an even further out bit of Paris, that’s only open Saturday afternoons. And where our morning visit to Vandermeersch landed us in a seemingly upscale neighborhood where people were up early for the morning runs along the grass boulevard dividers, that afternoon, we walked up the Metro steps on the main street of a heavily North African neighborhood; definitely outside the tourist bubble. Walking across the park here -- no grass, just dirt.</li>\r\n 	<li>But walking into the microbrewery, off kind of a dodgy street, put us in the midst of what seemed to be the standard afternoon outing for Parisian hipster families. Mostly while families with little kids; lots of bikes and beers; everyone eating sandwiches sold by an artisanal baker who looked to be friends of the brewers (his t-shirt read (in English) “More Bakers, Less Bankers”). Nice people; great beer. But an interesting contrast with the surrounding neighborhood. Inside the brewery, I could’ve been in Brooklyn or Portland. Outside, on the main street, maybe Algiers.</li>\r\n 	<li>Good pastry, good beer, but the hunt -- searching out these experiences -- is as much it’s own reward. It gave us a reason, a goal, to get out of the travel bubble, off the well-trod Notre Dame-to-Eiffel Tower-to-Louvre tourist triangle. Not that we didn’t do that too -- we did -- but if that’s all we did, it would have been a bit disappointing. And that we did it on our own, rather than as part of some “Hipster Paris” tour, gives an added touch of accomplishment.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music --<em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/weigl-proof/\">Piano Circus</a></em> by Philipp Weigl</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Pop-Up Entertainment</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Toward the end of our week in Paris, heading out again from the normal tourist zone -- in search of a brew pub with my son this time; my wife and daughter were hunting Longchamps bags -- we get on the Metro to find a busker on our subway car, a tuba busker. He was an older guy wearing a slightly Tyrolean looking hat with a waist-high battery-powered speaker in front of him taped to a luggage wheelie type of cart and an orange donations can taped to the handle. The speaker played the backing track while he played the main melody on the tuba. After one song (which I can’t say that I recognized), he left the backing track playing while walking the car with his hand out for tips. I think he was on the car for 3 stops.</li>\r\n 	<li>On the way back, during one of the 18 stops back, another busker walked onto our car, a younger guy who turned out to be a rapping busker. He had the same speaker rig and the same cadence as the tuba player -- last guy in, stood in front of the door, powered up the back beat on the speakers, rapped out a song between stops, solicited money between the next stops, and then left the train.</li>\r\n 	<li>I also saw what I consider the more typical subway buskers -- playing guitar, or a double-bass in the connecting tunnels, taking advantage of the tile acoustics. A little less typical was a couple ating out an opera scene in a wider area where 2 or 3 tunnels came together. Not only were they singing opera (with tile-driven acoustics), they were acting out the scene -- the woman fleeing toward one tunnel only to have the man catch her and pull her back. It took just a moment to connect the singing to the action; to realize that this wasn’t an actual assault. It drew a bit of a crowd. I don’t know if this was real busking or just advertising an opera show, but it certainly got my attention.</li>\r\n 	<li>Later on, my son and I were walking in front of Notre Dame and heard another woman singing opera. It took us a minute to locate her. She had her back to a building on the north side of the plaza. It was another good acoustic location -- the echo off the building seem to amplify and project her voice across the open space in front of the cathedral. The police seem to keep a heavy presence here. We’d seen them earlier descend on a woman who was panhandling the folks standing in line to get into the cathedral. But this time, they let the woman finish up her aria before moving her along. Quite a change from Chicago’s bucket boys.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #128</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Magnatune</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_127.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #128 — Hunt for Experiences; Pop-Up Entertainment','','inherit','closed','closed','','1747-revision-v1','','','2017-04-01 17:07:13','2017-04-01 22:07:13','',1747,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/04/01/1747-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1752,1,'2017-04-01 17:17:53','2017-04-01 22:17:53','[caption id=\"attachment_1749\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/IMG_0033.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1749\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/IMG_0033-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> One of the Four Major Food Groups[/caption]\r\n\r\nIt\'s a very Paris-centric episode; I\'m still trying to drop the weight I picked up on our 10-day stay. I talk about hunts for beer and pastry took us out of the usual Notre Dame-to-Eiffel Tower-to-Louvre tourist triangle, some of the interesting buskers we saw along the way, and my surprise at Munich Airport receiving an airport award. I also continue our on-going discussions about buying international SIM cards and ride-sharing. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_128.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/308841766\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n<!--more-->\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #128:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, after a full month of travel. I’m not complaining though, because -- first, I had been home, off the road, for 4 weeks straight and was beginning to make the place look untidy; and then more than a week of this travel spurt was in Paris, on vacation with the family. Tough to complain about travel with your mouth full of great food and wine. And mine certainly was. I’m not even looking at a scale for another 2 weeks.</li>\r\n 	<li>In what’s become our usual pattern for European trips, we flew out on a Thursday night. This works out well because typically Friday is a catch-up day at work -- more about internal conference calls than client work -- so it’s easier to skip out, and then landing on a Friday, more places are open -- like rental agency offices, phone stores -- if you need them. My wife and I flew into Paris and had a 3-star Michelin lunch to chase away jet lag, while the kids met up in Edinburgh for the weekend and lived off of beer and haggis. They then hopped one of the budget carriers to CDG Sunday night and managed to figure out the train well enough to land at the doorstep of our vacation rental on Rue de Rivoli, a bridge and a couple of blocks straight up from Notre Dame. My wife has this whole vacation rental thing down to a near science. I think I need to nag her into writing it up in a post for the TravelCommons web site.</li>\r\n 	<li>In the travel build-up to the Paris trip, another usual pattern; this one involves a bit more stupid travel -- bouncing across multiple clients and cities, to give everyone face-time before I disappear for a week; I found myself in Miami for a couple of days. I flew American back home to Chicago Friday night, and I guess because I was going between two of their hubs, I ended up on one of American’s international 767’s. Now, I typically despise 767’s because the overhead bins are way undersized. But, it was one of the best domestic upgrades I’ve scored. First, because between First and Business class, there’s a whole lot more seat for an upgrade. And then, this 767’s business class had been upgraded, so I had my own “pod” with a lie-flat seat and a 20-something inch screen -- much bigger than the screen smaller than my hand that I tweeted from the United 767 I took from ORD to CDG. Made for a very comfortable 3-hr flight.</li>\r\n 	<li>But back to Paris, the trip went without a hitch -- the strong dollar made an expensive a city a little less so, the weather was great for March -- sunny, a bit brisk. I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to get around with just English. I know I’m a language sloth, and while I didn’t expect it, I was happy not to have to struggle through with my minimal French. Indeed, the only smirch on trip was at the very end. We landed at ORD after 7pm, after half of Immigration shut down. The resulting lines were insane; Security was walking planeloads of people from the other side of the international terminal to our side and to the back of our line. They were shouting for all US citizens to get stand to the left of the hallway. After about 10 minutes of this, I asked a security person about Global Entry. “Oh, go this way,” she said and pointed down an empty line. We bolted, and were out after another 5 minutes. Customs should’ve had a guy walking that line taking Global Entry applications. They would’ve made a killing.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://www.magnatune.com/artists/albums/rompaey-mozaic/\">Bubbly</a></em> by Ruben van Rompaey</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>First up, a belated Thank You to iTunes user <em>California flying</em> for the 5-star review back in January:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>“As a project manager with lots of travel thrown in, I really enjoy hearing Mark’s travel tales and can very much relate to his insight and observations. It’s an easy and fun listen. Just wish it was more frequent!”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Thanks for taking the time to write that review. I’m glad you enjoy the podcast. I am trying on the frequency. This will be 3 straight months of episodes, so we’re starting 2017 in the right way.</li>\r\n 	<li>In the last episode, after deconstructing my own Top 10 travel tips list, I asked for listener contributions. Dan wrote this on the TravelCommons web site\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>“My biggest travel tip right now to my friends is get Nexus! Not only is it great when coming or going to the US (we live in Canada), but it gets you TSA Precheck while in the US which is great to have.”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Good tip, Dan. As a US citizen, I’m still a bit confused on the Global Entry vs. Nexus choice. But anything that lets you skip Immigration lines and keep from having to disrobe in the security line is a good thing.</li>\r\n 	<li>Dan Brener and Max Flight both hit the TravelCommons’ Facebook page to say they found the VPN comparison in the last episode useful. Dan said that he also uses PIA and has found that, sometimes, Netflix will let it connect -- which I mentioned is kinda the acid test for location shifting. Dan says it is a bit hit-&amp;-miss though.</li>\r\n 	<li>Continuing the thread from the past couple of episodes on buying pay-as-you-go-SIMs when overseas, my Paris experiences were a mixed bag. On that first Friday, between picking up the apartment keys and heading to the George V for lunch, I wanted to pick up at least one SIM so we’d have some connectivity. I walked to nearest Orange store -- about 3 blocks down Rue de Rivoli. They didn’t have any regular prepaid SIMs in stock; only the special Holiday SIM which had inter-EU calling which I didn’t need and, at 40 euros, was more than I needed to pay. This became a common refrain. Every company-owned Orange and SFR store I visited was out of prepaid SIMs. Only what appeared to be a franchised Orange store in the bottom of the big underground shopping mall at Les Halles had them, and also very friendly service. That got us through the weekend. On Monday, after another string of Orange stiff arms, we walked up to the main Free store -- which I think sells TV as well as mobile service. We walked up to a vending machine in the lobby and pretty quickly had two more SIMs; a much better buying experience except for the fact that the store was inconveniently tucked away down a bland business street north of the Champs Elysee. I’ll be glad when the eSIM gets market traction.</li>\r\n 	<li>And continuing another thread, this one on Uber, while I regularly use Uber and Lyft in the US, I rarely -- if ever -- use them while traveling in Europe. I got to thinking about this while in Paris when, on Saturday when heading to the airport, we chose to roll the luggage to a taxi rank rather than use Uber. It’s a couple of reasons. First, there doesn’t seem to be that much of a price difference between Uber and taxis. I first noticed this in Lisbon last spring and then again in Paris. Second, most taxis in Europe are not the beaters that many US cabs are. In the US, even at the same rate, I’ll often take Uber because the cars are in so much better shape. The cabs in Baltimore last summer were the most egregious case. There was a cab stand right outside the building I was in, but I’d still wait 5 minutes for an Uber. And third, and maybe the most nebulous (squishy?), I’m maybe a bit less comfortable getting into a ride-share in a country where I don’t know the language and am not confident that I’m solid on the customs and protocols. In the US, I know what’s right and what’s not. Even in the UK, I’m comfortable enough and don’t worry about communicating effectively with the driver. I know zero Portuguese and little more French. So I’m a bit more willing to search out a taxi stand.</li>\r\n 	<li>I was flipping through the online version of the UK’s Telegraph newspaper earlier this month and got clickbaited into a Top 10 Airport listicle from the 2017 Skytrax World Airport Awards. They had all the usual suspects at the top of the list -- Singapore, Seoul, Hong Kong -- but at #4, they had Munich! I was stunned because my last two experiences connecting through Munich -- last Nov en route to Pisa and this month on my way back from Paris -- were not great as my Twitter followers already know. Probably the worst thing are the lines, and how brutally slow they move. Back in episode #125, I described the security crawl when trying to connect to our Pisa flight mid-morning on a Friday. I was stunned how slow the security staff was moving. No sense of urgency as a dozen lines tailed back through the terminal. I thought a union had called for some job action. But then in March, it was a huge tailback off of passport control. I’m used to Frankfurt where you walk up, answer a question, boom-boom they stamp your passport and through you go. Not in Munich. It was that same meandering pace. Like the place was in slow motion. The same thing at the one restaurant we found in the satellite portion of Terminal 2. Four people were behind the counter. The line trying to ordering tailed back, but only one of the four was helping customers. The other three were having some conversation and doing some paperwork. So why did Skytrax rate Munich #4? Apparently, it has its own brewery, a mini-golf course, and in the winter, a Christmas market and an ice skating rink -- none of which I experienced while struggling through lines trying to make a connection. And maybe that’s the problem -- Munich is focused on being a shopping mall/entertainment center rather than being an airport. Planning a flight to Budapest in May, I was offered two connection choices -- Munich or Vienna. I didn’t even pause to think about it. choosing Vienna, even though it’s nowhere in that Skytrax list. I’m hoping they’ll work harder on getting me through the airport than grooming a mini-golf course.</li>\r\n 	<li>And finally, congrats to Frank Mohnhaupt for winning a year\'s subscription to NordVPN. Frank’s entry in the Rafflecopter drawing was subscribing to the TravelCommons’ SoundCloud feed. And thanks again to NordVPN for providing the giveaway prize.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/kokoon-berlin/\">How Do I Work This</a></em> by The Kokoon</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>The Hunt for Experiences</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>In Paris, that first weekend when it was just my wife and I -- the kids were hunting haggis in Edinburgh -- was spent a good chunk of the time on what I call “hunts”. We got up and out early on Saturday -- always a good way to fight jet lag -- hunting for a pastry. Not just any pastry, because in Paris, that would in no way qualify as a hunt. No, it was a specific kind of pastry -- a kugelhopf, a kind of a hat-shaped pastry. And not just any kugelhopf. We were tracking down Vandermeersch, which, according to an article my wife read in Saveur magazine, makes the best kugelhopf in Paris and usually sells out shortly after opening -- hence the early morning alarm. So off we go, using Google Maps to tell us the right combination of Metros to get us to the correct outer bit of Paris. We get there shortly after opening and had the full selection of kugelhopfs -- small, medium, large. The couple of nice middle-aged women running what was a small shop helped us to by 2 smalls -- one to eat right away; the second for Sunday morning -- and a medium for Monday morning for breakfast with the kids. We ate that small one fresh, on the street. I don’t know if it was the best kugelhopf because my sample size was (and still is) one, but it was a pretty damn good pastry and worth forgoing the snooze button the early alarm.</li>\r\n 	<li>Saturday afternoon, we went on my hunt -- for a microbrewery, in an even further out bit of Paris, that’s only open Saturday afternoons. And where our morning visit to Vandermeersch landed us in a seemingly upscale neighborhood where people were up early for the morning runs along the grass boulevard dividers, that afternoon, we walked up the Metro steps on the main street of a heavily North African neighborhood; definitely outside the tourist bubble. Walking across the park here -- no grass, just dirt.</li>\r\n 	<li>But walking into the microbrewery, off kind of a dodgy street, put us in the midst of what seemed to be the standard afternoon outing for Parisian hipster families. Mostly while families with little kids; lots of bikes and beers; everyone eating sandwiches sold by an artisanal baker who looked to be friends of the brewers (his t-shirt read (in English) “More Bakers, Less Bankers”). Nice people; great beer. But an interesting contrast with the surrounding neighborhood. Inside the brewery, I could’ve been in Brooklyn or Portland. Outside, on the main street, maybe Algiers.</li>\r\n 	<li>Good pastry, good beer, but the hunt -- searching out these experiences -- is as much it’s own reward. It gave us a reason, a goal, to get out of the travel bubble, off the well-trod Notre Dame-to-Eiffel Tower-to-Louvre tourist triangle. Not that we didn’t do that too -- we did -- but if that’s all we did, it would have been a bit disappointing. And that we did it on our own, rather than as part of some “Hipster Paris” tour, gives an added touch of accomplishment.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music --<em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/weigl-proof/\">Piano Circus</a></em> by Philipp Weigl</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Pop-Up Entertainment</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Toward the end of our week in Paris, heading out again from the normal tourist zone -- in search of a brew pub with my son this time; my wife and daughter were hunting Longchamps bags -- we get on the Metro to find a busker on our subway car, a tuba busker. He was an older guy wearing a slightly Tyrolean looking hat with a waist-high battery-powered speaker in front of him taped to a luggage wheelie type of cart and an orange donations can taped to the handle. The speaker played the backing track while he played the main melody on the tuba. After one song (which I can’t say that I recognized), he left the backing track playing while walking the car with his hand out for tips. I think he was on the car for 3 stops.</li>\r\n 	<li>On the way back, during one of the 18 stops back, another busker walked onto our car, a younger guy who turned out to be a rapping busker. He had the same speaker rig and the same cadence as the tuba player -- last guy in, stood in front of the door, powered up the back beat on the speakers, rapped out a song between stops, solicited money between the next stops, and then left the train.</li>\r\n 	<li>I also saw what I consider the more typical subway buskers -- playing guitar, or a double-bass in the connecting tunnels, taking advantage of the tile acoustics. A little less typical was a couple ating out an opera scene in a wider area where 2 or 3 tunnels came together. Not only were they singing opera (with tile-driven acoustics), they were acting out the scene -- the woman fleeing toward one tunnel only to have the man catch her and pull her back. It took just a moment to connect the singing to the action; to realize that this wasn’t an actual assault. It drew a bit of a crowd. I don’t know if this was real busking or just advertising an opera show, but it certainly got my attention.</li>\r\n 	<li>Later on, my son and I were walking in front of Notre Dame and heard another woman singing opera. It took us a minute to locate her. She had her back to a building on the north side of the plaza. It was another good acoustic location -- the echo off the building seem to amplify and project her voice across the open space in front of the cathedral. The police seem to keep a heavy presence here. We’d seen them earlier descend on a woman who was panhandling the folks standing in line to get into the cathedral. But this time, they let the woman finish up her aria before moving her along. Quite a change from Chicago’s bucket boys.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #128</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Magnatune</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_127.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #128 — Hunt for Experiences; Pop-Up Entertainment','','inherit','closed','closed','','1747-revision-v1','','','2017-04-01 17:17:53','2017-04-01 22:17:53','',1747,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/04/01/1747-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1753,1,'2017-04-01 21:56:56','2017-04-02 02:56:56','[caption id=\"attachment_1749\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/IMG_0033.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1749\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/IMG_0033-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> One of the Four Major Food Groups[/caption]\r\n\r\nIt\'s a very Paris-centric episode; I\'m still trying to drop the weight I picked up on our 10-day stay. I talk about hunts for beer and pastry took us out of the usual Notre Dame-to-Eiffel Tower-to-Louvre tourist triangle, some of the interesting buskers we saw along the way, and my surprise at Munich Airport receiving an airport award. I also continue our on-going discussions about buying international SIM cards and ride-sharing. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_128.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/315640920\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n<!--more-->\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #128:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, after a full month of travel. I’m not complaining though, because -- first, I had been home, off the road, for 4 weeks straight and was beginning to make the place look untidy; and then more than a week of this travel spurt was in Paris, on vacation with the family. Tough to complain about travel with your mouth full of great food and wine. And mine certainly was. I’m not even looking at a scale for another 2 weeks.</li>\r\n 	<li>In what’s become our usual pattern for European trips, we flew out on a Thursday night. This works out well because typically Friday is a catch-up day at work -- more about internal conference calls than client work -- so it’s easier to skip out, and then landing on a Friday, more places are open -- like rental agency offices, phone stores -- if you need them. My wife and I flew into Paris and had a 3-star Michelin lunch to chase away jet lag, while the kids met up in Edinburgh for the weekend and lived off of beer and haggis. They then hopped one of the budget carriers to CDG Sunday night and managed to figure out the train well enough to land at the doorstep of our vacation rental on Rue de Rivoli, a bridge and a couple of blocks straight up from Notre Dame. My wife has this whole vacation rental thing down to a near science. I think I need to nag her into writing it up in a post for the TravelCommons web site.</li>\r\n 	<li>In the travel build-up to the Paris trip, another usual pattern; this one involves a bit more stupid travel -- bouncing across multiple clients and cities, to give everyone face-time before I disappear for a week; I found myself in Miami for a couple of days. I flew American back home to Chicago Friday night, and I guess because I was going between two of their hubs, I ended up on one of American’s international 767’s. Now, I typically despise 767’s because the overhead bins are way undersized. But, it was one of the best domestic upgrades I’ve scored. First, because between First and Business class, there’s a whole lot more seat for an upgrade. And then, this 767’s business class had been upgraded, so I had my own “pod” with a lie-flat seat and a 20-something inch screen -- much bigger than the screen smaller than my hand that I tweeted from the United 767 I took from ORD to CDG. Made for a very comfortable 3-hr flight.</li>\r\n 	<li>But back to Paris, the trip went without a hitch -- the strong dollar made an expensive a city a little less so, the weather was great for March -- sunny, a bit brisk. I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to get around with just English. I know I’m a language sloth, and while I didn’t expect it, I was happy not to have to struggle through with my minimal French. Indeed, the only smirch on trip was at the very end. We landed at ORD after 7pm, after half of Immigration shut down. The resulting lines were insane; Security was walking planeloads of people from the other side of the international terminal to our side and to the back of our line. They were shouting for all US citizens to get stand to the left of the hallway. After about 10 minutes of this, I asked a security person about Global Entry. “Oh, go this way,” she said and pointed down an empty line. We bolted, and were out after another 5 minutes. Customs should’ve had a guy walking that line taking Global Entry applications. They would’ve made a killing.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://www.magnatune.com/artists/albums/rompaey-mozaic/\">Bubbly</a></em> by Ruben van Rompaey</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>First up, a belated Thank You to iTunes user <em>California flying</em> for the 5-star review back in January:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>“As a project manager with lots of travel thrown in, I really enjoy hearing Mark’s travel tales and can very much relate to his insight and observations. It’s an easy and fun listen. Just wish it was more frequent!”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Thanks for taking the time to write that review. I’m glad you enjoy the podcast. I am trying on the frequency. This will be 3 straight months of episodes, so we’re starting 2017 in the right way.</li>\r\n 	<li>In the last episode, after deconstructing my own Top 10 travel tips list, I asked for listener contributions. Dan wrote this on the TravelCommons web site\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>“My biggest travel tip right now to my friends is get Nexus! Not only is it great when coming or going to the US (we live in Canada), but it gets you TSA Precheck while in the US which is great to have.”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Good tip, Dan. As a US citizen, I’m still a bit confused on the Global Entry vs. Nexus choice. But anything that lets you skip Immigration lines and keep from having to disrobe in the security line is a good thing.</li>\r\n 	<li>Dan Brener and Max Flight both hit the TravelCommons’ Facebook page to say they found the VPN comparison in the last episode useful. Dan said that he also uses PIA and has found that, sometimes, Netflix will let it connect -- which I mentioned is kinda the acid test for location shifting. Dan says it is a bit hit-&amp;-miss though.</li>\r\n 	<li>Continuing the thread from the past couple of episodes on buying pay-as-you-go-SIMs when overseas, my Paris experiences were a mixed bag. On that first Friday, between picking up the apartment keys and heading to the George V for lunch, I wanted to pick up at least one SIM so we’d have some connectivity. I walked to nearest Orange store -- about 3 blocks down Rue de Rivoli. They didn’t have any regular prepaid SIMs in stock; only the special Holiday SIM which had inter-EU calling which I didn’t need and, at 40 euros, was more than I needed to pay. This became a common refrain. Every company-owned Orange and SFR store I visited was out of prepaid SIMs. Only what appeared to be a franchised Orange store in the bottom of the big underground shopping mall at Les Halles had them, and also very friendly service. That got us through the weekend. On Monday, after another string of Orange stiff arms, we walked up to the main Free store -- which I think sells TV as well as mobile service. We walked up to a vending machine in the lobby and pretty quickly had two more SIMs; a much better buying experience except for the fact that the store was inconveniently tucked away down a bland business street north of the Champs Elysee. I’ll be glad when the eSIM gets market traction.</li>\r\n 	<li>And continuing another thread, this one on Uber, while I regularly use Uber and Lyft in the US, I rarely -- if ever -- use them while traveling in Europe. I got to thinking about this while in Paris when, on Saturday when heading to the airport, we chose to roll the luggage to a taxi rank rather than use Uber. It’s a couple of reasons. First, there doesn’t seem to be that much of a price difference between Uber and taxis. I first noticed this in Lisbon last spring and then again in Paris. Second, most taxis in Europe are not the beaters that many US cabs are. In the US, even at the same rate, I’ll often take Uber because the cars are in so much better shape. The cabs in Baltimore last summer were the most egregious case. There was a cab stand right outside the building I was in, but I’d still wait 5 minutes for an Uber. And third, and maybe the most nebulous (squishy?), I’m maybe a bit less comfortable getting into a ride-share in a country where I don’t know the language and am not confident that I’m solid on the customs and protocols. In the US, I know what’s right and what’s not. Even in the UK, I’m comfortable enough and don’t worry about communicating effectively with the driver. I know zero Portuguese and little more French. So I’m a bit more willing to search out a taxi stand.</li>\r\n 	<li>I was flipping through the online version of the UK’s Telegraph newspaper earlier this month and got clickbaited into a Top 10 Airport listicle from the 2017 Skytrax World Airport Awards. They had all the usual suspects at the top of the list -- Singapore, Seoul, Hong Kong -- but at #4, they had Munich! I was stunned because my last two experiences connecting through Munich -- last Nov en route to Pisa and this month on my way back from Paris -- were not great as my Twitter followers already know. Probably the worst thing are the lines, and how brutally slow they move. Back in episode #125, I described the security crawl when trying to connect to our Pisa flight mid-morning on a Friday. I was stunned how slow the security staff was moving. No sense of urgency as a dozen lines tailed back through the terminal. I thought a union had called for some job action. But then in March, it was a huge tailback off of passport control. I’m used to Frankfurt where you walk up, answer a question, boom-boom they stamp your passport and through you go. Not in Munich. It was that same meandering pace. Like the place was in slow motion. The same thing at the one restaurant we found in the satellite portion of Terminal 2. Four people were behind the counter. The line trying to ordering tailed back, but only one of the four was helping customers. The other three were having some conversation and doing some paperwork. So why did Skytrax rate Munich #4? Apparently, it has its own brewery, a mini-golf course, and in the winter, a Christmas market and an ice skating rink -- none of which I experienced while struggling through lines trying to make a connection. And maybe that’s the problem -- Munich is focused on being a shopping mall/entertainment center rather than being an airport. Planning a flight to Budapest in May, I was offered two connection choices -- Munich or Vienna. I didn’t even pause to think about it. choosing Vienna, even though it’s nowhere in that Skytrax list. I’m hoping they’ll work harder on getting me through the airport than grooming a mini-golf course.</li>\r\n 	<li>And finally, congrats to Frank Mohnhaupt for winning a year\'s subscription to NordVPN. Frank’s entry in the Rafflecopter drawing was subscribing to the TravelCommons’ SoundCloud feed. And thanks again to NordVPN for providing the giveaway prize.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/kokoon-berlin/\">How Do I Work This</a></em> by The Kokoon</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>The Hunt for Experiences</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>In Paris, that first weekend when it was just my wife and I -- the kids were hunting haggis in Edinburgh -- was spent a good chunk of the time on what I call “hunts”. We got up and out early on Saturday -- always a good way to fight jet lag -- hunting for a pastry. Not just any pastry, because in Paris, that would in no way qualify as a hunt. No, it was a specific kind of pastry -- a kugelhopf, a kind of a hat-shaped pastry. And not just any kugelhopf. We were tracking down Vandermeersch, which, according to an article my wife read in Saveur magazine, makes the best kugelhopf in Paris and usually sells out shortly after opening -- hence the early morning alarm. So off we go, using Google Maps to tell us the right combination of Metros to get us to the correct outer bit of Paris. We get there shortly after opening and had the full selection of kugelhopfs -- small, medium, large. The couple of nice middle-aged women running what was a small shop helped us to by 2 smalls -- one to eat right away; the second for Sunday morning -- and a medium for Monday morning for breakfast with the kids. We ate that small one fresh, on the street. I don’t know if it was the best kugelhopf because my sample size was (and still is) one, but it was a pretty damn good pastry and worth forgoing the snooze button the early alarm.</li>\r\n 	<li>Saturday afternoon, we went on my hunt -- for a microbrewery, in an even further out bit of Paris, that’s only open Saturday afternoons. And where our morning visit to Vandermeersch landed us in a seemingly upscale neighborhood where people were up early for the morning runs along the grass boulevard dividers, that afternoon, we walked up the Metro steps on the main street of a heavily North African neighborhood; definitely outside the tourist bubble. Walking across the park here -- no grass, just dirt.</li>\r\n 	<li>But walking into the microbrewery, off kind of a dodgy street, put us in the midst of what seemed to be the standard afternoon outing for Parisian hipster families. Mostly while families with little kids; lots of bikes and beers; everyone eating sandwiches sold by an artisanal baker who looked to be friends of the brewers (his t-shirt read (in English) “More Bakers, Less Bankers”). Nice people; great beer. But an interesting contrast with the surrounding neighborhood. Inside the brewery, I could’ve been in Brooklyn or Portland. Outside, on the main street, maybe Algiers.</li>\r\n 	<li>Good pastry, good beer, but the hunt -- searching out these experiences -- is as much it’s own reward. It gave us a reason, a goal, to get out of the travel bubble, off the well-trod Notre Dame-to-Eiffel Tower-to-Louvre tourist triangle. Not that we didn’t do that too -- we did -- but if that’s all we did, it would have been a bit disappointing. And that we did it on our own, rather than as part of some “Hipster Paris” tour, gives an added touch of accomplishment.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music --<em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/weigl-proof/\">Piano Circus</a></em> by Philipp Weigl</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Pop-Up Entertainment</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Toward the end of our week in Paris, heading out again from the normal tourist zone -- in search of a brew pub with my son this time; my wife and daughter were hunting Longchamps bags -- we get on the Metro to find a busker on our subway car, a tuba busker. He was an older guy wearing a slightly Tyrolean looking hat with a waist-high battery-powered speaker in front of him taped to a luggage wheelie type of cart and an orange donations can taped to the handle. The speaker played the backing track while he played the main melody on the tuba. After one song (which I can’t say that I recognized), he left the backing track playing while walking the car with his hand out for tips. I think he was on the car for 3 stops.</li>\r\n 	<li>On the way back, during one of the 18 stops back, another busker walked onto our car, a younger guy who turned out to be a rapping busker. He had the same speaker rig and the same cadence as the tuba player -- last guy in, stood in front of the door, powered up the back beat on the speakers, rapped out a song between stops, solicited money between the next stops, and then left the train.</li>\r\n 	<li>I also saw what I consider the more typical subway buskers -- playing guitar, or a double-bass in the connecting tunnels, taking advantage of the tile acoustics. A little less typical was a couple ating out an opera scene in a wider area where 2 or 3 tunnels came together. Not only were they singing opera (with tile-driven acoustics), they were acting out the scene -- the woman fleeing toward one tunnel only to have the man catch her and pull her back. It took just a moment to connect the singing to the action; to realize that this wasn’t an actual assault. It drew a bit of a crowd. I don’t know if this was real busking or just advertising an opera show, but it certainly got my attention.</li>\r\n 	<li>Later on, my son and I were walking in front of Notre Dame and heard another woman singing opera. It took us a minute to locate her. She had her back to a building on the north side of the plaza. It was another good acoustic location -- the echo off the building seem to amplify and project her voice across the open space in front of the cathedral. The police seem to keep a heavy presence here. We’d seen them earlier descend on a woman who was panhandling the folks standing in line to get into the cathedral. But this time, they let the woman finish up her aria before moving her along. Quite a change from Chicago’s bucket boys.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #128</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Magnatune</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_127.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #128 — Hunt for Experiences; Pop-Up Entertainment','','inherit','closed','closed','','1747-revision-v1','','','2017-04-01 21:56:56','2017-04-02 02:56:56','',1747,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/04/01/1747-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1754,1,'2017-04-01 21:59:20','2017-04-02 02:59:20','[caption id=\"attachment_1749\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/IMG_0033.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1749\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/IMG_0033-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> One of the Four Major Food Groups[/caption]\r\n\r\nIt\'s a very Paris-centric episode; I\'m still trying to drop the weight I picked up on our 10-day stay. I talk about hunts for beer and pastry took us out of the usual Notre Dame-to-Eiffel Tower-to-Louvre tourist triangle, some of the interesting buskers we saw along the way, and my surprise at Munich Airport receiving an airport award. I also continue our on-going discussions about buying international SIM cards and ride-sharing. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_128.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/315640920\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n<!--more-->\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #128:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, after a full month of travel. I’m not complaining though, because -- first, I had been home, off the road, for 4 weeks straight and was beginning to make the place look untidy; and then more than a week of this travel spurt was in Paris, on vacation with the family. Tough to complain about travel with your mouth full of great food and wine. And mine certainly was. I’m not even looking at a scale for another 2 weeks.</li>\r\n 	<li>In what’s become our usual pattern for European trips, we flew out on a Thursday night. This works out well because typically Friday is a catch-up day at work -- more about internal conference calls than client work -- so it’s easier to skip out, and then landing on a Friday, more places are open -- like rental agency offices, phone stores -- if you need them. My wife and I flew into Paris and had a 3-star Michelin lunch to chase away jet lag, while the kids met up in Edinburgh for the weekend and lived off of beer and haggis. They then hopped one of the budget carriers to CDG Sunday night and managed to figure out the train well enough to land at the doorstep of our vacation rental on Rue de Rivoli, a bridge and a couple of blocks straight up from Notre Dame. My wife has this whole vacation rental thing down to a near science. I think I need to nag her into writing it up in a post for the TravelCommons web site.</li>\r\n 	<li>In the travel build-up to the Paris trip, another usual pattern; this one involves a bit more stupid travel -- bouncing across multiple clients and cities, to give everyone face-time before I disappear for a week; I found myself in Miami for a couple of days. I flew American back home to Chicago Friday night, and I guess because I was going between two of their hubs, I ended up on one of American’s international 767’s. Now, I typically despise 767’s because the overhead bins are way undersized. But, it was one of the best domestic upgrades I’ve scored. First, because between First and Business class, there’s a whole lot more seat for an upgrade. And then, this 767’s business class had been upgraded, so I had my own “pod” with a lie-flat seat and a 20-something inch screen -- much bigger than the screen smaller than my hand that I tweeted from the United 767 I took from ORD to CDG. Made for a very comfortable 3-hr flight.</li>\r\n 	<li>But back to Paris, the trip went without a hitch -- the strong dollar made an expensive a city a little less so, the weather was great for March -- sunny, a bit brisk. I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to get around with just English. I know I’m a language sloth, and while I didn’t expect it, I was happy not to have to struggle through with my minimal French. Indeed, the only smirch on trip was at the very end. We landed at ORD after 7pm, after half of Immigration shut down. The resulting lines were insane; Security was walking planeloads of people from the other side of the international terminal to our side and to the back of our line. They were shouting for all US citizens to get stand to the left of the hallway. After about 10 minutes of this, I asked a security person about Global Entry. “Oh, go this way,” she said and pointed down an empty line. We bolted, and were out after another 5 minutes. Customs should’ve had a guy walking that line taking Global Entry applications. They would’ve made a killing.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://www.magnatune.com/artists/albums/rompaey-mozaic/\">Bubbly</a></em> by Ruben van Rompaey</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>First up, a belated Thank You to iTunes user <em>California flying</em> for the 5-star review back in January:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>“As a project manager with lots of travel thrown in, I really enjoy hearing Mark’s travel tales and can very much relate to his insight and observations. It’s an easy and fun listen. Just wish it was more frequent!”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Thanks for taking the time to write that review. I’m glad you enjoy the podcast. I am trying on the frequency. This will be 3 straight months of episodes, so we’re starting 2017 in the right way.</li>\r\n 	<li>In the last episode, after deconstructing my own Top 10 travel tips list, I asked for listener contributions. Dan wrote this on the TravelCommons web site\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>“My biggest travel tip right now to my friends is get Nexus! Not only is it great when coming or going to the US (we live in Canada), but it gets you TSA Precheck while in the US which is great to have.”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Good tip, Dan. As a US citizen, I’m still a bit confused on the Global Entry vs. Nexus choice. But anything that lets you skip Immigration lines and keep from having to disrobe in the security line is a good thing.</li>\r\n 	<li>Dan Brener and Max Flight both hit the TravelCommons’ Facebook page to say they found the VPN comparison in the last episode useful. Dan said that he also uses PIA and has found that, sometimes, Netflix will let it connect -- which I mentioned is kinda the acid test for location shifting. Dan says it is a bit hit-&amp;-miss though.</li>\r\n 	<li>Continuing the thread from the past couple of episodes on buying pay-as-you-go-SIMs when overseas, my Paris experiences were a mixed bag. On that first Friday, between picking up the apartment keys and heading to the George V for lunch, I wanted to pick up at least one SIM so we’d have some connectivity. I walked to nearest Orange store -- about 3 blocks down Rue de Rivoli. They didn’t have any regular prepaid SIMs in stock; only the special Holiday SIM which had inter-EU calling which I didn’t need and, at 40 euros, was more than I needed to pay. This became a common refrain. Every company-owned Orange and SFR store I visited was out of prepaid SIMs. Only what appeared to be a franchised Orange store in the bottom of the big underground shopping mall at Les Halles had them, and also very friendly service. That got us through the weekend. On Monday, after another string of Orange stiff arms, we walked up to the main Free store -- which I think sells TV as well as mobile service. We walked up to a vending machine in the lobby and pretty quickly had two more SIMs; a much better buying experience except for the fact that the store was inconveniently tucked away down a bland business street north of the Champs Elysee. I’ll be glad when the eSIM gets market traction.</li>\r\n 	<li>And continuing another thread, this one on Uber, while I regularly use Uber and Lyft in the US, I rarely -- if ever -- use them while traveling in Europe. I got to thinking about this while in Paris when, on Saturday when heading to the airport, we chose to roll the luggage to a taxi rank rather than use Uber. It’s a couple of reasons. First, there doesn’t seem to be that much of a price difference between Uber and taxis. I first noticed this in Lisbon last spring and then again in Paris. Second, most taxis in Europe are not the beaters that many US cabs are. In the US, even at the same rate, I’ll often take Uber because the cars are in so much better shape. The cabs in Baltimore last summer were the most egregious case. There was a cab stand right outside the building I was in, but I’d still wait 5 minutes for an Uber. And third, and maybe the most nebulous (squishy?), I’m maybe a bit less comfortable getting into a ride-share in a country where I don’t know the language and am not confident that I’m solid on the customs and protocols. In the US, I know what’s right and what’s not. Even in the UK, I’m comfortable enough and don’t worry about communicating effectively with the driver. I know zero Portuguese and little more French. So I’m a bit more willing to search out a taxi stand.</li>\r\n 	<li>I was flipping through the online version of the UK’s Telegraph newspaper earlier this month and got clickbaited into a Top 10 Airport listicle from the 2017 Skytrax World Airport Awards. They had all the usual suspects at the top of the list -- Singapore, Seoul, Hong Kong -- but at #4, they had Munich! I was stunned because my last two experiences connecting through Munich -- last Nov en route to Pisa and this month on my way back from Paris -- were not great as my Twitter followers already know. Probably the worst thing are the lines, and how brutally slow they move. Back in episode #125, I described the security crawl when trying to connect to our Pisa flight mid-morning on a Friday. I was stunned how slow the security staff was moving. No sense of urgency as a dozen lines tailed back through the terminal. I thought a union had called for some job action. But then in March, it was a huge tailback off of passport control. I’m used to Frankfurt where you walk up, answer a question, boom-boom they stamp your passport and through you go. Not in Munich. It was that same meandering pace. Like the place was in slow motion. The same thing at the one restaurant we found in the satellite portion of Terminal 2. Four people were behind the counter. The line trying to ordering tailed back, but only one of the four was helping customers. The other three were having some conversation and doing some paperwork. So why did Skytrax rate Munich #4? Apparently, it has its own brewery, a mini-golf course, and in the winter, a Christmas market and an ice skating rink -- none of which I experienced while struggling through lines trying to make a connection. And maybe that’s the problem -- Munich is focused on being a shopping mall/entertainment center rather than being an airport. Planning a flight to Budapest in May, I was offered two connection choices -- Munich or Vienna. I didn’t even pause to think about it. choosing Vienna, even though it’s nowhere in that Skytrax list. I’m hoping they’ll work harder on getting me through the airport than grooming a mini-golf course.</li>\r\n 	<li>And finally, congrats to Frank Mohnhaupt for winning a year\'s subscription to NordVPN. Frank’s entry in the Rafflecopter drawing was subscribing to the TravelCommons’ SoundCloud feed. And thanks again to NordVPN for providing the giveaway prize.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/kokoon-berlin/\">How Do I Work This</a></em> by The Kokoon</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>The Hunt for Experiences</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>In Paris, that first weekend when it was just my wife and I -- the kids were hunting haggis in Edinburgh -- was spent a good chunk of the time on what I call “hunts”. We got up and out early on Saturday -- always a good way to fight jet lag -- hunting for a pastry. Not just any pastry, because in Paris, that would in no way qualify as a hunt. No, it was a specific kind of pastry -- a kugelhopf, a kind of a hat-shaped pastry. And not just any kugelhopf. We were tracking down Vandermeersch, which, according to an article my wife read in Saveur magazine, makes the best kugelhopf in Paris and usually sells out shortly after opening -- hence the early morning alarm. So off we go, using Google Maps to tell us the right combination of Metros to get us to the correct outer bit of Paris. We get there shortly after opening and had the full selection of kugelhopfs -- small, medium, large. The couple of nice middle-aged women running what was a small shop helped us to by 2 smalls -- one to eat right away; the second for Sunday morning -- and a medium for Monday morning for breakfast with the kids. We ate that small one fresh, on the street. I don’t know if it was the best kugelhopf because my sample size was (and still is) one, but it was a pretty damn good pastry and worth forgoing the snooze button the early alarm.</li>\r\n 	<li>Saturday afternoon, we went on my hunt -- for a microbrewery, in an even further out bit of Paris, that’s only open Saturday afternoons. And where our morning visit to Vandermeersch landed us in a seemingly upscale neighborhood where people were up early for the morning runs along the grass boulevard dividers, that afternoon, we walked up the Metro steps on the main street of a heavily North African neighborhood; definitely outside the tourist bubble. Walking across the park here -- no grass, just dirt.</li>\r\n 	<li>But walking into the microbrewery, off kind of a dodgy street, put us in the midst of what seemed to be the standard afternoon outing for Parisian hipster families. Mostly while families with little kids; lots of bikes and beers; everyone eating sandwiches sold by an artisanal baker who looked to be friends of the brewers (his t-shirt read (in English) “More Bakers, Less Bankers”). Nice people; great beer. But an interesting contrast with the surrounding neighborhood. Inside the brewery, I could’ve been in Brooklyn or Portland. Outside, on the main street, maybe Algiers.</li>\r\n 	<li>Good pastry, good beer, but the hunt -- searching out these experiences -- is as much it’s own reward. It gave us a reason, a goal, to get out of the travel bubble, off the well-trod Notre Dame-to-Eiffel Tower-to-Louvre tourist triangle. Not that we didn’t do that too -- we did -- but if that’s all we did, it would have been a bit disappointing. And that we did it on our own, rather than as part of some “Hipster Paris” tour, gives an added touch of accomplishment.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music --<em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/weigl-proof/\">Piano Circus</a></em> by Philipp Weigl</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Pop-Up Entertainment</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Toward the end of our week in Paris, heading out again from the normal tourist zone -- in search of a brew pub with my son this time; my wife and daughter were hunting Longchamps bags -- we get on the Metro to find a busker on our subway car, a tuba busker. He was an older guy wearing a slightly Tyrolean looking hat with a waist-high battery-powered speaker in front of him taped to a luggage wheelie type of cart and an orange donations can taped to the handle. The speaker played the backing track while he played the main melody on the tuba. After one song (which I can’t say that I recognized), he left the backing track playing while walking the car with his hand out for tips. I think he was on the car for 3 stops.</li>\r\n 	<li>On the way back, during one of the 18 stops back, another busker walked onto our car, a younger guy who turned out to be a rapping busker. He had the same speaker rig and the same cadence as the tuba player -- last guy in, stood in front of the door, powered up the back beat on the speakers, rapped out a song between stops, solicited money between the next stops, and then left the train.</li>\r\n 	<li>I also saw what I consider the more typical subway buskers -- playing guitar, or a double-bass in the connecting tunnels, taking advantage of the tile acoustics. A little less typical was a couple ating out an opera scene in a wider area where 2 or 3 tunnels came together. Not only were they singing opera (with tile-driven acoustics), they were acting out the scene -- the woman fleeing toward one tunnel only to have the man catch her and pull her back. It took just a moment to connect the singing to the action; to realize that this wasn’t an actual assault. It drew a bit of a crowd. I don’t know if this was real busking or just advertising an opera show, but it certainly got my attention.</li>\r\n 	<li>Later on, my son and I were walking in front of Notre Dame and heard another woman singing opera. It took us a minute to locate her. She had her back to a building on the north side of the plaza. It was another good acoustic location -- the echo off the building seem to amplify and project her voice across the open space in front of the cathedral. The police seem to keep a heavy presence here. We’d seen them earlier descend on a woman who was panhandling the folks standing in line to get into the cathedral. But this time, they let the woman finish up her aria before moving her along. Quite a change from Chicago’s bucket boys.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #128</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Magnatune</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_128.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #128 — Hunt for Experiences; Pop-Up Entertainment','','inherit','closed','closed','','1747-revision-v1','','','2017-04-01 21:59:20','2017-04-02 02:59:20','',1747,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/04/01/1747-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1755,1,'2017-04-01 22:10:41','2017-04-02 03:10:41','[caption id=\"attachment_1632\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/IMG_0324.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1632\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/IMG_0324-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Spring Break in Iceland\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Spring Break in Iceland[/caption]\r\n\r\nWatching Iceland makes its Cinderella run in the Euro 2016 soccer tourney got me thinking back to my March trip there. It is one of the hot travel destinations -- maybe too hot? Could be, but the descriptor I keep coming back to is \"dramatic.\" And it seems that on every trip I make out of the country, I get surprised by the amount of data my iPhone consumes -- in spite of flipping every Settings switch I can find. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_122.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_121.mp3\"]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #122:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you once again from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, on a week off of the road. I hate to say “a rare week”, but looking at my calendar, it is. For the first half of the year -- 26 weeks -- I didn’t get in an airplane during 2 of them. This week, the first of the second half of the year, is my 3rd non-travel week. Now absolutely some of them are self-inflicted -- 2 to be exact -- one week in Spain and one in Portugal. That’s an intense travel schedule, even for me. I usually find a way to take a break at least once every 6 weeks, but it just hasn’t worked out that way this year so far. Sometimes you control your schedule, while other times it controls you. I’m definitely been on the wrong end of the leash since January.</li>\r\n 	<li>Since the last episode, I’ve been traveling pretty much exclusively between Chicago and Charlottesville, VA. Now Charlottesville is a nice town, but it’s a pain to get to every week. The first direct flight from Chicago leaves around 11:30am, landing around 2pm -- not exactly convenient for the business traveler. Other earlier options are to fly into Washington-Dulles and drive for 2 hrs, or fly into Richmond and drive an hour and a half. What I’ve found myself doing for the past couple of weeks is flying in Sunday night -- which I absolutely hate -- on direct flight that leaves Chicago around 9:45pm, lands in Charlottesville around half past midnight and puts me into my hotel around 1am. There just doesn’t seem to be an easy way around this one.</li>\r\n 	<li>At least the flights back home are convenient -- 3:15 and 6:30pm. And it’s not a crowded airport. I think last week was the longest TSA line I hit -- 3 people were in front of me.</li>\r\n 	<li>And as I start to think about a September trip to Scotland to take our daughter back to University, I’m taking advantage of the post-Brexit exchange rate to stock my Revolut account with some much cheaper pounds. Though it’ll be another week on the road, I’ll be significantly upgrading my Scotch choices.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/hisboyelroy/430\" target=\"_blank\">Revolve</a> mix</em> by His Boy Elroy</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Last week’s attack at Istanbul’s Ataturk airport begs the same question as March’s Brussels bombings -- does more airport security actually make us safer or just move the target around? I said in the<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/05/30/podcast-121-tsa-lines-my-luggage-is-where/\" target=\"_blank\"> last episode</a> that the long TSA lines on the land side of security caused by stricter TSA inspections weren’t making the traveler any safer. Instead, they were make us less safe/more vulnerable to a Brussels or Istanbul-style attack. And while the TSA has fixed (at least for now) some of the worst lines, the issue is going to pop up again. And someone is going to suggest -- again -- that they move the security perimeter back -- say, checking itineraries and IDs at the terminal door like they do in India? The justification will be that a little bit more inconvenience is more than worth the price of safety. But, if they don’t staff it right (which was and will alway be the core problem), all you’ve done is just move the target -- the line of passengers -- out by another 1,000 feet. It’s less about location and more about execution. And given the TSA’s track record of execution over the past 15 years, I’m not optimistic that they’ll get to the right answer.</li>\r\n 	<li>I got a e-mail a few weeks ago that my 5-year Global Entry membership expires on my birthday this December. I don’t know exactly when Customs and Border Patrol started Global Entry, but 5 years ago, I was one of the early adopters. Back then, there weren’t that many interview centers. I was lucky that Chicago had one, but I had colleagues in Phoenix who had to fly up to Las Vegas for interviews. The renew process was pretty easy. I logged into GOES -- Global Online Enrollment Systems -- clicked the blue Renew Membership button and then cycled through all the profile screens -- but this time the screens were pre-populated so I only had to make updates. In my case, it was updating my job history for my current job and, the toughest part, entering all the countries I’d visited in the past 5 years. Normally, this would be pretty simple -- thumb through your passport pages and write down the country stamps. However, back in 2012, my backpack with my passport was stolen while on the train from Brussels city center to the airport -- a fun time I recount in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/05/20/podcast-98-stolen-luggage-restaurants-want-your-smartphone/\" target=\"_blank\">episode 98</a>. Luckily, I do a decent job of cataloging travel pics. Flipping through 2011 reminded me that we’d visited Venice that year and that I’d traveled there by train from Paris after a couple of days of customer meeting. The renewal cost is $100 -- $20/year is worth the price. Even more so when it’s free -- I charged it on my Amex Platinum card and immediately saw a $100 statement credit. Now I’m checking GOES every couple of days to see if Customs just waves my renewal through or if I have to talk again to the nice people in the bowels of ORD Terminal 5. I’m hoping that with the crush of new PreCheck applications, they’ll take the easy route.</li>\r\n 	<li>And as we’ve talked about before, I’m not really sure why anyone would sign up for PreCheck instead of Global Entry. Global Entry is just $15 more -- $100 instead of $85 -- the price of a beer at ORD.</li>\r\n 	<li>But if you’re not up for the $100 passport check line cut, Arnoud Heijnis, a long time TravelCommons listener, pinged me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> about another option -- the Mobile Passport app from US Customs and Border Patrol. I haven’t used it because I have Global Entry. My wife tried to get my son to download it before his return flight from Reykjavik, but he never got ‘round to it, and he said the early evening lines at ORD weren’t that bad. So while I don’t have any first- or second-hand experience with it, one of the tech writers at WSJ wrote up a <a href=\"http://www.wsj.com/articles/get-through-airport-customs-faster-with-this-free-app-1467221118\" target=\"_blank\">glowing review</a> of the app a few weeks back. Check out the show notes for a link to the article. And if you’ve tried the Mobile Passport, shoot me a note with your thoughts.</li>\r\n 	<li>During my flight back home last Weds, we were coming in on approach, you could feel the gradual descent -- slowing, descending, slowing, descending -- and then, all of a sudden, I’m pressed against the back of my seat as the plane rotates in the wrong direction -- up, that is -- and the engines roar with thrust. The experienced travelers know that the pilot had to abort the landing, but those who haven’t gone through this drill before are looking around, wondering “what the hell…?”. After about 5 minutes, the pilot came on “The plane in front of us hit a bird. They have to physically inspect the runway before another plane can land, so we had to fly around. We’ll be down in 10 minutes”. That was a nice announcement. I learned something new -- I didn’t know they had to inspect a runway after a bird strike, though it makes a lot of sense. Too often pilots or gate agents don’t take the time to explain the cause of a delay or a fly around, or don’t want to deal with the follow-up questions that may come -- and so I appreciate those that do. I remember a Southwest flight out of New Orleans. The plane lands -- it was a bit late -- but we’re not boarding right away. You could feel the impatience building in the gate area. The agent got on the PA -- “Sorry for the delay in boarding, but the plane was struck by lightning on its descent. The pilots have to do a physical inspection before we can board”. OK, that makes sense -- and just as you could feel the impatience build, it immediately drained away with that announcement. Maybe it’s because these delays weren’t the airline’s fault -- no negligence or bad judgement on American’s part for a bird strike or Southwest’s for lightning. Bit tougher to suck up when it’s the third delay in a row caused by maintenance issues -- spend some of those record profits on preventative maintenance -- or a missing crew -- maybe you should put a bit more slack in your scheduling. But as always, more transparency is better than vagueness -- even if it’s not the best story for you.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/septahelix/34050\" target=\"_blank\">Earth Soda</a></em> by septahelix</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Data-Hungry Phones</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I met up with a friend at <a href=\"http://www.empiricalbrewery.com/\">Empirical Brewing</a>, one of 3 microbreweries along Ravenswood Blvd in that Chicago northwest side neighborhood. I hadn’t seen him since he had gotten back from a trip he and his son did to Helsinki, St Petersburg, and Moscow. Among other things, he had problems getting his son’s AT&amp;T iPhone to work in Helsinki. That’s odd, I said. I’ve never had a problem with AT&amp;T’s GSM iPhones in Europe. AT&amp;T told him to reset it, which he did, after which it promptly downloaded a gig and a half of apps and data over the cellular data network. As you might guess, he’s disputing that couple of hundred dollar bill.</li>\r\n 	<li>I am always surprised at how much data my phone uses when I travel outside of the country. Now I’m sure that one reason for this is that it’s about the only time I look at my data usage since I’m grandfathered into one of the old AT&amp;T unlimited data plans. I don’t know how much I use, and don’t make a big effort to limit it. So when I travel overseas, I get to see my kids live their mobile lives trying to stay under a 300 MB data cap.</li>\r\n 	<li>International mobile data has gotten a bit cheaper. T-Mobile offers a reasonable unlimited international data plan if you can live with slower 2G-style speeds. I’m not that patient, so I tend to get the AT&amp;T 300 MB package for $60 because it also comes with free access to a decent set of wi-fi hotspots.</li>\r\n 	<li>Living on a data budget means thinking which apps really need mobile data -- which is not that many. So while I’m sitting on the plane waiting for everyone to board, I pull out my iPhone, go over to Settings | Cellular and start turning off cellular data access for most of my apps. I’m not quite sure why the healthcare flexible spending app or the app that came with my sous vide immersion heater ever need cellular data -- in the US or internationally. Anyhow, I spool through the last, turning most of them off and certainly that damn “Wi-Fi Assist” and then, after I’ve sent my last Snapchat, I hit “Reset Statistics” so I’ll have a clean view of how I’m burning through that 300 MB and then click over to Airplane mode.</li>\r\n 	<li>And then, when I land, I come out of Airplane mode, go back into Settings | Cellular and turn Roaming On, and catch up on the overnight e-mail while waiting to get off the plane. At some point that morning, I’ll look at the Current Period data usage and see that I’ve burned through, say, 75 MB of my 300 MB -- 25% of my total package -- in the first morning. Holy crap! I immediately dive back into Settings | Cellular and turn off Roaming. What happened?</li>\r\n 	<li>This is where, on the iPhone, you begin having to spelunk through the mess that the Settings app has become. You scroll down past all the apps you shut off from cellular access and look at the last entry -- “System Services” -- and see that it’s consumed at least half of that 75 MB. What the hell? You click through. Why has this phone used that much data on “Time &amp; Location” or “General” or “iTunes Accounts” (huh? I thought I shut off iTunes in the last screen). This is when you start to dig deep -- Settings | Privacy | Location Service and you find another list of apps -- kinda like the one you used to turn off cellular data, but this one is for accessing your location. Look, as much as I love the Tortas Frontera restaurants in ORD, I’m not sure why their app needs to pull my location information. And then you go to Settings | General | Background App Refresh for yet another list of apps where you shut off their permission to update themselves in the background. And then you go over to Settings | Mail and turn Fetch New Data to Off to keep your iPhone from constantly pinging your Exchange server.</li>\r\n 	<li>It’s kinda like whack-a-mole, and you’ll be sure to miss something because these phones and the apps we load on them are, for the most part, built on the assumption of ubiquitous unlimited data access. So changing that behavior, those assumptions -- to severely limit the data the phone inhales and exhales -- takes work. Which is why, if we’re going to be somewhere for more than 4-5 days, I’ll invest the hour it takes to find a phone store and $25 per phone to buy a local SIM with a gig or two of data. When I was in Iceland for 4 days in March, it didn’t seem necessary. But when then I flew down to Spain for 8 days, my first stop was the Orange store because I knew my phone couldn’t hold its breath for that long.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music --<em> <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/scottaltham/20747\">Hear Us Now</a></em> by scottaltham</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Dramatic Iceland</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Watching Iceland makes its Cinderella run in the Euro 2016 soccer tourney -- right up until the time they faceplanted into France last weekend -- reminded me of the trip my son and I took in March. Some reaction shots ESPN did from Reykjavik were places we had been -- saw a coffee shop we hit trying to stay awake on our first day, and a square that one of our hotels was on. Not that surprising since downtown Reykjavik isn’t that big. If I’d paid more attention to the people sitting next to me in the bars off that square, I’d have probably recognized some people in those shots too.</li>\r\n 	<li>Iceland is a hot tourist destination -- especially for people looking for something a bit different. And if I didn’t know already, when the Dorling Kindersley folks sent me review copies of their relaunched <a href=\"http://www.dk.com/us/travel/\">Eyewitness Travel Top 10 Guides</a>, in among the usual suspects -- New York, London, Paris, Barcelona -- was Iceland. In 2015, there were <a href=\"http://www.ferdamalastofa.is/static/files/ferdamalastofa/Frettamyndir/2016/juni/tourism_-in_iceland_in_figures_may2016.pdf\">1.3 million foreign tourists</a> in Iceland -- almost 4 times the population of 329,000 -- and a 29% increase over 2014. It’s a hot destination and getting hotter -- perhaps even to the point of overheating?</li>\r\n 	<li>Especially with Wow Air, a kinder and quirkier Spirit or Ryan Air, expanding the number of North American gateway cities. We ran into lots of folks who had seen ads for cheap Wow air fares and flew over for a 3 or 4 day weekend on a whim, without really thinking about what to do. We’d see folks walking up and down the downtown shopping and entertainment district in Reykjavik, and then figuring out some day trip bus rides out to the Golden Circle hot spots. And this was in March, not exactly the garden time in Iceland. But there were a lot of folks there. And so in that way, Iceland felt small.</li>\r\n 	<li>On our second day, we picked up a rental SUV -- a Dacia Duster, a great vehicle -- and headed out of town. Once we got out of Reykjavik’s catchment area, Iceland opened up quickly. The drama of the scenery, the spaces carved out by volcanos and glaciers -- “Land of Fire and Ice” it likes to bill itself -- make it feel much bigger. Of course, you could see this same space from the seat of a tour bus, but I was glad we rented a car. We got off the well-worn paths. Not too far, but when driving across a plain on a 2-lane highway with no traffic to speak of, the vistas did open up in front of us, which made me glad I was able to look forward and enjoy them through the expanse of the front windshield instead of looking off to the side through a motor coach window. And when we did some of the typical stops -- Þingvellir park, Gullfoss waterfall -- we could ride out the ebb and flow of the tour bus traffic, and have these spots pretty much to ourselves, even for just a little while. Or the time when we were driving toward the south coast, running through a series of rain bands -- in and out; in and out. I was starting to get annoyed until I looked out the rear view mirror and saw a huge double rainbow. I immediately pulled into a gas station and got out of the car. The landscape was wide open; we could see that rainbow from end to end. It was a phenomenal sight. And the smoked lamb sandwich we bought afterwards in the gas station wasn’t bad either.</li>\r\n 	<li>I struggle sometimes when asked about Iceland. Would I recommend it? Reykjavik is nice enough, but it’s a small town. I’m not a museum guy, so there was probably a day-and-a half of stuff for me to do. And Iceland is expensive. I had good fish and lamb, but it wasn’t cheap. And hotel rooms were tight in March, so I gotta figure the country is completely sold out in July and August.</li>\r\n 	<li>But the scenery outside of Reykjavik, I keep coming back to that word “dramatic”. I’m not sure it does it justice, but it’s all I got. If you get a car, then the trip starts to make sense.</li>\r\n 	<li>Well, that and the fermented shark chased with shots of brennivín -- Icelandic schnapps -- because, I dunno, how can you not?</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #122</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from the <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/\" target=\"_blank\">ccMixter</a> site</li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_122.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #122 — Data-Hungry Phones; Dramatic Iceland','','inherit','closed','closed','','1629-revision-v1','','','2017-04-01 22:10:41','2017-04-02 03:10:41','',1629,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/04/01/1629-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1758,1,'2017-04-27 20:39:52','2017-04-28 01:39:52','Pulled out the GoPro again for the recording of the latest episode. The GoPro is a bit too far from me for good audio, so I cut in the podcast audio from the Zoom recorder when it was available, hence the change in audio quality. I\'ll post the final audio on Saturday.\n\n<iframe width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"https://www.youtube.com/embed/et5b0N8xx9c\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"autoplay; encrypted-media\" allowfullscreen=\"\"></iframe>','Podcast #129 Uncut — The Video Version','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-129-uncut-the-video-version','','','2021-03-28 15:45:19','2021-03-28 20:45:19','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=1758',0,'post','',1),
(1759,1,'2017-04-28 08:39:52','2017-04-28 13:39:52','Pulled out the GoPro again for the recording of the latest episode. The GoPro is a bit too far from me for good audio, so I cut in the podcast audio from the Zoom recorder when it was available, hence the change in audio quality. I\'ll post the final audio on Saturday.\r\n\r\n[youtube]https://youtu.be/et5b0N8xx9c[/youtube]','Podcast #129 Uncut — The Video Version','','inherit','closed','closed','','1758-revision-v1','','','2017-04-28 08:39:52','2017-04-28 13:39:52','',1758,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/04/28/1758-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1760,1,'2017-04-27 21:39:42','2017-04-28 02:39:42','[caption id=\"attachment_1763\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/IMG_0887.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1763\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/IMG_0887-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Scottish Food Tourism can be an acquired taste[/caption]\n\nDifficult to do a travel podcast without talking about this month\'s incidents on United and American Airlines. The videos that hit social media were damning, but as more of the facts came out, the stories around each incident became more complex. On a much lighter note, we also talk about the explosion of food tourism, called by some \"The Bourdain Effect\" after Anthony Bourdain\'s TV travelogue series. Also, listener suggestions for visiting the Budapest baths, and compliments on the terminal improvements at San Francisco Airport (SFO). All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_129.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #129:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, taking a breather after a week of what I like to call “stupid travel” -- Mon, Tues in Charlottesville, VA, flying out Tues night to San Francisco by way of Charlotte because, well, that’s the way the connections worked. Spent Weds in San Francisco complete with a 4-5pm meeting which meant I got to SFO too late for the last reasonable flight to Detroit (I gave up red-eyes for Lent many years ago), so instead I caught the 7pm SFO-ORD flight, getting into ORD at 1am. Which meant I had to turn around the next morning, head back to ORD for a mid-morning flight to Detroit for an afternoon meeting in Ann Arbor. As we were driving out of DTW for Ann Arbor, I began to get texts from American that our return flight home was already delayed by thunderstorms at ORD. Later, looking out the window of the meeting room in Ann Arbor, I watched the rain bucket down. The delay made more sense. And it wasn’t a huge thing for me other than extending an already long week of travel by a couple of hours -- I had nothing planned that evening other than going to bed. Twitter followers should be pleasantly surprised by the lack of bitch tweets.</li>\n 	<li>And, I really didn’t think I could complain if this was the only delay in six flights that week. Although I did help my cause by connecting through Charlotte instead of ORD for my flight from Charlottesville to San Francisco. The ORD-SFO flight would’ve been an hour shorter, but the probability of making that connection, I think, would’ve been significantly lower. So instead, discretion being the better part of valor, I booked the connection through Charlotte in spite of the longer total trip duration and the incredibly long walks I typically have through that airport. The regional flights come into Concourse E which just goes on forever -- 35 gates just in that concourse -- while my connecting flights seem to always go out of Concourse A. Which means I’m usually race-walking the length of the airport even with an on-time arrival and a 60-minute connection time. However, on Tuesday night, my CHO-CLT flight got in early, I had a 90-minute connection time, and my flight went out Concourse B, which meant I had more than enough time to score some Carolina BBQ and a tall-boy beer -- a good luck trifecta which probably helped my patience with the Detroit delay two days later.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Vidian/52190\">Memories (infiniti loop)</a> by Vidian (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license. Ft: TheDice</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>First up, thanks to Robert Fenerty for sending along Budapest travel ideas. My wife’s parents were refugees from the 1956 uprising, so I’ve been to Hungary a few times -- the first in 1989 when it was still Communist, and then the last time was 11 or 12 years ago. So it’s been a while. On of Robert’s suggestions is heading to the Gellert Baths -- “My favorite,” he says, “Ornate lions dump water into the pool and you can stand beneath the lions.” I hit the Gellert Baths my first or second trip to Hungary. There wasn’t really any English spoken then by folks -- mostly German or Russian -- but I had done a “Hungarian on Tape” language course, had about a hundred word vocabulary, and so was able to manage buying a ticket and finding the locker room. Watching the old guys around me -- and it was just old guys -- I figured out that I was supposed to strip down and tie this little white apron around my waist and head in. You did feel like you were walking into the 1890’s. High ceilings, the spouting lions, old guys playing chess in the pools. I loved it. I told my son that’s it’s kind of a Hungarian onsen. We were both a little disappointed though when we saw on the Gellert website that the dress code had changed in four years ago -- no more single sex pools, no more aprons. It’s now co-ed with bathing suits required; as the website says “all bathers are expected to cover the most important gender essentials”.</li>\n 	<li>Chris Christensen sent in a quick note about the Munich airport -- “Munich does have its own brewery,” he said, “but it’s outside of security”. Lotta good that did me.</li>\n 	<li>And continuing on that riff from the last episode, wondering how travel guides are coming up with their top 10 airports, I have to say that SFO is not getting the credit it deserves. I think they’re doing the best job of any major US airport to remake themselves on the fly. First they build a new international terminal, then they rebuilt Terminal 2 into something that I think rivals Hong Kong or Singapore. They’ve done a great job renovating Terminal 3 -- opening up what used to be an overcrowded Newark-live cave into a bright, high-ceilinged concourse with wide walkways -- and now they’re tearing down Terminal 1 to completely rebuild that. So in, what, 10 years SFO will have completely rebuilt the passenger-side experience focusing on what travelers need -- no water slides or luxury shops, but reasonable security, a great selection of restaurants and bars, lots of seating and workspace, and what was, at least last week, screaming fast 5 GHz WiFi. Perceptions always lag reality, but I’m hoping that SFO starts getting some well-deserved love from the airport ranking lists.</li>\n 	<li>One of the podcasts on my subscription list is Men In Blazers, a soccer (or football) podcast. Toward the end of each show, the two hosts, Roger Bennett and Michael Davis, quickly review products that they’re putting in their Amazon Emporium for a little fund-raising. One thing that Michael Davis put it caught my ear -- compression socks. He said he’s started using them on NY-to-LA flights and loves them. I started using them on international flights after a flight home from Hong Kong in United economy had my legs swelling and stiffening up to tree trunks. I wasn’t the only one. There was another guy laying on the floor by one of the exit doors elevating his legs until a flight attendant shooed him off. I couldn’t bring myself to lie on an airplane floor -- at least not without a sanitized mat -- but after that I started flying in compression socks. Not something that I’ve ever seen make a Top 10 travel tip list -- it’s not the most exciting tip -- but I swear by it. Maybe I’ll sneak it in on my next list.</li>\n 	<li>And it wouldn’t be a complete Following Up segment without some beer comment, so thanks to eTuk Denver who tweeted “Mark, next time you\'re in Denver we will personally take you on one of our Beer tours for all the hours of entertainment provided.” Thanks guys! I’m glad you enjoy the podcast and look forward to taking you up on that offer. From their website, it looks like the eTuk guys do beer tours through Denver’s RiNo or River North Art District. The Drink Rino website says they “have the largest concentration of craft beverage manufacturers in the United States, with 15 craft breweries, cideries, wineries and distilleries in a one mile radius.” Yes, it sounds like my kind of neighborhood.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/50485\">Sunset Boulevard</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Siobhan Dakay, unreal_dm</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Airplane Fight Clubs</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>I purposely don’t try to do instant Twitter “hot takes” on the news. The near-instantaneous outrage that flares up on Facebook and Twitter often isn’t justified when all the facts work their way out days later. And the United Airlines dragging incident and the American Airlines stroller incident seem to be following those patterns.</li>\n 	<li>The April 9th videos of the Chicago aviation police dragging a bloodied semi-conscious passenger down the aisle of a plane are awful. But reading the police report released two weeks later on the 25th add facts not in the video -- that when an officer tried to get the passenger out of his seat, the passenger \"started swinging his arms up and down fast and violently” and that this flailing knocked off the officer’s hands causing the passenger to fall and hit his mouth on the armrest. And that after running back on the plane a second time yelled “\"I\'m not getting off the plane. Just kill me. I want to go home,\" Not exactly the Rosa Parks mantle that his lawyer claimed for him at the press conference announcing his lawsuit.</li>\n 	<li>Now, United, actually Republic -- it was their flight to Louisville operating under the United Express banner -- completely screwed this up in so many ways -- trying to go cheap on the incentives for volunteers, involuntarily bumping passengers already in their seats, not figuring out another way to get the deadheading crew to Louisville, and then escalating to the police -- which then led to the passenger escalating. The three other passengers who were involuntarily bumped took the high road -- grudging got off the plane so as not to inconvenience their fellow passengers and to follow what everyone understands are the post-9/11 rules -- once you pass through the plane door, you obey the airline and the crew or else.</li>\n 	<li>Unfortunately, for some crew, this expectation of being unquestioned oracle of right and wrong leads them to demand passengers to “respect my authority” first rather than try to de-escalate. The American Airlines incident that happened last weekend -- a conflict between a flight attendant and a mother of two with oversized strollers -- shows again that escalation between, in this case, the flight attendant trying to load the plane and a mother trying to bring 1 or 2 oversized strollers onto the plane instead of gate-checking them. The conflicting demands between “respect my authority” and “the carry-on rules don’t apply to me” collide. It later comes out that the “hot take” on this -- the flight attendant hit the mother and child with the stroller while trying to take it from her -- wasn’t true (no one was hit), but the rapid escalation -- mother yelling, threats between the flight attendant and some First Class passenger who inserted himself -- is everyone’s fault. It’s an unwillingness for someone to step back, swallow hard, and sacrifice their ego.</li>\n 	<li>The lawyer for the United Airlines passenger said in his press conference that airlines have been “bullying” passengers. I don’t know that he’s completely wrong on this. Spirit and Ryanair seem to have built their brand around treating passengers rudely. But the passenger treatment of mainline airlines has eroded in the name of operational efficiency -- packed planes, reduced leg room, flight attendants yelling at boarding passengers to hurry up and sit down so the flight can leave. Earlier this week the American Customer Satisfaction Index reported that the airline industry as a whole remains in the bottom third of those the ACSI tracks. “Customer satisfaction has never appeared to be a goal for airlines,” their analysis said. “\"Compared to other industries, the financial return on passenger satisfaction is not much of an incentive.” As the airline industry as consolidated into an oligopoly of 4 main carriers in the US and 3 global alliances -- Star Alliance, OneWorld, and Skyteam -- there aren’t many alternatives. Most of us shrug and bear it; a few lash out.</li>\n 	<li>Interesting to see, though, United’s latest efforts to bury this PR nightmare is a pay-out to the bloodied passenger and an announcement that they’ll now offer up to $10,000 for voluntary rebookings. And Southwest, who’ve been completely untouched by this, saying they’ll eliminate overbookings by June.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music --<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/ramblinglibrarian/55007\">Dawn at the Top of the World ft. copperhead &amp; Robert Seikawitch</a> by Ivan Chew (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>The Bourdain Effect</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>That’s how travel wags are explaining the explosion of food tourism -- people wanting to recreate experiences from Anthony Bourdain’s <em>No Reservations</em> and <em>Parts Unknown</em>. Not that it’s anything new -- people have been going to South Philly forever and flipping a coin between Pat’s and Geno’s cheese steaks or going to Detroit for a similar dance between American and Lafayette for coney dogs.</li>\n 	<li>It’s more that it’s flipped around today -- it’s used to be that you’d come to Chicago to visit family or see a Cubs game, and, by the way, queue up at Gino’s East for deep dish pizza. Now, it’s booking a table at Alinea, perennially in the top of the <em>World’s 50 Best Restaurant</em> list, and then booking flights, a hotel, and checking the Cubs schedule. Food is now a main draw with restaurants becoming travel destinations in their own right. Noma, the Copenhagen restaurant that is regularly #1 on the World’s 50 Best list has taken this to what is currently the most extreme -- they’re doing a pop-up restaurant in Tulum, Mexico; $600/seat and they sold out -- 5,000 seats in 3 hrs.</li>\n 	<li>Regular listeners know that I’m not immune to this. We have a group of 3 couples -- the guys, we all went to college together -- that are Exhibit A of this trend. One wife found a lunch opening at the French Laundry on OpenTable, booked it, then told us, and we all immediately booked a weekend in Napa. Finishing that lunch, we asked ourselves, “What’s our next 3-star?” My wife booked the kitchen table at Alinea, and the other two couples flew into Chicago.</li>\n 	<li>Travel experts explain this, saying food is one of the main travel experiences that can’t be digitized -- even though a lot of people try. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve been eating at an upscale restaurant and the guy next to me whips out a big Nikon DSLR, stands up and shoots his plate. Over a 10-course meal, those guys are working some calories.</li>\n 	<li>But of course, you can’t digitize taste. And you can’t save it. You can only experience it in the moment. And actually, that moment isn’t just about taste -- it’s the whole experience -- whether you’re having a 3-star lunch in Napa or Paris, your first taste of durian at a roadside stand in Singapore, or a Chicago hot dog at the Weiner Circle at 2 in the morning.</li>\n 	<li>One of my favorite travel memories with my father was many years ago when he and I went down to Cabo for a week. Charlie Trotter, one of the early high-end chefs in Chicago, had opened a restaurant in the One and Only resort between Cabo San Lucas and San Jose del Cabo. I had eaten at Trotter’s in Chicago many times and had even worked a shift in the kitchen -- I won it in a charity auction; it was a great experience, but it was real work -- so I wanted to check out this new place. They had just opened. The management was all down from Chicago and they were shaking things out. The starter courses were great, but my dad’s main course wasn’t hot. I flagged down a manager and asked him if they could heat up it up. Away went both of our plates. Hey, mine was fine; you just need to heat his up. The manager quickly came back. Nope, we’ll re-make your dad a new dish, and since he can’t be expected to watch you eat, we’ve taken yours and will re-make yours too so we can serve them at the same time. And while you’re waiting, here are a couple more appetizer dishes. My dad and I looked at each other and started nibbling at the new appetizers. And then we finished them. And then our main courses re-arrived hot and fresh. My dad looked over the table at me and said, “You know, I’m not really that hungry anymore”. I stared him down -- “After what they just went through, you’re going to eat that dish, all of it, and enjoy it”. Complete role reversal. We would replay that scene and laugh about it for years afterwards; way more than we’d look at pictures of us outside the Giggling Marlin.</li>\n 	<li>And now that we’re gearing up for our trip to Hungary next month, my wife is running through the list of top Budapest restaurants. I’m looking forward to that, but I also remember up a steep narrow sidewalk in Szentendre a little lángos stand -- deep fried bread rubbed in garlic with a bit of cheese on top. It didn’t make Bourdain’s <em>Parts Unknown</em> Budapest episode, but I’ll be searching for it all the same.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #129</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_128.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #129 — Airport Fight Club; The Bourdain Effect','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-129-airport-fight-club-the-bourdain-effect','','','2021-09-29 08:20:42','2021-09-29 13:20:42','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=1760',0,'post','',0),
(1761,1,'2017-04-28 15:50:20','2017-04-28 20:50:20','All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_129.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/315640920\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n<!--more-->\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #129:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, taking a breather after a week of what I like to call “stupid travel” -- Mon, Tues in Charlottesville, VA, flying out Tues night to San Francisco by way of Charlotte because, well, that’s the way the connections worked. Spent Weds in San Francisco complete with a 4-5pm meeting which meant I got to SFO too late for the last reasonable flight to Detroit (I gave up red-eyes for Lent many years ago), so instead I caught the 7pm SFO-ORD flight, getting into ORD at 1am. Which meant I had to turn around the next morning, head back to ORD for a mid-morning flight to Detroit for an afternoon meeting in Ann Arbor. As we were driving out of DTW for Ann Arbor, I began to get texts from American that our return flight home was already delayed by thunderstorms at ORD. Later, looking out the window of the meeting room in Ann Arbor, I watched the rain bucket down. The delay made more sense. And it wasn’t a huge thing for me other than extending an already long week of travel by a couple of hours -- I had nothing planned that evening other than going to bed. Twitter followers should be pleasantly surprised by the lack of bitch tweets.</li>\r\n 	<li>And, I really didn’t think I could complain if this was the only delay in six flights that week. Although I did help my cause by connecting through Charlotte instead of ORD for my flight from Charlottesville to San Francisco. The ORD-SFO flight would’ve been an hour shorter, but the probability of making that connection, I think, would’ve been significantly lower. So instead, discretion being the better part of valor, I booked the connection through Charlotte in spite of the longer total trip duration and the incredibly long walks I typically have through that airport. The regional flights come into Concourse E which just goes on forever -- 35 gates just in that concourse -- while my connecting flights seem to always go out of Concourse A. Which means I’m usually race-walking the length of the airport even with an on-time arrival and a 60-minute connection time. However, on Tuesday night, my CHO-CLT flight got in early, I had a 90-minute connection time, and my flight went out Concourse B, which meant I had more than enough time to score some Carolina BBQ and a tall-boy beer -- a good luck trifecta which probably helped my patience with the Detroit delay two days later.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://www.magnatune.com/artists/albums/rompaey-mozaic/\">Bubbly</a></em> by Ruben van Rompaey</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>First up, thanks to Robert Fenerty for sending along Budapest travel ideas. My wife’s parents were refugees from the 1956 uprising, so I’ve been to Hungary a few times -- the first in 1989 when it was still Communist, and then the last time was 11 or 12 years ago. So it’s been a while. On of Robert’s suggestions is heading to the Gellert Baths -- “My favorite,” he says, “Ornate lions dump water into the pool and you can stand beneath the lions.” I hit the Gellert Baths my first or second trip to Hungary. There wasn’t really any English spoken then by folks -- mostly German or Russian -- but I had done a “Hungarian on Tape” language course, had about a hundred word vocabulary, and so was able to manage buying a ticket and finding the locker room. Watching the old guys around me -- and it was just old guys -- I figured out that I was supposed to strip down and tie this little white apron around my waist and head in. You did feel like you were walking into the 1890’s. High ceilings, the spouting lions, old guys playing chess in the pools. I loved it. I told my son that’s it’s kind of a Hungarian onsen. We were both a little disappointed though when we saw on the Gellert website that the dress code had changed in four years ago -- no more single sex pools, no more aprons. It’s now co-ed with bathing suits required; as the website says “all bathers are expected to cover the most important gender essentials”.</li>\r\n 	<li>Chris Christensen sent in a quick note about the Munich airport -- “Munich does have its own brewery,” he said, “but it’s outside of security”. Lotta good that did me.</li>\r\n 	<li>And continuing on that riff from the last episode, wondering how travel guides are coming up with their top 10 airports, I have to say that SFO is not getting the credit it deserves. I think they’re doing the best job of any major US airport to remake themselves on the fly. First they build a new international terminal, then they rebuilt Terminal 2 into something that I think rivals Hong Kong or Singapore. They’ve done a great job renovating Terminal 3 -- opening up what used to be an overcrowded Newark-live cave into a bright, high-ceilinged concourse with wide walkways -- and now they’re tearing down Terminal 1 to completely rebuild that. So in, what, 10 years SFO will have completely rebuilt the passenger-side experience focusing on what travelers need -- no water slides or luxury shops, but reasonable security, a great selection of restaurants and bars, lots of seating and workspace, and what was, at least last week, screaming fast 5 GHz WiFi. Perceptions always lag reality, but I’m hoping that SFO starts getting some well-deserved love from the airport ranking lists.</li>\r\n 	<li>One of the podcasts on my subscription list is Men In Blazers, a soccer (or football) podcast. Toward the end of each show, the two hosts, Roger Bennett and Michael Davis, quickly review products that they’re putting in their Amazon Emporium for a little fund-raising. One thing that Michael Davis put it caught my ear -- compression socks. He said he’s started using them on NY-to-LA flights and loves them. I started using them on international flights after a flight home from Hong Kong in United economy had my legs swelling and stiffening up to tree trunks. I wasn’t the only one. There was another guy laying on the floor by one of the exit doors elevating his legs until a flight attendant shooed him off. I couldn’t bring myself to lie on an airplane floor -- at least not without a sanitized mat -- but after that I started flying in compression socks. Not something that I’ve ever seen make a Top 10 travel tip list -- it’s not the most exciting tip -- but I swear by it. Maybe I’ll sneak it in on my next list.</li>\r\n 	<li>And it wouldn’t be a complete Following Up segment without some beer comment, so thanks to eTuk Denver who tweeted “Mark, next time you\'re in Denver we will personally take you on one of our Beer tours for all the hours of entertainment provided.” Thanks guys! I’m glad you enjoy the podcast and look forward to taking you up on that offer. From their website, it looks like the eTuk guys do beer tours through Denver’s RiNo or River North Art District. The Drink Rino website says they “have the largest concentration of craft beverage manufacturers in the United States, with 15 craft breweries, cideries, wineries and distilleries in a one mile radius.” Yes, it sounds like my kind of neighborhood.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/kokoon-berlin/\">How Do I Work This</a></em> by The Kokoon</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Airplane Fight Clubs</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I purposely don’t try to do instant Twitter “hot takes” on the news. The near-instantaneous outrage that flares up on Facebook and Twitter often isn’t justified when all the facts work their way out days later. And the United Airlines dragging incident and the American Airlines stroller incident seem to be following those patterns.</li>\r\n 	<li>The April 9th videos of the Chicago aviation police dragging a bloodied semi-conscious passenger down the aisle of a plane are awful. But reading the police report released two weeks later on the 25th add facts not in the video -- that when an officer tried to get the passenger out of his seat, the passenger \"started swinging his arms up and down fast and violently” and that this flailing knocked off the officer’s hands causing the passenger to fall and hit his mouth on the armrest. And that after running back on the plane a second time yelled “\"I\'m not getting off the plane. Just kill me. I want to go home,\" Not exactly the Rosa Parks mantle that his lawyer claimed for him at the press conference announcing his lawsuit.</li>\r\n 	<li>Now, United, actually Republic -- it was their flight to Louisville operating under the United Express banner -- completely screwed this up in so many ways -- trying to go cheap on the incentives for volunteers, involuntarily bumping passengers already in their seats, not figuring out another way to get the deadheading crew to Louisville, and then escalating to the police -- which then led to the passenger escalating. The three other passengers who were involuntarily bumped took the high road -- grudging got off the plane so as not to inconvenience their fellow passengers and to follow what everyone understands are the post-9/11 rules -- once you pass through the plane door, you obey the airline and the crew or else.</li>\r\n 	<li>Unfortunately, for some crew, this expectation of being unquestioned oracle of right and wrong leads them to demand passengers to “respect my authority” first rather than try to de-escalate. The American Airlines incident that happened last weekend -- a conflict between a flight attendant and a mother of two with oversized strollers -- shows again that escalation between, in this case, the flight attendant trying to load the plane and a mother trying to bring 1 or 2 oversized strollers onto the plane instead of gate-checking them. The conflicting demands between “respect my authority” and “the carry-on rules don’t apply to me” collide. It later comes out that the “hot take” on this -- the flight attendant hit the mother and child with the stroller while trying to take it from her -- wasn’t true (no one was hit), but the rapid escalation -- mother yelling, threats between the flight attendant and some First Class passenger who inserted himself -- is everyone’s fault. It’s an unwillingness for someone to step back, swallow hard, and sacrifice their ego.</li>\r\n 	<li>The lawyer for the United Airlines passenger said in his press conference that airlines have been “bullying” passengers. I don’t know that he’s completely wrong on this. Spirit and Ryanair seem to have built their brand around treating passengers rudely. But the passenger treatment of mainline airlines has eroded in the name of operational efficiency -- packed planes, reduced leg room, flight attendants yelling at boarding passengers to hurry up and sit down so the flight can leave. Earlier this week the American Customer Satisfaction Index reported that the airline industry as a whole remains in the bottom third of those the ACSI tracks. “Customer satisfaction has never appeared to be a goal for airlines,” their analysis said. “\"Compared to other industries, the financial return on passenger satisfaction is not much of an incentive.” As the airline industry as consolidated into an oligopoly of 4 main carriers in the US and 3 global alliances -- Star Alliance, OneWorld, and Skyteam -- there aren’t many alternatives. Most of us shrug and bear it; a few lash out.</li>\r\n 	<li>Interesting to see, though, United’s latest efforts to bury this PR nightmare is a pay-out to the bloodied passenger and an announcement that they’ll now offer up to $10,000 for voluntary rebookings. And Southwest, who’ve been completely untouched by this, saying they’ll eliminate overbookings by June.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music --<em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/weigl-proof/\">Piano Circus</a></em> by Philipp Weigl</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>The Bourdain Effect</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>That’s how travel wags are explaining the explosion of food tourism -- people wanting to recreate experiences from Anthony Bourdain’s <em>No Reservations</em> and <em>Parts Unknown</em>. Not that it’s anything new -- people have been going to South Philly forever and flipping a coin between Pat’s and Geno’s cheese steaks or going to Detroit for a similar dance between American and Lafayette for coney dogs.</li>\r\n 	<li>It’s more that it’s flipped around today -- it’s used to be that you’d come to Chicago to visit family or see a Cubs game, and, by the way, queue up at Gino’s East for deep dish pizza. Now, it’s booking a table at Alinea, perennially in the top of the <em>World’s 50 Best Restaurant</em> list, and then booking flights, a hotel, and checking the Cubs schedule. Food is now a main draw with restaurants becoming travel destinations in their own right. Noma, the Copenhagen restaurant that is regularly #1 on the World’s 50 Best list has taken this to what is currently the most extreme -- they’re doing a pop-up restaurant in Tulum, Mexico; $600/seat and they sold out -- 5,000 seats in 3 hrs.</li>\r\n 	<li>Regular listeners know that I’m not immune to this. We have a group of 3 couples -- the guys, we all went to college together -- that are Exhibit A of this trend. One wife found a lunch opening at the French Laundry on OpenTable, booked it, then told us, and we all immediately booked a weekend in Napa. Finishing that lunch, we asked ourselves, “What’s our next 3-star?” My wife booked the kitchen table at Alinea, and the other two couples flew into Chicago.</li>\r\n 	<li>Travel experts explain this, saying food is one of the main travel experiences that can’t be digitized -- even though a lot of people try. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve been eating at an upscale restaurant and the guy next to me whips out a big Nikon DSLR, stands up and shoots his plate. Over a 10-course meal, those guys are working some calories.</li>\r\n 	<li>But of course, you can’t digitize taste. And you can’t save it. You can only experience it in the moment. And actually, that moment isn’t just about taste -- it’s the whole experience -- whether you’re having a 3-star lunch in Napa or Paris, your first taste of durian at a roadside stand in Singapore, or a Chicago hot dog at the Weiner Circle at 2 in the morning.</li>\r\n 	<li>One of my favorite travel memories with my father was many years ago when he and I went down to Cabo for a week. Charlie Trotter, one of the early high-end chefs in Chicago, had opened a restaurant in the One and Only resort between Cabo San Lucas and San Jose del Cabo. I had eaten at Trotter’s in Chicago many times and had even worked a shift in the kitchen -- I won it in a charity auction; it was a great experience, but it was real work -- so I wanted to check out this new place. They had just opened. The management was all down from Chicago and they were shaking things out. The starter courses were great, but my dad’s main course wasn’t hot. I flagged down a manager and asked him if they could heat up it up. Away went both of our plates. Hey, mine was fine; you just need to heat his up. The manager quickly came back. Nope, we’ll re-make your dad a new dish, and since he can’t be expected to watch you eat, we’ve taken yours and will re-make yours too so we can serve them at the same time. And while you’re waiting, here are a couple more appetizer dishes. My dad and I looked at each other and started nibbling at the new appetizers. And then we finished them. And then our main courses re-arrived hot and fresh. My dad looked over the table at me and said, “You know, I’m not really that hungry anymore”. I stared him down -- “After what they just went through, you’re going to eat that dish, all of it, and enjoy it”. Complete role reversal. We would replay that scene and laugh about it for years afterwards; way more than we’d look at pictures of us outside the Giggling Marlin.</li>\r\n 	<li>And now that we’re gearing up for our trip to Hungary next month, my wife is running through the list of top Budapest restaurants. I’m looking forward to that, but I also remember up a steep narrow sidewalk in Szentendre a little lángos stand -- deep fried bread rubbed in garlic with a bit of cheese on top. It didn’t make Bourdain’s <em>Parts Unknown</em> Budapest episode, but I’ll be searching for it all the same.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #129</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Magnatune</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_128.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #129 — Airport Fight Club; The Bourdain Effect','','inherit','closed','closed','','1760-revision-v1','','','2017-04-28 15:50:20','2017-04-28 20:50:20','',1760,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/04/28/1760-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1762,1,'2017-04-29 15:01:40','2017-04-29 20:01:40','All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_129.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/315640920\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n<!--more-->\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #129:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, taking a breather after a week of what I like to call “stupid travel” -- Mon, Tues in Charlottesville, VA, flying out Tues night to San Francisco by way of Charlotte because, well, that’s the way the connections worked. Spent Weds in San Francisco complete with a 4-5pm meeting which meant I got to SFO too late for the last reasonable flight to Detroit (I gave up red-eyes for Lent many years ago), so instead I caught the 7pm SFO-ORD flight, getting into ORD at 1am. Which meant I had to turn around the next morning, head back to ORD for a mid-morning flight to Detroit for an afternoon meeting in Ann Arbor. As we were driving out of DTW for Ann Arbor, I began to get texts from American that our return flight home was already delayed by thunderstorms at ORD. Later, looking out the window of the meeting room in Ann Arbor, I watched the rain bucket down. The delay made more sense. And it wasn’t a huge thing for me other than extending an already long week of travel by a couple of hours -- I had nothing planned that evening other than going to bed. Twitter followers should be pleasantly surprised by the lack of bitch tweets.</li>\r\n 	<li>And, I really didn’t think I could complain if this was the only delay in six flights that week. Although I did help my cause by connecting through Charlotte instead of ORD for my flight from Charlottesville to San Francisco. The ORD-SFO flight would’ve been an hour shorter, but the probability of making that connection, I think, would’ve been significantly lower. So instead, discretion being the better part of valor, I booked the connection through Charlotte in spite of the longer total trip duration and the incredibly long walks I typically have through that airport. The regional flights come into Concourse E which just goes on forever -- 35 gates just in that concourse -- while my connecting flights seem to always go out of Concourse A. Which means I’m usually race-walking the length of the airport even with an on-time arrival and a 60-minute connection time. However, on Tuesday night, my CHO-CLT flight got in early, I had a 90-minute connection time, and my flight went out Concourse B, which meant I had more than enough time to score some Carolina BBQ and a tall-boy beer -- a good luck trifecta which probably helped my patience with the Detroit delay two days later.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/50485\">Sunset Boulevard</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Siobhan Dakay, unreal_dm/li&gt;</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>First up, thanks to Robert Fenerty for sending along Budapest travel ideas. My wife’s parents were refugees from the 1956 uprising, so I’ve been to Hungary a few times -- the first in 1989 when it was still Communist, and then the last time was 11 or 12 years ago. So it’s been a while. On of Robert’s suggestions is heading to the Gellert Baths -- “My favorite,” he says, “Ornate lions dump water into the pool and you can stand beneath the lions.” I hit the Gellert Baths my first or second trip to Hungary. There wasn’t really any English spoken then by folks -- mostly German or Russian -- but I had done a “Hungarian on Tape” language course, had about a hundred word vocabulary, and so was able to manage buying a ticket and finding the locker room. Watching the old guys around me -- and it was just old guys -- I figured out that I was supposed to strip down and tie this little white apron around my waist and head in. You did feel like you were walking into the 1890’s. High ceilings, the spouting lions, old guys playing chess in the pools. I loved it. I told my son that’s it’s kind of a Hungarian onsen. We were both a little disappointed though when we saw on the Gellert website that the dress code had changed in four years ago -- no more single sex pools, no more aprons. It’s now co-ed with bathing suits required; as the website says “all bathers are expected to cover the most important gender essentials”.</li>\r\n 	<li>Chris Christensen sent in a quick note about the Munich airport -- “Munich does have its own brewery,” he said, “but it’s outside of security”. Lotta good that did me.</li>\r\n 	<li>And continuing on that riff from the last episode, wondering how travel guides are coming up with their top 10 airports, I have to say that SFO is not getting the credit it deserves. I think they’re doing the best job of any major US airport to remake themselves on the fly. First they build a new international terminal, then they rebuilt Terminal 2 into something that I think rivals Hong Kong or Singapore. They’ve done a great job renovating Terminal 3 -- opening up what used to be an overcrowded Newark-live cave into a bright, high-ceilinged concourse with wide walkways -- and now they’re tearing down Terminal 1 to completely rebuild that. So in, what, 10 years SFO will have completely rebuilt the passenger-side experience focusing on what travelers need -- no water slides or luxury shops, but reasonable security, a great selection of restaurants and bars, lots of seating and workspace, and what was, at least last week, screaming fast 5 GHz WiFi. Perceptions always lag reality, but I’m hoping that SFO starts getting some well-deserved love from the airport ranking lists.</li>\r\n 	<li>One of the podcasts on my subscription list is Men In Blazers, a soccer (or football) podcast. Toward the end of each show, the two hosts, Roger Bennett and Michael Davis, quickly review products that they’re putting in their Amazon Emporium for a little fund-raising. One thing that Michael Davis put it caught my ear -- compression socks. He said he’s started using them on NY-to-LA flights and loves them. I started using them on international flights after a flight home from Hong Kong in United economy had my legs swelling and stiffening up to tree trunks. I wasn’t the only one. There was another guy laying on the floor by one of the exit doors elevating his legs until a flight attendant shooed him off. I couldn’t bring myself to lie on an airplane floor -- at least not without a sanitized mat -- but after that I started flying in compression socks. Not something that I’ve ever seen make a Top 10 travel tip list -- it’s not the most exciting tip -- but I swear by it. Maybe I’ll sneak it in on my next list.</li>\r\n 	<li>And it wouldn’t be a complete Following Up segment without some beer comment, so thanks to eTuk Denver who tweeted “Mark, next time you\'re in Denver we will personally take you on one of our Beer tours for all the hours of entertainment provided.” Thanks guys! I’m glad you enjoy the podcast and look forward to taking you up on that offer. From their website, it looks like the eTuk guys do beer tours through Denver’s RiNo or River North Art District. The Drink Rino website says they “have the largest concentration of craft beverage manufacturers in the United States, with 15 craft breweries, cideries, wineries and distilleries in a one mile radius.” Yes, it sounds like my kind of neighborhood.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Vidian/52190\">Memories (infiniti loop)</a> by Vidian (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license. Ft: TheDice</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Airplane Fight Clubs</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I purposely don’t try to do instant Twitter “hot takes” on the news. The near-instantaneous outrage that flares up on Facebook and Twitter often isn’t justified when all the facts work their way out days later. And the United Airlines dragging incident and the American Airlines stroller incident seem to be following those patterns.</li>\r\n 	<li>The April 9th videos of the Chicago aviation police dragging a bloodied semi-conscious passenger down the aisle of a plane are awful. But reading the police report released two weeks later on the 25th add facts not in the video -- that when an officer tried to get the passenger out of his seat, the passenger \"started swinging his arms up and down fast and violently” and that this flailing knocked off the officer’s hands causing the passenger to fall and hit his mouth on the armrest. And that after running back on the plane a second time yelled “\"I\'m not getting off the plane. Just kill me. I want to go home,\" Not exactly the Rosa Parks mantle that his lawyer claimed for him at the press conference announcing his lawsuit.</li>\r\n 	<li>Now, United, actually Republic -- it was their flight to Louisville operating under the United Express banner -- completely screwed this up in so many ways -- trying to go cheap on the incentives for volunteers, involuntarily bumping passengers already in their seats, not figuring out another way to get the deadheading crew to Louisville, and then escalating to the police -- which then led to the passenger escalating. The three other passengers who were involuntarily bumped took the high road -- grudging got off the plane so as not to inconvenience their fellow passengers and to follow what everyone understands are the post-9/11 rules -- once you pass through the plane door, you obey the airline and the crew or else.</li>\r\n 	<li>Unfortunately, for some crew, this expectation of being unquestioned oracle of right and wrong leads them to demand passengers to “respect my authority” first rather than try to de-escalate. The American Airlines incident that happened last weekend -- a conflict between a flight attendant and a mother of two with oversized strollers -- shows again that escalation between, in this case, the flight attendant trying to load the plane and a mother trying to bring 1 or 2 oversized strollers onto the plane instead of gate-checking them. The conflicting demands between “respect my authority” and “the carry-on rules don’t apply to me” collide. It later comes out that the “hot take” on this -- the flight attendant hit the mother and child with the stroller while trying to take it from her -- wasn’t true (no one was hit), but the rapid escalation -- mother yelling, threats between the flight attendant and some First Class passenger who inserted himself -- is everyone’s fault. It’s an unwillingness for someone to step back, swallow hard, and sacrifice their ego.</li>\r\n 	<li>The lawyer for the United Airlines passenger said in his press conference that airlines have been “bullying” passengers. I don’t know that he’s completely wrong on this. Spirit and Ryanair seem to have built their brand around treating passengers rudely. But the passenger treatment of mainline airlines has eroded in the name of operational efficiency -- packed planes, reduced leg room, flight attendants yelling at boarding passengers to hurry up and sit down so the flight can leave. Earlier this week the American Customer Satisfaction Index reported that the airline industry as a whole remains in the bottom third of those the ACSI tracks. “Customer satisfaction has never appeared to be a goal for airlines,” their analysis said. “\"Compared to other industries, the financial return on passenger satisfaction is not much of an incentive.” As the airline industry as consolidated into an oligopoly of 4 main carriers in the US and 3 global alliances -- Star Alliance, OneWorld, and Skyteam -- there aren’t many alternatives. Most of us shrug and bear it; a few lash out.</li>\r\n 	<li>Interesting to see, though, United’s latest efforts to bury this PR nightmare is a pay-out to the bloodied passenger and an announcement that they’ll now offer up to $10,000 for voluntary rebookings. And Southwest, who’ve been completely untouched by this, saying they’ll eliminate overbookings by June.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music --<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/ramblinglibrarian/55007\">Dawn at the Top of the World ft. copperhead &amp; Robert Seikawitch</a> by Ivan Chew (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>The Bourdain Effect</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>That’s how travel wags are explaining the explosion of food tourism -- people wanting to recreate experiences from Anthony Bourdain’s <em>No Reservations</em> and <em>Parts Unknown</em>. Not that it’s anything new -- people have been going to South Philly forever and flipping a coin between Pat’s and Geno’s cheese steaks or going to Detroit for a similar dance between American and Lafayette for coney dogs.</li>\r\n 	<li>It’s more that it’s flipped around today -- it’s used to be that you’d come to Chicago to visit family or see a Cubs game, and, by the way, queue up at Gino’s East for deep dish pizza. Now, it’s booking a table at Alinea, perennially in the top of the <em>World’s 50 Best Restaurant</em> list, and then booking flights, a hotel, and checking the Cubs schedule. Food is now a main draw with restaurants becoming travel destinations in their own right. Noma, the Copenhagen restaurant that is regularly #1 on the World’s 50 Best list has taken this to what is currently the most extreme -- they’re doing a pop-up restaurant in Tulum, Mexico; $600/seat and they sold out -- 5,000 seats in 3 hrs.</li>\r\n 	<li>Regular listeners know that I’m not immune to this. We have a group of 3 couples -- the guys, we all went to college together -- that are Exhibit A of this trend. One wife found a lunch opening at the French Laundry on OpenTable, booked it, then told us, and we all immediately booked a weekend in Napa. Finishing that lunch, we asked ourselves, “What’s our next 3-star?” My wife booked the kitchen table at Alinea, and the other two couples flew into Chicago.</li>\r\n 	<li>Travel experts explain this, saying food is one of the main travel experiences that can’t be digitized -- even though a lot of people try. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve been eating at an upscale restaurant and the guy next to me whips out a big Nikon DSLR, stands up and shoots his plate. Over a 10-course meal, those guys are working some calories.</li>\r\n 	<li>But of course, you can’t digitize taste. And you can’t save it. You can only experience it in the moment. And actually, that moment isn’t just about taste -- it’s the whole experience -- whether you’re having a 3-star lunch in Napa or Paris, your first taste of durian at a roadside stand in Singapore, or a Chicago hot dog at the Weiner Circle at 2 in the morning.</li>\r\n 	<li>One of my favorite travel memories with my father was many years ago when he and I went down to Cabo for a week. Charlie Trotter, one of the early high-end chefs in Chicago, had opened a restaurant in the One and Only resort between Cabo San Lucas and San Jose del Cabo. I had eaten at Trotter’s in Chicago many times and had even worked a shift in the kitchen -- I won it in a charity auction; it was a great experience, but it was real work -- so I wanted to check out this new place. They had just opened. The management was all down from Chicago and they were shaking things out. The starter courses were great, but my dad’s main course wasn’t hot. I flagged down a manager and asked him if they could heat up it up. Away went both of our plates. Hey, mine was fine; you just need to heat his up. The manager quickly came back. Nope, we’ll re-make your dad a new dish, and since he can’t be expected to watch you eat, we’ve taken yours and will re-make yours too so we can serve them at the same time. And while you’re waiting, here are a couple more appetizer dishes. My dad and I looked at each other and started nibbling at the new appetizers. And then we finished them. And then our main courses re-arrived hot and fresh. My dad looked over the table at me and said, “You know, I’m not really that hungry anymore”. I stared him down -- “After what they just went through, you’re going to eat that dish, all of it, and enjoy it”. Complete role reversal. We would replay that scene and laugh about it for years afterwards; way more than we’d look at pictures of us outside the Giggling Marlin.</li>\r\n 	<li>And now that we’re gearing up for our trip to Hungary next month, my wife is running through the list of top Budapest restaurants. I’m looking forward to that, but I also remember up a steep narrow sidewalk in Szentendre a little lángos stand -- deep fried bread rubbed in garlic with a bit of cheese on top. It didn’t make Bourdain’s <em>Parts Unknown</em> Budapest episode, but I’ll be searching for it all the same.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #129</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Magnatune</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_128.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #129 — Airport Fight Club; The Bourdain Effect','','inherit','closed','closed','','1760-revision-v1','','','2017-04-29 15:01:40','2017-04-29 20:01:40','',1760,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/04/29/1760-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1763,1,'2017-04-29 16:02:45','2017-04-29 21:02:45','','IMG_0887','Scottish Food Tourism can be an acquired taste','inherit','open','closed','','img_0887','','','2017-04-29 16:03:46','2017-04-29 21:03:46','',1760,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/IMG_0887.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(1764,1,'2017-04-29 16:18:13','2017-04-29 21:18:13','[caption id=\"attachment_1763\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/IMG_0887.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1763\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/IMG_0887-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Scottish Food Tourism can be an acquired taste[/caption]\r\n\r\nDifficult to do a travel podcast without talking about this month\'s incidents on United and American Airlines. The videos that hit social media were damning, but as more of the facts came out, the stories around each incident became more complex. On a much lighter note, we also talk about the explosion of food tourism, called by some \"The Bourdain Effect\" after Anthony Bourdain\'s TV travelogue series. Also, listener suggestions for visiting the Budapest baths, and compliments on the terminal improvements at San Francisco Airport (SFO). All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_129.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/320097474\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n<!--more-->\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #129:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, taking a breather after a week of what I like to call “stupid travel” -- Mon, Tues in Charlottesville, VA, flying out Tues night to San Francisco by way of Charlotte because, well, that’s the way the connections worked. Spent Weds in San Francisco complete with a 4-5pm meeting which meant I got to SFO too late for the last reasonable flight to Detroit (I gave up red-eyes for Lent many years ago), so instead I caught the 7pm SFO-ORD flight, getting into ORD at 1am. Which meant I had to turn around the next morning, head back to ORD for a mid-morning flight to Detroit for an afternoon meeting in Ann Arbor. As we were driving out of DTW for Ann Arbor, I began to get texts from American that our return flight home was already delayed by thunderstorms at ORD. Later, looking out the window of the meeting room in Ann Arbor, I watched the rain bucket down. The delay made more sense. And it wasn’t a huge thing for me other than extending an already long week of travel by a couple of hours -- I had nothing planned that evening other than going to bed. Twitter followers should be pleasantly surprised by the lack of bitch tweets.</li>\r\n 	<li>And, I really didn’t think I could complain if this was the only delay in six flights that week. Although I did help my cause by connecting through Charlotte instead of ORD for my flight from Charlottesville to San Francisco. The ORD-SFO flight would’ve been an hour shorter, but the probability of making that connection, I think, would’ve been significantly lower. So instead, discretion being the better part of valor, I booked the connection through Charlotte in spite of the longer total trip duration and the incredibly long walks I typically have through that airport. The regional flights come into Concourse E which just goes on forever -- 35 gates just in that concourse -- while my connecting flights seem to always go out of Concourse A. Which means I’m usually race-walking the length of the airport even with an on-time arrival and a 60-minute connection time. However, on Tuesday night, my CHO-CLT flight got in early, I had a 90-minute connection time, and my flight went out Concourse B, which meant I had more than enough time to score some Carolina BBQ and a tall-boy beer -- a good luck trifecta which probably helped my patience with the Detroit delay two days later.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Vidian/52190\">Memories (infiniti loop)</a> by Vidian (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license. Ft: TheDice</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>First up, thanks to Robert Fenerty for sending along Budapest travel ideas. My wife’s parents were refugees from the 1956 uprising, so I’ve been to Hungary a few times -- the first in 1989 when it was still Communist, and then the last time was 11 or 12 years ago. So it’s been a while. On of Robert’s suggestions is heading to the Gellert Baths -- “My favorite,” he says, “Ornate lions dump water into the pool and you can stand beneath the lions.” I hit the Gellert Baths my first or second trip to Hungary. There wasn’t really any English spoken then by folks -- mostly German or Russian -- but I had done a “Hungarian on Tape” language course, had about a hundred word vocabulary, and so was able to manage buying a ticket and finding the locker room. Watching the old guys around me -- and it was just old guys -- I figured out that I was supposed to strip down and tie this little white apron around my waist and head in. You did feel like you were walking into the 1890’s. High ceilings, the spouting lions, old guys playing chess in the pools. I loved it. I told my son that’s it’s kind of a Hungarian onsen. We were both a little disappointed though when we saw on the Gellert website that the dress code had changed in four years ago -- no more single sex pools, no more aprons. It’s now co-ed with bathing suits required; as the website says “all bathers are expected to cover the most important gender essentials”.</li>\r\n 	<li>Chris Christensen sent in a quick note about the Munich airport -- “Munich does have its own brewery,” he said, “but it’s outside of security”. Lotta good that did me.</li>\r\n 	<li>And continuing on that riff from the last episode, wondering how travel guides are coming up with their top 10 airports, I have to say that SFO is not getting the credit it deserves. I think they’re doing the best job of any major US airport to remake themselves on the fly. First they build a new international terminal, then they rebuilt Terminal 2 into something that I think rivals Hong Kong or Singapore. They’ve done a great job renovating Terminal 3 -- opening up what used to be an overcrowded Newark-live cave into a bright, high-ceilinged concourse with wide walkways -- and now they’re tearing down Terminal 1 to completely rebuild that. So in, what, 10 years SFO will have completely rebuilt the passenger-side experience focusing on what travelers need -- no water slides or luxury shops, but reasonable security, a great selection of restaurants and bars, lots of seating and workspace, and what was, at least last week, screaming fast 5 GHz WiFi. Perceptions always lag reality, but I’m hoping that SFO starts getting some well-deserved love from the airport ranking lists.</li>\r\n 	<li>One of the podcasts on my subscription list is Men In Blazers, a soccer (or football) podcast. Toward the end of each show, the two hosts, Roger Bennett and Michael Davis, quickly review products that they’re putting in their Amazon Emporium for a little fund-raising. One thing that Michael Davis put it caught my ear -- compression socks. He said he’s started using them on NY-to-LA flights and loves them. I started using them on international flights after a flight home from Hong Kong in United economy had my legs swelling and stiffening up to tree trunks. I wasn’t the only one. There was another guy laying on the floor by one of the exit doors elevating his legs until a flight attendant shooed him off. I couldn’t bring myself to lie on an airplane floor -- at least not without a sanitized mat -- but after that I started flying in compression socks. Not something that I’ve ever seen make a Top 10 travel tip list -- it’s not the most exciting tip -- but I swear by it. Maybe I’ll sneak it in on my next list.</li>\r\n 	<li>And it wouldn’t be a complete Following Up segment without some beer comment, so thanks to eTuk Denver who tweeted “Mark, next time you\'re in Denver we will personally take you on one of our Beer tours for all the hours of entertainment provided.” Thanks guys! I’m glad you enjoy the podcast and look forward to taking you up on that offer. From their website, it looks like the eTuk guys do beer tours through Denver’s RiNo or River North Art District. The Drink Rino website says they “have the largest concentration of craft beverage manufacturers in the United States, with 15 craft breweries, cideries, wineries and distilleries in a one mile radius.” Yes, it sounds like my kind of neighborhood.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/50485\">Sunset Boulevard</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Siobhan Dakay, unreal_dm</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Airplane Fight Clubs</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I purposely don’t try to do instant Twitter “hot takes” on the news. The near-instantaneous outrage that flares up on Facebook and Twitter often isn’t justified when all the facts work their way out days later. And the United Airlines dragging incident and the American Airlines stroller incident seem to be following those patterns.</li>\r\n 	<li>The April 9th videos of the Chicago aviation police dragging a bloodied semi-conscious passenger down the aisle of a plane are awful. But reading the police report released two weeks later on the 25th add facts not in the video -- that when an officer tried to get the passenger out of his seat, the passenger \"started swinging his arms up and down fast and violently” and that this flailing knocked off the officer’s hands causing the passenger to fall and hit his mouth on the armrest. And that after running back on the plane a second time yelled “\"I\'m not getting off the plane. Just kill me. I want to go home,\" Not exactly the Rosa Parks mantle that his lawyer claimed for him at the press conference announcing his lawsuit.</li>\r\n 	<li>Now, United, actually Republic -- it was their flight to Louisville operating under the United Express banner -- completely screwed this up in so many ways -- trying to go cheap on the incentives for volunteers, involuntarily bumping passengers already in their seats, not figuring out another way to get the deadheading crew to Louisville, and then escalating to the police -- which then led to the passenger escalating. The three other passengers who were involuntarily bumped took the high road -- grudging got off the plane so as not to inconvenience their fellow passengers and to follow what everyone understands are the post-9/11 rules -- once you pass through the plane door, you obey the airline and the crew or else.</li>\r\n 	<li>Unfortunately, for some crew, this expectation of being unquestioned oracle of right and wrong leads them to demand passengers to “respect my authority” first rather than try to de-escalate. The American Airlines incident that happened last weekend -- a conflict between a flight attendant and a mother of two with oversized strollers -- shows again that escalation between, in this case, the flight attendant trying to load the plane and a mother trying to bring 1 or 2 oversized strollers onto the plane instead of gate-checking them. The conflicting demands between “respect my authority” and “the carry-on rules don’t apply to me” collide. It later comes out that the “hot take” on this -- the flight attendant hit the mother and child with the stroller while trying to take it from her -- wasn’t true (no one was hit), but the rapid escalation -- mother yelling, threats between the flight attendant and some First Class passenger who inserted himself -- is everyone’s fault. It’s an unwillingness for someone to step back, swallow hard, and sacrifice their ego.</li>\r\n 	<li>The lawyer for the United Airlines passenger said in his press conference that airlines have been “bullying” passengers. I don’t know that he’s completely wrong on this. Spirit and Ryanair seem to have built their brand around treating passengers rudely. But the passenger treatment of mainline airlines has eroded in the name of operational efficiency -- packed planes, reduced leg room, flight attendants yelling at boarding passengers to hurry up and sit down so the flight can leave. Earlier this week the American Customer Satisfaction Index reported that the airline industry as a whole remains in the bottom third of those the ACSI tracks. “Customer satisfaction has never appeared to be a goal for airlines,” their analysis said. “\"Compared to other industries, the financial return on passenger satisfaction is not much of an incentive.” As the airline industry as consolidated into an oligopoly of 4 main carriers in the US and 3 global alliances -- Star Alliance, OneWorld, and Skyteam -- there aren’t many alternatives. Most of us shrug and bear it; a few lash out.</li>\r\n 	<li>Interesting to see, though, United’s latest efforts to bury this PR nightmare is a pay-out to the bloodied passenger and an announcement that they’ll now offer up to $10,000 for voluntary rebookings. And Southwest, who’ve been completely untouched by this, saying they’ll eliminate overbookings by June.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music --<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/ramblinglibrarian/55007\">Dawn at the Top of the World ft. copperhead &amp; Robert Seikawitch</a> by Ivan Chew (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>The Bourdain Effect</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>That’s how travel wags are explaining the explosion of food tourism -- people wanting to recreate experiences from Anthony Bourdain’s <em>No Reservations</em> and <em>Parts Unknown</em>. Not that it’s anything new -- people have been going to South Philly forever and flipping a coin between Pat’s and Geno’s cheese steaks or going to Detroit for a similar dance between American and Lafayette for coney dogs.</li>\r\n 	<li>It’s more that it’s flipped around today -- it’s used to be that you’d come to Chicago to visit family or see a Cubs game, and, by the way, queue up at Gino’s East for deep dish pizza. Now, it’s booking a table at Alinea, perennially in the top of the <em>World’s 50 Best Restaurant</em> list, and then booking flights, a hotel, and checking the Cubs schedule. Food is now a main draw with restaurants becoming travel destinations in their own right. Noma, the Copenhagen restaurant that is regularly #1 on the World’s 50 Best list has taken this to what is currently the most extreme -- they’re doing a pop-up restaurant in Tulum, Mexico; $600/seat and they sold out -- 5,000 seats in 3 hrs.</li>\r\n 	<li>Regular listeners know that I’m not immune to this. We have a group of 3 couples -- the guys, we all went to college together -- that are Exhibit A of this trend. One wife found a lunch opening at the French Laundry on OpenTable, booked it, then told us, and we all immediately booked a weekend in Napa. Finishing that lunch, we asked ourselves, “What’s our next 3-star?” My wife booked the kitchen table at Alinea, and the other two couples flew into Chicago.</li>\r\n 	<li>Travel experts explain this, saying food is one of the main travel experiences that can’t be digitized -- even though a lot of people try. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve been eating at an upscale restaurant and the guy next to me whips out a big Nikon DSLR, stands up and shoots his plate. Over a 10-course meal, those guys are working some calories.</li>\r\n 	<li>But of course, you can’t digitize taste. And you can’t save it. You can only experience it in the moment. And actually, that moment isn’t just about taste -- it’s the whole experience -- whether you’re having a 3-star lunch in Napa or Paris, your first taste of durian at a roadside stand in Singapore, or a Chicago hot dog at the Weiner Circle at 2 in the morning.</li>\r\n 	<li>One of my favorite travel memories with my father was many years ago when he and I went down to Cabo for a week. Charlie Trotter, one of the early high-end chefs in Chicago, had opened a restaurant in the One and Only resort between Cabo San Lucas and San Jose del Cabo. I had eaten at Trotter’s in Chicago many times and had even worked a shift in the kitchen -- I won it in a charity auction; it was a great experience, but it was real work -- so I wanted to check out this new place. They had just opened. The management was all down from Chicago and they were shaking things out. The starter courses were great, but my dad’s main course wasn’t hot. I flagged down a manager and asked him if they could heat up it up. Away went both of our plates. Hey, mine was fine; you just need to heat his up. The manager quickly came back. Nope, we’ll re-make your dad a new dish, and since he can’t be expected to watch you eat, we’ve taken yours and will re-make yours too so we can serve them at the same time. And while you’re waiting, here are a couple more appetizer dishes. My dad and I looked at each other and started nibbling at the new appetizers. And then we finished them. And then our main courses re-arrived hot and fresh. My dad looked over the table at me and said, “You know, I’m not really that hungry anymore”. I stared him down -- “After what they just went through, you’re going to eat that dish, all of it, and enjoy it”. Complete role reversal. We would replay that scene and laugh about it for years afterwards; way more than we’d look at pictures of us outside the Giggling Marlin.</li>\r\n 	<li>And now that we’re gearing up for our trip to Hungary next month, my wife is running through the list of top Budapest restaurants. I’m looking forward to that, but I also remember up a steep narrow sidewalk in Szentendre a little lángos stand -- deep fried bread rubbed in garlic with a bit of cheese on top. It didn’t make Bourdain’s <em>Parts Unknown</em> Budapest episode, but I’ll be searching for it all the same.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #129</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Magnatune</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_128.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #129 — Airport Fight Club; The Bourdain Effect','','inherit','closed','closed','','1760-revision-v1','','','2017-04-29 16:18:13','2017-04-29 21:18:13','',1760,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/04/29/1760-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1765,1,'2017-04-29 16:21:03','2017-04-29 21:21:03','[caption id=\"attachment_1654\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/IMG_0725.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1654\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/IMG_0725-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Earning Status at Camp O\'Hare\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Earning Status at Camp O\'Hare[/caption]\r\n\r\nIt\'s been a tough travel month for a large portion of the traveling public. Between Delta and Southwest system outages and two straight Thursdays of thunderstorms in the east half of the US, dealing with travel delays has been a part of this month\'s travel experience. In this episode, we think about ways to avoid delays, or at least minimize their impact. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_123.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_123.mp3\"]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #123:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>This episode is sponsored by HMSHost, operating the restaurants and bars in the 20 busiest airports in the US, thanking the IT staffs at Southwest and Delta for helping us hit our Q3 revenue numbers. Please use the promo code: KICKOUTTHEPLUG on our website for a 20% thank you card good at any airport.</li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, at the back end of what’s been kind of a tough couple of weeks of travel. On the surface, it shouldn’t have been. I wasn’t going anywhere particularly exotic -- still back and forth to Charlottesville, as well as a quick West Coast loop to Vegas and Irvine, CA. Things actually started going sideways on the Vegas to Orange County flight. This should’ve been a quick hour hop. But then Southwest’s systems tipped over and things kinda just spiraled down from there, even in Vegas. After a while, I got tired of playing the slots; the payout in the airport is lousy anyways. And the beer selection is not the greatest. I got jealous watching the Virgin America flights take off, but at least I wasn’t one of the folks sitting on the tarmac in 110 degree weather waiting for gates to clear. I think my flight ended up taking something like a 4-hour delay. I was just glad my schedule wasn’t tight; that I didn’t have a critical meeting booked that afternoon.</li>\r\n 	<li>The next day, Thursday, I was flying American back to O’Hare and started to get delay notices. I popped open my flight tracking apps -- <a href=\"https://flightaware.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">FlightAware</a> and <a href=\"http://www.flightstats.com/go/Home/home.do\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">FlightStats</a> and could see the problem -- an ugly line of red on the weather map running through Chicago. Being on the west side of that meant things weren’t too bad for me though. Once the thunderstorm line cleared O’Hare, the first planes they launched were heading west -- away from the storm line. I took an hour delay. Back in the office on Friday, people flying back from the East Coast were getting in at 2 or 3 in the morning, if they got out at all. I definitely dodged a bullet.</li>\r\n 	<li>Which found its target the next Thursday. I was back in Charlottesville and the delay notices started at 2pm for a 6:30pm flight. That’s not a good sign. Back to FlightAware and FlightStats. It was a replay of the prior Thursday, except this time I was right in the midst of it. Caught up in ORD ground stops, the equipment for my Charlottesville flight couldn’t get out east and eventually cancelled. I drove 2 hours up DC to catch the last flight out of Dulles which by that time was having its own ground stops. The Frontier flight that was supposed to leave at 9:30 finally pushed back at 1:10am. It was my turn to stagger home at 2:30am</li>\r\n 	<li>At first, I thought I wouldn’t fly at all this week, but then I got roped into a Tuesday morning meeting in Atlanta. Not so bad I thought -- fly down Monday night, fly back Tuesday afternoon. But then I woke up Monday morning to the news that Delta’s systems had tipped over. Another bullet dodged. I was booked on American going down and United coming back. And both those flights left on time and arrived early.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/swivel-deep/\"><em>Arlos Auto Parts and Salvation</em></a> by Swivel Neck Jones</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>So, my wish from the last episode was not granted. My Global Entry renewal was “conditionally approved” but I still have to go in for an interview. They do look busy though. I had to look 3 months out for the first availability in ORD -- I got my notice in July and my appointment is in mid-October. I hope they don’t listen to this podcast or follow me on Twitter.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’ve been thru Dulles twice since the last episode. I mentioned my second visit a couple of minutes ago, catching a Frontier flight out of the Z concourse gates. I had never seen any Z gates before in Dulles -- and for a good reason. They’re about a half-dozen gates stuffed in a dark hallway at the east end of terminal; the typical “slum concourse” inhabited by budget carriers. On the earlier visit, I was making a connection on United between the two midfield concourses with involved a ride on the old mobile lounges. Now, if you know the history of Dulles airport, you know that these mobile lounges were supposed to be the future of airport design, replacing the fixed gate and concourse structure with mobile gate lounges that would shuttle you out to your plane parked on the tarmac and then raise you up to the door. Not really all that different from what happens in a lot of European airports, but without the hydraulic fun ride at the end. I tweeted a picture of the lounge -- really more like a high-clearance bus --which elicited a response from Matt McCurdy with a link to a 1958 video “The Expanding Airport: A Study of Service and Convenience for Washington International” hosted on Vimeo. From the credits, it looks like it was created for the firm that designed Dulles. It’s a 9½-minute video and an absolute must-see; the disconnect between what people thought the future of travel would be and the reality almost 60 years later. Just the contrast between how the architects thought the mobile lounges would look -- couches with coffee tables and flower vases with cocktail service, and everyone in suits and dresses -- vs. my Twitter picture of people in shorts, t-shirts, and backpacks crammed in, hanging onto poles and straps -- is something. Check out the shownotes for <a href=\"https://vimeo.com/4139559\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Matt’s link to the video</a>. The mobile lounges are slowly being replaced by the new underground light rail system between the main terminal and the midfield concourses. Maybe as fewer people take them, they’ll be able to replace the poles with some nice chintz couches.</li>\r\n 	<li>Last month, a PR agency for Marriott invited me to a launch that was being held at the Windy City Smokeout BBQ event in Chicago. Never one to turn down free BBQ, especially on a Friday afternoon, I went. They were launching a new partnership between their TownePlace Suites brand and Weber grills, where they’re putting Weber gas grills and tools out in the common areas for use by guests. Kinda makes sense for an all-suite hotel -- families not looking to eat out every night fire up some burgers on the grill -- especially when the TownePlace folks explained that they’re targeting the mid-tier price range. It was kinda entertaining to see the young country pop tarts try to grill pizzas (and, by the way, I apply the pop tart label to both the male and female teams), but I was more interested in understanding how Marriott was positioning their suite brands -- how did TownePlace (which I’d never heard of) relate to Residence Inn and SpringHill Suites? The PR folks introduced me to a couple of brand guys who tried to lay it out for me -- TownePlace is lower priced but a bit hipper than Residence Inns, but not edgy like Moxy, their new brand targeted at Millennials. And SpringHill never made it into the discussion. I don’t know how well these micro-targets work in the reality of, say, an Orlando or a Houston. Are you really able to hit those target audiences or is it just another brand to sell to a new franchisee so the guy running the combo Courtyard-Residence Inn property a couple miles down the road doesn’t sue you? I dunno, but I got to wonder if these TownePlace properties with the new Webers are also going to provide shuttle service to the nearest Whole Foods?</li>\r\n 	<li>A colleague went to Defcon in Las Vegas last weekend. There’s always interesting stuff coming out of there; always enough to nurture any seed of paranoia you may have lurking in your id. It also makes me a bit more sympathetic to the corporate IT security guys trying to keep up with this stuff. “Video jacking” was the buzzed-about thing this year to keep frequent travelers on the watchout. The attack uses a smartphone’s ability to duplicate video out the micro USB or Lightning port to an HDMI TV. Nice if you want to watch videos from your phone or tablet on your larger hotel TV. A little less nice if you plug your phone into what you think is a charging station. But using these HDMI/Mobile High Definition Link cables which look very similar to straight power cables, your phone screen is duplicated on a TV screen perhaps with a person or video camera watching as you enter your PIN, work your banking apps, pull up that hidden text file with all your passwords written down. Krebs On Security has a <a href=\"http://krebsonsecurity.com/2016/08/road-warriors-beware-of-video-jacking/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">good write-up</a> on it, complete with a quick demo video. I’ll put a link in the show notes.</li>\r\n 	<li>We’ve talked before about how full planes and tight seats are breaking down some of the courtesies necessary to survive sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with complete strangers for 2-4 hours straight. Usually it’s not a problem; everyone gets along to go along. On one of my United flights last month, though, this broke down slightly. It started at boarding. I get to my row. There’s a guy already in the middle seat. I tell him I’m in the window. He asks my seat number. Hmmm, little odd, but I tell him, confirming that, yes I can read my boarding pass and that he’s going to have to move out to let me in. He’s a 1K who seems a bit pissed that he’s in a center seat. Perhaps he was hoping to slide over to the window, but if that’s the case, he missed the announcements asking for volunteers. This plane was packed. About 45 minutes into the flight, he looks over at me, exasperated, and says “Fine, if you want the armrest, just take it!” and then bitched about how miserable the middle seat is. Huh? I told him, “We can share it,” I said. “There’s no sharing,” he shot back. “I dunno, I can usually manage that when I’m in the middle.” He looked at me like he wanted to hit me and then thought the better of it. The remaining 2 ½ hours was less-than-comfortable as we sat within inches of each other. You may disagree, but I’m not in with this whole “the middle seat is so miserable that you’re entitled to everything else in the row” idea. I’ve sat in the middle seat a lot and don’t think it’s that bad if you’re in an exit row or, as in this case, in United’s Economy Plus where you have extra legroom. Indeed, I’ll pick those middle seats over a window seat in the back of the plane almost every time. And when I do, I don’t expect any special treatment from my row mates. I manage to arrange my elbows so we all can use the armrests -- one of us take the front half, the other the back half. But most of all, I don’t blame my row mates for my seat choice.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/fuzz-messy/\"><em>Smiling Perspective</em></a> by General Fuzz</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Can We Avoid Travel Delays?</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Peter Rukavina, a long-time T/C listener, sent me an interesting e-mail at the front part of this week\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>The tweet-stream of travel despair is a frequent enough occurrence as to almost be its own medium now (\"@aircanada announces 9 hour delay; help!\" etc.). I\'m an occasional practitioner myself. My question: to what extent can delays, cancellations, luggage loss, bumping, etc. be mitigated by being travel-savvy? In other words, by traveling smart, how much more control over wrenches thrown into plans do you have?</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>A pretty damned good question, especially given the tales of woe over the past month that I went through at the start of this episode which, I’ll admit, were accompanied by a couple of streams of bitch tweets. We\'ll never completely avoid travel despair -- complete system failures ought to be “black swan” events, though having 3 full outages (United, Southwest, and Delta) in 13 months suggests maybe they’re not, and flying into smaller places like Charlottesville, VA leave you with few options. But I do think there are things we can do -- the consultant in me want to call them “strategies” -- that can reduce the probability of a bad time and hopefully reduce the impact when they happen. I’ve talked about some “strategies” in earlier podcasts -- focus trips to earn airline and hotel status, don’t check luggage, fly direct, if you have to connect never book a connection less than 90 minutes -- and you’ll find most of these in travel listacles that pop up around the holidays. Knowing that Peter, as a long-time listener, has heard these before, I tried to think about some next-level “strategies”. Here are the ones that came to mind. Not an exhaustive list, but I think a decent start...</li>\r\n 	<li>First, avoid flying in the evenings -- Now I break this rule all the time, but think about it. Delays build during the day -- from weather, congestion, mechanicals, psychotic passengers -- because the airlines don\'t build their schedules with enough slack to allow recovery. By 4 or 5pm, the sum of these delays combines with the packed evening \"rush hour\" schedule to drive a high probability of delays. American and United’s LGA-ORD evening schedules are this in spades. Throw in a summer thunderstorm in ORD or DFW or ATL and flight ops centers start cancelling flights to catch up. If you’re on the last flight out, you can be looking at a night on the comfy-looking airport couch. Even without cancellations, delays lead to tight connections which can lead to missed luggage.</li>\r\n 	<li>Use flight-tracking smart phone apps -- I use apps like FlightAware to access more data than the typical gate agent can. On the Thursday that I ended up in DC, as the delay notices started coming in from American,, FlightAware showed me that my plane was on the ground in Wichita, KS, probably waiting out an ORD ground stop from thunderstorms. It still had to get to Chicago and then out to Charlottesville. Seeing parallel lines of red on the radar view, I had a pretty good sense that it wasn\'t going to happen. When I decided to head up to Dulles for the Frontier flight, I could see the flight history on FlightAware; it delayed more often than not, but rarely cancelled. That night, as ORD and IAD ground stops kept pushing the departure time, I wasn\'t too worried that it would cancel because I had seen the flight history.</li>\r\n 	<li>Spread clothes across checked and unchecked luggage -- If you\'ve checked luggage, I assume it\'s for a good reason (e.g., carrying a bottles of wine home from a Napa trip, needing formal wear for a wedding) and that you also have a carry-on. Put two changes of clothes and a bare set of toiletries (e.g., toothbrush) in your carry-on. Most lost luggage will catch up to you within 24-36 hours. If you\'re traveling as a family, spread everyone\'s clothes out across all the bags rather than each person having their own bag. It would be rare for the airlines to lose all the bags of an entire party. With things spread across bags, everyone is good for a couple of days even if a bag is lost. I’m always amazed that more families don’t do this.</li>\r\n 	<li>Know your geography -- What are your alternative airports and how far of a drive are they? This has become even more important over the past few years as the big carriers have reduced flight frequency to fill up their planes. I once had a project in the middle of Connecticut that was just about equidistant between White Plains and Hartford airports. We always flew in/out of White Plains even though it was a smaller airport because, when flights delayed/cancelled, we could just keep driving down the Hutchinson to LaGuardia. When we flew out of Hartford, it was a much longer haul to the nearest airport.</li>\r\n 	<li>This last one might be a bit obscure, but it’s been useful to me. If your corporate car rental agency is Hertz, always book an intermediate car so you can use Gold Choice to quickly swap cars if Hertz assigns you a real beater. Now, you can always go back to the counter, stand in line, and demand a better, cleaner, less decrepit car, but we’re trying to avoid delays. Most corporate rates that I’ve used has at most a dollar or two difference between the compact and intermediate rate. It’s cheap insurance. I’ve used Gold Choice maybe 10-20% of the time, but I’m always glad to have that option.</li>\r\n 	<li>So there you go,. Five ways to travel smarter. If you have a suggestion, please send it in.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/atek-phoenix/\"><em>Goa Life</em></a> by Ambient Teknology</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Coping with Travel Delays</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>During my last CIO gig, I was traveling as much, if not more, than any of my consulting gigs. I kept my Chicago residence and rotated weekly across offices in Scottsdale, Dallas, Naples, FL and Croydon, south of London. The head of my project management team started doing a bit of travel to support some system migrations and after a couple of months of the usual flight delays and other travel snafus, he asked me, “How do you deal with this all the time?” “I depend on 3 major food groups,” I told him. “Alcohol, salt, and fat.”</li>\r\n 	<li>I remembered that as I was killing time in Dulles with a dinner of fish and chips and a local beer, Hop Lips IPA from Dover, DE. It rang the bell on all three.</li>\r\n 	<li>Doing that too much, though, is how you end up quietly asking for belt extenders, so you gotta find other ways of coping.</li>\r\n 	<li>One bad habit that I have is bitch tweeting. I’ve confessed to that in many prior episodes, and as much as I try to stop, I find it releases my frustrations -- kinda like shouting into a bag or something -- and keeps me from popping a cork at innocent gate agents. I apologize to all my Twitter followers who have to endure that. I have downloaded a meditation app for my iPhone, but it hasn’t seemed to help.</li>\r\n 	<li>A more constructive thing is that I try not to show up to the airport until I have to. If I get an early notice of a delay, I push back my cab to the airport. Part of the frustration is that delays consume time. I can be more productive in my office than trying to find a place to work at a crowded gate or airport club. When I was traveling regularly to New Orleans a few years back, it seemed that half the flights back to Chicago in the summer were delayed by afternoon thunderstorms. I wouldn’t leave for the airport until I saw the inbound equipment was in the air. I got a lot more work done, and ate much better food.</li>\r\n 	<li>The trend of airports upgrading their amenities helps a lot. I’ve never done the neck massage thing, but, back to the alcohol food group, I’ve done a few wine flights at the Vino Volo wine bars that are popping up in more US airports, and the beer flights at microbrewery bars like Great Lakes Brewery’s place in Cleveland, Cisco Brewers’ bar in Boston Logan or the Karl Strauss bar in LAX. It’s something local that keeps you occupied for a bit. And searching them out -- because they’re inevitably in a different concourse than you -- also kills time.</li>\r\n 	<li>In the end, though, it is what it is. If the delay isn’t causing you to miss something important, it’s easy to kick back and read the paper. If you’re missing your kid’s parent-teacher conference, there’s not much that’s going to help your frustration. Except maybe bitch tweeting...</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #123</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\">Magnatune</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_123.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #123 — How to Avoid Travel Delays','','inherit','closed','closed','','1644-revision-v1','','','2017-04-29 16:21:03','2017-04-29 21:21:03','',1644,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/04/29/1644-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1766,1,'2017-04-29 16:21:16','2017-04-29 21:21:16','[caption id=\"attachment_1632\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/IMG_0324.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1632\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/IMG_0324-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Spring Break in Iceland\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Spring Break in Iceland[/caption]\r\n\r\nWatching Iceland makes its Cinderella run in the Euro 2016 soccer tourney got me thinking back to my March trip there. It is one of the hot travel destinations -- maybe too hot? Could be, but the descriptor I keep coming back to is \"dramatic.\" And it seems that on every trip I make out of the country, I get surprised by the amount of data my iPhone consumes -- in spite of flipping every Settings switch I can find. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_122.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_122.mp3\"]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #122:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you once again from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, on a week off of the road. I hate to say “a rare week”, but looking at my calendar, it is. For the first half of the year -- 26 weeks -- I didn’t get in an airplane during 2 of them. This week, the first of the second half of the year, is my 3rd non-travel week. Now absolutely some of them are self-inflicted -- 2 to be exact -- one week in Spain and one in Portugal. That’s an intense travel schedule, even for me. I usually find a way to take a break at least once every 6 weeks, but it just hasn’t worked out that way this year so far. Sometimes you control your schedule, while other times it controls you. I’m definitely been on the wrong end of the leash since January.</li>\r\n 	<li>Since the last episode, I’ve been traveling pretty much exclusively between Chicago and Charlottesville, VA. Now Charlottesville is a nice town, but it’s a pain to get to every week. The first direct flight from Chicago leaves around 11:30am, landing around 2pm -- not exactly convenient for the business traveler. Other earlier options are to fly into Washington-Dulles and drive for 2 hrs, or fly into Richmond and drive an hour and a half. What I’ve found myself doing for the past couple of weeks is flying in Sunday night -- which I absolutely hate -- on direct flight that leaves Chicago around 9:45pm, lands in Charlottesville around half past midnight and puts me into my hotel around 1am. There just doesn’t seem to be an easy way around this one.</li>\r\n 	<li>At least the flights back home are convenient -- 3:15 and 6:30pm. And it’s not a crowded airport. I think last week was the longest TSA line I hit -- 3 people were in front of me.</li>\r\n 	<li>And as I start to think about a September trip to Scotland to take our daughter back to University, I’m taking advantage of the post-Brexit exchange rate to stock my Revolut account with some much cheaper pounds. Though it’ll be another week on the road, I’ll be significantly upgrading my Scotch choices.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/hisboyelroy/430\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Revolve</a> mix</em> by His Boy Elroy</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Last week’s attack at Istanbul’s Ataturk airport begs the same question as March’s Brussels bombings -- does more airport security actually make us safer or just move the target around? I said in the<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/05/30/podcast-121-tsa-lines-my-luggage-is-where/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"> last episode</a> that the long TSA lines on the land side of security caused by stricter TSA inspections weren’t making the traveler any safer. Instead, they were make us less safe/more vulnerable to a Brussels or Istanbul-style attack. And while the TSA has fixed (at least for now) some of the worst lines, the issue is going to pop up again. And someone is going to suggest -- again -- that they move the security perimeter back -- say, checking itineraries and IDs at the terminal door like they do in India? The justification will be that a little bit more inconvenience is more than worth the price of safety. But, if they don’t staff it right (which was and will alway be the core problem), all you’ve done is just move the target -- the line of passengers -- out by another 1,000 feet. It’s less about location and more about execution. And given the TSA’s track record of execution over the past 15 years, I’m not optimistic that they’ll get to the right answer.</li>\r\n 	<li>I got a e-mail a few weeks ago that my 5-year Global Entry membership expires on my birthday this December. I don’t know exactly when Customs and Border Patrol started Global Entry, but 5 years ago, I was one of the early adopters. Back then, there weren’t that many interview centers. I was lucky that Chicago had one, but I had colleagues in Phoenix who had to fly up to Las Vegas for interviews. The renew process was pretty easy. I logged into GOES -- Global Online Enrollment Systems -- clicked the blue Renew Membership button and then cycled through all the profile screens -- but this time the screens were pre-populated so I only had to make updates. In my case, it was updating my job history for my current job and, the toughest part, entering all the countries I’d visited in the past 5 years. Normally, this would be pretty simple -- thumb through your passport pages and write down the country stamps. However, back in 2012, my backpack with my passport was stolen while on the train from Brussels city center to the airport -- a fun time I recount in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/05/20/podcast-98-stolen-luggage-restaurants-want-your-smartphone/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">episode 98</a>. Luckily, I do a decent job of cataloging travel pics. Flipping through 2011 reminded me that we’d visited Venice that year and that I’d traveled there by train from Paris after a couple of days of customer meeting. The renewal cost is $100 -- $20/year is worth the price. Even more so when it’s free -- I charged it on my Amex Platinum card and immediately saw a $100 statement credit. Now I’m checking GOES every couple of days to see if Customs just waves my renewal through or if I have to talk again to the nice people in the bowels of ORD Terminal 5. I’m hoping that with the crush of new PreCheck applications, they’ll take the easy route.</li>\r\n 	<li>And as we’ve talked about before, I’m not really sure why anyone would sign up for PreCheck instead of Global Entry. Global Entry is just $15 more -- $100 instead of $85 -- the price of a beer at ORD.</li>\r\n 	<li>But if you’re not up for the $100 passport check line cut, Arnoud Heijnis, a long time TravelCommons listener, pinged me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> about another option -- the Mobile Passport app from US Customs and Border Patrol. I haven’t used it because I have Global Entry. My wife tried to get my son to download it before his return flight from Reykjavik, but he never got ‘round to it, and he said the early evening lines at ORD weren’t that bad. So while I don’t have any first- or second-hand experience with it, one of the tech writers at WSJ wrote up a <a href=\"http://www.wsj.com/articles/get-through-airport-customs-faster-with-this-free-app-1467221118\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">glowing review</a> of the app a few weeks back. Check out the show notes for a link to the article. And if you’ve tried the Mobile Passport, shoot me a note with your thoughts.</li>\r\n 	<li>During my flight back home last Weds, we were coming in on approach, you could feel the gradual descent -- slowing, descending, slowing, descending -- and then, all of a sudden, I’m pressed against the back of my seat as the plane rotates in the wrong direction -- up, that is -- and the engines roar with thrust. The experienced travelers know that the pilot had to abort the landing, but those who haven’t gone through this drill before are looking around, wondering “what the hell…?”. After about 5 minutes, the pilot came on “The plane in front of us hit a bird. They have to physically inspect the runway before another plane can land, so we had to fly around. We’ll be down in 10 minutes”. That was a nice announcement. I learned something new -- I didn’t know they had to inspect a runway after a bird strike, though it makes a lot of sense. Too often pilots or gate agents don’t take the time to explain the cause of a delay or a fly around, or don’t want to deal with the follow-up questions that may come -- and so I appreciate those that do. I remember a Southwest flight out of New Orleans. The plane lands -- it was a bit late -- but we’re not boarding right away. You could feel the impatience building in the gate area. The agent got on the PA -- “Sorry for the delay in boarding, but the plane was struck by lightning on its descent. The pilots have to do a physical inspection before we can board”. OK, that makes sense -- and just as you could feel the impatience build, it immediately drained away with that announcement. Maybe it’s because these delays weren’t the airline’s fault -- no negligence or bad judgement on American’s part for a bird strike or Southwest’s for lightning. Bit tougher to suck up when it’s the third delay in a row caused by maintenance issues -- spend some of those record profits on preventative maintenance -- or a missing crew -- maybe you should put a bit more slack in your scheduling. But as always, more transparency is better than vagueness -- even if it’s not the best story for you.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/septahelix/34050\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Earth Soda</a></em> by septahelix</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Data-Hungry Phones</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I met up with a friend at <a href=\"http://www.empiricalbrewery.com/\">Empirical Brewing</a>, one of 3 microbreweries along Ravenswood Blvd in that Chicago northwest side neighborhood. I hadn’t seen him since he had gotten back from a trip he and his son did to Helsinki, St Petersburg, and Moscow. Among other things, he had problems getting his son’s AT&amp;T iPhone to work in Helsinki. That’s odd, I said. I’ve never had a problem with AT&amp;T’s GSM iPhones in Europe. AT&amp;T told him to reset it, which he did, after which it promptly downloaded a gig and a half of apps and data over the cellular data network. As you might guess, he’s disputing that couple of hundred dollar bill.</li>\r\n 	<li>I am always surprised at how much data my phone uses when I travel outside of the country. Now I’m sure that one reason for this is that it’s about the only time I look at my data usage since I’m grandfathered into one of the old AT&amp;T unlimited data plans. I don’t know how much I use, and don’t make a big effort to limit it. So when I travel overseas, I get to see my kids live their mobile lives trying to stay under a 300 MB data cap.</li>\r\n 	<li>International mobile data has gotten a bit cheaper. T-Mobile offers a reasonable unlimited international data plan if you can live with slower 2G-style speeds. I’m not that patient, so I tend to get the AT&amp;T 300 MB package for $60 because it also comes with free access to a decent set of wi-fi hotspots.</li>\r\n 	<li>Living on a data budget means thinking which apps really need mobile data -- which is not that many. So while I’m sitting on the plane waiting for everyone to board, I pull out my iPhone, go over to Settings | Cellular and start turning off cellular data access for most of my apps. I’m not quite sure why the healthcare flexible spending app or the app that came with my sous vide immersion heater ever need cellular data -- in the US or internationally. Anyhow, I spool through the last, turning most of them off and certainly that damn “Wi-Fi Assist” and then, after I’ve sent my last Snapchat, I hit “Reset Statistics” so I’ll have a clean view of how I’m burning through that 300 MB and then click over to Airplane mode.</li>\r\n 	<li>And then, when I land, I come out of Airplane mode, go back into Settings | Cellular and turn Roaming On, and catch up on the overnight e-mail while waiting to get off the plane. At some point that morning, I’ll look at the Current Period data usage and see that I’ve burned through, say, 75 MB of my 300 MB -- 25% of my total package -- in the first morning. Holy crap! I immediately dive back into Settings | Cellular and turn off Roaming. What happened?</li>\r\n 	<li>This is where, on the iPhone, you begin having to spelunk through the mess that the Settings app has become. You scroll down past all the apps you shut off from cellular access and look at the last entry -- “System Services” -- and see that it’s consumed at least half of that 75 MB. What the hell? You click through. Why has this phone used that much data on “Time &amp; Location” or “General” or “iTunes Accounts” (huh? I thought I shut off iTunes in the last screen). This is when you start to dig deep -- Settings | Privacy | Location Service and you find another list of apps -- kinda like the one you used to turn off cellular data, but this one is for accessing your location. Look, as much as I love the Tortas Frontera restaurants in ORD, I’m not sure why their app needs to pull my location information. And then you go to Settings | General | Background App Refresh for yet another list of apps where you shut off their permission to update themselves in the background. And then you go over to Settings | Mail and turn Fetch New Data to Off to keep your iPhone from constantly pinging your Exchange server.</li>\r\n 	<li>It’s kinda like whack-a-mole, and you’ll be sure to miss something because these phones and the apps we load on them are, for the most part, built on the assumption of ubiquitous unlimited data access. So changing that behavior, those assumptions -- to severely limit the data the phone inhales and exhales -- takes work. Which is why, if we’re going to be somewhere for more than 4-5 days, I’ll invest the hour it takes to find a phone store and $25 per phone to buy a local SIM with a gig or two of data. When I was in Iceland for 4 days in March, it didn’t seem necessary. But when then I flew down to Spain for 8 days, my first stop was the Orange store because I knew my phone couldn’t hold its breath for that long.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music --<em> <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/scottaltham/20747\">Hear Us Now</a></em> by scottaltham</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Dramatic Iceland</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Watching Iceland makes its Cinderella run in the Euro 2016 soccer tourney -- right up until the time they faceplanted into France last weekend -- reminded me of the trip my son and I took in March. Some reaction shots ESPN did from Reykjavik were places we had been -- saw a coffee shop we hit trying to stay awake on our first day, and a square that one of our hotels was on. Not that surprising since downtown Reykjavik isn’t that big. If I’d paid more attention to the people sitting next to me in the bars off that square, I’d have probably recognized some people in those shots too.</li>\r\n 	<li>Iceland is a hot tourist destination -- especially for people looking for something a bit different. And if I didn’t know already, when the Dorling Kindersley folks sent me review copies of their relaunched <a href=\"http://www.dk.com/us/travel/\">Eyewitness Travel Top 10 Guides</a>, in among the usual suspects -- New York, London, Paris, Barcelona -- was Iceland. In 2015, there were <a href=\"http://www.ferdamalastofa.is/static/files/ferdamalastofa/Frettamyndir/2016/juni/tourism_-in_iceland_in_figures_may2016.pdf\">1.3 million foreign tourists</a> in Iceland -- almost 4 times the population of 329,000 -- and a 29% increase over 2014. It’s a hot destination and getting hotter -- perhaps even to the point of overheating?</li>\r\n 	<li>Especially with Wow Air, a kinder and quirkier Spirit or Ryan Air, expanding the number of North American gateway cities. We ran into lots of folks who had seen ads for cheap Wow air fares and flew over for a 3 or 4 day weekend on a whim, without really thinking about what to do. We’d see folks walking up and down the downtown shopping and entertainment district in Reykjavik, and then figuring out some day trip bus rides out to the Golden Circle hot spots. And this was in March, not exactly the garden time in Iceland. But there were a lot of folks there. And so in that way, Iceland felt small.</li>\r\n 	<li>On our second day, we picked up a rental SUV -- a Dacia Duster, a great vehicle -- and headed out of town. Once we got out of Reykjavik’s catchment area, Iceland opened up quickly. The drama of the scenery, the spaces carved out by volcanos and glaciers -- “Land of Fire and Ice” it likes to bill itself -- make it feel much bigger. Of course, you could see this same space from the seat of a tour bus, but I was glad we rented a car. We got off the well-worn paths. Not too far, but when driving across a plain on a 2-lane highway with no traffic to speak of, the vistas did open up in front of us, which made me glad I was able to look forward and enjoy them through the expanse of the front windshield instead of looking off to the side through a motor coach window. And when we did some of the typical stops -- Þingvellir park, Gullfoss waterfall -- we could ride out the ebb and flow of the tour bus traffic, and have these spots pretty much to ourselves, even for just a little while. Or the time when we were driving toward the south coast, running through a series of rain bands -- in and out; in and out. I was starting to get annoyed until I looked out the rear view mirror and saw a huge double rainbow. I immediately pulled into a gas station and got out of the car. The landscape was wide open; we could see that rainbow from end to end. It was a phenomenal sight. And the smoked lamb sandwich we bought afterwards in the gas station wasn’t bad either.</li>\r\n 	<li>I struggle sometimes when asked about Iceland. Would I recommend it? Reykjavik is nice enough, but it’s a small town. I’m not a museum guy, so there was probably a day-and-a half of stuff for me to do. And Iceland is expensive. I had good fish and lamb, but it wasn’t cheap. And hotel rooms were tight in March, so I gotta figure the country is completely sold out in July and August.</li>\r\n 	<li>But the scenery outside of Reykjavik, I keep coming back to that word “dramatic”. I’m not sure it does it justice, but it’s all I got. If you get a car, then the trip starts to make sense.</li>\r\n 	<li>Well, that and the fermented shark chased with shots of brennivín -- Icelandic schnapps -- because, I dunno, how can you not?</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #122</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from the <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">ccMixter</a> site</li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_122.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #122 — Data-Hungry Phones; Dramatic Iceland','','inherit','closed','closed','','1629-revision-v1','','','2017-04-29 16:21:16','2017-04-29 21:21:16','',1629,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/04/29/1629-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1767,1,'2017-04-29 16:24:34','2017-04-29 21:24:34','[caption id=\"attachment_1233\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"299\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/images.jpg\"><img class=\"size-full wp-image-1233\" title=\"Felix Baumgartner Losing United 1K Status (Redbull via YouTube)\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/images.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"299\" height=\"168\" /></a> Felix Baumgartner Losing United 1K Status (Redbull via YouTube)[/caption]\r\n\r\nTravel has been a bit less glamorous since I\'ve fallen from the top tier status, especially when I\'m doing \"stupid\" travel -- up-&amp;-backs across the continent in 48 hours. One of my recent flights was on a new United 737-900; the interior is a significant step up. Prepping for a vacation in Spain, I find it\'s easier and cheaper to get an unlocked phone to use with a local <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Subscriber identity module\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subscriber_identity_module\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"wikipedia noopener noreferrer\">SIM card</a>. And it wouldn\'t be a proper TravelCommons episode without a TSA story -- the fight over the new knife rules misses the point. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_104.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_104.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #104:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago. I was trying to get this written in time to do the show from the bathroom of the Vintage Plaza hotel in downtown Portland, or perhaps from the hottub that I found on the balcony of my room, but that just didn\'t come to pass.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’ve been on the road more than not since the last episode -- a couple of days in New York, 18 hours in Detroit, but mostly in Portland, OR. 4 trips since the last episode. So I\'ve experienced the full range of Portland weather -- 38 degrees and drizzle all the way to 58 degrees and drizzle. But I’m nowhere near close to tasting the full range of Oregon beers, no matter how hard I try. And the listeners who are friends on Untappd have seen how hard I\'ve been trying. My face has scrolled across the top of the digital menu at Bailey’s Taproom a few too many times.</li>\r\n 	<li>And though I joke about the weather (and who doesn\'t -- even the natives apologize) I enjoy flying in Portland, taking the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"MAX Light Rail\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAX_Light_Rail\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"wikipedia noopener noreferrer\">Max light rail</a> into the city center, and having a 10 min morning walk from the hotel to the office. No rental car, no traffic. There is the occasional street person, but they\'re much more polite than, say, the SF or Phila homeless.</li>\r\n 	<li>One of those Portland trips was in the midst of what I call “stupid” travel -- when I get committed to back-to-back meetings thousands of miles apart. I think I told the story a couple of years back when I did Chicago to London to Denver in two days. That was probably the stupidest trip I\'ve done. This one wasn\'t as bad -- Chicago to Portland to Detroit and then back to Chicago in two days.</li>\r\n 	<li>It went OK, as well as can be expected, right up until the last day. I had a breakfast meeting in lovely scenic <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Livonia, Michigan\" href=\"http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=42.4011111111,-83.3711111111&amp;spn=0.1,0.1&amp;q=42.4011111111,-83.3711111111 (Livonia%2C%20Michigan)&amp;t=h\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"geolocation noopener noreferrer\">Livonia, Michigan</a> -- a western suburb of Detroit -- that has the redeeming value of not being very far from the airport. Good thing because it started dumping snow that morning. Not a big problem. I called Amex Travel -- there’s an earlier flight to Chicago with seats available. I book it to the airport. Once there, I go up to the kiosk to change my flight, but it tells me that there’s no flight available. Hmmm... I walk up and down the concourse trying to find the right line to change my ticket. I have no status on Delta, so I can’t get into any of the Medallion lines. I’m not flying first class or internationally so I don’t qualify for those lines. I finally walk through an empty line that is for self-service baggage drop. Can you help me? She points to the kiosk -- you can make all your changes there. But I can’t. She shrugs and turns away. I’m trying to play nice and follow the rules, which has gotten me into a black hole bounded by poorly programmed kiosks and indifferent employees. Luckily, the baggage claim woman’s shrug is not shared by all of her co-workers. On another lap of the terminal, looking perplexed and annoyed, a couple of red-jacketed Delta employees stop me. I tell them my story and they take me directly to the front of a Medallion line and I’m taken care of. I thank them all multiple times and head to the gate.</li>\r\n 	<li>The flight is delayed 30 minutes because the inbound plane is late. Not surprising given the snow. No big deal. We finally board the plane. And wait. Now I know that deicing at Detroit Metro isn\'t done at the gate -- it’s done mid-field -- so I know we’re not waiting for the goop truck. Hmm... 30 minutes later, a maintenance guy shows up with a screwdriver to replace the latch on an overhead bin in first class that was stuck shut. Then we wait 20 minutes for the paperwork to clear, and then we head to deicing. I eventually got home 30 minutes earlier than if I had just stayed on my original flight. That’s the definition of stupid travel.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://ghosts.nin.com/main/home\"><em>7 Ghosts I</em></a> by <a title=\"Nine Inch Nails\" href=\"http://www.nin.com/\" rel=\"homepage\">Nine Inch Nails</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>A couple of Sundays ago, Chris Christensen of the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Amateur Traveler\" href=\"http://amateurtraveler.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"homepage noopener noreferrer\">Amateur Traveler</a> podcast pinged me on Google Talk. “What to be a guest on <a href=\"http://thisweekintravel.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">This Week in Travel</a> with Jen Leo and me?” “Sure, when?” “Now” And then an invite to a Google Hangout popped up. Oh, video! I had just finished working out. I grabbed a baseball cap before I clicked into the Hangout. It was a lot of fun -- Chris, Jen and another guest -- Corey Taratuta of the <a href=\"http://www.irishfireside.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Irish Fireside</a> podcast. After about an hour, we wrapped it up, but then when Chris went to save the Hangout, he couldn\'t find the button. He looked all over the console. Turns out he had set up the Hangout as private instead of public. So no recording and probably the smallest audience of This Week in Travel ever. The next night, Chris pinged me again -- Are you free? I have it set up correctly this time. And so we all popped back in. We started with a rundown of the week’s travel news headlines. Corey then talked about <a href=\"http://www.thegatheringireland.com/\">The Gathering</a>, which is not the latest teen vampire book, but instead is this year’s big tourist program in Ireland. Which reminded me of my favorite Ireland travel moment — running low on clean clothes during a post-graduate tour of Ireland, I found a laundromat next door to a pub in <a href=\"http://www.corkcity.ie/\">Cork</a>. And it was run by two very nice Irish women who took pity on me. They took care of my laundry while I had a couple of pints of Murphy’s stout. And yes, I did tip them. It’s a good fun. I have a <a title=\"Once More With Feeling…\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2013/03/06/once-more-with-feeling/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">link</a> to the YouTube video on the TravelCommons site. I’ll also put a link to the <a href=\"https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/134-that-feeling-deja-vu-corey/id327760888?i=135011815&amp;mt=2\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">audio podcast</a> in the show notes.</li>\r\n 	<li>In the<a title=\"Podcast #103 — Hospitality is Personal; Tablets Everywhere\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2013/01/24/podcast-103-hospitality-is-personal-tablets-everywhere/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"> last episode</a>, I talked about a post in a FlyerTalk thread that said “The content of the Travel Commons podcast is interesting, but the guy\'s voice is monotone and metronomically slow”. I said that it was probably from a former listener. Well, not true. The person, who asked me not to use their name, dropped me a note last week saying\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>“I’m still very much a regular listener and enjoy your podcasts! I’m Irish but living in China.</li>\r\n 	<li>“It’s tough for a single podcaster to inject variety and drama into his voice. By definition it ends being an unspontaneous scripted monologue. That’s why it’s always easier to listen to an ‘interview’ format or a ‘two friends chatting’ format”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>This is spot-on and the point was driven home to me again being one of four voices in “This Week in Travel”. And being part of four folks chatting, you’re not responsible for all the content. Trying to write 20-some odd minutes of interesting content is the main reason for the longish gaps between episodes. But, thanks for the note and I’m glad to hear that I’ve kept it interesting enough to keep you subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’m heading out to Madrid and Barcelona at the end of this week for Spring Break with my wife and daughter. We have some tours set up -- a market tour in Madrid suggested by Craig Martin from the <a href=\"http://indietravelpodcast.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Indie Travel</a> podcast and a wine tour in Priorat (my favorite Spanish wines) -- so I figured it would be handy to have a local Spanish phone number. I’ll often do this when we’re somewhere for more than a week -- bring an unlocked phone and buy a local SIM card. When we visited Cape Town, the pre-paid SIMs were sold at the checkout line next to the register -- gum, breath mints, SIM cards -- just another impulse buy. There were two or three brands. I was flipping through them trying to figure out which one to buy when the guy behind me in line tapped me on the shoulder -- “You looking to buy a SIM card?” Uh, yeah. “Don’t buy any of these. None of the numbers are good. I have better ones in my car.” Uh, OK.... So we bought our groceries and I followed the guy out to the parking lot. He opened his trunk and had about 50 SIM card packages. He started thumbing through them “Nah..., Nah..., Ah! Here’s a good number.” I honestly couldn\'t tell the difference between this one and the one I was looking at in the grocery store, but whatever. I gave him some rand, put the SIM into the <a href=\"http://www.motorola.com/mdirect/demos/how2_v551/V551G.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Motorola V551</a> that for some reason Cingular had shipped unlocked, and booked a table for dinner down the road. Very handy.</li>\r\n 	<li>I still have that V551 in a plastic bin, buried under a bunch of other semi-obsolete electronics that I keep thinking I’ll have use for, but no, it’s time has passed. When we’re in Spain, I’ll perhaps want to make a couple of calls, but will be more likely to be sending texts or getting directions or looking at a map or posting pictures -- not something that 7-8 year phone is going to handle. Looking around a unlocked smartphones, the market is getting a lot better. Google’s Nexus 4; BLU Products just announced a new Life series that looks good. Tempting, but I pulled out my old iPhone 4 outta my desk drawer and filled out AT&amp;T’s on-line unlock request. They spun on it a couple of days and then sent me an e-mail saying that I’d been approved. But then I needed to find a non-AT&amp;T microSIM to finish the unlock. I tried to cut down the Simple SIM that I’d used to unlock my iPhone 3G, but I must of clipped a contact because it didn\'t work. Then I saw a T-Mobile offer -- $1 dollar to have a microSIM shipped to my house. Done. It showed up a couple of days later. I dropped it into the 4, synced it to iTunes and it told me I was unlocked. I’ll buy a local SIM when I hit the ground in Madrid. However, unlike Cape Town, I understand that I need to register with my passport to buy one. Doesn\'t sound like I’ll be riffling through some guy’s trunk.</li>\r\n 	<li>And finally, we\'ve talked in the past about old planes. I talked about how I avoid flying American’s MD-80s. I ended up on Delta’s version on one leg of my Portland-Detroit flight. Must\'ve been an old Northwest plane because the interior looked like one of their renovated DC-9s, the predecessor to the MD-80. Quite a change when I walked onto a brand new United 737-900 on Monday for a flight back out to Portland. I think it still had a bit of that new plane smell. It had mood lighting and regular electrical plugs a la Virgin America; the push-up/sloping-up overhead bins a la 777. The air vents were some goofy leaf-like construct that took me a minute to figure out. But what caught my eye was what was missing -- there were no video screens anywhere. Was this a new trend -- was United cutting weight and maintenance costs, acknowledging the trend of passengers bringing their own entertainment devices? Uh, no. As we were pushing back, the flight attendant apologized for the lack of video. She said that the plane was so new, it hadn\'t yet had a chance to be retrofitted for in-flight entertainment yet. So much for trend spotting.</li>\r\n 	<li>But hey, If you spot a trend, or have a question, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- use the Voice Memo app on your iPhone or something like Easy Voice Recorder on your Android phone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">@mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em>Stupid Now</em> by <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/music/listeners/artistdetails.php?BandHash=be2a489f478e6d5335652fc8925eee03\">Bob Mould</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Status Free Fall</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>A couple of episodes ago, I talked about how my summer travel sabbatical was going to significantly impact frequent traveler statuses. I was reminded of that on Sunday, St Patrick’s Day, when I was playing <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pogues\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">The Pogues</a> and the song “If I should Fall from Grace with God”. For a couple of years, I was Global Services on United -- the top of the top of the Mileage Plus heap. It was rare I didn\'t get an upgrade. And when I consciously chose to sit in coach -- like when I was flying with my family -- flight attendants would come back, ask me why I was in the back, and then bring me free drinks from first class, which would generate quite a hairball of emotions with my wife -- some tangled mess of amusement and disgust.</li>\r\n 	<li>When I fell out of that rarefied air to just plain 1K, it was a bit of an adjustment -- where did all the kissing up go? But this year’s fall was going to be steeper -- from 1K to Premiere Silver, the lowest level of status. I was close to keeping Gold -- I probably should\'ve done a mileage run to the West Coast -- but the holidays crept up on me faster than I thought. United graciously offered a couple of times to sell me the 3 or 4 segments I needed for $650. I passed. And so I dropped to Silver on Feb 1. Just in time for me to start these Chicago-Portland hauls where United has the only convenient direct flights available. I get dropped down one boarding group -- from 1 to 2 -- which hasn\'t been a big deal. I haven’t had a problem finding overhead space. The bigger pain is not being able to pre-book Economy Plus seats for free. For all of United’s faults, the extra legroom of Economy Plus has always kept me coming back. But as Silver, I can’t book Economy Plus from free like I could as 1K. Now I either pay for it, or wait 24 hours before flight time when I can book it for free. I haven’t had a problem yet, but the ORD-PDX flights don’t seem to be the highest volume legs. Not a huge issue -- more of a discomfort than anything -- but when you’re spending 8-9 hours a week -- or more -- in a plane seat, a couple of extra inches starts to matter.</li>\r\n 	<li>It’s interesting, though, to compare United’s approach to the approach taken by hotel brands. I’d been Marriott top tier -- Platinum -- for many years -- earning it the hard way by spending 75 nights in the Ren Cen Marriott in downtown Detroit, a property legendary in its awfulness. When I changed jobs three years ago, Hilton properties were much more convenient to my offices and so I switched. That first year I made Hilton’s top tier -- Diamond -- and certainly didn\'t re-qualify for Marriott Platinum. But Marriott didn\'t drop me. They soft landed me, dropping me one status level a year. I appreciated that, and it kept me staying with them, even if not as frequently. And this year, Hilton kept me at Diamond even though I didn\'t meet their thresholds. I’m sure they’ll start to drop me next year, but they too will keep some business.</li>\r\n 	<li>And these programs are businesses. What started out as a way keep passengers loyalty in the early scary days of airline deregulation has turned into a cash-generating business in its own right. In 2010, it was estimated that Citibank paid American more than $1 billion for miles it distributed to AAdvantage credit card holders. Makes sense then that one of the first things American did when it filed for Chapter 11 was to tell everyone that their miles were safe. Employee pensions may take a haircut, but not AAdvantage balances.</li>\r\n 	<li>Now it’s one thing to be “de-statused” because I didn\'t thresholds, but it’s a whole other thing to get crammed down a peg because they make a new level above you. Now, this has been going on for a while. At the beginning of American’s AAdvantage program -- the original frequent flyer program -- there was only one status level -- Gold. And then they added a new level, Platinum. And then Executive Platinum as ways to further differentiate level of frequent fliers, and give them a new “brass ring” to chase. Kinda the original “gamification” play, but with early boarding instead of badges as the reward. Of course, if you’re just hitting the top of the old structure, you’re now down a peg when the new level gets created.</li>\r\n 	<li>Which you can understand for the annual award levels, but what about if it’s associated with a lifetime status award. United Million Mile fliers used to receive lifetime Premier Executive status -- the middle status akin to American’s Platinum level. Both these levels would earn 100% mileage bonuses -- earn 2 miles for each mile flown. American is still that way, but when United merged with Continental, Premier Exec became Premier Gold, the mileage bonus was reduced to 50% and a new level, Premier Platinum was inserted above it. If you’d invested dollars and time hitting a million miles on United, the return on that investment just got cut in half. And, of course, someone sued. And last month, the judge <a href=\"http://skift.com/2013/02/01/million-milers-frequent-flier-lawsuit-against-united-to-continue/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">rejected</a> United’s bid to throw the case out, saying “the court finds it plausible that defendant (United) had a contract with Million Miler members which differed from the contract they had with other Mileage Plus members.”</li>\r\n 	<li>So I guess if you\'ve been around long enough, even the airlines have to bring you in for a soft landing.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music --<em>When Irish Eyes are Burning</em> by <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/music/listeners/artistdetails.php?BandHash=a45aaee36685b61a392acf793155e127\">the Ike Reilly Assassination</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>TSA Knife Fight</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>The TSA’s announcement that they’ll allow small non-locking knives and various pieces of sports equipment past airport security checkpoints seemed to be executed with the agency’s typical obliviousness. They didn’t warn or try to pre-sell the idea to folks that have a stake in the decision -- airlines, flight attendants, even air marshals. Instead, they just dropped an announcement and expected everyone to just go along. Are they surprised that everyone is questioning their judgement? Remember, this is the one federal agency that’s more despised than the IRS.</li>\r\n 	<li>Even if the TSA’s threat analysis is correct, what good does it do to announce this change? I can’t remember the last time I was in a TSA line and heard someone say “Dammit, I should be allowed to take my pen knife (or hockey stick) on a plane!” People complain about taking their shoes off, they complain about having to dump their water out, but no one complains about having to leave their knife behind. And yet this is the issue the TSA decides to make a stand on. Sheer brilliance</li>\r\n 	<li>The sports equipment change -- that doesn’t make any sense to me. But the pen knife thing -- the better approach would’ve been to change the policy and not announce it. Anybody who’s observant has noticed that the TSA has eased up on semi-liquid toiletries. While you still can’t bring a full-sized bottle of shampoo onto a flight (and really, who needs to? Hotels provide an unlimited amount of toiletries and if you’re staying in a vacation rental, you’re going to the grocery store once you arrive, so buy it there), I haven’t had a screener pull out my hair stuff or a travel-sized toothpaste in years. They’re still technically forbidden and the screeners can still see them, but they’re rightly focused on more dangerous things. A more practical TSA would let their screeners ignore pen knives and leave it at that.</li>\r\n 	<li>The September 11th attacks changed many things -- including how passengers react to a terrorist attack. Before September 11th, the counsel to passengers was always to be passive, not to put yourselves in harms way. You’re just a bargaining chip. Let the professionals negotiate with the terrorists -- give them money, safe passage -- and odds were, you’ll get out OK. The attempted attacks after September 11th -- the shoe bomber, the underwear bomber -- were all subdued by the passengers around them. Nowadays, even unruly drunks get jumped and zip-tied by their fellow passengers. In this environment, I just don’t see someone taking down a 767 with the knife on a corkscrew.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917626811171154.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #104</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://nin.com/\">Nine Inch Nails</a> and the <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/\">Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_104.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #104 — Status Free Fall; TSA Knife Fight','','inherit','closed','closed','','1227-revision-v1','','','2017-04-29 16:24:34','2017-04-29 21:24:34','',1227,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/04/29/1227-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1768,1,'2017-04-29 16:25:43','2017-04-29 21:25:43','[caption id=\"attachment_1153\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/2012-11-07-17.29.10.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1153\" title=\"Nor\'easter Snow in NYC\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/2012-11-07-17.29.10-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> What Better Way to Test Travel Management Apps than a Nor\'easter in New York?[/caption]\r\n\r\nTraveling to New York earlier this month, I missed Hurricane Sandy but took the full brunt of the follow-up nor\'easter that the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"The Weather Channel\" href=\"http://www.weather.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"homepage noopener noreferrer\">Weather Channel</a> helpfully named Athena. The travel havoc wreaked by the wind and snow was a perfect setting for a side-by-side comparison of the free versions of the leading trip management apps -- <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"TripIt\" href=\"http://www.tripit.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"homepage noopener noreferrer\">TripIt</a>, <a href=\"http://tripcase.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">TripCase</a>, <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"WorldMate\" href=\"http://www.worldmate.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"homepage noopener noreferrer\">WorldMate</a>, and<a href=\"http://kayak.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"> Kayak</a>. Looking at three use cases, pulling together travel plans into a single itinerary, sharing that itinerary with others, and flight tracking when bad weather hits, TripCase came out on top. I also talk about the TSA\'s latest scanner debacle and the changes since I took listeners on a tour of my briefcase in <a title=\"Podcast #33 – Listener Mailbag, What’s in My Briefcase?\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2006/02/18/podcast-33-listener-mailbag-whats-in-my-briefcase/\">Episode 33</a> back in 2006. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_102.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_102.mp3\"]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #102:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago after an uneventful Thanksgiving Day weekend. Uneventful for me at least because I was able to hold fast to my rule of no travel during the Thanksgiving holiday. I woke up last Weds, the day before Thanksgiving, to see nothing but grey out my windows. <a href=\"http://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/flights/2012/11/21/dense-fog-snarls-chicago-flights-ahead-of-thanksgiving/1719885/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Heavy fog</a> hit Chicago. Not a normal event. But, with a nod to Murphy, if it was going to happen, why not on the busiest travel day of the year? About 1,500 flights were delayed or cancelled. Ugh...</li>\r\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">Earlier in the month, though, I did get slightly winged by the weather gods. I traveled to New York the week after, what is it Hurricane or Superstorm Sandy? I thought it was a Category 1 <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Sandy\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">hurricane</a> when it hit New Jersey. What’s with all the superstorm stuff? What is a <a href=\"http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/576b3276-21bc-11e2-b5d2-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2DZrTfhqW\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">superstorm</a>? Anyways, I land at <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"LaGuardia Airport\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaGuardia_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"wikipedia noopener noreferrer\">LaGuardia</a> the following Tuesday morning. I’m expecting a real hassle getting into midtown, but no, to my very pleasant surprise, there were loads of cabs and no queues. Talking to a colleague later in the day, he’d flown into Newark the night before and waited two hours for a car. Timing with these travel things is everything -- often better to be lucky than smart.</li>\r\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">And pretty soon I thought I’d used mine up in the cab line because, while I’d dodged Superstorm Sandy, I had just landed 18 hours in front of the follow-up nor’easter that the Weather Channel decided to name Winter Storm <a href=\"http://www.weather.com/news/winter/storms/2012/athena\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Athena</a>. OK, now we have hurricanes, superstorms, and winter storms all with names. Go figure. All I know is that I land in perfect weather on Tuesday morning and by Weds afternoon, I’m watching snow blow sideways on Central Park South.</li>\r\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">Of course, in this age of airlines maxing out seat occupancy, they start pre-emptively cancelling flights the day before Athena hits. Tues night, American and United were already canceling flights from Weds afternoon to Thurs morning -- United a bit more cautiously starting their cancellations at Weds noon while American, perhaps trying to squeeze out a bit more revenue, waited until 2.</li>\r\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">Actually, my luck was holding. I wasn’t scheduled to fly back until Thurs at 3. So, if this nor’easter hits when it’s supposed to, and moves through as fast as it’s supposed to, I could come out of this OK. On Weds, I kept looking out the windows of the conference hotel. About 3 -- a bit ahead of schedule -- I started to see snow fly. And by 5 when I walked out of the conference to meet a friend for a beer, it was a full-on blizzard. It was a sloppy walk back to my hotel -- seems that nobody in Manhattan owns a snow shovel. But looking out the hotel window Thurs morning, it was clear sidewalks and sunny skies. My flight out of LGA was delayed 40 minutes, which even on a good day qualifies as on time for a LGA-ORD flight. Lucky, ‘cause I couldn’t have planned it better if I’d tried...</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Mo Shang</em> by Soli</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">Got some good comments on the <a title=\"Video #3 – ORD Layover Excursion: a 6-Hour Tour of Chicago\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/09/24/video-3-ord-layover-excursion-a-6-hour-tour-of-chicago/\">ORD layover video</a>. Jeanette Irwin left a comment on the website asking\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">“I\'ve often wanted to take advantage of long layovers by making a quick trip into the city the airport in, but have never been able to figure out what to do with my luggage (if I can help it, I don\'t check my bag, but bring it on the plane with me). Do you have this issues as well, Mark? If so, what do you do about it?”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">Jeanette, I think any experienced traveler is going to have this issue because we all pretty much break out in hives and a cold sweat at the idea of checking a bag. However, with increased airport security post-9/11, short-term luggage checks are scarce if not extinct in the US and increasingly expensive in places like Heathrow. I’ll grit my teeth and check my bag if I know I’m doing a layover tour (I did this for my <a title=\"Video #2 – One City, Five Hours: Frankfurt\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/05/01/video-2-one-city-five-hours-frankfurt/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Frankfurt sprint</a>). If it’s a more spontaneous excursion, I’ll try to check my bag at an airport hotel or a hotel near my first stop. I’m usually successful. I just tell them I’m checking in later and my room isn’t ready, but I also generously tip at the front end -- to the guy taking my luggage -- to help grease the skids.</li>\r\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">Gary Learned and Steve Frick gave answers to the question I posed in the last episode -- how many of  the top 10 US hubs -- ATL, ORD, DFW, DEN, PHX, MSP, IAH, DTW, EWR, SFO -- could you do a 5-hour city/neighborhood tour through without needing a rental car? After checking off the easy ones -- ORD, EWR (New York) and SFO -- I asked for thoughts on the rest.</li>\r\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\"><a href=\"http://twitter.com/Denrael\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Gary Learned</a>weighed in on MSP via Twitter --\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">You can take the light rail into downtown Minneapolis or over to Mall of America</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">And then once you get to downtown Minneapolis, you never have to come outside -- you just wander building to building through the 8 miles of human habitrails called the Skyway. Some people go <a href=\"http://www.vita.mn/116353724.html?page=all\">weeks</a> in the winter without venturing outside.</li>\r\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">Steve Frick said\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">“You could Marta up to downtown Atlanta, there\'s plenty to do in a 5 hour time span”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">Steve must’ve followed the link to the TravelCommons Flickr page in last episode’s show notes because he also commented\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">“I was looking at your Flickr pictures, take a look back at your My Briefcase picture from 2006 technology certainly has evolved in the last 7 years”\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_1155\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"320\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/102434287_e1770f7622_n.jpg\"><img class=\"size-full wp-image-1155\" title=\"My Briefcase circa 2006\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/102434287_e1770f7622_n.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"320\" height=\"212\" /></a> My Briefcase circa 2006[/caption]</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">I did go back and look at that <a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/travelcommons/102434287/in/photostream/\">picture</a>. It’s the first picture in the TravelCommons’ Flickr photostream -- from February 2006. It accompanies an audio tour through my briefcase that was in <a title=\"Podcast #33 – Listener Mailbag, What’s in My Briefcase?\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2006/02/18/podcast-33-listener-mailbag-whats-in-my-briefcase/\">Episode #33</a></li>\r\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">Yes, using a Bluetooth dongle to push photos from my Motorola clamshell phone to my ThinkPad. That was cutting edge pre-smartphone stuff. The U2 clickwheel iPod also has a bit of a vintage feel, though when I heard “Vertigo” on the radio the other day, it didn’t seem that old. Some things haven’t changed though. I still record my podcasts on that little iRiver -- much to my chagrin. I still use Pilot G2 gel pens, and I still carry a tin of wintergreen Altoids to get rid of that plane nap taste in my mouth. I think about half the stuff in my briefcase has stayed the same since 2006.</li>\r\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">One of the things that has changed since ‘06 is the creation of a whole new class of travel electronics -- the tablet. The iPad and the Kindle are the two defining devices in that category. Just before Thanksgiving, I picked up a Google Nexus 7 tablet -- the competitor to the Kindle Fire and iPad Mini. The WiFi-only version has been out since the summer, but I waited to buy until they released a version with cellular data and I’d seen Apple’s 7-inch offering. I’ll do a full review in a later episode -- after I’ve had a chance to travel with the Nexus 7 for a bit, but after a week-and-a-half of use, I really like it. The hardware is nicely put together, the price is right -- about $260 cheaper than a similarly kitted-out iPad Mini, and the latest version of Android -- 4.2 or “Jelly Bean” -- is hugely better than the first tablet version of Android -- 3.0 or “Honeycomb”. Very positive first impression.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a question, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- use the Voice Memo app on your iPhone or something like Easy Voice Recorder on your Android phone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em>You’re the Big Sky</em> by Derek K. Miller</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Trip Management App Comparison</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">Back in the golden age of travel, when everyone dressed up to fly (or at least showered and shaved), flight attendants still had their pensions and so were more pleasant, first class food was served on china with real silverware, and there was leg room in coach, frequent travelers used travel agencies to book their travel. Before you left on your trip, they’d send you actual physical plane tickets and a printed itinerary that consolidated your flight, hotel, and car rental reservations onto a single page. They usually gave you 3 copies of the itinerary -- one for your admin, one for your spouse, and one for you.</li>\r\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">In today’s DIY (do it yourself) age of travel, where people are searching and booking their own travel a la carte -- using Hipmunk for flights, Orbitz for hotels, and booking a car directly with Avis -- and then want to share these plans with 450 of their geographically distributed “friends”, there is a need to update those paper itineraries with something a bit more interactive -- that leverages the billions of dollars of mobile stuff we’ve bought over the past few years -- certainly since I took that picture of my briefcase in 2006.</li>\r\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">I’ve used a number of these travel management applications -- <a href=\"http://tripit.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">TripIt</a>, <a href=\"http://tripcase.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">TripCase</a>, <a href=\"http://worldmate.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">WorldMate</a> -- since I got my first iPhone, but had never really compared them to one another. I eventually settled on TripIt for no other reason than the travel management software my company used, Concur Solutions, bought them and integrated them into their offering. It’s been awhile, so I thought it a good time to give them all another spin.</li>\r\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">I used my Winter Storm Athena New York trip on United and an upcoming SLC ski trip on Southwest as test beds. I loaded the free versions of TripIt, TripCase, WorldMate and <a href=\"http://kayak.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Kayak</a> apps on my iPhone 5 and Samsung Galaxy tablet running the most recent version of Android -- Jelly Bean. Kayak wasn’t in my initial pass of apps -- I think of them more as meta search than travel management, but Gary Learned pointed me to them via Twitter and I added them to the mix. Adding to the fun, I ran the Flight Track Pro and United Airline apps on my iPhone and used the Passbook app new to iOS 6 to hold my United boarding passes. I was fully apped-up and ready to go.</li>\r\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">All the apps hit the base use case of aggregating trip information and effectively displaying it on the screen of a smartphone or tablet. Everyone correctly parsed the United and Southwest confirmation e-mails and noted the Vegas stopover on the return leg of the Southwest trip with TripIt, WorldMate and Kayak expliciting calling out its 40-min length.</li>\r\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">Most apps also have some ways of automatically ingesting your travel plans. If your business uses Concur, you can have it send all your itineraries to TripIt. TripCase, owned by the Sabre travel system, can automatically pick up trips made by a travel agent in Sabre. I assume WorldMate will soon have something similar with Carlson Wagonlit. And though I didn’t try it, I’d guess that Kayak automatically loads trips you make through them. You can also authorize TripIt to scan your GMail account several times a day for confirmation e-mails.</li>\r\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">If aggregation is the first use case, sharing itineraries is the second. Now, in this day and age, people immediately translate that into social media posting -- Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn -- but there are different levels of sharing needed. I might want to post to Facebook and LinkedIn that I’m planning a New York trip, trolling for some serendipitous beer drinking, but not so sure I want to widely broadcast flight and hotel details. However, someone scheduling my meetings or meeting me at the airport (not to mention my wife), not only do they need all those details, they could probably use delay/reschedule updates also.</li>\r\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">Everyone handles what I’d call the base social media sharing -- publishing to Facebook and LinkedIn, though it didn’t appear that WorldMate pushed to Facebook automatically. I like TripIt’s two pushes -- “I’m planning a trip” when I book the trip and then “I’m leaving” the day before departure. Kayak’s pushes bothered me -- they were URL links to the itinerary, which makes way too much information available. TripCase and Kayak could push to Twitter; TripIt couldn’t, but could push to enterprise apps like Salesforce Chatter and Yammer.</li>\r\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">TripIt, TripCase, and Kayak all published web calendar feeds you can pull into Outlook or Google Calendar, which would allow your spouse or assistant to get regular updates of your detailed travel plans. WorldMate calendar sync isn’t available in their free product.</li>\r\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">Which is a nice-to-have, but basic gut-level e-mailing of itineraries is key. And I gotta tell you that I was a little surprised at the results. You’d think this would be easy. And for WorldMate and TripCase it was -- click on the Share button and they quickly shot out a one-page e-mail with all the trip details in a nice table. I was surprised, though, that TripCase was the only one where I could, as a global default, set up an e-mail address (my wife’s in my case) to automatically receive all my trip updates. However, to do so, she had to become a TripCase user. Not quite what I had in mind.</li>\r\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">Kayak and TripIt sent out e-mails with web links to the information. Clicking through Kayak’s got to a nice clean display of the itinerary. TripIt, though, made you sign-up as a TripIt user before you could see the travel details. Way too much work if I need to quickly share my travel plans with a colleague.</li>\r\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">So far, everyone was able to aggregate travel plans, with some apps having a convenience edge if you book through their partners -- Concur for TripIt, Sabre for TripCase, Kayak for... Kayak. TripIt and TripCase do the best with social media publishing, though TripIt wins if you’re a Yammer or Chatter user. TripCase and WorldMate win itinerary e-mailing, which TripIt epicly failed.</li>\r\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">So that’s mostly pre-trip stuff. The final use case is while you’re on the trip and something happens -- what airlines euphemistically call “irregular ops”. The sorts of things that happen when you’re traveling through LGA in the midst of, say, a winter nor’easter big enough to get it’s own name from the Weather Channel.  Flights are delayed, gates change...</li>\r\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">Since I was only using the free versions, TripIt and WorldMate didn’t help. You have to upgrade to their paid versions for updates and flight status. Having said that, WorldMate Gold is $10/yr while TripIt Pro is $49. Not huge numbers, especially WorldMate’s. Somewhere along the line, I’d bought Flight Track Pro for my iPhone. It’s a $10 app, but I gotta think it was cheaper when I bought it. Anyhow, it syncs with TripIt, so I was kinda getting updates from TripIt that way. In the same way, WorldMate’s free app provides a nice deep link into Flightstats.com from the trip page -- two clicks, no typing, and you get real time flight info for your flight. Not as good as a push notification, but it’s something.</li>\r\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">From free services, I got the best notifications from TripCase and Kayak -- TripCase through iPhone notifications, Kayak via e-mail. And both of them were faster than the airline -- United, in this case. I couldn’t even get gate information updated on my United boarding pass in Passbook, and trying to get push notifications from their app is a random walk through a bunch of screens. Though it’s a paid app, Flight Track Pro did a great job of pushing gate change and delay notifications to my iPhone, and the app does a nice job of displaying current weather, which can give you a sense of how much trouble you’re in.</li>\r\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">TripCase wins the the notification use case with timely gate change and departure time push notifications. Kayak does a good job with their e-mails, but I think a native smartphone app should be able to push notifications to the screen.</li>\r\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">Sorting this all down, TripCase wins as the best free smartphone app.  It was at the tops of all three use cases -- itinerary building and sharing, and real-time flight status updates. However, it doesn’t have a tablet-specific app -- it just scales up the smartphone app.  Which looks awful on my 10-in Samsung Galaxy Tab. WorldMate, Kayak and TripIt have good iPad apps, but only TripIt and Kayak have apps specifically for Android tablets. I like the TripIt screen widget better than Kayak’s, so I’ll give the Android tablet win to TripIt.</li>\r\n 	<li>This was a good exercise. As a long-time TripIt user, this kinda surprised me. But after Angry Birds, travel management is probably the most important app a frequent traveler uses. Let me know your thoughts -- Twitter, Facebook, E-mail, Web Site Comments, Carrier Pigeon -- all the usual comms channels are open...</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music --<em>Sliding into Slumber Land</em> by Little Stevie and the Fatratz</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<strong>TSA Scanner Shuffle</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">And just when you thought I’d make it through a podcast without a TSA item, here it is -- my favorite topic, full-body scanners. We’ve talked many, many times about the full-body scanners used in US airports. For the sake of long-time listeners, I won’t summarize my rants. Suffice it to say, I’m not a big fan.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_1156\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"251\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/tsascannerpic.png\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1156\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/tsascannerpic-251x300.png\" alt=\"TSA Backscatter Scanner Sample Images\" width=\"251\" height=\"300\" /></a> TSA Backscatter Scanner Sample Images[/caption]</li>\r\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">Now, there are two kinds of full body scanners -- backscatter that use X-rays to produce the near naked images we’ve seen in newspaper articles and millimeter wave machines that produce more generic stick figures. A few months ago, the TSA started swapping backscatter for millimeter wave machines at high-volume airports like Logan, LAX, and ORD to speed up security lines. Though you still have to pull everything out of your pockets, the processing time for millimeter wave machines -- from scan to “all-clear” -- is, in my experience, at least half that of backscatter. The slower backscatter machines were said to be redeployed to smaller, lower-volume airports.</li>\r\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">However, just before officials testified before Congress two weeks ago, the TSA announced that these 91 backscatter machines worth $14 million were actually <a href=\"http://homeland.house.gov/sites/homeland.house.gov/files/11-15-12%20Rogers%20Open_0.pdf\">bound</a> for a Texas storage warehouse. Space constraints in the smaller airports and <a href=\"http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/11/rapiscan-fraudulent-tests/\">suspicions</a> of manipulated test results by the backscatter manufacturer around new privacy software are to blame. Of course, this is the second multi-million dollar mistake the TSA has made with passenger screening technology. If you traveled through SFO in the mid-2000’s, you might have walked through a Puffer machine. It worked well in the lab, but completely failed when it faced the muck that floats around a real-world airport. The TSA spent <a href=\"http://www.homelandsecuritynewswire.com/tsa-puffer-machines-pulled-service\">$30 million</a> on 94 Puffers, deployed less than half of them, and pulled the last ones out of airports in 2010.</li>\r\n 	<li>No wonder the Congressional subcommittee chairman said during the hearing that he is “<a href=\"http://youtu.be/8fWPVYV_N9k\">really aggravated</a>” by the situation, saying that the country is “really struggling with some tough budgetary decisions and it’s … really hard to understand how this happens.” It doesn’t matter if you’re a Republican or a Democrat. You just have to be disgusted with the waste. It reinforces the sense that the TSA has never been much more than a real expensive piece of security theater. As the US shambles toward the brink of a fiscal cliff and has to make hard decisions about raising taxes and cutting entitlements, we can no longer afford to let the TSA take another $14 or 30 million away from schools or Medicare or out of taxpayers pockets. It’s a money pit we need to walk away from. And now I’ll tuck my soapbox away... until the next episode.</li>\r\n 	<li>Frequent travelers tend toward a rhythm, a pattern that allows them to quickly and efficiently navigate the hassles of today’s travel experience. There’s a thin line, though, between, efficiency and a rut, and the travel bubble straddles that line. It takes some effort to pop that bubble; good food and beer can help...</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917626811171154.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #102</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://music.mevio.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Mevio’s Music Alley</a></li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_102.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #102 — Trip Management App Comparison; TSA Scanner Shuffle','','inherit','closed','closed','','1151-revision-v1','','','2017-04-29 16:25:43','2017-04-29 21:25:43','',1151,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/04/29/1151-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1769,1,'2017-04-29 16:26:21','2017-04-29 21:26:21','[caption id=\"attachment_1128\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"225\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/2012-08-03-21.17.30.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1128\" title=\"Bolton\'s Spicy Chicken, Nashville\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/2012-08-03-21.17.30-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"225\" height=\"300\" /></a> Search for Nashville Hot Chicken Led to Interesting Neighborhoods[/caption]\r\n\r\nBack in the TravelCommons studios after a couple months of summer break. We open up with thoughts about skipping rental cars, sharing listener comments on the Chicago Layover Excursion <a title=\"Video #3 – ORD Layover Excursion: a 6-Hour Tour of Chicago\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/09/24/video-3-ord-layover-excursion-a-6-hour-tour-of-chicago/\">video</a>, and the current state of American Airlines -- great new airplanes, deteriorating on-time stats. <a href=\"http://www.crunchbase.com/person/michael-komarnitsky\">Michael Komarnitsky</a>, the founder and CEO of GoMiles, talks about why he sold his company to <a href=\"https://traxo.com/\">Traxo</a> and where he sees the mileage tracking industry going. We wrap with my thoughts about how I break through the frequent traveler \"travel bubble\" by looking for local artisanal food and craft beers. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_101.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_101.mp3\"]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #101:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago. Back after a couple of month hiatus. The Episode 100 celebrations ran a little long...</li>\r\n 	<li>Last week, Jeremy Phillips tweeted “Listening to Travel Commons by <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> episode 100 while en route ATL -&gt; SEA. I kind of miss the bathroom acoustics but love the podcast.” Jeremy, I was thinking of recording at least the intro to this episode in one of the studio bathrooms, but thought that would be a bit too contrived. I will see, though, if I can get my act together enough for the next episode to do a bit of throw-back recording from a hotel bathroom.</li>\r\n 	<li>Not a lot of travel since the last episode -- two flights to San Francisco and a day trip to Atlanta -- though my arrivals in each place had some interesting twists. For all these trips, I had car service arranged to pick me up from the airport and to take me back. The cost and hassles of car rental seem to be on an upward spiral. We’ve talked in past episodes about costs -- not so much the rental cost itself, but all the add-on fees, surcharges, and taxes. In an Oct 2009 <a title=\"Skipping the Rental Car\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2009/10/25/skipping-the-rental-car/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">blog post</a> about skipping rental cars, I looked at my receipts from rentals in LA, SF, Seattle, and Philadelphia and found that add-on charges increased my final bill 27-51%. I don’t think those percentages have gone down in the intervening 3 years.</li>\r\n 	<li>The hassles of car rental are just as off-putting -- airports are reclaiming close-in car rental sites to expand parking, pushing the rental companies further out. I’ve timed trips at Phoenix and BWI -- 30 minutes to get from the terminal to the rental cars.</li>\r\n 	<li>So, with all that, I have little problem justifying the cost of a car to haul me between the airport and my locations. But even hire cars are not without their hassles. In ATL, it took me three phone calls -- to the driver and the car service -- to figure out where to meet the car. Unlike, say , ORD or LGA, there are different places you can “surface” from the gates and terminals. Apparently I followed the wrong “Ground Transportation” signs and ended up at the wrong end of the airport. No big problem -- maybe a 10-minute delay.</li>\r\n 	<li>My last trip to SF was a bit more problematic. I text the driver “I’m here” and “Here’s the door I’m at” -- not a big opportunity for location confusion at SFO Terminal 3. I’m standing there -- a couple of cars pull up, a guy gets in one, a woman in another. 5 minutes go by, where’s the car that said he was a minute away. Turns out that the guy who got into one of those cars got into mine. He told the driver his name which, to the non-native English speaking driver, sounded like Peacock and off they went. Except when I’m still texting him -- confusing when he thinks I’m in the back seat. Somewhere on the 101 South, the driver and the passenger figure out the mix-up. The car comes back to SFO, picks me up, leaving my doppelganger -- whose last name sounds nothing like Peacock -- wandering aimless on the sidewalk looking for his long-gone car.</li>\r\n 	<li>All reinforcing the feeling that there’s just nothing about travel nowadays that “just works”...</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://www.musicalley.com/music/listeners/artistdetails.php?BandHash=5176b75737dbc595f7509067fbe080ad\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Science vs. Romance</a> </em>by Rilo Kiley</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>For those not following the various TravelCommons sites -- <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Facebook</a>, the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">web site</a> (I don’t do Pinterest because, well, I’m a guy, and I don’t do Tumblr because I’m over 25 years old) -- a couple of pointers to some content that didn’t make it into the iTunes feed.</li>\r\n 	<li>First, I did follow through on the threat/promise I made at the end of the last episode -- to do my own <a title=\"Video #3 – ORD Layover Excursion: a 6-Hour Tour of Chicago\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/09/24/video-3-ord-layover-excursion-a-6-hour-tour-of-chicago/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Chicago version</a> of the One City, Five Hours sprint tours that United used to do in their Hemispheres magazine. Last year, I did the Frankfurt tour while on a long layover between Mumbai and Chicago.  I video’d my results; it’s on the TravelCommons site as “<a title=\"Video #2 – One City, Five Hours: Frankfurt\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/05/01/video-2-one-city-five-hours-frankfurt/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Video #2</a>”. I had such a great time following that tour -- seeing new areas of Frankfurt rather than flipping through my iPad in the United lounge -- that I wanted to offer up a similar tour of Chicago to people with long layovers -- whether planned or not.</li>\r\n 	<li>While the Frankfurt video was a one-day affair -- shot on my iPhone and edited in iMovie on the flight home, the Chicago video turned out to be a lot more work. Of course I had to create the tour rather than following someone else’s. And the constraints of the format -- start and end at ORD, 5 hours long (which I failed; mine clocked in just over 6),  using in only public transit, and trying to show something other than the usual photo op sites -- made for some tough choices.</li>\r\n 	<li>Also, I wanted to provide detailed transit and walking directions -- showing street signs at crossings, building a detailed Google trip map for the show notes -- because that was my one frustration with United’s Frankfurt <a href=\"http://www.hemispheresmagazine.com/2010/03/01/one-city-five-hours-frankfurt/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">article</a> -- I kept getting lost which cut into my already limited time budget.</li>\r\n 	<li>I posted on the TravelCommons site and Facebook page about a month ago. I didn’t push it through the iTunes feed because I thought it would be too big of a download and wouldn’t be of interest to everyone.</li>\r\n 	<li>The TravelCommons Facebook community had some good things to say. Lisa Besso’s comment voiced a common theme --\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>“Wouldn\'t it be great to have these for all major hubs where we all spend too much time?”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>I got to thinking about this... If you think through the top 10 US hubs -- ATL, ORD, DFW, DEN, PHX, MSP, IAH, DTW, EWR, SFO -- how many of these could you do a 5-hour city/neighborhood tour without needing a rental car.\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>San Francisco is an obvious one</li>\r\n 	<li>Newark - take the PATH train to downtown Manhattan and walk up thru TriBeCa and Greenwich Village</li>\r\n 	<li>Atlanta - Downtown and Buckhead via Marta?</li>\r\n 	<li>Denver - You’ve landed in the middle of a buffalo herd. Maybe catch a bus to LoDo?</li>\r\n 	<li>And after that, my voice trails off. Anybody else have any ideas?</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Bob Fenerty and Robby Smith also left comments -- both compared the ORD video to Anthony Bourdain’s “Layover” series. Bob said\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>“Very fun; like watching an amateur version of ‘The Layover’”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Robby liked it because you could knock it off in an afternoon, unlike Bourdain’s 2-3 day layover.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you haven’t seen it already, go to the TravelCommons web site or Facebook page, check it out and leave some comments. I created a new “Video” category on the site -- you can find it on the right-hand nav bar if you want to quickly find last year’s Frankfurt video. And send along your thoughts on other layover tours if you have them.</li>\r\n 	<li>Another <a title=\"Food and Drink Highlights from My Drive South\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/08/14/food-and-drink-highlights-from-my-drive-south/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">blog post</a> follows up on the topic in the last episode about my “great circle” through the Mid South -- I-65 from Chicago to the Gulf Coast, across US-90 and then back up I-55 and 57. Listeners who follow my social media natterings on Twitter and Untappd had seen my food and beer comments along the tour and asked for a summary, which I posted on the site in August -- a city-by-city listing of the restaurants and bars I thought were the best -- along with a link to a Flickr <a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/travelcommons/sets/72157631067493698/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">photo set</a>, pulling together some of my better shots, though probably a bit overdone with Instagram filters. If you’re visiting Nashville, Louisville, Memphis soon, check that out.</li>\r\n 	<li>And finally, a follow-up on episode 100’s other topic -- breaking up with American Airline, I dunno, it’s 1 step forward and 2 steps back. One of my biggest complaints in that rant was the age of AA’s fleet -- the MD-80’s that have been around for 25-30 years -- they’re small, dingy, uncomfortable, and in my experience, more and more prone to maintenance delays. Last month, I flew on a new American 737-800 -- what a great plane! Huge luggage bins, some styling cues from the 787 Dreamliner, and regular electrical outlets in coach. Such a huge upgrade from the MD-80s -- especially the ones picked up with the TWA merger -- those are the worst. So, good forward movement with the planes -- which then gets completely offset (and more) by seats on their old planes coming loose and disgruntled pilots causing flight delays through a work-to-rule campaign. New planes are great, but I have to be able to depend upon them. So I’m completely off American until they get all of this cleared up.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a question, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- use the Voice Memo app on your iPhone or something like Virtual Recorder on your Android phone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://www.musicalley.com/music/listeners/artistdetails.php?BandHash=0e46bba4178825d4602555f523958a28\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Voodoo Dub</a> </em>by Cyrusfx</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Future of Mileage Tracking Tools</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Two years ago, in episode 85, I talked to Michael Komarnitsky, the founder and CEO of GoMiles, about his year-old mileage/awards points tracking service. Last month, Michael sold GoMiles to Traxo, a trip aggregation/travel management site. I caught up with him last week to get his thoughts on where the mileage/awards tracking market is going. I first asked him to remind us what GoMiles did for the traveler...</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music --<a href=\"http://www.nimbitmusic.com/saurabbhargava\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><em>Not Enough (Inside You, Part 2)</em></a> by Saurab Bhargava</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Bursting the Travel Bubble with Local Food and Craft Beer</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>As I mentioned earlier, those who follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"http://untappd.com/user/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Untappd</a> (a sort of FourSquare for beer nerds), see a lot of posts and pictures of food and beer. Though I guess it shouldn’t be surprising -- I think travel, food, and alcohol (beer, wine, scotch,...) naturally go together; if you’re interested in one, you’re interested in them all. It’s all about being interested in exploring cultures. One of the main reasons we travel (voluntarily, that is) is to experience other people, other cultures. And if you want to get deeper into a culture, it’s much easier to eat and drink with them than to marry them.  Not to say marrying is a bad thing, just a bit more permanent -- or perhaps that’s the old-school Catholic in me talking...</li>\r\n 	<li>In <a title=\"Podcast #90 — More Comfortable Traveling in India; Tipping Towards Android?\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/05/22/podcast-90-more-comfortable-traveling-in-india-tipping-towards-android/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">past</a> <a title=\"Podcast #83 – Business Travel in India; iPad vs. Netbook\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2010/05/28/podcast-83-business-travel-in-india-ipad-vs-netbook/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">episodes</a>, we’ve talked about how frequent travelers often <a title=\"Up in the Air — Captures Life in the “Travel Bubble”\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2009/12/15/up-in-the-air-captures-life-in-the-travel-bubble/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">float</a> above the day-to-day activities, the reality of the cities their visiting in a “travel bubble” -- kinda like Glenda the Good Witch in “Wicked”. In <a title=\"Podcast #64 – Escaping the Travel Bubble; Mark’s Travel Tips\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2008/04/29/podcast-64-escaping-the-travel-bubble-marks-travel-tips/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">one</a> of those episodes, I talked about how I like using public transportation, skipping the airport limos or private car services as a way to pop that bubble.</li>\r\n 	<li>But in my trips this summer to SF and through the Mid-South, the search for local food and beer popped the travel bubble, and it was a helluva lot more fun than wrestling with a fare card machine in Brooklyn\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_1124\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/IMG_1281.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1124\" title=\"San Francisco Farmers\' Market\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/IMG_1281-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> San Francisco Farmers\' Market Near UN Plaza[/caption]</li>\r\n 	<li>Now this is more than just skipping restaurant chains for local joints. Searching out a SF farmers market took me through the Tenderloin district and had me dodging cup-shaking panhandlers much further up Market St than I’d been before. Searching for Nashville hot chicken took me way off the usual Broadway tourist drag, to Bolton’s, a squat cinder block building in what felt like a bit of a sketch section of East Nashville for some very good and very spicy fried chicken. We ate under a wheezing air conditioner as a steady stream of neighborhood folk banged the screen door, ordering the Friday hot chicken and catching up with the owner.</li>\r\n 	<li>Hunting down local beers has been just as rewarding. Walking from SF’s Union Square to the edge of the SoMa neighborhood to find the <a href=\"http://www.citybeerstore.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">City Beer Store</a> took me a good bit out of the tourist zone. I ended up drinking local Magnolia beer, talking with a group of guys who were stopping off for one on their way to the bus stop. Following Google Maps off I-65 in Birmingham, AL, I found myself parking in what looked like a neighborhood trying hard to re-develop so I could try a beer at <a href=\"http://www.avondalebrewing.com/index-full.php\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Avondale Brewing</a>.</li>\r\n 	<li>I keep a running list of web clippings in Evernote of the restaurants, beer/wine bars, breweries I want to visit. I have folders for the cities I visit often or plan to visit soon. I also use social media -- in <a title=\"Podcast #96 — Eating and Drinking with Social Media; Frequent Flier Alliances\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/01/05/podcast-96-dining-with-social-media-frequent-flier-alliances/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">episode #96</a>, I talked about how I use Untappd, <a href=\"http://www.foodspotting.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Foodspotting</a> and Chowhound -- as well as asking the Twitter-verse for ideas.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_1125\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/2012-07-14-14.08.12.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1125\" title=\"Mash Tanks at Avondale Brewing\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/2012-07-14-14.08.12-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Mash Tanks at Avondale Brewing, Birmingham, AL[/caption]</li>\r\n 	<li>But that’s just so I have a starting point for my searches. Searching new places forces me to break that travel bubble wall between visitor (me) and residents. In Louisville, I headed over to the Louisville Beer Store in the downtown NuLu district. Drinking a couple of beers and talking to the owner, he said I had to visit his other place, the <a href=\"http://holygralelouisville.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Holy Grale</a>, an old church converted to a beer bar. While there, talking to some folks at the bar, a guy told me I had to visit New Orleans’<a href=\"http://http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bywater,_New_Orleans\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"> Bywater</a> District if I wanted to latest in good local non-tourist food there. Three days later, I was driving into New Orleans. Have been there many times, but never heard of the Bywater District. A little web searching on the iPhone and I found my way there, ending up having dinner at the bar of <a href=\"http://maurepasfoods.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Maurepas Foods</a>, a very local place with very good food.</li>\r\n 	<li>Frequent travelers tend toward a rhythm, a pattern that allows them to quickly and efficiently navigate the hassles of today’s travel experience. There’s a thin line, though, between, efficiency and a rut, and the travel bubble straddles that line. It takes some effort to pop that bubble; good food and beer can help...</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917626811171154.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #101</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://music.mevio.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Mevio’s Music Alley</a> and from <a href=\"http://www.saurabbhargava.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Saurab Bhargava</a>’s album <em>Chromatique</em></li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_101.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #101 — Future of Mileage Tracking Tools; Searching for Local Food and Craft Beer','','inherit','closed','closed','','1119-revision-v1','','','2017-04-29 16:26:21','2017-04-29 21:26:21','',1119,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/04/29/1119-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1770,1,'2017-04-29 16:27:04','2017-04-29 21:27:04','[caption id=\"attachment_1039\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/399422_3361993820725_821625873_n.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1039\" title=\"Stax Museum Marquee-Memphis\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/399422_3361993820725_821625873_n-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> One of the stops on my Drive South...[/caption]\r\n\r\nBack in the TravelCommons studios after a 2,100-mile drive through the Mid-South. We genuflect quickly to the milestone episode number and then move onto the topics at hand -- best piece of hardware schwag from Google I/O 2012, a slightly icky subway ride from downtown San Francisco to SFO, a grab bag of observations from my southern road trip, and why I find myself breaking up with American Airlines after almost 30 years of travel. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_100.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_100.mp3\"]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #100:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Well, here we are at a milestone episode number -- number 100 -- 7 years and a couple of months after I started. It took me 1½ years to do 50 podcasts... and then another 5½ to do 50 more.  Looks like my podcast productivity is exponentially decaying...</li>\r\n 	<li>But you people still keep hanging around! I do appreciate the kind words that you’ve sent along via FaceBook and Twitter. I am glad that so many of you find this podcast interesting/entertaining. It’s that more than anything else that keeps me plugging away.</li>\r\n 	<li>Changes on the job front have kept me off the road for business travel, but I’ve managed to fill a couple of the weeks since the last episode with some personal travel.</li>\r\n 	<li>At the end of June, the family and I headed off to San Francisco.  My son scored an academic ticket to the big geek-a-palooza Google I/O. I think this year’s event sold out in 20 minutes and there were a very limited number of discounted academic tickets, so getting one was a bit like getting one of the golden tickets in <em><a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Willy Wonka &amp; the Chocolate Factory\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willy_Wonka_%26_the_Chocolate_Factory\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"wikipedia noopener noreferrer\">Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory</a></em>.  So while my son watched videos of guys skydiving with Google virtual reality glasses, and dove into the intricacies of Google Maps APIs and the latest whizzy things that Chrome does, my wife, daughter and I did San Francisco tourist stuff -- rode bikes across the Golden Gate Bridge, rode cable cars, hang out in hipster coffee joints -- the sort of stuff that I’ve never quite found time to do in the 10-15 years that I’ve been going to SF for business.</li>\r\n 	<li>\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_1042\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/564585_3384869592605_665394828_n.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1042\" title=\"I-65 Between Louisville and Nashville\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/564585_3384869592605_665394828_n-300x225.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\" /></a> I-65 From Louisville to Nashville[/caption]\r\n\r\nAnd then last week, I decided to do a little trip on my own -- a 2,100-mile loop through the South.  I ran I-65 from top to bottom -- from its start in northern Indiana down to Louisville, Nashville, and <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Mobile, Alabama\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile%2C_Alabama\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"wikipedia noopener noreferrer\">Mobile, AL</a>; across the Mississippi Gulf Coast on US-90 to New Orleans, up I-55 to Memphis, up US-51 to Dyersburg, then across I-155 to <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Sikeston, Missouri\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sikeston%2C_Missouri\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"wikipedia noopener noreferrer\">Sikeston, MO</a>, and then finally up I-57 back to Chicago.  But more about that later in the show.</li>\r\n 	<li>I have noticed though that whenever I travel for leisure, I don’t travel quite as sharp -- I don’t feel as tightly wrapped, as “in the zone” as I do when I travel for business. On my flight out to SFO, I hit a new level of bad planning, of “non-preparedness.”  I had to reach for the SkyMall catalog before the plane even left the taxiway...</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/stefsax/7785\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Awel</a> </em>by Stefsax</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I wrote a <a title=\"How Much Do You Want to Tip?\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/06/16/how-much-do-you-want-to-tip/\">blog post</a> last month about tipping. I received a link to a nice infographic from somebody from Hospitalitymangementschools.org -- a web site that I still can’t quite figure out what it is. It seems like a legit web site with information about the hospitality management industry, but there’s no contact information -- just a web submissions form, and the domain name is held in proxy by GoDaddy.  I dunno -- it feels just a little fishy.</li>\r\n 	<li>Anyhow, the tipping guide infographic was good, if a little wonky on the iPhone, and seemed to offer reasonable advice.  There is a surprising amount of emotion wrapped up in figuring out a tip amount. You want to appropriately acknowledge the service someone has just given you, and that then gets combined with the image you want to portray -- am I a nice generous person, am I a sharp you-won’t-get-anything-by-me person?</li>\r\n 	<li>Looking at on my own tipping, I think I do well when dealing with a service person face-to-face -- a waiter, a car valet, a hotel bellhop -- but not so well with tipping people I don’t see -- like a hotel maid.</li>\r\n 	<li>Rich Fraser is in the same place -- both about not tipping cleaning staff and feeling slightly “off” about that\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I agree with your take on tipping the housekeeping staff. I’m probably totally off base, but I always considered housekeeping to be a service inherent to my stay. I get that service whether I ask for it or not, as opposed to the bellhop, bartender or concierge, which are optional services.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>And that’s just dealing with the US. Don’t get me started about international tipping -- which countries it’s an insult to tip, it’s an insult not to tip, which countries you just round the tab up....</li>\r\n 	<li>One of the highlights of our SF trip was, at the end of each day, seeing what schwag my son hauled back from<a href=\"http://www.techradar.com/news/computing/google-io-2012-top-moments-1086645\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"> Google I/O</a>. These developer sessions have become quite the giveaway spree as companies try to recruit independent developers to their platforms. Microsoft gave away Windows 8 tablets at its last conference, but Google is the one that goes the deepest. Over two days, my son got an unlocked Samsung Galaxy Nexus phone, a Chromebox, the Google Nexus Q media streaming device slash bocce ball stand-in, and a Nexus 7 tablet.  $1,200 of hardware for a $300 academic ticket.  No wonder it sold out in 20 minutes.</li>\r\n 	<li>The <a href=\"https://play.google.com/store/devices/details?id=nexus_7_8gb\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Nexus 7 tablet</a> was the highlight of the schwag bag.  $200 for the 8 GB model, it directly competes with the Kindle Fire and blows it out of the water. It runs the latest Android version-- 4.1 or Jelly Bean as the droid-heads call it -- while the Fire sits at a custom version of 2.3 or Gingerbread. In those intervening versions, Google has smoothed off a lot of Android’s sharp edges and has significantly improved performance. For the first time, I could see an Android tablet being a real competitor to the iPad.</li>\r\n 	<li>I also like the 7-inch form factor. Steve Jobs is famous for dismissing anything less than the iPad’s piece-of-paper size. I was surprised, though, how much easier I found reading and web-browsing on this much lighter device. And since most of what I use a tablet for is media consumption -- rather than as an executive laptop replacement -- I’m thinking I may downsize my next tablet. I’ll see if the rumored iPad “mini” appears and then, if not, I may head down the Google route too.</li>\r\n 	<li>\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_1048\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/IMG_1311.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1048\" title=\"Powell St BART Station\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/IMG_1311-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Can\'t See the Dirt if Everything is Blurry[/caption]\r\n\r\nAnd continuing on my periodic trains-to-airports thread, when leaving San Francisco, I took BART -- Bay Area Rapid Transit -- from downtown -- we were staying at the St Francis in Union Square -- to SFO for my flight home. It was a Sunday -- the last Sunday in June -- and a nice sunny, warm day -- a rare event in SF -- which brought out in full force the standard SF mix of street performers, cup rattlers, and tourists.  Getting through this melange with my rolling bag was my first challenge.  Once I got down to the station and in front of the fare machine, I got a bit of sticker shock -- it was $8.25 to get to the airport. Sure, you pay a lot more for London’s Heathrow Express, but it’s a private train company with just one stope.  The BART fare is one of the bigger numbers I’ve hit for a subway system -- Chicago is a flat-rate $2.25 from the Loop to O’Hare; Washington’s Metro is $3 from downtown to Reagan National. Sure, $8.25 is cheaper than a $40 cab ride, but still...</li>\r\n 	<li>And that sticker shock only sinks in deeper when you get on the train and see how beat-to-hell they are.  They’re the same style trains as the Metro, but they’re in much worse shape. Who thought it was a good idea to put cloth seats on a public transit train?  I wished I had a plastic sheet to sit on.  And I made a bee line to a restroom once I hit SFO to I could wash my hands -- it was just that disgusting.  I’m back to taxis when next in SF.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a question, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- use the Voice Memo app on your iPhone or something like Virtual Recorder on your Android phone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/williams-dusty/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Steam Train</a> </em>by John Williams</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Drive South -- A Southern Road Trip</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_1040\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"226\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/311522_3384921793910_1477911803_n.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1040\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/311522_3384921793910_1477911803_n-226x300.jpg\" alt=\"My &quot;Great Circle&quot; Route Through the Mid-South\" width=\"226\" height=\"300\" /></a> My \"Great Circle\" Route Through the Mid-South[/caption]\r\n\r\nAs I mentioned at the top of the show, I did a “great circle” road trip of the Mid-South earlier this month -- me, a full-up old 30 GB click-wheel iPod, a list of restaurants and bars, and a suitcase of nothing more than shorts and polo shirts all loaded up into my Saab convertible.  I started off by running I-65 from top to bottom -- from the Indiana Toll Road to Mobile, AL, with stops in Louisville, Nashville, and Birmingham.  I jogged over to the state line to Florida, passing the huge rebuilt version of the Florabama Bar &amp; Grill, for a weekend on the Gulf at Perdido Key.</li>\r\n 	<li>I then drove across the Mississippi Gulf Coast, past the re-built casinos in Biloxi, and then past the not-so-rebuilt towns of Gulfport and Pass Christian.  Here we are 7 years after the eye of Hurricane Katrina made landfall at Bay St Louis, MS and the vacant lots along the coastal road - US-90 -- far outnumber the rebuilt homes.  Indeed, the For Sale signs on vacant lots -- many of them hand-made with “Make me an offer” scrawled across the front” -- outnumber the rebuilt homes.</li>\r\n 	<li>I eventually ended up on I-10 and drove into New Orleans for dinner, reloaded on beignets and chicory coffee the next morning, and headed up I-55 with a lunch stop in Jackson, MS before landing in Memphis for a couple of days.  The final leg was Memphis to Sikeston, MO and then up I-57 back home to Chicago.  A 2,100-mile loop through what many people consider “fly-over” country.</li>\r\n 	<li>The first reaction that most folks have to this itinerary is -- Why? It’s certainly not on anyone’s top 10 scenic drives list. But it’s always been on my list of trips to-do -- to stop off on “drive thru” cities and spend a little time exploring, even if only for a couple of hours. And to do a bit of a nostalgia tour -- visit places I lived 25-30 years ago.  And to catch up with old friends -- physically rather than just over Facebook. But while I’ve been thinking about it for a while, it’s always been on the “B” list -- always getting bumped by something else.  Well, as I hinted at the start of the show, my professional situation has changed, providing me a bit of a summer sabbatical.  With a suddenly open schedule and nothing else planned, it’s the perfect time to work into that next tier of things to do.</li>\r\n 	<li>I took a week to do this great circle route -- not too fast, but not dawdling either. I had a great time. And came away with a few observations...</li>\r\n 	<li>First, that drive is not as boring as you might fear.  Now, I don’t want to sugar-coat it -- I-65 through northern Indiana and I-57 through Illinois are brutally mind-numbing -- flat unending fields of corn and soybeans, the monotony of which is occasionally broken by a unending rows of wind generators (they’re just too huge to be called windmills).  But past that, the landscape does have character.  The low-lying clouds tight against the hills, resting in the valleys in Southern Kentucky.  Driving long causeways over the marshes and bayous heading south into Mobile on I-65 or coming north out of New Orleans on I-55.  The red clay of any turned over ground in Alabama.  The forests of Southern Mississippi.  It’s certainly not the Big Sur Coastal drive, but it’s not (except for Illinois and Indiana) hundreds of miles of sameness.</li>\r\n 	<li>Second, with all that windshield time, I finally found a good use case for Apple’s Siri. I’ve seen the Samuel L Jackson and Zooey Deschanel commercials, but have never gotten Siri to be more than an annoyance -- I can always find something faster myself than repeating my question 3 times.  But with both hands on the wheel and my eyes on the road, Siri was very good at reading and replying to the daily flow of text messages.  The results of “Read new message” was unintelligible only once, and given my sister’s tendency for random punctuation and abbreviations, it was understandable.  Siri’s still not the virtual assistant Apple keeps pitching her as, but she does have her uses on a long drive.</li>\r\n 	<li>\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_1041\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"225\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/382380_3350829861633_1849689155_n.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1041\" title=\"The Ham Bar Menu\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/382380_3350829861633_1849689155_n-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"225\" height=\"300\" /></a> Today\'s Selections at the Ham Bar[/caption]\r\n\r\nThird, there’s good local food and beer everywhere.  Call it the “Brooklyn-ization” of America, but every decent sized city I visited had its own hipster neighborhoods with restaurants serving local artisan foods and local craft beers.  Louisville has its unfortunately named <a href=\"http://www.chicagotribune.com/travel/sc-trav-0327-louisville-kentucky-20120327,0,6168490.story\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">NuLu</a> neighborhood, Memphis the better-named <a href=\"http://cooperyoung.biz/night-out/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Cooper Young</a> at the intersection of Cooper St and Young Ave, and New Orleans has the Bywater district a good bit away from the French Quarter.</li>\r\n 	<li>You expect good food in New Orleans, but I had very good food and beer in every other place I stopped.  An example of that Southern local focus is restaurants using country ham in place of prosciutto -- which makes sense if you think of proscuitto as just another kind of air-dried ham -- but from Italy instead of Virginia.  At the<a href=\"http://www.garageonmarket.com\"> Garage Bar</a> in Louisville, they had a ham bar with a choice of f country hams from farms in Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee.  At the <a href=\"http://thebeautyshoprestaurant.anotherroadsideattractioncatering.com/\">Beauty Shop</a> in Memphis -- a great Twitter recommendation from @denrael -- country ham, cantaloupe, and an arugula salad made a great appetizer on a hot day.  I also hit on a string of locally sour brown ales at breweries in <a href=\"http://www.atgbrewery.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Louisville</a> and <a href=\"http://www.avondalebrewing.com/taproom.php\">Birmingham</a>. Definitely not lawnmower beers and as good as any I had in Brussels last spring. Finding these restaurants and breweries had the side benefit of taking me out of the normal tourist spots -- leaving behind the French Quarter and Beale Street.  Just look for art galleries, record stores, tattoo parlors, and people in skinny pants riding bicycles without helmets.</li>\r\n 	<li>Another observation -- waiting for the last minute to book a hotel room with Priceline’s Negotiator app works -- sometimes.  I’ve never used Priceline’s “opaque” pricing before -- naming my price for an unnamed hotel room. If I’m traveling on business or with my family, I typically want things nailed down a bit tighter. I have a much lower appetite for risk; am willing to pay more money to insure a good experience. But on this trip, I’m by myself and am only looking for a clean bed and decent water pressure for the morning’s shower.  Seemed like the right time to give Bill Shatner a try.</li>\r\n 	<li>My first try was Friday night around 7pm in Louisville.  Sitting in the Garage Bar after my serving of Kentucky country ham, I fired up the iPhone, got a sense of that the going rate at reasonable hotels was in the $75-110 range, and then bid $50 for a 3-star place near the airport. “Whoa, that’s a low bid” said a pop-up screen on the Priceline app.  Yup, that’s the idea.  After working through a few screens, I had a great room at a very nice Holiday Inn.  I ran the same play Sunday night driving into New Orleans and got a room at the Marriott on Canal St for $60.</li>\r\n 	<li>\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_1044\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"225\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/IMG_1368-e1343753854622.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1044\" title=\"Monday Special at Chimneyville Smokehouse, Jackson, MS\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/IMG_1368-e1343753854622-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"225\" height=\"300\" /></a> Hoping Vegetables Cut The Pork Fat[/caption]\r\n\r\nBut during the week while in Memphis, no luck. No one bit on my lowball bids and I ended up in a very substandard Hampton Inn and not so clean Comfort Inn.  Apparently there was some Little League tournament in town.  Don’t know others’ experiences, but the risk-reward trade-off with Priceline bidding is real. Which confirmed my initial instinct -- useful tool when traveling by myself with no rigid itinerary, but not so much for family or business travel.</li>\r\n 	<li>And finally, if I do this trip again, I’m packing some statins, some Mevacor.  After my fourth straight day of barbecue, I could feel the pork fat thicken my blood.  Not that that kept me from ordering one last slab of ribs on the drive home...</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music --<a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/rompaey-mozaic/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"> <em>Bubbly</em></a> by Ruben van Rompaey</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Breaking Up with American Airlines</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>My relationship with American Airlines began June 1985 when I flew from Chicago to Dallas to start my first job out of school.  And now here I am, 27 years and about 2.5 million miles later and I’m feeling just done with them.</li>\r\n 	<li>I wasn’t always like that. It’s easy enough to fly American out of DFW -- indeed, it damn close to impossible not to.  But I went out of my way to fly American after I left Dallas -- first back in Chicago, and then in Philadelphia.  Not too tough in Chicago; ORD is another AA hub. But sticking with them while flying out of US Air’s Philly fortress hub -- that took some commitment.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_952\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"200\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/photo.png\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-952\" title=\"AA Tweets &quot;I\'m Sorry&quot;\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/photo-200x300.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"200\" height=\"300\" /></a> Tweeting Apologies[/caption]\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Over the past, say, 5 years, though, things have changed.  American’s competitors declared bankruptcy, cleaned up their balance sheets and bought new planes.  Lousy if you’re an investor with stock, an executive with options, or a creditor taking a haircut on loans, but for a customer it works out. American seemed proud of not going bankrupt, but as their planes got older and dingier, and fuel prices got higher, something had to give.</li>\r\n 	<li>And give it has, not just renegotiating plane leases. At a time you’d think American would want to take extra care of customers, their service taken a dive. And they’ve gotten more aggressive with add-on luggage and seating fees.  And now combining older frequent flyer miles that had no expiration date with those that expire in 18 months. For me, it’s not a big number; it’s the change in attitude; the final break in what I thought I could expect from American.</li>\r\n 	<li>Will I stop flying American? No, unless they go completely under. Or worse, merge with USAir. They’ll keep a big hub out of ORD and I have lifetime Platinum status with them -- unless that too becomes a casualty of their new “take away” mentality.  What will stop, though, is giving American the benefit of the doubt, of having them be my “default” choice.  After 27 years, they’re just another uncomfortable plane seat.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917626811171154.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #100</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from the <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">ccMixter</a> web site and from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Magnatune</a></li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_100.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #100 — Southern Road Trip; Breaking Up with American Airlines','','inherit','closed','closed','','1034-revision-v1','','','2017-04-29 16:27:04','2017-04-29 21:27:04','',1034,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/04/29/1034-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1771,1,'2017-04-29 16:27:40','2017-04-29 21:27:40','[caption id=\"attachment_1002\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/4373298709_b408072134_b.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1002\" title=\"Thanks for flying with us\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/4373298709_b408072134_b-300x225.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\" /></a> Thanks for flying with us © Chris Freeland / Flickr[/caption]\r\n\r\nUnited Airlines\' CFO garnered some less-than-desired attention last month when he said that \"certain groups\" in the Mileage Plus program were \"over-entitled\".  United is the most recent airline to work on \"realigning benefits\" -- downgrading their elite fliers, especially those in the lower status tiers. We talk about how that impacts frequent flier strategies. We also talk about adjustments needed when frequent travelers come off the road -- how to find time to yourself. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_99.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_99.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #99:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Been off the road more than I’ve been on it since the <a title=\"Podcast #98 — Stolen Luggage &amp; Passports; Restaurants Want Your Smartphone\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/05/20/podcast-98-stolen-luggage-restaurants-want-your-smartphone/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">last episode</a>.  Just another trip to Dallas allowing me to take advantage again of the TSA’s <a href=\"http://www.tsa.gov/what_we_do/escreening.shtm\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">PreCheck</a> line. Getting envious and puzzled looks from other American Airlines elite fliers, getting waved through the special gate, tossing my bags on the X-Ray conveyer belt, sauntering through the metal detector, and then on my way to the gate. A 45-second exercise while they’re taking off their jackets, shoes, belts; emptying their pockets of coins, gum wrappers, business cards; pulling out their laptops, iPads, Kindles, 1-quart baggie of liquid toiletries; holding their arms up in the full-body scanner, waiting behind the tape until someone radios the “OK”; then reassembling their bags and getting re-dressed – belt, shoes, jacket, making sure nothing’s left behind before heading to the gate.</li>\r\n 	<li>And this is in the status line.  I’m seriously thinking of limiting my travels to only those places with TSA PreCheck lines…</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/Kirkoid/31109\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><em>Leviathan</em></a> by Kirkoid</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>While my podcasting cadence has slowed, I’ve written a few more blog posts of late.  In one, I disagreed with some surveys that called free WiFi the most important hotel amenity.  I <a title=\"Best Hotel Amenity? Free Breakfast\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/04/21/best-hotel-amenity-free-breakfast/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">made the case</a> for free breakfast.  First, it’s a great convenience.  Unless you’re staying downtown in a city, like in London or New York or San Francisco, getting breakfast outside of the hotel means involves a car ride.  Which usually then translates into Starbucks – and I’m a big fan of the spinach feta cheese wrap – or McDonald’s – where I’ll fall back to <strong>1 </strong>breakfast burrito no matter how many times they try to sell me two – or Dunkin Donuts where they inevitably give me a hard time about walking in with a cup of Starbucks coffee.  And, as Rich Fraser puts it, a great way to stretch your per diem dollars…\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>“Can’t beat it on value, although you have to get quite creative when it comes to those reconstituted eggs. Various combinations of cheese, ham, and hot sauce make them much more palatable. That, some yogurt, a cup of oatmeal and a piece of fruit, and I’m good until lunch without snacking. Just have to avoid the biscuits and gravy at all costs!”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_1009\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/IMG_1145.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1009\" title=\"Free Hotel Coffee\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/IMG_1145-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Free Hotel Coffee[/caption]</li>\r\n 	<li>Leo Vegoda, however is suspicious of the whole “free” thing\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I would prefer to have good Internet access that I pay for or a good breakfast that I pay for than something free, which will inevitably be of lower quality. After all, on a business trip, sustenance and network access are reasonable business expenses. That being said, I think the best “amenity” I want at a hotel is a fantastic concierge. A superb concierge is much better than a quick search on yelp.com and will help make your stay in a city far more fulfilling.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Thanks to both Rich and Leo for leaving their comments on the TravelCommons web site.</li>\r\n 	<li>Scott Drake pinged me on Twitter – “Just heard the first 2 minutes of <a title=\"Podcast #97 — 1st Trip to Beijing; Most Important Hotel Technology\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/03/03/podcast-97-first-trip-to-beijing-most-important-hotel-technology/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">episode #97</a>”, he wrote, which was about my first trip to Beijing in January. “You could taste the pollution.  Yes!  People look at me like I\'m crazy when I say that!  Glad I\'m not alone.” Oh no, you’re not alone.  The other 3 guys with me on that trip thought the same thing – you could taste it when you breathed in and when you coughed it back out. Don’t know which I enjoyed more on our Saturday trip out to the Great Wall – the breathtaking views or the fact that you could take a breath without coughing…</li>\r\n 	<li>In the <a title=\"Podcast #98 — Stolen Luggage &amp; Passports; Restaurants Want Your Smartphone\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/05/20/podcast-98-stolen-luggage-restaurants-want-your-smartphone/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">last episode</a>, I talked about restaurants pushing their own sort of BYOD – bring your own device – agenda on customers; taking advantage of customers’ smartphones to do things that restaurant-provided devices like pagers or credit card machines used to.  Not that it’s a bad thing; it actually makes a lot of sense.  I tried LevelUp, one of the mobile payment apps I mentioned, last week at a food truck – Duck n’ Roll – in downtown Chicago. I’m not sure the truck took cash.  The owner had an iPhone with a Square credit card reader and also accepted LevelUp.  I started the app on my iPhone – I had already run through the set-up routine, linking it to one of my credit cards.  It displayed a QR code that the truck owner read with the camera on her iPhone.  She pressed a couple of buttons and, boom, we were done.  While she got me my miso short rib bahn mi sandwich, the receipt showed up in my e-mail.  Much easier that paying with a credit card – or even cash.</li>\r\n 	<li>\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_1011\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"224\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/x2_6bbbfa1.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1011\" title=\"Setting up the cots at Camp O\'Hare...\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/x2_6bbbfa1-224x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"224\" height=\"300\" /></a> Setting up the cots at Camp O\'Hare...[/caption]\r\n\r\nAs we get into summer, we get into thunderstorm season, and in the middle of the US, tornado season.  Which reminds me of an incident about this time last year in O’Hare.  I was connecting through O’Hare on my way from a customer meeting in London to a conference in Austin, TX.  No direct flights there. My theory is – if I have to connect through a US airport, I might as well do it through O’Hare. I live 25 minutes from the airport. If things go bad, I can always sleep in my own bed.  It doesn’t work for everyone – check the shownotes for a picture of someone setting themselves up in “Camp O’Hare” for the night – but it does for me.</li>\r\n 	<li>Anyhow, I arrive from Heathrow early, breeze through Immigration, no problems getting through the TSA in Terminal 3, board my American flight to Austin…  The pilot says that a front is moving in and he’s going to try and get us out before it hits.  Hmmm, I’ve never seen anyone sprint out of O’Hare before – it’s just too big and too crowded.</li>\r\n 	<li>And it didn’t happen this day.  The front came hit and started rocking that MD-80 like nothing I’ve ever experienced.  We evacuated the plane.  People in the back of the plane began to panic.  “Get moving,” they yelled – or a cleaned-up version of what they yelled.</li>\r\n 	<li>Sprinting out of the shaking jet bridge back into Terminal 3, we were told “ah, you guys should stay away from the windows” which is a tough order in a concourse with windows on each side. People congregated around the McDonalds and a couple of bars – only windows on one side – and waited for the front to blow through.</li>\r\n 	<li>Over in Terminal 1 – the United terminal – they moved everyone down into the tunnel between the two concourses.  Much safer and, for those who’ve connected on United through O’Hare, you know it’s much more entertaining with the ceiling neon lights chasing themselves down the tunnel. Though I would guess the soothing New Age music would get on your nerves after a while.</li>\r\n 	<li>Of course, after all this entertainment, I still needed to get to Austin.  After the front blew through, they reopened the runways and started to untangle the delays – flights trying to get in so they could unload and leave again. After two hours of hemming and hawing, American admitted that our MD-80 was damaged by the jet bridge banging on the rockin’-and-rollin’ airplane during the worst of the winds. No surprise there.</li>\r\n 	<li>And there were no other flights left to take us to Austin because American had waited so long to cancel. No problem there – I just caught a cab home and slept in my own bed. I was surprised that the first available flight the next day was at 3 in the afternoon. Given I was due to fly back the following morning, that would’ve given me about 12 hours in Austin – 6 of which I would’ve been asleep. I decided to skip it.  But here’s the kicker – American charged me a $150 change fee to cancel my ticket and use it later.  Really?  Weather, they said. No, it was a damaged airplane because your gate agent didn’t pull back the jet bridge.  Weather, they said.  I didn’t fly American for another 6 months.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a question, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is <a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a> -- use the Voice Memo app on your iPhone or something like Virtual Recorder on your Android phone to record and send in an audio comment – or iMovie if you want to send in some video; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/Wired_Ant/36862\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">My Flaming Heart</a> </em>by Wired Ant</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Downgrading Elite Fliers</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Last month, United’s CFO <a href=\"http://travel.usatoday.com/alliance/flights/boardingarea/post/2012/05/Frequently-Flying---United-CFO-Certain-elites-were-over-entitled/697189/1\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">said this</a> about their Mileage Plus program\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>We had certain groups in this program that were over-entitled if you will. And now we’ve re-aligned the benefits of that program with what the customers and program participants are actually providing to the program, it’s a good change going forward.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Let’s parse that statement.  The first sentence – certain groups, which I assume means elite Mileage Plus members, were “over-entitled”.  Even if it’s true, you’d think the CFO would be smart enough to follow one of the golden rules of sales – “If it feels good, don’t say it.”  Coming off the industry-worst performance in on-time arrivals and baggage complaints, who would think it’s a good idea to insult a loyal subset of customers – those who bore the brunt of your lousy performance?</li>\r\n 	<li>The second sentence – we’ve “re-aligned the benefits” with what those customer are providing.  In other words, we were giving those customers too much value for the revenue they were providing us – so we’ve taken away some of what we were giving them so as to balance things out.</li>\r\n 	<li>In other words, downgrading elite fliers.  United is just the most recent – and probably the most egregious example of late.  Using the Continental merger as cover, United took away probably the most valuable perk from the lowest status level – free advanced booking of Economy Plus seats, seats with extended legroom.  And <a href=\"http://www.flyerguide.com/wiki/index.php/Elite_Levels_(UA)\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">added a new status level</a> – Platinum – at the 75,000-mile level – effectively devaluing their mid-tier status -- Platinum Exec – now “Gold”.  There were other tweaks – none of them positive – but that’s to be expected from an industry that continues to nickel-and-dime its customers for every last bit of revenue it can.</li>\r\n 	<li>And it’s not just United.  <a href=\"http://www.flyerguide.com/wiki/index.php/SkyMiles_Elite_Levels\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Delta</a> recently reduced the number of free bags its lowest status level fliers can check – from two to one. One more sign that the 25,000-mile status fliers don’t mean that much to the airlines – they really don’t get much more recognition than the guys paying $95/year for an airline credit card.</li>\r\n 	<li>Which makes sense if you look at the numbers.  When American Airlines started the Advantage program in 1981, it was a loyalty rewards program meant to give frequent fliers a reason to stick with American as deregulation commoditized the industry -- increasing flight choices and lower fares from new competitors.</li>\r\n 	<li>Today, it’s a major revenue source – a line of business is <a href=\"http://travel.nytimes.com/2012/06/10/travel/have-elite-fliers-been-downgraded.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">estimated to have added $7 billion</a> to the top line of North American carriers last year</li>\r\n 	<li>For a frequent traveler, these downgrades drive a change in strategy. It used to be that you would always want to concentrate as much of your travel as you could on a single airline in order to hit some level of status because even the bottom tier – the 25,000-mile level, American’s Advantage Gold, United’s Premiere, Delta’s Silver Medallion -- had value.  Today, since you can pretty much buy the bottom tier privileges for a $95 credit card fee (and even there, you can usually get the first year free), it only makes sense to concentrate if you think you can hit the 50,000-mile tier – American’s Advantage Platinum or Delta’s Gold Medallion.  The reduced rewards for bottom-tier status aren’t worth the hassles of twisting your schedule – or paying $50 extra – to fly a single airline.</li>\r\n 	<li>And the airlines are probably OK with this. The act of flying passengers is probably the least profitable part of an airline nowadays, while selling frequent flier miles to credit card companies is the most profitable. Airlines are shifting from rewarding their most loyal customers to the most profitable.  United’s top-top tier – Global Services – has always been for their highest-spending customers, not their highest-mileage ones.  In some ways, this makes life a bit easier.  Instead of working to earn special treatment, now you can just buy it.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/mika/24945\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Fall to pieces - Silence</a> </em>by mika</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Finding Time When Off The Road</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I’ve been off the road for 3 weeks now.  Not out of the ordinary for most people. But for me, this is the longest stretch I’ve been home in over a year.  And as always, there’s a bit of an adjustment.</li>\r\n 	<li>And that’s not to imply that adjustment is negative. I’ve increased the mileage I’ve put on my bike by an order of magnitude. Rather than getting 1, maybe 2 rides a week if I really push it – get up early on a Sunday – I’m getting 3 or 4 a week -- and more mileage because I don’t feel pressure to get off the road so I can do other things.</li>\r\n 	<li>Indeed, that’s probably the biggest change – the release from the pressure to pack a week’s worth of errands, to do’s, and family time into a 2-3 day window.</li>\r\n 	<li>Which kinda dovetails into another adjustment – finding alone time. When you travel, there’s plenty of alone time – even when you’re surrounded by people – in TSA queues, in boarding lines, in a center seat on a full plane.  And eating dinner solo at a bar and channel surfing in your hotel room at night.  These are certainly not the highlights of travel, but they do offer you time alone – to think, to listen to music (and podcasts), to read, or just to stare off into space.</li>\r\n 	<li>Coming off the road, you’re still geared to maximize family or friend or significant other time – even if it means watching lousy TV shows or playing Scrabble.  It’s takes some adjustment to figure out how and where you’ll grab/recreate that alone time – figuring out which lousy TV show you don’t have to watch, where you go off to read or listen to music.</li>\r\n 	<li>Sunday nights are a good time for me.  When I’m traveling, Sunday night after dinner is pretty much lost.  I lose that last bit of the weekend to getting ready for my Monday morning flight out of ORD – ordering a cab, checking into the flight, packing, checking/topping off the charges on the myriad of electronic devices I seem to now require for travel….  Since my family is used to me disappearing into my home office after Sunday dinner, I’ve kept it up – but I’m reading or writing instead of packing.  It’s that little bit of alone time.</li>\r\n 	<li>Of course the real adjustment is having to pay for my morning Starbucks stop.  It’s then that you really appreciate the power of the expense report…</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917626811171154.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #99</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from the <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">ccMixter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_99.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #99 — Downgrading Elite Fliers; Finding Time Off the Road','','inherit','closed','closed','','995-revision-v1','','','2017-04-29 16:27:40','2017-04-29 21:27:40','',995,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/04/29/995-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1772,1,'2017-04-29 16:28:37','2017-04-29 21:28:37','[caption id=\"attachment_879\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"207\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/DSC_85711.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-879\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/DSC_85711-207x300.jpg\" alt=\"On Tap in Edinburgh © Mark Peacock\" width=\"207\" height=\"300\" /></a> On Tap in Edinburgh © Mark Peacock[/caption]\r\n\r\nFinishing up my annual 2-week travel sabbatical in an unseasonably warm <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Chicago\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Chicago</a>. In this episode, a listener asks about if and when to use travel <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Compression stockings\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compression_stockings\" rel=\"wikipedia\">compression socks</a>, we discern the popularity of in-flight Wi-Fi service from Gogo\'s <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Initial public offering\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initial_public_offering\" rel=\"wikipedia\">IPO</a> filing, and dissect a recent article on the best airports for tech users.  We look at the new wave of social media dining apps such as <a href=\"http://untappd.com\">Untappd</a> which helps you drink beer socially, how they\'re taking advantage of smartphone cameras and location services. We wrap up with a look at how airline alliances are changing the frequent flier\'s experience. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_96.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_96.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript from TravelCommons podcast #96:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Happy New Year to everyone! Returning to work after my 2-week sabbatical from travel in unseasonably warm Chicagoland.  I was out in Phoenix for the first two weeks of December, where it was only 10-15 degrees warmer than Chicago.  Then I did a quick up-and-back to DC and was home for good by the evening of the 16<sup>th</sup>.  Though we didn’t have a white Christmas, I did have an amazing run of on-time and even early arrivals at ORD – a pleasant change from past December travel odysseys.</li>\r\n 	<li>Indeed, my trips at the beginning of December were some of the easiest, most pleasant I’ve had in a while – combination of mild weather and light crowds made travel a breeze – short security lines, non-cranky TSA screeners, plenty of overhead space, and the reappearance of that rarities of rarities – an empty middle seat.</li>\r\n 	<li>It feels like from the Tues or Weds after Thanksgiving to the week before Christmas is a bit of tourist dead zone and so the only ones traveling are the professional road warriors trying to close those last few deals, tie up those remaining loose ends before everyone and everything shuts down for the holidays.</li>\r\n 	<li>Or it’s frequent fliers doing one last <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Frequent-flyer program\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequent-flyer_program\" rel=\"wikipedia\">mileage run</a> to get them to the next status level.  I didn’t need to make any mileage runs per se, but I did need those last two Phoenix trips to re-up my Hilton Diamond status and to get me back on United’s red carpet with 1K status.</li>\r\n 	<li>Making 1K -- or more importantly, getting the systemwide upgrades that come with United’s top status was very timely.  I’m heading over to <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Beijing\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beijing\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Beijing</a> in January and being able to confirm an upgrade on United’s 14-hr Chicago-to-Beijing flight – which was one of the best Christmas presents I received…</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://www.nimbitmusic.com/saurabbhargava\">Exit</a></em> by Saurab Bhargava</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>All the bridge music on this episode from Saurab Bhargava’s new album Chromatique.  Saurab is a friend and long time TravelCommons listener. I’m happy to feature his music. That cut is Exit, which interestingly enough is the first cut on the album.  Here\'s a <a href=\"http://www.nimbitmusic.com/saurabbhargava/#music/chromatique\">link</a> to where you can buy them.</li>\r\n 	<li>Tony White wrote in to ask about travel compression socks…\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I am not sure if you covered this topic or not.  Do you have a preference of a minimum amount of hours of travel you choose to wear travel socks?</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Tony, thanks for the question. No, I haven\'t covered this topic before -- because I’ve never used travel socks.  <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Compression stockings\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compression_stockings\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Compression socks</a> squeeze the feet and calves – to improve circulation, which helps fight feet swelling and <a href=\"http://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/health/health-topics/topics/dvt/\">deep vein thrombosis</a> – blood clots in the lower legs.  When I’ve flown business class on long flights, I haven’t felt much swelling – even on the 16-17 hour NYC to J’burg flight.  I think the lie-flat or near-flat seats reduce the distance between head and feet and so minimize the blood pooling in the lower legs.  Even in coach, I haven\'t felt the need for them on an 8-hour flight to London or Honolulu. However, on a flight back from Hong Kong last year, I wasn\'t able to score an upgrade.  During the 15 hours in coach I definitely felt swelling in my calves.  It was a full flight, so I couldn\'t lift my legs up for any length of time. Indeed, I saw a couple of guys lying on the floor in front of the exit row with their legs in the air.  On my upcoming trip to Beijing, I mentioned that I scored an upgrade to business class on the way out, but my upgrade for the flight back is still waitlisted.  If that second upgrade doesn’t come through this week, I think I\'ll be doing some After Christmas shopping for compression socks.</li>\r\n 	<li>Two days before Christmas, <a href=\"http://gogoair.com/\">Gogo</a>, the dominant in-flight <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Wi-Fi\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi-Fi\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Wi-Fi</a> provider, <a href=\"http://venturebeat.com/2011/12/23/gogo-ipo/\">filed paperwork</a> with the SEC for a $100 million IPO.  The filing provided some interesting stats.  Gogo sells Wi-Fi on 4,000 flights a day on 9 out of the 10 North American airlines that offer Wi-Fi, though Delta represents 45% and bankrupt American 18% of their volume.  Gogo is available on over 1,100 planes, which they say is 85 percent of all Wi-Fi-enabled planes in North America, and they’re signed up to add another 525 soon. Impressive on the face of it, but if you start <a href=\"http://www.splatf.com/2011/12/gogo-ipo-filing/\">tumbling the numbers</a>, you quickly find that only 3-4% of passengers are buying – which syncs up with my experience.  We’ve talked about this in past episodes – while in-flight Wi-Fi has good use cases, especially when you don’t want to go radio-silent for 3-4 hours in the middle of the day, it’s a niche offering.  I’ve used it maybe half-a-dozen times in 2011.  From my anecdotal observations – looking over people’s shoulders walking to and from the aft toilets – most people are enjoying the unconnected time to watch a movie, read an e-book, or play Angry Birds (amazing how long that streak has been going).  Doesn’t seem that most folks are willing to pay $10-12 a flight to update their Facebook status.</li>\r\n 	<li>A <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"PC World (magazine)\" href=\"http://www.pcworld.com\" rel=\"homepage\">PCWorld</a> article on the <a href=\"http://www.pcworld.com/article/246001/20_best_us_airports_for_tech_travelers.html\">best airports for tech users</a> ranks the 40busiest US airports on outlet availability, speed of Wi-Fi service (either free or paid), and strength of cellular signal – a good set of <a href=\"http://www.pcworld.com/article/246181/best_airports_for_tech_users_how_the_40_busiest_us_airports_stack_up.html\">basic tech criteria</a>.  DFW ranks #1 – it wasn’t #1 on any single category, but earned above average marks across the board.  ORD, my usual hangout, ranked #34 out of 40, which I think is about right.  Finding an available outlet at a gate is like a grown-up Easter Egg hunt – complete with crawling around and looking under chairs. Everyone wants to board with a full battery pack, especially iPhone users. Apple still hasn’t gotten iOS 5 battery life back to where it needs to be.  And for me, cellular signal is much more important than Wi-Fi service because I tend to use my iDevices much more than my laptop in airports.  At ORD, the AT&amp;T 3G service is unbelievably bad.  I’ll have 4 or 5 bars on my iPhone but can’t pull anything – e-mail, web pages, nothing!  Which is the reason I travel with a Verizon 4G hotspot.  After I’ve gotten tired of watching the “Checking for Mail” circle impotently spin, I fire up the hotspot and – Bam! – I’ve got mail.</li>\r\n 	<li>But I dunno, hitting #1 for having visible electrical outlets and decent data signal seems damning with faint praise.  To really be a top tech airport, I think you need to have something like Qantas’s <a href=\"http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204296804577123004175940104.html\">set up</a> at Sydney airport – using RFID technology to make check-in, bag check, and plane boarding 5-second events.  I posted a link to the <a href=\"http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204296804577123004175940104.html\">WSJ article</a> on the TravelCommons Facebook page and Lisa Besso commented, saying that it’s a great system.  I’d be willing to suffer through ORD’s lousy AT&amp;T service is United did something like this.</li>\r\n 	<li>Early in December, when my family was trying to get their Christmas shopping done, they started bugging me for gift ideas. Sitting in my room in the Scottsdale Hilton Garden Inn (which, by the way, isn’t a bad place), paging through the <a href=\"http://usatoday.com\">USAToday</a>, listening to a podcast on my wireless Motorola headset, I thought a wireless speaker would be nice.  Now I realize that a lot of alarm clocks in hotel rooms have plugs that let you play your iDevice through their speakers, but the quality is marginal at best (except for those few hotels that stock iHome alarm clocks) and you’re stuck in the bedroom – not great if you’re in something like an Embassy or Doubletree Suites.  I asked the Twitter-verse for suggestions and ended up with a Jawbone <a href=\"http://jawbone.com/charitywater\">Jambox</a> under the tree.  My wife said she bought the special edition yellow one so that I wouldn’t miss it when packing up, though the fact that Jawbone donates $50 from each purchase to <a href=\"http://www.charitywater.org/\">charity:water</a> didn’t hurt.  The Jambox isn’t cheap, but it puts out a lot of sound from a small package and has the easiest Bluetooth pairing I’ve seen.  Again, not cheap, but I recommend it.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://www.nimbitmusic.com/saurabbhargava\">Yours in Mine</a> </em>by Saurab Bhargava</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Dining With Social Media</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Finding interesting places to eat is always a challenge for frequent travelers. When you’re traveling to the same place a lot – like I do to Scottsdale – it’s easy to fall into a rut, going to the same places near the office or the hotel every trip.</li>\r\n 	<li>When I started traveling, way before Al Gore invented the Internet, you’d rely on recommendations – from folks in the local office, the front desk clerk, a cab driver, a bartender, whomever you ran into.  Or maybe you pulled a top restaurant list out of the local paper or a guidebook.  I remember one project in SF in the early ‘90’s.  The project partner had a list of the top 100 restaurants in SF.  Don’t know where he got it, but it was a Bible to him.  We started at #1 for the project kick-off dinner and started working our way through the list.</li>\r\n 	<li>And so here we are, 20 years and billions of dollars of venture capital investment later, and we still rely on personal recommendations.  But on steroids.  The first wave of food social media was powered by the multiplier effect -- you weren’t limited to people you physically meet; you could tap the expertise and passion of a broad group of diners and foodies for broad set of recommendations. <a href=\"http://chowhound.chow.com/boards\">Chowhound</a>, a food discussion board I’ve mentioned in <a title=\"Podcast #22 – Other Side of the Ticket Counter; Finding Local Food\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/11/13/podcast-22-other-side-of-the-ticket-counter-finding-local-food/\">past</a> <a title=\"Podcast #41 – Full to the Brim, What’s the One Thing…?\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2006/06/30/podcast-41-full-to-the-brim-whats-the-one-thing/\">episodes</a>, is a perfect example of that.  I’m still a heavy user.  On my second trip to Phoenix last month, I was on my own for dinner every night.  Around 5 every night, I’ve hit the Phoenix board on Chowhound and start paging through the entries until I found a restaurant that hit my tastebuds.  One night I ended up eating a green chile pork stew in a post Scottsdale place; the next night I had a bowl of pho at a Vietnamese strip mall in Mesa.</li>\r\n 	<li>But if the first wave was discussion board-based, the current wave is smartphone-based, using the GPS and camera to build on the personal recommendations</li>\r\n 	<li>Those of you following my Twitter feed may notice the occasional tweet that I’ve earned a badge from Untappd. Untappd is a social media app for beer drinkers, or should I say people who enjoy drinking good beer.  Instead of checking in locations on FourSquare, I check in my beer on <a href=\"http://untappd.com/\">Untappd</a>.  It keeps track of the beers I drink and where I’m drinking them, allows friends to see what I’m drinking, and awards badges for “achievements” like checking in 200 unique beers or drinking a stout on Nov 3<sup>rd</sup>, what someone designated <a href=\"http://www.stoutday.com/\">International Stout Day</a>.</li>\r\n 	<li>The whole check-in thing gets me out of my hotel room to search out local beers wherever I’m traveling.  On that same trip to Phoenix, I found Papago Brewery in a Scottsdale strip mall and tried their El Robusto Porter. It wasn’t the best beer I’ve had, but it was something different.</li>\r\n 	<li>But when I’m on the road, the best use of Untappd for me is discovering bars with interesting beer selections. One night in New York a couple months back, I was wandering around Midtown looking for a good beer bar.  Standing in some ersatz Irish bar, I fired up Untappd; it used the iPhone GPS to display nearby check-ins.  Paging down, I saw interesting beers being checked in at place called the <a href=\"http://www.rattlenhumbarnyc.com/\">Rattle and Hum</a>. A couple of clicks and I have it on the Maps app –it’s about a 10 block walk.  It was a pretty nondescript place.  Indeed, I walked right past it the first time.  I go inside – it’s jammed and has a great beer selection.  A great find courtesy of a dozen people I’ve never met, and through GPS I quickly found it.</li>\r\n 	<li>Another app I use is <a href=\"http://foodspotting.com/\">Foodspotting</a>.  It also uses the iPhone GPS.  But rather than just showing a list of near-by restaurants, it cycles through pictures of dishes from those restaurants uploaded by diners.  Reading recommendations and menus are helpful in choosing a restaurant. Actually seeing the dishes takes a whole lot of the guesswork out.  My favorite use case is to park my car in a restaurant-rich neighborhood – I’ve done this in old town Scottsdale and in downtown Bethesda, MD – fire up Foodspotting and start cycling through the pictures.  Pretty quick, I get a sense of what place near-by is best matching my hunger pangs, and then map it with a couple of clicks – or screen presses, I guess.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’d like to personally thank all the venture capital firms that have invested billions of dollars over the years in all of this to help me quickly vector in on the perfect cheeseburger.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://www.nimbitmusic.com/saurabbhargava\">Through The Line</a> </em>by Saurab Bhargava</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Frequent Flier Alliances</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I mentioned earlier that I’d returned to 1K status on United; returning to the red boarding carpet at the United gates.  I also keep the 100% mileage matching – getting a bonus mile for each mile flown.  The 2012 changes to United’s awards program appear to reduce the bonus match for the mid-tier Premiere Exec’s –down to 50 or 70% depending on which of the new mid-tiers you hit.</li>\r\n 	<li>The interesting thing is – I didn’t fly that much on United last year – less than a dozen flights.  Just enough status miles to make Premiere – United’s entry-level status tier, which you can get the same benefits – free luggage, early boarding – free for a year by signing up for United’s Visa card.</li>\r\n 	<li>I earned most of the 100,000 qualifying miles on US Air and Lufthansa.  So I really didn’t earn 1K on United as much as I earned it on the Star Alliance.  Not that this is anything new – some chunk of my 2.5 million lifetime American Advantage miles are from British Airways.  However, with airlines rationalizing/reducing their number of seats; more tightly coordinating flight schedules and code sharing with their alliance partners, these partnerships – Star Alliance, OneWorld, and SkyTeam – become more of a way of life for frequent travelers, especially in those critical areas of status recognition, mileage credit, and mileage redemption.</li>\r\n 	<li>It’s not a simple situation.  There are core alliance members – United, Lufthansa, US Air in Star Alliance; Delta and AirFrance in SkyTeam; American and BA in OneWorld.  And then there are the “other” partners, and these can move around.  Aer Lingus, for example, was part of the OneWorld alliance with American, but left in 2007 to go independent, and is now matched up with JetBlue and United (but not Continental), while Virgin Atlantic is matched up with Continental, but not United.  There are promiscuous partners – Hawaiian Airlines and Jet Airways seem to be on everyone’s list – while others like Southwest remain single or assemble their own little group like Emirates.</li>\r\n 	<li>International travelers been stringing these beads for 20+ years to assemble their itineraries, but to have to do this domestically is a newer thing.  Because United and US Air are both Star Alliance partners, United has cut back their Chicago-Phoenix service, relying instead on code-sharing with US Air. I book the flight directly with US Air instead – one less step to traverse when something goes wrong – but give them my United Mileage Plus number instead of a Dividend Miles number (do I have one of those?). I still get to pre-board and, most importantly, concentrate my miles to maximize my status level.</li>\r\n 	<li>The downside? US Air doesn’t take the free drink coupons United sends out to its 1K members.  If they could get that redemption thing integrated, then it would truly be a seamless partnership</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids991762681117115.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #96</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>As I mentioned earlier, all the bridge music on this episode from Saurab Bhargava’s new album Chromatique.  The tracks were <em>Exit</em>, <em>Yours In Mine</em>, and <em>Through The Line</em>.  Here\'s a <a href=\"http://www.nimbitmusic.com/saurabbhargava/#music/chromatique\">link</a> where you can buy the songs or the entire album.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_96.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #96 — Eating and Drinking with Social Media; Frequent Flier Alliances','','inherit','closed','closed','','880-revision-v1','','','2017-04-29 16:28:37','2017-04-29 21:28:37','',880,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/04/29/880-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1774,1,'2017-06-24 23:04:50','2017-06-25 04:04:50','<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/IMG_0522.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1775\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/IMG_0522-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\nIt\'s a <em>Mitteleuropa</em> episode, talking about last month\'s travels through Vienna and Hungary. I came away with good first impressions of Austrian Airlines and the Vienna airport. And, for the first time in many visits, saw Hungary through a tourist\'s eyes, spending time in Budapest and the Tokaj wine region. We also talk about how Google Translate has become pretty much indistinguishable from magic and the potential impact the privatization of the US air traffic control system might have on the general aviation industry. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_130.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #130:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, after a good bit of travel -- I think the technical unit of measure is “a slug”. I’ve done a “slug” of travel recently. We got back from 9 days in Hungary on the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend, which gave us that Monday to recover a bit. After that short week at home, I got back on the road -- a week in Richmond and then last week and this week in Atlanta. Some folks wanted me to do stupid day trips -- say up to Michigan from Atlanta for a 90-minute meeting, but in a fit of, what is for me, rare realism, I said, “Uh, no”.</li>\n 	<li>This was the first time I’d spent any time in Richmond -- other than driving around it -- from Charlottesville to the airport, from DC over to Williamsburg. We were downtown. There are some nice pockets. Found a couple of restaurants and a microbrewery with a taproom, so I was happy. Even happier because it was just a 20-minute cab ride from the airport, and a 10-minute walk to the client. Contrast that to Atlanta, which I just hate having to travel to for business. It starts with the location of the airport -- at 6 o’clock, on the bottom of the I-285 perimeter, and all the business at the opposite side -- between 11 and 1 o’clock on the perimeter. And therein lies the most important question that every business traveler faces when they arrive and they leave Atlanta -- do I drive through the city or around it? Outside of rush hour, it’s not bad -- maybe 35 minutes. But when you’re trying to catch that 6pm flight home on Thursday night, the trip starts at an hour and deteriorates fast.</li>\n 	<li>And deterioration is a nice word for last week’s trip back. After an hour-and-a quarter drive through the city that would’ve been a lot worse except that there were 3 of us in the car, so we got to whiz by the beginnings of the traffic jam in the HOV lanes. Once in the center of the city, the HOV lanes were just as crowded, but it probably cut at least 5 minutes off our trip. We drop the car off at Hertz, board the Skytrain, are on our way to the terminal when it just stops. OK, maybe a bit of congestion at the station in front of us. So we wait, and wait,... and wait. No announcement, no nothing. Just wait. 10 minutes, 15 minutes. Finally, someone near the door presses the phone button. A voice comes on -- “We’re working on it; thanks for your patience.” Click. No reason for the delay; no thought on when we’d start up again. Another 5 minutes. Another guy presses the phone button. Same story. After 30 minutes, the train whirs to life and starts to move. And I never thought I’d get nostalgic for those car rental buses.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hansatom/47919\">Brilliant Day</a> by Hans Atom (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial license.  Ft: Lisa DeBenedictis</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>My son Andrew and I flew Austrian Air from Chicago to Budapest last month with an -- obvious -- connection in Vienna. Couple of things… First, why Austrian Air? Because it was among the cheapest non-budget fares over and because I could construct an 8-hr layover which meant we spent Saturday eating schnitzel and drinking beer in Vienna. We landed at 8:45 Saturday morning, checked our bags in Held Luggage, and then hopped a cab into the city. It wasn’t a cheap taxi -- probably around €40 -- but we didn’t have time to figure out and wait for the train. We went first to the Naschmarkt and met up with a friend of mine -- ex-client and ex-boss -- who’s now running the Polish development center for a stealth start-up. He came down Friday night; it was a good excuse to spend 3 hours on his new BMW motorcycle. We started out with coffee and then quickly moved to the beer crawl. At noon, we walked into a small place, <a href=\"http://www.xn--gasthauspschl-qmb.com/\">Gasthaus Pöschl</a> (Weihburggasse 17), just as they were opening. We promised to be out in an hour, so they picked up one of the “Reserved” signs and gave us great big plates of schnitzel and glasses of Grüner Veltliner. We needed a bit of a walk after that, a bit more beer, and we found a cab back to the airport. One of the best layovers I’ve had...</li>\n 	<li>And then the second thing -- Vienna Airport. I’ve whined over a couple of episodes about how much I don’t like Munich Airport. Indeed, one of my ORD-BUD options was on Lufthansa through MUC. That didn’t make the first cut. But Vienna was great. Pleasant folks in the immigration booths, efficient and well-staffed security, nice food and beer selection -- it was the anti-MUC. And the in-air service? Pretty good. Fairly new 777-200; typical kinda tight coach seat configuration; pleasant flight attendants. There was nothing that wowed me, but then again, I wasn’t expecting anything to. All I wanted was not to be annoyed; not to have a gate agent or flight attendant piss me off. Kinda the air travel version of the Hippocratic oath -- Do no harm to the passenger. And Austrian succeeded. If I were to ding them on anything, it would be that the bright red plane upholstery was a bit tough on the eyes. I’ll fly them again.</li>\n 	<li>I actually was two-for-two on airports on that trip. Budapest airport has had a significant upgrade since my last visit maybe 12 years ago. Again, efficient security lines, bright clean terminal, good places to grab a coffee and some breakfast. Much more pleasant than my first time passing through there in 1989, some Army guy checking that my exit visa had the right stamps. Much happier vibe this time. Two great airport experiences; I think I’ll need to consciously ratchet down my expectations for my next trip, though. I’ll be hitting London’s Gatwick and Heathrow next week.</li>\n 	<li>Thinking through my international travel this year -- Paris, Vienna, Budapest -- Google Translate has evolved to being pretty close to magic. Last September, Google made a big announcement that they moved Translate from a statistics-based approach to a neural network running in Google’s cloud. It was the cover story for the New York Times Sunday Magazine <a href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/14/magazine/the-great-ai-awakening.html\">The Great AI Awakening</a> -- using it as a case study of how artificial intelligence will “reinvent computing itself”. That’s all good -- and it was a good article -- but what’s really seems like magic is what Google calls Word Lens, where you activate your camera within Google Translate, point it at some text -- a menu or, say, the washing machine controls in a vacation rental -- and you see English words replacing the French or Hungarian words in real time. Amazingly useful. Saves you from blasting your delicates with hot water, or mistakenly ordering chicken when you mix up poulet and poisson after a couple of cocktails. The French translations seemed better than the Hungarian ones -- which makes sense when you remember that the quality of the neural network is dependent on the amount of training data -- but even the Hungarian was very useful. And Translate lets you download some amount of language data onto your phone so you don’t blow through $100 of roaming data trying to avoid brussels sprouts. As you can tell, a huge TravelCommons endorsement.</li>\n 	<li>A few weeks back, I retweeted an NPR story about the proposal to privatize US air traffic control. As someone who has had cumulative months if not years wasted on ATC delays, I commented that I can’t understand all the angst over this proposal. ATC privatization has worked for years in Canada and Europe. And it’s not like the FAA has bathed itself in glory with the NextGen program that was authorized in 2003. Rich Fraser, a long-time TravelCommons listener, fellow Midwesterner, and a pilot, came back with a great series of tweets explaining his objections, specifically on privatization’s impact on general aviation. I retweeted a number of them -- “Privatization decimated general aviation industries everywhere it was tried. GA is a $200 billion industry here. 1.4 mil jobs…” and “And Canada\'s general aviation industry is a tiny fraction the size of ours. Apples and oranges doesn\'t even begin to describe.” I was only thinking of the impact on commercial aviation -- the only aviation I experience. Rich’s tweets did a nice job of opening the aperture on the discussion to include the often unconsidered world of general aviation. Thanks for that, Rich.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/53277\">Fistful of Dub</a> (Feat. Snowflake and DJ Vadim) by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: snowflake and DJ Vadim</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Notes from Hungary</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>The flight from Vienna to Budapest is 40 minutes on a 20-seat prop plane. I don’t think it ever levels off -- just a parabola, going straight from climb out into descent. Not that really noticed. After one more beer in Vienna airport, Andrew and I were asleep before the plane left the ground. Yet another pleasant Austrian Air flight attendant graciously placed bottles of water for us in the seat back pocket in front of us. We found them when the plane touched down in Budapest.</li>\n 	<li>We’d been to Budapest many times before, but this one would be different. Many of my wife’s aunts and uncles has passed away in the 12 years since our last visit, so there weren’t many family obligations -- just a long Saturday lunch the day before we left. Instead, this was probably the first time we saw Hungary as tourists.</li>\n 	<li>Before we visited, we checked with friends who had recently visited. What had they seen, enjoyed? Everyone loved Budapest. Scouting out places to stay, we abandoned what had been our usual Budapest Marriott perch on the Danube for so many years and instead headed east to District VII -- Erzsébetváros, the old Jewish Quarter. During our last visit in 2005, no one would’ve thought to go out here. But now, it’s full of restaurants, craft beer bars, a few Starbucks, and ruin pubs.</li>\n 	<li>We followed TravelCommons’ listener Arnoud Heijnis’ recommendation to check out what is the classic -- and perhaps the first -- ruin bar in Budapest -- Szimpla Kert. Arnoud’s description of it having a “pop-uppy kinda feel” was right on-point. You walk through a dingy, half-lit hallway, with a couple of bars on each side, into an open two-story courtyard ringed by, I dunno, another half-dozen bars across the two floors. There were at least a couple of English stag parties going on when we walked in -- one with whom I assumed was the groom-to-be dressed in a white ballerina tutu; the other group was wearing matching t-shirts fronted with a goofy picture of their groom-to-be.</li>\n 	<li>I saw a lot of those while we were in Budapest -- party groups wearing matching t-shirts; not so much the ballerina tutus. Budapest -- at least the redeveloped district we were in -- seems to have become a fly-in party town. Maybe the bankruptcy of the old state-run airline Malev left a vacuum for budget carriers to fill -- including WizzAir with a Budapest hub. And then Hungary hasn’t yet joined the euro, so it can devalue its currency, the forint, and look cheap to the rest of Europe. And it had lots of buildings available to repurpose -- starting with squatters setting up bars and dance clubs in abandoned buildings, then large sports bars, and then what seemed to me an amazing number of burger places. And they were all filled starting Thursday night, mostly with English speaking parties. A huge change from my first visit in 1989 when seemingly no one but my wife spoke English, and we’d walk into empty restaurants looking for lunch.</li>\n 	<li>Spending money in some of those bars, you’d think that Hungary is moving toward a parallel currency economy -- the forint and euro being used interchangeably -- similar to what I saw in Vietnam where I’d pay, say, a single taxi fare, in a combination of dong and dollar bills. In Budapest, you’ll get a bar tab in forint with a euro number printed below it. You can pay in euro, but you’ll probably get change back in forint. If it’s not too late in the evening, say your first or second bar, and so you haven’t yet lost your capability to do arithmetic, you’ll notice that the euro exchange rate isn’t quite in your favor. I started doing the math at each bar -- which, by the way, seemed to make a couple of bartenders nervous. The range of exchange rates on bar tabs was between 250 and 275 forint to the euro. The market rate was about 300 forint to the euro. In effect, the bars were charging an 8-16% convenience fee for letting you skip the ATM down the street.</li>\n 	<li>District VII is not the only part of Budapest that’s upgraded. Downtown Pest, along the Danube, looks spiffier. The Parliament building -- always an incredibly ornate building that dares you not to take multiple pictures of it as you walk past -- looked like it has been freshly steam cleaned. In ‘89, a soldier shooed my wife and I off the steps; this time we walked down into a nice visitors center, bought some tour tickets and were escorted up the Golden Staircase, under the huge dome, and past the crown jewels. And further south along the river, new developments, plazas, bars, bike paths have all sprung up -- again, in places we wouldn’t have thought of going 12 years ago. I understood why friends who had visited over the past year had enjoyed it.</li>\n 	<li>As much as I liked knocking around Budapest -- and running through most of District VII’s craft beer bars where, according to Untappd, Andrew and I tasted 43 Hungarian beers -- my favorite bit of the trip was the day we spent visiting wineries in the Tokaj wine region -- about 2½ hrs northeast of Budapest near the border with Slovakia. We hired the guy (<a href=\"http://www.tokajtoday.com/contact/\">Gergely Somogyi</a>) who runs the Tokaj Today web site as our guide. He came to our hotel, gave us a 30-minute PowerPoint presentation (plugged right into the hotel’s flat screen TV in the breakfast room) on Tokaj’s history, geography, geology, grape and wine types. And with this Intro to Tokaj information still looking for neurons to hang out in, we were off to visit four winemakers. And say that rather than wineries because we sat down with each of the winemakers -- the two more established --<a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/demeterzoltantokaj\">Zoltán Demeter</a> and <a href=\"http://www.bottpince.hu/\">Judit Bodo</a> -- in their tasting rooms, the two garagistas -- <a href=\"http://new2017.samueltinon.com/en/\">Mathilde Hulot</a> and <a href=\"http://abrahampince.com/english/\">Róbert Péter</a> -- their kitchens and patios -- for an hour or more each, talking about their wine, about Hungary, and about what they’re trying to do. Only one of the four -- Demeter -- is from Tokaj. The rest moved there to make wine -- Bodo from the Hungarian-speaking part of Slovakia, Peter from Budapest, and Hulot from France -- because of its history and its potential to make great wine.</li>\n 	<li>Each told a version of the same story -- of Tokaj’s history, wine knowledge, and wine quality being broken during the 40-some years of Communism -- abandoning the high-quality vineyards on the hills for lower-quality fields on the plains that could be harvested with big Russian tractors, 5-year government planning that pushed quantity over quality. And of how each of them came to Tokaj to flip that equation back to quality over quantity -- even the Tokaj local had to leave to jobs in California and France to learn quality winemaking before he came back. But they all feel challenged to get the entire community, the “locals,” on board. Maybe it’s some of the residue of Communism -- it’s easier to crank out industrial plonk than good wine. Maybe it’s because many of them can’t afford these new wines and so don’t appreciate them. Bodo said she specifically priced one wine so that local young people who now drink beer could afford to drink good local wine. To appreciate what they have here, she said, everyone has to be able to enjoy good wine -- not just the winemakers.</li>\n 	<li>I hate to truck in the wine industry cliche that these winemakers have a “passion” for what they’re doing, but my thesaurus fails me, I can’t find a better word. They all appreciated that we’d taken the time to drive out from Budapest to visit (if maybe a bit puzzled by doing everything in a day), and were very generous with their time and their wine. It was tough to limit ourselves to buying just one bottle per stop. I had to keep reminding myself that I’d only brought my small rollerboard with me.</li>\n 	<li>On our last night, we’re back in Budapest, knocking around District VII, looking for our last dinner. We’d had some great food -- a couple of Michelin one-stars, some food trucks near a ruin bar -- but it was tough to find some of the homey Hungarian food -- call it “peasant food” -- that we’d had in the past. And then we found it -- a bit cafeteria style -- I’ll take that sausage, the hurka with the pork liver and rice -- oh, and that one too, the regular kolbasz with pork, paprika and garlic -- some pickled salad, a bowl of gulyas soup, and, OK, just one last beer.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #130</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_130.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #130 — Notes from Hungary','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-130-notes-from-hungary','','\nhttp://abrahampince.com/english/','2021-09-29 08:21:47','2021-09-29 13:21:47','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=1774',0,'post','',0),
(1775,1,'2017-06-24 22:19:52','2017-06-25 03:19:52','','IMG_0522','','inherit','open','closed','','img_0522','','','2017-06-24 22:19:52','2017-06-25 03:19:52','',1774,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/IMG_0522.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(1776,1,'2017-06-24 23:04:02','2017-06-25 04:04:02','<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/IMG_0522.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1775\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/IMG_0522-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nIt\'s a <em>Mitteleuropa</em> episode, talking about last month\'s travels through Vienna and Hungary. I came away with good first impressions of Austrian Airlines and the Vienna airport. And, for the first time in many visits, saw Hungary through a tourist\'s eyes, spending time in Budapest and the Tokaj wine region. We also talk about how Google Translate has become pretty much indistinguishable from magic and the potential impact the privatization of the US air traffic control system might have on the general aviation industry. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_130.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/329896443\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Great Vienna Restaurant -- <a href=\"http://www.xn--gasthauspschl-qmb.com/\">Gasthaus Pöschl</a> (Weihburggasse 17)</li>\r\n 	<li>New York Times Sunday Magazine article -- <a href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/14/magazine/the-great-ai-awakening.html\">The Great AI Awakening</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Tokaj wineries we visited\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/demeterzoltantokaj\">Zoltán Demeter</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"http://www.bottpince.hu/\">Bott Pince</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"http://new2017.samueltinon.com/en/\">Samuel Tinon</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"http://abrahampince.com/english/\">Ábrahám Pince</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — MBrilliant Day by Hans Atom (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hansatom/47919 Ft: Lisa DeBenedictis</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — Fistful of Dub (Feat. Snowflake and DJ Vadim) by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/53277 Ft: snowflake and DJ Vadim</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Magnatune</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Faceboo</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #130 — Notes from Hungary','','inherit','closed','closed','','1774-revision-v1','','','2017-06-24 23:04:02','2017-06-25 04:04:02','',1774,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/06/24/1774-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1777,1,'2017-06-24 23:06:16','2017-06-25 04:06:16','[caption id=\"attachment_1660\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/5777D166-DB5F-4FAF-A0D5-84AC87F58834.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1660\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/5777D166-DB5F-4FAF-A0D5-84AC87F58834-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Empty Beer Glasses\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> I Think We\'ve Bagged Our Limit[/caption]\r\n\r\nMy son joins the podcast to talk about hunting down craft beers. I then talk about a few \"a-ha\" moments from my recent trip to Scotland, my on-going struggles with bitch tweeting, a VPN hardware product that could come in handy, and why I\'ve come to hate the Rick Steves travel juggernaut. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_124.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_124.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #124:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the Sheraton Hotel and Conference Center in Framingham, MA. Just back from 10 mostly beautiful sunny days in Scotland. Flew United to Edinburgh via Newark on the the way out, but on the way back, paid an extra $200 for the luxury of skipping the Immigration lines there. Given my weekly experiences in Newark’s Terminal A at the beginning of this year, I can only imagine the Immigration hall as being a mash-up of the dungeons from all the Saw movies done in that frighteningly absurd sort of way that only the TSA can pull off. Think the LAX security lines without laid-back people, with that Jersey edge. Even with the Global Entry line cut, that was not the final memory I wanted from what had been a nice trip.</li>\r\n 	<li>My wife and I kinda ran the same play we did last year when we dropped our daughter off at University of St Andrews. Grabbed a car -- Hertz gave us a new Nissan X-Terra -- nice car, enough space for the bags my daughter brought over with her, but would be a lumbering beast among Fiat 500s later in the week when driving some of the single lane roads in the Highlands. I like to think I’m getting better at driving in the UK -- driving on the left and shifting with my left hand. No curb bumping or wide left-hand turns this time coming out of the airport. Stopped off at the mall 5 min from the airport for a Starbucks coffee and a couple of EE SIM cards -- £15 for 2GB of data, unlimited texts and, I dunno, 500 voice minutes, which for a week, is pretty much unlimited -- $20 at the current post-Brexit bargain basement exchange rate.</li>\r\n 	<li>After lunch and unloading our daughter, my wife and I drove up the coast for a few days of walking -- not hiking with packs and crampons, but trail walking. We stayed the weekend in Aberdeen because… we’d never been there before. It was a nice town. Went out to the Brewdog brewery for a tour and a couple of beers and then out walking it off along a North Sea trail. We also spent time in Cairngorms National Park on Balmoral getting blown out of our jackets by gale force winds while looking for the Queen in her Range Rover, and then straight up north to the coast -- through Banff, Portsoy, and Cullen for a bit more coastal trail walking. And then back down to St Andrews for the last couple of days doing the typical stuff parents do when they visit their kid at college -- take them out to nice restaurants, buy them groceries, and in our case, say good-bye until Christmas break.</li>\r\n 	<li>Flying out of Edinburgh airport on Saturday morning was surprisingly not a hassle. It’s not a huge airport -- mostly seems to be mostly budget airlines -- Ryanair, easyJet -- but United and American fly a couple of 757s in, and I saw an Etihad 787 -- jealous. The ticketing/check-in area is a bit of a cluster; gives a bad first impression. But once you get up the escalator and headed toward security, it’s much nicer -- a low hassle pass through security, and good shops and restaurants.</li>\r\n 	<li>It always strikes me how much more automated some of the European airports have become. At Edinburgh, there’s no security person checking your ticket before security. Instead, there’s a gate and a bar code reader. You scan your boarding pass. If it’s valid, the gate drops and you walk through. There are security people watching for gate jumpers and tailgaters, but there’s about a half-dozen automated gates, so there was no queue. And then at the X-ray machines, no TSA-like person bringing tubs to the front of the line. Instead, a person points you to one of 5 loading stations, a conveyor system spits out a bin, you load it up, and push it onto the belt that feeds the X-ray machine. Again, less waiting because, instead of a single person loading their tub and putting stuff on the belt, you have 5 people in parallel. If one person is slow, it doesn’t hold up the line. Not quite sure why the TSA, with all its budget and management staff, can’t just copy this.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/48114\">Velvet Green of Mystery (Instrumental)</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Kthugha, Jeris, Martijn de Boer</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Not to turn this into a complete Caledonian podcast, but I did have a few a-ha moments from this trip -\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>The spread of contactless card readers at stores in the UK has spread the acceptance of Apple and Android Pay, which makes not having a chip-&amp;-pin card much less painful (remember, the US cards are chip-&amp;-signature because, I guess, we can’t be trusted to remember 2 4-digit codes). It used to be painful -- or perhaps just embarrassing -- to wait for the Tesco self-service attendant to look at me a bit confused as she gave me a receipt to be signed. Now it’s even faster than a chip-&amp;-pin card -- tap my phone on the card reader, beep, and I’m done. Now they need to replace the little mobile card readers that restaurants use...</li>\r\n 	<li>It’s really tough to find a good cup of brewed black coffee in Europe. Now call me a red-necked Midwesterner, but there are times that I don’t want foamed milk, I don’t want a just a swig of coffee, and I certainly don’t want that swig of coffee -- espresso -- diluted with hot water, I just want a cup of black coffee -- filter coffee as I’ve learned. Impossible to find in Spain and Portugal and many places in the UK, except at Starbucks. There have been many European mornings after a late night that I thanked God (and Howard Schultz) for their aggressive international expansion. So I was surprised and thrilled (ecstatic, really) to find an actual Portlandia-like coffee pourover place, complete with Chemexes and Hario kettles, in Aberdeen on Saturday morning. Foodstory Cafe. I found it by Googling “Hipster Aberdeen”. Yes, really. Sounds silly/absurd but it works. I’ve used that search term in many cities and more times than not been happy with the results.</li>\r\n 	<li>Our hotel in Aberdeen was nice, except for one thing. The tub had one of those little half wall tub screens instead of a shower curtain. There should be a YouTube video on how to shower in those, because everytime I try, I hose down the sink and everything on it. Perhaps I’m too large. Why this instead of a shower curtain?</li>\r\n 	<li>Sitting in a restaurant our last night in St Andrews, our waitress -- very nice person, very good service -- had just a hint of an Eastern European accent. I wanted to ask her where she’s from, but in post-Brexit Britain, it felt rude to ask that. Now that’s not a snarky comment about the results of the vote -- the tough thing about democracy is that everyone\'s vote counts and needs to be respected, not just the people who agree with us. But you can feel a change -- just a bit...</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Back in the US, I continue to struggle with my tendency to bitch tweet. On one flight, I was able to hold back during a 20 min wait for a gate on United, though I did provide “frank” feedback on the customer service survey they sent me a couple of days later. But the next week, on my third straight delayed United flight, I just couldn’t control myself. I understood when we had to return to the gate to manually start the remaining engine -- jets often taxi out using just one engine in order to save fuel, which makes perfect sense. United did a good job of finding us a gate -- not easy at ORD -- and was pretty quick with the maintenance crew. Where I lost it, though, was when it took longer to download the updated data to the plane computer than the whole return to the gate and manually start the engine bit. To the pilot’s credit, he did a good job of explaining the situation and the status, and didn’t hide in the cabin when we were de-planing.</li>\r\n 	<li>Marc Loehrwald, a long-time listener, sent me a note asking “Would you consider this gentlemen solving his problems with Verizon over speakerphone in the otherwise quite empty and peaceful Lounge at JFK worth bitch tweeting…?” accompanied by a picture of a guy sitting alone among couple of dozen chairs. Bitch subtweeting! I should’ve done that to the guy behind me who had his feet up on the back of my seat the entire flight from BWI to ORD. Not a kid, a guy in his mid-50’s!. Marc, you’ve taken my bitch tweeting to a whole new level!</li>\r\n 	<li>Over the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/12/20/podcast-119-digital-security-on-the-road-us-airports-getting-better/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">past </a>few episodes, we’ve been talking about VPNs -- virtual private networks -- as a way to improve your security when you travel. VPNs encrypt your network traffic -- always a good thing over public and hotel WiFi -- and will also “tunnel” your traffic through the Internet, making it look like you’re accessing the Internet from the VPN end-point. For corporate users, this makes you look like you’re accessing the Internet from your office, allowing you to use systems inside your corporate firewall. For many international travelers, it gives you a way to watch, say, TV shows that are licensed to Netflix in the US but not in other countries. All the VPN products I’ve used have been software-based -- my company uses a Cisco VPN, while on my last trip to China, I used ExpressVPN to tunnel under the Great Firewall and post pictures to Facebook. A company called Homing Systems used Kickstarter to launch a hardware-based VPN product called AlwaysHome. They sent me a sample to try out. It’s a pair of USB dongles. You connect one to your home router -- I have it plugged into my Uverse box. I plugged the second one into the BT router in my daughter’s flat in St Andrews. She fired up her Netflix account and was able to continue her “Criminal Minds” binge, a show not on UK Netflix, without a problem. In earlier testing, I found AlwaysHome was a bit more fiddly when it needed to connect first through a password portal -- the typical set up at a hotel. It would connect, but took a bit more work. When the connection nailed up, though, the performance was solid. <a href=\"http://www.homingsystems.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Homing Systems</a>’ web site calls it “Space Shifting”. I think that’s the right positioning. I think it’s quicker to fire up a software VPN client for a quick session at Starbucks. The AlwaysHome dongle setup seems more suited for a more sustained session. Check out the show notes for links to Homing Systems.</li>\r\n 	<li><em>Homing Systems sent me a AlwaysHome Duo free of charge for me to review. I was not paid for this review. The opinions expressed in this episode are my own. </em></li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/spinmeister/53428\">Somewhere</a> by spinmeister (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license. Ft: DJ Vadim</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Craft Beer Hunting</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>My son and I hang out in his apartment in Chicago\'s Lake View neighborhood and talk about finding good beer in out-of-the-way places</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/48915\">Like Music (cdk Mix)</a> by cdk (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/\">Attribution Share-Alike (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Phasenwandler</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>I Hate Rick Steves</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Not personally, of course. I’m sure he’s a nice guy who doesn’t kick dogs. I guess to be more precise, I hate what he’s done to some of my vacations.</li>\r\n 	<li>Portugal is the most recent example. Preparing for our trip, my wife read a number of Lisbon travel guides, include Rick Steves. Rick advises his Lisbon travelers to do the day trip out to Sintra, the castle-filled UNESCO World Heritage Site, on Mondays when all the Lisbon museums are closed. So Monday morning, we get up early, go across the street for our standard breakfast of coffee and pastel de nata (egg custard tarts to die for), and hit the train. Standing room only. We get off the train in Sintra. All we see are older Americans with sensible haircuts, plastic rimmed glasses, and hiking shoes. It’s like we walking through an NPR listener convention in Ann Arbor, MI. And they’re all wearing their backpacks swung around in front to protect themselves from pickpockets and thieves. Except no local could penetrate the phalanx of blue book-wielding Steve-heads. Lucky for us, most of them followed Rick’s advice to catch the bus to the top of the hill. We decided we needed to work off that egg custard, and so broke away from the blue book brigade and walked up the road.</li>\r\n 	<li>I don’t begrudge Rick Steves his success -- good for him; he seems to have worked hard for it. But his motto -- “Europe through the back door” -- can’t really apply anymore when he has millions of readers trying to walk through it. The same thing happened to Lonely Planet. What was once the hip, backpacker’s guide to cool spots now leads people to mainstream tourism spots just by its recommendations because it’s Amazon’s best selling travel guide series.</li>\r\n 	<li>I think we successfully avoided the Steve-o’s on this trip to Scotland. Aberdeen and the Northeast Highlands are nowhere to be found in Rick Steves’ Scotland, and I can’t say that I heard too many North American accents during that part of our trip -- save for the one day we drove down to Dunnottar Castle, but that’s got to be one of the main tourist draws in that part of Scotland. I heard almost as much German as I did American twang.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’ve tended, more and more, to use local Google searches rather than guide books. Google often surfaces more local content, and limiting the results to the past year makes sure it’s current. But even this might not be “back door” enough. The barista in the Aberdeen coffee shop that I found through my “Hipster Aberdeen” Google search did mention seeing a surprising number of Americans recently. I wonder if my “Hipster” search strategy has gone mainstream.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #124</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/\">ccMixter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_124.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #124 — Craft Beer Hunting; I Hate Rick Steves','','inherit','closed','closed','','1658-revision-v1','','','2017-06-24 23:06:16','2017-06-25 04:06:16','',1658,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/06/24/1658-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1780,1,'2017-07-06 12:51:20','2017-07-06 17:51:20','<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/IMG_0522.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1775\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/IMG_0522-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nIt\'s a <em>Mitteleuropa</em> episode, talking about last month\'s travels through Vienna and Hungary. I came away with good first impressions of Austrian Airlines and the Vienna airport. And, for the first time in many visits, saw Hungary through a tourist\'s eyes, spending time in Budapest and the Tokaj wine region. We also talk about how Google Translate has become pretty much indistinguishable from magic and the potential impact the privatization of the US air traffic control system might have on the general aviation industry. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_130.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/329896443\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Great Vienna Restaurant -- <a href=\"http://www.xn--gasthauspschl-qmb.com/\">Gasthaus Pöschl</a> (Weihburggasse 17)</li>\r\n 	<li>New York Times Sunday Magazine article -- <a href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/14/magazine/the-great-ai-awakening.html\">The Great AI Awakening</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Tokaj tour guide - <a href=\"http://www.tokajtoday.com/contact/\">Gergely Somogyi</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Tokaj wineries we visited\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/demeterzoltantokaj\">Zoltán Demeter</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"http://www.bottpince.hu/\">Bott Pince</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"http://new2017.samueltinon.com/en/\">Samuel Tinon</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"http://abrahampince.com/english/\">Ábrahám Pince</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hansatom/47919\">MBrilliant Day</a> by Hans Atom (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial license.  Ft: Lisa DeBenedictis</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/53277\">Fistful of Dub</a> (Feat. Snowflake and DJ Vadim) by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: snowflake and DJ Vadim</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #130 — Notes from Hungary','','inherit','closed','closed','','1774-revision-v1','','','2017-07-06 12:51:20','2017-07-06 17:51:20','',1774,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/07/06/1774-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1783,1,'2017-07-31 09:07:15','2017-07-31 14:07:15','Finally recorded in the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Brooklyn\" href=\"http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=40.6247222222,-73.9522222222&amp;spn=0.1,0.1&amp;q=40.6247222222,-73.9522222222 (Brooklyn)&amp;t=h\" rel=\"geolocation\">Brooklyn</a> Marriott in <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"New York City\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/new-york-city\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\">New York</a> after hauling my recording gear across the Atlantic to <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Amsterdam\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/the-netherlands/amsterdam\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\">Amsterdam</a>, over to Minneapolis, and finally to New York. In this episode, a number of listeners comment on airport security, we talk about breaking out of the \"travel bubble\" that insulates so many frequent travelers from the cities they visit, and I answer some listener questions on mileage credit cards and how to get the most out of frequent flier status. Also, at the end of the episode, we announce our 3rd Anniversary concert. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_64.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_64.mp3\"]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #64:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none\">\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Recorded in the Brooklyn Marriott after trying to find time to record it in Minneapolis and Haarlem, the Netherlands</li>\r\n 	<li>A medley of earlier TravelCommons hotel room introductions</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://ghosts.nin.com/main/home\"><em>7 Ghosts I</em></a> by <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Nine Inch Nails\" href=\"http://www.nin.com/\" rel=\"homepage\">Nine Inch Nails</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none\">\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Leo Vegoda inventories the security screening inconsistencies he\'s faced in China, the US, and Europe</li>\r\n 	<li>Enrolling in the <a href=\"http://www.flyclear.com/\">Clear</a> registered traveler program, I gave up images of my driver\'s license, passport, irises, and fingerprints</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"http://blog.transparentsociety.com/\">Lori Humm</a> and <a href=\"http://budacast.hu\">Drew Leifheit</a> agree that the nipple ring removal incident typifies the TSA\'s disregard for travelers</li>\r\n 	<li>I hate how far away the BWI and CLE rental car facilities are from the terminals. Makes me choose DCA over BWI</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>When Irish Eyes are Burning</em> by <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/music/listeners/artistdetails.php?BandHash=a45aaee36685b61a392acf793155e127\">the Ike Reilly Assassination</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Breaking the Travel Bubble</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none\">\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Sometimes I get tired of traveling within the travel bubble that frequent travelers often construct for themselves</li>\r\n 	<li>Staying in the Brooklyn Marriott, taking the subway from the Borough Hall stop in Brooklyn to the 32nd St stop on Park Ave certainly gets me up close and personal with a lot of NYC residents</li>\r\n 	<li>Taking the commuter train from Amsterdam to Utrecht, I was engulfed in a swarm of bicyclists – the commuters got off their train, hopped on their bicycles in the dark, drizzly, 40 degree January night, and rode home</li>\r\n 	<li>Some travelers like to stay in the same hotel every time they visit a city – the \"Cheers\" syndrome – you wanna go where everybody knows your name</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Stupid Now</em> by <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/music/listeners/artistdetails.php?BandHash=be2a489f478e6d5335652fc8925eee03\">Bob Mould</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Mark’s Travel Tips</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none\">\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Joy in Denver asked me if I use mileage credit cards. I primarily use <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Diners Club International\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diners_Club_International\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Diners Club</a> because it doesn\'t lock you into a single mileage program. I\'ve used it to \"top off\" other accounts, where I needed some extra mileage to meet an award level.</li>\r\n 	<li>I also have a Starbucks Duetto Visa card that I also use occasionally for business expenses</li>\r\n 	<li>Brian from <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Naperville, Illinois\" href=\"http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=41.7480555556,-88.1655555556&amp;spn=0.1,0.1&amp;q=41.7480555556,-88.1655555556 (Naperville%2C%20Illinois)&amp;t=h\" rel=\"geolocation\">Naperville, IL</a> recently earned Gold status on American and is wondering the best way to maximize the benefit</li>\r\n 	<li>Key benefits of this first status level are separate security lines and priority boarding</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing\r\n</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917634.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://nin.com/\">Nine Inch Nails</a> and the <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/\">Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Feedback at comments@travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_64.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<div class=\"zemanta-pixie\" style=\"margin-top: 10px; height: 15px;\"><img class=\"zemanta-pixie-img\" style=\"border: none; float: right;\" src=\"http://img.zemanta.com/pixy.gif?x-id=f8af09be-99fc-41d7-bbae-c8fc048ffdf1\" alt=\"\" /></div>','Podcast #64 - Escaping the Travel Bubble; Mark\'s Travel Tips','','inherit','closed','closed','','99-revision-v1','','','2017-07-31 09:07:15','2017-07-31 14:07:15','',99,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/07/31/99-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1784,1,'2017-07-30 11:01:50','2017-07-30 16:01:50','[caption id=\"attachment_1786\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/File_000.jpeg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1786\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/File_000-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> I have a craft beer problem...[/caption]\n\nThis past week in Atlanta Hartsfield Airport, when I traveled across four terminals to find a restaurant serving a nice selection of local Atlanta beers, I finally had to admit that I have a craft beer problem. In addition to this confession, I talk about about taking the London Underground back from the big Adele concert in Wembley Stadium. The experience proved out some of the positive stereotypes about the English -- queuing well and muddling through without complaining. I talk about hotel room flat screen TVs and using Twitter to quickly get Hertz to fix a mistaken refueling charge. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_131.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #131:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, ready to admit that I have a craft beer problem. On Tuesday, I’m in Atlanta airport, on the back end of an one-day up-and-back. I got to the airport a bit early because: (a) I wanted to get forward-positioned for a 5pm conference call, and (b) afternoon travel times from north of Atlanta, where all my clients have ever been, to south of Atlanta where the airport is inconveniently located is highly unpredictable -- I’ve experienced anything from 40 min to an hour and a half. The conference call ends early, just as United posts a 15-min flight delay. Rather than bitch tweeting, I pop open my Untappd app and see what beers have been checked in nearby. I see some local Atlanta beers showing up at a place called “Chicken + Beer”. Good name! I find an sign board. It’s in Terminal D near Gate D5 -- almost to the end of the terminal. I’m in Terminal T -- the closest-in terminal, 4 terminals away. I look at my watch. According to United, I have an hour. I pop open the United app. The delayed in-bound flight is due in at 6:35 and United is calling for a 7:05 departure. No way in this age of completely full flights do they get that plane emptied and re-loaded in 30 minutes. And, since it’s a day trip, I don’t have to worry about carry-on. Easy decision -- I’m off. Highly recommended place if you’re connecting through ATL -- especially if you’re a bit closer, maybe in Terminals C, D or E.</li>\n 	<li>I posted the last episode the day before we headed out to London for a week, the highlight of which was going to the Adele concert in Wembley Stadium that Wednesday night -- my wife’s Christmas and birthday present. It was the opening night of what was supposed to be a 4-night finale to her world tour. Glad we caught one of the front-end shows. She canceled the last two due to vocal cord stress. Would’ve been unspeakably awful if we’d flown over and then got canceled. As it was, it was a great concert -- great voice and a phenomenal swearer. Impressive f-bomb count.</li>\n 	<li>Back in the US, I’ve been alternating weeks between Richmond and Atlanta. As I said in the last episode, of the two, I prefer Richmond -- I’m able to walk around downtown so no need for a rental, and it’s only a 20-minute ride to and from the airport. And a local turned me onto the Scott’s Addition neighborhood with three microbreweries in a 5-block radius. Yes, as you already know, I have a craft beer problem.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mindmapthat/53340\">Dub the Uke</a> by Kara Square (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: DJ Vadim</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>This week’s day trip to Atlanta for a meeting was the first time I’ve done that in a long time -- trusted an airline enough to fly in the day of an important meeting. As it was, I still baked in a large safety buffer -- I took a 6:15am flight out of ORD that landed ATL just after 9am local time; for a 12:30p meeting. Instead, as a way to lower my personal stress as well as the amount of my bitch tweeting, I’ll fly out, say, the night before. Or a couple of weeks ago, when my wife booked a dinner for 5:30p Thursday night, I flew back Weds night. Last year, I would’ve flown home Thursday afternoon -- scheduling myself ORD at, say, 3:30p, and then taking the El into the city. Now, I just don’t trust the airlines. There’s not enough slack in the system -- the planes are full, the crew schedules are optimized to the tee, and so when something anomalous happens, the whole things starts to come apart at the seams. This kinda happened a few weeks ago flying out of Richmond. My colleague and I were sitting in a conference room after lunch when his phone started going off -- flight delay texts from American about his evening flight back to DFW. I check on my United flight to ORD -- sure enough, I’m delayed too. Not critical -- just means I’ll be dining in the airport rather than at home. I hit the “where is my flight now” in the United app a couple of times to find that the delay from Grand Rapids airport which is then cascading through IAD and down to RIC. When the plane is scheduled for tight turnarounds, there’s no way to catch up. We check every 20 minutes or so, hoping things get better. And, surprisingly, mine does -- suddenly, there’s no delay. Did Grand Rapids magically clear up? Nope. Tracking the inbound plane again, now it’s sitting on the ground at IAD. They swapped equipment and now we’re back on schedule. We head over to RIC, and just as I go through security, I get a delay text from United. The plane is in IAD but the crew isn’t. Their inbound flight is delayed, which pushes ours. I sit down at the Sam Adams bar in RIC’s Terminal 2; I order a beer and some food. I get the beer right away. 45 minutes later, the waitress tells me they’ve run out of food. So I end up eating dinner at home after all -- just a bit later than usual.</li>\n 	<li>Hotel room technology is slow to change. I still see a lot of those alarm clocks with the old 30-pin iPhone connectors on the top of them; the iPhone 5 with the smaller Lightning connector came out almost 5 years ago. I think a good bit of this has to do with scale -- just upgrading the TVs in the 3,976 rooms at a place like Caesars Palace in Las Vegas can be a multi-year project. That being said, it’s been a long time now since I’ve seen a tube TV in a hotel room. Seems that most everyone has made the switch to wall-mounted flat screens, and I’m even seeing more of the second-generation -- more smart TVs from Samsung and LG with built in Netflix and Hulu apps, letting me log in to my accounts, access my own queues and watch just like I’m at home. I tend not to take them up on that offer though. I’m still a bit hesitant to scatter too much of my personal digital stuff around. And also, it’s not just Netflix that I want to watch. Sometimes I want to watch, say, James Corden’s newest Carpool Karaoke on YouTube that my daughter told me about, or watch the start of a Tour de France stage on NBCSN which almost no hotel cable package carries. Lucky for me, all of these newer flat screens provide easy access to an HDMI port -- the digital successor to the older analog VGA connectors on computers. I picked up a $5 Displayport-to-HDMI cable on Amazon, and now regularly plug my ThinkPad into my hotel room flat screen. Now if these hotels would upgrade their WiFi speeds...</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Suenjo/11162\">Natchoongi (New Hope Remix)</a> by Suenjo (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Twitter Concierge</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>One of the standards in my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/12/12/top-10-holiday-travel-tips-2/\">Top 10</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2013/12/19/top-10-holiday-travel-tips/\">Travel Tips</a> list -- which I usually write once a year as part of my annual prayers to the Google gods for more website traffic -- is to use Twitter as sort of a customer service concierge service. I’ve used Twitter to ping airlines on the status of planes when the gate agents were in the dark, A few weeks back, I tweeted to Lyft, asking why the price estimation piece of their app didn’t work (answer: it was turned off in Richmond for some reason). And Twitter saved me a bit of a hassle last week with Hertz.</li>\n 	<li>Now, I’ve gone hot and cold on Hertz through my travel career. At the start, back in 1985 when I was working for IBM and regularly flying into SJC, I liked them. But that was when SJC was an old-style California airport -- no jetways, just a walkway under a metal canopy to planes parked on the tarmac; no rental counters, just a parking lot at one end of the terminal with a little Hertz hut in the middle staffed by a nice woman who’d give you your keys. After a few trips, we got to know each other and she’d always give me one of the nicer cars on the lot. Fast forward 15 years to my low point with Hertz at DTW. I was there every week for about a year and never got a clean car or one under 24,000 miles. I’m back on an upswing with Hertz now that they’re doing the National Car Rental-like “pick your own car” service and I’ve yet to climb into a car with more than 1,000 miles</li>\n 	<li>Dropping my car off at ATL last week, I do my usual thing -- fill the car just outside the airport, drop it off, and walk away without waiting for the Hertz guy to check me in because it’s usually too long a wait during the afternoon drop-off rush hour and they’ll e-mail me the receipt. I usually put the gas receipt on the dashboard under the keys, but I didn’t do that this time. The gas station near ATL was a bit dodgy and had signs posted on the gas pump “Keep your car locked when filling up”. I decided not to wait for the pump to spit out a receipt.</li>\n 	<li>The e-mail from Hertz showed up on my phone just after I’d boarded the plane at ATL. I scanned the numbers -- damn it, there was a refueling charge. And the gas charge hadn’t posted yet to my Amex card so I couldn’t download a receipt. It just pissed me off. The gas gauge was clearly/unambiguously on F, so the check-in guy was just pencil-whipping the check-in. That’s what really annoyed me. Sitting there, waiting for the rest of the flight to board, I had time to stew. And to tweet out my annoyance to @Hertz -- complete with a mad face emoji.</li>\n 	<li>My flight takes off. I land at ORD, take my phone out of airplane mode and bing, there’s a reply from Hertz -- please DM us your rental agreement number. I flip over to the emailed receipt and copy/paste the number into Twitter. While still on the plane -- we’re doing the usual ORD thing of taxiing all over the airport looking for a gate -- I get a message back “Mark, apologies for the trouble with the fueling fee. After further review I will be refunding this charge to the account billed. We appreciate you bringing this to our attention so that we might look into this with our local Atlanta team.” I’ve now gone from pissed to impressed with how fast that got fixed. Now I’m sure some of that has to do with my status at Hertz, but still -- Twitter can be a very effective line-cut into customer service.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/3lb3r3th/44072\">Misunderstood</a> by 3lb3r3th (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: Alchemistry</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>London Tube Story</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>A few weeks ago on one of my Saturday bike rides, I was listening to Craig and Linda Martin’s Indie Travel Podcast episode about using public transit and it got me thinking about my recent public transit experiences. We’ve talked about public transit in past episodes. I’ve kinda nerded out about a it a bit, especially taking public transit between a city and an airport.</li>\n 	<li>During our week in London at the end of June, we used the Tube a lot. Underground, it was surprisingly still warm and stuffy from the 40-year high temperatures the prior week when it had been very hot by British standards -- in the 30’s Celsius, the upper 80’s/low 90’s Farenheit. We were staying in the Fitzrovia neighborhood of London -- north of Oxford St, just off of Tottenham High Street near University College London. The area is well-served by a number of Tube lines, and we’d chosen it for easy Tube access to Wembley Stadium for the Adele concert.</li>\n 	<li>We headed out early, planning to get there a couple hours before show time because we expected security to be tight. We got on a train that was an interesting mix of commuters winding down their day and concert goers getting ramped up -- seated people heads down in their papers; standing groups of people chatting away, maybe slipping a sip of a canned gin &amp; tonic, maybe singing a little tune snippet.</li>\n 	<li>If you think about it, the trip to the concert wouldn’t be too bad -- people would be spread out across 2, maybe 3 hours worth of trains. The end of the concert, though -- 96,000 people leaving at once, and a huge sea of them heading for the Wembley Stadium tube stop. Luckily, the rain forecasted earlier in the week had hit London earlier in the day and the evening was dry. If not, the 30-45 minutes we spend shoulder-to-shoulder penguin-walking the third- to-half mile between our seats and the Tube stop would’ve been miserable. As it was, everyone was in good spirits (it had been a great concert), and polite and courteous (no shoving, not a lot of trying to snake up in front of others). The security police would hold up signs at an intersection -- one side in red would say “Stop”, the other side green with “Go”. And when they spun it around to “Stop” the crowd would stop. No one would try to slip around the edges or make a last dash. One cop was playing songs through his bullhorn for the crowd while they waited for the next “Go” sign. It was so crowded; so much could’ve easily gone wrong; but it didn’t. And once back on the Tube, we made it back to Fitzrovia in time for a nightcap.</li>\n 	<li>But I guess I shouldn’t be so surprised. Doesn’t that experience validate the English stereotype -- queues well, suffers through without complaining -- the whole “Keep Calm and Carry On” ethos -- and eventually get through to the other side in time for a pint at the pub.</li>\n 	<li>And maybe that’s what I really like about taking public transit. In past episodes, I talked about public transit as a way of popping the travel bubble, using it to get a real feeling for where you are. The whole “Mind the Gap” thing in the Tube is another very English thing, as is the small taped-off space where buskers can perform in the connecting passageways between lines. Compare that to the less structured Paris Metro experiences I described a few episodes ago -- of the tuba busker and the 3-person opera reenactment that took over the whole shop area of a Metro stop. Or the way people bringing their bikes onto a Portland, Oregon light rail car just solidifies the whole Portlandia image, or picking up the Chicago El in the Loop after the markets close, with the few traders who work the options pits, heading up to Wrigley for an afternoon Cubs game.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #131</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_131.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #131 — Twitter Concierge Customer Service; London Tube Story','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-131-twitter-concierge-customer-service-london-tube-story','','','2021-09-29 08:22:54','2021-09-29 13:22:54','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=1784',0,'post','',1),
(1785,1,'2017-07-31 11:07:57','2017-07-31 16:07:57','<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/IMG_0522.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1775\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/IMG_0522-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nIt\'s a <em>Mitteleuropa</em> episode, talking about last month\'s travels through Vienna and Hungary. I came away with good first impressions of Austrian Airlines and the Vienna airport. And, for the first time in many visits, saw Hungary through a tourist\'s eyes, spending time in Budapest and the Tokaj wine region. We also talk about how Google Translate has become pretty much indistinguishable from magic and the potential impact the privatization of the US air traffic control system might have on the general aviation industry. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_130.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/329896443\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Great Vienna Restaurant -- <a href=\"http://www.xn--gasthauspschl-qmb.com/\">Gasthaus Pöschl</a> (Weihburggasse 17)</li>\r\n 	<li>New York Times Sunday Magazine article -- <a href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/14/magazine/the-great-ai-awakening.html\">The Great AI Awakening</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Tokaj tour guide - <a href=\"http://www.tokajtoday.com/contact/\">Gergely Somogyi</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Tokaj wineries we visited\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/demeterzoltantokaj\">Zoltán Demeter</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"http://www.bottpince.hu/\">Bott Pince</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"http://new2017.samueltinon.com/en/\">Samuel Tinon</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"http://abrahampince.com/english/\">Ábrahám Pince</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hansatom/47919\">MBrilliant Day</a> by Hans Atom (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial license.  Ft: Lisa DeBenedictis</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/53277\">Fistful of Dub</a> (Feat. Snowflake and DJ Vadim) by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: snowflake and DJ Vadim</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #131 — Twitter Concierge Customer Service; London Tube Story','','inherit','closed','closed','','1784-revision-v1','','','2017-07-31 11:07:57','2017-07-31 16:07:57','',1784,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/07/31/1784-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1786,1,'2017-07-31 11:19:35','2017-07-31 16:19:35','','File_000','I have a craft beer problem...','inherit','open','closed','','file_000-3','','','2017-07-31 11:20:02','2017-07-31 16:20:02','',1784,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/File_000.jpeg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(1787,1,'2017-07-31 11:20:24','2017-07-31 16:20:24','[caption id=\"attachment_1786\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/File_000.jpeg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1786\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/File_000-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> I have a craft beer problem...[/caption]\r\n\r\nIt\'s a <em>Mitteleuropa</em> episode, talking about last month\'s travels through Vienna and Hungary. I came away with good first impressions of Austrian Airlines and the Vienna airport. And, for the first time in many visits, saw Hungary through a tourist\'s eyes, spending time in Budapest and the Tokaj wine region. We also talk about how Google Translate has become pretty much indistinguishable from magic and the potential impact the privatization of the US air traffic control system might have on the general aviation industry. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_130.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/329896443\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n<!--more--></div>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Great Vienna Restaurant -- <a href=\"http://www.xn--gasthauspschl-qmb.com/\">Gasthaus Pöschl</a> (Weihburggasse 17)</li>\r\n 	<li>New York Times Sunday Magazine article -- <a href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/14/magazine/the-great-ai-awakening.html\">The Great AI Awakening</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Tokaj tour guide - <a href=\"http://www.tokajtoday.com/contact/\">Gergely Somogyi</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Tokaj wineries we visited\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/demeterzoltantokaj\">Zoltán Demeter</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"http://www.bottpince.hu/\">Bott Pince</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"http://new2017.samueltinon.com/en/\">Samuel Tinon</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"http://abrahampince.com/english/\">Ábrahám Pince</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hansatom/47919\">MBrilliant Day</a> by Hans Atom (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial license.  Ft: Lisa DeBenedictis</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/53277\">Fistful of Dub</a> (Feat. Snowflake and DJ Vadim) by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: snowflake and DJ Vadim</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #131 — Twitter Concierge Customer Service; London Tube Story','','inherit','closed','closed','','1784-revision-v1','','','2017-07-31 11:20:24','2017-07-31 16:20:24','',1784,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/07/31/1784-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1788,1,'2017-07-31 11:28:09','2017-07-31 16:28:09','[caption id=\"attachment_1786\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/File_000.jpeg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1786\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/File_000-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> I have a craft beer problem...[/caption]\r\n\r\nIt\'s a <em>Mitteleuropa</em> episode, talking about last month\'s travels through Vienna and Hungary. I came away with good first impressions of Austrian Airlines and the Vienna airport. And, for the first time in many visits, saw Hungary through a tourist\'s eyes, spending time in Budapest and the Tokaj wine region. We also talk about how Google Translate has become pretty much indistinguishable from magic and the potential impact the privatization of the US air traffic control system might have on the general aviation industry. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_130.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/329896443\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Great Vienna Restaurant -- <a href=\"http://www.xn--gasthauspschl-qmb.com/\">Gasthaus Pöschl</a> (Weihburggasse 17)</li>\r\n 	<li>New York Times Sunday Magazine article -- <a href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/14/magazine/the-great-ai-awakening.html\">The Great AI Awakening</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Tokaj tour guide - <a href=\"http://www.tokajtoday.com/contact/\">Gergely Somogyi</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Tokaj wineries we visited\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/demeterzoltantokaj\">Zoltán Demeter</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"http://www.bottpince.hu/\">Bott Pince</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"http://new2017.samueltinon.com/en/\">Samuel Tinon</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"http://abrahampince.com/english/\">Ábrahám Pince</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hansatom/47919\">MBrilliant Day</a> by Hans Atom (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial license.  Ft: Lisa DeBenedictis</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/53277\">Fistful of Dub</a> (Feat. Snowflake and DJ Vadim) by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: snowflake and DJ Vadim</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #131 — Twitter Concierge Customer Service; London Tube Story','','inherit','closed','closed','','1784-revision-v1','','','2017-07-31 11:28:09','2017-07-31 16:28:09','',1784,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/07/31/1784-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1789,1,'2017-07-31 16:59:13','2017-07-31 21:59:13','[caption id=\"attachment_1786\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/File_000.jpeg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1786\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/File_000-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> I have a craft beer problem...[/caption]\r\n\r\nThis past week in Atlanta Hartfield Airport, when I traveled across four terminals to find a restaurant serving a nice selection of local Atlanta beers, I finally had to admit that I have a craft beer problem. In addition to this confession, I talk about about taking the London Underground back from the big Adele concert in Wembley Stadium. The experience proved out some of the positive stereotypes about the English -- queuing well and muddling through without complaining. I talk about hotel room flat screen TVs and using Twitter to quickly get Hertz to fix a mistaken refueling charge. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_131.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/329896443\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Great Vienna Restaurant -- <a href=\"http://www.xn--gasthauspschl-qmb.com/\">Gasthaus Pöschl</a> (Weihburggasse 17)</li>\r\n 	<li>New York Times Sunday Magazine article -- <a href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/14/magazine/the-great-ai-awakening.html\">The Great AI Awakening</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Tokaj tour guide - <a href=\"http://www.tokajtoday.com/contact/\">Gergely Somogyi</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Tokaj wineries we visited\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/demeterzoltantokaj\">Zoltán Demeter</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"http://www.bottpince.hu/\">Bott Pince</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"http://new2017.samueltinon.com/en/\">Samuel Tinon</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"http://abrahampince.com/english/\">Ábrahám Pince</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hansatom/47919\">MBrilliant Day</a> by Hans Atom (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial license.  Ft: Lisa DeBenedictis</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/53277\">Fistful of Dub</a> (Feat. Snowflake and DJ Vadim) by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: snowflake and DJ Vadim</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #131 — Twitter Concierge Customer Service; London Tube Story','','inherit','closed','closed','','1784-revision-v1','','','2017-07-31 16:59:13','2017-07-31 21:59:13','',1784,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/07/31/1784-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1790,1,'2017-07-31 18:54:00','2017-07-31 23:54:00','[caption id=\"attachment_1786\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/File_000.jpeg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1786\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/File_000-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> I have a craft beer problem...[/caption]\r\n\r\nThis past week in Atlanta Hartfield Airport, when I traveled across four terminals to find a restaurant serving a nice selection of local Atlanta beers, I finally had to admit that I have a craft beer problem. In addition to this confession, I talk about about taking the London Underground back from the big Adele concert in Wembley Stadium. The experience proved out some of the positive stereotypes about the English -- queuing well and muddling through without complaining. I talk about hotel room flat screen TVs and using Twitter to quickly get Hertz to fix a mistaken refueling charge. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_131.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/329896443\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mindmapthat/53340\">Dub the Uke</a> by Kara Square (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: DJ Vadim</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Suenjo/11162\">Natchoongi (New Hope Remix)</a> by Suenjo (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/3lb3r3th/44072\">Misunderstood</a> by 3lb3r3th (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: Alchemistry</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #131 — Twitter Concierge Customer Service; London Tube Story','','inherit','closed','closed','','1784-revision-v1','','','2017-07-31 18:54:00','2017-07-31 23:54:00','',1784,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/07/31/1784-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1791,1,'2017-07-31 19:08:36','2017-08-01 00:08:36','[caption id=\"attachment_1786\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/File_000.jpeg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1786\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/File_000-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> I have a craft beer problem...[/caption]\r\n\r\nThis past week in Atlanta Hartfield Airport, when I traveled across four terminals to find a restaurant serving a nice selection of local Atlanta beers, I finally had to admit that I have a craft beer problem. In addition to this confession, I talk about about taking the London Underground back from the big Adele concert in Wembley Stadium. The experience proved out some of the positive stereotypes about the English -- queuing well and muddling through without complaining. I talk about hotel room flat screen TVs and using Twitter to quickly get Hertz to fix a mistaken refueling charge. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_131.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below. [soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/335722294\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mindmapthat/53340\">Dub the Uke</a> by Kara Square (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: DJ Vadim</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Suenjo/11162\">Natchoongi (New Hope Remix)</a> by Suenjo (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/3lb3r3th/44072\">Misunderstood</a> by 3lb3r3th (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: Alchemistry</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #131 — Twitter Concierge Customer Service; London Tube Story','','inherit','closed','closed','','1784-revision-v1','','','2017-07-31 19:08:36','2017-08-01 00:08:36','',1784,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/07/31/1784-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1792,1,'2017-07-31 19:19:27','2017-08-01 00:19:27','[caption id=\"attachment_1667\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/IMG_0201.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1667\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/IMG_0201-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"An aggressive Uber Pool driver\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> An aggressive Uber Pool driver[/caption]\r\n\r\nBack from 10 days in Tuscany where, among other things, we thought we\'d avoid all the noise of the US presidential election. We succeeded... almost. One of my latest travel hobbies has been to quiz Uber drivers for their life stories. It makes for interesting rides to and from the airport. We also continue the ongoing thread about travel safety. This time, we talk about using Bluetooth in rental cars. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_125.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_124.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #125:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, with a new episode just in time for the TSA Thanksgiving lines. I’m once again thankful that I’m able to avoid O’Hare this week -- the busiest travel week of the year. Since the last episode, I’ve been in Boston, Baltimore, Charlottesville, Hoboken, and, for the first time, I landed at Lehigh Valley Regional Airport in Allentown, PA. I was surprised how nice an airport it is. I was expecting something smaller -- just a handful of gates -- and perhaps a bit dingier -- maybe something along the lines of White Plains, NY. But it was clean and bright with big concourses -- not a lot of people, but a lot of space.</li>\r\n 	<li>Then I had 3 weeks at home -- my longest non-travel streak this year. There is something relaxing about not packing and unpacking. It also makes you realize how much time you lose in the act of travel -- standing in lines, waiting for security, to board the plane, to check in to your hotel, to get a cup of coffee…. The whole time, though, I was looking forward to getting back on the road -- because my next trip was with my wife to Tuscany for our 25th anniversary, revisiting the scene of our honeymoon.</li>\r\n 	<li>We flew into Pisa by way of Munich, another new airport for me. But I was much less impressed by this one. Things were going fine -- nothing special in typical German airport style -- until we hit security. There were a dozen lines that were just crawling. There weren’t that many people trying to go through security -- it was 10 or 11am on a Friday -- but maybe the security union was on a work slowdown because they had to be going out of their way to work that slow. As is my wont, I bitch tweeted that out. Colin McDowell tweeted back -- “Totally agree. Slowest security of any major airport, like Gatwick in the ‘80’s. Shops must be suffering”. And the bars too. I didn’t have time for my traditional German airport breakfast beer.</li>\r\n 	<li>Things got better at Pisa Airport though. This was not a new airport; we had flown in here for our honeymoon. I had booked a Fiat 500 from Hertz for kinda old times sake; we’d driven a Fiat Panda 25 years ago. I was pleasantly surprised to find an Alfa Romeo in the parking slot. Definitely a move up from the Panda. And it was an automatic -- the first time I haven’t driven a stick in Europe. At first I was kinda disappointed, but later, when I was winding through the Tuscan hills and picking my way through rutted dirt roads, I was happy that the car was doing the shifting.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/buy_album.php?id=39CE51194FB95B63577FBFD7E2EC168C99277BD6CE86C10FDC39095666B5D6CF\"><em>Heaven</em></a> by <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=BB22CBFF24501120EEC6ABA18AB0A15FEB05A36360E7FDA122C8D7A5C140F8DC\" rel=\"nofollow\">Los Lonely Boys</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>A <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/08/13/podcast-123-how-to-avoid-travel-delays/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">few episodes</a> back, I complained about having to do an interview for my Global Entry renewal. I’d read online about others getting renewed without the interview, so I was a bit peeved to have to make my way past the lines at the McDonalds in the lower lever of ORD Terminal 5 yet again. But, other than the smell of fries at 9am on a Friday (I’m too old to start my weekends on Thursday nights), it was a fairly painless experience. I was ushered back less than 5 minutes after I’d arrived and had a very straight forward interview with the Customs and Border Protection agent. He was a great guy; good conversation. Asked me a couple of questions -- including one about my stolen passport -- took a new picture and a new set of fingerprints and I was done. 10 minutes later, I was making my way past the McDonalds again. As I thought about it, I had no reason to be peeved. Seems reasonable that they’d want to put an eyeball on me after 5 years.</li>\r\n 	<li>Jim McDonough posted a comment on the TravelCommons web site about my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/09/28/podcast-124-craft-beer-hunting-i-hate-rick-steves/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Rick Steves rant</a>. Jim writes:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>My wife and I love Rick Steves (we call ourselves Rickheads) and use his books all the time. But I know what you mean about his fans overwhelming a particular place. It’s funny how many people in the States have no idea who he is, but in Europe, Rick Steves sits at the right hand of the father. Get your restaurant or hotel into his book, and you have it made</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>And while I was able to dodge the Rickheads in Aberdeen, I knew I was toast in Tuscany. Even in November, I was shoulder-to-shoulder with older, sensibly dressed, empty-nester Rickheads toting their blue bibles through Pisa, Lucca, and Florence. Only when we were staying on a farm in Chianti a couple of miles up a rutted dirt road were we free of them.</li>\r\n 	<li>David Glickman sent me a note recommending a more detailed guide of Scotland for my next visit:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Living just outside London I am not sure I have never read a Rick Steves Guidebook, but what I recommend getting hold of Peter Irvine’s really excellent guide ‘Scotland The Best’ before your next trip to St.Andrews. My wife and I are regular visitors to the States, and my wife travels to Madison Wi about 6 times a year through ORD so we really enjoy your podcasts. We have just returned from a trip and boy is your country now expensive to us poor post-Brexit Brits!</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>I immediately hit Amazon and ordered the new 2016 edition of <a href=\"https://www.amazon.com/Scotland-Best-Peter-Irvine/dp/0007559348/ref=dp_ob_title_bk\"><em>Scotland The Best</em></a>. Very detailed, with lots of suggestions. Looking forward to giving it a workout on my next visit. And I can imagine the US looks very expensive for pound- and euro-based tourists. The euro dropped another 5% in the week-and-a-half we’ve been back from Italy.</li>\r\n 	<li>About a year ago in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/10/11/podcast-117-random-thoughts-about-eggs-scotland-car-rentals/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">episode #117</a>, I first talked about Revolut, a virtual and real chip-and-pin debit card with great exchange rates. I first used it last fall on a trip to the UK. I’d transfer funds into it using my US debit card and manage conversions with a smartphone app. It was great. But note my use of the past tense. Over the past 3 months, the service has been deteriorating for US users. First, they began charging a 3% fee on fund transfers using US debit cards. I soon found that they only charged the fee if those transfers were in dollars. If I transferred funds in euros or pounds, there was no charge. Weird, but OK, it still worked. But when I tried that trick before my trips to Scotland and Italy, no dice. All US debit transfers were blocked. I suppose I could’ve tried an interbank transfer using something like TransferWise, but that’s way too much of a hassle. They say they “aim to change it ASAP” but it’s been 3 months now and no update. I have to retract my praise for Revolut and delete the app from my iPhone.</li>\r\n 	<li>I mentioned in the last episode, that the lack of a chip-&amp;-pin card in Scotland has become less of a hassle with the spread of contactless card readers that let me use Apple Pay on my iPhone. I didn’t find that same convenience in Italy. I didn’t see one place with a contactless reader. Other than large restaurant bills (we managed to find tables at a few Michelin starred restaurants during our stay), I paid mostly cash. It seemed much less of a hassle.</li>\r\n 	<li>Over the last 3-4 episodes, we had one blurb that’s talked about travel security. Last episode was VPNs, the one before that video jacking. So in this installment of <em>Travel Security</em>, I want to talk about car rentals; specifically, about when you use Bluetooth to pair your smartphone with your rental’s audio system. I do this all the time. It’s safer -- let’s me talk handsfree, avoiding wrecks and tickets. And it lets me listen to podcasts or Pandora or Spotify when I’m driving instead of fiddling around, finding a local radio station that I don’t hate. However, if you do this, you need to remember to delete your pairing when you return your car. There hasn’t been one time when I haven’t gone through and deleted 3-5 pairings before pairing my own. And if you scroll through the devices, they all have personalized names like “Timmy’s iPhone”. And most phones by default will download your contacts to the car when paired. You can turn this default behavior off in an Android phone, but I haven’t found that capabilities with iPhones. Instead, every time I pair my iPhone, I have to remember to flip the switch that prevents it. So for most people, they leave behind a profile in their rental with all of their contacts and phone numbers. That is just bad in so many ways.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://cyberset.cc/artists2.php?tr_release_id=104\"><em>Heaven</em></a> by <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=A951998E6011FA9B2D22387EB3CAC0B5EB05A36360E7FDA122C8D7A5C140F8DC\" rel=\"nofollow\">Electric Skychurch</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Uber Driver Stories</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I find myself taking more and more Ubers as opposed to regular taxi cabs. I like cabs, I like cab drivers, but Uber is usually a better experience. Thumbing the app is so much easier than trying to hail a cab, or finding the number of the local cab company and then dealing with an often(?)/usually(?) cab dispatcher. And the condition of the car is, 9 times out of 10, vastly superior to the beat-up cab I usually get. The Baltimore cabs I’d take from the Inner Harbor to the airport were some of the worst. But then in Chicago I got picked by an Uber driver in a BMW X3 and by a spotless Mercedes SUV at EWR. Indeed, 9 times out of 10 is giving cabs way too much of the benefit of the doubt. I’ve yet to ride in an Uber that was worse than a cab.</li>\r\n 	<li>But the best thing about taking an Uber is driver stories. Every Uber I take, I ask the driver how he/she likes it, how long they’ve been doing it, and what else they do -- if it’s not their full time gig (which is the definite minority)</li>\r\n 	<li>A lotta drivers I talk with are retired. One guy in Vegas told me he was a bit lonely and bored. He wanted to get out of the house, but really had nowhere to go. He didn’t want to gamble or sit in a bar at 10 in the morning, so driving Uber gave him a reason to get off the sofa.</li>\r\n 	<li>A Charlottesville, VA retired fireman drives the late night weekend shift when kids from UVa are willing to pay anything (or willing to charge anything to their parents’ accounts) for a ride home from the bars. He told me he gets huge surge fares, but he’s driving ‘til 3 or 4 in the morning.</li>\r\n 	<li>A woman in Baltimore is a retired teacher and principal. She drives to take a break from studying for her PhD. She too gets bored sitting around the house, and she likes to drive. She told me that it was her husband who got her to sign up for Uber. She was driving him crazy around the house. Another guy, non-retired, who is studying full-time for his CFA exam -- chartered financial analyst -- does the same thing, drives during his study breaks.</li>\r\n 	<li>I find that many morning drivers -- the ones taking me from my hotel to a client site -- are doing a little moonlighting; fitting in a few rides before they go to work, and then again at the end of the day. I was surprised to find out that Uber drivers don’t know your destination until they accept the ride. Thinking about it, it makes sense; keeps drivers from cherry picking, say, rides to the airport. But one woman told me about accepting a ride and finding out it was to some suburb 40 minutes away -- and she only had a quarter tank.</li>\r\n 	<li>Of course, there’s more to ridesharing than Uber. I’ve also used Lyft. During busy times, I’ll fire them both up to see which has less of a surge charge, or a shorter wait time. Most drivers will drive for both. In my unscientific polling, most prefer Lyft but get more traffic from Uber. One driver told my wife he prefers Lyft because the Lyft riders talk more. And then he proceeded to unload his life story on my wife and her friend for the next 40 minutes as they battled traffic into Chicago.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’m always interested in how the gig economy is working for them. For a while, we were reading that the sharing economy, the gig economy of Uber and Airbnb was the next wave. The froth seems to have worn off of that wave, but a lot of the Uber drivers I talk to need that extra money, though often they wonder if it’s worth it. The Mercedes SUV driver who took me from EWR to Hoboken wondered if it was worth hassle of waiting for an airport fare. The only full-time driver I had was in Baltimore, and she said she makes more money delivering packages for Uber than she does delivering passengers, and the packages are much quieter and more pleasant.</li>\r\n 	<li>But as good as these stories are, the best one I recently heard wasn’t from an Uber driver; it was from the manager of the Chianti farm we stayed at for a couple of days during our trip to Italy. He had lived in the Chicago area for about 10 years. He got his PhD in geochemistry at Univ of Illinois and then worked at Argonne National Labs doing research. After a while, he missed his family and the countryside where he’d grown up, so he moved back to Tuscany, married, had a kid, and now manages a cattle farm with a growing sideline in agritourism. Forget driving for Uber. I want to be this guy.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://www.podsafeaudio.com/jamroom/play.php?band_id=1258&amp;song_id=4378&amp;mode=song_hifi\"><em>Shadows</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.podsafeaudio.com/jamroom/bands/1258/\">Antardhyan</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Overseas for the Election</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>My wife and I flew to Italy the Thursday night before the election. We both voted early, so we didn’t shirk our civic duties. What we did do, though, was leave behind the last blast of election ads and media coverage. I mean, the one bad thing about Game 7 of the World Series going into extra innings was that it gave more time for political ads. We were very happy to leave all that noise behind us.</li>\r\n 	<li>On Election Day, we had dinner in a nice restaurant in a small town that was 45 minutes of switchbacks and rutted dirt roads away from our hotel. On the way back, I think we dodged a boar and a deer as we crossed back over the ridge of hills and headed down to our hotel. We went to bed while the polls in the US were still open and didn’t really think a thing about it.</li>\r\n 	<li>I woke up around 7 on Weds morning; Tuesday midnight in Chicago. I glanced at my iPhone and saw a cascade of notifications from the Wall Street Journal and Chicago Tribune about the election results. The election still hadn’t been called, but by the time we sat down for breakfast, it was done. Donald Trump had won.</li>\r\n 	<li>The Austrian guy working the desk and the breakfast (it was a small hotel) laughed when he walked up -- “At least you guys aren’t having a do-over” The July Austrian presidential election was set aside for problems with absentee ballots and they still haven’t done the revote. “Or Spain, going through two elections without getting a government.”</li>\r\n 	<li>Now, TravelCommons has never had a political point-of-view and I’m not about to change that here. I have good friends on both sides of the debate. What I will say is that I, like many others, was surprised by the results given all the predictions we’d heard right up until we were wheels up at ORD. All through breakfast, we refreshed our Twitter feeds and hit the Wall Street Journal and New York Times apps, trying to catch up on the coverage we’d slept through the night before. Where the night before, we were happy not to hear about politics, now we were digging for an explanation for this upset.</li>\r\n 	<li>After an hour of this, and an extra cappuccino, we set the phones aside again. It was nice that we could do that -- walk away from the disbelief (and some might say panic) at the result that was spreading over the media (social and traditional), and schools, and I imagine in the workplaces. Instead, we were driving our little Alfa Romeo through some beautiful Chianti vineyards that were brilliantly yellow with the vine leaves changing colors. We stopped off at the Antinori winery for a bit of a tasting and then continued our drive to Florence. We knew we’d eventually get pulled into the post-election vortex, but we knew we were lucky -- we would be in a cone of silence for another 3 days.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #125</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://promonet.iodalliance.com\">IODA Promonet</a> and <a href=\"http://podsafeaudio.com/\">PodSafe Audio</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_125.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #125 — Uber Driver Stories; Overseas for the Election','','inherit','closed','closed','','1666-revision-v1','','','2017-07-31 19:19:27','2017-08-01 00:19:27','',1666,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/07/31/1666-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1793,1,'2017-07-31 19:19:45','2017-08-01 00:19:45','[caption id=\"attachment_1667\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/IMG_0201.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1667\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/IMG_0201-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"An aggressive Uber Pool driver\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> An aggressive Uber Pool driver[/caption]\r\n\r\nBack from 10 days in Tuscany where, among other things, we thought we\'d avoid all the noise of the US presidential election. We succeeded... almost. One of my latest travel hobbies has been to quiz Uber drivers for their life stories. It makes for interesting rides to and from the airport. We also continue the ongoing thread about travel safety. This time, we talk about using Bluetooth in rental cars. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_125.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_125.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #125:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, with a new episode just in time for the TSA Thanksgiving lines. I’m once again thankful that I’m able to avoid O’Hare this week -- the busiest travel week of the year. Since the last episode, I’ve been in Boston, Baltimore, Charlottesville, Hoboken, and, for the first time, I landed at Lehigh Valley Regional Airport in Allentown, PA. I was surprised how nice an airport it is. I was expecting something smaller -- just a handful of gates -- and perhaps a bit dingier -- maybe something along the lines of White Plains, NY. But it was clean and bright with big concourses -- not a lot of people, but a lot of space.</li>\r\n 	<li>Then I had 3 weeks at home -- my longest non-travel streak this year. There is something relaxing about not packing and unpacking. It also makes you realize how much time you lose in the act of travel -- standing in lines, waiting for security, to board the plane, to check in to your hotel, to get a cup of coffee…. The whole time, though, I was looking forward to getting back on the road -- because my next trip was with my wife to Tuscany for our 25th anniversary, revisiting the scene of our honeymoon.</li>\r\n 	<li>We flew into Pisa by way of Munich, another new airport for me. But I was much less impressed by this one. Things were going fine -- nothing special in typical German airport style -- until we hit security. There were a dozen lines that were just crawling. There weren’t that many people trying to go through security -- it was 10 or 11am on a Friday -- but maybe the security union was on a work slowdown because they had to be going out of their way to work that slow. As is my wont, I bitch tweeted that out. Colin McDowell tweeted back -- “Totally agree. Slowest security of any major airport, like Gatwick in the ‘80’s. Shops must be suffering”. And the bars too. I didn’t have time for my traditional German airport breakfast beer.</li>\r\n 	<li>Things got better at Pisa Airport though. This was not a new airport; we had flown in here for our honeymoon. I had booked a Fiat 500 from Hertz for kinda old times sake; we’d driven a Fiat Panda 25 years ago. I was pleasantly surprised to find an Alfa Romeo in the parking slot. Definitely a move up from the Panda. And it was an automatic -- the first time I haven’t driven a stick in Europe. At first I was kinda disappointed, but later, when I was winding through the Tuscan hills and picking my way through rutted dirt roads, I was happy that the car was doing the shifting.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/buy_album.php?id=39CE51194FB95B63577FBFD7E2EC168C99277BD6CE86C10FDC39095666B5D6CF\"><em>Heaven</em></a> by <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=BB22CBFF24501120EEC6ABA18AB0A15FEB05A36360E7FDA122C8D7A5C140F8DC\" rel=\"nofollow\">Los Lonely Boys</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>A <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/08/13/podcast-123-how-to-avoid-travel-delays/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">few episodes</a> back, I complained about having to do an interview for my Global Entry renewal. I’d read online about others getting renewed without the interview, so I was a bit peeved to have to make my way past the lines at the McDonalds in the lower lever of ORD Terminal 5 yet again. But, other than the smell of fries at 9am on a Friday (I’m too old to start my weekends on Thursday nights), it was a fairly painless experience. I was ushered back less than 5 minutes after I’d arrived and had a very straight forward interview with the Customs and Border Protection agent. He was a great guy; good conversation. Asked me a couple of questions -- including one about my stolen passport -- took a new picture and a new set of fingerprints and I was done. 10 minutes later, I was making my way past the McDonalds again. As I thought about it, I had no reason to be peeved. Seems reasonable that they’d want to put an eyeball on me after 5 years.</li>\r\n 	<li>Jim McDonough posted a comment on the TravelCommons web site about my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/09/28/podcast-124-craft-beer-hunting-i-hate-rick-steves/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Rick Steves rant</a>. Jim writes:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>My wife and I love Rick Steves (we call ourselves Rickheads) and use his books all the time. But I know what you mean about his fans overwhelming a particular place. It’s funny how many people in the States have no idea who he is, but in Europe, Rick Steves sits at the right hand of the father. Get your restaurant or hotel into his book, and you have it made</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>And while I was able to dodge the Rickheads in Aberdeen, I knew I was toast in Tuscany. Even in November, I was shoulder-to-shoulder with older, sensibly dressed, empty-nester Rickheads toting their blue bibles through Pisa, Lucca, and Florence. Only when we were staying on a farm in Chianti a couple of miles up a rutted dirt road were we free of them.</li>\r\n 	<li>David Glickman sent me a note recommending a more detailed guide of Scotland for my next visit:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Living just outside London I am not sure I have never read a Rick Steves Guidebook, but what I recommend getting hold of Peter Irvine’s really excellent guide ‘Scotland The Best’ before your next trip to St.Andrews. My wife and I are regular visitors to the States, and my wife travels to Madison Wi about 6 times a year through ORD so we really enjoy your podcasts. We have just returned from a trip and boy is your country now expensive to us poor post-Brexit Brits!</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>I immediately hit Amazon and ordered the new 2016 edition of <a href=\"https://www.amazon.com/Scotland-Best-Peter-Irvine/dp/0007559348/ref=dp_ob_title_bk\"><em>Scotland The Best</em></a>. Very detailed, with lots of suggestions. Looking forward to giving it a workout on my next visit. And I can imagine the US looks very expensive for pound- and euro-based tourists. The euro dropped another 5% in the week-and-a-half we’ve been back from Italy.</li>\r\n 	<li>About a year ago in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/10/11/podcast-117-random-thoughts-about-eggs-scotland-car-rentals/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">episode #117</a>, I first talked about Revolut, a virtual and real chip-and-pin debit card with great exchange rates. I first used it last fall on a trip to the UK. I’d transfer funds into it using my US debit card and manage conversions with a smartphone app. It was great. But note my use of the past tense. Over the past 3 months, the service has been deteriorating for US users. First, they began charging a 3% fee on fund transfers using US debit cards. I soon found that they only charged the fee if those transfers were in dollars. If I transferred funds in euros or pounds, there was no charge. Weird, but OK, it still worked. But when I tried that trick before my trips to Scotland and Italy, no dice. All US debit transfers were blocked. I suppose I could’ve tried an interbank transfer using something like TransferWise, but that’s way too much of a hassle. They say they “aim to change it ASAP” but it’s been 3 months now and no update. I have to retract my praise for Revolut and delete the app from my iPhone.</li>\r\n 	<li>I mentioned in the last episode, that the lack of a chip-&amp;-pin card in Scotland has become less of a hassle with the spread of contactless card readers that let me use Apple Pay on my iPhone. I didn’t find that same convenience in Italy. I didn’t see one place with a contactless reader. Other than large restaurant bills (we managed to find tables at a few Michelin starred restaurants during our stay), I paid mostly cash. It seemed much less of a hassle.</li>\r\n 	<li>Over the last 3-4 episodes, we had one blurb that’s talked about travel security. Last episode was VPNs, the one before that video jacking. So in this installment of <em>Travel Security</em>, I want to talk about car rentals; specifically, about when you use Bluetooth to pair your smartphone with your rental’s audio system. I do this all the time. It’s safer -- let’s me talk handsfree, avoiding wrecks and tickets. And it lets me listen to podcasts or Pandora or Spotify when I’m driving instead of fiddling around, finding a local radio station that I don’t hate. However, if you do this, you need to remember to delete your pairing when you return your car. There hasn’t been one time when I haven’t gone through and deleted 3-5 pairings before pairing my own. And if you scroll through the devices, they all have personalized names like “Timmy’s iPhone”. And most phones by default will download your contacts to the car when paired. You can turn this default behavior off in an Android phone, but I haven’t found that capabilities with iPhones. Instead, every time I pair my iPhone, I have to remember to flip the switch that prevents it. So for most people, they leave behind a profile in their rental with all of their contacts and phone numbers. That is just bad in so many ways.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://cyberset.cc/artists2.php?tr_release_id=104\"><em>Heaven</em></a> by <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=A951998E6011FA9B2D22387EB3CAC0B5EB05A36360E7FDA122C8D7A5C140F8DC\" rel=\"nofollow\">Electric Skychurch</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Uber Driver Stories</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I find myself taking more and more Ubers as opposed to regular taxi cabs. I like cabs, I like cab drivers, but Uber is usually a better experience. Thumbing the app is so much easier than trying to hail a cab, or finding the number of the local cab company and then dealing with an often(?)/usually(?) cab dispatcher. And the condition of the car is, 9 times out of 10, vastly superior to the beat-up cab I usually get. The Baltimore cabs I’d take from the Inner Harbor to the airport were some of the worst. But then in Chicago I got picked by an Uber driver in a BMW X3 and by a spotless Mercedes SUV at EWR. Indeed, 9 times out of 10 is giving cabs way too much of the benefit of the doubt. I’ve yet to ride in an Uber that was worse than a cab.</li>\r\n 	<li>But the best thing about taking an Uber is driver stories. Every Uber I take, I ask the driver how he/she likes it, how long they’ve been doing it, and what else they do -- if it’s not their full time gig (which is the definite minority)</li>\r\n 	<li>A lotta drivers I talk with are retired. One guy in Vegas told me he was a bit lonely and bored. He wanted to get out of the house, but really had nowhere to go. He didn’t want to gamble or sit in a bar at 10 in the morning, so driving Uber gave him a reason to get off the sofa.</li>\r\n 	<li>A Charlottesville, VA retired fireman drives the late night weekend shift when kids from UVa are willing to pay anything (or willing to charge anything to their parents’ accounts) for a ride home from the bars. He told me he gets huge surge fares, but he’s driving ‘til 3 or 4 in the morning.</li>\r\n 	<li>A woman in Baltimore is a retired teacher and principal. She drives to take a break from studying for her PhD. She too gets bored sitting around the house, and she likes to drive. She told me that it was her husband who got her to sign up for Uber. She was driving him crazy around the house. Another guy, non-retired, who is studying full-time for his CFA exam -- chartered financial analyst -- does the same thing, drives during his study breaks.</li>\r\n 	<li>I find that many morning drivers -- the ones taking me from my hotel to a client site -- are doing a little moonlighting; fitting in a few rides before they go to work, and then again at the end of the day. I was surprised to find out that Uber drivers don’t know your destination until they accept the ride. Thinking about it, it makes sense; keeps drivers from cherry picking, say, rides to the airport. But one woman told me about accepting a ride and finding out it was to some suburb 40 minutes away -- and she only had a quarter tank.</li>\r\n 	<li>Of course, there’s more to ridesharing than Uber. I’ve also used Lyft. During busy times, I’ll fire them both up to see which has less of a surge charge, or a shorter wait time. Most drivers will drive for both. In my unscientific polling, most prefer Lyft but get more traffic from Uber. One driver told my wife he prefers Lyft because the Lyft riders talk more. And then he proceeded to unload his life story on my wife and her friend for the next 40 minutes as they battled traffic into Chicago.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’m always interested in how the gig economy is working for them. For a while, we were reading that the sharing economy, the gig economy of Uber and Airbnb was the next wave. The froth seems to have worn off of that wave, but a lot of the Uber drivers I talk to need that extra money, though often they wonder if it’s worth it. The Mercedes SUV driver who took me from EWR to Hoboken wondered if it was worth hassle of waiting for an airport fare. The only full-time driver I had was in Baltimore, and she said she makes more money delivering packages for Uber than she does delivering passengers, and the packages are much quieter and more pleasant.</li>\r\n 	<li>But as good as these stories are, the best one I recently heard wasn’t from an Uber driver; it was from the manager of the Chianti farm we stayed at for a couple of days during our trip to Italy. He had lived in the Chicago area for about 10 years. He got his PhD in geochemistry at Univ of Illinois and then worked at Argonne National Labs doing research. After a while, he missed his family and the countryside where he’d grown up, so he moved back to Tuscany, married, had a kid, and now manages a cattle farm with a growing sideline in agritourism. Forget driving for Uber. I want to be this guy.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://www.podsafeaudio.com/jamroom/play.php?band_id=1258&amp;song_id=4378&amp;mode=song_hifi\"><em>Shadows</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.podsafeaudio.com/jamroom/bands/1258/\">Antardhyan</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Overseas for the Election</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>My wife and I flew to Italy the Thursday night before the election. We both voted early, so we didn’t shirk our civic duties. What we did do, though, was leave behind the last blast of election ads and media coverage. I mean, the one bad thing about Game 7 of the World Series going into extra innings was that it gave more time for political ads. We were very happy to leave all that noise behind us.</li>\r\n 	<li>On Election Day, we had dinner in a nice restaurant in a small town that was 45 minutes of switchbacks and rutted dirt roads away from our hotel. On the way back, I think we dodged a boar and a deer as we crossed back over the ridge of hills and headed down to our hotel. We went to bed while the polls in the US were still open and didn’t really think a thing about it.</li>\r\n 	<li>I woke up around 7 on Weds morning; Tuesday midnight in Chicago. I glanced at my iPhone and saw a cascade of notifications from the Wall Street Journal and Chicago Tribune about the election results. The election still hadn’t been called, but by the time we sat down for breakfast, it was done. Donald Trump had won.</li>\r\n 	<li>The Austrian guy working the desk and the breakfast (it was a small hotel) laughed when he walked up -- “At least you guys aren’t having a do-over” The July Austrian presidential election was set aside for problems with absentee ballots and they still haven’t done the revote. “Or Spain, going through two elections without getting a government.”</li>\r\n 	<li>Now, TravelCommons has never had a political point-of-view and I’m not about to change that here. I have good friends on both sides of the debate. What I will say is that I, like many others, was surprised by the results given all the predictions we’d heard right up until we were wheels up at ORD. All through breakfast, we refreshed our Twitter feeds and hit the Wall Street Journal and New York Times apps, trying to catch up on the coverage we’d slept through the night before. Where the night before, we were happy not to hear about politics, now we were digging for an explanation for this upset.</li>\r\n 	<li>After an hour of this, and an extra cappuccino, we set the phones aside again. It was nice that we could do that -- walk away from the disbelief (and some might say panic) at the result that was spreading over the media (social and traditional), and schools, and I imagine in the workplaces. Instead, we were driving our little Alfa Romeo through some beautiful Chianti vineyards that were brilliantly yellow with the vine leaves changing colors. We stopped off at the Antinori winery for a bit of a tasting and then continued our drive to Florence. We knew we’d eventually get pulled into the post-election vortex, but we knew we were lucky -- we would be in a cone of silence for another 3 days.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #125</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://promonet.iodalliance.com\">IODA Promonet</a> and <a href=\"http://podsafeaudio.com/\">PodSafe Audio</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_125.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #125 — Uber Driver Stories; Overseas for the Election','','inherit','closed','closed','','1666-revision-v1','','','2017-07-31 19:19:45','2017-08-01 00:19:45','',1666,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/07/31/1666-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1794,1,'2017-07-31 19:21:29','2017-08-01 00:21:29','[caption id=\"attachment_1387\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/IMG_0002.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1387\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/IMG_0002-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Just a little snug for the next 14 hours...\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> It\'ll be a bit snug for the next 14 hours...[/caption]\r\n\r\nI tried to hold back, but I just couldn\'t. I <em>have</em> to finally weigh in on the seatback recline wars. I\'m stunned at the number of people who convert a couple of inches of seat movement into some sort of Manichean morality play. From that you can probably guess where I come out on this. On a much lighter side, I talk about finally taking Atlanta\'s MARTA subway from the airport and tagging on some beer hunting to some Midwest business travel. All this and more  at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_111.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below. [sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_111.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #111:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL having, through nothing other than sheer blind luck, dodged the cancellations caused by fire and attempted suicide at the <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Air_Route_Traffic_Control_Center\">Air Route Traffic Control Center</a> in Aurora, IL. Wasn’t that a heck of a story. A guy living outside Chicago tips over the edge after being told he’s getting transferred to Hawaii. It usually happens the other way around, especially after last winter.</li>\r\n 	<li>And it’s still a mess. Kinda helped me with my decision to drive to Indianapolis last Friday. Indy is right on the cusp of the fly-vs-drive break point -- about 180 miles from Chicago but it’s straight, flat, and most of it has a 70 mph speed limit. Also pushed me to take a break from ORD this week. Aurora’s supposed to be back online Oct 13 which is the next airline ticket I have, so I hope someone is cracking the whip over there.</li>\r\n 	<li>This episode should sound better than the last one. I did some eBay shopping and significantly upgraded my recording rig. I’d been recording with an iRiver MP3 recorder/player and little condenser mic since the beginning of this podcast. Unfortunately, iRiver didn’t feel like upgrading the drivers from Windows XP to Windows 7 or 8, and when my last XP machine was converted to a VMWare image, it just got to be a hassle pulling the audio off of it. So I applied a firmware upgrade that was supposed to make it look like a regular jump drive, which it did, but it also reduced the gain, the volume on my mic to almost nothing. After struggling with it for a bit, I finally gave up. The last episode was recorded on my HTC One with a significant amount of massaging in Adobe Audition. But now, I think I’ve got something that’ll work. We’ll see how this goes.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/beyond7-revelations/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Miss America</em></a> by Beyond 7</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Regular listeners know that I always like to check out rapid transit to and from airports. On a trip to Atlanta last month, I finally decided to buck up and try <a href=\"http://www.itsmarta.com/\">MARTA</a>. I’ve flown into Atlanta for years, but always rented a car because I never did work in Atlanta, always some place between 10 o’clock and 2 o’clock on the I-285 beltway. Which is always lovely because the airport sits at 6 o’clock -- directly opposite of where I normally need to be. So my usual MO is to rent a car and grind it out through the traffic -- either straight up the city or around the beltway -- which is why I try very hard to avoid meetings in Atlanta. So anyway, on this particular Thursday, I caught the 6am flight from ORD, hitting Atlanta right at the tail end of the morning rush. I guess I was being a bit passive aggressive on this trip, but I didn’t book a rental car. I just didn’t want to deal with the traffic. I had planned on taking a cab, but walking past the MARTA station in the airport, I plugged the office address into Google Maps and hit the Transit button, and found it was a straight shot up the Red Line and then a 5 minute walk from the station. For a $2.50 fare, it seemed worth a shot. And it was. The toughest part was trying to figure out which station exit to use so that I got on the correct side of the six-lane divided street I needed to walk along. I got it wrong the first time. I was pleasantly surprised, though, to find sidewalks -- not a common amenity in office park land. The lone pedestrian sprinting across a couple of intersections to avoid turning cars, I got to my destination without fighting traffic and more than an order of magnitude cheaper than cab fare.</li>\r\n 	<li>I got an interesting reaction from people when I told them about my morning’s MARTA journey. “Well that’s adventuresome” and “What time were you on? Rush hour? That’s OK. I wouldn’t try that after dark though” I never felt unsafe or uncomfortable during my ride. But then again, I never felt unsafe on train rides in Brussels -- until my backpack was stolen. I never felt unsafe on DC’s Metro system -- until the day a woman reached across the aisle, tapped my arm and strongly suggested that I put my iPad away. But I dunno, MARTA seemed as safe as the Metro system or the L in Chicago. And it was a damn sight cleaner than BART in San Francisco. I’ll take it again when I have to go back down to Atlanta in two weeks.</li>\r\n 	<li>Especially after I sprung the dollar for the Breeze card, which is the contactless/touch card that MARTA now requires you to buy instead of issuing the little paper cards like New York or DC. The fare machine concierge assured me “It’s good for 10 years!” Yes, provided I remember to bring it with me next time. These things are starting to stack up. I have a London Oyster card in some desk drawer; I forgot how much that card cost me. Chicago’s <a href=\"https://www.ventrachicago.com/\">Ventra </a>card cost $5(!) which they say will be put back on the card if I register it -- which I did but didn’t see any $5 credit. Maybe all these new cards are great for regular riders, but for the minority like me -- the occasional rider -- it’s a bit of a pain; more cost, more confusion, and a growing stack of plastic in my desk drawer. The Chicago system theoretically lets you use the NFC capabilities of newer Android phones like my HTC One to tap and pay with Google Wallet. I’m planning to check that out the next time I take the L. Would’ve been nice to know before I sprung the $5, but I’ll look harder for that when I’m in a new city. Of course, we could always go back to the cash box, like they still have on the New Orleans streetcars. But there I’m find myself fishing around for a quarter to drop the exact change into the cash box. For all the whining, it’s still better than renting a car.</li>\r\n 	<li>In <a title=\"Podcast #107 — Serious About Hotel Reviews; TSA Gets Something Right!\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/01/29/podcast-107-serious-about-hotel-reviews-tsa-gets-something-right/\">episode #107</a> earlier this year, I talked about the checklist I run through when I decide to review a hotel on TripAdvisor -- the bathroom, room size, workout room, location, service quality. And it’s that last one -- service quality -- that I really see the difference. It’s not at the front desk. Hotels have their training and employee selection programs nailed. It’s been a long time since I’ve been treated with anything less than enthusiastic hospitality. No, where it falls down is the back of the house. The latest example was a couple of weeks ago. I check in around 5:30. Walking up to my room, I see dirty room service dishes -- the little ketchup and mustard bottles suggest it was the remnants of a burger. I get ready to turn around -- I bet they gave me an occupied room by mistake. But nope, my key worked and the room was clean and empty. Hmmm… I call down to the front desk to tell them about the dishes. The very nice woman who just checked me in greeted me by name and apologize profusely, saying she’d send someone up right away. I walk out for dinner. I come back a couple hours later -- dishes are still there. I go out a bit later to grab a beer -- dishes are still there. I come back -- yup, the burger carcass is still there. Now I’m thinking, what else is lying around. I call back down to the nice woman. I’ll be checking out tomorrow morning.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any travel experiences -- thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons\">Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/westexit-extra/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>On Condition of Anonymity</em></a> by the West Exit</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Last Word (Hopefully) On Seatback Recline Wars</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I’ve resisted doing this topic, but how can I claim to be doing a podcast that gives the “voice of the traveler” and is “more about the journey than the destination” and not take some cut at whole seatback recline option explosion? Because it seems like no one else -- hard core traveler or rank amateur -- has kept their thoughts to themselves. The sheer amount of time and words -- physical or cyber -- devoted to this topic has been amazing.</li>\r\n 	<li>Let’s separate the specific from the general. First, let’s recap the incident that lit the fuse. A guy on his last leg home from Moscow, sitting in United’s Economy Plus, uses a Knee Defender to keep the woman in front of him from reclining her seat so he can get some work done on his laptop. She flags down the flight attendant about her seemingly malfunctioning seat, the flight attendant notices the Knee Defender and tells the guy to take it off. He does, and the woman slams her seat back to full recline. When she goes to the rest room, he pushes her seat back up and puts his Knee Defender back in. She comes back, pissed that she can’t recline her seat, tosses her glass of Sprite at him. The pilot makes an unscheduled landing to them both off the plane where, surprisingly, neither of them are rung up on charges.</li>\r\n 	<li>So the first thing to say is -- yes, these are two grown adults -- which is head-shakingly amazing. This would be out-of-bounds behavior at a ball park or a rock concert, let alone in a packed metal tube hurtling along at 600 mph at 36,000 feet. Now, that being said and in no way forgiving the woman, the guy was definitely the bigger pinhead in this escapade.</li>\r\n 	<li>The guy is 6’-1” -- about my size so I’ve got a pretty good frame of reference. Sitting in United’s Economy Plus, he had a extra 3-4 inches over the folks in the back of the plane. It’s roomy as coach seats go. When I’m flying United, I’ll regularly choose an E+ middle seat over a regular E aisle seat. From first hand experience, I call bull on his premise that he needed to use the Knee Defender to work on his laptop -- unless he has an undisclosed medical condition requiring him to type with completely extended arms, or his arms are long enough so he can tie his shoes without bending over.</li>\r\n 	<li>And moving from the specific case to the general discussion (argument?) about the morality of seat reclines, why does this guy (or anybody) think their right to work on a flight trumps another passenger’s right to comfort? I got it -- lots of people need those 2, 3, 4 hours to crank out stuff. But likewise, when I’m catching a 6:30am flight out Monday morning, I need to an hour or two of sleep to make it through the end of the day. And I don’t know of anyone who can sleep without reclining their seat. Which again get me to the question -- what’s with people casting this as some sort of Manichean morality play -- sitting straight up -- Good (morally upright?); space-hogging slouching recliners -- pure Evil.</li>\r\n 	<li>Of course, there are ways around this -- they just cost money. If you need the extra space to work -- or sleep -- then pay the extra money for a seat in something like United’s Economy Plus or American’s Main Cabin Extra -- or flight them enough to earn status and you get it for free. As I said earlier, I regularly give up shoulder space for leg room. Unfortunately, it’s a choice I have to make more often than I like, booking flights at the last minute in this age of high plane utilization. Need more space, get more status or buy a more expensive ticket that will get you to the top of the queue for an upgrade. Or just buy the 1st class ticket you need the space.</li>\r\n 	<li>But that’s not the story we want to hear -- we want more space than we’re willing to pay for. Airlines are pushing seats closer together because travelers shop purely on price -- a seat is a commodity. Years ago, American Airlines tried to differentiate themselves on legroom, pulling out rows of seats to increase pitch. I would fly those planes whenever I could. Unfortunately for American, I was in the small minority. They got their clocks cleaned and eventually had to put those rows back in. Most travelers don’t pay attention to seat pitch. They just click on the cheapest fare and then bitch about the lack of space.</li>\r\n 	<li>Don’t want to pay for the extra space, then do what our guy did when he had to get home after his unscheduled connection in Chicago. He flew Spirit. Their seats don’t recline.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/solace-medusa/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Subtle Vice</a> </em>by Solace</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Sneaking In Some Craft Beer Tourism</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>As regular podcast listeners <a title=\"Podcast #101 — Future of Mileage Tracking Tools; Searching for Local Food and Craft Beer\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/10/25/podcast-101-future-of-mileage-tracking-tools-searching-for-local-food-and-craft-beer/\">know</a>, I’m pretty much all-in with the US craft brew explosion. I was drinking Sierra Nevada in the ‘80’s while\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_1388\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/2012-10-11-16.11.25.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1388\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/2012-10-11-16.11.25-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Patron Saint of Craft Brewers\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Patron Saint of Craft Brewers[/caption]\r\n\r\nskiing at Lake Tahoe, got deep into Belgian beers in the early ‘90’s when I would travel to Brussels a half-dozen times a year while selling to the pharmaceutical industry, started homebrewing in the mid ‘90’s, and have just continued onward.</li>\r\n 	<li>The listeners who I’m friends with on <a href=\"https://untappd.com/\">Untappd</a> can see that I’ve checked in over 2,200 unique beers. It’s a passion that one could arguably say has tipped over a bit to obsession. So when I had a couple of Midwest trips recently -- I mentioned the Indy run, but also had a couple days in St Louis in September -- rather than bolting out of town immediately after my meetings, I did a bit of craft beer tourism, hitting some of the local microbreweries. In St Louis, where I had a bit more time, I hit <a href=\"http://urbanchestnut.com/home\">Urban Chestnut</a> for a dunkelweiss and a board full of knockwurst, stewed apples, cabbage, and pumpernickel bread -- which I managed to consume during a conference call with the judicious use of the mute button. I had some great sour beers at <a href=\"http://www.perennialbeer.com/\">Perennial Ales</a>, and then at <a href=\"http://www.thecivillife.com/\">Civil Life Brewing</a>, a very English pub-like place (not in the ersatz way of Union Jacks and Tube signs hanging around, but in the true sense of a pub -- a cozy local place) I had yet more encased meat -- a Hungarian bratwurst this time. Which was very pleasant change considering everything I’d eaten over the prior 48 hours had been from the Airport Marriott.</li>\r\n 	<li>In Indianapolis, I only had time for one stop and as it turned out, my meeting was 8 minutes away from<a href=\"http://www.sunkingbrewing.com/\"> Sun King Brewing</a>. I followed the line of growler-toting folks into the brewery. No taproom, but they gave me tickets and bottle caps good for 6 small samples. They had a Friday sale on growlers, but I’m already long in glassware, and when’s the next time I’m gonna be in Indy? Instead, I bought a couple of 4-packs of the beers I liked best. Since I drove, I didn’t have to make that decision -- is the beer good enough to justify checking luggage?</li>\r\n 	<li>Nowadays most hotel bars will have at least one decent craft beer on tap or available in bottles. The St Louis Airport Marriott had a nice selection with about 4 local draft handles including a <a href=\"http://schlafly.com/\">Schlafly </a>pumpkin beer -- not my favorite style, but you gotta give them props for giving it a tap. The Sheraton on Canal St in New Orleans has stepped up its game -- adding 1-2 more local taps in addition to the ubiquitous Abita tap. But on that 4th or 5th week in the same hotel -- or more; I just made Starwood Platinum at the Canal St Sheraton -- even those additional taps start to get boring. Luckily, some of the upscale grocery stores like Whole Foods are also tapped into the craft beer trend and sell single beers. On my first day in New Orleans, I tend to swing by <a href=\"https://shop.rouses.com/\">Rouse’s</a>, kind of a local version of Whole Foods, grab a couple of good beers and take them back to the Sheraton. The first time I did this, though, I had a problem -- there wasn’t a bottle opener in the room; these craft beers don’t typically come in twist-offs. I’m rummaging around, but nothing. It kinda pulled me up short -- when did hotels stop stocking their rooms with bottle openers? I go down to the front desk. They’re pretty puzzled too -- they start rummaging around their drawers. “Maybe you can borrow one from the bar?” Ever since, I always pack a bottle opener in my backpack. Just another thing to keep in the travel kit.</li>\r\n 	<li>Some airports are serving up great beer. I found two microbrewery joints at BWI, and I always try to swing by the <a href=\"http://www.greatlakesbrewing.com/home\">Great Lakes Brewery</a> spot in CLE. But in my last trip through ATL, a bartender saw me struggling with her Bud/Coors/Sam Adams draft selection. “Go down to the end of the terminal,” she said, “there’s a new craft beer bar just opened up” Great! I wheel my bag down the terminal but pull up short of the bar. This new beer bar is a smoking bar! That’s right -- I’m in the South. I watch the cigarette smoke billow out under the door. I turn around a walk away. Even an obsession has its limits.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917626811171154.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #111</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>The bridge music is from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Magnatune</a>, the <em>we are not evil</em> label. <em>Miss America</em> by Beyond 7, <em>On Condition of Anonymity</em> by the West End, and <em>Subtle Vice</em> by Solace. You can find these and more at <a href=\"http://magnatune.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">magnatunes.com</a>.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_111.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #111 — Seatback Recline Wars; Craft Beer Tourism','','inherit','closed','closed','','1380-revision-v1','','','2017-07-31 19:21:29','2017-08-01 00:21:29','',1380,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/07/31/1380-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1795,1,'2017-07-31 19:24:46','2017-08-01 00:24:46','[caption id=\"attachment_1749\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/IMG_0033.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1749\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/IMG_0033-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> One of the Four Major Food Groups[/caption]\r\n\r\nIt\'s a very Paris-centric episode; I\'m still trying to drop the weight I picked up on our 10-day stay. I talk about hunts for beer and pastry took us out of the usual Notre Dame-to-Eiffel Tower-to-Louvre tourist triangle, some of the interesting buskers we saw along the way, and my surprise at Munich Airport receiving an airport award. I also continue our on-going discussions about buying international SIM cards and ride-sharing. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_128.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/315640920\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n<!--more-->\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #128:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, after a full month of travel. I’m not complaining though, because -- first, I had been home, off the road, for 4 weeks straight and was beginning to make the place look untidy; and then more than a week of this travel spurt was in Paris, on vacation with the family. Tough to complain about travel with your mouth full of great food and wine. And mine certainly was. I’m not even looking at a scale for another 2 weeks.</li>\r\n 	<li>In what’s become our usual pattern for European trips, we flew out on a Thursday night. This works out well because typically Friday is a catch-up day at work -- more about internal conference calls than client work -- so it’s easier to skip out, and then landing on a Friday, more places are open -- like rental agency offices, phone stores -- if you need them. My wife and I flew into Paris and had a 3-star Michelin lunch to chase away jet lag, while the kids met up in Edinburgh for the weekend and lived off of beer and haggis. They then hopped one of the budget carriers to CDG Sunday night and managed to figure out the train well enough to land at the doorstep of our vacation rental on Rue de Rivoli, a bridge and a couple of blocks straight up from Notre Dame. My wife has this whole vacation rental thing down to a near science. I think I need to nag her into writing it up in a post for the TravelCommons web site.</li>\r\n 	<li>In the travel build-up to the Paris trip, another usual pattern; this one involves a bit more stupid travel -- bouncing across multiple clients and cities, to give everyone face-time before I disappear for a week; I found myself in Miami for a couple of days. I flew American back home to Chicago Friday night, and I guess because I was going between two of their hubs, I ended up on one of American’s international 767’s. Now, I typically despise 767’s because the overhead bins are way undersized. But, it was one of the best domestic upgrades I’ve scored. First, because between First and Business class, there’s a whole lot more seat for an upgrade. And then, this 767’s business class had been upgraded, so I had my own “pod” with a lie-flat seat and a 20-something inch screen -- much bigger than the screen smaller than my hand that I tweeted from the United 767 I took from ORD to CDG. Made for a very comfortable 3-hr flight.</li>\r\n 	<li>But back to Paris, the trip went without a hitch -- the strong dollar made an expensive a city a little less so, the weather was great for March -- sunny, a bit brisk. I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to get around with just English. I know I’m a language sloth, and while I didn’t expect it, I was happy not to have to struggle through with my minimal French. Indeed, the only smirch on trip was at the very end. We landed at ORD after 7pm, after half of Immigration shut down. The resulting lines were insane; Security was walking planeloads of people from the other side of the international terminal to our side and to the back of our line. They were shouting for all US citizens to get stand to the left of the hallway. After about 10 minutes of this, I asked a security person about Global Entry. “Oh, go this way,” she said and pointed down an empty line. We bolted, and were out after another 5 minutes. Customs should’ve had a guy walking that line taking Global Entry applications. They would’ve made a killing.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://www.magnatune.com/artists/albums/rompaey-mozaic/\">Bubbly</a></em> by Ruben van Rompaey</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>First up, a belated Thank You to iTunes user <em>California flying</em> for the 5-star review back in January:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>“As a project manager with lots of travel thrown in, I really enjoy hearing Mark’s travel tales and can very much relate to his insight and observations. It’s an easy and fun listen. Just wish it was more frequent!”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Thanks for taking the time to write that review. I’m glad you enjoy the podcast. I am trying on the frequency. This will be 3 straight months of episodes, so we’re starting 2017 in the right way.</li>\r\n 	<li>In the last episode, after deconstructing my own Top 10 travel tips list, I asked for listener contributions. Dan wrote this on the TravelCommons web site\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>“My biggest travel tip right now to my friends is get Nexus! Not only is it great when coming or going to the US (we live in Canada), but it gets you TSA Precheck while in the US which is great to have.”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Good tip, Dan. As a US citizen, I’m still a bit confused on the Global Entry vs. Nexus choice. But anything that lets you skip Immigration lines and keep from having to disrobe in the security line is a good thing.</li>\r\n 	<li>Dan Brener and Max Flight both hit the TravelCommons’ Facebook page to say they found the VPN comparison in the last episode useful. Dan said that he also uses PIA and has found that, sometimes, Netflix will let it connect -- which I mentioned is kinda the acid test for location shifting. Dan says it is a bit hit-&amp;-miss though.</li>\r\n 	<li>Continuing the thread from the past couple of episodes on buying pay-as-you-go-SIMs when overseas, my Paris experiences were a mixed bag. On that first Friday, between picking up the apartment keys and heading to the George V for lunch, I wanted to pick up at least one SIM so we’d have some connectivity. I walked to nearest Orange store -- about 3 blocks down Rue de Rivoli. They didn’t have any regular prepaid SIMs in stock; only the special Holiday SIM which had inter-EU calling which I didn’t need and, at 40 euros, was more than I needed to pay. This became a common refrain. Every company-owned Orange and SFR store I visited was out of prepaid SIMs. Only what appeared to be a franchised Orange store in the bottom of the big underground shopping mall at Les Halles had them, and also very friendly service. That got us through the weekend. On Monday, after another string of Orange stiff arms, we walked up to the main Free store -- which I think sells TV as well as mobile service. We walked up to a vending machine in the lobby and pretty quickly had two more SIMs; a much better buying experience except for the fact that the store was inconveniently tucked away down a bland business street north of the Champs Elysee. I’ll be glad when the eSIM gets market traction.</li>\r\n 	<li>And continuing another thread, this one on Uber, while I regularly use Uber and Lyft in the US, I rarely -- if ever -- use them while traveling in Europe. I got to thinking about this while in Paris when, on Saturday when heading to the airport, we chose to roll the luggage to a taxi rank rather than use Uber. It’s a couple of reasons. First, there doesn’t seem to be that much of a price difference between Uber and taxis. I first noticed this in Lisbon last spring and then again in Paris. Second, most taxis in Europe are not the beaters that many US cabs are. In the US, even at the same rate, I’ll often take Uber because the cars are in so much better shape. The cabs in Baltimore last summer were the most egregious case. There was a cab stand right outside the building I was in, but I’d still wait 5 minutes for an Uber. And third, and maybe the most nebulous (squishy?), I’m maybe a bit less comfortable getting into a ride-share in a country where I don’t know the language and am not confident that I’m solid on the customs and protocols. In the US, I know what’s right and what’s not. Even in the UK, I’m comfortable enough and don’t worry about communicating effectively with the driver. I know zero Portuguese and little more French. So I’m a bit more willing to search out a taxi stand.</li>\r\n 	<li>I was flipping through the online version of the UK’s Telegraph newspaper earlier this month and got clickbaited into a Top 10 Airport listicle from the 2017 Skytrax World Airport Awards. They had all the usual suspects at the top of the list -- Singapore, Seoul, Hong Kong -- but at #4, they had Munich! I was stunned because my last two experiences connecting through Munich -- last Nov en route to Pisa and this month on my way back from Paris -- were not great as my Twitter followers already know. Probably the worst thing are the lines, and how brutally slow they move. Back in episode #125, I described the security crawl when trying to connect to our Pisa flight mid-morning on a Friday. I was stunned how slow the security staff was moving. No sense of urgency as a dozen lines tailed back through the terminal. I thought a union had called for some job action. But then in March, it was a huge tailback off of passport control. I’m used to Frankfurt where you walk up, answer a question, boom-boom they stamp your passport and through you go. Not in Munich. It was that same meandering pace. Like the place was in slow motion. The same thing at the one restaurant we found in the satellite portion of Terminal 2. Four people were behind the counter. The line trying to ordering tailed back, but only one of the four was helping customers. The other three were having some conversation and doing some paperwork. So why did Skytrax rate Munich #4? Apparently, it has its own brewery, a mini-golf course, and in the winter, a Christmas market and an ice skating rink -- none of which I experienced while struggling through lines trying to make a connection. And maybe that’s the problem -- Munich is focused on being a shopping mall/entertainment center rather than being an airport. Planning a flight to Budapest in May, I was offered two connection choices -- Munich or Vienna. I didn’t even pause to think about it. choosing Vienna, even though it’s nowhere in that Skytrax list. I’m hoping they’ll work harder on getting me through the airport than grooming a mini-golf course.</li>\r\n 	<li>And finally, congrats to Frank Mohnhaupt for winning a year\'s subscription to NordVPN. Frank’s entry in the Rafflecopter drawing was subscribing to the TravelCommons’ SoundCloud feed. And thanks again to NordVPN for providing the giveaway prize.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/kokoon-berlin/\">How Do I Work This</a></em> by The Kokoon</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>The Hunt for Experiences</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>In Paris, that first weekend when it was just my wife and I -- the kids were hunting haggis in Edinburgh -- was spent a good chunk of the time on what I call “hunts”. We got up and out early on Saturday -- always a good way to fight jet lag -- hunting for a pastry. Not just any pastry, because in Paris, that would in no way qualify as a hunt. No, it was a specific kind of pastry -- a kugelhopf, a kind of a hat-shaped pastry. And not just any kugelhopf. We were tracking down Vandermeersch, which, according to an article my wife read in Saveur magazine, makes the best kugelhopf in Paris and usually sells out shortly after opening -- hence the early morning alarm. So off we go, using Google Maps to tell us the right combination of Metros to get us to the correct outer bit of Paris. We get there shortly after opening and had the full selection of kugelhopfs -- small, medium, large. The couple of nice middle-aged women running what was a small shop helped us to by 2 smalls -- one to eat right away; the second for Sunday morning -- and a medium for Monday morning for breakfast with the kids. We ate that small one fresh, on the street. I don’t know if it was the best kugelhopf because my sample size was (and still is) one, but it was a pretty damn good pastry and worth forgoing the snooze button the early alarm.</li>\r\n 	<li>Saturday afternoon, we went on my hunt -- for a microbrewery, in an even further out bit of Paris, that’s only open Saturday afternoons. And where our morning visit to Vandermeersch landed us in a seemingly upscale neighborhood where people were up early for the morning runs along the grass boulevard dividers, that afternoon, we walked up the Metro steps on the main street of a heavily North African neighborhood; definitely outside the tourist bubble. Walking across the park here -- no grass, just dirt.</li>\r\n 	<li>But walking into the microbrewery, off kind of a dodgy street, put us in the midst of what seemed to be the standard afternoon outing for Parisian hipster families. Mostly while families with little kids; lots of bikes and beers; everyone eating sandwiches sold by an artisanal baker who looked to be friends of the brewers (his t-shirt read (in English) “More Bakers, Less Bankers”). Nice people; great beer. But an interesting contrast with the surrounding neighborhood. Inside the brewery, I could’ve been in Brooklyn or Portland. Outside, on the main street, maybe Algiers.</li>\r\n 	<li>Good pastry, good beer, but the hunt -- searching out these experiences -- is as much it’s own reward. It gave us a reason, a goal, to get out of the travel bubble, off the well-trod Notre Dame-to-Eiffel Tower-to-Louvre tourist triangle. Not that we didn’t do that too -- we did -- but if that’s all we did, it would have been a bit disappointing. And that we did it on our own, rather than as part of some “Hipster Paris” tour, gives an added touch of accomplishment.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music --<em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/weigl-proof/\">Piano Circus</a></em> by Philipp Weigl</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Pop-Up Entertainment</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Toward the end of our week in Paris, heading out again from the normal tourist zone -- in search of a brew pub with my son this time; my wife and daughter were hunting Longchamps bags -- we get on the Metro to find a busker on our subway car, a tuba busker. He was an older guy wearing a slightly Tyrolean looking hat with a waist-high battery-powered speaker in front of him taped to a luggage wheelie type of cart and an orange donations can taped to the handle. The speaker played the backing track while he played the main melody on the tuba. After one song (which I can’t say that I recognized), he left the backing track playing while walking the car with his hand out for tips. I think he was on the car for 3 stops.</li>\r\n 	<li>On the way back, during one of the 18 stops back, another busker walked onto our car, a younger guy who turned out to be a rapping busker. He had the same speaker rig and the same cadence as the tuba player -- last guy in, stood in front of the door, powered up the back beat on the speakers, rapped out a song between stops, solicited money between the next stops, and then left the train.</li>\r\n 	<li>I also saw what I consider the more typical subway buskers -- playing guitar, or a double-bass in the connecting tunnels, taking advantage of the tile acoustics. A little less typical was a couple ating out an opera scene in a wider area where 2 or 3 tunnels came together. Not only were they singing opera (with tile-driven acoustics), they were acting out the scene -- the woman fleeing toward one tunnel only to have the man catch her and pull her back. It took just a moment to connect the singing to the action; to realize that this wasn’t an actual assault. It drew a bit of a crowd. I don’t know if this was real busking or just advertising an opera show, but it certainly got my attention.</li>\r\n 	<li>Later on, my son and I were walking in front of Notre Dame and heard another woman singing opera. It took us a minute to locate her. She had her back to a building on the north side of the plaza. It was another good acoustic location -- the echo off the building seem to amplify and project her voice across the open space in front of the cathedral. The police seem to keep a heavy presence here. We’d seen them earlier descend on a woman who was panhandling the folks standing in line to get into the cathedral. But this time, they let the woman finish up her aria before moving her along. Quite a change from Chicago’s bucket boys.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #128</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Magnatune</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_128.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #128 — Hunt for Experiences; Pop-Up Entertainment','','inherit','closed','closed','','1747-revision-v1','','','2017-07-31 19:24:46','2017-08-01 00:24:46','',1747,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/07/31/1747-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1798,1,'2017-08-27 19:32:33','2017-08-28 00:32:33','[caption id=\"attachment_1803\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/DSC_5935a.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1803\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/DSC_5935a-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> How Are Their Yelp Reviews?[/caption]\n\nIt\'s a listener request podcast. A fellow Peacock, this one named Jack, asked \"What travel apps do you have on your iPhone?\" Paging back through the TravelCommons archives, I’ve covered different categories of travel apps,  -- in the most recent iteration of my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/12/12/top-10-holiday-travel-tips-2/\">Top 10 Travel Tips</a> I recommended some flight tracking apps and way before that, did a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/11/29/podcast-102-trip-management-app-comparison-tsa-scanner-shuffle/\">bake-off of trip management apps</a> -- but never covered walked through what’s in the travel folder on the home screen of my iPhone. I\'ve now remedied that oversight. We also continue talking about overseas phone SIMs; the impact of the new EU ban on roaming charges. Also, my first encounter with some new TSA scanning equipment.  All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_132.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #132:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you, as always it seems, from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. Seems that I’ve swapped the romance of hotel bathrooms for the sound quality of the studio here. Seems like yesterday when I was <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2009/04/15/podcast-73-eating-alone-on-the-road-more-things-you-never-want-to-hear/\">recording the intro</a> in the business class toilet of a South African Airways A340 on the way down to J’burg</li>\n 	<li>My travel since <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/07/30/podcast-131-twitter-concierge-customer-service-london-tube-story/\">the last episode</a> hasn’t been anything quite as exciting. Trips to Richmond, Baltimore and New York City. Indeed, if I tried recording in the toilet of one of those American or United A321s, I don’t think I’d get too far past “Hello, this is Mark Peacock…” before someone started banging on the door.</li>\n 	<li>Richmond airport continued to be a problem for me -- not the airport itself, just the carriers flying into it. I get up on a Tuesday morning -- sidestepping the Monday morning road warrior crush -- iPhone notifications from American, TripIt, and Google all say my flight is on-time. Pulling up to the terminal -- everything still looks OK. I walk through the doors and my phone explodes -- my 8:20 am flight is now leaving at 4 something pm! The next note is from American telling me they’ve booked me on the 11:45am flight, so instead of getting to RIC at 11:20am, I’m now due in at 2:40pm -- over 3 hrs late. A quick call to Amex Travel tells me that the early morning United flight has already left, so this is my best option. Since, as I talked about in the last episode, I’ve given up depending on airlines being able to meet their schedules, I hadn’t booked any early afternoon meetings, so I just parked myself in the Admirals Club and got some work done. Nothing lost but a bit of sleep.</li>\n 	<li>With this in mind, I was gritting my teeth when I had to head back to ORD the next week for my flight to LGA. I haven’t had to fly to New York much recently, and when I have, I’ve flown into EWR to avoid the nightmare-ish delays being reported from LGA because of the construction. There’d been stories of people abandoning their cabs on the Grand Central Parkway to walk into LGA. And then there’s just flying between two of the US’s most congested airports. I’ve always said that anything less than a 30-minute delay between LGA and ORD is on-time. So I booked my flights to avoid rush hours -- leaving ORD at 4pm, arriving LGA at 7:30, and my return flight leaving LGA at 3:30 the next afternoon. I land in LGA on-time. There’s no taxi queue, and I’m into the Sheraton Times Square by a little after 8 -- no flight delays, no traffic. I quietly offer up my first beer at The Three Monkeys to the travel gods in thanksgiving.</li>\n 	<li>The next day, we finish up our meeting in midtown an hour early, I walk out of the building to find all sorts of cabs. The first cab doesn’t have the time to take me to LGA, but the second guy is happy to. We make good time across town to the tunnel and there’s no traffic on the Grand Central. I tip the guy well, walk up to an American kiosk and see that I can standby on the 1:30pm flight -- which will be boarding in about 5 minutes. I hit the TSA PreCheck line -- about 5 people in front of me, but the TSA folks are in good humor and moving things along. I hear the gate agent call my name as I walk up to the gate. The flight takes off on time and lands early. Hey, American made up 2 of the 3 hr-delay from last week! And on an LGA-ORD flight. I offered up a bigger beer when I got home.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/JeffSpeed68/54450\">Hula Hoop Party</a> by Stefan Kartenberg (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: Martijn de Boer, Blue Wave Theory</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Mike Skinner took a couple of minutes to stop by the TravelCommons web site and leave a comment about the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/07/30/podcast-131-twitter-concierge-customer-service-london-tube-story/\">last episode</a>. Mike writes\n<ul>\n 	<li>“Long time listener, really enjoy the show.“Your comments on the Dreamliner were very interesting to me. I\'ve flown one long-haul on several occasions, and yes, the windows are fun to play with. But you didn\'t have any comments on what I think is the most important attribute. The 787 isn\'t just another \"metal tube\"..... It is constructed from carbon fiber, and can be pressurized to a higher level than most normal passenger jets. The environment inside is at higher air pressure (like being at 6,000\' rather than 10000\' elevation), with a higher level of humidity (air not so dry), and more refreshes. I found it a great plane to fly on a long red-eye! Or any 5+ hour flight.\n“I\'m looking forward to this fall, when I\'m flying one r/t LAX-SYD in UA\'s BF cabin (14 hour flight)”</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Mike, thanks for the comment. You’re absolutely right about the 787’s carbon fiber build allowing it to be pressurized at a lower level -- I’m not sure if that’s because of an increase in strength from the carbon fiber or because it’s less impervious to the higher moisture content of the denser air. But I didn’t notice a difference between my flight out to on an A330 and my flight back on the 787. Of course, it might be that I wasn’t paying enough attention to the negative -- less dry eye; less “cotton mouth” -- or that that the LHR-ORD flight wasn’t a red-eye; and so I was able to keep myself hydrated more than I would on a red-eye. Maybe I would’ve noticed the difference on those 17-hr SAA flights to Joburg those years ago. Whatever the reason, anything that makes those long-haul flights more bearable is a great thing. Safe travels on your upcoming flight to Sydney.</li>\n 	<li>That A330 flight didn’t go direct to London. I was late booking my ticket and so instead flew Aer Lingus to Gatwick via Dublin. It was the first time in at least 25 years that I’ve been through Dublin airport. It was a nice enough airport, but crowded for an early Monday morning. I was glad I didn’t have to go through security again, because when I looked past the scanners, it looked to be a bit of zoo parade. But, adding again to the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/01/16/podcast-126-beating-the-traffic-rethinking-carry-on-luggage/\">multi</a>-<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/02/20/podcast-127-critiquing-my-top-10-travel-tips-reviewing-vpns/\">episode</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/03/31/podcast-128-hunt-for-experiences-pop-up-entertainment/\">thread </a>about buying and using local phone SIMs during international travel, I saw the first benefits of the EU’s ban against mobile roaming charges. On the flight over, I’d swapped my US SIM for my UK SIM. Coming out of airplane mode in Dublin, I get what look like the typical welcome texts, but instead of giving me the roaming charges, they tell me that my UK plan is good in Ireland. Might seem kind of a minor thing, but at least for traveling within Europe, there are some real benefits. First is not having to burn through an hour or two at the beginning of a vacation finding a phone store and then going through the hassle of buying a pay-as-you-go SIM. In Paris, I had to go to 3 phone stores to find the SIM I wanted. In Hungary, T-Mobile wouldn’t sell my wife a SIM without a Hungarian citizenship or registration card -- which, of course, she didn’t have. Luckily, my wife’s cousin was with her and she was able to buy SIMs for all of us. If I don’t need to buy a new French or Hungarian SIM to avoid roaming charges, this kind of hassle goes away. I wonder also if there’s a bit of an arbitrage opportunity. Now that I have a UK, French, and Hungarian SIM, do I figure out which one has the cheapest rate and then use that one for all of my trips? I need to read the new regs on that one.</li>\n 	<li>On my last couple of trips through ATL, it seems that the lines for PreCheck are configured differently every time. Not quite sure why that is. Every other airport, it’s pretty static -- go to this set of lanes, but ATL, for some reason, wants to change the entrance to the maze each time. They also have put new parallel loading baggage X-ray machines in the ATL PreCheck line. These are pretty common in Europe but just now dribbling into US airports. Rather than queuing up and waiting for each person to put their stuff on the belt, there are 4 loading stations where a group of people each reach below, grab a bin, put it in front of you, put your stuff in it, and then push it onto the conveyor. Since there are 4 people loading at the same time, there’s no “performance anxiety” to make sure you have your belt-loading choreography flawless, and there’s no eye-rolling and foot-tapping while waiting for those who don’t. There are a couple of hassles, though. First, since it’s new, most people are still in serial mode; they don’t know that it’s OK to break queue and step around to an empty loading station. At many European airports, they have someone telling you which loading station to go to (usually with numbered stickers on the floor -- “You, station 1; you, station 6). The TSA hasn’t quite got with this program. Second, if you’re in one of the front loading stations, it takes a little, uh, muscle to break the stream of bins, to shove your bin onto the conveyor. Too polite and you’ll just stand there watching a stream of bins go by. All in all, it’s a definite improvement, but needs a bit of, say, process optimization.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/49674\">H2O</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Travel Apps on My Phone</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>A few weeks ago, Jack Peacock from northern Florida -- kinda near where the panhandle connects to the peninsula -- pinged me on the TravelCommons website with a couple of questions. First was a genealogy question. Peacock isn’t a common last name in the US and so when we meet, “where’s the last name from” is a common icebreaker. Peacock is probably more common down South where Jack and other southern Peacocks will trace their roots back to a Samuel Peacock born 1671 probably in Colonial VA. My line is from more recent immigrant stock, though. My dad grew up in Southport, on the northwest coast of the UK, between Liverpool and Blackpool, and came over to the US in 1956.</li>\n 	<li>That out of the way, Jack said that he and his wife are retired, have put their home and vehicles up for sale, and are getting ready to Airbnb the globe. “Geriatric gap year” as Jack put it. I am officially jealous. Which leads to his second question -- what travel apps do I have on my phone? A very timely question since Carlson Wagonlit Travel just <a href=\"http://www.carlsonwagonlit.com/content/cwt/global/en/news/news-releases/20170824-Business-travelers-find-they-are-very-productive-due-to-more-technology-options.html\">released a survey</a> where 80% of business travelers said their smartphone was the “travel tool they can’t live without”, and 45% used airline and hotel apps as their main travel technology.</li>\n 	<li>Paging back through the TravelCommons archives, I see that I’ve touched on some categories of travel apps -- in the most recent iteration of my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/12/12/top-10-holiday-travel-tips-2/\">Top 10 Travel Tips</a> I recommended some flight tracking apps and way before that, did a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/11/29/podcast-102-trip-management-app-comparison-tsa-scanner-shuffle/\">bake-off of trip management apps</a> -- but never walked through what’s in the travel folder on the home screen of my iPhone.</li>\n 	<li>As long time listeners know -- and have suffered through -- I can’t just go through a laundry list. In other words, I can’t just quickly answer Jack’s question. First, I need to build (and drag you all through) some kind of framework that provides some structure to my laundry list. It’s my own little piece of OCD. One way to start is to split between apps with broad general use -- say like Google Maps -- and those more specific to a situation -- the apps of the airlines you use the most, or, say, mass transit apps for a city you’ll be visiting.</li>\n 	<li>Let’s dig down to the next layer of the specific category. I have apps for the airlines I use for 90% of my travel -- American, United, Southwest, and Delta -- in that order -- because living in Chicago, American and United have hubs at ORD and Southwest owns MDW. I have Delta for the odd flight between, say, Atlanta and New York. The mix will change based on what you fly -- in Boston, you may have JetBlue, in London you certainly have BA. I mostly use these apps for two reasons -- electronic boarding passes and flight status. I talked in the last episode about how I used the “Where is my plane now” feature of United’s app to track back to the source of a RIC flight delay to GRR. Helped give me a sense of whether that delay could shrink or grow. Also, these apps are getting much quicker about pushing flight status and gate change notifications. Indeed, these apps have gotten good enough that the independent/more general flight tracking apps on my phone -- FlightAware, FlightView, and FlightStats -- are on the bubble. I’ll probably delete two of them and keep one -- either FlightAware or FlightView because of how they show the projected flight path on a weather map. You can find this in the United app, but you have to dig a bit. FlightAware and FlightView have it as their primary app view. It’s another good piece of information for when you’re thinking through flight delays.</li>\n 	<li>I didn’t load up the Aer Lingus app for my flight to London last month (if they even have one). It’s not worth it for a single flight. Same reason I’ve never loaded Alaska Air’s app even though I seem to end up on them at least once a year. It’s not worth the phone real estate. Which is the same reason I’ve deleted hotel apps from my phone. I’ve never found any value in the Marriott or Starwood apps. Same with the Hertz and Avis apps. However, if I was Airbnb’ing around the world like Jack is planning, I would probably load up their app.</li>\n 	<li>Another specific app I have is My EE -- the app for the UK mobile carrier who’s pay-as-you-go SIM I use. The last iteration of this app made it easier than EE’s website to do a SIM top-up, so it’s now in my Travel folder.</li>\n 	<li>A bit more general is the Priority Pass app which gets me access to international airport lounges through my Amex Platinum card. It regularly updates its list of available lounges and has airport maps to help you find them. This came in real handy in Dublin where the lounge was tucked away on a second floor with very minimal signage.</li>\n 	<li>Another kinda general app is the companion app to my Bluesmart roller bag. It connects to my bag via Bluetooth, automatically locks it when it’s out of range of my phone, and displays the bag’s location when I have to check it. The auto lock is probably the most useful thing. It’s consistently on the bubble.</li>\n 	<li>I have both Uber and Lyft in my Travel folder. I’ll typically light both of those apps up when looking for a ride somewhere, comparing price and wait time. As I mentioned during a broader discussion of ride sharing <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/11/22/podcast-125-uber-driver-stories-overseas-for-the-election/\">a few episodes back</a>, all things being equal, I’ll choose Lyft, but I use both of them regularly.</li>\n 	<li>Five years ago, I <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/11/29/podcast-102-trip-management-app-comparison-tsa-scanner-shuffle/\">reviewed</a> the 3 main trip management apps -- Tripit, TripCase, and Worldmate -- that recreated the old company travel agent’s printed trip itinerary by integrating separate airline, hotel, and rental car reservations for free, and real-time flight updates for a fee. I liked Worldmate the best, with TripCase a solid second. Today, I use Tripit. Carlson Wagonlit closed up Worldmate at the beginning of the year, and Sabre’s TripCase is hot mess of advertising. Tripit has continued to improve their app. The ability to share a piece of an itinerary (a flight, a hotel) through iPhone’s iMessage is surprisingly handy. But the $50/yr Tripit Pro is also on the bubble because of the airline apps’ improved notifications.</li>\n 	<li>Google Translate has grown into a critical travel app. I’ve talked in a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/06/24/podcast-130-notes-from-hungary/\">previous episode</a> about how, with real-time translation through the camera, it’s becoming pretty close to magic.\nTransit is another app that continues to solidify its hold on screen real estate. Transit covers mass transit across North America and major cities in Europe. Google Maps suggests mass transit routings, but Transit goes much deeper -- with things like real-time bus and subway data and bike share locations for cities like Chicago and New York.</li>\n 	<li>And then, of course, there is Google Maps. I use it to plan trips, find hotels, check out neighborhoods, figure out where I am, share locations -- as well as getting me from Point A to Point B. It is probably the most indispensable travel app on my phone. Indeed, it’s the only travel app with its own screen real estate rather than sharing space in the Travel folder</li>\n 	<li>What are your suggestions?</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #132</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_132.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #132 — Travel Apps on My Phone','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-132-travel-apps-on-my-phone','','','2021-09-29 08:23:39','2021-09-29 13:23:39','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=1798',0,'post','',1),
(1800,1,'2017-08-26 20:30:05','2017-08-27 01:30:05','Recorded somewhere over the Atlantic in the business class toilet of a South African Airways A340 and the <a href=\"http://www.proteahotels.com/the-rosebank.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Rosebank Hotel</a> in Johannesburg at the start of a week\'s stay in South Africa. We talk about inconsistent rules for mobile devices on planes, the value of renewing my CLEAR registered traveler membership, the three things that make a restaurant a great place to eat solo, and listener suggestions on the one thing you never want to hear on a flight. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_73.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file. [sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_73.mp3\"]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #73:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Recorded in the business class toilet of a South African Airways A340 and the <a href=\"http://www.proteahotels.com/the-rosebank.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Rosebank Hotel</a> in Johannesburg</li>\r\n 	<li>En route to a week\'s business trip in South Africa</li>\r\n 	<li>Trips earlier this month saw very empty airports -- right up to Spring Break time, when they filled up with families and strollers</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Stinky Dog</em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/musicinside-forces/\">Music Inside</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"http://seat6d.com/\">Denrael</a> commented on Twitter that there are at least 5 iPhone apps available to keep track of your hotel room number -- free ones like <a href=\"http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=304561585&amp;mt=8\">Room</a> and paid ones like <a href=\"http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=309106848&amp;mt=8\">Zimmer</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Reached new heights of electronics inconsistency on my JFK-JNB SAA flight. After the stop in Dakar, Senegal, the purser announced that all smart phones – and he specifically named iPhones, Nokia E-series, Blackberries – were not allowed to be used in flight – even when put in Airplane mode</li>\r\n 	<li>Returning from SFO, one passenger decided that he was the electronics “hall monitor” and started yelling across the cabin at another passenger to turn off his “crackberry” as we were approaching ORD</li>\r\n 	<li>My <a href=\"http://flyclear.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">CLEAR</a> registered traveler card came in handy when in JFK\'s Terminal 4, but still haven\'t used it enough to justify the $179/yr fee</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Locovenido</em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/falik-dreams/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Falik</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Eating on the Road\r\n</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Eating a great dinner by myself at the bar of <a href=\"http://www.tintorestaurant.com/\">Tinto</a> in Philadelphia got me thinking about what makes for a good place to eat solo while on the road</li>\r\n 	<li>The sports bar might as well have been created just for solo guy travelers</li>\r\n 	<li>Outside the sports bar genre, what makes for a good place for a solo traveler? Taking “good food” and “cleanliness” as table stakes, there are 3 things -- availability, small plates, and bar seating</li>\r\n 	<li>Two nice-to-haves -- ability to make a reservation on <a href=\"http://opentable.com\">Open Table</a> and a web site built with something other than Flash so I can read the menu on my iPhone</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Just Don’t</em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/liebig-severed/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Lie Big</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>More Things You Never Want To Hear</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>In last month’s episode, we featured a listener\'s question – “What is the one thing you never want to hear on a flight?” and asked for your input</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"http://thehappyheadlines.com/\">Dawn Owens</a> offered “God, I should NOT have eaten that!”</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"http://fricksworld.blogspot.com/\">Steve Frick</a> said “I don\'t ever want to hear the pilot say ‘I\'m so tired I could just crash’”</li>\r\n 	<li>Greg B said the “one thing that I never want to hear at any stage of the flight ... ‘BRACE FOR IMPACT’”</li>\r\n 	<li>Steve F gave two suggestions – \"The smoke in the cabin is nothing to be concerned about\" and \"We have an FAA inspection team riding along with us, so we will doing everything by the book\"</li>\r\n 	<li>Michael Golden offers a non verbal thing you don\'t want to hear – shutting down an engine while taxiing out</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"http://ad.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/show?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;bids=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Magnatune</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Feedback at comments@travelcommons.com or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_73.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #73 - Eating Alone on The Road, More Things You Never Want to Hear','','inherit','closed','closed','','122-revision-v1','','','2017-08-26 20:30:05','2017-08-27 01:30:05','',122,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/08/26/122-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1801,1,'2017-08-26 20:31:24','2017-08-27 01:31:24','Again in Washington, DC, I\'m back on the road after two weeks at home. As my Twitter followers know, this trip didn\'t get off to the best start -- a 2 hour delay caused by yet another broken United Airlines plane. Listener comments continue the threads on in-flight bans on smartphones and falling prices of in-flight Wi-Fi. The collapse of the Clear Registered Traveler program makes me nervous about who has my fingerprints and iris scans. And, after my plane finally got into the air, I thought about what I miss when I\'m off the road. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_77.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file. [sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_77.mp3\"]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #77:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Recorded in the Convention Center Courtyard in downtown Washington, DC</li>\r\n 	<li>On a bit of an Amtrak bunny hop up the US East Coast -- DC to Phila to NYC</li>\r\n 	<li>Most of my travel in August has been personal -- Aspen, CO and Door County, WI</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/music/listeners/artistdetails.php?BandHash=00168e9762768c8f9a16a59343f973d0\">People Go A Lotta Nerve</a></em> by Neko Case</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Timo from Tampere, Finland wrote in about Ryanair not allowing any use of smartphones -- even in flight or airplane mode -- on a flight from Tampere, Finland to \"the misleadingly named Frankfurt Hahn airport\"</li>\r\n 	<li>Ryanair -- what a mess with all their add-on charges and anti-customer service</li>\r\n 	<li>Interesting that Ryanair severely limits the use of smartphones while simultaneously trying to launch an in-flight mobile phone call service</li>\r\n 	<li>South African Airways plans to <a href=\"http://www.itweb.co.za/sections/telecoms/2008/0808281033.asp\">petition</a> the SA Civil Aviation Authority to allow smart phones to be used in “flight” mode</li>\r\n 	<li>Recent WSJ.com <a href=\"http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203706604574374571364228440.html\">article</a> discusses the results of Alaska Air Wi-Fi pricing tests. In-flight wi-fi is very price-sensitive. Will carriers get the return they need on their investment in fleet-wide wi-fi rollouts?</li>\r\n 	<li>New celebrity sightings -- <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> followers know that I recently ate a couple of tables away from Lance Armstrong and shared a 1st Class row with LeAnne Rimes on a flight to LAX</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/music/listeners/artistdetails.php?BandHash=747b6ccf16c7202fd38068d510c11fd2\">Give It Up</a></em> by Jimmy Mancus</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>My, What Pretty Eyes You Have!\r\n</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Federal judge <a href=\"http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/08/defunct-airport-fast-pass-company-banned-from-selling-customer-biometrics/\">ruled</a> Clear Registered Traveler can’t sell its former customers’ biometric data – the fingerprints and iris scans that were used to identify travelers at checkpoint machines at airports across the country.</li>\r\n 	<li>What’s the best way to destroy my Clear card? My biometric data was stored on the card\'s smart chip</li>\r\n 	<li>But what about the biometric data stored with Clear and the TSA? I just want my data destroyed, but two US Congressmen want it <a href=\"http://fcw.com/articles/2009/08/21/lawmakers-urge-tsa-not-to-destroy-registered-traveler-data.aspx?sc_lang=en\">kept</a> around.</li>\r\n 	<li>I\'ve learned a lesson -- I\'ll never give the government this kind of data again.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/music/listeners/artistdetails.php?BandHash=155e0ac479805586bd2cbef2e5c44ddd\">Orange Blossoms</a></em> by JJ Grey and Mofro</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>What I Miss When I’m Off The Road</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Not much this evening -- first flight in two weeks and it’s delayed for 2½ hours because of a broken nose gear steering mechanism.</li>\r\n 	<li>Will <em>somebody</em> explain the United Airlines the benefits of preventative maintenance? What good is being super top-tier elite on an airline that can’t get their planes in the air? It’s getting so bad, I don’t know why they bother setting a departure and arrival time. Just put an AM or PM on the board and shoot for the best.</li>\r\n 	<li>What I miss most when not traveling is the variety -- seeing and experiencing different things each day. While I loved sleeping in my own bed and not having to do the TSA shuffle, two weeks of the same train ride into the same office, seeing the same skyline (though I love the Chicago skyline), eating at the same lunch places started the soles of my feet itching.</li>\r\n 	<li>You also get a better understanding of other people when you spend time with them face-to-face. While you can do a lot over a voice or video conference, there’s nothing like being there in person to get an appreciation for the differences, the challenges, and the personalities.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"http://ad.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/show?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;bids=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from the <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com\">Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Feedback at comments@travelcommons.com or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_77.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #77 – Keeping Traveler Data Private, What I Miss When Off The Road','','inherit','closed','closed','','161-revision-v1','','','2017-08-26 20:31:24','2017-08-27 01:31:24','',161,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/08/26/161-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1802,1,'2017-08-26 20:50:19','2017-08-27 01:50:19','[caption id=\"attachment_1763\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/IMG_0887.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1763\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/IMG_0887-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Scottish Food Tourism can be an acquired taste[/caption]\r\n\r\nDifficult to do a travel podcast without talking about this month\'s incidents on United and American Airlines. The videos that hit social media were damning, but as more of the facts came out, the stories around each incident became more complex. On a much lighter note, we also talk about the explosion of food tourism, called by some \"The Bourdain Effect\" after Anthony Bourdain\'s TV travelogue series. Also, listener suggestions for visiting the Budapest baths, and compliments on the terminal improvements at San Francisco Airport (SFO). All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_132.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/320097474\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n<!--more-->\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #132:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you, as always it seems, from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. Seems that I’ve swapped the romance of hotel bathrooms for the sound quality of the studio here. Seems like yesterday when I was <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2009/04/15/podcast-73-eating-alone-on-the-road-more-things-you-never-want-to-hear/\">recording the intro</a> in the business class toilet of a South African Airways A340 on the way down to J’burg</li>\r\n 	<li>My travel since the last episode hasn’t been anything quite as exciting. Trips to Richmond, Baltimore and New York City. Indeed, if I tried recording in the toilet of one of those American or United A321s, I don’t think I’d get too far past “Hello, this is Mark Peacock…” before someone started banging on the door.</li>\r\n 	<li>Richmond airport continued to be a problem for me -- not the airport itself, just the carriers flying into it. I get up on a Tuesday morning -- sidestepping the Monday morning road warrior crush -- iPhone notifications from American, TripIt, and Google all say my flight is on-time. Pulling up to the terminal -- everything still looks OK. I walk through the doors and my phone explodes -- my 8:20 am flight is now leaving at 4 something pm! The next note is from American telling me they’ve booked me on the 11:45am flight, so instead of getting to RIC at 11:20am, I’m now due in at 2:40pm -- over 3 hrs late. A quick call to Amex Travel tells me that the early morning United flight has already left, so this is my best option. Since, as I talked about in the last episode, I’ve given up depending on airlines being able to meet their schedules, I hadn’t booked any early afternoon meetings, so I just parked myself in the Admirals Club and got some work done. Nothing lost but a bit of sleep.</li>\r\n 	<li>With this in mind, I was gritting my teeth when I had to head back to ORD the next week for my flight to LGA. I haven’t had to fly to New York much recently, and when I have, I’ve flown into EWR to avoid the nightmare-ish delays being reported from LGA because of the construction. There’d been stories of people abandoning their cabs on the Grand Central Parkway to walk into LGA. And then there’s just flying between two of the US’s most congested airports. I’ve always said that anything less than a 30-minute delay between LGA and ORD is on-time. So I booked my flights to avoid rush hours -- leaving ORD at 4pm, arriving LGA at 7:30, and my return flight leaving LGA at 3:30 the next afternoon. I land in LGA on-time. There’s no taxi queue, and I’m into the Sheraton Times Square by a little after 8 -- no flight delays, no traffic. I quietly offer up my first beer at The Three Monkeys to the travel gods in thanksgiving.</li>\r\n 	<li>The next day, we finish up our meeting in midtown an hour early, I walk out of the building to find all sorts of cabs. The first cab doesn’t have the time to take me to LGA, but the second guy is happy to. We make good time across town to the tunnel and there’s no traffic on the Grand Central. I tip the guy well, walk up to an American kiosk and see that I can standby on the 1:30pm flight -- which will be boarding in about 5 minutes. I hit the TSA PreCheck line -- about 5 people in front of me, but the TSA folks are in good humor and moving things along. I hear the gate agent call my name as I walk up to the gate. The flight takes off on time and lands early. Hey, American made up 2 of the 3 hr-delay from last week! And on an LGA-ORD flight. I offered up a bigger beer when I got home.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Vidian/52190\">Memories (infiniti loop)</a> by Vidian (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license. Ft: TheDice</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Mike Skinner took a couple of minutes to stop by the TravelCommons web site and leave a comment about the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/07/30/podcast-131-twitter-concierge-customer-service-london-tube-story/\">last episode</a>. Mike writes\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>“Long time listener, really enjoy the show.“Your comments on the Dreamliner were very interesting to me. I\'ve flown one long-haul on several occasions, and yes, the windows are fun to play with. But you didn\'t have any comments on what I think is the most important attribute. The 787 isn\'t just another \"metal tube\"..... It is constructed from carbon fiber, and can be pressurized to a higher level than most normal passenger jets. The environment inside is at higher air pressure (like being at 6,000\' rather than 10000\' elevation), with a higher level of humidity (air not so dry), and more refreshes. I found it a great plane to fly on a long red-eye! Or any 5+ hour flight.\r\n“I\'m looking forward to this fall, when I\'m flying one r/t LAX-SYD in UA\'s BF cabin (14 hour flight)”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Mike, thanks for the comment. You’re absolutely right about the 787’s carbon fiber build allowing it to be pressurized at a lower level -- I’m not sure if that’s because of an increase in strength from the carbon fiber or because it’s less impervious to the higher moisture content of the denser air. But I didn’t notice a difference between my flight out to on an A330 and my flight back on the 787. Of course, it might be that I wasn’t paying enough attention to the negative -- less dry eye; less “cotton mouth” -- or that that the LHR-ORD flight wasn’t a red-eye; and so I was able to keep myself hydrated more than I would on a red-eye. Maybe I would’ve noticed the difference on those 17-hr SAA flights to Joburg those years ago. Whatever the reason, anything that makes those long-haul flights more bearable is a great thing. Safe travels on your upcoming flight to Sydney.</li>\r\n 	<li>That A330 flight didn’t go direct to London. I was late booking my ticket and so instead flew Aer Lingus to Gatwick via Dublin. It was the first time in at least 25 years that I’ve been through Dublin airport. It was a nice enough airport, but crowded for an early Monday morning. I was glad I didn’t have to go through security again, because when I looked past the scanners, it looked to be a bit of zoo parade. But, adding again to the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/01/16/podcast-126-beating-the-traffic-rethinking-carry-on-luggage/\">multi</a>-<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/02/20/podcast-127-critiquing-my-top-10-travel-tips-reviewing-vpns/\">episode</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/03/31/podcast-128-hunt-for-experiences-pop-up-entertainment/\">thread </a>about buying and using local phone SIMs during international travel, I saw the first benefits of the EU’s ban against mobile roaming charges. On the flight over, I’d swapped my US SIM for my UK SIM. Coming out of airplane mode in Dublin, I get what look like the typical welcome texts, but instead of giving me the roaming charges, they tell me that my UK plan is good in Ireland. Might seem kind of a minor thing, but at least for traveling within Europe, there are some real benefits. First is not having to burn through an hour or two at the beginning of a vacation finding a phone store and then going through the hassle of buying a pay-as-you-go SIM. In Paris, I had to go to 3 phone stores to find the SIM I wanted. In Hungary, T-Mobile wouldn’t sell my wife a SIM without a Hungarian citizenship or registration card -- which, of course, she didn’t have. Luckily, my wife’s cousin was with her and she was able to buy SIMs for all of us. If I don’t need to buy a new French or Hungarian SIM to avoid roaming charges, this kind of hassle goes away. I wonder also if there’s a bit of an arbitrage opportunity. Now that I have a UK, French, and Hungarian SIM, do I figure out which one has the cheapest rate and then use that one for all of my trips? I need to read the new regs on that one.</li>\r\n 	<li>On my last couple of trips through ATL, it seems that the lines for PreCheck are configured differently every time. Not quite sure why that is. Every other airport, it’s pretty static -- go to this set of lanes, but ATL, for some reason, wants to change the entrance to the maze each time. They also have put new parallel loading baggage X-ray machines in the ATL PreCheck line. These are pretty common in Europe but just now dribbling into US airports. Rather than queuing up and waiting for each person to put their stuff on the belt, there are 4 loading stations where a group of people each reach below, grab a bin, put it in front of you, put your stuff in it, and then push it onto the conveyor. Since there are 4 people loading at the same time, there’s no “performance anxiety” to make sure you have your belt-loading choreography flawless, and there’s no eye-rolling and foot-tapping while waiting for those who don’t. There are a couple of hassles, though. First, since it’s new, most people are still in serial mode; they don’t know that it’s OK to break queue and step around to an empty loading station. At many European airports, they have someone telling you which loading station to go to (usually with numbered stickers on the floor -- “You, station 1; you, station 6). The TSA hasn’t quite got with this program. Second, if you’re in one of the front loading stations, it takes a little, uh, muscle to break the stream of bins, to shove your bin onto the conveyor. Too polite and you’ll just stand there watching a stream of bins go by. All in all, it’s a definite improvement, but needs a bit of, say, process optimization.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/50485\">Sunset Boulevard</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Siobhan Dakay, unreal_dm</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Travel Apps on My Phone</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>A few weeks ago, Jack Peacock from northern Florida -- kinda near where the panhandle connects to the peninsula -- pinged me on the TravelCommons website with a couple of questions. First was a genealogy question. Peacock isn’t a common last name in the US and so when we meet, “where’s the last name from” is a common icebreaker. Peacock is probably more common down South where Jack and other southern Peacocks will trace their roots back to a Samuel Peacock born 1671 probably in Colonial VA. My line is from more recent immigrant stock, though. My dad grew up in Southport, on the northwest coast of the UK, between Liverpool and Blackpool, and came over to the US in 1956.</li>\r\n 	<li>That out of the way, Jack said that he and his wife are retired, have put their home and vehicles up for sale, and are getting ready to Airbnb the globe. “Geriatric gap year” as Jack put it. I am officially jealous. Which leads to his second question -- what travel apps do I have on my phone?</li>\r\n 	<li>Paging back through the TravelCommons archives, I see that I’ve touched on some categories of travel apps -- in the most recent iteration of my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/12/12/top-10-holiday-travel-tips-2/\">Top 10 Travel Tips</a> I recommended some flight tracking apps and way before that, did a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/11/29/podcast-102-trip-management-app-comparison-tsa-scanner-shuffle/\">bake-off of trip management apps</a> -- but never covered walked through what’s in the travel folder on the home screen of my iPhone.</li>\r\n 	<li>As long time listeners know -- and have suffered through -- I can’t just go through a laundry list. In other words, I can’t just quickly answer Jack’s question. First, I need to build (and drag you all through) some kind of framework that provides some structure to my laundry list. It’s my own little piece of OCD. One way to start is to split between apps with broad general use -- say like Google Maps -- and those more specific to a situation -- the apps of the airlines you use the most, or, say, mass transit apps for a city you’ll be visiting.</li>\r\n 	<li>Let’s dig down to the next layer of the specific category. I have apps for the airlines I use for 90% of my travel -- American, United, Southwest, and Delta -- in that order -- because living in Chicago, American and United have hubs at ORD and Southwest owns MDW. I have Delta for the odd flight between, say, Atlanta and New York. The mix will change based on what you fly -- in Boston, you may have JetBlue, in London you certainly have BA. I mostly use these apps for two reasons -- electronic boarding passes and flight status. I talked in the last episode about how I used the “Where is my plane now” feature of United’s app to track back to the source of a RIC flight delay to GRR. Helped give me a sense of whether that delay could shrink or grow. Also, these apps are getting much quicker about pushing flight status and gate change notifications. Indeed, these apps have gotten good enough that the independent/more general flight tracking apps on my phone -- FlightAware, FlightView, and FlightStats -- are on the bubble. I’ll probably delete two of them and keep one -- either FlightAware or FlightView because of how they show the projected flight path on a weather map. You can find this in the United app, but you have to dig a bit. FlightAware and FlightView have it as their primary app view. It’s another good piece of information for when you’re thinking through flight delays.</li>\r\n 	<li>I didn’t load up the Aer Lingus app for my flight to London last month (if they even have one). It’s not worth it for a single flight. Same reason I’ve never loaded Alaska Air’s app even though I seem to end up on them at least once a year. It’s not worth the phone real estate. Which is the same reason I’ve deleted hotel apps from my phone. I’ve never found any value in the Marriott or Starwood apps. Same with the Hertz and Avis apps. However, if I was Airbnb’ing around the world like Jack is planning, I would probably load up their app.</li>\r\n 	<li>Another specific app I have is My EE -- the app for the UK mobile carrier who’s pay-as-you-go SIM I use. The last iteration of this app made it easier than EE’s website to do a SIM top-up, so it’s now in my Travel folder.</li>\r\n 	<li>A bit more general is the Priority Pass app which gets me access to international airport lounges through my Amex Platinum card. It regularly updates its list of available lounges and has airport maps to help you find them. This came in real handy in Dublin where the lounge was tucked away on a second floor with very minimal signage.</li>\r\n 	<li>Another kinda general app is the companion app to my Bluesmart roller bag. It connects to my bag via Bluetooth, automatically locks it when it’s out of range of my phone, and displays the bag’s location when I have to check it. The auto lock is probably the most useful thing. It’s consistently on the bubble.</li>\r\n 	<li>I have both Uber and Lyft in my Travel folder. I’ll typically light both of those apps up when looking for a ride somewhere, comparing price and wait time. As I mentioned during a broader discussion of ride sharing a few episodes back, all things being equal, I’ll choose Lyft, but I use both of them regularly.</li>\r\n 	<li>Five years ago, I <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/11/29/podcast-102-trip-management-app-comparison-tsa-scanner-shuffle/\">reviewed</a> the 3 main trip management apps -- Tripit, TripCase, and Worldmate -- that recreated the old company travel agent’s printed trip itinerary by integrating separate airline, hotel, and rental car reservations for free, and real-time flight updates for a fee. I liked Worldmate the best, with TripCase a solid second. Today, I use Tripit. Carlson Wagonlit closed up Worldmate at the beginning of the year, and Sabre’s TripCase is hot mess of advertising. Tripit has continued to improve their app. The ability to share a piece of an itinerary (a flight, a hotel) through iPhone’s iMessage is surprisingly handy. But the $50/yr Tripit Pro is also on the bubble because of the airline apps’ improved notifications.</li>\r\n 	<li>Google Translate has grown into a critical travel app. I’ve talked in a previous episode about how, with real-time translation through the camera, it’s becoming pretty close to magic.\r\nTransit is another app that continues to solidify its hold on screen real estate. Transit covers mass transit across North America and major cities in Europe. Google Maps suggests mass transit routings, but Transit goes much deeper -- with things like real-time bus and subway data and bike share locations for cities like Chicago and New York.</li>\r\n 	<li>And then, of course, there is Google Maps. I use it to plan trips, find hotels, check out neighborhoods, figure out where I am, share locations -- as well as getting me from Point A to Point B. It is probably the most indispensable travel app on my phone. Indeed, it’s the only travel app with its own screen real estate rather than sharing space in the Travel folder</li>\r\n 	<li>What are your suggestions?</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music --<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/ramblinglibrarian/55007\">Dawn at the Top of the World ft. copperhead &amp; Robert Seikawitch</a> by Ivan Chew (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #132</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Magnatune</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_128.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','','','inherit','closed','closed','','1798-revision-v1','','','2017-08-26 20:50:19','2017-08-27 01:50:19','',1798,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/08/26/1798-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1803,1,'2017-08-26 20:52:31','2017-08-27 01:52:31','','DSC_5935a','How Are Their Yelp Reviews?','inherit','open','closed','','dsc_5935a','','','2017-08-26 20:58:05','2017-08-27 01:58:05','',1798,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/DSC_5935a.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(1804,1,'2017-08-26 20:58:43','2017-08-27 01:58:43','[caption id=\"attachment_1803\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/DSC_5935a.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1803\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/DSC_5935a-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> How Are Their Yelp Reviews?[/caption]\r\n\r\nDifficult to do a travel podcast without talking about this month\'s incidents on United and American Airlines. The videos that hit social media were damning, but as more of the facts came out, the stories around each incident became more complex. On a much lighter note, we also talk about the explosion of food tourism, called by some \"The Bourdain Effect\" after Anthony Bourdain\'s TV travelogue series. Also, listener suggestions for visiting the Budapest baths, and compliments on the terminal improvements at San Francisco Airport (SFO). All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_132.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/320097474\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n<!--more-->\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #132:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you, as always it seems, from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. Seems that I’ve swapped the romance of hotel bathrooms for the sound quality of the studio here. Seems like yesterday when I was <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2009/04/15/podcast-73-eating-alone-on-the-road-more-things-you-never-want-to-hear/\">recording the intro</a> in the business class toilet of a South African Airways A340 on the way down to J’burg</li>\r\n 	<li>My travel since the last episode hasn’t been anything quite as exciting. Trips to Richmond, Baltimore and New York City. Indeed, if I tried recording in the toilet of one of those American or United A321s, I don’t think I’d get too far past “Hello, this is Mark Peacock…” before someone started banging on the door.</li>\r\n 	<li>Richmond airport continued to be a problem for me -- not the airport itself, just the carriers flying into it. I get up on a Tuesday morning -- sidestepping the Monday morning road warrior crush -- iPhone notifications from American, TripIt, and Google all say my flight is on-time. Pulling up to the terminal -- everything still looks OK. I walk through the doors and my phone explodes -- my 8:20 am flight is now leaving at 4 something pm! The next note is from American telling me they’ve booked me on the 11:45am flight, so instead of getting to RIC at 11:20am, I’m now due in at 2:40pm -- over 3 hrs late. A quick call to Amex Travel tells me that the early morning United flight has already left, so this is my best option. Since, as I talked about in the last episode, I’ve given up depending on airlines being able to meet their schedules, I hadn’t booked any early afternoon meetings, so I just parked myself in the Admirals Club and got some work done. Nothing lost but a bit of sleep.</li>\r\n 	<li>With this in mind, I was gritting my teeth when I had to head back to ORD the next week for my flight to LGA. I haven’t had to fly to New York much recently, and when I have, I’ve flown into EWR to avoid the nightmare-ish delays being reported from LGA because of the construction. There’d been stories of people abandoning their cabs on the Grand Central Parkway to walk into LGA. And then there’s just flying between two of the US’s most congested airports. I’ve always said that anything less than a 30-minute delay between LGA and ORD is on-time. So I booked my flights to avoid rush hours -- leaving ORD at 4pm, arriving LGA at 7:30, and my return flight leaving LGA at 3:30 the next afternoon. I land in LGA on-time. There’s no taxi queue, and I’m into the Sheraton Times Square by a little after 8 -- no flight delays, no traffic. I quietly offer up my first beer at The Three Monkeys to the travel gods in thanksgiving.</li>\r\n 	<li>The next day, we finish up our meeting in midtown an hour early, I walk out of the building to find all sorts of cabs. The first cab doesn’t have the time to take me to LGA, but the second guy is happy to. We make good time across town to the tunnel and there’s no traffic on the Grand Central. I tip the guy well, walk up to an American kiosk and see that I can standby on the 1:30pm flight -- which will be boarding in about 5 minutes. I hit the TSA PreCheck line -- about 5 people in front of me, but the TSA folks are in good humor and moving things along. I hear the gate agent call my name as I walk up to the gate. The flight takes off on time and lands early. Hey, American made up 2 of the 3 hr-delay from last week! And on an LGA-ORD flight. I offered up a bigger beer when I got home.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Vidian/52190\">Memories (infiniti loop)</a> by Vidian (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license. Ft: TheDice</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Mike Skinner took a couple of minutes to stop by the TravelCommons web site and leave a comment about the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/07/30/podcast-131-twitter-concierge-customer-service-london-tube-story/\">last episode</a>. Mike writes\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>“Long time listener, really enjoy the show.“Your comments on the Dreamliner were very interesting to me. I\'ve flown one long-haul on several occasions, and yes, the windows are fun to play with. But you didn\'t have any comments on what I think is the most important attribute. The 787 isn\'t just another \"metal tube\"..... It is constructed from carbon fiber, and can be pressurized to a higher level than most normal passenger jets. The environment inside is at higher air pressure (like being at 6,000\' rather than 10000\' elevation), with a higher level of humidity (air not so dry), and more refreshes. I found it a great plane to fly on a long red-eye! Or any 5+ hour flight.\r\n“I\'m looking forward to this fall, when I\'m flying one r/t LAX-SYD in UA\'s BF cabin (14 hour flight)”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Mike, thanks for the comment. You’re absolutely right about the 787’s carbon fiber build allowing it to be pressurized at a lower level -- I’m not sure if that’s because of an increase in strength from the carbon fiber or because it’s less impervious to the higher moisture content of the denser air. But I didn’t notice a difference between my flight out to on an A330 and my flight back on the 787. Of course, it might be that I wasn’t paying enough attention to the negative -- less dry eye; less “cotton mouth” -- or that that the LHR-ORD flight wasn’t a red-eye; and so I was able to keep myself hydrated more than I would on a red-eye. Maybe I would’ve noticed the difference on those 17-hr SAA flights to Joburg those years ago. Whatever the reason, anything that makes those long-haul flights more bearable is a great thing. Safe travels on your upcoming flight to Sydney.</li>\r\n 	<li>That A330 flight didn’t go direct to London. I was late booking my ticket and so instead flew Aer Lingus to Gatwick via Dublin. It was the first time in at least 25 years that I’ve been through Dublin airport. It was a nice enough airport, but crowded for an early Monday morning. I was glad I didn’t have to go through security again, because when I looked past the scanners, it looked to be a bit of zoo parade. But, adding again to the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/01/16/podcast-126-beating-the-traffic-rethinking-carry-on-luggage/\">multi</a>-<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/02/20/podcast-127-critiquing-my-top-10-travel-tips-reviewing-vpns/\">episode</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/03/31/podcast-128-hunt-for-experiences-pop-up-entertainment/\">thread </a>about buying and using local phone SIMs during international travel, I saw the first benefits of the EU’s ban against mobile roaming charges. On the flight over, I’d swapped my US SIM for my UK SIM. Coming out of airplane mode in Dublin, I get what look like the typical welcome texts, but instead of giving me the roaming charges, they tell me that my UK plan is good in Ireland. Might seem kind of a minor thing, but at least for traveling within Europe, there are some real benefits. First is not having to burn through an hour or two at the beginning of a vacation finding a phone store and then going through the hassle of buying a pay-as-you-go SIM. In Paris, I had to go to 3 phone stores to find the SIM I wanted. In Hungary, T-Mobile wouldn’t sell my wife a SIM without a Hungarian citizenship or registration card -- which, of course, she didn’t have. Luckily, my wife’s cousin was with her and she was able to buy SIMs for all of us. If I don’t need to buy a new French or Hungarian SIM to avoid roaming charges, this kind of hassle goes away. I wonder also if there’s a bit of an arbitrage opportunity. Now that I have a UK, French, and Hungarian SIM, do I figure out which one has the cheapest rate and then use that one for all of my trips? I need to read the new regs on that one.</li>\r\n 	<li>On my last couple of trips through ATL, it seems that the lines for PreCheck are configured differently every time. Not quite sure why that is. Every other airport, it’s pretty static -- go to this set of lanes, but ATL, for some reason, wants to change the entrance to the maze each time. They also have put new parallel loading baggage X-ray machines in the ATL PreCheck line. These are pretty common in Europe but just now dribbling into US airports. Rather than queuing up and waiting for each person to put their stuff on the belt, there are 4 loading stations where a group of people each reach below, grab a bin, put it in front of you, put your stuff in it, and then push it onto the conveyor. Since there are 4 people loading at the same time, there’s no “performance anxiety” to make sure you have your belt-loading choreography flawless, and there’s no eye-rolling and foot-tapping while waiting for those who don’t. There are a couple of hassles, though. First, since it’s new, most people are still in serial mode; they don’t know that it’s OK to break queue and step around to an empty loading station. At many European airports, they have someone telling you which loading station to go to (usually with numbered stickers on the floor -- “You, station 1; you, station 6). The TSA hasn’t quite got with this program. Second, if you’re in one of the front loading stations, it takes a little, uh, muscle to break the stream of bins, to shove your bin onto the conveyor. Too polite and you’ll just stand there watching a stream of bins go by. All in all, it’s a definite improvement, but needs a bit of, say, process optimization.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/50485\">Sunset Boulevard</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Siobhan Dakay, unreal_dm</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Travel Apps on My Phone</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>A few weeks ago, Jack Peacock from northern Florida -- kinda near where the panhandle connects to the peninsula -- pinged me on the TravelCommons website with a couple of questions. First was a genealogy question. Peacock isn’t a common last name in the US and so when we meet, “where’s the last name from” is a common icebreaker. Peacock is probably more common down South where Jack and other southern Peacocks will trace their roots back to a Samuel Peacock born 1671 probably in Colonial VA. My line is from more recent immigrant stock, though. My dad grew up in Southport, on the northwest coast of the UK, between Liverpool and Blackpool, and came over to the US in 1956.</li>\r\n 	<li>That out of the way, Jack said that he and his wife are retired, have put their home and vehicles up for sale, and are getting ready to Airbnb the globe. “Geriatric gap year” as Jack put it. I am officially jealous. Which leads to his second question -- what travel apps do I have on my phone?</li>\r\n 	<li>Paging back through the TravelCommons archives, I see that I’ve touched on some categories of travel apps -- in the most recent iteration of my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/12/12/top-10-holiday-travel-tips-2/\">Top 10 Travel Tips</a> I recommended some flight tracking apps and way before that, did a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/11/29/podcast-102-trip-management-app-comparison-tsa-scanner-shuffle/\">bake-off of trip management apps</a> -- but never covered walked through what’s in the travel folder on the home screen of my iPhone.</li>\r\n 	<li>As long time listeners know -- and have suffered through -- I can’t just go through a laundry list. In other words, I can’t just quickly answer Jack’s question. First, I need to build (and drag you all through) some kind of framework that provides some structure to my laundry list. It’s my own little piece of OCD. One way to start is to split between apps with broad general use -- say like Google Maps -- and those more specific to a situation -- the apps of the airlines you use the most, or, say, mass transit apps for a city you’ll be visiting.</li>\r\n 	<li>Let’s dig down to the next layer of the specific category. I have apps for the airlines I use for 90% of my travel -- American, United, Southwest, and Delta -- in that order -- because living in Chicago, American and United have hubs at ORD and Southwest owns MDW. I have Delta for the odd flight between, say, Atlanta and New York. The mix will change based on what you fly -- in Boston, you may have JetBlue, in London you certainly have BA. I mostly use these apps for two reasons -- electronic boarding passes and flight status. I talked in the last episode about how I used the “Where is my plane now” feature of United’s app to track back to the source of a RIC flight delay to GRR. Helped give me a sense of whether that delay could shrink or grow. Also, these apps are getting much quicker about pushing flight status and gate change notifications. Indeed, these apps have gotten good enough that the independent/more general flight tracking apps on my phone -- FlightAware, FlightView, and FlightStats -- are on the bubble. I’ll probably delete two of them and keep one -- either FlightAware or FlightView because of how they show the projected flight path on a weather map. You can find this in the United app, but you have to dig a bit. FlightAware and FlightView have it as their primary app view. It’s another good piece of information for when you’re thinking through flight delays.</li>\r\n 	<li>I didn’t load up the Aer Lingus app for my flight to London last month (if they even have one). It’s not worth it for a single flight. Same reason I’ve never loaded Alaska Air’s app even though I seem to end up on them at least once a year. It’s not worth the phone real estate. Which is the same reason I’ve deleted hotel apps from my phone. I’ve never found any value in the Marriott or Starwood apps. Same with the Hertz and Avis apps. However, if I was Airbnb’ing around the world like Jack is planning, I would probably load up their app.</li>\r\n 	<li>Another specific app I have is My EE -- the app for the UK mobile carrier who’s pay-as-you-go SIM I use. The last iteration of this app made it easier than EE’s website to do a SIM top-up, so it’s now in my Travel folder.</li>\r\n 	<li>A bit more general is the Priority Pass app which gets me access to international airport lounges through my Amex Platinum card. It regularly updates its list of available lounges and has airport maps to help you find them. This came in real handy in Dublin where the lounge was tucked away on a second floor with very minimal signage.</li>\r\n 	<li>Another kinda general app is the companion app to my Bluesmart roller bag. It connects to my bag via Bluetooth, automatically locks it when it’s out of range of my phone, and displays the bag’s location when I have to check it. The auto lock is probably the most useful thing. It’s consistently on the bubble.</li>\r\n 	<li>I have both Uber and Lyft in my Travel folder. I’ll typically light both of those apps up when looking for a ride somewhere, comparing price and wait time. As I mentioned during a broader discussion of ride sharing a few episodes back, all things being equal, I’ll choose Lyft, but I use both of them regularly.</li>\r\n 	<li>Five years ago, I <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/11/29/podcast-102-trip-management-app-comparison-tsa-scanner-shuffle/\">reviewed</a> the 3 main trip management apps -- Tripit, TripCase, and Worldmate -- that recreated the old company travel agent’s printed trip itinerary by integrating separate airline, hotel, and rental car reservations for free, and real-time flight updates for a fee. I liked Worldmate the best, with TripCase a solid second. Today, I use Tripit. Carlson Wagonlit closed up Worldmate at the beginning of the year, and Sabre’s TripCase is hot mess of advertising. Tripit has continued to improve their app. The ability to share a piece of an itinerary (a flight, a hotel) through iPhone’s iMessage is surprisingly handy. But the $50/yr Tripit Pro is also on the bubble because of the airline apps’ improved notifications.</li>\r\n 	<li>Google Translate has grown into a critical travel app. I’ve talked in a previous episode about how, with real-time translation through the camera, it’s becoming pretty close to magic.\r\nTransit is another app that continues to solidify its hold on screen real estate. Transit covers mass transit across North America and major cities in Europe. Google Maps suggests mass transit routings, but Transit goes much deeper -- with things like real-time bus and subway data and bike share locations for cities like Chicago and New York.</li>\r\n 	<li>And then, of course, there is Google Maps. I use it to plan trips, find hotels, check out neighborhoods, figure out where I am, share locations -- as well as getting me from Point A to Point B. It is probably the most indispensable travel app on my phone. Indeed, it’s the only travel app with its own screen real estate rather than sharing space in the Travel folder</li>\r\n 	<li>What are your suggestions?</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music --<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/ramblinglibrarian/55007\">Dawn at the Top of the World ft. copperhead &amp; Robert Seikawitch</a> by Ivan Chew (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #132</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Magnatune</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_128.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #132 — Travel Apps on My Phone','','inherit','closed','closed','','1798-revision-v1','','','2017-08-26 20:58:43','2017-08-27 01:58:43','',1798,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/08/26/1798-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1805,1,'2017-08-26 21:11:10','2017-08-27 02:11:10','[caption id=\"attachment_1803\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/DSC_5935a.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1803\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/DSC_5935a-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> How Are Their Yelp Reviews?[/caption]\r\n\r\nDifficult to do a travel podcast without talking about this month\'s incidents on United and American Airlines. The videos that hit social media were damning, but as more of the facts came out, the stories around each incident became more complex. On a much lighter note, we also talk about the explosion of food tourism, called by some \"The Bourdain Effect\" after Anthony Bourdain\'s TV travelogue series. Also, listener suggestions for visiting the Budapest baths, and compliments on the terminal improvements at San Francisco Airport (SFO). All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_132.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/320097474\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n<!--more-->\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #132:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you, as always it seems, from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. Seems that I’ve swapped the romance of hotel bathrooms for the sound quality of the studio here. Seems like yesterday when I was <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2009/04/15/podcast-73-eating-alone-on-the-road-more-things-you-never-want-to-hear/\">recording the intro</a> in the business class toilet of a South African Airways A340 on the way down to J’burg</li>\r\n 	<li>My travel since the last episode hasn’t been anything quite as exciting. Trips to Richmond, Baltimore and New York City. Indeed, if I tried recording in the toilet of one of those American or United A321s, I don’t think I’d get too far past “Hello, this is Mark Peacock…” before someone started banging on the door.</li>\r\n 	<li>Richmond airport continued to be a problem for me -- not the airport itself, just the carriers flying into it. I get up on a Tuesday morning -- sidestepping the Monday morning road warrior crush -- iPhone notifications from American, TripIt, and Google all say my flight is on-time. Pulling up to the terminal -- everything still looks OK. I walk through the doors and my phone explodes -- my 8:20 am flight is now leaving at 4 something pm! The next note is from American telling me they’ve booked me on the 11:45am flight, so instead of getting to RIC at 11:20am, I’m now due in at 2:40pm -- over 3 hrs late. A quick call to Amex Travel tells me that the early morning United flight has already left, so this is my best option. Since, as I talked about in the last episode, I’ve given up depending on airlines being able to meet their schedules, I hadn’t booked any early afternoon meetings, so I just parked myself in the Admirals Club and got some work done. Nothing lost but a bit of sleep.</li>\r\n 	<li>With this in mind, I was gritting my teeth when I had to head back to ORD the next week for my flight to LGA. I haven’t had to fly to New York much recently, and when I have, I’ve flown into EWR to avoid the nightmare-ish delays being reported from LGA because of the construction. There’d been stories of people abandoning their cabs on the Grand Central Parkway to walk into LGA. And then there’s just flying between two of the US’s most congested airports. I’ve always said that anything less than a 30-minute delay between LGA and ORD is on-time. So I booked my flights to avoid rush hours -- leaving ORD at 4pm, arriving LGA at 7:30, and my return flight leaving LGA at 3:30 the next afternoon. I land in LGA on-time. There’s no taxi queue, and I’m into the Sheraton Times Square by a little after 8 -- no flight delays, no traffic. I quietly offer up my first beer at The Three Monkeys to the travel gods in thanksgiving.</li>\r\n 	<li>The next day, we finish up our meeting in midtown an hour early, I walk out of the building to find all sorts of cabs. The first cab doesn’t have the time to take me to LGA, but the second guy is happy to. We make good time across town to the tunnel and there’s no traffic on the Grand Central. I tip the guy well, walk up to an American kiosk and see that I can standby on the 1:30pm flight -- which will be boarding in about 5 minutes. I hit the TSA PreCheck line -- about 5 people in front of me, but the TSA folks are in good humor and moving things along. I hear the gate agent call my name as I walk up to the gate. The flight takes off on time and lands early. Hey, American made up 2 of the 3 hr-delay from last week! And on an LGA-ORD flight. I offered up a bigger beer when I got home.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Vidian/52190\">Memories (infiniti loop)</a> by Vidian (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license. Ft: TheDice</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Mike Skinner took a couple of minutes to stop by the TravelCommons web site and leave a comment about the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/07/30/podcast-131-twitter-concierge-customer-service-london-tube-story/\">last episode</a>. Mike writes\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>“Long time listener, really enjoy the show.“Your comments on the Dreamliner were very interesting to me. I\'ve flown one long-haul on several occasions, and yes, the windows are fun to play with. But you didn\'t have any comments on what I think is the most important attribute. The 787 isn\'t just another \"metal tube\"..... It is constructed from carbon fiber, and can be pressurized to a higher level than most normal passenger jets. The environment inside is at higher air pressure (like being at 6,000\' rather than 10000\' elevation), with a higher level of humidity (air not so dry), and more refreshes. I found it a great plane to fly on a long red-eye! Or any 5+ hour flight.\r\n“I\'m looking forward to this fall, when I\'m flying one r/t LAX-SYD in UA\'s BF cabin (14 hour flight)”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Mike, thanks for the comment. You’re absolutely right about the 787’s carbon fiber build allowing it to be pressurized at a lower level -- I’m not sure if that’s because of an increase in strength from the carbon fiber or because it’s less impervious to the higher moisture content of the denser air. But I didn’t notice a difference between my flight out to on an A330 and my flight back on the 787. Of course, it might be that I wasn’t paying enough attention to the negative -- less dry eye; less “cotton mouth” -- or that that the LHR-ORD flight wasn’t a red-eye; and so I was able to keep myself hydrated more than I would on a red-eye. Maybe I would’ve noticed the difference on those 17-hr SAA flights to Joburg those years ago. Whatever the reason, anything that makes those long-haul flights more bearable is a great thing. Safe travels on your upcoming flight to Sydney.</li>\r\n 	<li>That A330 flight didn’t go direct to London. I was late booking my ticket and so instead flew Aer Lingus to Gatwick via Dublin. It was the first time in at least 25 years that I’ve been through Dublin airport. It was a nice enough airport, but crowded for an early Monday morning. I was glad I didn’t have to go through security again, because when I looked past the scanners, it looked to be a bit of zoo parade. But, adding again to the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/01/16/podcast-126-beating-the-traffic-rethinking-carry-on-luggage/\">multi</a>-<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/02/20/podcast-127-critiquing-my-top-10-travel-tips-reviewing-vpns/\">episode</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/03/31/podcast-128-hunt-for-experiences-pop-up-entertainment/\">thread </a>about buying and using local phone SIMs during international travel, I saw the first benefits of the EU’s ban against mobile roaming charges. On the flight over, I’d swapped my US SIM for my UK SIM. Coming out of airplane mode in Dublin, I get what look like the typical welcome texts, but instead of giving me the roaming charges, they tell me that my UK plan is good in Ireland. Might seem kind of a minor thing, but at least for traveling within Europe, there are some real benefits. First is not having to burn through an hour or two at the beginning of a vacation finding a phone store and then going through the hassle of buying a pay-as-you-go SIM. In Paris, I had to go to 3 phone stores to find the SIM I wanted. In Hungary, T-Mobile wouldn’t sell my wife a SIM without a Hungarian citizenship or registration card -- which, of course, she didn’t have. Luckily, my wife’s cousin was with her and she was able to buy SIMs for all of us. If I don’t need to buy a new French or Hungarian SIM to avoid roaming charges, this kind of hassle goes away. I wonder also if there’s a bit of an arbitrage opportunity. Now that I have a UK, French, and Hungarian SIM, do I figure out which one has the cheapest rate and then use that one for all of my trips? I need to read the new regs on that one.</li>\r\n 	<li>On my last couple of trips through ATL, it seems that the lines for PreCheck are configured differently every time. Not quite sure why that is. Every other airport, it’s pretty static -- go to this set of lanes, but ATL, for some reason, wants to change the entrance to the maze each time. They also have put new parallel loading baggage X-ray machines in the ATL PreCheck line. These are pretty common in Europe but just now dribbling into US airports. Rather than queuing up and waiting for each person to put their stuff on the belt, there are 4 loading stations where a group of people each reach below, grab a bin, put it in front of you, put your stuff in it, and then push it onto the conveyor. Since there are 4 people loading at the same time, there’s no “performance anxiety” to make sure you have your belt-loading choreography flawless, and there’s no eye-rolling and foot-tapping while waiting for those who don’t. There are a couple of hassles, though. First, since it’s new, most people are still in serial mode; they don’t know that it’s OK to break queue and step around to an empty loading station. At many European airports, they have someone telling you which loading station to go to (usually with numbered stickers on the floor -- “You, station 1; you, station 6). The TSA hasn’t quite got with this program. Second, if you’re in one of the front loading stations, it takes a little, uh, muscle to break the stream of bins, to shove your bin onto the conveyor. Too polite and you’ll just stand there watching a stream of bins go by. All in all, it’s a definite improvement, but needs a bit of, say, process optimization.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/50485\">Sunset Boulevard</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Siobhan Dakay, unreal_dm</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Travel Apps on My Phone</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>A few weeks ago, Jack Peacock from northern Florida -- kinda near where the panhandle connects to the peninsula -- pinged me on the TravelCommons website with a couple of questions. First was a genealogy question. Peacock isn’t a common last name in the US and so when we meet, “where’s the last name from” is a common icebreaker. Peacock is probably more common down South where Jack and other southern Peacocks will trace their roots back to a Samuel Peacock born 1671 probably in Colonial VA. My line is from more recent immigrant stock, though. My dad grew up in Southport, on the northwest coast of the UK, between Liverpool and Blackpool, and came over to the US in 1956.</li>\r\n 	<li>That out of the way, Jack said that he and his wife are retired, have put their home and vehicles up for sale, and are getting ready to Airbnb the globe. “Geriatric gap year” as Jack put it. I am officially jealous. Which leads to his second question -- what travel apps do I have on my phone? A very timely question since Carlson Wagonlit Travel just <a href=\"http://www.carlsonwagonlit.com/content/cwt/global/en/news/news-releases/20170824-Business-travelers-find-they-are-very-productive-due-to-more-technology-options.html\">released a survey</a> where 80% of business travelers said their smartphone was the “travel tool they can’t live without”, and 45% used airline and hotel apps as their main travel technology.</li>\r\n 	<li>Paging back through the TravelCommons archives, I see that I’ve touched on some categories of travel apps -- in the most recent iteration of my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/12/12/top-10-holiday-travel-tips-2/\">Top 10 Travel Tips</a> I recommended some flight tracking apps and way before that, did a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/11/29/podcast-102-trip-management-app-comparison-tsa-scanner-shuffle/\">bake-off of trip management apps</a> -- but never covered walked through what’s in the travel folder on the home screen of my iPhone.</li>\r\n 	<li>As long time listeners know -- and have suffered through -- I can’t just go through a laundry list. In other words, I can’t just quickly answer Jack’s question. First, I need to build (and drag you all through) some kind of framework that provides some structure to my laundry list. It’s my own little piece of OCD. One way to start is to split between apps with broad general use -- say like Google Maps -- and those more specific to a situation -- the apps of the airlines you use the most, or, say, mass transit apps for a city you’ll be visiting.</li>\r\n 	<li>Let’s dig down to the next layer of the specific category. I have apps for the airlines I use for 90% of my travel -- American, United, Southwest, and Delta -- in that order -- because living in Chicago, American and United have hubs at ORD and Southwest owns MDW. I have Delta for the odd flight between, say, Atlanta and New York. The mix will change based on what you fly -- in Boston, you may have JetBlue, in London you certainly have BA. I mostly use these apps for two reasons -- electronic boarding passes and flight status. I talked in the last episode about how I used the “Where is my plane now” feature of United’s app to track back to the source of a RIC flight delay to GRR. Helped give me a sense of whether that delay could shrink or grow. Also, these apps are getting much quicker about pushing flight status and gate change notifications. Indeed, these apps have gotten good enough that the independent/more general flight tracking apps on my phone -- FlightAware, FlightView, and FlightStats -- are on the bubble. I’ll probably delete two of them and keep one -- either FlightAware or FlightView because of how they show the projected flight path on a weather map. You can find this in the United app, but you have to dig a bit. FlightAware and FlightView have it as their primary app view. It’s another good piece of information for when you’re thinking through flight delays.</li>\r\n 	<li>I didn’t load up the Aer Lingus app for my flight to London last month (if they even have one). It’s not worth it for a single flight. Same reason I’ve never loaded Alaska Air’s app even though I seem to end up on them at least once a year. It’s not worth the phone real estate. Which is the same reason I’ve deleted hotel apps from my phone. I’ve never found any value in the Marriott or Starwood apps. Same with the Hertz and Avis apps. However, if I was Airbnb’ing around the world like Jack is planning, I would probably load up their app.</li>\r\n 	<li>Another specific app I have is My EE -- the app for the UK mobile carrier who’s pay-as-you-go SIM I use. The last iteration of this app made it easier than EE’s website to do a SIM top-up, so it’s now in my Travel folder.</li>\r\n 	<li>A bit more general is the Priority Pass app which gets me access to international airport lounges through my Amex Platinum card. It regularly updates its list of available lounges and has airport maps to help you find them. This came in real handy in Dublin where the lounge was tucked away on a second floor with very minimal signage.</li>\r\n 	<li>Another kinda general app is the companion app to my Bluesmart roller bag. It connects to my bag via Bluetooth, automatically locks it when it’s out of range of my phone, and displays the bag’s location when I have to check it. The auto lock is probably the most useful thing. It’s consistently on the bubble.</li>\r\n 	<li>I have both Uber and Lyft in my Travel folder. I’ll typically light both of those apps up when looking for a ride somewhere, comparing price and wait time. As I mentioned during a broader discussion of ride sharing a few episodes back, all things being equal, I’ll choose Lyft, but I use both of them regularly.</li>\r\n 	<li>Five years ago, I <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/11/29/podcast-102-trip-management-app-comparison-tsa-scanner-shuffle/\">reviewed</a> the 3 main trip management apps -- Tripit, TripCase, and Worldmate -- that recreated the old company travel agent’s printed trip itinerary by integrating separate airline, hotel, and rental car reservations for free, and real-time flight updates for a fee. I liked Worldmate the best, with TripCase a solid second. Today, I use Tripit. Carlson Wagonlit closed up Worldmate at the beginning of the year, and Sabre’s TripCase is hot mess of advertising. Tripit has continued to improve their app. The ability to share a piece of an itinerary (a flight, a hotel) through iPhone’s iMessage is surprisingly handy. But the $50/yr Tripit Pro is also on the bubble because of the airline apps’ improved notifications.</li>\r\n 	<li>Google Translate has grown into a critical travel app. I’ve talked in a previous episode about how, with real-time translation through the camera, it’s becoming pretty close to magic.\r\nTransit is another app that continues to solidify its hold on screen real estate. Transit covers mass transit across North America and major cities in Europe. Google Maps suggests mass transit routings, but Transit goes much deeper -- with things like real-time bus and subway data and bike share locations for cities like Chicago and New York.</li>\r\n 	<li>And then, of course, there is Google Maps. I use it to plan trips, find hotels, check out neighborhoods, figure out where I am, share locations -- as well as getting me from Point A to Point B. It is probably the most indispensable travel app on my phone. Indeed, it’s the only travel app with its own screen real estate rather than sharing space in the Travel folder</li>\r\n 	<li>What are your suggestions?</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music --<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/ramblinglibrarian/55007\">Dawn at the Top of the World ft. copperhead &amp; Robert Seikawitch</a> by Ivan Chew (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #132</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Magnatune</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_128.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #132 — Travel Apps on My Phone','','inherit','closed','closed','','1798-revision-v1','','','2017-08-26 21:11:10','2017-08-27 02:11:10','',1798,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/08/26/1798-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1806,1,'2017-08-26 21:32:07','2017-08-27 02:32:07','[caption id=\"attachment_1803\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/DSC_5935a.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1803\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/DSC_5935a-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> How Are Their Yelp Reviews?[/caption]\r\n\r\nDifficult to do a travel podcast without talking about this month\'s incidents on United and American Airlines. The videos that hit social media were damning, but as more of the facts came out, the stories around each incident became more complex. On a much lighter note, we also talk about the explosion of food tourism, called by some \"The Bourdain Effect\" after Anthony Bourdain\'s TV travelogue series. Also, listener suggestions for visiting the Budapest baths, and compliments on the terminal improvements at San Francisco Airport (SFO). All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_132.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/320097474\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n<!--more-->\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #132:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you, as always it seems, from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. Seems that I’ve swapped the romance of hotel bathrooms for the sound quality of the studio here. Seems like yesterday when I was <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2009/04/15/podcast-73-eating-alone-on-the-road-more-things-you-never-want-to-hear/\">recording the intro</a> in the business class toilet of a South African Airways A340 on the way down to J’burg</li>\r\n 	<li>My travel since the last episode hasn’t been anything quite as exciting. Trips to Richmond, Baltimore and New York City. Indeed, if I tried recording in the toilet of one of those American or United A321s, I don’t think I’d get too far past “Hello, this is Mark Peacock…” before someone started banging on the door.</li>\r\n 	<li>Richmond airport continued to be a problem for me -- not the airport itself, just the carriers flying into it. I get up on a Tuesday morning -- sidestepping the Monday morning road warrior crush -- iPhone notifications from American, TripIt, and Google all say my flight is on-time. Pulling up to the terminal -- everything still looks OK. I walk through the doors and my phone explodes -- my 8:20 am flight is now leaving at 4 something pm! The next note is from American telling me they’ve booked me on the 11:45am flight, so instead of getting to RIC at 11:20am, I’m now due in at 2:40pm -- over 3 hrs late. A quick call to Amex Travel tells me that the early morning United flight has already left, so this is my best option. Since, as I talked about in the last episode, I’ve given up depending on airlines being able to meet their schedules, I hadn’t booked any early afternoon meetings, so I just parked myself in the Admirals Club and got some work done. Nothing lost but a bit of sleep.</li>\r\n 	<li>With this in mind, I was gritting my teeth when I had to head back to ORD the next week for my flight to LGA. I haven’t had to fly to New York much recently, and when I have, I’ve flown into EWR to avoid the nightmare-ish delays being reported from LGA because of the construction. There’d been stories of people abandoning their cabs on the Grand Central Parkway to walk into LGA. And then there’s just flying between two of the US’s most congested airports. I’ve always said that anything less than a 30-minute delay between LGA and ORD is on-time. So I booked my flights to avoid rush hours -- leaving ORD at 4pm, arriving LGA at 7:30, and my return flight leaving LGA at 3:30 the next afternoon. I land in LGA on-time. There’s no taxi queue, and I’m into the Sheraton Times Square by a little after 8 -- no flight delays, no traffic. I quietly offer up my first beer at The Three Monkeys to the travel gods in thanksgiving.</li>\r\n 	<li>The next day, we finish up our meeting in midtown an hour early, I walk out of the building to find all sorts of cabs. The first cab doesn’t have the time to take me to LGA, but the second guy is happy to. We make good time across town to the tunnel and there’s no traffic on the Grand Central. I tip the guy well, walk up to an American kiosk and see that I can standby on the 1:30pm flight -- which will be boarding in about 5 minutes. I hit the TSA PreCheck line -- about 5 people in front of me, but the TSA folks are in good humor and moving things along. I hear the gate agent call my name as I walk up to the gate. The flight takes off on time and lands early. Hey, American made up 2 of the 3 hr-delay from last week! And on an LGA-ORD flight. I offered up a bigger beer when I got home.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/JeffSpeed68/54450\">Hula Hoop Party</a> by Stefan Kartenberg (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: Martijn de Boer, Blue Wave Theory</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Mike Skinner took a couple of minutes to stop by the TravelCommons web site and leave a comment about the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/07/30/podcast-131-twitter-concierge-customer-service-london-tube-story/\">last episode</a>. Mike writes\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>“Long time listener, really enjoy the show.“Your comments on the Dreamliner were very interesting to me. I\'ve flown one long-haul on several occasions, and yes, the windows are fun to play with. But you didn\'t have any comments on what I think is the most important attribute. The 787 isn\'t just another \"metal tube\"..... It is constructed from carbon fiber, and can be pressurized to a higher level than most normal passenger jets. The environment inside is at higher air pressure (like being at 6,000\' rather than 10000\' elevation), with a higher level of humidity (air not so dry), and more refreshes. I found it a great plane to fly on a long red-eye! Or any 5+ hour flight.\r\n“I\'m looking forward to this fall, when I\'m flying one r/t LAX-SYD in UA\'s BF cabin (14 hour flight)”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Mike, thanks for the comment. You’re absolutely right about the 787’s carbon fiber build allowing it to be pressurized at a lower level -- I’m not sure if that’s because of an increase in strength from the carbon fiber or because it’s less impervious to the higher moisture content of the denser air. But I didn’t notice a difference between my flight out to on an A330 and my flight back on the 787. Of course, it might be that I wasn’t paying enough attention to the negative -- less dry eye; less “cotton mouth” -- or that that the LHR-ORD flight wasn’t a red-eye; and so I was able to keep myself hydrated more than I would on a red-eye. Maybe I would’ve noticed the difference on those 17-hr SAA flights to Joburg those years ago. Whatever the reason, anything that makes those long-haul flights more bearable is a great thing. Safe travels on your upcoming flight to Sydney.</li>\r\n 	<li>That A330 flight didn’t go direct to London. I was late booking my ticket and so instead flew Aer Lingus to Gatwick via Dublin. It was the first time in at least 25 years that I’ve been through Dublin airport. It was a nice enough airport, but crowded for an early Monday morning. I was glad I didn’t have to go through security again, because when I looked past the scanners, it looked to be a bit of zoo parade. But, adding again to the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/01/16/podcast-126-beating-the-traffic-rethinking-carry-on-luggage/\">multi</a>-<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/02/20/podcast-127-critiquing-my-top-10-travel-tips-reviewing-vpns/\">episode</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/03/31/podcast-128-hunt-for-experiences-pop-up-entertainment/\">thread </a>about buying and using local phone SIMs during international travel, I saw the first benefits of the EU’s ban against mobile roaming charges. On the flight over, I’d swapped my US SIM for my UK SIM. Coming out of airplane mode in Dublin, I get what look like the typical welcome texts, but instead of giving me the roaming charges, they tell me that my UK plan is good in Ireland. Might seem kind of a minor thing, but at least for traveling within Europe, there are some real benefits. First is not having to burn through an hour or two at the beginning of a vacation finding a phone store and then going through the hassle of buying a pay-as-you-go SIM. In Paris, I had to go to 3 phone stores to find the SIM I wanted. In Hungary, T-Mobile wouldn’t sell my wife a SIM without a Hungarian citizenship or registration card -- which, of course, she didn’t have. Luckily, my wife’s cousin was with her and she was able to buy SIMs for all of us. If I don’t need to buy a new French or Hungarian SIM to avoid roaming charges, this kind of hassle goes away. I wonder also if there’s a bit of an arbitrage opportunity. Now that I have a UK, French, and Hungarian SIM, do I figure out which one has the cheapest rate and then use that one for all of my trips? I need to read the new regs on that one.</li>\r\n 	<li>On my last couple of trips through ATL, it seems that the lines for PreCheck are configured differently every time. Not quite sure why that is. Every other airport, it’s pretty static -- go to this set of lanes, but ATL, for some reason, wants to change the entrance to the maze each time. They also have put new parallel loading baggage X-ray machines in the ATL PreCheck line. These are pretty common in Europe but just now dribbling into US airports. Rather than queuing up and waiting for each person to put their stuff on the belt, there are 4 loading stations where a group of people each reach below, grab a bin, put it in front of you, put your stuff in it, and then push it onto the conveyor. Since there are 4 people loading at the same time, there’s no “performance anxiety” to make sure you have your belt-loading choreography flawless, and there’s no eye-rolling and foot-tapping while waiting for those who don’t. There are a couple of hassles, though. First, since it’s new, most people are still in serial mode; they don’t know that it’s OK to break queue and step around to an empty loading station. At many European airports, they have someone telling you which loading station to go to (usually with numbered stickers on the floor -- “You, station 1; you, station 6). The TSA hasn’t quite got with this program. Second, if you’re in one of the front loading stations, it takes a little, uh, muscle to break the stream of bins, to shove your bin onto the conveyor. Too polite and you’ll just stand there watching a stream of bins go by. All in all, it’s a definite improvement, but needs a bit of, say, process optimization.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/49674\">H2O</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Travel Apps on My Phone</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>A few weeks ago, Jack Peacock from northern Florida -- kinda near where the panhandle connects to the peninsula -- pinged me on the TravelCommons website with a couple of questions. First was a genealogy question. Peacock isn’t a common last name in the US and so when we meet, “where’s the last name from” is a common icebreaker. Peacock is probably more common down South where Jack and other southern Peacocks will trace their roots back to a Samuel Peacock born 1671 probably in Colonial VA. My line is from more recent immigrant stock, though. My dad grew up in Southport, on the northwest coast of the UK, between Liverpool and Blackpool, and came over to the US in 1956.</li>\r\n 	<li>That out of the way, Jack said that he and his wife are retired, have put their home and vehicles up for sale, and are getting ready to Airbnb the globe. “Geriatric gap year” as Jack put it. I am officially jealous. Which leads to his second question -- what travel apps do I have on my phone? A very timely question since Carlson Wagonlit Travel just <a href=\"http://www.carlsonwagonlit.com/content/cwt/global/en/news/news-releases/20170824-Business-travelers-find-they-are-very-productive-due-to-more-technology-options.html\">released a survey</a> where 80% of business travelers said their smartphone was the “travel tool they can’t live without”, and 45% used airline and hotel apps as their main travel technology.</li>\r\n 	<li>Paging back through the TravelCommons archives, I see that I’ve touched on some categories of travel apps -- in the most recent iteration of my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/12/12/top-10-holiday-travel-tips-2/\">Top 10 Travel Tips</a> I recommended some flight tracking apps and way before that, did a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/11/29/podcast-102-trip-management-app-comparison-tsa-scanner-shuffle/\">bake-off of trip management apps</a> -- but never covered walked through what’s in the travel folder on the home screen of my iPhone.</li>\r\n 	<li>As long time listeners know -- and have suffered through -- I can’t just go through a laundry list. In other words, I can’t just quickly answer Jack’s question. First, I need to build (and drag you all through) some kind of framework that provides some structure to my laundry list. It’s my own little piece of OCD. One way to start is to split between apps with broad general use -- say like Google Maps -- and those more specific to a situation -- the apps of the airlines you use the most, or, say, mass transit apps for a city you’ll be visiting.</li>\r\n 	<li>Let’s dig down to the next layer of the specific category. I have apps for the airlines I use for 90% of my travel -- American, United, Southwest, and Delta -- in that order -- because living in Chicago, American and United have hubs at ORD and Southwest owns MDW. I have Delta for the odd flight between, say, Atlanta and New York. The mix will change based on what you fly -- in Boston, you may have JetBlue, in London you certainly have BA. I mostly use these apps for two reasons -- electronic boarding passes and flight status. I talked in the last episode about how I used the “Where is my plane now” feature of United’s app to track back to the source of a RIC flight delay to GRR. Helped give me a sense of whether that delay could shrink or grow. Also, these apps are getting much quicker about pushing flight status and gate change notifications. Indeed, these apps have gotten good enough that the independent/more general flight tracking apps on my phone -- FlightAware, FlightView, and FlightStats -- are on the bubble. I’ll probably delete two of them and keep one -- either FlightAware or FlightView because of how they show the projected flight path on a weather map. You can find this in the United app, but you have to dig a bit. FlightAware and FlightView have it as their primary app view. It’s another good piece of information for when you’re thinking through flight delays.</li>\r\n 	<li>I didn’t load up the Aer Lingus app for my flight to London last month (if they even have one). It’s not worth it for a single flight. Same reason I’ve never loaded Alaska Air’s app even though I seem to end up on them at least once a year. It’s not worth the phone real estate. Which is the same reason I’ve deleted hotel apps from my phone. I’ve never found any value in the Marriott or Starwood apps. Same with the Hertz and Avis apps. However, if I was Airbnb’ing around the world like Jack is planning, I would probably load up their app.</li>\r\n 	<li>Another specific app I have is My EE -- the app for the UK mobile carrier who’s pay-as-you-go SIM I use. The last iteration of this app made it easier than EE’s website to do a SIM top-up, so it’s now in my Travel folder.</li>\r\n 	<li>A bit more general is the Priority Pass app which gets me access to international airport lounges through my Amex Platinum card. It regularly updates its list of available lounges and has airport maps to help you find them. This came in real handy in Dublin where the lounge was tucked away on a second floor with very minimal signage.</li>\r\n 	<li>Another kinda general app is the companion app to my Bluesmart roller bag. It connects to my bag via Bluetooth, automatically locks it when it’s out of range of my phone, and displays the bag’s location when I have to check it. The auto lock is probably the most useful thing. It’s consistently on the bubble.</li>\r\n 	<li>I have both Uber and Lyft in my Travel folder. I’ll typically light both of those apps up when looking for a ride somewhere, comparing price and wait time. As I mentioned during a broader discussion of ride sharing a few episodes back, all things being equal, I’ll choose Lyft, but I use both of them regularly.</li>\r\n 	<li>Five years ago, I <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/11/29/podcast-102-trip-management-app-comparison-tsa-scanner-shuffle/\">reviewed</a> the 3 main trip management apps -- Tripit, TripCase, and Worldmate -- that recreated the old company travel agent’s printed trip itinerary by integrating separate airline, hotel, and rental car reservations for free, and real-time flight updates for a fee. I liked Worldmate the best, with TripCase a solid second. Today, I use Tripit. Carlson Wagonlit closed up Worldmate at the beginning of the year, and Sabre’s TripCase is hot mess of advertising. Tripit has continued to improve their app. The ability to share a piece of an itinerary (a flight, a hotel) through iPhone’s iMessage is surprisingly handy. But the $50/yr Tripit Pro is also on the bubble because of the airline apps’ improved notifications.</li>\r\n 	<li>Google Translate has grown into a critical travel app. I’ve talked in a previous episode about how, with real-time translation through the camera, it’s becoming pretty close to magic.\r\nTransit is another app that continues to solidify its hold on screen real estate. Transit covers mass transit across North America and major cities in Europe. Google Maps suggests mass transit routings, but Transit goes much deeper -- with things like real-time bus and subway data and bike share locations for cities like Chicago and New York.</li>\r\n 	<li>And then, of course, there is Google Maps. I use it to plan trips, find hotels, check out neighborhoods, figure out where I am, share locations -- as well as getting me from Point A to Point B. It is probably the most indispensable travel app on my phone. Indeed, it’s the only travel app with its own screen real estate rather than sharing space in the Travel folder</li>\r\n 	<li>What are your suggestions?</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #132</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_128.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #132 — Travel Apps on My Phone','','inherit','closed','closed','','1798-revision-v1','','','2017-08-26 21:32:07','2017-08-27 02:32:07','',1798,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/08/26/1798-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1807,1,'2017-08-26 21:33:35','2017-08-27 02:33:35','[caption id=\"attachment_1763\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/IMG_0887.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1763\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/IMG_0887-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Scottish Food Tourism can be an acquired taste[/caption]\r\n\r\nDifficult to do a travel podcast without talking about this month\'s incidents on United and American Airlines. The videos that hit social media were damning, but as more of the facts came out, the stories around each incident became more complex. On a much lighter note, we also talk about the explosion of food tourism, called by some \"The Bourdain Effect\" after Anthony Bourdain\'s TV travelogue series. Also, listener suggestions for visiting the Budapest baths, and compliments on the terminal improvements at San Francisco Airport (SFO). All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_129.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/320097474\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n<!--more-->\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #129:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, taking a breather after a week of what I like to call “stupid travel” -- Mon, Tues in Charlottesville, VA, flying out Tues night to San Francisco by way of Charlotte because, well, that’s the way the connections worked. Spent Weds in San Francisco complete with a 4-5pm meeting which meant I got to SFO too late for the last reasonable flight to Detroit (I gave up red-eyes for Lent many years ago), so instead I caught the 7pm SFO-ORD flight, getting into ORD at 1am. Which meant I had to turn around the next morning, head back to ORD for a mid-morning flight to Detroit for an afternoon meeting in Ann Arbor. As we were driving out of DTW for Ann Arbor, I began to get texts from American that our return flight home was already delayed by thunderstorms at ORD. Later, looking out the window of the meeting room in Ann Arbor, I watched the rain bucket down. The delay made more sense. And it wasn’t a huge thing for me other than extending an already long week of travel by a couple of hours -- I had nothing planned that evening other than going to bed. Twitter followers should be pleasantly surprised by the lack of bitch tweets.</li>\r\n 	<li>And, I really didn’t think I could complain if this was the only delay in six flights that week. Although I did help my cause by connecting through Charlotte instead of ORD for my flight from Charlottesville to San Francisco. The ORD-SFO flight would’ve been an hour shorter, but the probability of making that connection, I think, would’ve been significantly lower. So instead, discretion being the better part of valor, I booked the connection through Charlotte in spite of the longer total trip duration and the incredibly long walks I typically have through that airport. The regional flights come into Concourse E which just goes on forever -- 35 gates just in that concourse -- while my connecting flights seem to always go out of Concourse A. Which means I’m usually race-walking the length of the airport even with an on-time arrival and a 60-minute connection time. However, on Tuesday night, my CHO-CLT flight got in early, I had a 90-minute connection time, and my flight went out Concourse B, which meant I had more than enough time to score some Carolina BBQ and a tall-boy beer -- a good luck trifecta which probably helped my patience with the Detroit delay two days later.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Vidian/52190\">Memories (infiniti loop)</a> by Vidian (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license. Ft: TheDice</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>First up, thanks to Robert Fenerty for sending along Budapest travel ideas. My wife’s parents were refugees from the 1956 uprising, so I’ve been to Hungary a few times -- the first in 1989 when it was still Communist, and then the last time was 11 or 12 years ago. So it’s been a while. On of Robert’s suggestions is heading to the Gellert Baths -- “My favorite,” he says, “Ornate lions dump water into the pool and you can stand beneath the lions.” I hit the Gellert Baths my first or second trip to Hungary. There wasn’t really any English spoken then by folks -- mostly German or Russian -- but I had done a “Hungarian on Tape” language course, had about a hundred word vocabulary, and so was able to manage buying a ticket and finding the locker room. Watching the old guys around me -- and it was just old guys -- I figured out that I was supposed to strip down and tie this little white apron around my waist and head in. You did feel like you were walking into the 1890’s. High ceilings, the spouting lions, old guys playing chess in the pools. I loved it. I told my son that’s it’s kind of a Hungarian onsen. We were both a little disappointed though when we saw on the Gellert website that the dress code had changed in four years ago -- no more single sex pools, no more aprons. It’s now co-ed with bathing suits required; as the website says “all bathers are expected to cover the most important gender essentials”.</li>\r\n 	<li>Chris Christensen sent in a quick note about the Munich airport -- “Munich does have its own brewery,” he said, “but it’s outside of security”. Lotta good that did me.</li>\r\n 	<li>And continuing on that riff from the last episode, wondering how travel guides are coming up with their top 10 airports, I have to say that SFO is not getting the credit it deserves. I think they’re doing the best job of any major US airport to remake themselves on the fly. First they build a new international terminal, then they rebuilt Terminal 2 into something that I think rivals Hong Kong or Singapore. They’ve done a great job renovating Terminal 3 -- opening up what used to be an overcrowded Newark-live cave into a bright, high-ceilinged concourse with wide walkways -- and now they’re tearing down Terminal 1 to completely rebuild that. So in, what, 10 years SFO will have completely rebuilt the passenger-side experience focusing on what travelers need -- no water slides or luxury shops, but reasonable security, a great selection of restaurants and bars, lots of seating and workspace, and what was, at least last week, screaming fast 5 GHz WiFi. Perceptions always lag reality, but I’m hoping that SFO starts getting some well-deserved love from the airport ranking lists.</li>\r\n 	<li>One of the podcasts on my subscription list is Men In Blazers, a soccer (or football) podcast. Toward the end of each show, the two hosts, Roger Bennett and Michael Davis, quickly review products that they’re putting in their Amazon Emporium for a little fund-raising. One thing that Michael Davis put it caught my ear -- compression socks. He said he’s started using them on NY-to-LA flights and loves them. I started using them on international flights after a flight home from Hong Kong in United economy had my legs swelling and stiffening up to tree trunks. I wasn’t the only one. There was another guy laying on the floor by one of the exit doors elevating his legs until a flight attendant shooed him off. I couldn’t bring myself to lie on an airplane floor -- at least not without a sanitized mat -- but after that I started flying in compression socks. Not something that I’ve ever seen make a Top 10 travel tip list -- it’s not the most exciting tip -- but I swear by it. Maybe I’ll sneak it in on my next list.</li>\r\n 	<li>And it wouldn’t be a complete Following Up segment without some beer comment, so thanks to eTuk Denver who tweeted “Mark, next time you\'re in Denver we will personally take you on one of our Beer tours for all the hours of entertainment provided.” Thanks guys! I’m glad you enjoy the podcast and look forward to taking you up on that offer. From their website, it looks like the eTuk guys do beer tours through Denver’s RiNo or River North Art District. The Drink Rino website says they “have the largest concentration of craft beverage manufacturers in the United States, with 15 craft breweries, cideries, wineries and distilleries in a one mile radius.” Yes, it sounds like my kind of neighborhood.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/50485\">Sunset Boulevard</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Siobhan Dakay, unreal_dm</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Airplane Fight Clubs</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I purposely don’t try to do instant Twitter “hot takes” on the news. The near-instantaneous outrage that flares up on Facebook and Twitter often isn’t justified when all the facts work their way out days later. And the United Airlines dragging incident and the American Airlines stroller incident seem to be following those patterns.</li>\r\n 	<li>The April 9th videos of the Chicago aviation police dragging a bloodied semi-conscious passenger down the aisle of a plane are awful. But reading the police report released two weeks later on the 25th add facts not in the video -- that when an officer tried to get the passenger out of his seat, the passenger \"started swinging his arms up and down fast and violently” and that this flailing knocked off the officer’s hands causing the passenger to fall and hit his mouth on the armrest. And that after running back on the plane a second time yelled “\"I\'m not getting off the plane. Just kill me. I want to go home,\" Not exactly the Rosa Parks mantle that his lawyer claimed for him at the press conference announcing his lawsuit.</li>\r\n 	<li>Now, United, actually Republic -- it was their flight to Louisville operating under the United Express banner -- completely screwed this up in so many ways -- trying to go cheap on the incentives for volunteers, involuntarily bumping passengers already in their seats, not figuring out another way to get the deadheading crew to Louisville, and then escalating to the police -- which then led to the passenger escalating. The three other passengers who were involuntarily bumped took the high road -- grudging got off the plane so as not to inconvenience their fellow passengers and to follow what everyone understands are the post-9/11 rules -- once you pass through the plane door, you obey the airline and the crew or else.</li>\r\n 	<li>Unfortunately, for some crew, this expectation of being unquestioned oracle of right and wrong leads them to demand passengers to “respect my authority” first rather than try to de-escalate. The American Airlines incident that happened last weekend -- a conflict between a flight attendant and a mother of two with oversized strollers -- shows again that escalation between, in this case, the flight attendant trying to load the plane and a mother trying to bring 1 or 2 oversized strollers onto the plane instead of gate-checking them. The conflicting demands between “respect my authority” and “the carry-on rules don’t apply to me” collide. It later comes out that the “hot take” on this -- the flight attendant hit the mother and child with the stroller while trying to take it from her -- wasn’t true (no one was hit), but the rapid escalation -- mother yelling, threats between the flight attendant and some First Class passenger who inserted himself -- is everyone’s fault. It’s an unwillingness for someone to step back, swallow hard, and sacrifice their ego.</li>\r\n 	<li>The lawyer for the United Airlines passenger said in his press conference that airlines have been “bullying” passengers. I don’t know that he’s completely wrong on this. Spirit and Ryanair seem to have built their brand around treating passengers rudely. But the passenger treatment of mainline airlines has eroded in the name of operational efficiency -- packed planes, reduced leg room, flight attendants yelling at boarding passengers to hurry up and sit down so the flight can leave. Earlier this week the American Customer Satisfaction Index reported that the airline industry as a whole remains in the bottom third of those the ACSI tracks. “Customer satisfaction has never appeared to be a goal for airlines,” their analysis said. “\"Compared to other industries, the financial return on passenger satisfaction is not much of an incentive.” As the airline industry as consolidated into an oligopoly of 4 main carriers in the US and 3 global alliances -- Star Alliance, OneWorld, and Skyteam -- there aren’t many alternatives. Most of us shrug and bear it; a few lash out.</li>\r\n 	<li>Interesting to see, though, United’s latest efforts to bury this PR nightmare is a pay-out to the bloodied passenger and an announcement that they’ll now offer up to $10,000 for voluntary rebookings. And Southwest, who’ve been completely untouched by this, saying they’ll eliminate overbookings by June.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music --<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/ramblinglibrarian/55007\">Dawn at the Top of the World ft. copperhead &amp; Robert Seikawitch</a> by Ivan Chew (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>The Bourdain Effect</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>That’s how travel wags are explaining the explosion of food tourism -- people wanting to recreate experiences from Anthony Bourdain’s <em>No Reservations</em> and <em>Parts Unknown</em>. Not that it’s anything new -- people have been going to South Philly forever and flipping a coin between Pat’s and Geno’s cheese steaks or going to Detroit for a similar dance between American and Lafayette for coney dogs.</li>\r\n 	<li>It’s more that it’s flipped around today -- it’s used to be that you’d come to Chicago to visit family or see a Cubs game, and, by the way, queue up at Gino’s East for deep dish pizza. Now, it’s booking a table at Alinea, perennially in the top of the <em>World’s 50 Best Restaurant</em> list, and then booking flights, a hotel, and checking the Cubs schedule. Food is now a main draw with restaurants becoming travel destinations in their own right. Noma, the Copenhagen restaurant that is regularly #1 on the World’s 50 Best list has taken this to what is currently the most extreme -- they’re doing a pop-up restaurant in Tulum, Mexico; $600/seat and they sold out -- 5,000 seats in 3 hrs.</li>\r\n 	<li>Regular listeners know that I’m not immune to this. We have a group of 3 couples -- the guys, we all went to college together -- that are Exhibit A of this trend. One wife found a lunch opening at the French Laundry on OpenTable, booked it, then told us, and we all immediately booked a weekend in Napa. Finishing that lunch, we asked ourselves, “What’s our next 3-star?” My wife booked the kitchen table at Alinea, and the other two couples flew into Chicago.</li>\r\n 	<li>Travel experts explain this, saying food is one of the main travel experiences that can’t be digitized -- even though a lot of people try. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve been eating at an upscale restaurant and the guy next to me whips out a big Nikon DSLR, stands up and shoots his plate. Over a 10-course meal, those guys are working some calories.</li>\r\n 	<li>But of course, you can’t digitize taste. And you can’t save it. You can only experience it in the moment. And actually, that moment isn’t just about taste -- it’s the whole experience -- whether you’re having a 3-star lunch in Napa or Paris, your first taste of durian at a roadside stand in Singapore, or a Chicago hot dog at the Weiner Circle at 2 in the morning.</li>\r\n 	<li>One of my favorite travel memories with my father was many years ago when he and I went down to Cabo for a week. Charlie Trotter, one of the early high-end chefs in Chicago, had opened a restaurant in the One and Only resort between Cabo San Lucas and San Jose del Cabo. I had eaten at Trotter’s in Chicago many times and had even worked a shift in the kitchen -- I won it in a charity auction; it was a great experience, but it was real work -- so I wanted to check out this new place. They had just opened. The management was all down from Chicago and they were shaking things out. The starter courses were great, but my dad’s main course wasn’t hot. I flagged down a manager and asked him if they could heat up it up. Away went both of our plates. Hey, mine was fine; you just need to heat his up. The manager quickly came back. Nope, we’ll re-make your dad a new dish, and since he can’t be expected to watch you eat, we’ve taken yours and will re-make yours too so we can serve them at the same time. And while you’re waiting, here are a couple more appetizer dishes. My dad and I looked at each other and started nibbling at the new appetizers. And then we finished them. And then our main courses re-arrived hot and fresh. My dad looked over the table at me and said, “You know, I’m not really that hungry anymore”. I stared him down -- “After what they just went through, you’re going to eat that dish, all of it, and enjoy it”. Complete role reversal. We would replay that scene and laugh about it for years afterwards; way more than we’d look at pictures of us outside the Giggling Marlin.</li>\r\n 	<li>And now that we’re gearing up for our trip to Hungary next month, my wife is running through the list of top Budapest restaurants. I’m looking forward to that, but I also remember up a steep narrow sidewalk in Szentendre a little lángos stand -- deep fried bread rubbed in garlic with a bit of cheese on top. It didn’t make Bourdain’s <em>Parts Unknown</em> Budapest episode, but I’ll be searching for it all the same.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #129</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_128.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #129 — Airport Fight Club; The Bourdain Effect','','inherit','closed','closed','','1760-revision-v1','','','2017-08-26 21:33:35','2017-08-27 02:33:35','',1760,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/08/26/1760-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1809,1,'2017-08-26 21:45:05','2017-08-27 02:45:05','[caption id=\"attachment_1803\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/DSC_5935a.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1803\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/DSC_5935a-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> How Are Their Yelp Reviews?[/caption]\r\n\r\nDifficult to do a travel podcast without talking about this month\'s incidents on United and American Airlines. The videos that hit social media were damning, but as more of the facts came out, the stories around each incident became more complex. On a much lighter note, we also talk about the explosion of food tourism, called by some \"The Bourdain Effect\" after Anthony Bourdain\'s TV travelogue series. Also, listener suggestions for visiting the Budapest baths, and compliments on the terminal improvements at San Francisco Airport (SFO). All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_132.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/320097474\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n<!--more-->\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #132:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you, as always it seems, from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. Seems that I’ve swapped the romance of hotel bathrooms for the sound quality of the studio here. Seems like yesterday when I was <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2009/04/15/podcast-73-eating-alone-on-the-road-more-things-you-never-want-to-hear/\">recording the intro</a> in the business class toilet of a South African Airways A340 on the way down to J’burg</li>\r\n 	<li>My travel since the last episode hasn’t been anything quite as exciting. Trips to Richmond, Baltimore and New York City. Indeed, if I tried recording in the toilet of one of those American or United A321s, I don’t think I’d get too far past “Hello, this is Mark Peacock…” before someone started banging on the door.</li>\r\n 	<li>Richmond airport continued to be a problem for me -- not the airport itself, just the carriers flying into it. I get up on a Tuesday morning -- sidestepping the Monday morning road warrior crush -- iPhone notifications from American, TripIt, and Google all say my flight is on-time. Pulling up to the terminal -- everything still looks OK. I walk through the doors and my phone explodes -- my 8:20 am flight is now leaving at 4 something pm! The next note is from American telling me they’ve booked me on the 11:45am flight, so instead of getting to RIC at 11:20am, I’m now due in at 2:40pm -- over 3 hrs late. A quick call to Amex Travel tells me that the early morning United flight has already left, so this is my best option. Since, as I talked about in the last episode, I’ve given up depending on airlines being able to meet their schedules, I hadn’t booked any early afternoon meetings, so I just parked myself in the Admirals Club and got some work done. Nothing lost but a bit of sleep.</li>\r\n 	<li>With this in mind, I was gritting my teeth when I had to head back to ORD the next week for my flight to LGA. I haven’t had to fly to New York much recently, and when I have, I’ve flown into EWR to avoid the nightmare-ish delays being reported from LGA because of the construction. There’d been stories of people abandoning their cabs on the Grand Central Parkway to walk into LGA. And then there’s just flying between two of the US’s most congested airports. I’ve always said that anything less than a 30-minute delay between LGA and ORD is on-time. So I booked my flights to avoid rush hours -- leaving ORD at 4pm, arriving LGA at 7:30, and my return flight leaving LGA at 3:30 the next afternoon. I land in LGA on-time. There’s no taxi queue, and I’m into the Sheraton Times Square by a little after 8 -- no flight delays, no traffic. I quietly offer up my first beer at The Three Monkeys to the travel gods in thanksgiving.</li>\r\n 	<li>The next day, we finish up our meeting in midtown an hour early, I walk out of the building to find all sorts of cabs. The first cab doesn’t have the time to take me to LGA, but the second guy is happy to. We make good time across town to the tunnel and there’s no traffic on the Grand Central. I tip the guy well, walk up to an American kiosk and see that I can standby on the 1:30pm flight -- which will be boarding in about 5 minutes. I hit the TSA PreCheck line -- about 5 people in front of me, but the TSA folks are in good humor and moving things along. I hear the gate agent call my name as I walk up to the gate. The flight takes off on time and lands early. Hey, American made up 2 of the 3 hr-delay from last week! And on an LGA-ORD flight. I offered up a bigger beer when I got home.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/JeffSpeed68/54450\">Hula Hoop Party</a> by Stefan Kartenberg (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: Martijn de Boer, Blue Wave Theory</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Mike Skinner took a couple of minutes to stop by the TravelCommons web site and leave a comment about the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/07/30/podcast-131-twitter-concierge-customer-service-london-tube-story/\">last episode</a>. Mike writes\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>“Long time listener, really enjoy the show.“Your comments on the Dreamliner were very interesting to me. I\'ve flown one long-haul on several occasions, and yes, the windows are fun to play with. But you didn\'t have any comments on what I think is the most important attribute. The 787 isn\'t just another \"metal tube\"..... It is constructed from carbon fiber, and can be pressurized to a higher level than most normal passenger jets. The environment inside is at higher air pressure (like being at 6,000\' rather than 10000\' elevation), with a higher level of humidity (air not so dry), and more refreshes. I found it a great plane to fly on a long red-eye! Or any 5+ hour flight.\r\n“I\'m looking forward to this fall, when I\'m flying one r/t LAX-SYD in UA\'s BF cabin (14 hour flight)”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Mike, thanks for the comment. You’re absolutely right about the 787’s carbon fiber build allowing it to be pressurized at a lower level -- I’m not sure if that’s because of an increase in strength from the carbon fiber or because it’s less impervious to the higher moisture content of the denser air. But I didn’t notice a difference between my flight out to on an A330 and my flight back on the 787. Of course, it might be that I wasn’t paying enough attention to the negative -- less dry eye; less “cotton mouth” -- or that that the LHR-ORD flight wasn’t a red-eye; and so I was able to keep myself hydrated more than I would on a red-eye. Maybe I would’ve noticed the difference on those 17-hr SAA flights to Joburg those years ago. Whatever the reason, anything that makes those long-haul flights more bearable is a great thing. Safe travels on your upcoming flight to Sydney.</li>\r\n 	<li>That A330 flight didn’t go direct to London. I was late booking my ticket and so instead flew Aer Lingus to Gatwick via Dublin. It was the first time in at least 25 years that I’ve been through Dublin airport. It was a nice enough airport, but crowded for an early Monday morning. I was glad I didn’t have to go through security again, because when I looked past the scanners, it looked to be a bit of zoo parade. But, adding again to the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/01/16/podcast-126-beating-the-traffic-rethinking-carry-on-luggage/\">multi</a>-<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/02/20/podcast-127-critiquing-my-top-10-travel-tips-reviewing-vpns/\">episode</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/03/31/podcast-128-hunt-for-experiences-pop-up-entertainment/\">thread </a>about buying and using local phone SIMs during international travel, I saw the first benefits of the EU’s ban against mobile roaming charges. On the flight over, I’d swapped my US SIM for my UK SIM. Coming out of airplane mode in Dublin, I get what look like the typical welcome texts, but instead of giving me the roaming charges, they tell me that my UK plan is good in Ireland. Might seem kind of a minor thing, but at least for traveling within Europe, there are some real benefits. First is not having to burn through an hour or two at the beginning of a vacation finding a phone store and then going through the hassle of buying a pay-as-you-go SIM. In Paris, I had to go to 3 phone stores to find the SIM I wanted. In Hungary, T-Mobile wouldn’t sell my wife a SIM without a Hungarian citizenship or registration card -- which, of course, she didn’t have. Luckily, my wife’s cousin was with her and she was able to buy SIMs for all of us. If I don’t need to buy a new French or Hungarian SIM to avoid roaming charges, this kind of hassle goes away. I wonder also if there’s a bit of an arbitrage opportunity. Now that I have a UK, French, and Hungarian SIM, do I figure out which one has the cheapest rate and then use that one for all of my trips? I need to read the new regs on that one.</li>\r\n 	<li>On my last couple of trips through ATL, it seems that the lines for PreCheck are configured differently every time. Not quite sure why that is. Every other airport, it’s pretty static -- go to this set of lanes, but ATL, for some reason, wants to change the entrance to the maze each time. They also have put new parallel loading baggage X-ray machines in the ATL PreCheck line. These are pretty common in Europe but just now dribbling into US airports. Rather than queuing up and waiting for each person to put their stuff on the belt, there are 4 loading stations where a group of people each reach below, grab a bin, put it in front of you, put your stuff in it, and then push it onto the conveyor. Since there are 4 people loading at the same time, there’s no “performance anxiety” to make sure you have your belt-loading choreography flawless, and there’s no eye-rolling and foot-tapping while waiting for those who don’t. There are a couple of hassles, though. First, since it’s new, most people are still in serial mode; they don’t know that it’s OK to break queue and step around to an empty loading station. At many European airports, they have someone telling you which loading station to go to (usually with numbered stickers on the floor -- “You, station 1; you, station 6). The TSA hasn’t quite got with this program. Second, if you’re in one of the front loading stations, it takes a little, uh, muscle to break the stream of bins, to shove your bin onto the conveyor. Too polite and you’ll just stand there watching a stream of bins go by. All in all, it’s a definite improvement, but needs a bit of, say, process optimization.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/49674\">H2O</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Travel Apps on My Phone</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>A few weeks ago, Jack Peacock from northern Florida -- kinda near where the panhandle connects to the peninsula -- pinged me on the TravelCommons website with a couple of questions. First was a genealogy question. Peacock isn’t a common last name in the US and so when we meet, “where’s the last name from” is a common icebreaker. Peacock is probably more common down South where Jack and other southern Peacocks will trace their roots back to a Samuel Peacock born 1671 probably in Colonial VA. My line is from more recent immigrant stock, though. My dad grew up in Southport, on the northwest coast of the UK, between Liverpool and Blackpool, and came over to the US in 1956.</li>\r\n 	<li>That out of the way, Jack said that he and his wife are retired, have put their home and vehicles up for sale, and are getting ready to Airbnb the globe. “Geriatric gap year” as Jack put it. I am officially jealous. Which leads to his second question -- what travel apps do I have on my phone? A very timely question since Carlson Wagonlit Travel just <a href=\"http://www.carlsonwagonlit.com/content/cwt/global/en/news/news-releases/20170824-Business-travelers-find-they-are-very-productive-due-to-more-technology-options.html\">released a survey</a> where 80% of business travelers said their smartphone was the “travel tool they can’t live without”, and 45% used airline and hotel apps as their main travel technology.</li>\r\n 	<li>Paging back through the TravelCommons archives, I see that I’ve touched on some categories of travel apps -- in the most recent iteration of my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/12/12/top-10-holiday-travel-tips-2/\">Top 10 Travel Tips</a> I recommended some flight tracking apps and way before that, did a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/11/29/podcast-102-trip-management-app-comparison-tsa-scanner-shuffle/\">bake-off of trip management apps</a> -- but never covered walked through what’s in the travel folder on the home screen of my iPhone.</li>\r\n 	<li>As long time listeners know -- and have suffered through -- I can’t just go through a laundry list. In other words, I can’t just quickly answer Jack’s question. First, I need to build (and drag you all through) some kind of framework that provides some structure to my laundry list. It’s my own little piece of OCD. One way to start is to split between apps with broad general use -- say like Google Maps -- and those more specific to a situation -- the apps of the airlines you use the most, or, say, mass transit apps for a city you’ll be visiting.</li>\r\n 	<li>Let’s dig down to the next layer of the specific category. I have apps for the airlines I use for 90% of my travel -- American, United, Southwest, and Delta -- in that order -- because living in Chicago, American and United have hubs at ORD and Southwest owns MDW. I have Delta for the odd flight between, say, Atlanta and New York. The mix will change based on what you fly -- in Boston, you may have JetBlue, in London you certainly have BA. I mostly use these apps for two reasons -- electronic boarding passes and flight status. I talked in the last episode about how I used the “Where is my plane now” feature of United’s app to track back to the source of a RIC flight delay to GRR. Helped give me a sense of whether that delay could shrink or grow. Also, these apps are getting much quicker about pushing flight status and gate change notifications. Indeed, these apps have gotten good enough that the independent/more general flight tracking apps on my phone -- FlightAware, FlightView, and FlightStats -- are on the bubble. I’ll probably delete two of them and keep one -- either FlightAware or FlightView because of how they show the projected flight path on a weather map. You can find this in the United app, but you have to dig a bit. FlightAware and FlightView have it as their primary app view. It’s another good piece of information for when you’re thinking through flight delays.</li>\r\n 	<li>I didn’t load up the Aer Lingus app for my flight to London last month (if they even have one). It’s not worth it for a single flight. Same reason I’ve never loaded Alaska Air’s app even though I seem to end up on them at least once a year. It’s not worth the phone real estate. Which is the same reason I’ve deleted hotel apps from my phone. I’ve never found any value in the Marriott or Starwood apps. Same with the Hertz and Avis apps. However, if I was Airbnb’ing around the world like Jack is planning, I would probably load up their app.</li>\r\n 	<li>Another specific app I have is My EE -- the app for the UK mobile carrier who’s pay-as-you-go SIM I use. The last iteration of this app made it easier than EE’s website to do a SIM top-up, so it’s now in my Travel folder.</li>\r\n 	<li>A bit more general is the Priority Pass app which gets me access to international airport lounges through my Amex Platinum card. It regularly updates its list of available lounges and has airport maps to help you find them. This came in real handy in Dublin where the lounge was tucked away on a second floor with very minimal signage.</li>\r\n 	<li>Another kinda general app is the companion app to my Bluesmart roller bag. It connects to my bag via Bluetooth, automatically locks it when it’s out of range of my phone, and displays the bag’s location when I have to check it. The auto lock is probably the most useful thing. It’s consistently on the bubble.</li>\r\n 	<li>I have both Uber and Lyft in my Travel folder. I’ll typically light both of those apps up when looking for a ride somewhere, comparing price and wait time. As I mentioned during a broader discussion of ride sharing a few episodes back, all things being equal, I’ll choose Lyft, but I use both of them regularly.</li>\r\n 	<li>Five years ago, I <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/11/29/podcast-102-trip-management-app-comparison-tsa-scanner-shuffle/\">reviewed</a> the 3 main trip management apps -- Tripit, TripCase, and Worldmate -- that recreated the old company travel agent’s printed trip itinerary by integrating separate airline, hotel, and rental car reservations for free, and real-time flight updates for a fee. I liked Worldmate the best, with TripCase a solid second. Today, I use Tripit. Carlson Wagonlit closed up Worldmate at the beginning of the year, and Sabre’s TripCase is hot mess of advertising. Tripit has continued to improve their app. The ability to share a piece of an itinerary (a flight, a hotel) through iPhone’s iMessage is surprisingly handy. But the $50/yr Tripit Pro is also on the bubble because of the airline apps’ improved notifications.</li>\r\n 	<li>Google Translate has grown into a critical travel app. I’ve talked in a previous episode about how, with real-time translation through the camera, it’s becoming pretty close to magic.\r\nTransit is another app that continues to solidify its hold on screen real estate. Transit covers mass transit across North America and major cities in Europe. Google Maps suggests mass transit routings, but Transit goes much deeper -- with things like real-time bus and subway data and bike share locations for cities like Chicago and New York.</li>\r\n 	<li>And then, of course, there is Google Maps. I use it to plan trips, find hotels, check out neighborhoods, figure out where I am, share locations -- as well as getting me from Point A to Point B. It is probably the most indispensable travel app on my phone. Indeed, it’s the only travel app with its own screen real estate rather than sharing space in the Travel folder</li>\r\n 	<li>What are your suggestions?</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #132</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_132.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #132 — Travel Apps on My Phone','','inherit','closed','closed','','1798-revision-v1','','','2017-08-26 21:45:05','2017-08-27 02:45:05','',1798,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/08/26/1798-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1810,1,'2017-08-26 21:45:15','2017-08-27 02:45:15','[caption id=\"attachment_1786\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/File_000.jpeg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1786\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/File_000-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> I have a craft beer problem...[/caption]\r\n\r\nThis past week in Atlanta Hartfield Airport, when I traveled across four terminals to find a restaurant serving a nice selection of local Atlanta beers, I finally had to admit that I have a craft beer problem. In addition to this confession, I talk about about taking the London Underground back from the big Adele concert in Wembley Stadium. The experience proved out some of the positive stereotypes about the English -- queuing well and muddling through without complaining. I talk about hotel room flat screen TVs and using Twitter to quickly get Hertz to fix a mistaken refueling charge. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_131.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below. [soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/335722294\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #131:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, ready to admit that I have a craft beer problem. On Tuesday, I’m in Atlanta airport, on the back end of an one-day up-and-back. I got to the airport a bit early because: (a) I wanted to get forward-positioned for a 5pm conference call, and (b) afternoon travel times from north of Atlanta, where all my clients have ever been, to south of Atlanta where the airport is inconveniently located is highly unpredictable -- I’ve experienced anything from 40 min to an hour and a half. The conference call ends early, just as United posts a 15-min flight delay. Rather than bitch tweeting, I pop open my Untappd app and see what beers have been checked in nearby. I see some local Atlanta beers showing up at a place called “Chicken + Beer”. Good name! I find an sign board. It’s in Terminal D near Gate D5 -- almost to the end of the terminal. I’m in Terminal T -- the closest-in terminal, 4 terminals away. I look at my watch. According to United, I have an hour. I pop open the United app. The delayed in-bound flight is due in at 6:35 and United is calling for a 7:05 departure. No way in this age of completely full flights do they get that plane emptied and re-loaded in 30 minutes. And, since it’s a day trip, I don’t have to worry about carry-on. Easy decision -- I’m off. Highly recommended place if you’re connecting through ATL -- especially if you’re a bit closer, maybe in Terminals C, D or E.</li>\r\n 	<li>I posted the last episode the day before we headed out to London for a week, the highlight of which was going to the Adele concert in Wembley Stadium that Wednesday night -- my wife’s Christmas and birthday present. It was the opening night of what was supposed to be a 4-night finale to her world tour. Glad we caught one of the front-end shows. She canceled the last two due to vocal cord stress. Would’ve been unspeakably awful if we’d flown over and then got canceled. As it was, it was a great concert -- great voice and a phenomenal swearer. Impressive f-bomb count.</li>\r\n 	<li>Back in the US, I’ve been alternating weeks between Richmond and Atlanta. As I said in the last episode, of the two, I prefer Richmond -- I’m able to walk around downtown so no need for a rental, and it’s only a 20-minute ride to and from the airport. And a local turned me onto the Scott’s Addition neighborhood with three microbreweries in a 5-block radius. Yes, as you already know, I have a craft beer problem.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mindmapthat/53340\">Dub the Uke</a> by Kara Square (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: DJ Vadim</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>This week’s day trip to Atlanta for a meeting was the first time I’ve done that in a long time -- trusted an airline enough to fly in the day of an important meeting. As it was, I still baked in a large safety buffer -- I took a 6:15am flight out of ORD that landed ATL just after 9am local time; for a 12:30p meeting. Instead, as a way to lower my personal stress as well as the amount of my bitch tweeting, I’ll fly out, say, the night before. Or a couple of weeks ago, when my wife booked a dinner for 5:30p Thursday night, I flew back Weds night. Last year, I would’ve flown home Thursday afternoon -- scheduling myself ORD at, say, 3:30p, and then taking the El into the city. Now, I just don’t trust the airlines. There’s not enough slack in the system -- the planes are full, the crew schedules are optimized to the tee, and so when something anomalous happens, the whole things starts to come apart at the seams. This kinda happened a few weeks ago flying out of Richmond. My colleague and I were sitting in a conference room after lunch when his phone started going off -- flight delay texts from American about his evening flight back to DFW. I check on my United flight to ORD -- sure enough, I’m delayed too. Not critical -- just means I’ll be dining in the airport rather than at home. I hit the “where is my flight now” in the United app a couple of times to find that the delay from Grand Rapids airport which is then cascading through IAD and down to RIC. When the plane is scheduled for tight turnarounds, there’s no way to catch up. We check every 20 minutes or so, hoping things get better. And, surprisingly, mine does -- suddenly, there’s no delay. Did Grand Rapids magically clear up? Nope. Tracking the inbound plane again, now it’s sitting on the ground at IAD. They swapped equipment and now we’re back on schedule. We head over to RIC, and just as I go through security, I get a delay text from United. The plane is in IAD but the crew isn’t. Their inbound flight is delayed, which pushes ours. I sit down at the Sam Adams bar in RIC’s Terminal 2; I order a beer and some food. I get the beer right away. 45 minutes later, the waitress tells me they’ve run out of food. So I end up eating dinner at home after all -- just a bit later than usual.</li>\r\n 	<li>Hotel room technology is slow to change. I still see a lot of those alarm clocks with the old 30-pin iPhone connectors on the top of them; the iPhone 5 with the smaller Lightning connector came out almost 5 years ago. I think a good bit of this has to do with scale -- just upgrading the TVs in the 3,976 rooms at a place like Caesars Palace in Las Vegas can be a multi-year project. That being said, it’s been a long time now since I’ve seen a tube TV in a hotel room. Seems that most everyone has made the switch to wall-mounted flat screens, and I’m even seeing more of the second-generation -- more smart TVs from Samsung and LG with built in Netflix and Hulu apps, letting me log in to my accounts, access my own queues and watch just like I’m at home. I tend not to take them up on that offer though. I’m still a bit hesitant to scatter too much of my personal digital stuff around. And also, it’s not just Netflix that I want to watch. Sometimes I want to watch, say, James Corden’s newest Carpool Karaoke on YouTube that my daughter told me about, or watch the start of a Tour de France stage on NBCSN which almost no hotel cable package carries. Lucky for me, all of these newer flat screens provide easy access to an HDMI port -- the digital successor to the older analog VGA connectors on computers. I picked up a $5 Displayport-to-HDMI cable on Amazon, and now regularly plug my ThinkPad into my hotel room flat screen. Now if these hotels would upgrade their WiFi speeds...</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Suenjo/11162\">Natchoongi (New Hope Remix)</a> by Suenjo (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Twitter Concierge</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>One of the standards in my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/12/12/top-10-holiday-travel-tips-2/\">Top 10</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2013/12/19/top-10-holiday-travel-tips/\">Travel Tips</a> list -- which I usually write once a year as part of my annual prayers to the Google gods for more website traffic -- is to use Twitter as sort of a customer service concierge service. I’ve used Twitter to ping airlines on the status of planes when the gate agents were in the dark, A few weeks back, I tweeted to Lyft, asking why the price estimation piece of their app didn’t work (answer: it was turned off in Richmond for some reason). And Twitter saved me a bit of a hassle last week with Hertz.</li>\r\n 	<li>Now, I’ve gone hot and cold on Hertz through my travel career. At the start, back in 1985 when I was working for IBM and regularly flying into SJC, I liked them. But that was when SJC was an old-style California airport -- no jetways, just a walkway under a metal canopy to planes parked on the tarmac; no rental counters, just a parking lot at one end of the terminal with a little Hertz hut in the middle staffed by a nice woman who’d give you your keys. After a few trips, we got to know each other and she’d always give me one of the nicer cars on the lot. Fast forward 15 years to my low point with Hertz at DTW. I was there every week for about a year and never got a clean car or one under 24,000 miles. I’m back on an upswing with Hertz now that they’re doing the National Car Rental-like “pick your own car” service and I’ve yet to climb into a car with more than 1,000 miles</li>\r\n 	<li>Dropping my car off at ATL last week, I do my usual thing -- fill the car just outside the airport, drop it off, and walk away without waiting for the Hertz guy to check me in because it’s usually too long a wait during the afternoon drop-off rush hour and they’ll e-mail me the receipt. I usually put the gas receipt on the dashboard under the keys, but I didn’t do that this time. The gas station near ATL was a bit dodgy and had signs posted on the gas pump “Keep your car locked when filling up”. I decided not to wait for the pump to spit out a receipt.</li>\r\n 	<li>The e-mail from Hertz showed up on my phone just after I’d boarded the plane at ATL. I scanned the numbers -- damn it, there was a refueling charge. And the gas charge hadn’t posted yet to my Amex card so I couldn’t download a receipt. It just pissed me off. The gas gauge was clearly/unambiguously on F, so the check-in guy was just pencil-whipping the check-in. That’s what really annoyed me. Sitting there, waiting for the rest of the flight to board, I had time to stew. And to tweet out my annoyance to @Hertz -- complete with a mad face emoji.</li>\r\n 	<li>My flight takes off. I land at ORD, take my phone out of airplane mode and bing, there’s a reply from Hertz -- please DM us your rental agreement number. I flip over to the emailed receipt and copy/paste the number into Twitter. While still on the plane -- we’re doing the usual ORD thing of taxiing all over the airport looking for a gate -- I get a message back “Mark, apologies for the trouble with the fueling fee. After further review I will be refunding this charge to the account billed. We appreciate you bringing this to our attention so that we might look into this with our local Atlanta team.” I’ve now gone from pissed to impressed with how fast that got fixed. Now I’m sure some of that has to do with my status at Hertz, but still -- Twitter can be a very effective line-cut into customer service.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/3lb3r3th/44072\">Misunderstood</a> by 3lb3r3th (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: Alchemistry</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>London Tube Story</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>A few weeks ago on one of my Saturday bike rides, I was listening to Craig and Linda Martin’s Indie Travel Podcast episode about using public transit and it got me thinking about my recent public transit experiences. We’ve talked about public transit in past episodes. I’ve kinda nerded out about a it a bit, especially taking public transit between a city and an airport.</li>\r\n 	<li>During our week in London at the end of June, we used the Tube a lot. Underground, it was surprisingly still warm and stuffy from the 40-year high temperatures the prior week when it had been very hot by British standards -- in the 30’s Celsius, the upper 80’s/low 90’s Farenheit. We were staying in the Fitzrovia neighborhood of London -- north of Oxford St, just off of Tottenham High Street near University College London. The area is well-served by a number of Tube lines, and we’d chosen it for easy Tube access to Wembley Stadium for the Adele concert.</li>\r\n 	<li>We headed out early, planning to get there a couple hours before show time because we expected security to be tight. We got on a train that was an interesting mix of commuters winding down their day and concert goers getting ramped up -- seated people heads down in their papers; standing groups of people chatting away, maybe slipping a sip of a canned gin &amp; tonic, maybe singing a little tune snippet.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you think about it, the trip to the concert wouldn’t be too bad -- people would be spread out across 2, maybe 3 hours worth of trains. The end of the concert, though -- 96,000 people leaving at once, and a huge sea of them heading for the Wembley Stadium tube stop. Luckily, the rain forecasted earlier in the week had hit London earlier in the day and the evening was dry. If not, the 30-45 minutes we spend shoulder-to-shoulder penguin-walking the third- to-half mile between our seats and the Tube stop would’ve been miserable. As it was, everyone was in good spirits (it had been a great concert), and polite and courteous (no shoving, not a lot of trying to snake up in front of others). The security police would hold up signs at an intersection -- one side in red would say “Stop”, the other side green with “Go”. And when they spun it around to “Stop” the crowd would stop. No one would try to slip around the edges or make a last dash. One cop was playing songs through his bullhorn for the crowd while they waited for the next “Go” sign. It was so crowded; so much could’ve easily gone wrong; but it didn’t. And once back on the Tube, we made it back to Fitzrovia in time for a nightcap.</li>\r\n 	<li>But I guess I shouldn’t be so surprised. Doesn’t that experience validate the English stereotype -- queues well, suffers through without complaining -- the whole “Keep Calm and Carry On” ethos -- and eventually get through to the other side in time for a pint at the pub.</li>\r\n 	<li>And maybe that’s what I really like about taking public transit. In past episodes, I talked about public transit as a way of popping the travel bubble, using it to get a real feeling for where you are. The whole “Mind the Gap” thing in the Tube is another very English thing, as is the small taped-off space where buskers can perform in the connecting passageways between lines. Compare that to the less structured Paris Metro experiences I described a few episodes ago -- of the tuba busker and the 3-person opera reenactment that took over the whole shop area of a Metro stop. Or the way people bringing their bikes onto a Portland, Oregon light rail car just solidifies the whole Portlandia image, or picking up the Chicago El in the Loop after the markets close, with the few traders who work the options pits, heading up to Wrigley for an afternoon Cubs game.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #131</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_131.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #131 — Twitter Concierge Customer Service; London Tube Story','','inherit','closed','closed','','1784-revision-v1','','','2017-08-26 21:45:15','2017-08-27 02:45:15','',1784,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/08/26/1784-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0);
INSERT INTO `wp_posts` VALUES
(1811,1,'2017-08-26 21:58:51','2017-08-27 02:58:51','<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/IMG_0522.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1775\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/IMG_0522-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nIt\'s a <em>Mitteleuropa</em> episode, talking about last month\'s travels through Vienna and Hungary. I came away with good first impressions of Austrian Airlines and the Vienna airport. And, for the first time in many visits, saw Hungary through a tourist\'s eyes, spending time in Budapest and the Tokaj wine region. We also talk about how Google Translate has become pretty much indistinguishable from magic and the potential impact the privatization of the US air traffic control system might have on the general aviation industry. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_130.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/329896443\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #130:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, after a good bit of travel -- I think the technical unit of measure is “a slug”. I’ve done a “slug” of travel recently. We got back from 9 days in Hungary on the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend, which gave us that Monday to recover a bit. After that short week at home, I got back on the road -- a week in Richmond and then last week and this week in Atlanta. Some folks wanted me to do stupid day trips -- say up to Michigan from Atlanta for a 90-minute meeting, but in a fit of, what is for me, rare realism, I said, “Uh, no”.</li>\r\n 	<li>This was the first time I’d spent any time in Richmond -- other than driving around it -- from Charlottesville to the airport, from DC over to Williamsburg. We were downtown. There are some nice pockets. Found a couple of restaurants and a microbrewery with a taproom, so I was happy. Even happier because it was just a 20-minute cab ride from the airport, and a 10-minute walk to the client. Contrast that to Atlanta, which I just hate having to travel to for business. It starts with the location of the airport -- at 6 o’clock, on the bottom of the I-285 perimeter, and all the business at the opposite side -- between 11 and 1 o’clock on the perimeter. And therein lies the most important question that every business traveler faces when they arrive and they leave Atlanta -- do I drive through the city or around it? Outside of rush hour, it’s not bad -- maybe 35 minutes. But when you’re trying to catch that 6pm flight home on Thursday night, the trip starts at an hour and deteriorates fast.</li>\r\n 	<li>And deterioration is a nice word for last week’s trip back. After an hour-and-a quarter drive through the city that would’ve been a lot worse except that there were 3 of us in the car, so we got to whiz by the beginnings of the traffic jam in the HOV lanes. Once in the center of the city, the HOV lanes were just as crowded, but it probably cut at least 5 minutes off our trip. We drop the car off at Hertz, board the Skytrain, are on our way to the terminal when it just stops. OK, maybe a bit of congestion at the station in front of us. So we wait, and wait,... and wait. No announcement, no nothing. Just wait. 10 minutes, 15 minutes. Finally, someone near the door presses the phone button. A voice comes on -- “We’re working on it; thanks for your patience.” Click. No reason for the delay; no thought on when we’d start up again. Another 5 minutes. Another guy presses the phone button. Same story. After 30 minutes, the train whirs to life and starts to move. And I never thought I’d get nostalgic for those car rental buses.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hansatom/47919\">MBrilliant Day</a> by Hans Atom (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial license.  Ft: Lisa DeBenedictis</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>My son Andrew and I flew Austrian Air from Chicago to Budapest last month with an -- obvious -- connection in Vienna. Couple of things… First, why Austrian Air? Because it was among the cheapest non-budget fares over and because I could construct an 8-hr layover which meant we spent Saturday eating schnitzel and drinking beer in Vienna. We landed at 8:45 Saturday morning, checked our bags in Held Luggage, and then hopped a cab into the city. It wasn’t a cheap taxi -- probably around €40 -- but we didn’t have time to figure out and wait for the train. We went first to the Naschmarkt and met up with a friend of mine -- ex-client and ex-boss -- who’s now running the Polish development center for a stealth start-up. He came down Friday night; it was a good excuse to spend 3 hours on his new BMW motorcycle. We started out with coffee and then quickly moved to the beer crawl. At noon, we walked into a small place, <a href=\"http://www.xn--gasthauspschl-qmb.com/\">Gasthaus Pöschl</a> (Weihburggasse 17), just as they were opening. We promised to be out in an hour, so they picked up one of the “Reserved” signs and gave us great big plates of schnitzel and glasses of Grüner Veltliner. We needed a bit of a walk after that, a bit more beer, and we found a cab back to the airport. One of the best layovers I’ve had...</li>\r\n 	<li>And then the second thing -- Vienna Airport. I’ve whined over a couple of episodes about how much I don’t like Munich Airport. Indeed, one of my ORD-BUD options was on Lufthansa through MUC. That didn’t make the first cut. But Vienna was great. Pleasant folks in the immigration booths, efficient and well-staffed security, nice food and beer selection -- it was the anti-MUC. And the in-air service? Pretty good. Fairly new 777-200; typical kinda tight coach seat configuration; pleasant flight attendants. There was nothing that wowed me, but then again, I wasn’t expecting anything to. All I wanted was not to be annoyed; not to have a gate agent or flight attendant piss me off. Kinda the air travel version of the Hippocratic oath -- Do no harm to the passenger. And Austrian succeeded. If I were to ding them on anything, it would be that the bright red plane upholstery was a bit tough on the eyes. I’ll fly them again.\r\nI actually was two-for-two on airports on that trip. Budapest airport has had a significant upgrade since my last visit maybe 12 years ago. Again, efficient security lines, bright clean terminal, good places to grab a coffee and some breakfast. Much more pleasant than my first time passing through there in 1989, some Army guy checking that my exit visa had the right stamps. Much happier vibe this time. Two great airport experiences; I think I’ll need to consciously ratchet down my expectations for my next trip, though. I’ll be hitting London’s Gatwick and Heathrow next week.</li>\r\n 	<li>Thinking through my international travel this year -- Paris, Vienna, Budapest -- Google Translate has evolved to being pretty close to magic. Last September, Google made a big announcement that they moved Translate from a statistics-based approach to a neural network running in Google’s cloud. It was the cover story for the New York Times Sunday Magazine <a href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/14/magazine/the-great-ai-awakening.html\">The Great AI Awakening</a> -- using it as a case study of how artificial intelligence will “reinvent computing itself”. That’s all good -- and it was a good article -- but what’s really seems like magic is what Google calls Word Lens, where you activate your camera within Google Translate, point it at some text -- a menu or, say, the washing machine controls in a vacation rental -- and you see English words replacing the French or Hungarian words in real time. Amazingly useful. Saves you from blasting your delicates with hot water, or mistakenly ordering chicken when you mix up poulet and poisson after a couple of cocktails. The French translations seemed better than the Hungarian ones -- which makes sense when you remember that the quality of the neural network is dependent on the amount of training data -- but even the Hungarian was very useful. And Translate lets you download some amount of language data onto your phone so you don’t blow through $100 of roaming data trying to avoid brussels sprouts. As you can tell, a huge TravelCommons endorsement.</li>\r\n 	<li>A few weeks back, I retweeted an NPR story about the proposal to privatize US air traffic control. As someone who has had cumulative months if not years wasted on ATC delays, I commented that I can’t understand all the angst over this proposal. ATC privatization has worked for years in Canada and Europe. And it’s not like the FAA has bathed itself in glory with the NextGen program that was authorized in 2003. Rich Fraser, a long-time TravelCommons listener, fellow Midwesterner, and a pilot, came back with a great series of tweets explaining his objections, specifically on privatization’s impact on general aviation. I retweeted a number of them -- “Privatization decimated general aviation industries everywhere it was tried. GA is a $200 billion industry here. 1.4 mil jobs…” and “And Canada\'s general aviation industry is a tiny fraction the size of ours. Apples and oranges doesn\'t even begin to describe.” I was only thinking of the impact on commercial aviation -- the only aviation I experience. Rich’s tweets did a nice job of opening the aperture on the discussion to include the often unconsidered world of general aviation. Thanks for that, Rich.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/53277\">Fistful of Dub</a> (Feat. Snowflake and DJ Vadim) by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: snowflake and DJ Vadim</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Notes from Hungary</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>The flight from Vienna to Budapest is 40 minutes on a 20-seat prop plane. I don’t think it ever levels off -- just a parabola, going straight from climb out into descent. Not that really noticed. After one more beer in Vienna airport, Andrew and I were asleep before the plane left the ground. Yet another pleasant Vienna Air flight attendant graciously placed bottles of water for us in the seat back pocket in front of us. We found them when the plane touched down in Budapest.</li>\r\n 	<li>We’d been to Budapest many times before, but this one would be different. Many of my wife’s aunts and uncles has passed away in the 12 years since our last visit, so there weren’t many family obligations -- just a long Saturday lunch the day before we left. Instead, this was probably the first time we saw Hungary as tourists.</li>\r\n 	<li>Before we visited, we checked with friends who had recently visited. What had they seen, enjoyed? Everyone loved Budapest. Scouting out places to stay, we abandoned what had been our usual Budapest Marriott perch on the Danube for so many years and instead headed east to District VII -- Erzsébetváros, the old Jewish Quarter. During our last visit in 2005, no one would’ve thought to go out here. But now, it’s full of restaurants, craft beer bars, a few Starbucks, and ruin pubs.</li>\r\n 	<li>We followed TravelCommons’ listener Arnoud Heijnis’ recommendation to check out what is the classic -- and perhaps the first -- ruin bar in Budapest -- Szimpla Kert. Arnoud’s description of it having a “pop-uppy kinda feel” was right on-point. You walk through a dingy, half-lit hallway, with a couple of bars on each side, into an open two-story courtyard ringed by, I dunno, another half-dozen bars across the two floors. There were at least a couple of English stag parties going on when we walked in -- one with whom I assumed was the groom-to-be dressed in a white ballerina tutu; the other group was wearing matching t-shirts fronted with a goofy picture of their groom-to-be.</li>\r\n 	<li>I saw a lot of those while we were in Budapest -- party groups wearing matching t-shirts; not so much the ballerina tutus. Budapest -- at least the redeveloped district we were in -- seems to have become a fly-in party town. Maybe the bankruptcy of the old state-run airline Malev left a vacuum for budget carriers to fill -- including WizzAir with a Budapest hub. And then Hungary hasn’t yet joined the euro, so it can devalue its currency, the forint, and look cheap to the rest of Europe. And it had lots of buildings available to repurpose -- starting with squatters setting up bars and dance clubs in abandoned buildings, then large sports bars, and then what seemed to me an amazing number of burger places. And they were all filled starting Thursday night, mostly with English speaking parties. A huge change from my first visit in 1989 when seemingly no one but my wife spoke English, and we’d walk into empty restaurants looking for lunch.</li>\r\n 	<li>Spending money in some of those bars, you’d think that Hungary is moving toward a parallel currency economy -- the forint and euro being used interchangeably -- similar to what I saw in Vietnam where I’d pay, say, a single taxi fare, in a combination of dong and dollar bills. In Budapest, you’ll get a bar tab in forint with a euro number printed below it. You can pay in euro, but you’ll probably get change back in forint. If it’s not too late in the evening, say your first or second bar, and so you haven’t yet lost your capability to do arithmetic, you’ll notice that the euro exchange rate isn’t quite in your favor. I started doing the math at each bar -- which, by the way, seemed to make a couple of bartenders nervous. The range of exchange rates on bar tabs was between 250 and 275 forint to the euro. The market rate was about 300 forint to the euro. In effect, the bars were charging an 8-16% convenience fee for letting you skip the ATM down the street.</li>\r\n 	<li>District VII is not the only part of Budapest that’s upgraded. Downtown Pest, along the Danube, looks spiffier. The Parliament building -- always an incredibly ornate building that dares you not to take multiple pictures of it as you walk past -- looked like it has been freshly steam cleaned. In ‘89, a soldier shooed my wife and I off the steps; this time we walked down into a nice visitors center, bought some tour tickets and were escorted up the Golden Staircase, under the huge dome, and past the crown jewels. And further south along the river, new developments, plazas, bars, bike paths have all sprung up -- again, in places we wouldn’t have thought of going 12 years ago. I understood why friends who had visited over the past year had enjoyed it.</li>\r\n 	<li>As much as I liked knocking around Budapest -- and running through most of District VII’s craft beer bars where, according to Untappd, Andrew and I tasted 43 Hungarian beers -- my favorite bit of the trip was the day we spent visiting wineries in the Tokaj wine region -- about 2½ hrs northeast of Budapest near the border with Slovakia. We hired the guy (<a href=\"http://www.tokajtoday.com/contact/\">Gergely Somogyi</a>) who runs the Tokaj Today web site as our guide. He came to our hotel, gave us a 30-minute PowerPoint presentation (plugged right into the hotel’s flat screen TV in the breakfast room) on Tokaj’s history, geography, geology, grape and wine types. And with this Intro to Tokaj information still looking for neurons to hang out in, we were off to visit four winemakers. And say that rather than wineries because we sat down with each of the winemakers -- the two more established --<a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/demeterzoltantokaj\">Zoltán Demeter</a> and <a href=\"http://www.bottpince.hu/\">Judit Bodo</a> -- in their tasting rooms, the two garagistas -- <a href=\"http://new2017.samueltinon.com/en/\">Mathilde Hulot</a> and <a href=\"http://abrahampince.com/english/\">Róbert Péter</a> -- their kitchens and patios -- for an hour or more each, talking about their wine, about Hungary, and about what they’re trying to do. Only one of the four -- Demeter -- is from Tokaj. The rest moved there to make wine -- Bodo from the Hungarian-speaking part of Slovakia, Peter from Budapest, and Hulot from France -- because of its history and its potential to make great wine.</li>\r\n 	<li>Each told a version of the same story -- of Tokaj’s history, wine knowledge, and wine quality being broken during the 40-some years of Communism -- abandoning the high-quality vineyards on the hills for lower-quality fields on the plains that could be harvested with big Russian tractors, 5-year government planning that pushed quantity over quality. And of how each of them came to Tokaj to flip that equation back to quality over quantity -- even the Tokaj local had to leave to jobs in California and France to learn quality winemaking before he came back. But they all feel challenged to get the entire community, the “locals,” on board. Maybe it’s some of the residue of Communism -- it’s easier to crank out industrial plonk than good wine. Maybe it’s because many of them can’t afford these new wines and so don’t appreciate them. Bodo said she specifically priced one wine so that local young people who now drink beer could afford to drink good local wine. To appreciate what they have here, she said, everyone has to be able to enjoy good wine -- not just the winemakers.</li>\r\n 	<li>I hate to truck in the wine industry cliche that these winemakers have a “passion” for what they’re doing, but my thesaurus fails me, I can’t find a better word. They all appreciated that we’d taken the time to drive out from Budapest to visit (if maybe a bit puzzled by doing everything in a day), and were very generous with their time and their wine. It was tough to limit ourselves to buying just one bottle per stop. I had to keep reminding myself that I’d only brought my small rollerboard with me.</li>\r\n 	<li>On our last night, we’re back in Budapest, knocking around District VII, looking for our last dinner. We’d had some great food -- a couple of Michelin one-stars, some food trucks near a ruin bar -- but it was tough to find some of the homey Hungarian food -- call it “peasant food” -- that we’d had in the past. And then we found it -- a bit cafeteria style -- I’ll take that sausage, the hurka with the pork liver and rice -- oh, and that one too, the regular kolbasz with pork, paprika and garlic -- some pickled salad, a bowl of gulyas soup, and, OK, just one last beer.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #130</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_130.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #130 — Notes from Hungary','','inherit','closed','closed','','1774-revision-v1','','','2017-08-26 21:58:51','2017-08-27 02:58:51','',1774,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/08/26/1774-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1812,1,'2017-08-26 22:24:05','2017-08-27 03:24:05','[caption id=\"attachment_1803\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/DSC_5935a.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1803\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/DSC_5935a-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> How Are Their Yelp Reviews?[/caption]\r\n\r\nIt\'s a listener request podcast. A fellow Peacock, this one named Jack, asked \"What travel apps do you have on your iPhone?\" Paging back through the TravelCommons archives, I’ve covered different categories of travel apps,  -- in the most recent iteration of my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/12/12/top-10-holiday-travel-tips-2/\">Top 10 Travel Tips</a> I recommended some flight tracking apps and way before that, did a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/11/29/podcast-102-trip-management-app-comparison-tsa-scanner-shuffle/\">bake-off of trip management apps</a> -- but never covered walked through what’s in the travel folder on the home screen of my iPhone. I\'ve now remedied that oversight. We also continue talking about overseas phone SIMs; the impact of the new EU ban on roaming charges. Also, my first encounter with some new TSA scanning equipment.  All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_132.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/320097474\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n<!--more-->\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #132:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you, as always it seems, from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. Seems that I’ve swapped the romance of hotel bathrooms for the sound quality of the studio here. Seems like yesterday when I was <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2009/04/15/podcast-73-eating-alone-on-the-road-more-things-you-never-want-to-hear/\">recording the intro</a> in the business class toilet of a South African Airways A340 on the way down to J’burg</li>\r\n 	<li>My travel since the last episode hasn’t been anything quite as exciting. Trips to Richmond, Baltimore and New York City. Indeed, if I tried recording in the toilet of one of those American or United A321s, I don’t think I’d get too far past “Hello, this is Mark Peacock…” before someone started banging on the door.</li>\r\n 	<li>Richmond airport continued to be a problem for me -- not the airport itself, just the carriers flying into it. I get up on a Tuesday morning -- sidestepping the Monday morning road warrior crush -- iPhone notifications from American, TripIt, and Google all say my flight is on-time. Pulling up to the terminal -- everything still looks OK. I walk through the doors and my phone explodes -- my 8:20 am flight is now leaving at 4 something pm! The next note is from American telling me they’ve booked me on the 11:45am flight, so instead of getting to RIC at 11:20am, I’m now due in at 2:40pm -- over 3 hrs late. A quick call to Amex Travel tells me that the early morning United flight has already left, so this is my best option. Since, as I talked about in the last episode, I’ve given up depending on airlines being able to meet their schedules, I hadn’t booked any early afternoon meetings, so I just parked myself in the Admirals Club and got some work done. Nothing lost but a bit of sleep.</li>\r\n 	<li>With this in mind, I was gritting my teeth when I had to head back to ORD the next week for my flight to LGA. I haven’t had to fly to New York much recently, and when I have, I’ve flown into EWR to avoid the nightmare-ish delays being reported from LGA because of the construction. There’d been stories of people abandoning their cabs on the Grand Central Parkway to walk into LGA. And then there’s just flying between two of the US’s most congested airports. I’ve always said that anything less than a 30-minute delay between LGA and ORD is on-time. So I booked my flights to avoid rush hours -- leaving ORD at 4pm, arriving LGA at 7:30, and my return flight leaving LGA at 3:30 the next afternoon. I land in LGA on-time. There’s no taxi queue, and I’m into the Sheraton Times Square by a little after 8 -- no flight delays, no traffic. I quietly offer up my first beer at The Three Monkeys to the travel gods in thanksgiving.</li>\r\n 	<li>The next day, we finish up our meeting in midtown an hour early, I walk out of the building to find all sorts of cabs. The first cab doesn’t have the time to take me to LGA, but the second guy is happy to. We make good time across town to the tunnel and there’s no traffic on the Grand Central. I tip the guy well, walk up to an American kiosk and see that I can standby on the 1:30pm flight -- which will be boarding in about 5 minutes. I hit the TSA PreCheck line -- about 5 people in front of me, but the TSA folks are in good humor and moving things along. I hear the gate agent call my name as I walk up to the gate. The flight takes off on time and lands early. Hey, American made up 2 of the 3 hr-delay from last week! And on an LGA-ORD flight. I offered up a bigger beer when I got home.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/JeffSpeed68/54450\">Hula Hoop Party</a> by Stefan Kartenberg (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: Martijn de Boer, Blue Wave Theory</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Mike Skinner took a couple of minutes to stop by the TravelCommons web site and leave a comment about the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/07/30/podcast-131-twitter-concierge-customer-service-london-tube-story/\">last episode</a>. Mike writes\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>“Long time listener, really enjoy the show.“Your comments on the Dreamliner were very interesting to me. I\'ve flown one long-haul on several occasions, and yes, the windows are fun to play with. But you didn\'t have any comments on what I think is the most important attribute. The 787 isn\'t just another \"metal tube\"..... It is constructed from carbon fiber, and can be pressurized to a higher level than most normal passenger jets. The environment inside is at higher air pressure (like being at 6,000\' rather than 10000\' elevation), with a higher level of humidity (air not so dry), and more refreshes. I found it a great plane to fly on a long red-eye! Or any 5+ hour flight.\r\n“I\'m looking forward to this fall, when I\'m flying one r/t LAX-SYD in UA\'s BF cabin (14 hour flight)”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Mike, thanks for the comment. You’re absolutely right about the 787’s carbon fiber build allowing it to be pressurized at a lower level -- I’m not sure if that’s because of an increase in strength from the carbon fiber or because it’s less impervious to the higher moisture content of the denser air. But I didn’t notice a difference between my flight out to on an A330 and my flight back on the 787. Of course, it might be that I wasn’t paying enough attention to the negative -- less dry eye; less “cotton mouth” -- or that that the LHR-ORD flight wasn’t a red-eye; and so I was able to keep myself hydrated more than I would on a red-eye. Maybe I would’ve noticed the difference on those 17-hr SAA flights to Joburg those years ago. Whatever the reason, anything that makes those long-haul flights more bearable is a great thing. Safe travels on your upcoming flight to Sydney.</li>\r\n 	<li>That A330 flight didn’t go direct to London. I was late booking my ticket and so instead flew Aer Lingus to Gatwick via Dublin. It was the first time in at least 25 years that I’ve been through Dublin airport. It was a nice enough airport, but crowded for an early Monday morning. I was glad I didn’t have to go through security again, because when I looked past the scanners, it looked to be a bit of zoo parade. But, adding again to the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/01/16/podcast-126-beating-the-traffic-rethinking-carry-on-luggage/\">multi</a>-<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/02/20/podcast-127-critiquing-my-top-10-travel-tips-reviewing-vpns/\">episode</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/03/31/podcast-128-hunt-for-experiences-pop-up-entertainment/\">thread </a>about buying and using local phone SIMs during international travel, I saw the first benefits of the EU’s ban against mobile roaming charges. On the flight over, I’d swapped my US SIM for my UK SIM. Coming out of airplane mode in Dublin, I get what look like the typical welcome texts, but instead of giving me the roaming charges, they tell me that my UK plan is good in Ireland. Might seem kind of a minor thing, but at least for traveling within Europe, there are some real benefits. First is not having to burn through an hour or two at the beginning of a vacation finding a phone store and then going through the hassle of buying a pay-as-you-go SIM. In Paris, I had to go to 3 phone stores to find the SIM I wanted. In Hungary, T-Mobile wouldn’t sell my wife a SIM without a Hungarian citizenship or registration card -- which, of course, she didn’t have. Luckily, my wife’s cousin was with her and she was able to buy SIMs for all of us. If I don’t need to buy a new French or Hungarian SIM to avoid roaming charges, this kind of hassle goes away. I wonder also if there’s a bit of an arbitrage opportunity. Now that I have a UK, French, and Hungarian SIM, do I figure out which one has the cheapest rate and then use that one for all of my trips? I need to read the new regs on that one.</li>\r\n 	<li>On my last couple of trips through ATL, it seems that the lines for PreCheck are configured differently every time. Not quite sure why that is. Every other airport, it’s pretty static -- go to this set of lanes, but ATL, for some reason, wants to change the entrance to the maze each time. They also have put new parallel loading baggage X-ray machines in the ATL PreCheck line. These are pretty common in Europe but just now dribbling into US airports. Rather than queuing up and waiting for each person to put their stuff on the belt, there are 4 loading stations where a group of people each reach below, grab a bin, put it in front of you, put your stuff in it, and then push it onto the conveyor. Since there are 4 people loading at the same time, there’s no “performance anxiety” to make sure you have your belt-loading choreography flawless, and there’s no eye-rolling and foot-tapping while waiting for those who don’t. There are a couple of hassles, though. First, since it’s new, most people are still in serial mode; they don’t know that it’s OK to break queue and step around to an empty loading station. At many European airports, they have someone telling you which loading station to go to (usually with numbered stickers on the floor -- “You, station 1; you, station 6). The TSA hasn’t quite got with this program. Second, if you’re in one of the front loading stations, it takes a little, uh, muscle to break the stream of bins, to shove your bin onto the conveyor. Too polite and you’ll just stand there watching a stream of bins go by. All in all, it’s a definite improvement, but needs a bit of, say, process optimization.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/49674\">H2O</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Travel Apps on My Phone</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>A few weeks ago, Jack Peacock from northern Florida -- kinda near where the panhandle connects to the peninsula -- pinged me on the TravelCommons website with a couple of questions. First was a genealogy question. Peacock isn’t a common last name in the US and so when we meet, “where’s the last name from” is a common icebreaker. Peacock is probably more common down South where Jack and other southern Peacocks will trace their roots back to a Samuel Peacock born 1671 probably in Colonial VA. My line is from more recent immigrant stock, though. My dad grew up in Southport, on the northwest coast of the UK, between Liverpool and Blackpool, and came over to the US in 1956.</li>\r\n 	<li>That out of the way, Jack said that he and his wife are retired, have put their home and vehicles up for sale, and are getting ready to Airbnb the globe. “Geriatric gap year” as Jack put it. I am officially jealous. Which leads to his second question -- what travel apps do I have on my phone? A very timely question since Carlson Wagonlit Travel just <a href=\"http://www.carlsonwagonlit.com/content/cwt/global/en/news/news-releases/20170824-Business-travelers-find-they-are-very-productive-due-to-more-technology-options.html\">released a survey</a> where 80% of business travelers said their smartphone was the “travel tool they can’t live without”, and 45% used airline and hotel apps as their main travel technology.</li>\r\n 	<li>Paging back through the TravelCommons archives, I see that I’ve touched on some categories of travel apps -- in the most recent iteration of my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/12/12/top-10-holiday-travel-tips-2/\">Top 10 Travel Tips</a> I recommended some flight tracking apps and way before that, did a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/11/29/podcast-102-trip-management-app-comparison-tsa-scanner-shuffle/\">bake-off of trip management apps</a> -- but never walked through what’s in the travel folder on the home screen of my iPhone.</li>\r\n 	<li>As long time listeners know -- and have suffered through -- I can’t just go through a laundry list. In other words, I can’t just quickly answer Jack’s question. First, I need to build (and drag you all through) some kind of framework that provides some structure to my laundry list. It’s my own little piece of OCD. One way to start is to split between apps with broad general use -- say like Google Maps -- and those more specific to a situation -- the apps of the airlines you use the most, or, say, mass transit apps for a city you’ll be visiting.</li>\r\n 	<li>Let’s dig down to the next layer of the specific category. I have apps for the airlines I use for 90% of my travel -- American, United, Southwest, and Delta -- in that order -- because living in Chicago, American and United have hubs at ORD and Southwest owns MDW. I have Delta for the odd flight between, say, Atlanta and New York. The mix will change based on what you fly -- in Boston, you may have JetBlue, in London you certainly have BA. I mostly use these apps for two reasons -- electronic boarding passes and flight status. I talked in the last episode about how I used the “Where is my plane now” feature of United’s app to track back to the source of a RIC flight delay to GRR. Helped give me a sense of whether that delay could shrink or grow. Also, these apps are getting much quicker about pushing flight status and gate change notifications. Indeed, these apps have gotten good enough that the independent/more general flight tracking apps on my phone -- FlightAware, FlightView, and FlightStats -- are on the bubble. I’ll probably delete two of them and keep one -- either FlightAware or FlightView because of how they show the projected flight path on a weather map. You can find this in the United app, but you have to dig a bit. FlightAware and FlightView have it as their primary app view. It’s another good piece of information for when you’re thinking through flight delays.</li>\r\n 	<li>I didn’t load up the Aer Lingus app for my flight to London last month (if they even have one). It’s not worth it for a single flight. Same reason I’ve never loaded Alaska Air’s app even though I seem to end up on them at least once a year. It’s not worth the phone real estate. Which is the same reason I’ve deleted hotel apps from my phone. I’ve never found any value in the Marriott or Starwood apps. Same with the Hertz and Avis apps. However, if I was Airbnb’ing around the world like Jack is planning, I would probably load up their app.</li>\r\n 	<li>Another specific app I have is My EE -- the app for the UK mobile carrier who’s pay-as-you-go SIM I use. The last iteration of this app made it easier than EE’s website to do a SIM top-up, so it’s now in my Travel folder.</li>\r\n 	<li>A bit more general is the Priority Pass app which gets me access to international airport lounges through my Amex Platinum card. It regularly updates its list of available lounges and has airport maps to help you find them. This came in real handy in Dublin where the lounge was tucked away on a second floor with very minimal signage.</li>\r\n 	<li>Another kinda general app is the companion app to my Bluesmart roller bag. It connects to my bag via Bluetooth, automatically locks it when it’s out of range of my phone, and displays the bag’s location when I have to check it. The auto lock is probably the most useful thing. It’s consistently on the bubble.</li>\r\n 	<li>I have both Uber and Lyft in my Travel folder. I’ll typically light both of those apps up when looking for a ride somewhere, comparing price and wait time. As I mentioned during a broader discussion of ride sharing a few episodes back, all things being equal, I’ll choose Lyft, but I use both of them regularly.</li>\r\n 	<li>Five years ago, I <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/11/29/podcast-102-trip-management-app-comparison-tsa-scanner-shuffle/\">reviewed</a> the 3 main trip management apps -- Tripit, TripCase, and Worldmate -- that recreated the old company travel agent’s printed trip itinerary by integrating separate airline, hotel, and rental car reservations for free, and real-time flight updates for a fee. I liked Worldmate the best, with TripCase a solid second. Today, I use Tripit. Carlson Wagonlit closed up Worldmate at the beginning of the year, and Sabre’s TripCase is hot mess of advertising. Tripit has continued to improve their app. The ability to share a piece of an itinerary (a flight, a hotel) through iPhone’s iMessage is surprisingly handy. But the $50/yr Tripit Pro is also on the bubble because of the airline apps’ improved notifications.</li>\r\n 	<li>Google Translate has grown into a critical travel app. I’ve talked in a previous episode about how, with real-time translation through the camera, it’s becoming pretty close to magic.\r\nTransit is another app that continues to solidify its hold on screen real estate. Transit covers mass transit across North America and major cities in Europe. Google Maps suggests mass transit routings, but Transit goes much deeper -- with things like real-time bus and subway data and bike share locations for cities like Chicago and New York.</li>\r\n 	<li>And then, of course, there is Google Maps. I use it to plan trips, find hotels, check out neighborhoods, figure out where I am, share locations -- as well as getting me from Point A to Point B. It is probably the most indispensable travel app on my phone. Indeed, it’s the only travel app with its own screen real estate rather than sharing space in the Travel folder</li>\r\n 	<li>What are your suggestions?</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #132</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_132.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #132 — Travel Apps on My Phone','','inherit','closed','closed','','1798-revision-v1','','','2017-08-26 22:24:05','2017-08-27 03:24:05','',1798,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/08/26/1798-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1813,1,'2017-08-27 19:31:57','2017-08-28 00:31:57','[caption id=\"attachment_1803\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/DSC_5935a.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1803\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/DSC_5935a-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> How Are Their Yelp Reviews?[/caption]\r\n\r\nIt\'s a listener request podcast. A fellow Peacock, this one named Jack, asked \"What travel apps do you have on your iPhone?\" Paging back through the TravelCommons archives, I’ve covered different categories of travel apps,  -- in the most recent iteration of my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/12/12/top-10-holiday-travel-tips-2/\">Top 10 Travel Tips</a> I recommended some flight tracking apps and way before that, did a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/11/29/podcast-102-trip-management-app-comparison-tsa-scanner-shuffle/\">bake-off of trip management apps</a> -- but never covered walked through what’s in the travel folder on the home screen of my iPhone. I\'ve now remedied that oversight. We also continue talking about overseas phone SIMs; the impact of the new EU ban on roaming charges. Also, my first encounter with some new TSA scanning equipment.  All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_132.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/339778145\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n<!--more-->\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #132:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you, as always it seems, from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. Seems that I’ve swapped the romance of hotel bathrooms for the sound quality of the studio here. Seems like yesterday when I was <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2009/04/15/podcast-73-eating-alone-on-the-road-more-things-you-never-want-to-hear/\">recording the intro</a> in the business class toilet of a South African Airways A340 on the way down to J’burg</li>\r\n 	<li>My travel since the last episode hasn’t been anything quite as exciting. Trips to Richmond, Baltimore and New York City. Indeed, if I tried recording in the toilet of one of those American or United A321s, I don’t think I’d get too far past “Hello, this is Mark Peacock…” before someone started banging on the door.</li>\r\n 	<li>Richmond airport continued to be a problem for me -- not the airport itself, just the carriers flying into it. I get up on a Tuesday morning -- sidestepping the Monday morning road warrior crush -- iPhone notifications from American, TripIt, and Google all say my flight is on-time. Pulling up to the terminal -- everything still looks OK. I walk through the doors and my phone explodes -- my 8:20 am flight is now leaving at 4 something pm! The next note is from American telling me they’ve booked me on the 11:45am flight, so instead of getting to RIC at 11:20am, I’m now due in at 2:40pm -- over 3 hrs late. A quick call to Amex Travel tells me that the early morning United flight has already left, so this is my best option. Since, as I talked about in the last episode, I’ve given up depending on airlines being able to meet their schedules, I hadn’t booked any early afternoon meetings, so I just parked myself in the Admirals Club and got some work done. Nothing lost but a bit of sleep.</li>\r\n 	<li>With this in mind, I was gritting my teeth when I had to head back to ORD the next week for my flight to LGA. I haven’t had to fly to New York much recently, and when I have, I’ve flown into EWR to avoid the nightmare-ish delays being reported from LGA because of the construction. There’d been stories of people abandoning their cabs on the Grand Central Parkway to walk into LGA. And then there’s just flying between two of the US’s most congested airports. I’ve always said that anything less than a 30-minute delay between LGA and ORD is on-time. So I booked my flights to avoid rush hours -- leaving ORD at 4pm, arriving LGA at 7:30, and my return flight leaving LGA at 3:30 the next afternoon. I land in LGA on-time. There’s no taxi queue, and I’m into the Sheraton Times Square by a little after 8 -- no flight delays, no traffic. I quietly offer up my first beer at The Three Monkeys to the travel gods in thanksgiving.</li>\r\n 	<li>The next day, we finish up our meeting in midtown an hour early, I walk out of the building to find all sorts of cabs. The first cab doesn’t have the time to take me to LGA, but the second guy is happy to. We make good time across town to the tunnel and there’s no traffic on the Grand Central. I tip the guy well, walk up to an American kiosk and see that I can standby on the 1:30pm flight -- which will be boarding in about 5 minutes. I hit the TSA PreCheck line -- about 5 people in front of me, but the TSA folks are in good humor and moving things along. I hear the gate agent call my name as I walk up to the gate. The flight takes off on time and lands early. Hey, American made up 2 of the 3 hr-delay from last week! And on an LGA-ORD flight. I offered up a bigger beer when I got home.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/JeffSpeed68/54450\">Hula Hoop Party</a> by Stefan Kartenberg (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: Martijn de Boer, Blue Wave Theory</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Mike Skinner took a couple of minutes to stop by the TravelCommons web site and leave a comment about the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/07/30/podcast-131-twitter-concierge-customer-service-london-tube-story/\">last episode</a>. Mike writes\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>“Long time listener, really enjoy the show.“Your comments on the Dreamliner were very interesting to me. I\'ve flown one long-haul on several occasions, and yes, the windows are fun to play with. But you didn\'t have any comments on what I think is the most important attribute. The 787 isn\'t just another \"metal tube\"..... It is constructed from carbon fiber, and can be pressurized to a higher level than most normal passenger jets. The environment inside is at higher air pressure (like being at 6,000\' rather than 10000\' elevation), with a higher level of humidity (air not so dry), and more refreshes. I found it a great plane to fly on a long red-eye! Or any 5+ hour flight.\r\n“I\'m looking forward to this fall, when I\'m flying one r/t LAX-SYD in UA\'s BF cabin (14 hour flight)”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Mike, thanks for the comment. You’re absolutely right about the 787’s carbon fiber build allowing it to be pressurized at a lower level -- I’m not sure if that’s because of an increase in strength from the carbon fiber or because it’s less impervious to the higher moisture content of the denser air. But I didn’t notice a difference between my flight out to on an A330 and my flight back on the 787. Of course, it might be that I wasn’t paying enough attention to the negative -- less dry eye; less “cotton mouth” -- or that that the LHR-ORD flight wasn’t a red-eye; and so I was able to keep myself hydrated more than I would on a red-eye. Maybe I would’ve noticed the difference on those 17-hr SAA flights to Joburg those years ago. Whatever the reason, anything that makes those long-haul flights more bearable is a great thing. Safe travels on your upcoming flight to Sydney.</li>\r\n 	<li>That A330 flight didn’t go direct to London. I was late booking my ticket and so instead flew Aer Lingus to Gatwick via Dublin. It was the first time in at least 25 years that I’ve been through Dublin airport. It was a nice enough airport, but crowded for an early Monday morning. I was glad I didn’t have to go through security again, because when I looked past the scanners, it looked to be a bit of zoo parade. But, adding again to the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/01/16/podcast-126-beating-the-traffic-rethinking-carry-on-luggage/\">multi</a>-<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/02/20/podcast-127-critiquing-my-top-10-travel-tips-reviewing-vpns/\">episode</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/03/31/podcast-128-hunt-for-experiences-pop-up-entertainment/\">thread </a>about buying and using local phone SIMs during international travel, I saw the first benefits of the EU’s ban against mobile roaming charges. On the flight over, I’d swapped my US SIM for my UK SIM. Coming out of airplane mode in Dublin, I get what look like the typical welcome texts, but instead of giving me the roaming charges, they tell me that my UK plan is good in Ireland. Might seem kind of a minor thing, but at least for traveling within Europe, there are some real benefits. First is not having to burn through an hour or two at the beginning of a vacation finding a phone store and then going through the hassle of buying a pay-as-you-go SIM. In Paris, I had to go to 3 phone stores to find the SIM I wanted. In Hungary, T-Mobile wouldn’t sell my wife a SIM without a Hungarian citizenship or registration card -- which, of course, she didn’t have. Luckily, my wife’s cousin was with her and she was able to buy SIMs for all of us. If I don’t need to buy a new French or Hungarian SIM to avoid roaming charges, this kind of hassle goes away. I wonder also if there’s a bit of an arbitrage opportunity. Now that I have a UK, French, and Hungarian SIM, do I figure out which one has the cheapest rate and then use that one for all of my trips? I need to read the new regs on that one.</li>\r\n 	<li>On my last couple of trips through ATL, it seems that the lines for PreCheck are configured differently every time. Not quite sure why that is. Every other airport, it’s pretty static -- go to this set of lanes, but ATL, for some reason, wants to change the entrance to the maze each time. They also have put new parallel loading baggage X-ray machines in the ATL PreCheck line. These are pretty common in Europe but just now dribbling into US airports. Rather than queuing up and waiting for each person to put their stuff on the belt, there are 4 loading stations where a group of people each reach below, grab a bin, put it in front of you, put your stuff in it, and then push it onto the conveyor. Since there are 4 people loading at the same time, there’s no “performance anxiety” to make sure you have your belt-loading choreography flawless, and there’s no eye-rolling and foot-tapping while waiting for those who don’t. There are a couple of hassles, though. First, since it’s new, most people are still in serial mode; they don’t know that it’s OK to break queue and step around to an empty loading station. At many European airports, they have someone telling you which loading station to go to (usually with numbered stickers on the floor -- “You, station 1; you, station 6). The TSA hasn’t quite got with this program. Second, if you’re in one of the front loading stations, it takes a little, uh, muscle to break the stream of bins, to shove your bin onto the conveyor. Too polite and you’ll just stand there watching a stream of bins go by. All in all, it’s a definite improvement, but needs a bit of, say, process optimization.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/49674\">H2O</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Travel Apps on My Phone</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>A few weeks ago, Jack Peacock from northern Florida -- kinda near where the panhandle connects to the peninsula -- pinged me on the TravelCommons website with a couple of questions. First was a genealogy question. Peacock isn’t a common last name in the US and so when we meet, “where’s the last name from” is a common icebreaker. Peacock is probably more common down South where Jack and other southern Peacocks will trace their roots back to a Samuel Peacock born 1671 probably in Colonial VA. My line is from more recent immigrant stock, though. My dad grew up in Southport, on the northwest coast of the UK, between Liverpool and Blackpool, and came over to the US in 1956.</li>\r\n 	<li>That out of the way, Jack said that he and his wife are retired, have put their home and vehicles up for sale, and are getting ready to Airbnb the globe. “Geriatric gap year” as Jack put it. I am officially jealous. Which leads to his second question -- what travel apps do I have on my phone? A very timely question since Carlson Wagonlit Travel just <a href=\"http://www.carlsonwagonlit.com/content/cwt/global/en/news/news-releases/20170824-Business-travelers-find-they-are-very-productive-due-to-more-technology-options.html\">released a survey</a> where 80% of business travelers said their smartphone was the “travel tool they can’t live without”, and 45% used airline and hotel apps as their main travel technology.</li>\r\n 	<li>Paging back through the TravelCommons archives, I see that I’ve touched on some categories of travel apps -- in the most recent iteration of my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/12/12/top-10-holiday-travel-tips-2/\">Top 10 Travel Tips</a> I recommended some flight tracking apps and way before that, did a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/11/29/podcast-102-trip-management-app-comparison-tsa-scanner-shuffle/\">bake-off of trip management apps</a> -- but never walked through what’s in the travel folder on the home screen of my iPhone.</li>\r\n 	<li>As long time listeners know -- and have suffered through -- I can’t just go through a laundry list. In other words, I can’t just quickly answer Jack’s question. First, I need to build (and drag you all through) some kind of framework that provides some structure to my laundry list. It’s my own little piece of OCD. One way to start is to split between apps with broad general use -- say like Google Maps -- and those more specific to a situation -- the apps of the airlines you use the most, or, say, mass transit apps for a city you’ll be visiting.</li>\r\n 	<li>Let’s dig down to the next layer of the specific category. I have apps for the airlines I use for 90% of my travel -- American, United, Southwest, and Delta -- in that order -- because living in Chicago, American and United have hubs at ORD and Southwest owns MDW. I have Delta for the odd flight between, say, Atlanta and New York. The mix will change based on what you fly -- in Boston, you may have JetBlue, in London you certainly have BA. I mostly use these apps for two reasons -- electronic boarding passes and flight status. I talked in the last episode about how I used the “Where is my plane now” feature of United’s app to track back to the source of a RIC flight delay to GRR. Helped give me a sense of whether that delay could shrink or grow. Also, these apps are getting much quicker about pushing flight status and gate change notifications. Indeed, these apps have gotten good enough that the independent/more general flight tracking apps on my phone -- FlightAware, FlightView, and FlightStats -- are on the bubble. I’ll probably delete two of them and keep one -- either FlightAware or FlightView because of how they show the projected flight path on a weather map. You can find this in the United app, but you have to dig a bit. FlightAware and FlightView have it as their primary app view. It’s another good piece of information for when you’re thinking through flight delays.</li>\r\n 	<li>I didn’t load up the Aer Lingus app for my flight to London last month (if they even have one). It’s not worth it for a single flight. Same reason I’ve never loaded Alaska Air’s app even though I seem to end up on them at least once a year. It’s not worth the phone real estate. Which is the same reason I’ve deleted hotel apps from my phone. I’ve never found any value in the Marriott or Starwood apps. Same with the Hertz and Avis apps. However, if I was Airbnb’ing around the world like Jack is planning, I would probably load up their app.</li>\r\n 	<li>Another specific app I have is My EE -- the app for the UK mobile carrier who’s pay-as-you-go SIM I use. The last iteration of this app made it easier than EE’s website to do a SIM top-up, so it’s now in my Travel folder.</li>\r\n 	<li>A bit more general is the Priority Pass app which gets me access to international airport lounges through my Amex Platinum card. It regularly updates its list of available lounges and has airport maps to help you find them. This came in real handy in Dublin where the lounge was tucked away on a second floor with very minimal signage.</li>\r\n 	<li>Another kinda general app is the companion app to my Bluesmart roller bag. It connects to my bag via Bluetooth, automatically locks it when it’s out of range of my phone, and displays the bag’s location when I have to check it. The auto lock is probably the most useful thing. It’s consistently on the bubble.</li>\r\n 	<li>I have both Uber and Lyft in my Travel folder. I’ll typically light both of those apps up when looking for a ride somewhere, comparing price and wait time. As I mentioned during a broader discussion of ride sharing a few episodes back, all things being equal, I’ll choose Lyft, but I use both of them regularly.</li>\r\n 	<li>Five years ago, I <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/11/29/podcast-102-trip-management-app-comparison-tsa-scanner-shuffle/\">reviewed</a> the 3 main trip management apps -- Tripit, TripCase, and Worldmate -- that recreated the old company travel agent’s printed trip itinerary by integrating separate airline, hotel, and rental car reservations for free, and real-time flight updates for a fee. I liked Worldmate the best, with TripCase a solid second. Today, I use Tripit. Carlson Wagonlit closed up Worldmate at the beginning of the year, and Sabre’s TripCase is hot mess of advertising. Tripit has continued to improve their app. The ability to share a piece of an itinerary (a flight, a hotel) through iPhone’s iMessage is surprisingly handy. But the $50/yr Tripit Pro is also on the bubble because of the airline apps’ improved notifications.</li>\r\n 	<li>Google Translate has grown into a critical travel app. I’ve talked in a previous episode about how, with real-time translation through the camera, it’s becoming pretty close to magic.\r\nTransit is another app that continues to solidify its hold on screen real estate. Transit covers mass transit across North America and major cities in Europe. Google Maps suggests mass transit routings, but Transit goes much deeper -- with things like real-time bus and subway data and bike share locations for cities like Chicago and New York.</li>\r\n 	<li>And then, of course, there is Google Maps. I use it to plan trips, find hotels, check out neighborhoods, figure out where I am, share locations -- as well as getting me from Point A to Point B. It is probably the most indispensable travel app on my phone. Indeed, it’s the only travel app with its own screen real estate rather than sharing space in the Travel folder</li>\r\n 	<li>What are your suggestions?</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #132</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_132.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #132 — Travel Apps on My Phone','','inherit','closed','closed','','1798-revision-v1','','','2017-08-27 19:31:57','2017-08-28 00:31:57','',1798,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/08/27/1798-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1814,1,'2017-08-27 19:33:55','2017-08-28 00:33:55','[caption id=\"attachment_1703\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/File_000.jpeg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1703\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/File_000-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Car trunks need carry-on luggage limits too[/caption]\r\n\r\nSeems like I\'ve been doing as much driving as flying since the last episode, so I\'ve switched from apps that track flight delays to those that help me dodge traffic backups. I talk, yet again, about buying pay-as-you-go SIMs while traveling, but the need to do that may be ending. And I\'ve reshuffled my carry-on luggage as the airlines have changed their rules. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_126.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_126.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #126:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, hoping that everyone had a Merry Christmas -- or Happy Christmas if you’re on the other side of the Atlantic -- Happy Hanukkah, and a Happy New Year. I’m personally in trying a combo Dry-ish and Sugar-Free January in an attempt to drop 10 lbs of holiday weight that managed to sneak on-board -- the downside, I guess, from staying off the road for the back half of December.</li>\r\n 	<li>I eased back into travel mode with my usual Charlottesville trip the first workday of the New Year. I didn’t mind it too much since Charlottesville was about 20 degrees warmer than Chicago. It was nice to walk outside with just a scarf and a tweed jacket.</li>\r\n 	<li>Between <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/11/22/podcast-125-uber-driver-stories-overseas-for-the-election/\">the last episode</a> and my Christmas travel break, I did almost as much driving as I did flying. I drove down to Nashville the Friday after Thanksgiving to see my mother. That drive wasn’t so bad, The Sunday drive back to Chicago, though was a whole ‘nother matter. Then that next week, I had meetings in Richmond, VA, Baltimore, and Charlottesville. I didn’t even bother to look at flight schedules. I knew nonstop RIC-BWI and a BWI-CHO flights were non-existent and the 2-2.5 hour drive time was within my fly-or-drive tipping point. Neither drives were bad. The only hassle was the Hertz rental car. Since it was a one-way rental -- I was picking up in RIC and dropping off in CHO -- they gave me a beater car, an older Jeep Patriot that I think was the only car on their lot without Bluetooth, which made listening to podcasts or doing phone calls a bit less convenient.</li>\r\n 	<li>It did give me a chance to explore Baltimore and Charlottesville a bit more than usual, though. On my past visits, I wouldn’t bother with a rental; would just taxi in from the airport, and then walk or Uber to places. But with the beater Jeep, I could wander with a bit more range. In Baltimore, I drove around the Fells Point neighborhood, ending up in the <a href=\"http://www.thamesstreetoysterhouse.com/\">Thames St Oyster House</a>, then threading through some waterfront areas that I had been a bit hesitant to walk through. In Charlottesville, I wandered through the countryside until I found <a href=\"http://starrhill.com/\">Starr Hill Brewery</a>. Kinda empty on a rainy Weds night, which meant the bartender had time to take me through a flight of her favorite beers. Maybe I’ve found the source of a few of those holiday pounds.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/THE_CONCEPT_OF_ENERGY/55008\">ABANDONED BUTTERFLIES</a> by THE_CONCEPT_OF_ENERGY (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/\">Attribution</a> license. Ft: Doxent Zsigmond, Snowflake</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I’ve talked a couple of times in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/09/28/podcast-124-craft-beer-hunting-i-hate-rick-steves/\">past episodes</a> about the benefits of buying a pay-as-you-go SIM when traveling internationally -- $20 for a GB of data vs. AT&amp;T’s $60 for 300 MB is easy math. The only hassle is buying the SIM. First, you have to find the phone store, which can be a bit of an Easter Egg hunt. Back in November, our first day in Italy was in Pisa. We land, get the car, and head to the city center to find the phone store. However, the easiest one to get to was closed -- at 1 in the afternoon. Luckily, the next closest one was only a 10-minute walk and it was open. This time, I’d done my research before we left, purchased the SIMs online, and had printed out vouchers with bar codes, and instructions in English and Italian. I was ready for a quick and easy transaction. And yet again, I was wrong. The clerk knew nothing about the vouchers, didn’t know how to process them, and had to call around to other shops to figure it out. And then, each of the SIMs had to be registered and activated. Over an hour later, we’re sprinting out of the shop so we can make our time slot to get into the Leaning Tower -- which we’d also pre-paid. And this was a pretty typical experience. Which was why I was really excited a telecoms industry consultant told me that the virtual SIM, or the e-SIM was getting close to launch. Apple took the first crack at this back in 2014, but it’s been a slow ramp up. The iPhone 7 I picked up back in Sept still has the classic SIM. But this guy was telling me that going SIM-less is just about possible. He said it’ll be like signing into a WiFi hotspot. The next time I land in Italy and turn on my phone, I’ll be presented with a sign-in screen where I’ll be able to select my carrier and plan, and charge it to my credit card. Now given how wonky some WiFi gateways are, I’m not sure that this is the best comparison to sell me on the service, but if it saves me a couple of hours of frustration when I’m at my most jet lagged, I’ll figure it out.</li>\r\n 	<li>My age odometer clicked over again last month -- which I guess is a good thing, because if it didn’t click over, I be… dead. So, unless I find that Dorian Grey portrait at a garage sale, getting older is better than the alternative. I try not to let it bother me -- with varying levels of success. One thing, though, this does frustrate me is the need to bring my glasses into hotel bathrooms with me. Because it seems just as my reading vision is deteriorating, hotels are reducing the type size on their shampoo and conditioner bottles. As they try to go upscale with their toiletries, the bottle designers are taking the regular sized fancy labels into Photoshop and shrinking them down to fit on the front of a much smaller bottle, resulting is minuscule type that I might’ve been challenged to read in my 20’s let alone now. So my drill is to wear my glasses into the bathroom, figure out which bottle is shampoo, which is conditioner, and which is soap (or shower gel as they call it), and then line them up in order on the soap dish in the shower. Then take my glasses off, turn on the water, and hope that my lined up bottles don’t fall. The Hyatt Place that I stay at in Charlottesville is one of the few that doesn’t require this drill. They have a big “1” printed on the shampoo -- it runs about ¾’s the length of the bottle -- and a big “2” printed on the conditioner. And they’re in different colors. No need for glasses there. I love that hotel.</li>\r\n 	<li>It’s accepted wisdom that the most disgusting place on an airplane is the seat back pocket, and it just keeps getting worse. As airlines try to tighten up their ground turns -- how long a plane is on the ground before it takes off again -- the amount of time the cabin clean-up crew has to do its job continues to shrink. I was reminded of this by a Chicago Tribune article right before Thanksgiving when many airport workers -- cabin cleaners, baggage handlers, wheelchair attendants -- threatened to strike during that busiest travel week. The reporter interviewed a cabin cleaner who recently moved to Chicago from San Juan, PR. She said her crew of four are given 7 minutes to clean the cabin; no where near enough time to clean up all the crumbs, spilled drinks, and wrappers ground into the carpet, let alone time to clear the junk people leave in the seat back pocket. \"I don\'t know what is wrong with passengers nowadays,” she said. I won’t even pull out the safety card when I’m sitting in the exit row. A buddy told me a story about flying Tunisair from Brussels to Tunis many years ago. After the meal service, when people were done eating, they just shoved their trays into the seat back pocket. I’m not sure it’s all that different today.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/snowflake/46164\">A Foolish Game</a> by snowflake (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/\">Attribution (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Admiral Bob</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Beating The Traffic</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>As I mentioned earlier, I’ve done a bunch of travel by car lately. I talked in the last episode about driving through Tuscany. I was pleasantly surprised when Hertz upgraded us to an Alfa Romeo sports car, but when we had to drive through the rutted dirt back roads outside of Greve in Chianti, I was left wanting for something with a bit more ground clearance.</li>\r\n 	<li>The Thanksgiving drive down to Nashville was a lot smoother. They finally finished the years of construction expanding the I-80/94 constriction point around Lake Michigan in Northwest Indiana, and the traffic from there to I-65 south flowed smoothly. We made good enough time to make a couple of beer stops -- in Columbus, IN at a new Upland Brewing restaurant, and in downtown Louisville at Against The Grain Brewing.</li>\r\n 	<li>The drive back would be a whole other matter -- and I knew it and dreaded it. We drove down on that Friday, sailing through downtown Indy, Louisville, and Nashville because everyone was on vacation or shopping. Driving back Sunday though, we were right in the thick of the busiest travel day in the US. And while I always avoid flying on this day, I had managed to put myself on one of the US’s main north-south interstates. It would’ve only been worse if we’d been on the East Coast driving I-95 or the Jersey Turnpike. And it was the beat-down that I’d expected. The start of the drive out of Nashville was fine, and a bit pretty, going through rolling hills up to Louisville. The traffic was steady, but flowing. But we kept picking up more traffic as we headed north. We took a break in Indy this time, stopping off at Sun King Brewing right off the interstate, and then coffee-d up at a nearby Starbucks. North of Indy was when it really hit -- more and more cars and trucks heading up to Chicago, but still just 2 lanes. And so when the inevitable accident happened -- as it did many times that Sunday -- closing down one of those lanes, cutting the already clogged road by 50%, Waze became, if not a life saver, a time saver. I was running 3 nav systems, Waze, Google Maps, and the in-dash BMW nav. All had real-time traffic, but Waze seemed to be the quickest in sensing the need for a reroute. A couple of times that Sunday, it would direct us to take the next exit after traffic had stopped, and would vector us around the bottleneck and back onto the interstate, saving us 15-20 minutes of crawling and at least 70 points of increased blood pressure. I did skip the recommended diversion through the south side of Chicago, though. Given the record number of shootings in Chicago, stop-and-go traffic didn’t seem quite the burden that it did in rural Indiana.</li>\r\n 	<li>The next week’s triangulation across Richmond, Baltimore, and Charlottesville found me on I-95 having to make 2 passes around Washington, DC on the Capital Beltway, always a brutal 8-lane chokepoint. Heading up from Richmond Tuesday night, Google Maps told me to take the clockwise/west route around DC while Waze told me to go east. Odd since Google owns both. A friend said that he researched this a bit and found some articles claiming that Waze’s algorithm weighs current information more than historical trends; Google Maps tips the scales the other way. I don’t know if this is true -- I haven’t been able to find anything that says this -- but I often see different rush hour recommendations. Since Waze served me well on Thanksgiving Sunday, I went east and took the counterclockwise path around. It was a rainy night, but traffic flowed better than I expected and I made it to Baltimore in time for an oyster dinner.</li>\r\n 	<li>In spite of juggling nav apps, I found that I was more productive driving from Richmond to Baltimore to Charlottesville than I would’ve flying. You’d think it would be the other way around, but lack of direct flights would’ve mean going up and down, connecting through Washington Dulles. And on those few minutes I might be able to work, full planes and tight seats make it seem almost anti-social to try to open a laptop. On my 3-hour drive from Baltimore to Charlottesville, though, I was able to hammer through 2 conference calls and an unhurried, wide-ranging conversation with my boss. He called me. I told him that I was having a nice drive through Virginia horse country. “Good,” he said, “I have you captive.”</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/49674\">H2O</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Having to Think about Carry-on Luggage</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I don’t usually think a lot about packing or luggage. And sometimes I think that puts me in the minority of frequent travelers. I know guys who obsess over their Tumi bags and specific packing systems. I used a grey Samsonite roller until the New Orleans sidewalks beat the wheels out to a 30 degree splay, and then I went back to my old black Victorinox with customs stickers from Thailand and Vietnam.</li>\r\n 	<li>However, a few things in 2016 got me thinking about carry-ons -- my carry-on experience with Wow Air in Iceland that I talked about in an earlier episode where I had to pull out half my clothes to meet the weight restrictions; my daughter’s light blue carry-on catching the eye of seemingly every gate agent she tried to pass, being forced to check it, and then having it lost 75% of her flights in 2016; and most recently, enduring long and often cold waits on a jet bridge waiting for my “valet checked” carry-on bag when flying regional jets</li>\r\n 	<li>Starting from last to first, this regional jet thing kills me. It used to be that gate checking for a commuter flight wasn’t a big thing -- the bag would be waiting for you on the jet bridge before you got off the plane. Now, as regional jets have gotten larger, they put the gate checked luggage in the same hold with the regular checked luggage, the only differentiating factor being the tag they put on at the gate. I’m typically waiting around 10 minutes with 40-50 other passengers, lined up on one side of an unheated jet bridge leaning over to see if my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/File_000.png\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1708\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/File_000-169x300.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"169\" height=\"300\" /></a>bag has come up yet. It’s gotten bad. On some of the larger Embraer jets flown by JetBlue, the overhead bins are large enough for regular bags, but on most of the regionals, you’re standing in that jet bridge line. After a while, this got real old, so I scrounged around through the old luggage in the attic to find a smaller duffel for 1-2 night trips that would fit in the overhead. I found a black nylon duffel from a 2007 National Retail Foundation tech conference that was an attendee giveaway. It had all the sponsors names stenciled across it -- Oracle, Infosys. I kinda felt like a Nascar racer. But it did the job. I could squish it into the small overheads of the regional jets and so walk past the line of folks waiting for the “valets” to bring their luggage. But it still looked cheesy. So when I was in Italy in November, I kept my eye out for a nice leather bag. One rainy day in Florence - not unique on that trip -- we dove into a covered outdoor market. Wandering through the stalls, I found a beautiful leather bag for 100 euros. My wife pointed to a bag the next size up -- “Don’t you want this bigger one? It’s only 20 euros more.” Nope, that would defeat the whole purpose. I posted a picture of that bag on Twitter. Every time I walk up the ORD jet bridge when returning home from Charlottesville, I love that bag even more.</li>\r\n 	<li>I remember when I first started traveling, you’d never see a hard-sided carry-on. Now it seems at least 30% of the carry-ons are hard-sided. I think a lot of it is fashion -- they come in much cooler designs and colors, but there is some functionality to them. If you’re flying an airline that’s aggressively using a baggage sizer, it’s much easier to stay legal with a hard-sided bag. You can’t overstuff them to bulging like you can a soft-sided bag, and the polycarbonate shell slips much easier in and out of the metal baggage sizer. This is why I suggested to my daughter that she start using a hard-sided bag. And in a bit more muted color -- something that wouldn’t grab the gate agent’s eye.</li>\r\n 	<li>But if you’re working against weight limits as well as dimensions, like I was with Wow Air, you want the lightest, most stripped down bag possible. I haven’t experienced a carry-on weight limit in the US. Some US carriers post a 35 or 40 lb limit -- even Spirit is at 40 lbs -- but I’ve never seen a gate agent weigh a carry-on. The international carriers are where this comes in. Wow Air’s carry-on size dimensions are about the same as US carriers, but their weight limit is much less -- 10 kg or 22 lbs -- which seems like the consensus number for non-US carriers. In this case, you don’t want the extra weight of the hard siding. You probably don’t even want very sturdy wheels; just the lightest covering around your clothes that you can get. I know guys who’ll brag that they can fit everything they own into 2 suitcases. These guys are obviously aren’t doing carry-on.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #126</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/\">ccMixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_126.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #126 — Beating the Traffic; Rethinking Carry-On Luggage','','inherit','closed','closed','','1697-revision-v1','','','2017-08-27 19:33:55','2017-08-28 00:33:55','',1697,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/08/27/1697-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1816,1,'2017-08-27 19:40:42','2017-08-28 00:40:42','[caption id=\"attachment_1803\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/DSC_5935a.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1803\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/DSC_5935a-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> How Are Their Yelp Reviews?[/caption]\r\n\r\nIt\'s a listener request podcast. A fellow Peacock, this one named Jack, asked \"What travel apps do you have on your iPhone?\" Paging back through the TravelCommons archives, I’ve covered different categories of travel apps,  -- in the most recent iteration of my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/12/12/top-10-holiday-travel-tips-2/\">Top 10 Travel Tips</a> I recommended some flight tracking apps and way before that, did a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/11/29/podcast-102-trip-management-app-comparison-tsa-scanner-shuffle/\">bake-off of trip management apps</a> -- but never covered walked through what’s in the travel folder on the home screen of my iPhone. I\'ve now remedied that oversight. We also continue talking about overseas phone SIMs; the impact of the new EU ban on roaming charges. Also, my first encounter with some new TSA scanning equipment.  All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_132.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/339778145\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n<!--more-->\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #132:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you, as always it seems, from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. Seems that I’ve swapped the romance of hotel bathrooms for the sound quality of the studio here. Seems like yesterday when I was <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2009/04/15/podcast-73-eating-alone-on-the-road-more-things-you-never-want-to-hear/\">recording the intro</a> in the business class toilet of a South African Airways A340 on the way down to J’burg</li>\r\n 	<li>My travel since <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/07/30/podcast-131-twitter-concierge-customer-service-london-tube-story/\">the last episode</a> hasn’t been anything quite as exciting. Trips to Richmond, Baltimore and New York City. Indeed, if I tried recording in the toilet of one of those American or United A321s, I don’t think I’d get too far past “Hello, this is Mark Peacock…” before someone started banging on the door.</li>\r\n 	<li>Richmond airport continued to be a problem for me -- not the airport itself, just the carriers flying into it. I get up on a Tuesday morning -- sidestepping the Monday morning road warrior crush -- iPhone notifications from American, TripIt, and Google all say my flight is on-time. Pulling up to the terminal -- everything still looks OK. I walk through the doors and my phone explodes -- my 8:20 am flight is now leaving at 4 something pm! The next note is from American telling me they’ve booked me on the 11:45am flight, so instead of getting to RIC at 11:20am, I’m now due in at 2:40pm -- over 3 hrs late. A quick call to Amex Travel tells me that the early morning United flight has already left, so this is my best option. Since, as I talked about in the last episode, I’ve given up depending on airlines being able to meet their schedules, I hadn’t booked any early afternoon meetings, so I just parked myself in the Admirals Club and got some work done. Nothing lost but a bit of sleep.</li>\r\n 	<li>With this in mind, I was gritting my teeth when I had to head back to ORD the next week for my flight to LGA. I haven’t had to fly to New York much recently, and when I have, I’ve flown into EWR to avoid the nightmare-ish delays being reported from LGA because of the construction. There’d been stories of people abandoning their cabs on the Grand Central Parkway to walk into LGA. And then there’s just flying between two of the US’s most congested airports. I’ve always said that anything less than a 30-minute delay between LGA and ORD is on-time. So I booked my flights to avoid rush hours -- leaving ORD at 4pm, arriving LGA at 7:30, and my return flight leaving LGA at 3:30 the next afternoon. I land in LGA on-time. There’s no taxi queue, and I’m into the Sheraton Times Square by a little after 8 -- no flight delays, no traffic. I quietly offer up my first beer at The Three Monkeys to the travel gods in thanksgiving.</li>\r\n 	<li>The next day, we finish up our meeting in midtown an hour early, I walk out of the building to find all sorts of cabs. The first cab doesn’t have the time to take me to LGA, but the second guy is happy to. We make good time across town to the tunnel and there’s no traffic on the Grand Central. I tip the guy well, walk up to an American kiosk and see that I can standby on the 1:30pm flight -- which will be boarding in about 5 minutes. I hit the TSA PreCheck line -- about 5 people in front of me, but the TSA folks are in good humor and moving things along. I hear the gate agent call my name as I walk up to the gate. The flight takes off on time and lands early. Hey, American made up 2 of the 3 hr-delay from last week! And on an LGA-ORD flight. I offered up a bigger beer when I got home.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/JeffSpeed68/54450\">Hula Hoop Party</a> by Stefan Kartenberg (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: Martijn de Boer, Blue Wave Theory</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Mike Skinner took a couple of minutes to stop by the TravelCommons web site and leave a comment about the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/07/30/podcast-131-twitter-concierge-customer-service-london-tube-story/\">last episode</a>. Mike writes\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>“Long time listener, really enjoy the show.“Your comments on the Dreamliner were very interesting to me. I\'ve flown one long-haul on several occasions, and yes, the windows are fun to play with. But you didn\'t have any comments on what I think is the most important attribute. The 787 isn\'t just another \"metal tube\"..... It is constructed from carbon fiber, and can be pressurized to a higher level than most normal passenger jets. The environment inside is at higher air pressure (like being at 6,000\' rather than 10000\' elevation), with a higher level of humidity (air not so dry), and more refreshes. I found it a great plane to fly on a long red-eye! Or any 5+ hour flight.\r\n“I\'m looking forward to this fall, when I\'m flying one r/t LAX-SYD in UA\'s BF cabin (14 hour flight)”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Mike, thanks for the comment. You’re absolutely right about the 787’s carbon fiber build allowing it to be pressurized at a lower level -- I’m not sure if that’s because of an increase in strength from the carbon fiber or because it’s less impervious to the higher moisture content of the denser air. But I didn’t notice a difference between my flight out to on an A330 and my flight back on the 787. Of course, it might be that I wasn’t paying enough attention to the negative -- less dry eye; less “cotton mouth” -- or that that the LHR-ORD flight wasn’t a red-eye; and so I was able to keep myself hydrated more than I would on a red-eye. Maybe I would’ve noticed the difference on those 17-hr SAA flights to Joburg those years ago. Whatever the reason, anything that makes those long-haul flights more bearable is a great thing. Safe travels on your upcoming flight to Sydney.</li>\r\n 	<li>That A330 flight didn’t go direct to London. I was late booking my ticket and so instead flew Aer Lingus to Gatwick via Dublin. It was the first time in at least 25 years that I’ve been through Dublin airport. It was a nice enough airport, but crowded for an early Monday morning. I was glad I didn’t have to go through security again, because when I looked past the scanners, it looked to be a bit of zoo parade. But, adding again to the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/01/16/podcast-126-beating-the-traffic-rethinking-carry-on-luggage/\">multi</a>-<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/02/20/podcast-127-critiquing-my-top-10-travel-tips-reviewing-vpns/\">episode</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/03/31/podcast-128-hunt-for-experiences-pop-up-entertainment/\">thread </a>about buying and using local phone SIMs during international travel, I saw the first benefits of the EU’s ban against mobile roaming charges. On the flight over, I’d swapped my US SIM for my UK SIM. Coming out of airplane mode in Dublin, I get what look like the typical welcome texts, but instead of giving me the roaming charges, they tell me that my UK plan is good in Ireland. Might seem kind of a minor thing, but at least for traveling within Europe, there are some real benefits. First is not having to burn through an hour or two at the beginning of a vacation finding a phone store and then going through the hassle of buying a pay-as-you-go SIM. In Paris, I had to go to 3 phone stores to find the SIM I wanted. In Hungary, T-Mobile wouldn’t sell my wife a SIM without a Hungarian citizenship or registration card -- which, of course, she didn’t have. Luckily, my wife’s cousin was with her and she was able to buy SIMs for all of us. If I don’t need to buy a new French or Hungarian SIM to avoid roaming charges, this kind of hassle goes away. I wonder also if there’s a bit of an arbitrage opportunity. Now that I have a UK, French, and Hungarian SIM, do I figure out which one has the cheapest rate and then use that one for all of my trips? I need to read the new regs on that one.</li>\r\n 	<li>On my last couple of trips through ATL, it seems that the lines for PreCheck are configured differently every time. Not quite sure why that is. Every other airport, it’s pretty static -- go to this set of lanes, but ATL, for some reason, wants to change the entrance to the maze each time. They also have put new parallel loading baggage X-ray machines in the ATL PreCheck line. These are pretty common in Europe but just now dribbling into US airports. Rather than queuing up and waiting for each person to put their stuff on the belt, there are 4 loading stations where a group of people each reach below, grab a bin, put it in front of you, put your stuff in it, and then push it onto the conveyor. Since there are 4 people loading at the same time, there’s no “performance anxiety” to make sure you have your belt-loading choreography flawless, and there’s no eye-rolling and foot-tapping while waiting for those who don’t. There are a couple of hassles, though. First, since it’s new, most people are still in serial mode; they don’t know that it’s OK to break queue and step around to an empty loading station. At many European airports, they have someone telling you which loading station to go to (usually with numbered stickers on the floor -- “You, station 1; you, station 6). The TSA hasn’t quite got with this program. Second, if you’re in one of the front loading stations, it takes a little, uh, muscle to break the stream of bins, to shove your bin onto the conveyor. Too polite and you’ll just stand there watching a stream of bins go by. All in all, it’s a definite improvement, but needs a bit of, say, process optimization.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/49674\">H2O</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Travel Apps on My Phone</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>A few weeks ago, Jack Peacock from northern Florida -- kinda near where the panhandle connects to the peninsula -- pinged me on the TravelCommons website with a couple of questions. First was a genealogy question. Peacock isn’t a common last name in the US and so when we meet, “where’s the last name from” is a common icebreaker. Peacock is probably more common down South where Jack and other southern Peacocks will trace their roots back to a Samuel Peacock born 1671 probably in Colonial VA. My line is from more recent immigrant stock, though. My dad grew up in Southport, on the northwest coast of the UK, between Liverpool and Blackpool, and came over to the US in 1956.</li>\r\n 	<li>That out of the way, Jack said that he and his wife are retired, have put their home and vehicles up for sale, and are getting ready to Airbnb the globe. “Geriatric gap year” as Jack put it. I am officially jealous. Which leads to his second question -- what travel apps do I have on my phone? A very timely question since Carlson Wagonlit Travel just <a href=\"http://www.carlsonwagonlit.com/content/cwt/global/en/news/news-releases/20170824-Business-travelers-find-they-are-very-productive-due-to-more-technology-options.html\">released a survey</a> where 80% of business travelers said their smartphone was the “travel tool they can’t live without”, and 45% used airline and hotel apps as their main travel technology.</li>\r\n 	<li>Paging back through the TravelCommons archives, I see that I’ve touched on some categories of travel apps -- in the most recent iteration of my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/12/12/top-10-holiday-travel-tips-2/\">Top 10 Travel Tips</a> I recommended some flight tracking apps and way before that, did a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/11/29/podcast-102-trip-management-app-comparison-tsa-scanner-shuffle/\">bake-off of trip management apps</a> -- but never walked through what’s in the travel folder on the home screen of my iPhone.</li>\r\n 	<li>As long time listeners know -- and have suffered through -- I can’t just go through a laundry list. In other words, I can’t just quickly answer Jack’s question. First, I need to build (and drag you all through) some kind of framework that provides some structure to my laundry list. It’s my own little piece of OCD. One way to start is to split between apps with broad general use -- say like Google Maps -- and those more specific to a situation -- the apps of the airlines you use the most, or, say, mass transit apps for a city you’ll be visiting.</li>\r\n 	<li>Let’s dig down to the next layer of the specific category. I have apps for the airlines I use for 90% of my travel -- American, United, Southwest, and Delta -- in that order -- because living in Chicago, American and United have hubs at ORD and Southwest owns MDW. I have Delta for the odd flight between, say, Atlanta and New York. The mix will change based on what you fly -- in Boston, you may have JetBlue, in London you certainly have BA. I mostly use these apps for two reasons -- electronic boarding passes and flight status. I talked in the last episode about how I used the “Where is my plane now” feature of United’s app to track back to the source of a RIC flight delay to GRR. Helped give me a sense of whether that delay could shrink or grow. Also, these apps are getting much quicker about pushing flight status and gate change notifications. Indeed, these apps have gotten good enough that the independent/more general flight tracking apps on my phone -- FlightAware, FlightView, and FlightStats -- are on the bubble. I’ll probably delete two of them and keep one -- either FlightAware or FlightView because of how they show the projected flight path on a weather map. You can find this in the United app, but you have to dig a bit. FlightAware and FlightView have it as their primary app view. It’s another good piece of information for when you’re thinking through flight delays.</li>\r\n 	<li>I didn’t load up the Aer Lingus app for my flight to London last month (if they even have one). It’s not worth it for a single flight. Same reason I’ve never loaded Alaska Air’s app even though I seem to end up on them at least once a year. It’s not worth the phone real estate. Which is the same reason I’ve deleted hotel apps from my phone. I’ve never found any value in the Marriott or Starwood apps. Same with the Hertz and Avis apps. However, if I was Airbnb’ing around the world like Jack is planning, I would probably load up their app.</li>\r\n 	<li>Another specific app I have is My EE -- the app for the UK mobile carrier who’s pay-as-you-go SIM I use. The last iteration of this app made it easier than EE’s website to do a SIM top-up, so it’s now in my Travel folder.</li>\r\n 	<li>A bit more general is the Priority Pass app which gets me access to international airport lounges through my Amex Platinum card. It regularly updates its list of available lounges and has airport maps to help you find them. This came in real handy in Dublin where the lounge was tucked away on a second floor with very minimal signage.</li>\r\n 	<li>Another kinda general app is the companion app to my Bluesmart roller bag. It connects to my bag via Bluetooth, automatically locks it when it’s out of range of my phone, and displays the bag’s location when I have to check it. The auto lock is probably the most useful thing. It’s consistently on the bubble.</li>\r\n 	<li>I have both Uber and Lyft in my Travel folder. I’ll typically light both of those apps up when looking for a ride somewhere, comparing price and wait time. As I mentioned during a broader discussion of ride sharing <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/11/22/podcast-125-uber-driver-stories-overseas-for-the-election/\">a few episodes back</a>, all things being equal, I’ll choose Lyft, but I use both of them regularly.</li>\r\n 	<li>Five years ago, I <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/11/29/podcast-102-trip-management-app-comparison-tsa-scanner-shuffle/\">reviewed</a> the 3 main trip management apps -- Tripit, TripCase, and Worldmate -- that recreated the old company travel agent’s printed trip itinerary by integrating separate airline, hotel, and rental car reservations for free, and real-time flight updates for a fee. I liked Worldmate the best, with TripCase a solid second. Today, I use Tripit. Carlson Wagonlit closed up Worldmate at the beginning of the year, and Sabre’s TripCase is hot mess of advertising. Tripit has continued to improve their app. The ability to share a piece of an itinerary (a flight, a hotel) through iPhone’s iMessage is surprisingly handy. But the $50/yr Tripit Pro is also on the bubble because of the airline apps’ improved notifications.</li>\r\n 	<li>Google Translate has grown into a critical travel app. I’ve talked in a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/06/24/podcast-130-notes-from-hungary/\">previous episode</a> about how, with real-time translation through the camera, it’s becoming pretty close to magic.\r\nTransit is another app that continues to solidify its hold on screen real estate. Transit covers mass transit across North America and major cities in Europe. Google Maps suggests mass transit routings, but Transit goes much deeper -- with things like real-time bus and subway data and bike share locations for cities like Chicago and New York.</li>\r\n 	<li>And then, of course, there is Google Maps. I use it to plan trips, find hotels, check out neighborhoods, figure out where I am, share locations -- as well as getting me from Point A to Point B. It is probably the most indispensable travel app on my phone. Indeed, it’s the only travel app with its own screen real estate rather than sharing space in the Travel folder</li>\r\n 	<li>What are your suggestions?</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #132</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_132.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #132 — Travel Apps on My Phone','','inherit','closed','closed','','1798-revision-v1','','','2017-08-27 19:40:42','2017-08-28 00:40:42','',1798,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/08/27/1798-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1818,1,'2017-09-28 17:18:51','2017-09-28 22:18:51','Recorded in the TravelCommons studios outside of <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Chicago\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/chicago\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\">Chicago</a> after finishing up my travel for the year. But there was a good bit of travel before the year-end, including one of the craziest/stupidest(?) itineraries I\'ve done in a long time -- Chicago-London-Denver in a little more than a day. Many of the subsequent Twitter comments I received asked that perpetual question -- Why travel when you can <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Videoconferencing\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videoconferencing\" rel=\"wikipedia\">video conference</a>? Traveling to a business-formal office for the first time in 10 years causes me to investigate different methods in packing a suit. And the December storms that have snarled air traffic across the upper two-thirds of the US have me singing the praises of <a href=\"http://flightstats.com\">Flightstats</a>. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_70.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_70.mp3\"]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #70:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none\">\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Recorded at the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, done for travel for the year</li>\r\n 	<li>Not before a completely stupid itinerary -- Chicago to London to Denver in a day-&amp;-a-half</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Greensleeves</em> by <a href=\"http://www.georgefletcher.com/\">Tequila Mockingbirds</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none\">\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Difficult \"travel roulette\" story from Ian Morgan about trying to get from <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Hong Kong\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/china/hong-kong\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\">Hong Kong</a> to Syndey</li>\r\n 	<li>Linda Martin of the <a href=\"http://indietravelpodcast.com/\">Indie Travel Podcast</a> reflects back on her college psych studies and concludes that the hustling around involved in \"travel roulette\" is actually better for you than sitting helpless on a delayed flight</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"http://ruk.ca/\">Peter Rukavina</a> agrees that there\'s still value in frequent flier programs after scoring a last-minute direct flight from Charlottetown (PEI) to Boston on Thanksgiving weekend using the minimum amount of <a href=\"http://www.aeroplan.com/landing/process.do?lang=E\">Aeroplan</a> miles</li>\r\n 	<li>Experiencing a lot of pushback from taxi drivers when trying to charge my fare on a credit card. Are others seeing the same thing?</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Please Come Home for Christmas </em> by <a href=\"http://oppenheimermusic.co.uk/\">Oppenheimer</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Packing a Suit</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none\">\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Always see more suits on flights headed east from Chicago than on flights heading west</li>\r\n 	<li>Have managed to avoid having to wear a suit -- much easier to wear a blazer and pack a couple of pair of pants in my rolling bag</li>\r\n 	<li>New client in Philadelphia requires me to suit up -- need to learn to fold a suit so I can keep using my rolling bag</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"http://www.google.com/search?q=packing+a+suit&amp;hl=en\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Google search</a> reveals a consensus around two different ways</li>\r\n 	<li>One <a href=\"http://www.menswearhouse.com/aboutus/fashion/articles.jsp?articleID=1408474395561309&amp;browsePage=3&amp;FOLDER%3C%3Efolder_id=1408474395564053&amp;ASSORTMENT%3C%3East_id=94653&amp;bmUID=1197642683816\">approach</a> is to turn the jacket inside out and fold it in half</li>\r\n 	<li>The second <a href=\"http://www.essortment.com/travel/travelfoldsuit_trgk.htm\">approach</a> – I can’t figure out exactly how they’re doing it – but it seems like some sort of suit coat origami</li>\r\n 	<li>I\'ve ended it up with my own simple method – fold the jacket in half along the back seam, accordion-fold it in thirds, putting clothes in the folds – boxed shirts from the cleaners work the best</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Merry Christmas Baby</em> by <a href=\"http://topcatrecords.com/\">Calvin Owens</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Why travel when you can videoconference? </strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none\">\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>When I “twittered” or “tweeted” – pick your Web 2.0 verb – about traveling to London for a 2-hr meeting, the @ replies asked why I didn\'t use videoconferencing or <a href=\"http://webex.com/\">webex</a>?</li>\r\n 	<li>Had done all the prior meetings by teleconference</li>\r\n 	<li>But this was the final meeting and we were delivering some tough messages. And call me “old school”, but bad news is best delivered personally, face-to-face</li>\r\n 	<li>Gartner\'s latest “Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies” <a href=\"http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/mgmt/2D07F8BED99F6D70CC2574A60004AD10\">report</a> says “video telepresence”, their <a href=\"http://blog.gartner.com/blog/index.php?itemid=1969&amp;catid=51\">term</a> for a sort of high-def, IMAX-like videoconferencing set-up that supports “virtual meetings”, as “being on the brink of widespread adoption</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>I’ll Be Home for Christmas</em> by <a href=\"http://www.katimac.com/\">Kati Mac</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Outsmarting winter flight delays</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none\">\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Winter travel -- usually not a question of <em>are</em> you going to be delayed, but by how much? Or worse, are you going to get canceled?</li>\r\n 	<li>I use <a href=\"http://flightstats.com\">Flightstats.com</a>\'s Track Flight Status by Route travel tool to predict problems</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917641.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from the <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com\">Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Feedback at comments@travelcommons.com or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_70.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<div class=\"zemanta-pixie\" style=\"margin-top: 10px; height: 15px;\"><img class=\"zemanta-pixie-img\" style=\"border: none; float: right;\" src=\"http://img.zemanta.com/pixy.gif?x-id=6f8ad1a5-3042-4691-b3e8-b270284e43f7\" alt=\"\" /></div>','Podcast #70 - Packing a Suit, Videoconference over Travel, Watching Winter Flight Delays','','inherit','closed','closed','','113-revision-v1','','','2017-09-28 17:18:51','2017-09-28 22:18:51','',113,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/09/28/113-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1819,1,'2017-09-30 21:00:02','2017-10-01 02:00:02','[caption id=\"attachment_1820\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/IMG_0548.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1820\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/IMG_0548-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> One Way to Reduce Packing Needs by 50%[/caption]\n<p>Fitting 10 days of clothes for rain, hiking, and Michelin restaurants into a 22-inch carry-on forced me to pack ruthlessly, and to distill my packing thoughts into 5 packing pro tips. Flying to Hungary right after a cycling accident reminded me of the hassles of traveling on the injured reserve list. All this and listener comments on EU mobile regulations, travel apps on smartphones, and the need for Atlanta baggage X-ray ninja skills at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_133.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.<br /><br /><br />Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #133:</p>\n<ul>\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL after what has been a light month of travel, just 10 days in Scotland on vacation, and then a quick overnight to Atlanta a couple of days after I returned. Other than that, I’ve been in Chicago trying to get back my body clock back to local time. Conventional wisdom says that your body will adjust at the rate of 1-2 time zones a day. So, for the 6 hours between Chicago and the UK, it should take me 3-5 days to adjust. I dunno, it’s felt longer than that. The older I get, the longer it seems to get.</li>\n<li>It’s also harder for me coming west than going east. When I go to Europe, I can set an alarm to wake up at the right time and will myself out of bed and into the shower. Back in the US, I can’t quite “will” myself back to sleep when I wake up at 2 or 3 in the morning. I did find, though, on this trip that I needed to be careful how long I stayed up the first couple of nights. My usual routine is to take a 30-minute nap the first afternoon I’m there -- say around 4:30 -- which then lets me push through to, say 10 or 11 that night. I’m then tired enough to get to sleep at what my body might still think is 5 or 6pm. This trip, I found that if I stayed up past midnight -- maybe because I got to reading something after getting back from dinner -- my body sorta tipped over that inflection point, caught a second, or is it a third wind, and would be happy to push through to 2 or 3 in the morning, which would make the morning’s alarm much tougher to handle.</li>\n<li>The United flight to and from Edinburgh was direct -- always nice -- but on an old 757 that had definitely seen better days, and many of them. Eight hours on any narrow body is tough, but on a 757 -- the narrowest of the narrow bodies -- it’s a bit tougher. And it was completely full -- nothing out-of-the-ordinary nowadays. Our flight from ORD landed shortly after the United direct from EWR landed, and so there was quite a queue for the non-EU passport line. Indeed, as we were coming off the jet bridge, an airport worker turned off the escalator and blocked it off. The end of the passport queue was beginning to block it on the floor below. So I reached into my backpack and pulled out my UK passport and was waved over to a set of four unmanned automated gates with no lines. I put my passport in, took my glasses off for the camera, and walked through when the gates opened up. It was pretty slick.</li>\n<li>I still had to wait for my wife and kids to work their way through the non-EU line, but I made some good use of the time -- I helped a mother and daughter from the EWR flight wrestle some amazing large bags onto a luggage cart, and had collected all of our luggage. If they had a Starbucks there in baggage claim like they do at ORD, it would’ve been damn close to a perfect morning.</li>\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/bridges/15563\">i knew</a> by bridges (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. Ft: shannonsongs</li>\n</ul>\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<ul>\n<li>Received some good comments on the last episode</li>\n<li>Nick -- no last name on the e-mail -- helped answer the question I had about arbitraging different European phone SIMs now that the EU had banned roaming charges. Nick writes -\n<ul>\n<li>You mentioned having 3 EU SIMs to choose from in Dublin, and working out the best value of the three.<br />I live in the UK and have a UK SIM. If I go to Spain, and call a UK number (even if that number belongs to the person next to me) then I just pay a local rate call - or nothing if I have an unlimited calls account. However, if I call a Spanish number, then it counts as an overseas call, as if I were in the UK - even though I\'m in Spain. So which is the best SIM to use will to an extent depend on the actual call rates, but also which country it is registered in, and which country you are calling, independently of where you are.<br />I hope that makes sense, and it\'s useful</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n<li>Nick, thanks for that. It makes a lot of sense when I recall that the EU wanted to eliminate roaming charges, so a mobile call from the UK is the same as one from Spain. For us, though, we’re rarely making a phone call. Indeed, I’m usually the only one making phone calls and that’s typically into a conference bridge. During our 10 days in Scotland, I used 11 of the 300 minutes in my 30 day plan. My wife’s 7 day plan ran out and she never noticed, because her 1 GB of data didn’t. And I think that’s where the arbitrage still could work, on using the cheapest data plan. That will, though, take a good bit of wading through really bad websites with confusing plan descriptions that are only partially in English. I think I’ll probably default to using my UK SIM just out of sheer laziness.</li>\n<li>Steve Frick left a comment on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page about the new parallel loading baggage X-ray machines I’ve encountered in the ATL PreCheck line. Steve writes -\n<ul>\n<li>I agree with you that people are hesitant to jump the queue in front of others..... and you do need mad ninja skills if you\'re in the first slot trying to grab one of those oversized bins</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n<li>Steve linked to his blog post where he has video and a more detailed description of the situation. Check out the show notes for a <a href=\"http://www.hypeorlando.com/back-and-gone-again/2017/05/01/atlanta-hartsfield-has-automated-the-tsa-process/\">link to his blog</a></li>\n<li>I have to give the ATL TSA crew props for noticing the problem with breaking into the stream of bins if you’re in one of the front loading stations. When I was going through ATL a few weeks back, there was a TSA person at the parallel loading line choreographing each bin push, having everyone hold up until all the previous bins had cleared, and then having everyone push their bins onto the conveyor at once. I haven’t seen this problem with parallel loaders in, say, Edinburgh or Heathrow or Madrid. I wonder what’s different that requires this manual intervention.</li>\n<li>And there were a couple of comments on the travel apps people use on their smartphones. Dan Brener left this Facebook\n<ul>\n<li>Great episode! Here\'s the apps I use the most: Air Canada and United, TripIt (although it\'s not as good as it could/should be), I used to use FlightTrack and really miss it, FlightAware since the AC app doesn\'t tell me where planes are coming from, Uber and Lyft, Packing (it\'s a list app to make sure I don\'t forget something obvious!), SPG, Yelp, Google Maps and Waze. There\'s a few others, but those are the main ones.</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n<li>Dan, thanks for that list. I had forgotten to mention Yelp in the last episode. I have some colleagues who are heavy Yelp users; they’ll build lists of restaurants and bars before starting a project in a new city. I tend to use Yelp and the “Explore food &amp; drinks near you” feature in Google Maps for restaurant suggestions interchangeably when I’m in a new place. I’m always surprised at how different the recommendations often are.</li>\n<li>Gary Learned sent in on Twitter -\n<ul>\n<li>What I love about Lyft over Uber is their ability to produce a consolidated receipt of all my rides on a trip</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n<li>Thanks Gary. I’ve noticed that functionality in the Lyft app, but it’s not hugely useful for me since we use Concur for our T&amp;E reporting, and it picks up the individual Amex charges rather than a feed from Lyft. Would be handy if Concur would pull a single consolidated charge from Lyft.</li>\n<li>And finally, a couple of weeks later on Twitter, Eddie Antar, who is always a chuckle, said\n<ul>\n<li>Binge listening to TC bc I had to let an AA voucher expire.? OTOH I\'m not being groped or dragged down the aisle screaming, so.</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n<li>I dunno, listening to my is better than being groped or dragged down the plane aisle. Feels a bit like being damned with very faint praise...</li>\n<li>And one last Tweet, this one from the Craig and Linda Martin of the Indie Travel Podcast…\n<ul>\n<li>Highlight of the week? meeting fellow travel podcaster @mpeacock for lunch &amp; craft beer in Edinburgh. 10 or so years of podcast friendship</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n<li>Honestly, I think Linda and I had been trading e-mails for most of this year, seeing if we could physically meet up after so many years of knowing each other in the travel podcast universe. One of us would hear the other mention travel plans in a podcast that might overlap with the other’s. It finally came together at the end of our Scotland vacation and the beginning of theirs. They flew into EDI Sunday night; we were leaving from EDI Tuesday morning, so Monday lunch was the call. I drove over from St Andrews to a new neighborhood for me; kinda hip. Linda picked a nice pub with a great beer list that we all enjoyed. It is one of the great things about travel -- getting to meet up with friends; and in this case, for the first time.</li>\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/11510\">Funkist</a> - cdk dub mix by cdk (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: teru.</li>\n</ul>\n<p><strong>Packing Pro Tips</strong></p>\n<ul>\n<li>Getting everything I needed for our 10 days in Scotland into a carry-on bag pushed my packing skills just a bit. The trip was mostly hiking and hill walks with a couple of 1-star Michelin restaurants thrown into the mix. And the forecast was for rain just about every day. We were on a direct flight to EDI and my daughter had to check a bag with stuff she was taking back to university, so the carry-on limitation wasn’t because of lost luggage or being able to power past the baggage carousel -- a non-starter given the long non-EU immigration line at EDI. It was more about trunk space in the rental car. As it was, I was doing luggage jenga just about every morning trying to puzzle everything into the back of our Nissan X-Terra.</li>\n<li>I easily spent an hour -- 2-3 times longer than usual -- trying to figure out how to get hiking shoes, rain gear, dress shirts, and everything else into that 22-inch bag. It made me pack ruthlessly -- everything had to earn its space in the bag. And though I’ve casually mentioned some of these ideas in prior episodes, this latest packing experience really crystallized this pro tip list.</li>\n<li>First and foremost, pick a single color family for your clothes, and make it black. Three main reasons -- Black makes everyone look thinner, it spans casual to smart dress codes, and black doesn’t show stains. OK, the thinner thing is a nice-to-have, but hiding stains is key. I packed two pair of slacks and wore a third on the plane. I couldn’t be one-and-done because I took incoming from a fork-handling mishap.</li>\n<li>Second, no one-and-done outfits. Every piece of clothes has to serve multiple purposes so it can be worn multiple times -- every shirt has to work under multiple sweaters and has to go with more than one pair of pants. Versatility is key. And yet another reason to pack black.</li>\n<li>Third, think \"additively\"; pack layers. This was key in my last packing challenge too -- last year’s Spring Break trip to Iceland and Southern Spain that I talked about in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/05/30/podcast-121-tsa-lines-my-luggage-is-where/\">episode #121</a>. Pack multiple thin layers that you can pile on when it’s cold and wear separately when it’s not. Black sweaters and a black fleece vest are my layering go-to’s.</li>\n<li>Fourth, wear your bulkiest clothes on the flight. I packed the hiking rain shell and flew in the blazer I needed for the 1-stars because the shell is infinitely more crushable. My only caveat to this is shoes. I packed the hiking shoes, even though they were bulkier than the dressily casual walking shoes I was also bringing, because I didn’t want to set off the metal detector in the Pre-Check line or get pulled out because the soles are too thick. If you’re not doing Pre-Check, you’re already taking your shoes off, so wear your biggest ones.</li>\n<li>And my fifth and final pro tip, use a non-descript black rolling bag. Black not only makes you look thinner, it makes your bag look thinner to gate agents scanning for bag-sizer bait. My daughter had a baby blue roller bag for the longest time. She loved that color, and it was easy to spot on the luggage carousel, which is a good thing; it ended up there a lot because gate agents were always pulling my daughter out of line to gate check that bag. Her current bag is a dark eggplant purple. It’s not black, but it’s close. If you’re flying a budget airline that’s a stickler on size, use a hard-shell bag. It’ll keep its dimensions better when overstuffed, and the polycarbonate shell will slide past the metal bars of the sizer easier than the ballistic nylon of a soft-sided bag.</li>\n<li>There you go, my five packing pro tips. If you’ve got some of your own to share, send them along through the usual channels and we’ll have them on the next episode.</li>\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/48705\">Jolanta Blues</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license.  Ft: Admiral Bob, Martijn de Boer</li>\n</ul>\n<p><strong>Traveling Injured</strong></p>\n<ul>\n<li>In a couple of <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/02/06/podcast-87-sick-on-the-road-whats-in-my-briefcase/\">past</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/03/13/podcast-88-new-travel-goodies-losing-status/\">episodes</a>, we’ve talked about how miserable it is to be sick on the road. Traveling injured is a bit similar, but not quite the same. While you’re not, say, shivering under hotel blankets after you’ve cranked the thermostat as high as it’ll go, you’re not powering through your day at 100%.</li>\n<li>The most recent stint on travel injured reserve was our May trip to Hungary. My wife had left the week before to visit her aunt and cousins, leaving me alone with the cat. I was working from home one nice day and decided to take a break for a bike ride. Figured I should take every opportunity to burn some calories now since Hungarian food isn’t known as spa cuisine. I did my normal 17-mile circuit for the 50th or 60th time. Coming towards the last mile, I’m looking ahead to line up a turn and boom -- I hit some huge divot in the pavement that I’ve never seen before. My hands fly off the handle bar, I see the front wheel turned 90 degrees, and down I go, skidding across the asphalt. I come to a stop just short of the curb, pick myself up, rinse the visible road rash with the last bits of water in my bottle, and limp my bike and myself home.</li>\n<li>I immediately hit the shower, scrubbed out the road rash (with, as you might imagine, a bit of loud vocal commentary), and surveyed the damage. Good sized abrasions on my right elbow and forearm, my right butt cheek, both knees, and a line on my left chest where I must’ve popped the handle bar. I lost a bunch of skin, but felt lucky I didn’t break a collarbone or something worse.</li>\n<li>The Friday night flight to Vienna was not a comfortable one. No knock on Austrian Airlines; as I mentioned in an <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/06/24/podcast-130-notes-from-hungary/\">earlier podcast</a>, I was happy with their service. It was primarily the seat -- a standard coach seat, so not overly spacious -- pressing up against that large bit of road rash on my right, uhh, hip. Indeed, that abrasion was still -- I think “weeping” is the technical term. And so halfway through the flight, I was in the toilet with my tube of neosporin, my gauze pads and my surgical tape re-dressing it. It was either that or change pants. And following my packing pro tips, I couldn’t do a one-and-done on these pants. Luckily, I was in that quiet time between the after-dinner and the just-before-landing toilet rushes, so no banging on the door to hurry up.</li>\n<li>Every day was like that -- 30 minutes of removing and reapplying dressings, at first 3 times a day, then 2, and then when things finally scabbed up a bit, just in the morning, and really by then as much for cosmetic purposes -- so that people wouldn’t ask me about it -- as much as anything. I had to skip the family trip to a Budapest thermal bath -- I didn’t want some bath guard calling me out of the pool in front of a couple of thousand Hungarians, and I honestly wasn’t sure how aggressively they were chlorinating that water.</li>\n<li>That wasn’t my most awkward stint on the travel injured reserve list. Last year, I squeezed in a dermatologist appt for a mole scan before a flight out that afternoon. The doc said “This one looks a bit suspect”, putting his finger on a mole right in the middle of my back. He numbed it up, shaved it off, sent it off to the lab and bandaged me up. “Change that dressing every day,” he said as I raced out to head to ORD. The next morning, in a hotel bathroom, by myself, looking in the mirror at the gauze dressing between my shoulder blades that I couldn’t reach, I wondered how I could change that dressing -- call the front desk, ask a colleague? That seemed way too much to ask. And, it wasn’t that big of a mole. That dressing could wait ‘til Friday.</li>\n</ul>\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<ul>\n<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #133</li>\n<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\n<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_133.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #133 — Packing Pro Tips; Traveling Injured','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-133-packing-pro-tips-traveling-injured','','\nhttp://www.hypeorlando.com/back-and-gone-again/2017/05/01/atlanta-hartsfield-has-automated-the-tsa-process/','2021-09-29 08:24:25','2021-09-29 13:24:25','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=1819',0,'post','',0),
(1820,1,'2017-09-29 16:13:28','2017-09-29 21:13:28','','IMG_0548','Reduced Packing Requirements by 50%','inherit','open','closed','','img_0548','','','2017-09-29 16:13:50','2017-09-29 21:13:50','',1819,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/IMG_0548.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(1821,1,'2017-09-29 16:22:25','2017-09-29 21:22:25','[caption id=\"attachment_1820\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/IMG_0548.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1820\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/IMG_0548-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Reduced Packing Requirements by 50%[/caption]\r\n\r\nIt\'s a  All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_133.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/339778145\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n<!--more-->\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #133:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL after what has been a light month of travel, just 10 days in Scotland on vacation, and then a quick overnight to Atlanta a couple of days after I returned. Other than that, I’ve been in Chicago trying to get back my body clock back to local time. Conventional wisdom says that your body will adjust at the rate of 1-2 time zones a day. So, for the 6 hours between Chicago and the UK, it should take me 3-5 days to adjust. I dunno, it’s felt longer than that. The older I get, the longer it seems to get.</li>\r\n 	<li>It’s also harder for me coming west than going east. When I go to Europe, I can set an alarm to wake up at the right time and will myself out of bed and into the shower. Back in the US, I can’t quite “will” myself back to sleep when I wake up at 2 or 3 in the morning. I did find, though, on this trip that I needed to be careful how long I stayed up the first couple of nights. My usual routine is to take a 30-minute nap the first afternoon I’m there -- say around 4:30 -- which then lets me push through to, say 10 or 11 that night. I’m then tired enough to get to sleep at what my body might still think is 5 or 6pm. This trip, I found that if I stayed up past midnight -- maybe because I got to reading something after getting back from dinner -- my body sorta tipped over that inflection point, caught a second, or is it a third wind, and would be happy to push through to 2 or 3 in the morning, which would make the morning’s alarm much tougher to handle.</li>\r\n 	<li>The United flight to and from Edinburgh was direct -- always nice -- but on an old 757 that had definitely seen better days, and many of them. Eight hours on any narrow body is tough, but on a 757 -- the narrowest of the narrow bodies -- it’s a bit tougher. And it was completely full -- nothing out-of-the-ordinary nowadays. Our flight from ORD landed shortly after the United direct from EWR landed, and so there was quite a queue for the non-EU passport line. Indeed, as we were coming off the jet bridge, an airport worker turned off the escalator and blocked it off. The end of the passport queue was beginning to block it on the floor below. So I reached into my backpack and pulled out my UK passport and was waved over to a set of four unmanned automated gates with no lines. I put my passport in, took my glasses off for the camera, and walked through when the gates opened up. It was pretty slick.</li>\r\n 	<li>I still had to wait for my wife and kids to work their way through the non-EU line, but I made some good use of the time -- I helped a mother and daughter from the EWR flight wrestle some amazing large bags onto a luggage cart, and had collected all of our luggage. If they had a Starbucks there in baggage claim like they do at ORD, it would’ve been damn close to a perfect morning.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/JeffSpeed68/54450\">Hula Hoop Party</a> by Stefan Kartenberg (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: Martijn de Boer, Blue Wave Theory</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Received some good comments on the last episode</li>\r\n 	<li>Nick -- no last name on the e-mail -- helped answer the question I had about arbitraging different European phone SIMs now that the EU had banned roaming charges. Nick writes -\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>You mentioned having 3 EU SIMs to choose from in Dublin, and working out the best value of the three.\r\nI live in the UK and have a UK SIM. If I go to Spain, and call a UK number (even if that number belongs to the person next to me) then I just pay a local rate call - or nothing if I have an unlimited calls account. However, if I call a Spanish number, then it counts as an overseas call, as if I were in the UK - even though I\'m in Spain. So which is the best SIM to use will to an extent depend on the actual call rates, but also which country it is registered in, and which country you are calling, independently of where you are.\r\nI hope that makes sense, and it\'s useful</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Nick, thanks for that. It makes a lot of sense when I recall that the EU wanted to eliminate roaming charges, so a mobile call from the UK is the same as one from Spain. For us, though, we’re rarely making a phone call. Indeed, I’m usually the only one making phone calls and that’s typically into a conference bridge. During our 10 days in Scotland, I used 11 of the 300 minutes in my 30 day plan. My wife’s 7 day plan ran out and she never noticed, because her 1 GB of data didn’t. And I think that’s where the arbitrage still could work, on using the cheapest data plan. That will, though, take a good bit of wading through really bad websites with confusing plan descriptions that are only partially in English. I think I’ll probably default to using my UK SIM just out of sheer laziness.</li>\r\n 	<li>Steve Frick left a comment on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page about the new parallel loading baggage X-ray machines I’ve encountered in the ATL PreCheck line. Steve writes -\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I agree with you that people are hesitant to jump the queue in front of others..... and you do need mad ninja skills if you\'re in the first slot trying to grab one of those oversized bins</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Steve linked to his blog post where he has video and a more detailed description of the situation. Check out the show notes for a <a href=\"http://www.hypeorlando.com/back-and-gone-again/2017/05/01/atlanta-hartsfield-has-automated-the-tsa-process/\">link to his blog</a></li>\r\n 	<li>I have to give the ATL TSA crew props for noticing the problem with breaking into the stream of bins if you’re in one of the front loading stations. When I was going through ATL a few weeks back, there was a TSA person at the parallel loading line choreographing each bin push, having everyone hold up until all the previous bins had cleared, and then having everyone push their bins onto the conveyor at once. I haven’t seen this problem with parallel loaders in, say, Edinburgh or Heathrow or Madrid. I wonder what’s different that requires this manual intervention.</li>\r\n 	<li>And there were a couple of comments on the travel apps people use on their smartphones. Dan Brener left this Facebook\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Great episode! Here\'s the apps I use the most: Air Canada and United, TripIt (although it\'s not as good as it could/should be), I used to use FlightTrack and really miss it, FlightAware since the AC app doesn\'t tell me where planes are coming from, Uber and Lyft, Packing (it\'s a list app to make sure I don\'t forget something obvious!), SPG, Yelp, Google Maps and Waze. There\'s a few others, but those are the main ones.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Dan, thanks for that list. I had forgotten to mention Yelp in the last episode. I have some colleagues who are heavy Yelp users; they’ll build lists of restaurants and bars before starting a project in a new city. I tend to use Yelp and the “Explore food &amp; drinks near you” feature in Google Maps for restaurant suggestions interchangeably when I’m in a new place. I’m always surprised at how different the recommendations often are.</li>\r\n 	<li>Gary Learned sent in on Twitter -\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>What I love about Lyft over Uber is their ability to produce a consolidated receipt of all my rides on a trip</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Thanks Gary. I’ve noticed that functionality in the Lyft app, but it’s not hugely useful for me since we use Concur for our T&amp;E reporting, and it picks up the individual Amex charges rather than a feed from Lyft. Would be handy if Concur would pull a single consolidated charge from Lyft.</li>\r\n 	<li>And finally, a couple of weeks later on Twitter, Eddie Antar, who is always a chuckle, said\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Binge listening to TC bc I had to let an AA voucher expire.? OTOH I\'m not being groped or dragged down the aisle screaming, so.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>I dunno, listening to my is better than being groped or dragged down the plane aisle. Feels a bit like being damned with very faint praise...</li>\r\n 	<li>And one last Tweet, this one from the Craig and Linda Martin of the Indie Travel Podcast…\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Highlight of the week? meeting fellow travel podcaster @mpeacock for lunch &amp; craft beer in Edinburgh. 10 or so years of podcast friendship</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Honestly, I think Linda and I had been trading e-mails for most of this year, seeing if we could physically meet up after so many years of knowing each other in the travel podcast universe. One of us would hear the other mention travel plans in a podcast that might overlap with the other’s. It finally came together at the end of our Scotland vacation and the beginning of theirs. They flew into EDI Sunday night; we were leaving from EDI Tuesday morning, so Monday lunch was the call. I drove over from St Andrews to a new neighborhood for me; kinda hip. Linda picked a nice pub with a great beer list that we all enjoyed. It is one of the great things about travel -- getting to meet up with friends; and in this case, for the first time.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/49674\">H2O</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Packing Pro Tips</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Getting everything I needed for our 10 days in Scotland into a carry-on bag pushed my packing skills just a bit. The trip was mostly hiking and hill walks with a couple of 1-star Michelin restaurants thrown into the mix. And the forecast was for rain just about every day. We were on a direct flight to EDI and my daughter had to check a bag with stuff she was taking back to university, so the carry-on limitation wasn’t because of lost luggage or being able to power past the baggage carousel -- a non-starter given the long non-EU immigration line at EDI. It was more about trunk space in the rental car. As it was, I was doing luggage jenga just about every morning trying to puzzle everything into the back of our Nissan X-Terra.</li>\r\n 	<li>I easily spent an hour -- 2-3 times longer than usual -- trying to figure out how to get hiking shoes, rain gear, dress shirts, and everything else into that 22-inch bag. It made me pack ruthlessly -- everything had to earn its space in the bag. And though I’ve casually mentioned some of these ideas in prior episodes, this latest packing experience really crystallized this pro tip list.</li>\r\n 	<li>First and foremost, pick a single color family for your clothes, and make it black. Three main reasons -- Black makes everyone look thinner, it spans casual to smart dress codes, and black doesn’t show stains. OK, the thinner thing is a nice-to-have, but hiding stains is key. I packed two pair of slacks and wore a third on the plane. I couldn’t be one-and-done because I took incoming from a fork-handling mishap.</li>\r\n 	<li>Second, no one-and-done outfits. Every piece of clothes has to serve multiple purposes so it can be worn multiple times -- every shirt has to work under multiple sweaters and has to go with more than one pair of pants. Versatility is key. And yet another reason to pack black.</li>\r\n 	<li>Third, think \"additively\"; pack layers. This was key in my last packing challenge too -- last year’s Spring Break trip to Iceland and Southern Spain that I talked about in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/05/30/podcast-121-tsa-lines-my-luggage-is-where/\">episode #121</a>. Pack multiple thin layers that you can pile on when it’s cold and wear separately when it’s not. Black sweaters and a black fleece vest are my layering go-to’s.</li>\r\n 	<li>Fourth, wear your bulkiest clothes on the flight. I packed the hiking rain shell and flew in the blazer I needed for the 1-stars because the shell is infinitely more crushable. My only caveat to this is shoes. I packed the hiking shoes, even though they were bulkier than the dressily casual walking shoes I was also bringing, because I didn’t want to set off the metal detector in the Pre-Check line or get pulled out because the soles are too thick. If you’re not doing Pre-Check, you’re already taking your shoes off, so wear your biggest ones.</li>\r\n 	<li>And my fifth and final pro tip, use a non-descript black rolling bag. Black not only makes you look thinner, it makes your bag look thinner to gate agents scanning for bag-sizer bait. My daughter had a baby blue roller bag for the longest time. She loved that color, and it was easy to spot on the luggage carousel, which is a good thing; it ended up there a lot because gate agents were always pulling my daughter out of line to gate check that bag. Her current bag is a dark eggplant purple. It’s not black, but it’s close. If you’re flying a budget airline that’s a stickler on size, use a hard-shell bag. It’ll keep its dimensions better when overstuffed, and the polycarbonate shell will slide past the metal bars of the sizer easier than the ballistic nylon of a soft-sided bag.</li>\r\n 	<li>There you go, my five packing pro tips. If you’ve got some of your own to share, send them along through the usual channels and we’ll have them on the next episode.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Traveling Injured</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>stuff</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #132</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_133.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #133 — Packing Pro Tips; Traveling','','inherit','closed','closed','','1819-revision-v1','','','2017-09-29 16:22:25','2017-09-29 21:22:25','',1819,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/09/29/1819-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1822,1,'2017-09-29 16:41:08','2017-09-29 21:41:08','[caption id=\"attachment_1820\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/IMG_0548.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1820\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/IMG_0548-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Reduced Packing Requirements by 50%[/caption]\r\n\r\nIt\'s a  All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_133.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/339778145\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n<!--more-->\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #133:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL after what has been a light month of travel, just 10 days in Scotland on vacation, and then a quick overnight to Atlanta a couple of days after I returned. Other than that, I’ve been in Chicago trying to get back my body clock back to local time. Conventional wisdom says that your body will adjust at the rate of 1-2 time zones a day. So, for the 6 hours between Chicago and the UK, it should take me 3-5 days to adjust. I dunno, it’s felt longer than that. The older I get, the longer it seems to get.</li>\r\n 	<li>It’s also harder for me coming west than going east. When I go to Europe, I can set an alarm to wake up at the right time and will myself out of bed and into the shower. Back in the US, I can’t quite “will” myself back to sleep when I wake up at 2 or 3 in the morning. I did find, though, on this trip that I needed to be careful how long I stayed up the first couple of nights. My usual routine is to take a 30-minute nap the first afternoon I’m there -- say around 4:30 -- which then lets me push through to, say 10 or 11 that night. I’m then tired enough to get to sleep at what my body might still think is 5 or 6pm. This trip, I found that if I stayed up past midnight -- maybe because I got to reading something after getting back from dinner -- my body sorta tipped over that inflection point, caught a second, or is it a third wind, and would be happy to push through to 2 or 3 in the morning, which would make the morning’s alarm much tougher to handle.</li>\r\n 	<li>The United flight to and from Edinburgh was direct -- always nice -- but on an old 757 that had definitely seen better days, and many of them. Eight hours on any narrow body is tough, but on a 757 -- the narrowest of the narrow bodies -- it’s a bit tougher. And it was completely full -- nothing out-of-the-ordinary nowadays. Our flight from ORD landed shortly after the United direct from EWR landed, and so there was quite a queue for the non-EU passport line. Indeed, as we were coming off the jet bridge, an airport worker turned off the escalator and blocked it off. The end of the passport queue was beginning to block it on the floor below. So I reached into my backpack and pulled out my UK passport and was waved over to a set of four unmanned automated gates with no lines. I put my passport in, took my glasses off for the camera, and walked through when the gates opened up. It was pretty slick.</li>\r\n 	<li>I still had to wait for my wife and kids to work their way through the non-EU line, but I made some good use of the time -- I helped a mother and daughter from the EWR flight wrestle some amazing large bags onto a luggage cart, and had collected all of our luggage. If they had a Starbucks there in baggage claim like they do at ORD, it would’ve been damn close to a perfect morning.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/JeffSpeed68/54450\">Hula Hoop Party</a> by Stefan Kartenberg (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: Martijn de Boer, Blue Wave Theory</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Received some good comments on the last episode</li>\r\n 	<li>Nick -- no last name on the e-mail -- helped answer the question I had about arbitraging different European phone SIMs now that the EU had banned roaming charges. Nick writes -\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>You mentioned having 3 EU SIMs to choose from in Dublin, and working out the best value of the three.\r\nI live in the UK and have a UK SIM. If I go to Spain, and call a UK number (even if that number belongs to the person next to me) then I just pay a local rate call - or nothing if I have an unlimited calls account. However, if I call a Spanish number, then it counts as an overseas call, as if I were in the UK - even though I\'m in Spain. So which is the best SIM to use will to an extent depend on the actual call rates, but also which country it is registered in, and which country you are calling, independently of where you are.\r\nI hope that makes sense, and it\'s useful</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Nick, thanks for that. It makes a lot of sense when I recall that the EU wanted to eliminate roaming charges, so a mobile call from the UK is the same as one from Spain. For us, though, we’re rarely making a phone call. Indeed, I’m usually the only one making phone calls and that’s typically into a conference bridge. During our 10 days in Scotland, I used 11 of the 300 minutes in my 30 day plan. My wife’s 7 day plan ran out and she never noticed, because her 1 GB of data didn’t. And I think that’s where the arbitrage still could work, on using the cheapest data plan. That will, though, take a good bit of wading through really bad websites with confusing plan descriptions that are only partially in English. I think I’ll probably default to using my UK SIM just out of sheer laziness.</li>\r\n 	<li>Steve Frick left a comment on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page about the new parallel loading baggage X-ray machines I’ve encountered in the ATL PreCheck line. Steve writes -\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I agree with you that people are hesitant to jump the queue in front of others..... and you do need mad ninja skills if you\'re in the first slot trying to grab one of those oversized bins</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Steve linked to his blog post where he has video and a more detailed description of the situation. Check out the show notes for a <a href=\"http://www.hypeorlando.com/back-and-gone-again/2017/05/01/atlanta-hartsfield-has-automated-the-tsa-process/\">link to his blog</a></li>\r\n 	<li>I have to give the ATL TSA crew props for noticing the problem with breaking into the stream of bins if you’re in one of the front loading stations. When I was going through ATL a few weeks back, there was a TSA person at the parallel loading line choreographing each bin push, having everyone hold up until all the previous bins had cleared, and then having everyone push their bins onto the conveyor at once. I haven’t seen this problem with parallel loaders in, say, Edinburgh or Heathrow or Madrid. I wonder what’s different that requires this manual intervention.</li>\r\n 	<li>And there were a couple of comments on the travel apps people use on their smartphones. Dan Brener left this Facebook\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Great episode! Here\'s the apps I use the most: Air Canada and United, TripIt (although it\'s not as good as it could/should be), I used to use FlightTrack and really miss it, FlightAware since the AC app doesn\'t tell me where planes are coming from, Uber and Lyft, Packing (it\'s a list app to make sure I don\'t forget something obvious!), SPG, Yelp, Google Maps and Waze. There\'s a few others, but those are the main ones.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Dan, thanks for that list. I had forgotten to mention Yelp in the last episode. I have some colleagues who are heavy Yelp users; they’ll build lists of restaurants and bars before starting a project in a new city. I tend to use Yelp and the “Explore food &amp; drinks near you” feature in Google Maps for restaurant suggestions interchangeably when I’m in a new place. I’m always surprised at how different the recommendations often are.</li>\r\n 	<li>Gary Learned sent in on Twitter -\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>What I love about Lyft over Uber is their ability to produce a consolidated receipt of all my rides on a trip</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Thanks Gary. I’ve noticed that functionality in the Lyft app, but it’s not hugely useful for me since we use Concur for our T&amp;E reporting, and it picks up the individual Amex charges rather than a feed from Lyft. Would be handy if Concur would pull a single consolidated charge from Lyft.</li>\r\n 	<li>And finally, a couple of weeks later on Twitter, Eddie Antar, who is always a chuckle, said\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Binge listening to TC bc I had to let an AA voucher expire.? OTOH I\'m not being groped or dragged down the aisle screaming, so.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>I dunno, listening to my is better than being groped or dragged down the plane aisle. Feels a bit like being damned with very faint praise...</li>\r\n 	<li>And one last Tweet, this one from the Craig and Linda Martin of the Indie Travel Podcast…\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Highlight of the week? meeting fellow travel podcaster @mpeacock for lunch &amp; craft beer in Edinburgh. 10 or so years of podcast friendship</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Honestly, I think Linda and I had been trading e-mails for most of this year, seeing if we could physically meet up after so many years of knowing each other in the travel podcast universe. One of us would hear the other mention travel plans in a podcast that might overlap with the other’s. It finally came together at the end of our Scotland vacation and the beginning of theirs. They flew into EDI Sunday night; we were leaving from EDI Tuesday morning, so Monday lunch was the call. I drove over from St Andrews to a new neighborhood for me; kinda hip. Linda picked a nice pub with a great beer list that we all enjoyed. It is one of the great things about travel -- getting to meet up with friends; and in this case, for the first time.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/49674\">H2O</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Packing Pro Tips</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Getting everything I needed for our 10 days in Scotland into a carry-on bag pushed my packing skills just a bit. The trip was mostly hiking and hill walks with a couple of 1-star Michelin restaurants thrown into the mix. And the forecast was for rain just about every day. We were on a direct flight to EDI and my daughter had to check a bag with stuff she was taking back to university, so the carry-on limitation wasn’t because of lost luggage or being able to power past the baggage carousel -- a non-starter given the long non-EU immigration line at EDI. It was more about trunk space in the rental car. As it was, I was doing luggage jenga just about every morning trying to puzzle everything into the back of our Nissan X-Terra.</li>\r\n 	<li>I easily spent an hour -- 2-3 times longer than usual -- trying to figure out how to get hiking shoes, rain gear, dress shirts, and everything else into that 22-inch bag. It made me pack ruthlessly -- everything had to earn its space in the bag. And though I’ve casually mentioned some of these ideas in prior episodes, this latest packing experience really crystallized this pro tip list.</li>\r\n 	<li>First and foremost, pick a single color family for your clothes, and make it black. Three main reasons -- Black makes everyone look thinner, it spans casual to smart dress codes, and black doesn’t show stains. OK, the thinner thing is a nice-to-have, but hiding stains is key. I packed two pair of slacks and wore a third on the plane. I couldn’t be one-and-done because I took incoming from a fork-handling mishap.</li>\r\n 	<li>Second, no one-and-done outfits. Every piece of clothes has to serve multiple purposes so it can be worn multiple times -- every shirt has to work under multiple sweaters and has to go with more than one pair of pants. Versatility is key. And yet another reason to pack black.</li>\r\n 	<li>Third, think \"additively\"; pack layers. This was key in my last packing challenge too -- last year’s Spring Break trip to Iceland and Southern Spain that I talked about in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/05/30/podcast-121-tsa-lines-my-luggage-is-where/\">episode #121</a>. Pack multiple thin layers that you can pile on when it’s cold and wear separately when it’s not. Black sweaters and a black fleece vest are my layering go-to’s.</li>\r\n 	<li>Fourth, wear your bulkiest clothes on the flight. I packed the hiking rain shell and flew in the blazer I needed for the 1-stars because the shell is infinitely more crushable. My only caveat to this is shoes. I packed the hiking shoes, even though they were bulkier than the dressily casual walking shoes I was also bringing, because I didn’t want to set off the metal detector in the Pre-Check line or get pulled out because the soles are too thick. If you’re not doing Pre-Check, you’re already taking your shoes off, so wear your biggest ones.</li>\r\n 	<li>And my fifth and final pro tip, use a non-descript black rolling bag. Black not only makes you look thinner, it makes your bag look thinner to gate agents scanning for bag-sizer bait. My daughter had a baby blue roller bag for the longest time. She loved that color, and it was easy to spot on the luggage carousel, which is a good thing; it ended up there a lot because gate agents were always pulling my daughter out of line to gate check that bag. Her current bag is a dark eggplant purple. It’s not black, but it’s close. If you’re flying a budget airline that’s a stickler on size, use a hard-shell bag. It’ll keep its dimensions better when overstuffed, and the polycarbonate shell will slide past the metal bars of the sizer easier than the ballistic nylon of a soft-sided bag.</li>\r\n 	<li>There you go, my five packing pro tips. If you’ve got some of your own to share, send them along through the usual channels and we’ll have them on the next episode.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Traveling Injured</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>stuff</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #132</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_133.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #133 — Packing Pro Tips; Traveling Injured','','inherit','closed','closed','','1819-revision-v1','','','2017-09-29 16:41:08','2017-09-29 21:41:08','',1819,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/09/29/1819-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1823,1,'2017-09-29 16:46:03','2017-09-29 21:46:03','[caption id=\"attachment_543\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/taxi-sign1.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-543\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/taxi-sign1-300x210.jpg\" alt=\"Warning in a St Louis Taxi\" width=\"300\" height=\"210\" /></a> Warning in a St Louis Taxi[/caption]\r\n\r\nI skipped the Midwest\'s \"snow-pocalypse\" by flying to <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Phoenix, Arizona\" href=\"http://www.phoenix.gov/\" rel=\"homepage\">Phoenix</a> where it was unseasonably cold -- in the 20\'s and 30\'s F -- but without snow. It\'s been a cold winter and I came down with some nasty bug while visiting <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Dallas\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dallas\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Dallas</a>, which reminded me how miserable it is to be sick while traveling. Before my whining, though, I give a quick status on my New Year\'s travel resolutions, my observations on the status of the TSA\'s full body scanning program, and my struggles trying to use Avatron\'s Air Display app to turn my <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"iPad\" href=\"http://www.apple.com/ipad/\" rel=\"homepage\">iPad</a> into a second display for my MacBook Air.  Gary Learned suggests a headset that can defeat overhead PA announcements at airports, and I go through my briefcase -- how I\'ve changed what I carry for business travel over the past 5 years. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_87.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_87.mp3\"]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript from TravelCommons podcast #87:\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Chicago\" href=\"http://www.cityofchicago.org/\" rel=\"homepage\">Chicago, IL</a>.  I managed to skip this week’s “snopocalypse” -- the 20+ inches of snow that fell here Tuesday and Wednesday.  Instead, I flew down to Phoenix on Tuesday morning – though not without a couple of glitches courtesy of American Airlines – and came back Friday evening.  And yes, I did feel a bit guilty skipping out on the shoveling in the wind and cold, but that’s what kids are for.</li>\r\n 	<li>It has been a cold winter so far.  I was in Dallas a couple of weeks ago where it was rainy, in the low 30’s and the wind was blowing a steady 20 mph – OK, no snow, but not any better than Chicago.  And then even this week in Phoenix – the temperatures were in the 30’s, getting into the 20’s at night.  Yes it was colder in Chicago and elsewhere, but still – where’s that global warming when you really need it.</li>\r\n 	<li>Earlier in January, Phoenix was much nicer – sunny and in the 60’s.  The first couple of days I was there, I was running on autopilot a bit – for lunch, I’d dash out of the office, hop in my rental car and drive the quarter-mile north to the shopping area with the sandwich shops and a Whole Foods.  Driving back the second day, I thought, “What the hell am I doing?  It’s 20 degrees back home!”  The next day, I took an hour for lunch, walked to the Whole Foods, bought myself a cup of soup, sat outside in the sun and ate it, and then walked back to the office.</li>\r\n 	<li>Which kind of reminds me of the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/01/01/new-years-travel-resolutions/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">New Years resolutions</a> I posted on the TravelCommons site on the first of the year.  #3 was “Take More Quick Breaks” – along the lines of “take advantage of the travel because it sure takes advantage of you…” In the post, I mentioned the afternoons I took to hike up Squaw Peak in Phoenix or walk along the beach in <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Naples, Florida\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naples%2C_Florida\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Naples, FL</a>.  Walking along a road to lunch seems a bit of a pathetic reach, but the spirit is there – if you’re traveling from snow to sun for work, don’t forget to grab a couple of rays for yourself.</li>\r\n 	<li>Actually, I did a bit better than that – I went to the BCS college football championship game while in Phoenix, and to a Mavs-Lakers basketball game while in Dallas – something for each week.</li>\r\n 	<li>As for my other resolutions?  “Plan Further Ahead” because airline load factors/seat utilization is moving up again?  I’m doing OK with that – I’m booking out 2-3 weeks in advance, which is a huge improvement for me.</li>\r\n 	<li>“Repack My Briefcase?” – check out the “What’s in my bag” segment a bit later.</li>\r\n 	<li>“Take More Pictures?” – just a marginal improvement – I don’t count taking pictures with my <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"iPhone\" href=\"http://www.apple.com/iphone\" rel=\"homepage\">iPhone</a> of bullet points on whiteboards</li>\r\n 	<li>And the toughest one – “Be nicer to TSA agents?”  I was doing better because, at least over the past few trips, they’ve been nicer to me.  I hadn’t been groped or irradiated on my first couple of trips, which will tend to have a positive impact on anyone’s disposition.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/music/listeners/artistdetails.php?BandHash=f81ac4222ffce06bc8c3c7c3ae01a7fd\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Shine</a></em> by Hungry Lucy</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>The TSA full body scan controversy that was white-hot during the Thanksgiving weekend seems to have cooled quite a bit.  The TSA will <a href=\"http://www.politicsdaily.com/2010/11/22/poll-public-backs-full-body-scans-but-split-on-pat-downs/\" target=\"_self\">say</a> that this is proof the American public supports its program of full body scans or AIT – Advanced Imaging Technology – as they like to call it, and the “enhanced pat-down” as the TSA likes to call it, or the full body grope as the rest of us experience it.</li>\r\n 	<li>I think instead it’s that the TSA has pulled way back on their use of these invasive techniques.  I hadn’t been hit with a full-body scanner or a grope-down from the beginning of December until last week.  When the TSA dropped the scanners into ORD in July, they had <em>everyone</em> go through them, which doubled the screening time – at least.  Then through the Christmas travel season, it seemed that the machines were off more than they were on, and even when they were on, they weren’t not on every security lane, so it was pretty easy to avoid them unless you’re going thru a small security checkpoint – which is how they last caught me in DFW.</li>\r\n 	<li>They also seem to be have slowed the rollout.  I haven’t seen them crop up in any new places.  Terminal 2 in PHX, for example, is still a TSA porn-free zone.  Not that I’m complaining.  Nice to be able to just move through security without having to hold my hands above my head.  And remember when we used to complain about taking our shoes off…</li>\r\n 	<li>However, on my last two trips out of ORD, I was fully irradiated.  Again, it was going through a small checkpoint – the status-only checkpoint in Terminal 3, where American lives.</li>\r\n 	<li>Though the TSA will say that the full-body scan doesn’t take much longer than the metal detector, they’re just flat wrong.  The actual scan – the amount of time you have your arms above your head – is only a few seconds longer than walking through the metal detector, the entire screening process takes much longer.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’m beginning to consider the locations of these full-body scanners when I book flights.  In ORD, it seems easier to avoid them in Terminal 1 than Terminal 3, so my next flight down to Florida I’ve switched over to United. Not completely driven by full-body scanners, but it’s definitely a factor.</li>\r\n 	<li>And continuing my thread about my MacBook Air.  You’ll remember that one of the reasons I chose the 11-inch model was the TSA said it could stay in your briefcase – kinda like a bit iPad.  However, when you briefcase – or backpack – stacks your iPad on top of your MacBook Air, be prepared to pull one of them out.  Talking to a very pleasant TSA X-ray machine operator in ORD, he told me that when they stack up, they get too thick to properly scan.  Makes sense.  I’ve since moved my iPad to a difference section in my backpack – put some papers and magazines between the iPad and the MBA to provide a bit more separation and haven’t had a problem since.</li>\r\n 	<li>A number of folks have asked me why I carry both the iPad and a laptop – and I haven’t been able to come up with a real compelling reason.  As I’ve said before, I like reading on an iPad and writing on a laptop, but does that justify the extra weight and re-packing hassle of the iPad?  I was wishy-washy on that right up to last week when I thought I’d found my killer app for the iPad – Avatron’s <a href=\"http://avatron.com/apps/air-display\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Air Display</a>, which turns the iPad into a secondary display for the MacBook when they’re on the same WiFi network.</li>\r\n 	<li>Now here’s a reason.  While I can work on the smaller screen of my 11-inch MBA (or the 10.6-inch HP netbook before that), having a second display certainly makes it easier to “spread out”.  I have two 22-inch monitors on my Windows desktop box at home and love it.  I eagerly dropped the $10 for the Air Display app and fired it up…</li>\r\n 	<li>And was disappointed.  It didn’t work in the office.  OK, our network guys must have it locked down.  Not surprised.  I get back to the Hilton and fire it up – again, no luck.  At home, doesn’t work when associated with my Apple Airport Express, but does – just once – when associated with the access point that’s built into the big AT&amp;T U-verse modem/router thing in the basement.  The only access point I can get Air Display to regularly work on is when I use my Verizon Droid 2 as a 3G hot spot.  That’s a bit of a kludge.</li>\r\n 	<li>When it does work, it’s great – the few times that’s happened.  I’ve been hanging around Avatron’s support forums for about a week now, but haven’t found a solution yet.  Great concept; real spotty execution.  If they can get this to work, my iPad is no longer a heavy Kindle – it’s a real productivity tool.</li>\r\n 	<li>And following up on my thoughts in the last episode about some of the hassles of the “digital nomad” work style when it comes to finding a quiet place for a conference call, Gary Learned sent in some thoughts…</li>\r\n 	<li>Gary Learned audio clip</li>\r\n 	<li>Gary, thanks for that suggestion.  I’m hitting Amazon looking for that earpiece right now,</li>\r\n 	<li>And finally, the Gogo in-flight wireless guys have got a new giveaway as they continue to push awareness of their product.  For February, Gogo is adding Facebook to their set of free sites. After the plane gets above 10,000 ft, fire up your laptop or smartphone and associate with the “gogoinflight” wireless network.  Open your browser and you’ll get the GoGo sign-on page.  On the bottom of the page, you’ll see a set of free web sites – typically the dot com site for the airline you’re flying, a weather site, ….  And now, Facebook.  Nice to know that you can stay socially connected at 35,000 feet.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a question, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is <a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a> -- use the Voice Memo app on your iPhone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the Facebook page with GoGo’s free service -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at T/C.com</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Beggarstown</em> by Hollow Horse</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Sick on the Road</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>No, that’s not sick <em>of</em> the road – though that happens at times too.</li>\r\n 	<li>As I mentioned earlier, I was in Dallas a couple weeks ago – when it was just cold and windy; no snow or ice – and scored an invite to a vendor’s suite at the Mavs-Lakers basketball game.  Definitely a premiere game.  I went with a couple of guys from the office.</li>\r\n 	<li>It was a good game – Mavs were down at halftime but came back to beat the Lakers by 10.  During the second half, though, I started to feel a tickle in the back of my throat.  I couldn’t stop coughing – couldn’t seem to “finish up” a cough – and the beer and salsa were beginning to feel a little rough going down.</li>\r\n 	<li>Back in the hotel room, I just couldn’t get warm.  I went to bed, but soon started shivering. The thermostat was just above my head.  I kept pushing the Up button until I heard the heater kick in.  After a while, I finally got warm enough to sleep comfortably.  The next morning I looked at the temperature setting – it was at 78°.</li>\r\n 	<li>It didn’t get much better the rest of the day.  I drug myself through a full day of meetings and got on a United Express regional jet for my flight home that night.  Again, I couldn’t get warm.  Since United Express seems to have followed American in pulling blankets and pillows from its planes, I swaddled myself in my tweed jacket and overcoat, and tried not to cough on the person in the window seat.</li>\r\n 	<li>Now, as being sick on the road goes, this wasn’t that bad.  I’ve gotten food poisoning a couple of times, severely pulled muscles, flown with sinus infections that made my head feel like it was going to split in two during descent…</li>\r\n 	<li>But it did remind me how miserable it is to be sick on the road.  For the most part, you’re alone.  Though you may have co-workers who will try to help you a bit, when they go home to their families, you’re going home to an empty hotel room and are going to have to fend for yourself.</li>\r\n 	<li>And it’s not just that you’re lacking a spouse or child to help you out – bring you a blanket or a cup of tea.  You need to find a pharmacy, perhaps a doctor.  But even then, it can still be a struggle. When I was last in Paris, I tweaked my knee pretty bad and needed some ibuprofen for the pain and swelling.  The hotel concierge pointed me in the direction of a pharmacy a couple of blocks away.  Walking/limping in, I knew I couldn’t ask for Advil or Motrin – those US name brands don’t exist in France.  So I asked for ibuprofen – the generic name of the active ingredient.  Ibuprofen is ibuprofen, I thought.</li>\r\n 	<li>“Ibuprofen, s’il vous plaît” I asked.  The pharmacist cocked an eyebrow and looked at me.  “Ibuprofen, s’il vous plaît”, I said again.  Now the other eyebrow arched.  I fought the urge to say it again, only louder.  What was I missing?  Perhaps my throbbing knee was effecting my pronunciation.  I looked around on the counter; grabbed a pen and flipped over some advertising flyer.  I-b-u-p-r-o-f-e-n, I wrote.</li>\r\n 	<li>“Oh, EE-bu-pro-fen” the pharmacist said, and gave me the container of tablets I had needed since I got up that morning.  Flipping French, I thought, and limped back to my hotel.</li>\r\n 	<li>So what do you do?  Certainly “not getting sick” is the best approach – get enough sleep on the road – often tough to do in strange beds and with full schedules.  I find that the old saw – wash your hands for a full 20 seconds and do it often – has significantly reduced the number of colds I pick up, even when I’m flying a lot.</li>\r\n 	<li>Packing a well-stocked medicine cabinet helps a bit – allergy medicine, cold tablets, throat lozenges, ee-buprofen tablets, ….  For domestic travel, at least, you’re not trying to cure the sickness; just stave off the symptoms long enough so that you can get home and into the hands of your regular care-givers.</li>\r\n 	<li>International travel is a bit dicier.  I know some travelers who have medical jet/air ambulance insurance so that they have a quick way to get back home if something catastrophic happens.</li>\r\n 	<li>While I haven’t done that yet, I am looking for a medical phrase book before my next trip to Europe, complete with pronunciation guides for common drugs.  Ibuprofen, ee-buprofen – geez…</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music --<a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/music/listeners/artistdetails.php?BandHash=a3aaebb5e412ef546d1bddd6c9b4b4ed\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> <em>Love Survives</em></a> by Lovespirals</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>What\'s in My Bag?</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>One of the<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/01/01/new-years-travel-resolutions/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> New Year’s Travel Resolutions</a> that I posted on the TravelCommons site on Jan 1<sup>st</sup> was to “unpack and repack my briefcase”.</li>\r\n 	<li>Steve Frick, a long time TravelCommons listener, wrote the next day “did that this weekend. 3 pairs of headphones, approx 2 lbs of loose change, 50+ business cards and at least 15 hotel room keys. No wonder my laptop bag was so heavy.”</li>\r\n 	<li>Five years ago – February 2006 – in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2006/02/18/podcast-33-listener-mailbag-whats-in-my-briefcase/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">episode #33</a>, I did a bit of an audio tour through my briefcase</li>\r\n 	<li>&lt;audio clip&gt;</li>\r\n 	<li>The <a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/travelcommons/102434287/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">picture</a> of this de-constructed travel kit is the first picture of the TravelCommons Flickr photostream</li>\r\n 	<li>Five years later, some (and surprisingly only some) of the contents have changed, but the goal is the same – optimizing the trade-off between weight and having everything I need.  There’s always that desire to have everything you could possibly need – to make your briefcase into the road warrior version of Batman’s utility belt, letting you amaze your traveling companions by pulling out just the right thing to solve any travel problem.</li>\r\n 	<li>So you’re always prepared, but you’re always trailing up the rear – either because you’ve got the heaviest bag or because the TSA is always pulling your bag for secondary screening because all that stuff makes them suspicious.</li>\r\n 	<li>And so back to that balancing act – what do I need all the time (and so would be a pain to be without) vs. what can I buy or borrow for the one or two times I need it?</li>\r\n 	<li>The technology has changed quite a bit, as you would guess, in 5 years.  It’s kinda fun looking back.  I’ve traded an IBM ThinkPad for a MacBook Air; a Motorola flip phone and U2-themed iPod Classic replaced by an iPhone; and an Aliph Jawbone 2 Bluetooth headset bumping the Motorola H710.  No need for the Microsoft travel mouse or Bluetooth dongle with the MacBook. Also, my vendor-supplied thumb drives have been upgraded – from 512 MB to 4 GB.</li>\r\n 	<li>I replaced the Swiss Army briefcase – I called it a “poor man’s Tumi” in the podcast – with a backpack. And, of course, the TSA’s liquid ban stopped me from carrying on little bottles of hand lotion. I now grab them from every hotel and leave them scattered around conference rooms and rental cars</li>\r\n 	<li>What’s stayed the same?  The Moleskine notebook, the selection of pens, the pink semi-transparent folder for expense receipts, a bottle with ibuprofen and zyrtec tablets, the iRiver MP3 player and recorder that I use to record these podcasts, and, most importantly, a tin of wintergreen Altoids to counter dry mouth when I fall asleep in flight – a pretty common occurrence.</li>\r\n 	<li>What’s new?  An iPad, an extra battery for my iPhone, an AT&amp;T USB cellular modem which lets me skip paying for slow hotel WiFi, a set of Motorola Bluetooth stereo headphones that I use when I work out, a couple of Tazo green tea bags because in-flight coffee is just horrid, an inhaler to make it easier to breathe when I catch a cold (good advice from a “doc in the box” in San Mateo after being laid low in the SFO Marriott by bronchitis), and a Verizon Droid 2 for the too many times that AT&amp;T’s coverage sucks.</li>\r\n 	<li>The iPad let me ditch the printed reports I used to carry – I hated reading them on a computer screen, but don’t mind it on the iPad.  The iBooks and Kindle apps also let me leave physical books at home.  I also tossed the 3 business card holders I’d accumulated – my backpack has a pocket just for business cards.  And do we really need business cards anymore?  Unless you’re regularly meeting with Asian businessmen, business card exchanges are getting rarer and rarer.</li>\r\n 	<li>So I <em>think</em> I’m traveling lighter.  But it might be a push – what I’ve dropped in paper I think I’ve made up in device chargers.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids99176268.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #87</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://musicalley.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Music Alley</a></li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or MP3 file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to @mpeacock on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/153475331351358\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_87.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #87 -- Sick on the Road; What\'s in My Briefcase?','','inherit','closed','closed','','531-revision-v1','','','2017-09-29 16:46:03','2017-09-29 21:46:03','',531,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/09/29/531-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1824,1,'2017-09-29 16:50:20','2017-09-29 21:50:20','[caption id=\"attachment_565\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"215\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/Frequent-Flyer-Cards1.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-565\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/Frequent-Flyer-Cards1-215x300.jpg\" alt=\"Full House, Platinum over 1K\" width=\"215\" height=\"300\" /></a> Full House, Platinum over 1K[/caption]\r\n\r\nI\'m getting ready for a stint of international travel -- a couple trips to the UK, a vacation to Venice, and then bouncing around southern India. I visited the <a href=\"http://www.travel-goods.org/the-travel-goods-show/\">2011 Travel Goods show</a> in Chicago for a preview of the new travel goodies I\'d be seeing in the shops this spring.  Wading through a front room stacked with luggage, I hit the gadget room with the interesting stuff and interviewed some of the company owners. I also talk about the growing number of wireless <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Wi-Fi\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi-Fi\" rel=\"wikipedia\">WiFi</a> hotspots I\'m seeing in hotels, and about the different ways Marriott and United Airlines dropped my frequent flier/frequent sleeper status after my traveling patterns changed.  Also, a listener tells us about a good <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Air France\" href=\"http://www.airfrance.com\" rel=\"homepage\">Air France</a> experience re-routing around an East Coast snow storm, and an audio comment about being sick on the road. Listen through to the end of the podcast for how to enter the latest TravelCommons contest. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_88.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_88.mp3\"]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript from TravelCommons podcast #88:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you yet again from the TravelCommons studios. I just can’t seem to get my act together enough to have everything written in time to record from a hotel room, though if there’s going to be an April episode, I’ll need to.  The beginning of April finds me in Venice, wrapping up the Spring Break I discussed in an earlier episode.  I then get a week at home with some family coming in, then down to Florida for a week, then to the UK, and then, the last week of April in India, bouncing across the usual suspects – Bangalore, Pune, and Chennai – with a weekend in the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Kerala backwaters\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerala_backwaters\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Kerala backwaters</a>.</li>\r\n 	<li>Not that March has been quiet.  I’m just back from a trip to New York earlier this week and then head down to Phoenix next week. I’m hoping to catch a Spring Training ball game while I’m down there.  I\'ve been working off and on in Phoenix since the mid-‘90’s and have never been to a Spring Training game.  Every year I say I’m going to carve out time, and every year something comes up.  This year, though.  This will be the year.  Again working on that New Year’s travel resolution about taking more quick breaks.  The fact that I’m still thinking about a New Year’s resolution has to be breaking some sort of rule.</li>\r\n 	<li>Stay with me ‘til the end of this episode – either the preferred way by listening or the ADD way by scrubbing – for a quick TravelCommons contest.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Keep Your Motor Running</em> by Dave Hole</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>OK, let’s see what bits and bobs I have been keeping track of on Evernote, and Twitter, and Facebook…</li>\r\n 	<li>For everyone who watched all the way to the end of the <a title=\"Video #1 – Impressions of Vietnam\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2010/09/06/video-1-impressions-of-vietnam/\">Vietnam video</a> back in September – and for those of you who haven’t, it’s still available on the web site, on the iTunes feed, and on the TravelCommons Facebook page – there’s a picture, a head shot of me, with a boa – the large snake, not the feathered thing -- draped around my neck.  You can plainly see the receding graying hair. So it caught me up short when a United gate agent looked at my boarding pass, and then at me, and said “You look too young to have a <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"United Airlines\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Mileage Plus</a> number this low.”  It worked – I gave her one of those customer service “attaboys’ they always send to their status fliers.  It reminded me of my last trip to India when the immigration agent looked at me a couple of times and said that I looked much younger than my passport photo.  Either I’ve unknowingly picked up the ability to cloud men’s minds or that picture of Dorian Grey I picked up at a garage sale actually works.</li>\r\n 	<li>We’ve talked in past episodes about how for frequent travelers, the cost of wireless data plans can quickly pay for themselves in avoided hotel WiFi charges – 3-4 nights in a month -- if you tend to stay in hotels that still charge for wireless or don’t have precious metal status at chains like Hilton or Marriott.  Anyhow, I’ve seen over the past few months a growing number of wireless hotspots when I pop open my laptop in my hotel room.  I see in the network browser at least 2-3 Verizon hotspots, a Sprint, and every once in a while, a Virgin hotspot.  I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised – most Android phones have 3G hotspot capabilities built in.  I guess it’s the power I’m more surprised about.  If I’m seeing 5 or 6 of these, they’re broadcasting farther than just the adjacent room.  And while most have security enabled, there’s always 1 or 2 running naked.  And this will only increase after AT&amp;T iPhones get hotspot capability with iOS 4.3.  With only 11 channels in the US implementation of WiFi, there’s gonna be some congestion in the air soon.</li>\r\n 	<li>Some good comments also came into the web site, the e-mail box and Twitter since the last episode…</li>\r\n 	<li>Andre – who describes himself as a “long-time listener from Germany” – left this comment on the Winter Travel Tips post\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Wanted to share a positive experience with an airline call center when I was travelling to the US in January. I flew Air France on the international legs – Stuttgart to Paris-DeGaulle to JFK and back, and used United miles for the domestic portion to Florida – JFK to Washington-Dulles to Miami.</li>\r\n 	<li>As my departure approached, so did a massive snowstorm. Just as I finished packing my luggage the night before departure, Air France e-mailed me that my flight out of Kennedy was canceled.  Indeed, AF kept all 4 of their JFK flights in Paris to keep their schedule from getting screwed up. I called the AF call center. I said that I\'m currently in Miami and asked if there was flight to Paris out of here or DC. After waiting on hold for a while the agent transferred me to a special Delta help desk, warning me that I might have to pay extra to fly out of MIA. Next agent told me the same, but she had to talk to AF in Paris anyways.</li>\r\n 	<li>After another wait, she came back, totally astonished that AF, not only accepted the re-routing, but also did that free of charge. I guess they were just happy to have one less passenger standing around in New York.</li>\r\n 	<li>So, there are still moments where you think that you are a valued customer and they care about you.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Andre, thanks for that story.  This was a tough winter in the US.  I have a friend from Detroit who was in Boston one week and supposed to be in New York the next.  One of those storms blew through, cancelled his flight, and his next available flight home was the following Monday, when he was supposed to be flying back to New York.  He just hung around Boston for the weekend, bought some new underwear, and then caught Amtrak down to New York Monday morning – much less stressful.</li>\r\n 	<li>Peter Zurich sent in a note about the running thread on the TSA’s full body scanners, specifically about my observation in the last episode about the partial roll out of the scanners.  What good was it to scan 100% of the passengers in ORD’s Terminal 1 last Monday morning – pushing security lines down the concourse, and yet have no scanners at all in alternative airports like Ft Myers, FL.  In this same vein, Peter writes\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I am all onboard for security, but what we have now is security theatre that is just another meaningless escalation from x-ray to liquid ban to shoes off.  We joked about what a good thing it was that Richard Reid, the shoe bomber, didn’t have it in his underwear, and of course, that’s the next thing that happens, and we get the naked scanners.  On and on it goes…</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Yes, Peter, and so it does.  One thing the housing market meltdown has done is make people less mobile – they can’t easily get out of their houses to move to another city for a new job.  The number of people flying every week to their jobs is growing.  Making this work requires smooth predictable travel – something the TSA seems to have no interest in facilitating.</li>\r\n 	<li>And finally, yet another audio comment – I love these – this time from Lori Humm, another long-time TravelCommons listener, about a time when she was sick while on the road</li>\r\n 	<li>Lori Humm audio clip</li>\r\n 	<li>Lori, thanks for that story.  Makes me feel a bit of a whiner -- Type A flu definitely tops my cold I whined about in the last episode.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a question, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is <a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a> -- use the Voice Memo app on your iPhone or something like Virtual Recorder on your Android phone to record and send in an audio comment like Lori or Gary in last month’s episode; send a <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Twitter</a> message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/153475331351358\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Facebook</a> page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Baja Taxi</em> by Brian Buckit</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>New Travel Goodies</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Chris Truelove, another long time TravelCommons listener from the UK, dropped me a line a couple of weeks back, saying that he would be in Chicago for the 2011 Travel Goods show to launch the latest version of his luggage locator tag business. I had mentioned his globalbagtag.com business some episodes ago, and now he’s launching a new line – back2you.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Always looking for some podcast content – as well as the opportunity to meet a listener – I headed down on Sunday afternoon.</li>\r\n 	<li>McCormick Center in Chicago is one of the world’s largest exhibition spaces, so finding the show took a little bit.  Walking in, it was luggage as far as I could see.  There were lots of colors on display.  Everybody – well, except for Tumi – was looking to make a break from black.  I couldn’t discern a clear alternative, though – was red the new black or was beige.  I did see a surprising number of hardshell rolling bags and in all sorts of wild prints.  Perhaps those are more targeted at the recreational market – can’t say I saw a lot of cheetah-print hardshell bags being put in the overhead on my morning flight to New York last week.</li>\r\n 	<li>In spite of all the colors, my eyes began to glaze over – you can only look at so many suitcases before sleep – or boredom – begins to wash over you.  Then I walked into the back room and things got much more interesting.  Rather than 2-story luggage displays, in here were smaller booths filled with all sorts of travel gadgets.  Even the bags back here had interesting twists. Powerbag showed backpacks and briefcases with built-in batteries, complete with built-in iPhone and USB cords to keep your phones and iPods topped off while walking down the concourse.  And a company called Runnur (<a href=\"http://gorunnur.com/\">http://gorunnur.com/</a>) was selling a fanny pack reengineered into something like a bandolier, slinging everything across one shoulder instead of resting on your back-side.</li>\r\n 	<li>It was here that I found Chris and so, using the Voice Memo app on my iPhone, I asked him to tell me about Back2You (<a href=\"http://back2you.com/\">http://back2you.com/</a>)</li>\r\n 	<li>Back2You interview\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_577\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"150\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/DSC_7791-copy11.jpg\"><img class=\"size-thumbnail wp-image-577\" title=\"Back2You Tag\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/DSC_7791-copy-150x150.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"150\" height=\"150\" /></a> Back2You Bag Tag[/caption]</li>\r\n 	<li>Thanks Chris.  Those tags could come in handy on my upcoming trips to Italy, the UK, and India where I won’t be in any single place more than a couple of days.</li>\r\n 	<li>Walking around the back room, I found some other interesting products</li>\r\n 	<li>TuGo interview</li>\r\n 	<li>I’ll post a picture in the show notes.  I tried TuGo (<a href=\"http://goodtugo.com/\">http://goodtugo.com/</a>)  out last Monday morning in ORD.  It got it on my bag in less than a minute, put my coffee in there, then put my backpack on top of my bag and it worked like a charm.  Not sure if the problem it’s solving is worth the space it takes up in my bag, but it definitely works.</li>\r\n 	<li>One of the themes in the back room seemed to be comfort – as the seat pitch – the distance between rows – shrink and planes get more crowded, people are looking to buy a little something to make the journey more bearable.</li>\r\n 	<li>Kuhi Comfort interview\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_576\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"150\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/DSC_7788-copy11.jpg\"><img class=\"size-thumbnail wp-image-576\" title=\"TuGo Cupholder\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/DSC_7788-copy-150x150.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"150\" height=\"150\" /></a> TuGo Cupholder[/caption]</li>\r\n 	<li>I tried the Kuhi Comfort (<a href=\"http://www.kuhicomfort.com/\">http://www.kuhicomfort.com/</a>).  It was more comfortable than the typical neck pillow. I’m not sure about the pouch for aromatherapy. I like a little lavender oil as much as the next person, but in coach, where you’re less than a foot from the other passenger’s head – one person’s relaxing aromatherapy is the next person’s eye watering stench…</li>\r\n 	<li>The other theme I picked up was hygiene.  There were a handful of booths selling bed bug powders and plastic barriers.  The booth across from Chris Truelove’s --Shelves to Go (<a href=\"http://www.shelvestogo.net\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">http://www.shelvestogo.net</a>) was selling a packable shelving system – lifts straight out of your bag and hangs on the closet rod – avoiding, as the brochure says, “the risk of possible exposure to dirt and insect infestation” from putting your close in the hotel dresser  -- I’ll put a picture in the show notes.</li>\r\n 	<li>And then there was this new twist on the lowly wipe</li>\r\n 	<li>Paper Shower (<a href=\"http://papershower.com/\">http://papershower.com/</a>) interview</li>\r\n 	<li>So there you go, no end of stuff to make your travel life a bit easier, and your bag a bit heavier.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_579\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"150\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/DSC_7790-copy11.jpg\"><img class=\"size-thumbnail wp-image-579\" title=\"Shelves to Go\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/DSC_7790-copy-150x150.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"150\" height=\"150\" /></a> Shelves to Go[/caption]</li>\r\n 	<li>I’ll put URLs and any pictures I have of these products in the show notes.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Emily C</em> by Fiasco</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Losing Status</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Back in <a title=\"Podcast #82 – Changing My Travel; New Mileage Programs in a New Year\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2010/02/20/podcast-82-changing-my-travel-new-mileage-programs-in-a-new-year/\">episode 82</a>, I talked about how my job switch – moving from consulting to being the CIO of a technology company – was changing the way I travel, and how the new destinations were shaking up my frequent traveler program status.</li>\r\n 	<li>It all sorted out in mid-January.  Because of our office locations, I switched from Marriott – where I’d been top-tier Platinum status for at least 7 years – to Hilton for no other reason than sheer convenience.  I hit top tier Hilton – Diamond; gem stones rather than precious metals for Hilton – in December.  And, oddly enough, still haven’t received a new card or welcome packet.  Every other program – you hit a major tier and there are all sorts of thank you letters and program brochures showing up on your doorstep.  Hilton – nothing.</li>\r\n 	<li>As interesting, though was Marriott’s reaction.  I don’t think I stayed enough nights to qualify for any status, but they “soft landed” me.  They dropped me one level down – to Gold, which still gets you free WiFi and free breakfast in the concierge lounge – and an offer to let me buy back my Platinum status for 40,000 points.  Nice approach.  If I thought I’d be staying at more Marriotts this year, I’d have considered the buy back, but I appreciated the soft landing and have stayed at a couple of Marriott since them.</li>\r\n 	<li>United Airlines – not as nice.  No soft landing here.  I dropped two tiers – from 1K to Premiere, which is the status level I’d qualified for by the end of the year.  As I mentioned in<a title=\"Podcast #84 – End of Year Status Calculus; TSA Porn\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2010/10/30/podcast-84-end-of-year-status-calculus-tsa-porn/\"> episode 84</a>, when I saw in October that I would miss American’s Exec Platinum by about 10,000 miles, I flipped over to United to preserve a minimum level of status.  Which is exactly what I received.  Like Marriott, though, I received an offer to buy back my 1K status, but the price was a bit steeper -- $999 plus flying 35,000 qualifying miles in the first quarter 0f 2011.  Neither of those made any sense.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’ll probably go back to my old ways – splitting my mileage between United and American and keeping mid-tier status – Premiere Exec -- on United because, with monthly flights to Dallas and Fort Myers, FL where United has little to none non-stop service, there’s no way I’ll make 1K.</li>\r\n 	<li>Friends who left consulting used to joke that first January was one of their most conflicted times – down because they lost status and were now traveling with the peons; but happy with what it represented – that they were spending a lot more time with their families.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids991762681.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #88</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://musicalley.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Music Alley</a></li>\r\n 	<li>And now for the contest.  In the past, I\'ve run some quick contests to drive iTunes reviews.  This time, I – like every podcaster – am looking to drive Facebook “likes” – there’s got to be a better noun than that – “followers” on Twitter may be a bit creepy, but at least it’s not pathetic.  But, that’s the lingo, so I’ll have to go with it.  Go to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/153475331351358\">Facebook</a> page – there’s link in the shownotes and a badge above the fold on the first page of the web site – “like” it, and leave a comment.  The best comment, funniest or most insightful as judged by me, wins 2 drink coupons on United Airlines.  I look forward to some good stuff</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or MP3 file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/153475331351358\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_88.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #88 -- New Travel Goodies; Losing Elite Status','','inherit','closed','closed','','554-revision-v1','','','2017-09-29 16:50:20','2017-09-29 21:50:20','',554,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/09/29/554-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1825,1,'2017-09-29 16:55:20','2017-09-29 21:55:20','[caption id=\"attachment_1820\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/IMG_0548.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1820\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/IMG_0548-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Reduced Packing Requirements by 50%[/caption]\r\n\r\nIt\'s a  All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_133.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/339778145\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n<!--more-->\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #133:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL after what has been a light month of travel, just 10 days in Scotland on vacation, and then a quick overnight to Atlanta a couple of days after I returned. Other than that, I’ve been in Chicago trying to get back my body clock back to local time. Conventional wisdom says that your body will adjust at the rate of 1-2 time zones a day. So, for the 6 hours between Chicago and the UK, it should take me 3-5 days to adjust. I dunno, it’s felt longer than that. The older I get, the longer it seems to get.</li>\r\n 	<li>It’s also harder for me coming west than going east. When I go to Europe, I can set an alarm to wake up at the right time and will myself out of bed and into the shower. Back in the US, I can’t quite “will” myself back to sleep when I wake up at 2 or 3 in the morning. I did find, though, on this trip that I needed to be careful how long I stayed up the first couple of nights. My usual routine is to take a 30-minute nap the first afternoon I’m there -- say around 4:30 -- which then lets me push through to, say 10 or 11 that night. I’m then tired enough to get to sleep at what my body might still think is 5 or 6pm. This trip, I found that if I stayed up past midnight -- maybe because I got to reading something after getting back from dinner -- my body sorta tipped over that inflection point, caught a second, or is it a third wind, and would be happy to push through to 2 or 3 in the morning, which would make the morning’s alarm much tougher to handle.</li>\r\n 	<li>The United flight to and from Edinburgh was direct -- always nice -- but on an old 757 that had definitely seen better days, and many of them. Eight hours on any narrow body is tough, but on a 757 -- the narrowest of the narrow bodies -- it’s a bit tougher. And it was completely full -- nothing out-of-the-ordinary nowadays. Our flight from ORD landed shortly after the United direct from EWR landed, and so there was quite a queue for the non-EU passport line. Indeed, as we were coming off the jet bridge, an airport worker turned off the escalator and blocked it off. The end of the passport queue was beginning to block it on the floor below. So I reached into my backpack and pulled out my UK passport and was waved over to a set of four unmanned automated gates with no lines. I put my passport in, took my glasses off for the camera, and walked through when the gates opened up. It was pretty slick.</li>\r\n 	<li>I still had to wait for my wife and kids to work their way through the non-EU line, but I made some good use of the time -- I helped a mother and daughter from the EWR flight wrestle some amazing large bags onto a luggage cart, and had collected all of our luggage. If they had a Starbucks there in baggage claim like they do at ORD, it would’ve been damn close to a perfect morning.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/JeffSpeed68/54450\">Hula Hoop Party</a> by Stefan Kartenberg (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: Martijn de Boer, Blue Wave Theory</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Received some good comments on the last episode</li>\r\n 	<li>Nick -- no last name on the e-mail -- helped answer the question I had about arbitraging different European phone SIMs now that the EU had banned roaming charges. Nick writes -\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>You mentioned having 3 EU SIMs to choose from in Dublin, and working out the best value of the three.\r\nI live in the UK and have a UK SIM. If I go to Spain, and call a UK number (even if that number belongs to the person next to me) then I just pay a local rate call - or nothing if I have an unlimited calls account. However, if I call a Spanish number, then it counts as an overseas call, as if I were in the UK - even though I\'m in Spain. So which is the best SIM to use will to an extent depend on the actual call rates, but also which country it is registered in, and which country you are calling, independently of where you are.\r\nI hope that makes sense, and it\'s useful</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Nick, thanks for that. It makes a lot of sense when I recall that the EU wanted to eliminate roaming charges, so a mobile call from the UK is the same as one from Spain. For us, though, we’re rarely making a phone call. Indeed, I’m usually the only one making phone calls and that’s typically into a conference bridge. During our 10 days in Scotland, I used 11 of the 300 minutes in my 30 day plan. My wife’s 7 day plan ran out and she never noticed, because her 1 GB of data didn’t. And I think that’s where the arbitrage still could work, on using the cheapest data plan. That will, though, take a good bit of wading through really bad websites with confusing plan descriptions that are only partially in English. I think I’ll probably default to using my UK SIM just out of sheer laziness.</li>\r\n 	<li>Steve Frick left a comment on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page about the new parallel loading baggage X-ray machines I’ve encountered in the ATL PreCheck line. Steve writes -\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I agree with you that people are hesitant to jump the queue in front of others..... and you do need mad ninja skills if you\'re in the first slot trying to grab one of those oversized bins</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Steve linked to his blog post where he has video and a more detailed description of the situation. Check out the show notes for a <a href=\"http://www.hypeorlando.com/back-and-gone-again/2017/05/01/atlanta-hartsfield-has-automated-the-tsa-process/\">link to his blog</a></li>\r\n 	<li>I have to give the ATL TSA crew props for noticing the problem with breaking into the stream of bins if you’re in one of the front loading stations. When I was going through ATL a few weeks back, there was a TSA person at the parallel loading line choreographing each bin push, having everyone hold up until all the previous bins had cleared, and then having everyone push their bins onto the conveyor at once. I haven’t seen this problem with parallel loaders in, say, Edinburgh or Heathrow or Madrid. I wonder what’s different that requires this manual intervention.</li>\r\n 	<li>And there were a couple of comments on the travel apps people use on their smartphones. Dan Brener left this Facebook\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Great episode! Here\'s the apps I use the most: Air Canada and United, TripIt (although it\'s not as good as it could/should be), I used to use FlightTrack and really miss it, FlightAware since the AC app doesn\'t tell me where planes are coming from, Uber and Lyft, Packing (it\'s a list app to make sure I don\'t forget something obvious!), SPG, Yelp, Google Maps and Waze. There\'s a few others, but those are the main ones.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Dan, thanks for that list. I had forgotten to mention Yelp in the last episode. I have some colleagues who are heavy Yelp users; they’ll build lists of restaurants and bars before starting a project in a new city. I tend to use Yelp and the “Explore food &amp; drinks near you” feature in Google Maps for restaurant suggestions interchangeably when I’m in a new place. I’m always surprised at how different the recommendations often are.</li>\r\n 	<li>Gary Learned sent in on Twitter -\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>What I love about Lyft over Uber is their ability to produce a consolidated receipt of all my rides on a trip</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Thanks Gary. I’ve noticed that functionality in the Lyft app, but it’s not hugely useful for me since we use Concur for our T&amp;E reporting, and it picks up the individual Amex charges rather than a feed from Lyft. Would be handy if Concur would pull a single consolidated charge from Lyft.</li>\r\n 	<li>And finally, a couple of weeks later on Twitter, Eddie Antar, who is always a chuckle, said\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Binge listening to TC bc I had to let an AA voucher expire.? OTOH I\'m not being groped or dragged down the aisle screaming, so.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>I dunno, listening to my is better than being groped or dragged down the plane aisle. Feels a bit like being damned with very faint praise...</li>\r\n 	<li>And one last Tweet, this one from the Craig and Linda Martin of the Indie Travel Podcast…\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Highlight of the week? meeting fellow travel podcaster @mpeacock for lunch &amp; craft beer in Edinburgh. 10 or so years of podcast friendship</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Honestly, I think Linda and I had been trading e-mails for most of this year, seeing if we could physically meet up after so many years of knowing each other in the travel podcast universe. One of us would hear the other mention travel plans in a podcast that might overlap with the other’s. It finally came together at the end of our Scotland vacation and the beginning of theirs. They flew into EDI Sunday night; we were leaving from EDI Tuesday morning, so Monday lunch was the call. I drove over from St Andrews to a new neighborhood for me; kinda hip. Linda picked a nice pub with a great beer list that we all enjoyed. It is one of the great things about travel -- getting to meet up with friends; and in this case, for the first time.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/49674\">H2O</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Packing Pro Tips</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Getting everything I needed for our 10 days in Scotland into a carry-on bag pushed my packing skills just a bit. The trip was mostly hiking and hill walks with a couple of 1-star Michelin restaurants thrown into the mix. And the forecast was for rain just about every day. We were on a direct flight to EDI and my daughter had to check a bag with stuff she was taking back to university, so the carry-on limitation wasn’t because of lost luggage or being able to power past the baggage carousel -- a non-starter given the long non-EU immigration line at EDI. It was more about trunk space in the rental car. As it was, I was doing luggage jenga just about every morning trying to puzzle everything into the back of our Nissan X-Terra.</li>\r\n 	<li>I easily spent an hour -- 2-3 times longer than usual -- trying to figure out how to get hiking shoes, rain gear, dress shirts, and everything else into that 22-inch bag. It made me pack ruthlessly -- everything had to earn its space in the bag. And though I’ve casually mentioned some of these ideas in prior episodes, this latest packing experience really crystallized this pro tip list.</li>\r\n 	<li>First and foremost, pick a single color family for your clothes, and make it black. Three main reasons -- Black makes everyone look thinner, it spans casual to smart dress codes, and black doesn’t show stains. OK, the thinner thing is a nice-to-have, but hiding stains is key. I packed two pair of slacks and wore a third on the plane. I couldn’t be one-and-done because I took incoming from a fork-handling mishap.</li>\r\n 	<li>Second, no one-and-done outfits. Every piece of clothes has to serve multiple purposes so it can be worn multiple times -- every shirt has to work under multiple sweaters and has to go with more than one pair of pants. Versatility is key. And yet another reason to pack black.</li>\r\n 	<li>Third, think \"additively\"; pack layers. This was key in my last packing challenge too -- last year’s Spring Break trip to Iceland and Southern Spain that I talked about in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/05/30/podcast-121-tsa-lines-my-luggage-is-where/\">episode #121</a>. Pack multiple thin layers that you can pile on when it’s cold and wear separately when it’s not. Black sweaters and a black fleece vest are my layering go-to’s.</li>\r\n 	<li>Fourth, wear your bulkiest clothes on the flight. I packed the hiking rain shell and flew in the blazer I needed for the 1-stars because the shell is infinitely more crushable. My only caveat to this is shoes. I packed the hiking shoes, even though they were bulkier than the dressily casual walking shoes I was also bringing, because I didn’t want to set off the metal detector in the Pre-Check line or get pulled out because the soles are too thick. If you’re not doing Pre-Check, you’re already taking your shoes off, so wear your biggest ones.</li>\r\n 	<li>And my fifth and final pro tip, use a non-descript black rolling bag. Black not only makes you look thinner, it makes your bag look thinner to gate agents scanning for bag-sizer bait. My daughter had a baby blue roller bag for the longest time. She loved that color, and it was easy to spot on the luggage carousel, which is a good thing; it ended up there a lot because gate agents were always pulling my daughter out of line to gate check that bag. Her current bag is a dark eggplant purple. It’s not black, but it’s close. If you’re flying a budget airline that’s a stickler on size, use a hard-shell bag. It’ll keep its dimensions better when overstuffed, and the polycarbonate shell will slide past the metal bars of the sizer easier than the ballistic nylon of a soft-sided bag.</li>\r\n 	<li>There you go, my five packing pro tips. If you’ve got some of your own to share, send them along through the usual channels and we’ll have them on the next episode.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Traveling Injured</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>In a couple of <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/02/06/podcast-87-sick-on-the-road-whats-in-my-briefcase/\">past</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/03/13/podcast-88-new-travel-goodies-losing-status/\">episodes</a>, we’ve talked about how miserable it is to be sick on the road</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #132</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_133.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #133 — Packing Pro Tips; Traveling Injured','','inherit','closed','closed','','1819-revision-v1','','','2017-09-29 16:55:20','2017-09-29 21:55:20','',1819,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/09/29/1819-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1826,1,'2017-09-29 16:56:21','2017-09-29 21:56:21','<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/IMG_0522.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1775\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/IMG_0522-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nIt\'s a <em>Mitteleuropa</em> episode, talking about last month\'s travels through Vienna and Hungary. I came away with good first impressions of Austrian Airlines and the Vienna airport. And, for the first time in many visits, saw Hungary through a tourist\'s eyes, spending time in Budapest and the Tokaj wine region. We also talk about how Google Translate has become pretty much indistinguishable from magic and the potential impact the privatization of the US air traffic control system might have on the general aviation industry. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_130.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/329896443\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #130:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, after a good bit of travel -- I think the technical unit of measure is “a slug”. I’ve done a “slug” of travel recently. We got back from 9 days in Hungary on the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend, which gave us that Monday to recover a bit. After that short week at home, I got back on the road -- a week in Richmond and then last week and this week in Atlanta. Some folks wanted me to do stupid day trips -- say up to Michigan from Atlanta for a 90-minute meeting, but in a fit of, what is for me, rare realism, I said, “Uh, no”.</li>\r\n 	<li>This was the first time I’d spent any time in Richmond -- other than driving around it -- from Charlottesville to the airport, from DC over to Williamsburg. We were downtown. There are some nice pockets. Found a couple of restaurants and a microbrewery with a taproom, so I was happy. Even happier because it was just a 20-minute cab ride from the airport, and a 10-minute walk to the client. Contrast that to Atlanta, which I just hate having to travel to for business. It starts with the location of the airport -- at 6 o’clock, on the bottom of the I-285 perimeter, and all the business at the opposite side -- between 11 and 1 o’clock on the perimeter. And therein lies the most important question that every business traveler faces when they arrive and they leave Atlanta -- do I drive through the city or around it? Outside of rush hour, it’s not bad -- maybe 35 minutes. But when you’re trying to catch that 6pm flight home on Thursday night, the trip starts at an hour and deteriorates fast.</li>\r\n 	<li>And deterioration is a nice word for last week’s trip back. After an hour-and-a quarter drive through the city that would’ve been a lot worse except that there were 3 of us in the car, so we got to whiz by the beginnings of the traffic jam in the HOV lanes. Once in the center of the city, the HOV lanes were just as crowded, but it probably cut at least 5 minutes off our trip. We drop the car off at Hertz, board the Skytrain, are on our way to the terminal when it just stops. OK, maybe a bit of congestion at the station in front of us. So we wait, and wait,... and wait. No announcement, no nothing. Just wait. 10 minutes, 15 minutes. Finally, someone near the door presses the phone button. A voice comes on -- “We’re working on it; thanks for your patience.” Click. No reason for the delay; no thought on when we’d start up again. Another 5 minutes. Another guy presses the phone button. Same story. After 30 minutes, the train whirs to life and starts to move. And I never thought I’d get nostalgic for those car rental buses.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hansatom/47919\">Brilliant Day</a> by Hans Atom (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial license.  Ft: Lisa DeBenedictis</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>My son Andrew and I flew Austrian Air from Chicago to Budapest last month with an -- obvious -- connection in Vienna. Couple of things… First, why Austrian Air? Because it was among the cheapest non-budget fares over and because I could construct an 8-hr layover which meant we spent Saturday eating schnitzel and drinking beer in Vienna. We landed at 8:45 Saturday morning, checked our bags in Held Luggage, and then hopped a cab into the city. It wasn’t a cheap taxi -- probably around €40 -- but we didn’t have time to figure out and wait for the train. We went first to the Naschmarkt and met up with a friend of mine -- ex-client and ex-boss -- who’s now running the Polish development center for a stealth start-up. He came down Friday night; it was a good excuse to spend 3 hours on his new BMW motorcycle. We started out with coffee and then quickly moved to the beer crawl. At noon, we walked into a small place, <a href=\"http://www.xn--gasthauspschl-qmb.com/\">Gasthaus Pöschl</a> (Weihburggasse 17), just as they were opening. We promised to be out in an hour, so they picked up one of the “Reserved” signs and gave us great big plates of schnitzel and glasses of Grüner Veltliner. We needed a bit of a walk after that, a bit more beer, and we found a cab back to the airport. One of the best layovers I’ve had...</li>\r\n 	<li>And then the second thing -- Vienna Airport. I’ve whined over a couple of episodes about how much I don’t like Munich Airport. Indeed, one of my ORD-BUD options was on Lufthansa through MUC. That didn’t make the first cut. But Vienna was great. Pleasant folks in the immigration booths, efficient and well-staffed security, nice food and beer selection -- it was the anti-MUC. And the in-air service? Pretty good. Fairly new 777-200; typical kinda tight coach seat configuration; pleasant flight attendants. There was nothing that wowed me, but then again, I wasn’t expecting anything to. All I wanted was not to be annoyed; not to have a gate agent or flight attendant piss me off. Kinda the air travel version of the Hippocratic oath -- Do no harm to the passenger. And Austrian succeeded. If I were to ding them on anything, it would be that the bright red plane upholstery was a bit tough on the eyes. I’ll fly them again.\r\nI actually was two-for-two on airports on that trip. Budapest airport has had a significant upgrade since my last visit maybe 12 years ago. Again, efficient security lines, bright clean terminal, good places to grab a coffee and some breakfast. Much more pleasant than my first time passing through there in 1989, some Army guy checking that my exit visa had the right stamps. Much happier vibe this time. Two great airport experiences; I think I’ll need to consciously ratchet down my expectations for my next trip, though. I’ll be hitting London’s Gatwick and Heathrow next week.</li>\r\n 	<li>Thinking through my international travel this year -- Paris, Vienna, Budapest -- Google Translate has evolved to being pretty close to magic. Last September, Google made a big announcement that they moved Translate from a statistics-based approach to a neural network running in Google’s cloud. It was the cover story for the New York Times Sunday Magazine <a href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/14/magazine/the-great-ai-awakening.html\">The Great AI Awakening</a> -- using it as a case study of how artificial intelligence will “reinvent computing itself”. That’s all good -- and it was a good article -- but what’s really seems like magic is what Google calls Word Lens, where you activate your camera within Google Translate, point it at some text -- a menu or, say, the washing machine controls in a vacation rental -- and you see English words replacing the French or Hungarian words in real time. Amazingly useful. Saves you from blasting your delicates with hot water, or mistakenly ordering chicken when you mix up poulet and poisson after a couple of cocktails. The French translations seemed better than the Hungarian ones -- which makes sense when you remember that the quality of the neural network is dependent on the amount of training data -- but even the Hungarian was very useful. And Translate lets you download some amount of language data onto your phone so you don’t blow through $100 of roaming data trying to avoid brussels sprouts. As you can tell, a huge TravelCommons endorsement.</li>\r\n 	<li>A few weeks back, I retweeted an NPR story about the proposal to privatize US air traffic control. As someone who has had cumulative months if not years wasted on ATC delays, I commented that I can’t understand all the angst over this proposal. ATC privatization has worked for years in Canada and Europe. And it’s not like the FAA has bathed itself in glory with the NextGen program that was authorized in 2003. Rich Fraser, a long-time TravelCommons listener, fellow Midwesterner, and a pilot, came back with a great series of tweets explaining his objections, specifically on privatization’s impact on general aviation. I retweeted a number of them -- “Privatization decimated general aviation industries everywhere it was tried. GA is a $200 billion industry here. 1.4 mil jobs…” and “And Canada\'s general aviation industry is a tiny fraction the size of ours. Apples and oranges doesn\'t even begin to describe.” I was only thinking of the impact on commercial aviation -- the only aviation I experience. Rich’s tweets did a nice job of opening the aperture on the discussion to include the often unconsidered world of general aviation. Thanks for that, Rich.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/53277\">Fistful of Dub</a> (Feat. Snowflake and DJ Vadim) by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: snowflake and DJ Vadim</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Notes from Hungary</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>The flight from Vienna to Budapest is 40 minutes on a 20-seat prop plane. I don’t think it ever levels off -- just a parabola, going straight from climb out into descent. Not that really noticed. After one more beer in Vienna airport, Andrew and I were asleep before the plane left the ground. Yet another pleasant Vienna Air flight attendant graciously placed bottles of water for us in the seat back pocket in front of us. We found them when the plane touched down in Budapest.</li>\r\n 	<li>We’d been to Budapest many times before, but this one would be different. Many of my wife’s aunts and uncles has passed away in the 12 years since our last visit, so there weren’t many family obligations -- just a long Saturday lunch the day before we left. Instead, this was probably the first time we saw Hungary as tourists.</li>\r\n 	<li>Before we visited, we checked with friends who had recently visited. What had they seen, enjoyed? Everyone loved Budapest. Scouting out places to stay, we abandoned what had been our usual Budapest Marriott perch on the Danube for so many years and instead headed east to District VII -- Erzsébetváros, the old Jewish Quarter. During our last visit in 2005, no one would’ve thought to go out here. But now, it’s full of restaurants, craft beer bars, a few Starbucks, and ruin pubs.</li>\r\n 	<li>We followed TravelCommons’ listener Arnoud Heijnis’ recommendation to check out what is the classic -- and perhaps the first -- ruin bar in Budapest -- Szimpla Kert. Arnoud’s description of it having a “pop-uppy kinda feel” was right on-point. You walk through a dingy, half-lit hallway, with a couple of bars on each side, into an open two-story courtyard ringed by, I dunno, another half-dozen bars across the two floors. There were at least a couple of English stag parties going on when we walked in -- one with whom I assumed was the groom-to-be dressed in a white ballerina tutu; the other group was wearing matching t-shirts fronted with a goofy picture of their groom-to-be.</li>\r\n 	<li>I saw a lot of those while we were in Budapest -- party groups wearing matching t-shirts; not so much the ballerina tutus. Budapest -- at least the redeveloped district we were in -- seems to have become a fly-in party town. Maybe the bankruptcy of the old state-run airline Malev left a vacuum for budget carriers to fill -- including WizzAir with a Budapest hub. And then Hungary hasn’t yet joined the euro, so it can devalue its currency, the forint, and look cheap to the rest of Europe. And it had lots of buildings available to repurpose -- starting with squatters setting up bars and dance clubs in abandoned buildings, then large sports bars, and then what seemed to me an amazing number of burger places. And they were all filled starting Thursday night, mostly with English speaking parties. A huge change from my first visit in 1989 when seemingly no one but my wife spoke English, and we’d walk into empty restaurants looking for lunch.</li>\r\n 	<li>Spending money in some of those bars, you’d think that Hungary is moving toward a parallel currency economy -- the forint and euro being used interchangeably -- similar to what I saw in Vietnam where I’d pay, say, a single taxi fare, in a combination of dong and dollar bills. In Budapest, you’ll get a bar tab in forint with a euro number printed below it. You can pay in euro, but you’ll probably get change back in forint. If it’s not too late in the evening, say your first or second bar, and so you haven’t yet lost your capability to do arithmetic, you’ll notice that the euro exchange rate isn’t quite in your favor. I started doing the math at each bar -- which, by the way, seemed to make a couple of bartenders nervous. The range of exchange rates on bar tabs was between 250 and 275 forint to the euro. The market rate was about 300 forint to the euro. In effect, the bars were charging an 8-16% convenience fee for letting you skip the ATM down the street.</li>\r\n 	<li>District VII is not the only part of Budapest that’s upgraded. Downtown Pest, along the Danube, looks spiffier. The Parliament building -- always an incredibly ornate building that dares you not to take multiple pictures of it as you walk past -- looked like it has been freshly steam cleaned. In ‘89, a soldier shooed my wife and I off the steps; this time we walked down into a nice visitors center, bought some tour tickets and were escorted up the Golden Staircase, under the huge dome, and past the crown jewels. And further south along the river, new developments, plazas, bars, bike paths have all sprung up -- again, in places we wouldn’t have thought of going 12 years ago. I understood why friends who had visited over the past year had enjoyed it.</li>\r\n 	<li>As much as I liked knocking around Budapest -- and running through most of District VII’s craft beer bars where, according to Untappd, Andrew and I tasted 43 Hungarian beers -- my favorite bit of the trip was the day we spent visiting wineries in the Tokaj wine region -- about 2½ hrs northeast of Budapest near the border with Slovakia. We hired the guy (<a href=\"http://www.tokajtoday.com/contact/\">Gergely Somogyi</a>) who runs the Tokaj Today web site as our guide. He came to our hotel, gave us a 30-minute PowerPoint presentation (plugged right into the hotel’s flat screen TV in the breakfast room) on Tokaj’s history, geography, geology, grape and wine types. And with this Intro to Tokaj information still looking for neurons to hang out in, we were off to visit four winemakers. And say that rather than wineries because we sat down with each of the winemakers -- the two more established --<a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/demeterzoltantokaj\">Zoltán Demeter</a> and <a href=\"http://www.bottpince.hu/\">Judit Bodo</a> -- in their tasting rooms, the two garagistas -- <a href=\"http://new2017.samueltinon.com/en/\">Mathilde Hulot</a> and <a href=\"http://abrahampince.com/english/\">Róbert Péter</a> -- their kitchens and patios -- for an hour or more each, talking about their wine, about Hungary, and about what they’re trying to do. Only one of the four -- Demeter -- is from Tokaj. The rest moved there to make wine -- Bodo from the Hungarian-speaking part of Slovakia, Peter from Budapest, and Hulot from France -- because of its history and its potential to make great wine.</li>\r\n 	<li>Each told a version of the same story -- of Tokaj’s history, wine knowledge, and wine quality being broken during the 40-some years of Communism -- abandoning the high-quality vineyards on the hills for lower-quality fields on the plains that could be harvested with big Russian tractors, 5-year government planning that pushed quantity over quality. And of how each of them came to Tokaj to flip that equation back to quality over quantity -- even the Tokaj local had to leave to jobs in California and France to learn quality winemaking before he came back. But they all feel challenged to get the entire community, the “locals,” on board. Maybe it’s some of the residue of Communism -- it’s easier to crank out industrial plonk than good wine. Maybe it’s because many of them can’t afford these new wines and so don’t appreciate them. Bodo said she specifically priced one wine so that local young people who now drink beer could afford to drink good local wine. To appreciate what they have here, she said, everyone has to be able to enjoy good wine -- not just the winemakers.</li>\r\n 	<li>I hate to truck in the wine industry cliche that these winemakers have a “passion” for what they’re doing, but my thesaurus fails me, I can’t find a better word. They all appreciated that we’d taken the time to drive out from Budapest to visit (if maybe a bit puzzled by doing everything in a day), and were very generous with their time and their wine. It was tough to limit ourselves to buying just one bottle per stop. I had to keep reminding myself that I’d only brought my small rollerboard with me.</li>\r\n 	<li>On our last night, we’re back in Budapest, knocking around District VII, looking for our last dinner. We’d had some great food -- a couple of Michelin one-stars, some food trucks near a ruin bar -- but it was tough to find some of the homey Hungarian food -- call it “peasant food” -- that we’d had in the past. And then we found it -- a bit cafeteria style -- I’ll take that sausage, the hurka with the pork liver and rice -- oh, and that one too, the regular kolbasz with pork, paprika and garlic -- some pickled salad, a bowl of gulyas soup, and, OK, just one last beer.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #130</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_130.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #130 — Notes from Hungary','','inherit','closed','closed','','1774-revision-v1','','','2017-09-29 16:56:21','2017-09-29 21:56:21','',1774,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/09/29/1774-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1827,1,'2017-09-29 16:57:15','2017-09-29 21:57:15','<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/IMG_0522.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1775\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/IMG_0522-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nIt\'s a <em>Mitteleuropa</em> episode, talking about last month\'s travels through Vienna and Hungary. I came away with good first impressions of Austrian Airlines and the Vienna airport. And, for the first time in many visits, saw Hungary through a tourist\'s eyes, spending time in Budapest and the Tokaj wine region. We also talk about how Google Translate has become pretty much indistinguishable from magic and the potential impact the privatization of the US air traffic control system might have on the general aviation industry. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_130.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/329896443\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_artwork=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #130:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, after a good bit of travel -- I think the technical unit of measure is “a slug”. I’ve done a “slug” of travel recently. We got back from 9 days in Hungary on the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend, which gave us that Monday to recover a bit. After that short week at home, I got back on the road -- a week in Richmond and then last week and this week in Atlanta. Some folks wanted me to do stupid day trips -- say up to Michigan from Atlanta for a 90-minute meeting, but in a fit of, what is for me, rare realism, I said, “Uh, no”.</li>\r\n 	<li>This was the first time I’d spent any time in Richmond -- other than driving around it -- from Charlottesville to the airport, from DC over to Williamsburg. We were downtown. There are some nice pockets. Found a couple of restaurants and a microbrewery with a taproom, so I was happy. Even happier because it was just a 20-minute cab ride from the airport, and a 10-minute walk to the client. Contrast that to Atlanta, which I just hate having to travel to for business. It starts with the location of the airport -- at 6 o’clock, on the bottom of the I-285 perimeter, and all the business at the opposite side -- between 11 and 1 o’clock on the perimeter. And therein lies the most important question that every business traveler faces when they arrive and they leave Atlanta -- do I drive through the city or around it? Outside of rush hour, it’s not bad -- maybe 35 minutes. But when you’re trying to catch that 6pm flight home on Thursday night, the trip starts at an hour and deteriorates fast.</li>\r\n 	<li>And deterioration is a nice word for last week’s trip back. After an hour-and-a quarter drive through the city that would’ve been a lot worse except that there were 3 of us in the car, so we got to whiz by the beginnings of the traffic jam in the HOV lanes. Once in the center of the city, the HOV lanes were just as crowded, but it probably cut at least 5 minutes off our trip. We drop the car off at Hertz, board the Skytrain, are on our way to the terminal when it just stops. OK, maybe a bit of congestion at the station in front of us. So we wait, and wait,... and wait. No announcement, no nothing. Just wait. 10 minutes, 15 minutes. Finally, someone near the door presses the phone button. A voice comes on -- “We’re working on it; thanks for your patience.” Click. No reason for the delay; no thought on when we’d start up again. Another 5 minutes. Another guy presses the phone button. Same story. After 30 minutes, the train whirs to life and starts to move. And I never thought I’d get nostalgic for those car rental buses.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hansatom/47919\">Brilliant Day</a> by Hans Atom (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial license.  Ft: Lisa DeBenedictis</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>My son Andrew and I flew Austrian Air from Chicago to Budapest last month with an -- obvious -- connection in Vienna. Couple of things… First, why Austrian Air? Because it was among the cheapest non-budget fares over and because I could construct an 8-hr layover which meant we spent Saturday eating schnitzel and drinking beer in Vienna. We landed at 8:45 Saturday morning, checked our bags in Held Luggage, and then hopped a cab into the city. It wasn’t a cheap taxi -- probably around €40 -- but we didn’t have time to figure out and wait for the train. We went first to the Naschmarkt and met up with a friend of mine -- ex-client and ex-boss -- who’s now running the Polish development center for a stealth start-up. He came down Friday night; it was a good excuse to spend 3 hours on his new BMW motorcycle. We started out with coffee and then quickly moved to the beer crawl. At noon, we walked into a small place, <a href=\"http://www.xn--gasthauspschl-qmb.com/\">Gasthaus Pöschl</a> (Weihburggasse 17), just as they were opening. We promised to be out in an hour, so they picked up one of the “Reserved” signs and gave us great big plates of schnitzel and glasses of Grüner Veltliner. We needed a bit of a walk after that, a bit more beer, and we found a cab back to the airport. One of the best layovers I’ve had...</li>\r\n 	<li>And then the second thing -- Vienna Airport. I’ve whined over a couple of episodes about how much I don’t like Munich Airport. Indeed, one of my ORD-BUD options was on Lufthansa through MUC. That didn’t make the first cut. But Vienna was great. Pleasant folks in the immigration booths, efficient and well-staffed security, nice food and beer selection -- it was the anti-MUC. And the in-air service? Pretty good. Fairly new 777-200; typical kinda tight coach seat configuration; pleasant flight attendants. There was nothing that wowed me, but then again, I wasn’t expecting anything to. All I wanted was not to be annoyed; not to have a gate agent or flight attendant piss me off. Kinda the air travel version of the Hippocratic oath -- Do no harm to the passenger. And Austrian succeeded. If I were to ding them on anything, it would be that the bright red plane upholstery was a bit tough on the eyes. I’ll fly them again.</li>\r\n 	<li>I actually was two-for-two on airports on that trip. Budapest airport has had a significant upgrade since my last visit maybe 12 years ago. Again, efficient security lines, bright clean terminal, good places to grab a coffee and some breakfast. Much more pleasant than my first time passing through there in 1989, some Army guy checking that my exit visa had the right stamps. Much happier vibe this time. Two great airport experiences; I think I’ll need to consciously ratchet down my expectations for my next trip, though. I’ll be hitting London’s Gatwick and Heathrow next week.</li>\r\n 	<li>Thinking through my international travel this year -- Paris, Vienna, Budapest -- Google Translate has evolved to being pretty close to magic. Last September, Google made a big announcement that they moved Translate from a statistics-based approach to a neural network running in Google’s cloud. It was the cover story for the New York Times Sunday Magazine <a href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/14/magazine/the-great-ai-awakening.html\">The Great AI Awakening</a> -- using it as a case study of how artificial intelligence will “reinvent computing itself”. That’s all good -- and it was a good article -- but what’s really seems like magic is what Google calls Word Lens, where you activate your camera within Google Translate, point it at some text -- a menu or, say, the washing machine controls in a vacation rental -- and you see English words replacing the French or Hungarian words in real time. Amazingly useful. Saves you from blasting your delicates with hot water, or mistakenly ordering chicken when you mix up poulet and poisson after a couple of cocktails. The French translations seemed better than the Hungarian ones -- which makes sense when you remember that the quality of the neural network is dependent on the amount of training data -- but even the Hungarian was very useful. And Translate lets you download some amount of language data onto your phone so you don’t blow through $100 of roaming data trying to avoid brussels sprouts. As you can tell, a huge TravelCommons endorsement.</li>\r\n 	<li>A few weeks back, I retweeted an NPR story about the proposal to privatize US air traffic control. As someone who has had cumulative months if not years wasted on ATC delays, I commented that I can’t understand all the angst over this proposal. ATC privatization has worked for years in Canada and Europe. And it’s not like the FAA has bathed itself in glory with the NextGen program that was authorized in 2003. Rich Fraser, a long-time TravelCommons listener, fellow Midwesterner, and a pilot, came back with a great series of tweets explaining his objections, specifically on privatization’s impact on general aviation. I retweeted a number of them -- “Privatization decimated general aviation industries everywhere it was tried. GA is a $200 billion industry here. 1.4 mil jobs…” and “And Canada\'s general aviation industry is a tiny fraction the size of ours. Apples and oranges doesn\'t even begin to describe.” I was only thinking of the impact on commercial aviation -- the only aviation I experience. Rich’s tweets did a nice job of opening the aperture on the discussion to include the often unconsidered world of general aviation. Thanks for that, Rich.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/53277\">Fistful of Dub</a> (Feat. Snowflake and DJ Vadim) by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: snowflake and DJ Vadim</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Notes from Hungary</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>The flight from Vienna to Budapest is 40 minutes on a 20-seat prop plane. I don’t think it ever levels off -- just a parabola, going straight from climb out into descent. Not that really noticed. After one more beer in Vienna airport, Andrew and I were asleep before the plane left the ground. Yet another pleasant Vienna Air flight attendant graciously placed bottles of water for us in the seat back pocket in front of us. We found them when the plane touched down in Budapest.</li>\r\n 	<li>We’d been to Budapest many times before, but this one would be different. Many of my wife’s aunts and uncles has passed away in the 12 years since our last visit, so there weren’t many family obligations -- just a long Saturday lunch the day before we left. Instead, this was probably the first time we saw Hungary as tourists.</li>\r\n 	<li>Before we visited, we checked with friends who had recently visited. What had they seen, enjoyed? Everyone loved Budapest. Scouting out places to stay, we abandoned what had been our usual Budapest Marriott perch on the Danube for so many years and instead headed east to District VII -- Erzsébetváros, the old Jewish Quarter. During our last visit in 2005, no one would’ve thought to go out here. But now, it’s full of restaurants, craft beer bars, a few Starbucks, and ruin pubs.</li>\r\n 	<li>We followed TravelCommons’ listener Arnoud Heijnis’ recommendation to check out what is the classic -- and perhaps the first -- ruin bar in Budapest -- Szimpla Kert. Arnoud’s description of it having a “pop-uppy kinda feel” was right on-point. You walk through a dingy, half-lit hallway, with a couple of bars on each side, into an open two-story courtyard ringed by, I dunno, another half-dozen bars across the two floors. There were at least a couple of English stag parties going on when we walked in -- one with whom I assumed was the groom-to-be dressed in a white ballerina tutu; the other group was wearing matching t-shirts fronted with a goofy picture of their groom-to-be.</li>\r\n 	<li>I saw a lot of those while we were in Budapest -- party groups wearing matching t-shirts; not so much the ballerina tutus. Budapest -- at least the redeveloped district we were in -- seems to have become a fly-in party town. Maybe the bankruptcy of the old state-run airline Malev left a vacuum for budget carriers to fill -- including WizzAir with a Budapest hub. And then Hungary hasn’t yet joined the euro, so it can devalue its currency, the forint, and look cheap to the rest of Europe. And it had lots of buildings available to repurpose -- starting with squatters setting up bars and dance clubs in abandoned buildings, then large sports bars, and then what seemed to me an amazing number of burger places. And they were all filled starting Thursday night, mostly with English speaking parties. A huge change from my first visit in 1989 when seemingly no one but my wife spoke English, and we’d walk into empty restaurants looking for lunch.</li>\r\n 	<li>Spending money in some of those bars, you’d think that Hungary is moving toward a parallel currency economy -- the forint and euro being used interchangeably -- similar to what I saw in Vietnam where I’d pay, say, a single taxi fare, in a combination of dong and dollar bills. In Budapest, you’ll get a bar tab in forint with a euro number printed below it. You can pay in euro, but you’ll probably get change back in forint. If it’s not too late in the evening, say your first or second bar, and so you haven’t yet lost your capability to do arithmetic, you’ll notice that the euro exchange rate isn’t quite in your favor. I started doing the math at each bar -- which, by the way, seemed to make a couple of bartenders nervous. The range of exchange rates on bar tabs was between 250 and 275 forint to the euro. The market rate was about 300 forint to the euro. In effect, the bars were charging an 8-16% convenience fee for letting you skip the ATM down the street.</li>\r\n 	<li>District VII is not the only part of Budapest that’s upgraded. Downtown Pest, along the Danube, looks spiffier. The Parliament building -- always an incredibly ornate building that dares you not to take multiple pictures of it as you walk past -- looked like it has been freshly steam cleaned. In ‘89, a soldier shooed my wife and I off the steps; this time we walked down into a nice visitors center, bought some tour tickets and were escorted up the Golden Staircase, under the huge dome, and past the crown jewels. And further south along the river, new developments, plazas, bars, bike paths have all sprung up -- again, in places we wouldn’t have thought of going 12 years ago. I understood why friends who had visited over the past year had enjoyed it.</li>\r\n 	<li>As much as I liked knocking around Budapest -- and running through most of District VII’s craft beer bars where, according to Untappd, Andrew and I tasted 43 Hungarian beers -- my favorite bit of the trip was the day we spent visiting wineries in the Tokaj wine region -- about 2½ hrs northeast of Budapest near the border with Slovakia. We hired the guy (<a href=\"http://www.tokajtoday.com/contact/\">Gergely Somogyi</a>) who runs the Tokaj Today web site as our guide. He came to our hotel, gave us a 30-minute PowerPoint presentation (plugged right into the hotel’s flat screen TV in the breakfast room) on Tokaj’s history, geography, geology, grape and wine types. And with this Intro to Tokaj information still looking for neurons to hang out in, we were off to visit four winemakers. And say that rather than wineries because we sat down with each of the winemakers -- the two more established --<a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/demeterzoltantokaj\">Zoltán Demeter</a> and <a href=\"http://www.bottpince.hu/\">Judit Bodo</a> -- in their tasting rooms, the two garagistas -- <a href=\"http://new2017.samueltinon.com/en/\">Mathilde Hulot</a> and <a href=\"http://abrahampince.com/english/\">Róbert Péter</a> -- their kitchens and patios -- for an hour or more each, talking about their wine, about Hungary, and about what they’re trying to do. Only one of the four -- Demeter -- is from Tokaj. The rest moved there to make wine -- Bodo from the Hungarian-speaking part of Slovakia, Peter from Budapest, and Hulot from France -- because of its history and its potential to make great wine.</li>\r\n 	<li>Each told a version of the same story -- of Tokaj’s history, wine knowledge, and wine quality being broken during the 40-some years of Communism -- abandoning the high-quality vineyards on the hills for lower-quality fields on the plains that could be harvested with big Russian tractors, 5-year government planning that pushed quantity over quality. And of how each of them came to Tokaj to flip that equation back to quality over quantity -- even the Tokaj local had to leave to jobs in California and France to learn quality winemaking before he came back. But they all feel challenged to get the entire community, the “locals,” on board. Maybe it’s some of the residue of Communism -- it’s easier to crank out industrial plonk than good wine. Maybe it’s because many of them can’t afford these new wines and so don’t appreciate them. Bodo said she specifically priced one wine so that local young people who now drink beer could afford to drink good local wine. To appreciate what they have here, she said, everyone has to be able to enjoy good wine -- not just the winemakers.</li>\r\n 	<li>I hate to truck in the wine industry cliche that these winemakers have a “passion” for what they’re doing, but my thesaurus fails me, I can’t find a better word. They all appreciated that we’d taken the time to drive out from Budapest to visit (if maybe a bit puzzled by doing everything in a day), and were very generous with their time and their wine. It was tough to limit ourselves to buying just one bottle per stop. I had to keep reminding myself that I’d only brought my small rollerboard with me.</li>\r\n 	<li>On our last night, we’re back in Budapest, knocking around District VII, looking for our last dinner. We’d had some great food -- a couple of Michelin one-stars, some food trucks near a ruin bar -- but it was tough to find some of the homey Hungarian food -- call it “peasant food” -- that we’d had in the past. And then we found it -- a bit cafeteria style -- I’ll take that sausage, the hurka with the pork liver and rice -- oh, and that one too, the regular kolbasz with pork, paprika and garlic -- some pickled salad, a bowl of gulyas soup, and, OK, just one last beer.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #130</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_130.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #130 — Notes from Hungary','','inherit','closed','closed','','1774-revision-v1','','','2017-09-29 16:57:15','2017-09-29 21:57:15','',1774,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/09/29/1774-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1828,1,'2017-09-29 17:07:48','2017-09-29 22:07:48','[caption id=\"attachment_1820\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/IMG_0548.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1820\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/IMG_0548-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Reduced Packing Requirements by 50%[/caption]\r\n\r\nIt\'s a  All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_133.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/339778145\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n<!--more-->\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #133:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL after what has been a light month of travel, just 10 days in Scotland on vacation, and then a quick overnight to Atlanta a couple of days after I returned. Other than that, I’ve been in Chicago trying to get back my body clock back to local time. Conventional wisdom says that your body will adjust at the rate of 1-2 time zones a day. So, for the 6 hours between Chicago and the UK, it should take me 3-5 days to adjust. I dunno, it’s felt longer than that. The older I get, the longer it seems to get.</li>\r\n 	<li>It’s also harder for me coming west than going east. When I go to Europe, I can set an alarm to wake up at the right time and will myself out of bed and into the shower. Back in the US, I can’t quite “will” myself back to sleep when I wake up at 2 or 3 in the morning. I did find, though, on this trip that I needed to be careful how long I stayed up the first couple of nights. My usual routine is to take a 30-minute nap the first afternoon I’m there -- say around 4:30 -- which then lets me push through to, say 10 or 11 that night. I’m then tired enough to get to sleep at what my body might still think is 5 or 6pm. This trip, I found that if I stayed up past midnight -- maybe because I got to reading something after getting back from dinner -- my body sorta tipped over that inflection point, caught a second, or is it a third wind, and would be happy to push through to 2 or 3 in the morning, which would make the morning’s alarm much tougher to handle.</li>\r\n 	<li>The United flight to and from Edinburgh was direct -- always nice -- but on an old 757 that had definitely seen better days, and many of them. Eight hours on any narrow body is tough, but on a 757 -- the narrowest of the narrow bodies -- it’s a bit tougher. And it was completely full -- nothing out-of-the-ordinary nowadays. Our flight from ORD landed shortly after the United direct from EWR landed, and so there was quite a queue for the non-EU passport line. Indeed, as we were coming off the jet bridge, an airport worker turned off the escalator and blocked it off. The end of the passport queue was beginning to block it on the floor below. So I reached into my backpack and pulled out my UK passport and was waved over to a set of four unmanned automated gates with no lines. I put my passport in, took my glasses off for the camera, and walked through when the gates opened up. It was pretty slick.</li>\r\n 	<li>I still had to wait for my wife and kids to work their way through the non-EU line, but I made some good use of the time -- I helped a mother and daughter from the EWR flight wrestle some amazing large bags onto a luggage cart, and had collected all of our luggage. If they had a Starbucks there in baggage claim like they do at ORD, it would’ve been damn close to a perfect morning.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/JeffSpeed68/54450\">Hula Hoop Party</a> by Stefan Kartenberg (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: Martijn de Boer, Blue Wave Theory</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Received some good comments on the last episode</li>\r\n 	<li>Nick -- no last name on the e-mail -- helped answer the question I had about arbitraging different European phone SIMs now that the EU had banned roaming charges. Nick writes -\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>You mentioned having 3 EU SIMs to choose from in Dublin, and working out the best value of the three.\r\nI live in the UK and have a UK SIM. If I go to Spain, and call a UK number (even if that number belongs to the person next to me) then I just pay a local rate call - or nothing if I have an unlimited calls account. However, if I call a Spanish number, then it counts as an overseas call, as if I were in the UK - even though I\'m in Spain. So which is the best SIM to use will to an extent depend on the actual call rates, but also which country it is registered in, and which country you are calling, independently of where you are.\r\nI hope that makes sense, and it\'s useful</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Nick, thanks for that. It makes a lot of sense when I recall that the EU wanted to eliminate roaming charges, so a mobile call from the UK is the same as one from Spain. For us, though, we’re rarely making a phone call. Indeed, I’m usually the only one making phone calls and that’s typically into a conference bridge. During our 10 days in Scotland, I used 11 of the 300 minutes in my 30 day plan. My wife’s 7 day plan ran out and she never noticed, because her 1 GB of data didn’t. And I think that’s where the arbitrage still could work, on using the cheapest data plan. That will, though, take a good bit of wading through really bad websites with confusing plan descriptions that are only partially in English. I think I’ll probably default to using my UK SIM just out of sheer laziness.</li>\r\n 	<li>Steve Frick left a comment on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page about the new parallel loading baggage X-ray machines I’ve encountered in the ATL PreCheck line. Steve writes -\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I agree with you that people are hesitant to jump the queue in front of others..... and you do need mad ninja skills if you\'re in the first slot trying to grab one of those oversized bins</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Steve linked to his blog post where he has video and a more detailed description of the situation. Check out the show notes for a <a href=\"http://www.hypeorlando.com/back-and-gone-again/2017/05/01/atlanta-hartsfield-has-automated-the-tsa-process/\">link to his blog</a></li>\r\n 	<li>I have to give the ATL TSA crew props for noticing the problem with breaking into the stream of bins if you’re in one of the front loading stations. When I was going through ATL a few weeks back, there was a TSA person at the parallel loading line choreographing each bin push, having everyone hold up until all the previous bins had cleared, and then having everyone push their bins onto the conveyor at once. I haven’t seen this problem with parallel loaders in, say, Edinburgh or Heathrow or Madrid. I wonder what’s different that requires this manual intervention.</li>\r\n 	<li>And there were a couple of comments on the travel apps people use on their smartphones. Dan Brener left this Facebook\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Great episode! Here\'s the apps I use the most: Air Canada and United, TripIt (although it\'s not as good as it could/should be), I used to use FlightTrack and really miss it, FlightAware since the AC app doesn\'t tell me where planes are coming from, Uber and Lyft, Packing (it\'s a list app to make sure I don\'t forget something obvious!), SPG, Yelp, Google Maps and Waze. There\'s a few others, but those are the main ones.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Dan, thanks for that list. I had forgotten to mention Yelp in the last episode. I have some colleagues who are heavy Yelp users; they’ll build lists of restaurants and bars before starting a project in a new city. I tend to use Yelp and the “Explore food &amp; drinks near you” feature in Google Maps for restaurant suggestions interchangeably when I’m in a new place. I’m always surprised at how different the recommendations often are.</li>\r\n 	<li>Gary Learned sent in on Twitter -\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>What I love about Lyft over Uber is their ability to produce a consolidated receipt of all my rides on a trip</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Thanks Gary. I’ve noticed that functionality in the Lyft app, but it’s not hugely useful for me since we use Concur for our T&amp;E reporting, and it picks up the individual Amex charges rather than a feed from Lyft. Would be handy if Concur would pull a single consolidated charge from Lyft.</li>\r\n 	<li>And finally, a couple of weeks later on Twitter, Eddie Antar, who is always a chuckle, said\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Binge listening to TC bc I had to let an AA voucher expire.? OTOH I\'m not being groped or dragged down the aisle screaming, so.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>I dunno, listening to my is better than being groped or dragged down the plane aisle. Feels a bit like being damned with very faint praise...</li>\r\n 	<li>And one last Tweet, this one from the Craig and Linda Martin of the Indie Travel Podcast…\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Highlight of the week? meeting fellow travel podcaster @mpeacock for lunch &amp; craft beer in Edinburgh. 10 or so years of podcast friendship</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Honestly, I think Linda and I had been trading e-mails for most of this year, seeing if we could physically meet up after so many years of knowing each other in the travel podcast universe. One of us would hear the other mention travel plans in a podcast that might overlap with the other’s. It finally came together at the end of our Scotland vacation and the beginning of theirs. They flew into EDI Sunday night; we were leaving from EDI Tuesday morning, so Monday lunch was the call. I drove over from St Andrews to a new neighborhood for me; kinda hip. Linda picked a nice pub with a great beer list that we all enjoyed. It is one of the great things about travel -- getting to meet up with friends; and in this case, for the first time.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/49674\">H2O</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Packing Pro Tips</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Getting everything I needed for our 10 days in Scotland into a carry-on bag pushed my packing skills just a bit. The trip was mostly hiking and hill walks with a couple of 1-star Michelin restaurants thrown into the mix. And the forecast was for rain just about every day. We were on a direct flight to EDI and my daughter had to check a bag with stuff she was taking back to university, so the carry-on limitation wasn’t because of lost luggage or being able to power past the baggage carousel -- a non-starter given the long non-EU immigration line at EDI. It was more about trunk space in the rental car. As it was, I was doing luggage jenga just about every morning trying to puzzle everything into the back of our Nissan X-Terra.</li>\r\n 	<li>I easily spent an hour -- 2-3 times longer than usual -- trying to figure out how to get hiking shoes, rain gear, dress shirts, and everything else into that 22-inch bag. It made me pack ruthlessly -- everything had to earn its space in the bag. And though I’ve casually mentioned some of these ideas in prior episodes, this latest packing experience really crystallized this pro tip list.</li>\r\n 	<li>First and foremost, pick a single color family for your clothes, and make it black. Three main reasons -- Black makes everyone look thinner, it spans casual to smart dress codes, and black doesn’t show stains. OK, the thinner thing is a nice-to-have, but hiding stains is key. I packed two pair of slacks and wore a third on the plane. I couldn’t be one-and-done because I took incoming from a fork-handling mishap.</li>\r\n 	<li>Second, no one-and-done outfits. Every piece of clothes has to serve multiple purposes so it can be worn multiple times -- every shirt has to work under multiple sweaters and has to go with more than one pair of pants. Versatility is key. And yet another reason to pack black.</li>\r\n 	<li>Third, think \"additively\"; pack layers. This was key in my last packing challenge too -- last year’s Spring Break trip to Iceland and Southern Spain that I talked about in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/05/30/podcast-121-tsa-lines-my-luggage-is-where/\">episode #121</a>. Pack multiple thin layers that you can pile on when it’s cold and wear separately when it’s not. Black sweaters and a black fleece vest are my layering go-to’s.</li>\r\n 	<li>Fourth, wear your bulkiest clothes on the flight. I packed the hiking rain shell and flew in the blazer I needed for the 1-stars because the shell is infinitely more crushable. My only caveat to this is shoes. I packed the hiking shoes, even though they were bulkier than the dressily casual walking shoes I was also bringing, because I didn’t want to set off the metal detector in the Pre-Check line or get pulled out because the soles are too thick. If you’re not doing Pre-Check, you’re already taking your shoes off, so wear your biggest ones.</li>\r\n 	<li>And my fifth and final pro tip, use a non-descript black rolling bag. Black not only makes you look thinner, it makes your bag look thinner to gate agents scanning for bag-sizer bait. My daughter had a baby blue roller bag for the longest time. She loved that color, and it was easy to spot on the luggage carousel, which is a good thing; it ended up there a lot because gate agents were always pulling my daughter out of line to gate check that bag. Her current bag is a dark eggplant purple. It’s not black, but it’s close. If you’re flying a budget airline that’s a stickler on size, use a hard-shell bag. It’ll keep its dimensions better when overstuffed, and the polycarbonate shell will slide past the metal bars of the sizer easier than the ballistic nylon of a soft-sided bag.</li>\r\n 	<li>There you go, my five packing pro tips. If you’ve got some of your own to share, send them along through the usual channels and we’ll have them on the next episode.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Traveling Injured</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>In a couple of <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/02/06/podcast-87-sick-on-the-road-whats-in-my-briefcase/\">past</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/03/13/podcast-88-new-travel-goodies-losing-status/\">episodes</a>, we’ve talked about how miserable it is to be sick on the road. Traveling injured is a bit similar, but not quite the same. While you’re not, say, shivering under hotel blankets after you’ve cranked the thermostat as high as it’ll go, you’re not powering through your day at 100%.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #132</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_133.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #133 — Packing Pro Tips; Traveling Injured','','inherit','closed','closed','','1819-revision-v1','','','2017-09-29 17:07:48','2017-09-29 22:07:48','',1819,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/09/29/1819-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1829,1,'2017-09-29 17:32:59','2017-09-29 22:32:59','[caption id=\"attachment_1820\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/IMG_0548.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1820\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/IMG_0548-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Reduced Packing Requirements by 50%[/caption]\r\n\r\nIt\'s a  All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_133.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/339778145\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n<!--more-->\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #133:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL after what has been a light month of travel, just 10 days in Scotland on vacation, and then a quick overnight to Atlanta a couple of days after I returned. Other than that, I’ve been in Chicago trying to get back my body clock back to local time. Conventional wisdom says that your body will adjust at the rate of 1-2 time zones a day. So, for the 6 hours between Chicago and the UK, it should take me 3-5 days to adjust. I dunno, it’s felt longer than that. The older I get, the longer it seems to get.</li>\r\n 	<li>It’s also harder for me coming west than going east. When I go to Europe, I can set an alarm to wake up at the right time and will myself out of bed and into the shower. Back in the US, I can’t quite “will” myself back to sleep when I wake up at 2 or 3 in the morning. I did find, though, on this trip that I needed to be careful how long I stayed up the first couple of nights. My usual routine is to take a 30-minute nap the first afternoon I’m there -- say around 4:30 -- which then lets me push through to, say 10 or 11 that night. I’m then tired enough to get to sleep at what my body might still think is 5 or 6pm. This trip, I found that if I stayed up past midnight -- maybe because I got to reading something after getting back from dinner -- my body sorta tipped over that inflection point, caught a second, or is it a third wind, and would be happy to push through to 2 or 3 in the morning, which would make the morning’s alarm much tougher to handle.</li>\r\n 	<li>The United flight to and from Edinburgh was direct -- always nice -- but on an old 757 that had definitely seen better days, and many of them. Eight hours on any narrow body is tough, but on a 757 -- the narrowest of the narrow bodies -- it’s a bit tougher. And it was completely full -- nothing out-of-the-ordinary nowadays. Our flight from ORD landed shortly after the United direct from EWR landed, and so there was quite a queue for the non-EU passport line. Indeed, as we were coming off the jet bridge, an airport worker turned off the escalator and blocked it off. The end of the passport queue was beginning to block it on the floor below. So I reached into my backpack and pulled out my UK passport and was waved over to a set of four unmanned automated gates with no lines. I put my passport in, took my glasses off for the camera, and walked through when the gates opened up. It was pretty slick.</li>\r\n 	<li>I still had to wait for my wife and kids to work their way through the non-EU line, but I made some good use of the time -- I helped a mother and daughter from the EWR flight wrestle some amazing large bags onto a luggage cart, and had collected all of our luggage. If they had a Starbucks there in baggage claim like they do at ORD, it would’ve been damn close to a perfect morning.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/JeffSpeed68/54450\">Hula Hoop Party</a> by Stefan Kartenberg (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: Martijn de Boer, Blue Wave Theory</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Received some good comments on the last episode</li>\r\n 	<li>Nick -- no last name on the e-mail -- helped answer the question I had about arbitraging different European phone SIMs now that the EU had banned roaming charges. Nick writes -\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>You mentioned having 3 EU SIMs to choose from in Dublin, and working out the best value of the three.\r\nI live in the UK and have a UK SIM. If I go to Spain, and call a UK number (even if that number belongs to the person next to me) then I just pay a local rate call - or nothing if I have an unlimited calls account. However, if I call a Spanish number, then it counts as an overseas call, as if I were in the UK - even though I\'m in Spain. So which is the best SIM to use will to an extent depend on the actual call rates, but also which country it is registered in, and which country you are calling, independently of where you are.\r\nI hope that makes sense, and it\'s useful</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Nick, thanks for that. It makes a lot of sense when I recall that the EU wanted to eliminate roaming charges, so a mobile call from the UK is the same as one from Spain. For us, though, we’re rarely making a phone call. Indeed, I’m usually the only one making phone calls and that’s typically into a conference bridge. During our 10 days in Scotland, I used 11 of the 300 minutes in my 30 day plan. My wife’s 7 day plan ran out and she never noticed, because her 1 GB of data didn’t. And I think that’s where the arbitrage still could work, on using the cheapest data plan. That will, though, take a good bit of wading through really bad websites with confusing plan descriptions that are only partially in English. I think I’ll probably default to using my UK SIM just out of sheer laziness.</li>\r\n 	<li>Steve Frick left a comment on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page about the new parallel loading baggage X-ray machines I’ve encountered in the ATL PreCheck line. Steve writes -\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I agree with you that people are hesitant to jump the queue in front of others..... and you do need mad ninja skills if you\'re in the first slot trying to grab one of those oversized bins</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Steve linked to his blog post where he has video and a more detailed description of the situation. Check out the show notes for a <a href=\"http://www.hypeorlando.com/back-and-gone-again/2017/05/01/atlanta-hartsfield-has-automated-the-tsa-process/\">link to his blog</a></li>\r\n 	<li>I have to give the ATL TSA crew props for noticing the problem with breaking into the stream of bins if you’re in one of the front loading stations. When I was going through ATL a few weeks back, there was a TSA person at the parallel loading line choreographing each bin push, having everyone hold up until all the previous bins had cleared, and then having everyone push their bins onto the conveyor at once. I haven’t seen this problem with parallel loaders in, say, Edinburgh or Heathrow or Madrid. I wonder what’s different that requires this manual intervention.</li>\r\n 	<li>And there were a couple of comments on the travel apps people use on their smartphones. Dan Brener left this Facebook\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Great episode! Here\'s the apps I use the most: Air Canada and United, TripIt (although it\'s not as good as it could/should be), I used to use FlightTrack and really miss it, FlightAware since the AC app doesn\'t tell me where planes are coming from, Uber and Lyft, Packing (it\'s a list app to make sure I don\'t forget something obvious!), SPG, Yelp, Google Maps and Waze. There\'s a few others, but those are the main ones.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Dan, thanks for that list. I had forgotten to mention Yelp in the last episode. I have some colleagues who are heavy Yelp users; they’ll build lists of restaurants and bars before starting a project in a new city. I tend to use Yelp and the “Explore food &amp; drinks near you” feature in Google Maps for restaurant suggestions interchangeably when I’m in a new place. I’m always surprised at how different the recommendations often are.</li>\r\n 	<li>Gary Learned sent in on Twitter -\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>What I love about Lyft over Uber is their ability to produce a consolidated receipt of all my rides on a trip</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Thanks Gary. I’ve noticed that functionality in the Lyft app, but it’s not hugely useful for me since we use Concur for our T&amp;E reporting, and it picks up the individual Amex charges rather than a feed from Lyft. Would be handy if Concur would pull a single consolidated charge from Lyft.</li>\r\n 	<li>And finally, a couple of weeks later on Twitter, Eddie Antar, who is always a chuckle, said\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Binge listening to TC bc I had to let an AA voucher expire.? OTOH I\'m not being groped or dragged down the aisle screaming, so.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>I dunno, listening to my is better than being groped or dragged down the plane aisle. Feels a bit like being damned with very faint praise...</li>\r\n 	<li>And one last Tweet, this one from the Craig and Linda Martin of the Indie Travel Podcast…\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Highlight of the week? meeting fellow travel podcaster @mpeacock for lunch &amp; craft beer in Edinburgh. 10 or so years of podcast friendship</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Honestly, I think Linda and I had been trading e-mails for most of this year, seeing if we could physically meet up after so many years of knowing each other in the travel podcast universe. One of us would hear the other mention travel plans in a podcast that might overlap with the other’s. It finally came together at the end of our Scotland vacation and the beginning of theirs. They flew into EDI Sunday night; we were leaving from EDI Tuesday morning, so Monday lunch was the call. I drove over from St Andrews to a new neighborhood for me; kinda hip. Linda picked a nice pub with a great beer list that we all enjoyed. It is one of the great things about travel -- getting to meet up with friends; and in this case, for the first time.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/49674\">H2O</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Packing Pro Tips</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Getting everything I needed for our 10 days in Scotland into a carry-on bag pushed my packing skills just a bit. The trip was mostly hiking and hill walks with a couple of 1-star Michelin restaurants thrown into the mix. And the forecast was for rain just about every day. We were on a direct flight to EDI and my daughter had to check a bag with stuff she was taking back to university, so the carry-on limitation wasn’t because of lost luggage or being able to power past the baggage carousel -- a non-starter given the long non-EU immigration line at EDI. It was more about trunk space in the rental car. As it was, I was doing luggage jenga just about every morning trying to puzzle everything into the back of our Nissan X-Terra.</li>\r\n 	<li>I easily spent an hour -- 2-3 times longer than usual -- trying to figure out how to get hiking shoes, rain gear, dress shirts, and everything else into that 22-inch bag. It made me pack ruthlessly -- everything had to earn its space in the bag. And though I’ve casually mentioned some of these ideas in prior episodes, this latest packing experience really crystallized this pro tip list.</li>\r\n 	<li>First and foremost, pick a single color family for your clothes, and make it black. Three main reasons -- Black makes everyone look thinner, it spans casual to smart dress codes, and black doesn’t show stains. OK, the thinner thing is a nice-to-have, but hiding stains is key. I packed two pair of slacks and wore a third on the plane. I couldn’t be one-and-done because I took incoming from a fork-handling mishap.</li>\r\n 	<li>Second, no one-and-done outfits. Every piece of clothes has to serve multiple purposes so it can be worn multiple times -- every shirt has to work under multiple sweaters and has to go with more than one pair of pants. Versatility is key. And yet another reason to pack black.</li>\r\n 	<li>Third, think \"additively\"; pack layers. This was key in my last packing challenge too -- last year’s Spring Break trip to Iceland and Southern Spain that I talked about in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/05/30/podcast-121-tsa-lines-my-luggage-is-where/\">episode #121</a>. Pack multiple thin layers that you can pile on when it’s cold and wear separately when it’s not. Black sweaters and a black fleece vest are my layering go-to’s.</li>\r\n 	<li>Fourth, wear your bulkiest clothes on the flight. I packed the hiking rain shell and flew in the blazer I needed for the 1-stars because the shell is infinitely more crushable. My only caveat to this is shoes. I packed the hiking shoes, even though they were bulkier than the dressily casual walking shoes I was also bringing, because I didn’t want to set off the metal detector in the Pre-Check line or get pulled out because the soles are too thick. If you’re not doing Pre-Check, you’re already taking your shoes off, so wear your biggest ones.</li>\r\n 	<li>And my fifth and final pro tip, use a non-descript black rolling bag. Black not only makes you look thinner, it makes your bag look thinner to gate agents scanning for bag-sizer bait. My daughter had a baby blue roller bag for the longest time. She loved that color, and it was easy to spot on the luggage carousel, which is a good thing; it ended up there a lot because gate agents were always pulling my daughter out of line to gate check that bag. Her current bag is a dark eggplant purple. It’s not black, but it’s close. If you’re flying a budget airline that’s a stickler on size, use a hard-shell bag. It’ll keep its dimensions better when overstuffed, and the polycarbonate shell will slide past the metal bars of the sizer easier than the ballistic nylon of a soft-sided bag.</li>\r\n 	<li>There you go, my five packing pro tips. If you’ve got some of your own to share, send them along through the usual channels and we’ll have them on the next episode.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Traveling Injured</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>In a couple of <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/02/06/podcast-87-sick-on-the-road-whats-in-my-briefcase/\">past</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/03/13/podcast-88-new-travel-goodies-losing-status/\">episodes</a>, we’ve talked about how miserable it is to be sick on the road. Traveling injured is a bit similar, but not quite the same. While you’re not, say, shivering under hotel blankets after you’ve cranked the thermostat as high as it’ll go, you’re not powering through your day at 100%.</li>\r\n 	<li>The most recent stint on travel injured reserve was our May trip to Hungary. My wife had left the week before to visit her aunt and cousins, leaving me alone with the cat. I was working from home one nice day and decided to take a break for a bike ride. Figured I should take every opportunity to burn some calories now since Hungarian food isn’t known as spa cuisine. I did my normal 17-mile circuit for the 50th or 60th time. Coming towards the last mile, I’m looking ahead to line up a turn and boom -- I hit some huge divot in the pavement that I’ve never seen before. My hands fly off the handle bar, I see the front wheel turned 90 degrees, and down I go, skidding across the asphalt. I come to a stop just short of the curb, pick myself up, rinse the visible road rash with the last bits of water in my bottle, and limp my bike and myself home.</li>\r\n 	<li>I immediately hit the shower, scrubbed out the road rash (with, as you might imagine, a bit of loud vocal commentary), and surveyed the damage. Good sized abrasions on my right elbow and forearm, my right butt cheek, both knees, and a line on my left chest where I must’ve popped the handle bar. I lost a bunch of skin, but felt lucky I didn’t break a collarbone or something worse.</li>\r\n 	<li>The Friday night flight to Vienna was not a comfortable one. No knock on Austrian Airlines; as I mentioned in an <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/06/24/podcast-130-notes-from-hungary/\">earlier podcast</a>, I was happy with their service. It was primarily the seat -- a standard coach seat, so not overly spacious -- pressing up against that large bit of road rash on my right, uhh, hip. Indeed, that abrasion was still -- I think “weeping” is the technical term. And so halfway through the flight, I was in the toilet with my tube of neosporin, my gauze pads and my surgical tape re-dressing it. It was either that or change pants. And following my packing pro tips, I couldn’t do a one-and-done on these pants. Luckily, I was in that quiet time between the after-dinner and the just-before-landing toilet rushes, so no banging on the door to hurry up.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #132</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_133.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #133 — Packing Pro Tips; Traveling Injured','','inherit','closed','closed','','1819-revision-v1','','','2017-09-29 17:32:59','2017-09-29 22:32:59','',1819,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/09/29/1819-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1830,1,'2017-09-30 20:31:20','2017-10-01 01:31:20','[caption id=\"attachment_1820\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/IMG_0548.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1820\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/IMG_0548-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Reduced Packing Requirements by 50%[/caption]\r\n\r\nIt\'s a  All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_133.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/339778145\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n<!--more-->\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #133:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL after what has been a light month of travel, just 10 days in Scotland on vacation, and then a quick overnight to Atlanta a couple of days after I returned. Other than that, I’ve been in Chicago trying to get back my body clock back to local time. Conventional wisdom says that your body will adjust at the rate of 1-2 time zones a day. So, for the 6 hours between Chicago and the UK, it should take me 3-5 days to adjust. I dunno, it’s felt longer than that. The older I get, the longer it seems to get.</li>\r\n 	<li>It’s also harder for me coming west than going east. When I go to Europe, I can set an alarm to wake up at the right time and will myself out of bed and into the shower. Back in the US, I can’t quite “will” myself back to sleep when I wake up at 2 or 3 in the morning. I did find, though, on this trip that I needed to be careful how long I stayed up the first couple of nights. My usual routine is to take a 30-minute nap the first afternoon I’m there -- say around 4:30 -- which then lets me push through to, say 10 or 11 that night. I’m then tired enough to get to sleep at what my body might still think is 5 or 6pm. This trip, I found that if I stayed up past midnight -- maybe because I got to reading something after getting back from dinner -- my body sorta tipped over that inflection point, caught a second, or is it a third wind, and would be happy to push through to 2 or 3 in the morning, which would make the morning’s alarm much tougher to handle.</li>\r\n 	<li>The United flight to and from Edinburgh was direct -- always nice -- but on an old 757 that had definitely seen better days, and many of them. Eight hours on any narrow body is tough, but on a 757 -- the narrowest of the narrow bodies -- it’s a bit tougher. And it was completely full -- nothing out-of-the-ordinary nowadays. Our flight from ORD landed shortly after the United direct from EWR landed, and so there was quite a queue for the non-EU passport line. Indeed, as we were coming off the jet bridge, an airport worker turned off the escalator and blocked it off. The end of the passport queue was beginning to block it on the floor below. So I reached into my backpack and pulled out my UK passport and was waved over to a set of four unmanned automated gates with no lines. I put my passport in, took my glasses off for the camera, and walked through when the gates opened up. It was pretty slick.</li>\r\n 	<li>I still had to wait for my wife and kids to work their way through the non-EU line, but I made some good use of the time -- I helped a mother and daughter from the EWR flight wrestle some amazing large bags onto a luggage cart, and had collected all of our luggage. If they had a Starbucks there in baggage claim like they do at ORD, it would’ve been damn close to a perfect morning.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/bridges/15563\">i knew</a> by bridges (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. Ft: shannonsongs</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Received some good comments on the last episode</li>\r\n 	<li>Nick -- no last name on the e-mail -- helped answer the question I had about arbitraging different European phone SIMs now that the EU had banned roaming charges. Nick writes -\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>You mentioned having 3 EU SIMs to choose from in Dublin, and working out the best value of the three.\r\nI live in the UK and have a UK SIM. If I go to Spain, and call a UK number (even if that number belongs to the person next to me) then I just pay a local rate call - or nothing if I have an unlimited calls account. However, if I call a Spanish number, then it counts as an overseas call, as if I were in the UK - even though I\'m in Spain. So which is the best SIM to use will to an extent depend on the actual call rates, but also which country it is registered in, and which country you are calling, independently of where you are.\r\nI hope that makes sense, and it\'s useful</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Nick, thanks for that. It makes a lot of sense when I recall that the EU wanted to eliminate roaming charges, so a mobile call from the UK is the same as one from Spain. For us, though, we’re rarely making a phone call. Indeed, I’m usually the only one making phone calls and that’s typically into a conference bridge. During our 10 days in Scotland, I used 11 of the 300 minutes in my 30 day plan. My wife’s 7 day plan ran out and she never noticed, because her 1 GB of data didn’t. And I think that’s where the arbitrage still could work, on using the cheapest data plan. That will, though, take a good bit of wading through really bad websites with confusing plan descriptions that are only partially in English. I think I’ll probably default to using my UK SIM just out of sheer laziness.</li>\r\n 	<li>Steve Frick left a comment on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page about the new parallel loading baggage X-ray machines I’ve encountered in the ATL PreCheck line. Steve writes -\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I agree with you that people are hesitant to jump the queue in front of others..... and you do need mad ninja skills if you\'re in the first slot trying to grab one of those oversized bins</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Steve linked to his blog post where he has video and a more detailed description of the situation. Check out the show notes for a <a href=\"http://www.hypeorlando.com/back-and-gone-again/2017/05/01/atlanta-hartsfield-has-automated-the-tsa-process/\">link to his blog</a></li>\r\n 	<li>I have to give the ATL TSA crew props for noticing the problem with breaking into the stream of bins if you’re in one of the front loading stations. When I was going through ATL a few weeks back, there was a TSA person at the parallel loading line choreographing each bin push, having everyone hold up until all the previous bins had cleared, and then having everyone push their bins onto the conveyor at once. I haven’t seen this problem with parallel loaders in, say, Edinburgh or Heathrow or Madrid. I wonder what’s different that requires this manual intervention.</li>\r\n 	<li>And there were a couple of comments on the travel apps people use on their smartphones. Dan Brener left this Facebook\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Great episode! Here\'s the apps I use the most: Air Canada and United, TripIt (although it\'s not as good as it could/should be), I used to use FlightTrack and really miss it, FlightAware since the AC app doesn\'t tell me where planes are coming from, Uber and Lyft, Packing (it\'s a list app to make sure I don\'t forget something obvious!), SPG, Yelp, Google Maps and Waze. There\'s a few others, but those are the main ones.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Dan, thanks for that list. I had forgotten to mention Yelp in the last episode. I have some colleagues who are heavy Yelp users; they’ll build lists of restaurants and bars before starting a project in a new city. I tend to use Yelp and the “Explore food &amp; drinks near you” feature in Google Maps for restaurant suggestions interchangeably when I’m in a new place. I’m always surprised at how different the recommendations often are.</li>\r\n 	<li>Gary Learned sent in on Twitter -\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>What I love about Lyft over Uber is their ability to produce a consolidated receipt of all my rides on a trip</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Thanks Gary. I’ve noticed that functionality in the Lyft app, but it’s not hugely useful for me since we use Concur for our T&amp;E reporting, and it picks up the individual Amex charges rather than a feed from Lyft. Would be handy if Concur would pull a single consolidated charge from Lyft.</li>\r\n 	<li>And finally, a couple of weeks later on Twitter, Eddie Antar, who is always a chuckle, said\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Binge listening to TC bc I had to let an AA voucher expire.? OTOH I\'m not being groped or dragged down the aisle screaming, so.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>I dunno, listening to my is better than being groped or dragged down the plane aisle. Feels a bit like being damned with very faint praise...</li>\r\n 	<li>And one last Tweet, this one from the Craig and Linda Martin of the Indie Travel Podcast…\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Highlight of the week? meeting fellow travel podcaster @mpeacock for lunch &amp; craft beer in Edinburgh. 10 or so years of podcast friendship</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Honestly, I think Linda and I had been trading e-mails for most of this year, seeing if we could physically meet up after so many years of knowing each other in the travel podcast universe. One of us would hear the other mention travel plans in a podcast that might overlap with the other’s. It finally came together at the end of our Scotland vacation and the beginning of theirs. They flew into EDI Sunday night; we were leaving from EDI Tuesday morning, so Monday lunch was the call. I drove over from St Andrews to a new neighborhood for me; kinda hip. Linda picked a nice pub with a great beer list that we all enjoyed. It is one of the great things about travel -- getting to meet up with friends; and in this case, for the first time.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/11510\">Funkist</a> - cdk dub mix by cdk (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: teru.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Packing Pro Tips</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Getting everything I needed for our 10 days in Scotland into a carry-on bag pushed my packing skills just a bit. The trip was mostly hiking and hill walks with a couple of 1-star Michelin restaurants thrown into the mix. And the forecast was for rain just about every day. We were on a direct flight to EDI and my daughter had to check a bag with stuff she was taking back to university, so the carry-on limitation wasn’t because of lost luggage or being able to power past the baggage carousel -- a non-starter given the long non-EU immigration line at EDI. It was more about trunk space in the rental car. As it was, I was doing luggage jenga just about every morning trying to puzzle everything into the back of our Nissan X-Terra.</li>\r\n 	<li>I easily spent an hour -- 2-3 times longer than usual -- trying to figure out how to get hiking shoes, rain gear, dress shirts, and everything else into that 22-inch bag. It made me pack ruthlessly -- everything had to earn its space in the bag. And though I’ve casually mentioned some of these ideas in prior episodes, this latest packing experience really crystallized this pro tip list.</li>\r\n 	<li>First and foremost, pick a single color family for your clothes, and make it black. Three main reasons -- Black makes everyone look thinner, it spans casual to smart dress codes, and black doesn’t show stains. OK, the thinner thing is a nice-to-have, but hiding stains is key. I packed two pair of slacks and wore a third on the plane. I couldn’t be one-and-done because I took incoming from a fork-handling mishap.</li>\r\n 	<li>Second, no one-and-done outfits. Every piece of clothes has to serve multiple purposes so it can be worn multiple times -- every shirt has to work under multiple sweaters and has to go with more than one pair of pants. Versatility is key. And yet another reason to pack black.</li>\r\n 	<li>Third, think \"additively\"; pack layers. This was key in my last packing challenge too -- last year’s Spring Break trip to Iceland and Southern Spain that I talked about in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/05/30/podcast-121-tsa-lines-my-luggage-is-where/\">episode #121</a>. Pack multiple thin layers that you can pile on when it’s cold and wear separately when it’s not. Black sweaters and a black fleece vest are my layering go-to’s.</li>\r\n 	<li>Fourth, wear your bulkiest clothes on the flight. I packed the hiking rain shell and flew in the blazer I needed for the 1-stars because the shell is infinitely more crushable. My only caveat to this is shoes. I packed the hiking shoes, even though they were bulkier than the dressily casual walking shoes I was also bringing, because I didn’t want to set off the metal detector in the Pre-Check line or get pulled out because the soles are too thick. If you’re not doing Pre-Check, you’re already taking your shoes off, so wear your biggest ones.</li>\r\n 	<li>And my fifth and final pro tip, use a non-descript black rolling bag. Black not only makes you look thinner, it makes your bag look thinner to gate agents scanning for bag-sizer bait. My daughter had a baby blue roller bag for the longest time. She loved that color, and it was easy to spot on the luggage carousel, which is a good thing; it ended up there a lot because gate agents were always pulling my daughter out of line to gate check that bag. Her current bag is a dark eggplant purple. It’s not black, but it’s close. If you’re flying a budget airline that’s a stickler on size, use a hard-shell bag. It’ll keep its dimensions better when overstuffed, and the polycarbonate shell will slide past the metal bars of the sizer easier than the ballistic nylon of a soft-sided bag.</li>\r\n 	<li>There you go, my five packing pro tips. If you’ve got some of your own to share, send them along through the usual channels and we’ll have them on the next episode.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/48705\">Jolanta Blues</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license.  Ft: Admiral Bob, Martijn de Boer</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Traveling Injured</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>In a couple of <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/02/06/podcast-87-sick-on-the-road-whats-in-my-briefcase/\">past</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/03/13/podcast-88-new-travel-goodies-losing-status/\">episodes</a>, we’ve talked about how miserable it is to be sick on the road. Traveling injured is a bit similar, but not quite the same. While you’re not, say, shivering under hotel blankets after you’ve cranked the thermostat as high as it’ll go, you’re not powering through your day at 100%.</li>\r\n 	<li>The most recent stint on travel injured reserve was our May trip to Hungary. My wife had left the week before to visit her aunt and cousins, leaving me alone with the cat. I was working from home one nice day and decided to take a break for a bike ride. Figured I should take every opportunity to burn some calories now since Hungarian food isn’t known as spa cuisine. I did my normal 17-mile circuit for the 50th or 60th time. Coming towards the last mile, I’m looking ahead to line up a turn and boom -- I hit some huge divot in the pavement that I’ve never seen before. My hands fly off the handle bar, I see the front wheel turned 90 degrees, and down I go, skidding across the asphalt. I come to a stop just short of the curb, pick myself up, rinse the visible road rash with the last bits of water in my bottle, and limp my bike and myself home.</li>\r\n 	<li>I immediately hit the shower, scrubbed out the road rash (with, as you might imagine, a bit of loud vocal commentary), and surveyed the damage. Good sized abrasions on my right elbow and forearm, my right butt cheek, both knees, and a line on my left chest where I must’ve popped the handle bar. I lost a bunch of skin, but felt lucky I didn’t break a collarbone or something worse.</li>\r\n 	<li>The Friday night flight to Vienna was not a comfortable one. No knock on Austrian Airlines; as I mentioned in an <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/06/24/podcast-130-notes-from-hungary/\">earlier podcast</a>, I was happy with their service. It was primarily the seat -- a standard coach seat, so not overly spacious -- pressing up against that large bit of road rash on my right, uhh, hip. Indeed, that abrasion was still -- I think “weeping” is the technical term. And so halfway through the flight, I was in the toilet with my tube of neosporin, my gauze pads and my surgical tape re-dressing it. It was either that or change pants. And following my packing pro tips, I couldn’t do a one-and-done on these pants. Luckily, I was in that quiet time between the after-dinner and the just-before-landing toilet rushes, so no banging on the door to hurry up.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #132</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_133.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #133 — Packing Pro Tips; Traveling Injured','','inherit','closed','closed','','1819-revision-v1','','','2017-09-30 20:31:20','2017-10-01 01:31:20','',1819,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/09/30/1819-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1831,1,'2017-09-30 21:00:02','2017-10-01 02:00:02','[caption id=\"attachment_1820\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/IMG_0548.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1820\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/IMG_0548-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> One Way to Reduce Packing Needs by 50%[/caption]\r\n\r\nFitting 10 days of clothes for rain, hiking, and Michelin restaurants into a 22-inch carry-on forced me to pack ruthlessly, and to distill my packing thoughts into 5 packing pro tips. Flying to Hungary right after a cycling accident reminded me of the hassles of traveling on the injured reserve list. All this and listener comments on EU mobile regulations, travel apps on smartphones, and the need for Atlanta baggage X-ray ninja skills at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_133.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/344794816\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n<!--more-->\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #133:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL after what has been a light month of travel, just 10 days in Scotland on vacation, and then a quick overnight to Atlanta a couple of days after I returned. Other than that, I’ve been in Chicago trying to get back my body clock back to local time. Conventional wisdom says that your body will adjust at the rate of 1-2 time zones a day. So, for the 6 hours between Chicago and the UK, it should take me 3-5 days to adjust. I dunno, it’s felt longer than that. The older I get, the longer it seems to get.</li>\r\n 	<li>It’s also harder for me coming west than going east. When I go to Europe, I can set an alarm to wake up at the right time and will myself out of bed and into the shower. Back in the US, I can’t quite “will” myself back to sleep when I wake up at 2 or 3 in the morning. I did find, though, on this trip that I needed to be careful how long I stayed up the first couple of nights. My usual routine is to take a 30-minute nap the first afternoon I’m there -- say around 4:30 -- which then lets me push through to, say 10 or 11 that night. I’m then tired enough to get to sleep at what my body might still think is 5 or 6pm. This trip, I found that if I stayed up past midnight -- maybe because I got to reading something after getting back from dinner -- my body sorta tipped over that inflection point, caught a second, or is it a third wind, and would be happy to push through to 2 or 3 in the morning, which would make the morning’s alarm much tougher to handle.</li>\r\n 	<li>The United flight to and from Edinburgh was direct -- always nice -- but on an old 757 that had definitely seen better days, and many of them. Eight hours on any narrow body is tough, but on a 757 -- the narrowest of the narrow bodies -- it’s a bit tougher. And it was completely full -- nothing out-of-the-ordinary nowadays. Our flight from ORD landed shortly after the United direct from EWR landed, and so there was quite a queue for the non-EU passport line. Indeed, as we were coming off the jet bridge, an airport worker turned off the escalator and blocked it off. The end of the passport queue was beginning to block it on the floor below. So I reached into my backpack and pulled out my UK passport and was waved over to a set of four unmanned automated gates with no lines. I put my passport in, took my glasses off for the camera, and walked through when the gates opened up. It was pretty slick.</li>\r\n 	<li>I still had to wait for my wife and kids to work their way through the non-EU line, but I made some good use of the time -- I helped a mother and daughter from the EWR flight wrestle some amazing large bags onto a luggage cart, and had collected all of our luggage. If they had a Starbucks there in baggage claim like they do at ORD, it would’ve been damn close to a perfect morning.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/bridges/15563\">i knew</a> by bridges (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. Ft: shannonsongs</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Received some good comments on the last episode</li>\r\n 	<li>Nick -- no last name on the e-mail -- helped answer the question I had about arbitraging different European phone SIMs now that the EU had banned roaming charges. Nick writes -\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>You mentioned having 3 EU SIMs to choose from in Dublin, and working out the best value of the three.\r\nI live in the UK and have a UK SIM. If I go to Spain, and call a UK number (even if that number belongs to the person next to me) then I just pay a local rate call - or nothing if I have an unlimited calls account. However, if I call a Spanish number, then it counts as an overseas call, as if I were in the UK - even though I\'m in Spain. So which is the best SIM to use will to an extent depend on the actual call rates, but also which country it is registered in, and which country you are calling, independently of where you are.\r\nI hope that makes sense, and it\'s useful</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Nick, thanks for that. It makes a lot of sense when I recall that the EU wanted to eliminate roaming charges, so a mobile call from the UK is the same as one from Spain. For us, though, we’re rarely making a phone call. Indeed, I’m usually the only one making phone calls and that’s typically into a conference bridge. During our 10 days in Scotland, I used 11 of the 300 minutes in my 30 day plan. My wife’s 7 day plan ran out and she never noticed, because her 1 GB of data didn’t. And I think that’s where the arbitrage still could work, on using the cheapest data plan. That will, though, take a good bit of wading through really bad websites with confusing plan descriptions that are only partially in English. I think I’ll probably default to using my UK SIM just out of sheer laziness.</li>\r\n 	<li>Steve Frick left a comment on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page about the new parallel loading baggage X-ray machines I’ve encountered in the ATL PreCheck line. Steve writes -\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I agree with you that people are hesitant to jump the queue in front of others..... and you do need mad ninja skills if you\'re in the first slot trying to grab one of those oversized bins</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Steve linked to his blog post where he has video and a more detailed description of the situation. Check out the show notes for a <a href=\"http://www.hypeorlando.com/back-and-gone-again/2017/05/01/atlanta-hartsfield-has-automated-the-tsa-process/\">link to his blog</a></li>\r\n 	<li>I have to give the ATL TSA crew props for noticing the problem with breaking into the stream of bins if you’re in one of the front loading stations. When I was going through ATL a few weeks back, there was a TSA person at the parallel loading line choreographing each bin push, having everyone hold up until all the previous bins had cleared, and then having everyone push their bins onto the conveyor at once. I haven’t seen this problem with parallel loaders in, say, Edinburgh or Heathrow or Madrid. I wonder what’s different that requires this manual intervention.</li>\r\n 	<li>And there were a couple of comments on the travel apps people use on their smartphones. Dan Brener left this Facebook\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Great episode! Here\'s the apps I use the most: Air Canada and United, TripIt (although it\'s not as good as it could/should be), I used to use FlightTrack and really miss it, FlightAware since the AC app doesn\'t tell me where planes are coming from, Uber and Lyft, Packing (it\'s a list app to make sure I don\'t forget something obvious!), SPG, Yelp, Google Maps and Waze. There\'s a few others, but those are the main ones.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Dan, thanks for that list. I had forgotten to mention Yelp in the last episode. I have some colleagues who are heavy Yelp users; they’ll build lists of restaurants and bars before starting a project in a new city. I tend to use Yelp and the “Explore food &amp; drinks near you” feature in Google Maps for restaurant suggestions interchangeably when I’m in a new place. I’m always surprised at how different the recommendations often are.</li>\r\n 	<li>Gary Learned sent in on Twitter -\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>What I love about Lyft over Uber is their ability to produce a consolidated receipt of all my rides on a trip</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Thanks Gary. I’ve noticed that functionality in the Lyft app, but it’s not hugely useful for me since we use Concur for our T&amp;E reporting, and it picks up the individual Amex charges rather than a feed from Lyft. Would be handy if Concur would pull a single consolidated charge from Lyft.</li>\r\n 	<li>And finally, a couple of weeks later on Twitter, Eddie Antar, who is always a chuckle, said\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Binge listening to TC bc I had to let an AA voucher expire.? OTOH I\'m not being groped or dragged down the aisle screaming, so.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>I dunno, listening to my is better than being groped or dragged down the plane aisle. Feels a bit like being damned with very faint praise...</li>\r\n 	<li>And one last Tweet, this one from the Craig and Linda Martin of the Indie Travel Podcast…\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Highlight of the week? meeting fellow travel podcaster @mpeacock for lunch &amp; craft beer in Edinburgh. 10 or so years of podcast friendship</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Honestly, I think Linda and I had been trading e-mails for most of this year, seeing if we could physically meet up after so many years of knowing each other in the travel podcast universe. One of us would hear the other mention travel plans in a podcast that might overlap with the other’s. It finally came together at the end of our Scotland vacation and the beginning of theirs. They flew into EDI Sunday night; we were leaving from EDI Tuesday morning, so Monday lunch was the call. I drove over from St Andrews to a new neighborhood for me; kinda hip. Linda picked a nice pub with a great beer list that we all enjoyed. It is one of the great things about travel -- getting to meet up with friends; and in this case, for the first time.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/11510\">Funkist</a> - cdk dub mix by cdk (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: teru.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Packing Pro Tips</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Getting everything I needed for our 10 days in Scotland into a carry-on bag pushed my packing skills just a bit. The trip was mostly hiking and hill walks with a couple of 1-star Michelin restaurants thrown into the mix. And the forecast was for rain just about every day. We were on a direct flight to EDI and my daughter had to check a bag with stuff she was taking back to university, so the carry-on limitation wasn’t because of lost luggage or being able to power past the baggage carousel -- a non-starter given the long non-EU immigration line at EDI. It was more about trunk space in the rental car. As it was, I was doing luggage jenga just about every morning trying to puzzle everything into the back of our Nissan X-Terra.</li>\r\n 	<li>I easily spent an hour -- 2-3 times longer than usual -- trying to figure out how to get hiking shoes, rain gear, dress shirts, and everything else into that 22-inch bag. It made me pack ruthlessly -- everything had to earn its space in the bag. And though I’ve casually mentioned some of these ideas in prior episodes, this latest packing experience really crystallized this pro tip list.</li>\r\n 	<li>First and foremost, pick a single color family for your clothes, and make it black. Three main reasons -- Black makes everyone look thinner, it spans casual to smart dress codes, and black doesn’t show stains. OK, the thinner thing is a nice-to-have, but hiding stains is key. I packed two pair of slacks and wore a third on the plane. I couldn’t be one-and-done because I took incoming from a fork-handling mishap.</li>\r\n 	<li>Second, no one-and-done outfits. Every piece of clothes has to serve multiple purposes so it can be worn multiple times -- every shirt has to work under multiple sweaters and has to go with more than one pair of pants. Versatility is key. And yet another reason to pack black.</li>\r\n 	<li>Third, think \"additively\"; pack layers. This was key in my last packing challenge too -- last year’s Spring Break trip to Iceland and Southern Spain that I talked about in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/05/30/podcast-121-tsa-lines-my-luggage-is-where/\">episode #121</a>. Pack multiple thin layers that you can pile on when it’s cold and wear separately when it’s not. Black sweaters and a black fleece vest are my layering go-to’s.</li>\r\n 	<li>Fourth, wear your bulkiest clothes on the flight. I packed the hiking rain shell and flew in the blazer I needed for the 1-stars because the shell is infinitely more crushable. My only caveat to this is shoes. I packed the hiking shoes, even though they were bulkier than the dressily casual walking shoes I was also bringing, because I didn’t want to set off the metal detector in the Pre-Check line or get pulled out because the soles are too thick. If you’re not doing Pre-Check, you’re already taking your shoes off, so wear your biggest ones.</li>\r\n 	<li>And my fifth and final pro tip, use a non-descript black rolling bag. Black not only makes you look thinner, it makes your bag look thinner to gate agents scanning for bag-sizer bait. My daughter had a baby blue roller bag for the longest time. She loved that color, and it was easy to spot on the luggage carousel, which is a good thing; it ended up there a lot because gate agents were always pulling my daughter out of line to gate check that bag. Her current bag is a dark eggplant purple. It’s not black, but it’s close. If you’re flying a budget airline that’s a stickler on size, use a hard-shell bag. It’ll keep its dimensions better when overstuffed, and the polycarbonate shell will slide past the metal bars of the sizer easier than the ballistic nylon of a soft-sided bag.</li>\r\n 	<li>There you go, my five packing pro tips. If you’ve got some of your own to share, send them along through the usual channels and we’ll have them on the next episode.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/48705\">Jolanta Blues</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license.  Ft: Admiral Bob, Martijn de Boer</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Traveling Injured</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>In a couple of <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/02/06/podcast-87-sick-on-the-road-whats-in-my-briefcase/\">past</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/03/13/podcast-88-new-travel-goodies-losing-status/\">episodes</a>, we’ve talked about how miserable it is to be sick on the road. Traveling injured is a bit similar, but not quite the same. While you’re not, say, shivering under hotel blankets after you’ve cranked the thermostat as high as it’ll go, you’re not powering through your day at 100%.</li>\r\n 	<li>The most recent stint on travel injured reserve was our May trip to Hungary. My wife had left the week before to visit her aunt and cousins, leaving me alone with the cat. I was working from home one nice day and decided to take a break for a bike ride. Figured I should take every opportunity to burn some calories now since Hungarian food isn’t known as spa cuisine. I did my normal 17-mile circuit for the 50th or 60th time. Coming towards the last mile, I’m looking ahead to line up a turn and boom -- I hit some huge divot in the pavement that I’ve never seen before. My hands fly off the handle bar, I see the front wheel turned 90 degrees, and down I go, skidding across the asphalt. I come to a stop just short of the curb, pick myself up, rinse the visible road rash with the last bits of water in my bottle, and limp my bike and myself home.</li>\r\n 	<li>I immediately hit the shower, scrubbed out the road rash (with, as you might imagine, a bit of loud vocal commentary), and surveyed the damage. Good sized abrasions on my right elbow and forearm, my right butt cheek, both knees, and a line on my left chest where I must’ve popped the handle bar. I lost a bunch of skin, but felt lucky I didn’t break a collarbone or something worse.</li>\r\n 	<li>The Friday night flight to Vienna was not a comfortable one. No knock on Austrian Airlines; as I mentioned in an <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/06/24/podcast-130-notes-from-hungary/\">earlier podcast</a>, I was happy with their service. It was primarily the seat -- a standard coach seat, so not overly spacious -- pressing up against that large bit of road rash on my right, uhh, hip. Indeed, that abrasion was still -- I think “weeping” is the technical term. And so halfway through the flight, I was in the toilet with my tube of neosporin, my gauze pads and my surgical tape re-dressing it. It was either that or change pants. And following my packing pro tips, I couldn’t do a one-and-done on these pants. Luckily, I was in that quiet time between the after-dinner and the just-before-landing toilet rushes, so no banging on the door to hurry up.</li>\r\n 	<li>Every day was like that -- 30 minutes of removing and reapplying dressings, at first 3 times a day, then 2, and then when things finally scabbed up a bit, just in the morning, and really by then as much for cosmetic purposes -- so that people wouldn’t ask me about it -- as much as anything. I had to skip the family trip to a Budapest thermal bath -- I didn’t want some bath guard calling me out of the pool in front of a couple of thousand Hungarians, and I honestly wasn’t sure how aggressively they were chlorinating that water.</li>\r\n 	<li>That wasn’t my most awkward stint on the travel injured reserve list. Last year, I squeezed in a dermatologist appt for a mole scan before a flight out that afternoon. The doc said “This one looks a bit suspect”, putting his finger on a mole right in the middle of my back. He numbed it up, shaved it off, sent it off to the lab and bandaged me up. “Change that dressing every day,” he said as I raced out to head to ORD. The next morning, in a hotel bathroom, by myself, looking in the mirror at the gauze dressing between my shoulder blades that I couldn’t reach, I wondered how I could change that dressing -- call the front desk, ask a colleague? That seemed way too much to ask. And, it wasn’t that big of a mole. That dressing could wait ‘til Friday.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #133</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_133.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #133 — Packing Pro Tips; Traveling Injured','','inherit','closed','closed','','1819-revision-v1','','','2017-09-30 21:00:02','2017-10-01 02:00:02','',1819,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/09/30/1819-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1832,1,'2017-09-30 21:21:59','2017-10-01 02:21:59','[caption id=\"attachment_1722\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/IMG_0215a.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1722\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/IMG_0215a-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Last generation digital security[/caption]\r\n\r\nIn this episode, I talk again about digital security on the road, especially the use of a VPN. I review three VPN products, including <a href=\"http://nordvpn.com\" target=\"_blank\">NordVPN</a> which is giving away a year\'s subscription to a TravelCommons listener. I dig into the process of generating the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/12/12/top-10-holiday-travel-tips-2/\" target=\"_blank\">Top 10 Holiday Travel Tips</a> listicle I do every couple of year, and follow up on stories from Uber and Lyft drivers. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_127.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_127.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #127:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, in the midst of my third straight week at home. It is yet another sign of the impending apocalypse. All just can’t be right with the world - the office manager is nervous that I’m in the office for days in a row, my friends are shocked that I’m available during the week for a beer, my wife is tired of cooking dinner for me, and the cat is visibly pissed (in his own kitty way) that I’m taking up space on the couch. But, I am getting current on my doctor and dentist appointments, and I was able to get a haircut in a timely manner. Though these may seem little things, they can be a pain to get done when you’re traveling every week, and weekend appointments are a scarce commodity. Convenient, if not a bit boring.</li>\r\n 	<li>It also means I’ve missed 1 Delta and 2 United system outages and the associated ground-stops and cancellations, as well as getting stranded in last weekend’s East Coast winter storm. Those of you who follow me on Twitter have got to be happy about the lull in bitch tweeting.</li>\r\n 	<li>And I’ve also been around to provide real-time advice and counsel to my wife as she’s been planning our family spring break trip -- this year we’re skipping the Iberian Peninsula and going to Paris. I’m not sure how much she really appreciates my immediate reactions, but…. The house is awash with guidebooks -- except, of course, for Rick Steves. I pulled out the 2016 review copy of <a href=\"https://www.dk.com/us/9781465440839-top-10-paris/\" target=\"_blank\">DK’s Top 10 Paris</a>, the credenza looks like my wife cleared out the local library, and we have print outs of a bunch of web pages. I dunno,I guess I’m a visual and tactile person. When I’m trying to wrap my head around a bunch of disparate data sources, I still have to go physical -- print it out and spread it out. Or maybe this is just a fancy way to say I’m old.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Javolenus/41932\">Ianiscus</a> by Javolenus (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/\">Attribution (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Wired_Ant</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Just a heads up, I’ll be announcing a new giveaway later on in this episode. And since I can’t figure out how to create MP3 chapter marks in Adobe Audition, you’ll have listen all the way through.</li>\r\n 	<li>Rummaging through the mailbag…\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Dan Gradwohl dropped me a line agreeing with my complaint in the last episode about the small print size on most hotel shampoo and conditioner bottles. And, like me, he like Hyatt Place’s solution -- print a big “1” on the shampoo, a big “2” on the conditioner, and a big “3” on the shower gel. No need then to wear your reading glasses in the shower then. Dan also said that he “really liked” the music in the last episode. I can’t take credit for that. I outsourced the music search to my daughter Claire who was home for Winter Break. Since she received what may be the first positive comment about the music in 12 years, I asked her to to help me with this episode too.</li>\r\n 	<li>Long-time listener Robert Fenerty hit the TravelCommons website to comment on my pay-as-you-go SIM travails -- “Not many people are courageous enough to admit what a time sink it can be to find, purchase and setup a local SIM card. Sometimes it’s easy, the many Heathrow SIM vending machines being a great example. And Austria is a breeze. But outside of western countries, I’ve had to hand over my passport, stand in long lines, and try to explain “no, I need the one with data” to clerks whose language I don’t speak. Once I found out after leaving the store that my SIM was not properly initialized. Please go back to square one. The Verizon Travelpass is a great alternative for those 2-3 day trips. It’s often less expensive than the local SIM and it’s about as painless to enable/disable as you can imagine. Please keep up the good work, the beer tips, and the warm sentiments from the road. Your podcast has become an old friend that I have over for dinner every once in awhile.”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Robert, thanks for that post. What a nice way of putting it -- the podcast becoming an old friend. I haven’t heard it put that way before, but it’s a huge compliment.</li>\r\n 	<li>Looking at SIMs for our Paris trip next month, the new upstart network provider sells their SIMs through vending machines, so I think I’ll skip the Orange phone store and give the new guys a try. I’m not a Verizon phone customer, but many of my Verizon-using friend swear by Travelpass as being dead-simple. AT&amp;T finally matched that offer last month with their International Day Pass -- $10/day and it looks about as simple. An AT&amp;T-using friend who’ll be on an Asian cruise next month plans to use it. And that seems to be a perfect use case -- he’ll be in a different country every day.</li>\r\n 	<li>One of things we’ll be working on before the Paris trip is not to forget anything critical when we leave for the airport. Many years ago, we get out of the cab at ORD’s International Terminal for a family trip to London. I’m pulling the bags out of the trunk ...and there’s one missing. I send my family through to check-in and boarding while I hop back into the cab to run back home. I open the front door, and there’s the forgotten bag in the middle of the hallway. We only live a 25-min drive from ORD and luckily there was no traffic, and I had status on Virgin Atlantic at the time. I made it to the gate just before boarding was called. That memory seared in our brains, we never make that mistake again… until Sept when we were heading over to Scotland. We’re in the cab and my wife asks me “Do you have my passport?” Nope, thought you had it. At least we figured this out before we hit the airport. The driver makes an illegal U-turn across the tollway media and we sprint back home to find the passport sitting on my desk. It was only a 15-min backtrack this time, so we still got to ORD in time to get a sandwich at Tortas Frontera. But it was a wake-up call -- never be complacent about stupidity.</li>\r\n 	<li>We were in San Francisco a few weekends back. Always an interesting time, especially with 80,000 people marching through the center of town on Saturday. We stayed at the Westin St Francis on Union Square -- decided to go old-school for the weekend. It rained most of the weekend, which emptied out the cab rank outside the St Francis, which meant we did more ride-shares and less walking. I have both Uber and Lyft on my phone, so I’d pop them both open and compare wait times and pricing. Even with the rain, the wait times rarely topped 3 min -- which is almost instantaneous in the traffic around Union Square. I was amazed at the number of animated cars swarming the area. Continuing my research from a couple of episodes ago, I’d talk with each driver about how their gig was going. I was surprised at the overwhelming preference for Lyft over Uber. Lyft pays more than Uber, they said. Many said they only take Uber rides when they think they can hit Uber’s incentive bonuses. If not, they tend to Lyft. And they said the Lyft riders tended to be nicer, more considerate. Since I was using both apps, I didn’t quite know what to make of that. Our Sunday morning driver told us he drives solely for Lyft; he quit after Uber trialed driverless cars in San Francisco. He said it was just another proof point that Uber doesn’t care about its drivers. We ended up taking mostly Lyft that weekend.</li>\r\n 	<li>This echoed what I’d heard from an Uber and Lyft driver in Charlottesville, VA last month. This guy was a super driver -- he’d done 85,000 miles last year. He also preferred Lyft because they paid more, but said that he gets more rides from Uber. He lives in Charlottesville, but heads over to Richmond to drive when UVa is on break. He was planning to head up to DC for inauguration weekend, figuring the surge pricing would make it worth his while. I’ve never talked to anyone who is working the system as hard as this guy.</li>\r\n 	<li>Back home, telling our son Andrew about all this, he came down firmly on Uber’s side, because Uber can’t cancel a ride. He’s had too many Chicago Lyft drivers cancel on him. He deleted the<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/2017-02-20-08.37.43.png\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1729\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/2017-02-20-08.37.43-169x300.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"169\" height=\"300\" /></a> Lyft app off his phone and is exclusively Uber.</li>\r\n 	<li>Last month, I was back flying one of my usual routes from the ‘90’s -- ORD-DTW -- complete with the original aircraft -- an AA MD-80. That 2-3 cabin configuration and the what-now-seem-like half-height overhead bins. At least it was an original American MD-80, not one of TWA ones they held onto after that merger. The AA ones are actually not a bad plane if you’re toward the front, away from the engines in the back. They seem to have more rows of extra leg room Main Cabin Extra seats than the newer A319s and 320s. At some point during the flight, my row mate looks down at my phone and asks “How are you charging your phone? There aren’t any plugs here”. She was kinda right -- no regular two-prong AC plugs. But I knew from years of flying these planes (I first started flying American in 1985 -- when these MD-80s were in their prime), that down between the seats, I’d find an old cigarette lighter outlet. And I still carry a lighter power adapter for that 10% of the time Hertz sticks me with a beater rental that doesn’t have a USB plug -- or for times like this when I’m flying AA’s beater plane.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/48914\">In Peace (Somewhere Else Mix)</a> by cdk (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/\">Attribution (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Snowflake</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Critiquing my Top 10 Travel Tips</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Every couple of years, I bow to the search engine gods at Google and create a listicle -- an awful mashup word of list and article. They’re kinda click-baity. You see them on places like Mashable -- “Top 10 Ways to Hack Your Morning Routine” or “The 10 most cringeworthy advertising fails of 2015” (I didn’t make these up). But they exist because people search for them. So in December when my last listicle has rolled off the front page of TravelCommons, I create another one titled just like the last one -- “Top 10 Holiday Travel Tips”. And how do they score? When I searched just now for “Top 10 Holiday Travel Tips”, a Google+ posting for my 2013 edition made the first page of results -- albeit the last entry -- and last December’s, the most recent, made the top of the second page. Not too bad…</li>\r\n 	<li>When I write each new edition, I do try to think about what are today’s top 10 rather than just blindly copy-pasting the last post, although there is a good chunk of repetition -- “Fly Non-Stop” and “Skip the Tight Connection” are as valid today as they were 12 years ago when I started this podcast.\r\nThough they might also seem a bit obvious to even a slightly seasoned traveler. So I also have tried to weave in a few, if not Pro Tips, then at least a next level of insight. In 2013, I suggested buying status for the lead adult in the travel party. The rationale went like this -- for $20, you can take your whole family through the status security line and early boarding because I’ve never seen a security screener or gate agent split up a family.<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/2017-02-20-08.37.58.png\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1728\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/2017-02-20-08.37.58-169x300.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"169\" height=\"300\" /></a></li>\r\n 	<li>I’ve also consistently recommended that people use Twitter as an alternate way into customer service, “at addressing” an airline or hotel as a way to jump what might be a long queue in front of a gate agent or front-desk clerk. I don’t think a lot of folks realize the sophistication and focus that many companies put on monitoring social media. My tweet about that American MD-80 generated a quick reply from American -- “We\'re currently working on updating our fleet, Mark…” And while not exactly travel-related, AT&amp;T has now followed up with me twice over Twitter about a cellular service problem I was having last week. I gave this advice to a friend who called me from ORD on Christmas Day. Korean Air wouldn’t let him and his family board their flight to Hanoi because they didn’t have Vietnamese visas -- a new requirement that had just hit a couple of days earlier. They couldn’t find anyone to help them. Between the “at” Tweeting and sheer persistence, they finally found a way to get on the plane.</li>\r\n 	<li>I used to have “bring a portable battery pack” -- like a lipstick charger -- or a small power strip on my list because of the dearth of electrical outlets in airports. One listener recommended stalking cleaning crews to find hidden outlets. But now -- finally -- with long overdue gate area refreshes, airlines are adding accessible outlets -- either in new work areas or power “pylons” sponsored by Samsung or Verizon. So while I still carry a battery pack and often find it useful, it’s fallen out of the Top 10.</li>\r\n 	<li>Back in 2014, I did break it up a bit. Instead of a classic “Top 10” listicle, I offered Airport Etiquette tips -- things like “when traveling with your family, don’t stroll 4 abreast down the concourse” and “the airport Starbucks isn’t like your neighborhood one; keep your coffee order to 3 adjectives or less”. That article is nowhere to be found on the Google search page.</li>\r\n 	<li>What is the top travel pro tip that you’re handing out to your friends? Sending one in will be part of the giveaway I’ll announce in the next topic.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music --<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/35724\">Blue Like Venus</a> by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/\">Attribution (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Admiral Bob</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Reviewing VPNs</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/12/20/podcast-119-digital-security-on-the-road-us-airports-getting-better/\">episode #119</a>, I talked about digital security on the road, and the topic has turned into a persistent thread across episodes, which makes sense given the Chinese water torture-type steady drip, drip, drip of cyber breach announcements. Frequent travelers could be considered a high risk group because, being away from their homes and offices, heavily rely on public networks -- airports, hotels, Starbucks -- to work (and play) in today’s digitized -- what, economy, society, street corner?</li>\r\n 	<li>VPNs -- virtual private networks -- have two main use cases for the frequent traveler -- privacy on public networks and location shifting. VPNs accomplish these by altering the routing of the network traffic in and out of your PC, tablet or smartphone. What you’re putting out onto the Internet is encrypted so eavesdroppers -- like the guy wearing the hoodie in the dark corner of the Starbucks (to truck in stereotypes) running a packet sniffer -- can’t read what you’re browsing or e-mailing. And then the VPN routes your encrypted traffic to that it looks like you’re using the Internet from a different location -- what’s called the VPN “endpoint”</li>\r\n 	<li>So how much privacy do you really need, and is it worth the additional hassle of using a VPN? Like everything, it depends. Being a consultant, you’ll forgive me for giving into my reflex of distilling it down to a 2x2 matrix -- on what you’re doing, and how paranoid you are. In the low paranoid/high privacy need box I put things like on-line banking and filling out your Global Entry app. Lots of personal information there that you don’t want Mr Hoodie to hoover up and post on some dark web hacking site. In the low privacy need/high paranoid box, I’d put reading Mashable listicles or browsing porn site -- embarrassing if someone posted that info on your Facebook page, but they couldn’t drain your bank account.</li>\r\n 	<li>The location shifting use case -- I’m in Beijing but the Internet thinks I’m in Chicago -- only really comes into play for international travelers. Like when I’m in Madrid but wanting to stream the NCAA basketball tournament, or when my daughter in Scotland wants to watch “Friends” reruns (don’t ask me why) which is only on US Netflix. I also use VPNs whenever I’m in Beijing to hit Facebook and Twitter which are blocked by the “Great Firewall of China”.</li>\r\n 	<li>I looked at two highly rated software VPNs -- <a href=\"https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Private Internet Access</a> (PIA) and <a href=\"https://nordvpn.com/\" target=\"_blank\">NordVPN</a> -- and a Kickstarter hardware-based VPN, <a href=\"http://www.homingsystems.com/alwayshome-duo\" target=\"_blank\">AlwaysHome</a>, that I reviewed last fall in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/09/28/podcast-124-craft-beer-hunting-i-hate-rick-steves/\">episode #124</a>.</li>\r\n 	<li>PIA and NordVPN are quick to set up -- go to their website, buy a subscription (promotions change all the time, but when I’m writing this, PIA has discounted their annual subscription to $40 while NordVPN’s is at $79), download, install and run their software (VPN client), pick a VPN endpoint (which country do you want the Internet to think you’re coming from), and off you go. And the next time you access the Internet, you need to remember to start the client and pick an endpoint, unless you set the client to start automatically each time you log in.</li>\r\n 	<li>AlwaysHome, the hardware VPN, takes a bit more planning. You need to buy a pair of USB dongles and a service subscription (right now $180 for the dongles and a year’s service), plug one into your home router, and then take the second with you in your laptop bag.</li>\r\n 	<li>I tested the software VPNs on three platforms -- a Windows 10 PC hardwired into a network, a Samsung tablet running Android 6.0.1 (Marshmallow) on WiFi, and an iPhone 7 running iOS 10.2 on WiFi and AT&amp;T LTE mobile data.</li>\r\n 	<li>I first looked at performance -- how much speed was I giving up for the additional encryption and routing that gives me privacy? The Windows PC had the lowest penalty -- both VPNs cut upload and download speeds by about 6%. They also the same on the iPhone on WiFi, though the download penalty increased to 11%. Don’t know if this is an iOS limitation or something else. On the Samsung Android tablet on WiFi, NordVPNs download was on par with Windows PC -- about 6% on downloads -- while PIA was 25% slower on downloads. This one has to be marked down to PIA’s Android client.</li>\r\n 	<li>The really interesting result was on the iPhone on AT&amp;T’s LTE service. The download penalty on LTE was around 83% for both NordVPN and PIA. Must have something to do with AT&amp;T’s LTE service. And while interesting, it probably has the least practical value. Other than triple-paranoid people, I’m not sure why someone would tack a VPN onto their cellular connection.</li>\r\n 	<li>Accessing US Netflix from abroad is kinda the acid test for location shifting. Netflix, prompted by their content suppliers, has been the most aggressive service in blocking VPN endpoints; blocking people from outside the US streaming content that Netflix has only licenses in the US. I asked my daughter Claire, who’s at University of St Andrews in the UK, to test each VPN with her Netflix “Friends” test. PIA failed; Netflix served up its “blocked” screen. NordVPN let her log into US Netflix, though she said the connection was slow; probably the result of the lousy BT service coming into her flat over a chip shop. AlwaysHome did the best -- no Netflix blocking because it looks like she’s logging in from our house, and the best connection over the BT service because the AlwaysHome hardware lets it do accelerate network traffic in a way that the software VPNs can’t.</li>\r\n 	<li>I also asked Claire for her thoughts on the NordVPN and PIA software clients. She liked the NordVPN client better -- more graphic, easier to understand. The PIA client is a bit more stripped down. But she also liked that, with the AlwaysHome VPN, she didn’t have to install any software -- just connect to its WiFi.</li>\r\n 	<li>Sorting it all out, it you want an easy VPN solution that allows you to use Netflix when you’re overseas, go with NordVPN. If you want the cheapest solution that’s a bit more stripped down and you’re not running Android, then go with PIA. If you want the best Netflix experience from, say, a vacation rental that doesn’t require you to navigate WiFi login pages and you can plan a couple of weeks ahead, try AlwaysHome.</li>\r\n 	<li><em>NordVPN provided me a free month of their VPN service for testing purposes. I purchased a PIA subscription with my own money. Homing Systems sent me a AlwaysHome Duo free of charge for me to review. I was not paid for this review. The opinions expressed in this episode are my own. </em></li>\r\n 	<li>Now, for the giveaway. NordVPN has given me a year’s subscription to give away to one lucky TravelCommons listener. Go to the TravelCommons website and check out the top post to enter the raffle. It’ll be open for 10 days from the posting of this episode -- which, if I have my calendar math right, is March 2. Come by the website and enter for a shot to be more cyber-secure for a year. And thanks to the folks at NordVPN for this giveaway.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #127</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/\">ccMixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_127.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #127 — Critiquing My Top 10 Travel Tips; Reviewing VPNs','','inherit','closed','closed','','1723-revision-v1','','','2017-09-30 21:21:59','2017-10-01 02:21:59','',1723,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/09/30/1723-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1835,1,'2017-10-18 13:30:50','2017-10-18 18:30:50','[caption id=\"attachment_1703\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/File_000.jpeg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1703\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/File_000-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> Carefully thought-out carry-on luggage[/caption]\n\nMy longest packing sessions involve trying to get 10-14 days of clothes for multiple climates and/or activities into a single 22-inch carry-on bag.&nbsp; Two years ago, it was packing for a March trip that spanned Iceland and Southern Spain. Last month, it was a 10-day drive through Scotland with clothes for rainy day hikes and one<span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">-star Michelin restaurants. It makes me&nbsp;pack ruthlessly -- everything has to earn its space in the bag. And through these packing sessions, I\'ve developed this list of packing pro tips.</span>\n<ol>\n 	<li><strong>Pick a single color family for your clothes, and make it black</strong>. Three reasons: black makes everyone look thinner, it spans casual to smart dress codes, and black doesn’t show stains. The thinner thing is a nice-to-have, but hiding stains is key. I usually pack two pair of slacks and wear a third on the plane. I can\'t be one-and-done on a pair of pants because of incoming from a fork-handling mishap.</li>\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><strong>No one-and-done outfits</strong>. Every piece of clothes has to serve multiple purposes so it can be worn multiple times. Every shirt has to work under multiple sweaters and has to go with more than one pair of pants. Versatility is key. And another reason to pack black.</span></li>\n 	<li><strong>Think additively; pack layers</strong>. This was the key to solving my Iceland-Spain packing challenge. Pack multiple thin layers that you can pile on when it’s cold and wear separately when it’s not. Black sweaters and a black fleece vest are my layering go-to’s.</li>\n 	<li><strong>Leave the workout gear at home</strong>. Gym shoes take up a huge amount of space, which can be filled with a couple of sweaters and a second week of socks and understuff. Ditch the taxis, Ubers, and rental cars, and get your exercise by walking everywhere instead.</li>\n 	<li><strong>Wear your bulkiest clothes on the flight</strong>. On the trip to Scotland, I packed the hiking rain shell and flew in the blazer I needed for the one-stars because the shell was infinitely more crushable. My only caveat to this rule is shoes. For Scotland, I packed the hiking shoes even though they were bulkier. I didn’t want to set off the metal detector in the Pre-Check line or get pulled out by the TSA because the soles were too thick. If you’re not doing Pre-Check, you’re already taking your shoes off, so wear your biggest ones.</li>\n 	<li><strong>Use a nondescript black rolling bag</strong>. Black not only makes you look thinner, it makes your bag look thinner to gate agents scanning for bag-sizer bait. My daughter had a baby blue roller bag for the longest time. She loved that color, and it was easy to spot on the luggage carousel, which was a good thing. It ended up there a lot because gate agents were always pulling my daughter out of line to gate check that bag.&nbsp; If you’re flying a budget airline that’s a stickler on size, use a hard-shell bag. It’ll keep its dimensions better when overstuffed, and the polycarbonate shell will slide past the metal bars of the sizer easier than the ballistic nylon of a soft-sided bag.&nbsp;But if you’re working against weight limits as well as dimensions on international budget carriers like Wow Air, you want the lightest, most stripped down bag possible. You don’t want the extra weight of the hard siding. You probably don’t even want very sturdy wheels; just the lightest covering around your clothes that you can find.</li>\n</ol>','Ruthless Packing Tips','','publish','closed','closed','','ruthless-packing-tips','','','2021-09-29 21:47:38','2021-09-30 02:47:38','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=1835',0,'post','',0),
(1836,1,'2017-10-17 21:22:07','2017-10-18 02:22:07','[caption id=\"attachment_1703\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/File_000.jpeg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1703\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/File_000-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Carefully thought-out carry-on luggage[/caption]\r\n\r\nMy longest packing sessions involve trying to get 10-14 days of clothes for multiple climates and/or activities into a single 22-inch carry-on bag.  Two years ago, it was packing for a March trip that spanned Iceland and Southern Spain. Last month, it was a 10-day drive through Scotland with clothes for rainy day hikes and one<span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">-star Michelin restaurants. It makes me pack ruthlessly -- everything has to earn its space in the bag. And through these packing sessions, I\'ve developed this list of packing pro tips.</span>\r\n<ol>\r\n 	<li><strong>Pick a single color family for your clothes, and make it black</strong>. Three reasons: black makes everyone look thinner, it spans casual to smart dress codes, and black doesn’t show stains. The thinner thing is a nice-to-have, but hiding stains is key. I usually pack two pair of slacks and wear a third on the plane. I can\'t be one-and-done on a pair of pants because of incoming from a fork-handling mishap.</li>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><strong>No one-and-done outfits</strong>. Every piece of clothes has to serve multiple purposes so it can be worn multiple times. Every shirt has to work under multiple sweaters and has to go with more than one pair of pants. Versatility is key. And another reason to pack black.</span></li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Think additively; pack layers</strong>. This was the key to solving my Iceland-Spain packing challenge. Pack multiple thin layers that you can pile on when it’s cold and wear separately when it’s not. Black sweaters and a black fleece vest are my layering go-to’s.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Leave the workout gear at home</strong>. Gym shoes take up a huge amount of space, which can be filled with a couple of sweaters and a second week of socks and understuff. Ditch the taxis, Ubers, and rental cars, and get your exercise by walking everywhere instead.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Wear your bulkiest clothes on the flight</strong>. On the trip to Scotland, I packed the hiking rain shell and flew in the blazer I needed for the one-stars because the shell was infinitely more crushable. My only caveat to this rule is shoes. For Scotland, I packed the hiking shoes even though they were bulkier. I didn’t want to set off the metal detector in the Pre-Check line or get pulled out by the TSA because the soles were too thick. If you’re not doing Pre-Check, you’re already taking your shoes off, so wear your biggest ones.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Use a nondescript black rolling bag</strong>. Black not only makes you look thinner, it makes your bag look thinner to gate agents scanning for bag-sizer bait. My daughter had a baby blue roller bag for the longest time. She loved that color, and it was easy to spot on the luggage carousel, which was a good thing. It ended up there a lot because gate agents were always pulling my daughter out of line to gate check that bag.  If you’re flying a budget airline that’s a stickler on size, use a hard-shell bag. It’ll keep its dimensions better when overstuffed, and the polycarbonate shell will slide past the metal bars of the sizer easier than the ballistic nylon of a soft-sided bag. But if you’re working against weight limits as well as dimensions on international budget carriers like Wow Air, you want the lightest, most stripped down bag possible. You don’t want the extra weight of the hard siding. You probably don’t even want very sturdy wheels; just the lightest covering around your clothes that you can find.</li>\r\n</ol>','Ruthless Packing Pro Tips','','inherit','closed','closed','','1835-revision-v1','','','2017-10-17 21:22:07','2017-10-18 02:22:07','',1835,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/10/17/1835-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1837,1,'2017-10-17 21:22:48','2017-10-18 02:22:48','[caption id=\"attachment_1703\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/File_000.jpeg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1703\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/File_000-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Carefully thought-out carry-on luggage[/caption]\r\n\r\nMy longest packing sessions involve trying to get 10-14 days of clothes for multiple climates and/or activities into a single 22-inch carry-on bag.  Two years ago, it was packing for a March trip that spanned Iceland and Southern Spain. Last month, it was a 10-day drive through Scotland with clothes for rainy day hikes and one<span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">-star Michelin restaurants. It makes me pack ruthlessly -- everything has to earn its space in the bag. And through these packing sessions, I\'ve developed this list of packing pro tips.</span>\r\n<ol>\r\n 	<li><strong>Pick a single color family for your clothes, and make it black</strong>. Three reasons: black makes everyone look thinner, it spans casual to smart dress codes, and black doesn’t show stains. The thinner thing is a nice-to-have, but hiding stains is key. I usually pack two pair of slacks and wear a third on the plane. I can\'t be one-and-done on a pair of pants because of incoming from a fork-handling mishap.</li>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><strong>No one-and-done outfits</strong>. Every piece of clothes has to serve multiple purposes so it can be worn multiple times. Every shirt has to work under multiple sweaters and has to go with more than one pair of pants. Versatility is key. And another reason to pack black.</span></li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Think additively; pack layers</strong>. This was the key to solving my Iceland-Spain packing challenge. Pack multiple thin layers that you can pile on when it’s cold and wear separately when it’s not. Black sweaters and a black fleece vest are my layering go-to’s.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Leave the workout gear at home</strong>. Gym shoes take up a huge amount of space, which can be filled with a couple of sweaters and a second week of socks and understuff. Ditch the taxis, Ubers, and rental cars, and get your exercise by walking everywhere instead.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Wear your bulkiest clothes on the flight</strong>. On the trip to Scotland, I packed the hiking rain shell and flew in the blazer I needed for the one-stars because the shell was infinitely more crushable. My only caveat to this rule is shoes. For Scotland, I packed the hiking shoes even though they were bulkier. I didn’t want to set off the metal detector in the Pre-Check line or get pulled out by the TSA because the soles were too thick. If you’re not doing Pre-Check, you’re already taking your shoes off, so wear your biggest ones.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Use a nondescript black rolling bag</strong>. Black not only makes you look thinner, it makes your bag look thinner to gate agents scanning for bag-sizer bait. My daughter had a baby blue roller bag for the longest time. She loved that color, and it was easy to spot on the luggage carousel, which was a good thing. It ended up there a lot because gate agents were always pulling my daughter out of line to gate check that bag.  If you’re flying a budget airline that’s a stickler on size, use a hard-shell bag. It’ll keep its dimensions better when overstuffed, and the polycarbonate shell will slide past the metal bars of the sizer easier than the ballistic nylon of a soft-sided bag. But if you’re working against weight limits as well as dimensions on international budget carriers like Wow Air, you want the lightest, most stripped down bag possible. You don’t want the extra weight of the hard siding. You probably don’t even want very sturdy wheels; just the lightest covering around your clothes that you can find.</li>\r\n</ol>','Ruthless Packing Tips','','inherit','closed','closed','','1835-revision-v1','','','2017-10-17 21:22:48','2017-10-18 02:22:48','',1835,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/10/17/1835-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1839,1,'2017-10-28 17:34:44','2017-10-28 22:34:44','[caption id=\"attachment_1585\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/calvin_PC.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1585\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/calvin_PC-300x172.jpg\" alt=\"Cat-based cyber-security solution\" width=\"300\" height=\"172\" /></a> Cat-based cyber-security solution[/caption]\r\n\r\nHere\'s a little something to keep you entertained while you navigate the holiday airport lines. We talk about digital security on the road -- what\'s the right balance between hassle and hack? We also dig into JD Power\'s latest <a href=\"http://www.jdpower.com/press-releases/2015-north-america-airport-satisfaction-study\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">airport satisfaction survey</a>. They report a tick up in traveler experience and, for the most part, I think they have it right. We also cover Spirit Airlines\' growth and the planned expansion of US immigration pre-clearance. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_119.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_119.mp3\"]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #119:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, cranking out one last episode to keep you occupied while you navigate the holiday security lines while trying to get to -- or away from family. Myself, I’m settling for the Christmas break after doing a day trip yesterday to Philadelphia. I’m taking a break from O’Hare until January.</li>\r\n 	<li>No really remarkable travel since the last episode, just trips to Cleveland, Vegas, and Boston. When I was flying out of Vegas last week, I hit the <a href=\"http://thecenturionlounge.com/location/LAS\">Amex Centurion Lounge</a> for a couple of conference calls before boarding. It’s free entry with a Platinum Card, and so far and beyond any Admirals Club or Sky Club or United Club. It’s not quite as hip/a bit more button-down than Virgin Atlantic’s Upper Lounge in Heathrow, but the comfort, the free buffet and open bar just are just as good. Highly recommended. I just wish there were more of them.</li>\r\n 	<li>When I’m flying into Boston, I’m actually heading out 45 minutes west, close to Worcester. Now that’s a 45 minute drive out I-90 when I land at 9 or 10 in the morning. When I land at 5 in the evening, it’s a whole different story. I touch down at Logan, flip out of airplane mode and immediately open Waze. How bad is the traffic? How about <i>an hour</i> and 45 minute drive? Not looking forward to that parking lot, so I threaded my way over to Chelsea. Found a great little microbrewery complete with real live Boston Irish patrons and sample 1, 2, 4 of their beers. Then I walked up a couple of blocks to a Central American joint underneath a highway overpass. Had a great plate of food for less than $10.  I’ve spent a few dinner times wandering around nearby neighborhoods -- Charlestown, the Seaport District as well as Chelsea -- waiting for Waze to tell me when I-90’s traffic tantrum had subsided.</li>\r\n 	<li>Probably the biggest travel event this week wasn’t mine but my daughter’s. It’s her first solo flight -- returning from her first semester at Univ of St Andrews, flying Aer Lingus from Edinburgh to Chicago by way of Dublin. It’s a big adjustment in a couple of ways. First, of course, she has to figure out a new airport by herself. She’s never been through Dublin before, but I thought a smaller airport would be a better first solo than trying to navigate the start of holiday traffic at Heathrow. But she does now have to pay attention to what’s going on rather than just following in my slipstream. The second adjustment is a bit more of a First World problem -- flying as as plain old passenger, a villager, rather than tagging along with me through the Gold or Platinum baggage check lines and pre-boarding. It’s a tough come-down, but I did soften the blow a little bit. I paid her Global Entry fee as a going away gift.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- Dive Deep (Loveshadow remix) by spinningmerkaba (c) 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/50488 Ft: Loveshadow</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Not really any commentary on the last episode, though Ian Morgan swung by the Facebook page with adding to the support about British Airways’ stricter carry-on policy\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>“Just listened to your October episode! Picked up your post about BA hand luggage. They have just changed their policy on this to clamp down. I agree it is frustrating especially on lightly loaded widebody aircraft. However, as a regular BA traveller I have lost count of the number of times BA flights have been delayed whilst cabin crew offload hand luggage, especially since BA introduced \"hand baggage only\" fares. Before the change, I never saw BA using the size gauges - these days they use them much more frequently. It\'s part of the steady decline of BA from a full service airline to a low cost carriers. Just be grateful that you got a 767 instead of an A321 with new \'spacesaver\' seats with a 29\" seat pitch!!</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Ian, I think you’ve nailed it -- the descent of full-service carriers into the low-cost, low-service ring of travel hell created by Ryan Air and Spirit Airlines.  I’ve talked about this before -- a frequent traveler can’t fathom why someone would subject themselves to the hassles that Ryan and Spirit travelers endure. A recent <a href=\"http://www.chicagobusiness.com/article/20151205/ISSUE01/312059993/can-you-guess-whats-the-third-biggest-airline-at-ohare\">Crain’s Chicago article</a> about Spirit said just over half -- 58 % -- of their flights into ORD arrived on time in the first 9 months of this year. I fly at least 3 weeks out of 4. American Airlines’ 79% on-time percentage into ORD is only just acceptable; I’d go postal at 58%. But yet Spirit is now the 3rd largest airline at ORD after United and American. Working out of just two shared gates, it’s bigger than Delta. But then I remembered <a href=\"http://qz.com/533501/half-of-american-airlines-revenue-came-from-13-of-its-customers/\">some comments</a> made by the president of American Airlines during an analysts call right around the time American was doing the final merger of res systems with US Air. He said that half of American’s revenue last year came from the 87% of its customers that only flew them once. 50% of American’s revenue came from passengers that see air travel as a commodity and are looking for the lowest cost carriage between two points. And so for 50% of their revenue, American isn’t competing against United or Delta, they’re competing with Spirit.  It explains Delta’s Spirit-like Basic Economy offering, and the expectation that American and United will follow in 2016. And, I assume BA’s “hand baggage” fees that Ian mentions. The challenge, though, is how do you compete for the 87% of your passengers buying a commodity while also serving the remaining 13% of your passengers, who contribute the other 50% of your revenue, and value the little things like a seat that reclines a bit and a flight that arrives on time -- all in the same plane? Spirit doesn’t have that problem because they’ll never get that 13%. American, BA, Delta have the tougher problem.</li>\r\n 	<li>Connecting through Dublin airport, my daughter cleared US immigration and customs in there in Ireland and then just popped out at the one domestic baggage claim in ORD’s Terminal 5 -- the International Terminal. Kinda similar to what they’ve been doing at Toronto’s Pearson Airport since forever -- or at least the 90’s when I was flying through there weekly. But there, American’s YYZ-ORD flight would land in Terminal 3, just like a flight from, say, Buffalo, and you’d make your connection or just walk out to the cab line. Handy for the regular traveler, but if you’ve dropped the $100 Global Entry fee, immigration lines at, say, ORD, aren’t any worse than they are in Toronto or Dublin. Indeed, my daughter was bummed that she went through US Preclearance so soon, because food and shopping choices on the US side of Preclearance were a lot thinner than on the Irish side. And I think that’ll be the problem if the TSA follows through on their announced expansion of Preclearance -- from what is mostly Canadian, Irish, and Caribbean airports to 10 much larger airports, including Tokyo, Amsterdam, Madrid, London Heathrow. If you’re flying US carriers out of European airports, you’re already being put into a de facto American ghetto -- typically flying out of the most remote gates, with the longest walks from security and airport lounges, and the fewest food and shopping amenities. Walling it off to create the secured facilities to support Preclearance just formalizes it.  The DHS secretary calls it a “win-win” for travelers. I think it’s just squeezing the balloon -- making wait time go down in the US, but go up in places like Narita and Heathrow. It’s one thing to miss a connection in ORD due to immigration delays. Odds are there’s another flight you can catch within a couple of hours. It’s a whole other thing if you miss that once a day flight home from, say, Amsterdam.</li>\r\n 	<li>Thanks to El Niño, it’s been a warm start to the winter -- at least in North America. But soon enough, the temps will drop and the winter coats will start competing with carry-ons for overhead bin space. Last winter, while de-planing (what a weird verb construction!), someone handed me my black overcoat -- it was wedged in front of their suitcase. I threw it over my arm as I stepped out into the aisle, grabbed my carry-on, and hoofed it out of the plane, power-walking toward the cab line. It wasn’t until I stepped outside that I stopped to put my coat on and… it wasn’t my coat. I should’ve checked when it was handed to me, but I didn’t want to be that guy who stops <i>in the aisle</i> to put his jacket on. I went to Lost &amp; Found. The clerk called the gate, where the guy with my coat was standing, trying to find his coat. We got lucky. It took us about 10 minutes to sort everything out. He came down to Lost &amp; Found to swap coats. If it had been warmer out, like this week, I might not have put my coat on at all and gotten home for noticing the switch. Black bags, black coats. Love that black hides a lot of sins -- scuffs, dirt, extra pounds. Don’t love its ubiquity on an airplane. Keep your eyes on your stuff in these holiday crowds. Don’t want “Lost” to be the new black.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- Absolutely Clear (ft Jeris &amp; Goldfish) by SackJo22 (c) 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/45578 Ft: Jeris, Goldfish</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Digital Security On The Road</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Digital security, cyber security. I don’t know about you, but I’ve kinda hit security breach fatigue. On Thursday, yet another company announced a credit card breach. <a href=\"http://krebsonsecurity.com/2015/12/banks-card-breach-at-landrys-restaurants/\">This time</a> it’s Landry’s who runs Bubba Gumps and Morton’s Steakhouse and another 15 or so restaurant brands. I don’t frequent Landry’s brands that much, so I’m hoping that this breach doesn’t mean I have to replace one of my credit cards and again have to go through the goat rodeo of changing account numbers for all my autobills. But it still does reinforce that feeling the cyber security is not a matter of “if” but “when”</li>\r\n 	<li>But even if it’s a matter of “when”, I’d still like to postpone the “when” as long as possible. And traveling -- certainly during the holidays -- there’s a lot of opportunity to bring on the “when” if you’re not just a bit thoughtful. There’s also a balance between inconvenience -- the cost of being more digitally secure -- and the probability of being “breached” (can I say that without having to flag this as “explicit” in iTunes?).</li>\r\n 	<li>You could always go “old school” -- like 10 years ago when there was damn little public WiFi, no iPhones -- nothing to keep us entertained as we shuffled through the TSA lines other than trading snarky remarks with other line sufferers. Or you could go the “burner” route -- using disposable phones and a temporary PC, which is what many business travelers to China still do -- doing a complete wipe of their phones and PCs before and after each visit because they just expect to get hacked no matter what anti-virus and other safety precautions they take. But if all you’re doing is going from, say, San Francisco to Boston to see your family, these seem a bit “overkill” -- definitely not balancing the cost-benefit trade-off. I’m fairly lazy about this stuff, but there are a few precautions I do take.</li>\r\n 	<li>First, I never do any financial stuff over public WiFi -- no checking my bank account or credit card activity over an airport or Starbucks WiFi, or a hotel network at all -- whether WiFi or jacked into an Ethernet port. Even if the URL is showing https -- a encrypted web connection -- there’s just too many ways those networks or web sites can be misconfigured. Some folks will tell you to use a VPN. I used one in China, but it seems a bit too much in the US. If I have to do some banking, I’ll use my iPhone over the mobile carrier network -- AT&amp;T in the US, Orange when I was in Spain, .... I know it’s not perfect, but, as the cyber security guys like to say, it “reduces the attack surface” at what is considered one of the most vulnerable points.</li>\r\n 	<li>I rarely use hotel PCs -- the ones set up in lobbies or the concierge lounges. I mean, if I have a smartphone, a tablet, and a PC, why do I need to use a public PC that’s open to anyone loading up a key-logger that’ll capture anything you type -- including logins and passwords. If I do, for some odd reason, need to use one, I never log into anything. Maybe just search for a restaurant, but that’s about it.</li>\r\n 	<li>I always make sure that I’ve configured my phone and PC e-mail clients to use encrypted communications between servers -- using IMAP and SMTP over SSL (<i>&gt;now</i> we’re talking security because we used more acronyms than words in that last sentence) for my own mail servers; GMail does it automatically for you. But I don’t encrypt the message itself -- no PGP or signed MIME. There’s nothing in my e-mails that is <i>that</i> confidential to go through that hassle.</li>\r\n 	<li>I have recently, though, turned on two-factor authentication for every service that offers it -- GMail, some of my financial accounts, Dropbox, …. I resisted it for a long time -- again, thought it was more hassle than it was worth. But then I started getting some odd password reset e-mail requests -- that I didn’t request.</li>\r\n 	<li>I go back and forth on using smartphone or printed boarding passes. Smartphone boarding passes are quicker -- you can get it while in the cab to the airport rather than queueing up for a kiosk -- but I’ve had more than a few times when my boarding pass disappeared from the app during an extended flight delay. Printed boarding passes are easier to scan at the gate -- especially when juggling a backpack, a hot coffee, and a winter coat -- but there’s recently been a <a href=\"http://www.economist.com/blogs/gulliver/2015/10/security-check\">bit</a> of a <a href=\"http://krebsonsecurity.com/2015/10/whats-in-a-boarding-pass-barcode-a-lot/#more-31317\">stir</a> about the amount of personal information someone could pull out of the bar codes. Maybe I’m not paranoid enough, but that one feels a bit of a stretch. I do whatever’s the most convenient -- usually the smartphone route. But when I do print out a boarding pass, I keep it in my jacket pocket -- just to be sure.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- Drops of H2O ( The Filtered Water Treatment ) by J.Lang (c) 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/djlang59/37792 Ft: Airtone</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>US Airports Getting Better?</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>While I poked at London Heathrow a couple of <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/10/11/podcast-117-random-thoughts-about-eggs-scotland-car-rentals/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">episodes</a> back, it’s an article of faith among international travelers that North American airports pale in comparison to airports in Asia/Pac -- anyone flying from Beijing or Singapore to LAX needs a light sedative to cushion the shock -- and pretty much trail behind most European airports too. But JD Power, in their <a href=\"http://www.jdpower.com/press-releases/2015-north-america-airport-satisfaction-study\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">airport satisfaction survey</a> released last week, said that things are getting better. Not hugely better -- a 5-8% increase in their satisfaction score, but any improvement is good news.</li>\r\n 	<li>Power <a href=\"http://www.jdpower.com/ratings/study/North-America-Airport-Satisfaction-Study/763ENG/Large-Airports/1617\">rated</a> large- and medium-sized North American airports -- 60 US airports and Toronto Pearson, Calgary, Montreal, and Vancouver. They surveyed travelers around 6 attributes of their airport experience. In order of importance, they are: the state of the airport facilities themselves, how easy it is to get to the airport, security, baggage claim, the check-in experience, and available food and shopping. A frequent traveler might re-shuffle the order -- maybe drop baggage claim and the check-in experience to the bottom because we rarely check a bag -- but I think it’s a good list.</li>\r\n 	<li>And I think some of Power’s conclusions line up with things I’m seeing on the road. Like improvements in terminal facilities. In the last episode, I gave United a shout-out for the upgrade of their gate space in Boston Logan. I also think San Francisco’s complete rebuild of Terminal 2 is excellent and stands up to any airport in Asia or Europe.</li>\r\n 	<li>Power found what is a pretty logical connection between satisfaction and the time you spend in lines. As I said earlier, I rarely deal with check-in lines, but I think the TSA’s rollout of Precheck has provided a quantum level improvement in the security experience -- though at times, it feels like its popularity is on the verge of overwhelming it and sliding back. But even for those in the regular lines, I’ve seen TSA folks working hard to re-balance lines -- especially at ORD.</li>\r\n 	<li>Power split their ratings between large and medium airports. Their winning large airport is Portland, Oregon. I’ve done a bit of flying into PDX and while I wouldn’t have, unprompted, chosen it as the top large airport, I don’t argue with their conclusion. It’s a nice facility; easy mass transit (a TravelCommons’ fixation) via the MAX light rail; I disagree with its top marks for security check, but in how many other airports can I buy a growler of craft beer to go? The bottom four -- those I could’ve ticked off with missing a beat -- LaGuardia, Newark, LAX, and O’Hare. Old terminals, awkward layouts, leaking roofs, lousy food. Interesting they’re also the major airports for the US’s largest cities.</li>\r\n 	<li>The medium airport winner was a tie between Dallas’ downtown Love Field and Fort Myers’ Southwest Florida. This one, I dunno. I’ve used both of these airports a lot. Love has gone through a good sized facelift and I haven’t been through it since they finished, so I may be working off out-of-date impressions, but even though it’s close to downtown, it’s a pain to get to. Now Fort Myers is easy to get to -- and I love the short walk to the rental car facility -- but security screening can back way up and the food choice isn’t great. From my personal experience, I’d give top marks to Nashville. I mean, how can you go wrong with live music -- good live music -- as you’re walking down the terminal.</li>\r\n 	<li>Power’s most obvious finding is that dissatisfied customers are very vocal. Those who rate overall satisfaction 1 (on a 10-point scale) make an average of 13 negative comments about their experience. Anyone who follows me on Twitter knows how true that is.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #119</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_119.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #119 — Digital Security On The Road; US Airports Getting Better?','','inherit','closed','closed','','1579-revision-v1','','','2017-10-28 17:34:44','2017-10-28 22:34:44','',1579,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/10/28/1579-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1840,1,'2017-10-28 17:37:14','2017-10-28 22:37:14','[caption id=\"attachment_1573\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/DSC_4956.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1573\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/DSC_4956-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"This hotel door could use some work\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> This hotel door could use some work[/caption]\r\n\r\nA bit less of a random walk than the last episode, we talk about safety, physical safety, when traveling. While we sometimes put ourselves in the midst of dodgy surroundings, we usually feel safe when we retreat back into the \"travel bubble\" What about when the bubble is no longer safe? Smartphones are the frequent traveler\'s most important tool. So when an upgrade to my HTC One killed its usefulness, I found myself heading back to Apple.  All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_118.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_118.mp3\"]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #118:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, less than a month since the last episode. There’s a shocker. It’s been one of my lighter travel months. No international travel, no up-and-backs across the US. Indeed, there were a couple of weeks where I didn’t even pack a bag -- just did day trips to Detroit and Atlanta. There is something liberating about that -- just carrying a briefcase or backpack. I guess that would’ve been the ideal situation to check out Spirit Airlines, but I don’t hate myself that much.</li>\r\n 	<li>No rush to get to the gate for the start of boarding. Stroll up, sit down and then  stay seated while the agent works through the cadence of status boarding groups -- really important customers, kinda important customers, fake important customers, and then everyone else. No roller board meant no need for the boarding scrum. I just waited for last call and walked on board. Kinda reminded me of the days when I first started flying when, rather than racing to be first on the plane, we’d see who could be last -- how late you could show up and still get on the plane. My boss won when he talked his way past an agent, got onto the jet bridge, knocked on the plane door, which the crew opened and let him on. I don’t think I’ll push it quite that far.</li>\r\n 	<li>A few of this month’s trips have been in and out of Boston Logan Airport. And for as much stick as I give United Airlines -- broken planes, late flights, just general lousy service -- I have to give them credit for their <a href=\"http://newsroom.united.com/2014-04-28-New-United-Concourse-at-Boston-Logan-Offers-Customers-Modern-Streamlined-Airport-Experience\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">gate area</a> at Logan. Parts of it look like a hip hotel lounge -- cool hanging lights, non-bench seating. There’s stand-up/high-top counter space for laptops with lots of plugs. And even the self-serve boarding gates -- with modern subway-style turnstiles that scan your boarding pass before letting you in -- worked well. It’s probably one of the nicest gate areas I’ve been in in a long time. Nice job, United!</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Paint the Sky</em> by Hans Atom (c) 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/hansatom/50718 Ft: Miss Judged</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I got a good bit of commentary from the last episode, so thank everyone very much.</li>\r\n 	<li>Rob Cheshire posted this comment on the web site:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>“In defense of British Airways, you stepped into the middle of their new hand-luggage policy roll-out, which is designed to reign-in the amount of cabin baggage, which had really gotten out of hand. They are being strict across the board, on elite members, as well as everyone else, and it is definitely having a positive impact on bin-space, as well as minimising the amount of messing around (checking the last few wheelie bags that can’t be stowed) that the cabin crew have to take care of in the minutes prior to push-back.”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Rob, thanks for that. One thing I did like BA’s luggage approach was tagging the second bag meant to go underseat -- in my case, a backpack -- with a bright yellow tag to keep people from putting 2 bags overhead. There is not much that’s ruder in plane travel than early boarders -- status fliers -- maximizing their leg space at the expense of the rest the plane. Tagging that second bag makes it easy for flight attendants or later boarders to call out bin hogging. I’d love to see that move across the Atlantic.</li>\r\n 	<li>Andrew Gill left a comment on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page building on my thoughts about using the new Revolut debit card during my September trip to Scotland. Andrew said:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>“The piece of Revolut was interesting. I\'ve just spent six months living and working in The Philipines. I was lucky to be involved in the pilot of Supercard from <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/TravelexUK/?hc_location=ufi\">Travelex UK</a> (<a href=\"https://supercard.io/\">https://supercard.io/</a>). It\'s a physical card, complete with chip and pin, that can be used in retail stores and for online purchases too.</li>\r\n 	<li>“The card is free, and transactions are processed at the Visa Europe Exchange rate, with no foreign exchange fees or commission added on, but the *killer* feature is it\'s linked to an existing debit or credit card so there\'s no need to pre-load money onto the card. transactions are processed in my home currency, so again, there are no foreign exchange fees or commission added on</li>\r\n 	<li>“The pilot program has closed now, so fingers crossed, it comes out of pilot and into general release</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Andrew, thanks for that pointer. I agree that being able to link the Travelex Supercard back to a debit or credit card is very useful vs. the Revolut model which is more like a pre-paid debit card. Looking at the Supercard website, it looks like the pilot was only for UK card holders. Hopefully, they’ll be able to expand their geographic footprint when they fully launch the card. Interesting that Revolut is also a UK-based company. Seems like London is a hotspot for these fintech companies. Last week, I was talking to a guy who moved from London to Chicago to start up the US operations for a different London-based fintech company -- more based on lending than payments. He said that HSBC looked hard at buying Revolut because they were doing something HSBC couldn’t even given their global reach and scale. Between Revolut and Supercard, and big banks like Chase dropping foreign exchange fees on their credit cards, the money hassles of international travel keep going down. It’s a far cry from having to cash an American Express travelers check at the airport exchange desk so you could get a cab to your hotel.</li>\r\n 	<li>In an<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/01/29/podcast-107-serious-about-hotel-reviews-tsa-gets-something-right/\"> earlier episode</a>, I talked about evaluation criteria for my TripAdvisor reviews -- the bathroom, room size, workout room, location, service quality. I decided during one of my trips last month that I’m adding a new criterion -- accessible bedside electrical outlets. Most frequent travelers I know use their phone or tablet as an alarm, eliminating the need to discern operating instructions for each hotel’s unique brand of clock radio. Most hotels have figured this out and provide outlets on the nightstand -- in wall, along the side of the nightstand, on the lamp base…. But last month, I hit one of those knuckle draggers -- a hotel in Vegas. I practically had to disassemble one of the beds to find an outlet hidden behind it. Luckily, I carry long power cords.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Perfect Stranger</em> by stellarartwars (c) 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/stellarartwars/45510 Ft: TheDice</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Danger Within The Travel Bubble</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>In the last episode, I talked about attending the <a href=\"http://popeindc.cua.edu/the-papal-mass/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Papal Mass</a> at <a href=\"http://www.cua.edu/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Catholic University</a> in northeast DC which has never been one of the nicer sections of DC. I had taken the Metro up from the airport and would be getting back on it to catch my evening flight to Detroit. The Brookland stop at Catholic isn’t a big stop and I figured it would get overwhelmed at the end of the Mass by the 25,000 people there. I started thinking of alternatives. Getting a cab or an Uber would probably be just as tough, so my best alternative would be to walk down to the next stop south on the Red Line -- Rhode Island Ave. From my days in DC, I remember that neighborhood being a particularly rough one. That would not be a pleasant walk. I decided to skip Communion and leave the Pope early to beat the crowds at the Brookland stop.</li>\r\n 	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Most of the times when we talk about travel security, we talk about airport security or digital security, but not often about physical security. Yet very often, travel drops in unfamiliar settings -- usually by our own choice -- where we could unknowingly wander into a very unsafe situation</span></li>\r\n 	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I did exactly this some years ago when visiting Cape Town, South Africa. I was shopping through some craft stalls set up in a park and just kept wandering along. I kinda looking at the buildings, up and around… Oh, and I have my big Nikon SLR slung over my shoulder. Not sure I could’ve looked any more like a tourist unless I was wearing a big “Don’t Mess With Texas” t-shirt and a Dallas Cowboys baseball cap. At some point, I finally regain some situational awareness -- and, from my university years living in Northeast DC and on the Southside of Chicago, realize that I’m not in the best neighborhood right now. I move to the middle of the street -- so I don’t get jumped from a doorway -- and walk, with purpose now, back the way I came.</span></li>\r\n 	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I did a little better this spring in New Orleans. I was standing on St Charles St in the Garden District watching a Mardi Gras parade. After a while, I got a bad feeling about the atmosphere around me. Nothing that I could put my finger on, but enough to make me give up a prime spot on the parade round and walk up the street a bit. In the next morning’s paper, I read there had been a gun fight at that spot about 30 minutes after I’d left.</span></li>\r\n 	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">There have been other times in Joburg, Bangalore, Guadalajara, but considering how much I travel, they’re rare events -- I’ve wandered all through Madrid, Beijing, Tokyo, Edinburgh, Saigon and never felt unsafe -- but they get your attention. But then again, that’s outside the “travel bubble”. We’ve talked about that in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2008/04/29/podcast-64-escaping-the-travel-bubble-marks-travel-tips/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">past episodes</a>, how travelers can often seem to float above the places they visit unless they make the effort to “pop” the travel bubble and engage.</span></li>\r\n 	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">When those outside problems penetrate our bubble, now that’s more disturbing. Like the time some years back when I was visiting Rio -- years before the World Cup. I was checking in with a colleague who had done a lot of business there. He saw my room was on the second floor. “No, that won’t do,” he said, “we need to get you on a double-digit floor. At least 10 if not higher” “Why?” I asked. “Because,” he explained, “when the smash-and-grab gangs break in, they start on the first floor and work their way up until their bags are full. The higher you are, the more likely they’ll fill up before they get to you.” The logic was brutally impeccable. And this from a guy still sporting a couple of bruises from an earlier mugging on Copacabana Beach.</span></li>\r\n 	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Or a few years ago, when another colleague had to take a taxi to connect between Delhi’s domestic and international terminal -- before the latest renovation. He’d forgotten to print out his international itinerary, so they wouldn’t let him on the transfer bus (I’ve talked about, in prior episodes, the need to have a printed flight itinerary in India). He couldn’t find anyone in the terminal to print one out for him so he walked out to the cab rank. He piles his bags into and on top of a taxi and off he goes -- to some out-of-the-way place under a highway overpass where the cab driver and a friend shake him down for most of his money and his watch -- they leave him with his luggage and enough money for cab fare to the international terminal. A polite mugging; no bruises with this one.</span></li>\r\n 	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">My most disturbing bubble burst happened in the US -- in a Westin in Connecticut. A friend checked in and, since the hotel was oversold, was given one of those rooms that’s a conference room with a bathroom. They rolled out the tables and rolled in a bed for him. The next morning, as he’s getting dressed, he’s missing his watch, his ring, and the money and credit cards from his wallet -- all which were next to him on the nightstand. As he put it together, someone had broken into the room -- he saw that the conference room’s double doors had enough of a gap between them that you could open the lock by slipping a credit card or room key through the gap -- and they had stood next to him going through his stuff on the night stand. He’s lucky he’s a sound sleeper.</span></li>\r\n 	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">And I consider myself lucky. I don’t lock myself away in the hotel. I make an effort to step outside the travel bubble -- to engage -- and after 30 years of heavy travel, other than <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/05/20/podcast-98-stolen-luggage-restaurants-want-your-smartphone/\">having my camera and passport stolen</a>, I’m really no worse the wear. Certainly no bruises to show for it. I’m not sure I’d do it any other way. Though I do pay more attention to hotel door construction than I used to.</span></li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Foolish Game</em> by copperhead (c) 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/copperhead/46390 Ft: Snowflake,Sackjo22</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Switching Back to Apple</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>After your government ID, the smartphone is probably the most important thing you travel with. And while I quickly whip out my ID a few times a trip to prove my identity  -- to the TSA agent, to hotel clerks, to car rental check out folks, I use my smartphone constantly -- maybe too constantly. Be that as it may, the smartphone is <i>the</i> critical tool for today’s frequent traveler. A carpenter has his framing hammer, the auto mechanic his Snap-On wrench -- for the road warrior, it’s the smart phone.</li>\r\n 	<li>And so it wasn’t without a good bit of thought that I bit the bullet a few weeks ago and switched back to Apple; dumping my HTC One for a new iPhone 6S. I wasn’t thrilled to do it; I put it off for at least a month. And in the end, it was more a frustration with hardware -- with the slouching-toward-bankruptcy mess that HTC has become than it was excitement for the latest iThing.</li>\r\n 	<li>Which I guess is the pattern for me. My first smartphone was an iPhone 3G and I’d had just about every iPhone model up to the 5. And it was the frustration with its truly horrid battery life that led me to the HTC. The cause this time was the lousy performance of my HTC One after they pushed their Android upgrade -- “Lollipop” -- at the beginning of this year. It just trashed the phone -- the lag was awful. The hardware components have the specs to handle the new version; it’s just that HTC’s implementation of it is crap. Now, it’s not like Apple nails their OS upgrades every time. The IOS 8 release didn’t exactly cover them in glory. But at least they worked to resolve the problem by iterating through releases in a fairly timely manner. After the initial “Lollipop” release, Google iterated through updates  -- I think ver 5.1.1 is the most recent -- and I’m waited for HTC to use that as an opportunity to clean up their 5.0 mess. They would say on Twitter “It’s coming, just wait”, And then “Oh, we’ll just skip 5.1 and give you 6.0 by the end of the year”. That was it. I’d suffered through 6 months of lousy performance and now they were saying I would have at least 3 more -- not that I have any reason to think that the near-bankrupt company has gotten any better at software estimating.</li>\r\n 	<li>I don’t think that either Apple’s or Google’s operating systems are inherently better than the other. I’ve used them both. They both work. There are things I like about each of them, and since they seem to be stealing/emulating (?) each other’s best features, they’re more or less converging on each other.</li>\r\n 	<li>For me, the difference is the hardware -- which is what is actually in our hands each day. I’ve always thought Apple is a better hardware company than a software one. I loved my MacBook Air, but was very “meh” about OS X. It’s really the Android equipment manufacturers that are pushing me away. It seems that most of the Android hardware innovation is at the large end -- large screen sizes -- 5 ½ inches and up -- which is way bigger than what want. And then there are the delays in Android upgrades as each manufacturer gooses Google’s release -- my 18-month old Samsung tablet is still on version 4.4 “Kit Kat”, now two version levels down, with no update in sight, let alone any security patches. With mobile devices becoming more vital, that foot dragging on upgrades and security patching very uncomfortable.</li>\r\n 	<li>I was holding out for Google’s updated Nexus line, reading all rumor articles with spec leaks and blurred pictures. The 6P was too big for me, but the 5X -- I could do a 5.2-in screen with fast updates and patches. But then, when they unveiled the 5X, it topped it out at 32 GB with no expansion slots. For me, that is just too tight for my music, podcasts, pictures, video. So that’s it, I walked into the Apple store and bought a 64GB unlocked GSM 6S on their new upgrade plan -- new phone comes out, I trade mine in. It’s like leasing a car -- some people like the newest model. It’s all about the hardware.</li>\r\n 	<li>Now if I can just keep iTunes from crashing on my Windows 10 box...</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #118</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_118.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #118 — Danger In the Travel Bubble; Switching Back to Apple','','inherit','closed','closed','','1561-revision-v1','','','2017-10-28 17:37:14','2017-10-28 22:37:14','',1561,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/10/28/1561-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1842,1,'2017-10-31 21:46:26','2017-11-01 02:46:26','[caption id=\"attachment_1843\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/2D9A5999-E233-4434-BFCE-4A45D285BEA6.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1843\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/2D9A5999-E233-4434-BFCE-4A45D285BEA6-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Status Recognition in Vietnam[/caption]\n<p>Finding a Jag in the Hertz Presidents Club aisle has me thinking about the differing value of loyalty from hotel, airlines, and car rental companies while 5-star rating schemes are pushing grade inflation. All this and comments on luggage discounts, traveling while injured, and #metoo while flying at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_134.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.<br /><br /><br />Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #134:</p>\n<ul>\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. No exciting or exotic travel since the last episode; just a quick down-and-back to Atlanta, a day in Washington, DC, and a few trips to Charlottesville, VA.</li>\n<li>The first trip to Charlottesville, about 3 weeks ago, was the first time I’d been back in 5 months after spending more than a year there. Other than the flights being poorly timed -- there are non-stops from ORD, but they arrive at either 2:45 in the afternoon or quarter past midnight -- it’s been a great town to visit. So I was surprised as anyone by the white supremacist march there in August.</li>\n<li>I was on the late night flight and when I walked out of the terminal, the one cab at the curb had already been claimed. But it was only a 4 min wait for a Lyft driver, so not a problem. Indeed, it turned out to be a great ride. The Lyft driver, an older black guy, told me, unprompted, the whole back story of the protests; how it started as a local political battle that then blew up big. He wanted me to know that Charlottesville wasn’t like that. He told me “I’ve lived here for 40 years and have never seen that statue, until one day, I drove past a park, looked to my right and there it was!”</li>\n<li>Since the white supremacists had shown back up the Saturday before we came back, I said to the project team, “We need to find out where that statue is so we can avoid it.” One is from India, the other born in the US of Indian parents. I didn’t want us stumbling into a line of tiki torch-bearing protesters.<br />But as we got working that day, we forgot about it. Driving to dinner, we missed a turn -- actually we missed going straight; instead followed the road as it turned -- and as we wandered through some side streets to get back on track, I look to my right, and there’s the Robert E Lee statue covered in black tarp, with a couple of people camped out in front of it, and another group of people walking toward it. I suggested that we didn’t need to come to a complete stop at intersection. And, well, we know where that statue is now.</li>\n<li>For all of my complaints and bitch tweeting about delayed flights, I have to say that my American flight home from Reagan National Saturday morning was great. Exit row seat; no one in the middle. Everyone boarded quickly; they closed the door and left 10 minutes early and with no traffic on the taxiway and a beautiful sunny day, we were up and over the Potomac in 5 minutes. Typically, though, nothing like this goes unpunished at ORD, but we landed, didn’t have to wait for a gate, and taxied immediately in, arriving a half-hour early. Damn if this doesn’t make me look forward to my next trip.</li>\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/52154\">release.JOY.release</a> by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: essesq, Haskel (hej31)</li>\n</ul>\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<ul>\n<li>On my most recent trip through the ATL PreCheck line, there was no X-Ray machine choreography this time. If you remember in the last episode, I talked about the TSA agent at the parallel loading X-Ray machine coordinating each bin push, having everyone hold up until all the previous bins had cleared, and then having everyone push their bins onto the conveyor at once. Not this time, though I did get a bit of a stink eye from a couple when I walked around them to one of the further up loading stations. They’re obviously not old PC heads, otherwise they’d instantly understand the difference between serial and parallel paths.</li>\n<li>Following up on the packing pro tips topics from the last episode, which I also repurposed/recycled into the Ruthless Packing Tips blog post, Dan Bennett, the CEO of Test Facts, sent me a link to study where they tested and compared 32,672 luggage prices. I’ll put a <a href=\"https://www.testfacts.com/luggage-prices-analyzed/\"><strong>link</strong> </a>to the study in the show notes, but a couple of interesting factoids from their introductory infographic\n<ul>\n<li>You can save an average of $110/39% buying on-line</li>\n<li>Walmart and Target’s on-line stores tend to have the highest discounts; Kohl’s and Macy’s the lowest</li>\n<li>Amazon is in 10th place for average discount (in the 40% range), but is tops by a long way in greatest variety -- over 12,000 luggage items vs. 7,500 for Jet which was #2</li>\n<li>Luggage sets have a 23% higher discount than single pieces</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n<li>Check it out -- it’s an interesting piece of analysis</li>\n<li>Jim McDonough posted a “traveled while injured” story on Facebook that put my biking injury whining in its place\n<ul>\n<li>My wife and I were in County Kerry on the West Coast of Ireland. We were killing time before dinner, at an ancient stone circle on the edge of town. I was taking some photos, and it started raining. While walking down a slope, I was putting my camera back in my bag to keep it dry, when my left foot slipped on the wet grass. My right knee hyper-flexed, causing a complete tear of my quadriceps tendon. There was a loud crack, but no pain.</li>\n<li>It turns out you can\'t walk without a quadriceps tendon. We didn\'t know what the problem was. My wife ran off and found some people and got them to come and get me, and they took me to the doctor\'s house. The doctor (more like a physician\'s assistant, the regular doctor was away) poked around but couldn\'t diagnose anything. We went back to our B&amp;B but did not go out to dinner that night!</li>\n<li>Flying home, Dublin/Gatwick/DFW, I needed assistance for the connections. British Airways took such good care of me in Gatwick that I fly them whenever I can. While on the plane I was OK - I used seat backs to get to/from the head. American was supposed to provide a wheelchair at DFW but they failed to until the lead flight attendant got on the horn and got me one. I had surgery a couple of days later, and my rehab took a few months.</li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">This is the same injury that Bill Clinton had at Greg Norman\'s house. He had a better medical plan than I did</span></li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n<li>Just “ouch”, Jim. Reminds me of years ago when I broke my right foot getting out of my car in Philadelphia. I stepped on some broken concrete and heard a loud “snap”! After a long wait in an ER in downtown Philly -- where they rightly were triaging gunshot victims over me -- they plastered me up to my thigh and told me not to put any weight on my foot. The next day, I’m hobbling through 30th Street Station and down the stairs to the train platform on crutches with a carry-on bag across my back, swinging with every step. No one from Amtrak took any sort of care of me.</li>\n<li>Mika Pyyhkala tweeted me a great video of what I assume is a new service that guides blind travelers through airports. I’ll put a <a href=\"https://youtu.be/rXtv-M4WpMU\"><strong>link</strong> </a>in the show notes. It’s a great demo, show how a person in the contact center is viewing a real-time video stream through what I assume is a camera mounted on the head of the traveler, and then providing audio guidance. And watching the video made me realize what a mine field an airport is for blind or low-sight travelers. I guess I should’ve realized this; it’s typically a mine field for those with 20/20 vision. Thanks Mika for the pointer. Very cool video.</li>\n<li>The #metoo Twitter campaign on sexual harassment that started up a couple of weeks ago reminded me of a couple of stories women have told me about seat assignments. One from a woman CIO; she’s sitting in her aisle seat, pre-boarded with the top status group and is downloading some last-minute e-mails during regular boarding. She looks up, there’s a guy standing there who says “Why don’t you just slide over, honey”, pointing to the center seat. She closed her PC, stood up and pointed the guy to his center seat, and then leaned out into the aisle for the rest of the flight. Another story was from a friend, a woman air marshal, who was sitting in her assigned aisle First Class seat -- armed and incognito to everyone except the flight crew. During boarding, a well-known male TV host on MSNBC asks her to switch seats. She can’t; the regulations say that air marshals need to be in their assigned seats; but she can’t tell him that and stay undercover, so she politely tells him “No”. To which he becomes very irate, obnoxiously berating her -- “Do you know who I am” and all that. As much as she’d love to tell him why she can’t move, she can’t. So she has to sit there and take it, until finally a flight attendant comes over and intervenes. Followed by, again, an uncomfortable 2-hr flight in close quarters with a troglodyte. Sexual harassment is bad -- full stop. Having to fend someone off, and then be in the same tight metal tube with him unable to leave, even worse.</li>\n<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/snowflake/56508\">Rise Up (Like the Sun)</a> by Snowflake (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: Bluemillenium, Sackjo22, Martin Luther King, Kara Square</li>\n</ul>\n<p><strong>What’s the Current Value of Loyalty?</strong></p>\n<ul>\n<li>I continue to love Hertz’s new Presidents Club pick-your-own car aisle. Yes, National has been doing it for years. But on my last trip to Atlanta, I’m walking down the aisle looking at the cars -- Altima, Altima, Hyundai, Altima, Jag, Altima -- wait, what? I very quickly back up. It’s a new Jaguar Model XF. I look up -- nope, I haven’t slipped into the Upgrade aisle. I throw my bag in the back and take off for one of my nicer drives up I-85 through the city. Another time, I’m walking down the aisle and a Hertz guy pulls a new Dodge Charger into the space next to me. He hops out, hands me the keys saying “We want to make sure you guys have a nice selection of cars to choose from.” And so now as the year is winding down, I’m looking -- how many more rentals to keep Presidents Club status?</li>\n<li>I felt the flip side of this last week at the Charlottesville Courtyard where as I’m filling up a couple of water glasses in the workout room cooler, I tweet “I kinda hate Courtyard Hotels. They offer the worst experience for the money to Marriott Platinum members…” Scott Drake tweeted back “I’ll be the contrarian: at the price point is it not valuable? Are you expecting the JW experience at a Courtyard?” while Michael Kline asked “Detailed explanation? Maybe on the podcast?” Mine was a tweet that come from a comparison between my stay at an Atlanta Marriott the prior week and this Courtyard. For about the same rate, the Atlanta Marriott gave me a bit of a welcome gift, free breakfast every morning, and restocked my room with bottled water. The Courtyard -- I could either pick a bottle of something from their little market next to the front desk or have one free coffee during my stay. I took the bottle of water, which I then filled up every morning in the workout room until the maid threw it out. Not knocking the maid -- she’s just doing her job. But as I’m carrying the now filled water glasses back to my room, I’m thinking -- why am I staying here? And again, it’s not that I couldn’t go buy a bottle of water and expense it, it was more the disconnect of the thing -- how much better the Marriott treated me for the same price.</li>\n<li>On my last trip to ATL, I flew DL where I have absolutely no status. I was trying to thread my flights between already-booked conference calls, and DL, with way more flights than AA or UA, was the only way to string everything together. On the way down, I couldn’t get a seat assignment until I was at the gate -- 32B, second-to-the-last row on an old Boeing 717 -- the last of the DC-9/MD-80 series that I think Delta got from the old AirTrans. At the gate I thought I lucked into an aisle seat, but those 717’s have a 3-2 seat configuration, opposite of AA and the old NW, so B is a middle seat. The flight was fine; the service reasonable, and it was a short flight, so it wasn’t a big deal. But it was definitely a less enjoyable experience that my Saturday flight on American, with an exit row aisle seat and an empty middle seat.</li>\n<li>There was a study a few months ago that showed American was the most stingy carrier with award seats. And there are other ways that they’ve eroded the value of loyalty. I’ve flown American since July 1985 when I started my first full-time job in Dallas and I’ve noticed that chipping way over what’s now 37 years -- that’s a frightening number to say out loud. But when my objective is to get from Point A to Point B with the least amount of hassle, there is still some value to loyalty.</li>\n<li>Which is kinda the muddling middle ground I’ve carved out nowadays; invest enough time/effort to hit the loyalty level that fits the value I will get. I’ll go out of my way to re-up my Hertz status because it’s given me great rental car choices. I won’t push for anything more than mid-level airline status because, with the high load factors and the push to sell 1st-class seats, there not much more to get than free front-of-the-plane seating and a reasonable shot at overhead bin space. Going out of my way to make American’s Exec Platinum or United’s 1K again doesn’t appear to be worth it. And with Courtyards, there’s not much value in a $2 bottle of water.</li>\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djiz/10514\">Nube - Djiz Rmx</a> by Kwame (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: SylviaO</li>\n</ul>\n<p><strong>Need Those 5 Stars</strong></p>\n<ul>\n<li>A few months ago, after an overnight stay at a Residence Inn in Baltimore, I wrote up a TripAdvisor review. I titled it “Pretty standard Residence Inn experience” and gave the place 3 whatever TripAdvisor calls them -- stars, circles -- whatever they are, I gave them 3. Seemed in line with the review, where I said “Standard Residence Inn set up; friendly service. Shuttle driver provided good service driving us to/from nearby businesses”. Nothing controversial. So I was a little surprised when I got a note the next day from the general manager\n<ul>\n<li>“Thank you very much for going on TripAdvisor.com to review our hotel. We greatly appreciate it. One request I have, if you would be willing, is if you might consider changing your rating from a 3 star review to a 4 star review. Marriott hotels views a 3 star review or lower as a “0”. Meaning the hotel takes a hit/mark against it for providing what Marriott considers is a “bad” stay which is 3 or under in their view. It looks like your comments indicate that you had a good stay. In that regard, I wonder if you would be willing to change your score up to a 4? We would really appreciate it if you would.”</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n<li>I didn’t change the rating. Maybe I should’ve, but honestly, I don’t know. And even if I did, I really didn’t want to. I thought it was a 3-star experience. I’m sorry that Marriott doesn’t give you credit for that, but I kinda feel like that’s not my problem</li>\n<li>Now, I’m nothing if not inconsistent, because I’ll give every Uber and Lyft driver 5 stars if they get me to my destination in a reasonably clean car. Indeed, I was right with my son when he jumped all over my wife for giving a Lyft driver 3 stars for what she thought was an “OK, nothing special” ride. “You gonna get him kicked off!” he said. And he wasn’t wrong. Internal Uber documents leaked a few years back said that drivers with ratings less than 4.6 would be considered for deactivation. So this is a little different than TripAdvisor. Here, Uber, the owner of the platform, is saying that a reasonable, acceptable ride should be 5 stars, since anything less will slide the driver down toward the deactivation zone.</li>\n<li>It’s the Internet version of the Lake Wobegon effect -- everybody is above average. The latest stats I saw on Yelp said that the average rating is 3.8 and 46% of their reviews had 5 stars. Which explains why that 4-star diner you drove to try out was just “OK”.</li>\n<li>Call me cranky, but the two apps that I regularly rate on -- TripAdvisor and Untappd -- I rate “average” as a 3; kinda like King Canute trying to hold back the waves of grade inflation. On Untappd, anything below a 3, I wouldn’t order again. a 3 is OK, 4 is a great beer, 5 outstanding. I just downloaded my stats into Excel and after a little remedial pivot table training, I can see that I’m a bit skewed -- 13% of my ratings are below 3; 60% are between 3 and 3.75; 26% between 4 and 4.75; and 1% at 5 with a median rating of 3.5. Not as bad as Yelp, but maybe it’s because I really like beer.</li>\n</ul>\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<ul>\n<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #134</li>\n<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\n<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_134.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #134 — Value of Loyalty; Need Those 5 Stars','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-134-value-of-loyalty-need-those-5-stars','','\nhttps://www.testfacts.com/luggage-prices-analyzed/','2021-09-29 21:48:40','2021-09-30 02:48:40','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=1842',0,'post','',0),
(1843,1,'2017-10-31 18:17:47','2017-10-31 23:17:47','','2D9A5999-E233-4434-BFCE-4A45D285BEA6','Status Recognition in Vietnam','inherit','open','closed','','2d9a5999-e233-4434-bfce-4a45d285bea6','','','2017-10-31 18:18:31','2017-10-31 23:18:31','',1842,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/2D9A5999-E233-4434-BFCE-4A45D285BEA6.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(1844,1,'2017-10-31 18:22:22','2017-10-31 23:22:22','[caption id=\"attachment_1843\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/2D9A5999-E233-4434-BFCE-4A45D285BEA6.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1843\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/2D9A5999-E233-4434-BFCE-4A45D285BEA6-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Status Recognition in Vietnam[/caption]\r\n\r\nFitting 10 days of clothes for rain, hiking, and Michelin restaurants into a 22-inch carry-on forced me to pack ruthlessly, and to distill my packing thoughts into 5 packing pro tips. Flying to Hungary right after a cycling accident reminded me of the hassles of traveling on the injured reserve list. All this and listener comments on EU mobile regulations, travel apps on smartphones, and the need for Atlanta baggage X-ray ninja skills at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_133.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/344794816\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n<!--more-->\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #134:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. No exciting or exotic travel since the last episode; just a quick down-and-back to Atlanta, a day in Washington, DC, and a few trips to Charlottesville, VA.</li>\r\n 	<li>The first trip to Charlottesville, about 3 weeks ago, was the first time I’d been back in 5 months after spending more than a year there. Other than the flights being poorly timed -- there are non-stops from ORD, but they arrive at either 2:45 in the afternoon or quarter past midnight -- it’s been a great town to visit. So I was surprised as anyone by the white supremacist march there in August.</li>\r\n 	<li>I was on the late night flight and when I walked out of the terminal, the one cab at the curb had already been claimed. But it was only a 4 min wait for a Lyft driver, so not a problem. Indeed, it turned out to be a great ride. The Lyft driver, an older black guy, told me, unprompted, the whole back story of the protests; how it started as a local political battle that then blew up big. He wanted me to know that Charlottesville wasn’t like that. He told me “I’ve lived here for 40 years and have never seen that statue, until one day, I drove past a park, looked to my right and there it was!”</li>\r\n 	<li>Since the white supremacists had shown back up the Saturday before we came back, I said to the project team, “We need to find out where that statue is so we can avoid it.” One is from India, the other born in the US of Indian parents. I didn’t want us stumbling into a line of tiki torch-bearing protesters.\r\nBut as we got working that day, we forgot about it. Driving to dinner, we missed a turn -- actually we missed going straight; instead followed the road as it turned -- and as we wandered through some side streets to get back on track, I look to my right, and there’s the Robert E Lee statue covered in black tarp, with a couple of people camped out in front of it, and another group of people walking toward it. I suggested that we didn’t need to come to a complete stop at intersection. And, well, we know where that statue is now.</li>\r\n 	<li>For all of my complaints and bitch tweeting about delayed flights, I have to say that my American flight home from Reagan National Saturday morning was great. Exit row seat; no one in the middle. Everyone boarded quickly; they closed the door and left 10 minutes early and with no traffic on the taxiway and a beautiful sunny day, we were up and over the Potomac in 5 minutes. Typically, though, nothing like this goes unpunished at ORD, but we landed, didn’t have to wait for a gate, and taxied immediately in, arriving a half-hour early. Damn if this doesn’t make me look forward to my next trip.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/bridges/15563\">i knew</a> by bridges (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. Ft: shannonsongs</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>On my most recent trip through the ATL PreCheck line, there was no X-Ray machine choreography this time. If you remember in the last episode, I talked about the TSA agent at the parallel loading X-Ray machine coordinating each bin push, having everyone hold up until all the previous bins had cleared, and then having everyone push their bins onto the conveyor at once. Not this time, though I did get a bit of a stink eye from a couple when I walked around them to one of the further up loading stations. They’re obviously not old PC heads, otherwise they’d instantly understand the difference between serial and parallel paths.</li>\r\n 	<li>Following up on the packing pro tips topics from the last episode, which I also repurposed/recycled into the Ruthless Packing Tips blog post, Dan Bennett, the CEO of Test Facts, sent me a link to study where they tested and compared 32,672 luggage prices. I’ll put a <a href=\"https://www.testfacts.com/luggage-prices-analyzed/\"><strong>link</strong> </a>to the study in the show notes, but a couple of interesting factoids from their introductory infographic\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>You mentioned having 3 EU SIMs to choose from in Dublin, and working out the best value of the three.\r\nI live in the UK and have a UK SIM. If I go to Spain, and call a UK number (even if that number belongs to the person next to me) then I just pay a local rate call - or nothing if I have an unlimited calls account. However, if I call a Spanish number, then it counts as an overseas call, as if I were in the UK - even though I\'m in Spain. So which is the best SIM to use will to an extent depend on the actual call rates, but also which country it is registered in, and which country you are calling, independently of where you are.\r\nI hope that makes sense, and it\'s useful</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Nick, thanks for that. It makes a lot of sense when I recall that the EU wanted to eliminate roaming charges, so a mobile call from the UK is the same as one from Spain. For us, though, we’re rarely making a phone call. Indeed, I’m usually the only one making phone calls and that’s typically into a conference bridge. During our 10 days in Scotland, I used 11 of the 300 minutes in my 30 day plan. My wife’s 7 day plan ran out and she never noticed, because her 1 GB of data didn’t. And I think that’s where the arbitrage still could work, on using the cheapest data plan. That will, though, take a good bit of wading through really bad websites with confusing plan descriptions that are only partially in English. I think I’ll probably default to using my UK SIM just out of sheer laziness.</li>\r\n 	<li>Steve Frick left a comment on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page about the new parallel loading baggage X-ray machines I’ve encountered in the ATL PreCheck line. Steve writes -\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I agree with you that people are hesitant to jump the queue in front of others..... and you do need mad ninja skills if you\'re in the first slot trying to grab one of those oversized bins</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Steve linked to his blog post where he has video and a more detailed description of the situation. Check out the show notes for a <a href=\"http://www.hypeorlando.com/back-and-gone-again/2017/05/01/atlanta-hartsfield-has-automated-the-tsa-process/\">link to his blog</a></li>\r\n 	<li>I have to give the ATL TSA crew props for noticing the problem with breaking into the stream of bins if you’re in one of the front loading stations. When I was going through ATL a few weeks back, there was a TSA person at the parallel loading line choreographing each bin push, having everyone hold up until all the previous bins had cleared, and then having everyone push their bins onto the conveyor at once. I haven’t seen this problem with parallel loaders in, say, Edinburgh or Heathrow or Madrid. I wonder what’s different that requires this manual intervention.</li>\r\n 	<li>And there were a couple of comments on the travel apps people use on their smartphones. Dan Brener left this Facebook\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Great episode! Here\'s the apps I use the most: Air Canada and United, TripIt (although it\'s not as good as it could/should be), I used to use FlightTrack and really miss it, FlightAware since the AC app doesn\'t tell me where planes are coming from, Uber and Lyft, Packing (it\'s a list app to make sure I don\'t forget something obvious!), SPG, Yelp, Google Maps and Waze. There\'s a few others, but those are the main ones.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Dan, thanks for that list. I had forgotten to mention Yelp in the last episode. I have some colleagues who are heavy Yelp users; they’ll build lists of restaurants and bars before starting a project in a new city. I tend to use Yelp and the “Explore food &amp; drinks near you” feature in Google Maps for restaurant suggestions interchangeably when I’m in a new place. I’m always surprised at how different the recommendations often are.</li>\r\n 	<li>Gary Learned sent in on Twitter -\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>What I love about Lyft over Uber is their ability to produce a consolidated receipt of all my rides on a trip</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Thanks Gary. I’ve noticed that functionality in the Lyft app, but it’s not hugely useful for me since we use Concur for our T&amp;E reporting, and it picks up the individual Amex charges rather than a feed from Lyft. Would be handy if Concur would pull a single consolidated charge from Lyft.</li>\r\n 	<li>And finally, a couple of weeks later on Twitter, Eddie Antar, who is always a chuckle, said\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Binge listening to TC bc I had to let an AA voucher expire.? OTOH I\'m not being groped or dragged down the aisle screaming, so.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>I dunno, listening to my is better than being groped or dragged down the plane aisle. Feels a bit like being damned with very faint praise...</li>\r\n 	<li>And one last Tweet, this one from the Craig and Linda Martin of the Indie Travel Podcast…\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Highlight of the week? meeting fellow travel podcaster @mpeacock for lunch &amp; craft beer in Edinburgh. 10 or so years of podcast friendship</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Honestly, I think Linda and I had been trading e-mails for most of this year, seeing if we could physically meet up after so many years of knowing each other in the travel podcast universe. One of us would hear the other mention travel plans in a podcast that might overlap with the other’s. It finally came together at the end of our Scotland vacation and the beginning of theirs. They flew into EDI Sunday night; we were leaving from EDI Tuesday morning, so Monday lunch was the call. I drove over from St Andrews to a new neighborhood for me; kinda hip. Linda picked a nice pub with a great beer list that we all enjoyed. It is one of the great things about travel -- getting to meet up with friends; and in this case, for the first time.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/11510\">Funkist</a> - cdk dub mix by cdk (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: teru.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Packing Pro Tips</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Getting everything I needed for our 10 days in Scotland into a carry-on bag pushed my packing skills just a bit. The trip was mostly hiking and hill walks with a couple of 1-star Michelin restaurants thrown into the mix. And the forecast was for rain just about every day. We were on a direct flight to EDI and my daughter had to check a bag with stuff she was taking back to university, so the carry-on limitation wasn’t because of lost luggage or being able to power past the baggage carousel -- a non-starter given the long non-EU immigration line at EDI. It was more about trunk space in the rental car. As it was, I was doing luggage jenga just about every morning trying to puzzle everything into the back of our Nissan X-Terra.</li>\r\n 	<li>I easily spent an hour -- 2-3 times longer than usual -- trying to figure out how to get hiking shoes, rain gear, dress shirts, and everything else into that 22-inch bag. It made me pack ruthlessly -- everything had to earn its space in the bag. And though I’ve casually mentioned some of these ideas in prior episodes, this latest packing experience really crystallized this pro tip list.</li>\r\n 	<li>First and foremost, pick a single color family for your clothes, and make it black. Three main reasons -- Black makes everyone look thinner, it spans casual to smart dress codes, and black doesn’t show stains. OK, the thinner thing is a nice-to-have, but hiding stains is key. I packed two pair of slacks and wore a third on the plane. I couldn’t be one-and-done because I took incoming from a fork-handling mishap.</li>\r\n 	<li>Second, no one-and-done outfits. Every piece of clothes has to serve multiple purposes so it can be worn multiple times -- every shirt has to work under multiple sweaters and has to go with more than one pair of pants. Versatility is key. And yet another reason to pack black.</li>\r\n 	<li>Third, think \"additively\"; pack layers. This was key in my last packing challenge too -- last year’s Spring Break trip to Iceland and Southern Spain that I talked about in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/05/30/podcast-121-tsa-lines-my-luggage-is-where/\">episode #121</a>. Pack multiple thin layers that you can pile on when it’s cold and wear separately when it’s not. Black sweaters and a black fleece vest are my layering go-to’s.</li>\r\n 	<li>Fourth, wear your bulkiest clothes on the flight. I packed the hiking rain shell and flew in the blazer I needed for the 1-stars because the shell is infinitely more crushable. My only caveat to this is shoes. I packed the hiking shoes, even though they were bulkier than the dressily casual walking shoes I was also bringing, because I didn’t want to set off the metal detector in the Pre-Check line or get pulled out because the soles are too thick. If you’re not doing Pre-Check, you’re already taking your shoes off, so wear your biggest ones.</li>\r\n 	<li>And my fifth and final pro tip, use a non-descript black rolling bag. Black not only makes you look thinner, it makes your bag look thinner to gate agents scanning for bag-sizer bait. My daughter had a baby blue roller bag for the longest time. She loved that color, and it was easy to spot on the luggage carousel, which is a good thing; it ended up there a lot because gate agents were always pulling my daughter out of line to gate check that bag. Her current bag is a dark eggplant purple. It’s not black, but it’s close. If you’re flying a budget airline that’s a stickler on size, use a hard-shell bag. It’ll keep its dimensions better when overstuffed, and the polycarbonate shell will slide past the metal bars of the sizer easier than the ballistic nylon of a soft-sided bag.</li>\r\n 	<li>There you go, my five packing pro tips. If you’ve got some of your own to share, send them along through the usual channels and we’ll have them on the next episode.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/48705\">Jolanta Blues</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license.  Ft: Admiral Bob, Martijn de Boer</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Traveling Injured</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>In a couple of <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/02/06/podcast-87-sick-on-the-road-whats-in-my-briefcase/\">past</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/03/13/podcast-88-new-travel-goodies-losing-status/\">episodes</a>, we’ve talked about how miserable it is to be sick on the road. Traveling injured is a bit similar, but not quite the same. While you’re not, say, shivering under hotel blankets after you’ve cranked the thermostat as high as it’ll go, you’re not powering through your day at 100%.</li>\r\n 	<li>The most recent stint on travel injured reserve was our May trip to Hungary. My wife had left the week before to visit her aunt and cousins, leaving me alone with the cat. I was working from home one nice day and decided to take a break for a bike ride. Figured I should take every opportunity to burn some calories now since Hungarian food isn’t known as spa cuisine. I did my normal 17-mile circuit for the 50th or 60th time. Coming towards the last mile, I’m looking ahead to line up a turn and boom -- I hit some huge divot in the pavement that I’ve never seen before. My hands fly off the handle bar, I see the front wheel turned 90 degrees, and down I go, skidding across the asphalt. I come to a stop just short of the curb, pick myself up, rinse the visible road rash with the last bits of water in my bottle, and limp my bike and myself home.</li>\r\n 	<li>I immediately hit the shower, scrubbed out the road rash (with, as you might imagine, a bit of loud vocal commentary), and surveyed the damage. Good sized abrasions on my right elbow and forearm, my right butt cheek, both knees, and a line on my left chest where I must’ve popped the handle bar. I lost a bunch of skin, but felt lucky I didn’t break a collarbone or something worse.</li>\r\n 	<li>The Friday night flight to Vienna was not a comfortable one. No knock on Austrian Airlines; as I mentioned in an <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/06/24/podcast-130-notes-from-hungary/\">earlier podcast</a>, I was happy with their service. It was primarily the seat -- a standard coach seat, so not overly spacious -- pressing up against that large bit of road rash on my right, uhh, hip. Indeed, that abrasion was still -- I think “weeping” is the technical term. And so halfway through the flight, I was in the toilet with my tube of neosporin, my gauze pads and my surgical tape re-dressing it. It was either that or change pants. And following my packing pro tips, I couldn’t do a one-and-done on these pants. Luckily, I was in that quiet time between the after-dinner and the just-before-landing toilet rushes, so no banging on the door to hurry up.</li>\r\n 	<li>Every day was like that -- 30 minutes of removing and reapplying dressings, at first 3 times a day, then 2, and then when things finally scabbed up a bit, just in the morning, and really by then as much for cosmetic purposes -- so that people wouldn’t ask me about it -- as much as anything. I had to skip the family trip to a Budapest thermal bath -- I didn’t want some bath guard calling me out of the pool in front of a couple of thousand Hungarians, and I honestly wasn’t sure how aggressively they were chlorinating that water.</li>\r\n 	<li>That wasn’t my most awkward stint on the travel injured reserve list. Last year, I squeezed in a dermatologist appt for a mole scan before a flight out that afternoon. The doc said “This one looks a bit suspect”, putting his finger on a mole right in the middle of my back. He numbed it up, shaved it off, sent it off to the lab and bandaged me up. “Change that dressing every day,” he said as I raced out to head to ORD. The next morning, in a hotel bathroom, by myself, looking in the mirror at the gauze dressing between my shoulder blades that I couldn’t reach, I wondered how I could change that dressing -- call the front desk, ask a colleague? That seemed way too much to ask. And, it wasn’t that big of a mole. That dressing could wait ‘til Friday.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #133</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_133.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #133 — Value of Loyalty; Need Those 5 Stars','','inherit','closed','closed','','1842-revision-v1','','','2017-10-31 18:22:22','2017-10-31 23:22:22','',1842,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/10/31/1842-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1845,1,'2017-10-31 18:34:54','2017-10-31 23:34:54','[caption id=\"attachment_1843\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/2D9A5999-E233-4434-BFCE-4A45D285BEA6.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1843\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/2D9A5999-E233-4434-BFCE-4A45D285BEA6-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Status Recognition in Vietnam[/caption]\r\n\r\nFitting 10 days of clothes for rain, hiking, and Michelin restaurants into a 22-inch carry-on forced me to pack ruthlessly, and to distill my packing thoughts into 5 packing pro tips. Flying to Hungary right after a cycling accident reminded me of the hassles of traveling on the injured reserve list. All this and listener comments on EU mobile regulations, travel apps on smartphones, and the need for Atlanta baggage X-ray ninja skills at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_133.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/344794816\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n<!--more-->\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #134:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. No exciting or exotic travel since the last episode; just a quick down-and-back to Atlanta, a day in Washington, DC, and a few trips to Charlottesville, VA.</li>\r\n 	<li>The first trip to Charlottesville, about 3 weeks ago, was the first time I’d been back in 5 months after spending more than a year there. Other than the flights being poorly timed -- there are non-stops from ORD, but they arrive at either 2:45 in the afternoon or quarter past midnight -- it’s been a great town to visit. So I was surprised as anyone by the white supremacist march there in August.</li>\r\n 	<li>I was on the late night flight and when I walked out of the terminal, the one cab at the curb had already been claimed. But it was only a 4 min wait for a Lyft driver, so not a problem. Indeed, it turned out to be a great ride. The Lyft driver, an older black guy, told me, unprompted, the whole back story of the protests; how it started as a local political battle that then blew up big. He wanted me to know that Charlottesville wasn’t like that. He told me “I’ve lived here for 40 years and have never seen that statue, until one day, I drove past a park, looked to my right and there it was!”</li>\r\n 	<li>Since the white supremacists had shown back up the Saturday before we came back, I said to the project team, “We need to find out where that statue is so we can avoid it.” One is from India, the other born in the US of Indian parents. I didn’t want us stumbling into a line of tiki torch-bearing protesters.\r\nBut as we got working that day, we forgot about it. Driving to dinner, we missed a turn -- actually we missed going straight; instead followed the road as it turned -- and as we wandered through some side streets to get back on track, I look to my right, and there’s the Robert E Lee statue covered in black tarp, with a couple of people camped out in front of it, and another group of people walking toward it. I suggested that we didn’t need to come to a complete stop at intersection. And, well, we know where that statue is now.</li>\r\n 	<li>For all of my complaints and bitch tweeting about delayed flights, I have to say that my American flight home from Reagan National Saturday morning was great. Exit row seat; no one in the middle. Everyone boarded quickly; they closed the door and left 10 minutes early and with no traffic on the taxiway and a beautiful sunny day, we were up and over the Potomac in 5 minutes. Typically, though, nothing like this goes unpunished at ORD, but we landed, didn’t have to wait for a gate, and taxied immediately in, arriving a half-hour early. Damn if this doesn’t make me look forward to my next trip.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/bridges/15563\">i knew</a> by bridges (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. Ft: shannonsongs</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>On my most recent trip through the ATL PreCheck line, there was no X-Ray machine choreography this time. If you remember in the last episode, I talked about the TSA agent at the parallel loading X-Ray machine coordinating each bin push, having everyone hold up until all the previous bins had cleared, and then having everyone push their bins onto the conveyor at once. Not this time, though I did get a bit of a stink eye from a couple when I walked around them to one of the further up loading stations. They’re obviously not old PC heads, otherwise they’d instantly understand the difference between serial and parallel paths.</li>\r\n 	<li>Following up on the packing pro tips topics from the last episode, which I also repurposed/recycled into the Ruthless Packing Tips blog post, Dan Bennett, the CEO of Test Facts, sent me a link to study where they tested and compared 32,672 luggage prices. I’ll put a <a href=\"https://www.testfacts.com/luggage-prices-analyzed/\"><strong>link</strong> </a>to the study in the show notes, but a couple of interesting factoids from their introductory infographic\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>You can save an average of $110/39% buying on-line</li>\r\n 	<li>Walmart and Target’s on-line stores tend to have the highest discounts; Kohl’s and Macy’s the lowest</li>\r\n 	<li>Amazon is in 10th place for average discount (in the 40% range), but is tops by a long way in greatest variety -- over 12,000 luggage items vs. 7,500 for Jet which was #2</li>\r\n 	<li>Luggage sets have a 23% higher discount than single pieces</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Check it out -- it’s an interesting piece of analysis</li>\r\n 	<li>Jim McDonough posted a “traveled while injured” story on Facebook that put my biking injury whining in its place\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>My wife and I were in County Kerry on the West Coast of Ireland. We were killing time before dinner, at an ancient stone circle on the edge of town. I was taking some photos, and it started raining. While walking down a slope, I was putting my camera back in my bag to keep it dry, when my left foot slipped on the wet grass. My right knee hyper-flexed, causing a complete tear of my quadriceps tendon. There was a loud crack, but no pain.</li>\r\n 	<li>It turns out you can\'t walk without a quadriceps tendon. We didn\'t know what the problem was. My wife ran off and found some people and got them to come and get me, and they took me to the doctor\'s house. The doctor (more like a physician\'s assistant, the regular doctor was away) poked around but couldn\'t diagnose anything. We went back to our B&amp;B but did not go out to dinner that night!</li>\r\n 	<li>Flying home, Dublin/Gatwick/DFW, I needed assistance for the connections. British Airways took such good care of me in Gatwick that I fly them whenever I can. While on the plane I was OK - I used seat backs to get to/from the head. American was supposed to provide a wheelchair at DFW but they failed to until the lead flight attendant got on the horn and got me one. I had surgery a couple of days later, and my rehab took a few months.</li>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">This is the same injury that Bill Clinton had at Greg Norman\'s house. He had a better medical plan than I did</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Just “ouch”, Jim. Reminds me of years ago when I broke my right foot getting out of my car in Philadelphia. I stepped on some broken concrete and heard a loud “snap”! After a long wait in an ER in downtown Philly -- where they rightly were triaging gunshot victims over me -- they plastered me up to my thigh and told me not to put any weight on my foot. The next day, I’m hobbling through 30th Street Station and down the stairs to the train platform on crutches with a carry-on bag across my back, swinging with every step. No one from Amtrak took any sort of care of me.</li>\r\n 	<li>Mika Pyyhkala tweeted me a great video of what I assume is a new service that guides blind travelers through airports. I’ll put a <a href=\"https://youtu.be/rXtv-M4WpMU\"><strong>link</strong> </a>in the show notes. It’s a great demo, show how a person in the contact center is viewing a real-time video stream through what I assume is a camera mounted on the head of the traveler, and then providing audio guidance. And watching the video made me realize what a mine field an airport is for blind or low-sight travelers. I guess I should’ve realized this; it’s typically a mine field for those with 20/20 vision. Thanks Mika for the pointer. Very cool video.</li>\r\n 	<li>The #metoo Twitter campaign on sexual harassment that started up a couple of weeks ago reminded me of a couple of stories women have told me about seat assignments. One from a woman CIO; she’s sitting in her aisle seat, pre-boarded with the top status group and is downloading some last-minute e-mails during regular boarding. She looks up, there’s a guy standing there who says “Why don’t you just slide over, honey”, pointing to the center seat. She closed her PC, stood up and pointed the guy to his center seat, and then leaned out into the aisle for the rest of the flight. Another story was from a friend, a woman air marshal, who was sitting in her assigned aisle First Class seat -- armed and incognito to everyone except the flight crew. During boarding, a well-known male TV host on MSNBC asks her to switch seats. She can’t; the regulations say that air marshals need to be in their assigned seats; but she can’t tell him that and stay undercover, so she politely tells him “No”. To which he becomes very irate, obnoxiously berating her -- “Do you know who I am” and all that. As much as she’d love to tell him why she can’t move, she can’t. So she has to sit there and take it, until finally a flight attendant comes over and intervenes. Followed by, again, an uncomfortable 2-hr flight in close quarters with a troglodyte. Sexual harassment is bad -- full stop. Having to fend someone off, and then be in the same tight metal tube with him unable to leave, even worse.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/11510\">Funkist</a> - cdk dub mix by cdk (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: teru.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Packing Pro Tips</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Getting everything I needed for our 10 days in Scotland into a carry-on bag pushed my packing skills just a bit. The trip was mostly hiking and hill walks with a couple of 1-star Michelin restaurants thrown into the mix. And the forecast was for rain just about every day. We were on a direct flight to EDI and my daughter had to check a bag with stuff she was taking back to university, so the carry-on limitation wasn’t because of lost luggage or being able to power past the baggage carousel -- a non-starter given the long non-EU immigration line at EDI. It was more about trunk space in the rental car. As it was, I was doing luggage jenga just about every morning trying to puzzle everything into the back of our Nissan X-Terra.</li>\r\n 	<li>I easily spent an hour -- 2-3 times longer than usual -- trying to figure out how to get hiking shoes, rain gear, dress shirts, and everything else into that 22-inch bag. It made me pack ruthlessly -- everything had to earn its space in the bag. And though I’ve casually mentioned some of these ideas in prior episodes, this latest packing experience really crystallized this pro tip list.</li>\r\n 	<li>First and foremost, pick a single color family for your clothes, and make it black. Three main reasons -- Black makes everyone look thinner, it spans casual to smart dress codes, and black doesn’t show stains. OK, the thinner thing is a nice-to-have, but hiding stains is key. I packed two pair of slacks and wore a third on the plane. I couldn’t be one-and-done because I took incoming from a fork-handling mishap.</li>\r\n 	<li>Second, no one-and-done outfits. Every piece of clothes has to serve multiple purposes so it can be worn multiple times -- every shirt has to work under multiple sweaters and has to go with more than one pair of pants. Versatility is key. And yet another reason to pack black.</li>\r\n 	<li>Third, think \"additively\"; pack layers. This was key in my last packing challenge too -- last year’s Spring Break trip to Iceland and Southern Spain that I talked about in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/05/30/podcast-121-tsa-lines-my-luggage-is-where/\">episode #121</a>. Pack multiple thin layers that you can pile on when it’s cold and wear separately when it’s not. Black sweaters and a black fleece vest are my layering go-to’s.</li>\r\n 	<li>Fourth, wear your bulkiest clothes on the flight. I packed the hiking rain shell and flew in the blazer I needed for the 1-stars because the shell is infinitely more crushable. My only caveat to this is shoes. I packed the hiking shoes, even though they were bulkier than the dressily casual walking shoes I was also bringing, because I didn’t want to set off the metal detector in the Pre-Check line or get pulled out because the soles are too thick. If you’re not doing Pre-Check, you’re already taking your shoes off, so wear your biggest ones.</li>\r\n 	<li>And my fifth and final pro tip, use a non-descript black rolling bag. Black not only makes you look thinner, it makes your bag look thinner to gate agents scanning for bag-sizer bait. My daughter had a baby blue roller bag for the longest time. She loved that color, and it was easy to spot on the luggage carousel, which is a good thing; it ended up there a lot because gate agents were always pulling my daughter out of line to gate check that bag. Her current bag is a dark eggplant purple. It’s not black, but it’s close. If you’re flying a budget airline that’s a stickler on size, use a hard-shell bag. It’ll keep its dimensions better when overstuffed, and the polycarbonate shell will slide past the metal bars of the sizer easier than the ballistic nylon of a soft-sided bag.</li>\r\n 	<li>There you go, my five packing pro tips. If you’ve got some of your own to share, send them along through the usual channels and we’ll have them on the next episode.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/48705\">Jolanta Blues</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license.  Ft: Admiral Bob, Martijn de Boer</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Traveling Injured</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>In a couple of <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/02/06/podcast-87-sick-on-the-road-whats-in-my-briefcase/\">past</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/03/13/podcast-88-new-travel-goodies-losing-status/\">episodes</a>, we’ve talked about how miserable it is to be sick on the road. Traveling injured is a bit similar, but not quite the same. While you’re not, say, shivering under hotel blankets after you’ve cranked the thermostat as high as it’ll go, you’re not powering through your day at 100%.</li>\r\n 	<li>The most recent stint on travel injured reserve was our May trip to Hungary. My wife had left the week before to visit her aunt and cousins, leaving me alone with the cat. I was working from home one nice day and decided to take a break for a bike ride. Figured I should take every opportunity to burn some calories now since Hungarian food isn’t known as spa cuisine. I did my normal 17-mile circuit for the 50th or 60th time. Coming towards the last mile, I’m looking ahead to line up a turn and boom -- I hit some huge divot in the pavement that I’ve never seen before. My hands fly off the handle bar, I see the front wheel turned 90 degrees, and down I go, skidding across the asphalt. I come to a stop just short of the curb, pick myself up, rinse the visible road rash with the last bits of water in my bottle, and limp my bike and myself home.</li>\r\n 	<li>I immediately hit the shower, scrubbed out the road rash (with, as you might imagine, a bit of loud vocal commentary), and surveyed the damage. Good sized abrasions on my right elbow and forearm, my right butt cheek, both knees, and a line on my left chest where I must’ve popped the handle bar. I lost a bunch of skin, but felt lucky I didn’t break a collarbone or something worse.</li>\r\n 	<li>The Friday night flight to Vienna was not a comfortable one. No knock on Austrian Airlines; as I mentioned in an <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/06/24/podcast-130-notes-from-hungary/\">earlier podcast</a>, I was happy with their service. It was primarily the seat -- a standard coach seat, so not overly spacious -- pressing up against that large bit of road rash on my right, uhh, hip. Indeed, that abrasion was still -- I think “weeping” is the technical term. And so halfway through the flight, I was in the toilet with my tube of neosporin, my gauze pads and my surgical tape re-dressing it. It was either that or change pants. And following my packing pro tips, I couldn’t do a one-and-done on these pants. Luckily, I was in that quiet time between the after-dinner and the just-before-landing toilet rushes, so no banging on the door to hurry up.</li>\r\n 	<li>Every day was like that -- 30 minutes of removing and reapplying dressings, at first 3 times a day, then 2, and then when things finally scabbed up a bit, just in the morning, and really by then as much for cosmetic purposes -- so that people wouldn’t ask me about it -- as much as anything. I had to skip the family trip to a Budapest thermal bath -- I didn’t want some bath guard calling me out of the pool in front of a couple of thousand Hungarians, and I honestly wasn’t sure how aggressively they were chlorinating that water.</li>\r\n 	<li>That wasn’t my most awkward stint on the travel injured reserve list. Last year, I squeezed in a dermatologist appt for a mole scan before a flight out that afternoon. The doc said “This one looks a bit suspect”, putting his finger on a mole right in the middle of my back. He numbed it up, shaved it off, sent it off to the lab and bandaged me up. “Change that dressing every day,” he said as I raced out to head to ORD. The next morning, in a hotel bathroom, by myself, looking in the mirror at the gauze dressing between my shoulder blades that I couldn’t reach, I wondered how I could change that dressing -- call the front desk, ask a colleague? That seemed way too much to ask. And, it wasn’t that big of a mole. That dressing could wait ‘til Friday.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #133</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_133.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #133 — Value of Loyalty; Need Those 5 Stars','','inherit','closed','closed','','1842-revision-v1','','','2017-10-31 18:34:54','2017-10-31 23:34:54','',1842,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/10/31/1842-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1846,1,'2017-10-31 18:36:32','2017-10-31 23:36:32','[caption id=\"attachment_1843\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/2D9A5999-E233-4434-BFCE-4A45D285BEA6.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1843\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/2D9A5999-E233-4434-BFCE-4A45D285BEA6-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Status Recognition in Vietnam[/caption]\r\n\r\nFitting 10 days of clothes for rain, hiking, and Michelin restaurants into a 22-inch carry-on forced me to pack ruthlessly, and to distill my packing thoughts into 5 packing pro tips. Flying to Hungary right after a cycling accident reminded me of the hassles of traveling on the injured reserve list. All this and listener comments on EU mobile regulations, travel apps on smartphones, and the need for Atlanta baggage X-ray ninja skills at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_133.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/344794816\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n<!--more-->\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #134:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. No exciting or exotic travel since the last episode; just a quick down-and-back to Atlanta, a day in Washington, DC, and a few trips to Charlottesville, VA.</li>\r\n 	<li>The first trip to Charlottesville, about 3 weeks ago, was the first time I’d been back in 5 months after spending more than a year there. Other than the flights being poorly timed -- there are non-stops from ORD, but they arrive at either 2:45 in the afternoon or quarter past midnight -- it’s been a great town to visit. So I was surprised as anyone by the white supremacist march there in August.</li>\r\n 	<li>I was on the late night flight and when I walked out of the terminal, the one cab at the curb had already been claimed. But it was only a 4 min wait for a Lyft driver, so not a problem. Indeed, it turned out to be a great ride. The Lyft driver, an older black guy, told me, unprompted, the whole back story of the protests; how it started as a local political battle that then blew up big. He wanted me to know that Charlottesville wasn’t like that. He told me “I’ve lived here for 40 years and have never seen that statue, until one day, I drove past a park, looked to my right and there it was!”</li>\r\n 	<li>Since the white supremacists had shown back up the Saturday before we came back, I said to the project team, “We need to find out where that statue is so we can avoid it.” One is from India, the other born in the US of Indian parents. I didn’t want us stumbling into a line of tiki torch-bearing protesters.\r\nBut as we got working that day, we forgot about it. Driving to dinner, we missed a turn -- actually we missed going straight; instead followed the road as it turned -- and as we wandered through some side streets to get back on track, I look to my right, and there’s the Robert E Lee statue covered in black tarp, with a couple of people camped out in front of it, and another group of people walking toward it. I suggested that we didn’t need to come to a complete stop at intersection. And, well, we know where that statue is now.</li>\r\n 	<li>For all of my complaints and bitch tweeting about delayed flights, I have to say that my American flight home from Reagan National Saturday morning was great. Exit row seat; no one in the middle. Everyone boarded quickly; they closed the door and left 10 minutes early and with no traffic on the taxiway and a beautiful sunny day, we were up and over the Potomac in 5 minutes. Typically, though, nothing like this goes unpunished at ORD, but we landed, didn’t have to wait for a gate, and taxied immediately in, arriving a half-hour early. Damn if this doesn’t make me look forward to my next trip.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/bridges/15563\">i knew</a> by bridges (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. Ft: shannonsongs</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>On my most recent trip through the ATL PreCheck line, there was no X-Ray machine choreography this time. If you remember in the last episode, I talked about the TSA agent at the parallel loading X-Ray machine coordinating each bin push, having everyone hold up until all the previous bins had cleared, and then having everyone push their bins onto the conveyor at once. Not this time, though I did get a bit of a stink eye from a couple when I walked around them to one of the further up loading stations. They’re obviously not old PC heads, otherwise they’d instantly understand the difference between serial and parallel paths.</li>\r\n 	<li>Following up on the packing pro tips topics from the last episode, which I also repurposed/recycled into the Ruthless Packing Tips blog post, Dan Bennett, the CEO of Test Facts, sent me a link to study where they tested and compared 32,672 luggage prices. I’ll put a <a href=\"https://www.testfacts.com/luggage-prices-analyzed/\"><strong>link</strong> </a>to the study in the show notes, but a couple of interesting factoids from their introductory infographic\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>You can save an average of $110/39% buying on-line</li>\r\n 	<li>Walmart and Target’s on-line stores tend to have the highest discounts; Kohl’s and Macy’s the lowest</li>\r\n 	<li>Amazon is in 10th place for average discount (in the 40% range), but is tops by a long way in greatest variety -- over 12,000 luggage items vs. 7,500 for Jet which was #2</li>\r\n 	<li>Luggage sets have a 23% higher discount than single pieces</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Check it out -- it’s an interesting piece of analysis</li>\r\n 	<li>Jim McDonough posted a “traveled while injured” story on Facebook that put my biking injury whining in its place\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>My wife and I were in County Kerry on the West Coast of Ireland. We were killing time before dinner, at an ancient stone circle on the edge of town. I was taking some photos, and it started raining. While walking down a slope, I was putting my camera back in my bag to keep it dry, when my left foot slipped on the wet grass. My right knee hyper-flexed, causing a complete tear of my quadriceps tendon. There was a loud crack, but no pain.</li>\r\n 	<li>It turns out you can\'t walk without a quadriceps tendon. We didn\'t know what the problem was. My wife ran off and found some people and got them to come and get me, and they took me to the doctor\'s house. The doctor (more like a physician\'s assistant, the regular doctor was away) poked around but couldn\'t diagnose anything. We went back to our B&amp;B but did not go out to dinner that night!</li>\r\n 	<li>Flying home, Dublin/Gatwick/DFW, I needed assistance for the connections. British Airways took such good care of me in Gatwick that I fly them whenever I can. While on the plane I was OK - I used seat backs to get to/from the head. American was supposed to provide a wheelchair at DFW but they failed to until the lead flight attendant got on the horn and got me one. I had surgery a couple of days later, and my rehab took a few months.</li>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">This is the same injury that Bill Clinton had at Greg Norman\'s house. He had a better medical plan than I did</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Just “ouch”, Jim. Reminds me of years ago when I broke my right foot getting out of my car in Philadelphia. I stepped on some broken concrete and heard a loud “snap”! After a long wait in an ER in downtown Philly -- where they rightly were triaging gunshot victims over me -- they plastered me up to my thigh and told me not to put any weight on my foot. The next day, I’m hobbling through 30th Street Station and down the stairs to the train platform on crutches with a carry-on bag across my back, swinging with every step. No one from Amtrak took any sort of care of me.</li>\r\n 	<li>Mika Pyyhkala tweeted me a great video of what I assume is a new service that guides blind travelers through airports. I’ll put a <a href=\"https://youtu.be/rXtv-M4WpMU\"><strong>link</strong> </a>in the show notes. It’s a great demo, show how a person in the contact center is viewing a real-time video stream through what I assume is a camera mounted on the head of the traveler, and then providing audio guidance. And watching the video made me realize what a mine field an airport is for blind or low-sight travelers. I guess I should’ve realized this; it’s typically a mine field for those with 20/20 vision. Thanks Mika for the pointer. Very cool video.</li>\r\n 	<li>The #metoo Twitter campaign on sexual harassment that started up a couple of weeks ago reminded me of a couple of stories women have told me about seat assignments. One from a woman CIO; she’s sitting in her aisle seat, pre-boarded with the top status group and is downloading some last-minute e-mails during regular boarding. She looks up, there’s a guy standing there who says “Why don’t you just slide over, honey”, pointing to the center seat. She closed her PC, stood up and pointed the guy to his center seat, and then leaned out into the aisle for the rest of the flight. Another story was from a friend, a woman air marshal, who was sitting in her assigned aisle First Class seat -- armed and incognito to everyone except the flight crew. During boarding, a well-known male TV host on MSNBC asks her to switch seats. She can’t; the regulations say that air marshals need to be in their assigned seats; but she can’t tell him that and stay undercover, so she politely tells him “No”. To which he becomes very irate, obnoxiously berating her -- “Do you know who I am” and all that. As much as she’d love to tell him why she can’t move, she can’t. So she has to sit there and take it, until finally a flight attendant comes over and intervenes. Followed by, again, an uncomfortable 2-hr flight in close quarters with a troglodyte. Sexual harassment is bad -- full stop. Having to fend someone off, and then be in the same tight metal tube with him unable to leave, even worse.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/11510\">Funkist</a> - cdk dub mix by cdk (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: teru.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>What’s the Current Value of Loyalty?</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I continue to love Hertz’s new Presidents Club pick-your-own car aisle. Yes, National has been doing it for years. But on my last trip to Atlanta, I’m walking down the aisle looking at the cars -- Altima, Altima, Hyundai, Altima, Jag, Altima -- wait, what? I very quickly back up. It’s a new Jaguar Model XF. I look up -- nope, I haven’t slipped into the Upgrade aisle. I throw my bag in the back and take off for one of my nicer drives up I-85 through the city. Another time, I’m walking down the aisle and a Hertz guy pulls a new Dodge Charger into the space next to me. He hops out, hands me the keys saying “We want to make sure you guys have a nice selection of cars to choose from.” And so now as the year is winding down, I’m looking -- how many more rentals to keep Presidents Club status?</li>\r\n 	<li>I felt the flip side of this last week at the Charlottesville Courtyard where as I’m filling up a couple of water glasses in the workout room cooler, I tweet “I kinda hate Courtyard Hotels. They offer the worst experience for the money to Marriott Platinum members…” Scott Drake tweeted back “I’ll be the contrarian: at the price point is it not valuable? Are you expecting the JW experience at a Courtyard?” while Michael Kline asked “Detailed explanation? Maybe on the podcast?” Mine was a tweet that come from a comparison between my stay at an Atlanta Marriott the prior week and this Courtyard. For about the same rate, the Atlanta Marriott gave me a bit of a welcome gift, free breakfast every morning, and restocked my room with bottled water. The Courtyard -- I could either pick a bottle of something from their little market next to the front desk or have one free coffee during my stay. I took the bottle of water, which I then filled up every morning in the workout room until the maid threw it out. Not knocking the maid -- she’s just doing her job. But as I’m carrying the now filled water glasses back to my room, I’m thinking -- why am I staying here? And again, it’s not that I couldn’t go buy a bottle of water and expense it, it was more the disconnect of the thing -- how much better the Marriott treated me for the same price.</li>\r\n 	<li>On my last trip to ATL, I flew DL where I have absolutely no status. I was trying to thread my flights between already-booked conference calls, and DL, with way more flights than AA or UA, was the only way to string everything together. On the way down, I couldn’t get a seat assignment until I was at the gate -- 32B, second-to-the-last row on an old Boeing 717 -- the last of the DC-9/MD-80 series that I think Delta got from the old AirTrans. At the gate I thought I lucked into an aisle seat, but those 717’s have a 3-2 seat configuration, opposite of AA and the old NW, so B is a middle seat. The flight was fine; the service reasonable, and it was a short flight, so it wasn’t a big deal. But it was definitely a less enjoyable experience that my Saturday flight on American, with an exit row aisle seat and an empty middle seat.</li>\r\n 	<li>There was a study a few months ago that showed American was the most stingy carrier with award seats. And there are other ways that they’ve eroded the value of loyalty. I’ve flown American since July 1985 when I started my first full-time job in Dallas and I’ve noticed that chipping way over what’s now 37 years -- that’s a frightening number to say out loud. But when my objective is to get from Point A to Point B with the least amount of hassle, there is still some value to loyalty.</li>\r\n 	<li>Which is kinda the muddling middle ground I’ve carved out nowadays; invest enough time/effort to hit the loyalty level that fits the value I will get. I’ll go out of my way to re-up my Hertz status because it’s given me great rental car choices. I won’t push for anything more than mid-level airline status because, with the high load factors and the push to sell 1st-class seats, there not much more to get than free front-of-the-plane seating and a reasonable shot at overhead bin space. Going out of my way to make American’s Exec Platinum or United’s 1K again doesn’t appear to be worth it. And with Courtyards, there’s not much value in a $2 bottle of water.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/48705\">Jolanta Blues</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license.  Ft: Admiral Bob, Martijn de Boer</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Traveling Injured</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>In a couple of <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/02/06/podcast-87-sick-on-the-road-whats-in-my-briefcase/\">past</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/03/13/podcast-88-new-travel-goodies-losing-status/\">episodes</a>, we’ve talked about how miserable it is to be sick on the road. Traveling injured is a bit similar, but not quite the same. While you’re not, say, shivering under hotel blankets after you’ve cranked the thermostat as high as it’ll go, you’re not powering through your day at 100%.</li>\r\n 	<li>The most recent stint on travel injured reserve was our May trip to Hungary. My wife had left the week before to visit her aunt and cousins, leaving me alone with the cat. I was working from home one nice day and decided to take a break for a bike ride. Figured I should take every opportunity to burn some calories now since Hungarian food isn’t known as spa cuisine. I did my normal 17-mile circuit for the 50th or 60th time. Coming towards the last mile, I’m looking ahead to line up a turn and boom -- I hit some huge divot in the pavement that I’ve never seen before. My hands fly off the handle bar, I see the front wheel turned 90 degrees, and down I go, skidding across the asphalt. I come to a stop just short of the curb, pick myself up, rinse the visible road rash with the last bits of water in my bottle, and limp my bike and myself home.</li>\r\n 	<li>I immediately hit the shower, scrubbed out the road rash (with, as you might imagine, a bit of loud vocal commentary), and surveyed the damage. Good sized abrasions on my right elbow and forearm, my right butt cheek, both knees, and a line on my left chest where I must’ve popped the handle bar. I lost a bunch of skin, but felt lucky I didn’t break a collarbone or something worse.</li>\r\n 	<li>The Friday night flight to Vienna was not a comfortable one. No knock on Austrian Airlines; as I mentioned in an <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/06/24/podcast-130-notes-from-hungary/\">earlier podcast</a>, I was happy with their service. It was primarily the seat -- a standard coach seat, so not overly spacious -- pressing up against that large bit of road rash on my right, uhh, hip. Indeed, that abrasion was still -- I think “weeping” is the technical term. And so halfway through the flight, I was in the toilet with my tube of neosporin, my gauze pads and my surgical tape re-dressing it. It was either that or change pants. And following my packing pro tips, I couldn’t do a one-and-done on these pants. Luckily, I was in that quiet time between the after-dinner and the just-before-landing toilet rushes, so no banging on the door to hurry up.</li>\r\n 	<li>Every day was like that -- 30 minutes of removing and reapplying dressings, at first 3 times a day, then 2, and then when things finally scabbed up a bit, just in the morning, and really by then as much for cosmetic purposes -- so that people wouldn’t ask me about it -- as much as anything. I had to skip the family trip to a Budapest thermal bath -- I didn’t want some bath guard calling me out of the pool in front of a couple of thousand Hungarians, and I honestly wasn’t sure how aggressively they were chlorinating that water.</li>\r\n 	<li>That wasn’t my most awkward stint on the travel injured reserve list. Last year, I squeezed in a dermatologist appt for a mole scan before a flight out that afternoon. The doc said “This one looks a bit suspect”, putting his finger on a mole right in the middle of my back. He numbed it up, shaved it off, sent it off to the lab and bandaged me up. “Change that dressing every day,” he said as I raced out to head to ORD. The next morning, in a hotel bathroom, by myself, looking in the mirror at the gauze dressing between my shoulder blades that I couldn’t reach, I wondered how I could change that dressing -- call the front desk, ask a colleague? That seemed way too much to ask. And, it wasn’t that big of a mole. That dressing could wait ‘til Friday.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #133</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_133.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #133 — Value of Loyalty; Need Those 5 Stars','','inherit','closed','closed','','1842-revision-v1','','','2017-10-31 18:36:32','2017-10-31 23:36:32','',1842,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/10/31/1842-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1847,1,'2017-10-31 18:38:52','2017-10-31 23:38:52','[caption id=\"attachment_1843\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/2D9A5999-E233-4434-BFCE-4A45D285BEA6.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1843\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/2D9A5999-E233-4434-BFCE-4A45D285BEA6-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Status Recognition in Vietnam[/caption]\r\n\r\nFitting 10 days of clothes for rain, hiking, and Michelin restaurants into a 22-inch carry-on forced me to pack ruthlessly, and to distill my packing thoughts into 5 packing pro tips. Flying to Hungary right after a cycling accident reminded me of the hassles of traveling on the injured reserve list. All this and listener comments on EU mobile regulations, travel apps on smartphones, and the need for Atlanta baggage X-ray ninja skills at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_133.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/344794816\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n<!--more-->\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #134:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. No exciting or exotic travel since the last episode; just a quick down-and-back to Atlanta, a day in Washington, DC, and a few trips to Charlottesville, VA.</li>\r\n 	<li>The first trip to Charlottesville, about 3 weeks ago, was the first time I’d been back in 5 months after spending more than a year there. Other than the flights being poorly timed -- there are non-stops from ORD, but they arrive at either 2:45 in the afternoon or quarter past midnight -- it’s been a great town to visit. So I was surprised as anyone by the white supremacist march there in August.</li>\r\n 	<li>I was on the late night flight and when I walked out of the terminal, the one cab at the curb had already been claimed. But it was only a 4 min wait for a Lyft driver, so not a problem. Indeed, it turned out to be a great ride. The Lyft driver, an older black guy, told me, unprompted, the whole back story of the protests; how it started as a local political battle that then blew up big. He wanted me to know that Charlottesville wasn’t like that. He told me “I’ve lived here for 40 years and have never seen that statue, until one day, I drove past a park, looked to my right and there it was!”</li>\r\n 	<li>Since the white supremacists had shown back up the Saturday before we came back, I said to the project team, “We need to find out where that statue is so we can avoid it.” One is from India, the other born in the US of Indian parents. I didn’t want us stumbling into a line of tiki torch-bearing protesters.\r\nBut as we got working that day, we forgot about it. Driving to dinner, we missed a turn -- actually we missed going straight; instead followed the road as it turned -- and as we wandered through some side streets to get back on track, I look to my right, and there’s the Robert E Lee statue covered in black tarp, with a couple of people camped out in front of it, and another group of people walking toward it. I suggested that we didn’t need to come to a complete stop at intersection. And, well, we know where that statue is now.</li>\r\n 	<li>For all of my complaints and bitch tweeting about delayed flights, I have to say that my American flight home from Reagan National Saturday morning was great. Exit row seat; no one in the middle. Everyone boarded quickly; they closed the door and left 10 minutes early and with no traffic on the taxiway and a beautiful sunny day, we were up and over the Potomac in 5 minutes. Typically, though, nothing like this goes unpunished at ORD, but we landed, didn’t have to wait for a gate, and taxied immediately in, arriving a half-hour early. Damn if this doesn’t make me look forward to my next trip.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/bridges/15563\">i knew</a> by bridges (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. Ft: shannonsongs</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>On my most recent trip through the ATL PreCheck line, there was no X-Ray machine choreography this time. If you remember in the last episode, I talked about the TSA agent at the parallel loading X-Ray machine coordinating each bin push, having everyone hold up until all the previous bins had cleared, and then having everyone push their bins onto the conveyor at once. Not this time, though I did get a bit of a stink eye from a couple when I walked around them to one of the further up loading stations. They’re obviously not old PC heads, otherwise they’d instantly understand the difference between serial and parallel paths.</li>\r\n 	<li>Following up on the packing pro tips topics from the last episode, which I also repurposed/recycled into the Ruthless Packing Tips blog post, Dan Bennett, the CEO of Test Facts, sent me a link to study where they tested and compared 32,672 luggage prices. I’ll put a <a href=\"https://www.testfacts.com/luggage-prices-analyzed/\"><strong>link</strong> </a>to the study in the show notes, but a couple of interesting factoids from their introductory infographic\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>You can save an average of $110/39% buying on-line</li>\r\n 	<li>Walmart and Target’s on-line stores tend to have the highest discounts; Kohl’s and Macy’s the lowest</li>\r\n 	<li>Amazon is in 10th place for average discount (in the 40% range), but is tops by a long way in greatest variety -- over 12,000 luggage items vs. 7,500 for Jet which was #2</li>\r\n 	<li>Luggage sets have a 23% higher discount than single pieces</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Check it out -- it’s an interesting piece of analysis</li>\r\n 	<li>Jim McDonough posted a “traveled while injured” story on Facebook that put my biking injury whining in its place\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>My wife and I were in County Kerry on the West Coast of Ireland. We were killing time before dinner, at an ancient stone circle on the edge of town. I was taking some photos, and it started raining. While walking down a slope, I was putting my camera back in my bag to keep it dry, when my left foot slipped on the wet grass. My right knee hyper-flexed, causing a complete tear of my quadriceps tendon. There was a loud crack, but no pain.</li>\r\n 	<li>It turns out you can\'t walk without a quadriceps tendon. We didn\'t know what the problem was. My wife ran off and found some people and got them to come and get me, and they took me to the doctor\'s house. The doctor (more like a physician\'s assistant, the regular doctor was away) poked around but couldn\'t diagnose anything. We went back to our B&amp;B but did not go out to dinner that night!</li>\r\n 	<li>Flying home, Dublin/Gatwick/DFW, I needed assistance for the connections. British Airways took such good care of me in Gatwick that I fly them whenever I can. While on the plane I was OK - I used seat backs to get to/from the head. American was supposed to provide a wheelchair at DFW but they failed to until the lead flight attendant got on the horn and got me one. I had surgery a couple of days later, and my rehab took a few months.</li>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">This is the same injury that Bill Clinton had at Greg Norman\'s house. He had a better medical plan than I did</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Just “ouch”, Jim. Reminds me of years ago when I broke my right foot getting out of my car in Philadelphia. I stepped on some broken concrete and heard a loud “snap”! After a long wait in an ER in downtown Philly -- where they rightly were triaging gunshot victims over me -- they plastered me up to my thigh and told me not to put any weight on my foot. The next day, I’m hobbling through 30th Street Station and down the stairs to the train platform on crutches with a carry-on bag across my back, swinging with every step. No one from Amtrak took any sort of care of me.</li>\r\n 	<li>Mika Pyyhkala tweeted me a great video of what I assume is a new service that guides blind travelers through airports. I’ll put a <a href=\"https://youtu.be/rXtv-M4WpMU\"><strong>link</strong> </a>in the show notes. It’s a great demo, show how a person in the contact center is viewing a real-time video stream through what I assume is a camera mounted on the head of the traveler, and then providing audio guidance. And watching the video made me realize what a mine field an airport is for blind or low-sight travelers. I guess I should’ve realized this; it’s typically a mine field for those with 20/20 vision. Thanks Mika for the pointer. Very cool video.</li>\r\n 	<li>The #metoo Twitter campaign on sexual harassment that started up a couple of weeks ago reminded me of a couple of stories women have told me about seat assignments. One from a woman CIO; she’s sitting in her aisle seat, pre-boarded with the top status group and is downloading some last-minute e-mails during regular boarding. She looks up, there’s a guy standing there who says “Why don’t you just slide over, honey”, pointing to the center seat. She closed her PC, stood up and pointed the guy to his center seat, and then leaned out into the aisle for the rest of the flight. Another story was from a friend, a woman air marshal, who was sitting in her assigned aisle First Class seat -- armed and incognito to everyone except the flight crew. During boarding, a well-known male TV host on MSNBC asks her to switch seats. She can’t; the regulations say that air marshals need to be in their assigned seats; but she can’t tell him that and stay undercover, so she politely tells him “No”. To which he becomes very irate, obnoxiously berating her -- “Do you know who I am” and all that. As much as she’d love to tell him why she can’t move, she can’t. So she has to sit there and take it, until finally a flight attendant comes over and intervenes. Followed by, again, an uncomfortable 2-hr flight in close quarters with a troglodyte. Sexual harassment is bad -- full stop. Having to fend someone off, and then be in the same tight metal tube with him unable to leave, even worse.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/11510\">Funkist</a> - cdk dub mix by cdk (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: teru.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>What’s the Current Value of Loyalty?</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I continue to love Hertz’s new Presidents Club pick-your-own car aisle. Yes, National has been doing it for years. But on my last trip to Atlanta, I’m walking down the aisle looking at the cars -- Altima, Altima, Hyundai, Altima, Jag, Altima -- wait, what? I very quickly back up. It’s a new Jaguar Model XF. I look up -- nope, I haven’t slipped into the Upgrade aisle. I throw my bag in the back and take off for one of my nicer drives up I-85 through the city. Another time, I’m walking down the aisle and a Hertz guy pulls a new Dodge Charger into the space next to me. He hops out, hands me the keys saying “We want to make sure you guys have a nice selection of cars to choose from.” And so now as the year is winding down, I’m looking -- how many more rentals to keep Presidents Club status?</li>\r\n 	<li>I felt the flip side of this last week at the Charlottesville Courtyard where as I’m filling up a couple of water glasses in the workout room cooler, I tweet “I kinda hate Courtyard Hotels. They offer the worst experience for the money to Marriott Platinum members…” Scott Drake tweeted back “I’ll be the contrarian: at the price point is it not valuable? Are you expecting the JW experience at a Courtyard?” while Michael Kline asked “Detailed explanation? Maybe on the podcast?” Mine was a tweet that come from a comparison between my stay at an Atlanta Marriott the prior week and this Courtyard. For about the same rate, the Atlanta Marriott gave me a bit of a welcome gift, free breakfast every morning, and restocked my room with bottled water. The Courtyard -- I could either pick a bottle of something from their little market next to the front desk or have one free coffee during my stay. I took the bottle of water, which I then filled up every morning in the workout room until the maid threw it out. Not knocking the maid -- she’s just doing her job. But as I’m carrying the now filled water glasses back to my room, I’m thinking -- why am I staying here? And again, it’s not that I couldn’t go buy a bottle of water and expense it, it was more the disconnect of the thing -- how much better the Marriott treated me for the same price.</li>\r\n 	<li>On my last trip to ATL, I flew DL where I have absolutely no status. I was trying to thread my flights between already-booked conference calls, and DL, with way more flights than AA or UA, was the only way to string everything together. On the way down, I couldn’t get a seat assignment until I was at the gate -- 32B, second-to-the-last row on an old Boeing 717 -- the last of the DC-9/MD-80 series that I think Delta got from the old AirTrans. At the gate I thought I lucked into an aisle seat, but those 717’s have a 3-2 seat configuration, opposite of AA and the old NW, so B is a middle seat. The flight was fine; the service reasonable, and it was a short flight, so it wasn’t a big deal. But it was definitely a less enjoyable experience that my Saturday flight on American, with an exit row aisle seat and an empty middle seat.</li>\r\n 	<li>There was a study a few months ago that showed American was the most stingy carrier with award seats. And there are other ways that they’ve eroded the value of loyalty. I’ve flown American since July 1985 when I started my first full-time job in Dallas and I’ve noticed that chipping way over what’s now 37 years -- that’s a frightening number to say out loud. But when my objective is to get from Point A to Point B with the least amount of hassle, there is still some value to loyalty.</li>\r\n 	<li>Which is kinda the muddling middle ground I’ve carved out nowadays; invest enough time/effort to hit the loyalty level that fits the value I will get. I’ll go out of my way to re-up my Hertz status because it’s given me great rental car choices. I won’t push for anything more than mid-level airline status because, with the high load factors and the push to sell 1st-class seats, there not much more to get than free front-of-the-plane seating and a reasonable shot at overhead bin space. Going out of my way to make American’s Exec Platinum or United’s 1K again doesn’t appear to be worth it. And with Courtyards, there’s not much value in a $2 bottle of water.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/48705\">Jolanta Blues</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license.  Ft: Admiral Bob, Martijn de Boer</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Need Those 5 Stars</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>A few months ago, after an overnight stay at a Residence Inn in Baltimore, I wrote up a TripAdvisor review. I titled it “Pretty standard Residence Inn experience” and gave the place 3 whatever TripAdvisor calls them -- stars, circles -- whatever they are, I gave them 3. Seemed in line with the review, where I said “Standard Residence Inn set up; friendly service. Shuttle driver provided good service driving us to/from nearby businesses”. Nothing controversial. So I was a little surprised when I got a note the next day from the general manager\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>“Thank you very much for going on TripAdvisor.com to review our hotel. We greatly appreciate it. One request I have, if you would be willing, is if you might consider changing your rating from a 3 star review to a 4 star review. Marriott hotels views a 3 star review or lower as a “0”. Meaning the hotel takes a hit/mark against it for providing what Marriott considers is a “bad” stay which is 3 or under in their view. It looks like your comments indicate that you had a good stay. In that regard, I wonder if you would be willing to change your score up to a 4? We would really appreciate it if you would.”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>I didn’t change the rating. Maybe I should’ve, but honestly, I don’t know. And even if I did, I really didn’t want to. I thought it was a 3-star experience. I’m sorry that Marriott doesn’t give you credit for that, but I kinda feel like that’s not my problem</li>\r\n 	<li>Now, I’m nothing if not inconsistent, because I’ll give every Uber and Lyft driver 5 stars if they get me to my destination in a reasonably clean car. Indeed, I was right with my son when he jumped all over my wife for giving a Lyft driver 3 stars for what she thought was an “OK, nothing special” ride. “You gonna get him kicked off!” he said. And he wasn’t wrong. Internal Uber documents leaked a few years back said that drivers with ratings less than 4.6 would be considered for deactivation. So this is a little different than TripAdvisor. Here, Uber, the owner of the platform, is saying that a reasonable, acceptable ride should be 5 stars, since anything less will slide the driver down toward the deactivation zone.</li>\r\n 	<li>It’s the Internet version of the Lake Wobegon effect -- everybody is above average. The latest stats I saw on Yelp said that the average rating is 3.8 and 46% of their reviews had 5 stars. Which explains why that 4-star diner you drove to try out was just “OK”.</li>\r\n 	<li>Call me cranky, but the two apps that I regularly rate on -- TripAdvisor and Untappd -- I rate “average” as a 3; kinda like King Canute trying to hold back the waves of grade inflation. On Untappd, anything below a 3, I wouldn’t order again. a 3 is OK, 4 is a great beer, 5 outstanding. I just downloaded my stats into Excel and after a little remedial pivot table training, I can see that I’m a bit skewed -- 13% of my ratings are below 3; 60% are between 3 and 3.75; 26% between 4 and 4.75; and 1% at 5 with a median rating of 3.5. Not as bad as Yelp, but maybe it’s because I really like beer.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #134</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_133.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #133 — Value of Loyalty; Need Those 5 Stars','','inherit','closed','closed','','1842-revision-v1','','','2017-10-31 18:38:52','2017-10-31 23:38:52','',1842,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/10/31/1842-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1848,1,'2017-10-31 18:39:30','2017-10-31 23:39:30','[caption id=\"attachment_1843\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/2D9A5999-E233-4434-BFCE-4A45D285BEA6.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1843\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/2D9A5999-E233-4434-BFCE-4A45D285BEA6-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Status Recognition in Vietnam[/caption]\r\n\r\nFitting 10 days of clothes for rain, hiking, and Michelin restaurants into a 22-inch carry-on forced me to pack ruthlessly, and to distill my packing thoughts into 5 packing pro tips. Flying to Hungary right after a cycling accident reminded me of the hassles of traveling on the injured reserve list. All this and listener comments on EU mobile regulations, travel apps on smartphones, and the need for Atlanta baggage X-ray ninja skills at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_134.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/344794816\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n<!--more-->\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #134:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. No exciting or exotic travel since the last episode; just a quick down-and-back to Atlanta, a day in Washington, DC, and a few trips to Charlottesville, VA.</li>\r\n 	<li>The first trip to Charlottesville, about 3 weeks ago, was the first time I’d been back in 5 months after spending more than a year there. Other than the flights being poorly timed -- there are non-stops from ORD, but they arrive at either 2:45 in the afternoon or quarter past midnight -- it’s been a great town to visit. So I was surprised as anyone by the white supremacist march there in August.</li>\r\n 	<li>I was on the late night flight and when I walked out of the terminal, the one cab at the curb had already been claimed. But it was only a 4 min wait for a Lyft driver, so not a problem. Indeed, it turned out to be a great ride. The Lyft driver, an older black guy, told me, unprompted, the whole back story of the protests; how it started as a local political battle that then blew up big. He wanted me to know that Charlottesville wasn’t like that. He told me “I’ve lived here for 40 years and have never seen that statue, until one day, I drove past a park, looked to my right and there it was!”</li>\r\n 	<li>Since the white supremacists had shown back up the Saturday before we came back, I said to the project team, “We need to find out where that statue is so we can avoid it.” One is from India, the other born in the US of Indian parents. I didn’t want us stumbling into a line of tiki torch-bearing protesters.\r\nBut as we got working that day, we forgot about it. Driving to dinner, we missed a turn -- actually we missed going straight; instead followed the road as it turned -- and as we wandered through some side streets to get back on track, I look to my right, and there’s the Robert E Lee statue covered in black tarp, with a couple of people camped out in front of it, and another group of people walking toward it. I suggested that we didn’t need to come to a complete stop at intersection. And, well, we know where that statue is now.</li>\r\n 	<li>For all of my complaints and bitch tweeting about delayed flights, I have to say that my American flight home from Reagan National Saturday morning was great. Exit row seat; no one in the middle. Everyone boarded quickly; they closed the door and left 10 minutes early and with no traffic on the taxiway and a beautiful sunny day, we were up and over the Potomac in 5 minutes. Typically, though, nothing like this goes unpunished at ORD, but we landed, didn’t have to wait for a gate, and taxied immediately in, arriving a half-hour early. Damn if this doesn’t make me look forward to my next trip.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/bridges/15563\">i knew</a> by bridges (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. Ft: shannonsongs</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>On my most recent trip through the ATL PreCheck line, there was no X-Ray machine choreography this time. If you remember in the last episode, I talked about the TSA agent at the parallel loading X-Ray machine coordinating each bin push, having everyone hold up until all the previous bins had cleared, and then having everyone push their bins onto the conveyor at once. Not this time, though I did get a bit of a stink eye from a couple when I walked around them to one of the further up loading stations. They’re obviously not old PC heads, otherwise they’d instantly understand the difference between serial and parallel paths.</li>\r\n 	<li>Following up on the packing pro tips topics from the last episode, which I also repurposed/recycled into the Ruthless Packing Tips blog post, Dan Bennett, the CEO of Test Facts, sent me a link to study where they tested and compared 32,672 luggage prices. I’ll put a <a href=\"https://www.testfacts.com/luggage-prices-analyzed/\"><strong>link</strong> </a>to the study in the show notes, but a couple of interesting factoids from their introductory infographic\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>You can save an average of $110/39% buying on-line</li>\r\n 	<li>Walmart and Target’s on-line stores tend to have the highest discounts; Kohl’s and Macy’s the lowest</li>\r\n 	<li>Amazon is in 10th place for average discount (in the 40% range), but is tops by a long way in greatest variety -- over 12,000 luggage items vs. 7,500 for Jet which was #2</li>\r\n 	<li>Luggage sets have a 23% higher discount than single pieces</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Check it out -- it’s an interesting piece of analysis</li>\r\n 	<li>Jim McDonough posted a “traveled while injured” story on Facebook that put my biking injury whining in its place\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>My wife and I were in County Kerry on the West Coast of Ireland. We were killing time before dinner, at an ancient stone circle on the edge of town. I was taking some photos, and it started raining. While walking down a slope, I was putting my camera back in my bag to keep it dry, when my left foot slipped on the wet grass. My right knee hyper-flexed, causing a complete tear of my quadriceps tendon. There was a loud crack, but no pain.</li>\r\n 	<li>It turns out you can\'t walk without a quadriceps tendon. We didn\'t know what the problem was. My wife ran off and found some people and got them to come and get me, and they took me to the doctor\'s house. The doctor (more like a physician\'s assistant, the regular doctor was away) poked around but couldn\'t diagnose anything. We went back to our B&amp;B but did not go out to dinner that night!</li>\r\n 	<li>Flying home, Dublin/Gatwick/DFW, I needed assistance for the connections. British Airways took such good care of me in Gatwick that I fly them whenever I can. While on the plane I was OK - I used seat backs to get to/from the head. American was supposed to provide a wheelchair at DFW but they failed to until the lead flight attendant got on the horn and got me one. I had surgery a couple of days later, and my rehab took a few months.</li>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">This is the same injury that Bill Clinton had at Greg Norman\'s house. He had a better medical plan than I did</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Just “ouch”, Jim. Reminds me of years ago when I broke my right foot getting out of my car in Philadelphia. I stepped on some broken concrete and heard a loud “snap”! After a long wait in an ER in downtown Philly -- where they rightly were triaging gunshot victims over me -- they plastered me up to my thigh and told me not to put any weight on my foot. The next day, I’m hobbling through 30th Street Station and down the stairs to the train platform on crutches with a carry-on bag across my back, swinging with every step. No one from Amtrak took any sort of care of me.</li>\r\n 	<li>Mika Pyyhkala tweeted me a great video of what I assume is a new service that guides blind travelers through airports. I’ll put a <a href=\"https://youtu.be/rXtv-M4WpMU\"><strong>link</strong> </a>in the show notes. It’s a great demo, show how a person in the contact center is viewing a real-time video stream through what I assume is a camera mounted on the head of the traveler, and then providing audio guidance. And watching the video made me realize what a mine field an airport is for blind or low-sight travelers. I guess I should’ve realized this; it’s typically a mine field for those with 20/20 vision. Thanks Mika for the pointer. Very cool video.</li>\r\n 	<li>The #metoo Twitter campaign on sexual harassment that started up a couple of weeks ago reminded me of a couple of stories women have told me about seat assignments. One from a woman CIO; she’s sitting in her aisle seat, pre-boarded with the top status group and is downloading some last-minute e-mails during regular boarding. She looks up, there’s a guy standing there who says “Why don’t you just slide over, honey”, pointing to the center seat. She closed her PC, stood up and pointed the guy to his center seat, and then leaned out into the aisle for the rest of the flight. Another story was from a friend, a woman air marshal, who was sitting in her assigned aisle First Class seat -- armed and incognito to everyone except the flight crew. During boarding, a well-known male TV host on MSNBC asks her to switch seats. She can’t; the regulations say that air marshals need to be in their assigned seats; but she can’t tell him that and stay undercover, so she politely tells him “No”. To which he becomes very irate, obnoxiously berating her -- “Do you know who I am” and all that. As much as she’d love to tell him why she can’t move, she can’t. So she has to sit there and take it, until finally a flight attendant comes over and intervenes. Followed by, again, an uncomfortable 2-hr flight in close quarters with a troglodyte. Sexual harassment is bad -- full stop. Having to fend someone off, and then be in the same tight metal tube with him unable to leave, even worse.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/11510\">Funkist</a> - cdk dub mix by cdk (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: teru.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>What’s the Current Value of Loyalty?</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I continue to love Hertz’s new Presidents Club pick-your-own car aisle. Yes, National has been doing it for years. But on my last trip to Atlanta, I’m walking down the aisle looking at the cars -- Altima, Altima, Hyundai, Altima, Jag, Altima -- wait, what? I very quickly back up. It’s a new Jaguar Model XF. I look up -- nope, I haven’t slipped into the Upgrade aisle. I throw my bag in the back and take off for one of my nicer drives up I-85 through the city. Another time, I’m walking down the aisle and a Hertz guy pulls a new Dodge Charger into the space next to me. He hops out, hands me the keys saying “We want to make sure you guys have a nice selection of cars to choose from.” And so now as the year is winding down, I’m looking -- how many more rentals to keep Presidents Club status?</li>\r\n 	<li>I felt the flip side of this last week at the Charlottesville Courtyard where as I’m filling up a couple of water glasses in the workout room cooler, I tweet “I kinda hate Courtyard Hotels. They offer the worst experience for the money to Marriott Platinum members…” Scott Drake tweeted back “I’ll be the contrarian: at the price point is it not valuable? Are you expecting the JW experience at a Courtyard?” while Michael Kline asked “Detailed explanation? Maybe on the podcast?” Mine was a tweet that come from a comparison between my stay at an Atlanta Marriott the prior week and this Courtyard. For about the same rate, the Atlanta Marriott gave me a bit of a welcome gift, free breakfast every morning, and restocked my room with bottled water. The Courtyard -- I could either pick a bottle of something from their little market next to the front desk or have one free coffee during my stay. I took the bottle of water, which I then filled up every morning in the workout room until the maid threw it out. Not knocking the maid -- she’s just doing her job. But as I’m carrying the now filled water glasses back to my room, I’m thinking -- why am I staying here? And again, it’s not that I couldn’t go buy a bottle of water and expense it, it was more the disconnect of the thing -- how much better the Marriott treated me for the same price.</li>\r\n 	<li>On my last trip to ATL, I flew DL where I have absolutely no status. I was trying to thread my flights between already-booked conference calls, and DL, with way more flights than AA or UA, was the only way to string everything together. On the way down, I couldn’t get a seat assignment until I was at the gate -- 32B, second-to-the-last row on an old Boeing 717 -- the last of the DC-9/MD-80 series that I think Delta got from the old AirTrans. At the gate I thought I lucked into an aisle seat, but those 717’s have a 3-2 seat configuration, opposite of AA and the old NW, so B is a middle seat. The flight was fine; the service reasonable, and it was a short flight, so it wasn’t a big deal. But it was definitely a less enjoyable experience that my Saturday flight on American, with an exit row aisle seat and an empty middle seat.</li>\r\n 	<li>There was a study a few months ago that showed American was the most stingy carrier with award seats. And there are other ways that they’ve eroded the value of loyalty. I’ve flown American since July 1985 when I started my first full-time job in Dallas and I’ve noticed that chipping way over what’s now 37 years -- that’s a frightening number to say out loud. But when my objective is to get from Point A to Point B with the least amount of hassle, there is still some value to loyalty.</li>\r\n 	<li>Which is kinda the muddling middle ground I’ve carved out nowadays; invest enough time/effort to hit the loyalty level that fits the value I will get. I’ll go out of my way to re-up my Hertz status because it’s given me great rental car choices. I won’t push for anything more than mid-level airline status because, with the high load factors and the push to sell 1st-class seats, there not much more to get than free front-of-the-plane seating and a reasonable shot at overhead bin space. Going out of my way to make American’s Exec Platinum or United’s 1K again doesn’t appear to be worth it. And with Courtyards, there’s not much value in a $2 bottle of water.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/48705\">Jolanta Blues</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license.  Ft: Admiral Bob, Martijn de Boer</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Need Those 5 Stars</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>A few months ago, after an overnight stay at a Residence Inn in Baltimore, I wrote up a TripAdvisor review. I titled it “Pretty standard Residence Inn experience” and gave the place 3 whatever TripAdvisor calls them -- stars, circles -- whatever they are, I gave them 3. Seemed in line with the review, where I said “Standard Residence Inn set up; friendly service. Shuttle driver provided good service driving us to/from nearby businesses”. Nothing controversial. So I was a little surprised when I got a note the next day from the general manager\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>“Thank you very much for going on TripAdvisor.com to review our hotel. We greatly appreciate it. One request I have, if you would be willing, is if you might consider changing your rating from a 3 star review to a 4 star review. Marriott hotels views a 3 star review or lower as a “0”. Meaning the hotel takes a hit/mark against it for providing what Marriott considers is a “bad” stay which is 3 or under in their view. It looks like your comments indicate that you had a good stay. In that regard, I wonder if you would be willing to change your score up to a 4? We would really appreciate it if you would.”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>I didn’t change the rating. Maybe I should’ve, but honestly, I don’t know. And even if I did, I really didn’t want to. I thought it was a 3-star experience. I’m sorry that Marriott doesn’t give you credit for that, but I kinda feel like that’s not my problem</li>\r\n 	<li>Now, I’m nothing if not inconsistent, because I’ll give every Uber and Lyft driver 5 stars if they get me to my destination in a reasonably clean car. Indeed, I was right with my son when he jumped all over my wife for giving a Lyft driver 3 stars for what she thought was an “OK, nothing special” ride. “You gonna get him kicked off!” he said. And he wasn’t wrong. Internal Uber documents leaked a few years back said that drivers with ratings less than 4.6 would be considered for deactivation. So this is a little different than TripAdvisor. Here, Uber, the owner of the platform, is saying that a reasonable, acceptable ride should be 5 stars, since anything less will slide the driver down toward the deactivation zone.</li>\r\n 	<li>It’s the Internet version of the Lake Wobegon effect -- everybody is above average. The latest stats I saw on Yelp said that the average rating is 3.8 and 46% of their reviews had 5 stars. Which explains why that 4-star diner you drove to try out was just “OK”.</li>\r\n 	<li>Call me cranky, but the two apps that I regularly rate on -- TripAdvisor and Untappd -- I rate “average” as a 3; kinda like King Canute trying to hold back the waves of grade inflation. On Untappd, anything below a 3, I wouldn’t order again. a 3 is OK, 4 is a great beer, 5 outstanding. I just downloaded my stats into Excel and after a little remedial pivot table training, I can see that I’m a bit skewed -- 13% of my ratings are below 3; 60% are between 3 and 3.75; 26% between 4 and 4.75; and 1% at 5 with a median rating of 3.5. Not as bad as Yelp, but maybe it’s because I really like beer.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #134</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_134.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #133 — Value of Loyalty; Need Those 5 Stars','','inherit','closed','closed','','1842-revision-v1','','','2017-10-31 18:39:30','2017-10-31 23:39:30','',1842,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/10/31/1842-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1849,1,'2017-10-31 18:54:19','2017-10-31 23:54:19','[caption id=\"attachment_1843\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/2D9A5999-E233-4434-BFCE-4A45D285BEA6.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1843\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/2D9A5999-E233-4434-BFCE-4A45D285BEA6-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Status Recognition in Vietnam[/caption]\r\n\r\nFinding a Jag in the Hertz Presidents Club aisle has me thinking about the differing value of loyalty from hotel, airlines, and car rental companies while 5-star rating schemes are pushing grade inflation. All this and comments on luggage discounts, traveling while injured, and #metoo while flying at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_134.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/344794816\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n<!--more-->\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #134:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. No exciting or exotic travel since the last episode; just a quick down-and-back to Atlanta, a day in Washington, DC, and a few trips to Charlottesville, VA.</li>\r\n 	<li>The first trip to Charlottesville, about 3 weeks ago, was the first time I’d been back in 5 months after spending more than a year there. Other than the flights being poorly timed -- there are non-stops from ORD, but they arrive at either 2:45 in the afternoon or quarter past midnight -- it’s been a great town to visit. So I was surprised as anyone by the white supremacist march there in August.</li>\r\n 	<li>I was on the late night flight and when I walked out of the terminal, the one cab at the curb had already been claimed. But it was only a 4 min wait for a Lyft driver, so not a problem. Indeed, it turned out to be a great ride. The Lyft driver, an older black guy, told me, unprompted, the whole back story of the protests; how it started as a local political battle that then blew up big. He wanted me to know that Charlottesville wasn’t like that. He told me “I’ve lived here for 40 years and have never seen that statue, until one day, I drove past a park, looked to my right and there it was!”</li>\r\n 	<li>Since the white supremacists had shown back up the Saturday before we came back, I said to the project team, “We need to find out where that statue is so we can avoid it.” One is from India, the other born in the US of Indian parents. I didn’t want us stumbling into a line of tiki torch-bearing protesters.\r\nBut as we got working that day, we forgot about it. Driving to dinner, we missed a turn -- actually we missed going straight; instead followed the road as it turned -- and as we wandered through some side streets to get back on track, I look to my right, and there’s the Robert E Lee statue covered in black tarp, with a couple of people camped out in front of it, and another group of people walking toward it. I suggested that we didn’t need to come to a complete stop at intersection. And, well, we know where that statue is now.</li>\r\n 	<li>For all of my complaints and bitch tweeting about delayed flights, I have to say that my American flight home from Reagan National Saturday morning was great. Exit row seat; no one in the middle. Everyone boarded quickly; they closed the door and left 10 minutes early and with no traffic on the taxiway and a beautiful sunny day, we were up and over the Potomac in 5 minutes. Typically, though, nothing like this goes unpunished at ORD, but we landed, didn’t have to wait for a gate, and taxied immediately in, arriving a half-hour early. Damn if this doesn’t make me look forward to my next trip.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/bridges/15563\">i knew</a> by bridges (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. Ft: shannonsongs</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>On my most recent trip through the ATL PreCheck line, there was no X-Ray machine choreography this time. If you remember in the last episode, I talked about the TSA agent at the parallel loading X-Ray machine coordinating each bin push, having everyone hold up until all the previous bins had cleared, and then having everyone push their bins onto the conveyor at once. Not this time, though I did get a bit of a stink eye from a couple when I walked around them to one of the further up loading stations. They’re obviously not old PC heads, otherwise they’d instantly understand the difference between serial and parallel paths.</li>\r\n 	<li>Following up on the packing pro tips topics from the last episode, which I also repurposed/recycled into the Ruthless Packing Tips blog post, Dan Bennett, the CEO of Test Facts, sent me a link to study where they tested and compared 32,672 luggage prices. I’ll put a <a href=\"https://www.testfacts.com/luggage-prices-analyzed/\"><strong>link</strong> </a>to the study in the show notes, but a couple of interesting factoids from their introductory infographic\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>You can save an average of $110/39% buying on-line</li>\r\n 	<li>Walmart and Target’s on-line stores tend to have the highest discounts; Kohl’s and Macy’s the lowest</li>\r\n 	<li>Amazon is in 10th place for average discount (in the 40% range), but is tops by a long way in greatest variety -- over 12,000 luggage items vs. 7,500 for Jet which was #2</li>\r\n 	<li>Luggage sets have a 23% higher discount than single pieces</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Check it out -- it’s an interesting piece of analysis</li>\r\n 	<li>Jim McDonough posted a “traveled while injured” story on Facebook that put my biking injury whining in its place\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>My wife and I were in County Kerry on the West Coast of Ireland. We were killing time before dinner, at an ancient stone circle on the edge of town. I was taking some photos, and it started raining. While walking down a slope, I was putting my camera back in my bag to keep it dry, when my left foot slipped on the wet grass. My right knee hyper-flexed, causing a complete tear of my quadriceps tendon. There was a loud crack, but no pain.</li>\r\n 	<li>It turns out you can\'t walk without a quadriceps tendon. We didn\'t know what the problem was. My wife ran off and found some people and got them to come and get me, and they took me to the doctor\'s house. The doctor (more like a physician\'s assistant, the regular doctor was away) poked around but couldn\'t diagnose anything. We went back to our B&amp;B but did not go out to dinner that night!</li>\r\n 	<li>Flying home, Dublin/Gatwick/DFW, I needed assistance for the connections. British Airways took such good care of me in Gatwick that I fly them whenever I can. While on the plane I was OK - I used seat backs to get to/from the head. American was supposed to provide a wheelchair at DFW but they failed to until the lead flight attendant got on the horn and got me one. I had surgery a couple of days later, and my rehab took a few months.</li>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">This is the same injury that Bill Clinton had at Greg Norman\'s house. He had a better medical plan than I did</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Just “ouch”, Jim. Reminds me of years ago when I broke my right foot getting out of my car in Philadelphia. I stepped on some broken concrete and heard a loud “snap”! After a long wait in an ER in downtown Philly -- where they rightly were triaging gunshot victims over me -- they plastered me up to my thigh and told me not to put any weight on my foot. The next day, I’m hobbling through 30th Street Station and down the stairs to the train platform on crutches with a carry-on bag across my back, swinging with every step. No one from Amtrak took any sort of care of me.</li>\r\n 	<li>Mika Pyyhkala tweeted me a great video of what I assume is a new service that guides blind travelers through airports. I’ll put a <a href=\"https://youtu.be/rXtv-M4WpMU\"><strong>link</strong> </a>in the show notes. It’s a great demo, show how a person in the contact center is viewing a real-time video stream through what I assume is a camera mounted on the head of the traveler, and then providing audio guidance. And watching the video made me realize what a mine field an airport is for blind or low-sight travelers. I guess I should’ve realized this; it’s typically a mine field for those with 20/20 vision. Thanks Mika for the pointer. Very cool video.</li>\r\n 	<li>The #metoo Twitter campaign on sexual harassment that started up a couple of weeks ago reminded me of a couple of stories women have told me about seat assignments. One from a woman CIO; she’s sitting in her aisle seat, pre-boarded with the top status group and is downloading some last-minute e-mails during regular boarding. She looks up, there’s a guy standing there who says “Why don’t you just slide over, honey”, pointing to the center seat. She closed her PC, stood up and pointed the guy to his center seat, and then leaned out into the aisle for the rest of the flight. Another story was from a friend, a woman air marshal, who was sitting in her assigned aisle First Class seat -- armed and incognito to everyone except the flight crew. During boarding, a well-known male TV host on MSNBC asks her to switch seats. She can’t; the regulations say that air marshals need to be in their assigned seats; but she can’t tell him that and stay undercover, so she politely tells him “No”. To which he becomes very irate, obnoxiously berating her -- “Do you know who I am” and all that. As much as she’d love to tell him why she can’t move, she can’t. So she has to sit there and take it, until finally a flight attendant comes over and intervenes. Followed by, again, an uncomfortable 2-hr flight in close quarters with a troglodyte. Sexual harassment is bad -- full stop. Having to fend someone off, and then be in the same tight metal tube with him unable to leave, even worse.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/11510\">Funkist</a> - cdk dub mix by cdk (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: teru.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>What’s the Current Value of Loyalty?</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I continue to love Hertz’s new Presidents Club pick-your-own car aisle. Yes, National has been doing it for years. But on my last trip to Atlanta, I’m walking down the aisle looking at the cars -- Altima, Altima, Hyundai, Altima, Jag, Altima -- wait, what? I very quickly back up. It’s a new Jaguar Model XF. I look up -- nope, I haven’t slipped into the Upgrade aisle. I throw my bag in the back and take off for one of my nicer drives up I-85 through the city. Another time, I’m walking down the aisle and a Hertz guy pulls a new Dodge Charger into the space next to me. He hops out, hands me the keys saying “We want to make sure you guys have a nice selection of cars to choose from.” And so now as the year is winding down, I’m looking -- how many more rentals to keep Presidents Club status?</li>\r\n 	<li>I felt the flip side of this last week at the Charlottesville Courtyard where as I’m filling up a couple of water glasses in the workout room cooler, I tweet “I kinda hate Courtyard Hotels. They offer the worst experience for the money to Marriott Platinum members…” Scott Drake tweeted back “I’ll be the contrarian: at the price point is it not valuable? Are you expecting the JW experience at a Courtyard?” while Michael Kline asked “Detailed explanation? Maybe on the podcast?” Mine was a tweet that come from a comparison between my stay at an Atlanta Marriott the prior week and this Courtyard. For about the same rate, the Atlanta Marriott gave me a bit of a welcome gift, free breakfast every morning, and restocked my room with bottled water. The Courtyard -- I could either pick a bottle of something from their little market next to the front desk or have one free coffee during my stay. I took the bottle of water, which I then filled up every morning in the workout room until the maid threw it out. Not knocking the maid -- she’s just doing her job. But as I’m carrying the now filled water glasses back to my room, I’m thinking -- why am I staying here? And again, it’s not that I couldn’t go buy a bottle of water and expense it, it was more the disconnect of the thing -- how much better the Marriott treated me for the same price.</li>\r\n 	<li>On my last trip to ATL, I flew DL where I have absolutely no status. I was trying to thread my flights between already-booked conference calls, and DL, with way more flights than AA or UA, was the only way to string everything together. On the way down, I couldn’t get a seat assignment until I was at the gate -- 32B, second-to-the-last row on an old Boeing 717 -- the last of the DC-9/MD-80 series that I think Delta got from the old AirTrans. At the gate I thought I lucked into an aisle seat, but those 717’s have a 3-2 seat configuration, opposite of AA and the old NW, so B is a middle seat. The flight was fine; the service reasonable, and it was a short flight, so it wasn’t a big deal. But it was definitely a less enjoyable experience that my Saturday flight on American, with an exit row aisle seat and an empty middle seat.</li>\r\n 	<li>There was a study a few months ago that showed American was the most stingy carrier with award seats. And there are other ways that they’ve eroded the value of loyalty. I’ve flown American since July 1985 when I started my first full-time job in Dallas and I’ve noticed that chipping way over what’s now 37 years -- that’s a frightening number to say out loud. But when my objective is to get from Point A to Point B with the least amount of hassle, there is still some value to loyalty.</li>\r\n 	<li>Which is kinda the muddling middle ground I’ve carved out nowadays; invest enough time/effort to hit the loyalty level that fits the value I will get. I’ll go out of my way to re-up my Hertz status because it’s given me great rental car choices. I won’t push for anything more than mid-level airline status because, with the high load factors and the push to sell 1st-class seats, there not much more to get than free front-of-the-plane seating and a reasonable shot at overhead bin space. Going out of my way to make American’s Exec Platinum or United’s 1K again doesn’t appear to be worth it. And with Courtyards, there’s not much value in a $2 bottle of water.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/48705\">Jolanta Blues</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license.  Ft: Admiral Bob, Martijn de Boer</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Need Those 5 Stars</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>A few months ago, after an overnight stay at a Residence Inn in Baltimore, I wrote up a TripAdvisor review. I titled it “Pretty standard Residence Inn experience” and gave the place 3 whatever TripAdvisor calls them -- stars, circles -- whatever they are, I gave them 3. Seemed in line with the review, where I said “Standard Residence Inn set up; friendly service. Shuttle driver provided good service driving us to/from nearby businesses”. Nothing controversial. So I was a little surprised when I got a note the next day from the general manager\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>“Thank you very much for going on TripAdvisor.com to review our hotel. We greatly appreciate it. One request I have, if you would be willing, is if you might consider changing your rating from a 3 star review to a 4 star review. Marriott hotels views a 3 star review or lower as a “0”. Meaning the hotel takes a hit/mark against it for providing what Marriott considers is a “bad” stay which is 3 or under in their view. It looks like your comments indicate that you had a good stay. In that regard, I wonder if you would be willing to change your score up to a 4? We would really appreciate it if you would.”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>I didn’t change the rating. Maybe I should’ve, but honestly, I don’t know. And even if I did, I really didn’t want to. I thought it was a 3-star experience. I’m sorry that Marriott doesn’t give you credit for that, but I kinda feel like that’s not my problem</li>\r\n 	<li>Now, I’m nothing if not inconsistent, because I’ll give every Uber and Lyft driver 5 stars if they get me to my destination in a reasonably clean car. Indeed, I was right with my son when he jumped all over my wife for giving a Lyft driver 3 stars for what she thought was an “OK, nothing special” ride. “You gonna get him kicked off!” he said. And he wasn’t wrong. Internal Uber documents leaked a few years back said that drivers with ratings less than 4.6 would be considered for deactivation. So this is a little different than TripAdvisor. Here, Uber, the owner of the platform, is saying that a reasonable, acceptable ride should be 5 stars, since anything less will slide the driver down toward the deactivation zone.</li>\r\n 	<li>It’s the Internet version of the Lake Wobegon effect -- everybody is above average. The latest stats I saw on Yelp said that the average rating is 3.8 and 46% of their reviews had 5 stars. Which explains why that 4-star diner you drove to try out was just “OK”.</li>\r\n 	<li>Call me cranky, but the two apps that I regularly rate on -- TripAdvisor and Untappd -- I rate “average” as a 3; kinda like King Canute trying to hold back the waves of grade inflation. On Untappd, anything below a 3, I wouldn’t order again. a 3 is OK, 4 is a great beer, 5 outstanding. I just downloaded my stats into Excel and after a little remedial pivot table training, I can see that I’m a bit skewed -- 13% of my ratings are below 3; 60% are between 3 and 3.75; 26% between 4 and 4.75; and 1% at 5 with a median rating of 3.5. Not as bad as Yelp, but maybe it’s because I really like beer.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #134</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_134.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #133 — Value of Loyalty; Need Those 5 Stars','','inherit','closed','closed','','1842-revision-v1','','','2017-10-31 18:54:19','2017-10-31 23:54:19','',1842,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/10/31/1842-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1850,1,'2017-10-31 18:56:03','2017-10-31 23:56:03','[caption id=\"attachment_1843\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/2D9A5999-E233-4434-BFCE-4A45D285BEA6.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1843\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/2D9A5999-E233-4434-BFCE-4A45D285BEA6-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Status Recognition in Vietnam[/caption]\r\n\r\nFinding a Jag in the Hertz Presidents Club aisle has me thinking about the differing value of loyalty from hotel, airlines, and car rental companies while 5-star rating schemes are pushing grade inflation. All this and comments on luggage discounts, traveling while injured, and #metoo while flying at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_134.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/344794816\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n<!--more-->\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #134:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. No exciting or exotic travel since the last episode; just a quick down-and-back to Atlanta, a day in Washington, DC, and a few trips to Charlottesville, VA.</li>\r\n 	<li>The first trip to Charlottesville, about 3 weeks ago, was the first time I’d been back in 5 months after spending more than a year there. Other than the flights being poorly timed -- there are non-stops from ORD, but they arrive at either 2:45 in the afternoon or quarter past midnight -- it’s been a great town to visit. So I was surprised as anyone by the white supremacist march there in August.</li>\r\n 	<li>I was on the late night flight and when I walked out of the terminal, the one cab at the curb had already been claimed. But it was only a 4 min wait for a Lyft driver, so not a problem. Indeed, it turned out to be a great ride. The Lyft driver, an older black guy, told me, unprompted, the whole back story of the protests; how it started as a local political battle that then blew up big. He wanted me to know that Charlottesville wasn’t like that. He told me “I’ve lived here for 40 years and have never seen that statue, until one day, I drove past a park, looked to my right and there it was!”</li>\r\n 	<li>Since the white supremacists had shown back up the Saturday before we came back, I said to the project team, “We need to find out where that statue is so we can avoid it.” One is from India, the other born in the US of Indian parents. I didn’t want us stumbling into a line of tiki torch-bearing protesters.\r\nBut as we got working that day, we forgot about it. Driving to dinner, we missed a turn -- actually we missed going straight; instead followed the road as it turned -- and as we wandered through some side streets to get back on track, I look to my right, and there’s the Robert E Lee statue covered in black tarp, with a couple of people camped out in front of it, and another group of people walking toward it. I suggested that we didn’t need to come to a complete stop at intersection. And, well, we know where that statue is now.</li>\r\n 	<li>For all of my complaints and bitch tweeting about delayed flights, I have to say that my American flight home from Reagan National Saturday morning was great. Exit row seat; no one in the middle. Everyone boarded quickly; they closed the door and left 10 minutes early and with no traffic on the taxiway and a beautiful sunny day, we were up and over the Potomac in 5 minutes. Typically, though, nothing like this goes unpunished at ORD, but we landed, didn’t have to wait for a gate, and taxied immediately in, arriving a half-hour early. Damn if this doesn’t make me look forward to my next trip.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/bridges/15563\">i knew</a> by bridges (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. Ft: shannonsongs</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>On my most recent trip through the ATL PreCheck line, there was no X-Ray machine choreography this time. If you remember in the last episode, I talked about the TSA agent at the parallel loading X-Ray machine coordinating each bin push, having everyone hold up until all the previous bins had cleared, and then having everyone push their bins onto the conveyor at once. Not this time, though I did get a bit of a stink eye from a couple when I walked around them to one of the further up loading stations. They’re obviously not old PC heads, otherwise they’d instantly understand the difference between serial and parallel paths.</li>\r\n 	<li>Following up on the packing pro tips topics from the last episode, which I also repurposed/recycled into the Ruthless Packing Tips blog post, Dan Bennett, the CEO of Test Facts, sent me a link to study where they tested and compared 32,672 luggage prices. I’ll put a <a href=\"https://www.testfacts.com/luggage-prices-analyzed/\"><strong>link</strong> </a>to the study in the show notes, but a couple of interesting factoids from their introductory infographic\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>You can save an average of $110/39% buying on-line</li>\r\n 	<li>Walmart and Target’s on-line stores tend to have the highest discounts; Kohl’s and Macy’s the lowest</li>\r\n 	<li>Amazon is in 10th place for average discount (in the 40% range), but is tops by a long way in greatest variety -- over 12,000 luggage items vs. 7,500 for Jet which was #2</li>\r\n 	<li>Luggage sets have a 23% higher discount than single pieces</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Check it out -- it’s an interesting piece of analysis</li>\r\n 	<li>Jim McDonough posted a “traveled while injured” story on Facebook that put my biking injury whining in its place\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>My wife and I were in County Kerry on the West Coast of Ireland. We were killing time before dinner, at an ancient stone circle on the edge of town. I was taking some photos, and it started raining. While walking down a slope, I was putting my camera back in my bag to keep it dry, when my left foot slipped on the wet grass. My right knee hyper-flexed, causing a complete tear of my quadriceps tendon. There was a loud crack, but no pain.</li>\r\n 	<li>It turns out you can\'t walk without a quadriceps tendon. We didn\'t know what the problem was. My wife ran off and found some people and got them to come and get me, and they took me to the doctor\'s house. The doctor (more like a physician\'s assistant, the regular doctor was away) poked around but couldn\'t diagnose anything. We went back to our B&amp;B but did not go out to dinner that night!</li>\r\n 	<li>Flying home, Dublin/Gatwick/DFW, I needed assistance for the connections. British Airways took such good care of me in Gatwick that I fly them whenever I can. While on the plane I was OK - I used seat backs to get to/from the head. American was supposed to provide a wheelchair at DFW but they failed to until the lead flight attendant got on the horn and got me one. I had surgery a couple of days later, and my rehab took a few months.</li>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">This is the same injury that Bill Clinton had at Greg Norman\'s house. He had a better medical plan than I did</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Just “ouch”, Jim. Reminds me of years ago when I broke my right foot getting out of my car in Philadelphia. I stepped on some broken concrete and heard a loud “snap”! After a long wait in an ER in downtown Philly -- where they rightly were triaging gunshot victims over me -- they plastered me up to my thigh and told me not to put any weight on my foot. The next day, I’m hobbling through 30th Street Station and down the stairs to the train platform on crutches with a carry-on bag across my back, swinging with every step. No one from Amtrak took any sort of care of me.</li>\r\n 	<li>Mika Pyyhkala tweeted me a great video of what I assume is a new service that guides blind travelers through airports. I’ll put a <a href=\"https://youtu.be/rXtv-M4WpMU\"><strong>link</strong> </a>in the show notes. It’s a great demo, show how a person in the contact center is viewing a real-time video stream through what I assume is a camera mounted on the head of the traveler, and then providing audio guidance. And watching the video made me realize what a mine field an airport is for blind or low-sight travelers. I guess I should’ve realized this; it’s typically a mine field for those with 20/20 vision. Thanks Mika for the pointer. Very cool video.</li>\r\n 	<li>The #metoo Twitter campaign on sexual harassment that started up a couple of weeks ago reminded me of a couple of stories women have told me about seat assignments. One from a woman CIO; she’s sitting in her aisle seat, pre-boarded with the top status group and is downloading some last-minute e-mails during regular boarding. She looks up, there’s a guy standing there who says “Why don’t you just slide over, honey”, pointing to the center seat. She closed her PC, stood up and pointed the guy to his center seat, and then leaned out into the aisle for the rest of the flight. Another story was from a friend, a woman air marshal, who was sitting in her assigned aisle First Class seat -- armed and incognito to everyone except the flight crew. During boarding, a well-known male TV host on MSNBC asks her to switch seats. She can’t; the regulations say that air marshals need to be in their assigned seats; but she can’t tell him that and stay undercover, so she politely tells him “No”. To which he becomes very irate, obnoxiously berating her -- “Do you know who I am” and all that. As much as she’d love to tell him why she can’t move, she can’t. So she has to sit there and take it, until finally a flight attendant comes over and intervenes. Followed by, again, an uncomfortable 2-hr flight in close quarters with a troglodyte. Sexual harassment is bad -- full stop. Having to fend someone off, and then be in the same tight metal tube with him unable to leave, even worse.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/11510\">Funkist</a> - cdk dub mix by cdk (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: teru.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>What’s the Current Value of Loyalty?</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I continue to love Hertz’s new Presidents Club pick-your-own car aisle. Yes, National has been doing it for years. But on my last trip to Atlanta, I’m walking down the aisle looking at the cars -- Altima, Altima, Hyundai, Altima, Jag, Altima -- wait, what? I very quickly back up. It’s a new Jaguar Model XF. I look up -- nope, I haven’t slipped into the Upgrade aisle. I throw my bag in the back and take off for one of my nicer drives up I-85 through the city. Another time, I’m walking down the aisle and a Hertz guy pulls a new Dodge Charger into the space next to me. He hops out, hands me the keys saying “We want to make sure you guys have a nice selection of cars to choose from.” And so now as the year is winding down, I’m looking -- how many more rentals to keep Presidents Club status?</li>\r\n 	<li>I felt the flip side of this last week at the Charlottesville Courtyard where as I’m filling up a couple of water glasses in the workout room cooler, I tweet “I kinda hate Courtyard Hotels. They offer the worst experience for the money to Marriott Platinum members…” Scott Drake tweeted back “I’ll be the contrarian: at the price point is it not valuable? Are you expecting the JW experience at a Courtyard?” while Michael Kline asked “Detailed explanation? Maybe on the podcast?” Mine was a tweet that come from a comparison between my stay at an Atlanta Marriott the prior week and this Courtyard. For about the same rate, the Atlanta Marriott gave me a bit of a welcome gift, free breakfast every morning, and restocked my room with bottled water. The Courtyard -- I could either pick a bottle of something from their little market next to the front desk or have one free coffee during my stay. I took the bottle of water, which I then filled up every morning in the workout room until the maid threw it out. Not knocking the maid -- she’s just doing her job. But as I’m carrying the now filled water glasses back to my room, I’m thinking -- why am I staying here? And again, it’s not that I couldn’t go buy a bottle of water and expense it, it was more the disconnect of the thing -- how much better the Marriott treated me for the same price.</li>\r\n 	<li>On my last trip to ATL, I flew DL where I have absolutely no status. I was trying to thread my flights between already-booked conference calls, and DL, with way more flights than AA or UA, was the only way to string everything together. On the way down, I couldn’t get a seat assignment until I was at the gate -- 32B, second-to-the-last row on an old Boeing 717 -- the last of the DC-9/MD-80 series that I think Delta got from the old AirTrans. At the gate I thought I lucked into an aisle seat, but those 717’s have a 3-2 seat configuration, opposite of AA and the old NW, so B is a middle seat. The flight was fine; the service reasonable, and it was a short flight, so it wasn’t a big deal. But it was definitely a less enjoyable experience that my Saturday flight on American, with an exit row aisle seat and an empty middle seat.</li>\r\n 	<li>There was a study a few months ago that showed American was the most stingy carrier with award seats. And there are other ways that they’ve eroded the value of loyalty. I’ve flown American since July 1985 when I started my first full-time job in Dallas and I’ve noticed that chipping way over what’s now 37 years -- that’s a frightening number to say out loud. But when my objective is to get from Point A to Point B with the least amount of hassle, there is still some value to loyalty.</li>\r\n 	<li>Which is kinda the muddling middle ground I’ve carved out nowadays; invest enough time/effort to hit the loyalty level that fits the value I will get. I’ll go out of my way to re-up my Hertz status because it’s given me great rental car choices. I won’t push for anything more than mid-level airline status because, with the high load factors and the push to sell 1st-class seats, there not much more to get than free front-of-the-plane seating and a reasonable shot at overhead bin space. Going out of my way to make American’s Exec Platinum or United’s 1K again doesn’t appear to be worth it. And with Courtyards, there’s not much value in a $2 bottle of water.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/48705\">Jolanta Blues</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license.  Ft: Admiral Bob, Martijn de Boer</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Need Those 5 Stars</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>A few months ago, after an overnight stay at a Residence Inn in Baltimore, I wrote up a TripAdvisor review. I titled it “Pretty standard Residence Inn experience” and gave the place 3 whatever TripAdvisor calls them -- stars, circles -- whatever they are, I gave them 3. Seemed in line with the review, where I said “Standard Residence Inn set up; friendly service. Shuttle driver provided good service driving us to/from nearby businesses”. Nothing controversial. So I was a little surprised when I got a note the next day from the general manager\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>“Thank you very much for going on TripAdvisor.com to review our hotel. We greatly appreciate it. One request I have, if you would be willing, is if you might consider changing your rating from a 3 star review to a 4 star review. Marriott hotels views a 3 star review or lower as a “0”. Meaning the hotel takes a hit/mark against it for providing what Marriott considers is a “bad” stay which is 3 or under in their view. It looks like your comments indicate that you had a good stay. In that regard, I wonder if you would be willing to change your score up to a 4? We would really appreciate it if you would.”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>I didn’t change the rating. Maybe I should’ve, but honestly, I don’t know. And even if I did, I really didn’t want to. I thought it was a 3-star experience. I’m sorry that Marriott doesn’t give you credit for that, but I kinda feel like that’s not my problem</li>\r\n 	<li>Now, I’m nothing if not inconsistent, because I’ll give every Uber and Lyft driver 5 stars if they get me to my destination in a reasonably clean car. Indeed, I was right with my son when he jumped all over my wife for giving a Lyft driver 3 stars for what she thought was an “OK, nothing special” ride. “You gonna get him kicked off!” he said. And he wasn’t wrong. Internal Uber documents leaked a few years back said that drivers with ratings less than 4.6 would be considered for deactivation. So this is a little different than TripAdvisor. Here, Uber, the owner of the platform, is saying that a reasonable, acceptable ride should be 5 stars, since anything less will slide the driver down toward the deactivation zone.</li>\r\n 	<li>It’s the Internet version of the Lake Wobegon effect -- everybody is above average. The latest stats I saw on Yelp said that the average rating is 3.8 and 46% of their reviews had 5 stars. Which explains why that 4-star diner you drove to try out was just “OK”.</li>\r\n 	<li>Call me cranky, but the two apps that I regularly rate on -- TripAdvisor and Untappd -- I rate “average” as a 3; kinda like King Canute trying to hold back the waves of grade inflation. On Untappd, anything below a 3, I wouldn’t order again. a 3 is OK, 4 is a great beer, 5 outstanding. I just downloaded my stats into Excel and after a little remedial pivot table training, I can see that I’m a bit skewed -- 13% of my ratings are below 3; 60% are between 3 and 3.75; 26% between 4 and 4.75; and 1% at 5 with a median rating of 3.5. Not as bad as Yelp, but maybe it’s because I really like beer.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #134</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_134.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #134 — Value of Loyalty; Need Those 5 Stars','','inherit','closed','closed','','1842-revision-v1','','','2017-10-31 18:56:03','2017-10-31 23:56:03','',1842,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/10/31/1842-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1851,1,'2017-10-31 21:45:41','2017-11-01 02:45:41','[caption id=\"attachment_1843\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/2D9A5999-E233-4434-BFCE-4A45D285BEA6.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1843\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/2D9A5999-E233-4434-BFCE-4A45D285BEA6-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Status Recognition in Vietnam[/caption]\r\n\r\nFinding a Jag in the Hertz Presidents Club aisle has me thinking about the differing value of loyalty from hotel, airlines, and car rental companies while 5-star rating schemes are pushing grade inflation. All this and comments on luggage discounts, traveling while injured, and #metoo while flying at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_134.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/349555317\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n<!--more-->\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #134:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. No exciting or exotic travel since the last episode; just a quick down-and-back to Atlanta, a day in Washington, DC, and a few trips to Charlottesville, VA.</li>\r\n 	<li>The first trip to Charlottesville, about 3 weeks ago, was the first time I’d been back in 5 months after spending more than a year there. Other than the flights being poorly timed -- there are non-stops from ORD, but they arrive at either 2:45 in the afternoon or quarter past midnight -- it’s been a great town to visit. So I was surprised as anyone by the white supremacist march there in August.</li>\r\n 	<li>I was on the late night flight and when I walked out of the terminal, the one cab at the curb had already been claimed. But it was only a 4 min wait for a Lyft driver, so not a problem. Indeed, it turned out to be a great ride. The Lyft driver, an older black guy, told me, unprompted, the whole back story of the protests; how it started as a local political battle that then blew up big. He wanted me to know that Charlottesville wasn’t like that. He told me “I’ve lived here for 40 years and have never seen that statue, until one day, I drove past a park, looked to my right and there it was!”</li>\r\n 	<li>Since the white supremacists had shown back up the Saturday before we came back, I said to the project team, “We need to find out where that statue is so we can avoid it.” One is from India, the other born in the US of Indian parents. I didn’t want us stumbling into a line of tiki torch-bearing protesters.\r\nBut as we got working that day, we forgot about it. Driving to dinner, we missed a turn -- actually we missed going straight; instead followed the road as it turned -- and as we wandered through some side streets to get back on track, I look to my right, and there’s the Robert E Lee statue covered in black tarp, with a couple of people camped out in front of it, and another group of people walking toward it. I suggested that we didn’t need to come to a complete stop at intersection. And, well, we know where that statue is now.</li>\r\n 	<li>For all of my complaints and bitch tweeting about delayed flights, I have to say that my American flight home from Reagan National Saturday morning was great. Exit row seat; no one in the middle. Everyone boarded quickly; they closed the door and left 10 minutes early and with no traffic on the taxiway and a beautiful sunny day, we were up and over the Potomac in 5 minutes. Typically, though, nothing like this goes unpunished at ORD, but we landed, didn’t have to wait for a gate, and taxied immediately in, arriving a half-hour early. Damn if this doesn’t make me look forward to my next trip.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/bridges/15563\">i knew</a> by bridges (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. Ft: shannonsongs</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>On my most recent trip through the ATL PreCheck line, there was no X-Ray machine choreography this time. If you remember in the last episode, I talked about the TSA agent at the parallel loading X-Ray machine coordinating each bin push, having everyone hold up until all the previous bins had cleared, and then having everyone push their bins onto the conveyor at once. Not this time, though I did get a bit of a stink eye from a couple when I walked around them to one of the further up loading stations. They’re obviously not old PC heads, otherwise they’d instantly understand the difference between serial and parallel paths.</li>\r\n 	<li>Following up on the packing pro tips topics from the last episode, which I also repurposed/recycled into the Ruthless Packing Tips blog post, Dan Bennett, the CEO of Test Facts, sent me a link to study where they tested and compared 32,672 luggage prices. I’ll put a <a href=\"https://www.testfacts.com/luggage-prices-analyzed/\"><strong>link</strong> </a>to the study in the show notes, but a couple of interesting factoids from their introductory infographic\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>You can save an average of $110/39% buying on-line</li>\r\n 	<li>Walmart and Target’s on-line stores tend to have the highest discounts; Kohl’s and Macy’s the lowest</li>\r\n 	<li>Amazon is in 10th place for average discount (in the 40% range), but is tops by a long way in greatest variety -- over 12,000 luggage items vs. 7,500 for Jet which was #2</li>\r\n 	<li>Luggage sets have a 23% higher discount than single pieces</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Check it out -- it’s an interesting piece of analysis</li>\r\n 	<li>Jim McDonough posted a “traveled while injured” story on Facebook that put my biking injury whining in its place\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>My wife and I were in County Kerry on the West Coast of Ireland. We were killing time before dinner, at an ancient stone circle on the edge of town. I was taking some photos, and it started raining. While walking down a slope, I was putting my camera back in my bag to keep it dry, when my left foot slipped on the wet grass. My right knee hyper-flexed, causing a complete tear of my quadriceps tendon. There was a loud crack, but no pain.</li>\r\n 	<li>It turns out you can\'t walk without a quadriceps tendon. We didn\'t know what the problem was. My wife ran off and found some people and got them to come and get me, and they took me to the doctor\'s house. The doctor (more like a physician\'s assistant, the regular doctor was away) poked around but couldn\'t diagnose anything. We went back to our B&amp;B but did not go out to dinner that night!</li>\r\n 	<li>Flying home, Dublin/Gatwick/DFW, I needed assistance for the connections. British Airways took such good care of me in Gatwick that I fly them whenever I can. While on the plane I was OK - I used seat backs to get to/from the head. American was supposed to provide a wheelchair at DFW but they failed to until the lead flight attendant got on the horn and got me one. I had surgery a couple of days later, and my rehab took a few months.</li>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">This is the same injury that Bill Clinton had at Greg Norman\'s house. He had a better medical plan than I did</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Just “ouch”, Jim. Reminds me of years ago when I broke my right foot getting out of my car in Philadelphia. I stepped on some broken concrete and heard a loud “snap”! After a long wait in an ER in downtown Philly -- where they rightly were triaging gunshot victims over me -- they plastered me up to my thigh and told me not to put any weight on my foot. The next day, I’m hobbling through 30th Street Station and down the stairs to the train platform on crutches with a carry-on bag across my back, swinging with every step. No one from Amtrak took any sort of care of me.</li>\r\n 	<li>Mika Pyyhkala tweeted me a great video of what I assume is a new service that guides blind travelers through airports. I’ll put a <a href=\"https://youtu.be/rXtv-M4WpMU\"><strong>link</strong> </a>in the show notes. It’s a great demo, show how a person in the contact center is viewing a real-time video stream through what I assume is a camera mounted on the head of the traveler, and then providing audio guidance. And watching the video made me realize what a mine field an airport is for blind or low-sight travelers. I guess I should’ve realized this; it’s typically a mine field for those with 20/20 vision. Thanks Mika for the pointer. Very cool video.</li>\r\n 	<li>The #metoo Twitter campaign on sexual harassment that started up a couple of weeks ago reminded me of a couple of stories women have told me about seat assignments. One from a woman CIO; she’s sitting in her aisle seat, pre-boarded with the top status group and is downloading some last-minute e-mails during regular boarding. She looks up, there’s a guy standing there who says “Why don’t you just slide over, honey”, pointing to the center seat. She closed her PC, stood up and pointed the guy to his center seat, and then leaned out into the aisle for the rest of the flight. Another story was from a friend, a woman air marshal, who was sitting in her assigned aisle First Class seat -- armed and incognito to everyone except the flight crew. During boarding, a well-known male TV host on MSNBC asks her to switch seats. She can’t; the regulations say that air marshals need to be in their assigned seats; but she can’t tell him that and stay undercover, so she politely tells him “No”. To which he becomes very irate, obnoxiously berating her -- “Do you know who I am” and all that. As much as she’d love to tell him why she can’t move, she can’t. So she has to sit there and take it, until finally a flight attendant comes over and intervenes. Followed by, again, an uncomfortable 2-hr flight in close quarters with a troglodyte. Sexual harassment is bad -- full stop. Having to fend someone off, and then be in the same tight metal tube with him unable to leave, even worse.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/11510\">Funkist</a> - cdk dub mix by cdk (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: teru.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>What’s the Current Value of Loyalty?</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I continue to love Hertz’s new Presidents Club pick-your-own car aisle. Yes, National has been doing it for years. But on my last trip to Atlanta, I’m walking down the aisle looking at the cars -- Altima, Altima, Hyundai, Altima, Jag, Altima -- wait, what? I very quickly back up. It’s a new Jaguar Model XF. I look up -- nope, I haven’t slipped into the Upgrade aisle. I throw my bag in the back and take off for one of my nicer drives up I-85 through the city. Another time, I’m walking down the aisle and a Hertz guy pulls a new Dodge Charger into the space next to me. He hops out, hands me the keys saying “We want to make sure you guys have a nice selection of cars to choose from.” And so now as the year is winding down, I’m looking -- how many more rentals to keep Presidents Club status?</li>\r\n 	<li>I felt the flip side of this last week at the Charlottesville Courtyard where as I’m filling up a couple of water glasses in the workout room cooler, I tweet “I kinda hate Courtyard Hotels. They offer the worst experience for the money to Marriott Platinum members…” Scott Drake tweeted back “I’ll be the contrarian: at the price point is it not valuable? Are you expecting the JW experience at a Courtyard?” while Michael Kline asked “Detailed explanation? Maybe on the podcast?” Mine was a tweet that come from a comparison between my stay at an Atlanta Marriott the prior week and this Courtyard. For about the same rate, the Atlanta Marriott gave me a bit of a welcome gift, free breakfast every morning, and restocked my room with bottled water. The Courtyard -- I could either pick a bottle of something from their little market next to the front desk or have one free coffee during my stay. I took the bottle of water, which I then filled up every morning in the workout room until the maid threw it out. Not knocking the maid -- she’s just doing her job. But as I’m carrying the now filled water glasses back to my room, I’m thinking -- why am I staying here? And again, it’s not that I couldn’t go buy a bottle of water and expense it, it was more the disconnect of the thing -- how much better the Marriott treated me for the same price.</li>\r\n 	<li>On my last trip to ATL, I flew DL where I have absolutely no status. I was trying to thread my flights between already-booked conference calls, and DL, with way more flights than AA or UA, was the only way to string everything together. On the way down, I couldn’t get a seat assignment until I was at the gate -- 32B, second-to-the-last row on an old Boeing 717 -- the last of the DC-9/MD-80 series that I think Delta got from the old AirTrans. At the gate I thought I lucked into an aisle seat, but those 717’s have a 3-2 seat configuration, opposite of AA and the old NW, so B is a middle seat. The flight was fine; the service reasonable, and it was a short flight, so it wasn’t a big deal. But it was definitely a less enjoyable experience that my Saturday flight on American, with an exit row aisle seat and an empty middle seat.</li>\r\n 	<li>There was a study a few months ago that showed American was the most stingy carrier with award seats. And there are other ways that they’ve eroded the value of loyalty. I’ve flown American since July 1985 when I started my first full-time job in Dallas and I’ve noticed that chipping way over what’s now 37 years -- that’s a frightening number to say out loud. But when my objective is to get from Point A to Point B with the least amount of hassle, there is still some value to loyalty.</li>\r\n 	<li>Which is kinda the muddling middle ground I’ve carved out nowadays; invest enough time/effort to hit the loyalty level that fits the value I will get. I’ll go out of my way to re-up my Hertz status because it’s given me great rental car choices. I won’t push for anything more than mid-level airline status because, with the high load factors and the push to sell 1st-class seats, there not much more to get than free front-of-the-plane seating and a reasonable shot at overhead bin space. Going out of my way to make American’s Exec Platinum or United’s 1K again doesn’t appear to be worth it. And with Courtyards, there’s not much value in a $2 bottle of water.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/48705\">Jolanta Blues</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license.  Ft: Admiral Bob, Martijn de Boer</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Need Those 5 Stars</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>A few months ago, after an overnight stay at a Residence Inn in Baltimore, I wrote up a TripAdvisor review. I titled it “Pretty standard Residence Inn experience” and gave the place 3 whatever TripAdvisor calls them -- stars, circles -- whatever they are, I gave them 3. Seemed in line with the review, where I said “Standard Residence Inn set up; friendly service. Shuttle driver provided good service driving us to/from nearby businesses”. Nothing controversial. So I was a little surprised when I got a note the next day from the general manager\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>“Thank you very much for going on TripAdvisor.com to review our hotel. We greatly appreciate it. One request I have, if you would be willing, is if you might consider changing your rating from a 3 star review to a 4 star review. Marriott hotels views a 3 star review or lower as a “0”. Meaning the hotel takes a hit/mark against it for providing what Marriott considers is a “bad” stay which is 3 or under in their view. It looks like your comments indicate that you had a good stay. In that regard, I wonder if you would be willing to change your score up to a 4? We would really appreciate it if you would.”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>I didn’t change the rating. Maybe I should’ve, but honestly, I don’t know. And even if I did, I really didn’t want to. I thought it was a 3-star experience. I’m sorry that Marriott doesn’t give you credit for that, but I kinda feel like that’s not my problem</li>\r\n 	<li>Now, I’m nothing if not inconsistent, because I’ll give every Uber and Lyft driver 5 stars if they get me to my destination in a reasonably clean car. Indeed, I was right with my son when he jumped all over my wife for giving a Lyft driver 3 stars for what she thought was an “OK, nothing special” ride. “You gonna get him kicked off!” he said. And he wasn’t wrong. Internal Uber documents leaked a few years back said that drivers with ratings less than 4.6 would be considered for deactivation. So this is a little different than TripAdvisor. Here, Uber, the owner of the platform, is saying that a reasonable, acceptable ride should be 5 stars, since anything less will slide the driver down toward the deactivation zone.</li>\r\n 	<li>It’s the Internet version of the Lake Wobegon effect -- everybody is above average. The latest stats I saw on Yelp said that the average rating is 3.8 and 46% of their reviews had 5 stars. Which explains why that 4-star diner you drove to try out was just “OK”.</li>\r\n 	<li>Call me cranky, but the two apps that I regularly rate on -- TripAdvisor and Untappd -- I rate “average” as a 3; kinda like King Canute trying to hold back the waves of grade inflation. On Untappd, anything below a 3, I wouldn’t order again. a 3 is OK, 4 is a great beer, 5 outstanding. I just downloaded my stats into Excel and after a little remedial pivot table training, I can see that I’m a bit skewed -- 13% of my ratings are below 3; 60% are between 3 and 3.75; 26% between 4 and 4.75; and 1% at 5 with a median rating of 3.5. Not as bad as Yelp, but maybe it’s because I really like beer.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #134</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_134.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #134 — Value of Loyalty; Need Those 5 Stars','','inherit','closed','closed','','1842-revision-v1','','','2017-10-31 21:45:41','2017-11-01 02:45:41','',1842,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/10/31/1842-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1852,1,'2017-10-31 21:48:36','2017-11-01 02:48:36','[caption id=\"attachment_1749\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/IMG_0033.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1749\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/IMG_0033-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> One of the Four Major Food Groups[/caption]\r\n\r\nIt\'s a very Paris-centric episode; I\'m still trying to drop the weight I picked up on our 10-day stay. I talk about hunts for beer and pastry took us out of the usual Notre Dame-to-Eiffel Tower-to-Louvre tourist triangle, some of the interesting buskers we saw along the way, and my surprise at Munich Airport receiving an airport award. I also continue our on-going discussions about buying international SIM cards and ride-sharing. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_128.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_128.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #128:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, after a full month of travel. I’m not complaining though, because -- first, I had been home, off the road, for 4 weeks straight and was beginning to make the place look untidy; and then more than a week of this travel spurt was in Paris, on vacation with the family. Tough to complain about travel with your mouth full of great food and wine. And mine certainly was. I’m not even looking at a scale for another 2 weeks.</li>\r\n 	<li>In what’s become our usual pattern for European trips, we flew out on a Thursday night. This works out well because typically Friday is a catch-up day at work -- more about internal conference calls than client work -- so it’s easier to skip out, and then landing on a Friday, more places are open -- like rental agency offices, phone stores -- if you need them. My wife and I flew into Paris and had a 3-star Michelin lunch to chase away jet lag, while the kids met up in Edinburgh for the weekend and lived off of beer and haggis. They then hopped one of the budget carriers to CDG Sunday night and managed to figure out the train well enough to land at the doorstep of our vacation rental on Rue de Rivoli, a bridge and a couple of blocks straight up from Notre Dame. My wife has this whole vacation rental thing down to a near science. I think I need to nag her into writing it up in a post for the TravelCommons web site.</li>\r\n 	<li>In the travel build-up to the Paris trip, another usual pattern; this one involves a bit more stupid travel -- bouncing across multiple clients and cities, to give everyone face-time before I disappear for a week; I found myself in Miami for a couple of days. I flew American back home to Chicago Friday night, and I guess because I was going between two of their hubs, I ended up on one of American’s international 767’s. Now, I typically despise 767’s because the overhead bins are way undersized. But, it was one of the best domestic upgrades I’ve scored. First, because between First and Business class, there’s a whole lot more seat for an upgrade. And then, this 767’s business class had been upgraded, so I had my own “pod” with a lie-flat seat and a 20-something inch screen -- much bigger than the screen smaller than my hand that I tweeted from the United 767 I took from ORD to CDG. Made for a very comfortable 3-hr flight.</li>\r\n 	<li>But back to Paris, the trip went without a hitch -- the strong dollar made an expensive a city a little less so, the weather was great for March -- sunny, a bit brisk. I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to get around with just English. I know I’m a language sloth, and while I didn’t expect it, I was happy not to have to struggle through with my minimal French. Indeed, the only smirch on trip was at the very end. We landed at ORD after 7pm, after half of Immigration shut down. The resulting lines were insane; Security was walking planeloads of people from the other side of the international terminal to our side and to the back of our line. They were shouting for all US citizens to get stand to the left of the hallway. After about 10 minutes of this, I asked a security person about Global Entry. “Oh, go this way,” she said and pointed down an empty line. We bolted, and were out after another 5 minutes. Customs should’ve had a guy walking that line taking Global Entry applications. They would’ve made a killing.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://www.magnatune.com/artists/albums/rompaey-mozaic/\">Bubbly</a></em> by Ruben van Rompaey</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>First up, a belated Thank You to iTunes user <em>California flying</em> for the 5-star review back in January:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>“As a project manager with lots of travel thrown in, I really enjoy hearing Mark’s travel tales and can very much relate to his insight and observations. It’s an easy and fun listen. Just wish it was more frequent!”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Thanks for taking the time to write that review. I’m glad you enjoy the podcast. I am trying on the frequency. This will be 3 straight months of episodes, so we’re starting 2017 in the right way.</li>\r\n 	<li>In the last episode, after deconstructing my own Top 10 travel tips list, I asked for listener contributions. Dan wrote this on the TravelCommons web site\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>“My biggest travel tip right now to my friends is get Nexus! Not only is it great when coming or going to the US (we live in Canada), but it gets you TSA Precheck while in the US which is great to have.”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Good tip, Dan. As a US citizen, I’m still a bit confused on the Global Entry vs. Nexus choice. But anything that lets you skip Immigration lines and keep from having to disrobe in the security line is a good thing.</li>\r\n 	<li>Dan Brener and Max Flight both hit the TravelCommons’ Facebook page to say they found the VPN comparison in the last episode useful. Dan said that he also uses PIA and has found that, sometimes, Netflix will let it connect -- which I mentioned is kinda the acid test for location shifting. Dan says it is a bit hit-&amp;-miss though.</li>\r\n 	<li>Continuing the thread from the past couple of episodes on buying pay-as-you-go-SIMs when overseas, my Paris experiences were a mixed bag. On that first Friday, between picking up the apartment keys and heading to the George V for lunch, I wanted to pick up at least one SIM so we’d have some connectivity. I walked to nearest Orange store -- about 3 blocks down Rue de Rivoli. They didn’t have any regular prepaid SIMs in stock; only the special Holiday SIM which had inter-EU calling which I didn’t need and, at 40 euros, was more than I needed to pay. This became a common refrain. Every company-owned Orange and SFR store I visited was out of prepaid SIMs. Only what appeared to be a franchised Orange store in the bottom of the big underground shopping mall at Les Halles had them, and also very friendly service. That got us through the weekend. On Monday, after another string of Orange stiff arms, we walked up to the main Free store -- which I think sells TV as well as mobile service. We walked up to a vending machine in the lobby and pretty quickly had two more SIMs; a much better buying experience except for the fact that the store was inconveniently tucked away down a bland business street north of the Champs Elysee. I’ll be glad when the eSIM gets market traction.</li>\r\n 	<li>And continuing another thread, this one on Uber, while I regularly use Uber and Lyft in the US, I rarely -- if ever -- use them while traveling in Europe. I got to thinking about this while in Paris when, on Saturday when heading to the airport, we chose to roll the luggage to a taxi rank rather than use Uber. It’s a couple of reasons. First, there doesn’t seem to be that much of a price difference between Uber and taxis. I first noticed this in Lisbon last spring and then again in Paris. Second, most taxis in Europe are not the beaters that many US cabs are. In the US, even at the same rate, I’ll often take Uber because the cars are in so much better shape. The cabs in Baltimore last summer were the most egregious case. There was a cab stand right outside the building I was in, but I’d still wait 5 minutes for an Uber. And third, and maybe the most nebulous (squishy?), I’m maybe a bit less comfortable getting into a ride-share in a country where I don’t know the language and am not confident that I’m solid on the customs and protocols. In the US, I know what’s right and what’s not. Even in the UK, I’m comfortable enough and don’t worry about communicating effectively with the driver. I know zero Portuguese and little more French. So I’m a bit more willing to search out a taxi stand.</li>\r\n 	<li>I was flipping through the online version of the UK’s Telegraph newspaper earlier this month and got clickbaited into a Top 10 Airport listicle from the 2017 Skytrax World Airport Awards. They had all the usual suspects at the top of the list -- Singapore, Seoul, Hong Kong -- but at #4, they had Munich! I was stunned because my last two experiences connecting through Munich -- last Nov en route to Pisa and this month on my way back from Paris -- were not great as my Twitter followers already know. Probably the worst thing are the lines, and how brutally slow they move. Back in episode #125, I described the security crawl when trying to connect to our Pisa flight mid-morning on a Friday. I was stunned how slow the security staff was moving. No sense of urgency as a dozen lines tailed back through the terminal. I thought a union had called for some job action. But then in March, it was a huge tailback off of passport control. I’m used to Frankfurt where you walk up, answer a question, boom-boom they stamp your passport and through you go. Not in Munich. It was that same meandering pace. Like the place was in slow motion. The same thing at the one restaurant we found in the satellite portion of Terminal 2. Four people were behind the counter. The line trying to ordering tailed back, but only one of the four was helping customers. The other three were having some conversation and doing some paperwork. So why did Skytrax rate Munich #4? Apparently, it has its own brewery, a mini-golf course, and in the winter, a Christmas market and an ice skating rink -- none of which I experienced while struggling through lines trying to make a connection. And maybe that’s the problem -- Munich is focused on being a shopping mall/entertainment center rather than being an airport. Planning a flight to Budapest in May, I was offered two connection choices -- Munich or Vienna. I didn’t even pause to think about it. choosing Vienna, even though it’s nowhere in that Skytrax list. I’m hoping they’ll work harder on getting me through the airport than grooming a mini-golf course.</li>\r\n 	<li>And finally, congrats to Frank Mohnhaupt for winning a year\'s subscription to NordVPN. Frank’s entry in the Rafflecopter drawing was subscribing to the TravelCommons’ SoundCloud feed. And thanks again to NordVPN for providing the giveaway prize.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/kokoon-berlin/\">How Do I Work This</a></em> by The Kokoon</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>The Hunt for Experiences</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>In Paris, that first weekend when it was just my wife and I -- the kids were hunting haggis in Edinburgh -- was spent a good chunk of the time on what I call “hunts”. We got up and out early on Saturday -- always a good way to fight jet lag -- hunting for a pastry. Not just any pastry, because in Paris, that would in no way qualify as a hunt. No, it was a specific kind of pastry -- a kugelhopf, a kind of a hat-shaped pastry. And not just any kugelhopf. We were tracking down Vandermeersch, which, according to an article my wife read in Saveur magazine, makes the best kugelhopf in Paris and usually sells out shortly after opening -- hence the early morning alarm. So off we go, using Google Maps to tell us the right combination of Metros to get us to the correct outer bit of Paris. We get there shortly after opening and had the full selection of kugelhopfs -- small, medium, large. The couple of nice middle-aged women running what was a small shop helped us to by 2 smalls -- one to eat right away; the second for Sunday morning -- and a medium for Monday morning for breakfast with the kids. We ate that small one fresh, on the street. I don’t know if it was the best kugelhopf because my sample size was (and still is) one, but it was a pretty damn good pastry and worth forgoing the snooze button the early alarm.</li>\r\n 	<li>Saturday afternoon, we went on my hunt -- for a microbrewery, in an even further out bit of Paris, that’s only open Saturday afternoons. And where our morning visit to Vandermeersch landed us in a seemingly upscale neighborhood where people were up early for the morning runs along the grass boulevard dividers, that afternoon, we walked up the Metro steps on the main street of a heavily North African neighborhood; definitely outside the tourist bubble. Walking across the park here -- no grass, just dirt.</li>\r\n 	<li>But walking into the microbrewery, off kind of a dodgy street, put us in the midst of what seemed to be the standard afternoon outing for Parisian hipster families. Mostly while families with little kids; lots of bikes and beers; everyone eating sandwiches sold by an artisanal baker who looked to be friends of the brewers (his t-shirt read (in English) “More Bakers, Less Bankers”). Nice people; great beer. But an interesting contrast with the surrounding neighborhood. Inside the brewery, I could’ve been in Brooklyn or Portland. Outside, on the main street, maybe Algiers.</li>\r\n 	<li>Good pastry, good beer, but the hunt -- searching out these experiences -- is as much it’s own reward. It gave us a reason, a goal, to get out of the travel bubble, off the well-trod Notre Dame-to-Eiffel Tower-to-Louvre tourist triangle. Not that we didn’t do that too -- we did -- but if that’s all we did, it would have been a bit disappointing. And that we did it on our own, rather than as part of some “Hipster Paris” tour, gives an added touch of accomplishment.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music --<em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/weigl-proof/\">Piano Circus</a></em> by Philipp Weigl</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Pop-Up Entertainment</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Toward the end of our week in Paris, heading out again from the normal tourist zone -- in search of a brew pub with my son this time; my wife and daughter were hunting Longchamps bags -- we get on the Metro to find a busker on our subway car, a tuba busker. He was an older guy wearing a slightly Tyrolean looking hat with a waist-high battery-powered speaker in front of him taped to a luggage wheelie type of cart and an orange donations can taped to the handle. The speaker played the backing track while he played the main melody on the tuba. After one song (which I can’t say that I recognized), he left the backing track playing while walking the car with his hand out for tips. I think he was on the car for 3 stops.</li>\r\n 	<li>On the way back, during one of the 18 stops back, another busker walked onto our car, a younger guy who turned out to be a rapping busker. He had the same speaker rig and the same cadence as the tuba player -- last guy in, stood in front of the door, powered up the back beat on the speakers, rapped out a song between stops, solicited money between the next stops, and then left the train.</li>\r\n 	<li>I also saw what I consider the more typical subway buskers -- playing guitar, or a double-bass in the connecting tunnels, taking advantage of the tile acoustics. A little less typical was a couple ating out an opera scene in a wider area where 2 or 3 tunnels came together. Not only were they singing opera (with tile-driven acoustics), they were acting out the scene -- the woman fleeing toward one tunnel only to have the man catch her and pull her back. It took just a moment to connect the singing to the action; to realize that this wasn’t an actual assault. It drew a bit of a crowd. I don’t know if this was real busking or just advertising an opera show, but it certainly got my attention.</li>\r\n 	<li>Later on, my son and I were walking in front of Notre Dame and heard another woman singing opera. It took us a minute to locate her. She had her back to a building on the north side of the plaza. It was another good acoustic location -- the echo off the building seem to amplify and project her voice across the open space in front of the cathedral. The police seem to keep a heavy presence here. We’d seen them earlier descend on a woman who was panhandling the folks standing in line to get into the cathedral. But this time, they let the woman finish up her aria before moving her along. Quite a change from Chicago’s bucket boys.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #128</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Magnatune</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_128.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #128 — Hunt for Experiences; Pop-Up Entertainment','','inherit','closed','closed','','1747-revision-v1','','','2017-10-31 21:48:36','2017-11-01 02:48:36','',1747,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/10/31/1747-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1854,1,'2017-11-20 22:15:24','2017-11-21 03:15:24','[caption id=\"attachment_1855\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/IMG_0513-cropped.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1855\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/IMG_0513-cropped-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Always use a coffee name when crossing the 3-adjective limit[/caption]\n\nHere\'s something to listen to while in the Thanksgiving airport lines and traffic jams. We list out some of the squares we\'d like to see in an airport bingo card, and I end up going back to the future with my new travel PC. We also talk about my growing stack of subway \"tap\" cards and some forecasts on what could be a traffic jammed Thanksgiving holiday. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_135.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n\n\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #135:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. Started my traditional Thanksgiving no-fly shutdown a week early. My normal practice is to stay at home Thanksgiving week, avoiding what is in the US the busiest travel week of the year. But this year, I’m taking advantage of every opportunity to scale back my travel a bit; consciously going to an every other week travel schedule. This is a big change for me; I think last year I travelled all but 6 or 8 weeks. I’m finding this more leisurely makes me much less brittle/much more accepting of travel hiccups.</li>\n 	<li>Which came in very handy on my last trip because, as I feared, I jinxed myself with the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/10/31/podcast-134-value-of-loyalty-need-those-5-stars/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">last episode</a> when, after a great flight back from DC, I said “Damn if this doesn’t make me look forward to my next trip.” Well, we all know that no good deed goes unpunished. My next flight to Charlottesville was late night Sunday -- leave ORD 9:50pm, get into CHO around 12:30am. I’m sitting in the Admirals Club catching up on e-mail, reading a bit. I’d been getting occasional phone notifications; my flight was bouncing around, changing departure gates, never a good sign, but it settled down after a while. Around 9:15, I figured I’d walk over to the departure gate. I looked at the monitor -- gate G7 as it had been for the past half-hour, so I packed up my stuff. Just as I picked up my phone -- bing, a new notification -- my flight’s cancelled. What the hell?</li>\n 	<li>I asked the Admirals Club folks to check -- yup, it’s cancelled; no, they don’t know why, and yes, they’re as surprised as I am. Of course, American sends me a nice notification that they’ve re-booked me onto the same flight the next day -- leaving 9:50pm Monday -- seeming to expect that I’d be perfectly happy with them blowing a day hole in my schedule. The Admirals Club agents knew that was not an acceptable answer, and one of them immediately started looking for alternatives. Me too -- looking at CHO, DC, and Richmond. Because of how late AA canceled, there was nothing available the next morning. Not surprising given how full planes are flying these days. After about 20 minutes of non-stop keystrokes, the Admirals Club agent found me a flight the next day at 11:30, getting me into Richmond at 2:30pm. I took it -- that was as good as it was going to get -- and gave her a couple of the service recognition coupons American sends the status fliers. She’d earned them. And as I heard other guys around me scrambling for hotel rooms, I stopped thinking about how American had wasted my Sunday night and was going to waste my Monday morning, and instead was happy that the cab I was going to catch was taking me to my own bed.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/duckett/23334\"><em>Another Girl</em></a> by duckett</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>I’m sorta short-cycling what has become my normal monthly cadence -- just squeaking in episodes at the last day of the month -- so that I can give you something to listen to in those Thanksgiving airport line and traffic jams. Triple A forecasts 45.5 million people hitting the roads, the highest since 2005 -- probably some combination of low unemployment and low gas prices. And as the Thanksgiving holiday has expanded -- trying finding anyone in the office on Weds -- Tuesday evening is <a href=\"http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-met-holiday-travel-chicago-20171114-story.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">forecasted </a>to be the worst traffic, when getaway drivers and outbound rush hour combine into a hellish brew of standstill traffic jams. In Chicago, the trip from downtown to O’Hare is predicted to be an hour and 14 minutes, almost 4x more than what it takes on a clear road. Surpassed only by the 2 hour trip to JFK also forecasted for Tuesday evening.</li>\n 	<li>Steve Frick left a comment on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> about<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/10/31/podcast-134-value-of-loyalty-need-those-5-stars/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> last episode</a>’s topic on ratings grade inflation -- the need for that 5-star review. Steve writes:\n<ul>\n 	<li>I\'m a \"Yelp\" guy and I consistently give Fairfield Inn 3 stars. My reviews are along these lines \"Typical Fairfield, nothing that bad yet nothing yet nothing that great. Friendly staff, clean location, and comfortable beds. Same sub-par Fairfield breakfast, but that\'s why you pack instant oatmeal and protein bars.\" There\'s nothing that makes me want to tell people to stay there.</li>\n 	<li>Your <a href=\"https://untappd.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Untappd </a>information got me thinking. With around 1200 unique beers I\'m well below your numbers but I came in with the bulk of my ratings also at 3.75.</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Thanks for that, Steve. My rationalization for my beer ratings skew is selection bias -- with over 5,200 unique beer check-ins, I pretty much know what I like and what I don’t like, so I’m not knowingly going to order and pay for a beer I don’t think I’ll like. I did have the exception to that last weekend when my son and I were at <a href=\"http://fobab.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">FoBAB</a> -- the Festival of Barrel Aged Beers. We volunteered to pour on Friday -- the first night -- which earned us a free ticket for Saturday night. At some point, my son give me a glass “Here, taste this”. I spit it back into the glass, dumped it, and rinsed the glass twice. It was awful. What was it? It was a beer that I had specifically said I wanted to avoid after reading the description in the program -- “Aged 12 months in Ardbeg scotch barrels with coffee and peanut butter.” I rated it 0.25 out of 5 because a zero doesn’t register as a rating. After that, I think I can live with a bit of rating skew.</li>\n 	<li>I started off the other topic in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/10/31/podcast-134-value-of-loyalty-need-those-5-stars/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">last episode</a> -- the value of loyalty -- with the story of finding a new Jag in the Hertz Presidents Club aisle at ATL. Of course, I grabbed it. The next afternoon, though, I was kinda wishing I’d taken an Uber or Lyft. My meeting in Norcross, north of Atlanta, was running late and refreshing Waze, I could see traffic both through and around Atlanta was building. And the rental return is at least a 15-minute ride to the terminal -- when the train doesn’t make an unscheduled stop mid-transit as I described in an earlier episode. So I was gearing myself up for missing my flight and the hassles of finding a seat on something later, when up popped an e-mail from Hertz offering to drive me to the terminal for $20. Sold! After I pulled in, one of the car “checker-inners” hopped into the driver’s seat and off we drove. And she was as happy to be driving that Jag as I was. “I love this car!” she said as we pulled out. “It’s such a beautiful day, I may drop you off and just keep on driving!” We had a good chat. She dropped me off at the door closest to the PreCheck line and I legged it in to make my flight. I won’t pop for that every time, but that $20 was worth it.</li>\n 	<li>Also, thanks to Cristina Sainz of Booking.com’s <a href=\"http://info.suite.booking.com/business-travel-blog/7-podcasts-every-travel-manager-needs-to-listen-to\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Business Travel Blog</a> who put TravelCommons #2 in her list of the “7 Podcasts Every Travel Manager Needs to Listen to Right Now”. She describes the podcast as “serving up pithy travel advice since 2005.” Well, we try. Thanks again Cristina for the shout-out.</li>\n 	<li>When I was in DC last month, I added another subway “tap” card to my collection, which was a little bit of a bummer because I still had an old style Metrocard -- the paper fare card with a mag stripe -- with at least one ride’s worth of fare still on it. So now I have a Smart Trip card along with a Ventra card from Chicago, an Oyster card from London, and a Breeze card from Atlanta. I hold onto them because they’re reusable and, while not expensive, their costs start to add up. The Atlanta and DC cards were $2 each; the Chicago card was $5, and the London card £5 -- or about $6.60 at today’s exchange rate. The Chicago card is, of course, the one I use the most. And it’s nice because I can top it up with a smartphone app. Comes in handy when I decide to take the L from ORD downtown. Beats standing in the perpetual long lines in front of the ORD fare machines. You’d think that if CTA is going to charge a premium to board at ORD, they’d at least pony up to cut the line to pay it. Little known pro tip for folks coming into ORD -- skip the line and pay with your iPhone if you have Apple Pay set up. It doesn’t read as fast as the Ventra card, but it works -- at least on the L -- the subway. When I was in London this past summer, the Underground was wonky. I could tap in at the turnstile with my iPhone, but couldn’t tap out which was a real hassle. But my daughter, though, who has a contactless debit card from RBS had no problems. And there wasn’t an app to top up my Oyster card, so I had to queue up in front of a lot of fare machines. Last month, New York announced that they’re hiring the same company London used to revamp the MTA’s payment system. I hope they get Apple and Android Pay working right. And more broadly, I hope these tap cards are just a temporary bridge until these transit systems can fully upgrade their systems to use smartphones. Until then, I carry a card holder in my backpack with my $15-$20 worth of subway tap cards.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/flatwound/14476\"><em>The Long Goodbye</em></a> by John Pazden</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Playing Airport Bingo</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>I got a press release a couple of days ago from <a href=\"https://www.airhelp.com/en/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">AirHelp</a>, a company that looks like will file compensation claims for delayed flights in return for a 25% cut -- which doesn’t seem too bad since they’re doing it on a contingent basis. They sent along an Airport Bingo card for “helping you pass the time while not so patiently waiting to board”. It’s kinda the airport version of “buzzword bingo” that we all play on conference calls -- instead of marking a square someone says “synergy”, AirHelp has squares for things like “police dog” and “solo traveler”.</li>\n 	<li>That’s OK for a start, I guess. But here at TravelCommons, we try to go to the next level of road warrior-ism. I’m not going to fill out all 24 squares, but here are 12 squares’ worth to get you started\n<ol>\n 	<li>10-15 minute traffic jam on the airport access road -- just long enough to get those stress hormones flowing</li>\n 	<li>Guy in front of you in the PreCheck line walks through the metal detector with his smartphone. The alarm sounds. He stands there, puzzled. The TSA person rolls her eyes and asks, yet again, if he’d emptied his pockets. He looks surprised that his smartphone would set it off. She looks at her watch for how long ‘til her next break.</li>\n 	<li>Girl pulling a Hello Kitty kids-sized roller board on her way to Grandma’s. Hey, who said airport bingo had to be 100% snarky?</li>\n 	<li>Woman in front of you in the Starbucks line orders a half-decaf 3-pump no-foam vanilla latte, breaking the 3-adjective rule. It’s Sodexo, not your corner Starbucks. Keep it simple so the rest of us can order.</li>\n 	<li>A piano bar playing Christmas carols -- or if you’re in Nashville airport, a country duo</li>\n 	<li>A family of four or more walking abreast, slowly, so that people racing for their gates drift into the on-coming traffic, or try to thread through the crowd in front of a boarding gate. The only upside? One of the family might be pulling a Hello Kitty bag.</li>\n 	<li>An available rocking chair. More airports are scattering these around, in front of windows in terminal connectors, in random hallways. Bonus if it’s next to an open -- and working -- electrical outlet</li>\n 	<li>A craft beer bar with beers you haven’t had -- get those stress hormones back under control, and increment your unique beer counter on Untappd</li>\n 	<li>Dueling gate announcements. Gates G20 and G22 are boarding at the same time, with each gate agent talking over the other one. You hear Boarding Group 3 called and hustle up to the door, only to be shunted over to wait in the shame station; the other gate called Boarding Group 3.</li>\n 	<li>Boarding is complete and there’s an empty middle seat next to you! The clouds part and a golden ray of sunshine reflects off the iPad of the guy sitting in the window seat, illuminating that lovely little bit of extra elbow room. You and the window seat guy look at each other, smile, and feel those stress hormones drop another notch.</li>\n 	<li>Missing crew. Boarding’s complete, you’re next to an empty middle seat, but you have no crew. Their flight was late, and pulled into a gate two terminals over. They’re on their way, but now you’re worried that some stand-by will drop into that empty seat. That golden ray of sunshine dims a bit.</li>\n 	<li>Early arrival! Not only did the seat stay empty, but favorable winds put you on the ground 30 minutes early. You start to think that you should travel more often.</li>\n</ol>\n</li>\n 	<li>OK, there you go. There’s half your airport bingo card filled out. If you’re flying out Tues or Weds, you’ll have more that enough time in line to figure out the rest. Let us know -- <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Facebook</a>, or <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">website</a> -- what squares you come up with.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/28792\"><em>Slinky Blues</em></a> by Admiral Bob</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Back to the Future with my New Travel PC</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>I’ve been muttering under my breath about my Lenovo ThinkPad for a while now. I’ve had it for 4 years now. It’s feeling a bit heavy and looking a bit beat up, and though it’s no doubt been fully depreciated off the firm’s balance sheet, I don’t hear any rumors of an impending refresh. So I’ve been semi-shopping for a new Travel PC -- clicking through to Engadget reviews, glancing over, eyeing what the other folks on the plane or in the concierge lounge are using.</li>\n 	<li>Seven years ago (just about to the day), in what might’ve passed as an instance of pithy travel advice, I <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2010/11/15/two-weeks-with-a-macbook-air/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">wrote </a>about the use case for a Travel PC -- what it is, and more importantly, what it is not. It’s not my primary computer; it’s not my podcast production or video editing machine. That’s my home PC which is now up to 16GBs of RAM, an 8-core processor, 2 21-inch monitors, Blu-Ray burner, and a couple of terabyte hard drives. My Travel PC is spec’d for what’s important, what I need when I travel — light weight, long battery life, low screen profile so not to get crushed when the guy in the row in front of me power-reclines his seat, and reasonable processing power (in that order) — and leaves behind what’s not. Seven years ago -- in 2010 to save you the math -- the 11-inch MacBook Air was my choice for the Best Travel PC.</li>\n 	<li>My Travel PC use case hasn’t changed, but the market has -- kinda. In my looking around, what I’ve seen is 2 ½ kinds of travel PCs. There are the next generations of the laptop -- thin ultrabooks from Lenovo, HP and Dell; MacBook Pros from Apple -- or full-sized iPads with combo covers/soft keyboards and pens -- with the Microsoft Surface Pro being that ½ case, a thin Windows PC with a fold-out keyboard cover and pen. Quite honestly, none of those options really spoke to me -- at least enough to make me part with my own cash. The ultrabooks didn’t offer much new; I’d might as well “accidently” dump a grande cappuccino on my old Lenovo ‘cause this is what I’d get in return. The MacBook Pros are certainly sleek, but as a Travel PC, don’t seem to offer much more for the Apple premium. I have been thinking about the tablet/keyboard combo, specifically the Surface Pro; but watching guys try to work that soft keyboard on an airplane seatback tray… I could see myself wearing a cup of coffee two weeks after starting to fly with one of those. So, I kept semi-shopping</li>\n 	<li>But then last week, I got an e-mail blast from Newegg, the online PC parts retailer; I usually buy from them them when I’m assembling or upgrading my home PC. They had a flash sale on refurbed 11-inch MacBook Airs, not the 2010 model but what Apple dubs an “early 2014” model. Pretty much identical to my old one, but with updated specs, including the same processor as my Lenovo. I looked at it, did a few Internet search. It sat in a shopping cart for a couple of days until I thought “For $385, why not?” and pulled the trigger. It showed up a few days ago, and save for a corner ding, looks pretty new. I’ve upgraded to the current version of MacOS, installed Office 365 and VMFusion on it, and so I’m pretty much ready to go -- back to the future.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #135</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_135.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #135 — Airport Bingo; My New Old Travel PC','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-135-airport-bingo-new-old-travel-pc','','','2021-09-29 21:49:58','2021-09-30 02:49:58','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=1854',0,'post','',1),
(1855,1,'2017-11-20 16:58:20','2017-11-20 21:58:20','','IMG_0513-cropped','Always use a coffee name when crossing the 3-adjective limit','inherit','open','closed','','img_0513-cropped','','','2017-11-20 16:59:24','2017-11-20 21:59:24','',1854,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/IMG_0513-cropped.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(1856,1,'2017-11-20 18:07:59','2017-11-20 23:07:59','[caption id=\"attachment_1855\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/IMG_0513-cropped.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1855\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/IMG_0513-cropped-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Always use a coffee name when crossing the 3-adjective limit[/caption]\r\n\r\nFinding a Jag in the Hertz Presidents Club aisle has me thinking about the differing value of loyalty from hotel, airlines, and car rental companies while 5-star rating schemes are pushing grade inflation. All this and comments on luggage discounts, traveling while injured, and #metoo while flying at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_135.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/349555317\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n<!--more-->\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #135:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. Started my traditional Thanksgiving no-fly shutdown a week early. My normal practice is to stay at home Thanksgiving week, avoiding what is in the US the busiest travel week of the year. But this year, I’m taking advantage of every opportunity to scale back my travel a bit; consciously going to an every other week travel schedule. This is a big change for me; I think last year I travelled all but 6 or 8 weeks. I’m finding this more leisurely makes me much less brittle/much more accepting of travel hiccups.</li>\r\n 	<li>Which came in very handy on my last trip because, as I feared, I jinxed myself with the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/10/31/podcast-134-value-of-loyalty-need-those-5-stars/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">last episode</a> when, after a great flight back from DC, I said “Damn if this doesn’t make me look forward to my next trip.” Well, we all know that no good deed goes unpunished. My next flight to Charlottesville was late night Sunday -- leave ORD 9:50pm, get into CHO around 12:30am. I’m sitting in the Admirals Club catching up on e-mail, reading a bit. I’d been getting occasional phone notifications; my flight was bouncing around, changing departure gates, never a good sign, but it settled down after a while. Around 9:15, I figured I’d walk over to the departure gate. I looked at the monitor -- gate G7 as it had been for the past half-hour, so I packed up my stuff. Just as I picked up my phone -- bing, a new notification -- my flight’s cancelled. What the hell?</li>\r\n 	<li>I asked the Admirals Club folks to check -- yup, it’s cancelled; no, they don’t know why, and yes, they’re as surprised as I am. Of course, American sends me a nice notification that they’ve re-booked me onto the same flight the next day -- leaving 9:50pm Monday -- seeming to expect that I’d be perfectly happy with them blowing a day hole in my schedule. The Admirals Club agents knew that was not an acceptable answer, and one of them immediately started looking for alternatives. Me too -- looking at CHO, DC, and Richmond. Because of how late AA canceled, there was nothing available the next morning. Not surprising given how full planes are flying these days. After about 20 minutes of non-stop keystrokes, the Admirals Club agent found me a flight the next day at 11:30, getting me into Richmond at 2:30pm. I took it -- that was as good as it was going to get -- and gave her a couple of the service recognition coupons American sends the status fliers. She’d earned them. And as I heard other guys around me scrambling for hotel rooms, I stopped thinking about how American had wasted my Sunday night and was going to waste my Monday morning, and instead was happy that the cab I was going to catch was taking me to my own bed.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/bridges/15563\">i knew</a> by bridges (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. Ft: shannonsongs</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I’m sorta short-cycling what has become my normal monthly cadence -- just squeaking in episodes at the last day of the month -- so that I can give you something to listen to in those Thanksgiving airport line and traffic jams. Triple A forecasts 45.5 million people hitting the roads, the highest since 2005 -- probably some combination of low unemployment and low gas prices. And as the Thanksgiving holiday has expanded -- trying finding anyone in the office on Weds -- Tuesday evening is <a href=\"http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-met-holiday-travel-chicago-20171114-story.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">forecasted </a>to be the worst traffic, when getaway drivers and outbound rush hour combine into a hellish brew of standstill traffic jams. In Chicago, the trip from downtown to O’Hare is predicted to be an hour and 14 minutes, almost 4x more than what it takes on a clear road. Surpassed only by the 2 hour trip to JFK also forecasted for Tuesday evening.</li>\r\n 	<li>Steve Frick left a comment on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> about<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/10/31/podcast-134-value-of-loyalty-need-those-5-stars/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> last episode</a>’s topic on ratings grade inflation -- the need for that 5-star review. Steve writes:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li> I\'m a \"Yelp\" guy and I consistently give Fairfield Inn 3 stars. My reviews are along these lines \"Typical Fairfield, nothing that bad yet nothing yet nothing that great. Friendly staff, clean location, and comfortable beds. Same sub-par Fairfield breakfast, but that\'s why you pack instant oatmeal and protein bars.\" There\'s nothing that makes me want to tell people to stay there.</li>\r\n 	<li>Your <a href=\"https://untappd.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Untappd </a>information got me thinking. With around 1200 unique beers I\'m well below your numbers but I came in with the bulk of my ratings also at 3.75.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Thanks for that, Steve. My rationalization for my beer ratings skew is selection bias -- with over 5,200 unique beer check-ins, I pretty much know what I like and what I don’t like, so I’m not knowingly going to order and pay for a beer I don’t think I’ll like. I did have the exception to that last weekend when my son and I were at <a href=\"http://fobab.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">FoBAB</a> -- the Festival of Barrel Aged Beers. We volunteered to pour on Friday -- the first night -- which earned us a free ticket for Saturday night. At some point, my son give me a glass “Here, taste this”. I spit it back into the glass, dumped it, and rinsed the glass twice. It was awful. What was it? It was a beer that I had specifically said I wanted to avoid after reading the description in the program -- “Aged 12 months in Ardbeg scotch barrels with coffee and peanut butter.” I rated it 0.25 out of 5 because a zero doesn’t register as a rating. After that, I think I can live with a bit of rating skew.</li>\r\n 	<li>I started off the other topic in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/10/31/podcast-134-value-of-loyalty-need-those-5-stars/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">last episode</a> -- the value of loyalty -- with the story of finding a new Jag in the Hertz Presidents Club aisle at ATL. Of course, I grabbed it. The next afternoon, though, I was kinda wishing I’d taken an Uber or Lyft. My meeting in Norcross, north of Atlanta, was running late and refreshing Waze, I could see traffic both through and around Atlanta was building. And the rental return is at least a 15-minute ride to the terminal -- when the train doesn’t make an unscheduled stop mid-transit as I described in an earlier episode. So I was gearing myself up for missing my flight and the hassles of finding a seat on something later, when up popped an e-mail from Hertz offering to drive me to the terminal for $20. Sold! After I pulled in, one of the car “checker-inners” hopped into the driver’s seat and off we drove. And she was as happy to be driving that Jag as I was. “I love this car!” she said as we pulled out. “It’s such a beautiful day, I may drop you off and just keep on driving!” We had a good chat. She dropped me off at the door closest to the PreCheck line and I legged it in to make my flight. I won’t pop for that every time, but that $20 was worth it.</li>\r\n 	<li>Also, thanks to Cristina Sainz of Booking.com’s <a href=\"http://info.suite.booking.com/business-travel-blog/7-podcasts-every-travel-manager-needs-to-listen-to\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Business Travel Blog</a> who put TravelCommons #2 in her list of the “7 Podcasts Every Travel Manager Needs to Listen to Right Now”. She describes the podcast as “serving up pithy travel advice since 2005.” Well, we try. Thanks again Cristina for the shout-out.</li>\r\n 	<li>When I was in DC last month, I added another subway “tap” card to my collection, which was a little bit of a bummer because I still had an old style Metrocard -- the paper fare card with a mag stripe -- with at least one ride’s worth of fare still on it. So now I have a Smart Trip card along with a Ventra card from Chicago, an Oyster card from London, and a Breeze card from Atlanta. I hold onto them because they’re reusable and, while not expensive, their costs start to add up. The Atlanta and DC cards were $2 each; the Chicago card was $5, and the London card £5 -- or about $6.60 at today’s exchange rate. The Chicago card is, of course, the one I use the most. And it’s nice because I can top it up with a smartphone app. Comes in handy when I decide to take the L from ORD downtown. Beats standing in the perpetual long lines in front of the ORD fare machines. You’d think that if CTA is going to charge a premium to board at ORD, they’d at least pony up to cut the line to pay it. Little known pro tip for folks coming into ORD -- skip the line and pay with your iPhone if you have Apple Pay set up. It doesn’t read as fast as the Ventra card, but it works -- at least on the L -- the subway. When I was in London this past summer, the Underground was wonky. I could tap in at the turnstile with my iPhone, but couldn’t tap out which was a real hassle. But my daughter, though, who has a contactless debit card from RBS had no problems. And there wasn’t an app to top up my Oyster card, so I had to queue up in front of a lot of fare machines. Last month, New York announced that they’re hiring the same company London used to revamp the MTA’s payment system. I hope they get Apple and Android Pay working right. And more broadly, I hope these tap cards are just a temporary bridge until these transit systems can fully upgrade their systems to use smartphones. Until then, I carry a card holder in my backpack with my $15-$20 worth of subway tap cards.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/11510\">Funkist</a> - cdk dub mix by cdk (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: teru.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Playing Airport Bingo</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I continue to love Hertz’s new Presidents Club pick-your-own car aisle. Yes, National has been doing it for years. But on my last trip to Atlanta, I’m walking down the aisle looking at the cars -- Altima, Altima, Hyundai, Altima, Jag, Altima -- wait, what? I very quickly back up. It’s a new Jaguar Model XF. I look up -- nope, I haven’t slipped into the Upgrade aisle. I throw my bag in the back and take off for one of my nicer drives up I-85 through the city. Another time, I’m walking down the aisle and a Hertz guy pulls a new Dodge Charger into the space next to me. He hops out, hands me the keys saying “We want to make sure you guys have a nice selection of cars to choose from.” And so now as the year is winding down, I’m looking -- how many more rentals to keep Presidents Club status?</li>\r\n 	<li>I felt the flip side of this last week at the Charlottesville Courtyard where as I’m filling up a couple of water glasses in the workout room cooler, I tweet “I kinda hate Courtyard Hotels. They offer the worst experience for the money to Marriott Platinum members…” Scott Drake tweeted back “I’ll be the contrarian: at the price point is it not valuable? Are you expecting the JW experience at a Courtyard?” while Michael Kline asked “Detailed explanation? Maybe on the podcast?” Mine was a tweet that come from a comparison between my stay at an Atlanta Marriott the prior week and this Courtyard. For about the same rate, the Atlanta Marriott gave me a bit of a welcome gift, free breakfast every morning, and restocked my room with bottled water. The Courtyard -- I could either pick a bottle of something from their little market next to the front desk or have one free coffee during my stay. I took the bottle of water, which I then filled up every morning in the workout room until the maid threw it out. Not knocking the maid -- she’s just doing her job. But as I’m carrying the now filled water glasses back to my room, I’m thinking -- why am I staying here? And again, it’s not that I couldn’t go buy a bottle of water and expense it, it was more the disconnect of the thing -- how much better the Marriott treated me for the same price.</li>\r\n 	<li>On my last trip to ATL, I flew DL where I have absolutely no status. I was trying to thread my flights between already-booked conference calls, and DL, with way more flights than AA or UA, was the only way to string everything together. On the way down, I couldn’t get a seat assignment until I was at the gate -- 32B, second-to-the-last row on an old Boeing 717 -- the last of the DC-9/MD-80 series that I think Delta got from the old AirTrans. At the gate I thought I lucked into an aisle seat, but those 717’s have a 3-2 seat configuration, opposite of AA and the old NW, so B is a middle seat. The flight was fine; the service reasonable, and it was a short flight, so it wasn’t a big deal. But it was definitely a less enjoyable experience that my Saturday flight on American, with an exit row aisle seat and an empty middle seat.</li>\r\n 	<li>There was a study a few months ago that showed American was the most stingy carrier with award seats. And there are other ways that they’ve eroded the value of loyalty. I’ve flown American since July 1985 when I started my first full-time job in Dallas and I’ve noticed that chipping way over what’s now 37 years -- that’s a frightening number to say out loud. But when my objective is to get from Point A to Point B with the least amount of hassle, there is still some value to loyalty.</li>\r\n 	<li>Which is kinda the muddling middle ground I’ve carved out nowadays; invest enough time/effort to hit the loyalty level that fits the value I will get. I’ll go out of my way to re-up my Hertz status because it’s given me great rental car choices. I won’t push for anything more than mid-level airline status because, with the high load factors and the push to sell 1st-class seats, there not much more to get than free front-of-the-plane seating and a reasonable shot at overhead bin space. Going out of my way to make American’s Exec Platinum or United’s 1K again doesn’t appear to be worth it. And with Courtyards, there’s not much value in a $2 bottle of water.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/48705\">Jolanta Blues</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license.  Ft: Admiral Bob, Martijn de Boer</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Need Those 5 Stars</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>A few months ago, after an overnight stay at a Residence Inn in Baltimore, I wrote up a TripAdvisor review. I titled it “Pretty standard Residence Inn experience” and gave the place 3 whatever TripAdvisor calls them -- stars, circles -- whatever they are, I gave them 3. Seemed in line with the review, where I said “Standard Residence Inn set up; friendly service. Shuttle driver provided good service driving us to/from nearby businesses”. Nothing controversial. So I was a little surprised when I got a note the next day from the general manager\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>“Thank you very much for going on TripAdvisor.com to review our hotel. We greatly appreciate it. One request I have, if you would be willing, is if you might consider changing your rating from a 3 star review to a 4 star review. Marriott hotels views a 3 star review or lower as a “0”. Meaning the hotel takes a hit/mark against it for providing what Marriott considers is a “bad” stay which is 3 or under in their view. It looks like your comments indicate that you had a good stay. In that regard, I wonder if you would be willing to change your score up to a 4? We would really appreciate it if you would.”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>I didn’t change the rating. Maybe I should’ve, but honestly, I don’t know. And even if I did, I really didn’t want to. I thought it was a 3-star experience. I’m sorry that Marriott doesn’t give you credit for that, but I kinda feel like that’s not my problem</li>\r\n 	<li>Now, I’m nothing if not inconsistent, because I’ll give every Uber and Lyft driver 5 stars if they get me to my destination in a reasonably clean car. Indeed, I was right with my son when he jumped all over my wife for giving a Lyft driver 3 stars for what she thought was an “OK, nothing special” ride. “You gonna get him kicked off!” he said. And he wasn’t wrong. Internal Uber documents leaked a few years back said that drivers with ratings less than 4.6 would be considered for deactivation. So this is a little different than TripAdvisor. Here, Uber, the owner of the platform, is saying that a reasonable, acceptable ride should be 5 stars, since anything less will slide the driver down toward the deactivation zone.</li>\r\n 	<li>It’s the Internet version of the Lake Wobegon effect -- everybody is above average. The latest stats I saw on Yelp said that the average rating is 3.8 and 46% of their reviews had 5 stars. Which explains why that 4-star diner you drove to try out was just “OK”.</li>\r\n 	<li>Call me cranky, but the two apps that I regularly rate on -- TripAdvisor and Untappd -- I rate “average” as a 3; kinda like King Canute trying to hold back the waves of grade inflation. On Untappd, anything below a 3, I wouldn’t order again. a 3 is OK, 4 is a great beer, 5 outstanding. I just downloaded my stats into Excel and after a little remedial pivot table training, I can see that I’m a bit skewed -- 13% of my ratings are below 3; 60% are between 3 and 3.75; 26% between 4 and 4.75; and 1% at 5 with a median rating of 3.5. Not as bad as Yelp, but maybe it’s because I really like beer.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #135</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_135.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #135 — Airport Bingo; New Old Travel PC','','inherit','closed','closed','','1854-revision-v1','','','2017-11-20 18:07:59','2017-11-20 23:07:59','',1854,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/11/20/1854-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1857,1,'2017-11-20 18:16:47','2017-11-20 23:16:47','[caption id=\"attachment_1855\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/IMG_0513-cropped.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1855\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/IMG_0513-cropped-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Always use a coffee name when crossing the 3-adjective limit[/caption]\r\n\r\nFinding a Jag in the Hertz Presidents Club aisle has me thinking about the differing value of loyalty from hotel, airlines, and car rental companies while 5-star rating schemes are pushing grade inflation. All this and comments on luggage discounts, traveling while injured, and #metoo while flying at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_135.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/349555317\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n<!--more-->\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #135:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. Started my traditional Thanksgiving no-fly shutdown a week early. My normal practice is to stay at home Thanksgiving week, avoiding what is in the US the busiest travel week of the year. But this year, I’m taking advantage of every opportunity to scale back my travel a bit; consciously going to an every other week travel schedule. This is a big change for me; I think last year I travelled all but 6 or 8 weeks. I’m finding this more leisurely makes me much less brittle/much more accepting of travel hiccups.</li>\r\n 	<li>Which came in very handy on my last trip because, as I feared, I jinxed myself with the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/10/31/podcast-134-value-of-loyalty-need-those-5-stars/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">last episode</a> when, after a great flight back from DC, I said “Damn if this doesn’t make me look forward to my next trip.” Well, we all know that no good deed goes unpunished. My next flight to Charlottesville was late night Sunday -- leave ORD 9:50pm, get into CHO around 12:30am. I’m sitting in the Admirals Club catching up on e-mail, reading a bit. I’d been getting occasional phone notifications; my flight was bouncing around, changing departure gates, never a good sign, but it settled down after a while. Around 9:15, I figured I’d walk over to the departure gate. I looked at the monitor -- gate G7 as it had been for the past half-hour, so I packed up my stuff. Just as I picked up my phone -- bing, a new notification -- my flight’s cancelled. What the hell?</li>\r\n 	<li>I asked the Admirals Club folks to check -- yup, it’s cancelled; no, they don’t know why, and yes, they’re as surprised as I am. Of course, American sends me a nice notification that they’ve re-booked me onto the same flight the next day -- leaving 9:50pm Monday -- seeming to expect that I’d be perfectly happy with them blowing a day hole in my schedule. The Admirals Club agents knew that was not an acceptable answer, and one of them immediately started looking for alternatives. Me too -- looking at CHO, DC, and Richmond. Because of how late AA canceled, there was nothing available the next morning. Not surprising given how full planes are flying these days. After about 20 minutes of non-stop keystrokes, the Admirals Club agent found me a flight the next day at 11:30, getting me into Richmond at 2:30pm. I took it -- that was as good as it was going to get -- and gave her a couple of the service recognition coupons American sends the status fliers. She’d earned them. And as I heard other guys around me scrambling for hotel rooms, I stopped thinking about how American had wasted my Sunday night and was going to waste my Monday morning, and instead was happy that the cab I was going to catch was taking me to my own bed.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/bridges/15563\">i knew</a> by bridges (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. Ft: shannonsongs</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I’m sorta short-cycling what has become my normal monthly cadence -- just squeaking in episodes at the last day of the month -- so that I can give you something to listen to in those Thanksgiving airport line and traffic jams. Triple A forecasts 45.5 million people hitting the roads, the highest since 2005 -- probably some combination of low unemployment and low gas prices. And as the Thanksgiving holiday has expanded -- trying finding anyone in the office on Weds -- Tuesday evening is <a href=\"http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-met-holiday-travel-chicago-20171114-story.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">forecasted </a>to be the worst traffic, when getaway drivers and outbound rush hour combine into a hellish brew of standstill traffic jams. In Chicago, the trip from downtown to O’Hare is predicted to be an hour and 14 minutes, almost 4x more than what it takes on a clear road. Surpassed only by the 2 hour trip to JFK also forecasted for Tuesday evening.</li>\r\n 	<li>Steve Frick left a comment on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> about<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/10/31/podcast-134-value-of-loyalty-need-those-5-stars/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> last episode</a>’s topic on ratings grade inflation -- the need for that 5-star review. Steve writes:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I\'m a \"Yelp\" guy and I consistently give Fairfield Inn 3 stars. My reviews are along these lines \"Typical Fairfield, nothing that bad yet nothing yet nothing that great. Friendly staff, clean location, and comfortable beds. Same sub-par Fairfield breakfast, but that\'s why you pack instant oatmeal and protein bars.\" There\'s nothing that makes me want to tell people to stay there.</li>\r\n 	<li>Your <a href=\"https://untappd.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Untappd </a>information got me thinking. With around 1200 unique beers I\'m well below your numbers but I came in with the bulk of my ratings also at 3.75.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Thanks for that, Steve. My rationalization for my beer ratings skew is selection bias -- with over 5,200 unique beer check-ins, I pretty much know what I like and what I don’t like, so I’m not knowingly going to order and pay for a beer I don’t think I’ll like. I did have the exception to that last weekend when my son and I were at <a href=\"http://fobab.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">FoBAB</a> -- the Festival of Barrel Aged Beers. We volunteered to pour on Friday -- the first night -- which earned us a free ticket for Saturday night. At some point, my son give me a glass “Here, taste this”. I spit it back into the glass, dumped it, and rinsed the glass twice. It was awful. What was it? It was a beer that I had specifically said I wanted to avoid after reading the description in the program -- “Aged 12 months in Ardbeg scotch barrels with coffee and peanut butter.” I rated it 0.25 out of 5 because a zero doesn’t register as a rating. After that, I think I can live with a bit of rating skew.</li>\r\n 	<li>I started off the other topic in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/10/31/podcast-134-value-of-loyalty-need-those-5-stars/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">last episode</a> -- the value of loyalty -- with the story of finding a new Jag in the Hertz Presidents Club aisle at ATL. Of course, I grabbed it. The next afternoon, though, I was kinda wishing I’d taken an Uber or Lyft. My meeting in Norcross, north of Atlanta, was running late and refreshing Waze, I could see traffic both through and around Atlanta was building. And the rental return is at least a 15-minute ride to the terminal -- when the train doesn’t make an unscheduled stop mid-transit as I described in an earlier episode. So I was gearing myself up for missing my flight and the hassles of finding a seat on something later, when up popped an e-mail from Hertz offering to drive me to the terminal for $20. Sold! After I pulled in, one of the car “checker-inners” hopped into the driver’s seat and off we drove. And she was as happy to be driving that Jag as I was. “I love this car!” she said as we pulled out. “It’s such a beautiful day, I may drop you off and just keep on driving!” We had a good chat. She dropped me off at the door closest to the PreCheck line and I legged it in to make my flight. I won’t pop for that every time, but that $20 was worth it.</li>\r\n 	<li>Also, thanks to Cristina Sainz of Booking.com’s <a href=\"http://info.suite.booking.com/business-travel-blog/7-podcasts-every-travel-manager-needs-to-listen-to\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Business Travel Blog</a> who put TravelCommons #2 in her list of the “7 Podcasts Every Travel Manager Needs to Listen to Right Now”. She describes the podcast as “serving up pithy travel advice since 2005.” Well, we try. Thanks again Cristina for the shout-out.</li>\r\n 	<li>When I was in DC last month, I added another subway “tap” card to my collection, which was a little bit of a bummer because I still had an old style Metrocard -- the paper fare card with a mag stripe -- with at least one ride’s worth of fare still on it. So now I have a Smart Trip card along with a Ventra card from Chicago, an Oyster card from London, and a Breeze card from Atlanta. I hold onto them because they’re reusable and, while not expensive, their costs start to add up. The Atlanta and DC cards were $2 each; the Chicago card was $5, and the London card £5 -- or about $6.60 at today’s exchange rate. The Chicago card is, of course, the one I use the most. And it’s nice because I can top it up with a smartphone app. Comes in handy when I decide to take the L from ORD downtown. Beats standing in the perpetual long lines in front of the ORD fare machines. You’d think that if CTA is going to charge a premium to board at ORD, they’d at least pony up to cut the line to pay it. Little known pro tip for folks coming into ORD -- skip the line and pay with your iPhone if you have Apple Pay set up. It doesn’t read as fast as the Ventra card, but it works -- at least on the L -- the subway. When I was in London this past summer, the Underground was wonky. I could tap in at the turnstile with my iPhone, but couldn’t tap out which was a real hassle. But my daughter, though, who has a contactless debit card from RBS had no problems. And there wasn’t an app to top up my Oyster card, so I had to queue up in front of a lot of fare machines. Last month, New York announced that they’re hiring the same company London used to revamp the MTA’s payment system. I hope they get Apple and Android Pay working right. And more broadly, I hope these tap cards are just a temporary bridge until these transit systems can fully upgrade their systems to use smartphones. Until then, I carry a card holder in my backpack with my $15-$20 worth of subway tap cards.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/11510\">Funkist</a> - cdk dub mix by cdk (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: teru.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Playing Airport Bingo</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I got a press release a couple of days ago from <a href=\"https://www.airhelp.com/en/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">AirHelp</a>, a company that looks like will file compensation claims for delayed flights in return for a 25% cut -- which doesn’t seem too bad since they’re doing it on a contingent basis. They sent along an Airport Bingo card for “helping you pass the time while not so patiently waiting to board”. It’s kinda the airport version of “buzzword bingo” that we all play on conference calls -- instead of marking a square someone says “synergy”, AirHelp has squares for things like “police dog” and “solo traveler”.</li>\r\n 	<li>That’s OK for a start, I guess. But here at TravelCommons, we try to go to the next level of road warrior-ism. I’m not going to fill out all 24 squares, but here are 12 squares’ worth to get you started\r\n<ol>\r\n 	<li>10-15 minute traffic jam on the airport access road -- just long enough to get those stress hormones flowing</li>\r\n 	<li>Guy in front of you in the PreCheck line walks through the metal detector with his smartphone. The alarm sounds. He stands there, puzzled. The TSA person rolls her eyes and asks, yet again, if he’d emptied his pockets. He looks surprised that his smartphone would set it off. She looks at her watch for how long ‘til her next break.</li>\r\n 	<li>Girl pulling a Hello Kitty kids-sized roller board on her way to Grandma’s. Hey, who said airport bingo had to be 100% snarky?</li>\r\n 	<li>Woman in front of you in the Starbucks line orders a half-decaf 3-pump no-foam vanilla latte, breaking the 3-adjective rule. It’s Sodexo, not your corner Starbucks. Keep it simple so the rest of us can order.</li>\r\n 	<li>A piano bar playing Christmas carols -- or if you’re in Nashville airport, a country duo</li>\r\n 	<li>A family of four or more walking abreast, slowly, so that people racing for their gates drift into the on-coming traffic, or try to thread through the crowd in front of a boarding gate. The only upside? One of the family might be pulling a Hello Kitty bag.</li>\r\n 	<li>An available rocking chair. More airports are scattering these around, in front of windows in terminal connectors, in random hallways. Bonus if it’s next to an open -- and working -- electrical outlet</li>\r\n 	<li>A craft beer bar with beers you haven’t had -- get those stress hormones back under control, and increment your unique beer counter on Untappd</li>\r\n 	<li>Dueling gate announcements. Gates G20 and G22 are boarding at the same time, with each gate agent talking over the other one. You hear Boarding Group 3 called and hustle up to the door, only to be shunted over to wait in the shame station; the other gate called Boarding Group 3.</li>\r\n 	<li>Boarding is complete and there’s an empty middle seat next to you! The clouds part and a golden ray of sunshine reflects off the iPad of the guy sitting in the window seat, illuminating that lovely little bit of extra elbow room. You and the window seat guy look at each other, smile, and feel those stress hormones drop another notch.</li>\r\n 	<li>Missing crew. Boarding’s complete, you’re next to an empty middle seat, but you have no crew. Their flight was late, and pulled into a gate two terminals over. They’re on their way, but now you’re worried that some stand-by will drop into that empty seat. That golden ray of sunshine dims a bit.</li>\r\n 	<li>Early arrival! Not only did the seat stay empty, but favorable winds put you on the ground 30 minutes early. You start to think that you should travel more often.</li>\r\n</ol>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, there you go. There’s half your airport bingo card filled out. If you’re flying out Tues or Weds, you’ll have more that enough time in line to figure out the rest. Let us know -- <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Facebook</a>, or <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">website</a> -- what squares you come up with.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/48705\">Jolanta Blues</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license.  Ft: Admiral Bob, Martijn de Boer</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Back to the Future with my New Travel PC</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I’ve been muttering under my breath about my Lenovo ThinkPad for a while now. I’ve had it for 4 years now. It’s feeling a bit heavy and looking a bit beat up, and though it’s no doubt been fully depreciated off the firm’s balance sheet, I don’t hear any rumors of an impending refresh. So I’ve been semi-shopping for a new Travel PC -- clicking through to Engadget reviews, glancing over, eyeing what the other folks on the plane or in the concierge lounge are using.</li>\r\n 	<li>Seven years ago (just about to the day), in what might’ve passed as an instance of pithy travel advice, I wrote about the use case for a Travel PC -- what it is, and more importantly, what it is not. It’s not my primary computer; it’s not my podcast production or video editing machine. That’s my home PC which is now up to 16GBs of RAM, an 8-core processor, 2 21-inch monitors, Blu-Ray burner, and a couple of terabyte hard drives. My Travel PC is spec’d for what’s important, what I need when I travel — light weight, long battery life, low screen profile so not to get crushed when the guy in the row in front of me power-reclines his seat, and reasonable processing power (in that order) — and leaves behind what’s not. Seven years ago -- in 2010 to save you the math -- the 11-inch MacBook Air was my choice for the Best Travel PC.</li>\r\n 	<li>My Travel PC use case hasn’t changed, but the market has -- kinda. In my looking around, what I’ve seen is 2 ½ kinds of travel PCs. There are the next generations of the laptop -- thin ultrabooks from Lenovo, HP and Dell; MacBook Pros from Apple -- or full-sized iPads with combo covers/soft keyboards and pens -- with the Microsoft Surface Pro being that ½ case, a thin Windows PC with a fold-out keyboard cover and pen. Quite honestly, none of those options really spoke to me -- at least enough to make me part with my own cash. The ultrabooks didn’t offer much new; I’d might as well “accidently” dump a grande cappuccino on my old Lenovo ‘cause this is what I’d get in return. The MacBook Pros are certainly sleek, but as a Travel PC, don’t seem to offer much more for the Apple premium. I have been thinking about the tablet/keyboard combo, specifically the Surface Pro; but watching guys try to work that soft keyboard on an airplane seatback tray… I could see myself wearing a cup of coffee two weeks after starting to fly with one of those. So, I kept semi-shopping</li>\r\n 	<li>But then last week, I got an e-mail blast from Newegg, the online PC parts retailer; I usually buy from them them when I’m assembling or upgrading my home PC. They had a flash sale on refurbed 11-inch MacBook Airs, not the 2010 model but what Apple dubs an “early 2014” model. Pretty much identical to my old one, but with updated specs, including the same processor as my Lenovo. I looked at it, did a few Internet search. It sat in a shopping cart for a couple of days until I thought “For $385, why not?” and pulled the trigger. It showed up a few days ago, and save for a corner ding, looks pretty new. I’ve upgraded to the current version of MacOS, installed Office 365 and VMFusion on it, and so I’m pretty much ready to go -- back to the future.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #135</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_135.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #135 — Airport Bingo; New Old Travel PC','','inherit','closed','closed','','1854-revision-v1','','','2017-11-20 18:16:47','2017-11-20 23:16:47','',1854,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/11/20/1854-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1858,1,'2017-11-20 18:25:10','2017-11-20 23:25:10','[caption id=\"attachment_1855\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/IMG_0513-cropped.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1855\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/IMG_0513-cropped-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Always use a coffee name when crossing the 3-adjective limit[/caption]\r\n\r\nFinding a Jag in the Hertz Presidents Club aisle has me thinking about the differing value of loyalty from hotel, airlines, and car rental companies while 5-star rating schemes are pushing grade inflation. All this and comments on luggage discounts, traveling while injured, and #metoo while flying at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_135.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/349555317\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n<!--more-->\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #135:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. Started my traditional Thanksgiving no-fly shutdown a week early. My normal practice is to stay at home Thanksgiving week, avoiding what is in the US the busiest travel week of the year. But this year, I’m taking advantage of every opportunity to scale back my travel a bit; consciously going to an every other week travel schedule. This is a big change for me; I think last year I travelled all but 6 or 8 weeks. I’m finding this more leisurely makes me much less brittle/much more accepting of travel hiccups.</li>\r\n 	<li>Which came in very handy on my last trip because, as I feared, I jinxed myself with the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/10/31/podcast-134-value-of-loyalty-need-those-5-stars/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">last episode</a> when, after a great flight back from DC, I said “Damn if this doesn’t make me look forward to my next trip.” Well, we all know that no good deed goes unpunished. My next flight to Charlottesville was late night Sunday -- leave ORD 9:50pm, get into CHO around 12:30am. I’m sitting in the Admirals Club catching up on e-mail, reading a bit. I’d been getting occasional phone notifications; my flight was bouncing around, changing departure gates, never a good sign, but it settled down after a while. Around 9:15, I figured I’d walk over to the departure gate. I looked at the monitor -- gate G7 as it had been for the past half-hour, so I packed up my stuff. Just as I picked up my phone -- bing, a new notification -- my flight’s cancelled. What the hell?</li>\r\n 	<li>I asked the Admirals Club folks to check -- yup, it’s cancelled; no, they don’t know why, and yes, they’re as surprised as I am. Of course, American sends me a nice notification that they’ve re-booked me onto the same flight the next day -- leaving 9:50pm Monday -- seeming to expect that I’d be perfectly happy with them blowing a day hole in my schedule. The Admirals Club agents knew that was not an acceptable answer, and one of them immediately started looking for alternatives. Me too -- looking at CHO, DC, and Richmond. Because of how late AA canceled, there was nothing available the next morning. Not surprising given how full planes are flying these days. After about 20 minutes of non-stop keystrokes, the Admirals Club agent found me a flight the next day at 11:30, getting me into Richmond at 2:30pm. I took it -- that was as good as it was going to get -- and gave her a couple of the service recognition coupons American sends the status fliers. She’d earned them. And as I heard other guys around me scrambling for hotel rooms, I stopped thinking about how American had wasted my Sunday night and was going to waste my Monday morning, and instead was happy that the cab I was going to catch was taking me to my own bed.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/bridges/15563\">i knew</a> by bridges (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. Ft: shannonsongs</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I’m sorta short-cycling what has become my normal monthly cadence -- just squeaking in episodes at the last day of the month -- so that I can give you something to listen to in those Thanksgiving airport line and traffic jams. Triple A forecasts 45.5 million people hitting the roads, the highest since 2005 -- probably some combination of low unemployment and low gas prices. And as the Thanksgiving holiday has expanded -- trying finding anyone in the office on Weds -- Tuesday evening is <a href=\"http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-met-holiday-travel-chicago-20171114-story.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">forecasted </a>to be the worst traffic, when getaway drivers and outbound rush hour combine into a hellish brew of standstill traffic jams. In Chicago, the trip from downtown to O’Hare is predicted to be an hour and 14 minutes, almost 4x more than what it takes on a clear road. Surpassed only by the 2 hour trip to JFK also forecasted for Tuesday evening.</li>\r\n 	<li>Steve Frick left a comment on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> about<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/10/31/podcast-134-value-of-loyalty-need-those-5-stars/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> last episode</a>’s topic on ratings grade inflation -- the need for that 5-star review. Steve writes:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I\'m a \"Yelp\" guy and I consistently give Fairfield Inn 3 stars. My reviews are along these lines \"Typical Fairfield, nothing that bad yet nothing yet nothing that great. Friendly staff, clean location, and comfortable beds. Same sub-par Fairfield breakfast, but that\'s why you pack instant oatmeal and protein bars.\" There\'s nothing that makes me want to tell people to stay there.</li>\r\n 	<li>Your <a href=\"https://untappd.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Untappd </a>information got me thinking. With around 1200 unique beers I\'m well below your numbers but I came in with the bulk of my ratings also at 3.75.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Thanks for that, Steve. My rationalization for my beer ratings skew is selection bias -- with over 5,200 unique beer check-ins, I pretty much know what I like and what I don’t like, so I’m not knowingly going to order and pay for a beer I don’t think I’ll like. I did have the exception to that last weekend when my son and I were at <a href=\"http://fobab.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">FoBAB</a> -- the Festival of Barrel Aged Beers. We volunteered to pour on Friday -- the first night -- which earned us a free ticket for Saturday night. At some point, my son give me a glass “Here, taste this”. I spit it back into the glass, dumped it, and rinsed the glass twice. It was awful. What was it? It was a beer that I had specifically said I wanted to avoid after reading the description in the program -- “Aged 12 months in Ardbeg scotch barrels with coffee and peanut butter.” I rated it 0.25 out of 5 because a zero doesn’t register as a rating. After that, I think I can live with a bit of rating skew.</li>\r\n 	<li>I started off the other topic in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/10/31/podcast-134-value-of-loyalty-need-those-5-stars/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">last episode</a> -- the value of loyalty -- with the story of finding a new Jag in the Hertz Presidents Club aisle at ATL. Of course, I grabbed it. The next afternoon, though, I was kinda wishing I’d taken an Uber or Lyft. My meeting in Norcross, north of Atlanta, was running late and refreshing Waze, I could see traffic both through and around Atlanta was building. And the rental return is at least a 15-minute ride to the terminal -- when the train doesn’t make an unscheduled stop mid-transit as I described in an earlier episode. So I was gearing myself up for missing my flight and the hassles of finding a seat on something later, when up popped an e-mail from Hertz offering to drive me to the terminal for $20. Sold! After I pulled in, one of the car “checker-inners” hopped into the driver’s seat and off we drove. And she was as happy to be driving that Jag as I was. “I love this car!” she said as we pulled out. “It’s such a beautiful day, I may drop you off and just keep on driving!” We had a good chat. She dropped me off at the door closest to the PreCheck line and I legged it in to make my flight. I won’t pop for that every time, but that $20 was worth it.</li>\r\n 	<li>Also, thanks to Cristina Sainz of Booking.com’s <a href=\"http://info.suite.booking.com/business-travel-blog/7-podcasts-every-travel-manager-needs-to-listen-to\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Business Travel Blog</a> who put TravelCommons #2 in her list of the “7 Podcasts Every Travel Manager Needs to Listen to Right Now”. She describes the podcast as “serving up pithy travel advice since 2005.” Well, we try. Thanks again Cristina for the shout-out.</li>\r\n 	<li>When I was in DC last month, I added another subway “tap” card to my collection, which was a little bit of a bummer because I still had an old style Metrocard -- the paper fare card with a mag stripe -- with at least one ride’s worth of fare still on it. So now I have a Smart Trip card along with a Ventra card from Chicago, an Oyster card from London, and a Breeze card from Atlanta. I hold onto them because they’re reusable and, while not expensive, their costs start to add up. The Atlanta and DC cards were $2 each; the Chicago card was $5, and the London card £5 -- or about $6.60 at today’s exchange rate. The Chicago card is, of course, the one I use the most. And it’s nice because I can top it up with a smartphone app. Comes in handy when I decide to take the L from ORD downtown. Beats standing in the perpetual long lines in front of the ORD fare machines. You’d think that if CTA is going to charge a premium to board at ORD, they’d at least pony up to cut the line to pay it. Little known pro tip for folks coming into ORD -- skip the line and pay with your iPhone if you have Apple Pay set up. It doesn’t read as fast as the Ventra card, but it works -- at least on the L -- the subway. When I was in London this past summer, the Underground was wonky. I could tap in at the turnstile with my iPhone, but couldn’t tap out which was a real hassle. But my daughter, though, who has a contactless debit card from RBS had no problems. And there wasn’t an app to top up my Oyster card, so I had to queue up in front of a lot of fare machines. Last month, New York announced that they’re hiring the same company London used to revamp the MTA’s payment system. I hope they get Apple and Android Pay working right. And more broadly, I hope these tap cards are just a temporary bridge until these transit systems can fully upgrade their systems to use smartphones. Until then, I carry a card holder in my backpack with my $15-$20 worth of subway tap cards.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/11510\">Funkist</a> - cdk dub mix by cdk (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: teru.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Playing Airport Bingo</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I got a press release a couple of days ago from <a href=\"https://www.airhelp.com/en/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">AirHelp</a>, a company that looks like will file compensation claims for delayed flights in return for a 25% cut -- which doesn’t seem too bad since they’re doing it on a contingent basis. They sent along an Airport Bingo card for “helping you pass the time while not so patiently waiting to board”. It’s kinda the airport version of “buzzword bingo” that we all play on conference calls -- instead of marking a square someone says “synergy”, AirHelp has squares for things like “police dog” and “solo traveler”.</li>\r\n 	<li>That’s OK for a start, I guess. But here at TravelCommons, we try to go to the next level of road warrior-ism. I’m not going to fill out all 24 squares, but here are 12 squares’ worth to get you started\r\n<ol>\r\n 	<li>10-15 minute traffic jam on the airport access road -- just long enough to get those stress hormones flowing</li>\r\n 	<li>Guy in front of you in the PreCheck line walks through the metal detector with his smartphone. The alarm sounds. He stands there, puzzled. The TSA person rolls her eyes and asks, yet again, if he’d emptied his pockets. He looks surprised that his smartphone would set it off. She looks at her watch for how long ‘til her next break.</li>\r\n 	<li>Girl pulling a Hello Kitty kids-sized roller board on her way to Grandma’s. Hey, who said airport bingo had to be 100% snarky?</li>\r\n 	<li>Woman in front of you in the Starbucks line orders a half-decaf 3-pump no-foam vanilla latte, breaking the 3-adjective rule. It’s Sodexo, not your corner Starbucks. Keep it simple so the rest of us can order.</li>\r\n 	<li>A piano bar playing Christmas carols -- or if you’re in Nashville airport, a country duo</li>\r\n 	<li>A family of four or more walking abreast, slowly, so that people racing for their gates drift into the on-coming traffic, or try to thread through the crowd in front of a boarding gate. The only upside? One of the family might be pulling a Hello Kitty bag.</li>\r\n 	<li>An available rocking chair. More airports are scattering these around, in front of windows in terminal connectors, in random hallways. Bonus if it’s next to an open -- and working -- electrical outlet</li>\r\n 	<li>A craft beer bar with beers you haven’t had -- get those stress hormones back under control, and increment your unique beer counter on Untappd</li>\r\n 	<li>Dueling gate announcements. Gates G20 and G22 are boarding at the same time, with each gate agent talking over the other one. You hear Boarding Group 3 called and hustle up to the door, only to be shunted over to wait in the shame station; the other gate called Boarding Group 3.</li>\r\n 	<li>Boarding is complete and there’s an empty middle seat next to you! The clouds part and a golden ray of sunshine reflects off the iPad of the guy sitting in the window seat, illuminating that lovely little bit of extra elbow room. You and the window seat guy look at each other, smile, and feel those stress hormones drop another notch.</li>\r\n 	<li>Missing crew. Boarding’s complete, you’re next to an empty middle seat, but you have no crew. Their flight was late, and pulled into a gate two terminals over. They’re on their way, but now you’re worried that some stand-by will drop into that empty seat. That golden ray of sunshine dims a bit.</li>\r\n 	<li>Early arrival! Not only did the seat stay empty, but favorable winds put you on the ground 30 minutes early. You start to think that you should travel more often.</li>\r\n</ol>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, there you go. There’s half your airport bingo card filled out. If you’re flying out Tues or Weds, you’ll have more that enough time in line to figure out the rest. Let us know -- <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Facebook</a>, or <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">website</a> -- what squares you come up with.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/48705\">Jolanta Blues</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license.  Ft: Admiral Bob, Martijn de Boer</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Back to the Future with my New Travel PC</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I’ve been muttering under my breath about my Lenovo ThinkPad for a while now. I’ve had it for 4 years now. It’s feeling a bit heavy and looking a bit beat up, and though it’s no doubt been fully depreciated off the firm’s balance sheet, I don’t hear any rumors of an impending refresh. So I’ve been semi-shopping for a new Travel PC -- clicking through to Engadget reviews, glancing over, eyeing what the other folks on the plane or in the concierge lounge are using.</li>\r\n 	<li>Seven years ago (just about to the day), in what might’ve passed as an instance of pithy travel advice, I <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2010/11/15/two-weeks-with-a-macbook-air/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">wrote </a>about the use case for a Travel PC -- what it is, and more importantly, what it is not. It’s not my primary computer; it’s not my podcast production or video editing machine. That’s my home PC which is now up to 16GBs of RAM, an 8-core processor, 2 21-inch monitors, Blu-Ray burner, and a couple of terabyte hard drives. My Travel PC is spec’d for what’s important, what I need when I travel — light weight, long battery life, low screen profile so not to get crushed when the guy in the row in front of me power-reclines his seat, and reasonable processing power (in that order) — and leaves behind what’s not. Seven years ago -- in 2010 to save you the math -- the 11-inch MacBook Air was my choice for the Best Travel PC.</li>\r\n 	<li>My Travel PC use case hasn’t changed, but the market has -- kinda. In my looking around, what I’ve seen is 2 ½ kinds of travel PCs. There are the next generations of the laptop -- thin ultrabooks from Lenovo, HP and Dell; MacBook Pros from Apple -- or full-sized iPads with combo covers/soft keyboards and pens -- with the Microsoft Surface Pro being that ½ case, a thin Windows PC with a fold-out keyboard cover and pen. Quite honestly, none of those options really spoke to me -- at least enough to make me part with my own cash. The ultrabooks didn’t offer much new; I’d might as well “accidently” dump a grande cappuccino on my old Lenovo ‘cause this is what I’d get in return. The MacBook Pros are certainly sleek, but as a Travel PC, don’t seem to offer much more for the Apple premium. I have been thinking about the tablet/keyboard combo, specifically the Surface Pro; but watching guys try to work that soft keyboard on an airplane seatback tray… I could see myself wearing a cup of coffee two weeks after starting to fly with one of those. So, I kept semi-shopping</li>\r\n 	<li>But then last week, I got an e-mail blast from Newegg, the online PC parts retailer; I usually buy from them them when I’m assembling or upgrading my home PC. They had a flash sale on refurbed 11-inch MacBook Airs, not the 2010 model but what Apple dubs an “early 2014” model. Pretty much identical to my old one, but with updated specs, including the same processor as my Lenovo. I looked at it, did a few Internet search. It sat in a shopping cart for a couple of days until I thought “For $385, why not?” and pulled the trigger. It showed up a few days ago, and save for a corner ding, looks pretty new. I’ve upgraded to the current version of MacOS, installed Office 365 and VMFusion on it, and so I’m pretty much ready to go -- back to the future.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #135</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_135.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #135 — Airport Bingo; New Old Travel PC','','inherit','closed','closed','','1854-revision-v1','','','2017-11-20 18:25:10','2017-11-20 23:25:10','',1854,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/11/20/1854-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1859,1,'2017-11-20 18:38:03','2017-11-20 23:38:03','[caption id=\"attachment_1855\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/IMG_0513-cropped.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1855\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/IMG_0513-cropped-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Always use a coffee name when crossing the 3-adjective limit[/caption]\r\n\r\nHere\'s something to listen to while in the Thanksgiving airport lines and traffic jams. We list out some of the squares we\'d like to see in an airport bingo card, and I end up going back to the future with my new travel PC. We also talk about my growing stack of subway \"tap\" cards and some forecasts on what could be a traffic jammed Thanksgiving holiday. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_135.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/349555317\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n<!--more-->\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #135:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. Started my traditional Thanksgiving no-fly shutdown a week early. My normal practice is to stay at home Thanksgiving week, avoiding what is in the US the busiest travel week of the year. But this year, I’m taking advantage of every opportunity to scale back my travel a bit; consciously going to an every other week travel schedule. This is a big change for me; I think last year I travelled all but 6 or 8 weeks. I’m finding this more leisurely makes me much less brittle/much more accepting of travel hiccups.</li>\r\n 	<li>Which came in very handy on my last trip because, as I feared, I jinxed myself with the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/10/31/podcast-134-value-of-loyalty-need-those-5-stars/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">last episode</a> when, after a great flight back from DC, I said “Damn if this doesn’t make me look forward to my next trip.” Well, we all know that no good deed goes unpunished. My next flight to Charlottesville was late night Sunday -- leave ORD 9:50pm, get into CHO around 12:30am. I’m sitting in the Admirals Club catching up on e-mail, reading a bit. I’d been getting occasional phone notifications; my flight was bouncing around, changing departure gates, never a good sign, but it settled down after a while. Around 9:15, I figured I’d walk over to the departure gate. I looked at the monitor -- gate G7 as it had been for the past half-hour, so I packed up my stuff. Just as I picked up my phone -- bing, a new notification -- my flight’s cancelled. What the hell?</li>\r\n 	<li>I asked the Admirals Club folks to check -- yup, it’s cancelled; no, they don’t know why, and yes, they’re as surprised as I am. Of course, American sends me a nice notification that they’ve re-booked me onto the same flight the next day -- leaving 9:50pm Monday -- seeming to expect that I’d be perfectly happy with them blowing a day hole in my schedule. The Admirals Club agents knew that was not an acceptable answer, and one of them immediately started looking for alternatives. Me too -- looking at CHO, DC, and Richmond. Because of how late AA canceled, there was nothing available the next morning. Not surprising given how full planes are flying these days. After about 20 minutes of non-stop keystrokes, the Admirals Club agent found me a flight the next day at 11:30, getting me into Richmond at 2:30pm. I took it -- that was as good as it was going to get -- and gave her a couple of the service recognition coupons American sends the status fliers. She’d earned them. And as I heard other guys around me scrambling for hotel rooms, I stopped thinking about how American had wasted my Sunday night and was going to waste my Monday morning, and instead was happy that the cab I was going to catch was taking me to my own bed.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/duckett/23334\"><em>Another Girl</em></a> by duckett</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I’m sorta short-cycling what has become my normal monthly cadence -- just squeaking in episodes at the last day of the month -- so that I can give you something to listen to in those Thanksgiving airport line and traffic jams. Triple A forecasts 45.5 million people hitting the roads, the highest since 2005 -- probably some combination of low unemployment and low gas prices. And as the Thanksgiving holiday has expanded -- trying finding anyone in the office on Weds -- Tuesday evening is <a href=\"http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-met-holiday-travel-chicago-20171114-story.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">forecasted </a>to be the worst traffic, when getaway drivers and outbound rush hour combine into a hellish brew of standstill traffic jams. In Chicago, the trip from downtown to O’Hare is predicted to be an hour and 14 minutes, almost 4x more than what it takes on a clear road. Surpassed only by the 2 hour trip to JFK also forecasted for Tuesday evening.</li>\r\n 	<li>Steve Frick left a comment on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> about<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/10/31/podcast-134-value-of-loyalty-need-those-5-stars/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> last episode</a>’s topic on ratings grade inflation -- the need for that 5-star review. Steve writes:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I\'m a \"Yelp\" guy and I consistently give Fairfield Inn 3 stars. My reviews are along these lines \"Typical Fairfield, nothing that bad yet nothing yet nothing that great. Friendly staff, clean location, and comfortable beds. Same sub-par Fairfield breakfast, but that\'s why you pack instant oatmeal and protein bars.\" There\'s nothing that makes me want to tell people to stay there.</li>\r\n 	<li>Your <a href=\"https://untappd.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Untappd </a>information got me thinking. With around 1200 unique beers I\'m well below your numbers but I came in with the bulk of my ratings also at 3.75.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Thanks for that, Steve. My rationalization for my beer ratings skew is selection bias -- with over 5,200 unique beer check-ins, I pretty much know what I like and what I don’t like, so I’m not knowingly going to order and pay for a beer I don’t think I’ll like. I did have the exception to that last weekend when my son and I were at <a href=\"http://fobab.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">FoBAB</a> -- the Festival of Barrel Aged Beers. We volunteered to pour on Friday -- the first night -- which earned us a free ticket for Saturday night. At some point, my son give me a glass “Here, taste this”. I spit it back into the glass, dumped it, and rinsed the glass twice. It was awful. What was it? It was a beer that I had specifically said I wanted to avoid after reading the description in the program -- “Aged 12 months in Ardbeg scotch barrels with coffee and peanut butter.” I rated it 0.25 out of 5 because a zero doesn’t register as a rating. After that, I think I can live with a bit of rating skew.</li>\r\n 	<li>I started off the other topic in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/10/31/podcast-134-value-of-loyalty-need-those-5-stars/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">last episode</a> -- the value of loyalty -- with the story of finding a new Jag in the Hertz Presidents Club aisle at ATL. Of course, I grabbed it. The next afternoon, though, I was kinda wishing I’d taken an Uber or Lyft. My meeting in Norcross, north of Atlanta, was running late and refreshing Waze, I could see traffic both through and around Atlanta was building. And the rental return is at least a 15-minute ride to the terminal -- when the train doesn’t make an unscheduled stop mid-transit as I described in an earlier episode. So I was gearing myself up for missing my flight and the hassles of finding a seat on something later, when up popped an e-mail from Hertz offering to drive me to the terminal for $20. Sold! After I pulled in, one of the car “checker-inners” hopped into the driver’s seat and off we drove. And she was as happy to be driving that Jag as I was. “I love this car!” she said as we pulled out. “It’s such a beautiful day, I may drop you off and just keep on driving!” We had a good chat. She dropped me off at the door closest to the PreCheck line and I legged it in to make my flight. I won’t pop for that every time, but that $20 was worth it.</li>\r\n 	<li>Also, thanks to Cristina Sainz of Booking.com’s <a href=\"http://info.suite.booking.com/business-travel-blog/7-podcasts-every-travel-manager-needs-to-listen-to\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Business Travel Blog</a> who put TravelCommons #2 in her list of the “7 Podcasts Every Travel Manager Needs to Listen to Right Now”. She describes the podcast as “serving up pithy travel advice since 2005.” Well, we try. Thanks again Cristina for the shout-out.</li>\r\n 	<li>When I was in DC last month, I added another subway “tap” card to my collection, which was a little bit of a bummer because I still had an old style Metrocard -- the paper fare card with a mag stripe -- with at least one ride’s worth of fare still on it. So now I have a Smart Trip card along with a Ventra card from Chicago, an Oyster card from London, and a Breeze card from Atlanta. I hold onto them because they’re reusable and, while not expensive, their costs start to add up. The Atlanta and DC cards were $2 each; the Chicago card was $5, and the London card £5 -- or about $6.60 at today’s exchange rate. The Chicago card is, of course, the one I use the most. And it’s nice because I can top it up with a smartphone app. Comes in handy when I decide to take the L from ORD downtown. Beats standing in the perpetual long lines in front of the ORD fare machines. You’d think that if CTA is going to charge a premium to board at ORD, they’d at least pony up to cut the line to pay it. Little known pro tip for folks coming into ORD -- skip the line and pay with your iPhone if you have Apple Pay set up. It doesn’t read as fast as the Ventra card, but it works -- at least on the L -- the subway. When I was in London this past summer, the Underground was wonky. I could tap in at the turnstile with my iPhone, but couldn’t tap out which was a real hassle. But my daughter, though, who has a contactless debit card from RBS had no problems. And there wasn’t an app to top up my Oyster card, so I had to queue up in front of a lot of fare machines. Last month, New York announced that they’re hiring the same company London used to revamp the MTA’s payment system. I hope they get Apple and Android Pay working right. And more broadly, I hope these tap cards are just a temporary bridge until these transit systems can fully upgrade their systems to use smartphones. Until then, I carry a card holder in my backpack with my $15-$20 worth of subway tap cards.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/flatwound/14476\"><em>The Long Goodbye</em></a> by John Pazden</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Playing Airport Bingo</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I got a press release a couple of days ago from <a href=\"https://www.airhelp.com/en/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">AirHelp</a>, a company that looks like will file compensation claims for delayed flights in return for a 25% cut -- which doesn’t seem too bad since they’re doing it on a contingent basis. They sent along an Airport Bingo card for “helping you pass the time while not so patiently waiting to board”. It’s kinda the airport version of “buzzword bingo” that we all play on conference calls -- instead of marking a square someone says “synergy”, AirHelp has squares for things like “police dog” and “solo traveler”.</li>\r\n 	<li>That’s OK for a start, I guess. But here at TravelCommons, we try to go to the next level of road warrior-ism. I’m not going to fill out all 24 squares, but here are 12 squares’ worth to get you started\r\n<ol>\r\n 	<li>10-15 minute traffic jam on the airport access road -- just long enough to get those stress hormones flowing</li>\r\n 	<li>Guy in front of you in the PreCheck line walks through the metal detector with his smartphone. The alarm sounds. He stands there, puzzled. The TSA person rolls her eyes and asks, yet again, if he’d emptied his pockets. He looks surprised that his smartphone would set it off. She looks at her watch for how long ‘til her next break.</li>\r\n 	<li>Girl pulling a Hello Kitty kids-sized roller board on her way to Grandma’s. Hey, who said airport bingo had to be 100% snarky?</li>\r\n 	<li>Woman in front of you in the Starbucks line orders a half-decaf 3-pump no-foam vanilla latte, breaking the 3-adjective rule. It’s Sodexo, not your corner Starbucks. Keep it simple so the rest of us can order.</li>\r\n 	<li>A piano bar playing Christmas carols -- or if you’re in Nashville airport, a country duo</li>\r\n 	<li>A family of four or more walking abreast, slowly, so that people racing for their gates drift into the on-coming traffic, or try to thread through the crowd in front of a boarding gate. The only upside? One of the family might be pulling a Hello Kitty bag.</li>\r\n 	<li>An available rocking chair. More airports are scattering these around, in front of windows in terminal connectors, in random hallways. Bonus if it’s next to an open -- and working -- electrical outlet</li>\r\n 	<li>A craft beer bar with beers you haven’t had -- get those stress hormones back under control, and increment your unique beer counter on Untappd</li>\r\n 	<li>Dueling gate announcements. Gates G20 and G22 are boarding at the same time, with each gate agent talking over the other one. You hear Boarding Group 3 called and hustle up to the door, only to be shunted over to wait in the shame station; the other gate called Boarding Group 3.</li>\r\n 	<li>Boarding is complete and there’s an empty middle seat next to you! The clouds part and a golden ray of sunshine reflects off the iPad of the guy sitting in the window seat, illuminating that lovely little bit of extra elbow room. You and the window seat guy look at each other, smile, and feel those stress hormones drop another notch.</li>\r\n 	<li>Missing crew. Boarding’s complete, you’re next to an empty middle seat, but you have no crew. Their flight was late, and pulled into a gate two terminals over. They’re on their way, but now you’re worried that some stand-by will drop into that empty seat. That golden ray of sunshine dims a bit.</li>\r\n 	<li>Early arrival! Not only did the seat stay empty, but favorable winds put you on the ground 30 minutes early. You start to think that you should travel more often.</li>\r\n</ol>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, there you go. There’s half your airport bingo card filled out. If you’re flying out Tues or Weds, you’ll have more that enough time in line to figure out the rest. Let us know -- <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Facebook</a>, or <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">website</a> -- what squares you come up with.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/28792\"><em>Slinky Blues</em></a> by Admiral Bob</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Back to the Future with my New Travel PC</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I’ve been muttering under my breath about my Lenovo ThinkPad for a while now. I’ve had it for 4 years now. It’s feeling a bit heavy and looking a bit beat up, and though it’s no doubt been fully depreciated off the firm’s balance sheet, I don’t hear any rumors of an impending refresh. So I’ve been semi-shopping for a new Travel PC -- clicking through to Engadget reviews, glancing over, eyeing what the other folks on the plane or in the concierge lounge are using.</li>\r\n 	<li>Seven years ago (just about to the day), in what might’ve passed as an instance of pithy travel advice, I <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2010/11/15/two-weeks-with-a-macbook-air/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">wrote </a>about the use case for a Travel PC -- what it is, and more importantly, what it is not. It’s not my primary computer; it’s not my podcast production or video editing machine. That’s my home PC which is now up to 16GBs of RAM, an 8-core processor, 2 21-inch monitors, Blu-Ray burner, and a couple of terabyte hard drives. My Travel PC is spec’d for what’s important, what I need when I travel — light weight, long battery life, low screen profile so not to get crushed when the guy in the row in front of me power-reclines his seat, and reasonable processing power (in that order) — and leaves behind what’s not. Seven years ago -- in 2010 to save you the math -- the 11-inch MacBook Air was my choice for the Best Travel PC.</li>\r\n 	<li>My Travel PC use case hasn’t changed, but the market has -- kinda. In my looking around, what I’ve seen is 2 ½ kinds of travel PCs. There are the next generations of the laptop -- thin ultrabooks from Lenovo, HP and Dell; MacBook Pros from Apple -- or full-sized iPads with combo covers/soft keyboards and pens -- with the Microsoft Surface Pro being that ½ case, a thin Windows PC with a fold-out keyboard cover and pen. Quite honestly, none of those options really spoke to me -- at least enough to make me part with my own cash. The ultrabooks didn’t offer much new; I’d might as well “accidently” dump a grande cappuccino on my old Lenovo ‘cause this is what I’d get in return. The MacBook Pros are certainly sleek, but as a Travel PC, don’t seem to offer much more for the Apple premium. I have been thinking about the tablet/keyboard combo, specifically the Surface Pro; but watching guys try to work that soft keyboard on an airplane seatback tray… I could see myself wearing a cup of coffee two weeks after starting to fly with one of those. So, I kept semi-shopping</li>\r\n 	<li>But then last week, I got an e-mail blast from Newegg, the online PC parts retailer; I usually buy from them them when I’m assembling or upgrading my home PC. They had a flash sale on refurbed 11-inch MacBook Airs, not the 2010 model but what Apple dubs an “early 2014” model. Pretty much identical to my old one, but with updated specs, including the same processor as my Lenovo. I looked at it, did a few Internet search. It sat in a shopping cart for a couple of days until I thought “For $385, why not?” and pulled the trigger. It showed up a few days ago, and save for a corner ding, looks pretty new. I’ve upgraded to the current version of MacOS, installed Office 365 and VMFusion on it, and so I’m pretty much ready to go -- back to the future.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #135</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_135.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #135 — Airport Bingo; New Old Travel PC','','inherit','closed','closed','','1854-revision-v1','','','2017-11-20 18:38:03','2017-11-20 23:38:03','',1854,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/11/20/1854-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1860,1,'2017-11-20 22:14:19','2017-11-21 03:14:19','[caption id=\"attachment_1855\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/IMG_0513-cropped.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1855\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/IMG_0513-cropped-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Always use a coffee name when crossing the 3-adjective limit[/caption]\r\n\r\nHere\'s something to listen to while in the Thanksgiving airport lines and traffic jams. We list out some of the squares we\'d like to see in an airport bingo card, and I end up going back to the future with my new travel PC. We also talk about my growing stack of subway \"tap\" cards and some forecasts on what could be a traffic jammed Thanksgiving holiday. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_135.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks//358749968\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n<!--more-->\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #135:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. Started my traditional Thanksgiving no-fly shutdown a week early. My normal practice is to stay at home Thanksgiving week, avoiding what is in the US the busiest travel week of the year. But this year, I’m taking advantage of every opportunity to scale back my travel a bit; consciously going to an every other week travel schedule. This is a big change for me; I think last year I travelled all but 6 or 8 weeks. I’m finding this more leisurely makes me much less brittle/much more accepting of travel hiccups.</li>\r\n 	<li>Which came in very handy on my last trip because, as I feared, I jinxed myself with the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/10/31/podcast-134-value-of-loyalty-need-those-5-stars/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">last episode</a> when, after a great flight back from DC, I said “Damn if this doesn’t make me look forward to my next trip.” Well, we all know that no good deed goes unpunished. My next flight to Charlottesville was late night Sunday -- leave ORD 9:50pm, get into CHO around 12:30am. I’m sitting in the Admirals Club catching up on e-mail, reading a bit. I’d been getting occasional phone notifications; my flight was bouncing around, changing departure gates, never a good sign, but it settled down after a while. Around 9:15, I figured I’d walk over to the departure gate. I looked at the monitor -- gate G7 as it had been for the past half-hour, so I packed up my stuff. Just as I picked up my phone -- bing, a new notification -- my flight’s cancelled. What the hell?</li>\r\n 	<li>I asked the Admirals Club folks to check -- yup, it’s cancelled; no, they don’t know why, and yes, they’re as surprised as I am. Of course, American sends me a nice notification that they’ve re-booked me onto the same flight the next day -- leaving 9:50pm Monday -- seeming to expect that I’d be perfectly happy with them blowing a day hole in my schedule. The Admirals Club agents knew that was not an acceptable answer, and one of them immediately started looking for alternatives. Me too -- looking at CHO, DC, and Richmond. Because of how late AA canceled, there was nothing available the next morning. Not surprising given how full planes are flying these days. After about 20 minutes of non-stop keystrokes, the Admirals Club agent found me a flight the next day at 11:30, getting me into Richmond at 2:30pm. I took it -- that was as good as it was going to get -- and gave her a couple of the service recognition coupons American sends the status fliers. She’d earned them. And as I heard other guys around me scrambling for hotel rooms, I stopped thinking about how American had wasted my Sunday night and was going to waste my Monday morning, and instead was happy that the cab I was going to catch was taking me to my own bed.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/duckett/23334\"><em>Another Girl</em></a> by duckett</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I’m sorta short-cycling what has become my normal monthly cadence -- just squeaking in episodes at the last day of the month -- so that I can give you something to listen to in those Thanksgiving airport line and traffic jams. Triple A forecasts 45.5 million people hitting the roads, the highest since 2005 -- probably some combination of low unemployment and low gas prices. And as the Thanksgiving holiday has expanded -- trying finding anyone in the office on Weds -- Tuesday evening is <a href=\"http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-met-holiday-travel-chicago-20171114-story.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">forecasted </a>to be the worst traffic, when getaway drivers and outbound rush hour combine into a hellish brew of standstill traffic jams. In Chicago, the trip from downtown to O’Hare is predicted to be an hour and 14 minutes, almost 4x more than what it takes on a clear road. Surpassed only by the 2 hour trip to JFK also forecasted for Tuesday evening.</li>\r\n 	<li>Steve Frick left a comment on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> about<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/10/31/podcast-134-value-of-loyalty-need-those-5-stars/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> last episode</a>’s topic on ratings grade inflation -- the need for that 5-star review. Steve writes:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I\'m a \"Yelp\" guy and I consistently give Fairfield Inn 3 stars. My reviews are along these lines \"Typical Fairfield, nothing that bad yet nothing yet nothing that great. Friendly staff, clean location, and comfortable beds. Same sub-par Fairfield breakfast, but that\'s why you pack instant oatmeal and protein bars.\" There\'s nothing that makes me want to tell people to stay there.</li>\r\n 	<li>Your <a href=\"https://untappd.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Untappd </a>information got me thinking. With around 1200 unique beers I\'m well below your numbers but I came in with the bulk of my ratings also at 3.75.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Thanks for that, Steve. My rationalization for my beer ratings skew is selection bias -- with over 5,200 unique beer check-ins, I pretty much know what I like and what I don’t like, so I’m not knowingly going to order and pay for a beer I don’t think I’ll like. I did have the exception to that last weekend when my son and I were at <a href=\"http://fobab.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">FoBAB</a> -- the Festival of Barrel Aged Beers. We volunteered to pour on Friday -- the first night -- which earned us a free ticket for Saturday night. At some point, my son give me a glass “Here, taste this”. I spit it back into the glass, dumped it, and rinsed the glass twice. It was awful. What was it? It was a beer that I had specifically said I wanted to avoid after reading the description in the program -- “Aged 12 months in Ardbeg scotch barrels with coffee and peanut butter.” I rated it 0.25 out of 5 because a zero doesn’t register as a rating. After that, I think I can live with a bit of rating skew.</li>\r\n 	<li>I started off the other topic in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/10/31/podcast-134-value-of-loyalty-need-those-5-stars/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">last episode</a> -- the value of loyalty -- with the story of finding a new Jag in the Hertz Presidents Club aisle at ATL. Of course, I grabbed it. The next afternoon, though, I was kinda wishing I’d taken an Uber or Lyft. My meeting in Norcross, north of Atlanta, was running late and refreshing Waze, I could see traffic both through and around Atlanta was building. And the rental return is at least a 15-minute ride to the terminal -- when the train doesn’t make an unscheduled stop mid-transit as I described in an earlier episode. So I was gearing myself up for missing my flight and the hassles of finding a seat on something later, when up popped an e-mail from Hertz offering to drive me to the terminal for $20. Sold! After I pulled in, one of the car “checker-inners” hopped into the driver’s seat and off we drove. And she was as happy to be driving that Jag as I was. “I love this car!” she said as we pulled out. “It’s such a beautiful day, I may drop you off and just keep on driving!” We had a good chat. She dropped me off at the door closest to the PreCheck line and I legged it in to make my flight. I won’t pop for that every time, but that $20 was worth it.</li>\r\n 	<li>Also, thanks to Cristina Sainz of Booking.com’s <a href=\"http://info.suite.booking.com/business-travel-blog/7-podcasts-every-travel-manager-needs-to-listen-to\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Business Travel Blog</a> who put TravelCommons #2 in her list of the “7 Podcasts Every Travel Manager Needs to Listen to Right Now”. She describes the podcast as “serving up pithy travel advice since 2005.” Well, we try. Thanks again Cristina for the shout-out.</li>\r\n 	<li>When I was in DC last month, I added another subway “tap” card to my collection, which was a little bit of a bummer because I still had an old style Metrocard -- the paper fare card with a mag stripe -- with at least one ride’s worth of fare still on it. So now I have a Smart Trip card along with a Ventra card from Chicago, an Oyster card from London, and a Breeze card from Atlanta. I hold onto them because they’re reusable and, while not expensive, their costs start to add up. The Atlanta and DC cards were $2 each; the Chicago card was $5, and the London card £5 -- or about $6.60 at today’s exchange rate. The Chicago card is, of course, the one I use the most. And it’s nice because I can top it up with a smartphone app. Comes in handy when I decide to take the L from ORD downtown. Beats standing in the perpetual long lines in front of the ORD fare machines. You’d think that if CTA is going to charge a premium to board at ORD, they’d at least pony up to cut the line to pay it. Little known pro tip for folks coming into ORD -- skip the line and pay with your iPhone if you have Apple Pay set up. It doesn’t read as fast as the Ventra card, but it works -- at least on the L -- the subway. When I was in London this past summer, the Underground was wonky. I could tap in at the turnstile with my iPhone, but couldn’t tap out which was a real hassle. But my daughter, though, who has a contactless debit card from RBS had no problems. And there wasn’t an app to top up my Oyster card, so I had to queue up in front of a lot of fare machines. Last month, New York announced that they’re hiring the same company London used to revamp the MTA’s payment system. I hope they get Apple and Android Pay working right. And more broadly, I hope these tap cards are just a temporary bridge until these transit systems can fully upgrade their systems to use smartphones. Until then, I carry a card holder in my backpack with my $15-$20 worth of subway tap cards.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/flatwound/14476\"><em>The Long Goodbye</em></a> by John Pazden</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Playing Airport Bingo</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I got a press release a couple of days ago from <a href=\"https://www.airhelp.com/en/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">AirHelp</a>, a company that looks like will file compensation claims for delayed flights in return for a 25% cut -- which doesn’t seem too bad since they’re doing it on a contingent basis. They sent along an Airport Bingo card for “helping you pass the time while not so patiently waiting to board”. It’s kinda the airport version of “buzzword bingo” that we all play on conference calls -- instead of marking a square someone says “synergy”, AirHelp has squares for things like “police dog” and “solo traveler”.</li>\r\n 	<li>That’s OK for a start, I guess. But here at TravelCommons, we try to go to the next level of road warrior-ism. I’m not going to fill out all 24 squares, but here are 12 squares’ worth to get you started\r\n<ol>\r\n 	<li>10-15 minute traffic jam on the airport access road -- just long enough to get those stress hormones flowing</li>\r\n 	<li>Guy in front of you in the PreCheck line walks through the metal detector with his smartphone. The alarm sounds. He stands there, puzzled. The TSA person rolls her eyes and asks, yet again, if he’d emptied his pockets. He looks surprised that his smartphone would set it off. She looks at her watch for how long ‘til her next break.</li>\r\n 	<li>Girl pulling a Hello Kitty kids-sized roller board on her way to Grandma’s. Hey, who said airport bingo had to be 100% snarky?</li>\r\n 	<li>Woman in front of you in the Starbucks line orders a half-decaf 3-pump no-foam vanilla latte, breaking the 3-adjective rule. It’s Sodexo, not your corner Starbucks. Keep it simple so the rest of us can order.</li>\r\n 	<li>A piano bar playing Christmas carols -- or if you’re in Nashville airport, a country duo</li>\r\n 	<li>A family of four or more walking abreast, slowly, so that people racing for their gates drift into the on-coming traffic, or try to thread through the crowd in front of a boarding gate. The only upside? One of the family might be pulling a Hello Kitty bag.</li>\r\n 	<li>An available rocking chair. More airports are scattering these around, in front of windows in terminal connectors, in random hallways. Bonus if it’s next to an open -- and working -- electrical outlet</li>\r\n 	<li>A craft beer bar with beers you haven’t had -- get those stress hormones back under control, and increment your unique beer counter on Untappd</li>\r\n 	<li>Dueling gate announcements. Gates G20 and G22 are boarding at the same time, with each gate agent talking over the other one. You hear Boarding Group 3 called and hustle up to the door, only to be shunted over to wait in the shame station; the other gate called Boarding Group 3.</li>\r\n 	<li>Boarding is complete and there’s an empty middle seat next to you! The clouds part and a golden ray of sunshine reflects off the iPad of the guy sitting in the window seat, illuminating that lovely little bit of extra elbow room. You and the window seat guy look at each other, smile, and feel those stress hormones drop another notch.</li>\r\n 	<li>Missing crew. Boarding’s complete, you’re next to an empty middle seat, but you have no crew. Their flight was late, and pulled into a gate two terminals over. They’re on their way, but now you’re worried that some stand-by will drop into that empty seat. That golden ray of sunshine dims a bit.</li>\r\n 	<li>Early arrival! Not only did the seat stay empty, but favorable winds put you on the ground 30 minutes early. You start to think that you should travel more often.</li>\r\n</ol>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, there you go. There’s half your airport bingo card filled out. If you’re flying out Tues or Weds, you’ll have more that enough time in line to figure out the rest. Let us know -- <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Facebook</a>, or <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">website</a> -- what squares you come up with.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/28792\"><em>Slinky Blues</em></a> by Admiral Bob</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Back to the Future with my New Travel PC</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I’ve been muttering under my breath about my Lenovo ThinkPad for a while now. I’ve had it for 4 years now. It’s feeling a bit heavy and looking a bit beat up, and though it’s no doubt been fully depreciated off the firm’s balance sheet, I don’t hear any rumors of an impending refresh. So I’ve been semi-shopping for a new Travel PC -- clicking through to Engadget reviews, glancing over, eyeing what the other folks on the plane or in the concierge lounge are using.</li>\r\n 	<li>Seven years ago (just about to the day), in what might’ve passed as an instance of pithy travel advice, I <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2010/11/15/two-weeks-with-a-macbook-air/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">wrote </a>about the use case for a Travel PC -- what it is, and more importantly, what it is not. It’s not my primary computer; it’s not my podcast production or video editing machine. That’s my home PC which is now up to 16GBs of RAM, an 8-core processor, 2 21-inch monitors, Blu-Ray burner, and a couple of terabyte hard drives. My Travel PC is spec’d for what’s important, what I need when I travel — light weight, long battery life, low screen profile so not to get crushed when the guy in the row in front of me power-reclines his seat, and reasonable processing power (in that order) — and leaves behind what’s not. Seven years ago -- in 2010 to save you the math -- the 11-inch MacBook Air was my choice for the Best Travel PC.</li>\r\n 	<li>My Travel PC use case hasn’t changed, but the market has -- kinda. In my looking around, what I’ve seen is 2 ½ kinds of travel PCs. There are the next generations of the laptop -- thin ultrabooks from Lenovo, HP and Dell; MacBook Pros from Apple -- or full-sized iPads with combo covers/soft keyboards and pens -- with the Microsoft Surface Pro being that ½ case, a thin Windows PC with a fold-out keyboard cover and pen. Quite honestly, none of those options really spoke to me -- at least enough to make me part with my own cash. The ultrabooks didn’t offer much new; I’d might as well “accidently” dump a grande cappuccino on my old Lenovo ‘cause this is what I’d get in return. The MacBook Pros are certainly sleek, but as a Travel PC, don’t seem to offer much more for the Apple premium. I have been thinking about the tablet/keyboard combo, specifically the Surface Pro; but watching guys try to work that soft keyboard on an airplane seatback tray… I could see myself wearing a cup of coffee two weeks after starting to fly with one of those. So, I kept semi-shopping</li>\r\n 	<li>But then last week, I got an e-mail blast from Newegg, the online PC parts retailer; I usually buy from them them when I’m assembling or upgrading my home PC. They had a flash sale on refurbed 11-inch MacBook Airs, not the 2010 model but what Apple dubs an “early 2014” model. Pretty much identical to my old one, but with updated specs, including the same processor as my Lenovo. I looked at it, did a few Internet search. It sat in a shopping cart for a couple of days until I thought “For $385, why not?” and pulled the trigger. It showed up a few days ago, and save for a corner ding, looks pretty new. I’ve upgraded to the current version of MacOS, installed Office 365 and VMFusion on it, and so I’m pretty much ready to go -- back to the future.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #135</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_135.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #135 — Airport Bingo; New Old Travel PC','','inherit','closed','closed','','1854-revision-v1','','','2017-11-20 22:14:19','2017-11-21 03:14:19','',1854,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/11/20/1854-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1861,1,'2017-11-20 22:14:50','2017-11-21 03:14:50','[caption id=\"attachment_1855\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/IMG_0513-cropped.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1855\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/IMG_0513-cropped-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Always use a coffee name when crossing the 3-adjective limit[/caption]\r\n\r\nHere\'s something to listen to while in the Thanksgiving airport lines and traffic jams. We list out some of the squares we\'d like to see in an airport bingo card, and I end up going back to the future with my new travel PC. We also talk about my growing stack of subway \"tap\" cards and some forecasts on what could be a traffic jammed Thanksgiving holiday. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_135.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/358749968\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n<!--more-->\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #135:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. Started my traditional Thanksgiving no-fly shutdown a week early. My normal practice is to stay at home Thanksgiving week, avoiding what is in the US the busiest travel week of the year. But this year, I’m taking advantage of every opportunity to scale back my travel a bit; consciously going to an every other week travel schedule. This is a big change for me; I think last year I travelled all but 6 or 8 weeks. I’m finding this more leisurely makes me much less brittle/much more accepting of travel hiccups.</li>\r\n 	<li>Which came in very handy on my last trip because, as I feared, I jinxed myself with the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/10/31/podcast-134-value-of-loyalty-need-those-5-stars/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">last episode</a> when, after a great flight back from DC, I said “Damn if this doesn’t make me look forward to my next trip.” Well, we all know that no good deed goes unpunished. My next flight to Charlottesville was late night Sunday -- leave ORD 9:50pm, get into CHO around 12:30am. I’m sitting in the Admirals Club catching up on e-mail, reading a bit. I’d been getting occasional phone notifications; my flight was bouncing around, changing departure gates, never a good sign, but it settled down after a while. Around 9:15, I figured I’d walk over to the departure gate. I looked at the monitor -- gate G7 as it had been for the past half-hour, so I packed up my stuff. Just as I picked up my phone -- bing, a new notification -- my flight’s cancelled. What the hell?</li>\r\n 	<li>I asked the Admirals Club folks to check -- yup, it’s cancelled; no, they don’t know why, and yes, they’re as surprised as I am. Of course, American sends me a nice notification that they’ve re-booked me onto the same flight the next day -- leaving 9:50pm Monday -- seeming to expect that I’d be perfectly happy with them blowing a day hole in my schedule. The Admirals Club agents knew that was not an acceptable answer, and one of them immediately started looking for alternatives. Me too -- looking at CHO, DC, and Richmond. Because of how late AA canceled, there was nothing available the next morning. Not surprising given how full planes are flying these days. After about 20 minutes of non-stop keystrokes, the Admirals Club agent found me a flight the next day at 11:30, getting me into Richmond at 2:30pm. I took it -- that was as good as it was going to get -- and gave her a couple of the service recognition coupons American sends the status fliers. She’d earned them. And as I heard other guys around me scrambling for hotel rooms, I stopped thinking about how American had wasted my Sunday night and was going to waste my Monday morning, and instead was happy that the cab I was going to catch was taking me to my own bed.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/duckett/23334\"><em>Another Girl</em></a> by duckett</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I’m sorta short-cycling what has become my normal monthly cadence -- just squeaking in episodes at the last day of the month -- so that I can give you something to listen to in those Thanksgiving airport line and traffic jams. Triple A forecasts 45.5 million people hitting the roads, the highest since 2005 -- probably some combination of low unemployment and low gas prices. And as the Thanksgiving holiday has expanded -- trying finding anyone in the office on Weds -- Tuesday evening is <a href=\"http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-met-holiday-travel-chicago-20171114-story.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">forecasted </a>to be the worst traffic, when getaway drivers and outbound rush hour combine into a hellish brew of standstill traffic jams. In Chicago, the trip from downtown to O’Hare is predicted to be an hour and 14 minutes, almost 4x more than what it takes on a clear road. Surpassed only by the 2 hour trip to JFK also forecasted for Tuesday evening.</li>\r\n 	<li>Steve Frick left a comment on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> about<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/10/31/podcast-134-value-of-loyalty-need-those-5-stars/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> last episode</a>’s topic on ratings grade inflation -- the need for that 5-star review. Steve writes:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I\'m a \"Yelp\" guy and I consistently give Fairfield Inn 3 stars. My reviews are along these lines \"Typical Fairfield, nothing that bad yet nothing yet nothing that great. Friendly staff, clean location, and comfortable beds. Same sub-par Fairfield breakfast, but that\'s why you pack instant oatmeal and protein bars.\" There\'s nothing that makes me want to tell people to stay there.</li>\r\n 	<li>Your <a href=\"https://untappd.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Untappd </a>information got me thinking. With around 1200 unique beers I\'m well below your numbers but I came in with the bulk of my ratings also at 3.75.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Thanks for that, Steve. My rationalization for my beer ratings skew is selection bias -- with over 5,200 unique beer check-ins, I pretty much know what I like and what I don’t like, so I’m not knowingly going to order and pay for a beer I don’t think I’ll like. I did have the exception to that last weekend when my son and I were at <a href=\"http://fobab.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">FoBAB</a> -- the Festival of Barrel Aged Beers. We volunteered to pour on Friday -- the first night -- which earned us a free ticket for Saturday night. At some point, my son give me a glass “Here, taste this”. I spit it back into the glass, dumped it, and rinsed the glass twice. It was awful. What was it? It was a beer that I had specifically said I wanted to avoid after reading the description in the program -- “Aged 12 months in Ardbeg scotch barrels with coffee and peanut butter.” I rated it 0.25 out of 5 because a zero doesn’t register as a rating. After that, I think I can live with a bit of rating skew.</li>\r\n 	<li>I started off the other topic in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/10/31/podcast-134-value-of-loyalty-need-those-5-stars/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">last episode</a> -- the value of loyalty -- with the story of finding a new Jag in the Hertz Presidents Club aisle at ATL. Of course, I grabbed it. The next afternoon, though, I was kinda wishing I’d taken an Uber or Lyft. My meeting in Norcross, north of Atlanta, was running late and refreshing Waze, I could see traffic both through and around Atlanta was building. And the rental return is at least a 15-minute ride to the terminal -- when the train doesn’t make an unscheduled stop mid-transit as I described in an earlier episode. So I was gearing myself up for missing my flight and the hassles of finding a seat on something later, when up popped an e-mail from Hertz offering to drive me to the terminal for $20. Sold! After I pulled in, one of the car “checker-inners” hopped into the driver’s seat and off we drove. And she was as happy to be driving that Jag as I was. “I love this car!” she said as we pulled out. “It’s such a beautiful day, I may drop you off and just keep on driving!” We had a good chat. She dropped me off at the door closest to the PreCheck line and I legged it in to make my flight. I won’t pop for that every time, but that $20 was worth it.</li>\r\n 	<li>Also, thanks to Cristina Sainz of Booking.com’s <a href=\"http://info.suite.booking.com/business-travel-blog/7-podcasts-every-travel-manager-needs-to-listen-to\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Business Travel Blog</a> who put TravelCommons #2 in her list of the “7 Podcasts Every Travel Manager Needs to Listen to Right Now”. She describes the podcast as “serving up pithy travel advice since 2005.” Well, we try. Thanks again Cristina for the shout-out.</li>\r\n 	<li>When I was in DC last month, I added another subway “tap” card to my collection, which was a little bit of a bummer because I still had an old style Metrocard -- the paper fare card with a mag stripe -- with at least one ride’s worth of fare still on it. So now I have a Smart Trip card along with a Ventra card from Chicago, an Oyster card from London, and a Breeze card from Atlanta. I hold onto them because they’re reusable and, while not expensive, their costs start to add up. The Atlanta and DC cards were $2 each; the Chicago card was $5, and the London card £5 -- or about $6.60 at today’s exchange rate. The Chicago card is, of course, the one I use the most. And it’s nice because I can top it up with a smartphone app. Comes in handy when I decide to take the L from ORD downtown. Beats standing in the perpetual long lines in front of the ORD fare machines. You’d think that if CTA is going to charge a premium to board at ORD, they’d at least pony up to cut the line to pay it. Little known pro tip for folks coming into ORD -- skip the line and pay with your iPhone if you have Apple Pay set up. It doesn’t read as fast as the Ventra card, but it works -- at least on the L -- the subway. When I was in London this past summer, the Underground was wonky. I could tap in at the turnstile with my iPhone, but couldn’t tap out which was a real hassle. But my daughter, though, who has a contactless debit card from RBS had no problems. And there wasn’t an app to top up my Oyster card, so I had to queue up in front of a lot of fare machines. Last month, New York announced that they’re hiring the same company London used to revamp the MTA’s payment system. I hope they get Apple and Android Pay working right. And more broadly, I hope these tap cards are just a temporary bridge until these transit systems can fully upgrade their systems to use smartphones. Until then, I carry a card holder in my backpack with my $15-$20 worth of subway tap cards.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/flatwound/14476\"><em>The Long Goodbye</em></a> by John Pazden</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Playing Airport Bingo</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I got a press release a couple of days ago from <a href=\"https://www.airhelp.com/en/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">AirHelp</a>, a company that looks like will file compensation claims for delayed flights in return for a 25% cut -- which doesn’t seem too bad since they’re doing it on a contingent basis. They sent along an Airport Bingo card for “helping you pass the time while not so patiently waiting to board”. It’s kinda the airport version of “buzzword bingo” that we all play on conference calls -- instead of marking a square someone says “synergy”, AirHelp has squares for things like “police dog” and “solo traveler”.</li>\r\n 	<li>That’s OK for a start, I guess. But here at TravelCommons, we try to go to the next level of road warrior-ism. I’m not going to fill out all 24 squares, but here are 12 squares’ worth to get you started\r\n<ol>\r\n 	<li>10-15 minute traffic jam on the airport access road -- just long enough to get those stress hormones flowing</li>\r\n 	<li>Guy in front of you in the PreCheck line walks through the metal detector with his smartphone. The alarm sounds. He stands there, puzzled. The TSA person rolls her eyes and asks, yet again, if he’d emptied his pockets. He looks surprised that his smartphone would set it off. She looks at her watch for how long ‘til her next break.</li>\r\n 	<li>Girl pulling a Hello Kitty kids-sized roller board on her way to Grandma’s. Hey, who said airport bingo had to be 100% snarky?</li>\r\n 	<li>Woman in front of you in the Starbucks line orders a half-decaf 3-pump no-foam vanilla latte, breaking the 3-adjective rule. It’s Sodexo, not your corner Starbucks. Keep it simple so the rest of us can order.</li>\r\n 	<li>A piano bar playing Christmas carols -- or if you’re in Nashville airport, a country duo</li>\r\n 	<li>A family of four or more walking abreast, slowly, so that people racing for their gates drift into the on-coming traffic, or try to thread through the crowd in front of a boarding gate. The only upside? One of the family might be pulling a Hello Kitty bag.</li>\r\n 	<li>An available rocking chair. More airports are scattering these around, in front of windows in terminal connectors, in random hallways. Bonus if it’s next to an open -- and working -- electrical outlet</li>\r\n 	<li>A craft beer bar with beers you haven’t had -- get those stress hormones back under control, and increment your unique beer counter on Untappd</li>\r\n 	<li>Dueling gate announcements. Gates G20 and G22 are boarding at the same time, with each gate agent talking over the other one. You hear Boarding Group 3 called and hustle up to the door, only to be shunted over to wait in the shame station; the other gate called Boarding Group 3.</li>\r\n 	<li>Boarding is complete and there’s an empty middle seat next to you! The clouds part and a golden ray of sunshine reflects off the iPad of the guy sitting in the window seat, illuminating that lovely little bit of extra elbow room. You and the window seat guy look at each other, smile, and feel those stress hormones drop another notch.</li>\r\n 	<li>Missing crew. Boarding’s complete, you’re next to an empty middle seat, but you have no crew. Their flight was late, and pulled into a gate two terminals over. They’re on their way, but now you’re worried that some stand-by will drop into that empty seat. That golden ray of sunshine dims a bit.</li>\r\n 	<li>Early arrival! Not only did the seat stay empty, but favorable winds put you on the ground 30 minutes early. You start to think that you should travel more often.</li>\r\n</ol>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, there you go. There’s half your airport bingo card filled out. If you’re flying out Tues or Weds, you’ll have more that enough time in line to figure out the rest. Let us know -- <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Facebook</a>, or <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">website</a> -- what squares you come up with.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/28792\"><em>Slinky Blues</em></a> by Admiral Bob</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Back to the Future with my New Travel PC</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I’ve been muttering under my breath about my Lenovo ThinkPad for a while now. I’ve had it for 4 years now. It’s feeling a bit heavy and looking a bit beat up, and though it’s no doubt been fully depreciated off the firm’s balance sheet, I don’t hear any rumors of an impending refresh. So I’ve been semi-shopping for a new Travel PC -- clicking through to Engadget reviews, glancing over, eyeing what the other folks on the plane or in the concierge lounge are using.</li>\r\n 	<li>Seven years ago (just about to the day), in what might’ve passed as an instance of pithy travel advice, I <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2010/11/15/two-weeks-with-a-macbook-air/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">wrote </a>about the use case for a Travel PC -- what it is, and more importantly, what it is not. It’s not my primary computer; it’s not my podcast production or video editing machine. That’s my home PC which is now up to 16GBs of RAM, an 8-core processor, 2 21-inch monitors, Blu-Ray burner, and a couple of terabyte hard drives. My Travel PC is spec’d for what’s important, what I need when I travel — light weight, long battery life, low screen profile so not to get crushed when the guy in the row in front of me power-reclines his seat, and reasonable processing power (in that order) — and leaves behind what’s not. Seven years ago -- in 2010 to save you the math -- the 11-inch MacBook Air was my choice for the Best Travel PC.</li>\r\n 	<li>My Travel PC use case hasn’t changed, but the market has -- kinda. In my looking around, what I’ve seen is 2 ½ kinds of travel PCs. There are the next generations of the laptop -- thin ultrabooks from Lenovo, HP and Dell; MacBook Pros from Apple -- or full-sized iPads with combo covers/soft keyboards and pens -- with the Microsoft Surface Pro being that ½ case, a thin Windows PC with a fold-out keyboard cover and pen. Quite honestly, none of those options really spoke to me -- at least enough to make me part with my own cash. The ultrabooks didn’t offer much new; I’d might as well “accidently” dump a grande cappuccino on my old Lenovo ‘cause this is what I’d get in return. The MacBook Pros are certainly sleek, but as a Travel PC, don’t seem to offer much more for the Apple premium. I have been thinking about the tablet/keyboard combo, specifically the Surface Pro; but watching guys try to work that soft keyboard on an airplane seatback tray… I could see myself wearing a cup of coffee two weeks after starting to fly with one of those. So, I kept semi-shopping</li>\r\n 	<li>But then last week, I got an e-mail blast from Newegg, the online PC parts retailer; I usually buy from them them when I’m assembling or upgrading my home PC. They had a flash sale on refurbed 11-inch MacBook Airs, not the 2010 model but what Apple dubs an “early 2014” model. Pretty much identical to my old one, but with updated specs, including the same processor as my Lenovo. I looked at it, did a few Internet search. It sat in a shopping cart for a couple of days until I thought “For $385, why not?” and pulled the trigger. It showed up a few days ago, and save for a corner ding, looks pretty new. I’ve upgraded to the current version of MacOS, installed Office 365 and VMFusion on it, and so I’m pretty much ready to go -- back to the future.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #135</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_135.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #135 — Airport Bingo; New Old Travel PC','','inherit','closed','closed','','1854-revision-v1','','','2017-11-20 22:14:50','2017-11-21 03:14:50','',1854,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/11/20/1854-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1863,1,'2017-11-20 22:19:37','2017-11-21 03:19:37','[caption id=\"attachment_1855\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/IMG_0513-cropped.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1855\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/IMG_0513-cropped-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Always use a coffee name when crossing the 3-adjective limit[/caption]\r\n\r\nHere\'s something to listen to while in the Thanksgiving airport lines and traffic jams. We list out some of the squares we\'d like to see in an airport bingo card, and I end up going back to the future with my new travel PC. We also talk about my growing stack of subway \"tap\" cards and some forecasts on what could be a traffic jammed Thanksgiving holiday. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_135.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/358749968\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n<!--more-->\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #135:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. Started my traditional Thanksgiving no-fly shutdown a week early. My normal practice is to stay at home Thanksgiving week, avoiding what is in the US the busiest travel week of the year. But this year, I’m taking advantage of every opportunity to scale back my travel a bit; consciously going to an every other week travel schedule. This is a big change for me; I think last year I travelled all but 6 or 8 weeks. I’m finding this more leisurely makes me much less brittle/much more accepting of travel hiccups.</li>\r\n 	<li>Which came in very handy on my last trip because, as I feared, I jinxed myself with the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/10/31/podcast-134-value-of-loyalty-need-those-5-stars/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">last episode</a> when, after a great flight back from DC, I said “Damn if this doesn’t make me look forward to my next trip.” Well, we all know that no good deed goes unpunished. My next flight to Charlottesville was late night Sunday -- leave ORD 9:50pm, get into CHO around 12:30am. I’m sitting in the Admirals Club catching up on e-mail, reading a bit. I’d been getting occasional phone notifications; my flight was bouncing around, changing departure gates, never a good sign, but it settled down after a while. Around 9:15, I figured I’d walk over to the departure gate. I looked at the monitor -- gate G7 as it had been for the past half-hour, so I packed up my stuff. Just as I picked up my phone -- bing, a new notification -- my flight’s cancelled. What the hell?</li>\r\n 	<li>I asked the Admirals Club folks to check -- yup, it’s cancelled; no, they don’t know why, and yes, they’re as surprised as I am. Of course, American sends me a nice notification that they’ve re-booked me onto the same flight the next day -- leaving 9:50pm Monday -- seeming to expect that I’d be perfectly happy with them blowing a day hole in my schedule. The Admirals Club agents knew that was not an acceptable answer, and one of them immediately started looking for alternatives. Me too -- looking at CHO, DC, and Richmond. Because of how late AA canceled, there was nothing available the next morning. Not surprising given how full planes are flying these days. After about 20 minutes of non-stop keystrokes, the Admirals Club agent found me a flight the next day at 11:30, getting me into Richmond at 2:30pm. I took it -- that was as good as it was going to get -- and gave her a couple of the service recognition coupons American sends the status fliers. She’d earned them. And as I heard other guys around me scrambling for hotel rooms, I stopped thinking about how American had wasted my Sunday night and was going to waste my Monday morning, and instead was happy that the cab I was going to catch was taking me to my own bed.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/duckett/23334\"><em>Another Girl</em></a> by duckett</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I’m sorta short-cycling what has become my normal monthly cadence -- just squeaking in episodes at the last day of the month -- so that I can give you something to listen to in those Thanksgiving airport line and traffic jams. Triple A forecasts 45.5 million people hitting the roads, the highest since 2005 -- probably some combination of low unemployment and low gas prices. And as the Thanksgiving holiday has expanded -- trying finding anyone in the office on Weds -- Tuesday evening is <a href=\"http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-met-holiday-travel-chicago-20171114-story.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">forecasted </a>to be the worst traffic, when getaway drivers and outbound rush hour combine into a hellish brew of standstill traffic jams. In Chicago, the trip from downtown to O’Hare is predicted to be an hour and 14 minutes, almost 4x more than what it takes on a clear road. Surpassed only by the 2 hour trip to JFK also forecasted for Tuesday evening.</li>\r\n 	<li>Steve Frick left a comment on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> about<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/10/31/podcast-134-value-of-loyalty-need-those-5-stars/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> last episode</a>’s topic on ratings grade inflation -- the need for that 5-star review. Steve writes:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I\'m a \"Yelp\" guy and I consistently give Fairfield Inn 3 stars. My reviews are along these lines \"Typical Fairfield, nothing that bad yet nothing yet nothing that great. Friendly staff, clean location, and comfortable beds. Same sub-par Fairfield breakfast, but that\'s why you pack instant oatmeal and protein bars.\" There\'s nothing that makes me want to tell people to stay there.</li>\r\n 	<li>Your <a href=\"https://untappd.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Untappd </a>information got me thinking. With around 1200 unique beers I\'m well below your numbers but I came in with the bulk of my ratings also at 3.75.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Thanks for that, Steve. My rationalization for my beer ratings skew is selection bias -- with over 5,200 unique beer check-ins, I pretty much know what I like and what I don’t like, so I’m not knowingly going to order and pay for a beer I don’t think I’ll like. I did have the exception to that last weekend when my son and I were at <a href=\"http://fobab.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">FoBAB</a> -- the Festival of Barrel Aged Beers. We volunteered to pour on Friday -- the first night -- which earned us a free ticket for Saturday night. At some point, my son give me a glass “Here, taste this”. I spit it back into the glass, dumped it, and rinsed the glass twice. It was awful. What was it? It was a beer that I had specifically said I wanted to avoid after reading the description in the program -- “Aged 12 months in Ardbeg scotch barrels with coffee and peanut butter.” I rated it 0.25 out of 5 because a zero doesn’t register as a rating. After that, I think I can live with a bit of rating skew.</li>\r\n 	<li>I started off the other topic in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/10/31/podcast-134-value-of-loyalty-need-those-5-stars/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">last episode</a> -- the value of loyalty -- with the story of finding a new Jag in the Hertz Presidents Club aisle at ATL. Of course, I grabbed it. The next afternoon, though, I was kinda wishing I’d taken an Uber or Lyft. My meeting in Norcross, north of Atlanta, was running late and refreshing Waze, I could see traffic both through and around Atlanta was building. And the rental return is at least a 15-minute ride to the terminal -- when the train doesn’t make an unscheduled stop mid-transit as I described in an earlier episode. So I was gearing myself up for missing my flight and the hassles of finding a seat on something later, when up popped an e-mail from Hertz offering to drive me to the terminal for $20. Sold! After I pulled in, one of the car “checker-inners” hopped into the driver’s seat and off we drove. And she was as happy to be driving that Jag as I was. “I love this car!” she said as we pulled out. “It’s such a beautiful day, I may drop you off and just keep on driving!” We had a good chat. She dropped me off at the door closest to the PreCheck line and I legged it in to make my flight. I won’t pop for that every time, but that $20 was worth it.</li>\r\n 	<li>Also, thanks to Cristina Sainz of Booking.com’s <a href=\"http://info.suite.booking.com/business-travel-blog/7-podcasts-every-travel-manager-needs-to-listen-to\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Business Travel Blog</a> who put TravelCommons #2 in her list of the “7 Podcasts Every Travel Manager Needs to Listen to Right Now”. She describes the podcast as “serving up pithy travel advice since 2005.” Well, we try. Thanks again Cristina for the shout-out.</li>\r\n 	<li>When I was in DC last month, I added another subway “tap” card to my collection, which was a little bit of a bummer because I still had an old style Metrocard -- the paper fare card with a mag stripe -- with at least one ride’s worth of fare still on it. So now I have a Smart Trip card along with a Ventra card from Chicago, an Oyster card from London, and a Breeze card from Atlanta. I hold onto them because they’re reusable and, while not expensive, their costs start to add up. The Atlanta and DC cards were $2 each; the Chicago card was $5, and the London card £5 -- or about $6.60 at today’s exchange rate. The Chicago card is, of course, the one I use the most. And it’s nice because I can top it up with a smartphone app. Comes in handy when I decide to take the L from ORD downtown. Beats standing in the perpetual long lines in front of the ORD fare machines. You’d think that if CTA is going to charge a premium to board at ORD, they’d at least pony up to cut the line to pay it. Little known pro tip for folks coming into ORD -- skip the line and pay with your iPhone if you have Apple Pay set up. It doesn’t read as fast as the Ventra card, but it works -- at least on the L -- the subway. When I was in London this past summer, the Underground was wonky. I could tap in at the turnstile with my iPhone, but couldn’t tap out which was a real hassle. But my daughter, though, who has a contactless debit card from RBS had no problems. And there wasn’t an app to top up my Oyster card, so I had to queue up in front of a lot of fare machines. Last month, New York announced that they’re hiring the same company London used to revamp the MTA’s payment system. I hope they get Apple and Android Pay working right. And more broadly, I hope these tap cards are just a temporary bridge until these transit systems can fully upgrade their systems to use smartphones. Until then, I carry a card holder in my backpack with my $15-$20 worth of subway tap cards.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/flatwound/14476\"><em>The Long Goodbye</em></a> by John Pazden</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Playing Airport Bingo</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I got a press release a couple of days ago from <a href=\"https://www.airhelp.com/en/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">AirHelp</a>, a company that looks like will file compensation claims for delayed flights in return for a 25% cut -- which doesn’t seem too bad since they’re doing it on a contingent basis. They sent along an Airport Bingo card for “helping you pass the time while not so patiently waiting to board”. It’s kinda the airport version of “buzzword bingo” that we all play on conference calls -- instead of marking a square someone says “synergy”, AirHelp has squares for things like “police dog” and “solo traveler”.</li>\r\n 	<li>That’s OK for a start, I guess. But here at TravelCommons, we try to go to the next level of road warrior-ism. I’m not going to fill out all 24 squares, but here are 12 squares’ worth to get you started\r\n<ol>\r\n 	<li>10-15 minute traffic jam on the airport access road -- just long enough to get those stress hormones flowing</li>\r\n 	<li>Guy in front of you in the PreCheck line walks through the metal detector with his smartphone. The alarm sounds. He stands there, puzzled. The TSA person rolls her eyes and asks, yet again, if he’d emptied his pockets. He looks surprised that his smartphone would set it off. She looks at her watch for how long ‘til her next break.</li>\r\n 	<li>Girl pulling a Hello Kitty kids-sized roller board on her way to Grandma’s. Hey, who said airport bingo had to be 100% snarky?</li>\r\n 	<li>Woman in front of you in the Starbucks line orders a half-decaf 3-pump no-foam vanilla latte, breaking the 3-adjective rule. It’s Sodexo, not your corner Starbucks. Keep it simple so the rest of us can order.</li>\r\n 	<li>A piano bar playing Christmas carols -- or if you’re in Nashville airport, a country duo</li>\r\n 	<li>A family of four or more walking abreast, slowly, so that people racing for their gates drift into the on-coming traffic, or try to thread through the crowd in front of a boarding gate. The only upside? One of the family might be pulling a Hello Kitty bag.</li>\r\n 	<li>An available rocking chair. More airports are scattering these around, in front of windows in terminal connectors, in random hallways. Bonus if it’s next to an open -- and working -- electrical outlet</li>\r\n 	<li>A craft beer bar with beers you haven’t had -- get those stress hormones back under control, and increment your unique beer counter on Untappd</li>\r\n 	<li>Dueling gate announcements. Gates G20 and G22 are boarding at the same time, with each gate agent talking over the other one. You hear Boarding Group 3 called and hustle up to the door, only to be shunted over to wait in the shame station; the other gate called Boarding Group 3.</li>\r\n 	<li>Boarding is complete and there’s an empty middle seat next to you! The clouds part and a golden ray of sunshine reflects off the iPad of the guy sitting in the window seat, illuminating that lovely little bit of extra elbow room. You and the window seat guy look at each other, smile, and feel those stress hormones drop another notch.</li>\r\n 	<li>Missing crew. Boarding’s complete, you’re next to an empty middle seat, but you have no crew. Their flight was late, and pulled into a gate two terminals over. They’re on their way, but now you’re worried that some stand-by will drop into that empty seat. That golden ray of sunshine dims a bit.</li>\r\n 	<li>Early arrival! Not only did the seat stay empty, but favorable winds put you on the ground 30 minutes early. You start to think that you should travel more often.</li>\r\n</ol>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, there you go. There’s half your airport bingo card filled out. If you’re flying out Tues or Weds, you’ll have more that enough time in line to figure out the rest. Let us know -- <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Facebook</a>, or <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">website</a> -- what squares you come up with.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/28792\"><em>Slinky Blues</em></a> by Admiral Bob</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Back to the Future with my New Travel PC</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I’ve been muttering under my breath about my Lenovo ThinkPad for a while now. I’ve had it for 4 years now. It’s feeling a bit heavy and looking a bit beat up, and though it’s no doubt been fully depreciated off the firm’s balance sheet, I don’t hear any rumors of an impending refresh. So I’ve been semi-shopping for a new Travel PC -- clicking through to Engadget reviews, glancing over, eyeing what the other folks on the plane or in the concierge lounge are using.</li>\r\n 	<li>Seven years ago (just about to the day), in what might’ve passed as an instance of pithy travel advice, I <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2010/11/15/two-weeks-with-a-macbook-air/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">wrote </a>about the use case for a Travel PC -- what it is, and more importantly, what it is not. It’s not my primary computer; it’s not my podcast production or video editing machine. That’s my home PC which is now up to 16GBs of RAM, an 8-core processor, 2 21-inch monitors, Blu-Ray burner, and a couple of terabyte hard drives. My Travel PC is spec’d for what’s important, what I need when I travel — light weight, long battery life, low screen profile so not to get crushed when the guy in the row in front of me power-reclines his seat, and reasonable processing power (in that order) — and leaves behind what’s not. Seven years ago -- in 2010 to save you the math -- the 11-inch MacBook Air was my choice for the Best Travel PC.</li>\r\n 	<li>My Travel PC use case hasn’t changed, but the market has -- kinda. In my looking around, what I’ve seen is 2 ½ kinds of travel PCs. There are the next generations of the laptop -- thin ultrabooks from Lenovo, HP and Dell; MacBook Pros from Apple -- or full-sized iPads with combo covers/soft keyboards and pens -- with the Microsoft Surface Pro being that ½ case, a thin Windows PC with a fold-out keyboard cover and pen. Quite honestly, none of those options really spoke to me -- at least enough to make me part with my own cash. The ultrabooks didn’t offer much new; I’d might as well “accidently” dump a grande cappuccino on my old Lenovo ‘cause this is what I’d get in return. The MacBook Pros are certainly sleek, but as a Travel PC, don’t seem to offer much more for the Apple premium. I have been thinking about the tablet/keyboard combo, specifically the Surface Pro; but watching guys try to work that soft keyboard on an airplane seatback tray… I could see myself wearing a cup of coffee two weeks after starting to fly with one of those. So, I kept semi-shopping</li>\r\n 	<li>But then last week, I got an e-mail blast from Newegg, the online PC parts retailer; I usually buy from them them when I’m assembling or upgrading my home PC. They had a flash sale on refurbed 11-inch MacBook Airs, not the 2010 model but what Apple dubs an “early 2014” model. Pretty much identical to my old one, but with updated specs, including the same processor as my Lenovo. I looked at it, did a few Internet search. It sat in a shopping cart for a couple of days until I thought “For $385, why not?” and pulled the trigger. It showed up a few days ago, and save for a corner ding, looks pretty new. I’ve upgraded to the current version of MacOS, installed Office 365 and VMFusion on it, and so I’m pretty much ready to go -- back to the future.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #135</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_135.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #135 — Airport Bingo; My New Old Travel PC','','inherit','closed','closed','','1854-revision-v1','','','2017-11-20 22:19:37','2017-11-21 03:19:37','',1854,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/11/20/1854-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1864,1,'2017-11-20 22:33:03','2017-11-21 03:33:03','[caption id=\"attachment_1763\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/IMG_0887.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1763\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/IMG_0887-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Scottish Food Tourism can be an acquired taste[/caption]\r\n\r\nDifficult to do a travel podcast without talking about this month\'s incidents on United and American Airlines. The videos that hit social media were damning, but as more of the facts came out, the stories around each incident became more complex. On a much lighter note, we also talk about the explosion of food tourism, called by some \"The Bourdain Effect\" after Anthony Bourdain\'s TV travelogue series. Also, listener suggestions for visiting the Budapest baths, and compliments on the terminal improvements at San Francisco Airport (SFO). All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_129.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_129.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #129:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, taking a breather after a week of what I like to call “stupid travel” -- Mon, Tues in Charlottesville, VA, flying out Tues night to San Francisco by way of Charlotte because, well, that’s the way the connections worked. Spent Weds in San Francisco complete with a 4-5pm meeting which meant I got to SFO too late for the last reasonable flight to Detroit (I gave up red-eyes for Lent many years ago), so instead I caught the 7pm SFO-ORD flight, getting into ORD at 1am. Which meant I had to turn around the next morning, head back to ORD for a mid-morning flight to Detroit for an afternoon meeting in Ann Arbor. As we were driving out of DTW for Ann Arbor, I began to get texts from American that our return flight home was already delayed by thunderstorms at ORD. Later, looking out the window of the meeting room in Ann Arbor, I watched the rain bucket down. The delay made more sense. And it wasn’t a huge thing for me other than extending an already long week of travel by a couple of hours -- I had nothing planned that evening other than going to bed. Twitter followers should be pleasantly surprised by the lack of bitch tweets.</li>\r\n 	<li>And, I really didn’t think I could complain if this was the only delay in six flights that week. Although I did help my cause by connecting through Charlotte instead of ORD for my flight from Charlottesville to San Francisco. The ORD-SFO flight would’ve been an hour shorter, but the probability of making that connection, I think, would’ve been significantly lower. So instead, discretion being the better part of valor, I booked the connection through Charlotte in spite of the longer total trip duration and the incredibly long walks I typically have through that airport. The regional flights come into Concourse E which just goes on forever -- 35 gates just in that concourse -- while my connecting flights seem to always go out of Concourse A. Which means I’m usually race-walking the length of the airport even with an on-time arrival and a 60-minute connection time. However, on Tuesday night, my CHO-CLT flight got in early, I had a 90-minute connection time, and my flight went out Concourse B, which meant I had more than enough time to score some Carolina BBQ and a tall-boy beer -- a good luck trifecta which probably helped my patience with the Detroit delay two days later.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Vidian/52190\">Memories (infiniti loop)</a> by Vidian (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license. Ft: TheDice</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>First up, thanks to Robert Fenerty for sending along Budapest travel ideas. My wife’s parents were refugees from the 1956 uprising, so I’ve been to Hungary a few times -- the first in 1989 when it was still Communist, and then the last time was 11 or 12 years ago. So it’s been a while. On of Robert’s suggestions is heading to the Gellert Baths -- “My favorite,” he says, “Ornate lions dump water into the pool and you can stand beneath the lions.” I hit the Gellert Baths my first or second trip to Hungary. There wasn’t really any English spoken then by folks -- mostly German or Russian -- but I had done a “Hungarian on Tape” language course, had about a hundred word vocabulary, and so was able to manage buying a ticket and finding the locker room. Watching the old guys around me -- and it was just old guys -- I figured out that I was supposed to strip down and tie this little white apron around my waist and head in. You did feel like you were walking into the 1890’s. High ceilings, the spouting lions, old guys playing chess in the pools. I loved it. I told my son that’s it’s kind of a Hungarian onsen. We were both a little disappointed though when we saw on the Gellert website that the dress code had changed in four years ago -- no more single sex pools, no more aprons. It’s now co-ed with bathing suits required; as the website says “all bathers are expected to cover the most important gender essentials”.</li>\r\n 	<li>Chris Christensen sent in a quick note about the Munich airport -- “Munich does have its own brewery,” he said, “but it’s outside of security”. Lotta good that did me.</li>\r\n 	<li>And continuing on that riff from the last episode, wondering how travel guides are coming up with their top 10 airports, I have to say that SFO is not getting the credit it deserves. I think they’re doing the best job of any major US airport to remake themselves on the fly. First they build a new international terminal, then they rebuilt Terminal 2 into something that I think rivals Hong Kong or Singapore. They’ve done a great job renovating Terminal 3 -- opening up what used to be an overcrowded Newark-live cave into a bright, high-ceilinged concourse with wide walkways -- and now they’re tearing down Terminal 1 to completely rebuild that. So in, what, 10 years SFO will have completely rebuilt the passenger-side experience focusing on what travelers need -- no water slides or luxury shops, but reasonable security, a great selection of restaurants and bars, lots of seating and workspace, and what was, at least last week, screaming fast 5 GHz WiFi. Perceptions always lag reality, but I’m hoping that SFO starts getting some well-deserved love from the airport ranking lists.</li>\r\n 	<li>One of the podcasts on my subscription list is Men In Blazers, a soccer (or football) podcast. Toward the end of each show, the two hosts, Roger Bennett and Michael Davis, quickly review products that they’re putting in their Amazon Emporium for a little fund-raising. One thing that Michael Davis put it caught my ear -- compression socks. He said he’s started using them on NY-to-LA flights and loves them. I started using them on international flights after a flight home from Hong Kong in United economy had my legs swelling and stiffening up to tree trunks. I wasn’t the only one. There was another guy laying on the floor by one of the exit doors elevating his legs until a flight attendant shooed him off. I couldn’t bring myself to lie on an airplane floor -- at least not without a sanitized mat -- but after that I started flying in compression socks. Not something that I’ve ever seen make a Top 10 travel tip list -- it’s not the most exciting tip -- but I swear by it. Maybe I’ll sneak it in on my next list.</li>\r\n 	<li>And it wouldn’t be a complete Following Up segment without some beer comment, so thanks to eTuk Denver who tweeted “Mark, next time you\'re in Denver we will personally take you on one of our Beer tours for all the hours of entertainment provided.” Thanks guys! I’m glad you enjoy the podcast and look forward to taking you up on that offer. From their website, it looks like the eTuk guys do beer tours through Denver’s RiNo or River North Art District. The Drink Rino website says they “have the largest concentration of craft beverage manufacturers in the United States, with 15 craft breweries, cideries, wineries and distilleries in a one mile radius.” Yes, it sounds like my kind of neighborhood.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/50485\">Sunset Boulevard</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Siobhan Dakay, unreal_dm</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Airplane Fight Clubs</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I purposely don’t try to do instant Twitter “hot takes” on the news. The near-instantaneous outrage that flares up on Facebook and Twitter often isn’t justified when all the facts work their way out days later. And the United Airlines dragging incident and the American Airlines stroller incident seem to be following those patterns.</li>\r\n 	<li>The April 9th videos of the Chicago aviation police dragging a bloodied semi-conscious passenger down the aisle of a plane are awful. But reading the police report released two weeks later on the 25th add facts not in the video -- that when an officer tried to get the passenger out of his seat, the passenger \"started swinging his arms up and down fast and violently” and that this flailing knocked off the officer’s hands causing the passenger to fall and hit his mouth on the armrest. And that after running back on the plane a second time yelled “\"I\'m not getting off the plane. Just kill me. I want to go home,\" Not exactly the Rosa Parks mantle that his lawyer claimed for him at the press conference announcing his lawsuit.</li>\r\n 	<li>Now, United, actually Republic -- it was their flight to Louisville operating under the United Express banner -- completely screwed this up in so many ways -- trying to go cheap on the incentives for volunteers, involuntarily bumping passengers already in their seats, not figuring out another way to get the deadheading crew to Louisville, and then escalating to the police -- which then led to the passenger escalating. The three other passengers who were involuntarily bumped took the high road -- grudging got off the plane so as not to inconvenience their fellow passengers and to follow what everyone understands are the post-9/11 rules -- once you pass through the plane door, you obey the airline and the crew or else.</li>\r\n 	<li>Unfortunately, for some crew, this expectation of being unquestioned oracle of right and wrong leads them to demand passengers to “respect my authority” first rather than try to de-escalate. The American Airlines incident that happened last weekend -- a conflict between a flight attendant and a mother of two with oversized strollers -- shows again that escalation between, in this case, the flight attendant trying to load the plane and a mother trying to bring 1 or 2 oversized strollers onto the plane instead of gate-checking them. The conflicting demands between “respect my authority” and “the carry-on rules don’t apply to me” collide. It later comes out that the “hot take” on this -- the flight attendant hit the mother and child with the stroller while trying to take it from her -- wasn’t true (no one was hit), but the rapid escalation -- mother yelling, threats between the flight attendant and some First Class passenger who inserted himself -- is everyone’s fault. It’s an unwillingness for someone to step back, swallow hard, and sacrifice their ego.</li>\r\n 	<li>The lawyer for the United Airlines passenger said in his press conference that airlines have been “bullying” passengers. I don’t know that he’s completely wrong on this. Spirit and Ryanair seem to have built their brand around treating passengers rudely. But the passenger treatment of mainline airlines has eroded in the name of operational efficiency -- packed planes, reduced leg room, flight attendants yelling at boarding passengers to hurry up and sit down so the flight can leave. Earlier this week the American Customer Satisfaction Index reported that the airline industry as a whole remains in the bottom third of those the ACSI tracks. “Customer satisfaction has never appeared to be a goal for airlines,” their analysis said. “\"Compared to other industries, the financial return on passenger satisfaction is not much of an incentive.” As the airline industry as consolidated into an oligopoly of 4 main carriers in the US and 3 global alliances -- Star Alliance, OneWorld, and Skyteam -- there aren’t many alternatives. Most of us shrug and bear it; a few lash out.</li>\r\n 	<li>Interesting to see, though, United’s latest efforts to bury this PR nightmare is a pay-out to the bloodied passenger and an announcement that they’ll now offer up to $10,000 for voluntary rebookings. And Southwest, who’ve been completely untouched by this, saying they’ll eliminate overbookings by June.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music --<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/ramblinglibrarian/55007\">Dawn at the Top of the World ft. copperhead &amp; Robert Seikawitch</a> by Ivan Chew (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>The Bourdain Effect</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>That’s how travel wags are explaining the explosion of food tourism -- people wanting to recreate experiences from Anthony Bourdain’s <em>No Reservations</em> and <em>Parts Unknown</em>. Not that it’s anything new -- people have been going to South Philly forever and flipping a coin between Pat’s and Geno’s cheese steaks or going to Detroit for a similar dance between American and Lafayette for coney dogs.</li>\r\n 	<li>It’s more that it’s flipped around today -- it’s used to be that you’d come to Chicago to visit family or see a Cubs game, and, by the way, queue up at Gino’s East for deep dish pizza. Now, it’s booking a table at Alinea, perennially in the top of the <em>World’s 50 Best Restaurant</em> list, and then booking flights, a hotel, and checking the Cubs schedule. Food is now a main draw with restaurants becoming travel destinations in their own right. Noma, the Copenhagen restaurant that is regularly #1 on the World’s 50 Best list has taken this to what is currently the most extreme -- they’re doing a pop-up restaurant in Tulum, Mexico; $600/seat and they sold out -- 5,000 seats in 3 hrs.</li>\r\n 	<li>Regular listeners know that I’m not immune to this. We have a group of 3 couples -- the guys, we all went to college together -- that are Exhibit A of this trend. One wife found a lunch opening at the French Laundry on OpenTable, booked it, then told us, and we all immediately booked a weekend in Napa. Finishing that lunch, we asked ourselves, “What’s our next 3-star?” My wife booked the kitchen table at Alinea, and the other two couples flew into Chicago.</li>\r\n 	<li>Travel experts explain this, saying food is one of the main travel experiences that can’t be digitized -- even though a lot of people try. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve been eating at an upscale restaurant and the guy next to me whips out a big Nikon DSLR, stands up and shoots his plate. Over a 10-course meal, those guys are working some calories.</li>\r\n 	<li>But of course, you can’t digitize taste. And you can’t save it. You can only experience it in the moment. And actually, that moment isn’t just about taste -- it’s the whole experience -- whether you’re having a 3-star lunch in Napa or Paris, your first taste of durian at a roadside stand in Singapore, or a Chicago hot dog at the Weiner Circle at 2 in the morning.</li>\r\n 	<li>One of my favorite travel memories with my father was many years ago when he and I went down to Cabo for a week. Charlie Trotter, one of the early high-end chefs in Chicago, had opened a restaurant in the One and Only resort between Cabo San Lucas and San Jose del Cabo. I had eaten at Trotter’s in Chicago many times and had even worked a shift in the kitchen -- I won it in a charity auction; it was a great experience, but it was real work -- so I wanted to check out this new place. They had just opened. The management was all down from Chicago and they were shaking things out. The starter courses were great, but my dad’s main course wasn’t hot. I flagged down a manager and asked him if they could heat up it up. Away went both of our plates. Hey, mine was fine; you just need to heat his up. The manager quickly came back. Nope, we’ll re-make your dad a new dish, and since he can’t be expected to watch you eat, we’ve taken yours and will re-make yours too so we can serve them at the same time. And while you’re waiting, here are a couple more appetizer dishes. My dad and I looked at each other and started nibbling at the new appetizers. And then we finished them. And then our main courses re-arrived hot and fresh. My dad looked over the table at me and said, “You know, I’m not really that hungry anymore”. I stared him down -- “After what they just went through, you’re going to eat that dish, all of it, and enjoy it”. Complete role reversal. We would replay that scene and laugh about it for years afterwards; way more than we’d look at pictures of us outside the Giggling Marlin.</li>\r\n 	<li>And now that we’re gearing up for our trip to Hungary next month, my wife is running through the list of top Budapest restaurants. I’m looking forward to that, but I also remember up a steep narrow sidewalk in Szentendre a little lángos stand -- deep fried bread rubbed in garlic with a bit of cheese on top. It didn’t make Bourdain’s <em>Parts Unknown</em> Budapest episode, but I’ll be searching for it all the same.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #129</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_128.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #129 — Airport Fight Club; The Bourdain Effect','','inherit','closed','closed','','1760-revision-v1','','','2017-11-20 22:33:03','2017-11-21 03:33:03','',1760,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/11/20/1760-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1865,1,'2017-11-20 22:36:29','2017-11-21 03:36:29','[caption id=\"attachment_827\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/071.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-827\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/071-300x202.jpg\" alt=\"Downtown Brooklyn. People return to Brooklyn over the Manhattan Bridge still in shock, after fleeing from the attack on the World Trade Center. © Joseph Rodríguez\" width=\"300\" height=\"202\" /></a> Downtown Brooklyn. People return to Brooklyn over the Manhattan Bridge still in shock, after fleeing from the attack on the World Trade Center. © Joseph Rodríguez[/caption]\r\n\r\nComing up to the 10th anniversary of the September 11th terrorist attacks, I repeat a segment from the September 2005 <a title=\"Podcast #14 – September 11th Travel Stories; Writing a Great Travel Song\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/09/14/podcast-14-september-11th-travel-stories-writing-a-great-travel-song/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">episode</a> that tells the stories of travelers trying to get back home when all planes were grounded and all US borders were closed after the attacks. Also, we finish up the two-part review of new Google technology with observations after taking a Samsung Chromebook on the road for a month this summer. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_93.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_93.mp3\"]','Podcast #93 — Travel Stories from September 11th; Traveling with a Google Chromebook','','inherit','closed','closed','','825-revision-v1','','','2017-11-20 22:36:29','2017-11-21 03:36:29','',825,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/11/20/825-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1866,1,'2017-11-20 22:36:55','2017-11-21 03:36:55','[caption id=\"attachment_789\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"250\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/3300827223_3bea6ba1ff1.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-789\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/3300827223_3bea6ba1ff1-250x300.jpg\" alt=\"Train Crash at Montparnasse 1895\" width=\"250\" height=\"300\" /></a> Train Crash at Montparnasse 1895[/caption]\r\n\r\nInto the summer travel rhythm with a mix of vacation and business travel. Using an Apple iPad 2 and Samsung\'s new Galaxy Tab 10.1 Android tablet during this mix gave me enough real world experience to make some recommendations. A couple of recent web links describe this podcast as \"not as upbeat as others\" which is true, but because it focuses on traveling, not destinations. Perhaps this non-chipper attitude is partially explained by a recent study placing 4 US airline companies in the top 8 most hated companies in America. And a listener suggests ways to reduce roaming voice and data costs. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_92.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_92.mp3\"]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript from TravelCommons podcast #92:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Travel since the last podcast has been pretty evenly split between personal and business travel.  First couple of weeks was summer vacation in the UK -- the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Lake District\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_District\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Lake District</a>, Scotland, and a couple of days in London.  Had phenomenal weather the whole time we were there -- one afternoon of rain, and the rest of the time was warm and sunny.  Almost too warm for the clothes we packed. And everyone was amazed.  All the bed &amp; breakfast owners were marveling at the weather. “It’s luvly,” said our landlady in Edinburgh, “Last week it was hailing”. Lucky us because we certainly didn’t pack for that.</li>\r\n	<li>Just to make sure I didn\'t forget we were on vacation, we stayed at bed &amp; breakfasts the whole time -- until we hit London, when I made the reservations. Actually, when I think about it, it’s not <em>all</em> that different from the service I get in the concierge lounges at big hotels. Breakfast comes with the room -- though the full cooked breakfast, complete with black puddling in England and haggis in Scotland, was a bit heartier than the continental breakfasts I normally get in concierge lounges.  And there’s a bit of nice chit-chat when we walk in, though the B&amp;B owners are typically a bit older/more <em>seasoned</em> that the typical lounge staff.  The main differences -- most hotels I stay in don’t have dogs living there, and they prefer credit cards over cash.</li>\r\n	<li>Of course, back in the US, the weather’s been sweltering.  I was in South Florida a couple weeks ago and it was <em>cooler</em> there than Chicago.  But that wasn’t good enough, so last week, I was down in Phoenix, where it was hitting 105-107 degrees during the day and wasn’t getting below 100 any time while I was awake.</li>\r\n	<li>Tough weather to take advantage of the convertible red Mustang that Avis was nice enough to upgrade me to.</li>\r\n	<li>Wednesday night after dinner, though, I decided I just <em>had</em> to drop the top.  The dashboard said the external temperature was 102 -- and it felt it when I dropped that top.  Soon, though, I found that the key to driving top-down in 102 degrees is the pretty much the same as driving top-down in 55 degree weather. Set the fan to High and remember to have the knob set to A/C.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music -- <em>Crazy Love-The Alex &amp; Lang mix</em> by <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/djlang59/10579\">J.Lang</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Let’s take a run through the comment bag.</li>\r\n	<li>Sarah, who’s been a listener since 2006, posted a comment on the website on <a title=\"Podcast #85 — Importance of Hotel Bathrooms; Maximizing Miles\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2010/11/30/podcast-85-importance-of-hotel-bathrooms-maximizing-miles/\" target=\"_blank\">episode #85</a> (!) -- she says “I was playing catch up after all my driving trips this past two months.” In that episode, I talked about how the hotel industry seems to be focused on spiffing up their lobbies and putting whizzy new technology in the rooms, and that they were making a mistake ignoring what I think is critical to the hotel experience -- the bathroom.  Sarah says “I say ‘heck yeah’ to the bathroom being one of the most important parts of a stay.  I ended in a bed and breakfast in the middle of nowhere, with no wifi.  And the bathroom made me want to tell everyone about it. It had a hot tub and a beautifully large bathroom. But even though I knew no one who was going to the area, I wanted to tell everyone about it. It\'s the <a href=\"http://www.innatnewberlin.com/\">Inn in New Berlin, PA</a> (in case you care).”</li>\r\n	<li>Sarah, thanks for the note -- and thanks for the pointer to the Inn in New Berlin.  I do think we look for luxurious touches in hotels. And it doesn’t have to be anything big.  The first thing my wife looks for in a hotel room is to see if there are robes in the bathroom.  It’s a helluva lot cheaper than a tricked-out media panel, and it makes a much bigger impression.</li>\r\n	<li>Sarah’s comment about wanting to tell everyone about her find reminded me of some stats I saw a few days ago.  It said on average 24% of a hotel guests first heard about it from a friend or family member; 16% from a review site like <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"TripAdvisor\" href=\"http://www.tripadvisor.com\" rel=\"homepage\">TripAdvisor</a>. I would guess that if anyone could calculate the cost of creating an enthusiastic recommender like Sarah -- it would turn out to be a lot cheaper to do it with a great bathroom than a posh new lobby.</li>\r\n	<li>Fast forwarding to <a title=\"Podcast #90 — More Comfortable Traveling in India; Tipping Towards Android?\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/05/22/podcast-90-more-comfortable-traveling-in-india-tipping-towards-android/\" target=\"_blank\">episode #90</a>, Andrew Gill left a comment on the TravelCommons Facebook wall\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Thanks for podcast #90, it\'s great to hear how 170 degrees isn\'t as comfortable as fully flat when my company has a different approach to travel. UK to Australia in Economy has to be tried</li>\r\n	<li>You talked about using large chunks of roaming data in a recent trip and I\'ve a couple of hints to share.</li>\r\n	<li>Google Maps is great but try <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/offlinemaps\">City Maps 2Go</a>. I\'ve been using it for over a year having tried other off-line mapping products. It uses the built in compass so I don\'t have to walk a block either way to figure out if I\'m going in the right direction.</li>\r\n	<li>I\'ve also become a real convert to local SIM cards. Now this may not be perfect for a business trip, but I had two weeks in Chile in January and my iPhone bill was $500, compare this to two weeks in Australia using the AU$2 a day plan from Optus and my bill was $22. In Australia I didn\'t worry about when I used my phone or finding the next hotspot, because I had unlimited calls, SMS and internet usage all for AU$2 a day.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>Thanks Andrew.  Sorry about the whinging on 10 degrees of seat recline. I paid for it on my flight over to Manchester last month -- 8 hrs of suffering in coach in a packed American Airlines 757. Even United gives you free beer in coach, but not American.</li>\r\n	<li>Thanks for the tip on City Maps 2 Go.  I looked at it for our UK vacation and since we were spending most of our time in the hinterlands -- the Lake District, the Isle of Arran, around Loch Lomond, it wasn’t going to give us enough coverage.  I found, though, a great app from Phil Endecott called “UK Map”.  For $11 you get all the Ordnance Survey maps, 2D and 3D views, combined with OpenStreetMap.org info downloaded so you can use it off line.  It’s a universal app so I have it on my iPhone and iPad.  If you’re touring the UK, I highly recommend it.  I may end up back in Madrid in a couple of months.  If I do, I’ll be downloading its map from City Maps 2 Go.</li>\r\n	<li>I did find an unexpected but valuable benefit from my Starbucks obsession. I have a couple of Starbucks gift cards that I’ve registered.  I kinda did it on a whim.  They send me a card for a free drink after every 15 coffees I buy.  I don’t use them -- it would be wasted on a tall coffee or cappuccino.  I give ‘em to my kids who use them for venti frappuccinos.  But anyways, while in London, I found that my US <a href=\"https://www.starbucks.com/card\" target=\"_blank\">Starbucks Rewards</a> credentials gave me free WiFi in UK Starbucks. Since I was limiting my mobile data usage and there’s a Starbucks about every 200 ft in London, it was very handy.</li>\r\n	<li>\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_1502\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"263\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/web0118-starbuckstrenta12.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1502\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/web0118-starbuckstrenta12-263x300.jpg\" alt=\"How big, exactly, is Starbucks’ new ‘Trenta’ size?\" width=\"263\" height=\"300\" /></a> How big, exactly, is Starbucks’ new ‘Trenta’ size?[/caption]\r\n\r\nSpeaking of Starbucks, when I was flying out of ORD last week, one of the Starbucks in Terminal 3 advertised “trenta is here” -- Starbucks’ new “BigGulp” serving size. I thought about this while waiting in line to order my tall bold coffee.  Should they really be selling the trenta in airports?  I mean, does it make sense to sell someone 31 fluid ounces of a beverage right before they will be strapped into a seat for the next 2-4 hours?  And odds are that the person ordering a trenta will be in the window seat.  Meaning that he/she’s rousting two people at least twice during the flight to drain that trenta.</li>\r\n	<li>And then, reacting to my comments about Ryanair in the <a title=\"Podcast #91 — Can’t Patch Planes Forever; Saving Customers With A Personal Touch\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/06/18/podcast-91-cant-patch-planes-forever-saving-customers-with-a-personal-touch/\" target=\"_blank\">last episode</a>, Leo Vegoda wrote\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>What you say about Ryanair reminds me of how Irish comedian Andrew Maxwell described them: ‘Ryanair is what flying would be like if it was illegal’. I think that says it all.”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>That is perfect -- and I think perfectly describes Ryanair and Spirit and all that ilk.</li>\r\n	<li>And it shouldn\'t be too surprising then that 4 of the top 8 most hated companies in America are airlines.  The latest <a href=\"http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/07/the-19-most-hated-companies-in-america/241344/\" target=\"_blank\">American Customer Satisfaction Index</a> has American Airlines at #8, United at #7, US Airways at #6, Delta Airlines at #2(!), beat out by just 2 points for #1 by Potomac Electric utility.  Impressive results all around.</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a question, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is <a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a> -- use the Voice Memo app on your iPhone or something like Virtual Recorder on your Android phone to record and send in an audio comment – or iMovie if you want to send in some video; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at travelcommons.com.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music -- <em>August (Reggae Rework)</em> by <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/elB/16075\">el-B</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>The Not-So-Upbeat Traveler</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>This podcast is a hobby, not a business, for me -- as if you couldn’t tell that from my haphazard posting schedule. So, I don’t obsess over podcast or website statistics, how many downloads, how many page views, all the stuff that real web business live and breathe and monitor on a real-time basis. I do, though, check in every couple of days to make sure everything’s running, clean the spam bin, and to look at site stats to see if anyone is coming by.</li>\r\n	<li>I didn’t do any of this while on vacation, but when I got back and checked in, I saw that I’d gotten flooded with visits the first week in July.  Following the source links, I found most of the traffic came in from StumbleUpon, while another bit came from a recent post by Chris Christensen on his <em><a href=\"http://amateurtraveler.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Amateur Traveler</a></em> blog.</li>\r\n	<li>The StumbleUpon pointer was from “sher1lock,” a “woman from Ontario”.  She recommended episode #88, where I reported from the floor of the Travel Goods show and talked about losing elite status. Her comment -- “A neat travel site. Not as upbeat as some.”</li>\r\n	<li>Which actually lined up very nicely with Chris’ <a href=\"http://amateurtraveler.com/2011/06/30/where-is-the-darker-side-of-travel/\">post</a>.  Titled “Where is the Darker Side of Travel?”, Chris was responding to a listener’s letter that suggested his Amateur Traveler Podcast sugar-coats the travel experience a bit; the listener challenged Chris to “bring attention to the darker side of travel”. Chris gave a good, straight up response that boiled down to -- “Guilty as charged; I’m an optimistic guy” and “If you want a podcast about travel from the point of view of how bad can be, listen to Mark Peacock’s <em>Travel Commons</em>. Mark is a friend and fellow podcaster but I describe his show as the anti-Amateur Traveler.”</li>\r\n	<li>OK, so I’m not always the cheeriest guy about travel, but I didn\'t think I was a complete “Debbie Downer”.  But, because I talk about more about the journey -- the act of transiting, travel as a verb -- rather than being a tourist -- what you are when you get to your destination, my travel stories are going to naturally follow what we all think is the dramatic decline in the travel experience -- airplanes as flying cattle cars, beat-up high-mileage rental cars, ....  Any podcast whose major characters are <a href=\"http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/07/the-19-most-hated-companies-in-america/241344/\" target=\"_blank\">4 of the top 8 most hated companies in America</a> just isn\'t going to be “as upbeat as some.”</li>\r\n	<li>I have varying degrees of success in being cheery about my travels.  It’s always easier to be chipper when there’s something new in the mix -- new destination, new air carrier, new plane,...  <a title=\"Podcast #90 — More Comfortable Traveling in India; Tipping Towards Android?\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/05/22/podcast-90-more-comfortable-traveling-in-india-tipping-towards-android/\" target=\"_blank\">A couple podcasts ago</a>, when I talked about flying to Madrid on USAir -- the USAir service was definitely a 9-hour drag, but it couldn’t dull the excitement of a new destination. But this last trip to Phoenix? Going to the same place for the umpteenth time, on American, on old MD-80’s (one of which -- with a 1983 birth date -- treated me to yet another 2 hour delay), to temperatures in the 100’s every day.  I had to drag myself to the airport. The best thing about the trip -- a toss-up between  the convertible Mustang from Avis and the Tempe In-n-Out Burger where I killed some of that 2-hour delay.</li>\r\n	<li>But then again, who really enjoys their commute to work?  Most of the times, that’s what my travel is -- a commute to work.  Some people drive 45 minutes to work; I fly 3 hours.  And just like you should avoid road rage, I try to avoid travel rage. Specifically, when my commute goes wrong, I try to limit the collateral damage.</li>\r\n	<li>First off, I try not to call anybody. There’s just nothing to be gained from talking to family or colleagues live.\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>“I’m going to be late coming home/getting to the office.  American/United/Southwest/Joe’s Cattle Car decided to skip preventative maintenance this month in order to make payroll and so I’m waiting out a maintenance decision.  The delay’s going to be either 30 minutes or 3 hours -- depends on whether duct tape can fix the problem.”</li>\r\n	<li>“Oh, that’s too bad.  I’m sorry to hear that”</li>\r\n	<li>“Not half as sorry as I am to be living it”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>See?  That’s just not a good exchange for anyone. I’m not feeling any better, and worse yet, I’ve passed along my frustration, my lousy day to a completely innocent bystander.  Best to rely on e-mail or text messages. Just make sure you immediately delete the inevitable frowny face emoticon from your significant other. Leaving it fester in your inbox will just lead to bad things.</li>\r\n	<li>Same goes with airline gate agents and hotel clerks. They didn\'t overbook the hotel or break the plane.  On a good day, these folks are just barely breaking minimum wage.  They’re just trying to get on the other side of 8 hours.  Unless they’re pre-emptively snotty to me -- they take an attitude before I even open my mouth -- I give them a pass.</li>\r\n	<li>So we\'ve identified a lot of people who <em>aren\'t</em> responsible for botching up my commute.  Who is, then? Who can I dump this rage on? Well, that’s the challenge.  When you’re driving down the freeway and a guy cuts you off, you see the culprit. You can yell, you glare, you can flip him off.  You vent and, if you’re a normal person, you move on.</li>\r\n	<li>Airlines, hotels, car rentals -- you’ll never see the person that made your morning miserable. You can’t find them to flip them off; they don’t even know you exist. They’re sitting inside some operations center combining the output of some linear revenue optimization programs with the weather forecast and sending out e-mails that will complete jack up my day.  Nothing personal -- I’m just collateral damage.</li>\r\n	<li>Without that outlet, though; that ability to vent directly to the culprit, the frustration festers. The undisciplined take it out on innocent workers. The introverts mutter to themselves under their breaths.  The majority of us, though, inhale, exhale and then make for closest repository of the three cure-alls for travel frustration -- fat, salt, and beer.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music --<em> I Will Writhe</em> by <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/26739\">SackJo22</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Tablet Wars: Apple iPad 2 vs. Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Regular listeners know that, over the past couple of years, I’ve migrated to an all Apple technology kit -- the 11-in MacBook Air, an iPhone 4, and an iPad 2. This isn’t a religious sort of fanboy thing -- the desktop unit that I create this podcast on is a custom-built dual monitor Windows 7 64-bit rig with 3 hard drives and a Blu-Ray DVD burner.</li>\r\n	<li>Attending <a href=\"http://www.google.com/events/io/2011/index-live.html\" target=\"_blank\">Google I/O</a> earlier this summer, I received a <a href=\"http://www.samsung.com/global/microsite/galaxytab/10.1/index.html\" target=\"_blank\">Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1</a> with the <a href=\"http://www.engadget.com/2011/01/06/googles-android-3-0-honeycomb-for-tablets-a-guided-tour-of-the/\" target=\"_blank\">Honeycomb </a>tablet version of Android -- I think Honeycomb translates to version number 3.1 for non-Google-ites -- and a <a href=\"http://www.samsung.com/us/computer/chromebook\" target=\"_blank\">Samsung Chromebook</a>. During the summer I’ve been traveling with both the Google and Apple kit -- a significant increase in carry-on weight, but the only way I know to truly compare equipment is live in the field.  I’ll compare the tablets this episode and talk about my Chromebook experiences next time.</li>\r\n	<li>Not only did I carry both tablets for business over the past couple of months, I also took them both with me on vacation to the UK, leaving my laptop at home -- a real pressure test.</li>\r\n	<li>To cut to the chase -- which do I like better? -- it’s a real toss-up.  Both tablets are nice pieces of hardware -- the screen sizes are a bit different (the Galaxy has a bit more of an HD aspect ratio while the iPad’s dimensions are more like a sheet of paper) and the Samsung is a few ounces lighter than the iPad, but in the real world -- it’s a push.  They feels the same, both screens are beautiful, and their response times are great.</li>\r\n	<li>As you would expect, the iPad has a better selection of apps -- the Android tablet just launched this summer while the iPad has been out for over a year.  However, for apps that I use, the delta isn’t as huge as the raw number of apps -- iPad vs. Honeycomb -- would suggest.  Apps that I use regularly -- Evernote, Kindle, Pandora, Dropbox, Skype, Concur expense reporting, Angry Birds -- are all available for Android.  The Evernote app is the only tablet-specific one -- and it’s really nice -- but the others work fine.  The only MIA apps that have any real impact on me are WebEx and GoTo Meeting. I think the tablet form is the best way to watch an on-line presentation and so I do miss those apps.</li>\r\n	<li>The operating system -- Apple’s iOS vs. Google’s Android and the accompanying apps -- the comparison seems to be less of a “better-worse” and more a difference in philosophies.  The Apple experience is pretty much locked down -- there’s only one place to get apps, the screen layout not very customizable, there’s no independent access to the file system. Now that’s not necessarily bad -- most people never change the default settings on their technology and there’s a lot to be said for not letting users screw things up beyond recovery. It’s Apple’s point of view. It’s a valid one, but it does have some impact.</li>\r\n	<li>When we were in the UK with only the two tablets, I wanted to replace my Facebook profile picture with one taken that afternoon in the <a href=\"http://www.glengoyne.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Glengoyne Distillery</a> near Loch Lomond.  My daughter had taken the picture with my iPhone. Plunking around the Facebook app, I couldn’t find a way to change my profile. So I e-mailed the photo from my iPhone to my Gmail account.  Logging onto the Facebook site on the iPad Safari browser, I couldn’t save the picture from the Mail app to a place where the browser could access it -- for security reasons, all the apps seem to exist within their own sandboxes.  Opening up Gmail on the Samsung tablet, I could save the picture to the folder of my choice, and then upload the picture from that folder to the Facebook site through the Android browser.</li>\r\n	<li>It’s a little thing, but it illustrates why I found working solely with the Android system -- being without my PC -- easier than the iPad. The Android design philosophy is to give the users much greater control over their experience.  Which means I can spelunk around the file system, tweak the technical operations, create truly horrid screen designs, and view Flash-based web sites to my heart’s content</li>\r\n	<li>I also found it interesting that my daughter who’s starting high school this year, tends to pick up the Samsung tablet over the iPad. A lot of it probably has to do with the fact that she has an Android phone, but she seemed to prefer the Google experience.</li>\r\n	<li>So as I said at the top, it’s a toss-up.  I think the iPad is a more polished experience.  It feels 1-2 releases ahead of the Android tablet -- which it is.  The Samsung tablet, though, keeps right up with Apple in hardware and fit-and-finish, and Android lets the advanced user customize it better to his/her specific needs.  Final recommendation -- at the same price, I’d recommend the casual/non-technical user go with the iPad, but if you like to pop the hood on your technology, you won’t go wrong with the Samsung.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids991762681117.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #92</li>\r\n	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from the <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/\" target=\"_blank\">ccMixter</a> site</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_92.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #92 — Not-So-Upbeat Traveler; iPad 2 vs. Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1','','inherit','closed','closed','','785-revision-v1','','','2017-11-20 22:36:55','2017-11-21 03:36:55','',785,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/11/20/785-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1867,1,'2017-11-20 22:37:22','2017-11-21 03:37:22','[caption id=\"attachment_769\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/1366292835_a40fb811f8_z1.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-769\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/1366292835_a40fb811f8_z1-300x197.jpg\" alt=\"Let\'s seeeeeeeeeeeeeee ....\" width=\"300\" height=\"197\" /></a> Let\'s seeeeeeeeeeeeeee .... © Stefan Sonntag / Flickr[/caption]\r\n\r\nWas off the road for two weeks for my kids\' graduations, but now back in the security lines with a mix of domestic and international travel. Listener suggestions include dining at local music clubs to avoid the \"eating alone\" stigma, and using mini-USB hubs to power your gadgets without carrying a basketful of international plug adapters. I\'m impressed by how a couple of <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Transportation Security Administration\" href=\"http://www.tsa.gov\" rel=\"homepage\">TSA</a> screeners deal with a silly carry-on. I\'m not impressed though by how American Airline\'s old MD-80\'s keep delaying my travels. And, after a lousy Avis rental return experience, an employee reaches out and wins me back. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_91.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_91.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript from TravelCommons podcast #91:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>I’ve actually been in town more than not since the last <a title=\"Podcast #90 — More Comfortable Traveling in India; Tipping Towards Android?\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/05/22/podcast-90-more-comfortable-traveling-in-india-tipping-towards-android/\" target=\"_blank\">episode</a>.  Both my kids had graduations – my son from high school, my daughter from middle school. I decided it would be a good thing to be around for those.</li>\r\n	<li>Of course, nothing comes for free, so my packed travel schedule in May was “paying forward” for two weeks off the road in at the beginning of June.  And then I was back at it last week – back down to Phoenix for triple digit highs, 105° F every afternoon. Yes, I know that it’s a dry heat, but then again, so is an oven.  Then out to London for a customer meeting – out tomorrow night -- Sunday night (I hate flying out Sunday nights – blows your entire weekend), back Tuesday afternoon – but then instead of heading home, I’ll pick up a flight down to Austin, TX for the last two days of a travel technology conference.</li>\r\n	<li>Then home, and then back to the UK -- but this time combining leisure and business.  We fly from Chicago to Manchester – on an American 757 which I have to say I’m dreading – head over for an afternoon in my dad’s hometown Southport – kinda halfway between Liverpool and Blackpool on the Irish Sea – then up to the Lake District for a couple of days of hiking, drive around the west coast of Scotland for a couple of days, head over to Edinburgh for a couple of days, take the train down to London, and then I’ll work in London for a few days while the rest of the family sightsees around. Looking at my <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"TripIt\" href=\"http://www.tripit.com\" rel=\"homepage\">TripIt</a> page, I have no other travel planned – an oversight that I’m sure will be fixed soon.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Robert Fenerty left a good suggestion at the TravelCommons website on the “Table for One; Eating Alone” <a title=\"Table for One: Eating Alone on the Road\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/05/12/table-for-one-eating-alone-on-the-road/\" target=\"_blank\">blog post </a>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>“When I\'m on the road, I seek out live jazz. I can sit at a table for 90 minutes, order food and wine, and relax. In Chicago, I visit Bandera, where the servers don\'t hover and the private little booths reduce the \"look at that guy\" factor to a bare minimum. In Europe, jazz is easier to find than in most U.S. cities, but if you find the hip part of town and you can usually find jazz. But don\'t ask the concierge at your hotel, because they don\'t know what jazz is.”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>That’s a great suggestion – find a live music club, linger, and enjoy yourself.  Because, really, how often do you get to do that at home – especially if you have kids.  I always enjoy taking out-of-town guests to blues clubs in Chicago.  My favorite is B.L.U.E.S – a small place in the North Side Lincoln Park neighborhood.  On the weekends, the place is packed, but during the weekdays, you can get a seat at the bar, comfortably drink a couple of beers – sometimes with the band during breaks– and enjoy the music without the scrum of the weekend crowds.  And I guess that that’s the other great thing about Robert’s suggestion – you’re going during the week – no crowds to get between you and appreciating the music.  Great idea!</li>\r\n	<li>Steve Soechtig, a long time TravelCommons listener posted this suggestion after last month’s <a title=\"Podcast #90 — More Comfortable Traveling in India; Tipping Towards Android?\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/05/22/podcast-90-more-comfortable-traveling-in-india-tipping-towards-android/\" target=\"_blank\">epsisode </a>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>“Loved the post and particularly the idea of bringing a small power strip plus a voltage adapter for devices.  That\'s clever.</li>\r\n	<li>I\'d throw one more thing out there, as a benefit to Apple.  The interchangeable external power adapter allows me to plug my Macbook into EU, UK, and AUS power outlets (so far), and I have a micro 4 port USB adapter that I plug into the laptop - effectively giving me charging for the mobile, the iPad (yes, I still travel with both), and the headset.  Just a thought, as the USB adapter is probably 4\" x 1/2\" by 1/4\".  Very small.</li>\r\n	<li>Only other comment I\'d make is \"<a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"US Airways\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_Airways\" rel=\"wikipedia\">USAir</a>?  Are you crazy???\"</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>Thanks Steve.  I like the idea of the 4-port USB hub for charging. I’ve been looking for a power strip that has both outlets and USB ports, but have yet to find one. Your solution sounds more compact than mine. The only reason I might stay with the power strip is that 220v play – everything just seems to charge so much faster when you move from 110v here in the US to 220v overseas.</li>\r\n	<li>And US Air? Momentary lapse of judgment.  Will never happen again. Sympathies to listeners in Charlotte, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, and Phoenix.</li>\r\n	<li>And, on a complete sidetrack, speaking of power strips, I have to tell you that I was hugely impressed during last month’s Google IO conference in San Francisco’s Moscone Center -- every 3<sup>rd</sup> seat had a power strip zip-tied to the chair leg.  Talk about customer service; talk about catering to your audience’s most primal needs…</li>\r\n	<li>However, I do think that I’ve just about hit my limit on electronic gadgets. On my trip to Phoenix this past week, I brought all my portable gadgets – my iPhone 4, my iPad 2, my Motorola Droid 2, and my new Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 running Android 3.1 – because I needed to load our new mobile apps for booth demos at the trade show.  Along with my MacBook Air and my Motorola wireless Bluetooth headphones for my morning workouts and my Jabra Bluetooth headset, I felt like spent all my time charging devices.  The power strip in my office was completely full all the time, as was my travel power strip and most of the outlets in my hotel room.  I kinda felt like the gadget version of Mr Creosote from <em><a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Monty Python\'s The Meaning of Life\" href=\"http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/monty_pythons_the_meaning_of_life\" rel=\"rottentomatoes\">Monty Python and the Meaning of Life</a></em> – one more gadget, just a small wafer of a device, and I’d take down the power grid for all of Arizona</li>\r\n	<li>OK, now God only knows that there’s no love lost between me and the TSA, and I make no bones about it on this podcast.  And, for their part, the TSA usually does a great job of providing fodder for my mill. Last month’s YouTube video of a TSA agent patting down an infant was only the latest of a long line of headshakers.</li>\r\n	<li>However, to give credit where credit is due, many TSA agents are thoughtful, pragmatic people, not on a power trip, and just trying to get to the other end of the day while keeping some sort of grip on their job, their pay check, and their sanity.  I saw a couple of these sorts of guys in ORD earlier this week when having to make an overnight trip to Dallas.</li>\r\n	<li>The X-Ray reader saw something odd, so one of the screeners did a manual search of this one guy’s bag. The screener pulls out an 18 inch long, 1 inch diameter metal rod wrapped in brown paper. The screener says “I’m sorry but you can’t carry this on. It can be used as a weapon”, and then swings it once, as if to punctuate what is a completely obvious point to the rest of us in line. Remember, we’re in the status line – the frequent traveler line. The guy looks surprised. The rest of us looking at him like “Really? This think is 100x more dangerous than a police baton. What the hell were you thinking trying to check this on?”</li>\r\n	<li>The screener calmly and professionally explained that he could either go back out and check his bag or leave his 5-lb metal baton behind.  He left it behind. Two of the screeners swung it a couple of time and said the same thing those of us in line did –“You really thought you could carry that on? Really?”</li>\r\n	<li>Reminds me of the Oklahoma man arrested at ORD for trying to carry a loaded gun. Said he thought he needed it for self-defense in Chicago. Again, really? Reading stories like these reminds me to be a bit more patient with the TSA guy at the front telling/yelling at everyone to empty their pockets before going through the metal detector. In spite of 10 years of going through this drill, there are still clueless idiots out there who either don’t think the rules apply to them – or just don’t think – period.</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a question, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is <a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a> -- use the Voice Memo app on your iPhone or something like Virtual Recorder on your Android phone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at travelcommons.com.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Can\'t Patch Planes Forever</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>In the last <a title=\"Podcast #90 — More Comfortable Traveling in India; Tipping Towards Android?\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/05/22/podcast-90-more-comfortable-traveling-in-india-tipping-towards-android/\" target=\"_blank\">episode</a>, I talked about the differences in the business class experience between airlines, that the commodity view of air travel – a seat on one airline flying from Point A to Point B is the same, is interchangeable with any other airline flying that route – is just wrong. There are real differences between airline services – the question is how much you’re willing to pay.</li>\r\n	<li>While taxiing out of Madrid last month, I saw three Ryanair planes at adjacent gates. Ryanair always makes me shake my head. Who places such a low value on their time and general well-being that they’re willing to put up with an airline that makes it clear they think very little of their customers? Spirit Airlines in the US strikes me the same way – we’ll give you lower prices, but you’ll pay for it – financially and psychically -- in so many other ways. Obviously a lot of people are willing to accept a lot for a low-price ticket – or a lot of people don’t know how to calculate the full cost of their experience.</li>\r\n	<li>Taking yet another maintenance delay on an American Airlines MD-80 last month drove this point home to me again.  5-7 years ago, when many of the US airlines were declaring bankruptcy to clean up their balance sheets – United, Continental, Northwest – American was proud that it stayed out of Chapter 11 and didn’t wipe out its stockholders – many of which were, of course, the executive management team. There was a price for that, though.  To conserve cash, they delayed buying new planes – a new Boeing 737 can cost $50-70 million depending on your negotiating skills. But today, the airline is still flying planes from the mid to late-80’s – when I first started flying American. When you’re boarding one of those MD-80’s, look on the left-hand side of the door opening. There’s a small metal plate – on it is stamped the date the plane was manufactured.  I look at it every time. I see lots of 1988s, ‘89’s, ‘92’s and nothing much after that.</li>\r\n	<li>So here we are in 2011 – is it any wonder I’m seeing a lot of maintenance delays? Flipping through my calendar, 75% of my recent flights on American MD-80’s have been delayed.  Flights on their new 737-800’s have been fine; the record on the MD-80’s has been horrid.  Last month’s flight from ORD to Ft Myers, FL is a typical example.  They board the plane. Departure time approaches and it’s eerily quiet – none of the “please take your seats, we need to leave” hectoring from the flight attendants. Then the captain keys his mike. I know what he’s going to say before he says it – “We saw something on the pre-flight walkaround and are having maintenance come out to look at it.”  This is an instant 30-minute delay, probably longer, with a 50% chance of them taking the plane out of service.</li>\r\n	<li>Now mind you, this was a 7:25am flight; the plane had been sitting at the gate for a while – it didn’t just arrive – so why is maintenance only just coming out <em>now</em>, at <em>departure time</em>?  And why didn’t someone do a walkaround earlier?  With these old MD-80’s, you’d think you’d want to get a jump on it.</li>\r\n	<li>This time, the delay was an hour and 15 minutes, which is right at about the average I’ve been experiencing.  Some have been shorter – when they just need to “re-boot” the plane – and some have been longer – when they need to go back to the hanger and find another plane.  But this flight was a bit of a tipping point for me – after this flight, I started paying attention to equipment on American flights.  Every American MD-80 flight I looked at, I added an hour to the flight time.  If American isn’t going to do something to about their MD-80 delays – like spend more on preventative maintenance – then I’ll do something myself, like manually adjusting their flight times to factor in expected maintenance delays.</li>\r\n	<li>Doing this, the American MD-80 flights start to look like connecting flights – they take a lot longer than competitors’ flights and there’s more risk – cancellations from mechanicals look the same as missing a connection. As I’ve said in past episodes, I’ve done some rough calculus on the value of my time and I’m willing to pay $200 more for a direct flight to avoid the risk of missing a connection. I’m now at the same place with American MD-80 flights – it makes sense to pay $200 more for a flight that I have more confidence will get me to where I need to be on time.  Indeed, I did just this when booking next week’s trip to Austin, TX.  I paid $150 more to fly back to Chicago on United rather than an American MD-80.</li>\r\n	<li>Now I’m not arguing about the need to fix planes before flying.  Like every other passenger, I want to get to my destination safely.  But I also want to get there <em>on time</em>.  I do <em>a lot</em> of flying.  The cumulative amount of time spent waiting for American to fix their old planes – I’ll never get that time back.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Saving Customers With A Personal Touch</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>On my prior trip to Phoenix – in May, when the highs were only 90° F – I had a lousy rental return experience with Avis. Parking the car in the return lot, I counted 20 people waiting to be checked in – and 2 Avis check-in people.  I didn\'t have that much time to wait – especially with how far away PHX put the consolidated car rental facility -- so I left the keys in the car and headed for the bus.  I like the way Avis immediately sends an electronic receipt, so I knew I wasn’t missing much except the wait.  While in the terminal wolfing down a salad before my flight, the electronic receipt hit my iPhone. I quickly glanced at it, and then looked at it much harder. The Avis employee who checked in my rental marked the fuel as empty even though I filled it up on my way to the airport, leaving the fuel gauge solidly on F.  I immediately called the number on the receipt and was routed to some customer service agent who asked me to fax the gas pump receipt.  Tough to do in PHX Terminal 3, so I told him that I would have it done the following Monday.  Time passed and I heard nothing from Avis.</li>\r\n	<li>Except an e-mail asking me to click through to a survey about my last rental. How timely. I ignore a lot of these requests – they usually ask way too many questions – but this one, I was more than willing to invest some time.  As you might guess, my scores tended to the low side.  Asked for specifics, I wrote that there was an empty Coke can in the car when I picked it up and that they had charged me to refill a completely full gas tank.</li>\r\n	<li>I have to tell you that I was surprised when, a couple weeks later, I received an e-mail from Michael Wu, production manager for Avis at PHX.  It was a very nice personal note – not some rote thing – thanking me for filling out the survey.  He said –\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>“I sincerely apologize that the inside of the vehicle being dirty with a coke soda can in the back seat and that this was left unnoticed and was not clean correctly before your rental. I will be following this matter up with the agent who cleaned the vehicle and the driver that is responsible for parking the vehicle on the readyline. I also want to apologize for the vehicles and not living up to your expectations.”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>OK, appreciate that, I wrote him in a reply, “but have to tell you that the empty Coke can in the back seat wasn\'t the worst part of my rental experience.  It was the car return.”  And then I went on to describe the incorrect fuel charge and lack of any remedial action.  “The result,” I ended my note with, “is that Avis made an unearned $12.99 on this rental, but has lost my business going forward.  I\'m currently in SW Florida driving a Hertz rental car, and will be back in Phoenix in mid-June and have reserved a Hertz car for that trip rather than an Avis car.”</li>\r\n	<li>I admit that it felt good to send that note to a real person, not just in a “Do you have anything else to tell us” comment box on a web survey. Mr Wu didn’t let me down.  Two days later, he came back with a follow-up\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>“I’m truly sorry that you were put into such a bad situation and went through all the trouble trying to get this resolved, without any resolution or follow up.</li>\r\n	<li>“I will personally adjust the fuel charge and a little extra for all the inconvenience. I will also forward this to proper management so that they are aware about issues in returns and the follow up.</li>\r\n	<li>I will also like to extend to you, a personal offer for the next time you happen to rent from Avis. Just need you to e-mail me your reservation number for Avis and I’ll personally make sure your vehicle is clean (coke can free) and ready for you. I will also add a free upgrade and money off coupons for all your trouble.</li>\r\n	<li>Once again I sincerely apologize and hopeful for the opportunity to better serve your car rental need in the near future.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>And the following week, the credit showed up on my Amex.  Now I <em>have</em> to rent from Avis the next time I’m in PHX. Mr Wu goes out of his way to fix the problem, follows up twice, and offers to take care of my next rental personally.</li>\r\n	<li>I’ve always said that, at its core, the travel experience is a person-to-person one. No matter how much cost-cutting technology companies put in the middle – kiosks, mobile check-ins – the moments we remember are how we’re treated by other people.  A flight attendant with a snarky retort to your question; a gate agent who went out of her way to re-book you off a cancelled flight – these are what we remember. And so I have to rent my next car not from Mr Wu – who just happens to work for Avis.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917626811141.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #91</li>\r\n	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from me -- an the GarageBand app on my iPad2</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_91.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #91 -- Can\'t Patch Planes Forever; Saving Customers With A Personal Touch','','inherit','closed','closed','','770-revision-v1','','','2017-11-20 22:37:22','2017-11-21 03:37:22','',770,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/11/20/770-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1868,1,'2017-11-20 22:38:06','2017-11-21 03:38:06','[caption id=\"attachment_760\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"225\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/IMG_01371-e13062031715791.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-760\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/IMG_01371-e13062031715791-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"Security Sign\" width=\"225\" height=\"300\" /></a> A Polite Intrusion © Mark Peacock[/caption]\r\n\r\nLots of business travel this month -- UK, India, Germany, Phoenix, <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"San Francisco\" href=\"http://www.sfgov.org/\" rel=\"homepage\">San Francisco</a>, and Madrid -- so there\'s a lot to talk about. The international travel lets me compare business class seats -- there\'s a wide range of experiences even within the same airline. While in India, a listener asks my advice on adjusting for jetlag on Asian flights. I was surprised at the amount of data my <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"iPhone\" href=\"http://www.apple.com/iphone\" rel=\"homepage\">iPhone</a> consumed while I was in Europe but I finally found the culprit. I found myself much more comfortable traveling in India the second time around. And, walking away from the Google IO conference with a new Samsung Android \"Honeycomb\" tablet, my <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"iPad\" href=\"http://www.apple.com/ipad/\" rel=\"homepage\">iPad</a> fixation starts to loosen. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_90.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_90.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript from TravelCommons podcast #90:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>It’s been another full-contact month of travel.  I was out for a 2-week stint through the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"United Kingdom\" href=\"http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=51.5,-0.116666666667&amp;spn=10.0,10.0&amp;q=51.5,-0.116666666667 (United%20Kingdom)&amp;t=h\" rel=\"geolocation\">UK</a>, <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"India\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/India\" rel=\"wikipedia\">India</a>, Germany, then a quick jog out to Phoenix, a week to San Francisco for the big <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Google I/O\" href=\"http://code.google.com/events/io/\" rel=\"homepage\">Google IO conference</a>, and now, just returned from a 3-day trip to <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Madrid\" href=\"http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=40.3833333333,-3.71666666667&amp;spn=0.1,0.1&amp;q=40.3833333333,-3.71666666667 (Madrid)&amp;t=h\" rel=\"geolocation\">Madrid</a></li>\r\n	<li>I got lots of comments about the Madrid trip – “Ooh, you so lucky”, “I’d love to go to Spain” – most of these coming from my wife.  Unfortunately, my Madrid trip was just another business trip sandwiched between two 8-hour plane flights.  Left at 4:30pm Tuesday, arrived 6:30am Weds, cabbed to the hotel, showered, changed, caught up on e-mail, met the rest of the team in the lobby, spent the afternoon in a customer conference room, went back to the hotel room to catch up on e-mail and conference calls, went out to dinner with the customer, back to the hotel room for more e-mail and calls, sleep 5 hours, back in the conference room for a full day of meetings, dinner, e-mail, conference calls, 4 hours of sleep, cab back to the airport Friday morning to catch a 9:30am flight home.</li>\r\n	<li>Most of my time in Madrid was spent in a conference room without windows – so it could’ve been anywhere, really. The one bit of Madrid that I had was on our last night where, instead of going to a restaurant for dinner, we did a bit of a bar crawl on the street behind our hotel – a glass of rioja, some tapas, then onto the next bar.  It was good fun, but I was out and about more in San Francisco the week before.</li>\r\n	<li>I had kinda the opposite in <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Mumbai\" href=\"http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=18.975,72.8258333333&amp;spn=0.1,0.1&amp;q=18.975,72.8258333333 (Mumbai)&amp;t=h\" rel=\"geolocation\">Mumbai</a>, where I experienced perhaps more of the local culture than I wanted. My last day was in <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Pune\" href=\"http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=18.4736111111,73.7977777778&amp;spn=0.1,0.1&amp;q=18.4736111111,73.7977777778 (Pune)&amp;t=h\" rel=\"geolocation\">Pune</a> and then I was to be driven to <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chhatrapati_Shivaji_International_Airport\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Mumbai Airport</a> – a 3-4 hour drive depending on Pune and Mumbai traffic. No one told me the length of the drive until after I was India and couldn’t change my flight. My colleague’s flight left at 10pm, mine left at 2:45am. I figured I hop the same car and just hang out and nap at the airport.  The drive between Pune and Mumbai was great – cruised down a 6 lane divided toll road across some mountain range.</li>\r\n	<li>Walking into the terminal, the security guard stopped me, saying that I couldn’t get in until 4 hours before departure time.  So what to do – the cab driver is gone, and I’d purposely left myself with only a handful of rupees. I wandered around in front of the terminals, watching travelers pay their taxis, say “good-bye” and “I’m back” to their families. I played a bit of coliform roulette grabbing a bite from a food stall. Then, in my wanderings, I found the waiting area.  For 60 rupees – about a buck and a half – I could sit in air conditioning, ride the airport’s free WiFi, and use a men’s room – a bargain at twice the price.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Flight</em> by <a href=\"http://www.freshmusic.co.za/\">Ga\'inja</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Tony White dropped me a very germane question while I was in India\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>“I enjoy listening to your show every month and I put the knowledge to good use.  I have a question regarding jetlag and long flights to Asia and or Australia from the US.  I am traveling on my first business trip to Asia and Australia in July.  I have never traveled to Asia for business only for pleasure.  How do I prepare for traveling to Asia regarding the jetlag and time change?  My first meeting will be in less than 24 hours of arriving to Asia.  Do you have a routine to prepare for those long trips?  Do you sleep on the flight or do you stay awake to try to adjust to the time change?</li>\r\n	<li>“Thank you for the podcast and taking the time to ask these questions.”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>I\'ve always time zone adjustments to Europe and Asia differently.  Going to Europe, I set my watch on European time the minute I sit down on the plane and then force myself onto that schedule -- eating quickly and then putting on the eye shades and <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Bose headphones\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bose_headphones\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Bose headphones</a> for sleep.</li>\r\n	<li>Asia, though, is a whole different matter.  With the long flight times (14-15 hrs between ORD and India or China) and 10-12 hr time differences, I honestly don\'t even try to figure out what the destination time is.  I just go with the flow -- eat, sleep, read, repeat until landing.  I find that the flights are long enough to get enough sleep that I\'m rested enough when I hit the ground to work right away.  On this last trip to India, I hit Bangalore at midnight and was fine for an 8am breakfast meeting the next morning.</li>\r\n	<li>Everyone reacts differently.  I find that it\'s easy for me to push through -- perhaps taking a 1-hr nap before I go out to dinner the first day.  I do usually sleep poorly for the first 3 nights, but then am fine afterwards.  Everybody’s body clock is different, though. If there’s one thing I’ve learned over years of travel – you can only push your body just so far. Sleep is probably the most underrated and willingly ignored health tonic in existence.</li>\r\n	<li>And speaking of sleeping in flight, my recent travels have given me experience a number of business class seats over the past few months. Haven’t done any of the top carriers – like Singapore Air – so it haven’t had a life changing experience…  It’s been more for a search for 5 hours of sleep before the next meeting. The difference, though, has been surprising. The best seat on a United flight to London – 22-inch flat screen, complete lay-flat seat,….  The United flight to Frankfurt was a big step down – little 5-inch screen, almost flat seat.  Though it may not seem much, there’s a big difference between 170-degree and 180-degree seat recline. Your bed is 180.  At 170, you have your knees locked trying not to slip down in the seat. Not the ideal sleeping position.</li>\r\n	<li>The USAir seat from Charlotte to Madrid is probably at the bottom.  A narrow seat, no screen – instead they had some metal prongs that held a 7-inch Archos table that the flight attendant said was always wonky – volume magically went up and down, music would play while watching a movie, no real-time flight map to show position or ETA….  And the food and wine were marginal at best. Yes, it was still better than coach but that comparison isn’t going to get me on another USAir overseas flight.</li>\r\n	<li>While in the UK, I was amazed at the amount of cellular data my iPhone consumed.  I had remembered to add the 100 MB international data option to my AT&amp;T plan before I left.  I then reset the usage counters before I hit Birmingham so I didn’t overshoot. I was OK in Birmingham, but in London, I say I was consuming 20 MB in a day!  I wasn’t downloading any music or podcasts over 3G – I saved that for the hotel WiFi.  I started paying a bit more attention to my usage.</li>\r\n	<li>The difference between Birmingham and London was that I was walking to all my London appointments and was using Google Maps to find my way around town. Resetting the usage counters again, I’d see 5 MB every time I started up Maps. I needed to find some paper maps or figure out another way to work this. I “tuned” my usage a bit – opening up Google Maps in the morning while on the hotel WiFi and then scrolling to all the places I’d visit that day, trying to load up as much of the map data as I could in memory.  I worked pretty well and kept me from blowing past the 100 MB line.  But at $200 for the 100 MB of data, I think before my summer vacation driving through Scotland and the Lake District, I’ll blow the $50 on a GPS app that comes complete with its own maps – pre-downloaded.</li>\r\n	<li>I do like the way that all my electronics charge up at warp speed when I’m overseas. Most electronics chargers will handle 110 and 220 volts – the only exception I’ve found is my kids’ Nintendo DS charger – so I don’t bring a voltage converter when I travel, just a plug adapter.  I carry a small power strip, use one plug adapter, and then plug my array of charging devices into the strip. And plugged into a 220v socket, it’s a quick charge.</li>\r\n	<li>In<a title=\"Podcast #88 — New Travel Goodies; Losing Elite Status\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/03/13/podcast-88-new-travel-goodies-losing-status/\" target=\"_blank\"> episode #88</a>, I interviewed Chris Truelove at the 2011 Travel Goods show about his company Back2You.com, which helps travelers retrieve lost items.  Hopping in a taxi on the way to London Docklands airport, the driver gave me an AT&amp;T phone that an earlier fare had left behind.  He was trying to figure out how to find the owner’s information so he could return it. I wasn’t familiar with the model, but it wasn’t locked, so I started poking around. Calling the phone wouldn’t help – it would only ring in my hand – so I flipped through the contact list.  No ICE entry – “in case of emergency” – but I did find Mom’s Cell and Dad’s Cell, so I tried to call them – international calls were blocked; not surprised. Then tried to text them – those bounced too. I played around for 20 minutes, but no luck. Now, if it had one of Chris’s bag tags, I would’ve been able to send a quick text and his company would’ve sent a text to the owner. Glad I have one of his stickers on my iPhone and cameras.</li>\r\n	<li>It was my first time flying out of London Docklands – so much more convenient than Heathrow.  I was staying near Tower Bridge and flying off to Frankfurt.  It was a 20-minute cab ride – as opposed to at least double that to Heathrow, or taking a cab to Paddington Station to then catch the Heathrow Express.  No check-in line, short security line, free WiFi, and generally just a more relaxed atmosphere than the Heathrow insanity.  It is a small airport, though. I was on a Lufthansa A319, which looked like the biggest plane they were flying out of there.  Felt like the pilot has us backed up to the end of the runway, then he locked the brakes, revved the engines ‘til the plane started to shake, popped the brake release, and off we roared like one of the Bonneville Salt Flats rocket cars.  He rotated up right at the last moment, it seemed, going nose up just as the Thames appeared beneath us.  Definitely woke me up. Recommended over Heathrow if you’re hopping over to the continent.</li>\r\n	<li>And finally, if you haven’t seen it already, head over to the TravelCommons website or the FaceBook page and look for <a title=\"Video #2 – One City, Five Hours: Frankfurt\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/05/01/video-2-%e2%80%93-one-city-five-hours-frankfurt/\" target=\"_blank\">Video #2</a> – One City, Five Hours: Frankfurt. I had a 6-hr layover in Frankfurt on my way home from India. Rather than sit in the Lufthansa club all day, I ran through the 5-hour tourist sprint <a href=\"http://www.hemispheresmagazine.com/2010/03/01/one-city-five-hours-frankfurt/\" target=\"_blank\">itinerary</a> from United Airlines\' Hemispheres in-flight magazine. The prior weekend – in Kerala on the southwest coast of India – one of my hosts showed us how he was taking and editing videos all on his iPhone 4. Which led me to videoing the Frankfurt sprint on my iPhone 4. I then pulled over to my MacBook Air and edited on the flight to ORD. It’s no where near as polished as my Vietnam video, but it’s a fun piece all the same.</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a question, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is <a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a> -- use the Voice Memo app on your iPhone or something like Virtual Recorder on your Android phone to record and send in an audio comment – or iMovie if you want to send in some video; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at travelcommons.com.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Rocky Road</em> by <a href=\"http://www.kcentricity.com/\">KCentric</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>More Comfortable Traveling in India</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>At the end of April, I did my second annual trip to India.  I changed some things up – rather than doing the 15-hour non-stop from ORD to Delhi, I stopped off in Europe – for meeting in the UK on the way over; for the extended layover that I videoed on the way back.  This meant that I could skip Delhi and stay in the southern part of India – Bangalore, Chennai, Kerala. That made things a bit more temperate – 80’s instead of the 100’s in Delhi that I got to experience my last trip.</li>\r\n	<li>And I found myself a bit more comfortable with India. Until my last day, driving through Mumbai to the airport, I didn’t see the abject poverty that I saw last year in Delhi.  I didn’t feel the need to cling to my “travel bubble” quite as tightly as I did on my first visit, which I talked about in <a title=\"Podcast #83 – Business Travel in India; iPad vs. Netbook\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2010/05/28/podcast-83-business-travel-in-india-ipad-vs-netbook/\" target=\"_blank\">episode #83</a>.</li>\r\n	<li>It started with some of the planning – choosing and booking my own hotels in Bangalore, arranging many of my internal flights. Seems petty, but on my first visit, my vendors organized everything.  I just arrived and was taken from place to place.  Now, planning, doing some research, and then making sure I had ways to get from Point A to Point B made me a more active participant in this trip – not just a passenger.</li>\r\n	<li>I was also ready for some of the uniquely Indian travel rituals.  Like the <a href=\"http://www.indiatravelite.com/feature/indiancustoms.htm\" target=\"_blank\">welcoming ceremony</a> at each hotel – usually a combination of arati – an oil candle circled in front of you followed by a tilak – the red thumb mark applied between your eyebrows.</li>\r\n	<li>And like Indian security at airports. At Cochin airport in Kerala, we started counting the security checks.  The first one was just to get into the airport – either a printed itinerary or a printed boarding pass (I never saw anyone use a boarding pass on a smart phone) and ID. Learning my lesson from last year, I printed out all my itineraries <em>before</em> I left for India. Now through the front door, we walked 200 ft and hit another security check – looking at the same papers – before we could get to the check-in desk. We then took an immediate left and put our bags on the X-ray machine.  After coming out the other end, a guy taped the suitcase’s zipper tabs together and sent us off another couple hundred feet to the check-in desk.</li>\r\n	<li>Checked in, we head over to the security line. Our boarding passes are checked going into the queue.  We head to the Men’s security line.  The Ladies’ line is off to the side with a curtained pat-down area.  We put our carry-on bags through the X-ray machine, but get to keep our shoes on.  We queue up in front of the metal detector.  We walk through and then onto a wooden step where a security guard wands and pats us down. It’s the same whether you set off the metal detector or not. I’m not quite sure why they have the metal detector there other than to help form the line.</li>\r\n	<li>After the patdown, the guard stamps my boarding pass, proving that I’ve been patted down. I pick up my carry-on. It too has been stamped – on a blank address tag – to prove that it’s been x-rayed.</li>\r\n	<li>At boarding, the gate agent scans our boarding pass while another security guard looks for the security stamps on the boarding passes and the carry-on luggage tag.  No stamps and back you go.  We get on a bus that travels all of 500 ft and drops us at our plane. Another security guard checks our boarding pass and then we’re allowed to climb the steps and enter the plane – after 7 separate security checks. I had 5 flights in 7 days I was in India. I got pretty comfortable with the drill.</li>\r\n	<li>But this trip, I was a lot more comfortable just walking down the street. Maybe because in Cochin in Kerala, there are enough European tourists that I’m not the only white guy. But then, walking through a huge crowd after a IPL cricket match on Monday night in Chennai, I wasn’t uncomfortable – or any more so than walking through the crowd after, say, a University of Michigan football game.</li>\r\n	<li>A little more familiar, a little less alien.  I wasn’t clinging to my travel bubble quite so hard.  And so when I hit Mumbai airport and couldn’t get inside for 4 hours, it didn’t make me uncomfortable.  Annoyed, yes, but not uncomfortable.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Wilderness Dance</em> by <a href=\"http://www.snarkyavenger.com/\">DJ Squirrel King</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Travel Tech -- Tipping Towards Android?</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Me and 5,000 other Google IO attendees walked out of Moscone West in SF with some great schwag, specifically a pre-release version of Samsung’s 10.1-inch Galaxy Android tablet.  It’s a nice piece of work – slightly longer, slightly narrower, and slightly lighter than the iPad2.  No neat Smart Cover, but the screen is nice. The setup was easy – just logged in with my Gmail ID and it automatically loaded all the apps I have on my Droid2.  I was carrying it around with me all conference – as was everyone else – and found that I really liked it.</li>\r\n	<li>There are definitely a few rough edges that you’d expect with a pre-release model – like plugging in the power cord makes it think you’re trying to sync it with your PC and so doesn’t appear to let you use it and charge it at the same time – but the tablet version of Android – version 3.0 or “Honeycomb” if you’re into Google’s dessert naming scheme – is pretty stable.  The Android browser locked up and crashed a couple of times on me – but then again, so does my iPad Safari browser.  And the Android browser runs Flash so I can use it on all the restaurant web sites that won’t display on the iPad.  By the way, I agree that they should all swap out Flash for HTML 5, but until then, I would still like to be able to read their menus.  Can’t do it on the iPad.</li>\r\n	<li>But it makes no sense to carry around two tablets. Indeed, people keep asking me why I carry a MacBook Air <em>and</em> an iPad.  So right now, I’m traveling with the iPad2 – more out of habit than anything else – but find myself using the Samsung Android tablet around the house more and more.</li>\r\n	<li>The bonus prize from the conference – I’d call it the <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagniappe\" target=\"_blank\">lagniappe</a> if Google IO was held in New Orleans – was the Samsung Verizon 4G hot spot they tossed in because the Samsungs they gave us are WiFi only tablets.  I had been playing around with it in SF, but not so much because the city is blanketed in WiFi. However, sitting on the plane this week in Charlotte, waiting to head out to Madrid – long story about why I took this connection, or actually short, it saved me $3,000.  Anyhow, sitting on kind of a beat-up US Air 767 trying to pull the last bit of e-mail onto my iPad before take off and I was getting nothing, in spite of seeing a full house of 3G bars.  On a whim, I pulled out the Samsung hot spot out of my bag, fired it up and it connected immediately.  On another whim, I fired up the Speedtest.net app.  I got 13 Mbps download and 5 Mbps upload speeds – phenomenal.  Trying it in just now in the TravelCommons studios outside Chicago, I got 7.4 down and 7 up – compared to 2.7 down and 0.9 up on AT&amp;T 3G.</li>\r\n	<li>Not to pile onto AT&amp;T – ‘cause that’s a bit of a fish-in-a-barrel shooting exercise – but if the next iPhone iteration doesn’t have 4G, now that might be enough to push me to hug the little green guy.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids991762681113.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #90</li>\r\n	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from the <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/\">Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\r\n	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_90.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #90 -- More Comfortable Traveling in India; Tipping Towards Android?','','inherit','closed','closed','','755-revision-v1','','','2017-11-20 22:38:06','2017-11-21 03:38:06','',755,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/11/20/755-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1869,1,'2017-11-20 22:40:34','2017-11-21 03:40:34','[caption id=\"attachment_594\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/3717874334_4b20cc0037_o1.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-594\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/3717874334_4b20cc0037_o1-300x225.jpg\" alt=\"Danish Train © Hunter Desportes\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\" /></a> Danish Train © Hunter Desportes[/caption]\r\n\r\nMy business-vacation combo trip to <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"London\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/england/london\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\">London</a>, <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Paris\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/france/paris\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\">Paris</a>, and <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Venice\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/italy/venice\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\">Venice</a> provides the source for most of this episode\'s content. Wanting to pack light, I had to figure out how to pack for 10 days, 3 cities, two business meetings and a week\'s vacation in a single carry-on bag. After landing in London, I skipped the airports and used trains for all my intra-European travel, not boarding another flight until we were heading home from Venice -- though not before having to wrestle through a randomly rebooting kiosk. I also talk about toothpaste tablets -- another way to avoid liquid in your carry-on, and a great restaurant in O\'Hare\'s Terminal 1. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_89.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_89.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript from TravelCommons podcast #89:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Coming to you yet again from the TravelCommons studios. I know, I’m getting a bit bored with it too.  I tried to record this last week in the Doubletree Suites in <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Naples\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/florida/naples\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\">Naples, FL</a>, but couldn’t get everything written in time. I even downloaded Garageband for my <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"iPad\" href=\"http://www.apple.com/ipad/\" rel=\"homepage\">iPad 2</a>, but found that it has a time limit on its recordings – too short for the podcast, unless I wanted to be doing a lot more editing and stitching.</li>\r\n	<li>I’ve racked up a bit of mileage since the last episode – doing my usual runs to Phoenix – where I did catch my first spring training baseball game, the White Sox and the Giants sitting on the lawn on a beautiful afternoon -- and to Naples, FL.  There were also some new runs to London, Paris, and then to Milan on my way to a vacation rendezvous with the family in Venice.</li>\r\n	<li>It was kinda fun to meet up with my wife and daughter in a new city.  I’d taken the train over from Milan and got to our hotel first, so I was sitting on the patio drinking a cappuccino when they pulled up in their water taxi. I saw them coming down the canal and waved to them, but they didn’t see me until they were right at the hotel.  Indeed, my daughter took a picture of the hotel as they were coming up to it, and if you look closely, you can see me in the corner, waving from my table.  It’s pretty funny.</li>\r\n	<li>It doesn’t slow down going forward.  I’m off to the UK, and then, the last week of April in India, bouncing across the usual suspects – Bangalore, Pune, and Chennai – with a weekend in the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Kerala Backwaters\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/india/sights/river/kerala-backwaters\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\">Kerala backwaters</a>.  I get back, take a week to adjust to Central Time, and then head out to San Francisco for the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Google I/O\" href=\"http://code.google.com/events/io/2010/\" rel=\"homepage\">Google I/O conference</a>.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Planetenstaaten </em>by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/weigl-landwater/\" target=\"_blank\">Phillip Weigl</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Nobody sent in an audio comment this month, so you’re stuck with the sound of my voice all the way through.</li>\r\n	<li>So let’s get the obligatory <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Transportation Security Administration\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_Security_Administration\" rel=\"wikipedia\">TSA</a> rant out of the way.  When I saw the <a href=\"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3sH1GaO_nw&amp;feature=player_embedded\" target=\"_blank\">video</a> of the TSA doing a “grope-down” of a 6-yr old girl in <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"New Orleans Airport\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Orleans_Airport\" rel=\"wikipedia\">New Orleans airport</a> I wasn’t shocked, I wasn’t outraged – I just shook my head at the mindless stupidity of it, numb to yet another of the endless stream of senseless TSA acts. When the screener is executing the grope-down while being filmed by the parent and, off-camera, the supervisor agrees with the action, and then in a follow-up statement, the TSA says “Yup, the screener did the right thing” -- this incident is a proof point that it’s not stupid acts of individual screeners.  The TSA as an organization is fundamentally broken; it’s developed a culture that can’t use common sense. The only successful thing the TSA has done is replaced the IRS as the most reviled part of the federal government.</li>\r\n	<li>OK, glad to get that out of the way.  Let talk about something more fun.  In the <a title=\"Podcast #88 — New Travel Goodies; Losing Elite Status\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/03/13/podcast-88-new-travel-goodies-losing-status/\" target=\"_blank\">last episode</a>, I talked about stuff that caught my eye at last month’s Travel Goods show.  One thing I forgot to mention was <a href=\"http://www.archtekinc.com/product_info.php?products_id=52&amp;osCsid=eb7322cb97f95ed64391f31ae19e1297\" target=\"_blank\">Archtek Toothpaste Tablets</a>. Now I’ve talked in the past about switching from toothpaste to toothpowder some years ago to avoid the liquid ban, and then keeping it to avoid having to pull out a baggie full of toiletries at the screening point.  Archtek has a different spin.  You put one tablet in your mouth, chew it up, and then start brushing. I was a little skeptical at first.  Indeed, I had to remind myself not to swallow – it felt like a chewable vitamin.  But once I started brushing, it foamed up way more than any tooth powder I’ve used.  If you can find Archtek Toothpaste Tablets, buy ‘em.  Definitely recommended.</li>\r\n	<li>Also in the <a title=\"Podcast #88 — New Travel Goodies; Losing Elite Status\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/03/13/podcast-88-new-travel-goodies-losing-status/\" target=\"_blank\">last episode</a>, I talked about dropping status, specifically how United didn’t soft-land me from 1K status – they dropped me all the way from 1K to Premiere.  This had a big impact on accruing mileage – 1K’s get a 100% mileage bonus while Premieres only get 25%.  Another big impact is who you get routed to within United’s customer service network.  1K’s talk to United employees in corporate headquarters near O’Hare.  They’re the most experienced and best trained customer service agents.  The Premiere desk – when I had to change an award ticket to accommodate my London trip, I found out it’s in Cebu City in the Philippines.  It wasn’t a major problem – the agents were pleasant, spoke understandable English, and were able to make the changes that I needed.  But again, it was a bit of a jarring experience and reminded me once again of the little niceties status brings.</li>\r\n	<li>A point that was brought home to my 17-yr old son when he traveled without me on his German Club trip to Germany, Switzerland, and Austria – while the rest of us were in Venice.  Picking him up at the airport, he said, “I hate traveling without you, Dad.  I treated just like a peon.”  I’ll take that.  As any parent will tell you, it’s nice to wanted by your teenager – even if it’s just for pre-boarding and access to airport clubs.</li>\r\n	<li>So, in three groups -- my son, my wife and daughter, and me -- left for Europe out of O’Hare’s Terminal 1.  And all of us made time to stop off in Rick Bayless’ new Mexican tortas -- sandwich -- place <a href=\"http://www.rickbayless.com/news/view?articleID=171\" target=\"_blank\">Frontera Tortas</a> in the front concourse, Concourse B.  Bayless is one of the most famous chefs in Chicago – he won the first season of Bravo TV’s <em>Top Chef Masters</em> contest and runs Barack and Michelle Obama’s favorite date-night restaurant Topolobampo. I’ve eaten at his Frontera Grill since it opened in the mid-80’s and have yet to have a bad meal. So when he opened Frontera Torta, I had to try it.  The lines can be long, but the food is great.  I had the cochinita pibil torta – pulled pork and pickled red onions with a habanero salsa on the side.  Good thing – that salsa was the spiciest thing I’ve ever had in an airport anywhere.  They did warn me, though.  Anyhow, great food – good place to kill a United Airlines delay in ORD.</li>\r\n	<li>When I was flying out to London on United, I found it easier to check in with the self-service kiosks even though I was flying business class.  The line for business class check-in was at least 5 deep, but there were a half-dozen open kiosks.  I fired one up, put my passport on the scanner, and within a couple of minutes, was on my way to the security line.</li>\r\n	<li>It was not that easy, though, on the flight back.  We were flying Lufthansa back by way of Munich. After catching a water taxi from our hotel – much cooler, and much longer than the water taxis to and from Logan Airport in Boston – I queued up for the kiosk. It was taking the people in front of my much longer than a couple of minutes.   But, they looked like tourists.  Finally, I worked my way to the front of the line – not exactly a linear process in Italy.  I started checking in.  The workflow wasn’t as straight forward/as well-designed as the United kiosk, but that wasn’t the problem.  It was that the kiosk kept re-starting/re-booting halfway through the check-in and the passport scanner was very fiddly.  It took me at least 15 minutes to get my wife, daughter, and me checked in.  There wasn’t another alternative.  There were only 2 desk agents but they were just checking luggage for those who had checked in with the kiosk – and they had no interest in coming out from behind their desk to figure out the rebooting kiosks. I don’t mind self service – when it works.</li>\r\n	<li>And finally, going all the way back to <a title=\"Podcast #86 — Fun with Layovers; Story Behind the Closing Tune\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2010/12/26/podcast-86-fun-with-layovers-story-behind-closing-tune/\" target=\"_blank\">episode 86</a>, from last December… Prompted by a question from a listener, Betty Boyd, about the podcast’s closing song, <em>Pictures of You</em> by the Scottish band Evangeline, I dipped into the archives and played an interview with the band’s manager that gave some back story on the song.  A couple of days ago, the song’s writer dropped this comment on the TravelCommons website:</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</ul>\r\n\"Hi Mark. I’m John Naismith songwriter with the former band Evangeline, I’m so glad you enjoy the song <em>Pictures of You</em>, it’s also good to know that people like Becky from Carolina can identify with the song because that was the intent when writing it, life on the road is hard and leaving your family behind is hard! Anyway, a million thanks to you for using this song for so long I wish you and your show all the best for the future.Love and friendship from Scotland.\"\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>John, thanks for stopping by the site and leaving the comment.  And also, thanks for letting me use your song. It has always been, in my mind, the perfect song for the frequent traveler.</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a question, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is <a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a> -- use the Voice Memo app on your iPhone or something like Virtual Recorder on your Android phone to record and send in an audio comment like Lori or Gary in last month’s episode; send a <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">Twitter</a> message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/153475331351358\" target=\"_blank\">Facebook</a> page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/yoria-suerte/\" target=\"_blank\">Suerte Mijo</a> </em>by Arthur Yoria</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Trains Instead of Planes</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>My Spring Break vacation plans for Venice, Italy got munged up a bit when a customer in London demanded my presence the Wednesday afternoon before we were to fly out from Chicago.  Doing a one-day up-and back to London didn’t make any sense – though, as long-time listeners will recall from <a title=\"Podcast #70 – Packing a Suit, Videoconference over Travel, Watching Winter Flight Delays\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2008/12/23/podcast-70-packing-a-suit-videoconference-over-travel-watching-winter-flight-delays/\" target=\"_blank\">episode #70</a>, that hasn’t stopped in the past.  So instead, I visited staff in our Kew office on Thursday, a customer in Paris on Friday, and then vectored through Milan on Saturday to meet up with my family in Venice Sunday morning.</li>\r\n	<li>Since I wasn’t on a tight schedule, I decided to skip the airports and do all these legs on the train.  No lines, no grope-downs – just glide from center city to center city.  In past episodes, I’ve talked about my preference for Amtrak’s Acela when traveling the northeast corridor from New York to Washington, so I decided to try the same thing in Europe.</li>\r\n	<li>Last month, I tweeted a link to a <a href=\"http://www.tnooz.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/silverrail1.jpg\" target=\"_blank\">graph </a>showing that, in Europe, rail is becoming the preferred method of transport when trip time drops below 3 hours.  Indeed, before digging the Chunnel – the Channel Tunnel, London to Paris was one of the world’s busiest air routes.  But now, air travel has dropped to <a href=\"http://www.tnooz.com/2011/03/21/news/how-rail-is-evolving-and-why-travel-websites-need-to-be-ready/\" target=\"_blank\">less than 20%</a>. Since I needed to get from London to Paris on Thursday afternoon, I decided to start my train journey with the Eurostar.</li>\r\n	<li>It wasn’t cheap – premium economy was $250.  I couldn’t in my mind justify the $400 business class ticket.  Rolling my bag through St Pancras station in London felt a bit like an airport experience – queue up, waive your boarding pass in front of a reader, put your bags through the X-ray machine, walk through the metal detector, go through passport control (you go through French immigration in London, kinda like going through US immigration in Toronto airport)… but it was definitely a bit more laid-back -- nothing like the full-on insanity that is Heathrow.</li>\r\n	<li>It was at boarding time that I really felt the difference.  No calling out groups, no jockeying around the jet bridge door – we just walked up the ramp and found our car.  And pulling out, no PA announcements scolding us to immediately take our seats, no flight attendants giving us the once over to make sure we’d turned off our cell phones – people were still wandering around, and I was cranking on a document when I noticed out of the corner of my eye the platform slipping away.</li>\r\n	<li>The journey under the English Channel – I guess I was surprised at how uneventful it was.  Indeed, I was in the toilet when we entered the Chunnel.  No announcement, no ear-popping from going down – just a 15-20 minute journey though a dark tunnel and  “pop” you’re up in France.  I don’t know what I was expecting, but I guess I thought there’d be a bit more to it.</li>\r\n	<li>Saturday’s ride on the TGV – France’s high-speed train -- from Paris to Milan was a good bit different. The price was good bit lower -- $150 for business class. The ride was longer – 7 hrs instead of 2.  But the scenery was much better – up over the Alps instead of a tunnel under the ocean.</li>\r\n	<li>Being a Saturday, it was more families, less business – kinda like my Southwest flight this week back from Ft Myers, FL.  In some ways, it was worse.  Once the kids were seated on the Southwest flight, they stayed there, buckled in.  On the TGV, the entire car became the playground for this one toddler – he kept racing down the aisle from one end of the car to the other.  This went on for hours because the train ride was more than twice as long as the Ft Myers flight.</li>\r\n	<li>All that being said, I enjoyed this train ride too – it was an easy cab ride from my hotel to Gard du Nord, there was no security on boarding, it was able to get up and buy a beer whenever I wanted – provided I could dodge the running kid. I was really glad I brought an extra battery for the Bose headphones and had something to look at out the window.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/uniontrade-everyday/\" target=\"_blank\"><em>Violent and Beautiful</em> </a>by the Union Trade</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Travel Challenge -- Fitting Two Weeks into One Carry-On</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>The night before I left on my European trip, I tweeted and posted on the TravelCommons Facebook page – “Today\'s travel challenge -- How to pack for 10 days, 3 cities, two business meetings and a week\'s vacation in a single carry-on bag.”</li>\r\n	<li>Lori Humm wrote “My number one travel rule: pack light and buy what you need when you get there” while Allan Marko commented “Depends on how often you want to do laundry on vacation”.  Chris Webb tweeted back asking to know how it all came out.</li>\r\n	<li>Actually, it wasn’t as tough as I thought it might be.  The challenge was packing for business and for tourism without looking out of place in either.  Lucky for me I was only covering one climate – European spring, and I’d be vacationing among Italians – probably the best dressers in Europe.</li>\r\n	<li>My packing strategy always starts with a single color family, and usually that’s black.  Black jacket, olive and tan slacks, an assortment of shirts, a red pattern tie if absolutely necessary and I’m good for a week.</li>\r\n	<li>But what about the second week.  When I would do two-week stretches in South Africa, I would pack a week’s worth of clothes, send my shirts to the cleaners on the weekend, and stomp on my understuff and socks while I was in the shower.</li>\r\n	<li>For this trip, though, I took a different tack.  I kept the color wheel on black, but left my workout gear at home.  I figured we’d be walking all over Venice, so that would give me enough exercise.  Gym shoes take up a huge amount of space, which I filled with a couple of sweaters and another week of socks and understuff.  With a week’s worth of shirts, but two weeks of undershirts, I figured I could get two days out of each shirt – I didn’t think I’d be sweating too much in London and Paris in March. And most of the extra undershirts and socks were on their last legs.  I left a trail of Jockey t-shirts from London to Paris to Milan, making room for some souvenir Carnivale masks for next year’s Mardi Gras party.</li>\r\n	<li>It ended up working well for me.  I didn’t return with one clean piece of clothing, but didn’t have to do any laundry for the two weeks.  I’m not sure I can use the same strategy for next week’s trip to India though.  With a forecast of 90 degrees and 90% humidity, that “no sweat” assumption just doesn’t seem realistic.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917626811.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #89</li>\r\n	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Magnatune</a></li>\r\n	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or MP3 file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/153475331351358\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_89.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #89 -- Trains Over Planes; Fit 2 Weeks in 1 Carry-On','','inherit','closed','closed','','590-revision-v1','','','2017-11-20 22:40:34','2017-11-21 03:40:34','',590,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/11/20/590-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1870,1,'2017-11-20 22:41:49','2017-11-21 03:41:49','Safely hunkered down in the TravelCommons studios during the busiest US travel week of the year, I don\'t know how I can call this a travel podcast if we don\'t talk about the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Transportation Security Administration\" rel=\"wikipedia\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_Security_Administration\">TSA</a>\'s \"junk touching\" <a href=\"http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/11/29/second-city-takes-you-ins_n_789315.html\" target=\"_blank\">patdowns</a>.  The general traveling public is finally catching up with the frequent traveler set.  The TSA\'s claim that it\'s groping vs. safety is a false choice -- their security theater doesn\'t make us any safer.  The increased hassles associated with air travel have increased the fly-vs.-drive breakeven point -- almost tripled it according to some.  A new <a href=\"http://www.amadeus.com/hotelit/beyond-segmentation.html\" target=\"_blank\">study</a> on the future of hotels neglects one of the most important features of any hotel stay -- the bathroom.  And we wrap up talking about mileage tracking websites with the CEO of <a href=\"http://gomiles.com\" target=\"_blank\">GoMiles.com</a>.  Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_85.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_85.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />Here are the transcript from TravelCommons podcast #85:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\"></a>Coming to you once again from the TravelCommons studios outside of <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Chicago\" rel=\"wikipedia\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago\">Chicago, Illinois</a> during the one week a year I make a determined effort to stay <em>off </em>the road.  I wasn’t successful last year – a client scheduled a meeting in Philadelphia the Monday before Thanksgiving, so I did an 18-hour up &amp; back – last flight out Sunday night, returned Monday afternoon – to avoid the building crowds.  But this year, I have a bit more control over my travel schedule.  And that means I actually put my roller bag away – not just leave it lying around empty in the bedroom.</li>\r\n	<li>I hate to sound elitist, but this week is always amateur week at the airports – families, infrequent fliers.  They’re going to be the ones trying to take a water bottle through the security checkpoint, taking 2-3 shots at the metal detector before getting all their jewelry off; then walking slow, 4 or 5 abreast down the concourse, placing 5-adjective orders at Starbucks, crowding the jetway door trying to board with the handful of elites who couldn’t stay off the road, ….  Why should I torture both of us?  So I stay home and keep myself calm with a weekend long low-grade tryptophan-induced stupor supplemented by a steady diet of football and good-quality beer.</li>\r\n	<li>Watching the TSA patdown controversy from this distance was entertaining rather than frustrating -- even though it cost me the opportunity to earn the special “Don’t Touch my Junk” <a href=\"http://mashable.com/2010/11/23/foursquare-tsa/\" target=\"_blank\">badge</a> on <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Foursquare Solutions\" rel=\"homepage\" href=\"http://foursquare.com/\">FourSquare</a> . Coming during “amateur week”, there were more than enough infrequent travelers willing to put themselves in front of a reporter’s microphone and say “I don’t care how long I wait or how they need to touch me; I just want to be safe”.  They’re always there when the TSA turns the screw a bit tighter.  But this time, there were an equal number of people saying, “Wait a minute”.  I thought the woman who walked through LAX screening in a <a href=\"http://www.examiner.com/airlines-airport-in-national/woman-bikini-avoids-tsa-frisk-at-lax\" target=\"_blank\">black bikini</a> made the point</li>\r\n	<li>Though not many people voluntarily chose the full body groping during <a href=\"http://www.optoutday.com/\" target=\"_blank\">National Opt-Out Day </a>, the organizers did get an impressive amount of attention focused on the TSA’s screening procedures.  By Wednesday, <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"John S. Pistole\" rel=\"wikipedia\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_S._Pistole\">John Pistole</a>, the TSA administrator, must have gotten tired of getting wired up for the umpteenth remote interview with a news show..</li>\r\n	<li>The pile-up of interviews and media investigations made the point that frequent fliers figured out long ago – the TSA’s justification – the scanning and the gropings are a necessary evil for secure flight – is a false choice.  Most frequent fliers don’t think the TSA and their security theater makes us more secure – they’re just one more hassle we have to deal with before we can get to our destination.  Last week’s hoopla just drove the point home to everyone else.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/content/Per/Per_-_DLDN_Instrumental.mp3\" target=\"_blank\">DLDN Instrumental</a></em> by St Paul</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>First of all, here’s a nice audio comment from Linda Martin of the <a href=\"http://indietravelpodcast.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Indie Travel Podcast</a>…</li>\r\n	<li>Linda, thanks for taking the time out from yours and Craig’s jealousy-inspiring tour through <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Southeast Asia\" rel=\"wikipedia\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southeast_Asia\">Southeast Asia</a> to drop us that line…</li>\r\n	<li>Thanks also to the folks who “liked” the TravelCommons fan page on Facebook.  And to the folks who follow me on <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Twitter\" rel=\"homepage\" href=\"http://twitter.com\">Twitter</a>.  I try to use both services to keep in touch with listeners between episodes – especially with the “expanded spacing” between episodes.  I was scanning the archives the other day looking for the 1<sup>st</sup> –year recap show to put in the iTunes feed, and I realized that almost half of the TravelCommons episodes – 45% to be exact – were done in that first year.  Of course I had a lot of content to mine – years of travel notebooks – so it was easy to do a weekly show at first.  Now that I’m doing well to keep to a monthly schedule, the Facebook and Twitter “short-burst” messages make it easy for me to talk with everyone – or those who are interested – between episodes.</li>\r\n	<li>One such item I posted on the Facebook page was a link to an <a href=\"http://www.economist.com/node/21013202\" target=\"_blank\">article</a> by Gulliver, the Economist’s business travel blog, which itself linked to an <a href=\"http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2010/11/dear-airline-im-leaving-you/66750/\" target=\"_blank\">article</a> in the Atlantic about the breakeven point between flying vs. driving.  Back in one of my 1st year episodes (<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/11/20/podcast-23-fly-or-drive-scenes-from-the-hotel-bar/\" target=\"_blank\">#23</a> to be exact), I calculated the breakeven point to be at the 3 hour/180 mile mark – the distance between Chicago and Indianapolis.</li>\r\n	<li>Including <em>all</em> the time involved with catching the hour-long flight to Indy -- ½ hr drive to ORD, 45 minutes between check-in, security, and boarding, 1-hour flight time, ½ hr for deplaning and getting the rental car, and another ½ hr to drive to the meeting site – got me to 3hrs 15 minutes.</li>\r\n	<li>But that calculus is 5 years old.  In light of reduced flight availabilities and increased TSA hassles,<a href=\"http://www.economist.com/\" target=\"_blank\"> the Economist</a> and <a href=\"http://www.theatlantic.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Atlantic</a> writers declared the new fly-vs.-drive breakeven point to be 8 hours or 500 miles – almost triple my number!  “If it\'s under 500 miles, I\'ll do anything rather than hop on a plane,” says the Atlantic’s Megan McArdle.  “And if it\'s over 500 miles, it had better be way over . . . or I\'d better be carrying a cooler with a still-beating heart in it.”</li>\r\n	<li>Anecdotally, I know a number of families who used to fly to places like South Carolina and Florida for Thanksgiving, opted instead for the 10-12-hr drive.  If I’m an airline exec, these numbers tell me that I’m in a no-growth industry; that my one remaining value proposition – we get you there faster than if you can on your own – is being negated by the hassles – both my own and the government’s – that surround me.  And that I should be afraid.</li>\r\n	<li>Speaking of afraid, I’m sure that everyone will recall the uptick in surgical masks on planes last year during the <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influenza_A_virus_subtype_H1N1\" target=\"_blank\">H1N1</a> “pandemic”.  After that whole thing died under its own hype, it’s been pretty much back to business as usual – with the exception of the occasional Asian mask wearer.  So I was interested – no, enthralled – when the guy next to me on an ORD-LAX flight whipped out a box of disinfectant wipes and cleaned all the surfaces around him – the seat, the armrests, the headrest, the headrest in front of him, and the tray table.  Even at the height of the H1N1 scare, I’d never seen quite such a swab down.  After he finished, I wished for a big sneeze, but couldn’t muster up much more than a cough.</li>\r\n	<li>As I mentioned on Twitter at the beginning of the month, I switched over from my little HP netbook to an 11-inch MacBook Air.  Yes it’s light, yes it’s cool looking, but when I left it in my backpack going through security at both ORD and Orlando and came away unberated by the X-ray screener, that cinched it – it’s the best Travel PC out there.  I posted a full <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2010/11/15/two-weeks-with-a-macbook-air/\" target=\"_blank\">review</a> on the TravelCommon’s website with my impressions after 2 weeks on the road with it.  A full month and my thoughts haven’t changed.  It can still be a hassle integrating it into my company’s Windows infrastructure, but I can live with it.  It’s a great machine.</li>\r\n	<li>And finally, following up on last episode’s riff on in-flight WiFi, Google\'s Christmas <a href=\"http://www.freeholidaywifi.com/\" target=\"_blank\">present</a> this year to travelers is free Gogo in-flight WiFi on Delta, AirTran, and Virgin America airlines for the holidays – it’s started the weekend before Thanksgiving and runs through Jan 2nd.  I don’t think I’ll get to use it – the rest of my travel this year will be on American – but I hope some of you guys get a chance.</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a question, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a></span>, you can send me a Twitter message at mpeacock, or you can post them on the Facebook page or the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/content/Zapac/Zapac_-_Test_Drive.mp3\" target=\"_blank\">Test Drive</a> </em>by Zapac</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Importance of Hotel Bathrooms </strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Yes, the TravelCommons podcast has long had a close relationship with hotels bathrooms.  Being born in the bathroom of the Wardman Park Marriott in Northwest DC, I think the penultimate bathroom recording was in the shower stall of the Camelback Resort.  The echo was so bad I had to re-record the whole thing.</li>\r\n	<li>So I was disappointed – to say the least – when reading through <em><a href=\"http://www.amadeus.com/hotelit/beyond-segmentation.html\" target=\"_blank\">Hotels 2020</a></em>, a future-of-hotels study from <a href=\"http://www.amadeus.com/us/us.html\" target=\"_blank\">Amadeus</a>, a European travel technology company, there was no mention of the importance of the hotel bathroom – or toilette or WC – on the guest experience.</li>\r\n	<li>Let’s be honest.  When we walk into a new hotel room, we look at the bed first – mostly because, being the biggest thing in the middle of the room, it’s hard not to catch the eye – and then look at the bathroom.</li>\r\n	<li>It kinda makes sense – unless you have a suite, those are the <em>only</em> two rooms you have, so of course you’re going to check them out.  And, if you think about where you spend your time when in a hotel – you probably spend most of your time in your bed, with the bathroom in second place.  How close a second place – there’s way too many personal issues there for me to sort out in a 5-minute segment.</li>\r\n	<li>So where did the <em>Hotel 2020</em> study focus?  The usual suspects – the replacement of the fortress-like front check-in desk with self-service kiosks and live people roaming around with iPads (so we’re replacing front-desk lines with mobbing a wandering clerk?  And that’s progress how?); packing the rooms with even more technology – 3D TVs (so they replace the revenue lost on WiFi with rentals on the 3D glasses), plug-in jacks so we can more easily display the content we’re hauling around on our laptops and iPads and Droid phones; figuring out yet more ways to sell us “ancillary services” – tee times, massages, spa treatments – more ways to make more money from us while we’re at the hotel.</li>\r\n	<li>But no mention of the bathroom, which I think is a critical mistake.  The hotel bathroom probably the most underestimated, under-recognized cause for guest satisfaction – and dissatisfaction.</li>\r\n	<li>Think about it –when you look into that bathroom and see a big shower stall, a fluffy robe, and some cook toiletries – a smile comes to your face.  OK, you think, maybe I’ll take an extra long shower – something I don’t get to do at home – try this loofa thing, does the shower gel go on it or on me before it….  Who knows, but it’s fun trying something new.</li>\r\n	<li>Compare that with the alternative – small bathroom, water-stained tub with a small chest-high showerhead, and nothing more than a small bar of soap.  Not only are you <em>not </em>thinking of purchasing any “ancillary services”, you’re trying to figure out how to get out and book a room down the road.</li>\r\n	<li>And it makes sense -- we all know that our basic physiological needs must be met before we can self-actualize.  And it doesn’t get more basically physiological than the bathroom.  If a hotel can’t deliver a quality bathroom experience, why would I trust it to align my chakras with a hot stone massage?  Give me cut-rate toiletries and I figure you’re cutting corners on the scented oil rub down too?</li>\r\n	<li>So all you hoteliers, before you get too wrapped around the axle with the latest flat screens and electronic room service ordering and personalized e-mails and electronic concierges.  Make sure you’ve got a great showerhead and toilet that doesn’t run.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/content/oldDog/oldDog_-_Goodbye_sooner_or_later.mp3\" target=\"_blank\">Goodbye Sooner or Later</a></em> by oldDog</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Maximize Your Mile – Interview with Founder of GoMiles.com</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Miles, points – the one thing that helps make frequent travel bearable is the idea that, through the hassles, you’re earning a free trip to some place you actually <em>want</em> to go.  This year, I used United miles to fly my family of four from Chicago to Vietnam, and used Marriott points to cover the hotel in Hong Kong on our way back.  I also used Hilton points for an anniversary weekend in Chicago – left the kids behind with their grandmother – and will use more United miles for spring break trip to Venice for my wife, my daughter, and me.  Doing the math just on this year’s redemptions – the dollar value of these points adds up.</li>\r\n	<li>Of course, where there’s value, there’s a business opportunity.  A number of web sites for tracking miles and points have popped up over the past few years.  One of these sites is <a href=\"http://gomiles.com\" target=\"_blank\">GoMiles.com</a> – a free service that aggregates points across airline, hotel, and car rental programs and displays them on a single easy-to-read page.  I caught up with the founder and CEO Michael Komarnitsky for a Skype chat on why people use GoMiles…</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917628.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #85</li>\r\n	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n	<li>The bridge music is from <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/\" target=\"_blank\">ccMixter</a></li>\r\n	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or MP3 file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to @mpeacock on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com.  Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/153475331351358\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_85.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<div class=\"zemanta-pixie\" style=\"margin-top: 10px; height: 15px;\"><img class=\"zemanta-pixie-img\" style=\"border: none; float: right;\" src=\"http://img.zemanta.com/pixy.gif?x-id=9e618155-0c32-44bb-9572-c4107cad83cd\" alt=\"\" /></div>','Podcast #85 -- Importance of Hotel Bathrooms; Maximizing Miles','','inherit','closed','closed','','407-revision-v1','','','2017-11-20 22:41:49','2017-11-21 03:41:49','',407,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/11/20/407-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1871,1,'2017-11-20 22:42:20','2017-11-21 03:42:20','Walking into the TravelCommons studios for this episode felt like walking into a confessional -- \"Bless me Father for I have sinned; it\'s been 6 months since my last podcast...\"  I talk about the new TravelCommons web site and the new Facebook<a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/153475331351358\" target=\"_blank\"> fan page</a>. I talk about some recent WiFi experiences -- at 35,000 ft and while on vacation in <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Vietnam\" rel=\"wikipedia\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam\">Vietnam</a> -- and a bad dining experience in <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Scottsdale, Arizona\" rel=\"homepage\" href=\"http://www.scottsdaleaz.gov/\">Scottsdale, AZ</a>. I tumbled the numbers on my mileage and frequent sleeper points and, applying some complex division with the help of my iPhone calculator, redirected this year\'s remaining travel to maximize my frequent flyer and frequent sleeper status levels.  Finally, after the TSA\'s announcement of their \"enhanced\" <a href=\"http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39889732/ns/travel-news/\" target=\"_blank\">pat-down procedures</a>, I give up and let loose with a full-throated rant.  Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_84.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_84.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />Here are the transcript from TravelCommons podcast #84:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Chicago\" rel=\"wikipedia\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago\">Chicago, Illinois</a>.  Picking up to the mic, I kinda felt like I was walking into a confessional – “Bless me Father for I have sinned, it’s been 6 months since my last podcast…”  As I mentioned in the last episode, back in May, I wanted to take the summer off to focus on the new job – which I did.  I also wanted to do something with some video, which I did – a 6-minute summary of our summer trip to Vietnam, which is up on the site complete with a bit of an Easter egg at the end.  John Stalvern picked it up – he posted a question on the TravelCommons site – “is that an actual shot of the never-before-identified Mark Peacock at the end?”  Yup, complete with my new-found Vietnamese friend.</li>\r\n	<li>I also rebuilt the TravelCommons site on my own hosting service, pulling away from the BoardingArea site after they stopped paying me.  Not that I blame them – it’s a tough economy and their model is to sell banner ads for blogs.  I don’t think they ever figured out how to monetize a podcast.  So, I got a dump of my content and rebuilt my own TravelCommons site.  Because it’s my own site, I also have complete control.  So, my son built me a new look-&amp;-feel for the site, I loaded a better Twitter feed badge and will put up some additional stuff like polls when I get around to it.</li>\r\n	<li>I also set up a TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/153475331351358?v=wall\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook.  I don’t know exactly what I’ll do with it yet – right now it’s a mix of some web site content and expanded Twitter posts.  Come by – there’s a “badge” on the web site – “like” it and leave comments/suggestions on the wall.  Help me figure out what to do with it.</li>\r\n	<li>I’ve also been doing a bit of travel.  For those of you who watched the Vietnam video, you saw our itinerary – we toured Vietnam for 12 days and then stopped off in <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Hong Kong\" rel=\"wikipedia\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Kong\">Hong Kong</a> for three days on the way home.  My domestic travel has been a bit boring – mostly to our offices in Scottsdale, Dallas, and <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Naples, Florida\" rel=\"homepage\" href=\"http://www.naplesgov.com\">Naples, FL</a>, though I have hit Boston and San Diego recently, and have a conference in Orlando coming up.</li>\r\n	<li>Thinking back on my travel last year, in 2009, I miss the trips to <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"New York City\" rel=\"homepage\" href=\"http://www.nyc.gov/\">New York</a> and San Francisco.  But as we officially hit Autumn and can see December in Chicago quickly approaching – places like Scottsdale and Naples are sounding pretty good again.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/Loveshadow/26219\" target=\"_blank\"><em>SP*ANK Vox</em></a> by Loveshadow</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>OK, where to start, it’s been so long.  Maybe at the most recent and work my way back.</li>\r\n	<li>In-flight WiFi – I’ve said in past episodes that I’m not a big fan.  35,000 ft is my last refuge of non-connectedness.  It’s when I read, or listen to music, or listen to podcasts, or really crank on my e-mail in-box – cleaning out the backlog of “I’ll read that when I get some time” e-mails…  On my last flight down to Ft Myers, though, I broke down 30 minutes into the flight and bought a WiFi session from GoGo.  The price was $9.95 for my iPad or my netbook; $7.95 for my iPhone or Motorola Droid2.  I ponied up the extra $2 to use a full keyboard.  While I cringed when signing on, it was useful not going dark for 2.5 hours.  Right then, I was in the middle of a number of customer issues.  Being able to run e-mail saved me a 20-minute e-mail session sitting outside the airport Starbucks clearing 25+ e-mail messages.</li>\r\n	<li>The rise and now near-ubiquity of on-line storage/collaboration tools like Microsoft <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Microsoft SharePoint\" rel=\"wikipedia\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_SharePoint\">SharePoint</a> has also made me push the GoGo in-flight purchase button.  I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve clicked on an e-mail message to start reviewing a document and found nothing but a SharePoint link.  It reminds me yet again of the mental gulf between office dwellers and road warriors.  “Whaa… you’re not on the network?” is the refrain whenever I ask someone to send me the actual file.  I hate SharePoint…</li>\r\n	<li>Since I’m on a bit of a rant, I got rudely surprised a couple months back while eating dinner at a restaurant in Scottsdale, AZ.  We’ve talked across many episodes about dining solo in restaurants.  It’s gotten much easier over the past 3-4 years.  It’s a rare restaurant that won’t serve you off the full menu at the bar.  I been to some places where even they have a little tray that evens out the slant of the bar so that your plate won’t slip into your lap.</li>\r\n	<li>So, anyhow, I go to this restaurant – the Zinc Bistro – in the middle of one of the many shopping centers in Scottsdale.  I was supposed to meet a friend for dinner, but he had to bail at the last minute, so when I walked in, I asked if I could eat at the bar.  “Of course,” the hostess said.  I sat down – there was one other guy at the bar – ordered a glass of wine, a frisée salad, and a large order of charcuterie – it was a French place.  I ordered a second glass of wine, pulled out my iPad, and started flipping through the Financial Times app.  A couple of minutes later, an older guy introduced himself to me as the owner and then said, in a nice way, that computers weren’t allowed in the restaurant after sun down because it “spoiled the romantic atmosphere.”</li>\r\n	<li>Really? At first, I thought he was joking.  I looked around – the place was empty.  It was a Wednesday night, in summer, in Arizona.  Not exactly the height of tourist season. I counted less than 10 people in the place, none of which looked to be interested in a romantic atmosphere.  But the guy was serious.  I paid my bill – no tip – and told him I wouldn’t be back.  I always say – You can have an attitude, or you can have my money, but you can’t have both.  This guy chose the attitude.</li>\r\n	<li>OK, two negative rants – need to balance them out with something positive.  One of the biggest surprises of my Vietnam trip was the near ubiquity of free high quality WiFi.  Preparing for the trip, I didn’t plan to use my iPhone much because of the high cost of roaming for cellular data and voice.  I’d keep the phone with me in case of emergency calls and also figured I might download some podcasts off WiFi when in hotels.  When I got there, though, I found WiFi everywhere – almost every restaurant and bar seemed to have WiFi, most of which were open. I’d stand on a street corner waiting for my wife to finish shopping, and I’d have strong signals from 2 or 3 different places.</li>\r\n	<li>Some restaurants did have their Wi-Fi locked with WPA or WEP encryption.  But it was still free – you just had to ask your server for the password.  Unlike in the US where the WiFi is unencrypted but you hit a portal of some sort where you log in, in these restaurants in Saigon or HoiAn, the session was encrypted, so once I put the password into my iPhone, all the over-the-air transmissions were encrypted.  Which, given the emergence of things like <a href=\"http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/24/firesheep-in-wolves-clothing-app-lets-you-hack-into-twitter-facebook-accounts-easily/\" target=\"_blank\">Firesheep</a> which lets someone hijack people\'s Twitter and Facebook accounts over unencrypted WiFi, seems like a pretty good approach.</li>\r\n	<li>Well, once we figured out the program, the kids and I would be whipping out our devices whenever I’d stop for a beer – which given the heat and humidity in June was pretty often – and we’d ask for the WiFi key while placing our drink orders.  Usually, they’d point to a sign on the wall or bring us a small slip of paper.  However, at one restaurant, the waiter pointed to the little plastic stand-up menu holder.  We looked at it and then looked back at him? Huh? He pointed at the base of the menu holder where it said “Cisco. This is the power of the network”.  All that is the key?  Yup, he nodded.  That was one damn secure key.</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a question, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a></span>, you can send me a Twitter message at mpeacock, or you can post them on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/trifonic/445\" target=\"_blank\">Bored on Your Backside</a></em> by Trifonic</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>End-of-Year Status Calculus\r\n</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Last week, USAToday had an <a href=\"http://www.usatoday.com/travel/deals/inside/2010-10-21-airline-elite-status-miles_N.htm\" target=\"_blank\">article</a> about the importance of status to frequent travelers.  A timely article because October is the time every year that frequent travelers take stock of where they are in their various awards programs and figure out how they’re going to distribute their remaining travel to maximize their status.</li>\r\n	<li>Status has become more important in the past few years.  As airlines have become more aggressive with add-on fees, the silver, gold, platinum, premiere cards that exempt their holders from things like baggage fees or added charges for good seats have real monetary value.  Checking a bag and getting an aisle seat in the front of the plane can easily cost $50-$75 a trip without status.  The calculus can be even better stronger with hotels.  Precious metal cards can get you free breakfast and free wireless (for those places that still charge) – saving you, say, $120 over a week’s stay.  You can build a solid business case pretty quick if you need a one more trip to earn status.</li>\r\n	<li>But how to spread that status – is it better to spread it around – be mid-tier status with a couple of airlines and hotels – or should you double-down with just one and go for top tier?</li>\r\n	<li>It depends on what you want and how you travel.  If upgrades are important – flying first class, getting bumped to a suite – then you need to go for top tier status.  As airline seat utilization goes up – the latest figures are over 80% -- there are fewer first class seats available.  My United flight down to PHX this week was completely full and a Premiere guy standing next to me – United’s lowest level of status – said he was number 52 on the upgrade list.  With 24 first class seats on that 757 – which is a big first class nowadays – he knew he wasn’t getting out of seat 13E.  But at least his status got him into Economy Plus for free – otherwise that 5 extra inches of legroom would’ve cost him $25-50.</li>\r\n	<li>If you like to use your miles like I do --  my Chicago-to-Saigon flights were on miles and I just booked Chicago-to-Venice flights for next spring -- the answer isn\'t quite as straight-forward</li>\r\n	<li>As airline load factors and hotel occupancy levels improve, award availability is the first thing to go. Award trips dropped over 10% between 2008 and 2009.  If you\'ve doubled-down and have all your miles/points with one airline and one hotel, your ability to use your miles/points when and where you want can be tough.</li>\r\n	<li>My spring trip to Venice is a perfect example. The dates -- based on my daughter\'s spring break -- were inflexible. As was the location -- my daughter has always wanted to visit Venice and Verona. I knew this was going to be tough. I gritted my teeth, mixed myself a big cocktail, and started dialing awards desks. American could get me over the Atlantic, but couldn\'t get me back. BA couldn\'t get me to Heathrow, but could get me to Venice. Eventually, United could get me over on Lufthansa via Frankfurt and back on a double hop via Munich and Heathrow. If I had focused my miles solely on American, I would\'ve been $3,000 lighter</li>\r\n	<li>OK, nice bit of theory, but what did I <em>do</em> ?  A little of both, really.  Starting the year, taking a new job, my destinations changed, and United and Marriott -- where I had top tier status -  were no longer the most convenient choices for where I needed to go.  So I switched to American and Hilton because, for me, planes and hotels are a means to an end rather than the end itself.</li>\r\n	<li>Being in Chicago, with ORD\'s dual hub, I still put some miles on United based on schedule, but put most miles on American. Until this month. Tumbling the numbers, I didn\'t think I\'d hit Executive Platinum, so I pivoted most of my trips over to United to lock in at least Premiere status.</li>\r\n	<li>On hotels, though, I went deep on Hilton because they were everywhere I needed to be. I hit Gold early on, which gave me free breakfast and WiFi, and will make top-tier Diamond by year end.</li>\r\n	<li>So while strategizing to get early boarding and a free scoop of scrambled eggs may seem a bit pathetic to the occasional traveler, think about the efforts you expend to get a close-in parking space or a good subway seat. At least my scrambled eggs come with a free trip to Venice</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/hepepe/21074\" target=\"_blank\">Bogi Beat Budapest</a> </em>by KarmaHacker</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>TSA Porn </strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Let’s start off by stipulating a well-known fact – I’m not a big fan of the TSA.  Nothing earth-shattering there.  I’ve been pretty frank over the prior 83 episodes of this podcast and in many blog posts.</li>\r\n	<li>And I don’t think that I’m alone.  While there will always be some once-a-year flier who’ll pop up in front of a reporter’s microphone saying “I don’t care how long I wait; I just want to be safe”, I don’t know of any frequent flier who defends the TSA.  We see too much of them.  And while we see the occasional good deed – the Ft Myers’ TSA screener who was helpfully prompting older passengers to pull their toiletries out of their carry-on <em>before</em> they pushed their bags into the X-ray machine – it’s much more common to see them berating fliers at the other end.  Or to see a half-dozen of them standing around a closed screening machine chatting it up while we fliers stew in a 15-minute line.</li>\r\n	<li>But the most frustrating thing is, 9 years after the September 11<sup>th</sup> attacks that caused the TSA to be created, every new thing the TSA does seems to make things worse – more inconvenient, and more and more intrusive</li>\r\n	<li>The roll-out of full body scanners is an example of both.  Take shoes and everything metal off – belts, watches, jewelry – stand in the machine with your hands above your head holding your wallet for 5 seconds, then wait another 5-10 seconds for the all-clear, and then go collect your belongings.  And to think that, 5 years ago, I used to rail on this podcast about the inconvenience of taking my shoes off before walking through the metal detector.</li>\r\n	<li>And invasive?  Look, I’m not a prude, but when a TSA screener <a href=\"http://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/stupid/airport-security-size-matters\" target=\"_blank\">beats</a> a co-worker because, after a training session with a full body scanner, of jokes about his small “manhood”, I’m not buying the TSA’s line about privacy filters.</li>\r\n	<li>And they’re not using much discretion – there have been articles about screeners <a href=\"http://consumerist.com/2010/09/pregnant-traveler-tsa-screeners-bullied-me-into-full-body-scan.html\" target=\"_blank\">coercing</a> a pregnant woman into accepting a scan, or pulling a <a href=\"http://www.tampabay.com/news/transportation/airport-body-scanners-reveal-all-but-what-about-when-its-your-kid/1109659\" target=\"_blank\">12-year-old girl</a> out of line for a full scan – and this after the UK government has forbidden the use of scanners on anyone under 18 because the pictures can violate child pornography laws.</li>\r\n	<li>And now, this week, it just gets better.  The TSA <a href=\"http://www.tsa.gov/press/happenings/102810_patdown.shtm\" target=\"_blank\">announced</a> on its web site that it’s “implementing new pat-down procedures.” OK, pretty innocuous.  What it doesn’t say is that these “enhanced” procedures will involve the screener running their hand up <a href=\"http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39889732/ns/travel-news/\" target=\"_blank\">the inside of your leg</a>. OK, not as invasive as the patdown I got in Amsterdam a few years back when the screener “cupped” my “manhood”, but it’s close – and will be a lot more frequent.</li>\r\n	<li>It does make me wonder why, after 9 years and hundreds of millions of dollars, all the TSA can say, if they’re really honest with themselves – in the quiet of the scanner picture viewing room -- is that all they’ve accomplished is to make the lives of their main constituents – the travelers – more miserable with each “improvement” they claim</li>\r\n	<li>Well, I shouldn’t go that far.  They have improved the lives of one group of people – IRS employees.  They’re no longer the most reviled group of government employees.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids99176.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #84</li>\r\n	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n	<li>The bridge music is from <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/\" target=\"_blank\">ccMixter</a></li>\r\n	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or MP3 file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to @mpeacock on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com.  Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/153475331351358\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_84.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #84 - End of Year Status Calculus; TSA Porn','','inherit','closed','closed','','319-revision-v1','','','2017-11-20 22:42:20','2017-11-21 03:42:20','',319,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/11/20/319-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1872,1,'2017-11-20 22:42:55','2017-11-21 03:42:55','Returning from a week in India, I started recording this podcast in the business class toilet of an AA flight from Delhi to Chicago.  For the sake of listeners\' ears and the bladders of fellow passengers, I finished it in the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago.  We talk about how Twitter has led me to some great meals while on the road, a poor experience with GoGo in-flight Wi-Fi, and how ATMs revolutionized business travel.  I talk about my experiences inside the \"travel bubble\" while traveling in India, and compare my HP netbook to my Apple iPad.  Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_83.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_83.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />Here are the transcript from TravelCommons podcast #83:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Coming to you today from Business class toilet on an American Airlines 777 flying somewhere north of the Iceland volcano, flying back from my first trip to India.  After spending 2 days each in Guragon, Pune, and Bangalore,  I got on this non-stop flight back to Chicago – left Dehli at quarter past midnight Thursday night and some 14 hours later, get into ORD at around 4:30 am Friday morning.  I’ll talk more about my India trip in the first topic, but now, I’m going to get out of the john before someone thinks I’m doing something strange in here – not that recording a podcast in the bathroom is normal for any except me.</li>\r\n	<li>OK, I’m back in the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago – landed safely and am now spending the day trying to get my body clock reset.  The first time I flew home from Asia, I arrived before I took off – left Tokyo around 5pm and got into SFO around noon.  Made my brain hurt a little bit trying to figure it out.  Now, I just roll with it.  Flying to Europe, I make a point to get on the destination time right when I sit in the airplane seat.  Flying to Asia, that takes too much work.  I just sleep when I want and eat when I want and leave it to my iPhone alarm to help me power through the consequences.</li>\r\n	<li>One more quick India note – I was standing in line to board my return flight – we had to run the gauntlet in the jetway of repeated security questions (“Has your carry-on been out of your possession at any time”) and another wanding and pat-down -- and now waiting to board when I heard a guy describing the scene to someone on the phone.  It took about 20 seconds for it to hit me – Hey, I recognize that voice.  I turned around and about a half-dozen people back was a guy I had worked with 6 years ago.  Now I’m used to running into friends and former colleagues at ORD and LGA, but DEL?  It’s either a really small world, or I know way too many people who fly.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/curl-complex/\" target=\"_blank\">We Are Complex</a></em> by Curl</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>We’ve talked in past episodes about ways to find good restaurants on the road.  I’ve mentioned Chowhound.com – a popular foodie forum – as one of my main tools.  But Twitter has also become very useful.  The last time I was in LA, I couldn’t figure out what I wanted to do for dinner.  I tweeted – “What should I eat – sushi or In ‘n Out Burger?” – really thinking out loud to my family than anyone else, and then one follower replied “Try <a href=\"http://kogibbq.com/\">Kogi BBQ truck</a>”.  What a great idea!  I had read about these guys a few months prior – some guys running 3 taco trucks doing Korean-Mexican fusion food – like kim chi quesadillas – and tweet every day the locations of their trucks.  I hit Twitter, found the closest truck – a 30-minute drive – and headed out.  I found it and queued up with about two dozen other Angelenos past an Arco gas station, ordered up some tacos, and ate them on the hood of my car.  It was great – and I wouldn’t have thought about it without someone responding to my tweet.</li>\r\n	<li>The best meal on my last trip to Seattle was courtesy of Twitter – <a href=\"http://seat6d.com/\">Denrael</a> saw where I was and suggested the <a href=\"http://www.steelheaddiner.com/\">Steelhead Diner</a> and I ended up with another great meal.  I think this is how the whole social media thing is supposed to work.</li>\r\n	<li>Another thing that’s worked for me this year is hand-washing.  When all the panic about H1N1 virus started up, I ignored most of it – except for the talk about the benefits of extended hand-washing.  20 seconds with soap and water, they said, was more effective than those little bottles of Purell.  OK, I decided to give it a go – investing a bit more time under the faucet.  One day, at the beginning of April, as Chicago began to warm up, it came to me – I haven’t had a cold this season.  For the first time in as long as I can remember, in spite of doing the same amount of cohabitating metal tubes with sick people, inhaling their recycled exhales, I didn’t get sick.  I guess those airplane HEPA filters work after all.</li>\r\n	<li>I broke down and tried GoGo’s in-flight WiFi a few months ago.  I’d like to say that I did it purely from an investigative standpoint – so that I could report on it to you, my podcast listeners.  But actually, I had a half day in Phoenix, was racing to make the flight, and still had a bunch of e-mail that I wanted to get out before the end of the day, so rather than queueing up 25 e-mails and then blasting them out when I hit ORD, I ponied up for GoGo.  So here’s my bottom line -- Gogo inflight wi-fi is a pig, a slow one.  And it’s not so much the bandwidth to the ground, but just the response time from the web server in the plane – airborne.gogoinflight.com.  Maybe because it was a full plane with lots of laptop-toting professionals needing to get on-line in the middle of the day, but still, come on.  When I first connected to the Buy page, the price was $10 for the flight.  But that in-plane server timed out, so I had to start again from the start – great user experience.  Even better -- the second time I got to the Buy page, it was $13.  I haven’t used GoGo since.</li>\r\n	<li>Maybe it was a goofy day, though.  On that same flight, the guy next to me tried to buy a cheese-&amp;-cracker snack with cash.  And then was – should I say it?  No, I shouldn’t… but I will – he was “cheesed off” that American no longer takes cash.  I was amazed -- when was the last time this guy flew?</li>\r\n	<li>And finally, listening this week to <a href=\"http://www.theworld.org/2010/05/25/tech-podcast-saving-our-bits-in-the-swiss-fort-knox/\">The World’s Technology Podcast</a> , I heard about the death of John Shepherd-Barron, the inventor of the ATM – the automated banking machine.  For the business traveler, the ATM revolutionized our lives, as much, if not more than mobile phones.  I remember traveling before ATMs were ubiquitous.  You’d pay American Express a chunk of change for a wad of $100 traveler’s checks, and then spend a good bit of your trip getting ripped off by currency exchanges in the airports, and cutting out of meetings in mid-day Fridays to hunt down a bank before it closed so you would have some cash for the weekend.  It took a lot of planning ahead.  Contrast that with this last weekend.  On Sunday, I woke up in Guragon, wandered over to the mall next door, found a Citibank ATM a couple hundred feet from the front door, punched a few keys and out popped 10 crisp 500 rupee notes.  And without taking much note, I now had a bit of cash with which I could buy a cup of masala tea. Thanks, John. </li>\r\n		<li>If you have a question, a story, a comment – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com, you can send me a Twitter message at @mpeacock, or you can post them on the web site at travelcommons.com.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/quist-lucidity/\" target=\"_blank\"><em>Crazy</em></a> by Beth Quist</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Business Travel in India\r\n</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Long-time listener <a href=\"http://mlw.me\">Marc Loehrwald</a> came back to me in the midst of my Tweet stream from India asking “Are you collecting some stories for a new Travelcommons episode?”  Even without trying, I came back with some.</li>\r\n	<li>Deplaning at Indira Gandhi Int’l airport – IRI to the locals – was pretty uneventful, though the Immigration officer did comment that I looked much younger in my passport picture.  After a 15-hour flight, I’d have been surprised if it was any other way.  I told him “it’s not the years; it’s the mileage”, but I think he was a bit young to catch the Indiana Jones reference.</li>\r\n	<li>Getting out at our hotel, I had the first of many security screenings during my stay.  At every hotel and major building, I walked through a metal detector, was wanded down, and had my briefcase X-rayed.  The whole exercise took 90 seconds and the employees were exceedingly polite (because they worked for the hotel, not an overblown government agency), but given what happened in Mumbai a year and a half ago, the security was understandable.</li>\r\n	<li>Sunday afternoon, I was back at IRI, but this time at the domestic terminal for a flight on Kingfisher Airlines – yes, owned by the same person as Kingfisher Beer, but no, it’s not served on board; all domestic flights are non-alcoholic – to Pune.  I walk up to the door and am stopped by a security guard – polite, but not as nice as the hotel guys – asking to see an itinerary.  I have an e-ticket, I say, so I don’t have an itinerary.  No paper, no entry.  He points down the terminal to the Kingfisher ticketing desk and says they can print it out for me.  10 minutes and some aggressive line jockeying and was back with the necessary piece of paper – a printout of my flight itinerary.  Now I can go in.</li>\r\n	<li>And face more security.  Going through security screening, everyone kept on their shoes and belt, but then everyone was wanded and patted down after passing through the metal detector.  Every carryon had to have a tag, which was stamped after X-raying. These tags were then checked by a security guard as you boarded the plane.  No stamp and back you went to security.  </li>\r\n	<li>Leo Vegoda, another T/C listener, responding to my security line Tweet – “Is the line still 2 hours long?”  No, even with all this extra security, the lines weren’t long – there seemed to be enough staff to handle it.  I don’t know – perhaps I was traveling at non-peak times; or perhaps their staffing algorithm is better than the TSA’s.  </li>\r\n	<li>What struck me most by the middle of the week was how isolated my travels were.  In past T/C episodes, we’ve talked about the “travel bubble” that business travelers inhabit – seeming to float above the day-to-day activities of a given city – kinda like Glenda the Good Witch in “Wicked”  (I’m just full of pop references today…).  </li>\r\n	<li>In India, I was in an extreme travel bubble – eating breakfast in the hotel, taking a private car to my meetings, then driven to dinner (usually in a hotel restaurant), and finally dropped off at my hotel around 9 or 10 pm. But unlike everywhere else, I wasn’t trying to escape it.  I don’t think it was the poverty or a concern about security – I’ve dealt with that in places like Joburg and Rio.  No, it was something else, but I didn’t know what it was.  </li>\r\n	<li>Finally, looking out the car window one day, on one of my many rides, I realized that it was the crowds – everywhere I was, everywhere I looked, there were always huge numbers of people moving to and fro – much more than I’d seen before, and never letting up.  Maybe all the extra security got to me subconsciously.  I’m sure that, in time, I would’ve gotten comfortable with the crowds, but the pace of the trip – 3 cities, 7 days, 15 hours a day in meetings and then another 3 hours back in the room catching up on things back home – I never got situated, never got comfortable with where I was. </li>\r\n	<li>I finally fell out of my travel bubble transiting between the domestic and international terminals in Delhi.  It’s a 30-minute bus ride, but security wouldn’t let me on because I forgot to print my American Airlines itinerary.  I had to go outside and catch a cab – not a car, not a minibus, a regular street cab.  Careening through the streets, I remembered the story one of my hosts told me a few days past, about how he had taken a cab between the two terminals – the cab went off to a side street and only continued onto the international terminal after he gave them $100.  I watched the street signs – why wasn’t he taking the exit for the airport?  Down and around the support pillars of the expressway, past a strip of hotels with neon signs, driving in a sea of motorscooters, we emerged in front of the access road to the international terminal.  A couple of more jigs and jags to avoid construction and we were unloading my bags in front of the terminal.  I tipped the driver 200 rupees on a 250-rupee fare and slipped back inside my travel bubble.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Blues for a Rainy Day</em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/markcook-highway/\" target=\"_blank\">Mark Cook</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>iPad vs. Netbook\r\n</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>At the beginning of the month, I swapped my standard corporate-issue Dell Latitude E6400 laptop for an HP Mini 5102 netbook running Windows 7 and an Apple Wi-Fi + 3G iPad. After trips to Scottsdale and India with my lighter (by 1.4 lbs) briefcase, I found myself liking both devices, but for very different reasons.</li>\r\n	<li>The main reason I was willing to dump the 14-in Dell screen for a 10-in netbook display is that most of my computer time is now spent running e-mail.  Back when I was developing code or creating PowerPoint decks, I was willing to lug some extra pounds to get extra pixels.  Now that my life revolves around Outlook, screen size isn’t as important.  But a good keyboard is, and the HP’s traditional keyboard is much more usable for a touch typist than the iPad’s onscreen keyboard.  You can’t rest your fingers on the iPad’s virtual keys, and eliminating the semi-colon key causes some real problems for touch typists.  Also, being able to work in the actual Outlook client on the HP – looking at other people’s schedules when setting up meetings, browsing shared Exchange folders -- is a huge advantage over iPad’s mail client.  HP is the clear winner with e-mail.</li>\r\n	<li>Even though the HP’s screen specs out larger than the iPad (10.1-in diagonal vs. 9.7-in diagonal), the iPad’s screen looks bigger and brighter.  Perhaps it’s the 132 pixels per inch, but it probably because the iPad’s tablet form factor frees it from the desktop (or your lap) and makes it seem natural to bring it closer to your eyes.  And if you’re browsing rather than typing, touching the web site is a more direct interaction than connecting your finger to the cursor through the touchpad.  Unless, that is, your browsing involves web sites like Hulu, which lands you directly in the cross fire of Steve Jobs’ Flash jihad.  But for non-Flash web browsing, the iPad is the clear winner.</li>\r\n	<li>When I’m writing, the best keyboard wins out.  While I’m getting better on the iPad virtual keyboard after a couple of weeks’ practice, I switched over to the HP’s physical keyboard to write this episode.  A number of folks have suggested that I use a BlueTooth keyboard with my iPad, but one of my travel principles is to travel with the least number of electronic things as possible.  Having lots of electronic bits show up on the X-ray screen makes any TSA screener twitchy – it significantly increases the probability of a hand search – something any frequent traveler wants to avoid.  </li>\r\n	<li>It’s also easier to get files on and off the HP.  The iron sandbox that Apple has erected around the iPhone and now the iPad may improve its security, but makes it difficult to use as something other than an isolated machine. When I’m creating a document more than a few lines, I find myself switching to the HP.</li>\r\n	<li>Now, moving from the Dell’s 2.26 GHz Core 2 Duo processor to the HP’s 1.66 GHz Atom chip, you’d expect to wait a few more seconds for applications to start up.  And you do.  But if you’re just doing e-mail, web browsing, and some light Word/Excel/PowerPoint work, the Atom keeps up.  But there are no such compromises with the iPad’s custom A4 chip.  Video is smooth, screens snap, and there’s none of the stutter-step scrolling that has become so frustrating on my 3G iPhone.  From a user experience standpoint, the iPad’s performance smokes the HP.</li>\r\n	<li>Probably the biggest disappointment with the HP is the battery life.  The 4-cell battery specs out at 4½ hours, but it was dying after my 3½ hour flight from Chicago to Phoenix.  It could be that I don’t have Windows 7 configured correctly, but I couldn’t get much more battery life even after some deep Power Option tweaking. My experience with the iPad’s custom battery is the complete opposite.  I have yet to see the battery gauge turn red, even after pretty constant use on my 15-hour flights to and from India — a pleasant change indeed from the usual iPhone experience.</li>\r\n	<li>Now, doing a straight feature/cost comparison is tough — these are two very different machines.  Comparing the two machines in my briefcase — the HP 5102 Mini netbook with 2 GB memory and 160 GB hard drive lists for $535 on HP’s web site while my 64 GB Wi-Fi + 3G iPad goes for $829 on apple.com — HP looks the winner.  But if you factor in the delta between the price of a typical cellular data plan for the HP and the iPad’s lower cost 3G plan from AT&amp;T, and can drop down to the 32 GB Wi-Fi + 3G iPad, you get pretty close to breakeven after 12 months.  Is it a fair comparison, I don’t know — but it’s a data point.</li>\r\n	<li>What’s the bottom line?  It’s not clear.  I really like both machines, but for very different reasons.  The HP is a solid little machine — great keyboard, reasonable performance, and a compact size that doesn’t get crushed when the guy in front of me pushes his seat back in an American Airlines MD-80.  The iPad provides a much better way to browse web sites (non-Flash, of course) and watch videos.  I’d love to drop one of them, but since the TSA doesn’t make me take out my iPad before X-raying, I’m not in too big of a hurry.</li>\r\n\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids991761.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #83</li>\r\n	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n	<li>The bridge music is from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com\">Magnatune</a></li>\r\n	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or MP3 file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to @mpeacock on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com.  Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_83.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #83 - Business Travel in India; iPad vs. Netbook','','inherit','closed','closed','','246-revision-v1','','','2017-11-20 22:42:55','2017-11-21 03:42:55','',246,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/11/20/246-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1873,1,'2017-11-20 22:43:39','2017-11-21 03:43:39','The way I travel has changed significantly with my New Year\'s career change.  Moving from consulting to the corporate world, I no longer bounce across the country.  Instead, I spend a week in one of my company\'s three offices.  This has required a bit of an attitude adjustment with regards to travel.  The new job also drove me to reexamine my airline and hotel loyalties.  Looks like my air mileage and hotel nights will be landing someplace new.  In this episode, we also continue the thread on the best ways to track travel expenses, and a listener writes about how easy it is to do business with Southwest.  Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_82.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_82.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />Here are the transcript from TravelCommons podcast #82:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, Illinois.  Sorry for the long delay between episodes, but I started a new job at the beginning of the year – after 17 years of consulting, I got a real job as a CIO – and I’m just beginning to dry off after drinking through a firehose for the past 6 weeks.  I’m also in my 6th month of straight travel – I’ve gotten on a plane every week since Labor Day, but next week I’ll take a break, skip ORD for a week after 6 months.  Now I will say that one week of that was self-inflicted – I mentioned in the last episode that I cashed in some frequent flier and frequent sleeper points to take the family to Hawaii for a week.  Turned out to be a great decision – it was 75 degrees in Kauai, 7 degrees in Chicago.  Since the beginning of the year, though, I’ve been back in full travel mode -- Philadelphia, DC, and multiple visits to Phoenix , Dallas, and South Florida.</li>\r\n	<li>In January, I almost got trapped in Phoenix due to the huge rain storms that swept in from California.  I was sitting in a Scottsdale Starbucks when an automated voice from United rang me up to tell me that my 3:30pm flight to ORD was cancelled.  I called up the Global Services desk and got rebooked onto the earlier flight – the 1:20pm – and managed to keep my 1st class upgrade.  A bit of an annoyance – I had to shuffle my afternoon calendar – but it was manageable.</li>\r\n	<li>I get to the airport and ask gate agent -- why the cancellation?  The 1:20 was now the last flight out.  They’re forecasting 40 mph sustained winds and 70 mph gusts to hit town at 2pm.  The agents tell us we need to board quickly so that we can get out before the weather hits.  But then, nothing.  We sit and sit.  No boarding, no announcements.  Oh, wouldn’t this be great.  A January flight from PHX to ORD is cancelled for weather – in PHX!  Finally, we board.</li>\r\n	<li>But then, at the last minute, another delay. The caterer didn’t load enough lunches for everyone in 1st class. The sky is getting darker.  A half-dozen of us volunteer to skip the rubber chicken – just get this flight off the ground.  Finally the door closes and, as near as I can tell, we were the last flight off the ground before they closed the airport.  Downgrading to the Thai chicken wrap from the back of the plane was a small price to pay for making it home that night.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/unkai-unkai/\" target=\"_blank\">Bahar-Un</a></em> by Un-Kai</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>We’ve had a bit of a thread over the past few episodes on methods to track travel expenses and manage the receipts.  Around Heijnis started it with an e-mail wondering if there’s anything better than a set of envelopes or colored folders.  Up to now, no one has come up with anything better.”</li>\r\n	<li>However, I just started using on online travel &amp; expense tool called Concur Solutions which has moved me away from folders.  Now, I don’t think it’s a single person solution – I think your whole company has to be on it – but if you’re on it, it seems to be pretty good.  First, you use it to book your travel – airline, hotel, and car – which allows the system to create an expense report from your itinerary – automatically putting in your airline ticket, and place holders for your hotel and rental car.  They also have can pull in the e-receipts that most hotel chains now set up, which is a huge timesaver if you work for one of those obsessive-compulsive companies that wants you to separately itemize room charges and tax across each night of your stay.  Concur does that automatically when it sucks in the hotel receipt. It also pulls in electronic Amex receipts which you can drag and drop into the expense report.</li>\r\n	<li>They also have an iPhone app that allows you to immediately record an expenditure and upload it -- complete with a picture of the receipt from the iPhone camera if you want – so that you can drag and drop it into your expense report.  I don’t know what it costs our company, but it’s a pretty sweet system.</li>\r\n	<li>I was thinking about this when I saw a review for another one of those travel scanners on Gadling.  There were all sorts of comments about how great it is to be able to immediately scan your receipts so you don’t lose them… But I dunno, given that most of us are carrying around multi-mega pixel cameras in our pockets – embedded in our cell phones – I just don’t get the rationale for schlepping around another hundred dollar piece of hardware.  If the multi-colored folder system doesn’t do it for you – and it didn’t seem to for the many Gadling commenters who extolled the praises of scanning receipts – then take a picture of it –shoot it on a white sheet of paper if the aesthetics of, say, a wood bar bother you -- and sync it back to your PC or do it across the network with any number of iPhone or Blackberry apps.  I’m personally amazed that people are still buying those travel scanners.</li>\r\n	<li>Mika Pyyhkala sent me a note singing the praises of Southwest.  First, he loves how easy it is to gift someone with a Southwest award\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>I just had the best experience.  I booked the flight I thought my friend wanted from PHX to IAD, and sent him the PNR locator.  He could then log in himself under Travel Tools on the WN web site, and either view or change the itinerary to times that were more convenient.  Imagine what the process would be on say UA, US, CO, or DL.</li>\r\n	<li>While the media harps on bag fees, change/cancel fees are ****exponentially*** more money and more important to me.  I probably check a bag 3 times a year, but often need to change my tickets.  The media does not give Southwest credit for their consumer friendly change/cancellation rules, or point out how unfriendly the legacy carriers’ rules are in regards to that.</li>\r\n	<li>I travel at least twice a month from BOS to Washington.  I’ve taken 20 flights since Southwest launched the service and had only one incident where a gate agent was rude to me.  I sent in a complaint and they gave me a voucher for the entire value of the ticket.  And they didn’t just send a form letter -- it sounded like they actually investigated the issue I raised.</li>\r\n	<li>I am knocking on wood that writing this does not now bring me bad luck.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>Mika, I have to agree with you on Southwest’s treatment.  Having suffered through dealing with the crankiest set of AA gate agents and flight attendants that I’ve had in a while, it makes me appreciate the spirit and pleasantness of just about every Southwest employee I’ve encountered.  My mother is a big fan of theirs too.  Living in Denver, she was a loyal Frontier flyer until I gave her a Southwest award of mine that was about to expire.  She came off that trip singing their praises and immediately switched her loyalties to Southwest.  For Southwest, not a bad return on an free trip.</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a question, a story, a comment – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com, you can send me a Twitter message at @mpeacock, or you can post them on the web site at travelcommons.com.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/solace-opium/\" target=\"_blank\"><em>Opium Head</em></a> by Solace</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Changing the Way I Travel\r\n</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Moving from consulting to a corporate job is a significant change in so many ways -- I’m not even going to try and list them all here – but the way I travel is one of the biggest changes.  My new company has offices in Phoenix, AZ, Dallas, and Naples, FL – but because of personal reasons – my son is finishing up high school, trying to sell a house in this market – we agreed that I wouldn’t move from Chicago right away.  As the CEO said to me, “Mark, you travel all the time as it is, why change things?”</li>\r\n	<li>So while I keep traveling, the way I travel is very different.  As a partner in a consulting firm, I managed multiple project teams and sold new business. This meant usually travelled to multiple places a week.  At the front of each episode, I give a quick rundown of the places I’ve been since the last episode, sometimes highlighting an especially whacky itinerary – like the time I flew from Chicago to London for a day meeting – flew to Heathrow overnight, took a lunch meeting, and then hopped the afternoon flight back to Chicago – and then continued on to Denver where I drove through a blizzard to facilitate a two-day workshop.  And there have been more than a handful of weeks where I spent the front half of it on the East Coast and the back half on the West Coast.</li>\r\n	<li>But now, I’m traveling to one place – one of our offices – for 3-4 days at a time.  You’d think that this would be less stressful – and I guess it is in some ways – not as much packing &amp; unpacking of my bag, not as many TSA lines to grit my teeth through, not as many flight delays…  But the act of travel – going to and from airports, flying, navigating to new places – fills the time.</li>\r\n	<li>Without that, returning to the same hotel every night, there is empty time to fill.  Work fills some of it.  And you can only watch so much TV.  Indeed, the travel is more like a commute, but without your family at the back end.  The one saving grace of travel – experiencing new places, seeing new things – goes away.</li>\r\n	<li>But talking to others about this, I appear to be one of the few people who likes to change things up on business travel.  At a dinner this week, one guy talked about a recent stint of commuting between Dallas and Hong Kong 3 weeks out of 4.  “Every trip, I flew the same flight, sat in the same seat, stayed at the same hotel and tried to get the same room.”  Wow!  We’ve talked about travelers who get in ruts before, but this guy had dug his deep and furnished it!</li>\r\n	<li>But he had his reason – “After a while, the flight attendants, the hotel clerks got to know me.  They’d greet me by name – ‘Hi Mr Jenkins’ – invite me to board early, upgrade my room, give me a free drink.  It was nice.”  In other words, he’d assembled a bit of a replacement family – some familiar faces to greet him at the end of his commute.  Kinda the “Cheers” syndrome – you wanna be where everyone knows your name.</li>\r\n	<li>It’s a common desire.  One colleague had stayed for over a year straight at the Trumbull, CT Marriott, working on a call center project at a nearby corporation.  She got the full “Cheers” treatment – greetings, upgrades, leaving laundry over the weekend, Christmas cards from the front desk staff.  She was still getting cards two years later – “Come back; we miss you”. Heartfelt or kinda stalker creepy?  You judge.</li>\r\n	<li>I dunno – maybe I’m a bit of a misanthrope, but I’m happy with the family I’ve got.  I use Skype videochat when the phone isn’t cutting it.  And if I’m not getting to see new places, I’ll dig a little deeper into these places I’ll see again and again.  In Phoenix, it’s been local sports – saw my first Fiesta Bowl and caught a local hockey game – which was interesting because there were more fans for the Buffalo Sabers than the home town Coyotes.  Baseball spring training opens next week, so maybe I’ll get to catch a Cubs or White Sox game.</li>\r\n	<li>In Florida, I make it a point to drive to a beach at least one evening.  I take my shoes off and walk through the sand a bit.  Haven’t gotten in the water yet, but I will soon.</li>\r\n	<li>o	So while the litany of destinations at the beginning of the show will get a bit more repetitive, I’ll guess I’ll have to work a bit harder to keep my travel from getting dull.  If a hotel clerk greets me by name before looking up my reservation, I know it’s time to move on down the road.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Spaces</em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/fuzz-sunset/\" target=\"_blank\">General Fuzz</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>New Year, New Programs\r\n</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>At the start of each New Year, I take a look at my airline mileage and hotel “frequent sleeper” programs and, because all the elite “counters” for miles and nights have reset to zero, decide where I’m going to invest my time.  Because for frequent travelers, it is an investment -- the elite status is just as important – if not more so – than the actual points or miles.</li>\r\n	<li>Most of the time, I let things ride – enjoy the status I have while building for the next year.  Probably the last big change I made was swinging from American to United after I hit 2 million miles on AA.  Up to that point, I had always split my miles between American and United, maintaining mid-tier status on each – Platinum on AA and Premiere Exec on UA.  But hitting 2 million miles on AA meant lifetime Platinum status.  Since there was nothing to lose on AA, I doubled down on UA – made 1K my first couple of years and then made Global Services in 2009.</li>\r\n	<li>But now with my new job comes new destinations.  I’m no longer regularly traveling to LGA, DCA, and SFO.  Instead, I’m heading to DFW, Ft Myers, and PHX.  ORD to DFW is AA’s trunk line – they practically have flights every hour between their two big hubs. No surprise there.  But looking at Ft Myers, the only non-stops from Chicago are AA from ORD and SWA from MDW.  I was surprised that there aren’t any UA non-stops.  Hmmmm…  Even AA’s ORD-PHX schedule is better than UA’s.  I didn’t notice it when I was flying the big city routes, but it looks like UA got more aggressive than AA about taking out flight capacity.  So since the New Year, I’ve swung my mileage over to AA and am working on Executive Platinum.  Of course, UA made the decision a bit easier when they didn’t renew my GS status, even after I flew over 180,000 actual miles – or as the pros call it – BIS – butt-in-seat miles.</li>\r\n	<li>The new job is even affecting my hotel choices.  The hotels most convenient to my offices – the closest and the ones where we have the best rates – are in the Hilton chain – Hilton Suites and Doubletrees.  By the end of January I had already hit Hilton Honors Silver and am on a fast track to Gold.  I’ve been Marriott Platinum for 7 or 8 years, but it looks like that too will be changing.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids991762.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #82</li>\r\n	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n	<li>The bridge music is from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com\">Magnatune</a></li>\r\n	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or MP3 file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to @mpeacock on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com.  Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_82.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #82 - Changing My Travel; New Mileage Programs in a New Year','','inherit','closed','closed','','228-revision-v1','','','2017-11-20 22:43:39','2017-11-21 03:43:39','',228,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/11/20/228-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0);
INSERT INTO `wp_posts` VALUES
(1874,1,'2017-11-20 22:44:19','2017-11-21 03:44:19','Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago.  In this episode, listeners add to our list of \"Road Warrior 201\" tips for this holiday travel season, I give my impressions of the new George Clooney movie <em>Up in the Air</em>,and gather up some stories about airport security into a Jeopardy-like topic I call \"Security Potpourri\".   Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_81.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_81.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />Here are the transcript from TravelCommons podcast #81:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, Illinois, back in town after a quick trip to a very snowy Philadelphia.  My wife was a bit iffy about this trip – “It would be very bad if you got trapped in Phila.”  But while it was a miserable weekend for travelers coming out of the East Coast, watching the stream of Twitter updates from United Airlines on Sunday, I could see them bringing the airports back on line on Sunday.  Come Monday, I think there was more snow on the sidewalks of Center City Phila than on the runways at the airport.  Phila was lousy at snow removal when I lived there during the late ‘80’s and it didn’t look like they’d improved much since then.</li>\r\n	<li>This week continues my string of flight weeks.  I’ve been flying to somewhere every week since Labor Day week – the first week of September.  Since the November episode, I’ve been bouncing across the country -- Phoenix, New York, LA and multiple visits to Philadelphia.  I haven’t looked at my calendar, but I think at 4 months, this is the longest streak of flight weeks that I’ve had.</li>\r\n	<li>In past TravelCommons episodes at this time of the year, I’d be saying that I was done traveling for the year and looking forward to lying around the house for 2 weeks.  But this year is different.  I won’t get a chance to break the streak – but at least it won’t be for work</li>\r\n	<li>We’re going to burn off some frequent flier and frequent sleeper points the week after Christmas – heading to Honolulu and then to Kauai.</li>\r\n	<li>We hadn’t really planned it. Then United launched a weird little “stealth” promotion.  I got an e-mail saying that they had reserved a number of seats for mileage awards on the morning flight from Chicago to Honolulu on the 26th (Boxing Day for those in the Commonwealth) and on the afternoon flight returning on the 2nd.  They were opening a special web portal at 9am on a certain day to take seat requests – 1st come, 1st serve.  Then, 2 days later, they’d send you an e-mail letting you know how many seats you got, after which you had two days to call a special number and book the seats or lose them.  Weird, but getting prime-time seats to Hawaii at 40,000 miles a seat – it seemed a good deal.</li>\r\n	<li>And as it so happened, on the appointed day and the appointed hour when the portal opened, I was not traveling, but instead, sitting in a project room in front of my PC with a solid network connection.  I put my request in for 4 seats and got ‘em.  So, after Christmas, instead of scraping ice, we’ll be eating it – shaved ice, that is.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>I\'ll Be Home by Christmas</em> by <a href=\"http://www.katimac.com/kati_home.html\" target=\"_blank\">Kati Mac</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Skye Ho, a long time T/C listener, pointed me to a <a href=\"http://www.theonion.com/content/news/united_airlines_exploring\" target=\"_blank\">story</a> in the Onion that I think is very apropos for the holiday travel season – “In its ongoing effort to cut transportation costs and boost profits, United Airlines announced Tuesday that it was exploring the feasibility of herding passengers into planes and stacking them like cordwood from floor to ceiling.”</li>\r\n	<li>\"Research shows that we lose millions of dollars each month by having them all sit upright in individual seats for the duration of the flight,\" said CEO Glenn F. Tilton, speaking to reporters at United Airlines\' corporate headquarters. \"However, if we were to remove these seats, we could just sort of stack them all in there, one by one, as they file into the plane.\"  My flight home last week from LAX and my flight out to PHL Monday morning felt like pilot tests for this concept.</li>\r\n	<li>On the website, Ray Medina responded to Arnoud Heijnis’ request for help in managing expense receipts.  Ray writes –\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>My company uses SAP for our expenses.  I carry an envelope to every trip with the name of the customer. Throughout the day, I place the receipts in my wallet.  Then, every night I enter the information into SAP and move the receipts from my wallet to the envelope so the wallet is cleared for the next day. When I return from my trip, I scan the receipts to submit to my company along with the SAP expense summary. After I submit everything, I put the envelope in my filling cabinet.</li>\r\n	<li>It takes time to get the routine down, but once you have it, you have it!</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>Thanks Ray.  That’s pretty much my system, except that my company uses Oracle and I’m lucky enough to have a secretary who makes copies of the receipts for me.  Other than that, my workflow is pretty much the same.</li>\r\n	<li>Since the last episode, I’ve been trying <a href=\"http://www.evernote.com\" target=\"_blank\">Evernote</a> on my iPhone – taking a picture of the receipt and tagging it with a couple of words.  Actually, I think I lasted only about 3 days.  Getting out of a cab, calculating a tip, getting my bags, checking to make sure that I didn’t forget anything (remember the thread we had going for a couple of episodes about forgetting stuff in these transitions)… taking a picture of the cab receipt was just about the last thing on my mind.  I found it easier to just be disciplined about recording receipts every day or so.</li>\r\n	<li>Building on last episode’s holiday travel tips, a number of listeners posted some good “201” tips – the next level up from Travel Tips 101</li>\r\n	<li>Lori Humm writes\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Don\'t just pick your seat when you book your ticket; pay attention to the size of the airplane. Most of the regional jets can\'t even fit a rollerbag briefcase. Every week I watch people shake their heads in disbelief as they board the plane and realize that there really is no room. And no, there\'s also no room under the seat. Carry the laptop separate in a padded sleeve and be willing to surrender the bag to gate check. (Full disclosure: I\'m the one that got my laptop stolen last year because I didn\'t grab it out of my bag at gate check.)</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>Leo Vegoda writes\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>If you cannot get a direct flight but have a choice of transit airports then choose carefully. For instance, while in past years there might not have been much difference between changing at ORD or a New York area airport on a West coast to East coast flight, ORD is definitely the best choice this year. Fewer flights and a new runway mean its on-time rankings have risen quite a bit.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>Ian Morgan writes\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>I agree wholeheartedly with your point about allowing a bit of extra time at this time of the year.  It still amazes me how many of my colleagues try to do a 40 minute connection in Frankfurt in December!!</li>\r\n	<li>The simple thing that I always do is to Google the place I am going to see what\'s on.  Not only can it be interesting to experience different local festivities if you have a bit of downtime, it can also make the difference between missing a flight or meeting or making it on time.  If there is a large festival on in the city centre, or a demonstration planned, you are going to need to allow more time to get to/from your meeting/hotel etc.  Indeed, when in Athens last January, I was aware that there were almost daily clashes with police in the city centre: I changed my hotel to a downtown location.  At least this way it means that you aren\'t sat watching a cab meter clock up whatever local currency is in use, and you don\'t have to endure the cab driver\'s personal take on the situation after getting off a longhaul flight!</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>Thanks to Lori, Leo and Ian for those tips –definitely 201-level “been there, done that so you don’t have to” –type advice.  Good stuff.</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a question, a story, a comment – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com, you can send me a Twitter message at @mpeacock, or you can post them on the web site at travelcommons.com.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://www.musicalley.com/music/listeners/artistdetails.php?BandHash=b962a3af0d6bd40bee9dfd260e23f37b\" target=\"_blank\"><em>Blue Christmas</em></a> by Tom Keiffer</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Up In the Airworld\r\n</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>o	In episode #78, we talked about the upcoming movie Up In The Air, where George Clooney stars as an extreme frequent flyer.</li>\r\n	<li>Ever since the preview trailers hit the Web, people have been asking me — “Is this what your life is like?”  So, a couple of Fridays ago, my wife and I found the one theater in Chicago showing Up in the Air (it’s in very limited release until Christmas).</li>\r\n	<li>Watching the opening sequence — a montage of Ryan Bingham, the character played by George Clooney, going through his well-practiced drill of packing, checking in, and getting through security – grabbed me immediately.  Pack up, zip zip zip, walk with purpose through the terminal, hit the premium check-in kiosk (which was a bit of an off-note, because any self-respecting road warrior prints their boarding pass at home so they can go directly to the security line), let the overcoat and blazer drop off your shoulders in one motion… It was like watching a replay of my Monday mornings -- but with a much more attractive version of me.</li>\r\n	<li>As the movie continued, I started to pick up some niggling reality problems — international business class lie-flat seats on an MD-80, an underground tram in O’Hare, Bingham doesn’t forget his hotel room number, but every time we see him going into a hotel room (usually in the company of his love interest Alex, played by Vera Farmiga) we see him juggling a half-dozen room keys – you’d think he’d pitch them during check out like the rest of us.  But, except for the fact that none of Bingham’s flights seem to be delayed, the film does a good job of capturing the highs and lows of frequent business travelers.</li>\r\n	<li>Bingham’s lifestyle — 322 days on the road, leaving him “43 miserable days at home” in Omaha — is a common one for young road warriors.  Bingham’s empty apartment in Omaha looks almost exactly like my first apartment in Dallas, except that Bingham’s has more stuff – I had a futon and a stereo in the living room, and a mattress and box spring on the floor.</li>\r\n	<li>Most young frequent travelers enjoy this freedom for 3-5 years — I’ve had staff flying to, say, Amsterdam for the weekend instead going back to an empty apartment  in Chicago, or, when on a project in Europe, use their home leave allowance to visit Morocco rather than their belongings in Cleveland.  But eventually, they settle into relationships and a more settled way of life.</li>\r\n	<li>I do know a number of guys, though, (and they are all men) who never make that transition.  They continue to live their lives in the air, using business dinners and client meetings as stand-ins for more meaningful relationships; motion – a meeting in Orlando, a dinner in Tampa, another meeting in New York, a dinner in Philadelphia – as a reason for being – as Bingham says “we’re sharks, not swans.”  Their biggest fear is the same as Bingham’s — that one day the music will stop, the travel will end, and that they’ll be in stuck in an empty apartment with no way out.</li>\r\n	<li>In one of Bingham’s motivational talks, he says “Relationships are the heaviest components of your life”, counseling his audience to avoid them because they slow you down. You can’t live a life in the air when you’re weighed down by relationships.</li>\r\n	<li>If the front half of the movie snaps with the efficiency of a frequent traveler, the back half shows the dark side.  Millions of frequent flier miles later, Bingham is dragging himself through airports with a little less crispness, weighed down by disappointment and loneliness.  The melancholy air that pervades the movie is real.  It is the same sense of melancholy that rules airports late on a Friday night -- when the real-world Binghams are walking off their planes, looking forward to nothing more than their Monday morning flights out.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Walk A Thousand Miles </em> by <a href=\"http://www.matthewebel.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Matthew Ebel</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Security Potpourri\r\n</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>It’s the last episode of the year or maybe I’m getting a bit of an early jump on the “hang loose” ethos of Hawaii, but I had some bits-and -pieces of recent experiences with airport security that I can’t get “grow up” into a stand-alone topic, so instead, here’s a bit of a Jeopardy-like “potpourri” topic.</li>\r\n	<li>Last year – July of 2008 to be exact – the Ponemon Institute – any relation to Pokemon? – issued a research report that claimed 12,000 laptops are lost every week in US airports.  I wrote a <a href=\"http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2008/07/06/12000-laptops-lost-in-airports-every-week-hmmm/\" target=\"_blank\">post</a> that was a bit skeptical of the numbers – “I’ve never lost a laptop,” I wrote, “and I don’t know anyone who has lost one in an airport.  I know people who’ve had them stolen out of rental cars, who’ve left them in a plane’s overhead bin, but no one who has lost one in an airport.”</li>\r\n	<li>That is, until one of my recent trips out of ORD when I watched an older gentleman in front of me in security put on his shoes and walk off to his gate.  Repacking my briefcase, I saw his PC sitting there – lost and forlorn – in a grey bin.</li>\r\n	<li>I know how it happened.  He had unpacked everything on the X-ray belt and headed over to the metal detector, but was sent back because he still had his shoes on.  I saw a yellow Lufthansa boarding pass in his hand and guessed that he was European – used to taking his belt off, but not his shoes.  I had already started feeding my bags into the X-ray, so we slotted his shoes between my bins.  On the other side of security, he must’ve been distracted by trying to find his shoes and forgot about his laptop.</li>\r\n	<li>I flagged down a TSA screener, pointed out the forgotten PC and the gentleman walking away down the terminal.  She ran after the man and brought him back.  He looked at the PC, then opened his briefcase – nice PC sleeve, but it was missing a key component.  The TSA screener looked at me and said, “Thank you soo much”.  I sensed that I saved her the hassle of filling out a lot of paper work.</li>\r\n	<li>I recently paid $30 to avoid my own TSA hassles.  My Illinois driver’s license was up for renewal and, because I hadn’t run into anything in that past 4 years, all I had to do was send in a form and they’d mail me back a 4-year renewal sticker to put on the back of my license.  Nice, convenient service – except that the last time I did that, I spent the next 4 years telling TSA screeners and rental car booth bodies that – no, my license hasn’t expired, flip it over and you’ll see the renewal.  It’s not really their fault – they’re just reacting to an expiry date on the face of the license.  But avoiding that explanation every week for the next 4 years… it seemed worth it to make the extra visit to the DMV.  The only downside – other than the $30 – a really bad driver’s license picture that will stick with me for the next 4 years.</li>\r\n	<li>And then, on one of my recent trips to LAX, I was standing outside Terminal 7 waiting for the Avis bus, and an airport cop tells me to “move down a bit”.  There’s a suspicious package sitting on the bench nearby.  Suspicious?  How far down did I need to move?  The cops didn’t look too worried – they were standing right by it.  Their dog didn’t look like he was reacting to anything.  So I slid down half the island behind a big concrete truss – far enough, I figured, to miss the major force of any blast, but not so far that I’d miss the rental bus.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"http://ad.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/show?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;bids=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #81</li>\r\n	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n	<li>The bridge music is from <a href=\"http://music.mevio.com\">Mevio’s Music Alley</a></li>\r\n	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or MP3 file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to @mpeacock on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com.  Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_81.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #81 – More Travel Tips; Up in The Air; Security Stories','','inherit','closed','closed','','219-revision-v1','','','2017-11-20 22:44:19','2017-11-21 03:44:19','',219,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/11/20/219-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1875,1,'2017-11-20 22:44:48','2017-11-21 03:44:48','Coming to you today from the Courtyard Hotel just across from Philadelphia\'s City Hall in the midst of a last quick trip before leaving the airports to the Thanksgiving traveling crush.  In this episode, we talk about ways of keeping track of travel receipts and an airport theft ring that targeted black luggage bags. I update last year\'s \"Road Warrior 201\" tips for this holiday travel season, and have an interview with the creator of <em><a href=\"http://vimeo.com/7167640\">Frequent Flyer</a></em>, a new documentary about mileage junkies.  Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_80.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_80.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />Here are the transcript from TravelCommons podcast #80:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Coming to you today from the Courtyard in Downtown Philadelphia – just kitty corner from the amazing piece of architecture that is Philadelphia’s City Hall.  Whether you think it’s impressive or impressively kitsch, there are few city halls that are so “in the center of things” as Philadelphia’s.</li>\r\n	<li>The Thanksgiving travel season just seems to keep getting longer – more smeared out.  Walking to my car in ORD last Friday afternoon after three incessantly rainy days in Seattle, I could see the holiday traffic already starting to build – lots of families, small kids pulling junior-sized rolling bags.  I dunno, if you’re going to have your kid play business traveler, why not go all the way, get them a black or charcoal grey half-sized Tumi and let them feel the power the way that the primary colors of the Dora the Explorer bag will never let them experience.</li>\r\n	<li>Me, I just want to feel the power of that tryptophan high from Thanksgiving Day turkey, maybe extending it with leftovers through the weekend, just being a couch slug until next Monday, when I have to fight with the tail end of the smeared-out holiday travel traffic and head back west again.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/beyond7-revelations/\" target=\"_blank\"><em>Miss America</em></a> by Beyond 7</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Just to continue on my rental car rant from the last episode, I booked a car a couple of weeks ago in LAX -- $19 daily rate, but with an additional $15 in taxes &amp; surcharges.  44% of the total cost was taxes &amp; surcharges.  Go figure.</li>\r\n	<li>Arnoud Heijnis, a long time T/C listener, sent me a note earlier this month with the subject line – Expense Mayhem:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Work has forced me in to being a frequent traveller and although I’ve got most basics down and start to enjoy the efficiency I have made my own. However there is one thing that I still need to master. It may sound simple and you might think “what’s the deal” but I have a challenge doing and keeping track of my expenses.</li>\r\n	<li>I know most people carry one of those transparent filing sleeves, as do I, however I continuously get caught off guard, especially when going from trip in to trip, which my company wants to see split. I have tried many things, apps for the iPhone, apps for the BlackBerry, different filing folders etc. But haven’t gotten to a system which is really satisfactory to me.</li>\r\n	<li>My challenge is that I have receipts coming in from events in the evening when I don’t have my laptop bag at hand, at the airport, hotels, different settings etc.  When I finally hit my desk for the two days of doing expenses I try to decipher the mayhem of receipts, hotel bills, car rental printouts etc. I’m usually pretty successful however feel that I’m not as efficient as I could be.</li>\r\n	<li>I was wondering if you could enlighten me with some tips and tricks from a seasoned traveller</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>Arnoud, thanks for the question.  Keeping track of your travel expenses, and then getting them accurately into whatever system your company uses for reimbursement is a question close to the hearts and wallets of every frequent traveler.  I average $5-10,000/month in travel expenses, so it’s real money to me.  And there’s more than once where I missed filing a couple hundred dollar receipt, which then reinforces that uncertainty – am I getting paid back for everything I buy?</li>\r\n	<li>I’m probably at the low-tech end of the scale.  I use the transparent sleeves that Arnoud mentions, as well as a specific sleeve in my wallet that’s reserved for receipts I collect when I don’t have my briefcase with me – for taxi receipts, parking receipts, restaurant receipts.  I also keep a business card in there (because it’s a nice fit) where I jot down cash expenditures – these are the ones I forget the most.</li>\r\n	<li>I’ve known a couple of folks who’ve tried <a href=\"http://www.evernote.com/\">Evernote</a> on their iPhones – taking a picture of a receipt and then tagging it with the right project or account.  I dunno – I keep thinking about trying it, but it never gets above the B level on my to-do list, which means it doesn’t get done.</li>\r\n	<li>The method of capture, though, isn’t near as important as the discipline of doing data entry every day, or every other day max.  You can re-create your day, even yesterday in your mind.  But wait ‘til the weekend, and, unless you’re an elephant, you’re hosed.  I get into trouble when I wait ‘til the end of the week to bang in my expenses.  Every other day over an end-of-the–day beer is a best practice for me.</li>\r\n	<li>If any other listeners have suggestions for Arnoud, please send them in or post them as comments to the website.</li>\r\n	<li>Leo Vegoda sent me a <a href=\"http://www.abc15.com/content/news/phoenixmetro/central/story/Valley-couple-officially-charged-for-stealing/dKpV4Yry1EOFWqDe80dDrg.cspx\">link</a> to a story from the beginning of November about a Phoenix couple that’ve been stealing luggage from SkyHarbor airport since <em>2005</em>!  The couple is accused of stealing nearly 1,000 items.  After searching the couple’s 14-room home, a Phoenix detective said “there were suitcases everywhere.  Floor to ceiling.  Everywhere”.</li>\r\n	<li>In his note, Leo pointed out an interesting fact in the story – “Most of the luggage is reportedly black and similar looking” – referring to my riff on replacing my squeaky wheeled bag – “not sure if going for black sounds like a good idea”</li>\r\n	<li>It definitely wasn’t a good idea for a new colleague.  Vishal was traveling to every week to DC for a project – the usual consulting grind – take the 6am American flight from O’Hare to Reagan National, catch the Metro to the client, crank all day, check into the hotel around 7, go out to dinner, and then hit the sack.  So it was probably around 9:30 or 10pm when Vishal finally discovered that he’d pulled someone else’s black roller bag – same color, same model -- out of the overhead bin of the morning flight – some 12-13 hours ago.</li>\r\n	<li>Sometime the next day, Vishal got reconnected with his black bag.  He found the owner’s business card in one of the front pockets (an important travel tip for you new road warriors out there) and connected with him at lunch.  Over the past two podcasts, we’ve talked about forgetting things in that moment of transition – when you’re leaving the plane or the rental car.  Facing an overhead bin full of black bags after getting up at 3:30am to make the 6am flight…  That afternoon, Vishal walked down to a tourist store in DC, bought himself a little red &amp; blue Obama bandana and tied it around the handle of his bag.  Not a political statement.  In this case, I think the “Change” on the bandana refers to fresh underwear.</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a question, a story, a comment – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com, you can send me a Twitter message at @mpeacock, or you can post them on the web site at travelcommons.com.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/westexit-extra/\" target=\"_blank\"><em>On Condition of Anonymity</em></a> by the West Exit</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Holiday Travel Tips\r\n</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>A little over a year ago – episode #68 to be precise – I did a piece that I called “Road Warrior 201”  where I skipped the usual tips – don’t check luggage unless you absolutely have to, wear loafers or slip-on shoes make security screening easier – and gave some of my intermediate level, I guess non-obvious tips.  Listening to the holiday travel tips in the most recent <a href=\"http://indietravelpodcast.com/podcast/winter-vacation-holiday-travel-guide/\" target=\"_blank\">episode</a> of Craig and Linda Martin’s Indie Travel Podcast – where they gave the TravelCommons podcast a nice shout-out – made me think about re-visiting the topic in time for the holiday travel season.</li>\r\n	<li>Over my last couple of trips – returning from Seattle and this flight out to Phila – I paid attention to the families, the ones getting a jump on the Thanksgiving holiday.  The families that made it through the terminal and through security were the ones who were paying attention.  The parents took advantage of the time in the security lines and prepped their kids.  They had the Nintendos already put away in the backpacks, their coats off and their shoe laces undone.  They got their kids’ attention – putting away the Nintendos is probably a good help – told them what they needed to do, so that when the kids got to the screening station, they weren’t wandering around  -- they were loading up their bins and ready to walk through the metal detector.  Even the most hardened business traveler will give a family with young kids a break if they look like they’re trying.  So the tip – make good use of the long security lines – get prepared.</li>\r\n	<li>One of the “201” tips from last year’s podcast was to factor in the potential costs of a missed connection due to weather – when you’re responsible for room and board – when choosing between a connecting or a direct flight.  If you tried, but you’re stuck with a connection, as we come into the winter season – at least in the Northern Hemisphere – give that connection a bit of space.  In hubs like Denver or Dallas, airlines will offer connection times of as little as 45 minutes.  Don’t take it!  Think about it – that means you have 15 minutes to get off your plane packed with once-a-year holiday travelers, weave through the terminal packed with families wandering along four-a-breast, and find your gate before your flight begins to board.  Any sort of traffic or weather delay and that 15 minutes is gone.  Give yourself a holiday break and save the stress -- go for the 90-minute connection.  Worst case, you have an extra 45 minutes to read a book or grab a beer.  Cheap insurance against sleeping on the airport floor.</li>\r\n	<li>Another stress reliever – if you’re on a direct flight or on the final leg to your designation, don’t sweat about getting your carry-on into the cabin.  On winter holiday flights, if you’re seating area 3 or higher – odds are, between winter coats and packed flights – there’s no overhead bin space for you.  Let the agent gate-check the bag for you.  You won’t have to pay a checked bag fee and it’s very unlikely that they’ll lose your bag – it’s only traveling a couple hundred feet from the jet bridge to the luggage bay.  Yes, it’ll add 30-45 minutes at the end of your trip waiting at the luggage carousel, but popping a vein in frustration will shorten your life at lot more than that.</li>\r\n	<li>Another “201” tip from last year -- if you have to call an airline or hotel and you don’t have a special status 1K or Platinum number, choose the unpopular path on the phone tree.  Travel companies don’t staff their customer service centers for peak loads – like the day when a Chicago blizzard cancels 400 flights.  It’s too expensive. So on those days, you’ll wait forever for an agent if you’ve followed the typical path down the phone tree.  On those days, choose the “Spanish” or “Int’l Travel” option because most everyone else is choosing English and domestic travel.  Once you connect with someone, they’ll take care of you.  They all work on the same systems in the same service centers.</li>\r\n	<li>But, above all, be realistic – it’s going to be crowded.  Steel yourself for it, get your inner karma tuned for it, and give yourself extra time.  Figure out how much time it’ll take and add another 50%.  At worst, you’ll have some extra time to watch the planes take off.  But it’ll allow you to breathe a bit easier when the snow begins to fall</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/solace-medusa/\" target=\"_blank\">Subtle Vice</a> </em> by Solace</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong><em>Frequent Flyer</em> -- The Documentary\r\n</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>In episode #78, we talked about the upcoming movie <em><a href=\"http://www.theupintheairmovie.com/\">Up In The Air</a></em>, where George Clooney stars as an extreme frequent flyer.  Dave of the <a href=\"http://www.sandandtsunamis.com/\">Sand and Tsunamis</a> blog left a comment on the TravelCommons website pointing to a 20-minute documentary about “mileage junkies” called, fittingly enough, Frequent Flyer.  I caught up with the creator, Gabriel Leigh, over Skype and talked to him about his film.</li>\r\n	<li><em>Interview with Gabriel Leigh</em></li>\r\n	<li>Gabriel’s documentary <em>Frequent Flyer</em> can be <a href=\"http://vimeo.com/7167640\">found</a> on the Vimeo video site.  And on Weds, Nov 25th, a 13-minute <a href=\"http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/rough/2009/11/30000_feet_freq.html\">version</a> of the film will be on the PBS FrontLine site.  Watch it – I think you’ll enjoy it.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"http://ad.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/show?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;bids=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #80</li>\r\n	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n	<li>The bridge music is from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com\" target=\"_blank\">Magnatune</a>, the <em>we are not evil</em> label. <em>Miss America</em> by Beyond 7, <em>On Condition of Anonymity</em> by the West End, and <em>Subtle Vice</em> by Solace. You can find these and more at <a href=\"http://magnatune.com\" target=\"_blank\">magnatunes.com</a>.</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or MP3 file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to @mpeacock on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com.  Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_80.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #80 – Holiday Travel Tips; Frequent Flyer Documentary','','inherit','closed','closed','','198-revision-v1','','','2017-11-20 22:44:48','2017-11-21 03:44:48','',198,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/11/20/198-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1876,1,'2017-11-20 22:45:59','2017-11-21 03:45:59','Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, Illinois at the end of one of those travel weeks where I lost control of my schedule – DC to Dallas to Houston to LA.  In this episode, we talk about the problems with LAX security, my choices for <em>white noise</em> when I\'m trying to sleep on an airplane, and the reasons why I\'m skipping rental cars. I also talk with <a href=\"http://www.boingo.com/\">Boingo</a> WiFi about the choices frequent travelers are making in going wireless. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_79.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_79.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />Here are the transcript from TravelCommons podcast #79:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, Illinois, at the end of one of those travel weeks where I lost control of my schedule – the 6am flight to DC on Monday, the 6:30am flight to Houston on Tuesday by way of Dallas, the 6:30pm flight to LA, and then, refusing to take the red-eye, returning home Friday afternoon. Makes next week’s 4 days in Washington seem like a cake walk.</li>\r\n	<li>Seems like I’m getting more of those.Two weeks ago, my travel week was Monday in Stamford, CT; Tuesday in Providence, RI; Wednesday in Philadelphia; Thursday back in Chicago, and then Friday in San Diego, returning at 6:30am Saturday courtesy of the red eye. I used to be able to sleep on red eyes, but not so much anymore. And with a flight time between LAX and ORD of less than 4 hrs, there’s not a lot of time for sleep – even after scoring a first class upgrade. I was pretty worthless on Saturday – I went straight to bed after getting home and then took a nap later in the afternoon. The red-eye is false economy – I’m not saving time; just snowplowing the problem into the next day. Hence, my lack of enthusiasm for another red-eye this week.</li>\r\n	<li>I will say this, though. With winter coming in Chicago, I’m starting to look around for <em>strategically</em> located clients – Miami, Phoenix, LA. There are times when travel does have its rewards.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/clayne-potemkin/\" target=\"_blank\"><em>You Are The Reason</em></a> by C. Layne</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Robert Fenerty dropped us a line giving his point-of-view on many of the things covered in the last TravelCommons episode:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Mark, aboard a flight to Prague, and with 5 weeks of international travel ahead of me, I\'m also peering ahead to Thanksgiving.  On the other hand, I\'ll soon have United 1k status and am looking forward to seeing Versailles, Madrid, and the Dominican Republic.  As for keeping touch with my family, I really enjoy giving people a \"Skype tour\" of my hotel room.  I find that the wet running clothes or the ironing board next to the TV provide an easy segue to the events of the day.  I\'m lucky enough to have a client that pays for resort hotels, so there\'s usually something interesting to see and talk about.  That could be a dinner plate-sized showerhead or a view of a golf course.</li>\r\n	<li>As for losing things and making mistakes, my weakness is at the moments of transition.  As I leave the car to enter the shuttle, my mind is racing ahead to claim check, the coupon, the passport, and the luggage in the trunk.  But not the headlights, which I\'ve left on.  Perhaps the answer is to pause, consider the requirements of the moment, and not the future.  Incidentally, the parking attendant who jumped my car told me about a Prius that idled on and off in their parking lot for a week before running out of gas.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n	<li>Bob, thanks for the note.  Reading your itinerary -- Versailles, Madrid, and the Dominican Republic – I get a bit jealous.  But then I recall times when I had trip itineraries of Paris, London, Dublin, Zurich and other folks would say “Oh, that’s so glamorous”, but the reality was that I was spending my days in Paris, London, Dublin, and Zurich in conference rooms that looked very much like conference rooms in Cleveland, Nashville, Indianapolis, and Atlanta – except with different brands of bottled water and no air-conditioning.  Of course, I’m hoping Robert is doing a much better job of work-life balance than I did.</li>\r\n	<li>Leo Vegoda “@-signed” me on a Tweet from Seoul’s Inchon airport.  Leo wrote – “Check in &amp; security at ICN a breeze. Noodles and beancurd delicious. LAX are you listening?”</li>\r\n	<li>I was thinking about this when I walked into LAX Friday morning for my flight back to Chicago.  The lines in Terminal 7 were a zoo at all the screening stations.  It looked like a number of Japanese and Mexican tourists weren’t completely clear on the TSA’s 3-1-1 liquid carry-on limits.  I saw 1 TSA screener fill an entire gray bin with liquids – toothpaste, shampoo, water bottle, sour cream (?) – from one family.  Another woman kept unlocking and relocking her pink rolling bag to pull things out – first, her PC, then a bottle of water, then a jar of honey (?).  It was not pretty.</li>\r\n	<li>Of course, a big part of this is LAX with all its little terminals hanging off the access road, and none of them with enough real estate to house a proper screening set up.</li>\r\n	<li>Walking into this, I took a deep breath – I wasn’t tight on time, but shuffling through security lines wasn’t the way I wanted to start the day.  Sometimes when the main floor of Terminal 7 is bad, I’ll go up to the screening station on the bridge over from the parking garage.  I went to ask Airserv women – the contractors at the start of the line checking boarding passes – if that line was any shorter and she spotted the Global Services mark on my United boarding pass and said “But you’re Global Services so you don’t have to worry about that.”  She took my boarding pass and driver’s license, walked me past all the lines, dropped the line tape, gave my boarding pass to the TSA guy and escorted me right to an X-ray machine.  It was the ultimate – and very timely – line cut.  No noodles and beancurd like Leo had (a bit too early for that), but it did give me time to grab a cappuccino before getting on my flight home.  And reinforced, once again, the value of being “super elite”</li>\r\n	<li>I’ve talked in past podcasts about using white noise applications to drown out the cabin noise that my Bose noise-canceling headphones don’t cover.  I use a couple of applications on my iPhone – <a href=\"http://www.tmsoft.com/iphone-whitenoise.html\" target=\"_blank\">White Noise</a> and <a href=\"http://www.naturespace.com/iphone.php\" target=\"_blank\">Naturespace</a>.  White Noise was the first one I used – I liked their Amazon rain forest.</li>\r\n	<li>But then I flipped over to Naturespace because I thought the stereo quality, “aural spacing” of the sound in the headphones was a good bit better. But now I’m back to White Noise after the latest upgrade because I really like one of the new sounds – the Tibetan Singing Bowl.</li>\r\n	<li>Maybe it’s just me, but this is the perfect white noise for me.  Others I’ve played it for thought it sounded like a huge swarm of mosquitoes, but it’s come in very handy on the string of 6am Monday morning flights I recently had.</li>\r\n	<li>And just a quick note, for those of you who check out the show notes, I’ve switched over from summary bullet points to more of a transcript.  It’s a lot more words, but actually a good bit easier for me.  Since the show is usually just me talking – as opposed to many other shows that are interviews or conversations among multiple hosts – I script out a good bit of my show.  That may be disappointing to those who thought I was naturally this glib, but it saves me a <em>lot</em> of post-production time – editing out ums, ahs, and narrative dead-ends.  Since I have the script, I figured that copy-pasting it is easier than trying to summarize it – sort of the show notes version of Mark Twain’s “I’d have written a shorter letter if I had the time”.  So anyhow, starting with TravelCommons #78, you can wade through the gory details of each show by clicking through the “Read the rest of this entry” to the show notes page.</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a question, a story, a comment – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com, you can send me a Twitter message at @mpeacock, or you can post them on the web site at travelcommons.com.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/seldon-lost/\" target=\"_blank\"><em>Fire In The Day\'s Field</em></a> by the Seldon Plan</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Skipping the Rental Car\r\n</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Two weeks ago, I had to get from downtown Washington DC to a Northern Virginia suburb for a client dinner. I looked at the <a href=\"http://www.wmata.com/rail/maps/map.cfm\" target=\"_blank\">Metro map</a>, rang up some car services, but finally gritted my teeth and rented a car.  That’s pretty much my attitude toward car rentals these days — the choice of last resort.  It wasn’t always this way.  But with cost and fee increases, shrinking fleets, and more inconvenient locations, I work hard to skip the rental car counter.</li>\r\n	<li>The biggest issue is cost.  Rental car prices have <a href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/28/travel/28prac.html\" target=\"_blank\">soared</a> — increasing an average of 60-70% over last year.  But prices are just part of the story.  Additional fees and taxes can add another 50% to the number that finally hits your credit card.  The concession recovery fee that airports and train stations charge is usually one of the bigger charges.   Avis hit me with 11.11% concession recovery fees on recent trips through Seattle-Tacoma and LAX airports, and a 10% fee for renting at Philadelphia’s 30th Street train station.  Picking up the car in town doesn’t always dodge this fee.  Hertz leveled a 13% concession recovery fee on a rental from the San Francisco Marriott hotel. On top of that, the rental companies add on a customer facility charge, a vehicle licensing fee, and an energy recovery fee.  And then the state and local governments’ turn.  My Sea-Tac rental receipt shows a 9.5% sales tax plus a 9.7% rental tax.  California adds 3.5% tourism assessment fee.  My Philadelphia rental had 4% passenger car rental tax (split between the state and the city) plus a $2/day state surcharge.  Just across these four examples, fees and taxes added 27-51% to the final cost of my rental.</li>\r\n	<li>Another problem is being able to get a car.  The easiest way for rental car companies to make more money is to increase each car’s utilization — the number of days it’s rented.  Makes sense, but when demand for cars increases just a bit, the pickings start to get slim.  Last month, I flew from LAX to Washington-Dulles and planned to rent a car because it would be a bit cheaper than the round-trip cost of a cab to/from DC.  I landed at Dulles around midnight.  Wheeling my bag across the empty Avis Preferred parking spaces, I saw a huge Ford F150 4×4 King Cab pick-up truck.  ”They can’t be serious,” I thought.  Oh yes, they were — that was their idea of the intermediate size car I had requested.  This wasn’t going to fit in a parking garage in downtown DC.  I walked back to the rental bus and asked the driver to take me to the taxi line.</li>\r\n	<li>Of course, the drive back to the airport taxi line wasn’t a short one because airport authorities have been aggressively relocating rental car companies to “improved” consolidated facilities that are a 15-20 minute drive from the airport.  Frequent travelers work hard to reduce the time spent getting from one point to another — maintaining airline status so they can use the short security line, carrying on their bags so they don’t have to wait by the luggage carousel.  Renting a car used to be a quick transaction — walk off the plane, across to the parking lot, and into your rental car.  It’s still that way at smaller airports like Nashville and Little Rock, but at airports like Cleveland, Baltimore-Washington, and Phoenix, you need to pack a lunch.</li>\r\n	<li>I used to enjoy renting cars.  Now, I avoid it.  Hikes in prices and fees have made taxis and private car services more competitive, and moves to push rental lots way off property have made the alternatives a lot more convenient. Last year, at the tipping point where the cost of rental car was the same or maybe even a bit more than the cost of a taxi, I’d take the rental car. I enjoyed the flexibility of having a car, and even looked forward to finding a fun car in the Avis lot or under the Hertz Gold canopy. Now, I’ll pay extra to avoid them. While I work every year to make sure I keep my Marriott Platinum status, I fell out of Hertz’s President’s Circle without a care.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/fernwood-sangita/\" target=\"_blank\">White Oak</a> </em> by Fernwood</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>The Best Way to Drop Wires\r\n</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Working in airplanes, airports, hotels, Starbucks, and the back seats of taxis, frequent travelers are always trying to figure out the best way to work wirelessly.</li>\r\n	<li>This week, <a href=\"http://www.boingo.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Boingo</a> introduced an <a href=\"http://mobile.boingo.com/download/client.php?client=blackberry\" target=\"_blank\">app</a> on the BlackBerry platform for its WiFi service.  At first, I didn’t think much of it, but then I got thinking – why would I want WiFi if I have 3G?  I see more and more 3G modems hanging off of laptops.  Is WiFi fading out?</li>\r\n	<li>I spoke with <a href=\"http://www.linkedin.com/in/christiangunning\" target=\"_blank\">Christian Gunning</a> of Boingo and asked him just this question as I was sitting in Houston-Hobby airport waiting for my flight to LA</li>\r\n	<li>“It’s not an either/or,” he said, “the two technologies are complimentary.” In high-traffic/high-“loiter” areas like airports, 3G cells get maxed out by people entertaining themselves with streaming multimedia. While one cell can handle 600 voice calls, data quickly consumes those slots, pushing the capacity down to 50-80 calls.  Moving that streaming data over to a Boingo WiFi hot spot gives much better throughput.</li>\r\n	<li>Makes sense, but what about the cost?  I can get a 3G mobile plan from AT&amp;T or Verizon for $60/month.  I can get close to that in a couple of days with WiFi – paying $10 for a day pass in the airport, another $10 at Starbucks, and then another $10 in the hotel at night.</li>\r\n	<li>Christian pointed out that Boingo’s monthly WiFi plan costs $10 for unlimited bandwidth – as compared to the 5GB caps typical for 3G modems –covers 58 airports, Starbucks, McDonald’s, and many hotels.  Their smartphone plan – for iPhones and Blackberries – is 2 bucks cheaper.  And as they continue to sign reciprocal agreements with other network companies, their coverage expands.</li>\r\n	<li>He makes a compelling case for the continued relevance of WiFi – it’s built into every recent laptop, its higher bandwidth is better for multimedia, and the performance isn’t as variable as 3G.</li>\r\n	<li>My cut at it is – unfortunately, a frequent traveler needs both.  WiFi is great when you’re sitting in an airport or in a Starbucks; it’s no good when you’re inside the airplane waiting to take off or in long cab ride – because you’ve sworn off rental cars – or in a hotel with lousy broadband, because it’s not just 3G cells that can get flooded with streaming videos of , uh, artistic content.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"http://ad.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/show?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;bids=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #79</li>\r\n	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n	<li>The bridge music is from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com\" target=\"_blank\">Magnatune</a>, the <em>we are not evil</em> label. <em>You Are the Reason</em> by C Layne, <em>Fire in the Day’s Field</em> by the Seldon Plan, and <em>White Oak</em> by Fernwood. You can find these and more at <a href=\"http://magnatune.com\" target=\"_blank\">magnatunes.com</a>.</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or MP3 file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to @mpeacock on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com.  Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_79.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #79 – Skipping Rental Cars, WiFi or 3G?','','inherit','closed','closed','','191-revision-v1','','','2017-11-20 22:45:59','2017-11-21 03:45:59','',191,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/11/20/191-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1877,1,'2017-11-20 22:46:25','2017-11-21 03:46:25','Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, Illinois at the start of what\'s looking like 6 weeks of straight travel.  In this episode, we talk about the need to have a place to blow off steam after a frustrating day of travel, and how the distractions of cell phone calls have caused me to leave a trail of personal belongings behind in hotel and airplanes across the country.  Finally, while getting a knowing chuckle out of  the trailer for the upcoming movie <a href=\"http://www.theupintheairmovie.com\" target=\"_blank\"><em>Up In The Air</em></a> where George Clooney plays an uber-frequent traveler, the movie\'s theme about using travel to run away from relationships isn\'t all that fictional.\r\n\r\nHere\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_78.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_78.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />Here are the transcript from TravelCommons podcast #78:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, Illinois.  It was a light travel week for me this week – just out to Philadelphia for Tuesday, Weds, and Thurs and then back to Chicago, but a heavy work week, which unfortunately pushed this episode of TC out from my intended recording date of Weds, Sept 30th to today.</li>\r\n	<li>Looking at my calendar, I find myself in the midst of one of my 6-week-straight sets of travel.  It started 2 weeks ago when I had to be in LA and DC the same week – I just hate doing the transcon thing in the middle of the week.  Last week was Philadelphia and NYC – not too bad.  Next week, DC and Boston, then another week in Philadelphia, and then another LA and DC week.  The way it’s looking, I’m going to be traveling every week until Thanksgiving.</li>\r\n	<li>Which is, of course, the perfect time for my suitcase to break.  I think I mentioned a couple episodes ago that the bearing on one of the wheels is shot, giving me a nice “Squeak, Squeak” soundtrack as I walk down the airport concourse or go trundling through a prospect’s office space as I did last week in NYC.  It was embarrassing – lots of “prairie dogging” – heads popping up from the cube field, looking to see who’s making that annoying sound.  There’s a sure-fire sales technique for you.</li>\r\n	<li>But now one of the handle supports has broken, making the suitcase twist every time I pull it onto a plane or cross a street, and making it just about impossible to attach my computer bag to it. So I’m going to have to suck it up and buy a new suitcase.</li>\r\n	<li>It’s not like I haven’t gotten a lot of mileage out of this bag – 6 years at, say, 100,000 miles a year.  Or that it cost me a lot – maybe $200 at a TJ Maxx.  And it’s held up better than a colleague’s $700 Tumi – his is only 4 yrs old and last week dropped an entire wheel sub-assembly – the wheel and all the surrounding bits that keep it in the bag – while he was sprinting for a flight in LGA.</li>\r\n	<li>No, it’s just the hassle.  And how excited can you get shopping for my umpteenth black 22-inch rolling bag.  Maybe I’ll go for a new color – something that will stand out in the overhead bin, something that will express some individuality – something like, I dunno, navy blue!</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/seldon-circles/\"><em>Making Circles</em></a> by the Seldon Plan</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Sometimes when you’re traveling and things start to go sideways, you want to vent – just blow off your frustration – but to whom?  Certainly not to any airline personnel – at best, you’ll be ignored; at worst, you’ll be kicked off the plane and/or arrested.  If you’re traveling with a colleague, you can kvetch a bit, but too much and you look like a whiner – not a reputation that will propel you far up the career ladder.</li>\r\n	<li>For me, Twitter has become a little bolt hole into which I can scream my frustrations – from broken United planes to the conga line of frustrations that is Washington’s Dulles airport, I package my woes up in 140 characters and shove them into the Twitter-verse.  Has probably made a few of you guys “un-follow” me, but that’s OK.  It’s a small price to avoid getting busted by those gentle and caring guys who populate the Chicago police force.</li>\r\n	<li>For Lori Humm, a longtime TravelCommons listener, the TravelCommons comments section can provide a needed outlet.  Reacting to the latest addition to the TSA’s security play-acting, Lori writes...</li>\r\n<blockquote>Mark - I\'m about to lose my mind. Apparently, my airport, Richmond, is about to be the test bed for ANOTHER level of security. We already have the body scanning machines and now this – screening of powders.\r\n\r\nI\'d love to hear your thoughts on the addition of powders to security, especially given your pride (and constant defense of) your tooth powder! I moved to using all powder cosmetics to avoid carrying any liquids at all, and am starting to resign myself to being make-up free if that\'s what it take to avoid being sidelined for additional screening.\r\n\r\nBy the way - still doing the Richmond-to-Baton Rouge weekly haul - this makes my 15th month. If that doesn\'t make someone lose their mind, this additional screening certainly will.</blockquote>\r\n	<li>You know the TSA just doesn’t get it when they announced the powder screening as <a href=\"http://www.tsa.gov/press/releases/2009/0908.shtm\"><em>Implementing New Enhanced Threat Detection Capability</em></a> .  In the TSA’s blog, Blogger Bob, as defensive and oblivious as usual, <a href=\"http://www.tsa.gov/blog/2009/09/new-procedures-for-traveling-with.html\" target=\"_blank\">says</a> “We haven’t received any specific threats that led us to this new procedure” , but we thought it made sense to put in place some new annoyances for travelers and get some practice in before the holidays.  Just kidding – about the last bit.  Blogger Bob did actually write that, unlike the liquid ban, there’s nothing specific that caused them to launch this powder parade accompaniment to the shoe carnival.  I’m not so sure that my snarky annoyance comment is too far from the truth.</li>\r\n	<li>But, having said that, I’ve yet to see anybody get flagged over for a powder check.  I have seen a bit of an increase in random wipe-&amp;-tests – the guy behind me Tuesday at Midway had his shoes wiped and I had my computer bag wiped at ORD last month, but that’s not a big thing.  No unpacking and re-packing bags, no rustling through your toiletries kit – just a couple wipes on the outside surface with a test pad and they run it through what I guess is some sort of spectrograph. Takes 1 minute – they’re usually done before I get my shoes re-tied.</li>\r\n	<li>I gotta say, though, that the tougher part of that note is the 15 straight months of flying between Richmond and Baton Rouge.  I may complain a bit about flying from LA to DC, but 15 months of connecting through Atlanta, think about it – Hartsfield twice a week – I’m not sure anybody should be hassling Lori about anything.</li>\r\n	<li>And the final follow-up, we’ve have an ongoing thread through it seems like most of this year’s episodes about in-flight electronics.  Flying out here to Philadelphia on Southwest Tuesday morning – OK, I know that I said that I wouldn’t fly SW again for a long time after they left me hanging in Little Rock, but they’ve got a double credit promo going right how and I have 12 flight credits in the bank, so with this trip, I’ll get the 4 more credits I need for a free ticket, which I’ll then give to my mother for a spring trip to visit us, so, in the vein of “don’t cut your nose off to spite your face”, suck it up if you’re close to a free ticket.</li>\r\n	<li>So, anyhow, in the back of SW’s in-flight magazine, they had the best layout of allowed in-flight electronics of any airline.  Whereas the South Africa Airlines rules about no in-flight smartphones was buried halfway into a paragraph full of rules, Southwest has a nice graphic layout that has 3 sections – Always Allowed, Allowed Above 10,000 ft, and Never Allowed – really nice.  Nothing really controversial – Smart phones in Airline or Game mode are in the Allowed Above 10,000 ft section.  However, I was surprised to see Noise-Cancelling Headphones in the Always Allowed section.  Given that these have “on-off” switches, most by-the-book flight attendants see the red light on my Bose cans and tell me to switch them off.  But on SW, I guess, they’re good through the entire flight.  But still, one more example of the lack of consistency in rules – which I’ll say is one of the main drivers of traveler frustration.</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a question, a story, a comment – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com, you can send me a Twitter message at @mpeacock, or you can post them on the web site at T/C.com.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/eliyahu-wind/\">Oh Yeah</a></em> by Eliyahu Sills</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Lost in Distraction\r\n</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>We’ve talked in a number of episodes about things being left behind by travelers – the study about the number of laptops left behind in airports, people walking away from TSA checkpoints without their shoes, the overflowing box of power adaptors that just about every hotel can pull out when you ask to borrow one.</li>\r\n	<li>A couple of weeks ago, when unpacking from my last New York trip, I discovered that I’d left a pair of olive slacks in my hotel room.  It was one of those “head smacking” moments – how could I be so stupid?</li>\r\n	<li>Sometimes I feel like I’m leaving a little trail of belongings behind me as I travel.</li>\r\n	<li>Most are small – pens, books, magazines, enough toiletries to make up a couple of complete kits.</li>\r\n	<li>But some are big – the olive slacks, my original pair of Bose headphones, an entire suitcase in the trunk of a cab.</li>\r\n	<li>OK, I’m not sweating the books or the tooth brush, but, come on – an entire suitcase?  Other than creeping senility, what’s my problem?</li>\r\n	<li>At least for me, it’s answering my cell phone.  Every time I’ve forgotten something big, it’s been because of a phone call.</li>\r\n	<li>The Bose headphones?  My flight had landed in SFO, I was standing up, pulling my suitcase out of the overhead and the phone rings.  Of course I answer it, and now I’m juggling my phone, my jacket, my suitcase, my briefcase while trying to slide out into the aisle.  Distracted, I completely forget about the headphones in the seatback pocket.  I don’t remember them until the next day when they’re long gone, a birthday present for the son or daughter of one of the cleaning crew.</li>\r\n	<li>My olive slacks?  One of those days when I just couldn’t get out of my hotel room because of serial phone calls.  The phone rings, I answer it, 15-minute conversation, I hang up, re-start my packing, only to have the phone ring again.  Another 15-minute conversation, then another call comes in on call waiting.  I look at my watch – damn, I gotta get out of this hotel room if I’m going to make my flight home.  I didn’t do my usual room scan and walked out light one of my favorite pair of pants.</li>\r\n	<li>When I’m not distracted, I’m usually pretty methodical about leaving hotels or planes.  I think my wife thinks that my hotel routine is border-line obsessive-compulsive.  I empty the bathroom out, pack up my toiletries, then go back in, check around, turn off the light and close the door.  Then, over to the bed, I throw all the pillows on the floor (which, sometimes is 8 or 9 pillows), snap the bedspread to send any hidden socks flying.</li>\r\n	<li>Then, clear all the flat surfaces – it either goes with me or, like the room service menu, goes into a drawer.  This is how I didn’t leave behind my iPhone charger this past week.  I was clearing off the desk, which ends up being a tangle of hotel modem wires, lamp cords, promotional material, and my own tangle of electronics.  I thought I had everything packed, but was making one more scan – cleaning off the flat surfaces so I could give the room one last scan.  And there, as I was clearing off the desk, I found I had forgotten to pack my iPhone charger.  I had missed seeing it in the midst of the Ethernet cord coming out of the hotel modem.</li>\r\n	<li>Coming off a plane, I tick through a mental inventory, even patting myself down to make sure I have my wallet and iPhone.  I look, but don’t put my hands into the seat back pocket – it can be ugly in there.</li>\r\n	<li>But all this takes some concentration – avoid getting lost in distraction.</li>\r\n	<li>I was thinking about this the other day when one of those iPhone commercials came on.  There’s an app for this; there’s an app for that.  I thought “if there’s an app for everything, there’s gotta be one to keep from getting distracted.”  Then I realized there is one – kinda – and it’s built right in.  It’s the Off button.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/liquid-seventythree/\" target=\"_blank\">Is That Called Love</a> </em> by Liquid Zen</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>A Movie About Us</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>&lt;1st audio clip from trailer&gt;</li>\r\n	<li>I love that line – “I fly 350,000 miles a year; it’s 250,000 miles to the moon.”  From the latest trailer for “Up in the Air”, a movie with George Clooney starring as a consultant who fires people.  He’s good at his job, which keeps him on the road over 300 days a year.  He lives – thrives -- in “Airworld”, the travel bubble we’ve talked about on prior episodes where frequent travelers seem to float over the places they visit, insulated by airline clubs and hotel concierge lounges and special lines that whoosh the statused elite along to their next destination.</li>\r\n	<li>I’ll post a <a href=\"www.theupintheairmovie.com\" target=\"_blank\">link</a> to the movie’s web site.  It’s just starting the fall film festival cycle, building word-of-mouth for its release during the Christmas season.</li>\r\n	<li>The trailer has some good lines, like this advice on security line strategy that Clooney’s seasoned traveler gives to a newly-minted Ivy League grad</li>\r\n	<li>&lt;2nd audio clip from trailer&gt;</li>\r\n	<li>Going through both trailers on the movie’s website, you can see the premise is a bit deeper.  The George Clooney character is using his frequent flying lifestyle to avoid relationships – nothing too heavy</li>\r\n	<li>&lt;3rd audio clip from trailer&gt;</li>\r\n	<li>While fictional, there’s more than a bit of truth to this.  I’ve know a number of guys – and not the gender-neutral Midwest “guys”; they’re all men – over my career who used the need to leave Sunday night for LA or to stay over the weekend in Europe as ways to avoid problems at home – or, once divorced – which all of these guys eventually were – used the same excuses to avoid the barren new apartments.</li>\r\n	<li>Oftentimes when talking to new consultants, giving them some thoughts, some advice about the traveling lifestyle that is part and parcel of consulting, I talk less about who to avoid in the security lines and more about the need to manage their personal lives with at least the same amount of effort as they do their frequent flyer statuses.  I know I shouldn’t be, but I’m always surprised by the number of guys who don’t.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"http://ad.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/show?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;bids=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #78</li>\r\n	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n	<li>The bridge music is from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com\" target=\"_blank\">Magnatune</a>, the <em>we are not evil</em> label . Making Circles by the Seldon Plan, Oh Yeah by Eliyahu Sills, and Is That Called Love by Liquid Zen.  You can find these and more at <a href=\"http://magnatune.com\" target=\"_blank\">magnatunes.com</a>.</li>\r\n	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or MP3 file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to @mpeacock on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com.  Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_78.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #78 – Lost in Distraction, Movie About Us','','inherit','closed','closed','','168-revision-v1','','','2017-11-20 22:46:25','2017-11-21 03:46:25','',168,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/11/20/168-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1878,1,'2017-11-20 22:46:57','2017-11-21 03:46:57','Recorded in the Washington, DC Marriott as I wrap up a week of business travel before heading out for a week\'s vacation.  My recent trip back down to Johannesburg, South Africa provides a good bit of content -- on-plane security in Dakar, South Africa Airways\' unique <a href=\"http://www.moneyweb.co.za/mw/view/mw/en/page292671?oid=225852&amp;sn=2009%20Detail\">ban</a> on in-flight use of iPhones and Blackberries, and good luck with Skype.  Experiences on the flight back home illustrate the benefits of being a \"super elite\" flier, which might be easier to attain with Delta\'s recent <a href=\"http://crankyflier.com/2009/07/27/delta-introduces-rollover-miles/\">changes</a> to their SkyMiles program.  We wrap up with a couple of stories about how frequent travelers squeeze in \"instant\" vacations in the midst of business travel. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_76.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_76.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />Here are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #76:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Recorded in the Washington Marriott in downtown Washington, DC</li>\r\n	<li>Have been doing some easy travel – Tulsa, New York, St Louis, and now DC – but the month since the last podcast was dominated by a 2-week trip back down to Joburg, SA</li>\r\n	<li>Will move from South Africa Airways to Delta for my next flight because of SAA\'s <a href=\"http://www.moneyweb.co.za/mw/view/mw/en/page292671?oid=225852&amp;sn=2009%20Detail\">ban</a> on in-flight use of iPhones and Blackberries, even when in \"flight\" or \"airplane\" mode</li>\r\n	<li>Also not thrilled with being <a href=\"http://ashsd.afacwa.org/docs/pestdest.pdf\">sprayed with insecticides</a> after the stopover in Dakar, Senegal</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://www.magnatune.com/artists/albums/rompaey-mozaic/\">Bubbly</a></em> by Ruben van Rompaey</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>GoGo Inflight WiFi is offering 50% off their service through 8/31/09 using the coupon code 158FLF7365</li>\r\n	<li>Have become a big Skype user with my travels to South Africa.  Had good luck with the Skype iPhone app also</li>\r\n	<li>A new hurdle in Joburg airport -- had to take off my glasses for an optical body temperature scan before going through passport control</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/travelcommons/3763764793/\">Link</a> to the picture of the taxi sticker warning of a \"$200 clean up fee\" for anyone vomiting in the cab.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/kokoon-berlin/\">How Do I Work This</a></em> by The Kokoon</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Real Benefits to Being Super Elite\r\n</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Delta stirred up the frequent flier world by becoming <a href=\"http://crankyflier.com/2009/07/27/delta-introduces-rollover-miles/\">“the AT&amp;T of the airline industry,”</a> allowing the rollover of elite qualifying miles.</li>\r\n	<li>My IAD-JNB flight put me over 100,000 elite qualifying miles on United, the earliest I\'ve ever requalified for United 1K status</li>\r\n	<li>Rolling over elite qualifying miles would give me a reason to keep racking up miles on United rather than flipping to another airline to earn elite status</li>\r\n	<li>Special treatment provided to super elites is worth the qualifying effort.  United\'s Global Services desk helped me avoid a 4-hour mechanical delay on my way home from Washington, DC</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/weigl-proof/\">Piano Circus</a></em> by Philipp Weigl</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Instant Vacation</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Flight attendants on my IAD-ORD flight had bid on a trip with a 29-hour layover in Portland to give themselves a bit of an instant vacation -- time that you enjoy in the midst of a business trip</li>\r\n	<li>In the winter, I break up transcontinental flights with a ski day in Denver</li>\r\n	<li>Spoke with people from <a href=\"http://www.snow.com/Default.aspx\">Vail Resorts</a> who said that this was the kind of behavior they hoped to see when they introduced the <a href=\"http://www.snow.com/epicpass/home.aspx\">Epic Pass</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"http://ad.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/show?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;bids=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Magnatune</a></li>\r\n	<li>Feedback at comments@travelcommons.com or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_76.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #76 – Real Benefits of Being Super Elite, Instant Vacations','','inherit','closed','closed','','144-revision-v1','','','2017-11-20 22:46:57','2017-11-21 03:46:57','',144,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/11/20/144-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1879,1,'2017-11-20 22:47:59','2017-11-21 03:47:59','Recorded in the St Louis Airport Marriott courtesy of a blown connection by Southwest.  We clean out the TravelCommons mail bag, going through listener comments on disabling in-flight electronics, eating alone, and finding good non-chain food on the road.  We talk about the sudden collapse of the CLEAR registered traveler program and if in-flight WiFi will <em>really</em> improve frequent traveler productivity.  I also give a little personal history about how I came to travel so much. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_75.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_75.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />Here are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #75:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Recorded in the St Louis Airport Marriott due to a missed connection courtesy of Southwest Airlines</li>\r\n	<li>This is a pretty big miss by Southwest.  It’ll be a while before they see me at Midway again</li>\r\n	<li>Haven’t been doing quite as much travel as usual.  Passenger traffic in May was <a href=\"http://blogs.wsj.com/middleseat/2009/06/05/thanks-in-part-to-swine-flu-air-passenger-traffic-plunged-in-may/\">down over 9%</a> , and I personally contributed to that trend</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Ice Hotel</em> by <a href=\"http://www.paristocuba.com\">Mario Grigorov</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Thanks to everyone for the best wishes tweets, e-mails and website comments on last month’s 4th anniversary show</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"http://mikkelsen.tv/simon/\">Simon Mikkelsen</a> provided a nice fact-based response to my rant about the mess of in-flight electronics regulations</li>\r\n	<li>The CLEAR registered traveler program replaced its <a href=\"http://www.flyclear.com/\">web site</a> with a single white page announced its immediate shutdown.  Guess I made the right decision not renewing my membership</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Giving In</em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/senne-aerial/\" target=\"_blank\">Brad Senne</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Can’t I Fly Unplugged?\r\n</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Joint American Airlines/HP <a href=\"http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press/2009/090522a.html\" target=\"_blank\">survey</a> says most \" tech-savvy frequent flyers\" think WiFi is more important than food.</li>\r\n	<li>A not-so-surprising coincidence given AA\'s<a href=\"http://www.aa.com/aa/i18nForward.do?p=/urls/gogo.jsp\" target=\"_blank\"> recent announcement</a> of their roll-out of the <a href=\"http://www.gogoinflight.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Gogo</a> inflight Internet service.</li>\r\n	<li>I rate airport food availability much higher than WiFi — especially if I’m getting on a flight heading to or from the West Coast.</li>\r\n	<li>I think my productivity increases without inflight WiFi, but that\'s because I use a full-featured laptop</li>\r\n	<li>However, the emerging class of netbooks, with their corollary assumption of constant Internet connectivity – the model of a low-powered client leveraging the power and storage of the cloud -- would need in-flight WiFi to be productive</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Traveling Light </em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/fielding-distant/\" target=\"_blank\">Adam Fielding</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>How I Got Here</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Simon Mikkelsen wrote “I’ve had a question for a long time. What is your job? We’ve heard a bit from time to time, but what requires so much travel?”</li>\r\n	<li>Have tended not put too much of my personal background into TravelCommons.   Kind of a corollary tag line – it’s more about the journey than the presenter.  But after so many of you have stuck it out through 4 years and now 75 episodes, I thought I owed you a bit of background.</li>\r\n	<li>I\'m in consulting now, but traveled a lot even when I had real jobs</li>\r\n	<li>When I joined <a href=\"http://deloitte.com\">Deloitte Consulting</a> in Detroit, the real travel began. I made it to Northwest’s top tier in 9 months and had 750,000 miles in 4 years</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"http://ad.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/show?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;bids=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Magnatune</a></li>\r\n	<li>Feedback at comments@travelcommons.com or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_75.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #75 – Can\'t I Fly Unplugged, How I Got Here','','inherit','closed','closed','','138-revision-v1','','','2017-11-20 22:47:59','2017-11-21 03:47:59','',138,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/11/20/138-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1880,1,'2017-11-20 22:48:56','2017-11-21 03:48:56','Recorded in the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago at the end of a full week home, decompressing after 6 weeks of straight travel. We talk about some \"travel rules\" violators -- the woman whose airport meltdown is a YouTube hit and an Amazing Race couple whose violation got them eliminated.  A listener suggests a topic -- what is the one thing you never want to hear on a flight? And we close with a couple of suggestions on how to avoid the growing cacophony of flat screen TVs shouting out the depressing state of the world.  Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_72.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_72.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />Here are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #72:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Recorded at the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago</li>\r\n	<li>Enjoying a week off from O\'Hare after 6 weeks on the road</li>\r\n	<li>The Monday morning \"rush hour\" security lines are much easier to handle now that I\'ve fully embraced the \"line cut\" United Airlines provides the <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_airlines#Mileage_Plus\">Global Services</a> customers in ORD</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Santa Rosa Shuffle</em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/seismic_anamoly\">Seismic Anamoly</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Blog posting on the <a href=\"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i57IwNGu_qQ\">video</a> of a woman melting down after being denied boarding on a Cathay Pacific Hong Kong-to-San Francisco flight generated the most comments</li>\r\n	<li>Most comments expressed amazement.  One of the cardinal travel rules – don’t take out your frustrations with the airlines on its employees</li>\r\n	<li>Watching a recent <a href=\"http://www.cbs.com/primetime/amazing_race/recaps/1403/?season=14\">episode</a> of the TV show <em>Amazing Race</em>, saw a <a href=\"http://www.cbs.com/primetime/amazing_race/bio/brad_and_victoria_14/bio.php?season=14\">team</a> eliminated by breaking one of the top travel rules -- always take the direct flight</li>\r\n	<li>Was happy to see some economic stimulus money directed to high-speed rail, though not sure what we\'ll get by the time the $8 billion is spread across the 11 gov’t-designated <a href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2009/02/20/us/20rail-map.html\">high-speed rail corridors</a></li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Sproing-A-Dub</em> by <a href=\"http://www.magnatune.com/artists/albums/babylon-beat/\" target=\"_blank\">Burning Babylon</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Things You Never Want To Hear\r\n</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>A listener suggests asking people \"What is the one thing you never want to hear on a flight?\"</li>\r\n	<li>There are the two classes of “things you never want to hear” – those coming over the loud speaker and those coming from the passengers around you</li>\r\n	<li>Flying severely compresses our personal space creating two almost completely opposite reactions -- a sense of instant intimacy with complete strangers, or total obliviousness to the 5-10 complete strangers who can hear every word of a personal cell phone call</li>\r\n	<li>o	Probably the one thing I don’t want to hear from a fellow passenger is – “I gotta get outta here” when I\'m still in the air</li>\r\n	<li>if you do manage to “get outta here” at 25-35,000 ft, where do you go?</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Shinigami</em> by <a href=\"http://www.myspace.com/studiobebopmusic\" target=\"_blank\">Studio BeBop</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Can’t Find a Piece of Quiet</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Tough to avoid the depressing state of the world with TV screens blaring at you everywhere</li>\r\n	<li>CNN Airport News screens seem to be at every gate and an epidemic of flat screen TVs have covered the walls in bars, restaurants, airport clubs, and hotel lounges.</li>\r\n	<li>Mini-trend of putting rocking chairs in airports is some help.</li>\r\n	<li>Other fliers search out airport chapels -- no flat screens or PA announcements there</li>\r\n	<li>I cram my noise blocking earphones tightly in my ear and dial up the Amazon rain forest on the <a href=\"http://www.tmsoft.com/iphone-whitenoise.html\">White Noise</a> iPhone app</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"http://ad.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/show?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;bids=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Magnatune</a></li>\r\n	<li>Feedback at comments@travelcommons.com or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_72.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #72 - Breaking Travel Rules, What You Never Want to Hear','','inherit','closed','closed','','119-revision-v1','','','2017-11-20 22:48:56','2017-11-21 03:48:56','',119,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/11/20/119-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1881,1,'2017-11-20 22:50:05','2017-11-21 03:50:05','Recorded in the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, back doing my thing to support the travel industry with lots of travel in January. We talk about some recent TSA observations, good and bad; my latest spin of the \"travel roulette\" wheel, trading the plane for a train in an East Coast snow storm; a look back at last year\'s travel courtesy of <a href=\"http://blog.dopplr.com/2009/01/15/dopplr-presents-the-personal-annual-report-2008-freshly-generated-for-you-and-barack-obama/\" target=\"_blank\">Dopplr\'s Personal Annual Report</a>; and being saved by duct tape while flying the tatty skies of United.  Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_71.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_71.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />Here are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #71:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Recorded at the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago</li>\r\n	<li>Back doing my thing to support the travel industry, visiting Washington DC, Denver, Phoenix, San Francisco, Stamford, CT, and Jackson, MI</li>\r\n	<li>Noticing a lot more passengers paying attention to the pre-flight safety demo since the US Air Hudson River splashdown</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Beneath the Skin</em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/birdy-alter/\">Jerry Berlongieri</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Belated shout-out to Tim Grubb of <a href=\"http://www.sizeoflife.com/blog/\" target=\"_blank\">The Size of Life blog</a> -- \"lifestyle news and reviews for the big and tall man\"</li>\r\n	<li>Tim is doing a series of <a href=\"http://www.sizeoflife.com/blog/?cat=8\" target=\"_self\">articles</a> on \"Flying the (Big &amp; Tall) Friendly Skies\". The <a href=\"http://seatguru.com\" target=\"_self\">SeatGuru</a> map he uses as an illustration points out the best coach seat for a big &amp; tall man -- the window seat on the second exit row of a United Airbus 319</li>\r\n	<li>The new <a href=\"http://www.phl.org/news/081230.html\" target=\"_blank\">security checkpoint</a> for Philadelphia Airport\'s Terminal\'s D and E replace a near-medieval set-up with a much better experience</li>\r\n	<li>Watched the TSA do a full body patdown on <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_George\" target=\"_blank\">Cardinal Francis George</a>, the 72-yr-old Catholic Archbishop of Chicago.  Couldn\'t that screener\'s time been used more productively checking out someone who could <em>actually</em> be a threat?</li>\r\n	<li>Lost a recent game of \"travel roulette\". Moved from the Shuttle to Amtrak\'s Acela Express to avoid delays from an East Coast snow storm. The train ended up 2½ hours late because of equipment problems caused by the snow.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Hurt Me So I Can Walk Away </em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/joy-float/\" target=\"_blank\">Michael Joy</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Looking Back at Last Year\'s Travel\r\n</strong><ul>\r\n	<li><a href=\"http://dopplr.com\" target=\"_blank\">Dopplr</a> sent me a 2008 Personal Annual Report on my travel last year</li>\r\n	<li>Has some interesting factoids, such as my \"personal velocity\" in 2008 was the same as that of a squirrel</li>\r\n	<li>And that my 2008 carbon footprint was equivalent to 2.3 Hummers</li>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: center\"><img class=\"aligncenter\" src=\"http://thepeacocks.net/hummer.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"194\" height=\"139\" /></p>\r\n\r\n	<li>Of course, they could have used, say a Mercedes Benz S-600 sedan, which gets worse mileage than a Hummer H3, but I guess chest-pounding about big gas-guzzling American SUVs is easier self-awareness about big gas-guzzling Euro sedans – especially when your company is based in Helsinki.</li>\r\n	<li>The factoid that grabbed my attention was this one – “In 2008, you spent 214 days at home; 152 days traveling”</li>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: center\"><img class=\"aligncenter\" src=\"http://thepeacocks.net/days_home.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"149\" height=\"65\" /></p>\r\n\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Bulletproof</em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/musicinside-forces/\" target=\"_blank\">Music Inside</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Flying the Tatty Skies of United </strong><ul>\r\n	<li>My ORD-PHX flight was almost scuttled by a broken luggage bin door.  Here\'s the <a href=\"http://twinkle.tapulous.com/index.php?hash=ec89f28fab5481c60449e1ed4b91fe1ca5f9b1c6\" target=\"_blank\">photo</a> of the mechanic fixing it with duct tape</li>\r\n	<li>Those of us who spend a good bit of time flying United know that duct tape is not an uncommon sight. United is fraying around the edges.</li>\r\n	<li>United is the only major US airline to not have any current orders placed with any aircraft manufacturer</li>\r\n	<li>And the service has gotten a bit frayed around the edges.  The <a href=\"http://www.theacsi.org/index.php?option=com_content&amp;task=view&amp;id=149&amp;Itemid=157&amp;c=United+Airlines+(UAL+Corporation)&amp;i=Airlines\" target=\"_blank\">2008 American Customer Satisfaction Index</a> has United ahead of only US Airways</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"http://crankyflier.com/2008/11/20/united-gets-beaten-down-over-phocuswright-presentation-on-customer-experience\" target=\"_blank\">Brett Snyder</a> was at a travel industry conference last November where a United executive gave a talk titled <em>Customer Experience and Flying: Not an Oxymoron</em> and admitted that United would be \"overstretching\" if they tried to be as good as Singapore Air or Virgin Atlantic</li>\r\n	<li>Was refused entry to United\'s London-Heathrow business class arrivals lounge because I was flying on an upgraded coach ticket, not a full-fare business class ticket</li>\r\n	<li>United\'s employees continue to hold together their frayed company by reaching out to passengers</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"http://ad.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/show?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;bids=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Magnatune</a></li>\r\n	<li>Feedback at comments@travelcommons.com or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_71.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #71 - Winter Travel, Last Year\'s Travel, Tatty United','','inherit','closed','closed','','115-revision-v1','','','2017-11-20 22:50:05','2017-11-21 03:50:05','',115,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/11/20/115-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1884,1,'2017-12-11 16:03:38','2017-12-11 21:03:38','','Bingo played with bottle caps.  Winners board with no skill or risk in this game.  White and blue.','Buy another round! I just saw a Hello Kitty bag!','inherit','open','closed','','bingo-played-with-bottle-caps-winners-board-with-no-skill-or-risk-in-this-game-white-and-blue','','','2017-12-11 16:10:06','2017-12-11 21:10:06','',1885,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/iStock-672260056.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(1885,1,'2017-12-11 17:28:04','2017-12-11 22:28:04','[caption id=\"attachment_1884\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/iStock-672260056.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1884\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/iStock-672260056-300x200.jpg\" alt=\"Bingo card played with bottle caps.\" width=\"300\" height=\"200\"></a> Buy another round! I just saw a Hello Kitty bag![/caption]\n\nI remember playing <a href=\"https://www.walmart.com/ip/Regal-Games-License-Plate-Travel-Bingo-2-Cards/146176397\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">license plate</a> and <a href=\"https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004GVYD98/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">travel bingo</a> as a kid driving down I-65 to Grandma\'s house. But that was before deregulation, when plane flights were more comfortable but a lot more expensive. With more families flying to Grandma\'s house, airport bingo seems more on-target. A quick Google search will find all sorts of <a href=\"https://www.airhelp.com/en/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">airport</a> <a href=\"https://www.thomascook.com/blog/trip-tips/before-going-on-holiday/airport-bingo/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">bingo</a> <a href=\"https://staringispolite.github.io/airportbingo/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">cards</a>&nbsp;with squares for things like “police dog” and “solo traveler\" to help you&nbsp; as one press release put it, “pass the time while not so patiently waiting to board.\"\n\nThat’s OK for a start, I guess. But here at TravelCommons, we try to go to the next level of road warrior-ism, so here is an airport bingo card with a more realistic take at holiday air travel...\n<ol>\n 	<li>10-15 minute traffic jam on the airport access road -- just long enough to get those stress hormones flowing</li>\n 	<li>You score a complimentary PreCheck notice on your boarding pass</li>\n 	<li>Guy in front of you in the PreCheck line walks through the metal detector with his smartphone. The alarm sounds. He stands there, puzzled. The TSA person rolls her eyes and asks, yet again, if he’d emptied his pockets. He looks surprised that his smartphone would set it off. She looks at her watch for how long ‘til her next break.</li>\n 	<li>Girl pulling a Hello Kitty kids-sized roller board on her way to Grandma’s. Hey, who said airport bingo had to be 100% snarky?</li>\n 	<li>Woman in front of you in the Starbucks line orders a half-decaf 3-pump no-foam vanilla latte, breaking the 3-adjective rule. It’s Sodexo, not your corner Starbucks. Keep it simple so the rest of us can order.</li>\n 	<li>Piano bar playing Christmas carols -- or if you’re in Nashville airport, a country duo</li>\n 	<li>A family of four or more walking abreast, slowly, so that people racing for their gates drift into the on-coming traffic, or try to thread through the crowd in front of a boarding gate.</li>\n 	<li>Someone sprinting down the terminal</li>\n 	<li>Available rocking chair. More airports are scattering these around, in front of windows in terminal connectors, in random hallways. Bonus if it’s next to an open -- and working -- electrical outlet</li>\n 	<li>Craft beer bar with beers you haven’t had -- get those stress hormones back under control</li>\n 	<li>Dueling gate announcements. Gates G20 and G22 are boarding at the same time, with each gate agent talking over the other one. You hear Boarding Group 3 called and hustle up to the door, only to be shunted over to wait in the shame station; the other gate called Boarding Group 3.</li>\n 	<li>One of the cabin cleaning crew is wearing reindeer antlers</li>\n 	<li>Free Space</li>\n 	<li>Passenger walking back up to the front of the plane because the bag wouldn\'t fit in the overhead</li>\n 	<li>Boarding is complete and there’s an empty middle seat next to you!</li>\n 	<li>Missing crew. You’re next to an empty middle seat, but you have no crew. Their flight was late, and pulled into a gate two terminals over. They’re on their way, but now you’re worried that some stand-by will drop into that empty seat.</li>\n 	<li>Window seat passenger is startled by a direct hit from the de-icing fluid spray</li>\n 	<li>Someone in the row in front of you is watching a compilation of Game of Thrones sex scenes on a full-sized iPad</li>\n 	<li>Old school flight attendant hangs a coffee pack in the rear toilet as an air freshener</li>\n 	<li>Passenger wearing destination-inappropriate clothing (e.g., cargo shorts on a flight to Green Bay, Canada Goose jacket on a flight to Cancun)</li>\n 	<li>Passengers applaud the plane landing</li>\n 	<li>Early arrival!&nbsp; Favorable winds put you on the ground 30 minutes early. You start to think that you should travel more often.</li>\n 	<li>The first restroom you walk past is closed for cleaning, maintenance, or the line is out the door</li>\n 	<li>Your luggage is one of the first 10 bags to appear on the belt</li>\n 	<li>Grandma\'s car is there when you walk out of the terminal -- and the airport police didn\'t ticket her or make her recirculate</li>\n</ol>','Holiday Airport Bingo','','publish','closed','closed','','holiday-airport-bingo','','\nhttps://www.thomascook.com/blog/trip-tips/before-going-on-holiday/airport-bingo/','2021-09-29 21:50:43','2021-09-30 02:50:43','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=1885',0,'post','',0),
(1886,1,'2017-12-11 17:28:04','2017-12-11 22:28:04','[caption id=\"attachment_1884\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/iStock-672260056.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1884\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/iStock-672260056-300x200.jpg\" alt=\"Bingo card played with bottle caps.\" width=\"300\" height=\"200\" /></a> Buy another round! I just saw a Hello Kitty bag![/caption]\r\n\r\nI remember playing <a href=\"https://www.walmart.com/ip/Regal-Games-License-Plate-Travel-Bingo-2-Cards/146176397\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">license plate</a> and <a href=\"https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004GVYD98/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">travel bingo</a> as a kid driving down I-65 to Grandma\'s house. But that was before deregulation, when plane flights were more comfortable but a lot more expensive. With more families flying to Grandma\'s house, airport bingo seems more on-target. A quick Google search will find all sorts of <a href=\"https://www.airhelp.com/en/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">airport</a> <a href=\"https://www.thomascook.com/blog/trip-tips/before-going-on-holiday/airport-bingo/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">bingo</a> <a href=\"https://staringispolite.github.io/airportbingo/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">cards</a> with squares for things like “police dog” and “solo traveler\" to help you  as one press release put it, “pass the time while not so patiently waiting to board.\"\r\n\r\nThat’s OK for a start, I guess. But here at TravelCommons, we try to go to the next level of road warrior-ism, so here is an airport bingo card with a more realistic take at holiday air travel...\r\n<ol>\r\n 	<li>10-15 minute traffic jam on the airport access road -- just long enough to get those stress hormones flowing</li>\r\n 	<li>You score a complimentary PreCheck notice on your boarding pass</li>\r\n 	<li>Guy in front of you in the PreCheck line walks through the metal detector with his smartphone. The alarm sounds. He stands there, puzzled. The TSA person rolls her eyes and asks, yet again, if he’d emptied his pockets. He looks surprised that his smartphone would set it off. She looks at her watch for how long ‘til her next break.</li>\r\n 	<li>Girl pulling a Hello Kitty kids-sized roller board on her way to Grandma’s. Hey, who said airport bingo had to be 100% snarky?</li>\r\n 	<li>Woman in front of you in the Starbucks line orders a half-decaf 3-pump no-foam vanilla latte, breaking the 3-adjective rule. It’s Sodexo, not your corner Starbucks. Keep it simple so the rest of us can order.</li>\r\n 	<li>Piano bar playing Christmas carols -- or if you’re in Nashville airport, a country duo</li>\r\n 	<li>A family of four or more walking abreast, slowly, so that people racing for their gates drift into the on-coming traffic, or try to thread through the crowd in front of a boarding gate.</li>\r\n 	<li>Someone sprinting down the terminal</li>\r\n 	<li>Available rocking chair. More airports are scattering these around, in front of windows in terminal connectors, in random hallways. Bonus if it’s next to an open -- and working -- electrical outlet</li>\r\n 	<li>Craft beer bar with beers you haven’t had -- get those stress hormones back under control</li>\r\n 	<li>Dueling gate announcements. Gates G20 and G22 are boarding at the same time, with each gate agent talking over the other one. You hear Boarding Group 3 called and hustle up to the door, only to be shunted over to wait in the shame station; the other gate called Boarding Group 3.</li>\r\n 	<li>One of the cabin cleaning crew is wearing reindeer antlers</li>\r\n 	<li>Free Space</li>\r\n 	<li>Passenger walking back up to the front of the plane because the bag wouldn\'t fit in the overhead</li>\r\n 	<li>Boarding is complete and there’s an empty middle seat next to you!</li>\r\n 	<li>Missing crew. You’re next to an empty middle seat, but you have no crew. Their flight was late, and pulled into a gate two terminals over. They’re on their way, but now you’re worried that some stand-by will drop into that empty seat.</li>\r\n 	<li>Window seat passenger is startled by a direct hit from the de-icing fluid spray</li>\r\n 	<li>Someone in the row in front of you is watching a compilation of Game of Thrones sex scenes on a full-sized iPad</li>\r\n 	<li>Old school flight attendant hangs a coffee pack in the rear toilet as an air freshener</li>\r\n 	<li>Passenger wearing destination-inappropriate clothing (e.g., cargo shorts on a flight to Green Bay, Canada Goose jacket on a flight to Cancun)</li>\r\n 	<li>Passengers applaud the plane landing</li>\r\n 	<li>Early arrival!  Favorable winds put you on the ground 30 minutes early. You start to think that you should travel more often.</li>\r\n 	<li>The first restroom you walk past is closed for cleaning, maintenance, or the line is out the door</li>\r\n 	<li>Your luggage is one of the first 10 bags to appear on the belt</li>\r\n 	<li>Grandma\'s car is there when you walk out of the terminal -- and the airport police didn\'t ticket her or make her recirculate</li>\r\n</ol>','Holiday Airport Bingo','','inherit','closed','closed','','1885-revision-v1','','','2017-12-11 17:28:04','2017-12-11 22:28:04','',1885,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/11/1885-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1887,1,'2017-12-11 20:43:36','2017-12-12 01:43:36','Recorded in the bathroom of the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Philadelphia\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/pennsylvania/philadelphia\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\">Philadelphia</a> Marriott, this week\'s podcast comes at the end of my last flight of the year -- a triangulation across <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Boston\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/boston\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\">Boston</a>, <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Providence\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/new-england/providence\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\">Providence, RI</a>, and Philadelphia. A light schedule let me catch a good lunch and dinner in Philadelphia. A weekend ski trip to <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Denver\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/rocky-mountains/denver\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\">Denver</a> prompts thoughts on the disconnect between business travelers and resort hotels, and the increased number of non-frequent elite status travelers. Here\'s a <a href=\"http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3?http://radiotail.com/rt/cast/108/travelcommons_26.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file. [sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_26.mp3\"]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #26:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Recorded in the bathroom of the Philadelphia Marriott</li>\r\n 	<li>Quick 3-day triangulation through the northeast -- Boston, Providence, and Philadelphia -- before settling in back home for the Christmas holidays</li>\r\n 	<li>Get a great Hertz rental car -- an <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Infiniti G\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infiniti_G\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Infiniti G35</a> -- and smoke the drive from Boston to Providence</li>\r\n 	<li>Had time for a couple of great solo meals in Philadelphia -- lunch at a counter in <a href=\"http://www.readingterminalmarket.org/\"> the Reading Terminal Market</a> and dinner at the sushi bar in<a href=\"http://www.morimotorestaurant.com\"> Morimoto</a></li>\r\n 	<li><strong><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/travelcommons/103281516/\">Direct Link</a></strong> to a picture of Tommy Dinic\'s lunch counter at the Reading Terminal Market</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Changes in Latitudes Changes in Attitudes\" href=\"http://www.amazon.com/Changes-Latitudes-Attitudes-Jimmy-Buffett/dp/B000002PBN%3FSubscriptionId%3D0G81C5DAZ03ZR9WH9X82%26tag%3Dzemanta-20%26linkCode%3Dxm2%26camp%3D2025%26creative%3D165953%26creativeASIN%3DB000002PBN\" rel=\"amazon\">Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes</a></em> by <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Jimmy Buffett\" href=\"http://margaritaville.com\" rel=\"homepage\">Jimmy Buffett</a></li>\r\n 	<li>The challenges of staying in a resort location while on business travel</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Brass in Pocket</em> by The Pretenders</li>\r\n 	<li>Predictions of growth in the numbers of elite status travelers</li>\r\n 	<li>Many of these new elites are qualifying through non-flying programs</li>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Ramblin\' Man</em> by the Allman Brothers Band</li>\r\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3?http://radiotail.com/rt/cast/108/travelcommons_26.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<div class=\"zemanta-pixie\" style=\"margin-top: 10px; height: 15px;\"><img class=\"zemanta-pixie-img\" style=\"border: none; float: right;\" src=\"http://img.zemanta.com/pixy.gif?x-id=d8127aa2-73f9-4c94-ae70-90387edd529c\" alt=\"\" /></div>','Podcast #26 - Business Travel Among Vacationers; Explosion of Elites','','inherit','closed','closed','','29-revision-v1','','','2017-12-11 20:43:36','2017-12-12 01:43:36','',29,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/11/29-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1888,1,'2017-12-11 20:44:42','2017-12-12 01:44:42','Spent the holiday week digging through the TravelCommon archives and assembled a \"Best of TravelCommons 2005\" episode. Starting with a medley of hotel bathrooms, we revisit some rants on the TSA, the 3-episode Sean Penn arc, and excerpts from some of the best stories of 2005. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_27.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_27.mp3\"]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #27:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Home for Christmas week, recover from a tough 4 weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas</li>\r\n 	<li>Thanks to everyone who has left, or tried to leave, a review on the TravelCommons page of iTunes</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>Medley of TravelCommons Hotel Bathroom studios</li>\r\n 	<li>from T/C #5 - Why I record in bathrooms</li>\r\n 	<li>Medley of TSA rants</li>\r\n 	<li>from T/C #5-7 - Sean Penn comments</li>\r\n 	<li>from T/C #7 - Steve Frick of <a href=\"http://fricksworld.blogspot.com\">Frick\'s World</a> is a little uncomfortable recording in the bathroom</li>\r\n 	<li>from T/C #14 - Willie Evans from the Scots Band <a href=\"http://www.evangeline.org.uk/\"><strong>Evangeline</strong></a> talks about writing a travel song</li>\r\n 	<li>from T/C #17 - My kids\' view of travel</li>\r\n 	<li>from T/C #20 - Allan Marko tells a story about rapid airplane repair</li>\r\n 	<li>from T/C #3 - Flyers from <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Cleveland\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/great-lakes/cleveland\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\">Cleveland</a> to <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Chicago\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/chicago\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\">Chicago</a> looking for an early exit</li>\r\n 	<li>from T/C #11 - Packing light leaves no margin for error</li>\r\n 	<li>from T/C #23 - Patrons at the hotel bar drinking shots</li>\r\n 	<li>from T/C #19 - Different colors in <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Bologna\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/italy/emilia-romagna-and-san-marino/bologna\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\">Bologna, Italy</a></li>\r\n 	<li>from T/C #13 - Imaginative way to sleep on red-eyes</li>\r\n 	<li>from T/C #21 - Decisions on vacation photos</li>\r\n 	<li>from T/C #4 - Disappointed web search</li>\r\n 	<li>from T/C #24 - Fun with Rental Cars</li>\r\n 	<li>from T/C #7 - Air sickness without the bag</li>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Ramblin\' Man</em> by the Allman Brothers Band</li>\r\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_27.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<div class=\"zemanta-pixie\" style=\"margin-top: 10px; height: 15px;\"><img class=\"zemanta-pixie-img\" style=\"border: none; float: right;\" src=\"http://img.zemanta.com/pixy.gif?x-id=82ff5f4b-136b-46e7-a400-3c7009526322\" alt=\"\" /></div>','Podcast #27 - Best of 2005','','inherit','closed','closed','','30-revision-v1','','','2017-12-11 20:44:42','2017-12-12 01:44:42','',30,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/11/30-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1889,1,'2017-12-11 20:45:57','2017-12-12 01:45:57','This week\'s podcast is recorded in the bathroom of the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Oldsmar, Florida\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldsmar%2C_Florida\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Oldsmar, FL</a> Marriott. In the midst of a bunch of work and a tough travel itinerary, why am I surprised that I just can\'t get into the holiday spirit? A huge snowstorm blowing through <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Chicago\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/chicago\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\">Chicago</a> threatens to strand me in <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Memphis\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/memphis\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\">Memphis</a> -- until another traveler suggests driving the 550 miles home. And a Classic Travel Story from a former road warrior about finding love in a hotel bar. Here\'s a <a href=\"http://radiotail.com/rt/cast/104/25-long_drive_home;_meeting_your_future_in_a_hotel_bar.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_25.mp3\"]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #25:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Recorded in the bathroom of the Oldsmar, FL Courtyard</li>\r\n 	<li>Another tough travel week -- sleep deprivation from early morning flights, severe winter travel problems, and a whole lot of work</li>\r\n 	<li>Starting a 5-week sponsorship from <a href=\"http://expertflyer.com/travelcommons\">ExpertFlyer.com</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Steve Frick from <a href=\"http://fricksworld.blogspot.com/\">Frick\'s World</a> posts a great rental car comment on podcast #24</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music --  <em>I\'ll Be Home by Christmas</em> by <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Elvis Presley\" href=\"http://elvis.com\" rel=\"homepage\">Elvis Presley</a></li>\r\n 	<li>I\'m having a tough time getting into the holiday spirit</li>\r\n 	<li>Maybe I\'ll have an \"espresso\" Christmas -- a concentrated, more intense holiday experience</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Run Run Rudolph</em> by <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Dwight Yoakam\" href=\"http://www.dwightyoakam.com/\" rel=\"homepage\">Dwight Yoakam</a></li>\r\n 	<li>A winter storm in Chicago cancels flights and forces a decision -- wait \'til the morning or drive home tonight</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<img src=\"./images/pix/ord-mem.jpg\" alt=\"\" />\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <img alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Every Picture Tells a Story</em> by <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Rod Stewart\" href=\"http://www.rodstewart.com/\" rel=\"homepage\">Rod Stewart</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Classic Travel Story -- Meeting a husband in a hotel bar</li>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Ramblin\' Man</em> by the Allman Brothers Band</li>\r\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"http://radiotail.com/rt/cast/104/25-long_drive_home;_meeting_your_future_in_a_hotel_bar.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<div class=\"zemanta-pixie\" style=\"margin-top: 10px; height: 15px;\"><img class=\"zemanta-pixie-img\" style=\"border: none; float: right;\" src=\"http://img.zemanta.com/pixy.gif?x-id=3098fb67-97e3-4162-b529-960b4ebb2127\" alt=\"\" /></div>','Podcast #25 - Long Drive Home; Meeting Your Future in a Hotel Bar','','inherit','closed','closed','','28-revision-v1','','','2017-12-11 20:45:57','2017-12-12 01:45:57','',28,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/11/28-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1891,1,'2017-12-11 20:47:35','2017-12-12 01:47:35','Back on the road after the Thanksgiving holiday, this week\'s podcast is recorded in the bathroom of the Durham, NC Marriott and edited in the RDU Admirals Club. A listener asks \"What do you miss when you travel?\" Also, some ideas on staying connected with the family -- replacing those random bits of conversation while on the road, and some careless moments with rental cars. Here\'s a <a href=\"http://radiotail.com/rt/cast/92/24-what_do_you_miss_during_travel;_fun_with_rental_cars.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_24.mp3\"]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #24:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Recorded in the bathroom of the Durham, NC Marriott</li>\r\n 	<li>Paying for last week\'s holiday with a rough triangulation trip across Tampa, Memphis, and <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"The Triangle\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/the-south/the-triangle\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\">Raleigh-Durham</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Audio clip of an Atlanta-Hartsfield emergency alarm</li>\r\n 	<li>Here\'s the ClustrMap image showing web site traffic for the month of November<img src=\"./images/pix/clustermap.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></li>\r\n 	<li>Please click through to the Listener Survey on the left side of the screen</li>\r\n 	<li>Another listener experience with <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"British Airways\" href=\"http://www.ba.com\" rel=\"homepage\">British Airways</a> -- a positive one</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>A listener asks \"What do I miss when I travel?\"</li>\r\n 	<li>Recreating my morning routine in hotels</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Miss You</em> by the Rolling Stones</li>\r\n 	<li>The regular rhythms of conversation get disrupted when one party is on travel</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Fast Car</em> by Tracy Chapman</li>\r\n 	<li>A couple of stories about abusing rental cars</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/21561359@N00/103066097/\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to a picture of the Mustang speedometer in Phoenix</li>\r\n 	<li>Closing music --  <em>Ramblin\' Man</em> by the Allman Brothers Band</li>\r\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"http://radiotail.com/rt/cast/92/24-what_do_you_miss_during_travel;_fun_with_rental_cars.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<div class=\"zemanta-pixie\" style=\"margin-top: 10px; height: 15px;\"><img class=\"zemanta-pixie-img\" style=\"border: none; float: right;\" src=\"http://img.zemanta.com/pixy.gif?x-id=042d3414-512a-4aaa-81f8-09c4d0e4b51b\" alt=\"\" /></div>','Podcast #24 - What Do You Miss When You Travel; Fun with Rental Cars','','inherit','closed','closed','','27-revision-v1','','','2017-12-11 20:47:35','2017-12-12 01:47:35','',27,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/11/27-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1893,1,'2017-12-19 21:29:25','2017-12-20 02:29:25','<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/IMG_0522.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1775\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/IMG_0522-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nIt\'s a <em>Mitteleuropa</em> episode, talking about last month\'s travels through Vienna and Hungary. I came away with good first impressions of Austrian Airlines and the Vienna airport. And, for the first time in many visits, saw Hungary through a tourist\'s eyes, spending time in Budapest and the Tokaj wine region. We also talk about how Google Translate has become pretty much indistinguishable from magic and the potential impact the privatization of the US air traffic control system might have on the general aviation industry. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_130.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_130.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #130:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, after a good bit of travel -- I think the technical unit of measure is “a slug”. I’ve done a “slug” of travel recently. We got back from 9 days in Hungary on the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend, which gave us that Monday to recover a bit. After that short week at home, I got back on the road -- a week in Richmond and then last week and this week in Atlanta. Some folks wanted me to do stupid day trips -- say up to Michigan from Atlanta for a 90-minute meeting, but in a fit of, what is for me, rare realism, I said, “Uh, no”.</li>\r\n 	<li>This was the first time I’d spent any time in Richmond -- other than driving around it -- from Charlottesville to the airport, from DC over to Williamsburg. We were downtown. There are some nice pockets. Found a couple of restaurants and a microbrewery with a taproom, so I was happy. Even happier because it was just a 20-minute cab ride from the airport, and a 10-minute walk to the client. Contrast that to Atlanta, which I just hate having to travel to for business. It starts with the location of the airport -- at 6 o’clock, on the bottom of the I-285 perimeter, and all the business at the opposite side -- between 11 and 1 o’clock on the perimeter. And therein lies the most important question that every business traveler faces when they arrive and they leave Atlanta -- do I drive through the city or around it? Outside of rush hour, it’s not bad -- maybe 35 minutes. But when you’re trying to catch that 6pm flight home on Thursday night, the trip starts at an hour and deteriorates fast.</li>\r\n 	<li>And deterioration is a nice word for last week’s trip back. After an hour-and-a quarter drive through the city that would’ve been a lot worse except that there were 3 of us in the car, so we got to whiz by the beginnings of the traffic jam in the HOV lanes. Once in the center of the city, the HOV lanes were just as crowded, but it probably cut at least 5 minutes off our trip. We drop the car off at Hertz, board the Skytrain, are on our way to the terminal when it just stops. OK, maybe a bit of congestion at the station in front of us. So we wait, and wait,... and wait. No announcement, no nothing. Just wait. 10 minutes, 15 minutes. Finally, someone near the door presses the phone button. A voice comes on -- “We’re working on it; thanks for your patience.” Click. No reason for the delay; no thought on when we’d start up again. Another 5 minutes. Another guy presses the phone button. Same story. After 30 minutes, the train whirs to life and starts to move. And I never thought I’d get nostalgic for those car rental buses.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hansatom/47919\">Brilliant Day</a> by Hans Atom (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial license.  Ft: Lisa DeBenedictis</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>My son Andrew and I flew Austrian Air from Chicago to Budapest last month with an -- obvious -- connection in Vienna. Couple of things… First, why Austrian Air? Because it was among the cheapest non-budget fares over and because I could construct an 8-hr layover which meant we spent Saturday eating schnitzel and drinking beer in Vienna. We landed at 8:45 Saturday morning, checked our bags in Held Luggage, and then hopped a cab into the city. It wasn’t a cheap taxi -- probably around €40 -- but we didn’t have time to figure out and wait for the train. We went first to the Naschmarkt and met up with a friend of mine -- ex-client and ex-boss -- who’s now running the Polish development center for a stealth start-up. He came down Friday night; it was a good excuse to spend 3 hours on his new BMW motorcycle. We started out with coffee and then quickly moved to the beer crawl. At noon, we walked into a small place, <a href=\"http://www.xn--gasthauspschl-qmb.com/\">Gasthaus Pöschl</a> (Weihburggasse 17), just as they were opening. We promised to be out in an hour, so they picked up one of the “Reserved” signs and gave us great big plates of schnitzel and glasses of Grüner Veltliner. We needed a bit of a walk after that, a bit more beer, and we found a cab back to the airport. One of the best layovers I’ve had...</li>\r\n 	<li>And then the second thing -- Vienna Airport. I’ve whined over a couple of episodes about how much I don’t like Munich Airport. Indeed, one of my ORD-BUD options was on Lufthansa through MUC. That didn’t make the first cut. But Vienna was great. Pleasant folks in the immigration booths, efficient and well-staffed security, nice food and beer selection -- it was the anti-MUC. And the in-air service? Pretty good. Fairly new 777-200; typical kinda tight coach seat configuration; pleasant flight attendants. There was nothing that wowed me, but then again, I wasn’t expecting anything to. All I wanted was not to be annoyed; not to have a gate agent or flight attendant piss me off. Kinda the air travel version of the Hippocratic oath -- Do no harm to the passenger. And Austrian succeeded. If I were to ding them on anything, it would be that the bright red plane upholstery was a bit tough on the eyes. I’ll fly them again.</li>\r\n 	<li>I actually was two-for-two on airports on that trip. Budapest airport has had a significant upgrade since my last visit maybe 12 years ago. Again, efficient security lines, bright clean terminal, good places to grab a coffee and some breakfast. Much more pleasant than my first time passing through there in 1989, some Army guy checking that my exit visa had the right stamps. Much happier vibe this time. Two great airport experiences; I think I’ll need to consciously ratchet down my expectations for my next trip, though. I’ll be hitting London’s Gatwick and Heathrow next week.</li>\r\n 	<li>Thinking through my international travel this year -- Paris, Vienna, Budapest -- Google Translate has evolved to being pretty close to magic. Last September, Google made a big announcement that they moved Translate from a statistics-based approach to a neural network running in Google’s cloud. It was the cover story for the New York Times Sunday Magazine <a href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/14/magazine/the-great-ai-awakening.html\">The Great AI Awakening</a> -- using it as a case study of how artificial intelligence will “reinvent computing itself”. That’s all good -- and it was a good article -- but what’s really seems like magic is what Google calls Word Lens, where you activate your camera within Google Translate, point it at some text -- a menu or, say, the washing machine controls in a vacation rental -- and you see English words replacing the French or Hungarian words in real time. Amazingly useful. Saves you from blasting your delicates with hot water, or mistakenly ordering chicken when you mix up poulet and poisson after a couple of cocktails. The French translations seemed better than the Hungarian ones -- which makes sense when you remember that the quality of the neural network is dependent on the amount of training data -- but even the Hungarian was very useful. And Translate lets you download some amount of language data onto your phone so you don’t blow through $100 of roaming data trying to avoid brussels sprouts. As you can tell, a huge TravelCommons endorsement.</li>\r\n 	<li>A few weeks back, I retweeted an NPR story about the proposal to privatize US air traffic control. As someone who has had cumulative months if not years wasted on ATC delays, I commented that I can’t understand all the angst over this proposal. ATC privatization has worked for years in Canada and Europe. And it’s not like the FAA has bathed itself in glory with the NextGen program that was authorized in 2003. Rich Fraser, a long-time TravelCommons listener, fellow Midwesterner, and a pilot, came back with a great series of tweets explaining his objections, specifically on privatization’s impact on general aviation. I retweeted a number of them -- “Privatization decimated general aviation industries everywhere it was tried. GA is a $200 billion industry here. 1.4 mil jobs…” and “And Canada\'s general aviation industry is a tiny fraction the size of ours. Apples and oranges doesn\'t even begin to describe.” I was only thinking of the impact on commercial aviation -- the only aviation I experience. Rich’s tweets did a nice job of opening the aperture on the discussion to include the often unconsidered world of general aviation. Thanks for that, Rich.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/53277\">Fistful of Dub</a> (Feat. Snowflake and DJ Vadim) by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: snowflake and DJ Vadim</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Notes from Hungary</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>The flight from Vienna to Budapest is 40 minutes on a 20-seat prop plane. I don’t think it ever levels off -- just a parabola, going straight from climb out into descent. Not that really noticed. After one more beer in Vienna airport, Andrew and I were asleep before the plane left the ground. Yet another pleasant Vienna Air flight attendant graciously placed bottles of water for us in the seat back pocket in front of us. We found them when the plane touched down in Budapest.</li>\r\n 	<li>We’d been to Budapest many times before, but this one would be different. Many of my wife’s aunts and uncles has passed away in the 12 years since our last visit, so there weren’t many family obligations -- just a long Saturday lunch the day before we left. Instead, this was probably the first time we saw Hungary as tourists.</li>\r\n 	<li>Before we visited, we checked with friends who had recently visited. What had they seen, enjoyed? Everyone loved Budapest. Scouting out places to stay, we abandoned what had been our usual Budapest Marriott perch on the Danube for so many years and instead headed east to District VII -- Erzsébetváros, the old Jewish Quarter. During our last visit in 2005, no one would’ve thought to go out here. But now, it’s full of restaurants, craft beer bars, a few Starbucks, and ruin pubs.</li>\r\n 	<li>We followed TravelCommons’ listener Arnoud Heijnis’ recommendation to check out what is the classic -- and perhaps the first -- ruin bar in Budapest -- Szimpla Kert. Arnoud’s description of it having a “pop-uppy kinda feel” was right on-point. You walk through a dingy, half-lit hallway, with a couple of bars on each side, into an open two-story courtyard ringed by, I dunno, another half-dozen bars across the two floors. There were at least a couple of English stag parties going on when we walked in -- one with whom I assumed was the groom-to-be dressed in a white ballerina tutu; the other group was wearing matching t-shirts fronted with a goofy picture of their groom-to-be.</li>\r\n 	<li>I saw a lot of those while we were in Budapest -- party groups wearing matching t-shirts; not so much the ballerina tutus. Budapest -- at least the redeveloped district we were in -- seems to have become a fly-in party town. Maybe the bankruptcy of the old state-run airline Malev left a vacuum for budget carriers to fill -- including WizzAir with a Budapest hub. And then Hungary hasn’t yet joined the euro, so it can devalue its currency, the forint, and look cheap to the rest of Europe. And it had lots of buildings available to repurpose -- starting with squatters setting up bars and dance clubs in abandoned buildings, then large sports bars, and then what seemed to me an amazing number of burger places. And they were all filled starting Thursday night, mostly with English speaking parties. A huge change from my first visit in 1989 when seemingly no one but my wife spoke English, and we’d walk into empty restaurants looking for lunch.</li>\r\n 	<li>Spending money in some of those bars, you’d think that Hungary is moving toward a parallel currency economy -- the forint and euro being used interchangeably -- similar to what I saw in Vietnam where I’d pay, say, a single taxi fare, in a combination of dong and dollar bills. In Budapest, you’ll get a bar tab in forint with a euro number printed below it. You can pay in euro, but you’ll probably get change back in forint. If it’s not too late in the evening, say your first or second bar, and so you haven’t yet lost your capability to do arithmetic, you’ll notice that the euro exchange rate isn’t quite in your favor. I started doing the math at each bar -- which, by the way, seemed to make a couple of bartenders nervous. The range of exchange rates on bar tabs was between 250 and 275 forint to the euro. The market rate was about 300 forint to the euro. In effect, the bars were charging an 8-16% convenience fee for letting you skip the ATM down the street.</li>\r\n 	<li>District VII is not the only part of Budapest that’s upgraded. Downtown Pest, along the Danube, looks spiffier. The Parliament building -- always an incredibly ornate building that dares you not to take multiple pictures of it as you walk past -- looked like it has been freshly steam cleaned. In ‘89, a soldier shooed my wife and I off the steps; this time we walked down into a nice visitors center, bought some tour tickets and were escorted up the Golden Staircase, under the huge dome, and past the crown jewels. And further south along the river, new developments, plazas, bars, bike paths have all sprung up -- again, in places we wouldn’t have thought of going 12 years ago. I understood why friends who had visited over the past year had enjoyed it.</li>\r\n 	<li>As much as I liked knocking around Budapest -- and running through most of District VII’s craft beer bars where, according to Untappd, Andrew and I tasted 43 Hungarian beers -- my favorite bit of the trip was the day we spent visiting wineries in the Tokaj wine region -- about 2½ hrs northeast of Budapest near the border with Slovakia. We hired the guy (<a href=\"http://www.tokajtoday.com/contact/\">Gergely Somogyi</a>) who runs the Tokaj Today web site as our guide. He came to our hotel, gave us a 30-minute PowerPoint presentation (plugged right into the hotel’s flat screen TV in the breakfast room) on Tokaj’s history, geography, geology, grape and wine types. And with this Intro to Tokaj information still looking for neurons to hang out in, we were off to visit four winemakers. And say that rather than wineries because we sat down with each of the winemakers -- the two more established --<a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/demeterzoltantokaj\">Zoltán Demeter</a> and <a href=\"http://www.bottpince.hu/\">Judit Bodo</a> -- in their tasting rooms, the two garagistas -- <a href=\"http://new2017.samueltinon.com/en/\">Mathilde Hulot</a> and <a href=\"http://abrahampince.com/english/\">Róbert Péter</a> -- their kitchens and patios -- for an hour or more each, talking about their wine, about Hungary, and about what they’re trying to do. Only one of the four -- Demeter -- is from Tokaj. The rest moved there to make wine -- Bodo from the Hungarian-speaking part of Slovakia, Peter from Budapest, and Hulot from France -- because of its history and its potential to make great wine.</li>\r\n 	<li>Each told a version of the same story -- of Tokaj’s history, wine knowledge, and wine quality being broken during the 40-some years of Communism -- abandoning the high-quality vineyards on the hills for lower-quality fields on the plains that could be harvested with big Russian tractors, 5-year government planning that pushed quantity over quality. And of how each of them came to Tokaj to flip that equation back to quality over quantity -- even the Tokaj local had to leave to jobs in California and France to learn quality winemaking before he came back. But they all feel challenged to get the entire community, the “locals,” on board. Maybe it’s some of the residue of Communism -- it’s easier to crank out industrial plonk than good wine. Maybe it’s because many of them can’t afford these new wines and so don’t appreciate them. Bodo said she specifically priced one wine so that local young people who now drink beer could afford to drink good local wine. To appreciate what they have here, she said, everyone has to be able to enjoy good wine -- not just the winemakers.</li>\r\n 	<li>I hate to truck in the wine industry cliche that these winemakers have a “passion” for what they’re doing, but my thesaurus fails me, I can’t find a better word. They all appreciated that we’d taken the time to drive out from Budapest to visit (if maybe a bit puzzled by doing everything in a day), and were very generous with their time and their wine. It was tough to limit ourselves to buying just one bottle per stop. I had to keep reminding myself that I’d only brought my small rollerboard with me.</li>\r\n 	<li>On our last night, we’re back in Budapest, knocking around District VII, looking for our last dinner. We’d had some great food -- a couple of Michelin one-stars, some food trucks near a ruin bar -- but it was tough to find some of the homey Hungarian food -- call it “peasant food” -- that we’d had in the past. And then we found it -- a bit cafeteria style -- I’ll take that sausage, the hurka with the pork liver and rice -- oh, and that one too, the regular kolbasz with pork, paprika and garlic -- some pickled salad, a bowl of gulyas soup, and, OK, just one last beer.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #130</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_130.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #130 — Notes from Hungary','','inherit','closed','closed','','1774-revision-v1','','','2017-12-19 21:29:25','2017-12-20 02:29:25','',1774,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/1774-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1894,1,'2017-12-19 22:40:30','2017-12-20 03:40:30','[caption id=\"attachment_1895\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/iStock-502842002.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1895\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/iStock-502842002-300x200.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"200\" /></a> A C-Note for you, and you, and you...[/caption]\n\nAfter traveling with younger colleagues who pay for everything with cards, I wonder if I\'m the last generation of cash payers. I also talk about the upcoming smart luggage ban on US airlines and a long Saturday afternoon trying to redeem some British Airways Avios points. All this, a new Uber driver story, and a few Christmas carols at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_136.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #136:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL on what has been a very light travel month, just one trip to New York and then back down to Charlottesville, VA before an early wrap-up of my 2017 travel. I wanted to avoid flying into LGA because of the construction, but UA’s EWR monopoly jacks the price difference way beyond what I can justify, so I gritted my teeth and booked the LGA flight. It was amazingly smooth for Monday morning rush hour in ORD. Walked straight into the PreCheck line. There were a ton of people there -- as is typical on a Monday morning, lots of professional travelers -- but everything moved smoothly. The TSA stations were fully staffed; there was a minimal number of amateur travelers in PreCheck, and so what appeared to be a very daunting line was an easy 5-minute exercise. After that, I walked straight up the Starbucks register and ordered a coffee, and had a easy walk down to the gate. We left ORD on-time and landed at LGA 30 minutes early! I checked my watch again to make sure it was right. On a good day, I consider an flight between ORD and LGA to be on-time if I’m not more than 30 minutes late. I’m not sure I’ve ever arrived early. Indeed, somebody sent me a press release last month with stats saying that Chicago-New York is second only to SF-LA in the list of most disrupted air routes. All this joyousness hit the wall, though -- almost literally -- when I walked out of LGA Terminal B smack into the cab line which, for those of you not familiar with LGA, should not be see when you walk out the front of Terminal B because the cab rank is on the side of Terminal B. Well, maybe they moved it for the construction. Nope, it was where it always has been. So my time budget balanced out -- 30-minute early arrival funded the 30-minute cab ride. Easy come, easy go.</li>\n 	<li>I was only in New York for Monday day -- arrived at 11am and left at 8pm -- which meant trying to find a cab on 5th Ave to take me to LGA during rush hour. Or used to. Whatever your opinions on Uber or ride sharing in general, the ability to easily get a ride from Manhattan to LGA without dancing into the street, hiding your luggage behind a trash can, and pleading with the one guy who finally stopped is justification enough for its existence. And I’m obviously not the only one who feels this way, so there are gobs of Uber drivers on, say, 5th Ave at rush hour, making it hard to spot your ride and easy to get into someone else’s. Monday night, I noticed a new option on the Uber screen that was showing my driver crawling toward me through Midtown traffic. “Click here to change the color of your driver’s Uber badge”. I clicked and got a color spectrum slider, which kept me occupied while I was waiting. I changed the color to red, then blue, then yellow, and then Uber said he was a block away, to some shade of lime green. I looked up, and there was an SUV with a lime green Uber badge in the window. I hopped in and off we went. I asked him how his evening was going. “Fine,” he said, “though I think this Uber light is acting up. Just now, it started changing all sorts of colors.”</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/copperhead/40520\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen</a> by copperhead (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: Admiral Bob, Javolenus , Sackjo22</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Roger Nash sent a note on Twitter with a pointer to the Transport for London’s new Oyster app. In the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/11/20/podcast-135-airport-bingo-new-old-travel-pc/\">last episode</a>, I talked about my growing stack of contactless -- tap ‘n’ go -- transit cards, and difference between re-loading my Chicago Ventra card with a smartphone app vs. having to queue at a machine to top up my Oyster card when we were in London last summer. TfL launched their Oyster app a few months back and seem to be aggressively rev’ing it to add features. The only problem for me -- it’ll only take a UK-based payment card. So I’ll have to sponge off my daughter if I want to skip the machine. That’ll be a fun role change…</li>\n 	<li>Also got a good run of comments on the Airport Bingo topic.\n<ul>\n 	<li>An anonymous comment asking “Since when do bingo cards have a story arc?” Fair point…</li>\n 	<li>Donna Smith Pleiman on Twitter suggested a square for “sweaty guy racing onto the plane at the last minute plops down next to you, proceeds to take his shoes off.” Yeah, that one happens a little too often -- because once is too often</li>\n 	<li>Rob said: I like the \"3-adjective rule\". I\'ve always said, \"If you have to inhale to finish your drink order... you don\'t actually like coffee.\" Good point, if you have to use circular breathing in the Starbucks line, you need to re-think your beverage choices.</li>\n 	<li>And Steve Frick built his own card in a post on his Back and Gone Again blog. “Since not everyone travels by air, we’re focusing on travel in general,” he says and then spins through his set of 25 spaces. I’ll post a <a href=\"http://www.hypeorlando.com/back-and-gone-again/2017/11/22/holiday-travel-bingo/\">link</a> to it in the show notes.</li>\n 	<li>And with Steve throwing down that challenge, I stole a couple of his squares so I could expand my Airport Bingo card to the full 25 spaces in a blog post on the TravelCommons site last week. Check it out; I hope it keeps you entertained on your trip to Grandma’s house.</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>The smart luggage ban announced by Delta, American, and Alaska with the other US oligopoly members United and Southwest expected to follow shortly caused a bit of a Twitter storm. Next month, January 15 to be exact, smart luggage without removable batteries will be banned. And if your smart bag is checked, you have to remove battery before it goes in the hold -- which negates one of the key benefits pitched by smart bag sellers -- the ability to track your bag through built-in GPS and cellular data. No battery, and it’s just another bag left behind on the tarmac, or as one of my funnier Twitter followers @ThankYouLeetch replied that the airlines were hard at work -- “We\'re GOING to lose your bag, and we\'ll be damned if we let the likes of YOU find it! If you must know, we are just REALLY into this monopoly thing.\" Kinda blows if you just dropped $400 on one of these bags.</li>\n 	<li>This would seem to cause an existential problem for category pioneer Bluesmart because none of their bags -- the original one nor the recently released Series 2 -- have removable batteries. I backed Bluesmart’s initial Indiegogo campaign back in November 2014 -- longtime podcast listener Arnoud Heijnis <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/11/22/podcast-112-holiday-airport-etiquette-travel-tax-pile-up/\">pointed it out to me</a> -- and received my bag a year later. I reviewed it in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/12/podcast-120-where-do-guidebooks-fit-in-i-hate-shopping-for-suitcases/\">episode 120</a> after a couple of months of use -- my take: “I’m kinda “meh” on all the electronics, so it’s a nice enough hard-shell wheelie bag with a couple of bells and whistles that don’t necessarily wow me.” Though I did amend that “meh” in the very <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/05/30/podcast-121-tsa-lines-my-luggage-is-where/\">next episode</a> saying “the Bluesmart is the perfect carry-on size, it’s usually right above me in the plane cabin, so the location finder isn’t that valuable. Except when I have to gate check my bag on a small regional jet. On a recent Skywest flight, it was taking my bag a long time to show up at the gate after arriving. Hmmm, I pulled out my iPhone, hit the Location button on the Bluesmart app, and it showed me that my bag had updated its location a couple of minutes prior and was indeed here. A few minutes later, it showed up in the last tranche of bags heaved up into the jet bridge. Not critical functionality, but it moves up from “meh” to “kinda handy”.”</li>\n 	<li>The real pain for me is that I now have to shop for another suitcase which I really hate. I finally put my 10-year-old Victorinox bag out to pasture because the handle locked itself in the extended position, and so I’d switched over to my Bluesmart for these recent trips. My last flight back from CHO was on an American Eagle regional jet. I’m waiting along the side of a cold ORD bridge with about 20 other passengers for my bag. It comes out second because, even though there’s not First Class on this plane, I’ve clung to the yellow gate check tag that I got with a First Class upgrade last month. Sparky, the young gate agent, looks at my bag as he’s handing it to me and says “Is that a smart bag? Did you take the battery out of that?” “No, because I don’t have to until January 15,” I shot back. Don’t push it, American. You’re forcing me to scrap a 2-year-old bag; I got that. But don’t make me go luggage shopping the week before Christmas.</li>\n 	<li>One of the topics back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/11/22/podcast-125-uber-driver-stories-overseas-for-the-election/\">episode 125</a> was life stories from my Uber and Lyft drivers. I still do ask most of my drivers how they like driving, how long they’ve been doing it, and what else they do — if it’s not their full time gig. Last month, we were taking an Uber into the city on Saturday for a beer festival. The driver was great -- very personable guy. So I ask him about his gig. He’s been doing it full-time for 2 years now. Before that, he was a hotel manager. He quit because the stress was too much -- late night calls about guests, bedbug infestations,.... He said that driving Uber in Chicago was much less stressful. Think about next time you’re about to light into the assistant night manager about a missing towel -- their job is more stressful than driving full-time in bumper-to-bumper traffic. That was an eye-opener to me. I’ve gone out of my way to be more pleasant to front desk folks ever since.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/NiGiD/48586\">O Tannenbaum / Oh Christmas Tree</a> by Martijn de Boer (NiGiD) (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license.  Ft: Admiral Bob (admiralbob77)</span></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Is Cash is a Waning King?</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>As I said at the start of the show, my last trip this year was ORD to LGA to CHO. I didn’t arrive too late so there were a couple of cabs waiting -- no LGA-style lines, I just hopped in. It’s a $25 flat rate to downtown Charlottesville. We pulled up to my hotel, I gave the driver a 20 and a 10 and got out of the cab. “Cash? Thanks!” he said.</li>\n 	<li>I’ve said this before; I try to pay all of my cab fares in cash ever since one cab driver walked me through why he hates cards. There’s a timing problem-- he has to pay for gas, tolls, airport access fees, and the taxi company that day, but he doesn’t get his money until a couple of days later. And then there’s the high fees the processing companies charge taxi drivers.</li>\n 	<li>But when traveling with younger colleagues, I feel like I’m the last generation of cash payers. Not only do they pay for everything with a card, many of them don’t even carry cash. Maybe I’m just getting old, or maybe I remember when you couldn’t use cards everywhere.</li>\n 	<li>Especially in Europe in the late ‘80’s/early ‘90’s when I would be in a different country every day on sales calls with distributors. There weren’t international ATMs -- or really ATMs of any kind. We’d get a wallet full of American Express Travelers Checks before flying out and then typically cash a $100 check at the airport currency exchange after customs. This was before the euro, so we’d juggle D Marks, Belgian and French francs, British and Irish pounds, pesetas, lira,.... Almost all of the hotels we stayed in took credit cards -- except for this one random mom-&amp;-pop place outside of Munich; nice people but they screwed up my D Mark budget -- but not all restaurants and none of the taxis did. So our currency exit strategy -- so we didn’t pay double the exchange fees for having to go in and out of a currency that we might not use for another year or so -- was to throw down most of our excess cash at the hotel in the morning, saving enough for a sandwich, the cab back to the airport and a beer at the bar -- and then put on the Amex the balance of the hotel room. It usually worked well -- except for the one time that I mixed up the exchange rate between the Swedish krona and Swiss franc. Not an unreasonable mix up -- both countries start with an S and have a lot of snow -- but the krona exchange rate was about 6 to the dollar at that time while the Swiss franc was at 1.3 to the dollar. That one definitely screwed up my end-of-day cash strategy.</li>\n 	<li>But I absolutely understand the use case for going all plastic. First, you’re not having to float the money between travel and reimbursement. But I gotta think convenience is the bigger play. Many companies pipe their company card transactions straight into their expense reporting systems. Makes it incredibly easy -- log into Concur or whatever, assign each charge to an expense code and submit. Nothing forgotten and you’re done in 5 minutes. With cash, you have to remember what you spent, enter it, and probably submit a receipt too. I’ll never pay for my $2 ORD Starbucks coffee with my Amex card, but when the cab fare get above $50, even I’ll charge it.</li>\n 	<li>I do think it’s a bit of a generational thing, though. I remember my dad always walking around with a bunch of 50’s in a money clip in his pocket. And my kids always getting a $100 bill from their Hungarian grandparents for Christmas -- we’d call it the Eastern European C note. I now have a Venmo account, but I still like paying people back in cash. Feels like I need say “Get off my lawn” but I may not have completely aged out yet. When paying my daughter’s tuition at Univ of St Andrews, one sentence on the web site caught my eye -- “Ideally tuition and accommodation fees should not be paid in cash” -- which means that someone or multiple someones has done it. It’s not a travel expense, but the image of someone walking into the St Andrews bursar’s office and stacking piles of 100 pound notes just makes me smile. Makes me want to drop a C note on my next big cab ride.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/44580\"> What Child is This (Instrumental)</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license.  Ft: Jeris</span></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Don’t Make It Hard to Cash in on Loyalty</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Back in October, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/10/31/podcast-134-value-of-loyalty-need-those-5-stars/\">episode 134</a>, we talked about the value of loyalty. In November, JD Powers released their 2017 Airline Loyalty Program Satisfaction Study. Powers measured satisfaction “based on four factors (in order of importance): earning and redeeming rewards; program benefits; account management; and member communication”. Not a surprising list, and placing “redeeming awards” at the top makes sense since that’s sorta the core of a loyalty program -- here’s something to incent you to fly us more.</li>\n 	<li>A couple of years ago, in episode 116, I talked about why, for me, British Airways’ Avios program has been the worst program for redemptions. I had over 300,000 points sitting there because it never made sense to use them. When I’d price out an award ticket between Chicago and London, the addition cash I would owe for BA’s fuel surcharges (which made sense when oil was at $120/bbl, but much less so at $50) and Heathrow landing taxes would just about equal what I’d pay for a ticket with another airline -- so the miles were worth nothing. Not exactly a best practice for an airline loyalty program.</li>\n 	<li>But, when BA and Iberia, both owned by the same corporate parent, kinda combined their programs into, not a single but a sorta interchangeable Avios program, I thought there might be a way to finally get some value from my forlorn BA points. I said kinda interchangeable because I now have 2 Avios accounts -- a BA Avios account and an Iberia Avios account. And since I have had my Iberia Avios account for over 90 days, I can convert my BA Avios to Iberia Avios, which let me use points for a direct ORD-MAD flight this spring at a small fraction of the cash for fees and taxes that BA would charge.</li>\n 	<li>OK, good. I’ve found the flights, I’ve found the page on BA.com to transfer. I enter all the account info, press the button, and get a big red error screen. Hmmm… I try it a couple of more times, same result. Different browsers, same result. In incognito mode so there’s no legacy cookies, same result. Hmmm…</li>\n 	<li>So I dredge around BA’s site and find a technical support number. It’s Saturday afternoon Chicago time, but after a good bit of music, I get a live guy. And he’s a good guy. Here’s the problem, your name doesn’t match on your accounts -- it’s Mark Peacock on your BA account, and Mark Peacock Peacock on your Iberia account. You’ll need to call Iberia to change that, then the transfer will go through. OK, seems reasonable enough. So I call Iberia, again listen to music and again get a live person. Good guy, but he can’t help me. Here’s a number in Spain; give them a call. Which I do, a bit more music, and then another guy. We’ll need some documentation to make that change, send a picture of the first page of your passport to this Iberia email address and we’ll make the change.</li>\n 	<li>Lots of calls, spoke to some nice people, but I still can’t break these BA Avios points free. So I send the email, but I don’t expect this to get resolved soon. I open another beer and gear myself up for another fare search, but decide to give BA one more call. This time, I connect with a woman with a proper northern English accent. It felt like I’d somehow overflowed into a high status group; like when I was Global Services on United and agents picking up my calls were sitting in the corporate center near ORD and could make anything happen. I relate my tale of woe; “Oh, that’s no problem,” she says. Five minutes later, it’s done. Thanks to her, I got to redeem 100,000 Avios points and am feeling a bit more hopeful about the remaining balance. The only downside -- I didn’t get the woman’s name so I could give her a shout out. By the way, 3.5 weeks later and still no response to my email to Iberia.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #136</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_136.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #136 — Is Cash A Waning King; Don’t Make It Hard to Cash in on Loyalty','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty','','','2021-09-29 21:51:58','2021-09-30 02:51:58','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=1894',0,'post','',0),
(1895,1,'2017-12-19 21:38:37','2017-12-20 02:38:37','','US Dollars','A C-Note for you, and you, and you...','inherit','open','closed','','us-dollars','','','2017-12-19 21:40:49','2017-12-20 02:40:49','',1894,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/iStock-502842002.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(1896,1,'2017-12-19 21:48:48','2017-12-20 02:48:48','[caption id=\"attachment_1895\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/iStock-502842002.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1895\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/iStock-502842002-300x200.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"200\" /></a> A C-Note for you, and you, and you...[/caption]\r\n\r\nHere\'s something to listen to while in the Thanksgiving airport lines and traffic jams. We list out some of the squares we\'d like to see in an airport bingo card, and I end up going back to the future with my new travel PC. We also talk about my growing stack of subway \"tap\" cards and some forecasts on what could be a traffic jammed Thanksgiving holiday. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_136.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/358749968\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n<!--more-->\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #136:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL on what has been a very light travel month, just one trip to New York and then back down to Charlottesville, VA before an early wrap-up of my 2017 travel. I wanted to avoid flying into LGA because of the construction, but UA’s EWR monopoly jacks the price difference way beyond what I can justify, so I gritted my teeth and booked the LGA flight. It was amazingly smooth for Monday morning rush hour in ORD. Walked straight into the PreCheck line. There were a ton of people there -- as is typical on a Monday morning, lots of professional travelers -- but everything moved smoothly. The TSA stations were fully staffed; there was a minimal number of amateur travelers in PreCheck, and so what appeared to be a very daunting line was an easy 5-minute exercise. After that, I walked straight up the Starbucks register and ordered a coffee, and had a easy walk down to the gate. We left ORD on-time and landed at LGA 30 minutes early! I checked my watch again to make sure it was right. On a good day, I consider an flight between ORD and LGA to be on-time if I’m not more than 30 minutes late. I’m not sure I’ve ever arrived early. Indeed, somebody sent me a press release last month with stats saying that Chicago-New York is second only to SF-LA in the list of most disrupted air routes. All this joyousness hit the wall, though -- almost literally -- when I walked out of LGA Terminal B smack into the cab line which, for those of you not familiar with LGA, should not be see when you walk out the front of Terminal B because the cab rank is on the side of Terminal B. Well, maybe they moved it for the construction. Nope, it was where it always has been. So my time budget balanced out -- 30-minute early arrival funded the 30-minute cab ride. Easy come, easy go.</li>\r\n 	<li>I was only in New York for Monday day -- arrived at 11am and left at 8pm -- which meant trying to find a cab on 5th Ave to take me to LGA during rush hour. Or used to. Whatever your opinions on Uber or ride sharing in general, the ability to easily get a ride from Manhattan to LGA without dancing into the street, hiding your luggage behind a trash can, and pleading with the one guy who finally stopped is justification enough for its existence. And I’m obviously not the only one who feels this way, so there are gobs of Uber drivers on, say, 5th Ave at rush hour, making it hard to spot your ride and easy to get into someone else’s. Monday night, I noticed a new option on the Uber screen that was showing my driver crawling toward me through Midtown traffic. “Click here to change the color of your driver’s Uber badge”. I clicked and got a color spectrum slider, which kept me occupied while I was waiting. I changed the color to red, then blue, then yellow, and then Uber said he was a block away, to some shade of lime green. I looked up, and there was an SUV with a lime green Uber badge in the window. I hopped in and off we went. I asked him how his evening was going. “Fine,” he said, “though I think this Uber light is acting up. Just now, it started changing all sorts of colors.”</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/copperhead/40520\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen</a> by copperhead (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: Admiral Bob, Javolenus , Sackjo22</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I’m sorta short-cycling what has become my normal monthly cadence -- just squeaking in episodes at the last day of the month -- so that I can give you something to listen to in those Thanksgiving airport line and traffic jams. Triple A forecasts 45.5 million people hitting the roads, the highest since 2005 -- probably some combination of low unemployment and low gas prices. And as the Thanksgiving holiday has expanded -- trying finding anyone in the office on Weds -- Tuesday evening is <a href=\"http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-met-holiday-travel-chicago-20171114-story.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">forecasted </a>to be the worst traffic, when getaway drivers and outbound rush hour combine into a hellish brew of standstill traffic jams. In Chicago, the trip from downtown to O’Hare is predicted to be an hour and 14 minutes, almost 4x more than what it takes on a clear road. Surpassed only by the 2 hour trip to JFK also forecasted for Tuesday evening.</li>\r\n 	<li>Steve Frick left a comment on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> about<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/10/31/podcast-134-value-of-loyalty-need-those-5-stars/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> last episode</a>’s topic on ratings grade inflation -- the need for that 5-star review. Steve writes:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I\'m a \"Yelp\" guy and I consistently give Fairfield Inn 3 stars. My reviews are along these lines \"Typical Fairfield, nothing that bad yet nothing yet nothing that great. Friendly staff, clean location, and comfortable beds. Same sub-par Fairfield breakfast, but that\'s why you pack instant oatmeal and protein bars.\" There\'s nothing that makes me want to tell people to stay there.</li>\r\n 	<li>Your <a href=\"https://untappd.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Untappd </a>information got me thinking. With around 1200 unique beers I\'m well below your numbers but I came in with the bulk of my ratings also at 3.75.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Thanks for that, Steve. My rationalization for my beer ratings skew is selection bias -- with over 5,200 unique beer check-ins, I pretty much know what I like and what I don’t like, so I’m not knowingly going to order and pay for a beer I don’t think I’ll like. I did have the exception to that last weekend when my son and I were at <a href=\"http://fobab.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">FoBAB</a> -- the Festival of Barrel Aged Beers. We volunteered to pour on Friday -- the first night -- which earned us a free ticket for Saturday night. At some point, my son give me a glass “Here, taste this”. I spit it back into the glass, dumped it, and rinsed the glass twice. It was awful. What was it? It was a beer that I had specifically said I wanted to avoid after reading the description in the program -- “Aged 12 months in Ardbeg scotch barrels with coffee and peanut butter.” I rated it 0.25 out of 5 because a zero doesn’t register as a rating. After that, I think I can live with a bit of rating skew.</li>\r\n 	<li>I started off the other topic in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/10/31/podcast-134-value-of-loyalty-need-those-5-stars/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">last episode</a> -- the value of loyalty -- with the story of finding a new Jag in the Hertz Presidents Club aisle at ATL. Of course, I grabbed it. The next afternoon, though, I was kinda wishing I’d taken an Uber or Lyft. My meeting in Norcross, north of Atlanta, was running late and refreshing Waze, I could see traffic both through and around Atlanta was building. And the rental return is at least a 15-minute ride to the terminal -- when the train doesn’t make an unscheduled stop mid-transit as I described in an earlier episode. So I was gearing myself up for missing my flight and the hassles of finding a seat on something later, when up popped an e-mail from Hertz offering to drive me to the terminal for $20. Sold! After I pulled in, one of the car “checker-inners” hopped into the driver’s seat and off we drove. And she was as happy to be driving that Jag as I was. “I love this car!” she said as we pulled out. “It’s such a beautiful day, I may drop you off and just keep on driving!” We had a good chat. She dropped me off at the door closest to the PreCheck line and I legged it in to make my flight. I won’t pop for that every time, but that $20 was worth it.</li>\r\n 	<li>Also, thanks to Cristina Sainz of Booking.com’s <a href=\"http://info.suite.booking.com/business-travel-blog/7-podcasts-every-travel-manager-needs-to-listen-to\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Business Travel Blog</a> who put TravelCommons #2 in her list of the “7 Podcasts Every Travel Manager Needs to Listen to Right Now”. She describes the podcast as “serving up pithy travel advice since 2005.” Well, we try. Thanks again Cristina for the shout-out.</li>\r\n 	<li>When I was in DC last month, I added another subway “tap” card to my collection, which was a little bit of a bummer because I still had an old style Metrocard -- the paper fare card with a mag stripe -- with at least one ride’s worth of fare still on it. So now I have a Smart Trip card along with a Ventra card from Chicago, an Oyster card from London, and a Breeze card from Atlanta. I hold onto them because they’re reusable and, while not expensive, their costs start to add up. The Atlanta and DC cards were $2 each; the Chicago card was $5, and the London card £5 -- or about $6.60 at today’s exchange rate. The Chicago card is, of course, the one I use the most. And it’s nice because I can top it up with a smartphone app. Comes in handy when I decide to take the L from ORD downtown. Beats standing in the perpetual long lines in front of the ORD fare machines. You’d think that if CTA is going to charge a premium to board at ORD, they’d at least pony up to cut the line to pay it. Little known pro tip for folks coming into ORD -- skip the line and pay with your iPhone if you have Apple Pay set up. It doesn’t read as fast as the Ventra card, but it works -- at least on the L -- the subway. When I was in London this past summer, the Underground was wonky. I could tap in at the turnstile with my iPhone, but couldn’t tap out which was a real hassle. But my daughter, though, who has a contactless debit card from RBS had no problems. And there wasn’t an app to top up my Oyster card, so I had to queue up in front of a lot of fare machines. Last month, New York announced that they’re hiring the same company London used to revamp the MTA’s payment system. I hope they get Apple and Android Pay working right. And more broadly, I hope these tap cards are just a temporary bridge until these transit systems can fully upgrade their systems to use smartphones. Until then, I carry a card holder in my backpack with my $15-$20 worth of subway tap cards.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/flatwound/14476\"><em>The Long Goodbye</em></a> by John Pazden</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Playing Airport Bingo</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I got a press release a couple of days ago from <a href=\"https://www.airhelp.com/en/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">AirHelp</a>, a company that looks like will file compensation claims for delayed flights in return for a 25% cut -- which doesn’t seem too bad since they’re doing it on a contingent basis. They sent along an Airport Bingo card for “helping you pass the time while not so patiently waiting to board”. It’s kinda the airport version of “buzzword bingo” that we all play on conference calls -- instead of marking a square someone says “synergy”, AirHelp has squares for things like “police dog” and “solo traveler”.</li>\r\n 	<li>That’s OK for a start, I guess. But here at TravelCommons, we try to go to the next level of road warrior-ism. I’m not going to fill out all 24 squares, but here are 12 squares’ worth to get you started\r\n<ol>\r\n 	<li>10-15 minute traffic jam on the airport access road -- just long enough to get those stress hormones flowing</li>\r\n 	<li>Guy in front of you in the PreCheck line walks through the metal detector with his smartphone. The alarm sounds. He stands there, puzzled. The TSA person rolls her eyes and asks, yet again, if he’d emptied his pockets. He looks surprised that his smartphone would set it off. She looks at her watch for how long ‘til her next break.</li>\r\n 	<li>Girl pulling a Hello Kitty kids-sized roller board on her way to Grandma’s. Hey, who said airport bingo had to be 100% snarky?</li>\r\n 	<li>Woman in front of you in the Starbucks line orders a half-decaf 3-pump no-foam vanilla latte, breaking the 3-adjective rule. It’s Sodexo, not your corner Starbucks. Keep it simple so the rest of us can order.</li>\r\n 	<li>A piano bar playing Christmas carols -- or if you’re in Nashville airport, a country duo</li>\r\n 	<li>A family of four or more walking abreast, slowly, so that people racing for their gates drift into the on-coming traffic, or try to thread through the crowd in front of a boarding gate. The only upside? One of the family might be pulling a Hello Kitty bag.</li>\r\n 	<li>An available rocking chair. More airports are scattering these around, in front of windows in terminal connectors, in random hallways. Bonus if it’s next to an open -- and working -- electrical outlet</li>\r\n 	<li>A craft beer bar with beers you haven’t had -- get those stress hormones back under control, and increment your unique beer counter on Untappd</li>\r\n 	<li>Dueling gate announcements. Gates G20 and G22 are boarding at the same time, with each gate agent talking over the other one. You hear Boarding Group 3 called and hustle up to the door, only to be shunted over to wait in the shame station; the other gate called Boarding Group 3.</li>\r\n 	<li>Boarding is complete and there’s an empty middle seat next to you! The clouds part and a golden ray of sunshine reflects off the iPad of the guy sitting in the window seat, illuminating that lovely little bit of extra elbow room. You and the window seat guy look at each other, smile, and feel those stress hormones drop another notch.</li>\r\n 	<li>Missing crew. Boarding’s complete, you’re next to an empty middle seat, but you have no crew. Their flight was late, and pulled into a gate two terminals over. They’re on their way, but now you’re worried that some stand-by will drop into that empty seat. That golden ray of sunshine dims a bit.</li>\r\n 	<li>Early arrival! Not only did the seat stay empty, but favorable winds put you on the ground 30 minutes early. You start to think that you should travel more often.</li>\r\n</ol>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, there you go. There’s half your airport bingo card filled out. If you’re flying out Tues or Weds, you’ll have more that enough time in line to figure out the rest. Let us know -- <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Facebook</a>, or <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">website</a> -- what squares you come up with.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/28792\"><em>Slinky Blues</em></a> by Admiral Bob</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Back to the Future with my New Travel PC</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I’ve been muttering under my breath about my Lenovo ThinkPad for a while now. I’ve had it for 4 years now. It’s feeling a bit heavy and looking a bit beat up, and though it’s no doubt been fully depreciated off the firm’s balance sheet, I don’t hear any rumors of an impending refresh. So I’ve been semi-shopping for a new Travel PC -- clicking through to Engadget reviews, glancing over, eyeing what the other folks on the plane or in the concierge lounge are using.</li>\r\n 	<li>Seven years ago (just about to the day), in what might’ve passed as an instance of pithy travel advice, I <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2010/11/15/two-weeks-with-a-macbook-air/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">wrote </a>about the use case for a Travel PC -- what it is, and more importantly, what it is not. It’s not my primary computer; it’s not my podcast production or video editing machine. That’s my home PC which is now up to 16GBs of RAM, an 8-core processor, 2 21-inch monitors, Blu-Ray burner, and a couple of terabyte hard drives. My Travel PC is spec’d for what’s important, what I need when I travel — light weight, long battery life, low screen profile so not to get crushed when the guy in the row in front of me power-reclines his seat, and reasonable processing power (in that order) — and leaves behind what’s not. Seven years ago -- in 2010 to save you the math -- the 11-inch MacBook Air was my choice for the Best Travel PC.</li>\r\n 	<li>My Travel PC use case hasn’t changed, but the market has -- kinda. In my looking around, what I’ve seen is 2 ½ kinds of travel PCs. There are the next generations of the laptop -- thin ultrabooks from Lenovo, HP and Dell; MacBook Pros from Apple -- or full-sized iPads with combo covers/soft keyboards and pens -- with the Microsoft Surface Pro being that ½ case, a thin Windows PC with a fold-out keyboard cover and pen. Quite honestly, none of those options really spoke to me -- at least enough to make me part with my own cash. The ultrabooks didn’t offer much new; I’d might as well “accidently” dump a grande cappuccino on my old Lenovo ‘cause this is what I’d get in return. The MacBook Pros are certainly sleek, but as a Travel PC, don’t seem to offer much more for the Apple premium. I have been thinking about the tablet/keyboard combo, specifically the Surface Pro; but watching guys try to work that soft keyboard on an airplane seatback tray… I could see myself wearing a cup of coffee two weeks after starting to fly with one of those. So, I kept semi-shopping</li>\r\n 	<li>But then last week, I got an e-mail blast from Newegg, the online PC parts retailer; I usually buy from them them when I’m assembling or upgrading my home PC. They had a flash sale on refurbed 11-inch MacBook Airs, not the 2010 model but what Apple dubs an “early 2014” model. Pretty much identical to my old one, but with updated specs, including the same processor as my Lenovo. I looked at it, did a few Internet search. It sat in a shopping cart for a couple of days until I thought “For $385, why not?” and pulled the trigger. It showed up a few days ago, and save for a corner ding, looks pretty new. I’ve upgraded to the current version of MacOS, installed Office 365 and VMFusion on it, and so I’m pretty much ready to go -- back to the future.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #136</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_136.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #136 — Is Cash A Waning King; Don’t Make It Hard to Cash in on Loyalty','','inherit','closed','closed','','1894-revision-v1','','','2017-12-19 21:48:48','2017-12-20 02:48:48','',1894,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/1894-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1897,1,'2017-12-19 21:59:41','2017-12-20 02:59:41','[caption id=\"attachment_1895\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/iStock-502842002.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1895\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/iStock-502842002-300x200.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"200\" /></a> A C-Note for you, and you, and you...[/caption]\r\n\r\nHere\'s something to listen to while in the Thanksgiving airport lines and traffic jams. We list out some of the squares we\'d like to see in an airport bingo card, and I end up going back to the future with my new travel PC. We also talk about my growing stack of subway \"tap\" cards and some forecasts on what could be a traffic jammed Thanksgiving holiday. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_136.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/358749968\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n<!--more-->\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #136:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL on what has been a very light travel month, just one trip to New York and then back down to Charlottesville, VA before an early wrap-up of my 2017 travel. I wanted to avoid flying into LGA because of the construction, but UA’s EWR monopoly jacks the price difference way beyond what I can justify, so I gritted my teeth and booked the LGA flight. It was amazingly smooth for Monday morning rush hour in ORD. Walked straight into the PreCheck line. There were a ton of people there -- as is typical on a Monday morning, lots of professional travelers -- but everything moved smoothly. The TSA stations were fully staffed; there was a minimal number of amateur travelers in PreCheck, and so what appeared to be a very daunting line was an easy 5-minute exercise. After that, I walked straight up the Starbucks register and ordered a coffee, and had a easy walk down to the gate. We left ORD on-time and landed at LGA 30 minutes early! I checked my watch again to make sure it was right. On a good day, I consider an flight between ORD and LGA to be on-time if I’m not more than 30 minutes late. I’m not sure I’ve ever arrived early. Indeed, somebody sent me a press release last month with stats saying that Chicago-New York is second only to SF-LA in the list of most disrupted air routes. All this joyousness hit the wall, though -- almost literally -- when I walked out of LGA Terminal B smack into the cab line which, for those of you not familiar with LGA, should not be see when you walk out the front of Terminal B because the cab rank is on the side of Terminal B. Well, maybe they moved it for the construction. Nope, it was where it always has been. So my time budget balanced out -- 30-minute early arrival funded the 30-minute cab ride. Easy come, easy go.</li>\r\n 	<li>I was only in New York for Monday day -- arrived at 11am and left at 8pm -- which meant trying to find a cab on 5th Ave to take me to LGA during rush hour. Or used to. Whatever your opinions on Uber or ride sharing in general, the ability to easily get a ride from Manhattan to LGA without dancing into the street, hiding your luggage behind a trash can, and pleading with the one guy who finally stopped is justification enough for its existence. And I’m obviously not the only one who feels this way, so there are gobs of Uber drivers on, say, 5th Ave at rush hour, making it hard to spot your ride and easy to get into someone else’s. Monday night, I noticed a new option on the Uber screen that was showing my driver crawling toward me through Midtown traffic. “Click here to change the color of your driver’s Uber badge”. I clicked and got a color spectrum slider, which kept me occupied while I was waiting. I changed the color to red, then blue, then yellow, and then Uber said he was a block away, to some shade of lime green. I looked up, and there was an SUV with a lime green Uber badge in the window. I hopped in and off we went. I asked him how his evening was going. “Fine,” he said, “though I think this Uber light is acting up. Just now, it started changing all sorts of colors.”</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/copperhead/40520\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen</a> by copperhead (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: Admiral Bob, Javolenus , Sackjo22</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Roger Nash sent a note on Twitter with a pointer to the Transport for London’s new Oyster app. In the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/11/20/podcast-135-airport-bingo-new-old-travel-pc/\">last episode</a>, I talked about my growing stack of contactless -- tap ‘n’ go -- transit cards, and difference between re-loading my Chicago Ventra card with a smartphone app vs. having to queue at a machine to top up my Oyster card when we were in London last summer. TfL launched their Oyster app a few months back and seem to be aggressively rev’ing it to add features. The only problem for me -- it’ll only take a UK-based payment card. So I’ll have to sponge off my daughter if I want to skip the machine. That’ll be a fun role change…</li>\r\n 	<li>Also got a good run of comments on the Airport Bingo topic.</li>\r\n 	<li>An anonymous comment asking “Since when do bingo cards have a story arc?” Fair point…</li>\r\n 	<li>Donna Smith Pleiman on Twitter suggested a square for “sweaty guy racing onto the plane at the last minute plops down next to you, proceeds to take his shoes off.” Yeah, that one happens a little too often -- because once is too often</li>\r\n 	<li>Rob said: I like the \"3-adjective rule\". I\'ve always said, \"If you have to inhale to finish your drink order... you don\'t actually like coffee.\" Good point, if you have to use circular breathing in the Starbucks line, you need to re-think your beverage choices.</li>\r\n 	<li>And Steve Frick built his own card in a post on his Back and Gone Again blog. “Since not everyone travels by air, we’re focusing on travel in general,” he says and then spins through his set of 25 spaces. I’ll post a link to it in the show notes.</li>\r\n 	<li>And with Steve throwing down that challenge, I stole a couple of his squares so I could expand my Airport Bingo card to the full 25 spaces in a blog post on the TravelCommons site last week. Check it out; I hope it keeps you entertained on your trip to Grandma’s house.</li>\r\n 	<li>The smart luggage ban announced by Delta, American, and Alaska with the other US oligopoly members United and Southwest expected to follow shortly caused a bit of a Twitter storm. Next month, January 15 to be exact, smart luggage without removable batteries will be banned. And if your smart bag is checked, you have to remove battery before it goes in the hold -- which negates one of the key benefits pitched by smart bag sellers -- the ability to track your bag through built-in GPS and cellular data. No battery, and it’s just another bag left behind on the tarmac, or as one of my funnier Twitter followers @ThankYouLeetch replied that the airlines were hard at work -- “We\'re GOING to lose your bag, and we\'ll be damned if we let the likes of YOU find it! If you must know, we are just REALLY into this monopoly thing.\" Kinda blows if you just dropped $400 on one of these bags.</li>\r\n 	<li>This would seem to cause an existential problem for category pioneer Bluesmart because none of their bags -- the original one nor the recently released Series 2 -- have removable batteries. I backed Bluesmart’s initial Indiegogo campaign back in November 2014 -- longtime podcast listener Arnoud Heijnis <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/11/22/podcast-112-holiday-airport-etiquette-travel-tax-pile-up/\">pointed it out to me</a> -- and received my bag a year later. I reviewed it in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/12/podcast-120-where-do-guidebooks-fit-in-i-hate-shopping-for-suitcases/\">episode 120</a> after a couple of months of use -- my take: “I’m kinda “meh” on all the electronics, so it’s a nice enough hard-shell wheelie bag with a couple of bells and whistles that don’t necessarily wow me.” Though I did amend that “meh” in the very <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/05/30/podcast-121-tsa-lines-my-luggage-is-where/\">next episode</a> saying “the Bluesmart is the perfect carry-on size, it’s usually right above me in the plane cabin, so the location finder isn’t that valuable. Except when I have to gate check my bag on a small regional jet. On a recent Skywest flight, it was taking my bag a long time to show up at the gate after arriving. Hmmm, I pulled out my iPhone, hit the Location button on the Bluesmart app, and it showed me that my bag had updated its location a couple of minutes prior and was indeed here. A few minutes later, it showed up in the last tranche of bags heaved up into the jet bridge. Not critical functionality, but it moves up from “meh” to “kinda handy”.”</li>\r\n 	<li>The real pain for me is that I now have to shop for another suitcase which I really hate. I finally put my 10-year-old Victorinox bag out to pasture because the handle locked itself in the extended position, and so I’d switched over to my Bluesmart for these recent trips. My last flight back from CHO was on an American Eagle regional jet. I’m waiting along the side of a cold ORD bridge with about 20 other passengers for my bag. It comes out second because, even though there’s not First Class on this plane, I’ve clung to the yellow gate check tag that I got with a First Class upgrade last month. Sparky, the young gate agent, looks at my bag as he’s handing it to me and says “Is that a smart bag? Did you take the battery out of that?” “No, because I don’t have to until January 15,” I shot back. Don’t push it, American. You’re forcing me to scrap a 2-year-old bag; I got that. But don’t make me go luggage shopping the week before Christmas.</li>\r\n 	<li>One of the topics back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/11/22/podcast-125-uber-driver-stories-overseas-for-the-election/\">episode 125</a> was life stories from my Uber and Lyft drivers. I still do ask most of my drivers how they like driving, how long they’ve been doing it, and what else they do — if it’s not their full time gig. Last month, we were taking an Uber into the city on Saturday for a beer festival. The driver was great -- very personable guy. So I ask him about his gig. He’s been doing it full-time for 2 years now. Before that, he was a hotel manager. He quit because the stress was too much -- late night calls about guests, bedbug infestations,.... He said that driving Uber in Chicago was much less stressful. Think about next time you’re about to light into the assistant night manager about a missing towel -- their job is more stressful than driving full-time in bumper-to-bumper traffic. That was an eye-opener to me. I’ve gone out of my way to be more pleasant to front desk folks ever since.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/NiGiD/48586\">O Tannenbaum / Oh Christmas Tree</a> by Martijn de Boer (NiGiD) (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license.  Ft: Admiral Bob (admiralbob77)</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Playing Airport Bingo</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I got a press release a couple of days ago from <a href=\"https://www.airhelp.com/en/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">AirHelp</a>, a company that looks like will file compensation claims for delayed flights in return for a 25% cut -- which doesn’t seem too bad since they’re doing it on a contingent basis. They sent along an Airport Bingo card for “helping you pass the time while not so patiently waiting to board”. It’s kinda the airport version of “buzzword bingo” that we all play on conference calls -- instead of marking a square someone says “synergy”, AirHelp has squares for things like “police dog” and “solo traveler”.</li>\r\n 	<li>That’s OK for a start, I guess. But here at TravelCommons, we try to go to the next level of road warrior-ism. I’m not going to fill out all 24 squares, but here are 12 squares’ worth to get you started\r\n<ol>\r\n 	<li>10-15 minute traffic jam on the airport access road -- just long enough to get those stress hormones flowing</li>\r\n 	<li>Guy in front of you in the PreCheck line walks through the metal detector with his smartphone. The alarm sounds. He stands there, puzzled. The TSA person rolls her eyes and asks, yet again, if he’d emptied his pockets. He looks surprised that his smartphone would set it off. She looks at her watch for how long ‘til her next break.</li>\r\n 	<li>Girl pulling a Hello Kitty kids-sized roller board on her way to Grandma’s. Hey, who said airport bingo had to be 100% snarky?</li>\r\n 	<li>Woman in front of you in the Starbucks line orders a half-decaf 3-pump no-foam vanilla latte, breaking the 3-adjective rule. It’s Sodexo, not your corner Starbucks. Keep it simple so the rest of us can order.</li>\r\n 	<li>A piano bar playing Christmas carols -- or if you’re in Nashville airport, a country duo</li>\r\n 	<li>A family of four or more walking abreast, slowly, so that people racing for their gates drift into the on-coming traffic, or try to thread through the crowd in front of a boarding gate. The only upside? One of the family might be pulling a Hello Kitty bag.</li>\r\n 	<li>An available rocking chair. More airports are scattering these around, in front of windows in terminal connectors, in random hallways. Bonus if it’s next to an open -- and working -- electrical outlet</li>\r\n 	<li>A craft beer bar with beers you haven’t had -- get those stress hormones back under control, and increment your unique beer counter on Untappd</li>\r\n 	<li>Dueling gate announcements. Gates G20 and G22 are boarding at the same time, with each gate agent talking over the other one. You hear Boarding Group 3 called and hustle up to the door, only to be shunted over to wait in the shame station; the other gate called Boarding Group 3.</li>\r\n 	<li>Boarding is complete and there’s an empty middle seat next to you! The clouds part and a golden ray of sunshine reflects off the iPad of the guy sitting in the window seat, illuminating that lovely little bit of extra elbow room. You and the window seat guy look at each other, smile, and feel those stress hormones drop another notch.</li>\r\n 	<li>Missing crew. Boarding’s complete, you’re next to an empty middle seat, but you have no crew. Their flight was late, and pulled into a gate two terminals over. They’re on their way, but now you’re worried that some stand-by will drop into that empty seat. That golden ray of sunshine dims a bit.</li>\r\n 	<li>Early arrival! Not only did the seat stay empty, but favorable winds put you on the ground 30 minutes early. You start to think that you should travel more often.</li>\r\n</ol>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, there you go. There’s half your airport bingo card filled out. If you’re flying out Tues or Weds, you’ll have more that enough time in line to figure out the rest. Let us know -- <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Facebook</a>, or <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">website</a> -- what squares you come up with.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/28792\"><em>Slinky Blues</em></a> by Admiral Bob</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Back to the Future with my New Travel PC</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I’ve been muttering under my breath about my Lenovo ThinkPad for a while now. I’ve had it for 4 years now. It’s feeling a bit heavy and looking a bit beat up, and though it’s no doubt been fully depreciated off the firm’s balance sheet, I don’t hear any rumors of an impending refresh. So I’ve been semi-shopping for a new Travel PC -- clicking through to Engadget reviews, glancing over, eyeing what the other folks on the plane or in the concierge lounge are using.</li>\r\n 	<li>Seven years ago (just about to the day), in what might’ve passed as an instance of pithy travel advice, I <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2010/11/15/two-weeks-with-a-macbook-air/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">wrote </a>about the use case for a Travel PC -- what it is, and more importantly, what it is not. It’s not my primary computer; it’s not my podcast production or video editing machine. That’s my home PC which is now up to 16GBs of RAM, an 8-core processor, 2 21-inch monitors, Blu-Ray burner, and a couple of terabyte hard drives. My Travel PC is spec’d for what’s important, what I need when I travel — light weight, long battery life, low screen profile so not to get crushed when the guy in the row in front of me power-reclines his seat, and reasonable processing power (in that order) — and leaves behind what’s not. Seven years ago -- in 2010 to save you the math -- the 11-inch MacBook Air was my choice for the Best Travel PC.</li>\r\n 	<li>My Travel PC use case hasn’t changed, but the market has -- kinda. In my looking around, what I’ve seen is 2 ½ kinds of travel PCs. There are the next generations of the laptop -- thin ultrabooks from Lenovo, HP and Dell; MacBook Pros from Apple -- or full-sized iPads with combo covers/soft keyboards and pens -- with the Microsoft Surface Pro being that ½ case, a thin Windows PC with a fold-out keyboard cover and pen. Quite honestly, none of those options really spoke to me -- at least enough to make me part with my own cash. The ultrabooks didn’t offer much new; I’d might as well “accidently” dump a grande cappuccino on my old Lenovo ‘cause this is what I’d get in return. The MacBook Pros are certainly sleek, but as a Travel PC, don’t seem to offer much more for the Apple premium. I have been thinking about the tablet/keyboard combo, specifically the Surface Pro; but watching guys try to work that soft keyboard on an airplane seatback tray… I could see myself wearing a cup of coffee two weeks after starting to fly with one of those. So, I kept semi-shopping</li>\r\n 	<li>But then last week, I got an e-mail blast from Newegg, the online PC parts retailer; I usually buy from them them when I’m assembling or upgrading my home PC. They had a flash sale on refurbed 11-inch MacBook Airs, not the 2010 model but what Apple dubs an “early 2014” model. Pretty much identical to my old one, but with updated specs, including the same processor as my Lenovo. I looked at it, did a few Internet search. It sat in a shopping cart for a couple of days until I thought “For $385, why not?” and pulled the trigger. It showed up a few days ago, and save for a corner ding, looks pretty new. I’ve upgraded to the current version of MacOS, installed Office 365 and VMFusion on it, and so I’m pretty much ready to go -- back to the future.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #136</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_136.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #136 — Is Cash A Waning King; Don’t Make It Hard to Cash in on Loyalty','','inherit','closed','closed','','1894-revision-v1','','','2017-12-19 21:59:41','2017-12-20 02:59:41','',1894,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/1894-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1898,1,'2017-12-19 22:10:45','2017-12-20 03:10:45','[caption id=\"attachment_1895\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/iStock-502842002.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1895\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/iStock-502842002-300x200.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"200\" /></a> A C-Note for you, and you, and you...[/caption]\r\n\r\nHere\'s something to listen to while in the Thanksgiving airport lines and traffic jams. We list out some of the squares we\'d like to see in an airport bingo card, and I end up going back to the future with my new travel PC. We also talk about my growing stack of subway \"tap\" cards and some forecasts on what could be a traffic jammed Thanksgiving holiday. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_136.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/358749968\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n<!--more-->\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #136:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL on what has been a very light travel month, just one trip to New York and then back down to Charlottesville, VA before an early wrap-up of my 2017 travel. I wanted to avoid flying into LGA because of the construction, but UA’s EWR monopoly jacks the price difference way beyond what I can justify, so I gritted my teeth and booked the LGA flight. It was amazingly smooth for Monday morning rush hour in ORD. Walked straight into the PreCheck line. There were a ton of people there -- as is typical on a Monday morning, lots of professional travelers -- but everything moved smoothly. The TSA stations were fully staffed; there was a minimal number of amateur travelers in PreCheck, and so what appeared to be a very daunting line was an easy 5-minute exercise. After that, I walked straight up the Starbucks register and ordered a coffee, and had a easy walk down to the gate. We left ORD on-time and landed at LGA 30 minutes early! I checked my watch again to make sure it was right. On a good day, I consider an flight between ORD and LGA to be on-time if I’m not more than 30 minutes late. I’m not sure I’ve ever arrived early. Indeed, somebody sent me a press release last month with stats saying that Chicago-New York is second only to SF-LA in the list of most disrupted air routes. All this joyousness hit the wall, though -- almost literally -- when I walked out of LGA Terminal B smack into the cab line which, for those of you not familiar with LGA, should not be see when you walk out the front of Terminal B because the cab rank is on the side of Terminal B. Well, maybe they moved it for the construction. Nope, it was where it always has been. So my time budget balanced out -- 30-minute early arrival funded the 30-minute cab ride. Easy come, easy go.</li>\r\n 	<li>I was only in New York for Monday day -- arrived at 11am and left at 8pm -- which meant trying to find a cab on 5th Ave to take me to LGA during rush hour. Or used to. Whatever your opinions on Uber or ride sharing in general, the ability to easily get a ride from Manhattan to LGA without dancing into the street, hiding your luggage behind a trash can, and pleading with the one guy who finally stopped is justification enough for its existence. And I’m obviously not the only one who feels this way, so there are gobs of Uber drivers on, say, 5th Ave at rush hour, making it hard to spot your ride and easy to get into someone else’s. Monday night, I noticed a new option on the Uber screen that was showing my driver crawling toward me through Midtown traffic. “Click here to change the color of your driver’s Uber badge”. I clicked and got a color spectrum slider, which kept me occupied while I was waiting. I changed the color to red, then blue, then yellow, and then Uber said he was a block away, to some shade of lime green. I looked up, and there was an SUV with a lime green Uber badge in the window. I hopped in and off we went. I asked him how his evening was going. “Fine,” he said, “though I think this Uber light is acting up. Just now, it started changing all sorts of colors.”</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/copperhead/40520\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen</a> by copperhead (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: Admiral Bob, Javolenus , Sackjo22</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Roger Nash sent a note on Twitter with a pointer to the Transport for London’s new Oyster app. In the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/11/20/podcast-135-airport-bingo-new-old-travel-pc/\">last episode</a>, I talked about my growing stack of contactless -- tap ‘n’ go -- transit cards, and difference between re-loading my Chicago Ventra card with a smartphone app vs. having to queue at a machine to top up my Oyster card when we were in London last summer. TfL launched their Oyster app a few months back and seem to be aggressively rev’ing it to add features. The only problem for me -- it’ll only take a UK-based payment card. So I’ll have to sponge off my daughter if I want to skip the machine. That’ll be a fun role change…</li>\r\n 	<li>Also got a good run of comments on the Airport Bingo topic.\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>An anonymous comment asking “Since when do bingo cards have a story arc?” Fair point…</li>\r\n 	<li>Donna Smith Pleiman on Twitter suggested a square for “sweaty guy racing onto the plane at the last minute plops down next to you, proceeds to take his shoes off.” Yeah, that one happens a little too often -- because once is too often</li>\r\n 	<li>Rob said: I like the \"3-adjective rule\". I\'ve always said, \"If you have to inhale to finish your drink order... you don\'t actually like coffee.\" Good point, if you have to use circular breathing in the Starbucks line, you need to re-think your beverage choices.</li>\r\n 	<li>And Steve Frick built his own card in a post on his Back and Gone Again blog. “Since not everyone travels by air, we’re focusing on travel in general,” he says and then spins through his set of 25 spaces. I’ll post a <a href=\"http://www.hypeorlando.com/back-and-gone-again/2017/11/22/holiday-travel-bingo/\">link</a> to it in the show notes.</li>\r\n 	<li>And with Steve throwing down that challenge, I stole a couple of his squares so I could expand my Airport Bingo card to the full 25 spaces in a blog post on the TravelCommons site last week. Check it out; I hope it keeps you entertained on your trip to Grandma’s house.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>The smart luggage ban announced by Delta, American, and Alaska with the other US oligopoly members United and Southwest expected to follow shortly caused a bit of a Twitter storm. Next month, January 15 to be exact, smart luggage without removable batteries will be banned. And if your smart bag is checked, you have to remove battery before it goes in the hold -- which negates one of the key benefits pitched by smart bag sellers -- the ability to track your bag through built-in GPS and cellular data. No battery, and it’s just another bag left behind on the tarmac, or as one of my funnier Twitter followers @ThankYouLeetch replied that the airlines were hard at work -- “We\'re GOING to lose your bag, and we\'ll be damned if we let the likes of YOU find it! If you must know, we are just REALLY into this monopoly thing.\" Kinda blows if you just dropped $400 on one of these bags.</li>\r\n 	<li>This would seem to cause an existential problem for category pioneer Bluesmart because none of their bags -- the original one nor the recently released Series 2 -- have removable batteries. I backed Bluesmart’s initial Indiegogo campaign back in November 2014 -- longtime podcast listener Arnoud Heijnis <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/11/22/podcast-112-holiday-airport-etiquette-travel-tax-pile-up/\">pointed it out to me</a> -- and received my bag a year later. I reviewed it in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/12/podcast-120-where-do-guidebooks-fit-in-i-hate-shopping-for-suitcases/\">episode 120</a> after a couple of months of use -- my take: “I’m kinda “meh” on all the electronics, so it’s a nice enough hard-shell wheelie bag with a couple of bells and whistles that don’t necessarily wow me.” Though I did amend that “meh” in the very <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/05/30/podcast-121-tsa-lines-my-luggage-is-where/\">next episode</a> saying “the Bluesmart is the perfect carry-on size, it’s usually right above me in the plane cabin, so the location finder isn’t that valuable. Except when I have to gate check my bag on a small regional jet. On a recent Skywest flight, it was taking my bag a long time to show up at the gate after arriving. Hmmm, I pulled out my iPhone, hit the Location button on the Bluesmart app, and it showed me that my bag had updated its location a couple of minutes prior and was indeed here. A few minutes later, it showed up in the last tranche of bags heaved up into the jet bridge. Not critical functionality, but it moves up from “meh” to “kinda handy”.”</li>\r\n 	<li>The real pain for me is that I now have to shop for another suitcase which I really hate. I finally put my 10-year-old Victorinox bag out to pasture because the handle locked itself in the extended position, and so I’d switched over to my Bluesmart for these recent trips. My last flight back from CHO was on an American Eagle regional jet. I’m waiting along the side of a cold ORD bridge with about 20 other passengers for my bag. It comes out second because, even though there’s not First Class on this plane, I’ve clung to the yellow gate check tag that I got with a First Class upgrade last month. Sparky, the young gate agent, looks at my bag as he’s handing it to me and says “Is that a smart bag? Did you take the battery out of that?” “No, because I don’t have to until January 15,” I shot back. Don’t push it, American. You’re forcing me to scrap a 2-year-old bag; I got that. But don’t make me go luggage shopping the week before Christmas.</li>\r\n 	<li>One of the topics back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/11/22/podcast-125-uber-driver-stories-overseas-for-the-election/\">episode 125</a> was life stories from my Uber and Lyft drivers. I still do ask most of my drivers how they like driving, how long they’ve been doing it, and what else they do — if it’s not their full time gig. Last month, we were taking an Uber into the city on Saturday for a beer festival. The driver was great -- very personable guy. So I ask him about his gig. He’s been doing it full-time for 2 years now. Before that, he was a hotel manager. He quit because the stress was too much -- late night calls about guests, bedbug infestations,.... He said that driving Uber in Chicago was much less stressful. Think about next time you’re about to light into the assistant night manager about a missing towel -- their job is more stressful than driving full-time in bumper-to-bumper traffic. That was an eye-opener to me. I’ve gone out of my way to be more pleasant to front desk folks ever since.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/NiGiD/48586\">O Tannenbaum / Oh Christmas Tree</a> by Martijn de Boer (NiGiD) (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license.  Ft: Admiral Bob (admiralbob77)</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Is Cash is a Waning King?</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>As I said at the start of the show, my last trip this year was ORD to LGA to CHO. I didn’t arrive too late so there were a couple of cabs waiting -- no LGA-style lines, I just hopped in. It’s a $25 flat rate to downtown Charlottesville. We pulled up to my hotel, I gave the driver a 20 and a 10 and got out of the cab. “Cash? Thanks!” he said.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’ve said this before; I try to pay all of my cab fares in cash ever since one cab driver walked me through why he hates cards. There’s a timing problem-- he has to pay for gas, tolls, airport access fees, and the taxi company that day, but he doesn’t get his money until a couple of days later. And then there’s the high fees the processing companies charge taxi drivers.</li>\r\n 	<li>But when traveling with younger colleagues, I feel like I’m the last generation of cash payers. Not only do they pay for everything with a card, many of them don’t even carry cash. Maybe I’m just getting old, or maybe I remember when you couldn’t use cards everywhere.</li>\r\n 	<li>Especially in Europe in the late ‘80’s/early ‘90’s when I would be in a different country every day on sales calls with distributors. There weren’t international ATMs -- or really ATMs of any kind. We’d get a wallet full of American Express Travelers Checks before flying out and then typically cash a $100 check at the airport currency exchange after customs. This was before the euro, so we’d juggle D Marks, Belgian and French francs, British and Irish pounds, pesetas, lira,.... Almost all of the hotels we stayed in took credit cards -- except for this one random mom-&amp;-pop place outside of Munich; nice people but they screwed up my D Mark budget -- but not all restaurants and none of the taxis did. So our currency exit strategy -- so we didn’t pay double the exchange fees for having to go in and out of a currency that we might not use for another year or so -- was to throw down most of our excess cash at the hotel in the morning, saving enough for a sandwich, the cab back to the airport and a beer at the bar -- and then put on the Amex the balance of the hotel room. It usually worked well -- except for the one time that I mixed up the exchange rate between the Swedish krona and Swiss franc. Not an unreasonable mix up -- both countries start with an S and have a lot of snow -- but the krona exchange rate was about 6 to the dollar at that time while the Swiss franc was at 1.3 to the dollar. That one definitely screwed up my end-of-day cash strategy.</li>\r\n 	<li>But I absolutely understand the use case for going all plastic. First, you’re not having to float the money between travel and reimbursement. But I gotta think convenience is the bigger play. Many companies pipe their company card transactions straight into their expense reporting systems. Makes it incredibly easy -- log into Concur or whatever, assign each charge to an expense code and submit. Nothing forgotten and you’re done in 5 minutes. With cash, you have to remember what you spent, enter it, and probably submit a receipt too. I’ll never pay for my $2 ORD Starbucks coffee with my Amex card, but when the cab fare get above $50, even I’ll charge it.</li>\r\n 	<li>I do think it’s a bit of a generational thing, though. I remember my dad always walking around with a bunch of 50’s in a money clip in his pocket. And my kids always getting a $100 bill from their Hungarian grandparents for Christmas -- we’d call it the Eastern European C note. I now have a Venmo account, but I still like paying people back in cash. Feels like I need say “Get off my lawn” but I may not have completely aged out yet. When paying my daughter’s tuition at Univ of St Andrews, one sentence on the web site caught my eye -- “Ideally tuition and accommodation fees should not be paid in cash” -- which means that someone or multiple someones has done it. It’s not a travel expense, but the image of someone walking into the St Andrews bursar’s office and stacking piles of 100 pound notes just makes me smile. Makes me want to drop a C note on my next big cab ride.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/44580\"> What Child is This (Instrumental)</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license.  Ft: Jeris</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Back to the Future with my New Travel PC</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I’ve been muttering under my breath about my Lenovo ThinkPad for a while now. I’ve had it for 4 years now. It’s feeling a bit heavy and looking a bit beat up, and though it’s no doubt been fully depreciated off the firm’s balance sheet, I don’t hear any rumors of an impending refresh. So I’ve been semi-shopping for a new Travel PC -- clicking through to Engadget reviews, glancing over, eyeing what the other folks on the plane or in the concierge lounge are using.</li>\r\n 	<li>Seven years ago (just about to the day), in what might’ve passed as an instance of pithy travel advice, I <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2010/11/15/two-weeks-with-a-macbook-air/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">wrote </a>about the use case for a Travel PC -- what it is, and more importantly, what it is not. It’s not my primary computer; it’s not my podcast production or video editing machine. That’s my home PC which is now up to 16GBs of RAM, an 8-core processor, 2 21-inch monitors, Blu-Ray burner, and a couple of terabyte hard drives. My Travel PC is spec’d for what’s important, what I need when I travel — light weight, long battery life, low screen profile so not to get crushed when the guy in the row in front of me power-reclines his seat, and reasonable processing power (in that order) — and leaves behind what’s not. Seven years ago -- in 2010 to save you the math -- the 11-inch MacBook Air was my choice for the Best Travel PC.</li>\r\n 	<li>My Travel PC use case hasn’t changed, but the market has -- kinda. In my looking around, what I’ve seen is 2 ½ kinds of travel PCs. There are the next generations of the laptop -- thin ultrabooks from Lenovo, HP and Dell; MacBook Pros from Apple -- or full-sized iPads with combo covers/soft keyboards and pens -- with the Microsoft Surface Pro being that ½ case, a thin Windows PC with a fold-out keyboard cover and pen. Quite honestly, none of those options really spoke to me -- at least enough to make me part with my own cash. The ultrabooks didn’t offer much new; I’d might as well “accidently” dump a grande cappuccino on my old Lenovo ‘cause this is what I’d get in return. The MacBook Pros are certainly sleek, but as a Travel PC, don’t seem to offer much more for the Apple premium. I have been thinking about the tablet/keyboard combo, specifically the Surface Pro; but watching guys try to work that soft keyboard on an airplane seatback tray… I could see myself wearing a cup of coffee two weeks after starting to fly with one of those. So, I kept semi-shopping</li>\r\n 	<li>But then last week, I got an e-mail blast from Newegg, the online PC parts retailer; I usually buy from them them when I’m assembling or upgrading my home PC. They had a flash sale on refurbed 11-inch MacBook Airs, not the 2010 model but what Apple dubs an “early 2014” model. Pretty much identical to my old one, but with updated specs, including the same processor as my Lenovo. I looked at it, did a few Internet search. It sat in a shopping cart for a couple of days until I thought “For $385, why not?” and pulled the trigger. It showed up a few days ago, and save for a corner ding, looks pretty new. I’ve upgraded to the current version of MacOS, installed Office 365 and VMFusion on it, and so I’m pretty much ready to go -- back to the future.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #136</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_136.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #136 — Is Cash A Waning King; Don’t Make It Hard to Cash in on Loyalty','','inherit','closed','closed','','1894-revision-v1','','','2017-12-19 22:10:45','2017-12-20 03:10:45','',1894,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/1894-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1899,1,'2017-12-19 22:20:17','2017-12-20 03:20:17','[caption id=\"attachment_1895\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/iStock-502842002.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1895\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/iStock-502842002-300x200.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"200\" /></a> A C-Note for you, and you, and you...[/caption]\r\n\r\nHere\'s something to listen to while in the Thanksgiving airport lines and traffic jams. We list out some of the squares we\'d like to see in an airport bingo card, and I end up going back to the future with my new travel PC. We also talk about my growing stack of subway \"tap\" cards and some forecasts on what could be a traffic jammed Thanksgiving holiday. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_136.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/358749968\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n<!--more-->\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #136:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL on what has been a very light travel month, just one trip to New York and then back down to Charlottesville, VA before an early wrap-up of my 2017 travel. I wanted to avoid flying into LGA because of the construction, but UA’s EWR monopoly jacks the price difference way beyond what I can justify, so I gritted my teeth and booked the LGA flight. It was amazingly smooth for Monday morning rush hour in ORD. Walked straight into the PreCheck line. There were a ton of people there -- as is typical on a Monday morning, lots of professional travelers -- but everything moved smoothly. The TSA stations were fully staffed; there was a minimal number of amateur travelers in PreCheck, and so what appeared to be a very daunting line was an easy 5-minute exercise. After that, I walked straight up the Starbucks register and ordered a coffee, and had a easy walk down to the gate. We left ORD on-time and landed at LGA 30 minutes early! I checked my watch again to make sure it was right. On a good day, I consider an flight between ORD and LGA to be on-time if I’m not more than 30 minutes late. I’m not sure I’ve ever arrived early. Indeed, somebody sent me a press release last month with stats saying that Chicago-New York is second only to SF-LA in the list of most disrupted air routes. All this joyousness hit the wall, though -- almost literally -- when I walked out of LGA Terminal B smack into the cab line which, for those of you not familiar with LGA, should not be see when you walk out the front of Terminal B because the cab rank is on the side of Terminal B. Well, maybe they moved it for the construction. Nope, it was where it always has been. So my time budget balanced out -- 30-minute early arrival funded the 30-minute cab ride. Easy come, easy go.</li>\r\n 	<li>I was only in New York for Monday day -- arrived at 11am and left at 8pm -- which meant trying to find a cab on 5th Ave to take me to LGA during rush hour. Or used to. Whatever your opinions on Uber or ride sharing in general, the ability to easily get a ride from Manhattan to LGA without dancing into the street, hiding your luggage behind a trash can, and pleading with the one guy who finally stopped is justification enough for its existence. And I’m obviously not the only one who feels this way, so there are gobs of Uber drivers on, say, 5th Ave at rush hour, making it hard to spot your ride and easy to get into someone else’s. Monday night, I noticed a new option on the Uber screen that was showing my driver crawling toward me through Midtown traffic. “Click here to change the color of your driver’s Uber badge”. I clicked and got a color spectrum slider, which kept me occupied while I was waiting. I changed the color to red, then blue, then yellow, and then Uber said he was a block away, to some shade of lime green. I looked up, and there was an SUV with a lime green Uber badge in the window. I hopped in and off we went. I asked him how his evening was going. “Fine,” he said, “though I think this Uber light is acting up. Just now, it started changing all sorts of colors.”</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/copperhead/40520\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen</a> by copperhead (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: Admiral Bob, Javolenus , Sackjo22</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Roger Nash sent a note on Twitter with a pointer to the Transport for London’s new Oyster app. In the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/11/20/podcast-135-airport-bingo-new-old-travel-pc/\">last episode</a>, I talked about my growing stack of contactless -- tap ‘n’ go -- transit cards, and difference between re-loading my Chicago Ventra card with a smartphone app vs. having to queue at a machine to top up my Oyster card when we were in London last summer. TfL launched their Oyster app a few months back and seem to be aggressively rev’ing it to add features. The only problem for me -- it’ll only take a UK-based payment card. So I’ll have to sponge off my daughter if I want to skip the machine. That’ll be a fun role change…</li>\r\n 	<li>Also got a good run of comments on the Airport Bingo topic.\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>An anonymous comment asking “Since when do bingo cards have a story arc?” Fair point…</li>\r\n 	<li>Donna Smith Pleiman on Twitter suggested a square for “sweaty guy racing onto the plane at the last minute plops down next to you, proceeds to take his shoes off.” Yeah, that one happens a little too often -- because once is too often</li>\r\n 	<li>Rob said: I like the \"3-adjective rule\". I\'ve always said, \"If you have to inhale to finish your drink order... you don\'t actually like coffee.\" Good point, if you have to use circular breathing in the Starbucks line, you need to re-think your beverage choices.</li>\r\n 	<li>And Steve Frick built his own card in a post on his Back and Gone Again blog. “Since not everyone travels by air, we’re focusing on travel in general,” he says and then spins through his set of 25 spaces. I’ll post a <a href=\"http://www.hypeorlando.com/back-and-gone-again/2017/11/22/holiday-travel-bingo/\">link</a> to it in the show notes.</li>\r\n 	<li>And with Steve throwing down that challenge, I stole a couple of his squares so I could expand my Airport Bingo card to the full 25 spaces in a blog post on the TravelCommons site last week. Check it out; I hope it keeps you entertained on your trip to Grandma’s house.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>The smart luggage ban announced by Delta, American, and Alaska with the other US oligopoly members United and Southwest expected to follow shortly caused a bit of a Twitter storm. Next month, January 15 to be exact, smart luggage without removable batteries will be banned. And if your smart bag is checked, you have to remove battery before it goes in the hold -- which negates one of the key benefits pitched by smart bag sellers -- the ability to track your bag through built-in GPS and cellular data. No battery, and it’s just another bag left behind on the tarmac, or as one of my funnier Twitter followers @ThankYouLeetch replied that the airlines were hard at work -- “We\'re GOING to lose your bag, and we\'ll be damned if we let the likes of YOU find it! If you must know, we are just REALLY into this monopoly thing.\" Kinda blows if you just dropped $400 on one of these bags.</li>\r\n 	<li>This would seem to cause an existential problem for category pioneer Bluesmart because none of their bags -- the original one nor the recently released Series 2 -- have removable batteries. I backed Bluesmart’s initial Indiegogo campaign back in November 2014 -- longtime podcast listener Arnoud Heijnis <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/11/22/podcast-112-holiday-airport-etiquette-travel-tax-pile-up/\">pointed it out to me</a> -- and received my bag a year later. I reviewed it in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/12/podcast-120-where-do-guidebooks-fit-in-i-hate-shopping-for-suitcases/\">episode 120</a> after a couple of months of use -- my take: “I’m kinda “meh” on all the electronics, so it’s a nice enough hard-shell wheelie bag with a couple of bells and whistles that don’t necessarily wow me.” Though I did amend that “meh” in the very <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/05/30/podcast-121-tsa-lines-my-luggage-is-where/\">next episode</a> saying “the Bluesmart is the perfect carry-on size, it’s usually right above me in the plane cabin, so the location finder isn’t that valuable. Except when I have to gate check my bag on a small regional jet. On a recent Skywest flight, it was taking my bag a long time to show up at the gate after arriving. Hmmm, I pulled out my iPhone, hit the Location button on the Bluesmart app, and it showed me that my bag had updated its location a couple of minutes prior and was indeed here. A few minutes later, it showed up in the last tranche of bags heaved up into the jet bridge. Not critical functionality, but it moves up from “meh” to “kinda handy”.”</li>\r\n 	<li>The real pain for me is that I now have to shop for another suitcase which I really hate. I finally put my 10-year-old Victorinox bag out to pasture because the handle locked itself in the extended position, and so I’d switched over to my Bluesmart for these recent trips. My last flight back from CHO was on an American Eagle regional jet. I’m waiting along the side of a cold ORD bridge with about 20 other passengers for my bag. It comes out second because, even though there’s not First Class on this plane, I’ve clung to the yellow gate check tag that I got with a First Class upgrade last month. Sparky, the young gate agent, looks at my bag as he’s handing it to me and says “Is that a smart bag? Did you take the battery out of that?” “No, because I don’t have to until January 15,” I shot back. Don’t push it, American. You’re forcing me to scrap a 2-year-old bag; I got that. But don’t make me go luggage shopping the week before Christmas.</li>\r\n 	<li>One of the topics back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/11/22/podcast-125-uber-driver-stories-overseas-for-the-election/\">episode 125</a> was life stories from my Uber and Lyft drivers. I still do ask most of my drivers how they like driving, how long they’ve been doing it, and what else they do — if it’s not their full time gig. Last month, we were taking an Uber into the city on Saturday for a beer festival. The driver was great -- very personable guy. So I ask him about his gig. He’s been doing it full-time for 2 years now. Before that, he was a hotel manager. He quit because the stress was too much -- late night calls about guests, bedbug infestations,.... He said that driving Uber in Chicago was much less stressful. Think about next time you’re about to light into the assistant night manager about a missing towel -- their job is more stressful than driving full-time in bumper-to-bumper traffic. That was an eye-opener to me. I’ve gone out of my way to be more pleasant to front desk folks ever since.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/NiGiD/48586\">O Tannenbaum / Oh Christmas Tree</a> by Martijn de Boer (NiGiD) (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license.  Ft: Admiral Bob (admiralbob77)</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Is Cash is a Waning King?</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>As I said at the start of the show, my last trip this year was ORD to LGA to CHO. I didn’t arrive too late so there were a couple of cabs waiting -- no LGA-style lines, I just hopped in. It’s a $25 flat rate to downtown Charlottesville. We pulled up to my hotel, I gave the driver a 20 and a 10 and got out of the cab. “Cash? Thanks!” he said.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’ve said this before; I try to pay all of my cab fares in cash ever since one cab driver walked me through why he hates cards. There’s a timing problem-- he has to pay for gas, tolls, airport access fees, and the taxi company that day, but he doesn’t get his money until a couple of days later. And then there’s the high fees the processing companies charge taxi drivers.</li>\r\n 	<li>But when traveling with younger colleagues, I feel like I’m the last generation of cash payers. Not only do they pay for everything with a card, many of them don’t even carry cash. Maybe I’m just getting old, or maybe I remember when you couldn’t use cards everywhere.</li>\r\n 	<li>Especially in Europe in the late ‘80’s/early ‘90’s when I would be in a different country every day on sales calls with distributors. There weren’t international ATMs -- or really ATMs of any kind. We’d get a wallet full of American Express Travelers Checks before flying out and then typically cash a $100 check at the airport currency exchange after customs. This was before the euro, so we’d juggle D Marks, Belgian and French francs, British and Irish pounds, pesetas, lira,.... Almost all of the hotels we stayed in took credit cards -- except for this one random mom-&amp;-pop place outside of Munich; nice people but they screwed up my D Mark budget -- but not all restaurants and none of the taxis did. So our currency exit strategy -- so we didn’t pay double the exchange fees for having to go in and out of a currency that we might not use for another year or so -- was to throw down most of our excess cash at the hotel in the morning, saving enough for a sandwich, the cab back to the airport and a beer at the bar -- and then put on the Amex the balance of the hotel room. It usually worked well -- except for the one time that I mixed up the exchange rate between the Swedish krona and Swiss franc. Not an unreasonable mix up -- both countries start with an S and have a lot of snow -- but the krona exchange rate was about 6 to the dollar at that time while the Swiss franc was at 1.3 to the dollar. That one definitely screwed up my end-of-day cash strategy.</li>\r\n 	<li>But I absolutely understand the use case for going all plastic. First, you’re not having to float the money between travel and reimbursement. But I gotta think convenience is the bigger play. Many companies pipe their company card transactions straight into their expense reporting systems. Makes it incredibly easy -- log into Concur or whatever, assign each charge to an expense code and submit. Nothing forgotten and you’re done in 5 minutes. With cash, you have to remember what you spent, enter it, and probably submit a receipt too. I’ll never pay for my $2 ORD Starbucks coffee with my Amex card, but when the cab fare get above $50, even I’ll charge it.</li>\r\n 	<li>I do think it’s a bit of a generational thing, though. I remember my dad always walking around with a bunch of 50’s in a money clip in his pocket. And my kids always getting a $100 bill from their Hungarian grandparents for Christmas -- we’d call it the Eastern European C note. I now have a Venmo account, but I still like paying people back in cash. Feels like I need say “Get off my lawn” but I may not have completely aged out yet. When paying my daughter’s tuition at Univ of St Andrews, one sentence on the web site caught my eye -- “Ideally tuition and accommodation fees should not be paid in cash” -- which means that someone or multiple someones has done it. It’s not a travel expense, but the image of someone walking into the St Andrews bursar’s office and stacking piles of 100 pound notes just makes me smile. Makes me want to drop a C note on my next big cab ride.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/44580\"> What Child is This (Instrumental)</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license.  Ft: Jeris</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Don’t Make It Hard to Cash in on Loyalty</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Back in October, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/10/31/podcast-134-value-of-loyalty-need-those-5-stars/\">episode 134</a>, we talked about the value of loyalty. In November, JD Powers released their 2017 Airline Loyalty Program Satisfaction Study. Powers measured satisfaction “based on four factors (in order of importance): earning and redeeming rewards; program benefits; account management; and member communication”. Not a surprising list, and placing “redeeming awards” at the top makes sense since that’s sorta the core of a loyalty program -- here’s something to incent you to fly us more.</li>\r\n 	<li>A couple of years ago, in episode 116, I talked about why, for me, British Airways’ Avios program has been the worst program for redemptions. I had over 300,000 points sitting there because it never made sense to use them. When I’d price out an award ticket between Chicago and London, the addition cash I would owe for BA’s fuel surcharges (which made sense when oil was at $120/bbl, but much less so at $50) and Heathrow landing taxes would just about equal what I’d pay for a ticket with another airline -- so the miles were worth nothing. Not exactly a best practice for an airline loyalty program.</li>\r\n 	<li>But, when BA and Iberia, both owned by the same corporate parent, kinda combined their programs into, not a single but a sorta interchangeable Avios program, I thought there might be a way to finally get some value from my forlorn BA points. I said kinda interchangeable because I now have 2 Avios accounts -- a BA Avios account and an Iberia Avios account. And since I have had my Iberia Avios account for over 90 days, I can convert my BA Avios to Iberia Avios, which let me use points for a direct ORD-MAD flight this spring at a small fraction of the cash for fees and taxes that BA would charge.</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, good. I’ve found the flights, I’ve found the page on BA.com to transfer. I enter all the account info, press the button, and get a big red error screen. Hmmm… I try it a couple of more times, same result. Different browsers, same result. In incognito mode so there’s no legacy cookies, same result. Hmmm…</li>\r\n 	<li>So I dredge around BA’s site and find a technical support number. It’s Saturday afternoon Chicago time, but after a good bit of music, I get a live guy. And he’s a good guy. Here’s the problem, your name doesn’t match on your accounts -- it’s Mark Peacock on your BA account, and Mark Peacock Peacock on your Iberia account. You’ll need to call Iberia to change that, then the transfer will go through. OK, seems reasonable enough. So I call Iberia, again listen to music and again get a live person. Good guy, but he can’t help me. Here’s a number in Spain; give them a call. Which I do, a bit more music, and then another guy. We’ll need some documentation to make that change, send a picture of the first page of your passport to this Iberia email address and we’ll make the change.</li>\r\n 	<li>Lots of calls, spoke to some nice people, but I still can’t break these BA Avios points free. So I send the email, but I don’t expect this to get resolved soon. I open another beer and gear myself up for another fare search, but decide to give BA one more call. This time, I connect with a woman with a proper northern English accent. It felt like I’d somehow overflowed into a high status group; like when I was Global Services on United and agents picking up my calls were sitting in the corporate center near ORD and could make anything happen. I relate my tale of woe; “Oh, that’s no problem,” she says. Five minutes later, it’s done. Thanks to her, I got to redeem 100,000 Avios points and am feeling a bit more hopeful about the remaining balance. The only downside -- I didn’t get the woman’s name so I could give her a shout out. By the way, 3.5 weeks later and still no response to my email to Iberia.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #136</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_136.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #136 — Is Cash A Waning King; Don’t Make It Hard to Cash in on Loyalty','','inherit','closed','closed','','1894-revision-v1','','','2017-12-19 22:20:17','2017-12-20 03:20:17','',1894,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/1894-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1900,1,'2017-12-19 22:32:19','2017-12-20 03:32:19','[caption id=\"attachment_1895\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/iStock-502842002.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1895\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/iStock-502842002-300x200.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"200\" /></a> A C-Note for you, and you, and you...[/caption]\r\n\r\nAfter traveling with younger colleagues who pay for everything with cards, I wonder if I\'m the last generation of cash payers. I also talk about the upcoming smart luggage ban on US airlines and a long Saturday afternoon trying to redeem some British Airways Avios points. All this and a few Christmas carols at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_136.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/358749968\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n<!--more-->\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #136:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL on what has been a very light travel month, just one trip to New York and then back down to Charlottesville, VA before an early wrap-up of my 2017 travel. I wanted to avoid flying into LGA because of the construction, but UA’s EWR monopoly jacks the price difference way beyond what I can justify, so I gritted my teeth and booked the LGA flight. It was amazingly smooth for Monday morning rush hour in ORD. Walked straight into the PreCheck line. There were a ton of people there -- as is typical on a Monday morning, lots of professional travelers -- but everything moved smoothly. The TSA stations were fully staffed; there was a minimal number of amateur travelers in PreCheck, and so what appeared to be a very daunting line was an easy 5-minute exercise. After that, I walked straight up the Starbucks register and ordered a coffee, and had a easy walk down to the gate. We left ORD on-time and landed at LGA 30 minutes early! I checked my watch again to make sure it was right. On a good day, I consider an flight between ORD and LGA to be on-time if I’m not more than 30 minutes late. I’m not sure I’ve ever arrived early. Indeed, somebody sent me a press release last month with stats saying that Chicago-New York is second only to SF-LA in the list of most disrupted air routes. All this joyousness hit the wall, though -- almost literally -- when I walked out of LGA Terminal B smack into the cab line which, for those of you not familiar with LGA, should not be see when you walk out the front of Terminal B because the cab rank is on the side of Terminal B. Well, maybe they moved it for the construction. Nope, it was where it always has been. So my time budget balanced out -- 30-minute early arrival funded the 30-minute cab ride. Easy come, easy go.</li>\r\n 	<li>I was only in New York for Monday day -- arrived at 11am and left at 8pm -- which meant trying to find a cab on 5th Ave to take me to LGA during rush hour. Or used to. Whatever your opinions on Uber or ride sharing in general, the ability to easily get a ride from Manhattan to LGA without dancing into the street, hiding your luggage behind a trash can, and pleading with the one guy who finally stopped is justification enough for its existence. And I’m obviously not the only one who feels this way, so there are gobs of Uber drivers on, say, 5th Ave at rush hour, making it hard to spot your ride and easy to get into someone else’s. Monday night, I noticed a new option on the Uber screen that was showing my driver crawling toward me through Midtown traffic. “Click here to change the color of your driver’s Uber badge”. I clicked and got a color spectrum slider, which kept me occupied while I was waiting. I changed the color to red, then blue, then yellow, and then Uber said he was a block away, to some shade of lime green. I looked up, and there was an SUV with a lime green Uber badge in the window. I hopped in and off we went. I asked him how his evening was going. “Fine,” he said, “though I think this Uber light is acting up. Just now, it started changing all sorts of colors.”</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/copperhead/40520\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen</a> by copperhead (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: Admiral Bob, Javolenus , Sackjo22</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Roger Nash sent a note on Twitter with a pointer to the Transport for London’s new Oyster app. In the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/11/20/podcast-135-airport-bingo-new-old-travel-pc/\">last episode</a>, I talked about my growing stack of contactless -- tap ‘n’ go -- transit cards, and difference between re-loading my Chicago Ventra card with a smartphone app vs. having to queue at a machine to top up my Oyster card when we were in London last summer. TfL launched their Oyster app a few months back and seem to be aggressively rev’ing it to add features. The only problem for me -- it’ll only take a UK-based payment card. So I’ll have to sponge off my daughter if I want to skip the machine. That’ll be a fun role change…</li>\r\n 	<li>Also got a good run of comments on the Airport Bingo topic.\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>An anonymous comment asking “Since when do bingo cards have a story arc?” Fair point…</li>\r\n 	<li>Donna Smith Pleiman on Twitter suggested a square for “sweaty guy racing onto the plane at the last minute plops down next to you, proceeds to take his shoes off.” Yeah, that one happens a little too often -- because once is too often</li>\r\n 	<li>Rob said: I like the \"3-adjective rule\". I\'ve always said, \"If you have to inhale to finish your drink order... you don\'t actually like coffee.\" Good point, if you have to use circular breathing in the Starbucks line, you need to re-think your beverage choices.</li>\r\n 	<li>And Steve Frick built his own card in a post on his Back and Gone Again blog. “Since not everyone travels by air, we’re focusing on travel in general,” he says and then spins through his set of 25 spaces. I’ll post a <a href=\"http://www.hypeorlando.com/back-and-gone-again/2017/11/22/holiday-travel-bingo/\">link</a> to it in the show notes.</li>\r\n 	<li>And with Steve throwing down that challenge, I stole a couple of his squares so I could expand my Airport Bingo card to the full 25 spaces in a blog post on the TravelCommons site last week. Check it out; I hope it keeps you entertained on your trip to Grandma’s house.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>The smart luggage ban announced by Delta, American, and Alaska with the other US oligopoly members United and Southwest expected to follow shortly caused a bit of a Twitter storm. Next month, January 15 to be exact, smart luggage without removable batteries will be banned. And if your smart bag is checked, you have to remove battery before it goes in the hold -- which negates one of the key benefits pitched by smart bag sellers -- the ability to track your bag through built-in GPS and cellular data. No battery, and it’s just another bag left behind on the tarmac, or as one of my funnier Twitter followers @ThankYouLeetch replied that the airlines were hard at work -- “We\'re GOING to lose your bag, and we\'ll be damned if we let the likes of YOU find it! If you must know, we are just REALLY into this monopoly thing.\" Kinda blows if you just dropped $400 on one of these bags.</li>\r\n 	<li>This would seem to cause an existential problem for category pioneer Bluesmart because none of their bags -- the original one nor the recently released Series 2 -- have removable batteries. I backed Bluesmart’s initial Indiegogo campaign back in November 2014 -- longtime podcast listener Arnoud Heijnis <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/11/22/podcast-112-holiday-airport-etiquette-travel-tax-pile-up/\">pointed it out to me</a> -- and received my bag a year later. I reviewed it in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/12/podcast-120-where-do-guidebooks-fit-in-i-hate-shopping-for-suitcases/\">episode 120</a> after a couple of months of use -- my take: “I’m kinda “meh” on all the electronics, so it’s a nice enough hard-shell wheelie bag with a couple of bells and whistles that don’t necessarily wow me.” Though I did amend that “meh” in the very <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/05/30/podcast-121-tsa-lines-my-luggage-is-where/\">next episode</a> saying “the Bluesmart is the perfect carry-on size, it’s usually right above me in the plane cabin, so the location finder isn’t that valuable. Except when I have to gate check my bag on a small regional jet. On a recent Skywest flight, it was taking my bag a long time to show up at the gate after arriving. Hmmm, I pulled out my iPhone, hit the Location button on the Bluesmart app, and it showed me that my bag had updated its location a couple of minutes prior and was indeed here. A few minutes later, it showed up in the last tranche of bags heaved up into the jet bridge. Not critical functionality, but it moves up from “meh” to “kinda handy”.”</li>\r\n 	<li>The real pain for me is that I now have to shop for another suitcase which I really hate. I finally put my 10-year-old Victorinox bag out to pasture because the handle locked itself in the extended position, and so I’d switched over to my Bluesmart for these recent trips. My last flight back from CHO was on an American Eagle regional jet. I’m waiting along the side of a cold ORD bridge with about 20 other passengers for my bag. It comes out second because, even though there’s not First Class on this plane, I’ve clung to the yellow gate check tag that I got with a First Class upgrade last month. Sparky, the young gate agent, looks at my bag as he’s handing it to me and says “Is that a smart bag? Did you take the battery out of that?” “No, because I don’t have to until January 15,” I shot back. Don’t push it, American. You’re forcing me to scrap a 2-year-old bag; I got that. But don’t make me go luggage shopping the week before Christmas.</li>\r\n 	<li>One of the topics back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/11/22/podcast-125-uber-driver-stories-overseas-for-the-election/\">episode 125</a> was life stories from my Uber and Lyft drivers. I still do ask most of my drivers how they like driving, how long they’ve been doing it, and what else they do — if it’s not their full time gig. Last month, we were taking an Uber into the city on Saturday for a beer festival. The driver was great -- very personable guy. So I ask him about his gig. He’s been doing it full-time for 2 years now. Before that, he was a hotel manager. He quit because the stress was too much -- late night calls about guests, bedbug infestations,.... He said that driving Uber in Chicago was much less stressful. Think about next time you’re about to light into the assistant night manager about a missing towel -- their job is more stressful than driving full-time in bumper-to-bumper traffic. That was an eye-opener to me. I’ve gone out of my way to be more pleasant to front desk folks ever since.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/NiGiD/48586\">O Tannenbaum / Oh Christmas Tree</a> by Martijn de Boer (NiGiD) (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license.  Ft: Admiral Bob (admiralbob77)</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Is Cash is a Waning King?</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>As I said at the start of the show, my last trip this year was ORD to LGA to CHO. I didn’t arrive too late so there were a couple of cabs waiting -- no LGA-style lines, I just hopped in. It’s a $25 flat rate to downtown Charlottesville. We pulled up to my hotel, I gave the driver a 20 and a 10 and got out of the cab. “Cash? Thanks!” he said.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’ve said this before; I try to pay all of my cab fares in cash ever since one cab driver walked me through why he hates cards. There’s a timing problem-- he has to pay for gas, tolls, airport access fees, and the taxi company that day, but he doesn’t get his money until a couple of days later. And then there’s the high fees the processing companies charge taxi drivers.</li>\r\n 	<li>But when traveling with younger colleagues, I feel like I’m the last generation of cash payers. Not only do they pay for everything with a card, many of them don’t even carry cash. Maybe I’m just getting old, or maybe I remember when you couldn’t use cards everywhere.</li>\r\n 	<li>Especially in Europe in the late ‘80’s/early ‘90’s when I would be in a different country every day on sales calls with distributors. There weren’t international ATMs -- or really ATMs of any kind. We’d get a wallet full of American Express Travelers Checks before flying out and then typically cash a $100 check at the airport currency exchange after customs. This was before the euro, so we’d juggle D Marks, Belgian and French francs, British and Irish pounds, pesetas, lira,.... Almost all of the hotels we stayed in took credit cards -- except for this one random mom-&amp;-pop place outside of Munich; nice people but they screwed up my D Mark budget -- but not all restaurants and none of the taxis did. So our currency exit strategy -- so we didn’t pay double the exchange fees for having to go in and out of a currency that we might not use for another year or so -- was to throw down most of our excess cash at the hotel in the morning, saving enough for a sandwich, the cab back to the airport and a beer at the bar -- and then put on the Amex the balance of the hotel room. It usually worked well -- except for the one time that I mixed up the exchange rate between the Swedish krona and Swiss franc. Not an unreasonable mix up -- both countries start with an S and have a lot of snow -- but the krona exchange rate was about 6 to the dollar at that time while the Swiss franc was at 1.3 to the dollar. That one definitely screwed up my end-of-day cash strategy.</li>\r\n 	<li>But I absolutely understand the use case for going all plastic. First, you’re not having to float the money between travel and reimbursement. But I gotta think convenience is the bigger play. Many companies pipe their company card transactions straight into their expense reporting systems. Makes it incredibly easy -- log into Concur or whatever, assign each charge to an expense code and submit. Nothing forgotten and you’re done in 5 minutes. With cash, you have to remember what you spent, enter it, and probably submit a receipt too. I’ll never pay for my $2 ORD Starbucks coffee with my Amex card, but when the cab fare get above $50, even I’ll charge it.</li>\r\n 	<li>I do think it’s a bit of a generational thing, though. I remember my dad always walking around with a bunch of 50’s in a money clip in his pocket. And my kids always getting a $100 bill from their Hungarian grandparents for Christmas -- we’d call it the Eastern European C note. I now have a Venmo account, but I still like paying people back in cash. Feels like I need say “Get off my lawn” but I may not have completely aged out yet. When paying my daughter’s tuition at Univ of St Andrews, one sentence on the web site caught my eye -- “Ideally tuition and accommodation fees should not be paid in cash” -- which means that someone or multiple someones has done it. It’s not a travel expense, but the image of someone walking into the St Andrews bursar’s office and stacking piles of 100 pound notes just makes me smile. Makes me want to drop a C note on my next big cab ride.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/44580\"> What Child is This (Instrumental)</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license.  Ft: Jeris</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Don’t Make It Hard to Cash in on Loyalty</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Back in October, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/10/31/podcast-134-value-of-loyalty-need-those-5-stars/\">episode 134</a>, we talked about the value of loyalty. In November, JD Powers released their 2017 Airline Loyalty Program Satisfaction Study. Powers measured satisfaction “based on four factors (in order of importance): earning and redeeming rewards; program benefits; account management; and member communication”. Not a surprising list, and placing “redeeming awards” at the top makes sense since that’s sorta the core of a loyalty program -- here’s something to incent you to fly us more.</li>\r\n 	<li>A couple of years ago, in episode 116, I talked about why, for me, British Airways’ Avios program has been the worst program for redemptions. I had over 300,000 points sitting there because it never made sense to use them. When I’d price out an award ticket between Chicago and London, the addition cash I would owe for BA’s fuel surcharges (which made sense when oil was at $120/bbl, but much less so at $50) and Heathrow landing taxes would just about equal what I’d pay for a ticket with another airline -- so the miles were worth nothing. Not exactly a best practice for an airline loyalty program.</li>\r\n 	<li>But, when BA and Iberia, both owned by the same corporate parent, kinda combined their programs into, not a single but a sorta interchangeable Avios program, I thought there might be a way to finally get some value from my forlorn BA points. I said kinda interchangeable because I now have 2 Avios accounts -- a BA Avios account and an Iberia Avios account. And since I have had my Iberia Avios account for over 90 days, I can convert my BA Avios to Iberia Avios, which let me use points for a direct ORD-MAD flight this spring at a small fraction of the cash for fees and taxes that BA would charge.</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, good. I’ve found the flights, I’ve found the page on BA.com to transfer. I enter all the account info, press the button, and get a big red error screen. Hmmm… I try it a couple of more times, same result. Different browsers, same result. In incognito mode so there’s no legacy cookies, same result. Hmmm…</li>\r\n 	<li>So I dredge around BA’s site and find a technical support number. It’s Saturday afternoon Chicago time, but after a good bit of music, I get a live guy. And he’s a good guy. Here’s the problem, your name doesn’t match on your accounts -- it’s Mark Peacock on your BA account, and Mark Peacock Peacock on your Iberia account. You’ll need to call Iberia to change that, then the transfer will go through. OK, seems reasonable enough. So I call Iberia, again listen to music and again get a live person. Good guy, but he can’t help me. Here’s a number in Spain; give them a call. Which I do, a bit more music, and then another guy. We’ll need some documentation to make that change, send a picture of the first page of your passport to this Iberia email address and we’ll make the change.</li>\r\n 	<li>Lots of calls, spoke to some nice people, but I still can’t break these BA Avios points free. So I send the email, but I don’t expect this to get resolved soon. I open another beer and gear myself up for another fare search, but decide to give BA one more call. This time, I connect with a woman with a proper northern English accent. It felt like I’d somehow overflowed into a high status group; like when I was Global Services on United and agents picking up my calls were sitting in the corporate center near ORD and could make anything happen. I relate my tale of woe; “Oh, that’s no problem,” she says. Five minutes later, it’s done. Thanks to her, I got to redeem 100,000 Avios points and am feeling a bit more hopeful about the remaining balance. The only downside -- I didn’t get the woman’s name so I could give her a shout out. By the way, 3.5 weeks later and still no response to my email to Iberia.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #136</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_136.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #136 — Is Cash A Waning King; Don’t Make It Hard to Cash in on Loyalty','','inherit','closed','closed','','1894-revision-v1','','','2017-12-19 22:32:19','2017-12-20 03:32:19','',1894,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/1894-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1901,1,'2017-12-19 22:33:43','2017-12-20 03:33:43','[caption id=\"attachment_1895\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/iStock-502842002.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1895\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/iStock-502842002-300x200.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"200\" /></a> A C-Note for you, and you, and you...[/caption]\r\n\r\nAfter traveling with younger colleagues who pay for everything with cards, I wonder if I\'m the last generation of cash payers. I also talk about the upcoming smart luggage ban on US airlines and a long Saturday afternoon trying to redeem some British Airways Avios points. All this, a new Uber driver story, and a few Christmas carols at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_136.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/358749968\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n<!--more-->\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #136:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL on what has been a very light travel month, just one trip to New York and then back down to Charlottesville, VA before an early wrap-up of my 2017 travel. I wanted to avoid flying into LGA because of the construction, but UA’s EWR monopoly jacks the price difference way beyond what I can justify, so I gritted my teeth and booked the LGA flight. It was amazingly smooth for Monday morning rush hour in ORD. Walked straight into the PreCheck line. There were a ton of people there -- as is typical on a Monday morning, lots of professional travelers -- but everything moved smoothly. The TSA stations were fully staffed; there was a minimal number of amateur travelers in PreCheck, and so what appeared to be a very daunting line was an easy 5-minute exercise. After that, I walked straight up the Starbucks register and ordered a coffee, and had a easy walk down to the gate. We left ORD on-time and landed at LGA 30 minutes early! I checked my watch again to make sure it was right. On a good day, I consider an flight between ORD and LGA to be on-time if I’m not more than 30 minutes late. I’m not sure I’ve ever arrived early. Indeed, somebody sent me a press release last month with stats saying that Chicago-New York is second only to SF-LA in the list of most disrupted air routes. All this joyousness hit the wall, though -- almost literally -- when I walked out of LGA Terminal B smack into the cab line which, for those of you not familiar with LGA, should not be see when you walk out the front of Terminal B because the cab rank is on the side of Terminal B. Well, maybe they moved it for the construction. Nope, it was where it always has been. So my time budget balanced out -- 30-minute early arrival funded the 30-minute cab ride. Easy come, easy go.</li>\r\n 	<li>I was only in New York for Monday day -- arrived at 11am and left at 8pm -- which meant trying to find a cab on 5th Ave to take me to LGA during rush hour. Or used to. Whatever your opinions on Uber or ride sharing in general, the ability to easily get a ride from Manhattan to LGA without dancing into the street, hiding your luggage behind a trash can, and pleading with the one guy who finally stopped is justification enough for its existence. And I’m obviously not the only one who feels this way, so there are gobs of Uber drivers on, say, 5th Ave at rush hour, making it hard to spot your ride and easy to get into someone else’s. Monday night, I noticed a new option on the Uber screen that was showing my driver crawling toward me through Midtown traffic. “Click here to change the color of your driver’s Uber badge”. I clicked and got a color spectrum slider, which kept me occupied while I was waiting. I changed the color to red, then blue, then yellow, and then Uber said he was a block away, to some shade of lime green. I looked up, and there was an SUV with a lime green Uber badge in the window. I hopped in and off we went. I asked him how his evening was going. “Fine,” he said, “though I think this Uber light is acting up. Just now, it started changing all sorts of colors.”</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/copperhead/40520\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen</a> by copperhead (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: Admiral Bob, Javolenus , Sackjo22</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Roger Nash sent a note on Twitter with a pointer to the Transport for London’s new Oyster app. In the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/11/20/podcast-135-airport-bingo-new-old-travel-pc/\">last episode</a>, I talked about my growing stack of contactless -- tap ‘n’ go -- transit cards, and difference between re-loading my Chicago Ventra card with a smartphone app vs. having to queue at a machine to top up my Oyster card when we were in London last summer. TfL launched their Oyster app a few months back and seem to be aggressively rev’ing it to add features. The only problem for me -- it’ll only take a UK-based payment card. So I’ll have to sponge off my daughter if I want to skip the machine. That’ll be a fun role change…</li>\r\n 	<li>Also got a good run of comments on the Airport Bingo topic.\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>An anonymous comment asking “Since when do bingo cards have a story arc?” Fair point…</li>\r\n 	<li>Donna Smith Pleiman on Twitter suggested a square for “sweaty guy racing onto the plane at the last minute plops down next to you, proceeds to take his shoes off.” Yeah, that one happens a little too often -- because once is too often</li>\r\n 	<li>Rob said: I like the \"3-adjective rule\". I\'ve always said, \"If you have to inhale to finish your drink order... you don\'t actually like coffee.\" Good point, if you have to use circular breathing in the Starbucks line, you need to re-think your beverage choices.</li>\r\n 	<li>And Steve Frick built his own card in a post on his Back and Gone Again blog. “Since not everyone travels by air, we’re focusing on travel in general,” he says and then spins through his set of 25 spaces. I’ll post a <a href=\"http://www.hypeorlando.com/back-and-gone-again/2017/11/22/holiday-travel-bingo/\">link</a> to it in the show notes.</li>\r\n 	<li>And with Steve throwing down that challenge, I stole a couple of his squares so I could expand my Airport Bingo card to the full 25 spaces in a blog post on the TravelCommons site last week. Check it out; I hope it keeps you entertained on your trip to Grandma’s house.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>The smart luggage ban announced by Delta, American, and Alaska with the other US oligopoly members United and Southwest expected to follow shortly caused a bit of a Twitter storm. Next month, January 15 to be exact, smart luggage without removable batteries will be banned. And if your smart bag is checked, you have to remove battery before it goes in the hold -- which negates one of the key benefits pitched by smart bag sellers -- the ability to track your bag through built-in GPS and cellular data. No battery, and it’s just another bag left behind on the tarmac, or as one of my funnier Twitter followers @ThankYouLeetch replied that the airlines were hard at work -- “We\'re GOING to lose your bag, and we\'ll be damned if we let the likes of YOU find it! If you must know, we are just REALLY into this monopoly thing.\" Kinda blows if you just dropped $400 on one of these bags.</li>\r\n 	<li>This would seem to cause an existential problem for category pioneer Bluesmart because none of their bags -- the original one nor the recently released Series 2 -- have removable batteries. I backed Bluesmart’s initial Indiegogo campaign back in November 2014 -- longtime podcast listener Arnoud Heijnis <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/11/22/podcast-112-holiday-airport-etiquette-travel-tax-pile-up/\">pointed it out to me</a> -- and received my bag a year later. I reviewed it in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/12/podcast-120-where-do-guidebooks-fit-in-i-hate-shopping-for-suitcases/\">episode 120</a> after a couple of months of use -- my take: “I’m kinda “meh” on all the electronics, so it’s a nice enough hard-shell wheelie bag with a couple of bells and whistles that don’t necessarily wow me.” Though I did amend that “meh” in the very <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/05/30/podcast-121-tsa-lines-my-luggage-is-where/\">next episode</a> saying “the Bluesmart is the perfect carry-on size, it’s usually right above me in the plane cabin, so the location finder isn’t that valuable. Except when I have to gate check my bag on a small regional jet. On a recent Skywest flight, it was taking my bag a long time to show up at the gate after arriving. Hmmm, I pulled out my iPhone, hit the Location button on the Bluesmart app, and it showed me that my bag had updated its location a couple of minutes prior and was indeed here. A few minutes later, it showed up in the last tranche of bags heaved up into the jet bridge. Not critical functionality, but it moves up from “meh” to “kinda handy”.”</li>\r\n 	<li>The real pain for me is that I now have to shop for another suitcase which I really hate. I finally put my 10-year-old Victorinox bag out to pasture because the handle locked itself in the extended position, and so I’d switched over to my Bluesmart for these recent trips. My last flight back from CHO was on an American Eagle regional jet. I’m waiting along the side of a cold ORD bridge with about 20 other passengers for my bag. It comes out second because, even though there’s not First Class on this plane, I’ve clung to the yellow gate check tag that I got with a First Class upgrade last month. Sparky, the young gate agent, looks at my bag as he’s handing it to me and says “Is that a smart bag? Did you take the battery out of that?” “No, because I don’t have to until January 15,” I shot back. Don’t push it, American. You’re forcing me to scrap a 2-year-old bag; I got that. But don’t make me go luggage shopping the week before Christmas.</li>\r\n 	<li>One of the topics back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/11/22/podcast-125-uber-driver-stories-overseas-for-the-election/\">episode 125</a> was life stories from my Uber and Lyft drivers. I still do ask most of my drivers how they like driving, how long they’ve been doing it, and what else they do — if it’s not their full time gig. Last month, we were taking an Uber into the city on Saturday for a beer festival. The driver was great -- very personable guy. So I ask him about his gig. He’s been doing it full-time for 2 years now. Before that, he was a hotel manager. He quit because the stress was too much -- late night calls about guests, bedbug infestations,.... He said that driving Uber in Chicago was much less stressful. Think about next time you’re about to light into the assistant night manager about a missing towel -- their job is more stressful than driving full-time in bumper-to-bumper traffic. That was an eye-opener to me. I’ve gone out of my way to be more pleasant to front desk folks ever since.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/NiGiD/48586\">O Tannenbaum / Oh Christmas Tree</a> by Martijn de Boer (NiGiD) (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license.  Ft: Admiral Bob (admiralbob77)</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Is Cash is a Waning King?</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>As I said at the start of the show, my last trip this year was ORD to LGA to CHO. I didn’t arrive too late so there were a couple of cabs waiting -- no LGA-style lines, I just hopped in. It’s a $25 flat rate to downtown Charlottesville. We pulled up to my hotel, I gave the driver a 20 and a 10 and got out of the cab. “Cash? Thanks!” he said.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’ve said this before; I try to pay all of my cab fares in cash ever since one cab driver walked me through why he hates cards. There’s a timing problem-- he has to pay for gas, tolls, airport access fees, and the taxi company that day, but he doesn’t get his money until a couple of days later. And then there’s the high fees the processing companies charge taxi drivers.</li>\r\n 	<li>But when traveling with younger colleagues, I feel like I’m the last generation of cash payers. Not only do they pay for everything with a card, many of them don’t even carry cash. Maybe I’m just getting old, or maybe I remember when you couldn’t use cards everywhere.</li>\r\n 	<li>Especially in Europe in the late ‘80’s/early ‘90’s when I would be in a different country every day on sales calls with distributors. There weren’t international ATMs -- or really ATMs of any kind. We’d get a wallet full of American Express Travelers Checks before flying out and then typically cash a $100 check at the airport currency exchange after customs. This was before the euro, so we’d juggle D Marks, Belgian and French francs, British and Irish pounds, pesetas, lira,.... Almost all of the hotels we stayed in took credit cards -- except for this one random mom-&amp;-pop place outside of Munich; nice people but they screwed up my D Mark budget -- but not all restaurants and none of the taxis did. So our currency exit strategy -- so we didn’t pay double the exchange fees for having to go in and out of a currency that we might not use for another year or so -- was to throw down most of our excess cash at the hotel in the morning, saving enough for a sandwich, the cab back to the airport and a beer at the bar -- and then put on the Amex the balance of the hotel room. It usually worked well -- except for the one time that I mixed up the exchange rate between the Swedish krona and Swiss franc. Not an unreasonable mix up -- both countries start with an S and have a lot of snow -- but the krona exchange rate was about 6 to the dollar at that time while the Swiss franc was at 1.3 to the dollar. That one definitely screwed up my end-of-day cash strategy.</li>\r\n 	<li>But I absolutely understand the use case for going all plastic. First, you’re not having to float the money between travel and reimbursement. But I gotta think convenience is the bigger play. Many companies pipe their company card transactions straight into their expense reporting systems. Makes it incredibly easy -- log into Concur or whatever, assign each charge to an expense code and submit. Nothing forgotten and you’re done in 5 minutes. With cash, you have to remember what you spent, enter it, and probably submit a receipt too. I’ll never pay for my $2 ORD Starbucks coffee with my Amex card, but when the cab fare get above $50, even I’ll charge it.</li>\r\n 	<li>I do think it’s a bit of a generational thing, though. I remember my dad always walking around with a bunch of 50’s in a money clip in his pocket. And my kids always getting a $100 bill from their Hungarian grandparents for Christmas -- we’d call it the Eastern European C note. I now have a Venmo account, but I still like paying people back in cash. Feels like I need say “Get off my lawn” but I may not have completely aged out yet. When paying my daughter’s tuition at Univ of St Andrews, one sentence on the web site caught my eye -- “Ideally tuition and accommodation fees should not be paid in cash” -- which means that someone or multiple someones has done it. It’s not a travel expense, but the image of someone walking into the St Andrews bursar’s office and stacking piles of 100 pound notes just makes me smile. Makes me want to drop a C note on my next big cab ride.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/44580\"> What Child is This (Instrumental)</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license.  Ft: Jeris</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Don’t Make It Hard to Cash in on Loyalty</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Back in October, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/10/31/podcast-134-value-of-loyalty-need-those-5-stars/\">episode 134</a>, we talked about the value of loyalty. In November, JD Powers released their 2017 Airline Loyalty Program Satisfaction Study. Powers measured satisfaction “based on four factors (in order of importance): earning and redeeming rewards; program benefits; account management; and member communication”. Not a surprising list, and placing “redeeming awards” at the top makes sense since that’s sorta the core of a loyalty program -- here’s something to incent you to fly us more.</li>\r\n 	<li>A couple of years ago, in episode 116, I talked about why, for me, British Airways’ Avios program has been the worst program for redemptions. I had over 300,000 points sitting there because it never made sense to use them. When I’d price out an award ticket between Chicago and London, the addition cash I would owe for BA’s fuel surcharges (which made sense when oil was at $120/bbl, but much less so at $50) and Heathrow landing taxes would just about equal what I’d pay for a ticket with another airline -- so the miles were worth nothing. Not exactly a best practice for an airline loyalty program.</li>\r\n 	<li>But, when BA and Iberia, both owned by the same corporate parent, kinda combined their programs into, not a single but a sorta interchangeable Avios program, I thought there might be a way to finally get some value from my forlorn BA points. I said kinda interchangeable because I now have 2 Avios accounts -- a BA Avios account and an Iberia Avios account. And since I have had my Iberia Avios account for over 90 days, I can convert my BA Avios to Iberia Avios, which let me use points for a direct ORD-MAD flight this spring at a small fraction of the cash for fees and taxes that BA would charge.</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, good. I’ve found the flights, I’ve found the page on BA.com to transfer. I enter all the account info, press the button, and get a big red error screen. Hmmm… I try it a couple of more times, same result. Different browsers, same result. In incognito mode so there’s no legacy cookies, same result. Hmmm…</li>\r\n 	<li>So I dredge around BA’s site and find a technical support number. It’s Saturday afternoon Chicago time, but after a good bit of music, I get a live guy. And he’s a good guy. Here’s the problem, your name doesn’t match on your accounts -- it’s Mark Peacock on your BA account, and Mark Peacock Peacock on your Iberia account. You’ll need to call Iberia to change that, then the transfer will go through. OK, seems reasonable enough. So I call Iberia, again listen to music and again get a live person. Good guy, but he can’t help me. Here’s a number in Spain; give them a call. Which I do, a bit more music, and then another guy. We’ll need some documentation to make that change, send a picture of the first page of your passport to this Iberia email address and we’ll make the change.</li>\r\n 	<li>Lots of calls, spoke to some nice people, but I still can’t break these BA Avios points free. So I send the email, but I don’t expect this to get resolved soon. I open another beer and gear myself up for another fare search, but decide to give BA one more call. This time, I connect with a woman with a proper northern English accent. It felt like I’d somehow overflowed into a high status group; like when I was Global Services on United and agents picking up my calls were sitting in the corporate center near ORD and could make anything happen. I relate my tale of woe; “Oh, that’s no problem,” she says. Five minutes later, it’s done. Thanks to her, I got to redeem 100,000 Avios points and am feeling a bit more hopeful about the remaining balance. The only downside -- I didn’t get the woman’s name so I could give her a shout out. By the way, 3.5 weeks later and still no response to my email to Iberia.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #136</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_136.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #136 — Is Cash A Waning King; Don’t Make It Hard to Cash in on Loyalty','','inherit','closed','closed','','1894-revision-v1','','','2017-12-19 22:33:43','2017-12-20 03:33:43','',1894,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/1894-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1902,1,'2017-12-19 22:39:29','2017-12-20 03:39:29','[caption id=\"attachment_1895\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/iStock-502842002.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1895\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/iStock-502842002-300x200.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"200\" /></a> A C-Note for you, and you, and you...[/caption]\r\n\r\nAfter traveling with younger colleagues who pay for everything with cards, I wonder if I\'m the last generation of cash payers. I also talk about the upcoming smart luggage ban on US airlines and a long Saturday afternoon trying to redeem some British Airways Avios points. All this, a new Uber driver story, and a few Christmas carols at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_136.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/371970371\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /] <!--more-->\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #136:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL on what has been a very light travel month, just one trip to New York and then back down to Charlottesville, VA before an early wrap-up of my 2017 travel. I wanted to avoid flying into LGA because of the construction, but UA’s EWR monopoly jacks the price difference way beyond what I can justify, so I gritted my teeth and booked the LGA flight. It was amazingly smooth for Monday morning rush hour in ORD. Walked straight into the PreCheck line. There were a ton of people there -- as is typical on a Monday morning, lots of professional travelers -- but everything moved smoothly. The TSA stations were fully staffed; there was a minimal number of amateur travelers in PreCheck, and so what appeared to be a very daunting line was an easy 5-minute exercise. After that, I walked straight up the Starbucks register and ordered a coffee, and had a easy walk down to the gate. We left ORD on-time and landed at LGA 30 minutes early! I checked my watch again to make sure it was right. On a good day, I consider an flight between ORD and LGA to be on-time if I’m not more than 30 minutes late. I’m not sure I’ve ever arrived early. Indeed, somebody sent me a press release last month with stats saying that Chicago-New York is second only to SF-LA in the list of most disrupted air routes. All this joyousness hit the wall, though -- almost literally -- when I walked out of LGA Terminal B smack into the cab line which, for those of you not familiar with LGA, should not be see when you walk out the front of Terminal B because the cab rank is on the side of Terminal B. Well, maybe they moved it for the construction. Nope, it was where it always has been. So my time budget balanced out -- 30-minute early arrival funded the 30-minute cab ride. Easy come, easy go.</li>\r\n 	<li>I was only in New York for Monday day -- arrived at 11am and left at 8pm -- which meant trying to find a cab on 5th Ave to take me to LGA during rush hour. Or used to. Whatever your opinions on Uber or ride sharing in general, the ability to easily get a ride from Manhattan to LGA without dancing into the street, hiding your luggage behind a trash can, and pleading with the one guy who finally stopped is justification enough for its existence. And I’m obviously not the only one who feels this way, so there are gobs of Uber drivers on, say, 5th Ave at rush hour, making it hard to spot your ride and easy to get into someone else’s. Monday night, I noticed a new option on the Uber screen that was showing my driver crawling toward me through Midtown traffic. “Click here to change the color of your driver’s Uber badge”. I clicked and got a color spectrum slider, which kept me occupied while I was waiting. I changed the color to red, then blue, then yellow, and then Uber said he was a block away, to some shade of lime green. I looked up, and there was an SUV with a lime green Uber badge in the window. I hopped in and off we went. I asked him how his evening was going. “Fine,” he said, “though I think this Uber light is acting up. Just now, it started changing all sorts of colors.”</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/copperhead/40520\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen</a> by copperhead (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: Admiral Bob, Javolenus , Sackjo22</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Roger Nash sent a note on Twitter with a pointer to the Transport for London’s new Oyster app. In the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/11/20/podcast-135-airport-bingo-new-old-travel-pc/\">last episode</a>, I talked about my growing stack of contactless -- tap ‘n’ go -- transit cards, and difference between re-loading my Chicago Ventra card with a smartphone app vs. having to queue at a machine to top up my Oyster card when we were in London last summer. TfL launched their Oyster app a few months back and seem to be aggressively rev’ing it to add features. The only problem for me -- it’ll only take a UK-based payment card. So I’ll have to sponge off my daughter if I want to skip the machine. That’ll be a fun role change…</li>\r\n 	<li>Also got a good run of comments on the Airport Bingo topic.\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>An anonymous comment asking “Since when do bingo cards have a story arc?” Fair point…</li>\r\n 	<li>Donna Smith Pleiman on Twitter suggested a square for “sweaty guy racing onto the plane at the last minute plops down next to you, proceeds to take his shoes off.” Yeah, that one happens a little too often -- because once is too often</li>\r\n 	<li>Rob said: I like the \"3-adjective rule\". I\'ve always said, \"If you have to inhale to finish your drink order... you don\'t actually like coffee.\" Good point, if you have to use circular breathing in the Starbucks line, you need to re-think your beverage choices.</li>\r\n 	<li>And Steve Frick built his own card in a post on his Back and Gone Again blog. “Since not everyone travels by air, we’re focusing on travel in general,” he says and then spins through his set of 25 spaces. I’ll post a <a href=\"http://www.hypeorlando.com/back-and-gone-again/2017/11/22/holiday-travel-bingo/\">link</a> to it in the show notes.</li>\r\n 	<li>And with Steve throwing down that challenge, I stole a couple of his squares so I could expand my Airport Bingo card to the full 25 spaces in a blog post on the TravelCommons site last week. Check it out; I hope it keeps you entertained on your trip to Grandma’s house.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>The smart luggage ban announced by Delta, American, and Alaska with the other US oligopoly members United and Southwest expected to follow shortly caused a bit of a Twitter storm. Next month, January 15 to be exact, smart luggage without removable batteries will be banned. And if your smart bag is checked, you have to remove battery before it goes in the hold -- which negates one of the key benefits pitched by smart bag sellers -- the ability to track your bag through built-in GPS and cellular data. No battery, and it’s just another bag left behind on the tarmac, or as one of my funnier Twitter followers @ThankYouLeetch replied that the airlines were hard at work -- “We\'re GOING to lose your bag, and we\'ll be damned if we let the likes of YOU find it! If you must know, we are just REALLY into this monopoly thing.\" Kinda blows if you just dropped $400 on one of these bags.</li>\r\n 	<li>This would seem to cause an existential problem for category pioneer Bluesmart because none of their bags -- the original one nor the recently released Series 2 -- have removable batteries. I backed Bluesmart’s initial Indiegogo campaign back in November 2014 -- longtime podcast listener Arnoud Heijnis <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/11/22/podcast-112-holiday-airport-etiquette-travel-tax-pile-up/\">pointed it out to me</a> -- and received my bag a year later. I reviewed it in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/12/podcast-120-where-do-guidebooks-fit-in-i-hate-shopping-for-suitcases/\">episode 120</a> after a couple of months of use -- my take: “I’m kinda “meh” on all the electronics, so it’s a nice enough hard-shell wheelie bag with a couple of bells and whistles that don’t necessarily wow me.” Though I did amend that “meh” in the very <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/05/30/podcast-121-tsa-lines-my-luggage-is-where/\">next episode</a> saying “the Bluesmart is the perfect carry-on size, it’s usually right above me in the plane cabin, so the location finder isn’t that valuable. Except when I have to gate check my bag on a small regional jet. On a recent Skywest flight, it was taking my bag a long time to show up at the gate after arriving. Hmmm, I pulled out my iPhone, hit the Location button on the Bluesmart app, and it showed me that my bag had updated its location a couple of minutes prior and was indeed here. A few minutes later, it showed up in the last tranche of bags heaved up into the jet bridge. Not critical functionality, but it moves up from “meh” to “kinda handy”.”</li>\r\n 	<li>The real pain for me is that I now have to shop for another suitcase which I really hate. I finally put my 10-year-old Victorinox bag out to pasture because the handle locked itself in the extended position, and so I’d switched over to my Bluesmart for these recent trips. My last flight back from CHO was on an American Eagle regional jet. I’m waiting along the side of a cold ORD bridge with about 20 other passengers for my bag. It comes out second because, even though there’s not First Class on this plane, I’ve clung to the yellow gate check tag that I got with a First Class upgrade last month. Sparky, the young gate agent, looks at my bag as he’s handing it to me and says “Is that a smart bag? Did you take the battery out of that?” “No, because I don’t have to until January 15,” I shot back. Don’t push it, American. You’re forcing me to scrap a 2-year-old bag; I got that. But don’t make me go luggage shopping the week before Christmas.</li>\r\n 	<li>One of the topics back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/11/22/podcast-125-uber-driver-stories-overseas-for-the-election/\">episode 125</a> was life stories from my Uber and Lyft drivers. I still do ask most of my drivers how they like driving, how long they’ve been doing it, and what else they do — if it’s not their full time gig. Last month, we were taking an Uber into the city on Saturday for a beer festival. The driver was great -- very personable guy. So I ask him about his gig. He’s been doing it full-time for 2 years now. Before that, he was a hotel manager. He quit because the stress was too much -- late night calls about guests, bedbug infestations,.... He said that driving Uber in Chicago was much less stressful. Think about next time you’re about to light into the assistant night manager about a missing towel -- their job is more stressful than driving full-time in bumper-to-bumper traffic. That was an eye-opener to me. I’ve gone out of my way to be more pleasant to front desk folks ever since.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/NiGiD/48586\">O Tannenbaum / Oh Christmas Tree</a> by Martijn de Boer (NiGiD) (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license.  Ft: Admiral Bob (admiralbob77)</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Is Cash is a Waning King?</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>As I said at the start of the show, my last trip this year was ORD to LGA to CHO. I didn’t arrive too late so there were a couple of cabs waiting -- no LGA-style lines, I just hopped in. It’s a $25 flat rate to downtown Charlottesville. We pulled up to my hotel, I gave the driver a 20 and a 10 and got out of the cab. “Cash? Thanks!” he said.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’ve said this before; I try to pay all of my cab fares in cash ever since one cab driver walked me through why he hates cards. There’s a timing problem-- he has to pay for gas, tolls, airport access fees, and the taxi company that day, but he doesn’t get his money until a couple of days later. And then there’s the high fees the processing companies charge taxi drivers.</li>\r\n 	<li>But when traveling with younger colleagues, I feel like I’m the last generation of cash payers. Not only do they pay for everything with a card, many of them don’t even carry cash. Maybe I’m just getting old, or maybe I remember when you couldn’t use cards everywhere.</li>\r\n 	<li>Especially in Europe in the late ‘80’s/early ‘90’s when I would be in a different country every day on sales calls with distributors. There weren’t international ATMs -- or really ATMs of any kind. We’d get a wallet full of American Express Travelers Checks before flying out and then typically cash a $100 check at the airport currency exchange after customs. This was before the euro, so we’d juggle D Marks, Belgian and French francs, British and Irish pounds, pesetas, lira,.... Almost all of the hotels we stayed in took credit cards -- except for this one random mom-&amp;-pop place outside of Munich; nice people but they screwed up my D Mark budget -- but not all restaurants and none of the taxis did. So our currency exit strategy -- so we didn’t pay double the exchange fees for having to go in and out of a currency that we might not use for another year or so -- was to throw down most of our excess cash at the hotel in the morning, saving enough for a sandwich, the cab back to the airport and a beer at the bar -- and then put on the Amex the balance of the hotel room. It usually worked well -- except for the one time that I mixed up the exchange rate between the Swedish krona and Swiss franc. Not an unreasonable mix up -- both countries start with an S and have a lot of snow -- but the krona exchange rate was about 6 to the dollar at that time while the Swiss franc was at 1.3 to the dollar. That one definitely screwed up my end-of-day cash strategy.</li>\r\n 	<li>But I absolutely understand the use case for going all plastic. First, you’re not having to float the money between travel and reimbursement. But I gotta think convenience is the bigger play. Many companies pipe their company card transactions straight into their expense reporting systems. Makes it incredibly easy -- log into Concur or whatever, assign each charge to an expense code and submit. Nothing forgotten and you’re done in 5 minutes. With cash, you have to remember what you spent, enter it, and probably submit a receipt too. I’ll never pay for my $2 ORD Starbucks coffee with my Amex card, but when the cab fare get above $50, even I’ll charge it.</li>\r\n 	<li>I do think it’s a bit of a generational thing, though. I remember my dad always walking around with a bunch of 50’s in a money clip in his pocket. And my kids always getting a $100 bill from their Hungarian grandparents for Christmas -- we’d call it the Eastern European C note. I now have a Venmo account, but I still like paying people back in cash. Feels like I need say “Get off my lawn” but I may not have completely aged out yet. When paying my daughter’s tuition at Univ of St Andrews, one sentence on the web site caught my eye -- “Ideally tuition and accommodation fees should not be paid in cash” -- which means that someone or multiple someones has done it. It’s not a travel expense, but the image of someone walking into the St Andrews bursar’s office and stacking piles of 100 pound notes just makes me smile. Makes me want to drop a C note on my next big cab ride.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/44580\"> What Child is This (Instrumental)</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license.  Ft: Jeris</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Don’t Make It Hard to Cash in on Loyalty</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Back in October, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/10/31/podcast-134-value-of-loyalty-need-those-5-stars/\">episode 134</a>, we talked about the value of loyalty. In November, JD Powers released their 2017 Airline Loyalty Program Satisfaction Study. Powers measured satisfaction “based on four factors (in order of importance): earning and redeeming rewards; program benefits; account management; and member communication”. Not a surprising list, and placing “redeeming awards” at the top makes sense since that’s sorta the core of a loyalty program -- here’s something to incent you to fly us more.</li>\r\n 	<li>A couple of years ago, in episode 116, I talked about why, for me, British Airways’ Avios program has been the worst program for redemptions. I had over 300,000 points sitting there because it never made sense to use them. When I’d price out an award ticket between Chicago and London, the addition cash I would owe for BA’s fuel surcharges (which made sense when oil was at $120/bbl, but much less so at $50) and Heathrow landing taxes would just about equal what I’d pay for a ticket with another airline -- so the miles were worth nothing. Not exactly a best practice for an airline loyalty program.</li>\r\n 	<li>But, when BA and Iberia, both owned by the same corporate parent, kinda combined their programs into, not a single but a sorta interchangeable Avios program, I thought there might be a way to finally get some value from my forlorn BA points. I said kinda interchangeable because I now have 2 Avios accounts -- a BA Avios account and an Iberia Avios account. And since I have had my Iberia Avios account for over 90 days, I can convert my BA Avios to Iberia Avios, which let me use points for a direct ORD-MAD flight this spring at a small fraction of the cash for fees and taxes that BA would charge.</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, good. I’ve found the flights, I’ve found the page on BA.com to transfer. I enter all the account info, press the button, and get a big red error screen. Hmmm… I try it a couple of more times, same result. Different browsers, same result. In incognito mode so there’s no legacy cookies, same result. Hmmm…</li>\r\n 	<li>So I dredge around BA’s site and find a technical support number. It’s Saturday afternoon Chicago time, but after a good bit of music, I get a live guy. And he’s a good guy. Here’s the problem, your name doesn’t match on your accounts -- it’s Mark Peacock on your BA account, and Mark Peacock Peacock on your Iberia account. You’ll need to call Iberia to change that, then the transfer will go through. OK, seems reasonable enough. So I call Iberia, again listen to music and again get a live person. Good guy, but he can’t help me. Here’s a number in Spain; give them a call. Which I do, a bit more music, and then another guy. We’ll need some documentation to make that change, send a picture of the first page of your passport to this Iberia email address and we’ll make the change.</li>\r\n 	<li>Lots of calls, spoke to some nice people, but I still can’t break these BA Avios points free. So I send the email, but I don’t expect this to get resolved soon. I open another beer and gear myself up for another fare search, but decide to give BA one more call. This time, I connect with a woman with a proper northern English accent. It felt like I’d somehow overflowed into a high status group; like when I was Global Services on United and agents picking up my calls were sitting in the corporate center near ORD and could make anything happen. I relate my tale of woe; “Oh, that’s no problem,” she says. Five minutes later, it’s done. Thanks to her, I got to redeem 100,000 Avios points and am feeling a bit more hopeful about the remaining balance. The only downside -- I didn’t get the woman’s name so I could give her a shout out. By the way, 3.5 weeks later and still no response to my email to Iberia.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #136</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_136.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #136 — Is Cash A Waning King; Don’t Make It Hard to Cash in on Loyalty','','inherit','closed','closed','','1894-revision-v1','','','2017-12-19 22:39:29','2017-12-20 03:39:29','',1894,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/1894-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1904,1,'2017-12-29 15:32:57','2017-12-29 20:32:57','<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/IMG_0522.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1775\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/IMG_0522-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nIt\'s a <em>Mitteleuropa</em> episode, talking about last month\'s travels through Vienna and Hungary. I came away with good first impressions of Austrian Airlines and the Vienna airport. And, for the first time in many visits, saw Hungary through a tourist\'s eyes, spending time in Budapest and the Tokaj wine region. We also talk about how Google Translate has become pretty much indistinguishable from magic and the potential impact the privatization of the US air traffic control system might have on the general aviation industry. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_130.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_130.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #130:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, after a good bit of travel -- I think the technical unit of measure is “a slug”. I’ve done a “slug” of travel recently. We got back from 9 days in Hungary on the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend, which gave us that Monday to recover a bit. After that short week at home, I got back on the road -- a week in Richmond and then last week and this week in Atlanta. Some folks wanted me to do stupid day trips -- say up to Michigan from Atlanta for a 90-minute meeting, but in a fit of, what is for me, rare realism, I said, “Uh, no”.</li>\r\n 	<li>This was the first time I’d spent any time in Richmond -- other than driving around it -- from Charlottesville to the airport, from DC over to Williamsburg. We were downtown. There are some nice pockets. Found a couple of restaurants and a microbrewery with a taproom, so I was happy. Even happier because it was just a 20-minute cab ride from the airport, and a 10-minute walk to the client. Contrast that to Atlanta, which I just hate having to travel to for business. It starts with the location of the airport -- at 6 o’clock, on the bottom of the I-285 perimeter, and all the business at the opposite side -- between 11 and 1 o’clock on the perimeter. And therein lies the most important question that every business traveler faces when they arrive and they leave Atlanta -- do I drive through the city or around it? Outside of rush hour, it’s not bad -- maybe 35 minutes. But when you’re trying to catch that 6pm flight home on Thursday night, the trip starts at an hour and deteriorates fast.</li>\r\n 	<li>And deterioration is a nice word for last week’s trip back. After an hour-and-a quarter drive through the city that would’ve been a lot worse except that there were 3 of us in the car, so we got to whiz by the beginnings of the traffic jam in the HOV lanes. Once in the center of the city, the HOV lanes were just as crowded, but it probably cut at least 5 minutes off our trip. We drop the car off at Hertz, board the Skytrain, are on our way to the terminal when it just stops. OK, maybe a bit of congestion at the station in front of us. So we wait, and wait,... and wait. No announcement, no nothing. Just wait. 10 minutes, 15 minutes. Finally, someone near the door presses the phone button. A voice comes on -- “We’re working on it; thanks for your patience.” Click. No reason for the delay; no thought on when we’d start up again. Another 5 minutes. Another guy presses the phone button. Same story. After 30 minutes, the train whirs to life and starts to move. And I never thought I’d get nostalgic for those car rental buses.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hansatom/47919\">Brilliant Day</a> by Hans Atom (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial license.  Ft: Lisa DeBenedictis</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>My son Andrew and I flew Austrian Air from Chicago to Budapest last month with an -- obvious -- connection in Vienna. Couple of things… First, why Austrian Air? Because it was among the cheapest non-budget fares over and because I could construct an 8-hr layover which meant we spent Saturday eating schnitzel and drinking beer in Vienna. We landed at 8:45 Saturday morning, checked our bags in Held Luggage, and then hopped a cab into the city. It wasn’t a cheap taxi -- probably around €40 -- but we didn’t have time to figure out and wait for the train. We went first to the Naschmarkt and met up with a friend of mine -- ex-client and ex-boss -- who’s now running the Polish development center for a stealth start-up. He came down Friday night; it was a good excuse to spend 3 hours on his new BMW motorcycle. We started out with coffee and then quickly moved to the beer crawl. At noon, we walked into a small place, <a href=\"http://www.xn--gasthauspschl-qmb.com/\">Gasthaus Pöschl</a> (Weihburggasse 17), just as they were opening. We promised to be out in an hour, so they picked up one of the “Reserved” signs and gave us great big plates of schnitzel and glasses of Grüner Veltliner. We needed a bit of a walk after that, a bit more beer, and we found a cab back to the airport. One of the best layovers I’ve had...</li>\r\n 	<li>And then the second thing -- Vienna Airport. I’ve whined over a couple of episodes about how much I don’t like Munich Airport. Indeed, one of my ORD-BUD options was on Lufthansa through MUC. That didn’t make the first cut. But Vienna was great. Pleasant folks in the immigration booths, efficient and well-staffed security, nice food and beer selection -- it was the anti-MUC. And the in-air service? Pretty good. Fairly new 777-200; typical kinda tight coach seat configuration; pleasant flight attendants. There was nothing that wowed me, but then again, I wasn’t expecting anything to. All I wanted was not to be annoyed; not to have a gate agent or flight attendant piss me off. Kinda the air travel version of the Hippocratic oath -- Do no harm to the passenger. And Austrian succeeded. If I were to ding them on anything, it would be that the bright red plane upholstery was a bit tough on the eyes. I’ll fly them again.</li>\r\n 	<li>I actually was two-for-two on airports on that trip. Budapest airport has had a significant upgrade since my last visit maybe 12 years ago. Again, efficient security lines, bright clean terminal, good places to grab a coffee and some breakfast. Much more pleasant than my first time passing through there in 1989, some Army guy checking that my exit visa had the right stamps. Much happier vibe this time. Two great airport experiences; I think I’ll need to consciously ratchet down my expectations for my next trip, though. I’ll be hitting London’s Gatwick and Heathrow next week.</li>\r\n 	<li>Thinking through my international travel this year -- Paris, Vienna, Budapest -- Google Translate has evolved to being pretty close to magic. Last September, Google made a big announcement that they moved Translate from a statistics-based approach to a neural network running in Google’s cloud. It was the cover story for the New York Times Sunday Magazine <a href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/14/magazine/the-great-ai-awakening.html\">The Great AI Awakening</a> -- using it as a case study of how artificial intelligence will “reinvent computing itself”. That’s all good -- and it was a good article -- but what’s really seems like magic is what Google calls Word Lens, where you activate your camera within Google Translate, point it at some text -- a menu or, say, the washing machine controls in a vacation rental -- and you see English words replacing the French or Hungarian words in real time. Amazingly useful. Saves you from blasting your delicates with hot water, or mistakenly ordering chicken when you mix up poulet and poisson after a couple of cocktails. The French translations seemed better than the Hungarian ones -- which makes sense when you remember that the quality of the neural network is dependent on the amount of training data -- but even the Hungarian was very useful. And Translate lets you download some amount of language data onto your phone so you don’t blow through $100 of roaming data trying to avoid brussels sprouts. As you can tell, a huge TravelCommons endorsement.</li>\r\n 	<li>A few weeks back, I retweeted an NPR story about the proposal to privatize US air traffic control. As someone who has had cumulative months if not years wasted on ATC delays, I commented that I can’t understand all the angst over this proposal. ATC privatization has worked for years in Canada and Europe. And it’s not like the FAA has bathed itself in glory with the NextGen program that was authorized in 2003. Rich Fraser, a long-time TravelCommons listener, fellow Midwesterner, and a pilot, came back with a great series of tweets explaining his objections, specifically on privatization’s impact on general aviation. I retweeted a number of them -- “Privatization decimated general aviation industries everywhere it was tried. GA is a $200 billion industry here. 1.4 mil jobs…” and “And Canada\'s general aviation industry is a tiny fraction the size of ours. Apples and oranges doesn\'t even begin to describe.” I was only thinking of the impact on commercial aviation -- the only aviation I experience. Rich’s tweets did a nice job of opening the aperture on the discussion to include the often unconsidered world of general aviation. Thanks for that, Rich.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/53277\">Fistful of Dub</a> (Feat. Snowflake and DJ Vadim) by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: snowflake and DJ Vadim</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Notes from Hungary</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>The flight from Vienna to Budapest is 40 minutes on a 20-seat prop plane. I don’t think it ever levels off -- just a parabola, going straight from climb out into descent. Not that really noticed. After one more beer in Vienna airport, Andrew and I were asleep before the plane left the ground. Yet another pleasant Austrian Air flight attendant graciously placed bottles of water for us in the seat back pocket in front of us. We found them when the plane touched down in Budapest.</li>\r\n 	<li>We’d been to Budapest many times before, but this one would be different. Many of my wife’s aunts and uncles has passed away in the 12 years since our last visit, so there weren’t many family obligations -- just a long Saturday lunch the day before we left. Instead, this was probably the first time we saw Hungary as tourists.</li>\r\n 	<li>Before we visited, we checked with friends who had recently visited. What had they seen, enjoyed? Everyone loved Budapest. Scouting out places to stay, we abandoned what had been our usual Budapest Marriott perch on the Danube for so many years and instead headed east to District VII -- Erzsébetváros, the old Jewish Quarter. During our last visit in 2005, no one would’ve thought to go out here. But now, it’s full of restaurants, craft beer bars, a few Starbucks, and ruin pubs.</li>\r\n 	<li>We followed TravelCommons’ listener Arnoud Heijnis’ recommendation to check out what is the classic -- and perhaps the first -- ruin bar in Budapest -- Szimpla Kert. Arnoud’s description of it having a “pop-uppy kinda feel” was right on-point. You walk through a dingy, half-lit hallway, with a couple of bars on each side, into an open two-story courtyard ringed by, I dunno, another half-dozen bars across the two floors. There were at least a couple of English stag parties going on when we walked in -- one with whom I assumed was the groom-to-be dressed in a white ballerina tutu; the other group was wearing matching t-shirts fronted with a goofy picture of their groom-to-be.</li>\r\n 	<li>I saw a lot of those while we were in Budapest -- party groups wearing matching t-shirts; not so much the ballerina tutus. Budapest -- at least the redeveloped district we were in -- seems to have become a fly-in party town. Maybe the bankruptcy of the old state-run airline Malev left a vacuum for budget carriers to fill -- including WizzAir with a Budapest hub. And then Hungary hasn’t yet joined the euro, so it can devalue its currency, the forint, and look cheap to the rest of Europe. And it had lots of buildings available to repurpose -- starting with squatters setting up bars and dance clubs in abandoned buildings, then large sports bars, and then what seemed to me an amazing number of burger places. And they were all filled starting Thursday night, mostly with English speaking parties. A huge change from my first visit in 1989 when seemingly no one but my wife spoke English, and we’d walk into empty restaurants looking for lunch.</li>\r\n 	<li>Spending money in some of those bars, you’d think that Hungary is moving toward a parallel currency economy -- the forint and euro being used interchangeably -- similar to what I saw in Vietnam where I’d pay, say, a single taxi fare, in a combination of dong and dollar bills. In Budapest, you’ll get a bar tab in forint with a euro number printed below it. You can pay in euro, but you’ll probably get change back in forint. If it’s not too late in the evening, say your first or second bar, and so you haven’t yet lost your capability to do arithmetic, you’ll notice that the euro exchange rate isn’t quite in your favor. I started doing the math at each bar -- which, by the way, seemed to make a couple of bartenders nervous. The range of exchange rates on bar tabs was between 250 and 275 forint to the euro. The market rate was about 300 forint to the euro. In effect, the bars were charging an 8-16% convenience fee for letting you skip the ATM down the street.</li>\r\n 	<li>District VII is not the only part of Budapest that’s upgraded. Downtown Pest, along the Danube, looks spiffier. The Parliament building -- always an incredibly ornate building that dares you not to take multiple pictures of it as you walk past -- looked like it has been freshly steam cleaned. In ‘89, a soldier shooed my wife and I off the steps; this time we walked down into a nice visitors center, bought some tour tickets and were escorted up the Golden Staircase, under the huge dome, and past the crown jewels. And further south along the river, new developments, plazas, bars, bike paths have all sprung up -- again, in places we wouldn’t have thought of going 12 years ago. I understood why friends who had visited over the past year had enjoyed it.</li>\r\n 	<li>As much as I liked knocking around Budapest -- and running through most of District VII’s craft beer bars where, according to Untappd, Andrew and I tasted 43 Hungarian beers -- my favorite bit of the trip was the day we spent visiting wineries in the Tokaj wine region -- about 2½ hrs northeast of Budapest near the border with Slovakia. We hired the guy (<a href=\"http://www.tokajtoday.com/contact/\">Gergely Somogyi</a>) who runs the Tokaj Today web site as our guide. He came to our hotel, gave us a 30-minute PowerPoint presentation (plugged right into the hotel’s flat screen TV in the breakfast room) on Tokaj’s history, geography, geology, grape and wine types. And with this Intro to Tokaj information still looking for neurons to hang out in, we were off to visit four winemakers. And say that rather than wineries because we sat down with each of the winemakers -- the two more established --<a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/demeterzoltantokaj\">Zoltán Demeter</a> and <a href=\"http://www.bottpince.hu/\">Judit Bodo</a> -- in their tasting rooms, the two garagistas -- <a href=\"http://new2017.samueltinon.com/en/\">Mathilde Hulot</a> and <a href=\"http://abrahampince.com/english/\">Róbert Péter</a> -- their kitchens and patios -- for an hour or more each, talking about their wine, about Hungary, and about what they’re trying to do. Only one of the four -- Demeter -- is from Tokaj. The rest moved there to make wine -- Bodo from the Hungarian-speaking part of Slovakia, Peter from Budapest, and Hulot from France -- because of its history and its potential to make great wine.</li>\r\n 	<li>Each told a version of the same story -- of Tokaj’s history, wine knowledge, and wine quality being broken during the 40-some years of Communism -- abandoning the high-quality vineyards on the hills for lower-quality fields on the plains that could be harvested with big Russian tractors, 5-year government planning that pushed quantity over quality. And of how each of them came to Tokaj to flip that equation back to quality over quantity -- even the Tokaj local had to leave to jobs in California and France to learn quality winemaking before he came back. But they all feel challenged to get the entire community, the “locals,” on board. Maybe it’s some of the residue of Communism -- it’s easier to crank out industrial plonk than good wine. Maybe it’s because many of them can’t afford these new wines and so don’t appreciate them. Bodo said she specifically priced one wine so that local young people who now drink beer could afford to drink good local wine. To appreciate what they have here, she said, everyone has to be able to enjoy good wine -- not just the winemakers.</li>\r\n 	<li>I hate to truck in the wine industry cliche that these winemakers have a “passion” for what they’re doing, but my thesaurus fails me, I can’t find a better word. They all appreciated that we’d taken the time to drive out from Budapest to visit (if maybe a bit puzzled by doing everything in a day), and were very generous with their time and their wine. It was tough to limit ourselves to buying just one bottle per stop. I had to keep reminding myself that I’d only brought my small rollerboard with me.</li>\r\n 	<li>On our last night, we’re back in Budapest, knocking around District VII, looking for our last dinner. We’d had some great food -- a couple of Michelin one-stars, some food trucks near a ruin bar -- but it was tough to find some of the homey Hungarian food -- call it “peasant food” -- that we’d had in the past. And then we found it -- a bit cafeteria style -- I’ll take that sausage, the hurka with the pork liver and rice -- oh, and that one too, the regular kolbasz with pork, paprika and garlic -- some pickled salad, a bowl of gulyas soup, and, OK, just one last beer.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #130</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_130.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #130 — Notes from Hungary','','inherit','closed','closed','','1774-revision-v1','','','2017-12-29 15:32:57','2017-12-29 20:32:57','',1774,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/29/1774-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1905,1,'2018-01-01 22:42:23','2018-01-02 03:42:23','<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/iStock-454294231.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1906\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/iStock-454294231-213x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"213\" height=\"300\"></a>After clearing the mists of last night\'s New Year\'s Eve party, I thought about some of the highlights and lowlights of my travels in 2017\n\n<strong><u>Highlights</u></strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li><strong>Uber/Lyft Driver Stories</strong> -- Not only are Uber and Lyft rides easier to get than most taxis, the stories the drivers tell are a lot more entertaining. A Lyft driver in Charlottesville gave me a local\'s view on the Robert E. Lee statue controversy while a Uber driver told me why driving full-time in Chicago traffic was less stressful than being a hotel manager.</li>\n 	<li><strong>Continued Craft Beer Explosion</strong> -- Regular podcast listeners know that I have a craft beer obsession. The hunt for new beers and microbrewery taprooms helps me break out of the usual travel rut -- places like a light industrial area in Richmond, Virginia and a North African neighborhood on the west side of Paris.</li>\n 	<li><strong>Hertz\'s Presidents Circle Aisle</strong>&nbsp;-- My experience with Hertz has completely turned around -- from enduring a steady stream of beat-up high-mileage cars to picking out a new Jag. Three years ago, I paid no attention to Hertz\'s loyalty program. Two months ago, I made sure I had enough rentals to re-up my Presidents Club status for this year.</li>\n 	<li><strong>Hotel Flat-Screen TVs with Open HDMI Ports&nbsp;</strong>-- When I started traveling, hotel TVs were locked down tight because in-room movie rentals was a major revenue stream. While that stream dried up years before LodgeNet went bankrupt in 2013, hotels kept their TVs locked down and we resigned ourselves to watching Netflix on 14-inch laptop screens. But now that the latest generation of flat-screen TVs have open HDMI ports, I\'ve added an HDMI cable to my standard travel kit so I can plug my laptop in and watch movies on a 40-inch screen again.</li>\n 	<li><strong>Google Translate</strong> -- Thinking through my international travel this year (Paris, Vienna, Budapest), Google Translate has evolved to being pretty close to magic. The Word Lens feature lets you point your phone camera at, say, a menu and see English words replacing the French in real time. Saves you from mistakenly ordering chicken when you mix up poulet and poisson after a couple of cocktails.</li>\n 	<li><strong>Top 3 Airports</strong> -- SFO\'s new Terminal 2 which I think is better than perennial list toppers Singapore and Hong Kong, and then two pleasant surprises in May at Vienna and Budapest airports.</li>\n</ul>\n<span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><strong>Lowlights</strong></span>\n<ul>\n 	<li><strong>Passenger-Airline Personnel Conflicts Become Physical</strong> -- The worst thing that used to happen was raised voices between a gate agent and a bumped passenger. That now seems very quaint after United Airlines had ORD Security Police drag a passenger off a plane to make room for one of their employees.</li>\n 	<li><strong>Overtourism&nbsp;</strong>-- The #TouristGoHome campaign gaining traction in places like Barcelona and Venice recasts&nbsp; the travel industry as a resource-consuming zero-sum game that crowds out and prices out locals from the historic centers of their cities. Iceland is the poster child for overtourism with an estimated 2.3 million tourists in 2017 visiting a country with 340,000 residents. It\'s a wider threat, though; the dark side of the growth of Airbnb and budget airlines like WOW Air.</li>\n 	<li><strong>Smart Luggage Ban</strong> -- After two years of carrying GPS-enabled bags from start-ups like Bluesmart without incident, US airlines decided just before Christmas that the batteries powering those location trackers are a fire hazard and will be banned as of January 15. A lot of frequent travelers are going to need to find closet space for their expensive but now-obsolete luggage.</li>\n 	<li><strong>Full Planes with Tight Seats</strong> -- Airlines are flying fuller planes -- reducing the number of empty seats, and adding more rows. The tighter confines of the coach cabin make it difficult to do much more than sit up straight and listen to podcasts. I\'ve given up on trying to work on airplanes. It seems almost anti-social to try to open a laptop.</li>\n 	<li><strong>Lobbying for High Review Ratings&nbsp;</strong>-- More and more hotels, restaurants, and other travel businesses see anything other than a 5-star rating as an insult.</li>\n 	<li><strong>Bottom 3 Airports</strong> -- New York-LaGuardia (construction disruptions reinforce its bottom spot), Munich, and Atlanta (60-90 minutes of heavy traffic between the airport and most of Atlanta\'s business destinations)</li>\n</ul>','Looking Back at 2017 — The Highs and The Lows','','publish','closed','closed','','looking-back-at-2017-the-highs-and-the-lows','','','2021-09-29 21:53:05','2021-09-30 02:53:05','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=1905',0,'post','',2),
(1906,1,'2018-01-01 18:30:26','2018-01-01 23:30:26','','','','inherit','open','closed','','blackboard','','','2018-01-01 18:32:57','2018-01-01 23:32:57','',1905,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/iStock-454294231.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(1907,1,'2018-01-01 19:10:27','2018-01-02 00:10:27','<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/iStock-454294231.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1906\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/iStock-454294231-213x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"213\" height=\"300\" /></a> As I cleared enough of the mists of last night\'s New Year\'s Eve party to be able to plan this week\'s travel, I thought about some of the highlights and lowlights of traveling in 2017\r\n\r\n<strong><u>Highlights</u></strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li><strong>Uber/Lyft Driver Stories</strong> -- Not only are Uber and Lyft rides easier to get than most taxis, the stories the drivers tell are a lot more entertaining. A Lyft driver in Charlottesville gave me a local\'s view on the Robert E. Lee statue controversy while a Uber driver told me why driving full-time in Chicago traffic was less stressful than being a hotel manager.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Continued Craft Beer Explosion</strong> -- Regular podcast listeners know that I have a craft beer obsession. But the hunt for new beers and microbrewery taprooms has taken me way out of the usual travel spots -- be it to a light industrial area in Richmond, Virginia or North African neighborhood on the west side of Paris.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Hertz\'s Presidents Circle Aisle</strong> --</li>\r\n</ul>','Looking Back at 2017 -- The  Highs and The Lows','','inherit','closed','closed','','1905-revision-v1','','','2018-01-01 19:10:27','2018-01-02 00:10:27','',1905,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/01/01/1905-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1908,1,'2018-01-01 19:11:20','2018-01-02 00:11:20','<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/iStock-454294231.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1906\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/iStock-454294231-213x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"213\" height=\"300\" /></a> As I cleared enough of the mists of last night\'s New Year\'s Eve party to be able to plan this week\'s travel, I thought about some of the highlights and lowlights of traveling in 2017\r\n\r\n<strong><u>Highlights</u></strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li><strong>Uber/Lyft Driver Stories</strong> -- Not only are Uber and Lyft rides easier to get than most taxis, the stories the drivers tell are a lot more entertaining. A Lyft driver in Charlottesville gave me a local\'s view on the Robert E. Lee statue controversy while a Uber driver told me why driving full-time in Chicago traffic was less stressful than being a hotel manager.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Continued Craft Beer Explosion</strong> -- Regular podcast listeners know that I have a craft beer obsession. But the hunt for new beers and microbrewery taprooms has taken me way out of the usual travel spots -- be it to a light industrial area in Richmond, Virginia or North African neighborhood on the west side of Paris.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Hertz\'s Presidents Circle Aisle</strong> --</li>\r\n</ul>','Looking Back at 2017 — The  Highs and The Lows','','inherit','closed','closed','','1905-revision-v1','','','2018-01-01 19:11:20','2018-01-02 00:11:20','',1905,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/01/01/1905-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1909,1,'2018-01-01 21:08:24','2018-01-02 02:08:24','<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/iStock-454294231.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1906\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/iStock-454294231-213x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"213\" height=\"300\" /></a> As I cleared enough of the mists of last night\'s New Year\'s Eve party to be able to plan this week\'s travel, I thought about some of the highlights and lowlights of my travels in 2017\r\n\r\n<strong><u>Highlights</u></strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li><strong>Uber/Lyft Driver Stories</strong> -- Not only are Uber and Lyft rides easier to get than most taxis, the stories the drivers tell are a lot more entertaining. A Lyft driver in Charlottesville gave me a local\'s view on the Robert E. Lee statue controversy while a Uber driver told me why driving full-time in Chicago traffic was less stressful than being a hotel manager.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Continued Craft Beer Explosion</strong> -- Regular podcast listeners know that I have a craft beer obsession. But the hunt for new beers and microbrewery taprooms has taken me way out of the usual travel spots -- be it to a light industrial area in Richmond, Virginia or North African neighborhood on the west side of Paris.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Hertz\'s Presidents Circle Aisle</strong> -- My experience with Hertz has completely turned around -- from enduring a steady stream of beat-up high-mileage cars to picking out a new Jag. Three years ago, I paid no attention to Hertz\'s loyalty program. Two months ago, I made sure I had enough rentals to re-up Presidents Club status for 2018.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Hotel Flat-Screen TVs with Open HDMI Ports </strong>-- When I started traveling, hotel TVs were locked down tight because in-room movie rentals was a major revenue stream. While that stream dried up years before LodgeNet went bankrupt in 2013. hotels kept their TVs locked down and we resigned ourselves to watching Netflix on 14-inch laptop screens. But now that the latest generation of flat-screen TVs have open HDMI ports, I\'ve added an HDMI cable to my standard travel kit so I can plug my laptop in and watch movies on a 40-inch screen again.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Google Translate</strong> -- Thinking through my international travel this year (Paris, Vienna, Budapest), Google Translate has evolved to being pretty close to magic. The Word Lens feature lets you point your phone camera at some text — a menu or, say, the washing machine controls in a vacation rental — and you see English words replacing the French or Hungarian words in real time. Saves you from blasting your delicates with hot water, or mistakenly ordering chicken when you mix up poulet and poisson after a couple of cocktails.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Top 3 Airports</strong> -- SFO\'s new Terminal 2 which I think is better than perennial list toppers Singapore and Hong Kong, and then pleasant surprises at Vienna and Budapest airports in May.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><strong>Lowlights</strong></span>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li><strong>Passenger-Airline Personnel Conflicts Become Physical</strong> --</li>\r\n</ul>','Looking Back at 2017 — The Highs and The Lows','','inherit','closed','closed','','1905-revision-v1','','','2018-01-01 21:08:24','2018-01-02 02:08:24','',1905,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/01/01/1905-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1910,1,'2018-01-01 21:21:47','2018-01-02 02:21:47','<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/iStock-454294231.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1906\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/iStock-454294231-213x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"213\" height=\"300\" /></a> As I cleared enough of the mists of last night\'s New Year\'s Eve party to be able to plan this week\'s travel, I thought about some of the highlights and lowlights of my travels in 2017\r\n\r\n<strong><u>Highlights</u></strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li><strong>Uber/Lyft Driver Stories</strong> -- Not only are Uber and Lyft rides easier to get than most taxis, the stories the drivers tell are a lot more entertaining. A Lyft driver in Charlottesville gave me a local\'s view on the Robert E. Lee statue controversy while a Uber driver told me why driving full-time in Chicago traffic was less stressful than being a hotel manager.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Continued Craft Beer Explosion</strong> -- Regular podcast listeners know that I have a craft beer obsession. But the hunt for new beers and microbrewery taprooms has taken me way out of the usual travel spots -- be it to a light industrial area in Richmond, Virginia or North African neighborhood on the west side of Paris.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Hertz\'s Presidents Circle Aisle</strong> -- My experience with Hertz has completely turned around -- from enduring a steady stream of beat-up high-mileage cars to picking out a new Jag. Three years ago, I paid no attention to Hertz\'s loyalty program. Two months ago, I made sure I had enough rentals to re-up Presidents Club status for 2018.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Hotel Flat-Screen TVs with Open HDMI Ports </strong>-- When I started traveling, hotel TVs were locked down tight because in-room movie rentals was a major revenue stream. While that stream dried up years before LodgeNet went bankrupt in 2013. hotels kept their TVs locked down and we resigned ourselves to watching Netflix on 14-inch laptop screens. But now that the latest generation of flat-screen TVs have open HDMI ports, I\'ve added an HDMI cable to my standard travel kit so I can plug my laptop in and watch movies on a 40-inch screen again.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Google Translate</strong> -- Thinking through my international travel this year (Paris, Vienna, Budapest), Google Translate has evolved to being pretty close to magic. The Word Lens feature lets you point your phone camera at, say, a menu and you see English words replacing the French in real time. Saves you from mistakenly ordering chicken when you mix up poulet and poisson after a couple of cocktails.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Top 3 Airports</strong> -- SFO\'s new Terminal 2 which I think is better than perennial list toppers Singapore and Hong Kong, and then pleasant surprises at Vienna and Budapest airports in May.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><strong>Lowlights</strong></span>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li><strong>Passenger-Airline Personnel Conflicts Become Physical</strong> -- The worst thing that used to happen was raised voices between a gate agent and a bumped passenger. That now seems very quaint after United Airlines had ORD Security Police drag a passenger off a plane to make room for a United employee.</li>\r\n 	<li></li>\r\n</ul>','Looking Back at 2017 — The Highs and The Lows','','inherit','closed','closed','','1905-revision-v1','','','2018-01-01 21:21:47','2018-01-02 02:21:47','',1905,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/01/01/1905-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1911,1,'2018-01-01 21:29:29','2018-01-02 02:29:29','<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/iStock-454294231.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1906\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/iStock-454294231-213x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"213\" height=\"300\" /></a> As I cleared enough of the mists of last night\'s New Year\'s Eve party to be able to plan this week\'s travel, I thought about some of the highlights and lowlights of my travels in 2017\r\n\r\n<strong><u>Highlights</u></strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li><strong>Uber/Lyft Driver Stories</strong> -- Not only are Uber and Lyft rides easier to get than most taxis, the stories the drivers tell are a lot more entertaining. A Lyft driver in Charlottesville gave me a local\'s view on the Robert E. Lee statue controversy while a Uber driver told me why driving full-time in Chicago traffic was less stressful than being a hotel manager.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Continued Craft Beer Explosion</strong> -- Regular podcast listeners know that I have a craft beer obsession. But the hunt for new beers and microbrewery taprooms has taken me way out of the usual travel spots -- be it to a light industrial area in Richmond, Virginia or North African neighborhood on the west side of Paris.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Hertz\'s Presidents Circle Aisle</strong> -- My experience with Hertz has completely turned around -- from enduring a steady stream of beat-up high-mileage cars to picking out a new Jag. Three years ago, I paid no attention to Hertz\'s loyalty program. Two months ago, I made sure I had enough rentals to re-up Presidents Club status for 2018.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Hotel Flat-Screen TVs with Open HDMI Ports </strong>-- When I started traveling, hotel TVs were locked down tight because in-room movie rentals was a major revenue stream. While that stream dried up years before LodgeNet went bankrupt in 2013. hotels kept their TVs locked down and we resigned ourselves to watching Netflix on 14-inch laptop screens. But now that the latest generation of flat-screen TVs have open HDMI ports, I\'ve added an HDMI cable to my standard travel kit so I can plug my laptop in and watch movies on a 40-inch screen again.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Google Translate</strong> -- Thinking through my international travel this year (Paris, Vienna, Budapest), Google Translate has evolved to being pretty close to magic. The Word Lens feature lets you point your phone camera at, say, a menu and you see English words replacing the French in real time. Saves you from mistakenly ordering chicken when you mix up poulet and poisson after a couple of cocktails.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Top 3 Airports</strong> -- SFO\'s new Terminal 2 which I think is better than perennial list toppers Singapore and Hong Kong, and then pleasant surprises at Vienna and Budapest airports in May.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><strong>Lowlights</strong></span>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li><strong>Passenger-Airline Personnel Conflicts Become Physical</strong> -- The worst thing that used to happen was raised voices between a gate agent and a bumped passenger. That now seems very quaint after United Airlines had ORD Security Police drag a passenger off a plane to make room for a United employee.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Overtourism</strong></li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Smart Luggage Ban</strong></li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Full Planes</strong></li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Grade Inflation</strong></li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Bottom 3 Airports</strong> -- New York-LaGuardia (construction disruptions reinforce its bottom spot), Munich, and Atlanta (60-90 minutes of heavy traffic between the airport and most of Atlanta\'s business offices)</li>\r\n</ul>','Looking Back at 2017 — The Highs and The Lows','','inherit','closed','closed','','1905-revision-v1','','','2018-01-01 21:29:29','2018-01-02 02:29:29','',1905,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/01/01/1905-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1912,1,'2018-01-01 22:32:57','2018-01-02 03:32:57','<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/iStock-454294231.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1906\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/iStock-454294231-213x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"213\" height=\"300\" /></a>After clearing the mists of last night\'s New Year\'s Eve party, I thought about some of the highlights and lowlights of my travels in 2017\r\n\r\n<strong><u>Highlights</u></strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li><strong>Uber/Lyft Driver Stories</strong> -- Not only are Uber and Lyft rides easier to get than most taxis, the stories the drivers tell are a lot more entertaining. A Lyft driver in Charlottesville gave me a local\'s view on the Robert E. Lee statue controversy while a Uber driver told me why driving full-time in Chicago traffic was less stressful than being a hotel manager.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Continued Craft Beer Explosion</strong> -- Regular podcast listeners know that I have a craft beer obsession. But the hunt for new beers and microbrewery taprooms has taken me way out of the usual travel spots -- be it to a light industrial area in Richmond, Virginia or North African neighborhood on the west side of Paris.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Hertz\'s Presidents Circle Aisle</strong> -- My experience with Hertz has completely turned around -- from enduring a steady stream of beat-up high-mileage cars to picking out a new Jag. Three years ago, I paid no attention to Hertz\'s loyalty program. Two months ago, I made sure I had enough rentals to re-up Presidents Club status for 2018.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Hotel Flat-Screen TVs with Open HDMI Ports </strong>-- When I started traveling, hotel TVs were locked down tight because in-room movie rentals was a major revenue stream. While that stream dried up years before LodgeNet went bankrupt in 2013. hotels kept their TVs locked down and we resigned ourselves to watching Netflix on 14-inch laptop screens. But now that the latest generation of flat-screen TVs have open HDMI ports, I\'ve added an HDMI cable to my standard travel kit so I can plug my laptop in and watch movies on a 40-inch screen again.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Google Translate</strong> -- Thinking through my international travel this year (Paris, Vienna, Budapest), Google Translate has evolved to being pretty close to magic. The Word Lens feature lets you point your phone camera at, say, a menu and you see English words replacing the French in real time. Saves you from mistakenly ordering chicken when you mix up poulet and poisson after a couple of cocktails.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Top 3 Airports</strong> -- SFO\'s new Terminal 2 which I think is better than perennial list toppers Singapore and Hong Kong, and then pleasant surprises at Vienna and Budapest airports in May.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><strong>Lowlights</strong></span>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li><strong>Passenger-Airline Personnel Conflicts Become Physical</strong> -- The worst thing that used to happen was raised voices between a gate agent and a bumped passenger. That now seems very quaint after United Airlines had ORD Security Police drag a passenger off a plane to make room for a United employee.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Overtourism </strong>-- The #TouristGoHome campaign gaining traction in places like Barcelona and Venice recasts  the travel industry as a resource-consuming zero-sum game crowding and pricing out locals from the historic centers of their cities. Iceland is the poster child for overtourism with an estimated 2.3 million tourists in 2017 visiting a country with 340,000 residents, but it\'s a wider threat -- the dark side of the growth of Airbnb and budget airlines like WOW Air.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Smart Luggage Ban</strong> -- After two years of carrying GPS-enabled bags from start-ups like Bluesmart without incident, US airlines decided just before Christmas that the batteries powering those location trackers are a fire hazard and will be banned as of January 15. A lot of frequent travelers are going to need to find closet space for their expensive now-obsolete luggage.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Full Planes with Tight Seats</strong> -- Airlines are flying fuller planes -- reducing the number of empty seats, and adding more rows. The tighter confines of the coach cabin make it difficult to do much more than sit up straight and listen to podcasts. I\'ve given up on trying to work on airplanes. It seems almost anti-social to try to open a laptop.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Lobbying for High Review Ratings </strong>-- More and more hotels, restaurants, and other travel businesses see anything other than a 5-star rating as an insult.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Bottom 3 Airports</strong> -- New York-LaGuardia (construction disruptions reinforce its bottom spot), Munich, and Atlanta (60-90 minutes of heavy traffic between the airport and most of Atlanta\'s business offices)</li>\r\n</ul>','Looking Back at 2017 — The Highs and The Lows','','inherit','closed','closed','','1905-revision-v1','','','2018-01-01 22:32:57','2018-01-02 03:32:57','',1905,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/01/01/1905-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1913,1,'2018-01-01 22:42:23','2018-01-02 03:42:23','<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/iStock-454294231.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1906\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/iStock-454294231-213x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"213\" height=\"300\" /></a>After clearing the mists of last night\'s New Year\'s Eve party, I thought about some of the highlights and lowlights of my travels in 2017\r\n\r\n<strong><u>Highlights</u></strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li><strong>Uber/Lyft Driver Stories</strong> -- Not only are Uber and Lyft rides easier to get than most taxis, the stories the drivers tell are a lot more entertaining. A Lyft driver in Charlottesville gave me a local\'s view on the Robert E. Lee statue controversy while a Uber driver told me why driving full-time in Chicago traffic was less stressful than being a hotel manager.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Continued Craft Beer Explosion</strong> -- Regular podcast listeners know that I have a craft beer obsession. The hunt for new beers and microbrewery taprooms helps me break out of the usual travel rut -- places like a light industrial area in Richmond, Virginia and a North African neighborhood on the west side of Paris.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Hertz\'s Presidents Circle Aisle</strong> -- My experience with Hertz has completely turned around -- from enduring a steady stream of beat-up high-mileage cars to picking out a new Jag. Three years ago, I paid no attention to Hertz\'s loyalty program. Two months ago, I made sure I had enough rentals to re-up my Presidents Club status for this year.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Hotel Flat-Screen TVs with Open HDMI Ports </strong>-- When I started traveling, hotel TVs were locked down tight because in-room movie rentals was a major revenue stream. While that stream dried up years before LodgeNet went bankrupt in 2013, hotels kept their TVs locked down and we resigned ourselves to watching Netflix on 14-inch laptop screens. But now that the latest generation of flat-screen TVs have open HDMI ports, I\'ve added an HDMI cable to my standard travel kit so I can plug my laptop in and watch movies on a 40-inch screen again.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Google Translate</strong> -- Thinking through my international travel this year (Paris, Vienna, Budapest), Google Translate has evolved to being pretty close to magic. The Word Lens feature lets you point your phone camera at, say, a menu and see English words replacing the French in real time. Saves you from mistakenly ordering chicken when you mix up poulet and poisson after a couple of cocktails.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Top 3 Airports</strong> -- SFO\'s new Terminal 2 which I think is better than perennial list toppers Singapore and Hong Kong, and then two pleasant surprises in May at Vienna and Budapest airports.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><strong>Lowlights</strong></span>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li><strong>Passenger-Airline Personnel Conflicts Become Physical</strong> -- The worst thing that used to happen was raised voices between a gate agent and a bumped passenger. That now seems very quaint after United Airlines had ORD Security Police drag a passenger off a plane to make room for one of their employees.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Overtourism </strong>-- The #TouristGoHome campaign gaining traction in places like Barcelona and Venice recasts  the travel industry as a resource-consuming zero-sum game that crowds out and prices out locals from the historic centers of their cities. Iceland is the poster child for overtourism with an estimated 2.3 million tourists in 2017 visiting a country with 340,000 residents. It\'s a wider threat, though; the dark side of the growth of Airbnb and budget airlines like WOW Air.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Smart Luggage Ban</strong> -- After two years of carrying GPS-enabled bags from start-ups like Bluesmart without incident, US airlines decided just before Christmas that the batteries powering those location trackers are a fire hazard and will be banned as of January 15. A lot of frequent travelers are going to need to find closet space for their expensive but now-obsolete luggage.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Full Planes with Tight Seats</strong> -- Airlines are flying fuller planes -- reducing the number of empty seats, and adding more rows. The tighter confines of the coach cabin make it difficult to do much more than sit up straight and listen to podcasts. I\'ve given up on trying to work on airplanes. It seems almost anti-social to try to open a laptop.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Lobbying for High Review Ratings </strong>-- More and more hotels, restaurants, and other travel businesses see anything other than a 5-star rating as an insult.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Bottom 3 Airports</strong> -- New York-LaGuardia (construction disruptions reinforce its bottom spot), Munich, and Atlanta (60-90 minutes of heavy traffic between the airport and most of Atlanta\'s business destinations)</li>\r\n</ul>','Looking Back at 2017 — The Highs and The Lows','','inherit','closed','closed','','1905-revision-v1','','','2018-01-01 22:42:23','2018-01-02 03:42:23','',1905,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/01/01/1905-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1916,1,'2018-01-25 07:25:34','2018-01-25 12:25:34','[caption id=\"attachment_1925\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/IMG_20141210_231414.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1925\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/IMG_20141210_231414-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> How many nights to Leopard Print status?[/caption]\n\nSo we\'re four weeks into the new year and 30-50% of us have already ditched our New Year\'s resolutions, but we still have time to get our 2018 travel status lined up. Over the holiday break, I bought a non-smart carry-on to replace my now-banned Bluesmart; I walk through my shopping criteria. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_137.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\nThanks to <a href=\"http://go.travelperk.com/travelcommons\">TravelPerk</a> for sponsoring this episode.\n\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #137:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. This episode is sponsored by <a href=\"http://go.travelperk.com/travelcommons\">TravelPerk</a>, the #1 rated business travel tool on the Internet. It’s been a light travel month, just a drive down to Nashville, and a couple of trips over to Charlottesville, VA, which has been a nice break from what is otherwise turning out to be a brutally cold winter in Chicago. The day after New Years, I walked out of the house into a -10℉ morning -- not windchill, it was -10℉ ambient. Welcome to January. I had my team travel here last week for a 2018 kick-off meeting. No one accused us of boon-doggling. The guy from Phoenix did say he was filing an employee abuse claim though.</li>\n 	<li>I’ve found myself drinking less craft beer and much more Scotch whisky in this month; -10℉ is definitely brown liquor weather. Luckily, my daughter brought home a nice bottle of 18-year-old <a href=\"http://www.glenscotia.com/\">Glen Scotia</a> from Edinburgh for Christmas. I’ve made a sizable dent in it.</li>\n 	<li>On my first trip to Charlottesville, after being off the road for four weeks, it took me forever to gather up all the bits of my regular travel carry from around the house. Normally, my travel carry stays in my backpack and my suitcase; I buy duplicates of things like hair brushes and headphones just so I don’t need to pull them out of my bag. But for some reason, all discipline broke down over the holidays and my carefully curated travel carry was spread/spewed throughout the house. Luckily, my ride to ORD was 5 minutes late. I took my Bluesmart bag, squeezed in one last trip before American’s January 15th smart luggage ban took effect. I tweeted a picture of my Bluesmart before boarding. American replied “We\'re glad you\'re flying with us and appreciate your cooperation with our team.” My response -- “Not that I have much of a choice…” Especially with IATA recommending the ban to its 300 airline members. My new non-smart Victorinox bag arrived on my front porch before the ban clicked in, so once I shift everything from the Bluesmart to the Victorinox, I’ll power down the Bluesmart, delete its app from my iPhone, and consign it to the corner of the attic with all my other retired bags -- my own Land of Misfit Bags.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mactonite/29469\">Static</a> by Darkroom (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mactonite/29469 </span></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Starting off the New Year, I did a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/01/01/looking-back-at-2017-the-highs-and-the-lows/\">blog post</a> summarizing some of the high and low points that we talked about in 2017. The high points? Things like Uber and Lyft driver stories, yet more craft beer taprooms, and Hertz’s President Circle Aisle. Low points? Airlines dragging passengers from planes, everybody lobbying for 5-star reviews, and, no surprise, the smart luggage ban.</li>\n 	<li>Allan Marko, not just a long-time TravelCommon’s listener, but probably one of the original listeners showed his roots by posting on the original comment channel -- the TravelCommons website\n<ul>\n 	<li>Have had our Away luggage for only about six months prior to the battery ban. I really like the ‘smart’ charging feature. Luckily the Away battery is a nicely designed self-contained and easily removable unit (two screws; screwdriver included!) Now the battery lives in my backpack, and the luggage still usable.</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\"></li>\n 	<li>Allan’s psychic capabilities are showing. I think Away is the only major smart bag that meets the airlines’ requirement for a removable battery. But for me, charging wasn’t the major use case for me. I’m typically fine with my Anker lipstick charger. And if I forget to recharge that, my Verizon mobile WiFi hotspot also doubles as a charger. For me, the GPS tracking was the main use case -- for those times I had to check my bag, it was nice to know that it had also made it to my destination -- a use case that requires power. Pull out the battery and no more tracking. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted.</li>\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\"></li>\n 	<li>Jim McDonough replied to the Twitter announcement of the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">last episode</a> where I wondered if I was the last generation of cash payers. Jim wrote\n<ul>\n 	<li>I use cash a) at the local farmer’s market; b) pay for haircuts . . . having a hard time coming up with c)</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Jim, I dunno. Looking at your Twitter profile picture, you look like you could land in my generation. I apologize for using a card for anything under $20. Although I have to say that more and more microbrewery taprooms only take credit cards. I don’t apologize there; or at the self-service tills in Home Depot or Tesco’s -- mostly because there’s no one to apologize to even though they will take cash.</li>\n 	<li>Natalie on the British Airways social media team <a href=\"https://twitter.com/British_Airways/status/943550974102245376\">tweeted back</a> at me about the other topic on the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">last episode</a> -- about how hard it can be to cash in on loyalty points. You’ll remember that I talked about all the hassles I had in transferring Avios points from BA to Iberia, until I got a BA agent with solid northern accent. Natalie of BA said\n<ul>\n 	<li>Hey Mark! Thanks for tagging us in your article. I\'m glad to hear that one of our \'Geordie\' colleagues was able to help you redeem some of your Avios. It\'s a shame you didn\'t catch her name though.</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Absolutely it was a shame. She deserves huge props.</li>\n 	<li>In that same riff, I mentioned how my email to Iberia to clean up my name on my Iberia Plus account -- which might have been the root cause of my point transfer problem -- seemed to have fallen into a black hole. Well, apparently it didn’t. Soon after that episode, I got a letter from Iberia with a new card that had my correct name. That was nice. Would’ve been just a bit nicer if they’d hit the Reply button while handling the email and typed, I dunno, just 8 words -- “Got it fixed; new card in the mail” But it got done -- all of it, Avios points, non-stop ORD-MAD flight on points, and now, a card with my correct name.</li>\n 	<li>And that Iberia letter was probably one of the last surprises I got when I open the mailbox at home. Somehow, I’m not quite sure how, I signed up for a US Post Office service that sends me an email every morning with scanned images of letters I’m going to receive that day. When I got that first email, I was kinda “What the hell?”, but now I kinda like it, especially when I’m on the road. No more wondering what bills showed up, or during the holidays, who had sent us Christmas cards. It does kinda take the surprise out of opening the mailbox -- though not that there was much left since 90% of our physical mail is junk -- but it is kinda entertaining.</li>\n 	<li>Back in August, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/08/27/podcast-132-travel-apps-on-my-phone/\">episode #132</a> about the travel apps I have loaded on my phone, I talked about using the paid or “Pro” version of TripIt, and about how it was on the bubble for me because of how the airlines have improved the flight status notifications in their own apps. In 4 months since then, the airline apps have pretty consistently notified me of gate changes and delays faster than TripIt Pro. And so when my subscription ran out a few weeks ago, I ignored the renewal alerts. I’ll still use the free version -- I like the way TripIt consolidates separate plane, hotel, and rental car reservations into a single trip -- kinda replicating the itineraries your travel agent used to give you when they booked your entire trip. But paying $50 for what are now slower, redundant flight alerts? I’ll spend it on beer or brown liquor instead.</li>\n 	<li>I don’t know if it’s just me, but the cadence for boarding groups has gotten out of control. I think I was on a Delta flight where I was boarding group 1 or 2, but was the 4th or 5th group to board, after Delta One, and then Platinum Medallion, then Gold Medallion, Sky Team Elite -- it went on forever. American is a bit better -- only one non-numeric boarding group for the invite-only Concierge Key gang (remember George Clooney in Up In The Air) -- and then 1 through 9(!). I do love the announcement “If you don’t have a boarding group number, then board Group 7” which feels a bit random. Where it really becomes fun is on a regional jet, when the gate agent runs through this cadence for a plane with only 40-50 passengers and all the carry-on bags are gate… I mean valet checked. “Now boarding passengers in Group 1, Group 2, Group 3…” Four people board… “Groups 5, 6, 7, and the rest of you” followed by general scrum in front of the agent. I know the airlines have PhDs in psychology, sociology, and linear programming working on this stuff, but it continues to be a cluster</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>And thanks to this episode’s sponsor TravelPerk</li>\n 	<li>Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/11/20/podcast-135-airport-bingo-new-old-travel-pc/\">November episode</a>, I talked about American\'s last-minute cancellation of my night flight to Charlottesville and my ensuing scramble to find a replacement flight and to make sure the Hyatt Place didn\'t flush my reservation. But if I\'d booked with TravelPerk, they would\'ve done the scrambling for me.\n<ul>\n 	<li>This all-in-one business travel management tool includes a team of highly qualified agents ready to rescue disgruntled travelers from any scenario 24/7.</li>\n 	<li>It’s because of making magic happen in times like this that TravelPerk is now the #1 rated business travel tool on the internet.</li>\n 	<li>You\'ll love them because you can finally take control of your travel schedule, have freedom to book alternative accommodation like Airbnb, and have a built-in rescue team when stuff goes south. Remove some stress from the equation, go to <a href=\"http://go.travelperk.com/travelcommons\">go.travelperk.com/travelcommons</a> for a no-commitment test drive.</li>\n 	<li>It’s free forever if you to <a href=\"http://go.travelperk.com/travelcommons\">go.travelperk.com/travelcommons</a></li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Psykick/52938\">Another Way</a> by Psykick (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Psykick/52938</span></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Plan for 2018 Travel Perks</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>So here we are, 4 weeks into the new year and anywhere from a third to a half of us have already ditched our New Year\'s resolutions and are now in full anticipation of Super Bowl queso dip. But while your dry January may have been washed out early, you still have time to get your 2018 travel perks in place.</li>\n 	<li>Almost all travel perks come from status in loyalty programs and all those status earning counts reset on Jan 1, so the first step is to match up what you think your 2018 travel plans will be to your loyalty programs. Any gaps? If you think you’ll start flying to Seattle (maybe helping to shill your hometown for Amazon’s HQ2), you’ll probably want to sign up for Alaskan Airlines Mileage Plan, where before, it might not have been worth the extra junk mail.</li>\n 	<li>Or if you’re already a member, do a status match. When I took a new CIO job some years back, all the hotels near our offices were Hilton brands. I had a Hilton\'s Honors card but just in basic blue as opposed to my top-of-the-line sparkly platinum Marriott card. After I hit the “reset my password” link on the Hilton website, I went straight to their status match page. Right at the top, it says “For the next 90 days,... we’ll match your elite status with any other loyalty program.” If you complete 4 or 8 stays over those 90 days, the match is good for the year. So rather than having to grind my way to Hilton status, I started enjoying it on Day 1. I had a friend do that with American -- parlay his United 1K status to Executive Platinum when he moved from Denver to Dallas. Much better than slumming in Boarding Group 5 until you clear the first status bar.</li>\n 	<li>Doing this, you also need to keep in mind the different ecosystems; the partnerships that tie travel companies together. It used to be just the international alliances -- Star, SkyTeam, OneWorld. When I knew I’d be traveling down to South Africa, racking up some serious business class mileage, I had two real options -- SAA out of JFK and IAD, or DL out of ATL. Living in Chicago, I chose SAA because they’re part of Star Alliance with United, and I’d get a lot more use from United status out of Chicago than I would Delta. And it’s getting even more combinatorial now with United and Marriott are status matching each other.</li>\n 	<li>And then there’s the credit cards -- both affinity (United and Chase Visa, American and Citi MasterCard) and non (Amex Platinum, Chase Sapphire Reserve). You gotta do the math. For example, Amex’s Platinum card is $550/year. But with that, you get Membership Rewards points that transfer to airlines and hotels, access to Delta lounges and Amex’s Centurion Lounges, which if you travel frequently to DFW, LAS, MIA, LGA, and now JFK, is great. They’re much better than, say American’s Admirals Clubs. I wish they had one in Chicago. Amex also picks up the $100 Global Entry or $85 PreCheck fee, gives you 10 GoGo WiFi sessions, $200 in Uber credit, and some other benefits. If you’ll use these benefits, that $550 can be a better deal than, say, the $95 that the United Chase will cost you. However, that United Chase will get you baggage fee waiver, two United Club passes, and status boarding. If you don’t travel a huge amount and live in a United hub like Houston, the United card could be a better deal. But you gotta think about your travel, do the math, and sign up for it now so you have all year to maximize the status benefits.</li>\n 	<li>And while you’re in this planning zone, do yourself a big favor sign up and make an appointment for Global Entry if you do international travel, or PreCheck if you’re mostly a domestic flyer. If it makes sense for you to get an Amex Platinum or Chase Sapphire Reserve card, it’ll be free. To me, TSA and Customs lines are still the worst part of travel. While you’re figuring out how to bump your status up your status on airlines and hotels, do yourself a favor and step out of those TSA and Customs lines too.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/flatwound/14476\">The Long Goodbye</a> by John Pazdan (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/flatwound/14476</span></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>How to Shop For A Suitcase</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>OK, perhaps a bit presumptuous of a title; perhaps it’s “How I shopped for a suitcase.” But before we go there, let’s summarize the set up from past episodes -- my 10-year old black Swiss Army carry-on rendered itself unusable before Thanksgiving when the handle became stuck in the extended position (luckily as I was getting in a car coming home from ORD and not while trying to stow it in an overhead while boarding), I hate shopping for suitcases so I recharge my Bluesmart smart bag and put it back into service in December only to have it banned from air travel as of last week.</li>\n 	<li>So now I’m forced to shop for a suitcase. Like any good consultant, I, of course, construct a prioritized list of evaluation criteria. First, it has to be a carry-on. Now that may seem a bit of a “duh”, but there is some ambiguity; the <a href=\"https://travel-made-simple.com/carry-on-size-chart/\">approved height</a> varies by airline between 19 and 22-inches. If I wanted to play it safe, I’d go for a 20-inch bag, but I’m also want to maximize how much I can carry-on. I tilt toward choosing space. Most US carriers accept a 22-inch bag and that’s mostly what I fly, and even when I’m on European carriers I usually have enough alliance status (my American Platinum status carrying over to OneWorld) to glide past the baggage sizer.</li>\n 	<li>Which leads to the second criterion -- it needs to be black. As I said in my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/10/18/ruthless-packing-tips/\">Ruthless Packing Tips post</a> in October, black not only makes you look thinner, it makes your bag look thinner to gate agents scanning for bag-sizer bait.</li>\n 	<li>Third, 2 wheels, not 4. This is a bit more of a personal preference. My Bluesmart is a 4-wheel spinner and my wife swears by hers, but because the 4 wheels have to extend from the bottom of the bag, spinners sacrifice packing space for agility, while 2-wheelers can embed their wheels up in the backplane of the bag. Again trying to maximize packing space, I go for the 2-wheeler, and with the biggest wheels I can find to make it an easier, smoother pull. I was kinda surprised how this limited my selection. Spinners definitely rule.</li>\n 	<li>My fourth criterion -- I wanted the inside of the suitcase to be as plain and empty as possible. No bunch of zip compartments, or built-in suit hangers, or ratcheting down clothes dividers; just a wide open box that free to structure how I want for each trip. I was surprised how tough this was to find. Indeed, in the end, I couldn’t find it and settled for a bag where I could detach the suit hanger and clothes divider and stash that stuff up in the Land of Misfit Bags next to the Bluesmart.</li>\n 	<li>Whittling through all that, I ended up buying a black Victorinox Werks Traveler 5.0 2-wheeler. Victorinox is what used to be Swiss Army; I figured if my last bag survived 10 years of hard mileage, that said something for durability. It was also one of the few where I could detach all the internal storage stuff. And it has that additional zipper to expand the width by an inch -- kinda like when you drop a notch on your belt after Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner; for those times when I’m flying home and have bought a few too many bottles of wine or brown liquor.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #137</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>Thanks again to TravelPerk for sponsoring this episode. Remember to go to <a href=\"http://go.travelperk.com/travelcommons\">go.travelperk.com/travelcommons</a> for a test drive</li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_137.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #137 — New Year\'s Travel Status Tips; How to Shop for a Suitcase','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-137-new-years-travel-status-tips-how-to-shop-for-a-suitcase','','','2021-09-29 21:54:26','2021-09-30 02:54:26','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=1916',0,'post','',2),
(1917,1,'2018-01-22 21:02:12','2018-01-23 02:02:12','After traveling with younger colleagues who pay for everything with cards, I wonder if I\'m the last generation of cash payers. I also talk about the upcoming smart luggage ban on US airlines and a long Saturday afternoon trying to redeem some British Airways Avios points. All this, a new Uber driver story, and a few Christmas carols at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_136.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/371970371\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /] <!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #137:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. This episode is sponsored by <a href=\"http://go.travelperk.com/travelcommons\">TravelPerk</a>, the #1 rated business travel tool on the Internet. It’s been a light travel month, just a drive down to Nashville, and a couple of trips over to Charlottesville, VA, which has been a nice break from what is otherwise turning out to be a brutally cold winter in Chicago. The day after New Years, I walked out of the house into a -10℉ morning -- not windchill, it was -10℉ ambient. Welcome to January. I had my team travel here last week for a 2018 kick-off meeting. No one accused us of boon-doggling. The guy from Phoenix did say he was filing an employee abuse claim though.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’ve found myself drinking less craft beer and much more Scotch whisky in this month; -10℉ is definitely brown liquor weather. Luckily, my daughter brought home a nice bottle of 18-year-old <a href=\"http://www.glenscotia.com/\">Glen Scotia</a> from Edinburgh for Christmas. I’ve made a sizable dent in it.</li>\r\n 	<li>On my first trip to Charlottesville, after being off the road for four weeks, it took me forever to gather up all the bits of my regular travel carry from around the house. Normally, my travel carry stays in my backpack and my suitcase; I buy duplicates of things like hair brushes and headphones just so I don’t need to pull them out of my bag. But for some reason, all discipline broke down over the holidays and my carefully curated travel carry was spread/spewed throughout the house. Luckily, my ride to ORD was 5 minutes late. I took my Bluesmart bag, squeezed in one last trip before American’s January 15th smart luggage ban took effect. I tweeted a picture of my Bluesmart before boarding. American replied “We\'re glad you\'re flying with us and appreciate your cooperation with our team.” My response -- “Not that I have much of a choice…” Especially with IATA recommending the ban to its 300 airline members. My new non-smart Victorinox bag arrived on my front porch before the ban clicked in, so once I shift everything from the Bluesmart to the Victorinox, I’ll power down the Bluesmart, delete its app from my iPhone, and consign it to the corner of the attic with all my other retired bags -- my own Land of Misfit Bags.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/copperhead/40520\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen</a> by copperhead (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: Admiral Bob, Javolenus , Sackjo22</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\">\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Starting off the New Year, I did a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/01/01/looking-back-at-2017-the-highs-and-the-lows/\">blog post</a> summarizing some of the high and low points that we talked about in 2017. The high points? Things like Uber and Lyft driver stories, yet more craft beer taprooms, and Hertz’s President Circle Aisle. Low points? Airlines dragging passengers from planes, everybody lobbying for 5-star reviews, and, no surprise, the smart luggage ban.</li>\r\n 	<li>Allan Marko, not just a long-time TravelCommon’s listener, but probably one of the original listeners showed his roots by posting on the original comment channel -- the TravelCommons website\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Have had our Away luggage for only about six months prior to the battery ban. I really like the ‘smart’ charging feature. Luckily the Away battery is a nicely designed self-contained and easily removable unit (two screws; screwdriver included!) Now the battery lives in my backpack, and the luggage still usable.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Allan’s psychic capabilities are showing. I think Away is the only major smart bag that meets the airlines’ requirement for a removable battery. But for me, charging wasn’t the major use case for me. I’m typically fine with my Anker lipstick charger. And if I forget to recharge that, my Verizon mobile WiFi hotspot also doubles as a charger. For me, the GPS tracking was the main use case -- for those times I had to check my bag, it was nice to know that it had also made it to my destination -- a use case that requires power. Pull out the battery and no more tracking. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted.</li>\r\n 	<li>Jim McDonough replied to the Twitter announcement of the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">last episode</a> where I wondered if I was the last generation of cash payers. Jim wrote\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I use cash a) at the local farmer’s market; b) pay for haircuts . . . having a hard time coming up with c)</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Jim, I dunno. Looking at your Twitter profile picture, you look like you could land in my generation. I apologize for using a card for anything under $20. Although I have to say that more and more microbrewery taprooms only take credit cards. I don’t apologize there; or at the self-service tills in Home Depot or Tesco’s -- mostly because there’s no one to apologize to even though they will take cash.</li>\r\n 	<li>Natalie on the British Airways social media team tweeted back at me about the other topic on the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">last episode</a> -- about how hard it can be to cash in on loyalty points. You’ll remember that I talked about all the hassles I had in transferring Avios points from BA to Iberia, until I got a BA agent with solid northern accent. Natalie of BA said\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Hey Mark! Thanks for tagging us in your article. I\'m glad to hear that one of our \'Geordie\' colleagues was able to help you redeem some of your Avios. It\'s a shame you didn\'t catch her name though.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Absolutely it was a shame. She deserves huge props.</li>\r\n 	<li>In that same riff, I mentioned how my email to Iberia to clean up my name on my Iberia Plus account -- which might have been the root cause of my point transfer problem -- seemed to have fallen into a black hole. Well, apparently it didn’t. Soon after that episode, I got a letter from Iberia with a new card that had my correct name. That was nice. Would’ve been just a bit nicer if they’d hit the Reply button while handling the email and typed, I dunno, just 8 words -- “Got it fixed; new card in the mail” But it got done -- all of it, Avios points, non-stop ORD-MAD flight on points, and now, a card with my correct name.</li>\r\n 	<li>And that Iberia letter was probably one of the last surprises I got when I open the mailbox at home. Somehow, I’m not quite sure how, I signed up for a US Post Office service that sends me an email every morning with scanned images of letters I’m going to receive that day. When I got that first email, I was kinda “What the hell?”, but now I kinda like it, especially when I’m on the road. No more wondering what bills showed up, or during the holidays, who had sent us Christmas cards. It does kinda take the surprise out of opening the mailbox -- though not that there was much left since 90% of our physical mail is junk -- but it is kinda entertaining.</li>\r\n 	<li>Back in August, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/08/27/podcast-132-travel-apps-on-my-phone/\">episode #132</a> about the travel apps I have loaded on my phone, I talked about using the paid or “Pro” version of TripIt, and about how it was on the bubble for me because of how the airlines have improved the flight status notifications in their own apps. In 4 months since then, the airline apps have pretty consistently notified me of gate changes and delays faster than TripIt Pro. And so when my subscription ran out a few weeks ago, I ignored the renewal alerts. I’ll still use the free version -- I like the way TripIt consolidates separate plane, hotel, and rental car reservations into a single trip -- kinda replicating the itineraries your travel agent used to give you when they booked your entire trip. But paying $50 for what are now slower, redundant flight alerts? I’ll spend it on beer or brown liquor instead.</li>\r\n 	<li>I don’t know if it’s just me, but the cadence for boarding groups has gotten out of control. I think I was on a Delta flight where I was boarding group 1 or 2, but was the 4th or 5th group to board, after Delta One, and then Platinum Medallion, then Gold Medallion, Sky Team Elite -- it went on forever. American is a bit better -- only one non-numeric boarding group for the invite-only Concierge Key gang (remember George Clooney in Up In The Air) -- and then 1 through 9(!). I do love the announcement “If you don’t have a boarding group number, then board Group 7” which feels a bit random. Where it really becomes fun is on a regional jet, when the gate agent runs through this cadence for a plane with only 40-50 passengers and all the carry-on bags are gate… I mean valet checked. “Now boarding passengers in Group 1, Group 2, Group 3…” Four people board… “Groups 5, 6, 7, and the rest of you” followed by general scrum in front of the agent. I know the airlines have PhDs in psychology, sociology, and linear programming working on this stuff, but it continues to be a cluster</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>And thanks to this episode’s sponsor TravelPerk\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/11/20/podcast-135-airport-bingo-new-old-travel-pc/\">November episode</a>, I talked about American\'s last-minute cancellation of my night flight to Charlottesville and my ensuing scramble to find a replacement flight and to make sure the Hyatt Place didn\'t flush my reservation. But if I\'d booked with TravelPerk, they would\'ve done the scrambling for me.</li>\r\n 	<li>This all-in-one business travel management tool includes a team of highly qualified agents ready to rescue disgruntled travelers from any scenario 24/7.</li>\r\n 	<li>It’s because of making magic happen in times like this that TravelPerk is now the #1 rated business travel tool on the internet.</li>\r\n 	<li>You\'ll love them because you can finally take control of your travel schedule, have freedom to book alternative accommodation like Airbnb, and have a built-in rescue team when stuff goes south. Remove some stress from the equation, go to <a href=\"http://go.travelperk.com/travelcommons\">go.travelperk.com/travelcommons</a> for a no-commitment test drive.</li>\r\n 	<li>It’s free forever if you to <a href=\"http://go.travelperk.com/travelcommons\">go.travelperk.com/travelcommons</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/NiGiD/48586\">O Tannenbaum / Oh Christmas Tree</a> by Martijn de Boer (NiGiD) (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license.  Ft: Admiral Bob (admiralbob77)</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Is Cash is a Waning King?</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>As I said at the start of the show, my last trip this year was ORD to LGA to CHO. I didn’t arrive too late so there were a couple of cabs waiting -- no LGA-style lines, I just hopped in. It’s a $25 flat rate to downtown Charlottesville. We pulled up to my hotel, I gave the driver a 20 and a 10 and got out of the cab. “Cash? Thanks!” he said.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’ve said this before; I try to pay all of my cab fares in cash ever since one cab driver walked me through why he hates cards. There’s a timing problem-- he has to pay for gas, tolls, airport access fees, and the taxi company that day, but he doesn’t get his money until a couple of days later. And then there’s the high fees the processing companies charge taxi drivers.</li>\r\n 	<li>But when traveling with younger colleagues, I feel like I’m the last generation of cash payers. Not only do they pay for everything with a card, many of them don’t even carry cash. Maybe I’m just getting old, or maybe I remember when you couldn’t use cards everywhere.</li>\r\n 	<li>Especially in Europe in the late ‘80’s/early ‘90’s when I would be in a different country every day on sales calls with distributors. There weren’t international ATMs -- or really ATMs of any kind. We’d get a wallet full of American Express Travelers Checks before flying out and then typically cash a $100 check at the airport currency exchange after customs. This was before the euro, so we’d juggle D Marks, Belgian and French francs, British and Irish pounds, pesetas, lira,.... Almost all of the hotels we stayed in took credit cards -- except for this one random mom-&amp;-pop place outside of Munich; nice people but they screwed up my D Mark budget -- but not all restaurants and none of the taxis did. So our currency exit strategy -- so we didn’t pay double the exchange fees for having to go in and out of a currency that we might not use for another year or so -- was to throw down most of our excess cash at the hotel in the morning, saving enough for a sandwich, the cab back to the airport and a beer at the bar -- and then put on the Amex the balance of the hotel room. It usually worked well -- except for the one time that I mixed up the exchange rate between the Swedish krona and Swiss franc. Not an unreasonable mix up -- both countries start with an S and have a lot of snow -- but the krona exchange rate was about 6 to the dollar at that time while the Swiss franc was at 1.3 to the dollar. That one definitely screwed up my end-of-day cash strategy.</li>\r\n 	<li>But I absolutely understand the use case for going all plastic. First, you’re not having to float the money between travel and reimbursement. But I gotta think convenience is the bigger play. Many companies pipe their company card transactions straight into their expense reporting systems. Makes it incredibly easy -- log into Concur or whatever, assign each charge to an expense code and submit. Nothing forgotten and you’re done in 5 minutes. With cash, you have to remember what you spent, enter it, and probably submit a receipt too. I’ll never pay for my $2 ORD Starbucks coffee with my Amex card, but when the cab fare get above $50, even I’ll charge it.</li>\r\n 	<li>I do think it’s a bit of a generational thing, though. I remember my dad always walking around with a bunch of 50’s in a money clip in his pocket. And my kids always getting a $100 bill from their Hungarian grandparents for Christmas -- we’d call it the Eastern European C note. I now have a Venmo account, but I still like paying people back in cash. Feels like I need say “Get off my lawn” but I may not have completely aged out yet. When paying my daughter’s tuition at Univ of St Andrews, one sentence on the web site caught my eye -- “Ideally tuition and accommodation fees should not be paid in cash” -- which means that someone or multiple someones has done it. It’s not a travel expense, but the image of someone walking into the St Andrews bursar’s office and stacking piles of 100 pound notes just makes me smile. Makes me want to drop a C note on my next big cab ride.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/44580\"> What Child is This (Instrumental)</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license.  Ft: Jeris</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Don’t Make It Hard to Cash in on Loyalty</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\">\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\">\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Back in October, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/10/31/podcast-134-value-of-loyalty-need-those-5-stars/\">episode 134</a>, we talked about the value of loyalty. In November, JD Powers released their 2017 Airline Loyalty Program Satisfaction Study. Powers measured satisfaction “based on four factors (in order of importance): earning and redeeming rewards; program benefits; account management; and member communication”. Not a surprising list, and placing “redeeming awards” at the top makes sense since that’s sorta the core of a loyalty program -- here’s something to incent you to fly us more.</li>\r\n 	<li>A couple of years ago, in episode 116, I talked about why, for me, British Airways’ Avios program has been the worst program for redemptions. I had over 300,000 points sitting there because it never made sense to use them. When I’d price out an award ticket between Chicago and London, the addition cash I would owe for BA’s fuel surcharges (which made sense when oil was at $120/bbl, but much less so at $50) and Heathrow landing taxes would just about equal what I’d pay for a ticket with another airline -- so the miles were worth nothing. Not exactly a best practice for an airline loyalty program.</li>\r\n 	<li>But, when BA and Iberia, both owned by the same corporate parent, kinda combined their programs into, not a single but a sorta interchangeable Avios program, I thought there might be a way to finally get some value from my forlorn BA points. I said kinda interchangeable because I now have 2 Avios accounts -- a BA Avios account and an Iberia Avios account. And since I have had my Iberia Avios account for over 90 days, I can convert my BA Avios to Iberia Avios, which let me use points for a direct ORD-MAD flight this spring at a small fraction of the cash for fees and taxes that BA would charge.</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, good. I’ve found the flights, I’ve found the page on BA.com to transfer. I enter all the account info, press the button, and get a big red error screen. Hmmm… I try it a couple of more times, same result. Different browsers, same result. In incognito mode so there’s no legacy cookies, same result. Hmmm…</li>\r\n 	<li>So I dredge around BA’s site and find a technical support number. It’s Saturday afternoon Chicago time, but after a good bit of music, I get a live guy. And he’s a good guy. Here’s the problem, your name doesn’t match on your accounts -- it’s Mark Peacock on your BA account, and Mark Peacock Peacock on your Iberia account. You’ll need to call Iberia to change that, then the transfer will go through. OK, seems reasonable enough. So I call Iberia, again listen to music and again get a live person. Good guy, but he can’t help me. Here’s a number in Spain; give them a call. Which I do, a bit more music, and then another guy. We’ll need some documentation to make that change, send a picture of the first page of your passport to this Iberia email address and we’ll make the change.</li>\r\n 	<li>Lots of calls, spoke to some nice people, but I still can’t break these BA Avios points free. So I send the email, but I don’t expect this to get resolved soon. I open another beer and gear myself up for another fare search, but decide to give BA one more call. This time, I connect with a woman with a proper northern English accent. It felt like I’d somehow overflowed into a high status group; like when I was Global Services on United and agents picking up my calls were sitting in the corporate center near ORD and could make anything happen. I relate my tale of woe; “Oh, that’s no problem,” she says. Five minutes later, it’s done. Thanks to her, I got to redeem 100,000 Avios points and am feeling a bit more hopeful about the remaining balance. The only downside -- I didn’t get the woman’s name so I could give her a shout out. By the way, 3.5 weeks later and still no response to my email to Iberia.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\">\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #136</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_136.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #137 — New Year\'s Travel Status Tips; How to Shop for a Suitcase','','inherit','closed','closed','','1916-revision-v1','','','2018-01-22 21:02:12','2018-01-23 02:02:12','',1916,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/01/22/1916-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1919,1,'2018-01-22 21:04:28','2018-01-23 02:04:28','After traveling with younger colleagues who pay for everything with cards, I wonder if I\'m the last generation of cash payers. I also talk about the upcoming smart luggage ban on US airlines and a long Saturday afternoon trying to redeem some British Airways Avios points. All this, a new Uber driver story, and a few Christmas carols at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_136.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/371970371\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /] <!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #137:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. This episode is sponsored by <a href=\"http://go.travelperk.com/travelcommons\">TravelPerk</a>, the #1 rated business travel tool on the Internet. It’s been a light travel month, just a drive down to Nashville, and a couple of trips over to Charlottesville, VA, which has been a nice break from what is otherwise turning out to be a brutally cold winter in Chicago. The day after New Years, I walked out of the house into a -10℉ morning -- not windchill, it was -10℉ ambient. Welcome to January. I had my team travel here last week for a 2018 kick-off meeting. No one accused us of boon-doggling. The guy from Phoenix did say he was filing an employee abuse claim though.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’ve found myself drinking less craft beer and much more Scotch whisky in this month; -10℉ is definitely brown liquor weather. Luckily, my daughter brought home a nice bottle of 18-year-old <a href=\"http://www.glenscotia.com/\">Glen Scotia</a> from Edinburgh for Christmas. I’ve made a sizable dent in it.</li>\r\n 	<li>On my first trip to Charlottesville, after being off the road for four weeks, it took me forever to gather up all the bits of my regular travel carry from around the house. Normally, my travel carry stays in my backpack and my suitcase; I buy duplicates of things like hair brushes and headphones just so I don’t need to pull them out of my bag. But for some reason, all discipline broke down over the holidays and my carefully curated travel carry was spread/spewed throughout the house. Luckily, my ride to ORD was 5 minutes late. I took my Bluesmart bag, squeezed in one last trip before American’s January 15th smart luggage ban took effect. I tweeted a picture of my Bluesmart before boarding. American replied “We\'re glad you\'re flying with us and appreciate your cooperation with our team.” My response -- “Not that I have much of a choice…” Especially with IATA recommending the ban to its 300 airline members. My new non-smart Victorinox bag arrived on my front porch before the ban clicked in, so once I shift everything from the Bluesmart to the Victorinox, I’ll power down the Bluesmart, delete its app from my iPhone, and consign it to the corner of the attic with all my other retired bags -- my own Land of Misfit Bags.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/copperhead/40520\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen</a> by copperhead (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: Admiral Bob, Javolenus , Sackjo22</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Starting off the New Year, I did a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/01/01/looking-back-at-2017-the-highs-and-the-lows/\">blog post</a> summarizing some of the high and low points that we talked about in 2017. The high points? Things like Uber and Lyft driver stories, yet more craft beer taprooms, and Hertz’s President Circle Aisle. Low points? Airlines dragging passengers from planes, everybody lobbying for 5-star reviews, and, no surprise, the smart luggage ban.</li>\r\n 	<li>Allan Marko, not just a long-time TravelCommon’s listener, but probably one of the original listeners showed his roots by posting on the original comment channel -- the TravelCommons website</li>\r\n 	<li>Have had our Away luggage for only about six months prior to the battery ban. I really like the ‘smart’ charging feature. Luckily the Away battery is a nicely designed self-contained and easily removable unit (two screws; screwdriver included!) Now the battery lives in my backpack, and the luggage still usable.</li>\r\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\"></li>\r\n 	<li>Allan’s psychic capabilities are showing. I think Away is the only major smart bag that meets the airlines’ requirement for a removable battery. But for me, charging wasn’t the major use case for me. I’m typically fine with my Anker lipstick charger. And if I forget to recharge that, my Verizon mobile WiFi hotspot also doubles as a charger. For me, the GPS tracking was the main use case -- for those times I had to check my bag, it was nice to know that it had also made it to my destination -- a use case that requires power. Pull out the battery and no more tracking. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted.</li>\r\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\"></li>\r\n 	<li>Jim McDonough replied to the Twitter announcement of the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">last episode</a> where I wondered if I was the last generation of cash payers. Jim wrote</li>\r\n 	<li>I use cash a) at the local farmer’s market; b) pay for haircuts . . . having a hard time coming up with c)</li>\r\n 	<li>Jim, I dunno. Looking at your Twitter profile picture, you look like you could land in my generation. I apologize for using a card for anything under $20. Although I have to say that more and more microbrewery taprooms only take credit cards. I don’t apologize there; or at the self-service tills in Home Depot or Tesco’s -- mostly because there’s no one to apologize to even though they will take cash.</li>\r\n 	<li>Natalie on the British Airways social media team tweeted back at me about the other topic on the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">last episode</a> -- about how hard it can be to cash in on loyalty points. You’ll remember that I talked about all the hassles I had in transferring Avios points from BA to Iberia, until I got a BA agent with solid northern accent. Natalie of BA said</li>\r\n 	<li>Hey Mark! Thanks for tagging us in your article. I\'m glad to hear that one of our \'Geordie\' colleagues was able to help you redeem some of your Avios. It\'s a shame you didn\'t catch her name though.</li>\r\n 	<li>Absolutely it was a shame. She deserves huge props.</li>\r\n 	<li>In that same riff, I mentioned how my email to Iberia to clean up my name on my Iberia Plus account -- which might have been the root cause of my point transfer problem -- seemed to have fallen into a black hole. Well, apparently it didn’t. Soon after that episode, I got a letter from Iberia with a new card that had my correct name. That was nice. Would’ve been just a bit nicer if they’d hit the Reply button while handling the email and typed, I dunno, just 8 words -- “Got it fixed; new card in the mail” But it got done -- all of it, Avios points, non-stop ORD-MAD flight on points, and now, a card with my correct name.</li>\r\n 	<li>And that Iberia letter was probably one of the last surprises I got when I open the mailbox at home. Somehow, I’m not quite sure how, I signed up for a US Post Office service that sends me an email every morning with scanned images of letters I’m going to receive that day. When I got that first email, I was kinda “What the hell?”, but now I kinda like it, especially when I’m on the road. No more wondering what bills showed up, or during the holidays, who had sent us Christmas cards. It does kinda take the surprise out of opening the mailbox -- though not that there was much left since 90% of our physical mail is junk -- but it is kinda entertaining.</li>\r\n 	<li>Back in August, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/08/27/podcast-132-travel-apps-on-my-phone/\">episode #132</a> about the travel apps I have loaded on my phone, I talked about using the paid or “Pro” version of TripIt, and about how it was on the bubble for me because of how the airlines have improved the flight status notifications in their own apps. In 4 months since then, the airline apps have pretty consistently notified me of gate changes and delays faster than TripIt Pro. And so when my subscription ran out a few weeks ago, I ignored the renewal alerts. I’ll still use the free version -- I like the way TripIt consolidates separate plane, hotel, and rental car reservations into a single trip -- kinda replicating the itineraries your travel agent used to give you when they booked your entire trip. But paying $50 for what are now slower, redundant flight alerts? I’ll spend it on beer or brown liquor instead.</li>\r\n 	<li>I don’t know if it’s just me, but the cadence for boarding groups has gotten out of control. I think I was on a Delta flight where I was boarding group 1 or 2, but was the 4th or 5th group to board, after Delta One, and then Platinum Medallion, then Gold Medallion, Sky Team Elite -- it went on forever. American is a bit better -- only one non-numeric boarding group for the invite-only Concierge Key gang (remember George Clooney in Up In The Air) -- and then 1 through 9(!). I do love the announcement “If you don’t have a boarding group number, then board Group 7” which feels a bit random. Where it really becomes fun is on a regional jet, when the gate agent runs through this cadence for a plane with only 40-50 passengers and all the carry-on bags are gate… I mean valet checked. “Now boarding passengers in Group 1, Group 2, Group 3…” Four people board… “Groups 5, 6, 7, and the rest of you” followed by general scrum in front of the agent. I know the airlines have PhDs in psychology, sociology, and linear programming working on this stuff, but it continues to be a cluster</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>And thanks to this episode’s sponsor TravelPerk</li>\r\n 	<li>Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/11/20/podcast-135-airport-bingo-new-old-travel-pc/\">November episode</a>, I talked about American\'s last-minute cancellation of my night flight to Charlottesville and my ensuing scramble to find a replacement flight and to make sure the Hyatt Place didn\'t flush my reservation. But if I\'d booked with TravelPerk, they would\'ve done the scrambling for me.</li>\r\n 	<li>This all-in-one business travel management tool includes a team of highly qualified agents ready to rescue disgruntled travelers from any scenario 24/7.</li>\r\n 	<li>It’s because of making magic happen in times like this that TravelPerk is now the #1 rated business travel tool on the internet.</li>\r\n 	<li>You\'ll love them because you can finally take control of your travel schedule, have freedom to book alternative accommodation like Airbnb, and have a built-in rescue team when stuff goes south. Remove some stress from the equation, go to <a href=\"http://go.travelperk.com/travelcommons\">go.travelperk.com/travelcommons</a> for a no-commitment test drive.</li>\r\n 	<li>It’s free forever if you to <a href=\"http://go.travelperk.com/travelcommons\">go.travelperk.com/travelcommons</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/NiGiD/48586\">O Tannenbaum / Oh Christmas Tree</a> by Martijn de Boer (NiGiD) (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license.  Ft: Admiral Bob (admiralbob77)</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Is Cash is a Waning King?</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>As I said at the start of the show, my last trip this year was ORD to LGA to CHO. I didn’t arrive too late so there were a couple of cabs waiting -- no LGA-style lines, I just hopped in. It’s a $25 flat rate to downtown Charlottesville. We pulled up to my hotel, I gave the driver a 20 and a 10 and got out of the cab. “Cash? Thanks!” he said.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’ve said this before; I try to pay all of my cab fares in cash ever since one cab driver walked me through why he hates cards. There’s a timing problem-- he has to pay for gas, tolls, airport access fees, and the taxi company that day, but he doesn’t get his money until a couple of days later. And then there’s the high fees the processing companies charge taxi drivers.</li>\r\n 	<li>But when traveling with younger colleagues, I feel like I’m the last generation of cash payers. Not only do they pay for everything with a card, many of them don’t even carry cash. Maybe I’m just getting old, or maybe I remember when you couldn’t use cards everywhere.</li>\r\n 	<li>Especially in Europe in the late ‘80’s/early ‘90’s when I would be in a different country every day on sales calls with distributors. There weren’t international ATMs -- or really ATMs of any kind. We’d get a wallet full of American Express Travelers Checks before flying out and then typically cash a $100 check at the airport currency exchange after customs. This was before the euro, so we’d juggle D Marks, Belgian and French francs, British and Irish pounds, pesetas, lira,.... Almost all of the hotels we stayed in took credit cards -- except for this one random mom-&amp;-pop place outside of Munich; nice people but they screwed up my D Mark budget -- but not all restaurants and none of the taxis did. So our currency exit strategy -- so we didn’t pay double the exchange fees for having to go in and out of a currency that we might not use for another year or so -- was to throw down most of our excess cash at the hotel in the morning, saving enough for a sandwich, the cab back to the airport and a beer at the bar -- and then put on the Amex the balance of the hotel room. It usually worked well -- except for the one time that I mixed up the exchange rate between the Swedish krona and Swiss franc. Not an unreasonable mix up -- both countries start with an S and have a lot of snow -- but the krona exchange rate was about 6 to the dollar at that time while the Swiss franc was at 1.3 to the dollar. That one definitely screwed up my end-of-day cash strategy.</li>\r\n 	<li>But I absolutely understand the use case for going all plastic. First, you’re not having to float the money between travel and reimbursement. But I gotta think convenience is the bigger play. Many companies pipe their company card transactions straight into their expense reporting systems. Makes it incredibly easy -- log into Concur or whatever, assign each charge to an expense code and submit. Nothing forgotten and you’re done in 5 minutes. With cash, you have to remember what you spent, enter it, and probably submit a receipt too. I’ll never pay for my $2 ORD Starbucks coffee with my Amex card, but when the cab fare get above $50, even I’ll charge it.</li>\r\n 	<li>I do think it’s a bit of a generational thing, though. I remember my dad always walking around with a bunch of 50’s in a money clip in his pocket. And my kids always getting a $100 bill from their Hungarian grandparents for Christmas -- we’d call it the Eastern European C note. I now have a Venmo account, but I still like paying people back in cash. Feels like I need say “Get off my lawn” but I may not have completely aged out yet. When paying my daughter’s tuition at Univ of St Andrews, one sentence on the web site caught my eye -- “Ideally tuition and accommodation fees should not be paid in cash” -- which means that someone or multiple someones has done it. It’s not a travel expense, but the image of someone walking into the St Andrews bursar’s office and stacking piles of 100 pound notes just makes me smile. Makes me want to drop a C note on my next big cab ride.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/44580\"> What Child is This (Instrumental)</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license.  Ft: Jeris</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Don’t Make It Hard to Cash in on Loyalty</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\">\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\">\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Back in October, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/10/31/podcast-134-value-of-loyalty-need-those-5-stars/\">episode 134</a>, we talked about the value of loyalty. In November, JD Powers released their 2017 Airline Loyalty Program Satisfaction Study. Powers measured satisfaction “based on four factors (in order of importance): earning and redeeming rewards; program benefits; account management; and member communication”. Not a surprising list, and placing “redeeming awards” at the top makes sense since that’s sorta the core of a loyalty program -- here’s something to incent you to fly us more.</li>\r\n 	<li>A couple of years ago, in episode 116, I talked about why, for me, British Airways’ Avios program has been the worst program for redemptions. I had over 300,000 points sitting there because it never made sense to use them. When I’d price out an award ticket between Chicago and London, the addition cash I would owe for BA’s fuel surcharges (which made sense when oil was at $120/bbl, but much less so at $50) and Heathrow landing taxes would just about equal what I’d pay for a ticket with another airline -- so the miles were worth nothing. Not exactly a best practice for an airline loyalty program.</li>\r\n 	<li>But, when BA and Iberia, both owned by the same corporate parent, kinda combined their programs into, not a single but a sorta interchangeable Avios program, I thought there might be a way to finally get some value from my forlorn BA points. I said kinda interchangeable because I now have 2 Avios accounts -- a BA Avios account and an Iberia Avios account. And since I have had my Iberia Avios account for over 90 days, I can convert my BA Avios to Iberia Avios, which let me use points for a direct ORD-MAD flight this spring at a small fraction of the cash for fees and taxes that BA would charge.</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, good. I’ve found the flights, I’ve found the page on BA.com to transfer. I enter all the account info, press the button, and get a big red error screen. Hmmm… I try it a couple of more times, same result. Different browsers, same result. In incognito mode so there’s no legacy cookies, same result. Hmmm…</li>\r\n 	<li>So I dredge around BA’s site and find a technical support number. It’s Saturday afternoon Chicago time, but after a good bit of music, I get a live guy. And he’s a good guy. Here’s the problem, your name doesn’t match on your accounts -- it’s Mark Peacock on your BA account, and Mark Peacock Peacock on your Iberia account. You’ll need to call Iberia to change that, then the transfer will go through. OK, seems reasonable enough. So I call Iberia, again listen to music and again get a live person. Good guy, but he can’t help me. Here’s a number in Spain; give them a call. Which I do, a bit more music, and then another guy. We’ll need some documentation to make that change, send a picture of the first page of your passport to this Iberia email address and we’ll make the change.</li>\r\n 	<li>Lots of calls, spoke to some nice people, but I still can’t break these BA Avios points free. So I send the email, but I don’t expect this to get resolved soon. I open another beer and gear myself up for another fare search, but decide to give BA one more call. This time, I connect with a woman with a proper northern English accent. It felt like I’d somehow overflowed into a high status group; like when I was Global Services on United and agents picking up my calls were sitting in the corporate center near ORD and could make anything happen. I relate my tale of woe; “Oh, that’s no problem,” she says. Five minutes later, it’s done. Thanks to her, I got to redeem 100,000 Avios points and am feeling a bit more hopeful about the remaining balance. The only downside -- I didn’t get the woman’s name so I could give her a shout out. By the way, 3.5 weeks later and still no response to my email to Iberia.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\">\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #136</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_136.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #137 — New Year\'s Travel Status Tips; How to Shop for a Suitcase','','inherit','closed','closed','','1916-revision-v1','','','2018-01-22 21:04:28','2018-01-23 02:04:28','',1916,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/01/22/1916-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1920,1,'2018-01-22 21:06:02','2018-01-23 02:06:02','After traveling with younger colleagues who pay for everything with cards, I wonder if I\'m the last generation of cash payers. I also talk about the upcoming smart luggage ban on US airlines and a long Saturday afternoon trying to redeem some British Airways Avios points. All this, a new Uber driver story, and a few Christmas carols at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_136.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/371970371\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /] <!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #137:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. This episode is sponsored by <a href=\"http://go.travelperk.com/travelcommons\">TravelPerk</a>, the #1 rated business travel tool on the Internet. It’s been a light travel month, just a drive down to Nashville, and a couple of trips over to Charlottesville, VA, which has been a nice break from what is otherwise turning out to be a brutally cold winter in Chicago. The day after New Years, I walked out of the house into a -10℉ morning -- not windchill, it was -10℉ ambient. Welcome to January. I had my team travel here last week for a 2018 kick-off meeting. No one accused us of boon-doggling. The guy from Phoenix did say he was filing an employee abuse claim though.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’ve found myself drinking less craft beer and much more Scotch whisky in this month; -10℉ is definitely brown liquor weather. Luckily, my daughter brought home a nice bottle of 18-year-old <a href=\"http://www.glenscotia.com/\">Glen Scotia</a> from Edinburgh for Christmas. I’ve made a sizable dent in it.</li>\r\n 	<li>On my first trip to Charlottesville, after being off the road for four weeks, it took me forever to gather up all the bits of my regular travel carry from around the house. Normally, my travel carry stays in my backpack and my suitcase; I buy duplicates of things like hair brushes and headphones just so I don’t need to pull them out of my bag. But for some reason, all discipline broke down over the holidays and my carefully curated travel carry was spread/spewed throughout the house. Luckily, my ride to ORD was 5 minutes late. I took my Bluesmart bag, squeezed in one last trip before American’s January 15th smart luggage ban took effect. I tweeted a picture of my Bluesmart before boarding. American replied “We\'re glad you\'re flying with us and appreciate your cooperation with our team.” My response -- “Not that I have much of a choice…” Especially with IATA recommending the ban to its 300 airline members. My new non-smart Victorinox bag arrived on my front porch before the ban clicked in, so once I shift everything from the Bluesmart to the Victorinox, I’ll power down the Bluesmart, delete its app from my iPhone, and consign it to the corner of the attic with all my other retired bags -- my own Land of Misfit Bags.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/copperhead/40520\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen</a> by copperhead (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: Admiral Bob, Javolenus , Sackjo22</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Starting off the New Year, I did a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/01/01/looking-back-at-2017-the-highs-and-the-lows/\">blog post</a> summarizing some of the high and low points that we talked about in 2017. The high points? Things like Uber and Lyft driver stories, yet more craft beer taprooms, and Hertz’s President Circle Aisle. Low points? Airlines dragging passengers from planes, everybody lobbying for 5-star reviews, and, no surprise, the smart luggage ban.</li>\r\n 	<li>Allan Marko, not just a long-time TravelCommon’s listener, but probably one of the original listeners showed his roots by posting on the original comment channel -- the TravelCommons website\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Have had our Away luggage for only about six months prior to the battery ban. I really like the ‘smart’ charging feature. Luckily the Away battery is a nicely designed self-contained and easily removable unit (two screws; screwdriver included!) Now the battery lives in my backpack, and the luggage still usable.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\"></li>\r\n 	<li>Allan’s psychic capabilities are showing. I think Away is the only major smart bag that meets the airlines’ requirement for a removable battery. But for me, charging wasn’t the major use case for me. I’m typically fine with my Anker lipstick charger. And if I forget to recharge that, my Verizon mobile WiFi hotspot also doubles as a charger. For me, the GPS tracking was the main use case -- for those times I had to check my bag, it was nice to know that it had also made it to my destination -- a use case that requires power. Pull out the battery and no more tracking. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted.</li>\r\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\"></li>\r\n 	<li>Jim McDonough replied to the Twitter announcement of the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">last episode</a> where I wondered if I was the last generation of cash payers. Jim wrote\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I use cash a) at the local farmer’s market; b) pay for haircuts . . . having a hard time coming up with c)</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Jim, I dunno. Looking at your Twitter profile picture, you look like you could land in my generation. I apologize for using a card for anything under $20. Although I have to say that more and more microbrewery taprooms only take credit cards. I don’t apologize there; or at the self-service tills in Home Depot or Tesco’s -- mostly because there’s no one to apologize to even though they will take cash.</li>\r\n 	<li>Natalie on the British Airways social media team tweeted back at me about the other topic on the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">last episode</a> -- about how hard it can be to cash in on loyalty points. You’ll remember that I talked about all the hassles I had in transferring Avios points from BA to Iberia, until I got a BA agent with solid northern accent. Natalie of BA said\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Hey Mark! Thanks for tagging us in your article. I\'m glad to hear that one of our \'Geordie\' colleagues was able to help you redeem some of your Avios. It\'s a shame you didn\'t catch her name though.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Absolutely it was a shame. She deserves huge props.</li>\r\n 	<li>In that same riff, I mentioned how my email to Iberia to clean up my name on my Iberia Plus account -- which might have been the root cause of my point transfer problem -- seemed to have fallen into a black hole. Well, apparently it didn’t. Soon after that episode, I got a letter from Iberia with a new card that had my correct name. That was nice. Would’ve been just a bit nicer if they’d hit the Reply button while handling the email and typed, I dunno, just 8 words -- “Got it fixed; new card in the mail” But it got done -- all of it, Avios points, non-stop ORD-MAD flight on points, and now, a card with my correct name.</li>\r\n 	<li>And that Iberia letter was probably one of the last surprises I got when I open the mailbox at home. Somehow, I’m not quite sure how, I signed up for a US Post Office service that sends me an email every morning with scanned images of letters I’m going to receive that day. When I got that first email, I was kinda “What the hell?”, but now I kinda like it, especially when I’m on the road. No more wondering what bills showed up, or during the holidays, who had sent us Christmas cards. It does kinda take the surprise out of opening the mailbox -- though not that there was much left since 90% of our physical mail is junk -- but it is kinda entertaining.</li>\r\n 	<li>Back in August, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/08/27/podcast-132-travel-apps-on-my-phone/\">episode #132</a> about the travel apps I have loaded on my phone, I talked about using the paid or “Pro” version of TripIt, and about how it was on the bubble for me because of how the airlines have improved the flight status notifications in their own apps. In 4 months since then, the airline apps have pretty consistently notified me of gate changes and delays faster than TripIt Pro. And so when my subscription ran out a few weeks ago, I ignored the renewal alerts. I’ll still use the free version -- I like the way TripIt consolidates separate plane, hotel, and rental car reservations into a single trip -- kinda replicating the itineraries your travel agent used to give you when they booked your entire trip. But paying $50 for what are now slower, redundant flight alerts? I’ll spend it on beer or brown liquor instead.</li>\r\n 	<li>I don’t know if it’s just me, but the cadence for boarding groups has gotten out of control. I think I was on a Delta flight where I was boarding group 1 or 2, but was the 4th or 5th group to board, after Delta One, and then Platinum Medallion, then Gold Medallion, Sky Team Elite -- it went on forever. American is a bit better -- only one non-numeric boarding group for the invite-only Concierge Key gang (remember George Clooney in Up In The Air) -- and then 1 through 9(!). I do love the announcement “If you don’t have a boarding group number, then board Group 7” which feels a bit random. Where it really becomes fun is on a regional jet, when the gate agent runs through this cadence for a plane with only 40-50 passengers and all the carry-on bags are gate… I mean valet checked. “Now boarding passengers in Group 1, Group 2, Group 3…” Four people board… “Groups 5, 6, 7, and the rest of you” followed by general scrum in front of the agent. I know the airlines have PhDs in psychology, sociology, and linear programming working on this stuff, but it continues to be a cluster</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>And thanks to this episode’s sponsor TravelPerk</li>\r\n 	<li>Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/11/20/podcast-135-airport-bingo-new-old-travel-pc/\">November episode</a>, I talked about American\'s last-minute cancellation of my night flight to Charlottesville and my ensuing scramble to find a replacement flight and to make sure the Hyatt Place didn\'t flush my reservation. But if I\'d booked with TravelPerk, they would\'ve done the scrambling for me.\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>This all-in-one business travel management tool includes a team of highly qualified agents ready to rescue disgruntled travelers from any scenario 24/7.</li>\r\n 	<li>It’s because of making magic happen in times like this that TravelPerk is now the #1 rated business travel tool on the internet.</li>\r\n 	<li>You\'ll love them because you can finally take control of your travel schedule, have freedom to book alternative accommodation like Airbnb, and have a built-in rescue team when stuff goes south. Remove some stress from the equation, go to <a href=\"http://go.travelperk.com/travelcommons\">go.travelperk.com/travelcommons</a> for a no-commitment test drive.</li>\r\n 	<li>It’s free forever if you to <a href=\"http://go.travelperk.com/travelcommons\">go.travelperk.com/travelcommons</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/NiGiD/48586\">O Tannenbaum / Oh Christmas Tree</a> by Martijn de Boer (NiGiD) (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license.  Ft: Admiral Bob (admiralbob77)</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Is Cash is a Waning King?</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>As I said at the start of the show, my last trip this year was ORD to LGA to CHO. I didn’t arrive too late so there were a couple of cabs waiting -- no LGA-style lines, I just hopped in. It’s a $25 flat rate to downtown Charlottesville. We pulled up to my hotel, I gave the driver a 20 and a 10 and got out of the cab. “Cash? Thanks!” he said.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’ve said this before; I try to pay all of my cab fares in cash ever since one cab driver walked me through why he hates cards. There’s a timing problem-- he has to pay for gas, tolls, airport access fees, and the taxi company that day, but he doesn’t get his money until a couple of days later. And then there’s the high fees the processing companies charge taxi drivers.</li>\r\n 	<li>But when traveling with younger colleagues, I feel like I’m the last generation of cash payers. Not only do they pay for everything with a card, many of them don’t even carry cash. Maybe I’m just getting old, or maybe I remember when you couldn’t use cards everywhere.</li>\r\n 	<li>Especially in Europe in the late ‘80’s/early ‘90’s when I would be in a different country every day on sales calls with distributors. There weren’t international ATMs -- or really ATMs of any kind. We’d get a wallet full of American Express Travelers Checks before flying out and then typically cash a $100 check at the airport currency exchange after customs. This was before the euro, so we’d juggle D Marks, Belgian and French francs, British and Irish pounds, pesetas, lira,.... Almost all of the hotels we stayed in took credit cards -- except for this one random mom-&amp;-pop place outside of Munich; nice people but they screwed up my D Mark budget -- but not all restaurants and none of the taxis did. So our currency exit strategy -- so we didn’t pay double the exchange fees for having to go in and out of a currency that we might not use for another year or so -- was to throw down most of our excess cash at the hotel in the morning, saving enough for a sandwich, the cab back to the airport and a beer at the bar -- and then put on the Amex the balance of the hotel room. It usually worked well -- except for the one time that I mixed up the exchange rate between the Swedish krona and Swiss franc. Not an unreasonable mix up -- both countries start with an S and have a lot of snow -- but the krona exchange rate was about 6 to the dollar at that time while the Swiss franc was at 1.3 to the dollar. That one definitely screwed up my end-of-day cash strategy.</li>\r\n 	<li>But I absolutely understand the use case for going all plastic. First, you’re not having to float the money between travel and reimbursement. But I gotta think convenience is the bigger play. Many companies pipe their company card transactions straight into their expense reporting systems. Makes it incredibly easy -- log into Concur or whatever, assign each charge to an expense code and submit. Nothing forgotten and you’re done in 5 minutes. With cash, you have to remember what you spent, enter it, and probably submit a receipt too. I’ll never pay for my $2 ORD Starbucks coffee with my Amex card, but when the cab fare get above $50, even I’ll charge it.</li>\r\n 	<li>I do think it’s a bit of a generational thing, though. I remember my dad always walking around with a bunch of 50’s in a money clip in his pocket. And my kids always getting a $100 bill from their Hungarian grandparents for Christmas -- we’d call it the Eastern European C note. I now have a Venmo account, but I still like paying people back in cash. Feels like I need say “Get off my lawn” but I may not have completely aged out yet. When paying my daughter’s tuition at Univ of St Andrews, one sentence on the web site caught my eye -- “Ideally tuition and accommodation fees should not be paid in cash” -- which means that someone or multiple someones has done it. It’s not a travel expense, but the image of someone walking into the St Andrews bursar’s office and stacking piles of 100 pound notes just makes me smile. Makes me want to drop a C note on my next big cab ride.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/44580\"> What Child is This (Instrumental)</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license.  Ft: Jeris</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Don’t Make It Hard to Cash in on Loyalty</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\">\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\">\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Back in October, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/10/31/podcast-134-value-of-loyalty-need-those-5-stars/\">episode 134</a>, we talked about the value of loyalty. In November, JD Powers released their 2017 Airline Loyalty Program Satisfaction Study. Powers measured satisfaction “based on four factors (in order of importance): earning and redeeming rewards; program benefits; account management; and member communication”. Not a surprising list, and placing “redeeming awards” at the top makes sense since that’s sorta the core of a loyalty program -- here’s something to incent you to fly us more.</li>\r\n 	<li>A couple of years ago, in episode 116, I talked about why, for me, British Airways’ Avios program has been the worst program for redemptions. I had over 300,000 points sitting there because it never made sense to use them. When I’d price out an award ticket between Chicago and London, the addition cash I would owe for BA’s fuel surcharges (which made sense when oil was at $120/bbl, but much less so at $50) and Heathrow landing taxes would just about equal what I’d pay for a ticket with another airline -- so the miles were worth nothing. Not exactly a best practice for an airline loyalty program.</li>\r\n 	<li>But, when BA and Iberia, both owned by the same corporate parent, kinda combined their programs into, not a single but a sorta interchangeable Avios program, I thought there might be a way to finally get some value from my forlorn BA points. I said kinda interchangeable because I now have 2 Avios accounts -- a BA Avios account and an Iberia Avios account. And since I have had my Iberia Avios account for over 90 days, I can convert my BA Avios to Iberia Avios, which let me use points for a direct ORD-MAD flight this spring at a small fraction of the cash for fees and taxes that BA would charge.</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, good. I’ve found the flights, I’ve found the page on BA.com to transfer. I enter all the account info, press the button, and get a big red error screen. Hmmm… I try it a couple of more times, same result. Different browsers, same result. In incognito mode so there’s no legacy cookies, same result. Hmmm…</li>\r\n 	<li>So I dredge around BA’s site and find a technical support number. It’s Saturday afternoon Chicago time, but after a good bit of music, I get a live guy. And he’s a good guy. Here’s the problem, your name doesn’t match on your accounts -- it’s Mark Peacock on your BA account, and Mark Peacock Peacock on your Iberia account. You’ll need to call Iberia to change that, then the transfer will go through. OK, seems reasonable enough. So I call Iberia, again listen to music and again get a live person. Good guy, but he can’t help me. Here’s a number in Spain; give them a call. Which I do, a bit more music, and then another guy. We’ll need some documentation to make that change, send a picture of the first page of your passport to this Iberia email address and we’ll make the change.</li>\r\n 	<li>Lots of calls, spoke to some nice people, but I still can’t break these BA Avios points free. So I send the email, but I don’t expect this to get resolved soon. I open another beer and gear myself up for another fare search, but decide to give BA one more call. This time, I connect with a woman with a proper northern English accent. It felt like I’d somehow overflowed into a high status group; like when I was Global Services on United and agents picking up my calls were sitting in the corporate center near ORD and could make anything happen. I relate my tale of woe; “Oh, that’s no problem,” she says. Five minutes later, it’s done. Thanks to her, I got to redeem 100,000 Avios points and am feeling a bit more hopeful about the remaining balance. The only downside -- I didn’t get the woman’s name so I could give her a shout out. By the way, 3.5 weeks later and still no response to my email to Iberia.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\">\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #136</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_136.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #137 — New Year\'s Travel Status Tips; How to Shop for a Suitcase','','inherit','closed','closed','','1916-revision-v1','','','2018-01-22 21:06:02','2018-01-23 02:06:02','',1916,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/01/22/1916-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1921,1,'2018-01-22 21:08:22','2018-01-23 02:08:22','After traveling with younger colleagues who pay for everything with cards, I wonder if I\'m the last generation of cash payers. I also talk about the upcoming smart luggage ban on US airlines and a long Saturday afternoon trying to redeem some British Airways Avios points. All this, a new Uber driver story, and a few Christmas carols at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_136.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/371970371\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /] <!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #137:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. This episode is sponsored by <a href=\"http://go.travelperk.com/travelcommons\">TravelPerk</a>, the #1 rated business travel tool on the Internet. It’s been a light travel month, just a drive down to Nashville, and a couple of trips over to Charlottesville, VA, which has been a nice break from what is otherwise turning out to be a brutally cold winter in Chicago. The day after New Years, I walked out of the house into a -10℉ morning -- not windchill, it was -10℉ ambient. Welcome to January. I had my team travel here last week for a 2018 kick-off meeting. No one accused us of boon-doggling. The guy from Phoenix did say he was filing an employee abuse claim though.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’ve found myself drinking less craft beer and much more Scotch whisky in this month; -10℉ is definitely brown liquor weather. Luckily, my daughter brought home a nice bottle of 18-year-old <a href=\"http://www.glenscotia.com/\">Glen Scotia</a> from Edinburgh for Christmas. I’ve made a sizable dent in it.</li>\r\n 	<li>On my first trip to Charlottesville, after being off the road for four weeks, it took me forever to gather up all the bits of my regular travel carry from around the house. Normally, my travel carry stays in my backpack and my suitcase; I buy duplicates of things like hair brushes and headphones just so I don’t need to pull them out of my bag. But for some reason, all discipline broke down over the holidays and my carefully curated travel carry was spread/spewed throughout the house. Luckily, my ride to ORD was 5 minutes late. I took my Bluesmart bag, squeezed in one last trip before American’s January 15th smart luggage ban took effect. I tweeted a picture of my Bluesmart before boarding. American replied “We\'re glad you\'re flying with us and appreciate your cooperation with our team.” My response -- “Not that I have much of a choice…” Especially with IATA recommending the ban to its 300 airline members. My new non-smart Victorinox bag arrived on my front porch before the ban clicked in, so once I shift everything from the Bluesmart to the Victorinox, I’ll power down the Bluesmart, delete its app from my iPhone, and consign it to the corner of the attic with all my other retired bags -- my own Land of Misfit Bags.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/copperhead/40520\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen</a> by copperhead (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: Admiral Bob, Javolenus , Sackjo22</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Starting off the New Year, I did a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/01/01/looking-back-at-2017-the-highs-and-the-lows/\">blog post</a> summarizing some of the high and low points that we talked about in 2017. The high points? Things like Uber and Lyft driver stories, yet more craft beer taprooms, and Hertz’s President Circle Aisle. Low points? Airlines dragging passengers from planes, everybody lobbying for 5-star reviews, and, no surprise, the smart luggage ban.</li>\r\n 	<li>Allan Marko, not just a long-time TravelCommon’s listener, but probably one of the original listeners showed his roots by posting on the original comment channel -- the TravelCommons website\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Have had our Away luggage for only about six months prior to the battery ban. I really like the ‘smart’ charging feature. Luckily the Away battery is a nicely designed self-contained and easily removable unit (two screws; screwdriver included!) Now the battery lives in my backpack, and the luggage still usable.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\"></li>\r\n 	<li>Allan’s psychic capabilities are showing. I think Away is the only major smart bag that meets the airlines’ requirement for a removable battery. But for me, charging wasn’t the major use case for me. I’m typically fine with my Anker lipstick charger. And if I forget to recharge that, my Verizon mobile WiFi hotspot also doubles as a charger. For me, the GPS tracking was the main use case -- for those times I had to check my bag, it was nice to know that it had also made it to my destination -- a use case that requires power. Pull out the battery and no more tracking. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted.</li>\r\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\"></li>\r\n 	<li>Jim McDonough replied to the Twitter announcement of the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">last episode</a> where I wondered if I was the last generation of cash payers. Jim wrote\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I use cash a) at the local farmer’s market; b) pay for haircuts . . . having a hard time coming up with c)</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Jim, I dunno. Looking at your Twitter profile picture, you look like you could land in my generation. I apologize for using a card for anything under $20. Although I have to say that more and more microbrewery taprooms only take credit cards. I don’t apologize there; or at the self-service tills in Home Depot or Tesco’s -- mostly because there’s no one to apologize to even though they will take cash.</li>\r\n 	<li>Natalie on the British Airways social media team tweeted back at me about the other topic on the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">last episode</a> -- about how hard it can be to cash in on loyalty points. You’ll remember that I talked about all the hassles I had in transferring Avios points from BA to Iberia, until I got a BA agent with solid northern accent. Natalie of BA said\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Hey Mark! Thanks for tagging us in your article. I\'m glad to hear that one of our \'Geordie\' colleagues was able to help you redeem some of your Avios. It\'s a shame you didn\'t catch her name though.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Absolutely it was a shame. She deserves huge props.</li>\r\n 	<li>In that same riff, I mentioned how my email to Iberia to clean up my name on my Iberia Plus account -- which might have been the root cause of my point transfer problem -- seemed to have fallen into a black hole. Well, apparently it didn’t. Soon after that episode, I got a letter from Iberia with a new card that had my correct name. That was nice. Would’ve been just a bit nicer if they’d hit the Reply button while handling the email and typed, I dunno, just 8 words -- “Got it fixed; new card in the mail” But it got done -- all of it, Avios points, non-stop ORD-MAD flight on points, and now, a card with my correct name.</li>\r\n 	<li>And that Iberia letter was probably one of the last surprises I got when I open the mailbox at home. Somehow, I’m not quite sure how, I signed up for a US Post Office service that sends me an email every morning with scanned images of letters I’m going to receive that day. When I got that first email, I was kinda “What the hell?”, but now I kinda like it, especially when I’m on the road. No more wondering what bills showed up, or during the holidays, who had sent us Christmas cards. It does kinda take the surprise out of opening the mailbox -- though not that there was much left since 90% of our physical mail is junk -- but it is kinda entertaining.</li>\r\n 	<li>Back in August, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/08/27/podcast-132-travel-apps-on-my-phone/\">episode #132</a> about the travel apps I have loaded on my phone, I talked about using the paid or “Pro” version of TripIt, and about how it was on the bubble for me because of how the airlines have improved the flight status notifications in their own apps. In 4 months since then, the airline apps have pretty consistently notified me of gate changes and delays faster than TripIt Pro. And so when my subscription ran out a few weeks ago, I ignored the renewal alerts. I’ll still use the free version -- I like the way TripIt consolidates separate plane, hotel, and rental car reservations into a single trip -- kinda replicating the itineraries your travel agent used to give you when they booked your entire trip. But paying $50 for what are now slower, redundant flight alerts? I’ll spend it on beer or brown liquor instead.</li>\r\n 	<li>I don’t know if it’s just me, but the cadence for boarding groups has gotten out of control. I think I was on a Delta flight where I was boarding group 1 or 2, but was the 4th or 5th group to board, after Delta One, and then Platinum Medallion, then Gold Medallion, Sky Team Elite -- it went on forever. American is a bit better -- only one non-numeric boarding group for the invite-only Concierge Key gang (remember George Clooney in Up In The Air) -- and then 1 through 9(!). I do love the announcement “If you don’t have a boarding group number, then board Group 7” which feels a bit random. Where it really becomes fun is on a regional jet, when the gate agent runs through this cadence for a plane with only 40-50 passengers and all the carry-on bags are gate… I mean valet checked. “Now boarding passengers in Group 1, Group 2, Group 3…” Four people board… “Groups 5, 6, 7, and the rest of you” followed by general scrum in front of the agent. I know the airlines have PhDs in psychology, sociology, and linear programming working on this stuff, but it continues to be a cluster</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>And thanks to this episode’s sponsor TravelPerk</li>\r\n 	<li>Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/11/20/podcast-135-airport-bingo-new-old-travel-pc/\">November episode</a>, I talked about American\'s last-minute cancellation of my night flight to Charlottesville and my ensuing scramble to find a replacement flight and to make sure the Hyatt Place didn\'t flush my reservation. But if I\'d booked with TravelPerk, they would\'ve done the scrambling for me.\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>This all-in-one business travel management tool includes a team of highly qualified agents ready to rescue disgruntled travelers from any scenario 24/7.</li>\r\n 	<li>It’s because of making magic happen in times like this that TravelPerk is now the #1 rated business travel tool on the internet.</li>\r\n 	<li>You\'ll love them because you can finally take control of your travel schedule, have freedom to book alternative accommodation like Airbnb, and have a built-in rescue team when stuff goes south. Remove some stress from the equation, go to <a href=\"http://go.travelperk.com/travelcommons\">go.travelperk.com/travelcommons</a> for a no-commitment test drive.</li>\r\n 	<li>It’s free forever if you to <a href=\"http://go.travelperk.com/travelcommons\">go.travelperk.com/travelcommons</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/NiGiD/48586\">O Tannenbaum / Oh Christmas Tree</a> by Martijn de Boer (NiGiD) (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license.  Ft: Admiral Bob (admiralbob77)</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Is Cash is a Waning King?</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>As I said at the start of the show, my last trip this year was ORD to LGA to CHO. I didn’t arrive too late so there were a couple of cabs waiting -- no LGA-style lines, I just hopped in. It’s a $25 flat rate to downtown Charlottesville. We pulled up to my hotel, I gave the driver a 20 and a 10 and got out of the cab. “Cash? Thanks!” he said.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’ve said this before; I try to pay all of my cab fares in cash ever since one cab driver walked me through why he hates cards. There’s a timing problem-- he has to pay for gas, tolls, airport access fees, and the taxi company that day, but he doesn’t get his money until a couple of days later. And then there’s the high fees the processing companies charge taxi drivers.</li>\r\n 	<li>But when traveling with younger colleagues, I feel like I’m the last generation of cash payers. Not only do they pay for everything with a card, many of them don’t even carry cash. Maybe I’m just getting old, or maybe I remember when you couldn’t use cards everywhere.</li>\r\n 	<li>Especially in Europe in the late ‘80’s/early ‘90’s when I would be in a different country every day on sales calls with distributors. There weren’t international ATMs -- or really ATMs of any kind. We’d get a wallet full of American Express Travelers Checks before flying out and then typically cash a $100 check at the airport currency exchange after customs. This was before the euro, so we’d juggle D Marks, Belgian and French francs, British and Irish pounds, pesetas, lira,.... Almost all of the hotels we stayed in took credit cards -- except for this one random mom-&amp;-pop place outside of Munich; nice people but they screwed up my D Mark budget -- but not all restaurants and none of the taxis did. So our currency exit strategy -- so we didn’t pay double the exchange fees for having to go in and out of a currency that we might not use for another year or so -- was to throw down most of our excess cash at the hotel in the morning, saving enough for a sandwich, the cab back to the airport and a beer at the bar -- and then put on the Amex the balance of the hotel room. It usually worked well -- except for the one time that I mixed up the exchange rate between the Swedish krona and Swiss franc. Not an unreasonable mix up -- both countries start with an S and have a lot of snow -- but the krona exchange rate was about 6 to the dollar at that time while the Swiss franc was at 1.3 to the dollar. That one definitely screwed up my end-of-day cash strategy.</li>\r\n 	<li>But I absolutely understand the use case for going all plastic. First, you’re not having to float the money between travel and reimbursement. But I gotta think convenience is the bigger play. Many companies pipe their company card transactions straight into their expense reporting systems. Makes it incredibly easy -- log into Concur or whatever, assign each charge to an expense code and submit. Nothing forgotten and you’re done in 5 minutes. With cash, you have to remember what you spent, enter it, and probably submit a receipt too. I’ll never pay for my $2 ORD Starbucks coffee with my Amex card, but when the cab fare get above $50, even I’ll charge it.</li>\r\n 	<li>I do think it’s a bit of a generational thing, though. I remember my dad always walking around with a bunch of 50’s in a money clip in his pocket. And my kids always getting a $100 bill from their Hungarian grandparents for Christmas -- we’d call it the Eastern European C note. I now have a Venmo account, but I still like paying people back in cash. Feels like I need say “Get off my lawn” but I may not have completely aged out yet. When paying my daughter’s tuition at Univ of St Andrews, one sentence on the web site caught my eye -- “Ideally tuition and accommodation fees should not be paid in cash” -- which means that someone or multiple someones has done it. It’s not a travel expense, but the image of someone walking into the St Andrews bursar’s office and stacking piles of 100 pound notes just makes me smile. Makes me want to drop a C note on my next big cab ride.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/44580\"> What Child is This (Instrumental)</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license.  Ft: Jeris</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Don’t Make It Hard to Cash in on Loyalty</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\">\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\">\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Back in October, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/10/31/podcast-134-value-of-loyalty-need-those-5-stars/\">episode 134</a>, we talked about the value of loyalty. In November, JD Powers released their 2017 Airline Loyalty Program Satisfaction Study. Powers measured satisfaction “based on four factors (in order of importance): earning and redeeming rewards; program benefits; account management; and member communication”. Not a surprising list, and placing “redeeming awards” at the top makes sense since that’s sorta the core of a loyalty program -- here’s something to incent you to fly us more.</li>\r\n 	<li>A couple of years ago, in episode 116, I talked about why, for me, British Airways’ Avios program has been the worst program for redemptions. I had over 300,000 points sitting there because it never made sense to use them. When I’d price out an award ticket between Chicago and London, the addition cash I would owe for BA’s fuel surcharges (which made sense when oil was at $120/bbl, but much less so at $50) and Heathrow landing taxes would just about equal what I’d pay for a ticket with another airline -- so the miles were worth nothing. Not exactly a best practice for an airline loyalty program.</li>\r\n 	<li>But, when BA and Iberia, both owned by the same corporate parent, kinda combined their programs into, not a single but a sorta interchangeable Avios program, I thought there might be a way to finally get some value from my forlorn BA points. I said kinda interchangeable because I now have 2 Avios accounts -- a BA Avios account and an Iberia Avios account. And since I have had my Iberia Avios account for over 90 days, I can convert my BA Avios to Iberia Avios, which let me use points for a direct ORD-MAD flight this spring at a small fraction of the cash for fees and taxes that BA would charge.</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, good. I’ve found the flights, I’ve found the page on BA.com to transfer. I enter all the account info, press the button, and get a big red error screen. Hmmm… I try it a couple of more times, same result. Different browsers, same result. In incognito mode so there’s no legacy cookies, same result. Hmmm…</li>\r\n 	<li>So I dredge around BA’s site and find a technical support number. It’s Saturday afternoon Chicago time, but after a good bit of music, I get a live guy. And he’s a good guy. Here’s the problem, your name doesn’t match on your accounts -- it’s Mark Peacock on your BA account, and Mark Peacock Peacock on your Iberia account. You’ll need to call Iberia to change that, then the transfer will go through. OK, seems reasonable enough. So I call Iberia, again listen to music and again get a live person. Good guy, but he can’t help me. Here’s a number in Spain; give them a call. Which I do, a bit more music, and then another guy. We’ll need some documentation to make that change, send a picture of the first page of your passport to this Iberia email address and we’ll make the change.</li>\r\n 	<li>Lots of calls, spoke to some nice people, but I still can’t break these BA Avios points free. So I send the email, but I don’t expect this to get resolved soon. I open another beer and gear myself up for another fare search, but decide to give BA one more call. This time, I connect with a woman with a proper northern English accent. It felt like I’d somehow overflowed into a high status group; like when I was Global Services on United and agents picking up my calls were sitting in the corporate center near ORD and could make anything happen. I relate my tale of woe; “Oh, that’s no problem,” she says. Five minutes later, it’s done. Thanks to her, I got to redeem 100,000 Avios points and am feeling a bit more hopeful about the remaining balance. The only downside -- I didn’t get the woman’s name so I could give her a shout out. By the way, 3.5 weeks later and still no response to my email to Iberia.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\">\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #136</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_136.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #137 — New Year\'s Travel Status Tips; How to Shop for a Suitcase','','inherit','closed','closed','','1916-revision-v1','','','2018-01-22 21:08:22','2018-01-23 02:08:22','',1916,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/01/22/1916-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1922,1,'2018-01-22 21:10:24','2018-01-23 02:10:24','After traveling with younger colleagues who pay for everything with cards, I wonder if I\'m the last generation of cash payers. I also talk about the upcoming smart luggage ban on US airlines and a long Saturday afternoon trying to redeem some British Airways Avios points. All this, a new Uber driver story, and a few Christmas carols at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_136.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/371970371\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /] <!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #137:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. This episode is sponsored by <a href=\"http://go.travelperk.com/travelcommons\">TravelPerk</a>, the #1 rated business travel tool on the Internet. It’s been a light travel month, just a drive down to Nashville, and a couple of trips over to Charlottesville, VA, which has been a nice break from what is otherwise turning out to be a brutally cold winter in Chicago. The day after New Years, I walked out of the house into a -10℉ morning -- not windchill, it was -10℉ ambient. Welcome to January. I had my team travel here last week for a 2018 kick-off meeting. No one accused us of boon-doggling. The guy from Phoenix did say he was filing an employee abuse claim though.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’ve found myself drinking less craft beer and much more Scotch whisky in this month; -10℉ is definitely brown liquor weather. Luckily, my daughter brought home a nice bottle of 18-year-old <a href=\"http://www.glenscotia.com/\">Glen Scotia</a> from Edinburgh for Christmas. I’ve made a sizable dent in it.</li>\r\n 	<li>On my first trip to Charlottesville, after being off the road for four weeks, it took me forever to gather up all the bits of my regular travel carry from around the house. Normally, my travel carry stays in my backpack and my suitcase; I buy duplicates of things like hair brushes and headphones just so I don’t need to pull them out of my bag. But for some reason, all discipline broke down over the holidays and my carefully curated travel carry was spread/spewed throughout the house. Luckily, my ride to ORD was 5 minutes late. I took my Bluesmart bag, squeezed in one last trip before American’s January 15th smart luggage ban took effect. I tweeted a picture of my Bluesmart before boarding. American replied “We\'re glad you\'re flying with us and appreciate your cooperation with our team.” My response -- “Not that I have much of a choice…” Especially with IATA recommending the ban to its 300 airline members. My new non-smart Victorinox bag arrived on my front porch before the ban clicked in, so once I shift everything from the Bluesmart to the Victorinox, I’ll power down the Bluesmart, delete its app from my iPhone, and consign it to the corner of the attic with all my other retired bags -- my own Land of Misfit Bags.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/copperhead/40520\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen</a> by copperhead (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: Admiral Bob, Javolenus , Sackjo22</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Starting off the New Year, I did a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/01/01/looking-back-at-2017-the-highs-and-the-lows/\">blog post</a> summarizing some of the high and low points that we talked about in 2017. The high points? Things like Uber and Lyft driver stories, yet more craft beer taprooms, and Hertz’s President Circle Aisle. Low points? Airlines dragging passengers from planes, everybody lobbying for 5-star reviews, and, no surprise, the smart luggage ban.</li>\r\n 	<li>Allan Marko, not just a long-time TravelCommon’s listener, but probably one of the original listeners showed his roots by posting on the original comment channel -- the TravelCommons website\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Have had our Away luggage for only about six months prior to the battery ban. I really like the ‘smart’ charging feature. Luckily the Away battery is a nicely designed self-contained and easily removable unit (two screws; screwdriver included!) Now the battery lives in my backpack, and the luggage still usable.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\"></li>\r\n 	<li>Allan’s psychic capabilities are showing. I think Away is the only major smart bag that meets the airlines’ requirement for a removable battery. But for me, charging wasn’t the major use case for me. I’m typically fine with my Anker lipstick charger. And if I forget to recharge that, my Verizon mobile WiFi hotspot also doubles as a charger. For me, the GPS tracking was the main use case -- for those times I had to check my bag, it was nice to know that it had also made it to my destination -- a use case that requires power. Pull out the battery and no more tracking. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted.</li>\r\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\"></li>\r\n 	<li>Jim McDonough replied to the Twitter announcement of the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">last episode</a> where I wondered if I was the last generation of cash payers. Jim wrote\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I use cash a) at the local farmer’s market; b) pay for haircuts . . . having a hard time coming up with c)</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Jim, I dunno. Looking at your Twitter profile picture, you look like you could land in my generation. I apologize for using a card for anything under $20. Although I have to say that more and more microbrewery taprooms only take credit cards. I don’t apologize there; or at the self-service tills in Home Depot or Tesco’s -- mostly because there’s no one to apologize to even though they will take cash.</li>\r\n 	<li>Natalie on the British Airways social media team <a href=\"https://twitter.com/British_Airways/status/943550974102245376\">tweeted back</a> at me about the other topic on the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">last episode</a> -- about how hard it can be to cash in on loyalty points. You’ll remember that I talked about all the hassles I had in transferring Avios points from BA to Iberia, until I got a BA agent with solid northern accent. Natalie of BA said\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Hey Mark! Thanks for tagging us in your article. I\'m glad to hear that one of our \'Geordie\' colleagues was able to help you redeem some of your Avios. It\'s a shame you didn\'t catch her name though.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Absolutely it was a shame. She deserves huge props.</li>\r\n 	<li>In that same riff, I mentioned how my email to Iberia to clean up my name on my Iberia Plus account -- which might have been the root cause of my point transfer problem -- seemed to have fallen into a black hole. Well, apparently it didn’t. Soon after that episode, I got a letter from Iberia with a new card that had my correct name. That was nice. Would’ve been just a bit nicer if they’d hit the Reply button while handling the email and typed, I dunno, just 8 words -- “Got it fixed; new card in the mail” But it got done -- all of it, Avios points, non-stop ORD-MAD flight on points, and now, a card with my correct name.</li>\r\n 	<li>And that Iberia letter was probably one of the last surprises I got when I open the mailbox at home. Somehow, I’m not quite sure how, I signed up for a US Post Office service that sends me an email every morning with scanned images of letters I’m going to receive that day. When I got that first email, I was kinda “What the hell?”, but now I kinda like it, especially when I’m on the road. No more wondering what bills showed up, or during the holidays, who had sent us Christmas cards. It does kinda take the surprise out of opening the mailbox -- though not that there was much left since 90% of our physical mail is junk -- but it is kinda entertaining.</li>\r\n 	<li>Back in August, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/08/27/podcast-132-travel-apps-on-my-phone/\">episode #132</a> about the travel apps I have loaded on my phone, I talked about using the paid or “Pro” version of TripIt, and about how it was on the bubble for me because of how the airlines have improved the flight status notifications in their own apps. In 4 months since then, the airline apps have pretty consistently notified me of gate changes and delays faster than TripIt Pro. And so when my subscription ran out a few weeks ago, I ignored the renewal alerts. I’ll still use the free version -- I like the way TripIt consolidates separate plane, hotel, and rental car reservations into a single trip -- kinda replicating the itineraries your travel agent used to give you when they booked your entire trip. But paying $50 for what are now slower, redundant flight alerts? I’ll spend it on beer or brown liquor instead.</li>\r\n 	<li>I don’t know if it’s just me, but the cadence for boarding groups has gotten out of control. I think I was on a Delta flight where I was boarding group 1 or 2, but was the 4th or 5th group to board, after Delta One, and then Platinum Medallion, then Gold Medallion, Sky Team Elite -- it went on forever. American is a bit better -- only one non-numeric boarding group for the invite-only Concierge Key gang (remember George Clooney in Up In The Air) -- and then 1 through 9(!). I do love the announcement “If you don’t have a boarding group number, then board Group 7” which feels a bit random. Where it really becomes fun is on a regional jet, when the gate agent runs through this cadence for a plane with only 40-50 passengers and all the carry-on bags are gate… I mean valet checked. “Now boarding passengers in Group 1, Group 2, Group 3…” Four people board… “Groups 5, 6, 7, and the rest of you” followed by general scrum in front of the agent. I know the airlines have PhDs in psychology, sociology, and linear programming working on this stuff, but it continues to be a cluster</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>And thanks to this episode’s sponsor TravelPerk</li>\r\n 	<li>Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/11/20/podcast-135-airport-bingo-new-old-travel-pc/\">November episode</a>, I talked about American\'s last-minute cancellation of my night flight to Charlottesville and my ensuing scramble to find a replacement flight and to make sure the Hyatt Place didn\'t flush my reservation. But if I\'d booked with TravelPerk, they would\'ve done the scrambling for me.\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>This all-in-one business travel management tool includes a team of highly qualified agents ready to rescue disgruntled travelers from any scenario 24/7.</li>\r\n 	<li>It’s because of making magic happen in times like this that TravelPerk is now the #1 rated business travel tool on the internet.</li>\r\n 	<li>You\'ll love them because you can finally take control of your travel schedule, have freedom to book alternative accommodation like Airbnb, and have a built-in rescue team when stuff goes south. Remove some stress from the equation, go to <a href=\"http://go.travelperk.com/travelcommons\">go.travelperk.com/travelcommons</a> for a no-commitment test drive.</li>\r\n 	<li>It’s free forever if you to <a href=\"http://go.travelperk.com/travelcommons\">go.travelperk.com/travelcommons</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/NiGiD/48586\">O Tannenbaum / Oh Christmas Tree</a> by Martijn de Boer (NiGiD) (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license.  Ft: Admiral Bob (admiralbob77)</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Is Cash is a Waning King?</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>As I said at the start of the show, my last trip this year was ORD to LGA to CHO. I didn’t arrive too late so there were a couple of cabs waiting -- no LGA-style lines, I just hopped in. It’s a $25 flat rate to downtown Charlottesville. We pulled up to my hotel, I gave the driver a 20 and a 10 and got out of the cab. “Cash? Thanks!” he said.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’ve said this before; I try to pay all of my cab fares in cash ever since one cab driver walked me through why he hates cards. There’s a timing problem-- he has to pay for gas, tolls, airport access fees, and the taxi company that day, but he doesn’t get his money until a couple of days later. And then there’s the high fees the processing companies charge taxi drivers.</li>\r\n 	<li>But when traveling with younger colleagues, I feel like I’m the last generation of cash payers. Not only do they pay for everything with a card, many of them don’t even carry cash. Maybe I’m just getting old, or maybe I remember when you couldn’t use cards everywhere.</li>\r\n 	<li>Especially in Europe in the late ‘80’s/early ‘90’s when I would be in a different country every day on sales calls with distributors. There weren’t international ATMs -- or really ATMs of any kind. We’d get a wallet full of American Express Travelers Checks before flying out and then typically cash a $100 check at the airport currency exchange after customs. This was before the euro, so we’d juggle D Marks, Belgian and French francs, British and Irish pounds, pesetas, lira,.... Almost all of the hotels we stayed in took credit cards -- except for this one random mom-&amp;-pop place outside of Munich; nice people but they screwed up my D Mark budget -- but not all restaurants and none of the taxis did. So our currency exit strategy -- so we didn’t pay double the exchange fees for having to go in and out of a currency that we might not use for another year or so -- was to throw down most of our excess cash at the hotel in the morning, saving enough for a sandwich, the cab back to the airport and a beer at the bar -- and then put on the Amex the balance of the hotel room. It usually worked well -- except for the one time that I mixed up the exchange rate between the Swedish krona and Swiss franc. Not an unreasonable mix up -- both countries start with an S and have a lot of snow -- but the krona exchange rate was about 6 to the dollar at that time while the Swiss franc was at 1.3 to the dollar. That one definitely screwed up my end-of-day cash strategy.</li>\r\n 	<li>But I absolutely understand the use case for going all plastic. First, you’re not having to float the money between travel and reimbursement. But I gotta think convenience is the bigger play. Many companies pipe their company card transactions straight into their expense reporting systems. Makes it incredibly easy -- log into Concur or whatever, assign each charge to an expense code and submit. Nothing forgotten and you’re done in 5 minutes. With cash, you have to remember what you spent, enter it, and probably submit a receipt too. I’ll never pay for my $2 ORD Starbucks coffee with my Amex card, but when the cab fare get above $50, even I’ll charge it.</li>\r\n 	<li>I do think it’s a bit of a generational thing, though. I remember my dad always walking around with a bunch of 50’s in a money clip in his pocket. And my kids always getting a $100 bill from their Hungarian grandparents for Christmas -- we’d call it the Eastern European C note. I now have a Venmo account, but I still like paying people back in cash. Feels like I need say “Get off my lawn” but I may not have completely aged out yet. When paying my daughter’s tuition at Univ of St Andrews, one sentence on the web site caught my eye -- “Ideally tuition and accommodation fees should not be paid in cash” -- which means that someone or multiple someones has done it. It’s not a travel expense, but the image of someone walking into the St Andrews bursar’s office and stacking piles of 100 pound notes just makes me smile. Makes me want to drop a C note on my next big cab ride.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/44580\"> What Child is This (Instrumental)</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license.  Ft: Jeris</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Don’t Make It Hard to Cash in on Loyalty</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\">\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\">\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Back in October, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/10/31/podcast-134-value-of-loyalty-need-those-5-stars/\">episode 134</a>, we talked about the value of loyalty. In November, JD Powers released their 2017 Airline Loyalty Program Satisfaction Study. Powers measured satisfaction “based on four factors (in order of importance): earning and redeeming rewards; program benefits; account management; and member communication”. Not a surprising list, and placing “redeeming awards” at the top makes sense since that’s sorta the core of a loyalty program -- here’s something to incent you to fly us more.</li>\r\n 	<li>A couple of years ago, in episode 116, I talked about why, for me, British Airways’ Avios program has been the worst program for redemptions. I had over 300,000 points sitting there because it never made sense to use them. When I’d price out an award ticket between Chicago and London, the addition cash I would owe for BA’s fuel surcharges (which made sense when oil was at $120/bbl, but much less so at $50) and Heathrow landing taxes would just about equal what I’d pay for a ticket with another airline -- so the miles were worth nothing. Not exactly a best practice for an airline loyalty program.</li>\r\n 	<li>But, when BA and Iberia, both owned by the same corporate parent, kinda combined their programs into, not a single but a sorta interchangeable Avios program, I thought there might be a way to finally get some value from my forlorn BA points. I said kinda interchangeable because I now have 2 Avios accounts -- a BA Avios account and an Iberia Avios account. And since I have had my Iberia Avios account for over 90 days, I can convert my BA Avios to Iberia Avios, which let me use points for a direct ORD-MAD flight this spring at a small fraction of the cash for fees and taxes that BA would charge.</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, good. I’ve found the flights, I’ve found the page on BA.com to transfer. I enter all the account info, press the button, and get a big red error screen. Hmmm… I try it a couple of more times, same result. Different browsers, same result. In incognito mode so there’s no legacy cookies, same result. Hmmm…</li>\r\n 	<li>So I dredge around BA’s site and find a technical support number. It’s Saturday afternoon Chicago time, but after a good bit of music, I get a live guy. And he’s a good guy. Here’s the problem, your name doesn’t match on your accounts -- it’s Mark Peacock on your BA account, and Mark Peacock Peacock on your Iberia account. You’ll need to call Iberia to change that, then the transfer will go through. OK, seems reasonable enough. So I call Iberia, again listen to music and again get a live person. Good guy, but he can’t help me. Here’s a number in Spain; give them a call. Which I do, a bit more music, and then another guy. We’ll need some documentation to make that change, send a picture of the first page of your passport to this Iberia email address and we’ll make the change.</li>\r\n 	<li>Lots of calls, spoke to some nice people, but I still can’t break these BA Avios points free. So I send the email, but I don’t expect this to get resolved soon. I open another beer and gear myself up for another fare search, but decide to give BA one more call. This time, I connect with a woman with a proper northern English accent. It felt like I’d somehow overflowed into a high status group; like when I was Global Services on United and agents picking up my calls were sitting in the corporate center near ORD and could make anything happen. I relate my tale of woe; “Oh, that’s no problem,” she says. Five minutes later, it’s done. Thanks to her, I got to redeem 100,000 Avios points and am feeling a bit more hopeful about the remaining balance. The only downside -- I didn’t get the woman’s name so I could give her a shout out. By the way, 3.5 weeks later and still no response to my email to Iberia.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\">\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #136</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_136.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #137 — New Year\'s Travel Status Tips; How to Shop for a Suitcase','','inherit','closed','closed','','1916-revision-v1','','','2018-01-22 21:10:24','2018-01-23 02:10:24','',1916,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/01/22/1916-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1923,1,'2018-01-22 21:12:46','2018-01-23 02:12:46','After traveling with younger colleagues who pay for everything with cards, I wonder if I\'m the last generation of cash payers. I also talk about the upcoming smart luggage ban on US airlines and a long Saturday afternoon trying to redeem some British Airways Avios points. All this, a new Uber driver story, and a few Christmas carols at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_136.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/371970371\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /] <!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #137:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. This episode is sponsored by <a href=\"http://go.travelperk.com/travelcommons\">TravelPerk</a>, the #1 rated business travel tool on the Internet. It’s been a light travel month, just a drive down to Nashville, and a couple of trips over to Charlottesville, VA, which has been a nice break from what is otherwise turning out to be a brutally cold winter in Chicago. The day after New Years, I walked out of the house into a -10℉ morning -- not windchill, it was -10℉ ambient. Welcome to January. I had my team travel here last week for a 2018 kick-off meeting. No one accused us of boon-doggling. The guy from Phoenix did say he was filing an employee abuse claim though.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’ve found myself drinking less craft beer and much more Scotch whisky in this month; -10℉ is definitely brown liquor weather. Luckily, my daughter brought home a nice bottle of 18-year-old <a href=\"http://www.glenscotia.com/\">Glen Scotia</a> from Edinburgh for Christmas. I’ve made a sizable dent in it.</li>\r\n 	<li>On my first trip to Charlottesville, after being off the road for four weeks, it took me forever to gather up all the bits of my regular travel carry from around the house. Normally, my travel carry stays in my backpack and my suitcase; I buy duplicates of things like hair brushes and headphones just so I don’t need to pull them out of my bag. But for some reason, all discipline broke down over the holidays and my carefully curated travel carry was spread/spewed throughout the house. Luckily, my ride to ORD was 5 minutes late. I took my Bluesmart bag, squeezed in one last trip before American’s January 15th smart luggage ban took effect. I tweeted a picture of my Bluesmart before boarding. American replied “We\'re glad you\'re flying with us and appreciate your cooperation with our team.” My response -- “Not that I have much of a choice…” Especially with IATA recommending the ban to its 300 airline members. My new non-smart Victorinox bag arrived on my front porch before the ban clicked in, so once I shift everything from the Bluesmart to the Victorinox, I’ll power down the Bluesmart, delete its app from my iPhone, and consign it to the corner of the attic with all my other retired bags -- my own Land of Misfit Bags.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/copperhead/40520\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen</a> by copperhead (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: Admiral Bob, Javolenus , Sackjo22</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Starting off the New Year, I did a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/01/01/looking-back-at-2017-the-highs-and-the-lows/\">blog post</a> summarizing some of the high and low points that we talked about in 2017. The high points? Things like Uber and Lyft driver stories, yet more craft beer taprooms, and Hertz’s President Circle Aisle. Low points? Airlines dragging passengers from planes, everybody lobbying for 5-star reviews, and, no surprise, the smart luggage ban.</li>\r\n 	<li>Allan Marko, not just a long-time TravelCommon’s listener, but probably one of the original listeners showed his roots by posting on the original comment channel -- the TravelCommons website\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Have had our Away luggage for only about six months prior to the battery ban. I really like the ‘smart’ charging feature. Luckily the Away battery is a nicely designed self-contained and easily removable unit (two screws; screwdriver included!) Now the battery lives in my backpack, and the luggage still usable.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\"></li>\r\n 	<li>Allan’s psychic capabilities are showing. I think Away is the only major smart bag that meets the airlines’ requirement for a removable battery. But for me, charging wasn’t the major use case for me. I’m typically fine with my Anker lipstick charger. And if I forget to recharge that, my Verizon mobile WiFi hotspot also doubles as a charger. For me, the GPS tracking was the main use case -- for those times I had to check my bag, it was nice to know that it had also made it to my destination -- a use case that requires power. Pull out the battery and no more tracking. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted.</li>\r\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\"></li>\r\n 	<li>Jim McDonough replied to the Twitter announcement of the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">last episode</a> where I wondered if I was the last generation of cash payers. Jim wrote\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I use cash a) at the local farmer’s market; b) pay for haircuts . . . having a hard time coming up with c)</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Jim, I dunno. Looking at your Twitter profile picture, you look like you could land in my generation. I apologize for using a card for anything under $20. Although I have to say that more and more microbrewery taprooms only take credit cards. I don’t apologize there; or at the self-service tills in Home Depot or Tesco’s -- mostly because there’s no one to apologize to even though they will take cash.</li>\r\n 	<li>Natalie on the British Airways social media team <a href=\"https://twitter.com/British_Airways/status/943550974102245376\">tweeted back</a> at me about the other topic on the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">last episode</a> -- about how hard it can be to cash in on loyalty points. You’ll remember that I talked about all the hassles I had in transferring Avios points from BA to Iberia, until I got a BA agent with solid northern accent. Natalie of BA said\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Hey Mark! Thanks for tagging us in your article. I\'m glad to hear that one of our \'Geordie\' colleagues was able to help you redeem some of your Avios. It\'s a shame you didn\'t catch her name though.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Absolutely it was a shame. She deserves huge props.</li>\r\n 	<li>In that same riff, I mentioned how my email to Iberia to clean up my name on my Iberia Plus account -- which might have been the root cause of my point transfer problem -- seemed to have fallen into a black hole. Well, apparently it didn’t. Soon after that episode, I got a letter from Iberia with a new card that had my correct name. That was nice. Would’ve been just a bit nicer if they’d hit the Reply button while handling the email and typed, I dunno, just 8 words -- “Got it fixed; new card in the mail” But it got done -- all of it, Avios points, non-stop ORD-MAD flight on points, and now, a card with my correct name.</li>\r\n 	<li>And that Iberia letter was probably one of the last surprises I got when I open the mailbox at home. Somehow, I’m not quite sure how, I signed up for a US Post Office service that sends me an email every morning with scanned images of letters I’m going to receive that day. When I got that first email, I was kinda “What the hell?”, but now I kinda like it, especially when I’m on the road. No more wondering what bills showed up, or during the holidays, who had sent us Christmas cards. It does kinda take the surprise out of opening the mailbox -- though not that there was much left since 90% of our physical mail is junk -- but it is kinda entertaining.</li>\r\n 	<li>Back in August, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/08/27/podcast-132-travel-apps-on-my-phone/\">episode #132</a> about the travel apps I have loaded on my phone, I talked about using the paid or “Pro” version of TripIt, and about how it was on the bubble for me because of how the airlines have improved the flight status notifications in their own apps. In 4 months since then, the airline apps have pretty consistently notified me of gate changes and delays faster than TripIt Pro. And so when my subscription ran out a few weeks ago, I ignored the renewal alerts. I’ll still use the free version -- I like the way TripIt consolidates separate plane, hotel, and rental car reservations into a single trip -- kinda replicating the itineraries your travel agent used to give you when they booked your entire trip. But paying $50 for what are now slower, redundant flight alerts? I’ll spend it on beer or brown liquor instead.</li>\r\n 	<li>I don’t know if it’s just me, but the cadence for boarding groups has gotten out of control. I think I was on a Delta flight where I was boarding group 1 or 2, but was the 4th or 5th group to board, after Delta One, and then Platinum Medallion, then Gold Medallion, Sky Team Elite -- it went on forever. American is a bit better -- only one non-numeric boarding group for the invite-only Concierge Key gang (remember George Clooney in Up In The Air) -- and then 1 through 9(!). I do love the announcement “If you don’t have a boarding group number, then board Group 7” which feels a bit random. Where it really becomes fun is on a regional jet, when the gate agent runs through this cadence for a plane with only 40-50 passengers and all the carry-on bags are gate… I mean valet checked. “Now boarding passengers in Group 1, Group 2, Group 3…” Four people board… “Groups 5, 6, 7, and the rest of you” followed by general scrum in front of the agent. I know the airlines have PhDs in psychology, sociology, and linear programming working on this stuff, but it continues to be a cluster</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>And thanks to this episode’s sponsor TravelPerk</li>\r\n 	<li>Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/11/20/podcast-135-airport-bingo-new-old-travel-pc/\">November episode</a>, I talked about American\'s last-minute cancellation of my night flight to Charlottesville and my ensuing scramble to find a replacement flight and to make sure the Hyatt Place didn\'t flush my reservation. But if I\'d booked with TravelPerk, they would\'ve done the scrambling for me.\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>This all-in-one business travel management tool includes a team of highly qualified agents ready to rescue disgruntled travelers from any scenario 24/7.</li>\r\n 	<li>It’s because of making magic happen in times like this that TravelPerk is now the #1 rated business travel tool on the internet.</li>\r\n 	<li>You\'ll love them because you can finally take control of your travel schedule, have freedom to book alternative accommodation like Airbnb, and have a built-in rescue team when stuff goes south. Remove some stress from the equation, go to <a href=\"http://go.travelperk.com/travelcommons\">go.travelperk.com/travelcommons</a> for a no-commitment test drive.</li>\r\n 	<li>It’s free forever if you to <a href=\"http://go.travelperk.com/travelcommons\">go.travelperk.com/travelcommons</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/NiGiD/48586\">O Tannenbaum / Oh Christmas Tree</a> by Martijn de Boer (NiGiD) (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license.  Ft: Admiral Bob (admiralbob77)</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Plan for 2018 Travel Perks</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>So here we are, 4 weeks into the new year and anywhere from a third to a half of us have already ditched our New Year\'s resolutions and are now in full anticipation of Super Bowl queso dip. But while your dry January may have been washed out early, you still have time to get your 2018 travel perks in place.</li>\r\n 	<li>Almost all travel perks come from status in loyalty programs and all those status earning counts reset on Jan 1, so the first step is to match up what you think your 2018 travel plans will be to your loyalty programs. Any gaps? If you think you’ll start flying to Seattle (maybe helping to shill your hometown for Amazon’s HQ2), you’ll probably want to sign up for Alaskan Airlines Mileage Plan, where before, it might not have been worth the extra junk mail.</li>\r\n 	<li>Or if you’re already a member, do a status match. When I took a new CIO job some years back, all the hotels near our offices were Hilton brands. I had a Hilton\'s Honors card but just in basic blue as opposed to my top-of-the-line sparkly platinum Marriott card. After I hit the “reset my password” link on the Hilton website, I went straight to their status match page. Right at the top, it says “For the next 90 days,... we’ll match your elite status with any other loyalty program.” If you complete 4 or 8 stays over those 90 days, the match is good for the year. So rather than having to grind my way to Hilton status, I started enjoying it on Day 1. I had a friend do that with American -- parlay his United 1K status to Executive Platinum when he moved from Denver to Dallas. Much better than slumming in Boarding Group 5 until you clear the first status bar.</li>\r\n 	<li>Doing this, you also need to keep in mind the different ecosystems; the partnerships that tie travel companies together. It used to be just the international alliances -- Star, SkyTeam, OneWorld. When I knew I’d be traveling down to South Africa, racking up some serious business class mileage, I had two real options -- SAA out of JFK and IAD, or DL out of ATL. Living in Chicago, I chose SAA because they’re part of Star Alliance with United, and I’d get a lot more use from United status out of Chicago than I would Delta. And it’s getting even more combinatorial now with United and Marriott are status matching each other.</li>\r\n 	<li>And then there’s the credit cards -- both affinity (United and Chase Visa, American and Citi MasterCard) and non (Amex Platinum, Chase Sapphire Reserve). You gotta do the math. For example, Amex’s Platinum card is $550/year. But with that, you get Membership Rewards points that transfer to airlines and hotels, access to Delta lounges and Amex’s Centurion Lounges, which if you travel frequently to DFW, LAS, MIA, LGA, and now JFK, is great. They’re much better than, say American’s Admirals Clubs. I wish they had one in Chicago. Amex also picks up the $100 Global Entry or $85 PreCheck fee, gives you 10 GoGo WiFi sessions, $200 in Uber credit, and some other benefits. If you’ll use these benefits, that $550 can be a better deal than, say, the $95 that the United Chase will cost you. However, that United Chase will get you baggage fee waiver, two United Club passes, and status boarding. If you don’t travel a huge amount and live in a United hub like Houston, the United card could be a better deal. But you gotta think about your travel, do the math, and sign up for it now so you have all year to maximize the status benefits.</li>\r\n 	<li>And while you’re in this planning zone, do yourself a big favor sign up and make an appointment for Global Entry if you do international travel, or PreCheck if you’re mostly a domestic flyer. If it makes sense for you to get an Amex Platinum or Chase Sapphire Reserve card, it’ll be free. To me, TSA and Customs lines are still the worst part of travel. While you’re figuring out how to bump your status up your status on airlines and hotels, do yourself a favor and step out of those TSA and Customs lines too.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/44580\"> What Child is This (Instrumental)</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license.  Ft: Jeris</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Don’t Make It Hard to Cash in on Loyalty</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Back in October, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/10/31/podcast-134-value-of-loyalty-need-those-5-stars/\">episode 134</a>, we talked about the value of loyalty. In November, JD Powers released their 2017 Airline Loyalty Program Satisfaction Study. Powers measured satisfaction “based on four factors (in order of importance): earning and redeeming rewards; program benefits; account management; and member communication”. Not a surprising list, and placing “redeeming awards” at the top makes sense since that’s sorta the core of a loyalty program -- here’s something to incent you to fly us more.</li>\r\n 	<li>A couple of years ago, in episode 116, I talked about why, for me, British Airways’ Avios program has been the worst program for redemptions. I had over 300,000 points sitting there because it never made sense to use them. When I’d price out an award ticket between Chicago and London, the addition cash I would owe for BA’s fuel surcharges (which made sense when oil was at $120/bbl, but much less so at $50) and Heathrow landing taxes would just about equal what I’d pay for a ticket with another airline -- so the miles were worth nothing. Not exactly a best practice for an airline loyalty program.</li>\r\n 	<li>But, when BA and Iberia, both owned by the same corporate parent, kinda combined their programs into, not a single but a sorta interchangeable Avios program, I thought there might be a way to finally get some value from my forlorn BA points. I said kinda interchangeable because I now have 2 Avios accounts -- a BA Avios account and an Iberia Avios account. And since I have had my Iberia Avios account for over 90 days, I can convert my BA Avios to Iberia Avios, which let me use points for a direct ORD-MAD flight this spring at a small fraction of the cash for fees and taxes that BA would charge.</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, good. I’ve found the flights, I’ve found the page on BA.com to transfer. I enter all the account info, press the button, and get a big red error screen. Hmmm… I try it a couple of more times, same result. Different browsers, same result. In incognito mode so there’s no legacy cookies, same result. Hmmm…</li>\r\n 	<li>So I dredge around BA’s site and find a technical support number. It’s Saturday afternoon Chicago time, but after a good bit of music, I get a live guy. And he’s a good guy. Here’s the problem, your name doesn’t match on your accounts -- it’s Mark Peacock on your BA account, and Mark Peacock Peacock on your Iberia account. You’ll need to call Iberia to change that, then the transfer will go through. OK, seems reasonable enough. So I call Iberia, again listen to music and again get a live person. Good guy, but he can’t help me. Here’s a number in Spain; give them a call. Which I do, a bit more music, and then another guy. We’ll need some documentation to make that change, send a picture of the first page of your passport to this Iberia email address and we’ll make the change.</li>\r\n 	<li>Lots of calls, spoke to some nice people, but I still can’t break these BA Avios points free. So I send the email, but I don’t expect this to get resolved soon. I open another beer and gear myself up for another fare search, but decide to give BA one more call. This time, I connect with a woman with a proper northern English accent. It felt like I’d somehow overflowed into a high status group; like when I was Global Services on United and agents picking up my calls were sitting in the corporate center near ORD and could make anything happen. I relate my tale of woe; “Oh, that’s no problem,” she says. Five minutes later, it’s done. Thanks to her, I got to redeem 100,000 Avios points and am feeling a bit more hopeful about the remaining balance. The only downside -- I didn’t get the woman’s name so I could give her a shout out. By the way, 3.5 weeks later and still no response to my email to Iberia.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\">\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #136</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_136.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #137 — New Year\'s Travel Status Tips; How to Shop for a Suitcase','','inherit','closed','closed','','1916-revision-v1','','','2018-01-22 21:12:46','2018-01-23 02:12:46','',1916,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/01/22/1916-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1924,1,'2018-01-22 21:18:15','2018-01-23 02:18:15','After traveling with younger colleagues who pay for everything with cards, I wonder if I\'m the last generation of cash payers. I also talk about the upcoming smart luggage ban on US airlines and a long Saturday afternoon trying to redeem some British Airways Avios points. All this, a new Uber driver story, and a few Christmas carols at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_137.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/371970371\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /] <!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #137:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. This episode is sponsored by <a href=\"http://go.travelperk.com/travelcommons\">TravelPerk</a>, the #1 rated business travel tool on the Internet. It’s been a light travel month, just a drive down to Nashville, and a couple of trips over to Charlottesville, VA, which has been a nice break from what is otherwise turning out to be a brutally cold winter in Chicago. The day after New Years, I walked out of the house into a -10℉ morning -- not windchill, it was -10℉ ambient. Welcome to January. I had my team travel here last week for a 2018 kick-off meeting. No one accused us of boon-doggling. The guy from Phoenix did say he was filing an employee abuse claim though.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’ve found myself drinking less craft beer and much more Scotch whisky in this month; -10℉ is definitely brown liquor weather. Luckily, my daughter brought home a nice bottle of 18-year-old <a href=\"http://www.glenscotia.com/\">Glen Scotia</a> from Edinburgh for Christmas. I’ve made a sizable dent in it.</li>\r\n 	<li>On my first trip to Charlottesville, after being off the road for four weeks, it took me forever to gather up all the bits of my regular travel carry from around the house. Normally, my travel carry stays in my backpack and my suitcase; I buy duplicates of things like hair brushes and headphones just so I don’t need to pull them out of my bag. But for some reason, all discipline broke down over the holidays and my carefully curated travel carry was spread/spewed throughout the house. Luckily, my ride to ORD was 5 minutes late. I took my Bluesmart bag, squeezed in one last trip before American’s January 15th smart luggage ban took effect. I tweeted a picture of my Bluesmart before boarding. American replied “We\'re glad you\'re flying with us and appreciate your cooperation with our team.” My response -- “Not that I have much of a choice…” Especially with IATA recommending the ban to its 300 airline members. My new non-smart Victorinox bag arrived on my front porch before the ban clicked in, so once I shift everything from the Bluesmart to the Victorinox, I’ll power down the Bluesmart, delete its app from my iPhone, and consign it to the corner of the attic with all my other retired bags -- my own Land of Misfit Bags.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/copperhead/40520\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen</a> by copperhead (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: Admiral Bob, Javolenus , Sackjo22</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Starting off the New Year, I did a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/01/01/looking-back-at-2017-the-highs-and-the-lows/\">blog post</a> summarizing some of the high and low points that we talked about in 2017. The high points? Things like Uber and Lyft driver stories, yet more craft beer taprooms, and Hertz’s President Circle Aisle. Low points? Airlines dragging passengers from planes, everybody lobbying for 5-star reviews, and, no surprise, the smart luggage ban.</li>\r\n 	<li>Allan Marko, not just a long-time TravelCommon’s listener, but probably one of the original listeners showed his roots by posting on the original comment channel -- the TravelCommons website\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Have had our Away luggage for only about six months prior to the battery ban. I really like the ‘smart’ charging feature. Luckily the Away battery is a nicely designed self-contained and easily removable unit (two screws; screwdriver included!) Now the battery lives in my backpack, and the luggage still usable.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\"></li>\r\n 	<li>Allan’s psychic capabilities are showing. I think Away is the only major smart bag that meets the airlines’ requirement for a removable battery. But for me, charging wasn’t the major use case for me. I’m typically fine with my Anker lipstick charger. And if I forget to recharge that, my Verizon mobile WiFi hotspot also doubles as a charger. For me, the GPS tracking was the main use case -- for those times I had to check my bag, it was nice to know that it had also made it to my destination -- a use case that requires power. Pull out the battery and no more tracking. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted.</li>\r\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\"></li>\r\n 	<li>Jim McDonough replied to the Twitter announcement of the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">last episode</a> where I wondered if I was the last generation of cash payers. Jim wrote\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I use cash a) at the local farmer’s market; b) pay for haircuts . . . having a hard time coming up with c)</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Jim, I dunno. Looking at your Twitter profile picture, you look like you could land in my generation. I apologize for using a card for anything under $20. Although I have to say that more and more microbrewery taprooms only take credit cards. I don’t apologize there; or at the self-service tills in Home Depot or Tesco’s -- mostly because there’s no one to apologize to even though they will take cash.</li>\r\n 	<li>Natalie on the British Airways social media team <a href=\"https://twitter.com/British_Airways/status/943550974102245376\">tweeted back</a> at me about the other topic on the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">last episode</a> -- about how hard it can be to cash in on loyalty points. You’ll remember that I talked about all the hassles I had in transferring Avios points from BA to Iberia, until I got a BA agent with solid northern accent. Natalie of BA said\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Hey Mark! Thanks for tagging us in your article. I\'m glad to hear that one of our \'Geordie\' colleagues was able to help you redeem some of your Avios. It\'s a shame you didn\'t catch her name though.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Absolutely it was a shame. She deserves huge props.</li>\r\n 	<li>In that same riff, I mentioned how my email to Iberia to clean up my name on my Iberia Plus account -- which might have been the root cause of my point transfer problem -- seemed to have fallen into a black hole. Well, apparently it didn’t. Soon after that episode, I got a letter from Iberia with a new card that had my correct name. That was nice. Would’ve been just a bit nicer if they’d hit the Reply button while handling the email and typed, I dunno, just 8 words -- “Got it fixed; new card in the mail” But it got done -- all of it, Avios points, non-stop ORD-MAD flight on points, and now, a card with my correct name.</li>\r\n 	<li>And that Iberia letter was probably one of the last surprises I got when I open the mailbox at home. Somehow, I’m not quite sure how, I signed up for a US Post Office service that sends me an email every morning with scanned images of letters I’m going to receive that day. When I got that first email, I was kinda “What the hell?”, but now I kinda like it, especially when I’m on the road. No more wondering what bills showed up, or during the holidays, who had sent us Christmas cards. It does kinda take the surprise out of opening the mailbox -- though not that there was much left since 90% of our physical mail is junk -- but it is kinda entertaining.</li>\r\n 	<li>Back in August, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/08/27/podcast-132-travel-apps-on-my-phone/\">episode #132</a> about the travel apps I have loaded on my phone, I talked about using the paid or “Pro” version of TripIt, and about how it was on the bubble for me because of how the airlines have improved the flight status notifications in their own apps. In 4 months since then, the airline apps have pretty consistently notified me of gate changes and delays faster than TripIt Pro. And so when my subscription ran out a few weeks ago, I ignored the renewal alerts. I’ll still use the free version -- I like the way TripIt consolidates separate plane, hotel, and rental car reservations into a single trip -- kinda replicating the itineraries your travel agent used to give you when they booked your entire trip. But paying $50 for what are now slower, redundant flight alerts? I’ll spend it on beer or brown liquor instead.</li>\r\n 	<li>I don’t know if it’s just me, but the cadence for boarding groups has gotten out of control. I think I was on a Delta flight where I was boarding group 1 or 2, but was the 4th or 5th group to board, after Delta One, and then Platinum Medallion, then Gold Medallion, Sky Team Elite -- it went on forever. American is a bit better -- only one non-numeric boarding group for the invite-only Concierge Key gang (remember George Clooney in Up In The Air) -- and then 1 through 9(!). I do love the announcement “If you don’t have a boarding group number, then board Group 7” which feels a bit random. Where it really becomes fun is on a regional jet, when the gate agent runs through this cadence for a plane with only 40-50 passengers and all the carry-on bags are gate… I mean valet checked. “Now boarding passengers in Group 1, Group 2, Group 3…” Four people board… “Groups 5, 6, 7, and the rest of you” followed by general scrum in front of the agent. I know the airlines have PhDs in psychology, sociology, and linear programming working on this stuff, but it continues to be a cluster</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>And thanks to this episode’s sponsor TravelPerk</li>\r\n 	<li>Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/11/20/podcast-135-airport-bingo-new-old-travel-pc/\">November episode</a>, I talked about American\'s last-minute cancellation of my night flight to Charlottesville and my ensuing scramble to find a replacement flight and to make sure the Hyatt Place didn\'t flush my reservation. But if I\'d booked with TravelPerk, they would\'ve done the scrambling for me.\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>This all-in-one business travel management tool includes a team of highly qualified agents ready to rescue disgruntled travelers from any scenario 24/7.</li>\r\n 	<li>It’s because of making magic happen in times like this that TravelPerk is now the #1 rated business travel tool on the internet.</li>\r\n 	<li>You\'ll love them because you can finally take control of your travel schedule, have freedom to book alternative accommodation like Airbnb, and have a built-in rescue team when stuff goes south. Remove some stress from the equation, go to <a href=\"http://go.travelperk.com/travelcommons\">go.travelperk.com/travelcommons</a> for a no-commitment test drive.</li>\r\n 	<li>It’s free forever if you to <a href=\"http://go.travelperk.com/travelcommons\">go.travelperk.com/travelcommons</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/NiGiD/48586\">O Tannenbaum / Oh Christmas Tree</a> by Martijn de Boer (NiGiD) (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license.  Ft: Admiral Bob (admiralbob77)</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Plan for 2018 Travel Perks</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>So here we are, 4 weeks into the new year and anywhere from a third to a half of us have already ditched our New Year\'s resolutions and are now in full anticipation of Super Bowl queso dip. But while your dry January may have been washed out early, you still have time to get your 2018 travel perks in place.</li>\r\n 	<li>Almost all travel perks come from status in loyalty programs and all those status earning counts reset on Jan 1, so the first step is to match up what you think your 2018 travel plans will be to your loyalty programs. Any gaps? If you think you’ll start flying to Seattle (maybe helping to shill your hometown for Amazon’s HQ2), you’ll probably want to sign up for Alaskan Airlines Mileage Plan, where before, it might not have been worth the extra junk mail.</li>\r\n 	<li>Or if you’re already a member, do a status match. When I took a new CIO job some years back, all the hotels near our offices were Hilton brands. I had a Hilton\'s Honors card but just in basic blue as opposed to my top-of-the-line sparkly platinum Marriott card. After I hit the “reset my password” link on the Hilton website, I went straight to their status match page. Right at the top, it says “For the next 90 days,... we’ll match your elite status with any other loyalty program.” If you complete 4 or 8 stays over those 90 days, the match is good for the year. So rather than having to grind my way to Hilton status, I started enjoying it on Day 1. I had a friend do that with American -- parlay his United 1K status to Executive Platinum when he moved from Denver to Dallas. Much better than slumming in Boarding Group 5 until you clear the first status bar.</li>\r\n 	<li>Doing this, you also need to keep in mind the different ecosystems; the partnerships that tie travel companies together. It used to be just the international alliances -- Star, SkyTeam, OneWorld. When I knew I’d be traveling down to South Africa, racking up some serious business class mileage, I had two real options -- SAA out of JFK and IAD, or DL out of ATL. Living in Chicago, I chose SAA because they’re part of Star Alliance with United, and I’d get a lot more use from United status out of Chicago than I would Delta. And it’s getting even more combinatorial now with United and Marriott are status matching each other.</li>\r\n 	<li>And then there’s the credit cards -- both affinity (United and Chase Visa, American and Citi MasterCard) and non (Amex Platinum, Chase Sapphire Reserve). You gotta do the math. For example, Amex’s Platinum card is $550/year. But with that, you get Membership Rewards points that transfer to airlines and hotels, access to Delta lounges and Amex’s Centurion Lounges, which if you travel frequently to DFW, LAS, MIA, LGA, and now JFK, is great. They’re much better than, say American’s Admirals Clubs. I wish they had one in Chicago. Amex also picks up the $100 Global Entry or $85 PreCheck fee, gives you 10 GoGo WiFi sessions, $200 in Uber credit, and some other benefits. If you’ll use these benefits, that $550 can be a better deal than, say, the $95 that the United Chase will cost you. However, that United Chase will get you baggage fee waiver, two United Club passes, and status boarding. If you don’t travel a huge amount and live in a United hub like Houston, the United card could be a better deal. But you gotta think about your travel, do the math, and sign up for it now so you have all year to maximize the status benefits.</li>\r\n 	<li>And while you’re in this planning zone, do yourself a big favor sign up and make an appointment for Global Entry if you do international travel, or PreCheck if you’re mostly a domestic flyer. If it makes sense for you to get an Amex Platinum or Chase Sapphire Reserve card, it’ll be free. To me, TSA and Customs lines are still the worst part of travel. While you’re figuring out how to bump your status up your status on airlines and hotels, do yourself a favor and step out of those TSA and Customs lines too.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/44580\"> What Child is This (Instrumental)</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license.  Ft: Jeris</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>How to Shop For A Suitcase</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>OK, perhaps a bit presumptuous of a title; perhaps it’s “How I shopped for a suitcase.” But before we go there, let’s summarize the set up from past episodes -- my 10-year old black Swiss Army carry-on rendered itself unusable before Thanksgiving when the handle became stuck in the extended position (luckily as I was getting in a car coming home from ORD and not while trying to stow it in an overhead while boarding), I hate shopping for suitcases so I recharge my Bluesmart smart bag and put it back into service in December only to have it banned from air travel as of last week.</li>\r\n 	<li>So now I’m forced to shop for a suitcase. Like any good consultant, I, of course, construct a prioritized list of evaluation criteria. First, it has to be a carry-on. Now that may seem a bit of a “duh”, but there is some ambiguity; the <a href=\"https://travel-made-simple.com/carry-on-size-chart/\">approved height</a> varies by airline between 19 and 22-inches. If I wanted to play it safe, I’d go for a 20-inch bag, but I’m also want to maximize how much I can carry-on. I tilt toward choosing space. Most US carriers accept a 22-inch bag and that’s mostly what I fly, and even when I’m on European carriers I usually have enough alliance status (my American Platinum status carrying over to OneWorld) to glide past the baggage sizer.</li>\r\n 	<li>Which leads to the second criterion -- it needs to be black. As I said in my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/10/18/ruthless-packing-tips/\">Ruthless Packing Tips post</a> in October, black not only makes you look thinner, it makes your bag look thinner to gate agents scanning for bag-sizer bait.</li>\r\n 	<li>Third, 2 wheels, not 4. This is a bit more of a personal preference. My Bluesmart is a 4-wheel spinner and my wife swears by hers, but because the 4 wheels have to extend from the bottom of the bag, spinners sacrifice packing space for agility, while 2-wheelers can embed their wheels up in the backplane of the bag. Again trying to maximize packing space, I go for the 2-wheeler, and with the biggest wheels I can find to make it an easier, smoother pull. I was kinda surprised how this limited my selection. Spinners definitely rule.</li>\r\n 	<li>My fourth criterion -- I wanted the inside of the suitcase to be as plain and empty as possible. No bunch of zip compartments, or built-in suit hangers, or ratcheting down clothes dividers; just a wide open box that free to structure how I want for each trip. I was surprised how tough this was to find. Indeed, in the end, I couldn’t find it and settled for a bag where I could detach the suit hanger and clothes divider and stash that stuff up in the Land of Misfit Bags next to the Bluesmart.</li>\r\n 	<li>Whittling through all that, I ended up buying a black Victorinox Werks Traveler 5.0 2-wheeler. Victorinox is what used to be Swiss Army; I figured if my last bag survived 10 years of hard mileage, that said something for durability. It was also one of the few where I could detach all the internal storage stuff. And it has that additional zipper to expand the width by an inch -- kinda like when you drop a notch on your belt after Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner; for those times when I’m flying home and have bought a few too many bottles of wine or brown liquor.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #137</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>Thanks again to TravelPerk for sponsoring this episode. Remember to go to <a href=\"http://go.travelperk.com/travelcommons\">go.travelperk.com/travelcommons</a> for a test drive</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_137.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #137 — New Year\'s Travel Status Tips; How to Shop for a Suitcase','','inherit','closed','closed','','1916-revision-v1','','','2018-01-22 21:18:15','2018-01-23 02:18:15','',1916,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/01/22/1916-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1925,1,'2018-01-22 21:19:35','2018-01-23 02:19:35','','IMG_20141210_231414','How many nights \'til I get Leopard Print level status?','inherit','open','closed','','img_20141210_231414','','','2018-01-22 21:20:59','2018-01-23 02:20:59','',1916,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/IMG_20141210_231414.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(1926,1,'2018-01-22 21:25:56','2018-01-23 02:25:56','[caption id=\"attachment_1925\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/IMG_20141210_231414.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1925\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/IMG_20141210_231414-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> How many nights \'til I get Leopard Print status?[/caption]\r\n\r\nAfter traveling with younger colleagues who pay for everything with cards, I wonder if I\'m the last generation of cash payers. I also talk about the upcoming smart luggage ban on US airlines and a long Saturday afternoon trying to redeem some British Airways Avios points. All this, a new Uber driver story, and a few Christmas carols at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_137.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/371970371\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /] <!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #137:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. This episode is sponsored by <a href=\"http://go.travelperk.com/travelcommons\">TravelPerk</a>, the #1 rated business travel tool on the Internet. It’s been a light travel month, just a drive down to Nashville, and a couple of trips over to Charlottesville, VA, which has been a nice break from what is otherwise turning out to be a brutally cold winter in Chicago. The day after New Years, I walked out of the house into a -10℉ morning -- not windchill, it was -10℉ ambient. Welcome to January. I had my team travel here last week for a 2018 kick-off meeting. No one accused us of boon-doggling. The guy from Phoenix did say he was filing an employee abuse claim though.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’ve found myself drinking less craft beer and much more Scotch whisky in this month; -10℉ is definitely brown liquor weather. Luckily, my daughter brought home a nice bottle of 18-year-old <a href=\"http://www.glenscotia.com/\">Glen Scotia</a> from Edinburgh for Christmas. I’ve made a sizable dent in it.</li>\r\n 	<li>On my first trip to Charlottesville, after being off the road for four weeks, it took me forever to gather up all the bits of my regular travel carry from around the house. Normally, my travel carry stays in my backpack and my suitcase; I buy duplicates of things like hair brushes and headphones just so I don’t need to pull them out of my bag. But for some reason, all discipline broke down over the holidays and my carefully curated travel carry was spread/spewed throughout the house. Luckily, my ride to ORD was 5 minutes late. I took my Bluesmart bag, squeezed in one last trip before American’s January 15th smart luggage ban took effect. I tweeted a picture of my Bluesmart before boarding. American replied “We\'re glad you\'re flying with us and appreciate your cooperation with our team.” My response -- “Not that I have much of a choice…” Especially with IATA recommending the ban to its 300 airline members. My new non-smart Victorinox bag arrived on my front porch before the ban clicked in, so once I shift everything from the Bluesmart to the Victorinox, I’ll power down the Bluesmart, delete its app from my iPhone, and consign it to the corner of the attic with all my other retired bags -- my own Land of Misfit Bags.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/copperhead/40520\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen</a> by copperhead (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: Admiral Bob, Javolenus , Sackjo22</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Starting off the New Year, I did a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/01/01/looking-back-at-2017-the-highs-and-the-lows/\">blog post</a> summarizing some of the high and low points that we talked about in 2017. The high points? Things like Uber and Lyft driver stories, yet more craft beer taprooms, and Hertz’s President Circle Aisle. Low points? Airlines dragging passengers from planes, everybody lobbying for 5-star reviews, and, no surprise, the smart luggage ban.</li>\r\n 	<li>Allan Marko, not just a long-time TravelCommon’s listener, but probably one of the original listeners showed his roots by posting on the original comment channel -- the TravelCommons website\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Have had our Away luggage for only about six months prior to the battery ban. I really like the ‘smart’ charging feature. Luckily the Away battery is a nicely designed self-contained and easily removable unit (two screws; screwdriver included!) Now the battery lives in my backpack, and the luggage still usable.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\"></li>\r\n 	<li>Allan’s psychic capabilities are showing. I think Away is the only major smart bag that meets the airlines’ requirement for a removable battery. But for me, charging wasn’t the major use case for me. I’m typically fine with my Anker lipstick charger. And if I forget to recharge that, my Verizon mobile WiFi hotspot also doubles as a charger. For me, the GPS tracking was the main use case -- for those times I had to check my bag, it was nice to know that it had also made it to my destination -- a use case that requires power. Pull out the battery and no more tracking. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted.</li>\r\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\"></li>\r\n 	<li>Jim McDonough replied to the Twitter announcement of the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">last episode</a> where I wondered if I was the last generation of cash payers. Jim wrote\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I use cash a) at the local farmer’s market; b) pay for haircuts . . . having a hard time coming up with c)</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Jim, I dunno. Looking at your Twitter profile picture, you look like you could land in my generation. I apologize for using a card for anything under $20. Although I have to say that more and more microbrewery taprooms only take credit cards. I don’t apologize there; or at the self-service tills in Home Depot or Tesco’s -- mostly because there’s no one to apologize to even though they will take cash.</li>\r\n 	<li>Natalie on the British Airways social media team <a href=\"https://twitter.com/British_Airways/status/943550974102245376\">tweeted back</a> at me about the other topic on the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">last episode</a> -- about how hard it can be to cash in on loyalty points. You’ll remember that I talked about all the hassles I had in transferring Avios points from BA to Iberia, until I got a BA agent with solid northern accent. Natalie of BA said\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Hey Mark! Thanks for tagging us in your article. I\'m glad to hear that one of our \'Geordie\' colleagues was able to help you redeem some of your Avios. It\'s a shame you didn\'t catch her name though.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Absolutely it was a shame. She deserves huge props.</li>\r\n 	<li>In that same riff, I mentioned how my email to Iberia to clean up my name on my Iberia Plus account -- which might have been the root cause of my point transfer problem -- seemed to have fallen into a black hole. Well, apparently it didn’t. Soon after that episode, I got a letter from Iberia with a new card that had my correct name. That was nice. Would’ve been just a bit nicer if they’d hit the Reply button while handling the email and typed, I dunno, just 8 words -- “Got it fixed; new card in the mail” But it got done -- all of it, Avios points, non-stop ORD-MAD flight on points, and now, a card with my correct name.</li>\r\n 	<li>And that Iberia letter was probably one of the last surprises I got when I open the mailbox at home. Somehow, I’m not quite sure how, I signed up for a US Post Office service that sends me an email every morning with scanned images of letters I’m going to receive that day. When I got that first email, I was kinda “What the hell?”, but now I kinda like it, especially when I’m on the road. No more wondering what bills showed up, or during the holidays, who had sent us Christmas cards. It does kinda take the surprise out of opening the mailbox -- though not that there was much left since 90% of our physical mail is junk -- but it is kinda entertaining.</li>\r\n 	<li>Back in August, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/08/27/podcast-132-travel-apps-on-my-phone/\">episode #132</a> about the travel apps I have loaded on my phone, I talked about using the paid or “Pro” version of TripIt, and about how it was on the bubble for me because of how the airlines have improved the flight status notifications in their own apps. In 4 months since then, the airline apps have pretty consistently notified me of gate changes and delays faster than TripIt Pro. And so when my subscription ran out a few weeks ago, I ignored the renewal alerts. I’ll still use the free version -- I like the way TripIt consolidates separate plane, hotel, and rental car reservations into a single trip -- kinda replicating the itineraries your travel agent used to give you when they booked your entire trip. But paying $50 for what are now slower, redundant flight alerts? I’ll spend it on beer or brown liquor instead.</li>\r\n 	<li>I don’t know if it’s just me, but the cadence for boarding groups has gotten out of control. I think I was on a Delta flight where I was boarding group 1 or 2, but was the 4th or 5th group to board, after Delta One, and then Platinum Medallion, then Gold Medallion, Sky Team Elite -- it went on forever. American is a bit better -- only one non-numeric boarding group for the invite-only Concierge Key gang (remember George Clooney in Up In The Air) -- and then 1 through 9(!). I do love the announcement “If you don’t have a boarding group number, then board Group 7” which feels a bit random. Where it really becomes fun is on a regional jet, when the gate agent runs through this cadence for a plane with only 40-50 passengers and all the carry-on bags are gate… I mean valet checked. “Now boarding passengers in Group 1, Group 2, Group 3…” Four people board… “Groups 5, 6, 7, and the rest of you” followed by general scrum in front of the agent. I know the airlines have PhDs in psychology, sociology, and linear programming working on this stuff, but it continues to be a cluster</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>And thanks to this episode’s sponsor TravelPerk</li>\r\n 	<li>Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/11/20/podcast-135-airport-bingo-new-old-travel-pc/\">November episode</a>, I talked about American\'s last-minute cancellation of my night flight to Charlottesville and my ensuing scramble to find a replacement flight and to make sure the Hyatt Place didn\'t flush my reservation. But if I\'d booked with TravelPerk, they would\'ve done the scrambling for me.\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>This all-in-one business travel management tool includes a team of highly qualified agents ready to rescue disgruntled travelers from any scenario 24/7.</li>\r\n 	<li>It’s because of making magic happen in times like this that TravelPerk is now the #1 rated business travel tool on the internet.</li>\r\n 	<li>You\'ll love them because you can finally take control of your travel schedule, have freedom to book alternative accommodation like Airbnb, and have a built-in rescue team when stuff goes south. Remove some stress from the equation, go to <a href=\"http://go.travelperk.com/travelcommons\">go.travelperk.com/travelcommons</a> for a no-commitment test drive.</li>\r\n 	<li>It’s free forever if you to <a href=\"http://go.travelperk.com/travelcommons\">go.travelperk.com/travelcommons</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/NiGiD/48586\">O Tannenbaum / Oh Christmas Tree</a> by Martijn de Boer (NiGiD) (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license.  Ft: Admiral Bob (admiralbob77)</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Plan for 2018 Travel Perks</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>So here we are, 4 weeks into the new year and anywhere from a third to a half of us have already ditched our New Year\'s resolutions and are now in full anticipation of Super Bowl queso dip. But while your dry January may have been washed out early, you still have time to get your 2018 travel perks in place.</li>\r\n 	<li>Almost all travel perks come from status in loyalty programs and all those status earning counts reset on Jan 1, so the first step is to match up what you think your 2018 travel plans will be to your loyalty programs. Any gaps? If you think you’ll start flying to Seattle (maybe helping to shill your hometown for Amazon’s HQ2), you’ll probably want to sign up for Alaskan Airlines Mileage Plan, where before, it might not have been worth the extra junk mail.</li>\r\n 	<li>Or if you’re already a member, do a status match. When I took a new CIO job some years back, all the hotels near our offices were Hilton brands. I had a Hilton\'s Honors card but just in basic blue as opposed to my top-of-the-line sparkly platinum Marriott card. After I hit the “reset my password” link on the Hilton website, I went straight to their status match page. Right at the top, it says “For the next 90 days,... we’ll match your elite status with any other loyalty program.” If you complete 4 or 8 stays over those 90 days, the match is good for the year. So rather than having to grind my way to Hilton status, I started enjoying it on Day 1. I had a friend do that with American -- parlay his United 1K status to Executive Platinum when he moved from Denver to Dallas. Much better than slumming in Boarding Group 5 until you clear the first status bar.</li>\r\n 	<li>Doing this, you also need to keep in mind the different ecosystems; the partnerships that tie travel companies together. It used to be just the international alliances -- Star, SkyTeam, OneWorld. When I knew I’d be traveling down to South Africa, racking up some serious business class mileage, I had two real options -- SAA out of JFK and IAD, or DL out of ATL. Living in Chicago, I chose SAA because they’re part of Star Alliance with United, and I’d get a lot more use from United status out of Chicago than I would Delta. And it’s getting even more combinatorial now with United and Marriott are status matching each other.</li>\r\n 	<li>And then there’s the credit cards -- both affinity (United and Chase Visa, American and Citi MasterCard) and non (Amex Platinum, Chase Sapphire Reserve). You gotta do the math. For example, Amex’s Platinum card is $550/year. But with that, you get Membership Rewards points that transfer to airlines and hotels, access to Delta lounges and Amex’s Centurion Lounges, which if you travel frequently to DFW, LAS, MIA, LGA, and now JFK, is great. They’re much better than, say American’s Admirals Clubs. I wish they had one in Chicago. Amex also picks up the $100 Global Entry or $85 PreCheck fee, gives you 10 GoGo WiFi sessions, $200 in Uber credit, and some other benefits. If you’ll use these benefits, that $550 can be a better deal than, say, the $95 that the United Chase will cost you. However, that United Chase will get you baggage fee waiver, two United Club passes, and status boarding. If you don’t travel a huge amount and live in a United hub like Houston, the United card could be a better deal. But you gotta think about your travel, do the math, and sign up for it now so you have all year to maximize the status benefits.</li>\r\n 	<li>And while you’re in this planning zone, do yourself a big favor sign up and make an appointment for Global Entry if you do international travel, or PreCheck if you’re mostly a domestic flyer. If it makes sense for you to get an Amex Platinum or Chase Sapphire Reserve card, it’ll be free. To me, TSA and Customs lines are still the worst part of travel. While you’re figuring out how to bump your status up your status on airlines and hotels, do yourself a favor and step out of those TSA and Customs lines too.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/44580\"> What Child is This (Instrumental)</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license.  Ft: Jeris</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>How to Shop For A Suitcase</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>OK, perhaps a bit presumptuous of a title; perhaps it’s “How I shopped for a suitcase.” But before we go there, let’s summarize the set up from past episodes -- my 10-year old black Swiss Army carry-on rendered itself unusable before Thanksgiving when the handle became stuck in the extended position (luckily as I was getting in a car coming home from ORD and not while trying to stow it in an overhead while boarding), I hate shopping for suitcases so I recharge my Bluesmart smart bag and put it back into service in December only to have it banned from air travel as of last week.</li>\r\n 	<li>So now I’m forced to shop for a suitcase. Like any good consultant, I, of course, construct a prioritized list of evaluation criteria. First, it has to be a carry-on. Now that may seem a bit of a “duh”, but there is some ambiguity; the <a href=\"https://travel-made-simple.com/carry-on-size-chart/\">approved height</a> varies by airline between 19 and 22-inches. If I wanted to play it safe, I’d go for a 20-inch bag, but I’m also want to maximize how much I can carry-on. I tilt toward choosing space. Most US carriers accept a 22-inch bag and that’s mostly what I fly, and even when I’m on European carriers I usually have enough alliance status (my American Platinum status carrying over to OneWorld) to glide past the baggage sizer.</li>\r\n 	<li>Which leads to the second criterion -- it needs to be black. As I said in my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/10/18/ruthless-packing-tips/\">Ruthless Packing Tips post</a> in October, black not only makes you look thinner, it makes your bag look thinner to gate agents scanning for bag-sizer bait.</li>\r\n 	<li>Third, 2 wheels, not 4. This is a bit more of a personal preference. My Bluesmart is a 4-wheel spinner and my wife swears by hers, but because the 4 wheels have to extend from the bottom of the bag, spinners sacrifice packing space for agility, while 2-wheelers can embed their wheels up in the backplane of the bag. Again trying to maximize packing space, I go for the 2-wheeler, and with the biggest wheels I can find to make it an easier, smoother pull. I was kinda surprised how this limited my selection. Spinners definitely rule.</li>\r\n 	<li>My fourth criterion -- I wanted the inside of the suitcase to be as plain and empty as possible. No bunch of zip compartments, or built-in suit hangers, or ratcheting down clothes dividers; just a wide open box that free to structure how I want for each trip. I was surprised how tough this was to find. Indeed, in the end, I couldn’t find it and settled for a bag where I could detach the suit hanger and clothes divider and stash that stuff up in the Land of Misfit Bags next to the Bluesmart.</li>\r\n 	<li>Whittling through all that, I ended up buying a black Victorinox Werks Traveler 5.0 2-wheeler. Victorinox is what used to be Swiss Army; I figured if my last bag survived 10 years of hard mileage, that said something for durability. It was also one of the few where I could detach all the internal storage stuff. And it has that additional zipper to expand the width by an inch -- kinda like when you drop a notch on your belt after Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner; for those times when I’m flying home and have bought a few too many bottles of wine or brown liquor.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #137</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>Thanks again to TravelPerk for sponsoring this episode. Remember to go to <a href=\"http://go.travelperk.com/travelcommons\">go.travelperk.com/travelcommons</a> for a test drive</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_137.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #137 — New Year\'s Travel Status Tips; How to Shop for a Suitcase','','inherit','closed','closed','','1916-revision-v1','','','2018-01-22 21:25:56','2018-01-23 02:25:56','',1916,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/01/22/1916-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1927,1,'2018-01-22 21:27:32','2018-01-23 02:27:32','[caption id=\"attachment_1925\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/IMG_20141210_231414.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1925\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/IMG_20141210_231414-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> How many nights to get Leopard Print status?[/caption]\r\n\r\nAfter traveling with younger colleagues who pay for everything with cards, I wonder if I\'m the last generation of cash payers. I also talk about the upcoming smart luggage ban on US airlines and a long Saturday afternoon trying to redeem some British Airways Avios points. All this, a new Uber driver story, and a few Christmas carols at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_137.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/371970371\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /] <!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #137:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. This episode is sponsored by <a href=\"http://go.travelperk.com/travelcommons\">TravelPerk</a>, the #1 rated business travel tool on the Internet. It’s been a light travel month, just a drive down to Nashville, and a couple of trips over to Charlottesville, VA, which has been a nice break from what is otherwise turning out to be a brutally cold winter in Chicago. The day after New Years, I walked out of the house into a -10℉ morning -- not windchill, it was -10℉ ambient. Welcome to January. I had my team travel here last week for a 2018 kick-off meeting. No one accused us of boon-doggling. The guy from Phoenix did say he was filing an employee abuse claim though.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’ve found myself drinking less craft beer and much more Scotch whisky in this month; -10℉ is definitely brown liquor weather. Luckily, my daughter brought home a nice bottle of 18-year-old <a href=\"http://www.glenscotia.com/\">Glen Scotia</a> from Edinburgh for Christmas. I’ve made a sizable dent in it.</li>\r\n 	<li>On my first trip to Charlottesville, after being off the road for four weeks, it took me forever to gather up all the bits of my regular travel carry from around the house. Normally, my travel carry stays in my backpack and my suitcase; I buy duplicates of things like hair brushes and headphones just so I don’t need to pull them out of my bag. But for some reason, all discipline broke down over the holidays and my carefully curated travel carry was spread/spewed throughout the house. Luckily, my ride to ORD was 5 minutes late. I took my Bluesmart bag, squeezed in one last trip before American’s January 15th smart luggage ban took effect. I tweeted a picture of my Bluesmart before boarding. American replied “We\'re glad you\'re flying with us and appreciate your cooperation with our team.” My response -- “Not that I have much of a choice…” Especially with IATA recommending the ban to its 300 airline members. My new non-smart Victorinox bag arrived on my front porch before the ban clicked in, so once I shift everything from the Bluesmart to the Victorinox, I’ll power down the Bluesmart, delete its app from my iPhone, and consign it to the corner of the attic with all my other retired bags -- my own Land of Misfit Bags.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/copperhead/40520\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen</a> by copperhead (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: Admiral Bob, Javolenus , Sackjo22</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Starting off the New Year, I did a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/01/01/looking-back-at-2017-the-highs-and-the-lows/\">blog post</a> summarizing some of the high and low points that we talked about in 2017. The high points? Things like Uber and Lyft driver stories, yet more craft beer taprooms, and Hertz’s President Circle Aisle. Low points? Airlines dragging passengers from planes, everybody lobbying for 5-star reviews, and, no surprise, the smart luggage ban.</li>\r\n 	<li>Allan Marko, not just a long-time TravelCommon’s listener, but probably one of the original listeners showed his roots by posting on the original comment channel -- the TravelCommons website\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Have had our Away luggage for only about six months prior to the battery ban. I really like the ‘smart’ charging feature. Luckily the Away battery is a nicely designed self-contained and easily removable unit (two screws; screwdriver included!) Now the battery lives in my backpack, and the luggage still usable.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\"></li>\r\n 	<li>Allan’s psychic capabilities are showing. I think Away is the only major smart bag that meets the airlines’ requirement for a removable battery. But for me, charging wasn’t the major use case for me. I’m typically fine with my Anker lipstick charger. And if I forget to recharge that, my Verizon mobile WiFi hotspot also doubles as a charger. For me, the GPS tracking was the main use case -- for those times I had to check my bag, it was nice to know that it had also made it to my destination -- a use case that requires power. Pull out the battery and no more tracking. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted.</li>\r\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\"></li>\r\n 	<li>Jim McDonough replied to the Twitter announcement of the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">last episode</a> where I wondered if I was the last generation of cash payers. Jim wrote\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I use cash a) at the local farmer’s market; b) pay for haircuts . . . having a hard time coming up with c)</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Jim, I dunno. Looking at your Twitter profile picture, you look like you could land in my generation. I apologize for using a card for anything under $20. Although I have to say that more and more microbrewery taprooms only take credit cards. I don’t apologize there; or at the self-service tills in Home Depot or Tesco’s -- mostly because there’s no one to apologize to even though they will take cash.</li>\r\n 	<li>Natalie on the British Airways social media team <a href=\"https://twitter.com/British_Airways/status/943550974102245376\">tweeted back</a> at me about the other topic on the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">last episode</a> -- about how hard it can be to cash in on loyalty points. You’ll remember that I talked about all the hassles I had in transferring Avios points from BA to Iberia, until I got a BA agent with solid northern accent. Natalie of BA said\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Hey Mark! Thanks for tagging us in your article. I\'m glad to hear that one of our \'Geordie\' colleagues was able to help you redeem some of your Avios. It\'s a shame you didn\'t catch her name though.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Absolutely it was a shame. She deserves huge props.</li>\r\n 	<li>In that same riff, I mentioned how my email to Iberia to clean up my name on my Iberia Plus account -- which might have been the root cause of my point transfer problem -- seemed to have fallen into a black hole. Well, apparently it didn’t. Soon after that episode, I got a letter from Iberia with a new card that had my correct name. That was nice. Would’ve been just a bit nicer if they’d hit the Reply button while handling the email and typed, I dunno, just 8 words -- “Got it fixed; new card in the mail” But it got done -- all of it, Avios points, non-stop ORD-MAD flight on points, and now, a card with my correct name.</li>\r\n 	<li>And that Iberia letter was probably one of the last surprises I got when I open the mailbox at home. Somehow, I’m not quite sure how, I signed up for a US Post Office service that sends me an email every morning with scanned images of letters I’m going to receive that day. When I got that first email, I was kinda “What the hell?”, but now I kinda like it, especially when I’m on the road. No more wondering what bills showed up, or during the holidays, who had sent us Christmas cards. It does kinda take the surprise out of opening the mailbox -- though not that there was much left since 90% of our physical mail is junk -- but it is kinda entertaining.</li>\r\n 	<li>Back in August, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/08/27/podcast-132-travel-apps-on-my-phone/\">episode #132</a> about the travel apps I have loaded on my phone, I talked about using the paid or “Pro” version of TripIt, and about how it was on the bubble for me because of how the airlines have improved the flight status notifications in their own apps. In 4 months since then, the airline apps have pretty consistently notified me of gate changes and delays faster than TripIt Pro. And so when my subscription ran out a few weeks ago, I ignored the renewal alerts. I’ll still use the free version -- I like the way TripIt consolidates separate plane, hotel, and rental car reservations into a single trip -- kinda replicating the itineraries your travel agent used to give you when they booked your entire trip. But paying $50 for what are now slower, redundant flight alerts? I’ll spend it on beer or brown liquor instead.</li>\r\n 	<li>I don’t know if it’s just me, but the cadence for boarding groups has gotten out of control. I think I was on a Delta flight where I was boarding group 1 or 2, but was the 4th or 5th group to board, after Delta One, and then Platinum Medallion, then Gold Medallion, Sky Team Elite -- it went on forever. American is a bit better -- only one non-numeric boarding group for the invite-only Concierge Key gang (remember George Clooney in Up In The Air) -- and then 1 through 9(!). I do love the announcement “If you don’t have a boarding group number, then board Group 7” which feels a bit random. Where it really becomes fun is on a regional jet, when the gate agent runs through this cadence for a plane with only 40-50 passengers and all the carry-on bags are gate… I mean valet checked. “Now boarding passengers in Group 1, Group 2, Group 3…” Four people board… “Groups 5, 6, 7, and the rest of you” followed by general scrum in front of the agent. I know the airlines have PhDs in psychology, sociology, and linear programming working on this stuff, but it continues to be a cluster</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>And thanks to this episode’s sponsor TravelPerk</li>\r\n 	<li>Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/11/20/podcast-135-airport-bingo-new-old-travel-pc/\">November episode</a>, I talked about American\'s last-minute cancellation of my night flight to Charlottesville and my ensuing scramble to find a replacement flight and to make sure the Hyatt Place didn\'t flush my reservation. But if I\'d booked with TravelPerk, they would\'ve done the scrambling for me.\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>This all-in-one business travel management tool includes a team of highly qualified agents ready to rescue disgruntled travelers from any scenario 24/7.</li>\r\n 	<li>It’s because of making magic happen in times like this that TravelPerk is now the #1 rated business travel tool on the internet.</li>\r\n 	<li>You\'ll love them because you can finally take control of your travel schedule, have freedom to book alternative accommodation like Airbnb, and have a built-in rescue team when stuff goes south. Remove some stress from the equation, go to <a href=\"http://go.travelperk.com/travelcommons\">go.travelperk.com/travelcommons</a> for a no-commitment test drive.</li>\r\n 	<li>It’s free forever if you to <a href=\"http://go.travelperk.com/travelcommons\">go.travelperk.com/travelcommons</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/NiGiD/48586\">O Tannenbaum / Oh Christmas Tree</a> by Martijn de Boer (NiGiD) (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license.  Ft: Admiral Bob (admiralbob77)</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Plan for 2018 Travel Perks</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>So here we are, 4 weeks into the new year and anywhere from a third to a half of us have already ditched our New Year\'s resolutions and are now in full anticipation of Super Bowl queso dip. But while your dry January may have been washed out early, you still have time to get your 2018 travel perks in place.</li>\r\n 	<li>Almost all travel perks come from status in loyalty programs and all those status earning counts reset on Jan 1, so the first step is to match up what you think your 2018 travel plans will be to your loyalty programs. Any gaps? If you think you’ll start flying to Seattle (maybe helping to shill your hometown for Amazon’s HQ2), you’ll probably want to sign up for Alaskan Airlines Mileage Plan, where before, it might not have been worth the extra junk mail.</li>\r\n 	<li>Or if you’re already a member, do a status match. When I took a new CIO job some years back, all the hotels near our offices were Hilton brands. I had a Hilton\'s Honors card but just in basic blue as opposed to my top-of-the-line sparkly platinum Marriott card. After I hit the “reset my password” link on the Hilton website, I went straight to their status match page. Right at the top, it says “For the next 90 days,... we’ll match your elite status with any other loyalty program.” If you complete 4 or 8 stays over those 90 days, the match is good for the year. So rather than having to grind my way to Hilton status, I started enjoying it on Day 1. I had a friend do that with American -- parlay his United 1K status to Executive Platinum when he moved from Denver to Dallas. Much better than slumming in Boarding Group 5 until you clear the first status bar.</li>\r\n 	<li>Doing this, you also need to keep in mind the different ecosystems; the partnerships that tie travel companies together. It used to be just the international alliances -- Star, SkyTeam, OneWorld. When I knew I’d be traveling down to South Africa, racking up some serious business class mileage, I had two real options -- SAA out of JFK and IAD, or DL out of ATL. Living in Chicago, I chose SAA because they’re part of Star Alliance with United, and I’d get a lot more use from United status out of Chicago than I would Delta. And it’s getting even more combinatorial now with United and Marriott are status matching each other.</li>\r\n 	<li>And then there’s the credit cards -- both affinity (United and Chase Visa, American and Citi MasterCard) and non (Amex Platinum, Chase Sapphire Reserve). You gotta do the math. For example, Amex’s Platinum card is $550/year. But with that, you get Membership Rewards points that transfer to airlines and hotels, access to Delta lounges and Amex’s Centurion Lounges, which if you travel frequently to DFW, LAS, MIA, LGA, and now JFK, is great. They’re much better than, say American’s Admirals Clubs. I wish they had one in Chicago. Amex also picks up the $100 Global Entry or $85 PreCheck fee, gives you 10 GoGo WiFi sessions, $200 in Uber credit, and some other benefits. If you’ll use these benefits, that $550 can be a better deal than, say, the $95 that the United Chase will cost you. However, that United Chase will get you baggage fee waiver, two United Club passes, and status boarding. If you don’t travel a huge amount and live in a United hub like Houston, the United card could be a better deal. But you gotta think about your travel, do the math, and sign up for it now so you have all year to maximize the status benefits.</li>\r\n 	<li>And while you’re in this planning zone, do yourself a big favor sign up and make an appointment for Global Entry if you do international travel, or PreCheck if you’re mostly a domestic flyer. If it makes sense for you to get an Amex Platinum or Chase Sapphire Reserve card, it’ll be free. To me, TSA and Customs lines are still the worst part of travel. While you’re figuring out how to bump your status up your status on airlines and hotels, do yourself a favor and step out of those TSA and Customs lines too.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/44580\"> What Child is This (Instrumental)</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license.  Ft: Jeris</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>How to Shop For A Suitcase</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>OK, perhaps a bit presumptuous of a title; perhaps it’s “How I shopped for a suitcase.” But before we go there, let’s summarize the set up from past episodes -- my 10-year old black Swiss Army carry-on rendered itself unusable before Thanksgiving when the handle became stuck in the extended position (luckily as I was getting in a car coming home from ORD and not while trying to stow it in an overhead while boarding), I hate shopping for suitcases so I recharge my Bluesmart smart bag and put it back into service in December only to have it banned from air travel as of last week.</li>\r\n 	<li>So now I’m forced to shop for a suitcase. Like any good consultant, I, of course, construct a prioritized list of evaluation criteria. First, it has to be a carry-on. Now that may seem a bit of a “duh”, but there is some ambiguity; the <a href=\"https://travel-made-simple.com/carry-on-size-chart/\">approved height</a> varies by airline between 19 and 22-inches. If I wanted to play it safe, I’d go for a 20-inch bag, but I’m also want to maximize how much I can carry-on. I tilt toward choosing space. Most US carriers accept a 22-inch bag and that’s mostly what I fly, and even when I’m on European carriers I usually have enough alliance status (my American Platinum status carrying over to OneWorld) to glide past the baggage sizer.</li>\r\n 	<li>Which leads to the second criterion -- it needs to be black. As I said in my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/10/18/ruthless-packing-tips/\">Ruthless Packing Tips post</a> in October, black not only makes you look thinner, it makes your bag look thinner to gate agents scanning for bag-sizer bait.</li>\r\n 	<li>Third, 2 wheels, not 4. This is a bit more of a personal preference. My Bluesmart is a 4-wheel spinner and my wife swears by hers, but because the 4 wheels have to extend from the bottom of the bag, spinners sacrifice packing space for agility, while 2-wheelers can embed their wheels up in the backplane of the bag. Again trying to maximize packing space, I go for the 2-wheeler, and with the biggest wheels I can find to make it an easier, smoother pull. I was kinda surprised how this limited my selection. Spinners definitely rule.</li>\r\n 	<li>My fourth criterion -- I wanted the inside of the suitcase to be as plain and empty as possible. No bunch of zip compartments, or built-in suit hangers, or ratcheting down clothes dividers; just a wide open box that free to structure how I want for each trip. I was surprised how tough this was to find. Indeed, in the end, I couldn’t find it and settled for a bag where I could detach the suit hanger and clothes divider and stash that stuff up in the Land of Misfit Bags next to the Bluesmart.</li>\r\n 	<li>Whittling through all that, I ended up buying a black Victorinox Werks Traveler 5.0 2-wheeler. Victorinox is what used to be Swiss Army; I figured if my last bag survived 10 years of hard mileage, that said something for durability. It was also one of the few where I could detach all the internal storage stuff. And it has that additional zipper to expand the width by an inch -- kinda like when you drop a notch on your belt after Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner; for those times when I’m flying home and have bought a few too many bottles of wine or brown liquor.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #137</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>Thanks again to TravelPerk for sponsoring this episode. Remember to go to <a href=\"http://go.travelperk.com/travelcommons\">go.travelperk.com/travelcommons</a> for a test drive</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_137.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #137 — New Year\'s Travel Status Tips; How to Shop for a Suitcase','','inherit','closed','closed','','1916-revision-v1','','','2018-01-22 21:27:32','2018-01-23 02:27:32','',1916,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/01/22/1916-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1928,1,'2018-01-22 21:28:30','2018-01-23 02:28:30','[caption id=\"attachment_1925\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/IMG_20141210_231414.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1925\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/IMG_20141210_231414-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> How many nights to get Leopard Print status?[/caption]\r\n\r\nkhllkhlkhlkhlkh All this, a new Uber driver story, and a few Christmas carols at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_137.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/371970371\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /] <!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #137:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. This episode is sponsored by <a href=\"http://go.travelperk.com/travelcommons\">TravelPerk</a>, the #1 rated business travel tool on the Internet. It’s been a light travel month, just a drive down to Nashville, and a couple of trips over to Charlottesville, VA, which has been a nice break from what is otherwise turning out to be a brutally cold winter in Chicago. The day after New Years, I walked out of the house into a -10℉ morning -- not windchill, it was -10℉ ambient. Welcome to January. I had my team travel here last week for a 2018 kick-off meeting. No one accused us of boon-doggling. The guy from Phoenix did say he was filing an employee abuse claim though.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’ve found myself drinking less craft beer and much more Scotch whisky in this month; -10℉ is definitely brown liquor weather. Luckily, my daughter brought home a nice bottle of 18-year-old <a href=\"http://www.glenscotia.com/\">Glen Scotia</a> from Edinburgh for Christmas. I’ve made a sizable dent in it.</li>\r\n 	<li>On my first trip to Charlottesville, after being off the road for four weeks, it took me forever to gather up all the bits of my regular travel carry from around the house. Normally, my travel carry stays in my backpack and my suitcase; I buy duplicates of things like hair brushes and headphones just so I don’t need to pull them out of my bag. But for some reason, all discipline broke down over the holidays and my carefully curated travel carry was spread/spewed throughout the house. Luckily, my ride to ORD was 5 minutes late. I took my Bluesmart bag, squeezed in one last trip before American’s January 15th smart luggage ban took effect. I tweeted a picture of my Bluesmart before boarding. American replied “We\'re glad you\'re flying with us and appreciate your cooperation with our team.” My response -- “Not that I have much of a choice…” Especially with IATA recommending the ban to its 300 airline members. My new non-smart Victorinox bag arrived on my front porch before the ban clicked in, so once I shift everything from the Bluesmart to the Victorinox, I’ll power down the Bluesmart, delete its app from my iPhone, and consign it to the corner of the attic with all my other retired bags -- my own Land of Misfit Bags.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/copperhead/40520\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen</a> by copperhead (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: Admiral Bob, Javolenus , Sackjo22</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Starting off the New Year, I did a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/01/01/looking-back-at-2017-the-highs-and-the-lows/\">blog post</a> summarizing some of the high and low points that we talked about in 2017. The high points? Things like Uber and Lyft driver stories, yet more craft beer taprooms, and Hertz’s President Circle Aisle. Low points? Airlines dragging passengers from planes, everybody lobbying for 5-star reviews, and, no surprise, the smart luggage ban.</li>\r\n 	<li>Allan Marko, not just a long-time TravelCommon’s listener, but probably one of the original listeners showed his roots by posting on the original comment channel -- the TravelCommons website\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Have had our Away luggage for only about six months prior to the battery ban. I really like the ‘smart’ charging feature. Luckily the Away battery is a nicely designed self-contained and easily removable unit (two screws; screwdriver included!) Now the battery lives in my backpack, and the luggage still usable.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\"></li>\r\n 	<li>Allan’s psychic capabilities are showing. I think Away is the only major smart bag that meets the airlines’ requirement for a removable battery. But for me, charging wasn’t the major use case for me. I’m typically fine with my Anker lipstick charger. And if I forget to recharge that, my Verizon mobile WiFi hotspot also doubles as a charger. For me, the GPS tracking was the main use case -- for those times I had to check my bag, it was nice to know that it had also made it to my destination -- a use case that requires power. Pull out the battery and no more tracking. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted.</li>\r\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\"></li>\r\n 	<li>Jim McDonough replied to the Twitter announcement of the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">last episode</a> where I wondered if I was the last generation of cash payers. Jim wrote\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I use cash a) at the local farmer’s market; b) pay for haircuts . . . having a hard time coming up with c)</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Jim, I dunno. Looking at your Twitter profile picture, you look like you could land in my generation. I apologize for using a card for anything under $20. Although I have to say that more and more microbrewery taprooms only take credit cards. I don’t apologize there; or at the self-service tills in Home Depot or Tesco’s -- mostly because there’s no one to apologize to even though they will take cash.</li>\r\n 	<li>Natalie on the British Airways social media team <a href=\"https://twitter.com/British_Airways/status/943550974102245376\">tweeted back</a> at me about the other topic on the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">last episode</a> -- about how hard it can be to cash in on loyalty points. You’ll remember that I talked about all the hassles I had in transferring Avios points from BA to Iberia, until I got a BA agent with solid northern accent. Natalie of BA said\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Hey Mark! Thanks for tagging us in your article. I\'m glad to hear that one of our \'Geordie\' colleagues was able to help you redeem some of your Avios. It\'s a shame you didn\'t catch her name though.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Absolutely it was a shame. She deserves huge props.</li>\r\n 	<li>In that same riff, I mentioned how my email to Iberia to clean up my name on my Iberia Plus account -- which might have been the root cause of my point transfer problem -- seemed to have fallen into a black hole. Well, apparently it didn’t. Soon after that episode, I got a letter from Iberia with a new card that had my correct name. That was nice. Would’ve been just a bit nicer if they’d hit the Reply button while handling the email and typed, I dunno, just 8 words -- “Got it fixed; new card in the mail” But it got done -- all of it, Avios points, non-stop ORD-MAD flight on points, and now, a card with my correct name.</li>\r\n 	<li>And that Iberia letter was probably one of the last surprises I got when I open the mailbox at home. Somehow, I’m not quite sure how, I signed up for a US Post Office service that sends me an email every morning with scanned images of letters I’m going to receive that day. When I got that first email, I was kinda “What the hell?”, but now I kinda like it, especially when I’m on the road. No more wondering what bills showed up, or during the holidays, who had sent us Christmas cards. It does kinda take the surprise out of opening the mailbox -- though not that there was much left since 90% of our physical mail is junk -- but it is kinda entertaining.</li>\r\n 	<li>Back in August, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/08/27/podcast-132-travel-apps-on-my-phone/\">episode #132</a> about the travel apps I have loaded on my phone, I talked about using the paid or “Pro” version of TripIt, and about how it was on the bubble for me because of how the airlines have improved the flight status notifications in their own apps. In 4 months since then, the airline apps have pretty consistently notified me of gate changes and delays faster than TripIt Pro. And so when my subscription ran out a few weeks ago, I ignored the renewal alerts. I’ll still use the free version -- I like the way TripIt consolidates separate plane, hotel, and rental car reservations into a single trip -- kinda replicating the itineraries your travel agent used to give you when they booked your entire trip. But paying $50 for what are now slower, redundant flight alerts? I’ll spend it on beer or brown liquor instead.</li>\r\n 	<li>I don’t know if it’s just me, but the cadence for boarding groups has gotten out of control. I think I was on a Delta flight where I was boarding group 1 or 2, but was the 4th or 5th group to board, after Delta One, and then Platinum Medallion, then Gold Medallion, Sky Team Elite -- it went on forever. American is a bit better -- only one non-numeric boarding group for the invite-only Concierge Key gang (remember George Clooney in Up In The Air) -- and then 1 through 9(!). I do love the announcement “If you don’t have a boarding group number, then board Group 7” which feels a bit random. Where it really becomes fun is on a regional jet, when the gate agent runs through this cadence for a plane with only 40-50 passengers and all the carry-on bags are gate… I mean valet checked. “Now boarding passengers in Group 1, Group 2, Group 3…” Four people board… “Groups 5, 6, 7, and the rest of you” followed by general scrum in front of the agent. I know the airlines have PhDs in psychology, sociology, and linear programming working on this stuff, but it continues to be a cluster</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>And thanks to this episode’s sponsor TravelPerk</li>\r\n 	<li>Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/11/20/podcast-135-airport-bingo-new-old-travel-pc/\">November episode</a>, I talked about American\'s last-minute cancellation of my night flight to Charlottesville and my ensuing scramble to find a replacement flight and to make sure the Hyatt Place didn\'t flush my reservation. But if I\'d booked with TravelPerk, they would\'ve done the scrambling for me.\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>This all-in-one business travel management tool includes a team of highly qualified agents ready to rescue disgruntled travelers from any scenario 24/7.</li>\r\n 	<li>It’s because of making magic happen in times like this that TravelPerk is now the #1 rated business travel tool on the internet.</li>\r\n 	<li>You\'ll love them because you can finally take control of your travel schedule, have freedom to book alternative accommodation like Airbnb, and have a built-in rescue team when stuff goes south. Remove some stress from the equation, go to <a href=\"http://go.travelperk.com/travelcommons\">go.travelperk.com/travelcommons</a> for a no-commitment test drive.</li>\r\n 	<li>It’s free forever if you to <a href=\"http://go.travelperk.com/travelcommons\">go.travelperk.com/travelcommons</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/NiGiD/48586\">O Tannenbaum / Oh Christmas Tree</a> by Martijn de Boer (NiGiD) (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license.  Ft: Admiral Bob (admiralbob77)</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Plan for 2018 Travel Perks</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>So here we are, 4 weeks into the new year and anywhere from a third to a half of us have already ditched our New Year\'s resolutions and are now in full anticipation of Super Bowl queso dip. But while your dry January may have been washed out early, you still have time to get your 2018 travel perks in place.</li>\r\n 	<li>Almost all travel perks come from status in loyalty programs and all those status earning counts reset on Jan 1, so the first step is to match up what you think your 2018 travel plans will be to your loyalty programs. Any gaps? If you think you’ll start flying to Seattle (maybe helping to shill your hometown for Amazon’s HQ2), you’ll probably want to sign up for Alaskan Airlines Mileage Plan, where before, it might not have been worth the extra junk mail.</li>\r\n 	<li>Or if you’re already a member, do a status match. When I took a new CIO job some years back, all the hotels near our offices were Hilton brands. I had a Hilton\'s Honors card but just in basic blue as opposed to my top-of-the-line sparkly platinum Marriott card. After I hit the “reset my password” link on the Hilton website, I went straight to their status match page. Right at the top, it says “For the next 90 days,... we’ll match your elite status with any other loyalty program.” If you complete 4 or 8 stays over those 90 days, the match is good for the year. So rather than having to grind my way to Hilton status, I started enjoying it on Day 1. I had a friend do that with American -- parlay his United 1K status to Executive Platinum when he moved from Denver to Dallas. Much better than slumming in Boarding Group 5 until you clear the first status bar.</li>\r\n 	<li>Doing this, you also need to keep in mind the different ecosystems; the partnerships that tie travel companies together. It used to be just the international alliances -- Star, SkyTeam, OneWorld. When I knew I’d be traveling down to South Africa, racking up some serious business class mileage, I had two real options -- SAA out of JFK and IAD, or DL out of ATL. Living in Chicago, I chose SAA because they’re part of Star Alliance with United, and I’d get a lot more use from United status out of Chicago than I would Delta. And it’s getting even more combinatorial now with United and Marriott are status matching each other.</li>\r\n 	<li>And then there’s the credit cards -- both affinity (United and Chase Visa, American and Citi MasterCard) and non (Amex Platinum, Chase Sapphire Reserve). You gotta do the math. For example, Amex’s Platinum card is $550/year. But with that, you get Membership Rewards points that transfer to airlines and hotels, access to Delta lounges and Amex’s Centurion Lounges, which if you travel frequently to DFW, LAS, MIA, LGA, and now JFK, is great. They’re much better than, say American’s Admirals Clubs. I wish they had one in Chicago. Amex also picks up the $100 Global Entry or $85 PreCheck fee, gives you 10 GoGo WiFi sessions, $200 in Uber credit, and some other benefits. If you’ll use these benefits, that $550 can be a better deal than, say, the $95 that the United Chase will cost you. However, that United Chase will get you baggage fee waiver, two United Club passes, and status boarding. If you don’t travel a huge amount and live in a United hub like Houston, the United card could be a better deal. But you gotta think about your travel, do the math, and sign up for it now so you have all year to maximize the status benefits.</li>\r\n 	<li>And while you’re in this planning zone, do yourself a big favor sign up and make an appointment for Global Entry if you do international travel, or PreCheck if you’re mostly a domestic flyer. If it makes sense for you to get an Amex Platinum or Chase Sapphire Reserve card, it’ll be free. To me, TSA and Customs lines are still the worst part of travel. While you’re figuring out how to bump your status up your status on airlines and hotels, do yourself a favor and step out of those TSA and Customs lines too.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/44580\"> What Child is This (Instrumental)</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license.  Ft: Jeris</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>How to Shop For A Suitcase</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>OK, perhaps a bit presumptuous of a title; perhaps it’s “How I shopped for a suitcase.” But before we go there, let’s summarize the set up from past episodes -- my 10-year old black Swiss Army carry-on rendered itself unusable before Thanksgiving when the handle became stuck in the extended position (luckily as I was getting in a car coming home from ORD and not while trying to stow it in an overhead while boarding), I hate shopping for suitcases so I recharge my Bluesmart smart bag and put it back into service in December only to have it banned from air travel as of last week.</li>\r\n 	<li>So now I’m forced to shop for a suitcase. Like any good consultant, I, of course, construct a prioritized list of evaluation criteria. First, it has to be a carry-on. Now that may seem a bit of a “duh”, but there is some ambiguity; the <a href=\"https://travel-made-simple.com/carry-on-size-chart/\">approved height</a> varies by airline between 19 and 22-inches. If I wanted to play it safe, I’d go for a 20-inch bag, but I’m also want to maximize how much I can carry-on. I tilt toward choosing space. Most US carriers accept a 22-inch bag and that’s mostly what I fly, and even when I’m on European carriers I usually have enough alliance status (my American Platinum status carrying over to OneWorld) to glide past the baggage sizer.</li>\r\n 	<li>Which leads to the second criterion -- it needs to be black. As I said in my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/10/18/ruthless-packing-tips/\">Ruthless Packing Tips post</a> in October, black not only makes you look thinner, it makes your bag look thinner to gate agents scanning for bag-sizer bait.</li>\r\n 	<li>Third, 2 wheels, not 4. This is a bit more of a personal preference. My Bluesmart is a 4-wheel spinner and my wife swears by hers, but because the 4 wheels have to extend from the bottom of the bag, spinners sacrifice packing space for agility, while 2-wheelers can embed their wheels up in the backplane of the bag. Again trying to maximize packing space, I go for the 2-wheeler, and with the biggest wheels I can find to make it an easier, smoother pull. I was kinda surprised how this limited my selection. Spinners definitely rule.</li>\r\n 	<li>My fourth criterion -- I wanted the inside of the suitcase to be as plain and empty as possible. No bunch of zip compartments, or built-in suit hangers, or ratcheting down clothes dividers; just a wide open box that free to structure how I want for each trip. I was surprised how tough this was to find. Indeed, in the end, I couldn’t find it and settled for a bag where I could detach the suit hanger and clothes divider and stash that stuff up in the Land of Misfit Bags next to the Bluesmart.</li>\r\n 	<li>Whittling through all that, I ended up buying a black Victorinox Werks Traveler 5.0 2-wheeler. Victorinox is what used to be Swiss Army; I figured if my last bag survived 10 years of hard mileage, that said something for durability. It was also one of the few where I could detach all the internal storage stuff. And it has that additional zipper to expand the width by an inch -- kinda like when you drop a notch on your belt after Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner; for those times when I’m flying home and have bought a few too many bottles of wine or brown liquor.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #137</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>Thanks again to TravelPerk for sponsoring this episode. Remember to go to <a href=\"http://go.travelperk.com/travelcommons\">go.travelperk.com/travelcommons</a> for a test drive</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_137.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #137 — New Year\'s Travel Status Tips; How to Shop for a Suitcase','','inherit','closed','closed','','1916-revision-v1','','','2018-01-22 21:28:30','2018-01-23 02:28:30','',1916,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/01/22/1916-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1929,1,'2018-01-24 15:12:54','2018-01-24 20:12:54','[caption id=\"attachment_1925\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/IMG_20141210_231414.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1925\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/IMG_20141210_231414-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> How many nights to get Leopard Print status?[/caption]\r\n\r\nSo we\'re four weeks into the new year and 30-50% of us have already ditched our New Year\'s resolutions, but we still have time to get our 2018 travel status lined up. Over the holiday break, I bought a non-smart carry-on to replace my now-banned Bluesmart; I walk through my shopping criteria. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_137.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below. Thanks to <a href=\"http://go.travelperk.com/travelcommons\">TravelPerk</a> for sponsoring this episode. [soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/371970371\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /] <!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #137:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. This episode is sponsored by <a href=\"http://go.travelperk.com/travelcommons\">TravelPerk</a>, the #1 rated business travel tool on the Internet. It’s been a light travel month, just a drive down to Nashville, and a couple of trips over to Charlottesville, VA, which has been a nice break from what is otherwise turning out to be a brutally cold winter in Chicago. The day after New Years, I walked out of the house into a -10℉ morning -- not windchill, it was -10℉ ambient. Welcome to January. I had my team travel here last week for a 2018 kick-off meeting. No one accused us of boon-doggling. The guy from Phoenix did say he was filing an employee abuse claim though.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’ve found myself drinking less craft beer and much more Scotch whisky in this month; -10℉ is definitely brown liquor weather. Luckily, my daughter brought home a nice bottle of 18-year-old <a href=\"http://www.glenscotia.com/\">Glen Scotia</a> from Edinburgh for Christmas. I’ve made a sizable dent in it.</li>\r\n 	<li>On my first trip to Charlottesville, after being off the road for four weeks, it took me forever to gather up all the bits of my regular travel carry from around the house. Normally, my travel carry stays in my backpack and my suitcase; I buy duplicates of things like hair brushes and headphones just so I don’t need to pull them out of my bag. But for some reason, all discipline broke down over the holidays and my carefully curated travel carry was spread/spewed throughout the house. Luckily, my ride to ORD was 5 minutes late. I took my Bluesmart bag, squeezed in one last trip before American’s January 15th smart luggage ban took effect. I tweeted a picture of my Bluesmart before boarding. American replied “We\'re glad you\'re flying with us and appreciate your cooperation with our team.” My response -- “Not that I have much of a choice…” Especially with IATA recommending the ban to its 300 airline members. My new non-smart Victorinox bag arrived on my front porch before the ban clicked in, so once I shift everything from the Bluesmart to the Victorinox, I’ll power down the Bluesmart, delete its app from my iPhone, and consign it to the corner of the attic with all my other retired bags -- my own Land of Misfit Bags.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/copperhead/40520\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen</a> by copperhead (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: Admiral Bob, Javolenus , Sackjo22</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Starting off the New Year, I did a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/01/01/looking-back-at-2017-the-highs-and-the-lows/\">blog post</a> summarizing some of the high and low points that we talked about in 2017. The high points? Things like Uber and Lyft driver stories, yet more craft beer taprooms, and Hertz’s President Circle Aisle. Low points? Airlines dragging passengers from planes, everybody lobbying for 5-star reviews, and, no surprise, the smart luggage ban.</li>\r\n 	<li>Allan Marko, not just a long-time TravelCommon’s listener, but probably one of the original listeners showed his roots by posting on the original comment channel -- the TravelCommons website\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Have had our Away luggage for only about six months prior to the battery ban. I really like the ‘smart’ charging feature. Luckily the Away battery is a nicely designed self-contained and easily removable unit (two screws; screwdriver included!) Now the battery lives in my backpack, and the luggage still usable.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\"></li>\r\n 	<li>Allan’s psychic capabilities are showing. I think Away is the only major smart bag that meets the airlines’ requirement for a removable battery. But for me, charging wasn’t the major use case for me. I’m typically fine with my Anker lipstick charger. And if I forget to recharge that, my Verizon mobile WiFi hotspot also doubles as a charger. For me, the GPS tracking was the main use case -- for those times I had to check my bag, it was nice to know that it had also made it to my destination -- a use case that requires power. Pull out the battery and no more tracking. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted.</li>\r\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\"></li>\r\n 	<li>Jim McDonough replied to the Twitter announcement of the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">last episode</a> where I wondered if I was the last generation of cash payers. Jim wrote\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I use cash a) at the local farmer’s market; b) pay for haircuts . . . having a hard time coming up with c)</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Jim, I dunno. Looking at your Twitter profile picture, you look like you could land in my generation. I apologize for using a card for anything under $20. Although I have to say that more and more microbrewery taprooms only take credit cards. I don’t apologize there; or at the self-service tills in Home Depot or Tesco’s -- mostly because there’s no one to apologize to even though they will take cash.</li>\r\n 	<li>Natalie on the British Airways social media team <a href=\"https://twitter.com/British_Airways/status/943550974102245376\">tweeted back</a> at me about the other topic on the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">last episode</a> -- about how hard it can be to cash in on loyalty points. You’ll remember that I talked about all the hassles I had in transferring Avios points from BA to Iberia, until I got a BA agent with solid northern accent. Natalie of BA said\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Hey Mark! Thanks for tagging us in your article. I\'m glad to hear that one of our \'Geordie\' colleagues was able to help you redeem some of your Avios. It\'s a shame you didn\'t catch her name though.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Absolutely it was a shame. She deserves huge props.</li>\r\n 	<li>In that same riff, I mentioned how my email to Iberia to clean up my name on my Iberia Plus account -- which might have been the root cause of my point transfer problem -- seemed to have fallen into a black hole. Well, apparently it didn’t. Soon after that episode, I got a letter from Iberia with a new card that had my correct name. That was nice. Would’ve been just a bit nicer if they’d hit the Reply button while handling the email and typed, I dunno, just 8 words -- “Got it fixed; new card in the mail” But it got done -- all of it, Avios points, non-stop ORD-MAD flight on points, and now, a card with my correct name.</li>\r\n 	<li>And that Iberia letter was probably one of the last surprises I got when I open the mailbox at home. Somehow, I’m not quite sure how, I signed up for a US Post Office service that sends me an email every morning with scanned images of letters I’m going to receive that day. When I got that first email, I was kinda “What the hell?”, but now I kinda like it, especially when I’m on the road. No more wondering what bills showed up, or during the holidays, who had sent us Christmas cards. It does kinda take the surprise out of opening the mailbox -- though not that there was much left since 90% of our physical mail is junk -- but it is kinda entertaining.</li>\r\n 	<li>Back in August, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/08/27/podcast-132-travel-apps-on-my-phone/\">episode #132</a> about the travel apps I have loaded on my phone, I talked about using the paid or “Pro” version of TripIt, and about how it was on the bubble for me because of how the airlines have improved the flight status notifications in their own apps. In 4 months since then, the airline apps have pretty consistently notified me of gate changes and delays faster than TripIt Pro. And so when my subscription ran out a few weeks ago, I ignored the renewal alerts. I’ll still use the free version -- I like the way TripIt consolidates separate plane, hotel, and rental car reservations into a single trip -- kinda replicating the itineraries your travel agent used to give you when they booked your entire trip. But paying $50 for what are now slower, redundant flight alerts? I’ll spend it on beer or brown liquor instead.</li>\r\n 	<li>I don’t know if it’s just me, but the cadence for boarding groups has gotten out of control. I think I was on a Delta flight where I was boarding group 1 or 2, but was the 4th or 5th group to board, after Delta One, and then Platinum Medallion, then Gold Medallion, Sky Team Elite -- it went on forever. American is a bit better -- only one non-numeric boarding group for the invite-only Concierge Key gang (remember George Clooney in Up In The Air) -- and then 1 through 9(!). I do love the announcement “If you don’t have a boarding group number, then board Group 7” which feels a bit random. Where it really becomes fun is on a regional jet, when the gate agent runs through this cadence for a plane with only 40-50 passengers and all the carry-on bags are gate… I mean valet checked. “Now boarding passengers in Group 1, Group 2, Group 3…” Four people board… “Groups 5, 6, 7, and the rest of you” followed by general scrum in front of the agent. I know the airlines have PhDs in psychology, sociology, and linear programming working on this stuff, but it continues to be a cluster</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>And thanks to this episode’s sponsor TravelPerk</li>\r\n 	<li>Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/11/20/podcast-135-airport-bingo-new-old-travel-pc/\">November episode</a>, I talked about American\'s last-minute cancellation of my night flight to Charlottesville and my ensuing scramble to find a replacement flight and to make sure the Hyatt Place didn\'t flush my reservation. But if I\'d booked with TravelPerk, they would\'ve done the scrambling for me.\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>This all-in-one business travel management tool includes a team of highly qualified agents ready to rescue disgruntled travelers from any scenario 24/7.</li>\r\n 	<li>It’s because of making magic happen in times like this that TravelPerk is now the #1 rated business travel tool on the internet.</li>\r\n 	<li>You\'ll love them because you can finally take control of your travel schedule, have freedom to book alternative accommodation like Airbnb, and have a built-in rescue team when stuff goes south. Remove some stress from the equation, go to <a href=\"http://go.travelperk.com/travelcommons\">go.travelperk.com/travelcommons</a> for a no-commitment test drive.</li>\r\n 	<li>It’s free forever if you to <a href=\"http://go.travelperk.com/travelcommons\">go.travelperk.com/travelcommons</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/NiGiD/48586\">O Tannenbaum / Oh Christmas Tree</a> by Martijn de Boer (NiGiD) (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license.  Ft: Admiral Bob (admiralbob77)</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Plan for 2018 Travel Perks</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>So here we are, 4 weeks into the new year and anywhere from a third to a half of us have already ditched our New Year\'s resolutions and are now in full anticipation of Super Bowl queso dip. But while your dry January may have been washed out early, you still have time to get your 2018 travel perks in place.</li>\r\n 	<li>Almost all travel perks come from status in loyalty programs and all those status earning counts reset on Jan 1, so the first step is to match up what you think your 2018 travel plans will be to your loyalty programs. Any gaps? If you think you’ll start flying to Seattle (maybe helping to shill your hometown for Amazon’s HQ2), you’ll probably want to sign up for Alaskan Airlines Mileage Plan, where before, it might not have been worth the extra junk mail.</li>\r\n 	<li>Or if you’re already a member, do a status match. When I took a new CIO job some years back, all the hotels near our offices were Hilton brands. I had a Hilton\'s Honors card but just in basic blue as opposed to my top-of-the-line sparkly platinum Marriott card. After I hit the “reset my password” link on the Hilton website, I went straight to their status match page. Right at the top, it says “For the next 90 days,... we’ll match your elite status with any other loyalty program.” If you complete 4 or 8 stays over those 90 days, the match is good for the year. So rather than having to grind my way to Hilton status, I started enjoying it on Day 1. I had a friend do that with American -- parlay his United 1K status to Executive Platinum when he moved from Denver to Dallas. Much better than slumming in Boarding Group 5 until you clear the first status bar.</li>\r\n 	<li>Doing this, you also need to keep in mind the different ecosystems; the partnerships that tie travel companies together. It used to be just the international alliances -- Star, SkyTeam, OneWorld. When I knew I’d be traveling down to South Africa, racking up some serious business class mileage, I had two real options -- SAA out of JFK and IAD, or DL out of ATL. Living in Chicago, I chose SAA because they’re part of Star Alliance with United, and I’d get a lot more use from United status out of Chicago than I would Delta. And it’s getting even more combinatorial now with United and Marriott are status matching each other.</li>\r\n 	<li>And then there’s the credit cards -- both affinity (United and Chase Visa, American and Citi MasterCard) and non (Amex Platinum, Chase Sapphire Reserve). You gotta do the math. For example, Amex’s Platinum card is $550/year. But with that, you get Membership Rewards points that transfer to airlines and hotels, access to Delta lounges and Amex’s Centurion Lounges, which if you travel frequently to DFW, LAS, MIA, LGA, and now JFK, is great. They’re much better than, say American’s Admirals Clubs. I wish they had one in Chicago. Amex also picks up the $100 Global Entry or $85 PreCheck fee, gives you 10 GoGo WiFi sessions, $200 in Uber credit, and some other benefits. If you’ll use these benefits, that $550 can be a better deal than, say, the $95 that the United Chase will cost you. However, that United Chase will get you baggage fee waiver, two United Club passes, and status boarding. If you don’t travel a huge amount and live in a United hub like Houston, the United card could be a better deal. But you gotta think about your travel, do the math, and sign up for it now so you have all year to maximize the status benefits.</li>\r\n 	<li>And while you’re in this planning zone, do yourself a big favor sign up and make an appointment for Global Entry if you do international travel, or PreCheck if you’re mostly a domestic flyer. If it makes sense for you to get an Amex Platinum or Chase Sapphire Reserve card, it’ll be free. To me, TSA and Customs lines are still the worst part of travel. While you’re figuring out how to bump your status up your status on airlines and hotels, do yourself a favor and step out of those TSA and Customs lines too.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/44580\"> What Child is This (Instrumental)</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license.  Ft: Jeris</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>How to Shop For A Suitcase</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>OK, perhaps a bit presumptuous of a title; perhaps it’s “How I shopped for a suitcase.” But before we go there, let’s summarize the set up from past episodes -- my 10-year old black Swiss Army carry-on rendered itself unusable before Thanksgiving when the handle became stuck in the extended position (luckily as I was getting in a car coming home from ORD and not while trying to stow it in an overhead while boarding), I hate shopping for suitcases so I recharge my Bluesmart smart bag and put it back into service in December only to have it banned from air travel as of last week.</li>\r\n 	<li>So now I’m forced to shop for a suitcase. Like any good consultant, I, of course, construct a prioritized list of evaluation criteria. First, it has to be a carry-on. Now that may seem a bit of a “duh”, but there is some ambiguity; the <a href=\"https://travel-made-simple.com/carry-on-size-chart/\">approved height</a> varies by airline between 19 and 22-inches. If I wanted to play it safe, I’d go for a 20-inch bag, but I’m also want to maximize how much I can carry-on. I tilt toward choosing space. Most US carriers accept a 22-inch bag and that’s mostly what I fly, and even when I’m on European carriers I usually have enough alliance status (my American Platinum status carrying over to OneWorld) to glide past the baggage sizer.</li>\r\n 	<li>Which leads to the second criterion -- it needs to be black. As I said in my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/10/18/ruthless-packing-tips/\">Ruthless Packing Tips post</a> in October, black not only makes you look thinner, it makes your bag look thinner to gate agents scanning for bag-sizer bait.</li>\r\n 	<li>Third, 2 wheels, not 4. This is a bit more of a personal preference. My Bluesmart is a 4-wheel spinner and my wife swears by hers, but because the 4 wheels have to extend from the bottom of the bag, spinners sacrifice packing space for agility, while 2-wheelers can embed their wheels up in the backplane of the bag. Again trying to maximize packing space, I go for the 2-wheeler, and with the biggest wheels I can find to make it an easier, smoother pull. I was kinda surprised how this limited my selection. Spinners definitely rule.</li>\r\n 	<li>My fourth criterion -- I wanted the inside of the suitcase to be as plain and empty as possible. No bunch of zip compartments, or built-in suit hangers, or ratcheting down clothes dividers; just a wide open box that free to structure how I want for each trip. I was surprised how tough this was to find. Indeed, in the end, I couldn’t find it and settled for a bag where I could detach the suit hanger and clothes divider and stash that stuff up in the Land of Misfit Bags next to the Bluesmart.</li>\r\n 	<li>Whittling through all that, I ended up buying a black Victorinox Werks Traveler 5.0 2-wheeler. Victorinox is what used to be Swiss Army; I figured if my last bag survived 10 years of hard mileage, that said something for durability. It was also one of the few where I could detach all the internal storage stuff. And it has that additional zipper to expand the width by an inch -- kinda like when you drop a notch on your belt after Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner; for those times when I’m flying home and have bought a few too many bottles of wine or brown liquor.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #137</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>Thanks again to TravelPerk for sponsoring this episode. Remember to go to <a href=\"http://go.travelperk.com/travelcommons\">go.travelperk.com/travelcommons</a> for a test drive</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_137.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #137 — New Year\'s Travel Status Tips; How to Shop for a Suitcase','','inherit','closed','closed','','1916-revision-v1','','','2018-01-24 15:12:54','2018-01-24 20:12:54','',1916,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/01/24/1916-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1930,1,'2018-01-24 23:16:53','2018-01-25 04:16:53','[caption id=\"attachment_1925\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/IMG_20141210_231414.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1925\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/IMG_20141210_231414-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> How many nights to get Leopard Print status?[/caption]\r\n\r\nSo we\'re four weeks into the new year and 30-50% of us have already ditched our New Year\'s resolutions, but we still have time to get our 2018 travel status lined up. Over the holiday break, I bought a non-smart carry-on to replace my now-banned Bluesmart; I walk through my shopping criteria. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_137.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\nThanks to <a href=\"http://go.travelperk.com/travelcommons\">TravelPerk</a> for sponsoring this episode. [soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/371970371\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /] <!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #137:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. This episode is sponsored by <a href=\"http://go.travelperk.com/travelcommons\">TravelPerk</a>, the #1 rated business travel tool on the Internet. It’s been a light travel month, just a drive down to Nashville, and a couple of trips over to Charlottesville, VA, which has been a nice break from what is otherwise turning out to be a brutally cold winter in Chicago. The day after New Years, I walked out of the house into a -10℉ morning -- not windchill, it was -10℉ ambient. Welcome to January. I had my team travel here last week for a 2018 kick-off meeting. No one accused us of boon-doggling. The guy from Phoenix did say he was filing an employee abuse claim though.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’ve found myself drinking less craft beer and much more Scotch whisky in this month; -10℉ is definitely brown liquor weather. Luckily, my daughter brought home a nice bottle of 18-year-old <a href=\"http://www.glenscotia.com/\">Glen Scotia</a> from Edinburgh for Christmas. I’ve made a sizable dent in it.</li>\r\n 	<li>On my first trip to Charlottesville, after being off the road for four weeks, it took me forever to gather up all the bits of my regular travel carry from around the house. Normally, my travel carry stays in my backpack and my suitcase; I buy duplicates of things like hair brushes and headphones just so I don’t need to pull them out of my bag. But for some reason, all discipline broke down over the holidays and my carefully curated travel carry was spread/spewed throughout the house. Luckily, my ride to ORD was 5 minutes late. I took my Bluesmart bag, squeezed in one last trip before American’s January 15th smart luggage ban took effect. I tweeted a picture of my Bluesmart before boarding. American replied “We\'re glad you\'re flying with us and appreciate your cooperation with our team.” My response -- “Not that I have much of a choice…” Especially with IATA recommending the ban to its 300 airline members. My new non-smart Victorinox bag arrived on my front porch before the ban clicked in, so once I shift everything from the Bluesmart to the Victorinox, I’ll power down the Bluesmart, delete its app from my iPhone, and consign it to the corner of the attic with all my other retired bags -- my own Land of Misfit Bags.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/copperhead/40520\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen</a> by copperhead (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: Admiral Bob, Javolenus , Sackjo22</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Starting off the New Year, I did a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/01/01/looking-back-at-2017-the-highs-and-the-lows/\">blog post</a> summarizing some of the high and low points that we talked about in 2017. The high points? Things like Uber and Lyft driver stories, yet more craft beer taprooms, and Hertz’s President Circle Aisle. Low points? Airlines dragging passengers from planes, everybody lobbying for 5-star reviews, and, no surprise, the smart luggage ban.</li>\r\n 	<li>Allan Marko, not just a long-time TravelCommon’s listener, but probably one of the original listeners showed his roots by posting on the original comment channel -- the TravelCommons website\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Have had our Away luggage for only about six months prior to the battery ban. I really like the ‘smart’ charging feature. Luckily the Away battery is a nicely designed self-contained and easily removable unit (two screws; screwdriver included!) Now the battery lives in my backpack, and the luggage still usable.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\"></li>\r\n 	<li>Allan’s psychic capabilities are showing. I think Away is the only major smart bag that meets the airlines’ requirement for a removable battery. But for me, charging wasn’t the major use case for me. I’m typically fine with my Anker lipstick charger. And if I forget to recharge that, my Verizon mobile WiFi hotspot also doubles as a charger. For me, the GPS tracking was the main use case -- for those times I had to check my bag, it was nice to know that it had also made it to my destination -- a use case that requires power. Pull out the battery and no more tracking. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted.</li>\r\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\"></li>\r\n 	<li>Jim McDonough replied to the Twitter announcement of the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">last episode</a> where I wondered if I was the last generation of cash payers. Jim wrote\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I use cash a) at the local farmer’s market; b) pay for haircuts . . . having a hard time coming up with c)</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Jim, I dunno. Looking at your Twitter profile picture, you look like you could land in my generation. I apologize for using a card for anything under $20. Although I have to say that more and more microbrewery taprooms only take credit cards. I don’t apologize there; or at the self-service tills in Home Depot or Tesco’s -- mostly because there’s no one to apologize to even though they will take cash.</li>\r\n 	<li>Natalie on the British Airways social media team <a href=\"https://twitter.com/British_Airways/status/943550974102245376\">tweeted back</a> at me about the other topic on the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">last episode</a> -- about how hard it can be to cash in on loyalty points. You’ll remember that I talked about all the hassles I had in transferring Avios points from BA to Iberia, until I got a BA agent with solid northern accent. Natalie of BA said\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Hey Mark! Thanks for tagging us in your article. I\'m glad to hear that one of our \'Geordie\' colleagues was able to help you redeem some of your Avios. It\'s a shame you didn\'t catch her name though.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Absolutely it was a shame. She deserves huge props.</li>\r\n 	<li>In that same riff, I mentioned how my email to Iberia to clean up my name on my Iberia Plus account -- which might have been the root cause of my point transfer problem -- seemed to have fallen into a black hole. Well, apparently it didn’t. Soon after that episode, I got a letter from Iberia with a new card that had my correct name. That was nice. Would’ve been just a bit nicer if they’d hit the Reply button while handling the email and typed, I dunno, just 8 words -- “Got it fixed; new card in the mail” But it got done -- all of it, Avios points, non-stop ORD-MAD flight on points, and now, a card with my correct name.</li>\r\n 	<li>And that Iberia letter was probably one of the last surprises I got when I open the mailbox at home. Somehow, I’m not quite sure how, I signed up for a US Post Office service that sends me an email every morning with scanned images of letters I’m going to receive that day. When I got that first email, I was kinda “What the hell?”, but now I kinda like it, especially when I’m on the road. No more wondering what bills showed up, or during the holidays, who had sent us Christmas cards. It does kinda take the surprise out of opening the mailbox -- though not that there was much left since 90% of our physical mail is junk -- but it is kinda entertaining.</li>\r\n 	<li>Back in August, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/08/27/podcast-132-travel-apps-on-my-phone/\">episode #132</a> about the travel apps I have loaded on my phone, I talked about using the paid or “Pro” version of TripIt, and about how it was on the bubble for me because of how the airlines have improved the flight status notifications in their own apps. In 4 months since then, the airline apps have pretty consistently notified me of gate changes and delays faster than TripIt Pro. And so when my subscription ran out a few weeks ago, I ignored the renewal alerts. I’ll still use the free version -- I like the way TripIt consolidates separate plane, hotel, and rental car reservations into a single trip -- kinda replicating the itineraries your travel agent used to give you when they booked your entire trip. But paying $50 for what are now slower, redundant flight alerts? I’ll spend it on beer or brown liquor instead.</li>\r\n 	<li>I don’t know if it’s just me, but the cadence for boarding groups has gotten out of control. I think I was on a Delta flight where I was boarding group 1 or 2, but was the 4th or 5th group to board, after Delta One, and then Platinum Medallion, then Gold Medallion, Sky Team Elite -- it went on forever. American is a bit better -- only one non-numeric boarding group for the invite-only Concierge Key gang (remember George Clooney in Up In The Air) -- and then 1 through 9(!). I do love the announcement “If you don’t have a boarding group number, then board Group 7” which feels a bit random. Where it really becomes fun is on a regional jet, when the gate agent runs through this cadence for a plane with only 40-50 passengers and all the carry-on bags are gate… I mean valet checked. “Now boarding passengers in Group 1, Group 2, Group 3…” Four people board… “Groups 5, 6, 7, and the rest of you” followed by general scrum in front of the agent. I know the airlines have PhDs in psychology, sociology, and linear programming working on this stuff, but it continues to be a cluster</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>And thanks to this episode’s sponsor TravelPerk</li>\r\n 	<li>Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/11/20/podcast-135-airport-bingo-new-old-travel-pc/\">November episode</a>, I talked about American\'s last-minute cancellation of my night flight to Charlottesville and my ensuing scramble to find a replacement flight and to make sure the Hyatt Place didn\'t flush my reservation. But if I\'d booked with TravelPerk, they would\'ve done the scrambling for me.\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>This all-in-one business travel management tool includes a team of highly qualified agents ready to rescue disgruntled travelers from any scenario 24/7.</li>\r\n 	<li>It’s because of making magic happen in times like this that TravelPerk is now the #1 rated business travel tool on the internet.</li>\r\n 	<li>You\'ll love them because you can finally take control of your travel schedule, have freedom to book alternative accommodation like Airbnb, and have a built-in rescue team when stuff goes south. Remove some stress from the equation, go to <a href=\"http://go.travelperk.com/travelcommons\">go.travelperk.com/travelcommons</a> for a no-commitment test drive.</li>\r\n 	<li>It’s free forever if you to <a href=\"http://go.travelperk.com/travelcommons\">go.travelperk.com/travelcommons</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/NiGiD/48586\">O Tannenbaum / Oh Christmas Tree</a> by Martijn de Boer (NiGiD) (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license.  Ft: Admiral Bob (admiralbob77)</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Plan for 2018 Travel Perks</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>So here we are, 4 weeks into the new year and anywhere from a third to a half of us have already ditched our New Year\'s resolutions and are now in full anticipation of Super Bowl queso dip. But while your dry January may have been washed out early, you still have time to get your 2018 travel perks in place.</li>\r\n 	<li>Almost all travel perks come from status in loyalty programs and all those status earning counts reset on Jan 1, so the first step is to match up what you think your 2018 travel plans will be to your loyalty programs. Any gaps? If you think you’ll start flying to Seattle (maybe helping to shill your hometown for Amazon’s HQ2), you’ll probably want to sign up for Alaskan Airlines Mileage Plan, where before, it might not have been worth the extra junk mail.</li>\r\n 	<li>Or if you’re already a member, do a status match. When I took a new CIO job some years back, all the hotels near our offices were Hilton brands. I had a Hilton\'s Honors card but just in basic blue as opposed to my top-of-the-line sparkly platinum Marriott card. After I hit the “reset my password” link on the Hilton website, I went straight to their status match page. Right at the top, it says “For the next 90 days,... we’ll match your elite status with any other loyalty program.” If you complete 4 or 8 stays over those 90 days, the match is good for the year. So rather than having to grind my way to Hilton status, I started enjoying it on Day 1. I had a friend do that with American -- parlay his United 1K status to Executive Platinum when he moved from Denver to Dallas. Much better than slumming in Boarding Group 5 until you clear the first status bar.</li>\r\n 	<li>Doing this, you also need to keep in mind the different ecosystems; the partnerships that tie travel companies together. It used to be just the international alliances -- Star, SkyTeam, OneWorld. When I knew I’d be traveling down to South Africa, racking up some serious business class mileage, I had two real options -- SAA out of JFK and IAD, or DL out of ATL. Living in Chicago, I chose SAA because they’re part of Star Alliance with United, and I’d get a lot more use from United status out of Chicago than I would Delta. And it’s getting even more combinatorial now with United and Marriott are status matching each other.</li>\r\n 	<li>And then there’s the credit cards -- both affinity (United and Chase Visa, American and Citi MasterCard) and non (Amex Platinum, Chase Sapphire Reserve). You gotta do the math. For example, Amex’s Platinum card is $550/year. But with that, you get Membership Rewards points that transfer to airlines and hotels, access to Delta lounges and Amex’s Centurion Lounges, which if you travel frequently to DFW, LAS, MIA, LGA, and now JFK, is great. They’re much better than, say American’s Admirals Clubs. I wish they had one in Chicago. Amex also picks up the $100 Global Entry or $85 PreCheck fee, gives you 10 GoGo WiFi sessions, $200 in Uber credit, and some other benefits. If you’ll use these benefits, that $550 can be a better deal than, say, the $95 that the United Chase will cost you. However, that United Chase will get you baggage fee waiver, two United Club passes, and status boarding. If you don’t travel a huge amount and live in a United hub like Houston, the United card could be a better deal. But you gotta think about your travel, do the math, and sign up for it now so you have all year to maximize the status benefits.</li>\r\n 	<li>And while you’re in this planning zone, do yourself a big favor sign up and make an appointment for Global Entry if you do international travel, or PreCheck if you’re mostly a domestic flyer. If it makes sense for you to get an Amex Platinum or Chase Sapphire Reserve card, it’ll be free. To me, TSA and Customs lines are still the worst part of travel. While you’re figuring out how to bump your status up your status on airlines and hotels, do yourself a favor and step out of those TSA and Customs lines too.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/44580\"> What Child is This (Instrumental)</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license.  Ft: Jeris</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>How to Shop For A Suitcase</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>OK, perhaps a bit presumptuous of a title; perhaps it’s “How I shopped for a suitcase.” But before we go there, let’s summarize the set up from past episodes -- my 10-year old black Swiss Army carry-on rendered itself unusable before Thanksgiving when the handle became stuck in the extended position (luckily as I was getting in a car coming home from ORD and not while trying to stow it in an overhead while boarding), I hate shopping for suitcases so I recharge my Bluesmart smart bag and put it back into service in December only to have it banned from air travel as of last week.</li>\r\n 	<li>So now I’m forced to shop for a suitcase. Like any good consultant, I, of course, construct a prioritized list of evaluation criteria. First, it has to be a carry-on. Now that may seem a bit of a “duh”, but there is some ambiguity; the <a href=\"https://travel-made-simple.com/carry-on-size-chart/\">approved height</a> varies by airline between 19 and 22-inches. If I wanted to play it safe, I’d go for a 20-inch bag, but I’m also want to maximize how much I can carry-on. I tilt toward choosing space. Most US carriers accept a 22-inch bag and that’s mostly what I fly, and even when I’m on European carriers I usually have enough alliance status (my American Platinum status carrying over to OneWorld) to glide past the baggage sizer.</li>\r\n 	<li>Which leads to the second criterion -- it needs to be black. As I said in my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/10/18/ruthless-packing-tips/\">Ruthless Packing Tips post</a> in October, black not only makes you look thinner, it makes your bag look thinner to gate agents scanning for bag-sizer bait.</li>\r\n 	<li>Third, 2 wheels, not 4. This is a bit more of a personal preference. My Bluesmart is a 4-wheel spinner and my wife swears by hers, but because the 4 wheels have to extend from the bottom of the bag, spinners sacrifice packing space for agility, while 2-wheelers can embed their wheels up in the backplane of the bag. Again trying to maximize packing space, I go for the 2-wheeler, and with the biggest wheels I can find to make it an easier, smoother pull. I was kinda surprised how this limited my selection. Spinners definitely rule.</li>\r\n 	<li>My fourth criterion -- I wanted the inside of the suitcase to be as plain and empty as possible. No bunch of zip compartments, or built-in suit hangers, or ratcheting down clothes dividers; just a wide open box that free to structure how I want for each trip. I was surprised how tough this was to find. Indeed, in the end, I couldn’t find it and settled for a bag where I could detach the suit hanger and clothes divider and stash that stuff up in the Land of Misfit Bags next to the Bluesmart.</li>\r\n 	<li>Whittling through all that, I ended up buying a black Victorinox Werks Traveler 5.0 2-wheeler. Victorinox is what used to be Swiss Army; I figured if my last bag survived 10 years of hard mileage, that said something for durability. It was also one of the few where I could detach all the internal storage stuff. And it has that additional zipper to expand the width by an inch -- kinda like when you drop a notch on your belt after Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner; for those times when I’m flying home and have bought a few too many bottles of wine or brown liquor.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #137</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>Thanks again to TravelPerk for sponsoring this episode. Remember to go to <a href=\"http://go.travelperk.com/travelcommons\">go.travelperk.com/travelcommons</a> for a test drive</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_137.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #137 — New Year\'s Travel Status Tips; How to Shop for a Suitcase','','inherit','closed','closed','','1916-revision-v1','','','2018-01-24 23:16:53','2018-01-25 04:16:53','',1916,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/01/24/1916-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1931,1,'2018-01-24 23:17:32','2018-01-25 04:17:32','[caption id=\"attachment_1925\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/IMG_20141210_231414.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1925\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/IMG_20141210_231414-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> How many nights to get Leopard Print status?[/caption]\r\n\r\nSo we\'re four weeks into the new year and 30-50% of us have already ditched our New Year\'s resolutions, but we still have time to get our 2018 travel status lined up. Over the holiday break, I bought a non-smart carry-on to replace my now-banned Bluesmart; I walk through my shopping criteria. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_137.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\nThanks to <a href=\"http://go.travelperk.com/travelcommons\">TravelPerk</a> for sponsoring this episode. [soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/388761270\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]<!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #137:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. This episode is sponsored by <a href=\"http://go.travelperk.com/travelcommons\">TravelPerk</a>, the #1 rated business travel tool on the Internet. It’s been a light travel month, just a drive down to Nashville, and a couple of trips over to Charlottesville, VA, which has been a nice break from what is otherwise turning out to be a brutally cold winter in Chicago. The day after New Years, I walked out of the house into a -10℉ morning -- not windchill, it was -10℉ ambient. Welcome to January. I had my team travel here last week for a 2018 kick-off meeting. No one accused us of boon-doggling. The guy from Phoenix did say he was filing an employee abuse claim though.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’ve found myself drinking less craft beer and much more Scotch whisky in this month; -10℉ is definitely brown liquor weather. Luckily, my daughter brought home a nice bottle of 18-year-old <a href=\"http://www.glenscotia.com/\">Glen Scotia</a> from Edinburgh for Christmas. I’ve made a sizable dent in it.</li>\r\n 	<li>On my first trip to Charlottesville, after being off the road for four weeks, it took me forever to gather up all the bits of my regular travel carry from around the house. Normally, my travel carry stays in my backpack and my suitcase; I buy duplicates of things like hair brushes and headphones just so I don’t need to pull them out of my bag. But for some reason, all discipline broke down over the holidays and my carefully curated travel carry was spread/spewed throughout the house. Luckily, my ride to ORD was 5 minutes late. I took my Bluesmart bag, squeezed in one last trip before American’s January 15th smart luggage ban took effect. I tweeted a picture of my Bluesmart before boarding. American replied “We\'re glad you\'re flying with us and appreciate your cooperation with our team.” My response -- “Not that I have much of a choice…” Especially with IATA recommending the ban to its 300 airline members. My new non-smart Victorinox bag arrived on my front porch before the ban clicked in, so once I shift everything from the Bluesmart to the Victorinox, I’ll power down the Bluesmart, delete its app from my iPhone, and consign it to the corner of the attic with all my other retired bags -- my own Land of Misfit Bags.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/copperhead/40520\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen</a> by copperhead (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: Admiral Bob, Javolenus , Sackjo22</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Starting off the New Year, I did a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/01/01/looking-back-at-2017-the-highs-and-the-lows/\">blog post</a> summarizing some of the high and low points that we talked about in 2017. The high points? Things like Uber and Lyft driver stories, yet more craft beer taprooms, and Hertz’s President Circle Aisle. Low points? Airlines dragging passengers from planes, everybody lobbying for 5-star reviews, and, no surprise, the smart luggage ban.</li>\r\n 	<li>Allan Marko, not just a long-time TravelCommon’s listener, but probably one of the original listeners showed his roots by posting on the original comment channel -- the TravelCommons website\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Have had our Away luggage for only about six months prior to the battery ban. I really like the ‘smart’ charging feature. Luckily the Away battery is a nicely designed self-contained and easily removable unit (two screws; screwdriver included!) Now the battery lives in my backpack, and the luggage still usable.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\"></li>\r\n 	<li>Allan’s psychic capabilities are showing. I think Away is the only major smart bag that meets the airlines’ requirement for a removable battery. But for me, charging wasn’t the major use case for me. I’m typically fine with my Anker lipstick charger. And if I forget to recharge that, my Verizon mobile WiFi hotspot also doubles as a charger. For me, the GPS tracking was the main use case -- for those times I had to check my bag, it was nice to know that it had also made it to my destination -- a use case that requires power. Pull out the battery and no more tracking. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted.</li>\r\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\"></li>\r\n 	<li>Jim McDonough replied to the Twitter announcement of the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">last episode</a> where I wondered if I was the last generation of cash payers. Jim wrote\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I use cash a) at the local farmer’s market; b) pay for haircuts . . . having a hard time coming up with c)</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Jim, I dunno. Looking at your Twitter profile picture, you look like you could land in my generation. I apologize for using a card for anything under $20. Although I have to say that more and more microbrewery taprooms only take credit cards. I don’t apologize there; or at the self-service tills in Home Depot or Tesco’s -- mostly because there’s no one to apologize to even though they will take cash.</li>\r\n 	<li>Natalie on the British Airways social media team <a href=\"https://twitter.com/British_Airways/status/943550974102245376\">tweeted back</a> at me about the other topic on the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">last episode</a> -- about how hard it can be to cash in on loyalty points. You’ll remember that I talked about all the hassles I had in transferring Avios points from BA to Iberia, until I got a BA agent with solid northern accent. Natalie of BA said\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Hey Mark! Thanks for tagging us in your article. I\'m glad to hear that one of our \'Geordie\' colleagues was able to help you redeem some of your Avios. It\'s a shame you didn\'t catch her name though.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Absolutely it was a shame. She deserves huge props.</li>\r\n 	<li>In that same riff, I mentioned how my email to Iberia to clean up my name on my Iberia Plus account -- which might have been the root cause of my point transfer problem -- seemed to have fallen into a black hole. Well, apparently it didn’t. Soon after that episode, I got a letter from Iberia with a new card that had my correct name. That was nice. Would’ve been just a bit nicer if they’d hit the Reply button while handling the email and typed, I dunno, just 8 words -- “Got it fixed; new card in the mail” But it got done -- all of it, Avios points, non-stop ORD-MAD flight on points, and now, a card with my correct name.</li>\r\n 	<li>And that Iberia letter was probably one of the last surprises I got when I open the mailbox at home. Somehow, I’m not quite sure how, I signed up for a US Post Office service that sends me an email every morning with scanned images of letters I’m going to receive that day. When I got that first email, I was kinda “What the hell?”, but now I kinda like it, especially when I’m on the road. No more wondering what bills showed up, or during the holidays, who had sent us Christmas cards. It does kinda take the surprise out of opening the mailbox -- though not that there was much left since 90% of our physical mail is junk -- but it is kinda entertaining.</li>\r\n 	<li>Back in August, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/08/27/podcast-132-travel-apps-on-my-phone/\">episode #132</a> about the travel apps I have loaded on my phone, I talked about using the paid or “Pro” version of TripIt, and about how it was on the bubble for me because of how the airlines have improved the flight status notifications in their own apps. In 4 months since then, the airline apps have pretty consistently notified me of gate changes and delays faster than TripIt Pro. And so when my subscription ran out a few weeks ago, I ignored the renewal alerts. I’ll still use the free version -- I like the way TripIt consolidates separate plane, hotel, and rental car reservations into a single trip -- kinda replicating the itineraries your travel agent used to give you when they booked your entire trip. But paying $50 for what are now slower, redundant flight alerts? I’ll spend it on beer or brown liquor instead.</li>\r\n 	<li>I don’t know if it’s just me, but the cadence for boarding groups has gotten out of control. I think I was on a Delta flight where I was boarding group 1 or 2, but was the 4th or 5th group to board, after Delta One, and then Platinum Medallion, then Gold Medallion, Sky Team Elite -- it went on forever. American is a bit better -- only one non-numeric boarding group for the invite-only Concierge Key gang (remember George Clooney in Up In The Air) -- and then 1 through 9(!). I do love the announcement “If you don’t have a boarding group number, then board Group 7” which feels a bit random. Where it really becomes fun is on a regional jet, when the gate agent runs through this cadence for a plane with only 40-50 passengers and all the carry-on bags are gate… I mean valet checked. “Now boarding passengers in Group 1, Group 2, Group 3…” Four people board… “Groups 5, 6, 7, and the rest of you” followed by general scrum in front of the agent. I know the airlines have PhDs in psychology, sociology, and linear programming working on this stuff, but it continues to be a cluster</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>And thanks to this episode’s sponsor TravelPerk</li>\r\n 	<li>Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/11/20/podcast-135-airport-bingo-new-old-travel-pc/\">November episode</a>, I talked about American\'s last-minute cancellation of my night flight to Charlottesville and my ensuing scramble to find a replacement flight and to make sure the Hyatt Place didn\'t flush my reservation. But if I\'d booked with TravelPerk, they would\'ve done the scrambling for me.\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>This all-in-one business travel management tool includes a team of highly qualified agents ready to rescue disgruntled travelers from any scenario 24/7.</li>\r\n 	<li>It’s because of making magic happen in times like this that TravelPerk is now the #1 rated business travel tool on the internet.</li>\r\n 	<li>You\'ll love them because you can finally take control of your travel schedule, have freedom to book alternative accommodation like Airbnb, and have a built-in rescue team when stuff goes south. Remove some stress from the equation, go to <a href=\"http://go.travelperk.com/travelcommons\">go.travelperk.com/travelcommons</a> for a no-commitment test drive.</li>\r\n 	<li>It’s free forever if you to <a href=\"http://go.travelperk.com/travelcommons\">go.travelperk.com/travelcommons</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/NiGiD/48586\">O Tannenbaum / Oh Christmas Tree</a> by Martijn de Boer (NiGiD) (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license.  Ft: Admiral Bob (admiralbob77)</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Plan for 2018 Travel Perks</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>So here we are, 4 weeks into the new year and anywhere from a third to a half of us have already ditched our New Year\'s resolutions and are now in full anticipation of Super Bowl queso dip. But while your dry January may have been washed out early, you still have time to get your 2018 travel perks in place.</li>\r\n 	<li>Almost all travel perks come from status in loyalty programs and all those status earning counts reset on Jan 1, so the first step is to match up what you think your 2018 travel plans will be to your loyalty programs. Any gaps? If you think you’ll start flying to Seattle (maybe helping to shill your hometown for Amazon’s HQ2), you’ll probably want to sign up for Alaskan Airlines Mileage Plan, where before, it might not have been worth the extra junk mail.</li>\r\n 	<li>Or if you’re already a member, do a status match. When I took a new CIO job some years back, all the hotels near our offices were Hilton brands. I had a Hilton\'s Honors card but just in basic blue as opposed to my top-of-the-line sparkly platinum Marriott card. After I hit the “reset my password” link on the Hilton website, I went straight to their status match page. Right at the top, it says “For the next 90 days,... we’ll match your elite status with any other loyalty program.” If you complete 4 or 8 stays over those 90 days, the match is good for the year. So rather than having to grind my way to Hilton status, I started enjoying it on Day 1. I had a friend do that with American -- parlay his United 1K status to Executive Platinum when he moved from Denver to Dallas. Much better than slumming in Boarding Group 5 until you clear the first status bar.</li>\r\n 	<li>Doing this, you also need to keep in mind the different ecosystems; the partnerships that tie travel companies together. It used to be just the international alliances -- Star, SkyTeam, OneWorld. When I knew I’d be traveling down to South Africa, racking up some serious business class mileage, I had two real options -- SAA out of JFK and IAD, or DL out of ATL. Living in Chicago, I chose SAA because they’re part of Star Alliance with United, and I’d get a lot more use from United status out of Chicago than I would Delta. And it’s getting even more combinatorial now with United and Marriott are status matching each other.</li>\r\n 	<li>And then there’s the credit cards -- both affinity (United and Chase Visa, American and Citi MasterCard) and non (Amex Platinum, Chase Sapphire Reserve). You gotta do the math. For example, Amex’s Platinum card is $550/year. But with that, you get Membership Rewards points that transfer to airlines and hotels, access to Delta lounges and Amex’s Centurion Lounges, which if you travel frequently to DFW, LAS, MIA, LGA, and now JFK, is great. They’re much better than, say American’s Admirals Clubs. I wish they had one in Chicago. Amex also picks up the $100 Global Entry or $85 PreCheck fee, gives you 10 GoGo WiFi sessions, $200 in Uber credit, and some other benefits. If you’ll use these benefits, that $550 can be a better deal than, say, the $95 that the United Chase will cost you. However, that United Chase will get you baggage fee waiver, two United Club passes, and status boarding. If you don’t travel a huge amount and live in a United hub like Houston, the United card could be a better deal. But you gotta think about your travel, do the math, and sign up for it now so you have all year to maximize the status benefits.</li>\r\n 	<li>And while you’re in this planning zone, do yourself a big favor sign up and make an appointment for Global Entry if you do international travel, or PreCheck if you’re mostly a domestic flyer. If it makes sense for you to get an Amex Platinum or Chase Sapphire Reserve card, it’ll be free. To me, TSA and Customs lines are still the worst part of travel. While you’re figuring out how to bump your status up your status on airlines and hotels, do yourself a favor and step out of those TSA and Customs lines too.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/44580\"> What Child is This (Instrumental)</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license.  Ft: Jeris</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>How to Shop For A Suitcase</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>OK, perhaps a bit presumptuous of a title; perhaps it’s “How I shopped for a suitcase.” But before we go there, let’s summarize the set up from past episodes -- my 10-year old black Swiss Army carry-on rendered itself unusable before Thanksgiving when the handle became stuck in the extended position (luckily as I was getting in a car coming home from ORD and not while trying to stow it in an overhead while boarding), I hate shopping for suitcases so I recharge my Bluesmart smart bag and put it back into service in December only to have it banned from air travel as of last week.</li>\r\n 	<li>So now I’m forced to shop for a suitcase. Like any good consultant, I, of course, construct a prioritized list of evaluation criteria. First, it has to be a carry-on. Now that may seem a bit of a “duh”, but there is some ambiguity; the <a href=\"https://travel-made-simple.com/carry-on-size-chart/\">approved height</a> varies by airline between 19 and 22-inches. If I wanted to play it safe, I’d go for a 20-inch bag, but I’m also want to maximize how much I can carry-on. I tilt toward choosing space. Most US carriers accept a 22-inch bag and that’s mostly what I fly, and even when I’m on European carriers I usually have enough alliance status (my American Platinum status carrying over to OneWorld) to glide past the baggage sizer.</li>\r\n 	<li>Which leads to the second criterion -- it needs to be black. As I said in my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/10/18/ruthless-packing-tips/\">Ruthless Packing Tips post</a> in October, black not only makes you look thinner, it makes your bag look thinner to gate agents scanning for bag-sizer bait.</li>\r\n 	<li>Third, 2 wheels, not 4. This is a bit more of a personal preference. My Bluesmart is a 4-wheel spinner and my wife swears by hers, but because the 4 wheels have to extend from the bottom of the bag, spinners sacrifice packing space for agility, while 2-wheelers can embed their wheels up in the backplane of the bag. Again trying to maximize packing space, I go for the 2-wheeler, and with the biggest wheels I can find to make it an easier, smoother pull. I was kinda surprised how this limited my selection. Spinners definitely rule.</li>\r\n 	<li>My fourth criterion -- I wanted the inside of the suitcase to be as plain and empty as possible. No bunch of zip compartments, or built-in suit hangers, or ratcheting down clothes dividers; just a wide open box that free to structure how I want for each trip. I was surprised how tough this was to find. Indeed, in the end, I couldn’t find it and settled for a bag where I could detach the suit hanger and clothes divider and stash that stuff up in the Land of Misfit Bags next to the Bluesmart.</li>\r\n 	<li>Whittling through all that, I ended up buying a black Victorinox Werks Traveler 5.0 2-wheeler. Victorinox is what used to be Swiss Army; I figured if my last bag survived 10 years of hard mileage, that said something for durability. It was also one of the few where I could detach all the internal storage stuff. And it has that additional zipper to expand the width by an inch -- kinda like when you drop a notch on your belt after Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner; for those times when I’m flying home and have bought a few too many bottles of wine or brown liquor.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #137</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>Thanks again to TravelPerk for sponsoring this episode. Remember to go to <a href=\"http://go.travelperk.com/travelcommons\">go.travelperk.com/travelcommons</a> for a test drive</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_137.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #137 — New Year\'s Travel Status Tips; How to Shop for a Suitcase','','inherit','closed','closed','','1916-revision-v1','','','2018-01-24 23:17:32','2018-01-25 04:17:32','',1916,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/01/24/1916-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1933,1,'2018-01-24 23:25:06','2018-01-25 04:25:06','[caption id=\"attachment_1925\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/IMG_20141210_231414.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1925\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/IMG_20141210_231414-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> How many nights to get Leopard Print status?[/caption]\r\n\r\nSo we\'re four weeks into the new year and 30-50% of us have already ditched our New Year\'s resolutions, but we still have time to get our 2018 travel status lined up. Over the holiday break, I bought a non-smart carry-on to replace my now-banned Bluesmart; I walk through my shopping criteria. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_137.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\nThanks to <a href=\"http://go.travelperk.com/travelcommons\">TravelPerk</a> for sponsoring this episode. [soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/388761270\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]<!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #137:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. This episode is sponsored by <a href=\"http://go.travelperk.com/travelcommons\">TravelPerk</a>, the #1 rated business travel tool on the Internet. It’s been a light travel month, just a drive down to Nashville, and a couple of trips over to Charlottesville, VA, which has been a nice break from what is otherwise turning out to be a brutally cold winter in Chicago. The day after New Years, I walked out of the house into a -10℉ morning -- not windchill, it was -10℉ ambient. Welcome to January. I had my team travel here last week for a 2018 kick-off meeting. No one accused us of boon-doggling. The guy from Phoenix did say he was filing an employee abuse claim though.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’ve found myself drinking less craft beer and much more Scotch whisky in this month; -10℉ is definitely brown liquor weather. Luckily, my daughter brought home a nice bottle of 18-year-old <a href=\"http://www.glenscotia.com/\">Glen Scotia</a> from Edinburgh for Christmas. I’ve made a sizable dent in it.</li>\r\n 	<li>On my first trip to Charlottesville, after being off the road for four weeks, it took me forever to gather up all the bits of my regular travel carry from around the house. Normally, my travel carry stays in my backpack and my suitcase; I buy duplicates of things like hair brushes and headphones just so I don’t need to pull them out of my bag. But for some reason, all discipline broke down over the holidays and my carefully curated travel carry was spread/spewed throughout the house. Luckily, my ride to ORD was 5 minutes late. I took my Bluesmart bag, squeezed in one last trip before American’s January 15th smart luggage ban took effect. I tweeted a picture of my Bluesmart before boarding. American replied “We\'re glad you\'re flying with us and appreciate your cooperation with our team.” My response -- “Not that I have much of a choice…” Especially with IATA recommending the ban to its 300 airline members. My new non-smart Victorinox bag arrived on my front porch before the ban clicked in, so once I shift everything from the Bluesmart to the Victorinox, I’ll power down the Bluesmart, delete its app from my iPhone, and consign it to the corner of the attic with all my other retired bags -- my own Land of Misfit Bags.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mactonite/29469\">Static</a> by Darkroom (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mactonite/29469 </span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Starting off the New Year, I did a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/01/01/looking-back-at-2017-the-highs-and-the-lows/\">blog post</a> summarizing some of the high and low points that we talked about in 2017. The high points? Things like Uber and Lyft driver stories, yet more craft beer taprooms, and Hertz’s President Circle Aisle. Low points? Airlines dragging passengers from planes, everybody lobbying for 5-star reviews, and, no surprise, the smart luggage ban.</li>\r\n 	<li>Allan Marko, not just a long-time TravelCommon’s listener, but probably one of the original listeners showed his roots by posting on the original comment channel -- the TravelCommons website\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Have had our Away luggage for only about six months prior to the battery ban. I really like the ‘smart’ charging feature. Luckily the Away battery is a nicely designed self-contained and easily removable unit (two screws; screwdriver included!) Now the battery lives in my backpack, and the luggage still usable.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\"></li>\r\n 	<li>Allan’s psychic capabilities are showing. I think Away is the only major smart bag that meets the airlines’ requirement for a removable battery. But for me, charging wasn’t the major use case for me. I’m typically fine with my Anker lipstick charger. And if I forget to recharge that, my Verizon mobile WiFi hotspot also doubles as a charger. For me, the GPS tracking was the main use case -- for those times I had to check my bag, it was nice to know that it had also made it to my destination -- a use case that requires power. Pull out the battery and no more tracking. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted.</li>\r\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\"></li>\r\n 	<li>Jim McDonough replied to the Twitter announcement of the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">last episode</a> where I wondered if I was the last generation of cash payers. Jim wrote\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I use cash a) at the local farmer’s market; b) pay for haircuts . . . having a hard time coming up with c)</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Jim, I dunno. Looking at your Twitter profile picture, you look like you could land in my generation. I apologize for using a card for anything under $20. Although I have to say that more and more microbrewery taprooms only take credit cards. I don’t apologize there; or at the self-service tills in Home Depot or Tesco’s -- mostly because there’s no one to apologize to even though they will take cash.</li>\r\n 	<li>Natalie on the British Airways social media team <a href=\"https://twitter.com/British_Airways/status/943550974102245376\">tweeted back</a> at me about the other topic on the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">last episode</a> -- about how hard it can be to cash in on loyalty points. You’ll remember that I talked about all the hassles I had in transferring Avios points from BA to Iberia, until I got a BA agent with solid northern accent. Natalie of BA said\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Hey Mark! Thanks for tagging us in your article. I\'m glad to hear that one of our \'Geordie\' colleagues was able to help you redeem some of your Avios. It\'s a shame you didn\'t catch her name though.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Absolutely it was a shame. She deserves huge props.</li>\r\n 	<li>In that same riff, I mentioned how my email to Iberia to clean up my name on my Iberia Plus account -- which might have been the root cause of my point transfer problem -- seemed to have fallen into a black hole. Well, apparently it didn’t. Soon after that episode, I got a letter from Iberia with a new card that had my correct name. That was nice. Would’ve been just a bit nicer if they’d hit the Reply button while handling the email and typed, I dunno, just 8 words -- “Got it fixed; new card in the mail” But it got done -- all of it, Avios points, non-stop ORD-MAD flight on points, and now, a card with my correct name.</li>\r\n 	<li>And that Iberia letter was probably one of the last surprises I got when I open the mailbox at home. Somehow, I’m not quite sure how, I signed up for a US Post Office service that sends me an email every morning with scanned images of letters I’m going to receive that day. When I got that first email, I was kinda “What the hell?”, but now I kinda like it, especially when I’m on the road. No more wondering what bills showed up, or during the holidays, who had sent us Christmas cards. It does kinda take the surprise out of opening the mailbox -- though not that there was much left since 90% of our physical mail is junk -- but it is kinda entertaining.</li>\r\n 	<li>Back in August, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/08/27/podcast-132-travel-apps-on-my-phone/\">episode #132</a> about the travel apps I have loaded on my phone, I talked about using the paid or “Pro” version of TripIt, and about how it was on the bubble for me because of how the airlines have improved the flight status notifications in their own apps. In 4 months since then, the airline apps have pretty consistently notified me of gate changes and delays faster than TripIt Pro. And so when my subscription ran out a few weeks ago, I ignored the renewal alerts. I’ll still use the free version -- I like the way TripIt consolidates separate plane, hotel, and rental car reservations into a single trip -- kinda replicating the itineraries your travel agent used to give you when they booked your entire trip. But paying $50 for what are now slower, redundant flight alerts? I’ll spend it on beer or brown liquor instead.</li>\r\n 	<li>I don’t know if it’s just me, but the cadence for boarding groups has gotten out of control. I think I was on a Delta flight where I was boarding group 1 or 2, but was the 4th or 5th group to board, after Delta One, and then Platinum Medallion, then Gold Medallion, Sky Team Elite -- it went on forever. American is a bit better -- only one non-numeric boarding group for the invite-only Concierge Key gang (remember George Clooney in Up In The Air) -- and then 1 through 9(!). I do love the announcement “If you don’t have a boarding group number, then board Group 7” which feels a bit random. Where it really becomes fun is on a regional jet, when the gate agent runs through this cadence for a plane with only 40-50 passengers and all the carry-on bags are gate… I mean valet checked. “Now boarding passengers in Group 1, Group 2, Group 3…” Four people board… “Groups 5, 6, 7, and the rest of you” followed by general scrum in front of the agent. I know the airlines have PhDs in psychology, sociology, and linear programming working on this stuff, but it continues to be a cluster</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>And thanks to this episode’s sponsor TravelPerk</li>\r\n 	<li>Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/11/20/podcast-135-airport-bingo-new-old-travel-pc/\">November episode</a>, I talked about American\'s last-minute cancellation of my night flight to Charlottesville and my ensuing scramble to find a replacement flight and to make sure the Hyatt Place didn\'t flush my reservation. But if I\'d booked with TravelPerk, they would\'ve done the scrambling for me.\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>This all-in-one business travel management tool includes a team of highly qualified agents ready to rescue disgruntled travelers from any scenario 24/7.</li>\r\n 	<li>It’s because of making magic happen in times like this that TravelPerk is now the #1 rated business travel tool on the internet.</li>\r\n 	<li>You\'ll love them because you can finally take control of your travel schedule, have freedom to book alternative accommodation like Airbnb, and have a built-in rescue team when stuff goes south. Remove some stress from the equation, go to <a href=\"http://go.travelperk.com/travelcommons\">go.travelperk.com/travelcommons</a> for a no-commitment test drive.</li>\r\n 	<li>It’s free forever if you to <a href=\"http://go.travelperk.com/travelcommons\">go.travelperk.com/travelcommons</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Psykick/52938\">Another Way</a> by Psykick (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Psykick/52938</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Plan for 2018 Travel Perks</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>So here we are, 4 weeks into the new year and anywhere from a third to a half of us have already ditched our New Year\'s resolutions and are now in full anticipation of Super Bowl queso dip. But while your dry January may have been washed out early, you still have time to get your 2018 travel perks in place.</li>\r\n 	<li>Almost all travel perks come from status in loyalty programs and all those status earning counts reset on Jan 1, so the first step is to match up what you think your 2018 travel plans will be to your loyalty programs. Any gaps? If you think you’ll start flying to Seattle (maybe helping to shill your hometown for Amazon’s HQ2), you’ll probably want to sign up for Alaskan Airlines Mileage Plan, where before, it might not have been worth the extra junk mail.</li>\r\n 	<li>Or if you’re already a member, do a status match. When I took a new CIO job some years back, all the hotels near our offices were Hilton brands. I had a Hilton\'s Honors card but just in basic blue as opposed to my top-of-the-line sparkly platinum Marriott card. After I hit the “reset my password” link on the Hilton website, I went straight to their status match page. Right at the top, it says “For the next 90 days,... we’ll match your elite status with any other loyalty program.” If you complete 4 or 8 stays over those 90 days, the match is good for the year. So rather than having to grind my way to Hilton status, I started enjoying it on Day 1. I had a friend do that with American -- parlay his United 1K status to Executive Platinum when he moved from Denver to Dallas. Much better than slumming in Boarding Group 5 until you clear the first status bar.</li>\r\n 	<li>Doing this, you also need to keep in mind the different ecosystems; the partnerships that tie travel companies together. It used to be just the international alliances -- Star, SkyTeam, OneWorld. When I knew I’d be traveling down to South Africa, racking up some serious business class mileage, I had two real options -- SAA out of JFK and IAD, or DL out of ATL. Living in Chicago, I chose SAA because they’re part of Star Alliance with United, and I’d get a lot more use from United status out of Chicago than I would Delta. And it’s getting even more combinatorial now with United and Marriott are status matching each other.</li>\r\n 	<li>And then there’s the credit cards -- both affinity (United and Chase Visa, American and Citi MasterCard) and non (Amex Platinum, Chase Sapphire Reserve). You gotta do the math. For example, Amex’s Platinum card is $550/year. But with that, you get Membership Rewards points that transfer to airlines and hotels, access to Delta lounges and Amex’s Centurion Lounges, which if you travel frequently to DFW, LAS, MIA, LGA, and now JFK, is great. They’re much better than, say American’s Admirals Clubs. I wish they had one in Chicago. Amex also picks up the $100 Global Entry or $85 PreCheck fee, gives you 10 GoGo WiFi sessions, $200 in Uber credit, and some other benefits. If you’ll use these benefits, that $550 can be a better deal than, say, the $95 that the United Chase will cost you. However, that United Chase will get you baggage fee waiver, two United Club passes, and status boarding. If you don’t travel a huge amount and live in a United hub like Houston, the United card could be a better deal. But you gotta think about your travel, do the math, and sign up for it now so you have all year to maximize the status benefits.</li>\r\n 	<li>And while you’re in this planning zone, do yourself a big favor sign up and make an appointment for Global Entry if you do international travel, or PreCheck if you’re mostly a domestic flyer. If it makes sense for you to get an Amex Platinum or Chase Sapphire Reserve card, it’ll be free. To me, TSA and Customs lines are still the worst part of travel. While you’re figuring out how to bump your status up your status on airlines and hotels, do yourself a favor and step out of those TSA and Customs lines too.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/flatwound/14476\">The Long Goodbye</a> by John Pazdan (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/flatwound/14476</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>How to Shop For A Suitcase</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>OK, perhaps a bit presumptuous of a title; perhaps it’s “How I shopped for a suitcase.” But before we go there, let’s summarize the set up from past episodes -- my 10-year old black Swiss Army carry-on rendered itself unusable before Thanksgiving when the handle became stuck in the extended position (luckily as I was getting in a car coming home from ORD and not while trying to stow it in an overhead while boarding), I hate shopping for suitcases so I recharge my Bluesmart smart bag and put it back into service in December only to have it banned from air travel as of last week.</li>\r\n 	<li>So now I’m forced to shop for a suitcase. Like any good consultant, I, of course, construct a prioritized list of evaluation criteria. First, it has to be a carry-on. Now that may seem a bit of a “duh”, but there is some ambiguity; the <a href=\"https://travel-made-simple.com/carry-on-size-chart/\">approved height</a> varies by airline between 19 and 22-inches. If I wanted to play it safe, I’d go for a 20-inch bag, but I’m also want to maximize how much I can carry-on. I tilt toward choosing space. Most US carriers accept a 22-inch bag and that’s mostly what I fly, and even when I’m on European carriers I usually have enough alliance status (my American Platinum status carrying over to OneWorld) to glide past the baggage sizer.</li>\r\n 	<li>Which leads to the second criterion -- it needs to be black. As I said in my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/10/18/ruthless-packing-tips/\">Ruthless Packing Tips post</a> in October, black not only makes you look thinner, it makes your bag look thinner to gate agents scanning for bag-sizer bait.</li>\r\n 	<li>Third, 2 wheels, not 4. This is a bit more of a personal preference. My Bluesmart is a 4-wheel spinner and my wife swears by hers, but because the 4 wheels have to extend from the bottom of the bag, spinners sacrifice packing space for agility, while 2-wheelers can embed their wheels up in the backplane of the bag. Again trying to maximize packing space, I go for the 2-wheeler, and with the biggest wheels I can find to make it an easier, smoother pull. I was kinda surprised how this limited my selection. Spinners definitely rule.</li>\r\n 	<li>My fourth criterion -- I wanted the inside of the suitcase to be as plain and empty as possible. No bunch of zip compartments, or built-in suit hangers, or ratcheting down clothes dividers; just a wide open box that free to structure how I want for each trip. I was surprised how tough this was to find. Indeed, in the end, I couldn’t find it and settled for a bag where I could detach the suit hanger and clothes divider and stash that stuff up in the Land of Misfit Bags next to the Bluesmart.</li>\r\n 	<li>Whittling through all that, I ended up buying a black Victorinox Werks Traveler 5.0 2-wheeler. Victorinox is what used to be Swiss Army; I figured if my last bag survived 10 years of hard mileage, that said something for durability. It was also one of the few where I could detach all the internal storage stuff. And it has that additional zipper to expand the width by an inch -- kinda like when you drop a notch on your belt after Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner; for those times when I’m flying home and have bought a few too many bottles of wine or brown liquor.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #137</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>Thanks again to TravelPerk for sponsoring this episode. Remember to go to <a href=\"http://go.travelperk.com/travelcommons\">go.travelperk.com/travelcommons</a> for a test drive</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_137.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #137 — New Year\'s Travel Status Tips; How to Shop for a Suitcase','','inherit','closed','closed','','1916-revision-v1','','','2018-01-24 23:25:06','2018-01-25 04:25:06','',1916,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/01/24/1916-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1934,1,'2018-01-25 10:19:33','2018-01-25 15:19:33','[caption id=\"attachment_1786\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/File_000.jpeg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1786\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/File_000-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> I have a craft beer problem...[/caption]\r\n\r\nThis past week in Atlanta Hartfield Airport, when I traveled across four terminals to find a restaurant serving a nice selection of local Atlanta beers, I finally had to admit that I have a craft beer problem. In addition to this confession, I talk about about taking the London Underground back from the big Adele concert in Wembley Stadium. The experience proved out some of the positive stereotypes about the English -- queuing well and muddling through without complaining. I talk about hotel room flat screen TVs and using Twitter to quickly get Hertz to fix a mistaken refueling charge. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_131.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_130.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #131:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, ready to admit that I have a craft beer problem. On Tuesday, I’m in Atlanta airport, on the back end of an one-day up-and-back. I got to the airport a bit early because: (a) I wanted to get forward-positioned for a 5pm conference call, and (b) afternoon travel times from north of Atlanta, where all my clients have ever been, to south of Atlanta where the airport is inconveniently located is highly unpredictable -- I’ve experienced anything from 40 min to an hour and a half. The conference call ends early, just as United posts a 15-min flight delay. Rather than bitch tweeting, I pop open my Untappd app and see what beers have been checked in nearby. I see some local Atlanta beers showing up at a place called “Chicken + Beer”. Good name! I find an sign board. It’s in Terminal D near Gate D5 -- almost to the end of the terminal. I’m in Terminal T -- the closest-in terminal, 4 terminals away. I look at my watch. According to United, I have an hour. I pop open the United app. The delayed in-bound flight is due in at 6:35 and United is calling for a 7:05 departure. No way in this age of completely full flights do they get that plane emptied and re-loaded in 30 minutes. And, since it’s a day trip, I don’t have to worry about carry-on. Easy decision -- I’m off. Highly recommended place if you’re connecting through ATL -- especially if you’re a bit closer, maybe in Terminals C, D or E.</li>\r\n 	<li>I posted the last episode the day before we headed out to London for a week, the highlight of which was going to the Adele concert in Wembley Stadium that Wednesday night -- my wife’s Christmas and birthday present. It was the opening night of what was supposed to be a 4-night finale to her world tour. Glad we caught one of the front-end shows. She canceled the last two due to vocal cord stress. Would’ve been unspeakably awful if we’d flown over and then got canceled. As it was, it was a great concert -- great voice and a phenomenal swearer. Impressive f-bomb count.</li>\r\n 	<li>Back in the US, I’ve been alternating weeks between Richmond and Atlanta. As I said in the last episode, of the two, I prefer Richmond -- I’m able to walk around downtown so no need for a rental, and it’s only a 20-minute ride to and from the airport. And a local turned me onto the Scott’s Addition neighborhood with three microbreweries in a 5-block radius. Yes, as you already know, I have a craft beer problem.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mindmapthat/53340\">Dub the Uke</a> by Kara Square (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: DJ Vadim</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>This week’s day trip to Atlanta for a meeting was the first time I’ve done that in a long time -- trusted an airline enough to fly in the day of an important meeting. As it was, I still baked in a large safety buffer -- I took a 6:15am flight out of ORD that landed ATL just after 9am local time; for a 12:30p meeting. Instead, as a way to lower my personal stress as well as the amount of my bitch tweeting, I’ll fly out, say, the night before. Or a couple of weeks ago, when my wife booked a dinner for 5:30p Thursday night, I flew back Weds night. Last year, I would’ve flown home Thursday afternoon -- scheduling myself ORD at, say, 3:30p, and then taking the El into the city. Now, I just don’t trust the airlines. There’s not enough slack in the system -- the planes are full, the crew schedules are optimized to the tee, and so when something anomalous happens, the whole things starts to come apart at the seams. This kinda happened a few weeks ago flying out of Richmond. My colleague and I were sitting in a conference room after lunch when his phone started going off -- flight delay texts from American about his evening flight back to DFW. I check on my United flight to ORD -- sure enough, I’m delayed too. Not critical -- just means I’ll be dining in the airport rather than at home. I hit the “where is my flight now” in the United app a couple of times to find that the delay from Grand Rapids airport which is then cascading through IAD and down to RIC. When the plane is scheduled for tight turnarounds, there’s no way to catch up. We check every 20 minutes or so, hoping things get better. And, surprisingly, mine does -- suddenly, there’s no delay. Did Grand Rapids magically clear up? Nope. Tracking the inbound plane again, now it’s sitting on the ground at IAD. They swapped equipment and now we’re back on schedule. We head over to RIC, and just as I go through security, I get a delay text from United. The plane is in IAD but the crew isn’t. Their inbound flight is delayed, which pushes ours. I sit down at the Sam Adams bar in RIC’s Terminal 2; I order a beer and some food. I get the beer right away. 45 minutes later, the waitress tells me they’ve run out of food. So I end up eating dinner at home after all -- just a bit later than usual.</li>\r\n 	<li>Hotel room technology is slow to change. I still see a lot of those alarm clocks with the old 30-pin iPhone connectors on the top of them; the iPhone 5 with the smaller Lightning connector came out almost 5 years ago. I think a good bit of this has to do with scale -- just upgrading the TVs in the 3,976 rooms at a place like Caesars Palace in Las Vegas can be a multi-year project. That being said, it’s been a long time now since I’ve seen a tube TV in a hotel room. Seems that most everyone has made the switch to wall-mounted flat screens, and I’m even seeing more of the second-generation -- more smart TVs from Samsung and LG with built in Netflix and Hulu apps, letting me log in to my accounts, access my own queues and watch just like I’m at home. I tend not to take them up on that offer though. I’m still a bit hesitant to scatter too much of my personal digital stuff around. And also, it’s not just Netflix that I want to watch. Sometimes I want to watch, say, James Corden’s newest Carpool Karaoke on YouTube that my daughter told me about, or watch the start of a Tour de France stage on NBCSN which almost no hotel cable package carries. Lucky for me, all of these newer flat screens provide easy access to an HDMI port -- the digital successor to the older analog VGA connectors on computers. I picked up a $5 Displayport-to-HDMI cable on Amazon, and now regularly plug my ThinkPad into my hotel room flat screen. Now if these hotels would upgrade their WiFi speeds...</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Suenjo/11162\">Natchoongi (New Hope Remix)</a> by Suenjo (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Twitter Concierge</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>One of the standards in my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/12/12/top-10-holiday-travel-tips-2/\">Top 10</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2013/12/19/top-10-holiday-travel-tips/\">Travel Tips</a> list -- which I usually write once a year as part of my annual prayers to the Google gods for more website traffic -- is to use Twitter as sort of a customer service concierge service. I’ve used Twitter to ping airlines on the status of planes when the gate agents were in the dark, A few weeks back, I tweeted to Lyft, asking why the price estimation piece of their app didn’t work (answer: it was turned off in Richmond for some reason). And Twitter saved me a bit of a hassle last week with Hertz.</li>\r\n 	<li>Now, I’ve gone hot and cold on Hertz through my travel career. At the start, back in 1985 when I was working for IBM and regularly flying into SJC, I liked them. But that was when SJC was an old-style California airport -- no jetways, just a walkway under a metal canopy to planes parked on the tarmac; no rental counters, just a parking lot at one end of the terminal with a little Hertz hut in the middle staffed by a nice woman who’d give you your keys. After a few trips, we got to know each other and she’d always give me one of the nicer cars on the lot. Fast forward 15 years to my low point with Hertz at DTW. I was there every week for about a year and never got a clean car or one under 24,000 miles. I’m back on an upswing with Hertz now that they’re doing the National Car Rental-like “pick your own car” service and I’ve yet to climb into a car with more than 1,000 miles</li>\r\n 	<li>Dropping my car off at ATL last week, I do my usual thing -- fill the car just outside the airport, drop it off, and walk away without waiting for the Hertz guy to check me in because it’s usually too long a wait during the afternoon drop-off rush hour and they’ll e-mail me the receipt. I usually put the gas receipt on the dashboard under the keys, but I didn’t do that this time. The gas station near ATL was a bit dodgy and had signs posted on the gas pump “Keep your car locked when filling up”. I decided not to wait for the pump to spit out a receipt.</li>\r\n 	<li>The e-mail from Hertz showed up on my phone just after I’d boarded the plane at ATL. I scanned the numbers -- damn it, there was a refueling charge. And the gas charge hadn’t posted yet to my Amex card so I couldn’t download a receipt. It just pissed me off. The gas gauge was clearly/unambiguously on F, so the check-in guy was just pencil-whipping the check-in. That’s what really annoyed me. Sitting there, waiting for the rest of the flight to board, I had time to stew. And to tweet out my annoyance to @Hertz -- complete with a mad face emoji.</li>\r\n 	<li>My flight takes off. I land at ORD, take my phone out of airplane mode and bing, there’s a reply from Hertz -- please DM us your rental agreement number. I flip over to the emailed receipt and copy/paste the number into Twitter. While still on the plane -- we’re doing the usual ORD thing of taxiing all over the airport looking for a gate -- I get a message back “Mark, apologies for the trouble with the fueling fee. After further review I will be refunding this charge to the account billed. We appreciate you bringing this to our attention so that we might look into this with our local Atlanta team.” I’ve now gone from pissed to impressed with how fast that got fixed. Now I’m sure some of that has to do with my status at Hertz, but still -- Twitter can be a very effective line-cut into customer service.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/3lb3r3th/44072\">Misunderstood</a> by 3lb3r3th (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: Alchemistry</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>London Tube Story</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>A few weeks ago on one of my Saturday bike rides, I was listening to Craig and Linda Martin’s Indie Travel Podcast episode about using public transit and it got me thinking about my recent public transit experiences. We’ve talked about public transit in past episodes. I’ve kinda nerded out about a it a bit, especially taking public transit between a city and an airport.</li>\r\n 	<li>During our week in London at the end of June, we used the Tube a lot. Underground, it was surprisingly still warm and stuffy from the 40-year high temperatures the prior week when it had been very hot by British standards -- in the 30’s Celsius, the upper 80’s/low 90’s Farenheit. We were staying in the Fitzrovia neighborhood of London -- north of Oxford St, just off of Tottenham High Street near University College London. The area is well-served by a number of Tube lines, and we’d chosen it for easy Tube access to Wembley Stadium for the Adele concert.</li>\r\n 	<li>We headed out early, planning to get there a couple hours before show time because we expected security to be tight. We got on a train that was an interesting mix of commuters winding down their day and concert goers getting ramped up -- seated people heads down in their papers; standing groups of people chatting away, maybe slipping a sip of a canned gin &amp; tonic, maybe singing a little tune snippet.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you think about it, the trip to the concert wouldn’t be too bad -- people would be spread out across 2, maybe 3 hours worth of trains. The end of the concert, though -- 96,000 people leaving at once, and a huge sea of them heading for the Wembley Stadium tube stop. Luckily, the rain forecasted earlier in the week had hit London earlier in the day and the evening was dry. If not, the 30-45 minutes we spend shoulder-to-shoulder penguin-walking the third- to-half mile between our seats and the Tube stop would’ve been miserable. As it was, everyone was in good spirits (it had been a great concert), and polite and courteous (no shoving, not a lot of trying to snake up in front of others). The security police would hold up signs at an intersection -- one side in red would say “Stop”, the other side green with “Go”. And when they spun it around to “Stop” the crowd would stop. No one would try to slip around the edges or make a last dash. One cop was playing songs through his bullhorn for the crowd while they waited for the next “Go” sign. It was so crowded; so much could’ve easily gone wrong; but it didn’t. And once back on the Tube, we made it back to Fitzrovia in time for a nightcap.</li>\r\n 	<li>But I guess I shouldn’t be so surprised. Doesn’t that experience validate the English stereotype -- queues well, suffers through without complaining -- the whole “Keep Calm and Carry On” ethos -- and eventually get through to the other side in time for a pint at the pub.</li>\r\n 	<li>And maybe that’s what I really like about taking public transit. In past episodes, I talked about public transit as a way of popping the travel bubble, using it to get a real feeling for where you are. The whole “Mind the Gap” thing in the Tube is another very English thing, as is the small taped-off space where buskers can perform in the connecting passageways between lines. Compare that to the less structured Paris Metro experiences I described a few episodes ago -- of the tuba busker and the 3-person opera reenactment that took over the whole shop area of a Metro stop. Or the way people bringing their bikes onto a Portland, Oregon light rail car just solidifies the whole Portlandia image, or picking up the Chicago El in the Loop after the markets close, with the few traders who work the options pits, heading up to Wrigley for an afternoon Cubs game.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #131</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_131.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #131 — Twitter Concierge Customer Service; London Tube Story','','inherit','closed','closed','','1784-revision-v1','','','2018-01-25 10:19:33','2018-01-25 15:19:33','',1784,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/01/25/1784-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1937,1,'2018-02-06 19:24:37','2018-02-07 00:24:37','[caption id=\"attachment_1938\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/IMG_0091.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1938\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/IMG_0091-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> Rejected and Retired Suitcases[/caption]\n\nI\'ve been putting off shopping for a new bag for a long time, as in years. Up until a few months ago,&nbsp;I was using a vintage Swiss Army black roller that still sported the Vietnamese and Hong Kong customs stickers it picked up in 2008. A few years ago, I\'d retired it in favor of a grey Samsonite bag, but had to force the old vet back into service when the Samsonite’s rollers got wonky — the rubber wore off and the wheels splayed out after 2½ years of trundling across New Orleans sidewalks.\n\nBut then, right before Thanksgiving, the old Swiss guy resigned, rendering itself unusable when its retractable handle stuck in the extended position. I was still able to avoid luggage shopping, though. I&nbsp; pulled out the Bluesmart smart bag I\'d bought from their Indiegogo fundraising campaign. I recharged the battery, updated its iPhone app, and put it back into service -- only to read the next week that it was about to be banned by airlines because its lithium battery isn\'t removable.\n\nWith nothing left in the attic, I was finally forced to shop for a new suitcase. But what to buy? I started with a survey of fellow travelers. Actually, it was more like stalking; I eyeballed every piece of luggage that passed by me for two weeks. Then I wandered through the basement luggage departments of a couple of Macy\'s, opening bags and waving off clerks. After all that, I gave into my OCD and built this prioritized list of suitcase shopping evaluation criteria:\n<ol>\n 	<li><em>The bag has to be a carry-on</em>. Now that may seem a bit of a “duh”, but there is some ambiguity; the <a href=\"https://travel-made-simple.com/carry-on-size-chart/\">approved height</a>&nbsp;of a carry-on bag varies by airline between 19 and 22-inches. If I want to play it safe, I’d go for a 20-inch bag, but then I also want to maximize my carry-on space. Most US carriers accept a 22-inch bag and that’s mostly what I fly, and even when I’m on European carriers I usually have enough alliance status to glide past the baggage sizer. So I tilt the balance in favor of maximum packing volume and go for a 22-inch bag.</li>\n 	<li>I<em>t needs to be black</em>. As I said in my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/10/18/ruthless-packing-tips/\">Ruthless Packing Tips post</a>, black not only makes you look thinner, it makes your bag look thinner to gate agents scanning for bag-sizer bait. Black also doesn\'t show stains. My grey Samsonite bag, after 3-4 months of my travel schedule, started to look a lot less non-black. Smudges from grease on overhead bin hinges, muck from taxi trunks, muddy water from New Orleans gutters, spilled coffee…. It\'s why I can\'t have nice luggage.</li>\n 	<li><em>Two wheels, not four</em>. This is more of a personal preference. My Bluesmart is a 4-wheel spinner and my wife swears by hers, but because the 4 wheels have to extend from the bottom of the bag, spinners sacrifice packing space for agility. Also, I find 4-wheelers have a tendency to wander off -- rolling away down ramps or on uneven floors. I go for the 2-wheeler, and with the biggest wheels I can find to make it an easier, smoother pull. I was surprised how much this limited my selection. Spinners definitely rule.</li>\n 	<li><em>The inside of the suitcase has to be plain and empty</em>. No clever collection of zipped compartments, or built-in suit hangers, or ratcheting clothes dividers; just a wide open box that I\'m free to structure how I want for each trip. I was surprised how this also limited my selection. Indeed, in the end, I couldn’t find just a plain box, and settled for a bag where I could detach the suit hanger and clothes divider and stash that stuff up in Luggage Retirement Home next to the Bluesmart.</li>\n 	<li><em>Buy on-line</em>. A <a href=\"https://www.testfacts.com/luggage-prices-analyzed/\">recent study</a> of 32,672 luggage price showed&nbsp;that you can save an average of $110/39% buying on-line.&nbsp;Walmart and Target’s on-line stores had the highest discounts. And while&nbsp;Amazon was in 10th place for average discount (in the 40% range), it was tops with the greatest variety — over 12,000 luggage items.</li>\n</ol>','Tips for Buying A Suitcase','','publish','closed','closed','','tips-for-buying-a-suitcase','','','2021-09-29 21:55:03','2021-09-30 02:55:03','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=1937',0,'post','',3),
(1938,1,'2018-02-05 22:40:12','2018-02-06 03:40:12','','IMG_0091','Rejected and Retired Suitcases','inherit','open','closed','','img_0091','','','2018-02-05 22:40:42','2018-02-06 03:40:42','',1937,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/IMG_0091.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(1939,1,'2018-02-05 23:04:41','2018-02-06 04:04:41','[caption id=\"attachment_1938\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/IMG_0091.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1938\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/IMG_0091-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Rejected and Retired Suitcases[/caption]\r\n\r\nI\'ve been putting off shopping for a new bag for quite some time. Up until a few months ago, I was using my vintage Swiss Army black roller that still sported Vietnamese and Hong Kong customs stickers from 2008. I had retired it in favor of a grey Samsonite bag, but had to force the old guy back into service when the Samsonite’s wheels got wonky — the rubber wore off and the wheels splayed out after 2½ years of trundling across New Orleans sidewalks.\r\n\r\nBut then, right before Thanksgiving, the old Swiss guy resigned, rendering itself unusable when its retractable handle stuck in the extended position. Still avoiding luggage shopping, I went back up to the attic and pulled out my Bluesmart smart bag. I recharged the battery, updated its iPhone app, and put it back into service -- only to read a week later that it would be banned by airlines a month later because its lithium battery isn\'t removable.\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>So now I’m forced to shop for a suitcase. Like any good consultant, I, of course, construct a prioritized list of evaluation criteria. First, it has to be a carry-on. Now that may seem a bit of a “duh”, but there is some ambiguity; the <a href=\"https://travel-made-simple.com/carry-on-size-chart/\">approved height</a> varies by airline between 19 and 22-inches. If I wanted to play it safe, I’d go for a 20-inch bag, but I’m also want to maximize how much I can carry-on. I tilt toward choosing space. Most US carriers accept a 22-inch bag and that’s mostly what I fly, and even when I’m on European carriers I usually have enough alliance status (my American Platinum status carrying over to OneWorld) to glide past the baggage sizer.</li>\r\n 	<li>Which leads to the second criterion -- it needs to be black. As I said in my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/10/18/ruthless-packing-tips/\">Ruthless Packing Tips post</a> in October, black not only makes you look thinner, it makes your bag look thinner to gate agents scanning for bag-sizer bait.</li>\r\n 	<li>Third, 2 wheels, not 4. This is a bit more of a personal preference. My Bluesmart is a 4-wheel spinner and my wife swears by hers, but because the 4 wheels have to extend from the bottom of the bag, spinners sacrifice packing space for agility, while 2-wheelers can embed their wheels up in the backplane of the bag. Again trying to maximize packing space, I go for the 2-wheeler, and with the biggest wheels I can find to make it an easier, smoother pull. I was kinda surprised how this limited my selection. Spinners definitely rule.</li>\r\n 	<li>My fourth criterion -- I wanted the inside of the suitcase to be as plain and empty as possible. No bunch of zip compartments, or built-in suit hangers, or ratcheting down clothes dividers; just a wide open box that free to structure how I want for each trip. I was surprised how tough this was to find. Indeed, in the end, I couldn’t find it and settled for a bag where I could detach the suit hanger and clothes divider and stash that stuff up in the Land of Misfit Bags next to the Bluesmart.</li>\r\n 	<li>Whittling through all that, I ended up buying a black Victorinox Werks Traveler 5.0 2-wheeler. Victorinox is what used to be Swiss Army; I figured if my last bag survived 10 years of hard mileage, that said something for durability. It was also one of the few where I could detach all the internal storage stuff. And it has that additional zipper to expand the width by an inch -- kinda like when you drop a notch on your belt after Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner; for those times when I’m flying home and have bought a few too many bottles of wine or brown liquor.</li>\r\n</ul>','Tips for Buying A Suitcase','','inherit','closed','closed','','1937-revision-v1','','','2018-02-05 23:04:41','2018-02-06 04:04:41','',1937,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/02/05/1937-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1940,1,'2018-02-05 23:25:24','2018-02-06 04:25:24','[caption id=\"attachment_1938\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/IMG_0091.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1938\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/IMG_0091-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Rejected and Retired Suitcases[/caption]\r\n\r\nI\'ve been putting off shopping for a new bag for quite some time. Up until a few months ago, I was using my vintage Swiss Army black roller that still sported Vietnamese and Hong Kong customs stickers from 2008. I had retired it in favor of a grey Samsonite bag, but had to force the old guy back into service when the Samsonite’s wheels got wonky — the rubber wore off and the wheels splayed out after 2½ years of trundling across New Orleans sidewalks.\r\n\r\nBut then, right before Thanksgiving, the old Swiss guy resigned, rendering itself unusable when its retractable handle stuck in the extended position. Still avoiding luggage shopping, I went back up to the attic and pulled out my Bluesmart smart bag. I recharged the battery, updated its iPhone app, and put it back into service -- only to read the next week that it would be banned by airlines a month later because its lithium battery isn\'t removable.\r\n\r\nWith nothing left in the attic, I was forced to shop for a new suitcase. But what to buy? I started with a survey of fellow travelers. Actually, it was more like stalking; I eyeballed every piece of luggage that passed by me for two weeks. Then I wandered through the basement luggage departments of a couple of Macy\'s and local specialty travel store, opening bags and waving off clerks. Like any good consultant, I, of course, construct a prioritized list of evaluation criteria. First, it has to be a carry-on. Now that may seem a bit of a “duh”, but there is some ambiguity; the <a href=\"https://travel-made-simple.com/carry-on-size-chart/\">approved height</a> varies by airline between 19 and 22-inches. If I wanted to play it safe, I’d go for a 20-inch bag, but I’m also want to maximize how much I can carry-on. I tilt toward choosing space. Most US carriers accept a 22-inch bag and that’s mostly what I fly, and even when I’m on European carriers I usually have enough alliance status (my American Platinum status carrying over to OneWorld) to glide past the baggage sizer.\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Which leads to the second criterion -- it needs to be black. As I said in my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/10/18/ruthless-packing-tips/\">Ruthless Packing Tips post</a> in October, black not only makes you look thinner, it makes your bag look thinner to gate agents scanning for bag-sizer bait.</li>\r\n 	<li>Third, 2 wheels, not 4. This is a bit more of a personal preference. My Bluesmart is a 4-wheel spinner and my wife swears by hers, but because the 4 wheels have to extend from the bottom of the bag, spinners sacrifice packing space for agility, while 2-wheelers can embed their wheels up in the backplane of the bag. Again trying to maximize packing space, I go for the 2-wheeler, and with the biggest wheels I can find to make it an easier, smoother pull. I was kinda surprised how this limited my selection. Spinners definitely rule.</li>\r\n 	<li>My fourth criterion -- I wanted the inside of the suitcase to be as plain and empty as possible. No bunch of zip compartments, or built-in suit hangers, or ratcheting down clothes dividers; just a wide open box that free to structure how I want for each trip. I was surprised how tough this was to find. Indeed, in the end, I couldn’t find it and settled for a bag where I could detach the suit hanger and clothes divider and stash that stuff up in the Land of Misfit Bags next to the Bluesmart.</li>\r\n 	<li>Whittling through all that, I ended up buying a black Victorinox Werks Traveler 5.0 2-wheeler. Victorinox is what used to be Swiss Army; I figured if my last bag survived 10 years of hard mileage, that said something for durability. It was also one of the few where I could detach all the internal storage stuff. And it has that additional zipper to expand the width by an inch -- kinda like when you drop a notch on your belt after Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner; for those times when I’m flying home and have bought a few too many bottles of wine or brown liquor.</li>\r\n</ul>','Tips for Buying A Suitcase','','inherit','closed','closed','','1937-revision-v1','','','2018-02-05 23:25:24','2018-02-06 04:25:24','',1937,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/02/05/1937-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1941,1,'2018-02-05 23:31:01','2018-02-06 04:31:01','[caption id=\"attachment_1938\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/IMG_0091.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1938\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/IMG_0091-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Rejected and Retired Suitcases[/caption]\r\n\r\nI\'ve been putting off shopping for a new bag for quite some time. Up until a few months ago, I was using my vintage Swiss Army black roller that still sported Vietnamese and Hong Kong customs stickers from 2008. I had retired it in favor of a grey Samsonite bag, but had to force the old guy back into service when the Samsonite’s wheels got wonky — the rubber wore off and the wheels splayed out after 2½ years of trundling across New Orleans sidewalks.\r\n\r\nBut then, right before Thanksgiving, the old Swiss guy resigned, rendering itself unusable when its retractable handle stuck in the extended position. Still avoiding luggage shopping, I went back up to the attic and pulled out my Bluesmart smart bag. I recharged the battery, updated its iPhone app, and put it back into service -- only to read the next week that it would be banned by airlines a month later because its lithium battery isn\'t removable.\r\n\r\nWith nothing left in the attic, I was forced to shop for a new suitcase. But what to buy? I started with a survey of fellow travelers. Actually, it was more like stalking; I eyeballed every piece of luggage that passed by me for two weeks. Then I wandered through the basement luggage departments of a couple of Macy\'s and local specialty travel store, opening bags and waving off clerks. After all that, I gave into my OCD and built this prioritized list of evaluation criteria\r\n<ol>\r\n 	<li>First, it has to be a carry-on. Now that may seem a bit of a “duh”, but there is some ambiguity; the <a href=\"https://travel-made-simple.com/carry-on-size-chart/\">approved height</a> varies by airline between 19 and 22-inches. If I wanted to play it safe, I’d go for a 20-inch bag, but I’m also want to maximize how much I can carry-on. I tilt toward choosing space. Most US carriers accept a 22-inch bag and that’s mostly what I fly, and even when I’m on European carriers I usually have enough alliance status (my American Platinum status carrying over to OneWorld) to glide past the baggage sizer.</li>\r\n</ol>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Which leads to the second criterion -- it needs to be black. As I said in my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/10/18/ruthless-packing-tips/\">Ruthless Packing Tips post</a> in October, black not only makes you look thinner, it makes your bag look thinner to gate agents scanning for bag-sizer bait.</li>\r\n 	<li>Third, 2 wheels, not 4. This is a bit more of a personal preference. My Bluesmart is a 4-wheel spinner and my wife swears by hers, but because the 4 wheels have to extend from the bottom of the bag, spinners sacrifice packing space for agility, while 2-wheelers can embed their wheels up in the backplane of the bag. Again trying to maximize packing space, I go for the 2-wheeler, and with the biggest wheels I can find to make it an easier, smoother pull. I was kinda surprised how this limited my selection. Spinners definitely rule.</li>\r\n 	<li>My fourth criterion -- I wanted the inside of the suitcase to be as plain and empty as possible. No bunch of zip compartments, or built-in suit hangers, or ratcheting down clothes dividers; just a wide open box that free to structure how I want for each trip. I was surprised how tough this was to find. Indeed, in the end, I couldn’t find it and settled for a bag where I could detach the suit hanger and clothes divider and stash that stuff up in the Land of Misfit Bags next to the Bluesmart.</li>\r\n 	<li>Whittling through all that, I ended up buying a black Victorinox Werks Traveler 5.0 2-wheeler. Victorinox is what used to be Swiss Army; I figured if my last bag survived 10 years of hard mileage, that said something for durability. It was also one of the few where I could detach all the internal storage stuff. And it has that additional zipper to expand the width by an inch -- kinda like when you drop a notch on your belt after Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner; for those times when I’m flying home and have bought a few too many bottles of wine or brown liquor.</li>\r\n</ul>','Tips for Buying A Suitcase','','inherit','closed','closed','','1937-revision-v1','','','2018-02-05 23:31:01','2018-02-06 04:31:01','',1937,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/02/05/1937-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1942,1,'2018-02-05 23:55:13','2018-02-06 04:55:13','[caption id=\"attachment_1938\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/IMG_0091.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1938\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/IMG_0091-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Rejected and Retired Suitcases[/caption]\r\n\r\nI\'ve been putting off shopping for a new bag for quite some time. Up until a few months ago, I was using my vintage Swiss Army black roller that still sported Vietnamese and Hong Kong customs stickers from 2008. I had retired it in favor of a grey Samsonite bag, but had to force the old guy back into service when the Samsonite’s wheels got wonky — the rubber wore off and the wheels splayed out after 2½ years of trundling across New Orleans sidewalks.\r\n\r\nBut then, right before Thanksgiving, the old Swiss guy resigned, rendering itself unusable when its retractable handle stuck in the extended position. Still avoiding luggage shopping, I went back up to the attic and pulled out my Bluesmart smart bag. I recharged the battery, updated its iPhone app, and put it back into service -- only to read the next week that it would be banned by airlines a month later because its lithium battery isn\'t removable.\r\n\r\nWith nothing left in the attic, I was forced to shop for a new suitcase. But what to buy? I started with a survey of fellow travelers. Actually, it was more like stalking; I eyeballed every piece of luggage that passed by me for two weeks. Then I wandered through the basement luggage departments of a couple of Macy\'s and local specialty travel store, opening bags and waving off clerks. After all that, I gave into my OCD and built this prioritized list of suitcase shopping evaluation criteria:\r\n<ol>\r\n 	<li>My bag has to be a carry-on. Now that may seem a bit of a “duh”, but there is some ambiguity; the <a href=\"https://travel-made-simple.com/carry-on-size-chart/\">approved height</a> of a carry-on bag varies by airline between 19 and 22-inches. If I wanted to play it safe, I’d go for a 20-inch bag, but I also want to maximize my carry-on space. But most US carriers accept a 22-inch bag and that’s mostly what I fly, and even when I’m on European carriers I usually have enough alliance status to glide past the baggage sizer. So I tilt the balance in favor of maximum packing volume and go for the 22-inch bag.</li>\r\n 	<li>It needs to be black. As I said in my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/10/18/ruthless-packing-tips/\">Ruthless Packing Tips post</a>, black not only makes you look thinner, it makes your bag look thinner to gate agents scanning for bag-sizer bait. Black also doesn\'t show stains.  And after 3-4 months of my travel schedule, my grey Samsonite bag started to look less non-black. Smudges from grease on overhead bin hinges, muck from taxi trunks, muddy water from New Orleans gutters, spilled coffee…. It\'s why I can\'t have nice luggage</li>\r\n 	<li>Two wheels, not four. This is more of a personal preference. My Bluesmart is a 4-wheel spinner and my wife swears by hers, but because the 4 wheels have to extend from the bottom of the bag, spinners sacrifice packing space for agility. Also, I find 4-wheelers have a tendency to wander off -- rolling away down ramps or on uneven floors. I go for the 2-wheeler, and with the biggest wheels I can find to make it an easier, smoother pull. I was surprised how much this limited my selection. Spinners definitely rule.</li>\r\n 	<li>The inside of the suitcase has to be as plain and empty as possible. No clever collection of zipped compartments, or built-in suit hangers, or ratcheting clothes dividers; just a wide open box that I\'m free to structure how I want for each trip. I was surprised how this also limited my selection. Indeed, in the end, I couldn’t find just a plain box, and settled for a bag where I could detach the suit hanger and clothes divider and stash that stuff up in Luggage Retirement Home next to the Bluesmart.</li>\r\n 	<li>Buy on-line. A <a href=\"https://www.testfacts.com/luggage-prices-analyzed/\">recent study</a> of 32,672 luggage price showed that you can save an average of $110/39% buying on-line. Walmart and Target’s on-line stores had the highest discounts. And while Amazon was in 10th place for average discount (in the 40% range), it was tops with the greatest variety — over 12,000 luggage items.</li>\r\n</ol>','Tips for Buying A Suitcase','','inherit','closed','closed','','1937-revision-v1','','','2018-02-05 23:55:13','2018-02-06 04:55:13','',1937,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/02/05/1937-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1943,1,'2018-02-06 19:24:37','2018-02-07 00:24:37','[caption id=\"attachment_1938\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/IMG_0091.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1938\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/IMG_0091-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Rejected and Retired Suitcases[/caption]\r\n\r\nI\'ve been putting off shopping for a new bag for a long time, as in years. Up until a few months ago, I was using a vintage Swiss Army black roller that still sported the Vietnamese and Hong Kong customs stickers it picked up in 2008. A few years ago, I\'d retired it in favor of a grey Samsonite bag, but had to force the old vet back into service when the Samsonite’s rollers got wonky — the rubber wore off and the wheels splayed out after 2½ years of trundling across New Orleans sidewalks.\r\n\r\nBut then, right before Thanksgiving, the old Swiss guy resigned, rendering itself unusable when its retractable handle stuck in the extended position. I was still able to avoid luggage shopping, though. I  pulled out the Bluesmart smart bag I\'d bought from their Indiegogo fundraising campaign. I recharged the battery, updated its iPhone app, and put it back into service -- only to read the next week that it was about to be banned by airlines because its lithium battery isn\'t removable.\r\n\r\nWith nothing left in the attic, I was finally forced to shop for a new suitcase. But what to buy? I started with a survey of fellow travelers. Actually, it was more like stalking; I eyeballed every piece of luggage that passed by me for two weeks. Then I wandered through the basement luggage departments of a couple of Macy\'s, opening bags and waving off clerks. After all that, I gave into my OCD and built this prioritized list of suitcase shopping evaluation criteria:\r\n<ol>\r\n 	<li><em>The bag has to be a carry-on</em>. Now that may seem a bit of a “duh”, but there is some ambiguity; the <a href=\"https://travel-made-simple.com/carry-on-size-chart/\">approved height</a> of a carry-on bag varies by airline between 19 and 22-inches. If I want to play it safe, I’d go for a 20-inch bag, but then I also want to maximize my carry-on space. Most US carriers accept a 22-inch bag and that’s mostly what I fly, and even when I’m on European carriers I usually have enough alliance status to glide past the baggage sizer. So I tilt the balance in favor of maximum packing volume and go for a 22-inch bag.</li>\r\n 	<li>I<em>t needs to be black</em>. As I said in my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/10/18/ruthless-packing-tips/\">Ruthless Packing Tips post</a>, black not only makes you look thinner, it makes your bag look thinner to gate agents scanning for bag-sizer bait. Black also doesn\'t show stains. My grey Samsonite bag, after 3-4 months of my travel schedule, started to look a lot less non-black. Smudges from grease on overhead bin hinges, muck from taxi trunks, muddy water from New Orleans gutters, spilled coffee…. It\'s why I can\'t have nice luggage.</li>\r\n 	<li><em>Two wheels, not four</em>. This is more of a personal preference. My Bluesmart is a 4-wheel spinner and my wife swears by hers, but because the 4 wheels have to extend from the bottom of the bag, spinners sacrifice packing space for agility. Also, I find 4-wheelers have a tendency to wander off -- rolling away down ramps or on uneven floors. I go for the 2-wheeler, and with the biggest wheels I can find to make it an easier, smoother pull. I was surprised how much this limited my selection. Spinners definitely rule.</li>\r\n 	<li><em>The inside of the suitcase has to be plain and empty</em>. No clever collection of zipped compartments, or built-in suit hangers, or ratcheting clothes dividers; just a wide open box that I\'m free to structure how I want for each trip. I was surprised how this also limited my selection. Indeed, in the end, I couldn’t find just a plain box, and settled for a bag where I could detach the suit hanger and clothes divider and stash that stuff up in Luggage Retirement Home next to the Bluesmart.</li>\r\n 	<li><em>Buy on-line</em>. A <a href=\"https://www.testfacts.com/luggage-prices-analyzed/\">recent study</a> of 32,672 luggage price showed that you can save an average of $110/39% buying on-line. Walmart and Target’s on-line stores had the highest discounts. And while Amazon was in 10th place for average discount (in the 40% range), it was tops with the greatest variety — over 12,000 luggage items.</li>\r\n</ol>','Tips for Buying A Suitcase','','inherit','closed','closed','','1937-revision-v1','','','2018-02-06 19:24:37','2018-02-07 00:24:37','',1937,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/02/06/1937-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1945,1,'2018-02-26 18:40:38','0000-00-00 00:00:00','<p>\n<strong>NEW: Improved Reporting Dashboard with MonsterInsights 7.0</strong><br />\nYou asked for it, here it is. MonsterInsights 7.0 comes with beautiful new reporting dashboard.</p>\n<p>We have created custom reports for Publishers, eCommerce store owners, Google Search Console, and Custom Dimensions. You also have the ability to choose custom date ranges.\n</p>\n<p><a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/lite/?utm_source=wpdashboard&#038;utm_medium=amnotification&#038;utm_campaign=newreports\" target=\"_blank\" class=\"button button-primary\">Click Here to Upgrade &raquo;</a> <a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/introducing-monsterinsights-7/?utm_source=wpdashboard&#038;utm_medium=amnotification&#038;utm_campaign=newreports\" class=\"button button-secondary\" target=\"_blank\">Read the Full Announcement</a></p>\n<p>Thanks as always for your continuous support of MonsterInsights!<br />\nChris Christoff<br />\nLead Developer of MonsterInsights</p>\n','','','draft','closed','closed','','','','','2018-02-26 18:40:38','0000-00-00 00:00:00','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?post_type=amn_mi-lite&p=1945',0,'amn_mi-lite','',0),
(1947,1,'2018-02-28 23:06:48','2018-03-01 04:06:48','[caption id=\"attachment_1949\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/iStock-535339649.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1949\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/iStock-535339649-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> TSA! Look at What You\'ve Done to Me![/caption]\n\nFebruary is a tough time to be in the Midwest, so when my travel took me south, to New Orleans and then to Florida, there was no bitch tweeting about the TSA lines or flight delays. In this episode, I walk through how each change in airport security has pushed me to be more hipster and how we all want to understand the real cause of the flight delays that inconvenience us. Also a good bit of listener feedback extending the on-going luggage discussion. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_138.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #138:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. This has been a good travel month for me. Not too heavy, and all my travel had me headed south -- an important thing in February when you live in Chicago. The week before Mardi Gras, I headed down to New Orleans for a meeting. It easily could’ve been an overnight trip, but neither my wife nor I had been down in a while, so she came down with me. We caught some parades -- Nyx, Chaos, Muses -- ate way too much food, and except for a cold rain Wednesday night, had great weather. On Thursday, we were walking along the Mississippi back to the French Quarter from the Bywater neighborhood in bright sunshine and upper 60’s while Chicago was getting slammed with 8-12 inches of snow.</li>\n 	<li>When flew back to Chicago Friday night, we were able to thread the gap between the Friday end of that 8-12 inch drop and the start of the Saturday-Sunday 5-inch fall. Timing is everything. We came to the airport prepared for a long delay -- fully charged batteries, and muffaletta sandwiches and a mini king cake from Cochon Butcher. Southwest had cancelled this same flight the night before and that morning -- understandable given the snow -- so we didn’t think we wouldn’t get home; it was just going to be a question of how long. As it turned out, we were only an hour late, which given the weather, felt as good as on-time.</li>\n 	<li>Last week, I managed to point myself south again, this time to Florida -- Orlando and Miami -- and was able to skip two days of a heavy cold rain. The JW Marriott in Miami upgraded me to a room with a balcony on the 20th floor -- I didn’t have an ocean view, but I sat outside, 75 degrees, drinking a couple of beers, watching the sun go down, looking over to some of the rooftop bar action in the Brickell neighborhood. Miami is always an experience. It’s not the southernmost US big city, but rather the northernmost Latin American big city. I was reminded of that in the airport when I heard them paging someone in Spanish -- twice. They didn’t even bother wasting their time with English.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- Leviathan by Kirkoid (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Kirkoid/31109</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Lots of comments about luggage since the last episode, which makes sense -- the last episode was heavy on luggage talk between the continuing thread on the smart luggage ban and the suitcase buying tips which I then ported over to a blog post.\n<ul>\n 	<li>So, starting off, Allan Marko forwarded along the latest e-mails from Away luggage, one of the few smart bags with removable batteries and so not caught up in the smart luggage ban. Or so they thought until Delta decided to add their own twist to the ban. If the battery in the bag requires a tool to remove it -- which the original Away bag does -- you have to remove it from the bag before you board -- whether you’re carrying on the bag or gate-checking it. The later version of the Away bag has an ejectable pop-up battery which Delta thinks is OK. What a mess! This is what happens when engineers run amok -- and I can say that as a recovering engineer. These guys are going to keep tweaking and twisting this, which will just confuse gate agents and frustrate passengers -- which is why I’ve mothballed my smart bag and bought another Anker lipstick charger.</li>\n 	<li>Steve Frick hit the TravelCommons web site and left this comment -- “I replaced my luggage with the exact same bag as I had before, a TravelPro. It was an easy choice, I like you, wanted a simple bag. I knew my gear would fit, I already knew what to put in the outside pockets. One of the guys I work with recently bought and then returned a 4-wheel spinner. The reason for the return……. he discovered that most hotel parking lots weren’t level and each time he let go of the bag to raise the trunk lid his bag rolled away.” Steve, I had that same problem with my Bluesmart 4-wheeler, except in airports rather than parking lots. I’d put the Bluesmart against the wall in a restroom and it would wander away.</li>\n 	<li>Jerry Sarfati posted on the TravelCommons Facebook page -- “Mark, great episode as usual” Thanks, Jerry! “I had a different experience when choosing a new bag. I was stopped twice by American Airlines gate agents telling me my 22\" bag was too big. I’m in Group 2. So I settled for the 20\" Victorinox spinner.” I asked Jerry if they made him put it in a bag sizer. “Once only. It barely fit, and she said ‘too big, it must slide in easily, it must be checked’. Other time the agent said the sizer is missing, but ‘I can already see it won\'t fit’. I didn\'t want to argue and get thrown off the flight.” Jerry, that -- in technical travel terms -- is bullshit. I remember one time in Boston Logan, I got shunted over to the bag sizer by the Icelandic Air gate agent. And I knew I was on the bubble because this was the trip I’ve talked about a couple of times where I had to pack for 10 days between Iceland and Southern Spain in one carry-on. I grabbed that bag by the side handle, had it about chest high, and then drove it into the bag sizer with all my might. It was either going to fit, break the bag or blow apart the bag sizer. Luckily, it fit -- though the gate agent jumped back just a bit when the bag hit the bottom of the sizer. She let me carry it on. I flew 3 legs on American last week with my 22-incher and didn’t get a glance. But having said that, you made the right choice -- discretion is the better part of valor. Gate agents have complete discretion. Obey or get bounced. Too bad you got caught up by other folks’ power trips.</li>\n 	<li>Back on the web site, Robert Fenerty wrote “I want a four-wheel spinner; my wife loves hers. But I won’t get one, because I believe that bags with only two wheels have a bit more interior space than four-wheelers of the same length. That’s because the spinners can’t tuck into the side of the bag so you’re losing the inch or two between the middle of the spinner wheel and the top of the stem that attaches the spinner to the bottom of the bag. How’s that for OCD?” Robert, I’ll see your OCD and raise you! I pulled out a metal ruler and measured the ground clearance difference between my Victorinox 2-wheeler and my wife’s Samsonite 4-wheel spinner. I measured a 1.5-inch difference. Multiply that by the 14x9-inch base size gives you a 189 cubic inch cost for spinner agility. I look at that being one day’s worth of workout kit.</li>\n 	<li>Also on the web site, Jim McDonough wrote “My favorite bag was a Rick Steves 21” rollaboard that had just one compartment and two really good wheels. I used it for a decade and finally had problems with my wife’s bag (wheel fell apart) and the side of mine cracked from all the abuse. He doesn’t sell them any more, because it was a hair too big for European airlines. We are now using Samsonite spinners. They don’t hold as much as the old Rick bags. We only check bags when we are staying in one place for at least a week. Carrying on is simply liberating.” Liberating in a couple of ways -- not standing around waiting for the luggage carousel to start to get your bag, and not waiting around for it to stop to confirm that airline has lost it. I remember one trip where BA forced me to gate-check a bag, and then somehow lost it -- how you lose a bag in the, say, 50 ft between the jet bridge and baggage hold I’ll never know. The problem was -- I was in a different city every day. And so, they’d deliver the bag to my hotel the next morning after I’d already checked out and headed for my first meeting. This went on for a couple of days until I finally convinced them to leapfrog me and send it two stops one. Liberating myself from well-worn clothes -- I love it when I can find happiness in the small things.</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Another reminder that Miami is a bit different -- the in-room coffee machine at the JW Marriott wasn’t the standard issue single cupper with Starbucks Pike Place filter disks (that, by the way, are always too big for the filter holder). Instead, it was an Illy espresso machine with its own special little capsules and branded demitasse cups. Took me a couple of tries to get the capsule properly situated, but after that, I ran through all 3, 4 (?) of the capsules in 15 minutes and was ready to attack the day.</li>\n 	<li>Last month, The Aviating Railfanner stopped by the TravelCommons YouTube page and left a comment on the 2012 video O\'Hare Layover Excursion: a 6-Hour Tour of Chicago saying “I think it would be a good idea to mention that the Randolph/Wabash station has been demolished and is now the Washington/Wabash station” Good point. Indeed, there are a more than a few things that have changed in the 5 years since I did that video. I stole the idea from the “One City, Five Hours” series that United used to have in their Hemisphere’s magazine. The locations are still good -- Wrigley Field, Millennium Park, the Picasso. I’m not sure in this age of Uber if the focus on the subway/the L is still valid. I may see if I can lightly edit this video -- insert some text to send people to the right station, and update the 1-day travel pass options -- and then think about some new options, like maybe a craft beer taproom-focused layover tour. There you go, One City, Five Taprooms and then come roaring back into the TSA line. Hmmm, I may need to rethink that one.</li>\n 	<li>And if you’re thinking about any questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Ethereal (nop mix) by @nop (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Lancefield/34818</span></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Travel Is Turning Me Hipster</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Not wanting to turn this into the “Luggage Today” podcast, but when I was shifting things from my Bluesmart to my new Victorinox bag, I also restructured my toiletries kit. And as I was going through the contents -- what stays, what don’t I need anymore -- it struck me how much my travelling had changed something as basic as how I started my day.</li>\n 	<li>It started years, no decades ago -- sometime in the late ‘80’s or early ‘90’s. I was living in Philadelphia and flying to Europe pretty frequently, and at that time, the only real direct flight over the Atlantic (can I tell you how much I hate it when people say “The Pond”; it just puts my teeth on edge) was a BA 747 into Heathrow. Now, back then, I loved Heathrow. It was a great airport with fantastic connections. Now it’s an overcrowed shitshow that I avoid at all costs, but back then, it was great. Anyhow, at some point, Heathrow security required all electric devices to be pulled out for screening. Note I didn’t say “electronic”; this was before laptops and tablets and mobile phones were ubiquitous. No, this meant things like my electric razor had to be pulled out of my bag. Two go-rounds with Heathrow security and that Philips razor got jettisoned for a Gillette non-electric blade.</li>\n 	<li>Fast forward a decade-and-a-half to August 2006. I woke up in the SFO Marriott to the news of the foiled plot to blow up London-to-US flights by disguising separate explosive ingredients in soda bottles then then assembling and detonating them on board. I was trying to fly back the next day. Baggage check lines exploded when all the flyers with toothpaste, shaving cream, make-up -- pretty much everyone -- were made to check their bags. That weekend, I re-worked my toiletries kit -- hitting the local Whole Foods for tooth powder to replace toothpaste, hair wax for hair gel, and trading the shaving cream that I picked up in that last revamp for a badger hair shaving brush. I think this was the tipping point -- when my kit started to skew hipster.</li>\n 	<li>Fast forward another decade-and-a-half to this Christmas. My son gives me a selection of travel sized shaving soaps, each in their own tin container with a screw top. My daughter gives me a bottle of Lush toothy tabs -- kinda compressed tooth powder. These immediately go into my travel kit. My son forwards me a Massdrop buy for an Oristo razor -- a $100 version of my grandfather’s safety razor, precision engineered for a “very efficient yet non-aggressive shaving experience”. I think seriously about this. My toiletry kit has gone almost full hipster.</li>\n 	<li>And though I’ve slagged on the TSA for God knows how many episodes over the life of this podcast, I do have to thank them for one thing, keeping my toiletry kit from going full-on hipster, because I know they’ll never allow me to shift to shaving with a straight razor.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">My Flaming Heart by Wired Ant (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Wired_Ant/36862 Ft: Javolenus</span></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Every Delay Has a Story</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>In the last episode, I talked about why I dropped my subscription to TripIt’s paid “Pro” service -- the main benefit, live flight status notifications, was slower than the free notifications I was getting from the airlines themselves -- from American, United, and Delta. However, when we were idling in the New Orleans airport waiting on our flight back to Chicago, I found the Southwest delay notifications lagged way behind TripIt Pro. Not that I re-upped my TripIt Pro subscription; my wife forgot to cancel a 30-day trial she signed up for, so she now has a year’s subscription. I, instead, was using FlightAware, specifically the feature I’ve talked about in prior episodes that shows you where your plane is. From that I could see that the delay wasn’t because of the snow in Chicago; the plane was spending a lot of time on the ground in Ft Lauderdale, the stop before New Orleans. So I hit Twitter -- Why is flight 860 sitting in FLL so long? The reply -- “Hey, Mark. We know delays can be tough, and apologize for the inconvenience. It looks like Flight #860 is delayed due to inclement weather earlier in the day.” Perhaps a delay in Denver, but why the long ground turn in FLL? No answer.</li>\n 	<li>United announced a pilot program in January called “Every Flight Has A Story” where they’d push out much more detailed information on delayed flights -- rather than “Late Arriving Aircraft”, it would be “Our maintenance team is replacing an item on your plane and needs extra time to complete”. The pilot was scheduled for Houston and Phoenix. I haven’t seen much reaction to it, but at least for me, having some sense for the reason for a delay let’s me better figure out what I’m going to do next. I’m much less trusting of a newly posted departure time if I know the inbound plane is still on the ground, or if it’s a maintenance delay.</li>\n 	<li>Of course, some of those explanations could be a bit more embarrassing than others. Like for Southwest, a couple of days after our flight back to Chicago, they had to cancel more than 200 flights because they ran out of de-icing fluid at Midway airport. You get that notification, and you’re shaking your head as you dial up an airline that knows how to fly in the winter.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #138</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_138.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #138 — Travel Turning Me Hipster; Every Delay Has a Story','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-138-travel-turning-me-hipster-every-delay-has-a-story','','','2021-09-29 21:56:41','2021-09-30 02:56:41','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=1947',0,'post','',5),
(1948,1,'2018-02-28 17:47:41','2018-02-28 22:47:41','All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_138.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/388761270\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]<!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #138:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. This episode is sponsored by <a href=\"http://go.travelperk.com/travelcommons\">TravelPerk</a>, the #1 rated business travel tool on the Internet. It’s been a light travel month, just a drive down to Nashville, and a couple of trips over to Charlottesville, VA, which has been a nice break from what is otherwise turning out to be a brutally cold winter in Chicago. The day after New Years, I walked out of the house into a -10℉ morning -- not windchill, it was -10℉ ambient. Welcome to January. I had my team travel here last week for a 2018 kick-off meeting. No one accused us of boon-doggling. The guy from Phoenix did say he was filing an employee abuse claim though.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’ve found myself drinking less craft beer and much more Scotch whisky in this month; -10℉ is definitely brown liquor weather. Luckily, my daughter brought home a nice bottle of 18-year-old <a href=\"http://www.glenscotia.com/\">Glen Scotia</a> from Edinburgh for Christmas. I’ve made a sizable dent in it.</li>\r\n 	<li>On my first trip to Charlottesville, after being off the road for four weeks, it took me forever to gather up all the bits of my regular travel carry from around the house. Normally, my travel carry stays in my backpack and my suitcase; I buy duplicates of things like hair brushes and headphones just so I don’t need to pull them out of my bag. But for some reason, all discipline broke down over the holidays and my carefully curated travel carry was spread/spewed throughout the house. Luckily, my ride to ORD was 5 minutes late. I took my Bluesmart bag, squeezed in one last trip before American’s January 15th smart luggage ban took effect. I tweeted a picture of my Bluesmart before boarding. American replied “We\'re glad you\'re flying with us and appreciate your cooperation with our team.” My response -- “Not that I have much of a choice…” Especially with IATA recommending the ban to its 300 airline members. My new non-smart Victorinox bag arrived on my front porch before the ban clicked in, so once I shift everything from the Bluesmart to the Victorinox, I’ll power down the Bluesmart, delete its app from my iPhone, and consign it to the corner of the attic with all my other retired bags -- my own Land of Misfit Bags.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mactonite/29469\">Static</a> by Darkroom (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mactonite/29469 </span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Starting off the New Year, I did a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/01/01/looking-back-at-2017-the-highs-and-the-lows/\">blog post</a> summarizing some of the high and low points that we talked about in 2017. The high points? Things like Uber and Lyft driver stories, yet more craft beer taprooms, and Hertz’s President Circle Aisle. Low points? Airlines dragging passengers from planes, everybody lobbying for 5-star reviews, and, no surprise, the smart luggage ban.</li>\r\n 	<li>Allan Marko, not just a long-time TravelCommon’s listener, but probably one of the original listeners showed his roots by posting on the original comment channel -- the TravelCommons website\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Have had our Away luggage for only about six months prior to the battery ban. I really like the ‘smart’ charging feature. Luckily the Away battery is a nicely designed self-contained and easily removable unit (two screws; screwdriver included!) Now the battery lives in my backpack, and the luggage still usable.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\"></li>\r\n 	<li>Allan’s psychic capabilities are showing. I think Away is the only major smart bag that meets the airlines’ requirement for a removable battery. But for me, charging wasn’t the major use case for me. I’m typically fine with my Anker lipstick charger. And if I forget to recharge that, my Verizon mobile WiFi hotspot also doubles as a charger. For me, the GPS tracking was the main use case -- for those times I had to check my bag, it was nice to know that it had also made it to my destination -- a use case that requires power. Pull out the battery and no more tracking. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted.</li>\r\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\"></li>\r\n 	<li>Jim McDonough replied to the Twitter announcement of the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">last episode</a> where I wondered if I was the last generation of cash payers. Jim wrote\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I use cash a) at the local farmer’s market; b) pay for haircuts . . . having a hard time coming up with c)</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Jim, I dunno. Looking at your Twitter profile picture, you look like you could land in my generation. I apologize for using a card for anything under $20. Although I have to say that more and more microbrewery taprooms only take credit cards. I don’t apologize there; or at the self-service tills in Home Depot or Tesco’s -- mostly because there’s no one to apologize to even though they will take cash.</li>\r\n 	<li>Natalie on the British Airways social media team <a href=\"https://twitter.com/British_Airways/status/943550974102245376\">tweeted back</a> at me about the other topic on the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">last episode</a> -- about how hard it can be to cash in on loyalty points. You’ll remember that I talked about all the hassles I had in transferring Avios points from BA to Iberia, until I got a BA agent with solid northern accent. Natalie of BA said\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Hey Mark! Thanks for tagging us in your article. I\'m glad to hear that one of our \'Geordie\' colleagues was able to help you redeem some of your Avios. It\'s a shame you didn\'t catch her name though.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Absolutely it was a shame. She deserves huge props.</li>\r\n 	<li>In that same riff, I mentioned how my email to Iberia to clean up my name on my Iberia Plus account -- which might have been the root cause of my point transfer problem -- seemed to have fallen into a black hole. Well, apparently it didn’t. Soon after that episode, I got a letter from Iberia with a new card that had my correct name. That was nice. Would’ve been just a bit nicer if they’d hit the Reply button while handling the email and typed, I dunno, just 8 words -- “Got it fixed; new card in the mail” But it got done -- all of it, Avios points, non-stop ORD-MAD flight on points, and now, a card with my correct name.</li>\r\n 	<li>And that Iberia letter was probably one of the last surprises I got when I open the mailbox at home. Somehow, I’m not quite sure how, I signed up for a US Post Office service that sends me an email every morning with scanned images of letters I’m going to receive that day. When I got that first email, I was kinda “What the hell?”, but now I kinda like it, especially when I’m on the road. No more wondering what bills showed up, or during the holidays, who had sent us Christmas cards. It does kinda take the surprise out of opening the mailbox -- though not that there was much left since 90% of our physical mail is junk -- but it is kinda entertaining.</li>\r\n 	<li>Back in August, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/08/27/podcast-132-travel-apps-on-my-phone/\">episode #132</a> about the travel apps I have loaded on my phone, I talked about using the paid or “Pro” version of TripIt, and about how it was on the bubble for me because of how the airlines have improved the flight status notifications in their own apps. In 4 months since then, the airline apps have pretty consistently notified me of gate changes and delays faster than TripIt Pro. And so when my subscription ran out a few weeks ago, I ignored the renewal alerts. I’ll still use the free version -- I like the way TripIt consolidates separate plane, hotel, and rental car reservations into a single trip -- kinda replicating the itineraries your travel agent used to give you when they booked your entire trip. But paying $50 for what are now slower, redundant flight alerts? I’ll spend it on beer or brown liquor instead.</li>\r\n 	<li>I don’t know if it’s just me, but the cadence for boarding groups has gotten out of control. I think I was on a Delta flight where I was boarding group 1 or 2, but was the 4th or 5th group to board, after Delta One, and then Platinum Medallion, then Gold Medallion, Sky Team Elite -- it went on forever. American is a bit better -- only one non-numeric boarding group for the invite-only Concierge Key gang (remember George Clooney in Up In The Air) -- and then 1 through 9(!). I do love the announcement “If you don’t have a boarding group number, then board Group 7” which feels a bit random. Where it really becomes fun is on a regional jet, when the gate agent runs through this cadence for a plane with only 40-50 passengers and all the carry-on bags are gate… I mean valet checked. “Now boarding passengers in Group 1, Group 2, Group 3…” Four people board… “Groups 5, 6, 7, and the rest of you” followed by general scrum in front of the agent. I know the airlines have PhDs in psychology, sociology, and linear programming working on this stuff, but it continues to be a cluster</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>And thanks to this episode’s sponsor TravelPerk</li>\r\n 	<li>Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/11/20/podcast-135-airport-bingo-new-old-travel-pc/\">November episode</a>, I talked about American\'s last-minute cancellation of my night flight to Charlottesville and my ensuing scramble to find a replacement flight and to make sure the Hyatt Place didn\'t flush my reservation. But if I\'d booked with TravelPerk, they would\'ve done the scrambling for me.\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>This all-in-one business travel management tool includes a team of highly qualified agents ready to rescue disgruntled travelers from any scenario 24/7.</li>\r\n 	<li>It’s because of making magic happen in times like this that TravelPerk is now the #1 rated business travel tool on the internet.</li>\r\n 	<li>You\'ll love them because you can finally take control of your travel schedule, have freedom to book alternative accommodation like Airbnb, and have a built-in rescue team when stuff goes south. Remove some stress from the equation, go to <a href=\"http://go.travelperk.com/travelcommons\">go.travelperk.com/travelcommons</a> for a no-commitment test drive.</li>\r\n 	<li>It’s free forever if you to <a href=\"http://go.travelperk.com/travelcommons\">go.travelperk.com/travelcommons</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Psykick/52938\">Another Way</a> by Psykick (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Psykick/52938</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Plan for 2018 Travel Perks</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>So here we are, 4 weeks into the new year and anywhere from a third to a half of us have already ditched our New Year\'s resolutions and are now in full anticipation of Super Bowl queso dip. But while your dry January may have been washed out early, you still have time to get your 2018 travel perks in place.</li>\r\n 	<li>Almost all travel perks come from status in loyalty programs and all those status earning counts reset on Jan 1, so the first step is to match up what you think your 2018 travel plans will be to your loyalty programs. Any gaps? If you think you’ll start flying to Seattle (maybe helping to shill your hometown for Amazon’s HQ2), you’ll probably want to sign up for Alaskan Airlines Mileage Plan, where before, it might not have been worth the extra junk mail.</li>\r\n 	<li>Or if you’re already a member, do a status match. When I took a new CIO job some years back, all the hotels near our offices were Hilton brands. I had a Hilton\'s Honors card but just in basic blue as opposed to my top-of-the-line sparkly platinum Marriott card. After I hit the “reset my password” link on the Hilton website, I went straight to their status match page. Right at the top, it says “For the next 90 days,... we’ll match your elite status with any other loyalty program.” If you complete 4 or 8 stays over those 90 days, the match is good for the year. So rather than having to grind my way to Hilton status, I started enjoying it on Day 1. I had a friend do that with American -- parlay his United 1K status to Executive Platinum when he moved from Denver to Dallas. Much better than slumming in Boarding Group 5 until you clear the first status bar.</li>\r\n 	<li>Doing this, you also need to keep in mind the different ecosystems; the partnerships that tie travel companies together. It used to be just the international alliances -- Star, SkyTeam, OneWorld. When I knew I’d be traveling down to South Africa, racking up some serious business class mileage, I had two real options -- SAA out of JFK and IAD, or DL out of ATL. Living in Chicago, I chose SAA because they’re part of Star Alliance with United, and I’d get a lot more use from United status out of Chicago than I would Delta. And it’s getting even more combinatorial now with United and Marriott are status matching each other.</li>\r\n 	<li>And then there’s the credit cards -- both affinity (United and Chase Visa, American and Citi MasterCard) and non (Amex Platinum, Chase Sapphire Reserve). You gotta do the math. For example, Amex’s Platinum card is $550/year. But with that, you get Membership Rewards points that transfer to airlines and hotels, access to Delta lounges and Amex’s Centurion Lounges, which if you travel frequently to DFW, LAS, MIA, LGA, and now JFK, is great. They’re much better than, say American’s Admirals Clubs. I wish they had one in Chicago. Amex also picks up the $100 Global Entry or $85 PreCheck fee, gives you 10 GoGo WiFi sessions, $200 in Uber credit, and some other benefits. If you’ll use these benefits, that $550 can be a better deal than, say, the $95 that the United Chase will cost you. However, that United Chase will get you baggage fee waiver, two United Club passes, and status boarding. If you don’t travel a huge amount and live in a United hub like Houston, the United card could be a better deal. But you gotta think about your travel, do the math, and sign up for it now so you have all year to maximize the status benefits.</li>\r\n 	<li>And while you’re in this planning zone, do yourself a big favor sign up and make an appointment for Global Entry if you do international travel, or PreCheck if you’re mostly a domestic flyer. If it makes sense for you to get an Amex Platinum or Chase Sapphire Reserve card, it’ll be free. To me, TSA and Customs lines are still the worst part of travel. While you’re figuring out how to bump your status up your status on airlines and hotels, do yourself a favor and step out of those TSA and Customs lines too.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/flatwound/14476\">The Long Goodbye</a> by John Pazdan (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/flatwound/14476</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>How to Shop For A Suitcase</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>OK, perhaps a bit presumptuous of a title; perhaps it’s “How I shopped for a suitcase.” But before we go there, let’s summarize the set up from past episodes -- my 10-year old black Swiss Army carry-on rendered itself unusable before Thanksgiving when the handle became stuck in the extended position (luckily as I was getting in a car coming home from ORD and not while trying to stow it in an overhead while boarding), I hate shopping for suitcases so I recharge my Bluesmart smart bag and put it back into service in December only to have it banned from air travel as of last week.</li>\r\n 	<li>So now I’m forced to shop for a suitcase. Like any good consultant, I, of course, construct a prioritized list of evaluation criteria. First, it has to be a carry-on. Now that may seem a bit of a “duh”, but there is some ambiguity; the <a href=\"https://travel-made-simple.com/carry-on-size-chart/\">approved height</a> varies by airline between 19 and 22-inches. If I wanted to play it safe, I’d go for a 20-inch bag, but I’m also want to maximize how much I can carry-on. I tilt toward choosing space. Most US carriers accept a 22-inch bag and that’s mostly what I fly, and even when I’m on European carriers I usually have enough alliance status (my American Platinum status carrying over to OneWorld) to glide past the baggage sizer.</li>\r\n 	<li>Which leads to the second criterion -- it needs to be black. As I said in my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/10/18/ruthless-packing-tips/\">Ruthless Packing Tips post</a> in October, black not only makes you look thinner, it makes your bag look thinner to gate agents scanning for bag-sizer bait.</li>\r\n 	<li>Third, 2 wheels, not 4. This is a bit more of a personal preference. My Bluesmart is a 4-wheel spinner and my wife swears by hers, but because the 4 wheels have to extend from the bottom of the bag, spinners sacrifice packing space for agility, while 2-wheelers can embed their wheels up in the backplane of the bag. Again trying to maximize packing space, I go for the 2-wheeler, and with the biggest wheels I can find to make it an easier, smoother pull. I was kinda surprised how this limited my selection. Spinners definitely rule.</li>\r\n 	<li>My fourth criterion -- I wanted the inside of the suitcase to be as plain and empty as possible. No bunch of zip compartments, or built-in suit hangers, or ratcheting down clothes dividers; just a wide open box that free to structure how I want for each trip. I was surprised how tough this was to find. Indeed, in the end, I couldn’t find it and settled for a bag where I could detach the suit hanger and clothes divider and stash that stuff up in the Land of Misfit Bags next to the Bluesmart.</li>\r\n 	<li>Whittling through all that, I ended up buying a black Victorinox Werks Traveler 5.0 2-wheeler. Victorinox is what used to be Swiss Army; I figured if my last bag survived 10 years of hard mileage, that said something for durability. It was also one of the few where I could detach all the internal storage stuff. And it has that additional zipper to expand the width by an inch -- kinda like when you drop a notch on your belt after Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner; for those times when I’m flying home and have bought a few too many bottles of wine or brown liquor.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #138</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>Thanks again to TravelPerk for sponsoring this episode. Remember to go to <a href=\"http://go.travelperk.com/travelcommons\">go.travelperk.com/travelcommons</a> for a test drive</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_138.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #138 — Travel Turning Me Hipster; Every Delay Has a Story','','inherit','closed','closed','','1947-revision-v1','','','2018-02-28 17:47:41','2018-02-28 22:47:41','',1947,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/02/28/1947-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1949,1,'2018-02-28 17:52:50','2018-02-28 22:52:50','','Help me! Help meeee!','Hipster boy poster with geek design elements vector illustration','inherit','open','closed','','hipster-boy-poster','','','2018-02-28 17:56:42','2018-02-28 22:56:42','',1947,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/iStock-535339649.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(1950,1,'2018-02-28 17:57:49','2018-02-28 22:57:49','[caption id=\"attachment_1949\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/iStock-535339649.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1949\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/iStock-535339649-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> TSA! Look at What You\'ve Done to Me![/caption]\r\n\r\nAll this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_138.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/388761270\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]<!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #138:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. This episode is sponsored by <a href=\"http://go.travelperk.com/travelcommons\">TravelPerk</a>, the #1 rated business travel tool on the Internet. It’s been a light travel month, just a drive down to Nashville, and a couple of trips over to Charlottesville, VA, which has been a nice break from what is otherwise turning out to be a brutally cold winter in Chicago. The day after New Years, I walked out of the house into a -10℉ morning -- not windchill, it was -10℉ ambient. Welcome to January. I had my team travel here last week for a 2018 kick-off meeting. No one accused us of boon-doggling. The guy from Phoenix did say he was filing an employee abuse claim though.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’ve found myself drinking less craft beer and much more Scotch whisky in this month; -10℉ is definitely brown liquor weather. Luckily, my daughter brought home a nice bottle of 18-year-old <a href=\"http://www.glenscotia.com/\">Glen Scotia</a> from Edinburgh for Christmas. I’ve made a sizable dent in it.</li>\r\n 	<li>On my first trip to Charlottesville, after being off the road for four weeks, it took me forever to gather up all the bits of my regular travel carry from around the house. Normally, my travel carry stays in my backpack and my suitcase; I buy duplicates of things like hair brushes and headphones just so I don’t need to pull them out of my bag. But for some reason, all discipline broke down over the holidays and my carefully curated travel carry was spread/spewed throughout the house. Luckily, my ride to ORD was 5 minutes late. I took my Bluesmart bag, squeezed in one last trip before American’s January 15th smart luggage ban took effect. I tweeted a picture of my Bluesmart before boarding. American replied “We\'re glad you\'re flying with us and appreciate your cooperation with our team.” My response -- “Not that I have much of a choice…” Especially with IATA recommending the ban to its 300 airline members. My new non-smart Victorinox bag arrived on my front porch before the ban clicked in, so once I shift everything from the Bluesmart to the Victorinox, I’ll power down the Bluesmart, delete its app from my iPhone, and consign it to the corner of the attic with all my other retired bags -- my own Land of Misfit Bags.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mactonite/29469\">Static</a> by Darkroom (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mactonite/29469 </span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Starting off the New Year, I did a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/01/01/looking-back-at-2017-the-highs-and-the-lows/\">blog post</a> summarizing some of the high and low points that we talked about in 2017. The high points? Things like Uber and Lyft driver stories, yet more craft beer taprooms, and Hertz’s President Circle Aisle. Low points? Airlines dragging passengers from planes, everybody lobbying for 5-star reviews, and, no surprise, the smart luggage ban.</li>\r\n 	<li>Allan Marko, not just a long-time TravelCommon’s listener, but probably one of the original listeners showed his roots by posting on the original comment channel -- the TravelCommons website\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Have had our Away luggage for only about six months prior to the battery ban. I really like the ‘smart’ charging feature. Luckily the Away battery is a nicely designed self-contained and easily removable unit (two screws; screwdriver included!) Now the battery lives in my backpack, and the luggage still usable.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\"></li>\r\n 	<li>Allan’s psychic capabilities are showing. I think Away is the only major smart bag that meets the airlines’ requirement for a removable battery. But for me, charging wasn’t the major use case for me. I’m typically fine with my Anker lipstick charger. And if I forget to recharge that, my Verizon mobile WiFi hotspot also doubles as a charger. For me, the GPS tracking was the main use case -- for those times I had to check my bag, it was nice to know that it had also made it to my destination -- a use case that requires power. Pull out the battery and no more tracking. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted.</li>\r\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\"></li>\r\n 	<li>Jim McDonough replied to the Twitter announcement of the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">last episode</a> where I wondered if I was the last generation of cash payers. Jim wrote\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I use cash a) at the local farmer’s market; b) pay for haircuts . . . having a hard time coming up with c)</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Jim, I dunno. Looking at your Twitter profile picture, you look like you could land in my generation. I apologize for using a card for anything under $20. Although I have to say that more and more microbrewery taprooms only take credit cards. I don’t apologize there; or at the self-service tills in Home Depot or Tesco’s -- mostly because there’s no one to apologize to even though they will take cash.</li>\r\n 	<li>Natalie on the British Airways social media team <a href=\"https://twitter.com/British_Airways/status/943550974102245376\">tweeted back</a> at me about the other topic on the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">last episode</a> -- about how hard it can be to cash in on loyalty points. You’ll remember that I talked about all the hassles I had in transferring Avios points from BA to Iberia, until I got a BA agent with solid northern accent. Natalie of BA said\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Hey Mark! Thanks for tagging us in your article. I\'m glad to hear that one of our \'Geordie\' colleagues was able to help you redeem some of your Avios. It\'s a shame you didn\'t catch her name though.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Absolutely it was a shame. She deserves huge props.</li>\r\n 	<li>In that same riff, I mentioned how my email to Iberia to clean up my name on my Iberia Plus account -- which might have been the root cause of my point transfer problem -- seemed to have fallen into a black hole. Well, apparently it didn’t. Soon after that episode, I got a letter from Iberia with a new card that had my correct name. That was nice. Would’ve been just a bit nicer if they’d hit the Reply button while handling the email and typed, I dunno, just 8 words -- “Got it fixed; new card in the mail” But it got done -- all of it, Avios points, non-stop ORD-MAD flight on points, and now, a card with my correct name.</li>\r\n 	<li>And that Iberia letter was probably one of the last surprises I got when I open the mailbox at home. Somehow, I’m not quite sure how, I signed up for a US Post Office service that sends me an email every morning with scanned images of letters I’m going to receive that day. When I got that first email, I was kinda “What the hell?”, but now I kinda like it, especially when I’m on the road. No more wondering what bills showed up, or during the holidays, who had sent us Christmas cards. It does kinda take the surprise out of opening the mailbox -- though not that there was much left since 90% of our physical mail is junk -- but it is kinda entertaining.</li>\r\n 	<li>Back in August, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/08/27/podcast-132-travel-apps-on-my-phone/\">episode #132</a> about the travel apps I have loaded on my phone, I talked about using the paid or “Pro” version of TripIt, and about how it was on the bubble for me because of how the airlines have improved the flight status notifications in their own apps. In 4 months since then, the airline apps have pretty consistently notified me of gate changes and delays faster than TripIt Pro. And so when my subscription ran out a few weeks ago, I ignored the renewal alerts. I’ll still use the free version -- I like the way TripIt consolidates separate plane, hotel, and rental car reservations into a single trip -- kinda replicating the itineraries your travel agent used to give you when they booked your entire trip. But paying $50 for what are now slower, redundant flight alerts? I’ll spend it on beer or brown liquor instead.</li>\r\n 	<li>I don’t know if it’s just me, but the cadence for boarding groups has gotten out of control. I think I was on a Delta flight where I was boarding group 1 or 2, but was the 4th or 5th group to board, after Delta One, and then Platinum Medallion, then Gold Medallion, Sky Team Elite -- it went on forever. American is a bit better -- only one non-numeric boarding group for the invite-only Concierge Key gang (remember George Clooney in Up In The Air) -- and then 1 through 9(!). I do love the announcement “If you don’t have a boarding group number, then board Group 7” which feels a bit random. Where it really becomes fun is on a regional jet, when the gate agent runs through this cadence for a plane with only 40-50 passengers and all the carry-on bags are gate… I mean valet checked. “Now boarding passengers in Group 1, Group 2, Group 3…” Four people board… “Groups 5, 6, 7, and the rest of you” followed by general scrum in front of the agent. I know the airlines have PhDs in psychology, sociology, and linear programming working on this stuff, but it continues to be a cluster</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>And thanks to this episode’s sponsor TravelPerk</li>\r\n 	<li>Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/11/20/podcast-135-airport-bingo-new-old-travel-pc/\">November episode</a>, I talked about American\'s last-minute cancellation of my night flight to Charlottesville and my ensuing scramble to find a replacement flight and to make sure the Hyatt Place didn\'t flush my reservation. But if I\'d booked with TravelPerk, they would\'ve done the scrambling for me.\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>This all-in-one business travel management tool includes a team of highly qualified agents ready to rescue disgruntled travelers from any scenario 24/7.</li>\r\n 	<li>It’s because of making magic happen in times like this that TravelPerk is now the #1 rated business travel tool on the internet.</li>\r\n 	<li>You\'ll love them because you can finally take control of your travel schedule, have freedom to book alternative accommodation like Airbnb, and have a built-in rescue team when stuff goes south. Remove some stress from the equation, go to <a href=\"http://go.travelperk.com/travelcommons\">go.travelperk.com/travelcommons</a> for a no-commitment test drive.</li>\r\n 	<li>It’s free forever if you to <a href=\"http://go.travelperk.com/travelcommons\">go.travelperk.com/travelcommons</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Psykick/52938\">Another Way</a> by Psykick (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Psykick/52938</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Plan for 2018 Travel Perks</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>So here we are, 4 weeks into the new year and anywhere from a third to a half of us have already ditched our New Year\'s resolutions and are now in full anticipation of Super Bowl queso dip. But while your dry January may have been washed out early, you still have time to get your 2018 travel perks in place.</li>\r\n 	<li>Almost all travel perks come from status in loyalty programs and all those status earning counts reset on Jan 1, so the first step is to match up what you think your 2018 travel plans will be to your loyalty programs. Any gaps? If you think you’ll start flying to Seattle (maybe helping to shill your hometown for Amazon’s HQ2), you’ll probably want to sign up for Alaskan Airlines Mileage Plan, where before, it might not have been worth the extra junk mail.</li>\r\n 	<li>Or if you’re already a member, do a status match. When I took a new CIO job some years back, all the hotels near our offices were Hilton brands. I had a Hilton\'s Honors card but just in basic blue as opposed to my top-of-the-line sparkly platinum Marriott card. After I hit the “reset my password” link on the Hilton website, I went straight to their status match page. Right at the top, it says “For the next 90 days,... we’ll match your elite status with any other loyalty program.” If you complete 4 or 8 stays over those 90 days, the match is good for the year. So rather than having to grind my way to Hilton status, I started enjoying it on Day 1. I had a friend do that with American -- parlay his United 1K status to Executive Platinum when he moved from Denver to Dallas. Much better than slumming in Boarding Group 5 until you clear the first status bar.</li>\r\n 	<li>Doing this, you also need to keep in mind the different ecosystems; the partnerships that tie travel companies together. It used to be just the international alliances -- Star, SkyTeam, OneWorld. When I knew I’d be traveling down to South Africa, racking up some serious business class mileage, I had two real options -- SAA out of JFK and IAD, or DL out of ATL. Living in Chicago, I chose SAA because they’re part of Star Alliance with United, and I’d get a lot more use from United status out of Chicago than I would Delta. And it’s getting even more combinatorial now with United and Marriott are status matching each other.</li>\r\n 	<li>And then there’s the credit cards -- both affinity (United and Chase Visa, American and Citi MasterCard) and non (Amex Platinum, Chase Sapphire Reserve). You gotta do the math. For example, Amex’s Platinum card is $550/year. But with that, you get Membership Rewards points that transfer to airlines and hotels, access to Delta lounges and Amex’s Centurion Lounges, which if you travel frequently to DFW, LAS, MIA, LGA, and now JFK, is great. They’re much better than, say American’s Admirals Clubs. I wish they had one in Chicago. Amex also picks up the $100 Global Entry or $85 PreCheck fee, gives you 10 GoGo WiFi sessions, $200 in Uber credit, and some other benefits. If you’ll use these benefits, that $550 can be a better deal than, say, the $95 that the United Chase will cost you. However, that United Chase will get you baggage fee waiver, two United Club passes, and status boarding. If you don’t travel a huge amount and live in a United hub like Houston, the United card could be a better deal. But you gotta think about your travel, do the math, and sign up for it now so you have all year to maximize the status benefits.</li>\r\n 	<li>And while you’re in this planning zone, do yourself a big favor sign up and make an appointment for Global Entry if you do international travel, or PreCheck if you’re mostly a domestic flyer. If it makes sense for you to get an Amex Platinum or Chase Sapphire Reserve card, it’ll be free. To me, TSA and Customs lines are still the worst part of travel. While you’re figuring out how to bump your status up your status on airlines and hotels, do yourself a favor and step out of those TSA and Customs lines too.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/flatwound/14476\">The Long Goodbye</a> by John Pazdan (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/flatwound/14476</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>How to Shop For A Suitcase</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>OK, perhaps a bit presumptuous of a title; perhaps it’s “How I shopped for a suitcase.” But before we go there, let’s summarize the set up from past episodes -- my 10-year old black Swiss Army carry-on rendered itself unusable before Thanksgiving when the handle became stuck in the extended position (luckily as I was getting in a car coming home from ORD and not while trying to stow it in an overhead while boarding), I hate shopping for suitcases so I recharge my Bluesmart smart bag and put it back into service in December only to have it banned from air travel as of last week.</li>\r\n 	<li>So now I’m forced to shop for a suitcase. Like any good consultant, I, of course, construct a prioritized list of evaluation criteria. First, it has to be a carry-on. Now that may seem a bit of a “duh”, but there is some ambiguity; the <a href=\"https://travel-made-simple.com/carry-on-size-chart/\">approved height</a> varies by airline between 19 and 22-inches. If I wanted to play it safe, I’d go for a 20-inch bag, but I’m also want to maximize how much I can carry-on. I tilt toward choosing space. Most US carriers accept a 22-inch bag and that’s mostly what I fly, and even when I’m on European carriers I usually have enough alliance status (my American Platinum status carrying over to OneWorld) to glide past the baggage sizer.</li>\r\n 	<li>Which leads to the second criterion -- it needs to be black. As I said in my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/10/18/ruthless-packing-tips/\">Ruthless Packing Tips post</a> in October, black not only makes you look thinner, it makes your bag look thinner to gate agents scanning for bag-sizer bait.</li>\r\n 	<li>Third, 2 wheels, not 4. This is a bit more of a personal preference. My Bluesmart is a 4-wheel spinner and my wife swears by hers, but because the 4 wheels have to extend from the bottom of the bag, spinners sacrifice packing space for agility, while 2-wheelers can embed their wheels up in the backplane of the bag. Again trying to maximize packing space, I go for the 2-wheeler, and with the biggest wheels I can find to make it an easier, smoother pull. I was kinda surprised how this limited my selection. Spinners definitely rule.</li>\r\n 	<li>My fourth criterion -- I wanted the inside of the suitcase to be as plain and empty as possible. No bunch of zip compartments, or built-in suit hangers, or ratcheting down clothes dividers; just a wide open box that free to structure how I want for each trip. I was surprised how tough this was to find. Indeed, in the end, I couldn’t find it and settled for a bag where I could detach the suit hanger and clothes divider and stash that stuff up in the Land of Misfit Bags next to the Bluesmart.</li>\r\n 	<li>Whittling through all that, I ended up buying a black Victorinox Werks Traveler 5.0 2-wheeler. Victorinox is what used to be Swiss Army; I figured if my last bag survived 10 years of hard mileage, that said something for durability. It was also one of the few where I could detach all the internal storage stuff. And it has that additional zipper to expand the width by an inch -- kinda like when you drop a notch on your belt after Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner; for those times when I’m flying home and have bought a few too many bottles of wine or brown liquor.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #138</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>Thanks again to TravelPerk for sponsoring this episode. Remember to go to <a href=\"http://go.travelperk.com/travelcommons\">go.travelperk.com/travelcommons</a> for a test drive</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_138.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #138 — Travel Turning Me Hipster; Every Delay Has a Story','','inherit','closed','closed','','1947-revision-v1','','','2018-02-28 17:57:49','2018-02-28 22:57:49','',1947,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/02/28/1947-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1951,1,'2018-02-28 18:10:33','2018-02-28 23:10:33','[caption id=\"attachment_1949\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/iStock-535339649.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1949\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/iStock-535339649-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> TSA! Look at What You\'ve Done to Me![/caption]\r\n\r\nAll this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_138.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/388761270\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]<!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #138:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. This has been a good travel month for me. Not too heavy, and all my travel had me headed south -- an important thing in February when you live in Chicago. The week before Mardi Gras, I headed down to New Orleans for a meeting. It easily could’ve been an overnight trip, but neither my wife nor I had been down in a while, so she came down with me. We caught some parades -- Nyx, Chaos, Muses -- ate way too much food, and except for a cold rain Wednesday night, had great weather. On Thursday, we were walking along the Mississippi back to the French Quarter from the Bywater neighborhood in bright sunshine and upper 60’s while Chicago was getting slammed with 8-12 inches of snow.</li>\r\n 	<li>When flew back to Chicago Friday night, we were able to thread the gap between the Friday end of that 8-12 inch drop and the start of the Saturday-Sunday 5-inch fall. Timing is everything. We came to the airport prepared for a long delay -- fully charged batteries, and muffaletta sandwiches and a mini king cake from Cochon Butcher. Southwest had cancelled this same flight the night before and that morning -- understandable given the snow -- so we didn’t think we wouldn’t get home; it was just going to be a question of how long. As it turned out, we were only an hour late, which given the weather, felt as good as on-time.</li>\r\n 	<li>Last week, I managed to point myself south again, this time to Florida -- Orlando and Miami -- and was able to skip two days of a heavy cold rain. The JW Marriott in Miami upgraded me to a room with a balcony on the 20th floor -- I didn’t have an ocean view, but I sat outside, 75 degrees, drinking a couple of beers, watching the sun go down, looking over to some of the rooftop bar action in the Brickell neighborhood. Miami is always an experience. It’s not the southernmost US big city, but rather the northernmost Latin American big city. I was reminded of that in the airport when I heard them paging someone in Spanish -- twice. They didn’t even bother wasting their time with English.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mactonite/29469\">Static</a> by Darkroom (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mactonite/29469 </span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Lots of comments about luggage since the last episode, which makes sense -- the last episode was heavy on luggage talk between the continuing thread on the smart luggage ban and the suitcase buying tips which I then ported over to a blog post.\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>So, starting off, Allan Marko forwarded along the latest e-mails from Away luggage, one of the few smart bags with removable batteries and so not caught up in the smart luggage ban. Or so they thought until Delta decided to add their own twist to the ban. If the battery in the bag requires a tool to remove it -- which the original Away bag does -- you have to remove it from the bag before you board -- whether you’re carrying on the bag or gate-checking it. The later version of the Away bag has an ejectable pop-up battery which Delta thinks is OK. What a mess! This is what happens when engineers run amok -- and I can say that as a recovering engineer. These guys are going to keep tweaking and twisting this, which will just confuse gate agents and frustrate passengers -- which is why I’ve mothballed my smart bag and bought another Anker lipstick charger.</li>\r\n 	<li>Steve Frick hit the TravelCommons web site and left this comment -- “I replaced my luggage with the exact same bag as I had before, a TravelPro. It was an easy choice, I like you, wanted a simple bag. I knew my gear would fit, I already knew what to put in the outside pockets. One of the guys I work with recently bought and then returned a 4-wheel spinner. The reason for the return……. he discovered that most hotel parking lots weren’t level and each time he let go of the bag to raise the trunk lid his bag rolled away.” Steve, I had that same problem with my Bluesmart 4-wheeler, except in airports rather than parking lots. I’d put the Bluesmart against the wall in a restroom and it would wander away.</li>\r\n 	<li>Jerry Sarfati posted on the TravelCommons Facebook page -- “Mark, great episode as usual” Thanks, Jerry! “I had a different experience when choosing a new bag. I was stopped twice by American Airlines gate agents telling me my 22\" bag was too big. I’m in Group 2. So I settled for the 20\" Victorinox spinner.” I asked Jerry if they made him put it in a bag sizer. “Once only. It barely fit, and she said ‘too big, it must slide in easily, it must be checked’. Other time the agent said the sizer is missing, but ‘I can already see it won\'t fit’. I didn\'t want to argue and get thrown off the flight.” Jerry, that -- in technical travel terms -- is bullshit. I remember one time in Boston Logan, I got shunted over to the bag sizer by the Icelandic Air gate agent. And I knew I was on the bubble because this was the trip I’ve talked about a couple of times where I had to pack for 10 days between Iceland and Southern Spain in one carry-on. I grabbed that bag by the side handle, had it about chest high, and then drove it into the bag sizer with all my might. It was either going to fit, break the bag or blow apart the bag sizer. Luckily, it fit -- though the gate agent jumped back just a bit when the bag hit the bottom of the sizer. She let me carry it on. I flew 3 legs on American last week with my 22-incher and didn’t get a glance. But having said that, you made the right choice -- discretion is the better part of valor. Gate agents have complete discretion. Obey or get bounced. Too bad you got caught up by other folks’ power trips.</li>\r\n 	<li>Back on the web site, Robert Fenerty wrote “I want a four-wheel spinner; my wife loves hers. But I won’t get one, because I believe that bags with only two wheels have a bit more interior space than four-wheelers of the same length. That’s because the spinners can’t tuck into the side of the bag so you’re losing the inch or two between the middle of the spinner wheel and the top of the stem that attaches the spinner to the bottom of the bag. How’s that for OCD?” Robert, I’ll see your OCD and raise you! I pulled out a metal ruler and measured the ground clearance difference between my Victorinox 2-wheeler and my wife’s Samsonite 4-wheel spinner. I measured a 1.5-inch difference. Multiply that by the 14x9-inch base size gives you a 189 cubic inch cost for spinner agility. I look at that being one day’s worth of workout kit.</li>\r\n 	<li>Also on the web site, Jim McDonough wrote “My favorite bag was a Rick Steves 21” rollaboard that had just one compartment and two really good wheels. I used it for a decade and finally had problems with my wife’s bag (wheel fell apart) and the side of mine cracked from all the abuse. He doesn’t sell them any more, because it was a hair too big for European airlines. We are now using Samsonite spinners. They don’t hold as much as the old Rick bags. We only check bags when we are staying in one place for at least a week. Carrying on is simply liberating.” Liberating in a couple of ways -- not standing around waiting for the luggage carousel to start to get your bag, and not waiting around for it to stop to confirm that airline has lost it. I remember one trip where BA forced me to gate-check a bag, and then somehow lost it -- how you lose a bag in the, say, 50 ft between the jet bridge and baggage hold I’ll never know. The problem was -- I was in a different city every day. And so, they’d deliver the bag to my hotel the next morning after I’d already checked out and headed for my first meeting. This went on for a couple of days until I finally convinced them to leapfrog me and send it two stops one. Liberating myself from well-worn clothes -- I love it when I can find happiness in the small things.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Another reminder that Miami is a bit different -- the in-room coffee machine at the JW Marriott wasn’t the standard issue single cupper with Starbucks Pike Place filter disks (that, by the way, are always too big for the filter holder). Instead, it was an Illy espresso machine with its own special little capsules and branded demitasse cups. Took me a couple of tries to get the capsule properly situated, but after that, I ran through all 3, 4 (?) of the capsules in 15 minutes and was ready to attack the day.</li>\r\n 	<li>Last month, The Aviating Railfanner stopped by the TravelCommons YouTube page and left a comment on the 2012 video O\'Hare Layover Excursion: a 6-Hour Tour of Chicago saying “I think it would be a good idea to mention that the Randolph/Wabash station has been demolished and is now the Washington/Wabash station” Good point. Indeed, there are a more than a few things that have changed in the 5 years since I did that video. I stole the idea from the “One City, Five Hours” series that United used to have in their Hemisphere’s magazine. The locations are still good -- Wrigley Field, Millenium Park, the Picasso. I’m not sure in this age of Uber if the focus on the subway/the L is still valid. I may see if I can lightly edit this video -- insert some text to send people to the right station, and update the 1-day travel pass options -- and then think about some new options, like maybe a craft beer taproom-focused layover tour. There you go, One City, Five Taprooms and then come roaring back into the TSA line. Hmmm, I may need to rethink that one.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you’re thinking about any questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Psykick/52938\">Another Way</a> by Psykick (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Psykick/52938</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Travel Is Turning Me Hipster</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Not wanting to turn this into the “Luggage Today” podcast, but when I was shifting things from my Bluesmart to my new Victorinox bag, I also restructured my toiletries kit. And as I was going through the contents -- what stays, what don’t I need anymore -- it struck me how much my travelling had changed something as basic as how I started my day.</li>\r\n 	<li>It started years, no decades ago -- sometime in the late ‘80’s or early ‘90’s. I was living in Philadelphia and flying to Europe pretty frequently, and at that time, the only real direct flight over the Atlantic (can I tell you how much I hate it when people say “The Pond”; it just puts my teeth on edge) was a BA 747 into Heathrow. Now, back then, I loved Heathrow. It was a great airport with fantastic connections. Now it’s an overcrowed shitshow that I avoid at all costs, but back then, it was great. Anyhow, at some point, Heathrow security required all electric devices to be pulled out for screening. Note I didn’t say “electronic”; this was before laptops and tablets and mobile phones were ubiquitous. No, this meant things like my electric razor had to be pulled out of my bag. Two go-rounds with Heathrow security and that Philips razor got jettisoned for a Gillette non-electric blade.</li>\r\n 	<li>Fast forward a decade-and-a-half to August 2006. I woke up in the SFO Marriott to the news of the foiled plot to blow up London-to-US flights by disguising separate explosive ingredients in soda bottles then then assembling and detonating them on board. I was trying to fly back the next day. Baggage check lines exploded when all the flyers with toothpaste, shaving cream, make-up -- pretty much everyone -- were made to check their bags. That weekend, I re-worked my toiletries kit -- hitting the local Whole Foods for tooth powder to replace toothpaste, hair wax for hair gel, and trading the shaving cream that I picked up in that last revamp for a badger hair shaving brush. I think this was the tipping point -- when my kit started to skew hipster.</li>\r\n 	<li>Fast forward another decade-and-a-half to this Christmas. My son gives me a selection of travel sized shaving soaps, each in their own tin container with a screw top. My daughter gives me a bottle of Lush toothy tabs -- kinda compressed tooth powder. These immediately go into my travel kit. My son forwards me a Massdrop buy for an Oristo razor -- a $100 version of my grandfather’s safety razor, precision engineered for a “very efficient yet non-aggressive shaving experience”. I think seriously about this. My toiletry kit has gone almost full hipster.</li>\r\n 	<li>And though I’ve slagged on the TSA for God knows how many episodes over the life of this podcast, I do have to thank them for one thing, keeping my toiletry kit from going full-on hipster, because I know they’ll never allow me to shift to shaving with a straight razor.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/flatwound/14476\">The Long Goodbye</a> by John Pazdan (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/flatwound/14476</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Every Delay Has a Story</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>In the last episode, I talked about why I dropped my subscription to TripIt’s paid “Pro” service -- the main benefit, live flight status notifications, was slower than the free notifications I was getting from the airlines themselves -- from American, United, and Delta. However, when we were idling in the New Orleans airport waiting on our flight back to Chicago, I found the Southwest delay notifications lagged way behind TripIt Pro. Not that I re-upped my TripIt Pro subscription; my wife forgot to cancel a 30-day trial she signed up for, so she now has a year’s subscription. I, instead, was using FlightAware, specifically the feature I’ve talked about in prior episodes that shows you where your plane is. From that I could see that the delay wasn’t because of the snow in Chicago; the plane was spending a lot of time on the ground in Ft Lauderdale, the stop before New Orleans. So I hit Twitter -- Why is flight 860 sitting in FLL so long? The reply -- “Hey, Mark. We know delays can be tough, and apologize for the inconvenience. It looks like Flight #860 is delayed due to inclement weather earlier in the day.” Perhaps a delay in Denver, but why the long ground turn in FLL? No answer.</li>\r\n 	<li>United announced a pilot program in January called “Every Flight Has A Story” where they’d push out much more detailed information on delayed flights -- rather than “Late Arriving Aircraft”, it would be “Our maintenance team is replacing an item on your plane and needs extra time to complete”. The pilot was scheduled for Houston and Phoenix. I haven’t seen much reaction to it, but at least for me, having some sense for the reason for a delay let’s me better figure out what I’m going to do next. I’m much less trusting of a newly posted departure time if I know the inbound plane is still on the ground, or if it’s a maintenance delay.</li>\r\n 	<li>Of course, some of those explanations could be a bit more embarrassing than others. Like for Southwest, a couple of days after our flight back to Chicago, they had to cancel more than 200 flights because they ran out of de-icing fluid at Midway airport. You get that notification, and you’re shaking your head as you dial up an airline that knows how to fly in the winter.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #138</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_138.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #138 — Travel Turning Me Hipster; Every Delay Has a Story','','inherit','closed','closed','','1947-revision-v1','','','2018-02-28 18:10:33','2018-02-28 23:10:33','',1947,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/02/28/1947-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1952,1,'2018-02-28 18:28:41','2018-02-28 23:28:41','[caption id=\"attachment_1820\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/IMG_0548.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1820\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/IMG_0548-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> One Way to Reduce Packing Needs by 50%[/caption]\r\n\r\nFitting 10 days of clothes for rain, hiking, and Michelin restaurants into a 22-inch carry-on forced me to pack ruthlessly, and to distill my packing thoughts into 5 packing pro tips. Flying to Hungary right after a cycling accident reminded me of the hassles of traveling on the injured reserve list. All this and listener comments on EU mobile regulations, travel apps on smartphones, and the need for Atlanta baggage X-ray ninja skills at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_133.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_133.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #133:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL after what has been a light month of travel, just 10 days in Scotland on vacation, and then a quick overnight to Atlanta a couple of days after I returned. Other than that, I’ve been in Chicago trying to get back my body clock back to local time. Conventional wisdom says that your body will adjust at the rate of 1-2 time zones a day. So, for the 6 hours between Chicago and the UK, it should take me 3-5 days to adjust. I dunno, it’s felt longer than that. The older I get, the longer it seems to get.</li>\r\n 	<li>It’s also harder for me coming west than going east. When I go to Europe, I can set an alarm to wake up at the right time and will myself out of bed and into the shower. Back in the US, I can’t quite “will” myself back to sleep when I wake up at 2 or 3 in the morning. I did find, though, on this trip that I needed to be careful how long I stayed up the first couple of nights. My usual routine is to take a 30-minute nap the first afternoon I’m there -- say around 4:30 -- which then lets me push through to, say 10 or 11 that night. I’m then tired enough to get to sleep at what my body might still think is 5 or 6pm. This trip, I found that if I stayed up past midnight -- maybe because I got to reading something after getting back from dinner -- my body sorta tipped over that inflection point, caught a second, or is it a third wind, and would be happy to push through to 2 or 3 in the morning, which would make the morning’s alarm much tougher to handle.</li>\r\n 	<li>The United flight to and from Edinburgh was direct -- always nice -- but on an old 757 that had definitely seen better days, and many of them. Eight hours on any narrow body is tough, but on a 757 -- the narrowest of the narrow bodies -- it’s a bit tougher. And it was completely full -- nothing out-of-the-ordinary nowadays. Our flight from ORD landed shortly after the United direct from EWR landed, and so there was quite a queue for the non-EU passport line. Indeed, as we were coming off the jet bridge, an airport worker turned off the escalator and blocked it off. The end of the passport queue was beginning to block it on the floor below. So I reached into my backpack and pulled out my UK passport and was waved over to a set of four unmanned automated gates with no lines. I put my passport in, took my glasses off for the camera, and walked through when the gates opened up. It was pretty slick.</li>\r\n 	<li>I still had to wait for my wife and kids to work their way through the non-EU line, but I made some good use of the time -- I helped a mother and daughter from the EWR flight wrestle some amazing large bags onto a luggage cart, and had collected all of our luggage. If they had a Starbucks there in baggage claim like they do at ORD, it would’ve been damn close to a perfect morning.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/bridges/15563\">i knew</a> by bridges (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. Ft: shannonsongs</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Received some good comments on the last episode</li>\r\n 	<li>Nick -- no last name on the e-mail -- helped answer the question I had about arbitraging different European phone SIMs now that the EU had banned roaming charges. Nick writes -\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>You mentioned having 3 EU SIMs to choose from in Dublin, and working out the best value of the three.\r\nI live in the UK and have a UK SIM. If I go to Spain, and call a UK number (even if that number belongs to the person next to me) then I just pay a local rate call - or nothing if I have an unlimited calls account. However, if I call a Spanish number, then it counts as an overseas call, as if I were in the UK - even though I\'m in Spain. So which is the best SIM to use will to an extent depend on the actual call rates, but also which country it is registered in, and which country you are calling, independently of where you are.\r\nI hope that makes sense, and it\'s useful</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Nick, thanks for that. It makes a lot of sense when I recall that the EU wanted to eliminate roaming charges, so a mobile call from the UK is the same as one from Spain. For us, though, we’re rarely making a phone call. Indeed, I’m usually the only one making phone calls and that’s typically into a conference bridge. During our 10 days in Scotland, I used 11 of the 300 minutes in my 30 day plan. My wife’s 7 day plan ran out and she never noticed, because her 1 GB of data didn’t. And I think that’s where the arbitrage still could work, on using the cheapest data plan. That will, though, take a good bit of wading through really bad websites with confusing plan descriptions that are only partially in English. I think I’ll probably default to using my UK SIM just out of sheer laziness.</li>\r\n 	<li>Steve Frick left a comment on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page about the new parallel loading baggage X-ray machines I’ve encountered in the ATL PreCheck line. Steve writes -\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I agree with you that people are hesitant to jump the queue in front of others..... and you do need mad ninja skills if you\'re in the first slot trying to grab one of those oversized bins</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Steve linked to his blog post where he has video and a more detailed description of the situation. Check out the show notes for a <a href=\"http://www.hypeorlando.com/back-and-gone-again/2017/05/01/atlanta-hartsfield-has-automated-the-tsa-process/\">link to his blog</a></li>\r\n 	<li>I have to give the ATL TSA crew props for noticing the problem with breaking into the stream of bins if you’re in one of the front loading stations. When I was going through ATL a few weeks back, there was a TSA person at the parallel loading line choreographing each bin push, having everyone hold up until all the previous bins had cleared, and then having everyone push their bins onto the conveyor at once. I haven’t seen this problem with parallel loaders in, say, Edinburgh or Heathrow or Madrid. I wonder what’s different that requires this manual intervention.</li>\r\n 	<li>And there were a couple of comments on the travel apps people use on their smartphones. Dan Brener left this Facebook\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Great episode! Here\'s the apps I use the most: Air Canada and United, TripIt (although it\'s not as good as it could/should be), I used to use FlightTrack and really miss it, FlightAware since the AC app doesn\'t tell me where planes are coming from, Uber and Lyft, Packing (it\'s a list app to make sure I don\'t forget something obvious!), SPG, Yelp, Google Maps and Waze. There\'s a few others, but those are the main ones.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Dan, thanks for that list. I had forgotten to mention Yelp in the last episode. I have some colleagues who are heavy Yelp users; they’ll build lists of restaurants and bars before starting a project in a new city. I tend to use Yelp and the “Explore food &amp; drinks near you” feature in Google Maps for restaurant suggestions interchangeably when I’m in a new place. I’m always surprised at how different the recommendations often are.</li>\r\n 	<li>Gary Learned sent in on Twitter -\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>What I love about Lyft over Uber is their ability to produce a consolidated receipt of all my rides on a trip</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Thanks Gary. I’ve noticed that functionality in the Lyft app, but it’s not hugely useful for me since we use Concur for our T&amp;E reporting, and it picks up the individual Amex charges rather than a feed from Lyft. Would be handy if Concur would pull a single consolidated charge from Lyft.</li>\r\n 	<li>And finally, a couple of weeks later on Twitter, Eddie Antar, who is always a chuckle, said\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Binge listening to TC bc I had to let an AA voucher expire.? OTOH I\'m not being groped or dragged down the aisle screaming, so.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>I dunno, listening to my is better than being groped or dragged down the plane aisle. Feels a bit like being damned with very faint praise...</li>\r\n 	<li>And one last Tweet, this one from the Craig and Linda Martin of the Indie Travel Podcast…\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Highlight of the week? meeting fellow travel podcaster @mpeacock for lunch &amp; craft beer in Edinburgh. 10 or so years of podcast friendship</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Honestly, I think Linda and I had been trading e-mails for most of this year, seeing if we could physically meet up after so many years of knowing each other in the travel podcast universe. One of us would hear the other mention travel plans in a podcast that might overlap with the other’s. It finally came together at the end of our Scotland vacation and the beginning of theirs. They flew into EDI Sunday night; we were leaving from EDI Tuesday morning, so Monday lunch was the call. I drove over from St Andrews to a new neighborhood for me; kinda hip. Linda picked a nice pub with a great beer list that we all enjoyed. It is one of the great things about travel -- getting to meet up with friends; and in this case, for the first time.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/11510\">Funkist</a> - cdk dub mix by cdk (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: teru.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Packing Pro Tips</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Getting everything I needed for our 10 days in Scotland into a carry-on bag pushed my packing skills just a bit. The trip was mostly hiking and hill walks with a couple of 1-star Michelin restaurants thrown into the mix. And the forecast was for rain just about every day. We were on a direct flight to EDI and my daughter had to check a bag with stuff she was taking back to university, so the carry-on limitation wasn’t because of lost luggage or being able to power past the baggage carousel -- a non-starter given the long non-EU immigration line at EDI. It was more about trunk space in the rental car. As it was, I was doing luggage jenga just about every morning trying to puzzle everything into the back of our Nissan X-Terra.</li>\r\n 	<li>I easily spent an hour -- 2-3 times longer than usual -- trying to figure out how to get hiking shoes, rain gear, dress shirts, and everything else into that 22-inch bag. It made me pack ruthlessly -- everything had to earn its space in the bag. And though I’ve casually mentioned some of these ideas in prior episodes, this latest packing experience really crystallized this pro tip list.</li>\r\n 	<li>First and foremost, pick a single color family for your clothes, and make it black. Three main reasons -- Black makes everyone look thinner, it spans casual to smart dress codes, and black doesn’t show stains. OK, the thinner thing is a nice-to-have, but hiding stains is key. I packed two pair of slacks and wore a third on the plane. I couldn’t be one-and-done because I took incoming from a fork-handling mishap.</li>\r\n 	<li>Second, no one-and-done outfits. Every piece of clothes has to serve multiple purposes so it can be worn multiple times -- every shirt has to work under multiple sweaters and has to go with more than one pair of pants. Versatility is key. And yet another reason to pack black.</li>\r\n 	<li>Third, think \"additively\"; pack layers. This was key in my last packing challenge too -- last year’s Spring Break trip to Iceland and Southern Spain that I talked about in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/05/30/podcast-121-tsa-lines-my-luggage-is-where/\">episode #121</a>. Pack multiple thin layers that you can pile on when it’s cold and wear separately when it’s not. Black sweaters and a black fleece vest are my layering go-to’s.</li>\r\n 	<li>Fourth, wear your bulkiest clothes on the flight. I packed the hiking rain shell and flew in the blazer I needed for the 1-stars because the shell is infinitely more crushable. My only caveat to this is shoes. I packed the hiking shoes, even though they were bulkier than the dressily casual walking shoes I was also bringing, because I didn’t want to set off the metal detector in the Pre-Check line or get pulled out because the soles are too thick. If you’re not doing Pre-Check, you’re already taking your shoes off, so wear your biggest ones.</li>\r\n 	<li>And my fifth and final pro tip, use a non-descript black rolling bag. Black not only makes you look thinner, it makes your bag look thinner to gate agents scanning for bag-sizer bait. My daughter had a baby blue roller bag for the longest time. She loved that color, and it was easy to spot on the luggage carousel, which is a good thing; it ended up there a lot because gate agents were always pulling my daughter out of line to gate check that bag. Her current bag is a dark eggplant purple. It’s not black, but it’s close. If you’re flying a budget airline that’s a stickler on size, use a hard-shell bag. It’ll keep its dimensions better when overstuffed, and the polycarbonate shell will slide past the metal bars of the sizer easier than the ballistic nylon of a soft-sided bag.</li>\r\n 	<li>There you go, my five packing pro tips. If you’ve got some of your own to share, send them along through the usual channels and we’ll have them on the next episode.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/48705\">Jolanta Blues</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license.  Ft: Admiral Bob, Martijn de Boer</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Traveling Injured</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>In a couple of <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/02/06/podcast-87-sick-on-the-road-whats-in-my-briefcase/\">past</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/03/13/podcast-88-new-travel-goodies-losing-status/\">episodes</a>, we’ve talked about how miserable it is to be sick on the road. Traveling injured is a bit similar, but not quite the same. While you’re not, say, shivering under hotel blankets after you’ve cranked the thermostat as high as it’ll go, you’re not powering through your day at 100%.</li>\r\n 	<li>The most recent stint on travel injured reserve was our May trip to Hungary. My wife had left the week before to visit her aunt and cousins, leaving me alone with the cat. I was working from home one nice day and decided to take a break for a bike ride. Figured I should take every opportunity to burn some calories now since Hungarian food isn’t known as spa cuisine. I did my normal 17-mile circuit for the 50th or 60th time. Coming towards the last mile, I’m looking ahead to line up a turn and boom -- I hit some huge divot in the pavement that I’ve never seen before. My hands fly off the handle bar, I see the front wheel turned 90 degrees, and down I go, skidding across the asphalt. I come to a stop just short of the curb, pick myself up, rinse the visible road rash with the last bits of water in my bottle, and limp my bike and myself home.</li>\r\n 	<li>I immediately hit the shower, scrubbed out the road rash (with, as you might imagine, a bit of loud vocal commentary), and surveyed the damage. Good sized abrasions on my right elbow and forearm, my right butt cheek, both knees, and a line on my left chest where I must’ve popped the handle bar. I lost a bunch of skin, but felt lucky I didn’t break a collarbone or something worse.</li>\r\n 	<li>The Friday night flight to Vienna was not a comfortable one. No knock on Austrian Airlines; as I mentioned in an <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/06/24/podcast-130-notes-from-hungary/\">earlier podcast</a>, I was happy with their service. It was primarily the seat -- a standard coach seat, so not overly spacious -- pressing up against that large bit of road rash on my right, uhh, hip. Indeed, that abrasion was still -- I think “weeping” is the technical term. And so halfway through the flight, I was in the toilet with my tube of neosporin, my gauze pads and my surgical tape re-dressing it. It was either that or change pants. And following my packing pro tips, I couldn’t do a one-and-done on these pants. Luckily, I was in that quiet time between the after-dinner and the just-before-landing toilet rushes, so no banging on the door to hurry up.</li>\r\n 	<li>Every day was like that -- 30 minutes of removing and reapplying dressings, at first 3 times a day, then 2, and then when things finally scabbed up a bit, just in the morning, and really by then as much for cosmetic purposes -- so that people wouldn’t ask me about it -- as much as anything. I had to skip the family trip to a Budapest thermal bath -- I didn’t want some bath guard calling me out of the pool in front of a couple of thousand Hungarians, and I honestly wasn’t sure how aggressively they were chlorinating that water.</li>\r\n 	<li>That wasn’t my most awkward stint on the travel injured reserve list. Last year, I squeezed in a dermatologist appt for a mole scan before a flight out that afternoon. The doc said “This one looks a bit suspect”, putting his finger on a mole right in the middle of my back. He numbed it up, shaved it off, sent it off to the lab and bandaged me up. “Change that dressing every day,” he said as I raced out to head to ORD. The next morning, in a hotel bathroom, by myself, looking in the mirror at the gauze dressing between my shoulder blades that I couldn’t reach, I wondered how I could change that dressing -- call the front desk, ask a colleague? That seemed way too much to ask. And, it wasn’t that big of a mole. That dressing could wait ‘til Friday.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #133</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_133.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #133 — Packing Pro Tips; Traveling Injured','','inherit','closed','closed','','1819-revision-v1','','','2018-02-28 18:28:41','2018-02-28 23:28:41','',1819,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/02/28/1819-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1953,1,'2018-02-28 20:13:11','2018-03-01 01:13:11','[caption id=\"attachment_1949\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/iStock-535339649.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1949\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/iStock-535339649-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> TSA! Look at What You\'ve Done to Me![/caption]\r\n\r\nFebruary is a tough time to be in the Midwest, so when my travel took me south, to New Orleans and then to Florida, there was no bitch tweeting about the TSA lines or flight delays. In this episode, I walk through how each change in airport security has pushed me to be more hipster and how we all want to understand the real cause of the flight delays that inconvenience us. Also a good bit of listener feedback extending the luggage thread. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_138.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/388761270\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]<!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #138:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. This has been a good travel month for me. Not too heavy, and all my travel had me headed south -- an important thing in February when you live in Chicago. The week before Mardi Gras, I headed down to New Orleans for a meeting. It easily could’ve been an overnight trip, but neither my wife nor I had been down in a while, so she came down with me. We caught some parades -- Nyx, Chaos, Muses -- ate way too much food, and except for a cold rain Wednesday night, had great weather. On Thursday, we were walking along the Mississippi back to the French Quarter from the Bywater neighborhood in bright sunshine and upper 60’s while Chicago was getting slammed with 8-12 inches of snow.</li>\r\n 	<li>When flew back to Chicago Friday night, we were able to thread the gap between the Friday end of that 8-12 inch drop and the start of the Saturday-Sunday 5-inch fall. Timing is everything. We came to the airport prepared for a long delay -- fully charged batteries, and muffaletta sandwiches and a mini king cake from Cochon Butcher. Southwest had cancelled this same flight the night before and that morning -- understandable given the snow -- so we didn’t think we wouldn’t get home; it was just going to be a question of how long. As it turned out, we were only an hour late, which given the weather, felt as good as on-time.</li>\r\n 	<li>Last week, I managed to point myself south again, this time to Florida -- Orlando and Miami -- and was able to skip two days of a heavy cold rain. The JW Marriott in Miami upgraded me to a room with a balcony on the 20th floor -- I didn’t have an ocean view, but I sat outside, 75 degrees, drinking a couple of beers, watching the sun go down, looking over to some of the rooftop bar action in the Brickell neighborhood. Miami is always an experience. It’s not the southernmost US big city, but rather the northernmost Latin American big city. I was reminded of that in the airport when I heard them paging someone in Spanish -- twice. They didn’t even bother wasting their time with English.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mactonite/29469\">Static</a> by Darkroom (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mactonite/29469 </span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Lots of comments about luggage since the last episode, which makes sense -- the last episode was heavy on luggage talk between the continuing thread on the smart luggage ban and the suitcase buying tips which I then ported over to a blog post.\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>So, starting off, Allan Marko forwarded along the latest e-mails from Away luggage, one of the few smart bags with removable batteries and so not caught up in the smart luggage ban. Or so they thought until Delta decided to add their own twist to the ban. If the battery in the bag requires a tool to remove it -- which the original Away bag does -- you have to remove it from the bag before you board -- whether you’re carrying on the bag or gate-checking it. The later version of the Away bag has an ejectable pop-up battery which Delta thinks is OK. What a mess! This is what happens when engineers run amok -- and I can say that as a recovering engineer. These guys are going to keep tweaking and twisting this, which will just confuse gate agents and frustrate passengers -- which is why I’ve mothballed my smart bag and bought another Anker lipstick charger.</li>\r\n 	<li>Steve Frick hit the TravelCommons web site and left this comment -- “I replaced my luggage with the exact same bag as I had before, a TravelPro. It was an easy choice, I like you, wanted a simple bag. I knew my gear would fit, I already knew what to put in the outside pockets. One of the guys I work with recently bought and then returned a 4-wheel spinner. The reason for the return……. he discovered that most hotel parking lots weren’t level and each time he let go of the bag to raise the trunk lid his bag rolled away.” Steve, I had that same problem with my Bluesmart 4-wheeler, except in airports rather than parking lots. I’d put the Bluesmart against the wall in a restroom and it would wander away.</li>\r\n 	<li>Jerry Sarfati posted on the TravelCommons Facebook page -- “Mark, great episode as usual” Thanks, Jerry! “I had a different experience when choosing a new bag. I was stopped twice by American Airlines gate agents telling me my 22\" bag was too big. I’m in Group 2. So I settled for the 20\" Victorinox spinner.” I asked Jerry if they made him put it in a bag sizer. “Once only. It barely fit, and she said ‘too big, it must slide in easily, it must be checked’. Other time the agent said the sizer is missing, but ‘I can already see it won\'t fit’. I didn\'t want to argue and get thrown off the flight.” Jerry, that -- in technical travel terms -- is bullshit. I remember one time in Boston Logan, I got shunted over to the bag sizer by the Icelandic Air gate agent. And I knew I was on the bubble because this was the trip I’ve talked about a couple of times where I had to pack for 10 days between Iceland and Southern Spain in one carry-on. I grabbed that bag by the side handle, had it about chest high, and then drove it into the bag sizer with all my might. It was either going to fit, break the bag or blow apart the bag sizer. Luckily, it fit -- though the gate agent jumped back just a bit when the bag hit the bottom of the sizer. She let me carry it on. I flew 3 legs on American last week with my 22-incher and didn’t get a glance. But having said that, you made the right choice -- discretion is the better part of valor. Gate agents have complete discretion. Obey or get bounced. Too bad you got caught up by other folks’ power trips.</li>\r\n 	<li>Back on the web site, Robert Fenerty wrote “I want a four-wheel spinner; my wife loves hers. But I won’t get one, because I believe that bags with only two wheels have a bit more interior space than four-wheelers of the same length. That’s because the spinners can’t tuck into the side of the bag so you’re losing the inch or two between the middle of the spinner wheel and the top of the stem that attaches the spinner to the bottom of the bag. How’s that for OCD?” Robert, I’ll see your OCD and raise you! I pulled out a metal ruler and measured the ground clearance difference between my Victorinox 2-wheeler and my wife’s Samsonite 4-wheel spinner. I measured a 1.5-inch difference. Multiply that by the 14x9-inch base size gives you a 189 cubic inch cost for spinner agility. I look at that being one day’s worth of workout kit.</li>\r\n 	<li>Also on the web site, Jim McDonough wrote “My favorite bag was a Rick Steves 21” rollaboard that had just one compartment and two really good wheels. I used it for a decade and finally had problems with my wife’s bag (wheel fell apart) and the side of mine cracked from all the abuse. He doesn’t sell them any more, because it was a hair too big for European airlines. We are now using Samsonite spinners. They don’t hold as much as the old Rick bags. We only check bags when we are staying in one place for at least a week. Carrying on is simply liberating.” Liberating in a couple of ways -- not standing around waiting for the luggage carousel to start to get your bag, and not waiting around for it to stop to confirm that airline has lost it. I remember one trip where BA forced me to gate-check a bag, and then somehow lost it -- how you lose a bag in the, say, 50 ft between the jet bridge and baggage hold I’ll never know. The problem was -- I was in a different city every day. And so, they’d deliver the bag to my hotel the next morning after I’d already checked out and headed for my first meeting. This went on for a couple of days until I finally convinced them to leapfrog me and send it two stops one. Liberating myself from well-worn clothes -- I love it when I can find happiness in the small things.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Another reminder that Miami is a bit different -- the in-room coffee machine at the JW Marriott wasn’t the standard issue single cupper with Starbucks Pike Place filter disks (that, by the way, are always too big for the filter holder). Instead, it was an Illy espresso machine with its own special little capsules and branded demitasse cups. Took me a couple of tries to get the capsule properly situated, but after that, I ran through all 3, 4 (?) of the capsules in 15 minutes and was ready to attack the day.</li>\r\n 	<li>Last month, The Aviating Railfanner stopped by the TravelCommons YouTube page and left a comment on the 2012 video O\'Hare Layover Excursion: a 6-Hour Tour of Chicago saying “I think it would be a good idea to mention that the Randolph/Wabash station has been demolished and is now the Washington/Wabash station” Good point. Indeed, there are a more than a few things that have changed in the 5 years since I did that video. I stole the idea from the “One City, Five Hours” series that United used to have in their Hemisphere’s magazine. The locations are still good -- Wrigley Field, Millenium Park, the Picasso. I’m not sure in this age of Uber if the focus on the subway/the L is still valid. I may see if I can lightly edit this video -- insert some text to send people to the right station, and update the 1-day travel pass options -- and then think about some new options, like maybe a craft beer taproom-focused layover tour. There you go, One City, Five Taprooms and then come roaring back into the TSA line. Hmmm, I may need to rethink that one.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you’re thinking about any questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Psykick/52938\">Another Way</a> by Psykick (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Psykick/52938</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Travel Is Turning Me Hipster</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Not wanting to turn this into the “Luggage Today” podcast, but when I was shifting things from my Bluesmart to my new Victorinox bag, I also restructured my toiletries kit. And as I was going through the contents -- what stays, what don’t I need anymore -- it struck me how much my travelling had changed something as basic as how I started my day.</li>\r\n 	<li>It started years, no decades ago -- sometime in the late ‘80’s or early ‘90’s. I was living in Philadelphia and flying to Europe pretty frequently, and at that time, the only real direct flight over the Atlantic (can I tell you how much I hate it when people say “The Pond”; it just puts my teeth on edge) was a BA 747 into Heathrow. Now, back then, I loved Heathrow. It was a great airport with fantastic connections. Now it’s an overcrowed shitshow that I avoid at all costs, but back then, it was great. Anyhow, at some point, Heathrow security required all electric devices to be pulled out for screening. Note I didn’t say “electronic”; this was before laptops and tablets and mobile phones were ubiquitous. No, this meant things like my electric razor had to be pulled out of my bag. Two go-rounds with Heathrow security and that Philips razor got jettisoned for a Gillette non-electric blade.</li>\r\n 	<li>Fast forward a decade-and-a-half to August 2006. I woke up in the SFO Marriott to the news of the foiled plot to blow up London-to-US flights by disguising separate explosive ingredients in soda bottles then then assembling and detonating them on board. I was trying to fly back the next day. Baggage check lines exploded when all the flyers with toothpaste, shaving cream, make-up -- pretty much everyone -- were made to check their bags. That weekend, I re-worked my toiletries kit -- hitting the local Whole Foods for tooth powder to replace toothpaste, hair wax for hair gel, and trading the shaving cream that I picked up in that last revamp for a badger hair shaving brush. I think this was the tipping point -- when my kit started to skew hipster.</li>\r\n 	<li>Fast forward another decade-and-a-half to this Christmas. My son gives me a selection of travel sized shaving soaps, each in their own tin container with a screw top. My daughter gives me a bottle of Lush toothy tabs -- kinda compressed tooth powder. These immediately go into my travel kit. My son forwards me a Massdrop buy for an Oristo razor -- a $100 version of my grandfather’s safety razor, precision engineered for a “very efficient yet non-aggressive shaving experience”. I think seriously about this. My toiletry kit has gone almost full hipster.</li>\r\n 	<li>And though I’ve slagged on the TSA for God knows how many episodes over the life of this podcast, I do have to thank them for one thing, keeping my toiletry kit from going full-on hipster, because I know they’ll never allow me to shift to shaving with a straight razor.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/flatwound/14476\">The Long Goodbye</a> by John Pazdan (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/flatwound/14476</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Every Delay Has a Story</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>In the last episode, I talked about why I dropped my subscription to TripIt’s paid “Pro” service -- the main benefit, live flight status notifications, was slower than the free notifications I was getting from the airlines themselves -- from American, United, and Delta. However, when we were idling in the New Orleans airport waiting on our flight back to Chicago, I found the Southwest delay notifications lagged way behind TripIt Pro. Not that I re-upped my TripIt Pro subscription; my wife forgot to cancel a 30-day trial she signed up for, so she now has a year’s subscription. I, instead, was using FlightAware, specifically the feature I’ve talked about in prior episodes that shows you where your plane is. From that I could see that the delay wasn’t because of the snow in Chicago; the plane was spending a lot of time on the ground in Ft Lauderdale, the stop before New Orleans. So I hit Twitter -- Why is flight 860 sitting in FLL so long? The reply -- “Hey, Mark. We know delays can be tough, and apologize for the inconvenience. It looks like Flight #860 is delayed due to inclement weather earlier in the day.” Perhaps a delay in Denver, but why the long ground turn in FLL? No answer.</li>\r\n 	<li>United announced a pilot program in January called “Every Flight Has A Story” where they’d push out much more detailed information on delayed flights -- rather than “Late Arriving Aircraft”, it would be “Our maintenance team is replacing an item on your plane and needs extra time to complete”. The pilot was scheduled for Houston and Phoenix. I haven’t seen much reaction to it, but at least for me, having some sense for the reason for a delay let’s me better figure out what I’m going to do next. I’m much less trusting of a newly posted departure time if I know the inbound plane is still on the ground, or if it’s a maintenance delay.</li>\r\n 	<li>Of course, some of those explanations could be a bit more embarrassing than others. Like for Southwest, a couple of days after our flight back to Chicago, they had to cancel more than 200 flights because they ran out of de-icing fluid at Midway airport. You get that notification, and you’re shaking your head as you dial up an airline that knows how to fly in the winter.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #138</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_138.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #138 — Travel Turning Me Hipster; Every Delay Has a Story','','inherit','closed','closed','','1947-revision-v1','','','2018-02-28 20:13:11','2018-03-01 01:13:11','',1947,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/02/28/1947-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1954,1,'2018-02-28 20:24:48','2018-03-01 01:24:48','[caption id=\"attachment_1949\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/iStock-535339649.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1949\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/iStock-535339649-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> TSA! Look at What You\'ve Done to Me![/caption]\r\n\r\nFebruary is a tough time to be in the Midwest, so when my travel took me south, to New Orleans and then to Florida, there was no bitch tweeting about the TSA lines or flight delays. In this episode, I walk through how each change in airport security has pushed me to be more hipster and how we all want to understand the real cause of the flight delays that inconvenience us. Also a good bit of listener feedback extending the luggage thread. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_138.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/388761270\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]<!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #138:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. This has been a good travel month for me. Not too heavy, and all my travel had me headed south -- an important thing in February when you live in Chicago. The week before Mardi Gras, I headed down to New Orleans for a meeting. It easily could’ve been an overnight trip, but neither my wife nor I had been down in a while, so she came down with me. We caught some parades -- Nyx, Chaos, Muses -- ate way too much food, and except for a cold rain Wednesday night, had great weather. On Thursday, we were walking along the Mississippi back to the French Quarter from the Bywater neighborhood in bright sunshine and upper 60’s while Chicago was getting slammed with 8-12 inches of snow.</li>\r\n 	<li>When flew back to Chicago Friday night, we were able to thread the gap between the Friday end of that 8-12 inch drop and the start of the Saturday-Sunday 5-inch fall. Timing is everything. We came to the airport prepared for a long delay -- fully charged batteries, and muffaletta sandwiches and a mini king cake from Cochon Butcher. Southwest had cancelled this same flight the night before and that morning -- understandable given the snow -- so we didn’t think we wouldn’t get home; it was just going to be a question of how long. As it turned out, we were only an hour late, which given the weather, felt as good as on-time.</li>\r\n 	<li>Last week, I managed to point myself south again, this time to Florida -- Orlando and Miami -- and was able to skip two days of a heavy cold rain. The JW Marriott in Miami upgraded me to a room with a balcony on the 20th floor -- I didn’t have an ocean view, but I sat outside, 75 degrees, drinking a couple of beers, watching the sun go down, looking over to some of the rooftop bar action in the Brickell neighborhood. Miami is always an experience. It’s not the southernmost US big city, but rather the northernmost Latin American big city. I was reminded of that in the airport when I heard them paging someone in Spanish -- twice. They didn’t even bother wasting their time with English.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- Leviathan by Kirkoid (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Kirkoid/31109</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Lots of comments about luggage since the last episode, which makes sense -- the last episode was heavy on luggage talk between the continuing thread on the smart luggage ban and the suitcase buying tips which I then ported over to a blog post.\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>So, starting off, Allan Marko forwarded along the latest e-mails from Away luggage, one of the few smart bags with removable batteries and so not caught up in the smart luggage ban. Or so they thought until Delta decided to add their own twist to the ban. If the battery in the bag requires a tool to remove it -- which the original Away bag does -- you have to remove it from the bag before you board -- whether you’re carrying on the bag or gate-checking it. The later version of the Away bag has an ejectable pop-up battery which Delta thinks is OK. What a mess! This is what happens when engineers run amok -- and I can say that as a recovering engineer. These guys are going to keep tweaking and twisting this, which will just confuse gate agents and frustrate passengers -- which is why I’ve mothballed my smart bag and bought another Anker lipstick charger.</li>\r\n 	<li>Steve Frick hit the TravelCommons web site and left this comment -- “I replaced my luggage with the exact same bag as I had before, a TravelPro. It was an easy choice, I like you, wanted a simple bag. I knew my gear would fit, I already knew what to put in the outside pockets. One of the guys I work with recently bought and then returned a 4-wheel spinner. The reason for the return……. he discovered that most hotel parking lots weren’t level and each time he let go of the bag to raise the trunk lid his bag rolled away.” Steve, I had that same problem with my Bluesmart 4-wheeler, except in airports rather than parking lots. I’d put the Bluesmart against the wall in a restroom and it would wander away.</li>\r\n 	<li>Jerry Sarfati posted on the TravelCommons Facebook page -- “Mark, great episode as usual” Thanks, Jerry! “I had a different experience when choosing a new bag. I was stopped twice by American Airlines gate agents telling me my 22\" bag was too big. I’m in Group 2. So I settled for the 20\" Victorinox spinner.” I asked Jerry if they made him put it in a bag sizer. “Once only. It barely fit, and she said ‘too big, it must slide in easily, it must be checked’. Other time the agent said the sizer is missing, but ‘I can already see it won\'t fit’. I didn\'t want to argue and get thrown off the flight.” Jerry, that -- in technical travel terms -- is bullshit. I remember one time in Boston Logan, I got shunted over to the bag sizer by the Icelandic Air gate agent. And I knew I was on the bubble because this was the trip I’ve talked about a couple of times where I had to pack for 10 days between Iceland and Southern Spain in one carry-on. I grabbed that bag by the side handle, had it about chest high, and then drove it into the bag sizer with all my might. It was either going to fit, break the bag or blow apart the bag sizer. Luckily, it fit -- though the gate agent jumped back just a bit when the bag hit the bottom of the sizer. She let me carry it on. I flew 3 legs on American last week with my 22-incher and didn’t get a glance. But having said that, you made the right choice -- discretion is the better part of valor. Gate agents have complete discretion. Obey or get bounced. Too bad you got caught up by other folks’ power trips.</li>\r\n 	<li>Back on the web site, Robert Fenerty wrote “I want a four-wheel spinner; my wife loves hers. But I won’t get one, because I believe that bags with only two wheels have a bit more interior space than four-wheelers of the same length. That’s because the spinners can’t tuck into the side of the bag so you’re losing the inch or two between the middle of the spinner wheel and the top of the stem that attaches the spinner to the bottom of the bag. How’s that for OCD?” Robert, I’ll see your OCD and raise you! I pulled out a metal ruler and measured the ground clearance difference between my Victorinox 2-wheeler and my wife’s Samsonite 4-wheel spinner. I measured a 1.5-inch difference. Multiply that by the 14x9-inch base size gives you a 189 cubic inch cost for spinner agility. I look at that being one day’s worth of workout kit.</li>\r\n 	<li>Also on the web site, Jim McDonough wrote “My favorite bag was a Rick Steves 21” rollaboard that had just one compartment and two really good wheels. I used it for a decade and finally had problems with my wife’s bag (wheel fell apart) and the side of mine cracked from all the abuse. He doesn’t sell them any more, because it was a hair too big for European airlines. We are now using Samsonite spinners. They don’t hold as much as the old Rick bags. We only check bags when we are staying in one place for at least a week. Carrying on is simply liberating.” Liberating in a couple of ways -- not standing around waiting for the luggage carousel to start to get your bag, and not waiting around for it to stop to confirm that airline has lost it. I remember one trip where BA forced me to gate-check a bag, and then somehow lost it -- how you lose a bag in the, say, 50 ft between the jet bridge and baggage hold I’ll never know. The problem was -- I was in a different city every day. And so, they’d deliver the bag to my hotel the next morning after I’d already checked out and headed for my first meeting. This went on for a couple of days until I finally convinced them to leapfrog me and send it two stops one. Liberating myself from well-worn clothes -- I love it when I can find happiness in the small things.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Another reminder that Miami is a bit different -- the in-room coffee machine at the JW Marriott wasn’t the standard issue single cupper with Starbucks Pike Place filter disks (that, by the way, are always too big for the filter holder). Instead, it was an Illy espresso machine with its own special little capsules and branded demitasse cups. Took me a couple of tries to get the capsule properly situated, but after that, I ran through all 3, 4 (?) of the capsules in 15 minutes and was ready to attack the day.</li>\r\n 	<li>Last month, The Aviating Railfanner stopped by the TravelCommons YouTube page and left a comment on the 2012 video O\'Hare Layover Excursion: a 6-Hour Tour of Chicago saying “I think it would be a good idea to mention that the Randolph/Wabash station has been demolished and is now the Washington/Wabash station” Good point. Indeed, there are a more than a few things that have changed in the 5 years since I did that video. I stole the idea from the “One City, Five Hours” series that United used to have in their Hemisphere’s magazine. The locations are still good -- Wrigley Field, Millenium Park, the Picasso. I’m not sure in this age of Uber if the focus on the subway/the L is still valid. I may see if I can lightly edit this video -- insert some text to send people to the right station, and update the 1-day travel pass options -- and then think about some new options, like maybe a craft beer taproom-focused layover tour. There you go, One City, Five Taprooms and then come roaring back into the TSA line. Hmmm, I may need to rethink that one.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you’re thinking about any questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Ethereal (nop mix) by @nop (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Lancefield/34818</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Travel Is Turning Me Hipster</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Not wanting to turn this into the “Luggage Today” podcast, but when I was shifting things from my Bluesmart to my new Victorinox bag, I also restructured my toiletries kit. And as I was going through the contents -- what stays, what don’t I need anymore -- it struck me how much my travelling had changed something as basic as how I started my day.</li>\r\n 	<li>It started years, no decades ago -- sometime in the late ‘80’s or early ‘90’s. I was living in Philadelphia and flying to Europe pretty frequently, and at that time, the only real direct flight over the Atlantic (can I tell you how much I hate it when people say “The Pond”; it just puts my teeth on edge) was a BA 747 into Heathrow. Now, back then, I loved Heathrow. It was a great airport with fantastic connections. Now it’s an overcrowed shitshow that I avoid at all costs, but back then, it was great. Anyhow, at some point, Heathrow security required all electric devices to be pulled out for screening. Note I didn’t say “electronic”; this was before laptops and tablets and mobile phones were ubiquitous. No, this meant things like my electric razor had to be pulled out of my bag. Two go-rounds with Heathrow security and that Philips razor got jettisoned for a Gillette non-electric blade.</li>\r\n 	<li>Fast forward a decade-and-a-half to August 2006. I woke up in the SFO Marriott to the news of the foiled plot to blow up London-to-US flights by disguising separate explosive ingredients in soda bottles then then assembling and detonating them on board. I was trying to fly back the next day. Baggage check lines exploded when all the flyers with toothpaste, shaving cream, make-up -- pretty much everyone -- were made to check their bags. That weekend, I re-worked my toiletries kit -- hitting the local Whole Foods for tooth powder to replace toothpaste, hair wax for hair gel, and trading the shaving cream that I picked up in that last revamp for a badger hair shaving brush. I think this was the tipping point -- when my kit started to skew hipster.</li>\r\n 	<li>Fast forward another decade-and-a-half to this Christmas. My son gives me a selection of travel sized shaving soaps, each in their own tin container with a screw top. My daughter gives me a bottle of Lush toothy tabs -- kinda compressed tooth powder. These immediately go into my travel kit. My son forwards me a Massdrop buy for an Oristo razor -- a $100 version of my grandfather’s safety razor, precision engineered for a “very efficient yet non-aggressive shaving experience”. I think seriously about this. My toiletry kit has gone almost full hipster.</li>\r\n 	<li>And though I’ve slagged on the TSA for God knows how many episodes over the life of this podcast, I do have to thank them for one thing, keeping my toiletry kit from going full-on hipster, because I know they’ll never allow me to shift to shaving with a straight razor.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Song Title Indicates Meaning by jaspertine (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons CC0 (CC Zero) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jaspertine/50957 </span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Every Delay Has a Story</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>In the last episode, I talked about why I dropped my subscription to TripIt’s paid “Pro” service -- the main benefit, live flight status notifications, was slower than the free notifications I was getting from the airlines themselves -- from American, United, and Delta. However, when we were idling in the New Orleans airport waiting on our flight back to Chicago, I found the Southwest delay notifications lagged way behind TripIt Pro. Not that I re-upped my TripIt Pro subscription; my wife forgot to cancel a 30-day trial she signed up for, so she now has a year’s subscription. I, instead, was using FlightAware, specifically the feature I’ve talked about in prior episodes that shows you where your plane is. From that I could see that the delay wasn’t because of the snow in Chicago; the plane was spending a lot of time on the ground in Ft Lauderdale, the stop before New Orleans. So I hit Twitter -- Why is flight 860 sitting in FLL so long? The reply -- “Hey, Mark. We know delays can be tough, and apologize for the inconvenience. It looks like Flight #860 is delayed due to inclement weather earlier in the day.” Perhaps a delay in Denver, but why the long ground turn in FLL? No answer.</li>\r\n 	<li>United announced a pilot program in January called “Every Flight Has A Story” where they’d push out much more detailed information on delayed flights -- rather than “Late Arriving Aircraft”, it would be “Our maintenance team is replacing an item on your plane and needs extra time to complete”. The pilot was scheduled for Houston and Phoenix. I haven’t seen much reaction to it, but at least for me, having some sense for the reason for a delay let’s me better figure out what I’m going to do next. I’m much less trusting of a newly posted departure time if I know the inbound plane is still on the ground, or if it’s a maintenance delay.</li>\r\n 	<li>Of course, some of those explanations could be a bit more embarrassing than others. Like for Southwest, a couple of days after our flight back to Chicago, they had to cancel more than 200 flights because they ran out of de-icing fluid at Midway airport. You get that notification, and you’re shaking your head as you dial up an airline that knows how to fly in the winter.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #138</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_138.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #138 — Travel Turning Me Hipster; Every Delay Has a Story','','inherit','closed','closed','','1947-revision-v1','','','2018-02-28 20:24:48','2018-03-01 01:24:48','',1947,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/02/28/1947-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1955,1,'2018-02-28 20:28:08','2018-03-01 01:28:08','[caption id=\"attachment_1949\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/iStock-535339649.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1949\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/iStock-535339649-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> TSA! Look at What You\'ve Done to Me![/caption]\r\n\r\nFebruary is a tough time to be in the Midwest, so when my travel took me south, to New Orleans and then to Florida, there was no bitch tweeting about the TSA lines or flight delays. In this episode, I walk through how each change in airport security has pushed me to be more hipster and how we all want to understand the real cause of the flight delays that inconvenience us. Also a good bit of listener feedback extending the luggage thread. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_138.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/388761270\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]<!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #138:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. This has been a good travel month for me. Not too heavy, and all my travel had me headed south -- an important thing in February when you live in Chicago. The week before Mardi Gras, I headed down to New Orleans for a meeting. It easily could’ve been an overnight trip, but neither my wife nor I had been down in a while, so she came down with me. We caught some parades -- Nyx, Chaos, Muses -- ate way too much food, and except for a cold rain Wednesday night, had great weather. On Thursday, we were walking along the Mississippi back to the French Quarter from the Bywater neighborhood in bright sunshine and upper 60’s while Chicago was getting slammed with 8-12 inches of snow.</li>\r\n 	<li>When flew back to Chicago Friday night, we were able to thread the gap between the Friday end of that 8-12 inch drop and the start of the Saturday-Sunday 5-inch fall. Timing is everything. We came to the airport prepared for a long delay -- fully charged batteries, and muffaletta sandwiches and a mini king cake from Cochon Butcher. Southwest had cancelled this same flight the night before and that morning -- understandable given the snow -- so we didn’t think we wouldn’t get home; it was just going to be a question of how long. As it turned out, we were only an hour late, which given the weather, felt as good as on-time.</li>\r\n 	<li>Last week, I managed to point myself south again, this time to Florida -- Orlando and Miami -- and was able to skip two days of a heavy cold rain. The JW Marriott in Miami upgraded me to a room with a balcony on the 20th floor -- I didn’t have an ocean view, but I sat outside, 75 degrees, drinking a couple of beers, watching the sun go down, looking over to some of the rooftop bar action in the Brickell neighborhood. Miami is always an experience. It’s not the southernmost US big city, but rather the northernmost Latin American big city. I was reminded of that in the airport when I heard them paging someone in Spanish -- twice. They didn’t even bother wasting their time with English.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- Leviathan by Kirkoid (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Kirkoid/31109</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Lots of comments about luggage since the last episode, which makes sense -- the last episode was heavy on luggage talk between the continuing thread on the smart luggage ban and the suitcase buying tips which I then ported over to a blog post.\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>So, starting off, Allan Marko forwarded along the latest e-mails from Away luggage, one of the few smart bags with removable batteries and so not caught up in the smart luggage ban. Or so they thought until Delta decided to add their own twist to the ban. If the battery in the bag requires a tool to remove it -- which the original Away bag does -- you have to remove it from the bag before you board -- whether you’re carrying on the bag or gate-checking it. The later version of the Away bag has an ejectable pop-up battery which Delta thinks is OK. What a mess! This is what happens when engineers run amok -- and I can say that as a recovering engineer. These guys are going to keep tweaking and twisting this, which will just confuse gate agents and frustrate passengers -- which is why I’ve mothballed my smart bag and bought another Anker lipstick charger.</li>\r\n 	<li>Steve Frick hit the TravelCommons web site and left this comment -- “I replaced my luggage with the exact same bag as I had before, a TravelPro. It was an easy choice, I like you, wanted a simple bag. I knew my gear would fit, I already knew what to put in the outside pockets. One of the guys I work with recently bought and then returned a 4-wheel spinner. The reason for the return……. he discovered that most hotel parking lots weren’t level and each time he let go of the bag to raise the trunk lid his bag rolled away.” Steve, I had that same problem with my Bluesmart 4-wheeler, except in airports rather than parking lots. I’d put the Bluesmart against the wall in a restroom and it would wander away.</li>\r\n 	<li>Jerry Sarfati posted on the TravelCommons Facebook page -- “Mark, great episode as usual” Thanks, Jerry! “I had a different experience when choosing a new bag. I was stopped twice by American Airlines gate agents telling me my 22\" bag was too big. I’m in Group 2. So I settled for the 20\" Victorinox spinner.” I asked Jerry if they made him put it in a bag sizer. “Once only. It barely fit, and she said ‘too big, it must slide in easily, it must be checked’. Other time the agent said the sizer is missing, but ‘I can already see it won\'t fit’. I didn\'t want to argue and get thrown off the flight.” Jerry, that -- in technical travel terms -- is bullshit. I remember one time in Boston Logan, I got shunted over to the bag sizer by the Icelandic Air gate agent. And I knew I was on the bubble because this was the trip I’ve talked about a couple of times where I had to pack for 10 days between Iceland and Southern Spain in one carry-on. I grabbed that bag by the side handle, had it about chest high, and then drove it into the bag sizer with all my might. It was either going to fit, break the bag or blow apart the bag sizer. Luckily, it fit -- though the gate agent jumped back just a bit when the bag hit the bottom of the sizer. She let me carry it on. I flew 3 legs on American last week with my 22-incher and didn’t get a glance. But having said that, you made the right choice -- discretion is the better part of valor. Gate agents have complete discretion. Obey or get bounced. Too bad you got caught up by other folks’ power trips.</li>\r\n 	<li>Back on the web site, Robert Fenerty wrote “I want a four-wheel spinner; my wife loves hers. But I won’t get one, because I believe that bags with only two wheels have a bit more interior space than four-wheelers of the same length. That’s because the spinners can’t tuck into the side of the bag so you’re losing the inch or two between the middle of the spinner wheel and the top of the stem that attaches the spinner to the bottom of the bag. How’s that for OCD?” Robert, I’ll see your OCD and raise you! I pulled out a metal ruler and measured the ground clearance difference between my Victorinox 2-wheeler and my wife’s Samsonite 4-wheel spinner. I measured a 1.5-inch difference. Multiply that by the 14x9-inch base size gives you a 189 cubic inch cost for spinner agility. I look at that being one day’s worth of workout kit.</li>\r\n 	<li>Also on the web site, Jim McDonough wrote “My favorite bag was a Rick Steves 21” rollaboard that had just one compartment and two really good wheels. I used it for a decade and finally had problems with my wife’s bag (wheel fell apart) and the side of mine cracked from all the abuse. He doesn’t sell them any more, because it was a hair too big for European airlines. We are now using Samsonite spinners. They don’t hold as much as the old Rick bags. We only check bags when we are staying in one place for at least a week. Carrying on is simply liberating.” Liberating in a couple of ways -- not standing around waiting for the luggage carousel to start to get your bag, and not waiting around for it to stop to confirm that airline has lost it. I remember one trip where BA forced me to gate-check a bag, and then somehow lost it -- how you lose a bag in the, say, 50 ft between the jet bridge and baggage hold I’ll never know. The problem was -- I was in a different city every day. And so, they’d deliver the bag to my hotel the next morning after I’d already checked out and headed for my first meeting. This went on for a couple of days until I finally convinced them to leapfrog me and send it two stops one. Liberating myself from well-worn clothes -- I love it when I can find happiness in the small things.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Another reminder that Miami is a bit different -- the in-room coffee machine at the JW Marriott wasn’t the standard issue single cupper with Starbucks Pike Place filter disks (that, by the way, are always too big for the filter holder). Instead, it was an Illy espresso machine with its own special little capsules and branded demitasse cups. Took me a couple of tries to get the capsule properly situated, but after that, I ran through all 3, 4 (?) of the capsules in 15 minutes and was ready to attack the day.</li>\r\n 	<li>Last month, The Aviating Railfanner stopped by the TravelCommons YouTube page and left a comment on the 2012 video O\'Hare Layover Excursion: a 6-Hour Tour of Chicago saying “I think it would be a good idea to mention that the Randolph/Wabash station has been demolished and is now the Washington/Wabash station” Good point. Indeed, there are a more than a few things that have changed in the 5 years since I did that video. I stole the idea from the “One City, Five Hours” series that United used to have in their Hemisphere’s magazine. The locations are still good -- Wrigley Field, Millenium Park, the Picasso. I’m not sure in this age of Uber if the focus on the subway/the L is still valid. I may see if I can lightly edit this video -- insert some text to send people to the right station, and update the 1-day travel pass options -- and then think about some new options, like maybe a craft beer taproom-focused layover tour. There you go, One City, Five Taprooms and then come roaring back into the TSA line. Hmmm, I may need to rethink that one.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you’re thinking about any questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Ethereal (nop mix) by @nop (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Lancefield/34818</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Travel Is Turning Me Hipster</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Not wanting to turn this into the “Luggage Today” podcast, but when I was shifting things from my Bluesmart to my new Victorinox bag, I also restructured my toiletries kit. And as I was going through the contents -- what stays, what don’t I need anymore -- it struck me how much my travelling had changed something as basic as how I started my day.</li>\r\n 	<li>It started years, no decades ago -- sometime in the late ‘80’s or early ‘90’s. I was living in Philadelphia and flying to Europe pretty frequently, and at that time, the only real direct flight over the Atlantic (can I tell you how much I hate it when people say “The Pond”; it just puts my teeth on edge) was a BA 747 into Heathrow. Now, back then, I loved Heathrow. It was a great airport with fantastic connections. Now it’s an overcrowed shitshow that I avoid at all costs, but back then, it was great. Anyhow, at some point, Heathrow security required all electric devices to be pulled out for screening. Note I didn’t say “electronic”; this was before laptops and tablets and mobile phones were ubiquitous. No, this meant things like my electric razor had to be pulled out of my bag. Two go-rounds with Heathrow security and that Philips razor got jettisoned for a Gillette non-electric blade.</li>\r\n 	<li>Fast forward a decade-and-a-half to August 2006. I woke up in the SFO Marriott to the news of the foiled plot to blow up London-to-US flights by disguising separate explosive ingredients in soda bottles then then assembling and detonating them on board. I was trying to fly back the next day. Baggage check lines exploded when all the flyers with toothpaste, shaving cream, make-up -- pretty much everyone -- were made to check their bags. That weekend, I re-worked my toiletries kit -- hitting the local Whole Foods for tooth powder to replace toothpaste, hair wax for hair gel, and trading the shaving cream that I picked up in that last revamp for a badger hair shaving brush. I think this was the tipping point -- when my kit started to skew hipster.</li>\r\n 	<li>Fast forward another decade-and-a-half to this Christmas. My son gives me a selection of travel sized shaving soaps, each in their own tin container with a screw top. My daughter gives me a bottle of Lush toothy tabs -- kinda compressed tooth powder. These immediately go into my travel kit. My son forwards me a Massdrop buy for an Oristo razor -- a $100 version of my grandfather’s safety razor, precision engineered for a “very efficient yet non-aggressive shaving experience”. I think seriously about this. My toiletry kit has gone almost full hipster.</li>\r\n 	<li>And though I’ve slagged on the TSA for God knows how many episodes over the life of this podcast, I do have to thank them for one thing, keeping my toiletry kit from going full-on hipster, because I know they’ll never allow me to shift to shaving with a straight razor.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">My Flaming Heart by Wired Ant (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Wired_Ant/36862 Ft: Javolenus</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Every Delay Has a Story</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>In the last episode, I talked about why I dropped my subscription to TripIt’s paid “Pro” service -- the main benefit, live flight status notifications, was slower than the free notifications I was getting from the airlines themselves -- from American, United, and Delta. However, when we were idling in the New Orleans airport waiting on our flight back to Chicago, I found the Southwest delay notifications lagged way behind TripIt Pro. Not that I re-upped my TripIt Pro subscription; my wife forgot to cancel a 30-day trial she signed up for, so she now has a year’s subscription. I, instead, was using FlightAware, specifically the feature I’ve talked about in prior episodes that shows you where your plane is. From that I could see that the delay wasn’t because of the snow in Chicago; the plane was spending a lot of time on the ground in Ft Lauderdale, the stop before New Orleans. So I hit Twitter -- Why is flight 860 sitting in FLL so long? The reply -- “Hey, Mark. We know delays can be tough, and apologize for the inconvenience. It looks like Flight #860 is delayed due to inclement weather earlier in the day.” Perhaps a delay in Denver, but why the long ground turn in FLL? No answer.</li>\r\n 	<li>United announced a pilot program in January called “Every Flight Has A Story” where they’d push out much more detailed information on delayed flights -- rather than “Late Arriving Aircraft”, it would be “Our maintenance team is replacing an item on your plane and needs extra time to complete”. The pilot was scheduled for Houston and Phoenix. I haven’t seen much reaction to it, but at least for me, having some sense for the reason for a delay let’s me better figure out what I’m going to do next. I’m much less trusting of a newly posted departure time if I know the inbound plane is still on the ground, or if it’s a maintenance delay.</li>\r\n 	<li>Of course, some of those explanations could be a bit more embarrassing than others. Like for Southwest, a couple of days after our flight back to Chicago, they had to cancel more than 200 flights because they ran out of de-icing fluid at Midway airport. You get that notification, and you’re shaking your head as you dial up an airline that knows how to fly in the winter.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #138</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_138.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #138 — Travel Turning Me Hipster; Every Delay Has a Story','','inherit','closed','closed','','1947-revision-v1','','','2018-02-28 20:28:08','2018-03-01 01:28:08','',1947,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/02/28/1947-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1956,1,'2018-02-28 23:04:14','2018-03-01 04:04:14','[caption id=\"attachment_1949\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/iStock-535339649.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1949\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/iStock-535339649-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> TSA! Look at What You\'ve Done to Me![/caption]\r\n\r\nFebruary is a tough time to be in the Midwest, so when my travel took me south, to New Orleans and then to Florida, there was no bitch tweeting about the TSA lines or flight delays. In this episode, I walk through how each change in airport security has pushed me to be more hipster and how we all want to understand the real cause of the flight delays that inconvenience us. Also a good bit of listener feedback extending the on-going luggage discussion. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_138.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n&lt;iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/406850538&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"&gt;&lt;/iframe&gt;\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #138:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. This has been a good travel month for me. Not too heavy, and all my travel had me headed south -- an important thing in February when you live in Chicago. The week before Mardi Gras, I headed down to New Orleans for a meeting. It easily could’ve been an overnight trip, but neither my wife nor I had been down in a while, so she came down with me. We caught some parades -- Nyx, Chaos, Muses -- ate way too much food, and except for a cold rain Wednesday night, had great weather. On Thursday, we were walking along the Mississippi back to the French Quarter from the Bywater neighborhood in bright sunshine and upper 60’s while Chicago was getting slammed with 8-12 inches of snow.</li>\r\n 	<li>When flew back to Chicago Friday night, we were able to thread the gap between the Friday end of that 8-12 inch drop and the start of the Saturday-Sunday 5-inch fall. Timing is everything. We came to the airport prepared for a long delay -- fully charged batteries, and muffaletta sandwiches and a mini king cake from Cochon Butcher. Southwest had cancelled this same flight the night before and that morning -- understandable given the snow -- so we didn’t think we wouldn’t get home; it was just going to be a question of how long. As it turned out, we were only an hour late, which given the weather, felt as good as on-time.</li>\r\n 	<li>Last week, I managed to point myself south again, this time to Florida -- Orlando and Miami -- and was able to skip two days of a heavy cold rain. The JW Marriott in Miami upgraded me to a room with a balcony on the 20th floor -- I didn’t have an ocean view, but I sat outside, 75 degrees, drinking a couple of beers, watching the sun go down, looking over to some of the rooftop bar action in the Brickell neighborhood. Miami is always an experience. It’s not the southernmost US big city, but rather the northernmost Latin American big city. I was reminded of that in the airport when I heard them paging someone in Spanish -- twice. They didn’t even bother wasting their time with English.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- Leviathan by Kirkoid (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Kirkoid/31109</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Lots of comments about luggage since the last episode, which makes sense -- the last episode was heavy on luggage talk between the continuing thread on the smart luggage ban and the suitcase buying tips which I then ported over to a blog post.\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>So, starting off, Allan Marko forwarded along the latest e-mails from Away luggage, one of the few smart bags with removable batteries and so not caught up in the smart luggage ban. Or so they thought until Delta decided to add their own twist to the ban. If the battery in the bag requires a tool to remove it -- which the original Away bag does -- you have to remove it from the bag before you board -- whether you’re carrying on the bag or gate-checking it. The later version of the Away bag has an ejectable pop-up battery which Delta thinks is OK. What a mess! This is what happens when engineers run amok -- and I can say that as a recovering engineer. These guys are going to keep tweaking and twisting this, which will just confuse gate agents and frustrate passengers -- which is why I’ve mothballed my smart bag and bought another Anker lipstick charger.</li>\r\n 	<li>Steve Frick hit the TravelCommons web site and left this comment -- “I replaced my luggage with the exact same bag as I had before, a TravelPro. It was an easy choice, I like you, wanted a simple bag. I knew my gear would fit, I already knew what to put in the outside pockets. One of the guys I work with recently bought and then returned a 4-wheel spinner. The reason for the return……. he discovered that most hotel parking lots weren’t level and each time he let go of the bag to raise the trunk lid his bag rolled away.” Steve, I had that same problem with my Bluesmart 4-wheeler, except in airports rather than parking lots. I’d put the Bluesmart against the wall in a restroom and it would wander away.</li>\r\n 	<li>Jerry Sarfati posted on the TravelCommons Facebook page -- “Mark, great episode as usual” Thanks, Jerry! “I had a different experience when choosing a new bag. I was stopped twice by American Airlines gate agents telling me my 22\" bag was too big. I’m in Group 2. So I settled for the 20\" Victorinox spinner.” I asked Jerry if they made him put it in a bag sizer. “Once only. It barely fit, and she said ‘too big, it must slide in easily, it must be checked’. Other time the agent said the sizer is missing, but ‘I can already see it won\'t fit’. I didn\'t want to argue and get thrown off the flight.” Jerry, that -- in technical travel terms -- is bullshit. I remember one time in Boston Logan, I got shunted over to the bag sizer by the Icelandic Air gate agent. And I knew I was on the bubble because this was the trip I’ve talked about a couple of times where I had to pack for 10 days between Iceland and Southern Spain in one carry-on. I grabbed that bag by the side handle, had it about chest high, and then drove it into the bag sizer with all my might. It was either going to fit, break the bag or blow apart the bag sizer. Luckily, it fit -- though the gate agent jumped back just a bit when the bag hit the bottom of the sizer. She let me carry it on. I flew 3 legs on American last week with my 22-incher and didn’t get a glance. But having said that, you made the right choice -- discretion is the better part of valor. Gate agents have complete discretion. Obey or get bounced. Too bad you got caught up by other folks’ power trips.</li>\r\n 	<li>Back on the web site, Robert Fenerty wrote “I want a four-wheel spinner; my wife loves hers. But I won’t get one, because I believe that bags with only two wheels have a bit more interior space than four-wheelers of the same length. That’s because the spinners can’t tuck into the side of the bag so you’re losing the inch or two between the middle of the spinner wheel and the top of the stem that attaches the spinner to the bottom of the bag. How’s that for OCD?” Robert, I’ll see your OCD and raise you! I pulled out a metal ruler and measured the ground clearance difference between my Victorinox 2-wheeler and my wife’s Samsonite 4-wheel spinner. I measured a 1.5-inch difference. Multiply that by the 14x9-inch base size gives you a 189 cubic inch cost for spinner agility. I look at that being one day’s worth of workout kit.</li>\r\n 	<li>Also on the web site, Jim McDonough wrote “My favorite bag was a Rick Steves 21” rollaboard that had just one compartment and two really good wheels. I used it for a decade and finally had problems with my wife’s bag (wheel fell apart) and the side of mine cracked from all the abuse. He doesn’t sell them any more, because it was a hair too big for European airlines. We are now using Samsonite spinners. They don’t hold as much as the old Rick bags. We only check bags when we are staying in one place for at least a week. Carrying on is simply liberating.” Liberating in a couple of ways -- not standing around waiting for the luggage carousel to start to get your bag, and not waiting around for it to stop to confirm that airline has lost it. I remember one trip where BA forced me to gate-check a bag, and then somehow lost it -- how you lose a bag in the, say, 50 ft between the jet bridge and baggage hold I’ll never know. The problem was -- I was in a different city every day. And so, they’d deliver the bag to my hotel the next morning after I’d already checked out and headed for my first meeting. This went on for a couple of days until I finally convinced them to leapfrog me and send it two stops one. Liberating myself from well-worn clothes -- I love it when I can find happiness in the small things.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Another reminder that Miami is a bit different -- the in-room coffee machine at the JW Marriott wasn’t the standard issue single cupper with Starbucks Pike Place filter disks (that, by the way, are always too big for the filter holder). Instead, it was an Illy espresso machine with its own special little capsules and branded demitasse cups. Took me a couple of tries to get the capsule properly situated, but after that, I ran through all 3, 4 (?) of the capsules in 15 minutes and was ready to attack the day.</li>\r\n 	<li>Last month, The Aviating Railfanner stopped by the TravelCommons YouTube page and left a comment on the 2012 video O\'Hare Layover Excursion: a 6-Hour Tour of Chicago saying “I think it would be a good idea to mention that the Randolph/Wabash station has been demolished and is now the Washington/Wabash station” Good point. Indeed, there are a more than a few things that have changed in the 5 years since I did that video. I stole the idea from the “One City, Five Hours” series that United used to have in their Hemisphere’s magazine. The locations are still good -- Wrigley Field, Millenium Park, the Picasso. I’m not sure in this age of Uber if the focus on the subway/the L is still valid. I may see if I can lightly edit this video -- insert some text to send people to the right station, and update the 1-day travel pass options -- and then think about some new options, like maybe a craft beer taproom-focused layover tour. There you go, One City, Five Taprooms and then come roaring back into the TSA line. Hmmm, I may need to rethink that one.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you’re thinking about any questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Ethereal (nop mix) by @nop (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Lancefield/34818</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Travel Is Turning Me Hipster</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Not wanting to turn this into the “Luggage Today” podcast, but when I was shifting things from my Bluesmart to my new Victorinox bag, I also restructured my toiletries kit. And as I was going through the contents -- what stays, what don’t I need anymore -- it struck me how much my travelling had changed something as basic as how I started my day.</li>\r\n 	<li>It started years, no decades ago -- sometime in the late ‘80’s or early ‘90’s. I was living in Philadelphia and flying to Europe pretty frequently, and at that time, the only real direct flight over the Atlantic (can I tell you how much I hate it when people say “The Pond”; it just puts my teeth on edge) was a BA 747 into Heathrow. Now, back then, I loved Heathrow. It was a great airport with fantastic connections. Now it’s an overcrowed shitshow that I avoid at all costs, but back then, it was great. Anyhow, at some point, Heathrow security required all electric devices to be pulled out for screening. Note I didn’t say “electronic”; this was before laptops and tablets and mobile phones were ubiquitous. No, this meant things like my electric razor had to be pulled out of my bag. Two go-rounds with Heathrow security and that Philips razor got jettisoned for a Gillette non-electric blade.</li>\r\n 	<li>Fast forward a decade-and-a-half to August 2006. I woke up in the SFO Marriott to the news of the foiled plot to blow up London-to-US flights by disguising separate explosive ingredients in soda bottles then then assembling and detonating them on board. I was trying to fly back the next day. Baggage check lines exploded when all the flyers with toothpaste, shaving cream, make-up -- pretty much everyone -- were made to check their bags. That weekend, I re-worked my toiletries kit -- hitting the local Whole Foods for tooth powder to replace toothpaste, hair wax for hair gel, and trading the shaving cream that I picked up in that last revamp for a badger hair shaving brush. I think this was the tipping point -- when my kit started to skew hipster.</li>\r\n 	<li>Fast forward another decade-and-a-half to this Christmas. My son gives me a selection of travel sized shaving soaps, each in their own tin container with a screw top. My daughter gives me a bottle of Lush toothy tabs -- kinda compressed tooth powder. These immediately go into my travel kit. My son forwards me a Massdrop buy for an Oristo razor -- a $100 version of my grandfather’s safety razor, precision engineered for a “very efficient yet non-aggressive shaving experience”. I think seriously about this. My toiletry kit has gone almost full hipster.</li>\r\n 	<li>And though I’ve slagged on the TSA for God knows how many episodes over the life of this podcast, I do have to thank them for one thing, keeping my toiletry kit from going full-on hipster, because I know they’ll never allow me to shift to shaving with a straight razor.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">My Flaming Heart by Wired Ant (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Wired_Ant/36862 Ft: Javolenus</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Every Delay Has a Story</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>In the last episode, I talked about why I dropped my subscription to TripIt’s paid “Pro” service -- the main benefit, live flight status notifications, was slower than the free notifications I was getting from the airlines themselves -- from American, United, and Delta. However, when we were idling in the New Orleans airport waiting on our flight back to Chicago, I found the Southwest delay notifications lagged way behind TripIt Pro. Not that I re-upped my TripIt Pro subscription; my wife forgot to cancel a 30-day trial she signed up for, so she now has a year’s subscription. I, instead, was using FlightAware, specifically the feature I’ve talked about in prior episodes that shows you where your plane is. From that I could see that the delay wasn’t because of the snow in Chicago; the plane was spending a lot of time on the ground in Ft Lauderdale, the stop before New Orleans. So I hit Twitter -- Why is flight 860 sitting in FLL so long? The reply -- “Hey, Mark. We know delays can be tough, and apologize for the inconvenience. It looks like Flight #860 is delayed due to inclement weather earlier in the day.” Perhaps a delay in Denver, but why the long ground turn in FLL? No answer.</li>\r\n 	<li>United announced a pilot program in January called “Every Flight Has A Story” where they’d push out much more detailed information on delayed flights -- rather than “Late Arriving Aircraft”, it would be “Our maintenance team is replacing an item on your plane and needs extra time to complete”. The pilot was scheduled for Houston and Phoenix. I haven’t seen much reaction to it, but at least for me, having some sense for the reason for a delay let’s me better figure out what I’m going to do next. I’m much less trusting of a newly posted departure time if I know the inbound plane is still on the ground, or if it’s a maintenance delay.</li>\r\n 	<li>Of course, some of those explanations could be a bit more embarrassing than others. Like for Southwest, a couple of days after our flight back to Chicago, they had to cancel more than 200 flights because they ran out of de-icing fluid at Midway airport. You get that notification, and you’re shaking your head as you dial up an airline that knows how to fly in the winter.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #138</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_138.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #138 — Travel Turning Me Hipster; Every Delay Has a Story','','inherit','closed','closed','','1947-revision-v1','','','2018-02-28 23:04:14','2018-03-01 04:04:14','',1947,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/02/28/1947-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1957,1,'2018-02-28 23:06:20','2018-03-01 04:06:20','[caption id=\"attachment_1949\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/iStock-535339649.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1949\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/iStock-535339649-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> TSA! Look at What You\'ve Done to Me![/caption]\r\n\r\nFebruary is a tough time to be in the Midwest, so when my travel took me south, to New Orleans and then to Florida, there was no bitch tweeting about the TSA lines or flight delays. In this episode, I walk through how each change in airport security has pushed me to be more hipster and how we all want to understand the real cause of the flight delays that inconvenience us. Also a good bit of listener feedback extending the on-going luggage discussion. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_138.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/406850538\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #138:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. This has been a good travel month for me. Not too heavy, and all my travel had me headed south -- an important thing in February when you live in Chicago. The week before Mardi Gras, I headed down to New Orleans for a meeting. It easily could’ve been an overnight trip, but neither my wife nor I had been down in a while, so she came down with me. We caught some parades -- Nyx, Chaos, Muses -- ate way too much food, and except for a cold rain Wednesday night, had great weather. On Thursday, we were walking along the Mississippi back to the French Quarter from the Bywater neighborhood in bright sunshine and upper 60’s while Chicago was getting slammed with 8-12 inches of snow.</li>\r\n 	<li>When flew back to Chicago Friday night, we were able to thread the gap between the Friday end of that 8-12 inch drop and the start of the Saturday-Sunday 5-inch fall. Timing is everything. We came to the airport prepared for a long delay -- fully charged batteries, and muffaletta sandwiches and a mini king cake from Cochon Butcher. Southwest had cancelled this same flight the night before and that morning -- understandable given the snow -- so we didn’t think we wouldn’t get home; it was just going to be a question of how long. As it turned out, we were only an hour late, which given the weather, felt as good as on-time.</li>\r\n 	<li>Last week, I managed to point myself south again, this time to Florida -- Orlando and Miami -- and was able to skip two days of a heavy cold rain. The JW Marriott in Miami upgraded me to a room with a balcony on the 20th floor -- I didn’t have an ocean view, but I sat outside, 75 degrees, drinking a couple of beers, watching the sun go down, looking over to some of the rooftop bar action in the Brickell neighborhood. Miami is always an experience. It’s not the southernmost US big city, but rather the northernmost Latin American big city. I was reminded of that in the airport when I heard them paging someone in Spanish -- twice. They didn’t even bother wasting their time with English.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- Leviathan by Kirkoid (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Kirkoid/31109</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Lots of comments about luggage since the last episode, which makes sense -- the last episode was heavy on luggage talk between the continuing thread on the smart luggage ban and the suitcase buying tips which I then ported over to a blog post.\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>So, starting off, Allan Marko forwarded along the latest e-mails from Away luggage, one of the few smart bags with removable batteries and so not caught up in the smart luggage ban. Or so they thought until Delta decided to add their own twist to the ban. If the battery in the bag requires a tool to remove it -- which the original Away bag does -- you have to remove it from the bag before you board -- whether you’re carrying on the bag or gate-checking it. The later version of the Away bag has an ejectable pop-up battery which Delta thinks is OK. What a mess! This is what happens when engineers run amok -- and I can say that as a recovering engineer. These guys are going to keep tweaking and twisting this, which will just confuse gate agents and frustrate passengers -- which is why I’ve mothballed my smart bag and bought another Anker lipstick charger.</li>\r\n 	<li>Steve Frick hit the TravelCommons web site and left this comment -- “I replaced my luggage with the exact same bag as I had before, a TravelPro. It was an easy choice, I like you, wanted a simple bag. I knew my gear would fit, I already knew what to put in the outside pockets. One of the guys I work with recently bought and then returned a 4-wheel spinner. The reason for the return……. he discovered that most hotel parking lots weren’t level and each time he let go of the bag to raise the trunk lid his bag rolled away.” Steve, I had that same problem with my Bluesmart 4-wheeler, except in airports rather than parking lots. I’d put the Bluesmart against the wall in a restroom and it would wander away.</li>\r\n 	<li>Jerry Sarfati posted on the TravelCommons Facebook page -- “Mark, great episode as usual” Thanks, Jerry! “I had a different experience when choosing a new bag. I was stopped twice by American Airlines gate agents telling me my 22\" bag was too big. I’m in Group 2. So I settled for the 20\" Victorinox spinner.” I asked Jerry if they made him put it in a bag sizer. “Once only. It barely fit, and she said ‘too big, it must slide in easily, it must be checked’. Other time the agent said the sizer is missing, but ‘I can already see it won\'t fit’. I didn\'t want to argue and get thrown off the flight.” Jerry, that -- in technical travel terms -- is bullshit. I remember one time in Boston Logan, I got shunted over to the bag sizer by the Icelandic Air gate agent. And I knew I was on the bubble because this was the trip I’ve talked about a couple of times where I had to pack for 10 days between Iceland and Southern Spain in one carry-on. I grabbed that bag by the side handle, had it about chest high, and then drove it into the bag sizer with all my might. It was either going to fit, break the bag or blow apart the bag sizer. Luckily, it fit -- though the gate agent jumped back just a bit when the bag hit the bottom of the sizer. She let me carry it on. I flew 3 legs on American last week with my 22-incher and didn’t get a glance. But having said that, you made the right choice -- discretion is the better part of valor. Gate agents have complete discretion. Obey or get bounced. Too bad you got caught up by other folks’ power trips.</li>\r\n 	<li>Back on the web site, Robert Fenerty wrote “I want a four-wheel spinner; my wife loves hers. But I won’t get one, because I believe that bags with only two wheels have a bit more interior space than four-wheelers of the same length. That’s because the spinners can’t tuck into the side of the bag so you’re losing the inch or two between the middle of the spinner wheel and the top of the stem that attaches the spinner to the bottom of the bag. How’s that for OCD?” Robert, I’ll see your OCD and raise you! I pulled out a metal ruler and measured the ground clearance difference between my Victorinox 2-wheeler and my wife’s Samsonite 4-wheel spinner. I measured a 1.5-inch difference. Multiply that by the 14x9-inch base size gives you a 189 cubic inch cost for spinner agility. I look at that being one day’s worth of workout kit.</li>\r\n 	<li>Also on the web site, Jim McDonough wrote “My favorite bag was a Rick Steves 21” rollaboard that had just one compartment and two really good wheels. I used it for a decade and finally had problems with my wife’s bag (wheel fell apart) and the side of mine cracked from all the abuse. He doesn’t sell them any more, because it was a hair too big for European airlines. We are now using Samsonite spinners. They don’t hold as much as the old Rick bags. We only check bags when we are staying in one place for at least a week. Carrying on is simply liberating.” Liberating in a couple of ways -- not standing around waiting for the luggage carousel to start to get your bag, and not waiting around for it to stop to confirm that airline has lost it. I remember one trip where BA forced me to gate-check a bag, and then somehow lost it -- how you lose a bag in the, say, 50 ft between the jet bridge and baggage hold I’ll never know. The problem was -- I was in a different city every day. And so, they’d deliver the bag to my hotel the next morning after I’d already checked out and headed for my first meeting. This went on for a couple of days until I finally convinced them to leapfrog me and send it two stops one. Liberating myself from well-worn clothes -- I love it when I can find happiness in the small things.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Another reminder that Miami is a bit different -- the in-room coffee machine at the JW Marriott wasn’t the standard issue single cupper with Starbucks Pike Place filter disks (that, by the way, are always too big for the filter holder). Instead, it was an Illy espresso machine with its own special little capsules and branded demitasse cups. Took me a couple of tries to get the capsule properly situated, but after that, I ran through all 3, 4 (?) of the capsules in 15 minutes and was ready to attack the day.</li>\r\n 	<li>Last month, The Aviating Railfanner stopped by the TravelCommons YouTube page and left a comment on the 2012 video O\'Hare Layover Excursion: a 6-Hour Tour of Chicago saying “I think it would be a good idea to mention that the Randolph/Wabash station has been demolished and is now the Washington/Wabash station” Good point. Indeed, there are a more than a few things that have changed in the 5 years since I did that video. I stole the idea from the “One City, Five Hours” series that United used to have in their Hemisphere’s magazine. The locations are still good -- Wrigley Field, Millenium Park, the Picasso. I’m not sure in this age of Uber if the focus on the subway/the L is still valid. I may see if I can lightly edit this video -- insert some text to send people to the right station, and update the 1-day travel pass options -- and then think about some new options, like maybe a craft beer taproom-focused layover tour. There you go, One City, Five Taprooms and then come roaring back into the TSA line. Hmmm, I may need to rethink that one.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you’re thinking about any questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Ethereal (nop mix) by @nop (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Lancefield/34818</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Travel Is Turning Me Hipster</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Not wanting to turn this into the “Luggage Today” podcast, but when I was shifting things from my Bluesmart to my new Victorinox bag, I also restructured my toiletries kit. And as I was going through the contents -- what stays, what don’t I need anymore -- it struck me how much my travelling had changed something as basic as how I started my day.</li>\r\n 	<li>It started years, no decades ago -- sometime in the late ‘80’s or early ‘90’s. I was living in Philadelphia and flying to Europe pretty frequently, and at that time, the only real direct flight over the Atlantic (can I tell you how much I hate it when people say “The Pond”; it just puts my teeth on edge) was a BA 747 into Heathrow. Now, back then, I loved Heathrow. It was a great airport with fantastic connections. Now it’s an overcrowed shitshow that I avoid at all costs, but back then, it was great. Anyhow, at some point, Heathrow security required all electric devices to be pulled out for screening. Note I didn’t say “electronic”; this was before laptops and tablets and mobile phones were ubiquitous. No, this meant things like my electric razor had to be pulled out of my bag. Two go-rounds with Heathrow security and that Philips razor got jettisoned for a Gillette non-electric blade.</li>\r\n 	<li>Fast forward a decade-and-a-half to August 2006. I woke up in the SFO Marriott to the news of the foiled plot to blow up London-to-US flights by disguising separate explosive ingredients in soda bottles then then assembling and detonating them on board. I was trying to fly back the next day. Baggage check lines exploded when all the flyers with toothpaste, shaving cream, make-up -- pretty much everyone -- were made to check their bags. That weekend, I re-worked my toiletries kit -- hitting the local Whole Foods for tooth powder to replace toothpaste, hair wax for hair gel, and trading the shaving cream that I picked up in that last revamp for a badger hair shaving brush. I think this was the tipping point -- when my kit started to skew hipster.</li>\r\n 	<li>Fast forward another decade-and-a-half to this Christmas. My son gives me a selection of travel sized shaving soaps, each in their own tin container with a screw top. My daughter gives me a bottle of Lush toothy tabs -- kinda compressed tooth powder. These immediately go into my travel kit. My son forwards me a Massdrop buy for an Oristo razor -- a $100 version of my grandfather’s safety razor, precision engineered for a “very efficient yet non-aggressive shaving experience”. I think seriously about this. My toiletry kit has gone almost full hipster.</li>\r\n 	<li>And though I’ve slagged on the TSA for God knows how many episodes over the life of this podcast, I do have to thank them for one thing, keeping my toiletry kit from going full-on hipster, because I know they’ll never allow me to shift to shaving with a straight razor.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">My Flaming Heart by Wired Ant (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Wired_Ant/36862 Ft: Javolenus</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Every Delay Has a Story</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>In the last episode, I talked about why I dropped my subscription to TripIt’s paid “Pro” service -- the main benefit, live flight status notifications, was slower than the free notifications I was getting from the airlines themselves -- from American, United, and Delta. However, when we were idling in the New Orleans airport waiting on our flight back to Chicago, I found the Southwest delay notifications lagged way behind TripIt Pro. Not that I re-upped my TripIt Pro subscription; my wife forgot to cancel a 30-day trial she signed up for, so she now has a year’s subscription. I, instead, was using FlightAware, specifically the feature I’ve talked about in prior episodes that shows you where your plane is. From that I could see that the delay wasn’t because of the snow in Chicago; the plane was spending a lot of time on the ground in Ft Lauderdale, the stop before New Orleans. So I hit Twitter -- Why is flight 860 sitting in FLL so long? The reply -- “Hey, Mark. We know delays can be tough, and apologize for the inconvenience. It looks like Flight #860 is delayed due to inclement weather earlier in the day.” Perhaps a delay in Denver, but why the long ground turn in FLL? No answer.</li>\r\n 	<li>United announced a pilot program in January called “Every Flight Has A Story” where they’d push out much more detailed information on delayed flights -- rather than “Late Arriving Aircraft”, it would be “Our maintenance team is replacing an item on your plane and needs extra time to complete”. The pilot was scheduled for Houston and Phoenix. I haven’t seen much reaction to it, but at least for me, having some sense for the reason for a delay let’s me better figure out what I’m going to do next. I’m much less trusting of a newly posted departure time if I know the inbound plane is still on the ground, or if it’s a maintenance delay.</li>\r\n 	<li>Of course, some of those explanations could be a bit more embarrassing than others. Like for Southwest, a couple of days after our flight back to Chicago, they had to cancel more than 200 flights because they ran out of de-icing fluid at Midway airport. You get that notification, and you’re shaking your head as you dial up an airline that knows how to fly in the winter.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #138</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_138.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #138 — Travel Turning Me Hipster; Every Delay Has a Story','','inherit','closed','closed','','1947-revision-v1','','','2018-02-28 23:06:20','2018-03-01 04:06:20','',1947,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/02/28/1947-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1961,1,'2018-03-29 22:44:41','2018-03-30 03:44:41','<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/IMG_1145.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1009\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/IMG_1145-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>Returning to the mic after 10 days of food, wine, wind, rain, and snow in the north of Spain. I talk about traveling in Spain, and with my guest Coleman Collins about how to make the best coffee in your hotel room.  All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_139.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n<!--more-->\n\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #139:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. Just got back Sunday night from 10 days in Spain -- about 4 days each in Madrid and San Sebastian, with a couple of days in the Rioja wine region in between. A friend on the East Coast sent me a note while I was in Spain -- “Good week to be out of town; we got whacked with yet another dump of snow.” Not quite. It’s been a cold Spring in Europe and Spain has been no different. Our first weekend in Madrid was in the upper 30’s/low 40’s with a mix of rain and wet snow. Which turned into just snow as we drove up to Rioja. Some of that drive reminded me of I-70 in the Colorado Rockies -- go into a tunnel with fine weather; come out of it to blowing snow. Having said that, it was nothing like the 7 or 9 or 14 inches that Winter Storm Toby dropped on the East Coast last week. And even with lousy weather, the food and the wine in Spain makes it hard to sustain any sort of cranky attitude, though it shorten up our pintxos crawl through Logroño.</li>\n 	<li>We flew Iberia to Madrid because: a) they have a non-stop flight from Chicago and b) as I mentioned <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">a few episodes ago</a>, I was finally able to burn off some of those Avios points that had been collecting cobwebs in my BA account. I decided to try Iberia’s Premium Economy service on the flight over. Most airlines are using this sorta “tweener” service to capture revenue from people willing to pay a bit more for some comfort, but aren’t willing to go the 2-300% Business Class uplift out of their own pocket. And it was truly a “tweener” service -- about 5 rows between the Business and regular Coach cabins, and coach seats with spacing and recline somewhere between domestic First Class and, say, United’s Economy Plus. The meal service was the same as Economy, but they served us first, and they gave us a little amenities kit with just the essentials -- earplugs, eye mask, socks, and a toothbrush. It was as-advertised -- Coach with a bit more space, which made for better napping on the 8-hour flight over. I’ve talked in past episodes that I really question the value-for-money with Business Class on Transatlantic flights, but this tweener class was a reasonable deal.</li>\n 	<li>The deeper recline of the Premium Economy seat also makes it easier for you to stay in your space when you sleep. On the way back, I was in regular Coach because -- well, I’m cheap and didn’t need to sleep. But the guy next to me did. He nodded off as soon as we left the ground, which meant he didn’t recline his seat, which meant that he started to list to port, toward my shoulder. This guy looked like he was the younger brother of Dos Equis’ “Most Interesting Man”. But there was no amount of interesting that was going to have him sleeping on my shoulder. Just as he was about to touch down on my shoulder, I gave our seat row a bit of a shake -- some single row turbulence. He startled awake, realized what he was doing, and immediately sat straight up. Stay upright, my friend.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">P.I.H.E. by Budapest BluesBoy (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hepepe/26362 Ft: Inna Barmash - Zhurbin</span></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Just a quick addendum to the luggage thread we’ve been running over the last couple of episodes. In the last episode Jerry Sarfati talked about downsizing from a 22 to a 20-inch carry-on bag because of the hassles he’d gotten from American Airlines gate agents. I mentioned then that I haven’t had any problems from American, and didn’t get pulled over on my Chicago-to-Madrid Iberia flight. Just goes to show you how much discretion gate agents have. I didn’t test it on the way back home -- 2 bottles bought in Rioja tasting rooms and a tin of olive oil tipped me way over the liquid limit.</li>\n 	<li>The EU’s no roaming rules also let me skip what had become our first day of European vacation ritual of burning a couple of hours in a phone store buying local SIM cards for our mobile phones. Instead, the week before we left, I fired up EE’s iPhone app and topped up our UK SIMs. Somewhere over the Bay of Biscay, after my breakfast tray was cleared, I swapped out my AT&amp;T SIM. Once on the ground, I turned on my phone and was good to go. And because the whole family has EE SIMs, it was easy to call each other when we got separated on our pintxos crawls. I know that everyone just messages nowadays, but I’m still one of those knuckledraggers who occasionally finds talking quicker than texting.</li>\n 	<li>While in Madrid, I also added to my subway “tap-n-go” card collection for €2.50 -- or about $3 at current exchange rates. The interesting twist on Madrid’s system is that you can tap up to 4 people through the turnstile with a single card, so I only had to buy one tap card for the whole family. I’d load it up with 10 rides -- which seemed to be the only option -- we’d line up behind one turnstile, then tap through and pass it back. Getting out, we just walked through the turnstile since the Madrid Metro fare system seems based on zones rather than start and ending stations. Just adding it to the growing stack...</li>\n 	<li>In past episodes, I’ve talked about how I’ve come to value the service I get from Hertz with President’s Club status. And so I rented a car from Hertz in Madrid for our drive up to Rioja for wine tasting and then over to San Sebastian and back. On Tuesday morning, we headed to Atocha train station, found the Hertz counter, and then I sent my family to get breakfast because I knew from past experience renting cars in Spain, that I was in for 30 minutes of hard upselling. It didn’t matter that I had already booked on-line at Hertz.com and selected the options I wanted, I was going to get sold. Mel, the Hertz agent, spoke excellent American English -- all the right terms, slang, colloquialisms. Telling me the rate I got was “crazy low” -- I’d used our corporate rate plus cashed in some Hertz points -- because I didn’t have any insurance. And then came the big push -- writing down big liability numbers, huge damage possibilities -- even though a lot of this was covered by our corporate rate and the credit card. After this, there was the upsell for the car -- did you know you booked a manual, can you drive a manual -- because, well, no Americans know how to work a clutch. I just smiled and nodded, and let Mel work through his spiel -- I had kinda hoped that my status would save me, but nope, there was no short-circuiting this. After he was done, I said “No” to everything. I finally got the keys just as my family finished breakfast, and then off we went. I would’ve been frustrated if I hadn’t expected it and budgeted time for it. Instead, I was just slightly weary. I’m glad my wife got me a coffee to-go.</li>\n 	<li>And in the seeming obligatory craft beer segment of TravelCommons, having the rental car let me hit the Basqueland Brewing Project taproom outside of San Sebastian. It had a very American feel to it -- winding through a light industrial area, finding the place by spotting the picnic tables in front of the open loading door, walking past the foosball table and shelves holding 20-kg sacks of malt, the fluorescent pink cord blocking access to the brewing area. And for good reason, the place is owned by 3 Americans. One of them was working the taps when we arrived. He quickly flipped from Spanish to English when we ordered. Originally from Baltimore, he came over 6 years ago when his wife wanted to move back home. Nice guy, good beer.</li>\n 	<li>Rob Cheshire, a TravelCommons listener and Untappd friend, hit the comments section on the last episode -- first, to egg me on about my comment in the last episode to do a One City, Five Taprooms layover video, and then about taprooms near Wrigley Field when he comes in to see the Reds play the Cubs. I managed to string together a 6-taproom crawl; he may need to break that up into a couple of rounds.</li>\n 	<li>And, to Rob’s first question, I actually will do a taproom layover video, but instead of basing it out of ORD like my last layover video, I’m going to do this one from MDW -- give those Southwest fliers some love. It’ll let me hit 4 taprooms that have opened in the past couple of years in what can only be described as the “post-industrial” landscape of Chicago’s near south side. It should be fun. Working on the scheduling now. Will shoot it in April. With the additional production time video requires, it might not get up until May, but I’ll keep everyone posted</li>\n 	<li>One last thing -- last week I tweeted out a link to a pretty rigorous study from the FlyHealthy Research Team out of Emory University in Atlanta about passenger movements on transcontinental flights and what it means for the spread of respiratory diseases. The team took 10 flights, logging passenger movements, taking air samples, and swabs of hard surfaces. I won’t go through the whole study -- I’ll put a <a href=\"http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/03/13/1711611115\">link</a> in the show notes for those who want to read it, which I encourage you to do; it’s very readable as scientific papers go -- but the main takeaways for me were: a) you really only have to be concerned about the people immediately in front, behind, and next to you -- a one-row radius; b) the people wiping down their trays, armrests, and seat belt buckles with Purell Wipes are wasting their time; and c) if you’re really worried, get a window seat in the front part of the plane and don’t leave it for the entire flight (which, as a side benefit, will also endear you to your row mates). As one who has called planes “flying petri dishes”, I was pleasantly surprised by the Emory team’s findings.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">~aether theories~ by Vidian (c) copyright 2018 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Vidian/57398 Ft: Gurdonark, White-throated Sparrow</span></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Brewing the Best Hotel Room Coffee</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Interview with Coleman Collins. His blog post on brewing hotel room coffee is <a href=\"https://roadwarrior.blog/hotel-room-coffee/\">here</a></li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Tools of the Trade by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/56512 Ft: Abstract Audio, Mr Yesterday, Martijn de Boer, Speck</span></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Notes from Spain</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>This was our 4th spring trip to Spain. Our first trip we hit Madrid and Barcelona, the usual suspects. The next trip, we headed south to Andalucia -- Córdoba, Granada, Ronda, Seville -- during Semana Santa, Holy Week, and saw penitential processions every day in every town and city we visited, culminating in Holy Thursday night outside of Seville Cathedral. The last trip, in 2016, we headed back down South, but even further, taking a boat across the Straits of Gibraltar to Tangier, Morocco. For this trip, we gave up warm weather for some new territory -- Rioja and the Basque Country.</li>\n 	<li>As I said at the top of the show, for me, Spain is about food and wine. There’s certainly culture -- the Semana Santa processions are phenomenal cultural events, standing in front of the huge canvas of Picasso’s Guernica in the Reina Sofia in Madrid, the Mezquita in Cordoba,... -- but it’s the food and wine that keep bringing us back.</li>\n 	<li>On our first trip to Granada, we were staying in a Marriott -- maybe one of their AC properties -- in the middle of town. A great building; it had been a convent at one time. There was an interior courtyard; we had a nightcap there one night. 4 glasses of wine at the hotel bar -- figuring $12-15/glass, I’m waiting for a 40 euro tab. It was 12 euros -- I love this country.</li>\n 	<li>The pintxos crawl was the food center of this trip north, first in Logroño and then in San Sebastian, walking from bar to bar -- a glass of wine and a bite at each. It was a good mix of food. In Logroño, we started at a couple of dive-ier, more local places that focused on just one pintxos -- sauteed mushrooms at one, ground lamb sandwich at the next, the meat seared on a flat grill behind the bar, and then served on a bun with a great tasting green sauce -- and serving local Rioja wines, pulling the bottles from a bucket at the end of the bar. We then swung into a distinctly higher end place, complete with a Michelin sticker on the front door; more variety of food -- seared red tuna, pickled white anchovies, grilled octopus -- and the next level up of Rioja wines. Later in the week, in San Sebastian, when the weather turned a bit better, we could see the crawl pick up volume in the pedestrian streets of the old town; people still bundled up a bit, but taking their wine outside, and willing to walk to the next place rather than hunkering down for a couple of courses in the warmth.</li>\n 	<li>Cider is big in the Basque Country, though it’s drier, not as sweet as you get in the US or the UK. And during cider season -- January through April -- the siderias, the cider houses in the hills outside of San Sebastian, open up to serve cider streamed directly from the tap of huge chestnut wood barrels into your glass, and then the glass of the person behind you,... and a traditional menu of salt-cod omelette, fresh cod fried with peppers and onions, and damn big grilled t-bones served either standing up or at communal tables. We ended up sharing a meal with a busload of folks from just over the border in France. A couple dozen of us lined up as a worker manned the tap -- letting a thin stream of cider out. We lined up our wide-mouthed plastic tumblers about three feet away to impart a bit of fizz to the three fingers of cider that we caught before moving out of the stream to let it hit the tumbler that someone was holding right below ours.</li>\n 	<li>For a great food country, the food at Madrid airport, though, is a bit pedestrian. So to extend our food extravaganza for one more meal, we skip the “meh” restaurants and buy a package of the top-end iberian ham -- the bellota, from the free range Iberian pigs fattening up on acorns. We can’t bring it into the US, but it’s an 8-hour flight from Madrid to Chicago. That package never makes it as far at US landfall.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #139</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_139.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #139 — Brewing Best Hotel Room Coffee; Notes from Spain','Returning to the mic after 10 days of food, wine, wind, rain, and snow in the north of Spain. I talk about traveling in Spain, and with my guest Coleman Collins about how to make the best coffee in your hotel room','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-139-brewing-best-hotel-room-coffee-notes-from-spain','','','2021-03-10 22:51:50','2021-03-11 03:51:50','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=1961',0,'post','',0),
(1962,1,'2018-03-29 21:01:28','2018-03-30 02:01:28','<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/IMG_1145.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1009\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/IMG_1145-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>February is a tough time to be in the Midwest, so when my travel took me south, to New Orleans and then to Florida, there was no bitch tweeting about the TSA lines or flight delays. In this episode, I walk through how each change in airport security has pushed me to be more hipster and how we all want to understand the real cause of the flight delays that inconvenience us. Also a good bit of listener feedback extending the on-going luggage discussion. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_138.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/406850538\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #139:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. Just got back Sunday night from 10 days in Spain -- about 4 days each in Madrid and San Sebastian, with a couple of days in the Rioja wine region in between. A friend on the East Coast sent me a note while I was in Spain -- “Good week to be out of town; we got whacked with yet another dump of snow.” Not quite. It’s been a cold Spring in Europe and Spain has been no different. Our first weekend in Madrid was in the upper 30’s/low 40’s with a mix of rain and wet snow. Which turned into just snow as we drove up to Rioja. Some of that drive reminded me of I-70 in the Colorado Rockies -- go into a tunnel with fine weather; come out of it to blowing snow. Having said that, it was nothing like the 7 or 9 or 14 inches that Winter Storm Toby dropped on the East Coast last week. And even with lousy weather, the food and the wine in Spain makes it hard to sustain any sort of cranky attitude, though it shorten up our pintxos crawl through Logroño.</li>\r\n 	<li>We flew Iberia to Madrid because: a) they have a non-stop flight from Chicago and b) as I mentioned <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">a few episodes ago</a>, I was finally able to burn off some of those Avios points that had been collecting cobwebs in my BA account. I decided to try Iberia’s Premium Economy service on the flight over. Most airlines are using this sorta “tweener” service to capture revenue from people willing to pay a bit more for some comfort, but aren’t willing to go the 2-300% Business Class uplift out of their own pocket. And it was truly a “tweener” service -- about 5 rows between the Business and regular Coach cabins, and coach seats with spacing and recline somewhere between domestic First Class and, say, United’s Economy Plus. The meal service was the same as Economy, but they served us first, and they gave us a little amenities kit with just the essentials -- earplugs, eye mask, socks, and a toothbrush. It was as-advertised -- Coach with a bit more space, which made for better napping on the 8-hour flight over. I’ve talked in past episodes that I really question the value-for-money with Business Class on Transatlantic flights, but this tweener class was a reasonable deal.</li>\r\n 	<li>The deeper recline of the Premium Economy seat also makes it easier for you to stay in your space when you sleep. On the way back, I was in regular Coach because -- well, I’m cheap and didn’t need to sleep. But the guy next to me did. He nodded off as soon as we left the ground, which meant he didn’t recline his seat, which meant that he started to list to port, toward my shoulder. This guy looked like he was the younger brother of Dos Equis’ “Most Interesting Man”. But there was no amount of interesting that was going to have him sleeping on my shoulder. Just as he was about to touch down on my shoulder, I gave our seat row a bit of a shake -- some single row turbulence. He startled awake, realized what he was doing, and immediately sat straight up. Stay upright, my friend.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- Leviathan by Kirkoid (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Kirkoid/31109</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>ust a quick addendum to the luggage thread we’ve been running over the last couple of episodes. In the last episode Jerry Sarfati talked about downsizing from a 22 to a 20-inch carry-on bag because of the hassles he’d gotten from American Airlines gate agents. I mentioned then that I haven’t had any problems from American, and didn’t get pulled over on my Chicago-to-Madrid Iberia flight. Just goes to show you how much discretion gate agents have. I didn’t test it on the way back home -- 2 bottles bought in Rioja tasting rooms and a tin of olive oil tipped me way over the liquid limit.</li>\r\n 	<li>The EU’s no roaming rules also let me skip what had become our first day of European vacation ritual of burning a couple of hours in a phone store buying local SIM cards for our mobile phones. Instead, the week before we left, I fired up EE’s iPhone app and topped up our UK SIMs. Somewhere over the Bay of Biscay, after my breakfast tray was cleared, I swapped out my AT&amp;T SIM. Once on the ground, I turned on my phone and was good to go. And because the whole family has EE SIMs, it was easy to call each other when we got separated on our pintxos crawls. I know that everyone just messages nowadays, but I’m still one of those knuckledraggers who occasionally finds talking quicker than texting.</li>\r\n 	<li>While in Madrid, I also added to my subway “tap-n-go” card collection for €2.50 -- or about $3 at current exchange rates. The interesting twist on Madrid’s system is that you can tap up to 4 people through the turnstile with a single card, so I only had to buy one tap card for the whole family. I’d load it up with 10 rides -- which seemed to be the only option -- we’d line up behind one turnstile, then tap through and pass it back. Getting out, we just walked through the turnstile since the Madrid Metro fare system seems based on zones rather than start and ending stations. Just adding it to the growing stack...</li>\r\n 	<li>In past episodes, I’ve talked about how I’ve come to value the service I get from Hertz with President’s Club status. And so I rented a car from Hertz in Madrid for our drive up to Rioja for wine tasting and then over to San Sebastian and back. On Tuesday morning, we headed to Atocha train station, found the Hertz counter, and then I sent my family to get breakfast because I knew from past experience renting cars in Spain, that I was in for 30 minutes of hard upselling. It didn’t matter that I had already booked on-line at Hertz.com and selected the options I wanted, I was going to get sold. Mel, the Hertz agent, spoke excellent American English -- all the right terms, slang, colloquialisms. Telling me the rate I got was “crazy low” -- I’d used our corporate rate plus cashed in some Hertz points -- because I didn’t have any insurance. And then came the big push -- writing down big liability numbers, huge damage possibilities -- even though a lot of this was covered by our corporate rate and the credit card. After this, there was the upsell for the car -- did you know you booked a manual, can you drive a manual -- because, well, no Americans know how to work a clutch. I just smiled and nodded, and let Mel work through his spiel -- I had kinda hoped that my status would save me, but nope, there was no short-circuiting this. After he was done, I said “No” to everything. I finally got the keys just as my family finished breakfast, and then off we went. I would’ve been frustrated if I hadn’t expected it and budgeted time for it. Instead, I was just slightly weary. I’m glad my wife got me a coffee to-go.</li>\r\n 	<li>And in the seeming obligatory craft beer segment of TravelCommons, having the rental car let me hit the Basqueland Brewing Project taproom outside of San Sebastian. It had a very American feel to it -- winding through a light industrial area, finding the place by spotting the picnic tables in front of the open loading door, walking past the foosball table and shelves holding 20-kg sacks of malt, the fluorescent pink cord blocking access to the brewing area. And for good reason, the place is owned by 3 Americans. One of them was working the taps when we arrived. He quickly flipped from Spanish to English when we ordered. Originally from Baltimore, he came over 6 years ago when his wife wanted to move back home. Nice guy, good beer.</li>\r\n 	<li>Rob Cheshire, a TravelCommons listener and Untappd friend, hit the comments section on the last episode -- first, to egg me on about my comment in the last episode to do a One City, Five Taprooms layover video, and then about taprooms near Wrigley Field when he comes in to see the Reds play the Cubs. I managed to string together a 6-taproom crawl; he may need to break that up into a couple of rounds.</li>\r\n 	<li>And, to Rob’s first question, I actually will do a taproom layover video, but instead of basing it out of ORD like my last layover video, I’m going to do this one from MDW -- give those Southwest fliers some love. It’ll let me hit 4 taprooms that have opened in the past couple of years in what can only be described as the “post-industrial” landscape of Chicago’s near south side. It should be fun. Working on the scheduling now. Will shoot it in April. With the additional production time video requires, it might not get up until May, but I’ll keep everyone posted</li>\r\n 	<li>One last thing -- last week I tweeted out a link to a pretty rigorous study from the FlyHealthy Research Team out of Emory University in Atlanta about passenger movements on transcontinental flights and what it means for the spread of respiratory diseases. The team took 10 flights, logging passenger movements, taking air samples, and swabs of hard surfaces. I won’t go through the whole study -- I’ll put a <a href=\"http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/03/13/1711611115\">link</a> in the show notes for those who want to read it, which I encourage you to do; it’s very readable as scientific papers go -- but the main takeaways for me were: a) you really only have to be concerned about the people immediately in front, behind, and next to you -- a one-row radius; b) the people wiping down their trays, armrests, and seat belt buckles with Purell Wipes are wasting their time; and c) if you’re really worried, get a window seat in the front part of the plane and don’t leave it for the entire flight (which, as a side benefit, will also endear you to your row mates). As one who has called planes “flying petri dishes”, I was pleasantly surprised by the Emory team’s findings.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Ethereal (nop mix) by @nop (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Lancefield/34818</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Brewing the Best Hotel Room Coffee</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Interview with Coleman Collins. His blog post on brewing hotel room coffee is <a href=\"https://roadwarrior.blog/hotel-room-coffee/\">here</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">My Flaming Heart by Wired Ant (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Wired_Ant/36862 Ft: Javolenus</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Notes from Spain</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>This was our 4th spring trip to Spain. Our first trip we hit Madrid and Barcelona, the usual suspects. The next trip, we headed south to Andalucia -- Córdoba, Granada, Ronda, Seville -- during Semana Santa, Holy Week, and saw penitential processions every day in every town and city we visited, culminating in Holy Thursday night outside of Seville Cathedral. The last trip, in 2016, we headed back down South, but even further, taking a boat across the Straits of Gibraltar to Tangier, Morocco. For this trip, we gave up warm weather for some new territory -- Rioja and the Basque Country.</li>\r\n 	<li>As I said at the top of the show, for me, Spain is about food and wine. There’s certainly culture -- the Semana Santa processions are phenomenal cultural events, standing in front of the huge canvas of Picasso’s Guernica in the Reina Sofia in Madrid, the Mezquita in Cordoba,... -- but it’s the food and wine that keep bringing us back.</li>\r\n 	<li>On our first trip to Granada, we were staying in a Marriott -- maybe one of their AC properties -- in the middle of town. A great building; it had been a convent at one time. There was an interior courtyard; we had a nightcap there one night. 4 glasses of wine at the hotel bar -- figuring $12-15/glass, I’m waiting for a 40 euro tab. It was 12 euros -- I love this country.</li>\r\n 	<li>The pintxos crawl was the food center of this trip north, first in Logroño and then in San Sebastian, walking from bar to bar -- a glass of wine and a bite at each. It was a good mix of food. In Logroño, we started at a couple of dive-ier, more local places that focused on just one pintxos -- sauteed mushrooms at one, ground lamb sandwich at the next, the meat seared on a flat grill behind the bar, and then served on a bun with a great tasting green sauce -- and serving local Rioja wines, pulling the bottles from a bucket at the end of the bar. We then swung into a distinctly higher end place, complete with a Michelin sticker on the front door; more variety of food -- seared red tuna, pickled white anchovies, grilled octopus -- and the next level up of Rioja wines. Later in the week, in San Sebastian, when the weather turned a bit better, we could see the crawl pick up volume in the pedestrian streets of the old town; people still bundled up a bit, but taking their wine outside, and willing to walk to the next place rather than hunkering down for a couple of courses in the warmth.</li>\r\n 	<li>Cider is big in the Basque Country, though it’s drier, not as sweet as you get in the US or the UK. And during cider season -- January through April -- the siderias, the cider houses in the hills outside of San Sebastian, open up to serve cider streamed directly from the tap of huge chestnut wood barrels into your glass, and then the glass of the person behind you,... and a traditional menu of salt-cod omelette, fresh cod fried with peppers and onions, and damn big grilled t-bones served either standing up or at communal tables. We ended up sharing a meal with a busload of folks from just over the border in France. A couple dozen of us lined up as a worker manned the tap -- letting a thin stream of cider out. We lined up our wide-mouthed plastic tumblers about three feet away to impart a bit of fizz to the three fingers of cider that we caught before moving out of the stream to let it hit the tumbler that someone was holding right below ours.</li>\r\n 	<li>For a great food country, the food at Madrid airport, though, is a bit pedestrian. So to extend our food extravaganza for one more meal, we skip the “meh” restaurants and buy a package of the top-end iberian ham -- the bellota, from the free range Iberian pigs fattening up on acorns. We can’t bring it into the US, but it’s an 8-hour flight from Madrid to Chicago. That package never makes it as far at US landfall.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #139</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_138.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/IMG_1145.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1009\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/IMG_1145-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>','Podcast #139 — Brewing Best Hotel Room Coffee; Notes from Spain','','inherit','closed','closed','','1961-revision-v1','','','2018-03-29 21:01:28','2018-03-30 02:01:28','',1961,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/03/29/1961-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1963,1,'2018-03-29 21:12:06','2018-03-30 02:12:06','<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/IMG_1145.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1009\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/IMG_1145-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>Returning to the mic after 10 days of food, wine, wind, rain, and snow in the north of Spain. I talk about traveling in Spain, and with my guest Coleman Collins about how to make the best coffee in your hotel room.  All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_139.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/406850538\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #139:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. Just got back Sunday night from 10 days in Spain -- about 4 days each in Madrid and San Sebastian, with a couple of days in the Rioja wine region in between. A friend on the East Coast sent me a note while I was in Spain -- “Good week to be out of town; we got whacked with yet another dump of snow.” Not quite. It’s been a cold Spring in Europe and Spain has been no different. Our first weekend in Madrid was in the upper 30’s/low 40’s with a mix of rain and wet snow. Which turned into just snow as we drove up to Rioja. Some of that drive reminded me of I-70 in the Colorado Rockies -- go into a tunnel with fine weather; come out of it to blowing snow. Having said that, it was nothing like the 7 or 9 or 14 inches that Winter Storm Toby dropped on the East Coast last week. And even with lousy weather, the food and the wine in Spain makes it hard to sustain any sort of cranky attitude, though it shorten up our pintxos crawl through Logroño.</li>\r\n 	<li>We flew Iberia to Madrid because: a) they have a non-stop flight from Chicago and b) as I mentioned <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">a few episodes ago</a>, I was finally able to burn off some of those Avios points that had been collecting cobwebs in my BA account. I decided to try Iberia’s Premium Economy service on the flight over. Most airlines are using this sorta “tweener” service to capture revenue from people willing to pay a bit more for some comfort, but aren’t willing to go the 2-300% Business Class uplift out of their own pocket. And it was truly a “tweener” service -- about 5 rows between the Business and regular Coach cabins, and coach seats with spacing and recline somewhere between domestic First Class and, say, United’s Economy Plus. The meal service was the same as Economy, but they served us first, and they gave us a little amenities kit with just the essentials -- earplugs, eye mask, socks, and a toothbrush. It was as-advertised -- Coach with a bit more space, which made for better napping on the 8-hour flight over. I’ve talked in past episodes that I really question the value-for-money with Business Class on Transatlantic flights, but this tweener class was a reasonable deal.</li>\r\n 	<li>The deeper recline of the Premium Economy seat also makes it easier for you to stay in your space when you sleep. On the way back, I was in regular Coach because -- well, I’m cheap and didn’t need to sleep. But the guy next to me did. He nodded off as soon as we left the ground, which meant he didn’t recline his seat, which meant that he started to list to port, toward my shoulder. This guy looked like he was the younger brother of Dos Equis’ “Most Interesting Man”. But there was no amount of interesting that was going to have him sleeping on my shoulder. Just as he was about to touch down on my shoulder, I gave our seat row a bit of a shake -- some single row turbulence. He startled awake, realized what he was doing, and immediately sat straight up. Stay upright, my friend.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- Leviathan by Kirkoid (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Kirkoid/31109</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>ust a quick addendum to the luggage thread we’ve been running over the last couple of episodes. In the last episode Jerry Sarfati talked about downsizing from a 22 to a 20-inch carry-on bag because of the hassles he’d gotten from American Airlines gate agents. I mentioned then that I haven’t had any problems from American, and didn’t get pulled over on my Chicago-to-Madrid Iberia flight. Just goes to show you how much discretion gate agents have. I didn’t test it on the way back home -- 2 bottles bought in Rioja tasting rooms and a tin of olive oil tipped me way over the liquid limit.</li>\r\n 	<li>The EU’s no roaming rules also let me skip what had become our first day of European vacation ritual of burning a couple of hours in a phone store buying local SIM cards for our mobile phones. Instead, the week before we left, I fired up EE’s iPhone app and topped up our UK SIMs. Somewhere over the Bay of Biscay, after my breakfast tray was cleared, I swapped out my AT&amp;T SIM. Once on the ground, I turned on my phone and was good to go. And because the whole family has EE SIMs, it was easy to call each other when we got separated on our pintxos crawls. I know that everyone just messages nowadays, but I’m still one of those knuckledraggers who occasionally finds talking quicker than texting.</li>\r\n 	<li>While in Madrid, I also added to my subway “tap-n-go” card collection for €2.50 -- or about $3 at current exchange rates. The interesting twist on Madrid’s system is that you can tap up to 4 people through the turnstile with a single card, so I only had to buy one tap card for the whole family. I’d load it up with 10 rides -- which seemed to be the only option -- we’d line up behind one turnstile, then tap through and pass it back. Getting out, we just walked through the turnstile since the Madrid Metro fare system seems based on zones rather than start and ending stations. Just adding it to the growing stack...</li>\r\n 	<li>In past episodes, I’ve talked about how I’ve come to value the service I get from Hertz with President’s Club status. And so I rented a car from Hertz in Madrid for our drive up to Rioja for wine tasting and then over to San Sebastian and back. On Tuesday morning, we headed to Atocha train station, found the Hertz counter, and then I sent my family to get breakfast because I knew from past experience renting cars in Spain, that I was in for 30 minutes of hard upselling. It didn’t matter that I had already booked on-line at Hertz.com and selected the options I wanted, I was going to get sold. Mel, the Hertz agent, spoke excellent American English -- all the right terms, slang, colloquialisms. Telling me the rate I got was “crazy low” -- I’d used our corporate rate plus cashed in some Hertz points -- because I didn’t have any insurance. And then came the big push -- writing down big liability numbers, huge damage possibilities -- even though a lot of this was covered by our corporate rate and the credit card. After this, there was the upsell for the car -- did you know you booked a manual, can you drive a manual -- because, well, no Americans know how to work a clutch. I just smiled and nodded, and let Mel work through his spiel -- I had kinda hoped that my status would save me, but nope, there was no short-circuiting this. After he was done, I said “No” to everything. I finally got the keys just as my family finished breakfast, and then off we went. I would’ve been frustrated if I hadn’t expected it and budgeted time for it. Instead, I was just slightly weary. I’m glad my wife got me a coffee to-go.</li>\r\n 	<li>And in the seeming obligatory craft beer segment of TravelCommons, having the rental car let me hit the Basqueland Brewing Project taproom outside of San Sebastian. It had a very American feel to it -- winding through a light industrial area, finding the place by spotting the picnic tables in front of the open loading door, walking past the foosball table and shelves holding 20-kg sacks of malt, the fluorescent pink cord blocking access to the brewing area. And for good reason, the place is owned by 3 Americans. One of them was working the taps when we arrived. He quickly flipped from Spanish to English when we ordered. Originally from Baltimore, he came over 6 years ago when his wife wanted to move back home. Nice guy, good beer.</li>\r\n 	<li>Rob Cheshire, a TravelCommons listener and Untappd friend, hit the comments section on the last episode -- first, to egg me on about my comment in the last episode to do a One City, Five Taprooms layover video, and then about taprooms near Wrigley Field when he comes in to see the Reds play the Cubs. I managed to string together a 6-taproom crawl; he may need to break that up into a couple of rounds.</li>\r\n 	<li>And, to Rob’s first question, I actually will do a taproom layover video, but instead of basing it out of ORD like my last layover video, I’m going to do this one from MDW -- give those Southwest fliers some love. It’ll let me hit 4 taprooms that have opened in the past couple of years in what can only be described as the “post-industrial” landscape of Chicago’s near south side. It should be fun. Working on the scheduling now. Will shoot it in April. With the additional production time video requires, it might not get up until May, but I’ll keep everyone posted</li>\r\n 	<li>One last thing -- last week I tweeted out a link to a pretty rigorous study from the FlyHealthy Research Team out of Emory University in Atlanta about passenger movements on transcontinental flights and what it means for the spread of respiratory diseases. The team took 10 flights, logging passenger movements, taking air samples, and swabs of hard surfaces. I won’t go through the whole study -- I’ll put a <a href=\"http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/03/13/1711611115\">link</a> in the show notes for those who want to read it, which I encourage you to do; it’s very readable as scientific papers go -- but the main takeaways for me were: a) you really only have to be concerned about the people immediately in front, behind, and next to you -- a one-row radius; b) the people wiping down their trays, armrests, and seat belt buckles with Purell Wipes are wasting their time; and c) if you’re really worried, get a window seat in the front part of the plane and don’t leave it for the entire flight (which, as a side benefit, will also endear you to your row mates). As one who has called planes “flying petri dishes”, I was pleasantly surprised by the Emory team’s findings.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Ethereal (nop mix) by @nop (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Lancefield/34818</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Brewing the Best Hotel Room Coffee</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Interview with Coleman Collins. His blog post on brewing hotel room coffee is <a href=\"https://roadwarrior.blog/hotel-room-coffee/\">here</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">My Flaming Heart by Wired Ant (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Wired_Ant/36862 Ft: Javolenus</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Notes from Spain</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>This was our 4th spring trip to Spain. Our first trip we hit Madrid and Barcelona, the usual suspects. The next trip, we headed south to Andalucia -- Córdoba, Granada, Ronda, Seville -- during Semana Santa, Holy Week, and saw penitential processions every day in every town and city we visited, culminating in Holy Thursday night outside of Seville Cathedral. The last trip, in 2016, we headed back down South, but even further, taking a boat across the Straits of Gibraltar to Tangier, Morocco. For this trip, we gave up warm weather for some new territory -- Rioja and the Basque Country.</li>\r\n 	<li>As I said at the top of the show, for me, Spain is about food and wine. There’s certainly culture -- the Semana Santa processions are phenomenal cultural events, standing in front of the huge canvas of Picasso’s Guernica in the Reina Sofia in Madrid, the Mezquita in Cordoba,... -- but it’s the food and wine that keep bringing us back.</li>\r\n 	<li>On our first trip to Granada, we were staying in a Marriott -- maybe one of their AC properties -- in the middle of town. A great building; it had been a convent at one time. There was an interior courtyard; we had a nightcap there one night. 4 glasses of wine at the hotel bar -- figuring $12-15/glass, I’m waiting for a 40 euro tab. It was 12 euros -- I love this country.</li>\r\n 	<li>The pintxos crawl was the food center of this trip north, first in Logroño and then in San Sebastian, walking from bar to bar -- a glass of wine and a bite at each. It was a good mix of food. In Logroño, we started at a couple of dive-ier, more local places that focused on just one pintxos -- sauteed mushrooms at one, ground lamb sandwich at the next, the meat seared on a flat grill behind the bar, and then served on a bun with a great tasting green sauce -- and serving local Rioja wines, pulling the bottles from a bucket at the end of the bar. We then swung into a distinctly higher end place, complete with a Michelin sticker on the front door; more variety of food -- seared red tuna, pickled white anchovies, grilled octopus -- and the next level up of Rioja wines. Later in the week, in San Sebastian, when the weather turned a bit better, we could see the crawl pick up volume in the pedestrian streets of the old town; people still bundled up a bit, but taking their wine outside, and willing to walk to the next place rather than hunkering down for a couple of courses in the warmth.</li>\r\n 	<li>Cider is big in the Basque Country, though it’s drier, not as sweet as you get in the US or the UK. And during cider season -- January through April -- the siderias, the cider houses in the hills outside of San Sebastian, open up to serve cider streamed directly from the tap of huge chestnut wood barrels into your glass, and then the glass of the person behind you,... and a traditional menu of salt-cod omelette, fresh cod fried with peppers and onions, and damn big grilled t-bones served either standing up or at communal tables. We ended up sharing a meal with a busload of folks from just over the border in France. A couple dozen of us lined up as a worker manned the tap -- letting a thin stream of cider out. We lined up our wide-mouthed plastic tumblers about three feet away to impart a bit of fizz to the three fingers of cider that we caught before moving out of the stream to let it hit the tumbler that someone was holding right below ours.</li>\r\n 	<li>For a great food country, the food at Madrid airport, though, is a bit pedestrian. So to extend our food extravaganza for one more meal, we skip the “meh” restaurants and buy a package of the top-end iberian ham -- the bellota, from the free range Iberian pigs fattening up on acorns. We can’t bring it into the US, but it’s an 8-hour flight from Madrid to Chicago. That package never makes it as far at US landfall.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #139</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_139.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #139 — Brewing Best Hotel Room Coffee; Notes from Spain','','inherit','closed','closed','','1961-revision-v1','','','2018-03-29 21:12:06','2018-03-30 02:12:06','',1961,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/03/29/1961-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0);
INSERT INTO `wp_posts` VALUES
(1964,1,'2018-03-29 22:23:15','2018-03-30 03:23:15','<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/IMG_1145.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1009\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/IMG_1145-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>Returning to the mic after 10 days of food, wine, wind, rain, and snow in the north of Spain. I talk about traveling in Spain, and with my guest Coleman Collins about how to make the best coffee in your hotel room.  All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_139.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/406850538\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #139:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. Just got back Sunday night from 10 days in Spain -- about 4 days each in Madrid and San Sebastian, with a couple of days in the Rioja wine region in between. A friend on the East Coast sent me a note while I was in Spain -- “Good week to be out of town; we got whacked with yet another dump of snow.” Not quite. It’s been a cold Spring in Europe and Spain has been no different. Our first weekend in Madrid was in the upper 30’s/low 40’s with a mix of rain and wet snow. Which turned into just snow as we drove up to Rioja. Some of that drive reminded me of I-70 in the Colorado Rockies -- go into a tunnel with fine weather; come out of it to blowing snow. Having said that, it was nothing like the 7 or 9 or 14 inches that Winter Storm Toby dropped on the East Coast last week. And even with lousy weather, the food and the wine in Spain makes it hard to sustain any sort of cranky attitude, though it shorten up our pintxos crawl through Logroño.</li>\r\n 	<li>We flew Iberia to Madrid because: a) they have a non-stop flight from Chicago and b) as I mentioned <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">a few episodes ago</a>, I was finally able to burn off some of those Avios points that had been collecting cobwebs in my BA account. I decided to try Iberia’s Premium Economy service on the flight over. Most airlines are using this sorta “tweener” service to capture revenue from people willing to pay a bit more for some comfort, but aren’t willing to go the 2-300% Business Class uplift out of their own pocket. And it was truly a “tweener” service -- about 5 rows between the Business and regular Coach cabins, and coach seats with spacing and recline somewhere between domestic First Class and, say, United’s Economy Plus. The meal service was the same as Economy, but they served us first, and they gave us a little amenities kit with just the essentials -- earplugs, eye mask, socks, and a toothbrush. It was as-advertised -- Coach with a bit more space, which made for better napping on the 8-hour flight over. I’ve talked in past episodes that I really question the value-for-money with Business Class on Transatlantic flights, but this tweener class was a reasonable deal.</li>\r\n 	<li>The deeper recline of the Premium Economy seat also makes it easier for you to stay in your space when you sleep. On the way back, I was in regular Coach because -- well, I’m cheap and didn’t need to sleep. But the guy next to me did. He nodded off as soon as we left the ground, which meant he didn’t recline his seat, which meant that he started to list to port, toward my shoulder. This guy looked like he was the younger brother of Dos Equis’ “Most Interesting Man”. But there was no amount of interesting that was going to have him sleeping on my shoulder. Just as he was about to touch down on my shoulder, I gave our seat row a bit of a shake -- some single row turbulence. He startled awake, realized what he was doing, and immediately sat straight up. Stay upright, my friend.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">P.I.H.E. by Budapest BluesBoy (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hepepe/26362 Ft: Inna Barmash - Zhurbin</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>ust a quick addendum to the luggage thread we’ve been running over the last couple of episodes. In the last episode Jerry Sarfati talked about downsizing from a 22 to a 20-inch carry-on bag because of the hassles he’d gotten from American Airlines gate agents. I mentioned then that I haven’t had any problems from American, and didn’t get pulled over on my Chicago-to-Madrid Iberia flight. Just goes to show you how much discretion gate agents have. I didn’t test it on the way back home -- 2 bottles bought in Rioja tasting rooms and a tin of olive oil tipped me way over the liquid limit.</li>\r\n 	<li>The EU’s no roaming rules also let me skip what had become our first day of European vacation ritual of burning a couple of hours in a phone store buying local SIM cards for our mobile phones. Instead, the week before we left, I fired up EE’s iPhone app and topped up our UK SIMs. Somewhere over the Bay of Biscay, after my breakfast tray was cleared, I swapped out my AT&amp;T SIM. Once on the ground, I turned on my phone and was good to go. And because the whole family has EE SIMs, it was easy to call each other when we got separated on our pintxos crawls. I know that everyone just messages nowadays, but I’m still one of those knuckledraggers who occasionally finds talking quicker than texting.</li>\r\n 	<li>While in Madrid, I also added to my subway “tap-n-go” card collection for €2.50 -- or about $3 at current exchange rates. The interesting twist on Madrid’s system is that you can tap up to 4 people through the turnstile with a single card, so I only had to buy one tap card for the whole family. I’d load it up with 10 rides -- which seemed to be the only option -- we’d line up behind one turnstile, then tap through and pass it back. Getting out, we just walked through the turnstile since the Madrid Metro fare system seems based on zones rather than start and ending stations. Just adding it to the growing stack...</li>\r\n 	<li>In past episodes, I’ve talked about how I’ve come to value the service I get from Hertz with President’s Club status. And so I rented a car from Hertz in Madrid for our drive up to Rioja for wine tasting and then over to San Sebastian and back. On Tuesday morning, we headed to Atocha train station, found the Hertz counter, and then I sent my family to get breakfast because I knew from past experience renting cars in Spain, that I was in for 30 minutes of hard upselling. It didn’t matter that I had already booked on-line at Hertz.com and selected the options I wanted, I was going to get sold. Mel, the Hertz agent, spoke excellent American English -- all the right terms, slang, colloquialisms. Telling me the rate I got was “crazy low” -- I’d used our corporate rate plus cashed in some Hertz points -- because I didn’t have any insurance. And then came the big push -- writing down big liability numbers, huge damage possibilities -- even though a lot of this was covered by our corporate rate and the credit card. After this, there was the upsell for the car -- did you know you booked a manual, can you drive a manual -- because, well, no Americans know how to work a clutch. I just smiled and nodded, and let Mel work through his spiel -- I had kinda hoped that my status would save me, but nope, there was no short-circuiting this. After he was done, I said “No” to everything. I finally got the keys just as my family finished breakfast, and then off we went. I would’ve been frustrated if I hadn’t expected it and budgeted time for it. Instead, I was just slightly weary. I’m glad my wife got me a coffee to-go.</li>\r\n 	<li>And in the seeming obligatory craft beer segment of TravelCommons, having the rental car let me hit the Basqueland Brewing Project taproom outside of San Sebastian. It had a very American feel to it -- winding through a light industrial area, finding the place by spotting the picnic tables in front of the open loading door, walking past the foosball table and shelves holding 20-kg sacks of malt, the fluorescent pink cord blocking access to the brewing area. And for good reason, the place is owned by 3 Americans. One of them was working the taps when we arrived. He quickly flipped from Spanish to English when we ordered. Originally from Baltimore, he came over 6 years ago when his wife wanted to move back home. Nice guy, good beer.</li>\r\n 	<li>Rob Cheshire, a TravelCommons listener and Untappd friend, hit the comments section on the last episode -- first, to egg me on about my comment in the last episode to do a One City, Five Taprooms layover video, and then about taprooms near Wrigley Field when he comes in to see the Reds play the Cubs. I managed to string together a 6-taproom crawl; he may need to break that up into a couple of rounds.</li>\r\n 	<li>And, to Rob’s first question, I actually will do a taproom layover video, but instead of basing it out of ORD like my last layover video, I’m going to do this one from MDW -- give those Southwest fliers some love. It’ll let me hit 4 taprooms that have opened in the past couple of years in what can only be described as the “post-industrial” landscape of Chicago’s near south side. It should be fun. Working on the scheduling now. Will shoot it in April. With the additional production time video requires, it might not get up until May, but I’ll keep everyone posted</li>\r\n 	<li>One last thing -- last week I tweeted out a link to a pretty rigorous study from the FlyHealthy Research Team out of Emory University in Atlanta about passenger movements on transcontinental flights and what it means for the spread of respiratory diseases. The team took 10 flights, logging passenger movements, taking air samples, and swabs of hard surfaces. I won’t go through the whole study -- I’ll put a <a href=\"http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/03/13/1711611115\">link</a> in the show notes for those who want to read it, which I encourage you to do; it’s very readable as scientific papers go -- but the main takeaways for me were: a) you really only have to be concerned about the people immediately in front, behind, and next to you -- a one-row radius; b) the people wiping down their trays, armrests, and seat belt buckles with Purell Wipes are wasting their time; and c) if you’re really worried, get a window seat in the front part of the plane and don’t leave it for the entire flight (which, as a side benefit, will also endear you to your row mates). As one who has called planes “flying petri dishes”, I was pleasantly surprised by the Emory team’s findings.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Ethereal (nop mix) by @nop (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Lancefield/34818</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Brewing the Best Hotel Room Coffee</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Interview with Coleman Collins. His blog post on brewing hotel room coffee is <a href=\"https://roadwarrior.blog/hotel-room-coffee/\">here</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">My Flaming Heart by Wired Ant (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Wired_Ant/36862 Ft: Javolenus</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Notes from Spain</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>This was our 4th spring trip to Spain. Our first trip we hit Madrid and Barcelona, the usual suspects. The next trip, we headed south to Andalucia -- Córdoba, Granada, Ronda, Seville -- during Semana Santa, Holy Week, and saw penitential processions every day in every town and city we visited, culminating in Holy Thursday night outside of Seville Cathedral. The last trip, in 2016, we headed back down South, but even further, taking a boat across the Straits of Gibraltar to Tangier, Morocco. For this trip, we gave up warm weather for some new territory -- Rioja and the Basque Country.</li>\r\n 	<li>As I said at the top of the show, for me, Spain is about food and wine. There’s certainly culture -- the Semana Santa processions are phenomenal cultural events, standing in front of the huge canvas of Picasso’s Guernica in the Reina Sofia in Madrid, the Mezquita in Cordoba,... -- but it’s the food and wine that keep bringing us back.</li>\r\n 	<li>On our first trip to Granada, we were staying in a Marriott -- maybe one of their AC properties -- in the middle of town. A great building; it had been a convent at one time. There was an interior courtyard; we had a nightcap there one night. 4 glasses of wine at the hotel bar -- figuring $12-15/glass, I’m waiting for a 40 euro tab. It was 12 euros -- I love this country.</li>\r\n 	<li>The pintxos crawl was the food center of this trip north, first in Logroño and then in San Sebastian, walking from bar to bar -- a glass of wine and a bite at each. It was a good mix of food. In Logroño, we started at a couple of dive-ier, more local places that focused on just one pintxos -- sauteed mushrooms at one, ground lamb sandwich at the next, the meat seared on a flat grill behind the bar, and then served on a bun with a great tasting green sauce -- and serving local Rioja wines, pulling the bottles from a bucket at the end of the bar. We then swung into a distinctly higher end place, complete with a Michelin sticker on the front door; more variety of food -- seared red tuna, pickled white anchovies, grilled octopus -- and the next level up of Rioja wines. Later in the week, in San Sebastian, when the weather turned a bit better, we could see the crawl pick up volume in the pedestrian streets of the old town; people still bundled up a bit, but taking their wine outside, and willing to walk to the next place rather than hunkering down for a couple of courses in the warmth.</li>\r\n 	<li>Cider is big in the Basque Country, though it’s drier, not as sweet as you get in the US or the UK. And during cider season -- January through April -- the siderias, the cider houses in the hills outside of San Sebastian, open up to serve cider streamed directly from the tap of huge chestnut wood barrels into your glass, and then the glass of the person behind you,... and a traditional menu of salt-cod omelette, fresh cod fried with peppers and onions, and damn big grilled t-bones served either standing up or at communal tables. We ended up sharing a meal with a busload of folks from just over the border in France. A couple dozen of us lined up as a worker manned the tap -- letting a thin stream of cider out. We lined up our wide-mouthed plastic tumblers about three feet away to impart a bit of fizz to the three fingers of cider that we caught before moving out of the stream to let it hit the tumbler that someone was holding right below ours.</li>\r\n 	<li>For a great food country, the food at Madrid airport, though, is a bit pedestrian. So to extend our food extravaganza for one more meal, we skip the “meh” restaurants and buy a package of the top-end iberian ham -- the bellota, from the free range Iberian pigs fattening up on acorns. We can’t bring it into the US, but it’s an 8-hour flight from Madrid to Chicago. That package never makes it as far at US landfall.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #139</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_139.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #139 — Brewing Best Hotel Room Coffee; Notes from Spain','','inherit','closed','closed','','1961-revision-v1','','','2018-03-29 22:23:15','2018-03-30 03:23:15','',1961,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/03/29/1961-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1965,1,'2018-03-29 22:31:11','2018-03-30 03:31:11','<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/IMG_1145.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1009\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/IMG_1145-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>Returning to the mic after 10 days of food, wine, wind, rain, and snow in the north of Spain. I talk about traveling in Spain, and with my guest Coleman Collins about how to make the best coffee in your hotel room.  All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_139.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/406850538\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #139:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. Just got back Sunday night from 10 days in Spain -- about 4 days each in Madrid and San Sebastian, with a couple of days in the Rioja wine region in between. A friend on the East Coast sent me a note while I was in Spain -- “Good week to be out of town; we got whacked with yet another dump of snow.” Not quite. It’s been a cold Spring in Europe and Spain has been no different. Our first weekend in Madrid was in the upper 30’s/low 40’s with a mix of rain and wet snow. Which turned into just snow as we drove up to Rioja. Some of that drive reminded me of I-70 in the Colorado Rockies -- go into a tunnel with fine weather; come out of it to blowing snow. Having said that, it was nothing like the 7 or 9 or 14 inches that Winter Storm Toby dropped on the East Coast last week. And even with lousy weather, the food and the wine in Spain makes it hard to sustain any sort of cranky attitude, though it shorten up our pintxos crawl through Logroño.</li>\r\n 	<li>We flew Iberia to Madrid because: a) they have a non-stop flight from Chicago and b) as I mentioned <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">a few episodes ago</a>, I was finally able to burn off some of those Avios points that had been collecting cobwebs in my BA account. I decided to try Iberia’s Premium Economy service on the flight over. Most airlines are using this sorta “tweener” service to capture revenue from people willing to pay a bit more for some comfort, but aren’t willing to go the 2-300% Business Class uplift out of their own pocket. And it was truly a “tweener” service -- about 5 rows between the Business and regular Coach cabins, and coach seats with spacing and recline somewhere between domestic First Class and, say, United’s Economy Plus. The meal service was the same as Economy, but they served us first, and they gave us a little amenities kit with just the essentials -- earplugs, eye mask, socks, and a toothbrush. It was as-advertised -- Coach with a bit more space, which made for better napping on the 8-hour flight over. I’ve talked in past episodes that I really question the value-for-money with Business Class on Transatlantic flights, but this tweener class was a reasonable deal.</li>\r\n 	<li>The deeper recline of the Premium Economy seat also makes it easier for you to stay in your space when you sleep. On the way back, I was in regular Coach because -- well, I’m cheap and didn’t need to sleep. But the guy next to me did. He nodded off as soon as we left the ground, which meant he didn’t recline his seat, which meant that he started to list to port, toward my shoulder. This guy looked like he was the younger brother of Dos Equis’ “Most Interesting Man”. But there was no amount of interesting that was going to have him sleeping on my shoulder. Just as he was about to touch down on my shoulder, I gave our seat row a bit of a shake -- some single row turbulence. He startled awake, realized what he was doing, and immediately sat straight up. Stay upright, my friend.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">P.I.H.E. by Budapest BluesBoy (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hepepe/26362 Ft: Inna Barmash - Zhurbin</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>ust a quick addendum to the luggage thread we’ve been running over the last couple of episodes. In the last episode Jerry Sarfati talked about downsizing from a 22 to a 20-inch carry-on bag because of the hassles he’d gotten from American Airlines gate agents. I mentioned then that I haven’t had any problems from American, and didn’t get pulled over on my Chicago-to-Madrid Iberia flight. Just goes to show you how much discretion gate agents have. I didn’t test it on the way back home -- 2 bottles bought in Rioja tasting rooms and a tin of olive oil tipped me way over the liquid limit.</li>\r\n 	<li>The EU’s no roaming rules also let me skip what had become our first day of European vacation ritual of burning a couple of hours in a phone store buying local SIM cards for our mobile phones. Instead, the week before we left, I fired up EE’s iPhone app and topped up our UK SIMs. Somewhere over the Bay of Biscay, after my breakfast tray was cleared, I swapped out my AT&amp;T SIM. Once on the ground, I turned on my phone and was good to go. And because the whole family has EE SIMs, it was easy to call each other when we got separated on our pintxos crawls. I know that everyone just messages nowadays, but I’m still one of those knuckledraggers who occasionally finds talking quicker than texting.</li>\r\n 	<li>While in Madrid, I also added to my subway “tap-n-go” card collection for €2.50 -- or about $3 at current exchange rates. The interesting twist on Madrid’s system is that you can tap up to 4 people through the turnstile with a single card, so I only had to buy one tap card for the whole family. I’d load it up with 10 rides -- which seemed to be the only option -- we’d line up behind one turnstile, then tap through and pass it back. Getting out, we just walked through the turnstile since the Madrid Metro fare system seems based on zones rather than start and ending stations. Just adding it to the growing stack...</li>\r\n 	<li>In past episodes, I’ve talked about how I’ve come to value the service I get from Hertz with President’s Club status. And so I rented a car from Hertz in Madrid for our drive up to Rioja for wine tasting and then over to San Sebastian and back. On Tuesday morning, we headed to Atocha train station, found the Hertz counter, and then I sent my family to get breakfast because I knew from past experience renting cars in Spain, that I was in for 30 minutes of hard upselling. It didn’t matter that I had already booked on-line at Hertz.com and selected the options I wanted, I was going to get sold. Mel, the Hertz agent, spoke excellent American English -- all the right terms, slang, colloquialisms. Telling me the rate I got was “crazy low” -- I’d used our corporate rate plus cashed in some Hertz points -- because I didn’t have any insurance. And then came the big push -- writing down big liability numbers, huge damage possibilities -- even though a lot of this was covered by our corporate rate and the credit card. After this, there was the upsell for the car -- did you know you booked a manual, can you drive a manual -- because, well, no Americans know how to work a clutch. I just smiled and nodded, and let Mel work through his spiel -- I had kinda hoped that my status would save me, but nope, there was no short-circuiting this. After he was done, I said “No” to everything. I finally got the keys just as my family finished breakfast, and then off we went. I would’ve been frustrated if I hadn’t expected it and budgeted time for it. Instead, I was just slightly weary. I’m glad my wife got me a coffee to-go.</li>\r\n 	<li>And in the seeming obligatory craft beer segment of TravelCommons, having the rental car let me hit the Basqueland Brewing Project taproom outside of San Sebastian. It had a very American feel to it -- winding through a light industrial area, finding the place by spotting the picnic tables in front of the open loading door, walking past the foosball table and shelves holding 20-kg sacks of malt, the fluorescent pink cord blocking access to the brewing area. And for good reason, the place is owned by 3 Americans. One of them was working the taps when we arrived. He quickly flipped from Spanish to English when we ordered. Originally from Baltimore, he came over 6 years ago when his wife wanted to move back home. Nice guy, good beer.</li>\r\n 	<li>Rob Cheshire, a TravelCommons listener and Untappd friend, hit the comments section on the last episode -- first, to egg me on about my comment in the last episode to do a One City, Five Taprooms layover video, and then about taprooms near Wrigley Field when he comes in to see the Reds play the Cubs. I managed to string together a 6-taproom crawl; he may need to break that up into a couple of rounds.</li>\r\n 	<li>And, to Rob’s first question, I actually will do a taproom layover video, but instead of basing it out of ORD like my last layover video, I’m going to do this one from MDW -- give those Southwest fliers some love. It’ll let me hit 4 taprooms that have opened in the past couple of years in what can only be described as the “post-industrial” landscape of Chicago’s near south side. It should be fun. Working on the scheduling now. Will shoot it in April. With the additional production time video requires, it might not get up until May, but I’ll keep everyone posted</li>\r\n 	<li>One last thing -- last week I tweeted out a link to a pretty rigorous study from the FlyHealthy Research Team out of Emory University in Atlanta about passenger movements on transcontinental flights and what it means for the spread of respiratory diseases. The team took 10 flights, logging passenger movements, taking air samples, and swabs of hard surfaces. I won’t go through the whole study -- I’ll put a <a href=\"http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/03/13/1711611115\">link</a> in the show notes for those who want to read it, which I encourage you to do; it’s very readable as scientific papers go -- but the main takeaways for me were: a) you really only have to be concerned about the people immediately in front, behind, and next to you -- a one-row radius; b) the people wiping down their trays, armrests, and seat belt buckles with Purell Wipes are wasting their time; and c) if you’re really worried, get a window seat in the front part of the plane and don’t leave it for the entire flight (which, as a side benefit, will also endear you to your row mates). As one who has called planes “flying petri dishes”, I was pleasantly surprised by the Emory team’s findings.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">~aether theories~ by Vidian (c) copyright 2018 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Vidian/57398 Ft: Gurdonark, White-throated Sparrow</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Brewing the Best Hotel Room Coffee</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Interview with Coleman Collins. His blog post on brewing hotel room coffee is <a href=\"https://roadwarrior.blog/hotel-room-coffee/\">here</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Tools of the Trade by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/56512 Ft: Abstract Audio, Mr Yesterday, Martijn de Boer, Speck</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Notes from Spain</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>This was our 4th spring trip to Spain. Our first trip we hit Madrid and Barcelona, the usual suspects. The next trip, we headed south to Andalucia -- Córdoba, Granada, Ronda, Seville -- during Semana Santa, Holy Week, and saw penitential processions every day in every town and city we visited, culminating in Holy Thursday night outside of Seville Cathedral. The last trip, in 2016, we headed back down South, but even further, taking a boat across the Straits of Gibraltar to Tangier, Morocco. For this trip, we gave up warm weather for some new territory -- Rioja and the Basque Country.</li>\r\n 	<li>As I said at the top of the show, for me, Spain is about food and wine. There’s certainly culture -- the Semana Santa processions are phenomenal cultural events, standing in front of the huge canvas of Picasso’s Guernica in the Reina Sofia in Madrid, the Mezquita in Cordoba,... -- but it’s the food and wine that keep bringing us back.</li>\r\n 	<li>On our first trip to Granada, we were staying in a Marriott -- maybe one of their AC properties -- in the middle of town. A great building; it had been a convent at one time. There was an interior courtyard; we had a nightcap there one night. 4 glasses of wine at the hotel bar -- figuring $12-15/glass, I’m waiting for a 40 euro tab. It was 12 euros -- I love this country.</li>\r\n 	<li>The pintxos crawl was the food center of this trip north, first in Logroño and then in San Sebastian, walking from bar to bar -- a glass of wine and a bite at each. It was a good mix of food. In Logroño, we started at a couple of dive-ier, more local places that focused on just one pintxos -- sauteed mushrooms at one, ground lamb sandwich at the next, the meat seared on a flat grill behind the bar, and then served on a bun with a great tasting green sauce -- and serving local Rioja wines, pulling the bottles from a bucket at the end of the bar. We then swung into a distinctly higher end place, complete with a Michelin sticker on the front door; more variety of food -- seared red tuna, pickled white anchovies, grilled octopus -- and the next level up of Rioja wines. Later in the week, in San Sebastian, when the weather turned a bit better, we could see the crawl pick up volume in the pedestrian streets of the old town; people still bundled up a bit, but taking their wine outside, and willing to walk to the next place rather than hunkering down for a couple of courses in the warmth.</li>\r\n 	<li>Cider is big in the Basque Country, though it’s drier, not as sweet as you get in the US or the UK. And during cider season -- January through April -- the siderias, the cider houses in the hills outside of San Sebastian, open up to serve cider streamed directly from the tap of huge chestnut wood barrels into your glass, and then the glass of the person behind you,... and a traditional menu of salt-cod omelette, fresh cod fried with peppers and onions, and damn big grilled t-bones served either standing up or at communal tables. We ended up sharing a meal with a busload of folks from just over the border in France. A couple dozen of us lined up as a worker manned the tap -- letting a thin stream of cider out. We lined up our wide-mouthed plastic tumblers about three feet away to impart a bit of fizz to the three fingers of cider that we caught before moving out of the stream to let it hit the tumbler that someone was holding right below ours.</li>\r\n 	<li>For a great food country, the food at Madrid airport, though, is a bit pedestrian. So to extend our food extravaganza for one more meal, we skip the “meh” restaurants and buy a package of the top-end iberian ham -- the bellota, from the free range Iberian pigs fattening up on acorns. We can’t bring it into the US, but it’s an 8-hour flight from Madrid to Chicago. That package never makes it as far at US landfall.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #139</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_139.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #139 — Brewing Best Hotel Room Coffee; Notes from Spain','','inherit','closed','closed','','1961-revision-v1','','','2018-03-29 22:31:11','2018-03-30 03:31:11','',1961,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/03/29/1961-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1966,1,'2018-03-29 22:44:12','2018-03-30 03:44:12','<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/IMG_1145.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1009\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/IMG_1145-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>Returning to the mic after 10 days of food, wine, wind, rain, and snow in the north of Spain. I talk about traveling in Spain, and with my guest Coleman Collins about how to make the best coffee in your hotel room.  All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_139.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/422166231\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #139:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. Just got back Sunday night from 10 days in Spain -- about 4 days each in Madrid and San Sebastian, with a couple of days in the Rioja wine region in between. A friend on the East Coast sent me a note while I was in Spain -- “Good week to be out of town; we got whacked with yet another dump of snow.” Not quite. It’s been a cold Spring in Europe and Spain has been no different. Our first weekend in Madrid was in the upper 30’s/low 40’s with a mix of rain and wet snow. Which turned into just snow as we drove up to Rioja. Some of that drive reminded me of I-70 in the Colorado Rockies -- go into a tunnel with fine weather; come out of it to blowing snow. Having said that, it was nothing like the 7 or 9 or 14 inches that Winter Storm Toby dropped on the East Coast last week. And even with lousy weather, the food and the wine in Spain makes it hard to sustain any sort of cranky attitude, though it shorten up our pintxos crawl through Logroño.</li>\r\n 	<li>We flew Iberia to Madrid because: a) they have a non-stop flight from Chicago and b) as I mentioned <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">a few episodes ago</a>, I was finally able to burn off some of those Avios points that had been collecting cobwebs in my BA account. I decided to try Iberia’s Premium Economy service on the flight over. Most airlines are using this sorta “tweener” service to capture revenue from people willing to pay a bit more for some comfort, but aren’t willing to go the 2-300% Business Class uplift out of their own pocket. And it was truly a “tweener” service -- about 5 rows between the Business and regular Coach cabins, and coach seats with spacing and recline somewhere between domestic First Class and, say, United’s Economy Plus. The meal service was the same as Economy, but they served us first, and they gave us a little amenities kit with just the essentials -- earplugs, eye mask, socks, and a toothbrush. It was as-advertised -- Coach with a bit more space, which made for better napping on the 8-hour flight over. I’ve talked in past episodes that I really question the value-for-money with Business Class on Transatlantic flights, but this tweener class was a reasonable deal.</li>\r\n 	<li>The deeper recline of the Premium Economy seat also makes it easier for you to stay in your space when you sleep. On the way back, I was in regular Coach because -- well, I’m cheap and didn’t need to sleep. But the guy next to me did. He nodded off as soon as we left the ground, which meant he didn’t recline his seat, which meant that he started to list to port, toward my shoulder. This guy looked like he was the younger brother of Dos Equis’ “Most Interesting Man”. But there was no amount of interesting that was going to have him sleeping on my shoulder. Just as he was about to touch down on my shoulder, I gave our seat row a bit of a shake -- some single row turbulence. He startled awake, realized what he was doing, and immediately sat straight up. Stay upright, my friend.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">P.I.H.E. by Budapest BluesBoy (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hepepe/26362 Ft: Inna Barmash - Zhurbin</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>ust a quick addendum to the luggage thread we’ve been running over the last couple of episodes. In the last episode Jerry Sarfati talked about downsizing from a 22 to a 20-inch carry-on bag because of the hassles he’d gotten from American Airlines gate agents. I mentioned then that I haven’t had any problems from American, and didn’t get pulled over on my Chicago-to-Madrid Iberia flight. Just goes to show you how much discretion gate agents have. I didn’t test it on the way back home -- 2 bottles bought in Rioja tasting rooms and a tin of olive oil tipped me way over the liquid limit.</li>\r\n 	<li>The EU’s no roaming rules also let me skip what had become our first day of European vacation ritual of burning a couple of hours in a phone store buying local SIM cards for our mobile phones. Instead, the week before we left, I fired up EE’s iPhone app and topped up our UK SIMs. Somewhere over the Bay of Biscay, after my breakfast tray was cleared, I swapped out my AT&amp;T SIM. Once on the ground, I turned on my phone and was good to go. And because the whole family has EE SIMs, it was easy to call each other when we got separated on our pintxos crawls. I know that everyone just messages nowadays, but I’m still one of those knuckledraggers who occasionally finds talking quicker than texting.</li>\r\n 	<li>While in Madrid, I also added to my subway “tap-n-go” card collection for €2.50 -- or about $3 at current exchange rates. The interesting twist on Madrid’s system is that you can tap up to 4 people through the turnstile with a single card, so I only had to buy one tap card for the whole family. I’d load it up with 10 rides -- which seemed to be the only option -- we’d line up behind one turnstile, then tap through and pass it back. Getting out, we just walked through the turnstile since the Madrid Metro fare system seems based on zones rather than start and ending stations. Just adding it to the growing stack...</li>\r\n 	<li>In past episodes, I’ve talked about how I’ve come to value the service I get from Hertz with President’s Club status. And so I rented a car from Hertz in Madrid for our drive up to Rioja for wine tasting and then over to San Sebastian and back. On Tuesday morning, we headed to Atocha train station, found the Hertz counter, and then I sent my family to get breakfast because I knew from past experience renting cars in Spain, that I was in for 30 minutes of hard upselling. It didn’t matter that I had already booked on-line at Hertz.com and selected the options I wanted, I was going to get sold. Mel, the Hertz agent, spoke excellent American English -- all the right terms, slang, colloquialisms. Telling me the rate I got was “crazy low” -- I’d used our corporate rate plus cashed in some Hertz points -- because I didn’t have any insurance. And then came the big push -- writing down big liability numbers, huge damage possibilities -- even though a lot of this was covered by our corporate rate and the credit card. After this, there was the upsell for the car -- did you know you booked a manual, can you drive a manual -- because, well, no Americans know how to work a clutch. I just smiled and nodded, and let Mel work through his spiel -- I had kinda hoped that my status would save me, but nope, there was no short-circuiting this. After he was done, I said “No” to everything. I finally got the keys just as my family finished breakfast, and then off we went. I would’ve been frustrated if I hadn’t expected it and budgeted time for it. Instead, I was just slightly weary. I’m glad my wife got me a coffee to-go.</li>\r\n 	<li>And in the seeming obligatory craft beer segment of TravelCommons, having the rental car let me hit the Basqueland Brewing Project taproom outside of San Sebastian. It had a very American feel to it -- winding through a light industrial area, finding the place by spotting the picnic tables in front of the open loading door, walking past the foosball table and shelves holding 20-kg sacks of malt, the fluorescent pink cord blocking access to the brewing area. And for good reason, the place is owned by 3 Americans. One of them was working the taps when we arrived. He quickly flipped from Spanish to English when we ordered. Originally from Baltimore, he came over 6 years ago when his wife wanted to move back home. Nice guy, good beer.</li>\r\n 	<li>Rob Cheshire, a TravelCommons listener and Untappd friend, hit the comments section on the last episode -- first, to egg me on about my comment in the last episode to do a One City, Five Taprooms layover video, and then about taprooms near Wrigley Field when he comes in to see the Reds play the Cubs. I managed to string together a 6-taproom crawl; he may need to break that up into a couple of rounds.</li>\r\n 	<li>And, to Rob’s first question, I actually will do a taproom layover video, but instead of basing it out of ORD like my last layover video, I’m going to do this one from MDW -- give those Southwest fliers some love. It’ll let me hit 4 taprooms that have opened in the past couple of years in what can only be described as the “post-industrial” landscape of Chicago’s near south side. It should be fun. Working on the scheduling now. Will shoot it in April. With the additional production time video requires, it might not get up until May, but I’ll keep everyone posted</li>\r\n 	<li>One last thing -- last week I tweeted out a link to a pretty rigorous study from the FlyHealthy Research Team out of Emory University in Atlanta about passenger movements on transcontinental flights and what it means for the spread of respiratory diseases. The team took 10 flights, logging passenger movements, taking air samples, and swabs of hard surfaces. I won’t go through the whole study -- I’ll put a <a href=\"http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/03/13/1711611115\">link</a> in the show notes for those who want to read it, which I encourage you to do; it’s very readable as scientific papers go -- but the main takeaways for me were: a) you really only have to be concerned about the people immediately in front, behind, and next to you -- a one-row radius; b) the people wiping down their trays, armrests, and seat belt buckles with Purell Wipes are wasting their time; and c) if you’re really worried, get a window seat in the front part of the plane and don’t leave it for the entire flight (which, as a side benefit, will also endear you to your row mates). As one who has called planes “flying petri dishes”, I was pleasantly surprised by the Emory team’s findings.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">~aether theories~ by Vidian (c) copyright 2018 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Vidian/57398 Ft: Gurdonark, White-throated Sparrow</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Brewing the Best Hotel Room Coffee</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Interview with Coleman Collins. His blog post on brewing hotel room coffee is <a href=\"https://roadwarrior.blog/hotel-room-coffee/\">here</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Tools of the Trade by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/56512 Ft: Abstract Audio, Mr Yesterday, Martijn de Boer, Speck</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Notes from Spain</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>This was our 4th spring trip to Spain. Our first trip we hit Madrid and Barcelona, the usual suspects. The next trip, we headed south to Andalucia -- Córdoba, Granada, Ronda, Seville -- during Semana Santa, Holy Week, and saw penitential processions every day in every town and city we visited, culminating in Holy Thursday night outside of Seville Cathedral. The last trip, in 2016, we headed back down South, but even further, taking a boat across the Straits of Gibraltar to Tangier, Morocco. For this trip, we gave up warm weather for some new territory -- Rioja and the Basque Country.</li>\r\n 	<li>As I said at the top of the show, for me, Spain is about food and wine. There’s certainly culture -- the Semana Santa processions are phenomenal cultural events, standing in front of the huge canvas of Picasso’s Guernica in the Reina Sofia in Madrid, the Mezquita in Cordoba,... -- but it’s the food and wine that keep bringing us back.</li>\r\n 	<li>On our first trip to Granada, we were staying in a Marriott -- maybe one of their AC properties -- in the middle of town. A great building; it had been a convent at one time. There was an interior courtyard; we had a nightcap there one night. 4 glasses of wine at the hotel bar -- figuring $12-15/glass, I’m waiting for a 40 euro tab. It was 12 euros -- I love this country.</li>\r\n 	<li>The pintxos crawl was the food center of this trip north, first in Logroño and then in San Sebastian, walking from bar to bar -- a glass of wine and a bite at each. It was a good mix of food. In Logroño, we started at a couple of dive-ier, more local places that focused on just one pintxos -- sauteed mushrooms at one, ground lamb sandwich at the next, the meat seared on a flat grill behind the bar, and then served on a bun with a great tasting green sauce -- and serving local Rioja wines, pulling the bottles from a bucket at the end of the bar. We then swung into a distinctly higher end place, complete with a Michelin sticker on the front door; more variety of food -- seared red tuna, pickled white anchovies, grilled octopus -- and the next level up of Rioja wines. Later in the week, in San Sebastian, when the weather turned a bit better, we could see the crawl pick up volume in the pedestrian streets of the old town; people still bundled up a bit, but taking their wine outside, and willing to walk to the next place rather than hunkering down for a couple of courses in the warmth.</li>\r\n 	<li>Cider is big in the Basque Country, though it’s drier, not as sweet as you get in the US or the UK. And during cider season -- January through April -- the siderias, the cider houses in the hills outside of San Sebastian, open up to serve cider streamed directly from the tap of huge chestnut wood barrels into your glass, and then the glass of the person behind you,... and a traditional menu of salt-cod omelette, fresh cod fried with peppers and onions, and damn big grilled t-bones served either standing up or at communal tables. We ended up sharing a meal with a busload of folks from just over the border in France. A couple dozen of us lined up as a worker manned the tap -- letting a thin stream of cider out. We lined up our wide-mouthed plastic tumblers about three feet away to impart a bit of fizz to the three fingers of cider that we caught before moving out of the stream to let it hit the tumbler that someone was holding right below ours.</li>\r\n 	<li>For a great food country, the food at Madrid airport, though, is a bit pedestrian. So to extend our food extravaganza for one more meal, we skip the “meh” restaurants and buy a package of the top-end iberian ham -- the bellota, from the free range Iberian pigs fattening up on acorns. We can’t bring it into the US, but it’s an 8-hour flight from Madrid to Chicago. That package never makes it as far at US landfall.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #139</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_139.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #139 — Brewing Best Hotel Room Coffee; Notes from Spain','','inherit','closed','closed','','1961-revision-v1','','','2018-03-29 22:44:12','2018-03-30 03:44:12','',1961,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/03/29/1961-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1967,1,'2018-03-29 22:56:05','2018-03-30 03:56:05','[caption id=\"attachment_1786\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/File_000.jpeg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1786\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/File_000-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> I have a craft beer problem...[/caption]\r\n\r\nThis past week in Atlanta Hartsfield Airport, when I traveled across four terminals to find a restaurant serving a nice selection of local Atlanta beers, I finally had to admit that I have a craft beer problem. In addition to this confession, I talk about about taking the London Underground back from the big Adele concert in Wembley Stadium. The experience proved out some of the positive stereotypes about the English -- queuing well and muddling through without complaining. I talk about hotel room flat screen TVs and using Twitter to quickly get Hertz to fix a mistaken refueling charge. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_131.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_130.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #131:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, ready to admit that I have a craft beer problem. On Tuesday, I’m in Atlanta airport, on the back end of an one-day up-and-back. I got to the airport a bit early because: (a) I wanted to get forward-positioned for a 5pm conference call, and (b) afternoon travel times from north of Atlanta, where all my clients have ever been, to south of Atlanta where the airport is inconveniently located is highly unpredictable -- I’ve experienced anything from 40 min to an hour and a half. The conference call ends early, just as United posts a 15-min flight delay. Rather than bitch tweeting, I pop open my Untappd app and see what beers have been checked in nearby. I see some local Atlanta beers showing up at a place called “Chicken + Beer”. Good name! I find an sign board. It’s in Terminal D near Gate D5 -- almost to the end of the terminal. I’m in Terminal T -- the closest-in terminal, 4 terminals away. I look at my watch. According to United, I have an hour. I pop open the United app. The delayed in-bound flight is due in at 6:35 and United is calling for a 7:05 departure. No way in this age of completely full flights do they get that plane emptied and re-loaded in 30 minutes. And, since it’s a day trip, I don’t have to worry about carry-on. Easy decision -- I’m off. Highly recommended place if you’re connecting through ATL -- especially if you’re a bit closer, maybe in Terminals C, D or E.</li>\r\n 	<li>I posted the last episode the day before we headed out to London for a week, the highlight of which was going to the Adele concert in Wembley Stadium that Wednesday night -- my wife’s Christmas and birthday present. It was the opening night of what was supposed to be a 4-night finale to her world tour. Glad we caught one of the front-end shows. She canceled the last two due to vocal cord stress. Would’ve been unspeakably awful if we’d flown over and then got canceled. As it was, it was a great concert -- great voice and a phenomenal swearer. Impressive f-bomb count.</li>\r\n 	<li>Back in the US, I’ve been alternating weeks between Richmond and Atlanta. As I said in the last episode, of the two, I prefer Richmond -- I’m able to walk around downtown so no need for a rental, and it’s only a 20-minute ride to and from the airport. And a local turned me onto the Scott’s Addition neighborhood with three microbreweries in a 5-block radius. Yes, as you already know, I have a craft beer problem.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mindmapthat/53340\">Dub the Uke</a> by Kara Square (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: DJ Vadim</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>This week’s day trip to Atlanta for a meeting was the first time I’ve done that in a long time -- trusted an airline enough to fly in the day of an important meeting. As it was, I still baked in a large safety buffer -- I took a 6:15am flight out of ORD that landed ATL just after 9am local time; for a 12:30p meeting. Instead, as a way to lower my personal stress as well as the amount of my bitch tweeting, I’ll fly out, say, the night before. Or a couple of weeks ago, when my wife booked a dinner for 5:30p Thursday night, I flew back Weds night. Last year, I would’ve flown home Thursday afternoon -- scheduling myself ORD at, say, 3:30p, and then taking the El into the city. Now, I just don’t trust the airlines. There’s not enough slack in the system -- the planes are full, the crew schedules are optimized to the tee, and so when something anomalous happens, the whole things starts to come apart at the seams. This kinda happened a few weeks ago flying out of Richmond. My colleague and I were sitting in a conference room after lunch when his phone started going off -- flight delay texts from American about his evening flight back to DFW. I check on my United flight to ORD -- sure enough, I’m delayed too. Not critical -- just means I’ll be dining in the airport rather than at home. I hit the “where is my flight now” in the United app a couple of times to find that the delay from Grand Rapids airport which is then cascading through IAD and down to RIC. When the plane is scheduled for tight turnarounds, there’s no way to catch up. We check every 20 minutes or so, hoping things get better. And, surprisingly, mine does -- suddenly, there’s no delay. Did Grand Rapids magically clear up? Nope. Tracking the inbound plane again, now it’s sitting on the ground at IAD. They swapped equipment and now we’re back on schedule. We head over to RIC, and just as I go through security, I get a delay text from United. The plane is in IAD but the crew isn’t. Their inbound flight is delayed, which pushes ours. I sit down at the Sam Adams bar in RIC’s Terminal 2; I order a beer and some food. I get the beer right away. 45 minutes later, the waitress tells me they’ve run out of food. So I end up eating dinner at home after all -- just a bit later than usual.</li>\r\n 	<li>Hotel room technology is slow to change. I still see a lot of those alarm clocks with the old 30-pin iPhone connectors on the top of them; the iPhone 5 with the smaller Lightning connector came out almost 5 years ago. I think a good bit of this has to do with scale -- just upgrading the TVs in the 3,976 rooms at a place like Caesars Palace in Las Vegas can be a multi-year project. That being said, it’s been a long time now since I’ve seen a tube TV in a hotel room. Seems that most everyone has made the switch to wall-mounted flat screens, and I’m even seeing more of the second-generation -- more smart TVs from Samsung and LG with built in Netflix and Hulu apps, letting me log in to my accounts, access my own queues and watch just like I’m at home. I tend not to take them up on that offer though. I’m still a bit hesitant to scatter too much of my personal digital stuff around. And also, it’s not just Netflix that I want to watch. Sometimes I want to watch, say, James Corden’s newest Carpool Karaoke on YouTube that my daughter told me about, or watch the start of a Tour de France stage on NBCSN which almost no hotel cable package carries. Lucky for me, all of these newer flat screens provide easy access to an HDMI port -- the digital successor to the older analog VGA connectors on computers. I picked up a $5 Displayport-to-HDMI cable on Amazon, and now regularly plug my ThinkPad into my hotel room flat screen. Now if these hotels would upgrade their WiFi speeds...</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Suenjo/11162\">Natchoongi (New Hope Remix)</a> by Suenjo (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Twitter Concierge</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>One of the standards in my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/12/12/top-10-holiday-travel-tips-2/\">Top 10</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2013/12/19/top-10-holiday-travel-tips/\">Travel Tips</a> list -- which I usually write once a year as part of my annual prayers to the Google gods for more website traffic -- is to use Twitter as sort of a customer service concierge service. I’ve used Twitter to ping airlines on the status of planes when the gate agents were in the dark, A few weeks back, I tweeted to Lyft, asking why the price estimation piece of their app didn’t work (answer: it was turned off in Richmond for some reason). And Twitter saved me a bit of a hassle last week with Hertz.</li>\r\n 	<li>Now, I’ve gone hot and cold on Hertz through my travel career. At the start, back in 1985 when I was working for IBM and regularly flying into SJC, I liked them. But that was when SJC was an old-style California airport -- no jetways, just a walkway under a metal canopy to planes parked on the tarmac; no rental counters, just a parking lot at one end of the terminal with a little Hertz hut in the middle staffed by a nice woman who’d give you your keys. After a few trips, we got to know each other and she’d always give me one of the nicer cars on the lot. Fast forward 15 years to my low point with Hertz at DTW. I was there every week for about a year and never got a clean car or one under 24,000 miles. I’m back on an upswing with Hertz now that they’re doing the National Car Rental-like “pick your own car” service and I’ve yet to climb into a car with more than 1,000 miles</li>\r\n 	<li>Dropping my car off at ATL last week, I do my usual thing -- fill the car just outside the airport, drop it off, and walk away without waiting for the Hertz guy to check me in because it’s usually too long a wait during the afternoon drop-off rush hour and they’ll e-mail me the receipt. I usually put the gas receipt on the dashboard under the keys, but I didn’t do that this time. The gas station near ATL was a bit dodgy and had signs posted on the gas pump “Keep your car locked when filling up”. I decided not to wait for the pump to spit out a receipt.</li>\r\n 	<li>The e-mail from Hertz showed up on my phone just after I’d boarded the plane at ATL. I scanned the numbers -- damn it, there was a refueling charge. And the gas charge hadn’t posted yet to my Amex card so I couldn’t download a receipt. It just pissed me off. The gas gauge was clearly/unambiguously on F, so the check-in guy was just pencil-whipping the check-in. That’s what really annoyed me. Sitting there, waiting for the rest of the flight to board, I had time to stew. And to tweet out my annoyance to @Hertz -- complete with a mad face emoji.</li>\r\n 	<li>My flight takes off. I land at ORD, take my phone out of airplane mode and bing, there’s a reply from Hertz -- please DM us your rental agreement number. I flip over to the emailed receipt and copy/paste the number into Twitter. While still on the plane -- we’re doing the usual ORD thing of taxiing all over the airport looking for a gate -- I get a message back “Mark, apologies for the trouble with the fueling fee. After further review I will be refunding this charge to the account billed. We appreciate you bringing this to our attention so that we might look into this with our local Atlanta team.” I’ve now gone from pissed to impressed with how fast that got fixed. Now I’m sure some of that has to do with my status at Hertz, but still -- Twitter can be a very effective line-cut into customer service.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/3lb3r3th/44072\">Misunderstood</a> by 3lb3r3th (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: Alchemistry</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>London Tube Story</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>A few weeks ago on one of my Saturday bike rides, I was listening to Craig and Linda Martin’s Indie Travel Podcast episode about using public transit and it got me thinking about my recent public transit experiences. We’ve talked about public transit in past episodes. I’ve kinda nerded out about a it a bit, especially taking public transit between a city and an airport.</li>\r\n 	<li>During our week in London at the end of June, we used the Tube a lot. Underground, it was surprisingly still warm and stuffy from the 40-year high temperatures the prior week when it had been very hot by British standards -- in the 30’s Celsius, the upper 80’s/low 90’s Farenheit. We were staying in the Fitzrovia neighborhood of London -- north of Oxford St, just off of Tottenham High Street near University College London. The area is well-served by a number of Tube lines, and we’d chosen it for easy Tube access to Wembley Stadium for the Adele concert.</li>\r\n 	<li>We headed out early, planning to get there a couple hours before show time because we expected security to be tight. We got on a train that was an interesting mix of commuters winding down their day and concert goers getting ramped up -- seated people heads down in their papers; standing groups of people chatting away, maybe slipping a sip of a canned gin &amp; tonic, maybe singing a little tune snippet.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you think about it, the trip to the concert wouldn’t be too bad -- people would be spread out across 2, maybe 3 hours worth of trains. The end of the concert, though -- 96,000 people leaving at once, and a huge sea of them heading for the Wembley Stadium tube stop. Luckily, the rain forecasted earlier in the week had hit London earlier in the day and the evening was dry. If not, the 30-45 minutes we spend shoulder-to-shoulder penguin-walking the third- to-half mile between our seats and the Tube stop would’ve been miserable. As it was, everyone was in good spirits (it had been a great concert), and polite and courteous (no shoving, not a lot of trying to snake up in front of others). The security police would hold up signs at an intersection -- one side in red would say “Stop”, the other side green with “Go”. And when they spun it around to “Stop” the crowd would stop. No one would try to slip around the edges or make a last dash. One cop was playing songs through his bullhorn for the crowd while they waited for the next “Go” sign. It was so crowded; so much could’ve easily gone wrong; but it didn’t. And once back on the Tube, we made it back to Fitzrovia in time for a nightcap.</li>\r\n 	<li>But I guess I shouldn’t be so surprised. Doesn’t that experience validate the English stereotype -- queues well, suffers through without complaining -- the whole “Keep Calm and Carry On” ethos -- and eventually get through to the other side in time for a pint at the pub.</li>\r\n 	<li>And maybe that’s what I really like about taking public transit. In past episodes, I talked about public transit as a way of popping the travel bubble, using it to get a real feeling for where you are. The whole “Mind the Gap” thing in the Tube is another very English thing, as is the small taped-off space where buskers can perform in the connecting passageways between lines. Compare that to the less structured Paris Metro experiences I described a few episodes ago -- of the tuba busker and the 3-person opera reenactment that took over the whole shop area of a Metro stop. Or the way people bringing their bikes onto a Portland, Oregon light rail car just solidifies the whole Portlandia image, or picking up the Chicago El in the Loop after the markets close, with the few traders who work the options pits, heading up to Wrigley for an afternoon Cubs game.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #131</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_131.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #131 — Twitter Concierge Customer Service; London Tube Story','','inherit','closed','closed','','1784-revision-v1','','','2018-03-29 22:56:05','2018-03-30 03:56:05','',1784,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/03/29/1784-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1968,1,'2018-03-29 22:56:30','2018-03-30 03:56:30','[caption id=\"attachment_1803\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/DSC_5935a.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1803\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/DSC_5935a-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> How Are Their Yelp Reviews?[/caption]\r\n\r\nIt\'s a listener request podcast. A fellow Peacock, this one named Jack, asked \"What travel apps do you have on your iPhone?\" Paging back through the TravelCommons archives, I’ve covered different categories of travel apps,  -- in the most recent iteration of my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/12/12/top-10-holiday-travel-tips-2/\">Top 10 Travel Tips</a> I recommended some flight tracking apps and way before that, did a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/11/29/podcast-102-trip-management-app-comparison-tsa-scanner-shuffle/\">bake-off of trip management apps</a> -- but never covered walked through what’s in the travel folder on the home screen of my iPhone. I\'ve now remedied that oversight. We also continue talking about overseas phone SIMs; the impact of the new EU ban on roaming charges. Also, my first encounter with some new TSA scanning equipment.  All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_132.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_130.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #132:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you, as always it seems, from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. Seems that I’ve swapped the romance of hotel bathrooms for the sound quality of the studio here. Seems like yesterday when I was <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2009/04/15/podcast-73-eating-alone-on-the-road-more-things-you-never-want-to-hear/\">recording the intro</a> in the business class toilet of a South African Airways A340 on the way down to J’burg</li>\r\n 	<li>My travel since <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/07/30/podcast-131-twitter-concierge-customer-service-london-tube-story/\">the last episode</a> hasn’t been anything quite as exciting. Trips to Richmond, Baltimore and New York City. Indeed, if I tried recording in the toilet of one of those American or United A321s, I don’t think I’d get too far past “Hello, this is Mark Peacock…” before someone started banging on the door.</li>\r\n 	<li>Richmond airport continued to be a problem for me -- not the airport itself, just the carriers flying into it. I get up on a Tuesday morning -- sidestepping the Monday morning road warrior crush -- iPhone notifications from American, TripIt, and Google all say my flight is on-time. Pulling up to the terminal -- everything still looks OK. I walk through the doors and my phone explodes -- my 8:20 am flight is now leaving at 4 something pm! The next note is from American telling me they’ve booked me on the 11:45am flight, so instead of getting to RIC at 11:20am, I’m now due in at 2:40pm -- over 3 hrs late. A quick call to Amex Travel tells me that the early morning United flight has already left, so this is my best option. Since, as I talked about in the last episode, I’ve given up depending on airlines being able to meet their schedules, I hadn’t booked any early afternoon meetings, so I just parked myself in the Admirals Club and got some work done. Nothing lost but a bit of sleep.</li>\r\n 	<li>With this in mind, I was gritting my teeth when I had to head back to ORD the next week for my flight to LGA. I haven’t had to fly to New York much recently, and when I have, I’ve flown into EWR to avoid the nightmare-ish delays being reported from LGA because of the construction. There’d been stories of people abandoning their cabs on the Grand Central Parkway to walk into LGA. And then there’s just flying between two of the US’s most congested airports. I’ve always said that anything less than a 30-minute delay between LGA and ORD is on-time. So I booked my flights to avoid rush hours -- leaving ORD at 4pm, arriving LGA at 7:30, and my return flight leaving LGA at 3:30 the next afternoon. I land in LGA on-time. There’s no taxi queue, and I’m into the Sheraton Times Square by a little after 8 -- no flight delays, no traffic. I quietly offer up my first beer at The Three Monkeys to the travel gods in thanksgiving.</li>\r\n 	<li>The next day, we finish up our meeting in midtown an hour early, I walk out of the building to find all sorts of cabs. The first cab doesn’t have the time to take me to LGA, but the second guy is happy to. We make good time across town to the tunnel and there’s no traffic on the Grand Central. I tip the guy well, walk up to an American kiosk and see that I can standby on the 1:30pm flight -- which will be boarding in about 5 minutes. I hit the TSA PreCheck line -- about 5 people in front of me, but the TSA folks are in good humor and moving things along. I hear the gate agent call my name as I walk up to the gate. The flight takes off on time and lands early. Hey, American made up 2 of the 3 hr-delay from last week! And on an LGA-ORD flight. I offered up a bigger beer when I got home.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/JeffSpeed68/54450\">Hula Hoop Party</a> by Stefan Kartenberg (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: Martijn de Boer, Blue Wave Theory</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Mike Skinner took a couple of minutes to stop by the TravelCommons web site and leave a comment about the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/07/30/podcast-131-twitter-concierge-customer-service-london-tube-story/\">last episode</a>. Mike writes\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>“Long time listener, really enjoy the show.“Your comments on the Dreamliner were very interesting to me. I\'ve flown one long-haul on several occasions, and yes, the windows are fun to play with. But you didn\'t have any comments on what I think is the most important attribute. The 787 isn\'t just another \"metal tube\"..... It is constructed from carbon fiber, and can be pressurized to a higher level than most normal passenger jets. The environment inside is at higher air pressure (like being at 6,000\' rather than 10000\' elevation), with a higher level of humidity (air not so dry), and more refreshes. I found it a great plane to fly on a long red-eye! Or any 5+ hour flight.\r\n“I\'m looking forward to this fall, when I\'m flying one r/t LAX-SYD in UA\'s BF cabin (14 hour flight)”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Mike, thanks for the comment. You’re absolutely right about the 787’s carbon fiber build allowing it to be pressurized at a lower level -- I’m not sure if that’s because of an increase in strength from the carbon fiber or because it’s less impervious to the higher moisture content of the denser air. But I didn’t notice a difference between my flight out to on an A330 and my flight back on the 787. Of course, it might be that I wasn’t paying enough attention to the negative -- less dry eye; less “cotton mouth” -- or that that the LHR-ORD flight wasn’t a red-eye; and so I was able to keep myself hydrated more than I would on a red-eye. Maybe I would’ve noticed the difference on those 17-hr SAA flights to Joburg those years ago. Whatever the reason, anything that makes those long-haul flights more bearable is a great thing. Safe travels on your upcoming flight to Sydney.</li>\r\n 	<li>That A330 flight didn’t go direct to London. I was late booking my ticket and so instead flew Aer Lingus to Gatwick via Dublin. It was the first time in at least 25 years that I’ve been through Dublin airport. It was a nice enough airport, but crowded for an early Monday morning. I was glad I didn’t have to go through security again, because when I looked past the scanners, it looked to be a bit of zoo parade. But, adding again to the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/01/16/podcast-126-beating-the-traffic-rethinking-carry-on-luggage/\">multi</a>-<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/02/20/podcast-127-critiquing-my-top-10-travel-tips-reviewing-vpns/\">episode</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/03/31/podcast-128-hunt-for-experiences-pop-up-entertainment/\">thread </a>about buying and using local phone SIMs during international travel, I saw the first benefits of the EU’s ban against mobile roaming charges. On the flight over, I’d swapped my US SIM for my UK SIM. Coming out of airplane mode in Dublin, I get what look like the typical welcome texts, but instead of giving me the roaming charges, they tell me that my UK plan is good in Ireland. Might seem kind of a minor thing, but at least for traveling within Europe, there are some real benefits. First is not having to burn through an hour or two at the beginning of a vacation finding a phone store and then going through the hassle of buying a pay-as-you-go SIM. In Paris, I had to go to 3 phone stores to find the SIM I wanted. In Hungary, T-Mobile wouldn’t sell my wife a SIM without a Hungarian citizenship or registration card -- which, of course, she didn’t have. Luckily, my wife’s cousin was with her and she was able to buy SIMs for all of us. If I don’t need to buy a new French or Hungarian SIM to avoid roaming charges, this kind of hassle goes away. I wonder also if there’s a bit of an arbitrage opportunity. Now that I have a UK, French, and Hungarian SIM, do I figure out which one has the cheapest rate and then use that one for all of my trips? I need to read the new regs on that one.</li>\r\n 	<li>On my last couple of trips through ATL, it seems that the lines for PreCheck are configured differently every time. Not quite sure why that is. Every other airport, it’s pretty static -- go to this set of lanes, but ATL, for some reason, wants to change the entrance to the maze each time. They also have put new parallel loading baggage X-ray machines in the ATL PreCheck line. These are pretty common in Europe but just now dribbling into US airports. Rather than queuing up and waiting for each person to put their stuff on the belt, there are 4 loading stations where a group of people each reach below, grab a bin, put it in front of you, put your stuff in it, and then push it onto the conveyor. Since there are 4 people loading at the same time, there’s no “performance anxiety” to make sure you have your belt-loading choreography flawless, and there’s no eye-rolling and foot-tapping while waiting for those who don’t. There are a couple of hassles, though. First, since it’s new, most people are still in serial mode; they don’t know that it’s OK to break queue and step around to an empty loading station. At many European airports, they have someone telling you which loading station to go to (usually with numbered stickers on the floor -- “You, station 1; you, station 6). The TSA hasn’t quite got with this program. Second, if you’re in one of the front loading stations, it takes a little, uh, muscle to break the stream of bins, to shove your bin onto the conveyor. Too polite and you’ll just stand there watching a stream of bins go by. All in all, it’s a definite improvement, but needs a bit of, say, process optimization.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/49674\">H2O</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Travel Apps on My Phone</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>A few weeks ago, Jack Peacock from northern Florida -- kinda near where the panhandle connects to the peninsula -- pinged me on the TravelCommons website with a couple of questions. First was a genealogy question. Peacock isn’t a common last name in the US and so when we meet, “where’s the last name from” is a common icebreaker. Peacock is probably more common down South where Jack and other southern Peacocks will trace their roots back to a Samuel Peacock born 1671 probably in Colonial VA. My line is from more recent immigrant stock, though. My dad grew up in Southport, on the northwest coast of the UK, between Liverpool and Blackpool, and came over to the US in 1956.</li>\r\n 	<li>That out of the way, Jack said that he and his wife are retired, have put their home and vehicles up for sale, and are getting ready to Airbnb the globe. “Geriatric gap year” as Jack put it. I am officially jealous. Which leads to his second question -- what travel apps do I have on my phone? A very timely question since Carlson Wagonlit Travel just <a href=\"http://www.carlsonwagonlit.com/content/cwt/global/en/news/news-releases/20170824-Business-travelers-find-they-are-very-productive-due-to-more-technology-options.html\">released a survey</a> where 80% of business travelers said their smartphone was the “travel tool they can’t live without”, and 45% used airline and hotel apps as their main travel technology.</li>\r\n 	<li>Paging back through the TravelCommons archives, I see that I’ve touched on some categories of travel apps -- in the most recent iteration of my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/12/12/top-10-holiday-travel-tips-2/\">Top 10 Travel Tips</a> I recommended some flight tracking apps and way before that, did a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/11/29/podcast-102-trip-management-app-comparison-tsa-scanner-shuffle/\">bake-off of trip management apps</a> -- but never walked through what’s in the travel folder on the home screen of my iPhone.</li>\r\n 	<li>As long time listeners know -- and have suffered through -- I can’t just go through a laundry list. In other words, I can’t just quickly answer Jack’s question. First, I need to build (and drag you all through) some kind of framework that provides some structure to my laundry list. It’s my own little piece of OCD. One way to start is to split between apps with broad general use -- say like Google Maps -- and those more specific to a situation -- the apps of the airlines you use the most, or, say, mass transit apps for a city you’ll be visiting.</li>\r\n 	<li>Let’s dig down to the next layer of the specific category. I have apps for the airlines I use for 90% of my travel -- American, United, Southwest, and Delta -- in that order -- because living in Chicago, American and United have hubs at ORD and Southwest owns MDW. I have Delta for the odd flight between, say, Atlanta and New York. The mix will change based on what you fly -- in Boston, you may have JetBlue, in London you certainly have BA. I mostly use these apps for two reasons -- electronic boarding passes and flight status. I talked in the last episode about how I used the “Where is my plane now” feature of United’s app to track back to the source of a RIC flight delay to GRR. Helped give me a sense of whether that delay could shrink or grow. Also, these apps are getting much quicker about pushing flight status and gate change notifications. Indeed, these apps have gotten good enough that the independent/more general flight tracking apps on my phone -- FlightAware, FlightView, and FlightStats -- are on the bubble. I’ll probably delete two of them and keep one -- either FlightAware or FlightView because of how they show the projected flight path on a weather map. You can find this in the United app, but you have to dig a bit. FlightAware and FlightView have it as their primary app view. It’s another good piece of information for when you’re thinking through flight delays.</li>\r\n 	<li>I didn’t load up the Aer Lingus app for my flight to London last month (if they even have one). It’s not worth it for a single flight. Same reason I’ve never loaded Alaska Air’s app even though I seem to end up on them at least once a year. It’s not worth the phone real estate. Which is the same reason I’ve deleted hotel apps from my phone. I’ve never found any value in the Marriott or Starwood apps. Same with the Hertz and Avis apps. However, if I was Airbnb’ing around the world like Jack is planning, I would probably load up their app.</li>\r\n 	<li>Another specific app I have is My EE -- the app for the UK mobile carrier who’s pay-as-you-go SIM I use. The last iteration of this app made it easier than EE’s website to do a SIM top-up, so it’s now in my Travel folder.</li>\r\n 	<li>A bit more general is the Priority Pass app which gets me access to international airport lounges through my Amex Platinum card. It regularly updates its list of available lounges and has airport maps to help you find them. This came in real handy in Dublin where the lounge was tucked away on a second floor with very minimal signage.</li>\r\n 	<li>Another kinda general app is the companion app to my Bluesmart roller bag. It connects to my bag via Bluetooth, automatically locks it when it’s out of range of my phone, and displays the bag’s location when I have to check it. The auto lock is probably the most useful thing. It’s consistently on the bubble.</li>\r\n 	<li>I have both Uber and Lyft in my Travel folder. I’ll typically light both of those apps up when looking for a ride somewhere, comparing price and wait time. As I mentioned during a broader discussion of ride sharing <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/11/22/podcast-125-uber-driver-stories-overseas-for-the-election/\">a few episodes back</a>, all things being equal, I’ll choose Lyft, but I use both of them regularly.</li>\r\n 	<li>Five years ago, I <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/11/29/podcast-102-trip-management-app-comparison-tsa-scanner-shuffle/\">reviewed</a> the 3 main trip management apps -- Tripit, TripCase, and Worldmate -- that recreated the old company travel agent’s printed trip itinerary by integrating separate airline, hotel, and rental car reservations for free, and real-time flight updates for a fee. I liked Worldmate the best, with TripCase a solid second. Today, I use Tripit. Carlson Wagonlit closed up Worldmate at the beginning of the year, and Sabre’s TripCase is hot mess of advertising. Tripit has continued to improve their app. The ability to share a piece of an itinerary (a flight, a hotel) through iPhone’s iMessage is surprisingly handy. But the $50/yr Tripit Pro is also on the bubble because of the airline apps’ improved notifications.</li>\r\n 	<li>Google Translate has grown into a critical travel app. I’ve talked in a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/06/24/podcast-130-notes-from-hungary/\">previous episode</a> about how, with real-time translation through the camera, it’s becoming pretty close to magic.\r\nTransit is another app that continues to solidify its hold on screen real estate. Transit covers mass transit across North America and major cities in Europe. Google Maps suggests mass transit routings, but Transit goes much deeper -- with things like real-time bus and subway data and bike share locations for cities like Chicago and New York.</li>\r\n 	<li>And then, of course, there is Google Maps. I use it to plan trips, find hotels, check out neighborhoods, figure out where I am, share locations -- as well as getting me from Point A to Point B. It is probably the most indispensable travel app on my phone. Indeed, it’s the only travel app with its own screen real estate rather than sharing space in the Travel folder</li>\r\n 	<li>What are your suggestions?</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #132</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_132.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #132 — Travel Apps on My Phone','','inherit','closed','closed','','1798-revision-v1','','','2018-03-29 22:56:30','2018-03-30 03:56:30','',1798,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/03/29/1798-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1969,1,'2018-04-03 09:05:06','2018-04-03 14:05:06','<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/IMG_1145.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1009\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/IMG_1145-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>Returning to the mic after 10 days of food, wine, wind, rain, and snow in the north of Spain. I talk about traveling in Spain, and with my guest Coleman Collins about how to make the best coffee in your hotel room.  All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_139.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/422166231\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #139:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. Just got back Sunday night from 10 days in Spain -- about 4 days each in Madrid and San Sebastian, with a couple of days in the Rioja wine region in between. A friend on the East Coast sent me a note while I was in Spain -- “Good week to be out of town; we got whacked with yet another dump of snow.” Not quite. It’s been a cold Spring in Europe and Spain has been no different. Our first weekend in Madrid was in the upper 30’s/low 40’s with a mix of rain and wet snow. Which turned into just snow as we drove up to Rioja. Some of that drive reminded me of I-70 in the Colorado Rockies -- go into a tunnel with fine weather; come out of it to blowing snow. Having said that, it was nothing like the 7 or 9 or 14 inches that Winter Storm Toby dropped on the East Coast last week. And even with lousy weather, the food and the wine in Spain makes it hard to sustain any sort of cranky attitude, though it shorten up our pintxos crawl through Logroño.</li>\r\n 	<li>We flew Iberia to Madrid because: a) they have a non-stop flight from Chicago and b) as I mentioned <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">a few episodes ago</a>, I was finally able to burn off some of those Avios points that had been collecting cobwebs in my BA account. I decided to try Iberia’s Premium Economy service on the flight over. Most airlines are using this sorta “tweener” service to capture revenue from people willing to pay a bit more for some comfort, but aren’t willing to go the 2-300% Business Class uplift out of their own pocket. And it was truly a “tweener” service -- about 5 rows between the Business and regular Coach cabins, and coach seats with spacing and recline somewhere between domestic First Class and, say, United’s Economy Plus. The meal service was the same as Economy, but they served us first, and they gave us a little amenities kit with just the essentials -- earplugs, eye mask, socks, and a toothbrush. It was as-advertised -- Coach with a bit more space, which made for better napping on the 8-hour flight over. I’ve talked in past episodes that I really question the value-for-money with Business Class on Transatlantic flights, but this tweener class was a reasonable deal.</li>\r\n 	<li>The deeper recline of the Premium Economy seat also makes it easier for you to stay in your space when you sleep. On the way back, I was in regular Coach because -- well, I’m cheap and didn’t need to sleep. But the guy next to me did. He nodded off as soon as we left the ground, which meant he didn’t recline his seat, which meant that he started to list to port, toward my shoulder. This guy looked like he was the younger brother of Dos Equis’ “Most Interesting Man”. But there was no amount of interesting that was going to have him sleeping on my shoulder. Just as he was about to touch down on my shoulder, I gave our seat row a bit of a shake -- some single row turbulence. He startled awake, realized what he was doing, and immediately sat straight up. Stay upright, my friend.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">P.I.H.E. by Budapest BluesBoy (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hepepe/26362 Ft: Inna Barmash - Zhurbin</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Just a quick addendum to the luggage thread we’ve been running over the last couple of episodes. In the last episode Jerry Sarfati talked about downsizing from a 22 to a 20-inch carry-on bag because of the hassles he’d gotten from American Airlines gate agents. I mentioned then that I haven’t had any problems from American, and didn’t get pulled over on my Chicago-to-Madrid Iberia flight. Just goes to show you how much discretion gate agents have. I didn’t test it on the way back home -- 2 bottles bought in Rioja tasting rooms and a tin of olive oil tipped me way over the liquid limit.</li>\r\n 	<li>The EU’s no roaming rules also let me skip what had become our first day of European vacation ritual of burning a couple of hours in a phone store buying local SIM cards for our mobile phones. Instead, the week before we left, I fired up EE’s iPhone app and topped up our UK SIMs. Somewhere over the Bay of Biscay, after my breakfast tray was cleared, I swapped out my AT&amp;T SIM. Once on the ground, I turned on my phone and was good to go. And because the whole family has EE SIMs, it was easy to call each other when we got separated on our pintxos crawls. I know that everyone just messages nowadays, but I’m still one of those knuckledraggers who occasionally finds talking quicker than texting.</li>\r\n 	<li>While in Madrid, I also added to my subway “tap-n-go” card collection for €2.50 -- or about $3 at current exchange rates. The interesting twist on Madrid’s system is that you can tap up to 4 people through the turnstile with a single card, so I only had to buy one tap card for the whole family. I’d load it up with 10 rides -- which seemed to be the only option -- we’d line up behind one turnstile, then tap through and pass it back. Getting out, we just walked through the turnstile since the Madrid Metro fare system seems based on zones rather than start and ending stations. Just adding it to the growing stack...</li>\r\n 	<li>In past episodes, I’ve talked about how I’ve come to value the service I get from Hertz with President’s Club status. And so I rented a car from Hertz in Madrid for our drive up to Rioja for wine tasting and then over to San Sebastian and back. On Tuesday morning, we headed to Atocha train station, found the Hertz counter, and then I sent my family to get breakfast because I knew from past experience renting cars in Spain, that I was in for 30 minutes of hard upselling. It didn’t matter that I had already booked on-line at Hertz.com and selected the options I wanted, I was going to get sold. Mel, the Hertz agent, spoke excellent American English -- all the right terms, slang, colloquialisms. Telling me the rate I got was “crazy low” -- I’d used our corporate rate plus cashed in some Hertz points -- because I didn’t have any insurance. And then came the big push -- writing down big liability numbers, huge damage possibilities -- even though a lot of this was covered by our corporate rate and the credit card. After this, there was the upsell for the car -- did you know you booked a manual, can you drive a manual -- because, well, no Americans know how to work a clutch. I just smiled and nodded, and let Mel work through his spiel -- I had kinda hoped that my status would save me, but nope, there was no short-circuiting this. After he was done, I said “No” to everything. I finally got the keys just as my family finished breakfast, and then off we went. I would’ve been frustrated if I hadn’t expected it and budgeted time for it. Instead, I was just slightly weary. I’m glad my wife got me a coffee to-go.</li>\r\n 	<li>And in the seeming obligatory craft beer segment of TravelCommons, having the rental car let me hit the Basqueland Brewing Project taproom outside of San Sebastian. It had a very American feel to it -- winding through a light industrial area, finding the place by spotting the picnic tables in front of the open loading door, walking past the foosball table and shelves holding 20-kg sacks of malt, the fluorescent pink cord blocking access to the brewing area. And for good reason, the place is owned by 3 Americans. One of them was working the taps when we arrived. He quickly flipped from Spanish to English when we ordered. Originally from Baltimore, he came over 6 years ago when his wife wanted to move back home. Nice guy, good beer.</li>\r\n 	<li>Rob Cheshire, a TravelCommons listener and Untappd friend, hit the comments section on the last episode -- first, to egg me on about my comment in the last episode to do a One City, Five Taprooms layover video, and then about taprooms near Wrigley Field when he comes in to see the Reds play the Cubs. I managed to string together a 6-taproom crawl; he may need to break that up into a couple of rounds.</li>\r\n 	<li>And, to Rob’s first question, I actually will do a taproom layover video, but instead of basing it out of ORD like my last layover video, I’m going to do this one from MDW -- give those Southwest fliers some love. It’ll let me hit 4 taprooms that have opened in the past couple of years in what can only be described as the “post-industrial” landscape of Chicago’s near south side. It should be fun. Working on the scheduling now. Will shoot it in April. With the additional production time video requires, it might not get up until May, but I’ll keep everyone posted</li>\r\n 	<li>One last thing -- last week I tweeted out a link to a pretty rigorous study from the FlyHealthy Research Team out of Emory University in Atlanta about passenger movements on transcontinental flights and what it means for the spread of respiratory diseases. The team took 10 flights, logging passenger movements, taking air samples, and swabs of hard surfaces. I won’t go through the whole study -- I’ll put a <a href=\"http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/03/13/1711611115\">link</a> in the show notes for those who want to read it, which I encourage you to do; it’s very readable as scientific papers go -- but the main takeaways for me were: a) you really only have to be concerned about the people immediately in front, behind, and next to you -- a one-row radius; b) the people wiping down their trays, armrests, and seat belt buckles with Purell Wipes are wasting their time; and c) if you’re really worried, get a window seat in the front part of the plane and don’t leave it for the entire flight (which, as a side benefit, will also endear you to your row mates). As one who has called planes “flying petri dishes”, I was pleasantly surprised by the Emory team’s findings.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">~aether theories~ by Vidian (c) copyright 2018 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Vidian/57398 Ft: Gurdonark, White-throated Sparrow</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Brewing the Best Hotel Room Coffee</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Interview with Coleman Collins. His blog post on brewing hotel room coffee is <a href=\"https://roadwarrior.blog/hotel-room-coffee/\">here</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Tools of the Trade by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/56512 Ft: Abstract Audio, Mr Yesterday, Martijn de Boer, Speck</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Notes from Spain</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>This was our 4th spring trip to Spain. Our first trip we hit Madrid and Barcelona, the usual suspects. The next trip, we headed south to Andalucia -- Córdoba, Granada, Ronda, Seville -- during Semana Santa, Holy Week, and saw penitential processions every day in every town and city we visited, culminating in Holy Thursday night outside of Seville Cathedral. The last trip, in 2016, we headed back down South, but even further, taking a boat across the Straits of Gibraltar to Tangier, Morocco. For this trip, we gave up warm weather for some new territory -- Rioja and the Basque Country.</li>\r\n 	<li>As I said at the top of the show, for me, Spain is about food and wine. There’s certainly culture -- the Semana Santa processions are phenomenal cultural events, standing in front of the huge canvas of Picasso’s Guernica in the Reina Sofia in Madrid, the Mezquita in Cordoba,... -- but it’s the food and wine that keep bringing us back.</li>\r\n 	<li>On our first trip to Granada, we were staying in a Marriott -- maybe one of their AC properties -- in the middle of town. A great building; it had been a convent at one time. There was an interior courtyard; we had a nightcap there one night. 4 glasses of wine at the hotel bar -- figuring $12-15/glass, I’m waiting for a 40 euro tab. It was 12 euros -- I love this country.</li>\r\n 	<li>The pintxos crawl was the food center of this trip north, first in Logroño and then in San Sebastian, walking from bar to bar -- a glass of wine and a bite at each. It was a good mix of food. In Logroño, we started at a couple of dive-ier, more local places that focused on just one pintxos -- sauteed mushrooms at one, ground lamb sandwich at the next, the meat seared on a flat grill behind the bar, and then served on a bun with a great tasting green sauce -- and serving local Rioja wines, pulling the bottles from a bucket at the end of the bar. We then swung into a distinctly higher end place, complete with a Michelin sticker on the front door; more variety of food -- seared red tuna, pickled white anchovies, grilled octopus -- and the next level up of Rioja wines. Later in the week, in San Sebastian, when the weather turned a bit better, we could see the crawl pick up volume in the pedestrian streets of the old town; people still bundled up a bit, but taking their wine outside, and willing to walk to the next place rather than hunkering down for a couple of courses in the warmth.</li>\r\n 	<li>Cider is big in the Basque Country, though it’s drier, not as sweet as you get in the US or the UK. And during cider season -- January through April -- the siderias, the cider houses in the hills outside of San Sebastian, open up to serve cider streamed directly from the tap of huge chestnut wood barrels into your glass, and then the glass of the person behind you,... and a traditional menu of salt-cod omelette, fresh cod fried with peppers and onions, and damn big grilled t-bones served either standing up or at communal tables. We ended up sharing a meal with a busload of folks from just over the border in France. A couple dozen of us lined up as a worker manned the tap -- letting a thin stream of cider out. We lined up our wide-mouthed plastic tumblers about three feet away to impart a bit of fizz to the three fingers of cider that we caught before moving out of the stream to let it hit the tumbler that someone was holding right below ours.</li>\r\n 	<li>For a great food country, the food at Madrid airport, though, is a bit pedestrian. So to extend our food extravaganza for one more meal, we skip the “meh” restaurants and buy a package of the top-end iberian ham -- the bellota, from the free range Iberian pigs fattening up on acorns. We can’t bring it into the US, but it’s an 8-hour flight from Madrid to Chicago. That package never makes it as far at US landfall.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #139</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_139.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #139 — Brewing Best Hotel Room Coffee; Notes from Spain','','inherit','closed','closed','','1961-revision-v1','','','2018-04-03 09:05:06','2018-04-03 14:05:06','',1961,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/04/03/1961-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1972,1,'2018-04-12 21:41:17','2018-04-13 02:41:17','<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/IMG_1145.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1009\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/IMG_1145-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>Returning to the mic after 10 days of food, wine, wind, rain, and snow in the north of Spain. I talk about traveling in Spain, and with my guest Coleman Collins about how to make the best coffee in your hotel room.  All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_139.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/422166231\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #139:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. Just got back Sunday night from 10 days in Spain -- about 4 days each in Madrid and San Sebastian, with a couple of days in the Rioja wine region in between. A friend on the East Coast sent me a note while I was in Spain -- “Good week to be out of town; we got whacked with yet another dump of snow.” Not quite. It’s been a cold Spring in Europe and Spain has been no different. Our first weekend in Madrid was in the upper 30’s/low 40’s with a mix of rain and wet snow. Which turned into just snow as we drove up to Rioja. Some of that drive reminded me of I-70 in the Colorado Rockies -- go into a tunnel with fine weather; come out of it to blowing snow. Having said that, it was nothing like the 7 or 9 or 14 inches that Winter Storm Toby dropped on the East Coast last week. And even with lousy weather, the food and the wine in Spain makes it hard to sustain any sort of cranky attitude, though it shorten up our pintxos crawl through Logroño.</li>\r\n 	<li>We flew Iberia to Madrid because: a) they have a non-stop flight from Chicago and b) as I mentioned <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">a few episodes ago</a>, I was finally able to burn off some of those Avios points that had been collecting cobwebs in my BA account. I decided to try Iberia’s Premium Economy service on the flight over. Most airlines are using this sorta “tweener” service to capture revenue from people willing to pay a bit more for some comfort, but aren’t willing to go the 2-300% Business Class uplift out of their own pocket. And it was truly a “tweener” service -- about 5 rows between the Business and regular Coach cabins, and coach seats with spacing and recline somewhere between domestic First Class and, say, United’s Economy Plus. The meal service was the same as Economy, but they served us first, and they gave us a little amenities kit with just the essentials -- earplugs, eye mask, socks, and a toothbrush. It was as-advertised -- Coach with a bit more space, which made for better napping on the 8-hour flight over. I’ve talked in past episodes that I really question the value-for-money with Business Class on Transatlantic flights, but this tweener class was a reasonable deal.</li>\r\n 	<li>The deeper recline of the Premium Economy seat also makes it easier for you to stay in your space when you sleep. On the way back, I was in regular Coach because -- well, I’m cheap and didn’t need to sleep. But the guy next to me did. He nodded off as soon as we left the ground, which meant he didn’t recline his seat, which meant that he started to list to port, toward my shoulder. This guy looked like he was the younger brother of Dos Equis’ “Most Interesting Man”. But there was no amount of interesting that was going to have him sleeping on my shoulder. Just as he was about to touch down on my shoulder, I gave our seat row a bit of a shake -- some single row turbulence. He startled awake, realized what he was doing, and immediately sat straight up. Stay upright, my friend.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">P.I.H.E. by Budapest BluesBoy (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hepepe/26362 Ft: Inna Barmash - Zhurbin</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Just a quick addendum to the luggage thread we’ve been running over the last couple of episodes. In the last episode Jerry Sarfati talked about downsizing from a 22 to a 20-inch carry-on bag because of the hassles he’d gotten from American Airlines gate agents. I mentioned then that I haven’t had any problems from American, and didn’t get pulled over on my Chicago-to-Madrid Iberia flight. Just goes to show you how much discretion gate agents have. I didn’t test it on the way back home -- 2 bottles bought in Rioja tasting rooms and a tin of olive oil tipped me way over the liquid limit.</li>\r\n 	<li>The EU’s no roaming rules also let me skip what had become our first day of European vacation ritual of burning a couple of hours in a phone store buying local SIM cards for our mobile phones. Instead, the week before we left, I fired up EE’s iPhone app and topped up our UK SIMs. Somewhere over the Bay of Biscay, after my breakfast tray was cleared, I swapped out my AT&amp;T SIM. Once on the ground, I turned on my phone and was good to go. And because the whole family has EE SIMs, it was easy to call each other when we got separated on our pintxos crawls. I know that everyone just messages nowadays, but I’m still one of those knuckledraggers who occasionally finds talking quicker than texting.</li>\r\n 	<li>While in Madrid, I also added to my subway “tap-n-go” card collection for €2.50 -- or about $3 at current exchange rates. The interesting twist on Madrid’s system is that you can tap up to 4 people through the turnstile with a single card, so I only had to buy one tap card for the whole family. I’d load it up with 10 rides -- which seemed to be the only option -- we’d line up behind one turnstile, then tap through and pass it back. Getting out, we just walked through the turnstile since the Madrid Metro fare system seems based on zones rather than start and ending stations. Just adding it to the growing stack...</li>\r\n 	<li>In past episodes, I’ve talked about how I’ve come to value the service I get from Hertz with President’s Club status. And so I rented a car from Hertz in Madrid for our drive up to Rioja for wine tasting and then over to San Sebastian and back. On Tuesday morning, we headed to Atocha train station, found the Hertz counter, and then I sent my family to get breakfast because I knew from past experience renting cars in Spain, that I was in for 30 minutes of hard upselling. It didn’t matter that I had already booked on-line at Hertz.com and selected the options I wanted, I was going to get sold. Mel, the Hertz agent, spoke excellent American English -- all the right terms, slang, colloquialisms. Telling me the rate I got was “crazy low” -- I’d used our corporate rate plus cashed in some Hertz points -- because I didn’t have any insurance. And then came the big push -- writing down big liability numbers, huge damage possibilities -- even though a lot of this was covered by our corporate rate and the credit card. After this, there was the upsell for the car -- did you know you booked a manual, can you drive a manual -- because, well, no Americans know how to work a clutch. I just smiled and nodded, and let Mel work through his spiel -- I had kinda hoped that my status would save me, but nope, there was no short-circuiting this. After he was done, I said “No” to everything. I finally got the keys just as my family finished breakfast, and then off we went. I would’ve been frustrated if I hadn’t expected it and budgeted time for it. Instead, I was just slightly weary. I’m glad my wife got me a coffee to-go.</li>\r\n 	<li>And in the seeming obligatory craft beer segment of TravelCommons, having the rental car let me hit the Basqueland Brewing Project taproom outside of San Sebastian. It had a very American feel to it -- winding through a light industrial area, finding the place by spotting the picnic tables in front of the open loading door, walking past the foosball table and shelves holding 20-kg sacks of malt, the fluorescent pink cord blocking access to the brewing area. And for good reason, the place is owned by 3 Americans. One of them was working the taps when we arrived. He quickly flipped from Spanish to English when we ordered. Originally from Baltimore, he came over 6 years ago when his wife wanted to move back home. Nice guy, good beer.</li>\r\n 	<li>Rob Cheshire, a TravelCommons listener and Untappd friend, hit the comments section on the last episode -- first, to egg me on about my comment in the last episode to do a One City, Five Taprooms layover video, and then about taprooms near Wrigley Field when he comes in to see the Reds play the Cubs. I managed to string together a 6-taproom crawl; he may need to break that up into a couple of rounds.</li>\r\n 	<li>And, to Rob’s first question, I actually will do a taproom layover video, but instead of basing it out of ORD like my last layover video, I’m going to do this one from MDW -- give those Southwest fliers some love. It’ll let me hit 4 taprooms that have opened in the past couple of years in what can only be described as the “post-industrial” landscape of Chicago’s near south side. It should be fun. Working on the scheduling now. Will shoot it in April. With the additional production time video requires, it might not get up until May, but I’ll keep everyone posted</li>\r\n 	<li>One last thing -- last week I tweeted out a link to a pretty rigorous study from the FlyHealthy Research Team out of Emory University in Atlanta about passenger movements on transcontinental flights and what it means for the spread of respiratory diseases. The team took 10 flights, logging passenger movements, taking air samples, and swabs of hard surfaces. I won’t go through the whole study -- I’ll put a <a href=\"http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/03/13/1711611115\">link</a> in the show notes for those who want to read it, which I encourage you to do; it’s very readable as scientific papers go -- but the main takeaways for me were: a) you really only have to be concerned about the people immediately in front, behind, and next to you -- a one-row radius; b) the people wiping down their trays, armrests, and seat belt buckles with Purell Wipes are wasting their time; and c) if you’re really worried, get a window seat in the front part of the plane and don’t leave it for the entire flight (which, as a side benefit, will also endear you to your row mates). As one who has called planes “flying petri dishes”, I was pleasantly surprised by the Emory team’s findings.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">~aether theories~ by Vidian (c) copyright 2018 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Vidian/57398 Ft: Gurdonark, White-throated Sparrow</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Brewing the Best Hotel Room Coffee</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Interview with Coleman Collins. His blog post on brewing hotel room coffee is <a href=\"https://roadwarrior.blog/hotel-room-coffee/\">here</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Tools of the Trade by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/56512 Ft: Abstract Audio, Mr Yesterday, Martijn de Boer, Speck</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Notes from Spain</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>This was our 4th spring trip to Spain. Our first trip we hit Madrid and Barcelona, the usual suspects. The next trip, we headed south to Andalucia -- Córdoba, Granada, Ronda, Seville -- during Semana Santa, Holy Week, and saw penitential processions every day in every town and city we visited, culminating in Holy Thursday night outside of Seville Cathedral. The last trip, in 2016, we headed back down South, but even further, taking a boat across the Straits of Gibraltar to Tangier, Morocco. For this trip, we gave up warm weather for some new territory -- Rioja and the Basque Country.</li>\r\n 	<li>As I said at the top of the show, for me, Spain is about food and wine. There’s certainly culture -- the Semana Santa processions are phenomenal cultural events, standing in front of the huge canvas of Picasso’s Guernica in the Reina Sofia in Madrid, the Mezquita in Cordoba,... -- but it’s the food and wine that keep bringing us back.</li>\r\n 	<li>On our first trip to Granada, we were staying in a Marriott -- maybe one of their AC properties -- in the middle of town. A great building; it had been a convent at one time. There was an interior courtyard; we had a nightcap there one night. 4 glasses of wine at the hotel bar -- figuring $12-15/glass, I’m waiting for a 40 euro tab. It was 12 euros -- I love this country.</li>\r\n 	<li>The pintxos crawl was the food center of this trip north, first in Logroño and then in San Sebastian, walking from bar to bar -- a glass of wine and a bite at each. It was a good mix of food. In Logroño, we started at a couple of dive-ier, more local places that focused on just one pintxos -- sauteed mushrooms at one, ground lamb sandwich at the next, the meat seared on a flat grill behind the bar, and then served on a bun with a great tasting green sauce -- and serving local Rioja wines, pulling the bottles from a bucket at the end of the bar. We then swung into a distinctly higher end place, complete with a Michelin sticker on the front door; more variety of food -- seared red tuna, pickled white anchovies, grilled octopus -- and the next level up of Rioja wines. Later in the week, in San Sebastian, when the weather turned a bit better, we could see the crawl pick up volume in the pedestrian streets of the old town; people still bundled up a bit, but taking their wine outside, and willing to walk to the next place rather than hunkering down for a couple of courses in the warmth.</li>\r\n 	<li>Cider is big in the Basque Country, though it’s drier, not as sweet as you get in the US or the UK. And during cider season -- January through April -- the siderias, the cider houses in the hills outside of San Sebastian, open up to serve cider streamed directly from the tap of huge chestnut wood barrels into your glass, and then the glass of the person behind you,... and a traditional menu of salt-cod omelette, fresh cod fried with peppers and onions, and damn big grilled t-bones served either standing up or at communal tables. We ended up sharing a meal with a busload of folks from just over the border in France. A couple dozen of us lined up as a worker manned the tap -- letting a thin stream of cider out. We lined up our wide-mouthed plastic tumblers about three feet away to impart a bit of fizz to the three fingers of cider that we caught before moving out of the stream to let it hit the tumbler that someone was holding right below ours.</li>\r\n 	<li>For a great food country, the food at Madrid airport, though, is a bit pedestrian. So to extend our food extravaganza for one more meal, we skip the “meh” restaurants and buy a package of the top-end iberian ham -- the bellota, from the free range Iberian pigs fattening up on acorns. We can’t bring it into the US, but it’s an 8-hour flight from Madrid to Chicago. That package never makes it as far at US landfall.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #139</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_139.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #139 — Brewing Best Hotel Room Coffee; Notes from Spain','','inherit','closed','closed','','1961-revision-v1','','','2018-04-12 21:41:17','2018-04-13 02:41:17','',1961,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/04/12/1961-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1973,1,'2018-04-12 21:43:41','2018-04-13 02:43:41','[caption id=\"attachment_1949\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/iStock-535339649.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1949\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/iStock-535339649-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> TSA! Look at What You\'ve Done to Me![/caption]\r\n\r\nFebruary is a tough time to be in the Midwest, so when my travel took me south, to New Orleans and then to Florida, there was no bitch tweeting about the TSA lines or flight delays. In this episode, I walk through how each change in airport security has pushed me to be more hipster and how we all want to understand the real cause of the flight delays that inconvenience us. Also a good bit of listener feedback extending the on-going luggage discussion. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_138.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/406850538\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #138:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. This has been a good travel month for me. Not too heavy, and all my travel had me headed south -- an important thing in February when you live in Chicago. The week before Mardi Gras, I headed down to New Orleans for a meeting. It easily could’ve been an overnight trip, but neither my wife nor I had been down in a while, so she came down with me. We caught some parades -- Nyx, Chaos, Muses -- ate way too much food, and except for a cold rain Wednesday night, had great weather. On Thursday, we were walking along the Mississippi back to the French Quarter from the Bywater neighborhood in bright sunshine and upper 60’s while Chicago was getting slammed with 8-12 inches of snow.</li>\r\n 	<li>When flew back to Chicago Friday night, we were able to thread the gap between the Friday end of that 8-12 inch drop and the start of the Saturday-Sunday 5-inch fall. Timing is everything. We came to the airport prepared for a long delay -- fully charged batteries, and muffaletta sandwiches and a mini king cake from Cochon Butcher. Southwest had cancelled this same flight the night before and that morning -- understandable given the snow -- so we didn’t think we wouldn’t get home; it was just going to be a question of how long. As it turned out, we were only an hour late, which given the weather, felt as good as on-time.</li>\r\n 	<li>Last week, I managed to point myself south again, this time to Florida -- Orlando and Miami -- and was able to skip two days of a heavy cold rain. The JW Marriott in Miami upgraded me to a room with a balcony on the 20th floor -- I didn’t have an ocean view, but I sat outside, 75 degrees, drinking a couple of beers, watching the sun go down, looking over to some of the rooftop bar action in the Brickell neighborhood. Miami is always an experience. It’s not the southernmost US big city, but rather the northernmost Latin American big city. I was reminded of that in the airport when I heard them paging someone in Spanish -- twice. They didn’t even bother wasting their time with English.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- Leviathan by Kirkoid (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Kirkoid/31109</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Lots of comments about luggage since the last episode, which makes sense -- the last episode was heavy on luggage talk between the continuing thread on the smart luggage ban and the suitcase buying tips which I then ported over to a blog post.\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>So, starting off, Allan Marko forwarded along the latest e-mails from Away luggage, one of the few smart bags with removable batteries and so not caught up in the smart luggage ban. Or so they thought until Delta decided to add their own twist to the ban. If the battery in the bag requires a tool to remove it -- which the original Away bag does -- you have to remove it from the bag before you board -- whether you’re carrying on the bag or gate-checking it. The later version of the Away bag has an ejectable pop-up battery which Delta thinks is OK. What a mess! This is what happens when engineers run amok -- and I can say that as a recovering engineer. These guys are going to keep tweaking and twisting this, which will just confuse gate agents and frustrate passengers -- which is why I’ve mothballed my smart bag and bought another Anker lipstick charger.</li>\r\n 	<li>Steve Frick hit the TravelCommons web site and left this comment -- “I replaced my luggage with the exact same bag as I had before, a TravelPro. It was an easy choice, I like you, wanted a simple bag. I knew my gear would fit, I already knew what to put in the outside pockets. One of the guys I work with recently bought and then returned a 4-wheel spinner. The reason for the return……. he discovered that most hotel parking lots weren’t level and each time he let go of the bag to raise the trunk lid his bag rolled away.” Steve, I had that same problem with my Bluesmart 4-wheeler, except in airports rather than parking lots. I’d put the Bluesmart against the wall in a restroom and it would wander away.</li>\r\n 	<li>Jerry Sarfati posted on the TravelCommons Facebook page -- “Mark, great episode as usual” Thanks, Jerry! “I had a different experience when choosing a new bag. I was stopped twice by American Airlines gate agents telling me my 22\" bag was too big. I’m in Group 2. So I settled for the 20\" Victorinox spinner.” I asked Jerry if they made him put it in a bag sizer. “Once only. It barely fit, and she said ‘too big, it must slide in easily, it must be checked’. Other time the agent said the sizer is missing, but ‘I can already see it won\'t fit’. I didn\'t want to argue and get thrown off the flight.” Jerry, that -- in technical travel terms -- is bullshit. I remember one time in Boston Logan, I got shunted over to the bag sizer by the Icelandic Air gate agent. And I knew I was on the bubble because this was the trip I’ve talked about a couple of times where I had to pack for 10 days between Iceland and Southern Spain in one carry-on. I grabbed that bag by the side handle, had it about chest high, and then drove it into the bag sizer with all my might. It was either going to fit, break the bag or blow apart the bag sizer. Luckily, it fit -- though the gate agent jumped back just a bit when the bag hit the bottom of the sizer. She let me carry it on. I flew 3 legs on American last week with my 22-incher and didn’t get a glance. But having said that, you made the right choice -- discretion is the better part of valor. Gate agents have complete discretion. Obey or get bounced. Too bad you got caught up by other folks’ power trips.</li>\r\n 	<li>Back on the web site, Robert Fenerty wrote “I want a four-wheel spinner; my wife loves hers. But I won’t get one, because I believe that bags with only two wheels have a bit more interior space than four-wheelers of the same length. That’s because the spinners can’t tuck into the side of the bag so you’re losing the inch or two between the middle of the spinner wheel and the top of the stem that attaches the spinner to the bottom of the bag. How’s that for OCD?” Robert, I’ll see your OCD and raise you! I pulled out a metal ruler and measured the ground clearance difference between my Victorinox 2-wheeler and my wife’s Samsonite 4-wheel spinner. I measured a 1.5-inch difference. Multiply that by the 14x9-inch base size gives you a 189 cubic inch cost for spinner agility. I look at that being one day’s worth of workout kit.</li>\r\n 	<li>Also on the web site, Jim McDonough wrote “My favorite bag was a Rick Steves 21” rollaboard that had just one compartment and two really good wheels. I used it for a decade and finally had problems with my wife’s bag (wheel fell apart) and the side of mine cracked from all the abuse. He doesn’t sell them any more, because it was a hair too big for European airlines. We are now using Samsonite spinners. They don’t hold as much as the old Rick bags. We only check bags when we are staying in one place for at least a week. Carrying on is simply liberating.” Liberating in a couple of ways -- not standing around waiting for the luggage carousel to start to get your bag, and not waiting around for it to stop to confirm that airline has lost it. I remember one trip where BA forced me to gate-check a bag, and then somehow lost it -- how you lose a bag in the, say, 50 ft between the jet bridge and baggage hold I’ll never know. The problem was -- I was in a different city every day. And so, they’d deliver the bag to my hotel the next morning after I’d already checked out and headed for my first meeting. This went on for a couple of days until I finally convinced them to leapfrog me and send it two stops one. Liberating myself from well-worn clothes -- I love it when I can find happiness in the small things.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Another reminder that Miami is a bit different -- the in-room coffee machine at the JW Marriott wasn’t the standard issue single cupper with Starbucks Pike Place filter disks (that, by the way, are always too big for the filter holder). Instead, it was an Illy espresso machine with its own special little capsules and branded demitasse cups. Took me a couple of tries to get the capsule properly situated, but after that, I ran through all 3, 4 (?) of the capsules in 15 minutes and was ready to attack the day.</li>\r\n 	<li>Last month, The Aviating Railfanner stopped by the TravelCommons YouTube page and left a comment on the 2012 video O\'Hare Layover Excursion: a 6-Hour Tour of Chicago saying “I think it would be a good idea to mention that the Randolph/Wabash station has been demolished and is now the Washington/Wabash station” Good point. Indeed, there are a more than a few things that have changed in the 5 years since I did that video. I stole the idea from the “One City, Five Hours” series that United used to have in their Hemisphere’s magazine. The locations are still good -- Wrigley Field, Millenium Park, the Picasso. I’m not sure in this age of Uber if the focus on the subway/the L is still valid. I may see if I can lightly edit this video -- insert some text to send people to the right station, and update the 1-day travel pass options -- and then think about some new options, like maybe a craft beer taproom-focused layover tour. There you go, One City, Five Taprooms and then come roaring back into the TSA line. Hmmm, I may need to rethink that one.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you’re thinking about any questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Ethereal (nop mix) by @nop (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Lancefield/34818</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Travel Is Turning Me Hipster</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Not wanting to turn this into the “Luggage Today” podcast, but when I was shifting things from my Bluesmart to my new Victorinox bag, I also restructured my toiletries kit. And as I was going through the contents -- what stays, what don’t I need anymore -- it struck me how much my travelling had changed something as basic as how I started my day.</li>\r\n 	<li>It started years, no decades ago -- sometime in the late ‘80’s or early ‘90’s. I was living in Philadelphia and flying to Europe pretty frequently, and at that time, the only real direct flight over the Atlantic (can I tell you how much I hate it when people say “The Pond”; it just puts my teeth on edge) was a BA 747 into Heathrow. Now, back then, I loved Heathrow. It was a great airport with fantastic connections. Now it’s an overcrowed shitshow that I avoid at all costs, but back then, it was great. Anyhow, at some point, Heathrow security required all electric devices to be pulled out for screening. Note I didn’t say “electronic”; this was before laptops and tablets and mobile phones were ubiquitous. No, this meant things like my electric razor had to be pulled out of my bag. Two go-rounds with Heathrow security and that Philips razor got jettisoned for a Gillette non-electric blade.</li>\r\n 	<li>Fast forward a decade-and-a-half to August 2006. I woke up in the SFO Marriott to the news of the foiled plot to blow up London-to-US flights by disguising separate explosive ingredients in soda bottles then then assembling and detonating them on board. I was trying to fly back the next day. Baggage check lines exploded when all the flyers with toothpaste, shaving cream, make-up -- pretty much everyone -- were made to check their bags. That weekend, I re-worked my toiletries kit -- hitting the local Whole Foods for tooth powder to replace toothpaste, hair wax for hair gel, and trading the shaving cream that I picked up in that last revamp for a badger hair shaving brush. I think this was the tipping point -- when my kit started to skew hipster.</li>\r\n 	<li>Fast forward another decade-and-a-half to this Christmas. My son gives me a selection of travel sized shaving soaps, each in their own tin container with a screw top. My daughter gives me a bottle of Lush toothy tabs -- kinda compressed tooth powder. These immediately go into my travel kit. My son forwards me a Massdrop buy for an Oristo razor -- a $100 version of my grandfather’s safety razor, precision engineered for a “very efficient yet non-aggressive shaving experience”. I think seriously about this. My toiletry kit has gone almost full hipster.</li>\r\n 	<li>And though I’ve slagged on the TSA for God knows how many episodes over the life of this podcast, I do have to thank them for one thing, keeping my toiletry kit from going full-on hipster, because I know they’ll never allow me to shift to shaving with a straight razor.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">My Flaming Heart by Wired Ant (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Wired_Ant/36862 Ft: Javolenus</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Every Delay Has a Story</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>In the last episode, I talked about why I dropped my subscription to TripIt’s paid “Pro” service -- the main benefit, live flight status notifications, was slower than the free notifications I was getting from the airlines themselves -- from American, United, and Delta. However, when we were idling in the New Orleans airport waiting on our flight back to Chicago, I found the Southwest delay notifications lagged way behind TripIt Pro. Not that I re-upped my TripIt Pro subscription; my wife forgot to cancel a 30-day trial she signed up for, so she now has a year’s subscription. I, instead, was using FlightAware, specifically the feature I’ve talked about in prior episodes that shows you where your plane is. From that I could see that the delay wasn’t because of the snow in Chicago; the plane was spending a lot of time on the ground in Ft Lauderdale, the stop before New Orleans. So I hit Twitter -- Why is flight 860 sitting in FLL so long? The reply -- “Hey, Mark. We know delays can be tough, and apologize for the inconvenience. It looks like Flight #860 is delayed due to inclement weather earlier in the day.” Perhaps a delay in Denver, but why the long ground turn in FLL? No answer.</li>\r\n 	<li>United announced a pilot program in January called “Every Flight Has A Story” where they’d push out much more detailed information on delayed flights -- rather than “Late Arriving Aircraft”, it would be “Our maintenance team is replacing an item on your plane and needs extra time to complete”. The pilot was scheduled for Houston and Phoenix. I haven’t seen much reaction to it, but at least for me, having some sense for the reason for a delay let’s me better figure out what I’m going to do next. I’m much less trusting of a newly posted departure time if I know the inbound plane is still on the ground, or if it’s a maintenance delay.</li>\r\n 	<li>Of course, some of those explanations could be a bit more embarrassing than others. Like for Southwest, a couple of days after our flight back to Chicago, they had to cancel more than 200 flights because they ran out of de-icing fluid at Midway airport. You get that notification, and you’re shaking your head as you dial up an airline that knows how to fly in the winter.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #138</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_138.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #138 — Travel Turning Me Hipster; Every Delay Has a Story','','inherit','closed','closed','','1947-revision-v1','','','2018-04-12 21:43:41','2018-04-13 02:43:41','',1947,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/04/12/1947-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1974,1,'2018-04-12 21:47:48','2018-04-13 02:47:48','[caption id=\"attachment_1938\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/IMG_0091.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1938\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/IMG_0091-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Rejected and Retired Suitcases[/caption]\r\n\r\nI\'ve been putting off shopping for a new bag for a long time, as in years. Up until a few months ago, I was using a vintage Swiss Army black roller that still sported the Vietnamese and Hong Kong customs stickers it picked up in 2008. A few years ago, I\'d retired it in favor of a grey Samsonite bag, but had to force the old vet back into service when the Samsonite’s rollers got wonky — the rubber wore off and the wheels splayed out after 2½ years of trundling across New Orleans sidewalks.\r\n\r\nBut then, right before Thanksgiving, the old Swiss guy resigned, rendering itself unusable when its retractable handle stuck in the extended position. I was still able to avoid luggage shopping, though. I  pulled out the Bluesmart smart bag I\'d bought from their Indiegogo fundraising campaign. I recharged the battery, updated its iPhone app, and put it back into service -- only to read the next week that it was about to be banned by airlines because its lithium battery isn\'t removable.\r\n\r\nWith nothing left in the attic, I was finally forced to shop for a new suitcase. But what to buy? I started with a survey of fellow travelers. Actually, it was more like stalking; I eyeballed every piece of luggage that passed by me for two weeks. Then I wandered through the basement luggage departments of a couple of Macy\'s, opening bags and waving off clerks. After all that, I gave into my OCD and built this prioritized list of suitcase shopping evaluation criteria:\r\n<ol>\r\n 	<li><em>The bag has to be a carry-on</em>. Now that may seem a bit of a “duh”, but there is some ambiguity; the <a href=\"https://travel-made-simple.com/carry-on-size-chart/\">approved height</a> of a carry-on bag varies by airline between 19 and 22-inches. If I want to play it safe, I’d go for a 20-inch bag, but then I also want to maximize my carry-on space. Most US carriers accept a 22-inch bag and that’s mostly what I fly, and even when I’m on European carriers I usually have enough alliance status to glide past the baggage sizer. So I tilt the balance in favor of maximum packing volume and go for a 22-inch bag.</li>\r\n 	<li>I<em>t needs to be black</em>. As I said in my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/10/18/ruthless-packing-tips/\">Ruthless Packing Tips post</a>, black not only makes you look thinner, it makes your bag look thinner to gate agents scanning for bag-sizer bait. Black also doesn\'t show stains. My grey Samsonite bag, after 3-4 months of my travel schedule, started to look a lot less non-black. Smudges from grease on overhead bin hinges, muck from taxi trunks, muddy water from New Orleans gutters, spilled coffee…. It\'s why I can\'t have nice luggage.</li>\r\n 	<li><em>Two wheels, not four</em>. This is more of a personal preference. My Bluesmart is a 4-wheel spinner and my wife swears by hers, but because the 4 wheels have to extend from the bottom of the bag, spinners sacrifice packing space for agility. Also, I find 4-wheelers have a tendency to wander off -- rolling away down ramps or on uneven floors. I go for the 2-wheeler, and with the biggest wheels I can find to make it an easier, smoother pull. I was surprised how much this limited my selection. Spinners definitely rule.</li>\r\n 	<li><em>The inside of the suitcase has to be plain and empty</em>. No clever collection of zipped compartments, or built-in suit hangers, or ratcheting clothes dividers; just a wide open box that I\'m free to structure how I want for each trip. I was surprised how this also limited my selection. Indeed, in the end, I couldn’t find just a plain box, and settled for a bag where I could detach the suit hanger and clothes divider and stash that stuff up in Luggage Retirement Home next to the Bluesmart.</li>\r\n 	<li><em>Buy on-line</em>. A <a href=\"https://www.testfacts.com/luggage-prices-analyzed/\">recent study</a> of 32,672 luggage price showed that you can save an average of $110/39% buying on-line. Walmart and Target’s on-line stores had the highest discounts. And while Amazon was in 10th place for average discount (in the 40% range), it was tops with the greatest variety — over 12,000 luggage items.</li>\r\n</ol>','Tips for Buying A Suitcase','','inherit','closed','closed','','1937-revision-v1','','','2018-04-12 21:47:48','2018-04-13 02:47:48','',1937,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/04/12/1937-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1975,1,'2018-04-12 22:04:02','2018-04-13 03:04:02','<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/IMG_1145.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1009\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/IMG_1145-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>Returning to the mic after 10 days of food, wine, wind, rain, and snow in the north of Spain. I talk about traveling in Spain, and with my guest Coleman Collins about how to make the best coffee in your hotel room.  All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_139.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/422166231\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #139:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. Just got back Sunday night from 10 days in Spain -- about 4 days each in Madrid and San Sebastian, with a couple of days in the Rioja wine region in between. A friend on the East Coast sent me a note while I was in Spain -- “Good week to be out of town; we got whacked with yet another dump of snow.” Not quite. It’s been a cold Spring in Europe and Spain has been no different. Our first weekend in Madrid was in the upper 30’s/low 40’s with a mix of rain and wet snow. Which turned into just snow as we drove up to Rioja. Some of that drive reminded me of I-70 in the Colorado Rockies -- go into a tunnel with fine weather; come out of it to blowing snow. Having said that, it was nothing like the 7 or 9 or 14 inches that Winter Storm Toby dropped on the East Coast last week. And even with lousy weather, the food and the wine in Spain makes it hard to sustain any sort of cranky attitude, though it shorten up our pintxos crawl through Logroño.</li>\r\n 	<li>We flew Iberia to Madrid because: a) they have a non-stop flight from Chicago and b) as I mentioned <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">a few episodes ago</a>, I was finally able to burn off some of those Avios points that had been collecting cobwebs in my BA account. I decided to try Iberia’s Premium Economy service on the flight over. Most airlines are using this sorta “tweener” service to capture revenue from people willing to pay a bit more for some comfort, but aren’t willing to go the 2-300% Business Class uplift out of their own pocket. And it was truly a “tweener” service -- about 5 rows between the Business and regular Coach cabins, and coach seats with spacing and recline somewhere between domestic First Class and, say, United’s Economy Plus. The meal service was the same as Economy, but they served us first, and they gave us a little amenities kit with just the essentials -- earplugs, eye mask, socks, and a toothbrush. It was as-advertised -- Coach with a bit more space, which made for better napping on the 8-hour flight over. I’ve talked in past episodes that I really question the value-for-money with Business Class on Transatlantic flights, but this tweener class was a reasonable deal.</li>\r\n 	<li>The deeper recline of the Premium Economy seat also makes it easier for you to stay in your space when you sleep. On the way back, I was in regular Coach because -- well, I’m cheap and didn’t need to sleep. But the guy next to me did. He nodded off as soon as we left the ground, which meant he didn’t recline his seat, which meant that he started to list to port, toward my shoulder. This guy looked like he was the younger brother of Dos Equis’ “Most Interesting Man”. But there was no amount of interesting that was going to have him sleeping on my shoulder. Just as he was about to touch down on my shoulder, I gave our seat row a bit of a shake -- some single row turbulence. He startled awake, realized what he was doing, and immediately sat straight up. Stay upright, my friend.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">P.I.H.E. by Budapest BluesBoy (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hepepe/26362 Ft: Inna Barmash - Zhurbin</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Just a quick addendum to the luggage thread we’ve been running over the last couple of episodes. In the last episode Jerry Sarfati talked about downsizing from a 22 to a 20-inch carry-on bag because of the hassles he’d gotten from American Airlines gate agents. I mentioned then that I haven’t had any problems from American, and didn’t get pulled over on my Chicago-to-Madrid Iberia flight. Just goes to show you how much discretion gate agents have. I didn’t test it on the way back home -- 2 bottles bought in Rioja tasting rooms and a tin of olive oil tipped me way over the liquid limit.</li>\r\n 	<li>The EU’s no roaming rules also let me skip what had become our first day of European vacation ritual of burning a couple of hours in a phone store buying local SIM cards for our mobile phones. Instead, the week before we left, I fired up EE’s iPhone app and topped up our UK SIMs. Somewhere over the Bay of Biscay, after my breakfast tray was cleared, I swapped out my AT&amp;T SIM. Once on the ground, I turned on my phone and was good to go. And because the whole family has EE SIMs, it was easy to call each other when we got separated on our pintxos crawls. I know that everyone just messages nowadays, but I’m still one of those knuckledraggers who occasionally finds talking quicker than texting.</li>\r\n 	<li>While in Madrid, I also added to my subway “tap-n-go” card collection for €2.50 -- or about $3 at current exchange rates. The interesting twist on Madrid’s system is that you can tap up to 4 people through the turnstile with a single card, so I only had to buy one tap card for the whole family. I’d load it up with 10 rides -- which seemed to be the only option -- we’d line up behind one turnstile, then tap through and pass it back. Getting out, we just walked through the turnstile since the Madrid Metro fare system seems based on zones rather than start and ending stations. Just adding it to the growing stack...</li>\r\n 	<li>In past episodes, I’ve talked about how I’ve come to value the service I get from Hertz with President’s Club status. And so I rented a car from Hertz in Madrid for our drive up to Rioja for wine tasting and then over to San Sebastian and back. On Tuesday morning, we headed to Atocha train station, found the Hertz counter, and then I sent my family to get breakfast because I knew from past experience renting cars in Spain, that I was in for 30 minutes of hard upselling. It didn’t matter that I had already booked on-line at Hertz.com and selected the options I wanted, I was going to get sold. Mel, the Hertz agent, spoke excellent American English -- all the right terms, slang, colloquialisms. Telling me the rate I got was “crazy low” -- I’d used our corporate rate plus cashed in some Hertz points -- because I didn’t have any insurance. And then came the big push -- writing down big liability numbers, huge damage possibilities -- even though a lot of this was covered by our corporate rate and the credit card. After this, there was the upsell for the car -- did you know you booked a manual, can you drive a manual -- because, well, no Americans know how to work a clutch. I just smiled and nodded, and let Mel work through his spiel -- I had kinda hoped that my status would save me, but nope, there was no short-circuiting this. After he was done, I said “No” to everything. I finally got the keys just as my family finished breakfast, and then off we went. I would’ve been frustrated if I hadn’t expected it and budgeted time for it. Instead, I was just slightly weary. I’m glad my wife got me a coffee to-go.</li>\r\n 	<li>And in the seeming obligatory craft beer segment of TravelCommons, having the rental car let me hit the Basqueland Brewing Project taproom outside of San Sebastian. It had a very American feel to it -- winding through a light industrial area, finding the place by spotting the picnic tables in front of the open loading door, walking past the foosball table and shelves holding 20-kg sacks of malt, the fluorescent pink cord blocking access to the brewing area. And for good reason, the place is owned by 3 Americans. One of them was working the taps when we arrived. He quickly flipped from Spanish to English when we ordered. Originally from Baltimore, he came over 6 years ago when his wife wanted to move back home. Nice guy, good beer.</li>\r\n 	<li>Rob Cheshire, a TravelCommons listener and Untappd friend, hit the comments section on the last episode -- first, to egg me on about my comment in the last episode to do a One City, Five Taprooms layover video, and then about taprooms near Wrigley Field when he comes in to see the Reds play the Cubs. I managed to string together a 6-taproom crawl; he may need to break that up into a couple of rounds.</li>\r\n 	<li>And, to Rob’s first question, I actually will do a taproom layover video, but instead of basing it out of ORD like my last layover video, I’m going to do this one from MDW -- give those Southwest fliers some love. It’ll let me hit 4 taprooms that have opened in the past couple of years in what can only be described as the “post-industrial” landscape of Chicago’s near south side. It should be fun. Working on the scheduling now. Will shoot it in April. With the additional production time video requires, it might not get up until May, but I’ll keep everyone posted</li>\r\n 	<li>One last thing -- last week I tweeted out a link to a pretty rigorous study from the FlyHealthy Research Team out of Emory University in Atlanta about passenger movements on transcontinental flights and what it means for the spread of respiratory diseases. The team took 10 flights, logging passenger movements, taking air samples, and swabs of hard surfaces. I won’t go through the whole study -- I’ll put a <a href=\"http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/03/13/1711611115\">link</a> in the show notes for those who want to read it, which I encourage you to do; it’s very readable as scientific papers go -- but the main takeaways for me were: a) you really only have to be concerned about the people immediately in front, behind, and next to you -- a one-row radius; b) the people wiping down their trays, armrests, and seat belt buckles with Purell Wipes are wasting their time; and c) if you’re really worried, get a window seat in the front part of the plane and don’t leave it for the entire flight (which, as a side benefit, will also endear you to your row mates). As one who has called planes “flying petri dishes”, I was pleasantly surprised by the Emory team’s findings.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">~aether theories~ by Vidian (c) copyright 2018 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Vidian/57398 Ft: Gurdonark, White-throated Sparrow</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Brewing the Best Hotel Room Coffee</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Interview with Coleman Collins. His blog post on brewing hotel room coffee is <a href=\"https://roadwarrior.blog/hotel-room-coffee/\">here</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Tools of the Trade by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/56512 Ft: Abstract Audio, Mr Yesterday, Martijn de Boer, Speck</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Notes from Spain</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>This was our 4th spring trip to Spain. Our first trip we hit Madrid and Barcelona, the usual suspects. The next trip, we headed south to Andalucia -- Córdoba, Granada, Ronda, Seville -- during Semana Santa, Holy Week, and saw penitential processions every day in every town and city we visited, culminating in Holy Thursday night outside of Seville Cathedral. The last trip, in 2016, we headed back down South, but even further, taking a boat across the Straits of Gibraltar to Tangier, Morocco. For this trip, we gave up warm weather for some new territory -- Rioja and the Basque Country.</li>\r\n 	<li>As I said at the top of the show, for me, Spain is about food and wine. There’s certainly culture -- the Semana Santa processions are phenomenal cultural events, standing in front of the huge canvas of Picasso’s Guernica in the Reina Sofia in Madrid, the Mezquita in Cordoba,... -- but it’s the food and wine that keep bringing us back.</li>\r\n 	<li>On our first trip to Granada, we were staying in a Marriott -- maybe one of their AC properties -- in the middle of town. A great building; it had been a convent at one time. There was an interior courtyard; we had a nightcap there one night. 4 glasses of wine at the hotel bar -- figuring $12-15/glass, I’m waiting for a 40 euro tab. It was 12 euros -- I love this country.</li>\r\n 	<li>The pintxos crawl was the food center of this trip north, first in Logroño and then in San Sebastian, walking from bar to bar -- a glass of wine and a bite at each. It was a good mix of food. In Logroño, we started at a couple of dive-ier, more local places that focused on just one pintxos -- sauteed mushrooms at one, ground lamb sandwich at the next, the meat seared on a flat grill behind the bar, and then served on a bun with a great tasting green sauce -- and serving local Rioja wines, pulling the bottles from a bucket at the end of the bar. We then swung into a distinctly higher end place, complete with a Michelin sticker on the front door; more variety of food -- seared red tuna, pickled white anchovies, grilled octopus -- and the next level up of Rioja wines. Later in the week, in San Sebastian, when the weather turned a bit better, we could see the crawl pick up volume in the pedestrian streets of the old town; people still bundled up a bit, but taking their wine outside, and willing to walk to the next place rather than hunkering down for a couple of courses in the warmth.</li>\r\n 	<li>Cider is big in the Basque Country, though it’s drier, not as sweet as you get in the US or the UK. And during cider season -- January through April -- the siderias, the cider houses in the hills outside of San Sebastian, open up to serve cider streamed directly from the tap of huge chestnut wood barrels into your glass, and then the glass of the person behind you,... and a traditional menu of salt-cod omelette, fresh cod fried with peppers and onions, and damn big grilled t-bones served either standing up or at communal tables. We ended up sharing a meal with a busload of folks from just over the border in France. A couple dozen of us lined up as a worker manned the tap -- letting a thin stream of cider out. We lined up our wide-mouthed plastic tumblers about three feet away to impart a bit of fizz to the three fingers of cider that we caught before moving out of the stream to let it hit the tumbler that someone was holding right below ours.</li>\r\n 	<li>For a great food country, the food at Madrid airport, though, is a bit pedestrian. So to extend our food extravaganza for one more meal, we skip the “meh” restaurants and buy a package of the top-end iberian ham -- the bellota, from the free range Iberian pigs fattening up on acorns. We can’t bring it into the US, but it’s an 8-hour flight from Madrid to Chicago. That package never makes it as far at US landfall.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #139</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_139.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #139 — Brewing Best Hotel Room Coffee; Notes from Spain','','inherit','closed','closed','','1961-revision-v1','','','2018-04-12 22:04:02','2018-04-13 03:04:02','',1961,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/04/12/1961-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1977,1,'2018-04-30 20:42:02','2018-05-01 01:42:02','[caption id=\"attachment_1985\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/6AB2DE86-7AE4-4DAF-AD9F-DEFB51F737E0-01.jpeg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1985\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/6AB2DE86-7AE4-4DAF-AD9F-DEFB51F737E0-01-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> The Look of Augmented Reality?[/caption]\n\nBroke out the mobile unit to record this episode in the Buckhead neighborhood of Atlanta; much warmer than getting caught in a spring snow storm in Milwaukee. When much of the travel tech news is about the latest phone apps, we talk about physical travel technology that we can touch and carry. <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">And when flying during the past two weeks, flight attendants\' safety demonstrations have become a bit more strident. </span>All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_140.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #140:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you from the Hyatt Place-Buckhead in Atlanta, GA missing what I hope is the long-delayed start of Spring finally showing up the Midwest. I have done damn little travel since the last episode -- a couple of drives to a client up north of Milwaukee, a quick trip to Minneapolis last week, and flight this morning down to Atlanta. I managed to avoid the foot of late April snow in Minnesota but got caught by 3-4 inches in Milwaukee. Luckily, I’d looked at the forecast before I left and, walking out to the garage, grabbed my LL Bean boots and threw them into the trunk of the car Which saved my dress shoes later that evening and the next morning on unshoveled walks and is is the good thing about driving; I didn’t have to worry about space constraints. I couldn’t have done the same thing flying to Minneapolis.</li>\n 	<li>I ended up flying Southwest to Minneapolis because: a) they were the cheapest flight out on Monday morning at short notice; and b) it let me meet an A-List challenge that Southwest had sent me at the beginning of the year -- fly 3 roundtrips by the end of April and get A-List for the rest of the year. Now, I don’t fly Southwest a whole lot, so I can’t completely justify what I pushed to do this challenge -- except just because it was a challenge, I guess. That, and it’ll make it easier for those times I end up on Southwest this year. I won’t have to pay the $12 for auto check-in or set an alarm to check in 24 hours before flight time -- both of which typically only get me in the second or “B” boarding group. Not an earth shattering perk, but anything that reduces travel hassles is a good thing.</li>\n 	<li>When I went Chicago Midway airport on last Monday to catch that flight, I ran into a new TSA trick -- funnel everyone through a single-file U-turn line to be sniffed a TSA agent and a dog, after people headed into either regular security or TSA PreCheck. Which, at 7am on a Monday morning, quickly pushed the security line back into the hallway toward the parking garage. So, after spending what looks like the $190 million a year the past couple of years on screening technology like those snazzy full-body scanners that people empty their pockets and line up for, the TSA is now having us line up for yet another a new screening technology -- but at least this technology is cute. And when was the last time you heard a traveler wanting to pet the body scanner.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/media/files/DJBLUE/11541\">Hear Me</a></em> by DJ Blue</li>\n</ul>\n<h3><strong>Following Up</strong></h3>\n<ul>\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">A couple of things for those not following my Twitter or the TravelCommons Facebook page…</span>\n<ul>\n 	<li>First, for those Amazon fans, Alexa will now play the latest episode of TravelCommons for you if you ask nicely. I got an Echo Spot in a schwag bag for a conference in January. I put it on the standing desk in my home office and started playing around with it. After listening to the WJS Minute Briefing as part of my Flash Briefing, I started thinking about how to get TravelCommons onto it. At first, I thought I was going to have to figure out how to build an Alexa skill, but digging a little deeper, I found out that the TuneIn app is sorta the default podcast player for Alexa. So after I got TravelCommons approved for TuneIn -- felt like they had an actual human check out my app -- it appeared on my Echo Spot. So if you say, “Alexa, play TravelCommons podcast”, she should play the latest episode for you. Check out the Facebook page or my Twitter feed for a quick video showing the magic happen</li>\n 	<li>Second, I took advantage of being in town and the crap April weather to do the filming for the Midway taproom tour layover video. As I mentioned in the last episode, the idea has been to feature an itinerary out of Chicago’s “other” airport -- what was Chicago’s original airport that morphed into the budget airline airport that morphed into Southwest Airlines’ biggest operation. We used Uber and Lyft to hit 4 taprooms in what can only be described as the “post-industrial” landscape of Chicago’s near south side. We started by driving past the Cook County prison en route to Lagunitas’ plant and taproom that’s built in an old steel mill. While New Belgium and Sierra Nevada landed their national expansions in the much more bucolic environs of the North Carolina Smoky Mountains, Lagunitas’ owner Tony Magee dropped his expansion in a dodgy part of Chicago. We then hit smaller scale, more local places that have repurposed old manufacturing plants in less-visited Chicago neighborhoods -- Lo Rez in Pilsen, Marz in what can charitably described as “lower” Bridgeport, and then ending up at Whiner Beer in the Back of the Yards neighborhood -- where the Chicago Stockyards used to be decades ago. I started working on production, but then looked at the calendar and knew that I only had time for either this episode or the video. And since I’ve worked hard on keeping a monthly cadence of podcast episodes, I kicked the video into next month. So watch Facebook, Twitter, and the web site for the post. Since it’s a bit more narrow scope, I don’t think I’ll put the video in the podcast feed; not sure the non-beer-drinking listeners will want some 100 meg video clogging up their internet.</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>While sitting in the backseat of one of those Lyft rides, I noticed something new on the pink Lyft light that many drivers have in the middle of their dash. You always see the front of it -- the pink Lyft logo -- from the outside, through the front windshield. Glancing at the back of it from inside of the car, I something flash by. Looking more closely, I saw a little message scroll by - “15 min eta”. I saw it again in the Lyft car I took to MSP on last Tuesday. I asked the driver about it. He told me that Lyft sent it to him after he did 300 rides -- “bit of a status thing” he said. I told him about the Uber dash light that I saw in New York, that let me adjust the color of the light from the app -- I talked about this in a prior episode. He thought that was pretty cool too, but he liked Lyft, the company, better than Uber, and he appreciated his messaging light.</li>\n 	<li>All sorts of press releases drop into the TravelCommons mailbox, but the one announcing April 24, last Tuesday, as the first National Business Traveler Day caught my eye. I guess because it’s new, it hasn’t made it onto the National Day Calendar, a list of these sorts of designations. It’s a good choice of date, though, because there is only one national day listed on the 24th -- National Pigs-In-A-Blanket Day -- which, I can imagine, some First or Business Class flight attendants might reasonably associate with some sleeping business travelers. National Business Traveler Day was announced (created?) by “Upside Business Travel, the first online travel service built just for the do-it-yourself (DIY) business traveler” in recognition of “the important contributions made by business travelers to America\'s economy.” I dunno, this could go in so many snarky directions -- with the pigs-in-a-blanket thing as just a starter. I have to say, though, I felt very unrecognized when I walked into MSP Terminal 2 the afternoon of National Business Travelers Day -- an obvious frequent business traveler: wearing a black blazer, head-down on the iPhone, speedwalking to the furthest security checkpoint because it’s the only one with PreCheck. Nobody was gave me a thank-you, a flower, a hug, but then again, the first person I had contact with was an old, overweight but jolly TSA screener. Nice guy, but not sure I would’ve wanted a hug from him.</li>\n 	<li>And it could’ve been that MSP’s Terminal 2 which I’ll add to my list of ghetto terminals, the land of misbegotten travelers, which also includes ORD’s T2, Detroit’s North Terminal, Madrid’s 4S satellite terminal, Munich’s T2 satellite terminal… I’ve talked about this before. In fortress hubs, like ORD, DTW, and MSP, the terminals the hub airlines use is clean, bright, has lots of restaurant and shopping choices. Delta’s terminal in Detroit has an airy 2 or 3-story ceiling with a monorail train running the length of the terminal up at the top. The North terminal that every other airline is dumped into is the old terminal that Delta -- or actually Northwest left behind, with a bit of a clean up and 3 restaurants. Delta’s terminal in Minneapolis is the same story -- lots of shops and restaurants, a big craft beer bar, all with a bit of that North Woods feel. Terminal 2 - generic airport sterility, a Subway sandwich joint, a bar where all the handles were removed from the beer taps. And there’s no inside-security connections between these terminals in MSP and DTW if you want to check out the better side -- it’s a 10-minute bus ride and another pass through security. At least in ORD, you can walk from T2 to the American or United terminals and hit Rick Bayless’ Torta Frontera for great Mexican food or Goose Island for a good beer. On Tuesday, I was stuck in the Humphrey Terminal with my Subway sandwich and a choice of Bud Light or Blue Moon -- which maybe was fitting on National Business Traveler Day.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/media/files/savoyard/10743\">Madrugada</a></em> by Savoyard</li>\n</ul>\n<h3><strong>Travel Tech Gets Physical</strong></h3>\n<ul>\n 	<li>In addition to press releases about National Business Travelers Day, I also get press releases announcing new funding rounds for travel startups. These things come in waves. Like the wave of companies building tour aggregation platforms. That investment thesis went -- because millennials are more into experiential travel, they’re more likely to spend money on something like a food tour or hang gliding; the market for travel experiences is fragmented making discovery and purchasing difficult; our platform will solve this problem by aggregating experience providers and providing world-class search and user experience. The latest wave seems to be about building platforms that “reduce the pain” of corporate business travel. In April, in addition to Upside’s National Business Traveler Day announcement, Rocketrip sent out a release about their $15 million funding round and TravelPerk, who sponsored our January episode, touted their $21 million round -- which sounds like, some 20+ years after Travelocity and Expedia hit the market, companies continue to spend millions of dollars trying to figure out how to replace travel agents.</li>\n 	<li>At times, it feels like much of the work on improving travel is virtual, about software -- new apps, new search platforms, better ways to spit out a single travel itinerary. But in spite of the venture capital mantra that “software is eating the world,” travel is inherently physical -- we want to move our bodies, our stuff from Point A to Point B, and most often back again. It seems like the ‘60’s were the golden age of this, when Boeing and Airbus’ predecessors and the Russians were designing and building supersonic planes. I really felt ancient the other day telling some Millennial staffers about, how way back when, Concorde would fly from JFK to LHR in less than 3 hrs. Now it seems that Boeing and Airbus are completely focused on cramming more people into subsonic flying buses. Logical, but not very aspirational. Now if all the work on hyperloops -- the test circuits, the design contests -- actually turns into something, and isn’t just high-tech hobbies for Elon Musk and Richard Branson -- we’ll be onto something.</li>\n 	<li>But in the meantime, in the space between now -- thinner, more uncomfortable plane seats and hotel keys that keep demagnetizing -- and the inspirational future -- us whizzing along in pods at 750 mph, doing LA to SF in 35 minutes without having to buy CO2 offsets to feel better about ourselves -- what are some of the physical things about to hit?</li>\n 	<li>One thing that seems to be finally hitting critical mass is real-time luggage tracking through RFID luggage tags. Logistics is another thing that’s hard, but it feels that airports and some airlines, Delta especially, have slogged through deploying enough RFID readers along the miles of luggage conveyor belts in the bowels of most of the airports they use, and then wiring it back in near real-time to their smartphone apps so that it’s useful. I’m hoping the combination of competitive pressure, falling equipment pricing, and government fines will push the rest of the airlines to follow suit. For me, real-time location tracking was the main use case for smart bags like BlueSmart. If I can get this through RFID tags, I’ll feel a lot less salty about the smart bag ban.</li>\n 	<li>Wearables also get a lot of buzz. Carnival Cruise Lines has been the latest, announcing their “Ocean Medallion” last year as a way to “personalize” your cruise experience -- and, of course, to make it easier to buy drinks on board. Nothing really new here. Disney’s been doing this forever; 20 years ago, I remember using a wristband at Northstar ski resort in Tahoe to track how many vertical feet we’d skied in a day, and to easily buy beers in the lodge. I’m wondering what happens here if the current noise about the use (and misuse) of personal data by Facebook and others resets people’s privacy vs. ease-of-use balance point rather than just blowing over. For me, it’s less about how the companies use the data (though I’m not completely unconcerned about this) and more about their inability to secure it. Seems like every couple of weeks, another travel company admits to some hack of, say, their point-of-sale system and the associated loss of millions of names and credit card numbers. Doesn’t incent me to let them track my movements and spending habits.</li>\n 	<li>AR/VR -- Augmented and virtual reality continues to buzz. I’ve talked about Google Translate’s AR feature -- point your camera at, say, a menu or washing machine, and it’ll display the translation over the original text in real-time. It’s not perfect -- the translations can rapidly change, sorta flicker between different interpretations, but it’s often “good enough”, and a whole lot quicker than banging in each menu entree. Google has tried to extend this real-time translation from visual to speech with their Pixel Bud headphones with much more Version 1.0 mixed results. I’m probably being way overly optimistic here, but if the Buds follow the same improvement trajectory, they could be pretty cool in 3 years’ time.</li>\n 	<li>It really gets buzzy when we move from AR to VR. A guy at a VR start-up talked to me about using VR in hotel rooms for what he called “social viewing”. Rather than watching, say Black Mirror on Netflix on your laptop or one of those Enseo TVs I’m seeing more and more of, you strap on a VR headset, as does your spouse or kids, and you’re all watching together in a virtual living room or virtual theater. And then there’s always the pitch -- why fly over to, say, Madrid to see Picasso’s Guernica in the Reina Sofia when you strap on a VR headset and “be” in the room instantly? Hey, remember how virtual reality turned out in The Matrix movies? Yeah, I think I’ll keep my travel physical.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/media/files/djlang59/10579\">Crazy Love</a></em> by DJ Lang</li>\n</ul>\n<h3><strong>You <em>Will</em> Pay Attention to the Safety Briefing</strong></h3>\n<ul>\n 	<li>The selfie of passengers on Southwest flight 1380 not wearing the oxygen masks correctly went viral in the days after the engine explosion, along with the stories -- the guy telling the woman next to him that she didn’t need to squeeze the airbag, and the guy who logged into WiFi and Facebook Live before putting on his mask. The flight attendant interviews that seemingly every news outlet did dripped with schadenfreude -- no one ever pays attention to the safety videos or demonstrations, and look what happened!</li>\n 	<li>Improving airline safety records have let people grow numb as to how unnatural air travel is -- flying over 600 mph at 35,000 ft. Flight 1380 was the first accident-related fatality on a US airliner since 2009, and the Southwest’s first ever -- since it was founded in 1971.</li>\n 	<li>I’ll admit that I don’t pay attention to every demo, especially when I do multiple flights in a single week. I do typically look around me for the nearest exits -- in front and behind me -- because those can change pretty often with different seat configurations. I will pay attention, as a refresher, if I haven’t flown for a couple of weeks -- like last week’s flight to MSP. Or if it’s a plane I haven’t flown in a while, I’ll look at the seat back card -- like I did today when noticing I was in a Boeing 717, a pretty rare event for me.</li>\n 	<li>I have noticed that the flight attendants’ requests/demands for attention have become a bit more strident since 1380. On my Southwest flight back home from MSP last week, the flight attendant chanted “Nose and mouth; nose and mouth!”, eliciting some nervous laughter.</li>\n 	<li>The attendant on my Delta flight this morning was a bit more direct, perhaps fatalistic this morning. “Please pay attention! We’re doing this for you. But if you don’t want to watch us, well, I guess it’s your life…”</li>\n</ul>\n<h3><strong>Closing</strong></h3>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #140</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a> and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_140.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #140 — Travel Tech Gets Physical; Pay Attention to the Safety Briefing','Physical travel technology rather than latest phone app; TSA K9 screening; dingy airport terminals, flight attendants\' safety demonstrations become strident. ','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-140-travel-tech-gets-physical-pay-attention-to-the-safety-briefing','','','2021-09-29 21:58:08','2021-09-30 02:58:08','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=1977',0,'post','',0),
(1978,1,'2018-05-01 12:19:51','2018-05-01 17:19:51','','Podcast #140 — Travel Tech Gets Physical; Pay Attention to the Safety Briefing','','inherit','closed','closed','','1977-revision-v1','','','2018-05-01 12:19:51','2018-05-01 17:19:51','',1977,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/05/01/1977-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1979,1,'2018-05-01 12:22:53','2018-05-01 17:22:53','<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/IMG_1145.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1009\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/IMG_1145-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>Returning to the mic after 10 days of food, wine, wind, rain, and snow in the north of Spain. I talk about traveling in Spain, and with my guest Coleman Collins about how to make the best coffee in your hotel room.  All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_139.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/422166231\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #139:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. Just got back Sunday night from 10 days in Spain -- about 4 days each in Madrid and San Sebastian, with a couple of days in the Rioja wine region in between. A friend on the East Coast sent me a note while I was in Spain -- “Good week to be out of town; we got whacked with yet another dump of snow.” Not quite. It’s been a cold Spring in Europe and Spain has been no different. Our first weekend in Madrid was in the upper 30’s/low 40’s with a mix of rain and wet snow. Which turned into just snow as we drove up to Rioja. Some of that drive reminded me of I-70 in the Colorado Rockies -- go into a tunnel with fine weather; come out of it to blowing snow. Having said that, it was nothing like the 7 or 9 or 14 inches that Winter Storm Toby dropped on the East Coast last week. And even with lousy weather, the food and the wine in Spain makes it hard to sustain any sort of cranky attitude, though it shorten up our pintxos crawl through Logroño.</li>\r\n 	<li>We flew Iberia to Madrid because: a) they have a non-stop flight from Chicago and b) as I mentioned <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">a few episodes ago</a>, I was finally able to burn off some of those Avios points that had been collecting cobwebs in my BA account. I decided to try Iberia’s Premium Economy service on the flight over. Most airlines are using this sorta “tweener” service to capture revenue from people willing to pay a bit more for some comfort, but aren’t willing to go the 2-300% Business Class uplift out of their own pocket. And it was truly a “tweener” service -- about 5 rows between the Business and regular Coach cabins, and coach seats with spacing and recline somewhere between domestic First Class and, say, United’s Economy Plus. The meal service was the same as Economy, but they served us first, and they gave us a little amenities kit with just the essentials -- earplugs, eye mask, socks, and a toothbrush. It was as-advertised -- Coach with a bit more space, which made for better napping on the 8-hour flight over. I’ve talked in past episodes that I really question the value-for-money with Business Class on Transatlantic flights, but this tweener class was a reasonable deal.</li>\r\n 	<li>The deeper recline of the Premium Economy seat also makes it easier for you to stay in your space when you sleep. On the way back, I was in regular Coach because -- well, I’m cheap and didn’t need to sleep. But the guy next to me did. He nodded off as soon as we left the ground, which meant he didn’t recline his seat, which meant that he started to list to port, toward my shoulder. This guy looked like he was the younger brother of Dos Equis’ “Most Interesting Man”. But there was no amount of interesting that was going to have him sleeping on my shoulder. Just as he was about to touch down on my shoulder, I gave our seat row a bit of a shake -- some single row turbulence. He startled awake, realized what he was doing, and immediately sat straight up. Stay upright, my friend.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">P.I.H.E. by Budapest BluesBoy (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hepepe/26362 Ft: Inna Barmash - Zhurbin</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Just a quick addendum to the luggage thread we’ve been running over the last couple of episodes. In the last episode Jerry Sarfati talked about downsizing from a 22 to a 20-inch carry-on bag because of the hassles he’d gotten from American Airlines gate agents. I mentioned then that I haven’t had any problems from American, and didn’t get pulled over on my Chicago-to-Madrid Iberia flight. Just goes to show you how much discretion gate agents have. I didn’t test it on the way back home -- 2 bottles bought in Rioja tasting rooms and a tin of olive oil tipped me way over the liquid limit.</li>\r\n 	<li>The EU’s no roaming rules also let me skip what had become our first day of European vacation ritual of burning a couple of hours in a phone store buying local SIM cards for our mobile phones. Instead, the week before we left, I fired up EE’s iPhone app and topped up our UK SIMs. Somewhere over the Bay of Biscay, after my breakfast tray was cleared, I swapped out my AT&amp;T SIM. Once on the ground, I turned on my phone and was good to go. And because the whole family has EE SIMs, it was easy to call each other when we got separated on our pintxos crawls. I know that everyone just messages nowadays, but I’m still one of those knuckledraggers who occasionally finds talking quicker than texting.</li>\r\n 	<li>While in Madrid, I also added to my subway “tap-n-go” card collection for €2.50 -- or about $3 at current exchange rates. The interesting twist on Madrid’s system is that you can tap up to 4 people through the turnstile with a single card, so I only had to buy one tap card for the whole family. I’d load it up with 10 rides -- which seemed to be the only option -- we’d line up behind one turnstile, then tap through and pass it back. Getting out, we just walked through the turnstile since the Madrid Metro fare system seems based on zones rather than start and ending stations. Just adding it to the growing stack...</li>\r\n 	<li>In past episodes, I’ve talked about how I’ve come to value the service I get from Hertz with President’s Club status. And so I rented a car from Hertz in Madrid for our drive up to Rioja for wine tasting and then over to San Sebastian and back. On Tuesday morning, we headed to Atocha train station, found the Hertz counter, and then I sent my family to get breakfast because I knew from past experience renting cars in Spain, that I was in for 30 minutes of hard upselling. It didn’t matter that I had already booked on-line at Hertz.com and selected the options I wanted, I was going to get sold. Mel, the Hertz agent, spoke excellent American English -- all the right terms, slang, colloquialisms. Telling me the rate I got was “crazy low” -- I’d used our corporate rate plus cashed in some Hertz points -- because I didn’t have any insurance. And then came the big push -- writing down big liability numbers, huge damage possibilities -- even though a lot of this was covered by our corporate rate and the credit card. After this, there was the upsell for the car -- did you know you booked a manual, can you drive a manual -- because, well, no Americans know how to work a clutch. I just smiled and nodded, and let Mel work through his spiel -- I had kinda hoped that my status would save me, but nope, there was no short-circuiting this. After he was done, I said “No” to everything. I finally got the keys just as my family finished breakfast, and then off we went. I would’ve been frustrated if I hadn’t expected it and budgeted time for it. Instead, I was just slightly weary. I’m glad my wife got me a coffee to-go.</li>\r\n 	<li>And in the seeming obligatory craft beer segment of TravelCommons, having the rental car let me hit the Basqueland Brewing Project taproom outside of San Sebastian. It had a very American feel to it -- winding through a light industrial area, finding the place by spotting the picnic tables in front of the open loading door, walking past the foosball table and shelves holding 20-kg sacks of malt, the fluorescent pink cord blocking access to the brewing area. And for good reason, the place is owned by 3 Americans. One of them was working the taps when we arrived. He quickly flipped from Spanish to English when we ordered. Originally from Baltimore, he came over 6 years ago when his wife wanted to move back home. Nice guy, good beer.</li>\r\n 	<li>Rob Cheshire, a TravelCommons listener and Untappd friend, hit the comments section on the last episode -- first, to egg me on about my comment in the last episode to do a One City, Five Taprooms layover video, and then about taprooms near Wrigley Field when he comes in to see the Reds play the Cubs. I managed to string together a 6-taproom crawl; he may need to break that up into a couple of rounds.</li>\r\n 	<li>And, to Rob’s first question, I actually will do a taproom layover video, but instead of basing it out of ORD like my last layover video, I’m going to do this one from MDW -- give those Southwest fliers some love. It’ll let me hit 4 taprooms that have opened in the past couple of years in what can only be described as the “post-industrial” landscape of Chicago’s near south side. It should be fun. Working on the scheduling now. Will shoot it in April. With the additional production time video requires, it might not get up until May, but I’ll keep everyone posted</li>\r\n 	<li>One last thing -- last week I tweeted out a link to a pretty rigorous study from the FlyHealthy Research Team out of Emory University in Atlanta about passenger movements on transcontinental flights and what it means for the spread of respiratory diseases. The team took 10 flights, logging passenger movements, taking air samples, and swabs of hard surfaces. I won’t go through the whole study -- I’ll put a <a href=\"http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/03/13/1711611115\">link</a> in the show notes for those who want to read it, which I encourage you to do; it’s very readable as scientific papers go -- but the main takeaways for me were: a) you really only have to be concerned about the people immediately in front, behind, and next to you -- a one-row radius; b) the people wiping down their trays, armrests, and seat belt buckles with Purell Wipes are wasting their time; and c) if you’re really worried, get a window seat in the front part of the plane and don’t leave it for the entire flight (which, as a side benefit, will also endear you to your row mates). As one who has called planes “flying petri dishes”, I was pleasantly surprised by the Emory team’s findings.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">~aether theories~ by Vidian (c) copyright 2018 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Vidian/57398 Ft: Gurdonark, White-throated Sparrow</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Brewing the Best Hotel Room Coffee</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Interview with Coleman Collins. His blog post on brewing hotel room coffee is <a href=\"https://roadwarrior.blog/hotel-room-coffee/\">here</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Tools of the Trade by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/56512 Ft: Abstract Audio, Mr Yesterday, Martijn de Boer, Speck</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Notes from Spain</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>This was our 4th spring trip to Spain. Our first trip we hit Madrid and Barcelona, the usual suspects. The next trip, we headed south to Andalucia -- Córdoba, Granada, Ronda, Seville -- during Semana Santa, Holy Week, and saw penitential processions every day in every town and city we visited, culminating in Holy Thursday night outside of Seville Cathedral. The last trip, in 2016, we headed back down South, but even further, taking a boat across the Straits of Gibraltar to Tangier, Morocco. For this trip, we gave up warm weather for some new territory -- Rioja and the Basque Country.</li>\r\n 	<li>As I said at the top of the show, for me, Spain is about food and wine. There’s certainly culture -- the Semana Santa processions are phenomenal cultural events, standing in front of the huge canvas of Picasso’s Guernica in the Reina Sofia in Madrid, the Mezquita in Cordoba,... -- but it’s the food and wine that keep bringing us back.</li>\r\n 	<li>On our first trip to Granada, we were staying in a Marriott -- maybe one of their AC properties -- in the middle of town. A great building; it had been a convent at one time. There was an interior courtyard; we had a nightcap there one night. 4 glasses of wine at the hotel bar -- figuring $12-15/glass, I’m waiting for a 40 euro tab. It was 12 euros -- I love this country.</li>\r\n 	<li>The pintxos crawl was the food center of this trip north, first in Logroño and then in San Sebastian, walking from bar to bar -- a glass of wine and a bite at each. It was a good mix of food. In Logroño, we started at a couple of dive-ier, more local places that focused on just one pintxos -- sauteed mushrooms at one, ground lamb sandwich at the next, the meat seared on a flat grill behind the bar, and then served on a bun with a great tasting green sauce -- and serving local Rioja wines, pulling the bottles from a bucket at the end of the bar. We then swung into a distinctly higher end place, complete with a Michelin sticker on the front door; more variety of food -- seared red tuna, pickled white anchovies, grilled octopus -- and the next level up of Rioja wines. Later in the week, in San Sebastian, when the weather turned a bit better, we could see the crawl pick up volume in the pedestrian streets of the old town; people still bundled up a bit, but taking their wine outside, and willing to walk to the next place rather than hunkering down for a couple of courses in the warmth.</li>\r\n 	<li>Cider is big in the Basque Country, though it’s drier, not as sweet as you get in the US or the UK. And during cider season -- January through April -- the siderias, the cider houses in the hills outside of San Sebastian, open up to serve cider streamed directly from the tap of huge chestnut wood barrels into your glass, and then the glass of the person behind you,... and a traditional menu of salt-cod omelette, fresh cod fried with peppers and onions, and damn big grilled t-bones served either standing up or at communal tables. We ended up sharing a meal with a busload of folks from just over the border in France. A couple dozen of us lined up as a worker manned the tap -- letting a thin stream of cider out. We lined up our wide-mouthed plastic tumblers about three feet away to impart a bit of fizz to the three fingers of cider that we caught before moving out of the stream to let it hit the tumbler that someone was holding right below ours.</li>\r\n 	<li>For a great food country, the food at Madrid airport, though, is a bit pedestrian. So to extend our food extravaganza for one more meal, we skip the “meh” restaurants and buy a package of the top-end iberian ham -- the bellota, from the free range Iberian pigs fattening up on acorns. We can’t bring it into the US, but it’s an 8-hour flight from Madrid to Chicago. That package never makes it as far at US landfall.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #139</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_139.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #140 — Travel Tech Gets Physical; Pay Attention to the Safety Briefing','','inherit','closed','closed','','1977-revision-v1','','','2018-05-01 12:22:53','2018-05-01 17:22:53','',1977,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/05/01/1977-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1980,1,'2018-05-01 16:54:31','2018-05-01 21:54:31','<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/IMG_1145.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1009\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/IMG_1145-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>Returning to the mic after 10 days of food, wine, wind, rain, and snow in the north of Spain. I talk about traveling in Spain, and with my guest Coleman Collins about how to make the best coffee in your hotel room.  All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_139.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/422166231\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #140:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. Just got back Sunday night from 10 days in Spain -- about 4 days each in Madrid and San Sebastian, with a couple of days in the Rioja wine region in between. A friend on the East Coast sent me a note while I was in Spain -- “Good week to be out of town; we got whacked with yet another dump of snow.” Not quite. It’s been a cold Spring in Europe and Spain has been no different. Our first weekend in Madrid was in the upper 30’s/low 40’s with a mix of rain and wet snow. Which turned into just snow as we drove up to Rioja. Some of that drive reminded me of I-70 in the Colorado Rockies -- go into a tunnel with fine weather; come out of it to blowing snow. Having said that, it was nothing like the 7 or 9 or 14 inches that Winter Storm Toby dropped on the East Coast last week. And even with lousy weather, the food and the wine in Spain makes it hard to sustain any sort of cranky attitude, though it shorten up our pintxos crawl through Logroño.</li>\r\n 	<li>We flew Iberia to Madrid because: a) they have a non-stop flight from Chicago and b) as I mentioned <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">a few episodes ago</a>, I was finally able to burn off some of those Avios points that had been collecting cobwebs in my BA account. I decided to try Iberia’s Premium Economy service on the flight over. Most airlines are using this sorta “tweener” service to capture revenue from people willing to pay a bit more for some comfort, but aren’t willing to go the 2-300% Business Class uplift out of their own pocket. And it was truly a “tweener” service -- about 5 rows between the Business and regular Coach cabins, and coach seats with spacing and recline somewhere between domestic First Class and, say, United’s Economy Plus. The meal service was the same as Economy, but they served us first, and they gave us a little amenities kit with just the essentials -- earplugs, eye mask, socks, and a toothbrush. It was as-advertised -- Coach with a bit more space, which made for better napping on the 8-hour flight over. I’ve talked in past episodes that I really question the value-for-money with Business Class on Transatlantic flights, but this tweener class was a reasonable deal.</li>\r\n 	<li>The deeper recline of the Premium Economy seat also makes it easier for you to stay in your space when you sleep. On the way back, I was in regular Coach because -- well, I’m cheap and didn’t need to sleep. But the guy next to me did. He nodded off as soon as we left the ground, which meant he didn’t recline his seat, which meant that he started to list to port, toward my shoulder. This guy looked like he was the younger brother of Dos Equis’ “Most Interesting Man”. But there was no amount of interesting that was going to have him sleeping on my shoulder. Just as he was about to touch down on my shoulder, I gave our seat row a bit of a shake -- some single row turbulence. He startled awake, realized what he was doing, and immediately sat straight up. Stay upright, my friend.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">P.I.H.E. by Budapest BluesBoy (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hepepe/26362 Ft: Inna Barmash - Zhurbin</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Just a quick addendum to the luggage thread we’ve been running over the last couple of episodes. In the last episode Jerry Sarfati talked about downsizing from a 22 to a 20-inch carry-on bag because of the hassles he’d gotten from American Airlines gate agents. I mentioned then that I haven’t had any problems from American, and didn’t get pulled over on my Chicago-to-Madrid Iberia flight. Just goes to show you how much discretion gate agents have. I didn’t test it on the way back home -- 2 bottles bought in Rioja tasting rooms and a tin of olive oil tipped me way over the liquid limit.</li>\r\n 	<li>The EU’s no roaming rules also let me skip what had become our first day of European vacation ritual of burning a couple of hours in a phone store buying local SIM cards for our mobile phones. Instead, the week before we left, I fired up EE’s iPhone app and topped up our UK SIMs. Somewhere over the Bay of Biscay, after my breakfast tray was cleared, I swapped out my AT&amp;T SIM. Once on the ground, I turned on my phone and was good to go. And because the whole family has EE SIMs, it was easy to call each other when we got separated on our pintxos crawls. I know that everyone just messages nowadays, but I’m still one of those knuckledraggers who occasionally finds talking quicker than texting.</li>\r\n 	<li>While in Madrid, I also added to my subway “tap-n-go” card collection for €2.50 -- or about $3 at current exchange rates. The interesting twist on Madrid’s system is that you can tap up to 4 people through the turnstile with a single card, so I only had to buy one tap card for the whole family. I’d load it up with 10 rides -- which seemed to be the only option -- we’d line up behind one turnstile, then tap through and pass it back. Getting out, we just walked through the turnstile since the Madrid Metro fare system seems based on zones rather than start and ending stations. Just adding it to the growing stack...</li>\r\n 	<li>In past episodes, I’ve talked about how I’ve come to value the service I get from Hertz with President’s Club status. And so I rented a car from Hertz in Madrid for our drive up to Rioja for wine tasting and then over to San Sebastian and back. On Tuesday morning, we headed to Atocha train station, found the Hertz counter, and then I sent my family to get breakfast because I knew from past experience renting cars in Spain, that I was in for 30 minutes of hard upselling. It didn’t matter that I had already booked on-line at Hertz.com and selected the options I wanted, I was going to get sold. Mel, the Hertz agent, spoke excellent American English -- all the right terms, slang, colloquialisms. Telling me the rate I got was “crazy low” -- I’d used our corporate rate plus cashed in some Hertz points -- because I didn’t have any insurance. And then came the big push -- writing down big liability numbers, huge damage possibilities -- even though a lot of this was covered by our corporate rate and the credit card. After this, there was the upsell for the car -- did you know you booked a manual, can you drive a manual -- because, well, no Americans know how to work a clutch. I just smiled and nodded, and let Mel work through his spiel -- I had kinda hoped that my status would save me, but nope, there was no short-circuiting this. After he was done, I said “No” to everything. I finally got the keys just as my family finished breakfast, and then off we went. I would’ve been frustrated if I hadn’t expected it and budgeted time for it. Instead, I was just slightly weary. I’m glad my wife got me a coffee to-go.</li>\r\n 	<li>And in the seeming obligatory craft beer segment of TravelCommons, having the rental car let me hit the Basqueland Brewing Project taproom outside of San Sebastian. It had a very American feel to it -- winding through a light industrial area, finding the place by spotting the picnic tables in front of the open loading door, walking past the foosball table and shelves holding 20-kg sacks of malt, the fluorescent pink cord blocking access to the brewing area. And for good reason, the place is owned by 3 Americans. One of them was working the taps when we arrived. He quickly flipped from Spanish to English when we ordered. Originally from Baltimore, he came over 6 years ago when his wife wanted to move back home. Nice guy, good beer.</li>\r\n 	<li>Rob Cheshire, a TravelCommons listener and Untappd friend, hit the comments section on the last episode -- first, to egg me on about my comment in the last episode to do a One City, Five Taprooms layover video, and then about taprooms near Wrigley Field when he comes in to see the Reds play the Cubs. I managed to string together a 6-taproom crawl; he may need to break that up into a couple of rounds.</li>\r\n 	<li>And, to Rob’s first question, I actually will do a taproom layover video, but instead of basing it out of ORD like my last layover video, I’m going to do this one from MDW -- give those Southwest fliers some love. It’ll let me hit 4 taprooms that have opened in the past couple of years in what can only be described as the “post-industrial” landscape of Chicago’s near south side. It should be fun. Working on the scheduling now. Will shoot it in April. With the additional production time video requires, it might not get up until May, but I’ll keep everyone posted</li>\r\n 	<li>One last thing -- last week I tweeted out a link to a pretty rigorous study from the FlyHealthy Research Team out of Emory University in Atlanta about passenger movements on transcontinental flights and what it means for the spread of respiratory diseases. The team took 10 flights, logging passenger movements, taking air samples, and swabs of hard surfaces. I won’t go through the whole study -- I’ll put a <a href=\"http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/03/13/1711611115\">link</a> in the show notes for those who want to read it, which I encourage you to do; it’s very readable as scientific papers go -- but the main takeaways for me were: a) you really only have to be concerned about the people immediately in front, behind, and next to you -- a one-row radius; b) the people wiping down their trays, armrests, and seat belt buckles with Purell Wipes are wasting their time; and c) if you’re really worried, get a window seat in the front part of the plane and don’t leave it for the entire flight (which, as a side benefit, will also endear you to your row mates). As one who has called planes “flying petri dishes”, I was pleasantly surprised by the Emory team’s findings.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">~aether theories~ by Vidian (c) copyright 2018 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Vidian/57398 Ft: Gurdonark, White-throated Sparrow</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Brewing the Best Hotel Room Coffee</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Interview with Coleman Collins. His blog post on brewing hotel room coffee is <a href=\"https://roadwarrior.blog/hotel-room-coffee/\">here</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Tools of the Trade by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/56512 Ft: Abstract Audio, Mr Yesterday, Martijn de Boer, Speck</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Notes from Spain</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>This was our 4th spring trip to Spain. Our first trip we hit Madrid and Barcelona, the usual suspects. The next trip, we headed south to Andalucia -- Córdoba, Granada, Ronda, Seville -- during Semana Santa, Holy Week, and saw penitential processions every day in every town and city we visited, culminating in Holy Thursday night outside of Seville Cathedral. The last trip, in 2016, we headed back down South, but even further, taking a boat across the Straits of Gibraltar to Tangier, Morocco. For this trip, we gave up warm weather for some new territory -- Rioja and the Basque Country.</li>\r\n 	<li>As I said at the top of the show, for me, Spain is about food and wine. There’s certainly culture -- the Semana Santa processions are phenomenal cultural events, standing in front of the huge canvas of Picasso’s Guernica in the Reina Sofia in Madrid, the Mezquita in Cordoba,... -- but it’s the food and wine that keep bringing us back.</li>\r\n 	<li>On our first trip to Granada, we were staying in a Marriott -- maybe one of their AC properties -- in the middle of town. A great building; it had been a convent at one time. There was an interior courtyard; we had a nightcap there one night. 4 glasses of wine at the hotel bar -- figuring $12-15/glass, I’m waiting for a 40 euro tab. It was 12 euros -- I love this country.</li>\r\n 	<li>The pintxos crawl was the food center of this trip north, first in Logroño and then in San Sebastian, walking from bar to bar -- a glass of wine and a bite at each. It was a good mix of food. In Logroño, we started at a couple of dive-ier, more local places that focused on just one pintxos -- sauteed mushrooms at one, ground lamb sandwich at the next, the meat seared on a flat grill behind the bar, and then served on a bun with a great tasting green sauce -- and serving local Rioja wines, pulling the bottles from a bucket at the end of the bar. We then swung into a distinctly higher end place, complete with a Michelin sticker on the front door; more variety of food -- seared red tuna, pickled white anchovies, grilled octopus -- and the next level up of Rioja wines. Later in the week, in San Sebastian, when the weather turned a bit better, we could see the crawl pick up volume in the pedestrian streets of the old town; people still bundled up a bit, but taking their wine outside, and willing to walk to the next place rather than hunkering down for a couple of courses in the warmth.</li>\r\n 	<li>Cider is big in the Basque Country, though it’s drier, not as sweet as you get in the US or the UK. And during cider season -- January through April -- the siderias, the cider houses in the hills outside of San Sebastian, open up to serve cider streamed directly from the tap of huge chestnut wood barrels into your glass, and then the glass of the person behind you,... and a traditional menu of salt-cod omelette, fresh cod fried with peppers and onions, and damn big grilled t-bones served either standing up or at communal tables. We ended up sharing a meal with a busload of folks from just over the border in France. A couple dozen of us lined up as a worker manned the tap -- letting a thin stream of cider out. We lined up our wide-mouthed plastic tumblers about three feet away to impart a bit of fizz to the three fingers of cider that we caught before moving out of the stream to let it hit the tumbler that someone was holding right below ours.</li>\r\n 	<li>For a great food country, the food at Madrid airport, though, is a bit pedestrian. So to extend our food extravaganza for one more meal, we skip the “meh” restaurants and buy a package of the top-end iberian ham -- the bellota, from the free range Iberian pigs fattening up on acorns. We can’t bring it into the US, but it’s an 8-hour flight from Madrid to Chicago. That package never makes it as far at US landfall.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #139</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_139.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #140 — Travel Tech Gets Physical; Pay Attention to the Safety Briefing','','inherit','closed','closed','','1977-revision-v1','','','2018-05-01 16:54:31','2018-05-01 21:54:31','',1977,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/05/01/1977-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1981,1,'2018-05-01 16:57:18','2018-05-01 21:57:18','<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/IMG_1145.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1009\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/IMG_1145-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>Returning to the mic after 10 days of food, wine, wind, rain, and snow in the north of Spain. I talk about traveling in Spain, and with my guest Coleman Collins about how to make the best coffee in your hotel room.  All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_139.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/422166231\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #140:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the Hyatt Place-Buckhead in Atlanta, GA missing what I hope is the long-delayed start of Spring finally showing up the Midwest. I have done damn little travel since the last episode -- a couple of drives to a client up north of Milwaukee, a quick trip to Minneapolis last week, and flight this morning down to Atlanta. I managed to avoid the foot of late April snow in Minnesota but got caught by 3-4 inches in Milwaukee. Luckily, I’d looked at the forecast before I left and, walking out to the garage, grabbed my LL Bean boots and threw them into the trunk of the car Which saved my dress shoes later that evening and the next morning on unshoveled walks and is is the good thing about driving; I didn’t have to worry about space constraints. I couldn’t have done the same thing flying to Minneapolis.</li>\r\n 	<li>I ended up flying Southwest to Minneapolis because: a) they were the cheapest flight out on Monday morning at short notice; and b) it let me meet an A-List challenge that Southwest had sent me at the beginning of the year -- fly 3 roundtrips by the end of April and get A-List for the rest of the year. Now, I don’t fly Southwest a whole lot, so I can’t completely justify what I pushed to do this challenge -- except just because it was a challenge, I guess. That, and it’ll make it easier for those times I end up on Southwest this year. I won’t have to pay the $12 for auto check-in or set an alarm to check in 24 hours before flight time -- both of which typically only get me in the second or “B” boarding group. Not an earth shattering perk, but anything that reduces travel hassles is a good thing.</li>\r\n 	<li>When I went Chicago Midway airport on last Monday to catch that flight, I ran into a new TSA trick -- funnel everyone through a single-file U-turn line to be sniffed a TSA agent and a dog, after people headed into either regular security or TSA PreCheck. Which, at 7am on a Monday morning, quickly pushed the security line back into the hallway toward the parking garage. So, after spending what looks like the $190 million a year the past couple of years on screening technology like those snazzy full-body scanners that people empty their pockets and line up for, the TSA is now having us line up for yet another a new screening technology -- but at least this technology is cute. And when was the last time you heard a traveler wanting to pet the body scanner.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">P.I.H.E. by Budapest BluesBoy (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hepepe/26362 Ft: Inna Barmash - Zhurbin</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">A couple of things for those not following my Twitter or the TravelCommons Facebook page…</span>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>First, for those Amazon fans, Alexa will now play the latest episode of TravelCommons for you if you ask nicely. I got an Echo Spot in a schwag bag for a conference in January. I put it on the standing desk in my home office and started playing around with it. After listening to the WJS Minute Briefing as part of my Flash Briefing, I started thinking about how to get TravelCommons onto it. At first, I thought I was going to have to figure out how to build an Alexa skill, but digging a little deeper, I found out that the TuneIn app is sorta the default podcast player for Alexa. So after I got TravelCommons approved for TuneIn -- felt like they had an actual human check out my app -- it appeared on my Echo Spot. So if you say, “Alexa, play TravelCommons podcast”, she should play the latest episode for you. Check out the Facebook page or my Twitter feed for a quick video showing the magic happen</li>\r\n 	<li>Second, I took advantage of being in town and the crap April weather to do the filming for the Midway taproom tour layover video. As I mentioned in the last episode, the idea has been to feature an itinerary out of Chicago’s “other” airport -- what was Chicago’s original airport that morphed into the budget airline airport that morphed into Southwest Airlines’ biggest operation. We used Uber and Lyft to hit 4 taprooms in what can only be described as the “post-industrial” landscape of Chicago’s near south side. We started by driving past the Cook County prison en route to Lagunitas’ plant and taproom that’s built in an old steel mill. While New Belgium and Sierra Nevada landed their national expansions in the much more bucolic environs of the North Carolina Smoky Mountains, Lagunitas’ owner Tony Magee dropped his expansion in a dodgy part of Chicago. We then hit smaller scale, more local places that have repurposed old manufacturing plants in less-visited Chicago neighborhoods -- Lo Rez in Pilsen, Marz in what can charitably described as “lower” Bridgeport, and then ending up at Whiner Beer in the Back of the Yards neighborhood -- where the Chicago Stockyards used to be decades ago. I started working on production, but then looked at the calendar and knew that I only had time for either this episode or the video. And since I’ve worked hard on keeping a monthly cadence of podcast episodes, I kicked the video into next month. So watch Facebook, Twitter, and the web site for the post. Since it’s a bit more narrow scope, I don’t think I’ll put the video in the podcast feed; not sure the non-beer-drinking listeners will want some 100 meg video clogging up their internet.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>The EU’s no roaming rules also let me skip what had become our first day of European vacation ritual of burning a couple of hours in a phone store buying local SIM cards for our mobile phones. Instead, the week before we left, I fired up EE’s iPhone app and topped up our UK SIMs. Somewhere over the Bay of Biscay, after my breakfast tray was cleared, I swapped out my AT&amp;T SIM. Once on the ground, I turned on my phone and was good to go. And because the whole family has EE SIMs, it was easy to call each other when we got separated on our pintxos crawls. I know that everyone just messages nowadays, but I’m still one of those knuckledraggers who occasionally finds talking quicker than texting.</li>\r\n 	<li>While in Madrid, I also added to my subway “tap-n-go” card collection for €2.50 -- or about $3 at current exchange rates. The interesting twist on Madrid’s system is that you can tap up to 4 people through the turnstile with a single card, so I only had to buy one tap card for the whole family. I’d load it up with 10 rides -- which seemed to be the only option -- we’d line up behind one turnstile, then tap through and pass it back. Getting out, we just walked through the turnstile since the Madrid Metro fare system seems based on zones rather than start and ending stations. Just adding it to the growing stack...</li>\r\n 	<li>In past episodes, I’ve talked about how I’ve come to value the service I get from Hertz with President’s Club status. And so I rented a car from Hertz in Madrid for our drive up to Rioja for wine tasting and then over to San Sebastian and back. On Tuesday morning, we headed to Atocha train station, found the Hertz counter, and then I sent my family to get breakfast because I knew from past experience renting cars in Spain, that I was in for 30 minutes of hard upselling. It didn’t matter that I had already booked on-line at Hertz.com and selected the options I wanted, I was going to get sold. Mel, the Hertz agent, spoke excellent American English -- all the right terms, slang, colloquialisms. Telling me the rate I got was “crazy low” -- I’d used our corporate rate plus cashed in some Hertz points -- because I didn’t have any insurance. And then came the big push -- writing down big liability numbers, huge damage possibilities -- even though a lot of this was covered by our corporate rate and the credit card. After this, there was the upsell for the car -- did you know you booked a manual, can you drive a manual -- because, well, no Americans know how to work a clutch. I just smiled and nodded, and let Mel work through his spiel -- I had kinda hoped that my status would save me, but nope, there was no short-circuiting this. After he was done, I said “No” to everything. I finally got the keys just as my family finished breakfast, and then off we went. I would’ve been frustrated if I hadn’t expected it and budgeted time for it. Instead, I was just slightly weary. I’m glad my wife got me a coffee to-go.</li>\r\n 	<li>And in the seeming obligatory craft beer segment of TravelCommons, having the rental car let me hit the Basqueland Brewing Project taproom outside of San Sebastian. It had a very American feel to it -- winding through a light industrial area, finding the place by spotting the picnic tables in front of the open loading door, walking past the foosball table and shelves holding 20-kg sacks of malt, the fluorescent pink cord blocking access to the brewing area. And for good reason, the place is owned by 3 Americans. One of them was working the taps when we arrived. He quickly flipped from Spanish to English when we ordered. Originally from Baltimore, he came over 6 years ago when his wife wanted to move back home. Nice guy, good beer.</li>\r\n 	<li>Rob Cheshire, a TravelCommons listener and Untappd friend, hit the comments section on the last episode -- first, to egg me on about my comment in the last episode to do a One City, Five Taprooms layover video, and then about taprooms near Wrigley Field when he comes in to see the Reds play the Cubs. I managed to string together a 6-taproom crawl; he may need to break that up into a couple of rounds.</li>\r\n 	<li>And, to Rob’s first question, I actually will do a taproom layover video, but instead of basing it out of ORD like my last layover video, I’m going to do this one from MDW -- give those Southwest fliers some love. It’ll let me hit 4 taprooms that have opened in the past couple of years in what can only be described as the “post-industrial” landscape of Chicago’s near south side. It should be fun. Working on the scheduling now. Will shoot it in April. With the additional production time video requires, it might not get up until May, but I’ll keep everyone posted</li>\r\n 	<li>One last thing -- last week I tweeted out a link to a pretty rigorous study from the FlyHealthy Research Team out of Emory University in Atlanta about passenger movements on transcontinental flights and what it means for the spread of respiratory diseases. The team took 10 flights, logging passenger movements, taking air samples, and swabs of hard surfaces. I won’t go through the whole study -- I’ll put a <a href=\"http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/03/13/1711611115\">link</a> in the show notes for those who want to read it, which I encourage you to do; it’s very readable as scientific papers go -- but the main takeaways for me were: a) you really only have to be concerned about the people immediately in front, behind, and next to you -- a one-row radius; b) the people wiping down their trays, armrests, and seat belt buckles with Purell Wipes are wasting their time; and c) if you’re really worried, get a window seat in the front part of the plane and don’t leave it for the entire flight (which, as a side benefit, will also endear you to your row mates). As one who has called planes “flying petri dishes”, I was pleasantly surprised by the Emory team’s findings.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">~aether theories~ by Vidian (c) copyright 2018 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Vidian/57398 Ft: Gurdonark, White-throated Sparrow</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Brewing the Best Hotel Room Coffee</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Interview with Coleman Collins. His blog post on brewing hotel room coffee is <a href=\"https://roadwarrior.blog/hotel-room-coffee/\">here</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Tools of the Trade by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/56512 Ft: Abstract Audio, Mr Yesterday, Martijn de Boer, Speck</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Notes from Spain</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>This was our 4th spring trip to Spain. Our first trip we hit Madrid and Barcelona, the usual suspects. The next trip, we headed south to Andalucia -- Córdoba, Granada, Ronda, Seville -- during Semana Santa, Holy Week, and saw penitential processions every day in every town and city we visited, culminating in Holy Thursday night outside of Seville Cathedral. The last trip, in 2016, we headed back down South, but even further, taking a boat across the Straits of Gibraltar to Tangier, Morocco. For this trip, we gave up warm weather for some new territory -- Rioja and the Basque Country.</li>\r\n 	<li>As I said at the top of the show, for me, Spain is about food and wine. There’s certainly culture -- the Semana Santa processions are phenomenal cultural events, standing in front of the huge canvas of Picasso’s Guernica in the Reina Sofia in Madrid, the Mezquita in Cordoba,... -- but it’s the food and wine that keep bringing us back.</li>\r\n 	<li>On our first trip to Granada, we were staying in a Marriott -- maybe one of their AC properties -- in the middle of town. A great building; it had been a convent at one time. There was an interior courtyard; we had a nightcap there one night. 4 glasses of wine at the hotel bar -- figuring $12-15/glass, I’m waiting for a 40 euro tab. It was 12 euros -- I love this country.</li>\r\n 	<li>The pintxos crawl was the food center of this trip north, first in Logroño and then in San Sebastian, walking from bar to bar -- a glass of wine and a bite at each. It was a good mix of food. In Logroño, we started at a couple of dive-ier, more local places that focused on just one pintxos -- sauteed mushrooms at one, ground lamb sandwich at the next, the meat seared on a flat grill behind the bar, and then served on a bun with a great tasting green sauce -- and serving local Rioja wines, pulling the bottles from a bucket at the end of the bar. We then swung into a distinctly higher end place, complete with a Michelin sticker on the front door; more variety of food -- seared red tuna, pickled white anchovies, grilled octopus -- and the next level up of Rioja wines. Later in the week, in San Sebastian, when the weather turned a bit better, we could see the crawl pick up volume in the pedestrian streets of the old town; people still bundled up a bit, but taking their wine outside, and willing to walk to the next place rather than hunkering down for a couple of courses in the warmth.</li>\r\n 	<li>Cider is big in the Basque Country, though it’s drier, not as sweet as you get in the US or the UK. And during cider season -- January through April -- the siderias, the cider houses in the hills outside of San Sebastian, open up to serve cider streamed directly from the tap of huge chestnut wood barrels into your glass, and then the glass of the person behind you,... and a traditional menu of salt-cod omelette, fresh cod fried with peppers and onions, and damn big grilled t-bones served either standing up or at communal tables. We ended up sharing a meal with a busload of folks from just over the border in France. A couple dozen of us lined up as a worker manned the tap -- letting a thin stream of cider out. We lined up our wide-mouthed plastic tumblers about three feet away to impart a bit of fizz to the three fingers of cider that we caught before moving out of the stream to let it hit the tumbler that someone was holding right below ours.</li>\r\n 	<li>For a great food country, the food at Madrid airport, though, is a bit pedestrian. So to extend our food extravaganza for one more meal, we skip the “meh” restaurants and buy a package of the top-end iberian ham -- the bellota, from the free range Iberian pigs fattening up on acorns. We can’t bring it into the US, but it’s an 8-hour flight from Madrid to Chicago. That package never makes it as far at US landfall.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #139</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_139.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #140 — Travel Tech Gets Physical; Pay Attention to the Safety Briefing','','inherit','closed','closed','','1977-revision-v1','','','2018-05-01 16:57:18','2018-05-01 21:57:18','',1977,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/05/01/1977-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1982,1,'2018-05-01 17:03:44','2018-05-01 22:03:44','<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/IMG_1145.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1009\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/IMG_1145-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>Returning to the mic after 10 days of food, wine, wind, rain, and snow in the north of Spain. I talk about traveling in Spain, and with my guest Coleman Collins about how to make the best coffee in your hotel room.  All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_140.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/422166231\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #140:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the Hyatt Place-Buckhead in Atlanta, GA missing what I hope is the long-delayed start of Spring finally showing up the Midwest. I have done damn little travel since the last episode -- a couple of drives to a client up north of Milwaukee, a quick trip to Minneapolis last week, and flight this morning down to Atlanta. I managed to avoid the foot of late April snow in Minnesota but got caught by 3-4 inches in Milwaukee. Luckily, I’d looked at the forecast before I left and, walking out to the garage, grabbed my LL Bean boots and threw them into the trunk of the car Which saved my dress shoes later that evening and the next morning on unshoveled walks and is is the good thing about driving; I didn’t have to worry about space constraints. I couldn’t have done the same thing flying to Minneapolis.</li>\r\n 	<li>I ended up flying Southwest to Minneapolis because: a) they were the cheapest flight out on Monday morning at short notice; and b) it let me meet an A-List challenge that Southwest had sent me at the beginning of the year -- fly 3 roundtrips by the end of April and get A-List for the rest of the year. Now, I don’t fly Southwest a whole lot, so I can’t completely justify what I pushed to do this challenge -- except just because it was a challenge, I guess. That, and it’ll make it easier for those times I end up on Southwest this year. I won’t have to pay the $12 for auto check-in or set an alarm to check in 24 hours before flight time -- both of which typically only get me in the second or “B” boarding group. Not an earth shattering perk, but anything that reduces travel hassles is a good thing.</li>\r\n 	<li>When I went Chicago Midway airport on last Monday to catch that flight, I ran into a new TSA trick -- funnel everyone through a single-file U-turn line to be sniffed a TSA agent and a dog, after people headed into either regular security or TSA PreCheck. Which, at 7am on a Monday morning, quickly pushed the security line back into the hallway toward the parking garage. So, after spending what looks like the $190 million a year the past couple of years on screening technology like those snazzy full-body scanners that people empty their pockets and line up for, the TSA is now having us line up for yet another a new screening technology -- but at least this technology is cute. And when was the last time you heard a traveler wanting to pet the body scanner.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">P.I.H.E. by Budapest BluesBoy (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hepepe/26362 Ft: Inna Barmash - Zhurbin</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">A couple of things for those not following my Twitter or the TravelCommons Facebook page…</span>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>First, for those Amazon fans, Alexa will now play the latest episode of TravelCommons for you if you ask nicely. I got an Echo Spot in a schwag bag for a conference in January. I put it on the standing desk in my home office and started playing around with it. After listening to the WJS Minute Briefing as part of my Flash Briefing, I started thinking about how to get TravelCommons onto it. At first, I thought I was going to have to figure out how to build an Alexa skill, but digging a little deeper, I found out that the TuneIn app is sorta the default podcast player for Alexa. So after I got TravelCommons approved for TuneIn -- felt like they had an actual human check out my app -- it appeared on my Echo Spot. So if you say, “Alexa, play TravelCommons podcast”, she should play the latest episode for you. Check out the Facebook page or my Twitter feed for a quick video showing the magic happen</li>\r\n 	<li>Second, I took advantage of being in town and the crap April weather to do the filming for the Midway taproom tour layover video. As I mentioned in the last episode, the idea has been to feature an itinerary out of Chicago’s “other” airport -- what was Chicago’s original airport that morphed into the budget airline airport that morphed into Southwest Airlines’ biggest operation. We used Uber and Lyft to hit 4 taprooms in what can only be described as the “post-industrial” landscape of Chicago’s near south side. We started by driving past the Cook County prison en route to Lagunitas’ plant and taproom that’s built in an old steel mill. While New Belgium and Sierra Nevada landed their national expansions in the much more bucolic environs of the North Carolina Smoky Mountains, Lagunitas’ owner Tony Magee dropped his expansion in a dodgy part of Chicago. We then hit smaller scale, more local places that have repurposed old manufacturing plants in less-visited Chicago neighborhoods -- Lo Rez in Pilsen, Marz in what can charitably described as “lower” Bridgeport, and then ending up at Whiner Beer in the Back of the Yards neighborhood -- where the Chicago Stockyards used to be decades ago. I started working on production, but then looked at the calendar and knew that I only had time for either this episode or the video. And since I’ve worked hard on keeping a monthly cadence of podcast episodes, I kicked the video into next month. So watch Facebook, Twitter, and the web site for the post. Since it’s a bit more narrow scope, I don’t think I’ll put the video in the podcast feed; not sure the non-beer-drinking listeners will want some 100 meg video clogging up their internet.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>While sitting in the backseat of one of those Lyft rides, I noticed something new on the pink Lyft light that many drivers have in the middle of their dash. You always see the front of it -- the pink Lyft logo -- from the outside, through the front windshield. Glancing at the back of it from inside of the car, I something flash by. Looking more closely, I saw a little message scroll by - “15 min eta”. I saw it again in the Lyft car I took to MSP on last Tuesday. I asked the driver about it. He told me that Lyft sent it to him after he did 300 rides -- “bit of a status thing” he said. I told him about the Uber dash light that I saw in New York, that let me adjust the color of the light from the app -- I talked about this in a prior episode. He thought that was pretty cool too, but he liked Lyft, the company, better than Uber, and he appreciated his messaging light.</li>\r\n 	<li>All sorts of press releases drop into the TravelCommons mailbox, but the one announcing April 24, last Tuesday, as the first National Business Traveler Day caught my eye. I guess because it’s new, it hasn’t made it onto the National Day Calendar, a list of these sorts of designations. It’s a good choice of date, though, because there is only one national day listed on the 24th -- National Pigs-In-A-Blanket Day -- which, I can imagine, some First or Business Class flight attendants might reasonably associate with some sleeping business travelers. National Business Traveler Day was announced (created?) by “Upside Business Travel, the first online travel service built just for the do-it-yourself (DIY) business traveler” in recognition of “the important contributions made by business travelers to America\'s economy.” I dunno, this could go in so many snarky directions -- with the pigs-in-a-blanket thing as just a starter. I have to say, though, I felt very unrecognized when I walked into MSP Terminal 2 the afternoon of National Business Travelers Day -- an obvious frequent business traveler: wearing a black blazer, head-down on the iPhone, speedwalking to the furthest security checkpoint because it’s the only one with PreCheck. Nobody was gave me a thank-you, a flower, a hug, but then again, the first person I had contact with was an old, overweight but jolly TSA screener. Nice guy, but not sure I would’ve wanted a hug from him.</li>\r\n 	<li>And it could’ve been that MSP’s Terminal 2 which I’ll add to my list of ghetto terminals, the land of misbegotten travelers, which also includes ORD’s T2, Detroit’s North Terminal, Madrid’s 4S satellite terminal, Munich’s T2 satellite terminal… I’ve talked about this before. In fortress hubs, like ORD, DTW, and MSP, the terminals the hub airlines use is clean, bright, has lots of restaurant and shopping choices. Delta’s terminal in Detroit has an airy 2 or 3-story ceiling with a monorail train running the length of the terminal up at the top. The North terminal that every other airline is dumped into is the old terminal that Delta -- or actually Northwest left behind, with a bit of a clean up and 3 restaurants. Delta’s terminal in Minneapolis is the same story -- lots of shops and restaurants, a big craft beer bar, all with a bit of that North Woods feel. Terminal 2 - generic airport sterility, a Subway sandwich joint, a bar where all the handles were removed from the beer taps. And there’s no inside-security connections between these terminals in MSP and DTW if you want to check out the better side -- it’s a 10-minute bus ride and another pass through security. At least in ORD, you can walk from T2 to the American or United terminals and hit Rick Bayless’ Torta Frontera for great Mexican food or Goose Island for a good beer. On Tuesday, I was stuck in the Humphrey Terminal with my Subway sandwich and a choice of Bud Light or Blue Moon -- which maybe was fitting on National Business Traveler Day.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">~aether theories~ by Vidian (c) copyright 2018 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Vidian/57398 Ft: Gurdonark, White-throated Sparrow</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Travel Tech Gets Physical</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>In addition to press releases about National Business Travelers Day, I also get press releases announcing new funding rounds for travel startups. These things come in waves. Like the wave of companies building tour aggregation platforms. That investment thesis went -- because millennials are more into experiential travel, they’re more likely to spend money on something like a food tour or hang gliding; the market for travel experiences is fragmented making discovery and purchasing difficult; our platform will solve this problem by aggregating experience providers and providing world-class search and user experience. The latest wave seems to be about building platforms that “reduce the pain” of corporate business travel. In April, in addition to Upside’s National Business Traveler Day announcement, Rocketrip sent out a release about their $15 million funding round and TravelPerk, who sponsored our January episode, touted their $21 million round -- which sounds like, some 20+ years after Travelocity and Expedia hit the market, companies continue to spend millions of dollars trying to figure out how to replace travel agents.</li>\r\n 	<li>At times, it feels like much of the work on improving travel is virtual, about software -- new apps, new search platforms, better ways to spit out a single travel itinerary. But in spite of the venture capital mantra that “software is eating the world,” travel is inherently physical -- we want to move our bodies, our stuff from Point A to Point B, and most often back again. It seems like the ‘60’s were the golden age of this, when Boeing and Airbus’ predecessors and the Russians were designing and building supersonic planes. I really felt ancient the other day telling some Millennial staffers about, how way back when, Concorde would fly from JFK to LHR in less than 3 hrs. Now it seems that Boeing and Airbus are completely focused on cramming more people into subsonic flying buses. Logical, but not very aspirational. Now if all the work on hyperloops -- the test circuits, the design contests -- actually turns into something, and isn’t just high-tech hobbies for Elon Musk and Richard Branson -- we’ll be onto something.</li>\r\n 	<li>But in the meantime, in the space between now -- thinner, more uncomfortable plane seats and hotel keys that keep demagnetizing -- and the inspirational future -- us whizzing along in pods at 750 mph, doing LA to SF in 35 minutes without having to buy CO2 offsets to feel better about ourselves -- what are some of the physical things about to hit?</li>\r\n 	<li>One thing that seems to be finally hitting critical mass is real-time luggage tracking through RFID luggage tags. Logistics is another thing that’s hard, but it feels that airports and some airlines, Delta especially, have slogged through deploying enough RFID readers along the miles of luggage conveyor belts in the bowels of most of the airports they use, and then wiring it back in near real-time to their smartphone apps so that it’s useful. I’m hoping the combination of competitive pressure, falling equipment pricing, and government fines will push the rest of the airlines to follow suit. For me, real-time location tracking was the main use case for smart bags like BlueSmart. If I can get this through RFID tags, I’ll feel a lot less salty about the smart bag ban.</li>\r\n 	<li>Wearables also get a lot of buzz. Carnival Cruise Lines has been the latest, announcing their “Ocean Medallion” last year as a way to “personalize” your cruise experience -- and, of course, to make it easier to buy drinks on board. Nothing really new here. Disney’s been doing this forever; 20 years ago, I remember using a wristband at Northstar ski resort in Tahoe to track how many vertical feet we’d skied in a day, and to easily buy beers in the lodge. I’m wondering what happens here if the current noise about the use (and misuse) of personal data by Facebook and others resets people’s privacy vs. ease-of-use balance point rather than just blowing over. For me, it’s less about how the companies use the data (though I’m not completely unconcerned about this) and more about their inability to secure it. Seems like every couple of weeks, another travel company admits to some hack of, say, their point-of-sale system and the associated loss of millions of names and credit card numbers. Doesn’t incent me to let them track my movements and spending habits.</li>\r\n 	<li>AR/VR -- Augmented and virtual reality continues to buzz. I’ve talked about Google Translate’s AR feature -- point your camera at, say, a menu or washing machine, and it’ll display the translation over the original text in real-time. It’s not perfect -- the translations can rapidly change, sorta flicker between different interpretations, but it’s often “good enough”, and a whole lot quicker than banging in each menu entree. Google has tried to extend this real-time translation from visual to speech with their Pixel Bud headphones with much more Version 1.0 mixed results. I’m probably being way overly optimistic here, but if the Buds follow the same improvement trajectory, they could be pretty cool in 3 years’ time.</li>\r\n 	<li>It really gets buzzy when we move from AR to VR. A guy at a VR start-up talked to me about using VR in hotel rooms for what he called “social viewing”. Rather than watching, say Black Mirror on Netflix on your laptop or one of those Enseo TVs I’m seeing more and more of, you strap on a VR headset, as does your spouse or kids, and you’re all watching together in a virtual living room or virtual theater. And then there’s always the pitch -- why fly over to, say, Madrid to see Picasso’s Guernica in the Reina Sofia when you strap on a VR headset and “be” in the room instantly? Hey, remember how virtual reality turned out in The Matrix movies? Yeah, I think I’ll keep my travel physical.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Tools of the Trade by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/56512 Ft: Abstract Audio, Mr Yesterday, Martijn de Boer, Speck</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>You <em>Will</em> Pay Attention to the Safety Briefing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>The selfie of passengers on Southwest flight 1380 not wearing the oxygen masks correctly went viral in the days after the engine explosion, along with the stories -- the guy telling the woman next to him that she didn’t need to squeeze the airbag, and the guy who logged into WiFi and Facebook Live before putting on his mask. The flight attendant interviews that seemingly every news outlet did dripped with schadenfreude -- no one ever pays attention to the safety videos or demonstrations, and look what happened!</li>\r\n 	<li>Improving airline safety records have let people grow numb as to how unnatural air travel is -- flying over 600 mph at 35,000 ft. Flight 1380 was the first accident-related fatality on a US airliner since 2009, and the Southwest’s first ever -- since it was founded in 1971.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’ll admit that I don’t pay attention to every demo, especially when I do multiple flights in a single week. I do typically look around me for the nearest exits -- in front and behind me -- because those can change pretty often with different seat configurations. I will pay attention, as a refresher, if I haven’t flown for a couple of weeks -- like last week’s flight to MSP. Or if it’s a plane I haven’t flown in a while, I’ll look at the seat back card -- like I did today when noticing I was in a Boeing 717, a pretty rare event for me.</li>\r\n 	<li>I have noticed that the flight attendants’ requests/demands for attention have become a bit more strident since 1380. On my Southwest flight back home from MSP last week, the flight attendant chanted “Nose and mouth; nose and mouth!”, eliciting some nervous laughter.</li>\r\n 	<li>The attendant on my Delta flight this morning was a bit more direct, perhaps fatalistic this morning. “Please pay attention! We’re doing this for you. But if you don’t want to watch us, well, I guess it’s your life…”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #140</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_140.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #140 — Travel Tech Gets Physical; Pay Attention to the Safety Briefing','','inherit','closed','closed','','1977-revision-v1','','','2018-05-01 17:03:44','2018-05-01 22:03:44','',1977,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/05/01/1977-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1983,1,'2018-05-01 17:51:54','2018-05-01 22:51:54','Broke out the mobile unit to record this episode in the Bucktown neighborhood of Atlanta.  Returning to the mic after 10 days of food, wine, wind, rain, and snow in the north of Spain. I talk about traveling in Spain, and with my guest Coleman Collins about how to make the best coffee in your hotel room.  All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_140.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/422166231\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #140:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the Hyatt Place-Buckhead in Atlanta, GA missing what I hope is the long-delayed start of Spring finally showing up the Midwest. I have done damn little travel since the last episode -- a couple of drives to a client up north of Milwaukee, a quick trip to Minneapolis last week, and flight this morning down to Atlanta. I managed to avoid the foot of late April snow in Minnesota but got caught by 3-4 inches in Milwaukee. Luckily, I’d looked at the forecast before I left and, walking out to the garage, grabbed my LL Bean boots and threw them into the trunk of the car Which saved my dress shoes later that evening and the next morning on unshoveled walks and is is the good thing about driving; I didn’t have to worry about space constraints. I couldn’t have done the same thing flying to Minneapolis.</li>\r\n 	<li>I ended up flying Southwest to Minneapolis because: a) they were the cheapest flight out on Monday morning at short notice; and b) it let me meet an A-List challenge that Southwest had sent me at the beginning of the year -- fly 3 roundtrips by the end of April and get A-List for the rest of the year. Now, I don’t fly Southwest a whole lot, so I can’t completely justify what I pushed to do this challenge -- except just because it was a challenge, I guess. That, and it’ll make it easier for those times I end up on Southwest this year. I won’t have to pay the $12 for auto check-in or set an alarm to check in 24 hours before flight time -- both of which typically only get me in the second or “B” boarding group. Not an earth shattering perk, but anything that reduces travel hassles is a good thing.</li>\r\n 	<li>When I went Chicago Midway airport on last Monday to catch that flight, I ran into a new TSA trick -- funnel everyone through a single-file U-turn line to be sniffed a TSA agent and a dog, after people headed into either regular security or TSA PreCheck. Which, at 7am on a Monday morning, quickly pushed the security line back into the hallway toward the parking garage. So, after spending what looks like the $190 million a year the past couple of years on screening technology like those snazzy full-body scanners that people empty their pockets and line up for, the TSA is now having us line up for yet another a new screening technology -- but at least this technology is cute. And when was the last time you heard a traveler wanting to pet the body scanner.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">P.I.H.E. by Budapest BluesBoy (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hepepe/26362 Ft: Inna Barmash - Zhurbin</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">A couple of things for those not following my Twitter or the TravelCommons Facebook page…</span>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>First, for those Amazon fans, Alexa will now play the latest episode of TravelCommons for you if you ask nicely. I got an Echo Spot in a schwag bag for a conference in January. I put it on the standing desk in my home office and started playing around with it. After listening to the WJS Minute Briefing as part of my Flash Briefing, I started thinking about how to get TravelCommons onto it. At first, I thought I was going to have to figure out how to build an Alexa skill, but digging a little deeper, I found out that the TuneIn app is sorta the default podcast player for Alexa. So after I got TravelCommons approved for TuneIn -- felt like they had an actual human check out my app -- it appeared on my Echo Spot. So if you say, “Alexa, play TravelCommons podcast”, she should play the latest episode for you. Check out the Facebook page or my Twitter feed for a quick video showing the magic happen</li>\r\n 	<li>Second, I took advantage of being in town and the crap April weather to do the filming for the Midway taproom tour layover video. As I mentioned in the last episode, the idea has been to feature an itinerary out of Chicago’s “other” airport -- what was Chicago’s original airport that morphed into the budget airline airport that morphed into Southwest Airlines’ biggest operation. We used Uber and Lyft to hit 4 taprooms in what can only be described as the “post-industrial” landscape of Chicago’s near south side. We started by driving past the Cook County prison en route to Lagunitas’ plant and taproom that’s built in an old steel mill. While New Belgium and Sierra Nevada landed their national expansions in the much more bucolic environs of the North Carolina Smoky Mountains, Lagunitas’ owner Tony Magee dropped his expansion in a dodgy part of Chicago. We then hit smaller scale, more local places that have repurposed old manufacturing plants in less-visited Chicago neighborhoods -- Lo Rez in Pilsen, Marz in what can charitably described as “lower” Bridgeport, and then ending up at Whiner Beer in the Back of the Yards neighborhood -- where the Chicago Stockyards used to be decades ago. I started working on production, but then looked at the calendar and knew that I only had time for either this episode or the video. And since I’ve worked hard on keeping a monthly cadence of podcast episodes, I kicked the video into next month. So watch Facebook, Twitter, and the web site for the post. Since it’s a bit more narrow scope, I don’t think I’ll put the video in the podcast feed; not sure the non-beer-drinking listeners will want some 100 meg video clogging up their internet.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>While sitting in the backseat of one of those Lyft rides, I noticed something new on the pink Lyft light that many drivers have in the middle of their dash. You always see the front of it -- the pink Lyft logo -- from the outside, through the front windshield. Glancing at the back of it from inside of the car, I something flash by. Looking more closely, I saw a little message scroll by - “15 min eta”. I saw it again in the Lyft car I took to MSP on last Tuesday. I asked the driver about it. He told me that Lyft sent it to him after he did 300 rides -- “bit of a status thing” he said. I told him about the Uber dash light that I saw in New York, that let me adjust the color of the light from the app -- I talked about this in a prior episode. He thought that was pretty cool too, but he liked Lyft, the company, better than Uber, and he appreciated his messaging light.</li>\r\n 	<li>All sorts of press releases drop into the TravelCommons mailbox, but the one announcing April 24, last Tuesday, as the first National Business Traveler Day caught my eye. I guess because it’s new, it hasn’t made it onto the National Day Calendar, a list of these sorts of designations. It’s a good choice of date, though, because there is only one national day listed on the 24th -- National Pigs-In-A-Blanket Day -- which, I can imagine, some First or Business Class flight attendants might reasonably associate with some sleeping business travelers. National Business Traveler Day was announced (created?) by “Upside Business Travel, the first online travel service built just for the do-it-yourself (DIY) business traveler” in recognition of “the important contributions made by business travelers to America\'s economy.” I dunno, this could go in so many snarky directions -- with the pigs-in-a-blanket thing as just a starter. I have to say, though, I felt very unrecognized when I walked into MSP Terminal 2 the afternoon of National Business Travelers Day -- an obvious frequent business traveler: wearing a black blazer, head-down on the iPhone, speedwalking to the furthest security checkpoint because it’s the only one with PreCheck. Nobody was gave me a thank-you, a flower, a hug, but then again, the first person I had contact with was an old, overweight but jolly TSA screener. Nice guy, but not sure I would’ve wanted a hug from him.</li>\r\n 	<li>And it could’ve been that MSP’s Terminal 2 which I’ll add to my list of ghetto terminals, the land of misbegotten travelers, which also includes ORD’s T2, Detroit’s North Terminal, Madrid’s 4S satellite terminal, Munich’s T2 satellite terminal… I’ve talked about this before. In fortress hubs, like ORD, DTW, and MSP, the terminals the hub airlines use is clean, bright, has lots of restaurant and shopping choices. Delta’s terminal in Detroit has an airy 2 or 3-story ceiling with a monorail train running the length of the terminal up at the top. The North terminal that every other airline is dumped into is the old terminal that Delta -- or actually Northwest left behind, with a bit of a clean up and 3 restaurants. Delta’s terminal in Minneapolis is the same story -- lots of shops and restaurants, a big craft beer bar, all with a bit of that North Woods feel. Terminal 2 - generic airport sterility, a Subway sandwich joint, a bar where all the handles were removed from the beer taps. And there’s no inside-security connections between these terminals in MSP and DTW if you want to check out the better side -- it’s a 10-minute bus ride and another pass through security. At least in ORD, you can walk from T2 to the American or United terminals and hit Rick Bayless’ Torta Frontera for great Mexican food or Goose Island for a good beer. On Tuesday, I was stuck in the Humphrey Terminal with my Subway sandwich and a choice of Bud Light or Blue Moon -- which maybe was fitting on National Business Traveler Day.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">~aether theories~ by Vidian (c) copyright 2018 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Vidian/57398 Ft: Gurdonark, White-throated Sparrow</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Travel Tech Gets Physical</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>In addition to press releases about National Business Travelers Day, I also get press releases announcing new funding rounds for travel startups. These things come in waves. Like the wave of companies building tour aggregation platforms. That investment thesis went -- because millennials are more into experiential travel, they’re more likely to spend money on something like a food tour or hang gliding; the market for travel experiences is fragmented making discovery and purchasing difficult; our platform will solve this problem by aggregating experience providers and providing world-class search and user experience. The latest wave seems to be about building platforms that “reduce the pain” of corporate business travel. In April, in addition to Upside’s National Business Traveler Day announcement, Rocketrip sent out a release about their $15 million funding round and TravelPerk, who sponsored our January episode, touted their $21 million round -- which sounds like, some 20+ years after Travelocity and Expedia hit the market, companies continue to spend millions of dollars trying to figure out how to replace travel agents.</li>\r\n 	<li>At times, it feels like much of the work on improving travel is virtual, about software -- new apps, new search platforms, better ways to spit out a single travel itinerary. But in spite of the venture capital mantra that “software is eating the world,” travel is inherently physical -- we want to move our bodies, our stuff from Point A to Point B, and most often back again. It seems like the ‘60’s were the golden age of this, when Boeing and Airbus’ predecessors and the Russians were designing and building supersonic planes. I really felt ancient the other day telling some Millennial staffers about, how way back when, Concorde would fly from JFK to LHR in less than 3 hrs. Now it seems that Boeing and Airbus are completely focused on cramming more people into subsonic flying buses. Logical, but not very aspirational. Now if all the work on hyperloops -- the test circuits, the design contests -- actually turns into something, and isn’t just high-tech hobbies for Elon Musk and Richard Branson -- we’ll be onto something.</li>\r\n 	<li>But in the meantime, in the space between now -- thinner, more uncomfortable plane seats and hotel keys that keep demagnetizing -- and the inspirational future -- us whizzing along in pods at 750 mph, doing LA to SF in 35 minutes without having to buy CO2 offsets to feel better about ourselves -- what are some of the physical things about to hit?</li>\r\n 	<li>One thing that seems to be finally hitting critical mass is real-time luggage tracking through RFID luggage tags. Logistics is another thing that’s hard, but it feels that airports and some airlines, Delta especially, have slogged through deploying enough RFID readers along the miles of luggage conveyor belts in the bowels of most of the airports they use, and then wiring it back in near real-time to their smartphone apps so that it’s useful. I’m hoping the combination of competitive pressure, falling equipment pricing, and government fines will push the rest of the airlines to follow suit. For me, real-time location tracking was the main use case for smart bags like BlueSmart. If I can get this through RFID tags, I’ll feel a lot less salty about the smart bag ban.</li>\r\n 	<li>Wearables also get a lot of buzz. Carnival Cruise Lines has been the latest, announcing their “Ocean Medallion” last year as a way to “personalize” your cruise experience -- and, of course, to make it easier to buy drinks on board. Nothing really new here. Disney’s been doing this forever; 20 years ago, I remember using a wristband at Northstar ski resort in Tahoe to track how many vertical feet we’d skied in a day, and to easily buy beers in the lodge. I’m wondering what happens here if the current noise about the use (and misuse) of personal data by Facebook and others resets people’s privacy vs. ease-of-use balance point rather than just blowing over. For me, it’s less about how the companies use the data (though I’m not completely unconcerned about this) and more about their inability to secure it. Seems like every couple of weeks, another travel company admits to some hack of, say, their point-of-sale system and the associated loss of millions of names and credit card numbers. Doesn’t incent me to let them track my movements and spending habits.</li>\r\n 	<li>AR/VR -- Augmented and virtual reality continues to buzz. I’ve talked about Google Translate’s AR feature -- point your camera at, say, a menu or washing machine, and it’ll display the translation over the original text in real-time. It’s not perfect -- the translations can rapidly change, sorta flicker between different interpretations, but it’s often “good enough”, and a whole lot quicker than banging in each menu entree. Google has tried to extend this real-time translation from visual to speech with their Pixel Bud headphones with much more Version 1.0 mixed results. I’m probably being way overly optimistic here, but if the Buds follow the same improvement trajectory, they could be pretty cool in 3 years’ time.</li>\r\n 	<li>It really gets buzzy when we move from AR to VR. A guy at a VR start-up talked to me about using VR in hotel rooms for what he called “social viewing”. Rather than watching, say Black Mirror on Netflix on your laptop or one of those Enseo TVs I’m seeing more and more of, you strap on a VR headset, as does your spouse or kids, and you’re all watching together in a virtual living room or virtual theater. And then there’s always the pitch -- why fly over to, say, Madrid to see Picasso’s Guernica in the Reina Sofia when you strap on a VR headset and “be” in the room instantly? Hey, remember how virtual reality turned out in The Matrix movies? Yeah, I think I’ll keep my travel physical.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Tools of the Trade by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/56512 Ft: Abstract Audio, Mr Yesterday, Martijn de Boer, Speck</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>You <em>Will</em> Pay Attention to the Safety Briefing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>The selfie of passengers on Southwest flight 1380 not wearing the oxygen masks correctly went viral in the days after the engine explosion, along with the stories -- the guy telling the woman next to him that she didn’t need to squeeze the airbag, and the guy who logged into WiFi and Facebook Live before putting on his mask. The flight attendant interviews that seemingly every news outlet did dripped with schadenfreude -- no one ever pays attention to the safety videos or demonstrations, and look what happened!</li>\r\n 	<li>Improving airline safety records have let people grow numb as to how unnatural air travel is -- flying over 600 mph at 35,000 ft. Flight 1380 was the first accident-related fatality on a US airliner since 2009, and the Southwest’s first ever -- since it was founded in 1971.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’ll admit that I don’t pay attention to every demo, especially when I do multiple flights in a single week. I do typically look around me for the nearest exits -- in front and behind me -- because those can change pretty often with different seat configurations. I will pay attention, as a refresher, if I haven’t flown for a couple of weeks -- like last week’s flight to MSP. Or if it’s a plane I haven’t flown in a while, I’ll look at the seat back card -- like I did today when noticing I was in a Boeing 717, a pretty rare event for me.</li>\r\n 	<li>I have noticed that the flight attendants’ requests/demands for attention have become a bit more strident since 1380. On my Southwest flight back home from MSP last week, the flight attendant chanted “Nose and mouth; nose and mouth!”, eliciting some nervous laughter.</li>\r\n 	<li>The attendant on my Delta flight this morning was a bit more direct, perhaps fatalistic this morning. “Please pay attention! We’re doing this for you. But if you don’t want to watch us, well, I guess it’s your life…”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #140</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_140.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #140 — Travel Tech Gets Physical; Pay Attention to the Safety Briefing','','inherit','closed','closed','','1977-revision-v1','','','2018-05-01 17:51:54','2018-05-01 22:51:54','',1977,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/05/01/1977-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1985,1,'2018-05-01 22:03:41','2018-05-02 03:03:41','','6AB2DE86-7AE4-4DAF-AD9F-DEFB51F737E0-01','','inherit','open','closed','','6ab2de86-7ae4-4daf-ad9f-defb51f737e0-01','','','2018-05-01 22:04:51','2018-05-02 03:04:51','',1977,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/6AB2DE86-7AE4-4DAF-AD9F-DEFB51F737E0-01.jpeg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(1986,1,'2018-05-01 22:09:27','2018-05-02 03:09:27','[caption id=\"attachment_1985\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/6AB2DE86-7AE4-4DAF-AD9F-DEFB51F737E0-01.jpeg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1985\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/6AB2DE86-7AE4-4DAF-AD9F-DEFB51F737E0-01-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Modeling Some VR Glasses?[/caption]\r\n\r\nBroke out the mobile unit to record this episode in the Bucktown neighborhood of Atlanta.  Returning to the mic after 10 days of food, wine, wind, rain, and snow in the north of Spain. I talk about traveling in Spain, and with my guest Coleman Collins about how to make the best coffee in your hotel room.  All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_140.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/422166231\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #140:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the Hyatt Place-Buckhead in Atlanta, GA missing what I hope is the long-delayed start of Spring finally showing up the Midwest. I have done damn little travel since the last episode -- a couple of drives to a client up north of Milwaukee, a quick trip to Minneapolis last week, and flight this morning down to Atlanta. I managed to avoid the foot of late April snow in Minnesota but got caught by 3-4 inches in Milwaukee. Luckily, I’d looked at the forecast before I left and, walking out to the garage, grabbed my LL Bean boots and threw them into the trunk of the car Which saved my dress shoes later that evening and the next morning on unshoveled walks and is is the good thing about driving; I didn’t have to worry about space constraints. I couldn’t have done the same thing flying to Minneapolis.</li>\r\n 	<li>I ended up flying Southwest to Minneapolis because: a) they were the cheapest flight out on Monday morning at short notice; and b) it let me meet an A-List challenge that Southwest had sent me at the beginning of the year -- fly 3 roundtrips by the end of April and get A-List for the rest of the year. Now, I don’t fly Southwest a whole lot, so I can’t completely justify what I pushed to do this challenge -- except just because it was a challenge, I guess. That, and it’ll make it easier for those times I end up on Southwest this year. I won’t have to pay the $12 for auto check-in or set an alarm to check in 24 hours before flight time -- both of which typically only get me in the second or “B” boarding group. Not an earth shattering perk, but anything that reduces travel hassles is a good thing.</li>\r\n 	<li>When I went Chicago Midway airport on last Monday to catch that flight, I ran into a new TSA trick -- funnel everyone through a single-file U-turn line to be sniffed a TSA agent and a dog, after people headed into either regular security or TSA PreCheck. Which, at 7am on a Monday morning, quickly pushed the security line back into the hallway toward the parking garage. So, after spending what looks like the $190 million a year the past couple of years on screening technology like those snazzy full-body scanners that people empty their pockets and line up for, the TSA is now having us line up for yet another a new screening technology -- but at least this technology is cute. And when was the last time you heard a traveler wanting to pet the body scanner.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">P.I.H.E. by Budapest BluesBoy (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hepepe/26362 Ft: Inna Barmash - Zhurbin</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">A couple of things for those not following my Twitter or the TravelCommons Facebook page…</span>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>First, for those Amazon fans, Alexa will now play the latest episode of TravelCommons for you if you ask nicely. I got an Echo Spot in a schwag bag for a conference in January. I put it on the standing desk in my home office and started playing around with it. After listening to the WJS Minute Briefing as part of my Flash Briefing, I started thinking about how to get TravelCommons onto it. At first, I thought I was going to have to figure out how to build an Alexa skill, but digging a little deeper, I found out that the TuneIn app is sorta the default podcast player for Alexa. So after I got TravelCommons approved for TuneIn -- felt like they had an actual human check out my app -- it appeared on my Echo Spot. So if you say, “Alexa, play TravelCommons podcast”, she should play the latest episode for you. Check out the Facebook page or my Twitter feed for a quick video showing the magic happen</li>\r\n 	<li>Second, I took advantage of being in town and the crap April weather to do the filming for the Midway taproom tour layover video. As I mentioned in the last episode, the idea has been to feature an itinerary out of Chicago’s “other” airport -- what was Chicago’s original airport that morphed into the budget airline airport that morphed into Southwest Airlines’ biggest operation. We used Uber and Lyft to hit 4 taprooms in what can only be described as the “post-industrial” landscape of Chicago’s near south side. We started by driving past the Cook County prison en route to Lagunitas’ plant and taproom that’s built in an old steel mill. While New Belgium and Sierra Nevada landed their national expansions in the much more bucolic environs of the North Carolina Smoky Mountains, Lagunitas’ owner Tony Magee dropped his expansion in a dodgy part of Chicago. We then hit smaller scale, more local places that have repurposed old manufacturing plants in less-visited Chicago neighborhoods -- Lo Rez in Pilsen, Marz in what can charitably described as “lower” Bridgeport, and then ending up at Whiner Beer in the Back of the Yards neighborhood -- where the Chicago Stockyards used to be decades ago. I started working on production, but then looked at the calendar and knew that I only had time for either this episode or the video. And since I’ve worked hard on keeping a monthly cadence of podcast episodes, I kicked the video into next month. So watch Facebook, Twitter, and the web site for the post. Since it’s a bit more narrow scope, I don’t think I’ll put the video in the podcast feed; not sure the non-beer-drinking listeners will want some 100 meg video clogging up their internet.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>While sitting in the backseat of one of those Lyft rides, I noticed something new on the pink Lyft light that many drivers have in the middle of their dash. You always see the front of it -- the pink Lyft logo -- from the outside, through the front windshield. Glancing at the back of it from inside of the car, I something flash by. Looking more closely, I saw a little message scroll by - “15 min eta”. I saw it again in the Lyft car I took to MSP on last Tuesday. I asked the driver about it. He told me that Lyft sent it to him after he did 300 rides -- “bit of a status thing” he said. I told him about the Uber dash light that I saw in New York, that let me adjust the color of the light from the app -- I talked about this in a prior episode. He thought that was pretty cool too, but he liked Lyft, the company, better than Uber, and he appreciated his messaging light.</li>\r\n 	<li>All sorts of press releases drop into the TravelCommons mailbox, but the one announcing April 24, last Tuesday, as the first National Business Traveler Day caught my eye. I guess because it’s new, it hasn’t made it onto the National Day Calendar, a list of these sorts of designations. It’s a good choice of date, though, because there is only one national day listed on the 24th -- National Pigs-In-A-Blanket Day -- which, I can imagine, some First or Business Class flight attendants might reasonably associate with some sleeping business travelers. National Business Traveler Day was announced (created?) by “Upside Business Travel, the first online travel service built just for the do-it-yourself (DIY) business traveler” in recognition of “the important contributions made by business travelers to America\'s economy.” I dunno, this could go in so many snarky directions -- with the pigs-in-a-blanket thing as just a starter. I have to say, though, I felt very unrecognized when I walked into MSP Terminal 2 the afternoon of National Business Travelers Day -- an obvious frequent business traveler: wearing a black blazer, head-down on the iPhone, speedwalking to the furthest security checkpoint because it’s the only one with PreCheck. Nobody was gave me a thank-you, a flower, a hug, but then again, the first person I had contact with was an old, overweight but jolly TSA screener. Nice guy, but not sure I would’ve wanted a hug from him.</li>\r\n 	<li>And it could’ve been that MSP’s Terminal 2 which I’ll add to my list of ghetto terminals, the land of misbegotten travelers, which also includes ORD’s T2, Detroit’s North Terminal, Madrid’s 4S satellite terminal, Munich’s T2 satellite terminal… I’ve talked about this before. In fortress hubs, like ORD, DTW, and MSP, the terminals the hub airlines use is clean, bright, has lots of restaurant and shopping choices. Delta’s terminal in Detroit has an airy 2 or 3-story ceiling with a monorail train running the length of the terminal up at the top. The North terminal that every other airline is dumped into is the old terminal that Delta -- or actually Northwest left behind, with a bit of a clean up and 3 restaurants. Delta’s terminal in Minneapolis is the same story -- lots of shops and restaurants, a big craft beer bar, all with a bit of that North Woods feel. Terminal 2 - generic airport sterility, a Subway sandwich joint, a bar where all the handles were removed from the beer taps. And there’s no inside-security connections between these terminals in MSP and DTW if you want to check out the better side -- it’s a 10-minute bus ride and another pass through security. At least in ORD, you can walk from T2 to the American or United terminals and hit Rick Bayless’ Torta Frontera for great Mexican food or Goose Island for a good beer. On Tuesday, I was stuck in the Humphrey Terminal with my Subway sandwich and a choice of Bud Light or Blue Moon -- which maybe was fitting on National Business Traveler Day.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">~aether theories~ by Vidian (c) copyright 2018 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Vidian/57398 Ft: Gurdonark, White-throated Sparrow</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Travel Tech Gets Physical</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>In addition to press releases about National Business Travelers Day, I also get press releases announcing new funding rounds for travel startups. These things come in waves. Like the wave of companies building tour aggregation platforms. That investment thesis went -- because millennials are more into experiential travel, they’re more likely to spend money on something like a food tour or hang gliding; the market for travel experiences is fragmented making discovery and purchasing difficult; our platform will solve this problem by aggregating experience providers and providing world-class search and user experience. The latest wave seems to be about building platforms that “reduce the pain” of corporate business travel. In April, in addition to Upside’s National Business Traveler Day announcement, Rocketrip sent out a release about their $15 million funding round and TravelPerk, who sponsored our January episode, touted their $21 million round -- which sounds like, some 20+ years after Travelocity and Expedia hit the market, companies continue to spend millions of dollars trying to figure out how to replace travel agents.</li>\r\n 	<li>At times, it feels like much of the work on improving travel is virtual, about software -- new apps, new search platforms, better ways to spit out a single travel itinerary. But in spite of the venture capital mantra that “software is eating the world,” travel is inherently physical -- we want to move our bodies, our stuff from Point A to Point B, and most often back again. It seems like the ‘60’s were the golden age of this, when Boeing and Airbus’ predecessors and the Russians were designing and building supersonic planes. I really felt ancient the other day telling some Millennial staffers about, how way back when, Concorde would fly from JFK to LHR in less than 3 hrs. Now it seems that Boeing and Airbus are completely focused on cramming more people into subsonic flying buses. Logical, but not very aspirational. Now if all the work on hyperloops -- the test circuits, the design contests -- actually turns into something, and isn’t just high-tech hobbies for Elon Musk and Richard Branson -- we’ll be onto something.</li>\r\n 	<li>But in the meantime, in the space between now -- thinner, more uncomfortable plane seats and hotel keys that keep demagnetizing -- and the inspirational future -- us whizzing along in pods at 750 mph, doing LA to SF in 35 minutes without having to buy CO2 offsets to feel better about ourselves -- what are some of the physical things about to hit?</li>\r\n 	<li>One thing that seems to be finally hitting critical mass is real-time luggage tracking through RFID luggage tags. Logistics is another thing that’s hard, but it feels that airports and some airlines, Delta especially, have slogged through deploying enough RFID readers along the miles of luggage conveyor belts in the bowels of most of the airports they use, and then wiring it back in near real-time to their smartphone apps so that it’s useful. I’m hoping the combination of competitive pressure, falling equipment pricing, and government fines will push the rest of the airlines to follow suit. For me, real-time location tracking was the main use case for smart bags like BlueSmart. If I can get this through RFID tags, I’ll feel a lot less salty about the smart bag ban.</li>\r\n 	<li>Wearables also get a lot of buzz. Carnival Cruise Lines has been the latest, announcing their “Ocean Medallion” last year as a way to “personalize” your cruise experience -- and, of course, to make it easier to buy drinks on board. Nothing really new here. Disney’s been doing this forever; 20 years ago, I remember using a wristband at Northstar ski resort in Tahoe to track how many vertical feet we’d skied in a day, and to easily buy beers in the lodge. I’m wondering what happens here if the current noise about the use (and misuse) of personal data by Facebook and others resets people’s privacy vs. ease-of-use balance point rather than just blowing over. For me, it’s less about how the companies use the data (though I’m not completely unconcerned about this) and more about their inability to secure it. Seems like every couple of weeks, another travel company admits to some hack of, say, their point-of-sale system and the associated loss of millions of names and credit card numbers. Doesn’t incent me to let them track my movements and spending habits.</li>\r\n 	<li>AR/VR -- Augmented and virtual reality continues to buzz. I’ve talked about Google Translate’s AR feature -- point your camera at, say, a menu or washing machine, and it’ll display the translation over the original text in real-time. It’s not perfect -- the translations can rapidly change, sorta flicker between different interpretations, but it’s often “good enough”, and a whole lot quicker than banging in each menu entree. Google has tried to extend this real-time translation from visual to speech with their Pixel Bud headphones with much more Version 1.0 mixed results. I’m probably being way overly optimistic here, but if the Buds follow the same improvement trajectory, they could be pretty cool in 3 years’ time.</li>\r\n 	<li>It really gets buzzy when we move from AR to VR. A guy at a VR start-up talked to me about using VR in hotel rooms for what he called “social viewing”. Rather than watching, say Black Mirror on Netflix on your laptop or one of those Enseo TVs I’m seeing more and more of, you strap on a VR headset, as does your spouse or kids, and you’re all watching together in a virtual living room or virtual theater. And then there’s always the pitch -- why fly over to, say, Madrid to see Picasso’s Guernica in the Reina Sofia when you strap on a VR headset and “be” in the room instantly? Hey, remember how virtual reality turned out in The Matrix movies? Yeah, I think I’ll keep my travel physical.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Tools of the Trade by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/56512 Ft: Abstract Audio, Mr Yesterday, Martijn de Boer, Speck</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>You <em>Will</em> Pay Attention to the Safety Briefing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>The selfie of passengers on Southwest flight 1380 not wearing the oxygen masks correctly went viral in the days after the engine explosion, along with the stories -- the guy telling the woman next to him that she didn’t need to squeeze the airbag, and the guy who logged into WiFi and Facebook Live before putting on his mask. The flight attendant interviews that seemingly every news outlet did dripped with schadenfreude -- no one ever pays attention to the safety videos or demonstrations, and look what happened!</li>\r\n 	<li>Improving airline safety records have let people grow numb as to how unnatural air travel is -- flying over 600 mph at 35,000 ft. Flight 1380 was the first accident-related fatality on a US airliner since 2009, and the Southwest’s first ever -- since it was founded in 1971.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’ll admit that I don’t pay attention to every demo, especially when I do multiple flights in a single week. I do typically look around me for the nearest exits -- in front and behind me -- because those can change pretty often with different seat configurations. I will pay attention, as a refresher, if I haven’t flown for a couple of weeks -- like last week’s flight to MSP. Or if it’s a plane I haven’t flown in a while, I’ll look at the seat back card -- like I did today when noticing I was in a Boeing 717, a pretty rare event for me.</li>\r\n 	<li>I have noticed that the flight attendants’ requests/demands for attention have become a bit more strident since 1380. On my Southwest flight back home from MSP last week, the flight attendant chanted “Nose and mouth; nose and mouth!”, eliciting some nervous laughter.</li>\r\n 	<li>The attendant on my Delta flight this morning was a bit more direct, perhaps fatalistic this morning. “Please pay attention! We’re doing this for you. But if you don’t want to watch us, well, I guess it’s your life…”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #140</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_140.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #140 — Travel Tech Gets Physical; Pay Attention to the Safety Briefing','','inherit','closed','closed','','1977-revision-v1','','','2018-05-01 22:09:27','2018-05-02 03:09:27','',1977,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/05/01/1977-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1987,1,'2018-05-01 22:17:58','2018-05-02 03:17:58','[caption id=\"attachment_1985\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/6AB2DE86-7AE4-4DAF-AD9F-DEFB51F737E0-01.jpeg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1985\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/6AB2DE86-7AE4-4DAF-AD9F-DEFB51F737E0-01-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Modeling Some VR Glasses?[/caption]\r\n\r\nBroke out the mobile unit to record this episode in the Bucktown neighborhood of Atlanta; much warmer than getting caught in a spring snow storm in Milwaukee. When much of the travel tech news is about the latest phone apps, we talk about physical travel technology since <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">travel is a physical act, moving our bodies and stuff from Point A to Point B, and most often back again. And when flying during the past two weeks, flight attendants\' safety demonstrations have become a bit more strident. </span>All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_140.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/422166231\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #140:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the Hyatt Place-Buckhead in Atlanta, GA missing what I hope is the long-delayed start of Spring finally showing up the Midwest. I have done damn little travel since the last episode -- a couple of drives to a client up north of Milwaukee, a quick trip to Minneapolis last week, and flight this morning down to Atlanta. I managed to avoid the foot of late April snow in Minnesota but got caught by 3-4 inches in Milwaukee. Luckily, I’d looked at the forecast before I left and, walking out to the garage, grabbed my LL Bean boots and threw them into the trunk of the car Which saved my dress shoes later that evening and the next morning on unshoveled walks and is is the good thing about driving; I didn’t have to worry about space constraints. I couldn’t have done the same thing flying to Minneapolis.</li>\r\n 	<li>I ended up flying Southwest to Minneapolis because: a) they were the cheapest flight out on Monday morning at short notice; and b) it let me meet an A-List challenge that Southwest had sent me at the beginning of the year -- fly 3 roundtrips by the end of April and get A-List for the rest of the year. Now, I don’t fly Southwest a whole lot, so I can’t completely justify what I pushed to do this challenge -- except just because it was a challenge, I guess. That, and it’ll make it easier for those times I end up on Southwest this year. I won’t have to pay the $12 for auto check-in or set an alarm to check in 24 hours before flight time -- both of which typically only get me in the second or “B” boarding group. Not an earth shattering perk, but anything that reduces travel hassles is a good thing.</li>\r\n 	<li>When I went Chicago Midway airport on last Monday to catch that flight, I ran into a new TSA trick -- funnel everyone through a single-file U-turn line to be sniffed a TSA agent and a dog, after people headed into either regular security or TSA PreCheck. Which, at 7am on a Monday morning, quickly pushed the security line back into the hallway toward the parking garage. So, after spending what looks like the $190 million a year the past couple of years on screening technology like those snazzy full-body scanners that people empty their pockets and line up for, the TSA is now having us line up for yet another a new screening technology -- but at least this technology is cute. And when was the last time you heard a traveler wanting to pet the body scanner.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">P.I.H.E. by Budapest BluesBoy (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hepepe/26362 Ft: Inna Barmash - Zhurbin</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">A couple of things for those not following my Twitter or the TravelCommons Facebook page…</span>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>First, for those Amazon fans, Alexa will now play the latest episode of TravelCommons for you if you ask nicely. I got an Echo Spot in a schwag bag for a conference in January. I put it on the standing desk in my home office and started playing around with it. After listening to the WJS Minute Briefing as part of my Flash Briefing, I started thinking about how to get TravelCommons onto it. At first, I thought I was going to have to figure out how to build an Alexa skill, but digging a little deeper, I found out that the TuneIn app is sorta the default podcast player for Alexa. So after I got TravelCommons approved for TuneIn -- felt like they had an actual human check out my app -- it appeared on my Echo Spot. So if you say, “Alexa, play TravelCommons podcast”, she should play the latest episode for you. Check out the Facebook page or my Twitter feed for a quick video showing the magic happen</li>\r\n 	<li>Second, I took advantage of being in town and the crap April weather to do the filming for the Midway taproom tour layover video. As I mentioned in the last episode, the idea has been to feature an itinerary out of Chicago’s “other” airport -- what was Chicago’s original airport that morphed into the budget airline airport that morphed into Southwest Airlines’ biggest operation. We used Uber and Lyft to hit 4 taprooms in what can only be described as the “post-industrial” landscape of Chicago’s near south side. We started by driving past the Cook County prison en route to Lagunitas’ plant and taproom that’s built in an old steel mill. While New Belgium and Sierra Nevada landed their national expansions in the much more bucolic environs of the North Carolina Smoky Mountains, Lagunitas’ owner Tony Magee dropped his expansion in a dodgy part of Chicago. We then hit smaller scale, more local places that have repurposed old manufacturing plants in less-visited Chicago neighborhoods -- Lo Rez in Pilsen, Marz in what can charitably described as “lower” Bridgeport, and then ending up at Whiner Beer in the Back of the Yards neighborhood -- where the Chicago Stockyards used to be decades ago. I started working on production, but then looked at the calendar and knew that I only had time for either this episode or the video. And since I’ve worked hard on keeping a monthly cadence of podcast episodes, I kicked the video into next month. So watch Facebook, Twitter, and the web site for the post. Since it’s a bit more narrow scope, I don’t think I’ll put the video in the podcast feed; not sure the non-beer-drinking listeners will want some 100 meg video clogging up their internet.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>While sitting in the backseat of one of those Lyft rides, I noticed something new on the pink Lyft light that many drivers have in the middle of their dash. You always see the front of it -- the pink Lyft logo -- from the outside, through the front windshield. Glancing at the back of it from inside of the car, I something flash by. Looking more closely, I saw a little message scroll by - “15 min eta”. I saw it again in the Lyft car I took to MSP on last Tuesday. I asked the driver about it. He told me that Lyft sent it to him after he did 300 rides -- “bit of a status thing” he said. I told him about the Uber dash light that I saw in New York, that let me adjust the color of the light from the app -- I talked about this in a prior episode. He thought that was pretty cool too, but he liked Lyft, the company, better than Uber, and he appreciated his messaging light.</li>\r\n 	<li>All sorts of press releases drop into the TravelCommons mailbox, but the one announcing April 24, last Tuesday, as the first National Business Traveler Day caught my eye. I guess because it’s new, it hasn’t made it onto the National Day Calendar, a list of these sorts of designations. It’s a good choice of date, though, because there is only one national day listed on the 24th -- National Pigs-In-A-Blanket Day -- which, I can imagine, some First or Business Class flight attendants might reasonably associate with some sleeping business travelers. National Business Traveler Day was announced (created?) by “Upside Business Travel, the first online travel service built just for the do-it-yourself (DIY) business traveler” in recognition of “the important contributions made by business travelers to America\'s economy.” I dunno, this could go in so many snarky directions -- with the pigs-in-a-blanket thing as just a starter. I have to say, though, I felt very unrecognized when I walked into MSP Terminal 2 the afternoon of National Business Travelers Day -- an obvious frequent business traveler: wearing a black blazer, head-down on the iPhone, speedwalking to the furthest security checkpoint because it’s the only one with PreCheck. Nobody was gave me a thank-you, a flower, a hug, but then again, the first person I had contact with was an old, overweight but jolly TSA screener. Nice guy, but not sure I would’ve wanted a hug from him.</li>\r\n 	<li>And it could’ve been that MSP’s Terminal 2 which I’ll add to my list of ghetto terminals, the land of misbegotten travelers, which also includes ORD’s T2, Detroit’s North Terminal, Madrid’s 4S satellite terminal, Munich’s T2 satellite terminal… I’ve talked about this before. In fortress hubs, like ORD, DTW, and MSP, the terminals the hub airlines use is clean, bright, has lots of restaurant and shopping choices. Delta’s terminal in Detroit has an airy 2 or 3-story ceiling with a monorail train running the length of the terminal up at the top. The North terminal that every other airline is dumped into is the old terminal that Delta -- or actually Northwest left behind, with a bit of a clean up and 3 restaurants. Delta’s terminal in Minneapolis is the same story -- lots of shops and restaurants, a big craft beer bar, all with a bit of that North Woods feel. Terminal 2 - generic airport sterility, a Subway sandwich joint, a bar where all the handles were removed from the beer taps. And there’s no inside-security connections between these terminals in MSP and DTW if you want to check out the better side -- it’s a 10-minute bus ride and another pass through security. At least in ORD, you can walk from T2 to the American or United terminals and hit Rick Bayless’ Torta Frontera for great Mexican food or Goose Island for a good beer. On Tuesday, I was stuck in the Humphrey Terminal with my Subway sandwich and a choice of Bud Light or Blue Moon -- which maybe was fitting on National Business Traveler Day.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">~aether theories~ by Vidian (c) copyright 2018 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Vidian/57398 Ft: Gurdonark, White-throated Sparrow</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Travel Tech Gets Physical</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>In addition to press releases about National Business Travelers Day, I also get press releases announcing new funding rounds for travel startups. These things come in waves. Like the wave of companies building tour aggregation platforms. That investment thesis went -- because millennials are more into experiential travel, they’re more likely to spend money on something like a food tour or hang gliding; the market for travel experiences is fragmented making discovery and purchasing difficult; our platform will solve this problem by aggregating experience providers and providing world-class search and user experience. The latest wave seems to be about building platforms that “reduce the pain” of corporate business travel. In April, in addition to Upside’s National Business Traveler Day announcement, Rocketrip sent out a release about their $15 million funding round and TravelPerk, who sponsored our January episode, touted their $21 million round -- which sounds like, some 20+ years after Travelocity and Expedia hit the market, companies continue to spend millions of dollars trying to figure out how to replace travel agents.</li>\r\n 	<li>At times, it feels like much of the work on improving travel is virtual, about software -- new apps, new search platforms, better ways to spit out a single travel itinerary. But in spite of the venture capital mantra that “software is eating the world,” travel is inherently physical -- we want to move our bodies, our stuff from Point A to Point B, and most often back again. It seems like the ‘60’s were the golden age of this, when Boeing and Airbus’ predecessors and the Russians were designing and building supersonic planes. I really felt ancient the other day telling some Millennial staffers about, how way back when, Concorde would fly from JFK to LHR in less than 3 hrs. Now it seems that Boeing and Airbus are completely focused on cramming more people into subsonic flying buses. Logical, but not very aspirational. Now if all the work on hyperloops -- the test circuits, the design contests -- actually turns into something, and isn’t just high-tech hobbies for Elon Musk and Richard Branson -- we’ll be onto something.</li>\r\n 	<li>But in the meantime, in the space between now -- thinner, more uncomfortable plane seats and hotel keys that keep demagnetizing -- and the inspirational future -- us whizzing along in pods at 750 mph, doing LA to SF in 35 minutes without having to buy CO2 offsets to feel better about ourselves -- what are some of the physical things about to hit?</li>\r\n 	<li>One thing that seems to be finally hitting critical mass is real-time luggage tracking through RFID luggage tags. Logistics is another thing that’s hard, but it feels that airports and some airlines, Delta especially, have slogged through deploying enough RFID readers along the miles of luggage conveyor belts in the bowels of most of the airports they use, and then wiring it back in near real-time to their smartphone apps so that it’s useful. I’m hoping the combination of competitive pressure, falling equipment pricing, and government fines will push the rest of the airlines to follow suit. For me, real-time location tracking was the main use case for smart bags like BlueSmart. If I can get this through RFID tags, I’ll feel a lot less salty about the smart bag ban.</li>\r\n 	<li>Wearables also get a lot of buzz. Carnival Cruise Lines has been the latest, announcing their “Ocean Medallion” last year as a way to “personalize” your cruise experience -- and, of course, to make it easier to buy drinks on board. Nothing really new here. Disney’s been doing this forever; 20 years ago, I remember using a wristband at Northstar ski resort in Tahoe to track how many vertical feet we’d skied in a day, and to easily buy beers in the lodge. I’m wondering what happens here if the current noise about the use (and misuse) of personal data by Facebook and others resets people’s privacy vs. ease-of-use balance point rather than just blowing over. For me, it’s less about how the companies use the data (though I’m not completely unconcerned about this) and more about their inability to secure it. Seems like every couple of weeks, another travel company admits to some hack of, say, their point-of-sale system and the associated loss of millions of names and credit card numbers. Doesn’t incent me to let them track my movements and spending habits.</li>\r\n 	<li>AR/VR -- Augmented and virtual reality continues to buzz. I’ve talked about Google Translate’s AR feature -- point your camera at, say, a menu or washing machine, and it’ll display the translation over the original text in real-time. It’s not perfect -- the translations can rapidly change, sorta flicker between different interpretations, but it’s often “good enough”, and a whole lot quicker than banging in each menu entree. Google has tried to extend this real-time translation from visual to speech with their Pixel Bud headphones with much more Version 1.0 mixed results. I’m probably being way overly optimistic here, but if the Buds follow the same improvement trajectory, they could be pretty cool in 3 years’ time.</li>\r\n 	<li>It really gets buzzy when we move from AR to VR. A guy at a VR start-up talked to me about using VR in hotel rooms for what he called “social viewing”. Rather than watching, say Black Mirror on Netflix on your laptop or one of those Enseo TVs I’m seeing more and more of, you strap on a VR headset, as does your spouse or kids, and you’re all watching together in a virtual living room or virtual theater. And then there’s always the pitch -- why fly over to, say, Madrid to see Picasso’s Guernica in the Reina Sofia when you strap on a VR headset and “be” in the room instantly? Hey, remember how virtual reality turned out in The Matrix movies? Yeah, I think I’ll keep my travel physical.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Tools of the Trade by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/56512 Ft: Abstract Audio, Mr Yesterday, Martijn de Boer, Speck</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>You <em>Will</em> Pay Attention to the Safety Briefing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>The selfie of passengers on Southwest flight 1380 not wearing the oxygen masks correctly went viral in the days after the engine explosion, along with the stories -- the guy telling the woman next to him that she didn’t need to squeeze the airbag, and the guy who logged into WiFi and Facebook Live before putting on his mask. The flight attendant interviews that seemingly every news outlet did dripped with schadenfreude -- no one ever pays attention to the safety videos or demonstrations, and look what happened!</li>\r\n 	<li>Improving airline safety records have let people grow numb as to how unnatural air travel is -- flying over 600 mph at 35,000 ft. Flight 1380 was the first accident-related fatality on a US airliner since 2009, and the Southwest’s first ever -- since it was founded in 1971.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’ll admit that I don’t pay attention to every demo, especially when I do multiple flights in a single week. I do typically look around me for the nearest exits -- in front and behind me -- because those can change pretty often with different seat configurations. I will pay attention, as a refresher, if I haven’t flown for a couple of weeks -- like last week’s flight to MSP. Or if it’s a plane I haven’t flown in a while, I’ll look at the seat back card -- like I did today when noticing I was in a Boeing 717, a pretty rare event for me.</li>\r\n 	<li>I have noticed that the flight attendants’ requests/demands for attention have become a bit more strident since 1380. On my Southwest flight back home from MSP last week, the flight attendant chanted “Nose and mouth; nose and mouth!”, eliciting some nervous laughter.</li>\r\n 	<li>The attendant on my Delta flight this morning was a bit more direct, perhaps fatalistic this morning. “Please pay attention! We’re doing this for you. But if you don’t want to watch us, well, I guess it’s your life…”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #140</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_140.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #140 — Travel Tech Gets Physical; Pay Attention to the Safety Briefing','','inherit','closed','closed','','1977-revision-v1','','','2018-05-01 22:17:58','2018-05-02 03:17:58','',1977,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/05/01/1977-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1988,1,'2018-05-01 22:20:59','2018-05-02 03:20:59','[caption id=\"attachment_1985\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/6AB2DE86-7AE4-4DAF-AD9F-DEFB51F737E0-01.jpeg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1985\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/6AB2DE86-7AE4-4DAF-AD9F-DEFB51F737E0-01-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> The Look of Augmented Reality?[/caption]\r\n\r\nBroke out the mobile unit to record this episode in the Bucktown neighborhood of Atlanta; much warmer than getting caught in a spring snow storm in Milwaukee. When much of the travel tech news is about the latest phone apps, we talk about physical travel technology that we can touch and carry. <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">And when flying during the past two weeks, flight attendants\' safety demonstrations have become a bit more strident. </span>All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_140.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/422166231\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #140:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the Hyatt Place-Buckhead in Atlanta, GA missing what I hope is the long-delayed start of Spring finally showing up the Midwest. I have done damn little travel since the last episode -- a couple of drives to a client up north of Milwaukee, a quick trip to Minneapolis last week, and flight this morning down to Atlanta. I managed to avoid the foot of late April snow in Minnesota but got caught by 3-4 inches in Milwaukee. Luckily, I’d looked at the forecast before I left and, walking out to the garage, grabbed my LL Bean boots and threw them into the trunk of the car Which saved my dress shoes later that evening and the next morning on unshoveled walks and is is the good thing about driving; I didn’t have to worry about space constraints. I couldn’t have done the same thing flying to Minneapolis.</li>\r\n 	<li>I ended up flying Southwest to Minneapolis because: a) they were the cheapest flight out on Monday morning at short notice; and b) it let me meet an A-List challenge that Southwest had sent me at the beginning of the year -- fly 3 roundtrips by the end of April and get A-List for the rest of the year. Now, I don’t fly Southwest a whole lot, so I can’t completely justify what I pushed to do this challenge -- except just because it was a challenge, I guess. That, and it’ll make it easier for those times I end up on Southwest this year. I won’t have to pay the $12 for auto check-in or set an alarm to check in 24 hours before flight time -- both of which typically only get me in the second or “B” boarding group. Not an earth shattering perk, but anything that reduces travel hassles is a good thing.</li>\r\n 	<li>When I went Chicago Midway airport on last Monday to catch that flight, I ran into a new TSA trick -- funnel everyone through a single-file U-turn line to be sniffed a TSA agent and a dog, after people headed into either regular security or TSA PreCheck. Which, at 7am on a Monday morning, quickly pushed the security line back into the hallway toward the parking garage. So, after spending what looks like the $190 million a year the past couple of years on screening technology like those snazzy full-body scanners that people empty their pockets and line up for, the TSA is now having us line up for yet another a new screening technology -- but at least this technology is cute. And when was the last time you heard a traveler wanting to pet the body scanner.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">P.I.H.E. by Budapest BluesBoy (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hepepe/26362 Ft: Inna Barmash - Zhurbin</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">A couple of things for those not following my Twitter or the TravelCommons Facebook page…</span>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>First, for those Amazon fans, Alexa will now play the latest episode of TravelCommons for you if you ask nicely. I got an Echo Spot in a schwag bag for a conference in January. I put it on the standing desk in my home office and started playing around with it. After listening to the WJS Minute Briefing as part of my Flash Briefing, I started thinking about how to get TravelCommons onto it. At first, I thought I was going to have to figure out how to build an Alexa skill, but digging a little deeper, I found out that the TuneIn app is sorta the default podcast player for Alexa. So after I got TravelCommons approved for TuneIn -- felt like they had an actual human check out my app -- it appeared on my Echo Spot. So if you say, “Alexa, play TravelCommons podcast”, she should play the latest episode for you. Check out the Facebook page or my Twitter feed for a quick video showing the magic happen</li>\r\n 	<li>Second, I took advantage of being in town and the crap April weather to do the filming for the Midway taproom tour layover video. As I mentioned in the last episode, the idea has been to feature an itinerary out of Chicago’s “other” airport -- what was Chicago’s original airport that morphed into the budget airline airport that morphed into Southwest Airlines’ biggest operation. We used Uber and Lyft to hit 4 taprooms in what can only be described as the “post-industrial” landscape of Chicago’s near south side. We started by driving past the Cook County prison en route to Lagunitas’ plant and taproom that’s built in an old steel mill. While New Belgium and Sierra Nevada landed their national expansions in the much more bucolic environs of the North Carolina Smoky Mountains, Lagunitas’ owner Tony Magee dropped his expansion in a dodgy part of Chicago. We then hit smaller scale, more local places that have repurposed old manufacturing plants in less-visited Chicago neighborhoods -- Lo Rez in Pilsen, Marz in what can charitably described as “lower” Bridgeport, and then ending up at Whiner Beer in the Back of the Yards neighborhood -- where the Chicago Stockyards used to be decades ago. I started working on production, but then looked at the calendar and knew that I only had time for either this episode or the video. And since I’ve worked hard on keeping a monthly cadence of podcast episodes, I kicked the video into next month. So watch Facebook, Twitter, and the web site for the post. Since it’s a bit more narrow scope, I don’t think I’ll put the video in the podcast feed; not sure the non-beer-drinking listeners will want some 100 meg video clogging up their internet.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>While sitting in the backseat of one of those Lyft rides, I noticed something new on the pink Lyft light that many drivers have in the middle of their dash. You always see the front of it -- the pink Lyft logo -- from the outside, through the front windshield. Glancing at the back of it from inside of the car, I something flash by. Looking more closely, I saw a little message scroll by - “15 min eta”. I saw it again in the Lyft car I took to MSP on last Tuesday. I asked the driver about it. He told me that Lyft sent it to him after he did 300 rides -- “bit of a status thing” he said. I told him about the Uber dash light that I saw in New York, that let me adjust the color of the light from the app -- I talked about this in a prior episode. He thought that was pretty cool too, but he liked Lyft, the company, better than Uber, and he appreciated his messaging light.</li>\r\n 	<li>All sorts of press releases drop into the TravelCommons mailbox, but the one announcing April 24, last Tuesday, as the first National Business Traveler Day caught my eye. I guess because it’s new, it hasn’t made it onto the National Day Calendar, a list of these sorts of designations. It’s a good choice of date, though, because there is only one national day listed on the 24th -- National Pigs-In-A-Blanket Day -- which, I can imagine, some First or Business Class flight attendants might reasonably associate with some sleeping business travelers. National Business Traveler Day was announced (created?) by “Upside Business Travel, the first online travel service built just for the do-it-yourself (DIY) business traveler” in recognition of “the important contributions made by business travelers to America\'s economy.” I dunno, this could go in so many snarky directions -- with the pigs-in-a-blanket thing as just a starter. I have to say, though, I felt very unrecognized when I walked into MSP Terminal 2 the afternoon of National Business Travelers Day -- an obvious frequent business traveler: wearing a black blazer, head-down on the iPhone, speedwalking to the furthest security checkpoint because it’s the only one with PreCheck. Nobody was gave me a thank-you, a flower, a hug, but then again, the first person I had contact with was an old, overweight but jolly TSA screener. Nice guy, but not sure I would’ve wanted a hug from him.</li>\r\n 	<li>And it could’ve been that MSP’s Terminal 2 which I’ll add to my list of ghetto terminals, the land of misbegotten travelers, which also includes ORD’s T2, Detroit’s North Terminal, Madrid’s 4S satellite terminal, Munich’s T2 satellite terminal… I’ve talked about this before. In fortress hubs, like ORD, DTW, and MSP, the terminals the hub airlines use is clean, bright, has lots of restaurant and shopping choices. Delta’s terminal in Detroit has an airy 2 or 3-story ceiling with a monorail train running the length of the terminal up at the top. The North terminal that every other airline is dumped into is the old terminal that Delta -- or actually Northwest left behind, with a bit of a clean up and 3 restaurants. Delta’s terminal in Minneapolis is the same story -- lots of shops and restaurants, a big craft beer bar, all with a bit of that North Woods feel. Terminal 2 - generic airport sterility, a Subway sandwich joint, a bar where all the handles were removed from the beer taps. And there’s no inside-security connections between these terminals in MSP and DTW if you want to check out the better side -- it’s a 10-minute bus ride and another pass through security. At least in ORD, you can walk from T2 to the American or United terminals and hit Rick Bayless’ Torta Frontera for great Mexican food or Goose Island for a good beer. On Tuesday, I was stuck in the Humphrey Terminal with my Subway sandwich and a choice of Bud Light or Blue Moon -- which maybe was fitting on National Business Traveler Day.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">~aether theories~ by Vidian (c) copyright 2018 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Vidian/57398 Ft: Gurdonark, White-throated Sparrow</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Travel Tech Gets Physical</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>In addition to press releases about National Business Travelers Day, I also get press releases announcing new funding rounds for travel startups. These things come in waves. Like the wave of companies building tour aggregation platforms. That investment thesis went -- because millennials are more into experiential travel, they’re more likely to spend money on something like a food tour or hang gliding; the market for travel experiences is fragmented making discovery and purchasing difficult; our platform will solve this problem by aggregating experience providers and providing world-class search and user experience. The latest wave seems to be about building platforms that “reduce the pain” of corporate business travel. In April, in addition to Upside’s National Business Traveler Day announcement, Rocketrip sent out a release about their $15 million funding round and TravelPerk, who sponsored our January episode, touted their $21 million round -- which sounds like, some 20+ years after Travelocity and Expedia hit the market, companies continue to spend millions of dollars trying to figure out how to replace travel agents.</li>\r\n 	<li>At times, it feels like much of the work on improving travel is virtual, about software -- new apps, new search platforms, better ways to spit out a single travel itinerary. But in spite of the venture capital mantra that “software is eating the world,” travel is inherently physical -- we want to move our bodies, our stuff from Point A to Point B, and most often back again. It seems like the ‘60’s were the golden age of this, when Boeing and Airbus’ predecessors and the Russians were designing and building supersonic planes. I really felt ancient the other day telling some Millennial staffers about, how way back when, Concorde would fly from JFK to LHR in less than 3 hrs. Now it seems that Boeing and Airbus are completely focused on cramming more people into subsonic flying buses. Logical, but not very aspirational. Now if all the work on hyperloops -- the test circuits, the design contests -- actually turns into something, and isn’t just high-tech hobbies for Elon Musk and Richard Branson -- we’ll be onto something.</li>\r\n 	<li>But in the meantime, in the space between now -- thinner, more uncomfortable plane seats and hotel keys that keep demagnetizing -- and the inspirational future -- us whizzing along in pods at 750 mph, doing LA to SF in 35 minutes without having to buy CO2 offsets to feel better about ourselves -- what are some of the physical things about to hit?</li>\r\n 	<li>One thing that seems to be finally hitting critical mass is real-time luggage tracking through RFID luggage tags. Logistics is another thing that’s hard, but it feels that airports and some airlines, Delta especially, have slogged through deploying enough RFID readers along the miles of luggage conveyor belts in the bowels of most of the airports they use, and then wiring it back in near real-time to their smartphone apps so that it’s useful. I’m hoping the combination of competitive pressure, falling equipment pricing, and government fines will push the rest of the airlines to follow suit. For me, real-time location tracking was the main use case for smart bags like BlueSmart. If I can get this through RFID tags, I’ll feel a lot less salty about the smart bag ban.</li>\r\n 	<li>Wearables also get a lot of buzz. Carnival Cruise Lines has been the latest, announcing their “Ocean Medallion” last year as a way to “personalize” your cruise experience -- and, of course, to make it easier to buy drinks on board. Nothing really new here. Disney’s been doing this forever; 20 years ago, I remember using a wristband at Northstar ski resort in Tahoe to track how many vertical feet we’d skied in a day, and to easily buy beers in the lodge. I’m wondering what happens here if the current noise about the use (and misuse) of personal data by Facebook and others resets people’s privacy vs. ease-of-use balance point rather than just blowing over. For me, it’s less about how the companies use the data (though I’m not completely unconcerned about this) and more about their inability to secure it. Seems like every couple of weeks, another travel company admits to some hack of, say, their point-of-sale system and the associated loss of millions of names and credit card numbers. Doesn’t incent me to let them track my movements and spending habits.</li>\r\n 	<li>AR/VR -- Augmented and virtual reality continues to buzz. I’ve talked about Google Translate’s AR feature -- point your camera at, say, a menu or washing machine, and it’ll display the translation over the original text in real-time. It’s not perfect -- the translations can rapidly change, sorta flicker between different interpretations, but it’s often “good enough”, and a whole lot quicker than banging in each menu entree. Google has tried to extend this real-time translation from visual to speech with their Pixel Bud headphones with much more Version 1.0 mixed results. I’m probably being way overly optimistic here, but if the Buds follow the same improvement trajectory, they could be pretty cool in 3 years’ time.</li>\r\n 	<li>It really gets buzzy when we move from AR to VR. A guy at a VR start-up talked to me about using VR in hotel rooms for what he called “social viewing”. Rather than watching, say Black Mirror on Netflix on your laptop or one of those Enseo TVs I’m seeing more and more of, you strap on a VR headset, as does your spouse or kids, and you’re all watching together in a virtual living room or virtual theater. And then there’s always the pitch -- why fly over to, say, Madrid to see Picasso’s Guernica in the Reina Sofia when you strap on a VR headset and “be” in the room instantly? Hey, remember how virtual reality turned out in The Matrix movies? Yeah, I think I’ll keep my travel physical.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Tools of the Trade by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/56512 Ft: Abstract Audio, Mr Yesterday, Martijn de Boer, Speck</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>You <em>Will</em> Pay Attention to the Safety Briefing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>The selfie of passengers on Southwest flight 1380 not wearing the oxygen masks correctly went viral in the days after the engine explosion, along with the stories -- the guy telling the woman next to him that she didn’t need to squeeze the airbag, and the guy who logged into WiFi and Facebook Live before putting on his mask. The flight attendant interviews that seemingly every news outlet did dripped with schadenfreude -- no one ever pays attention to the safety videos or demonstrations, and look what happened!</li>\r\n 	<li>Improving airline safety records have let people grow numb as to how unnatural air travel is -- flying over 600 mph at 35,000 ft. Flight 1380 was the first accident-related fatality on a US airliner since 2009, and the Southwest’s first ever -- since it was founded in 1971.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’ll admit that I don’t pay attention to every demo, especially when I do multiple flights in a single week. I do typically look around me for the nearest exits -- in front and behind me -- because those can change pretty often with different seat configurations. I will pay attention, as a refresher, if I haven’t flown for a couple of weeks -- like last week’s flight to MSP. Or if it’s a plane I haven’t flown in a while, I’ll look at the seat back card -- like I did today when noticing I was in a Boeing 717, a pretty rare event for me.</li>\r\n 	<li>I have noticed that the flight attendants’ requests/demands for attention have become a bit more strident since 1380. On my Southwest flight back home from MSP last week, the flight attendant chanted “Nose and mouth; nose and mouth!”, eliciting some nervous laughter.</li>\r\n 	<li>The attendant on my Delta flight this morning was a bit more direct, perhaps fatalistic this morning. “Please pay attention! We’re doing this for you. But if you don’t want to watch us, well, I guess it’s your life…”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #140</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_140.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #140 — Travel Tech Gets Physical; Pay Attention to the Safety Briefing','','inherit','closed','closed','','1977-revision-v1','','','2018-05-01 22:20:59','2018-05-02 03:20:59','',1977,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/05/01/1977-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1989,1,'2018-05-02 19:17:32','2018-05-03 00:17:32','[caption id=\"attachment_1985\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/6AB2DE86-7AE4-4DAF-AD9F-DEFB51F737E0-01.jpeg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1985\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/6AB2DE86-7AE4-4DAF-AD9F-DEFB51F737E0-01-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> The Look of Augmented Reality?[/caption]\r\n\r\nBroke out the mobile unit to record this episode in the Bucktown neighborhood of Atlanta; much warmer than getting caught in a spring snow storm in Milwaukee. When much of the travel tech news is about the latest phone apps, we talk about physical travel technology that we can touch and carry. <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">And when flying during the past two weeks, flight attendants\' safety demonstrations have become a bit more strident. </span>All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_140.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/422166231\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #140:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the Hyatt Place-Buckhead in Atlanta, GA missing what I hope is the long-delayed start of Spring finally showing up the Midwest. I have done damn little travel since the last episode -- a couple of drives to a client up north of Milwaukee, a quick trip to Minneapolis last week, and flight this morning down to Atlanta. I managed to avoid the foot of late April snow in Minnesota but got caught by 3-4 inches in Milwaukee. Luckily, I’d looked at the forecast before I left and, walking out to the garage, grabbed my LL Bean boots and threw them into the trunk of the car Which saved my dress shoes later that evening and the next morning on unshoveled walks and is is the good thing about driving; I didn’t have to worry about space constraints. I couldn’t have done the same thing flying to Minneapolis.</li>\r\n 	<li>I ended up flying Southwest to Minneapolis because: a) they were the cheapest flight out on Monday morning at short notice; and b) it let me meet an A-List challenge that Southwest had sent me at the beginning of the year -- fly 3 roundtrips by the end of April and get A-List for the rest of the year. Now, I don’t fly Southwest a whole lot, so I can’t completely justify what I pushed to do this challenge -- except just because it was a challenge, I guess. That, and it’ll make it easier for those times I end up on Southwest this year. I won’t have to pay the $12 for auto check-in or set an alarm to check in 24 hours before flight time -- both of which typically only get me in the second or “B” boarding group. Not an earth shattering perk, but anything that reduces travel hassles is a good thing.</li>\r\n 	<li>When I went Chicago Midway airport on last Monday to catch that flight, I ran into a new TSA trick -- funnel everyone through a single-file U-turn line to be sniffed a TSA agent and a dog, after people headed into either regular security or TSA PreCheck. Which, at 7am on a Monday morning, quickly pushed the security line back into the hallway toward the parking garage. So, after spending what looks like the $190 million a year the past couple of years on screening technology like those snazzy full-body scanners that people empty their pockets and line up for, the TSA is now having us line up for yet another a new screening technology -- but at least this technology is cute. And when was the last time you heard a traveler wanting to pet the body scanner.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/media/files/DJBLUE/11541\">Hear Me</a></em> by DJ Blue</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">A couple of things for those not following my Twitter or the TravelCommons Facebook page…</span>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>First, for those Amazon fans, Alexa will now play the latest episode of TravelCommons for you if you ask nicely. I got an Echo Spot in a schwag bag for a conference in January. I put it on the standing desk in my home office and started playing around with it. After listening to the WJS Minute Briefing as part of my Flash Briefing, I started thinking about how to get TravelCommons onto it. At first, I thought I was going to have to figure out how to build an Alexa skill, but digging a little deeper, I found out that the TuneIn app is sorta the default podcast player for Alexa. So after I got TravelCommons approved for TuneIn -- felt like they had an actual human check out my app -- it appeared on my Echo Spot. So if you say, “Alexa, play TravelCommons podcast”, she should play the latest episode for you. Check out the Facebook page or my Twitter feed for a quick video showing the magic happen</li>\r\n 	<li>Second, I took advantage of being in town and the crap April weather to do the filming for the Midway taproom tour layover video. As I mentioned in the last episode, the idea has been to feature an itinerary out of Chicago’s “other” airport -- what was Chicago’s original airport that morphed into the budget airline airport that morphed into Southwest Airlines’ biggest operation. We used Uber and Lyft to hit 4 taprooms in what can only be described as the “post-industrial” landscape of Chicago’s near south side. We started by driving past the Cook County prison en route to Lagunitas’ plant and taproom that’s built in an old steel mill. While New Belgium and Sierra Nevada landed their national expansions in the much more bucolic environs of the North Carolina Smoky Mountains, Lagunitas’ owner Tony Magee dropped his expansion in a dodgy part of Chicago. We then hit smaller scale, more local places that have repurposed old manufacturing plants in less-visited Chicago neighborhoods -- Lo Rez in Pilsen, Marz in what can charitably described as “lower” Bridgeport, and then ending up at Whiner Beer in the Back of the Yards neighborhood -- where the Chicago Stockyards used to be decades ago. I started working on production, but then looked at the calendar and knew that I only had time for either this episode or the video. And since I’ve worked hard on keeping a monthly cadence of podcast episodes, I kicked the video into next month. So watch Facebook, Twitter, and the web site for the post. Since it’s a bit more narrow scope, I don’t think I’ll put the video in the podcast feed; not sure the non-beer-drinking listeners will want some 100 meg video clogging up their internet.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>While sitting in the backseat of one of those Lyft rides, I noticed something new on the pink Lyft light that many drivers have in the middle of their dash. You always see the front of it -- the pink Lyft logo -- from the outside, through the front windshield. Glancing at the back of it from inside of the car, I something flash by. Looking more closely, I saw a little message scroll by - “15 min eta”. I saw it again in the Lyft car I took to MSP on last Tuesday. I asked the driver about it. He told me that Lyft sent it to him after he did 300 rides -- “bit of a status thing” he said. I told him about the Uber dash light that I saw in New York, that let me adjust the color of the light from the app -- I talked about this in a prior episode. He thought that was pretty cool too, but he liked Lyft, the company, better than Uber, and he appreciated his messaging light.</li>\r\n 	<li>All sorts of press releases drop into the TravelCommons mailbox, but the one announcing April 24, last Tuesday, as the first National Business Traveler Day caught my eye. I guess because it’s new, it hasn’t made it onto the National Day Calendar, a list of these sorts of designations. It’s a good choice of date, though, because there is only one national day listed on the 24th -- National Pigs-In-A-Blanket Day -- which, I can imagine, some First or Business Class flight attendants might reasonably associate with some sleeping business travelers. National Business Traveler Day was announced (created?) by “Upside Business Travel, the first online travel service built just for the do-it-yourself (DIY) business traveler” in recognition of “the important contributions made by business travelers to America\'s economy.” I dunno, this could go in so many snarky directions -- with the pigs-in-a-blanket thing as just a starter. I have to say, though, I felt very unrecognized when I walked into MSP Terminal 2 the afternoon of National Business Travelers Day -- an obvious frequent business traveler: wearing a black blazer, head-down on the iPhone, speedwalking to the furthest security checkpoint because it’s the only one with PreCheck. Nobody was gave me a thank-you, a flower, a hug, but then again, the first person I had contact with was an old, overweight but jolly TSA screener. Nice guy, but not sure I would’ve wanted a hug from him.</li>\r\n 	<li>And it could’ve been that MSP’s Terminal 2 which I’ll add to my list of ghetto terminals, the land of misbegotten travelers, which also includes ORD’s T2, Detroit’s North Terminal, Madrid’s 4S satellite terminal, Munich’s T2 satellite terminal… I’ve talked about this before. In fortress hubs, like ORD, DTW, and MSP, the terminals the hub airlines use is clean, bright, has lots of restaurant and shopping choices. Delta’s terminal in Detroit has an airy 2 or 3-story ceiling with a monorail train running the length of the terminal up at the top. The North terminal that every other airline is dumped into is the old terminal that Delta -- or actually Northwest left behind, with a bit of a clean up and 3 restaurants. Delta’s terminal in Minneapolis is the same story -- lots of shops and restaurants, a big craft beer bar, all with a bit of that North Woods feel. Terminal 2 - generic airport sterility, a Subway sandwich joint, a bar where all the handles were removed from the beer taps. And there’s no inside-security connections between these terminals in MSP and DTW if you want to check out the better side -- it’s a 10-minute bus ride and another pass through security. At least in ORD, you can walk from T2 to the American or United terminals and hit Rick Bayless’ Torta Frontera for great Mexican food or Goose Island for a good beer. On Tuesday, I was stuck in the Humphrey Terminal with my Subway sandwich and a choice of Bud Light or Blue Moon -- which maybe was fitting on National Business Traveler Day.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/media/files/savoyard/10743\">Madrugada</a></em> by Savoyard</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Travel Tech Gets Physical</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>In addition to press releases about National Business Travelers Day, I also get press releases announcing new funding rounds for travel startups. These things come in waves. Like the wave of companies building tour aggregation platforms. That investment thesis went -- because millennials are more into experiential travel, they’re more likely to spend money on something like a food tour or hang gliding; the market for travel experiences is fragmented making discovery and purchasing difficult; our platform will solve this problem by aggregating experience providers and providing world-class search and user experience. The latest wave seems to be about building platforms that “reduce the pain” of corporate business travel. In April, in addition to Upside’s National Business Traveler Day announcement, Rocketrip sent out a release about their $15 million funding round and TravelPerk, who sponsored our January episode, touted their $21 million round -- which sounds like, some 20+ years after Travelocity and Expedia hit the market, companies continue to spend millions of dollars trying to figure out how to replace travel agents.</li>\r\n 	<li>At times, it feels like much of the work on improving travel is virtual, about software -- new apps, new search platforms, better ways to spit out a single travel itinerary. But in spite of the venture capital mantra that “software is eating the world,” travel is inherently physical -- we want to move our bodies, our stuff from Point A to Point B, and most often back again. It seems like the ‘60’s were the golden age of this, when Boeing and Airbus’ predecessors and the Russians were designing and building supersonic planes. I really felt ancient the other day telling some Millennial staffers about, how way back when, Concorde would fly from JFK to LHR in less than 3 hrs. Now it seems that Boeing and Airbus are completely focused on cramming more people into subsonic flying buses. Logical, but not very aspirational. Now if all the work on hyperloops -- the test circuits, the design contests -- actually turns into something, and isn’t just high-tech hobbies for Elon Musk and Richard Branson -- we’ll be onto something.</li>\r\n 	<li>But in the meantime, in the space between now -- thinner, more uncomfortable plane seats and hotel keys that keep demagnetizing -- and the inspirational future -- us whizzing along in pods at 750 mph, doing LA to SF in 35 minutes without having to buy CO2 offsets to feel better about ourselves -- what are some of the physical things about to hit?</li>\r\n 	<li>One thing that seems to be finally hitting critical mass is real-time luggage tracking through RFID luggage tags. Logistics is another thing that’s hard, but it feels that airports and some airlines, Delta especially, have slogged through deploying enough RFID readers along the miles of luggage conveyor belts in the bowels of most of the airports they use, and then wiring it back in near real-time to their smartphone apps so that it’s useful. I’m hoping the combination of competitive pressure, falling equipment pricing, and government fines will push the rest of the airlines to follow suit. For me, real-time location tracking was the main use case for smart bags like BlueSmart. If I can get this through RFID tags, I’ll feel a lot less salty about the smart bag ban.</li>\r\n 	<li>Wearables also get a lot of buzz. Carnival Cruise Lines has been the latest, announcing their “Ocean Medallion” last year as a way to “personalize” your cruise experience -- and, of course, to make it easier to buy drinks on board. Nothing really new here. Disney’s been doing this forever; 20 years ago, I remember using a wristband at Northstar ski resort in Tahoe to track how many vertical feet we’d skied in a day, and to easily buy beers in the lodge. I’m wondering what happens here if the current noise about the use (and misuse) of personal data by Facebook and others resets people’s privacy vs. ease-of-use balance point rather than just blowing over. For me, it’s less about how the companies use the data (though I’m not completely unconcerned about this) and more about their inability to secure it. Seems like every couple of weeks, another travel company admits to some hack of, say, their point-of-sale system and the associated loss of millions of names and credit card numbers. Doesn’t incent me to let them track my movements and spending habits.</li>\r\n 	<li>AR/VR -- Augmented and virtual reality continues to buzz. I’ve talked about Google Translate’s AR feature -- point your camera at, say, a menu or washing machine, and it’ll display the translation over the original text in real-time. It’s not perfect -- the translations can rapidly change, sorta flicker between different interpretations, but it’s often “good enough”, and a whole lot quicker than banging in each menu entree. Google has tried to extend this real-time translation from visual to speech with their Pixel Bud headphones with much more Version 1.0 mixed results. I’m probably being way overly optimistic here, but if the Buds follow the same improvement trajectory, they could be pretty cool in 3 years’ time.</li>\r\n 	<li>It really gets buzzy when we move from AR to VR. A guy at a VR start-up talked to me about using VR in hotel rooms for what he called “social viewing”. Rather than watching, say Black Mirror on Netflix on your laptop or one of those Enseo TVs I’m seeing more and more of, you strap on a VR headset, as does your spouse or kids, and you’re all watching together in a virtual living room or virtual theater. And then there’s always the pitch -- why fly over to, say, Madrid to see Picasso’s Guernica in the Reina Sofia when you strap on a VR headset and “be” in the room instantly? Hey, remember how virtual reality turned out in The Matrix movies? Yeah, I think I’ll keep my travel physical.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/media/files/djlang59/10579\">Crazy Love</a></em> by DJ Lang</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>You <em>Will</em> Pay Attention to the Safety Briefing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>The selfie of passengers on Southwest flight 1380 not wearing the oxygen masks correctly went viral in the days after the engine explosion, along with the stories -- the guy telling the woman next to him that she didn’t need to squeeze the airbag, and the guy who logged into WiFi and Facebook Live before putting on his mask. The flight attendant interviews that seemingly every news outlet did dripped with schadenfreude -- no one ever pays attention to the safety videos or demonstrations, and look what happened!</li>\r\n 	<li>Improving airline safety records have let people grow numb as to how unnatural air travel is -- flying over 600 mph at 35,000 ft. Flight 1380 was the first accident-related fatality on a US airliner since 2009, and the Southwest’s first ever -- since it was founded in 1971.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’ll admit that I don’t pay attention to every demo, especially when I do multiple flights in a single week. I do typically look around me for the nearest exits -- in front and behind me -- because those can change pretty often with different seat configurations. I will pay attention, as a refresher, if I haven’t flown for a couple of weeks -- like last week’s flight to MSP. Or if it’s a plane I haven’t flown in a while, I’ll look at the seat back card -- like I did today when noticing I was in a Boeing 717, a pretty rare event for me.</li>\r\n 	<li>I have noticed that the flight attendants’ requests/demands for attention have become a bit more strident since 1380. On my Southwest flight back home from MSP last week, the flight attendant chanted “Nose and mouth; nose and mouth!”, eliciting some nervous laughter.</li>\r\n 	<li>The attendant on my Delta flight this morning was a bit more direct, perhaps fatalistic this morning. “Please pay attention! We’re doing this for you. But if you don’t want to watch us, well, I guess it’s your life…”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #140</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_140.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #140 — Travel Tech Gets Physical; Pay Attention to the Safety Briefing','','inherit','closed','closed','','1977-revision-v1','','','2018-05-02 19:17:32','2018-05-03 00:17:32','',1977,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/05/02/1977-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1990,1,'2018-05-02 21:07:42','2018-05-03 02:07:42','[caption id=\"attachment_1985\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/6AB2DE86-7AE4-4DAF-AD9F-DEFB51F737E0-01.jpeg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1985\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/6AB2DE86-7AE4-4DAF-AD9F-DEFB51F737E0-01-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> The Look of Augmented Reality?[/caption]\r\n\r\nBroke out the mobile unit to record this episode in the Bucktown neighborhood of Atlanta; much warmer than getting caught in a spring snow storm in Milwaukee. When much of the travel tech news is about the latest phone apps, we talk about physical travel technology that we can touch and carry. <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">And when flying during the past two weeks, flight attendants\' safety demonstrations have become a bit more strident. </span>All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_140.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/438588876\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #140:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the Hyatt Place-Buckhead in Atlanta, GA missing what I hope is the long-delayed start of Spring finally showing up the Midwest. I have done damn little travel since the last episode -- a couple of drives to a client up north of Milwaukee, a quick trip to Minneapolis last week, and flight this morning down to Atlanta. I managed to avoid the foot of late April snow in Minnesota but got caught by 3-4 inches in Milwaukee. Luckily, I’d looked at the forecast before I left and, walking out to the garage, grabbed my LL Bean boots and threw them into the trunk of the car Which saved my dress shoes later that evening and the next morning on unshoveled walks and is is the good thing about driving; I didn’t have to worry about space constraints. I couldn’t have done the same thing flying to Minneapolis.</li>\r\n 	<li>I ended up flying Southwest to Minneapolis because: a) they were the cheapest flight out on Monday morning at short notice; and b) it let me meet an A-List challenge that Southwest had sent me at the beginning of the year -- fly 3 roundtrips by the end of April and get A-List for the rest of the year. Now, I don’t fly Southwest a whole lot, so I can’t completely justify what I pushed to do this challenge -- except just because it was a challenge, I guess. That, and it’ll make it easier for those times I end up on Southwest this year. I won’t have to pay the $12 for auto check-in or set an alarm to check in 24 hours before flight time -- both of which typically only get me in the second or “B” boarding group. Not an earth shattering perk, but anything that reduces travel hassles is a good thing.</li>\r\n 	<li>When I went Chicago Midway airport on last Monday to catch that flight, I ran into a new TSA trick -- funnel everyone through a single-file U-turn line to be sniffed a TSA agent and a dog, after people headed into either regular security or TSA PreCheck. Which, at 7am on a Monday morning, quickly pushed the security line back into the hallway toward the parking garage. So, after spending what looks like the $190 million a year the past couple of years on screening technology like those snazzy full-body scanners that people empty their pockets and line up for, the TSA is now having us line up for yet another a new screening technology -- but at least this technology is cute. And when was the last time you heard a traveler wanting to pet the body scanner.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/media/files/DJBLUE/11541\">Hear Me</a></em> by DJ Blue</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">A couple of things for those not following my Twitter or the TravelCommons Facebook page…</span>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>First, for those Amazon fans, Alexa will now play the latest episode of TravelCommons for you if you ask nicely. I got an Echo Spot in a schwag bag for a conference in January. I put it on the standing desk in my home office and started playing around with it. After listening to the WJS Minute Briefing as part of my Flash Briefing, I started thinking about how to get TravelCommons onto it. At first, I thought I was going to have to figure out how to build an Alexa skill, but digging a little deeper, I found out that the TuneIn app is sorta the default podcast player for Alexa. So after I got TravelCommons approved for TuneIn -- felt like they had an actual human check out my app -- it appeared on my Echo Spot. So if you say, “Alexa, play TravelCommons podcast”, she should play the latest episode for you. Check out the Facebook page or my Twitter feed for a quick video showing the magic happen</li>\r\n 	<li>Second, I took advantage of being in town and the crap April weather to do the filming for the Midway taproom tour layover video. As I mentioned in the last episode, the idea has been to feature an itinerary out of Chicago’s “other” airport -- what was Chicago’s original airport that morphed into the budget airline airport that morphed into Southwest Airlines’ biggest operation. We used Uber and Lyft to hit 4 taprooms in what can only be described as the “post-industrial” landscape of Chicago’s near south side. We started by driving past the Cook County prison en route to Lagunitas’ plant and taproom that’s built in an old steel mill. While New Belgium and Sierra Nevada landed their national expansions in the much more bucolic environs of the North Carolina Smoky Mountains, Lagunitas’ owner Tony Magee dropped his expansion in a dodgy part of Chicago. We then hit smaller scale, more local places that have repurposed old manufacturing plants in less-visited Chicago neighborhoods -- Lo Rez in Pilsen, Marz in what can charitably described as “lower” Bridgeport, and then ending up at Whiner Beer in the Back of the Yards neighborhood -- where the Chicago Stockyards used to be decades ago. I started working on production, but then looked at the calendar and knew that I only had time for either this episode or the video. And since I’ve worked hard on keeping a monthly cadence of podcast episodes, I kicked the video into next month. So watch Facebook, Twitter, and the web site for the post. Since it’s a bit more narrow scope, I don’t think I’ll put the video in the podcast feed; not sure the non-beer-drinking listeners will want some 100 meg video clogging up their internet.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>While sitting in the backseat of one of those Lyft rides, I noticed something new on the pink Lyft light that many drivers have in the middle of their dash. You always see the front of it -- the pink Lyft logo -- from the outside, through the front windshield. Glancing at the back of it from inside of the car, I something flash by. Looking more closely, I saw a little message scroll by - “15 min eta”. I saw it again in the Lyft car I took to MSP on last Tuesday. I asked the driver about it. He told me that Lyft sent it to him after he did 300 rides -- “bit of a status thing” he said. I told him about the Uber dash light that I saw in New York, that let me adjust the color of the light from the app -- I talked about this in a prior episode. He thought that was pretty cool too, but he liked Lyft, the company, better than Uber, and he appreciated his messaging light.</li>\r\n 	<li>All sorts of press releases drop into the TravelCommons mailbox, but the one announcing April 24, last Tuesday, as the first National Business Traveler Day caught my eye. I guess because it’s new, it hasn’t made it onto the National Day Calendar, a list of these sorts of designations. It’s a good choice of date, though, because there is only one national day listed on the 24th -- National Pigs-In-A-Blanket Day -- which, I can imagine, some First or Business Class flight attendants might reasonably associate with some sleeping business travelers. National Business Traveler Day was announced (created?) by “Upside Business Travel, the first online travel service built just for the do-it-yourself (DIY) business traveler” in recognition of “the important contributions made by business travelers to America\'s economy.” I dunno, this could go in so many snarky directions -- with the pigs-in-a-blanket thing as just a starter. I have to say, though, I felt very unrecognized when I walked into MSP Terminal 2 the afternoon of National Business Travelers Day -- an obvious frequent business traveler: wearing a black blazer, head-down on the iPhone, speedwalking to the furthest security checkpoint because it’s the only one with PreCheck. Nobody was gave me a thank-you, a flower, a hug, but then again, the first person I had contact with was an old, overweight but jolly TSA screener. Nice guy, but not sure I would’ve wanted a hug from him.</li>\r\n 	<li>And it could’ve been that MSP’s Terminal 2 which I’ll add to my list of ghetto terminals, the land of misbegotten travelers, which also includes ORD’s T2, Detroit’s North Terminal, Madrid’s 4S satellite terminal, Munich’s T2 satellite terminal… I’ve talked about this before. In fortress hubs, like ORD, DTW, and MSP, the terminals the hub airlines use is clean, bright, has lots of restaurant and shopping choices. Delta’s terminal in Detroit has an airy 2 or 3-story ceiling with a monorail train running the length of the terminal up at the top. The North terminal that every other airline is dumped into is the old terminal that Delta -- or actually Northwest left behind, with a bit of a clean up and 3 restaurants. Delta’s terminal in Minneapolis is the same story -- lots of shops and restaurants, a big craft beer bar, all with a bit of that North Woods feel. Terminal 2 - generic airport sterility, a Subway sandwich joint, a bar where all the handles were removed from the beer taps. And there’s no inside-security connections between these terminals in MSP and DTW if you want to check out the better side -- it’s a 10-minute bus ride and another pass through security. At least in ORD, you can walk from T2 to the American or United terminals and hit Rick Bayless’ Torta Frontera for great Mexican food or Goose Island for a good beer. On Tuesday, I was stuck in the Humphrey Terminal with my Subway sandwich and a choice of Bud Light or Blue Moon -- which maybe was fitting on National Business Traveler Day.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/media/files/savoyard/10743\">Madrugada</a></em> by Savoyard</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Travel Tech Gets Physical</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>In addition to press releases about National Business Travelers Day, I also get press releases announcing new funding rounds for travel startups. These things come in waves. Like the wave of companies building tour aggregation platforms. That investment thesis went -- because millennials are more into experiential travel, they’re more likely to spend money on something like a food tour or hang gliding; the market for travel experiences is fragmented making discovery and purchasing difficult; our platform will solve this problem by aggregating experience providers and providing world-class search and user experience. The latest wave seems to be about building platforms that “reduce the pain” of corporate business travel. In April, in addition to Upside’s National Business Traveler Day announcement, Rocketrip sent out a release about their $15 million funding round and TravelPerk, who sponsored our January episode, touted their $21 million round -- which sounds like, some 20+ years after Travelocity and Expedia hit the market, companies continue to spend millions of dollars trying to figure out how to replace travel agents.</li>\r\n 	<li>At times, it feels like much of the work on improving travel is virtual, about software -- new apps, new search platforms, better ways to spit out a single travel itinerary. But in spite of the venture capital mantra that “software is eating the world,” travel is inherently physical -- we want to move our bodies, our stuff from Point A to Point B, and most often back again. It seems like the ‘60’s were the golden age of this, when Boeing and Airbus’ predecessors and the Russians were designing and building supersonic planes. I really felt ancient the other day telling some Millennial staffers about, how way back when, Concorde would fly from JFK to LHR in less than 3 hrs. Now it seems that Boeing and Airbus are completely focused on cramming more people into subsonic flying buses. Logical, but not very aspirational. Now if all the work on hyperloops -- the test circuits, the design contests -- actually turns into something, and isn’t just high-tech hobbies for Elon Musk and Richard Branson -- we’ll be onto something.</li>\r\n 	<li>But in the meantime, in the space between now -- thinner, more uncomfortable plane seats and hotel keys that keep demagnetizing -- and the inspirational future -- us whizzing along in pods at 750 mph, doing LA to SF in 35 minutes without having to buy CO2 offsets to feel better about ourselves -- what are some of the physical things about to hit?</li>\r\n 	<li>One thing that seems to be finally hitting critical mass is real-time luggage tracking through RFID luggage tags. Logistics is another thing that’s hard, but it feels that airports and some airlines, Delta especially, have slogged through deploying enough RFID readers along the miles of luggage conveyor belts in the bowels of most of the airports they use, and then wiring it back in near real-time to their smartphone apps so that it’s useful. I’m hoping the combination of competitive pressure, falling equipment pricing, and government fines will push the rest of the airlines to follow suit. For me, real-time location tracking was the main use case for smart bags like BlueSmart. If I can get this through RFID tags, I’ll feel a lot less salty about the smart bag ban.</li>\r\n 	<li>Wearables also get a lot of buzz. Carnival Cruise Lines has been the latest, announcing their “Ocean Medallion” last year as a way to “personalize” your cruise experience -- and, of course, to make it easier to buy drinks on board. Nothing really new here. Disney’s been doing this forever; 20 years ago, I remember using a wristband at Northstar ski resort in Tahoe to track how many vertical feet we’d skied in a day, and to easily buy beers in the lodge. I’m wondering what happens here if the current noise about the use (and misuse) of personal data by Facebook and others resets people’s privacy vs. ease-of-use balance point rather than just blowing over. For me, it’s less about how the companies use the data (though I’m not completely unconcerned about this) and more about their inability to secure it. Seems like every couple of weeks, another travel company admits to some hack of, say, their point-of-sale system and the associated loss of millions of names and credit card numbers. Doesn’t incent me to let them track my movements and spending habits.</li>\r\n 	<li>AR/VR -- Augmented and virtual reality continues to buzz. I’ve talked about Google Translate’s AR feature -- point your camera at, say, a menu or washing machine, and it’ll display the translation over the original text in real-time. It’s not perfect -- the translations can rapidly change, sorta flicker between different interpretations, but it’s often “good enough”, and a whole lot quicker than banging in each menu entree. Google has tried to extend this real-time translation from visual to speech with their Pixel Bud headphones with much more Version 1.0 mixed results. I’m probably being way overly optimistic here, but if the Buds follow the same improvement trajectory, they could be pretty cool in 3 years’ time.</li>\r\n 	<li>It really gets buzzy when we move from AR to VR. A guy at a VR start-up talked to me about using VR in hotel rooms for what he called “social viewing”. Rather than watching, say Black Mirror on Netflix on your laptop or one of those Enseo TVs I’m seeing more and more of, you strap on a VR headset, as does your spouse or kids, and you’re all watching together in a virtual living room or virtual theater. And then there’s always the pitch -- why fly over to, say, Madrid to see Picasso’s Guernica in the Reina Sofia when you strap on a VR headset and “be” in the room instantly? Hey, remember how virtual reality turned out in The Matrix movies? Yeah, I think I’ll keep my travel physical.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/media/files/djlang59/10579\">Crazy Love</a></em> by DJ Lang</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>You <em>Will</em> Pay Attention to the Safety Briefing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>The selfie of passengers on Southwest flight 1380 not wearing the oxygen masks correctly went viral in the days after the engine explosion, along with the stories -- the guy telling the woman next to him that she didn’t need to squeeze the airbag, and the guy who logged into WiFi and Facebook Live before putting on his mask. The flight attendant interviews that seemingly every news outlet did dripped with schadenfreude -- no one ever pays attention to the safety videos or demonstrations, and look what happened!</li>\r\n 	<li>Improving airline safety records have let people grow numb as to how unnatural air travel is -- flying over 600 mph at 35,000 ft. Flight 1380 was the first accident-related fatality on a US airliner since 2009, and the Southwest’s first ever -- since it was founded in 1971.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’ll admit that I don’t pay attention to every demo, especially when I do multiple flights in a single week. I do typically look around me for the nearest exits -- in front and behind me -- because those can change pretty often with different seat configurations. I will pay attention, as a refresher, if I haven’t flown for a couple of weeks -- like last week’s flight to MSP. Or if it’s a plane I haven’t flown in a while, I’ll look at the seat back card -- like I did today when noticing I was in a Boeing 717, a pretty rare event for me.</li>\r\n 	<li>I have noticed that the flight attendants’ requests/demands for attention have become a bit more strident since 1380. On my Southwest flight back home from MSP last week, the flight attendant chanted “Nose and mouth; nose and mouth!”, eliciting some nervous laughter.</li>\r\n 	<li>The attendant on my Delta flight this morning was a bit more direct, perhaps fatalistic this morning. “Please pay attention! We’re doing this for you. But if you don’t want to watch us, well, I guess it’s your life…”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #140</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_140.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #140 — Travel Tech Gets Physical; Pay Attention to the Safety Briefing','','inherit','closed','closed','','1977-revision-v1','','','2018-05-02 21:07:42','2018-05-03 02:07:42','',1977,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/05/02/1977-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1991,1,'2018-05-04 13:20:34','2018-05-04 18:20:34','[caption id=\"attachment_1985\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/6AB2DE86-7AE4-4DAF-AD9F-DEFB51F737E0-01.jpeg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1985\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/6AB2DE86-7AE4-4DAF-AD9F-DEFB51F737E0-01-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> The Look of Augmented Reality?[/caption]\r\n\r\nBroke out the mobile unit to record this episode in the Bucktown neighborhood of Atlanta; much warmer than getting caught in a spring snow storm in Milwaukee. When much of the travel tech news is about the latest phone apps, we talk about physical travel technology that we can touch and carry. <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">And when flying during the past two weeks, flight attendants\' safety demonstrations have become a bit more strident. </span>All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_140.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/438588876\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #140:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the Hyatt Place-Buckhead in Atlanta, GA missing what I hope is the long-delayed start of Spring finally showing up the Midwest. I have done damn little travel since the last episode -- a couple of drives to a client up north of Milwaukee, a quick trip to Minneapolis last week, and flight this morning down to Atlanta. I managed to avoid the foot of late April snow in Minnesota but got caught by 3-4 inches in Milwaukee. Luckily, I’d looked at the forecast before I left and, walking out to the garage, grabbed my LL Bean boots and threw them into the trunk of the car Which saved my dress shoes later that evening and the next morning on unshoveled walks and is is the good thing about driving; I didn’t have to worry about space constraints. I couldn’t have done the same thing flying to Minneapolis.</li>\r\n 	<li>I ended up flying Southwest to Minneapolis because: a) they were the cheapest flight out on Monday morning at short notice; and b) it let me meet an A-List challenge that Southwest had sent me at the beginning of the year -- fly 3 roundtrips by the end of April and get A-List for the rest of the year. Now, I don’t fly Southwest a whole lot, so I can’t completely justify what I pushed to do this challenge -- except just because it was a challenge, I guess. That, and it’ll make it easier for those times I end up on Southwest this year. I won’t have to pay the $12 for auto check-in or set an alarm to check in 24 hours before flight time -- both of which typically only get me in the second or “B” boarding group. Not an earth shattering perk, but anything that reduces travel hassles is a good thing.</li>\r\n 	<li>When I went Chicago Midway airport on last Monday to catch that flight, I ran into a new TSA trick -- funnel everyone through a single-file U-turn line to be sniffed a TSA agent and a dog, after people headed into either regular security or TSA PreCheck. Which, at 7am on a Monday morning, quickly pushed the security line back into the hallway toward the parking garage. So, after spending what looks like the $190 million a year the past couple of years on screening technology like those snazzy full-body scanners that people empty their pockets and line up for, the TSA is now having us line up for yet another a new screening technology -- but at least this technology is cute. And when was the last time you heard a traveler wanting to pet the body scanner.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/media/files/DJBLUE/11541\">Hear Me</a></em> by DJ Blue</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">A couple of things for those not following my Twitter or the TravelCommons Facebook page…</span>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>First, for those Amazon fans, Alexa will now play the latest episode of TravelCommons for you if you ask nicely. I got an Echo Spot in a schwag bag for a conference in January. I put it on the standing desk in my home office and started playing around with it. After listening to the WJS Minute Briefing as part of my Flash Briefing, I started thinking about how to get TravelCommons onto it. At first, I thought I was going to have to figure out how to build an Alexa skill, but digging a little deeper, I found out that the TuneIn app is sorta the default podcast player for Alexa. So after I got TravelCommons approved for TuneIn -- felt like they had an actual human check out my app -- it appeared on my Echo Spot. So if you say, “Alexa, play TravelCommons podcast”, she should play the latest episode for you. Check out the Facebook page or my Twitter feed for a quick video showing the magic happen</li>\r\n 	<li>Second, I took advantage of being in town and the crap April weather to do the filming for the Midway taproom tour layover video. As I mentioned in the last episode, the idea has been to feature an itinerary out of Chicago’s “other” airport -- what was Chicago’s original airport that morphed into the budget airline airport that morphed into Southwest Airlines’ biggest operation. We used Uber and Lyft to hit 4 taprooms in what can only be described as the “post-industrial” landscape of Chicago’s near south side. We started by driving past the Cook County prison en route to Lagunitas’ plant and taproom that’s built in an old steel mill. While New Belgium and Sierra Nevada landed their national expansions in the much more bucolic environs of the North Carolina Smoky Mountains, Lagunitas’ owner Tony Magee dropped his expansion in a dodgy part of Chicago. We then hit smaller scale, more local places that have repurposed old manufacturing plants in less-visited Chicago neighborhoods -- Lo Rez in Pilsen, Marz in what can charitably described as “lower” Bridgeport, and then ending up at Whiner Beer in the Back of the Yards neighborhood -- where the Chicago Stockyards used to be decades ago. I started working on production, but then looked at the calendar and knew that I only had time for either this episode or the video. And since I’ve worked hard on keeping a monthly cadence of podcast episodes, I kicked the video into next month. So watch Facebook, Twitter, and the web site for the post. Since it’s a bit more narrow scope, I don’t think I’ll put the video in the podcast feed; not sure the non-beer-drinking listeners will want some 100 meg video clogging up their internet.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>While sitting in the backseat of one of those Lyft rides, I noticed something new on the pink Lyft light that many drivers have in the middle of their dash. You always see the front of it -- the pink Lyft logo -- from the outside, through the front windshield. Glancing at the back of it from inside of the car, I something flash by. Looking more closely, I saw a little message scroll by - “15 min eta”. I saw it again in the Lyft car I took to MSP on last Tuesday. I asked the driver about it. He told me that Lyft sent it to him after he did 300 rides -- “bit of a status thing” he said. I told him about the Uber dash light that I saw in New York, that let me adjust the color of the light from the app -- I talked about this in a prior episode. He thought that was pretty cool too, but he liked Lyft, the company, better than Uber, and he appreciated his messaging light.</li>\r\n 	<li>All sorts of press releases drop into the TravelCommons mailbox, but the one announcing April 24, last Tuesday, as the first National Business Traveler Day caught my eye. I guess because it’s new, it hasn’t made it onto the National Day Calendar, a list of these sorts of designations. It’s a good choice of date, though, because there is only one national day listed on the 24th -- National Pigs-In-A-Blanket Day -- which, I can imagine, some First or Business Class flight attendants might reasonably associate with some sleeping business travelers. National Business Traveler Day was announced (created?) by “Upside Business Travel, the first online travel service built just for the do-it-yourself (DIY) business traveler” in recognition of “the important contributions made by business travelers to America\'s economy.” I dunno, this could go in so many snarky directions -- with the pigs-in-a-blanket thing as just a starter. I have to say, though, I felt very unrecognized when I walked into MSP Terminal 2 the afternoon of National Business Travelers Day -- an obvious frequent business traveler: wearing a black blazer, head-down on the iPhone, speedwalking to the furthest security checkpoint because it’s the only one with PreCheck. Nobody was gave me a thank-you, a flower, a hug, but then again, the first person I had contact with was an old, overweight but jolly TSA screener. Nice guy, but not sure I would’ve wanted a hug from him.</li>\r\n 	<li>And it could’ve been that MSP’s Terminal 2 which I’ll add to my list of ghetto terminals, the land of misbegotten travelers, which also includes ORD’s T2, Detroit’s North Terminal, Madrid’s 4S satellite terminal, Munich’s T2 satellite terminal… I’ve talked about this before. In fortress hubs, like ORD, DTW, and MSP, the terminals the hub airlines use is clean, bright, has lots of restaurant and shopping choices. Delta’s terminal in Detroit has an airy 2 or 3-story ceiling with a monorail train running the length of the terminal up at the top. The North terminal that every other airline is dumped into is the old terminal that Delta -- or actually Northwest left behind, with a bit of a clean up and 3 restaurants. Delta’s terminal in Minneapolis is the same story -- lots of shops and restaurants, a big craft beer bar, all with a bit of that North Woods feel. Terminal 2 - generic airport sterility, a Subway sandwich joint, a bar where all the handles were removed from the beer taps. And there’s no inside-security connections between these terminals in MSP and DTW if you want to check out the better side -- it’s a 10-minute bus ride and another pass through security. At least in ORD, you can walk from T2 to the American or United terminals and hit Rick Bayless’ Torta Frontera for great Mexican food or Goose Island for a good beer. On Tuesday, I was stuck in the Humphrey Terminal with my Subway sandwich and a choice of Bud Light or Blue Moon -- which maybe was fitting on National Business Traveler Day.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/media/files/savoyard/10743\">Madrugada</a></em> by Savoyard</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Travel Tech Gets Physical</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>In addition to press releases about National Business Travelers Day, I also get press releases announcing new funding rounds for travel startups. These things come in waves. Like the wave of companies building tour aggregation platforms. That investment thesis went -- because millennials are more into experiential travel, they’re more likely to spend money on something like a food tour or hang gliding; the market for travel experiences is fragmented making discovery and purchasing difficult; our platform will solve this problem by aggregating experience providers and providing world-class search and user experience. The latest wave seems to be about building platforms that “reduce the pain” of corporate business travel. In April, in addition to Upside’s National Business Traveler Day announcement, Rocketrip sent out a release about their $15 million funding round and TravelPerk, who sponsored our January episode, touted their $21 million round -- which sounds like, some 20+ years after Travelocity and Expedia hit the market, companies continue to spend millions of dollars trying to figure out how to replace travel agents.</li>\r\n 	<li>At times, it feels like much of the work on improving travel is virtual, about software -- new apps, new search platforms, better ways to spit out a single travel itinerary. But in spite of the venture capital mantra that “software is eating the world,” travel is inherently physical -- we want to move our bodies, our stuff from Point A to Point B, and most often back again. It seems like the ‘60’s were the golden age of this, when Boeing and Airbus’ predecessors and the Russians were designing and building supersonic planes. I really felt ancient the other day telling some Millennial staffers about, how way back when, Concorde would fly from JFK to LHR in less than 3 hrs. Now it seems that Boeing and Airbus are completely focused on cramming more people into subsonic flying buses. Logical, but not very aspirational. Now if all the work on hyperloops -- the test circuits, the design contests -- actually turns into something, and isn’t just high-tech hobbies for Elon Musk and Richard Branson -- we’ll be onto something.</li>\r\n 	<li>But in the meantime, in the space between now -- thinner, more uncomfortable plane seats and hotel keys that keep demagnetizing -- and the inspirational future -- us whizzing along in pods at 750 mph, doing LA to SF in 35 minutes without having to buy CO2 offsets to feel better about ourselves -- what are some of the physical things about to hit?</li>\r\n 	<li>One thing that seems to be finally hitting critical mass is real-time luggage tracking through RFID luggage tags. Logistics is another thing that’s hard, but it feels that airports and some airlines, Delta especially, have slogged through deploying enough RFID readers along the miles of luggage conveyor belts in the bowels of most of the airports they use, and then wiring it back in near real-time to their smartphone apps so that it’s useful. I’m hoping the combination of competitive pressure, falling equipment pricing, and government fines will push the rest of the airlines to follow suit. For me, real-time location tracking was the main use case for smart bags like BlueSmart. If I can get this through RFID tags, I’ll feel a lot less salty about the smart bag ban.</li>\r\n 	<li>Wearables also get a lot of buzz. Carnival Cruise Lines has been the latest, announcing their “Ocean Medallion” last year as a way to “personalize” your cruise experience -- and, of course, to make it easier to buy drinks on board. Nothing really new here. Disney’s been doing this forever; 20 years ago, I remember using a wristband at Northstar ski resort in Tahoe to track how many vertical feet we’d skied in a day, and to easily buy beers in the lodge. I’m wondering what happens here if the current noise about the use (and misuse) of personal data by Facebook and others resets people’s privacy vs. ease-of-use balance point rather than just blowing over. For me, it’s less about how the companies use the data (though I’m not completely unconcerned about this) and more about their inability to secure it. Seems like every couple of weeks, another travel company admits to some hack of, say, their point-of-sale system and the associated loss of millions of names and credit card numbers. Doesn’t incent me to let them track my movements and spending habits.</li>\r\n 	<li>AR/VR -- Augmented and virtual reality continues to buzz. I’ve talked about Google Translate’s AR feature -- point your camera at, say, a menu or washing machine, and it’ll display the translation over the original text in real-time. It’s not perfect -- the translations can rapidly change, sorta flicker between different interpretations, but it’s often “good enough”, and a whole lot quicker than banging in each menu entree. Google has tried to extend this real-time translation from visual to speech with their Pixel Bud headphones with much more Version 1.0 mixed results. I’m probably being way overly optimistic here, but if the Buds follow the same improvement trajectory, they could be pretty cool in 3 years’ time.</li>\r\n 	<li>It really gets buzzy when we move from AR to VR. A guy at a VR start-up talked to me about using VR in hotel rooms for what he called “social viewing”. Rather than watching, say Black Mirror on Netflix on your laptop or one of those Enseo TVs I’m seeing more and more of, you strap on a VR headset, as does your spouse or kids, and you’re all watching together in a virtual living room or virtual theater. And then there’s always the pitch -- why fly over to, say, Madrid to see Picasso’s Guernica in the Reina Sofia when you strap on a VR headset and “be” in the room instantly? Hey, remember how virtual reality turned out in The Matrix movies? Yeah, I think I’ll keep my travel physical.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/media/files/djlang59/10579\">Crazy Love</a></em> by DJ Lang</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>You <em>Will</em> Pay Attention to the Safety Briefing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>The selfie of passengers on Southwest flight 1380 not wearing the oxygen masks correctly went viral in the days after the engine explosion, along with the stories -- the guy telling the woman next to him that she didn’t need to squeeze the airbag, and the guy who logged into WiFi and Facebook Live before putting on his mask. The flight attendant interviews that seemingly every news outlet did dripped with schadenfreude -- no one ever pays attention to the safety videos or demonstrations, and look what happened!</li>\r\n 	<li>Improving airline safety records have let people grow numb as to how unnatural air travel is -- flying over 600 mph at 35,000 ft. Flight 1380 was the first accident-related fatality on a US airliner since 2009, and the Southwest’s first ever -- since it was founded in 1971.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’ll admit that I don’t pay attention to every demo, especially when I do multiple flights in a single week. I do typically look around me for the nearest exits -- in front and behind me -- because those can change pretty often with different seat configurations. I will pay attention, as a refresher, if I haven’t flown for a couple of weeks -- like last week’s flight to MSP. Or if it’s a plane I haven’t flown in a while, I’ll look at the seat back card -- like I did today when noticing I was in a Boeing 717, a pretty rare event for me.</li>\r\n 	<li>I have noticed that the flight attendants’ requests/demands for attention have become a bit more strident since 1380. On my Southwest flight back home from MSP last week, the flight attendant chanted “Nose and mouth; nose and mouth!”, eliciting some nervous laughter.</li>\r\n 	<li>The attendant on my Delta flight this morning was a bit more direct, perhaps fatalistic this morning. “Please pay attention! We’re doing this for you. But if you don’t want to watch us, well, I guess it’s your life…”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #140</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a> and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_140.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #140 — Travel Tech Gets Physical; Pay Attention to the Safety Briefing','','inherit','closed','closed','','1977-revision-v1','','','2018-05-04 13:20:34','2018-05-04 18:20:34','',1977,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/05/04/1977-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1993,1,'2018-05-26 10:35:10','0000-00-00 00:00:00','<p>\n<strong>New Resource: WordPress and GDPR Compliance (in Plain English)</strong><br />\nAre you confused by GDPR, and how it will impact your WordPress site? We have gotten dozens of emails from users asking us to explain GDPR in plain English and share tips on how to make your WordPress site GDPR compliant. So we created an ultimate guide to explain everything you need to know about GDPR and WordPress (without the complex legal jargon).\n</p>\n<p><a href=\"http://www.wpbeginner.com/beginners-guide/the-ultimate-guide-to-wordpress-and-gdpr-compliance-everything-you-need-to-know/?utm_source=wpdashboard&#038;utm_medium=amnotification&#038;utm_campaign=gdprguide\" target=\"_blank\" class=\"button button-primary\">Read our WordPress and GDPR Compliance Guide &raquo;</a></p>\n<p>\nSyed Balkhi<br />\nFounder of WPBeginner and MonsterInsights</p>\n','','','draft','closed','closed','','','','','2018-05-26 10:35:10','0000-00-00 00:00:00','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?post_type=amn_mi-lite&p=1993',0,'amn_mi-lite','',0),
(1995,1,'2018-05-26 11:15:21','2018-05-26 16:15:21','<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/IMG_1145.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1009\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/IMG_1145-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>Returning to the mic after 10 days of food, wine, wind, rain, and snow in the north of Spain. I talk about traveling in Spain, and with my guest Coleman Collins about how to make the best coffee in your hotel room.  All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_139.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/422166231\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #139:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. Just got back Sunday night from 10 days in Spain -- about 4 days each in Madrid and San Sebastian, with a couple of days in the Rioja wine region in between. A friend on the East Coast sent me a note while I was in Spain -- “Good week to be out of town; we got whacked with yet another dump of snow.” Not quite. It’s been a cold Spring in Europe and Spain has been no different. Our first weekend in Madrid was in the upper 30’s/low 40’s with a mix of rain and wet snow. Which turned into just snow as we drove up to Rioja. Some of that drive reminded me of I-70 in the Colorado Rockies -- go into a tunnel with fine weather; come out of it to blowing snow. Having said that, it was nothing like the 7 or 9 or 14 inches that Winter Storm Toby dropped on the East Coast last week. And even with lousy weather, the food and the wine in Spain makes it hard to sustain any sort of cranky attitude, though it shorten up our pintxos crawl through Logroño.</li>\r\n 	<li>We flew Iberia to Madrid because: a) they have a non-stop flight from Chicago and b) as I mentioned <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">a few episodes ago</a>, I was finally able to burn off some of those Avios points that had been collecting cobwebs in my BA account. I decided to try Iberia’s Premium Economy service on the flight over. Most airlines are using this sorta “tweener” service to capture revenue from people willing to pay a bit more for some comfort, but aren’t willing to go the 2-300% Business Class uplift out of their own pocket. And it was truly a “tweener” service -- about 5 rows between the Business and regular Coach cabins, and coach seats with spacing and recline somewhere between domestic First Class and, say, United’s Economy Plus. The meal service was the same as Economy, but they served us first, and they gave us a little amenities kit with just the essentials -- earplugs, eye mask, socks, and a toothbrush. It was as-advertised -- Coach with a bit more space, which made for better napping on the 8-hour flight over. I’ve talked in past episodes that I really question the value-for-money with Business Class on Transatlantic flights, but this tweener class was a reasonable deal.</li>\r\n 	<li>The deeper recline of the Premium Economy seat also makes it easier for you to stay in your space when you sleep. On the way back, I was in regular Coach because -- well, I’m cheap and didn’t need to sleep. But the guy next to me did. He nodded off as soon as we left the ground, which meant he didn’t recline his seat, which meant that he started to list to port, toward my shoulder. This guy looked like he was the younger brother of Dos Equis’ “Most Interesting Man”. But there was no amount of interesting that was going to have him sleeping on my shoulder. Just as he was about to touch down on my shoulder, I gave our seat row a bit of a shake -- some single row turbulence. He startled awake, realized what he was doing, and immediately sat straight up. Stay upright, my friend.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">P.I.H.E. by Budapest BluesBoy (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hepepe/26362 Ft: Inna Barmash - Zhurbin</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Just a quick addendum to the luggage thread we’ve been running over the last couple of episodes. In the last episode Jerry Sarfati talked about downsizing from a 22 to a 20-inch carry-on bag because of the hassles he’d gotten from American Airlines gate agents. I mentioned then that I haven’t had any problems from American, and didn’t get pulled over on my Chicago-to-Madrid Iberia flight. Just goes to show you how much discretion gate agents have. I didn’t test it on the way back home -- 2 bottles bought in Rioja tasting rooms and a tin of olive oil tipped me way over the liquid limit.</li>\r\n 	<li>The EU’s no roaming rules also let me skip what had become our first day of European vacation ritual of burning a couple of hours in a phone store buying local SIM cards for our mobile phones. Instead, the week before we left, I fired up EE’s iPhone app and topped up our UK SIMs. Somewhere over the Bay of Biscay, after my breakfast tray was cleared, I swapped out my AT&amp;T SIM. Once on the ground, I turned on my phone and was good to go. And because the whole family has EE SIMs, it was easy to call each other when we got separated on our pintxos crawls. I know that everyone just messages nowadays, but I’m still one of those knuckledraggers who occasionally finds talking quicker than texting.</li>\r\n 	<li>While in Madrid, I also added to my subway “tap-n-go” card collection for €2.50 -- or about $3 at current exchange rates. The interesting twist on Madrid’s system is that you can tap up to 4 people through the turnstile with a single card, so I only had to buy one tap card for the whole family. I’d load it up with 10 rides -- which seemed to be the only option -- we’d line up behind one turnstile, then tap through and pass it back. Getting out, we just walked through the turnstile since the Madrid Metro fare system seems based on zones rather than start and ending stations. Just adding it to the growing stack...</li>\r\n 	<li>In past episodes, I’ve talked about how I’ve come to value the service I get from Hertz with President’s Club status. And so I rented a car from Hertz in Madrid for our drive up to Rioja for wine tasting and then over to San Sebastian and back. On Tuesday morning, we headed to Atocha train station, found the Hertz counter, and then I sent my family to get breakfast because I knew from past experience renting cars in Spain, that I was in for 30 minutes of hard upselling. It didn’t matter that I had already booked on-line at Hertz.com and selected the options I wanted, I was going to get sold. Mel, the Hertz agent, spoke excellent American English -- all the right terms, slang, colloquialisms. Telling me the rate I got was “crazy low” -- I’d used our corporate rate plus cashed in some Hertz points -- because I didn’t have any insurance. And then came the big push -- writing down big liability numbers, huge damage possibilities -- even though a lot of this was covered by our corporate rate and the credit card. After this, there was the upsell for the car -- did you know you booked a manual, can you drive a manual -- because, well, no Americans know how to work a clutch. I just smiled and nodded, and let Mel work through his spiel -- I had kinda hoped that my status would save me, but nope, there was no short-circuiting this. After he was done, I said “No” to everything. I finally got the keys just as my family finished breakfast, and then off we went. I would’ve been frustrated if I hadn’t expected it and budgeted time for it. Instead, I was just slightly weary. I’m glad my wife got me a coffee to-go.</li>\r\n 	<li>And in the seeming obligatory craft beer segment of TravelCommons, having the rental car let me hit the Basqueland Brewing Project taproom outside of San Sebastian. It had a very American feel to it -- winding through a light industrial area, finding the place by spotting the picnic tables in front of the open loading door, walking past the foosball table and shelves holding 20-kg sacks of malt, the fluorescent pink cord blocking access to the brewing area. And for good reason, the place is owned by 3 Americans. One of them was working the taps when we arrived. He quickly flipped from Spanish to English when we ordered. Originally from Baltimore, he came over 6 years ago when his wife wanted to move back home. Nice guy, good beer.</li>\r\n 	<li>Rob Cheshire, a TravelCommons listener and Untappd friend, hit the comments section on the last episode -- first, to egg me on about my comment in the last episode to do a One City, Five Taprooms layover video, and then about taprooms near Wrigley Field when he comes in to see the Reds play the Cubs. I managed to string together a 6-taproom crawl; he may need to break that up into a couple of rounds.</li>\r\n 	<li>And, to Rob’s first question, I actually will do a taproom layover video, but instead of basing it out of ORD like my last layover video, I’m going to do this one from MDW -- give those Southwest fliers some love. It’ll let me hit 4 taprooms that have opened in the past couple of years in what can only be described as the “post-industrial” landscape of Chicago’s near south side. It should be fun. Working on the scheduling now. Will shoot it in April. With the additional production time video requires, it might not get up until May, but I’ll keep everyone posted</li>\r\n 	<li>One last thing -- last week I tweeted out a link to a pretty rigorous study from the FlyHealthy Research Team out of Emory University in Atlanta about passenger movements on transcontinental flights and what it means for the spread of respiratory diseases. The team took 10 flights, logging passenger movements, taking air samples, and swabs of hard surfaces. I won’t go through the whole study -- I’ll put a <a href=\"http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/03/13/1711611115\">link</a> in the show notes for those who want to read it, which I encourage you to do; it’s very readable as scientific papers go -- but the main takeaways for me were: a) you really only have to be concerned about the people immediately in front, behind, and next to you -- a one-row radius; b) the people wiping down their trays, armrests, and seat belt buckles with Purell Wipes are wasting their time; and c) if you’re really worried, get a window seat in the front part of the plane and don’t leave it for the entire flight (which, as a side benefit, will also endear you to your row mates). As one who has called planes “flying petri dishes”, I was pleasantly surprised by the Emory team’s findings.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">~aether theories~ by Vidian (c) copyright 2018 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Vidian/57398 Ft: Gurdonark, White-throated Sparrow</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Brewing the Best Hotel Room Coffee</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Interview with Coleman Collins. His blog post on brewing hotel room coffee is <a href=\"https://roadwarrior.blog/hotel-room-coffee/\">here</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Tools of the Trade by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/56512 Ft: Abstract Audio, Mr Yesterday, Martijn de Boer, Speck</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Notes from Spain</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>This was our 4th spring trip to Spain. Our first trip we hit Madrid and Barcelona, the usual suspects. The next trip, we headed south to Andalucia -- Córdoba, Granada, Ronda, Seville -- during Semana Santa, Holy Week, and saw penitential processions every day in every town and city we visited, culminating in Holy Thursday night outside of Seville Cathedral. The last trip, in 2016, we headed back down South, but even further, taking a boat across the Straits of Gibraltar to Tangier, Morocco. For this trip, we gave up warm weather for some new territory -- Rioja and the Basque Country.</li>\r\n 	<li>As I said at the top of the show, for me, Spain is about food and wine. There’s certainly culture -- the Semana Santa processions are phenomenal cultural events, standing in front of the huge canvas of Picasso’s Guernica in the Reina Sofia in Madrid, the Mezquita in Cordoba,... -- but it’s the food and wine that keep bringing us back.</li>\r\n 	<li>On our first trip to Granada, we were staying in a Marriott -- maybe one of their AC properties -- in the middle of town. A great building; it had been a convent at one time. There was an interior courtyard; we had a nightcap there one night. 4 glasses of wine at the hotel bar -- figuring $12-15/glass, I’m waiting for a 40 euro tab. It was 12 euros -- I love this country.</li>\r\n 	<li>The pintxos crawl was the food center of this trip north, first in Logroño and then in San Sebastian, walking from bar to bar -- a glass of wine and a bite at each. It was a good mix of food. In Logroño, we started at a couple of dive-ier, more local places that focused on just one pintxos -- sauteed mushrooms at one, ground lamb sandwich at the next, the meat seared on a flat grill behind the bar, and then served on a bun with a great tasting green sauce -- and serving local Rioja wines, pulling the bottles from a bucket at the end of the bar. We then swung into a distinctly higher end place, complete with a Michelin sticker on the front door; more variety of food -- seared red tuna, pickled white anchovies, grilled octopus -- and the next level up of Rioja wines. Later in the week, in San Sebastian, when the weather turned a bit better, we could see the crawl pick up volume in the pedestrian streets of the old town; people still bundled up a bit, but taking their wine outside, and willing to walk to the next place rather than hunkering down for a couple of courses in the warmth.</li>\r\n 	<li>Cider is big in the Basque Country, though it’s drier, not as sweet as you get in the US or the UK. And during cider season -- January through April -- the siderias, the cider houses in the hills outside of San Sebastian, open up to serve cider streamed directly from the tap of huge chestnut wood barrels into your glass, and then the glass of the person behind you,... and a traditional menu of salt-cod omelette, fresh cod fried with peppers and onions, and damn big grilled t-bones served either standing up or at communal tables. We ended up sharing a meal with a busload of folks from just over the border in France. A couple dozen of us lined up as a worker manned the tap -- letting a thin stream of cider out. We lined up our wide-mouthed plastic tumblers about three feet away to impart a bit of fizz to the three fingers of cider that we caught before moving out of the stream to let it hit the tumbler that someone was holding right below ours.</li>\r\n 	<li>For a great food country, the food at Madrid airport, though, is a bit pedestrian. So to extend our food extravaganza for one more meal, we skip the “meh” restaurants and buy a package of the top-end iberian ham -- the bellota, from the free range Iberian pigs fattening up on acorns. We can’t bring it into the US, but it’s an 8-hour flight from Madrid to Chicago. That package never makes it as far at US landfall.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #139</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_139.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #139 — Brewing Best Hotel Room Coffee; Notes from Spain','','inherit','closed','closed','','1961-revision-v1','','','2018-05-26 11:15:21','2018-05-26 16:15:21','',1961,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/05/26/1961-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1997,1,'2018-05-26 11:46:12','2018-05-26 16:46:12','[caption id=\"attachment_1843\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/2D9A5999-E233-4434-BFCE-4A45D285BEA6.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1843\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/2D9A5999-E233-4434-BFCE-4A45D285BEA6-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Status Recognition in Vietnam[/caption]\r\n\r\nFinding a Jag in the Hertz Presidents Club aisle has me thinking about the differing value of loyalty from hotel, airlines, and car rental companies while 5-star rating schemes are pushing grade inflation. All this and comments on luggage discounts, traveling while injured, and #metoo while flying at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_134.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_134.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #134:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. No exciting or exotic travel since the last episode; just a quick down-and-back to Atlanta, a day in Washington, DC, and a few trips to Charlottesville, VA.</li>\r\n 	<li>The first trip to Charlottesville, about 3 weeks ago, was the first time I’d been back in 5 months after spending more than a year there. Other than the flights being poorly timed -- there are non-stops from ORD, but they arrive at either 2:45 in the afternoon or quarter past midnight -- it’s been a great town to visit. So I was surprised as anyone by the white supremacist march there in August.</li>\r\n 	<li>I was on the late night flight and when I walked out of the terminal, the one cab at the curb had already been claimed. But it was only a 4 min wait for a Lyft driver, so not a problem. Indeed, it turned out to be a great ride. The Lyft driver, an older black guy, told me, unprompted, the whole back story of the protests; how it started as a local political battle that then blew up big. He wanted me to know that Charlottesville wasn’t like that. He told me “I’ve lived here for 40 years and have never seen that statue, until one day, I drove past a park, looked to my right and there it was!”</li>\r\n 	<li>Since the white supremacists had shown back up the Saturday before we came back, I said to the project team, “We need to find out where that statue is so we can avoid it.” One is from India, the other born in the US of Indian parents. I didn’t want us stumbling into a line of tiki torch-bearing protesters.\r\nBut as we got working that day, we forgot about it. Driving to dinner, we missed a turn -- actually we missed going straight; instead followed the road as it turned -- and as we wandered through some side streets to get back on track, I look to my right, and there’s the Robert E Lee statue covered in black tarp, with a couple of people camped out in front of it, and another group of people walking toward it. I suggested that we didn’t need to come to a complete stop at intersection. And, well, we know where that statue is now.</li>\r\n 	<li>For all of my complaints and bitch tweeting about delayed flights, I have to say that my American flight home from Reagan National Saturday morning was great. Exit row seat; no one in the middle. Everyone boarded quickly; they closed the door and left 10 minutes early and with no traffic on the taxiway and a beautiful sunny day, we were up and over the Potomac in 5 minutes. Typically, though, nothing like this goes unpunished at ORD, but we landed, didn’t have to wait for a gate, and taxied immediately in, arriving a half-hour early. Damn if this doesn’t make me look forward to my next trip.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/bridges/15563\">i knew</a> by bridges (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. Ft: shannonsongs</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>On my most recent trip through the ATL PreCheck line, there was no X-Ray machine choreography this time. If you remember in the last episode, I talked about the TSA agent at the parallel loading X-Ray machine coordinating each bin push, having everyone hold up until all the previous bins had cleared, and then having everyone push their bins onto the conveyor at once. Not this time, though I did get a bit of a stink eye from a couple when I walked around them to one of the further up loading stations. They’re obviously not old PC heads, otherwise they’d instantly understand the difference between serial and parallel paths.</li>\r\n 	<li>Following up on the packing pro tips topics from the last episode, which I also repurposed/recycled into the Ruthless Packing Tips blog post, Dan Bennett, the CEO of Test Facts, sent me a link to study where they tested and compared 32,672 luggage prices. I’ll put a <a href=\"https://www.testfacts.com/luggage-prices-analyzed/\"><strong>link</strong> </a>to the study in the show notes, but a couple of interesting factoids from their introductory infographic\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>You can save an average of $110/39% buying on-line</li>\r\n 	<li>Walmart and Target’s on-line stores tend to have the highest discounts; Kohl’s and Macy’s the lowest</li>\r\n 	<li>Amazon is in 10th place for average discount (in the 40% range), but is tops by a long way in greatest variety -- over 12,000 luggage items vs. 7,500 for Jet which was #2</li>\r\n 	<li>Luggage sets have a 23% higher discount than single pieces</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Check it out -- it’s an interesting piece of analysis</li>\r\n 	<li>Jim McDonough posted a “traveled while injured” story on Facebook that put my biking injury whining in its place\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>My wife and I were in County Kerry on the West Coast of Ireland. We were killing time before dinner, at an ancient stone circle on the edge of town. I was taking some photos, and it started raining. While walking down a slope, I was putting my camera back in my bag to keep it dry, when my left foot slipped on the wet grass. My right knee hyper-flexed, causing a complete tear of my quadriceps tendon. There was a loud crack, but no pain.</li>\r\n 	<li>It turns out you can\'t walk without a quadriceps tendon. We didn\'t know what the problem was. My wife ran off and found some people and got them to come and get me, and they took me to the doctor\'s house. The doctor (more like a physician\'s assistant, the regular doctor was away) poked around but couldn\'t diagnose anything. We went back to our B&amp;B but did not go out to dinner that night!</li>\r\n 	<li>Flying home, Dublin/Gatwick/DFW, I needed assistance for the connections. British Airways took such good care of me in Gatwick that I fly them whenever I can. While on the plane I was OK - I used seat backs to get to/from the head. American was supposed to provide a wheelchair at DFW but they failed to until the lead flight attendant got on the horn and got me one. I had surgery a couple of days later, and my rehab took a few months.</li>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">This is the same injury that Bill Clinton had at Greg Norman\'s house. He had a better medical plan than I did</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Just “ouch”, Jim. Reminds me of years ago when I broke my right foot getting out of my car in Philadelphia. I stepped on some broken concrete and heard a loud “snap”! After a long wait in an ER in downtown Philly -- where they rightly were triaging gunshot victims over me -- they plastered me up to my thigh and told me not to put any weight on my foot. The next day, I’m hobbling through 30th Street Station and down the stairs to the train platform on crutches with a carry-on bag across my back, swinging with every step. No one from Amtrak took any sort of care of me.</li>\r\n 	<li>Mika Pyyhkala tweeted me a great video of what I assume is a new service that guides blind travelers through airports. I’ll put a <a href=\"https://youtu.be/rXtv-M4WpMU\"><strong>link</strong> </a>in the show notes. It’s a great demo, show how a person in the contact center is viewing a real-time video stream through what I assume is a camera mounted on the head of the traveler, and then providing audio guidance. And watching the video made me realize what a mine field an airport is for blind or low-sight travelers. I guess I should’ve realized this; it’s typically a mine field for those with 20/20 vision. Thanks Mika for the pointer. Very cool video.</li>\r\n 	<li>The #metoo Twitter campaign on sexual harassment that started up a couple of weeks ago reminded me of a couple of stories women have told me about seat assignments. One from a woman CIO; she’s sitting in her aisle seat, pre-boarded with the top status group and is downloading some last-minute e-mails during regular boarding. She looks up, there’s a guy standing there who says “Why don’t you just slide over, honey”, pointing to the center seat. She closed her PC, stood up and pointed the guy to his center seat, and then leaned out into the aisle for the rest of the flight. Another story was from a friend, a woman air marshal, who was sitting in her assigned aisle First Class seat -- armed and incognito to everyone except the flight crew. During boarding, a well-known male TV host on MSNBC asks her to switch seats. She can’t; the regulations say that air marshals need to be in their assigned seats; but she can’t tell him that and stay undercover, so she politely tells him “No”. To which he becomes very irate, obnoxiously berating her -- “Do you know who I am” and all that. As much as she’d love to tell him why she can’t move, she can’t. So she has to sit there and take it, until finally a flight attendant comes over and intervenes. Followed by, again, an uncomfortable 2-hr flight in close quarters with a troglodyte. Sexual harassment is bad -- full stop. Having to fend someone off, and then be in the same tight metal tube with him unable to leave, even worse.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/11510\">Funkist</a> - cdk dub mix by cdk (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: teru.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>What’s the Current Value of Loyalty?</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I continue to love Hertz’s new Presidents Club pick-your-own car aisle. Yes, National has been doing it for years. But on my last trip to Atlanta, I’m walking down the aisle looking at the cars -- Altima, Altima, Hyundai, Altima, Jag, Altima -- wait, what? I very quickly back up. It’s a new Jaguar Model XF. I look up -- nope, I haven’t slipped into the Upgrade aisle. I throw my bag in the back and take off for one of my nicer drives up I-85 through the city. Another time, I’m walking down the aisle and a Hertz guy pulls a new Dodge Charger into the space next to me. He hops out, hands me the keys saying “We want to make sure you guys have a nice selection of cars to choose from.” And so now as the year is winding down, I’m looking -- how many more rentals to keep Presidents Club status?</li>\r\n 	<li>I felt the flip side of this last week at the Charlottesville Courtyard where as I’m filling up a couple of water glasses in the workout room cooler, I tweet “I kinda hate Courtyard Hotels. They offer the worst experience for the money to Marriott Platinum members…” Scott Drake tweeted back “I’ll be the contrarian: at the price point is it not valuable? Are you expecting the JW experience at a Courtyard?” while Michael Kline asked “Detailed explanation? Maybe on the podcast?” Mine was a tweet that come from a comparison between my stay at an Atlanta Marriott the prior week and this Courtyard. For about the same rate, the Atlanta Marriott gave me a bit of a welcome gift, free breakfast every morning, and restocked my room with bottled water. The Courtyard -- I could either pick a bottle of something from their little market next to the front desk or have one free coffee during my stay. I took the bottle of water, which I then filled up every morning in the workout room until the maid threw it out. Not knocking the maid -- she’s just doing her job. But as I’m carrying the now filled water glasses back to my room, I’m thinking -- why am I staying here? And again, it’s not that I couldn’t go buy a bottle of water and expense it, it was more the disconnect of the thing -- how much better the Marriott treated me for the same price.</li>\r\n 	<li>On my last trip to ATL, I flew DL where I have absolutely no status. I was trying to thread my flights between already-booked conference calls, and DL, with way more flights than AA or UA, was the only way to string everything together. On the way down, I couldn’t get a seat assignment until I was at the gate -- 32B, second-to-the-last row on an old Boeing 717 -- the last of the DC-9/MD-80 series that I think Delta got from the old AirTrans. At the gate I thought I lucked into an aisle seat, but those 717’s have a 3-2 seat configuration, opposite of AA and the old NW, so B is a middle seat. The flight was fine; the service reasonable, and it was a short flight, so it wasn’t a big deal. But it was definitely a less enjoyable experience that my Saturday flight on American, with an exit row aisle seat and an empty middle seat.</li>\r\n 	<li>There was a study a few months ago that showed American was the most stingy carrier with award seats. And there are other ways that they’ve eroded the value of loyalty. I’ve flown American since July 1985 when I started my first full-time job in Dallas and I’ve noticed that chipping way over what’s now 37 years -- that’s a frightening number to say out loud. But when my objective is to get from Point A to Point B with the least amount of hassle, there is still some value to loyalty.</li>\r\n 	<li>Which is kinda the muddling middle ground I’ve carved out nowadays; invest enough time/effort to hit the loyalty level that fits the value I will get. I’ll go out of my way to re-up my Hertz status because it’s given me great rental car choices. I won’t push for anything more than mid-level airline status because, with the high load factors and the push to sell 1st-class seats, there not much more to get than free front-of-the-plane seating and a reasonable shot at overhead bin space. Going out of my way to make American’s Exec Platinum or United’s 1K again doesn’t appear to be worth it. And with Courtyards, there’s not much value in a $2 bottle of water.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/48705\">Jolanta Blues</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license.  Ft: Admiral Bob, Martijn de Boer</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Need Those 5 Stars</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>A few months ago, after an overnight stay at a Residence Inn in Baltimore, I wrote up a TripAdvisor review. I titled it “Pretty standard Residence Inn experience” and gave the place 3 whatever TripAdvisor calls them -- stars, circles -- whatever they are, I gave them 3. Seemed in line with the review, where I said “Standard Residence Inn set up; friendly service. Shuttle driver provided good service driving us to/from nearby businesses”. Nothing controversial. So I was a little surprised when I got a note the next day from the general manager\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>“Thank you very much for going on TripAdvisor.com to review our hotel. We greatly appreciate it. One request I have, if you would be willing, is if you might consider changing your rating from a 3 star review to a 4 star review. Marriott hotels views a 3 star review or lower as a “0”. Meaning the hotel takes a hit/mark against it for providing what Marriott considers is a “bad” stay which is 3 or under in their view. It looks like your comments indicate that you had a good stay. In that regard, I wonder if you would be willing to change your score up to a 4? We would really appreciate it if you would.”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>I didn’t change the rating. Maybe I should’ve, but honestly, I don’t know. And even if I did, I really didn’t want to. I thought it was a 3-star experience. I’m sorry that Marriott doesn’t give you credit for that, but I kinda feel like that’s not my problem</li>\r\n 	<li>Now, I’m nothing if not inconsistent, because I’ll give every Uber and Lyft driver 5 stars if they get me to my destination in a reasonably clean car. Indeed, I was right with my son when he jumped all over my wife for giving a Lyft driver 3 stars for what she thought was an “OK, nothing special” ride. “You gonna get him kicked off!” he said. And he wasn’t wrong. Internal Uber documents leaked a few years back said that drivers with ratings less than 4.6 would be considered for deactivation. So this is a little different than TripAdvisor. Here, Uber, the owner of the platform, is saying that a reasonable, acceptable ride should be 5 stars, since anything less will slide the driver down toward the deactivation zone.</li>\r\n 	<li>It’s the Internet version of the Lake Wobegon effect -- everybody is above average. The latest stats I saw on Yelp said that the average rating is 3.8 and 46% of their reviews had 5 stars. Which explains why that 4-star diner you drove to try out was just “OK”.</li>\r\n 	<li>Call me cranky, but the two apps that I regularly rate on -- TripAdvisor and Untappd -- I rate “average” as a 3; kinda like King Canute trying to hold back the waves of grade inflation. On Untappd, anything below a 3, I wouldn’t order again. a 3 is OK, 4 is a great beer, 5 outstanding. I just downloaded my stats into Excel and after a little remedial pivot table training, I can see that I’m a bit skewed -- 13% of my ratings are below 3; 60% are between 3 and 3.75; 26% between 4 and 4.75; and 1% at 5 with a median rating of 3.5. Not as bad as Yelp, but maybe it’s because I really like beer.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #134</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_134.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #134 — Value of Loyalty; Need Those 5 Stars','','inherit','closed','closed','','1842-revision-v1','','','2018-05-26 11:46:12','2018-05-26 16:46:12','',1842,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/05/26/1842-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(1998,1,'2018-05-31 21:33:59','2018-06-01 02:33:59','[caption id=\"attachment_2004\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/IMG_0464.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2004\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/IMG_0464-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> Effects of Extended Exposure to TSA Scan[/caption]\n\nA last-minute trip to Pune, India provided more than enough material for this episode -- a visa dash, <em>very</em> hands-on airport security, worthless rupee notes, flight disruptions.... We also read the obits for a couple of smart bag companies and hear why MSP\'s T2 isn\'t so ghetto after all. All this and more at the&nbsp;<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_141.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.\n\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #141:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. Not much travel since the last episode -- just driving up to Wisconsin -- until last week when I did a 5-day trip with a client to Pune, India. Left ORD Friday night, landed in Frankfurt late Saturday morning, heard the announce a flight to Pune before my flight to Delhi. Arrived in Delhi at 1am Monday morning. Overnighted at the airport Radisson Blu (not a bad hotel), and then caught an afternoon Jet Airways flight to Pune. Note to self: you don’t always have to fly the client’s itinerary. In spite of all those legs, those multiple points of potential failure, everything went relatively smoothly.</li>\n 	<li>Not so much on the way home. The itinerary was to take an Air India flight from Pune to Delhi at 7pm Thursday night, then the United flight to Newark, getting back to ORD around 9:30. We passed on a 5:30p Jet Airways flight fearing Pune rush hour traffic. And that’s where the itinerary fell apart. While waiting for the client team to check their luggage -- I decided to ignore Air India’s 8 kg carry-on weight limit -- I get an e-mail from Air India with a 2 hr delay due to “operational reasons” which usually means a broken plane. Great. What was a reasonable 2½ layover was suddenly an unrealistic 30-minute dash off the plane, through the standard Indian airport itinerary check, then passport control, full patdown security, weave through the terminal and to the gate. And the inbound Air India plane hasn’t left Delhi yet. I call our Amex travel number -- any room on that Jet Airways flight because it hasn’t left yet. Nope, sold out. I briefly think about 3-hr drive to Mumbai but decide to keep heading to Delhi. I bang “flights DEL ORD May 24” into Google. I filter the Google Flights results for one-way and shortest duration, and then call Amex back. When the agent stopped after listing the limited United options -- I guess because it’s less work for them to keep me on the same airline -- I asked her to check on the non-United options that Google Flights listed. There’s the direct Air India flight to ORD getting in around 7:30a or a Lufthansa connection back through Frankfurt arriving around 1pm. I have her book both, knowing that I can cancel one well within the 24-hr no-penalty window.</li>\n 	<li>Pune Airport is a dump. I’m trying to think of a worse airport I’ve been in and I’m drawing a complete blank. Weak air conditioning failing to fight the 95 degree day, 3-4 food stands against the wall, and no bar. With nothing better to do, I bang “Air India ORD DEL business class review” into Google. The results were not kind. But I still think - how bad could it really be? This seems like a bad karma travel day; skipping the FRA connection, avoiding another point of failure, seems to be good idea. But then I finally got on the Air India plane to Delhi. It was also a complete dump. It was a bad 2 hrs; I couldn’t do another 15 hrs with them. I decided to risk the Frankfurt connection. At first it went well; breakfast beer and pretzel in the lounge, on-time boarding. But after boarding, we sat and sat. The captain came on. The good news? The luggage was finally loaded and the cargo doors buttoned up. The bad news? Our pushback time is an hour from now. There was nothing I could do. I pulled out my iPhone and buried myself in the zen of Solitaire. As it turned out, we didn’t take the full hour delay and the pilot juiced the engines so we arrived only 15 minutes late. And after looking at in-flight pictures from the gang that took the Air India direct flight, that 15 minute delay was trampled by the arrival of full-on schadenfreude. I had definitely made the right decision</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<em>Gargantua</em> by Admiral Bob (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/46361 Ft: My Free Mickey, Martijn de Boer</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>The airlines’ smart bag ban claimed a couple of casualties this month. Bluesmart posted its blog obituary first -- “the banning of smart luggage with non-removable batteries put our company in an irreversibly difficult financial and business situation”. selling their IP, their intellectual property to TravelPro, one of the “legacy” suitcase brands they used to dismiss. A few weeks later, Raden posted a similar obit -- “We sincerely apologize to those who chose to travel with us, our intent was to add ease and simplicity to your travel experience and this unforeseen policy change has made this impossible.” Both companies said they’re no longer honoring warranties though Bluesmart says they’ll still provide some level of e-mail support. And the smartphone apps if you want to use your grounded bag on, say, a train or a bus. The bag maker Away is still in business, though, even developing a free kit that retrofits their first generation smart bag with an ejectable battery, making them compliant with the airlines’ rules.</li>\n 	<li>Gary Learned tweeted back a solid counter-argument on last episode’s rant on MSP’s Terminal 2. After waiting for a Southwest flight back to Chicago, I added it to my “ghetto terminal” list -- the terminals for non-hub airlines -- like O’Hare’s Terminal 2 and Detroit’s North Terminal. Gary has a different take, though. He writes -\n<ul>\n 	<li>I respectfully disagree on MSP T2. Surdyks has some great taps and wine as well as good small bites. Barrio is a nice little Mexican local restaurant. I can go from car to gate in 5 min. Now MDW on the other hand …</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Car to gate in 5 minutes -- that’s a selling point right there that you won’t pick up Uber-ing in and out of a place. That used to be Midway before it blew up -- little parking lot in front of the terminal and walk right in. I won’t defend Midway now -- it’s a bit of a cluster, though I’m hoping that the pending reconstruction of the security concourse sort of “un-clusters” at least that part of it. Gary, thanks for giving us the contra view of MSP T2. I’ll give Barrio a try the next time I’m there.</li>\n 	<li>And since we’re talking about ghetto terminals, when choosing among the client-selected itineraries to India, a connection thru Munich was one of the options -- which long-time listeners know I immediately skipped. Skytrax again named Munich the top European airport. God only knows why, though I know they certainly didn’t ask me. Instead, I connected through Frankfurt, which while not a “wow-sy” airport, is efficient, not a hassle, and gets me on my way. Normally, I’m flying over to FRA from ORD and connecting to some place in Europe, often in the Schengen zone so I don’t have to go through passport control. Connecting to India, though, was a different matter. According to my iPhone’s Health app (admittedly not the most accurate), I walked 1.6 miles that Saturday morning between my ORD and DEL flights. I drug my bag down long corridors empty except for some black plastic chairs fixed in a semi-reclined position surrounded by black cloth cots. FRA airport really missed the chance to strategically locate some little beer stube kiosks along the way. I would’ve stopped at least a couple of times on that trek for some breakfast beers.</li>\n 	<li>The India trip was a bit of a last-minute thing which necessitated a scramble for a new Indian visa. This would be my 3rd Indian visa. My first one was a 5-year visa that I lost when my passport was stolen in Brussels. My second one was only for 6 months; I can’t remember why it was so short. This time, I decided to avoid future scrambles and apply for a 10-year visa. Because there’s an Indian consulate in Chicago, I didn’t have to hassle with postage or third-party passport services. The day before, I sent notes to our US HR department and the admin manager in our Hyderabad office asking for the necessary letters of guarantee and invitation, and then did the application online, printed it out and signed it, and then booked an appointment the next morning. I didn’t actually go to the consulate. I’ve always gone to an outsourced visa processing company that handled the front end administrivia, with, near as I can tell, the consulate just approving and signing the visas. Each visa has been with a different processor. For my first visa in 2010, I dropped my forms and passport off at an office in the morning, and received a text at the end of the day that it was ready. In 2014, a different processor gave my wife a hard time -- trying to upsell her on expedited handling charges that weren’t needed. This time, Cox and Kings was a surprisingly painless experience. I went in Thursday after lunch; there was no wait, the people were pleasant. End of day Thursday, I received an e-mail and a text telling me that my application had been processed and was heading to the consulate. On Friday morning, I received and e-mail and text saying that my application had arrived at the consulate. Another message at lunch said that it was being processes, and a last message on Friday said that it was back at Cox and Kings. Monday morning, another message told me it was being packaged up, followed by a message with a UPS tracking number. Tuesday afternoon, my passport landed on my front porch with my 10-year visa. I was incredibly impressed… and feeling a bit spoiled comparing this level of customer service to what my non-US friends tell me they have to go through to get a US visa.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em>A Foolish Game</em> by Zep Hurme&nbsp;(c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license.&nbsp;http://ccmixter.org/files/zep_hurme/46448</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>When You Think the TSA is Bad...</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>A week of flying around India is always a good sanity check for me -- that no matter what crankiness I’m have about the TSA, airport security in the US is so much easier than in India. When I was talking at the start of the episode about how the delay of our Pune-Delhi flight blew up the rest of our itinerary home, the main reason we immediately starting working alternative flights was because how long we knew it would take to work our way through the different layers of security in Delhi. It started when trying to make our way from domestic flight arrivals into the international departures area so we could re-ticket our flights. We had to pass through the usual itinerary check. I show the army guy the boarding pass for United flight we’d missed -- it was all I had. But since that flight had already left, he wasn’t going to let me through. Luckily, one of the group I was flying with was United Global Services, and two customer service staff had met us as we got off the Air India flight. Even then, it took her a good bit of time to explain the situation to the army guy and convince him to let me through. But for that, I would’ve been idling around baggage claim on my own trying to figure out how to get to a ticket counter.</li>\n 	<li>Passport control was pretty efficient, but the security scans -- not so much. After you unpack all your electronics and push everything through the X-ray machine, you walk through the metal detector for your gender -- different scanners for “Gents” and “Ladies” because there’s a full wanding and patdown on the other side. Indeed, the “Ladies” go into a little curtained booth for their patdown. Not normally too much of a hassle, unless the “Ladies” patdown line backs up, and a back up of women’s luggage in the X-ray machine is blocking mine -- which happened that evening. None of the security people moved to clear things. Nothing to do but stand there and wait. Our flight from Pune landed at Delhi at 11pm. When looking at flight alternatives, I’d seen an Air Canada flight leaving at 12:10pm and passed right by it. I knew there was no way we’d make that flight.</li>\n 	<li>The security checks in Frankfurt, while much more efficient, were still more than you’d get in the US. On the way over to India, after passing everything through the X-ray machine, I was intercepted after collecting my bags, directed over to a cubicle where all of my bags were swabbed and checked for explosives residue. All done with a German sense of politeness, but I was glad I wasn’t in a rush. On the connection back home, it was a different security line, with a body scanner instead of the walkthru metal detector. No big deal, but just different enough to be awkward. Instead of the TSA’s hands up “don’t shoot” pose, it was an arms down-elbows out pose, kinda like you’re holding luggage. The guy working the scanner was visibly annoyed that he had to instruct me on the pose -- to hold me arms further away from my body. But then there was no luggage swiping on the other side.</li>\n 	<li>Picking up my bags, I maneuvered around three officers cradling automatic rifles; they were standing there chatting, but watching. No big deal now, but I remember when I first starting traveling through Europe -- London Heathrow and Frankfurt in the mid- to late-’80’s and being taken aback by the army guys walking around with unslung M-16s and the like. This was pre-TSA time in the US, when it would be out-of-place to see anything more than a rent-a-cop in an airport terminal and you could still turn up 30 minutes before departure time and make your flight. Back then, the difference was eye-opening for a twenty-something traveler. Of course, none of us knew that it was a preview of what flying would be like 20 years later.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<em>Melt Away</em>&nbsp;by Kara Square (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp;http://ccmixter.org/files/mindmapthat/46605</li>\n</ul>\n<b>Expired Money</b>\n<ul>\n 	<li>In last December’s episode, I talked about how I need to have some cash in my pocket when I travel. I know it’s a generational thing; many of my younger colleagues don’t carry any cash, but going “cash naked” just makes me nervous. Assuaging this anxiety on international travel means fills one of my desk drawers with random bits of currency. That’s not a big deal for countries that I or my family visit often. Before my daughter flew back to the UK for her spring semester at St Andrews, I rummaged through the desk and found a £20 note; it bought her breakfast when she landed in Edinburgh.</li>\n 	<li>But for countries I visit less often, the money just sits there. I have 350 Mexican pesos -- about $18 at today’s exchange rate; I can’t remember the last time I was in Mexico. I have 400 Chinese yuan -- over $60 -- left over from my last trip to Beijing 4 years ago. At the end of that trip, I thought I’d be going back within the year, so didn’t work hard to spend down those notes. But that next trip didn’t happen, and so there those yuan sit.</li>\n 	<li>Before the India trip, I hit the cash drawer and pulled out €12 in notes and coins from our trip to Spain last March, that was for my connections through Frankfurt, and 200 rupees -- about $30 -- left over from my 2014 trip to India. I didn’t spend any of the euros; I spent most of my time either walking through concourses or drinking beer in the Lufthansa lounge. But the rupees came in handy for tipping all the guys at the hotel who insisted on helping me with my carry-on bag. Here’s a 100 for you, and you, and you, and, oh, you too.</li>\n 	<li>One night in Pune, we were at the JW Marriott rooftop bar for hors d\'oeuvres and pre-dinner drinks. The catered bar on our side of the terrace has the usual Kingfisher beers. But then I saw someone on the other, the non-catered/public side of the terrace with a different, non-Kingfisher beer. It was a Bira 91 Blonde. I headed over to the main bar to get one. Now, because this was the main bar, not the catered one, I was going to have to pay for the Bira 91, but that wasn’t a problem because I had rupees in my pocket. Yes, they also would’ve taken my Amex card, but I had a 1,000 and a 500 rupee note that I needed to break for more luggage tips, so I laid the 1,000 note on the bar next to my check and then wandered over to the edge of the rooftop to look over the city. A couple minutes later, a guy taps me on the shoulder and gives me back my 1,000 rupees. The note was no good. And then I remembered. Back in Nov 2016, the Indian government made a snap announcement to replace the 500 and 1,000 rupee notes to fight counterfeiting. $20 of my rupees had expired while sitting in my desk drawer. Lots of apologizing, and I ended up pulling out my Amex card after all.</li>\n 	<li>When I got home, I took a deeper dive through my cash drawer. Luckily, I didn’t have any old £10 notes, the ones with Charles Darwin on them. He expired a couple of months ago in March, replaced by a new tenner with Jane Austen. I did find a 1,000 Italian lire note with Maria Montessori on the face, which must’ve been left over from, I dunno, maybe our 10th anniversary trip to Tuscany because lire notes were replaced with Euro notes in 2002. My 1,000 note was worth maybe half a euro, about 60 cents when it expired: not a big loss. But today, when I searched on eBay, I saw it selling for $2-3. That’s a 300-400% return. So maybe I’ll just stuff these rupee back in my drawer and check back in, oh, 2035 and make a killing.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #141</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a> and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_141.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #141 — When You Think the TSA is Bad...; Expired Money','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-141-when-you-think-the-tsa-is-bad-expired-money','','','2021-09-29 21:58:57','2021-09-30 02:58:57','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=1998',0,'post','',0),
(1999,1,'2018-06-02 16:45:47','2018-06-02 21:45:47','Broke out the mobile unit to record this episode in the Bucktown neighborhood of Atlanta; much warmer than getting caught in a spring snow storm in Milwaukee. When much of the travel tech news is about the latest phone apps, we talk about physical travel technology that we can touch and carry. And when flying during the past two weeks, flight attendants\' safety demonstrations have become a bit more strident. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_141.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/438588876\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #141:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the Hyatt Place-Buckhead in Atlanta, GA missing what I hope is the long-delayed start of Spring finally showing up the Midwest. I have done damn little travel since the last episode -- a couple of drives to a client up north of Milwaukee, a quick trip to Minneapolis last week, and flight this morning down to Atlanta. I managed to avoid the foot of late April snow in Minnesota but got caught by 3-4 inches in Milwaukee. Luckily, I’d looked at the forecast before I left and, walking out to the garage, grabbed my LL Bean boots and threw them into the trunk of the car Which saved my dress shoes later that evening and the next morning on unshoveled walks and is is the good thing about driving; I didn’t have to worry about space constraints. I couldn’t have done the same thing flying to Minneapolis.</li>\r\n 	<li>I ended up flying Southwest to Minneapolis because: a) they were the cheapest flight out on Monday morning at short notice; and b) it let me meet an A-List challenge that Southwest had sent me at the beginning of the year -- fly 3 roundtrips by the end of April and get A-List for the rest of the year. Now, I don’t fly Southwest a whole lot, so I can’t completely justify what I pushed to do this challenge -- except just because it was a challenge, I guess. That, and it’ll make it easier for those times I end up on Southwest this year. I won’t have to pay the $12 for auto check-in or set an alarm to check in 24 hours before flight time -- both of which typically only get me in the second or “B” boarding group. Not an earth shattering perk, but anything that reduces travel hassles is a good thing.</li>\r\n 	<li>When I went Chicago Midway airport on last Monday to catch that flight, I ran into a new TSA trick -- funnel everyone through a single-file U-turn line to be sniffed a TSA agent and a dog, after people headed into either regular security or TSA PreCheck. Which, at 7am on a Monday morning, quickly pushed the security line back into the hallway toward the parking garage. So, after spending what looks like the $190 million a year the past couple of years on screening technology like those snazzy full-body scanners that people empty their pockets and line up for, the TSA is now having us line up for yet another a new screening technology -- but at least this technology is cute. And when was the last time you heard a traveler wanting to pet the body scanner.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/media/files/DJBLUE/11541\">Hear Me</a></em> by DJ Blue</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">A couple of things for those not following my Twitter or the TravelCommons Facebook page…</span>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>First, for those Amazon fans, Alexa will now play the latest episode of TravelCommons for you if you ask nicely. I got an Echo Spot in a schwag bag for a conference in January. I put it on the standing desk in my home office and started playing around with it. After listening to the WJS Minute Briefing as part of my Flash Briefing, I started thinking about how to get TravelCommons onto it. At first, I thought I was going to have to figure out how to build an Alexa skill, but digging a little deeper, I found out that the TuneIn app is sorta the default podcast player for Alexa. So after I got TravelCommons approved for TuneIn -- felt like they had an actual human check out my app -- it appeared on my Echo Spot. So if you say, “Alexa, play TravelCommons podcast”, she should play the latest episode for you. Check out the Facebook page or my Twitter feed for a quick video showing the magic happen</li>\r\n 	<li>Second, I took advantage of being in town and the crap April weather to do the filming for the Midway taproom tour layover video. As I mentioned in the last episode, the idea has been to feature an itinerary out of Chicago’s “other” airport -- what was Chicago’s original airport that morphed into the budget airline airport that morphed into Southwest Airlines’ biggest operation. We used Uber and Lyft to hit 4 taprooms in what can only be described as the “post-industrial” landscape of Chicago’s near south side. We started by driving past the Cook County prison en route to Lagunitas’ plant and taproom that’s built in an old steel mill. While New Belgium and Sierra Nevada landed their national expansions in the much more bucolic environs of the North Carolina Smoky Mountains, Lagunitas’ owner Tony Magee dropped his expansion in a dodgy part of Chicago. We then hit smaller scale, more local places that have repurposed old manufacturing plants in less-visited Chicago neighborhoods -- Lo Rez in Pilsen, Marz in what can charitably described as “lower” Bridgeport, and then ending up at Whiner Beer in the Back of the Yards neighborhood -- where the Chicago Stockyards used to be decades ago. I started working on production, but then looked at the calendar and knew that I only had time for either this episode or the video. And since I’ve worked hard on keeping a monthly cadence of podcast episodes, I kicked the video into next month. So watch Facebook, Twitter, and the web site for the post. Since it’s a bit more narrow scope, I don’t think I’ll put the video in the podcast feed; not sure the non-beer-drinking listeners will want some 100 meg video clogging up their internet.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>While sitting in the backseat of one of those Lyft rides, I noticed something new on the pink Lyft light that many drivers have in the middle of their dash. You always see the front of it -- the pink Lyft logo -- from the outside, through the front windshield. Glancing at the back of it from inside of the car, I something flash by. Looking more closely, I saw a little message scroll by - “15 min eta”. I saw it again in the Lyft car I took to MSP on last Tuesday. I asked the driver about it. He told me that Lyft sent it to him after he did 300 rides -- “bit of a status thing” he said. I told him about the Uber dash light that I saw in New York, that let me adjust the color of the light from the app -- I talked about this in a prior episode. He thought that was pretty cool too, but he liked Lyft, the company, better than Uber, and he appreciated his messaging light.</li>\r\n 	<li>All sorts of press releases drop into the TravelCommons mailbox, but the one announcing April 24, last Tuesday, as the first National Business Traveler Day caught my eye. I guess because it’s new, it hasn’t made it onto the National Day Calendar, a list of these sorts of designations. It’s a good choice of date, though, because there is only one national day listed on the 24th -- National Pigs-In-A-Blanket Day -- which, I can imagine, some First or Business Class flight attendants might reasonably associate with some sleeping business travelers. National Business Traveler Day was announced (created?) by “Upside Business Travel, the first online travel service built just for the do-it-yourself (DIY) business traveler” in recognition of “the important contributions made by business travelers to America\'s economy.” I dunno, this could go in so many snarky directions -- with the pigs-in-a-blanket thing as just a starter. I have to say, though, I felt very unrecognized when I walked into MSP Terminal 2 the afternoon of National Business Travelers Day -- an obvious frequent business traveler: wearing a black blazer, head-down on the iPhone, speedwalking to the furthest security checkpoint because it’s the only one with PreCheck. Nobody was gave me a thank-you, a flower, a hug, but then again, the first person I had contact with was an old, overweight but jolly TSA screener. Nice guy, but not sure I would’ve wanted a hug from him.</li>\r\n 	<li>And it could’ve been that MSP’s Terminal 2 which I’ll add to my list of ghetto terminals, the land of misbegotten travelers, which also includes ORD’s T2, Detroit’s North Terminal, Madrid’s 4S satellite terminal, Munich’s T2 satellite terminal… I’ve talked about this before. In fortress hubs, like ORD, DTW, and MSP, the terminals the hub airlines use is clean, bright, has lots of restaurant and shopping choices. Delta’s terminal in Detroit has an airy 2 or 3-story ceiling with a monorail train running the length of the terminal up at the top. The North terminal that every other airline is dumped into is the old terminal that Delta -- or actually Northwest left behind, with a bit of a clean up and 3 restaurants. Delta’s terminal in Minneapolis is the same story -- lots of shops and restaurants, a big craft beer bar, all with a bit of that North Woods feel. Terminal 2 - generic airport sterility, a Subway sandwich joint, a bar where all the handles were removed from the beer taps. And there’s no inside-security connections between these terminals in MSP and DTW if you want to check out the better side -- it’s a 10-minute bus ride and another pass through security. At least in ORD, you can walk from T2 to the American or United terminals and hit Rick Bayless’ Torta Frontera for great Mexican food or Goose Island for a good beer. On Tuesday, I was stuck in the Humphrey Terminal with my Subway sandwich and a choice of Bud Light or Blue Moon -- which maybe was fitting on National Business Traveler Day.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/media/files/savoyard/10743\">Madrugada</a></em> by Savoyard</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Travel Tech Gets Physical</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>In addition to press releases about National Business Travelers Day, I also get press releases announcing new funding rounds for travel startups. These things come in waves. Like the wave of companies building tour aggregation platforms. That investment thesis went -- because millennials are more into experiential travel, they’re more likely to spend money on something like a food tour or hang gliding; the market for travel experiences is fragmented making discovery and purchasing difficult; our platform will solve this problem by aggregating experience providers and providing world-class search and user experience. The latest wave seems to be about building platforms that “reduce the pain” of corporate business travel. In April, in addition to Upside’s National Business Traveler Day announcement, Rocketrip sent out a release about their $15 million funding round and TravelPerk, who sponsored our January episode, touted their $21 million round -- which sounds like, some 20+ years after Travelocity and Expedia hit the market, companies continue to spend millions of dollars trying to figure out how to replace travel agents.</li>\r\n 	<li>At times, it feels like much of the work on improving travel is virtual, about software -- new apps, new search platforms, better ways to spit out a single travel itinerary. But in spite of the venture capital mantra that “software is eating the world,” travel is inherently physical -- we want to move our bodies, our stuff from Point A to Point B, and most often back again. It seems like the ‘60’s were the golden age of this, when Boeing and Airbus’ predecessors and the Russians were designing and building supersonic planes. I really felt ancient the other day telling some Millennial staffers about, how way back when, Concorde would fly from JFK to LHR in less than 3 hrs. Now it seems that Boeing and Airbus are completely focused on cramming more people into subsonic flying buses. Logical, but not very aspirational. Now if all the work on hyperloops -- the test circuits, the design contests -- actually turns into something, and isn’t just high-tech hobbies for Elon Musk and Richard Branson -- we’ll be onto something.</li>\r\n 	<li>But in the meantime, in the space between now -- thinner, more uncomfortable plane seats and hotel keys that keep demagnetizing -- and the inspirational future -- us whizzing along in pods at 750 mph, doing LA to SF in 35 minutes without having to buy CO2 offsets to feel better about ourselves -- what are some of the physical things about to hit?</li>\r\n 	<li>One thing that seems to be finally hitting critical mass is real-time luggage tracking through RFID luggage tags. Logistics is another thing that’s hard, but it feels that airports and some airlines, Delta especially, have slogged through deploying enough RFID readers along the miles of luggage conveyor belts in the bowels of most of the airports they use, and then wiring it back in near real-time to their smartphone apps so that it’s useful. I’m hoping the combination of competitive pressure, falling equipment pricing, and government fines will push the rest of the airlines to follow suit. For me, real-time location tracking was the main use case for smart bags like BlueSmart. If I can get this through RFID tags, I’ll feel a lot less salty about the smart bag ban.</li>\r\n 	<li>Wearables also get a lot of buzz. Carnival Cruise Lines has been the latest, announcing their “Ocean Medallion” last year as a way to “personalize” your cruise experience -- and, of course, to make it easier to buy drinks on board. Nothing really new here. Disney’s been doing this forever; 20 years ago, I remember using a wristband at Northstar ski resort in Tahoe to track how many vertical feet we’d skied in a day, and to easily buy beers in the lodge. I’m wondering what happens here if the current noise about the use (and misuse) of personal data by Facebook and others resets people’s privacy vs. ease-of-use balance point rather than just blowing over. For me, it’s less about how the companies use the data (though I’m not completely unconcerned about this) and more about their inability to secure it. Seems like every couple of weeks, another travel company admits to some hack of, say, their point-of-sale system and the associated loss of millions of names and credit card numbers. Doesn’t incent me to let them track my movements and spending habits.</li>\r\n 	<li>AR/VR -- Augmented and virtual reality continues to buzz. I’ve talked about Google Translate’s AR feature -- point your camera at, say, a menu or washing machine, and it’ll display the translation over the original text in real-time. It’s not perfect -- the translations can rapidly change, sorta flicker between different interpretations, but it’s often “good enough”, and a whole lot quicker than banging in each menu entree. Google has tried to extend this real-time translation from visual to speech with their Pixel Bud headphones with much more Version 1.0 mixed results. I’m probably being way overly optimistic here, but if the Buds follow the same improvement trajectory, they could be pretty cool in 3 years’ time.</li>\r\n 	<li>It really gets buzzy when we move from AR to VR. A guy at a VR start-up talked to me about using VR in hotel rooms for what he called “social viewing”. Rather than watching, say Black Mirror on Netflix on your laptop or one of those Enseo TVs I’m seeing more and more of, you strap on a VR headset, as does your spouse or kids, and you’re all watching together in a virtual living room or virtual theater. And then there’s always the pitch -- why fly over to, say, Madrid to see Picasso’s Guernica in the Reina Sofia when you strap on a VR headset and “be” in the room instantly? Hey, remember how virtual reality turned out in The Matrix movies? Yeah, I think I’ll keep my travel physical.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/media/files/djlang59/10579\">Crazy Love</a></em> by DJ Lang</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>You <em>Will</em> Pay Attention to the Safety Briefing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>The selfie of passengers on Southwest flight 1380 not wearing the oxygen masks correctly went viral in the days after the engine explosion, along with the stories -- the guy telling the woman next to him that she didn’t need to squeeze the airbag, and the guy who logged into WiFi and Facebook Live before putting on his mask. The flight attendant interviews that seemingly every news outlet did dripped with schadenfreude -- no one ever pays attention to the safety videos or demonstrations, and look what happened!</li>\r\n 	<li>Improving airline safety records have let people grow numb as to how unnatural air travel is -- flying over 600 mph at 35,000 ft. Flight 1380 was the first accident-related fatality on a US airliner since 2009, and the Southwest’s first ever -- since it was founded in 1971.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’ll admit that I don’t pay attention to every demo, especially when I do multiple flights in a single week. I do typically look around me for the nearest exits -- in front and behind me -- because those can change pretty often with different seat configurations. I will pay attention, as a refresher, if I haven’t flown for a couple of weeks -- like last week’s flight to MSP. Or if it’s a plane I haven’t flown in a while, I’ll look at the seat back card -- like I did today when noticing I was in a Boeing 717, a pretty rare event for me.</li>\r\n 	<li>I have noticed that the flight attendants’ requests/demands for attention have become a bit more strident since 1380. On my Southwest flight back home from MSP last week, the flight attendant chanted “Nose and mouth; nose and mouth!”, eliciting some nervous laughter.</li>\r\n 	<li>The attendant on my Delta flight this morning was a bit more direct, perhaps fatalistic this morning. “Please pay attention! We’re doing this for you. But if you don’t want to watch us, well, I guess it’s your life…”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #141</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a> and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_140.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #141 — Travel T','','inherit','closed','closed','','1998-revision-v1','','','2018-06-02 16:45:47','2018-06-02 21:45:47','',1998,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/06/02/1998-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2000,1,'2018-06-02 16:48:01','2018-06-02 21:48:01','Broke out the mobile unit to record this episode in the Bucktown neighborhood of Atlanta; much warmer than getting caught in a spring snow storm in Milwaukee. When much of the travel tech news is about the latest phone apps, we talk about physical travel technology that we can touch and carry. And when flying during the past two weeks, flight attendants\' safety demonstrations have become a bit more strident. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_141.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/438588876\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #141:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. Not much travel since the last episode -- just driving up to Wisconsin -- until last week when I did a 5-day trip with a client to Pune, India. Left ORD Friday night, landed in Frankfurt late Saturday morning, heard the announce a flight to Pune before my flight to Delhi. Arrived in Delhi at 1am Monday morning. Overnighted at the airport Radisson Blu (not a bad hotel), and then caught an afternoon Jet Airways flight to Pune. Note to self: you don’t always have to fly the client’s itinerary. In spite of all those legs, those multiple points of potential failure, everything went relatively smoothly.</li>\r\n 	<li>Not so much on the way home. The itinerary was to take an Air India flight from Pune to Delhi at 7pm Thursday night, then the United flight to Newark, getting back to ORD around 9:30. We passed on a 5:30p Jet Airways flight fearing Pune rush hour traffic. And that’s where the itinerary fell apart. While waiting for the client team to check their luggage -- I decided to ignore Air India’s 8 kg carry-on weight limit -- I get an e-mail from Air India with a 2 hr delay due to “operational reasons” which usually means a broken plane. Great. What was a reasonable 2½ layover was suddenly an unrealistic 30-minute dash off the plane, through the standard Indian airport itinerary check, then passport control, full patdown security, weave through the terminal and to the gate. And the inbound Air India plane hasn’t left Delhi yet. I call our Amex travel number -- any room on that Jet Airways flight because it hasn’t left yet. Nope, sold out. I briefly think about 3-hr drive to Mumbai but decide to keep heading to Delhi. I bang “flights DEL ORD May 24” into Google. I filter the Google Flights results for one-way and shortest duration, and then call Amex back. When the agent stopped after listing the limited United options -- I guess because it’s less work for them to keep me on the same airline -- I asked her to check on the non-United options that Google Flights listed. There’s the direct Air India flight to ORD getting in around 7:30a or a Lufthansa connection back through Frankfurt arriving around 1pm. I have her book both, knowing that I can cancel one well within the 24-hr no-penalty window.</li>\r\n 	<li>Pune Airport is a dump. I’m trying to think of a worse airport I’ve been in and I’m drawing a complete blank. Weak air conditioning failing to fight the 95 degree day, 3-4 food stands against the wall, and no bar. With nothing better to do, I bang “Air India ORD DEL business class review” into Google. The results were not kind. But I still think - how bad could it really be? This seems like a bad karma travel day; skipping the FRA connection, avoiding another point of failure, seems to be good idea. But then I finally got on the Air India plane to Delhi. It was also a complete dump. It was a bad 2 hrs; I couldn’t do another 15 hrs with them. I decided to risk the Frankfurt connection. At first it went well; breakfast beer and pretzel in the lounge, on-time boarding. But after boarding, we sat and sat. The captain came on. The good news? The luggage was finally loaded and the cargo doors buttoned up. The bad news? Our pushback time is an hour from now. There was nothing I could do. I pulled out my iPhone and buried myself in the zen of Solitaire. As it turned out, we didn’t take the full hour delay and the pilot juiced the engines so we arrived only 15 minutes late. And after looking at in-flight pictures from the gang that took the Air India direct flight, that 15 minute delay was trampled by the arrival of full-on schadenfreude. I had definitely made the right decision</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/media/files/DJBLUE/11541\">Hear Me</a></em> by DJ Blue</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">A couple of things for those not following my Twitter or the TravelCommons Facebook page…</span>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>First, for those Amazon fans, Alexa will now play the latest episode of TravelCommons for you if you ask nicely. I got an Echo Spot in a schwag bag for a conference in January. I put it on the standing desk in my home office and started playing around with it. After listening to the WJS Minute Briefing as part of my Flash Briefing, I started thinking about how to get TravelCommons onto it. At first, I thought I was going to have to figure out how to build an Alexa skill, but digging a little deeper, I found out that the TuneIn app is sorta the default podcast player for Alexa. So after I got TravelCommons approved for TuneIn -- felt like they had an actual human check out my app -- it appeared on my Echo Spot. So if you say, “Alexa, play TravelCommons podcast”, she should play the latest episode for you. Check out the Facebook page or my Twitter feed for a quick video showing the magic happen</li>\r\n 	<li>Second, I took advantage of being in town and the crap April weather to do the filming for the Midway taproom tour layover video. As I mentioned in the last episode, the idea has been to feature an itinerary out of Chicago’s “other” airport -- what was Chicago’s original airport that morphed into the budget airline airport that morphed into Southwest Airlines’ biggest operation. We used Uber and Lyft to hit 4 taprooms in what can only be described as the “post-industrial” landscape of Chicago’s near south side. We started by driving past the Cook County prison en route to Lagunitas’ plant and taproom that’s built in an old steel mill. While New Belgium and Sierra Nevada landed their national expansions in the much more bucolic environs of the North Carolina Smoky Mountains, Lagunitas’ owner Tony Magee dropped his expansion in a dodgy part of Chicago. We then hit smaller scale, more local places that have repurposed old manufacturing plants in less-visited Chicago neighborhoods -- Lo Rez in Pilsen, Marz in what can charitably described as “lower” Bridgeport, and then ending up at Whiner Beer in the Back of the Yards neighborhood -- where the Chicago Stockyards used to be decades ago. I started working on production, but then looked at the calendar and knew that I only had time for either this episode or the video. And since I’ve worked hard on keeping a monthly cadence of podcast episodes, I kicked the video into next month. So watch Facebook, Twitter, and the web site for the post. Since it’s a bit more narrow scope, I don’t think I’ll put the video in the podcast feed; not sure the non-beer-drinking listeners will want some 100 meg video clogging up their internet.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>While sitting in the backseat of one of those Lyft rides, I noticed something new on the pink Lyft light that many drivers have in the middle of their dash. You always see the front of it -- the pink Lyft logo -- from the outside, through the front windshield. Glancing at the back of it from inside of the car, I something flash by. Looking more closely, I saw a little message scroll by - “15 min eta”. I saw it again in the Lyft car I took to MSP on last Tuesday. I asked the driver about it. He told me that Lyft sent it to him after he did 300 rides -- “bit of a status thing” he said. I told him about the Uber dash light that I saw in New York, that let me adjust the color of the light from the app -- I talked about this in a prior episode. He thought that was pretty cool too, but he liked Lyft, the company, better than Uber, and he appreciated his messaging light.</li>\r\n 	<li>All sorts of press releases drop into the TravelCommons mailbox, but the one announcing April 24, last Tuesday, as the first National Business Traveler Day caught my eye. I guess because it’s new, it hasn’t made it onto the National Day Calendar, a list of these sorts of designations. It’s a good choice of date, though, because there is only one national day listed on the 24th -- National Pigs-In-A-Blanket Day -- which, I can imagine, some First or Business Class flight attendants might reasonably associate with some sleeping business travelers. National Business Traveler Day was announced (created?) by “Upside Business Travel, the first online travel service built just for the do-it-yourself (DIY) business traveler” in recognition of “the important contributions made by business travelers to America\'s economy.” I dunno, this could go in so many snarky directions -- with the pigs-in-a-blanket thing as just a starter. I have to say, though, I felt very unrecognized when I walked into MSP Terminal 2 the afternoon of National Business Travelers Day -- an obvious frequent business traveler: wearing a black blazer, head-down on the iPhone, speedwalking to the furthest security checkpoint because it’s the only one with PreCheck. Nobody was gave me a thank-you, a flower, a hug, but then again, the first person I had contact with was an old, overweight but jolly TSA screener. Nice guy, but not sure I would’ve wanted a hug from him.</li>\r\n 	<li>And it could’ve been that MSP’s Terminal 2 which I’ll add to my list of ghetto terminals, the land of misbegotten travelers, which also includes ORD’s T2, Detroit’s North Terminal, Madrid’s 4S satellite terminal, Munich’s T2 satellite terminal… I’ve talked about this before. In fortress hubs, like ORD, DTW, and MSP, the terminals the hub airlines use is clean, bright, has lots of restaurant and shopping choices. Delta’s terminal in Detroit has an airy 2 or 3-story ceiling with a monorail train running the length of the terminal up at the top. The North terminal that every other airline is dumped into is the old terminal that Delta -- or actually Northwest left behind, with a bit of a clean up and 3 restaurants. Delta’s terminal in Minneapolis is the same story -- lots of shops and restaurants, a big craft beer bar, all with a bit of that North Woods feel. Terminal 2 - generic airport sterility, a Subway sandwich joint, a bar where all the handles were removed from the beer taps. And there’s no inside-security connections between these terminals in MSP and DTW if you want to check out the better side -- it’s a 10-minute bus ride and another pass through security. At least in ORD, you can walk from T2 to the American or United terminals and hit Rick Bayless’ Torta Frontera for great Mexican food or Goose Island for a good beer. On Tuesday, I was stuck in the Humphrey Terminal with my Subway sandwich and a choice of Bud Light or Blue Moon -- which maybe was fitting on National Business Traveler Day.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/media/files/savoyard/10743\">Madrugada</a></em> by Savoyard</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Travel Tech Gets Physical</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>In addition to press releases about National Business Travelers Day, I also get press releases announcing new funding rounds for travel startups. These things come in waves. Like the wave of companies building tour aggregation platforms. That investment thesis went -- because millennials are more into experiential travel, they’re more likely to spend money on something like a food tour or hang gliding; the market for travel experiences is fragmented making discovery and purchasing difficult; our platform will solve this problem by aggregating experience providers and providing world-class search and user experience. The latest wave seems to be about building platforms that “reduce the pain” of corporate business travel. In April, in addition to Upside’s National Business Traveler Day announcement, Rocketrip sent out a release about their $15 million funding round and TravelPerk, who sponsored our January episode, touted their $21 million round -- which sounds like, some 20+ years after Travelocity and Expedia hit the market, companies continue to spend millions of dollars trying to figure out how to replace travel agents.</li>\r\n 	<li>At times, it feels like much of the work on improving travel is virtual, about software -- new apps, new search platforms, better ways to spit out a single travel itinerary. But in spite of the venture capital mantra that “software is eating the world,” travel is inherently physical -- we want to move our bodies, our stuff from Point A to Point B, and most often back again. It seems like the ‘60’s were the golden age of this, when Boeing and Airbus’ predecessors and the Russians were designing and building supersonic planes. I really felt ancient the other day telling some Millennial staffers about, how way back when, Concorde would fly from JFK to LHR in less than 3 hrs. Now it seems that Boeing and Airbus are completely focused on cramming more people into subsonic flying buses. Logical, but not very aspirational. Now if all the work on hyperloops -- the test circuits, the design contests -- actually turns into something, and isn’t just high-tech hobbies for Elon Musk and Richard Branson -- we’ll be onto something.</li>\r\n 	<li>But in the meantime, in the space between now -- thinner, more uncomfortable plane seats and hotel keys that keep demagnetizing -- and the inspirational future -- us whizzing along in pods at 750 mph, doing LA to SF in 35 minutes without having to buy CO2 offsets to feel better about ourselves -- what are some of the physical things about to hit?</li>\r\n 	<li>One thing that seems to be finally hitting critical mass is real-time luggage tracking through RFID luggage tags. Logistics is another thing that’s hard, but it feels that airports and some airlines, Delta especially, have slogged through deploying enough RFID readers along the miles of luggage conveyor belts in the bowels of most of the airports they use, and then wiring it back in near real-time to their smartphone apps so that it’s useful. I’m hoping the combination of competitive pressure, falling equipment pricing, and government fines will push the rest of the airlines to follow suit. For me, real-time location tracking was the main use case for smart bags like BlueSmart. If I can get this through RFID tags, I’ll feel a lot less salty about the smart bag ban.</li>\r\n 	<li>Wearables also get a lot of buzz. Carnival Cruise Lines has been the latest, announcing their “Ocean Medallion” last year as a way to “personalize” your cruise experience -- and, of course, to make it easier to buy drinks on board. Nothing really new here. Disney’s been doing this forever; 20 years ago, I remember using a wristband at Northstar ski resort in Tahoe to track how many vertical feet we’d skied in a day, and to easily buy beers in the lodge. I’m wondering what happens here if the current noise about the use (and misuse) of personal data by Facebook and others resets people’s privacy vs. ease-of-use balance point rather than just blowing over. For me, it’s less about how the companies use the data (though I’m not completely unconcerned about this) and more about their inability to secure it. Seems like every couple of weeks, another travel company admits to some hack of, say, their point-of-sale system and the associated loss of millions of names and credit card numbers. Doesn’t incent me to let them track my movements and spending habits.</li>\r\n 	<li>AR/VR -- Augmented and virtual reality continues to buzz. I’ve talked about Google Translate’s AR feature -- point your camera at, say, a menu or washing machine, and it’ll display the translation over the original text in real-time. It’s not perfect -- the translations can rapidly change, sorta flicker between different interpretations, but it’s often “good enough”, and a whole lot quicker than banging in each menu entree. Google has tried to extend this real-time translation from visual to speech with their Pixel Bud headphones with much more Version 1.0 mixed results. I’m probably being way overly optimistic here, but if the Buds follow the same improvement trajectory, they could be pretty cool in 3 years’ time.</li>\r\n 	<li>It really gets buzzy when we move from AR to VR. A guy at a VR start-up talked to me about using VR in hotel rooms for what he called “social viewing”. Rather than watching, say Black Mirror on Netflix on your laptop or one of those Enseo TVs I’m seeing more and more of, you strap on a VR headset, as does your spouse or kids, and you’re all watching together in a virtual living room or virtual theater. And then there’s always the pitch -- why fly over to, say, Madrid to see Picasso’s Guernica in the Reina Sofia when you strap on a VR headset and “be” in the room instantly? Hey, remember how virtual reality turned out in The Matrix movies? Yeah, I think I’ll keep my travel physical.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/media/files/djlang59/10579\">Crazy Love</a></em> by DJ Lang</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>You <em>Will</em> Pay Attention to the Safety Briefing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>The selfie of passengers on Southwest flight 1380 not wearing the oxygen masks correctly went viral in the days after the engine explosion, along with the stories -- the guy telling the woman next to him that she didn’t need to squeeze the airbag, and the guy who logged into WiFi and Facebook Live before putting on his mask. The flight attendant interviews that seemingly every news outlet did dripped with schadenfreude -- no one ever pays attention to the safety videos or demonstrations, and look what happened!</li>\r\n 	<li>Improving airline safety records have let people grow numb as to how unnatural air travel is -- flying over 600 mph at 35,000 ft. Flight 1380 was the first accident-related fatality on a US airliner since 2009, and the Southwest’s first ever -- since it was founded in 1971.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’ll admit that I don’t pay attention to every demo, especially when I do multiple flights in a single week. I do typically look around me for the nearest exits -- in front and behind me -- because those can change pretty often with different seat configurations. I will pay attention, as a refresher, if I haven’t flown for a couple of weeks -- like last week’s flight to MSP. Or if it’s a plane I haven’t flown in a while, I’ll look at the seat back card -- like I did today when noticing I was in a Boeing 717, a pretty rare event for me.</li>\r\n 	<li>I have noticed that the flight attendants’ requests/demands for attention have become a bit more strident since 1380. On my Southwest flight back home from MSP last week, the flight attendant chanted “Nose and mouth; nose and mouth!”, eliciting some nervous laughter.</li>\r\n 	<li>The attendant on my Delta flight this morning was a bit more direct, perhaps fatalistic this morning. “Please pay attention! We’re doing this for you. But if you don’t want to watch us, well, I guess it’s your life…”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #141</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a> and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_140.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #141 — Travel T','','inherit','closed','closed','','1998-revision-v1','','','2018-06-02 16:48:01','2018-06-02 21:48:01','',1998,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/06/02/1998-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2001,1,'2018-06-02 16:52:22','2018-06-02 21:52:22','Broke out the mobile unit to record this episode in the Bucktown neighborhood of Atlanta; much warmer than getting caught in a spring snow storm in Milwaukee. When much of the travel tech news is about the latest phone apps, we talk about physical travel technology that we can touch and carry. And when flying during the past two weeks, flight attendants\' safety demonstrations have become a bit more strident. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_141.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/438588876\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #141:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. Not much travel since the last episode -- just driving up to Wisconsin -- until last week when I did a 5-day trip with a client to Pune, India. Left ORD Friday night, landed in Frankfurt late Saturday morning, heard the announce a flight to Pune before my flight to Delhi. Arrived in Delhi at 1am Monday morning. Overnighted at the airport Radisson Blu (not a bad hotel), and then caught an afternoon Jet Airways flight to Pune. Note to self: you don’t always have to fly the client’s itinerary. In spite of all those legs, those multiple points of potential failure, everything went relatively smoothly.</li>\r\n 	<li>Not so much on the way home. The itinerary was to take an Air India flight from Pune to Delhi at 7pm Thursday night, then the United flight to Newark, getting back to ORD around 9:30. We passed on a 5:30p Jet Airways flight fearing Pune rush hour traffic. And that’s where the itinerary fell apart. While waiting for the client team to check their luggage -- I decided to ignore Air India’s 8 kg carry-on weight limit -- I get an e-mail from Air India with a 2 hr delay due to “operational reasons” which usually means a broken plane. Great. What was a reasonable 2½ layover was suddenly an unrealistic 30-minute dash off the plane, through the standard Indian airport itinerary check, then passport control, full patdown security, weave through the terminal and to the gate. And the inbound Air India plane hasn’t left Delhi yet. I call our Amex travel number -- any room on that Jet Airways flight because it hasn’t left yet. Nope, sold out. I briefly think about 3-hr drive to Mumbai but decide to keep heading to Delhi. I bang “flights DEL ORD May 24” into Google. I filter the Google Flights results for one-way and shortest duration, and then call Amex back. When the agent stopped after listing the limited United options -- I guess because it’s less work for them to keep me on the same airline -- I asked her to check on the non-United options that Google Flights listed. There’s the direct Air India flight to ORD getting in around 7:30a or a Lufthansa connection back through Frankfurt arriving around 1pm. I have her book both, knowing that I can cancel one well within the 24-hr no-penalty window.</li>\r\n 	<li>Pune Airport is a dump. I’m trying to think of a worse airport I’ve been in and I’m drawing a complete blank. Weak air conditioning failing to fight the 95 degree day, 3-4 food stands against the wall, and no bar. With nothing better to do, I bang “Air India ORD DEL business class review” into Google. The results were not kind. But I still think - how bad could it really be? This seems like a bad karma travel day; skipping the FRA connection, avoiding another point of failure, seems to be good idea. But then I finally got on the Air India plane to Delhi. It was also a complete dump. It was a bad 2 hrs; I couldn’t do another 15 hrs with them. I decided to risk the Frankfurt connection. At first it went well; breakfast beer and pretzel in the lounge, on-time boarding. But after boarding, we sat and sat. The captain came on. The good news? The luggage was finally loaded and the cargo doors buttoned up. The bad news? Our pushback time is an hour from now. There was nothing I could do. I pulled out my iPhone and buried myself in the zen of Solitaire. As it turned out, we didn’t take the full hour delay and the pilot juiced the engines so we arrived only 15 minutes late. And after looking at in-flight pictures from the gang that took the Air India direct flight, that 15 minute delay was trampled by the arrival of full-on schadenfreude. I had definitely made the right decision</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/media/files/DJBLUE/11541\">Hear Me</a></em> by DJ Blue</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>The airlines’ smart bag ban claimed a couple of casualties this month. Bluesmart posted its blog obituary first -- “the banning of smart luggage with non-removable batteries put our company in an irreversibly difficult financial and business situation”. selling their IP, their intellectual property to TravelPro, one of the “legacy” suitcase brands they used to dismiss. A few weeks later, Raden posted a similar obit -- “We sincerely apologize to those who chose to travel with us, our intent was to add ease and simplicity to your travel experience and this unforeseen policy change has made this impossible.” Both companies said they’re no longer honoring warranties though Bluesmart says they’ll still provide some level of e-mail support. And the smartphone apps if you want to use your grounded bag on, say, a train or a bus. The bag maker Away is still in business, though, even developing a free kit that retrofits their first generation smart bag with an ejectable battery, making them compliant with the airlines’ rules.</li>\r\n 	<li>Gary Learned tweeted back a solid counter-argument on last episode’s rant on MSP’s Terminal 2. After waiting for a Southwest flight back to Chicago, I added it to my “ghetto terminal” list -- the terminals for non-hub airlines -- like O’Hare’s Terminal 2 and Detroit’s North Terminal. Gary has a different take, though. He writes -\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I respectfully disagree on MSP T2. Surdyks has some great taps and wine as well as good small bites. Barrio is a nice little Mexican local restaurant. I can go from car to gate in 5 min. Now MDW on the other hand …</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Car to gate in 5 minutes -- that’s a selling point right there that you won’t pick up Uber-ing in and out of a place. That used to be Midway before it blew up -- little parking lot in front of the terminal and walk right in. I won’t defend Midway now -- it’s a bit of a cluster, though I’m hoping that the pending reconstruction of the security concourse sort of “un-clusters” at least that part of it. Gary, thanks for giving us the contra view of MSP T2. I’ll give Barrio a try the next time I’m there.</li>\r\n 	<li>And since we’re talking about ghetto terminals, when choosing among the client-selected itineraries to India, a connection thru Munich was one of the options -- which long-time listeners know I immediately skipped. Skytrax again named Munich the top European airport. God only knows why, though I know they certainly didn’t ask me. Instead, I connected through Frankfurt, which while not a “wow-sy” airport, is efficient, not a hassle, and gets me on my way. Normally, I’m flying over to FRA from ORD and connecting to some place in Europe, often in the Schengen zone so I don’t have to go through passport control. Connecting to India, though, was a different matter. According to my iPhone’s Health app (admittedly not the most accurate), I walked 1.6 miles that Saturday morning between my ORD and DEL flights. I drug my bag down long corridors empty except for some black plastic chairs fixed in a semi-reclined position surrounded by black cloth cots. FRA airport really missed the chance to strategically locate some little beer stube kiosks along the way. I would’ve stopped at least a couple of times on that trek for some breakfast beers.</li>\r\n 	<li>The India trip was a bit of a last-minute thing which necessitated a scramble for a new Indian visa. This would be my 3rd Indian visa. My first one was a 5-year visa that I lost when my passport was stolen in Brussels. My second one was only for 6 months; I can’t remember why it was so short. This time, I decided to avoid future scrambles and apply for a 10-year visa. Because there’s an Indian consulate in Chicago, I didn’t have to hassle with postage or third-party passport services. The day before, I sent notes to our US HR department and the admin manager in our Hyderabad office asking for the necessary letters of guarantee and invitation, and then did the application online, printed it out and signed it, and then booked an appointment the next morning. I didn’t actually go to the consulate. I’ve always gone to an outsourced visa processing company that handled the front end administrivia, with, near as I can tell, the consulate just approving and signing the visas. Each visa has been with a different processor. For my first visa in 2010, I dropped my forms and passport off at an office in the morning, and received a text at the end of the day that it was ready. In 2014, a different processor gave my wife a hard time -- trying to upsell her on expedited handling charges that weren’t needed. This time, Cox and Kings was a surprisingly painless experience. I went in Thursday after lunch; there was no wait, the people were pleasant. End of day Thursday, I received an e-mail and a text telling me that my application had been processed and was heading to the consulate. On Friday morning, I received and e-mail and text saying that my application had arrived at the consulate. Another message at lunch said that it was being processes, and a last message on Friday said that it was back at Cox and Kings. Monday morning, another message told me it was being packaged up, followed by a message with a UPS tracking number. Tuesday afternoon, my passport landed on my front porch with my 10-year visa. I was incredibly impressed… and feeling a bit spoiled comparing this level of customer service to what my non-US friends tell me they have to go through to get a US visa.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/media/files/savoyard/10743\">Madrugada</a></em> by Savoyard</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>When You Think the TSA is Bad...</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>In addition to press releases about National Business Travelers Day, I also get press releases announcing new funding rounds for travel startups. These things come in waves. Like the wave of companies building tour aggregation platforms. That investment thesis went -- because millennials are more into experiential travel, they’re more likely to spend money on something like a food tour or hang gliding; the market for travel experiences is fragmented making discovery and purchasing difficult; our platform will solve this problem by aggregating experience providers and providing world-class search and user experience. The latest wave seems to be about building platforms that “reduce the pain” of corporate business travel. In April, in addition to Upside’s National Business Traveler Day announcement, Rocketrip sent out a release about their $15 million funding round and TravelPerk, who sponsored our January episode, touted their $21 million round -- which sounds like, some 20+ years after Travelocity and Expedia hit the market, companies continue to spend millions of dollars trying to figure out how to replace travel agents.</li>\r\n 	<li>At times, it feels like much of the work on improving travel is virtual, about software -- new apps, new search platforms, better ways to spit out a single travel itinerary. But in spite of the venture capital mantra that “software is eating the world,” travel is inherently physical -- we want to move our bodies, our stuff from Point A to Point B, and most often back again. It seems like the ‘60’s were the golden age of this, when Boeing and Airbus’ predecessors and the Russians were designing and building supersonic planes. I really felt ancient the other day telling some Millennial staffers about, how way back when, Concorde would fly from JFK to LHR in less than 3 hrs. Now it seems that Boeing and Airbus are completely focused on cramming more people into subsonic flying buses. Logical, but not very aspirational. Now if all the work on hyperloops -- the test circuits, the design contests -- actually turns into something, and isn’t just high-tech hobbies for Elon Musk and Richard Branson -- we’ll be onto something.</li>\r\n 	<li>But in the meantime, in the space between now -- thinner, more uncomfortable plane seats and hotel keys that keep demagnetizing -- and the inspirational future -- us whizzing along in pods at 750 mph, doing LA to SF in 35 minutes without having to buy CO2 offsets to feel better about ourselves -- what are some of the physical things about to hit?</li>\r\n 	<li>One thing that seems to be finally hitting critical mass is real-time luggage tracking through RFID luggage tags. Logistics is another thing that’s hard, but it feels that airports and some airlines, Delta especially, have slogged through deploying enough RFID readers along the miles of luggage conveyor belts in the bowels of most of the airports they use, and then wiring it back in near real-time to their smartphone apps so that it’s useful. I’m hoping the combination of competitive pressure, falling equipment pricing, and government fines will push the rest of the airlines to follow suit. For me, real-time location tracking was the main use case for smart bags like BlueSmart. If I can get this through RFID tags, I’ll feel a lot less salty about the smart bag ban.</li>\r\n 	<li>Wearables also get a lot of buzz. Carnival Cruise Lines has been the latest, announcing their “Ocean Medallion” last year as a way to “personalize” your cruise experience -- and, of course, to make it easier to buy drinks on board. Nothing really new here. Disney’s been doing this forever; 20 years ago, I remember using a wristband at Northstar ski resort in Tahoe to track how many vertical feet we’d skied in a day, and to easily buy beers in the lodge. I’m wondering what happens here if the current noise about the use (and misuse) of personal data by Facebook and others resets people’s privacy vs. ease-of-use balance point rather than just blowing over. For me, it’s less about how the companies use the data (though I’m not completely unconcerned about this) and more about their inability to secure it. Seems like every couple of weeks, another travel company admits to some hack of, say, their point-of-sale system and the associated loss of millions of names and credit card numbers. Doesn’t incent me to let them track my movements and spending habits.</li>\r\n 	<li>AR/VR -- Augmented and virtual reality continues to buzz. I’ve talked about Google Translate’s AR feature -- point your camera at, say, a menu or washing machine, and it’ll display the translation over the original text in real-time. It’s not perfect -- the translations can rapidly change, sorta flicker between different interpretations, but it’s often “good enough”, and a whole lot quicker than banging in each menu entree. Google has tried to extend this real-time translation from visual to speech with their Pixel Bud headphones with much more Version 1.0 mixed results. I’m probably being way overly optimistic here, but if the Buds follow the same improvement trajectory, they could be pretty cool in 3 years’ time.</li>\r\n 	<li>It really gets buzzy when we move from AR to VR. A guy at a VR start-up talked to me about using VR in hotel rooms for what he called “social viewing”. Rather than watching, say Black Mirror on Netflix on your laptop or one of those Enseo TVs I’m seeing more and more of, you strap on a VR headset, as does your spouse or kids, and you’re all watching together in a virtual living room or virtual theater. And then there’s always the pitch -- why fly over to, say, Madrid to see Picasso’s Guernica in the Reina Sofia when you strap on a VR headset and “be” in the room instantly? Hey, remember how virtual reality turned out in The Matrix movies? Yeah, I think I’ll keep my travel physical.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/media/files/djlang59/10579\">Crazy Love</a></em> by DJ Lang</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>You <em>Will</em> Pay Attention to the Safety Briefing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>The selfie of passengers on Southwest flight 1380 not wearing the oxygen masks correctly went viral in the days after the engine explosion, along with the stories -- the guy telling the woman next to him that she didn’t need to squeeze the airbag, and the guy who logged into WiFi and Facebook Live before putting on his mask. The flight attendant interviews that seemingly every news outlet did dripped with schadenfreude -- no one ever pays attention to the safety videos or demonstrations, and look what happened!</li>\r\n 	<li>Improving airline safety records have let people grow numb as to how unnatural air travel is -- flying over 600 mph at 35,000 ft. Flight 1380 was the first accident-related fatality on a US airliner since 2009, and the Southwest’s first ever -- since it was founded in 1971.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’ll admit that I don’t pay attention to every demo, especially when I do multiple flights in a single week. I do typically look around me for the nearest exits -- in front and behind me -- because those can change pretty often with different seat configurations. I will pay attention, as a refresher, if I haven’t flown for a couple of weeks -- like last week’s flight to MSP. Or if it’s a plane I haven’t flown in a while, I’ll look at the seat back card -- like I did today when noticing I was in a Boeing 717, a pretty rare event for me.</li>\r\n 	<li>I have noticed that the flight attendants’ requests/demands for attention have become a bit more strident since 1380. On my Southwest flight back home from MSP last week, the flight attendant chanted “Nose and mouth; nose and mouth!”, eliciting some nervous laughter.</li>\r\n 	<li>The attendant on my Delta flight this morning was a bit more direct, perhaps fatalistic this morning. “Please pay attention! We’re doing this for you. But if you don’t want to watch us, well, I guess it’s your life…”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #141</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a> and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_140.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #141 — Travel T','','inherit','closed','closed','','1998-revision-v1','','','2018-06-02 16:52:22','2018-06-02 21:52:22','',1998,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/06/02/1998-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2002,1,'2018-06-03 07:33:33','2018-06-03 12:33:33','Broke out the mobile unit to record this episode in the Bucktown neighborhood of Atlanta; much warmer than getting caught in a spring snow storm in Milwaukee. When much of the travel tech news is about the latest phone apps, we talk about physical travel technology that we can touch and carry. And when flying during the past two weeks, flight attendants\' safety demonstrations have become a bit more strident. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_141.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/438588876\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #141:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. Not much travel since the last episode -- just driving up to Wisconsin -- until last week when I did a 5-day trip with a client to Pune, India. Left ORD Friday night, landed in Frankfurt late Saturday morning, heard the announce a flight to Pune before my flight to Delhi. Arrived in Delhi at 1am Monday morning. Overnighted at the airport Radisson Blu (not a bad hotel), and then caught an afternoon Jet Airways flight to Pune. Note to self: you don’t always have to fly the client’s itinerary. In spite of all those legs, those multiple points of potential failure, everything went relatively smoothly.</li>\r\n 	<li>Not so much on the way home. The itinerary was to take an Air India flight from Pune to Delhi at 7pm Thursday night, then the United flight to Newark, getting back to ORD around 9:30. We passed on a 5:30p Jet Airways flight fearing Pune rush hour traffic. And that’s where the itinerary fell apart. While waiting for the client team to check their luggage -- I decided to ignore Air India’s 8 kg carry-on weight limit -- I get an e-mail from Air India with a 2 hr delay due to “operational reasons” which usually means a broken plane. Great. What was a reasonable 2½ layover was suddenly an unrealistic 30-minute dash off the plane, through the standard Indian airport itinerary check, then passport control, full patdown security, weave through the terminal and to the gate. And the inbound Air India plane hasn’t left Delhi yet. I call our Amex travel number -- any room on that Jet Airways flight because it hasn’t left yet. Nope, sold out. I briefly think about 3-hr drive to Mumbai but decide to keep heading to Delhi. I bang “flights DEL ORD May 24” into Google. I filter the Google Flights results for one-way and shortest duration, and then call Amex back. When the agent stopped after listing the limited United options -- I guess because it’s less work for them to keep me on the same airline -- I asked her to check on the non-United options that Google Flights listed. There’s the direct Air India flight to ORD getting in around 7:30a or a Lufthansa connection back through Frankfurt arriving around 1pm. I have her book both, knowing that I can cancel one well within the 24-hr no-penalty window.</li>\r\n 	<li>Pune Airport is a dump. I’m trying to think of a worse airport I’ve been in and I’m drawing a complete blank. Weak air conditioning failing to fight the 95 degree day, 3-4 food stands against the wall, and no bar. With nothing better to do, I bang “Air India ORD DEL business class review” into Google. The results were not kind. But I still think - how bad could it really be? This seems like a bad karma travel day; skipping the FRA connection, avoiding another point of failure, seems to be good idea. But then I finally got on the Air India plane to Delhi. It was also a complete dump. It was a bad 2 hrs; I couldn’t do another 15 hrs with them. I decided to risk the Frankfurt connection. At first it went well; breakfast beer and pretzel in the lounge, on-time boarding. But after boarding, we sat and sat. The captain came on. The good news? The luggage was finally loaded and the cargo doors buttoned up. The bad news? Our pushback time is an hour from now. There was nothing I could do. I pulled out my iPhone and buried myself in the zen of Solitaire. As it turned out, we didn’t take the full hour delay and the pilot juiced the engines so we arrived only 15 minutes late. And after looking at in-flight pictures from the gang that took the Air India direct flight, that 15 minute delay was trampled by the arrival of full-on schadenfreude. I had definitely made the right decision</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/media/files/DJBLUE/11541\">Hear Me</a></em> by DJ Blue</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>The airlines’ smart bag ban claimed a couple of casualties this month. Bluesmart posted its blog obituary first -- “the banning of smart luggage with non-removable batteries put our company in an irreversibly difficult financial and business situation”. selling their IP, their intellectual property to TravelPro, one of the “legacy” suitcase brands they used to dismiss. A few weeks later, Raden posted a similar obit -- “We sincerely apologize to those who chose to travel with us, our intent was to add ease and simplicity to your travel experience and this unforeseen policy change has made this impossible.” Both companies said they’re no longer honoring warranties though Bluesmart says they’ll still provide some level of e-mail support. And the smartphone apps if you want to use your grounded bag on, say, a train or a bus. The bag maker Away is still in business, though, even developing a free kit that retrofits their first generation smart bag with an ejectable battery, making them compliant with the airlines’ rules.</li>\r\n 	<li>Gary Learned tweeted back a solid counter-argument on last episode’s rant on MSP’s Terminal 2. After waiting for a Southwest flight back to Chicago, I added it to my “ghetto terminal” list -- the terminals for non-hub airlines -- like O’Hare’s Terminal 2 and Detroit’s North Terminal. Gary has a different take, though. He writes -\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I respectfully disagree on MSP T2. Surdyks has some great taps and wine as well as good small bites. Barrio is a nice little Mexican local restaurant. I can go from car to gate in 5 min. Now MDW on the other hand …</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Car to gate in 5 minutes -- that’s a selling point right there that you won’t pick up Uber-ing in and out of a place. That used to be Midway before it blew up -- little parking lot in front of the terminal and walk right in. I won’t defend Midway now -- it’s a bit of a cluster, though I’m hoping that the pending reconstruction of the security concourse sort of “un-clusters” at least that part of it. Gary, thanks for giving us the contra view of MSP T2. I’ll give Barrio a try the next time I’m there.</li>\r\n 	<li>And since we’re talking about ghetto terminals, when choosing among the client-selected itineraries to India, a connection thru Munich was one of the options -- which long-time listeners know I immediately skipped. Skytrax again named Munich the top European airport. God only knows why, though I know they certainly didn’t ask me. Instead, I connected through Frankfurt, which while not a “wow-sy” airport, is efficient, not a hassle, and gets me on my way. Normally, I’m flying over to FRA from ORD and connecting to some place in Europe, often in the Schengen zone so I don’t have to go through passport control. Connecting to India, though, was a different matter. According to my iPhone’s Health app (admittedly not the most accurate), I walked 1.6 miles that Saturday morning between my ORD and DEL flights. I drug my bag down long corridors empty except for some black plastic chairs fixed in a semi-reclined position surrounded by black cloth cots. FRA airport really missed the chance to strategically locate some little beer stube kiosks along the way. I would’ve stopped at least a couple of times on that trek for some breakfast beers.</li>\r\n 	<li>The India trip was a bit of a last-minute thing which necessitated a scramble for a new Indian visa. This would be my 3rd Indian visa. My first one was a 5-year visa that I lost when my passport was stolen in Brussels. My second one was only for 6 months; I can’t remember why it was so short. This time, I decided to avoid future scrambles and apply for a 10-year visa. Because there’s an Indian consulate in Chicago, I didn’t have to hassle with postage or third-party passport services. The day before, I sent notes to our US HR department and the admin manager in our Hyderabad office asking for the necessary letters of guarantee and invitation, and then did the application online, printed it out and signed it, and then booked an appointment the next morning. I didn’t actually go to the consulate. I’ve always gone to an outsourced visa processing company that handled the front end administrivia, with, near as I can tell, the consulate just approving and signing the visas. Each visa has been with a different processor. For my first visa in 2010, I dropped my forms and passport off at an office in the morning, and received a text at the end of the day that it was ready. In 2014, a different processor gave my wife a hard time -- trying to upsell her on expedited handling charges that weren’t needed. This time, Cox and Kings was a surprisingly painless experience. I went in Thursday after lunch; there was no wait, the people were pleasant. End of day Thursday, I received an e-mail and a text telling me that my application had been processed and was heading to the consulate. On Friday morning, I received and e-mail and text saying that my application had arrived at the consulate. Another message at lunch said that it was being processes, and a last message on Friday said that it was back at Cox and Kings. Monday morning, another message told me it was being packaged up, followed by a message with a UPS tracking number. Tuesday afternoon, my passport landed on my front porch with my 10-year visa. I was incredibly impressed… and feeling a bit spoiled comparing this level of customer service to what my non-US friends tell me they have to go through to get a US visa.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/media/files/savoyard/10743\">Madrugada</a></em> by Savoyard</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>When You Think the TSA is Bad...</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>A week of flying around India is always a good sanity check for me -- that no matter what crankiness I’m have about the TSA, airport security in the US is so much easier than in India. When I was talking at the start of the episode about how the delay of our Pune-Delhi flight blew up the rest of our itinerary home, the main reason we immediately starting working alternative flights was because how long we knew it would take to work our way through the different layers of security in Delhi. It started when trying to make our way from domestic flight arrivals into the international departures area so we could re-ticket our flights. We had to pass through the usual itinerary check. I show the army guy the boarding pass for United flight we’d missed -- it was all I had. But since that flight had already left, he wasn’t going to let me through. Luckily, one of the group I was flying with was United Global Services, and two customer service staff had met us as we got off the Air India flight. Even then, it took her a good bit of time to explain the situation to the army guy and convince him to let me through. But for that, I would’ve been idling around baggage claim on my own trying to figure out how to get to a ticket counter.</li>\r\n 	<li>Passport control was pretty efficient, but the security scans -- not so much. After you unpack all your electronics and push everything through the X-ray machine, you walk through the metal detector for your gender -- different scanners for “Gents” and “Ladies” because there’s a full wanding and patdown on the other side. Indeed, the “Ladies” go into a little curtained booth for their patdown. Not normally too much of a hassle, unless the “Ladies” patdown line backs up, and a back up of women’s luggage in the X-ray machine is blocking mine -- which happened that evening. None of the security people moved to clear things. Nothing to do but stand there and wait. Our flight from Pune landed at Delhi at 11pm. When looking at flight alternatives, I’d seen an Air Canada flight leaving at 12:10pm and passed right by it. I knew there was no way we’d make that flight.</li>\r\n 	<li>The security checks in Frankfurt, while much more efficient, were still more than you’d get in the US. On the way over to India, after passing everything through the X-ray machine, I was intercepted after collecting my bags, directed over to a cubicle where all of my bags were swabbed and checked for explosives residue. All done with a German sense of politeness, but I was glad I wasn’t in a rush. On the connection back home, it was a different security line, with a body scanner instead of the walkthru metal detector. No big deal, but just different enough to be awkward. Instead of the TSA’s hands up “don’t shoot” pose, it was an arms down-elbows out pose, kinda like you’re holding luggage. The guy working the scanner was visibly annoyed that he had to instruct me on the pose -- to hold me arms further away from my body. But then there was no luggage swiping on the other side.</li>\r\n 	<li>Picking up my bags, I maneuvered around three officers cradling automatic rifles; they were standing there chatting, but watching. No big deal now, but I remember when I first starting traveling through Europe -- London Heathrow and Frankfurt in the mid- to late-’80’s and being taken aback by the army guys walking around with unslung M-16s and the like. This was pre-TSA time in the US, when it would be out-of-place to see anything more than a rent-a-cop in an airport terminal and you could still turn up 30 minutes before departure time and make your flight. Back then, the difference was eye-opening for a twenty-something traveler. Of course, none of us knew that it was a preview of what flying would be like 20 years later.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/media/files/djlang59/10579\">Crazy Love</a></em> by DJ Lang</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>You <em>Will</em> Pay Attention to the Safety Briefing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>The selfie of passengers on Southwest flight 1380 not wearing the oxygen masks correctly went viral in the days after the engine explosion, along with the stories -- the guy telling the woman next to him that she didn’t need to squeeze the airbag, and the guy who logged into WiFi and Facebook Live before putting on his mask. The flight attendant interviews that seemingly every news outlet did dripped with schadenfreude -- no one ever pays attention to the safety videos or demonstrations, and look what happened!</li>\r\n 	<li>Improving airline safety records have let people grow numb as to how unnatural air travel is -- flying over 600 mph at 35,000 ft. Flight 1380 was the first accident-related fatality on a US airliner since 2009, and the Southwest’s first ever -- since it was founded in 1971.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’ll admit that I don’t pay attention to every demo, especially when I do multiple flights in a single week. I do typically look around me for the nearest exits -- in front and behind me -- because those can change pretty often with different seat configurations. I will pay attention, as a refresher, if I haven’t flown for a couple of weeks -- like last week’s flight to MSP. Or if it’s a plane I haven’t flown in a while, I’ll look at the seat back card -- like I did today when noticing I was in a Boeing 717, a pretty rare event for me.</li>\r\n 	<li>I have noticed that the flight attendants’ requests/demands for attention have become a bit more strident since 1380. On my Southwest flight back home from MSP last week, the flight attendant chanted “Nose and mouth; nose and mouth!”, eliciting some nervous laughter.</li>\r\n 	<li>The attendant on my Delta flight this morning was a bit more direct, perhaps fatalistic this morning. “Please pay attention! We’re doing this for you. But if you don’t want to watch us, well, I guess it’s your life…”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #141</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a> and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_140.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #141 — Travel T','','inherit','closed','closed','','1998-revision-v1','','','2018-06-03 07:33:33','2018-06-03 12:33:33','',1998,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/06/03/1998-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2003,1,'2018-06-03 07:34:18','2018-06-03 12:34:18','Broke out the mobile unit to record this episode in the Bucktown neighborhood of Atlanta; much warmer than getting caught in a spring snow storm in Milwaukee. When much of the travel tech news is about the latest phone apps, we talk about physical travel technology that we can touch and carry. And when flying during the past two weeks, flight attendants\' safety demonstrations have become a bit more strident. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_141.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/438588876\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #141:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. Not much travel since the last episode -- just driving up to Wisconsin -- until last week when I did a 5-day trip with a client to Pune, India. Left ORD Friday night, landed in Frankfurt late Saturday morning, heard the announce a flight to Pune before my flight to Delhi. Arrived in Delhi at 1am Monday morning. Overnighted at the airport Radisson Blu (not a bad hotel), and then caught an afternoon Jet Airways flight to Pune. Note to self: you don’t always have to fly the client’s itinerary. In spite of all those legs, those multiple points of potential failure, everything went relatively smoothly.</li>\r\n 	<li>Not so much on the way home. The itinerary was to take an Air India flight from Pune to Delhi at 7pm Thursday night, then the United flight to Newark, getting back to ORD around 9:30. We passed on a 5:30p Jet Airways flight fearing Pune rush hour traffic. And that’s where the itinerary fell apart. While waiting for the client team to check their luggage -- I decided to ignore Air India’s 8 kg carry-on weight limit -- I get an e-mail from Air India with a 2 hr delay due to “operational reasons” which usually means a broken plane. Great. What was a reasonable 2½ layover was suddenly an unrealistic 30-minute dash off the plane, through the standard Indian airport itinerary check, then passport control, full patdown security, weave through the terminal and to the gate. And the inbound Air India plane hasn’t left Delhi yet. I call our Amex travel number -- any room on that Jet Airways flight because it hasn’t left yet. Nope, sold out. I briefly think about 3-hr drive to Mumbai but decide to keep heading to Delhi. I bang “flights DEL ORD May 24” into Google. I filter the Google Flights results for one-way and shortest duration, and then call Amex back. When the agent stopped after listing the limited United options -- I guess because it’s less work for them to keep me on the same airline -- I asked her to check on the non-United options that Google Flights listed. There’s the direct Air India flight to ORD getting in around 7:30a or a Lufthansa connection back through Frankfurt arriving around 1pm. I have her book both, knowing that I can cancel one well within the 24-hr no-penalty window.</li>\r\n 	<li>Pune Airport is a dump. I’m trying to think of a worse airport I’ve been in and I’m drawing a complete blank. Weak air conditioning failing to fight the 95 degree day, 3-4 food stands against the wall, and no bar. With nothing better to do, I bang “Air India ORD DEL business class review” into Google. The results were not kind. But I still think - how bad could it really be? This seems like a bad karma travel day; skipping the FRA connection, avoiding another point of failure, seems to be good idea. But then I finally got on the Air India plane to Delhi. It was also a complete dump. It was a bad 2 hrs; I couldn’t do another 15 hrs with them. I decided to risk the Frankfurt connection. At first it went well; breakfast beer and pretzel in the lounge, on-time boarding. But after boarding, we sat and sat. The captain came on. The good news? The luggage was finally loaded and the cargo doors buttoned up. The bad news? Our pushback time is an hour from now. There was nothing I could do. I pulled out my iPhone and buried myself in the zen of Solitaire. As it turned out, we didn’t take the full hour delay and the pilot juiced the engines so we arrived only 15 minutes late. And after looking at in-flight pictures from the gang that took the Air India direct flight, that 15 minute delay was trampled by the arrival of full-on schadenfreude. I had definitely made the right decision</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/media/files/DJBLUE/11541\">Hear Me</a></em> by DJ Blue</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>The airlines’ smart bag ban claimed a couple of casualties this month. Bluesmart posted its blog obituary first -- “the banning of smart luggage with non-removable batteries put our company in an irreversibly difficult financial and business situation”. selling their IP, their intellectual property to TravelPro, one of the “legacy” suitcase brands they used to dismiss. A few weeks later, Raden posted a similar obit -- “We sincerely apologize to those who chose to travel with us, our intent was to add ease and simplicity to your travel experience and this unforeseen policy change has made this impossible.” Both companies said they’re no longer honoring warranties though Bluesmart says they’ll still provide some level of e-mail support. And the smartphone apps if you want to use your grounded bag on, say, a train or a bus. The bag maker Away is still in business, though, even developing a free kit that retrofits their first generation smart bag with an ejectable battery, making them compliant with the airlines’ rules.</li>\r\n 	<li>Gary Learned tweeted back a solid counter-argument on last episode’s rant on MSP’s Terminal 2. After waiting for a Southwest flight back to Chicago, I added it to my “ghetto terminal” list -- the terminals for non-hub airlines -- like O’Hare’s Terminal 2 and Detroit’s North Terminal. Gary has a different take, though. He writes -\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I respectfully disagree on MSP T2. Surdyks has some great taps and wine as well as good small bites. Barrio is a nice little Mexican local restaurant. I can go from car to gate in 5 min. Now MDW on the other hand …</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Car to gate in 5 minutes -- that’s a selling point right there that you won’t pick up Uber-ing in and out of a place. That used to be Midway before it blew up -- little parking lot in front of the terminal and walk right in. I won’t defend Midway now -- it’s a bit of a cluster, though I’m hoping that the pending reconstruction of the security concourse sort of “un-clusters” at least that part of it. Gary, thanks for giving us the contra view of MSP T2. I’ll give Barrio a try the next time I’m there.</li>\r\n 	<li>And since we’re talking about ghetto terminals, when choosing among the client-selected itineraries to India, a connection thru Munich was one of the options -- which long-time listeners know I immediately skipped. Skytrax again named Munich the top European airport. God only knows why, though I know they certainly didn’t ask me. Instead, I connected through Frankfurt, which while not a “wow-sy” airport, is efficient, not a hassle, and gets me on my way. Normally, I’m flying over to FRA from ORD and connecting to some place in Europe, often in the Schengen zone so I don’t have to go through passport control. Connecting to India, though, was a different matter. According to my iPhone’s Health app (admittedly not the most accurate), I walked 1.6 miles that Saturday morning between my ORD and DEL flights. I drug my bag down long corridors empty except for some black plastic chairs fixed in a semi-reclined position surrounded by black cloth cots. FRA airport really missed the chance to strategically locate some little beer stube kiosks along the way. I would’ve stopped at least a couple of times on that trek for some breakfast beers.</li>\r\n 	<li>The India trip was a bit of a last-minute thing which necessitated a scramble for a new Indian visa. This would be my 3rd Indian visa. My first one was a 5-year visa that I lost when my passport was stolen in Brussels. My second one was only for 6 months; I can’t remember why it was so short. This time, I decided to avoid future scrambles and apply for a 10-year visa. Because there’s an Indian consulate in Chicago, I didn’t have to hassle with postage or third-party passport services. The day before, I sent notes to our US HR department and the admin manager in our Hyderabad office asking for the necessary letters of guarantee and invitation, and then did the application online, printed it out and signed it, and then booked an appointment the next morning. I didn’t actually go to the consulate. I’ve always gone to an outsourced visa processing company that handled the front end administrivia, with, near as I can tell, the consulate just approving and signing the visas. Each visa has been with a different processor. For my first visa in 2010, I dropped my forms and passport off at an office in the morning, and received a text at the end of the day that it was ready. In 2014, a different processor gave my wife a hard time -- trying to upsell her on expedited handling charges that weren’t needed. This time, Cox and Kings was a surprisingly painless experience. I went in Thursday after lunch; there was no wait, the people were pleasant. End of day Thursday, I received an e-mail and a text telling me that my application had been processed and was heading to the consulate. On Friday morning, I received and e-mail and text saying that my application had arrived at the consulate. Another message at lunch said that it was being processes, and a last message on Friday said that it was back at Cox and Kings. Monday morning, another message told me it was being packaged up, followed by a message with a UPS tracking number. Tuesday afternoon, my passport landed on my front porch with my 10-year visa. I was incredibly impressed… and feeling a bit spoiled comparing this level of customer service to what my non-US friends tell me they have to go through to get a US visa.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/media/files/savoyard/10743\">Madrugada</a></em> by Savoyard</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>When You Think the TSA is Bad...</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>A week of flying around India is always a good sanity check for me -- that no matter what crankiness I’m have about the TSA, airport security in the US is so much easier than in India. When I was talking at the start of the episode about how the delay of our Pune-Delhi flight blew up the rest of our itinerary home, the main reason we immediately starting working alternative flights was because how long we knew it would take to work our way through the different layers of security in Delhi. It started when trying to make our way from domestic flight arrivals into the international departures area so we could re-ticket our flights. We had to pass through the usual itinerary check. I show the army guy the boarding pass for United flight we’d missed -- it was all I had. But since that flight had already left, he wasn’t going to let me through. Luckily, one of the group I was flying with was United Global Services, and two customer service staff had met us as we got off the Air India flight. Even then, it took her a good bit of time to explain the situation to the army guy and convince him to let me through. But for that, I would’ve been idling around baggage claim on my own trying to figure out how to get to a ticket counter.</li>\r\n 	<li>Passport control was pretty efficient, but the security scans -- not so much. After you unpack all your electronics and push everything through the X-ray machine, you walk through the metal detector for your gender -- different scanners for “Gents” and “Ladies” because there’s a full wanding and patdown on the other side. Indeed, the “Ladies” go into a little curtained booth for their patdown. Not normally too much of a hassle, unless the “Ladies” patdown line backs up, and a back up of women’s luggage in the X-ray machine is blocking mine -- which happened that evening. None of the security people moved to clear things. Nothing to do but stand there and wait. Our flight from Pune landed at Delhi at 11pm. When looking at flight alternatives, I’d seen an Air Canada flight leaving at 12:10pm and passed right by it. I knew there was no way we’d make that flight.</li>\r\n 	<li>The security checks in Frankfurt, while much more efficient, were still more than you’d get in the US. On the way over to India, after passing everything through the X-ray machine, I was intercepted after collecting my bags, directed over to a cubicle where all of my bags were swabbed and checked for explosives residue. All done with a German sense of politeness, but I was glad I wasn’t in a rush. On the connection back home, it was a different security line, with a body scanner instead of the walkthru metal detector. No big deal, but just different enough to be awkward. Instead of the TSA’s hands up “don’t shoot” pose, it was an arms down-elbows out pose, kinda like you’re holding luggage. The guy working the scanner was visibly annoyed that he had to instruct me on the pose -- to hold me arms further away from my body. But then there was no luggage swiping on the other side.</li>\r\n 	<li>Picking up my bags, I maneuvered around three officers cradling automatic rifles; they were standing there chatting, but watching. No big deal now, but I remember when I first starting traveling through Europe -- London Heathrow and Frankfurt in the mid- to late-’80’s and being taken aback by the army guys walking around with unslung M-16s and the like. This was pre-TSA time in the US, when it would be out-of-place to see anything more than a rent-a-cop in an airport terminal and you could still turn up 30 minutes before departure time and make your flight. Back then, the difference was eye-opening for a twenty-something traveler. Of course, none of us knew that it was a preview of what flying would be like 20 years later.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/media/files/djlang59/10579\">Crazy Love</a></em> by DJ Lang</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Expired Money</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>The selfie of passengers on Southwest flight 1380 not wearing the oxygen masks correctly went viral in the days after the engine explosion, along with the stories -- the guy telling the woman next to him that she didn’t need to squeeze the airbag, and the guy who logged into WiFi and Facebook Live before putting on his mask. The flight attendant interviews that seemingly every news outlet did dripped with schadenfreude -- no one ever pays attention to the safety videos or demonstrations, and look what happened!</li>\r\n 	<li>Improving airline safety records have let people grow numb as to how unnatural air travel is -- flying over 600 mph at 35,000 ft. Flight 1380 was the first accident-related fatality on a US airliner since 2009, and the Southwest’s first ever -- since it was founded in 1971.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’ll admit that I don’t pay attention to every demo, especially when I do multiple flights in a single week. I do typically look around me for the nearest exits -- in front and behind me -- because those can change pretty often with different seat configurations. I will pay attention, as a refresher, if I haven’t flown for a couple of weeks -- like last week’s flight to MSP. Or if it’s a plane I haven’t flown in a while, I’ll look at the seat back card -- like I did today when noticing I was in a Boeing 717, a pretty rare event for me.</li>\r\n 	<li>I have noticed that the flight attendants’ requests/demands for attention have become a bit more strident since 1380. On my Southwest flight back home from MSP last week, the flight attendant chanted “Nose and mouth; nose and mouth!”, eliciting some nervous laughter.</li>\r\n 	<li>The attendant on my Delta flight this morning was a bit more direct, perhaps fatalistic this morning. “Please pay attention! We’re doing this for you. But if you don’t want to watch us, well, I guess it’s your life…”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #141</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a> and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_140.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #141 — When You Think the TSA is Bad; Expired Money','','inherit','closed','closed','','1998-revision-v1','','','2018-06-03 07:34:18','2018-06-03 12:34:18','',1998,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/06/03/1998-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2004,1,'2018-06-03 07:41:15','2018-06-03 12:41:15','','IMG_0464','Extended Exposure to TSA Scanners Has Side Effects','inherit','open','closed','','img_0464','','','2018-06-03 07:42:11','2018-06-03 12:42:11','',1998,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/IMG_0464.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(2005,1,'2018-06-03 07:46:10','2018-06-03 12:46:10','[caption id=\"attachment_1985\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/6AB2DE86-7AE4-4DAF-AD9F-DEFB51F737E0-01.jpeg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1985\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/6AB2DE86-7AE4-4DAF-AD9F-DEFB51F737E0-01-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> The Look of Augmented Reality?[/caption]\r\n\r\nBroke out the mobile unit to record this episode in the Buckhead neighborhood of Atlanta; much warmer than getting caught in a spring snow storm in Milwaukee. When much of the travel tech news is about the latest phone apps, we talk about physical travel technology that we can touch and carry. <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">And when flying during the past two weeks, flight attendants\' safety demonstrations have become a bit more strident. </span>All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_140.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/438588876\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #140:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the Hyatt Place-Buckhead in Atlanta, GA missing what I hope is the long-delayed start of Spring finally showing up the Midwest. I have done damn little travel since the last episode -- a couple of drives to a client up north of Milwaukee, a quick trip to Minneapolis last week, and flight this morning down to Atlanta. I managed to avoid the foot of late April snow in Minnesota but got caught by 3-4 inches in Milwaukee. Luckily, I’d looked at the forecast before I left and, walking out to the garage, grabbed my LL Bean boots and threw them into the trunk of the car Which saved my dress shoes later that evening and the next morning on unshoveled walks and is is the good thing about driving; I didn’t have to worry about space constraints. I couldn’t have done the same thing flying to Minneapolis.</li>\r\n 	<li>I ended up flying Southwest to Minneapolis because: a) they were the cheapest flight out on Monday morning at short notice; and b) it let me meet an A-List challenge that Southwest had sent me at the beginning of the year -- fly 3 roundtrips by the end of April and get A-List for the rest of the year. Now, I don’t fly Southwest a whole lot, so I can’t completely justify what I pushed to do this challenge -- except just because it was a challenge, I guess. That, and it’ll make it easier for those times I end up on Southwest this year. I won’t have to pay the $12 for auto check-in or set an alarm to check in 24 hours before flight time -- both of which typically only get me in the second or “B” boarding group. Not an earth shattering perk, but anything that reduces travel hassles is a good thing.</li>\r\n 	<li>When I went Chicago Midway airport on last Monday to catch that flight, I ran into a new TSA trick -- funnel everyone through a single-file U-turn line to be sniffed a TSA agent and a dog, after people headed into either regular security or TSA PreCheck. Which, at 7am on a Monday morning, quickly pushed the security line back into the hallway toward the parking garage. So, after spending what looks like the $190 million a year the past couple of years on screening technology like those snazzy full-body scanners that people empty their pockets and line up for, the TSA is now having us line up for yet another a new screening technology -- but at least this technology is cute. And when was the last time you heard a traveler wanting to pet the body scanner.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/media/files/DJBLUE/11541\">Hear Me</a></em> by DJ Blue</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">A couple of things for those not following my Twitter or the TravelCommons Facebook page…</span>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>First, for those Amazon fans, Alexa will now play the latest episode of TravelCommons for you if you ask nicely. I got an Echo Spot in a schwag bag for a conference in January. I put it on the standing desk in my home office and started playing around with it. After listening to the WJS Minute Briefing as part of my Flash Briefing, I started thinking about how to get TravelCommons onto it. At first, I thought I was going to have to figure out how to build an Alexa skill, but digging a little deeper, I found out that the TuneIn app is sorta the default podcast player for Alexa. So after I got TravelCommons approved for TuneIn -- felt like they had an actual human check out my app -- it appeared on my Echo Spot. So if you say, “Alexa, play TravelCommons podcast”, she should play the latest episode for you. Check out the Facebook page or my Twitter feed for a quick video showing the magic happen</li>\r\n 	<li>Second, I took advantage of being in town and the crap April weather to do the filming for the Midway taproom tour layover video. As I mentioned in the last episode, the idea has been to feature an itinerary out of Chicago’s “other” airport -- what was Chicago’s original airport that morphed into the budget airline airport that morphed into Southwest Airlines’ biggest operation. We used Uber and Lyft to hit 4 taprooms in what can only be described as the “post-industrial” landscape of Chicago’s near south side. We started by driving past the Cook County prison en route to Lagunitas’ plant and taproom that’s built in an old steel mill. While New Belgium and Sierra Nevada landed their national expansions in the much more bucolic environs of the North Carolina Smoky Mountains, Lagunitas’ owner Tony Magee dropped his expansion in a dodgy part of Chicago. We then hit smaller scale, more local places that have repurposed old manufacturing plants in less-visited Chicago neighborhoods -- Lo Rez in Pilsen, Marz in what can charitably described as “lower” Bridgeport, and then ending up at Whiner Beer in the Back of the Yards neighborhood -- where the Chicago Stockyards used to be decades ago. I started working on production, but then looked at the calendar and knew that I only had time for either this episode or the video. And since I’ve worked hard on keeping a monthly cadence of podcast episodes, I kicked the video into next month. So watch Facebook, Twitter, and the web site for the post. Since it’s a bit more narrow scope, I don’t think I’ll put the video in the podcast feed; not sure the non-beer-drinking listeners will want some 100 meg video clogging up their internet.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>While sitting in the backseat of one of those Lyft rides, I noticed something new on the pink Lyft light that many drivers have in the middle of their dash. You always see the front of it -- the pink Lyft logo -- from the outside, through the front windshield. Glancing at the back of it from inside of the car, I something flash by. Looking more closely, I saw a little message scroll by - “15 min eta”. I saw it again in the Lyft car I took to MSP on last Tuesday. I asked the driver about it. He told me that Lyft sent it to him after he did 300 rides -- “bit of a status thing” he said. I told him about the Uber dash light that I saw in New York, that let me adjust the color of the light from the app -- I talked about this in a prior episode. He thought that was pretty cool too, but he liked Lyft, the company, better than Uber, and he appreciated his messaging light.</li>\r\n 	<li>All sorts of press releases drop into the TravelCommons mailbox, but the one announcing April 24, last Tuesday, as the first National Business Traveler Day caught my eye. I guess because it’s new, it hasn’t made it onto the National Day Calendar, a list of these sorts of designations. It’s a good choice of date, though, because there is only one national day listed on the 24th -- National Pigs-In-A-Blanket Day -- which, I can imagine, some First or Business Class flight attendants might reasonably associate with some sleeping business travelers. National Business Traveler Day was announced (created?) by “Upside Business Travel, the first online travel service built just for the do-it-yourself (DIY) business traveler” in recognition of “the important contributions made by business travelers to America\'s economy.” I dunno, this could go in so many snarky directions -- with the pigs-in-a-blanket thing as just a starter. I have to say, though, I felt very unrecognized when I walked into MSP Terminal 2 the afternoon of National Business Travelers Day -- an obvious frequent business traveler: wearing a black blazer, head-down on the iPhone, speedwalking to the furthest security checkpoint because it’s the only one with PreCheck. Nobody was gave me a thank-you, a flower, a hug, but then again, the first person I had contact with was an old, overweight but jolly TSA screener. Nice guy, but not sure I would’ve wanted a hug from him.</li>\r\n 	<li>And it could’ve been that MSP’s Terminal 2 which I’ll add to my list of ghetto terminals, the land of misbegotten travelers, which also includes ORD’s T2, Detroit’s North Terminal, Madrid’s 4S satellite terminal, Munich’s T2 satellite terminal… I’ve talked about this before. In fortress hubs, like ORD, DTW, and MSP, the terminals the hub airlines use is clean, bright, has lots of restaurant and shopping choices. Delta’s terminal in Detroit has an airy 2 or 3-story ceiling with a monorail train running the length of the terminal up at the top. The North terminal that every other airline is dumped into is the old terminal that Delta -- or actually Northwest left behind, with a bit of a clean up and 3 restaurants. Delta’s terminal in Minneapolis is the same story -- lots of shops and restaurants, a big craft beer bar, all with a bit of that North Woods feel. Terminal 2 - generic airport sterility, a Subway sandwich joint, a bar where all the handles were removed from the beer taps. And there’s no inside-security connections between these terminals in MSP and DTW if you want to check out the better side -- it’s a 10-minute bus ride and another pass through security. At least in ORD, you can walk from T2 to the American or United terminals and hit Rick Bayless’ Torta Frontera for great Mexican food or Goose Island for a good beer. On Tuesday, I was stuck in the Humphrey Terminal with my Subway sandwich and a choice of Bud Light or Blue Moon -- which maybe was fitting on National Business Traveler Day.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/media/files/savoyard/10743\">Madrugada</a></em> by Savoyard</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Travel Tech Gets Physical</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>In addition to press releases about National Business Travelers Day, I also get press releases announcing new funding rounds for travel startups. These things come in waves. Like the wave of companies building tour aggregation platforms. That investment thesis went -- because millennials are more into experiential travel, they’re more likely to spend money on something like a food tour or hang gliding; the market for travel experiences is fragmented making discovery and purchasing difficult; our platform will solve this problem by aggregating experience providers and providing world-class search and user experience. The latest wave seems to be about building platforms that “reduce the pain” of corporate business travel. In April, in addition to Upside’s National Business Traveler Day announcement, Rocketrip sent out a release about their $15 million funding round and TravelPerk, who sponsored our January episode, touted their $21 million round -- which sounds like, some 20+ years after Travelocity and Expedia hit the market, companies continue to spend millions of dollars trying to figure out how to replace travel agents.</li>\r\n 	<li>At times, it feels like much of the work on improving travel is virtual, about software -- new apps, new search platforms, better ways to spit out a single travel itinerary. But in spite of the venture capital mantra that “software is eating the world,” travel is inherently physical -- we want to move our bodies, our stuff from Point A to Point B, and most often back again. It seems like the ‘60’s were the golden age of this, when Boeing and Airbus’ predecessors and the Russians were designing and building supersonic planes. I really felt ancient the other day telling some Millennial staffers about, how way back when, Concorde would fly from JFK to LHR in less than 3 hrs. Now it seems that Boeing and Airbus are completely focused on cramming more people into subsonic flying buses. Logical, but not very aspirational. Now if all the work on hyperloops -- the test circuits, the design contests -- actually turns into something, and isn’t just high-tech hobbies for Elon Musk and Richard Branson -- we’ll be onto something.</li>\r\n 	<li>But in the meantime, in the space between now -- thinner, more uncomfortable plane seats and hotel keys that keep demagnetizing -- and the inspirational future -- us whizzing along in pods at 750 mph, doing LA to SF in 35 minutes without having to buy CO2 offsets to feel better about ourselves -- what are some of the physical things about to hit?</li>\r\n 	<li>One thing that seems to be finally hitting critical mass is real-time luggage tracking through RFID luggage tags. Logistics is another thing that’s hard, but it feels that airports and some airlines, Delta especially, have slogged through deploying enough RFID readers along the miles of luggage conveyor belts in the bowels of most of the airports they use, and then wiring it back in near real-time to their smartphone apps so that it’s useful. I’m hoping the combination of competitive pressure, falling equipment pricing, and government fines will push the rest of the airlines to follow suit. For me, real-time location tracking was the main use case for smart bags like BlueSmart. If I can get this through RFID tags, I’ll feel a lot less salty about the smart bag ban.</li>\r\n 	<li>Wearables also get a lot of buzz. Carnival Cruise Lines has been the latest, announcing their “Ocean Medallion” last year as a way to “personalize” your cruise experience -- and, of course, to make it easier to buy drinks on board. Nothing really new here. Disney’s been doing this forever; 20 years ago, I remember using a wristband at Northstar ski resort in Tahoe to track how many vertical feet we’d skied in a day, and to easily buy beers in the lodge. I’m wondering what happens here if the current noise about the use (and misuse) of personal data by Facebook and others resets people’s privacy vs. ease-of-use balance point rather than just blowing over. For me, it’s less about how the companies use the data (though I’m not completely unconcerned about this) and more about their inability to secure it. Seems like every couple of weeks, another travel company admits to some hack of, say, their point-of-sale system and the associated loss of millions of names and credit card numbers. Doesn’t incent me to let them track my movements and spending habits.</li>\r\n 	<li>AR/VR -- Augmented and virtual reality continues to buzz. I’ve talked about Google Translate’s AR feature -- point your camera at, say, a menu or washing machine, and it’ll display the translation over the original text in real-time. It’s not perfect -- the translations can rapidly change, sorta flicker between different interpretations, but it’s often “good enough”, and a whole lot quicker than banging in each menu entree. Google has tried to extend this real-time translation from visual to speech with their Pixel Bud headphones with much more Version 1.0 mixed results. I’m probably being way overly optimistic here, but if the Buds follow the same improvement trajectory, they could be pretty cool in 3 years’ time.</li>\r\n 	<li>It really gets buzzy when we move from AR to VR. A guy at a VR start-up talked to me about using VR in hotel rooms for what he called “social viewing”. Rather than watching, say Black Mirror on Netflix on your laptop or one of those Enseo TVs I’m seeing more and more of, you strap on a VR headset, as does your spouse or kids, and you’re all watching together in a virtual living room or virtual theater. And then there’s always the pitch -- why fly over to, say, Madrid to see Picasso’s Guernica in the Reina Sofia when you strap on a VR headset and “be” in the room instantly? Hey, remember how virtual reality turned out in The Matrix movies? Yeah, I think I’ll keep my travel physical.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/media/files/djlang59/10579\">Crazy Love</a></em> by DJ Lang</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>You <em>Will</em> Pay Attention to the Safety Briefing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>The selfie of passengers on Southwest flight 1380 not wearing the oxygen masks correctly went viral in the days after the engine explosion, along with the stories -- the guy telling the woman next to him that she didn’t need to squeeze the airbag, and the guy who logged into WiFi and Facebook Live before putting on his mask. The flight attendant interviews that seemingly every news outlet did dripped with schadenfreude -- no one ever pays attention to the safety videos or demonstrations, and look what happened!</li>\r\n 	<li>Improving airline safety records have let people grow numb as to how unnatural air travel is -- flying over 600 mph at 35,000 ft. Flight 1380 was the first accident-related fatality on a US airliner since 2009, and the Southwest’s first ever -- since it was founded in 1971.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’ll admit that I don’t pay attention to every demo, especially when I do multiple flights in a single week. I do typically look around me for the nearest exits -- in front and behind me -- because those can change pretty often with different seat configurations. I will pay attention, as a refresher, if I haven’t flown for a couple of weeks -- like last week’s flight to MSP. Or if it’s a plane I haven’t flown in a while, I’ll look at the seat back card -- like I did today when noticing I was in a Boeing 717, a pretty rare event for me.</li>\r\n 	<li>I have noticed that the flight attendants’ requests/demands for attention have become a bit more strident since 1380. On my Southwest flight back home from MSP last week, the flight attendant chanted “Nose and mouth; nose and mouth!”, eliciting some nervous laughter.</li>\r\n 	<li>The attendant on my Delta flight this morning was a bit more direct, perhaps fatalistic this morning. “Please pay attention! We’re doing this for you. But if you don’t want to watch us, well, I guess it’s your life…”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #140</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a> and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_140.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #140 — Travel Tech Gets Physical; Pay Attention to the Safety Briefing','','inherit','closed','closed','','1977-revision-v1','','','2018-06-03 07:46:10','2018-06-03 12:46:10','',1977,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/06/03/1977-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2007,1,'2018-06-03 07:53:11','2018-06-03 12:53:11','<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/IMG_1145.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1009\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/IMG_1145-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>Returning to the mic after 10 days of food, wine, wind, rain, and snow in the north of Spain. I talk about traveling in Spain, and with my guest Coleman Collins about how to make the best coffee in your hotel room.  All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_139.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/422166231\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #139:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. Just got back Sunday night from 10 days in Spain -- about 4 days each in Madrid and San Sebastian, with a couple of days in the Rioja wine region in between. A friend on the East Coast sent me a note while I was in Spain -- “Good week to be out of town; we got whacked with yet another dump of snow.” Not quite. It’s been a cold Spring in Europe and Spain has been no different. Our first weekend in Madrid was in the upper 30’s/low 40’s with a mix of rain and wet snow. Which turned into just snow as we drove up to Rioja. Some of that drive reminded me of I-70 in the Colorado Rockies -- go into a tunnel with fine weather; come out of it to blowing snow. Having said that, it was nothing like the 7 or 9 or 14 inches that Winter Storm Toby dropped on the East Coast last week. And even with lousy weather, the food and the wine in Spain makes it hard to sustain any sort of cranky attitude, though it shorten up our pintxos crawl through Logroño.</li>\r\n 	<li>We flew Iberia to Madrid because: a) they have a non-stop flight from Chicago and b) as I mentioned <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">a few episodes ago</a>, I was finally able to burn off some of those Avios points that had been collecting cobwebs in my BA account. I decided to try Iberia’s Premium Economy service on the flight over. Most airlines are using this sorta “tweener” service to capture revenue from people willing to pay a bit more for some comfort, but aren’t willing to go the 2-300% Business Class uplift out of their own pocket. And it was truly a “tweener” service -- about 5 rows between the Business and regular Coach cabins, and coach seats with spacing and recline somewhere between domestic First Class and, say, United’s Economy Plus. The meal service was the same as Economy, but they served us first, and they gave us a little amenities kit with just the essentials -- earplugs, eye mask, socks, and a toothbrush. It was as-advertised -- Coach with a bit more space, which made for better napping on the 8-hour flight over. I’ve talked in past episodes that I really question the value-for-money with Business Class on Transatlantic flights, but this tweener class was a reasonable deal.</li>\r\n 	<li>The deeper recline of the Premium Economy seat also makes it easier for you to stay in your space when you sleep. On the way back, I was in regular Coach because -- well, I’m cheap and didn’t need to sleep. But the guy next to me did. He nodded off as soon as we left the ground, which meant he didn’t recline his seat, which meant that he started to list to port, toward my shoulder. This guy looked like he was the younger brother of Dos Equis’ “Most Interesting Man”. But there was no amount of interesting that was going to have him sleeping on my shoulder. Just as he was about to touch down on my shoulder, I gave our seat row a bit of a shake -- some single row turbulence. He startled awake, realized what he was doing, and immediately sat straight up. Stay upright, my friend.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">P.I.H.E. by Budapest BluesBoy (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hepepe/26362 Ft: Inna Barmash - Zhurbin</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Just a quick addendum to the luggage thread we’ve been running over the last couple of episodes. In the last episode Jerry Sarfati talked about downsizing from a 22 to a 20-inch carry-on bag because of the hassles he’d gotten from American Airlines gate agents. I mentioned then that I haven’t had any problems from American, and didn’t get pulled over on my Chicago-to-Madrid Iberia flight. Just goes to show you how much discretion gate agents have. I didn’t test it on the way back home -- 2 bottles bought in Rioja tasting rooms and a tin of olive oil tipped me way over the liquid limit.</li>\r\n 	<li>The EU’s no roaming rules also let me skip what had become our first day of European vacation ritual of burning a couple of hours in a phone store buying local SIM cards for our mobile phones. Instead, the week before we left, I fired up EE’s iPhone app and topped up our UK SIMs. Somewhere over the Bay of Biscay, after my breakfast tray was cleared, I swapped out my AT&amp;T SIM. Once on the ground, I turned on my phone and was good to go. And because the whole family has EE SIMs, it was easy to call each other when we got separated on our pintxos crawls. I know that everyone just messages nowadays, but I’m still one of those knuckledraggers who occasionally finds talking quicker than texting.</li>\r\n 	<li>While in Madrid, I also added to my subway “tap-n-go” card collection for €2.50 -- or about $3 at current exchange rates. The interesting twist on Madrid’s system is that you can tap up to 4 people through the turnstile with a single card, so I only had to buy one tap card for the whole family. I’d load it up with 10 rides -- which seemed to be the only option -- we’d line up behind one turnstile, then tap through and pass it back. Getting out, we just walked through the turnstile since the Madrid Metro fare system seems based on zones rather than start and ending stations. Just adding it to the growing stack...</li>\r\n 	<li>In past episodes, I’ve talked about how I’ve come to value the service I get from Hertz with President’s Club status. And so I rented a car from Hertz in Madrid for our drive up to Rioja for wine tasting and then over to San Sebastian and back. On Tuesday morning, we headed to Atocha train station, found the Hertz counter, and then I sent my family to get breakfast because I knew from past experience renting cars in Spain, that I was in for 30 minutes of hard upselling. It didn’t matter that I had already booked on-line at Hertz.com and selected the options I wanted, I was going to get sold. Mel, the Hertz agent, spoke excellent American English -- all the right terms, slang, colloquialisms. Telling me the rate I got was “crazy low” -- I’d used our corporate rate plus cashed in some Hertz points -- because I didn’t have any insurance. And then came the big push -- writing down big liability numbers, huge damage possibilities -- even though a lot of this was covered by our corporate rate and the credit card. After this, there was the upsell for the car -- did you know you booked a manual, can you drive a manual -- because, well, no Americans know how to work a clutch. I just smiled and nodded, and let Mel work through his spiel -- I had kinda hoped that my status would save me, but nope, there was no short-circuiting this. After he was done, I said “No” to everything. I finally got the keys just as my family finished breakfast, and then off we went. I would’ve been frustrated if I hadn’t expected it and budgeted time for it. Instead, I was just slightly weary. I’m glad my wife got me a coffee to-go.</li>\r\n 	<li>And in the seeming obligatory craft beer segment of TravelCommons, having the rental car let me hit the Basqueland Brewing Project taproom outside of San Sebastian. It had a very American feel to it -- winding through a light industrial area, finding the place by spotting the picnic tables in front of the open loading door, walking past the foosball table and shelves holding 20-kg sacks of malt, the fluorescent pink cord blocking access to the brewing area. And for good reason, the place is owned by 3 Americans. One of them was working the taps when we arrived. He quickly flipped from Spanish to English when we ordered. Originally from Baltimore, he came over 6 years ago when his wife wanted to move back home. Nice guy, good beer.</li>\r\n 	<li>Rob Cheshire, a TravelCommons listener and Untappd friend, hit the comments section on the last episode -- first, to egg me on about my comment in the last episode to do a One City, Five Taprooms layover video, and then about taprooms near Wrigley Field when he comes in to see the Reds play the Cubs. I managed to string together a 6-taproom crawl; he may need to break that up into a couple of rounds.</li>\r\n 	<li>And, to Rob’s first question, I actually will do a taproom layover video, but instead of basing it out of ORD like my last layover video, I’m going to do this one from MDW -- give those Southwest fliers some love. It’ll let me hit 4 taprooms that have opened in the past couple of years in what can only be described as the “post-industrial” landscape of Chicago’s near south side. It should be fun. Working on the scheduling now. Will shoot it in April. With the additional production time video requires, it might not get up until May, but I’ll keep everyone posted</li>\r\n 	<li>One last thing -- last week I tweeted out a link to a pretty rigorous study from the FlyHealthy Research Team out of Emory University in Atlanta about passenger movements on transcontinental flights and what it means for the spread of respiratory diseases. The team took 10 flights, logging passenger movements, taking air samples, and swabs of hard surfaces. I won’t go through the whole study -- I’ll put a <a href=\"http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/03/13/1711611115\">link</a> in the show notes for those who want to read it, which I encourage you to do; it’s very readable as scientific papers go -- but the main takeaways for me were: a) you really only have to be concerned about the people immediately in front, behind, and next to you -- a one-row radius; b) the people wiping down their trays, armrests, and seat belt buckles with Purell Wipes are wasting their time; and c) if you’re really worried, get a window seat in the front part of the plane and don’t leave it for the entire flight (which, as a side benefit, will also endear you to your row mates). As one who has called planes “flying petri dishes”, I was pleasantly surprised by the Emory team’s findings.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">~aether theories~ by Vidian (c) copyright 2018 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Vidian/57398 Ft: Gurdonark, White-throated Sparrow</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Brewing the Best Hotel Room Coffee</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Interview with Coleman Collins. His blog post on brewing hotel room coffee is <a href=\"https://roadwarrior.blog/hotel-room-coffee/\">here</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Tools of the Trade by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/56512 Ft: Abstract Audio, Mr Yesterday, Martijn de Boer, Speck</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Notes from Spain</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>This was our 4th spring trip to Spain. Our first trip we hit Madrid and Barcelona, the usual suspects. The next trip, we headed south to Andalucia -- Córdoba, Granada, Ronda, Seville -- during Semana Santa, Holy Week, and saw penitential processions every day in every town and city we visited, culminating in Holy Thursday night outside of Seville Cathedral. The last trip, in 2016, we headed back down South, but even further, taking a boat across the Straits of Gibraltar to Tangier, Morocco. For this trip, we gave up warm weather for some new territory -- Rioja and the Basque Country.</li>\r\n 	<li>As I said at the top of the show, for me, Spain is about food and wine. There’s certainly culture -- the Semana Santa processions are phenomenal cultural events, standing in front of the huge canvas of Picasso’s Guernica in the Reina Sofia in Madrid, the Mezquita in Cordoba,... -- but it’s the food and wine that keep bringing us back.</li>\r\n 	<li>On our first trip to Granada, we were staying in a Marriott -- maybe one of their AC properties -- in the middle of town. A great building; it had been a convent at one time. There was an interior courtyard; we had a nightcap there one night. 4 glasses of wine at the hotel bar -- figuring $12-15/glass, I’m waiting for a 40 euro tab. It was 12 euros -- I love this country.</li>\r\n 	<li>The pintxos crawl was the food center of this trip north, first in Logroño and then in San Sebastian, walking from bar to bar -- a glass of wine and a bite at each. It was a good mix of food. In Logroño, we started at a couple of dive-ier, more local places that focused on just one pintxos -- sauteed mushrooms at one, ground lamb sandwich at the next, the meat seared on a flat grill behind the bar, and then served on a bun with a great tasting green sauce -- and serving local Rioja wines, pulling the bottles from a bucket at the end of the bar. We then swung into a distinctly higher end place, complete with a Michelin sticker on the front door; more variety of food -- seared red tuna, pickled white anchovies, grilled octopus -- and the next level up of Rioja wines. Later in the week, in San Sebastian, when the weather turned a bit better, we could see the crawl pick up volume in the pedestrian streets of the old town; people still bundled up a bit, but taking their wine outside, and willing to walk to the next place rather than hunkering down for a couple of courses in the warmth.</li>\r\n 	<li>Cider is big in the Basque Country, though it’s drier, not as sweet as you get in the US or the UK. And during cider season -- January through April -- the siderias, the cider houses in the hills outside of San Sebastian, open up to serve cider streamed directly from the tap of huge chestnut wood barrels into your glass, and then the glass of the person behind you,... and a traditional menu of salt-cod omelette, fresh cod fried with peppers and onions, and damn big grilled t-bones served either standing up or at communal tables. We ended up sharing a meal with a busload of folks from just over the border in France. A couple dozen of us lined up as a worker manned the tap -- letting a thin stream of cider out. We lined up our wide-mouthed plastic tumblers about three feet away to impart a bit of fizz to the three fingers of cider that we caught before moving out of the stream to let it hit the tumbler that someone was holding right below ours.</li>\r\n 	<li>For a great food country, the food at Madrid airport, though, is a bit pedestrian. So to extend our food extravaganza for one more meal, we skip the “meh” restaurants and buy a package of the top-end iberian ham -- the bellota, from the free range Iberian pigs fattening up on acorns. We can’t bring it into the US, but it’s an 8-hour flight from Madrid to Chicago. That package never makes it as far at US landfall.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #139</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_139.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #139 — Brewing Best Hotel Room Coffee; Notes from Spain','','inherit','closed','closed','','1961-revision-v1','','','2018-06-03 07:53:11','2018-06-03 12:53:11','',1961,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/06/03/1961-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2008,1,'2018-06-03 07:54:51','2018-06-03 12:54:51','[caption id=\"attachment_1949\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/iStock-535339649.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1949\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/iStock-535339649-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> TSA! Look at What You\'ve Done to Me![/caption]\r\n\r\nFebruary is a tough time to be in the Midwest, so when my travel took me south, to New Orleans and then to Florida, there was no bitch tweeting about the TSA lines or flight delays. In this episode, I walk through how each change in airport security has pushed me to be more hipster and how we all want to understand the real cause of the flight delays that inconvenience us. Also a good bit of listener feedback extending the on-going luggage discussion. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_138.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/406850538\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #138:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. This has been a good travel month for me. Not too heavy, and all my travel had me headed south -- an important thing in February when you live in Chicago. The week before Mardi Gras, I headed down to New Orleans for a meeting. It easily could’ve been an overnight trip, but neither my wife nor I had been down in a while, so she came down with me. We caught some parades -- Nyx, Chaos, Muses -- ate way too much food, and except for a cold rain Wednesday night, had great weather. On Thursday, we were walking along the Mississippi back to the French Quarter from the Bywater neighborhood in bright sunshine and upper 60’s while Chicago was getting slammed with 8-12 inches of snow.</li>\r\n 	<li>When flew back to Chicago Friday night, we were able to thread the gap between the Friday end of that 8-12 inch drop and the start of the Saturday-Sunday 5-inch fall. Timing is everything. We came to the airport prepared for a long delay -- fully charged batteries, and muffaletta sandwiches and a mini king cake from Cochon Butcher. Southwest had cancelled this same flight the night before and that morning -- understandable given the snow -- so we didn’t think we wouldn’t get home; it was just going to be a question of how long. As it turned out, we were only an hour late, which given the weather, felt as good as on-time.</li>\r\n 	<li>Last week, I managed to point myself south again, this time to Florida -- Orlando and Miami -- and was able to skip two days of a heavy cold rain. The JW Marriott in Miami upgraded me to a room with a balcony on the 20th floor -- I didn’t have an ocean view, but I sat outside, 75 degrees, drinking a couple of beers, watching the sun go down, looking over to some of the rooftop bar action in the Brickell neighborhood. Miami is always an experience. It’s not the southernmost US big city, but rather the northernmost Latin American big city. I was reminded of that in the airport when I heard them paging someone in Spanish -- twice. They didn’t even bother wasting their time with English.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- Leviathan by Kirkoid (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Kirkoid/31109</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Lots of comments about luggage since the last episode, which makes sense -- the last episode was heavy on luggage talk between the continuing thread on the smart luggage ban and the suitcase buying tips which I then ported over to a blog post.\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>So, starting off, Allan Marko forwarded along the latest e-mails from Away luggage, one of the few smart bags with removable batteries and so not caught up in the smart luggage ban. Or so they thought until Delta decided to add their own twist to the ban. If the battery in the bag requires a tool to remove it -- which the original Away bag does -- you have to remove it from the bag before you board -- whether you’re carrying on the bag or gate-checking it. The later version of the Away bag has an ejectable pop-up battery which Delta thinks is OK. What a mess! This is what happens when engineers run amok -- and I can say that as a recovering engineer. These guys are going to keep tweaking and twisting this, which will just confuse gate agents and frustrate passengers -- which is why I’ve mothballed my smart bag and bought another Anker lipstick charger.</li>\r\n 	<li>Steve Frick hit the TravelCommons web site and left this comment -- “I replaced my luggage with the exact same bag as I had before, a TravelPro. It was an easy choice, I like you, wanted a simple bag. I knew my gear would fit, I already knew what to put in the outside pockets. One of the guys I work with recently bought and then returned a 4-wheel spinner. The reason for the return……. he discovered that most hotel parking lots weren’t level and each time he let go of the bag to raise the trunk lid his bag rolled away.” Steve, I had that same problem with my Bluesmart 4-wheeler, except in airports rather than parking lots. I’d put the Bluesmart against the wall in a restroom and it would wander away.</li>\r\n 	<li>Jerry Sarfati posted on the TravelCommons Facebook page -- “Mark, great episode as usual” Thanks, Jerry! “I had a different experience when choosing a new bag. I was stopped twice by American Airlines gate agents telling me my 22\" bag was too big. I’m in Group 2. So I settled for the 20\" Victorinox spinner.” I asked Jerry if they made him put it in a bag sizer. “Once only. It barely fit, and she said ‘too big, it must slide in easily, it must be checked’. Other time the agent said the sizer is missing, but ‘I can already see it won\'t fit’. I didn\'t want to argue and get thrown off the flight.” Jerry, that -- in technical travel terms -- is bullshit. I remember one time in Boston Logan, I got shunted over to the bag sizer by the Icelandic Air gate agent. And I knew I was on the bubble because this was the trip I’ve talked about a couple of times where I had to pack for 10 days between Iceland and Southern Spain in one carry-on. I grabbed that bag by the side handle, had it about chest high, and then drove it into the bag sizer with all my might. It was either going to fit, break the bag or blow apart the bag sizer. Luckily, it fit -- though the gate agent jumped back just a bit when the bag hit the bottom of the sizer. She let me carry it on. I flew 3 legs on American last week with my 22-incher and didn’t get a glance. But having said that, you made the right choice -- discretion is the better part of valor. Gate agents have complete discretion. Obey or get bounced. Too bad you got caught up by other folks’ power trips.</li>\r\n 	<li>Back on the web site, Robert Fenerty wrote “I want a four-wheel spinner; my wife loves hers. But I won’t get one, because I believe that bags with only two wheels have a bit more interior space than four-wheelers of the same length. That’s because the spinners can’t tuck into the side of the bag so you’re losing the inch or two between the middle of the spinner wheel and the top of the stem that attaches the spinner to the bottom of the bag. How’s that for OCD?” Robert, I’ll see your OCD and raise you! I pulled out a metal ruler and measured the ground clearance difference between my Victorinox 2-wheeler and my wife’s Samsonite 4-wheel spinner. I measured a 1.5-inch difference. Multiply that by the 14x9-inch base size gives you a 189 cubic inch cost for spinner agility. I look at that being one day’s worth of workout kit.</li>\r\n 	<li>Also on the web site, Jim McDonough wrote “My favorite bag was a Rick Steves 21” rollaboard that had just one compartment and two really good wheels. I used it for a decade and finally had problems with my wife’s bag (wheel fell apart) and the side of mine cracked from all the abuse. He doesn’t sell them any more, because it was a hair too big for European airlines. We are now using Samsonite spinners. They don’t hold as much as the old Rick bags. We only check bags when we are staying in one place for at least a week. Carrying on is simply liberating.” Liberating in a couple of ways -- not standing around waiting for the luggage carousel to start to get your bag, and not waiting around for it to stop to confirm that airline has lost it. I remember one trip where BA forced me to gate-check a bag, and then somehow lost it -- how you lose a bag in the, say, 50 ft between the jet bridge and baggage hold I’ll never know. The problem was -- I was in a different city every day. And so, they’d deliver the bag to my hotel the next morning after I’d already checked out and headed for my first meeting. This went on for a couple of days until I finally convinced them to leapfrog me and send it two stops one. Liberating myself from well-worn clothes -- I love it when I can find happiness in the small things.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Another reminder that Miami is a bit different -- the in-room coffee machine at the JW Marriott wasn’t the standard issue single cupper with Starbucks Pike Place filter disks (that, by the way, are always too big for the filter holder). Instead, it was an Illy espresso machine with its own special little capsules and branded demitasse cups. Took me a couple of tries to get the capsule properly situated, but after that, I ran through all 3, 4 (?) of the capsules in 15 minutes and was ready to attack the day.</li>\r\n 	<li>Last month, The Aviating Railfanner stopped by the TravelCommons YouTube page and left a comment on the 2012 video O\'Hare Layover Excursion: a 6-Hour Tour of Chicago saying “I think it would be a good idea to mention that the Randolph/Wabash station has been demolished and is now the Washington/Wabash station” Good point. Indeed, there are a more than a few things that have changed in the 5 years since I did that video. I stole the idea from the “One City, Five Hours” series that United used to have in their Hemisphere’s magazine. The locations are still good -- Wrigley Field, Millenium Park, the Picasso. I’m not sure in this age of Uber if the focus on the subway/the L is still valid. I may see if I can lightly edit this video -- insert some text to send people to the right station, and update the 1-day travel pass options -- and then think about some new options, like maybe a craft beer taproom-focused layover tour. There you go, One City, Five Taprooms and then come roaring back into the TSA line. Hmmm, I may need to rethink that one.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you’re thinking about any questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Ethereal (nop mix) by @nop (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Lancefield/34818</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Travel Is Turning Me Hipster</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Not wanting to turn this into the “Luggage Today” podcast, but when I was shifting things from my Bluesmart to my new Victorinox bag, I also restructured my toiletries kit. And as I was going through the contents -- what stays, what don’t I need anymore -- it struck me how much my travelling had changed something as basic as how I started my day.</li>\r\n 	<li>It started years, no decades ago -- sometime in the late ‘80’s or early ‘90’s. I was living in Philadelphia and flying to Europe pretty frequently, and at that time, the only real direct flight over the Atlantic (can I tell you how much I hate it when people say “The Pond”; it just puts my teeth on edge) was a BA 747 into Heathrow. Now, back then, I loved Heathrow. It was a great airport with fantastic connections. Now it’s an overcrowed shitshow that I avoid at all costs, but back then, it was great. Anyhow, at some point, Heathrow security required all electric devices to be pulled out for screening. Note I didn’t say “electronic”; this was before laptops and tablets and mobile phones were ubiquitous. No, this meant things like my electric razor had to be pulled out of my bag. Two go-rounds with Heathrow security and that Philips razor got jettisoned for a Gillette non-electric blade.</li>\r\n 	<li>Fast forward a decade-and-a-half to August 2006. I woke up in the SFO Marriott to the news of the foiled plot to blow up London-to-US flights by disguising separate explosive ingredients in soda bottles then then assembling and detonating them on board. I was trying to fly back the next day. Baggage check lines exploded when all the flyers with toothpaste, shaving cream, make-up -- pretty much everyone -- were made to check their bags. That weekend, I re-worked my toiletries kit -- hitting the local Whole Foods for tooth powder to replace toothpaste, hair wax for hair gel, and trading the shaving cream that I picked up in that last revamp for a badger hair shaving brush. I think this was the tipping point -- when my kit started to skew hipster.</li>\r\n 	<li>Fast forward another decade-and-a-half to this Christmas. My son gives me a selection of travel sized shaving soaps, each in their own tin container with a screw top. My daughter gives me a bottle of Lush toothy tabs -- kinda compressed tooth powder. These immediately go into my travel kit. My son forwards me a Massdrop buy for an Oristo razor -- a $100 version of my grandfather’s safety razor, precision engineered for a “very efficient yet non-aggressive shaving experience”. I think seriously about this. My toiletry kit has gone almost full hipster.</li>\r\n 	<li>And though I’ve slagged on the TSA for God knows how many episodes over the life of this podcast, I do have to thank them for one thing, keeping my toiletry kit from going full-on hipster, because I know they’ll never allow me to shift to shaving with a straight razor.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">My Flaming Heart by Wired Ant (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Wired_Ant/36862 Ft: Javolenus</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Every Delay Has a Story</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>In the last episode, I talked about why I dropped my subscription to TripIt’s paid “Pro” service -- the main benefit, live flight status notifications, was slower than the free notifications I was getting from the airlines themselves -- from American, United, and Delta. However, when we were idling in the New Orleans airport waiting on our flight back to Chicago, I found the Southwest delay notifications lagged way behind TripIt Pro. Not that I re-upped my TripIt Pro subscription; my wife forgot to cancel a 30-day trial she signed up for, so she now has a year’s subscription. I, instead, was using FlightAware, specifically the feature I’ve talked about in prior episodes that shows you where your plane is. From that I could see that the delay wasn’t because of the snow in Chicago; the plane was spending a lot of time on the ground in Ft Lauderdale, the stop before New Orleans. So I hit Twitter -- Why is flight 860 sitting in FLL so long? The reply -- “Hey, Mark. We know delays can be tough, and apologize for the inconvenience. It looks like Flight #860 is delayed due to inclement weather earlier in the day.” Perhaps a delay in Denver, but why the long ground turn in FLL? No answer.</li>\r\n 	<li>United announced a pilot program in January called “Every Flight Has A Story” where they’d push out much more detailed information on delayed flights -- rather than “Late Arriving Aircraft”, it would be “Our maintenance team is replacing an item on your plane and needs extra time to complete”. The pilot was scheduled for Houston and Phoenix. I haven’t seen much reaction to it, but at least for me, having some sense for the reason for a delay let’s me better figure out what I’m going to do next. I’m much less trusting of a newly posted departure time if I know the inbound plane is still on the ground, or if it’s a maintenance delay.</li>\r\n 	<li>Of course, some of those explanations could be a bit more embarrassing than others. Like for Southwest, a couple of days after our flight back to Chicago, they had to cancel more than 200 flights because they ran out of de-icing fluid at Midway airport. You get that notification, and you’re shaking your head as you dial up an airline that knows how to fly in the winter.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #138</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_138.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #138 — Travel Turning Me Hipster; Every Delay Has a Story','','inherit','closed','closed','','1947-revision-v1','','','2018-06-03 07:54:51','2018-06-03 12:54:51','',1947,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/06/03/1947-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2010,1,'2018-06-03 07:58:44','2018-06-03 12:58:44','[caption id=\"attachment_1364\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/pic-r-1402317187245.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1364\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/pic-r-1402317187245-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Plane is here; no mechanics in sight. Do I feel lucky?\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Plane is here; no mechanics in sight. Do I feel lucky?[/caption]\r\n\r\nEven though the weather hasn\'t been bad this summer, I\'ve endured a rash of flight cancellations. Digging deeper, it\'s been regional jets operated by small airline \"partners\" that\'s causing me grief. Service to mid-sized cities has moved to regional jets, making travel to these cities more problematic. Traveling to China or India can catch US travelers by surprise with their visa requirements. We also talk about how fast airlines respond to Twitter messages, airport \"wall huggers\", carry-on luggage throwback, and I haven\'t flipped through a Skymall magazine in months. All this and more  at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_110.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below. [sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_110.mp3\"]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #110:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the Sheraton Hotel on Canal St in New Orleans. I have a room looking over the French Quarter. It’s a big convention hotel -- not my usual choice. But the price is good, it has a great gym and I’m about 5 stays away from making Starwood Platinum, so what the heck.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’m back to my usual commute -- Chicago to New Orleans -- after taking a quick jaunt out to LA last week. It is that time of year on the Gulf Coast when the weather gets a bit monotonous -- high of 91 degrees with a chance of afternoon thunderstorms. Repeat until Labor Day. But the thunderstorms are tending to be earlier than last year when they seemed to roll in about 4:30 -- right about the time when the inbound plane for my flight back to Chicago would be scheduled to arrive. While my flights home still aren’t arriving on time, I haven’t hit the big 2-4 hour downpour delays I would get last year. Not killing as much time in the airport bars, but I always appreciate New Orleans airport letting me to take me beer to the gate.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em>Stinky Dog</em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/musicinside-forces/\">Music Inside</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Flying through LAX last week reminded me of what a dump that airport is -- or I guess I should say key parts of it. Flying out of there last Thursday morning, it took me a half-hour in the Hertz bus to get to the United terminal -- P7 -- because of access road traffic which is driven by this odd concept of a bunch of little terminals arranged in a U around short term parking garages. No problem is you’re flying Southwest in P1; really lousy if you’re going out American in P5 or United in P6 or P7. Annoying, but it gets really dumpy when you get inside. There’s not enough room in each of the little terminals to properly handle post-9/11 security, so small security stations are dotted over the terminals with lines snaking down the corridors. Given that LAX is a major gateway to international traffic from Asia, it’s fair to compare LAX to Singapore and Beijing -- much newer airports, yes, but the LAX experience ends up looking like the 4th circle of Hell comparatively. Can’t be a great thing for the US tourism industry.</li>\r\n 	<li>In the <a title=\"Podcast #109 — ‘Round the World in 8 Days; Beijing Mass Transit\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/06/07/podcast-109-round-the-world-in-8-days-beijing-mass-transit-2/\">last episode</a>, I updated my thoughts on using Twitter as a concierge service, or at least another way into airlines’ customer service groups. A couple of weeks back, the Wall Street Journal had a good <a href=\"http://online.wsj.com/articles/airlines-take-to-twitter-to-keep-world-informed-1406125253\">article</a> about airlines’ use of Twitter. They had an interesting graphic showing the differences in response times between airlines. American Airlines was the top, responding to 80% of customer queries within 15 minutes and 99% within an hour. KLM, which has made a big push into social media, was much lower, responding to 12% within 15 minutes, 64% within an hour, taking a full day to get up to 99%. Of course, as we talked about last time, it’s one thing to quickly press the button on a canned responses like United’s ubiquitous “No one dislikes delays more than us”, it’s a whole other thing to do something meaningful. Check out the detailed show notes on the TravelCommons web site for a link to the article.</li>\r\n 	<li>Also in the <a title=\"Podcast #109 — ‘Round the World in 8 Days; Beijing Mass Transit\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/06/07/podcast-109-round-the-world-in-8-days-beijing-mass-transit-2/\">last episode</a>, I mentioned my big technology switch -- from my iPhone 5 to an HTC One. The main reason for the switch was battery life. I got tired of being psychotic about battery life -- stalking airport gate areas for an outlet so I could top off my battery before getting on the plane. Last month, Samsung Mobile captured that hassle perfectly in a <a href=\"youtu.be/mzMUTrTYD9s%20\">video</a> about “wall huggers”. It’s on YouTube -- I put the <a href=\"youtu.be/mzMUTrTYD9s%20\">link</a> in the show notes. Check it out. It’s painfully close to my reality with the iPhone. But not with the HTC One. The battery life is great, even with the larger screen.</li>\r\n 	<li>One thing that has bitten me recently with that change is the Android version of American Airlines’ app. I always use the phone apps for boarding passes -- one less piece of paper to keep track of, one less line to stand in if I couldn’t print it at home. I’ve never had a problem until a couple of months ago. I was boarding a flight to New Orleans, put my phone on the reader, heard the beep, the gate agent waved me through, and I sat in my seat. A bit later during the boarding process, I looked at my screen again and saw that the app had refreshed and no longer showed a seat number on the boarding pass. Hmmm, that doesn’t seem good. And I was right. Somehow, my boarding must not have registered and so, 10 minutes before the flight, they flushed me as a no-show and gave my seat to a stand-by passenger. Unfortunately for her, I was in my seat, but because I didn’t have a paper boarding pass, I couldn’t prove that it was my seat. Lucky for me, the gate agent remembered me -- it was a small regional jet --and said “Oh, this happens a lot”. I kept the seat, but the flight was delayed about 15 minutes while they figured it all out. I never had that happen with American’s iPhone app, but then again, it hasn’t happened since on the Android app. Maybe they fixed in in out of the updates they pushed out, but I usually grab a paper boarding pass on American when I have the time.</li>\r\n 	<li>And I don’t know about you all, but I haven\'t looked at Skymall or any of the other seat back pocket air magazines since the FAA allowed use of tablets &amp; smartphones during takeoffs and landings. I always have a book or two on my tablet -- right now I’m pounding through “The War that Ended Peace”, Margaret MacMillian’s history of the lead up to World War I. I also download the daily edition of the Chicago Tribune -- they have an HTML5 web app that shows you each page of the physical paper; you then tap an article to read it. The app is pretty good, sometimes a bit fiddly, but it lets you download the content for offline reading -- perfect for a flight. The Wall Street Journal’s Android app used to let you do the same thing and so I’d read that too, but earlier this year they “upgraded” the app and took away the ability to download a day’s paper. Still trying to think how they qualified that as an upgrade.</li>\r\n 	<li>I saw a guy come onto a flight last week with a hanging suit bag. Wow! That was a throwback. Even the flight attendant looked at him kinda funny when he asked to hang it in the front closet. Which was a very typical thing -- in the ‘90’s. You’d angle for early boarding so you had a chance for hanging space in the front closet. You see guys pushing all the bags to one end so he could fit his in -- not even really needing to hang it; just staying put from the pressure of the other bags. The whole business casual trend expanded the fight -- moving it out of the front galley to the entire plane aisle with rolling bags. I can’t remember the last time I used a hanging bag. I have my cleaners fold my shirts so they’re easy to pack, and then I use them (with their cardboard inserts) to cushion the folds of my slacks so they don’t wrinkle. Even on those rare occasions when I wear a suit, I fold it and put it in my rolling bag. It’s certainly a lot easier on the shoulder and back. And just a lot less awkward. I could never figure out a really good way to carry gym shoes in my hanging bag.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any travel experiences -- technology or otherwise, or just general observations, thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons\">Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em>Locovenido</em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/falik-dreams/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Falik</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong> Regional Jets Are Ruining My Life</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>One Wednesday afternoon in June, I had a particularly difficult time getting from Memphis to New Orleans. First, I felt my phone vibrate with multiple text messages while I was refueling my rental car at a particularly dicey gas station just north of the airport. I had a pretty good idea what was up -- United and TripIt were simultaneously notifying me that my flight was cancelled. I got on the phone to Amex. They were able to jam me onto a full US Air flight to Charlotte with a connection back to New Orleans. Bit of a zig zag, but OK. I returned the rental car. Just as I pulled my boarding pass out of the kiosk, I saw them update my flight -- 2 hr maintenance delay. Which would mean I’d miss the connection. I go up to the desk. Two agents -- one from USAir, one from American (I’m seeing the New American form right in front of me) -- bang on their terminal for a couple of minutes. “OK, we’ll put you in first class to DFW where you’ll connect to New Orleans” Great -- better routing with an upgrade to boot! I get to the gate. A colleague calls me. As we’re talking, I see them post a 2 hr delay -- weather in Texas -- which means I’d have 15 min for my connection if everything worked perfectly. Which it wasn’t going to because a delay with a round number -- like 2 hrs -- means they have no idea when the plane will actually leave</li>\r\n 	<li>That’s it! I give! Three airlines fail me in the span of 60 minutes. I can take a hint. I wasn’t meant to fly to New Orleans today. However, I did need to get there. So I fired up Google Maps. 5½ hour drive. Fine. I have nothing else going on tonight. I load the Hertz app, book a car, and walk back out of the terminal.</li>\r\n 	<li>I drive to the river front to get a decent dinner -- the food quality in Memphis airport, like the flight selection, have cratered since Delta shut down its hub operations there. While eating at the bar, I get the text from American -- the DFW flight cancelled. Now there’s a surprise.</li>\r\n 	<li>The drive to New Orleans to simple, straightforward -- and dull. I-55 south through Mississippi, into Louisiana until it dead ends into I-10. Take a left. You’re in New Orleans. At least that was the plan. South of Jackson, traffic comes to a complete halt. People are getting out of their cars -- never a good sign. I get out, look around an 18-wheeler and see a 10-ft column of fire. This is not a good sign. I-55 here is 2 lanes each way with a narrow shoulder. They’re not squeezing us past that. Eventually, after making an 8-point turn, I join a line of cars heading the back north along the shoulder -- one tire on the pavement, one tire in the wet red clay. After 10 minutes, I get to a gravel crossover that I don’t think will bottom out my rental Ford. I hit the frontage road, bypass the burning car, get back on a now empty I-55 and eventually pull into my hotel at 2am. Another glorious day of travel that I’m sure will inspire envy in all my Facebook friends.</li>\r\n 	<li>Now Memphis seems to be an extreme example -- a woman on my project is commuting weekly from New York and she’s yet to have an on-time, no-drama journey. Indeed, she’s spent a Thursday night in every Midwest hub city. But as airlines close hub operations in mid-size cities like Memphis and Cleveland, replacing mainline service with regional jets from smaller operators you’ve never heard -- ExpressJet or Endeavour Air -- getting to and from these cities just sucks.</li>\r\n 	<li>At first, I thought it was a United problem. After all, they’d canceled my flight down to New Orleans day before, and then the next week, they delayed my flight to Columbus, OH 2 hours because the flight before it was late getting off the gate, and then once our plane got to the gate, it needed to have a wheel bearing fixed before it could travel on. I mean, at some point, why does United bother posting actual departure and arrival times? Why not just post an AM or a PM and shoot for that? It’s not too far from what they’re doing now.</li>\r\n 	<li>But as I looked at the flights that were really screwing up my life, they weren’t the main United or American or Delta flights, they were the regional jets. My United flights to and from LAX last week were fine. But if I’d been flying a regional jet, I would’ve had a problem on the return leg. The original plane had a mechanical issue -- remember, this is United -- but they were able to get a replacement, so we left LAX on time and even got into ORD early. If it had been United Express by, say, GoJet, I would’ve been scrambling after yet another cancelled flight because they don’t have spare jets.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’m 5,000 miles away from hitting a million miles on United (I have over 2.5 million on American), but sitting at the bar that night in Memphis having dinner before my ill-fated drive, I tweeted out of pure frustration -- “Really @united? Two cancelled flights in two days? I\'ll never hit 1M miles when you cancel every flight I\'m on…” To which, of course, they pressed the button on reply #76 -- “No one dislikes flight cancellations more than we do. Do you need help with rebooking? Thanks.” My response the next morning -- “Unless you too had to drive 5+ hrs and get to your destination at 2am, you can\'t hate flight cancellations more than me…” No response… except from Dan, a longtime TravelCommons listener who chimed in -- “Sounds like an upcoming podcast topic”. Indeed it is, Dan. Some good had to come of it...</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em>Just Don’t</em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/liebig-severed/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Lie Big</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Visas Hassles</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Over the past couple of episodes I’ve been talking about my Asian travels -- to India and China -- which has forced me to become knowledgeable about something that doesn’t often affect US travelers -- visas.</li>\r\n 	<li>When US travelers decide to cross their border, if they have a passport, they’re typically good to go. When I checked Wikipedia yesterday, US passport holders <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_requirements_for_United_States_citizens\">can visit</a> 174 countries without having to buy a visa in advance, tied at the top of the “travel freedom” ranking with Germany, Sweden, United Kingdom, and Finland.</li>\r\n 	<li>But this seemed to be the year for visas for me. My son doing a semester abroad in China, then us visiting him in the Spring, and then me going to India on business a couple of months ago. I just slipped out of another trip to China -- business this time, but I figured I’d risk it since my tourist visa is valid until next Spring.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you live in a major city -- New York, DC, LA, Chicago -- it’s not too bad because most of the big visa-requiring countries have consulates there. Otherwise, you’re mailing your passport away, or paying extra for a courier service. And paying to fly to the consulate for an interview if you don’t have a plain vanilla visa application -- like anyone of Pakistani descent applying for an Indian visa.</li>\r\n 	<li>But even walking to the consulates, like I can do in Chicago, is not always so straightforward. Research is important. Hitting the consulate web site, know their hours and what paperwork they require. Our visit for my son’s Chinese student visa was amazingly smooth. We had all the paperwork, had it organized, knew the consulate closed for lunch, so we showed up early. Boom, boom, boom -- we were in and out in 30 minutes. Four days later, we went back, paid, and picked up his passport with his visa.</li>\r\n 	<li>Getting visas for our visit to Beijing in March was less smooth. There was a little hiccup in the application. Their website said we needed proof of a return flight and hotel reservations. I had all that, all organized. But what wasn’t clear on the website was that I needed a copy for each visa. I’d printed out one copy of the hotel reservation for the one room that the three of us were staying in. I needed three copies -- one for each application. I’m not the first one who’d made that mistake. The woman pointed to the copying machine. Luckily, I had a pocket full of change.</li>\r\n 	<li>Picking them up was also a bit more of a hassle. First, because it was Spring Break season, there were a number of teachers picking up batches of passports for school trips. I think the guy two positions in front of me had 50 passports. A minor inconvenience -- until their credit card machine broke. The web site was adamant -- no personal checks, no cash accepted; just credit cards or cashier’s checks. And how many people know where to get a cashiers check anymore. So everything came to a screeching halt. “We’ll take cash if you have it,” one of the women said. But I didn’t bring any because it’s $140 a head -- $420 for all of us. I look at my watch -- it’s just about closing time. I ask the guard, “Will you let me back in if I make a run down to the ATM for some cash?” “Make it quick,” he said. I sprint down, around the corner, tap out the cash machine, and sprint back up. The guard lets me back in even though he’d locked the doors for the day. Everyone’s sorta milling around, not knowing what to do. The guy who had been in front of me was there to pick up 10 visas. No way he was coming up with $1,400 in cash quickly. I politely make my way to the window. “Cash?” I ask, giving her the fresh stack of ATM 20’s. She counts them twice, gives me my passports and I’m on my way.</li>\r\n 	<li>But this was nothing compared to the cluster that was the Indian visa process. Which was a real surprise to me because four years ago, when I went for my last Indian visa, it was the pinnacle of efficiency -- I dropped everything off at 8am and at 5pm received a text that my passport was ready for pickup. Impressive. Phenomenal. I used to rave about it. Not so much any more.</li>\r\n 	<li>But based on last time, I thought this would be simple. I put all the documents together and, because I was traveling, had my wife take it downtown for me. “No worries,” I said, “Drop it off, do some shopping, grab lunch, and it should be done”. 10am my wife calls me -- “They need your flight reservations”. “I haven’t made them yet,” I told her, “They specifically say on their website not to book flights until you get the visa.” “Hold on,” she said and talked to the clerk. “Yeah, I guess things have changed. She’ll hold onto your application until you e-mail her your flight info. Oh, and she’s going to charge you another $30 for an expedite fee.” “Wait,” I said, “according to the website, I’m OK on their deadlines -- I shouldn’t need them to expedite.” “Hold on,” she said again. “Yeah, I guess those deadlines have changed too.” Unfortunately, I was only able to get a 1 year visa. If this visa expires before my next trip, I think I’ll send one of my staff in my place. I think I need to introduce some other Americans to the fine art of applying for visas.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917626811171154.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #110</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com\">Magnatune</a></li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_110.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #110 — Regional Jets Ruining My Life; Visa Hassles','','inherit','closed','closed','','1359-revision-v1','','','2018-06-03 07:58:44','2018-06-03 12:58:44','',1359,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/06/03/1359-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2011,1,'2018-06-03 08:00:21','2018-06-03 13:00:21','[caption id=\"attachment_1342\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"225\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/2014-05-02-17.52.56.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1342\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/2014-05-02-17.52.56-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"I confess... I\'m carrying a concealed Totes\" width=\"225\" height=\"300\" /></a> Yes, I\'m carrying a concealed Totes[/caption]\r\n\r\nJust when I\'d reset my body clock after a trip to Beijing, I headed off for an 8-day around-the-world itinerary. It was 44 hours of flight time, setting a new personal record for stupid travel. I learned a few new things along the way -- Singapore Air flight attendants get grumpy when you don\'t let them serve you, and Manila Airport considers a Totes umbrella as lethal as a box cutter.  We also talk about the reason Beijing has scored second to last in taxi service, the difference between United and Delta Twitter service, the secret to buying Bose headphones, and my switch from an iPhone to Android. All this and more  at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_109.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below. [sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_109.mp3\"]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #109:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago. I’m back at my normal commute -- Chicago to New Orleans with the odd stop in Memphis --  after a couple of big Asian trips in April and May. I talked a bit about my Beijing trip in the last episode, and then at the beginning of this month, I flew around the world in 8 days -- some flash travel for meetings in Bangalore and Manila.</li>\r\n 	<li>As you can imagine, it took me a couple of weeks to recover from that trip. That amount of airtime -- I added up 44 hours in the air -- was a push, even for me, and I’ll regularly do up-and-backs between Chicago and San Francisco, and you may remember a while back when I talked about doing an up-and-back to London -- leaving Chicago on the overnight flight to Heathrow, showering and changing in the airline club, taking a car out to Reading for a lunch meeting, then heading back to Heathrow in time for the afternoon flight to Denver. That trip had been my most stupid piece of travel -- until this one.  This one, I think aged me in dog years.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em>Stinky Dog</em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/musicinside-forces/\">Music Inside</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Back in December, in my Top 10 Travel Tips article, I talked about using Twitter as a concierge service. I suggested “at naming” them in a tweet, which I found tends to generate a response in a couple of minutes. However, in the 5 months since I made that recommendation, I’ve seen the quality and usefulness of that response degrade almost exponentially. “At naming” United almost inevitably results in some cut-and-pasted pre-approved apology -- “Sorry, we hate delays as much as you do” or “Our apologies for the delay in your travel. Safety is our utmost  priority”, My frustrated response  -- “Oh stop! If you were concerned about safety, you\'d spend more on preventative maintenance to avoid these delays in the first place” -- generated nothing but silence.</li>\r\n 	<li>Delta’s Twitter account, on the other hand, did quickly solve a problem that I couldn’t figure out elsewhere. I mentioned in an earlier episode that I hated having to fly Delta because I couldn’t get Pre-Check. Facing another Delta flight out of New Orleans, I thought I try one more time to fix it. I found what I thought was the right Delta Twitter handle -- @DeltaAssist -- and tweeted them the message “How do I get my Global Traveler # associated with my Delta profile so I can get PreCheck for my MSY-DTW flight tomorrow?” A couple of minutes later, I got a reply “Please DM me your info and I’ll proceed”. Within 10 minutes, it was done. When I checked in 30 minutes later on the Delta app, there was the Pre- Check symbol on the boarding pass. So perhaps the usefulness decay is airline-specific, perhaps with some direct connection with United’s low score on the latest JD Powers’ customer satisfaction survey. Perhaps.</li>\r\n 	<li>As I have mentioned many times on this podcast, Bose noise-canceling headphones are the mark of a true road warrior. Sure, you seem some new Gen Y analyst types sporting Beats or maybe some audiophile wearing some big Sennheiser cans. But still, by and far, Bose is still number 1. But they’re expensive -- $300 and never on sale, not even in the Bose outlet stores. And so, about once every six months, I have this conversation with a seatmate -- “Do you like your Bose?” “Yup, I think they’re great” “Yeah, I’d love to get a pair, but they’re so damn expensive” -- also most word-for-word, every 6 months, right down to the “damn” in front of “expensive”. And here’s what I tell them -- No one ever buys Bose headphones with cash. Nobody. That\'s what Membership Miles are for. If you’re traveling for business, odds are you have a corporate Amex card on which you’re racking up Membership Miles for plane tickets and hotel bills, and you never quite know what to do with them. What you do is splurge on travel luxuries for yourself like Bose headphones. They\'re for your miles; you suffered to earn them. Go on, get a little something that will make that middle seat a bit more bearable. But whatever you do, don’t tell your spouse about them. They’ll want to buy something sensible for the house. First, buy the Bose. After than, maybe one of those road warrior Tumi carryons...</li>\r\n 	<li>And one last travel technology bit...finally, as I’ve threatened for many episodes, I ditched my iPhone 5 for an HTC One Android phone. I just got completely fed up with the lousy, unpredictable battery life on the iPhone 5 after upgrading to iOS 7. Maybe iOS 8 Apple announced this week will fix things, but I waited as long as I could. I got tired of being psychotic about battery life -- about making sure I topped off my battery before boarding a plane, watching the battery meter drop 10% in the time it took to taxi from the runway to the gate -- just not being able to be away from a charging cable for more than 2 hours.</li>\r\n 	<li>And one last travel technology bit...finally, as I’ve threatened for many episodes, I ditched my iPhone 5 for an HTC One Android phone. I just got completely fed up with the lousy, unpredictable battery life on the iPhone 5 after upgrading to iOS 7. Maybe iOS 8 Apple announced this week will fix things, but I waited as long as I could. I got tired of being psychotic about battery life -- about making sure I topped off my battery before boarding a plane, watching the battery meter drop 10% in the time it took to taxi from the runway to the gate -- just not being able to be away from a charging cable for more than 2 hours.</li>\r\n 	<li>Now I’m not a stranger to Android. I’ve used a Google Nexus 7 for a couple of years and a Samsung tablet before that, so I’m comfortable with Android. Indeed, I’ve said on past episodes that I prefer Android tablets to iPads because I can do more with them -- get to the directory structure, attach files to e-mails. For me, Android tablets are closer to a PC replacement than iPads. But phones are different -- using it to talk and text is more important than editing a document. I had been on iOS since the iPhone 3G, so this is a bit change -- Android hides settings in different places than iOS, so it’s been a learning experience. The same with the mail and calendar apps, though with Android, there’s more of a choice. I have 4 mail apps on my phone now, figuring out which one I like the best, and then I’ll blow away the other three. I gotta say though that I\'m very happy to be rid of that lousy iPhone podcasting app.</li>\r\n 	<li>But the most important thing is battery life. I’m no longer waiting ‘til the last minute to board my plane, trying to push that iPhone battery meter up one last percentage point. And with the bigger screen -- 5-inches vs. 4 on the iPhone 5 -- I find myself reading more stuff on my phone and leaving my tablet in my backpack more often. I’m still tweaking things, but am very satisfied with the change.</li>\r\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">And if you have any travel observations, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">Bridge Music — <em>Locovenido</em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/falik-dreams/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Falik</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong> \'Round the World in 8 Days</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I think it’s a given that your mind is more of a barrier to doing something than your body. I always surprise myself when, once I’ve pushed through what I thought was a major barrier, how normal or ordinary it seems on the other side. I do that with road biking all the time -- thinking a 50-mile ride, or a 100-km or 100-mile ride is a big deal… until I do it.</li>\r\n 	<li>Flight times are that way too. Early in my career, I remember thinking that the 3-4 hours from Chicago to California was huge, and that the 14 hrs it would take to fly to Tokyo was inconceivable. But then I flew 7 hrs to London; 10 hrs from Europe to South Africa. Then a big jump, 17 hours from New York to Joburg every 6 weeks for a project. With that experience under my belt, that 14 hr flight time to Tokyo -- or to India or China -- was no longer unthinkable, just long.</li>\r\n 	<li>So when project requirements and the May Day holiday forced me to compress trips to India and Manila into a single week, I gulped but thought “What the hell?”  Cutting HG Wells’ time by an order of magnitude, my itinerary took me around the world in 8 days -- Chicago to Newark to Delhi to Bangalore to Singapore to Manila to Tokyo to Chicago. 44 hrs of flight time -- that’s in-the-air time. Doesn’t count wait time or layover time. That 44 hrs at 39,000 ft in a week.</li>\r\n 	<li>I left Chicago Saturday afternoon; touched down in Delhi Sunday night. I was fine on Monday and Tuesday. There wasn’t much down time -- we meeting people pretty much straight through from 7am breakfast to dinners ending at 11 at night. I think people would’ve followed me into the toilet if I didn’t give them a stern look. Wednesday, we hit the wall but because of the impending May Day holiday shutdown, we couldn’t stop. So we doubled down on caffeine consumption and pushed through.</li>\r\n 	<li>Because we had a break on Thursday, May 1. While everyone was celebrating the workers’ holiday, we hopped Singapore Air to Manila. SingAir is always at the top of any list of the best business class cabins. Unfortunately, I can’t opine on that, because I think I slept all but 45 minutes of the 7-8 hours I spent there. Which I think really frustrated the flight attendants. They kept trying to give me food and drinks whenever I opened my eyes. I would just ask for more water and then go back to sleep.</li>\r\n 	<li>All my Manila to Chicago flight options connected through Tokyo. I could’ve flown United, but I’m on a bit of a United strike right now -- I’m just not happy with how many delays and cancellations I’ve taken from them -- so I decided to try a new airline and flew ANA -- All Nippon Airways. I’d never flown a Japanese airline before, so it would be something new. And since they were one of the first airlines to buy a 787 Dreamliner, I was hoping to one of those would show up on my route. No luck on that, it was Triple 7’s on both legs. But what was fun was mealtime. The menu has two sides -- a Japanese menu and “International” menu -- American and European food. I figured I should go Japanese -- eat as local as possible at 39,000 ft -- and so was a little disconcerted when I saw most of the Japanese passengers ordering the International menu, but hey….  It turned out fine for me, though. Half the value of airplane meals, especially on long-haul flights, is the distraction; the entertainment value. A good business class meal service should keep you occupied for at least an hour -- between perusing the menu, choosing a wine, have the meal coursed out, then the dessert trolley, then the liquor trolley. The Japanese meal was the best ever at that. Every tray they put down in front of me had at 6-8 different little cups or boxes of food on it, none of which I recognized, and I eat Japanese food pretty regularly on the road. So they’d put the tray down, I’d look at it, then I’d look through the menu and try to match each line on the menu with a box or cup in front of me. And not all of them were easy -- “oh, <i>that’s</i> the custard with the snow crab…”. Which was great, because the menu matching kept me even more occupied than normal. Lotsa fun. And the food was pretty good too.</li>\r\n 	<li>Of course, when you travel to a new country, there’s always something that can trip you up. I’ve traveled to India a number of times over the past 3-4 years, so I know some of its eccentricities, like needing a physical print out of your itinerary to even get into an airport terminal, and the separate men and women’s security lines because every passenger gets wanded and patted down after walking through the metal detector. It makes TSA PreCheck seem like a morning walk that’s been momentarily interrupted by a couple of nice mall cops.</li>\r\n 	<li>But the Philippines were new. We landed in Manila at 11pm Thursday night. Immigration was a bit of a goat rodeo, and the ride to the hotel felt like we were passing through some just-this-side-of-dodgy parts of LA. Much more “normal” than our first night in Delhi. The way out was where the bumps showed up. First is the exit tax -- they like to call it an “airport fee” but you can’t leave until you pay it, so it feels like an exit tax. It was 500 pesos -- about $14 -- in cash. Not a big thing -- if you know about it ahead of time. Which I almost didn’t. We were having some beers before dinner Friday night and somebody asked a question about the Manila airport. I don’t remember the question, but none of us knew the answer, so, of course, we all whipped out our smartphones and revved up Google. Somewhere on one of the web pages I was scanning, I saw a comment about the exit tax. Whoa! We ran over to the concierge. Yup, it’s true. I have 750 pesos on me from an earlier trip to the ATM, so I was good. The other guys had no Filipino currency, but got the front desk clerk to give them cash and charge the 500 pesos to their room. Crisis averted.</li>\r\n 	<li>The thing that <i>did</i> catch me, though, was the sign at the check-in desk Saturday morning saying portable umbrellas were prohibited in carry-ons. Wait, what? I’ve carried this bag on three-quarters of the way around the world and now I have to check it because I have a 10-in Totes umbrella in the front pocket? Did these guys watch too much Batman when they were kids and now are having flashbacks to when the Penguin used a machine gun umbrella? And this in a country where it dumps rain every afternoon, so you really need an umbrella! But from the look on the agent’s face, I could tell -- Yes, it’s for real, and No, I don’t agree with it either. So, I reluctantly checked my bag and headed off to security… Where none of the security screeners seem to be paying much attention to any other security signage. In spite of signs to the contrary, I’m waved off from taking my PC out or taking my blazer off. Could I have sneaked my lethal Totes through? Probably. But I just wanted to get on the plane so I could go back to sleep.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em>Just Don’t</em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/liebig-severed/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Lie Big</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong> Beijing Mass Transit</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>One of the things I didn’t get to in the last episode when talking about my April trip to Beijing was to report out on mass transit. It’s been an on-going thread in the TravelCommons podcast, probably for the past couple of years, about getting around cities -- did videos for Frankfurt and Chicago, and have talked about Portland, San Francisco, Amsterdam… So let’s add Beijing to the mix.</li>\r\n 	<li>We got to the other side of customs in Beijing Airport late -- 10:30, 11:00pm local time after a 14-hr flight. We saw signs for an Airport Express, but since it was late, we couldn’t figure out the particulars of the Airport Express -- most importantly, where it would drop us in relation to our hotel -- and the cab fare was only about US$15, we headed toward the taxi line.</li>\r\n 	<li>Which offered its own kind of challenges. The line overflowed the regular switchback corral and past a sign that said “60 minute wait from here.” Great. And then there were what they call “black cabs”, non-licensed guys, walking up and down the back end of the line soliciting rides. But when I saw the locals blowing them off, I did the same. A couple of times, the airport police walked down the line, and the black cab guys ran off -- literally -- though we did see a couple of guys melt into the line, standing behind a concrete pillar out of the cops’ line of sight. In the end, it wasn’t that bad, 20 minutes and we were at the front of the line.</li>\r\n 	<li>Which then meant we could get our first experience with the hassle of dealing with Beijing cab drivers. They’re picky and incredibly argumentative. And, of course, since they’re arguing in Chinese, a language I don’t speak, it can be a challenge to actually get going. At the airport, the cab rank people waved me toward a cab. I had printed out the directions -- in Chinese -- of the Marriott from their website, complete with a small map. I showed it to the cab driver. He took the paper, looked a bit puzzled, showed it to another guy, who then tried to wave me over to his car -- a black cab -- while my assigned cab driver wandered away. I went back to the cab rank guy, showed <i>him</i> the directions. He then started yelling at the cab driver, which finally got the cab driver to start loading our bags into the cab.</li>\r\n 	<li>This scene would be repeated almost every time we caught a cab from the hotel. We would have the concierge book us a table at a restaurant, write the address and directions out in Chinese characters, we’d show it to the cab driver, who would then look puzzled and start arguing with the doormen. One time, I had to pull up Google Maps and do a bit of a pantomime with the cab driver -- here’s where we want to go -- before he would head off.</li>\r\n 	<li>The only thing that was worse than this was trying to hail a cab in town. Cabs would have their “available” sign showing in their window but wave me off when I tried to hail them. It would usually take 3-5 attempts, before one stopped. But then about half of those wouldn’t want to take us where we wanted to go. I tell you, I’ve had better luck getting a cab from mid-town Manhattan to LGA in the rain during rush hour than I had getting a taxi in Beijing. So it made perfect sense when I read TripAdvisor’s <a href=\"http://www.multivu.com/mnr/70425525-tokyo-tops-tripadvisor-world-city-survey-amongst-global-travelers\">survey</a> a couple of weeks ago saying that Beijing was second only to Moscow as the worst city for taxi service.</li>\r\n 	<li>Which really made us appreciate how great the Beijing subway is. It’s cheap, clean, modern, station announcements in Chinese and English -- leftover from the 2008 Summer Olympics? --- we took it all the time. The only downside -- it’s jammed. You think the London Tube at rush hour is crowded; the Chicago Red Line during a Cubs home game? Subway riding in Beijing is a full contact sport. But with 25 million people in the city, I’m not sure I should be surprised. I think I sat down in a subway car once in all the rides I took. But even crowded, it’s a great system. Except maybe for having to pass your bag through an X-ray machine before entering the station. But at least the Chinese didn’t want to take away my umbrella.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917626811171154.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #109</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Magnatune</a></li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_109.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #109 — \'Round the World in 8 Days; Beijing Mass Transit','','inherit','closed','closed','','1353-revision-v1','','','2018-06-03 08:00:21','2018-06-03 13:00:21','',1353,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/06/03/1353-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2012,1,'2018-06-03 08:02:13','2018-06-03 13:02:13','[caption id=\"attachment_1985\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/6AB2DE86-7AE4-4DAF-AD9F-DEFB51F737E0-01.jpeg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1985\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/6AB2DE86-7AE4-4DAF-AD9F-DEFB51F737E0-01-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> The Look of Augmented Reality?[/caption]\r\n\r\nBroke out the mobile unit to record this episode in the Buckhead neighborhood of Atlanta; much warmer than getting caught in a spring snow storm in Milwaukee. When much of the travel tech news is about the latest phone apps, we talk about physical travel technology that we can touch and carry. <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">And when flying during the past two weeks, flight attendants\' safety demonstrations have become a bit more strident. </span>All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_140.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/438588876\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #140:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the Hyatt Place-Buckhead in Atlanta, GA missing what I hope is the long-delayed start of Spring finally showing up the Midwest. I have done damn little travel since the last episode -- a couple of drives to a client up north of Milwaukee, a quick trip to Minneapolis last week, and flight this morning down to Atlanta. I managed to avoid the foot of late April snow in Minnesota but got caught by 3-4 inches in Milwaukee. Luckily, I’d looked at the forecast before I left and, walking out to the garage, grabbed my LL Bean boots and threw them into the trunk of the car Which saved my dress shoes later that evening and the next morning on unshoveled walks and is is the good thing about driving; I didn’t have to worry about space constraints. I couldn’t have done the same thing flying to Minneapolis.</li>\r\n 	<li>I ended up flying Southwest to Minneapolis because: a) they were the cheapest flight out on Monday morning at short notice; and b) it let me meet an A-List challenge that Southwest had sent me at the beginning of the year -- fly 3 roundtrips by the end of April and get A-List for the rest of the year. Now, I don’t fly Southwest a whole lot, so I can’t completely justify what I pushed to do this challenge -- except just because it was a challenge, I guess. That, and it’ll make it easier for those times I end up on Southwest this year. I won’t have to pay the $12 for auto check-in or set an alarm to check in 24 hours before flight time -- both of which typically only get me in the second or “B” boarding group. Not an earth shattering perk, but anything that reduces travel hassles is a good thing.</li>\r\n 	<li>When I went Chicago Midway airport on last Monday to catch that flight, I ran into a new TSA trick -- funnel everyone through a single-file U-turn line to be sniffed a TSA agent and a dog, after people headed into either regular security or TSA PreCheck. Which, at 7am on a Monday morning, quickly pushed the security line back into the hallway toward the parking garage. So, after spending what looks like the $190 million a year the past couple of years on screening technology like those snazzy full-body scanners that people empty their pockets and line up for, the TSA is now having us line up for yet another a new screening technology -- but at least this technology is cute. And when was the last time you heard a traveler wanting to pet the body scanner.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/media/files/DJBLUE/11541\">Hear Me</a></em> by DJ Blue</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">A couple of things for those not following my Twitter or the TravelCommons Facebook page…</span>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>First, for those Amazon fans, Alexa will now play the latest episode of TravelCommons for you if you ask nicely. I got an Echo Spot in a schwag bag for a conference in January. I put it on the standing desk in my home office and started playing around with it. After listening to the WJS Minute Briefing as part of my Flash Briefing, I started thinking about how to get TravelCommons onto it. At first, I thought I was going to have to figure out how to build an Alexa skill, but digging a little deeper, I found out that the TuneIn app is sorta the default podcast player for Alexa. So after I got TravelCommons approved for TuneIn -- felt like they had an actual human check out my app -- it appeared on my Echo Spot. So if you say, “Alexa, play TravelCommons podcast”, she should play the latest episode for you. Check out the Facebook page or my Twitter feed for a quick video showing the magic happen</li>\r\n 	<li>Second, I took advantage of being in town and the crap April weather to do the filming for the Midway taproom tour layover video. As I mentioned in the last episode, the idea has been to feature an itinerary out of Chicago’s “other” airport -- what was Chicago’s original airport that morphed into the budget airline airport that morphed into Southwest Airlines’ biggest operation. We used Uber and Lyft to hit 4 taprooms in what can only be described as the “post-industrial” landscape of Chicago’s near south side. We started by driving past the Cook County prison en route to Lagunitas’ plant and taproom that’s built in an old steel mill. While New Belgium and Sierra Nevada landed their national expansions in the much more bucolic environs of the North Carolina Smoky Mountains, Lagunitas’ owner Tony Magee dropped his expansion in a dodgy part of Chicago. We then hit smaller scale, more local places that have repurposed old manufacturing plants in less-visited Chicago neighborhoods -- Lo Rez in Pilsen, Marz in what can charitably described as “lower” Bridgeport, and then ending up at Whiner Beer in the Back of the Yards neighborhood -- where the Chicago Stockyards used to be decades ago. I started working on production, but then looked at the calendar and knew that I only had time for either this episode or the video. And since I’ve worked hard on keeping a monthly cadence of podcast episodes, I kicked the video into next month. So watch Facebook, Twitter, and the web site for the post. Since it’s a bit more narrow scope, I don’t think I’ll put the video in the podcast feed; not sure the non-beer-drinking listeners will want some 100 meg video clogging up their internet.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>While sitting in the backseat of one of those Lyft rides, I noticed something new on the pink Lyft light that many drivers have in the middle of their dash. You always see the front of it -- the pink Lyft logo -- from the outside, through the front windshield. Glancing at the back of it from inside of the car, I something flash by. Looking more closely, I saw a little message scroll by - “15 min eta”. I saw it again in the Lyft car I took to MSP on last Tuesday. I asked the driver about it. He told me that Lyft sent it to him after he did 300 rides -- “bit of a status thing” he said. I told him about the Uber dash light that I saw in New York, that let me adjust the color of the light from the app -- I talked about this in a prior episode. He thought that was pretty cool too, but he liked Lyft, the company, better than Uber, and he appreciated his messaging light.</li>\r\n 	<li>All sorts of press releases drop into the TravelCommons mailbox, but the one announcing April 24, last Tuesday, as the first National Business Traveler Day caught my eye. I guess because it’s new, it hasn’t made it onto the National Day Calendar, a list of these sorts of designations. It’s a good choice of date, though, because there is only one national day listed on the 24th -- National Pigs-In-A-Blanket Day -- which, I can imagine, some First or Business Class flight attendants might reasonably associate with some sleeping business travelers. National Business Traveler Day was announced (created?) by “Upside Business Travel, the first online travel service built just for the do-it-yourself (DIY) business traveler” in recognition of “the important contributions made by business travelers to America\'s economy.” I dunno, this could go in so many snarky directions -- with the pigs-in-a-blanket thing as just a starter. I have to say, though, I felt very unrecognized when I walked into MSP Terminal 2 the afternoon of National Business Travelers Day -- an obvious frequent business traveler: wearing a black blazer, head-down on the iPhone, speedwalking to the furthest security checkpoint because it’s the only one with PreCheck. Nobody was gave me a thank-you, a flower, a hug, but then again, the first person I had contact with was an old, overweight but jolly TSA screener. Nice guy, but not sure I would’ve wanted a hug from him.</li>\r\n 	<li>And it could’ve been that MSP’s Terminal 2 which I’ll add to my list of ghetto terminals, the land of misbegotten travelers, which also includes ORD’s T2, Detroit’s North Terminal, Madrid’s 4S satellite terminal, Munich’s T2 satellite terminal… I’ve talked about this before. In fortress hubs, like ORD, DTW, and MSP, the terminals the hub airlines use is clean, bright, has lots of restaurant and shopping choices. Delta’s terminal in Detroit has an airy 2 or 3-story ceiling with a monorail train running the length of the terminal up at the top. The North terminal that every other airline is dumped into is the old terminal that Delta -- or actually Northwest left behind, with a bit of a clean up and 3 restaurants. Delta’s terminal in Minneapolis is the same story -- lots of shops and restaurants, a big craft beer bar, all with a bit of that North Woods feel. Terminal 2 - generic airport sterility, a Subway sandwich joint, a bar where all the handles were removed from the beer taps. And there’s no inside-security connections between these terminals in MSP and DTW if you want to check out the better side -- it’s a 10-minute bus ride and another pass through security. At least in ORD, you can walk from T2 to the American or United terminals and hit Rick Bayless’ Torta Frontera for great Mexican food or Goose Island for a good beer. On Tuesday, I was stuck in the Humphrey Terminal with my Subway sandwich and a choice of Bud Light or Blue Moon -- which maybe was fitting on National Business Traveler Day.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/media/files/savoyard/10743\">Madrugada</a></em> by Savoyard</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Travel Tech Gets Physical</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>In addition to press releases about National Business Travelers Day, I also get press releases announcing new funding rounds for travel startups. These things come in waves. Like the wave of companies building tour aggregation platforms. That investment thesis went -- because millennials are more into experiential travel, they’re more likely to spend money on something like a food tour or hang gliding; the market for travel experiences is fragmented making discovery and purchasing difficult; our platform will solve this problem by aggregating experience providers and providing world-class search and user experience. The latest wave seems to be about building platforms that “reduce the pain” of corporate business travel. In April, in addition to Upside’s National Business Traveler Day announcement, Rocketrip sent out a release about their $15 million funding round and TravelPerk, who sponsored our January episode, touted their $21 million round -- which sounds like, some 20+ years after Travelocity and Expedia hit the market, companies continue to spend millions of dollars trying to figure out how to replace travel agents.</li>\r\n 	<li>At times, it feels like much of the work on improving travel is virtual, about software -- new apps, new search platforms, better ways to spit out a single travel itinerary. But in spite of the venture capital mantra that “software is eating the world,” travel is inherently physical -- we want to move our bodies, our stuff from Point A to Point B, and most often back again. It seems like the ‘60’s were the golden age of this, when Boeing and Airbus’ predecessors and the Russians were designing and building supersonic planes. I really felt ancient the other day telling some Millennial staffers about, how way back when, Concorde would fly from JFK to LHR in less than 3 hrs. Now it seems that Boeing and Airbus are completely focused on cramming more people into subsonic flying buses. Logical, but not very aspirational. Now if all the work on hyperloops -- the test circuits, the design contests -- actually turns into something, and isn’t just high-tech hobbies for Elon Musk and Richard Branson -- we’ll be onto something.</li>\r\n 	<li>But in the meantime, in the space between now -- thinner, more uncomfortable plane seats and hotel keys that keep demagnetizing -- and the inspirational future -- us whizzing along in pods at 750 mph, doing LA to SF in 35 minutes without having to buy CO2 offsets to feel better about ourselves -- what are some of the physical things about to hit?</li>\r\n 	<li>One thing that seems to be finally hitting critical mass is real-time luggage tracking through RFID luggage tags. Logistics is another thing that’s hard, but it feels that airports and some airlines, Delta especially, have slogged through deploying enough RFID readers along the miles of luggage conveyor belts in the bowels of most of the airports they use, and then wiring it back in near real-time to their smartphone apps so that it’s useful. I’m hoping the combination of competitive pressure, falling equipment pricing, and government fines will push the rest of the airlines to follow suit. For me, real-time location tracking was the main use case for smart bags like BlueSmart. If I can get this through RFID tags, I’ll feel a lot less salty about the smart bag ban.</li>\r\n 	<li>Wearables also get a lot of buzz. Carnival Cruise Lines has been the latest, announcing their “Ocean Medallion” last year as a way to “personalize” your cruise experience -- and, of course, to make it easier to buy drinks on board. Nothing really new here. Disney’s been doing this forever; 20 years ago, I remember using a wristband at Northstar ski resort in Tahoe to track how many vertical feet we’d skied in a day, and to easily buy beers in the lodge. I’m wondering what happens here if the current noise about the use (and misuse) of personal data by Facebook and others resets people’s privacy vs. ease-of-use balance point rather than just blowing over. For me, it’s less about how the companies use the data (though I’m not completely unconcerned about this) and more about their inability to secure it. Seems like every couple of weeks, another travel company admits to some hack of, say, their point-of-sale system and the associated loss of millions of names and credit card numbers. Doesn’t incent me to let them track my movements and spending habits.</li>\r\n 	<li>AR/VR -- Augmented and virtual reality continues to buzz. I’ve talked about Google Translate’s AR feature -- point your camera at, say, a menu or washing machine, and it’ll display the translation over the original text in real-time. It’s not perfect -- the translations can rapidly change, sorta flicker between different interpretations, but it’s often “good enough”, and a whole lot quicker than banging in each menu entree. Google has tried to extend this real-time translation from visual to speech with their Pixel Bud headphones with much more Version 1.0 mixed results. I’m probably being way overly optimistic here, but if the Buds follow the same improvement trajectory, they could be pretty cool in 3 years’ time.</li>\r\n 	<li>It really gets buzzy when we move from AR to VR. A guy at a VR start-up talked to me about using VR in hotel rooms for what he called “social viewing”. Rather than watching, say Black Mirror on Netflix on your laptop or one of those Enseo TVs I’m seeing more and more of, you strap on a VR headset, as does your spouse or kids, and you’re all watching together in a virtual living room or virtual theater. And then there’s always the pitch -- why fly over to, say, Madrid to see Picasso’s Guernica in the Reina Sofia when you strap on a VR headset and “be” in the room instantly? Hey, remember how virtual reality turned out in The Matrix movies? Yeah, I think I’ll keep my travel physical.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/media/files/djlang59/10579\">Crazy Love</a></em> by DJ Lang</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>You <em>Will</em> Pay Attention to the Safety Briefing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>The selfie of passengers on Southwest flight 1380 not wearing the oxygen masks correctly went viral in the days after the engine explosion, along with the stories -- the guy telling the woman next to him that she didn’t need to squeeze the airbag, and the guy who logged into WiFi and Facebook Live before putting on his mask. The flight attendant interviews that seemingly every news outlet did dripped with schadenfreude -- no one ever pays attention to the safety videos or demonstrations, and look what happened!</li>\r\n 	<li>Improving airline safety records have let people grow numb as to how unnatural air travel is -- flying over 600 mph at 35,000 ft. Flight 1380 was the first accident-related fatality on a US airliner since 2009, and the Southwest’s first ever -- since it was founded in 1971.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’ll admit that I don’t pay attention to every demo, especially when I do multiple flights in a single week. I do typically look around me for the nearest exits -- in front and behind me -- because those can change pretty often with different seat configurations. I will pay attention, as a refresher, if I haven’t flown for a couple of weeks -- like last week’s flight to MSP. Or if it’s a plane I haven’t flown in a while, I’ll look at the seat back card -- like I did today when noticing I was in a Boeing 717, a pretty rare event for me.</li>\r\n 	<li>I have noticed that the flight attendants’ requests/demands for attention have become a bit more strident since 1380. On my Southwest flight back home from MSP last week, the flight attendant chanted “Nose and mouth; nose and mouth!”, eliciting some nervous laughter.</li>\r\n 	<li>The attendant on my Delta flight this morning was a bit more direct, perhaps fatalistic this morning. “Please pay attention! We’re doing this for you. But if you don’t want to watch us, well, I guess it’s your life…”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #140</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a> and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_140.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #140 — Travel Tech Gets Physical; Pay Attention to the Safety Briefing','','inherit','closed','closed','','1977-revision-v1','','','2018-06-03 08:02:13','2018-06-03 13:02:13','',1977,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/06/03/1977-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2013,1,'2018-06-03 08:04:23','2018-06-03 13:04:23','<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/IMG_1145.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1009\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/IMG_1145-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>Returning to the mic after 10 days of food, wine, wind, rain, and snow in the north of Spain. I talk about traveling in Spain, and with my guest Coleman Collins about how to make the best coffee in your hotel room.  All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_139.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/422166231\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #139:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. Just got back Sunday night from 10 days in Spain -- about 4 days each in Madrid and San Sebastian, with a couple of days in the Rioja wine region in between. A friend on the East Coast sent me a note while I was in Spain -- “Good week to be out of town; we got whacked with yet another dump of snow.” Not quite. It’s been a cold Spring in Europe and Spain has been no different. Our first weekend in Madrid was in the upper 30’s/low 40’s with a mix of rain and wet snow. Which turned into just snow as we drove up to Rioja. Some of that drive reminded me of I-70 in the Colorado Rockies -- go into a tunnel with fine weather; come out of it to blowing snow. Having said that, it was nothing like the 7 or 9 or 14 inches that Winter Storm Toby dropped on the East Coast last week. And even with lousy weather, the food and the wine in Spain makes it hard to sustain any sort of cranky attitude, though it shorten up our pintxos crawl through Logroño.</li>\r\n 	<li>We flew Iberia to Madrid because: a) they have a non-stop flight from Chicago and b) as I mentioned <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">a few episodes ago</a>, I was finally able to burn off some of those Avios points that had been collecting cobwebs in my BA account. I decided to try Iberia’s Premium Economy service on the flight over. Most airlines are using this sorta “tweener” service to capture revenue from people willing to pay a bit more for some comfort, but aren’t willing to go the 2-300% Business Class uplift out of their own pocket. And it was truly a “tweener” service -- about 5 rows between the Business and regular Coach cabins, and coach seats with spacing and recline somewhere between domestic First Class and, say, United’s Economy Plus. The meal service was the same as Economy, but they served us first, and they gave us a little amenities kit with just the essentials -- earplugs, eye mask, socks, and a toothbrush. It was as-advertised -- Coach with a bit more space, which made for better napping on the 8-hour flight over. I’ve talked in past episodes that I really question the value-for-money with Business Class on Transatlantic flights, but this tweener class was a reasonable deal.</li>\r\n 	<li>The deeper recline of the Premium Economy seat also makes it easier for you to stay in your space when you sleep. On the way back, I was in regular Coach because -- well, I’m cheap and didn’t need to sleep. But the guy next to me did. He nodded off as soon as we left the ground, which meant he didn’t recline his seat, which meant that he started to list to port, toward my shoulder. This guy looked like he was the younger brother of Dos Equis’ “Most Interesting Man”. But there was no amount of interesting that was going to have him sleeping on my shoulder. Just as he was about to touch down on my shoulder, I gave our seat row a bit of a shake -- some single row turbulence. He startled awake, realized what he was doing, and immediately sat straight up. Stay upright, my friend.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">P.I.H.E. by Budapest BluesBoy (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hepepe/26362 Ft: Inna Barmash - Zhurbin</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Just a quick addendum to the luggage thread we’ve been running over the last couple of episodes. In the last episode Jerry Sarfati talked about downsizing from a 22 to a 20-inch carry-on bag because of the hassles he’d gotten from American Airlines gate agents. I mentioned then that I haven’t had any problems from American, and didn’t get pulled over on my Chicago-to-Madrid Iberia flight. Just goes to show you how much discretion gate agents have. I didn’t test it on the way back home -- 2 bottles bought in Rioja tasting rooms and a tin of olive oil tipped me way over the liquid limit.</li>\r\n 	<li>The EU’s no roaming rules also let me skip what had become our first day of European vacation ritual of burning a couple of hours in a phone store buying local SIM cards for our mobile phones. Instead, the week before we left, I fired up EE’s iPhone app and topped up our UK SIMs. Somewhere over the Bay of Biscay, after my breakfast tray was cleared, I swapped out my AT&amp;T SIM. Once on the ground, I turned on my phone and was good to go. And because the whole family has EE SIMs, it was easy to call each other when we got separated on our pintxos crawls. I know that everyone just messages nowadays, but I’m still one of those knuckledraggers who occasionally finds talking quicker than texting.</li>\r\n 	<li>While in Madrid, I also added to my subway “tap-n-go” card collection for €2.50 -- or about $3 at current exchange rates. The interesting twist on Madrid’s system is that you can tap up to 4 people through the turnstile with a single card, so I only had to buy one tap card for the whole family. I’d load it up with 10 rides -- which seemed to be the only option -- we’d line up behind one turnstile, then tap through and pass it back. Getting out, we just walked through the turnstile since the Madrid Metro fare system seems based on zones rather than start and ending stations. Just adding it to the growing stack...</li>\r\n 	<li>In past episodes, I’ve talked about how I’ve come to value the service I get from Hertz with President’s Club status. And so I rented a car from Hertz in Madrid for our drive up to Rioja for wine tasting and then over to San Sebastian and back. On Tuesday morning, we headed to Atocha train station, found the Hertz counter, and then I sent my family to get breakfast because I knew from past experience renting cars in Spain, that I was in for 30 minutes of hard upselling. It didn’t matter that I had already booked on-line at Hertz.com and selected the options I wanted, I was going to get sold. Mel, the Hertz agent, spoke excellent American English -- all the right terms, slang, colloquialisms. Telling me the rate I got was “crazy low” -- I’d used our corporate rate plus cashed in some Hertz points -- because I didn’t have any insurance. And then came the big push -- writing down big liability numbers, huge damage possibilities -- even though a lot of this was covered by our corporate rate and the credit card. After this, there was the upsell for the car -- did you know you booked a manual, can you drive a manual -- because, well, no Americans know how to work a clutch. I just smiled and nodded, and let Mel work through his spiel -- I had kinda hoped that my status would save me, but nope, there was no short-circuiting this. After he was done, I said “No” to everything. I finally got the keys just as my family finished breakfast, and then off we went. I would’ve been frustrated if I hadn’t expected it and budgeted time for it. Instead, I was just slightly weary. I’m glad my wife got me a coffee to-go.</li>\r\n 	<li>And in the seeming obligatory craft beer segment of TravelCommons, having the rental car let me hit the Basqueland Brewing Project taproom outside of San Sebastian. It had a very American feel to it -- winding through a light industrial area, finding the place by spotting the picnic tables in front of the open loading door, walking past the foosball table and shelves holding 20-kg sacks of malt, the fluorescent pink cord blocking access to the brewing area. And for good reason, the place is owned by 3 Americans. One of them was working the taps when we arrived. He quickly flipped from Spanish to English when we ordered. Originally from Baltimore, he came over 6 years ago when his wife wanted to move back home. Nice guy, good beer.</li>\r\n 	<li>Rob Cheshire, a TravelCommons listener and Untappd friend, hit the comments section on the last episode -- first, to egg me on about my comment in the last episode to do a One City, Five Taprooms layover video, and then about taprooms near Wrigley Field when he comes in to see the Reds play the Cubs. I managed to string together a 6-taproom crawl; he may need to break that up into a couple of rounds.</li>\r\n 	<li>And, to Rob’s first question, I actually will do a taproom layover video, but instead of basing it out of ORD like my last layover video, I’m going to do this one from MDW -- give those Southwest fliers some love. It’ll let me hit 4 taprooms that have opened in the past couple of years in what can only be described as the “post-industrial” landscape of Chicago’s near south side. It should be fun. Working on the scheduling now. Will shoot it in April. With the additional production time video requires, it might not get up until May, but I’ll keep everyone posted</li>\r\n 	<li>One last thing -- last week I tweeted out a link to a pretty rigorous study from the FlyHealthy Research Team out of Emory University in Atlanta about passenger movements on transcontinental flights and what it means for the spread of respiratory diseases. The team took 10 flights, logging passenger movements, taking air samples, and swabs of hard surfaces. I won’t go through the whole study -- I’ll put a <a href=\"http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/03/13/1711611115\">link</a> in the show notes for those who want to read it, which I encourage you to do; it’s very readable as scientific papers go -- but the main takeaways for me were: a) you really only have to be concerned about the people immediately in front, behind, and next to you -- a one-row radius; b) the people wiping down their trays, armrests, and seat belt buckles with Purell Wipes are wasting their time; and c) if you’re really worried, get a window seat in the front part of the plane and don’t leave it for the entire flight (which, as a side benefit, will also endear you to your row mates). As one who has called planes “flying petri dishes”, I was pleasantly surprised by the Emory team’s findings.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">~aether theories~ by Vidian (c) copyright 2018 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Vidian/57398 Ft: Gurdonark, White-throated Sparrow</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Brewing the Best Hotel Room Coffee</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Interview with Coleman Collins. His blog post on brewing hotel room coffee is <a href=\"https://roadwarrior.blog/hotel-room-coffee/\">here</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Tools of the Trade by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/56512 Ft: Abstract Audio, Mr Yesterday, Martijn de Boer, Speck</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Notes from Spain</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>This was our 4th spring trip to Spain. Our first trip we hit Madrid and Barcelona, the usual suspects. The next trip, we headed south to Andalucia -- Córdoba, Granada, Ronda, Seville -- during Semana Santa, Holy Week, and saw penitential processions every day in every town and city we visited, culminating in Holy Thursday night outside of Seville Cathedral. The last trip, in 2016, we headed back down South, but even further, taking a boat across the Straits of Gibraltar to Tangier, Morocco. For this trip, we gave up warm weather for some new territory -- Rioja and the Basque Country.</li>\r\n 	<li>As I said at the top of the show, for me, Spain is about food and wine. There’s certainly culture -- the Semana Santa processions are phenomenal cultural events, standing in front of the huge canvas of Picasso’s Guernica in the Reina Sofia in Madrid, the Mezquita in Cordoba,... -- but it’s the food and wine that keep bringing us back.</li>\r\n 	<li>On our first trip to Granada, we were staying in a Marriott -- maybe one of their AC properties -- in the middle of town. A great building; it had been a convent at one time. There was an interior courtyard; we had a nightcap there one night. 4 glasses of wine at the hotel bar -- figuring $12-15/glass, I’m waiting for a 40 euro tab. It was 12 euros -- I love this country.</li>\r\n 	<li>The pintxos crawl was the food center of this trip north, first in Logroño and then in San Sebastian, walking from bar to bar -- a glass of wine and a bite at each. It was a good mix of food. In Logroño, we started at a couple of dive-ier, more local places that focused on just one pintxos -- sauteed mushrooms at one, ground lamb sandwich at the next, the meat seared on a flat grill behind the bar, and then served on a bun with a great tasting green sauce -- and serving local Rioja wines, pulling the bottles from a bucket at the end of the bar. We then swung into a distinctly higher end place, complete with a Michelin sticker on the front door; more variety of food -- seared red tuna, pickled white anchovies, grilled octopus -- and the next level up of Rioja wines. Later in the week, in San Sebastian, when the weather turned a bit better, we could see the crawl pick up volume in the pedestrian streets of the old town; people still bundled up a bit, but taking their wine outside, and willing to walk to the next place rather than hunkering down for a couple of courses in the warmth.</li>\r\n 	<li>Cider is big in the Basque Country, though it’s drier, not as sweet as you get in the US or the UK. And during cider season -- January through April -- the siderias, the cider houses in the hills outside of San Sebastian, open up to serve cider streamed directly from the tap of huge chestnut wood barrels into your glass, and then the glass of the person behind you,... and a traditional menu of salt-cod omelette, fresh cod fried with peppers and onions, and damn big grilled t-bones served either standing up or at communal tables. We ended up sharing a meal with a busload of folks from just over the border in France. A couple dozen of us lined up as a worker manned the tap -- letting a thin stream of cider out. We lined up our wide-mouthed plastic tumblers about three feet away to impart a bit of fizz to the three fingers of cider that we caught before moving out of the stream to let it hit the tumbler that someone was holding right below ours.</li>\r\n 	<li>For a great food country, the food at Madrid airport, though, is a bit pedestrian. So to extend our food extravaganza for one more meal, we skip the “meh” restaurants and buy a package of the top-end iberian ham -- the bellota, from the free range Iberian pigs fattening up on acorns. We can’t bring it into the US, but it’s an 8-hour flight from Madrid to Chicago. That package never makes it as far at US landfall.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #139</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_139.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #139 — Brewing Best Hotel Room Coffee; Notes from Spain','','inherit','closed','closed','','1961-revision-v1','','','2018-06-03 08:04:23','2018-06-03 13:04:23','',1961,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/06/03/1961-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2014,1,'2018-06-03 08:07:39','2018-06-03 13:07:39','[caption id=\"attachment_1949\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/iStock-535339649.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1949\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/iStock-535339649-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> TSA! Look at What You\'ve Done to Me![/caption]\r\n\r\nFebruary is a tough time to be in the Midwest, so when my travel took me south, to New Orleans and then to Florida, there was no bitch tweeting about the TSA lines or flight delays. In this episode, I walk through how each change in airport security has pushed me to be more hipster and how we all want to understand the real cause of the flight delays that inconvenience us. Also a good bit of listener feedback extending the on-going luggage discussion. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_138.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/406850538\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #138:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. This has been a good travel month for me. Not too heavy, and all my travel had me headed south -- an important thing in February when you live in Chicago. The week before Mardi Gras, I headed down to New Orleans for a meeting. It easily could’ve been an overnight trip, but neither my wife nor I had been down in a while, so she came down with me. We caught some parades -- Nyx, Chaos, Muses -- ate way too much food, and except for a cold rain Wednesday night, had great weather. On Thursday, we were walking along the Mississippi back to the French Quarter from the Bywater neighborhood in bright sunshine and upper 60’s while Chicago was getting slammed with 8-12 inches of snow.</li>\r\n 	<li>When flew back to Chicago Friday night, we were able to thread the gap between the Friday end of that 8-12 inch drop and the start of the Saturday-Sunday 5-inch fall. Timing is everything. We came to the airport prepared for a long delay -- fully charged batteries, and muffaletta sandwiches and a mini king cake from Cochon Butcher. Southwest had cancelled this same flight the night before and that morning -- understandable given the snow -- so we didn’t think we wouldn’t get home; it was just going to be a question of how long. As it turned out, we were only an hour late, which given the weather, felt as good as on-time.</li>\r\n 	<li>Last week, I managed to point myself south again, this time to Florida -- Orlando and Miami -- and was able to skip two days of a heavy cold rain. The JW Marriott in Miami upgraded me to a room with a balcony on the 20th floor -- I didn’t have an ocean view, but I sat outside, 75 degrees, drinking a couple of beers, watching the sun go down, looking over to some of the rooftop bar action in the Brickell neighborhood. Miami is always an experience. It’s not the southernmost US big city, but rather the northernmost Latin American big city. I was reminded of that in the airport when I heard them paging someone in Spanish -- twice. They didn’t even bother wasting their time with English.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- Leviathan by Kirkoid (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Kirkoid/31109</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Lots of comments about luggage since the last episode, which makes sense -- the last episode was heavy on luggage talk between the continuing thread on the smart luggage ban and the suitcase buying tips which I then ported over to a blog post.\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>So, starting off, Allan Marko forwarded along the latest e-mails from Away luggage, one of the few smart bags with removable batteries and so not caught up in the smart luggage ban. Or so they thought until Delta decided to add their own twist to the ban. If the battery in the bag requires a tool to remove it -- which the original Away bag does -- you have to remove it from the bag before you board -- whether you’re carrying on the bag or gate-checking it. The later version of the Away bag has an ejectable pop-up battery which Delta thinks is OK. What a mess! This is what happens when engineers run amok -- and I can say that as a recovering engineer. These guys are going to keep tweaking and twisting this, which will just confuse gate agents and frustrate passengers -- which is why I’ve mothballed my smart bag and bought another Anker lipstick charger.</li>\r\n 	<li>Steve Frick hit the TravelCommons web site and left this comment -- “I replaced my luggage with the exact same bag as I had before, a TravelPro. It was an easy choice, I like you, wanted a simple bag. I knew my gear would fit, I already knew what to put in the outside pockets. One of the guys I work with recently bought and then returned a 4-wheel spinner. The reason for the return……. he discovered that most hotel parking lots weren’t level and each time he let go of the bag to raise the trunk lid his bag rolled away.” Steve, I had that same problem with my Bluesmart 4-wheeler, except in airports rather than parking lots. I’d put the Bluesmart against the wall in a restroom and it would wander away.</li>\r\n 	<li>Jerry Sarfati posted on the TravelCommons Facebook page -- “Mark, great episode as usual” Thanks, Jerry! “I had a different experience when choosing a new bag. I was stopped twice by American Airlines gate agents telling me my 22\" bag was too big. I’m in Group 2. So I settled for the 20\" Victorinox spinner.” I asked Jerry if they made him put it in a bag sizer. “Once only. It barely fit, and she said ‘too big, it must slide in easily, it must be checked’. Other time the agent said the sizer is missing, but ‘I can already see it won\'t fit’. I didn\'t want to argue and get thrown off the flight.” Jerry, that -- in technical travel terms -- is bullshit. I remember one time in Boston Logan, I got shunted over to the bag sizer by the Icelandic Air gate agent. And I knew I was on the bubble because this was the trip I’ve talked about a couple of times where I had to pack for 10 days between Iceland and Southern Spain in one carry-on. I grabbed that bag by the side handle, had it about chest high, and then drove it into the bag sizer with all my might. It was either going to fit, break the bag or blow apart the bag sizer. Luckily, it fit -- though the gate agent jumped back just a bit when the bag hit the bottom of the sizer. She let me carry it on. I flew 3 legs on American last week with my 22-incher and didn’t get a glance. But having said that, you made the right choice -- discretion is the better part of valor. Gate agents have complete discretion. Obey or get bounced. Too bad you got caught up by other folks’ power trips.</li>\r\n 	<li>Back on the web site, Robert Fenerty wrote “I want a four-wheel spinner; my wife loves hers. But I won’t get one, because I believe that bags with only two wheels have a bit more interior space than four-wheelers of the same length. That’s because the spinners can’t tuck into the side of the bag so you’re losing the inch or two between the middle of the spinner wheel and the top of the stem that attaches the spinner to the bottom of the bag. How’s that for OCD?” Robert, I’ll see your OCD and raise you! I pulled out a metal ruler and measured the ground clearance difference between my Victorinox 2-wheeler and my wife’s Samsonite 4-wheel spinner. I measured a 1.5-inch difference. Multiply that by the 14x9-inch base size gives you a 189 cubic inch cost for spinner agility. I look at that being one day’s worth of workout kit.</li>\r\n 	<li>Also on the web site, Jim McDonough wrote “My favorite bag was a Rick Steves 21” rollaboard that had just one compartment and two really good wheels. I used it for a decade and finally had problems with my wife’s bag (wheel fell apart) and the side of mine cracked from all the abuse. He doesn’t sell them any more, because it was a hair too big for European airlines. We are now using Samsonite spinners. They don’t hold as much as the old Rick bags. We only check bags when we are staying in one place for at least a week. Carrying on is simply liberating.” Liberating in a couple of ways -- not standing around waiting for the luggage carousel to start to get your bag, and not waiting around for it to stop to confirm that airline has lost it. I remember one trip where BA forced me to gate-check a bag, and then somehow lost it -- how you lose a bag in the, say, 50 ft between the jet bridge and baggage hold I’ll never know. The problem was -- I was in a different city every day. And so, they’d deliver the bag to my hotel the next morning after I’d already checked out and headed for my first meeting. This went on for a couple of days until I finally convinced them to leapfrog me and send it two stops one. Liberating myself from well-worn clothes -- I love it when I can find happiness in the small things.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Another reminder that Miami is a bit different -- the in-room coffee machine at the JW Marriott wasn’t the standard issue single cupper with Starbucks Pike Place filter disks (that, by the way, are always too big for the filter holder). Instead, it was an Illy espresso machine with its own special little capsules and branded demitasse cups. Took me a couple of tries to get the capsule properly situated, but after that, I ran through all 3, 4 (?) of the capsules in 15 minutes and was ready to attack the day.</li>\r\n 	<li>Last month, The Aviating Railfanner stopped by the TravelCommons YouTube page and left a comment on the 2012 video O\'Hare Layover Excursion: a 6-Hour Tour of Chicago saying “I think it would be a good idea to mention that the Randolph/Wabash station has been demolished and is now the Washington/Wabash station” Good point. Indeed, there are a more than a few things that have changed in the 5 years since I did that video. I stole the idea from the “One City, Five Hours” series that United used to have in their Hemisphere’s magazine. The locations are still good -- Wrigley Field, Millenium Park, the Picasso. I’m not sure in this age of Uber if the focus on the subway/the L is still valid. I may see if I can lightly edit this video -- insert some text to send people to the right station, and update the 1-day travel pass options -- and then think about some new options, like maybe a craft beer taproom-focused layover tour. There you go, One City, Five Taprooms and then come roaring back into the TSA line. Hmmm, I may need to rethink that one.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you’re thinking about any questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Ethereal (nop mix) by @nop (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Lancefield/34818</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Travel Is Turning Me Hipster</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Not wanting to turn this into the “Luggage Today” podcast, but when I was shifting things from my Bluesmart to my new Victorinox bag, I also restructured my toiletries kit. And as I was going through the contents -- what stays, what don’t I need anymore -- it struck me how much my travelling had changed something as basic as how I started my day.</li>\r\n 	<li>It started years, no decades ago -- sometime in the late ‘80’s or early ‘90’s. I was living in Philadelphia and flying to Europe pretty frequently, and at that time, the only real direct flight over the Atlantic (can I tell you how much I hate it when people say “The Pond”; it just puts my teeth on edge) was a BA 747 into Heathrow. Now, back then, I loved Heathrow. It was a great airport with fantastic connections. Now it’s an overcrowed shitshow that I avoid at all costs, but back then, it was great. Anyhow, at some point, Heathrow security required all electric devices to be pulled out for screening. Note I didn’t say “electronic”; this was before laptops and tablets and mobile phones were ubiquitous. No, this meant things like my electric razor had to be pulled out of my bag. Two go-rounds with Heathrow security and that Philips razor got jettisoned for a Gillette non-electric blade.</li>\r\n 	<li>Fast forward a decade-and-a-half to August 2006. I woke up in the SFO Marriott to the news of the foiled plot to blow up London-to-US flights by disguising separate explosive ingredients in soda bottles then then assembling and detonating them on board. I was trying to fly back the next day. Baggage check lines exploded when all the flyers with toothpaste, shaving cream, make-up -- pretty much everyone -- were made to check their bags. That weekend, I re-worked my toiletries kit -- hitting the local Whole Foods for tooth powder to replace toothpaste, hair wax for hair gel, and trading the shaving cream that I picked up in that last revamp for a badger hair shaving brush. I think this was the tipping point -- when my kit started to skew hipster.</li>\r\n 	<li>Fast forward another decade-and-a-half to this Christmas. My son gives me a selection of travel sized shaving soaps, each in their own tin container with a screw top. My daughter gives me a bottle of Lush toothy tabs -- kinda compressed tooth powder. These immediately go into my travel kit. My son forwards me a Massdrop buy for an Oristo razor -- a $100 version of my grandfather’s safety razor, precision engineered for a “very efficient yet non-aggressive shaving experience”. I think seriously about this. My toiletry kit has gone almost full hipster.</li>\r\n 	<li>And though I’ve slagged on the TSA for God knows how many episodes over the life of this podcast, I do have to thank them for one thing, keeping my toiletry kit from going full-on hipster, because I know they’ll never allow me to shift to shaving with a straight razor.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">My Flaming Heart by Wired Ant (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Wired_Ant/36862 Ft: Javolenus</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Every Delay Has a Story</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>In the last episode, I talked about why I dropped my subscription to TripIt’s paid “Pro” service -- the main benefit, live flight status notifications, was slower than the free notifications I was getting from the airlines themselves -- from American, United, and Delta. However, when we were idling in the New Orleans airport waiting on our flight back to Chicago, I found the Southwest delay notifications lagged way behind TripIt Pro. Not that I re-upped my TripIt Pro subscription; my wife forgot to cancel a 30-day trial she signed up for, so she now has a year’s subscription. I, instead, was using FlightAware, specifically the feature I’ve talked about in prior episodes that shows you where your plane is. From that I could see that the delay wasn’t because of the snow in Chicago; the plane was spending a lot of time on the ground in Ft Lauderdale, the stop before New Orleans. So I hit Twitter -- Why is flight 860 sitting in FLL so long? The reply -- “Hey, Mark. We know delays can be tough, and apologize for the inconvenience. It looks like Flight #860 is delayed due to inclement weather earlier in the day.” Perhaps a delay in Denver, but why the long ground turn in FLL? No answer.</li>\r\n 	<li>United announced a pilot program in January called “Every Flight Has A Story” where they’d push out much more detailed information on delayed flights -- rather than “Late Arriving Aircraft”, it would be “Our maintenance team is replacing an item on your plane and needs extra time to complete”. The pilot was scheduled for Houston and Phoenix. I haven’t seen much reaction to it, but at least for me, having some sense for the reason for a delay let’s me better figure out what I’m going to do next. I’m much less trusting of a newly posted departure time if I know the inbound plane is still on the ground, or if it’s a maintenance delay.</li>\r\n 	<li>Of course, some of those explanations could be a bit more embarrassing than others. Like for Southwest, a couple of days after our flight back to Chicago, they had to cancel more than 200 flights because they ran out of de-icing fluid at Midway airport. You get that notification, and you’re shaking your head as you dial up an airline that knows how to fly in the winter.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #138</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_138.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #138 — Travel Turning Me Hipster; Every Delay Has a Story','','inherit','closed','closed','','1947-revision-v1','','','2018-06-03 08:07:39','2018-06-03 13:07:39','',1947,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/06/03/1947-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2015,1,'2018-06-03 08:10:19','2018-06-03 13:10:19','[caption id=\"attachment_1925\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/IMG_20141210_231414.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1925\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/IMG_20141210_231414-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> How many nights to get Leopard Print status?[/caption]\r\n\r\nSo we\'re four weeks into the new year and 30-50% of us have already ditched our New Year\'s resolutions, but we still have time to get our 2018 travel status lined up. Over the holiday break, I bought a non-smart carry-on to replace my now-banned Bluesmart; I walk through my shopping criteria. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_137.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\nThanks to <a href=\"http://go.travelperk.com/travelcommons\">TravelPerk</a> for sponsoring this episode. [soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/388761270\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]<!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #137:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. This episode is sponsored by <a href=\"http://go.travelperk.com/travelcommons\">TravelPerk</a>, the #1 rated business travel tool on the Internet. It’s been a light travel month, just a drive down to Nashville, and a couple of trips over to Charlottesville, VA, which has been a nice break from what is otherwise turning out to be a brutally cold winter in Chicago. The day after New Years, I walked out of the house into a -10℉ morning -- not windchill, it was -10℉ ambient. Welcome to January. I had my team travel here last week for a 2018 kick-off meeting. No one accused us of boon-doggling. The guy from Phoenix did say he was filing an employee abuse claim though.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’ve found myself drinking less craft beer and much more Scotch whisky in this month; -10℉ is definitely brown liquor weather. Luckily, my daughter brought home a nice bottle of 18-year-old <a href=\"http://www.glenscotia.com/\">Glen Scotia</a> from Edinburgh for Christmas. I’ve made a sizable dent in it.</li>\r\n 	<li>On my first trip to Charlottesville, after being off the road for four weeks, it took me forever to gather up all the bits of my regular travel carry from around the house. Normally, my travel carry stays in my backpack and my suitcase; I buy duplicates of things like hair brushes and headphones just so I don’t need to pull them out of my bag. But for some reason, all discipline broke down over the holidays and my carefully curated travel carry was spread/spewed throughout the house. Luckily, my ride to ORD was 5 minutes late. I took my Bluesmart bag, squeezed in one last trip before American’s January 15th smart luggage ban took effect. I tweeted a picture of my Bluesmart before boarding. American replied “We\'re glad you\'re flying with us and appreciate your cooperation with our team.” My response -- “Not that I have much of a choice…” Especially with IATA recommending the ban to its 300 airline members. My new non-smart Victorinox bag arrived on my front porch before the ban clicked in, so once I shift everything from the Bluesmart to the Victorinox, I’ll power down the Bluesmart, delete its app from my iPhone, and consign it to the corner of the attic with all my other retired bags -- my own Land of Misfit Bags.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mactonite/29469\">Static</a> by Darkroom (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mactonite/29469 </span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Starting off the New Year, I did a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/01/01/looking-back-at-2017-the-highs-and-the-lows/\">blog post</a> summarizing some of the high and low points that we talked about in 2017. The high points? Things like Uber and Lyft driver stories, yet more craft beer taprooms, and Hertz’s President Circle Aisle. Low points? Airlines dragging passengers from planes, everybody lobbying for 5-star reviews, and, no surprise, the smart luggage ban.</li>\r\n 	<li>Allan Marko, not just a long-time TravelCommon’s listener, but probably one of the original listeners showed his roots by posting on the original comment channel -- the TravelCommons website\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Have had our Away luggage for only about six months prior to the battery ban. I really like the ‘smart’ charging feature. Luckily the Away battery is a nicely designed self-contained and easily removable unit (two screws; screwdriver included!) Now the battery lives in my backpack, and the luggage still usable.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\"></li>\r\n 	<li>Allan’s psychic capabilities are showing. I think Away is the only major smart bag that meets the airlines’ requirement for a removable battery. But for me, charging wasn’t the major use case for me. I’m typically fine with my Anker lipstick charger. And if I forget to recharge that, my Verizon mobile WiFi hotspot also doubles as a charger. For me, the GPS tracking was the main use case -- for those times I had to check my bag, it was nice to know that it had also made it to my destination -- a use case that requires power. Pull out the battery and no more tracking. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted.</li>\r\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\"></li>\r\n 	<li>Jim McDonough replied to the Twitter announcement of the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">last episode</a> where I wondered if I was the last generation of cash payers. Jim wrote\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I use cash a) at the local farmer’s market; b) pay for haircuts . . . having a hard time coming up with c)</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Jim, I dunno. Looking at your Twitter profile picture, you look like you could land in my generation. I apologize for using a card for anything under $20. Although I have to say that more and more microbrewery taprooms only take credit cards. I don’t apologize there; or at the self-service tills in Home Depot or Tesco’s -- mostly because there’s no one to apologize to even though they will take cash.</li>\r\n 	<li>Natalie on the British Airways social media team <a href=\"https://twitter.com/British_Airways/status/943550974102245376\">tweeted back</a> at me about the other topic on the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">last episode</a> -- about how hard it can be to cash in on loyalty points. You’ll remember that I talked about all the hassles I had in transferring Avios points from BA to Iberia, until I got a BA agent with solid northern accent. Natalie of BA said\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Hey Mark! Thanks for tagging us in your article. I\'m glad to hear that one of our \'Geordie\' colleagues was able to help you redeem some of your Avios. It\'s a shame you didn\'t catch her name though.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Absolutely it was a shame. She deserves huge props.</li>\r\n 	<li>In that same riff, I mentioned how my email to Iberia to clean up my name on my Iberia Plus account -- which might have been the root cause of my point transfer problem -- seemed to have fallen into a black hole. Well, apparently it didn’t. Soon after that episode, I got a letter from Iberia with a new card that had my correct name. That was nice. Would’ve been just a bit nicer if they’d hit the Reply button while handling the email and typed, I dunno, just 8 words -- “Got it fixed; new card in the mail” But it got done -- all of it, Avios points, non-stop ORD-MAD flight on points, and now, a card with my correct name.</li>\r\n 	<li>And that Iberia letter was probably one of the last surprises I got when I open the mailbox at home. Somehow, I’m not quite sure how, I signed up for a US Post Office service that sends me an email every morning with scanned images of letters I’m going to receive that day. When I got that first email, I was kinda “What the hell?”, but now I kinda like it, especially when I’m on the road. No more wondering what bills showed up, or during the holidays, who had sent us Christmas cards. It does kinda take the surprise out of opening the mailbox -- though not that there was much left since 90% of our physical mail is junk -- but it is kinda entertaining.</li>\r\n 	<li>Back in August, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/08/27/podcast-132-travel-apps-on-my-phone/\">episode #132</a> about the travel apps I have loaded on my phone, I talked about using the paid or “Pro” version of TripIt, and about how it was on the bubble for me because of how the airlines have improved the flight status notifications in their own apps. In 4 months since then, the airline apps have pretty consistently notified me of gate changes and delays faster than TripIt Pro. And so when my subscription ran out a few weeks ago, I ignored the renewal alerts. I’ll still use the free version -- I like the way TripIt consolidates separate plane, hotel, and rental car reservations into a single trip -- kinda replicating the itineraries your travel agent used to give you when they booked your entire trip. But paying $50 for what are now slower, redundant flight alerts? I’ll spend it on beer or brown liquor instead.</li>\r\n 	<li>I don’t know if it’s just me, but the cadence for boarding groups has gotten out of control. I think I was on a Delta flight where I was boarding group 1 or 2, but was the 4th or 5th group to board, after Delta One, and then Platinum Medallion, then Gold Medallion, Sky Team Elite -- it went on forever. American is a bit better -- only one non-numeric boarding group for the invite-only Concierge Key gang (remember George Clooney in Up In The Air) -- and then 1 through 9(!). I do love the announcement “If you don’t have a boarding group number, then board Group 7” which feels a bit random. Where it really becomes fun is on a regional jet, when the gate agent runs through this cadence for a plane with only 40-50 passengers and all the carry-on bags are gate… I mean valet checked. “Now boarding passengers in Group 1, Group 2, Group 3…” Four people board… “Groups 5, 6, 7, and the rest of you” followed by general scrum in front of the agent. I know the airlines have PhDs in psychology, sociology, and linear programming working on this stuff, but it continues to be a cluster</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>And thanks to this episode’s sponsor TravelPerk</li>\r\n 	<li>Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/11/20/podcast-135-airport-bingo-new-old-travel-pc/\">November episode</a>, I talked about American\'s last-minute cancellation of my night flight to Charlottesville and my ensuing scramble to find a replacement flight and to make sure the Hyatt Place didn\'t flush my reservation. But if I\'d booked with TravelPerk, they would\'ve done the scrambling for me.\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>This all-in-one business travel management tool includes a team of highly qualified agents ready to rescue disgruntled travelers from any scenario 24/7.</li>\r\n 	<li>It’s because of making magic happen in times like this that TravelPerk is now the #1 rated business travel tool on the internet.</li>\r\n 	<li>You\'ll love them because you can finally take control of your travel schedule, have freedom to book alternative accommodation like Airbnb, and have a built-in rescue team when stuff goes south. Remove some stress from the equation, go to <a href=\"http://go.travelperk.com/travelcommons\">go.travelperk.com/travelcommons</a> for a no-commitment test drive.</li>\r\n 	<li>It’s free forever if you to <a href=\"http://go.travelperk.com/travelcommons\">go.travelperk.com/travelcommons</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Psykick/52938\">Another Way</a> by Psykick (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Psykick/52938</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Plan for 2018 Travel Perks</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>So here we are, 4 weeks into the new year and anywhere from a third to a half of us have already ditched our New Year\'s resolutions and are now in full anticipation of Super Bowl queso dip. But while your dry January may have been washed out early, you still have time to get your 2018 travel perks in place.</li>\r\n 	<li>Almost all travel perks come from status in loyalty programs and all those status earning counts reset on Jan 1, so the first step is to match up what you think your 2018 travel plans will be to your loyalty programs. Any gaps? If you think you’ll start flying to Seattle (maybe helping to shill your hometown for Amazon’s HQ2), you’ll probably want to sign up for Alaskan Airlines Mileage Plan, where before, it might not have been worth the extra junk mail.</li>\r\n 	<li>Or if you’re already a member, do a status match. When I took a new CIO job some years back, all the hotels near our offices were Hilton brands. I had a Hilton\'s Honors card but just in basic blue as opposed to my top-of-the-line sparkly platinum Marriott card. After I hit the “reset my password” link on the Hilton website, I went straight to their status match page. Right at the top, it says “For the next 90 days,... we’ll match your elite status with any other loyalty program.” If you complete 4 or 8 stays over those 90 days, the match is good for the year. So rather than having to grind my way to Hilton status, I started enjoying it on Day 1. I had a friend do that with American -- parlay his United 1K status to Executive Platinum when he moved from Denver to Dallas. Much better than slumming in Boarding Group 5 until you clear the first status bar.</li>\r\n 	<li>Doing this, you also need to keep in mind the different ecosystems; the partnerships that tie travel companies together. It used to be just the international alliances -- Star, SkyTeam, OneWorld. When I knew I’d be traveling down to South Africa, racking up some serious business class mileage, I had two real options -- SAA out of JFK and IAD, or DL out of ATL. Living in Chicago, I chose SAA because they’re part of Star Alliance with United, and I’d get a lot more use from United status out of Chicago than I would Delta. And it’s getting even more combinatorial now with United and Marriott are status matching each other.</li>\r\n 	<li>And then there’s the credit cards -- both affinity (United and Chase Visa, American and Citi MasterCard) and non (Amex Platinum, Chase Sapphire Reserve). You gotta do the math. For example, Amex’s Platinum card is $550/year. But with that, you get Membership Rewards points that transfer to airlines and hotels, access to Delta lounges and Amex’s Centurion Lounges, which if you travel frequently to DFW, LAS, MIA, LGA, and now JFK, is great. They’re much better than, say American’s Admirals Clubs. I wish they had one in Chicago. Amex also picks up the $100 Global Entry or $85 PreCheck fee, gives you 10 GoGo WiFi sessions, $200 in Uber credit, and some other benefits. If you’ll use these benefits, that $550 can be a better deal than, say, the $95 that the United Chase will cost you. However, that United Chase will get you baggage fee waiver, two United Club passes, and status boarding. If you don’t travel a huge amount and live in a United hub like Houston, the United card could be a better deal. But you gotta think about your travel, do the math, and sign up for it now so you have all year to maximize the status benefits.</li>\r\n 	<li>And while you’re in this planning zone, do yourself a big favor sign up and make an appointment for Global Entry if you do international travel, or PreCheck if you’re mostly a domestic flyer. If it makes sense for you to get an Amex Platinum or Chase Sapphire Reserve card, it’ll be free. To me, TSA and Customs lines are still the worst part of travel. While you’re figuring out how to bump your status up your status on airlines and hotels, do yourself a favor and step out of those TSA and Customs lines too.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/flatwound/14476\">The Long Goodbye</a> by John Pazdan (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/flatwound/14476</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>How to Shop For A Suitcase</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>OK, perhaps a bit presumptuous of a title; perhaps it’s “How I shopped for a suitcase.” But before we go there, let’s summarize the set up from past episodes -- my 10-year old black Swiss Army carry-on rendered itself unusable before Thanksgiving when the handle became stuck in the extended position (luckily as I was getting in a car coming home from ORD and not while trying to stow it in an overhead while boarding), I hate shopping for suitcases so I recharge my Bluesmart smart bag and put it back into service in December only to have it banned from air travel as of last week.</li>\r\n 	<li>So now I’m forced to shop for a suitcase. Like any good consultant, I, of course, construct a prioritized list of evaluation criteria. First, it has to be a carry-on. Now that may seem a bit of a “duh”, but there is some ambiguity; the <a href=\"https://travel-made-simple.com/carry-on-size-chart/\">approved height</a> varies by airline between 19 and 22-inches. If I wanted to play it safe, I’d go for a 20-inch bag, but I’m also want to maximize how much I can carry-on. I tilt toward choosing space. Most US carriers accept a 22-inch bag and that’s mostly what I fly, and even when I’m on European carriers I usually have enough alliance status (my American Platinum status carrying over to OneWorld) to glide past the baggage sizer.</li>\r\n 	<li>Which leads to the second criterion -- it needs to be black. As I said in my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/10/18/ruthless-packing-tips/\">Ruthless Packing Tips post</a> in October, black not only makes you look thinner, it makes your bag look thinner to gate agents scanning for bag-sizer bait.</li>\r\n 	<li>Third, 2 wheels, not 4. This is a bit more of a personal preference. My Bluesmart is a 4-wheel spinner and my wife swears by hers, but because the 4 wheels have to extend from the bottom of the bag, spinners sacrifice packing space for agility, while 2-wheelers can embed their wheels up in the backplane of the bag. Again trying to maximize packing space, I go for the 2-wheeler, and with the biggest wheels I can find to make it an easier, smoother pull. I was kinda surprised how this limited my selection. Spinners definitely rule.</li>\r\n 	<li>My fourth criterion -- I wanted the inside of the suitcase to be as plain and empty as possible. No bunch of zip compartments, or built-in suit hangers, or ratcheting down clothes dividers; just a wide open box that free to structure how I want for each trip. I was surprised how tough this was to find. Indeed, in the end, I couldn’t find it and settled for a bag where I could detach the suit hanger and clothes divider and stash that stuff up in the Land of Misfit Bags next to the Bluesmart.</li>\r\n 	<li>Whittling through all that, I ended up buying a black Victorinox Werks Traveler 5.0 2-wheeler. Victorinox is what used to be Swiss Army; I figured if my last bag survived 10 years of hard mileage, that said something for durability. It was also one of the few where I could detach all the internal storage stuff. And it has that additional zipper to expand the width by an inch -- kinda like when you drop a notch on your belt after Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner; for those times when I’m flying home and have bought a few too many bottles of wine or brown liquor.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #137</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>Thanks again to TravelPerk for sponsoring this episode. Remember to go to <a href=\"http://go.travelperk.com/travelcommons\">go.travelperk.com/travelcommons</a> for a test drive</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_137.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #137 — New Year\'s Travel Status Tips; How to Shop for a Suitcase','','inherit','closed','closed','','1916-revision-v1','','','2018-06-03 08:10:19','2018-06-03 13:10:19','',1916,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/06/03/1916-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2016,1,'2018-06-03 08:11:50','2018-06-03 13:11:50','[caption id=\"attachment_1938\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/IMG_0091.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1938\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/IMG_0091-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Rejected and Retired Suitcases[/caption]\r\n\r\nI\'ve been putting off shopping for a new bag for a long time, as in years. Up until a few months ago, I was using a vintage Swiss Army black roller that still sported the Vietnamese and Hong Kong customs stickers it picked up in 2008. A few years ago, I\'d retired it in favor of a grey Samsonite bag, but had to force the old vet back into service when the Samsonite’s rollers got wonky — the rubber wore off and the wheels splayed out after 2½ years of trundling across New Orleans sidewalks.\r\n\r\nBut then, right before Thanksgiving, the old Swiss guy resigned, rendering itself unusable when its retractable handle stuck in the extended position. I was still able to avoid luggage shopping, though. I  pulled out the Bluesmart smart bag I\'d bought from their Indiegogo fundraising campaign. I recharged the battery, updated its iPhone app, and put it back into service -- only to read the next week that it was about to be banned by airlines because its lithium battery isn\'t removable.\r\n\r\nWith nothing left in the attic, I was finally forced to shop for a new suitcase. But what to buy? I started with a survey of fellow travelers. Actually, it was more like stalking; I eyeballed every piece of luggage that passed by me for two weeks. Then I wandered through the basement luggage departments of a couple of Macy\'s, opening bags and waving off clerks. After all that, I gave into my OCD and built this prioritized list of suitcase shopping evaluation criteria:\r\n<ol>\r\n 	<li><em>The bag has to be a carry-on</em>. Now that may seem a bit of a “duh”, but there is some ambiguity; the <a href=\"https://travel-made-simple.com/carry-on-size-chart/\">approved height</a> of a carry-on bag varies by airline between 19 and 22-inches. If I want to play it safe, I’d go for a 20-inch bag, but then I also want to maximize my carry-on space. Most US carriers accept a 22-inch bag and that’s mostly what I fly, and even when I’m on European carriers I usually have enough alliance status to glide past the baggage sizer. So I tilt the balance in favor of maximum packing volume and go for a 22-inch bag.</li>\r\n 	<li>I<em>t needs to be black</em>. As I said in my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/10/18/ruthless-packing-tips/\">Ruthless Packing Tips post</a>, black not only makes you look thinner, it makes your bag look thinner to gate agents scanning for bag-sizer bait. Black also doesn\'t show stains. My grey Samsonite bag, after 3-4 months of my travel schedule, started to look a lot less non-black. Smudges from grease on overhead bin hinges, muck from taxi trunks, muddy water from New Orleans gutters, spilled coffee…. It\'s why I can\'t have nice luggage.</li>\r\n 	<li><em>Two wheels, not four</em>. This is more of a personal preference. My Bluesmart is a 4-wheel spinner and my wife swears by hers, but because the 4 wheels have to extend from the bottom of the bag, spinners sacrifice packing space for agility. Also, I find 4-wheelers have a tendency to wander off -- rolling away down ramps or on uneven floors. I go for the 2-wheeler, and with the biggest wheels I can find to make it an easier, smoother pull. I was surprised how much this limited my selection. Spinners definitely rule.</li>\r\n 	<li><em>The inside of the suitcase has to be plain and empty</em>. No clever collection of zipped compartments, or built-in suit hangers, or ratcheting clothes dividers; just a wide open box that I\'m free to structure how I want for each trip. I was surprised how this also limited my selection. Indeed, in the end, I couldn’t find just a plain box, and settled for a bag where I could detach the suit hanger and clothes divider and stash that stuff up in Luggage Retirement Home next to the Bluesmart.</li>\r\n 	<li><em>Buy on-line</em>. A <a href=\"https://www.testfacts.com/luggage-prices-analyzed/\">recent study</a> of 32,672 luggage price showed that you can save an average of $110/39% buying on-line. Walmart and Target’s on-line stores had the highest discounts. And while Amazon was in 10th place for average discount (in the 40% range), it was tops with the greatest variety — over 12,000 luggage items.</li>\r\n</ol>','Tips for Buying A Suitcase','','inherit','closed','closed','','1937-revision-v1','','','2018-06-03 08:11:50','2018-06-03 13:11:50','',1937,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/06/03/1937-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2017,1,'2018-06-03 08:12:43','2018-06-03 13:12:43','<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/iStock-454294231.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1906\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/iStock-454294231-213x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"213\" height=\"300\" /></a>After clearing the mists of last night\'s New Year\'s Eve party, I thought about some of the highlights and lowlights of my travels in 2017\r\n\r\n<strong><u>Highlights</u></strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li><strong>Uber/Lyft Driver Stories</strong> -- Not only are Uber and Lyft rides easier to get than most taxis, the stories the drivers tell are a lot more entertaining. A Lyft driver in Charlottesville gave me a local\'s view on the Robert E. Lee statue controversy while a Uber driver told me why driving full-time in Chicago traffic was less stressful than being a hotel manager.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Continued Craft Beer Explosion</strong> -- Regular podcast listeners know that I have a craft beer obsession. The hunt for new beers and microbrewery taprooms helps me break out of the usual travel rut -- places like a light industrial area in Richmond, Virginia and a North African neighborhood on the west side of Paris.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Hertz\'s Presidents Circle Aisle</strong> -- My experience with Hertz has completely turned around -- from enduring a steady stream of beat-up high-mileage cars to picking out a new Jag. Three years ago, I paid no attention to Hertz\'s loyalty program. Two months ago, I made sure I had enough rentals to re-up my Presidents Club status for this year.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Hotel Flat-Screen TVs with Open HDMI Ports </strong>-- When I started traveling, hotel TVs were locked down tight because in-room movie rentals was a major revenue stream. While that stream dried up years before LodgeNet went bankrupt in 2013, hotels kept their TVs locked down and we resigned ourselves to watching Netflix on 14-inch laptop screens. But now that the latest generation of flat-screen TVs have open HDMI ports, I\'ve added an HDMI cable to my standard travel kit so I can plug my laptop in and watch movies on a 40-inch screen again.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Google Translate</strong> -- Thinking through my international travel this year (Paris, Vienna, Budapest), Google Translate has evolved to being pretty close to magic. The Word Lens feature lets you point your phone camera at, say, a menu and see English words replacing the French in real time. Saves you from mistakenly ordering chicken when you mix up poulet and poisson after a couple of cocktails.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Top 3 Airports</strong> -- SFO\'s new Terminal 2 which I think is better than perennial list toppers Singapore and Hong Kong, and then two pleasant surprises in May at Vienna and Budapest airports.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><strong>Lowlights</strong></span>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li><strong>Passenger-Airline Personnel Conflicts Become Physical</strong> -- The worst thing that used to happen was raised voices between a gate agent and a bumped passenger. That now seems very quaint after United Airlines had ORD Security Police drag a passenger off a plane to make room for one of their employees.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Overtourism </strong>-- The #TouristGoHome campaign gaining traction in places like Barcelona and Venice recasts  the travel industry as a resource-consuming zero-sum game that crowds out and prices out locals from the historic centers of their cities. Iceland is the poster child for overtourism with an estimated 2.3 million tourists in 2017 visiting a country with 340,000 residents. It\'s a wider threat, though; the dark side of the growth of Airbnb and budget airlines like WOW Air.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Smart Luggage Ban</strong> -- After two years of carrying GPS-enabled bags from start-ups like Bluesmart without incident, US airlines decided just before Christmas that the batteries powering those location trackers are a fire hazard and will be banned as of January 15. A lot of frequent travelers are going to need to find closet space for their expensive but now-obsolete luggage.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Full Planes with Tight Seats</strong> -- Airlines are flying fuller planes -- reducing the number of empty seats, and adding more rows. The tighter confines of the coach cabin make it difficult to do much more than sit up straight and listen to podcasts. I\'ve given up on trying to work on airplanes. It seems almost anti-social to try to open a laptop.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Lobbying for High Review Ratings </strong>-- More and more hotels, restaurants, and other travel businesses see anything other than a 5-star rating as an insult.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Bottom 3 Airports</strong> -- New York-LaGuardia (construction disruptions reinforce its bottom spot), Munich, and Atlanta (60-90 minutes of heavy traffic between the airport and most of Atlanta\'s business destinations)</li>\r\n</ul>','Looking Back at 2017 — The Highs and The Lows','','inherit','closed','closed','','1905-revision-v1','','','2018-06-03 08:12:43','2018-06-03 13:12:43','',1905,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/06/03/1905-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2018,1,'2018-06-03 08:14:06','2018-06-03 13:14:06','[caption id=\"attachment_1895\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/iStock-502842002.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1895\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/iStock-502842002-300x200.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"200\" /></a> A C-Note for you, and you, and you...[/caption]\r\n\r\nAfter traveling with younger colleagues who pay for everything with cards, I wonder if I\'m the last generation of cash payers. I also talk about the upcoming smart luggage ban on US airlines and a long Saturday afternoon trying to redeem some British Airways Avios points. All this, a new Uber driver story, and a few Christmas carols at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_136.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/371970371\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /] <!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #136:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL on what has been a very light travel month, just one trip to New York and then back down to Charlottesville, VA before an early wrap-up of my 2017 travel. I wanted to avoid flying into LGA because of the construction, but UA’s EWR monopoly jacks the price difference way beyond what I can justify, so I gritted my teeth and booked the LGA flight. It was amazingly smooth for Monday morning rush hour in ORD. Walked straight into the PreCheck line. There were a ton of people there -- as is typical on a Monday morning, lots of professional travelers -- but everything moved smoothly. The TSA stations were fully staffed; there was a minimal number of amateur travelers in PreCheck, and so what appeared to be a very daunting line was an easy 5-minute exercise. After that, I walked straight up the Starbucks register and ordered a coffee, and had a easy walk down to the gate. We left ORD on-time and landed at LGA 30 minutes early! I checked my watch again to make sure it was right. On a good day, I consider an flight between ORD and LGA to be on-time if I’m not more than 30 minutes late. I’m not sure I’ve ever arrived early. Indeed, somebody sent me a press release last month with stats saying that Chicago-New York is second only to SF-LA in the list of most disrupted air routes. All this joyousness hit the wall, though -- almost literally -- when I walked out of LGA Terminal B smack into the cab line which, for those of you not familiar with LGA, should not be see when you walk out the front of Terminal B because the cab rank is on the side of Terminal B. Well, maybe they moved it for the construction. Nope, it was where it always has been. So my time budget balanced out -- 30-minute early arrival funded the 30-minute cab ride. Easy come, easy go.</li>\r\n 	<li>I was only in New York for Monday day -- arrived at 11am and left at 8pm -- which meant trying to find a cab on 5th Ave to take me to LGA during rush hour. Or used to. Whatever your opinions on Uber or ride sharing in general, the ability to easily get a ride from Manhattan to LGA without dancing into the street, hiding your luggage behind a trash can, and pleading with the one guy who finally stopped is justification enough for its existence. And I’m obviously not the only one who feels this way, so there are gobs of Uber drivers on, say, 5th Ave at rush hour, making it hard to spot your ride and easy to get into someone else’s. Monday night, I noticed a new option on the Uber screen that was showing my driver crawling toward me through Midtown traffic. “Click here to change the color of your driver’s Uber badge”. I clicked and got a color spectrum slider, which kept me occupied while I was waiting. I changed the color to red, then blue, then yellow, and then Uber said he was a block away, to some shade of lime green. I looked up, and there was an SUV with a lime green Uber badge in the window. I hopped in and off we went. I asked him how his evening was going. “Fine,” he said, “though I think this Uber light is acting up. Just now, it started changing all sorts of colors.”</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/copperhead/40520\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen</a> by copperhead (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: Admiral Bob, Javolenus , Sackjo22</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Roger Nash sent a note on Twitter with a pointer to the Transport for London’s new Oyster app. In the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/11/20/podcast-135-airport-bingo-new-old-travel-pc/\">last episode</a>, I talked about my growing stack of contactless -- tap ‘n’ go -- transit cards, and difference between re-loading my Chicago Ventra card with a smartphone app vs. having to queue at a machine to top up my Oyster card when we were in London last summer. TfL launched their Oyster app a few months back and seem to be aggressively rev’ing it to add features. The only problem for me -- it’ll only take a UK-based payment card. So I’ll have to sponge off my daughter if I want to skip the machine. That’ll be a fun role change…</li>\r\n 	<li>Also got a good run of comments on the Airport Bingo topic.\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>An anonymous comment asking “Since when do bingo cards have a story arc?” Fair point…</li>\r\n 	<li>Donna Smith Pleiman on Twitter suggested a square for “sweaty guy racing onto the plane at the last minute plops down next to you, proceeds to take his shoes off.” Yeah, that one happens a little too often -- because once is too often</li>\r\n 	<li>Rob said: I like the \"3-adjective rule\". I\'ve always said, \"If you have to inhale to finish your drink order... you don\'t actually like coffee.\" Good point, if you have to use circular breathing in the Starbucks line, you need to re-think your beverage choices.</li>\r\n 	<li>And Steve Frick built his own card in a post on his Back and Gone Again blog. “Since not everyone travels by air, we’re focusing on travel in general,” he says and then spins through his set of 25 spaces. I’ll post a <a href=\"http://www.hypeorlando.com/back-and-gone-again/2017/11/22/holiday-travel-bingo/\">link</a> to it in the show notes.</li>\r\n 	<li>And with Steve throwing down that challenge, I stole a couple of his squares so I could expand my Airport Bingo card to the full 25 spaces in a blog post on the TravelCommons site last week. Check it out; I hope it keeps you entertained on your trip to Grandma’s house.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>The smart luggage ban announced by Delta, American, and Alaska with the other US oligopoly members United and Southwest expected to follow shortly caused a bit of a Twitter storm. Next month, January 15 to be exact, smart luggage without removable batteries will be banned. And if your smart bag is checked, you have to remove battery before it goes in the hold -- which negates one of the key benefits pitched by smart bag sellers -- the ability to track your bag through built-in GPS and cellular data. No battery, and it’s just another bag left behind on the tarmac, or as one of my funnier Twitter followers @ThankYouLeetch replied that the airlines were hard at work -- “We\'re GOING to lose your bag, and we\'ll be damned if we let the likes of YOU find it! If you must know, we are just REALLY into this monopoly thing.\" Kinda blows if you just dropped $400 on one of these bags.</li>\r\n 	<li>This would seem to cause an existential problem for category pioneer Bluesmart because none of their bags -- the original one nor the recently released Series 2 -- have removable batteries. I backed Bluesmart’s initial Indiegogo campaign back in November 2014 -- longtime podcast listener Arnoud Heijnis <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/11/22/podcast-112-holiday-airport-etiquette-travel-tax-pile-up/\">pointed it out to me</a> -- and received my bag a year later. I reviewed it in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/12/podcast-120-where-do-guidebooks-fit-in-i-hate-shopping-for-suitcases/\">episode 120</a> after a couple of months of use -- my take: “I’m kinda “meh” on all the electronics, so it’s a nice enough hard-shell wheelie bag with a couple of bells and whistles that don’t necessarily wow me.” Though I did amend that “meh” in the very <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/05/30/podcast-121-tsa-lines-my-luggage-is-where/\">next episode</a> saying “the Bluesmart is the perfect carry-on size, it’s usually right above me in the plane cabin, so the location finder isn’t that valuable. Except when I have to gate check my bag on a small regional jet. On a recent Skywest flight, it was taking my bag a long time to show up at the gate after arriving. Hmmm, I pulled out my iPhone, hit the Location button on the Bluesmart app, and it showed me that my bag had updated its location a couple of minutes prior and was indeed here. A few minutes later, it showed up in the last tranche of bags heaved up into the jet bridge. Not critical functionality, but it moves up from “meh” to “kinda handy”.”</li>\r\n 	<li>The real pain for me is that I now have to shop for another suitcase which I really hate. I finally put my 10-year-old Victorinox bag out to pasture because the handle locked itself in the extended position, and so I’d switched over to my Bluesmart for these recent trips. My last flight back from CHO was on an American Eagle regional jet. I’m waiting along the side of a cold ORD bridge with about 20 other passengers for my bag. It comes out second because, even though there’s not First Class on this plane, I’ve clung to the yellow gate check tag that I got with a First Class upgrade last month. Sparky, the young gate agent, looks at my bag as he’s handing it to me and says “Is that a smart bag? Did you take the battery out of that?” “No, because I don’t have to until January 15,” I shot back. Don’t push it, American. You’re forcing me to scrap a 2-year-old bag; I got that. But don’t make me go luggage shopping the week before Christmas.</li>\r\n 	<li>One of the topics back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/11/22/podcast-125-uber-driver-stories-overseas-for-the-election/\">episode 125</a> was life stories from my Uber and Lyft drivers. I still do ask most of my drivers how they like driving, how long they’ve been doing it, and what else they do — if it’s not their full time gig. Last month, we were taking an Uber into the city on Saturday for a beer festival. The driver was great -- very personable guy. So I ask him about his gig. He’s been doing it full-time for 2 years now. Before that, he was a hotel manager. He quit because the stress was too much -- late night calls about guests, bedbug infestations,.... He said that driving Uber in Chicago was much less stressful. Think about next time you’re about to light into the assistant night manager about a missing towel -- their job is more stressful than driving full-time in bumper-to-bumper traffic. That was an eye-opener to me. I’ve gone out of my way to be more pleasant to front desk folks ever since.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/NiGiD/48586\">O Tannenbaum / Oh Christmas Tree</a> by Martijn de Boer (NiGiD) (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license.  Ft: Admiral Bob (admiralbob77)</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Is Cash is a Waning King?</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>As I said at the start of the show, my last trip this year was ORD to LGA to CHO. I didn’t arrive too late so there were a couple of cabs waiting -- no LGA-style lines, I just hopped in. It’s a $25 flat rate to downtown Charlottesville. We pulled up to my hotel, I gave the driver a 20 and a 10 and got out of the cab. “Cash? Thanks!” he said.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’ve said this before; I try to pay all of my cab fares in cash ever since one cab driver walked me through why he hates cards. There’s a timing problem-- he has to pay for gas, tolls, airport access fees, and the taxi company that day, but he doesn’t get his money until a couple of days later. And then there’s the high fees the processing companies charge taxi drivers.</li>\r\n 	<li>But when traveling with younger colleagues, I feel like I’m the last generation of cash payers. Not only do they pay for everything with a card, many of them don’t even carry cash. Maybe I’m just getting old, or maybe I remember when you couldn’t use cards everywhere.</li>\r\n 	<li>Especially in Europe in the late ‘80’s/early ‘90’s when I would be in a different country every day on sales calls with distributors. There weren’t international ATMs -- or really ATMs of any kind. We’d get a wallet full of American Express Travelers Checks before flying out and then typically cash a $100 check at the airport currency exchange after customs. This was before the euro, so we’d juggle D Marks, Belgian and French francs, British and Irish pounds, pesetas, lira,.... Almost all of the hotels we stayed in took credit cards -- except for this one random mom-&amp;-pop place outside of Munich; nice people but they screwed up my D Mark budget -- but not all restaurants and none of the taxis did. So our currency exit strategy -- so we didn’t pay double the exchange fees for having to go in and out of a currency that we might not use for another year or so -- was to throw down most of our excess cash at the hotel in the morning, saving enough for a sandwich, the cab back to the airport and a beer at the bar -- and then put on the Amex the balance of the hotel room. It usually worked well -- except for the one time that I mixed up the exchange rate between the Swedish krona and Swiss franc. Not an unreasonable mix up -- both countries start with an S and have a lot of snow -- but the krona exchange rate was about 6 to the dollar at that time while the Swiss franc was at 1.3 to the dollar. That one definitely screwed up my end-of-day cash strategy.</li>\r\n 	<li>But I absolutely understand the use case for going all plastic. First, you’re not having to float the money between travel and reimbursement. But I gotta think convenience is the bigger play. Many companies pipe their company card transactions straight into their expense reporting systems. Makes it incredibly easy -- log into Concur or whatever, assign each charge to an expense code and submit. Nothing forgotten and you’re done in 5 minutes. With cash, you have to remember what you spent, enter it, and probably submit a receipt too. I’ll never pay for my $2 ORD Starbucks coffee with my Amex card, but when the cab fare get above $50, even I’ll charge it.</li>\r\n 	<li>I do think it’s a bit of a generational thing, though. I remember my dad always walking around with a bunch of 50’s in a money clip in his pocket. And my kids always getting a $100 bill from their Hungarian grandparents for Christmas -- we’d call it the Eastern European C note. I now have a Venmo account, but I still like paying people back in cash. Feels like I need say “Get off my lawn” but I may not have completely aged out yet. When paying my daughter’s tuition at Univ of St Andrews, one sentence on the web site caught my eye -- “Ideally tuition and accommodation fees should not be paid in cash” -- which means that someone or multiple someones has done it. It’s not a travel expense, but the image of someone walking into the St Andrews bursar’s office and stacking piles of 100 pound notes just makes me smile. Makes me want to drop a C note on my next big cab ride.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/44580\"> What Child is This (Instrumental)</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license.  Ft: Jeris</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Don’t Make It Hard to Cash in on Loyalty</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Back in October, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/10/31/podcast-134-value-of-loyalty-need-those-5-stars/\">episode 134</a>, we talked about the value of loyalty. In November, JD Powers released their 2017 Airline Loyalty Program Satisfaction Study. Powers measured satisfaction “based on four factors (in order of importance): earning and redeeming rewards; program benefits; account management; and member communication”. Not a surprising list, and placing “redeeming awards” at the top makes sense since that’s sorta the core of a loyalty program -- here’s something to incent you to fly us more.</li>\r\n 	<li>A couple of years ago, in episode 116, I talked about why, for me, British Airways’ Avios program has been the worst program for redemptions. I had over 300,000 points sitting there because it never made sense to use them. When I’d price out an award ticket between Chicago and London, the addition cash I would owe for BA’s fuel surcharges (which made sense when oil was at $120/bbl, but much less so at $50) and Heathrow landing taxes would just about equal what I’d pay for a ticket with another airline -- so the miles were worth nothing. Not exactly a best practice for an airline loyalty program.</li>\r\n 	<li>But, when BA and Iberia, both owned by the same corporate parent, kinda combined their programs into, not a single but a sorta interchangeable Avios program, I thought there might be a way to finally get some value from my forlorn BA points. I said kinda interchangeable because I now have 2 Avios accounts -- a BA Avios account and an Iberia Avios account. And since I have had my Iberia Avios account for over 90 days, I can convert my BA Avios to Iberia Avios, which let me use points for a direct ORD-MAD flight this spring at a small fraction of the cash for fees and taxes that BA would charge.</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, good. I’ve found the flights, I’ve found the page on BA.com to transfer. I enter all the account info, press the button, and get a big red error screen. Hmmm… I try it a couple of more times, same result. Different browsers, same result. In incognito mode so there’s no legacy cookies, same result. Hmmm…</li>\r\n 	<li>So I dredge around BA’s site and find a technical support number. It’s Saturday afternoon Chicago time, but after a good bit of music, I get a live guy. And he’s a good guy. Here’s the problem, your name doesn’t match on your accounts -- it’s Mark Peacock on your BA account, and Mark Peacock Peacock on your Iberia account. You’ll need to call Iberia to change that, then the transfer will go through. OK, seems reasonable enough. So I call Iberia, again listen to music and again get a live person. Good guy, but he can’t help me. Here’s a number in Spain; give them a call. Which I do, a bit more music, and then another guy. We’ll need some documentation to make that change, send a picture of the first page of your passport to this Iberia email address and we’ll make the change.</li>\r\n 	<li>Lots of calls, spoke to some nice people, but I still can’t break these BA Avios points free. So I send the email, but I don’t expect this to get resolved soon. I open another beer and gear myself up for another fare search, but decide to give BA one more call. This time, I connect with a woman with a proper northern English accent. It felt like I’d somehow overflowed into a high status group; like when I was Global Services on United and agents picking up my calls were sitting in the corporate center near ORD and could make anything happen. I relate my tale of woe; “Oh, that’s no problem,” she says. Five minutes later, it’s done. Thanks to her, I got to redeem 100,000 Avios points and am feeling a bit more hopeful about the remaining balance. The only downside -- I didn’t get the woman’s name so I could give her a shout out. By the way, 3.5 weeks later and still no response to my email to Iberia.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #136</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_136.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #136 — Is Cash A Waning King; Don’t Make It Hard to Cash in on Loyalty','','inherit','closed','closed','','1894-revision-v1','','','2018-06-03 08:14:06','2018-06-03 13:14:06','',1894,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/06/03/1894-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2019,1,'2018-06-03 08:14:50','2018-06-03 13:14:50','[caption id=\"attachment_1884\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/iStock-672260056.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1884\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/iStock-672260056-300x200.jpg\" alt=\"Bingo card played with bottle caps.\" width=\"300\" height=\"200\" /></a> Buy another round! I just saw a Hello Kitty bag![/caption]\r\n\r\nI remember playing <a href=\"https://www.walmart.com/ip/Regal-Games-License-Plate-Travel-Bingo-2-Cards/146176397\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">license plate</a> and <a href=\"https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004GVYD98/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">travel bingo</a> as a kid driving down I-65 to Grandma\'s house. But that was before deregulation, when plane flights were more comfortable but a lot more expensive. With more families flying to Grandma\'s house, airport bingo seems more on-target. A quick Google search will find all sorts of <a href=\"https://www.airhelp.com/en/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">airport</a> <a href=\"https://www.thomascook.com/blog/trip-tips/before-going-on-holiday/airport-bingo/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">bingo</a> <a href=\"https://staringispolite.github.io/airportbingo/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">cards</a> with squares for things like “police dog” and “solo traveler\" to help you  as one press release put it, “pass the time while not so patiently waiting to board.\"\r\n\r\nThat’s OK for a start, I guess. But here at TravelCommons, we try to go to the next level of road warrior-ism, so here is an airport bingo card with a more realistic take at holiday air travel...\r\n<ol>\r\n 	<li>10-15 minute traffic jam on the airport access road -- just long enough to get those stress hormones flowing</li>\r\n 	<li>You score a complimentary PreCheck notice on your boarding pass</li>\r\n 	<li>Guy in front of you in the PreCheck line walks through the metal detector with his smartphone. The alarm sounds. He stands there, puzzled. The TSA person rolls her eyes and asks, yet again, if he’d emptied his pockets. He looks surprised that his smartphone would set it off. She looks at her watch for how long ‘til her next break.</li>\r\n 	<li>Girl pulling a Hello Kitty kids-sized roller board on her way to Grandma’s. Hey, who said airport bingo had to be 100% snarky?</li>\r\n 	<li>Woman in front of you in the Starbucks line orders a half-decaf 3-pump no-foam vanilla latte, breaking the 3-adjective rule. It’s Sodexo, not your corner Starbucks. Keep it simple so the rest of us can order.</li>\r\n 	<li>Piano bar playing Christmas carols -- or if you’re in Nashville airport, a country duo</li>\r\n 	<li>A family of four or more walking abreast, slowly, so that people racing for their gates drift into the on-coming traffic, or try to thread through the crowd in front of a boarding gate.</li>\r\n 	<li>Someone sprinting down the terminal</li>\r\n 	<li>Available rocking chair. More airports are scattering these around, in front of windows in terminal connectors, in random hallways. Bonus if it’s next to an open -- and working -- electrical outlet</li>\r\n 	<li>Craft beer bar with beers you haven’t had -- get those stress hormones back under control</li>\r\n 	<li>Dueling gate announcements. Gates G20 and G22 are boarding at the same time, with each gate agent talking over the other one. You hear Boarding Group 3 called and hustle up to the door, only to be shunted over to wait in the shame station; the other gate called Boarding Group 3.</li>\r\n 	<li>One of the cabin cleaning crew is wearing reindeer antlers</li>\r\n 	<li>Free Space</li>\r\n 	<li>Passenger walking back up to the front of the plane because the bag wouldn\'t fit in the overhead</li>\r\n 	<li>Boarding is complete and there’s an empty middle seat next to you!</li>\r\n 	<li>Missing crew. You’re next to an empty middle seat, but you have no crew. Their flight was late, and pulled into a gate two terminals over. They’re on their way, but now you’re worried that some stand-by will drop into that empty seat.</li>\r\n 	<li>Window seat passenger is startled by a direct hit from the de-icing fluid spray</li>\r\n 	<li>Someone in the row in front of you is watching a compilation of Game of Thrones sex scenes on a full-sized iPad</li>\r\n 	<li>Old school flight attendant hangs a coffee pack in the rear toilet as an air freshener</li>\r\n 	<li>Passenger wearing destination-inappropriate clothing (e.g., cargo shorts on a flight to Green Bay, Canada Goose jacket on a flight to Cancun)</li>\r\n 	<li>Passengers applaud the plane landing</li>\r\n 	<li>Early arrival!  Favorable winds put you on the ground 30 minutes early. You start to think that you should travel more often.</li>\r\n 	<li>The first restroom you walk past is closed for cleaning, maintenance, or the line is out the door</li>\r\n 	<li>Your luggage is one of the first 10 bags to appear on the belt</li>\r\n 	<li>Grandma\'s car is there when you walk out of the terminal -- and the airport police didn\'t ticket her or make her recirculate</li>\r\n</ol>','Holiday Airport Bingo','','inherit','closed','closed','','1885-revision-v1','','','2018-06-03 08:14:50','2018-06-03 13:14:50','',1885,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/06/03/1885-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2020,1,'2018-06-03 08:26:29','2018-06-03 13:26:29','[caption id=\"attachment_1364\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/pic-r-1402317187245.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1364\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/pic-r-1402317187245-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Plane is here; no mechanics in sight. Do I feel lucky?\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Plane is here; no mechanics in sight. Do I feel lucky?[/caption]\r\n\r\nEven though the weather hasn\'t been bad this summer, I\'ve endured a rash of flight cancellations. Digging deeper, it\'s been regional jets operated by small airline \"partners\" that\'s causing me grief. Service to mid-sized cities has moved to regional jets, making travel to these cities more problematic. Traveling to China or India can catch US travelers by surprise with their visa requirements. We also talk about how fast airlines respond to Twitter messages, airport \"wall huggers\", carry-on luggage throwback, and I haven\'t flipped through a Skymall magazine in months. All this and more  at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_110.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below. [sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_110.mp3\"]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #110:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the Sheraton Hotel on Canal St in New Orleans. I have a room looking over the French Quarter. It’s a big convention hotel -- not my usual choice. But the price is good, it has a great gym and I’m about 5 stays away from making Starwood Platinum, so what the heck.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’m back to my usual commute -- Chicago to New Orleans -- after taking a quick jaunt out to LA last week. It is that time of year on the Gulf Coast when the weather gets a bit monotonous -- high of 91 degrees with a chance of afternoon thunderstorms. Repeat until Labor Day. But the thunderstorms are tending to be earlier than last year when they seemed to roll in about 4:30 -- right about the time when the inbound plane for my flight back to Chicago would be scheduled to arrive. While my flights home still aren’t arriving on time, I haven’t hit the big 2-4 hour downpour delays I would get last year. Not killing as much time in the airport bars, but I always appreciate New Orleans airport letting me to take me beer to the gate.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — Gargantua by Admiral Bob (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/46361 Ft: My Free Mickey, Martijn de Boer</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Flying through LAX last week reminded me of what a dump that airport is -- or I guess I should say key parts of it. Flying out of there last Thursday morning, it took me a half-hour in the Hertz bus to get to the United terminal -- P7 -- because of access road traffic which is driven by this odd concept of a bunch of little terminals arranged in a U around short term parking garages. No problem is you’re flying Southwest in P1; really lousy if you’re going out American in P5 or United in P6 or P7. Annoying, but it gets really dumpy when you get inside. There’s not enough room in each of the little terminals to properly handle post-9/11 security, so small security stations are dotted over the terminals with lines snaking down the corridors. Given that LAX is a major gateway to international traffic from Asia, it’s fair to compare LAX to Singapore and Beijing -- much newer airports, yes, but the LAX experience ends up looking like the 4th circle of Hell comparatively. Can’t be a great thing for the US tourism industry.</li>\r\n 	<li>In the <a title=\"Podcast #109 — ‘Round the World in 8 Days; Beijing Mass Transit\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/06/07/podcast-109-round-the-world-in-8-days-beijing-mass-transit-2/\">last episode</a>, I updated my thoughts on using Twitter as a concierge service, or at least another way into airlines’ customer service groups. A couple of weeks back, the Wall Street Journal had a good <a href=\"http://online.wsj.com/articles/airlines-take-to-twitter-to-keep-world-informed-1406125253\">article</a> about airlines’ use of Twitter. They had an interesting graphic showing the differences in response times between airlines. American Airlines was the top, responding to 80% of customer queries within 15 minutes and 99% within an hour. KLM, which has made a big push into social media, was much lower, responding to 12% within 15 minutes, 64% within an hour, taking a full day to get up to 99%. Of course, as we talked about last time, it’s one thing to quickly press the button on a canned responses like United’s ubiquitous “No one dislikes delays more than us”, it’s a whole other thing to do something meaningful. Check out the detailed show notes on the TravelCommons web site for a link to the article.</li>\r\n 	<li>Also in the <a title=\"Podcast #109 — ‘Round the World in 8 Days; Beijing Mass Transit\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/06/07/podcast-109-round-the-world-in-8-days-beijing-mass-transit-2/\">last episode</a>, I mentioned my big technology switch -- from my iPhone 5 to an HTC One. The main reason for the switch was battery life. I got tired of being psychotic about battery life -- stalking airport gate areas for an outlet so I could top off my battery before getting on the plane. Last month, Samsung Mobile captured that hassle perfectly in a <a href=\"youtu.be/mzMUTrTYD9s%20\">video</a> about “wall huggers”. It’s on YouTube -- I put the <a href=\"youtu.be/mzMUTrTYD9s%20\">link</a> in the show notes. Check it out. It’s painfully close to my reality with the iPhone. But not with the HTC One. The battery life is great, even with the larger screen.</li>\r\n 	<li>One thing that has bitten me recently with that change is the Android version of American Airlines’ app. I always use the phone apps for boarding passes -- one less piece of paper to keep track of, one less line to stand in if I couldn’t print it at home. I’ve never had a problem until a couple of months ago. I was boarding a flight to New Orleans, put my phone on the reader, heard the beep, the gate agent waved me through, and I sat in my seat. A bit later during the boarding process, I looked at my screen again and saw that the app had refreshed and no longer showed a seat number on the boarding pass. Hmmm, that doesn’t seem good. And I was right. Somehow, my boarding must not have registered and so, 10 minutes before the flight, they flushed me as a no-show and gave my seat to a stand-by passenger. Unfortunately for her, I was in my seat, but because I didn’t have a paper boarding pass, I couldn’t prove that it was my seat. Lucky for me, the gate agent remembered me -- it was a small regional jet --and said “Oh, this happens a lot”. I kept the seat, but the flight was delayed about 15 minutes while they figured it all out. I never had that happen with American’s iPhone app, but then again, it hasn’t happened since on the Android app. Maybe they fixed in in out of the updates they pushed out, but I usually grab a paper boarding pass on American when I have the time.</li>\r\n 	<li>And I don’t know about you all, but I haven\'t looked at Skymall or any of the other seat back pocket air magazines since the FAA allowed use of tablets &amp; smartphones during takeoffs and landings. I always have a book or two on my tablet -- right now I’m pounding through “The War that Ended Peace”, Margaret MacMillian’s history of the lead up to World War I. I also download the daily edition of the Chicago Tribune -- they have an HTML5 web app that shows you each page of the physical paper; you then tap an article to read it. The app is pretty good, sometimes a bit fiddly, but it lets you download the content for offline reading -- perfect for a flight. The Wall Street Journal’s Android app used to let you do the same thing and so I’d read that too, but earlier this year they “upgraded” the app and took away the ability to download a day’s paper. Still trying to think how they qualified that as an upgrade.</li>\r\n 	<li>I saw a guy come onto a flight last week with a hanging suit bag. Wow! That was a throwback. Even the flight attendant looked at him kinda funny when he asked to hang it in the front closet. Which was a very typical thing -- in the ‘90’s. You’d angle for early boarding so you had a chance for hanging space in the front closet. You see guys pushing all the bags to one end so he could fit his in -- not even really needing to hang it; just staying put from the pressure of the other bags. The whole business casual trend expanded the fight -- moving it out of the front galley to the entire plane aisle with rolling bags. I can’t remember the last time I used a hanging bag. I have my cleaners fold my shirts so they’re easy to pack, and then I use them (with their cardboard inserts) to cushion the folds of my slacks so they don’t wrinkle. Even on those rare occasions when I wear a suit, I fold it and put it in my rolling bag. It’s certainly a lot easier on the shoulder and back. And just a lot less awkward. I could never figure out a really good way to carry gym shoes in my hanging bag.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any travel experiences -- technology or otherwise, or just general observations, thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons\">Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em>Locovenido</em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/falik-dreams/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Falik</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong> Regional Jets Are Ruining My Life</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>One Wednesday afternoon in June, I had a particularly difficult time getting from Memphis to New Orleans. First, I felt my phone vibrate with multiple text messages while I was refueling my rental car at a particularly dicey gas station just north of the airport. I had a pretty good idea what was up -- United and TripIt were simultaneously notifying me that my flight was cancelled. I got on the phone to Amex. They were able to jam me onto a full US Air flight to Charlotte with a connection back to New Orleans. Bit of a zig zag, but OK. I returned the rental car. Just as I pulled my boarding pass out of the kiosk, I saw them update my flight -- 2 hr maintenance delay. Which would mean I’d miss the connection. I go up to the desk. Two agents -- one from USAir, one from American (I’m seeing the New American form right in front of me) -- bang on their terminal for a couple of minutes. “OK, we’ll put you in first class to DFW where you’ll connect to New Orleans” Great -- better routing with an upgrade to boot! I get to the gate. A colleague calls me. As we’re talking, I see them post a 2 hr delay -- weather in Texas -- which means I’d have 15 min for my connection if everything worked perfectly. Which it wasn’t going to because a delay with a round number -- like 2 hrs -- means they have no idea when the plane will actually leave</li>\r\n 	<li>That’s it! I give! Three airlines fail me in the span of 60 minutes. I can take a hint. I wasn’t meant to fly to New Orleans today. However, I did need to get there. So I fired up Google Maps. 5½ hour drive. Fine. I have nothing else going on tonight. I load the Hertz app, book a car, and walk back out of the terminal.</li>\r\n 	<li>I drive to the river front to get a decent dinner -- the food quality in Memphis airport, like the flight selection, have cratered since Delta shut down its hub operations there. While eating at the bar, I get the text from American -- the DFW flight cancelled. Now there’s a surprise.</li>\r\n 	<li>The drive to New Orleans to simple, straightforward -- and dull. I-55 south through Mississippi, into Louisiana until it dead ends into I-10. Take a left. You’re in New Orleans. At least that was the plan. South of Jackson, traffic comes to a complete halt. People are getting out of their cars -- never a good sign. I get out, look around an 18-wheeler and see a 10-ft column of fire. This is not a good sign. I-55 here is 2 lanes each way with a narrow shoulder. They’re not squeezing us past that. Eventually, after making an 8-point turn, I join a line of cars heading the back north along the shoulder -- one tire on the pavement, one tire in the wet red clay. After 10 minutes, I get to a gravel crossover that I don’t think will bottom out my rental Ford. I hit the frontage road, bypass the burning car, get back on a now empty I-55 and eventually pull into my hotel at 2am. Another glorious day of travel that I’m sure will inspire envy in all my Facebook friends.</li>\r\n 	<li>Now Memphis seems to be an extreme example -- a woman on my project is commuting weekly from New York and she’s yet to have an on-time, no-drama journey. Indeed, she’s spent a Thursday night in every Midwest hub city. But as airlines close hub operations in mid-size cities like Memphis and Cleveland, replacing mainline service with regional jets from smaller operators you’ve never heard -- ExpressJet or Endeavour Air -- getting to and from these cities just sucks.</li>\r\n 	<li>At first, I thought it was a United problem. After all, they’d canceled my flight down to New Orleans day before, and then the next week, they delayed my flight to Columbus, OH 2 hours because the flight before it was late getting off the gate, and then once our plane got to the gate, it needed to have a wheel bearing fixed before it could travel on. I mean, at some point, why does United bother posting actual departure and arrival times? Why not just post an AM or a PM and shoot for that? It’s not too far from what they’re doing now.</li>\r\n 	<li>But as I looked at the flights that were really screwing up my life, they weren’t the main United or American or Delta flights, they were the regional jets. My United flights to and from LAX last week were fine. But if I’d been flying a regional jet, I would’ve had a problem on the return leg. The original plane had a mechanical issue -- remember, this is United -- but they were able to get a replacement, so we left LAX on time and even got into ORD early. If it had been United Express by, say, GoJet, I would’ve been scrambling after yet another cancelled flight because they don’t have spare jets.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’m 5,000 miles away from hitting a million miles on United (I have over 2.5 million on American), but sitting at the bar that night in Memphis having dinner before my ill-fated drive, I tweeted out of pure frustration -- “Really @united? Two cancelled flights in two days? I\'ll never hit 1M miles when you cancel every flight I\'m on…” To which, of course, they pressed the button on reply #76 -- “No one dislikes flight cancellations more than we do. Do you need help with rebooking? Thanks.” My response the next morning -- “Unless you too had to drive 5+ hrs and get to your destination at 2am, you can\'t hate flight cancellations more than me…” No response… except from Dan, a longtime TravelCommons listener who chimed in -- “Sounds like an upcoming podcast topic”. Indeed it is, Dan. Some good had to come of it...</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em>Just Don’t</em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/liebig-severed/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Lie Big</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Visas Hassles</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Over the past couple of episodes I’ve been talking about my Asian travels -- to India and China -- which has forced me to become knowledgeable about something that doesn’t often affect US travelers -- visas.</li>\r\n 	<li>When US travelers decide to cross their border, if they have a passport, they’re typically good to go. When I checked Wikipedia yesterday, US passport holders <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_requirements_for_United_States_citizens\">can visit</a> 174 countries without having to buy a visa in advance, tied at the top of the “travel freedom” ranking with Germany, Sweden, United Kingdom, and Finland.</li>\r\n 	<li>But this seemed to be the year for visas for me. My son doing a semester abroad in China, then us visiting him in the Spring, and then me going to India on business a couple of months ago. I just slipped out of another trip to China -- business this time, but I figured I’d risk it since my tourist visa is valid until next Spring.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you live in a major city -- New York, DC, LA, Chicago -- it’s not too bad because most of the big visa-requiring countries have consulates there. Otherwise, you’re mailing your passport away, or paying extra for a courier service. And paying to fly to the consulate for an interview if you don’t have a plain vanilla visa application -- like anyone of Pakistani descent applying for an Indian visa.</li>\r\n 	<li>But even walking to the consulates, like I can do in Chicago, is not always so straightforward. Research is important. Hitting the consulate web site, know their hours and what paperwork they require. Our visit for my son’s Chinese student visa was amazingly smooth. We had all the paperwork, had it organized, knew the consulate closed for lunch, so we showed up early. Boom, boom, boom -- we were in and out in 30 minutes. Four days later, we went back, paid, and picked up his passport with his visa.</li>\r\n 	<li>Getting visas for our visit to Beijing in March was less smooth. There was a little hiccup in the application. Their website said we needed proof of a return flight and hotel reservations. I had all that, all organized. But what wasn’t clear on the website was that I needed a copy for each visa. I’d printed out one copy of the hotel reservation for the one room that the three of us were staying in. I needed three copies -- one for each application. I’m not the first one who’d made that mistake. The woman pointed to the copying machine. Luckily, I had a pocket full of change.</li>\r\n 	<li>Picking them up was also a bit more of a hassle. First, because it was Spring Break season, there were a number of teachers picking up batches of passports for school trips. I think the guy two positions in front of me had 50 passports. A minor inconvenience -- until their credit card machine broke. The web site was adamant -- no personal checks, no cash accepted; just credit cards or cashier’s checks. And how many people know where to get a cashiers check anymore. So everything came to a screeching halt. “We’ll take cash if you have it,” one of the women said. But I didn’t bring any because it’s $140 a head -- $420 for all of us. I look at my watch -- it’s just about closing time. I ask the guard, “Will you let me back in if I make a run down to the ATM for some cash?” “Make it quick,” he said. I sprint down, around the corner, tap out the cash machine, and sprint back up. The guard lets me back in even though he’d locked the doors for the day. Everyone’s sorta milling around, not knowing what to do. The guy who had been in front of me was there to pick up 10 visas. No way he was coming up with $1,400 in cash quickly. I politely make my way to the window. “Cash?” I ask, giving her the fresh stack of ATM 20’s. She counts them twice, gives me my passports and I’m on my way.</li>\r\n 	<li>But this was nothing compared to the cluster that was the Indian visa process. Which was a real surprise to me because four years ago, when I went for my last Indian visa, it was the pinnacle of efficiency -- I dropped everything off at 8am and at 5pm received a text that my passport was ready for pickup. Impressive. Phenomenal. I used to rave about it. Not so much any more.</li>\r\n 	<li>But based on last time, I thought this would be simple. I put all the documents together and, because I was traveling, had my wife take it downtown for me. “No worries,” I said, “Drop it off, do some shopping, grab lunch, and it should be done”. 10am my wife calls me -- “They need your flight reservations”. “I haven’t made them yet,” I told her, “They specifically say on their website not to book flights until you get the visa.” “Hold on,” she said and talked to the clerk. “Yeah, I guess things have changed. She’ll hold onto your application until you e-mail her your flight info. Oh, and she’s going to charge you another $30 for an expedite fee.” “Wait,” I said, “according to the website, I’m OK on their deadlines -- I shouldn’t need them to expedite.” “Hold on,” she said again. “Yeah, I guess those deadlines have changed too.” Unfortunately, I was only able to get a 1 year visa. If this visa expires before my next trip, I think I’ll send one of my staff in my place. I think I need to introduce some other Americans to the fine art of applying for visas.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917626811171154.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #110</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com\">Magnatune</a></li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_110.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #110 — Regional Jets Ruining My Life; Visa Hassles','','inherit','closed','closed','','1359-revision-v1','','','2018-06-03 08:26:29','2018-06-03 13:26:29','',1359,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/06/03/1359-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2021,1,'2018-06-03 08:30:27','2018-06-03 13:30:27','[caption id=\"attachment_1364\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/pic-r-1402317187245.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1364\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/pic-r-1402317187245-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Plane is here; no mechanics in sight. Do I feel lucky?\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Plane is here; no mechanics in sight. Do I feel lucky?[/caption]\r\n\r\nEven though the weather hasn\'t been bad this summer, I\'ve endured a rash of flight cancellations. Digging deeper, it\'s been regional jets operated by small airline \"partners\" that\'s causing me grief. Service to mid-sized cities has moved to regional jets, making travel to these cities more problematic. Traveling to China or India can catch US travelers by surprise with their visa requirements. We also talk about how fast airlines respond to Twitter messages, airport \"wall huggers\", carry-on luggage throwback, and I haven\'t flipped through a Skymall magazine in months. All this and more  at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_110.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below. [sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_110.mp3\"]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #110:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the Sheraton Hotel on Canal St in New Orleans. I have a room looking over the French Quarter. It’s a big convention hotel -- not my usual choice. But the price is good, it has a great gym and I’m about 5 stays away from making Starwood Platinum, so what the heck.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’m back to my usual commute -- Chicago to New Orleans -- after taking a quick jaunt out to LA last week. It is that time of year on the Gulf Coast when the weather gets a bit monotonous -- high of 91 degrees with a chance of afternoon thunderstorms. Repeat until Labor Day. But the thunderstorms are tending to be earlier than last year when they seemed to roll in about 4:30 -- right about the time when the inbound plane for my flight back to Chicago would be scheduled to arrive. While my flights home still aren’t arriving on time, I haven’t hit the big 2-4 hour downpour delays I would get last year. Not killing as much time in the airport bars, but I always appreciate New Orleans airport letting me to take me beer to the gate.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em>Gargantua</em> by Admiral Bob (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/46361 Ft: My Free Mickey, Martijn de Boer</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Flying through LAX last week reminded me of what a dump that airport is -- or I guess I should say key parts of it. Flying out of there last Thursday morning, it took me a half-hour in the Hertz bus to get to the United terminal -- P7 -- because of access road traffic which is driven by this odd concept of a bunch of little terminals arranged in a U around short term parking garages. No problem is you’re flying Southwest in P1; really lousy if you’re going out American in P5 or United in P6 or P7. Annoying, but it gets really dumpy when you get inside. There’s not enough room in each of the little terminals to properly handle post-9/11 security, so small security stations are dotted over the terminals with lines snaking down the corridors. Given that LAX is a major gateway to international traffic from Asia, it’s fair to compare LAX to Singapore and Beijing -- much newer airports, yes, but the LAX experience ends up looking like the 4th circle of Hell comparatively. Can’t be a great thing for the US tourism industry.</li>\r\n 	<li>In the <a title=\"Podcast #109 — ‘Round the World in 8 Days; Beijing Mass Transit\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/06/07/podcast-109-round-the-world-in-8-days-beijing-mass-transit-2/\">last episode</a>, I updated my thoughts on using Twitter as a concierge service, or at least another way into airlines’ customer service groups. A couple of weeks back, the Wall Street Journal had a good <a href=\"http://online.wsj.com/articles/airlines-take-to-twitter-to-keep-world-informed-1406125253\">article</a> about airlines’ use of Twitter. They had an interesting graphic showing the differences in response times between airlines. American Airlines was the top, responding to 80% of customer queries within 15 minutes and 99% within an hour. KLM, which has made a big push into social media, was much lower, responding to 12% within 15 minutes, 64% within an hour, taking a full day to get up to 99%. Of course, as we talked about last time, it’s one thing to quickly press the button on a canned responses like United’s ubiquitous “No one dislikes delays more than us”, it’s a whole other thing to do something meaningful. Check out the detailed show notes on the TravelCommons web site for a link to the article.</li>\r\n 	<li>Also in the <a title=\"Podcast #109 — ‘Round the World in 8 Days; Beijing Mass Transit\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/06/07/podcast-109-round-the-world-in-8-days-beijing-mass-transit-2/\">last episode</a>, I mentioned my big technology switch -- from my iPhone 5 to an HTC One. The main reason for the switch was battery life. I got tired of being psychotic about battery life -- stalking airport gate areas for an outlet so I could top off my battery before getting on the plane. Last month, Samsung Mobile captured that hassle perfectly in a <a href=\"youtu.be/mzMUTrTYD9s%20\">video</a> about “wall huggers”. It’s on YouTube -- I put the <a href=\"youtu.be/mzMUTrTYD9s%20\">link</a> in the show notes. Check it out. It’s painfully close to my reality with the iPhone. But not with the HTC One. The battery life is great, even with the larger screen.</li>\r\n 	<li>One thing that has bitten me recently with that change is the Android version of American Airlines’ app. I always use the phone apps for boarding passes -- one less piece of paper to keep track of, one less line to stand in if I couldn’t print it at home. I’ve never had a problem until a couple of months ago. I was boarding a flight to New Orleans, put my phone on the reader, heard the beep, the gate agent waved me through, and I sat in my seat. A bit later during the boarding process, I looked at my screen again and saw that the app had refreshed and no longer showed a seat number on the boarding pass. Hmmm, that doesn’t seem good. And I was right. Somehow, my boarding must not have registered and so, 10 minutes before the flight, they flushed me as a no-show and gave my seat to a stand-by passenger. Unfortunately for her, I was in my seat, but because I didn’t have a paper boarding pass, I couldn’t prove that it was my seat. Lucky for me, the gate agent remembered me -- it was a small regional jet --and said “Oh, this happens a lot”. I kept the seat, but the flight was delayed about 15 minutes while they figured it all out. I never had that happen with American’s iPhone app, but then again, it hasn’t happened since on the Android app. Maybe they fixed in in out of the updates they pushed out, but I usually grab a paper boarding pass on American when I have the time.</li>\r\n 	<li>And I don’t know about you all, but I haven\'t looked at Skymall or any of the other seat back pocket air magazines since the FAA allowed use of tablets &amp; smartphones during takeoffs and landings. I always have a book or two on my tablet -- right now I’m pounding through “The War that Ended Peace”, Margaret MacMillian’s history of the lead up to World War I. I also download the daily edition of the Chicago Tribune -- they have an HTML5 web app that shows you each page of the physical paper; you then tap an article to read it. The app is pretty good, sometimes a bit fiddly, but it lets you download the content for offline reading -- perfect for a flight. The Wall Street Journal’s Android app used to let you do the same thing and so I’d read that too, but earlier this year they “upgraded” the app and took away the ability to download a day’s paper. Still trying to think how they qualified that as an upgrade.</li>\r\n 	<li>I saw a guy come onto a flight last week with a hanging suit bag. Wow! That was a throwback. Even the flight attendant looked at him kinda funny when he asked to hang it in the front closet. Which was a very typical thing -- in the ‘90’s. You’d angle for early boarding so you had a chance for hanging space in the front closet. You see guys pushing all the bags to one end so he could fit his in -- not even really needing to hang it; just staying put from the pressure of the other bags. The whole business casual trend expanded the fight -- moving it out of the front galley to the entire plane aisle with rolling bags. I can’t remember the last time I used a hanging bag. I have my cleaners fold my shirts so they’re easy to pack, and then I use them (with their cardboard inserts) to cushion the folds of my slacks so they don’t wrinkle. Even on those rare occasions when I wear a suit, I fold it and put it in my rolling bag. It’s certainly a lot easier on the shoulder and back. And just a lot less awkward. I could never figure out a really good way to carry gym shoes in my hanging bag.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any travel experiences -- technology or otherwise, or just general observations, thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons\">Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — A Foolish Game by Zep Hurme (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/zep_hurme/46448</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong> Regional Jets Are Ruining My Life</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>One Wednesday afternoon in June, I had a particularly difficult time getting from Memphis to New Orleans. First, I felt my phone vibrate with multiple text messages while I was refueling my rental car at a particularly dicey gas station just north of the airport. I had a pretty good idea what was up -- United and TripIt were simultaneously notifying me that my flight was cancelled. I got on the phone to Amex. They were able to jam me onto a full US Air flight to Charlotte with a connection back to New Orleans. Bit of a zig zag, but OK. I returned the rental car. Just as I pulled my boarding pass out of the kiosk, I saw them update my flight -- 2 hr maintenance delay. Which would mean I’d miss the connection. I go up to the desk. Two agents -- one from USAir, one from American (I’m seeing the New American form right in front of me) -- bang on their terminal for a couple of minutes. “OK, we’ll put you in first class to DFW where you’ll connect to New Orleans” Great -- better routing with an upgrade to boot! I get to the gate. A colleague calls me. As we’re talking, I see them post a 2 hr delay -- weather in Texas -- which means I’d have 15 min for my connection if everything worked perfectly. Which it wasn’t going to because a delay with a round number -- like 2 hrs -- means they have no idea when the plane will actually leave</li>\r\n 	<li>That’s it! I give! Three airlines fail me in the span of 60 minutes. I can take a hint. I wasn’t meant to fly to New Orleans today. However, I did need to get there. So I fired up Google Maps. 5½ hour drive. Fine. I have nothing else going on tonight. I load the Hertz app, book a car, and walk back out of the terminal.</li>\r\n 	<li>I drive to the river front to get a decent dinner -- the food quality in Memphis airport, like the flight selection, have cratered since Delta shut down its hub operations there. While eating at the bar, I get the text from American -- the DFW flight cancelled. Now there’s a surprise.</li>\r\n 	<li>The drive to New Orleans to simple, straightforward -- and dull. I-55 south through Mississippi, into Louisiana until it dead ends into I-10. Take a left. You’re in New Orleans. At least that was the plan. South of Jackson, traffic comes to a complete halt. People are getting out of their cars -- never a good sign. I get out, look around an 18-wheeler and see a 10-ft column of fire. This is not a good sign. I-55 here is 2 lanes each way with a narrow shoulder. They’re not squeezing us past that. Eventually, after making an 8-point turn, I join a line of cars heading the back north along the shoulder -- one tire on the pavement, one tire in the wet red clay. After 10 minutes, I get to a gravel crossover that I don’t think will bottom out my rental Ford. I hit the frontage road, bypass the burning car, get back on a now empty I-55 and eventually pull into my hotel at 2am. Another glorious day of travel that I’m sure will inspire envy in all my Facebook friends.</li>\r\n 	<li>Now Memphis seems to be an extreme example -- a woman on my project is commuting weekly from New York and she’s yet to have an on-time, no-drama journey. Indeed, she’s spent a Thursday night in every Midwest hub city. But as airlines close hub operations in mid-size cities like Memphis and Cleveland, replacing mainline service with regional jets from smaller operators you’ve never heard -- ExpressJet or Endeavour Air -- getting to and from these cities just sucks.</li>\r\n 	<li>At first, I thought it was a United problem. After all, they’d canceled my flight down to New Orleans day before, and then the next week, they delayed my flight to Columbus, OH 2 hours because the flight before it was late getting off the gate, and then once our plane got to the gate, it needed to have a wheel bearing fixed before it could travel on. I mean, at some point, why does United bother posting actual departure and arrival times? Why not just post an AM or a PM and shoot for that? It’s not too far from what they’re doing now.</li>\r\n 	<li>But as I looked at the flights that were really screwing up my life, they weren’t the main United or American or Delta flights, they were the regional jets. My United flights to and from LAX last week were fine. But if I’d been flying a regional jet, I would’ve had a problem on the return leg. The original plane had a mechanical issue -- remember, this is United -- but they were able to get a replacement, so we left LAX on time and even got into ORD early. If it had been United Express by, say, GoJet, I would’ve been scrambling after yet another cancelled flight because they don’t have spare jets.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’m 5,000 miles away from hitting a million miles on United (I have over 2.5 million on American), but sitting at the bar that night in Memphis having dinner before my ill-fated drive, I tweeted out of pure frustration -- “Really @united? Two cancelled flights in two days? I\'ll never hit 1M miles when you cancel every flight I\'m on…” To which, of course, they pressed the button on reply #76 -- “No one dislikes flight cancellations more than we do. Do you need help with rebooking? Thanks.” My response the next morning -- “Unless you too had to drive 5+ hrs and get to your destination at 2am, you can\'t hate flight cancellations more than me…” No response… except from Dan, a longtime TravelCommons listener who chimed in -- “Sounds like an upcoming podcast topic”. Indeed it is, Dan. Some good had to come of it...</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em>Just Don’t</em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/liebig-severed/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Lie Big</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Visas Hassles</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Over the past couple of episodes I’ve been talking about my Asian travels -- to India and China -- which has forced me to become knowledgeable about something that doesn’t often affect US travelers -- visas.</li>\r\n 	<li>When US travelers decide to cross their border, if they have a passport, they’re typically good to go. When I checked Wikipedia yesterday, US passport holders <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_requirements_for_United_States_citizens\">can visit</a> 174 countries without having to buy a visa in advance, tied at the top of the “travel freedom” ranking with Germany, Sweden, United Kingdom, and Finland.</li>\r\n 	<li>But this seemed to be the year for visas for me. My son doing a semester abroad in China, then us visiting him in the Spring, and then me going to India on business a couple of months ago. I just slipped out of another trip to China -- business this time, but I figured I’d risk it since my tourist visa is valid until next Spring.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you live in a major city -- New York, DC, LA, Chicago -- it’s not too bad because most of the big visa-requiring countries have consulates there. Otherwise, you’re mailing your passport away, or paying extra for a courier service. And paying to fly to the consulate for an interview if you don’t have a plain vanilla visa application -- like anyone of Pakistani descent applying for an Indian visa.</li>\r\n 	<li>But even walking to the consulates, like I can do in Chicago, is not always so straightforward. Research is important. Hitting the consulate web site, know their hours and what paperwork they require. Our visit for my son’s Chinese student visa was amazingly smooth. We had all the paperwork, had it organized, knew the consulate closed for lunch, so we showed up early. Boom, boom, boom -- we were in and out in 30 minutes. Four days later, we went back, paid, and picked up his passport with his visa.</li>\r\n 	<li>Getting visas for our visit to Beijing in March was less smooth. There was a little hiccup in the application. Their website said we needed proof of a return flight and hotel reservations. I had all that, all organized. But what wasn’t clear on the website was that I needed a copy for each visa. I’d printed out one copy of the hotel reservation for the one room that the three of us were staying in. I needed three copies -- one for each application. I’m not the first one who’d made that mistake. The woman pointed to the copying machine. Luckily, I had a pocket full of change.</li>\r\n 	<li>Picking them up was also a bit more of a hassle. First, because it was Spring Break season, there were a number of teachers picking up batches of passports for school trips. I think the guy two positions in front of me had 50 passports. A minor inconvenience -- until their credit card machine broke. The web site was adamant -- no personal checks, no cash accepted; just credit cards or cashier’s checks. And how many people know where to get a cashiers check anymore. So everything came to a screeching halt. “We’ll take cash if you have it,” one of the women said. But I didn’t bring any because it’s $140 a head -- $420 for all of us. I look at my watch -- it’s just about closing time. I ask the guard, “Will you let me back in if I make a run down to the ATM for some cash?” “Make it quick,” he said. I sprint down, around the corner, tap out the cash machine, and sprint back up. The guard lets me back in even though he’d locked the doors for the day. Everyone’s sorta milling around, not knowing what to do. The guy who had been in front of me was there to pick up 10 visas. No way he was coming up with $1,400 in cash quickly. I politely make my way to the window. “Cash?” I ask, giving her the fresh stack of ATM 20’s. She counts them twice, gives me my passports and I’m on my way.</li>\r\n 	<li>But this was nothing compared to the cluster that was the Indian visa process. Which was a real surprise to me because four years ago, when I went for my last Indian visa, it was the pinnacle of efficiency -- I dropped everything off at 8am and at 5pm received a text that my passport was ready for pickup. Impressive. Phenomenal. I used to rave about it. Not so much any more.</li>\r\n 	<li>But based on last time, I thought this would be simple. I put all the documents together and, because I was traveling, had my wife take it downtown for me. “No worries,” I said, “Drop it off, do some shopping, grab lunch, and it should be done”. 10am my wife calls me -- “They need your flight reservations”. “I haven’t made them yet,” I told her, “They specifically say on their website not to book flights until you get the visa.” “Hold on,” she said and talked to the clerk. “Yeah, I guess things have changed. She’ll hold onto your application until you e-mail her your flight info. Oh, and she’s going to charge you another $30 for an expedite fee.” “Wait,” I said, “according to the website, I’m OK on their deadlines -- I shouldn’t need them to expedite.” “Hold on,” she said again. “Yeah, I guess those deadlines have changed too.” Unfortunately, I was only able to get a 1 year visa. If this visa expires before my next trip, I think I’ll send one of my staff in my place. I think I need to introduce some other Americans to the fine art of applying for visas.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917626811171154.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #110</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com\">Magnatune</a></li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_110.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #110 — Regional Jets Ruining My Life; Visa Hassles','','inherit','closed','closed','','1359-revision-v1','','','2018-06-03 08:30:27','2018-06-03 13:30:27','',1359,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/06/03/1359-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2022,1,'2018-06-03 08:34:05','2018-06-03 13:34:05','[caption id=\"attachment_1364\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/pic-r-1402317187245.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1364\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/pic-r-1402317187245-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Plane is here; no mechanics in sight. Do I feel lucky?\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Plane is here; no mechanics in sight. Do I feel lucky?[/caption]\r\n\r\nEven though the weather hasn\'t been bad this summer, I\'ve endured a rash of flight cancellations. Digging deeper, it\'s been regional jets operated by small airline \"partners\" that\'s causing me grief. Service to mid-sized cities has moved to regional jets, making travel to these cities more problematic. Traveling to China or India can catch US travelers by surprise with their visa requirements. We also talk about how fast airlines respond to Twitter messages, airport \"wall huggers\", carry-on luggage throwback, and I haven\'t flipped through a Skymall magazine in months. All this and more  at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_110.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below. [sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_110.mp3\"]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #110:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the Sheraton Hotel on Canal St in New Orleans. I have a room looking over the French Quarter. It’s a big convention hotel -- not my usual choice. But the price is good, it has a great gym and I’m about 5 stays away from making Starwood Platinum, so what the heck.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’m back to my usual commute -- Chicago to New Orleans -- after taking a quick jaunt out to LA last week. It is that time of year on the Gulf Coast when the weather gets a bit monotonous -- high of 91 degrees with a chance of afternoon thunderstorms. Repeat until Labor Day. But the thunderstorms are tending to be earlier than last year when they seemed to roll in about 4:30 -- right about the time when the inbound plane for my flight back to Chicago would be scheduled to arrive. While my flights home still aren’t arriving on time, I haven’t hit the big 2-4 hour downpour delays I would get last year. Not killing as much time in the airport bars, but I always appreciate New Orleans airport letting me to take me beer to the gate.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em>Gargantua</em> by Admiral Bob (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/46361 Ft: My Free Mickey, Martijn de Boer</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Flying through LAX last week reminded me of what a dump that airport is -- or I guess I should say key parts of it. Flying out of there last Thursday morning, it took me a half-hour in the Hertz bus to get to the United terminal -- P7 -- because of access road traffic which is driven by this odd concept of a bunch of little terminals arranged in a U around short term parking garages. No problem is you’re flying Southwest in P1; really lousy if you’re going out American in P5 or United in P6 or P7. Annoying, but it gets really dumpy when you get inside. There’s not enough room in each of the little terminals to properly handle post-9/11 security, so small security stations are dotted over the terminals with lines snaking down the corridors. Given that LAX is a major gateway to international traffic from Asia, it’s fair to compare LAX to Singapore and Beijing -- much newer airports, yes, but the LAX experience ends up looking like the 4th circle of Hell comparatively. Can’t be a great thing for the US tourism industry.</li>\r\n 	<li>In the <a title=\"Podcast #109 — ‘Round the World in 8 Days; Beijing Mass Transit\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/06/07/podcast-109-round-the-world-in-8-days-beijing-mass-transit-2/\">last episode</a>, I updated my thoughts on using Twitter as a concierge service, or at least another way into airlines’ customer service groups. A couple of weeks back, the Wall Street Journal had a good <a href=\"http://online.wsj.com/articles/airlines-take-to-twitter-to-keep-world-informed-1406125253\">article</a> about airlines’ use of Twitter. They had an interesting graphic showing the differences in response times between airlines. American Airlines was the top, responding to 80% of customer queries within 15 minutes and 99% within an hour. KLM, which has made a big push into social media, was much lower, responding to 12% within 15 minutes, 64% within an hour, taking a full day to get up to 99%. Of course, as we talked about last time, it’s one thing to quickly press the button on a canned responses like United’s ubiquitous “No one dislikes delays more than us”, it’s a whole other thing to do something meaningful. Check out the detailed show notes on the TravelCommons web site for a link to the article.</li>\r\n 	<li>Also in the <a title=\"Podcast #109 — ‘Round the World in 8 Days; Beijing Mass Transit\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/06/07/podcast-109-round-the-world-in-8-days-beijing-mass-transit-2/\">last episode</a>, I mentioned my big technology switch -- from my iPhone 5 to an HTC One. The main reason for the switch was battery life. I got tired of being psychotic about battery life -- stalking airport gate areas for an outlet so I could top off my battery before getting on the plane. Last month, Samsung Mobile captured that hassle perfectly in a <a href=\"youtu.be/mzMUTrTYD9s%20\">video</a> about “wall huggers”. It’s on YouTube -- I put the <a href=\"youtu.be/mzMUTrTYD9s%20\">link</a> in the show notes. Check it out. It’s painfully close to my reality with the iPhone. But not with the HTC One. The battery life is great, even with the larger screen.</li>\r\n 	<li>One thing that has bitten me recently with that change is the Android version of American Airlines’ app. I always use the phone apps for boarding passes -- one less piece of paper to keep track of, one less line to stand in if I couldn’t print it at home. I’ve never had a problem until a couple of months ago. I was boarding a flight to New Orleans, put my phone on the reader, heard the beep, the gate agent waved me through, and I sat in my seat. A bit later during the boarding process, I looked at my screen again and saw that the app had refreshed and no longer showed a seat number on the boarding pass. Hmmm, that doesn’t seem good. And I was right. Somehow, my boarding must not have registered and so, 10 minutes before the flight, they flushed me as a no-show and gave my seat to a stand-by passenger. Unfortunately for her, I was in my seat, but because I didn’t have a paper boarding pass, I couldn’t prove that it was my seat. Lucky for me, the gate agent remembered me -- it was a small regional jet --and said “Oh, this happens a lot”. I kept the seat, but the flight was delayed about 15 minutes while they figured it all out. I never had that happen with American’s iPhone app, but then again, it hasn’t happened since on the Android app. Maybe they fixed in in out of the updates they pushed out, but I usually grab a paper boarding pass on American when I have the time.</li>\r\n 	<li>And I don’t know about you all, but I haven\'t looked at Skymall or any of the other seat back pocket air magazines since the FAA allowed use of tablets &amp; smartphones during takeoffs and landings. I always have a book or two on my tablet -- right now I’m pounding through “The War that Ended Peace”, Margaret MacMillian’s history of the lead up to World War I. I also download the daily edition of the Chicago Tribune -- they have an HTML5 web app that shows you each page of the physical paper; you then tap an article to read it. The app is pretty good, sometimes a bit fiddly, but it lets you download the content for offline reading -- perfect for a flight. The Wall Street Journal’s Android app used to let you do the same thing and so I’d read that too, but earlier this year they “upgraded” the app and took away the ability to download a day’s paper. Still trying to think how they qualified that as an upgrade.</li>\r\n 	<li>I saw a guy come onto a flight last week with a hanging suit bag. Wow! That was a throwback. Even the flight attendant looked at him kinda funny when he asked to hang it in the front closet. Which was a very typical thing -- in the ‘90’s. You’d angle for early boarding so you had a chance for hanging space in the front closet. You see guys pushing all the bags to one end so he could fit his in -- not even really needing to hang it; just staying put from the pressure of the other bags. The whole business casual trend expanded the fight -- moving it out of the front galley to the entire plane aisle with rolling bags. I can’t remember the last time I used a hanging bag. I have my cleaners fold my shirts so they’re easy to pack, and then I use them (with their cardboard inserts) to cushion the folds of my slacks so they don’t wrinkle. Even on those rare occasions when I wear a suit, I fold it and put it in my rolling bag. It’s certainly a lot easier on the shoulder and back. And just a lot less awkward. I could never figure out a really good way to carry gym shoes in my hanging bag.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any travel experiences -- technology or otherwise, or just general observations, thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons\">Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em>A Foolish Game</em> by Zep Hurme (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/zep_hurme/46448</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong> Regional Jets Are Ruining My Life</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>One Wednesday afternoon in June, I had a particularly difficult time getting from Memphis to New Orleans. First, I felt my phone vibrate with multiple text messages while I was refueling my rental car at a particularly dicey gas station just north of the airport. I had a pretty good idea what was up -- United and TripIt were simultaneously notifying me that my flight was cancelled. I got on the phone to Amex. They were able to jam me onto a full US Air flight to Charlotte with a connection back to New Orleans. Bit of a zig zag, but OK. I returned the rental car. Just as I pulled my boarding pass out of the kiosk, I saw them update my flight -- 2 hr maintenance delay. Which would mean I’d miss the connection. I go up to the desk. Two agents -- one from USAir, one from American (I’m seeing the New American form right in front of me) -- bang on their terminal for a couple of minutes. “OK, we’ll put you in first class to DFW where you’ll connect to New Orleans” Great -- better routing with an upgrade to boot! I get to the gate. A colleague calls me. As we’re talking, I see them post a 2 hr delay -- weather in Texas -- which means I’d have 15 min for my connection if everything worked perfectly. Which it wasn’t going to because a delay with a round number -- like 2 hrs -- means they have no idea when the plane will actually leave</li>\r\n 	<li>That’s it! I give! Three airlines fail me in the span of 60 minutes. I can take a hint. I wasn’t meant to fly to New Orleans today. However, I did need to get there. So I fired up Google Maps. 5½ hour drive. Fine. I have nothing else going on tonight. I load the Hertz app, book a car, and walk back out of the terminal.</li>\r\n 	<li>I drive to the river front to get a decent dinner -- the food quality in Memphis airport, like the flight selection, have cratered since Delta shut down its hub operations there. While eating at the bar, I get the text from American -- the DFW flight cancelled. Now there’s a surprise.</li>\r\n 	<li>The drive to New Orleans to simple, straightforward -- and dull. I-55 south through Mississippi, into Louisiana until it dead ends into I-10. Take a left. You’re in New Orleans. At least that was the plan. South of Jackson, traffic comes to a complete halt. People are getting out of their cars -- never a good sign. I get out, look around an 18-wheeler and see a 10-ft column of fire. This is not a good sign. I-55 here is 2 lanes each way with a narrow shoulder. They’re not squeezing us past that. Eventually, after making an 8-point turn, I join a line of cars heading the back north along the shoulder -- one tire on the pavement, one tire in the wet red clay. After 10 minutes, I get to a gravel crossover that I don’t think will bottom out my rental Ford. I hit the frontage road, bypass the burning car, get back on a now empty I-55 and eventually pull into my hotel at 2am. Another glorious day of travel that I’m sure will inspire envy in all my Facebook friends.</li>\r\n 	<li>Now Memphis seems to be an extreme example -- a woman on my project is commuting weekly from New York and she’s yet to have an on-time, no-drama journey. Indeed, she’s spent a Thursday night in every Midwest hub city. But as airlines close hub operations in mid-size cities like Memphis and Cleveland, replacing mainline service with regional jets from smaller operators you’ve never heard -- ExpressJet or Endeavour Air -- getting to and from these cities just sucks.</li>\r\n 	<li>At first, I thought it was a United problem. After all, they’d canceled my flight down to New Orleans day before, and then the next week, they delayed my flight to Columbus, OH 2 hours because the flight before it was late getting off the gate, and then once our plane got to the gate, it needed to have a wheel bearing fixed before it could travel on. I mean, at some point, why does United bother posting actual departure and arrival times? Why not just post an AM or a PM and shoot for that? It’s not too far from what they’re doing now.</li>\r\n 	<li>But as I looked at the flights that were really screwing up my life, they weren’t the main United or American or Delta flights, they were the regional jets. My United flights to and from LAX last week were fine. But if I’d been flying a regional jet, I would’ve had a problem on the return leg. The original plane had a mechanical issue -- remember, this is United -- but they were able to get a replacement, so we left LAX on time and even got into ORD early. If it had been United Express by, say, GoJet, I would’ve been scrambling after yet another cancelled flight because they don’t have spare jets.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’m 5,000 miles away from hitting a million miles on United (I have over 2.5 million on American), but sitting at the bar that night in Memphis having dinner before my ill-fated drive, I tweeted out of pure frustration -- “Really @united? Two cancelled flights in two days? I\'ll never hit 1M miles when you cancel every flight I\'m on…” To which, of course, they pressed the button on reply #76 -- “No one dislikes flight cancellations more than we do. Do you need help with rebooking? Thanks.” My response the next morning -- “Unless you too had to drive 5+ hrs and get to your destination at 2am, you can\'t hate flight cancellations more than me…” No response… except from Dan, a longtime TravelCommons listener who chimed in -- “Sounds like an upcoming podcast topic”. Indeed it is, Dan. Some good had to come of it...</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em>Melt Away</em> by Kara Square (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/mindmapthat/46605</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Visas Hassles</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Over the past couple of episodes I’ve been talking about my Asian travels -- to India and China -- which has forced me to become knowledgeable about something that doesn’t often affect US travelers -- visas.</li>\r\n 	<li>When US travelers decide to cross their border, if they have a passport, they’re typically good to go. When I checked Wikipedia yesterday, US passport holders <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_requirements_for_United_States_citizens\">can visit</a> 174 countries without having to buy a visa in advance, tied at the top of the “travel freedom” ranking with Germany, Sweden, United Kingdom, and Finland.</li>\r\n 	<li>But this seemed to be the year for visas for me. My son doing a semester abroad in China, then us visiting him in the Spring, and then me going to India on business a couple of months ago. I just slipped out of another trip to China -- business this time, but I figured I’d risk it since my tourist visa is valid until next Spring.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you live in a major city -- New York, DC, LA, Chicago -- it’s not too bad because most of the big visa-requiring countries have consulates there. Otherwise, you’re mailing your passport away, or paying extra for a courier service. And paying to fly to the consulate for an interview if you don’t have a plain vanilla visa application -- like anyone of Pakistani descent applying for an Indian visa.</li>\r\n 	<li>But even walking to the consulates, like I can do in Chicago, is not always so straightforward. Research is important. Hitting the consulate web site, know their hours and what paperwork they require. Our visit for my son’s Chinese student visa was amazingly smooth. We had all the paperwork, had it organized, knew the consulate closed for lunch, so we showed up early. Boom, boom, boom -- we were in and out in 30 minutes. Four days later, we went back, paid, and picked up his passport with his visa.</li>\r\n 	<li>Getting visas for our visit to Beijing in March was less smooth. There was a little hiccup in the application. Their website said we needed proof of a return flight and hotel reservations. I had all that, all organized. But what wasn’t clear on the website was that I needed a copy for each visa. I’d printed out one copy of the hotel reservation for the one room that the three of us were staying in. I needed three copies -- one for each application. I’m not the first one who’d made that mistake. The woman pointed to the copying machine. Luckily, I had a pocket full of change.</li>\r\n 	<li>Picking them up was also a bit more of a hassle. First, because it was Spring Break season, there were a number of teachers picking up batches of passports for school trips. I think the guy two positions in front of me had 50 passports. A minor inconvenience -- until their credit card machine broke. The web site was adamant -- no personal checks, no cash accepted; just credit cards or cashier’s checks. And how many people know where to get a cashiers check anymore. So everything came to a screeching halt. “We’ll take cash if you have it,” one of the women said. But I didn’t bring any because it’s $140 a head -- $420 for all of us. I look at my watch -- it’s just about closing time. I ask the guard, “Will you let me back in if I make a run down to the ATM for some cash?” “Make it quick,” he said. I sprint down, around the corner, tap out the cash machine, and sprint back up. The guard lets me back in even though he’d locked the doors for the day. Everyone’s sorta milling around, not knowing what to do. The guy who had been in front of me was there to pick up 10 visas. No way he was coming up with $1,400 in cash quickly. I politely make my way to the window. “Cash?” I ask, giving her the fresh stack of ATM 20’s. She counts them twice, gives me my passports and I’m on my way.</li>\r\n 	<li>But this was nothing compared to the cluster that was the Indian visa process. Which was a real surprise to me because four years ago, when I went for my last Indian visa, it was the pinnacle of efficiency -- I dropped everything off at 8am and at 5pm received a text that my passport was ready for pickup. Impressive. Phenomenal. I used to rave about it. Not so much any more.</li>\r\n 	<li>But based on last time, I thought this would be simple. I put all the documents together and, because I was traveling, had my wife take it downtown for me. “No worries,” I said, “Drop it off, do some shopping, grab lunch, and it should be done”. 10am my wife calls me -- “They need your flight reservations”. “I haven’t made them yet,” I told her, “They specifically say on their website not to book flights until you get the visa.” “Hold on,” she said and talked to the clerk. “Yeah, I guess things have changed. She’ll hold onto your application until you e-mail her your flight info. Oh, and she’s going to charge you another $30 for an expedite fee.” “Wait,” I said, “according to the website, I’m OK on their deadlines -- I shouldn’t need them to expedite.” “Hold on,” she said again. “Yeah, I guess those deadlines have changed too.” Unfortunately, I was only able to get a 1 year visa. If this visa expires before my next trip, I think I’ll send one of my staff in my place. I think I need to introduce some other Americans to the fine art of applying for visas.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917626811171154.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #110</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/\">cc:Mixter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_110.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #110 — Regional Jets Ruining My Life; Visa Hassles','','inherit','closed','closed','','1359-revision-v1','','','2018-06-03 08:34:05','2018-06-03 13:34:05','',1359,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/06/03/1359-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2024,1,'2018-06-03 08:50:10','2018-06-03 13:50:10','[caption id=\"attachment_1985\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/6AB2DE86-7AE4-4DAF-AD9F-DEFB51F737E0-01.jpeg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1985\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/6AB2DE86-7AE4-4DAF-AD9F-DEFB51F737E0-01-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> The Look of Augmented Reality?[/caption]\r\n\r\nBroke out the mobile unit to record this episode in the Buckhead neighborhood of Atlanta; much warmer than getting caught in a spring snow storm in Milwaukee. When much of the travel tech news is about the latest phone apps, we talk about physical travel technology that we can touch and carry. <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">And when flying during the past two weeks, flight attendants\' safety demonstrations have become a bit more strident. </span>All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_140.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n&lt;iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/438588876&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"&gt;&lt;/iframe&gt;\r\n\r\n[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/438588876\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #140:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the Hyatt Place-Buckhead in Atlanta, GA missing what I hope is the long-delayed start of Spring finally showing up the Midwest. I have done damn little travel since the last episode -- a couple of drives to a client up north of Milwaukee, a quick trip to Minneapolis last week, and flight this morning down to Atlanta. I managed to avoid the foot of late April snow in Minnesota but got caught by 3-4 inches in Milwaukee. Luckily, I’d looked at the forecast before I left and, walking out to the garage, grabbed my LL Bean boots and threw them into the trunk of the car Which saved my dress shoes later that evening and the next morning on unshoveled walks and is is the good thing about driving; I didn’t have to worry about space constraints. I couldn’t have done the same thing flying to Minneapolis.</li>\r\n 	<li>I ended up flying Southwest to Minneapolis because: a) they were the cheapest flight out on Monday morning at short notice; and b) it let me meet an A-List challenge that Southwest had sent me at the beginning of the year -- fly 3 roundtrips by the end of April and get A-List for the rest of the year. Now, I don’t fly Southwest a whole lot, so I can’t completely justify what I pushed to do this challenge -- except just because it was a challenge, I guess. That, and it’ll make it easier for those times I end up on Southwest this year. I won’t have to pay the $12 for auto check-in or set an alarm to check in 24 hours before flight time -- both of which typically only get me in the second or “B” boarding group. Not an earth shattering perk, but anything that reduces travel hassles is a good thing.</li>\r\n 	<li>When I went Chicago Midway airport on last Monday to catch that flight, I ran into a new TSA trick -- funnel everyone through a single-file U-turn line to be sniffed a TSA agent and a dog, after people headed into either regular security or TSA PreCheck. Which, at 7am on a Monday morning, quickly pushed the security line back into the hallway toward the parking garage. So, after spending what looks like the $190 million a year the past couple of years on screening technology like those snazzy full-body scanners that people empty their pockets and line up for, the TSA is now having us line up for yet another a new screening technology -- but at least this technology is cute. And when was the last time you heard a traveler wanting to pet the body scanner.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/media/files/DJBLUE/11541\">Hear Me</a></em> by DJ Blue</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">A couple of things for those not following my Twitter or the TravelCommons Facebook page…</span>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>First, for those Amazon fans, Alexa will now play the latest episode of TravelCommons for you if you ask nicely. I got an Echo Spot in a schwag bag for a conference in January. I put it on the standing desk in my home office and started playing around with it. After listening to the WJS Minute Briefing as part of my Flash Briefing, I started thinking about how to get TravelCommons onto it. At first, I thought I was going to have to figure out how to build an Alexa skill, but digging a little deeper, I found out that the TuneIn app is sorta the default podcast player for Alexa. So after I got TravelCommons approved for TuneIn -- felt like they had an actual human check out my app -- it appeared on my Echo Spot. So if you say, “Alexa, play TravelCommons podcast”, she should play the latest episode for you. Check out the Facebook page or my Twitter feed for a quick video showing the magic happen</li>\r\n 	<li>Second, I took advantage of being in town and the crap April weather to do the filming for the Midway taproom tour layover video. As I mentioned in the last episode, the idea has been to feature an itinerary out of Chicago’s “other” airport -- what was Chicago’s original airport that morphed into the budget airline airport that morphed into Southwest Airlines’ biggest operation. We used Uber and Lyft to hit 4 taprooms in what can only be described as the “post-industrial” landscape of Chicago’s near south side. We started by driving past the Cook County prison en route to Lagunitas’ plant and taproom that’s built in an old steel mill. While New Belgium and Sierra Nevada landed their national expansions in the much more bucolic environs of the North Carolina Smoky Mountains, Lagunitas’ owner Tony Magee dropped his expansion in a dodgy part of Chicago. We then hit smaller scale, more local places that have repurposed old manufacturing plants in less-visited Chicago neighborhoods -- Lo Rez in Pilsen, Marz in what can charitably described as “lower” Bridgeport, and then ending up at Whiner Beer in the Back of the Yards neighborhood -- where the Chicago Stockyards used to be decades ago. I started working on production, but then looked at the calendar and knew that I only had time for either this episode or the video. And since I’ve worked hard on keeping a monthly cadence of podcast episodes, I kicked the video into next month. So watch Facebook, Twitter, and the web site for the post. Since it’s a bit more narrow scope, I don’t think I’ll put the video in the podcast feed; not sure the non-beer-drinking listeners will want some 100 meg video clogging up their internet.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>While sitting in the backseat of one of those Lyft rides, I noticed something new on the pink Lyft light that many drivers have in the middle of their dash. You always see the front of it -- the pink Lyft logo -- from the outside, through the front windshield. Glancing at the back of it from inside of the car, I something flash by. Looking more closely, I saw a little message scroll by - “15 min eta”. I saw it again in the Lyft car I took to MSP on last Tuesday. I asked the driver about it. He told me that Lyft sent it to him after he did 300 rides -- “bit of a status thing” he said. I told him about the Uber dash light that I saw in New York, that let me adjust the color of the light from the app -- I talked about this in a prior episode. He thought that was pretty cool too, but he liked Lyft, the company, better than Uber, and he appreciated his messaging light.</li>\r\n 	<li>All sorts of press releases drop into the TravelCommons mailbox, but the one announcing April 24, last Tuesday, as the first National Business Traveler Day caught my eye. I guess because it’s new, it hasn’t made it onto the National Day Calendar, a list of these sorts of designations. It’s a good choice of date, though, because there is only one national day listed on the 24th -- National Pigs-In-A-Blanket Day -- which, I can imagine, some First or Business Class flight attendants might reasonably associate with some sleeping business travelers. National Business Traveler Day was announced (created?) by “Upside Business Travel, the first online travel service built just for the do-it-yourself (DIY) business traveler” in recognition of “the important contributions made by business travelers to America\'s economy.” I dunno, this could go in so many snarky directions -- with the pigs-in-a-blanket thing as just a starter. I have to say, though, I felt very unrecognized when I walked into MSP Terminal 2 the afternoon of National Business Travelers Day -- an obvious frequent business traveler: wearing a black blazer, head-down on the iPhone, speedwalking to the furthest security checkpoint because it’s the only one with PreCheck. Nobody was gave me a thank-you, a flower, a hug, but then again, the first person I had contact with was an old, overweight but jolly TSA screener. Nice guy, but not sure I would’ve wanted a hug from him.</li>\r\n 	<li>And it could’ve been that MSP’s Terminal 2 which I’ll add to my list of ghetto terminals, the land of misbegotten travelers, which also includes ORD’s T2, Detroit’s North Terminal, Madrid’s 4S satellite terminal, Munich’s T2 satellite terminal… I’ve talked about this before. In fortress hubs, like ORD, DTW, and MSP, the terminals the hub airlines use is clean, bright, has lots of restaurant and shopping choices. Delta’s terminal in Detroit has an airy 2 or 3-story ceiling with a monorail train running the length of the terminal up at the top. The North terminal that every other airline is dumped into is the old terminal that Delta -- or actually Northwest left behind, with a bit of a clean up and 3 restaurants. Delta’s terminal in Minneapolis is the same story -- lots of shops and restaurants, a big craft beer bar, all with a bit of that North Woods feel. Terminal 2 - generic airport sterility, a Subway sandwich joint, a bar where all the handles were removed from the beer taps. And there’s no inside-security connections between these terminals in MSP and DTW if you want to check out the better side -- it’s a 10-minute bus ride and another pass through security. At least in ORD, you can walk from T2 to the American or United terminals and hit Rick Bayless’ Torta Frontera for great Mexican food or Goose Island for a good beer. On Tuesday, I was stuck in the Humphrey Terminal with my Subway sandwich and a choice of Bud Light or Blue Moon -- which maybe was fitting on National Business Traveler Day.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/media/files/savoyard/10743\">Madrugada</a></em> by Savoyard</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Travel Tech Gets Physical</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>In addition to press releases about National Business Travelers Day, I also get press releases announcing new funding rounds for travel startups. These things come in waves. Like the wave of companies building tour aggregation platforms. That investment thesis went -- because millennials are more into experiential travel, they’re more likely to spend money on something like a food tour or hang gliding; the market for travel experiences is fragmented making discovery and purchasing difficult; our platform will solve this problem by aggregating experience providers and providing world-class search and user experience. The latest wave seems to be about building platforms that “reduce the pain” of corporate business travel. In April, in addition to Upside’s National Business Traveler Day announcement, Rocketrip sent out a release about their $15 million funding round and TravelPerk, who sponsored our January episode, touted their $21 million round -- which sounds like, some 20+ years after Travelocity and Expedia hit the market, companies continue to spend millions of dollars trying to figure out how to replace travel agents.</li>\r\n 	<li>At times, it feels like much of the work on improving travel is virtual, about software -- new apps, new search platforms, better ways to spit out a single travel itinerary. But in spite of the venture capital mantra that “software is eating the world,” travel is inherently physical -- we want to move our bodies, our stuff from Point A to Point B, and most often back again. It seems like the ‘60’s were the golden age of this, when Boeing and Airbus’ predecessors and the Russians were designing and building supersonic planes. I really felt ancient the other day telling some Millennial staffers about, how way back when, Concorde would fly from JFK to LHR in less than 3 hrs. Now it seems that Boeing and Airbus are completely focused on cramming more people into subsonic flying buses. Logical, but not very aspirational. Now if all the work on hyperloops -- the test circuits, the design contests -- actually turns into something, and isn’t just high-tech hobbies for Elon Musk and Richard Branson -- we’ll be onto something.</li>\r\n 	<li>But in the meantime, in the space between now -- thinner, more uncomfortable plane seats and hotel keys that keep demagnetizing -- and the inspirational future -- us whizzing along in pods at 750 mph, doing LA to SF in 35 minutes without having to buy CO2 offsets to feel better about ourselves -- what are some of the physical things about to hit?</li>\r\n 	<li>One thing that seems to be finally hitting critical mass is real-time luggage tracking through RFID luggage tags. Logistics is another thing that’s hard, but it feels that airports and some airlines, Delta especially, have slogged through deploying enough RFID readers along the miles of luggage conveyor belts in the bowels of most of the airports they use, and then wiring it back in near real-time to their smartphone apps so that it’s useful. I’m hoping the combination of competitive pressure, falling equipment pricing, and government fines will push the rest of the airlines to follow suit. For me, real-time location tracking was the main use case for smart bags like BlueSmart. If I can get this through RFID tags, I’ll feel a lot less salty about the smart bag ban.</li>\r\n 	<li>Wearables also get a lot of buzz. Carnival Cruise Lines has been the latest, announcing their “Ocean Medallion” last year as a way to “personalize” your cruise experience -- and, of course, to make it easier to buy drinks on board. Nothing really new here. Disney’s been doing this forever; 20 years ago, I remember using a wristband at Northstar ski resort in Tahoe to track how many vertical feet we’d skied in a day, and to easily buy beers in the lodge. I’m wondering what happens here if the current noise about the use (and misuse) of personal data by Facebook and others resets people’s privacy vs. ease-of-use balance point rather than just blowing over. For me, it’s less about how the companies use the data (though I’m not completely unconcerned about this) and more about their inability to secure it. Seems like every couple of weeks, another travel company admits to some hack of, say, their point-of-sale system and the associated loss of millions of names and credit card numbers. Doesn’t incent me to let them track my movements and spending habits.</li>\r\n 	<li>AR/VR -- Augmented and virtual reality continues to buzz. I’ve talked about Google Translate’s AR feature -- point your camera at, say, a menu or washing machine, and it’ll display the translation over the original text in real-time. It’s not perfect -- the translations can rapidly change, sorta flicker between different interpretations, but it’s often “good enough”, and a whole lot quicker than banging in each menu entree. Google has tried to extend this real-time translation from visual to speech with their Pixel Bud headphones with much more Version 1.0 mixed results. I’m probably being way overly optimistic here, but if the Buds follow the same improvement trajectory, they could be pretty cool in 3 years’ time.</li>\r\n 	<li>It really gets buzzy when we move from AR to VR. A guy at a VR start-up talked to me about using VR in hotel rooms for what he called “social viewing”. Rather than watching, say Black Mirror on Netflix on your laptop or one of those Enseo TVs I’m seeing more and more of, you strap on a VR headset, as does your spouse or kids, and you’re all watching together in a virtual living room or virtual theater. And then there’s always the pitch -- why fly over to, say, Madrid to see Picasso’s Guernica in the Reina Sofia when you strap on a VR headset and “be” in the room instantly? Hey, remember how virtual reality turned out in The Matrix movies? Yeah, I think I’ll keep my travel physical.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/media/files/djlang59/10579\">Crazy Love</a></em> by DJ Lang</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>You <em>Will</em> Pay Attention to the Safety Briefing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>The selfie of passengers on Southwest flight 1380 not wearing the oxygen masks correctly went viral in the days after the engine explosion, along with the stories -- the guy telling the woman next to him that she didn’t need to squeeze the airbag, and the guy who logged into WiFi and Facebook Live before putting on his mask. The flight attendant interviews that seemingly every news outlet did dripped with schadenfreude -- no one ever pays attention to the safety videos or demonstrations, and look what happened!</li>\r\n 	<li>Improving airline safety records have let people grow numb as to how unnatural air travel is -- flying over 600 mph at 35,000 ft. Flight 1380 was the first accident-related fatality on a US airliner since 2009, and the Southwest’s first ever -- since it was founded in 1971.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’ll admit that I don’t pay attention to every demo, especially when I do multiple flights in a single week. I do typically look around me for the nearest exits -- in front and behind me -- because those can change pretty often with different seat configurations. I will pay attention, as a refresher, if I haven’t flown for a couple of weeks -- like last week’s flight to MSP. Or if it’s a plane I haven’t flown in a while, I’ll look at the seat back card -- like I did today when noticing I was in a Boeing 717, a pretty rare event for me.</li>\r\n 	<li>I have noticed that the flight attendants’ requests/demands for attention have become a bit more strident since 1380. On my Southwest flight back home from MSP last week, the flight attendant chanted “Nose and mouth; nose and mouth!”, eliciting some nervous laughter.</li>\r\n 	<li>The attendant on my Delta flight this morning was a bit more direct, perhaps fatalistic this morning. “Please pay attention! We’re doing this for you. But if you don’t want to watch us, well, I guess it’s your life…”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #140</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a> and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_140.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #140 — Travel Tech Gets Physical; Pay Attention to the Safety Briefing','','inherit','closed','closed','','1977-revision-v1','','','2018-06-03 08:50:10','2018-06-03 13:50:10','',1977,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/06/03/1977-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2025,1,'2018-06-03 08:53:49','2018-06-03 13:53:49','[caption id=\"attachment_1985\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/6AB2DE86-7AE4-4DAF-AD9F-DEFB51F737E0-01.jpeg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1985\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/6AB2DE86-7AE4-4DAF-AD9F-DEFB51F737E0-01-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> The Look of Augmented Reality?[/caption]\r\n\r\nBroke out the mobile unit to record this episode in the Buckhead neighborhood of Atlanta; much warmer than getting caught in a spring snow storm in Milwaukee. When much of the travel tech news is about the latest phone apps, we talk about physical travel technology that we can touch and carry. <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">And when flying during the past two weeks, flight attendants\' safety demonstrations have become a bit more strident. </span>All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_140.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/438588876&color=%23ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true\"></iframe>\r\n\r\n[soundcloud url=\"https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/438588876\" params=\"color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" iframe=\"true\" /]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #140:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the Hyatt Place-Buckhead in Atlanta, GA missing what I hope is the long-delayed start of Spring finally showing up the Midwest. I have done damn little travel since the last episode -- a couple of drives to a client up north of Milwaukee, a quick trip to Minneapolis last week, and flight this morning down to Atlanta. I managed to avoid the foot of late April snow in Minnesota but got caught by 3-4 inches in Milwaukee. Luckily, I’d looked at the forecast before I left and, walking out to the garage, grabbed my LL Bean boots and threw them into the trunk of the car Which saved my dress shoes later that evening and the next morning on unshoveled walks and is is the good thing about driving; I didn’t have to worry about space constraints. I couldn’t have done the same thing flying to Minneapolis.</li>\r\n 	<li>I ended up flying Southwest to Minneapolis because: a) they were the cheapest flight out on Monday morning at short notice; and b) it let me meet an A-List challenge that Southwest had sent me at the beginning of the year -- fly 3 roundtrips by the end of April and get A-List for the rest of the year. Now, I don’t fly Southwest a whole lot, so I can’t completely justify what I pushed to do this challenge -- except just because it was a challenge, I guess. That, and it’ll make it easier for those times I end up on Southwest this year. I won’t have to pay the $12 for auto check-in or set an alarm to check in 24 hours before flight time -- both of which typically only get me in the second or “B” boarding group. Not an earth shattering perk, but anything that reduces travel hassles is a good thing.</li>\r\n 	<li>When I went Chicago Midway airport on last Monday to catch that flight, I ran into a new TSA trick -- funnel everyone through a single-file U-turn line to be sniffed a TSA agent and a dog, after people headed into either regular security or TSA PreCheck. Which, at 7am on a Monday morning, quickly pushed the security line back into the hallway toward the parking garage. So, after spending what looks like the $190 million a year the past couple of years on screening technology like those snazzy full-body scanners that people empty their pockets and line up for, the TSA is now having us line up for yet another a new screening technology -- but at least this technology is cute. And when was the last time you heard a traveler wanting to pet the body scanner.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/media/files/DJBLUE/11541\">Hear Me</a></em> by DJ Blue</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">A couple of things for those not following my Twitter or the TravelCommons Facebook page…</span>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>First, for those Amazon fans, Alexa will now play the latest episode of TravelCommons for you if you ask nicely. I got an Echo Spot in a schwag bag for a conference in January. I put it on the standing desk in my home office and started playing around with it. After listening to the WJS Minute Briefing as part of my Flash Briefing, I started thinking about how to get TravelCommons onto it. At first, I thought I was going to have to figure out how to build an Alexa skill, but digging a little deeper, I found out that the TuneIn app is sorta the default podcast player for Alexa. So after I got TravelCommons approved for TuneIn -- felt like they had an actual human check out my app -- it appeared on my Echo Spot. So if you say, “Alexa, play TravelCommons podcast”, she should play the latest episode for you. Check out the Facebook page or my Twitter feed for a quick video showing the magic happen</li>\r\n 	<li>Second, I took advantage of being in town and the crap April weather to do the filming for the Midway taproom tour layover video. As I mentioned in the last episode, the idea has been to feature an itinerary out of Chicago’s “other” airport -- what was Chicago’s original airport that morphed into the budget airline airport that morphed into Southwest Airlines’ biggest operation. We used Uber and Lyft to hit 4 taprooms in what can only be described as the “post-industrial” landscape of Chicago’s near south side. We started by driving past the Cook County prison en route to Lagunitas’ plant and taproom that’s built in an old steel mill. While New Belgium and Sierra Nevada landed their national expansions in the much more bucolic environs of the North Carolina Smoky Mountains, Lagunitas’ owner Tony Magee dropped his expansion in a dodgy part of Chicago. We then hit smaller scale, more local places that have repurposed old manufacturing plants in less-visited Chicago neighborhoods -- Lo Rez in Pilsen, Marz in what can charitably described as “lower” Bridgeport, and then ending up at Whiner Beer in the Back of the Yards neighborhood -- where the Chicago Stockyards used to be decades ago. I started working on production, but then looked at the calendar and knew that I only had time for either this episode or the video. And since I’ve worked hard on keeping a monthly cadence of podcast episodes, I kicked the video into next month. So watch Facebook, Twitter, and the web site for the post. Since it’s a bit more narrow scope, I don’t think I’ll put the video in the podcast feed; not sure the non-beer-drinking listeners will want some 100 meg video clogging up their internet.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>While sitting in the backseat of one of those Lyft rides, I noticed something new on the pink Lyft light that many drivers have in the middle of their dash. You always see the front of it -- the pink Lyft logo -- from the outside, through the front windshield. Glancing at the back of it from inside of the car, I something flash by. Looking more closely, I saw a little message scroll by - “15 min eta”. I saw it again in the Lyft car I took to MSP on last Tuesday. I asked the driver about it. He told me that Lyft sent it to him after he did 300 rides -- “bit of a status thing” he said. I told him about the Uber dash light that I saw in New York, that let me adjust the color of the light from the app -- I talked about this in a prior episode. He thought that was pretty cool too, but he liked Lyft, the company, better than Uber, and he appreciated his messaging light.</li>\r\n 	<li>All sorts of press releases drop into the TravelCommons mailbox, but the one announcing April 24, last Tuesday, as the first National Business Traveler Day caught my eye. I guess because it’s new, it hasn’t made it onto the National Day Calendar, a list of these sorts of designations. It’s a good choice of date, though, because there is only one national day listed on the 24th -- National Pigs-In-A-Blanket Day -- which, I can imagine, some First or Business Class flight attendants might reasonably associate with some sleeping business travelers. National Business Traveler Day was announced (created?) by “Upside Business Travel, the first online travel service built just for the do-it-yourself (DIY) business traveler” in recognition of “the important contributions made by business travelers to America\'s economy.” I dunno, this could go in so many snarky directions -- with the pigs-in-a-blanket thing as just a starter. I have to say, though, I felt very unrecognized when I walked into MSP Terminal 2 the afternoon of National Business Travelers Day -- an obvious frequent business traveler: wearing a black blazer, head-down on the iPhone, speedwalking to the furthest security checkpoint because it’s the only one with PreCheck. Nobody was gave me a thank-you, a flower, a hug, but then again, the first person I had contact with was an old, overweight but jolly TSA screener. Nice guy, but not sure I would’ve wanted a hug from him.</li>\r\n 	<li>And it could’ve been that MSP’s Terminal 2 which I’ll add to my list of ghetto terminals, the land of misbegotten travelers, which also includes ORD’s T2, Detroit’s North Terminal, Madrid’s 4S satellite terminal, Munich’s T2 satellite terminal… I’ve talked about this before. In fortress hubs, like ORD, DTW, and MSP, the terminals the hub airlines use is clean, bright, has lots of restaurant and shopping choices. Delta’s terminal in Detroit has an airy 2 or 3-story ceiling with a monorail train running the length of the terminal up at the top. The North terminal that every other airline is dumped into is the old terminal that Delta -- or actually Northwest left behind, with a bit of a clean up and 3 restaurants. Delta’s terminal in Minneapolis is the same story -- lots of shops and restaurants, a big craft beer bar, all with a bit of that North Woods feel. Terminal 2 - generic airport sterility, a Subway sandwich joint, a bar where all the handles were removed from the beer taps. And there’s no inside-security connections between these terminals in MSP and DTW if you want to check out the better side -- it’s a 10-minute bus ride and another pass through security. At least in ORD, you can walk from T2 to the American or United terminals and hit Rick Bayless’ Torta Frontera for great Mexican food or Goose Island for a good beer. On Tuesday, I was stuck in the Humphrey Terminal with my Subway sandwich and a choice of Bud Light or Blue Moon -- which maybe was fitting on National Business Traveler Day.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/media/files/savoyard/10743\">Madrugada</a></em> by Savoyard</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Travel Tech Gets Physical</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>In addition to press releases about National Business Travelers Day, I also get press releases announcing new funding rounds for travel startups. These things come in waves. Like the wave of companies building tour aggregation platforms. That investment thesis went -- because millennials are more into experiential travel, they’re more likely to spend money on something like a food tour or hang gliding; the market for travel experiences is fragmented making discovery and purchasing difficult; our platform will solve this problem by aggregating experience providers and providing world-class search and user experience. The latest wave seems to be about building platforms that “reduce the pain” of corporate business travel. In April, in addition to Upside’s National Business Traveler Day announcement, Rocketrip sent out a release about their $15 million funding round and TravelPerk, who sponsored our January episode, touted their $21 million round -- which sounds like, some 20+ years after Travelocity and Expedia hit the market, companies continue to spend millions of dollars trying to figure out how to replace travel agents.</li>\r\n 	<li>At times, it feels like much of the work on improving travel is virtual, about software -- new apps, new search platforms, better ways to spit out a single travel itinerary. But in spite of the venture capital mantra that “software is eating the world,” travel is inherently physical -- we want to move our bodies, our stuff from Point A to Point B, and most often back again. It seems like the ‘60’s were the golden age of this, when Boeing and Airbus’ predecessors and the Russians were designing and building supersonic planes. I really felt ancient the other day telling some Millennial staffers about, how way back when, Concorde would fly from JFK to LHR in less than 3 hrs. Now it seems that Boeing and Airbus are completely focused on cramming more people into subsonic flying buses. Logical, but not very aspirational. Now if all the work on hyperloops -- the test circuits, the design contests -- actually turns into something, and isn’t just high-tech hobbies for Elon Musk and Richard Branson -- we’ll be onto something.</li>\r\n 	<li>But in the meantime, in the space between now -- thinner, more uncomfortable plane seats and hotel keys that keep demagnetizing -- and the inspirational future -- us whizzing along in pods at 750 mph, doing LA to SF in 35 minutes without having to buy CO2 offsets to feel better about ourselves -- what are some of the physical things about to hit?</li>\r\n 	<li>One thing that seems to be finally hitting critical mass is real-time luggage tracking through RFID luggage tags. Logistics is another thing that’s hard, but it feels that airports and some airlines, Delta especially, have slogged through deploying enough RFID readers along the miles of luggage conveyor belts in the bowels of most of the airports they use, and then wiring it back in near real-time to their smartphone apps so that it’s useful. I’m hoping the combination of competitive pressure, falling equipment pricing, and government fines will push the rest of the airlines to follow suit. For me, real-time location tracking was the main use case for smart bags like BlueSmart. If I can get this through RFID tags, I’ll feel a lot less salty about the smart bag ban.</li>\r\n 	<li>Wearables also get a lot of buzz. Carnival Cruise Lines has been the latest, announcing their “Ocean Medallion” last year as a way to “personalize” your cruise experience -- and, of course, to make it easier to buy drinks on board. Nothing really new here. Disney’s been doing this forever; 20 years ago, I remember using a wristband at Northstar ski resort in Tahoe to track how many vertical feet we’d skied in a day, and to easily buy beers in the lodge. I’m wondering what happens here if the current noise about the use (and misuse) of personal data by Facebook and others resets people’s privacy vs. ease-of-use balance point rather than just blowing over. For me, it’s less about how the companies use the data (though I’m not completely unconcerned about this) and more about their inability to secure it. Seems like every couple of weeks, another travel company admits to some hack of, say, their point-of-sale system and the associated loss of millions of names and credit card numbers. Doesn’t incent me to let them track my movements and spending habits.</li>\r\n 	<li>AR/VR -- Augmented and virtual reality continues to buzz. I’ve talked about Google Translate’s AR feature -- point your camera at, say, a menu or washing machine, and it’ll display the translation over the original text in real-time. It’s not perfect -- the translations can rapidly change, sorta flicker between different interpretations, but it’s often “good enough”, and a whole lot quicker than banging in each menu entree. Google has tried to extend this real-time translation from visual to speech with their Pixel Bud headphones with much more Version 1.0 mixed results. I’m probably being way overly optimistic here, but if the Buds follow the same improvement trajectory, they could be pretty cool in 3 years’ time.</li>\r\n 	<li>It really gets buzzy when we move from AR to VR. A guy at a VR start-up talked to me about using VR in hotel rooms for what he called “social viewing”. Rather than watching, say Black Mirror on Netflix on your laptop or one of those Enseo TVs I’m seeing more and more of, you strap on a VR headset, as does your spouse or kids, and you’re all watching together in a virtual living room or virtual theater. And then there’s always the pitch -- why fly over to, say, Madrid to see Picasso’s Guernica in the Reina Sofia when you strap on a VR headset and “be” in the room instantly? Hey, remember how virtual reality turned out in The Matrix movies? Yeah, I think I’ll keep my travel physical.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/media/files/djlang59/10579\">Crazy Love</a></em> by DJ Lang</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>You <em>Will</em> Pay Attention to the Safety Briefing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>The selfie of passengers on Southwest flight 1380 not wearing the oxygen masks correctly went viral in the days after the engine explosion, along with the stories -- the guy telling the woman next to him that she didn’t need to squeeze the airbag, and the guy who logged into WiFi and Facebook Live before putting on his mask. The flight attendant interviews that seemingly every news outlet did dripped with schadenfreude -- no one ever pays attention to the safety videos or demonstrations, and look what happened!</li>\r\n 	<li>Improving airline safety records have let people grow numb as to how unnatural air travel is -- flying over 600 mph at 35,000 ft. Flight 1380 was the first accident-related fatality on a US airliner since 2009, and the Southwest’s first ever -- since it was founded in 1971.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’ll admit that I don’t pay attention to every demo, especially when I do multiple flights in a single week. I do typically look around me for the nearest exits -- in front and behind me -- because those can change pretty often with different seat configurations. I will pay attention, as a refresher, if I haven’t flown for a couple of weeks -- like last week’s flight to MSP. Or if it’s a plane I haven’t flown in a while, I’ll look at the seat back card -- like I did today when noticing I was in a Boeing 717, a pretty rare event for me.</li>\r\n 	<li>I have noticed that the flight attendants’ requests/demands for attention have become a bit more strident since 1380. On my Southwest flight back home from MSP last week, the flight attendant chanted “Nose and mouth; nose and mouth!”, eliciting some nervous laughter.</li>\r\n 	<li>The attendant on my Delta flight this morning was a bit more direct, perhaps fatalistic this morning. “Please pay attention! We’re doing this for you. But if you don’t want to watch us, well, I guess it’s your life…”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #140</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a> and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_140.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #140 — Travel Tech Gets Physical; Pay Attention to the Safety Briefing','','inherit','closed','closed','','1977-revision-v1','','','2018-06-03 08:53:49','2018-06-03 13:53:49','',1977,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/06/03/1977-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2026,1,'2018-06-03 08:55:06','2018-06-03 13:55:06','[caption id=\"attachment_1985\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/6AB2DE86-7AE4-4DAF-AD9F-DEFB51F737E0-01.jpeg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1985\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/6AB2DE86-7AE4-4DAF-AD9F-DEFB51F737E0-01-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> The Look of Augmented Reality?[/caption]\r\n\r\nBroke out the mobile unit to record this episode in the Buckhead neighborhood of Atlanta; much warmer than getting caught in a spring snow storm in Milwaukee. When much of the travel tech news is about the latest phone apps, we talk about physical travel technology that we can touch and carry. <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">And when flying during the past two weeks, flight attendants\' safety demonstrations have become a bit more strident. </span>All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_140.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n<iframe src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/438588876&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"></iframe>\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #140:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the Hyatt Place-Buckhead in Atlanta, GA missing what I hope is the long-delayed start of Spring finally showing up the Midwest. I have done damn little travel since the last episode -- a couple of drives to a client up north of Milwaukee, a quick trip to Minneapolis last week, and flight this morning down to Atlanta. I managed to avoid the foot of late April snow in Minnesota but got caught by 3-4 inches in Milwaukee. Luckily, I’d looked at the forecast before I left and, walking out to the garage, grabbed my LL Bean boots and threw them into the trunk of the car Which saved my dress shoes later that evening and the next morning on unshoveled walks and is is the good thing about driving; I didn’t have to worry about space constraints. I couldn’t have done the same thing flying to Minneapolis.</li>\r\n 	<li>I ended up flying Southwest to Minneapolis because: a) they were the cheapest flight out on Monday morning at short notice; and b) it let me meet an A-List challenge that Southwest had sent me at the beginning of the year -- fly 3 roundtrips by the end of April and get A-List for the rest of the year. Now, I don’t fly Southwest a whole lot, so I can’t completely justify what I pushed to do this challenge -- except just because it was a challenge, I guess. That, and it’ll make it easier for those times I end up on Southwest this year. I won’t have to pay the $12 for auto check-in or set an alarm to check in 24 hours before flight time -- both of which typically only get me in the second or “B” boarding group. Not an earth shattering perk, but anything that reduces travel hassles is a good thing.</li>\r\n 	<li>When I went Chicago Midway airport on last Monday to catch that flight, I ran into a new TSA trick -- funnel everyone through a single-file U-turn line to be sniffed a TSA agent and a dog, after people headed into either regular security or TSA PreCheck. Which, at 7am on a Monday morning, quickly pushed the security line back into the hallway toward the parking garage. So, after spending what looks like the $190 million a year the past couple of years on screening technology like those snazzy full-body scanners that people empty their pockets and line up for, the TSA is now having us line up for yet another a new screening technology -- but at least this technology is cute. And when was the last time you heard a traveler wanting to pet the body scanner.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/media/files/DJBLUE/11541\">Hear Me</a></em> by DJ Blue</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">A couple of things for those not following my Twitter or the TravelCommons Facebook page…</span>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>First, for those Amazon fans, Alexa will now play the latest episode of TravelCommons for you if you ask nicely. I got an Echo Spot in a schwag bag for a conference in January. I put it on the standing desk in my home office and started playing around with it. After listening to the WJS Minute Briefing as part of my Flash Briefing, I started thinking about how to get TravelCommons onto it. At first, I thought I was going to have to figure out how to build an Alexa skill, but digging a little deeper, I found out that the TuneIn app is sorta the default podcast player for Alexa. So after I got TravelCommons approved for TuneIn -- felt like they had an actual human check out my app -- it appeared on my Echo Spot. So if you say, “Alexa, play TravelCommons podcast”, she should play the latest episode for you. Check out the Facebook page or my Twitter feed for a quick video showing the magic happen</li>\r\n 	<li>Second, I took advantage of being in town and the crap April weather to do the filming for the Midway taproom tour layover video. As I mentioned in the last episode, the idea has been to feature an itinerary out of Chicago’s “other” airport -- what was Chicago’s original airport that morphed into the budget airline airport that morphed into Southwest Airlines’ biggest operation. We used Uber and Lyft to hit 4 taprooms in what can only be described as the “post-industrial” landscape of Chicago’s near south side. We started by driving past the Cook County prison en route to Lagunitas’ plant and taproom that’s built in an old steel mill. While New Belgium and Sierra Nevada landed their national expansions in the much more bucolic environs of the North Carolina Smoky Mountains, Lagunitas’ owner Tony Magee dropped his expansion in a dodgy part of Chicago. We then hit smaller scale, more local places that have repurposed old manufacturing plants in less-visited Chicago neighborhoods -- Lo Rez in Pilsen, Marz in what can charitably described as “lower” Bridgeport, and then ending up at Whiner Beer in the Back of the Yards neighborhood -- where the Chicago Stockyards used to be decades ago. I started working on production, but then looked at the calendar and knew that I only had time for either this episode or the video. And since I’ve worked hard on keeping a monthly cadence of podcast episodes, I kicked the video into next month. So watch Facebook, Twitter, and the web site for the post. Since it’s a bit more narrow scope, I don’t think I’ll put the video in the podcast feed; not sure the non-beer-drinking listeners will want some 100 meg video clogging up their internet.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>While sitting in the backseat of one of those Lyft rides, I noticed something new on the pink Lyft light that many drivers have in the middle of their dash. You always see the front of it -- the pink Lyft logo -- from the outside, through the front windshield. Glancing at the back of it from inside of the car, I something flash by. Looking more closely, I saw a little message scroll by - “15 min eta”. I saw it again in the Lyft car I took to MSP on last Tuesday. I asked the driver about it. He told me that Lyft sent it to him after he did 300 rides -- “bit of a status thing” he said. I told him about the Uber dash light that I saw in New York, that let me adjust the color of the light from the app -- I talked about this in a prior episode. He thought that was pretty cool too, but he liked Lyft, the company, better than Uber, and he appreciated his messaging light.</li>\r\n 	<li>All sorts of press releases drop into the TravelCommons mailbox, but the one announcing April 24, last Tuesday, as the first National Business Traveler Day caught my eye. I guess because it’s new, it hasn’t made it onto the National Day Calendar, a list of these sorts of designations. It’s a good choice of date, though, because there is only one national day listed on the 24th -- National Pigs-In-A-Blanket Day -- which, I can imagine, some First or Business Class flight attendants might reasonably associate with some sleeping business travelers. National Business Traveler Day was announced (created?) by “Upside Business Travel, the first online travel service built just for the do-it-yourself (DIY) business traveler” in recognition of “the important contributions made by business travelers to America\'s economy.” I dunno, this could go in so many snarky directions -- with the pigs-in-a-blanket thing as just a starter. I have to say, though, I felt very unrecognized when I walked into MSP Terminal 2 the afternoon of National Business Travelers Day -- an obvious frequent business traveler: wearing a black blazer, head-down on the iPhone, speedwalking to the furthest security checkpoint because it’s the only one with PreCheck. Nobody was gave me a thank-you, a flower, a hug, but then again, the first person I had contact with was an old, overweight but jolly TSA screener. Nice guy, but not sure I would’ve wanted a hug from him.</li>\r\n 	<li>And it could’ve been that MSP’s Terminal 2 which I’ll add to my list of ghetto terminals, the land of misbegotten travelers, which also includes ORD’s T2, Detroit’s North Terminal, Madrid’s 4S satellite terminal, Munich’s T2 satellite terminal… I’ve talked about this before. In fortress hubs, like ORD, DTW, and MSP, the terminals the hub airlines use is clean, bright, has lots of restaurant and shopping choices. Delta’s terminal in Detroit has an airy 2 or 3-story ceiling with a monorail train running the length of the terminal up at the top. The North terminal that every other airline is dumped into is the old terminal that Delta -- or actually Northwest left behind, with a bit of a clean up and 3 restaurants. Delta’s terminal in Minneapolis is the same story -- lots of shops and restaurants, a big craft beer bar, all with a bit of that North Woods feel. Terminal 2 - generic airport sterility, a Subway sandwich joint, a bar where all the handles were removed from the beer taps. And there’s no inside-security connections between these terminals in MSP and DTW if you want to check out the better side -- it’s a 10-minute bus ride and another pass through security. At least in ORD, you can walk from T2 to the American or United terminals and hit Rick Bayless’ Torta Frontera for great Mexican food or Goose Island for a good beer. On Tuesday, I was stuck in the Humphrey Terminal with my Subway sandwich and a choice of Bud Light or Blue Moon -- which maybe was fitting on National Business Traveler Day.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/media/files/savoyard/10743\">Madrugada</a></em> by Savoyard</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Travel Tech Gets Physical</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>In addition to press releases about National Business Travelers Day, I also get press releases announcing new funding rounds for travel startups. These things come in waves. Like the wave of companies building tour aggregation platforms. That investment thesis went -- because millennials are more into experiential travel, they’re more likely to spend money on something like a food tour or hang gliding; the market for travel experiences is fragmented making discovery and purchasing difficult; our platform will solve this problem by aggregating experience providers and providing world-class search and user experience. The latest wave seems to be about building platforms that “reduce the pain” of corporate business travel. In April, in addition to Upside’s National Business Traveler Day announcement, Rocketrip sent out a release about their $15 million funding round and TravelPerk, who sponsored our January episode, touted their $21 million round -- which sounds like, some 20+ years after Travelocity and Expedia hit the market, companies continue to spend millions of dollars trying to figure out how to replace travel agents.</li>\r\n 	<li>At times, it feels like much of the work on improving travel is virtual, about software -- new apps, new search platforms, better ways to spit out a single travel itinerary. But in spite of the venture capital mantra that “software is eating the world,” travel is inherently physical -- we want to move our bodies, our stuff from Point A to Point B, and most often back again. It seems like the ‘60’s were the golden age of this, when Boeing and Airbus’ predecessors and the Russians were designing and building supersonic planes. I really felt ancient the other day telling some Millennial staffers about, how way back when, Concorde would fly from JFK to LHR in less than 3 hrs. Now it seems that Boeing and Airbus are completely focused on cramming more people into subsonic flying buses. Logical, but not very aspirational. Now if all the work on hyperloops -- the test circuits, the design contests -- actually turns into something, and isn’t just high-tech hobbies for Elon Musk and Richard Branson -- we’ll be onto something.</li>\r\n 	<li>But in the meantime, in the space between now -- thinner, more uncomfortable plane seats and hotel keys that keep demagnetizing -- and the inspirational future -- us whizzing along in pods at 750 mph, doing LA to SF in 35 minutes without having to buy CO2 offsets to feel better about ourselves -- what are some of the physical things about to hit?</li>\r\n 	<li>One thing that seems to be finally hitting critical mass is real-time luggage tracking through RFID luggage tags. Logistics is another thing that’s hard, but it feels that airports and some airlines, Delta especially, have slogged through deploying enough RFID readers along the miles of luggage conveyor belts in the bowels of most of the airports they use, and then wiring it back in near real-time to their smartphone apps so that it’s useful. I’m hoping the combination of competitive pressure, falling equipment pricing, and government fines will push the rest of the airlines to follow suit. For me, real-time location tracking was the main use case for smart bags like BlueSmart. If I can get this through RFID tags, I’ll feel a lot less salty about the smart bag ban.</li>\r\n 	<li>Wearables also get a lot of buzz. Carnival Cruise Lines has been the latest, announcing their “Ocean Medallion” last year as a way to “personalize” your cruise experience -- and, of course, to make it easier to buy drinks on board. Nothing really new here. Disney’s been doing this forever; 20 years ago, I remember using a wristband at Northstar ski resort in Tahoe to track how many vertical feet we’d skied in a day, and to easily buy beers in the lodge. I’m wondering what happens here if the current noise about the use (and misuse) of personal data by Facebook and others resets people’s privacy vs. ease-of-use balance point rather than just blowing over. For me, it’s less about how the companies use the data (though I’m not completely unconcerned about this) and more about their inability to secure it. Seems like every couple of weeks, another travel company admits to some hack of, say, their point-of-sale system and the associated loss of millions of names and credit card numbers. Doesn’t incent me to let them track my movements and spending habits.</li>\r\n 	<li>AR/VR -- Augmented and virtual reality continues to buzz. I’ve talked about Google Translate’s AR feature -- point your camera at, say, a menu or washing machine, and it’ll display the translation over the original text in real-time. It’s not perfect -- the translations can rapidly change, sorta flicker between different interpretations, but it’s often “good enough”, and a whole lot quicker than banging in each menu entree. Google has tried to extend this real-time translation from visual to speech with their Pixel Bud headphones with much more Version 1.0 mixed results. I’m probably being way overly optimistic here, but if the Buds follow the same improvement trajectory, they could be pretty cool in 3 years’ time.</li>\r\n 	<li>It really gets buzzy when we move from AR to VR. A guy at a VR start-up talked to me about using VR in hotel rooms for what he called “social viewing”. Rather than watching, say Black Mirror on Netflix on your laptop or one of those Enseo TVs I’m seeing more and more of, you strap on a VR headset, as does your spouse or kids, and you’re all watching together in a virtual living room or virtual theater. And then there’s always the pitch -- why fly over to, say, Madrid to see Picasso’s Guernica in the Reina Sofia when you strap on a VR headset and “be” in the room instantly? Hey, remember how virtual reality turned out in The Matrix movies? Yeah, I think I’ll keep my travel physical.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/media/files/djlang59/10579\">Crazy Love</a></em> by DJ Lang</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>You <em>Will</em> Pay Attention to the Safety Briefing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>The selfie of passengers on Southwest flight 1380 not wearing the oxygen masks correctly went viral in the days after the engine explosion, along with the stories -- the guy telling the woman next to him that she didn’t need to squeeze the airbag, and the guy who logged into WiFi and Facebook Live before putting on his mask. The flight attendant interviews that seemingly every news outlet did dripped with schadenfreude -- no one ever pays attention to the safety videos or demonstrations, and look what happened!</li>\r\n 	<li>Improving airline safety records have let people grow numb as to how unnatural air travel is -- flying over 600 mph at 35,000 ft. Flight 1380 was the first accident-related fatality on a US airliner since 2009, and the Southwest’s first ever -- since it was founded in 1971.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’ll admit that I don’t pay attention to every demo, especially when I do multiple flights in a single week. I do typically look around me for the nearest exits -- in front and behind me -- because those can change pretty often with different seat configurations. I will pay attention, as a refresher, if I haven’t flown for a couple of weeks -- like last week’s flight to MSP. Or if it’s a plane I haven’t flown in a while, I’ll look at the seat back card -- like I did today when noticing I was in a Boeing 717, a pretty rare event for me.</li>\r\n 	<li>I have noticed that the flight attendants’ requests/demands for attention have become a bit more strident since 1380. On my Southwest flight back home from MSP last week, the flight attendant chanted “Nose and mouth; nose and mouth!”, eliciting some nervous laughter.</li>\r\n 	<li>The attendant on my Delta flight this morning was a bit more direct, perhaps fatalistic this morning. “Please pay attention! We’re doing this for you. But if you don’t want to watch us, well, I guess it’s your life…”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #140</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a> and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_140.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #140 — Travel Tech Gets Physical; Pay Attention to the Safety Briefing','','inherit','closed','closed','','1977-revision-v1','','','2018-06-03 08:55:06','2018-06-03 13:55:06','',1977,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/06/03/1977-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2027,1,'2018-06-03 08:56:29','2018-06-03 13:56:29','<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/IMG_1145.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1009\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/IMG_1145-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>Returning to the mic after 10 days of food, wine, wind, rain, and snow in the north of Spain. I talk about traveling in Spain, and with my guest Coleman Collins about how to make the best coffee in your hotel room.  All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_139.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n<iframe src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/422166231&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"></iframe>\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #139:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. Just got back Sunday night from 10 days in Spain -- about 4 days each in Madrid and San Sebastian, with a couple of days in the Rioja wine region in between. A friend on the East Coast sent me a note while I was in Spain -- “Good week to be out of town; we got whacked with yet another dump of snow.” Not quite. It’s been a cold Spring in Europe and Spain has been no different. Our first weekend in Madrid was in the upper 30’s/low 40’s with a mix of rain and wet snow. Which turned into just snow as we drove up to Rioja. Some of that drive reminded me of I-70 in the Colorado Rockies -- go into a tunnel with fine weather; come out of it to blowing snow. Having said that, it was nothing like the 7 or 9 or 14 inches that Winter Storm Toby dropped on the East Coast last week. And even with lousy weather, the food and the wine in Spain makes it hard to sustain any sort of cranky attitude, though it shorten up our pintxos crawl through Logroño.</li>\r\n 	<li>We flew Iberia to Madrid because: a) they have a non-stop flight from Chicago and b) as I mentioned <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">a few episodes ago</a>, I was finally able to burn off some of those Avios points that had been collecting cobwebs in my BA account. I decided to try Iberia’s Premium Economy service on the flight over. Most airlines are using this sorta “tweener” service to capture revenue from people willing to pay a bit more for some comfort, but aren’t willing to go the 2-300% Business Class uplift out of their own pocket. And it was truly a “tweener” service -- about 5 rows between the Business and regular Coach cabins, and coach seats with spacing and recline somewhere between domestic First Class and, say, United’s Economy Plus. The meal service was the same as Economy, but they served us first, and they gave us a little amenities kit with just the essentials -- earplugs, eye mask, socks, and a toothbrush. It was as-advertised -- Coach with a bit more space, which made for better napping on the 8-hour flight over. I’ve talked in past episodes that I really question the value-for-money with Business Class on Transatlantic flights, but this tweener class was a reasonable deal.</li>\r\n 	<li>The deeper recline of the Premium Economy seat also makes it easier for you to stay in your space when you sleep. On the way back, I was in regular Coach because -- well, I’m cheap and didn’t need to sleep. But the guy next to me did. He nodded off as soon as we left the ground, which meant he didn’t recline his seat, which meant that he started to list to port, toward my shoulder. This guy looked like he was the younger brother of Dos Equis’ “Most Interesting Man”. But there was no amount of interesting that was going to have him sleeping on my shoulder. Just as he was about to touch down on my shoulder, I gave our seat row a bit of a shake -- some single row turbulence. He startled awake, realized what he was doing, and immediately sat straight up. Stay upright, my friend.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">P.I.H.E. by Budapest BluesBoy (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hepepe/26362 Ft: Inna Barmash - Zhurbin</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Just a quick addendum to the luggage thread we’ve been running over the last couple of episodes. In the last episode Jerry Sarfati talked about downsizing from a 22 to a 20-inch carry-on bag because of the hassles he’d gotten from American Airlines gate agents. I mentioned then that I haven’t had any problems from American, and didn’t get pulled over on my Chicago-to-Madrid Iberia flight. Just goes to show you how much discretion gate agents have. I didn’t test it on the way back home -- 2 bottles bought in Rioja tasting rooms and a tin of olive oil tipped me way over the liquid limit.</li>\r\n 	<li>The EU’s no roaming rules also let me skip what had become our first day of European vacation ritual of burning a couple of hours in a phone store buying local SIM cards for our mobile phones. Instead, the week before we left, I fired up EE’s iPhone app and topped up our UK SIMs. Somewhere over the Bay of Biscay, after my breakfast tray was cleared, I swapped out my AT&amp;T SIM. Once on the ground, I turned on my phone and was good to go. And because the whole family has EE SIMs, it was easy to call each other when we got separated on our pintxos crawls. I know that everyone just messages nowadays, but I’m still one of those knuckledraggers who occasionally finds talking quicker than texting.</li>\r\n 	<li>While in Madrid, I also added to my subway “tap-n-go” card collection for €2.50 -- or about $3 at current exchange rates. The interesting twist on Madrid’s system is that you can tap up to 4 people through the turnstile with a single card, so I only had to buy one tap card for the whole family. I’d load it up with 10 rides -- which seemed to be the only option -- we’d line up behind one turnstile, then tap through and pass it back. Getting out, we just walked through the turnstile since the Madrid Metro fare system seems based on zones rather than start and ending stations. Just adding it to the growing stack...</li>\r\n 	<li>In past episodes, I’ve talked about how I’ve come to value the service I get from Hertz with President’s Club status. And so I rented a car from Hertz in Madrid for our drive up to Rioja for wine tasting and then over to San Sebastian and back. On Tuesday morning, we headed to Atocha train station, found the Hertz counter, and then I sent my family to get breakfast because I knew from past experience renting cars in Spain, that I was in for 30 minutes of hard upselling. It didn’t matter that I had already booked on-line at Hertz.com and selected the options I wanted, I was going to get sold. Mel, the Hertz agent, spoke excellent American English -- all the right terms, slang, colloquialisms. Telling me the rate I got was “crazy low” -- I’d used our corporate rate plus cashed in some Hertz points -- because I didn’t have any insurance. And then came the big push -- writing down big liability numbers, huge damage possibilities -- even though a lot of this was covered by our corporate rate and the credit card. After this, there was the upsell for the car -- did you know you booked a manual, can you drive a manual -- because, well, no Americans know how to work a clutch. I just smiled and nodded, and let Mel work through his spiel -- I had kinda hoped that my status would save me, but nope, there was no short-circuiting this. After he was done, I said “No” to everything. I finally got the keys just as my family finished breakfast, and then off we went. I would’ve been frustrated if I hadn’t expected it and budgeted time for it. Instead, I was just slightly weary. I’m glad my wife got me a coffee to-go.</li>\r\n 	<li>And in the seeming obligatory craft beer segment of TravelCommons, having the rental car let me hit the Basqueland Brewing Project taproom outside of San Sebastian. It had a very American feel to it -- winding through a light industrial area, finding the place by spotting the picnic tables in front of the open loading door, walking past the foosball table and shelves holding 20-kg sacks of malt, the fluorescent pink cord blocking access to the brewing area. And for good reason, the place is owned by 3 Americans. One of them was working the taps when we arrived. He quickly flipped from Spanish to English when we ordered. Originally from Baltimore, he came over 6 years ago when his wife wanted to move back home. Nice guy, good beer.</li>\r\n 	<li>Rob Cheshire, a TravelCommons listener and Untappd friend, hit the comments section on the last episode -- first, to egg me on about my comment in the last episode to do a One City, Five Taprooms layover video, and then about taprooms near Wrigley Field when he comes in to see the Reds play the Cubs. I managed to string together a 6-taproom crawl; he may need to break that up into a couple of rounds.</li>\r\n 	<li>And, to Rob’s first question, I actually will do a taproom layover video, but instead of basing it out of ORD like my last layover video, I’m going to do this one from MDW -- give those Southwest fliers some love. It’ll let me hit 4 taprooms that have opened in the past couple of years in what can only be described as the “post-industrial” landscape of Chicago’s near south side. It should be fun. Working on the scheduling now. Will shoot it in April. With the additional production time video requires, it might not get up until May, but I’ll keep everyone posted</li>\r\n 	<li>One last thing -- last week I tweeted out a link to a pretty rigorous study from the FlyHealthy Research Team out of Emory University in Atlanta about passenger movements on transcontinental flights and what it means for the spread of respiratory diseases. The team took 10 flights, logging passenger movements, taking air samples, and swabs of hard surfaces. I won’t go through the whole study -- I’ll put a <a href=\"http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/03/13/1711611115\">link</a> in the show notes for those who want to read it, which I encourage you to do; it’s very readable as scientific papers go -- but the main takeaways for me were: a) you really only have to be concerned about the people immediately in front, behind, and next to you -- a one-row radius; b) the people wiping down their trays, armrests, and seat belt buckles with Purell Wipes are wasting their time; and c) if you’re really worried, get a window seat in the front part of the plane and don’t leave it for the entire flight (which, as a side benefit, will also endear you to your row mates). As one who has called planes “flying petri dishes”, I was pleasantly surprised by the Emory team’s findings.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">~aether theories~ by Vidian (c) copyright 2018 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Vidian/57398 Ft: Gurdonark, White-throated Sparrow</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Brewing the Best Hotel Room Coffee</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Interview with Coleman Collins. His blog post on brewing hotel room coffee is <a href=\"https://roadwarrior.blog/hotel-room-coffee/\">here</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Tools of the Trade by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/56512 Ft: Abstract Audio, Mr Yesterday, Martijn de Boer, Speck</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Notes from Spain</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>This was our 4th spring trip to Spain. Our first trip we hit Madrid and Barcelona, the usual suspects. The next trip, we headed south to Andalucia -- Córdoba, Granada, Ronda, Seville -- during Semana Santa, Holy Week, and saw penitential processions every day in every town and city we visited, culminating in Holy Thursday night outside of Seville Cathedral. The last trip, in 2016, we headed back down South, but even further, taking a boat across the Straits of Gibraltar to Tangier, Morocco. For this trip, we gave up warm weather for some new territory -- Rioja and the Basque Country.</li>\r\n 	<li>As I said at the top of the show, for me, Spain is about food and wine. There’s certainly culture -- the Semana Santa processions are phenomenal cultural events, standing in front of the huge canvas of Picasso’s Guernica in the Reina Sofia in Madrid, the Mezquita in Cordoba,... -- but it’s the food and wine that keep bringing us back.</li>\r\n 	<li>On our first trip to Granada, we were staying in a Marriott -- maybe one of their AC properties -- in the middle of town. A great building; it had been a convent at one time. There was an interior courtyard; we had a nightcap there one night. 4 glasses of wine at the hotel bar -- figuring $12-15/glass, I’m waiting for a 40 euro tab. It was 12 euros -- I love this country.</li>\r\n 	<li>The pintxos crawl was the food center of this trip north, first in Logroño and then in San Sebastian, walking from bar to bar -- a glass of wine and a bite at each. It was a good mix of food. In Logroño, we started at a couple of dive-ier, more local places that focused on just one pintxos -- sauteed mushrooms at one, ground lamb sandwich at the next, the meat seared on a flat grill behind the bar, and then served on a bun with a great tasting green sauce -- and serving local Rioja wines, pulling the bottles from a bucket at the end of the bar. We then swung into a distinctly higher end place, complete with a Michelin sticker on the front door; more variety of food -- seared red tuna, pickled white anchovies, grilled octopus -- and the next level up of Rioja wines. Later in the week, in San Sebastian, when the weather turned a bit better, we could see the crawl pick up volume in the pedestrian streets of the old town; people still bundled up a bit, but taking their wine outside, and willing to walk to the next place rather than hunkering down for a couple of courses in the warmth.</li>\r\n 	<li>Cider is big in the Basque Country, though it’s drier, not as sweet as you get in the US or the UK. And during cider season -- January through April -- the siderias, the cider houses in the hills outside of San Sebastian, open up to serve cider streamed directly from the tap of huge chestnut wood barrels into your glass, and then the glass of the person behind you,... and a traditional menu of salt-cod omelette, fresh cod fried with peppers and onions, and damn big grilled t-bones served either standing up or at communal tables. We ended up sharing a meal with a busload of folks from just over the border in France. A couple dozen of us lined up as a worker manned the tap -- letting a thin stream of cider out. We lined up our wide-mouthed plastic tumblers about three feet away to impart a bit of fizz to the three fingers of cider that we caught before moving out of the stream to let it hit the tumbler that someone was holding right below ours.</li>\r\n 	<li>For a great food country, the food at Madrid airport, though, is a bit pedestrian. So to extend our food extravaganza for one more meal, we skip the “meh” restaurants and buy a package of the top-end iberian ham -- the bellota, from the free range Iberian pigs fattening up on acorns. We can’t bring it into the US, but it’s an 8-hour flight from Madrid to Chicago. That package never makes it as far at US landfall.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #139</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_139.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #139 — Brewing Best Hotel Room Coffee; Notes from Spain','','inherit','closed','closed','','1961-revision-v1','','','2018-06-03 08:56:29','2018-06-03 13:56:29','',1961,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/06/03/1961-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2028,1,'2018-06-03 08:57:54','2018-06-03 13:57:54','[caption id=\"attachment_1949\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/iStock-535339649.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1949\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/iStock-535339649-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> TSA! Look at What You\'ve Done to Me![/caption]\r\n\r\nFebruary is a tough time to be in the Midwest, so when my travel took me south, to New Orleans and then to Florida, there was no bitch tweeting about the TSA lines or flight delays. In this episode, I walk through how each change in airport security has pushed me to be more hipster and how we all want to understand the real cause of the flight delays that inconvenience us. Also a good bit of listener feedback extending the on-going luggage discussion. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_138.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n<iframe src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/406850538&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"></iframe>\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #138:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. This has been a good travel month for me. Not too heavy, and all my travel had me headed south -- an important thing in February when you live in Chicago. The week before Mardi Gras, I headed down to New Orleans for a meeting. It easily could’ve been an overnight trip, but neither my wife nor I had been down in a while, so she came down with me. We caught some parades -- Nyx, Chaos, Muses -- ate way too much food, and except for a cold rain Wednesday night, had great weather. On Thursday, we were walking along the Mississippi back to the French Quarter from the Bywater neighborhood in bright sunshine and upper 60’s while Chicago was getting slammed with 8-12 inches of snow.</li>\r\n 	<li>When flew back to Chicago Friday night, we were able to thread the gap between the Friday end of that 8-12 inch drop and the start of the Saturday-Sunday 5-inch fall. Timing is everything. We came to the airport prepared for a long delay -- fully charged batteries, and muffaletta sandwiches and a mini king cake from Cochon Butcher. Southwest had cancelled this same flight the night before and that morning -- understandable given the snow -- so we didn’t think we wouldn’t get home; it was just going to be a question of how long. As it turned out, we were only an hour late, which given the weather, felt as good as on-time.</li>\r\n 	<li>Last week, I managed to point myself south again, this time to Florida -- Orlando and Miami -- and was able to skip two days of a heavy cold rain. The JW Marriott in Miami upgraded me to a room with a balcony on the 20th floor -- I didn’t have an ocean view, but I sat outside, 75 degrees, drinking a couple of beers, watching the sun go down, looking over to some of the rooftop bar action in the Brickell neighborhood. Miami is always an experience. It’s not the southernmost US big city, but rather the northernmost Latin American big city. I was reminded of that in the airport when I heard them paging someone in Spanish -- twice. They didn’t even bother wasting their time with English.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- Leviathan by Kirkoid (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Kirkoid/31109</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Lots of comments about luggage since the last episode, which makes sense -- the last episode was heavy on luggage talk between the continuing thread on the smart luggage ban and the suitcase buying tips which I then ported over to a blog post.\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>So, starting off, Allan Marko forwarded along the latest e-mails from Away luggage, one of the few smart bags with removable batteries and so not caught up in the smart luggage ban. Or so they thought until Delta decided to add their own twist to the ban. If the battery in the bag requires a tool to remove it -- which the original Away bag does -- you have to remove it from the bag before you board -- whether you’re carrying on the bag or gate-checking it. The later version of the Away bag has an ejectable pop-up battery which Delta thinks is OK. What a mess! This is what happens when engineers run amok -- and I can say that as a recovering engineer. These guys are going to keep tweaking and twisting this, which will just confuse gate agents and frustrate passengers -- which is why I’ve mothballed my smart bag and bought another Anker lipstick charger.</li>\r\n 	<li>Steve Frick hit the TravelCommons web site and left this comment -- “I replaced my luggage with the exact same bag as I had before, a TravelPro. It was an easy choice, I like you, wanted a simple bag. I knew my gear would fit, I already knew what to put in the outside pockets. One of the guys I work with recently bought and then returned a 4-wheel spinner. The reason for the return……. he discovered that most hotel parking lots weren’t level and each time he let go of the bag to raise the trunk lid his bag rolled away.” Steve, I had that same problem with my Bluesmart 4-wheeler, except in airports rather than parking lots. I’d put the Bluesmart against the wall in a restroom and it would wander away.</li>\r\n 	<li>Jerry Sarfati posted on the TravelCommons Facebook page -- “Mark, great episode as usual” Thanks, Jerry! “I had a different experience when choosing a new bag. I was stopped twice by American Airlines gate agents telling me my 22\" bag was too big. I’m in Group 2. So I settled for the 20\" Victorinox spinner.” I asked Jerry if they made him put it in a bag sizer. “Once only. It barely fit, and she said ‘too big, it must slide in easily, it must be checked’. Other time the agent said the sizer is missing, but ‘I can already see it won\'t fit’. I didn\'t want to argue and get thrown off the flight.” Jerry, that -- in technical travel terms -- is bullshit. I remember one time in Boston Logan, I got shunted over to the bag sizer by the Icelandic Air gate agent. And I knew I was on the bubble because this was the trip I’ve talked about a couple of times where I had to pack for 10 days between Iceland and Southern Spain in one carry-on. I grabbed that bag by the side handle, had it about chest high, and then drove it into the bag sizer with all my might. It was either going to fit, break the bag or blow apart the bag sizer. Luckily, it fit -- though the gate agent jumped back just a bit when the bag hit the bottom of the sizer. She let me carry it on. I flew 3 legs on American last week with my 22-incher and didn’t get a glance. But having said that, you made the right choice -- discretion is the better part of valor. Gate agents have complete discretion. Obey or get bounced. Too bad you got caught up by other folks’ power trips.</li>\r\n 	<li>Back on the web site, Robert Fenerty wrote “I want a four-wheel spinner; my wife loves hers. But I won’t get one, because I believe that bags with only two wheels have a bit more interior space than four-wheelers of the same length. That’s because the spinners can’t tuck into the side of the bag so you’re losing the inch or two between the middle of the spinner wheel and the top of the stem that attaches the spinner to the bottom of the bag. How’s that for OCD?” Robert, I’ll see your OCD and raise you! I pulled out a metal ruler and measured the ground clearance difference between my Victorinox 2-wheeler and my wife’s Samsonite 4-wheel spinner. I measured a 1.5-inch difference. Multiply that by the 14x9-inch base size gives you a 189 cubic inch cost for spinner agility. I look at that being one day’s worth of workout kit.</li>\r\n 	<li>Also on the web site, Jim McDonough wrote “My favorite bag was a Rick Steves 21” rollaboard that had just one compartment and two really good wheels. I used it for a decade and finally had problems with my wife’s bag (wheel fell apart) and the side of mine cracked from all the abuse. He doesn’t sell them any more, because it was a hair too big for European airlines. We are now using Samsonite spinners. They don’t hold as much as the old Rick bags. We only check bags when we are staying in one place for at least a week. Carrying on is simply liberating.” Liberating in a couple of ways -- not standing around waiting for the luggage carousel to start to get your bag, and not waiting around for it to stop to confirm that airline has lost it. I remember one trip where BA forced me to gate-check a bag, and then somehow lost it -- how you lose a bag in the, say, 50 ft between the jet bridge and baggage hold I’ll never know. The problem was -- I was in a different city every day. And so, they’d deliver the bag to my hotel the next morning after I’d already checked out and headed for my first meeting. This went on for a couple of days until I finally convinced them to leapfrog me and send it two stops one. Liberating myself from well-worn clothes -- I love it when I can find happiness in the small things.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Another reminder that Miami is a bit different -- the in-room coffee machine at the JW Marriott wasn’t the standard issue single cupper with Starbucks Pike Place filter disks (that, by the way, are always too big for the filter holder). Instead, it was an Illy espresso machine with its own special little capsules and branded demitasse cups. Took me a couple of tries to get the capsule properly situated, but after that, I ran through all 3, 4 (?) of the capsules in 15 minutes and was ready to attack the day.</li>\r\n 	<li>Last month, The Aviating Railfanner stopped by the TravelCommons YouTube page and left a comment on the 2012 video O\'Hare Layover Excursion: a 6-Hour Tour of Chicago saying “I think it would be a good idea to mention that the Randolph/Wabash station has been demolished and is now the Washington/Wabash station” Good point. Indeed, there are a more than a few things that have changed in the 5 years since I did that video. I stole the idea from the “One City, Five Hours” series that United used to have in their Hemisphere’s magazine. The locations are still good -- Wrigley Field, Millenium Park, the Picasso. I’m not sure in this age of Uber if the focus on the subway/the L is still valid. I may see if I can lightly edit this video -- insert some text to send people to the right station, and update the 1-day travel pass options -- and then think about some new options, like maybe a craft beer taproom-focused layover tour. There you go, One City, Five Taprooms and then come roaring back into the TSA line. Hmmm, I may need to rethink that one.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you’re thinking about any questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Ethereal (nop mix) by @nop (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Lancefield/34818</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Travel Is Turning Me Hipster</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Not wanting to turn this into the “Luggage Today” podcast, but when I was shifting things from my Bluesmart to my new Victorinox bag, I also restructured my toiletries kit. And as I was going through the contents -- what stays, what don’t I need anymore -- it struck me how much my travelling had changed something as basic as how I started my day.</li>\r\n 	<li>It started years, no decades ago -- sometime in the late ‘80’s or early ‘90’s. I was living in Philadelphia and flying to Europe pretty frequently, and at that time, the only real direct flight over the Atlantic (can I tell you how much I hate it when people say “The Pond”; it just puts my teeth on edge) was a BA 747 into Heathrow. Now, back then, I loved Heathrow. It was a great airport with fantastic connections. Now it’s an overcrowed shitshow that I avoid at all costs, but back then, it was great. Anyhow, at some point, Heathrow security required all electric devices to be pulled out for screening. Note I didn’t say “electronic”; this was before laptops and tablets and mobile phones were ubiquitous. No, this meant things like my electric razor had to be pulled out of my bag. Two go-rounds with Heathrow security and that Philips razor got jettisoned for a Gillette non-electric blade.</li>\r\n 	<li>Fast forward a decade-and-a-half to August 2006. I woke up in the SFO Marriott to the news of the foiled plot to blow up London-to-US flights by disguising separate explosive ingredients in soda bottles then then assembling and detonating them on board. I was trying to fly back the next day. Baggage check lines exploded when all the flyers with toothpaste, shaving cream, make-up -- pretty much everyone -- were made to check their bags. That weekend, I re-worked my toiletries kit -- hitting the local Whole Foods for tooth powder to replace toothpaste, hair wax for hair gel, and trading the shaving cream that I picked up in that last revamp for a badger hair shaving brush. I think this was the tipping point -- when my kit started to skew hipster.</li>\r\n 	<li>Fast forward another decade-and-a-half to this Christmas. My son gives me a selection of travel sized shaving soaps, each in their own tin container with a screw top. My daughter gives me a bottle of Lush toothy tabs -- kinda compressed tooth powder. These immediately go into my travel kit. My son forwards me a Massdrop buy for an Oristo razor -- a $100 version of my grandfather’s safety razor, precision engineered for a “very efficient yet non-aggressive shaving experience”. I think seriously about this. My toiletry kit has gone almost full hipster.</li>\r\n 	<li>And though I’ve slagged on the TSA for God knows how many episodes over the life of this podcast, I do have to thank them for one thing, keeping my toiletry kit from going full-on hipster, because I know they’ll never allow me to shift to shaving with a straight razor.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">My Flaming Heart by Wired Ant (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Wired_Ant/36862 Ft: Javolenus</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Every Delay Has a Story</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>In the last episode, I talked about why I dropped my subscription to TripIt’s paid “Pro” service -- the main benefit, live flight status notifications, was slower than the free notifications I was getting from the airlines themselves -- from American, United, and Delta. However, when we were idling in the New Orleans airport waiting on our flight back to Chicago, I found the Southwest delay notifications lagged way behind TripIt Pro. Not that I re-upped my TripIt Pro subscription; my wife forgot to cancel a 30-day trial she signed up for, so she now has a year’s subscription. I, instead, was using FlightAware, specifically the feature I’ve talked about in prior episodes that shows you where your plane is. From that I could see that the delay wasn’t because of the snow in Chicago; the plane was spending a lot of time on the ground in Ft Lauderdale, the stop before New Orleans. So I hit Twitter -- Why is flight 860 sitting in FLL so long? The reply -- “Hey, Mark. We know delays can be tough, and apologize for the inconvenience. It looks like Flight #860 is delayed due to inclement weather earlier in the day.” Perhaps a delay in Denver, but why the long ground turn in FLL? No answer.</li>\r\n 	<li>United announced a pilot program in January called “Every Flight Has A Story” where they’d push out much more detailed information on delayed flights -- rather than “Late Arriving Aircraft”, it would be “Our maintenance team is replacing an item on your plane and needs extra time to complete”. The pilot was scheduled for Houston and Phoenix. I haven’t seen much reaction to it, but at least for me, having some sense for the reason for a delay let’s me better figure out what I’m going to do next. I’m much less trusting of a newly posted departure time if I know the inbound plane is still on the ground, or if it’s a maintenance delay.</li>\r\n 	<li>Of course, some of those explanations could be a bit more embarrassing than others. Like for Southwest, a couple of days after our flight back to Chicago, they had to cancel more than 200 flights because they ran out of de-icing fluid at Midway airport. You get that notification, and you’re shaking your head as you dial up an airline that knows how to fly in the winter.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #138</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_138.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #138 — Travel Turning Me Hipster; Every Delay Has a Story','','inherit','closed','closed','','1947-revision-v1','','','2018-06-03 08:57:54','2018-06-03 13:57:54','',1947,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/06/03/1947-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2029,1,'2018-06-03 09:00:17','2018-06-03 14:00:17','[caption id=\"attachment_1925\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/IMG_20141210_231414.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1925\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/IMG_20141210_231414-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> How many nights to get Leopard Print status?[/caption]\r\n\r\nSo we\'re four weeks into the new year and 30-50% of us have already ditched our New Year\'s resolutions, but we still have time to get our 2018 travel status lined up. Over the holiday break, I bought a non-smart carry-on to replace my now-banned Bluesmart; I walk through my shopping criteria. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_137.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\nThanks to <a href=\"http://go.travelperk.com/travelcommons\">TravelPerk</a> for sponsoring this episode. <iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/388761270&color=%23ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true\"></iframe><!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #137:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. This episode is sponsored by <a href=\"http://go.travelperk.com/travelcommons\">TravelPerk</a>, the #1 rated business travel tool on the Internet. It’s been a light travel month, just a drive down to Nashville, and a couple of trips over to Charlottesville, VA, which has been a nice break from what is otherwise turning out to be a brutally cold winter in Chicago. The day after New Years, I walked out of the house into a -10℉ morning -- not windchill, it was -10℉ ambient. Welcome to January. I had my team travel here last week for a 2018 kick-off meeting. No one accused us of boon-doggling. The guy from Phoenix did say he was filing an employee abuse claim though.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’ve found myself drinking less craft beer and much more Scotch whisky in this month; -10℉ is definitely brown liquor weather. Luckily, my daughter brought home a nice bottle of 18-year-old <a href=\"http://www.glenscotia.com/\">Glen Scotia</a> from Edinburgh for Christmas. I’ve made a sizable dent in it.</li>\r\n 	<li>On my first trip to Charlottesville, after being off the road for four weeks, it took me forever to gather up all the bits of my regular travel carry from around the house. Normally, my travel carry stays in my backpack and my suitcase; I buy duplicates of things like hair brushes and headphones just so I don’t need to pull them out of my bag. But for some reason, all discipline broke down over the holidays and my carefully curated travel carry was spread/spewed throughout the house. Luckily, my ride to ORD was 5 minutes late. I took my Bluesmart bag, squeezed in one last trip before American’s January 15th smart luggage ban took effect. I tweeted a picture of my Bluesmart before boarding. American replied “We\'re glad you\'re flying with us and appreciate your cooperation with our team.” My response -- “Not that I have much of a choice…” Especially with IATA recommending the ban to its 300 airline members. My new non-smart Victorinox bag arrived on my front porch before the ban clicked in, so once I shift everything from the Bluesmart to the Victorinox, I’ll power down the Bluesmart, delete its app from my iPhone, and consign it to the corner of the attic with all my other retired bags -- my own Land of Misfit Bags.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mactonite/29469\">Static</a> by Darkroom (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mactonite/29469 </span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Starting off the New Year, I did a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/01/01/looking-back-at-2017-the-highs-and-the-lows/\">blog post</a> summarizing some of the high and low points that we talked about in 2017. The high points? Things like Uber and Lyft driver stories, yet more craft beer taprooms, and Hertz’s President Circle Aisle. Low points? Airlines dragging passengers from planes, everybody lobbying for 5-star reviews, and, no surprise, the smart luggage ban.</li>\r\n 	<li>Allan Marko, not just a long-time TravelCommon’s listener, but probably one of the original listeners showed his roots by posting on the original comment channel -- the TravelCommons website\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Have had our Away luggage for only about six months prior to the battery ban. I really like the ‘smart’ charging feature. Luckily the Away battery is a nicely designed self-contained and easily removable unit (two screws; screwdriver included!) Now the battery lives in my backpack, and the luggage still usable.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\"></li>\r\n 	<li>Allan’s psychic capabilities are showing. I think Away is the only major smart bag that meets the airlines’ requirement for a removable battery. But for me, charging wasn’t the major use case for me. I’m typically fine with my Anker lipstick charger. And if I forget to recharge that, my Verizon mobile WiFi hotspot also doubles as a charger. For me, the GPS tracking was the main use case -- for those times I had to check my bag, it was nice to know that it had also made it to my destination -- a use case that requires power. Pull out the battery and no more tracking. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted.</li>\r\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\"></li>\r\n 	<li>Jim McDonough replied to the Twitter announcement of the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">last episode</a> where I wondered if I was the last generation of cash payers. Jim wrote\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I use cash a) at the local farmer’s market; b) pay for haircuts . . . having a hard time coming up with c)</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Jim, I dunno. Looking at your Twitter profile picture, you look like you could land in my generation. I apologize for using a card for anything under $20. Although I have to say that more and more microbrewery taprooms only take credit cards. I don’t apologize there; or at the self-service tills in Home Depot or Tesco’s -- mostly because there’s no one to apologize to even though they will take cash.</li>\r\n 	<li>Natalie on the British Airways social media team <a href=\"https://twitter.com/British_Airways/status/943550974102245376\">tweeted back</a> at me about the other topic on the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">last episode</a> -- about how hard it can be to cash in on loyalty points. You’ll remember that I talked about all the hassles I had in transferring Avios points from BA to Iberia, until I got a BA agent with solid northern accent. Natalie of BA said\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Hey Mark! Thanks for tagging us in your article. I\'m glad to hear that one of our \'Geordie\' colleagues was able to help you redeem some of your Avios. It\'s a shame you didn\'t catch her name though.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Absolutely it was a shame. She deserves huge props.</li>\r\n 	<li>In that same riff, I mentioned how my email to Iberia to clean up my name on my Iberia Plus account -- which might have been the root cause of my point transfer problem -- seemed to have fallen into a black hole. Well, apparently it didn’t. Soon after that episode, I got a letter from Iberia with a new card that had my correct name. That was nice. Would’ve been just a bit nicer if they’d hit the Reply button while handling the email and typed, I dunno, just 8 words -- “Got it fixed; new card in the mail” But it got done -- all of it, Avios points, non-stop ORD-MAD flight on points, and now, a card with my correct name.</li>\r\n 	<li>And that Iberia letter was probably one of the last surprises I got when I open the mailbox at home. Somehow, I’m not quite sure how, I signed up for a US Post Office service that sends me an email every morning with scanned images of letters I’m going to receive that day. When I got that first email, I was kinda “What the hell?”, but now I kinda like it, especially when I’m on the road. No more wondering what bills showed up, or during the holidays, who had sent us Christmas cards. It does kinda take the surprise out of opening the mailbox -- though not that there was much left since 90% of our physical mail is junk -- but it is kinda entertaining.</li>\r\n 	<li>Back in August, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/08/27/podcast-132-travel-apps-on-my-phone/\">episode #132</a> about the travel apps I have loaded on my phone, I talked about using the paid or “Pro” version of TripIt, and about how it was on the bubble for me because of how the airlines have improved the flight status notifications in their own apps. In 4 months since then, the airline apps have pretty consistently notified me of gate changes and delays faster than TripIt Pro. And so when my subscription ran out a few weeks ago, I ignored the renewal alerts. I’ll still use the free version -- I like the way TripIt consolidates separate plane, hotel, and rental car reservations into a single trip -- kinda replicating the itineraries your travel agent used to give you when they booked your entire trip. But paying $50 for what are now slower, redundant flight alerts? I’ll spend it on beer or brown liquor instead.</li>\r\n 	<li>I don’t know if it’s just me, but the cadence for boarding groups has gotten out of control. I think I was on a Delta flight where I was boarding group 1 or 2, but was the 4th or 5th group to board, after Delta One, and then Platinum Medallion, then Gold Medallion, Sky Team Elite -- it went on forever. American is a bit better -- only one non-numeric boarding group for the invite-only Concierge Key gang (remember George Clooney in Up In The Air) -- and then 1 through 9(!). I do love the announcement “If you don’t have a boarding group number, then board Group 7” which feels a bit random. Where it really becomes fun is on a regional jet, when the gate agent runs through this cadence for a plane with only 40-50 passengers and all the carry-on bags are gate… I mean valet checked. “Now boarding passengers in Group 1, Group 2, Group 3…” Four people board… “Groups 5, 6, 7, and the rest of you” followed by general scrum in front of the agent. I know the airlines have PhDs in psychology, sociology, and linear programming working on this stuff, but it continues to be a cluster</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>And thanks to this episode’s sponsor TravelPerk</li>\r\n 	<li>Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/11/20/podcast-135-airport-bingo-new-old-travel-pc/\">November episode</a>, I talked about American\'s last-minute cancellation of my night flight to Charlottesville and my ensuing scramble to find a replacement flight and to make sure the Hyatt Place didn\'t flush my reservation. But if I\'d booked with TravelPerk, they would\'ve done the scrambling for me.\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>This all-in-one business travel management tool includes a team of highly qualified agents ready to rescue disgruntled travelers from any scenario 24/7.</li>\r\n 	<li>It’s because of making magic happen in times like this that TravelPerk is now the #1 rated business travel tool on the internet.</li>\r\n 	<li>You\'ll love them because you can finally take control of your travel schedule, have freedom to book alternative accommodation like Airbnb, and have a built-in rescue team when stuff goes south. Remove some stress from the equation, go to <a href=\"http://go.travelperk.com/travelcommons\">go.travelperk.com/travelcommons</a> for a no-commitment test drive.</li>\r\n 	<li>It’s free forever if you to <a href=\"http://go.travelperk.com/travelcommons\">go.travelperk.com/travelcommons</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Psykick/52938\">Another Way</a> by Psykick (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Psykick/52938</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Plan for 2018 Travel Perks</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>So here we are, 4 weeks into the new year and anywhere from a third to a half of us have already ditched our New Year\'s resolutions and are now in full anticipation of Super Bowl queso dip. But while your dry January may have been washed out early, you still have time to get your 2018 travel perks in place.</li>\r\n 	<li>Almost all travel perks come from status in loyalty programs and all those status earning counts reset on Jan 1, so the first step is to match up what you think your 2018 travel plans will be to your loyalty programs. Any gaps? If you think you’ll start flying to Seattle (maybe helping to shill your hometown for Amazon’s HQ2), you’ll probably want to sign up for Alaskan Airlines Mileage Plan, where before, it might not have been worth the extra junk mail.</li>\r\n 	<li>Or if you’re already a member, do a status match. When I took a new CIO job some years back, all the hotels near our offices were Hilton brands. I had a Hilton\'s Honors card but just in basic blue as opposed to my top-of-the-line sparkly platinum Marriott card. After I hit the “reset my password” link on the Hilton website, I went straight to their status match page. Right at the top, it says “For the next 90 days,... we’ll match your elite status with any other loyalty program.” If you complete 4 or 8 stays over those 90 days, the match is good for the year. So rather than having to grind my way to Hilton status, I started enjoying it on Day 1. I had a friend do that with American -- parlay his United 1K status to Executive Platinum when he moved from Denver to Dallas. Much better than slumming in Boarding Group 5 until you clear the first status bar.</li>\r\n 	<li>Doing this, you also need to keep in mind the different ecosystems; the partnerships that tie travel companies together. It used to be just the international alliances -- Star, SkyTeam, OneWorld. When I knew I’d be traveling down to South Africa, racking up some serious business class mileage, I had two real options -- SAA out of JFK and IAD, or DL out of ATL. Living in Chicago, I chose SAA because they’re part of Star Alliance with United, and I’d get a lot more use from United status out of Chicago than I would Delta. And it’s getting even more combinatorial now with United and Marriott are status matching each other.</li>\r\n 	<li>And then there’s the credit cards -- both affinity (United and Chase Visa, American and Citi MasterCard) and non (Amex Platinum, Chase Sapphire Reserve). You gotta do the math. For example, Amex’s Platinum card is $550/year. But with that, you get Membership Rewards points that transfer to airlines and hotels, access to Delta lounges and Amex’s Centurion Lounges, which if you travel frequently to DFW, LAS, MIA, LGA, and now JFK, is great. They’re much better than, say American’s Admirals Clubs. I wish they had one in Chicago. Amex also picks up the $100 Global Entry or $85 PreCheck fee, gives you 10 GoGo WiFi sessions, $200 in Uber credit, and some other benefits. If you’ll use these benefits, that $550 can be a better deal than, say, the $95 that the United Chase will cost you. However, that United Chase will get you baggage fee waiver, two United Club passes, and status boarding. If you don’t travel a huge amount and live in a United hub like Houston, the United card could be a better deal. But you gotta think about your travel, do the math, and sign up for it now so you have all year to maximize the status benefits.</li>\r\n 	<li>And while you’re in this planning zone, do yourself a big favor sign up and make an appointment for Global Entry if you do international travel, or PreCheck if you’re mostly a domestic flyer. If it makes sense for you to get an Amex Platinum or Chase Sapphire Reserve card, it’ll be free. To me, TSA and Customs lines are still the worst part of travel. While you’re figuring out how to bump your status up your status on airlines and hotels, do yourself a favor and step out of those TSA and Customs lines too.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/flatwound/14476\">The Long Goodbye</a> by John Pazdan (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/flatwound/14476</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>How to Shop For A Suitcase</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>OK, perhaps a bit presumptuous of a title; perhaps it’s “How I shopped for a suitcase.” But before we go there, let’s summarize the set up from past episodes -- my 10-year old black Swiss Army carry-on rendered itself unusable before Thanksgiving when the handle became stuck in the extended position (luckily as I was getting in a car coming home from ORD and not while trying to stow it in an overhead while boarding), I hate shopping for suitcases so I recharge my Bluesmart smart bag and put it back into service in December only to have it banned from air travel as of last week.</li>\r\n 	<li>So now I’m forced to shop for a suitcase. Like any good consultant, I, of course, construct a prioritized list of evaluation criteria. First, it has to be a carry-on. Now that may seem a bit of a “duh”, but there is some ambiguity; the <a href=\"https://travel-made-simple.com/carry-on-size-chart/\">approved height</a> varies by airline between 19 and 22-inches. If I wanted to play it safe, I’d go for a 20-inch bag, but I’m also want to maximize how much I can carry-on. I tilt toward choosing space. Most US carriers accept a 22-inch bag and that’s mostly what I fly, and even when I’m on European carriers I usually have enough alliance status (my American Platinum status carrying over to OneWorld) to glide past the baggage sizer.</li>\r\n 	<li>Which leads to the second criterion -- it needs to be black. As I said in my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/10/18/ruthless-packing-tips/\">Ruthless Packing Tips post</a> in October, black not only makes you look thinner, it makes your bag look thinner to gate agents scanning for bag-sizer bait.</li>\r\n 	<li>Third, 2 wheels, not 4. This is a bit more of a personal preference. My Bluesmart is a 4-wheel spinner and my wife swears by hers, but because the 4 wheels have to extend from the bottom of the bag, spinners sacrifice packing space for agility, while 2-wheelers can embed their wheels up in the backplane of the bag. Again trying to maximize packing space, I go for the 2-wheeler, and with the biggest wheels I can find to make it an easier, smoother pull. I was kinda surprised how this limited my selection. Spinners definitely rule.</li>\r\n 	<li>My fourth criterion -- I wanted the inside of the suitcase to be as plain and empty as possible. No bunch of zip compartments, or built-in suit hangers, or ratcheting down clothes dividers; just a wide open box that free to structure how I want for each trip. I was surprised how tough this was to find. Indeed, in the end, I couldn’t find it and settled for a bag where I could detach the suit hanger and clothes divider and stash that stuff up in the Land of Misfit Bags next to the Bluesmart.</li>\r\n 	<li>Whittling through all that, I ended up buying a black Victorinox Werks Traveler 5.0 2-wheeler. Victorinox is what used to be Swiss Army; I figured if my last bag survived 10 years of hard mileage, that said something for durability. It was also one of the few where I could detach all the internal storage stuff. And it has that additional zipper to expand the width by an inch -- kinda like when you drop a notch on your belt after Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner; for those times when I’m flying home and have bought a few too many bottles of wine or brown liquor.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #137</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>Thanks again to TravelPerk for sponsoring this episode. Remember to go to <a href=\"http://go.travelperk.com/travelcommons\">go.travelperk.com/travelcommons</a> for a test drive</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_137.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #137 — New Year\'s Travel Status Tips; How to Shop for a Suitcase','','inherit','closed','closed','','1916-revision-v1','','','2018-06-03 09:00:17','2018-06-03 14:00:17','',1916,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/06/03/1916-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2030,1,'2018-06-03 09:02:20','2018-06-03 14:02:20','[caption id=\"attachment_1895\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/iStock-502842002.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1895\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/iStock-502842002-300x200.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"200\" /></a> A C-Note for you, and you, and you...[/caption]\r\n\r\nAfter traveling with younger colleagues who pay for everything with cards, I wonder if I\'m the last generation of cash payers. I also talk about the upcoming smart luggage ban on US airlines and a long Saturday afternoon trying to redeem some British Airways Avios points. All this, a new Uber driver story, and a few Christmas carols at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_136.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/371970371&color=%23ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true\"></iframe> <!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #136:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL on what has been a very light travel month, just one trip to New York and then back down to Charlottesville, VA before an early wrap-up of my 2017 travel. I wanted to avoid flying into LGA because of the construction, but UA’s EWR monopoly jacks the price difference way beyond what I can justify, so I gritted my teeth and booked the LGA flight. It was amazingly smooth for Monday morning rush hour in ORD. Walked straight into the PreCheck line. There were a ton of people there -- as is typical on a Monday morning, lots of professional travelers -- but everything moved smoothly. The TSA stations were fully staffed; there was a minimal number of amateur travelers in PreCheck, and so what appeared to be a very daunting line was an easy 5-minute exercise. After that, I walked straight up the Starbucks register and ordered a coffee, and had a easy walk down to the gate. We left ORD on-time and landed at LGA 30 minutes early! I checked my watch again to make sure it was right. On a good day, I consider an flight between ORD and LGA to be on-time if I’m not more than 30 minutes late. I’m not sure I’ve ever arrived early. Indeed, somebody sent me a press release last month with stats saying that Chicago-New York is second only to SF-LA in the list of most disrupted air routes. All this joyousness hit the wall, though -- almost literally -- when I walked out of LGA Terminal B smack into the cab line which, for those of you not familiar with LGA, should not be see when you walk out the front of Terminal B because the cab rank is on the side of Terminal B. Well, maybe they moved it for the construction. Nope, it was where it always has been. So my time budget balanced out -- 30-minute early arrival funded the 30-minute cab ride. Easy come, easy go.</li>\r\n 	<li>I was only in New York for Monday day -- arrived at 11am and left at 8pm -- which meant trying to find a cab on 5th Ave to take me to LGA during rush hour. Or used to. Whatever your opinions on Uber or ride sharing in general, the ability to easily get a ride from Manhattan to LGA without dancing into the street, hiding your luggage behind a trash can, and pleading with the one guy who finally stopped is justification enough for its existence. And I’m obviously not the only one who feels this way, so there are gobs of Uber drivers on, say, 5th Ave at rush hour, making it hard to spot your ride and easy to get into someone else’s. Monday night, I noticed a new option on the Uber screen that was showing my driver crawling toward me through Midtown traffic. “Click here to change the color of your driver’s Uber badge”. I clicked and got a color spectrum slider, which kept me occupied while I was waiting. I changed the color to red, then blue, then yellow, and then Uber said he was a block away, to some shade of lime green. I looked up, and there was an SUV with a lime green Uber badge in the window. I hopped in and off we went. I asked him how his evening was going. “Fine,” he said, “though I think this Uber light is acting up. Just now, it started changing all sorts of colors.”</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/copperhead/40520\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen</a> by copperhead (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: Admiral Bob, Javolenus , Sackjo22</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Roger Nash sent a note on Twitter with a pointer to the Transport for London’s new Oyster app. In the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/11/20/podcast-135-airport-bingo-new-old-travel-pc/\">last episode</a>, I talked about my growing stack of contactless -- tap ‘n’ go -- transit cards, and difference between re-loading my Chicago Ventra card with a smartphone app vs. having to queue at a machine to top up my Oyster card when we were in London last summer. TfL launched their Oyster app a few months back and seem to be aggressively rev’ing it to add features. The only problem for me -- it’ll only take a UK-based payment card. So I’ll have to sponge off my daughter if I want to skip the machine. That’ll be a fun role change…</li>\r\n 	<li>Also got a good run of comments on the Airport Bingo topic.\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>An anonymous comment asking “Since when do bingo cards have a story arc?” Fair point…</li>\r\n 	<li>Donna Smith Pleiman on Twitter suggested a square for “sweaty guy racing onto the plane at the last minute plops down next to you, proceeds to take his shoes off.” Yeah, that one happens a little too often -- because once is too often</li>\r\n 	<li>Rob said: I like the \"3-adjective rule\". I\'ve always said, \"If you have to inhale to finish your drink order... you don\'t actually like coffee.\" Good point, if you have to use circular breathing in the Starbucks line, you need to re-think your beverage choices.</li>\r\n 	<li>And Steve Frick built his own card in a post on his Back and Gone Again blog. “Since not everyone travels by air, we’re focusing on travel in general,” he says and then spins through his set of 25 spaces. I’ll post a <a href=\"http://www.hypeorlando.com/back-and-gone-again/2017/11/22/holiday-travel-bingo/\">link</a> to it in the show notes.</li>\r\n 	<li>And with Steve throwing down that challenge, I stole a couple of his squares so I could expand my Airport Bingo card to the full 25 spaces in a blog post on the TravelCommons site last week. Check it out; I hope it keeps you entertained on your trip to Grandma’s house.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>The smart luggage ban announced by Delta, American, and Alaska with the other US oligopoly members United and Southwest expected to follow shortly caused a bit of a Twitter storm. Next month, January 15 to be exact, smart luggage without removable batteries will be banned. And if your smart bag is checked, you have to remove battery before it goes in the hold -- which negates one of the key benefits pitched by smart bag sellers -- the ability to track your bag through built-in GPS and cellular data. No battery, and it’s just another bag left behind on the tarmac, or as one of my funnier Twitter followers @ThankYouLeetch replied that the airlines were hard at work -- “We\'re GOING to lose your bag, and we\'ll be damned if we let the likes of YOU find it! If you must know, we are just REALLY into this monopoly thing.\" Kinda blows if you just dropped $400 on one of these bags.</li>\r\n 	<li>This would seem to cause an existential problem for category pioneer Bluesmart because none of their bags -- the original one nor the recently released Series 2 -- have removable batteries. I backed Bluesmart’s initial Indiegogo campaign back in November 2014 -- longtime podcast listener Arnoud Heijnis <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/11/22/podcast-112-holiday-airport-etiquette-travel-tax-pile-up/\">pointed it out to me</a> -- and received my bag a year later. I reviewed it in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/12/podcast-120-where-do-guidebooks-fit-in-i-hate-shopping-for-suitcases/\">episode 120</a> after a couple of months of use -- my take: “I’m kinda “meh” on all the electronics, so it’s a nice enough hard-shell wheelie bag with a couple of bells and whistles that don’t necessarily wow me.” Though I did amend that “meh” in the very <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/05/30/podcast-121-tsa-lines-my-luggage-is-where/\">next episode</a> saying “the Bluesmart is the perfect carry-on size, it’s usually right above me in the plane cabin, so the location finder isn’t that valuable. Except when I have to gate check my bag on a small regional jet. On a recent Skywest flight, it was taking my bag a long time to show up at the gate after arriving. Hmmm, I pulled out my iPhone, hit the Location button on the Bluesmart app, and it showed me that my bag had updated its location a couple of minutes prior and was indeed here. A few minutes later, it showed up in the last tranche of bags heaved up into the jet bridge. Not critical functionality, but it moves up from “meh” to “kinda handy”.”</li>\r\n 	<li>The real pain for me is that I now have to shop for another suitcase which I really hate. I finally put my 10-year-old Victorinox bag out to pasture because the handle locked itself in the extended position, and so I’d switched over to my Bluesmart for these recent trips. My last flight back from CHO was on an American Eagle regional jet. I’m waiting along the side of a cold ORD bridge with about 20 other passengers for my bag. It comes out second because, even though there’s not First Class on this plane, I’ve clung to the yellow gate check tag that I got with a First Class upgrade last month. Sparky, the young gate agent, looks at my bag as he’s handing it to me and says “Is that a smart bag? Did you take the battery out of that?” “No, because I don’t have to until January 15,” I shot back. Don’t push it, American. You’re forcing me to scrap a 2-year-old bag; I got that. But don’t make me go luggage shopping the week before Christmas.</li>\r\n 	<li>One of the topics back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/11/22/podcast-125-uber-driver-stories-overseas-for-the-election/\">episode 125</a> was life stories from my Uber and Lyft drivers. I still do ask most of my drivers how they like driving, how long they’ve been doing it, and what else they do — if it’s not their full time gig. Last month, we were taking an Uber into the city on Saturday for a beer festival. The driver was great -- very personable guy. So I ask him about his gig. He’s been doing it full-time for 2 years now. Before that, he was a hotel manager. He quit because the stress was too much -- late night calls about guests, bedbug infestations,.... He said that driving Uber in Chicago was much less stressful. Think about next time you’re about to light into the assistant night manager about a missing towel -- their job is more stressful than driving full-time in bumper-to-bumper traffic. That was an eye-opener to me. I’ve gone out of my way to be more pleasant to front desk folks ever since.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/NiGiD/48586\">O Tannenbaum / Oh Christmas Tree</a> by Martijn de Boer (NiGiD) (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license.  Ft: Admiral Bob (admiralbob77)</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Is Cash is a Waning King?</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>As I said at the start of the show, my last trip this year was ORD to LGA to CHO. I didn’t arrive too late so there were a couple of cabs waiting -- no LGA-style lines, I just hopped in. It’s a $25 flat rate to downtown Charlottesville. We pulled up to my hotel, I gave the driver a 20 and a 10 and got out of the cab. “Cash? Thanks!” he said.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’ve said this before; I try to pay all of my cab fares in cash ever since one cab driver walked me through why he hates cards. There’s a timing problem-- he has to pay for gas, tolls, airport access fees, and the taxi company that day, but he doesn’t get his money until a couple of days later. And then there’s the high fees the processing companies charge taxi drivers.</li>\r\n 	<li>But when traveling with younger colleagues, I feel like I’m the last generation of cash payers. Not only do they pay for everything with a card, many of them don’t even carry cash. Maybe I’m just getting old, or maybe I remember when you couldn’t use cards everywhere.</li>\r\n 	<li>Especially in Europe in the late ‘80’s/early ‘90’s when I would be in a different country every day on sales calls with distributors. There weren’t international ATMs -- or really ATMs of any kind. We’d get a wallet full of American Express Travelers Checks before flying out and then typically cash a $100 check at the airport currency exchange after customs. This was before the euro, so we’d juggle D Marks, Belgian and French francs, British and Irish pounds, pesetas, lira,.... Almost all of the hotels we stayed in took credit cards -- except for this one random mom-&amp;-pop place outside of Munich; nice people but they screwed up my D Mark budget -- but not all restaurants and none of the taxis did. So our currency exit strategy -- so we didn’t pay double the exchange fees for having to go in and out of a currency that we might not use for another year or so -- was to throw down most of our excess cash at the hotel in the morning, saving enough for a sandwich, the cab back to the airport and a beer at the bar -- and then put on the Amex the balance of the hotel room. It usually worked well -- except for the one time that I mixed up the exchange rate between the Swedish krona and Swiss franc. Not an unreasonable mix up -- both countries start with an S and have a lot of snow -- but the krona exchange rate was about 6 to the dollar at that time while the Swiss franc was at 1.3 to the dollar. That one definitely screwed up my end-of-day cash strategy.</li>\r\n 	<li>But I absolutely understand the use case for going all plastic. First, you’re not having to float the money between travel and reimbursement. But I gotta think convenience is the bigger play. Many companies pipe their company card transactions straight into their expense reporting systems. Makes it incredibly easy -- log into Concur or whatever, assign each charge to an expense code and submit. Nothing forgotten and you’re done in 5 minutes. With cash, you have to remember what you spent, enter it, and probably submit a receipt too. I’ll never pay for my $2 ORD Starbucks coffee with my Amex card, but when the cab fare get above $50, even I’ll charge it.</li>\r\n 	<li>I do think it’s a bit of a generational thing, though. I remember my dad always walking around with a bunch of 50’s in a money clip in his pocket. And my kids always getting a $100 bill from their Hungarian grandparents for Christmas -- we’d call it the Eastern European C note. I now have a Venmo account, but I still like paying people back in cash. Feels like I need say “Get off my lawn” but I may not have completely aged out yet. When paying my daughter’s tuition at Univ of St Andrews, one sentence on the web site caught my eye -- “Ideally tuition and accommodation fees should not be paid in cash” -- which means that someone or multiple someones has done it. It’s not a travel expense, but the image of someone walking into the St Andrews bursar’s office and stacking piles of 100 pound notes just makes me smile. Makes me want to drop a C note on my next big cab ride.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/44580\"> What Child is This (Instrumental)</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license.  Ft: Jeris</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Don’t Make It Hard to Cash in on Loyalty</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Back in October, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/10/31/podcast-134-value-of-loyalty-need-those-5-stars/\">episode 134</a>, we talked about the value of loyalty. In November, JD Powers released their 2017 Airline Loyalty Program Satisfaction Study. Powers measured satisfaction “based on four factors (in order of importance): earning and redeeming rewards; program benefits; account management; and member communication”. Not a surprising list, and placing “redeeming awards” at the top makes sense since that’s sorta the core of a loyalty program -- here’s something to incent you to fly us more.</li>\r\n 	<li>A couple of years ago, in episode 116, I talked about why, for me, British Airways’ Avios program has been the worst program for redemptions. I had over 300,000 points sitting there because it never made sense to use them. When I’d price out an award ticket between Chicago and London, the addition cash I would owe for BA’s fuel surcharges (which made sense when oil was at $120/bbl, but much less so at $50) and Heathrow landing taxes would just about equal what I’d pay for a ticket with another airline -- so the miles were worth nothing. Not exactly a best practice for an airline loyalty program.</li>\r\n 	<li>But, when BA and Iberia, both owned by the same corporate parent, kinda combined their programs into, not a single but a sorta interchangeable Avios program, I thought there might be a way to finally get some value from my forlorn BA points. I said kinda interchangeable because I now have 2 Avios accounts -- a BA Avios account and an Iberia Avios account. And since I have had my Iberia Avios account for over 90 days, I can convert my BA Avios to Iberia Avios, which let me use points for a direct ORD-MAD flight this spring at a small fraction of the cash for fees and taxes that BA would charge.</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, good. I’ve found the flights, I’ve found the page on BA.com to transfer. I enter all the account info, press the button, and get a big red error screen. Hmmm… I try it a couple of more times, same result. Different browsers, same result. In incognito mode so there’s no legacy cookies, same result. Hmmm…</li>\r\n 	<li>So I dredge around BA’s site and find a technical support number. It’s Saturday afternoon Chicago time, but after a good bit of music, I get a live guy. And he’s a good guy. Here’s the problem, your name doesn’t match on your accounts -- it’s Mark Peacock on your BA account, and Mark Peacock Peacock on your Iberia account. You’ll need to call Iberia to change that, then the transfer will go through. OK, seems reasonable enough. So I call Iberia, again listen to music and again get a live person. Good guy, but he can’t help me. Here’s a number in Spain; give them a call. Which I do, a bit more music, and then another guy. We’ll need some documentation to make that change, send a picture of the first page of your passport to this Iberia email address and we’ll make the change.</li>\r\n 	<li>Lots of calls, spoke to some nice people, but I still can’t break these BA Avios points free. So I send the email, but I don’t expect this to get resolved soon. I open another beer and gear myself up for another fare search, but decide to give BA one more call. This time, I connect with a woman with a proper northern English accent. It felt like I’d somehow overflowed into a high status group; like when I was Global Services on United and agents picking up my calls were sitting in the corporate center near ORD and could make anything happen. I relate my tale of woe; “Oh, that’s no problem,” she says. Five minutes later, it’s done. Thanks to her, I got to redeem 100,000 Avios points and am feeling a bit more hopeful about the remaining balance. The only downside -- I didn’t get the woman’s name so I could give her a shout out. By the way, 3.5 weeks later and still no response to my email to Iberia.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #136</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_136.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #136 — Is Cash A Waning King; Don’t Make It Hard to Cash in on Loyalty','','inherit','closed','closed','','1894-revision-v1','','','2018-06-03 09:02:20','2018-06-03 14:02:20','',1894,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/06/03/1894-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0);
INSERT INTO `wp_posts` VALUES
(2031,1,'2018-06-03 09:06:57','2018-06-03 14:06:57','[caption id=\"attachment_1843\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/2D9A5999-E233-4434-BFCE-4A45D285BEA6.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1843\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/2D9A5999-E233-4434-BFCE-4A45D285BEA6-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Status Recognition in Vietnam[/caption]\r\n\r\nFinding a Jag in the Hertz Presidents Club aisle has me thinking about the differing value of loyalty from hotel, airlines, and car rental companies while 5-star rating schemes are pushing grade inflation. All this and comments on luggage discounts, traveling while injured, and #metoo while flying at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_134.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_134.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #134:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. No exciting or exotic travel since the last episode; just a quick down-and-back to Atlanta, a day in Washington, DC, and a few trips to Charlottesville, VA.</li>\r\n 	<li>The first trip to Charlottesville, about 3 weeks ago, was the first time I’d been back in 5 months after spending more than a year there. Other than the flights being poorly timed -- there are non-stops from ORD, but they arrive at either 2:45 in the afternoon or quarter past midnight -- it’s been a great town to visit. So I was surprised as anyone by the white supremacist march there in August.</li>\r\n 	<li>I was on the late night flight and when I walked out of the terminal, the one cab at the curb had already been claimed. But it was only a 4 min wait for a Lyft driver, so not a problem. Indeed, it turned out to be a great ride. The Lyft driver, an older black guy, told me, unprompted, the whole back story of the protests; how it started as a local political battle that then blew up big. He wanted me to know that Charlottesville wasn’t like that. He told me “I’ve lived here for 40 years and have never seen that statue, until one day, I drove past a park, looked to my right and there it was!”</li>\r\n 	<li>Since the white supremacists had shown back up the Saturday before we came back, I said to the project team, “We need to find out where that statue is so we can avoid it.” One is from India, the other born in the US of Indian parents. I didn’t want us stumbling into a line of tiki torch-bearing protesters.\r\nBut as we got working that day, we forgot about it. Driving to dinner, we missed a turn -- actually we missed going straight; instead followed the road as it turned -- and as we wandered through some side streets to get back on track, I look to my right, and there’s the Robert E Lee statue covered in black tarp, with a couple of people camped out in front of it, and another group of people walking toward it. I suggested that we didn’t need to come to a complete stop at intersection. And, well, we know where that statue is now.</li>\r\n 	<li>For all of my complaints and bitch tweeting about delayed flights, I have to say that my American flight home from Reagan National Saturday morning was great. Exit row seat; no one in the middle. Everyone boarded quickly; they closed the door and left 10 minutes early and with no traffic on the taxiway and a beautiful sunny day, we were up and over the Potomac in 5 minutes. Typically, though, nothing like this goes unpunished at ORD, but we landed, didn’t have to wait for a gate, and taxied immediately in, arriving a half-hour early. Damn if this doesn’t make me look forward to my next trip.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/bridges/15563\">i knew</a> by bridges (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. Ft: shannonsongs</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>On my most recent trip through the ATL PreCheck line, there was no X-Ray machine choreography this time. If you remember in the last episode, I talked about the TSA agent at the parallel loading X-Ray machine coordinating each bin push, having everyone hold up until all the previous bins had cleared, and then having everyone push their bins onto the conveyor at once. Not this time, though I did get a bit of a stink eye from a couple when I walked around them to one of the further up loading stations. They’re obviously not old PC heads, otherwise they’d instantly understand the difference between serial and parallel paths.</li>\r\n 	<li>Following up on the packing pro tips topics from the last episode, which I also repurposed/recycled into the Ruthless Packing Tips blog post, Dan Bennett, the CEO of Test Facts, sent me a link to study where they tested and compared 32,672 luggage prices. I’ll put a <a href=\"https://www.testfacts.com/luggage-prices-analyzed/\"><strong>link</strong> </a>to the study in the show notes, but a couple of interesting factoids from their introductory infographic\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>You can save an average of $110/39% buying on-line</li>\r\n 	<li>Walmart and Target’s on-line stores tend to have the highest discounts; Kohl’s and Macy’s the lowest</li>\r\n 	<li>Amazon is in 10th place for average discount (in the 40% range), but is tops by a long way in greatest variety -- over 12,000 luggage items vs. 7,500 for Jet which was #2</li>\r\n 	<li>Luggage sets have a 23% higher discount than single pieces</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Check it out -- it’s an interesting piece of analysis</li>\r\n 	<li>Jim McDonough posted a “traveled while injured” story on Facebook that put my biking injury whining in its place\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>My wife and I were in County Kerry on the West Coast of Ireland. We were killing time before dinner, at an ancient stone circle on the edge of town. I was taking some photos, and it started raining. While walking down a slope, I was putting my camera back in my bag to keep it dry, when my left foot slipped on the wet grass. My right knee hyper-flexed, causing a complete tear of my quadriceps tendon. There was a loud crack, but no pain.</li>\r\n 	<li>It turns out you can\'t walk without a quadriceps tendon. We didn\'t know what the problem was. My wife ran off and found some people and got them to come and get me, and they took me to the doctor\'s house. The doctor (more like a physician\'s assistant, the regular doctor was away) poked around but couldn\'t diagnose anything. We went back to our B&amp;B but did not go out to dinner that night!</li>\r\n 	<li>Flying home, Dublin/Gatwick/DFW, I needed assistance for the connections. British Airways took such good care of me in Gatwick that I fly them whenever I can. While on the plane I was OK - I used seat backs to get to/from the head. American was supposed to provide a wheelchair at DFW but they failed to until the lead flight attendant got on the horn and got me one. I had surgery a couple of days later, and my rehab took a few months.</li>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">This is the same injury that Bill Clinton had at Greg Norman\'s house. He had a better medical plan than I did</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Just “ouch”, Jim. Reminds me of years ago when I broke my right foot getting out of my car in Philadelphia. I stepped on some broken concrete and heard a loud “snap”! After a long wait in an ER in downtown Philly -- where they rightly were triaging gunshot victims over me -- they plastered me up to my thigh and told me not to put any weight on my foot. The next day, I’m hobbling through 30th Street Station and down the stairs to the train platform on crutches with a carry-on bag across my back, swinging with every step. No one from Amtrak took any sort of care of me.</li>\r\n 	<li>Mika Pyyhkala tweeted me a great video of what I assume is a new service that guides blind travelers through airports. I’ll put a <a href=\"https://youtu.be/rXtv-M4WpMU\"><strong>link</strong> </a>in the show notes. It’s a great demo, show how a person in the contact center is viewing a real-time video stream through what I assume is a camera mounted on the head of the traveler, and then providing audio guidance. And watching the video made me realize what a mine field an airport is for blind or low-sight travelers. I guess I should’ve realized this; it’s typically a mine field for those with 20/20 vision. Thanks Mika for the pointer. Very cool video.</li>\r\n 	<li>The #metoo Twitter campaign on sexual harassment that started up a couple of weeks ago reminded me of a couple of stories women have told me about seat assignments. One from a woman CIO; she’s sitting in her aisle seat, pre-boarded with the top status group and is downloading some last-minute e-mails during regular boarding. She looks up, there’s a guy standing there who says “Why don’t you just slide over, honey”, pointing to the center seat. She closed her PC, stood up and pointed the guy to his center seat, and then leaned out into the aisle for the rest of the flight. Another story was from a friend, a woman air marshal, who was sitting in her assigned aisle First Class seat -- armed and incognito to everyone except the flight crew. During boarding, a well-known male TV host on MSNBC asks her to switch seats. She can’t; the regulations say that air marshals need to be in their assigned seats; but she can’t tell him that and stay undercover, so she politely tells him “No”. To which he becomes very irate, obnoxiously berating her -- “Do you know who I am” and all that. As much as she’d love to tell him why she can’t move, she can’t. So she has to sit there and take it, until finally a flight attendant comes over and intervenes. Followed by, again, an uncomfortable 2-hr flight in close quarters with a troglodyte. Sexual harassment is bad -- full stop. Having to fend someone off, and then be in the same tight metal tube with him unable to leave, even worse.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/11510\">Funkist</a> - cdk dub mix by cdk (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: teru.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>What’s the Current Value of Loyalty?</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I continue to love Hertz’s new Presidents Club pick-your-own car aisle. Yes, National has been doing it for years. But on my last trip to Atlanta, I’m walking down the aisle looking at the cars -- Altima, Altima, Hyundai, Altima, Jag, Altima -- wait, what? I very quickly back up. It’s a new Jaguar Model XF. I look up -- nope, I haven’t slipped into the Upgrade aisle. I throw my bag in the back and take off for one of my nicer drives up I-85 through the city. Another time, I’m walking down the aisle and a Hertz guy pulls a new Dodge Charger into the space next to me. He hops out, hands me the keys saying “We want to make sure you guys have a nice selection of cars to choose from.” And so now as the year is winding down, I’m looking -- how many more rentals to keep Presidents Club status?</li>\r\n 	<li>I felt the flip side of this last week at the Charlottesville Courtyard where as I’m filling up a couple of water glasses in the workout room cooler, I tweet “I kinda hate Courtyard Hotels. They offer the worst experience for the money to Marriott Platinum members…” Scott Drake tweeted back “I’ll be the contrarian: at the price point is it not valuable? Are you expecting the JW experience at a Courtyard?” while Michael Kline asked “Detailed explanation? Maybe on the podcast?” Mine was a tweet that come from a comparison between my stay at an Atlanta Marriott the prior week and this Courtyard. For about the same rate, the Atlanta Marriott gave me a bit of a welcome gift, free breakfast every morning, and restocked my room with bottled water. The Courtyard -- I could either pick a bottle of something from their little market next to the front desk or have one free coffee during my stay. I took the bottle of water, which I then filled up every morning in the workout room until the maid threw it out. Not knocking the maid -- she’s just doing her job. But as I’m carrying the now filled water glasses back to my room, I’m thinking -- why am I staying here? And again, it’s not that I couldn’t go buy a bottle of water and expense it, it was more the disconnect of the thing -- how much better the Marriott treated me for the same price.</li>\r\n 	<li>On my last trip to ATL, I flew DL where I have absolutely no status. I was trying to thread my flights between already-booked conference calls, and DL, with way more flights than AA or UA, was the only way to string everything together. On the way down, I couldn’t get a seat assignment until I was at the gate -- 32B, second-to-the-last row on an old Boeing 717 -- the last of the DC-9/MD-80 series that I think Delta got from the old AirTrans. At the gate I thought I lucked into an aisle seat, but those 717’s have a 3-2 seat configuration, opposite of AA and the old NW, so B is a middle seat. The flight was fine; the service reasonable, and it was a short flight, so it wasn’t a big deal. But it was definitely a less enjoyable experience that my Saturday flight on American, with an exit row aisle seat and an empty middle seat.</li>\r\n 	<li>There was a study a few months ago that showed American was the most stingy carrier with award seats. And there are other ways that they’ve eroded the value of loyalty. I’ve flown American since July 1985 when I started my first full-time job in Dallas and I’ve noticed that chipping way over what’s now 37 years -- that’s a frightening number to say out loud. But when my objective is to get from Point A to Point B with the least amount of hassle, there is still some value to loyalty.</li>\r\n 	<li>Which is kinda the muddling middle ground I’ve carved out nowadays; invest enough time/effort to hit the loyalty level that fits the value I will get. I’ll go out of my way to re-up my Hertz status because it’s given me great rental car choices. I won’t push for anything more than mid-level airline status because, with the high load factors and the push to sell 1st-class seats, there not much more to get than free front-of-the-plane seating and a reasonable shot at overhead bin space. Going out of my way to make American’s Exec Platinum or United’s 1K again doesn’t appear to be worth it. And with Courtyards, there’s not much value in a $2 bottle of water.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/48705\">Jolanta Blues</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license.  Ft: Admiral Bob, Martijn de Boer</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Need Those 5 Stars</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>A few months ago, after an overnight stay at a Residence Inn in Baltimore, I wrote up a TripAdvisor review. I titled it “Pretty standard Residence Inn experience” and gave the place 3 whatever TripAdvisor calls them -- stars, circles -- whatever they are, I gave them 3. Seemed in line with the review, where I said “Standard Residence Inn set up; friendly service. Shuttle driver provided good service driving us to/from nearby businesses”. Nothing controversial. So I was a little surprised when I got a note the next day from the general manager\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>“Thank you very much for going on TripAdvisor.com to review our hotel. We greatly appreciate it. One request I have, if you would be willing, is if you might consider changing your rating from a 3 star review to a 4 star review. Marriott hotels views a 3 star review or lower as a “0”. Meaning the hotel takes a hit/mark against it for providing what Marriott considers is a “bad” stay which is 3 or under in their view. It looks like your comments indicate that you had a good stay. In that regard, I wonder if you would be willing to change your score up to a 4? We would really appreciate it if you would.”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>I didn’t change the rating. Maybe I should’ve, but honestly, I don’t know. And even if I did, I really didn’t want to. I thought it was a 3-star experience. I’m sorry that Marriott doesn’t give you credit for that, but I kinda feel like that’s not my problem</li>\r\n 	<li>Now, I’m nothing if not inconsistent, because I’ll give every Uber and Lyft driver 5 stars if they get me to my destination in a reasonably clean car. Indeed, I was right with my son when he jumped all over my wife for giving a Lyft driver 3 stars for what she thought was an “OK, nothing special” ride. “You gonna get him kicked off!” he said. And he wasn’t wrong. Internal Uber documents leaked a few years back said that drivers with ratings less than 4.6 would be considered for deactivation. So this is a little different than TripAdvisor. Here, Uber, the owner of the platform, is saying that a reasonable, acceptable ride should be 5 stars, since anything less will slide the driver down toward the deactivation zone.</li>\r\n 	<li>It’s the Internet version of the Lake Wobegon effect -- everybody is above average. The latest stats I saw on Yelp said that the average rating is 3.8 and 46% of their reviews had 5 stars. Which explains why that 4-star diner you drove to try out was just “OK”.</li>\r\n 	<li>Call me cranky, but the two apps that I regularly rate on -- TripAdvisor and Untappd -- I rate “average” as a 3; kinda like King Canute trying to hold back the waves of grade inflation. On Untappd, anything below a 3, I wouldn’t order again. a 3 is OK, 4 is a great beer, 5 outstanding. I just downloaded my stats into Excel and after a little remedial pivot table training, I can see that I’m a bit skewed -- 13% of my ratings are below 3; 60% are between 3 and 3.75; 26% between 4 and 4.75; and 1% at 5 with a median rating of 3.5. Not as bad as Yelp, but maybe it’s because I really like beer.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #134</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_134.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #134 — Value of Loyalty; Need Those 5 Stars','','inherit','closed','closed','','1842-revision-v1','','','2018-06-03 09:06:57','2018-06-03 14:06:57','',1842,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/06/03/1842-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2032,1,'2018-06-03 09:08:57','2018-06-03 14:08:57','[caption id=\"attachment_1855\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/IMG_0513-cropped.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1855\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/IMG_0513-cropped-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Always use a coffee name when crossing the 3-adjective limit[/caption]\r\n\r\nHere\'s something to listen to while in the Thanksgiving airport lines and traffic jams. We list out some of the squares we\'d like to see in an airport bingo card, and I end up going back to the future with my new travel PC. We also talk about my growing stack of subway \"tap\" cards and some forecasts on what could be a traffic jammed Thanksgiving holiday. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_135.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_135.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #135:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. Started my traditional Thanksgiving no-fly shutdown a week early. My normal practice is to stay at home Thanksgiving week, avoiding what is in the US the busiest travel week of the year. But this year, I’m taking advantage of every opportunity to scale back my travel a bit; consciously going to an every other week travel schedule. This is a big change for me; I think last year I travelled all but 6 or 8 weeks. I’m finding this more leisurely makes me much less brittle/much more accepting of travel hiccups.</li>\r\n 	<li>Which came in very handy on my last trip because, as I feared, I jinxed myself with the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/10/31/podcast-134-value-of-loyalty-need-those-5-stars/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">last episode</a> when, after a great flight back from DC, I said “Damn if this doesn’t make me look forward to my next trip.” Well, we all know that no good deed goes unpunished. My next flight to Charlottesville was late night Sunday -- leave ORD 9:50pm, get into CHO around 12:30am. I’m sitting in the Admirals Club catching up on e-mail, reading a bit. I’d been getting occasional phone notifications; my flight was bouncing around, changing departure gates, never a good sign, but it settled down after a while. Around 9:15, I figured I’d walk over to the departure gate. I looked at the monitor -- gate G7 as it had been for the past half-hour, so I packed up my stuff. Just as I picked up my phone -- bing, a new notification -- my flight’s cancelled. What the hell?</li>\r\n 	<li>I asked the Admirals Club folks to check -- yup, it’s cancelled; no, they don’t know why, and yes, they’re as surprised as I am. Of course, American sends me a nice notification that they’ve re-booked me onto the same flight the next day -- leaving 9:50pm Monday -- seeming to expect that I’d be perfectly happy with them blowing a day hole in my schedule. The Admirals Club agents knew that was not an acceptable answer, and one of them immediately started looking for alternatives. Me too -- looking at CHO, DC, and Richmond. Because of how late AA canceled, there was nothing available the next morning. Not surprising given how full planes are flying these days. After about 20 minutes of non-stop keystrokes, the Admirals Club agent found me a flight the next day at 11:30, getting me into Richmond at 2:30pm. I took it -- that was as good as it was going to get -- and gave her a couple of the service recognition coupons American sends the status fliers. She’d earned them. And as I heard other guys around me scrambling for hotel rooms, I stopped thinking about how American had wasted my Sunday night and was going to waste my Monday morning, and instead was happy that the cab I was going to catch was taking me to my own bed.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/duckett/23334\"><em>Another Girl</em></a> by duckett</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I’m sorta short-cycling what has become my normal monthly cadence -- just squeaking in episodes at the last day of the month -- so that I can give you something to listen to in those Thanksgiving airport line and traffic jams. Triple A forecasts 45.5 million people hitting the roads, the highest since 2005 -- probably some combination of low unemployment and low gas prices. And as the Thanksgiving holiday has expanded -- trying finding anyone in the office on Weds -- Tuesday evening is <a href=\"http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-met-holiday-travel-chicago-20171114-story.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">forecasted </a>to be the worst traffic, when getaway drivers and outbound rush hour combine into a hellish brew of standstill traffic jams. In Chicago, the trip from downtown to O’Hare is predicted to be an hour and 14 minutes, almost 4x more than what it takes on a clear road. Surpassed only by the 2 hour trip to JFK also forecasted for Tuesday evening.</li>\r\n 	<li>Steve Frick left a comment on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> about<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/10/31/podcast-134-value-of-loyalty-need-those-5-stars/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> last episode</a>’s topic on ratings grade inflation -- the need for that 5-star review. Steve writes:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I\'m a \"Yelp\" guy and I consistently give Fairfield Inn 3 stars. My reviews are along these lines \"Typical Fairfield, nothing that bad yet nothing yet nothing that great. Friendly staff, clean location, and comfortable beds. Same sub-par Fairfield breakfast, but that\'s why you pack instant oatmeal and protein bars.\" There\'s nothing that makes me want to tell people to stay there.</li>\r\n 	<li>Your <a href=\"https://untappd.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Untappd </a>information got me thinking. With around 1200 unique beers I\'m well below your numbers but I came in with the bulk of my ratings also at 3.75.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Thanks for that, Steve. My rationalization for my beer ratings skew is selection bias -- with over 5,200 unique beer check-ins, I pretty much know what I like and what I don’t like, so I’m not knowingly going to order and pay for a beer I don’t think I’ll like. I did have the exception to that last weekend when my son and I were at <a href=\"http://fobab.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">FoBAB</a> -- the Festival of Barrel Aged Beers. We volunteered to pour on Friday -- the first night -- which earned us a free ticket for Saturday night. At some point, my son give me a glass “Here, taste this”. I spit it back into the glass, dumped it, and rinsed the glass twice. It was awful. What was it? It was a beer that I had specifically said I wanted to avoid after reading the description in the program -- “Aged 12 months in Ardbeg scotch barrels with coffee and peanut butter.” I rated it 0.25 out of 5 because a zero doesn’t register as a rating. After that, I think I can live with a bit of rating skew.</li>\r\n 	<li>I started off the other topic in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/10/31/podcast-134-value-of-loyalty-need-those-5-stars/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">last episode</a> -- the value of loyalty -- with the story of finding a new Jag in the Hertz Presidents Club aisle at ATL. Of course, I grabbed it. The next afternoon, though, I was kinda wishing I’d taken an Uber or Lyft. My meeting in Norcross, north of Atlanta, was running late and refreshing Waze, I could see traffic both through and around Atlanta was building. And the rental return is at least a 15-minute ride to the terminal -- when the train doesn’t make an unscheduled stop mid-transit as I described in an earlier episode. So I was gearing myself up for missing my flight and the hassles of finding a seat on something later, when up popped an e-mail from Hertz offering to drive me to the terminal for $20. Sold! After I pulled in, one of the car “checker-inners” hopped into the driver’s seat and off we drove. And she was as happy to be driving that Jag as I was. “I love this car!” she said as we pulled out. “It’s such a beautiful day, I may drop you off and just keep on driving!” We had a good chat. She dropped me off at the door closest to the PreCheck line and I legged it in to make my flight. I won’t pop for that every time, but that $20 was worth it.</li>\r\n 	<li>Also, thanks to Cristina Sainz of Booking.com’s <a href=\"http://info.suite.booking.com/business-travel-blog/7-podcasts-every-travel-manager-needs-to-listen-to\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Business Travel Blog</a> who put TravelCommons #2 in her list of the “7 Podcasts Every Travel Manager Needs to Listen to Right Now”. She describes the podcast as “serving up pithy travel advice since 2005.” Well, we try. Thanks again Cristina for the shout-out.</li>\r\n 	<li>When I was in DC last month, I added another subway “tap” card to my collection, which was a little bit of a bummer because I still had an old style Metrocard -- the paper fare card with a mag stripe -- with at least one ride’s worth of fare still on it. So now I have a Smart Trip card along with a Ventra card from Chicago, an Oyster card from London, and a Breeze card from Atlanta. I hold onto them because they’re reusable and, while not expensive, their costs start to add up. The Atlanta and DC cards were $2 each; the Chicago card was $5, and the London card £5 -- or about $6.60 at today’s exchange rate. The Chicago card is, of course, the one I use the most. And it’s nice because I can top it up with a smartphone app. Comes in handy when I decide to take the L from ORD downtown. Beats standing in the perpetual long lines in front of the ORD fare machines. You’d think that if CTA is going to charge a premium to board at ORD, they’d at least pony up to cut the line to pay it. Little known pro tip for folks coming into ORD -- skip the line and pay with your iPhone if you have Apple Pay set up. It doesn’t read as fast as the Ventra card, but it works -- at least on the L -- the subway. When I was in London this past summer, the Underground was wonky. I could tap in at the turnstile with my iPhone, but couldn’t tap out which was a real hassle. But my daughter, though, who has a contactless debit card from RBS had no problems. And there wasn’t an app to top up my Oyster card, so I had to queue up in front of a lot of fare machines. Last month, New York announced that they’re hiring the same company London used to revamp the MTA’s payment system. I hope they get Apple and Android Pay working right. And more broadly, I hope these tap cards are just a temporary bridge until these transit systems can fully upgrade their systems to use smartphones. Until then, I carry a card holder in my backpack with my $15-$20 worth of subway tap cards.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/flatwound/14476\"><em>The Long Goodbye</em></a> by John Pazden</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Playing Airport Bingo</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I got a press release a couple of days ago from <a href=\"https://www.airhelp.com/en/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">AirHelp</a>, a company that looks like will file compensation claims for delayed flights in return for a 25% cut -- which doesn’t seem too bad since they’re doing it on a contingent basis. They sent along an Airport Bingo card for “helping you pass the time while not so patiently waiting to board”. It’s kinda the airport version of “buzzword bingo” that we all play on conference calls -- instead of marking a square someone says “synergy”, AirHelp has squares for things like “police dog” and “solo traveler”.</li>\r\n 	<li>That’s OK for a start, I guess. But here at TravelCommons, we try to go to the next level of road warrior-ism. I’m not going to fill out all 24 squares, but here are 12 squares’ worth to get you started\r\n<ol>\r\n 	<li>10-15 minute traffic jam on the airport access road -- just long enough to get those stress hormones flowing</li>\r\n 	<li>Guy in front of you in the PreCheck line walks through the metal detector with his smartphone. The alarm sounds. He stands there, puzzled. The TSA person rolls her eyes and asks, yet again, if he’d emptied his pockets. He looks surprised that his smartphone would set it off. She looks at her watch for how long ‘til her next break.</li>\r\n 	<li>Girl pulling a Hello Kitty kids-sized roller board on her way to Grandma’s. Hey, who said airport bingo had to be 100% snarky?</li>\r\n 	<li>Woman in front of you in the Starbucks line orders a half-decaf 3-pump no-foam vanilla latte, breaking the 3-adjective rule. It’s Sodexo, not your corner Starbucks. Keep it simple so the rest of us can order.</li>\r\n 	<li>A piano bar playing Christmas carols -- or if you’re in Nashville airport, a country duo</li>\r\n 	<li>A family of four or more walking abreast, slowly, so that people racing for their gates drift into the on-coming traffic, or try to thread through the crowd in front of a boarding gate. The only upside? One of the family might be pulling a Hello Kitty bag.</li>\r\n 	<li>An available rocking chair. More airports are scattering these around, in front of windows in terminal connectors, in random hallways. Bonus if it’s next to an open -- and working -- electrical outlet</li>\r\n 	<li>A craft beer bar with beers you haven’t had -- get those stress hormones back under control, and increment your unique beer counter on Untappd</li>\r\n 	<li>Dueling gate announcements. Gates G20 and G22 are boarding at the same time, with each gate agent talking over the other one. You hear Boarding Group 3 called and hustle up to the door, only to be shunted over to wait in the shame station; the other gate called Boarding Group 3.</li>\r\n 	<li>Boarding is complete and there’s an empty middle seat next to you! The clouds part and a golden ray of sunshine reflects off the iPad of the guy sitting in the window seat, illuminating that lovely little bit of extra elbow room. You and the window seat guy look at each other, smile, and feel those stress hormones drop another notch.</li>\r\n 	<li>Missing crew. Boarding’s complete, you’re next to an empty middle seat, but you have no crew. Their flight was late, and pulled into a gate two terminals over. They’re on their way, but now you’re worried that some stand-by will drop into that empty seat. That golden ray of sunshine dims a bit.</li>\r\n 	<li>Early arrival! Not only did the seat stay empty, but favorable winds put you on the ground 30 minutes early. You start to think that you should travel more often.</li>\r\n</ol>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, there you go. There’s half your airport bingo card filled out. If you’re flying out Tues or Weds, you’ll have more that enough time in line to figure out the rest. Let us know -- <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Facebook</a>, or <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">website</a> -- what squares you come up with.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/28792\"><em>Slinky Blues</em></a> by Admiral Bob</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Back to the Future with my New Travel PC</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I’ve been muttering under my breath about my Lenovo ThinkPad for a while now. I’ve had it for 4 years now. It’s feeling a bit heavy and looking a bit beat up, and though it’s no doubt been fully depreciated off the firm’s balance sheet, I don’t hear any rumors of an impending refresh. So I’ve been semi-shopping for a new Travel PC -- clicking through to Engadget reviews, glancing over, eyeing what the other folks on the plane or in the concierge lounge are using.</li>\r\n 	<li>Seven years ago (just about to the day), in what might’ve passed as an instance of pithy travel advice, I <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2010/11/15/two-weeks-with-a-macbook-air/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">wrote </a>about the use case for a Travel PC -- what it is, and more importantly, what it is not. It’s not my primary computer; it’s not my podcast production or video editing machine. That’s my home PC which is now up to 16GBs of RAM, an 8-core processor, 2 21-inch monitors, Blu-Ray burner, and a couple of terabyte hard drives. My Travel PC is spec’d for what’s important, what I need when I travel — light weight, long battery life, low screen profile so not to get crushed when the guy in the row in front of me power-reclines his seat, and reasonable processing power (in that order) — and leaves behind what’s not. Seven years ago -- in 2010 to save you the math -- the 11-inch MacBook Air was my choice for the Best Travel PC.</li>\r\n 	<li>My Travel PC use case hasn’t changed, but the market has -- kinda. In my looking around, what I’ve seen is 2 ½ kinds of travel PCs. There are the next generations of the laptop -- thin ultrabooks from Lenovo, HP and Dell; MacBook Pros from Apple -- or full-sized iPads with combo covers/soft keyboards and pens -- with the Microsoft Surface Pro being that ½ case, a thin Windows PC with a fold-out keyboard cover and pen. Quite honestly, none of those options really spoke to me -- at least enough to make me part with my own cash. The ultrabooks didn’t offer much new; I’d might as well “accidently” dump a grande cappuccino on my old Lenovo ‘cause this is what I’d get in return. The MacBook Pros are certainly sleek, but as a Travel PC, don’t seem to offer much more for the Apple premium. I have been thinking about the tablet/keyboard combo, specifically the Surface Pro; but watching guys try to work that soft keyboard on an airplane seatback tray… I could see myself wearing a cup of coffee two weeks after starting to fly with one of those. So, I kept semi-shopping</li>\r\n 	<li>But then last week, I got an e-mail blast from Newegg, the online PC parts retailer; I usually buy from them them when I’m assembling or upgrading my home PC. They had a flash sale on refurbed 11-inch MacBook Airs, not the 2010 model but what Apple dubs an “early 2014” model. Pretty much identical to my old one, but with updated specs, including the same processor as my Lenovo. I looked at it, did a few Internet search. It sat in a shopping cart for a couple of days until I thought “For $385, why not?” and pulled the trigger. It showed up a few days ago, and save for a corner ding, looks pretty new. I’ve upgraded to the current version of MacOS, installed Office 365 and VMFusion on it, and so I’m pretty much ready to go -- back to the future.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #135</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_135.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #135 — Airport Bingo; My New Old Travel PC','','inherit','closed','closed','','1854-revision-v1','','','2018-06-03 09:08:57','2018-06-03 14:08:57','',1854,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/06/03/1854-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2033,1,'2018-06-03 09:13:27','2018-06-03 14:13:27','[caption id=\"attachment_2004\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/IMG_0464.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2004\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/IMG_0464-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Effects of Extended Exposure to TSA Scan[/caption]\r\n\r\nBroke out the mobile unit to record this episode in the Bucktown neighborhood of Atlanta; much warmer than getting caught in a spring snow storm in Milwaukee. When much of the travel tech news is about the latest phone apps, we talk about physical travel technology that we can touch and carry. And when flying during the past two weeks, flight attendants\' safety demonstrations have become a bit more strident. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_142.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #141:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. Not much travel since the last episode -- just driving up to Wisconsin -- until last week when I did a 5-day trip with a client to Pune, India. Left ORD Friday night, landed in Frankfurt late Saturday morning, heard the announce a flight to Pune before my flight to Delhi. Arrived in Delhi at 1am Monday morning. Overnighted at the airport Radisson Blu (not a bad hotel), and then caught an afternoon Jet Airways flight to Pune. Note to self: you don’t always have to fly the client’s itinerary. In spite of all those legs, those multiple points of potential failure, everything went relatively smoothly.</li>\r\n 	<li>Not so much on the way home. The itinerary was to take an Air India flight from Pune to Delhi at 7pm Thursday night, then the United flight to Newark, getting back to ORD around 9:30. We passed on a 5:30p Jet Airways flight fearing Pune rush hour traffic. And that’s where the itinerary fell apart. While waiting for the client team to check their luggage -- I decided to ignore Air India’s 8 kg carry-on weight limit -- I get an e-mail from Air India with a 2 hr delay due to “operational reasons” which usually means a broken plane. Great. What was a reasonable 2½ layover was suddenly an unrealistic 30-minute dash off the plane, through the standard Indian airport itinerary check, then passport control, full patdown security, weave through the terminal and to the gate. And the inbound Air India plane hasn’t left Delhi yet. I call our Amex travel number -- any room on that Jet Airways flight because it hasn’t left yet. Nope, sold out. I briefly think about 3-hr drive to Mumbai but decide to keep heading to Delhi. I bang “flights DEL ORD May 24” into Google. I filter the Google Flights results for one-way and shortest duration, and then call Amex back. When the agent stopped after listing the limited United options -- I guess because it’s less work for them to keep me on the same airline -- I asked her to check on the non-United options that Google Flights listed. There’s the direct Air India flight to ORD getting in around 7:30a or a Lufthansa connection back through Frankfurt arriving around 1pm. I have her book both, knowing that I can cancel one well within the 24-hr no-penalty window.</li>\r\n 	<li>Pune Airport is a dump. I’m trying to think of a worse airport I’ve been in and I’m drawing a complete blank. Weak air conditioning failing to fight the 95 degree day, 3-4 food stands against the wall, and no bar. With nothing better to do, I bang “Air India ORD DEL business class review” into Google. The results were not kind. But I still think - how bad could it really be? This seems like a bad karma travel day; skipping the FRA connection, avoiding another point of failure, seems to be good idea. But then I finally got on the Air India plane to Delhi. It was also a complete dump. It was a bad 2 hrs; I couldn’t do another 15 hrs with them. I decided to risk the Frankfurt connection. At first it went well; breakfast beer and pretzel in the lounge, on-time boarding. But after boarding, we sat and sat. The captain came on. The good news? The luggage was finally loaded and the cargo doors buttoned up. The bad news? Our pushback time is an hour from now. There was nothing I could do. I pulled out my iPhone and buried myself in the zen of Solitaire. As it turned out, we didn’t take the full hour delay and the pilot juiced the engines so we arrived only 15 minutes late. And after looking at in-flight pictures from the gang that took the Air India direct flight, that 15 minute delay was trampled by the arrival of full-on schadenfreude. I had definitely made the right decision</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em>Gargantua</em> by Admiral Bob (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/46361 Ft: My Free Mickey, Martijn de Boer</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>The airlines’ smart bag ban claimed a couple of casualties this month. Bluesmart posted its blog obituary first -- “the banning of smart luggage with non-removable batteries put our company in an irreversibly difficult financial and business situation”. selling their IP, their intellectual property to TravelPro, one of the “legacy” suitcase brands they used to dismiss. A few weeks later, Raden posted a similar obit -- “We sincerely apologize to those who chose to travel with us, our intent was to add ease and simplicity to your travel experience and this unforeseen policy change has made this impossible.” Both companies said they’re no longer honoring warranties though Bluesmart says they’ll still provide some level of e-mail support. And the smartphone apps if you want to use your grounded bag on, say, a train or a bus. The bag maker Away is still in business, though, even developing a free kit that retrofits their first generation smart bag with an ejectable battery, making them compliant with the airlines’ rules.</li>\r\n 	<li>Gary Learned tweeted back a solid counter-argument on last episode’s rant on MSP’s Terminal 2. After waiting for a Southwest flight back to Chicago, I added it to my “ghetto terminal” list -- the terminals for non-hub airlines -- like O’Hare’s Terminal 2 and Detroit’s North Terminal. Gary has a different take, though. He writes -\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I respectfully disagree on MSP T2. Surdyks has some great taps and wine as well as good small bites. Barrio is a nice little Mexican local restaurant. I can go from car to gate in 5 min. Now MDW on the other hand …</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Car to gate in 5 minutes -- that’s a selling point right there that you won’t pick up Uber-ing in and out of a place. That used to be Midway before it blew up -- little parking lot in front of the terminal and walk right in. I won’t defend Midway now -- it’s a bit of a cluster, though I’m hoping that the pending reconstruction of the security concourse sort of “un-clusters” at least that part of it. Gary, thanks for giving us the contra view of MSP T2. I’ll give Barrio a try the next time I’m there.</li>\r\n 	<li>And since we’re talking about ghetto terminals, when choosing among the client-selected itineraries to India, a connection thru Munich was one of the options -- which long-time listeners know I immediately skipped. Skytrax again named Munich the top European airport. God only knows why, though I know they certainly didn’t ask me. Instead, I connected through Frankfurt, which while not a “wow-sy” airport, is efficient, not a hassle, and gets me on my way. Normally, I’m flying over to FRA from ORD and connecting to some place in Europe, often in the Schengen zone so I don’t have to go through passport control. Connecting to India, though, was a different matter. According to my iPhone’s Health app (admittedly not the most accurate), I walked 1.6 miles that Saturday morning between my ORD and DEL flights. I drug my bag down long corridors empty except for some black plastic chairs fixed in a semi-reclined position surrounded by black cloth cots. FRA airport really missed the chance to strategically locate some little beer stube kiosks along the way. I would’ve stopped at least a couple of times on that trek for some breakfast beers.</li>\r\n 	<li>The India trip was a bit of a last-minute thing which necessitated a scramble for a new Indian visa. This would be my 3rd Indian visa. My first one was a 5-year visa that I lost when my passport was stolen in Brussels. My second one was only for 6 months; I can’t remember why it was so short. This time, I decided to avoid future scrambles and apply for a 10-year visa. Because there’s an Indian consulate in Chicago, I didn’t have to hassle with postage or third-party passport services. The day before, I sent notes to our US HR department and the admin manager in our Hyderabad office asking for the necessary letters of guarantee and invitation, and then did the application online, printed it out and signed it, and then booked an appointment the next morning. I didn’t actually go to the consulate. I’ve always gone to an outsourced visa processing company that handled the front end administrivia, with, near as I can tell, the consulate just approving and signing the visas. Each visa has been with a different processor. For my first visa in 2010, I dropped my forms and passport off at an office in the morning, and received a text at the end of the day that it was ready. In 2014, a different processor gave my wife a hard time -- trying to upsell her on expedited handling charges that weren’t needed. This time, Cox and Kings was a surprisingly painless experience. I went in Thursday after lunch; there was no wait, the people were pleasant. End of day Thursday, I received an e-mail and a text telling me that my application had been processed and was heading to the consulate. On Friday morning, I received and e-mail and text saying that my application had arrived at the consulate. Another message at lunch said that it was being processes, and a last message on Friday said that it was back at Cox and Kings. Monday morning, another message told me it was being packaged up, followed by a message with a UPS tracking number. Tuesday afternoon, my passport landed on my front porch with my 10-year visa. I was incredibly impressed… and feeling a bit spoiled comparing this level of customer service to what my non-US friends tell me they have to go through to get a US visa.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/media/files/savoyard/10743\">Madrugada</a></em> by Savoyard</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>When You Think the TSA is Bad...</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>A week of flying around India is always a good sanity check for me -- that no matter what crankiness I’m have about the TSA, airport security in the US is so much easier than in India. When I was talking at the start of the episode about how the delay of our Pune-Delhi flight blew up the rest of our itinerary home, the main reason we immediately starting working alternative flights was because how long we knew it would take to work our way through the different layers of security in Delhi. It started when trying to make our way from domestic flight arrivals into the international departures area so we could re-ticket our flights. We had to pass through the usual itinerary check. I show the army guy the boarding pass for United flight we’d missed -- it was all I had. But since that flight had already left, he wasn’t going to let me through. Luckily, one of the group I was flying with was United Global Services, and two customer service staff had met us as we got off the Air India flight. Even then, it took her a good bit of time to explain the situation to the army guy and convince him to let me through. But for that, I would’ve been idling around baggage claim on my own trying to figure out how to get to a ticket counter.</li>\r\n 	<li>Passport control was pretty efficient, but the security scans -- not so much. After you unpack all your electronics and push everything through the X-ray machine, you walk through the metal detector for your gender -- different scanners for “Gents” and “Ladies” because there’s a full wanding and patdown on the other side. Indeed, the “Ladies” go into a little curtained booth for their patdown. Not normally too much of a hassle, unless the “Ladies” patdown line backs up, and a back up of women’s luggage in the X-ray machine is blocking mine -- which happened that evening. None of the security people moved to clear things. Nothing to do but stand there and wait. Our flight from Pune landed at Delhi at 11pm. When looking at flight alternatives, I’d seen an Air Canada flight leaving at 12:10pm and passed right by it. I knew there was no way we’d make that flight.</li>\r\n 	<li>The security checks in Frankfurt, while much more efficient, were still more than you’d get in the US. On the way over to India, after passing everything through the X-ray machine, I was intercepted after collecting my bags, directed over to a cubicle where all of my bags were swabbed and checked for explosives residue. All done with a German sense of politeness, but I was glad I wasn’t in a rush. On the connection back home, it was a different security line, with a body scanner instead of the walkthru metal detector. No big deal, but just different enough to be awkward. Instead of the TSA’s hands up “don’t shoot” pose, it was an arms down-elbows out pose, kinda like you’re holding luggage. The guy working the scanner was visibly annoyed that he had to instruct me on the pose -- to hold me arms further away from my body. But then there was no luggage swiping on the other side.</li>\r\n 	<li>Picking up my bags, I maneuvered around three officers cradling automatic rifles; they were standing there chatting, but watching. No big deal now, but I remember when I first starting traveling through Europe -- London Heathrow and Frankfurt in the mid- to late-’80’s and being taken aback by the army guys walking around with unslung M-16s and the like. This was pre-TSA time in the US, when it would be out-of-place to see anything more than a rent-a-cop in an airport terminal and you could still turn up 30 minutes before departure time and make your flight. Back then, the difference was eye-opening for a twenty-something traveler. Of course, none of us knew that it was a preview of what flying would be like 20 years later.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/media/files/djlang59/10579\">Crazy Love</a></em> by DJ Lang</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Expired Money</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>The selfie of passengers on Southwest flight 1380 not wearing the oxygen masks correctly went viral in the days after the engine explosion, along with the stories -- the guy telling the woman next to him that she didn’t need to squeeze the airbag, and the guy who logged into WiFi and Facebook Live before putting on his mask. The flight attendant interviews that seemingly every news outlet did dripped with schadenfreude -- no one ever pays attention to the safety videos or demonstrations, and look what happened!</li>\r\n 	<li>Improving airline safety records have let people grow numb as to how unnatural air travel is -- flying over 600 mph at 35,000 ft. Flight 1380 was the first accident-related fatality on a US airliner since 2009, and the Southwest’s first ever -- since it was founded in 1971.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’ll admit that I don’t pay attention to every demo, especially when I do multiple flights in a single week. I do typically look around me for the nearest exits -- in front and behind me -- because those can change pretty often with different seat configurations. I will pay attention, as a refresher, if I haven’t flown for a couple of weeks -- like last week’s flight to MSP. Or if it’s a plane I haven’t flown in a while, I’ll look at the seat back card -- like I did today when noticing I was in a Boeing 717, a pretty rare event for me.</li>\r\n 	<li>I have noticed that the flight attendants’ requests/demands for attention have become a bit more strident since 1380. On my Southwest flight back home from MSP last week, the flight attendant chanted “Nose and mouth; nose and mouth!”, eliciting some nervous laughter.</li>\r\n 	<li>The attendant on my Delta flight this morning was a bit more direct, perhaps fatalistic this morning. “Please pay attention! We’re doing this for you. But if you don’t want to watch us, well, I guess it’s your life…”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #141</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a> and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_141.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #141 — When You Think the TSA is Bad; Expired Money','','inherit','closed','closed','','1998-revision-v1','','','2018-06-03 09:13:27','2018-06-03 14:13:27','',1998,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/06/03/1998-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2034,1,'2018-06-03 09:14:07','2018-06-03 14:14:07','[caption id=\"attachment_2004\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/IMG_0464.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2004\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/IMG_0464-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Effects of Extended Exposure to TSA Scan[/caption]\r\n\r\nBroke out the mobile unit to record this episode in the Bucktown neighborhood of Atlanta; much warmer than getting caught in a spring snow storm in Milwaukee. When much of the travel tech news is about the latest phone apps, we talk about physical travel technology that we can touch and carry. And when flying during the past two weeks, flight attendants\' safety demonstrations have become a bit more strident. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_142.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #141:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. Not much travel since the last episode -- just driving up to Wisconsin -- until last week when I did a 5-day trip with a client to Pune, India. Left ORD Friday night, landed in Frankfurt late Saturday morning, heard the announce a flight to Pune before my flight to Delhi. Arrived in Delhi at 1am Monday morning. Overnighted at the airport Radisson Blu (not a bad hotel), and then caught an afternoon Jet Airways flight to Pune. Note to self: you don’t always have to fly the client’s itinerary. In spite of all those legs, those multiple points of potential failure, everything went relatively smoothly.</li>\r\n 	<li>Not so much on the way home. The itinerary was to take an Air India flight from Pune to Delhi at 7pm Thursday night, then the United flight to Newark, getting back to ORD around 9:30. We passed on a 5:30p Jet Airways flight fearing Pune rush hour traffic. And that’s where the itinerary fell apart. While waiting for the client team to check their luggage -- I decided to ignore Air India’s 8 kg carry-on weight limit -- I get an e-mail from Air India with a 2 hr delay due to “operational reasons” which usually means a broken plane. Great. What was a reasonable 2½ layover was suddenly an unrealistic 30-minute dash off the plane, through the standard Indian airport itinerary check, then passport control, full patdown security, weave through the terminal and to the gate. And the inbound Air India plane hasn’t left Delhi yet. I call our Amex travel number -- any room on that Jet Airways flight because it hasn’t left yet. Nope, sold out. I briefly think about 3-hr drive to Mumbai but decide to keep heading to Delhi. I bang “flights DEL ORD May 24” into Google. I filter the Google Flights results for one-way and shortest duration, and then call Amex back. When the agent stopped after listing the limited United options -- I guess because it’s less work for them to keep me on the same airline -- I asked her to check on the non-United options that Google Flights listed. There’s the direct Air India flight to ORD getting in around 7:30a or a Lufthansa connection back through Frankfurt arriving around 1pm. I have her book both, knowing that I can cancel one well within the 24-hr no-penalty window.</li>\r\n 	<li>Pune Airport is a dump. I’m trying to think of a worse airport I’ve been in and I’m drawing a complete blank. Weak air conditioning failing to fight the 95 degree day, 3-4 food stands against the wall, and no bar. With nothing better to do, I bang “Air India ORD DEL business class review” into Google. The results were not kind. But I still think - how bad could it really be? This seems like a bad karma travel day; skipping the FRA connection, avoiding another point of failure, seems to be good idea. But then I finally got on the Air India plane to Delhi. It was also a complete dump. It was a bad 2 hrs; I couldn’t do another 15 hrs with them. I decided to risk the Frankfurt connection. At first it went well; breakfast beer and pretzel in the lounge, on-time boarding. But after boarding, we sat and sat. The captain came on. The good news? The luggage was finally loaded and the cargo doors buttoned up. The bad news? Our pushback time is an hour from now. There was nothing I could do. I pulled out my iPhone and buried myself in the zen of Solitaire. As it turned out, we didn’t take the full hour delay and the pilot juiced the engines so we arrived only 15 minutes late. And after looking at in-flight pictures from the gang that took the Air India direct flight, that 15 minute delay was trampled by the arrival of full-on schadenfreude. I had definitely made the right decision</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em>Gargantua</em> by Admiral Bob (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/46361 Ft: My Free Mickey, Martijn de Boer</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>The airlines’ smart bag ban claimed a couple of casualties this month. Bluesmart posted its blog obituary first -- “the banning of smart luggage with non-removable batteries put our company in an irreversibly difficult financial and business situation”. selling their IP, their intellectual property to TravelPro, one of the “legacy” suitcase brands they used to dismiss. A few weeks later, Raden posted a similar obit -- “We sincerely apologize to those who chose to travel with us, our intent was to add ease and simplicity to your travel experience and this unforeseen policy change has made this impossible.” Both companies said they’re no longer honoring warranties though Bluesmart says they’ll still provide some level of e-mail support. And the smartphone apps if you want to use your grounded bag on, say, a train or a bus. The bag maker Away is still in business, though, even developing a free kit that retrofits their first generation smart bag with an ejectable battery, making them compliant with the airlines’ rules.</li>\r\n 	<li>Gary Learned tweeted back a solid counter-argument on last episode’s rant on MSP’s Terminal 2. After waiting for a Southwest flight back to Chicago, I added it to my “ghetto terminal” list -- the terminals for non-hub airlines -- like O’Hare’s Terminal 2 and Detroit’s North Terminal. Gary has a different take, though. He writes -\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I respectfully disagree on MSP T2. Surdyks has some great taps and wine as well as good small bites. Barrio is a nice little Mexican local restaurant. I can go from car to gate in 5 min. Now MDW on the other hand …</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Car to gate in 5 minutes -- that’s a selling point right there that you won’t pick up Uber-ing in and out of a place. That used to be Midway before it blew up -- little parking lot in front of the terminal and walk right in. I won’t defend Midway now -- it’s a bit of a cluster, though I’m hoping that the pending reconstruction of the security concourse sort of “un-clusters” at least that part of it. Gary, thanks for giving us the contra view of MSP T2. I’ll give Barrio a try the next time I’m there.</li>\r\n 	<li>And since we’re talking about ghetto terminals, when choosing among the client-selected itineraries to India, a connection thru Munich was one of the options -- which long-time listeners know I immediately skipped. Skytrax again named Munich the top European airport. God only knows why, though I know they certainly didn’t ask me. Instead, I connected through Frankfurt, which while not a “wow-sy” airport, is efficient, not a hassle, and gets me on my way. Normally, I’m flying over to FRA from ORD and connecting to some place in Europe, often in the Schengen zone so I don’t have to go through passport control. Connecting to India, though, was a different matter. According to my iPhone’s Health app (admittedly not the most accurate), I walked 1.6 miles that Saturday morning between my ORD and DEL flights. I drug my bag down long corridors empty except for some black plastic chairs fixed in a semi-reclined position surrounded by black cloth cots. FRA airport really missed the chance to strategically locate some little beer stube kiosks along the way. I would’ve stopped at least a couple of times on that trek for some breakfast beers.</li>\r\n 	<li>The India trip was a bit of a last-minute thing which necessitated a scramble for a new Indian visa. This would be my 3rd Indian visa. My first one was a 5-year visa that I lost when my passport was stolen in Brussels. My second one was only for 6 months; I can’t remember why it was so short. This time, I decided to avoid future scrambles and apply for a 10-year visa. Because there’s an Indian consulate in Chicago, I didn’t have to hassle with postage or third-party passport services. The day before, I sent notes to our US HR department and the admin manager in our Hyderabad office asking for the necessary letters of guarantee and invitation, and then did the application online, printed it out and signed it, and then booked an appointment the next morning. I didn’t actually go to the consulate. I’ve always gone to an outsourced visa processing company that handled the front end administrivia, with, near as I can tell, the consulate just approving and signing the visas. Each visa has been with a different processor. For my first visa in 2010, I dropped my forms and passport off at an office in the morning, and received a text at the end of the day that it was ready. In 2014, a different processor gave my wife a hard time -- trying to upsell her on expedited handling charges that weren’t needed. This time, Cox and Kings was a surprisingly painless experience. I went in Thursday after lunch; there was no wait, the people were pleasant. End of day Thursday, I received an e-mail and a text telling me that my application had been processed and was heading to the consulate. On Friday morning, I received and e-mail and text saying that my application had arrived at the consulate. Another message at lunch said that it was being processes, and a last message on Friday said that it was back at Cox and Kings. Monday morning, another message told me it was being packaged up, followed by a message with a UPS tracking number. Tuesday afternoon, my passport landed on my front porch with my 10-year visa. I was incredibly impressed… and feeling a bit spoiled comparing this level of customer service to what my non-US friends tell me they have to go through to get a US visa.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em>A Foolish Game</em> by Zep Hurme (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/zep_hurme/46448</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>When You Think the TSA is Bad...</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>A week of flying around India is always a good sanity check for me -- that no matter what crankiness I’m have about the TSA, airport security in the US is so much easier than in India. When I was talking at the start of the episode about how the delay of our Pune-Delhi flight blew up the rest of our itinerary home, the main reason we immediately starting working alternative flights was because how long we knew it would take to work our way through the different layers of security in Delhi. It started when trying to make our way from domestic flight arrivals into the international departures area so we could re-ticket our flights. We had to pass through the usual itinerary check. I show the army guy the boarding pass for United flight we’d missed -- it was all I had. But since that flight had already left, he wasn’t going to let me through. Luckily, one of the group I was flying with was United Global Services, and two customer service staff had met us as we got off the Air India flight. Even then, it took her a good bit of time to explain the situation to the army guy and convince him to let me through. But for that, I would’ve been idling around baggage claim on my own trying to figure out how to get to a ticket counter.</li>\r\n 	<li>Passport control was pretty efficient, but the security scans -- not so much. After you unpack all your electronics and push everything through the X-ray machine, you walk through the metal detector for your gender -- different scanners for “Gents” and “Ladies” because there’s a full wanding and patdown on the other side. Indeed, the “Ladies” go into a little curtained booth for their patdown. Not normally too much of a hassle, unless the “Ladies” patdown line backs up, and a back up of women’s luggage in the X-ray machine is blocking mine -- which happened that evening. None of the security people moved to clear things. Nothing to do but stand there and wait. Our flight from Pune landed at Delhi at 11pm. When looking at flight alternatives, I’d seen an Air Canada flight leaving at 12:10pm and passed right by it. I knew there was no way we’d make that flight.</li>\r\n 	<li>The security checks in Frankfurt, while much more efficient, were still more than you’d get in the US. On the way over to India, after passing everything through the X-ray machine, I was intercepted after collecting my bags, directed over to a cubicle where all of my bags were swabbed and checked for explosives residue. All done with a German sense of politeness, but I was glad I wasn’t in a rush. On the connection back home, it was a different security line, with a body scanner instead of the walkthru metal detector. No big deal, but just different enough to be awkward. Instead of the TSA’s hands up “don’t shoot” pose, it was an arms down-elbows out pose, kinda like you’re holding luggage. The guy working the scanner was visibly annoyed that he had to instruct me on the pose -- to hold me arms further away from my body. But then there was no luggage swiping on the other side.</li>\r\n 	<li>Picking up my bags, I maneuvered around three officers cradling automatic rifles; they were standing there chatting, but watching. No big deal now, but I remember when I first starting traveling through Europe -- London Heathrow and Frankfurt in the mid- to late-’80’s and being taken aback by the army guys walking around with unslung M-16s and the like. This was pre-TSA time in the US, when it would be out-of-place to see anything more than a rent-a-cop in an airport terminal and you could still turn up 30 minutes before departure time and make your flight. Back then, the difference was eye-opening for a twenty-something traveler. Of course, none of us knew that it was a preview of what flying would be like 20 years later.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/media/files/djlang59/10579\">Crazy Love</a></em> by DJ Lang</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Expired Money</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>The selfie of passengers on Southwest flight 1380 not wearing the oxygen masks correctly went viral in the days after the engine explosion, along with the stories -- the guy telling the woman next to him that she didn’t need to squeeze the airbag, and the guy who logged into WiFi and Facebook Live before putting on his mask. The flight attendant interviews that seemingly every news outlet did dripped with schadenfreude -- no one ever pays attention to the safety videos or demonstrations, and look what happened!</li>\r\n 	<li>Improving airline safety records have let people grow numb as to how unnatural air travel is -- flying over 600 mph at 35,000 ft. Flight 1380 was the first accident-related fatality on a US airliner since 2009, and the Southwest’s first ever -- since it was founded in 1971.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’ll admit that I don’t pay attention to every demo, especially when I do multiple flights in a single week. I do typically look around me for the nearest exits -- in front and behind me -- because those can change pretty often with different seat configurations. I will pay attention, as a refresher, if I haven’t flown for a couple of weeks -- like last week’s flight to MSP. Or if it’s a plane I haven’t flown in a while, I’ll look at the seat back card -- like I did today when noticing I was in a Boeing 717, a pretty rare event for me.</li>\r\n 	<li>I have noticed that the flight attendants’ requests/demands for attention have become a bit more strident since 1380. On my Southwest flight back home from MSP last week, the flight attendant chanted “Nose and mouth; nose and mouth!”, eliciting some nervous laughter.</li>\r\n 	<li>The attendant on my Delta flight this morning was a bit more direct, perhaps fatalistic this morning. “Please pay attention! We’re doing this for you. But if you don’t want to watch us, well, I guess it’s your life…”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #141</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a> and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_141.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #141 — When You Think the TSA is Bad; Expired Money','','inherit','closed','closed','','1998-revision-v1','','','2018-06-03 09:14:07','2018-06-03 14:14:07','',1998,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/06/03/1998-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2035,1,'2018-06-03 09:14:41','2018-06-03 14:14:41','[caption id=\"attachment_2004\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/IMG_0464.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2004\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/IMG_0464-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Effects of Extended Exposure to TSA Scan[/caption]\r\n\r\nBroke out the mobile unit to record this episode in the Bucktown neighborhood of Atlanta; much warmer than getting caught in a spring snow storm in Milwaukee. When much of the travel tech news is about the latest phone apps, we talk about physical travel technology that we can touch and carry. And when flying during the past two weeks, flight attendants\' safety demonstrations have become a bit more strident. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_142.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #141:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. Not much travel since the last episode -- just driving up to Wisconsin -- until last week when I did a 5-day trip with a client to Pune, India. Left ORD Friday night, landed in Frankfurt late Saturday morning, heard the announce a flight to Pune before my flight to Delhi. Arrived in Delhi at 1am Monday morning. Overnighted at the airport Radisson Blu (not a bad hotel), and then caught an afternoon Jet Airways flight to Pune. Note to self: you don’t always have to fly the client’s itinerary. In spite of all those legs, those multiple points of potential failure, everything went relatively smoothly.</li>\r\n 	<li>Not so much on the way home. The itinerary was to take an Air India flight from Pune to Delhi at 7pm Thursday night, then the United flight to Newark, getting back to ORD around 9:30. We passed on a 5:30p Jet Airways flight fearing Pune rush hour traffic. And that’s where the itinerary fell apart. While waiting for the client team to check their luggage -- I decided to ignore Air India’s 8 kg carry-on weight limit -- I get an e-mail from Air India with a 2 hr delay due to “operational reasons” which usually means a broken plane. Great. What was a reasonable 2½ layover was suddenly an unrealistic 30-minute dash off the plane, through the standard Indian airport itinerary check, then passport control, full patdown security, weave through the terminal and to the gate. And the inbound Air India plane hasn’t left Delhi yet. I call our Amex travel number -- any room on that Jet Airways flight because it hasn’t left yet. Nope, sold out. I briefly think about 3-hr drive to Mumbai but decide to keep heading to Delhi. I bang “flights DEL ORD May 24” into Google. I filter the Google Flights results for one-way and shortest duration, and then call Amex back. When the agent stopped after listing the limited United options -- I guess because it’s less work for them to keep me on the same airline -- I asked her to check on the non-United options that Google Flights listed. There’s the direct Air India flight to ORD getting in around 7:30a or a Lufthansa connection back through Frankfurt arriving around 1pm. I have her book both, knowing that I can cancel one well within the 24-hr no-penalty window.</li>\r\n 	<li>Pune Airport is a dump. I’m trying to think of a worse airport I’ve been in and I’m drawing a complete blank. Weak air conditioning failing to fight the 95 degree day, 3-4 food stands against the wall, and no bar. With nothing better to do, I bang “Air India ORD DEL business class review” into Google. The results were not kind. But I still think - how bad could it really be? This seems like a bad karma travel day; skipping the FRA connection, avoiding another point of failure, seems to be good idea. But then I finally got on the Air India plane to Delhi. It was also a complete dump. It was a bad 2 hrs; I couldn’t do another 15 hrs with them. I decided to risk the Frankfurt connection. At first it went well; breakfast beer and pretzel in the lounge, on-time boarding. But after boarding, we sat and sat. The captain came on. The good news? The luggage was finally loaded and the cargo doors buttoned up. The bad news? Our pushback time is an hour from now. There was nothing I could do. I pulled out my iPhone and buried myself in the zen of Solitaire. As it turned out, we didn’t take the full hour delay and the pilot juiced the engines so we arrived only 15 minutes late. And after looking at in-flight pictures from the gang that took the Air India direct flight, that 15 minute delay was trampled by the arrival of full-on schadenfreude. I had definitely made the right decision</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em>Gargantua</em> by Admiral Bob (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/46361 Ft: My Free Mickey, Martijn de Boer</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>The airlines’ smart bag ban claimed a couple of casualties this month. Bluesmart posted its blog obituary first -- “the banning of smart luggage with non-removable batteries put our company in an irreversibly difficult financial and business situation”. selling their IP, their intellectual property to TravelPro, one of the “legacy” suitcase brands they used to dismiss. A few weeks later, Raden posted a similar obit -- “We sincerely apologize to those who chose to travel with us, our intent was to add ease and simplicity to your travel experience and this unforeseen policy change has made this impossible.” Both companies said they’re no longer honoring warranties though Bluesmart says they’ll still provide some level of e-mail support. And the smartphone apps if you want to use your grounded bag on, say, a train or a bus. The bag maker Away is still in business, though, even developing a free kit that retrofits their first generation smart bag with an ejectable battery, making them compliant with the airlines’ rules.</li>\r\n 	<li>Gary Learned tweeted back a solid counter-argument on last episode’s rant on MSP’s Terminal 2. After waiting for a Southwest flight back to Chicago, I added it to my “ghetto terminal” list -- the terminals for non-hub airlines -- like O’Hare’s Terminal 2 and Detroit’s North Terminal. Gary has a different take, though. He writes -\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I respectfully disagree on MSP T2. Surdyks has some great taps and wine as well as good small bites. Barrio is a nice little Mexican local restaurant. I can go from car to gate in 5 min. Now MDW on the other hand …</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Car to gate in 5 minutes -- that’s a selling point right there that you won’t pick up Uber-ing in and out of a place. That used to be Midway before it blew up -- little parking lot in front of the terminal and walk right in. I won’t defend Midway now -- it’s a bit of a cluster, though I’m hoping that the pending reconstruction of the security concourse sort of “un-clusters” at least that part of it. Gary, thanks for giving us the contra view of MSP T2. I’ll give Barrio a try the next time I’m there.</li>\r\n 	<li>And since we’re talking about ghetto terminals, when choosing among the client-selected itineraries to India, a connection thru Munich was one of the options -- which long-time listeners know I immediately skipped. Skytrax again named Munich the top European airport. God only knows why, though I know they certainly didn’t ask me. Instead, I connected through Frankfurt, which while not a “wow-sy” airport, is efficient, not a hassle, and gets me on my way. Normally, I’m flying over to FRA from ORD and connecting to some place in Europe, often in the Schengen zone so I don’t have to go through passport control. Connecting to India, though, was a different matter. According to my iPhone’s Health app (admittedly not the most accurate), I walked 1.6 miles that Saturday morning between my ORD and DEL flights. I drug my bag down long corridors empty except for some black plastic chairs fixed in a semi-reclined position surrounded by black cloth cots. FRA airport really missed the chance to strategically locate some little beer stube kiosks along the way. I would’ve stopped at least a couple of times on that trek for some breakfast beers.</li>\r\n 	<li>The India trip was a bit of a last-minute thing which necessitated a scramble for a new Indian visa. This would be my 3rd Indian visa. My first one was a 5-year visa that I lost when my passport was stolen in Brussels. My second one was only for 6 months; I can’t remember why it was so short. This time, I decided to avoid future scrambles and apply for a 10-year visa. Because there’s an Indian consulate in Chicago, I didn’t have to hassle with postage or third-party passport services. The day before, I sent notes to our US HR department and the admin manager in our Hyderabad office asking for the necessary letters of guarantee and invitation, and then did the application online, printed it out and signed it, and then booked an appointment the next morning. I didn’t actually go to the consulate. I’ve always gone to an outsourced visa processing company that handled the front end administrivia, with, near as I can tell, the consulate just approving and signing the visas. Each visa has been with a different processor. For my first visa in 2010, I dropped my forms and passport off at an office in the morning, and received a text at the end of the day that it was ready. In 2014, a different processor gave my wife a hard time -- trying to upsell her on expedited handling charges that weren’t needed. This time, Cox and Kings was a surprisingly painless experience. I went in Thursday after lunch; there was no wait, the people were pleasant. End of day Thursday, I received an e-mail and a text telling me that my application had been processed and was heading to the consulate. On Friday morning, I received and e-mail and text saying that my application had arrived at the consulate. Another message at lunch said that it was being processes, and a last message on Friday said that it was back at Cox and Kings. Monday morning, another message told me it was being packaged up, followed by a message with a UPS tracking number. Tuesday afternoon, my passport landed on my front porch with my 10-year visa. I was incredibly impressed… and feeling a bit spoiled comparing this level of customer service to what my non-US friends tell me they have to go through to get a US visa.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em>A Foolish Game</em> by Zep Hurme (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/zep_hurme/46448</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>When You Think the TSA is Bad...</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>A week of flying around India is always a good sanity check for me -- that no matter what crankiness I’m have about the TSA, airport security in the US is so much easier than in India. When I was talking at the start of the episode about how the delay of our Pune-Delhi flight blew up the rest of our itinerary home, the main reason we immediately starting working alternative flights was because how long we knew it would take to work our way through the different layers of security in Delhi. It started when trying to make our way from domestic flight arrivals into the international departures area so we could re-ticket our flights. We had to pass through the usual itinerary check. I show the army guy the boarding pass for United flight we’d missed -- it was all I had. But since that flight had already left, he wasn’t going to let me through. Luckily, one of the group I was flying with was United Global Services, and two customer service staff had met us as we got off the Air India flight. Even then, it took her a good bit of time to explain the situation to the army guy and convince him to let me through. But for that, I would’ve been idling around baggage claim on my own trying to figure out how to get to a ticket counter.</li>\r\n 	<li>Passport control was pretty efficient, but the security scans -- not so much. After you unpack all your electronics and push everything through the X-ray machine, you walk through the metal detector for your gender -- different scanners for “Gents” and “Ladies” because there’s a full wanding and patdown on the other side. Indeed, the “Ladies” go into a little curtained booth for their patdown. Not normally too much of a hassle, unless the “Ladies” patdown line backs up, and a back up of women’s luggage in the X-ray machine is blocking mine -- which happened that evening. None of the security people moved to clear things. Nothing to do but stand there and wait. Our flight from Pune landed at Delhi at 11pm. When looking at flight alternatives, I’d seen an Air Canada flight leaving at 12:10pm and passed right by it. I knew there was no way we’d make that flight.</li>\r\n 	<li>The security checks in Frankfurt, while much more efficient, were still more than you’d get in the US. On the way over to India, after passing everything through the X-ray machine, I was intercepted after collecting my bags, directed over to a cubicle where all of my bags were swabbed and checked for explosives residue. All done with a German sense of politeness, but I was glad I wasn’t in a rush. On the connection back home, it was a different security line, with a body scanner instead of the walkthru metal detector. No big deal, but just different enough to be awkward. Instead of the TSA’s hands up “don’t shoot” pose, it was an arms down-elbows out pose, kinda like you’re holding luggage. The guy working the scanner was visibly annoyed that he had to instruct me on the pose -- to hold me arms further away from my body. But then there was no luggage swiping on the other side.</li>\r\n 	<li>Picking up my bags, I maneuvered around three officers cradling automatic rifles; they were standing there chatting, but watching. No big deal now, but I remember when I first starting traveling through Europe -- London Heathrow and Frankfurt in the mid- to late-’80’s and being taken aback by the army guys walking around with unslung M-16s and the like. This was pre-TSA time in the US, when it would be out-of-place to see anything more than a rent-a-cop in an airport terminal and you could still turn up 30 minutes before departure time and make your flight. Back then, the difference was eye-opening for a twenty-something traveler. Of course, none of us knew that it was a preview of what flying would be like 20 years later.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em>Melt Away</em> by Kara Square (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/mindmapthat/46605</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Expired Money</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>The selfie of passengers on Southwest flight 1380 not wearing the oxygen masks correctly went viral in the days after the engine explosion, along with the stories -- the guy telling the woman next to him that she didn’t need to squeeze the airbag, and the guy who logged into WiFi and Facebook Live before putting on his mask. The flight attendant interviews that seemingly every news outlet did dripped with schadenfreude -- no one ever pays attention to the safety videos or demonstrations, and look what happened!</li>\r\n 	<li>Improving airline safety records have let people grow numb as to how unnatural air travel is -- flying over 600 mph at 35,000 ft. Flight 1380 was the first accident-related fatality on a US airliner since 2009, and the Southwest’s first ever -- since it was founded in 1971.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’ll admit that I don’t pay attention to every demo, especially when I do multiple flights in a single week. I do typically look around me for the nearest exits -- in front and behind me -- because those can change pretty often with different seat configurations. I will pay attention, as a refresher, if I haven’t flown for a couple of weeks -- like last week’s flight to MSP. Or if it’s a plane I haven’t flown in a while, I’ll look at the seat back card -- like I did today when noticing I was in a Boeing 717, a pretty rare event for me.</li>\r\n 	<li>I have noticed that the flight attendants’ requests/demands for attention have become a bit more strident since 1380. On my Southwest flight back home from MSP last week, the flight attendant chanted “Nose and mouth; nose and mouth!”, eliciting some nervous laughter.</li>\r\n 	<li>The attendant on my Delta flight this morning was a bit more direct, perhaps fatalistic this morning. “Please pay attention! We’re doing this for you. But if you don’t want to watch us, well, I guess it’s your life…”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #141</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a> and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_141.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #141 — When You Think the TSA is Bad; Expired Money','','inherit','closed','closed','','1998-revision-v1','','','2018-06-03 09:14:41','2018-06-03 14:14:41','',1998,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/06/03/1998-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2036,1,'2018-06-03 09:20:27','2018-06-03 14:20:27','[caption id=\"attachment_1364\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/pic-r-1402317187245.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1364\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/pic-r-1402317187245-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Plane is here; no mechanics in sight. Do I feel lucky?\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Plane is here; no mechanics in sight. Do I feel lucky?[/caption]\r\n\r\nEven though the weather hasn\'t been bad this summer, I\'ve endured a rash of flight cancellations. Digging deeper, it\'s been regional jets operated by small airline \"partners\" that\'s causing me grief. Service to mid-sized cities has moved to regional jets, making travel to these cities more problematic. Traveling to China or India can catch US travelers by surprise with their visa requirements. We also talk about how fast airlines respond to Twitter messages, airport \"wall huggers\", carry-on luggage throwback, and I haven\'t flipped through a Skymall magazine in months. All this and more  at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_110.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below. [sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_110.mp3\"]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #110:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the Sheraton Hotel on Canal St in New Orleans. I have a room looking over the French Quarter. It’s a big convention hotel -- not my usual choice. But the price is good, it has a great gym and I’m about 5 stays away from making Starwood Platinum, so what the heck.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’m back to my usual commute -- Chicago to New Orleans -- after taking a quick jaunt out to LA last week. It is that time of year on the Gulf Coast when the weather gets a bit monotonous -- high of 91 degrees with a chance of afternoon thunderstorms. Repeat until Labor Day. But the thunderstorms are tending to be earlier than last year when they seemed to roll in about 4:30 -- right about the time when the inbound plane for my flight back to Chicago would be scheduled to arrive. While my flights home still aren’t arriving on time, I haven’t hit the big 2-4 hour downpour delays I would get last year. Not killing as much time in the airport bars, but I always appreciate New Orleans airport letting me to take me beer to the gate.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em>Gargantua</em> by Admiral Bob (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/46361 Ft: My Free Mickey, Martijn de Boer</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Flying through LAX last week reminded me of what a dump that airport is -- or I guess I should say key parts of it. Flying out of there last Thursday morning, it took me a half-hour in the Hertz bus to get to the United terminal -- P7 -- because of access road traffic which is driven by this odd concept of a bunch of little terminals arranged in a U around short term parking garages. No problem is you’re flying Southwest in P1; really lousy if you’re going out American in P5 or United in P6 or P7. Annoying, but it gets really dumpy when you get inside. There’s not enough room in each of the little terminals to properly handle post-9/11 security, so small security stations are dotted over the terminals with lines snaking down the corridors. Given that LAX is a major gateway to international traffic from Asia, it’s fair to compare LAX to Singapore and Beijing -- much newer airports, yes, but the LAX experience ends up looking like the 4th circle of Hell comparatively. Can’t be a great thing for the US tourism industry.</li>\r\n 	<li>In the <a title=\"Podcast #109 — ‘Round the World in 8 Days; Beijing Mass Transit\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/06/07/podcast-109-round-the-world-in-8-days-beijing-mass-transit-2/\">last episode</a>, I updated my thoughts on using Twitter as a concierge service, or at least another way into airlines’ customer service groups. A couple of weeks back, the Wall Street Journal had a good <a href=\"http://online.wsj.com/articles/airlines-take-to-twitter-to-keep-world-informed-1406125253\">article</a> about airlines’ use of Twitter. They had an interesting graphic showing the differences in response times between airlines. American Airlines was the top, responding to 80% of customer queries within 15 minutes and 99% within an hour. KLM, which has made a big push into social media, was much lower, responding to 12% within 15 minutes, 64% within an hour, taking a full day to get up to 99%. Of course, as we talked about last time, it’s one thing to quickly press the button on a canned responses like United’s ubiquitous “No one dislikes delays more than us”, it’s a whole other thing to do something meaningful. Check out the detailed show notes on the TravelCommons web site for a link to the article.</li>\r\n 	<li>Also in the <a title=\"Podcast #109 — ‘Round the World in 8 Days; Beijing Mass Transit\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/06/07/podcast-109-round-the-world-in-8-days-beijing-mass-transit-2/\">last episode</a>, I mentioned my big technology switch -- from my iPhone 5 to an HTC One. The main reason for the switch was battery life. I got tired of being psychotic about battery life -- stalking airport gate areas for an outlet so I could top off my battery before getting on the plane. Last month, Samsung Mobile captured that hassle perfectly in a <a href=\"youtu.be/mzMUTrTYD9s%20\">video</a> about “wall huggers”. It’s on YouTube -- I put the <a href=\"youtu.be/mzMUTrTYD9s%20\">link</a> in the show notes. Check it out. It’s painfully close to my reality with the iPhone. But not with the HTC One. The battery life is great, even with the larger screen.</li>\r\n 	<li>One thing that has bitten me recently with that change is the Android version of American Airlines’ app. I always use the phone apps for boarding passes -- one less piece of paper to keep track of, one less line to stand in if I couldn’t print it at home. I’ve never had a problem until a couple of months ago. I was boarding a flight to New Orleans, put my phone on the reader, heard the beep, the gate agent waved me through, and I sat in my seat. A bit later during the boarding process, I looked at my screen again and saw that the app had refreshed and no longer showed a seat number on the boarding pass. Hmmm, that doesn’t seem good. And I was right. Somehow, my boarding must not have registered and so, 10 minutes before the flight, they flushed me as a no-show and gave my seat to a stand-by passenger. Unfortunately for her, I was in my seat, but because I didn’t have a paper boarding pass, I couldn’t prove that it was my seat. Lucky for me, the gate agent remembered me -- it was a small regional jet --and said “Oh, this happens a lot”. I kept the seat, but the flight was delayed about 15 minutes while they figured it all out. I never had that happen with American’s iPhone app, but then again, it hasn’t happened since on the Android app. Maybe they fixed in in out of the updates they pushed out, but I usually grab a paper boarding pass on American when I have the time.</li>\r\n 	<li>And I don’t know about you all, but I haven\'t looked at Skymall or any of the other seat back pocket air magazines since the FAA allowed use of tablets &amp; smartphones during takeoffs and landings. I always have a book or two on my tablet -- right now I’m pounding through “The War that Ended Peace”, Margaret MacMillian’s history of the lead up to World War I. I also download the daily edition of the Chicago Tribune -- they have an HTML5 web app that shows you each page of the physical paper; you then tap an article to read it. The app is pretty good, sometimes a bit fiddly, but it lets you download the content for offline reading -- perfect for a flight. The Wall Street Journal’s Android app used to let you do the same thing and so I’d read that too, but earlier this year they “upgraded” the app and took away the ability to download a day’s paper. Still trying to think how they qualified that as an upgrade.</li>\r\n 	<li>I saw a guy come onto a flight last week with a hanging suit bag. Wow! That was a throwback. Even the flight attendant looked at him kinda funny when he asked to hang it in the front closet. Which was a very typical thing -- in the ‘90’s. You’d angle for early boarding so you had a chance for hanging space in the front closet. You see guys pushing all the bags to one end so he could fit his in -- not even really needing to hang it; just staying put from the pressure of the other bags. The whole business casual trend expanded the fight -- moving it out of the front galley to the entire plane aisle with rolling bags. I can’t remember the last time I used a hanging bag. I have my cleaners fold my shirts so they’re easy to pack, and then I use them (with their cardboard inserts) to cushion the folds of my slacks so they don’t wrinkle. Even on those rare occasions when I wear a suit, I fold it and put it in my rolling bag. It’s certainly a lot easier on the shoulder and back. And just a lot less awkward. I could never figure out a really good way to carry gym shoes in my hanging bag.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any travel experiences -- technology or otherwise, or just general observations, thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons\">Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em>A Foolish Game</em> by Zep Hurme (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/zep_hurme/46448</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong> Regional Jets Are Ruining My Life</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>One Wednesday afternoon in June, I had a particularly difficult time getting from Memphis to New Orleans. First, I felt my phone vibrate with multiple text messages while I was refueling my rental car at a particularly dicey gas station just north of the airport. I had a pretty good idea what was up -- United and TripIt were simultaneously notifying me that my flight was cancelled. I got on the phone to Amex. They were able to jam me onto a full US Air flight to Charlotte with a connection back to New Orleans. Bit of a zig zag, but OK. I returned the rental car. Just as I pulled my boarding pass out of the kiosk, I saw them update my flight -- 2 hr maintenance delay. Which would mean I’d miss the connection. I go up to the desk. Two agents -- one from USAir, one from American (I’m seeing the New American form right in front of me) -- bang on their terminal for a couple of minutes. “OK, we’ll put you in first class to DFW where you’ll connect to New Orleans” Great -- better routing with an upgrade to boot! I get to the gate. A colleague calls me. As we’re talking, I see them post a 2 hr delay -- weather in Texas -- which means I’d have 15 min for my connection if everything worked perfectly. Which it wasn’t going to because a delay with a round number -- like 2 hrs -- means they have no idea when the plane will actually leave</li>\r\n 	<li>That’s it! I give! Three airlines fail me in the span of 60 minutes. I can take a hint. I wasn’t meant to fly to New Orleans today. However, I did need to get there. So I fired up Google Maps. 5½ hour drive. Fine. I have nothing else going on tonight. I load the Hertz app, book a car, and walk back out of the terminal.</li>\r\n 	<li>I drive to the river front to get a decent dinner -- the food quality in Memphis airport, like the flight selection, have cratered since Delta shut down its hub operations there. While eating at the bar, I get the text from American -- the DFW flight cancelled. Now there’s a surprise.</li>\r\n 	<li>The drive to New Orleans to simple, straightforward -- and dull. I-55 south through Mississippi, into Louisiana until it dead ends into I-10. Take a left. You’re in New Orleans. At least that was the plan. South of Jackson, traffic comes to a complete halt. People are getting out of their cars -- never a good sign. I get out, look around an 18-wheeler and see a 10-ft column of fire. This is not a good sign. I-55 here is 2 lanes each way with a narrow shoulder. They’re not squeezing us past that. Eventually, after making an 8-point turn, I join a line of cars heading the back north along the shoulder -- one tire on the pavement, one tire in the wet red clay. After 10 minutes, I get to a gravel crossover that I don’t think will bottom out my rental Ford. I hit the frontage road, bypass the burning car, get back on a now empty I-55 and eventually pull into my hotel at 2am. Another glorious day of travel that I’m sure will inspire envy in all my Facebook friends.</li>\r\n 	<li>Now Memphis seems to be an extreme example -- a woman on my project is commuting weekly from New York and she’s yet to have an on-time, no-drama journey. Indeed, she’s spent a Thursday night in every Midwest hub city. But as airlines close hub operations in mid-size cities like Memphis and Cleveland, replacing mainline service with regional jets from smaller operators you’ve never heard -- ExpressJet or Endeavour Air -- getting to and from these cities just sucks.</li>\r\n 	<li>At first, I thought it was a United problem. After all, they’d canceled my flight down to New Orleans day before, and then the next week, they delayed my flight to Columbus, OH 2 hours because the flight before it was late getting off the gate, and then once our plane got to the gate, it needed to have a wheel bearing fixed before it could travel on. I mean, at some point, why does United bother posting actual departure and arrival times? Why not just post an AM or a PM and shoot for that? It’s not too far from what they’re doing now.</li>\r\n 	<li>But as I looked at the flights that were really screwing up my life, they weren’t the main United or American or Delta flights, they were the regional jets. My United flights to and from LAX last week were fine. But if I’d been flying a regional jet, I would’ve had a problem on the return leg. The original plane had a mechanical issue -- remember, this is United -- but they were able to get a replacement, so we left LAX on time and even got into ORD early. If it had been United Express by, say, GoJet, I would’ve been scrambling after yet another cancelled flight because they don’t have spare jets.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’m 5,000 miles away from hitting a million miles on United (I have over 2.5 million on American), but sitting at the bar that night in Memphis having dinner before my ill-fated drive, I tweeted out of pure frustration -- “Really @united? Two cancelled flights in two days? I\'ll never hit 1M miles when you cancel every flight I\'m on…” To which, of course, they pressed the button on reply #76 -- “No one dislikes flight cancellations more than we do. Do you need help with rebooking? Thanks.” My response the next morning -- “Unless you too had to drive 5+ hrs and get to your destination at 2am, you can\'t hate flight cancellations more than me…” No response… except from Dan, a longtime TravelCommons listener who chimed in -- “Sounds like an upcoming podcast topic”. Indeed it is, Dan. Some good had to come of it...</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em>Melt Away</em> by Kara Square (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/mindmapthat/46605</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Visas Hassles</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Over the past couple of episodes I’ve been talking about my Asian travels -- to India and China -- which has forced me to become knowledgeable about something that doesn’t often affect US travelers -- visas.</li>\r\n 	<li>When US travelers decide to cross their border, if they have a passport, they’re typically good to go. When I checked Wikipedia yesterday, US passport holders <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_requirements_for_United_States_citizens\">can visit</a> 174 countries without having to buy a visa in advance, tied at the top of the “travel freedom” ranking with Germany, Sweden, United Kingdom, and Finland.</li>\r\n 	<li>But this seemed to be the year for visas for me. My son doing a semester abroad in China, then us visiting him in the Spring, and then me going to India on business a couple of months ago. I just slipped out of another trip to China -- business this time, but I figured I’d risk it since my tourist visa is valid until next Spring.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you live in a major city -- New York, DC, LA, Chicago -- it’s not too bad because most of the big visa-requiring countries have consulates there. Otherwise, you’re mailing your passport away, or paying extra for a courier service. And paying to fly to the consulate for an interview if you don’t have a plain vanilla visa application -- like anyone of Pakistani descent applying for an Indian visa.</li>\r\n 	<li>But even walking to the consulates, like I can do in Chicago, is not always so straightforward. Research is important. Hitting the consulate web site, know their hours and what paperwork they require. Our visit for my son’s Chinese student visa was amazingly smooth. We had all the paperwork, had it organized, knew the consulate closed for lunch, so we showed up early. Boom, boom, boom -- we were in and out in 30 minutes. Four days later, we went back, paid, and picked up his passport with his visa.</li>\r\n 	<li>Getting visas for our visit to Beijing in March was less smooth. There was a little hiccup in the application. Their website said we needed proof of a return flight and hotel reservations. I had all that, all organized. But what wasn’t clear on the website was that I needed a copy for each visa. I’d printed out one copy of the hotel reservation for the one room that the three of us were staying in. I needed three copies -- one for each application. I’m not the first one who’d made that mistake. The woman pointed to the copying machine. Luckily, I had a pocket full of change.</li>\r\n 	<li>Picking them up was also a bit more of a hassle. First, because it was Spring Break season, there were a number of teachers picking up batches of passports for school trips. I think the guy two positions in front of me had 50 passports. A minor inconvenience -- until their credit card machine broke. The web site was adamant -- no personal checks, no cash accepted; just credit cards or cashier’s checks. And how many people know where to get a cashiers check anymore. So everything came to a screeching halt. “We’ll take cash if you have it,” one of the women said. But I didn’t bring any because it’s $140 a head -- $420 for all of us. I look at my watch -- it’s just about closing time. I ask the guard, “Will you let me back in if I make a run down to the ATM for some cash?” “Make it quick,” he said. I sprint down, around the corner, tap out the cash machine, and sprint back up. The guard lets me back in even though he’d locked the doors for the day. Everyone’s sorta milling around, not knowing what to do. The guy who had been in front of me was there to pick up 10 visas. No way he was coming up with $1,400 in cash quickly. I politely make my way to the window. “Cash?” I ask, giving her the fresh stack of ATM 20’s. She counts them twice, gives me my passports and I’m on my way.</li>\r\n 	<li>But this was nothing compared to the cluster that was the Indian visa process. Which was a real surprise to me because four years ago, when I went for my last Indian visa, it was the pinnacle of efficiency -- I dropped everything off at 8am and at 5pm received a text that my passport was ready for pickup. Impressive. Phenomenal. I used to rave about it. Not so much any more.</li>\r\n 	<li>But based on last time, I thought this would be simple. I put all the documents together and, because I was traveling, had my wife take it downtown for me. “No worries,” I said, “Drop it off, do some shopping, grab lunch, and it should be done”. 10am my wife calls me -- “They need your flight reservations”. “I haven’t made them yet,” I told her, “They specifically say on their website not to book flights until you get the visa.” “Hold on,” she said and talked to the clerk. “Yeah, I guess things have changed. She’ll hold onto your application until you e-mail her your flight info. Oh, and she’s going to charge you another $30 for an expedite fee.” “Wait,” I said, “according to the website, I’m OK on their deadlines -- I shouldn’t need them to expedite.” “Hold on,” she said again. “Yeah, I guess those deadlines have changed too.” Unfortunately, I was only able to get a 1 year visa. If this visa expires before my next trip, I think I’ll send one of my staff in my place. I think I need to introduce some other Americans to the fine art of applying for visas.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #110</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/\">cc:Mixter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_110.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #110 — Regional Jets Ruining My Life; Visa Hassles','','inherit','closed','closed','','1359-revision-v1','','','2018-06-03 09:20:27','2018-06-03 14:20:27','',1359,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/06/03/1359-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2037,1,'2018-06-03 21:07:50','2018-06-04 02:07:50','[caption id=\"attachment_2004\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/IMG_0464.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2004\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/IMG_0464-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Effects of Extended Exposure to TSA Scan[/caption]\r\n\r\nBroke out the mobile unit to record this episode in the Bucktown neighborhood of Atlanta; much warmer than getting caught in a spring snow storm in Milwaukee. When much of the travel tech news is about the latest phone apps, we talk about physical travel technology that we can touch and carry. And when flying during the past two weeks, flight attendants\' safety demonstrations have become a bit more strident. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_142.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.<!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #141:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. Not much travel since the last episode -- just driving up to Wisconsin -- until last week when I did a 5-day trip with a client to Pune, India. Left ORD Friday night, landed in Frankfurt late Saturday morning, heard the announce a flight to Pune before my flight to Delhi. Arrived in Delhi at 1am Monday morning. Overnighted at the airport Radisson Blu (not a bad hotel), and then caught an afternoon Jet Airways flight to Pune. Note to self: you don’t always have to fly the client’s itinerary. In spite of all those legs, those multiple points of potential failure, everything went relatively smoothly.</li>\r\n 	<li>Not so much on the way home. The itinerary was to take an Air India flight from Pune to Delhi at 7pm Thursday night, then the United flight to Newark, getting back to ORD around 9:30. We passed on a 5:30p Jet Airways flight fearing Pune rush hour traffic. And that’s where the itinerary fell apart. While waiting for the client team to check their luggage -- I decided to ignore Air India’s 8 kg carry-on weight limit -- I get an e-mail from Air India with a 2 hr delay due to “operational reasons” which usually means a broken plane. Great. What was a reasonable 2½ layover was suddenly an unrealistic 30-minute dash off the plane, through the standard Indian airport itinerary check, then passport control, full patdown security, weave through the terminal and to the gate. And the inbound Air India plane hasn’t left Delhi yet. I call our Amex travel number -- any room on that Jet Airways flight because it hasn’t left yet. Nope, sold out. I briefly think about 3-hr drive to Mumbai but decide to keep heading to Delhi. I bang “flights DEL ORD May 24” into Google. I filter the Google Flights results for one-way and shortest duration, and then call Amex back. When the agent stopped after listing the limited United options -- I guess because it’s less work for them to keep me on the same airline -- I asked her to check on the non-United options that Google Flights listed. There’s the direct Air India flight to ORD getting in around 7:30a or a Lufthansa connection back through Frankfurt arriving around 1pm. I have her book both, knowing that I can cancel one well within the 24-hr no-penalty window.</li>\r\n 	<li>Pune Airport is a dump. I’m trying to think of a worse airport I’ve been in and I’m drawing a complete blank. Weak air conditioning failing to fight the 95 degree day, 3-4 food stands against the wall, and no bar. With nothing better to do, I bang “Air India ORD DEL business class review” into Google. The results were not kind. But I still think - how bad could it really be? This seems like a bad karma travel day; skipping the FRA connection, avoiding another point of failure, seems to be good idea. But then I finally got on the Air India plane to Delhi. It was also a complete dump. It was a bad 2 hrs; I couldn’t do another 15 hrs with them. I decided to risk the Frankfurt connection. At first it went well; breakfast beer and pretzel in the lounge, on-time boarding. But after boarding, we sat and sat. The captain came on. The good news? The luggage was finally loaded and the cargo doors buttoned up. The bad news? Our pushback time is an hour from now. There was nothing I could do. I pulled out my iPhone and buried myself in the zen of Solitaire. As it turned out, we didn’t take the full hour delay and the pilot juiced the engines so we arrived only 15 minutes late. And after looking at in-flight pictures from the gang that took the Air India direct flight, that 15 minute delay was trampled by the arrival of full-on schadenfreude. I had definitely made the right decision</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em>Gargantua</em> by Admiral Bob (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/46361 Ft: My Free Mickey, Martijn de Boer</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>The airlines’ smart bag ban claimed a couple of casualties this month. Bluesmart posted its blog obituary first -- “the banning of smart luggage with non-removable batteries put our company in an irreversibly difficult financial and business situation”. selling their IP, their intellectual property to TravelPro, one of the “legacy” suitcase brands they used to dismiss. A few weeks later, Raden posted a similar obit -- “We sincerely apologize to those who chose to travel with us, our intent was to add ease and simplicity to your travel experience and this unforeseen policy change has made this impossible.” Both companies said they’re no longer honoring warranties though Bluesmart says they’ll still provide some level of e-mail support. And the smartphone apps if you want to use your grounded bag on, say, a train or a bus. The bag maker Away is still in business, though, even developing a free kit that retrofits their first generation smart bag with an ejectable battery, making them compliant with the airlines’ rules.</li>\r\n 	<li>Gary Learned tweeted back a solid counter-argument on last episode’s rant on MSP’s Terminal 2. After waiting for a Southwest flight back to Chicago, I added it to my “ghetto terminal” list -- the terminals for non-hub airlines -- like O’Hare’s Terminal 2 and Detroit’s North Terminal. Gary has a different take, though. He writes -\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I respectfully disagree on MSP T2. Surdyks has some great taps and wine as well as good small bites. Barrio is a nice little Mexican local restaurant. I can go from car to gate in 5 min. Now MDW on the other hand …</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Car to gate in 5 minutes -- that’s a selling point right there that you won’t pick up Uber-ing in and out of a place. That used to be Midway before it blew up -- little parking lot in front of the terminal and walk right in. I won’t defend Midway now -- it’s a bit of a cluster, though I’m hoping that the pending reconstruction of the security concourse sort of “un-clusters” at least that part of it. Gary, thanks for giving us the contra view of MSP T2. I’ll give Barrio a try the next time I’m there.</li>\r\n 	<li>And since we’re talking about ghetto terminals, when choosing among the client-selected itineraries to India, a connection thru Munich was one of the options -- which long-time listeners know I immediately skipped. Skytrax again named Munich the top European airport. God only knows why, though I know they certainly didn’t ask me. Instead, I connected through Frankfurt, which while not a “wow-sy” airport, is efficient, not a hassle, and gets me on my way. Normally, I’m flying over to FRA from ORD and connecting to some place in Europe, often in the Schengen zone so I don’t have to go through passport control. Connecting to India, though, was a different matter. According to my iPhone’s Health app (admittedly not the most accurate), I walked 1.6 miles that Saturday morning between my ORD and DEL flights. I drug my bag down long corridors empty except for some black plastic chairs fixed in a semi-reclined position surrounded by black cloth cots. FRA airport really missed the chance to strategically locate some little beer stube kiosks along the way. I would’ve stopped at least a couple of times on that trek for some breakfast beers.</li>\r\n 	<li>The India trip was a bit of a last-minute thing which necessitated a scramble for a new Indian visa. This would be my 3rd Indian visa. My first one was a 5-year visa that I lost when my passport was stolen in Brussels. My second one was only for 6 months; I can’t remember why it was so short. This time, I decided to avoid future scrambles and apply for a 10-year visa. Because there’s an Indian consulate in Chicago, I didn’t have to hassle with postage or third-party passport services. The day before, I sent notes to our US HR department and the admin manager in our Hyderabad office asking for the necessary letters of guarantee and invitation, and then did the application online, printed it out and signed it, and then booked an appointment the next morning. I didn’t actually go to the consulate. I’ve always gone to an outsourced visa processing company that handled the front end administrivia, with, near as I can tell, the consulate just approving and signing the visas. Each visa has been with a different processor. For my first visa in 2010, I dropped my forms and passport off at an office in the morning, and received a text at the end of the day that it was ready. In 2014, a different processor gave my wife a hard time -- trying to upsell her on expedited handling charges that weren’t needed. This time, Cox and Kings was a surprisingly painless experience. I went in Thursday after lunch; there was no wait, the people were pleasant. End of day Thursday, I received an e-mail and a text telling me that my application had been processed and was heading to the consulate. On Friday morning, I received and e-mail and text saying that my application had arrived at the consulate. Another message at lunch said that it was being processes, and a last message on Friday said that it was back at Cox and Kings. Monday morning, another message told me it was being packaged up, followed by a message with a UPS tracking number. Tuesday afternoon, my passport landed on my front porch with my 10-year visa. I was incredibly impressed… and feeling a bit spoiled comparing this level of customer service to what my non-US friends tell me they have to go through to get a US visa.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em>A Foolish Game</em> by Zep Hurme (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/zep_hurme/46448</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>When You Think the TSA is Bad...</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>A week of flying around India is always a good sanity check for me -- that no matter what crankiness I’m have about the TSA, airport security in the US is so much easier than in India. When I was talking at the start of the episode about how the delay of our Pune-Delhi flight blew up the rest of our itinerary home, the main reason we immediately starting working alternative flights was because how long we knew it would take to work our way through the different layers of security in Delhi. It started when trying to make our way from domestic flight arrivals into the international departures area so we could re-ticket our flights. We had to pass through the usual itinerary check. I show the army guy the boarding pass for United flight we’d missed -- it was all I had. But since that flight had already left, he wasn’t going to let me through. Luckily, one of the group I was flying with was United Global Services, and two customer service staff had met us as we got off the Air India flight. Even then, it took her a good bit of time to explain the situation to the army guy and convince him to let me through. But for that, I would’ve been idling around baggage claim on my own trying to figure out how to get to a ticket counter.</li>\r\n 	<li>Passport control was pretty efficient, but the security scans -- not so much. After you unpack all your electronics and push everything through the X-ray machine, you walk through the metal detector for your gender -- different scanners for “Gents” and “Ladies” because there’s a full wanding and patdown on the other side. Indeed, the “Ladies” go into a little curtained booth for their patdown. Not normally too much of a hassle, unless the “Ladies” patdown line backs up, and a back up of women’s luggage in the X-ray machine is blocking mine -- which happened that evening. None of the security people moved to clear things. Nothing to do but stand there and wait. Our flight from Pune landed at Delhi at 11pm. When looking at flight alternatives, I’d seen an Air Canada flight leaving at 12:10pm and passed right by it. I knew there was no way we’d make that flight.</li>\r\n 	<li>The security checks in Frankfurt, while much more efficient, were still more than you’d get in the US. On the way over to India, after passing everything through the X-ray machine, I was intercepted after collecting my bags, directed over to a cubicle where all of my bags were swabbed and checked for explosives residue. All done with a German sense of politeness, but I was glad I wasn’t in a rush. On the connection back home, it was a different security line, with a body scanner instead of the walkthru metal detector. No big deal, but just different enough to be awkward. Instead of the TSA’s hands up “don’t shoot” pose, it was an arms down-elbows out pose, kinda like you’re holding luggage. The guy working the scanner was visibly annoyed that he had to instruct me on the pose -- to hold me arms further away from my body. But then there was no luggage swiping on the other side.</li>\r\n 	<li>Picking up my bags, I maneuvered around three officers cradling automatic rifles; they were standing there chatting, but watching. No big deal now, but I remember when I first starting traveling through Europe -- London Heathrow and Frankfurt in the mid- to late-’80’s and being taken aback by the army guys walking around with unslung M-16s and the like. This was pre-TSA time in the US, when it would be out-of-place to see anything more than a rent-a-cop in an airport terminal and you could still turn up 30 minutes before departure time and make your flight. Back then, the difference was eye-opening for a twenty-something traveler. Of course, none of us knew that it was a preview of what flying would be like 20 years later.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em>Melt Away</em> by Kara Square (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/mindmapthat/46605</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Expired Money</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>In last December’s episode, I talked about how I need to have some cash in my pocket when I travel. I know it’s a generational thing; many of my younger colleagues don’t carry any cash, but going “cash naked” just makes me nervous. Assuaging this anxiety on international travel means fills one of my desk drawers with random bits of currency. That’s not a big deal for countries that I or my family visit often. Before my daughter flew back to the UK for her spring semester at St Andrews, I rummaged through the desk and found a £20 note; it bought her breakfast when she landed in Edinburgh.</li>\r\n 	<li>But for countries I visit less often, the money just sits there. I have 350 Mexican pesos -- about $18 at today’s exchange rate; I can’t remember the last time I was in Mexico. I have 400 Chinese yuan -- over $60 -- left over from my last trip to Beijing 4 years ago. At the end of that trip, I thought I’d be going back within the year, so didn’t work hard to spend down those notes. But that next trip didn’t happen, and so there those yuan sit.</li>\r\n 	<li>Before the India trip, I hit the cash drawer and pulled out €12 in notes and coins from our trip to Spain last March, that was for my connections through Frankfurt, and 200 rupees -- about $30 -- left over from my 2014 trip to India. I didn’t spend any of the euros; I spent most of my time either walking through concourses or drinking beer in the Lufthansa lounge. But the rupees came in handy for tipping all the guys at the hotel who insisted on helping me with my carry-on bag. Here’s a 100 for you, and you, and you, and, oh, you too.</li>\r\n 	<li>One night in Pune, we were at the JW Marriott rooftop bar for hors d\'oeuvres and pre-dinner drinks. The catered bar on our side of the terrace has the usual Kingfisher beers. But then I saw someone on the other, the non-catered/public side of the terrace with a different, non-Kingfisher beer. It was a Bira 91 Blonde. I headed over to the main bar to get one. Now, because this was the main bar, not the catered one, I was going to have to pay for the Bira 91, but that wasn’t a problem because I had rupees in my pocket. Yes, they also would’ve taken my Amex card, but I had a 1,000 and a 500 rupee note that I needed to break for more luggage tips, so I laid the 1,000 note on the bar next to my check and then wandered over to the edge of the rooftop to look over the city. A couple minutes later, a guy taps me on the shoulder and gives me back my 1,000 rupees. The note was no good. And then I remembered. Back in Nov 2016, the Indian government made a snap announcement to replace the 500 and 1,000 rupee notes to fight counterfeiting. $20 of my rupees had expired while sitting in my desk drawer. Lots of apologizing, and I ended up pulling out my Amex card after all.</li>\r\n 	<li>When I got home, I took a deeper dive through my cash drawer. Luckily, I didn’t have any old £10 notes, the ones with Charles Darwin on them. He expired a couple of months ago in March, replaced by a new tenner with Jane Austen. I did find a 1,000 Italian lire note with Maria Montessori on the face, which must’ve been left over from, I dunno, maybe our 10th anniversary trip to Tuscany because lire notes were replaced with Euro notes in 2002. My 1,000 note was worth maybe half a euro, about 60 cents when it expired: not a big loss. But today, when I searched on eBay, I saw it selling for $2-3. That’s a 300-400% return. So maybe I’ll just stuff these rupee back in my drawer and check back in, oh, 2035 and make a killing.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #141</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a> and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_141.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #141 — When You Think the TSA is Bad...; Expired Money','','inherit','closed','closed','','1998-revision-v1','','','2018-06-03 21:07:50','2018-06-04 02:07:50','',1998,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/06/03/1998-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2038,1,'2018-06-03 21:17:03','2018-06-04 02:17:03','[caption id=\"attachment_2004\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/IMG_0464.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2004\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/IMG_0464-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Effects of Extended Exposure to TSA Scan[/caption]\r\n\r\nA last-minute trip to Pune, India. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_142.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.<!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #141:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. Not much travel since the last episode -- just driving up to Wisconsin -- until last week when I did a 5-day trip with a client to Pune, India. Left ORD Friday night, landed in Frankfurt late Saturday morning, heard the announce a flight to Pune before my flight to Delhi. Arrived in Delhi at 1am Monday morning. Overnighted at the airport Radisson Blu (not a bad hotel), and then caught an afternoon Jet Airways flight to Pune. Note to self: you don’t always have to fly the client’s itinerary. In spite of all those legs, those multiple points of potential failure, everything went relatively smoothly.</li>\r\n 	<li>Not so much on the way home. The itinerary was to take an Air India flight from Pune to Delhi at 7pm Thursday night, then the United flight to Newark, getting back to ORD around 9:30. We passed on a 5:30p Jet Airways flight fearing Pune rush hour traffic. And that’s where the itinerary fell apart. While waiting for the client team to check their luggage -- I decided to ignore Air India’s 8 kg carry-on weight limit -- I get an e-mail from Air India with a 2 hr delay due to “operational reasons” which usually means a broken plane. Great. What was a reasonable 2½ layover was suddenly an unrealistic 30-minute dash off the plane, through the standard Indian airport itinerary check, then passport control, full patdown security, weave through the terminal and to the gate. And the inbound Air India plane hasn’t left Delhi yet. I call our Amex travel number -- any room on that Jet Airways flight because it hasn’t left yet. Nope, sold out. I briefly think about 3-hr drive to Mumbai but decide to keep heading to Delhi. I bang “flights DEL ORD May 24” into Google. I filter the Google Flights results for one-way and shortest duration, and then call Amex back. When the agent stopped after listing the limited United options -- I guess because it’s less work for them to keep me on the same airline -- I asked her to check on the non-United options that Google Flights listed. There’s the direct Air India flight to ORD getting in around 7:30a or a Lufthansa connection back through Frankfurt arriving around 1pm. I have her book both, knowing that I can cancel one well within the 24-hr no-penalty window.</li>\r\n 	<li>Pune Airport is a dump. I’m trying to think of a worse airport I’ve been in and I’m drawing a complete blank. Weak air conditioning failing to fight the 95 degree day, 3-4 food stands against the wall, and no bar. With nothing better to do, I bang “Air India ORD DEL business class review” into Google. The results were not kind. But I still think - how bad could it really be? This seems like a bad karma travel day; skipping the FRA connection, avoiding another point of failure, seems to be good idea. But then I finally got on the Air India plane to Delhi. It was also a complete dump. It was a bad 2 hrs; I couldn’t do another 15 hrs with them. I decided to risk the Frankfurt connection. At first it went well; breakfast beer and pretzel in the lounge, on-time boarding. But after boarding, we sat and sat. The captain came on. The good news? The luggage was finally loaded and the cargo doors buttoned up. The bad news? Our pushback time is an hour from now. There was nothing I could do. I pulled out my iPhone and buried myself in the zen of Solitaire. As it turned out, we didn’t take the full hour delay and the pilot juiced the engines so we arrived only 15 minutes late. And after looking at in-flight pictures from the gang that took the Air India direct flight, that 15 minute delay was trampled by the arrival of full-on schadenfreude. I had definitely made the right decision</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em>Gargantua</em> by Admiral Bob (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/46361 Ft: My Free Mickey, Martijn de Boer</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>The airlines’ smart bag ban claimed a couple of casualties this month. Bluesmart posted its blog obituary first -- “the banning of smart luggage with non-removable batteries put our company in an irreversibly difficult financial and business situation”. selling their IP, their intellectual property to TravelPro, one of the “legacy” suitcase brands they used to dismiss. A few weeks later, Raden posted a similar obit -- “We sincerely apologize to those who chose to travel with us, our intent was to add ease and simplicity to your travel experience and this unforeseen policy change has made this impossible.” Both companies said they’re no longer honoring warranties though Bluesmart says they’ll still provide some level of e-mail support. And the smartphone apps if you want to use your grounded bag on, say, a train or a bus. The bag maker Away is still in business, though, even developing a free kit that retrofits their first generation smart bag with an ejectable battery, making them compliant with the airlines’ rules.</li>\r\n 	<li>Gary Learned tweeted back a solid counter-argument on last episode’s rant on MSP’s Terminal 2. After waiting for a Southwest flight back to Chicago, I added it to my “ghetto terminal” list -- the terminals for non-hub airlines -- like O’Hare’s Terminal 2 and Detroit’s North Terminal. Gary has a different take, though. He writes -\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I respectfully disagree on MSP T2. Surdyks has some great taps and wine as well as good small bites. Barrio is a nice little Mexican local restaurant. I can go from car to gate in 5 min. Now MDW on the other hand …</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Car to gate in 5 minutes -- that’s a selling point right there that you won’t pick up Uber-ing in and out of a place. That used to be Midway before it blew up -- little parking lot in front of the terminal and walk right in. I won’t defend Midway now -- it’s a bit of a cluster, though I’m hoping that the pending reconstruction of the security concourse sort of “un-clusters” at least that part of it. Gary, thanks for giving us the contra view of MSP T2. I’ll give Barrio a try the next time I’m there.</li>\r\n 	<li>And since we’re talking about ghetto terminals, when choosing among the client-selected itineraries to India, a connection thru Munich was one of the options -- which long-time listeners know I immediately skipped. Skytrax again named Munich the top European airport. God only knows why, though I know they certainly didn’t ask me. Instead, I connected through Frankfurt, which while not a “wow-sy” airport, is efficient, not a hassle, and gets me on my way. Normally, I’m flying over to FRA from ORD and connecting to some place in Europe, often in the Schengen zone so I don’t have to go through passport control. Connecting to India, though, was a different matter. According to my iPhone’s Health app (admittedly not the most accurate), I walked 1.6 miles that Saturday morning between my ORD and DEL flights. I drug my bag down long corridors empty except for some black plastic chairs fixed in a semi-reclined position surrounded by black cloth cots. FRA airport really missed the chance to strategically locate some little beer stube kiosks along the way. I would’ve stopped at least a couple of times on that trek for some breakfast beers.</li>\r\n 	<li>The India trip was a bit of a last-minute thing which necessitated a scramble for a new Indian visa. This would be my 3rd Indian visa. My first one was a 5-year visa that I lost when my passport was stolen in Brussels. My second one was only for 6 months; I can’t remember why it was so short. This time, I decided to avoid future scrambles and apply for a 10-year visa. Because there’s an Indian consulate in Chicago, I didn’t have to hassle with postage or third-party passport services. The day before, I sent notes to our US HR department and the admin manager in our Hyderabad office asking for the necessary letters of guarantee and invitation, and then did the application online, printed it out and signed it, and then booked an appointment the next morning. I didn’t actually go to the consulate. I’ve always gone to an outsourced visa processing company that handled the front end administrivia, with, near as I can tell, the consulate just approving and signing the visas. Each visa has been with a different processor. For my first visa in 2010, I dropped my forms and passport off at an office in the morning, and received a text at the end of the day that it was ready. In 2014, a different processor gave my wife a hard time -- trying to upsell her on expedited handling charges that weren’t needed. This time, Cox and Kings was a surprisingly painless experience. I went in Thursday after lunch; there was no wait, the people were pleasant. End of day Thursday, I received an e-mail and a text telling me that my application had been processed and was heading to the consulate. On Friday morning, I received and e-mail and text saying that my application had arrived at the consulate. Another message at lunch said that it was being processes, and a last message on Friday said that it was back at Cox and Kings. Monday morning, another message told me it was being packaged up, followed by a message with a UPS tracking number. Tuesday afternoon, my passport landed on my front porch with my 10-year visa. I was incredibly impressed… and feeling a bit spoiled comparing this level of customer service to what my non-US friends tell me they have to go through to get a US visa.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em>A Foolish Game</em> by Zep Hurme (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/zep_hurme/46448</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>When You Think the TSA is Bad...</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>A week of flying around India is always a good sanity check for me -- that no matter what crankiness I’m have about the TSA, airport security in the US is so much easier than in India. When I was talking at the start of the episode about how the delay of our Pune-Delhi flight blew up the rest of our itinerary home, the main reason we immediately starting working alternative flights was because how long we knew it would take to work our way through the different layers of security in Delhi. It started when trying to make our way from domestic flight arrivals into the international departures area so we could re-ticket our flights. We had to pass through the usual itinerary check. I show the army guy the boarding pass for United flight we’d missed -- it was all I had. But since that flight had already left, he wasn’t going to let me through. Luckily, one of the group I was flying with was United Global Services, and two customer service staff had met us as we got off the Air India flight. Even then, it took her a good bit of time to explain the situation to the army guy and convince him to let me through. But for that, I would’ve been idling around baggage claim on my own trying to figure out how to get to a ticket counter.</li>\r\n 	<li>Passport control was pretty efficient, but the security scans -- not so much. After you unpack all your electronics and push everything through the X-ray machine, you walk through the metal detector for your gender -- different scanners for “Gents” and “Ladies” because there’s a full wanding and patdown on the other side. Indeed, the “Ladies” go into a little curtained booth for their patdown. Not normally too much of a hassle, unless the “Ladies” patdown line backs up, and a back up of women’s luggage in the X-ray machine is blocking mine -- which happened that evening. None of the security people moved to clear things. Nothing to do but stand there and wait. Our flight from Pune landed at Delhi at 11pm. When looking at flight alternatives, I’d seen an Air Canada flight leaving at 12:10pm and passed right by it. I knew there was no way we’d make that flight.</li>\r\n 	<li>The security checks in Frankfurt, while much more efficient, were still more than you’d get in the US. On the way over to India, after passing everything through the X-ray machine, I was intercepted after collecting my bags, directed over to a cubicle where all of my bags were swabbed and checked for explosives residue. All done with a German sense of politeness, but I was glad I wasn’t in a rush. On the connection back home, it was a different security line, with a body scanner instead of the walkthru metal detector. No big deal, but just different enough to be awkward. Instead of the TSA’s hands up “don’t shoot” pose, it was an arms down-elbows out pose, kinda like you’re holding luggage. The guy working the scanner was visibly annoyed that he had to instruct me on the pose -- to hold me arms further away from my body. But then there was no luggage swiping on the other side.</li>\r\n 	<li>Picking up my bags, I maneuvered around three officers cradling automatic rifles; they were standing there chatting, but watching. No big deal now, but I remember when I first starting traveling through Europe -- London Heathrow and Frankfurt in the mid- to late-’80’s and being taken aback by the army guys walking around with unslung M-16s and the like. This was pre-TSA time in the US, when it would be out-of-place to see anything more than a rent-a-cop in an airport terminal and you could still turn up 30 minutes before departure time and make your flight. Back then, the difference was eye-opening for a twenty-something traveler. Of course, none of us knew that it was a preview of what flying would be like 20 years later.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em>Melt Away</em> by Kara Square (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/mindmapthat/46605</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Expired Money</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>In last December’s episode, I talked about how I need to have some cash in my pocket when I travel. I know it’s a generational thing; many of my younger colleagues don’t carry any cash, but going “cash naked” just makes me nervous. Assuaging this anxiety on international travel means fills one of my desk drawers with random bits of currency. That’s not a big deal for countries that I or my family visit often. Before my daughter flew back to the UK for her spring semester at St Andrews, I rummaged through the desk and found a £20 note; it bought her breakfast when she landed in Edinburgh.</li>\r\n 	<li>But for countries I visit less often, the money just sits there. I have 350 Mexican pesos -- about $18 at today’s exchange rate; I can’t remember the last time I was in Mexico. I have 400 Chinese yuan -- over $60 -- left over from my last trip to Beijing 4 years ago. At the end of that trip, I thought I’d be going back within the year, so didn’t work hard to spend down those notes. But that next trip didn’t happen, and so there those yuan sit.</li>\r\n 	<li>Before the India trip, I hit the cash drawer and pulled out €12 in notes and coins from our trip to Spain last March, that was for my connections through Frankfurt, and 200 rupees -- about $30 -- left over from my 2014 trip to India. I didn’t spend any of the euros; I spent most of my time either walking through concourses or drinking beer in the Lufthansa lounge. But the rupees came in handy for tipping all the guys at the hotel who insisted on helping me with my carry-on bag. Here’s a 100 for you, and you, and you, and, oh, you too.</li>\r\n 	<li>One night in Pune, we were at the JW Marriott rooftop bar for hors d\'oeuvres and pre-dinner drinks. The catered bar on our side of the terrace has the usual Kingfisher beers. But then I saw someone on the other, the non-catered/public side of the terrace with a different, non-Kingfisher beer. It was a Bira 91 Blonde. I headed over to the main bar to get one. Now, because this was the main bar, not the catered one, I was going to have to pay for the Bira 91, but that wasn’t a problem because I had rupees in my pocket. Yes, they also would’ve taken my Amex card, but I had a 1,000 and a 500 rupee note that I needed to break for more luggage tips, so I laid the 1,000 note on the bar next to my check and then wandered over to the edge of the rooftop to look over the city. A couple minutes later, a guy taps me on the shoulder and gives me back my 1,000 rupees. The note was no good. And then I remembered. Back in Nov 2016, the Indian government made a snap announcement to replace the 500 and 1,000 rupee notes to fight counterfeiting. $20 of my rupees had expired while sitting in my desk drawer. Lots of apologizing, and I ended up pulling out my Amex card after all.</li>\r\n 	<li>When I got home, I took a deeper dive through my cash drawer. Luckily, I didn’t have any old £10 notes, the ones with Charles Darwin on them. He expired a couple of months ago in March, replaced by a new tenner with Jane Austen. I did find a 1,000 Italian lire note with Maria Montessori on the face, which must’ve been left over from, I dunno, maybe our 10th anniversary trip to Tuscany because lire notes were replaced with Euro notes in 2002. My 1,000 note was worth maybe half a euro, about 60 cents when it expired: not a big loss. But today, when I searched on eBay, I saw it selling for $2-3. That’s a 300-400% return. So maybe I’ll just stuff these rupee back in my drawer and check back in, oh, 2035 and make a killing.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #141</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a> and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_141.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #141 — When You Think the TSA is Bad...; Expired Money','','inherit','closed','closed','','1998-revision-v1','','','2018-06-03 21:17:03','2018-06-04 02:17:03','',1998,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/06/03/1998-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2039,1,'2018-06-03 21:31:34','2018-06-04 02:31:34','[caption id=\"attachment_2004\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/IMG_0464.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2004\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/IMG_0464-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Effects of Extended Exposure to TSA Scan[/caption]\r\n\r\nA last-minute trip to Pune, India provided more than enough material for this episode -- a visa dash, <em>very</em> hands-on airport security, worthless rupee notes, flight disruptions.... We also read the obits for a couple of smart bag companies and hear why MSP\'s T2 isn\'t so ghetto after all. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_141.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n<iframe src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/453397353&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"></iframe><!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #141:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. Not much travel since the last episode -- just driving up to Wisconsin -- until last week when I did a 5-day trip with a client to Pune, India. Left ORD Friday night, landed in Frankfurt late Saturday morning, heard the announce a flight to Pune before my flight to Delhi. Arrived in Delhi at 1am Monday morning. Overnighted at the airport Radisson Blu (not a bad hotel), and then caught an afternoon Jet Airways flight to Pune. Note to self: you don’t always have to fly the client’s itinerary. In spite of all those legs, those multiple points of potential failure, everything went relatively smoothly.</li>\r\n 	<li>Not so much on the way home. The itinerary was to take an Air India flight from Pune to Delhi at 7pm Thursday night, then the United flight to Newark, getting back to ORD around 9:30. We passed on a 5:30p Jet Airways flight fearing Pune rush hour traffic. And that’s where the itinerary fell apart. While waiting for the client team to check their luggage -- I decided to ignore Air India’s 8 kg carry-on weight limit -- I get an e-mail from Air India with a 2 hr delay due to “operational reasons” which usually means a broken plane. Great. What was a reasonable 2½ layover was suddenly an unrealistic 30-minute dash off the plane, through the standard Indian airport itinerary check, then passport control, full patdown security, weave through the terminal and to the gate. And the inbound Air India plane hasn’t left Delhi yet. I call our Amex travel number -- any room on that Jet Airways flight because it hasn’t left yet. Nope, sold out. I briefly think about 3-hr drive to Mumbai but decide to keep heading to Delhi. I bang “flights DEL ORD May 24” into Google. I filter the Google Flights results for one-way and shortest duration, and then call Amex back. When the agent stopped after listing the limited United options -- I guess because it’s less work for them to keep me on the same airline -- I asked her to check on the non-United options that Google Flights listed. There’s the direct Air India flight to ORD getting in around 7:30a or a Lufthansa connection back through Frankfurt arriving around 1pm. I have her book both, knowing that I can cancel one well within the 24-hr no-penalty window.</li>\r\n 	<li>Pune Airport is a dump. I’m trying to think of a worse airport I’ve been in and I’m drawing a complete blank. Weak air conditioning failing to fight the 95 degree day, 3-4 food stands against the wall, and no bar. With nothing better to do, I bang “Air India ORD DEL business class review” into Google. The results were not kind. But I still think - how bad could it really be? This seems like a bad karma travel day; skipping the FRA connection, avoiding another point of failure, seems to be good idea. But then I finally got on the Air India plane to Delhi. It was also a complete dump. It was a bad 2 hrs; I couldn’t do another 15 hrs with them. I decided to risk the Frankfurt connection. At first it went well; breakfast beer and pretzel in the lounge, on-time boarding. But after boarding, we sat and sat. The captain came on. The good news? The luggage was finally loaded and the cargo doors buttoned up. The bad news? Our pushback time is an hour from now. There was nothing I could do. I pulled out my iPhone and buried myself in the zen of Solitaire. As it turned out, we didn’t take the full hour delay and the pilot juiced the engines so we arrived only 15 minutes late. And after looking at in-flight pictures from the gang that took the Air India direct flight, that 15 minute delay was trampled by the arrival of full-on schadenfreude. I had definitely made the right decision</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em>Gargantua</em> by Admiral Bob (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/46361 Ft: My Free Mickey, Martijn de Boer</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>The airlines’ smart bag ban claimed a couple of casualties this month. Bluesmart posted its blog obituary first -- “the banning of smart luggage with non-removable batteries put our company in an irreversibly difficult financial and business situation”. selling their IP, their intellectual property to TravelPro, one of the “legacy” suitcase brands they used to dismiss. A few weeks later, Raden posted a similar obit -- “We sincerely apologize to those who chose to travel with us, our intent was to add ease and simplicity to your travel experience and this unforeseen policy change has made this impossible.” Both companies said they’re no longer honoring warranties though Bluesmart says they’ll still provide some level of e-mail support. And the smartphone apps if you want to use your grounded bag on, say, a train or a bus. The bag maker Away is still in business, though, even developing a free kit that retrofits their first generation smart bag with an ejectable battery, making them compliant with the airlines’ rules.</li>\r\n 	<li>Gary Learned tweeted back a solid counter-argument on last episode’s rant on MSP’s Terminal 2. After waiting for a Southwest flight back to Chicago, I added it to my “ghetto terminal” list -- the terminals for non-hub airlines -- like O’Hare’s Terminal 2 and Detroit’s North Terminal. Gary has a different take, though. He writes -\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I respectfully disagree on MSP T2. Surdyks has some great taps and wine as well as good small bites. Barrio is a nice little Mexican local restaurant. I can go from car to gate in 5 min. Now MDW on the other hand …</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Car to gate in 5 minutes -- that’s a selling point right there that you won’t pick up Uber-ing in and out of a place. That used to be Midway before it blew up -- little parking lot in front of the terminal and walk right in. I won’t defend Midway now -- it’s a bit of a cluster, though I’m hoping that the pending reconstruction of the security concourse sort of “un-clusters” at least that part of it. Gary, thanks for giving us the contra view of MSP T2. I’ll give Barrio a try the next time I’m there.</li>\r\n 	<li>And since we’re talking about ghetto terminals, when choosing among the client-selected itineraries to India, a connection thru Munich was one of the options -- which long-time listeners know I immediately skipped. Skytrax again named Munich the top European airport. God only knows why, though I know they certainly didn’t ask me. Instead, I connected through Frankfurt, which while not a “wow-sy” airport, is efficient, not a hassle, and gets me on my way. Normally, I’m flying over to FRA from ORD and connecting to some place in Europe, often in the Schengen zone so I don’t have to go through passport control. Connecting to India, though, was a different matter. According to my iPhone’s Health app (admittedly not the most accurate), I walked 1.6 miles that Saturday morning between my ORD and DEL flights. I drug my bag down long corridors empty except for some black plastic chairs fixed in a semi-reclined position surrounded by black cloth cots. FRA airport really missed the chance to strategically locate some little beer stube kiosks along the way. I would’ve stopped at least a couple of times on that trek for some breakfast beers.</li>\r\n 	<li>The India trip was a bit of a last-minute thing which necessitated a scramble for a new Indian visa. This would be my 3rd Indian visa. My first one was a 5-year visa that I lost when my passport was stolen in Brussels. My second one was only for 6 months; I can’t remember why it was so short. This time, I decided to avoid future scrambles and apply for a 10-year visa. Because there’s an Indian consulate in Chicago, I didn’t have to hassle with postage or third-party passport services. The day before, I sent notes to our US HR department and the admin manager in our Hyderabad office asking for the necessary letters of guarantee and invitation, and then did the application online, printed it out and signed it, and then booked an appointment the next morning. I didn’t actually go to the consulate. I’ve always gone to an outsourced visa processing company that handled the front end administrivia, with, near as I can tell, the consulate just approving and signing the visas. Each visa has been with a different processor. For my first visa in 2010, I dropped my forms and passport off at an office in the morning, and received a text at the end of the day that it was ready. In 2014, a different processor gave my wife a hard time -- trying to upsell her on expedited handling charges that weren’t needed. This time, Cox and Kings was a surprisingly painless experience. I went in Thursday after lunch; there was no wait, the people were pleasant. End of day Thursday, I received an e-mail and a text telling me that my application had been processed and was heading to the consulate. On Friday morning, I received and e-mail and text saying that my application had arrived at the consulate. Another message at lunch said that it was being processes, and a last message on Friday said that it was back at Cox and Kings. Monday morning, another message told me it was being packaged up, followed by a message with a UPS tracking number. Tuesday afternoon, my passport landed on my front porch with my 10-year visa. I was incredibly impressed… and feeling a bit spoiled comparing this level of customer service to what my non-US friends tell me they have to go through to get a US visa.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em>A Foolish Game</em> by Zep Hurme (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/zep_hurme/46448</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>When You Think the TSA is Bad...</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>A week of flying around India is always a good sanity check for me -- that no matter what crankiness I’m have about the TSA, airport security in the US is so much easier than in India. When I was talking at the start of the episode about how the delay of our Pune-Delhi flight blew up the rest of our itinerary home, the main reason we immediately starting working alternative flights was because how long we knew it would take to work our way through the different layers of security in Delhi. It started when trying to make our way from domestic flight arrivals into the international departures area so we could re-ticket our flights. We had to pass through the usual itinerary check. I show the army guy the boarding pass for United flight we’d missed -- it was all I had. But since that flight had already left, he wasn’t going to let me through. Luckily, one of the group I was flying with was United Global Services, and two customer service staff had met us as we got off the Air India flight. Even then, it took her a good bit of time to explain the situation to the army guy and convince him to let me through. But for that, I would’ve been idling around baggage claim on my own trying to figure out how to get to a ticket counter.</li>\r\n 	<li>Passport control was pretty efficient, but the security scans -- not so much. After you unpack all your electronics and push everything through the X-ray machine, you walk through the metal detector for your gender -- different scanners for “Gents” and “Ladies” because there’s a full wanding and patdown on the other side. Indeed, the “Ladies” go into a little curtained booth for their patdown. Not normally too much of a hassle, unless the “Ladies” patdown line backs up, and a back up of women’s luggage in the X-ray machine is blocking mine -- which happened that evening. None of the security people moved to clear things. Nothing to do but stand there and wait. Our flight from Pune landed at Delhi at 11pm. When looking at flight alternatives, I’d seen an Air Canada flight leaving at 12:10pm and passed right by it. I knew there was no way we’d make that flight.</li>\r\n 	<li>The security checks in Frankfurt, while much more efficient, were still more than you’d get in the US. On the way over to India, after passing everything through the X-ray machine, I was intercepted after collecting my bags, directed over to a cubicle where all of my bags were swabbed and checked for explosives residue. All done with a German sense of politeness, but I was glad I wasn’t in a rush. On the connection back home, it was a different security line, with a body scanner instead of the walkthru metal detector. No big deal, but just different enough to be awkward. Instead of the TSA’s hands up “don’t shoot” pose, it was an arms down-elbows out pose, kinda like you’re holding luggage. The guy working the scanner was visibly annoyed that he had to instruct me on the pose -- to hold me arms further away from my body. But then there was no luggage swiping on the other side.</li>\r\n 	<li>Picking up my bags, I maneuvered around three officers cradling automatic rifles; they were standing there chatting, but watching. No big deal now, but I remember when I first starting traveling through Europe -- London Heathrow and Frankfurt in the mid- to late-’80’s and being taken aback by the army guys walking around with unslung M-16s and the like. This was pre-TSA time in the US, when it would be out-of-place to see anything more than a rent-a-cop in an airport terminal and you could still turn up 30 minutes before departure time and make your flight. Back then, the difference was eye-opening for a twenty-something traveler. Of course, none of us knew that it was a preview of what flying would be like 20 years later.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em>Melt Away</em> by Kara Square (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/mindmapthat/46605</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Expired Money</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>In last December’s episode, I talked about how I need to have some cash in my pocket when I travel. I know it’s a generational thing; many of my younger colleagues don’t carry any cash, but going “cash naked” just makes me nervous. Assuaging this anxiety on international travel means fills one of my desk drawers with random bits of currency. That’s not a big deal for countries that I or my family visit often. Before my daughter flew back to the UK for her spring semester at St Andrews, I rummaged through the desk and found a £20 note; it bought her breakfast when she landed in Edinburgh.</li>\r\n 	<li>But for countries I visit less often, the money just sits there. I have 350 Mexican pesos -- about $18 at today’s exchange rate; I can’t remember the last time I was in Mexico. I have 400 Chinese yuan -- over $60 -- left over from my last trip to Beijing 4 years ago. At the end of that trip, I thought I’d be going back within the year, so didn’t work hard to spend down those notes. But that next trip didn’t happen, and so there those yuan sit.</li>\r\n 	<li>Before the India trip, I hit the cash drawer and pulled out €12 in notes and coins from our trip to Spain last March, that was for my connections through Frankfurt, and 200 rupees -- about $30 -- left over from my 2014 trip to India. I didn’t spend any of the euros; I spent most of my time either walking through concourses or drinking beer in the Lufthansa lounge. But the rupees came in handy for tipping all the guys at the hotel who insisted on helping me with my carry-on bag. Here’s a 100 for you, and you, and you, and, oh, you too.</li>\r\n 	<li>One night in Pune, we were at the JW Marriott rooftop bar for hors d\'oeuvres and pre-dinner drinks. The catered bar on our side of the terrace has the usual Kingfisher beers. But then I saw someone on the other, the non-catered/public side of the terrace with a different, non-Kingfisher beer. It was a Bira 91 Blonde. I headed over to the main bar to get one. Now, because this was the main bar, not the catered one, I was going to have to pay for the Bira 91, but that wasn’t a problem because I had rupees in my pocket. Yes, they also would’ve taken my Amex card, but I had a 1,000 and a 500 rupee note that I needed to break for more luggage tips, so I laid the 1,000 note on the bar next to my check and then wandered over to the edge of the rooftop to look over the city. A couple minutes later, a guy taps me on the shoulder and gives me back my 1,000 rupees. The note was no good. And then I remembered. Back in Nov 2016, the Indian government made a snap announcement to replace the 500 and 1,000 rupee notes to fight counterfeiting. $20 of my rupees had expired while sitting in my desk drawer. Lots of apologizing, and I ended up pulling out my Amex card after all.</li>\r\n 	<li>When I got home, I took a deeper dive through my cash drawer. Luckily, I didn’t have any old £10 notes, the ones with Charles Darwin on them. He expired a couple of months ago in March, replaced by a new tenner with Jane Austen. I did find a 1,000 Italian lire note with Maria Montessori on the face, which must’ve been left over from, I dunno, maybe our 10th anniversary trip to Tuscany because lire notes were replaced with Euro notes in 2002. My 1,000 note was worth maybe half a euro, about 60 cents when it expired: not a big loss. But today, when I searched on eBay, I saw it selling for $2-3. That’s a 300-400% return. So maybe I’ll just stuff these rupee back in my drawer and check back in, oh, 2035 and make a killing.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #141</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a> and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_141.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #141 — When You Think the TSA is Bad...; Expired Money','','inherit','closed','closed','','1998-revision-v1','','','2018-06-03 21:31:34','2018-06-04 02:31:34','',1998,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/06/03/1998-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2042,1,'2018-07-03 23:38:40','2018-07-04 04:38:40','[caption id=\"attachment_2044\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/2018-06-22-20.15.56-1.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2044\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/2018-06-22-20.15.56-1-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> What\'s the Chinese character for \"wurst\"?[/caption]\n\nYet another last-minute long-distance trip, this time to Frankfurt, Germany, lets me check out United Airlines\' new business class service, and think again about the value for those expensive lie-flat seats. Seeing a new Chinese menu at a favorite wurst stand in the old part of Frankfurt reminds me of the changes driven by the new wave of Chinese tourists. I also read recent PR pitches for a new smart bag and a business traveler\'s biohack. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_142.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #142:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you from a rather jumbled up TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. Been playing “furniture jenga” for the past couple of weeks as we do a lot of deferred maintenance before trying to relocate the studios into Chicago. The recording studio is jammed full and the regular production bay has been taken out of commission, hence me missing my usual end-of-month posting and slipping into the first week of July.</li>\n 	<li>June’s travel cadence was almost a complete rinse-and-repeat of May’s. A few day drives up to Wisconsin, pretty easy -- until I had to make a last-minute trip to Germany with about 36-hour notice -- leave Weds night, land Thurs morning, meet with the client Thursday afternoon, lead a workshop Friday, fly home Saturday morning. I booked an eye-bleedingly expensive last-minute business class ticket because I needed to work and get some sleep on the flight over, which United was kind enough to convert into a 1st-class seat on the Weds flight, giving me more than enough space to eat and work simultaneously.</li>\n 	<li>Though shorter notice than last month’s India trip, it was a bit easier -- no last-minute visa dash, and I got to walk out of the airport in Frankfurt this time rather than transferring to another 8-hour flight. And thanks to Google Maps, I was able to find a non-stop local train from the station in the basement of Frankfurt airport (just finding that was a win for Google) to the station just outside the client’s headquarters for about €8. And because the train ticketing machine could do contactless, I just dinged it with my iPhone rather than having to wrestle with my US Amex card not having a PIN. All in all, it was as painless as a last-minute 8,000-mile trip can be. And not having to push furniture around for 3 days -- that was a nice bonus...</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://www.nimbitmusic.com/saurabbhargava\">Exit</a></em> by Saurab Bhargava</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>The bumper music is from Saurab Bhargava, a long-time listener and longer-time friend and colleague who said in a note “Took some time on the cruise to catch up on some TravelCommons podcasts. Glad you\'re still keeping the rhythm on that!” I have been working to keep a regular monthly cadence. I’ve managed to keep it up for a year, which is why I’m a bit put off with myself for missing my June deadline. Though I have to tell you, the combination of a flash trip to Germany, studio reconfiguration, and the World Cup hasn’t helped -- especially the World Cup. Maybe now that we’re in the knockout round, and there’s only 2 games in a day, I’ll double up on episodes in July.</li>\n 	<li>Being World Cup-literate was very handy while in Germany. Good for making small talk with the client, and Friday night in Frankfurt, every bar seemed to have found half-a-dozen big screens a piece and stood them up everywhere inside and outside. It was easy to keep up with the matches, even when walking down the street. And this wasn’t even for the German team; it was Nigeria-Iceland and Switzerland-Serbia -- not even in Germany’s group. Good reminder of how big a deal it is outside the US.</li>\n 	<li>Long-time listener Geoffrey Greene pinged me on Facebook to let me know that TravelCommons is on the new Google Podcast app. I think I mentioned some time back, that I’ve been having problems with Google Play picking up TravelCommons ever since they started with podcasts. I’d filled out all the forms, submitted the RSS feed, but there was some error somewhere. Finding someone somewhere in Google support to resolve that has been on my to-do list for a while. I still need to get that sorted, but I’m glad to know the problem hasn’t carried over to the new app. I also need to update the website with links to all the places where people can subscribe to TravelCommons. Yet another line on the to-do list.</li>\n 	<li>Continuing the ongoing thread about smart bags… in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/05/31/podcast-141-when-you-think-the-tsa-is-bad-expired-money/\">last episode</a>, I talked about 2 smart bag manufacturers going out of business. But this past week, sifting through the PR pitches in the TravelCommons mail bag, I saw this -- “First Smart Luggage Safe to Fly Worldwide”. Plevo -- who thinks of these names? -- claims to be “the first smart luggage in the world that was designed to be safe to fly around the world” with “a removable battery pack, GPS Tracking, Smart Lock, Built-in Digital Scale, distance alerts and a Travel Assistant App”. OK, this is interesting. I head over to the inevitable Kickstarter page and check out the video. Very slick, but it didn’t answer what is the key question for smart bags -- how does Plevo provide location tracking and connect to the app when the battery pack is removed? Briana, the PR person, told me the Plevo bags have 2 batteries -- a removable Lithium battery pack and a permanent Nickel battery that takes over when the Li battery is removed. Elegant solution. The risk, though, is when that elegance breaks down in the face of a harried gate agent that doesn’t have the time to work through the safety differences between Li and Ni batteries, and just finds it easier to say “No”.  No problem getting past the UA gate agent in Frankfurt with my low-tech leather bag I bought in Italy a few years ago on our 25th anniversary. Checking my passport, she looked down -- “That’s a great bag!” she said. Sometimes, simpler is better.</li>\n 	<li>Another PR pitch that caught my eye, but in a less positive way, was titled “A Travel Hack Every Business Traveler Should Know About”. I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty much done with growth hackers and lifehackers and especially travel hackers. I’m old enough to remember when a hack was an ugly bit of code that managed to get a system running, but it wasn’t something that anyone was proud of. But I digress. I was killing time in United’s very nice new ORD Polaris business class lounge waiting for my Frankfurt flight, so I took the bail and opened it up. “With more executives turning to food as a biohack,” I’m regretting this click already, “an airport meal that fits with your food lifestyle can be hard to find.” The pitch was for Ample, a powdered, rehydrateable drinkable meal that’s TSA-compliant and “packed with on-trend ingredients like MCTs from coconut oil, fiber, probiotics, micronutrients from chlorella, and protein from grass-fed whey and collagen.” MCT’s, a Google search tells me, are medium-chain triglycerides that are good for you in a whole bunch of ways, I guess. Ample reduces decision fatigue -- “Just like Zuck never needs to decide what to wear, deciding what to eat at an airport is a piece of decision fatigue that you just don\'t need” and makes it easier to follow “a ketogenic lifestyle”. Feeling the onset of buzzword fatigue, I set my phone down, walked over to the bar, abandoned any hope of achieving ketosis, and pointed to the Revolution Brewing Anti-Hero IPA draft handle.</li>\n 	<li>I didn’t mention this in the last episode, but before I headed out on my India trip, I hit the AT&amp;T website to see if India is included in their international plan (it is) and to get one of their international data packages since I wasn’t going to have time to figure out the local SIM market. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the data limit of their base $60 offering has been bumped from 300MB to 1GB sometime in the last 2 years, and way up from 100MB back in 2011. The last time I used AT&amp;T’s international plan was March 2016 during a 4-day trip in Iceland. I turned cellular access off on just about every app except Google Maps and only just squeaked through without topping the 300MB limit. 1GB is a whole lot roomier. I had no problems in India. I don’t know when that limit got bumped up, but good on AT&amp;T for making that base plan much more realistic.</li>\n 	<li>This is about the time when I have the obligatory craft beer comment, and you’d think that coming off a trip to Germany, I’d be full of them. And at the end of the day on Thursday, after taking a 20-minute nap to catch my second or third wind, I headed out looking exactly for that -- a bierstube with some local beers and maybe a wurst platter. Walking around near the hotel, there wasn’t much -- it was kind of a dead plaza with some pizza and doner kebab places. One nice restaurant, but nothing special. I pulled out Google Maps and started scrolling around, zooming in and out looking for some beer places. I don’t see many of those, but I keep seeing wineries pop up south of me. So I start walking. 15 minutes, I hit one of the wineries and walk in. What’s with all the wineries, I ask? “You’re in one of the largest wine producing regions in Germany,” the guy nicely explained. “I’m getting ready for a big wine dinner right now, but stop in tomorrow if you want to taste our wines.” I’d be leaving for Frankfurt tomorrow, but I thanked him. So now, I’m looking for wine. It was after 5, and all the other wineries I passed looked closed, but I found a restaurant with what looked like a good local wine list and a nice courtyard. The waitress made some recommendations -- “This is a nice wine from our next door neighbor” We struggled a little bit figuring out the translation for the daily special on the chalkboard, but with dueling smartphone searches, we figured it out -- it was a local dish of spit-roasted pork. It was a nice surprise; a nice ending to the first day of what I thought was going to be just a Bataan death march of a trip. Which it would’ve been if I’d stayed in my hotel room rehydrating my third bottle of Ample ketogenic liquid so I could slog through another 50 emails on my way to zero inbox nirvana.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> or our new <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a> at travelcommons -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://www.nimbitmusic.com/saurabbhargava\">Yours in Mine</a> </em>by Saurab Bhargava</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Sleeping in Business Class</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>The trips to India and Germany put me back in international business class for the first time in a while. In past episodes, I’ve been ambivalent about the value for money for business class -- is the extra space and the better meal service worth the $5-6,000 uplift? On these trips, I kinda think “Yes” because neither trip had any slack in the schedule -- I’d be landing and going directly into meetings, so those lie-flat business class seats were what I really needed so I could get some amount of quality sleep.</li>\n 	<li>The start of both trips was a United flight from ORD to FRA. United has made a big deal of upgrading their international business class, even giving it a new name -- Polaris. And they’re building separate Polaris lounges, so it you’re flying international First or Business, no more slumming in the crowded Red Carpet clubs. The Polaris lounges are nice -- everything is free, good beer and wine selection -- even a cocktail list -- and a nice buffet. They’re probably the best business class lounges I hit on either trip, better than the variety of Lufthansa lounges I hit in Frankfurt. And United is pushing them. The Polaris lounge in ORD is in the far concourse, Concourse C, which makes sense; that’s where most of United’s international flights leave from. In June, though, my flight to Frankfurt left out of the B Concourse, so I went into the Red Carpet club right across from the gate. The guy at the desk looked at my ticket -- “Oh, you want to go to the Polaris Lounge. It’s about a 15 minute walk, but it’s definitely worth it.”</li>\n 	<li>Walking on the United Triple 7 though, you could feel United packing as much as they could in that business class with a 2-4-2 seat configuration -- only just slightly less packed than the 3-4-3 seating on the other side of the curtain in Economy. I’d never seen two middle seats in business class before. Business class in the Lufthansa A380s between Frankfurt and India were 2-2-2 -- no middle seats. Now on my flight over in May, I had the aisle and a couple had the middle two seats, so not too bad, and they were good folks. I felt bad for the husband during the night, though, when I had my seat in full lie-flat mode. When he needed to hit the toilet at night, he had to kinda vault me.</li>\n 	<li>On my last flight back from Frankfurt, a good-sized guy had the middle seat next to me. I’d guess he was a former football player, still in good shape, but taller and broader than the average build that United had sized these Polaris pods for. He said that the flight over, he couldn’t lay flat; it felt like a coffin, so he just reclined it and catnapped, which kinda defeated the purpose of hitting the ground running. I could sympathize. I’m not that broad, but I had to drop the aisle-side armrest in my pod to be able to comfortably fit. Kinda nice service, but definitely snug.</li>\n 	<li>The Lufthansa business class lounges lacked the pizzazz of United’s lounges. But one thing that was new to me… the flights to India went out of a different concourse in Frankfurt -- on the last episode, I talked about the mile-&amp;-a-half walk and the extra security -- and here, they boarded the A380 first and business classes straight from the lounge. No walking down to the gate and idling around with the economy classes. They had gate agents and kiosks in the club. I set down my beer, had my boarding pass scanned, and then walked down the jetway to the plane.</li>\n 	<li>Once on-board, Lufthansa’s A380s were definitely roomier than United’s Triple 7’s -- maybe a bigger plane, maybe because they weren’t trying to cram 8 people across. With only 6 people across, the lie-flat seats were more comfortable, not as “coffin-ish” as United’s. Indeed, maybe a little too comfortable. A guy in the row behind me on my flight to Delhi must’ve gone deep in sleep because he snored -- loudly, really sawing wood -- for a couple of hours. The one time I wouldn’t have minded a little turbulence to jostle the plane. But good for him, he was definitely getting his money’s worth from Business Class.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://www.nimbitmusic.com/saurabbhargava\">Through The Line</a> </em>by Saurab Bhargava</li>\n</ul>\n<b>Changes from Chinese Tourists</b>\n<ul>\n 	<li>The last night I was in Germany, Friday night, I stayed in Frankfurt so I’d have just a 20-minute cab ride to the airport for my 8:15am flight. It had been 7 years since I’d walked around the city -- back in 2011 when I did a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/05/01/video-2-one-city-five-hours-frankfurt/\">TravelCommons video</a>, retracing the “1 City, 5 Hours” article about Frankfurt in United’s seatback magazine. I walked down to the Romer area - a big open square surrounded by historic buildings -- and over to a sausage, a wurst stand that I’d eaten at in the past. They’d added a new menu -- the German menu was now on the ground, under the ordering window; the new menu at eye level was in Chinese.</li>\n 	<li>The travel press has been talking about the impending growth of Chinese tourism for a bit now. I’ve seen the tour buses full of Chinese travelers for some time -- back in 2016 when my son and I were in Iceland, it became a bit of a game for us to stay ahead of those buses, and then in Frankfurt, down in a basement applewine pub off some back alley, I was the only non-Asian person there. But now, I’m noticing more, I dunno, systemic or infrastructure changes being driven by Chinese tourism. Not just Chinese menus but also seeing restaurants in the US and Europe accepting Chinese mobile payments - WeChat and Alipay. And some folks in the hotel business will say that the push to provide free wi-fi, mobile apps and family-sized rooms is driven, in some ways, by what Chinese tourists are looking for. Makes sense. Last year, there were 130 million outbound Chinese tourists, a big number but only 10% of the population of China. There’s a lot more to come.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #142</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a> and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from from Saurab Bhargava’s album <em>Chromatique</em>.  The tracks were <em>Exit</em>, <em>Yours In Mine</em>, and <em>Through The Line</em>.  Here\'s an Amazon <a href=\"https://www.amazon.com/Chromatique-Saurab-Bhargava/dp/B004R7W3O8\">link </a>where you can buy the album.</li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_142.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #142 — Sleeping in Business Class; Changes from Chinese Tourists','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-142-sleeping-in-business-class-changes-from-chinese-tourists','','','2021-09-29 22:00:08','2021-09-30 03:00:08','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=2042',0,'post','',0),
(2043,1,'2018-07-03 19:46:14','2018-07-04 00:46:14','','Podcast #142 — Sleeping in Business Class; Changes from Chinese Tourists','','inherit','closed','closed','','2042-revision-v1','','','2018-07-03 19:46:14','2018-07-04 00:46:14','',2042,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/07/03/2042-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2044,1,'2018-07-03 19:46:59','2018-07-04 00:46:59','','2018-06-22 20.15.56-1','What\'s the Chinese character for \"wurst\"?','inherit','open','closed','','2018-06-22-20-15-56-1','','','2018-07-03 19:48:24','2018-07-04 00:48:24','',2042,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/2018-06-22-20.15.56-1.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(2045,1,'2018-07-03 19:49:38','2018-07-04 00:49:38','[caption id=\"attachment_2044\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/2018-06-22-20.15.56-1.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2044\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/2018-06-22-20.15.56-1-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> What\'s the Chinese character for \"wurst\"?[/caption]\r\n\r\nA last-minute trip to Pune, India provided more than enough material for this episode -- a visa dash, <em>very</em> hands-on airport security, worthless rupee notes, flight disruptions.... We also read the obits for a couple of smart bag companies and hear why MSP\'s T2 isn\'t so ghetto after all. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_141.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n<iframe src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/453397353&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"></iframe><!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #141:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. Not much travel since the last episode -- just driving up to Wisconsin -- until last week when I did a 5-day trip with a client to Pune, India. Left ORD Friday night, landed in Frankfurt late Saturday morning, heard the announce a flight to Pune before my flight to Delhi. Arrived in Delhi at 1am Monday morning. Overnighted at the airport Radisson Blu (not a bad hotel), and then caught an afternoon Jet Airways flight to Pune. Note to self: you don’t always have to fly the client’s itinerary. In spite of all those legs, those multiple points of potential failure, everything went relatively smoothly.</li>\r\n 	<li>Not so much on the way home. The itinerary was to take an Air India flight from Pune to Delhi at 7pm Thursday night, then the United flight to Newark, getting back to ORD around 9:30. We passed on a 5:30p Jet Airways flight fearing Pune rush hour traffic. And that’s where the itinerary fell apart. While waiting for the client team to check their luggage -- I decided to ignore Air India’s 8 kg carry-on weight limit -- I get an e-mail from Air India with a 2 hr delay due to “operational reasons” which usually means a broken plane. Great. What was a reasonable 2½ layover was suddenly an unrealistic 30-minute dash off the plane, through the standard Indian airport itinerary check, then passport control, full patdown security, weave through the terminal and to the gate. And the inbound Air India plane hasn’t left Delhi yet. I call our Amex travel number -- any room on that Jet Airways flight because it hasn’t left yet. Nope, sold out. I briefly think about 3-hr drive to Mumbai but decide to keep heading to Delhi. I bang “flights DEL ORD May 24” into Google. I filter the Google Flights results for one-way and shortest duration, and then call Amex back. When the agent stopped after listing the limited United options -- I guess because it’s less work for them to keep me on the same airline -- I asked her to check on the non-United options that Google Flights listed. There’s the direct Air India flight to ORD getting in around 7:30a or a Lufthansa connection back through Frankfurt arriving around 1pm. I have her book both, knowing that I can cancel one well within the 24-hr no-penalty window.</li>\r\n 	<li>Pune Airport is a dump. I’m trying to think of a worse airport I’ve been in and I’m drawing a complete blank. Weak air conditioning failing to fight the 95 degree day, 3-4 food stands against the wall, and no bar. With nothing better to do, I bang “Air India ORD DEL business class review” into Google. The results were not kind. But I still think - how bad could it really be? This seems like a bad karma travel day; skipping the FRA connection, avoiding another point of failure, seems to be good idea. But then I finally got on the Air India plane to Delhi. It was also a complete dump. It was a bad 2 hrs; I couldn’t do another 15 hrs with them. I decided to risk the Frankfurt connection. At first it went well; breakfast beer and pretzel in the lounge, on-time boarding. But after boarding, we sat and sat. The captain came on. The good news? The luggage was finally loaded and the cargo doors buttoned up. The bad news? Our pushback time is an hour from now. There was nothing I could do. I pulled out my iPhone and buried myself in the zen of Solitaire. As it turned out, we didn’t take the full hour delay and the pilot juiced the engines so we arrived only 15 minutes late. And after looking at in-flight pictures from the gang that took the Air India direct flight, that 15 minute delay was trampled by the arrival of full-on schadenfreude. I had definitely made the right decision</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em>Gargantua</em> by Admiral Bob (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/46361 Ft: My Free Mickey, Martijn de Boer</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>The airlines’ smart bag ban claimed a couple of casualties this month. Bluesmart posted its blog obituary first -- “the banning of smart luggage with non-removable batteries put our company in an irreversibly difficult financial and business situation”. selling their IP, their intellectual property to TravelPro, one of the “legacy” suitcase brands they used to dismiss. A few weeks later, Raden posted a similar obit -- “We sincerely apologize to those who chose to travel with us, our intent was to add ease and simplicity to your travel experience and this unforeseen policy change has made this impossible.” Both companies said they’re no longer honoring warranties though Bluesmart says they’ll still provide some level of e-mail support. And the smartphone apps if you want to use your grounded bag on, say, a train or a bus. The bag maker Away is still in business, though, even developing a free kit that retrofits their first generation smart bag with an ejectable battery, making them compliant with the airlines’ rules.</li>\r\n 	<li>Gary Learned tweeted back a solid counter-argument on last episode’s rant on MSP’s Terminal 2. After waiting for a Southwest flight back to Chicago, I added it to my “ghetto terminal” list -- the terminals for non-hub airlines -- like O’Hare’s Terminal 2 and Detroit’s North Terminal. Gary has a different take, though. He writes -\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I respectfully disagree on MSP T2. Surdyks has some great taps and wine as well as good small bites. Barrio is a nice little Mexican local restaurant. I can go from car to gate in 5 min. Now MDW on the other hand …</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Car to gate in 5 minutes -- that’s a selling point right there that you won’t pick up Uber-ing in and out of a place. That used to be Midway before it blew up -- little parking lot in front of the terminal and walk right in. I won’t defend Midway now -- it’s a bit of a cluster, though I’m hoping that the pending reconstruction of the security concourse sort of “un-clusters” at least that part of it. Gary, thanks for giving us the contra view of MSP T2. I’ll give Barrio a try the next time I’m there.</li>\r\n 	<li>And since we’re talking about ghetto terminals, when choosing among the client-selected itineraries to India, a connection thru Munich was one of the options -- which long-time listeners know I immediately skipped. Skytrax again named Munich the top European airport. God only knows why, though I know they certainly didn’t ask me. Instead, I connected through Frankfurt, which while not a “wow-sy” airport, is efficient, not a hassle, and gets me on my way. Normally, I’m flying over to FRA from ORD and connecting to some place in Europe, often in the Schengen zone so I don’t have to go through passport control. Connecting to India, though, was a different matter. According to my iPhone’s Health app (admittedly not the most accurate), I walked 1.6 miles that Saturday morning between my ORD and DEL flights. I drug my bag down long corridors empty except for some black plastic chairs fixed in a semi-reclined position surrounded by black cloth cots. FRA airport really missed the chance to strategically locate some little beer stube kiosks along the way. I would’ve stopped at least a couple of times on that trek for some breakfast beers.</li>\r\n 	<li>The India trip was a bit of a last-minute thing which necessitated a scramble for a new Indian visa. This would be my 3rd Indian visa. My first one was a 5-year visa that I lost when my passport was stolen in Brussels. My second one was only for 6 months; I can’t remember why it was so short. This time, I decided to avoid future scrambles and apply for a 10-year visa. Because there’s an Indian consulate in Chicago, I didn’t have to hassle with postage or third-party passport services. The day before, I sent notes to our US HR department and the admin manager in our Hyderabad office asking for the necessary letters of guarantee and invitation, and then did the application online, printed it out and signed it, and then booked an appointment the next morning. I didn’t actually go to the consulate. I’ve always gone to an outsourced visa processing company that handled the front end administrivia, with, near as I can tell, the consulate just approving and signing the visas. Each visa has been with a different processor. For my first visa in 2010, I dropped my forms and passport off at an office in the morning, and received a text at the end of the day that it was ready. In 2014, a different processor gave my wife a hard time -- trying to upsell her on expedited handling charges that weren’t needed. This time, Cox and Kings was a surprisingly painless experience. I went in Thursday after lunch; there was no wait, the people were pleasant. End of day Thursday, I received an e-mail and a text telling me that my application had been processed and was heading to the consulate. On Friday morning, I received and e-mail and text saying that my application had arrived at the consulate. Another message at lunch said that it was being processes, and a last message on Friday said that it was back at Cox and Kings. Monday morning, another message told me it was being packaged up, followed by a message with a UPS tracking number. Tuesday afternoon, my passport landed on my front porch with my 10-year visa. I was incredibly impressed… and feeling a bit spoiled comparing this level of customer service to what my non-US friends tell me they have to go through to get a US visa.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em>A Foolish Game</em> by Zep Hurme (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/zep_hurme/46448</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>When You Think the TSA is Bad...</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>A week of flying around India is always a good sanity check for me -- that no matter what crankiness I’m have about the TSA, airport security in the US is so much easier than in India. When I was talking at the start of the episode about how the delay of our Pune-Delhi flight blew up the rest of our itinerary home, the main reason we immediately starting working alternative flights was because how long we knew it would take to work our way through the different layers of security in Delhi. It started when trying to make our way from domestic flight arrivals into the international departures area so we could re-ticket our flights. We had to pass through the usual itinerary check. I show the army guy the boarding pass for United flight we’d missed -- it was all I had. But since that flight had already left, he wasn’t going to let me through. Luckily, one of the group I was flying with was United Global Services, and two customer service staff had met us as we got off the Air India flight. Even then, it took her a good bit of time to explain the situation to the army guy and convince him to let me through. But for that, I would’ve been idling around baggage claim on my own trying to figure out how to get to a ticket counter.</li>\r\n 	<li>Passport control was pretty efficient, but the security scans -- not so much. After you unpack all your electronics and push everything through the X-ray machine, you walk through the metal detector for your gender -- different scanners for “Gents” and “Ladies” because there’s a full wanding and patdown on the other side. Indeed, the “Ladies” go into a little curtained booth for their patdown. Not normally too much of a hassle, unless the “Ladies” patdown line backs up, and a back up of women’s luggage in the X-ray machine is blocking mine -- which happened that evening. None of the security people moved to clear things. Nothing to do but stand there and wait. Our flight from Pune landed at Delhi at 11pm. When looking at flight alternatives, I’d seen an Air Canada flight leaving at 12:10pm and passed right by it. I knew there was no way we’d make that flight.</li>\r\n 	<li>The security checks in Frankfurt, while much more efficient, were still more than you’d get in the US. On the way over to India, after passing everything through the X-ray machine, I was intercepted after collecting my bags, directed over to a cubicle where all of my bags were swabbed and checked for explosives residue. All done with a German sense of politeness, but I was glad I wasn’t in a rush. On the connection back home, it was a different security line, with a body scanner instead of the walkthru metal detector. No big deal, but just different enough to be awkward. Instead of the TSA’s hands up “don’t shoot” pose, it was an arms down-elbows out pose, kinda like you’re holding luggage. The guy working the scanner was visibly annoyed that he had to instruct me on the pose -- to hold me arms further away from my body. But then there was no luggage swiping on the other side.</li>\r\n 	<li>Picking up my bags, I maneuvered around three officers cradling automatic rifles; they were standing there chatting, but watching. No big deal now, but I remember when I first starting traveling through Europe -- London Heathrow and Frankfurt in the mid- to late-’80’s and being taken aback by the army guys walking around with unslung M-16s and the like. This was pre-TSA time in the US, when it would be out-of-place to see anything more than a rent-a-cop in an airport terminal and you could still turn up 30 minutes before departure time and make your flight. Back then, the difference was eye-opening for a twenty-something traveler. Of course, none of us knew that it was a preview of what flying would be like 20 years later.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em>Melt Away</em> by Kara Square (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/mindmapthat/46605</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Expired Money</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>In last December’s episode, I talked about how I need to have some cash in my pocket when I travel. I know it’s a generational thing; many of my younger colleagues don’t carry any cash, but going “cash naked” just makes me nervous. Assuaging this anxiety on international travel means fills one of my desk drawers with random bits of currency. That’s not a big deal for countries that I or my family visit often. Before my daughter flew back to the UK for her spring semester at St Andrews, I rummaged through the desk and found a £20 note; it bought her breakfast when she landed in Edinburgh.</li>\r\n 	<li>But for countries I visit less often, the money just sits there. I have 350 Mexican pesos -- about $18 at today’s exchange rate; I can’t remember the last time I was in Mexico. I have 400 Chinese yuan -- over $60 -- left over from my last trip to Beijing 4 years ago. At the end of that trip, I thought I’d be going back within the year, so didn’t work hard to spend down those notes. But that next trip didn’t happen, and so there those yuan sit.</li>\r\n 	<li>Before the India trip, I hit the cash drawer and pulled out €12 in notes and coins from our trip to Spain last March, that was for my connections through Frankfurt, and 200 rupees -- about $30 -- left over from my 2014 trip to India. I didn’t spend any of the euros; I spent most of my time either walking through concourses or drinking beer in the Lufthansa lounge. But the rupees came in handy for tipping all the guys at the hotel who insisted on helping me with my carry-on bag. Here’s a 100 for you, and you, and you, and, oh, you too.</li>\r\n 	<li>One night in Pune, we were at the JW Marriott rooftop bar for hors d\'oeuvres and pre-dinner drinks. The catered bar on our side of the terrace has the usual Kingfisher beers. But then I saw someone on the other, the non-catered/public side of the terrace with a different, non-Kingfisher beer. It was a Bira 91 Blonde. I headed over to the main bar to get one. Now, because this was the main bar, not the catered one, I was going to have to pay for the Bira 91, but that wasn’t a problem because I had rupees in my pocket. Yes, they also would’ve taken my Amex card, but I had a 1,000 and a 500 rupee note that I needed to break for more luggage tips, so I laid the 1,000 note on the bar next to my check and then wandered over to the edge of the rooftop to look over the city. A couple minutes later, a guy taps me on the shoulder and gives me back my 1,000 rupees. The note was no good. And then I remembered. Back in Nov 2016, the Indian government made a snap announcement to replace the 500 and 1,000 rupee notes to fight counterfeiting. $20 of my rupees had expired while sitting in my desk drawer. Lots of apologizing, and I ended up pulling out my Amex card after all.</li>\r\n 	<li>When I got home, I took a deeper dive through my cash drawer. Luckily, I didn’t have any old £10 notes, the ones with Charles Darwin on them. He expired a couple of months ago in March, replaced by a new tenner with Jane Austen. I did find a 1,000 Italian lire note with Maria Montessori on the face, which must’ve been left over from, I dunno, maybe our 10th anniversary trip to Tuscany because lire notes were replaced with Euro notes in 2002. My 1,000 note was worth maybe half a euro, about 60 cents when it expired: not a big loss. But today, when I searched on eBay, I saw it selling for $2-3. That’s a 300-400% return. So maybe I’ll just stuff these rupee back in my drawer and check back in, oh, 2035 and make a killing.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #141</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a> and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_141.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #142 — Sleeping in Business Class; Changes from Chinese Tourists','','inherit','closed','closed','','2042-revision-v1','','','2018-07-03 19:49:38','2018-07-04 00:49:38','',2042,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/07/03/2042-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2046,1,'2018-07-03 19:51:31','2018-07-04 00:51:31','[caption id=\"attachment_2044\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/2018-06-22-20.15.56-1.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2044\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/2018-06-22-20.15.56-1-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> What\'s the Chinese character for \"wurst\"?[/caption]\r\n\r\nA last-minute trip to Pune, India provided more than enough material for this episode -- a visa dash, <em>very</em> hands-on airport security, worthless rupee notes, flight disruptions.... We also read the obits for a couple of smart bag companies and hear why MSP\'s T2 isn\'t so ghetto after all. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_141.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n<iframe src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/453397353&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"></iframe><!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #141:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from a rather jumbled up TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. Been playing “furniture jenga” for the past couple of weeks as we do a lot of deferred maintenance before trying to relocate the studios into Chicago. The recording studio is jammed full and the regular production bay has been taken out of commission, hence me missing my usual end-of-month posting and slipping into the first week of July.</li>\r\n 	<li>June’s travel cadence was almost a complete rinse-and-repeat of May’s. A few day drives up to Wisconsin, pretty easy -- until I had to make a last-minute trip to Germany with about 36-hour notice -- leave Weds night, land Thurs morning, meet with the client Thursday afternoon, lead a workshop Friday, fly home Saturday morning. I booked an eye-bleedingly expensive last-minute business class ticket because I needed to work and get some sleep on the flight over, which United was kind enough to convert into a 1st-class seat on the Weds flight, giving me more than enough space to eat and work simultaneously.</li>\r\n 	<li>Though shorter notice than last month’s India trip, it was a bit easier -- no last-minute visa dash, and I got to walk out of the airport in Frankfurt this time rather than transferring to another 8-hour flight. And thanks to Google Maps, I was able to find a non-stop local train from the station in the basement of Frankfurt airport (just finding that was a win for Google) to the station just outside the client’s headquarters for about €8. And because the train ticketing machine could do contactless, I just dinged it with my iPhone rather than having to wrestle with my US Amex card not having a PIN. All in all, it was as painless as a last-minute 8,000-mile trip can be. And not having to push furniture around for 3 days -- that was a nice bonus...</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em>Gargantua</em> by Admiral Bob (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/46361 Ft: My Free Mickey, Martijn de Boer</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>The airlines’ smart bag ban claimed a couple of casualties this month. Bluesmart posted its blog obituary first -- “the banning of smart luggage with non-removable batteries put our company in an irreversibly difficult financial and business situation”. selling their IP, their intellectual property to TravelPro, one of the “legacy” suitcase brands they used to dismiss. A few weeks later, Raden posted a similar obit -- “We sincerely apologize to those who chose to travel with us, our intent was to add ease and simplicity to your travel experience and this unforeseen policy change has made this impossible.” Both companies said they’re no longer honoring warranties though Bluesmart says they’ll still provide some level of e-mail support. And the smartphone apps if you want to use your grounded bag on, say, a train or a bus. The bag maker Away is still in business, though, even developing a free kit that retrofits their first generation smart bag with an ejectable battery, making them compliant with the airlines’ rules.</li>\r\n 	<li>Gary Learned tweeted back a solid counter-argument on last episode’s rant on MSP’s Terminal 2. After waiting for a Southwest flight back to Chicago, I added it to my “ghetto terminal” list -- the terminals for non-hub airlines -- like O’Hare’s Terminal 2 and Detroit’s North Terminal. Gary has a different take, though. He writes -\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I respectfully disagree on MSP T2. Surdyks has some great taps and wine as well as good small bites. Barrio is a nice little Mexican local restaurant. I can go from car to gate in 5 min. Now MDW on the other hand …</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Car to gate in 5 minutes -- that’s a selling point right there that you won’t pick up Uber-ing in and out of a place. That used to be Midway before it blew up -- little parking lot in front of the terminal and walk right in. I won’t defend Midway now -- it’s a bit of a cluster, though I’m hoping that the pending reconstruction of the security concourse sort of “un-clusters” at least that part of it. Gary, thanks for giving us the contra view of MSP T2. I’ll give Barrio a try the next time I’m there.</li>\r\n 	<li>And since we’re talking about ghetto terminals, when choosing among the client-selected itineraries to India, a connection thru Munich was one of the options -- which long-time listeners know I immediately skipped. Skytrax again named Munich the top European airport. God only knows why, though I know they certainly didn’t ask me. Instead, I connected through Frankfurt, which while not a “wow-sy” airport, is efficient, not a hassle, and gets me on my way. Normally, I’m flying over to FRA from ORD and connecting to some place in Europe, often in the Schengen zone so I don’t have to go through passport control. Connecting to India, though, was a different matter. According to my iPhone’s Health app (admittedly not the most accurate), I walked 1.6 miles that Saturday morning between my ORD and DEL flights. I drug my bag down long corridors empty except for some black plastic chairs fixed in a semi-reclined position surrounded by black cloth cots. FRA airport really missed the chance to strategically locate some little beer stube kiosks along the way. I would’ve stopped at least a couple of times on that trek for some breakfast beers.</li>\r\n 	<li>The India trip was a bit of a last-minute thing which necessitated a scramble for a new Indian visa. This would be my 3rd Indian visa. My first one was a 5-year visa that I lost when my passport was stolen in Brussels. My second one was only for 6 months; I can’t remember why it was so short. This time, I decided to avoid future scrambles and apply for a 10-year visa. Because there’s an Indian consulate in Chicago, I didn’t have to hassle with postage or third-party passport services. The day before, I sent notes to our US HR department and the admin manager in our Hyderabad office asking for the necessary letters of guarantee and invitation, and then did the application online, printed it out and signed it, and then booked an appointment the next morning. I didn’t actually go to the consulate. I’ve always gone to an outsourced visa processing company that handled the front end administrivia, with, near as I can tell, the consulate just approving and signing the visas. Each visa has been with a different processor. For my first visa in 2010, I dropped my forms and passport off at an office in the morning, and received a text at the end of the day that it was ready. In 2014, a different processor gave my wife a hard time -- trying to upsell her on expedited handling charges that weren’t needed. This time, Cox and Kings was a surprisingly painless experience. I went in Thursday after lunch; there was no wait, the people were pleasant. End of day Thursday, I received an e-mail and a text telling me that my application had been processed and was heading to the consulate. On Friday morning, I received and e-mail and text saying that my application had arrived at the consulate. Another message at lunch said that it was being processes, and a last message on Friday said that it was back at Cox and Kings. Monday morning, another message told me it was being packaged up, followed by a message with a UPS tracking number. Tuesday afternoon, my passport landed on my front porch with my 10-year visa. I was incredibly impressed… and feeling a bit spoiled comparing this level of customer service to what my non-US friends tell me they have to go through to get a US visa.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em>A Foolish Game</em> by Zep Hurme (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/zep_hurme/46448</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>When You Think the TSA is Bad...</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>A week of flying around India is always a good sanity check for me -- that no matter what crankiness I’m have about the TSA, airport security in the US is so much easier than in India. When I was talking at the start of the episode about how the delay of our Pune-Delhi flight blew up the rest of our itinerary home, the main reason we immediately starting working alternative flights was because how long we knew it would take to work our way through the different layers of security in Delhi. It started when trying to make our way from domestic flight arrivals into the international departures area so we could re-ticket our flights. We had to pass through the usual itinerary check. I show the army guy the boarding pass for United flight we’d missed -- it was all I had. But since that flight had already left, he wasn’t going to let me through. Luckily, one of the group I was flying with was United Global Services, and two customer service staff had met us as we got off the Air India flight. Even then, it took her a good bit of time to explain the situation to the army guy and convince him to let me through. But for that, I would’ve been idling around baggage claim on my own trying to figure out how to get to a ticket counter.</li>\r\n 	<li>Passport control was pretty efficient, but the security scans -- not so much. After you unpack all your electronics and push everything through the X-ray machine, you walk through the metal detector for your gender -- different scanners for “Gents” and “Ladies” because there’s a full wanding and patdown on the other side. Indeed, the “Ladies” go into a little curtained booth for their patdown. Not normally too much of a hassle, unless the “Ladies” patdown line backs up, and a back up of women’s luggage in the X-ray machine is blocking mine -- which happened that evening. None of the security people moved to clear things. Nothing to do but stand there and wait. Our flight from Pune landed at Delhi at 11pm. When looking at flight alternatives, I’d seen an Air Canada flight leaving at 12:10pm and passed right by it. I knew there was no way we’d make that flight.</li>\r\n 	<li>The security checks in Frankfurt, while much more efficient, were still more than you’d get in the US. On the way over to India, after passing everything through the X-ray machine, I was intercepted after collecting my bags, directed over to a cubicle where all of my bags were swabbed and checked for explosives residue. All done with a German sense of politeness, but I was glad I wasn’t in a rush. On the connection back home, it was a different security line, with a body scanner instead of the walkthru metal detector. No big deal, but just different enough to be awkward. Instead of the TSA’s hands up “don’t shoot” pose, it was an arms down-elbows out pose, kinda like you’re holding luggage. The guy working the scanner was visibly annoyed that he had to instruct me on the pose -- to hold me arms further away from my body. But then there was no luggage swiping on the other side.</li>\r\n 	<li>Picking up my bags, I maneuvered around three officers cradling automatic rifles; they were standing there chatting, but watching. No big deal now, but I remember when I first starting traveling through Europe -- London Heathrow and Frankfurt in the mid- to late-’80’s and being taken aback by the army guys walking around with unslung M-16s and the like. This was pre-TSA time in the US, when it would be out-of-place to see anything more than a rent-a-cop in an airport terminal and you could still turn up 30 minutes before departure time and make your flight. Back then, the difference was eye-opening for a twenty-something traveler. Of course, none of us knew that it was a preview of what flying would be like 20 years later.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em>Melt Away</em> by Kara Square (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/mindmapthat/46605</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Expired Money</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>In last December’s episode, I talked about how I need to have some cash in my pocket when I travel. I know it’s a generational thing; many of my younger colleagues don’t carry any cash, but going “cash naked” just makes me nervous. Assuaging this anxiety on international travel means fills one of my desk drawers with random bits of currency. That’s not a big deal for countries that I or my family visit often. Before my daughter flew back to the UK for her spring semester at St Andrews, I rummaged through the desk and found a £20 note; it bought her breakfast when she landed in Edinburgh.</li>\r\n 	<li>But for countries I visit less often, the money just sits there. I have 350 Mexican pesos -- about $18 at today’s exchange rate; I can’t remember the last time I was in Mexico. I have 400 Chinese yuan -- over $60 -- left over from my last trip to Beijing 4 years ago. At the end of that trip, I thought I’d be going back within the year, so didn’t work hard to spend down those notes. But that next trip didn’t happen, and so there those yuan sit.</li>\r\n 	<li>Before the India trip, I hit the cash drawer and pulled out €12 in notes and coins from our trip to Spain last March, that was for my connections through Frankfurt, and 200 rupees -- about $30 -- left over from my 2014 trip to India. I didn’t spend any of the euros; I spent most of my time either walking through concourses or drinking beer in the Lufthansa lounge. But the rupees came in handy for tipping all the guys at the hotel who insisted on helping me with my carry-on bag. Here’s a 100 for you, and you, and you, and, oh, you too.</li>\r\n 	<li>One night in Pune, we were at the JW Marriott rooftop bar for hors d\'oeuvres and pre-dinner drinks. The catered bar on our side of the terrace has the usual Kingfisher beers. But then I saw someone on the other, the non-catered/public side of the terrace with a different, non-Kingfisher beer. It was a Bira 91 Blonde. I headed over to the main bar to get one. Now, because this was the main bar, not the catered one, I was going to have to pay for the Bira 91, but that wasn’t a problem because I had rupees in my pocket. Yes, they also would’ve taken my Amex card, but I had a 1,000 and a 500 rupee note that I needed to break for more luggage tips, so I laid the 1,000 note on the bar next to my check and then wandered over to the edge of the rooftop to look over the city. A couple minutes later, a guy taps me on the shoulder and gives me back my 1,000 rupees. The note was no good. And then I remembered. Back in Nov 2016, the Indian government made a snap announcement to replace the 500 and 1,000 rupee notes to fight counterfeiting. $20 of my rupees had expired while sitting in my desk drawer. Lots of apologizing, and I ended up pulling out my Amex card after all.</li>\r\n 	<li>When I got home, I took a deeper dive through my cash drawer. Luckily, I didn’t have any old £10 notes, the ones with Charles Darwin on them. He expired a couple of months ago in March, replaced by a new tenner with Jane Austen. I did find a 1,000 Italian lire note with Maria Montessori on the face, which must’ve been left over from, I dunno, maybe our 10th anniversary trip to Tuscany because lire notes were replaced with Euro notes in 2002. My 1,000 note was worth maybe half a euro, about 60 cents when it expired: not a big loss. But today, when I searched on eBay, I saw it selling for $2-3. That’s a 300-400% return. So maybe I’ll just stuff these rupee back in my drawer and check back in, oh, 2035 and make a killing.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #141</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a> and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_141.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #142 — Sleeping in Business Class; Changes from Chinese Tourists','','inherit','closed','closed','','2042-revision-v1','','','2018-07-03 19:51:31','2018-07-04 00:51:31','',2042,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/07/03/2042-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2047,1,'2018-07-03 19:56:29','2018-07-04 00:56:29','[caption id=\"attachment_2044\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/2018-06-22-20.15.56-1.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2044\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/2018-06-22-20.15.56-1-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> What\'s the Chinese character for \"wurst\"?[/caption]\r\n\r\nA last-minute trip to Pune, India provided more than enough material for this episode -- a visa dash, <em>very</em> hands-on airport security, worthless rupee notes, flight disruptions.... We also read the obits for a couple of smart bag companies and hear why MSP\'s T2 isn\'t so ghetto after all. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_141.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n<iframe src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/453397353&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"></iframe><!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #141:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from a rather jumbled up TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. Been playing “furniture jenga” for the past couple of weeks as we do a lot of deferred maintenance before trying to relocate the studios into Chicago. The recording studio is jammed full and the regular production bay has been taken out of commission, hence me missing my usual end-of-month posting and slipping into the first week of July.</li>\r\n 	<li>June’s travel cadence was almost a complete rinse-and-repeat of May’s. A few day drives up to Wisconsin, pretty easy -- until I had to make a last-minute trip to Germany with about 36-hour notice -- leave Weds night, land Thurs morning, meet with the client Thursday afternoon, lead a workshop Friday, fly home Saturday morning. I booked an eye-bleedingly expensive last-minute business class ticket because I needed to work and get some sleep on the flight over, which United was kind enough to convert into a 1st-class seat on the Weds flight, giving me more than enough space to eat and work simultaneously.</li>\r\n 	<li>Though shorter notice than last month’s India trip, it was a bit easier -- no last-minute visa dash, and I got to walk out of the airport in Frankfurt this time rather than transferring to another 8-hour flight. And thanks to Google Maps, I was able to find a non-stop local train from the station in the basement of Frankfurt airport (just finding that was a win for Google) to the station just outside the client’s headquarters for about €8. And because the train ticketing machine could do contactless, I just dinged it with my iPhone rather than having to wrestle with my US Amex card not having a PIN. All in all, it was as painless as a last-minute 8,000-mile trip can be. And not having to push furniture around for 3 days -- that was a nice bonus...</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em>Gargantua</em> by Admiral Bob (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/46361 Ft: My Free Mickey, Martijn de Boer</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>The bumper music is from Saurab Bhargava, a long-time listener and longer-time friend and colleague who said in a note “Took some time on the cruise to catch up on some TravelCommons podcasts. Glad you\'re still keeping the rhythm on that!” I have been working to keep a regular monthly cadence. I’ve managed to keep it up for a year, which is why I’m a bit put off with myself for missing my June deadline. Though I have to tell you, the combination of a flash trip to Germany, studio reconfiguration, and the World Cup hasn’t helped -- especially the World Cup. Maybe now that we’re in the knockout round, and there’s only 2 games in a day, I’ll double up on episodes in July.</li>\r\n 	<li>Being World Cup-literate was very handy while in Germany. Good for making small talk with the client, and Friday night in Frankfurt, every bar seemed to have found half-a-dozen big screens a piece and stood them up everywhere inside and outside. It was easy to keep up with the matches, even when walking down the street. And this wasn’t even for the German team; it was Nigeria-Iceland and Switzerland-Serbia -- not even in Germany’s group. Good reminder of how big a deal it is outside the US.</li>\r\n 	<li>Long-time listener Geoffrey Greene pinged me on Facebook to let me know that TravelCommons is on the new Google Podcast app. I think I mentioned some time back, that I’ve been having problems with Google Play picking up TravelCommons ever since they started with podcasts. I’d filled out all the forms, submitted the RSS feed, but there was some error somewhere. Finding someone somewhere in Google support to resolve that has been on my to-do list for a while. I still need to get that sorted, but I’m glad to know the problem hasn’t carried over to the new app. I also need to update the website with links to all the places where people can subscribe to TravelCommons. Yet another line on the to-do list.</li>\r\n 	<li>Continuing the ongoing thread about smart bags… in the last episode, I talked about 2 smart bag manufacturers going out of business. But this past week, sifting through the PR pitches in the TravelCommons mail bag, I saw this -- “First Smart Luggage Safe to Fly Worldwide”. Plevo -- who thinks of these names? -- claims to be “the first smart luggage in the world that was designed to be safe to fly around the world” with “a removable battery pack, GPS Tracking, Smart Lock, Built-in Digital Scale, distance alerts and a Travel Assistant App”. OK, this is interesting. I head over to the inevitable Kickstarter page and check out the video. Very slick, but it didn’t answer what is the key question for smart bags -- how does Plevo provide location tracking and connect to the app when the battery pack is removed? Briana, the PR person, told me the Plevo bags have 2 batteries -- a removable Lithium battery pack and a permanent Nickel battery that takes over when the Li battery is removed. Elegant solution. The risk, though, is when that elegance breaks down in the face of a harried gate agent that doesn’t have the time to work through the safety differences between Li and Ni batteries, and just finds it easier to say “No”.  No problem getting past the UA gate agent in Frankfurt with my low-tech leather bag I bought in Italy a few years ago on our 25th anniversary. Checking my passport, she looked down -- “That’s a great bag!” she said. Sometimes, simpler is better.</li>\r\n 	<li>Another PR pitch that caught my eye, but in a less positive way, was titled “A Travel Hack Every Business Traveler Should Know About”. I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty much done with growth hackers and lifehackers and especially travel hackers. I’m old enough to remember when a hack was an ugly bit of code that managed to get a system running, but it wasn’t something that anyone was proud of. But I digress. I was killing time in United’s very nice new ORD Polaris business class lounge waiting for my Frankfurt flight, so I took the bail and opened it up. “With more executives turning to food as a biohack,” I’m regretting this click already, “an airport meal that fits with your food lifestyle can be hard to find.” The pitch was for Ample, a powdered, rehydrateable drinkable meal that’s TSA-compliant and “packed with on-trend ingredients like MCTs from coconut oil, fiber, probiotics, micronutrients from chlorella, and protein from grass-fed whey and collagen.” MCT’s, a Google search tells me, are medium-chain triglycerides that are good for you in a whole bunch of ways, I guess. Ample reduces decision fatigue -- “Just like Zuck never needs to decide what to wear, deciding what to eat at an airport is a piece of decision fatigue that you just don\'t need” and makes it easier to follow “a ketogenic lifestyle”. Feeling the onset of buzzword fatigue, I set my phone down, walked over to the bar, abandoned any hope of achieving ketosis, and pointed to the Revolution Brewing Anti-Hero IPA draft handle.</li>\r\n 	<li>I didn’t mention this in the last episode, but before I headed out on my India trip, I hit the AT&amp;T website to see if India is included in their international plan (it is) and to get one of their international data packages since I wasn’t going to have time to figure out the local SIM market. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the data limit of their base $60 offering has been bumped from 300MB to 1GB sometime in the last 2 years, and way up from 100MB back in 2011. The last time I used AT&amp;T’s international plan was March 2016 during a 4-day trip in Iceland. I turned cellular access off on just about every app except Google Maps and only just squeaked through without topping the 300MB limit. 1GB is a whole lot roomier. I had no problems in India. I don’t know when that limit got bumped up, but good on AT&amp;T for making that base plan much more realistic.</li>\r\n 	<li>This is about the time when I have the obligatory craft beer comment, and you’d think that coming off a trip to Germany, I’d be full of them. And at the end of the day on Thursday, after taking a 20-minute nap to catch my second or third wind, I headed out looking exactly for that -- a bierstube with some local beers and maybe a wurst platter. Walking around near the hotel, there wasn’t much -- it was kind of a dead plaza with some pizza and doner kebab places. One nice restaurant, but nothing special. I pulled out Google Maps and started scrolling around, zooming in and out looking for some beer places. I don’t see many of those, but I keep seeing wineries pop up south of me. So I start walking. 15 minutes, I hit one of the wineries and walk in. What’s with all the wineries, I ask? “You’re in one of the largest wine producing regions in Germany,” the guy nicely explained. “I’m getting ready for a big wine dinner right now, but stop in tomorrow if you want to taste our wines.” I’d be leaving for Frankfurt tomorrow, but I thanked him. So now, I’m looking for wine. It was after 5, and all the other wineries I passed looked closed, but I found a restaurant with what looked like a good local wine list and a nice courtyard. The waitress made some recommendations -- “This is a nice wine from our next door neighbor” We struggled a little bit figuring out the translation for the daily special on the chalkboard, but with dueling smartphone searches, we figured it out -- it was a local dish of spit-roasted pork. It was a nice surprise; a nice ending to the first day of what I thought was going to be just a Bataan death march of a trip. Which it would’ve been if I’d stayed in my hotel room rehydrating my third bottle of Ample ketogenic liquid so I could slog through another 50 emails on my way to zero inbox nirvana.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> or our new <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a> at travelcommons -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em>A Foolish Game</em> by Zep Hurme (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/zep_hurme/46448</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>When You Think the TSA is Bad...</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>A week of flying around India is always a good sanity check for me -- that no matter what crankiness I’m have about the TSA, airport security in the US is so much easier than in India. When I was talking at the start of the episode about how the delay of our Pune-Delhi flight blew up the rest of our itinerary home, the main reason we immediately starting working alternative flights was because how long we knew it would take to work our way through the different layers of security in Delhi. It started when trying to make our way from domestic flight arrivals into the international departures area so we could re-ticket our flights. We had to pass through the usual itinerary check. I show the army guy the boarding pass for United flight we’d missed -- it was all I had. But since that flight had already left, he wasn’t going to let me through. Luckily, one of the group I was flying with was United Global Services, and two customer service staff had met us as we got off the Air India flight. Even then, it took her a good bit of time to explain the situation to the army guy and convince him to let me through. But for that, I would’ve been idling around baggage claim on my own trying to figure out how to get to a ticket counter.</li>\r\n 	<li>Passport control was pretty efficient, but the security scans -- not so much. After you unpack all your electronics and push everything through the X-ray machine, you walk through the metal detector for your gender -- different scanners for “Gents” and “Ladies” because there’s a full wanding and patdown on the other side. Indeed, the “Ladies” go into a little curtained booth for their patdown. Not normally too much of a hassle, unless the “Ladies” patdown line backs up, and a back up of women’s luggage in the X-ray machine is blocking mine -- which happened that evening. None of the security people moved to clear things. Nothing to do but stand there and wait. Our flight from Pune landed at Delhi at 11pm. When looking at flight alternatives, I’d seen an Air Canada flight leaving at 12:10pm and passed right by it. I knew there was no way we’d make that flight.</li>\r\n 	<li>The security checks in Frankfurt, while much more efficient, were still more than you’d get in the US. On the way over to India, after passing everything through the X-ray machine, I was intercepted after collecting my bags, directed over to a cubicle where all of my bags were swabbed and checked for explosives residue. All done with a German sense of politeness, but I was glad I wasn’t in a rush. On the connection back home, it was a different security line, with a body scanner instead of the walkthru metal detector. No big deal, but just different enough to be awkward. Instead of the TSA’s hands up “don’t shoot” pose, it was an arms down-elbows out pose, kinda like you’re holding luggage. The guy working the scanner was visibly annoyed that he had to instruct me on the pose -- to hold me arms further away from my body. But then there was no luggage swiping on the other side.</li>\r\n 	<li>Picking up my bags, I maneuvered around three officers cradling automatic rifles; they were standing there chatting, but watching. No big deal now, but I remember when I first starting traveling through Europe -- London Heathrow and Frankfurt in the mid- to late-’80’s and being taken aback by the army guys walking around with unslung M-16s and the like. This was pre-TSA time in the US, when it would be out-of-place to see anything more than a rent-a-cop in an airport terminal and you could still turn up 30 minutes before departure time and make your flight. Back then, the difference was eye-opening for a twenty-something traveler. Of course, none of us knew that it was a preview of what flying would be like 20 years later.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em>Melt Away</em> by Kara Square (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/mindmapthat/46605</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Expired Money</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>In last December’s episode, I talked about how I need to have some cash in my pocket when I travel. I know it’s a generational thing; many of my younger colleagues don’t carry any cash, but going “cash naked” just makes me nervous. Assuaging this anxiety on international travel means fills one of my desk drawers with random bits of currency. That’s not a big deal for countries that I or my family visit often. Before my daughter flew back to the UK for her spring semester at St Andrews, I rummaged through the desk and found a £20 note; it bought her breakfast when she landed in Edinburgh.</li>\r\n 	<li>But for countries I visit less often, the money just sits there. I have 350 Mexican pesos -- about $18 at today’s exchange rate; I can’t remember the last time I was in Mexico. I have 400 Chinese yuan -- over $60 -- left over from my last trip to Beijing 4 years ago. At the end of that trip, I thought I’d be going back within the year, so didn’t work hard to spend down those notes. But that next trip didn’t happen, and so there those yuan sit.</li>\r\n 	<li>Before the India trip, I hit the cash drawer and pulled out €12 in notes and coins from our trip to Spain last March, that was for my connections through Frankfurt, and 200 rupees -- about $30 -- left over from my 2014 trip to India. I didn’t spend any of the euros; I spent most of my time either walking through concourses or drinking beer in the Lufthansa lounge. But the rupees came in handy for tipping all the guys at the hotel who insisted on helping me with my carry-on bag. Here’s a 100 for you, and you, and you, and, oh, you too.</li>\r\n 	<li>One night in Pune, we were at the JW Marriott rooftop bar for hors d\'oeuvres and pre-dinner drinks. The catered bar on our side of the terrace has the usual Kingfisher beers. But then I saw someone on the other, the non-catered/public side of the terrace with a different, non-Kingfisher beer. It was a Bira 91 Blonde. I headed over to the main bar to get one. Now, because this was the main bar, not the catered one, I was going to have to pay for the Bira 91, but that wasn’t a problem because I had rupees in my pocket. Yes, they also would’ve taken my Amex card, but I had a 1,000 and a 500 rupee note that I needed to break for more luggage tips, so I laid the 1,000 note on the bar next to my check and then wandered over to the edge of the rooftop to look over the city. A couple minutes later, a guy taps me on the shoulder and gives me back my 1,000 rupees. The note was no good. And then I remembered. Back in Nov 2016, the Indian government made a snap announcement to replace the 500 and 1,000 rupee notes to fight counterfeiting. $20 of my rupees had expired while sitting in my desk drawer. Lots of apologizing, and I ended up pulling out my Amex card after all.</li>\r\n 	<li>When I got home, I took a deeper dive through my cash drawer. Luckily, I didn’t have any old £10 notes, the ones with Charles Darwin on them. He expired a couple of months ago in March, replaced by a new tenner with Jane Austen. I did find a 1,000 Italian lire note with Maria Montessori on the face, which must’ve been left over from, I dunno, maybe our 10th anniversary trip to Tuscany because lire notes were replaced with Euro notes in 2002. My 1,000 note was worth maybe half a euro, about 60 cents when it expired: not a big loss. But today, when I searched on eBay, I saw it selling for $2-3. That’s a 300-400% return. So maybe I’ll just stuff these rupee back in my drawer and check back in, oh, 2035 and make a killing.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #141</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a> and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_141.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #142 — Sleeping in Business Class; Changes from Chinese Tourists','','inherit','closed','closed','','2042-revision-v1','','','2018-07-03 19:56:29','2018-07-04 00:56:29','',2042,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/07/03/2042-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2048,1,'2018-07-03 19:58:37','2018-07-04 00:58:37','[caption id=\"attachment_2044\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/2018-06-22-20.15.56-1.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2044\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/2018-06-22-20.15.56-1-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> What\'s the Chinese character for \"wurst\"?[/caption]\r\n\r\nA last-minute trip to Pune, India provided more than enough material for this episode -- a visa dash, <em>very</em> hands-on airport security, worthless rupee notes, flight disruptions.... We also read the obits for a couple of smart bag companies and hear why MSP\'s T2 isn\'t so ghetto after all. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_142.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n<iframe src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/453397353&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"></iframe><!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #142:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from a rather jumbled up TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. Been playing “furniture jenga” for the past couple of weeks as we do a lot of deferred maintenance before trying to relocate the studios into Chicago. The recording studio is jammed full and the regular production bay has been taken out of commission, hence me missing my usual end-of-month posting and slipping into the first week of July.</li>\r\n 	<li>June’s travel cadence was almost a complete rinse-and-repeat of May’s. A few day drives up to Wisconsin, pretty easy -- until I had to make a last-minute trip to Germany with about 36-hour notice -- leave Weds night, land Thurs morning, meet with the client Thursday afternoon, lead a workshop Friday, fly home Saturday morning. I booked an eye-bleedingly expensive last-minute business class ticket because I needed to work and get some sleep on the flight over, which United was kind enough to convert into a 1st-class seat on the Weds flight, giving me more than enough space to eat and work simultaneously.</li>\r\n 	<li>Though shorter notice than last month’s India trip, it was a bit easier -- no last-minute visa dash, and I got to walk out of the airport in Frankfurt this time rather than transferring to another 8-hour flight. And thanks to Google Maps, I was able to find a non-stop local train from the station in the basement of Frankfurt airport (just finding that was a win for Google) to the station just outside the client’s headquarters for about €8. And because the train ticketing machine could do contactless, I just dinged it with my iPhone rather than having to wrestle with my US Amex card not having a PIN. All in all, it was as painless as a last-minute 8,000-mile trip can be. And not having to push furniture around for 3 days -- that was a nice bonus...</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em>Gargantua</em> by Admiral Bob (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/46361 Ft: My Free Mickey, Martijn de Boer</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>The bumper music is from Saurab Bhargava, a long-time listener and longer-time friend and colleague who said in a note “Took some time on the cruise to catch up on some TravelCommons podcasts. Glad you\'re still keeping the rhythm on that!” I have been working to keep a regular monthly cadence. I’ve managed to keep it up for a year, which is why I’m a bit put off with myself for missing my June deadline. Though I have to tell you, the combination of a flash trip to Germany, studio reconfiguration, and the World Cup hasn’t helped -- especially the World Cup. Maybe now that we’re in the knockout round, and there’s only 2 games in a day, I’ll double up on episodes in July.</li>\r\n 	<li>Being World Cup-literate was very handy while in Germany. Good for making small talk with the client, and Friday night in Frankfurt, every bar seemed to have found half-a-dozen big screens a piece and stood them up everywhere inside and outside. It was easy to keep up with the matches, even when walking down the street. And this wasn’t even for the German team; it was Nigeria-Iceland and Switzerland-Serbia -- not even in Germany’s group. Good reminder of how big a deal it is outside the US.</li>\r\n 	<li>Long-time listener Geoffrey Greene pinged me on Facebook to let me know that TravelCommons is on the new Google Podcast app. I think I mentioned some time back, that I’ve been having problems with Google Play picking up TravelCommons ever since they started with podcasts. I’d filled out all the forms, submitted the RSS feed, but there was some error somewhere. Finding someone somewhere in Google support to resolve that has been on my to-do list for a while. I still need to get that sorted, but I’m glad to know the problem hasn’t carried over to the new app. I also need to update the website with links to all the places where people can subscribe to TravelCommons. Yet another line on the to-do list.</li>\r\n 	<li>Continuing the ongoing thread about smart bags… in the last episode, I talked about 2 smart bag manufacturers going out of business. But this past week, sifting through the PR pitches in the TravelCommons mail bag, I saw this -- “First Smart Luggage Safe to Fly Worldwide”. Plevo -- who thinks of these names? -- claims to be “the first smart luggage in the world that was designed to be safe to fly around the world” with “a removable battery pack, GPS Tracking, Smart Lock, Built-in Digital Scale, distance alerts and a Travel Assistant App”. OK, this is interesting. I head over to the inevitable Kickstarter page and check out the video. Very slick, but it didn’t answer what is the key question for smart bags -- how does Plevo provide location tracking and connect to the app when the battery pack is removed? Briana, the PR person, told me the Plevo bags have 2 batteries -- a removable Lithium battery pack and a permanent Nickel battery that takes over when the Li battery is removed. Elegant solution. The risk, though, is when that elegance breaks down in the face of a harried gate agent that doesn’t have the time to work through the safety differences between Li and Ni batteries, and just finds it easier to say “No”.  No problem getting past the UA gate agent in Frankfurt with my low-tech leather bag I bought in Italy a few years ago on our 25th anniversary. Checking my passport, she looked down -- “That’s a great bag!” she said. Sometimes, simpler is better.</li>\r\n 	<li>Another PR pitch that caught my eye, but in a less positive way, was titled “A Travel Hack Every Business Traveler Should Know About”. I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty much done with growth hackers and lifehackers and especially travel hackers. I’m old enough to remember when a hack was an ugly bit of code that managed to get a system running, but it wasn’t something that anyone was proud of. But I digress. I was killing time in United’s very nice new ORD Polaris business class lounge waiting for my Frankfurt flight, so I took the bail and opened it up. “With more executives turning to food as a biohack,” I’m regretting this click already, “an airport meal that fits with your food lifestyle can be hard to find.” The pitch was for Ample, a powdered, rehydrateable drinkable meal that’s TSA-compliant and “packed with on-trend ingredients like MCTs from coconut oil, fiber, probiotics, micronutrients from chlorella, and protein from grass-fed whey and collagen.” MCT’s, a Google search tells me, are medium-chain triglycerides that are good for you in a whole bunch of ways, I guess. Ample reduces decision fatigue -- “Just like Zuck never needs to decide what to wear, deciding what to eat at an airport is a piece of decision fatigue that you just don\'t need” and makes it easier to follow “a ketogenic lifestyle”. Feeling the onset of buzzword fatigue, I set my phone down, walked over to the bar, abandoned any hope of achieving ketosis, and pointed to the Revolution Brewing Anti-Hero IPA draft handle.</li>\r\n 	<li>I didn’t mention this in the last episode, but before I headed out on my India trip, I hit the AT&amp;T website to see if India is included in their international plan (it is) and to get one of their international data packages since I wasn’t going to have time to figure out the local SIM market. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the data limit of their base $60 offering has been bumped from 300MB to 1GB sometime in the last 2 years, and way up from 100MB back in 2011. The last time I used AT&amp;T’s international plan was March 2016 during a 4-day trip in Iceland. I turned cellular access off on just about every app except Google Maps and only just squeaked through without topping the 300MB limit. 1GB is a whole lot roomier. I had no problems in India. I don’t know when that limit got bumped up, but good on AT&amp;T for making that base plan much more realistic.</li>\r\n 	<li>This is about the time when I have the obligatory craft beer comment, and you’d think that coming off a trip to Germany, I’d be full of them. And at the end of the day on Thursday, after taking a 20-minute nap to catch my second or third wind, I headed out looking exactly for that -- a bierstube with some local beers and maybe a wurst platter. Walking around near the hotel, there wasn’t much -- it was kind of a dead plaza with some pizza and doner kebab places. One nice restaurant, but nothing special. I pulled out Google Maps and started scrolling around, zooming in and out looking for some beer places. I don’t see many of those, but I keep seeing wineries pop up south of me. So I start walking. 15 minutes, I hit one of the wineries and walk in. What’s with all the wineries, I ask? “You’re in one of the largest wine producing regions in Germany,” the guy nicely explained. “I’m getting ready for a big wine dinner right now, but stop in tomorrow if you want to taste our wines.” I’d be leaving for Frankfurt tomorrow, but I thanked him. So now, I’m looking for wine. It was after 5, and all the other wineries I passed looked closed, but I found a restaurant with what looked like a good local wine list and a nice courtyard. The waitress made some recommendations -- “This is a nice wine from our next door neighbor” We struggled a little bit figuring out the translation for the daily special on the chalkboard, but with dueling smartphone searches, we figured it out -- it was a local dish of spit-roasted pork. It was a nice surprise; a nice ending to the first day of what I thought was going to be just a Bataan death march of a trip. Which it would’ve been if I’d stayed in my hotel room rehydrating my third bottle of Ample ketogenic liquid so I could slog through another 50 emails on my way to zero inbox nirvana.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> or our new <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a> at travelcommons -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em>A Foolish Game</em> by Zep Hurme (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/zep_hurme/46448</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Sleeping in Business Class</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>The trips to India and Germany put me back in international business class for the first time in a while. In past episodes, I’ve been ambivalent about the value for money for business class -- is the extra space and the better meal service worth the $5-6,000 uplift? On these trips, I kinda think “Yes” because neither trip had any slack in the schedule -- I’d be landing and going directly into meetings, so those lie-flat business class seats were what I really needed so I could get some amount of quality sleep.</li>\r\n 	<li>The start of both trips was a United flight from ORD to FRA. United has made a big deal of upgrading their international business class, even giving it a new name -- Polaris. And they’re building separate Polaris lounges, so it you’re flying international First or Business, no more slumming in the crowded Red Carpet clubs. The Polaris lounges are nice -- everything is free, good beer and wine selection -- even a cocktail list -- and a nice buffet. They’re probably the best business class lounges I hit on either trip, better than the variety of Lufthansa lounges I hit in Frankfurt. And United is pushing them. The Polaris lounge in ORD is in the far concourse, Concourse C, which makes sense; that’s where most of United’s international flights leave from. In June, though, my flight to Frankfurt left out of the B Concourse, so I went into the Red Carpet club right across from the gate. The guy at the desk looked at my ticket -- “Oh, you want to go to the Polaris Lounge. It’s about a 15 minute walk, but it’s definitely worth it.”</li>\r\n 	<li>Walking on the United Triple 7 though, you could feel United packing as much as they could in that business class with a 2-4-2 seat configuration -- only just slightly less packed than the 3-4-3 seating on the other side of the curtain in Economy. I’d never seen two middle seats in business class before. Business class in the Lufthansa A380s between Frankfurt and India were 2-2-2 -- no middle seats. Now on my flight over in May, I had the aisle and a couple had the middle two seats, so not too bad, and they were good folks. I felt bad for the husband during the night, though, when I had my seat in full lie-flat mode. When he needed to hit the toilet at night, he had to kinda vault me.</li>\r\n 	<li>On my last flight back from Frankfurt, a good-sized guy had the middle seat next to me. I’d guess he was a former football player, still in good shape, but taller and broader than the average build that United had sized these Polaris pods for. He said that the flight over, he couldn’t lay flat; it felt like a coffin, so he just reclined it and catnapped, which kinda defeated the purpose of hitting the ground running. I could sympathize. I’m not that broad, but I had to drop the aisle-side armrest in my pod to be able to comfortably fit. Kinda nice service, but definitely snug.</li>\r\n 	<li>The Lufthansa business class lounges lacked the pizzazz of United’s lounges. But one thing that was new to me… the flights to India went out of a different concourse in Frankfurt -- on the last episode, I talked about the mile-&amp;-a-half walk and the extra security -- and here, they boarded the A380 first and business classes straight from the lounge. No walking down to the gate and idling around with the economy classes. They had gate agents and kiosks in the club. I set down my beer, had my boarding pass scanned, and then walked down the jetway to the plane.</li>\r\n 	<li>Once on-board, Lufthansa’s A380s were definitely roomier than United’s Triple 7’s -- maybe a bigger plane, maybe because they weren’t trying to cram 8 people across. With only 6 people across, the lie-flat seats were more comfortable, not as “coffin-ish” as United’s. Indeed, maybe a little too comfortable. A guy in the row behind me on my flight to Delhi must’ve gone deep in sleep because he snored -- loudly, really sawing wood -- for a couple of hours. The one time I wouldn’t have minded a little turbulence to jostle the plane. But good for him, he was definitely getting his money’s worth from Business Class.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em>Melt Away</em> by Kara Square (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/mindmapthat/46605</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Expired Money</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>In last December’s episode, I talked about how I need to have some cash in my pocket when I travel. I know it’s a generational thing; many of my younger colleagues don’t carry any cash, but going “cash naked” just makes me nervous. Assuaging this anxiety on international travel means fills one of my desk drawers with random bits of currency. That’s not a big deal for countries that I or my family visit often. Before my daughter flew back to the UK for her spring semester at St Andrews, I rummaged through the desk and found a £20 note; it bought her breakfast when she landed in Edinburgh.</li>\r\n 	<li>But for countries I visit less often, the money just sits there. I have 350 Mexican pesos -- about $18 at today’s exchange rate; I can’t remember the last time I was in Mexico. I have 400 Chinese yuan -- over $60 -- left over from my last trip to Beijing 4 years ago. At the end of that trip, I thought I’d be going back within the year, so didn’t work hard to spend down those notes. But that next trip didn’t happen, and so there those yuan sit.</li>\r\n 	<li>Before the India trip, I hit the cash drawer and pulled out €12 in notes and coins from our trip to Spain last March, that was for my connections through Frankfurt, and 200 rupees -- about $30 -- left over from my 2014 trip to India. I didn’t spend any of the euros; I spent most of my time either walking through concourses or drinking beer in the Lufthansa lounge. But the rupees came in handy for tipping all the guys at the hotel who insisted on helping me with my carry-on bag. Here’s a 100 for you, and you, and you, and, oh, you too.</li>\r\n 	<li>One night in Pune, we were at the JW Marriott rooftop bar for hors d\'oeuvres and pre-dinner drinks. The catered bar on our side of the terrace has the usual Kingfisher beers. But then I saw someone on the other, the non-catered/public side of the terrace with a different, non-Kingfisher beer. It was a Bira 91 Blonde. I headed over to the main bar to get one. Now, because this was the main bar, not the catered one, I was going to have to pay for the Bira 91, but that wasn’t a problem because I had rupees in my pocket. Yes, they also would’ve taken my Amex card, but I had a 1,000 and a 500 rupee note that I needed to break for more luggage tips, so I laid the 1,000 note on the bar next to my check and then wandered over to the edge of the rooftop to look over the city. A couple minutes later, a guy taps me on the shoulder and gives me back my 1,000 rupees. The note was no good. And then I remembered. Back in Nov 2016, the Indian government made a snap announcement to replace the 500 and 1,000 rupee notes to fight counterfeiting. $20 of my rupees had expired while sitting in my desk drawer. Lots of apologizing, and I ended up pulling out my Amex card after all.</li>\r\n 	<li>When I got home, I took a deeper dive through my cash drawer. Luckily, I didn’t have any old £10 notes, the ones with Charles Darwin on them. He expired a couple of months ago in March, replaced by a new tenner with Jane Austen. I did find a 1,000 Italian lire note with Maria Montessori on the face, which must’ve been left over from, I dunno, maybe our 10th anniversary trip to Tuscany because lire notes were replaced with Euro notes in 2002. My 1,000 note was worth maybe half a euro, about 60 cents when it expired: not a big loss. But today, when I searched on eBay, I saw it selling for $2-3. That’s a 300-400% return. So maybe I’ll just stuff these rupee back in my drawer and check back in, oh, 2035 and make a killing.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #142</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a> and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_142.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #142 — Sleeping in Business Class; Changes from Chinese Tourists','','inherit','closed','closed','','2042-revision-v1','','','2018-07-03 19:58:37','2018-07-04 00:58:37','',2042,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/07/03/2042-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2049,1,'2018-07-03 20:01:16','2018-07-04 01:01:16','[caption id=\"attachment_2044\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/2018-06-22-20.15.56-1.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2044\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/2018-06-22-20.15.56-1-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> What\'s the Chinese character for \"wurst\"?[/caption]\r\n\r\nA last-minute trip to Pune, India provided more than enough material for this episode -- a visa dash, <em>very</em> hands-on airport security, worthless rupee notes, flight disruptions.... We also read the obits for a couple of smart bag companies and hear why MSP\'s T2 isn\'t so ghetto after all. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_142.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n<iframe src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/453397353&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"></iframe><!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #142:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from a rather jumbled up TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. Been playing “furniture jenga” for the past couple of weeks as we do a lot of deferred maintenance before trying to relocate the studios into Chicago. The recording studio is jammed full and the regular production bay has been taken out of commission, hence me missing my usual end-of-month posting and slipping into the first week of July.</li>\r\n 	<li>June’s travel cadence was almost a complete rinse-and-repeat of May’s. A few day drives up to Wisconsin, pretty easy -- until I had to make a last-minute trip to Germany with about 36-hour notice -- leave Weds night, land Thurs morning, meet with the client Thursday afternoon, lead a workshop Friday, fly home Saturday morning. I booked an eye-bleedingly expensive last-minute business class ticket because I needed to work and get some sleep on the flight over, which United was kind enough to convert into a 1st-class seat on the Weds flight, giving me more than enough space to eat and work simultaneously.</li>\r\n 	<li>Though shorter notice than last month’s India trip, it was a bit easier -- no last-minute visa dash, and I got to walk out of the airport in Frankfurt this time rather than transferring to another 8-hour flight. And thanks to Google Maps, I was able to find a non-stop local train from the station in the basement of Frankfurt airport (just finding that was a win for Google) to the station just outside the client’s headquarters for about €8. And because the train ticketing machine could do contactless, I just dinged it with my iPhone rather than having to wrestle with my US Amex card not having a PIN. All in all, it was as painless as a last-minute 8,000-mile trip can be. And not having to push furniture around for 3 days -- that was a nice bonus...</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em>Gargantua</em> by Admiral Bob (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/46361 Ft: My Free Mickey, Martijn de Boer</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>The bumper music is from Saurab Bhargava, a long-time listener and longer-time friend and colleague who said in a note “Took some time on the cruise to catch up on some TravelCommons podcasts. Glad you\'re still keeping the rhythm on that!” I have been working to keep a regular monthly cadence. I’ve managed to keep it up for a year, which is why I’m a bit put off with myself for missing my June deadline. Though I have to tell you, the combination of a flash trip to Germany, studio reconfiguration, and the World Cup hasn’t helped -- especially the World Cup. Maybe now that we’re in the knockout round, and there’s only 2 games in a day, I’ll double up on episodes in July.</li>\r\n 	<li>Being World Cup-literate was very handy while in Germany. Good for making small talk with the client, and Friday night in Frankfurt, every bar seemed to have found half-a-dozen big screens a piece and stood them up everywhere inside and outside. It was easy to keep up with the matches, even when walking down the street. And this wasn’t even for the German team; it was Nigeria-Iceland and Switzerland-Serbia -- not even in Germany’s group. Good reminder of how big a deal it is outside the US.</li>\r\n 	<li>Long-time listener Geoffrey Greene pinged me on Facebook to let me know that TravelCommons is on the new Google Podcast app. I think I mentioned some time back, that I’ve been having problems with Google Play picking up TravelCommons ever since they started with podcasts. I’d filled out all the forms, submitted the RSS feed, but there was some error somewhere. Finding someone somewhere in Google support to resolve that has been on my to-do list for a while. I still need to get that sorted, but I’m glad to know the problem hasn’t carried over to the new app. I also need to update the website with links to all the places where people can subscribe to TravelCommons. Yet another line on the to-do list.</li>\r\n 	<li>Continuing the ongoing thread about smart bags… in the last episode, I talked about 2 smart bag manufacturers going out of business. But this past week, sifting through the PR pitches in the TravelCommons mail bag, I saw this -- “First Smart Luggage Safe to Fly Worldwide”. Plevo -- who thinks of these names? -- claims to be “the first smart luggage in the world that was designed to be safe to fly around the world” with “a removable battery pack, GPS Tracking, Smart Lock, Built-in Digital Scale, distance alerts and a Travel Assistant App”. OK, this is interesting. I head over to the inevitable Kickstarter page and check out the video. Very slick, but it didn’t answer what is the key question for smart bags -- how does Plevo provide location tracking and connect to the app when the battery pack is removed? Briana, the PR person, told me the Plevo bags have 2 batteries -- a removable Lithium battery pack and a permanent Nickel battery that takes over when the Li battery is removed. Elegant solution. The risk, though, is when that elegance breaks down in the face of a harried gate agent that doesn’t have the time to work through the safety differences between Li and Ni batteries, and just finds it easier to say “No”.  No problem getting past the UA gate agent in Frankfurt with my low-tech leather bag I bought in Italy a few years ago on our 25th anniversary. Checking my passport, she looked down -- “That’s a great bag!” she said. Sometimes, simpler is better.</li>\r\n 	<li>Another PR pitch that caught my eye, but in a less positive way, was titled “A Travel Hack Every Business Traveler Should Know About”. I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty much done with growth hackers and lifehackers and especially travel hackers. I’m old enough to remember when a hack was an ugly bit of code that managed to get a system running, but it wasn’t something that anyone was proud of. But I digress. I was killing time in United’s very nice new ORD Polaris business class lounge waiting for my Frankfurt flight, so I took the bail and opened it up. “With more executives turning to food as a biohack,” I’m regretting this click already, “an airport meal that fits with your food lifestyle can be hard to find.” The pitch was for Ample, a powdered, rehydrateable drinkable meal that’s TSA-compliant and “packed with on-trend ingredients like MCTs from coconut oil, fiber, probiotics, micronutrients from chlorella, and protein from grass-fed whey and collagen.” MCT’s, a Google search tells me, are medium-chain triglycerides that are good for you in a whole bunch of ways, I guess. Ample reduces decision fatigue -- “Just like Zuck never needs to decide what to wear, deciding what to eat at an airport is a piece of decision fatigue that you just don\'t need” and makes it easier to follow “a ketogenic lifestyle”. Feeling the onset of buzzword fatigue, I set my phone down, walked over to the bar, abandoned any hope of achieving ketosis, and pointed to the Revolution Brewing Anti-Hero IPA draft handle.</li>\r\n 	<li>I didn’t mention this in the last episode, but before I headed out on my India trip, I hit the AT&amp;T website to see if India is included in their international plan (it is) and to get one of their international data packages since I wasn’t going to have time to figure out the local SIM market. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the data limit of their base $60 offering has been bumped from 300MB to 1GB sometime in the last 2 years, and way up from 100MB back in 2011. The last time I used AT&amp;T’s international plan was March 2016 during a 4-day trip in Iceland. I turned cellular access off on just about every app except Google Maps and only just squeaked through without topping the 300MB limit. 1GB is a whole lot roomier. I had no problems in India. I don’t know when that limit got bumped up, but good on AT&amp;T for making that base plan much more realistic.</li>\r\n 	<li>This is about the time when I have the obligatory craft beer comment, and you’d think that coming off a trip to Germany, I’d be full of them. And at the end of the day on Thursday, after taking a 20-minute nap to catch my second or third wind, I headed out looking exactly for that -- a bierstube with some local beers and maybe a wurst platter. Walking around near the hotel, there wasn’t much -- it was kind of a dead plaza with some pizza and doner kebab places. One nice restaurant, but nothing special. I pulled out Google Maps and started scrolling around, zooming in and out looking for some beer places. I don’t see many of those, but I keep seeing wineries pop up south of me. So I start walking. 15 minutes, I hit one of the wineries and walk in. What’s with all the wineries, I ask? “You’re in one of the largest wine producing regions in Germany,” the guy nicely explained. “I’m getting ready for a big wine dinner right now, but stop in tomorrow if you want to taste our wines.” I’d be leaving for Frankfurt tomorrow, but I thanked him. So now, I’m looking for wine. It was after 5, and all the other wineries I passed looked closed, but I found a restaurant with what looked like a good local wine list and a nice courtyard. The waitress made some recommendations -- “This is a nice wine from our next door neighbor” We struggled a little bit figuring out the translation for the daily special on the chalkboard, but with dueling smartphone searches, we figured it out -- it was a local dish of spit-roasted pork. It was a nice surprise; a nice ending to the first day of what I thought was going to be just a Bataan death march of a trip. Which it would’ve been if I’d stayed in my hotel room rehydrating my third bottle of Ample ketogenic liquid so I could slog through another 50 emails on my way to zero inbox nirvana.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> or our new <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a> at travelcommons -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em>A Foolish Game</em> by Zep Hurme (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/zep_hurme/46448</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Sleeping in Business Class</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>The trips to India and Germany put me back in international business class for the first time in a while. In past episodes, I’ve been ambivalent about the value for money for business class -- is the extra space and the better meal service worth the $5-6,000 uplift? On these trips, I kinda think “Yes” because neither trip had any slack in the schedule -- I’d be landing and going directly into meetings, so those lie-flat business class seats were what I really needed so I could get some amount of quality sleep.</li>\r\n 	<li>The start of both trips was a United flight from ORD to FRA. United has made a big deal of upgrading their international business class, even giving it a new name -- Polaris. And they’re building separate Polaris lounges, so it you’re flying international First or Business, no more slumming in the crowded Red Carpet clubs. The Polaris lounges are nice -- everything is free, good beer and wine selection -- even a cocktail list -- and a nice buffet. They’re probably the best business class lounges I hit on either trip, better than the variety of Lufthansa lounges I hit in Frankfurt. And United is pushing them. The Polaris lounge in ORD is in the far concourse, Concourse C, which makes sense; that’s where most of United’s international flights leave from. In June, though, my flight to Frankfurt left out of the B Concourse, so I went into the Red Carpet club right across from the gate. The guy at the desk looked at my ticket -- “Oh, you want to go to the Polaris Lounge. It’s about a 15 minute walk, but it’s definitely worth it.”</li>\r\n 	<li>Walking on the United Triple 7 though, you could feel United packing as much as they could in that business class with a 2-4-2 seat configuration -- only just slightly less packed than the 3-4-3 seating on the other side of the curtain in Economy. I’d never seen two middle seats in business class before. Business class in the Lufthansa A380s between Frankfurt and India were 2-2-2 -- no middle seats. Now on my flight over in May, I had the aisle and a couple had the middle two seats, so not too bad, and they were good folks. I felt bad for the husband during the night, though, when I had my seat in full lie-flat mode. When he needed to hit the toilet at night, he had to kinda vault me.</li>\r\n 	<li>On my last flight back from Frankfurt, a good-sized guy had the middle seat next to me. I’d guess he was a former football player, still in good shape, but taller and broader than the average build that United had sized these Polaris pods for. He said that the flight over, he couldn’t lay flat; it felt like a coffin, so he just reclined it and catnapped, which kinda defeated the purpose of hitting the ground running. I could sympathize. I’m not that broad, but I had to drop the aisle-side armrest in my pod to be able to comfortably fit. Kinda nice service, but definitely snug.</li>\r\n 	<li>The Lufthansa business class lounges lacked the pizzazz of United’s lounges. But one thing that was new to me… the flights to India went out of a different concourse in Frankfurt -- on the last episode, I talked about the mile-&amp;-a-half walk and the extra security -- and here, they boarded the A380 first and business classes straight from the lounge. No walking down to the gate and idling around with the economy classes. They had gate agents and kiosks in the club. I set down my beer, had my boarding pass scanned, and then walked down the jetway to the plane.</li>\r\n 	<li>Once on-board, Lufthansa’s A380s were definitely roomier than United’s Triple 7’s -- maybe a bigger plane, maybe because they weren’t trying to cram 8 people across. With only 6 people across, the lie-flat seats were more comfortable, not as “coffin-ish” as United’s. Indeed, maybe a little too comfortable. A guy in the row behind me on my flight to Delhi must’ve gone deep in sleep because he snored -- loudly, really sawing wood -- for a couple of hours. The one time I wouldn’t have minded a little turbulence to jostle the plane. But good for him, he was definitely getting his money’s worth from Business Class.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em>Melt Away</em> by Kara Square (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/mindmapthat/46605</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Changes from Chinese Tourists</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>The last night I was in Germany, Friday night, I stayed in Frankfurt so I’d have just a 20-minute cab ride to the airport for my 8:15am flight. It had been 7 years since I’d walked around the city -- back in 2011 when I did a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/05/01/video-2-one-city-five-hours-frankfurt/\">TravelCommons video</a>, retracing the “1 City, 5 Hours” article about Frankfurt in United’s seatback magazine. I walked down to the Romer area - a big open square surrounded by historic buildings -- and over to a sausage, a wurst stand that I’d eaten at in the past. They’d added a new menu -- the German menu was now on the ground, under the ordering window; the new menu at eye level was in Chinese.</li>\r\n 	<li>The travel press has been talking about the impending growth of Chinese tourism for a bit now. I’ve seen the tour buses full of Chinese travelers for some time -- back in 2016 when my son and I were in Iceland, it became a bit of a game for us to stay ahead of those buses, and then in Frankfurt, down in a basement applewine pub off some back alley, I was the only non-Asian person there. But now, I’m noticing more, I dunno, systemic or infrastructure changes being driven by Chinese tourism. Not just Chinese menus but also seeing restaurants in the US and Europe accepting Chinese mobile payments - WeChat and Alipay. And some folks in the hotel business will say that the push to provide free wi-fi, mobile apps and family-sized rooms is driven, in some ways, by what Chinese tourists are looking for. Makes sense. Last year, there were 130 million outbound Chinese tourists, a big number but only 10% of the population of China. There’s a lot more to come.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #142</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a> and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_142.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #142 — Sleeping in Business Class; Changes from Chinese Tourists','','inherit','closed','closed','','2042-revision-v1','','','2018-07-03 20:01:16','2018-07-04 01:01:16','',2042,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/07/03/2042-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2050,1,'2018-07-03 20:13:04','2018-07-04 01:13:04','[caption id=\"attachment_2044\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/2018-06-22-20.15.56-1.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2044\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/2018-06-22-20.15.56-1-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> What\'s the Chinese character for \"wurst\"?[/caption]\r\n\r\nA last-minute trip to Pune, India provided more than enough material for this episode -- a visa dash, <em>very</em> hands-on airport security, worthless rupee notes, flight disruptions.... We also read the obits for a couple of smart bag companies and hear why MSP\'s T2 isn\'t so ghetto after all. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_142.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n<iframe src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/453397353&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"></iframe><!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #142:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from a rather jumbled up TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. Been playing “furniture jenga” for the past couple of weeks as we do a lot of deferred maintenance before trying to relocate the studios into Chicago. The recording studio is jammed full and the regular production bay has been taken out of commission, hence me missing my usual end-of-month posting and slipping into the first week of July.</li>\r\n 	<li>June’s travel cadence was almost a complete rinse-and-repeat of May’s. A few day drives up to Wisconsin, pretty easy -- until I had to make a last-minute trip to Germany with about 36-hour notice -- leave Weds night, land Thurs morning, meet with the client Thursday afternoon, lead a workshop Friday, fly home Saturday morning. I booked an eye-bleedingly expensive last-minute business class ticket because I needed to work and get some sleep on the flight over, which United was kind enough to convert into a 1st-class seat on the Weds flight, giving me more than enough space to eat and work simultaneously.</li>\r\n 	<li>Though shorter notice than last month’s India trip, it was a bit easier -- no last-minute visa dash, and I got to walk out of the airport in Frankfurt this time rather than transferring to another 8-hour flight. And thanks to Google Maps, I was able to find a non-stop local train from the station in the basement of Frankfurt airport (just finding that was a win for Google) to the station just outside the client’s headquarters for about €8. And because the train ticketing machine could do contactless, I just dinged it with my iPhone rather than having to wrestle with my US Amex card not having a PIN. All in all, it was as painless as a last-minute 8,000-mile trip can be. And not having to push furniture around for 3 days -- that was a nice bonus...</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em>Gargantua</em> by Admiral Bob (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/46361 Ft: My Free Mickey, Martijn de Boer</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>The bumper music is from Saurab Bhargava, a long-time listener and longer-time friend and colleague who said in a note “Took some time on the cruise to catch up on some TravelCommons podcasts. Glad you\'re still keeping the rhythm on that!” I have been working to keep a regular monthly cadence. I’ve managed to keep it up for a year, which is why I’m a bit put off with myself for missing my June deadline. Though I have to tell you, the combination of a flash trip to Germany, studio reconfiguration, and the World Cup hasn’t helped -- especially the World Cup. Maybe now that we’re in the knockout round, and there’s only 2 games in a day, I’ll double up on episodes in July.</li>\r\n 	<li>Being World Cup-literate was very handy while in Germany. Good for making small talk with the client, and Friday night in Frankfurt, every bar seemed to have found half-a-dozen big screens a piece and stood them up everywhere inside and outside. It was easy to keep up with the matches, even when walking down the street. And this wasn’t even for the German team; it was Nigeria-Iceland and Switzerland-Serbia -- not even in Germany’s group. Good reminder of how big a deal it is outside the US.</li>\r\n 	<li>Long-time listener Geoffrey Greene pinged me on Facebook to let me know that TravelCommons is on the new Google Podcast app. I think I mentioned some time back, that I’ve been having problems with Google Play picking up TravelCommons ever since they started with podcasts. I’d filled out all the forms, submitted the RSS feed, but there was some error somewhere. Finding someone somewhere in Google support to resolve that has been on my to-do list for a while. I still need to get that sorted, but I’m glad to know the problem hasn’t carried over to the new app. I also need to update the website with links to all the places where people can subscribe to TravelCommons. Yet another line on the to-do list.</li>\r\n 	<li>Continuing the ongoing thread about smart bags… in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/05/31/podcast-141-when-you-think-the-tsa-is-bad-expired-money/\">last episode</a>, I talked about 2 smart bag manufacturers going out of business. But this past week, sifting through the PR pitches in the TravelCommons mail bag, I saw this -- “First Smart Luggage Safe to Fly Worldwide”. Plevo -- who thinks of these names? -- claims to be “the first smart luggage in the world that was designed to be safe to fly around the world” with “a removable battery pack, GPS Tracking, Smart Lock, Built-in Digital Scale, distance alerts and a Travel Assistant App”. OK, this is interesting. I head over to the inevitable Kickstarter page and check out the video. Very slick, but it didn’t answer what is the key question for smart bags -- how does Plevo provide location tracking and connect to the app when the battery pack is removed? Briana, the PR person, told me the Plevo bags have 2 batteries -- a removable Lithium battery pack and a permanent Nickel battery that takes over when the Li battery is removed. Elegant solution. The risk, though, is when that elegance breaks down in the face of a harried gate agent that doesn’t have the time to work through the safety differences between Li and Ni batteries, and just finds it easier to say “No”.  No problem getting past the UA gate agent in Frankfurt with my low-tech leather bag I bought in Italy a few years ago on our 25th anniversary. Checking my passport, she looked down -- “That’s a great bag!” she said. Sometimes, simpler is better.</li>\r\n 	<li>Another PR pitch that caught my eye, but in a less positive way, was titled “A Travel Hack Every Business Traveler Should Know About”. I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty much done with growth hackers and lifehackers and especially travel hackers. I’m old enough to remember when a hack was an ugly bit of code that managed to get a system running, but it wasn’t something that anyone was proud of. But I digress. I was killing time in United’s very nice new ORD Polaris business class lounge waiting for my Frankfurt flight, so I took the bail and opened it up. “With more executives turning to food as a biohack,” I’m regretting this click already, “an airport meal that fits with your food lifestyle can be hard to find.” The pitch was for Ample, a powdered, rehydrateable drinkable meal that’s TSA-compliant and “packed with on-trend ingredients like MCTs from coconut oil, fiber, probiotics, micronutrients from chlorella, and protein from grass-fed whey and collagen.” MCT’s, a Google search tells me, are medium-chain triglycerides that are good for you in a whole bunch of ways, I guess. Ample reduces decision fatigue -- “Just like Zuck never needs to decide what to wear, deciding what to eat at an airport is a piece of decision fatigue that you just don\'t need” and makes it easier to follow “a ketogenic lifestyle”. Feeling the onset of buzzword fatigue, I set my phone down, walked over to the bar, abandoned any hope of achieving ketosis, and pointed to the Revolution Brewing Anti-Hero IPA draft handle.</li>\r\n 	<li>I didn’t mention this in the last episode, but before I headed out on my India trip, I hit the AT&amp;T website to see if India is included in their international plan (it is) and to get one of their international data packages since I wasn’t going to have time to figure out the local SIM market. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the data limit of their base $60 offering has been bumped from 300MB to 1GB sometime in the last 2 years, and way up from 100MB back in 2011. The last time I used AT&amp;T’s international plan was March 2016 during a 4-day trip in Iceland. I turned cellular access off on just about every app except Google Maps and only just squeaked through without topping the 300MB limit. 1GB is a whole lot roomier. I had no problems in India. I don’t know when that limit got bumped up, but good on AT&amp;T for making that base plan much more realistic.</li>\r\n 	<li>This is about the time when I have the obligatory craft beer comment, and you’d think that coming off a trip to Germany, I’d be full of them. And at the end of the day on Thursday, after taking a 20-minute nap to catch my second or third wind, I headed out looking exactly for that -- a bierstube with some local beers and maybe a wurst platter. Walking around near the hotel, there wasn’t much -- it was kind of a dead plaza with some pizza and doner kebab places. One nice restaurant, but nothing special. I pulled out Google Maps and started scrolling around, zooming in and out looking for some beer places. I don’t see many of those, but I keep seeing wineries pop up south of me. So I start walking. 15 minutes, I hit one of the wineries and walk in. What’s with all the wineries, I ask? “You’re in one of the largest wine producing regions in Germany,” the guy nicely explained. “I’m getting ready for a big wine dinner right now, but stop in tomorrow if you want to taste our wines.” I’d be leaving for Frankfurt tomorrow, but I thanked him. So now, I’m looking for wine. It was after 5, and all the other wineries I passed looked closed, but I found a restaurant with what looked like a good local wine list and a nice courtyard. The waitress made some recommendations -- “This is a nice wine from our next door neighbor” We struggled a little bit figuring out the translation for the daily special on the chalkboard, but with dueling smartphone searches, we figured it out -- it was a local dish of spit-roasted pork. It was a nice surprise; a nice ending to the first day of what I thought was going to be just a Bataan death march of a trip. Which it would’ve been if I’d stayed in my hotel room rehydrating my third bottle of Ample ketogenic liquid so I could slog through another 50 emails on my way to zero inbox nirvana.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> or our new <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a> at travelcommons -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em>A Foolish Game</em> by Zep Hurme (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/zep_hurme/46448</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Sleeping in Business Class</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>The trips to India and Germany put me back in international business class for the first time in a while. In past episodes, I’ve been ambivalent about the value for money for business class -- is the extra space and the better meal service worth the $5-6,000 uplift? On these trips, I kinda think “Yes” because neither trip had any slack in the schedule -- I’d be landing and going directly into meetings, so those lie-flat business class seats were what I really needed so I could get some amount of quality sleep.</li>\r\n 	<li>The start of both trips was a United flight from ORD to FRA. United has made a big deal of upgrading their international business class, even giving it a new name -- Polaris. And they’re building separate Polaris lounges, so it you’re flying international First or Business, no more slumming in the crowded Red Carpet clubs. The Polaris lounges are nice -- everything is free, good beer and wine selection -- even a cocktail list -- and a nice buffet. They’re probably the best business class lounges I hit on either trip, better than the variety of Lufthansa lounges I hit in Frankfurt. And United is pushing them. The Polaris lounge in ORD is in the far concourse, Concourse C, which makes sense; that’s where most of United’s international flights leave from. In June, though, my flight to Frankfurt left out of the B Concourse, so I went into the Red Carpet club right across from the gate. The guy at the desk looked at my ticket -- “Oh, you want to go to the Polaris Lounge. It’s about a 15 minute walk, but it’s definitely worth it.”</li>\r\n 	<li>Walking on the United Triple 7 though, you could feel United packing as much as they could in that business class with a 2-4-2 seat configuration -- only just slightly less packed than the 3-4-3 seating on the other side of the curtain in Economy. I’d never seen two middle seats in business class before. Business class in the Lufthansa A380s between Frankfurt and India were 2-2-2 -- no middle seats. Now on my flight over in May, I had the aisle and a couple had the middle two seats, so not too bad, and they were good folks. I felt bad for the husband during the night, though, when I had my seat in full lie-flat mode. When he needed to hit the toilet at night, he had to kinda vault me.</li>\r\n 	<li>On my last flight back from Frankfurt, a good-sized guy had the middle seat next to me. I’d guess he was a former football player, still in good shape, but taller and broader than the average build that United had sized these Polaris pods for. He said that the flight over, he couldn’t lay flat; it felt like a coffin, so he just reclined it and catnapped, which kinda defeated the purpose of hitting the ground running. I could sympathize. I’m not that broad, but I had to drop the aisle-side armrest in my pod to be able to comfortably fit. Kinda nice service, but definitely snug.</li>\r\n 	<li>The Lufthansa business class lounges lacked the pizzazz of United’s lounges. But one thing that was new to me… the flights to India went out of a different concourse in Frankfurt -- on the last episode, I talked about the mile-&amp;-a-half walk and the extra security -- and here, they boarded the A380 first and business classes straight from the lounge. No walking down to the gate and idling around with the economy classes. They had gate agents and kiosks in the club. I set down my beer, had my boarding pass scanned, and then walked down the jetway to the plane.</li>\r\n 	<li>Once on-board, Lufthansa’s A380s were definitely roomier than United’s Triple 7’s -- maybe a bigger plane, maybe because they weren’t trying to cram 8 people across. With only 6 people across, the lie-flat seats were more comfortable, not as “coffin-ish” as United’s. Indeed, maybe a little too comfortable. A guy in the row behind me on my flight to Delhi must’ve gone deep in sleep because he snored -- loudly, really sawing wood -- for a couple of hours. The one time I wouldn’t have minded a little turbulence to jostle the plane. But good for him, he was definitely getting his money’s worth from Business Class.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em>Melt Away</em> by Kara Square (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/mindmapthat/46605</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Changes from Chinese Tourists</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>The last night I was in Germany, Friday night, I stayed in Frankfurt so I’d have just a 20-minute cab ride to the airport for my 8:15am flight. It had been 7 years since I’d walked around the city -- back in 2011 when I did a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/05/01/video-2-one-city-five-hours-frankfurt/\">TravelCommons video</a>, retracing the “1 City, 5 Hours” article about Frankfurt in United’s seatback magazine. I walked down to the Romer area - a big open square surrounded by historic buildings -- and over to a sausage, a wurst stand that I’d eaten at in the past. They’d added a new menu -- the German menu was now on the ground, under the ordering window; the new menu at eye level was in Chinese.</li>\r\n 	<li>The travel press has been talking about the impending growth of Chinese tourism for a bit now. I’ve seen the tour buses full of Chinese travelers for some time -- back in 2016 when my son and I were in Iceland, it became a bit of a game for us to stay ahead of those buses, and then in Frankfurt, down in a basement applewine pub off some back alley, I was the only non-Asian person there. But now, I’m noticing more, I dunno, systemic or infrastructure changes being driven by Chinese tourism. Not just Chinese menus but also seeing restaurants in the US and Europe accepting Chinese mobile payments - WeChat and Alipay. And some folks in the hotel business will say that the push to provide free wi-fi, mobile apps and family-sized rooms is driven, in some ways, by what Chinese tourists are looking for. Makes sense. Last year, there were 130 million outbound Chinese tourists, a big number but only 10% of the population of China. There’s a lot more to come.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #142</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a> and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_142.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #142 — Sleeping in Business Class; Changes from Chinese Tourists','','inherit','closed','closed','','2042-revision-v1','','','2018-07-03 20:13:04','2018-07-04 01:13:04','',2042,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/07/03/2042-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2051,1,'2018-07-03 20:14:30','2018-07-04 01:14:30','[caption id=\"attachment_1128\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"225\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/2012-08-03-21.17.30.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1128\" title=\"Bolton\'s Spicy Chicken, Nashville\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/2012-08-03-21.17.30-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"225\" height=\"300\" /></a> Search for Nashville Hot Chicken Led to Interesting Neighborhoods[/caption]\r\n\r\nBack in the TravelCommons studios after a couple months of summer break. We open up with thoughts about skipping rental cars, sharing listener comments on the Chicago Layover Excursion <a title=\"Video #3 – ORD Layover Excursion: a 6-Hour Tour of Chicago\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/09/24/video-3-ord-layover-excursion-a-6-hour-tour-of-chicago/\">video</a>, and the current state of American Airlines -- great new airplanes, deteriorating on-time stats. <a href=\"http://www.crunchbase.com/person/michael-komarnitsky\">Michael Komarnitsky</a>, the founder and CEO of GoMiles, talks about why he sold his company to <a href=\"https://traxo.com/\">Traxo</a> and where he sees the mileage tracking industry going. We wrap with my thoughts about how I break through the frequent traveler \"travel bubble\" by looking for local artisanal food and craft beers. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_101.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_101.mp3\"]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #101:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago. Back after a couple of month hiatus. The Episode 100 celebrations ran a little long...</li>\r\n 	<li>Last week, Jeremy Phillips tweeted “Listening to Travel Commons by <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> episode 100 while en route ATL -&gt; SEA. I kind of miss the bathroom acoustics but love the podcast.” Jeremy, I was thinking of recording at least the intro to this episode in one of the studio bathrooms, but thought that would be a bit too contrived. I will see, though, if I can get my act together enough for the next episode to do a bit of throw-back recording from a hotel bathroom.</li>\r\n 	<li>Not a lot of travel since the last episode -- two flights to San Francisco and a day trip to Atlanta -- though my arrivals in each place had some interesting twists. For all these trips, I had car service arranged to pick me up from the airport and to take me back. The cost and hassles of car rental seem to be on an upward spiral. We’ve talked in past episodes about costs -- not so much the rental cost itself, but all the add-on fees, surcharges, and taxes. In an Oct 2009 <a title=\"Skipping the Rental Car\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2009/10/25/skipping-the-rental-car/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">blog post</a> about skipping rental cars, I looked at my receipts from rentals in LA, SF, Seattle, and Philadelphia and found that add-on charges increased my final bill 27-51%. I don’t think those percentages have gone down in the intervening 3 years.</li>\r\n 	<li>The hassles of car rental are just as off-putting -- airports are reclaiming close-in car rental sites to expand parking, pushing the rental companies further out. I’ve timed trips at Phoenix and BWI -- 30 minutes to get from the terminal to the rental cars.</li>\r\n 	<li>So, with all that, I have little problem justifying the cost of a car to haul me between the airport and my locations. But even hire cars are not without their hassles. In ATL, it took me three phone calls -- to the driver and the car service -- to figure out where to meet the car. Unlike, say , ORD or LGA, there are different places you can “surface” from the gates and terminals. Apparently I followed the wrong “Ground Transportation” signs and ended up at the wrong end of the airport. No big problem -- maybe a 10-minute delay.</li>\r\n 	<li>My last trip to SF was a bit more problematic. I text the driver “I’m here” and “Here’s the door I’m at” -- not a big opportunity for location confusion at SFO Terminal 3. I’m standing there -- a couple of cars pull up, a guy gets in one, a woman in another. 5 minutes go by, where’s the car that said he was a minute away. Turns out that the guy who got into one of those cars got into mine. He told the driver his name which, to the non-native English speaking driver, sounded like Peacock and off they went. Except when I’m still texting him -- confusing when he thinks I’m in the back seat. Somewhere on the 101 South, the driver and the passenger figure out the mix-up. The car comes back to SFO, picks me up, leaving my doppelganger -- whose last name sounds nothing like Peacock -- wandering aimless on the sidewalk looking for his long-gone car.</li>\r\n 	<li>All reinforcing the feeling that there’s just nothing about travel nowadays that “just works”...</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://www.musicalley.com/music/listeners/artistdetails.php?BandHash=5176b75737dbc595f7509067fbe080ad\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Science vs. Romance</a> </em>by Rilo Kiley</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>For those not following the various TravelCommons sites -- <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Facebook</a>, the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">web site</a> (I don’t do Pinterest because, well, I’m a guy, and I don’t do Tumblr because I’m over 25 years old) -- a couple of pointers to some content that didn’t make it into the iTunes feed.</li>\r\n 	<li>First, I did follow through on the threat/promise I made at the end of the last episode -- to do my own <a title=\"Video #3 – ORD Layover Excursion: a 6-Hour Tour of Chicago\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/09/24/video-3-ord-layover-excursion-a-6-hour-tour-of-chicago/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Chicago version</a> of the One City, Five Hours sprint tours that United used to do in their Hemispheres magazine. Last year, I did the Frankfurt tour while on a long layover between Mumbai and Chicago.  I video’d my results; it’s on the TravelCommons site as “<a title=\"Video #2 – One City, Five Hours: Frankfurt\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/05/01/video-2-one-city-five-hours-frankfurt/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Video #2</a>”. I had such a great time following that tour -- seeing new areas of Frankfurt rather than flipping through my iPad in the United lounge -- that I wanted to offer up a similar tour of Chicago to people with long layovers -- whether planned or not.</li>\r\n 	<li>While the Frankfurt video was a one-day affair -- shot on my iPhone and edited in iMovie on the flight home, the Chicago video turned out to be a lot more work. Of course I had to create the tour rather than following someone else’s. And the constraints of the format -- start and end at ORD, 5 hours long (which I failed; mine clocked in just over 6),  using in only public transit, and trying to show something other than the usual photo op sites -- made for some tough choices.</li>\r\n 	<li>Also, I wanted to provide detailed transit and walking directions -- showing street signs at crossings, building a detailed Google trip map for the show notes -- because that was my one frustration with United’s Frankfurt <a href=\"http://www.hemispheresmagazine.com/2010/03/01/one-city-five-hours-frankfurt/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">article</a> -- I kept getting lost which cut into my already limited time budget.</li>\r\n 	<li>I posted on the TravelCommons site and Facebook page about a month ago. I didn’t push it through the iTunes feed because I thought it would be too big of a download and wouldn’t be of interest to everyone.</li>\r\n 	<li>The TravelCommons Facebook community had some good things to say. Lisa Besso’s comment voiced a common theme --\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>“Wouldn\'t it be great to have these for all major hubs where we all spend too much time?”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>I got to thinking about this... If you think through the top 10 US hubs -- ATL, ORD, DFW, DEN, PHX, MSP, IAH, DTW, EWR, SFO -- how many of these could you do a 5-hour city/neighborhood tour without needing a rental car.\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>San Francisco is an obvious one</li>\r\n 	<li>Newark - take the PATH train to downtown Manhattan and walk up thru TriBeCa and Greenwich Village</li>\r\n 	<li>Atlanta - Downtown and Buckhead via Marta?</li>\r\n 	<li>Denver - You’ve landed in the middle of a buffalo herd. Maybe catch a bus to LoDo?</li>\r\n 	<li>And after that, my voice trails off. Anybody else have any ideas?</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Bob Fenerty and Robby Smith also left comments -- both compared the ORD video to Anthony Bourdain’s “Layover” series. Bob said\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>“Very fun; like watching an amateur version of ‘The Layover’”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Robby liked it because you could knock it off in an afternoon, unlike Bourdain’s 2-3 day layover.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you haven’t seen it already, go to the TravelCommons web site or Facebook page, check it out and leave some comments. I created a new “Video” category on the site -- you can find it on the right-hand nav bar if you want to quickly find last year’s Frankfurt video. And send along your thoughts on other layover tours if you have them.</li>\r\n 	<li>Another <a title=\"Food and Drink Highlights from My Drive South\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/08/14/food-and-drink-highlights-from-my-drive-south/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">blog post</a> follows up on the topic in the last episode about my “great circle” through the Mid South -- I-65 from Chicago to the Gulf Coast, across US-90 and then back up I-55 and 57. Listeners who follow my social media natterings on Twitter and Untappd had seen my food and beer comments along the tour and asked for a summary, which I posted on the site in August -- a city-by-city listing of the restaurants and bars I thought were the best -- along with a link to a Flickr <a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/travelcommons/sets/72157631067493698/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">photo set</a>, pulling together some of my better shots, though probably a bit overdone with Instagram filters. If you’re visiting Nashville, Louisville, Memphis soon, check that out.</li>\r\n 	<li>And finally, a follow-up on episode 100’s other topic -- breaking up with American Airline, I dunno, it’s 1 step forward and 2 steps back. One of my biggest complaints in that rant was the age of AA’s fleet -- the MD-80’s that have been around for 25-30 years -- they’re small, dingy, uncomfortable, and in my experience, more and more prone to maintenance delays. Last month, I flew on a new American 737-800 -- what a great plane! Huge luggage bins, some styling cues from the 787 Dreamliner, and regular electrical outlets in coach. Such a huge upgrade from the MD-80s -- especially the ones picked up with the TWA merger -- those are the worst. So, good forward movement with the planes -- which then gets completely offset (and more) by seats on their old planes coming loose and disgruntled pilots causing flight delays through a work-to-rule campaign. New planes are great, but I have to be able to depend upon them. So I’m completely off American until they get all of this cleared up.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a question, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- use the Voice Memo app on your iPhone or something like Virtual Recorder on your Android phone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://www.musicalley.com/music/listeners/artistdetails.php?BandHash=0e46bba4178825d4602555f523958a28\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Voodoo Dub</a> </em>by Cyrusfx</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Future of Mileage Tracking Tools</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Two years ago, in episode 85, I talked to Michael Komarnitsky, the founder and CEO of GoMiles, about his year-old mileage/awards points tracking service. Last month, Michael sold GoMiles to Traxo, a trip aggregation/travel management site. I caught up with him last week to get his thoughts on where the mileage/awards tracking market is going. I first asked him to remind us what GoMiles did for the traveler...</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music --<a href=\"http://www.nimbitmusic.com/saurabbhargava\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><em>Not Enough (Inside You, Part 2)</em></a> by Saurab Bhargava</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Bursting the Travel Bubble with Local Food and Craft Beer</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>As I mentioned earlier, those who follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"http://untappd.com/user/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Untappd</a> (a sort of FourSquare for beer nerds), see a lot of posts and pictures of food and beer. Though I guess it shouldn’t be surprising -- I think travel, food, and alcohol (beer, wine, scotch,...) naturally go together; if you’re interested in one, you’re interested in them all. It’s all about being interested in exploring cultures. One of the main reasons we travel (voluntarily, that is) is to experience other people, other cultures. And if you want to get deeper into a culture, it’s much easier to eat and drink with them than to marry them.  Not to say marrying is a bad thing, just a bit more permanent -- or perhaps that’s the old-school Catholic in me talking...</li>\r\n 	<li>In <a title=\"Podcast #90 — More Comfortable Traveling in India; Tipping Towards Android?\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/05/22/podcast-90-more-comfortable-traveling-in-india-tipping-towards-android/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">past</a> <a title=\"Podcast #83 – Business Travel in India; iPad vs. Netbook\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2010/05/28/podcast-83-business-travel-in-india-ipad-vs-netbook/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">episodes</a>, we’ve talked about how frequent travelers often <a title=\"Up in the Air — Captures Life in the “Travel Bubble”\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2009/12/15/up-in-the-air-captures-life-in-the-travel-bubble/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">float</a> above the day-to-day activities, the reality of the cities their visiting in a “travel bubble” -- kinda like Glenda the Good Witch in “Wicked”. In <a title=\"Podcast #64 – Escaping the Travel Bubble; Mark’s Travel Tips\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2008/04/29/podcast-64-escaping-the-travel-bubble-marks-travel-tips/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">one</a> of those episodes, I talked about how I like using public transportation, skipping the airport limos or private car services as a way to pop that bubble.</li>\r\n 	<li>But in my trips this summer to SF and through the Mid-South, the search for local food and beer popped the travel bubble, and it was a helluva lot more fun than wrestling with a fare card machine in Brooklyn\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_1124\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/IMG_1281.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1124\" title=\"San Francisco Farmers\' Market\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/IMG_1281-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> San Francisco Farmers\' Market Near UN Plaza[/caption]</li>\r\n 	<li>Now this is more than just skipping restaurant chains for local joints. Searching out a SF farmers market took me through the Tenderloin district and had me dodging cup-shaking panhandlers much further up Market St than I’d been before. Searching for Nashville hot chicken took me way off the usual Broadway tourist drag, to Bolton’s, a squat cinder block building in what felt like a bit of a sketch section of East Nashville for some very good and very spicy fried chicken. We ate under a wheezing air conditioner as a steady stream of neighborhood folk banged the screen door, ordering the Friday hot chicken and catching up with the owner.</li>\r\n 	<li>Hunting down local beers has been just as rewarding. Walking from SF’s Union Square to the edge of the SoMa neighborhood to find the <a href=\"http://www.citybeerstore.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">City Beer Store</a> took me a good bit out of the tourist zone. I ended up drinking local Magnolia beer, talking with a group of guys who were stopping off for one on their way to the bus stop. Following Google Maps off I-65 in Birmingham, AL, I found myself parking in what looked like a neighborhood trying hard to re-develop so I could try a beer at <a href=\"http://www.avondalebrewing.com/index-full.php\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Avondale Brewing</a>.</li>\r\n 	<li>I keep a running list of web clippings in Evernote of the restaurants, beer/wine bars, breweries I want to visit. I have folders for the cities I visit often or plan to visit soon. I also use social media -- in <a title=\"Podcast #96 — Eating and Drinking with Social Media; Frequent Flier Alliances\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/01/05/podcast-96-dining-with-social-media-frequent-flier-alliances/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">episode #96</a>, I talked about how I use Untappd, <a href=\"http://www.foodspotting.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Foodspotting</a> and Chowhound -- as well as asking the Twitter-verse for ideas.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_1125\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/2012-07-14-14.08.12.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1125\" title=\"Mash Tanks at Avondale Brewing\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/2012-07-14-14.08.12-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Mash Tanks at Avondale Brewing, Birmingham, AL[/caption]</li>\r\n 	<li>But that’s just so I have a starting point for my searches. Searching new places forces me to break that travel bubble wall between visitor (me) and residents. In Louisville, I headed over to the Louisville Beer Store in the downtown NuLu district. Drinking a couple of beers and talking to the owner, he said I had to visit his other place, the <a href=\"http://holygralelouisville.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Holy Grale</a>, an old church converted to a beer bar. While there, talking to some folks at the bar, a guy told me I had to visit New Orleans’<a href=\"http://http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bywater,_New_Orleans\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"> Bywater</a> District if I wanted to latest in good local non-tourist food there. Three days later, I was driving into New Orleans. Have been there many times, but never heard of the Bywater District. A little web searching on the iPhone and I found my way there, ending up having dinner at the bar of <a href=\"http://maurepasfoods.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Maurepas Foods</a>, a very local place with very good food.</li>\r\n 	<li>Frequent travelers tend toward a rhythm, a pattern that allows them to quickly and efficiently navigate the hassles of today’s travel experience. There’s a thin line, though, between, efficiency and a rut, and the travel bubble straddles that line. It takes some effort to pop that bubble; good food and beer can help...</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917626811171154.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #101</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://music.mevio.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Mevio’s Music Alley</a> and from <a href=\"http://www.saurabbhargava.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Saurab Bhargava</a>’s album <em>Chromatique</em></li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_101.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #101 — Future of Mileage Tracking Tools; Searching for Local Food and Craft Beer','','inherit','closed','closed','','1119-revision-v1','','','2018-07-03 20:14:30','2018-07-04 01:14:30','',1119,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/07/03/1119-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2052,1,'2018-07-03 20:15:51','2018-07-04 01:15:51','[caption id=\"attachment_879\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"207\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/DSC_85711.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-879\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/DSC_85711-207x300.jpg\" alt=\"On Tap in Edinburgh © Mark Peacock\" width=\"207\" height=\"300\" /></a> On Tap in Edinburgh © Mark Peacock[/caption]\r\n\r\nFinishing up my annual 2-week travel sabbatical in an unseasonably warm <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Chicago\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Chicago</a>. In this episode, a listener asks about if and when to use travel <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Compression stockings\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compression_stockings\" rel=\"wikipedia\">compression socks</a>, we discern the popularity of in-flight Wi-Fi service from Gogo\'s <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Initial public offering\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initial_public_offering\" rel=\"wikipedia\">IPO</a> filing, and dissect a recent article on the best airports for tech users.  We look at the new wave of social media dining apps such as <a href=\"http://untappd.com\">Untappd</a> which helps you drink beer socially, how they\'re taking advantage of smartphone cameras and location services. We wrap up with a look at how airline alliances are changing the frequent flier\'s experience. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_96.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_96.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript from TravelCommons podcast #96:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Happy New Year to everyone! Returning to work after my 2-week sabbatical from travel in unseasonably warm Chicagoland.  I was out in Phoenix for the first two weeks of December, where it was only 10-15 degrees warmer than Chicago.  Then I did a quick up-and-back to DC and was home for good by the evening of the 16<sup>th</sup>.  Though we didn’t have a white Christmas, I did have an amazing run of on-time and even early arrivals at ORD – a pleasant change from past December travel odysseys.</li>\r\n 	<li>Indeed, my trips at the beginning of December were some of the easiest, most pleasant I’ve had in a while – combination of mild weather and light crowds made travel a breeze – short security lines, non-cranky TSA screeners, plenty of overhead space, and the reappearance of that rarities of rarities – an empty middle seat.</li>\r\n 	<li>It feels like from the Tues or Weds after Thanksgiving to the week before Christmas is a bit of tourist dead zone and so the only ones traveling are the professional road warriors trying to close those last few deals, tie up those remaining loose ends before everyone and everything shuts down for the holidays.</li>\r\n 	<li>Or it’s frequent fliers doing one last <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Frequent-flyer program\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequent-flyer_program\" rel=\"wikipedia\">mileage run</a> to get them to the next status level.  I didn’t need to make any mileage runs per se, but I did need those last two Phoenix trips to re-up my Hilton Diamond status and to get me back on United’s red carpet with 1K status.</li>\r\n 	<li>Making 1K -- or more importantly, getting the systemwide upgrades that come with United’s top status was very timely.  I’m heading over to <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Beijing\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beijing\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Beijing</a> in January and being able to confirm an upgrade on United’s 14-hr Chicago-to-Beijing flight – which was one of the best Christmas presents I received…</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://www.nimbitmusic.com/saurabbhargava\">Exit</a></em> by Saurab Bhargava</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>All the bridge music on this episode from Saurab Bhargava’s new album Chromatique.  Saurab is a friend and long time TravelCommons listener. I’m happy to feature his music. That cut is Exit, which interestingly enough is the first cut on the album.  Here\'s a <a href=\"http://www.nimbitmusic.com/saurabbhargava/#music/chromatique\">link</a> to where you can buy them.</li>\r\n 	<li>Tony White wrote in to ask about travel compression socks…\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I am not sure if you covered this topic or not.  Do you have a preference of a minimum amount of hours of travel you choose to wear travel socks?</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Tony, thanks for the question. No, I haven\'t covered this topic before -- because I’ve never used travel socks.  <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Compression stockings\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compression_stockings\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Compression socks</a> squeeze the feet and calves – to improve circulation, which helps fight feet swelling and <a href=\"http://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/health/health-topics/topics/dvt/\">deep vein thrombosis</a> – blood clots in the lower legs.  When I’ve flown business class on long flights, I haven’t felt much swelling – even on the 16-17 hour NYC to J’burg flight.  I think the lie-flat or near-flat seats reduce the distance between head and feet and so minimize the blood pooling in the lower legs.  Even in coach, I haven\'t felt the need for them on an 8-hour flight to London or Honolulu. However, on a flight back from Hong Kong last year, I wasn\'t able to score an upgrade.  During the 15 hours in coach I definitely felt swelling in my calves.  It was a full flight, so I couldn\'t lift my legs up for any length of time. Indeed, I saw a couple of guys lying on the floor in front of the exit row with their legs in the air.  On my upcoming trip to Beijing, I mentioned that I scored an upgrade to business class on the way out, but my upgrade for the flight back is still waitlisted.  If that second upgrade doesn’t come through this week, I think I\'ll be doing some After Christmas shopping for compression socks.</li>\r\n 	<li>Two days before Christmas, <a href=\"http://gogoair.com/\">Gogo</a>, the dominant in-flight <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Wi-Fi\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi-Fi\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Wi-Fi</a> provider, <a href=\"http://venturebeat.com/2011/12/23/gogo-ipo/\">filed paperwork</a> with the SEC for a $100 million IPO.  The filing provided some interesting stats.  Gogo sells Wi-Fi on 4,000 flights a day on 9 out of the 10 North American airlines that offer Wi-Fi, though Delta represents 45% and bankrupt American 18% of their volume.  Gogo is available on over 1,100 planes, which they say is 85 percent of all Wi-Fi-enabled planes in North America, and they’re signed up to add another 525 soon. Impressive on the face of it, but if you start <a href=\"http://www.splatf.com/2011/12/gogo-ipo-filing/\">tumbling the numbers</a>, you quickly find that only 3-4% of passengers are buying – which syncs up with my experience.  We’ve talked about this in past episodes – while in-flight Wi-Fi has good use cases, especially when you don’t want to go radio-silent for 3-4 hours in the middle of the day, it’s a niche offering.  I’ve used it maybe half-a-dozen times in 2011.  From my anecdotal observations – looking over people’s shoulders walking to and from the aft toilets – most people are enjoying the unconnected time to watch a movie, read an e-book, or play Angry Birds (amazing how long that streak has been going).  Doesn’t seem that most folks are willing to pay $10-12 a flight to update their Facebook status.</li>\r\n 	<li>A <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"PC World (magazine)\" href=\"http://www.pcworld.com\" rel=\"homepage\">PCWorld</a> article on the <a href=\"http://www.pcworld.com/article/246001/20_best_us_airports_for_tech_travelers.html\">best airports for tech users</a> ranks the 40busiest US airports on outlet availability, speed of Wi-Fi service (either free or paid), and strength of cellular signal – a good set of <a href=\"http://www.pcworld.com/article/246181/best_airports_for_tech_users_how_the_40_busiest_us_airports_stack_up.html\">basic tech criteria</a>.  DFW ranks #1 – it wasn’t #1 on any single category, but earned above average marks across the board.  ORD, my usual hangout, ranked #34 out of 40, which I think is about right.  Finding an available outlet at a gate is like a grown-up Easter Egg hunt – complete with crawling around and looking under chairs. Everyone wants to board with a full battery pack, especially iPhone users. Apple still hasn’t gotten iOS 5 battery life back to where it needs to be.  And for me, cellular signal is much more important than Wi-Fi service because I tend to use my iDevices much more than my laptop in airports.  At ORD, the AT&amp;T 3G service is unbelievably bad.  I’ll have 4 or 5 bars on my iPhone but can’t pull anything – e-mail, web pages, nothing!  Which is the reason I travel with a Verizon 4G hotspot.  After I’ve gotten tired of watching the “Checking for Mail” circle impotently spin, I fire up the hotspot and – Bam! – I’ve got mail.</li>\r\n 	<li>But I dunno, hitting #1 for having visible electrical outlets and decent data signal seems damning with faint praise.  To really be a top tech airport, I think you need to have something like Qantas’s <a href=\"http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204296804577123004175940104.html\">set up</a> at Sydney airport – using RFID technology to make check-in, bag check, and plane boarding 5-second events.  I posted a link to the <a href=\"http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204296804577123004175940104.html\">WSJ article</a> on the TravelCommons Facebook page and Lisa Besso commented, saying that it’s a great system.  I’d be willing to suffer through ORD’s lousy AT&amp;T service is United did something like this.</li>\r\n 	<li>Early in December, when my family was trying to get their Christmas shopping done, they started bugging me for gift ideas. Sitting in my room in the Scottsdale Hilton Garden Inn (which, by the way, isn’t a bad place), paging through the <a href=\"http://usatoday.com\">USAToday</a>, listening to a podcast on my wireless Motorola headset, I thought a wireless speaker would be nice.  Now I realize that a lot of alarm clocks in hotel rooms have plugs that let you play your iDevice through their speakers, but the quality is marginal at best (except for those few hotels that stock iHome alarm clocks) and you’re stuck in the bedroom – not great if you’re in something like an Embassy or Doubletree Suites.  I asked the Twitter-verse for suggestions and ended up with a Jawbone <a href=\"http://jawbone.com/charitywater\">Jambox</a> under the tree.  My wife said she bought the special edition yellow one so that I wouldn’t miss it when packing up, though the fact that Jawbone donates $50 from each purchase to <a href=\"http://www.charitywater.org/\">charity:water</a> didn’t hurt.  The Jambox isn’t cheap, but it puts out a lot of sound from a small package and has the easiest Bluetooth pairing I’ve seen.  Again, not cheap, but I recommend it.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://www.nimbitmusic.com/saurabbhargava\">Yours in Mine</a> </em>by Saurab Bhargava</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Dining With Social Media</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Finding interesting places to eat is always a challenge for frequent travelers. When you’re traveling to the same place a lot – like I do to Scottsdale – it’s easy to fall into a rut, going to the same places near the office or the hotel every trip.</li>\r\n 	<li>When I started traveling, way before Al Gore invented the Internet, you’d rely on recommendations – from folks in the local office, the front desk clerk, a cab driver, a bartender, whomever you ran into.  Or maybe you pulled a top restaurant list out of the local paper or a guidebook.  I remember one project in SF in the early ‘90’s.  The project partner had a list of the top 100 restaurants in SF.  Don’t know where he got it, but it was a Bible to him.  We started at #1 for the project kick-off dinner and started working our way through the list.</li>\r\n 	<li>And so here we are, 20 years and billions of dollars of venture capital investment later, and we still rely on personal recommendations.  But on steroids.  The first wave of food social media was powered by the multiplier effect -- you weren’t limited to people you physically meet; you could tap the expertise and passion of a broad group of diners and foodies for broad set of recommendations. <a href=\"http://chowhound.chow.com/boards\">Chowhound</a>, a food discussion board I’ve mentioned in <a title=\"Podcast #22 – Other Side of the Ticket Counter; Finding Local Food\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/11/13/podcast-22-other-side-of-the-ticket-counter-finding-local-food/\">past</a> <a title=\"Podcast #41 – Full to the Brim, What’s the One Thing…?\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2006/06/30/podcast-41-full-to-the-brim-whats-the-one-thing/\">episodes</a>, is a perfect example of that.  I’m still a heavy user.  On my second trip to Phoenix last month, I was on my own for dinner every night.  Around 5 every night, I’ve hit the Phoenix board on Chowhound and start paging through the entries until I found a restaurant that hit my tastebuds.  One night I ended up eating a green chile pork stew in a post Scottsdale place; the next night I had a bowl of pho at a Vietnamese strip mall in Mesa.</li>\r\n 	<li>But if the first wave was discussion board-based, the current wave is smartphone-based, using the GPS and camera to build on the personal recommendations</li>\r\n 	<li>Those of you following my Twitter feed may notice the occasional tweet that I’ve earned a badge from Untappd. Untappd is a social media app for beer drinkers, or should I say people who enjoy drinking good beer.  Instead of checking in locations on FourSquare, I check in my beer on <a href=\"http://untappd.com/\">Untappd</a>.  It keeps track of the beers I drink and where I’m drinking them, allows friends to see what I’m drinking, and awards badges for “achievements” like checking in 200 unique beers or drinking a stout on Nov 3<sup>rd</sup>, what someone designated <a href=\"http://www.stoutday.com/\">International Stout Day</a>.</li>\r\n 	<li>The whole check-in thing gets me out of my hotel room to search out local beers wherever I’m traveling.  On that same trip to Phoenix, I found Papago Brewery in a Scottsdale strip mall and tried their El Robusto Porter. It wasn’t the best beer I’ve had, but it was something different.</li>\r\n 	<li>But when I’m on the road, the best use of Untappd for me is discovering bars with interesting beer selections. One night in New York a couple months back, I was wandering around Midtown looking for a good beer bar.  Standing in some ersatz Irish bar, I fired up Untappd; it used the iPhone GPS to display nearby check-ins.  Paging down, I saw interesting beers being checked in at place called the <a href=\"http://www.rattlenhumbarnyc.com/\">Rattle and Hum</a>. A couple of clicks and I have it on the Maps app –it’s about a 10 block walk.  It was a pretty nondescript place.  Indeed, I walked right past it the first time.  I go inside – it’s jammed and has a great beer selection.  A great find courtesy of a dozen people I’ve never met, and through GPS I quickly found it.</li>\r\n 	<li>Another app I use is <a href=\"http://foodspotting.com/\">Foodspotting</a>.  It also uses the iPhone GPS.  But rather than just showing a list of near-by restaurants, it cycles through pictures of dishes from those restaurants uploaded by diners.  Reading recommendations and menus are helpful in choosing a restaurant. Actually seeing the dishes takes a whole lot of the guesswork out.  My favorite use case is to park my car in a restaurant-rich neighborhood – I’ve done this in old town Scottsdale and in downtown Bethesda, MD – fire up Foodspotting and start cycling through the pictures.  Pretty quick, I get a sense of what place near-by is best matching my hunger pangs, and then map it with a couple of clicks – or screen presses, I guess.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’d like to personally thank all the venture capital firms that have invested billions of dollars over the years in all of this to help me quickly vector in on the perfect cheeseburger.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://www.nimbitmusic.com/saurabbhargava\">Through The Line</a> </em>by Saurab Bhargava</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Frequent Flier Alliances</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I mentioned earlier that I’d returned to 1K status on United; returning to the red boarding carpet at the United gates.  I also keep the 100% mileage matching – getting a bonus mile for each mile flown.  The 2012 changes to United’s awards program appear to reduce the bonus match for the mid-tier Premiere Exec’s –down to 50 or 70% depending on which of the new mid-tiers you hit.</li>\r\n 	<li>The interesting thing is – I didn’t fly that much on United last year – less than a dozen flights.  Just enough status miles to make Premiere – United’s entry-level status tier, which you can get the same benefits – free luggage, early boarding – free for a year by signing up for United’s Visa card.</li>\r\n 	<li>I earned most of the 100,000 qualifying miles on US Air and Lufthansa.  So I really didn’t earn 1K on United as much as I earned it on the Star Alliance.  Not that this is anything new – some chunk of my 2.5 million lifetime American Advantage miles are from British Airways.  However, with airlines rationalizing/reducing their number of seats; more tightly coordinating flight schedules and code sharing with their alliance partners, these partnerships – Star Alliance, OneWorld, and SkyTeam – become more of a way of life for frequent travelers, especially in those critical areas of status recognition, mileage credit, and mileage redemption.</li>\r\n 	<li>It’s not a simple situation.  There are core alliance members – United, Lufthansa, US Air in Star Alliance; Delta and AirFrance in SkyTeam; American and BA in OneWorld.  And then there are the “other” partners, and these can move around.  Aer Lingus, for example, was part of the OneWorld alliance with American, but left in 2007 to go independent, and is now matched up with JetBlue and United (but not Continental), while Virgin Atlantic is matched up with Continental, but not United.  There are promiscuous partners – Hawaiian Airlines and Jet Airways seem to be on everyone’s list – while others like Southwest remain single or assemble their own little group like Emirates.</li>\r\n 	<li>International travelers been stringing these beads for 20+ years to assemble their itineraries, but to have to do this domestically is a newer thing.  Because United and US Air are both Star Alliance partners, United has cut back their Chicago-Phoenix service, relying instead on code-sharing with US Air. I book the flight directly with US Air instead – one less step to traverse when something goes wrong – but give them my United Mileage Plus number instead of a Dividend Miles number (do I have one of those?). I still get to pre-board and, most importantly, concentrate my miles to maximize my status level.</li>\r\n 	<li>The downside? US Air doesn’t take the free drink coupons United sends out to its 1K members.  If they could get that redemption thing integrated, then it would truly be a seamless partnership</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids991762681117115.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #96</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>As I mentioned earlier, all the bridge music on this episode from Saurab Bhargava’s new album Chromatique.  The tracks were <em>Exit</em>, <em>Yours In Mine</em>, and <em>Through The Line</em>.  Here\'s a <a href=\"http://www.nimbitmusic.com/saurabbhargava/#music/chromatique\">link</a> where you can buy the songs or the entire album.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_96.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #96 — Eating and Drinking with Social Media; Frequent Flier Alliances','','inherit','closed','closed','','880-revision-v1','','','2018-07-03 20:15:51','2018-07-04 01:15:51','',880,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/07/03/880-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2053,1,'2018-07-03 20:16:34','2018-07-04 01:16:34','Recorded in the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago after a week of skiing in Colorado. In this episode, we talk about some of the difficulties faced by today\'s frequent travelers. A listener gives a blow-by-blow account of the myriad of lines he faced trying to get home from Newark. Another listener relates about the challenges of attending a business conference in a hotel full of 50+ year-old women. We talk about how lengthy delays on the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"New York City\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/new-york-city\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\">New York</a>-to-Chicago route are giving regular travelers a dazed look that might be called the \"733-Mile Stare\". And I have to comment on a couple of recent <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Transportation Security Administration\" href=\"http://www.tsa.gov\" rel=\"homepage\">TSA</a> incidents. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_63.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_63.mp3\"]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #63:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none\">\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Recorded in the TravelCommons studios outside <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Chicago\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/chicago\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\">Chicago, IL</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Just got back from a week\'s skiing in Breckenridge and A-Basin in Colorado</li>\r\n 	<li>Wanted to check out the TSA\'s new Diamond Lane program that its <a href=\"http://www.tsa.gov/blog/2008/03/diamonds-are-passengers-best-friend.html\">blog claims</a> is a huge success. However, the security line with the old system was much shorter.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://ghosts.nin.com/main/home\"><em>3 Ghosts I</em></a> by <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Nine Inch Nails\" href=\"http://www.nin.com/\" rel=\"homepage\">Nine Inch Nails</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none\">\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li><a title=\"Evan Sparks\' blog on the 5-passenger AA ORD-LHR flight\" href=\"http://evansparks.wordpress.com/2008/03/05/and-emissions-trading-would-have-helped-here-how/\">Evan Sparks’ Aviation Policy Blog</a> picked up the <a title=\"Daily Telegraph story on the AA ORD-LHR flight\" href=\"http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?view=DETAILS&amp;grid=&amp;xml=/news/2008/03/05/nplane105.xml\">story</a> of a Feb 9th <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"American Airlines\" href=\"http://www.aa.com/\" rel=\"homepage\">American Airlines</a> flight from Chicago to London that carried only 5 passengers and the resulting ruckus raised by environmental groups.</li>\r\n 	<li><a title=\"Gary Learned\'s blog\" href=\"http://seat6d.tumblr.com/\">Gary Learned</a> tells about attending a business conference in the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Opryland Hotel\" href=\"http://hotels.lonelyplanet.com/usa/nashville-r2102050/gaylord-opryland-resort-and-spa-p1045418/\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\">Gaylord Opryland</a> at the same time as 5,000 <a title=\"The Red Hat Society Website\" href=\"http://www.redhatsociety.com/\">Red Hats</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a title=\"Saurab Bhargava\'s web site\" href=\"http://www.saurabbhargava.com/\">Saurab Bhargava</a> sends along his account of a particularly bad day in Newark</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/buy_album.php?id=08E508A6096F11910641E13331B70EED6DFA5BB929282F731E19BBAFA8F08FFD686BD99DD86BA0D5E844DD5536E1AEFB\" rel=\"nofollow\"><em>Ghost Hardware</em></a> by Burial</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>The 733-Mile Stare\r\n</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none\">\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>During the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Vietnam War\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Vietnam War</a>, the “thousand-yard stare” described the dazed look, the unfocused straight-ahead gaze of the front-line soldier</li>\r\n 	<li>Regular travelers on the Chicago-to-New York run are starting to develop their own dazed look as they try to fight through delays, and cancellations to get home or get to an important meeting</li>\r\n 	<li>Call it the \"733-mile stare\" – the flight mileage between ORD and LGA</li>\r\n 	<li><a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"USA Today\" href=\"http://www.usatoday.com/\" rel=\"homepage\">USA Today</a> <a title=\"10 Busiest Round Trip Routes\" href=\"http://www.usatoday.com/travel/flights/2008-03-25-air-routes_N.htm\">article</a> said that, based on 2007 passenger counts, the ORD-LGA route was the 3rd busiest in the country</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a title=\"MP3 Download\" href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/download_track.php?id=0E74C6FEB7390D18D02B4B399668093172F6C8CC66DDC09D90A3BF7DDA436823CFAC859AE2B2C73E46A278A4950E1030\">Lonely Dog Blues</a></em> by <a title=\"Tobin James\' Web Site\" href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/label.php?id=2A3449F03E7B8462FF74407B60F0C4B0A30A0CBE880C61DE37E3B342387F0643\">Tobin James</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>TSA Can\'t Help Themselves</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none\">\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>USA Today <a title=\"Flier angry after TSA makes her remove nipple ring\" href=\"http://www.usatoday.com/travel/flights/2008-03-28-tsa-nipple-ring_N.htm\">article</a> on TSA forcing a woman to remove nipple rings</li>\r\n 	<li>TSA posted a statement on their <a title=\"TSA Press Release Justifying Nipple Ring Removal\" href=\"http://www.tsa.gov/press/happenings/lubbock.shtm\">website</a> and <a title=\"TSA Blog Post Justifying Nipple Ring Removal\" href=\"http://www.tsa.gov/blog/2008/03/tsa-and-piercings.html\">blog</a> saying that the screeners “properly followed procedures” and that they were “acting to protect the passengers and crews of the flights departing Lubbock that day.”</li>\r\n 	<li>Watched a TSA officer in Chicago-O\'Hare help a confused Chinese couple find their connecting flight.</li>\r\n 	<li>Why can\'t the TSA act more like the ORD officer and spend less time justifying stupid decisions like those in Lubbock?</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing\r\n</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917633.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://iodapromonet.com/index.php\">IODA Promonet</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Feedback at comments@travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_63.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>\r\nTags: <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/travel+podcast\">travel podcast</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/travel\">travel</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/business+travel\">business travel</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/Denver\">Denver</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/TSA\">TSA</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/American+Airlines\">American Airlines</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/friends+of+the+earth\">Friends of the Earth</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/Opryland\">Opryland</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/cNewark\">Newark</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/LaGuardia\">LaGuardia</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/o\'hare\">O\'Hare</a>\r\n<div class=\"zemanta-pixie\" style=\"margin-top: 10px; height: 15px;\"><img class=\"zemanta-pixie-img\" style=\"border: none; float: right;\" src=\"http://img.zemanta.com/pixy.gif?x-id=aa29d1f3-3a80-48f0-bf3a-1eb132b2ef3b\" alt=\"\" /></div>','Podcast #63 - The 733-Mile Stare; TSA Can\'t Help Themselves','','inherit','closed','closed','','97-revision-v1','','','2018-07-03 20:16:34','2018-07-04 01:16:34','',97,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/07/03/97-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2054,1,'2018-07-03 20:17:21','2018-07-04 01:17:21','Recorded in the TravelCommons studio after a week in the Bay Area and a tough struggle to get back home in the teeth of the first winter storm of the season. A listener passes along the story of a trip as an inadvertent stowaway. I walk through the timelime of my efforts to get home to Chicago and, in the Travel Tech segment, talk about two wireless applications I use every day. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_49.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_49.mp3\"]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #49:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Recorded in the TravelCommons studios outside Chicago</li>\r\n 	<li>Back in the Bay Area and had a real struggle getting home in the face of the \"thunder snow\" storms that blew across the US this week</li>\r\n 	<li>Had good hearty German food with a couple of TravelCommons contributors at San Francisco\'s <a href=\"http://www.suppenkuche.com/welcome.html\">Suppenküche</a> restaurant</li>\r\n 	<li>Having some very good Hertz karma</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://www.saurabbhargava.com/downloads/04%20The%20Void.mp3\"><em>The Void</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.saurabbhargava.com/\">Saurab Bhargava</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Tested the free WiFi at the <a href=\"http://www.monaco-chicago.com\">Hotel Monaco</a> in Chicago using the <a href=\"http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest/\">Speakeasy Speed Test</a> and found it a bit slow</li>\r\n 	<li>Received my new Nikon D-80 digital SLR, which made me check out the travel pictures on <a href=\"http://richmanwisco.blogspot.com/\"><em>This Blog Title for Sale</em></a> and <a href=\"http://fricksworld.blogspot.com/\"><em>Frick\'s World</em></a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/travelcommons/330509240/\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the <em>View from Here</em> out the window of the SFO Marriott</li>\r\n 	<li>The FBI <a href=\"http://www.theindychannel.com/news/10419665/detail.html\">dropped its case</a> against the researcher who created a web site that printed valid-looking boarding passes</li>\r\n 	<li>A listener sends in a story about flying to Chicago without a ticket</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://www.saurabbhargava.com/downloads/03%20Aware.mp3\"><em>Aware</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.saurabbhargava.com/\">Saurab Bhargava</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Bad weather threatening Chicago made me try to get home early, but the airlines were already canceling flights</li>\r\n 	<li>A timeline of my efforts to get home to Chicago amid cancellations and delays</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://www.saurabbhargava.com/downloads/08%20Conversations.mp3\"><em>Conversations</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.saurabbhargava.com/\">Saurab Bhargava</a></li>\r\n 	<li>On my struggle to get home, I used my BlackBerry to check <a href=\"http://aa2go.com\">American Airlines\' mobile flight status site</a> at least 50 times</li>\r\n 	<li>Yahoo! Mobile has a good <a href=\"http://mobile.yahoo.com/resource_center/wapdir/Travel_and_Transportation/Flight_Information/Airlines/\">listing</a> of other airline status sites</li>\r\n 	<li>To download Google Maps, point the browser on your mobile device to <a href=\"http://www.google.com/gmm\">http://www.google.com/gmm</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917611.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://www.saurabbhargava.com/\">Saurab Bhargava</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_49.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #49 - Working Hard to Get Home, Wireless Apps That Help','','inherit','closed','closed','','61-revision-v1','','','2018-07-03 20:17:21','2018-07-04 01:17:21','',61,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/07/03/61-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2056,1,'2018-07-03 20:32:14','2018-07-04 01:32:14','[caption id=\"attachment_2044\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/2018-06-22-20.15.56-1.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2044\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/2018-06-22-20.15.56-1-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> What\'s the Chinese character for \"wurst\"?[/caption]\r\n\r\nA last-minute trip to Pune, India provided more than enough material for this episode -- a visa dash, <em>very</em> hands-on airport security, worthless rupee notes, flight disruptions.... We also read the obits for a couple of smart bag companies and hear why MSP\'s T2 isn\'t so ghetto after all. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_142.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n<iframe src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/453397353&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"></iframe><!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #142:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none\">\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from a rather jumbled up TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. Been playing “furniture jenga” for the past couple of weeks as we do a lot of deferred maintenance before trying to relocate the studios into Chicago. The recording studio is jammed full and the regular production bay has been taken out of commission, hence me missing my usual end-of-month posting and slipping into the first week of July.</li>\r\n 	<li>June’s travel cadence was almost a complete rinse-and-repeat of May’s. A few day drives up to Wisconsin, pretty easy -- until I had to make a last-minute trip to Germany with about 36-hour notice -- leave Weds night, land Thurs morning, meet with the client Thursday afternoon, lead a workshop Friday, fly home Saturday morning. I booked an eye-bleedingly expensive last-minute business class ticket because I needed to work and get some sleep on the flight over, which United was kind enough to convert into a 1st-class seat on the Weds flight, giving me more than enough space to eat and work simultaneously.</li>\r\n 	<li>Though shorter notice than last month’s India trip, it was a bit easier -- no last-minute visa dash, and I got to walk out of the airport in Frankfurt this time rather than transferring to another 8-hour flight. And thanks to Google Maps, I was able to find a non-stop local train from the station in the basement of Frankfurt airport (just finding that was a win for Google) to the station just outside the client’s headquarters for about €8. And because the train ticketing machine could do contactless, I just dinged it with my iPhone rather than having to wrestle with my US Amex card not having a PIN. All in all, it was as painless as a last-minute 8,000-mile trip can be. And not having to push furniture around for 3 days -- that was a nice bonus...</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://www.nimbitmusic.com/saurabbhargava\">Exit</a></em> by Saurab Bhargava</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>The bumper music is from Saurab Bhargava, a long-time listener and longer-time friend and colleague who said in a note “Took some time on the cruise to catch up on some TravelCommons podcasts. Glad you\'re still keeping the rhythm on that!” I have been working to keep a regular monthly cadence. I’ve managed to keep it up for a year, which is why I’m a bit put off with myself for missing my June deadline. Though I have to tell you, the combination of a flash trip to Germany, studio reconfiguration, and the World Cup hasn’t helped -- especially the World Cup. Maybe now that we’re in the knockout round, and there’s only 2 games in a day, I’ll double up on episodes in July.</li>\r\n 	<li>Being World Cup-literate was very handy while in Germany. Good for making small talk with the client, and Friday night in Frankfurt, every bar seemed to have found half-a-dozen big screens a piece and stood them up everywhere inside and outside. It was easy to keep up with the matches, even when walking down the street. And this wasn’t even for the German team; it was Nigeria-Iceland and Switzerland-Serbia -- not even in Germany’s group. Good reminder of how big a deal it is outside the US.</li>\r\n 	<li>Long-time listener Geoffrey Greene pinged me on Facebook to let me know that TravelCommons is on the new Google Podcast app. I think I mentioned some time back, that I’ve been having problems with Google Play picking up TravelCommons ever since they started with podcasts. I’d filled out all the forms, submitted the RSS feed, but there was some error somewhere. Finding someone somewhere in Google support to resolve that has been on my to-do list for a while. I still need to get that sorted, but I’m glad to know the problem hasn’t carried over to the new app. I also need to update the website with links to all the places where people can subscribe to TravelCommons. Yet another line on the to-do list.</li>\r\n 	<li>Continuing the ongoing thread about smart bags… in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/05/31/podcast-141-when-you-think-the-tsa-is-bad-expired-money/\">last episode</a>, I talked about 2 smart bag manufacturers going out of business. But this past week, sifting through the PR pitches in the TravelCommons mail bag, I saw this -- “First Smart Luggage Safe to Fly Worldwide”. Plevo -- who thinks of these names? -- claims to be “the first smart luggage in the world that was designed to be safe to fly around the world” with “a removable battery pack, GPS Tracking, Smart Lock, Built-in Digital Scale, distance alerts and a Travel Assistant App”. OK, this is interesting. I head over to the inevitable Kickstarter page and check out the video. Very slick, but it didn’t answer what is the key question for smart bags -- how does Plevo provide location tracking and connect to the app when the battery pack is removed? Briana, the PR person, told me the Plevo bags have 2 batteries -- a removable Lithium battery pack and a permanent Nickel battery that takes over when the Li battery is removed. Elegant solution. The risk, though, is when that elegance breaks down in the face of a harried gate agent that doesn’t have the time to work through the safety differences between Li and Ni batteries, and just finds it easier to say “No”.  No problem getting past the UA gate agent in Frankfurt with my low-tech leather bag I bought in Italy a few years ago on our 25th anniversary. Checking my passport, she looked down -- “That’s a great bag!” she said. Sometimes, simpler is better.</li>\r\n 	<li>Another PR pitch that caught my eye, but in a less positive way, was titled “A Travel Hack Every Business Traveler Should Know About”. I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty much done with growth hackers and lifehackers and especially travel hackers. I’m old enough to remember when a hack was an ugly bit of code that managed to get a system running, but it wasn’t something that anyone was proud of. But I digress. I was killing time in United’s very nice new ORD Polaris business class lounge waiting for my Frankfurt flight, so I took the bail and opened it up. “With more executives turning to food as a biohack,” I’m regretting this click already, “an airport meal that fits with your food lifestyle can be hard to find.” The pitch was for Ample, a powdered, rehydrateable drinkable meal that’s TSA-compliant and “packed with on-trend ingredients like MCTs from coconut oil, fiber, probiotics, micronutrients from chlorella, and protein from grass-fed whey and collagen.” MCT’s, a Google search tells me, are medium-chain triglycerides that are good for you in a whole bunch of ways, I guess. Ample reduces decision fatigue -- “Just like Zuck never needs to decide what to wear, deciding what to eat at an airport is a piece of decision fatigue that you just don\'t need” and makes it easier to follow “a ketogenic lifestyle”. Feeling the onset of buzzword fatigue, I set my phone down, walked over to the bar, abandoned any hope of achieving ketosis, and pointed to the Revolution Brewing Anti-Hero IPA draft handle.</li>\r\n 	<li>I didn’t mention this in the last episode, but before I headed out on my India trip, I hit the AT&amp;T website to see if India is included in their international plan (it is) and to get one of their international data packages since I wasn’t going to have time to figure out the local SIM market. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the data limit of their base $60 offering has been bumped from 300MB to 1GB sometime in the last 2 years, and way up from 100MB back in 2011. The last time I used AT&amp;T’s international plan was March 2016 during a 4-day trip in Iceland. I turned cellular access off on just about every app except Google Maps and only just squeaked through without topping the 300MB limit. 1GB is a whole lot roomier. I had no problems in India. I don’t know when that limit got bumped up, but good on AT&amp;T for making that base plan much more realistic.</li>\r\n 	<li>This is about the time when I have the obligatory craft beer comment, and you’d think that coming off a trip to Germany, I’d be full of them. And at the end of the day on Thursday, after taking a 20-minute nap to catch my second or third wind, I headed out looking exactly for that -- a bierstube with some local beers and maybe a wurst platter. Walking around near the hotel, there wasn’t much -- it was kind of a dead plaza with some pizza and doner kebab places. One nice restaurant, but nothing special. I pulled out Google Maps and started scrolling around, zooming in and out looking for some beer places. I don’t see many of those, but I keep seeing wineries pop up south of me. So I start walking. 15 minutes, I hit one of the wineries and walk in. What’s with all the wineries, I ask? “You’re in one of the largest wine producing regions in Germany,” the guy nicely explained. “I’m getting ready for a big wine dinner right now, but stop in tomorrow if you want to taste our wines.” I’d be leaving for Frankfurt tomorrow, but I thanked him. So now, I’m looking for wine. It was after 5, and all the other wineries I passed looked closed, but I found a restaurant with what looked like a good local wine list and a nice courtyard. The waitress made some recommendations -- “This is a nice wine from our next door neighbor” We struggled a little bit figuring out the translation for the daily special on the chalkboard, but with dueling smartphone searches, we figured it out -- it was a local dish of spit-roasted pork. It was a nice surprise; a nice ending to the first day of what I thought was going to be just a Bataan death march of a trip. Which it would’ve been if I’d stayed in my hotel room rehydrating my third bottle of Ample ketogenic liquid so I could slog through another 50 emails on my way to zero inbox nirvana.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> or our new <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a> at travelcommons -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://www.nimbitmusic.com/saurabbhargava\">Yours in Mine</a> </em>by Saurab Bhargava</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Sleeping in Business Class</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>The trips to India and Germany put me back in international business class for the first time in a while. In past episodes, I’ve been ambivalent about the value for money for business class -- is the extra space and the better meal service worth the $5-6,000 uplift? On these trips, I kinda think “Yes” because neither trip had any slack in the schedule -- I’d be landing and going directly into meetings, so those lie-flat business class seats were what I really needed so I could get some amount of quality sleep.</li>\r\n 	<li>The start of both trips was a United flight from ORD to FRA. United has made a big deal of upgrading their international business class, even giving it a new name -- Polaris. And they’re building separate Polaris lounges, so it you’re flying international First or Business, no more slumming in the crowded Red Carpet clubs. The Polaris lounges are nice -- everything is free, good beer and wine selection -- even a cocktail list -- and a nice buffet. They’re probably the best business class lounges I hit on either trip, better than the variety of Lufthansa lounges I hit in Frankfurt. And United is pushing them. The Polaris lounge in ORD is in the far concourse, Concourse C, which makes sense; that’s where most of United’s international flights leave from. In June, though, my flight to Frankfurt left out of the B Concourse, so I went into the Red Carpet club right across from the gate. The guy at the desk looked at my ticket -- “Oh, you want to go to the Polaris Lounge. It’s about a 15 minute walk, but it’s definitely worth it.”</li>\r\n 	<li>Walking on the United Triple 7 though, you could feel United packing as much as they could in that business class with a 2-4-2 seat configuration -- only just slightly less packed than the 3-4-3 seating on the other side of the curtain in Economy. I’d never seen two middle seats in business class before. Business class in the Lufthansa A380s between Frankfurt and India were 2-2-2 -- no middle seats. Now on my flight over in May, I had the aisle and a couple had the middle two seats, so not too bad, and they were good folks. I felt bad for the husband during the night, though, when I had my seat in full lie-flat mode. When he needed to hit the toilet at night, he had to kinda vault me.</li>\r\n 	<li>On my last flight back from Frankfurt, a good-sized guy had the middle seat next to me. I’d guess he was a former football player, still in good shape, but taller and broader than the average build that United had sized these Polaris pods for. He said that the flight over, he couldn’t lay flat; it felt like a coffin, so he just reclined it and catnapped, which kinda defeated the purpose of hitting the ground running. I could sympathize. I’m not that broad, but I had to drop the aisle-side armrest in my pod to be able to comfortably fit. Kinda nice service, but definitely snug.</li>\r\n 	<li>The Lufthansa business class lounges lacked the pizzazz of United’s lounges. But one thing that was new to me… the flights to India went out of a different concourse in Frankfurt -- on the last episode, I talked about the mile-&amp;-a-half walk and the extra security -- and here, they boarded the A380 first and business classes straight from the lounge. No walking down to the gate and idling around with the economy classes. They had gate agents and kiosks in the club. I set down my beer, had my boarding pass scanned, and then walked down the jetway to the plane.</li>\r\n 	<li>Once on-board, Lufthansa’s A380s were definitely roomier than United’s Triple 7’s -- maybe a bigger plane, maybe because they weren’t trying to cram 8 people across. With only 6 people across, the lie-flat seats were more comfortable, not as “coffin-ish” as United’s. Indeed, maybe a little too comfortable. A guy in the row behind me on my flight to Delhi must’ve gone deep in sleep because he snored -- loudly, really sawing wood -- for a couple of hours. The one time I wouldn’t have minded a little turbulence to jostle the plane. But good for him, he was definitely getting his money’s worth from Business Class.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://www.nimbitmusic.com/saurabbhargava\">Through The Line</a> </em>by Saurab Bhargava</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Changes from Chinese Tourists</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>The last night I was in Germany, Friday night, I stayed in Frankfurt so I’d have just a 20-minute cab ride to the airport for my 8:15am flight. It had been 7 years since I’d walked around the city -- back in 2011 when I did a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/05/01/video-2-one-city-five-hours-frankfurt/\">TravelCommons video</a>, retracing the “1 City, 5 Hours” article about Frankfurt in United’s seatback magazine. I walked down to the Romer area - a big open square surrounded by historic buildings -- and over to a sausage, a wurst stand that I’d eaten at in the past. They’d added a new menu -- the German menu was now on the ground, under the ordering window; the new menu at eye level was in Chinese.</li>\r\n 	<li>The travel press has been talking about the impending growth of Chinese tourism for a bit now. I’ve seen the tour buses full of Chinese travelers for some time -- back in 2016 when my son and I were in Iceland, it became a bit of a game for us to stay ahead of those buses, and then in Frankfurt, down in a basement applewine pub off some back alley, I was the only non-Asian person there. But now, I’m noticing more, I dunno, systemic or infrastructure changes being driven by Chinese tourism. Not just Chinese menus but also seeing restaurants in the US and Europe accepting Chinese mobile payments - WeChat and Alipay. And some folks in the hotel business will say that the push to provide free wi-fi, mobile apps and family-sized rooms is driven, in some ways, by what Chinese tourists are looking for. Makes sense. Last year, there were 130 million outbound Chinese tourists, a big number but only 10% of the population of China. There’s a lot more to come.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #142</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a> and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from from Saurab Bhargava’s album <em>Chromatique</em>.  The tracks were <em>Exit</em>, <em>Yours In Mine</em>, and <em>Through The Line</em>.  Here\'s a <a href=\"http://www.nimbitmusic.com/saurabbhargava/#music/chromatique\">link</a> where you can buy the songs or the entire album.</li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_142.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #142 — Sleeping in Business Class; Changes from Chinese Tourists','','inherit','closed','closed','','2042-revision-v1','','','2018-07-03 20:32:14','2018-07-04 01:32:14','',2042,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/07/03/2042-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2057,1,'2018-07-03 20:38:34','2018-07-04 01:38:34','[caption id=\"attachment_2044\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/2018-06-22-20.15.56-1.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2044\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/2018-06-22-20.15.56-1-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> What\'s the Chinese character for \"wurst\"?[/caption]\r\n\r\nAnother last-minute trip, this time to Frankfurt, Germany, All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_142.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n<iframe src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/453397353&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"></iframe><!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #142:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from a rather jumbled up TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. Been playing “furniture jenga” for the past couple of weeks as we do a lot of deferred maintenance before trying to relocate the studios into Chicago. The recording studio is jammed full and the regular production bay has been taken out of commission, hence me missing my usual end-of-month posting and slipping into the first week of July.</li>\r\n 	<li>June’s travel cadence was almost a complete rinse-and-repeat of May’s. A few day drives up to Wisconsin, pretty easy -- until I had to make a last-minute trip to Germany with about 36-hour notice -- leave Weds night, land Thurs morning, meet with the client Thursday afternoon, lead a workshop Friday, fly home Saturday morning. I booked an eye-bleedingly expensive last-minute business class ticket because I needed to work and get some sleep on the flight over, which United was kind enough to convert into a 1st-class seat on the Weds flight, giving me more than enough space to eat and work simultaneously.</li>\r\n 	<li>Though shorter notice than last month’s India trip, it was a bit easier -- no last-minute visa dash, and I got to walk out of the airport in Frankfurt this time rather than transferring to another 8-hour flight. And thanks to Google Maps, I was able to find a non-stop local train from the station in the basement of Frankfurt airport (just finding that was a win for Google) to the station just outside the client’s headquarters for about €8. And because the train ticketing machine could do contactless, I just dinged it with my iPhone rather than having to wrestle with my US Amex card not having a PIN. All in all, it was as painless as a last-minute 8,000-mile trip can be. And not having to push furniture around for 3 days -- that was a nice bonus...</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://www.nimbitmusic.com/saurabbhargava\">Exit</a></em> by Saurab Bhargava</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>The bumper music is from Saurab Bhargava, a long-time listener and longer-time friend and colleague who said in a note “Took some time on the cruise to catch up on some TravelCommons podcasts. Glad you\'re still keeping the rhythm on that!” I have been working to keep a regular monthly cadence. I’ve managed to keep it up for a year, which is why I’m a bit put off with myself for missing my June deadline. Though I have to tell you, the combination of a flash trip to Germany, studio reconfiguration, and the World Cup hasn’t helped -- especially the World Cup. Maybe now that we’re in the knockout round, and there’s only 2 games in a day, I’ll double up on episodes in July.</li>\r\n 	<li>Being World Cup-literate was very handy while in Germany. Good for making small talk with the client, and Friday night in Frankfurt, every bar seemed to have found half-a-dozen big screens a piece and stood them up everywhere inside and outside. It was easy to keep up with the matches, even when walking down the street. And this wasn’t even for the German team; it was Nigeria-Iceland and Switzerland-Serbia -- not even in Germany’s group. Good reminder of how big a deal it is outside the US.</li>\r\n 	<li>Long-time listener Geoffrey Greene pinged me on Facebook to let me know that TravelCommons is on the new Google Podcast app. I think I mentioned some time back, that I’ve been having problems with Google Play picking up TravelCommons ever since they started with podcasts. I’d filled out all the forms, submitted the RSS feed, but there was some error somewhere. Finding someone somewhere in Google support to resolve that has been on my to-do list for a while. I still need to get that sorted, but I’m glad to know the problem hasn’t carried over to the new app. I also need to update the website with links to all the places where people can subscribe to TravelCommons. Yet another line on the to-do list.</li>\r\n 	<li>Continuing the ongoing thread about smart bags… in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/05/31/podcast-141-when-you-think-the-tsa-is-bad-expired-money/\">last episode</a>, I talked about 2 smart bag manufacturers going out of business. But this past week, sifting through the PR pitches in the TravelCommons mail bag, I saw this -- “First Smart Luggage Safe to Fly Worldwide”. Plevo -- who thinks of these names? -- claims to be “the first smart luggage in the world that was designed to be safe to fly around the world” with “a removable battery pack, GPS Tracking, Smart Lock, Built-in Digital Scale, distance alerts and a Travel Assistant App”. OK, this is interesting. I head over to the inevitable Kickstarter page and check out the video. Very slick, but it didn’t answer what is the key question for smart bags -- how does Plevo provide location tracking and connect to the app when the battery pack is removed? Briana, the PR person, told me the Plevo bags have 2 batteries -- a removable Lithium battery pack and a permanent Nickel battery that takes over when the Li battery is removed. Elegant solution. The risk, though, is when that elegance breaks down in the face of a harried gate agent that doesn’t have the time to work through the safety differences between Li and Ni batteries, and just finds it easier to say “No”.  No problem getting past the UA gate agent in Frankfurt with my low-tech leather bag I bought in Italy a few years ago on our 25th anniversary. Checking my passport, she looked down -- “That’s a great bag!” she said. Sometimes, simpler is better.</li>\r\n 	<li>Another PR pitch that caught my eye, but in a less positive way, was titled “A Travel Hack Every Business Traveler Should Know About”. I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty much done with growth hackers and lifehackers and especially travel hackers. I’m old enough to remember when a hack was an ugly bit of code that managed to get a system running, but it wasn’t something that anyone was proud of. But I digress. I was killing time in United’s very nice new ORD Polaris business class lounge waiting for my Frankfurt flight, so I took the bail and opened it up. “With more executives turning to food as a biohack,” I’m regretting this click already, “an airport meal that fits with your food lifestyle can be hard to find.” The pitch was for Ample, a powdered, rehydrateable drinkable meal that’s TSA-compliant and “packed with on-trend ingredients like MCTs from coconut oil, fiber, probiotics, micronutrients from chlorella, and protein from grass-fed whey and collagen.” MCT’s, a Google search tells me, are medium-chain triglycerides that are good for you in a whole bunch of ways, I guess. Ample reduces decision fatigue -- “Just like Zuck never needs to decide what to wear, deciding what to eat at an airport is a piece of decision fatigue that you just don\'t need” and makes it easier to follow “a ketogenic lifestyle”. Feeling the onset of buzzword fatigue, I set my phone down, walked over to the bar, abandoned any hope of achieving ketosis, and pointed to the Revolution Brewing Anti-Hero IPA draft handle.</li>\r\n 	<li>I didn’t mention this in the last episode, but before I headed out on my India trip, I hit the AT&amp;T website to see if India is included in their international plan (it is) and to get one of their international data packages since I wasn’t going to have time to figure out the local SIM market. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the data limit of their base $60 offering has been bumped from 300MB to 1GB sometime in the last 2 years, and way up from 100MB back in 2011. The last time I used AT&amp;T’s international plan was March 2016 during a 4-day trip in Iceland. I turned cellular access off on just about every app except Google Maps and only just squeaked through without topping the 300MB limit. 1GB is a whole lot roomier. I had no problems in India. I don’t know when that limit got bumped up, but good on AT&amp;T for making that base plan much more realistic.</li>\r\n 	<li>This is about the time when I have the obligatory craft beer comment, and you’d think that coming off a trip to Germany, I’d be full of them. And at the end of the day on Thursday, after taking a 20-minute nap to catch my second or third wind, I headed out looking exactly for that -- a bierstube with some local beers and maybe a wurst platter. Walking around near the hotel, there wasn’t much -- it was kind of a dead plaza with some pizza and doner kebab places. One nice restaurant, but nothing special. I pulled out Google Maps and started scrolling around, zooming in and out looking for some beer places. I don’t see many of those, but I keep seeing wineries pop up south of me. So I start walking. 15 minutes, I hit one of the wineries and walk in. What’s with all the wineries, I ask? “You’re in one of the largest wine producing regions in Germany,” the guy nicely explained. “I’m getting ready for a big wine dinner right now, but stop in tomorrow if you want to taste our wines.” I’d be leaving for Frankfurt tomorrow, but I thanked him. So now, I’m looking for wine. It was after 5, and all the other wineries I passed looked closed, but I found a restaurant with what looked like a good local wine list and a nice courtyard. The waitress made some recommendations -- “This is a nice wine from our next door neighbor” We struggled a little bit figuring out the translation for the daily special on the chalkboard, but with dueling smartphone searches, we figured it out -- it was a local dish of spit-roasted pork. It was a nice surprise; a nice ending to the first day of what I thought was going to be just a Bataan death march of a trip. Which it would’ve been if I’d stayed in my hotel room rehydrating my third bottle of Ample ketogenic liquid so I could slog through another 50 emails on my way to zero inbox nirvana.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> or our new <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a> at travelcommons -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://www.nimbitmusic.com/saurabbhargava\">Yours in Mine</a> </em>by Saurab Bhargava</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Sleeping in Business Class</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>The trips to India and Germany put me back in international business class for the first time in a while. In past episodes, I’ve been ambivalent about the value for money for business class -- is the extra space and the better meal service worth the $5-6,000 uplift? On these trips, I kinda think “Yes” because neither trip had any slack in the schedule -- I’d be landing and going directly into meetings, so those lie-flat business class seats were what I really needed so I could get some amount of quality sleep.</li>\r\n 	<li>The start of both trips was a United flight from ORD to FRA. United has made a big deal of upgrading their international business class, even giving it a new name -- Polaris. And they’re building separate Polaris lounges, so it you’re flying international First or Business, no more slumming in the crowded Red Carpet clubs. The Polaris lounges are nice -- everything is free, good beer and wine selection -- even a cocktail list -- and a nice buffet. They’re probably the best business class lounges I hit on either trip, better than the variety of Lufthansa lounges I hit in Frankfurt. And United is pushing them. The Polaris lounge in ORD is in the far concourse, Concourse C, which makes sense; that’s where most of United’s international flights leave from. In June, though, my flight to Frankfurt left out of the B Concourse, so I went into the Red Carpet club right across from the gate. The guy at the desk looked at my ticket -- “Oh, you want to go to the Polaris Lounge. It’s about a 15 minute walk, but it’s definitely worth it.”</li>\r\n 	<li>Walking on the United Triple 7 though, you could feel United packing as much as they could in that business class with a 2-4-2 seat configuration -- only just slightly less packed than the 3-4-3 seating on the other side of the curtain in Economy. I’d never seen two middle seats in business class before. Business class in the Lufthansa A380s between Frankfurt and India were 2-2-2 -- no middle seats. Now on my flight over in May, I had the aisle and a couple had the middle two seats, so not too bad, and they were good folks. I felt bad for the husband during the night, though, when I had my seat in full lie-flat mode. When he needed to hit the toilet at night, he had to kinda vault me.</li>\r\n 	<li>On my last flight back from Frankfurt, a good-sized guy had the middle seat next to me. I’d guess he was a former football player, still in good shape, but taller and broader than the average build that United had sized these Polaris pods for. He said that the flight over, he couldn’t lay flat; it felt like a coffin, so he just reclined it and catnapped, which kinda defeated the purpose of hitting the ground running. I could sympathize. I’m not that broad, but I had to drop the aisle-side armrest in my pod to be able to comfortably fit. Kinda nice service, but definitely snug.</li>\r\n 	<li>The Lufthansa business class lounges lacked the pizzazz of United’s lounges. But one thing that was new to me… the flights to India went out of a different concourse in Frankfurt -- on the last episode, I talked about the mile-&amp;-a-half walk and the extra security -- and here, they boarded the A380 first and business classes straight from the lounge. No walking down to the gate and idling around with the economy classes. They had gate agents and kiosks in the club. I set down my beer, had my boarding pass scanned, and then walked down the jetway to the plane.</li>\r\n 	<li>Once on-board, Lufthansa’s A380s were definitely roomier than United’s Triple 7’s -- maybe a bigger plane, maybe because they weren’t trying to cram 8 people across. With only 6 people across, the lie-flat seats were more comfortable, not as “coffin-ish” as United’s. Indeed, maybe a little too comfortable. A guy in the row behind me on my flight to Delhi must’ve gone deep in sleep because he snored -- loudly, really sawing wood -- for a couple of hours. The one time I wouldn’t have minded a little turbulence to jostle the plane. But good for him, he was definitely getting his money’s worth from Business Class.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://www.nimbitmusic.com/saurabbhargava\">Through The Line</a> </em>by Saurab Bhargava</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Changes from Chinese Tourists</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>The last night I was in Germany, Friday night, I stayed in Frankfurt so I’d have just a 20-minute cab ride to the airport for my 8:15am flight. It had been 7 years since I’d walked around the city -- back in 2011 when I did a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/05/01/video-2-one-city-five-hours-frankfurt/\">TravelCommons video</a>, retracing the “1 City, 5 Hours” article about Frankfurt in United’s seatback magazine. I walked down to the Romer area - a big open square surrounded by historic buildings -- and over to a sausage, a wurst stand that I’d eaten at in the past. They’d added a new menu -- the German menu was now on the ground, under the ordering window; the new menu at eye level was in Chinese.</li>\r\n 	<li>The travel press has been talking about the impending growth of Chinese tourism for a bit now. I’ve seen the tour buses full of Chinese travelers for some time -- back in 2016 when my son and I were in Iceland, it became a bit of a game for us to stay ahead of those buses, and then in Frankfurt, down in a basement applewine pub off some back alley, I was the only non-Asian person there. But now, I’m noticing more, I dunno, systemic or infrastructure changes being driven by Chinese tourism. Not just Chinese menus but also seeing restaurants in the US and Europe accepting Chinese mobile payments - WeChat and Alipay. And some folks in the hotel business will say that the push to provide free wi-fi, mobile apps and family-sized rooms is driven, in some ways, by what Chinese tourists are looking for. Makes sense. Last year, there were 130 million outbound Chinese tourists, a big number but only 10% of the population of China. There’s a lot more to come.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #142</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a> and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from from Saurab Bhargava’s album <em>Chromatique</em>.  The tracks were <em>Exit</em>, <em>Yours In Mine</em>, and <em>Through The Line</em>.  Here\'s an Amazon <a href=\"https://www.amazon.com/Chromatique-Saurab-Bhargava/dp/B004R7W3O8\">link </a>where you can buy the album.</li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_142.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #142 — Sleeping in Business Class; Changes from Chinese Tourists','','inherit','closed','closed','','2042-revision-v1','','','2018-07-03 20:38:34','2018-07-04 01:38:34','',2042,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/07/03/2042-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2058,1,'2018-07-03 20:43:34','2018-07-04 01:43:34','[caption id=\"attachment_2044\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/2018-06-22-20.15.56-1.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2044\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/2018-06-22-20.15.56-1-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> What\'s the Chinese character for \"wurst\"?[/caption]\r\n\r\nYet another last-minute long-distance trip, this time to Frankfurt, Germany, lets me check out United Airlines\' new business class service, and think again about the value for those expensive lie-flat seats. Seeing a new Chinese menu at a favorite wurst stand in the old part of Frankfurt reminds me of the changes driven by the new wave of Chinese tourists. I also review recent PR pitches for a new smart bag and a business traveler\'s biohack. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_142.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n<iframe src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/453397353&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"></iframe><!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #142:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from a rather jumbled up TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. Been playing “furniture jenga” for the past couple of weeks as we do a lot of deferred maintenance before trying to relocate the studios into Chicago. The recording studio is jammed full and the regular production bay has been taken out of commission, hence me missing my usual end-of-month posting and slipping into the first week of July.</li>\r\n 	<li>June’s travel cadence was almost a complete rinse-and-repeat of May’s. A few day drives up to Wisconsin, pretty easy -- until I had to make a last-minute trip to Germany with about 36-hour notice -- leave Weds night, land Thurs morning, meet with the client Thursday afternoon, lead a workshop Friday, fly home Saturday morning. I booked an eye-bleedingly expensive last-minute business class ticket because I needed to work and get some sleep on the flight over, which United was kind enough to convert into a 1st-class seat on the Weds flight, giving me more than enough space to eat and work simultaneously.</li>\r\n 	<li>Though shorter notice than last month’s India trip, it was a bit easier -- no last-minute visa dash, and I got to walk out of the airport in Frankfurt this time rather than transferring to another 8-hour flight. And thanks to Google Maps, I was able to find a non-stop local train from the station in the basement of Frankfurt airport (just finding that was a win for Google) to the station just outside the client’s headquarters for about €8. And because the train ticketing machine could do contactless, I just dinged it with my iPhone rather than having to wrestle with my US Amex card not having a PIN. All in all, it was as painless as a last-minute 8,000-mile trip can be. And not having to push furniture around for 3 days -- that was a nice bonus...</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://www.nimbitmusic.com/saurabbhargava\">Exit</a></em> by Saurab Bhargava</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>The bumper music is from Saurab Bhargava, a long-time listener and longer-time friend and colleague who said in a note “Took some time on the cruise to catch up on some TravelCommons podcasts. Glad you\'re still keeping the rhythm on that!” I have been working to keep a regular monthly cadence. I’ve managed to keep it up for a year, which is why I’m a bit put off with myself for missing my June deadline. Though I have to tell you, the combination of a flash trip to Germany, studio reconfiguration, and the World Cup hasn’t helped -- especially the World Cup. Maybe now that we’re in the knockout round, and there’s only 2 games in a day, I’ll double up on episodes in July.</li>\r\n 	<li>Being World Cup-literate was very handy while in Germany. Good for making small talk with the client, and Friday night in Frankfurt, every bar seemed to have found half-a-dozen big screens a piece and stood them up everywhere inside and outside. It was easy to keep up with the matches, even when walking down the street. And this wasn’t even for the German team; it was Nigeria-Iceland and Switzerland-Serbia -- not even in Germany’s group. Good reminder of how big a deal it is outside the US.</li>\r\n 	<li>Long-time listener Geoffrey Greene pinged me on Facebook to let me know that TravelCommons is on the new Google Podcast app. I think I mentioned some time back, that I’ve been having problems with Google Play picking up TravelCommons ever since they started with podcasts. I’d filled out all the forms, submitted the RSS feed, but there was some error somewhere. Finding someone somewhere in Google support to resolve that has been on my to-do list for a while. I still need to get that sorted, but I’m glad to know the problem hasn’t carried over to the new app. I also need to update the website with links to all the places where people can subscribe to TravelCommons. Yet another line on the to-do list.</li>\r\n 	<li>Continuing the ongoing thread about smart bags… in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/05/31/podcast-141-when-you-think-the-tsa-is-bad-expired-money/\">last episode</a>, I talked about 2 smart bag manufacturers going out of business. But this past week, sifting through the PR pitches in the TravelCommons mail bag, I saw this -- “First Smart Luggage Safe to Fly Worldwide”. Plevo -- who thinks of these names? -- claims to be “the first smart luggage in the world that was designed to be safe to fly around the world” with “a removable battery pack, GPS Tracking, Smart Lock, Built-in Digital Scale, distance alerts and a Travel Assistant App”. OK, this is interesting. I head over to the inevitable Kickstarter page and check out the video. Very slick, but it didn’t answer what is the key question for smart bags -- how does Plevo provide location tracking and connect to the app when the battery pack is removed? Briana, the PR person, told me the Plevo bags have 2 batteries -- a removable Lithium battery pack and a permanent Nickel battery that takes over when the Li battery is removed. Elegant solution. The risk, though, is when that elegance breaks down in the face of a harried gate agent that doesn’t have the time to work through the safety differences between Li and Ni batteries, and just finds it easier to say “No”.  No problem getting past the UA gate agent in Frankfurt with my low-tech leather bag I bought in Italy a few years ago on our 25th anniversary. Checking my passport, she looked down -- “That’s a great bag!” she said. Sometimes, simpler is better.</li>\r\n 	<li>Another PR pitch that caught my eye, but in a less positive way, was titled “A Travel Hack Every Business Traveler Should Know About”. I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty much done with growth hackers and lifehackers and especially travel hackers. I’m old enough to remember when a hack was an ugly bit of code that managed to get a system running, but it wasn’t something that anyone was proud of. But I digress. I was killing time in United’s very nice new ORD Polaris business class lounge waiting for my Frankfurt flight, so I took the bail and opened it up. “With more executives turning to food as a biohack,” I’m regretting this click already, “an airport meal that fits with your food lifestyle can be hard to find.” The pitch was for Ample, a powdered, rehydrateable drinkable meal that’s TSA-compliant and “packed with on-trend ingredients like MCTs from coconut oil, fiber, probiotics, micronutrients from chlorella, and protein from grass-fed whey and collagen.” MCT’s, a Google search tells me, are medium-chain triglycerides that are good for you in a whole bunch of ways, I guess. Ample reduces decision fatigue -- “Just like Zuck never needs to decide what to wear, deciding what to eat at an airport is a piece of decision fatigue that you just don\'t need” and makes it easier to follow “a ketogenic lifestyle”. Feeling the onset of buzzword fatigue, I set my phone down, walked over to the bar, abandoned any hope of achieving ketosis, and pointed to the Revolution Brewing Anti-Hero IPA draft handle.</li>\r\n 	<li>I didn’t mention this in the last episode, but before I headed out on my India trip, I hit the AT&amp;T website to see if India is included in their international plan (it is) and to get one of their international data packages since I wasn’t going to have time to figure out the local SIM market. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the data limit of their base $60 offering has been bumped from 300MB to 1GB sometime in the last 2 years, and way up from 100MB back in 2011. The last time I used AT&amp;T’s international plan was March 2016 during a 4-day trip in Iceland. I turned cellular access off on just about every app except Google Maps and only just squeaked through without topping the 300MB limit. 1GB is a whole lot roomier. I had no problems in India. I don’t know when that limit got bumped up, but good on AT&amp;T for making that base plan much more realistic.</li>\r\n 	<li>This is about the time when I have the obligatory craft beer comment, and you’d think that coming off a trip to Germany, I’d be full of them. And at the end of the day on Thursday, after taking a 20-minute nap to catch my second or third wind, I headed out looking exactly for that -- a bierstube with some local beers and maybe a wurst platter. Walking around near the hotel, there wasn’t much -- it was kind of a dead plaza with some pizza and doner kebab places. One nice restaurant, but nothing special. I pulled out Google Maps and started scrolling around, zooming in and out looking for some beer places. I don’t see many of those, but I keep seeing wineries pop up south of me. So I start walking. 15 minutes, I hit one of the wineries and walk in. What’s with all the wineries, I ask? “You’re in one of the largest wine producing regions in Germany,” the guy nicely explained. “I’m getting ready for a big wine dinner right now, but stop in tomorrow if you want to taste our wines.” I’d be leaving for Frankfurt tomorrow, but I thanked him. So now, I’m looking for wine. It was after 5, and all the other wineries I passed looked closed, but I found a restaurant with what looked like a good local wine list and a nice courtyard. The waitress made some recommendations -- “This is a nice wine from our next door neighbor” We struggled a little bit figuring out the translation for the daily special on the chalkboard, but with dueling smartphone searches, we figured it out -- it was a local dish of spit-roasted pork. It was a nice surprise; a nice ending to the first day of what I thought was going to be just a Bataan death march of a trip. Which it would’ve been if I’d stayed in my hotel room rehydrating my third bottle of Ample ketogenic liquid so I could slog through another 50 emails on my way to zero inbox nirvana.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> or our new <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a> at travelcommons -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://www.nimbitmusic.com/saurabbhargava\">Yours in Mine</a> </em>by Saurab Bhargava</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Sleeping in Business Class</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>The trips to India and Germany put me back in international business class for the first time in a while. In past episodes, I’ve been ambivalent about the value for money for business class -- is the extra space and the better meal service worth the $5-6,000 uplift? On these trips, I kinda think “Yes” because neither trip had any slack in the schedule -- I’d be landing and going directly into meetings, so those lie-flat business class seats were what I really needed so I could get some amount of quality sleep.</li>\r\n 	<li>The start of both trips was a United flight from ORD to FRA. United has made a big deal of upgrading their international business class, even giving it a new name -- Polaris. And they’re building separate Polaris lounges, so it you’re flying international First or Business, no more slumming in the crowded Red Carpet clubs. The Polaris lounges are nice -- everything is free, good beer and wine selection -- even a cocktail list -- and a nice buffet. They’re probably the best business class lounges I hit on either trip, better than the variety of Lufthansa lounges I hit in Frankfurt. And United is pushing them. The Polaris lounge in ORD is in the far concourse, Concourse C, which makes sense; that’s where most of United’s international flights leave from. In June, though, my flight to Frankfurt left out of the B Concourse, so I went into the Red Carpet club right across from the gate. The guy at the desk looked at my ticket -- “Oh, you want to go to the Polaris Lounge. It’s about a 15 minute walk, but it’s definitely worth it.”</li>\r\n 	<li>Walking on the United Triple 7 though, you could feel United packing as much as they could in that business class with a 2-4-2 seat configuration -- only just slightly less packed than the 3-4-3 seating on the other side of the curtain in Economy. I’d never seen two middle seats in business class before. Business class in the Lufthansa A380s between Frankfurt and India were 2-2-2 -- no middle seats. Now on my flight over in May, I had the aisle and a couple had the middle two seats, so not too bad, and they were good folks. I felt bad for the husband during the night, though, when I had my seat in full lie-flat mode. When he needed to hit the toilet at night, he had to kinda vault me.</li>\r\n 	<li>On my last flight back from Frankfurt, a good-sized guy had the middle seat next to me. I’d guess he was a former football player, still in good shape, but taller and broader than the average build that United had sized these Polaris pods for. He said that the flight over, he couldn’t lay flat; it felt like a coffin, so he just reclined it and catnapped, which kinda defeated the purpose of hitting the ground running. I could sympathize. I’m not that broad, but I had to drop the aisle-side armrest in my pod to be able to comfortably fit. Kinda nice service, but definitely snug.</li>\r\n 	<li>The Lufthansa business class lounges lacked the pizzazz of United’s lounges. But one thing that was new to me… the flights to India went out of a different concourse in Frankfurt -- on the last episode, I talked about the mile-&amp;-a-half walk and the extra security -- and here, they boarded the A380 first and business classes straight from the lounge. No walking down to the gate and idling around with the economy classes. They had gate agents and kiosks in the club. I set down my beer, had my boarding pass scanned, and then walked down the jetway to the plane.</li>\r\n 	<li>Once on-board, Lufthansa’s A380s were definitely roomier than United’s Triple 7’s -- maybe a bigger plane, maybe because they weren’t trying to cram 8 people across. With only 6 people across, the lie-flat seats were more comfortable, not as “coffin-ish” as United’s. Indeed, maybe a little too comfortable. A guy in the row behind me on my flight to Delhi must’ve gone deep in sleep because he snored -- loudly, really sawing wood -- for a couple of hours. The one time I wouldn’t have minded a little turbulence to jostle the plane. But good for him, he was definitely getting his money’s worth from Business Class.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://www.nimbitmusic.com/saurabbhargava\">Through The Line</a> </em>by Saurab Bhargava</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Changes from Chinese Tourists</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>The last night I was in Germany, Friday night, I stayed in Frankfurt so I’d have just a 20-minute cab ride to the airport for my 8:15am flight. It had been 7 years since I’d walked around the city -- back in 2011 when I did a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/05/01/video-2-one-city-five-hours-frankfurt/\">TravelCommons video</a>, retracing the “1 City, 5 Hours” article about Frankfurt in United’s seatback magazine. I walked down to the Romer area - a big open square surrounded by historic buildings -- and over to a sausage, a wurst stand that I’d eaten at in the past. They’d added a new menu -- the German menu was now on the ground, under the ordering window; the new menu at eye level was in Chinese.</li>\r\n 	<li>The travel press has been talking about the impending growth of Chinese tourism for a bit now. I’ve seen the tour buses full of Chinese travelers for some time -- back in 2016 when my son and I were in Iceland, it became a bit of a game for us to stay ahead of those buses, and then in Frankfurt, down in a basement applewine pub off some back alley, I was the only non-Asian person there. But now, I’m noticing more, I dunno, systemic or infrastructure changes being driven by Chinese tourism. Not just Chinese menus but also seeing restaurants in the US and Europe accepting Chinese mobile payments - WeChat and Alipay. And some folks in the hotel business will say that the push to provide free wi-fi, mobile apps and family-sized rooms is driven, in some ways, by what Chinese tourists are looking for. Makes sense. Last year, there were 130 million outbound Chinese tourists, a big number but only 10% of the population of China. There’s a lot more to come.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #142</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a> and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from from Saurab Bhargava’s album <em>Chromatique</em>.  The tracks were <em>Exit</em>, <em>Yours In Mine</em>, and <em>Through The Line</em>.  Here\'s an Amazon <a href=\"https://www.amazon.com/Chromatique-Saurab-Bhargava/dp/B004R7W3O8\">link </a>where you can buy the album.</li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_142.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #142 — Sleeping in Business Class; Changes from Chinese Tourists','','inherit','closed','closed','','2042-revision-v1','','','2018-07-03 20:43:34','2018-07-04 01:43:34','',2042,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/07/03/2042-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2059,1,'2018-07-03 20:47:23','2018-07-04 01:47:23','[caption id=\"attachment_2044\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/2018-06-22-20.15.56-1.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2044\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/2018-06-22-20.15.56-1-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> What\'s the Chinese character for \"wurst\"?[/caption]\r\n\r\nYet another last-minute long-distance trip, this time to Frankfurt, Germany, lets me check out United Airlines\' new business class service, and think again about the value for those expensive lie-flat seats. Seeing a new Chinese menu at a favorite wurst stand in the old part of Frankfurt reminds me of the changes driven by the new wave of Chinese tourists. I also read recent PR pitches for a new smart bag and a business traveler\'s biohack. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_142.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n<iframe src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/453397353&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"></iframe><!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #142:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from a rather jumbled up TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. Been playing “furniture jenga” for the past couple of weeks as we do a lot of deferred maintenance before trying to relocate the studios into Chicago. The recording studio is jammed full and the regular production bay has been taken out of commission, hence me missing my usual end-of-month posting and slipping into the first week of July.</li>\r\n 	<li>June’s travel cadence was almost a complete rinse-and-repeat of May’s. A few day drives up to Wisconsin, pretty easy -- until I had to make a last-minute trip to Germany with about 36-hour notice -- leave Weds night, land Thurs morning, meet with the client Thursday afternoon, lead a workshop Friday, fly home Saturday morning. I booked an eye-bleedingly expensive last-minute business class ticket because I needed to work and get some sleep on the flight over, which United was kind enough to convert into a 1st-class seat on the Weds flight, giving me more than enough space to eat and work simultaneously.</li>\r\n 	<li>Though shorter notice than last month’s India trip, it was a bit easier -- no last-minute visa dash, and I got to walk out of the airport in Frankfurt this time rather than transferring to another 8-hour flight. And thanks to Google Maps, I was able to find a non-stop local train from the station in the basement of Frankfurt airport (just finding that was a win for Google) to the station just outside the client’s headquarters for about €8. And because the train ticketing machine could do contactless, I just dinged it with my iPhone rather than having to wrestle with my US Amex card not having a PIN. All in all, it was as painless as a last-minute 8,000-mile trip can be. And not having to push furniture around for 3 days -- that was a nice bonus...</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://www.nimbitmusic.com/saurabbhargava\">Exit</a></em> by Saurab Bhargava</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>The bumper music is from Saurab Bhargava, a long-time listener and longer-time friend and colleague who said in a note “Took some time on the cruise to catch up on some TravelCommons podcasts. Glad you\'re still keeping the rhythm on that!” I have been working to keep a regular monthly cadence. I’ve managed to keep it up for a year, which is why I’m a bit put off with myself for missing my June deadline. Though I have to tell you, the combination of a flash trip to Germany, studio reconfiguration, and the World Cup hasn’t helped -- especially the World Cup. Maybe now that we’re in the knockout round, and there’s only 2 games in a day, I’ll double up on episodes in July.</li>\r\n 	<li>Being World Cup-literate was very handy while in Germany. Good for making small talk with the client, and Friday night in Frankfurt, every bar seemed to have found half-a-dozen big screens a piece and stood them up everywhere inside and outside. It was easy to keep up with the matches, even when walking down the street. And this wasn’t even for the German team; it was Nigeria-Iceland and Switzerland-Serbia -- not even in Germany’s group. Good reminder of how big a deal it is outside the US.</li>\r\n 	<li>Long-time listener Geoffrey Greene pinged me on Facebook to let me know that TravelCommons is on the new Google Podcast app. I think I mentioned some time back, that I’ve been having problems with Google Play picking up TravelCommons ever since they started with podcasts. I’d filled out all the forms, submitted the RSS feed, but there was some error somewhere. Finding someone somewhere in Google support to resolve that has been on my to-do list for a while. I still need to get that sorted, but I’m glad to know the problem hasn’t carried over to the new app. I also need to update the website with links to all the places where people can subscribe to TravelCommons. Yet another line on the to-do list.</li>\r\n 	<li>Continuing the ongoing thread about smart bags… in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/05/31/podcast-141-when-you-think-the-tsa-is-bad-expired-money/\">last episode</a>, I talked about 2 smart bag manufacturers going out of business. But this past week, sifting through the PR pitches in the TravelCommons mail bag, I saw this -- “First Smart Luggage Safe to Fly Worldwide”. Plevo -- who thinks of these names? -- claims to be “the first smart luggage in the world that was designed to be safe to fly around the world” with “a removable battery pack, GPS Tracking, Smart Lock, Built-in Digital Scale, distance alerts and a Travel Assistant App”. OK, this is interesting. I head over to the inevitable Kickstarter page and check out the video. Very slick, but it didn’t answer what is the key question for smart bags -- how does Plevo provide location tracking and connect to the app when the battery pack is removed? Briana, the PR person, told me the Plevo bags have 2 batteries -- a removable Lithium battery pack and a permanent Nickel battery that takes over when the Li battery is removed. Elegant solution. The risk, though, is when that elegance breaks down in the face of a harried gate agent that doesn’t have the time to work through the safety differences between Li and Ni batteries, and just finds it easier to say “No”.  No problem getting past the UA gate agent in Frankfurt with my low-tech leather bag I bought in Italy a few years ago on our 25th anniversary. Checking my passport, she looked down -- “That’s a great bag!” she said. Sometimes, simpler is better.</li>\r\n 	<li>Another PR pitch that caught my eye, but in a less positive way, was titled “A Travel Hack Every Business Traveler Should Know About”. I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty much done with growth hackers and lifehackers and especially travel hackers. I’m old enough to remember when a hack was an ugly bit of code that managed to get a system running, but it wasn’t something that anyone was proud of. But I digress. I was killing time in United’s very nice new ORD Polaris business class lounge waiting for my Frankfurt flight, so I took the bail and opened it up. “With more executives turning to food as a biohack,” I’m regretting this click already, “an airport meal that fits with your food lifestyle can be hard to find.” The pitch was for Ample, a powdered, rehydrateable drinkable meal that’s TSA-compliant and “packed with on-trend ingredients like MCTs from coconut oil, fiber, probiotics, micronutrients from chlorella, and protein from grass-fed whey and collagen.” MCT’s, a Google search tells me, are medium-chain triglycerides that are good for you in a whole bunch of ways, I guess. Ample reduces decision fatigue -- “Just like Zuck never needs to decide what to wear, deciding what to eat at an airport is a piece of decision fatigue that you just don\'t need” and makes it easier to follow “a ketogenic lifestyle”. Feeling the onset of buzzword fatigue, I set my phone down, walked over to the bar, abandoned any hope of achieving ketosis, and pointed to the Revolution Brewing Anti-Hero IPA draft handle.</li>\r\n 	<li>I didn’t mention this in the last episode, but before I headed out on my India trip, I hit the AT&amp;T website to see if India is included in their international plan (it is) and to get one of their international data packages since I wasn’t going to have time to figure out the local SIM market. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the data limit of their base $60 offering has been bumped from 300MB to 1GB sometime in the last 2 years, and way up from 100MB back in 2011. The last time I used AT&amp;T’s international plan was March 2016 during a 4-day trip in Iceland. I turned cellular access off on just about every app except Google Maps and only just squeaked through without topping the 300MB limit. 1GB is a whole lot roomier. I had no problems in India. I don’t know when that limit got bumped up, but good on AT&amp;T for making that base plan much more realistic.</li>\r\n 	<li>This is about the time when I have the obligatory craft beer comment, and you’d think that coming off a trip to Germany, I’d be full of them. And at the end of the day on Thursday, after taking a 20-minute nap to catch my second or third wind, I headed out looking exactly for that -- a bierstube with some local beers and maybe a wurst platter. Walking around near the hotel, there wasn’t much -- it was kind of a dead plaza with some pizza and doner kebab places. One nice restaurant, but nothing special. I pulled out Google Maps and started scrolling around, zooming in and out looking for some beer places. I don’t see many of those, but I keep seeing wineries pop up south of me. So I start walking. 15 minutes, I hit one of the wineries and walk in. What’s with all the wineries, I ask? “You’re in one of the largest wine producing regions in Germany,” the guy nicely explained. “I’m getting ready for a big wine dinner right now, but stop in tomorrow if you want to taste our wines.” I’d be leaving for Frankfurt tomorrow, but I thanked him. So now, I’m looking for wine. It was after 5, and all the other wineries I passed looked closed, but I found a restaurant with what looked like a good local wine list and a nice courtyard. The waitress made some recommendations -- “This is a nice wine from our next door neighbor” We struggled a little bit figuring out the translation for the daily special on the chalkboard, but with dueling smartphone searches, we figured it out -- it was a local dish of spit-roasted pork. It was a nice surprise; a nice ending to the first day of what I thought was going to be just a Bataan death march of a trip. Which it would’ve been if I’d stayed in my hotel room rehydrating my third bottle of Ample ketogenic liquid so I could slog through another 50 emails on my way to zero inbox nirvana.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> or our new <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a> at travelcommons -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://www.nimbitmusic.com/saurabbhargava\">Yours in Mine</a> </em>by Saurab Bhargava</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Sleeping in Business Class</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>The trips to India and Germany put me back in international business class for the first time in a while. In past episodes, I’ve been ambivalent about the value for money for business class -- is the extra space and the better meal service worth the $5-6,000 uplift? On these trips, I kinda think “Yes” because neither trip had any slack in the schedule -- I’d be landing and going directly into meetings, so those lie-flat business class seats were what I really needed so I could get some amount of quality sleep.</li>\r\n 	<li>The start of both trips was a United flight from ORD to FRA. United has made a big deal of upgrading their international business class, even giving it a new name -- Polaris. And they’re building separate Polaris lounges, so it you’re flying international First or Business, no more slumming in the crowded Red Carpet clubs. The Polaris lounges are nice -- everything is free, good beer and wine selection -- even a cocktail list -- and a nice buffet. They’re probably the best business class lounges I hit on either trip, better than the variety of Lufthansa lounges I hit in Frankfurt. And United is pushing them. The Polaris lounge in ORD is in the far concourse, Concourse C, which makes sense; that’s where most of United’s international flights leave from. In June, though, my flight to Frankfurt left out of the B Concourse, so I went into the Red Carpet club right across from the gate. The guy at the desk looked at my ticket -- “Oh, you want to go to the Polaris Lounge. It’s about a 15 minute walk, but it’s definitely worth it.”</li>\r\n 	<li>Walking on the United Triple 7 though, you could feel United packing as much as they could in that business class with a 2-4-2 seat configuration -- only just slightly less packed than the 3-4-3 seating on the other side of the curtain in Economy. I’d never seen two middle seats in business class before. Business class in the Lufthansa A380s between Frankfurt and India were 2-2-2 -- no middle seats. Now on my flight over in May, I had the aisle and a couple had the middle two seats, so not too bad, and they were good folks. I felt bad for the husband during the night, though, when I had my seat in full lie-flat mode. When he needed to hit the toilet at night, he had to kinda vault me.</li>\r\n 	<li>On my last flight back from Frankfurt, a good-sized guy had the middle seat next to me. I’d guess he was a former football player, still in good shape, but taller and broader than the average build that United had sized these Polaris pods for. He said that the flight over, he couldn’t lay flat; it felt like a coffin, so he just reclined it and catnapped, which kinda defeated the purpose of hitting the ground running. I could sympathize. I’m not that broad, but I had to drop the aisle-side armrest in my pod to be able to comfortably fit. Kinda nice service, but definitely snug.</li>\r\n 	<li>The Lufthansa business class lounges lacked the pizzazz of United’s lounges. But one thing that was new to me… the flights to India went out of a different concourse in Frankfurt -- on the last episode, I talked about the mile-&amp;-a-half walk and the extra security -- and here, they boarded the A380 first and business classes straight from the lounge. No walking down to the gate and idling around with the economy classes. They had gate agents and kiosks in the club. I set down my beer, had my boarding pass scanned, and then walked down the jetway to the plane.</li>\r\n 	<li>Once on-board, Lufthansa’s A380s were definitely roomier than United’s Triple 7’s -- maybe a bigger plane, maybe because they weren’t trying to cram 8 people across. With only 6 people across, the lie-flat seats were more comfortable, not as “coffin-ish” as United’s. Indeed, maybe a little too comfortable. A guy in the row behind me on my flight to Delhi must’ve gone deep in sleep because he snored -- loudly, really sawing wood -- for a couple of hours. The one time I wouldn’t have minded a little turbulence to jostle the plane. But good for him, he was definitely getting his money’s worth from Business Class.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://www.nimbitmusic.com/saurabbhargava\">Through The Line</a> </em>by Saurab Bhargava</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Changes from Chinese Tourists</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>The last night I was in Germany, Friday night, I stayed in Frankfurt so I’d have just a 20-minute cab ride to the airport for my 8:15am flight. It had been 7 years since I’d walked around the city -- back in 2011 when I did a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/05/01/video-2-one-city-five-hours-frankfurt/\">TravelCommons video</a>, retracing the “1 City, 5 Hours” article about Frankfurt in United’s seatback magazine. I walked down to the Romer area - a big open square surrounded by historic buildings -- and over to a sausage, a wurst stand that I’d eaten at in the past. They’d added a new menu -- the German menu was now on the ground, under the ordering window; the new menu at eye level was in Chinese.</li>\r\n 	<li>The travel press has been talking about the impending growth of Chinese tourism for a bit now. I’ve seen the tour buses full of Chinese travelers for some time -- back in 2016 when my son and I were in Iceland, it became a bit of a game for us to stay ahead of those buses, and then in Frankfurt, down in a basement applewine pub off some back alley, I was the only non-Asian person there. But now, I’m noticing more, I dunno, systemic or infrastructure changes being driven by Chinese tourism. Not just Chinese menus but also seeing restaurants in the US and Europe accepting Chinese mobile payments - WeChat and Alipay. And some folks in the hotel business will say that the push to provide free wi-fi, mobile apps and family-sized rooms is driven, in some ways, by what Chinese tourists are looking for. Makes sense. Last year, there were 130 million outbound Chinese tourists, a big number but only 10% of the population of China. There’s a lot more to come.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #142</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a> and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from from Saurab Bhargava’s album <em>Chromatique</em>.  The tracks were <em>Exit</em>, <em>Yours In Mine</em>, and <em>Through The Line</em>.  Here\'s an Amazon <a href=\"https://www.amazon.com/Chromatique-Saurab-Bhargava/dp/B004R7W3O8\">link </a>where you can buy the album.</li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_142.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #142 — Sleeping in Business Class; Changes from Chinese Tourists','','inherit','closed','closed','','2042-revision-v1','','','2018-07-03 20:47:23','2018-07-04 01:47:23','',2042,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/07/03/2042-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2060,1,'2018-07-03 23:38:40','2018-07-04 04:38:40','[caption id=\"attachment_2044\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/2018-06-22-20.15.56-1.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2044\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/2018-06-22-20.15.56-1-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> What\'s the Chinese character for \"wurst\"?[/caption]\r\n\r\nYet another last-minute long-distance trip, this time to Frankfurt, Germany, lets me check out United Airlines\' new business class service, and think again about the value for those expensive lie-flat seats. Seeing a new Chinese menu at a favorite wurst stand in the old part of Frankfurt reminds me of the changes driven by the new wave of Chinese tourists. I also read recent PR pitches for a new smart bag and a business traveler\'s biohack. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_142.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n<iframe src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/467065119&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"></iframe><!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #142:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from a rather jumbled up TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. Been playing “furniture jenga” for the past couple of weeks as we do a lot of deferred maintenance before trying to relocate the studios into Chicago. The recording studio is jammed full and the regular production bay has been taken out of commission, hence me missing my usual end-of-month posting and slipping into the first week of July.</li>\r\n 	<li>June’s travel cadence was almost a complete rinse-and-repeat of May’s. A few day drives up to Wisconsin, pretty easy -- until I had to make a last-minute trip to Germany with about 36-hour notice -- leave Weds night, land Thurs morning, meet with the client Thursday afternoon, lead a workshop Friday, fly home Saturday morning. I booked an eye-bleedingly expensive last-minute business class ticket because I needed to work and get some sleep on the flight over, which United was kind enough to convert into a 1st-class seat on the Weds flight, giving me more than enough space to eat and work simultaneously.</li>\r\n 	<li>Though shorter notice than last month’s India trip, it was a bit easier -- no last-minute visa dash, and I got to walk out of the airport in Frankfurt this time rather than transferring to another 8-hour flight. And thanks to Google Maps, I was able to find a non-stop local train from the station in the basement of Frankfurt airport (just finding that was a win for Google) to the station just outside the client’s headquarters for about €8. And because the train ticketing machine could do contactless, I just dinged it with my iPhone rather than having to wrestle with my US Amex card not having a PIN. All in all, it was as painless as a last-minute 8,000-mile trip can be. And not having to push furniture around for 3 days -- that was a nice bonus...</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://www.nimbitmusic.com/saurabbhargava\">Exit</a></em> by Saurab Bhargava</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>The bumper music is from Saurab Bhargava, a long-time listener and longer-time friend and colleague who said in a note “Took some time on the cruise to catch up on some TravelCommons podcasts. Glad you\'re still keeping the rhythm on that!” I have been working to keep a regular monthly cadence. I’ve managed to keep it up for a year, which is why I’m a bit put off with myself for missing my June deadline. Though I have to tell you, the combination of a flash trip to Germany, studio reconfiguration, and the World Cup hasn’t helped -- especially the World Cup. Maybe now that we’re in the knockout round, and there’s only 2 games in a day, I’ll double up on episodes in July.</li>\r\n 	<li>Being World Cup-literate was very handy while in Germany. Good for making small talk with the client, and Friday night in Frankfurt, every bar seemed to have found half-a-dozen big screens a piece and stood them up everywhere inside and outside. It was easy to keep up with the matches, even when walking down the street. And this wasn’t even for the German team; it was Nigeria-Iceland and Switzerland-Serbia -- not even in Germany’s group. Good reminder of how big a deal it is outside the US.</li>\r\n 	<li>Long-time listener Geoffrey Greene pinged me on Facebook to let me know that TravelCommons is on the new Google Podcast app. I think I mentioned some time back, that I’ve been having problems with Google Play picking up TravelCommons ever since they started with podcasts. I’d filled out all the forms, submitted the RSS feed, but there was some error somewhere. Finding someone somewhere in Google support to resolve that has been on my to-do list for a while. I still need to get that sorted, but I’m glad to know the problem hasn’t carried over to the new app. I also need to update the website with links to all the places where people can subscribe to TravelCommons. Yet another line on the to-do list.</li>\r\n 	<li>Continuing the ongoing thread about smart bags… in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/05/31/podcast-141-when-you-think-the-tsa-is-bad-expired-money/\">last episode</a>, I talked about 2 smart bag manufacturers going out of business. But this past week, sifting through the PR pitches in the TravelCommons mail bag, I saw this -- “First Smart Luggage Safe to Fly Worldwide”. Plevo -- who thinks of these names? -- claims to be “the first smart luggage in the world that was designed to be safe to fly around the world” with “a removable battery pack, GPS Tracking, Smart Lock, Built-in Digital Scale, distance alerts and a Travel Assistant App”. OK, this is interesting. I head over to the inevitable Kickstarter page and check out the video. Very slick, but it didn’t answer what is the key question for smart bags -- how does Plevo provide location tracking and connect to the app when the battery pack is removed? Briana, the PR person, told me the Plevo bags have 2 batteries -- a removable Lithium battery pack and a permanent Nickel battery that takes over when the Li battery is removed. Elegant solution. The risk, though, is when that elegance breaks down in the face of a harried gate agent that doesn’t have the time to work through the safety differences between Li and Ni batteries, and just finds it easier to say “No”.  No problem getting past the UA gate agent in Frankfurt with my low-tech leather bag I bought in Italy a few years ago on our 25th anniversary. Checking my passport, she looked down -- “That’s a great bag!” she said. Sometimes, simpler is better.</li>\r\n 	<li>Another PR pitch that caught my eye, but in a less positive way, was titled “A Travel Hack Every Business Traveler Should Know About”. I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty much done with growth hackers and lifehackers and especially travel hackers. I’m old enough to remember when a hack was an ugly bit of code that managed to get a system running, but it wasn’t something that anyone was proud of. But I digress. I was killing time in United’s very nice new ORD Polaris business class lounge waiting for my Frankfurt flight, so I took the bail and opened it up. “With more executives turning to food as a biohack,” I’m regretting this click already, “an airport meal that fits with your food lifestyle can be hard to find.” The pitch was for Ample, a powdered, rehydrateable drinkable meal that’s TSA-compliant and “packed with on-trend ingredients like MCTs from coconut oil, fiber, probiotics, micronutrients from chlorella, and protein from grass-fed whey and collagen.” MCT’s, a Google search tells me, are medium-chain triglycerides that are good for you in a whole bunch of ways, I guess. Ample reduces decision fatigue -- “Just like Zuck never needs to decide what to wear, deciding what to eat at an airport is a piece of decision fatigue that you just don\'t need” and makes it easier to follow “a ketogenic lifestyle”. Feeling the onset of buzzword fatigue, I set my phone down, walked over to the bar, abandoned any hope of achieving ketosis, and pointed to the Revolution Brewing Anti-Hero IPA draft handle.</li>\r\n 	<li>I didn’t mention this in the last episode, but before I headed out on my India trip, I hit the AT&amp;T website to see if India is included in their international plan (it is) and to get one of their international data packages since I wasn’t going to have time to figure out the local SIM market. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the data limit of their base $60 offering has been bumped from 300MB to 1GB sometime in the last 2 years, and way up from 100MB back in 2011. The last time I used AT&amp;T’s international plan was March 2016 during a 4-day trip in Iceland. I turned cellular access off on just about every app except Google Maps and only just squeaked through without topping the 300MB limit. 1GB is a whole lot roomier. I had no problems in India. I don’t know when that limit got bumped up, but good on AT&amp;T for making that base plan much more realistic.</li>\r\n 	<li>This is about the time when I have the obligatory craft beer comment, and you’d think that coming off a trip to Germany, I’d be full of them. And at the end of the day on Thursday, after taking a 20-minute nap to catch my second or third wind, I headed out looking exactly for that -- a bierstube with some local beers and maybe a wurst platter. Walking around near the hotel, there wasn’t much -- it was kind of a dead plaza with some pizza and doner kebab places. One nice restaurant, but nothing special. I pulled out Google Maps and started scrolling around, zooming in and out looking for some beer places. I don’t see many of those, but I keep seeing wineries pop up south of me. So I start walking. 15 minutes, I hit one of the wineries and walk in. What’s with all the wineries, I ask? “You’re in one of the largest wine producing regions in Germany,” the guy nicely explained. “I’m getting ready for a big wine dinner right now, but stop in tomorrow if you want to taste our wines.” I’d be leaving for Frankfurt tomorrow, but I thanked him. So now, I’m looking for wine. It was after 5, and all the other wineries I passed looked closed, but I found a restaurant with what looked like a good local wine list and a nice courtyard. The waitress made some recommendations -- “This is a nice wine from our next door neighbor” We struggled a little bit figuring out the translation for the daily special on the chalkboard, but with dueling smartphone searches, we figured it out -- it was a local dish of spit-roasted pork. It was a nice surprise; a nice ending to the first day of what I thought was going to be just a Bataan death march of a trip. Which it would’ve been if I’d stayed in my hotel room rehydrating my third bottle of Ample ketogenic liquid so I could slog through another 50 emails on my way to zero inbox nirvana.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> or our new <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a> at travelcommons -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://www.nimbitmusic.com/saurabbhargava\">Yours in Mine</a> </em>by Saurab Bhargava</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Sleeping in Business Class</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>The trips to India and Germany put me back in international business class for the first time in a while. In past episodes, I’ve been ambivalent about the value for money for business class -- is the extra space and the better meal service worth the $5-6,000 uplift? On these trips, I kinda think “Yes” because neither trip had any slack in the schedule -- I’d be landing and going directly into meetings, so those lie-flat business class seats were what I really needed so I could get some amount of quality sleep.</li>\r\n 	<li>The start of both trips was a United flight from ORD to FRA. United has made a big deal of upgrading their international business class, even giving it a new name -- Polaris. And they’re building separate Polaris lounges, so it you’re flying international First or Business, no more slumming in the crowded Red Carpet clubs. The Polaris lounges are nice -- everything is free, good beer and wine selection -- even a cocktail list -- and a nice buffet. They’re probably the best business class lounges I hit on either trip, better than the variety of Lufthansa lounges I hit in Frankfurt. And United is pushing them. The Polaris lounge in ORD is in the far concourse, Concourse C, which makes sense; that’s where most of United’s international flights leave from. In June, though, my flight to Frankfurt left out of the B Concourse, so I went into the Red Carpet club right across from the gate. The guy at the desk looked at my ticket -- “Oh, you want to go to the Polaris Lounge. It’s about a 15 minute walk, but it’s definitely worth it.”</li>\r\n 	<li>Walking on the United Triple 7 though, you could feel United packing as much as they could in that business class with a 2-4-2 seat configuration -- only just slightly less packed than the 3-4-3 seating on the other side of the curtain in Economy. I’d never seen two middle seats in business class before. Business class in the Lufthansa A380s between Frankfurt and India were 2-2-2 -- no middle seats. Now on my flight over in May, I had the aisle and a couple had the middle two seats, so not too bad, and they were good folks. I felt bad for the husband during the night, though, when I had my seat in full lie-flat mode. When he needed to hit the toilet at night, he had to kinda vault me.</li>\r\n 	<li>On my last flight back from Frankfurt, a good-sized guy had the middle seat next to me. I’d guess he was a former football player, still in good shape, but taller and broader than the average build that United had sized these Polaris pods for. He said that the flight over, he couldn’t lay flat; it felt like a coffin, so he just reclined it and catnapped, which kinda defeated the purpose of hitting the ground running. I could sympathize. I’m not that broad, but I had to drop the aisle-side armrest in my pod to be able to comfortably fit. Kinda nice service, but definitely snug.</li>\r\n 	<li>The Lufthansa business class lounges lacked the pizzazz of United’s lounges. But one thing that was new to me… the flights to India went out of a different concourse in Frankfurt -- on the last episode, I talked about the mile-&amp;-a-half walk and the extra security -- and here, they boarded the A380 first and business classes straight from the lounge. No walking down to the gate and idling around with the economy classes. They had gate agents and kiosks in the club. I set down my beer, had my boarding pass scanned, and then walked down the jetway to the plane.</li>\r\n 	<li>Once on-board, Lufthansa’s A380s were definitely roomier than United’s Triple 7’s -- maybe a bigger plane, maybe because they weren’t trying to cram 8 people across. With only 6 people across, the lie-flat seats were more comfortable, not as “coffin-ish” as United’s. Indeed, maybe a little too comfortable. A guy in the row behind me on my flight to Delhi must’ve gone deep in sleep because he snored -- loudly, really sawing wood -- for a couple of hours. The one time I wouldn’t have minded a little turbulence to jostle the plane. But good for him, he was definitely getting his money’s worth from Business Class.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://www.nimbitmusic.com/saurabbhargava\">Through The Line</a> </em>by Saurab Bhargava</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Changes from Chinese Tourists</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>The last night I was in Germany, Friday night, I stayed in Frankfurt so I’d have just a 20-minute cab ride to the airport for my 8:15am flight. It had been 7 years since I’d walked around the city -- back in 2011 when I did a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/05/01/video-2-one-city-five-hours-frankfurt/\">TravelCommons video</a>, retracing the “1 City, 5 Hours” article about Frankfurt in United’s seatback magazine. I walked down to the Romer area - a big open square surrounded by historic buildings -- and over to a sausage, a wurst stand that I’d eaten at in the past. They’d added a new menu -- the German menu was now on the ground, under the ordering window; the new menu at eye level was in Chinese.</li>\r\n 	<li>The travel press has been talking about the impending growth of Chinese tourism for a bit now. I’ve seen the tour buses full of Chinese travelers for some time -- back in 2016 when my son and I were in Iceland, it became a bit of a game for us to stay ahead of those buses, and then in Frankfurt, down in a basement applewine pub off some back alley, I was the only non-Asian person there. But now, I’m noticing more, I dunno, systemic or infrastructure changes being driven by Chinese tourism. Not just Chinese menus but also seeing restaurants in the US and Europe accepting Chinese mobile payments - WeChat and Alipay. And some folks in the hotel business will say that the push to provide free wi-fi, mobile apps and family-sized rooms is driven, in some ways, by what Chinese tourists are looking for. Makes sense. Last year, there were 130 million outbound Chinese tourists, a big number but only 10% of the population of China. There’s a lot more to come.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #142</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a> and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from from Saurab Bhargava’s album <em>Chromatique</em>.  The tracks were <em>Exit</em>, <em>Yours In Mine</em>, and <em>Through The Line</em>.  Here\'s an Amazon <a href=\"https://www.amazon.com/Chromatique-Saurab-Bhargava/dp/B004R7W3O8\">link </a>where you can buy the album.</li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_142.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #142 — Sleeping in Business Class; Changes from Chinese Tourists','','inherit','closed','closed','','2042-revision-v1','','','2018-07-03 23:38:40','2018-07-04 04:38:40','',2042,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/07/03/2042-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2062,1,'2018-07-15 19:14:11','2018-07-16 00:14:11','<span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">With a bit of forethought, a 4-5 hour layover allows you to do a quick flyby of a new city’s highlights, or get deep into some part of a city. In this video, we’re laying over at Midway, Chicago’s older, less-known airport and one of Southwest’s busiest stations, skipping the usual tourist spots and instead for what can only be described as the “post-industrial” landscape of Chicago’s near South Side for a tour of 4 craft beer taprooms -- <a href=\"https://lagunitas.com/taproom/chicago\">Lagunitas Brewing</a>, <a href=\"http://lorezbrewing.com/\">Lo Rez Brewing</a>, <a href=\"http://marzbrewing.com/\">Marz Community Brewing</a>, and <a href=\"http://www.whinerbeer.com/\">Whiner Beer</a></span>\n\n<iframe src=\"https://www.youtube.com/embed/kfynoyZQ7ws\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"></iframe>','Video - Chicago MDW Layover Taproom Tour','','publish','closed','closed','','video-chicago-mdw-layover-taproom-tour','','','2021-03-28 15:43:44','2021-03-28 20:43:44','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=2062',0,'post','',3),
(2063,1,'2018-07-15 19:04:33','2018-07-16 00:04:33','','35-Lagunitas Taproom Sign (1)','','inherit','open','closed','','35-lagunitas-taproom-sign-1','','','2018-07-15 19:04:33','2018-07-16 00:04:33','',2062,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/35-Lagunitas-Taproom-Sign-1.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(2064,1,'2018-07-15 19:04:56','2018-07-16 00:04:56','<span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">With a bit of forethought, a 4-5 hour layover allows you to do a quick flyby of a new city’s highlights, or get deep into some part of a city. In this video, we’re laying over at Midway, Chicago’s older, less-known airport and one of Southwest’s busiest stations, skipping the usual tourist spots and instead for what can only be described as the “post-industrial” landscape of Chicago’s near South Side for a tour of 4 craft beer taprooms -- <a href=\"https://lagunitas.com/taproom/chicago\">Lagunitas Brewing</a>, <a href=\"http://lorezbrewing.com/\">Lo Rez Brewing</a>, <a href=\"http://marzbrewing.com/\">Marz Community Brewing</a>, and <a href=\"http://www.whinerbeer.com/\">Whiner Beer</a></span>\r\n\r\n[youtube]https://youtu.be/kfynoyZQ7ws[/youtube]','Video - Chicago MDW Layover Taproom Tour','','inherit','closed','closed','','2062-revision-v1','','','2018-07-15 19:04:56','2018-07-16 00:04:56','',2062,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/07/15/2062-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2065,1,'2018-07-15 19:16:41','2018-07-16 00:16:41','<span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">With a bit of forethought, a 4-5 hour layover allows you to do a quick flyby of a new city’s highlights, or get deep into some part of a city. In this video, we’re laying over at Midway, Chicago’s older, less-known airport and one of Southwest’s busiest stations, skipping the usual tourist spots and instead for what can only be described as the “post-industrial” landscape of Chicago’s near South Side for a tour of 4 craft beer taprooms -- <a href=\"https://lagunitas.com/taproom/chicago\">Lagunitas Brewing</a>, <a href=\"http://lorezbrewing.com/\">Lo Rez Brewing</a>, <a href=\"http://marzbrewing.com/\">Marz Community Brewing</a>, and <a href=\"http://www.whinerbeer.com/\">Whiner Beer</a></span>\r\n\r\n<iframe width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"https://www.youtube.com/embed/kfynoyZQ7ws\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"autoplay; encrypted-media\" allowfullscreen></iframe>','Video - Chicago MDW Layover Taproom Tour','','inherit','closed','closed','','2062-revision-v1','','','2018-07-15 19:16:41','2018-07-16 00:16:41','',2062,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/07/15/2062-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2066,1,'2018-07-15 19:19:19','2018-07-16 00:19:19','Pulled out the GoPro again for the recording of the latest episode. The GoPro is a bit too far from me for good audio, so I cut in the podcast audio from the Zoom recorder when it was available, hence the change in audio quality. I\'ll post the final audio on Saturday.\r\n\r\n<iframe width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"https://www.youtube.com/embed/et5b0N8xx9c\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"autoplay; encrypted-media\" allowfullscreen></iframe>','Podcast #129 Uncut — The Video Version','','inherit','closed','closed','','1758-revision-v1','','','2018-07-15 19:19:19','2018-07-16 00:19:19','',1758,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/07/15/1758-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2067,1,'2018-07-15 19:20:20','2018-07-16 00:20:20','I finally found a way to produce a video version of the podcast without a huge amount of post-production work. I put my GoPro camera on top of my Zoom H4n recorder and hit Record.\r\n\r\n<iframe width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"https://www.youtube.com/embed/c0Puq669A5M\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"autoplay; encrypted-media\" allowfullscreen></iframe>','Podcast #114 Uncut — The LoFi Video Version','','inherit','closed','closed','','1435-revision-v1','','','2018-07-15 19:20:20','2018-07-16 00:20:20','',1435,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/07/15/1435-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2068,1,'2018-07-15 19:21:39','2018-07-16 00:21:39','Here\'s a 3-minute summary of what I liked best during my Spring 2013 visit to Madrid, Spain.\r\n\r\n<iframe width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"https://www.youtube.com/embed/49lo9vDLHjY\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"autoplay; encrypted-media\" allowfullscreen></iframe>\r\n\r\nSome of the places mentioned include\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li><a title=\"Reina Sofia Museum\" href=\"http://www.museoreinasofia.es/en\" target=\"_blank\">Reina Sofia museum</a></li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plaza_Mayor,_Madrid\" target=\"_blank\">Plaza Mayor</a></li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"http://www.mercadodesanmiguel.es/\" target=\"_blank\">Mercado de San Miguel</a></li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"http://www.mercadoantonmartin.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Mercado de Antón Martín</a></li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"http://viandasdesalamanca.es/home/web/\" target=\"_blank\">Viandas de Salamanca</a></li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malasa%C3%B1a\" target=\"_blank\">Malasaña District</a></li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"http://fabricamaravillas.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Fábrica Maravillas</a></li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"http://madridfoodtour.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Madrid Food Tour</a></li>\r\n</ul>','Video - What to do in Madrid... in 180 Seconds','','inherit','closed','closed','','1284-revision-v1','','','2018-07-15 19:21:39','2018-07-16 00:21:39','',1284,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/07/15/1284-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2069,1,'2018-07-15 19:23:04','2018-07-16 00:23:04','A long layover can be an impromptu vacation or a mind-numbing marathon of CNN Airport Network shows. Inspired by my own 5-hour layover <a title=\"Video #2 – One City, Five Hours: Frankfurt\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/05/01/video-2-one-city-five-hours-frankfurt/\">excursion</a> through Frankfurt, I grabbed my iPhone and shot what I\'d recommend you do and see on a long layover at O\'Hare Airport.\r\n\r\nUsing foot power and a one-day unlimited <a href=\"http://faremedia.chicago-card.com/store/main.aspx?DepartmentId=34\" target=\"_blank\">pass</a> on Chicago\'s<a href=\"http://www.transitchicago.com/riding_cta/airports.aspx\" target=\"_blank\"> \'L\"</a> (subway/metro), this tour hits:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li><a href=\"http://chicago.cubs.mlb.com/chc/ballpark/index.jsp\" target=\"_blank\">Wrigley Field</a></li>\r\n	<li>Chicago hot dogs at the <a href=\"http://www.wienercircle.net/\" target=\"_blank\">Wieners Circle</a></li>\r\n	<li>Lincoln Park, Old Town, and Wicker Park/Bucktown neighborhoods</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"http://explorechicago.org/city/en/millennium.html\" target=\"_blank\">Millennium Park</a></li>\r\n	<li>the Loop (Chicago\'s business district)</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<div><iframe width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"https://www.youtube.com/embed/fAOsuSoV7b4\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"autoplay; encrypted-media\" allowfullscreen></iframe></div>\r\nHere\'s a map highlighting each stop on the tour:\r\n\r\n<iframe src=\"https://maps.google.com/maps/ms?msa=0&amp;msid=212647958930931165546.0004ca28d6953e133cf86&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;t=m&amp;ll=41.908154,-87.677765&amp;spn=0.089427,0.145912&amp;z=12&amp;output=embed\" width=\"425\" height=\"350\" frameborder=\"0\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\"></iframe>\r\n<small>View <a style=\"color: #0000ff; text-align: left;\" href=\"https://maps.google.com/maps/ms?msa=0&amp;msid=212647958930931165546.0004ca28d6953e133cf86&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;t=m&amp;ll=41.908154,-87.677765&amp;spn=0.089427,0.145912&amp;z=12&amp;source=embed\">ORD Layover Excursion</a> in a larger map</small>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\nSome ideas on how you can customize this tour...\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>If you\'re coming in from <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Chicago Midway International Airport\" href=\"http://www.flychicago.com/midway/MidwayHomepage.shtm\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"homepage\">Midway Airport</a>, take the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Orange Line (Chicago Transit Authority)\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange_Line_%28Chicago_Transit_Authority%29\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"wikipedia\">CTA Orange Line</a> to the Loop\'s <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Clark/Lake (CTA station)\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clark/Lake_%28CTA_station%29\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Clark/Lake</a> Exit to pick up the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Brown Line (Chicago Transit Authority)\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_Line_%28Chicago_Transit_Authority%29\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Brown Line</a> north. Midway is closer to the Loop, so you can shave 40-60 minutes off the itinerary</li>\r\n	<li>You can save about 30 minutes by taking a taxi to Wrigley Field from O\'Hare. You can then pick up the itinerary heading south from the Addison \'L\' stop</li>\r\n	<li>If you\'re interested in high-end shopping, take a left (east) at North Ave (instead of the suggested right), right (south) on State Pkwy, bear left at Rush St, and then turn left (east) on Oak St. Shop along here to Michigan Ave and head south (right). Get a beer/glass of wine at the <a href=\"http://www.signatureroom.com/Signature-Lounge/\" target=\"_blank\">bar</a> on the 96th floor of the John Hancock building and enjoy the view. When you\'re finished, take a taxi to <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Richard J. Daley Center\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_J._Daley_Center\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Daley Plaza</a> and pick up the itinerary there.</li>\r\n	<li>If you want to go to the top of the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Willis Tower\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willis_Tower\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Sears Tower</a> (no Chicagoan calls it the Willis Tower), keep heading across the Loop (west) on Adams after the Art Institute. Take a left (south) on Franklin one block to Jackson for the entrance to the SkyDeck.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<div>If you have any other suggestions or your experience doing this tour, please leave a comment here.</div>','Video #3 - ORD Layover Excursion: a 6-Hour Tour of Chicago','','inherit','closed','closed','','1095-revision-v1','','','2018-07-15 19:23:04','2018-07-16 00:23:04','',1095,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/07/15/1095-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2070,1,'2018-07-15 19:23:50','2018-07-16 00:23:50','A long layover can be an impromptu vacation or a mind-numbing marathon of CNN Airport Network shows. Inspired by my own 5-hour layover <a title=\"Video #2 – One City, Five Hours: Frankfurt\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/05/01/video-2-one-city-five-hours-frankfurt/\">excursion</a> through Frankfurt, I grabbed my iPhone and shot what I\'d recommend you do and see on a long layover at O\'Hare Airport.\r\n\r\nUsing foot power and a one-day unlimited <a href=\"http://faremedia.chicago-card.com/store/main.aspx?DepartmentId=34\" target=\"_blank\">pass</a> on Chicago\'s<a href=\"http://www.transitchicago.com/riding_cta/airports.aspx\" target=\"_blank\"> \'L\"</a> (subway/metro), this tour hits:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li><a href=\"http://chicago.cubs.mlb.com/chc/ballpark/index.jsp\" target=\"_blank\">Wrigley Field</a></li>\r\n	<li>Chicago hot dogs at the <a href=\"http://www.wienercircle.net/\" target=\"_blank\">Wieners Circle</a></li>\r\n	<li>Lincoln Park, Old Town, and Wicker Park/Bucktown neighborhoods</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"http://explorechicago.org/city/en/millennium.html\" target=\"_blank\">Millennium Park</a></li>\r\n	<li>the Loop (Chicago\'s business district)</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<div><iframe width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"https://www.youtube.com/embed/fAOsuSoV7b4\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"autoplay; encrypted-media\" allowfullscreen></iframe></div>\r\nHere\'s a map highlighting each stop on the tour:\r\n\r\n<iframe src=\"https://maps.google.com/maps/ms?msa=0&amp;msid=212647958930931165546.0004ca28d6953e133cf86&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;t=m&amp;ll=41.908154,-87.677765&amp;spn=0.089427,0.145912&amp;z=12&amp;output=embed\" width=\"425\" height=\"350\" frameborder=\"0\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\"></iframe>\r\n<small>View <a style=\"color: #0000ff; text-align: left;\" href=\"https://maps.google.com/maps/ms?msa=0&amp;msid=212647958930931165546.0004ca28d6953e133cf86&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;t=m&amp;ll=41.908154,-87.677765&amp;spn=0.089427,0.145912&amp;z=12&amp;source=embed\">ORD Layover Excursion</a> in a larger map</small>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\nSome ideas on how you can customize this tour...\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>If you\'re coming in from <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Chicago Midway International Airport\" href=\"http://www.flychicago.com/midway/MidwayHomepage.shtm\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"homepage\">Midway Airport</a>, take the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Orange Line (Chicago Transit Authority)\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange_Line_%28Chicago_Transit_Authority%29\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"wikipedia\">CTA Orange Line</a> to the Loop\'s <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Clark/Lake (CTA station)\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clark/Lake_%28CTA_station%29\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Clark/Lake</a> Exit to pick up the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Brown Line (Chicago Transit Authority)\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_Line_%28Chicago_Transit_Authority%29\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Brown Line</a> north. Midway is closer to the Loop, so you can shave 40-60 minutes off the itinerary</li>\r\n	<li>You can save about 30 minutes by taking a taxi to Wrigley Field from O\'Hare. You can then pick up the itinerary heading south from the Addison \'L\' stop</li>\r\n	<li>If you\'re interested in high-end shopping, take a left (east) at North Ave (instead of the suggested right), right (south) on State Pkwy, bear left at Rush St, and then turn left (east) on Oak St. Shop along here to Michigan Ave and head south (right). Get a beer/glass of wine at the <a href=\"http://www.signatureroom.com/Signature-Lounge/\" target=\"_blank\">bar</a> on the 96th floor of the John Hancock building and enjoy the view. When you\'re finished, take a taxi to <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Richard J. Daley Center\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_J._Daley_Center\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Daley Plaza</a> and pick up the itinerary there.</li>\r\n	<li>If you want to go to the top of the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Willis Tower\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willis_Tower\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Sears Tower</a> (no Chicagoan calls it the Willis Tower), keep heading across the Loop (west) on Adams after the Art Institute. Take a left (south) on Franklin one block to Jackson for the entrance to the SkyDeck.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<div>If you have any other suggestions or your experience doing this tour, please leave a comment here.</div>','Video  - ORD Layover Excursion: a 6-Hour Tour of Chicago','','inherit','closed','closed','','1095-revision-v1','','','2018-07-15 19:23:50','2018-07-16 00:23:50','',1095,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/07/15/1095-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2071,1,'2018-07-15 19:25:21','2018-07-16 00:25:21','I \"sprint toured\" <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Frankfurt-am-Main\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/germany/frankfurt-am-main\">Frankfurt</a> using Hemispheres Magazine\'s \"One City, Five Hours: Frankfurt\" <a href=\"http://www.hemispheresmagazine.com/2010/03/01/one-city-five-hours-frankfurt/\">article</a> while on a 6-hour layover between Mumbai and Chicago. I shot this on my iPhone 4 and edited it in iMovie on my MacBook Air while flying from Frankfurt to Chicago. My iPhone video inexperience shows -- I shot the entire thing in portrait mode.\r\n\r\n<iframe width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"https://www.youtube.com/embed/3s4aYmeoS2k\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"autoplay; encrypted-media\" allowfullscreen></iframe>','Video  – One City, Five Hours: Frankfurt','','inherit','closed','closed','','605-revision-v1','','','2018-07-15 19:25:21','2018-07-16 00:25:21','',605,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/07/15/605-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2072,1,'2018-07-15 19:27:34','2018-07-16 00:27:34','After returning from a 10-day visit to Vietnam, friends and TravelCommons podcast listeners asked me a lot of questions about our trip. In this video, I answer the most common question -- \"How did they treat you when they found out you were American?\" -- and give my impressions of <a title=\"Ho Chi Minh City\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/vietnam/ho-chi-minh-city\">Ho Chi Minh City</a> (Saigon), <a title=\"Hoi An\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/vietnam/central-vietnam/hoi-an\">HoiAn</a>, Hanoi, and Halong Bay.\r\n\r\n<iframe width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"https://www.youtube.com/embed/NQj_v6qK10k\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"autoplay; encrypted-media\" allowfullscreen></iframe>\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript from TravelCommons video #1:\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n	<li>Spent 10 days at the end of June on a family vacation in Vietnam</li>\r\n	<li>Ran the entire length of the country – Ho Chi Minh City (otherwise known as Saigon), to Hue, to HoiAn, to Hanoi, to Halong Bay, and then back down to Ho Chi Minh City for our flight home.</li>\r\n	<li>It’s a long country – about the length of California.  So this itinerary didn’t allow time to get deep; go in-depth in any one place, but we did get a good “overview” of Vietnam</li>\r\n	<li>Returning to the US, I’ve had a lot of questions about the trip, but the one everyone asks is  – how did they treat you when they found out you were from America?</li>\r\n	<li>The short answer is “Fine”.  We didn’t feel the need to hide our nationality – add an “ehh” on the back of every sentence to pass as Canadian.  When we handed over our passports to hotel clerks, or told car drivers that we were from the US, we never felt any animosity or change in demeanor.  Everyone was friendly.</li>\r\n	<li>The only anti-Americanism we saw was where you’d most expect it – on displays at the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"War Remnants Museum\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/vietnam/ho-chi-minh-city/sights/museum/war-remnants-museum\">War Remnants Museum</a> in Ho Chi Minh City and in the introductory video for the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Cu Chi Tunnels\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/vietnam/around-ho-chi-minh-city/cu-chi-tunnels\">Cu Chi Tunnels</a>, a park that commemorates the Viet Cong guerilla efforts.</li>\r\n	<li>But never from the people we ran into, or our tour guides or drivers.  At My Son, a sort of mini Angkor Wat in Central Vietnam, south of Da Nang, our guide mentioned the temples destroyed by B-52 bombs -- never in an accusing way, just a statement of fact about something that happened some 40 years ago.</li>\r\n	<li>Indeed, the bigger disconnect seemed to be between the South Vietnamese who had served in the war and the rest of today’s Vietnam.  There seemed both a political and generational divide.  I had to wonder how our Saigon guide – a former South Vietnamese army officer – felt taking us through exhibits that insulted him and lionized his enemies.</li>\r\n	<li>A couple of years ago, when we vacationed in Singapore and Phuket, Thailand, I joked with my family that we were only doing \"Asia Lite\". Starting in Ho Chi Minh City – still called Saigon by many – is full-contact Asia -- 9 million people, 10 million motorbikes, and where crossing the street has been elevated to an extreme sport.</li>\r\n	<li>Starting here was jumping into the deep end.  It wasn\'t until we came back the second time -- a couple of days before leaving -- that we began to feel comfortable with Saigon.</li>\r\n	<li>Unlike Dehli or Joburg or Rio, I didn\'t see the abject poverty and shanty towns in HCMC that I\'ve seen in those other cities, nor did I feel as unsafe.  While we mostly stayed in District 1 -- the main tourism area -- walking back to our hotel at night after dinner and some evening shopping wasn\'t a problem.</li>\r\n	<li>HoiAn is kinda like a Vietnamese Williamsburg -- a preserved historic port town and a UNESCO World Heritage site with no war damage.  The old town is really for tourists.  The historic building now house tailor shops, art galleries, trinket shops, bars, and restaurants. Can\'t be too interesting for locals, but it\'s a sort of \"Vietnam-lite\" for tourists weary of the press of Ho Chi Minh City.</li>\r\n	<li>I was pleasantly surprised with Hanoi.  I had heard that it was \"cold\" to Americans -- which would\'ve been understandable -- but didn\'t see anything like that.  At only 4 million people, Hanoi seemed less \"crazy\", easier to manage than Saigon. Motorbikes stop at traffic lights -- crossing the street didn\'t generate the same fight-or-flight response as it did in Saigon.</li>\r\n	<li>After a half-day drive east of Hanoi, we cruised <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Halong Bay\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/vietnam/northeast-vietnam/halong-bay\">Ha Long Bay</a> for two days on a 10 passenger replica of a Chinese junk.  Weaving among the limestone islands or \"karsks\", visiting a floating fishing and oyster-farming village, the scenery and pace was stark difference from what been, to this point, a very urban vacation.</li>\r\n	<li>We love Vietnamese food, so eating was a real highlight of the trip.  The variety was great -- we really didn\'t eat the same thing twice -- except for pho, the classic noodle soup, but that was by choice.  I ate pho for breakfast almost every day, and for dinner our last night in Saigon -- pho for 4, 2 Tiger Beers, 2 Cokes -- $10.  It was the perfect last meal</li>\r\n	<li>I\'m glad we went to Vietnam when we did, because it\'s starting to get crowded with tourists -- Australians, French, and a growing number of Chinese.  The drive south from Da Nang to Hoi An along China Beach -- hotel after resort after time shares under construction -- will flood the place in 18-36 months.  It seems to be in a sweet spot -- enough business to support a good tourism industry, but not yet completely overrun, and so still happy to welcome new visitors -- even Americans.</li>\r\n<div class=\"zemanta-pixie\" style=\"margin-top: 10px; height: 15px;\"><img class=\"zemanta-pixie-img\" style=\"border: none; float: right;\" src=\"http://img.zemanta.com/pixy.gif?x-id=044a6880-a7ee-4a80-b4c8-3d6bdfbd2094\" alt=\"\" /></div>','Video - Impressions of Vietnam','','inherit','closed','closed','','250-revision-v1','','','2018-07-15 19:27:34','2018-07-16 00:27:34','',250,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/07/15/250-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2074,1,'2018-07-23 15:37:02','2018-07-23 20:37:02','<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/IMG_0522.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1775\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/IMG_0522-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\r\nIt\'s a <em>Mitteleuropa</em> episode, talking about last month\'s travels through Vienna and Hungary. I came away with good first impressions of Austrian Airlines and the Vienna airport. And, for the first time in many visits, saw Hungary through a tourist\'s eyes, spending time in Budapest and the Tokaj wine region. We also talk about how Google Translate has become pretty much indistinguishable from magic and the potential impact the privatization of the US air traffic control system might have on the general aviation industry. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_130.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_130.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #130:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, after a good bit of travel -- I think the technical unit of measure is “a slug”. I’ve done a “slug” of travel recently. We got back from 9 days in Hungary on the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend, which gave us that Monday to recover a bit. After that short week at home, I got back on the road -- a week in Richmond and then last week and this week in Atlanta. Some folks wanted me to do stupid day trips -- say up to Michigan from Atlanta for a 90-minute meeting, but in a fit of, what is for me, rare realism, I said, “Uh, no”.</li>\r\n 	<li>This was the first time I’d spent any time in Richmond -- other than driving around it -- from Charlottesville to the airport, from DC over to Williamsburg. We were downtown. There are some nice pockets. Found a couple of restaurants and a microbrewery with a taproom, so I was happy. Even happier because it was just a 20-minute cab ride from the airport, and a 10-minute walk to the client. Contrast that to Atlanta, which I just hate having to travel to for business. It starts with the location of the airport -- at 6 o’clock, on the bottom of the I-285 perimeter, and all the business at the opposite side -- between 11 and 1 o’clock on the perimeter. And therein lies the most important question that every business traveler faces when they arrive and they leave Atlanta -- do I drive through the city or around it? Outside of rush hour, it’s not bad -- maybe 35 minutes. But when you’re trying to catch that 6pm flight home on Thursday night, the trip starts at an hour and deteriorates fast.</li>\r\n 	<li>And deterioration is a nice word for last week’s trip back. After an hour-and-a quarter drive through the city that would’ve been a lot worse except that there were 3 of us in the car, so we got to whiz by the beginnings of the traffic jam in the HOV lanes. Once in the center of the city, the HOV lanes were just as crowded, but it probably cut at least 5 minutes off our trip. We drop the car off at Hertz, board the Skytrain, are on our way to the terminal when it just stops. OK, maybe a bit of congestion at the station in front of us. So we wait, and wait,... and wait. No announcement, no nothing. Just wait. 10 minutes, 15 minutes. Finally, someone near the door presses the phone button. A voice comes on -- “We’re working on it; thanks for your patience.” Click. No reason for the delay; no thought on when we’d start up again. Another 5 minutes. Another guy presses the phone button. Same story. After 30 minutes, the train whirs to life and starts to move. And I never thought I’d get nostalgic for those car rental buses.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hansatom/47919\">Brilliant Day</a> by Hans Atom (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial license.  Ft: Lisa DeBenedictis</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>My son Andrew and I flew Austrian Air from Chicago to Budapest last month with an -- obvious -- connection in Vienna. Couple of things… First, why Austrian Air? Because it was among the cheapest non-budget fares over and because I could construct an 8-hr layover which meant we spent Saturday eating schnitzel and drinking beer in Vienna. We landed at 8:45 Saturday morning, checked our bags in Held Luggage, and then hopped a cab into the city. It wasn’t a cheap taxi -- probably around €40 -- but we didn’t have time to figure out and wait for the train. We went first to the Naschmarkt and met up with a friend of mine -- ex-client and ex-boss -- who’s now running the Polish development center for a stealth start-up. He came down Friday night; it was a good excuse to spend 3 hours on his new BMW motorcycle. We started out with coffee and then quickly moved to the beer crawl. At noon, we walked into a small place, <a href=\"http://www.xn--gasthauspschl-qmb.com/\">Gasthaus Pöschl</a> (Weihburggasse 17), just as they were opening. We promised to be out in an hour, so they picked up one of the “Reserved” signs and gave us great big plates of schnitzel and glasses of Grüner Veltliner. We needed a bit of a walk after that, a bit more beer, and we found a cab back to the airport. One of the best layovers I’ve had...</li>\r\n 	<li>And then the second thing -- Vienna Airport. I’ve whined over a couple of episodes about how much I don’t like Munich Airport. Indeed, one of my ORD-BUD options was on Lufthansa through MUC. That didn’t make the first cut. But Vienna was great. Pleasant folks in the immigration booths, efficient and well-staffed security, nice food and beer selection -- it was the anti-MUC. And the in-air service? Pretty good. Fairly new 777-200; typical kinda tight coach seat configuration; pleasant flight attendants. There was nothing that wowed me, but then again, I wasn’t expecting anything to. All I wanted was not to be annoyed; not to have a gate agent or flight attendant piss me off. Kinda the air travel version of the Hippocratic oath -- Do no harm to the passenger. And Austrian succeeded. If I were to ding them on anything, it would be that the bright red plane upholstery was a bit tough on the eyes. I’ll fly them again.</li>\r\n 	<li>I actually was two-for-two on airports on that trip. Budapest airport has had a significant upgrade since my last visit maybe 12 years ago. Again, efficient security lines, bright clean terminal, good places to grab a coffee and some breakfast. Much more pleasant than my first time passing through there in 1989, some Army guy checking that my exit visa had the right stamps. Much happier vibe this time. Two great airport experiences; I think I’ll need to consciously ratchet down my expectations for my next trip, though. I’ll be hitting London’s Gatwick and Heathrow next week.</li>\r\n 	<li>Thinking through my international travel this year -- Paris, Vienna, Budapest -- Google Translate has evolved to being pretty close to magic. Last September, Google made a big announcement that they moved Translate from a statistics-based approach to a neural network running in Google’s cloud. It was the cover story for the New York Times Sunday Magazine <a href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/14/magazine/the-great-ai-awakening.html\">The Great AI Awakening</a> -- using it as a case study of how artificial intelligence will “reinvent computing itself”. That’s all good -- and it was a good article -- but what’s really seems like magic is what Google calls Word Lens, where you activate your camera within Google Translate, point it at some text -- a menu or, say, the washing machine controls in a vacation rental -- and you see English words replacing the French or Hungarian words in real time. Amazingly useful. Saves you from blasting your delicates with hot water, or mistakenly ordering chicken when you mix up poulet and poisson after a couple of cocktails. The French translations seemed better than the Hungarian ones -- which makes sense when you remember that the quality of the neural network is dependent on the amount of training data -- but even the Hungarian was very useful. And Translate lets you download some amount of language data onto your phone so you don’t blow through $100 of roaming data trying to avoid brussels sprouts. As you can tell, a huge TravelCommons endorsement.</li>\r\n 	<li>A few weeks back, I retweeted an NPR story about the proposal to privatize US air traffic control. As someone who has had cumulative months if not years wasted on ATC delays, I commented that I can’t understand all the angst over this proposal. ATC privatization has worked for years in Canada and Europe. And it’s not like the FAA has bathed itself in glory with the NextGen program that was authorized in 2003. Rich Fraser, a long-time TravelCommons listener, fellow Midwesterner, and a pilot, came back with a great series of tweets explaining his objections, specifically on privatization’s impact on general aviation. I retweeted a number of them -- “Privatization decimated general aviation industries everywhere it was tried. GA is a $200 billion industry here. 1.4 mil jobs…” and “And Canada\'s general aviation industry is a tiny fraction the size of ours. Apples and oranges doesn\'t even begin to describe.” I was only thinking of the impact on commercial aviation -- the only aviation I experience. Rich’s tweets did a nice job of opening the aperture on the discussion to include the often unconsidered world of general aviation. Thanks for that, Rich.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/53277\">Fistful of Dub</a> (Feat. Snowflake and DJ Vadim) by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: snowflake and DJ Vadim</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Notes from Hungary</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>The flight from Vienna to Budapest is 40 minutes on a 20-seat prop plane. I don’t think it ever levels off -- just a parabola, going straight from climb out into descent. Not that really noticed. After one more beer in Vienna airport, Andrew and I were asleep before the plane left the ground. Yet another pleasant Austrian Air flight attendant graciously placed bottles of water for us in the seat back pocket in front of us. We found them when the plane touched down in Budapest.</li>\r\n 	<li>We’d been to Budapest many times before, but this one would be different. Many of my wife’s aunts and uncles has passed away in the 12 years since our last visit, so there weren’t many family obligations -- just a long Saturday lunch the day before we left. Instead, this was probably the first time we saw Hungary as tourists.</li>\r\n 	<li>Before we visited, we checked with friends who had recently visited. What had they seen, enjoyed? Everyone loved Budapest. Scouting out places to stay, we abandoned what had been our usual Budapest Marriott perch on the Danube for so many years and instead headed east to District VII -- Erzsébetváros, the old Jewish Quarter. During our last visit in 2005, no one would’ve thought to go out here. But now, it’s full of restaurants, craft beer bars, a few Starbucks, and ruin pubs.</li>\r\n 	<li>We followed TravelCommons’ listener Arnoud Heijnis’ recommendation to check out what is the classic -- and perhaps the first -- ruin bar in Budapest -- Szimpla Kert. Arnoud’s description of it having a “pop-uppy kinda feel” was right on-point. You walk through a dingy, half-lit hallway, with a couple of bars on each side, into an open two-story courtyard ringed by, I dunno, another half-dozen bars across the two floors. There were at least a couple of English stag parties going on when we walked in -- one with whom I assumed was the groom-to-be dressed in a white ballerina tutu; the other group was wearing matching t-shirts fronted with a goofy picture of their groom-to-be.</li>\r\n 	<li>I saw a lot of those while we were in Budapest -- party groups wearing matching t-shirts; not so much the ballerina tutus. Budapest -- at least the redeveloped district we were in -- seems to have become a fly-in party town. Maybe the bankruptcy of the old state-run airline Malev left a vacuum for budget carriers to fill -- including WizzAir with a Budapest hub. And then Hungary hasn’t yet joined the euro, so it can devalue its currency, the forint, and look cheap to the rest of Europe. And it had lots of buildings available to repurpose -- starting with squatters setting up bars and dance clubs in abandoned buildings, then large sports bars, and then what seemed to me an amazing number of burger places. And they were all filled starting Thursday night, mostly with English speaking parties. A huge change from my first visit in 1989 when seemingly no one but my wife spoke English, and we’d walk into empty restaurants looking for lunch.</li>\r\n 	<li>Spending money in some of those bars, you’d think that Hungary is moving toward a parallel currency economy -- the forint and euro being used interchangeably -- similar to what I saw in Vietnam where I’d pay, say, a single taxi fare, in a combination of dong and dollar bills. In Budapest, you’ll get a bar tab in forint with a euro number printed below it. You can pay in euro, but you’ll probably get change back in forint. If it’s not too late in the evening, say your first or second bar, and so you haven’t yet lost your capability to do arithmetic, you’ll notice that the euro exchange rate isn’t quite in your favor. I started doing the math at each bar -- which, by the way, seemed to make a couple of bartenders nervous. The range of exchange rates on bar tabs was between 250 and 275 forint to the euro. The market rate was about 300 forint to the euro. In effect, the bars were charging an 8-16% convenience fee for letting you skip the ATM down the street.</li>\r\n 	<li>District VII is not the only part of Budapest that’s upgraded. Downtown Pest, along the Danube, looks spiffier. The Parliament building -- always an incredibly ornate building that dares you not to take multiple pictures of it as you walk past -- looked like it has been freshly steam cleaned. In ‘89, a soldier shooed my wife and I off the steps; this time we walked down into a nice visitors center, bought some tour tickets and were escorted up the Golden Staircase, under the huge dome, and past the crown jewels. And further south along the river, new developments, plazas, bars, bike paths have all sprung up -- again, in places we wouldn’t have thought of going 12 years ago. I understood why friends who had visited over the past year had enjoyed it.</li>\r\n 	<li>As much as I liked knocking around Budapest -- and running through most of District VII’s craft beer bars where, according to Untappd, Andrew and I tasted 43 Hungarian beers -- my favorite bit of the trip was the day we spent visiting wineries in the Tokaj wine region -- about 2½ hrs northeast of Budapest near the border with Slovakia. We hired the guy (<a href=\"http://www.tokajtoday.com/contact/\">Gergely Somogyi</a>) who runs the Tokaj Today web site as our guide. He came to our hotel, gave us a 30-minute PowerPoint presentation (plugged right into the hotel’s flat screen TV in the breakfast room) on Tokaj’s history, geography, geology, grape and wine types. And with this Intro to Tokaj information still looking for neurons to hang out in, we were off to visit four winemakers. And say that rather than wineries because we sat down with each of the winemakers -- the two more established --<a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/demeterzoltantokaj\">Zoltán Demeter</a> and <a href=\"http://www.bottpince.hu/\">Judit Bodo</a> -- in their tasting rooms, the two garagistas -- <a href=\"http://new2017.samueltinon.com/en/\">Mathilde Hulot</a> and <a href=\"http://abrahampince.com/english/\">Róbert Péter</a> -- their kitchens and patios -- for an hour or more each, talking about their wine, about Hungary, and about what they’re trying to do. Only one of the four -- Demeter -- is from Tokaj. The rest moved there to make wine -- Bodo from the Hungarian-speaking part of Slovakia, Peter from Budapest, and Hulot from France -- because of its history and its potential to make great wine.</li>\r\n 	<li>Each told a version of the same story -- of Tokaj’s history, wine knowledge, and wine quality being broken during the 40-some years of Communism -- abandoning the high-quality vineyards on the hills for lower-quality fields on the plains that could be harvested with big Russian tractors, 5-year government planning that pushed quantity over quality. And of how each of them came to Tokaj to flip that equation back to quality over quantity -- even the Tokaj local had to leave to jobs in California and France to learn quality winemaking before he came back. But they all feel challenged to get the entire community, the “locals,” on board. Maybe it’s some of the residue of Communism -- it’s easier to crank out industrial plonk than good wine. Maybe it’s because many of them can’t afford these new wines and so don’t appreciate them. Bodo said she specifically priced one wine so that local young people who now drink beer could afford to drink good local wine. To appreciate what they have here, she said, everyone has to be able to enjoy good wine -- not just the winemakers.</li>\r\n 	<li>I hate to truck in the wine industry cliche that these winemakers have a “passion” for what they’re doing, but my thesaurus fails me, I can’t find a better word. They all appreciated that we’d taken the time to drive out from Budapest to visit (if maybe a bit puzzled by doing everything in a day), and were very generous with their time and their wine. It was tough to limit ourselves to buying just one bottle per stop. I had to keep reminding myself that I’d only brought my small rollerboard with me.</li>\r\n 	<li>On our last night, we’re back in Budapest, knocking around District VII, looking for our last dinner. We’d had some great food -- a couple of Michelin one-stars, some food trucks near a ruin bar -- but it was tough to find some of the homey Hungarian food -- call it “peasant food” -- that we’d had in the past. And then we found it -- a bit cafeteria style -- I’ll take that sausage, the hurka with the pork liver and rice -- oh, and that one too, the regular kolbasz with pork, paprika and garlic -- some pickled salad, a bowl of gulyas soup, and, OK, just one last beer.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #130</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_130.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #130 — Notes from Hungary','','inherit','closed','closed','','1774-revision-v1','','','2018-07-23 15:37:02','2018-07-23 20:37:02','',1774,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/07/23/1774-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2075,1,'2018-07-23 15:37:52','2018-07-23 20:37:52','[caption id=\"attachment_1763\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/IMG_0887.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1763\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/IMG_0887-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Scottish Food Tourism can be an acquired taste[/caption]\r\n\r\nDifficult to do a travel podcast without talking about this month\'s incidents on United and American Airlines. The videos that hit social media were damning, but as more of the facts came out, the stories around each incident became more complex. On a much lighter note, we also talk about the explosion of food tourism, called by some \"The Bourdain Effect\" after Anthony Bourdain\'s TV travelogue series. Also, listener suggestions for visiting the Budapest baths, and compliments on the terminal improvements at San Francisco Airport (SFO). All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_129.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_129.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #129:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, taking a breather after a week of what I like to call “stupid travel” -- Mon, Tues in Charlottesville, VA, flying out Tues night to San Francisco by way of Charlotte because, well, that’s the way the connections worked. Spent Weds in San Francisco complete with a 4-5pm meeting which meant I got to SFO too late for the last reasonable flight to Detroit (I gave up red-eyes for Lent many years ago), so instead I caught the 7pm SFO-ORD flight, getting into ORD at 1am. Which meant I had to turn around the next morning, head back to ORD for a mid-morning flight to Detroit for an afternoon meeting in Ann Arbor. As we were driving out of DTW for Ann Arbor, I began to get texts from American that our return flight home was already delayed by thunderstorms at ORD. Later, looking out the window of the meeting room in Ann Arbor, I watched the rain bucket down. The delay made more sense. And it wasn’t a huge thing for me other than extending an already long week of travel by a couple of hours -- I had nothing planned that evening other than going to bed. Twitter followers should be pleasantly surprised by the lack of bitch tweets.</li>\r\n 	<li>And, I really didn’t think I could complain if this was the only delay in six flights that week. Although I did help my cause by connecting through Charlotte instead of ORD for my flight from Charlottesville to San Francisco. The ORD-SFO flight would’ve been an hour shorter, but the probability of making that connection, I think, would’ve been significantly lower. So instead, discretion being the better part of valor, I booked the connection through Charlotte in spite of the longer total trip duration and the incredibly long walks I typically have through that airport. The regional flights come into Concourse E which just goes on forever -- 35 gates just in that concourse -- while my connecting flights seem to always go out of Concourse A. Which means I’m usually race-walking the length of the airport even with an on-time arrival and a 60-minute connection time. However, on Tuesday night, my CHO-CLT flight got in early, I had a 90-minute connection time, and my flight went out Concourse B, which meant I had more than enough time to score some Carolina BBQ and a tall-boy beer -- a good luck trifecta which probably helped my patience with the Detroit delay two days later.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Vidian/52190\">Memories (infiniti loop)</a> by Vidian (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license. Ft: TheDice</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>First up, thanks to Robert Fenerty for sending along Budapest travel ideas. My wife’s parents were refugees from the 1956 uprising, so I’ve been to Hungary a few times -- the first in 1989 when it was still Communist, and then the last time was 11 or 12 years ago. So it’s been a while. On of Robert’s suggestions is heading to the Gellert Baths -- “My favorite,” he says, “Ornate lions dump water into the pool and you can stand beneath the lions.” I hit the Gellert Baths my first or second trip to Hungary. There wasn’t really any English spoken then by folks -- mostly German or Russian -- but I had done a “Hungarian on Tape” language course, had about a hundred word vocabulary, and so was able to manage buying a ticket and finding the locker room. Watching the old guys around me -- and it was just old guys -- I figured out that I was supposed to strip down and tie this little white apron around my waist and head in. You did feel like you were walking into the 1890’s. High ceilings, the spouting lions, old guys playing chess in the pools. I loved it. I told my son that’s it’s kind of a Hungarian onsen. We were both a little disappointed though when we saw on the Gellert website that the dress code had changed in four years ago -- no more single sex pools, no more aprons. It’s now co-ed with bathing suits required; as the website says “all bathers are expected to cover the most important gender essentials”.</li>\r\n 	<li>Chris Christensen sent in a quick note about the Munich airport -- “Munich does have its own brewery,” he said, “but it’s outside of security”. Lotta good that did me.</li>\r\n 	<li>And continuing on that riff from the last episode, wondering how travel guides are coming up with their top 10 airports, I have to say that SFO is not getting the credit it deserves. I think they’re doing the best job of any major US airport to remake themselves on the fly. First they build a new international terminal, then they rebuilt Terminal 2 into something that I think rivals Hong Kong or Singapore. They’ve done a great job renovating Terminal 3 -- opening up what used to be an overcrowded Newark-live cave into a bright, high-ceilinged concourse with wide walkways -- and now they’re tearing down Terminal 1 to completely rebuild that. So in, what, 10 years SFO will have completely rebuilt the passenger-side experience focusing on what travelers need -- no water slides or luxury shops, but reasonable security, a great selection of restaurants and bars, lots of seating and workspace, and what was, at least last week, screaming fast 5 GHz WiFi. Perceptions always lag reality, but I’m hoping that SFO starts getting some well-deserved love from the airport ranking lists.</li>\r\n 	<li>One of the podcasts on my subscription list is Men In Blazers, a soccer (or football) podcast. Toward the end of each show, the two hosts, Roger Bennett and Michael Davis, quickly review products that they’re putting in their Amazon Emporium for a little fund-raising. One thing that Michael Davis put it caught my ear -- compression socks. He said he’s started using them on NY-to-LA flights and loves them. I started using them on international flights after a flight home from Hong Kong in United economy had my legs swelling and stiffening up to tree trunks. I wasn’t the only one. There was another guy laying on the floor by one of the exit doors elevating his legs until a flight attendant shooed him off. I couldn’t bring myself to lie on an airplane floor -- at least not without a sanitized mat -- but after that I started flying in compression socks. Not something that I’ve ever seen make a Top 10 travel tip list -- it’s not the most exciting tip -- but I swear by it. Maybe I’ll sneak it in on my next list.</li>\r\n 	<li>And it wouldn’t be a complete Following Up segment without some beer comment, so thanks to eTuk Denver who tweeted “Mark, next time you\'re in Denver we will personally take you on one of our Beer tours for all the hours of entertainment provided.” Thanks guys! I’m glad you enjoy the podcast and look forward to taking you up on that offer. From their website, it looks like the eTuk guys do beer tours through Denver’s RiNo or River North Art District. The Drink Rino website says they “have the largest concentration of craft beverage manufacturers in the United States, with 15 craft breweries, cideries, wineries and distilleries in a one mile radius.” Yes, it sounds like my kind of neighborhood.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/50485\">Sunset Boulevard</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Siobhan Dakay, unreal_dm</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Airplane Fight Clubs</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I purposely don’t try to do instant Twitter “hot takes” on the news. The near-instantaneous outrage that flares up on Facebook and Twitter often isn’t justified when all the facts work their way out days later. And the United Airlines dragging incident and the American Airlines stroller incident seem to be following those patterns.</li>\r\n 	<li>The April 9th videos of the Chicago aviation police dragging a bloodied semi-conscious passenger down the aisle of a plane are awful. But reading the police report released two weeks later on the 25th add facts not in the video -- that when an officer tried to get the passenger out of his seat, the passenger \"started swinging his arms up and down fast and violently” and that this flailing knocked off the officer’s hands causing the passenger to fall and hit his mouth on the armrest. And that after running back on the plane a second time yelled “\"I\'m not getting off the plane. Just kill me. I want to go home,\" Not exactly the Rosa Parks mantle that his lawyer claimed for him at the press conference announcing his lawsuit.</li>\r\n 	<li>Now, United, actually Republic -- it was their flight to Louisville operating under the United Express banner -- completely screwed this up in so many ways -- trying to go cheap on the incentives for volunteers, involuntarily bumping passengers already in their seats, not figuring out another way to get the deadheading crew to Louisville, and then escalating to the police -- which then led to the passenger escalating. The three other passengers who were involuntarily bumped took the high road -- grudging got off the plane so as not to inconvenience their fellow passengers and to follow what everyone understands are the post-9/11 rules -- once you pass through the plane door, you obey the airline and the crew or else.</li>\r\n 	<li>Unfortunately, for some crew, this expectation of being unquestioned oracle of right and wrong leads them to demand passengers to “respect my authority” first rather than try to de-escalate. The American Airlines incident that happened last weekend -- a conflict between a flight attendant and a mother of two with oversized strollers -- shows again that escalation between, in this case, the flight attendant trying to load the plane and a mother trying to bring 1 or 2 oversized strollers onto the plane instead of gate-checking them. The conflicting demands between “respect my authority” and “the carry-on rules don’t apply to me” collide. It later comes out that the “hot take” on this -- the flight attendant hit the mother and child with the stroller while trying to take it from her -- wasn’t true (no one was hit), but the rapid escalation -- mother yelling, threats between the flight attendant and some First Class passenger who inserted himself -- is everyone’s fault. It’s an unwillingness for someone to step back, swallow hard, and sacrifice their ego.</li>\r\n 	<li>The lawyer for the United Airlines passenger said in his press conference that airlines have been “bullying” passengers. I don’t know that he’s completely wrong on this. Spirit and Ryanair seem to have built their brand around treating passengers rudely. But the passenger treatment of mainline airlines has eroded in the name of operational efficiency -- packed planes, reduced leg room, flight attendants yelling at boarding passengers to hurry up and sit down so the flight can leave. Earlier this week the American Customer Satisfaction Index reported that the airline industry as a whole remains in the bottom third of those the ACSI tracks. “Customer satisfaction has never appeared to be a goal for airlines,” their analysis said. “\"Compared to other industries, the financial return on passenger satisfaction is not much of an incentive.” As the airline industry as consolidated into an oligopoly of 4 main carriers in the US and 3 global alliances -- Star Alliance, OneWorld, and Skyteam -- there aren’t many alternatives. Most of us shrug and bear it; a few lash out.</li>\r\n 	<li>Interesting to see, though, United’s latest efforts to bury this PR nightmare is a pay-out to the bloodied passenger and an announcement that they’ll now offer up to $10,000 for voluntary rebookings. And Southwest, who’ve been completely untouched by this, saying they’ll eliminate overbookings by June.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music --<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/ramblinglibrarian/55007\">Dawn at the Top of the World ft. copperhead &amp; Robert Seikawitch</a> by Ivan Chew (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>The Bourdain Effect</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>That’s how travel wags are explaining the explosion of food tourism -- people wanting to recreate experiences from Anthony Bourdain’s <em>No Reservations</em> and <em>Parts Unknown</em>. Not that it’s anything new -- people have been going to South Philly forever and flipping a coin between Pat’s and Geno’s cheese steaks or going to Detroit for a similar dance between American and Lafayette for coney dogs.</li>\r\n 	<li>It’s more that it’s flipped around today -- it’s used to be that you’d come to Chicago to visit family or see a Cubs game, and, by the way, queue up at Gino’s East for deep dish pizza. Now, it’s booking a table at Alinea, perennially in the top of the <em>World’s 50 Best Restaurant</em> list, and then booking flights, a hotel, and checking the Cubs schedule. Food is now a main draw with restaurants becoming travel destinations in their own right. Noma, the Copenhagen restaurant that is regularly #1 on the World’s 50 Best list has taken this to what is currently the most extreme -- they’re doing a pop-up restaurant in Tulum, Mexico; $600/seat and they sold out -- 5,000 seats in 3 hrs.</li>\r\n 	<li>Regular listeners know that I’m not immune to this. We have a group of 3 couples -- the guys, we all went to college together -- that are Exhibit A of this trend. One wife found a lunch opening at the French Laundry on OpenTable, booked it, then told us, and we all immediately booked a weekend in Napa. Finishing that lunch, we asked ourselves, “What’s our next 3-star?” My wife booked the kitchen table at Alinea, and the other two couples flew into Chicago.</li>\r\n 	<li>Travel experts explain this, saying food is one of the main travel experiences that can’t be digitized -- even though a lot of people try. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve been eating at an upscale restaurant and the guy next to me whips out a big Nikon DSLR, stands up and shoots his plate. Over a 10-course meal, those guys are working some calories.</li>\r\n 	<li>But of course, you can’t digitize taste. And you can’t save it. You can only experience it in the moment. And actually, that moment isn’t just about taste -- it’s the whole experience -- whether you’re having a 3-star lunch in Napa or Paris, your first taste of durian at a roadside stand in Singapore, or a Chicago hot dog at the Weiner Circle at 2 in the morning.</li>\r\n 	<li>One of my favorite travel memories with my father was many years ago when he and I went down to Cabo for a week. Charlie Trotter, one of the early high-end chefs in Chicago, had opened a restaurant in the One and Only resort between Cabo San Lucas and San Jose del Cabo. I had eaten at Trotter’s in Chicago many times and had even worked a shift in the kitchen -- I won it in a charity auction; it was a great experience, but it was real work -- so I wanted to check out this new place. They had just opened. The management was all down from Chicago and they were shaking things out. The starter courses were great, but my dad’s main course wasn’t hot. I flagged down a manager and asked him if they could heat up it up. Away went both of our plates. Hey, mine was fine; you just need to heat his up. The manager quickly came back. Nope, we’ll re-make your dad a new dish, and since he can’t be expected to watch you eat, we’ve taken yours and will re-make yours too so we can serve them at the same time. And while you’re waiting, here are a couple more appetizer dishes. My dad and I looked at each other and started nibbling at the new appetizers. And then we finished them. And then our main courses re-arrived hot and fresh. My dad looked over the table at me and said, “You know, I’m not really that hungry anymore”. I stared him down -- “After what they just went through, you’re going to eat that dish, all of it, and enjoy it”. Complete role reversal. We would replay that scene and laugh about it for years afterwards; way more than we’d look at pictures of us outside the Giggling Marlin.</li>\r\n 	<li>And now that we’re gearing up for our trip to Hungary next month, my wife is running through the list of top Budapest restaurants. I’m looking forward to that, but I also remember up a steep narrow sidewalk in Szentendre a little lángos stand -- deep fried bread rubbed in garlic with a bit of cheese on top. It didn’t make Bourdain’s <em>Parts Unknown</em> Budapest episode, but I’ll be searching for it all the same.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #129</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_128.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #129 — Airport Fight Club; The Bourdain Effect','','inherit','closed','closed','','1760-revision-v1','','','2018-07-23 15:37:52','2018-07-23 20:37:52','',1760,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/07/23/1760-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2076,1,'2018-07-23 15:38:44','2018-07-23 20:38:44','[caption id=\"attachment_1749\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/IMG_0033.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1749\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/IMG_0033-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> One of the Four Major Food Groups[/caption]\r\n\r\nIt\'s a very Paris-centric episode; I\'m still trying to drop the weight I picked up on our 10-day stay. I talk about hunts for beer and pastry took us out of the usual Notre Dame-to-Eiffel Tower-to-Louvre tourist triangle, some of the interesting buskers we saw along the way, and my surprise at Munich Airport receiving an airport award. I also continue our on-going discussions about buying international SIM cards and ride-sharing. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_128.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_128.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #128:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, after a full month of travel. I’m not complaining though, because -- first, I had been home, off the road, for 4 weeks straight and was beginning to make the place look untidy; and then more than a week of this travel spurt was in Paris, on vacation with the family. Tough to complain about travel with your mouth full of great food and wine. And mine certainly was. I’m not even looking at a scale for another 2 weeks.</li>\r\n 	<li>In what’s become our usual pattern for European trips, we flew out on a Thursday night. This works out well because typically Friday is a catch-up day at work -- more about internal conference calls than client work -- so it’s easier to skip out, and then landing on a Friday, more places are open -- like rental agency offices, phone stores -- if you need them. My wife and I flew into Paris and had a 3-star Michelin lunch to chase away jet lag, while the kids met up in Edinburgh for the weekend and lived off of beer and haggis. They then hopped one of the budget carriers to CDG Sunday night and managed to figure out the train well enough to land at the doorstep of our vacation rental on Rue de Rivoli, a bridge and a couple of blocks straight up from Notre Dame. My wife has this whole vacation rental thing down to a near science. I think I need to nag her into writing it up in a post for the TravelCommons web site.</li>\r\n 	<li>In the travel build-up to the Paris trip, another usual pattern; this one involves a bit more stupid travel -- bouncing across multiple clients and cities, to give everyone face-time before I disappear for a week; I found myself in Miami for a couple of days. I flew American back home to Chicago Friday night, and I guess because I was going between two of their hubs, I ended up on one of American’s international 767’s. Now, I typically despise 767’s because the overhead bins are way undersized. But, it was one of the best domestic upgrades I’ve scored. First, because between First and Business class, there’s a whole lot more seat for an upgrade. And then, this 767’s business class had been upgraded, so I had my own “pod” with a lie-flat seat and a 20-something inch screen -- much bigger than the screen smaller than my hand that I tweeted from the United 767 I took from ORD to CDG. Made for a very comfortable 3-hr flight.</li>\r\n 	<li>But back to Paris, the trip went without a hitch -- the strong dollar made an expensive a city a little less so, the weather was great for March -- sunny, a bit brisk. I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to get around with just English. I know I’m a language sloth, and while I didn’t expect it, I was happy not to have to struggle through with my minimal French. Indeed, the only smirch on trip was at the very end. We landed at ORD after 7pm, after half of Immigration shut down. The resulting lines were insane; Security was walking planeloads of people from the other side of the international terminal to our side and to the back of our line. They were shouting for all US citizens to get stand to the left of the hallway. After about 10 minutes of this, I asked a security person about Global Entry. “Oh, go this way,” she said and pointed down an empty line. We bolted, and were out after another 5 minutes. Customs should’ve had a guy walking that line taking Global Entry applications. They would’ve made a killing.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://www.magnatune.com/artists/albums/rompaey-mozaic/\">Bubbly</a></em> by Ruben van Rompaey</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>First up, a belated Thank You to iTunes user <em>California flying</em> for the 5-star review back in January:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>“As a project manager with lots of travel thrown in, I really enjoy hearing Mark’s travel tales and can very much relate to his insight and observations. It’s an easy and fun listen. Just wish it was more frequent!”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Thanks for taking the time to write that review. I’m glad you enjoy the podcast. I am trying on the frequency. This will be 3 straight months of episodes, so we’re starting 2017 in the right way.</li>\r\n 	<li>In the last episode, after deconstructing my own Top 10 travel tips list, I asked for listener contributions. Dan wrote this on the TravelCommons web site\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>“My biggest travel tip right now to my friends is get Nexus! Not only is it great when coming or going to the US (we live in Canada), but it gets you TSA Precheck while in the US which is great to have.”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Good tip, Dan. As a US citizen, I’m still a bit confused on the Global Entry vs. Nexus choice. But anything that lets you skip Immigration lines and keep from having to disrobe in the security line is a good thing.</li>\r\n 	<li>Dan Brener and Max Flight both hit the TravelCommons’ Facebook page to say they found the VPN comparison in the last episode useful. Dan said that he also uses PIA and has found that, sometimes, Netflix will let it connect -- which I mentioned is kinda the acid test for location shifting. Dan says it is a bit hit-&amp;-miss though.</li>\r\n 	<li>Continuing the thread from the past couple of episodes on buying pay-as-you-go-SIMs when overseas, my Paris experiences were a mixed bag. On that first Friday, between picking up the apartment keys and heading to the George V for lunch, I wanted to pick up at least one SIM so we’d have some connectivity. I walked to nearest Orange store -- about 3 blocks down Rue de Rivoli. They didn’t have any regular prepaid SIMs in stock; only the special Holiday SIM which had inter-EU calling which I didn’t need and, at 40 euros, was more than I needed to pay. This became a common refrain. Every company-owned Orange and SFR store I visited was out of prepaid SIMs. Only what appeared to be a franchised Orange store in the bottom of the big underground shopping mall at Les Halles had them, and also very friendly service. That got us through the weekend. On Monday, after another string of Orange stiff arms, we walked up to the main Free store -- which I think sells TV as well as mobile service. We walked up to a vending machine in the lobby and pretty quickly had two more SIMs; a much better buying experience except for the fact that the store was inconveniently tucked away down a bland business street north of the Champs Elysee. I’ll be glad when the eSIM gets market traction.</li>\r\n 	<li>And continuing another thread, this one on Uber, while I regularly use Uber and Lyft in the US, I rarely -- if ever -- use them while traveling in Europe. I got to thinking about this while in Paris when, on Saturday when heading to the airport, we chose to roll the luggage to a taxi rank rather than use Uber. It’s a couple of reasons. First, there doesn’t seem to be that much of a price difference between Uber and taxis. I first noticed this in Lisbon last spring and then again in Paris. Second, most taxis in Europe are not the beaters that many US cabs are. In the US, even at the same rate, I’ll often take Uber because the cars are in so much better shape. The cabs in Baltimore last summer were the most egregious case. There was a cab stand right outside the building I was in, but I’d still wait 5 minutes for an Uber. And third, and maybe the most nebulous (squishy?), I’m maybe a bit less comfortable getting into a ride-share in a country where I don’t know the language and am not confident that I’m solid on the customs and protocols. In the US, I know what’s right and what’s not. Even in the UK, I’m comfortable enough and don’t worry about communicating effectively with the driver. I know zero Portuguese and little more French. So I’m a bit more willing to search out a taxi stand.</li>\r\n 	<li>I was flipping through the online version of the UK’s Telegraph newspaper earlier this month and got clickbaited into a Top 10 Airport listicle from the 2017 Skytrax World Airport Awards. They had all the usual suspects at the top of the list -- Singapore, Seoul, Hong Kong -- but at #4, they had Munich! I was stunned because my last two experiences connecting through Munich -- last Nov en route to Pisa and this month on my way back from Paris -- were not great as my Twitter followers already know. Probably the worst thing are the lines, and how brutally slow they move. Back in episode #125, I described the security crawl when trying to connect to our Pisa flight mid-morning on a Friday. I was stunned how slow the security staff was moving. No sense of urgency as a dozen lines tailed back through the terminal. I thought a union had called for some job action. But then in March, it was a huge tailback off of passport control. I’m used to Frankfurt where you walk up, answer a question, boom-boom they stamp your passport and through you go. Not in Munich. It was that same meandering pace. Like the place was in slow motion. The same thing at the one restaurant we found in the satellite portion of Terminal 2. Four people were behind the counter. The line trying to ordering tailed back, but only one of the four was helping customers. The other three were having some conversation and doing some paperwork. So why did Skytrax rate Munich #4? Apparently, it has its own brewery, a mini-golf course, and in the winter, a Christmas market and an ice skating rink -- none of which I experienced while struggling through lines trying to make a connection. And maybe that’s the problem -- Munich is focused on being a shopping mall/entertainment center rather than being an airport. Planning a flight to Budapest in May, I was offered two connection choices -- Munich or Vienna. I didn’t even pause to think about it. choosing Vienna, even though it’s nowhere in that Skytrax list. I’m hoping they’ll work harder on getting me through the airport than grooming a mini-golf course.</li>\r\n 	<li>And finally, congrats to Frank Mohnhaupt for winning a year\'s subscription to NordVPN. Frank’s entry in the Rafflecopter drawing was subscribing to the TravelCommons’ SoundCloud feed. And thanks again to NordVPN for providing the giveaway prize.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/kokoon-berlin/\">How Do I Work This</a></em> by The Kokoon</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>The Hunt for Experiences</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>In Paris, that first weekend when it was just my wife and I -- the kids were hunting haggis in Edinburgh -- was spent a good chunk of the time on what I call “hunts”. We got up and out early on Saturday -- always a good way to fight jet lag -- hunting for a pastry. Not just any pastry, because in Paris, that would in no way qualify as a hunt. No, it was a specific kind of pastry -- a kugelhopf, a kind of a hat-shaped pastry. And not just any kugelhopf. We were tracking down Vandermeersch, which, according to an article my wife read in Saveur magazine, makes the best kugelhopf in Paris and usually sells out shortly after opening -- hence the early morning alarm. So off we go, using Google Maps to tell us the right combination of Metros to get us to the correct outer bit of Paris. We get there shortly after opening and had the full selection of kugelhopfs -- small, medium, large. The couple of nice middle-aged women running what was a small shop helped us to by 2 smalls -- one to eat right away; the second for Sunday morning -- and a medium for Monday morning for breakfast with the kids. We ate that small one fresh, on the street. I don’t know if it was the best kugelhopf because my sample size was (and still is) one, but it was a pretty damn good pastry and worth forgoing the snooze button the early alarm.</li>\r\n 	<li>Saturday afternoon, we went on my hunt -- for a microbrewery, in an even further out bit of Paris, that’s only open Saturday afternoons. And where our morning visit to Vandermeersch landed us in a seemingly upscale neighborhood where people were up early for the morning runs along the grass boulevard dividers, that afternoon, we walked up the Metro steps on the main street of a heavily North African neighborhood; definitely outside the tourist bubble. Walking across the park here -- no grass, just dirt.</li>\r\n 	<li>But walking into the microbrewery, off kind of a dodgy street, put us in the midst of what seemed to be the standard afternoon outing for Parisian hipster families. Mostly while families with little kids; lots of bikes and beers; everyone eating sandwiches sold by an artisanal baker who looked to be friends of the brewers (his t-shirt read (in English) “More Bakers, Less Bankers”). Nice people; great beer. But an interesting contrast with the surrounding neighborhood. Inside the brewery, I could’ve been in Brooklyn or Portland. Outside, on the main street, maybe Algiers.</li>\r\n 	<li>Good pastry, good beer, but the hunt -- searching out these experiences -- is as much it’s own reward. It gave us a reason, a goal, to get out of the travel bubble, off the well-trod Notre Dame-to-Eiffel Tower-to-Louvre tourist triangle. Not that we didn’t do that too -- we did -- but if that’s all we did, it would have been a bit disappointing. And that we did it on our own, rather than as part of some “Hipster Paris” tour, gives an added touch of accomplishment.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music --<em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/weigl-proof/\">Piano Circus</a></em> by Philipp Weigl</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Pop-Up Entertainment</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Toward the end of our week in Paris, heading out again from the normal tourist zone -- in search of a brew pub with my son this time; my wife and daughter were hunting Longchamps bags -- we get on the Metro to find a busker on our subway car, a tuba busker. He was an older guy wearing a slightly Tyrolean looking hat with a waist-high battery-powered speaker in front of him taped to a luggage wheelie type of cart and an orange donations can taped to the handle. The speaker played the backing track while he played the main melody on the tuba. After one song (which I can’t say that I recognized), he left the backing track playing while walking the car with his hand out for tips. I think he was on the car for 3 stops.</li>\r\n 	<li>On the way back, during one of the 18 stops back, another busker walked onto our car, a younger guy who turned out to be a rapping busker. He had the same speaker rig and the same cadence as the tuba player -- last guy in, stood in front of the door, powered up the back beat on the speakers, rapped out a song between stops, solicited money between the next stops, and then left the train.</li>\r\n 	<li>I also saw what I consider the more typical subway buskers -- playing guitar, or a double-bass in the connecting tunnels, taking advantage of the tile acoustics. A little less typical was a couple ating out an opera scene in a wider area where 2 or 3 tunnels came together. Not only were they singing opera (with tile-driven acoustics), they were acting out the scene -- the woman fleeing toward one tunnel only to have the man catch her and pull her back. It took just a moment to connect the singing to the action; to realize that this wasn’t an actual assault. It drew a bit of a crowd. I don’t know if this was real busking or just advertising an opera show, but it certainly got my attention.</li>\r\n 	<li>Later on, my son and I were walking in front of Notre Dame and heard another woman singing opera. It took us a minute to locate her. She had her back to a building on the north side of the plaza. It was another good acoustic location -- the echo off the building seem to amplify and project her voice across the open space in front of the cathedral. The police seem to keep a heavy presence here. We’d seen them earlier descend on a woman who was panhandling the folks standing in line to get into the cathedral. But this time, they let the woman finish up her aria before moving her along. Quite a change from Chicago’s bucket boys.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #128</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Magnatune</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_128.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #128 — Hunt for Experiences; Pop-Up Entertainment','','inherit','closed','closed','','1747-revision-v1','','','2018-07-23 15:38:44','2018-07-23 20:38:44','',1747,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/07/23/1747-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2077,1,'2018-07-23 15:40:36','2018-07-23 20:40:36','[caption id=\"attachment_1722\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/IMG_0215a.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1722\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/IMG_0215a-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Last generation digital security[/caption]\r\n\r\nIn this episode, I talk again about digital security on the road, especially the use of a VPN. I review three VPN products, including <a href=\"http://nordvpn.com\" target=\"_blank\">NordVPN</a> which is giving away a year\'s subscription to a TravelCommons listener. I dig into the process of generating the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/12/12/top-10-holiday-travel-tips-2/\" target=\"_blank\">Top 10 Holiday Travel Tips</a> listicle I do every couple of year, and follow up on stories from Uber and Lyft drivers. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_127.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_127.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #127:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, in the midst of my third straight week at home. It is yet another sign of the impending apocalypse. All just can’t be right with the world - the office manager is nervous that I’m in the office for days in a row, my friends are shocked that I’m available during the week for a beer, my wife is tired of cooking dinner for me, and the cat is visibly pissed (in his own kitty way) that I’m taking up space on the couch. But, I am getting current on my doctor and dentist appointments, and I was able to get a haircut in a timely manner. Though these may seem little things, they can be a pain to get done when you’re traveling every week, and weekend appointments are a scarce commodity. Convenient, if not a bit boring.</li>\r\n 	<li>It also means I’ve missed 1 Delta and 2 United system outages and the associated ground-stops and cancellations, as well as getting stranded in last weekend’s East Coast winter storm. Those of you who follow me on Twitter have got to be happy about the lull in bitch tweeting.</li>\r\n 	<li>And I’ve also been around to provide real-time advice and counsel to my wife as she’s been planning our family spring break trip -- this year we’re skipping the Iberian Peninsula and going to Paris. I’m not sure how much she really appreciates my immediate reactions, but…. The house is awash with guidebooks -- except, of course, for Rick Steves. I pulled out the 2016 review copy of <a href=\"https://www.dk.com/us/9781465440839-top-10-paris/\" target=\"_blank\">DK’s Top 10 Paris</a>, the credenza looks like my wife cleared out the local library, and we have print outs of a bunch of web pages. I dunno,I guess I’m a visual and tactile person. When I’m trying to wrap my head around a bunch of disparate data sources, I still have to go physical -- print it out and spread it out. Or maybe this is just a fancy way to say I’m old.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Javolenus/41932\">Ianiscus</a> by Javolenus (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/\">Attribution (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Wired_Ant</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Just a heads up, I’ll be announcing a new giveaway later on in this episode. And since I can’t figure out how to create MP3 chapter marks in Adobe Audition, you’ll have listen all the way through.</li>\r\n 	<li>Rummaging through the mailbag…\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Dan Gradwohl dropped me a line agreeing with my complaint in the last episode about the small print size on most hotel shampoo and conditioner bottles. And, like me, he like Hyatt Place’s solution -- print a big “1” on the shampoo, a big “2” on the conditioner, and a big “3” on the shower gel. No need then to wear your reading glasses in the shower then. Dan also said that he “really liked” the music in the last episode. I can’t take credit for that. I outsourced the music search to my daughter Claire who was home for Winter Break. Since she received what may be the first positive comment about the music in 12 years, I asked her to to help me with this episode too.</li>\r\n 	<li>Long-time listener Robert Fenerty hit the TravelCommons website to comment on my pay-as-you-go SIM travails -- “Not many people are courageous enough to admit what a time sink it can be to find, purchase and setup a local SIM card. Sometimes it’s easy, the many Heathrow SIM vending machines being a great example. And Austria is a breeze. But outside of western countries, I’ve had to hand over my passport, stand in long lines, and try to explain “no, I need the one with data” to clerks whose language I don’t speak. Once I found out after leaving the store that my SIM was not properly initialized. Please go back to square one. The Verizon Travelpass is a great alternative for those 2-3 day trips. It’s often less expensive than the local SIM and it’s about as painless to enable/disable as you can imagine. Please keep up the good work, the beer tips, and the warm sentiments from the road. Your podcast has become an old friend that I have over for dinner every once in awhile.”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Robert, thanks for that post. What a nice way of putting it -- the podcast becoming an old friend. I haven’t heard it put that way before, but it’s a huge compliment.</li>\r\n 	<li>Looking at SIMs for our Paris trip next month, the new upstart network provider sells their SIMs through vending machines, so I think I’ll skip the Orange phone store and give the new guys a try. I’m not a Verizon phone customer, but many of my Verizon-using friend swear by Travelpass as being dead-simple. AT&amp;T finally matched that offer last month with their International Day Pass -- $10/day and it looks about as simple. An AT&amp;T-using friend who’ll be on an Asian cruise next month plans to use it. And that seems to be a perfect use case -- he’ll be in a different country every day.</li>\r\n 	<li>One of things we’ll be working on before the Paris trip is not to forget anything critical when we leave for the airport. Many years ago, we get out of the cab at ORD’s International Terminal for a family trip to London. I’m pulling the bags out of the trunk ...and there’s one missing. I send my family through to check-in and boarding while I hop back into the cab to run back home. I open the front door, and there’s the forgotten bag in the middle of the hallway. We only live a 25-min drive from ORD and luckily there was no traffic, and I had status on Virgin Atlantic at the time. I made it to the gate just before boarding was called. That memory seared in our brains, we never make that mistake again… until Sept when we were heading over to Scotland. We’re in the cab and my wife asks me “Do you have my passport?” Nope, thought you had it. At least we figured this out before we hit the airport. The driver makes an illegal U-turn across the tollway media and we sprint back home to find the passport sitting on my desk. It was only a 15-min backtrack this time, so we still got to ORD in time to get a sandwich at Tortas Frontera. But it was a wake-up call -- never be complacent about stupidity.</li>\r\n 	<li>We were in San Francisco a few weekends back. Always an interesting time, especially with 80,000 people marching through the center of town on Saturday. We stayed at the Westin St Francis on Union Square -- decided to go old-school for the weekend. It rained most of the weekend, which emptied out the cab rank outside the St Francis, which meant we did more ride-shares and less walking. I have both Uber and Lyft on my phone, so I’d pop them both open and compare wait times and pricing. Even with the rain, the wait times rarely topped 3 min -- which is almost instantaneous in the traffic around Union Square. I was amazed at the number of animated cars swarming the area. Continuing my research from a couple of episodes ago, I’d talk with each driver about how their gig was going. I was surprised at the overwhelming preference for Lyft over Uber. Lyft pays more than Uber, they said. Many said they only take Uber rides when they think they can hit Uber’s incentive bonuses. If not, they tend to Lyft. And they said the Lyft riders tended to be nicer, more considerate. Since I was using both apps, I didn’t quite know what to make of that. Our Sunday morning driver told us he drives solely for Lyft; he quit after Uber trialed driverless cars in San Francisco. He said it was just another proof point that Uber doesn’t care about its drivers. We ended up taking mostly Lyft that weekend.</li>\r\n 	<li>This echoed what I’d heard from an Uber and Lyft driver in Charlottesville, VA last month. This guy was a super driver -- he’d done 85,000 miles last year. He also preferred Lyft because they paid more, but said that he gets more rides from Uber. He lives in Charlottesville, but heads over to Richmond to drive when UVa is on break. He was planning to head up to DC for inauguration weekend, figuring the surge pricing would make it worth his while. I’ve never talked to anyone who is working the system as hard as this guy.</li>\r\n 	<li>Back home, telling our son Andrew about all this, he came down firmly on Uber’s side, because Uber can’t cancel a ride. He’s had too many Chicago Lyft drivers cancel on him. He deleted the<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/2017-02-20-08.37.43.png\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1729\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/2017-02-20-08.37.43-169x300.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"169\" height=\"300\" /></a> Lyft app off his phone and is exclusively Uber.</li>\r\n 	<li>Last month, I was back flying one of my usual routes from the ‘90’s -- ORD-DTW -- complete with the original aircraft -- an AA MD-80. That 2-3 cabin configuration and the what-now-seem-like half-height overhead bins. At least it was an original American MD-80, not one of TWA ones they held onto after that merger. The AA ones are actually not a bad plane if you’re toward the front, away from the engines in the back. They seem to have more rows of extra leg room Main Cabin Extra seats than the newer A319s and 320s. At some point during the flight, my row mate looks down at my phone and asks “How are you charging your phone? There aren’t any plugs here”. She was kinda right -- no regular two-prong AC plugs. But I knew from years of flying these planes (I first started flying American in 1985 -- when these MD-80s were in their prime), that down between the seats, I’d find an old cigarette lighter outlet. And I still carry a lighter power adapter for that 10% of the time Hertz sticks me with a beater rental that doesn’t have a USB plug -- or for times like this when I’m flying AA’s beater plane.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/48914\">In Peace (Somewhere Else Mix)</a> by cdk (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/\">Attribution (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Snowflake</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Critiquing my Top 10 Travel Tips</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Every couple of years, I bow to the search engine gods at Google and create a listicle -- an awful mashup word of list and article. They’re kinda click-baity. You see them on places like Mashable -- “Top 10 Ways to Hack Your Morning Routine” or “The 10 most cringeworthy advertising fails of 2015” (I didn’t make these up). But they exist because people search for them. So in December when my last listicle has rolled off the front page of TravelCommons, I create another one titled just like the last one -- “Top 10 Holiday Travel Tips”. And how do they score? When I searched just now for “Top 10 Holiday Travel Tips”, a Google+ posting for my 2013 edition made the first page of results -- albeit the last entry -- and last December’s, the most recent, made the top of the second page. Not too bad…</li>\r\n 	<li>When I write each new edition, I do try to think about what are today’s top 10 rather than just blindly copy-pasting the last post, although there is a good chunk of repetition -- “Fly Non-Stop” and “Skip the Tight Connection” are as valid today as they were 12 years ago when I started this podcast.\r\nThough they might also seem a bit obvious to even a slightly seasoned traveler. So I also have tried to weave in a few, if not Pro Tips, then at least a next level of insight. In 2013, I suggested buying status for the lead adult in the travel party. The rationale went like this -- for $20, you can take your whole family through the status security line and early boarding because I’ve never seen a security screener or gate agent split up a family.<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/2017-02-20-08.37.58.png\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1728\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/2017-02-20-08.37.58-169x300.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"169\" height=\"300\" /></a></li>\r\n 	<li>I’ve also consistently recommended that people use Twitter as an alternate way into customer service, “at addressing” an airline or hotel as a way to jump what might be a long queue in front of a gate agent or front-desk clerk. I don’t think a lot of folks realize the sophistication and focus that many companies put on monitoring social media. My tweet about that American MD-80 generated a quick reply from American -- “We\'re currently working on updating our fleet, Mark…” And while not exactly travel-related, AT&amp;T has now followed up with me twice over Twitter about a cellular service problem I was having last week. I gave this advice to a friend who called me from ORD on Christmas Day. Korean Air wouldn’t let him and his family board their flight to Hanoi because they didn’t have Vietnamese visas -- a new requirement that had just hit a couple of days earlier. They couldn’t find anyone to help them. Between the “at” Tweeting and sheer persistence, they finally found a way to get on the plane.</li>\r\n 	<li>I used to have “bring a portable battery pack” -- like a lipstick charger -- or a small power strip on my list because of the dearth of electrical outlets in airports. One listener recommended stalking cleaning crews to find hidden outlets. But now -- finally -- with long overdue gate area refreshes, airlines are adding accessible outlets -- either in new work areas or power “pylons” sponsored by Samsung or Verizon. So while I still carry a battery pack and often find it useful, it’s fallen out of the Top 10.</li>\r\n 	<li>Back in 2014, I did break it up a bit. Instead of a classic “Top 10” listicle, I offered Airport Etiquette tips -- things like “when traveling with your family, don’t stroll 4 abreast down the concourse” and “the airport Starbucks isn’t like your neighborhood one; keep your coffee order to 3 adjectives or less”. That article is nowhere to be found on the Google search page.</li>\r\n 	<li>What is the top travel pro tip that you’re handing out to your friends? Sending one in will be part of the giveaway I’ll announce in the next topic.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music --<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/35724\">Blue Like Venus</a> by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/\">Attribution (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Admiral Bob</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Reviewing VPNs</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/12/20/podcast-119-digital-security-on-the-road-us-airports-getting-better/\">episode #119</a>, I talked about digital security on the road, and the topic has turned into a persistent thread across episodes, which makes sense given the Chinese water torture-type steady drip, drip, drip of cyber breach announcements. Frequent travelers could be considered a high risk group because, being away from their homes and offices, heavily rely on public networks -- airports, hotels, Starbucks -- to work (and play) in today’s digitized -- what, economy, society, street corner?</li>\r\n 	<li>VPNs -- virtual private networks -- have two main use cases for the frequent traveler -- privacy on public networks and location shifting. VPNs accomplish these by altering the routing of the network traffic in and out of your PC, tablet or smartphone. What you’re putting out onto the Internet is encrypted so eavesdroppers -- like the guy wearing the hoodie in the dark corner of the Starbucks (to truck in stereotypes) running a packet sniffer -- can’t read what you’re browsing or e-mailing. And then the VPN routes your encrypted traffic to that it looks like you’re using the Internet from a different location -- what’s called the VPN “endpoint”</li>\r\n 	<li>So how much privacy do you really need, and is it worth the additional hassle of using a VPN? Like everything, it depends. Being a consultant, you’ll forgive me for giving into my reflex of distilling it down to a 2x2 matrix -- on what you’re doing, and how paranoid you are. In the low paranoid/high privacy need box I put things like on-line banking and filling out your Global Entry app. Lots of personal information there that you don’t want Mr Hoodie to hoover up and post on some dark web hacking site. In the low privacy need/high paranoid box, I’d put reading Mashable listicles or browsing porn site -- embarrassing if someone posted that info on your Facebook page, but they couldn’t drain your bank account.</li>\r\n 	<li>The location shifting use case -- I’m in Beijing but the Internet thinks I’m in Chicago -- only really comes into play for international travelers. Like when I’m in Madrid but wanting to stream the NCAA basketball tournament, or when my daughter in Scotland wants to watch “Friends” reruns (don’t ask me why) which is only on US Netflix. I also use VPNs whenever I’m in Beijing to hit Facebook and Twitter which are blocked by the “Great Firewall of China”.</li>\r\n 	<li>I looked at two highly rated software VPNs -- <a href=\"https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Private Internet Access</a> (PIA) and <a href=\"https://nordvpn.com/\" target=\"_blank\">NordVPN</a> -- and a Kickstarter hardware-based VPN, <a href=\"http://www.homingsystems.com/alwayshome-duo\" target=\"_blank\">AlwaysHome</a>, that I reviewed last fall in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/09/28/podcast-124-craft-beer-hunting-i-hate-rick-steves/\">episode #124</a>.</li>\r\n 	<li>PIA and NordVPN are quick to set up -- go to their website, buy a subscription (promotions change all the time, but when I’m writing this, PIA has discounted their annual subscription to $40 while NordVPN’s is at $79), download, install and run their software (VPN client), pick a VPN endpoint (which country do you want the Internet to think you’re coming from), and off you go. And the next time you access the Internet, you need to remember to start the client and pick an endpoint, unless you set the client to start automatically each time you log in.</li>\r\n 	<li>AlwaysHome, the hardware VPN, takes a bit more planning. You need to buy a pair of USB dongles and a service subscription (right now $180 for the dongles and a year’s service), plug one into your home router, and then take the second with you in your laptop bag.</li>\r\n 	<li>I tested the software VPNs on three platforms -- a Windows 10 PC hardwired into a network, a Samsung tablet running Android 6.0.1 (Marshmallow) on WiFi, and an iPhone 7 running iOS 10.2 on WiFi and AT&amp;T LTE mobile data.</li>\r\n 	<li>I first looked at performance -- how much speed was I giving up for the additional encryption and routing that gives me privacy? The Windows PC had the lowest penalty -- both VPNs cut upload and download speeds by about 6%. They also the same on the iPhone on WiFi, though the download penalty increased to 11%. Don’t know if this is an iOS limitation or something else. On the Samsung Android tablet on WiFi, NordVPNs download was on par with Windows PC -- about 6% on downloads -- while PIA was 25% slower on downloads. This one has to be marked down to PIA’s Android client.</li>\r\n 	<li>The really interesting result was on the iPhone on AT&amp;T’s LTE service. The download penalty on LTE was around 83% for both NordVPN and PIA. Must have something to do with AT&amp;T’s LTE service. And while interesting, it probably has the least practical value. Other than triple-paranoid people, I’m not sure why someone would tack a VPN onto their cellular connection.</li>\r\n 	<li>Accessing US Netflix from abroad is kinda the acid test for location shifting. Netflix, prompted by their content suppliers, has been the most aggressive service in blocking VPN endpoints; blocking people from outside the US streaming content that Netflix has only licenses in the US. I asked my daughter Claire, who’s at University of St Andrews in the UK, to test each VPN with her Netflix “Friends” test. PIA failed; Netflix served up its “blocked” screen. NordVPN let her log into US Netflix, though she said the connection was slow; probably the result of the lousy BT service coming into her flat over a chip shop. AlwaysHome did the best -- no Netflix blocking because it looks like she’s logging in from our house, and the best connection over the BT service because the AlwaysHome hardware lets it do accelerate network traffic in a way that the software VPNs can’t.</li>\r\n 	<li>I also asked Claire for her thoughts on the NordVPN and PIA software clients. She liked the NordVPN client better -- more graphic, easier to understand. The PIA client is a bit more stripped down. But she also liked that, with the AlwaysHome VPN, she didn’t have to install any software -- just connect to its WiFi.</li>\r\n 	<li>Sorting it all out, it you want an easy VPN solution that allows you to use Netflix when you’re overseas, go with NordVPN. If you want the cheapest solution that’s a bit more stripped down and you’re not running Android, then go with PIA. If you want the best Netflix experience from, say, a vacation rental that doesn’t require you to navigate WiFi login pages and you can plan a couple of weeks ahead, try AlwaysHome.</li>\r\n 	<li><em>NordVPN provided me a free month of their VPN service for testing purposes. I purchased a PIA subscription with my own money. Homing Systems sent me a AlwaysHome Duo free of charge for me to review. I was not paid for this review. The opinions expressed in this episode are my own. </em></li>\r\n 	<li>Now, for the giveaway. NordVPN has given me a year’s subscription to give away to one lucky TravelCommons listener. Go to the TravelCommons website and check out the top post to enter the raffle. It’ll be open for 10 days from the posting of this episode -- which, if I have my calendar math right, is March 2. Come by the website and enter for a shot to be more cyber-secure for a year. And thanks to the folks at NordVPN for this giveaway.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #127</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/\">ccMixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_127.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #127 — Critiquing My Top 10 Travel Tips; Reviewing VPNs','','inherit','closed','closed','','1723-revision-v1','','','2018-07-23 15:40:36','2018-07-23 20:40:36','',1723,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/07/23/1723-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2078,1,'2018-07-23 15:41:47','2018-07-23 20:41:47','[caption id=\"attachment_1703\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/File_000.jpeg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1703\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/File_000-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Car trunks need carry-on luggage limits too[/caption]\r\n\r\nSeems like I\'ve been doing as much driving as flying since the last episode, so I\'ve switched from apps that track flight delays to those that help me dodge traffic backups. I talk, yet again, about buying pay-as-you-go SIMs while traveling, but the need to do that may be ending. And I\'ve reshuffled my carry-on luggage as the airlines have changed their rules. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_126.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_126.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #126:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, hoping that everyone had a Merry Christmas -- or Happy Christmas if you’re on the other side of the Atlantic -- Happy Hanukkah, and a Happy New Year. I’m personally in trying a combo Dry-ish and Sugar-Free January in an attempt to drop 10 lbs of holiday weight that managed to sneak on-board -- the downside, I guess, from staying off the road for the back half of December.</li>\r\n 	<li>I eased back into travel mode with my usual Charlottesville trip the first workday of the New Year. I didn’t mind it too much since Charlottesville was about 20 degrees warmer than Chicago. It was nice to walk outside with just a scarf and a tweed jacket.</li>\r\n 	<li>Between <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/11/22/podcast-125-uber-driver-stories-overseas-for-the-election/\">the last episode</a> and my Christmas travel break, I did almost as much driving as I did flying. I drove down to Nashville the Friday after Thanksgiving to see my mother. That drive wasn’t so bad, The Sunday drive back to Chicago, though was a whole ‘nother matter. Then that next week, I had meetings in Richmond, VA, Baltimore, and Charlottesville. I didn’t even bother to look at flight schedules. I knew nonstop RIC-BWI and a BWI-CHO flights were non-existent and the 2-2.5 hour drive time was within my fly-or-drive tipping point. Neither drives were bad. The only hassle was the Hertz rental car. Since it was a one-way rental -- I was picking up in RIC and dropping off in CHO -- they gave me a beater car, an older Jeep Patriot that I think was the only car on their lot without Bluetooth, which made listening to podcasts or doing phone calls a bit less convenient.</li>\r\n 	<li>It did give me a chance to explore Baltimore and Charlottesville a bit more than usual, though. On my past visits, I wouldn’t bother with a rental; would just taxi in from the airport, and then walk or Uber to places. But with the beater Jeep, I could wander with a bit more range. In Baltimore, I drove around the Fells Point neighborhood, ending up in the <a href=\"http://www.thamesstreetoysterhouse.com/\">Thames St Oyster House</a>, then threading through some waterfront areas that I had been a bit hesitant to walk through. In Charlottesville, I wandered through the countryside until I found <a href=\"http://starrhill.com/\">Starr Hill Brewery</a>. Kinda empty on a rainy Weds night, which meant the bartender had time to take me through a flight of her favorite beers. Maybe I’ve found the source of a few of those holiday pounds.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/THE_CONCEPT_OF_ENERGY/55008\">ABANDONED BUTTERFLIES</a> by THE_CONCEPT_OF_ENERGY (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/\">Attribution</a> license. Ft: Doxent Zsigmond, Snowflake</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I’ve talked a couple of times in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/09/28/podcast-124-craft-beer-hunting-i-hate-rick-steves/\">past episodes</a> about the benefits of buying a pay-as-you-go SIM when traveling internationally -- $20 for a GB of data vs. AT&amp;T’s $60 for 300 MB is easy math. The only hassle is buying the SIM. First, you have to find the phone store, which can be a bit of an Easter Egg hunt. Back in November, our first day in Italy was in Pisa. We land, get the car, and head to the city center to find the phone store. However, the easiest one to get to was closed -- at 1 in the afternoon. Luckily, the next closest one was only a 10-minute walk and it was open. This time, I’d done my research before we left, purchased the SIMs online, and had printed out vouchers with bar codes, and instructions in English and Italian. I was ready for a quick and easy transaction. And yet again, I was wrong. The clerk knew nothing about the vouchers, didn’t know how to process them, and had to call around to other shops to figure it out. And then, each of the SIMs had to be registered and activated. Over an hour later, we’re sprinting out of the shop so we can make our time slot to get into the Leaning Tower -- which we’d also pre-paid. And this was a pretty typical experience. Which was why I was really excited a telecoms industry consultant told me that the virtual SIM, or the e-SIM was getting close to launch. Apple took the first crack at this back in 2014, but it’s been a slow ramp up. The iPhone 7 I picked up back in Sept still has the classic SIM. But this guy was telling me that going SIM-less is just about possible. He said it’ll be like signing into a WiFi hotspot. The next time I land in Italy and turn on my phone, I’ll be presented with a sign-in screen where I’ll be able to select my carrier and plan, and charge it to my credit card. Now given how wonky some WiFi gateways are, I’m not sure that this is the best comparison to sell me on the service, but if it saves me a couple of hours of frustration when I’m at my most jet lagged, I’ll figure it out.</li>\r\n 	<li>My age odometer clicked over again last month -- which I guess is a good thing, because if it didn’t click over, I be… dead. So, unless I find that Dorian Grey portrait at a garage sale, getting older is better than the alternative. I try not to let it bother me -- with varying levels of success. One thing, though, this does frustrate me is the need to bring my glasses into hotel bathrooms with me. Because it seems just as my reading vision is deteriorating, hotels are reducing the type size on their shampoo and conditioner bottles. As they try to go upscale with their toiletries, the bottle designers are taking the regular sized fancy labels into Photoshop and shrinking them down to fit on the front of a much smaller bottle, resulting is minuscule type that I might’ve been challenged to read in my 20’s let alone now. So my drill is to wear my glasses into the bathroom, figure out which bottle is shampoo, which is conditioner, and which is soap (or shower gel as they call it), and then line them up in order on the soap dish in the shower. Then take my glasses off, turn on the water, and hope that my lined up bottles don’t fall. The Hyatt Place that I stay at in Charlottesville is one of the few that doesn’t require this drill. They have a big “1” printed on the shampoo -- it runs about ¾’s the length of the bottle -- and a big “2” printed on the conditioner. And they’re in different colors. No need for glasses there. I love that hotel.</li>\r\n 	<li>It’s accepted wisdom that the most disgusting place on an airplane is the seat back pocket, and it just keeps getting worse. As airlines try to tighten up their ground turns -- how long a plane is on the ground before it takes off again -- the amount of time the cabin clean-up crew has to do its job continues to shrink. I was reminded of this by a Chicago Tribune article right before Thanksgiving when many airport workers -- cabin cleaners, baggage handlers, wheelchair attendants -- threatened to strike during that busiest travel week. The reporter interviewed a cabin cleaner who recently moved to Chicago from San Juan, PR. She said her crew of four are given 7 minutes to clean the cabin; no where near enough time to clean up all the crumbs, spilled drinks, and wrappers ground into the carpet, let alone time to clear the junk people leave in the seat back pocket. \"I don\'t know what is wrong with passengers nowadays,” she said. I won’t even pull out the safety card when I’m sitting in the exit row. A buddy told me a story about flying Tunisair from Brussels to Tunis many years ago. After the meal service, when people were done eating, they just shoved their trays into the seat back pocket. I’m not sure it’s all that different today.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/snowflake/46164\">A Foolish Game</a> by snowflake (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/\">Attribution (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Admiral Bob</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Beating The Traffic</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>As I mentioned earlier, I’ve done a bunch of travel by car lately. I talked in the last episode about driving through Tuscany. I was pleasantly surprised when Hertz upgraded us to an Alfa Romeo sports car, but when we had to drive through the rutted dirt back roads outside of Greve in Chianti, I was left wanting for something with a bit more ground clearance.</li>\r\n 	<li>The Thanksgiving drive down to Nashville was a lot smoother. They finally finished the years of construction expanding the I-80/94 constriction point around Lake Michigan in Northwest Indiana, and the traffic from there to I-65 south flowed smoothly. We made good enough time to make a couple of beer stops -- in Columbus, IN at a new Upland Brewing restaurant, and in downtown Louisville at Against The Grain Brewing.</li>\r\n 	<li>The drive back would be a whole other matter -- and I knew it and dreaded it. We drove down on that Friday, sailing through downtown Indy, Louisville, and Nashville because everyone was on vacation or shopping. Driving back Sunday though, we were right in the thick of the busiest travel day in the US. And while I always avoid flying on this day, I had managed to put myself on one of the US’s main north-south interstates. It would’ve only been worse if we’d been on the East Coast driving I-95 or the Jersey Turnpike. And it was the beat-down that I’d expected. The start of the drive out of Nashville was fine, and a bit pretty, going through rolling hills up to Louisville. The traffic was steady, but flowing. But we kept picking up more traffic as we headed north. We took a break in Indy this time, stopping off at Sun King Brewing right off the interstate, and then coffee-d up at a nearby Starbucks. North of Indy was when it really hit -- more and more cars and trucks heading up to Chicago, but still just 2 lanes. And so when the inevitable accident happened -- as it did many times that Sunday -- closing down one of those lanes, cutting the already clogged road by 50%, Waze became, if not a life saver, a time saver. I was running 3 nav systems, Waze, Google Maps, and the in-dash BMW nav. All had real-time traffic, but Waze seemed to be the quickest in sensing the need for a reroute. A couple of times that Sunday, it would direct us to take the next exit after traffic had stopped, and would vector us around the bottleneck and back onto the interstate, saving us 15-20 minutes of crawling and at least 70 points of increased blood pressure. I did skip the recommended diversion through the south side of Chicago, though. Given the record number of shootings in Chicago, stop-and-go traffic didn’t seem quite the burden that it did in rural Indiana.</li>\r\n 	<li>The next week’s triangulation across Richmond, Baltimore, and Charlottesville found me on I-95 having to make 2 passes around Washington, DC on the Capital Beltway, always a brutal 8-lane chokepoint. Heading up from Richmond Tuesday night, Google Maps told me to take the clockwise/west route around DC while Waze told me to go east. Odd since Google owns both. A friend said that he researched this a bit and found some articles claiming that Waze’s algorithm weighs current information more than historical trends; Google Maps tips the scales the other way. I don’t know if this is true -- I haven’t been able to find anything that says this -- but I often see different rush hour recommendations. Since Waze served me well on Thanksgiving Sunday, I went east and took the counterclockwise path around. It was a rainy night, but traffic flowed better than I expected and I made it to Baltimore in time for an oyster dinner.</li>\r\n 	<li>In spite of juggling nav apps, I found that I was more productive driving from Richmond to Baltimore to Charlottesville than I would’ve flying. You’d think it would be the other way around, but lack of direct flights would’ve mean going up and down, connecting through Washington Dulles. And on those few minutes I might be able to work, full planes and tight seats make it seem almost anti-social to try to open a laptop. On my 3-hour drive from Baltimore to Charlottesville, though, I was able to hammer through 2 conference calls and an unhurried, wide-ranging conversation with my boss. He called me. I told him that I was having a nice drive through Virginia horse country. “Good,” he said, “I have you captive.”</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/49674\">H2O</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Having to Think about Carry-on Luggage</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I don’t usually think a lot about packing or luggage. And sometimes I think that puts me in the minority of frequent travelers. I know guys who obsess over their Tumi bags and specific packing systems. I used a grey Samsonite roller until the New Orleans sidewalks beat the wheels out to a 30 degree splay, and then I went back to my old black Victorinox with customs stickers from Thailand and Vietnam.</li>\r\n 	<li>However, a few things in 2016 got me thinking about carry-ons -- my carry-on experience with Wow Air in Iceland that I talked about in an earlier episode where I had to pull out half my clothes to meet the weight restrictions; my daughter’s light blue carry-on catching the eye of seemingly every gate agent she tried to pass, being forced to check it, and then having it lost 75% of her flights in 2016; and most recently, enduring long and often cold waits on a jet bridge waiting for my “valet checked” carry-on bag when flying regional jets</li>\r\n 	<li>Starting from last to first, this regional jet thing kills me. It used to be that gate checking for a commuter flight wasn’t a big thing -- the bag would be waiting for you on the jet bridge before you got off the plane. Now, as regional jets have gotten larger, they put the gate checked luggage in the same hold with the regular checked luggage, the only differentiating factor being the tag they put on at the gate. I’m typically waiting around 10 minutes with 40-50 other passengers, lined up on one side of an unheated jet bridge leaning over to see if my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/File_000.png\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1708\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/File_000-169x300.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"169\" height=\"300\" /></a>bag has come up yet. It’s gotten bad. On some of the larger Embraer jets flown by JetBlue, the overhead bins are large enough for regular bags, but on most of the regionals, you’re standing in that jet bridge line. After a while, this got real old, so I scrounged around through the old luggage in the attic to find a smaller duffel for 1-2 night trips that would fit in the overhead. I found a black nylon duffel from a 2007 National Retail Foundation tech conference that was an attendee giveaway. It had all the sponsors names stenciled across it -- Oracle, Infosys. I kinda felt like a Nascar racer. But it did the job. I could squish it into the small overheads of the regional jets and so walk past the line of folks waiting for the “valets” to bring their luggage. But it still looked cheesy. So when I was in Italy in November, I kept my eye out for a nice leather bag. One rainy day in Florence - not unique on that trip -- we dove into a covered outdoor market. Wandering through the stalls, I found a beautiful leather bag for 100 euros. My wife pointed to a bag the next size up -- “Don’t you want this bigger one? It’s only 20 euros more.” Nope, that would defeat the whole purpose. I posted a picture of that bag on Twitter. Every time I walk up the ORD jet bridge when returning home from Charlottesville, I love that bag even more.</li>\r\n 	<li>I remember when I first started traveling, you’d never see a hard-sided carry-on. Now it seems at least 30% of the carry-ons are hard-sided. I think a lot of it is fashion -- they come in much cooler designs and colors, but there is some functionality to them. If you’re flying an airline that’s aggressively using a baggage sizer, it’s much easier to stay legal with a hard-sided bag. You can’t overstuff them to bulging like you can a soft-sided bag, and the polycarbonate shell slips much easier in and out of the metal baggage sizer. This is why I suggested to my daughter that she start using a hard-sided bag. And in a bit more muted color -- something that wouldn’t grab the gate agent’s eye.</li>\r\n 	<li>But if you’re working against weight limits as well as dimensions, like I was with Wow Air, you want the lightest, most stripped down bag possible. I haven’t experienced a carry-on weight limit in the US. Some US carriers post a 35 or 40 lb limit -- even Spirit is at 40 lbs -- but I’ve never seen a gate agent weigh a carry-on. The international carriers are where this comes in. Wow Air’s carry-on size dimensions are about the same as US carriers, but their weight limit is much less -- 10 kg or 22 lbs -- which seems like the consensus number for non-US carriers. In this case, you don’t want the extra weight of the hard siding. You probably don’t even want very sturdy wheels; just the lightest covering around your clothes that you can get. I know guys who’ll brag that they can fit everything they own into 2 suitcases. These guys are obviously aren’t doing carry-on.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #126</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/\">ccMixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_126.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #126 — Beating the Traffic; Rethinking Carry-On Luggage','','inherit','closed','closed','','1697-revision-v1','','','2018-07-23 15:41:47','2018-07-23 20:41:47','',1697,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/07/23/1697-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2079,1,'2018-07-23 15:42:39','2018-07-23 20:42:39','[caption id=\"attachment_1683\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/774653_521026384596249_472247542_o.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1683\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/774653_521026384596249_472247542_o-300x225.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\" /></a> Green Bay Looks So Pretty This Time of Year[/caption]\r\n\r\nAs the economy recovers, so does travel volume. As you gird yourself to wade into the crowds, here are 10 tips to keep you moving over the river and through the woods...\r\n<ol>\r\n 	<li><strong>Expand Your Fly-vs.-Drive Tipping Point </strong>— My normal tipping point is 350 miles; anything less and I drive it. However, the holiday traffic changes the calculus a bit. If you fly, figure the airport logistics will add 3 hours to your in-flight time. Airlines are recommending passengers arrive 2 hours before their holiday flights, and when you arrive, all the additional people means it\'ll take you at least an hour to de-plane, collect your luggage, and get off the airport property. And that\'s if there are no delays. This increases the holiday fly-vs.-drive tipping point to at least 500 miles.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Use Multiple Navigation Apps — </strong>If you decide to drive, use more than one maps app to help you route around traffic jams from rush hour, construction, and accidents. I personally use both <a href=\"https://www.waze.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Waze</a> and <a href=\"https://maps.google.com\">Google Maps</a> because, even though they\'re both owned by Google, they often give you different directions. I find Waze is better at redirecting you around accidents and traffic jams, but can be a bit twitchy -- sending you wandering through sub-divisions to save a minute of drive time. I tend to follow Waze but periodically check it against Google Maps.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Sign Up for TSA PreCheck — </strong>Gift yourself and spend the $85 on some time and hassle reduction. You won\'t get it in time for this Christmas, but it\'s good for 5 years, so you\'ll have it next Christmas.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Apply for an Airline Credit Card — </strong>If your credit is good enough for instant approval, getting your airline\'s credit card will get you entry level frequent flier status. This allows you to use the status security lines (handy if you don\'t have PreCheck) and the second boarding group which is usually good enough to let you find some overhead bin space. This typically will work for you and your family. If the lead adult’s boarding pass shows priority/premiere access, the overworked minimum-wage airport staffers guarding the status security lanes will let the family tag along. And at the gate, I’ve never seen a family split across boarding groups.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Fly Non-Stop —</strong> Holiday travel stacks up problems —  high passenger load factors combined with winter weather disruptions almost guarantees late arrivals and missed connections. Even if you’re connecting through Houston, an intermediate stop adds one more point of failure, one more opportunity for the airlines to screw up. Pay the extra $100 for a non-stop flight.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Skip the Tight Connection —  </strong>If you can’t fly direct, step away from any connection that’s less than 60 minutes.  Yes, we usually want to get to our destination in the shortest possible time, but accepting a connection of 1 hour or less…. Think about it – a 15-minute delay on your flight into a big hub like <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27hare_Airport\" target=\"_blank\">Chicago</a> or <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denver_International_Airport\" target=\"_blank\">Denver</a> or <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detroit_Metropolitan_Wayne_County_Airport\" target=\"_blank\">Detroit</a> (as good as on-time in the winter for most airlines) and you’re sprinting across terminals and concourses just to beat the closing door.  A 1-hr connection is just asking for a stress attack and/or an overnight stay at the airport branch of the <a title=\"Bates Motel\" href=\"http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092622/\" rel=\"imdb\">Bates Motel</a>.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Research Before You Leave — </strong>You don\'t have time to be clueless. Hit the <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/travel/travel-tips\">TSA website</a> or the <a href=\"https://twitter.com/AskTSA/with_replies\">@AskTSA</a> gang on Twitter so you know what\'s allowed in your carry-on. Research the airports you\'ll be using so you know how to your gates, where the good restaurants are, or better yet, if there\'s a brewpub. Also, figure out the geography. Knowing alternatives to your destination airport gives you more flexibility dealing with cancelled flights or missed connections. In New York, the LaGuardia-to-Newark pivot is easy, but others aren’t so obvious.  Everyone knows that Chicago has two airports – O’Hare and Midway.  But what about Milwaukee’s Mitchell Field 80 miles north?  If Philadelphia is in trouble, how many folks think about Harrisburg or BWI?  Or Sacramento as an alternative to SFO?</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Catch the Early Flight </strong>— Delays stack up as the day wears on.  As your airplane goes from airport to airport, the probability of it getting stuck increases.  Overnight, airlines have a chance to recover – late planes finally get their destinations and operations groups can reassign planes.  So while the last flight out can be a crap shoot, I rarely hit a delay on the first flight out.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Use Multiple Flight Tracking Apps</strong> — Use your smartphone to keep track of gate changes and flight delays. Sign up for text notifications from your airline when you book your ticket. However,  I’ve often experienced long delays with the airlines’ services or notices that were never sent out. So I also use <a href=\"http://tripit.com/\">TripIt</a>, <a href=\"http://flightaware.com/\">FlightAware</a>, and <a href=\"http://flightstats.com\">FlightStats</a>. It means multiple notices, but it also means I don’t miss anything.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Use Twitter as a Concierge Service</strong> — Most airlines have social media teams monitoring Twitter. Before you leave, find and follow your airline’s Twitter customer service account. “At naming” them in a Tweet (e.g., “<a dir=\"ltr\" href=\"https://twitter.com/united\">@united</a> what’s happening with UA 4286 MSY-ORD that it’s 1:45 hr delayed?”) usually gets a response in a couple of minutes. Following them allows you to exchange personal information such as record locator numbers via direct message (DM). It’s usually faster than queuing up for a frazzled gate agent and the results can be better.</li>\r\n</ol>\r\nBut above all, be realistic. It’s gonna be a zoo. Steel yourself; get your inner karma tuned for it. Pack a snack and a book, and practice deep cleansing breaths.','Top 10 Holiday Travel Tips','','inherit','closed','closed','','1682-revision-v1','','','2018-07-23 15:42:39','2018-07-23 20:42:39','',1682,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/07/23/1682-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2080,1,'2018-07-23 15:43:51','2018-07-23 20:43:51','[caption id=\"attachment_1667\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/IMG_0201.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1667\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/IMG_0201-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"An aggressive Uber Pool driver\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> An aggressive Uber Pool driver[/caption]\r\n\r\nBack from 10 days in Tuscany where, among other things, we thought we\'d avoid all the noise of the US presidential election. We succeeded... almost. One of my latest travel hobbies has been to quiz Uber drivers for their life stories. It makes for interesting rides to and from the airport. We also continue the ongoing thread about travel safety. This time, we talk about using Bluetooth in rental cars. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_125.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_125.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #125:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, with a new episode just in time for the TSA Thanksgiving lines. I’m once again thankful that I’m able to avoid O’Hare this week -- the busiest travel week of the year. Since the last episode, I’ve been in Boston, Baltimore, Charlottesville, Hoboken, and, for the first time, I landed at Lehigh Valley Regional Airport in Allentown, PA. I was surprised how nice an airport it is. I was expecting something smaller -- just a handful of gates -- and perhaps a bit dingier -- maybe something along the lines of White Plains, NY. But it was clean and bright with big concourses -- not a lot of people, but a lot of space.</li>\r\n 	<li>Then I had 3 weeks at home -- my longest non-travel streak this year. There is something relaxing about not packing and unpacking. It also makes you realize how much time you lose in the act of travel -- standing in lines, waiting for security, to board the plane, to check in to your hotel, to get a cup of coffee…. The whole time, though, I was looking forward to getting back on the road -- because my next trip was with my wife to Tuscany for our 25th anniversary, revisiting the scene of our honeymoon.</li>\r\n 	<li>We flew into Pisa by way of Munich, another new airport for me. But I was much less impressed by this one. Things were going fine -- nothing special in typical German airport style -- until we hit security. There were a dozen lines that were just crawling. There weren’t that many people trying to go through security -- it was 10 or 11am on a Friday -- but maybe the security union was on a work slowdown because they had to be going out of their way to work that slow. As is my wont, I bitch tweeted that out. Colin McDowell tweeted back -- “Totally agree. Slowest security of any major airport, like Gatwick in the ‘80’s. Shops must be suffering”. And the bars too. I didn’t have time for my traditional German airport breakfast beer.</li>\r\n 	<li>Things got better at Pisa Airport though. This was not a new airport; we had flown in here for our honeymoon. I had booked a Fiat 500 from Hertz for kinda old times sake; we’d driven a Fiat Panda 25 years ago. I was pleasantly surprised to find an Alfa Romeo in the parking slot. Definitely a move up from the Panda. And it was an automatic -- the first time I haven’t driven a stick in Europe. At first I was kinda disappointed, but later, when I was winding through the Tuscan hills and picking my way through rutted dirt roads, I was happy that the car was doing the shifting.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/buy_album.php?id=39CE51194FB95B63577FBFD7E2EC168C99277BD6CE86C10FDC39095666B5D6CF\"><em>Heaven</em></a> by <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=BB22CBFF24501120EEC6ABA18AB0A15FEB05A36360E7FDA122C8D7A5C140F8DC\" rel=\"nofollow\">Los Lonely Boys</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>A <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/08/13/podcast-123-how-to-avoid-travel-delays/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">few episodes</a> back, I complained about having to do an interview for my Global Entry renewal. I’d read online about others getting renewed without the interview, so I was a bit peeved to have to make my way past the lines at the McDonalds in the lower lever of ORD Terminal 5 yet again. But, other than the smell of fries at 9am on a Friday (I’m too old to start my weekends on Thursday nights), it was a fairly painless experience. I was ushered back less than 5 minutes after I’d arrived and had a very straight forward interview with the Customs and Border Protection agent. He was a great guy; good conversation. Asked me a couple of questions -- including one about my stolen passport -- took a new picture and a new set of fingerprints and I was done. 10 minutes later, I was making my way past the McDonalds again. As I thought about it, I had no reason to be peeved. Seems reasonable that they’d want to put an eyeball on me after 5 years.</li>\r\n 	<li>Jim McDonough posted a comment on the TravelCommons web site about my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/09/28/podcast-124-craft-beer-hunting-i-hate-rick-steves/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Rick Steves rant</a>. Jim writes:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>My wife and I love Rick Steves (we call ourselves Rickheads) and use his books all the time. But I know what you mean about his fans overwhelming a particular place. It’s funny how many people in the States have no idea who he is, but in Europe, Rick Steves sits at the right hand of the father. Get your restaurant or hotel into his book, and you have it made</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>And while I was able to dodge the Rickheads in Aberdeen, I knew I was toast in Tuscany. Even in November, I was shoulder-to-shoulder with older, sensibly dressed, empty-nester Rickheads toting their blue bibles through Pisa, Lucca, and Florence. Only when we were staying on a farm in Chianti a couple of miles up a rutted dirt road were we free of them.</li>\r\n 	<li>David Glickman sent me a note recommending a more detailed guide of Scotland for my next visit:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Living just outside London I am not sure I have never read a Rick Steves Guidebook, but what I recommend getting hold of Peter Irvine’s really excellent guide ‘Scotland The Best’ before your next trip to St.Andrews. My wife and I are regular visitors to the States, and my wife travels to Madison Wi about 6 times a year through ORD so we really enjoy your podcasts. We have just returned from a trip and boy is your country now expensive to us poor post-Brexit Brits!</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>I immediately hit Amazon and ordered the new 2016 edition of <a href=\"https://www.amazon.com/Scotland-Best-Peter-Irvine/dp/0007559348/ref=dp_ob_title_bk\"><em>Scotland The Best</em></a>. Very detailed, with lots of suggestions. Looking forward to giving it a workout on my next visit. And I can imagine the US looks very expensive for pound- and euro-based tourists. The euro dropped another 5% in the week-and-a-half we’ve been back from Italy.</li>\r\n 	<li>About a year ago in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/10/11/podcast-117-random-thoughts-about-eggs-scotland-car-rentals/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">episode #117</a>, I first talked about Revolut, a virtual and real chip-and-pin debit card with great exchange rates. I first used it last fall on a trip to the UK. I’d transfer funds into it using my US debit card and manage conversions with a smartphone app. It was great. But note my use of the past tense. Over the past 3 months, the service has been deteriorating for US users. First, they began charging a 3% fee on fund transfers using US debit cards. I soon found that they only charged the fee if those transfers were in dollars. If I transferred funds in euros or pounds, there was no charge. Weird, but OK, it still worked. But when I tried that trick before my trips to Scotland and Italy, no dice. All US debit transfers were blocked. I suppose I could’ve tried an interbank transfer using something like TransferWise, but that’s way too much of a hassle. They say they “aim to change it ASAP” but it’s been 3 months now and no update. I have to retract my praise for Revolut and delete the app from my iPhone.</li>\r\n 	<li>I mentioned in the last episode, that the lack of a chip-&amp;-pin card in Scotland has become less of a hassle with the spread of contactless card readers that let me use Apple Pay on my iPhone. I didn’t find that same convenience in Italy. I didn’t see one place with a contactless reader. Other than large restaurant bills (we managed to find tables at a few Michelin starred restaurants during our stay), I paid mostly cash. It seemed much less of a hassle.</li>\r\n 	<li>Over the last 3-4 episodes, we had one blurb that’s talked about travel security. Last episode was VPNs, the one before that video jacking. So in this installment of <em>Travel Security</em>, I want to talk about car rentals; specifically, about when you use Bluetooth to pair your smartphone with your rental’s audio system. I do this all the time. It’s safer -- let’s me talk handsfree, avoiding wrecks and tickets. And it lets me listen to podcasts or Pandora or Spotify when I’m driving instead of fiddling around, finding a local radio station that I don’t hate. However, if you do this, you need to remember to delete your pairing when you return your car. There hasn’t been one time when I haven’t gone through and deleted 3-5 pairings before pairing my own. And if you scroll through the devices, they all have personalized names like “Timmy’s iPhone”. And most phones by default will download your contacts to the car when paired. You can turn this default behavior off in an Android phone, but I haven’t found that capabilities with iPhones. Instead, every time I pair my iPhone, I have to remember to flip the switch that prevents it. So for most people, they leave behind a profile in their rental with all of their contacts and phone numbers. That is just bad in so many ways.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://cyberset.cc/artists2.php?tr_release_id=104\"><em>Heaven</em></a> by <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=A951998E6011FA9B2D22387EB3CAC0B5EB05A36360E7FDA122C8D7A5C140F8DC\" rel=\"nofollow\">Electric Skychurch</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Uber Driver Stories</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I find myself taking more and more Ubers as opposed to regular taxi cabs. I like cabs, I like cab drivers, but Uber is usually a better experience. Thumbing the app is so much easier than trying to hail a cab, or finding the number of the local cab company and then dealing with an often(?)/usually(?) cab dispatcher. And the condition of the car is, 9 times out of 10, vastly superior to the beat-up cab I usually get. The Baltimore cabs I’d take from the Inner Harbor to the airport were some of the worst. But then in Chicago I got picked by an Uber driver in a BMW X3 and by a spotless Mercedes SUV at EWR. Indeed, 9 times out of 10 is giving cabs way too much of the benefit of the doubt. I’ve yet to ride in an Uber that was worse than a cab.</li>\r\n 	<li>But the best thing about taking an Uber is driver stories. Every Uber I take, I ask the driver how he/she likes it, how long they’ve been doing it, and what else they do -- if it’s not their full time gig (which is the definite minority)</li>\r\n 	<li>A lotta drivers I talk with are retired. One guy in Vegas told me he was a bit lonely and bored. He wanted to get out of the house, but really had nowhere to go. He didn’t want to gamble or sit in a bar at 10 in the morning, so driving Uber gave him a reason to get off the sofa.</li>\r\n 	<li>A Charlottesville, VA retired fireman drives the late night weekend shift when kids from UVa are willing to pay anything (or willing to charge anything to their parents’ accounts) for a ride home from the bars. He told me he gets huge surge fares, but he’s driving ‘til 3 or 4 in the morning.</li>\r\n 	<li>A woman in Baltimore is a retired teacher and principal. She drives to take a break from studying for her PhD. She too gets bored sitting around the house, and she likes to drive. She told me that it was her husband who got her to sign up for Uber. She was driving him crazy around the house. Another guy, non-retired, who is studying full-time for his CFA exam -- chartered financial analyst -- does the same thing, drives during his study breaks.</li>\r\n 	<li>I find that many morning drivers -- the ones taking me from my hotel to a client site -- are doing a little moonlighting; fitting in a few rides before they go to work, and then again at the end of the day. I was surprised to find out that Uber drivers don’t know your destination until they accept the ride. Thinking about it, it makes sense; keeps drivers from cherry picking, say, rides to the airport. But one woman told me about accepting a ride and finding out it was to some suburb 40 minutes away -- and she only had a quarter tank.</li>\r\n 	<li>Of course, there’s more to ridesharing than Uber. I’ve also used Lyft. During busy times, I’ll fire them both up to see which has less of a surge charge, or a shorter wait time. Most drivers will drive for both. In my unscientific polling, most prefer Lyft but get more traffic from Uber. One driver told my wife he prefers Lyft because the Lyft riders talk more. And then he proceeded to unload his life story on my wife and her friend for the next 40 minutes as they battled traffic into Chicago.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’m always interested in how the gig economy is working for them. For a while, we were reading that the sharing economy, the gig economy of Uber and Airbnb was the next wave. The froth seems to have worn off of that wave, but a lot of the Uber drivers I talk to need that extra money, though often they wonder if it’s worth it. The Mercedes SUV driver who took me from EWR to Hoboken wondered if it was worth hassle of waiting for an airport fare. The only full-time driver I had was in Baltimore, and she said she makes more money delivering packages for Uber than she does delivering passengers, and the packages are much quieter and more pleasant.</li>\r\n 	<li>But as good as these stories are, the best one I recently heard wasn’t from an Uber driver; it was from the manager of the Chianti farm we stayed at for a couple of days during our trip to Italy. He had lived in the Chicago area for about 10 years. He got his PhD in geochemistry at Univ of Illinois and then worked at Argonne National Labs doing research. After a while, he missed his family and the countryside where he’d grown up, so he moved back to Tuscany, married, had a kid, and now manages a cattle farm with a growing sideline in agritourism. Forget driving for Uber. I want to be this guy.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://www.podsafeaudio.com/jamroom/play.php?band_id=1258&amp;song_id=4378&amp;mode=song_hifi\"><em>Shadows</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.podsafeaudio.com/jamroom/bands/1258/\">Antardhyan</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Overseas for the Election</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>My wife and I flew to Italy the Thursday night before the election. We both voted early, so we didn’t shirk our civic duties. What we did do, though, was leave behind the last blast of election ads and media coverage. I mean, the one bad thing about Game 7 of the World Series going into extra innings was that it gave more time for political ads. We were very happy to leave all that noise behind us.</li>\r\n 	<li>On Election Day, we had dinner in a nice restaurant in a small town that was 45 minutes of switchbacks and rutted dirt roads away from our hotel. On the way back, I think we dodged a boar and a deer as we crossed back over the ridge of hills and headed down to our hotel. We went to bed while the polls in the US were still open and didn’t really think a thing about it.</li>\r\n 	<li>I woke up around 7 on Weds morning; Tuesday midnight in Chicago. I glanced at my iPhone and saw a cascade of notifications from the Wall Street Journal and Chicago Tribune about the election results. The election still hadn’t been called, but by the time we sat down for breakfast, it was done. Donald Trump had won.</li>\r\n 	<li>The Austrian guy working the desk and the breakfast (it was a small hotel) laughed when he walked up -- “At least you guys aren’t having a do-over” The July Austrian presidential election was set aside for problems with absentee ballots and they still haven’t done the revote. “Or Spain, going through two elections without getting a government.”</li>\r\n 	<li>Now, TravelCommons has never had a political point-of-view and I’m not about to change that here. I have good friends on both sides of the debate. What I will say is that I, like many others, was surprised by the results given all the predictions we’d heard right up until we were wheels up at ORD. All through breakfast, we refreshed our Twitter feeds and hit the Wall Street Journal and New York Times apps, trying to catch up on the coverage we’d slept through the night before. Where the night before, we were happy not to hear about politics, now we were digging for an explanation for this upset.</li>\r\n 	<li>After an hour of this, and an extra cappuccino, we set the phones aside again. It was nice that we could do that -- walk away from the disbelief (and some might say panic) at the result that was spreading over the media (social and traditional), and schools, and I imagine in the workplaces. Instead, we were driving our little Alfa Romeo through some beautiful Chianti vineyards that were brilliantly yellow with the vine leaves changing colors. We stopped off at the Antinori winery for a bit of a tasting and then continued our drive to Florence. We knew we’d eventually get pulled into the post-election vortex, but we knew we were lucky -- we would be in a cone of silence for another 3 days.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #125</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://promonet.iodalliance.com\">IODA Promonet</a> and <a href=\"http://podsafeaudio.com/\">PodSafe Audio</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_125.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #125 — Uber Driver Stories; Overseas for the Election','','inherit','closed','closed','','1666-revision-v1','','','2018-07-23 15:43:51','2018-07-23 20:43:51','',1666,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/07/23/1666-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2081,1,'2018-07-23 15:44:44','2018-07-23 20:44:44','[caption id=\"attachment_1660\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/5777D166-DB5F-4FAF-A0D5-84AC87F58834.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1660\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/5777D166-DB5F-4FAF-A0D5-84AC87F58834-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Empty Beer Glasses\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> I Think We\'ve Bagged Our Limit[/caption]\r\n\r\nMy son joins the podcast to talk about hunting down craft beers. I then talk about a few \"a-ha\" moments from my recent trip to Scotland, my on-going struggles with bitch tweeting, a VPN hardware product that could come in handy, and why I\'ve come to hate the Rick Steves travel juggernaut. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_124.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_124.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #124:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the Sheraton Hotel and Conference Center in Framingham, MA. Just back from 10 mostly beautiful sunny days in Scotland. Flew United to Edinburgh via Newark on the the way out, but on the way back, paid an extra $200 for the luxury of skipping the Immigration lines there. Given my weekly experiences in Newark’s Terminal A at the beginning of this year, I can only imagine the Immigration hall as being a mash-up of the dungeons from all the Saw movies done in that frighteningly absurd sort of way that only the TSA can pull off. Think the LAX security lines without laid-back people, with that Jersey edge. Even with the Global Entry line cut, that was not the final memory I wanted from what had been a nice trip.</li>\r\n 	<li>My wife and I kinda ran the same play we did last year when we dropped our daughter off at University of St Andrews. Grabbed a car -- Hertz gave us a new Nissan X-Terra -- nice car, enough space for the bags my daughter brought over with her, but would be a lumbering beast among Fiat 500s later in the week when driving some of the single lane roads in the Highlands. I like to think I’m getting better at driving in the UK -- driving on the left and shifting with my left hand. No curb bumping or wide left-hand turns this time coming out of the airport. Stopped off at the mall 5 min from the airport for a Starbucks coffee and a couple of EE SIM cards -- £15 for 2GB of data, unlimited texts and, I dunno, 500 voice minutes, which for a week, is pretty much unlimited -- $20 at the current post-Brexit bargain basement exchange rate.</li>\r\n 	<li>After lunch and unloading our daughter, my wife and I drove up the coast for a few days of walking -- not hiking with packs and crampons, but trail walking. We stayed the weekend in Aberdeen because… we’d never been there before. It was a nice town. Went out to the Brewdog brewery for a tour and a couple of beers and then out walking it off along a North Sea trail. We also spent time in Cairngorms National Park on Balmoral getting blown out of our jackets by gale force winds while looking for the Queen in her Range Rover, and then straight up north to the coast -- through Banff, Portsoy, and Cullen for a bit more coastal trail walking. And then back down to St Andrews for the last couple of days doing the typical stuff parents do when they visit their kid at college -- take them out to nice restaurants, buy them groceries, and in our case, say good-bye until Christmas break.</li>\r\n 	<li>Flying out of Edinburgh airport on Saturday morning was surprisingly not a hassle. It’s not a huge airport -- mostly seems to be mostly budget airlines -- Ryanair, easyJet -- but United and American fly a couple of 757s in, and I saw an Etihad 787 -- jealous. The ticketing/check-in area is a bit of a cluster; gives a bad first impression. But once you get up the escalator and headed toward security, it’s much nicer -- a low hassle pass through security, and good shops and restaurants.</li>\r\n 	<li>It always strikes me how much more automated some of the European airports have become. At Edinburgh, there’s no security person checking your ticket before security. Instead, there’s a gate and a bar code reader. You scan your boarding pass. If it’s valid, the gate drops and you walk through. There are security people watching for gate jumpers and tailgaters, but there’s about a half-dozen automated gates, so there was no queue. And then at the X-ray machines, no TSA-like person bringing tubs to the front of the line. Instead, a person points you to one of 5 loading stations, a conveyor system spits out a bin, you load it up, and push it onto the belt that feeds the X-ray machine. Again, less waiting because, instead of a single person loading their tub and putting stuff on the belt, you have 5 people in parallel. If one person is slow, it doesn’t hold up the line. Not quite sure why the TSA, with all its budget and management staff, can’t just copy this.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/48114\">Velvet Green of Mystery (Instrumental)</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Kthugha, Jeris, Martijn de Boer</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Not to turn this into a complete Caledonian podcast, but I did have a few a-ha moments from this trip -\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>The spread of contactless card readers at stores in the UK has spread the acceptance of Apple and Android Pay, which makes not having a chip-&amp;-pin card much less painful (remember, the US cards are chip-&amp;-signature because, I guess, we can’t be trusted to remember 2 4-digit codes). It used to be painful -- or perhaps just embarrassing -- to wait for the Tesco self-service attendant to look at me a bit confused as she gave me a receipt to be signed. Now it’s even faster than a chip-&amp;-pin card -- tap my phone on the card reader, beep, and I’m done. Now they need to replace the little mobile card readers that restaurants use...</li>\r\n 	<li>It’s really tough to find a good cup of brewed black coffee in Europe. Now call me a red-necked Midwesterner, but there are times that I don’t want foamed milk, I don’t want a just a swig of coffee, and I certainly don’t want that swig of coffee -- espresso -- diluted with hot water, I just want a cup of black coffee -- filter coffee as I’ve learned. Impossible to find in Spain and Portugal and many places in the UK, except at Starbucks. There have been many European mornings after a late night that I thanked God (and Howard Schultz) for their aggressive international expansion. So I was surprised and thrilled (ecstatic, really) to find an actual Portlandia-like coffee pourover place, complete with Chemexes and Hario kettles, in Aberdeen on Saturday morning. Foodstory Cafe. I found it by Googling “Hipster Aberdeen”. Yes, really. Sounds silly/absurd but it works. I’ve used that search term in many cities and more times than not been happy with the results.</li>\r\n 	<li>Our hotel in Aberdeen was nice, except for one thing. The tub had one of those little half wall tub screens instead of a shower curtain. There should be a YouTube video on how to shower in those, because everytime I try, I hose down the sink and everything on it. Perhaps I’m too large. Why this instead of a shower curtain?</li>\r\n 	<li>Sitting in a restaurant our last night in St Andrews, our waitress -- very nice person, very good service -- had just a hint of an Eastern European accent. I wanted to ask her where she’s from, but in post-Brexit Britain, it felt rude to ask that. Now that’s not a snarky comment about the results of the vote -- the tough thing about democracy is that everyone\'s vote counts and needs to be respected, not just the people who agree with us. But you can feel a change -- just a bit...</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Back in the US, I continue to struggle with my tendency to bitch tweet. On one flight, I was able to hold back during a 20 min wait for a gate on United, though I did provide “frank” feedback on the customer service survey they sent me a couple of days later. But the next week, on my third straight delayed United flight, I just couldn’t control myself. I understood when we had to return to the gate to manually start the remaining engine -- jets often taxi out using just one engine in order to save fuel, which makes perfect sense. United did a good job of finding us a gate -- not easy at ORD -- and was pretty quick with the maintenance crew. Where I lost it, though, was when it took longer to download the updated data to the plane computer than the whole return to the gate and manually start the engine bit. To the pilot’s credit, he did a good job of explaining the situation and the status, and didn’t hide in the cabin when we were de-planing.</li>\r\n 	<li>Marc Loehrwald, a long-time listener, sent me a note asking “Would you consider this gentlemen solving his problems with Verizon over speakerphone in the otherwise quite empty and peaceful Lounge at JFK worth bitch tweeting…?” accompanied by a picture of a guy sitting alone among couple of dozen chairs. Bitch subtweeting! I should’ve done that to the guy behind me who had his feet up on the back of my seat the entire flight from BWI to ORD. Not a kid, a guy in his mid-50’s!. Marc, you’ve taken my bitch tweeting to a whole new level!</li>\r\n 	<li>Over the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/12/20/podcast-119-digital-security-on-the-road-us-airports-getting-better/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">past </a>few episodes, we’ve been talking about VPNs -- virtual private networks -- as a way to improve your security when you travel. VPNs encrypt your network traffic -- always a good thing over public and hotel WiFi -- and will also “tunnel” your traffic through the Internet, making it look like you’re accessing the Internet from the VPN end-point. For corporate users, this makes you look like you’re accessing the Internet from your office, allowing you to use systems inside your corporate firewall. For many international travelers, it gives you a way to watch, say, TV shows that are licensed to Netflix in the US but not in other countries. All the VPN products I’ve used have been software-based -- my company uses a Cisco VPN, while on my last trip to China, I used ExpressVPN to tunnel under the Great Firewall and post pictures to Facebook. A company called Homing Systems used Kickstarter to launch a hardware-based VPN product called AlwaysHome. They sent me a sample to try out. It’s a pair of USB dongles. You connect one to your home router -- I have it plugged into my Uverse box. I plugged the second one into the BT router in my daughter’s flat in St Andrews. She fired up her Netflix account and was able to continue her “Criminal Minds” binge, a show not on UK Netflix, without a problem. In earlier testing, I found AlwaysHome was a bit more fiddly when it needed to connect first through a password portal -- the typical set up at a hotel. It would connect, but took a bit more work. When the connection nailed up, though, the performance was solid. <a href=\"http://www.homingsystems.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Homing Systems</a>’ web site calls it “Space Shifting”. I think that’s the right positioning. I think it’s quicker to fire up a software VPN client for a quick session at Starbucks. The AlwaysHome dongle setup seems more suited for a more sustained session. Check out the show notes for links to Homing Systems.</li>\r\n 	<li><em>Homing Systems sent me a AlwaysHome Duo free of charge for me to review. I was not paid for this review. The opinions expressed in this episode are my own. </em></li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/spinmeister/53428\">Somewhere</a> by spinmeister (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license. Ft: DJ Vadim</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Craft Beer Hunting</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>My son and I hang out in his apartment in Chicago\'s Lake View neighborhood and talk about finding good beer in out-of-the-way places</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/48915\">Like Music (cdk Mix)</a> by cdk (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/\">Attribution Share-Alike (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Phasenwandler</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>I Hate Rick Steves</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Not personally, of course. I’m sure he’s a nice guy who doesn’t kick dogs. I guess to be more precise, I hate what he’s done to some of my vacations.</li>\r\n 	<li>Portugal is the most recent example. Preparing for our trip, my wife read a number of Lisbon travel guides, include Rick Steves. Rick advises his Lisbon travelers to do the day trip out to Sintra, the castle-filled UNESCO World Heritage Site, on Mondays when all the Lisbon museums are closed. So Monday morning, we get up early, go across the street for our standard breakfast of coffee and pastel de nata (egg custard tarts to die for), and hit the train. Standing room only. We get off the train in Sintra. All we see are older Americans with sensible haircuts, plastic rimmed glasses, and hiking shoes. It’s like we walking through an NPR listener convention in Ann Arbor, MI. And they’re all wearing their backpacks swung around in front to protect themselves from pickpockets and thieves. Except no local could penetrate the phalanx of blue book-wielding Steve-heads. Lucky for us, most of them followed Rick’s advice to catch the bus to the top of the hill. We decided we needed to work off that egg custard, and so broke away from the blue book brigade and walked up the road.</li>\r\n 	<li>I don’t begrudge Rick Steves his success -- good for him; he seems to have worked hard for it. But his motto -- “Europe through the back door” -- can’t really apply anymore when he has millions of readers trying to walk through it. The same thing happened to Lonely Planet. What was once the hip, backpacker’s guide to cool spots now leads people to mainstream tourism spots just by its recommendations because it’s Amazon’s best selling travel guide series.</li>\r\n 	<li>I think we successfully avoided the Steve-o’s on this trip to Scotland. Aberdeen and the Northeast Highlands are nowhere to be found in Rick Steves’ Scotland, and I can’t say that I heard too many North American accents during that part of our trip -- save for the one day we drove down to Dunnottar Castle, but that’s got to be one of the main tourist draws in that part of Scotland. I heard almost as much German as I did American twang.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’ve tended, more and more, to use local Google searches rather than guide books. Google often surfaces more local content, and limiting the results to the past year makes sure it’s current. But even this might not be “back door” enough. The barista in the Aberdeen coffee shop that I found through my “Hipster Aberdeen” Google search did mention seeing a surprising number of Americans recently. I wonder if my “Hipster” search strategy has gone mainstream.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #124</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/\">ccMixter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_124.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #124 — Craft Beer Hunting; I Hate Rick Steves','','inherit','closed','closed','','1658-revision-v1','','','2018-07-23 15:44:44','2018-07-23 20:44:44','',1658,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/07/23/1658-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2082,1,'2018-07-23 15:45:37','2018-07-23 20:45:37','[caption id=\"attachment_1654\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/IMG_0725.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1654\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/IMG_0725-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Earning Status at Camp O\'Hare\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Earning Status at Camp O\'Hare[/caption]\r\n\r\nIt\'s been a tough travel month for a large portion of the traveling public. Between Delta and Southwest system outages and two straight Thursdays of thunderstorms in the east half of the US, dealing with travel delays has been a part of this month\'s travel experience. In this episode, we think about ways to avoid delays, or at least minimize their impact. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_123.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_123.mp3\"]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #123:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>This episode is sponsored by HMSHost, operating the restaurants and bars in the 20 busiest airports in the US, thanking the IT staffs at Southwest and Delta for helping us hit our Q3 revenue numbers. Please use the promo code: KICKOUTTHEPLUG on our website for a 20% thank you card good at any airport.</li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, at the back end of what’s been kind of a tough couple of weeks of travel. On the surface, it shouldn’t have been. I wasn’t going anywhere particularly exotic -- still back and forth to Charlottesville, as well as a quick West Coast loop to Vegas and Irvine, CA. Things actually started going sideways on the Vegas to Orange County flight. This should’ve been a quick hour hop. But then Southwest’s systems tipped over and things kinda just spiraled down from there, even in Vegas. After a while, I got tired of playing the slots; the payout in the airport is lousy anyways. And the beer selection is not the greatest. I got jealous watching the Virgin America flights take off, but at least I wasn’t one of the folks sitting on the tarmac in 110 degree weather waiting for gates to clear. I think my flight ended up taking something like a 4-hour delay. I was just glad my schedule wasn’t tight; that I didn’t have a critical meeting booked that afternoon.</li>\r\n 	<li>The next day, Thursday, I was flying American back to O’Hare and started to get delay notices. I popped open my flight tracking apps -- <a href=\"https://flightaware.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">FlightAware</a> and <a href=\"http://www.flightstats.com/go/Home/home.do\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">FlightStats</a> and could see the problem -- an ugly line of red on the weather map running through Chicago. Being on the west side of that meant things weren’t too bad for me though. Once the thunderstorm line cleared O’Hare, the first planes they launched were heading west -- away from the storm line. I took an hour delay. Back in the office on Friday, people flying back from the East Coast were getting in at 2 or 3 in the morning, if they got out at all. I definitely dodged a bullet.</li>\r\n 	<li>Which found its target the next Thursday. I was back in Charlottesville and the delay notices started at 2pm for a 6:30pm flight. That’s not a good sign. Back to FlightAware and FlightStats. It was a replay of the prior Thursday, except this time I was right in the midst of it. Caught up in ORD ground stops, the equipment for my Charlottesville flight couldn’t get out east and eventually cancelled. I drove 2 hours up DC to catch the last flight out of Dulles which by that time was having its own ground stops. The Frontier flight that was supposed to leave at 9:30 finally pushed back at 1:10am. It was my turn to stagger home at 2:30am</li>\r\n 	<li>At first, I thought I wouldn’t fly at all this week, but then I got roped into a Tuesday morning meeting in Atlanta. Not so bad I thought -- fly down Monday night, fly back Tuesday afternoon. But then I woke up Monday morning to the news that Delta’s systems had tipped over. Another bullet dodged. I was booked on American going down and United coming back. And both those flights left on time and arrived early.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/swivel-deep/\"><em>Arlos Auto Parts and Salvation</em></a> by Swivel Neck Jones</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>So, my wish from the last episode was not granted. My Global Entry renewal was “conditionally approved” but I still have to go in for an interview. They do look busy though. I had to look 3 months out for the first availability in ORD -- I got my notice in July and my appointment is in mid-October. I hope they don’t listen to this podcast or follow me on Twitter.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’ve been thru Dulles twice since the last episode. I mentioned my second visit a couple of minutes ago, catching a Frontier flight out of the Z concourse gates. I had never seen any Z gates before in Dulles -- and for a good reason. They’re about a half-dozen gates stuffed in a dark hallway at the east end of terminal; the typical “slum concourse” inhabited by budget carriers. On the earlier visit, I was making a connection on United between the two midfield concourses with involved a ride on the old mobile lounges. Now, if you know the history of Dulles airport, you know that these mobile lounges were supposed to be the future of airport design, replacing the fixed gate and concourse structure with mobile gate lounges that would shuttle you out to your plane parked on the tarmac and then raise you up to the door. Not really all that different from what happens in a lot of European airports, but without the hydraulic fun ride at the end. I tweeted a picture of the lounge -- really more like a high-clearance bus --which elicited a response from Matt McCurdy with a link to a 1958 video “The Expanding Airport: A Study of Service and Convenience for Washington International” hosted on Vimeo. From the credits, it looks like it was created for the firm that designed Dulles. It’s a 9½-minute video and an absolute must-see; the disconnect between what people thought the future of travel would be and the reality almost 60 years later. Just the contrast between how the architects thought the mobile lounges would look -- couches with coffee tables and flower vases with cocktail service, and everyone in suits and dresses -- vs. my Twitter picture of people in shorts, t-shirts, and backpacks crammed in, hanging onto poles and straps -- is something. Check out the shownotes for <a href=\"https://vimeo.com/4139559\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Matt’s link to the video</a>. The mobile lounges are slowly being replaced by the new underground light rail system between the main terminal and the midfield concourses. Maybe as fewer people take them, they’ll be able to replace the poles with some nice chintz couches.</li>\r\n 	<li>Last month, a PR agency for Marriott invited me to a launch that was being held at the Windy City Smokeout BBQ event in Chicago. Never one to turn down free BBQ, especially on a Friday afternoon, I went. They were launching a new partnership between their TownePlace Suites brand and Weber grills, where they’re putting Weber gas grills and tools out in the common areas for use by guests. Kinda makes sense for an all-suite hotel -- families not looking to eat out every night fire up some burgers on the grill -- especially when the TownePlace folks explained that they’re targeting the mid-tier price range. It was kinda entertaining to see the young country pop tarts try to grill pizzas (and, by the way, I apply the pop tart label to both the male and female teams), but I was more interested in understanding how Marriott was positioning their suite brands -- how did TownePlace (which I’d never heard of) relate to Residence Inn and SpringHill Suites? The PR folks introduced me to a couple of brand guys who tried to lay it out for me -- TownePlace is lower priced but a bit hipper than Residence Inns, but not edgy like Moxy, their new brand targeted at Millennials. And SpringHill never made it into the discussion. I don’t know how well these micro-targets work in the reality of, say, an Orlando or a Houston. Are you really able to hit those target audiences or is it just another brand to sell to a new franchisee so the guy running the combo Courtyard-Residence Inn property a couple miles down the road doesn’t sue you? I dunno, but I got to wonder if these TownePlace properties with the new Webers are also going to provide shuttle service to the nearest Whole Foods?</li>\r\n 	<li>A colleague went to Defcon in Las Vegas last weekend. There’s always interesting stuff coming out of there; always enough to nurture any seed of paranoia you may have lurking in your id. It also makes me a bit more sympathetic to the corporate IT security guys trying to keep up with this stuff. “Video jacking” was the buzzed-about thing this year to keep frequent travelers on the watchout. The attack uses a smartphone’s ability to duplicate video out the micro USB or Lightning port to an HDMI TV. Nice if you want to watch videos from your phone or tablet on your larger hotel TV. A little less nice if you plug your phone into what you think is a charging station. But using these HDMI/Mobile High Definition Link cables which look very similar to straight power cables, your phone screen is duplicated on a TV screen perhaps with a person or video camera watching as you enter your PIN, work your banking apps, pull up that hidden text file with all your passwords written down. Krebs On Security has a <a href=\"http://krebsonsecurity.com/2016/08/road-warriors-beware-of-video-jacking/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">good write-up</a> on it, complete with a quick demo video. I’ll put a link in the show notes.</li>\r\n 	<li>We’ve talked before about how full planes and tight seats are breaking down some of the courtesies necessary to survive sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with complete strangers for 2-4 hours straight. Usually it’s not a problem; everyone gets along to go along. On one of my United flights last month, though, this broke down slightly. It started at boarding. I get to my row. There’s a guy already in the middle seat. I tell him I’m in the window. He asks my seat number. Hmmm, little odd, but I tell him, confirming that, yes I can read my boarding pass and that he’s going to have to move out to let me in. He’s a 1K who seems a bit pissed that he’s in a center seat. Perhaps he was hoping to slide over to the window, but if that’s the case, he missed the announcements asking for volunteers. This plane was packed. About 45 minutes into the flight, he looks over at me, exasperated, and says “Fine, if you want the armrest, just take it!” and then bitched about how miserable the middle seat is. Huh? I told him, “We can share it,” I said. “There’s no sharing,” he shot back. “I dunno, I can usually manage that when I’m in the middle.” He looked at me like he wanted to hit me and then thought the better of it. The remaining 2 ½ hours was less-than-comfortable as we sat within inches of each other. You may disagree, but I’m not in with this whole “the middle seat is so miserable that you’re entitled to everything else in the row” idea. I’ve sat in the middle seat a lot and don’t think it’s that bad if you’re in an exit row or, as in this case, in United’s Economy Plus where you have extra legroom. Indeed, I’ll pick those middle seats over a window seat in the back of the plane almost every time. And when I do, I don’t expect any special treatment from my row mates. I manage to arrange my elbows so we all can use the armrests -- one of us take the front half, the other the back half. But most of all, I don’t blame my row mates for my seat choice.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/fuzz-messy/\"><em>Smiling Perspective</em></a> by General Fuzz</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Can We Avoid Travel Delays?</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Peter Rukavina, a long-time T/C listener, sent me an interesting e-mail at the front part of this week\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>The tweet-stream of travel despair is a frequent enough occurrence as to almost be its own medium now (\"@aircanada announces 9 hour delay; help!\" etc.). I\'m an occasional practitioner myself. My question: to what extent can delays, cancellations, luggage loss, bumping, etc. be mitigated by being travel-savvy? In other words, by traveling smart, how much more control over wrenches thrown into plans do you have?</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>A pretty damned good question, especially given the tales of woe over the past month that I went through at the start of this episode which, I’ll admit, were accompanied by a couple of streams of bitch tweets. We\'ll never completely avoid travel despair -- complete system failures ought to be “black swan” events, though having 3 full outages (United, Southwest, and Delta) in 13 months suggests maybe they’re not, and flying into smaller places like Charlottesville, VA leave you with few options. But I do think there are things we can do -- the consultant in me want to call them “strategies” -- that can reduce the probability of a bad time and hopefully reduce the impact when they happen. I’ve talked about some “strategies” in earlier podcasts -- focus trips to earn airline and hotel status, don’t check luggage, fly direct, if you have to connect never book a connection less than 90 minutes -- and you’ll find most of these in travel listacles that pop up around the holidays. Knowing that Peter, as a long-time listener, has heard these before, I tried to think about some next-level “strategies”. Here are the ones that came to mind. Not an exhaustive list, but I think a decent start...</li>\r\n 	<li>First, avoid flying in the evenings -- Now I break this rule all the time, but think about it. Delays build during the day -- from weather, congestion, mechanicals, psychotic passengers -- because the airlines don\'t build their schedules with enough slack to allow recovery. By 4 or 5pm, the sum of these delays combines with the packed evening \"rush hour\" schedule to drive a high probability of delays. American and United’s LGA-ORD evening schedules are this in spades. Throw in a summer thunderstorm in ORD or DFW or ATL and flight ops centers start cancelling flights to catch up. If you’re on the last flight out, you can be looking at a night on the comfy-looking airport couch. Even without cancellations, delays lead to tight connections which can lead to missed luggage.</li>\r\n 	<li>Use flight-tracking smart phone apps -- I use apps like FlightAware to access more data than the typical gate agent can. On the Thursday that I ended up in DC, as the delay notices started coming in from American,, FlightAware showed me that my plane was on the ground in Wichita, KS, probably waiting out an ORD ground stop from thunderstorms. It still had to get to Chicago and then out to Charlottesville. Seeing parallel lines of red on the radar view, I had a pretty good sense that it wasn\'t going to happen. When I decided to head up to Dulles for the Frontier flight, I could see the flight history on FlightAware; it delayed more often than not, but rarely cancelled. That night, as ORD and IAD ground stops kept pushing the departure time, I wasn\'t too worried that it would cancel because I had seen the flight history.</li>\r\n 	<li>Spread clothes across checked and unchecked luggage -- If you\'ve checked luggage, I assume it\'s for a good reason (e.g., carrying a bottles of wine home from a Napa trip, needing formal wear for a wedding) and that you also have a carry-on. Put two changes of clothes and a bare set of toiletries (e.g., toothbrush) in your carry-on. Most lost luggage will catch up to you within 24-36 hours. If you\'re traveling as a family, spread everyone\'s clothes out across all the bags rather than each person having their own bag. It would be rare for the airlines to lose all the bags of an entire party. With things spread across bags, everyone is good for a couple of days even if a bag is lost. I’m always amazed that more families don’t do this.</li>\r\n 	<li>Know your geography -- What are your alternative airports and how far of a drive are they? This has become even more important over the past few years as the big carriers have reduced flight frequency to fill up their planes. I once had a project in the middle of Connecticut that was just about equidistant between White Plains and Hartford airports. We always flew in/out of White Plains even though it was a smaller airport because, when flights delayed/cancelled, we could just keep driving down the Hutchinson to LaGuardia. When we flew out of Hartford, it was a much longer haul to the nearest airport.</li>\r\n 	<li>This last one might be a bit obscure, but it’s been useful to me. If your corporate car rental agency is Hertz, always book an intermediate car so you can use Gold Choice to quickly swap cars if Hertz assigns you a real beater. Now, you can always go back to the counter, stand in line, and demand a better, cleaner, less decrepit car, but we’re trying to avoid delays. Most corporate rates that I’ve used has at most a dollar or two difference between the compact and intermediate rate. It’s cheap insurance. I’ve used Gold Choice maybe 10-20% of the time, but I’m always glad to have that option.</li>\r\n 	<li>So there you go,. Five ways to travel smarter. If you have a suggestion, please send it in.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/atek-phoenix/\"><em>Goa Life</em></a> by Ambient Teknology</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Coping with Travel Delays</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>During my last CIO gig, I was traveling as much, if not more, than any of my consulting gigs. I kept my Chicago residence and rotated weekly across offices in Scottsdale, Dallas, Naples, FL and Croydon, south of London. The head of my project management team started doing a bit of travel to support some system migrations and after a couple of months of the usual flight delays and other travel snafus, he asked me, “How do you deal with this all the time?” “I depend on 3 major food groups,” I told him. “Alcohol, salt, and fat.”</li>\r\n 	<li>I remembered that as I was killing time in Dulles with a dinner of fish and chips and a local beer, Hop Lips IPA from Dover, DE. It rang the bell on all three.</li>\r\n 	<li>Doing that too much, though, is how you end up quietly asking for belt extenders, so you gotta find other ways of coping.</li>\r\n 	<li>One bad habit that I have is bitch tweeting. I’ve confessed to that in many prior episodes, and as much as I try to stop, I find it releases my frustrations -- kinda like shouting into a bag or something -- and keeps me from popping a cork at innocent gate agents. I apologize to all my Twitter followers who have to endure that. I have downloaded a meditation app for my iPhone, but it hasn’t seemed to help.</li>\r\n 	<li>A more constructive thing is that I try not to show up to the airport until I have to. If I get an early notice of a delay, I push back my cab to the airport. Part of the frustration is that delays consume time. I can be more productive in my office than trying to find a place to work at a crowded gate or airport club. When I was traveling regularly to New Orleans a few years back, it seemed that half the flights back to Chicago in the summer were delayed by afternoon thunderstorms. I wouldn’t leave for the airport until I saw the inbound equipment was in the air. I got a lot more work done, and ate much better food.</li>\r\n 	<li>The trend of airports upgrading their amenities helps a lot. I’ve never done the neck massage thing, but, back to the alcohol food group, I’ve done a few wine flights at the Vino Volo wine bars that are popping up in more US airports, and the beer flights at microbrewery bars like Great Lakes Brewery’s place in Cleveland, Cisco Brewers’ bar in Boston Logan or the Karl Strauss bar in LAX. It’s something local that keeps you occupied for a bit. And searching them out -- because they’re inevitably in a different concourse than you -- also kills time.</li>\r\n 	<li>In the end, though, it is what it is. If the delay isn’t causing you to miss something important, it’s easy to kick back and read the paper. If you’re missing your kid’s parent-teacher conference, there’s not much that’s going to help your frustration. Except maybe bitch tweeting...</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #123</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\">Magnatune</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_123.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #123 — How to Avoid Travel Delays','','inherit','closed','closed','','1644-revision-v1','','','2018-07-23 15:45:37','2018-07-23 20:45:37','',1644,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/07/23/1644-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2083,1,'2018-07-23 15:46:32','2018-07-23 20:46:32','[caption id=\"attachment_1632\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/IMG_0324.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1632\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/IMG_0324-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Spring Break in Iceland\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Spring Break in Iceland[/caption]\r\n\r\nWatching Iceland makes its Cinderella run in the Euro 2016 soccer tourney got me thinking back to my March trip there. It is one of the hot travel destinations -- maybe too hot? Could be, but the descriptor I keep coming back to is \"dramatic.\" And it seems that on every trip I make out of the country, I get surprised by the amount of data my iPhone consumes -- in spite of flipping every Settings switch I can find. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_122.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_122.mp3\"]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #122:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you once again from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, on a week off of the road. I hate to say “a rare week”, but looking at my calendar, it is. For the first half of the year -- 26 weeks -- I didn’t get in an airplane during 2 of them. This week, the first of the second half of the year, is my 3rd non-travel week. Now absolutely some of them are self-inflicted -- 2 to be exact -- one week in Spain and one in Portugal. That’s an intense travel schedule, even for me. I usually find a way to take a break at least once every 6 weeks, but it just hasn’t worked out that way this year so far. Sometimes you control your schedule, while other times it controls you. I’m definitely been on the wrong end of the leash since January.</li>\r\n 	<li>Since the last episode, I’ve been traveling pretty much exclusively between Chicago and Charlottesville, VA. Now Charlottesville is a nice town, but it’s a pain to get to every week. The first direct flight from Chicago leaves around 11:30am, landing around 2pm -- not exactly convenient for the business traveler. Other earlier options are to fly into Washington-Dulles and drive for 2 hrs, or fly into Richmond and drive an hour and a half. What I’ve found myself doing for the past couple of weeks is flying in Sunday night -- which I absolutely hate -- on direct flight that leaves Chicago around 9:45pm, lands in Charlottesville around half past midnight and puts me into my hotel around 1am. There just doesn’t seem to be an easy way around this one.</li>\r\n 	<li>At least the flights back home are convenient -- 3:15 and 6:30pm. And it’s not a crowded airport. I think last week was the longest TSA line I hit -- 3 people were in front of me.</li>\r\n 	<li>And as I start to think about a September trip to Scotland to take our daughter back to University, I’m taking advantage of the post-Brexit exchange rate to stock my Revolut account with some much cheaper pounds. Though it’ll be another week on the road, I’ll be significantly upgrading my Scotch choices.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/hisboyelroy/430\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Revolve</a> mix</em> by His Boy Elroy</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Last week’s attack at Istanbul’s Ataturk airport begs the same question as March’s Brussels bombings -- does more airport security actually make us safer or just move the target around? I said in the<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/05/30/podcast-121-tsa-lines-my-luggage-is-where/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"> last episode</a> that the long TSA lines on the land side of security caused by stricter TSA inspections weren’t making the traveler any safer. Instead, they were make us less safe/more vulnerable to a Brussels or Istanbul-style attack. And while the TSA has fixed (at least for now) some of the worst lines, the issue is going to pop up again. And someone is going to suggest -- again -- that they move the security perimeter back -- say, checking itineraries and IDs at the terminal door like they do in India? The justification will be that a little bit more inconvenience is more than worth the price of safety. But, if they don’t staff it right (which was and will alway be the core problem), all you’ve done is just move the target -- the line of passengers -- out by another 1,000 feet. It’s less about location and more about execution. And given the TSA’s track record of execution over the past 15 years, I’m not optimistic that they’ll get to the right answer.</li>\r\n 	<li>I got a e-mail a few weeks ago that my 5-year Global Entry membership expires on my birthday this December. I don’t know exactly when Customs and Border Patrol started Global Entry, but 5 years ago, I was one of the early adopters. Back then, there weren’t that many interview centers. I was lucky that Chicago had one, but I had colleagues in Phoenix who had to fly up to Las Vegas for interviews. The renew process was pretty easy. I logged into GOES -- Global Online Enrollment Systems -- clicked the blue Renew Membership button and then cycled through all the profile screens -- but this time the screens were pre-populated so I only had to make updates. In my case, it was updating my job history for my current job and, the toughest part, entering all the countries I’d visited in the past 5 years. Normally, this would be pretty simple -- thumb through your passport pages and write down the country stamps. However, back in 2012, my backpack with my passport was stolen while on the train from Brussels city center to the airport -- a fun time I recount in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/05/20/podcast-98-stolen-luggage-restaurants-want-your-smartphone/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">episode 98</a>. Luckily, I do a decent job of cataloging travel pics. Flipping through 2011 reminded me that we’d visited Venice that year and that I’d traveled there by train from Paris after a couple of days of customer meeting. The renewal cost is $100 -- $20/year is worth the price. Even more so when it’s free -- I charged it on my Amex Platinum card and immediately saw a $100 statement credit. Now I’m checking GOES every couple of days to see if Customs just waves my renewal through or if I have to talk again to the nice people in the bowels of ORD Terminal 5. I’m hoping that with the crush of new PreCheck applications, they’ll take the easy route.</li>\r\n 	<li>And as we’ve talked about before, I’m not really sure why anyone would sign up for PreCheck instead of Global Entry. Global Entry is just $15 more -- $100 instead of $85 -- the price of a beer at ORD.</li>\r\n 	<li>But if you’re not up for the $100 passport check line cut, Arnoud Heijnis, a long time TravelCommons listener, pinged me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> about another option -- the Mobile Passport app from US Customs and Border Patrol. I haven’t used it because I have Global Entry. My wife tried to get my son to download it before his return flight from Reykjavik, but he never got ‘round to it, and he said the early evening lines at ORD weren’t that bad. So while I don’t have any first- or second-hand experience with it, one of the tech writers at WSJ wrote up a <a href=\"http://www.wsj.com/articles/get-through-airport-customs-faster-with-this-free-app-1467221118\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">glowing review</a> of the app a few weeks back. Check out the show notes for a link to the article. And if you’ve tried the Mobile Passport, shoot me a note with your thoughts.</li>\r\n 	<li>During my flight back home last Weds, we were coming in on approach, you could feel the gradual descent -- slowing, descending, slowing, descending -- and then, all of a sudden, I’m pressed against the back of my seat as the plane rotates in the wrong direction -- up, that is -- and the engines roar with thrust. The experienced travelers know that the pilot had to abort the landing, but those who haven’t gone through this drill before are looking around, wondering “what the hell…?”. After about 5 minutes, the pilot came on “The plane in front of us hit a bird. They have to physically inspect the runway before another plane can land, so we had to fly around. We’ll be down in 10 minutes”. That was a nice announcement. I learned something new -- I didn’t know they had to inspect a runway after a bird strike, though it makes a lot of sense. Too often pilots or gate agents don’t take the time to explain the cause of a delay or a fly around, or don’t want to deal with the follow-up questions that may come -- and so I appreciate those that do. I remember a Southwest flight out of New Orleans. The plane lands -- it was a bit late -- but we’re not boarding right away. You could feel the impatience building in the gate area. The agent got on the PA -- “Sorry for the delay in boarding, but the plane was struck by lightning on its descent. The pilots have to do a physical inspection before we can board”. OK, that makes sense -- and just as you could feel the impatience build, it immediately drained away with that announcement. Maybe it’s because these delays weren’t the airline’s fault -- no negligence or bad judgement on American’s part for a bird strike or Southwest’s for lightning. Bit tougher to suck up when it’s the third delay in a row caused by maintenance issues -- spend some of those record profits on preventative maintenance -- or a missing crew -- maybe you should put a bit more slack in your scheduling. But as always, more transparency is better than vagueness -- even if it’s not the best story for you.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/septahelix/34050\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Earth Soda</a></em> by septahelix</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Data-Hungry Phones</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I met up with a friend at <a href=\"http://www.empiricalbrewery.com/\">Empirical Brewing</a>, one of 3 microbreweries along Ravenswood Blvd in that Chicago northwest side neighborhood. I hadn’t seen him since he had gotten back from a trip he and his son did to Helsinki, St Petersburg, and Moscow. Among other things, he had problems getting his son’s AT&amp;T iPhone to work in Helsinki. That’s odd, I said. I’ve never had a problem with AT&amp;T’s GSM iPhones in Europe. AT&amp;T told him to reset it, which he did, after which it promptly downloaded a gig and a half of apps and data over the cellular data network. As you might guess, he’s disputing that couple of hundred dollar bill.</li>\r\n 	<li>I am always surprised at how much data my phone uses when I travel outside of the country. Now I’m sure that one reason for this is that it’s about the only time I look at my data usage since I’m grandfathered into one of the old AT&amp;T unlimited data plans. I don’t know how much I use, and don’t make a big effort to limit it. So when I travel overseas, I get to see my kids live their mobile lives trying to stay under a 300 MB data cap.</li>\r\n 	<li>International mobile data has gotten a bit cheaper. T-Mobile offers a reasonable unlimited international data plan if you can live with slower 2G-style speeds. I’m not that patient, so I tend to get the AT&amp;T 300 MB package for $60 because it also comes with free access to a decent set of wi-fi hotspots.</li>\r\n 	<li>Living on a data budget means thinking which apps really need mobile data -- which is not that many. So while I’m sitting on the plane waiting for everyone to board, I pull out my iPhone, go over to Settings | Cellular and start turning off cellular data access for most of my apps. I’m not quite sure why the healthcare flexible spending app or the app that came with my sous vide immersion heater ever need cellular data -- in the US or internationally. Anyhow, I spool through the last, turning most of them off and certainly that damn “Wi-Fi Assist” and then, after I’ve sent my last Snapchat, I hit “Reset Statistics” so I’ll have a clean view of how I’m burning through that 300 MB and then click over to Airplane mode.</li>\r\n 	<li>And then, when I land, I come out of Airplane mode, go back into Settings | Cellular and turn Roaming On, and catch up on the overnight e-mail while waiting to get off the plane. At some point that morning, I’ll look at the Current Period data usage and see that I’ve burned through, say, 75 MB of my 300 MB -- 25% of my total package -- in the first morning. Holy crap! I immediately dive back into Settings | Cellular and turn off Roaming. What happened?</li>\r\n 	<li>This is where, on the iPhone, you begin having to spelunk through the mess that the Settings app has become. You scroll down past all the apps you shut off from cellular access and look at the last entry -- “System Services” -- and see that it’s consumed at least half of that 75 MB. What the hell? You click through. Why has this phone used that much data on “Time &amp; Location” or “General” or “iTunes Accounts” (huh? I thought I shut off iTunes in the last screen). This is when you start to dig deep -- Settings | Privacy | Location Service and you find another list of apps -- kinda like the one you used to turn off cellular data, but this one is for accessing your location. Look, as much as I love the Tortas Frontera restaurants in ORD, I’m not sure why their app needs to pull my location information. And then you go to Settings | General | Background App Refresh for yet another list of apps where you shut off their permission to update themselves in the background. And then you go over to Settings | Mail and turn Fetch New Data to Off to keep your iPhone from constantly pinging your Exchange server.</li>\r\n 	<li>It’s kinda like whack-a-mole, and you’ll be sure to miss something because these phones and the apps we load on them are, for the most part, built on the assumption of ubiquitous unlimited data access. So changing that behavior, those assumptions -- to severely limit the data the phone inhales and exhales -- takes work. Which is why, if we’re going to be somewhere for more than 4-5 days, I’ll invest the hour it takes to find a phone store and $25 per phone to buy a local SIM with a gig or two of data. When I was in Iceland for 4 days in March, it didn’t seem necessary. But when then I flew down to Spain for 8 days, my first stop was the Orange store because I knew my phone couldn’t hold its breath for that long.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music --<em> <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/scottaltham/20747\">Hear Us Now</a></em> by scottaltham</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Dramatic Iceland</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Watching Iceland makes its Cinderella run in the Euro 2016 soccer tourney -- right up until the time they faceplanted into France last weekend -- reminded me of the trip my son and I took in March. Some reaction shots ESPN did from Reykjavik were places we had been -- saw a coffee shop we hit trying to stay awake on our first day, and a square that one of our hotels was on. Not that surprising since downtown Reykjavik isn’t that big. If I’d paid more attention to the people sitting next to me in the bars off that square, I’d have probably recognized some people in those shots too.</li>\r\n 	<li>Iceland is a hot tourist destination -- especially for people looking for something a bit different. And if I didn’t know already, when the Dorling Kindersley folks sent me review copies of their relaunched <a href=\"http://www.dk.com/us/travel/\">Eyewitness Travel Top 10 Guides</a>, in among the usual suspects -- New York, London, Paris, Barcelona -- was Iceland. In 2015, there were <a href=\"http://www.ferdamalastofa.is/static/files/ferdamalastofa/Frettamyndir/2016/juni/tourism_-in_iceland_in_figures_may2016.pdf\">1.3 million foreign tourists</a> in Iceland -- almost 4 times the population of 329,000 -- and a 29% increase over 2014. It’s a hot destination and getting hotter -- perhaps even to the point of overheating?</li>\r\n 	<li>Especially with Wow Air, a kinder and quirkier Spirit or Ryan Air, expanding the number of North American gateway cities. We ran into lots of folks who had seen ads for cheap Wow air fares and flew over for a 3 or 4 day weekend on a whim, without really thinking about what to do. We’d see folks walking up and down the downtown shopping and entertainment district in Reykjavik, and then figuring out some day trip bus rides out to the Golden Circle hot spots. And this was in March, not exactly the garden time in Iceland. But there were a lot of folks there. And so in that way, Iceland felt small.</li>\r\n 	<li>On our second day, we picked up a rental SUV -- a Dacia Duster, a great vehicle -- and headed out of town. Once we got out of Reykjavik’s catchment area, Iceland opened up quickly. The drama of the scenery, the spaces carved out by volcanos and glaciers -- “Land of Fire and Ice” it likes to bill itself -- make it feel much bigger. Of course, you could see this same space from the seat of a tour bus, but I was glad we rented a car. We got off the well-worn paths. Not too far, but when driving across a plain on a 2-lane highway with no traffic to speak of, the vistas did open up in front of us, which made me glad I was able to look forward and enjoy them through the expanse of the front windshield instead of looking off to the side through a motor coach window. And when we did some of the typical stops -- Þingvellir park, Gullfoss waterfall -- we could ride out the ebb and flow of the tour bus traffic, and have these spots pretty much to ourselves, even for just a little while. Or the time when we were driving toward the south coast, running through a series of rain bands -- in and out; in and out. I was starting to get annoyed until I looked out the rear view mirror and saw a huge double rainbow. I immediately pulled into a gas station and got out of the car. The landscape was wide open; we could see that rainbow from end to end. It was a phenomenal sight. And the smoked lamb sandwich we bought afterwards in the gas station wasn’t bad either.</li>\r\n 	<li>I struggle sometimes when asked about Iceland. Would I recommend it? Reykjavik is nice enough, but it’s a small town. I’m not a museum guy, so there was probably a day-and-a half of stuff for me to do. And Iceland is expensive. I had good fish and lamb, but it wasn’t cheap. And hotel rooms were tight in March, so I gotta figure the country is completely sold out in July and August.</li>\r\n 	<li>But the scenery outside of Reykjavik, I keep coming back to that word “dramatic”. I’m not sure it does it justice, but it’s all I got. If you get a car, then the trip starts to make sense.</li>\r\n 	<li>Well, that and the fermented shark chased with shots of brennivín -- Icelandic schnapps -- because, I dunno, how can you not?</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #122</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from the <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">ccMixter</a> site</li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_122.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #122 — Data-Hungry Phones; Dramatic Iceland','','inherit','closed','closed','','1629-revision-v1','','','2018-07-23 15:46:32','2018-07-23 20:46:32','',1629,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/07/23/1629-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2084,1,'2018-07-23 20:50:38','2018-07-24 01:50:38','[caption id=\"attachment_1616\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"225\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/IMAG0569_1.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1616\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/IMAG0569_1-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"This should be interesting...\" width=\"225\" height=\"300\" /></a> This should be interesting...[/caption]\r\n\r\nAfter two vacations to Europe and some full-contact business travel in-between, I found my way back into the TravelCommons studios. I talk about these recent trips -- the awful timeliness of an <a href=\"http://aa.com\">American Airlines</a>\' regional jet partner, an incredible string of lost luggage, a meaningless baggage strip tease with <a href=\"http://wowair.us\">Wow Air</a>, and being surprised to still find some quirks when using ATMs and credit cards in Europe. And it wouldn\'t be a travel podcast if I didn\'t weigh in on the TSA\'s \"line-mageddon\" -- their <a href=\"http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-tsa-airport-security-lines-met-0517-20160516-story.html\">meltdown at O\'Hare</a>. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_121.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_121.mp3\"]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #121:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you once again from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, after rewriting an episode I’d hoped to get done 3 weeks ago. I’d even posted on the TravelCommons Facebook wall on May 1st about having a new episode next weekend -- a post I’ve since deleted. Seems to be a trend with me. I get started on a new episode, but then it gets elbowed aside by other things -- like work. Maybe if I could just figure out a way to monetize this thing…</li>\r\n 	<li>I had hoped to record this episode halfway between two European trips. As I mentioned in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/12/podcast-120-where-do-guidebooks-fit-in-i-hate-shopping-for-suitcases/\">the last episode</a>, I had a weird Spring Break itinerary in April right before Easter -- Chicago to Reykjavik, Iceland for a 4-day long weekend with my son, and then, as he headed back to Chicago, I flew down to Spain to meet my wife and daughter and some friends for a week in Andalucia. As you can imagine, packing for that trip in a 22-inch carry on required equal amounts of editing and physical force. And then in mid-May, we all headed over to Portugal for a week. The excuse being that we needed to shove all my daughter’s belongings into storage after her first year at university in Scotland, but decided that Portugal would have better food and wine than Scotland. So we headed to Lisbon as a family, and then my wife and daughter are flew back up to St Andrews to do all the packing stuff. I think I came out of this pretty good.</li>\r\n 	<li>Where this episode got shoved off the rails was the week before I left for Portugal. We all know that vacations aren’t free -- that we pay for them the week before we leave and the week after. I was blissfully in denial of this immutable law, thinking that I could write, record, produce, and post this episode then. Cramming two weeks of business travel into 4 days (we were leaving for Lisbon Friday afternoon), that week’s travel itinerary was New Jersey on Monday, Boston on Tuesday, New Orleans on Wednesday, and Atlanta on Thursday. Across four airlines -- United ORD-EWR-BOS, JetBlue BOS-MSY, Southwest MSY-ATL, and American ATL-ORD -- I racked up about 2:30 hrs in flight delays with JetBlue being the only carrier without a black mark.</li>\r\n 	<li>Over April and May, what’s been particularly awful has been my run on one of American Airline’s regional jet partners Skywest. One Monday in April, Skywest lost voice and data connectivity at its Dallas dispatch center causing a ground stop of its planes. After two hours of hanging around the Admirals Club, watching my Newark departure time get pushed out every 30 minutes, I called Amex to get switched over to a real American plane flying into LGA. It added about 45 minutes to my drive after I landed, but at least I got there, especially since Skywest ended up canceling my original Newark flight. The next Monday, I ended up on another Skywest American flight; this time to Charlottesville, VA. Again, another 1+ hr delay. This time it was plane maintenance. Then that Friday, I get a text after lunch -- my flight home was delayed over 2 hours. That was it. Three Skywest flights in a row that couldn’t get close to on-schedule. I called Amex again. Got on a United flight out of Richmond. After an hour-and-a-half drag race down I-64, I landed at ORD, drove home, ate dinner with my wife, and had a couple of glasses of wine before my original Skywest plane finally made it to Chicago.</li>\r\n 	<li>Now I’m not a airline ops expert, but when the women behind the desks in the Admirals Club tell you about SkyWest “They’re not our favorite”, you might think about finding a new partner.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://cyberset.cc/artists2.php?tr_release_id=104\"><em>Heaven</em></a> by <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=A951998E6011FA9B2D22387EB3CAC0B5EB05A36360E7FDA122C8D7A5C140F8DC\" rel=\"nofollow\">Electric Skychurch</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Steve Frick asked in a comment on the TravelCommons website about how I use Evernote. In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/12/podcast-120-where-do-guidebooks-fit-in-i-hate-shopping-for-suitcases/\">the last episode</a>, I talked about how I use it to in my vacation travel planning. I used to store all sorts of things in Evernote — scanned receipts, recipes, etc. Now I mostly just use it to store on-line travel articles using its Web Clipper Chrome extension which I really like. A couple of days ago, I was reading a 36 Hours in Philadelphia article in the NYTimes. I clicked the little elephant head on the Chrome bar and now I have it saved, and synced across all my devices. I know a bunch of folks who are big OneNote users. I’ve been thinking of looking at it, but it’s pretty low on the priority list since I’m good in Evernote’s free tier.</li>\r\n 	<li>Peter Zurich sent in <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEyFH-a-XoQ\">a link</a> to an Onion YouTube video about the Franz Kafka Airport in Prague. Now, the Onion is talented/notorious for writing absurd articles in a straight voice that’s just close enough to the truth to make people accept that it is true. This video is well done. Anyone who read Kafka in high school or college will get a kick out of it, and remind you how close to Kafka-esque absurdity the modern travel experience gets. And it did make me look up the Prague airport -- did they really name it after Kafka? As great as that would be, the airport has been called Václav Havel Airport Prague since 2012 in honor of the Czech’s former president and leader of the Velvet Revolution.</li>\r\n 	<li>Dan Gradwohl dropped me a note regarding the “I Hate Shopping for a Suitcase” topic in the last episode where I talked about my difficulties in replacing my worn backpack.\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>As for the backpack search, Sara feels your pain as she searched long and hard for a new backpack before settling on a Gregory for her upcoming trip on The Camino in northern Spain. Of course, her backpack needs differ from yours! For baggage, she uses the REI Tech Beast and loves it. She\'s had it for 8 years, still going strong with 100,000+ miles per year easily on it. She has not found an overhead bin it does not fit in, from a CR9/170 to an A380/744.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Dan, thanks for that. I just got a couple of REI coupons in the mail. I’ll have to go check out the Tech Beast</li>\r\n 	<li>In that same segment, I talked about my “smart” luggage bag from<a href=\"http://bluesmart.com/\"> Bluesmart</a>. I think I summarized my review as “meh” -- nice enough bag, but all the electronics felt more like a gimmick than something I needed. I’m going to backtrack a bit on that -- specifically with regards to its location finder capability. The bag has a GPS and global SIM card and through a deal with Telefonica transmits its location periodically which you can see on the smartphone app. As I mentioned in the last episode, the Bluesmart is the perfect carry-on size, it’s usually right above me in the plane cabin, so the location finder isn’t that valuable. Except recently, I’ve been flying regional jets a lot where I’ve had to gate check (“valet”) my bag. Normally I don’t worry about this -- I’ve never had an airline lose my bag in the couple of hundred feet between the jetway and the plane. But one on of these recent Skywest flights, it was taking my bag a long time to show up at the gate after arriving. Hmmm, I pulled out my iPhone, hit the Location button on the Bluesmart app, and it showed me that my bag had updated its location a couple of minutes prior and was indeed here. A few minutes later, it showed up in the last tranche of bags heaved up into the jet bridge. Not critical functionality, but it moves up from “meh” to “kinda handy”.</li>\r\n 	<li>Which I guess would’ve been handy but not necessarily useful in the string of bad luggage karma that my daughter and her friends have experienced over the past couple of month. My daughter’s luggage has been lost on 3 out of 4 trips -- Air Brussels lost it between EDI and MAD through BRU, KLM lost it on her return through AMS, and then AirFrance lost it between LIS and EDI through DeGaulle. And a friend of her had Ibera lose a bag between Seville and MAD. How does that happen? You have to really work hard to lose anything in an airport the size of Seville. And it’s not that my daughter wanted to check her bag. She wanted to carry on, But she has this short light blue roller bag that seems to pull gate agent eyes toward it. I gotta get her something more nondescript, like a black hardshell roller.</li>\r\n 	<li>But the thing that will catch you in Europe is that carry-on bags often have a weight limit as well as a size limit. Checking in for my <a href=\"http://wowair.us/\">Wow Air</a> flight from Reykjavik to London, I arrived 2 hrs before check in to see what appeared to be a stationary check in line of a couple of hundred people. Reykjavik is Wow’s hub and, near as I could see, they have 4 agents checking people in with luggage. I hadn’t wanted to check my luggage since I had a weird connection in London en route to Madrid -- no interlining between Wow and Ibera, so I would have to claim luggage in Gatwick, pass through Customs, and then recheck the bag with Iberia. And checking in with carry on was a separate and much shorter line. My bag fit -- snuggly -- in the sizer, so I figured I was good to go. No so fast. Wow also has a 7kg/15 lbs weight limit for carryons! Not even Spirit Airlines pulls that stunt. So I take my bag off the scale, pull some clothes out, zip it back up, and put it back on the scale. Not enough, the agent says. I do this 3 or 4 more times. The agent finally takes pity -- or gets tired of me -- and gives me the approval tag to put on my bag (saying “You shall pass” -- Wow Air definitely pushes the “we’re quirky” image). I walk about 10 feet with my tagged bag and armful of clothes, open my bag and put my clothes back in. When I got on the plane, a brand new Airbus A321, my carry on fit perfectly in the overhead bin, just like it does for every other Airbus A321, A320, and A319 I fly in the US and Europe. So I’m not quite sure what the Wow agent and I accomplished with that baggage strip tease, but I got what I wanted -- my bag right above me rather than trundling around Keflavik airport for the next couple of days.</li>\r\n 	<li>In the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/12/20/podcast-119-digital-security-on-the-road-us-airports-getting-better/\">last</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/12/podcast-120-where-do-guidebooks-fit-in-i-hate-shopping-for-suitcases/\">couple </a>of episodes, I’ve talked about the <a href=\"https://revolut.com/\">Revolut</a> card which is a Mastercard pre-paid debit card with some very nice foreign exchange functionality. I loved this card when it first came out -- first when I was traveling in the UK and then cheaply transfer money to my daughter studying in Scotland. Then I went very cold when they blew up the “cheaply” component , when they added a 3% fee when you added money/”topped up” your Revolut account using a US debit card. This episode, I’ve warmed up a bit. First, I discovered a way to bypass that 3% debit charge --I topped up my account in Euros with my US debit card. This avoids the 3% charge from Revolut, though the app does note that you’re not using the right currency with your card and asks you if you really mean to do this. My bank charges me less than 1% for the conversion, and though the exchange rate isn’t as good as Revolut’s, it’s not bad enough to cost-justify the 3% charge that USD top-ups attract. So, we’re back to a reasonably priced conversion -- in a roundabout way.</li>\r\n 	<li>Which is good because, for some reason, my US ATM card never worked the whole time I was in Iceland. And I could never figure out why. I traded notes with my bank. They weren’t denying anything; they weren’t ever seeing the transaction show up at their end. I dunno, maybe it’s some residual wonkiness left over from their banking meltdown. I can’t remember the last time I had problems like that. Which, before I left for Iceland, made me wonder if I still needed to carry a wad of backup USD with me on this trip -- given how ubiquitous and seamless ATMs are nowadays. I still didn’t need the Jacksons though because my Revolut card had no problem pulling krona from any ATM. In Portugal, I did hit a couple of different quirks. First, the train and Lisbon subway ticket machines don’t accept pre-paid debit cards which left me scrambling for exact change a surprising number of times. Second, a number of shops only accepted Visa cards, which blocked out Revolut’s MasterCard-based card. I used to see this more often in the past -- shops only accepted cards on one network -- Visa or MasterCard, and often didn’t take American Express -- which has led me to always carry one of each card, but I thought the need for that backup had also faded. So I guess I’ll keep carrying a fist full of credit cards and USD for at least a couple more years.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Rocky Road</em> by <a href=\"http://www.kcentricity.com/\">KCentric</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>TSA Lines</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>For much of March and April, I’d been traveling in and out of Newark pretty much every week which, I have to say, if you’re using Terminal A, is the worst airport in the country. Now, I know that Terminal B in LaGuardia gives it a good run with the ceiling tarps drained by garden hoses into trash cans in the middle of the terminal, but the TSA security set up in Newark Terminal A beats that. They’ve split the corridor, the hallway down to gates in two -- the right side has the TSA stations, the left side the line for passengers waiting to be screened and the walkway for exiting passengers. The screening line is usually a bit of a cluster -- you can never quite tell which screening station you’re waiting for -- maybe #3 or should I scoot around to get in the line for #4. The really special feature of this configuration -- what wins it the prize -- is that you often have to wait in line to leave the terminal. Yup, more than a few times there’s a TSA agent holding up a line of departing passengers because of some confusion in the screening lines. It’s just awful.</li>\r\n 	<li>I just missed the TSA’s line-mageddon in O’Hare (I flew out the Friday before) where 450 American Airlines passengers got to experience Camp O’Hare cots after missing their flights because of 2-3 hour long TSA screening lines. But you could see it coming. My wife had spend 45 minutes in line in March, and the Monday morning rush hour had become a jumble of lines extending the length of the concourse. With summer travel volumes starting to build, it was a matter of when, not if, the whole thing imploded. And if I could tell this from my weekly flight out of ORD, you know the TSA folks on the ground knew it and were dreading it. So why didn’t they get in front of this instead of waiting until after the meltdown and the screaming headlines to replace management and add staff.</li>\r\n 	<li>Wading through recriminations about incompetence, baggage fees, gross misforecasting of PreCheck sign-ups, and the general <a href=\"http://www.travelandleisure.com/travel-tips/travel-warnings/tsa-blames-passengers\">cluelessness of infrequent fliers</a>, I think a couple of economists get to the real answer in an <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/737290917220995075\">article</a> in Sunday’s New York Times -- “the TSA has been acting as if there were no cost to tying people up for hours in security lines. In effect, all that time on line is “free” to the T.S.A.” “This glaring omission creates perverse incentives for government agencies. Cutting staff improves an agency’s bottom line, while wasting citizens’ time has little material consequence for it aside from expressions of annoyance and outrage in tweets and (newspaper) articles”</li>\r\n 	<li>I think that pretty much nails it. I retweeted a <a href=\"http://qz.com/659461/tsa-is-our-no-1-problem-right-now-long-security-lines-are-frustrating-us-airlines-too/\">link </a>to a Quartz article with a pretty self-explanatory graph. Air traveller volume has increased more than 10% over the past 12 months while the number of TSA screeners has decreased by more than that. Everyone knew this train wreck was coming, but there was no incentive to fix it -- until the wreck happened and the volume of complaints and outrage became impossible to ignore.</li>\r\n 	<li>In the immediate term, the spectacle of those 450 filled cots at ORD spurred some good action -- Congress let the TSA move some money around to hire more personnel, the TSA head of security got sacked, lines at ORD have shrunk, and a lot more people are ponying up the $85 for PreCheck (which is causing a whole other set of lines that I’m not going into).\r\nIn the short to medium term, maybe some new technology will help -- automating checkpoints like they do in London Heathrow, posting real-time wait times so travelers can “self-balance” security lines.</li>\r\n 	<li>But not until the TSA explicitly considers the value of travelers time will we get to some semblance of realistic balance between the cost and risk of travel.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #121</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_121.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #121 — TSA Lines, My Luggage is Where?','','inherit','closed','closed','','1615-revision-v1','','','2018-07-23 20:50:38','2018-07-24 01:50:38','',1615,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/07/23/1615-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2085,1,'2018-07-23 20:52:21','2018-07-24 01:52:21','[caption id=\"attachment_1603\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/IMG_0266-01.jpeg\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-1603\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1603\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/IMG_0266-01-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"Just a Few Guidebooks....\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Just a Few Guidebooks....[/caption]\r\n\r\nWhere do guidebooks fit in the world of apps, review websites, social media, and podcasts? Planning for a trip to Iceland got me thinking about how to make sense of the explosion of travel tips. And then, after giving my thoughts about my new <a href=\"http://bluesmart.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Bluesmart </a>\"smart connected suitcase\", I talk about how idiosyncratic frequent travelers are about packing strategies and their choice of suitcases. There\'s also follow-up about foreign exchange apps, and listener comments about digital travel security and Spirit Airlines\' growth. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_120.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_120.mp3\"]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #120:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, after a much longer-than-intended break. Looking back at the Google Docs revision history for this episode, I started it on Feb 2, so I had the best of intentions. But I’ve been traveling almost non-stop since then. At which point you might reasonably say “But you have all that time in airports and hotels to write” -- which should be the case, but I find that I have to remove all possible distractions before I can write. Hence my lack of a journalism career.</li>\r\n 	<li>So instead, I keep jotting down ideas in Evernote, feeling like I’m making progress, but not ever buckling down to actually write an episode. Until last Weds, when Dan Gradwohl sent me an e-mail with the subject line “Mark, where’s the next TravelCommons?”, asking in a very nice way -- when are you getting off your duff? I snarled back at Dan a bit -- more at frustration with myself than anything he wrote. But it got the intended result. So, I dedicate this episode to Dan.</li>\r\n 	<li>The travel that got in the way wasn’t anything exotic -- just the usual bouncing around -- New Orleans, Vegas, Atlanta, Boston, New Jersey. But it was the tail end of 7 weeks of straight travel -- which is right about the time I hit my fun quotient. My patience dives and my bitch tweeting climbs. Of course, the fact that my American Airlines flights were hitting a 50% on-time rate didn’t help. I think I finally tipped over when I found my EWR-ORD flight was an ancient AA MD-80. Trying to wedge my bag long ways into the short overhead bin on the AB side was a complete throwback to when I first started traveling for business -- in 1985, on American Airlines, out of DFW, on MD-80s. 30 years later, I find myself on the same plane -- with less legroom and no peanuts.</li>\r\n 	<li>I am gearing up for some fun travel in March, though. Trying out Iceland Air’s new Chicago-to-Reykjavik service with my son, and then trying out Iceland’s budget carrier Wow Air to meet up with my wife and daughter in Spain. I’m hoping it all works fine, but I’m preparing myself to having to call a couple of audibles.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/seldon-circles/\"><em>Making Circles</em></a> by the Seldon Plan</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Peter Zurich sent a great note, adding onto the digital security topic in<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/12/20/podcast-119-digital-security-on-the-road-us-airports-getting-better/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> the last episode</a>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>“Your suggestion to switch to cellular network as opposed to airport wifi is okay but it is becoming easy to obtain technology to set up a rogue cell site that will silently capture traffic -- your data will be caught and you will be none the wiser.</li>\r\n 	<li>“Thus, in my opinion, it is still very important to only use HTPS encrypted web sites and I would still add on the VPN if you have one available. Bottom line when using any website where you need your password to access sensitive information, make sure the computer is trusted (no public access/borrowed/loaner computers) and make sure the website is HTTPS. If using Outlook or other applications than the web browser you should be on your company\'s VPN.</li>\r\n 	<li>“Second thing, people should be aware that tearing a 2-D barcode in half doesn\'t necessarily render it undecipherable. 2D barcodes have a configurable level of redundancy built-in so that even if part (or possibly most) of the barcode is missing/unreadable it can still be decoded. My personal policy is once we have confirmed our FF miles have posted, the BP\'s go in the shredder.”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Peter, thanks for these. Last week’s <a href=\"http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/columnist/2016/02/24/got-hacked-my-mac-while-writing-story/80844720/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">story </a>about the USA Today columnist whose e-mail was hacked while he used Gogo’s WiFi service on an American Airlines flight demonstrates again the potential dangers of using public WiFi. It takes a bit of spelunking through the columnist’s Twitter feed to figure out how that happened -- he was using an Earthlink e-mail service that didn’t encrypt traffic back to the mail server. Technical listeners would be right in saying “Well, there you go. What did you expect doing plain-text comms over public WiFi?” Indeed, when we talked about this in the last episode, I specifically called out the need to encrypt e-mail protocols -- POP, IMAP, SMTP -- over SSL. But that’s not the default configuration for many e-mail clients, including Outlook and, the last time I checked, the iPhone mail client. You have to go poking around in the settings, changing ports. I know how to do it -- but it’s nothing my wife would. Building on Peter’s suggestion, probably the easiest thing to do is use a web e-mail client like GMail over https -- when the green lock shows in the browser address bar. Next easiest is to set up your e-mail client to encrypt its traffic. Most e-mail providers have instructions on their sites. Perhaps the fiddliest, but the most secure is to install and use a VPN. If your company device comes with one already installed, then it’s easy -- though remember VPN web traffic is usually tracked just like it is in your office. If it’s your own device, then you’re probably going to want to buy a service. They’re not overly expensive -- $3-8/month. I use <a href=\"https://www.expressvpn.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">ExpressVPN</a>, which is on the pricer side, but their VPN client is easy to install and use. And it has the side benefit of letting me watch NCAA March Madness video streams when I’m overseas. In March, I’ll be trying out a hardware-based VPN solution -- <a href=\"http://www.homingsystems.com/alwayshome-duo\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">AlwaysHome</a>, which sets up a VPN with matching USB dongles. Could be an easier solution. I’ll report back in the next episode.</li>\r\n 	<li>Dan Gradwohl, before he poked me into action, had a “Hmm…” reaction to a comment in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/12/20/podcast-119-digital-security-on-the-road-us-airports-getting-better/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">the last episode</a> about Spirit Airlines passing Delta as the 3rd largest at Chicago O’Hare. Looking at January schedules, he found Spirit had 29 daily departures to Delta’s 52. Would seem like Delta is still larger. However, the Crain’s Chicago article said Spirit carried more passengers than Delta -- which could be since some of Delta’s 52 departures were co-branded smaller regional jets. This is not a new thing. For a long time, O’Hare continued to claim the title of World’s Busiest Airport based on <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_world%27s_busiest_airports_by_aircraft_movements#2014_statistics\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">number of takeoffs/landings</a> (which it reclaimed in 2014) after Atlanta Hartsfield passed it on total passengers handled. Using that <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_world%27s_busiest_airports_by_passenger_traffic#2015_statistics\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">stat</a>, ORD is the 4th largest after ATL, Beijing, and Dubai. All that being said, Spirit is ramping up hard in the Chicago market, hiring new flight attendants ahead of plane deliveries, and pushing the city for more gate space. And Delta and American are rolling out new Economy Basic fares to fight them. Might not be too long before Spirit passes Delta on both measures.</li>\r\n 	<li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/10/11/podcast-117-random-thoughts-about-eggs-scotland-car-rentals/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Episode #117</a>, I talked -- raved, actually -- about a FinTech company called <a href=\"https://revolut.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Revolut</a>. It offered a convenient and low-cost way to exchange, transfer, and access money internationally. I started using it last September when my daughter started up at University of St Andrews. I used it to convert and push money to her UK bank account, and used the Revolut chip-&amp;-pin debit card to avoid the hassle of US chip-&amp;-signature credit cards. Last week, though, the low-cost component of their value prop disappeared -- at least for US customers, when they added a 3% fee when you added money/”topped up” your Revolut account with a US debit card. They said they were passing through the fees they were being charged, a claim I don’t doubt. However, it started me looking for cheaper foreign exchange options. Which lead me down quite the rabbit hole -- sorting through the differences in transaction costs and exchange rates quickly led to an Excel modelling session, which is just how I want to spend a Saturday morning. If you look at <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">my Twitter feed</a>, there’s a string of tweets walking through my analysis, but for my case, TransferWise, another UK FinTech startup, and Xoom, owned by PayPal, were much cheaper than Revolut after considering their new 3% fee. I expect that I’ll still use the Revolut card a bit when in Europe -- at self-service check-outs or gas pumps -- but nowhere near the volume I was using it before last week. But, I’m glad to have options and do a bit of math so avoid a $50 bank wire fee or Western Union’s 7% premium from market exchange rates.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/eliyahu-wind/\">Oh Yeah</a></em> by Eliyahu Sills</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Where Do Guidebooks Fit In?</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>As I mentioned in the opening, my son and I are hitting Iceland in a couple of weeks for a 4-day weekend. We’ve never been before, so I needed to figure out what to do and where to stay. Right about then, someone from what I used to know as Dorling Kindersley -- now shortened to DK -- pinged me about the February relaunch of <a href=\"http://www.dk.com/us/travel/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">DK’s Eyewitness Travel Top 10 Guides</a> -- one of the first 10 is for Iceland. It started me thinking about where guidebooks fit in these days of in the world of apps (Yelp, Foursquare, Untappd), podcasts (Amateur Traveler, Indie Travel Podcast), websites (TripAdvisor), newspaper articles (NYTimes’ <a href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/22/travel/36-hours-in-reykjavik.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">36 Hours in Reykjavik</a>) and friends’ social media posts on Facebook and Instagram.</li>\r\n 	<li>When I want to torture my kids, I do the “when I was young…” thing. But going back to our honeymoon 25 years ago (this November -- need to get on that planning!), I cashed in a slug of British Airways miles to fly us first class to Pisa for a touring holiday in Tuscany. The only plans I had made were to rent a car (a Fiat Panda) and book our first night’s room (via Telex) in Lucca. We ran the rest of the vacation off of a set of Michelin guides -- the red one to find hotels and restaurants and the green one to figure out what to see. Between those and reading “A Room With A View”, we were set. We exchanged American Express travelers checks at the bank for lira, took pictures on Kodak and Fuji film, navigated using a paper maps… Whoops, got off track a bit there. I think my kids are somewhere screaming “Stop!”</li>\r\n 	<li>I think like everybody, I start with a Google search -- “What to do in Iceland in March”, limit the results to the last 2 years and start clicking. Lots of articles from UK papers (I think because of Wow Air, the Icelandic version of Spirit or EasyJet, flying into London Gatwick) which I clip over to Evernote using their nifty little Chrome extension. Then I narrow the search down to specific interests -- like “Iceland craft beer” and a few more article get sync’d to Evernote. I stack up a bunch of facts -- a sort of <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointillism\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">pointillist </a>view of what to do in Iceland.</li>\r\n 	<li>Every survey about how people go about travel planning will tell you that personal recommendations are the far and away the most important source of travel planning information. Which makes sense -- you know the person, how their interests, ways of travel align with yours. We have good friends that we’ll take restaurant recommendations from, but not hotels. We share the same tastes in interesting food, but they like to stay in hotels with nice pools. We’re tend to stay a bit more “closer to ground” -- choosing vacation rentals over the Westin resort.</li>\r\n 	<li>And once people find that you travel a lot and to different/interesting places, you get hit up -- a lot -- for recommendations. Friend and long-time T/C listener Allan Marko curates a set of notes for his favorite European cities, places like Paris, that he regularly e-mails out. After a couple of visits to Spain, I’ve taken it to the next level of geekdom -- embedding my recommendations on a Google Map page and sending out the URL. For this trip, a friend from work sent me the itinerary she and her family did last summer. Not sure that she and her husband would be search out craft beer bars with 2 young kids in tow, but I did take her recommendation for the Hotel Geysir at the top of the Golden Circle route, and hitting the Blue Lagoon on the way back to the airport.</li>\r\n 	<li>I like The NY Times’ 36 Hours and United Airlines’ 3 Perfect Days series. They’re focused on the long weekend getaway -- if you have a limited amount of time, here’s what to do. These are the sorts of articles we used to rip out of the Sunday travel section of the local newspaper or a travel magazine and stash in a travel folder. The Internet has shifted that behavior just a bit -- we now search for them when we right when we need them. Perhaps more for travel planning than for inspiration, but they serve the same purpose as the green Michelin guide did for our honeymoon -- a curated list of things you ought to see.</li>\r\n 	<li>The DK Top 10 Iceland guide seems to fit into this “hit the highlights” mode -- top 10 highlights by region and by thing (top 10 churches, waterfalls, volcanoes, bars, cheap restaurants…), 2-day and 7-day itineraries, which is nice because the 36 Hours in Reykjavik article I pulled up was from 2013, maybe on the ragged edge of up-to-dateness. And the DK guide has everything nicely packaged, which I remember from the Dorling Kindersley books of old -- all the lists in one place wrapped in a sturdy cover that has fold-out maps in the front (Iceland) and the back (downtown Reykjavik) -- which is handy if you didn’t plan ahead and cache Google Maps data before leaving the hotel wi-fi bubble.</li>\r\n 	<li>There’s another kind of guidebook that I’ll use, though I couldn’t find one for Iceland. They’re less about lists and more about stories -- think Bill Bryson’s <em>Notes from a Small Island</em> about the UK, or more recently, <em><a href=\"http://roadsandkingdoms.com/store/rice-noodle-fish-book/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Rice Noodle Fish</a></em> an Anthony Bourdain book by Matt Goulding (whatever that means) about Japan. I read those more before I travel than packing them in my bag. They’re about context/texture -- kinda like what “Room With A View” was for us about Florence 25 years ago -- that prepare rather than guide you, and maybe give you a bit more appreciation when you’re running through those Top 10 Highlights lists.</li>\r\n 	<li>Maybe it comes down to the kind of reader you are -- are you someone that likes things more tangible than electronic. Do you like to flip pages rather than screens? The Kindle cannibalized a good-sized chunk of the demand for physical books, but didn’t replace it. Just like overall book market, recent numbers show the demand for physical guide books has stabilized albeit at a lower level. I sorta split the difference. I like paging through my Evernote virtual travel folder when I’m back at the room, but like to have a physical map and list when I’m out walking during the day. Maybe that physicality keeps me more engaged with where I am. Or at least looking up and forward, which should help keep me avoid that new travelers’ epidemic -- Death by GPS.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music --<em> <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/liquid-seventythree/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Is That Called Love</a> </em></em>by Liquid Zen</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>I Hate Shopping for Suitcases</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I’ve been traveling for a few months now with the <a href=\"http://bluesmart.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Bluesmart </a>suitcase. I’ve mentioned it in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/08/26/podcast-116-traveling-thru-japan-luggage-trends/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">a past episode</a> when I pre-ordered it through their Indiegogo campaign. And now that they’re shipping, they’re making a lot of Top Traveler Gadget lists.</li>\r\n 	<li>It claims to be the first piece of “smart” luggage to hit the market. It pairs with my iPhone through Bluetooth. It automatically locks when I step away from it and then unlocks itself when I return. It has a built-in battery to power itself and charge personal electronics through a couple of USB ports. It also periodically sends out its location when I can then check through the iPhone app. And it has a cool front light that glows blue when it’s paired with my phone.</li>\r\n 	<li>Aside from all the electronics, it’s a hard-shell wheelie bag with nice-sized wheels that roll easily -- sometimes too easily. It fits perfectly into American’s and United’s luggage sizers -- at least the ones in Boston Logan airport. (Some blogger who reviewed the bag raised a bit of a ruckus saying that the bag dimensions on the website were too big for carry-on. I guess he doesn’t travel enough to go an airport and check it out himself). The iPhone app is getting better -- Bluesmart is doing a nice job of reving the app frequently to stomp bugs, though the location alerts -- “You’re leaving me behind” are still a bit wonky.</li>\r\n 	<li>All in all, it’s a nice enough bag. I had been thinking about getting something a bit smaller for 1-2 night trips and this fits the bill. I’m kinda “meh” on all the electronics. The large battery is fine, but I already carry a recharger in my backpack that will top up my iPhone or tablet a couple of times -- good enough and more accessible in-flight. The location functionality seems to work only when I press the button to “wake up” the bag -- which means I’m right beside my bag and know its location. And since it’s the perfect carry-on size, it’s usually right above me in the plane cabin. So it’s a nice enough hard-shell wheelie bag with a couple of bells and whistles that don’t necessarily wow me.</li>\r\n 	<li>Which shouldn’t be interpreted as a knock against Bluesmart. I’m sure there are a number of travelers who love every one of those bells and whistles. It’s not so much a criticism about Bluesmart as it is how personal and idiosyncratic frequent travelers are about suitcases. It’s gotta fit your packing strategies, which are also very idiosyncratic. Some people love compartments to help them structure their packing. Me? I’m all about the flexibility of a single open space -- I build my own structure with shoes and different kinds of clothes depending on the trip. And even though I see more and more hard-shell bags -- and now own one, I’m not completely sold on it. I still like the ability to bulge when I need to. And the two- vs. four-wheel thing. Pushing a 4-wheel through the airport seems easier on my wrist, but sometimes they roll too easily and won’t stay put. It’s the reason I’ve been walking around with a ripped backpack for 4 months -- I really hate shopping for travel bags. And am very happy that leather wallets last a really long time.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #120</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/\">Podshow Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_120.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #120 — Where Do Guidebooks Fit In? I Hate Shopping for Suitcases','','inherit','closed','closed','','1598-revision-v1','','','2018-07-23 20:52:21','2018-07-24 01:52:21','',1598,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/07/23/1598-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2086,1,'2018-07-23 20:53:13','2018-07-24 01:53:13','[caption id=\"attachment_1585\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/calvin_PC.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1585\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/calvin_PC-300x172.jpg\" alt=\"Cat-based cyber-security solution\" width=\"300\" height=\"172\" /></a> Cat-based cyber-security solution[/caption]\r\n\r\nHere\'s a little something to keep you entertained while you navigate the holiday airport lines. We talk about digital security on the road -- what\'s the right balance between hassle and hack? We also dig into JD Power\'s latest <a href=\"http://www.jdpower.com/press-releases/2015-north-america-airport-satisfaction-study\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">airport satisfaction survey</a>. They report a tick up in traveler experience and, for the most part, I think they have it right. We also cover Spirit Airlines\' growth and the planned expansion of US immigration pre-clearance. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_119.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_119.mp3\"]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #119:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, cranking out one last episode to keep you occupied while you navigate the holiday security lines while trying to get to -- or away from family. Myself, I’m settling for the Christmas break after doing a day trip yesterday to Philadelphia. I’m taking a break from O’Hare until January.</li>\r\n 	<li>No really remarkable travel since the last episode, just trips to Cleveland, Vegas, and Boston. When I was flying out of Vegas last week, I hit the <a href=\"http://thecenturionlounge.com/location/LAS\">Amex Centurion Lounge</a> for a couple of conference calls before boarding. It’s free entry with a Platinum Card, and so far and beyond any Admirals Club or Sky Club or United Club. It’s not quite as hip/a bit more button-down than Virgin Atlantic’s Upper Lounge in Heathrow, but the comfort, the free buffet and open bar just are just as good. Highly recommended. I just wish there were more of them.</li>\r\n 	<li>When I’m flying into Boston, I’m actually heading out 45 minutes west, close to Worcester. Now that’s a 45 minute drive out I-90 when I land at 9 or 10 in the morning. When I land at 5 in the evening, it’s a whole different story. I touch down at Logan, flip out of airplane mode and immediately open Waze. How bad is the traffic? How about <i>an hour</i> and 45 minute drive? Not looking forward to that parking lot, so I threaded my way over to Chelsea. Found a great little microbrewery complete with real live Boston Irish patrons and sample 1, 2, 4 of their beers. Then I walked up a couple of blocks to a Central American joint underneath a highway overpass. Had a great plate of food for less than $10.  I’ve spent a few dinner times wandering around nearby neighborhoods -- Charlestown, the Seaport District as well as Chelsea -- waiting for Waze to tell me when I-90’s traffic tantrum had subsided.</li>\r\n 	<li>Probably the biggest travel event this week wasn’t mine but my daughter’s. It’s her first solo flight -- returning from her first semester at Univ of St Andrews, flying Aer Lingus from Edinburgh to Chicago by way of Dublin. It’s a big adjustment in a couple of ways. First, of course, she has to figure out a new airport by herself. She’s never been through Dublin before, but I thought a smaller airport would be a better first solo than trying to navigate the start of holiday traffic at Heathrow. But she does now have to pay attention to what’s going on rather than just following in my slipstream. The second adjustment is a bit more of a First World problem -- flying as as plain old passenger, a villager, rather than tagging along with me through the Gold or Platinum baggage check lines and pre-boarding. It’s a tough come-down, but I did soften the blow a little bit. I paid her Global Entry fee as a going away gift.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- Dive Deep (Loveshadow remix) by spinningmerkaba (c) 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/50488 Ft: Loveshadow</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Not really any commentary on the last episode, though Ian Morgan swung by the Facebook page with adding to the support about British Airways’ stricter carry-on policy\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>“Just listened to your October episode! Picked up your post about BA hand luggage. They have just changed their policy on this to clamp down. I agree it is frustrating especially on lightly loaded widebody aircraft. However, as a regular BA traveller I have lost count of the number of times BA flights have been delayed whilst cabin crew offload hand luggage, especially since BA introduced \"hand baggage only\" fares. Before the change, I never saw BA using the size gauges - these days they use them much more frequently. It\'s part of the steady decline of BA from a full service airline to a low cost carriers. Just be grateful that you got a 767 instead of an A321 with new \'spacesaver\' seats with a 29\" seat pitch!!</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Ian, I think you’ve nailed it -- the descent of full-service carriers into the low-cost, low-service ring of travel hell created by Ryan Air and Spirit Airlines.  I’ve talked about this before -- a frequent traveler can’t fathom why someone would subject themselves to the hassles that Ryan and Spirit travelers endure. A recent <a href=\"http://www.chicagobusiness.com/article/20151205/ISSUE01/312059993/can-you-guess-whats-the-third-biggest-airline-at-ohare\">Crain’s Chicago article</a> about Spirit said just over half -- 58 % -- of their flights into ORD arrived on time in the first 9 months of this year. I fly at least 3 weeks out of 4. American Airlines’ 79% on-time percentage into ORD is only just acceptable; I’d go postal at 58%. But yet Spirit is now the 3rd largest airline at ORD after United and American. Working out of just two shared gates, it’s bigger than Delta. But then I remembered <a href=\"http://qz.com/533501/half-of-american-airlines-revenue-came-from-13-of-its-customers/\">some comments</a> made by the president of American Airlines during an analysts call right around the time American was doing the final merger of res systems with US Air. He said that half of American’s revenue last year came from the 87% of its customers that only flew them once. 50% of American’s revenue came from passengers that see air travel as a commodity and are looking for the lowest cost carriage between two points. And so for 50% of their revenue, American isn’t competing against United or Delta, they’re competing with Spirit.  It explains Delta’s Spirit-like Basic Economy offering, and the expectation that American and United will follow in 2016. And, I assume BA’s “hand baggage” fees that Ian mentions. The challenge, though, is how do you compete for the 87% of your passengers buying a commodity while also serving the remaining 13% of your passengers, who contribute the other 50% of your revenue, and value the little things like a seat that reclines a bit and a flight that arrives on time -- all in the same plane? Spirit doesn’t have that problem because they’ll never get that 13%. American, BA, Delta have the tougher problem.</li>\r\n 	<li>Connecting through Dublin airport, my daughter cleared US immigration and customs in there in Ireland and then just popped out at the one domestic baggage claim in ORD’s Terminal 5 -- the International Terminal. Kinda similar to what they’ve been doing at Toronto’s Pearson Airport since forever -- or at least the 90’s when I was flying through there weekly. But there, American’s YYZ-ORD flight would land in Terminal 3, just like a flight from, say, Buffalo, and you’d make your connection or just walk out to the cab line. Handy for the regular traveler, but if you’ve dropped the $100 Global Entry fee, immigration lines at, say, ORD, aren’t any worse than they are in Toronto or Dublin. Indeed, my daughter was bummed that she went through US Preclearance so soon, because food and shopping choices on the US side of Preclearance were a lot thinner than on the Irish side. And I think that’ll be the problem if the TSA follows through on their announced expansion of Preclearance -- from what is mostly Canadian, Irish, and Caribbean airports to 10 much larger airports, including Tokyo, Amsterdam, Madrid, London Heathrow. If you’re flying US carriers out of European airports, you’re already being put into a de facto American ghetto -- typically flying out of the most remote gates, with the longest walks from security and airport lounges, and the fewest food and shopping amenities. Walling it off to create the secured facilities to support Preclearance just formalizes it.  The DHS secretary calls it a “win-win” for travelers. I think it’s just squeezing the balloon -- making wait time go down in the US, but go up in places like Narita and Heathrow. It’s one thing to miss a connection in ORD due to immigration delays. Odds are there’s another flight you can catch within a couple of hours. It’s a whole other thing if you miss that once a day flight home from, say, Amsterdam.</li>\r\n 	<li>Thanks to El Niño, it’s been a warm start to the winter -- at least in North America. But soon enough, the temps will drop and the winter coats will start competing with carry-ons for overhead bin space. Last winter, while de-planing (what a weird verb construction!), someone handed me my black overcoat -- it was wedged in front of their suitcase. I threw it over my arm as I stepped out into the aisle, grabbed my carry-on, and hoofed it out of the plane, power-walking toward the cab line. It wasn’t until I stepped outside that I stopped to put my coat on and… it wasn’t my coat. I should’ve checked when it was handed to me, but I didn’t want to be that guy who stops <i>in the aisle</i> to put his jacket on. I went to Lost &amp; Found. The clerk called the gate, where the guy with my coat was standing, trying to find his coat. We got lucky. It took us about 10 minutes to sort everything out. He came down to Lost &amp; Found to swap coats. If it had been warmer out, like this week, I might not have put my coat on at all and gotten home for noticing the switch. Black bags, black coats. Love that black hides a lot of sins -- scuffs, dirt, extra pounds. Don’t love its ubiquity on an airplane. Keep your eyes on your stuff in these holiday crowds. Don’t want “Lost” to be the new black.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- Absolutely Clear (ft Jeris &amp; Goldfish) by SackJo22 (c) 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/45578 Ft: Jeris, Goldfish</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Digital Security On The Road</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Digital security, cyber security. I don’t know about you, but I’ve kinda hit security breach fatigue. On Thursday, yet another company announced a credit card breach. <a href=\"http://krebsonsecurity.com/2015/12/banks-card-breach-at-landrys-restaurants/\">This time</a> it’s Landry’s who runs Bubba Gumps and Morton’s Steakhouse and another 15 or so restaurant brands. I don’t frequent Landry’s brands that much, so I’m hoping that this breach doesn’t mean I have to replace one of my credit cards and again have to go through the goat rodeo of changing account numbers for all my autobills. But it still does reinforce that feeling the cyber security is not a matter of “if” but “when”</li>\r\n 	<li>But even if it’s a matter of “when”, I’d still like to postpone the “when” as long as possible. And traveling -- certainly during the holidays -- there’s a lot of opportunity to bring on the “when” if you’re not just a bit thoughtful. There’s also a balance between inconvenience -- the cost of being more digitally secure -- and the probability of being “breached” (can I say that without having to flag this as “explicit” in iTunes?).</li>\r\n 	<li>You could always go “old school” -- like 10 years ago when there was damn little public WiFi, no iPhones -- nothing to keep us entertained as we shuffled through the TSA lines other than trading snarky remarks with other line sufferers. Or you could go the “burner” route -- using disposable phones and a temporary PC, which is what many business travelers to China still do -- doing a complete wipe of their phones and PCs before and after each visit because they just expect to get hacked no matter what anti-virus and other safety precautions they take. But if all you’re doing is going from, say, San Francisco to Boston to see your family, these seem a bit “overkill” -- definitely not balancing the cost-benefit trade-off. I’m fairly lazy about this stuff, but there are a few precautions I do take.</li>\r\n 	<li>First, I never do any financial stuff over public WiFi -- no checking my bank account or credit card activity over an airport or Starbucks WiFi, or a hotel network at all -- whether WiFi or jacked into an Ethernet port. Even if the URL is showing https -- a encrypted web connection -- there’s just too many ways those networks or web sites can be misconfigured. Some folks will tell you to use a VPN. I used one in China, but it seems a bit too much in the US. If I have to do some banking, I’ll use my iPhone over the mobile carrier network -- AT&amp;T in the US, Orange when I was in Spain, .... I know it’s not perfect, but, as the cyber security guys like to say, it “reduces the attack surface” at what is considered one of the most vulnerable points.</li>\r\n 	<li>I rarely use hotel PCs -- the ones set up in lobbies or the concierge lounges. I mean, if I have a smartphone, a tablet, and a PC, why do I need to use a public PC that’s open to anyone loading up a key-logger that’ll capture anything you type -- including logins and passwords. If I do, for some odd reason, need to use one, I never log into anything. Maybe just search for a restaurant, but that’s about it.</li>\r\n 	<li>I always make sure that I’ve configured my phone and PC e-mail clients to use encrypted communications between servers -- using IMAP and SMTP over SSL (<i>&gt;now</i> we’re talking security because we used more acronyms than words in that last sentence) for my own mail servers; GMail does it automatically for you. But I don’t encrypt the message itself -- no PGP or signed MIME. There’s nothing in my e-mails that is <i>that</i> confidential to go through that hassle.</li>\r\n 	<li>I have recently, though, turned on two-factor authentication for every service that offers it -- GMail, some of my financial accounts, Dropbox, …. I resisted it for a long time -- again, thought it was more hassle than it was worth. But then I started getting some odd password reset e-mail requests -- that I didn’t request.</li>\r\n 	<li>I go back and forth on using smartphone or printed boarding passes. Smartphone boarding passes are quicker -- you can get it while in the cab to the airport rather than queueing up for a kiosk -- but I’ve had more than a few times when my boarding pass disappeared from the app during an extended flight delay. Printed boarding passes are easier to scan at the gate -- especially when juggling a backpack, a hot coffee, and a winter coat -- but there’s recently been a <a href=\"http://www.economist.com/blogs/gulliver/2015/10/security-check\">bit</a> of a <a href=\"http://krebsonsecurity.com/2015/10/whats-in-a-boarding-pass-barcode-a-lot/#more-31317\">stir</a> about the amount of personal information someone could pull out of the bar codes. Maybe I’m not paranoid enough, but that one feels a bit of a stretch. I do whatever’s the most convenient -- usually the smartphone route. But when I do print out a boarding pass, I keep it in my jacket pocket -- just to be sure.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- Drops of H2O ( The Filtered Water Treatment ) by J.Lang (c) 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/djlang59/37792 Ft: Airtone</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>US Airports Getting Better?</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>While I poked at London Heathrow a couple of <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/10/11/podcast-117-random-thoughts-about-eggs-scotland-car-rentals/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">episodes</a> back, it’s an article of faith among international travelers that North American airports pale in comparison to airports in Asia/Pac -- anyone flying from Beijing or Singapore to LAX needs a light sedative to cushion the shock -- and pretty much trail behind most European airports too. But JD Power, in their <a href=\"http://www.jdpower.com/press-releases/2015-north-america-airport-satisfaction-study\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">airport satisfaction survey</a> released last week, said that things are getting better. Not hugely better -- a 5-8% increase in their satisfaction score, but any improvement is good news.</li>\r\n 	<li>Power <a href=\"http://www.jdpower.com/ratings/study/North-America-Airport-Satisfaction-Study/763ENG/Large-Airports/1617\">rated</a> large- and medium-sized North American airports -- 60 US airports and Toronto Pearson, Calgary, Montreal, and Vancouver. They surveyed travelers around 6 attributes of their airport experience. In order of importance, they are: the state of the airport facilities themselves, how easy it is to get to the airport, security, baggage claim, the check-in experience, and available food and shopping. A frequent traveler might re-shuffle the order -- maybe drop baggage claim and the check-in experience to the bottom because we rarely check a bag -- but I think it’s a good list.</li>\r\n 	<li>And I think some of Power’s conclusions line up with things I’m seeing on the road. Like improvements in terminal facilities. In the last episode, I gave United a shout-out for the upgrade of their gate space in Boston Logan. I also think San Francisco’s complete rebuild of Terminal 2 is excellent and stands up to any airport in Asia or Europe.</li>\r\n 	<li>Power found what is a pretty logical connection between satisfaction and the time you spend in lines. As I said earlier, I rarely deal with check-in lines, but I think the TSA’s rollout of Precheck has provided a quantum level improvement in the security experience -- though at times, it feels like its popularity is on the verge of overwhelming it and sliding back. But even for those in the regular lines, I’ve seen TSA folks working hard to re-balance lines -- especially at ORD.</li>\r\n 	<li>Power split their ratings between large and medium airports. Their winning large airport is Portland, Oregon. I’ve done a bit of flying into PDX and while I wouldn’t have, unprompted, chosen it as the top large airport, I don’t argue with their conclusion. It’s a nice facility; easy mass transit (a TravelCommons’ fixation) via the MAX light rail; I disagree with its top marks for security check, but in how many other airports can I buy a growler of craft beer to go? The bottom four -- those I could’ve ticked off with missing a beat -- LaGuardia, Newark, LAX, and O’Hare. Old terminals, awkward layouts, leaking roofs, lousy food. Interesting they’re also the major airports for the US’s largest cities.</li>\r\n 	<li>The medium airport winner was a tie between Dallas’ downtown Love Field and Fort Myers’ Southwest Florida. This one, I dunno. I’ve used both of these airports a lot. Love has gone through a good sized facelift and I haven’t been through it since they finished, so I may be working off out-of-date impressions, but even though it’s close to downtown, it’s a pain to get to. Now Fort Myers is easy to get to -- and I love the short walk to the rental car facility -- but security screening can back way up and the food choice isn’t great. From my personal experience, I’d give top marks to Nashville. I mean, how can you go wrong with live music -- good live music -- as you’re walking down the terminal.</li>\r\n 	<li>Power’s most obvious finding is that dissatisfied customers are very vocal. Those who rate overall satisfaction 1 (on a 10-point scale) make an average of 13 negative comments about their experience. Anyone who follows me on Twitter knows how true that is.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #119</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_119.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #119 — Digital Security On The Road; US Airports Getting Better?','','inherit','closed','closed','','1579-revision-v1','','','2018-07-23 20:53:13','2018-07-24 01:53:13','',1579,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/07/23/1579-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2087,1,'2018-07-23 20:54:36','2018-07-24 01:54:36','[caption id=\"attachment_1573\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/DSC_4956.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1573\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/DSC_4956-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"This hotel door could use some work\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> This hotel door could use some work[/caption]\r\n\r\nA bit less of a random walk than the last episode, we talk about safety, physical safety, when traveling. While we sometimes put ourselves in the midst of dodgy surroundings, we usually feel safe when we retreat back into the \"travel bubble\" What about when the bubble is no longer safe? Smartphones are the frequent traveler\'s most important tool. So when an upgrade to my HTC One killed its usefulness, I found myself heading back to Apple.  All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_118.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_118.mp3\"]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #118:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, less than a month since the last episode. There’s a shocker. It’s been one of my lighter travel months. No international travel, no up-and-backs across the US. Indeed, there were a couple of weeks where I didn’t even pack a bag -- just did day trips to Detroit and Atlanta. There is something liberating about that -- just carrying a briefcase or backpack. I guess that would’ve been the ideal situation to check out Spirit Airlines, but I don’t hate myself that much.</li>\r\n 	<li>No rush to get to the gate for the start of boarding. Stroll up, sit down and then  stay seated while the agent works through the cadence of status boarding groups -- really important customers, kinda important customers, fake important customers, and then everyone else. No roller board meant no need for the boarding scrum. I just waited for last call and walked on board. Kinda reminded me of the days when I first started flying when, rather than racing to be first on the plane, we’d see who could be last -- how late you could show up and still get on the plane. My boss won when he talked his way past an agent, got onto the jet bridge, knocked on the plane door, which the crew opened and let him on. I don’t think I’ll push it quite that far.</li>\r\n 	<li>A few of this month’s trips have been in and out of Boston Logan Airport. And for as much stick as I give United Airlines -- broken planes, late flights, just general lousy service -- I have to give them credit for their <a href=\"http://newsroom.united.com/2014-04-28-New-United-Concourse-at-Boston-Logan-Offers-Customers-Modern-Streamlined-Airport-Experience\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">gate area</a> at Logan. Parts of it look like a hip hotel lounge -- cool hanging lights, non-bench seating. There’s stand-up/high-top counter space for laptops with lots of plugs. And even the self-serve boarding gates -- with modern subway-style turnstiles that scan your boarding pass before letting you in -- worked well. It’s probably one of the nicest gate areas I’ve been in in a long time. Nice job, United!</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Paint the Sky</em> by Hans Atom (c) 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/hansatom/50718 Ft: Miss Judged</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I got a good bit of commentary from the last episode, so thank everyone very much.</li>\r\n 	<li>Rob Cheshire posted this comment on the web site:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>“In defense of British Airways, you stepped into the middle of their new hand-luggage policy roll-out, which is designed to reign-in the amount of cabin baggage, which had really gotten out of hand. They are being strict across the board, on elite members, as well as everyone else, and it is definitely having a positive impact on bin-space, as well as minimising the amount of messing around (checking the last few wheelie bags that can’t be stowed) that the cabin crew have to take care of in the minutes prior to push-back.”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Rob, thanks for that. One thing I did like BA’s luggage approach was tagging the second bag meant to go underseat -- in my case, a backpack -- with a bright yellow tag to keep people from putting 2 bags overhead. There is not much that’s ruder in plane travel than early boarders -- status fliers -- maximizing their leg space at the expense of the rest the plane. Tagging that second bag makes it easy for flight attendants or later boarders to call out bin hogging. I’d love to see that move across the Atlantic.</li>\r\n 	<li>Andrew Gill left a comment on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page building on my thoughts about using the new Revolut debit card during my September trip to Scotland. Andrew said:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>“The piece of Revolut was interesting. I\'ve just spent six months living and working in The Philipines. I was lucky to be involved in the pilot of Supercard from <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/TravelexUK/?hc_location=ufi\">Travelex UK</a> (<a href=\"https://supercard.io/\">https://supercard.io/</a>). It\'s a physical card, complete with chip and pin, that can be used in retail stores and for online purchases too.</li>\r\n 	<li>“The card is free, and transactions are processed at the Visa Europe Exchange rate, with no foreign exchange fees or commission added on, but the *killer* feature is it\'s linked to an existing debit or credit card so there\'s no need to pre-load money onto the card. transactions are processed in my home currency, so again, there are no foreign exchange fees or commission added on</li>\r\n 	<li>“The pilot program has closed now, so fingers crossed, it comes out of pilot and into general release</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Andrew, thanks for that pointer. I agree that being able to link the Travelex Supercard back to a debit or credit card is very useful vs. the Revolut model which is more like a pre-paid debit card. Looking at the Supercard website, it looks like the pilot was only for UK card holders. Hopefully, they’ll be able to expand their geographic footprint when they fully launch the card. Interesting that Revolut is also a UK-based company. Seems like London is a hotspot for these fintech companies. Last week, I was talking to a guy who moved from London to Chicago to start up the US operations for a different London-based fintech company -- more based on lending than payments. He said that HSBC looked hard at buying Revolut because they were doing something HSBC couldn’t even given their global reach and scale. Between Revolut and Supercard, and big banks like Chase dropping foreign exchange fees on their credit cards, the money hassles of international travel keep going down. It’s a far cry from having to cash an American Express travelers check at the airport exchange desk so you could get a cab to your hotel.</li>\r\n 	<li>In an<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/01/29/podcast-107-serious-about-hotel-reviews-tsa-gets-something-right/\"> earlier episode</a>, I talked about evaluation criteria for my TripAdvisor reviews -- the bathroom, room size, workout room, location, service quality. I decided during one of my trips last month that I’m adding a new criterion -- accessible bedside electrical outlets. Most frequent travelers I know use their phone or tablet as an alarm, eliminating the need to discern operating instructions for each hotel’s unique brand of clock radio. Most hotels have figured this out and provide outlets on the nightstand -- in wall, along the side of the nightstand, on the lamp base…. But last month, I hit one of those knuckle draggers -- a hotel in Vegas. I practically had to disassemble one of the beds to find an outlet hidden behind it. Luckily, I carry long power cords.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Perfect Stranger</em> by stellarartwars (c) 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/stellarartwars/45510 Ft: TheDice</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Danger Within The Travel Bubble</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>In the last episode, I talked about attending the <a href=\"http://popeindc.cua.edu/the-papal-mass/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Papal Mass</a> at <a href=\"http://www.cua.edu/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Catholic University</a> in northeast DC which has never been one of the nicer sections of DC. I had taken the Metro up from the airport and would be getting back on it to catch my evening flight to Detroit. The Brookland stop at Catholic isn’t a big stop and I figured it would get overwhelmed at the end of the Mass by the 25,000 people there. I started thinking of alternatives. Getting a cab or an Uber would probably be just as tough, so my best alternative would be to walk down to the next stop south on the Red Line -- Rhode Island Ave. From my days in DC, I remember that neighborhood being a particularly rough one. That would not be a pleasant walk. I decided to skip Communion and leave the Pope early to beat the crowds at the Brookland stop.</li>\r\n 	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Most of the times when we talk about travel security, we talk about airport security or digital security, but not often about physical security. Yet very often, travel drops in unfamiliar settings -- usually by our own choice -- where we could unknowingly wander into a very unsafe situation</span></li>\r\n 	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I did exactly this some years ago when visiting Cape Town, South Africa. I was shopping through some craft stalls set up in a park and just kept wandering along. I kinda looking at the buildings, up and around… Oh, and I have my big Nikon SLR slung over my shoulder. Not sure I could’ve looked any more like a tourist unless I was wearing a big “Don’t Mess With Texas” t-shirt and a Dallas Cowboys baseball cap. At some point, I finally regain some situational awareness -- and, from my university years living in Northeast DC and on the Southside of Chicago, realize that I’m not in the best neighborhood right now. I move to the middle of the street -- so I don’t get jumped from a doorway -- and walk, with purpose now, back the way I came.</span></li>\r\n 	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I did a little better this spring in New Orleans. I was standing on St Charles St in the Garden District watching a Mardi Gras parade. After a while, I got a bad feeling about the atmosphere around me. Nothing that I could put my finger on, but enough to make me give up a prime spot on the parade round and walk up the street a bit. In the next morning’s paper, I read there had been a gun fight at that spot about 30 minutes after I’d left.</span></li>\r\n 	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">There have been other times in Joburg, Bangalore, Guadalajara, but considering how much I travel, they’re rare events -- I’ve wandered all through Madrid, Beijing, Tokyo, Edinburgh, Saigon and never felt unsafe -- but they get your attention. But then again, that’s outside the “travel bubble”. We’ve talked about that in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2008/04/29/podcast-64-escaping-the-travel-bubble-marks-travel-tips/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">past episodes</a>, how travelers can often seem to float above the places they visit unless they make the effort to “pop” the travel bubble and engage.</span></li>\r\n 	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">When those outside problems penetrate our bubble, now that’s more disturbing. Like the time some years back when I was visiting Rio -- years before the World Cup. I was checking in with a colleague who had done a lot of business there. He saw my room was on the second floor. “No, that won’t do,” he said, “we need to get you on a double-digit floor. At least 10 if not higher” “Why?” I asked. “Because,” he explained, “when the smash-and-grab gangs break in, they start on the first floor and work their way up until their bags are full. The higher you are, the more likely they’ll fill up before they get to you.” The logic was brutally impeccable. And this from a guy still sporting a couple of bruises from an earlier mugging on Copacabana Beach.</span></li>\r\n 	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Or a few years ago, when another colleague had to take a taxi to connect between Delhi’s domestic and international terminal -- before the latest renovation. He’d forgotten to print out his international itinerary, so they wouldn’t let him on the transfer bus (I’ve talked about, in prior episodes, the need to have a printed flight itinerary in India). He couldn’t find anyone in the terminal to print one out for him so he walked out to the cab rank. He piles his bags into and on top of a taxi and off he goes -- to some out-of-the-way place under a highway overpass where the cab driver and a friend shake him down for most of his money and his watch -- they leave him with his luggage and enough money for cab fare to the international terminal. A polite mugging; no bruises with this one.</span></li>\r\n 	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">My most disturbing bubble burst happened in the US -- in a Westin in Connecticut. A friend checked in and, since the hotel was oversold, was given one of those rooms that’s a conference room with a bathroom. They rolled out the tables and rolled in a bed for him. The next morning, as he’s getting dressed, he’s missing his watch, his ring, and the money and credit cards from his wallet -- all which were next to him on the nightstand. As he put it together, someone had broken into the room -- he saw that the conference room’s double doors had enough of a gap between them that you could open the lock by slipping a credit card or room key through the gap -- and they had stood next to him going through his stuff on the night stand. He’s lucky he’s a sound sleeper.</span></li>\r\n 	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">And I consider myself lucky. I don’t lock myself away in the hotel. I make an effort to step outside the travel bubble -- to engage -- and after 30 years of heavy travel, other than <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/05/20/podcast-98-stolen-luggage-restaurants-want-your-smartphone/\">having my camera and passport stolen</a>, I’m really no worse the wear. Certainly no bruises to show for it. I’m not sure I’d do it any other way. Though I do pay more attention to hotel door construction than I used to.</span></li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Foolish Game</em> by copperhead (c) 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/copperhead/46390 Ft: Snowflake,Sackjo22</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Switching Back to Apple</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>After your government ID, the smartphone is probably the most important thing you travel with. And while I quickly whip out my ID a few times a trip to prove my identity  -- to the TSA agent, to hotel clerks, to car rental check out folks, I use my smartphone constantly -- maybe too constantly. Be that as it may, the smartphone is <i>the</i> critical tool for today’s frequent traveler. A carpenter has his framing hammer, the auto mechanic his Snap-On wrench -- for the road warrior, it’s the smart phone.</li>\r\n 	<li>And so it wasn’t without a good bit of thought that I bit the bullet a few weeks ago and switched back to Apple; dumping my HTC One for a new iPhone 6S. I wasn’t thrilled to do it; I put it off for at least a month. And in the end, it was more a frustration with hardware -- with the slouching-toward-bankruptcy mess that HTC has become than it was excitement for the latest iThing.</li>\r\n 	<li>Which I guess is the pattern for me. My first smartphone was an iPhone 3G and I’d had just about every iPhone model up to the 5. And it was the frustration with its truly horrid battery life that led me to the HTC. The cause this time was the lousy performance of my HTC One after they pushed their Android upgrade -- “Lollipop” -- at the beginning of this year. It just trashed the phone -- the lag was awful. The hardware components have the specs to handle the new version; it’s just that HTC’s implementation of it is crap. Now, it’s not like Apple nails their OS upgrades every time. The IOS 8 release didn’t exactly cover them in glory. But at least they worked to resolve the problem by iterating through releases in a fairly timely manner. After the initial “Lollipop” release, Google iterated through updates  -- I think ver 5.1.1 is the most recent -- and I’m waited for HTC to use that as an opportunity to clean up their 5.0 mess. They would say on Twitter “It’s coming, just wait”, And then “Oh, we’ll just skip 5.1 and give you 6.0 by the end of the year”. That was it. I’d suffered through 6 months of lousy performance and now they were saying I would have at least 3 more -- not that I have any reason to think that the near-bankrupt company has gotten any better at software estimating.</li>\r\n 	<li>I don’t think that either Apple’s or Google’s operating systems are inherently better than the other. I’ve used them both. They both work. There are things I like about each of them, and since they seem to be stealing/emulating (?) each other’s best features, they’re more or less converging on each other.</li>\r\n 	<li>For me, the difference is the hardware -- which is what is actually in our hands each day. I’ve always thought Apple is a better hardware company than a software one. I loved my MacBook Air, but was very “meh” about OS X. It’s really the Android equipment manufacturers that are pushing me away. It seems that most of the Android hardware innovation is at the large end -- large screen sizes -- 5 ½ inches and up -- which is way bigger than what want. And then there are the delays in Android upgrades as each manufacturer gooses Google’s release -- my 18-month old Samsung tablet is still on version 4.4 “Kit Kat”, now two version levels down, with no update in sight, let alone any security patches. With mobile devices becoming more vital, that foot dragging on upgrades and security patching very uncomfortable.</li>\r\n 	<li>I was holding out for Google’s updated Nexus line, reading all rumor articles with spec leaks and blurred pictures. The 6P was too big for me, but the 5X -- I could do a 5.2-in screen with fast updates and patches. But then, when they unveiled the 5X, it topped it out at 32 GB with no expansion slots. For me, that is just too tight for my music, podcasts, pictures, video. So that’s it, I walked into the Apple store and bought a 64GB unlocked GSM 6S on their new upgrade plan -- new phone comes out, I trade mine in. It’s like leasing a car -- some people like the newest model. It’s all about the hardware.</li>\r\n 	<li>Now if I can just keep iTunes from crashing on my Windows 10 box...</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #118</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_118.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #118 — Danger In the Travel Bubble; Switching Back to Apple','','inherit','closed','closed','','1561-revision-v1','','','2018-07-23 20:54:36','2018-07-24 01:54:36','',1561,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/07/23/1561-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2088,1,'2018-07-23 20:55:28','2018-07-24 01:55:28','[caption id=\"attachment_1554\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/2015-09-03-15.12.36.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1554\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/2015-09-03-15.12.36-300x200.jpg\" alt=\"Did The Pope Have This Problem?\" width=\"300\" height=\"200\" /></a> Did The Pope Have This Problem?[/caption]\r\n\r\nApologies in advance because this is pretty much a stream-of-consciousness episode, with semi-strung together thoughts about eggs, car rentals, seeing the Pope, travel food, and stuff from my September trip to Scotland.  I talk about how handy I found the new <a href=\"https://revolut.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Revolut</a> service for spending and sending money in Europe; recent good and bad experiences with <a href=\"https://www.hertz.com/rentacar/emember/join/overview.do?learnMore=presidentsCircle\" target=\"_blank\">Hertz </a>and other car rentals; most bad experience with <a href=\"http://britishairways.com\" target=\"_blank\">British Airways</a>; and how true-to-life the <a href=\"https://youtu.be/2JqRXLQYF9o\" target=\"_blank\">Doritos Super Bowl commercial</a> portrays the Southwest boarding experience.  All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_117.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_117.mp3\"]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #117:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. I was trying to do this from the Bally’s Casino in Las Vegas where I was earlier in the week, but it just didn’t work out. I was there for business, not pleasure, but I always feel that I should stay in a casino hotel when in Vegas. I dunno, staying in a Westin or Marriott up by the convention center just doesn’t feel Vegas. When I was here last year for a business convention I stayed in the MGM Grand. Years ago, though, when I’d do regular booth duty at technology shows, I would always stay at Mandalay Bay, which I really liked.</li>\r\n 	<li>The more I know about hotels, the more I’m impressed by Vegas hotel operations. Caesars, the MGM Grand, Mandalay Bay -- they’re huge mini-cities -- orders of magnitude bigger than couple-hundred room hotels I’d stay at in Denver or New Orleans. And yet the service, the execution is almost always way better than those smaller hotels. If you’re any sort of an operations nerd, you gotta give ‘em a nod. Though on the other hand, when you head to the gym at 6am and pass by the old guy dragging on a cigarette playing the quarter slots, it kinda makes you wish they were a little less good...</li>\r\n 	<li>As I mentioned in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/08/26/podcast-116-traveling-thru-japan-luggage-trends/\">the last episode</a>, the big travel for me was at the beginning of September when we were in Scotland for 2 weeks getting my daughter situated at Univ of St Andrews. Now while I say “getting my daughter situated,” there were equal parts getting my wife situated with the idea of her youngest child being an ocean away -- a big difference from when my son was 90 minutes up the road in Milwaukee.</li>\r\n 	<li>The following week’s travel had a nice difficulty factor. Weds morning, I flew from Chicago to DC for the papal Mass on the campus of my alma mater, Catholic University of America, and then back to Detroit that evening for meetings first thing Thursday morning. The difficulty factor was my luggage. No back packs, no selfie sticks, so certainly no roller bags were getting through the security checkpoints. Finding a checked luggage place is a real challenge anymore. I thought about checking my bag into my DCA-DTW flight, but I was too early -- 8 hours prior to flight time max. There is a checked baggage place at Union Station -- DC’s train station -- which is conveniently located a couple of stops south of Catholic on the Metro Red Line.</li>\r\n 	<li>Freed of my baggage, I emerged from the Brookland Metro Stop to an unbelievable combination of people and fencing. Incredibly long lines of people corralled in by what had to be miles of fences. I was lucky; I somehow got into a quick security line -- only 45 minutes. After finding my seating section, the gates were closed and we were sealed in our sections until the Pope arrived and did a couple of laps around campus in the Popemobile. After Mass started, they opened up the gates again. Which was great, because while the music and the liturgy were top notch, I wasn’t queuing up for communion with 25,000 other folks. After the homily, I was one of the trickle of folks making an early exit to beat the rush. I had a flight to catch. I’m sure the Pope understood.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>One Day</em> by <a href=\"http://www.hollowhorse.co.uk/\">Hollow Horse</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>OK, just as a warning, this section is going to ramble on for a while. I have a random walk of comments/opinions that I just can’t seem to synthesize into  coherent topics. So here it goes...</li>\r\n 	<li>First stop in the mail bag, I was pleasantly surprised to receive this audio comment from Linda Martin of the Indie Travel Podcast\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Linda, thanks for that. The thing with eggs -- you can tell I’ve thought about this way too much -- it’s a trade-off between good eggs and time. It takes time for a cooked-to-order egg, but in the morning, I don’t often have that time. Usually, I’ve worked out; I’m cooling down during breakfast, then hitting the shower and off to work. When I stayed in one of the Renaissance Hotels in New Orleans, they didn’t have a separate executive lounge. Breakfast was served in the restaurant. They had the typical lounge buffet set up, but you could also order off the menu, which I think I did once in a dozen stays. It was a nice egg, but it took an extra 10 min that usually wasn’t in my morning schedule. Definitely a 1st World problem</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Lisa Walls wrote on the TravelCommons Facebook Wall\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>“Hey Mark, I love your podcast, especially the comments on food and craft beers. Other than the Altoids, do you carry any food in your briefcase, such as protein bars? I am always looking for something that is shelf stable that tastes good and travels well.”</li>\r\n 	<li>Lisa, thanks for the note. I usually keep 1-2 KIND bars in the bottom of my bag. The fruit-&amp;-nut ones seem to hold up to weeks of getting crushed by my PC power supply. They’re also not too sweet the way some other granola and power bars are.</li>\r\n 	<li>I know I’m about to lose any foodie cred I may have built up over the years, but I gotta say that, for me, the McDonald\'s grilled chicken Snack Wraps are just about the right amount of food to cover a 2-hour flight. They’re quick to buy, and compact to bring on board and eat. I find it tough to manage a salad while sitting in a center seat.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>I’m not sure if I mentioned this last episode, but I’m flying Southwest on this week’s Vegas-Denver-Chicago trip to click over A-list status. It kinda crept up on me -- I don’t typically fly SW enough to make status, but apparently I have this year. As near as I can tell, this means I won’t have to pay the $12.50 Early Bird fee or be staring at my Southwest app exactly 24 hours before flight time in order to get a decent boarding position. Which, as we all know, is critical on Southwest since there’s no assigned seating. An A or early B boarding group number is necessary for an aisle seat. On my Vegas flight, hitting the “Check In” button maybe 2 seconds after the 24-hour window got me B 7, so I got an aisle seat in the back half of the plane. It was a full flight, so after that, I was living last year’s Super Bowl Doritos commercial -- looking down, trying to avoid eye contact with potentially bad seat mates while looking friendly to attract good ones. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://youtu.be/2JqRXLQYF9o\">link</a> to the commercial. It’s spot on.</li>\r\n 	<li>In the last episode, I talked about travel amateurs clogging up the PreCheck lanes. These would be people getting PreCheck as part of the TSA’s “Managed Inclusion” program, where they randomly shunt travelers over to PreCheck to balance screening line loads. This to the utter frustration of travelers who paid $85 for PreCheck screening or $100 for Global Entry. You might recall long-time listener Rich Fraser saying he was getting PreCheck about 75% of the time so why should he pay? But now the TSA says they’re throttling back on “Managed Inclusion”, driven at least in part by the publicity generated by auditors finding that travelers on various watch lists were being given PreCheck. I’ve certainly noticed the length of PreCheck lines dropping.</li>\r\n 	<li>Also in the last episode, I talked about luggage trends. One trend that sorta hit the cutting room floor is the move to fully rotating twirly wheels. Certainly handy in getting your luggage down a tight airplane aisle, but to my eye, most of them look a bit tinier, a bit flimsier than the standard roller-blade style wheel partially embedded in the back of the suitcase. The twirly wheels don’t seem rugged enough to survive getting pulled down Manhattan sidewalks or some of the ruts in New Orleans. And to allow full rotation, the wheels stick out of the bottom of the suitcase making the bag longer. This tripped up my wife on our flight from EDI to LHR. The BA gate agent asked my wife to put her bag in the luggage sizer. It would’ve fit -- except for the twirly wheels. Now we have to gate check it -- which means standing off to the side of the gate pulling some stuff out, transferring it into her shoulder bag. Understandable -- until we get on the plane and see it’s a half-full 767 and there are fully empty luggage bins. Really? So as is my wont, I vented my frustration on Twitter rather than any BA employees. BA’s social media department responded pretty quickly saying they needed to check all luggage to be fair to all passengers. But how would allowing a bag that was, at most, an inch over-long because of its twirly wheels on a half-full flight with empty overheads cheat any other passengers? It’s an over-officiousness that just doesn’t make sense. And it’s the reason I avoid BA now whenever possible. Which is a real shame, because back in the early ‘90’s when I was doing a lot of travel to Europe, I prefered BA. But that was 20 years ago and, it seems, a different BA.</li>\r\n 	<li>There is another reason I avoid BA -- officiousness <i>and</i> Heathrow. Again, another thing I loved in the ‘90’s, I now avoid whenever possible. Heathrow is a complete nightmare. You land, you trundle along through corridors, down escalators, into a bus, get a tour of the Heathrow back alleys, stop at another terminal, fight through security again, and then end up in the midst of a packed retail space where you wander through the shops because there’s no place to sit. It’s gotten to the point that I’ll fly the extra hour to connect through Frankfurt or Amsterdam just to avoid Heathrow. We were doing this St Andrews trip on AA miles. We were fine on the way out -- ORD-JFK-EDI all on AA. But coming back, it was EDI-LHR-ORD with the first leg on BA. Just ugh! I still keep thinking about how to get something out of my 300K BA Avios miles. Maybe I’ll make my daughter fly BA.</li>\r\n 	<li>On a brighter note, I tried a new financial service during this trip and it worked really well. It’s called Revolut -- as in Revolution cut a bit short. It’s a FinTech start up based in the UK that gives you a virtual and real debit card with really great exchange rates. As with all the cool start-ups nowadays, everything is done through a smartphone app -- which, to stow the snark for a second, makes a lot of sense for any travel app. I opened an account before I left and funded it with $200 from my regular ATM/debit card. I could then convert my dollars to pounds or euros at what appeared to be just about the market rate -- there didn’t seem to be a lot of margin taken on the buy or sell sides. I also instantly had a virtual debit card with which I could use those new pounds or euros to buy things on the web -- like train tickets or top up a phone card. I then requested a physical version of my card, which took about a week to show up from the UK. Now I had a proper European chip-&amp;-pin card that I could use at an ATM or, say, the self-serve checkout line at Tesco’s without waiting for a clerk to take my signed receipt. It only hiccuped one at the Costa coffee shop in St Andrews; I still don’t know why. Poking around a bit more, I found that I could send pounds to my daughter’s RBS account with a day or so lag. Now, none of this functionality is necessarily new, though being able to do it all through a slick smartphone app is very handy. The real innovation is the cost. Funding my Revolut account from my debit card cost me less than 1% -- less than $2 for the $200 transfer, which is cheaper than most non-network ATM fees. After that, no transaction fees to move money between currencies or to withdraw. Compare that to hitting a foreign ATM with your US card. My personal bank is very reasonable, only charging me Visa’s 1% transaction fee, but many big banks will hit you with a $5 non-network fee on top of any transaction fees. And then transferring money to my daughter’s account -- wire transfers can cost $25-30. Revolut has well-packaged functionality delivered at the lowest costs I’ve seen. I don’t know how long they’ll keep this price point, but right now, it’s the best deal I’ve seen for money needed for international travel. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://revolut.com/\">link</a> to the Revolut web site.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Clear My Head</em> by <a href=\"http://www.thefiasco.net/\">FIASCO</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Random Thoughts about Car Rentals</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I guess I could’ve cut two or three comments out of the last segment and labeled them “Random Comments about My Scotland Trip” but that just seems entire too gratuitous. But I have been collecting car rental experiences in my TravelCommons Evernote drop file and I think I now have enough for make up a topic -- or at least what might marginally pass for a topic</li>\r\n 	<li>As I’ve mentioned in past episodes, I really don’t like to rent cars. I much prefer to use rail or a cab in from the airport and then walk to where ever I need to go. That works well in New York or Chicago or San Francisco, not so much in Denver or Detroit. So I’ve been renting a lot of cars over the past 6 months.</li>\r\n 	<li>So many in fact that Hertz bumped my status up to President\'s Circle. Not quite sure that gets me, but it sounds status-y. Though right after my congratulatory e-mail, I found a dumpy Toyota Corolla in my Hertz Gold spot, so maybe it’s not anything special.</li>\r\n 	<li>But in times like those -- when I get assigned the 45,000-mile Toyota with crumbs still in the driver seat, or a Ford F-150 king cab pick up truck in Boston (?) -- I’ve come to love Hertz Gold Choice. If you rent a mid-size or above -- and for our corporate rate, the price of a compact and mid-size are the same -- you can go to the Choice aisle and take one of those cars instead. I left the dumpy Toyota and took a new Nissan instead.</li>\r\n 	<li>I have started to make note of differences in service <i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">and</span></i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> attitude across locations. I never rent from Hertz at Detroit airport anymore. I’ve yet to get a non-dumpy car there and the attitude is not great. Though I think Hertz’s Newark station is the worst. A recent example -- a colleague was driving his car toward the lot exit when a low tire pressure alarm lit up. So he asked the guy at the exit gate where he could get some air to top off the tire. “Try a gas station,” the attendant told him. That was helpful.</span></li>\r\n 	<li>I’ve had challenges with car rental web sites -- Hertz, Avis -- when my pick-up or drop off time didn’t match the hours of the office I selected. I get the error notice and then when I go back to try another site or time, these websites will randomly select another date or location. I had this happen to me in Edinburgh on the second car we rented. We were training from Lockerbie back to Edinburgh where we’d done 4 days of biking while our daughter was going through freshman orientation. I’d booked a car on Hertz’s web site to pick up at the train station and drop off at EDI 5 days later. It took me 5 tries to get it right -- each time I re-started, it reset the pick-up location from Waverly Station to EDI. And each time I’d correct it. Except, it seems, the last time. When we arrived in Waverly, there was no car. I looked at the res -- pick up at EDI. Ugh. Not the end of the world -- we could’ve taken the new light rail out to EDI, but it was aggravating. I searched through the Hertz.co.uk website for a phone number -- that itself being a little extra helping of aggravation -- and called the res center. The woman on the other end was inordinately calm and helpful. 3 minutes later, she’d moved my pick-up to Waverly. I thanked her -- a lot. I should’ve booked with her instead of the website.</li>\r\n 	<li>We rented our first car in Edinburgh from Enterprise. It was a great car -- a Fiat 500 L. All the bags fit easily in the hatchback. Nice nav, nice sound system, clean....  Drove to a near-by shopping mall -- grabbed a coffee at Starbucks and phone SIMs at the ee store. Next stop, IKEA to buy things we didn’t pack -- like towels and hangers. Coming off the motorway, through a traffic circle, the clutch crapped out. I’d put it in gear, let out the clutch pedal, nothing. 3 hours later after Enterprise, the auto club and Fiat scrummed about who was supposed to pick up the car, the tow truck dropped us back off at EDI where the Enterprise folks apologized profusely and gave us an even nicer Nissan. A couple of weeks, I noticed the Pope used a Fiat 500L to drive from Andrews Airforce Base to the Vatican Embassy. The next day, though, he was in a Jeep Popemobile. I could sympathize.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a title=\"MP3 Download\" href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/download_track.php?id=0E74C6FEB7390D18D02B4B399668093172F6C8CC66DDC09D90A3BF7DDA436823CFAC859AE2B2C73E46A278A4950E1030\">Lonely Dog Blues</a></em> by <a title=\"Tobin James\' Web Site\" href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/label.php?id=2A3449F03E7B8462FF74407B60F0C4B0A30A0CBE880C61DE37E3B342387F0643\">Tobin James</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917626811171154.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #117</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/\">Podshow Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_117.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #117 — Random Thoughts About Eggs, Scotland & Car Rentals','','inherit','closed','closed','','1542-revision-v1','','','2018-07-23 20:55:28','2018-07-24 01:55:28','',1542,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/07/23/1542-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2089,1,'2018-07-23 20:57:05','2018-07-24 01:57:05','[caption id=\"attachment_1532\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/DSC_5744.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1532\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/DSC_5744-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Lost Without Translation\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Lost Without Translation[/caption]\r\n\r\nBack behind the microphone after an extended summer break highlighted by a two-week family vacation in Japan. We talk about traveling in Japan. It was a fantastic time, though we were lost without translation at times. But with the US dollar buying 124 yen, it was the right time to go. We also talk about frustration in using frequent flier miles, trends toward prettier and higher tech luggage, and a connoisseur of scrambled eggs. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_116.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_116.mp3\"]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #116:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, after a <i>long </i>absence. Let’s call it summer vacation. And there was a nice bit of vacation there -- 2 weeks in Japan with the family. People would ask me “Have you been to Japan before?” Never outside of Narita. Which I translated to an answer of “Mostly no” before my trip, and updated to a plain “No” after my trip. But more on that later.</li>\r\n 	<li>Over the years, I’ve gotten into the habit of leaving the country if I want a real vacation. I find the disconnection process works much better I’m more than 5  time zones removed from home. Europe is 6 or 7 hours ahead -- pretty good. But the 14 hour difference between Chicago and Tokyo -- that’s real separation.</li>\r\n 	<li>You can’t unplug for 2 weeks for free, though. It takes a bit of planning, and in my case, a good bit of travel -- both before and after the trip.</li>\r\n 	<li>The 6 business days before my flight to Tokyo had me in Nashville, Detroit, Dallas, and the day before I left, Denver. I flew out Sunday night, flew home Monday night, and then left for Japan Tuesday noon. Coming back, we hit ORD 3:30 Sunday afternoon only to find myself back there 15 hours later for the first flight back out to Denver Monday morning. I was just happy that it was a short week for the 4th of July holiday.</li>\r\n 	<li>Since then, I’ve been keeping up the Denver-Dallas triangulation with the occasional random jump to somewhere like Detroit. I’ll probably keep it up through August since the beginning of September will have me out of the country again -- to Edinburgh, helping my daughter settle in at <a href=\"http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/\">University of St Andrews</a>. After that, I may just sleep until October.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://ghosts.nin.com/main/home\"><em>3 Ghosts I</em></a> by <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Nine Inch Nails\" href=\"http://www.nin.com/\" rel=\"homepage\">Nine Inch Nails</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>So that was the start of the <a href=\"https://blog.stackexchange.com/2015/06/stack-exchange-podcast-65-the-word-has-two-meanings-you-see/\">Stack Exchange Podcast</a> where Joel Spolsky goes pretty much non-linear over his attempt to use frequent flier miles.</li>\r\n 	<li>Any attempt to use frequent flier miles will be a frustrating exercise. My recent attempts to do <i>anything</i>with the 300,000 BA Avios miles is own personal exercise in masochism. But, to be honest, I’ve had pretty good luck this year, getting 2 flights down to New Orleans on Southwest, 4 direct flights from and from Tokyo with UA Mileage Plus and 3 flights between ORD and Edinburgh on American. Now, it wasn’t a complete cakewalk -- on SW, my wife and daughter took a 6am flight back on Monday, on UA, we had to come home a couple of days earlier than we had originally planned while on AA it’s a day later. But flexibility has always been a requirement to use frequent flyer miles. And those minor shifts are a whole lot better than my exercise with BA which only offered me one day in the entire month of September that I could use Avios miles to get to Edinburgh. I’m not sure there’s a more useless awards program.</li>\r\n 	<li>When I first started looking for Chicago to Edinburgh flights, I went straight to Hipmunk.com. It has been my go-to flight search tool for a while now. It’s easy -- it defaults to flight search, unlike Expedia’s push for bundled deals or Orbitz pushing hotels. And graphical display -- bars for each flight showing flight duration spread across the day -- makes it very easy to focus on the flights you’re most interested in. But when searching for Edinburgh flights, I spotted something new -- right under the red Virgin Atlantic bar was a purple one labeled “Mystery”. Kinda like Priceline’s unnamed hotels you bid for. But I’d never seen what the travel industry calls “opaque pricing” on Hipmunk before. Of course, it wasn’t really that opaque. Clicking on the bar revealed the flight details -- a 4:40pm departure with an hour connection in Madrid. Hmmm, let’s see. Only Iberia flies from ORD to MAD. Doing a quick search, I found the times did indeed match Iberia flight number 345 -- which Hipmunk only slightly masked as Mystery Airline #345. Must’ve been an experiment, because I haven’t seen it since, but I did get a good chuckle out of it.</li>\r\n 	<li>A colleague who I met up with on one of my Detroit trips flew Spirit Airline for the first time and <i>didn’t</i> get much of a chuckle. It was a last-minute meeting. He was flying in from Kansas City and, following the rules by using the mandated American Express Travel website to book his flight, he saw a Spirit flight that was significantly less than other carriers. Being a good corporate citizen, he booked it. He showed up at the ticket counter to get his boarding pass. “You gonna carry that one?” the Spirit agent asked him, pointing to his suitcase. “Of course,” he said. “That’ll cost you $55. And that briefcase doesn’t look like it’ll fit under the seat, so that’s another $55.” Pretty quickly, the price difference that led him to book Spirit disappeared in the smoke of carryon charges. Some might say it’s his fault for not knowing Spirit’s uniquely aggressive add-on fee structure -- what Spirit calls “bundling”. But I’d say it’s Amex’s fault -- for displaying Spirit’s base fare (without carryon fees) in the same ways as they display Delta’s or Southwest’s. And then marking those higher, but more inclusive, fares as being “out of policy” because they’re higher, and requiring additional steps to justify booking them. More power to Spirit to differentiate themselves with a unique fee structure, but Amex and the like need to do their job and let business travelers know what they’re in for when they book those low fares.</li>\r\n 	<li>Rich Fraser did saw my PreCheck frustration spill over to Twitter.\r\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" lang=\"en\">\r\n<p dir=\"ltr\" lang=\"en\">Folks, it\'s a *metal* detector! Large chunks of metal in your pocket - cell phones, car keys, $5 worth of quarters - *will* set it off</p>\r\n— Mark Peacock (@mpeacock) <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/623113695426670592\">July 20, 2015</a></blockquote>\r\n<script src=\"//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js\" async=\"\" charset=\"utf-8\"></script>I don’t know if it’s summer travel amateurs hitting the PreCheck lottery, but I’ve been stunned at the number of people who look amazed when the metal detector alarms when they try to walk through with a slug of metal in their pockets. Mobile phone, big electronic key fobs, two fistfuls of change… I mean, what part of “metal detector” do they not get? It’s doing it’s job! But people will stand there, dumbfounded, they can’t stroll through wearing the quarter-pound of metal and electronics that is an iPhone. I hate to be a snob, but I beginning to think they need to split PreCheck between the veterans who paid for it and the occasional random selectees. To which Rich mentioned that it’s not so occasional for him -- he’s gotten Pre on 3 of his last 4 trips. So, he says, why pay for it? Hey, as long as he remembers to take his mobile phone and car keys out of his pocket, I say, more power to him.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’ve probably mentioned this before, but I think one of the absolute best airport restaurants is Rick Bayless’ <a href=\"http://www.rickbayless.com/restaurants/tortas-frontera/\">Torta Frontera</a> in the American, United and International terminals at ORD. The tortas, the Mexican sandwiches, are fantastic -- great local ingredients and made-to-order. Being made-to-order is key to the great taste and texture, but it’s 10 minutes from the time you order and at ORD rush hour, you can stand in line for 10 minutes before you get to the counter. Great restaurant -- and popular. So I was cautiously excited last week when I saw they had a new ordering app. I was catching an evening flight to DTW and decided to check out the app. I downloaded and set up the app after parking in the deck -- created an account and loaded a credit card. Then, while in the PreCheck line, I scrolled through the menu and loaded the shopping cart with a Cubana, my favorite torta. I was going to hit the Order Now button, but the TSA guys were a little too efficient, waving 3 of us forward at once. So, I hit Order a couple of minutes later on the other side of the X-Ray machine. I quickly received an e-mail “Thanks for your order, we’ll let you know when it’s ready”. That’s it. No ETA, no typical wait time. Hmmm… I walk down to the T3 Tortas -- longest line I’ve seen. Hmmm…  Just then, I get a second e-mail -- 7 minutes after the first -- “You order will be ready at 5:43pm” -- 10 minutes from now. OK, not bad given this line. I walk to the rest room, browse the bookstore across the hall, and put myself in front of the order pick-up station at 5:43pm. About a minute later, the woman calls out “Anybody order on-line?” Two of us step up. “Mark?” I reach out and take my bag. The pre-order worked well, though next time, I’ll let the TSA guy wait for a minute while I hit the Order button a bit sooner.</li>\r\n 	<li>All the way back in April 2012, I wrote a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/04/21/best-hotel-amenity-free-breakfast/\">blog post</a> about free breakfast being the best hotel amenity.  (I had to do a good bit of scrolling on the TravelCommons website to find it -- I’ll save you that with a link in the show notes). It’s still true, even though, it’s, as I wrote back then, it’s more about convenience than food quality -- especially when you’re grabbing that breakfast in the concierge lounge of a Marriott or Sheraton or Westin. And it kinda turns you into a connoisseur of scrambled eggs. A buddy and I got into this conversation a few weeks back -- comparing the quality of scrambled eggs across hotels we’ve stayed at.  We concluded that the most typical consistency was firm, almost quiche like. We liked them with a bit of cheese mixed in to give them a bit of flavor (neither of us are vegan). Every once in a great while, you get great scrambled eggs -- soft curds, slightly moist. But you definitely don’t want them runny -- there’s nothing more disgusting at 6am than tilting back that warming tray clamshell lid and seeing scrambled eggs sitting in a pool of yellowish liquid. We’ll go for hard dry over swimming in yellow eggs every morning. But hard dry bacon, now that’s just wrong</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/buy_album.php?id=08E508A6096F11910641E13331B70EED6DFA5BB929282F731E19BBAFA8F08FFD686BD99DD86BA0D5E844DD5536E1AEFB\" rel=\"nofollow\"><em>Ghost Hardware</em></a> by Burial</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Traveling Thru Japan</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>The family and I have done a fair bit of travel in Asia -- Thailand, Singapore, Vietnam, Hong Kong, China -- which left two big holes -- Japan and Korea. We filled one of them this summer when we spent two weeks visiting Tokyo, Kyoto, and Osaka. Japan had always been on our list to visit, but its reputation for high prices always gave us an excuse to put it off and go some place where we could stretch our dollars further. But with the dollar buying ¥124 and then scoring 4 direct ORD-NRT tickets on United Mileage Plus awards, this seemed the time.</li>\r\n 	<li>Now as long time listeners know, this won’t be a travelog, a list of things to see in Tokyo or Kyoto -- I leave that to friends like Chris Christensen of the <a href=\"http://asia.amateurtraveler.com/tag/japan/\">Amateur Travelers podcast</a>. Since I always say that this podcast is more about the journey than the destination, let’s talk about travel in Japan.</li>\r\n 	<li>As my family and I tend to do on our trips, our only trips to the airport were coming and going to the US. Everything else was on train. Which in Japan works very well. My wife bought us 2-week Japan Rail (JR) passes before we left. It wasn’t a small number for the 4 of us, but they paid off over our trip -- allowing us unlimited use of the high-speed bullet trains, even to reserve seats for a bit more relaxed boarding.</li>\r\n 	<li>We broke the passes in on the Narita Express, the hour ride from the airport to Tokyo Station. I’m not sure they could’ve put Narita any further out. Given the distance, everyone takes the train or a bus. The train was fine, kinda like the Heathrow Express but without the TV screens. It worked with a minimum amount of fuss -- which was a good thing after a 12-hour flight.</li>\r\n 	<li>We really hammered the JR passes to train among Tokyo, Kyoto, and Osaka, all less than 3-hour trips. Some of the stations were huge and there were times when we had to lean in to thread through the crowds of commuters. But the signage was pretty good and the trains absolutely met their reputation for timeliness (if only airlines in the US were half as timely…). And while JR would roll a food cart while on the rails, we got a bit more into the Japanese train culture and stocked up at the train station food courts before we left -- bento boxes, rice cakes, and of course, train beers -- Kirin tall boys usually. And if we didn’t have time to hit the food court, we could always grab something from the vending machines -- which were positioned about every 20 feet on the train platform. The vending machine thing in Japan is intense -- but convenient.</li>\r\n 	<li>We didn’t just train point-to-point between the major stations. A lot of times it was a smaller train to the main station, then the high-speed train, then connecting to again to a smaller train. The HyperDia smartphone app came highly recommended and the free version was great when planning out these connecting journeys -- both inter-city and within Tokyo where a trip across town might span a couple of rail companies, say Tokyo Metro to a JR train. It also displays the fare, which is very handy, avoiding the need to try and decipher the rate table while in front of the fare machine with a queue building behind you. The public transit tab on Google Maps also worked surprisingly well.</li>\r\n 	<li>Being able to use these apps when you really need them requires mobile data for your phone. You don’t want to be trying to search for an open WiFi access point before figuring out which train you’re connecting to. Which, in Japan, like so many things, isn’t exactly straightforward. As a tourist, you can only buy data SIMs; no voice capabilities. One of my go-to websites -- the aptly, but somewhat awkwardly named <a href=\"http://prepaid-data-sim-card.wikia.com/wiki/Japan\">Prepaid Data SIM Card Wiki</a> -- came through again. Before we left, I ordered a b-mobile SIM to be delivered to our first hotel -- the Marriott Courtyard in the Ginza District -- and then I bought another -- Japan Travel SIM -- from the Tourist Information Center at Tokyo Station. The lack of local voice wasn’t a huge inconvenience for us -- we were communicating via e-mail with hotels and apartment rentals -- but it still seemed a little weird.</li>\r\n 	<li>The one thing that pulled me up short was the limited amount of signage in the Latin alphabet. I’m OK with the Japanese names when phonetically rendered in Latin characters, but I’m not so hot on reading kanji or kana. We wrestled with this our first morning in Tokyo at the Tsukiji Fish Market. My wife had a list of sushi restaurant recommendations -- all of which were Japanese names in Latin script; all the restaurant signs were in kanji. And then at a Kyoto ramen restaurant, where you buy tickets for your food from a machine and then hand them across the counter to the cook, having only kanji on the machine buttons without pictures, made ordering a bit of a challenge. It got me thinking back to my trip last year to Beijing -- I didn’t recall having the same level of challenge there.</li>\r\n 	<li>What made this all work is that just about all of the Japanese people we ran into were the nicest, the most welcoming people. I was constantly struck at how many people would strike up a conversation -- asking where we’re from, helping us with Ramen machines, shouting “Welcome to Japan” while riding by on a bike, volunteering to walk us across train stations to help us with connections. I’m not sure I’ve experienced that consistent level of engagement from random strangers anywhere else. Of course, some of it could get a slightly embarrassing, like the group of middle school kids who wanted a picture with me. Or my daughter who regularly would get tagged by Japanese girls for pictures. We had that experience often in Beijing, but there, when we were often the lone white people, it was understandable. Having that same thing happen in Japan -- more Westernized, more white people wandering around -- that surprised us. In Arashiyama, a pretty touristy area on the west side of Kyoto, we were flagged down by 3 middle school teachers who video’d us answering their question about why we chose to visit this town. They told us that they taught English and wanted to show their classes native English speakers. OK, makes sense, but with all videos on YouTube, I wasn’t quite sure why they wanted a video of us.</li>\r\n 	<li>But that being said, except for the signage, Japan was one of the easier countries we’ve traveled in. And maybe, with a couple more revs of Google Translate, even that barrier will get smoothed away.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a title=\"MP3 Download\" href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/download_track.php?id=0E74C6FEB7390D18D02B4B399668093172F6C8CC66DDC09D90A3BF7DDA436823CFAC859AE2B2C73E46A278A4950E1030\">Lonely Dog Blues</a></em> by <a title=\"Tobin James\' Web Site\" href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/label.php?id=2A3449F03E7B8462FF74407B60F0C4B0A30A0CBE880C61DE37E3B342387F0643\">Tobin James</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Luggage Trends</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I think it was when I was grabbing our luggage off the carousel in ORD, returning from Spain with our luggage full of wine and olive oil. I picked up my wife’s red bag and was struck at how tatty the fabric had become. I set it down in front of her and said “That’s become embarrassing. I’m not sure I can travel with that bag again”</li>\r\n 	<li>Now it’s not that I have a styling bag. It’s stock Swiss Army black roller still bearing Vietnamese customs stickers from 2008. I had retired it in favor of a grey Samsonite bag, but had to pull it back out when the Samsonite’s wheels got wonky -- the rubber wore off and the wheels splayed out after 2.5 years of pulling it across New Orleans sidewalks.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’m seeing more hardshell rollers in non-black colors -- burgundy, yellow, floral prints, Disney characters…. They look nice; but that just may be because they look different -- they catch my eye because of what they’re not -- not a black ballistic nylon roller bag. My recently deceased Samsonite was non-black -- grey rather than floral, but still non-black. And after 3-4 months of my travel schedule, it started to look less non-black. Smudges from grease on overhead bin hinges, muck from taxi trunks, muddy water from New Orleans gutters, spilled coffee... That’s why I can’t have nice luggage.</li>\r\n 	<li>We’ve talked about the impending trend of “smart luggage” in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/11/22/podcast-112-holiday-airport-etiquette-travel-tax-pile-up/\">past</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/05/14/podcast-115-a-decade-of-travelcommons/\">episodes</a>. Bluesmart has been the poster child for this. They crushed their Indiegogo campaign last year, and 2 weeks ago announced they’re in volume production, targeting initial deliveries in late September. “Control your suitcase from the app” is one of their tag lines. Digital lock, digital scale, battery charger, location tracking, proximity alerts. It spoke to my inner travel propeller head, so I did the Indiegogo thing. When it shows up, I’ll be sure to tell you all about it.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bluesmart is at the top of the Google searches for “smart luggage”, but there are a growing list of followers with similar feature lists. Location tracking is an interesting one. I can count the number of times my luggage has been lost on one hand and have change left over, but when it happens, it can be catastrophic. I remember BA lost a bag on my way over to a 2-week “city-a-day” trip -- today London, tomorrow Stockholm, Friday in Zurich. My bag was always one stop behind me. So I get the importance of location tracking. At the high end, Bluesmart and others are equipping their bags with GPS and cellular modems to enable “global tracking”. At a much simpler level, travelers like long-time TC listener Mika Pyyhkala are using Bluetooth key fobs like the Pally Smartfinder to check if their bag made it onto their plane.</li>\r\n 	<li>I can see it being useful at the other end. Look at the app -- bag’s not off the plane yet. I have time to stop off at the restroom -- or better yet, the bar.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917626811171154.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #116</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://iodapromonet.com/index.php\">IODA Promonet</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_116.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #116 — Traveling Thru Japan; Luggage Trends','','inherit','closed','closed','','1531-revision-v1','','','2018-07-23 20:57:05','2018-07-24 01:57:05','',1531,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/07/23/1531-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2090,1,'2018-07-23 21:01:02','2018-07-24 02:01:02','[caption id=\"attachment_1508\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"228\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/2014-06-01-15.20.55-e1431490750219.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1508\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/2014-06-01-15.20.55-e1431490750219-228x300.jpg\" alt=\"Been on Duty for 10 Years...\" width=\"228\" height=\"300\" /></a> Been on Duty for 10 Years...[/caption]\r\n\r\nHard to believe that I\'ve been prattling along for 10 years. Looking back, I see that I\'ve become less of a TSA-hater, but am still pretty clear-eyed about the tediousness of the frequent travel experience. It\'s tough to pack 10 years into a 30-min episode, but I think I\'ve cherry-picked some good snippets. Before that, I talk about spending Semana Santa (Holy Week) in southern Spain and \"smart luggage.\" The listener mailbag continues the conversation about mass transit to airports. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_115.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_115.mp3\"]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #115:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\">\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, so no video “uncut” version like I did last episode from New Orleans. No maid service in the TravelCommons studio to tidy up before the podcast.</li>\r\n 	<li>We’re deep in the bipolar weather roller coaster that is Spring in the Midwest -- 70’s one day, 40’s the next; bright sun at 10 in the morning, pissing down rain at noon. Which is as good an explanation as any why Chicago’s two airports, O’Hare and Midway, own the basement of the DOT’s on-time departures ranking.</li>\r\n 	<li>My travel has been a bit more interesting since the last episode. Did a few of my normal runs down to New Orleans, but broke the pattern a bit with travel to Denver and Charlotte. And even one of the runs down to New Orleans broke the usual down-Monday-back-Thursday routine. At the beginning of April, I flew down Thursday night with my wife and daughter, met up with friends for the French Quarter Fest weekend. It’s one of my favorite music festivals. Free music from local bands; stages and food stands spread around the Quarter -- a bit lower key than the 460,000 people who descended on the Fair Grounds for Jazz Fest a few weeks back.</li>\r\n 	<li>The big trip, though, was a couple of weeks prior to that when we went to Andalucia -- southern Spain -- for Spring Break and found ourselves there during Semana Santa -- Holy Week. Cordoba, Granada, Sevilla, the hill town of Ronda. Processions (plural) almost every night. My wife said it was like the Tour de France for Catholics. And as a Catholic, I couldn’t argue -- it was pretty full contact. I posted a <a href=\"https://vine.co/v/OL66AUgHwwi\">Vine video</a> of a Granada procession to my <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter feed</a> and then a couple of minutes of GoPro footage from the last Holy Thursday procession in Sevilla on the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons\">Facebook</a> page and <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\">YouTube channel</a>. It was close to midnight, after which I think they took an hour break and then started up the Good Friday processions. We went to bed. When we went out the next morning around 8:30 to grab some breakfast -- our usual of cafe con leche and tomato bread topped with jamón iberico -- the restaurant was jammed with people who just finished a procession. It just kept going.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n[vine url=\"https://vine.co/v/OL66AUgHwwi\" height=480 width=480 type=\"postcard\"]\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>And so do we. I drained my United account for a trip next month to Japan, and then in September, we’re heading over to Scotland so my daughter can start at the <a href=\"http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/\">University of St Andrews</a>, so I should have enough content to keep TravelCommons rolling into an 11th year.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/download_track.php?id=6E494292C6B4E14E784F04400EB2C54CE135E29730530171C5F931345CAA3733A93C8CF03BBFAC71CD59B5710E25327F\" rel=\"nofollow\">All Around</a></em> by <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=AEF14840F87CD6C39BE8918AF693E89C276517530C9606BA2CB20418C6A8B4CB\" rel=\"nofollow\">Jel</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Before we get into the meat of things, just a quick pointer to let everyone know that TravelCommons is available on the Stitcher radio smartphone app as well as on <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>. Since iTunes started handling podcasts -- June 2005, right around episodes <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/06/19/podcast-6-the-tsa-talks-back/\">6</a> or <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/06/29/podcast-7-eating-alone-classic-travel-stories/\">7</a> -- it dominated the TravelCommons download stats. Now it’s only responsible for a third of the downloads.</li>\r\n 	<li>Rummaging through the mailbag…</li>\r\n 	<li>Back last November in episode <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/11/22/podcast-112-holiday-airport-etiquette-travel-tax-pile-up/\">112</a>, Dan Gradwohl sent me a pointer to the website <a href=\"http://www.toandfromtheairport.com/\">To and From The Airport</a>, a collation of airport transit options. In that episode, I talked about reviewing the ORD listing and sending in a few updates. Toward the end of March, I received a note thanking me for my contribution and apologizing for the delay. Whatever issues were happening there now seem to have passed; it appears the site is back to being actively maintained.</li>\r\n 	<li>Tom Brown, a longtime TravelCommons listener, sent a note following up on last episode’s riff on Nate Silver’s <a href=\"http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/planes-trains-and-taxis-when-to-take-public-transit-from-the-airport/\">538 blog post</a> about mass transit times to major US airports. He wrote:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>You noted London as the gold standard of public transport out of the airport. I would put it at bronze at best.  Decaying infrastructure, not so comfortable trains and destination not so friendly to business traveler in London doesn\'t help its ranking. Singapore is the best in my opinion with Hong Kong 2nd. Tokyo even ranks above London to me.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Tom, thanks for that, expanding our sample size. My past trips thru Hong Kong and Singapore were family vacations - late arrivals from the US, tired kids, too much luggage - and so opted for taxis instead on mass transit. I missed the opportunity to add those trains to my personal sample, but I did end up with one of the wackiest cab rides while in HK. It was kind of a hoarder cab -- newspapers filling the trunk, tchotchkes all over the dashboard and hanging from the roof. I don’t know how we got 4 people and 4 bags into that cab. As I mentioned earlier, we’ll be flying in and out of Narita at the back half of June and given the distance and cab fares, we’ll take the Tokyo train at least once.</li>\r\n 	<li>Our Spring Break trip to Andalucia started with a flight into Madrid airport. Our plans had us landing in Madrid, then making the 20-min schlep in from Terminal 4 (could they have put that terminal any further out?) and then heading downtown to catch the high-speed Renfe train to Córdoba. After I booked the tickets on-line (a process made infinitely easier than 2 years ago now that Renfe accepts PayPal) I was pleasantly surprised to stumble across a TripAdvisor post saying that the tickets included a free train ride down to the Puerta Atocha train station. It wasn\'t the fastest ride - a local train that made 4-5 stops before Atocha - but it was clean and not beat up. And since we were headed downtown during Friday rush hour, it took the same 30 min that Google Maps estimated for the cab.</li>\r\n 	<li>And continuing on the transit theme, Nick Gassman sent a note about comments I made in episode <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/10/12/podcast-111-seatback-recline-wars-craft-beer-tourism/\">111</a> about the proliferation of pre-paid cards for subway and mass transit systems. Nick says about the London Underground:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>You can use your own contactless payment card (Visa, Amex etc) without having to buy an Oyster card, and get the same rates. You can register the card if you wish, to track spend.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>The link to the Tube web page is similar to the Chicago L page -- it feels a bit ambiguous, probably because the contactless technology is still a bit young, a bit ambiguous itself. Both London and Chicago say they’ll also work with NFC mobile phones -- like the latest Samsung Galaxies, the HTC Ones, and the iPhone 6. I think I’ve just got to get over to an L station and give it a try. But it’s probably not the kind of experiment I want to try and debug during rush hour when there’s a couple hundred hard-core commuters storming the 3-4 tap through gates. Seems like more of a midday or weekend morning thing.</li>\r\n 	<li>Reaching back again to episode <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/11/22/podcast-112-holiday-airport-etiquette-travel-tax-pile-up/\">112 </a>where I talked about funding the Indiegogo campaign for the Bluesmart carry-on bag, what they call “The First Smart, Connected Luggage” complete with a smartphone app that acts as a digital lock, a scale, tracks location, and sounds an alarm if your smart bag wanders off. They’ve gotten huge press; they blew thru the funding goal by 3800%. But now they have to deliver the bag. They’ve been doing a good job of pushing out <a href=\"https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/bluesmart-world-s-first-smart-connected-carry-on#activity\">updates </a>and seem to be sticking to their August ship date. Which would be good for them because competitors are starting to move into this space. I tweeted out a link to an Engadget story last week about Samsung and Samsonite partnering up on a line of smart suitcases with functionality that sounds very similar to Bluesmart’s. Then I received a press release in the TravelCommons e-mail box from Planet Traveler <a href=\"http://www.planettravelerusa.com/preorder\">announcing</a> a Kickstarter campaign for the Space Case 1 line of smart luggage which will have all the functionality of the Bluesmart bag <i>plus</i> fingerprint unlock <i>and</i> Bluetooth speakers. As if the gate areas aren’t noisy enough.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/download_track.php?id=A1F44F3B330BFBBD5C7863108B61B09977CADC67705C23C5AECA03FC6F2C0320A93C8CF03BBFAC71CD59B5710E25327F\" rel=\"nofollow\">La Tra (basephunk mix)</a></em> by <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/label.php?id=3AF558B2D658A22FFF10B13F9D87237D276517530C9606BA2CB20418C6A8B4CB\" rel=\"nofollow\">Omar Sosa</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<b>A Decade of TravelCommons</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>It was ten  years ago <i>today </i>that I recorded the first T/C podcast in the bathroom of the Wardman Park Marriott in NW Washington, DC</li>\r\n 	<li>[tc1-opening &amp; 1]</li>\r\n 	<li>It was an interesting mix of topics…\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>TSA problems in ORD, LGA and DCA, the first of many TSA rants over the years;</li>\r\n 	<li>The first sighting of a “puffer” security screening machine, don’t know if you ever walked through one of those, but we also talked about their multi-million dollar demise in an episode a some years later;</li>\r\n 	<li>Hungarian roadside prostitutes -- a topic that I don’t believe I’ve revisited</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>And it was the first in a long string of what one listener referred to as a “pottycast” -- using the tile of hotel bathrooms as a poor man’s reverb chamber</li>\r\n 	<li>[tc74-hotel medley]</li>\r\n 	<li>Listening to that, I now understand why I have lifetime Marriott Platinum status.</li>\r\n 	<li>One of the more noticeable changes over the years has been about the TSA. Early podcasts railed against the TSA -- the security theatre, the shoe carnival, liquid bans, and of course, the power trips</li>\r\n 	<li>[tc45-finding tooth powder]</li>\r\n 	<li>But with some much needed customer service training and, most importantly, the introduction of PreCheck, the TSA isn’t the podcast pinata it had been for the first 4-5 years -- especially when compared to airport security in places like India</li>\r\n 	<li>[tc109-mall cop, umbrella]</li>\r\n 	<li>Travel technology has been one constant through the TravelCommons decade</li>\r\n 	<li>[tc87-briefcase]</li>\r\n 	<li>[tc91-too much technology]</li>\r\n 	<li>And while I’ve cycled through a number of phones, tablets, and laptops, the Bose noise-cancelling headphones remain the official headphones of the TravelCommons podcast</li>\r\n 	<li>[tc48-bose lust]</li>\r\n 	<li>Food has also been a common theme…</li>\r\n 	<li>[tc97-food]</li>\r\n 	<li>Never one to be accused of being a travel industry cheerleader…</li>\r\n 	<li>[tc92-not-so-upbeat]</li>\r\n 	<li>But I always try, if only partially successfully, to maintain some perspective</li>\r\n 	<li>[t61-zen]</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917626811171154.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #115</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>Links to 3 prior anniversary episodes\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/12/27/podcast-27-best-of-2005/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Episode 27</a> -- Best of 2005</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2006/06/13/podcast-40-looking-back-over-the-first-year/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Episode 40</a> -- Looking Back Over the First Year</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2009/05/14/podcast-74-looking-back-over-four-years-of-travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Episode 74</a> -- Looking Back Over Four Years</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from the <a href=\"http://promonet.iodalliance.com/\">IODA Promonet</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_115.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #115 — A Decade of TravelCommons','','inherit','closed','closed','','1505-revision-v1','','','2018-07-23 21:01:02','2018-07-24 02:01:02','',1505,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/07/23/1505-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2093,1,'2018-08-09 22:26:47','2018-08-10 03:26:47','[caption id=\"attachment_2100\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/20121212_195127000_iOS.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2100\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/20121212_195127000_iOS-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Duck squats are supposed to keep you healthy[/caption]\n\nNo long-distance travel this month. Instead, I\"m getting back into regional jets, and waiting out a long delay in Cincinnati has me wondering about American Eagle\'s flight scheduling algorithm. My flights into CVG cause me to think about the impact of losing hub status. CVG looks overbuilt, but MEM is spending money to shrink itself. A Harvard Business Review article about how frequent business travel leads to poor health choices emphasizes the need for \"mindfulness\" on the road. The Midway Layover Taproom video gets me thinking about the time needed for a fun layover tour. And I give a listener my Chicago restaurant and taproom recommendations. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_143.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #143:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you a spiffed up TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. The production bay has been somewhat reassembled -- less one piece of furniture in the name of decluttering -- with the walls now a real estate agent-approved shade of “greige” and the floors redone from cherry to a bit more of a walnut; bowing to the presumed tastes of the millennial buyer. It’s not bad, just different. Definitely lighter though.</li>\n 	<li>No spur-of-the-moment international trips in July; mostly just running around the Midwest, but re-vectoring from Wisconsin to Cincinnati; a bit too far to drive, so I’m losing the freedom to leave when I want and back to stooping through regional jet doorways.</li>\n 	<li>And back to having my schedule jacked up by weather events thousands of miles away from me. As we’ve talked about before, the regional jet operators, affiliates that don’t have spare jets available to step in and wipe out delays a plane may encounter along their daily bunny hop schedule. Last week, my AA flight from CVG to ORD was a textbook example of this. At 12:30, on the way back from lunch, I got my first delay notice -- for a 6pm flight. It was just 20 minutes, so I didn’t think much of it. It was a nice day in both Cincinnati and Chicago, so I just chalked it up to standard ORD traffic. But then the delay started to stretch -- to 30 minutes, to 40 minutes, to an hour. I fired up FlightAware and used the “Where’s My Plane Now?” functionality to try and figure out what was going on. The nice thing about the FlightAware screen is it shows you the flight path and the current weather. My plane was traveling from Norfolk, VA to Miami, and then up to Cincinnati -- and I could see heavy storms all along the Southeast coast. The plane was late leaving Norfolk, and then was having to vector down the Florida Gulf Coast to avoid the storms over the Atlantic Coast. This wasn’t looking good.</li>\n 	<li>FlightAware also shows a 10-day history for a flight’s departure/arrival times. This American flight had only arrived on-time once; had also canceled once, and arrived late the other 8 times. With a bit of time to kill, I fired up Excel and calculated that this flight averaged an hour and 20 minute delay -- counting the one on-time flight, but not counting the cancellation (figuring out how to average in infinity was a bit more work that I was willing to tackle). This wasn’t really a one-off weather delay; it was a bad flight route. So as I’m wont to do, I hit American on Twitter -- “this flt has been delayed/cancelled 8 of the past 9 days. Kinda think AA needs to rethink the scheduling for this one”. I looked at the history of the United flight also leaving at 6pm -- one late flight in the past 10 days. It flies back and forth between ORD and CVG. Maybe not a great plan for the winter, but better than flying through the humid South in July and August. I’m switching. Besides, the beer selection in CVG won’t keep me occupied through too many more hour-long delays.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/beyond7-revelations/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><em>Miss America</em></a> by Beyond 7</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul class=\"\">\n 	<li>Even in the midst of studio refurb, I managed to push out the long-promised Chicago Midway Layover Southside Taproom Tour video. These videos always take longer than I think, but it’s fun and I like the end result. One of the things I’ve liked about the craft beer explosion -- in addition, of course, to good beer -- is that searching out new microbreweries has taken me to parts of cities I never would’ve visited otherwise -- walking into a basement in Portland, Oregon wondering how in the hell they got these huge steel tanks down here; or coming out of the Paris Metro in the middle of a North African neighborhood. I hope this Midway video has some of that same feel -- skipping the parts of Chicago that make the tour guides or TV shows -- the baseball themepark of Wrigleyville, the lakefront, hipster enclaves of Wicker Park and Logan Square -- guiding folks to pass through Douglas Park, Pilsen, Bridgeport, and the Back of the Yards. If you haven’t seen it already, check it out. You can watch it on the TravelCommons Facebook page, or go to the TravelCommons web site and you can click through to it on YouTube. Robert Fenerty left a comment on YouTube -- “Might be an excellent way to help get my A List status renewed this year!” Which, I think, is an excellent idea…</li>\n 	<li>Rob Cheshire commented on the web site, talking about the Southside breweries I featured on the video --\n<ul>\n 	<li>Thanks Mark! I will definitely build a visit to Marz and Lo-rez into my schedule for my August trip to Chicago. I am undecided about Whiner, which might be a bit too “European” in terms of beer styles for my tastes.I am a bit conflicted about Lagunitas, being part of the evil-Heineken Empire! I have no doubt that they have some great beers, and that the tasting room is a very cool spot.</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Rob and I have trading thoughts on Chicago brewery in comments to TravelCommons web site posts and Untappd check ins for a couple of months leading up to his trip here. Little does he know that I’m going to hit him up the other way for suggestions for my quick visit to Copenhagen in September. Rob has started his own blog -- <a href=\"https://taproomadventure.blogspot.com/\">The Great Taproom Adventure</a> -- with his notes on the taprooms he visits.</li>\n 	<li>Keith Love -- “long-time listener, first-time caller” as he describes himself -- sent me a note. He and his son are hitting Chicago early this month -- maybe for Lollapalooza? You’d be surprised how many older folks go hard on that 4-day music festival. Keith asked me for some restaurant and taproom recommendations, which got me thinking that I should do a Chicago episode, but in lieu of that, here’s the list I built for Keith in case you’re passing through Chicago soon -\n<ul>\n 	<li>Restaurant suggestions with good food/beer selections\n<ul>\n 	<li><del>The Publican (Fulton Market)</del> <em>Food is not that great anymore</em></li>\n 	<li>Cruz Blanca (Randolph St)</li>\n 	<li><del>The Fountainhead (North Center)</del> <em>COVID casualty</em></li>\n 	<li>Hopleaf (Andersonville)</li>\n 	<li>Purple Pig (Michigan Ave)</li>\n 	<li>Eataly (River North; beer bar on the top floor)</li>\n 	<li><del>Fat Rice (Logan Square -- a bit of a cheat; OK beer, but food you won\'t find anywhere else)</del> <em>COVID casualty</em></li>\n 	<li>Wiener Circle (Lakeview -- even more of a cheat; no beer but a great char-Polish)</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Favorite Chicago taprooms -- this is more Northside focused since Keith said he was staying in River North\n<ul>\n 	<li>Goose Island Taproom (on Fulton St, not the brewpub)</li>\n 	<li>Half Acre (on either Lincoln or the new, larger one further north on Balmoral)</li>\n 	<li>Revolution Brewery Taproom (on Kedzie, not the brewpub on Milwaukee)</li>\n 	<li>Ravenswood taproom crawl -- 4 taprooms on Ravenswood between Foster and Irving Park Rd</li>\n 	<li>DryHop (Lakeview - another cheat; more of a brewpub, but a fav of mine)</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Keith also asked if I have a favorite airport app to, as he said, “actually guide you through airports and their amenities/services.” I had to admit that I’m a bit more old-school and use the maps that are posted around, though I will use Untappd to find the airport bars that have the best beer selection, which is how I killed a bit of that CVG delay I talked about earlier. If anybody uses an airport app, please let me know and I’ll talk about it on the next episode.</li>\n 	<li>The stint in Cincinnati forces me to fly out of ORD first thing Monday morning, the worst part of the road warrior rush hour. I normally avoid Monday morning flights like the plague, but my schedule these past weeks has forced me into it. That first Monday, I gave myself an extra 30 minutes, figuring life is too short to hyperventilate in a TSA line. But even then, the line tailing out of the Terminal 3 PreCheck took my breath away -- half the way down the terminal and I couldn’t catch up to the end of it; it grew faster than I could walk. I finally was able to get in -- I may have cut someone off, I dunno, the end of the line was a bit nebulous, lot of people muddling around, eventually forming a coherent line. Kinda like the travelers version of post-Big Bang dust clouds eventually forming galaxies. Anyhow, I get into line and start walking back toward the PreCheck station, at a brisk pace, and I didn’t really stop until I stood at the little swinging gate, waiting for the next available agent to check my license. It was 5-7 minutes tops. It’s amazing how many passengers they can process with 9 agents checking ID and every screening machine running. And with a line that’s 90% experienced travelers. It was just this side of a precision drill squad. I was impressed.</li>\n 	<li>I haven’t spent much time in Cincinnati airport before. It’s a very nice airport, but feels a bit “overbuilt”, especially with Delta “de-hubbing” it after it merged with Northwest.There’s two terminals with a train running between them and to the main building. The train is fine, as airplane trains go -- no better or worse than Denver’s or Atlanta’s -- but it seems a lot shorter. Indeed, the walk between terminals is maybe 3 minutes. The train seems a bit superfluous, or that the Cincinnati airport is trying to punch above its weight. Though feeling a bit overbuilt, it’s doesn’t have the ghost town feeling that the Memphis airport had the last time I was there. There were concourses there where I didn’t see a soul. It too was a casualty of the Delta-Northwest merger, a Northwest hub that was shut down in favor of Delta’s superhub in Atlanta. Memphis has lost ⅔’s of its passenger traffic and is now spending millions to downsize, to shutdown and mothball those empty concourses. There’s a <a href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/23/us/memphis-airport.html\">good NY Times story</a> about this. I tweeted out a link while I was writing this, but will also put a link in the show notes.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> or our new <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a> at travelcommons -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/westexit-extra/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><em>On Condition of Anonymity</em></a> by the West Exit</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>How Bad is Business Travel For Your Health?</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>I stumbled across an article in Harvard Business Review -- <a href=\"https://hbr.org/2018/05/just-how-bad-is-business-travel-for-your-health-heres-the-data\">Just How Bad is Business Travel for Your Health? Here’s the Data</a> -- by Dr Andrew Rundle, a pr ofessor of epidemiology at Columbia University. His bio says “his research focuses on the risks for, and consequences of, sedentary lifestyles and obesity.”\nThe article summarizes his recent research which boils down to\n<ul>\n 	<li>Employees who spent 14 or more nights away from home per month had significantly higher body mass index scores and were significantly more likely to report clinical symptoms of anxiety, depression and alcohol dependence; no physical activity or exercise; smoking; and trouble sleeping. The odds of being obese were 92% higher for those who traveled 21 or more nights per month</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Yup, so tell me something I don’t know. It takes work, or “mindfulness” to be on-trend, to eat right, exercise, and go to bed at a reasonable time when the guardrails of your normal routine disappear. Rundle’s population is people who travel every week. In the US, many consultancies shoot for a “3-4-5” travel schedule for their full-time project staff -- 3 nights, 4 days on the road -- leaving Monday morning, returning Thursday night -- with the 5th day in the office or working from home. Depending on the number of weeks in the month, that’s 12 -15 nights/month.</li>\n 	<li>When I went into consulting and full-time travel, the change was immediate -- working late and then project team dinners rolled over my evening workout routine, eating out every meal blew up my regular diet, and waking up at 4am on Monday morning to catch the 6am flight to LaGuardia, so I could be at my midtown Manhattan client by 10am screwed up my sleep cycle for the next couple of days. I could see the effects on the guys in my “class” -- the guys who joined the firm the same fall that I did -- putting on weight, walking a bit slower through the airport, drinking a bit more at dinner, maybe missing an early morning meeting or call after staying out a bit too late.</li>\n 	<li>I made some adjustments -- moved to morning workouts, became more “mindful” about what I was eating -- ordering fish and vegetarian meals where I could (though there aren’t always great options for non-Big 3 proteins (non-beef, chicken, or pork) in places like Dover, OH, Ephrata, PA, or Huntsville, AL). Maybe this slowed the inevitable, but 10 years on, we were on a family vacation with my folks, a Caribbean cruise. One of the stops along the Yucatan, the Mayan Riviera as they were starting to call it, I walk out of the water to our chairs, my dad looks up at me and says “You’ve put a bit of weight on, haven’t you?” I would’ve blown him off, except that I knew it was true. My waist size was 2 inches bigger and I was carrying 20 lbs more than when I started. I was heading in the same direction as my colleagues, even though it was at a slower pace.</li>\n 	<li>I was able to reverse the trend, and I think one of the key reasons was by then, I was senior enough to have more control over my schedule. I was managing the projects rather than being managed. So I could relieve the expectations of nightly team dinners -- at least one night a week, everyone was on their own, and no pressure if you bagged out other nights. I’d turn in early on Monday nights when most of us had gotten up early to fly out. We’d pick hotels with good workout rooms and where we could walk to the client and to restaurants rather than drive. Where I could, I’d negotiate remote work weeks with the client -- save them expense money, and give our team a break from the airport. It took work to break out of the usual, the default behaviors -- that “mindfulness” thing again.</li>\n 	<li>Thinking back on it, I guess I’m surprised that the firms I was with expected me to figure this out on my own. There were always travel policies on spending limits, and using the corporate travel agency, and what receipts were needed, and when you could fly business class, but no real guidance/support on how to lead a somewhat healthy life on the road. Maybe because the people writing those policies weren’t traveling -- the accountants and HR managers were paying for their own meals and going home every night, maybe a bit jealous thinking we were living it up every night eating steak dinners and drinking bottles of wine. Which some of us were, because we weren’t mindful enough to think about another way.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/solace-medusa/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Subtle Vice</a> </em>by Solace</li>\n</ul>\n<b>Make Layovers Fun</b>\n<ul>\n 	<li>One of the most sacred frequent traveler rules is Fly Direct. Be it winter with snow or summer with thunderstorms, adding that intermediate stop adds one more point of failure, one more opportunity for the airlines to screw up. But, with a bit of planning and an “adventuring” frame of mind, you can actually manufacture something good -- a mini-tour -- out of a connection. That has been the inspiration behind two TravelCommons videos -- the new MDW Layover Taproom Tour and the ORD Layover Excursion that I did almost 6 years ago -- and that is still getting regular hits on YouTube.</li>\n 	<li>To do it right, though, does take a bit of planning… and time. You have to factor in all the delay points -- getting off the plane, stashing your luggage if you carried on, getting to and from where you’re going, and then getting back through security when you return. For most airports, I think it’s tough to do a good layover tour in less than 4 hours -- this is supposed to be a fun daybreak, not another travel stressor.</li>\n 	<li>United Airlines used to have a series in their Hemispheres magazine called One City, Five Hours that would outline a 5-hour layover tour in a different city -- Reno, Albuquerque, Copenhagen, …. One of the early TravelCommons videos is me following their <a href=\"http://old.hemimag.us/2010/03/01/one-city-five-hours-frankfurt/\">Frankfurt tour</a> on a 6-hr layover between Mumbai and Chicago. Those article are tough to find, even with Google, but managed to dredge up the <a href=\"http://old.hemimag.us/2011/01/01/one-city-five-hours-copenhagen/\">Copenhagen one</a> from the Hemispheres archives and am going to give it a go at the end of this month.</li>\n 	<li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/06/24/podcast-130-notes-from-hungary/\">Episode 130</a> last year, I talked about how my son and I passed up a 90-minute connection in Vienna for an 8-hr one and then spent a Saturday eating schnitzel and drinking beer in the old section of town with a buddy of mine who came down from Poland.</li>\n 	<li>And I think that 5-8 hour span is about right. There are some exceptions -- the quick shopping jaunt from MSP to Mall of the Americas -- but even if you’re hitting the nearby Blue Lagoon on your Wow Air layover in Reykjavik, I’d still allow 4 hours, especially given the Wow check-in lines I stood in the last time I took flew them.\nJim McDonough felt that squeeze a few months ago. Commenting on the MDW Layover Facebook posting, Jim said</li>\n 	<li>We had a four hour layover at O\'Hare back in May on our way to Ireland. American did a schedule change that made a planned two hour layover into four. But we did not leave the airport. Somehow on international it didn\'t make sense. Had some bad \'free\' beer at the Admiral\'s Club.</li>\n 	<li>Yes, that would’ve been snug. Jim and his wife maybe could’ve swung down to Logan Square or Wicker Park -- both stops on the ORD subway line -- for a bite and a bit of a walkaround, but they would’ve needed to have a solid plan for that, tough with that last-minute schedule change.</li>\n 	<li>But even unplanned layovers can work out. Several years ago, my parents flew from Denver to Paducah, KY to visit my aunt and grandmother. As you can imagine, no direct flights so they connected through ORD. And, as you might guess, on the way home, their commuter flight was late out of Paducah and they missed a tight connection. My dad called me from the airport. It was New Year’s Eve night and we were having 3 or 4 couples over. “Get your luggage and book the flight out tomorrow,” I told him, “you can help me cook dinner.” I picked them up, brought them home, threw an apron at my dad, opened an early bottle of champagne, and we had a great time.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #143</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a> and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music is from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Magnatune</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_143.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #143 — How Bad is Business Travel For Your Health; Make Layovers Fun','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-143-how-bad-is-business-travel-for-your-health-make-layovers-fun','','','2021-09-29 22:04:13','2021-09-30 03:04:13','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=2093',0,'post','',1),
(2094,1,'2018-08-09 20:44:02','2018-08-10 01:44:02','[caption id=\"attachment_2044\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/2018-06-22-20.15.56-1.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2044\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/2018-06-22-20.15.56-1-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> What\'s the Chinese character for \"wurst\"?[/caption]\r\n\r\nYet another last-minute long-distance trip, this time to Frankfurt, Germany, lets me check out United Airlines\' new business class service, and think again about the value for those expensive lie-flat seats. Seeing a new Chinese menu at a favorite wurst stand in the old part of Frankfurt reminds me of the changes driven by the new wave of Chinese tourists. I also read recent PR pitches for a new smart bag and a business traveler\'s biohack. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_142.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n<iframe src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/467065119&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"></iframe><!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #142:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from a rather jumbled up TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. Been playing “furniture jenga” for the past couple of weeks as we do a lot of deferred maintenance before trying to relocate the studios into Chicago. The recording studio is jammed full and the regular production bay has been taken out of commission, hence me missing my usual end-of-month posting and slipping into the first week of July.</li>\r\n 	<li>June’s travel cadence was almost a complete rinse-and-repeat of May’s. A few day drives up to Wisconsin, pretty easy -- until I had to make a last-minute trip to Germany with about 36-hour notice -- leave Weds night, land Thurs morning, meet with the client Thursday afternoon, lead a workshop Friday, fly home Saturday morning. I booked an eye-bleedingly expensive last-minute business class ticket because I needed to work and get some sleep on the flight over, which United was kind enough to convert into a 1st-class seat on the Weds flight, giving me more than enough space to eat and work simultaneously.</li>\r\n 	<li>Though shorter notice than last month’s India trip, it was a bit easier -- no last-minute visa dash, and I got to walk out of the airport in Frankfurt this time rather than transferring to another 8-hour flight. And thanks to Google Maps, I was able to find a non-stop local train from the station in the basement of Frankfurt airport (just finding that was a win for Google) to the station just outside the client’s headquarters for about €8. And because the train ticketing machine could do contactless, I just dinged it with my iPhone rather than having to wrestle with my US Amex card not having a PIN. All in all, it was as painless as a last-minute 8,000-mile trip can be. And not having to push furniture around for 3 days -- that was a nice bonus...</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://www.nimbitmusic.com/saurabbhargava\">Exit</a></em> by Saurab Bhargava</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>The bumper music is from Saurab Bhargava, a long-time listener and longer-time friend and colleague who said in a note “Took some time on the cruise to catch up on some TravelCommons podcasts. Glad you\'re still keeping the rhythm on that!” I have been working to keep a regular monthly cadence. I’ve managed to keep it up for a year, which is why I’m a bit put off with myself for missing my June deadline. Though I have to tell you, the combination of a flash trip to Germany, studio reconfiguration, and the World Cup hasn’t helped -- especially the World Cup. Maybe now that we’re in the knockout round, and there’s only 2 games in a day, I’ll double up on episodes in July.</li>\r\n 	<li>Being World Cup-literate was very handy while in Germany. Good for making small talk with the client, and Friday night in Frankfurt, every bar seemed to have found half-a-dozen big screens a piece and stood them up everywhere inside and outside. It was easy to keep up with the matches, even when walking down the street. And this wasn’t even for the German team; it was Nigeria-Iceland and Switzerland-Serbia -- not even in Germany’s group. Good reminder of how big a deal it is outside the US.</li>\r\n 	<li>Long-time listener Geoffrey Greene pinged me on Facebook to let me know that TravelCommons is on the new Google Podcast app. I think I mentioned some time back, that I’ve been having problems with Google Play picking up TravelCommons ever since they started with podcasts. I’d filled out all the forms, submitted the RSS feed, but there was some error somewhere. Finding someone somewhere in Google support to resolve that has been on my to-do list for a while. I still need to get that sorted, but I’m glad to know the problem hasn’t carried over to the new app. I also need to update the website with links to all the places where people can subscribe to TravelCommons. Yet another line on the to-do list.</li>\r\n 	<li>Continuing the ongoing thread about smart bags… in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/05/31/podcast-141-when-you-think-the-tsa-is-bad-expired-money/\">last episode</a>, I talked about 2 smart bag manufacturers going out of business. But this past week, sifting through the PR pitches in the TravelCommons mail bag, I saw this -- “First Smart Luggage Safe to Fly Worldwide”. Plevo -- who thinks of these names? -- claims to be “the first smart luggage in the world that was designed to be safe to fly around the world” with “a removable battery pack, GPS Tracking, Smart Lock, Built-in Digital Scale, distance alerts and a Travel Assistant App”. OK, this is interesting. I head over to the inevitable Kickstarter page and check out the video. Very slick, but it didn’t answer what is the key question for smart bags -- how does Plevo provide location tracking and connect to the app when the battery pack is removed? Briana, the PR person, told me the Plevo bags have 2 batteries -- a removable Lithium battery pack and a permanent Nickel battery that takes over when the Li battery is removed. Elegant solution. The risk, though, is when that elegance breaks down in the face of a harried gate agent that doesn’t have the time to work through the safety differences between Li and Ni batteries, and just finds it easier to say “No”.  No problem getting past the UA gate agent in Frankfurt with my low-tech leather bag I bought in Italy a few years ago on our 25th anniversary. Checking my passport, she looked down -- “That’s a great bag!” she said. Sometimes, simpler is better.</li>\r\n 	<li>Another PR pitch that caught my eye, but in a less positive way, was titled “A Travel Hack Every Business Traveler Should Know About”. I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty much done with growth hackers and lifehackers and especially travel hackers. I’m old enough to remember when a hack was an ugly bit of code that managed to get a system running, but it wasn’t something that anyone was proud of. But I digress. I was killing time in United’s very nice new ORD Polaris business class lounge waiting for my Frankfurt flight, so I took the bail and opened it up. “With more executives turning to food as a biohack,” I’m regretting this click already, “an airport meal that fits with your food lifestyle can be hard to find.” The pitch was for Ample, a powdered, rehydrateable drinkable meal that’s TSA-compliant and “packed with on-trend ingredients like MCTs from coconut oil, fiber, probiotics, micronutrients from chlorella, and protein from grass-fed whey and collagen.” MCT’s, a Google search tells me, are medium-chain triglycerides that are good for you in a whole bunch of ways, I guess. Ample reduces decision fatigue -- “Just like Zuck never needs to decide what to wear, deciding what to eat at an airport is a piece of decision fatigue that you just don\'t need” and makes it easier to follow “a ketogenic lifestyle”. Feeling the onset of buzzword fatigue, I set my phone down, walked over to the bar, abandoned any hope of achieving ketosis, and pointed to the Revolution Brewing Anti-Hero IPA draft handle.</li>\r\n 	<li>I didn’t mention this in the last episode, but before I headed out on my India trip, I hit the AT&amp;T website to see if India is included in their international plan (it is) and to get one of their international data packages since I wasn’t going to have time to figure out the local SIM market. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the data limit of their base $60 offering has been bumped from 300MB to 1GB sometime in the last 2 years, and way up from 100MB back in 2011. The last time I used AT&amp;T’s international plan was March 2016 during a 4-day trip in Iceland. I turned cellular access off on just about every app except Google Maps and only just squeaked through without topping the 300MB limit. 1GB is a whole lot roomier. I had no problems in India. I don’t know when that limit got bumped up, but good on AT&amp;T for making that base plan much more realistic.</li>\r\n 	<li>This is about the time when I have the obligatory craft beer comment, and you’d think that coming off a trip to Germany, I’d be full of them. And at the end of the day on Thursday, after taking a 20-minute nap to catch my second or third wind, I headed out looking exactly for that -- a bierstube with some local beers and maybe a wurst platter. Walking around near the hotel, there wasn’t much -- it was kind of a dead plaza with some pizza and doner kebab places. One nice restaurant, but nothing special. I pulled out Google Maps and started scrolling around, zooming in and out looking for some beer places. I don’t see many of those, but I keep seeing wineries pop up south of me. So I start walking. 15 minutes, I hit one of the wineries and walk in. What’s with all the wineries, I ask? “You’re in one of the largest wine producing regions in Germany,” the guy nicely explained. “I’m getting ready for a big wine dinner right now, but stop in tomorrow if you want to taste our wines.” I’d be leaving for Frankfurt tomorrow, but I thanked him. So now, I’m looking for wine. It was after 5, and all the other wineries I passed looked closed, but I found a restaurant with what looked like a good local wine list and a nice courtyard. The waitress made some recommendations -- “This is a nice wine from our next door neighbor” We struggled a little bit figuring out the translation for the daily special on the chalkboard, but with dueling smartphone searches, we figured it out -- it was a local dish of spit-roasted pork. It was a nice surprise; a nice ending to the first day of what I thought was going to be just a Bataan death march of a trip. Which it would’ve been if I’d stayed in my hotel room rehydrating my third bottle of Ample ketogenic liquid so I could slog through another 50 emails on my way to zero inbox nirvana.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> or our new <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a> at travelcommons -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://www.nimbitmusic.com/saurabbhargava\">Yours in Mine</a> </em>by Saurab Bhargava</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Sleeping in Business Class</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>The trips to India and Germany put me back in international business class for the first time in a while. In past episodes, I’ve been ambivalent about the value for money for business class -- is the extra space and the better meal service worth the $5-6,000 uplift? On these trips, I kinda think “Yes” because neither trip had any slack in the schedule -- I’d be landing and going directly into meetings, so those lie-flat business class seats were what I really needed so I could get some amount of quality sleep.</li>\r\n 	<li>The start of both trips was a United flight from ORD to FRA. United has made a big deal of upgrading their international business class, even giving it a new name -- Polaris. And they’re building separate Polaris lounges, so it you’re flying international First or Business, no more slumming in the crowded Red Carpet clubs. The Polaris lounges are nice -- everything is free, good beer and wine selection -- even a cocktail list -- and a nice buffet. They’re probably the best business class lounges I hit on either trip, better than the variety of Lufthansa lounges I hit in Frankfurt. And United is pushing them. The Polaris lounge in ORD is in the far concourse, Concourse C, which makes sense; that’s where most of United’s international flights leave from. In June, though, my flight to Frankfurt left out of the B Concourse, so I went into the Red Carpet club right across from the gate. The guy at the desk looked at my ticket -- “Oh, you want to go to the Polaris Lounge. It’s about a 15 minute walk, but it’s definitely worth it.”</li>\r\n 	<li>Walking on the United Triple 7 though, you could feel United packing as much as they could in that business class with a 2-4-2 seat configuration -- only just slightly less packed than the 3-4-3 seating on the other side of the curtain in Economy. I’d never seen two middle seats in business class before. Business class in the Lufthansa A380s between Frankfurt and India were 2-2-2 -- no middle seats. Now on my flight over in May, I had the aisle and a couple had the middle two seats, so not too bad, and they were good folks. I felt bad for the husband during the night, though, when I had my seat in full lie-flat mode. When he needed to hit the toilet at night, he had to kinda vault me.</li>\r\n 	<li>On my last flight back from Frankfurt, a good-sized guy had the middle seat next to me. I’d guess he was a former football player, still in good shape, but taller and broader than the average build that United had sized these Polaris pods for. He said that the flight over, he couldn’t lay flat; it felt like a coffin, so he just reclined it and catnapped, which kinda defeated the purpose of hitting the ground running. I could sympathize. I’m not that broad, but I had to drop the aisle-side armrest in my pod to be able to comfortably fit. Kinda nice service, but definitely snug.</li>\r\n 	<li>The Lufthansa business class lounges lacked the pizzazz of United’s lounges. But one thing that was new to me… the flights to India went out of a different concourse in Frankfurt -- on the last episode, I talked about the mile-&amp;-a-half walk and the extra security -- and here, they boarded the A380 first and business classes straight from the lounge. No walking down to the gate and idling around with the economy classes. They had gate agents and kiosks in the club. I set down my beer, had my boarding pass scanned, and then walked down the jetway to the plane.</li>\r\n 	<li>Once on-board, Lufthansa’s A380s were definitely roomier than United’s Triple 7’s -- maybe a bigger plane, maybe because they weren’t trying to cram 8 people across. With only 6 people across, the lie-flat seats were more comfortable, not as “coffin-ish” as United’s. Indeed, maybe a little too comfortable. A guy in the row behind me on my flight to Delhi must’ve gone deep in sleep because he snored -- loudly, really sawing wood -- for a couple of hours. The one time I wouldn’t have minded a little turbulence to jostle the plane. But good for him, he was definitely getting his money’s worth from Business Class.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://www.nimbitmusic.com/saurabbhargava\">Through The Line</a> </em>by Saurab Bhargava</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Changes from Chinese Tourists</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>The last night I was in Germany, Friday night, I stayed in Frankfurt so I’d have just a 20-minute cab ride to the airport for my 8:15am flight. It had been 7 years since I’d walked around the city -- back in 2011 when I did a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/05/01/video-2-one-city-five-hours-frankfurt/\">TravelCommons video</a>, retracing the “1 City, 5 Hours” article about Frankfurt in United’s seatback magazine. I walked down to the Romer area - a big open square surrounded by historic buildings -- and over to a sausage, a wurst stand that I’d eaten at in the past. They’d added a new menu -- the German menu was now on the ground, under the ordering window; the new menu at eye level was in Chinese.</li>\r\n 	<li>The travel press has been talking about the impending growth of Chinese tourism for a bit now. I’ve seen the tour buses full of Chinese travelers for some time -- back in 2016 when my son and I were in Iceland, it became a bit of a game for us to stay ahead of those buses, and then in Frankfurt, down in a basement applewine pub off some back alley, I was the only non-Asian person there. But now, I’m noticing more, I dunno, systemic or infrastructure changes being driven by Chinese tourism. Not just Chinese menus but also seeing restaurants in the US and Europe accepting Chinese mobile payments - WeChat and Alipay. And some folks in the hotel business will say that the push to provide free wi-fi, mobile apps and family-sized rooms is driven, in some ways, by what Chinese tourists are looking for. Makes sense. Last year, there were 130 million outbound Chinese tourists, a big number but only 10% of the population of China. There’s a lot more to come.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #142</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a> and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from from Saurab Bhargava’s album <em>Chromatique</em>.  The tracks were <em>Exit</em>, <em>Yours In Mine</em>, and <em>Through The Line</em>.  Here\'s an Amazon <a href=\"https://www.amazon.com/Chromatique-Saurab-Bhargava/dp/B004R7W3O8\">link </a>where you can buy the album.</li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_142.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #143 — How Bad is Business Travel For Your Health; Make Layovers Fun','','inherit','closed','closed','','2093-revision-v1','','','2018-08-09 20:44:02','2018-08-10 01:44:02','',2093,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/08/09/2093-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2095,1,'2018-08-09 21:06:27','2018-08-10 02:06:27','[caption id=\"attachment_2044\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/2018-06-22-20.15.56-1.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2044\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/2018-06-22-20.15.56-1-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> What\'s the Chinese character for \"wurst\"?[/caption]\r\n\r\nYet another last-minute long-distance trip, this time to Frankfurt, Germany, lets me check out United Airlines\' new business class service, and think again about the value for those expensive lie-flat seats. Seeing a new Chinese menu at a favorite wurst stand in the old part of Frankfurt reminds me of the changes driven by the new wave of Chinese tourists. I also read recent PR pitches for a new smart bag and a business traveler\'s biohack. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_143.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n<iframe src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/467065119&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"></iframe><!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #143:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you a spiffed up TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. The production bay has been somewhat reassembled -- less one piece of furniture in the name of decluttering -- with the walls now a real estate agent-approved shade of “greige” and the floors redone from cherry to a bit more of a walnut; bowing to the presumed tastes of the millennial buyer. It’s not bad, just different. Definitely lighter though.</li>\r\n 	<li>No spur-of-the-moment international trips in July; mostly just running around the Midwest, but re-vectoring from Wisconsin to Cincinnati; a bit too far to drive, so I’m losing the freedom to leave when I want and back to stooping through regional jet doorways.</li>\r\n 	<li>And back to having my schedule jacked up by weather events thousands of miles away from me. As we’ve talked about before, the regional jet operators, affiliates that don’t have spare jets available to step in and wipe out delays a plane may encounter along their daily bunny hop schedule. Last week, my AA flight from CVG to ORD was a textbook example of this. At 12:30, on the way back from lunch, I got my first delay notice -- for a 6pm flight. It was just 20 minutes, so I didn’t think much of it. It was a nice day in both Cincinnati and Chicago, so I just chalked it up to standard ORD traffic. But then the delay started to stretch -- to 30 minutes, to 40 minutes, to an hour. I fired up FlightAware and used the “Where’s My Plane Now?” functionality to try and figure out what was going on. The nice thing about the FlightAware screen is it shows you the flight path and the current weather. My plane was traveling from Norfolk, VA to Miami, and then up to Cincinnati -- and I could see heavy storms all along the Southeast coast. The plane was late leaving Norfolk, and then was having to vector down the Florida Gulf Coast to avoid the storms over the Atlantic Coast. This wasn’t looking good.</li>\r\n 	<li>FlightAware also shows a 10-day history for a flight’s departure/arrival times. This American flight had only arrived on-time once; had also canceled once, and arrived late the other 8 times. With a bit of time to kill, I fired up Excel and calculated that this flight averaged an hour and 20 minute delay -- counting the one on-time flight, but not counting the cancellation (figuring out how to average in infinity was a bit more work that I was willing to tackle). This wasn’t really a one-off weather delay; it was a bad flight route. So as I’m wont to do, I hit American on Twitter -- “this flt has been delayed/cancelled 8 of the past 9 days. Kinda think AA needs to rethink the scheduling for this one”. I looked at the history of the United flight also leaving at 6pm -- one late flight in the past 10 days. It flies back and forth between ORD and CVG. Maybe not a great plan for the winter, but better than flying through the humid South in July and August. I’m switching. Besides, the beer selection in CVG won’t keep me occupied through too many more hour-long delays.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/beyond7-revelations/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Miss America</em></a> by Beyond 7</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul class=\"\">\r\n 	<li>Even in the midst of studio refurb, I managed to push out the long-promised Chicago Midway Layover Southside Taproom Tour video. These videos always take longer than I think, but it’s fun and I like the end result. One of the things I’ve liked about the craft beer explosion -- in addition, of course, to good beer -- is that searching out new microbreweries has taken me to parts of cities I never would’ve visited otherwise -- walking into a basement in Portland, Oregon wondering how in the hell they got these huge steel tanks down here; or coming out of the Paris Metro in the middle of a North African neighborhood. I hope this Midway video has some of that same feel -- skipping the parts of Chicago that make the tour guides or TV shows -- the baseball themepark of Wrigleyville, the lakefront, hipster enclaves of Wicker Park and Logan Square -- guiding folks to pass through Douglas Park, Pilsen, Bridgeport, and the Back of the Yards. If you haven’t seen it already, check it out. You can watch it on the TravelCommons Facebook page, or go to the TravelCommons web site and you can click through to it on YouTube. Robert Fenerty left a comment on YouTube -- “Might be an excellent way to help get my A List status renewed this year!” Which, I think, is an excellent idea…</li>\r\n 	<li>Rob Cheshire commented on the web site, talking about the Southside breweries I featured on the video --\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Thanks Mark! I will definitely build a visit to Marz and Lo-rez into my schedule for my August trip to Chicago. I am undecided about Whiner, which might be a bit too “European” in terms of beer styles for my tastes.I am a bit conflicted about Lagunitas, being part of the evil-Heineken Empire! I have no doubt that they have some great beers, and that the tasting room is a very cool spot.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Rob and I have trading thoughts on Chicago brewery in comments to TravelCommons web site posts and Untappd check ins for a couple of months leading up to his trip here. Little does he know that I’m going to hit him up the other way for suggestions for my quick visit to Copenhagen in September. Rob has started his own blog -- <a href=\"https://taproomadventure.blogspot.com/\">The Great Taproom Adventure</a> -- with his notes on the taprooms he visits.</li>\r\n 	<li>Keith Love -- “long-time listener, first-time caller” as he describes himself -- sent me a note. He and his son are hitting Chicago early this month -- maybe for Lollapalooza? You’d be surprised how many older folks go hard on that 4-day music festival. Keith asked me for some restaurant and taproom recommendations, which got me thinking that I should do a Chicago episode, but in lieu of that, here’s the list I built for Keith in case you’re passing through Chicago soon -\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Restaurant suggestions with good food/beer selections\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>The Publican (Fulton Market)</li>\r\n 	<li>Cruz Blanca (Randolph St)</li>\r\n 	<li>The Fountainhead (North Center)</li>\r\n 	<li>Hopleaf (Andersonville)</li>\r\n 	<li>Purple Pig (Michigan Ave)</li>\r\n 	<li>Eataly (River North; beer bar on the top floor)</li>\r\n 	<li>Fat Rice (Logan Square -- a bit of a cheat; OK beer, but food you won\'t find anywhere else)</li>\r\n 	<li>Wiener Circle (Lakeview -- even more of a cheat; no beer but a great char-Polish)</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Favorite Chicago taprooms -- this is more Northside focused since Keith said he was staying in River North\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Goose Island Taproom (on Fulton St, not the brewpub)</li>\r\n 	<li>Half Acre (on either Lincoln or the new, larger one further north on Balmoral)</li>\r\n 	<li>Revolution Brewery Taproom (on Kedzie, not the brewpub on Milwaukee)</li>\r\n 	<li>Ravenswood taproom crawl -- 4 taprooms on Ravenswood between Foster and Irving Park Rd</li>\r\n 	<li>DryHop (Lakeview - another cheat; more of a brewpub, but a fav of mine)</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Keith also asked if I have a favorite airport app to, as he said, “actually guide you through airports and their amenities/services.” I had to admit that I’m a bit more old-school and use the maps that are posted around, though I will use Untappd to find the airport bars that have the best beer selection, which is how I killed a bit of that CVG delay I talked about earlier. If anybody uses an airport app, please let me know and I’ll talk about it on the next episode.</li>\r\n 	<li>The stint in Cincinnati forces me to fly out of ORD first thing Monday morning, the worst part of the road warrior rush hour. I normally avoid Monday morning flights like the plague, but my schedule these past weeks has forced me into it. That first Monday, I gave myself an extra 30 minutes, figuring life is too short to hyperventilate in a TSA line. But even then, the line tailing out of the Terminal 3 PreCheck took my breath away -- half the way down the terminal and I couldn’t catch up to the end of it; it grew faster than I could walk. I finally was able to get in -- I may have cut someone off, I dunno, the end of the line was a bit nebulous, lot of people muddling around, eventually forming a coherent line. Kinda like the travelers version of post-Big Bang dust clouds eventually forming galaxies. Anyhow, I get into line and start walking back toward the PreCheck station, at a brisk pace, and I didn’t really stop until I stood at the little swinging gate, waiting for the next available agent to check my license. It was 5-7 minutes tops. It’s amazing how many passengers they can process with 9 agents checking ID and every screening machine running. And with a line that’s 90% experienced travelers. It was just this side of a precision drill squad. I was impressed.</li>\r\n 	<li>I haven’t spent much time in Cincinnati airport before. It’s a very nice airport, but feels a bit “overbuilt”, especially with Delta “de-hubbing” it after it merged with Northwest.There’s two terminals with a train running between them and to the main building. The train is fine, as airplane trains go -- no better or worse than Denver’s or Atlanta’s -- but it seems a lot shorter. Indeed, the walk between terminals is maybe 3 minutes. The train seems a bit superfluous, or that the Cincinnati airport is trying to punch above its weight. Though feeling a bit overbuilt, it’s doesn’t have the ghost town feeling that the Memphis airport had the last time I was there. There were concourses there where I didn’t see a soul. It too was a casualty of the Delta-Northwest merger, a Northwest hub that was shut down in favor of Delta’s superhub in Atlanta. Memphis has lost ⅔’s of its passenger traffic and is now spending millions to downsize, to shutdown and mothball those empty concourses. There’s a <a href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/23/us/memphis-airport.html\">good NY Times story</a> about this. I tweeted out a link while I was writing this, but will also put a link in the show notes.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> or our new <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a> at travelcommons -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/westexit-extra/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>On Condition of Anonymity</em></a> by the West Exit</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Sleeping in Business Class</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>The trips to India and Germany put me back in international business class for the first time in a while. In past episodes, I’ve been ambivalent about the value for money for business class -- is the extra space and the better meal service worth the $5-6,000 uplift? On these trips, I kinda think “Yes” because neither trip had any slack in the schedule -- I’d be landing and going directly into meetings, so those lie-flat business class seats were what I really needed so I could get some amount of quality sleep.</li>\r\n 	<li>The start of both trips was a United flight from ORD to FRA. United has made a big deal of upgrading their international business class, even giving it a new name -- Polaris. And they’re building separate Polaris lounges, so it you’re flying international First or Business, no more slumming in the crowded Red Carpet clubs. The Polaris lounges are nice -- everything is free, good beer and wine selection -- even a cocktail list -- and a nice buffet. They’re probably the best business class lounges I hit on either trip, better than the variety of Lufthansa lounges I hit in Frankfurt. And United is pushing them. The Polaris lounge in ORD is in the far concourse, Concourse C, which makes sense; that’s where most of United’s international flights leave from. In June, though, my flight to Frankfurt left out of the B Concourse, so I went into the Red Carpet club right across from the gate. The guy at the desk looked at my ticket -- “Oh, you want to go to the Polaris Lounge. It’s about a 15 minute walk, but it’s definitely worth it.”</li>\r\n 	<li>Walking on the United Triple 7 though, you could feel United packing as much as they could in that business class with a 2-4-2 seat configuration -- only just slightly less packed than the 3-4-3 seating on the other side of the curtain in Economy. I’d never seen two middle seats in business class before. Business class in the Lufthansa A380s between Frankfurt and India were 2-2-2 -- no middle seats. Now on my flight over in May, I had the aisle and a couple had the middle two seats, so not too bad, and they were good folks. I felt bad for the husband during the night, though, when I had my seat in full lie-flat mode. When he needed to hit the toilet at night, he had to kinda vault me.</li>\r\n 	<li>On my last flight back from Frankfurt, a good-sized guy had the middle seat next to me. I’d guess he was a former football player, still in good shape, but taller and broader than the average build that United had sized these Polaris pods for. He said that the flight over, he couldn’t lay flat; it felt like a coffin, so he just reclined it and catnapped, which kinda defeated the purpose of hitting the ground running. I could sympathize. I’m not that broad, but I had to drop the aisle-side armrest in my pod to be able to comfortably fit. Kinda nice service, but definitely snug.</li>\r\n 	<li>The Lufthansa business class lounges lacked the pizzazz of United’s lounges. But one thing that was new to me… the flights to India went out of a different concourse in Frankfurt -- on the last episode, I talked about the mile-&amp;-a-half walk and the extra security -- and here, they boarded the A380 first and business classes straight from the lounge. No walking down to the gate and idling around with the economy classes. They had gate agents and kiosks in the club. I set down my beer, had my boarding pass scanned, and then walked down the jetway to the plane.</li>\r\n 	<li>Once on-board, Lufthansa’s A380s were definitely roomier than United’s Triple 7’s -- maybe a bigger plane, maybe because they weren’t trying to cram 8 people across. With only 6 people across, the lie-flat seats were more comfortable, not as “coffin-ish” as United’s. Indeed, maybe a little too comfortable. A guy in the row behind me on my flight to Delhi must’ve gone deep in sleep because he snored -- loudly, really sawing wood -- for a couple of hours. The one time I wouldn’t have minded a little turbulence to jostle the plane. But good for him, he was definitely getting his money’s worth from Business Class.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/solace-medusa/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Subtle Vice</a> </em>by Solace</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Changes from Chinese Tourists</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>The last night I was in Germany, Friday night, I stayed in Frankfurt so I’d have just a 20-minute cab ride to the airport for my 8:15am flight. It had been 7 years since I’d walked around the city -- back in 2011 when I did a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/05/01/video-2-one-city-five-hours-frankfurt/\">TravelCommons video</a>, retracing the “1 City, 5 Hours” article about Frankfurt in United’s seatback magazine. I walked down to the Romer area - a big open square surrounded by historic buildings -- and over to a sausage, a wurst stand that I’d eaten at in the past. They’d added a new menu -- the German menu was now on the ground, under the ordering window; the new menu at eye level was in Chinese.</li>\r\n 	<li>The travel press has been talking about the impending growth of Chinese tourism for a bit now. I’ve seen the tour buses full of Chinese travelers for some time -- back in 2016 when my son and I were in Iceland, it became a bit of a game for us to stay ahead of those buses, and then in Frankfurt, down in a basement applewine pub off some back alley, I was the only non-Asian person there. But now, I’m noticing more, I dunno, systemic or infrastructure changes being driven by Chinese tourism. Not just Chinese menus but also seeing restaurants in the US and Europe accepting Chinese mobile payments - WeChat and Alipay. And some folks in the hotel business will say that the push to provide free wi-fi, mobile apps and family-sized rooms is driven, in some ways, by what Chinese tourists are looking for. Makes sense. Last year, there were 130 million outbound Chinese tourists, a big number but only 10% of the population of China. There’s a lot more to come.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #143</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a> and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from from Saurab Bhargava’s album <em>Chromatique</em>.  The tracks were <em>Exit</em>, <em>Yours In Mine</em>, and <em>Through The Line</em>.  Here\'s an Amazon <a href=\"https://www.amazon.com/Chromatique-Saurab-Bhargava/dp/B004R7W3O8\">link </a>where you can buy the album.</li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_143.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #143 — How Bad is Business Travel For Your Health; Make Layovers Fun','','inherit','closed','closed','','2093-revision-v1','','','2018-08-09 21:06:27','2018-08-10 02:06:27','',2093,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/08/09/2093-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2096,1,'2018-08-09 21:17:34','2018-08-10 02:17:34','[caption id=\"attachment_2044\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/2018-06-22-20.15.56-1.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2044\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/2018-06-22-20.15.56-1-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> What\'s the Chinese character for \"wurst\"?[/caption]\r\n\r\nYet another last-minute long-distance trip, this time to Frankfurt, Germany, lets me check out United Airlines\' new business class service, and think again about the value for those expensive lie-flat seats. Seeing a new Chinese menu at a favorite wurst stand in the old part of Frankfurt reminds me of the changes driven by the new wave of Chinese tourists. I also read recent PR pitches for a new smart bag and a business traveler\'s biohack. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_143.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n<iframe src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/467065119&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"></iframe><!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #143:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you a spiffed up TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. The production bay has been somewhat reassembled -- less one piece of furniture in the name of decluttering -- with the walls now a real estate agent-approved shade of “greige” and the floors redone from cherry to a bit more of a walnut; bowing to the presumed tastes of the millennial buyer. It’s not bad, just different. Definitely lighter though.</li>\r\n 	<li>No spur-of-the-moment international trips in July; mostly just running around the Midwest, but re-vectoring from Wisconsin to Cincinnati; a bit too far to drive, so I’m losing the freedom to leave when I want and back to stooping through regional jet doorways.</li>\r\n 	<li>And back to having my schedule jacked up by weather events thousands of miles away from me. As we’ve talked about before, the regional jet operators, affiliates that don’t have spare jets available to step in and wipe out delays a plane may encounter along their daily bunny hop schedule. Last week, my AA flight from CVG to ORD was a textbook example of this. At 12:30, on the way back from lunch, I got my first delay notice -- for a 6pm flight. It was just 20 minutes, so I didn’t think much of it. It was a nice day in both Cincinnati and Chicago, so I just chalked it up to standard ORD traffic. But then the delay started to stretch -- to 30 minutes, to 40 minutes, to an hour. I fired up FlightAware and used the “Where’s My Plane Now?” functionality to try and figure out what was going on. The nice thing about the FlightAware screen is it shows you the flight path and the current weather. My plane was traveling from Norfolk, VA to Miami, and then up to Cincinnati -- and I could see heavy storms all along the Southeast coast. The plane was late leaving Norfolk, and then was having to vector down the Florida Gulf Coast to avoid the storms over the Atlantic Coast. This wasn’t looking good.</li>\r\n 	<li>FlightAware also shows a 10-day history for a flight’s departure/arrival times. This American flight had only arrived on-time once; had also canceled once, and arrived late the other 8 times. With a bit of time to kill, I fired up Excel and calculated that this flight averaged an hour and 20 minute delay -- counting the one on-time flight, but not counting the cancellation (figuring out how to average in infinity was a bit more work that I was willing to tackle). This wasn’t really a one-off weather delay; it was a bad flight route. So as I’m wont to do, I hit American on Twitter -- “this flt has been delayed/cancelled 8 of the past 9 days. Kinda think AA needs to rethink the scheduling for this one”. I looked at the history of the United flight also leaving at 6pm -- one late flight in the past 10 days. It flies back and forth between ORD and CVG. Maybe not a great plan for the winter, but better than flying through the humid South in July and August. I’m switching. Besides, the beer selection in CVG won’t keep me occupied through too many more hour-long delays.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/beyond7-revelations/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Miss America</em></a> by Beyond 7</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul class=\"\">\r\n 	<li>Even in the midst of studio refurb, I managed to push out the long-promised Chicago Midway Layover Southside Taproom Tour video. These videos always take longer than I think, but it’s fun and I like the end result. One of the things I’ve liked about the craft beer explosion -- in addition, of course, to good beer -- is that searching out new microbreweries has taken me to parts of cities I never would’ve visited otherwise -- walking into a basement in Portland, Oregon wondering how in the hell they got these huge steel tanks down here; or coming out of the Paris Metro in the middle of a North African neighborhood. I hope this Midway video has some of that same feel -- skipping the parts of Chicago that make the tour guides or TV shows -- the baseball themepark of Wrigleyville, the lakefront, hipster enclaves of Wicker Park and Logan Square -- guiding folks to pass through Douglas Park, Pilsen, Bridgeport, and the Back of the Yards. If you haven’t seen it already, check it out. You can watch it on the TravelCommons Facebook page, or go to the TravelCommons web site and you can click through to it on YouTube. Robert Fenerty left a comment on YouTube -- “Might be an excellent way to help get my A List status renewed this year!” Which, I think, is an excellent idea…</li>\r\n 	<li>Rob Cheshire commented on the web site, talking about the Southside breweries I featured on the video --\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Thanks Mark! I will definitely build a visit to Marz and Lo-rez into my schedule for my August trip to Chicago. I am undecided about Whiner, which might be a bit too “European” in terms of beer styles for my tastes.I am a bit conflicted about Lagunitas, being part of the evil-Heineken Empire! I have no doubt that they have some great beers, and that the tasting room is a very cool spot.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Rob and I have trading thoughts on Chicago brewery in comments to TravelCommons web site posts and Untappd check ins for a couple of months leading up to his trip here. Little does he know that I’m going to hit him up the other way for suggestions for my quick visit to Copenhagen in September. Rob has started his own blog -- <a href=\"https://taproomadventure.blogspot.com/\">The Great Taproom Adventure</a> -- with his notes on the taprooms he visits.</li>\r\n 	<li>Keith Love -- “long-time listener, first-time caller” as he describes himself -- sent me a note. He and his son are hitting Chicago early this month -- maybe for Lollapalooza? You’d be surprised how many older folks go hard on that 4-day music festival. Keith asked me for some restaurant and taproom recommendations, which got me thinking that I should do a Chicago episode, but in lieu of that, here’s the list I built for Keith in case you’re passing through Chicago soon -\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Restaurant suggestions with good food/beer selections\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>The Publican (Fulton Market)</li>\r\n 	<li>Cruz Blanca (Randolph St)</li>\r\n 	<li>The Fountainhead (North Center)</li>\r\n 	<li>Hopleaf (Andersonville)</li>\r\n 	<li>Purple Pig (Michigan Ave)</li>\r\n 	<li>Eataly (River North; beer bar on the top floor)</li>\r\n 	<li>Fat Rice (Logan Square -- a bit of a cheat; OK beer, but food you won\'t find anywhere else)</li>\r\n 	<li>Wiener Circle (Lakeview -- even more of a cheat; no beer but a great char-Polish)</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Favorite Chicago taprooms -- this is more Northside focused since Keith said he was staying in River North\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Goose Island Taproom (on Fulton St, not the brewpub)</li>\r\n 	<li>Half Acre (on either Lincoln or the new, larger one further north on Balmoral)</li>\r\n 	<li>Revolution Brewery Taproom (on Kedzie, not the brewpub on Milwaukee)</li>\r\n 	<li>Ravenswood taproom crawl -- 4 taprooms on Ravenswood between Foster and Irving Park Rd</li>\r\n 	<li>DryHop (Lakeview - another cheat; more of a brewpub, but a fav of mine)</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Keith also asked if I have a favorite airport app to, as he said, “actually guide you through airports and their amenities/services.” I had to admit that I’m a bit more old-school and use the maps that are posted around, though I will use Untappd to find the airport bars that have the best beer selection, which is how I killed a bit of that CVG delay I talked about earlier. If anybody uses an airport app, please let me know and I’ll talk about it on the next episode.</li>\r\n 	<li>The stint in Cincinnati forces me to fly out of ORD first thing Monday morning, the worst part of the road warrior rush hour. I normally avoid Monday morning flights like the plague, but my schedule these past weeks has forced me into it. That first Monday, I gave myself an extra 30 minutes, figuring life is too short to hyperventilate in a TSA line. But even then, the line tailing out of the Terminal 3 PreCheck took my breath away -- half the way down the terminal and I couldn’t catch up to the end of it; it grew faster than I could walk. I finally was able to get in -- I may have cut someone off, I dunno, the end of the line was a bit nebulous, lot of people muddling around, eventually forming a coherent line. Kinda like the travelers version of post-Big Bang dust clouds eventually forming galaxies. Anyhow, I get into line and start walking back toward the PreCheck station, at a brisk pace, and I didn’t really stop until I stood at the little swinging gate, waiting for the next available agent to check my license. It was 5-7 minutes tops. It’s amazing how many passengers they can process with 9 agents checking ID and every screening machine running. And with a line that’s 90% experienced travelers. It was just this side of a precision drill squad. I was impressed.</li>\r\n 	<li>I haven’t spent much time in Cincinnati airport before. It’s a very nice airport, but feels a bit “overbuilt”, especially with Delta “de-hubbing” it after it merged with Northwest.There’s two terminals with a train running between them and to the main building. The train is fine, as airplane trains go -- no better or worse than Denver’s or Atlanta’s -- but it seems a lot shorter. Indeed, the walk between terminals is maybe 3 minutes. The train seems a bit superfluous, or that the Cincinnati airport is trying to punch above its weight. Though feeling a bit overbuilt, it’s doesn’t have the ghost town feeling that the Memphis airport had the last time I was there. There were concourses there where I didn’t see a soul. It too was a casualty of the Delta-Northwest merger, a Northwest hub that was shut down in favor of Delta’s superhub in Atlanta. Memphis has lost ⅔’s of its passenger traffic and is now spending millions to downsize, to shutdown and mothball those empty concourses. There’s a <a href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/23/us/memphis-airport.html\">good NY Times story</a> about this. I tweeted out a link while I was writing this, but will also put a link in the show notes.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> or our new <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a> at travelcommons -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/westexit-extra/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>On Condition of Anonymity</em></a> by the West Exit</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>How Bad is Business Travel For Your Health?</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I stumbled across an article in Harvard Business Review -- <a href=\"https://hbr.org/2018/05/just-how-bad-is-business-travel-for-your-health-heres-the-data\">Just How Bad is Business Travel for Your Health? Here’s the Data</a> -- by Dr Andrew Rundle, a pr ofessor of epidemiology at Columbia University. His bio says “his research focuses on the risks for, and consequences of, sedentary lifestyles and obesity.”\r\nThe article summarizes his recent research which boils down to\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Employees who spent 14 or more nights away from home per month had significantly higher body mass index scores and were significantly more likely to report clinical symptoms of anxiety, depression and alcohol dependence; no physical activity or exercise; smoking; and trouble sleeping. The odds of being obese were 92% higher for those who traveled 21 or more nights per month</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Yup, so tell me something I don’t know. It takes work, or “mindfulness” to be on-trend, to eat right, exercise, and go to bed at a reasonable time when the guardrails of your normal routine disappear. Rundle’s population is people who travel every week. In the US, many consultancies shoot for a “3-4-5” travel schedule for their full-time project staff -- 3 nights, 4 days on the road -- leaving Monday morning, returning Thursday night -- with the 5th day in the office or working from home. Depending on the number of weeks in the month, that’s 12 -15 nights/month.</li>\r\n 	<li>When I went into consulting and full-time travel, the change was immediate -- working late and then project team dinners rolled over my evening workout routine, eating out every meal blew up my regular diet, and waking up at 4am on Monday morning to catch the 6am flight to LaGuardia, so I could be at my midtown Manhattan client by 10am screwed up my sleep cycle for the next couple of days. I could see the effects on the guys in my “class” -- the guys who joined the firm the same fall that I did -- putting on weight, walking a bit slower through the airport, drinking a bit more at dinner, maybe missing an early morning meeting or call after staying out a bit too late.</li>\r\n 	<li>I made some adjustments -- moved to morning workouts, became more “mindful” about what I was eating -- ordering fish and vegetarian meals where I could (though there aren’t always great options for non-Big 3 proteins (non-beef, chicken, or pork) in places like Dover, OH, Ephrata, PA, or Huntsville, AL). Maybe this slowed the inevitable, but 10 years on, we were on a family vacation with my folks, a Caribbean cruise. One of the stops along the Yucatan, the Mayan Riviera as they were starting to call it, I walk out of the water to our chairs, my dad looks up at me and says “You’ve put a bit of weight on, haven’t you?” I would’ve blown him off, except that I knew it was true. My waist size was 2 inches bigger and I was carrying 20 lbs more than when I started. I was heading in the same direction as my colleagues, even though it was at a slower pace.</li>\r\n 	<li>I was able to reverse the trend, and I think one of the key reasons was by then, I was senior enough to have more control over my schedule. I was managing the projects rather than being managed. So I could relieve the expectations of nightly team dinners -- at least one night a week, everyone was on their own, and no pressure if you bagged out other nights. I’d turn in early on Monday nights when most of us had gotten up early to fly out. We’d pick hotels with good workout rooms and where we could walk to the client and to restaurants rather than drive. Where I could, I’d negotiate remote work weeks with the client -- save them expense money, and give our team a break from the airport. It took work to break out of the usual, the default behaviors -- that “mindfulness” thing again.</li>\r\n 	<li>Thinking back on it, I guess I’m surprised that the firms I was with expected me to figure this out on my own. There were always travel policies on spending limits, and using the corporate travel agency, and what receipts were needed, and when you could fly business class, but no real guidance/support on how to lead a somewhat healthy life on the road. Maybe because the people writing those policies weren’t traveling -- the accountants and HR managers were paying for their own meals and going home every night, maybe a bit jealous thinking we were living it up every night eating steak dinners and drinking bottles of wine. Which some of us were, because we weren’t mindful enough to think about another way.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/solace-medusa/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Subtle Vice</a> </em>by Solace</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Make Layovers Fun</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>One of the most sacred frequent traveler rules is Fly Direct. Be it winter with snow or summer with thunderstorms, adding that intermediate stop adds one more point of failure, one more opportunity for the airlines to screw up. But, with a bit of planning and an “adventuring” frame of mind, you can actually manufacture something good -- a mini-tour -- out of a connection. That has been the inspiration behind two TravelCommons videos -- the new MDW Layover Taproom Tour and the ORD Layover Excursion that I did almost 6 years ago -- and that is still getting regular hits on YouTube.</li>\r\n 	<li>To do it right, though, does take a bit of planning… and time. You have to factor in all the delay points -- getting off the plane, stashing your luggage if you carried on, getting to and from where you’re going, and then getting back through security when you return. For most airports, I think it’s tough to do a good layover tour in less than 4 hours -- this is supposed to be a fun daybreak, not another travel stressor.</li>\r\n 	<li>United Airlines used to have a series in their Hemispheres magazine called One City, Five Hours that would outline a 5-hour layover tour in a different city -- Reno, Albuquerque, Copenhagen, …. One of the early TravelCommons videos is me following their <a href=\"http://old.hemimag.us/2010/03/01/one-city-five-hours-frankfurt/\">Frankfurt tour</a> on a 6-hr layover between Mumbai and Chicago. Those article are tough to find, even with Google, but managed to dredge up the <a href=\"http://old.hemimag.us/2011/01/01/one-city-five-hours-copenhagen/\">Copenhagen one</a> from the Hemispheres archives and am going to give it a go at the end of this month.\r\nIn Episode 130 last year, I talked about how my son and I passed up a 90-minute connection in Vienna for an 8-hr one and then spent a Saturday eating schnitzel and drinking beer in the old section of town with a buddy of mine who came down from Poland.</li>\r\n 	<li>And I think that 5-8 hour span is about right. There are some exceptions -- the quick shopping jaunt from MSP to Mall of the Americas -- but even if you’re hitting the nearby Blue Lagoon on your Wow Air layover in Reykjavik, I’d still allow 4 hours, especially given the Wow check-in lines I stood in the last time I took flew them.\r\nJim McDonough felt that squeeze a few months ago. Commenting on the MDW Layover Facebook posting, Jim said</li>\r\n 	<li>We had a four hour layover at O\'Hare back in May on our way to Ireland. American did a schedule change that made a planned two hour layover into four. But we did not leave the airport. Somehow on international it didn\'t make sense. Had some bad \'free\' beer at the Admiral\'s Club.</li>\r\n 	<li>Yes, that would’ve been snug. Jim and his wife maybe could’ve swung down to Logan Square or Wicker Park -- both stops on the ORD subway line -- for a bite and a bit of a walkaround, but they would’ve needed to have a solid plan for that, tough with that last-minute schedule change.</li>\r\n 	<li>But even unplanned layovers can work out. Several years ago, my parents flew from Denver to Paducah, KY to visit my aunt and grandmother. As you can imagine, no direct flights so they connected through ORD. And, as you might guess, on the way home, their commuter flight was late out of Paducah and they missed a tight connection. My dad called me from the airport. It was New Year’s Eve night and we were having 3 or 4 couples over. “Get your luggage and book the flight out tomorrow,” I told him, “you can help me cook dinner.” I picked them up, brought them home, threw an apron at my dad, opened an early bottle of champagne, and we had a great time.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #143</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a> and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from from Saurab Bhargava’s album <em>Chromatique</em>.  The tracks were <em>Exit</em>, <em>Yours In Mine</em>, and <em>Through The Line</em>.  Here\'s an Amazon <a href=\"https://www.amazon.com/Chromatique-Saurab-Bhargava/dp/B004R7W3O8\">link </a>where you can buy the album.</li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_143.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #143 — How Bad is Business Travel For Your Health; Make Layovers Fun','','inherit','closed','closed','','2093-revision-v1','','','2018-08-09 21:17:34','2018-08-10 02:17:34','',2093,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/08/09/2093-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2097,1,'2018-08-09 21:19:36','2018-08-10 02:19:36','[caption id=\"attachment_2044\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/2018-06-22-20.15.56-1.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2044\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/2018-06-22-20.15.56-1-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> What\'s the Chinese character for \"wurst\"?[/caption]\r\n\r\nYet another last-minute long-distance trip, this time to Frankfurt, Germany, lets me check out United Airlines\' new business class service, and think again about the value for those expensive lie-flat seats. Seeing a new Chinese menu at a favorite wurst stand in the old part of Frankfurt reminds me of the changes driven by the new wave of Chinese tourists. I also read recent PR pitches for a new smart bag and a business traveler\'s biohack. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_143.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n<iframe src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/467065119&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"></iframe><!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #143:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you a spiffed up TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. The production bay has been somewhat reassembled -- less one piece of furniture in the name of decluttering -- with the walls now a real estate agent-approved shade of “greige” and the floors redone from cherry to a bit more of a walnut; bowing to the presumed tastes of the millennial buyer. It’s not bad, just different. Definitely lighter though.</li>\r\n 	<li>No spur-of-the-moment international trips in July; mostly just running around the Midwest, but re-vectoring from Wisconsin to Cincinnati; a bit too far to drive, so I’m losing the freedom to leave when I want and back to stooping through regional jet doorways.</li>\r\n 	<li>And back to having my schedule jacked up by weather events thousands of miles away from me. As we’ve talked about before, the regional jet operators, affiliates that don’t have spare jets available to step in and wipe out delays a plane may encounter along their daily bunny hop schedule. Last week, my AA flight from CVG to ORD was a textbook example of this. At 12:30, on the way back from lunch, I got my first delay notice -- for a 6pm flight. It was just 20 minutes, so I didn’t think much of it. It was a nice day in both Cincinnati and Chicago, so I just chalked it up to standard ORD traffic. But then the delay started to stretch -- to 30 minutes, to 40 minutes, to an hour. I fired up FlightAware and used the “Where’s My Plane Now?” functionality to try and figure out what was going on. The nice thing about the FlightAware screen is it shows you the flight path and the current weather. My plane was traveling from Norfolk, VA to Miami, and then up to Cincinnati -- and I could see heavy storms all along the Southeast coast. The plane was late leaving Norfolk, and then was having to vector down the Florida Gulf Coast to avoid the storms over the Atlantic Coast. This wasn’t looking good.</li>\r\n 	<li>FlightAware also shows a 10-day history for a flight’s departure/arrival times. This American flight had only arrived on-time once; had also canceled once, and arrived late the other 8 times. With a bit of time to kill, I fired up Excel and calculated that this flight averaged an hour and 20 minute delay -- counting the one on-time flight, but not counting the cancellation (figuring out how to average in infinity was a bit more work that I was willing to tackle). This wasn’t really a one-off weather delay; it was a bad flight route. So as I’m wont to do, I hit American on Twitter -- “this flt has been delayed/cancelled 8 of the past 9 days. Kinda think AA needs to rethink the scheduling for this one”. I looked at the history of the United flight also leaving at 6pm -- one late flight in the past 10 days. It flies back and forth between ORD and CVG. Maybe not a great plan for the winter, but better than flying through the humid South in July and August. I’m switching. Besides, the beer selection in CVG won’t keep me occupied through too many more hour-long delays.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/beyond7-revelations/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Miss America</em></a> by Beyond 7</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul class=\"\">\r\n 	<li>Even in the midst of studio refurb, I managed to push out the long-promised Chicago Midway Layover Southside Taproom Tour video. These videos always take longer than I think, but it’s fun and I like the end result. One of the things I’ve liked about the craft beer explosion -- in addition, of course, to good beer -- is that searching out new microbreweries has taken me to parts of cities I never would’ve visited otherwise -- walking into a basement in Portland, Oregon wondering how in the hell they got these huge steel tanks down here; or coming out of the Paris Metro in the middle of a North African neighborhood. I hope this Midway video has some of that same feel -- skipping the parts of Chicago that make the tour guides or TV shows -- the baseball themepark of Wrigleyville, the lakefront, hipster enclaves of Wicker Park and Logan Square -- guiding folks to pass through Douglas Park, Pilsen, Bridgeport, and the Back of the Yards. If you haven’t seen it already, check it out. You can watch it on the TravelCommons Facebook page, or go to the TravelCommons web site and you can click through to it on YouTube. Robert Fenerty left a comment on YouTube -- “Might be an excellent way to help get my A List status renewed this year!” Which, I think, is an excellent idea…</li>\r\n 	<li>Rob Cheshire commented on the web site, talking about the Southside breweries I featured on the video --\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Thanks Mark! I will definitely build a visit to Marz and Lo-rez into my schedule for my August trip to Chicago. I am undecided about Whiner, which might be a bit too “European” in terms of beer styles for my tastes.I am a bit conflicted about Lagunitas, being part of the evil-Heineken Empire! I have no doubt that they have some great beers, and that the tasting room is a very cool spot.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Rob and I have trading thoughts on Chicago brewery in comments to TravelCommons web site posts and Untappd check ins for a couple of months leading up to his trip here. Little does he know that I’m going to hit him up the other way for suggestions for my quick visit to Copenhagen in September. Rob has started his own blog -- <a href=\"https://taproomadventure.blogspot.com/\">The Great Taproom Adventure</a> -- with his notes on the taprooms he visits.</li>\r\n 	<li>Keith Love -- “long-time listener, first-time caller” as he describes himself -- sent me a note. He and his son are hitting Chicago early this month -- maybe for Lollapalooza? You’d be surprised how many older folks go hard on that 4-day music festival. Keith asked me for some restaurant and taproom recommendations, which got me thinking that I should do a Chicago episode, but in lieu of that, here’s the list I built for Keith in case you’re passing through Chicago soon -\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Restaurant suggestions with good food/beer selections\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>The Publican (Fulton Market)</li>\r\n 	<li>Cruz Blanca (Randolph St)</li>\r\n 	<li>The Fountainhead (North Center)</li>\r\n 	<li>Hopleaf (Andersonville)</li>\r\n 	<li>Purple Pig (Michigan Ave)</li>\r\n 	<li>Eataly (River North; beer bar on the top floor)</li>\r\n 	<li>Fat Rice (Logan Square -- a bit of a cheat; OK beer, but food you won\'t find anywhere else)</li>\r\n 	<li>Wiener Circle (Lakeview -- even more of a cheat; no beer but a great char-Polish)</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Favorite Chicago taprooms -- this is more Northside focused since Keith said he was staying in River North\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Goose Island Taproom (on Fulton St, not the brewpub)</li>\r\n 	<li>Half Acre (on either Lincoln or the new, larger one further north on Balmoral)</li>\r\n 	<li>Revolution Brewery Taproom (on Kedzie, not the brewpub on Milwaukee)</li>\r\n 	<li>Ravenswood taproom crawl -- 4 taprooms on Ravenswood between Foster and Irving Park Rd</li>\r\n 	<li>DryHop (Lakeview - another cheat; more of a brewpub, but a fav of mine)</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Keith also asked if I have a favorite airport app to, as he said, “actually guide you through airports and their amenities/services.” I had to admit that I’m a bit more old-school and use the maps that are posted around, though I will use Untappd to find the airport bars that have the best beer selection, which is how I killed a bit of that CVG delay I talked about earlier. If anybody uses an airport app, please let me know and I’ll talk about it on the next episode.</li>\r\n 	<li>The stint in Cincinnati forces me to fly out of ORD first thing Monday morning, the worst part of the road warrior rush hour. I normally avoid Monday morning flights like the plague, but my schedule these past weeks has forced me into it. That first Monday, I gave myself an extra 30 minutes, figuring life is too short to hyperventilate in a TSA line. But even then, the line tailing out of the Terminal 3 PreCheck took my breath away -- half the way down the terminal and I couldn’t catch up to the end of it; it grew faster than I could walk. I finally was able to get in -- I may have cut someone off, I dunno, the end of the line was a bit nebulous, lot of people muddling around, eventually forming a coherent line. Kinda like the travelers version of post-Big Bang dust clouds eventually forming galaxies. Anyhow, I get into line and start walking back toward the PreCheck station, at a brisk pace, and I didn’t really stop until I stood at the little swinging gate, waiting for the next available agent to check my license. It was 5-7 minutes tops. It’s amazing how many passengers they can process with 9 agents checking ID and every screening machine running. And with a line that’s 90% experienced travelers. It was just this side of a precision drill squad. I was impressed.</li>\r\n 	<li>I haven’t spent much time in Cincinnati airport before. It’s a very nice airport, but feels a bit “overbuilt”, especially with Delta “de-hubbing” it after it merged with Northwest.There’s two terminals with a train running between them and to the main building. The train is fine, as airplane trains go -- no better or worse than Denver’s or Atlanta’s -- but it seems a lot shorter. Indeed, the walk between terminals is maybe 3 minutes. The train seems a bit superfluous, or that the Cincinnati airport is trying to punch above its weight. Though feeling a bit overbuilt, it’s doesn’t have the ghost town feeling that the Memphis airport had the last time I was there. There were concourses there where I didn’t see a soul. It too was a casualty of the Delta-Northwest merger, a Northwest hub that was shut down in favor of Delta’s superhub in Atlanta. Memphis has lost ⅔’s of its passenger traffic and is now spending millions to downsize, to shutdown and mothball those empty concourses. There’s a <a href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/23/us/memphis-airport.html\">good NY Times story</a> about this. I tweeted out a link while I was writing this, but will also put a link in the show notes.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> or our new <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a> at travelcommons -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/westexit-extra/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>On Condition of Anonymity</em></a> by the West Exit</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>How Bad is Business Travel For Your Health?</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I stumbled across an article in Harvard Business Review -- <a href=\"https://hbr.org/2018/05/just-how-bad-is-business-travel-for-your-health-heres-the-data\">Just How Bad is Business Travel for Your Health? Here’s the Data</a> -- by Dr Andrew Rundle, a pr ofessor of epidemiology at Columbia University. His bio says “his research focuses on the risks for, and consequences of, sedentary lifestyles and obesity.”\r\nThe article summarizes his recent research which boils down to\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Employees who spent 14 or more nights away from home per month had significantly higher body mass index scores and were significantly more likely to report clinical symptoms of anxiety, depression and alcohol dependence; no physical activity or exercise; smoking; and trouble sleeping. The odds of being obese were 92% higher for those who traveled 21 or more nights per month</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Yup, so tell me something I don’t know. It takes work, or “mindfulness” to be on-trend, to eat right, exercise, and go to bed at a reasonable time when the guardrails of your normal routine disappear. Rundle’s population is people who travel every week. In the US, many consultancies shoot for a “3-4-5” travel schedule for their full-time project staff -- 3 nights, 4 days on the road -- leaving Monday morning, returning Thursday night -- with the 5th day in the office or working from home. Depending on the number of weeks in the month, that’s 12 -15 nights/month.</li>\r\n 	<li>When I went into consulting and full-time travel, the change was immediate -- working late and then project team dinners rolled over my evening workout routine, eating out every meal blew up my regular diet, and waking up at 4am on Monday morning to catch the 6am flight to LaGuardia, so I could be at my midtown Manhattan client by 10am screwed up my sleep cycle for the next couple of days. I could see the effects on the guys in my “class” -- the guys who joined the firm the same fall that I did -- putting on weight, walking a bit slower through the airport, drinking a bit more at dinner, maybe missing an early morning meeting or call after staying out a bit too late.</li>\r\n 	<li>I made some adjustments -- moved to morning workouts, became more “mindful” about what I was eating -- ordering fish and vegetarian meals where I could (though there aren’t always great options for non-Big 3 proteins (non-beef, chicken, or pork) in places like Dover, OH, Ephrata, PA, or Huntsville, AL). Maybe this slowed the inevitable, but 10 years on, we were on a family vacation with my folks, a Caribbean cruise. One of the stops along the Yucatan, the Mayan Riviera as they were starting to call it, I walk out of the water to our chairs, my dad looks up at me and says “You’ve put a bit of weight on, haven’t you?” I would’ve blown him off, except that I knew it was true. My waist size was 2 inches bigger and I was carrying 20 lbs more than when I started. I was heading in the same direction as my colleagues, even though it was at a slower pace.</li>\r\n 	<li>I was able to reverse the trend, and I think one of the key reasons was by then, I was senior enough to have more control over my schedule. I was managing the projects rather than being managed. So I could relieve the expectations of nightly team dinners -- at least one night a week, everyone was on their own, and no pressure if you bagged out other nights. I’d turn in early on Monday nights when most of us had gotten up early to fly out. We’d pick hotels with good workout rooms and where we could walk to the client and to restaurants rather than drive. Where I could, I’d negotiate remote work weeks with the client -- save them expense money, and give our team a break from the airport. It took work to break out of the usual, the default behaviors -- that “mindfulness” thing again.</li>\r\n 	<li>Thinking back on it, I guess I’m surprised that the firms I was with expected me to figure this out on my own. There were always travel policies on spending limits, and using the corporate travel agency, and what receipts were needed, and when you could fly business class, but no real guidance/support on how to lead a somewhat healthy life on the road. Maybe because the people writing those policies weren’t traveling -- the accountants and HR managers were paying for their own meals and going home every night, maybe a bit jealous thinking we were living it up every night eating steak dinners and drinking bottles of wine. Which some of us were, because we weren’t mindful enough to think about another way.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/solace-medusa/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Subtle Vice</a> </em>by Solace</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Make Layovers Fun</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>One of the most sacred frequent traveler rules is Fly Direct. Be it winter with snow or summer with thunderstorms, adding that intermediate stop adds one more point of failure, one more opportunity for the airlines to screw up. But, with a bit of planning and an “adventuring” frame of mind, you can actually manufacture something good -- a mini-tour -- out of a connection. That has been the inspiration behind two TravelCommons videos -- the new MDW Layover Taproom Tour and the ORD Layover Excursion that I did almost 6 years ago -- and that is still getting regular hits on YouTube.</li>\r\n 	<li>To do it right, though, does take a bit of planning… and time. You have to factor in all the delay points -- getting off the plane, stashing your luggage if you carried on, getting to and from where you’re going, and then getting back through security when you return. For most airports, I think it’s tough to do a good layover tour in less than 4 hours -- this is supposed to be a fun daybreak, not another travel stressor.</li>\r\n 	<li>United Airlines used to have a series in their Hemispheres magazine called One City, Five Hours that would outline a 5-hour layover tour in a different city -- Reno, Albuquerque, Copenhagen, …. One of the early TravelCommons videos is me following their <a href=\"http://old.hemimag.us/2010/03/01/one-city-five-hours-frankfurt/\">Frankfurt tour</a> on a 6-hr layover between Mumbai and Chicago. Those article are tough to find, even with Google, but managed to dredge up the <a href=\"http://old.hemimag.us/2011/01/01/one-city-five-hours-copenhagen/\">Copenhagen one</a> from the Hemispheres archives and am going to give it a go at the end of this month.</li>\r\n 	<li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/06/24/podcast-130-notes-from-hungary/\">Episode 130</a> last year, I talked about how my son and I passed up a 90-minute connection in Vienna for an 8-hr one and then spent a Saturday eating schnitzel and drinking beer in the old section of town with a buddy of mine who came down from Poland.</li>\r\n 	<li>And I think that 5-8 hour span is about right. There are some exceptions -- the quick shopping jaunt from MSP to Mall of the Americas -- but even if you’re hitting the nearby Blue Lagoon on your Wow Air layover in Reykjavik, I’d still allow 4 hours, especially given the Wow check-in lines I stood in the last time I took flew them.\r\nJim McDonough felt that squeeze a few months ago. Commenting on the MDW Layover Facebook posting, Jim said</li>\r\n 	<li>We had a four hour layover at O\'Hare back in May on our way to Ireland. American did a schedule change that made a planned two hour layover into four. But we did not leave the airport. Somehow on international it didn\'t make sense. Had some bad \'free\' beer at the Admiral\'s Club.</li>\r\n 	<li>Yes, that would’ve been snug. Jim and his wife maybe could’ve swung down to Logan Square or Wicker Park -- both stops on the ORD subway line -- for a bite and a bit of a walkaround, but they would’ve needed to have a solid plan for that, tough with that last-minute schedule change.</li>\r\n 	<li>But even unplanned layovers can work out. Several years ago, my parents flew from Denver to Paducah, KY to visit my aunt and grandmother. As you can imagine, no direct flights so they connected through ORD. And, as you might guess, on the way home, their commuter flight was late out of Paducah and they missed a tight connection. My dad called me from the airport. It was New Year’s Eve night and we were having 3 or 4 couples over. “Get your luggage and book the flight out tomorrow,” I told him, “you can help me cook dinner.” I picked them up, brought them home, threw an apron at my dad, opened an early bottle of champagne, and we had a great time.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #143</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a> and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from from Saurab Bhargava’s album <em>Chromatique</em>.  The tracks were <em>Exit</em>, <em>Yours In Mine</em>, and <em>Through The Line</em>.  Here\'s an Amazon <a href=\"https://www.amazon.com/Chromatique-Saurab-Bhargava/dp/B004R7W3O8\">link </a>where you can buy the album.</li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_143.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #143 — How Bad is Business Travel For Your Health; Make Layovers Fun','','inherit','closed','closed','','2093-revision-v1','','','2018-08-09 21:19:36','2018-08-10 02:19:36','',2093,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/08/09/2093-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2098,1,'2018-08-09 21:22:10','2018-08-10 02:22:10','[caption id=\"attachment_2044\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/2018-06-22-20.15.56-1.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2044\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/2018-06-22-20.15.56-1-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> What\'s the Chinese character for \"wurst\"?[/caption]\r\n\r\nYet another last-minute long-distance trip, this time to Frankfurt, Germany, lets me check out United Airlines\' new business class service, and think again about the value for those expensive lie-flat seats. Seeing a new Chinese menu at a favorite wurst stand in the old part of Frankfurt reminds me of the changes driven by the new wave of Chinese tourists. I also read recent PR pitches for a new smart bag and a business traveler\'s biohack. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_143.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n<iframe src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/467065119&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"></iframe><!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #143:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you a spiffed up TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. The production bay has been somewhat reassembled -- less one piece of furniture in the name of decluttering -- with the walls now a real estate agent-approved shade of “greige” and the floors redone from cherry to a bit more of a walnut; bowing to the presumed tastes of the millennial buyer. It’s not bad, just different. Definitely lighter though.</li>\r\n 	<li>No spur-of-the-moment international trips in July; mostly just running around the Midwest, but re-vectoring from Wisconsin to Cincinnati; a bit too far to drive, so I’m losing the freedom to leave when I want and back to stooping through regional jet doorways.</li>\r\n 	<li>And back to having my schedule jacked up by weather events thousands of miles away from me. As we’ve talked about before, the regional jet operators, affiliates that don’t have spare jets available to step in and wipe out delays a plane may encounter along their daily bunny hop schedule. Last week, my AA flight from CVG to ORD was a textbook example of this. At 12:30, on the way back from lunch, I got my first delay notice -- for a 6pm flight. It was just 20 minutes, so I didn’t think much of it. It was a nice day in both Cincinnati and Chicago, so I just chalked it up to standard ORD traffic. But then the delay started to stretch -- to 30 minutes, to 40 minutes, to an hour. I fired up FlightAware and used the “Where’s My Plane Now?” functionality to try and figure out what was going on. The nice thing about the FlightAware screen is it shows you the flight path and the current weather. My plane was traveling from Norfolk, VA to Miami, and then up to Cincinnati -- and I could see heavy storms all along the Southeast coast. The plane was late leaving Norfolk, and then was having to vector down the Florida Gulf Coast to avoid the storms over the Atlantic Coast. This wasn’t looking good.</li>\r\n 	<li>FlightAware also shows a 10-day history for a flight’s departure/arrival times. This American flight had only arrived on-time once; had also canceled once, and arrived late the other 8 times. With a bit of time to kill, I fired up Excel and calculated that this flight averaged an hour and 20 minute delay -- counting the one on-time flight, but not counting the cancellation (figuring out how to average in infinity was a bit more work that I was willing to tackle). This wasn’t really a one-off weather delay; it was a bad flight route. So as I’m wont to do, I hit American on Twitter -- “this flt has been delayed/cancelled 8 of the past 9 days. Kinda think AA needs to rethink the scheduling for this one”. I looked at the history of the United flight also leaving at 6pm -- one late flight in the past 10 days. It flies back and forth between ORD and CVG. Maybe not a great plan for the winter, but better than flying through the humid South in July and August. I’m switching. Besides, the beer selection in CVG won’t keep me occupied through too many more hour-long delays.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/beyond7-revelations/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Miss America</em></a> by Beyond 7</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul class=\"\">\r\n 	<li>Even in the midst of studio refurb, I managed to push out the long-promised Chicago Midway Layover Southside Taproom Tour video. These videos always take longer than I think, but it’s fun and I like the end result. One of the things I’ve liked about the craft beer explosion -- in addition, of course, to good beer -- is that searching out new microbreweries has taken me to parts of cities I never would’ve visited otherwise -- walking into a basement in Portland, Oregon wondering how in the hell they got these huge steel tanks down here; or coming out of the Paris Metro in the middle of a North African neighborhood. I hope this Midway video has some of that same feel -- skipping the parts of Chicago that make the tour guides or TV shows -- the baseball themepark of Wrigleyville, the lakefront, hipster enclaves of Wicker Park and Logan Square -- guiding folks to pass through Douglas Park, Pilsen, Bridgeport, and the Back of the Yards. If you haven’t seen it already, check it out. You can watch it on the TravelCommons Facebook page, or go to the TravelCommons web site and you can click through to it on YouTube. Robert Fenerty left a comment on YouTube -- “Might be an excellent way to help get my A List status renewed this year!” Which, I think, is an excellent idea…</li>\r\n 	<li>Rob Cheshire commented on the web site, talking about the Southside breweries I featured on the video --\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Thanks Mark! I will definitely build a visit to Marz and Lo-rez into my schedule for my August trip to Chicago. I am undecided about Whiner, which might be a bit too “European” in terms of beer styles for my tastes.I am a bit conflicted about Lagunitas, being part of the evil-Heineken Empire! I have no doubt that they have some great beers, and that the tasting room is a very cool spot.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Rob and I have trading thoughts on Chicago brewery in comments to TravelCommons web site posts and Untappd check ins for a couple of months leading up to his trip here. Little does he know that I’m going to hit him up the other way for suggestions for my quick visit to Copenhagen in September. Rob has started his own blog -- <a href=\"https://taproomadventure.blogspot.com/\">The Great Taproom Adventure</a> -- with his notes on the taprooms he visits.</li>\r\n 	<li>Keith Love -- “long-time listener, first-time caller” as he describes himself -- sent me a note. He and his son are hitting Chicago early this month -- maybe for Lollapalooza? You’d be surprised how many older folks go hard on that 4-day music festival. Keith asked me for some restaurant and taproom recommendations, which got me thinking that I should do a Chicago episode, but in lieu of that, here’s the list I built for Keith in case you’re passing through Chicago soon -\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Restaurant suggestions with good food/beer selections\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>The Publican (Fulton Market)</li>\r\n 	<li>Cruz Blanca (Randolph St)</li>\r\n 	<li>The Fountainhead (North Center)</li>\r\n 	<li>Hopleaf (Andersonville)</li>\r\n 	<li>Purple Pig (Michigan Ave)</li>\r\n 	<li>Eataly (River North; beer bar on the top floor)</li>\r\n 	<li>Fat Rice (Logan Square -- a bit of a cheat; OK beer, but food you won\'t find anywhere else)</li>\r\n 	<li>Wiener Circle (Lakeview -- even more of a cheat; no beer but a great char-Polish)</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Favorite Chicago taprooms -- this is more Northside focused since Keith said he was staying in River North\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Goose Island Taproom (on Fulton St, not the brewpub)</li>\r\n 	<li>Half Acre (on either Lincoln or the new, larger one further north on Balmoral)</li>\r\n 	<li>Revolution Brewery Taproom (on Kedzie, not the brewpub on Milwaukee)</li>\r\n 	<li>Ravenswood taproom crawl -- 4 taprooms on Ravenswood between Foster and Irving Park Rd</li>\r\n 	<li>DryHop (Lakeview - another cheat; more of a brewpub, but a fav of mine)</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Keith also asked if I have a favorite airport app to, as he said, “actually guide you through airports and their amenities/services.” I had to admit that I’m a bit more old-school and use the maps that are posted around, though I will use Untappd to find the airport bars that have the best beer selection, which is how I killed a bit of that CVG delay I talked about earlier. If anybody uses an airport app, please let me know and I’ll talk about it on the next episode.</li>\r\n 	<li>The stint in Cincinnati forces me to fly out of ORD first thing Monday morning, the worst part of the road warrior rush hour. I normally avoid Monday morning flights like the plague, but my schedule these past weeks has forced me into it. That first Monday, I gave myself an extra 30 minutes, figuring life is too short to hyperventilate in a TSA line. But even then, the line tailing out of the Terminal 3 PreCheck took my breath away -- half the way down the terminal and I couldn’t catch up to the end of it; it grew faster than I could walk. I finally was able to get in -- I may have cut someone off, I dunno, the end of the line was a bit nebulous, lot of people muddling around, eventually forming a coherent line. Kinda like the travelers version of post-Big Bang dust clouds eventually forming galaxies. Anyhow, I get into line and start walking back toward the PreCheck station, at a brisk pace, and I didn’t really stop until I stood at the little swinging gate, waiting for the next available agent to check my license. It was 5-7 minutes tops. It’s amazing how many passengers they can process with 9 agents checking ID and every screening machine running. And with a line that’s 90% experienced travelers. It was just this side of a precision drill squad. I was impressed.</li>\r\n 	<li>I haven’t spent much time in Cincinnati airport before. It’s a very nice airport, but feels a bit “overbuilt”, especially with Delta “de-hubbing” it after it merged with Northwest.There’s two terminals with a train running between them and to the main building. The train is fine, as airplane trains go -- no better or worse than Denver’s or Atlanta’s -- but it seems a lot shorter. Indeed, the walk between terminals is maybe 3 minutes. The train seems a bit superfluous, or that the Cincinnati airport is trying to punch above its weight. Though feeling a bit overbuilt, it’s doesn’t have the ghost town feeling that the Memphis airport had the last time I was there. There were concourses there where I didn’t see a soul. It too was a casualty of the Delta-Northwest merger, a Northwest hub that was shut down in favor of Delta’s superhub in Atlanta. Memphis has lost ⅔’s of its passenger traffic and is now spending millions to downsize, to shutdown and mothball those empty concourses. There’s a <a href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/23/us/memphis-airport.html\">good NY Times story</a> about this. I tweeted out a link while I was writing this, but will also put a link in the show notes.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> or our new <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a> at travelcommons -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/westexit-extra/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>On Condition of Anonymity</em></a> by the West Exit</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>How Bad is Business Travel For Your Health?</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I stumbled across an article in Harvard Business Review -- <a href=\"https://hbr.org/2018/05/just-how-bad-is-business-travel-for-your-health-heres-the-data\">Just How Bad is Business Travel for Your Health? Here’s the Data</a> -- by Dr Andrew Rundle, a pr ofessor of epidemiology at Columbia University. His bio says “his research focuses on the risks for, and consequences of, sedentary lifestyles and obesity.”\r\nThe article summarizes his recent research which boils down to\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Employees who spent 14 or more nights away from home per month had significantly higher body mass index scores and were significantly more likely to report clinical symptoms of anxiety, depression and alcohol dependence; no physical activity or exercise; smoking; and trouble sleeping. The odds of being obese were 92% higher for those who traveled 21 or more nights per month</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Yup, so tell me something I don’t know. It takes work, or “mindfulness” to be on-trend, to eat right, exercise, and go to bed at a reasonable time when the guardrails of your normal routine disappear. Rundle’s population is people who travel every week. In the US, many consultancies shoot for a “3-4-5” travel schedule for their full-time project staff -- 3 nights, 4 days on the road -- leaving Monday morning, returning Thursday night -- with the 5th day in the office or working from home. Depending on the number of weeks in the month, that’s 12 -15 nights/month.</li>\r\n 	<li>When I went into consulting and full-time travel, the change was immediate -- working late and then project team dinners rolled over my evening workout routine, eating out every meal blew up my regular diet, and waking up at 4am on Monday morning to catch the 6am flight to LaGuardia, so I could be at my midtown Manhattan client by 10am screwed up my sleep cycle for the next couple of days. I could see the effects on the guys in my “class” -- the guys who joined the firm the same fall that I did -- putting on weight, walking a bit slower through the airport, drinking a bit more at dinner, maybe missing an early morning meeting or call after staying out a bit too late.</li>\r\n 	<li>I made some adjustments -- moved to morning workouts, became more “mindful” about what I was eating -- ordering fish and vegetarian meals where I could (though there aren’t always great options for non-Big 3 proteins (non-beef, chicken, or pork) in places like Dover, OH, Ephrata, PA, or Huntsville, AL). Maybe this slowed the inevitable, but 10 years on, we were on a family vacation with my folks, a Caribbean cruise. One of the stops along the Yucatan, the Mayan Riviera as they were starting to call it, I walk out of the water to our chairs, my dad looks up at me and says “You’ve put a bit of weight on, haven’t you?” I would’ve blown him off, except that I knew it was true. My waist size was 2 inches bigger and I was carrying 20 lbs more than when I started. I was heading in the same direction as my colleagues, even though it was at a slower pace.</li>\r\n 	<li>I was able to reverse the trend, and I think one of the key reasons was by then, I was senior enough to have more control over my schedule. I was managing the projects rather than being managed. So I could relieve the expectations of nightly team dinners -- at least one night a week, everyone was on their own, and no pressure if you bagged out other nights. I’d turn in early on Monday nights when most of us had gotten up early to fly out. We’d pick hotels with good workout rooms and where we could walk to the client and to restaurants rather than drive. Where I could, I’d negotiate remote work weeks with the client -- save them expense money, and give our team a break from the airport. It took work to break out of the usual, the default behaviors -- that “mindfulness” thing again.</li>\r\n 	<li>Thinking back on it, I guess I’m surprised that the firms I was with expected me to figure this out on my own. There were always travel policies on spending limits, and using the corporate travel agency, and what receipts were needed, and when you could fly business class, but no real guidance/support on how to lead a somewhat healthy life on the road. Maybe because the people writing those policies weren’t traveling -- the accountants and HR managers were paying for their own meals and going home every night, maybe a bit jealous thinking we were living it up every night eating steak dinners and drinking bottles of wine. Which some of us were, because we weren’t mindful enough to think about another way.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/solace-medusa/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Subtle Vice</a> </em>by Solace</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Make Layovers Fun</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>One of the most sacred frequent traveler rules is Fly Direct. Be it winter with snow or summer with thunderstorms, adding that intermediate stop adds one more point of failure, one more opportunity for the airlines to screw up. But, with a bit of planning and an “adventuring” frame of mind, you can actually manufacture something good -- a mini-tour -- out of a connection. That has been the inspiration behind two TravelCommons videos -- the new MDW Layover Taproom Tour and the ORD Layover Excursion that I did almost 6 years ago -- and that is still getting regular hits on YouTube.</li>\r\n 	<li>To do it right, though, does take a bit of planning… and time. You have to factor in all the delay points -- getting off the plane, stashing your luggage if you carried on, getting to and from where you’re going, and then getting back through security when you return. For most airports, I think it’s tough to do a good layover tour in less than 4 hours -- this is supposed to be a fun daybreak, not another travel stressor.</li>\r\n 	<li>United Airlines used to have a series in their Hemispheres magazine called One City, Five Hours that would outline a 5-hour layover tour in a different city -- Reno, Albuquerque, Copenhagen, …. One of the early TravelCommons videos is me following their <a href=\"http://old.hemimag.us/2010/03/01/one-city-five-hours-frankfurt/\">Frankfurt tour</a> on a 6-hr layover between Mumbai and Chicago. Those article are tough to find, even with Google, but managed to dredge up the <a href=\"http://old.hemimag.us/2011/01/01/one-city-five-hours-copenhagen/\">Copenhagen one</a> from the Hemispheres archives and am going to give it a go at the end of this month.</li>\r\n 	<li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/06/24/podcast-130-notes-from-hungary/\">Episode 130</a> last year, I talked about how my son and I passed up a 90-minute connection in Vienna for an 8-hr one and then spent a Saturday eating schnitzel and drinking beer in the old section of town with a buddy of mine who came down from Poland.</li>\r\n 	<li>And I think that 5-8 hour span is about right. There are some exceptions -- the quick shopping jaunt from MSP to Mall of the Americas -- but even if you’re hitting the nearby Blue Lagoon on your Wow Air layover in Reykjavik, I’d still allow 4 hours, especially given the Wow check-in lines I stood in the last time I took flew them.\r\nJim McDonough felt that squeeze a few months ago. Commenting on the MDW Layover Facebook posting, Jim said</li>\r\n 	<li>We had a four hour layover at O\'Hare back in May on our way to Ireland. American did a schedule change that made a planned two hour layover into four. But we did not leave the airport. Somehow on international it didn\'t make sense. Had some bad \'free\' beer at the Admiral\'s Club.</li>\r\n 	<li>Yes, that would’ve been snug. Jim and his wife maybe could’ve swung down to Logan Square or Wicker Park -- both stops on the ORD subway line -- for a bite and a bit of a walkaround, but they would’ve needed to have a solid plan for that, tough with that last-minute schedule change.</li>\r\n 	<li>But even unplanned layovers can work out. Several years ago, my parents flew from Denver to Paducah, KY to visit my aunt and grandmother. As you can imagine, no direct flights so they connected through ORD. And, as you might guess, on the way home, their commuter flight was late out of Paducah and they missed a tight connection. My dad called me from the airport. It was New Year’s Eve night and we were having 3 or 4 couples over. “Get your luggage and book the flight out tomorrow,” I told him, “you can help me cook dinner.” I picked them up, brought them home, threw an apron at my dad, opened an early bottle of champagne, and we had a great time.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #143</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a> and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music is from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Magnatune</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_143.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #143 — How Bad is Business Travel For Your Health; Make Layovers Fun','','inherit','closed','closed','','2093-revision-v1','','','2018-08-09 21:22:10','2018-08-10 02:22:10','',2093,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/08/09/2093-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2099,1,'2018-08-09 21:25:41','2018-08-10 02:25:41','I \"sprint toured\" <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Frankfurt-am-Main\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/germany/frankfurt-am-main\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\">Frankfurt</a> using Hemispheres Magazine\'s \"One City, Five Hours: Frankfurt\" <a href=\"http://old.hemimag.us/2010/03/01/one-city-five-hours-frankfurt/\">article</a> while on a 6-hour layover between Mumbai and Chicago. I shot this on my iPhone 4 and edited it in iMovie on my MacBook Air while flying from Frankfurt to Chicago. My iPhone video inexperience shows -- I shot the entire thing in portrait mode.\r\n\r\n<iframe src=\"https://www.youtube.com/embed/3s4aYmeoS2k\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"></iframe>','Video  – One City, Five Hours: Frankfurt','','inherit','closed','closed','','605-revision-v1','','','2018-08-09 21:25:41','2018-08-10 02:25:41','',605,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/08/09/605-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2100,1,'2018-08-09 21:59:36','2018-08-10 02:59:36','','20121212_195127000_iOS','Duck squats are supposed to keep you healthy','inherit','open','closed','','20121212_195127000_ios','','','2018-08-09 22:01:57','2018-08-10 03:01:57','',2093,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/20121212_195127000_iOS.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(2101,1,'2018-08-09 22:02:56','2018-08-10 03:02:56','[caption id=\"attachment_2100\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/20121212_195127000_iOS.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2100\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/20121212_195127000_iOS-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Duck squats are supposed to keep you healthy[/caption]\r\n\r\nYet another last-minute long-distance trip, this time to Frankfurt, Germany, lets me check out United Airlines\' new business class service, and think again about the value for those expensive lie-flat seats. Seeing a new Chinese menu at a favorite wurst stand in the old part of Frankfurt reminds me of the changes driven by the new wave of Chinese tourists. I also read recent PR pitches for a new smart bag and a business traveler\'s biohack. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_143.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n<iframe src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/467065119&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"></iframe><!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #143:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you a spiffed up TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. The production bay has been somewhat reassembled -- less one piece of furniture in the name of decluttering -- with the walls now a real estate agent-approved shade of “greige” and the floors redone from cherry to a bit more of a walnut; bowing to the presumed tastes of the millennial buyer. It’s not bad, just different. Definitely lighter though.</li>\r\n 	<li>No spur-of-the-moment international trips in July; mostly just running around the Midwest, but re-vectoring from Wisconsin to Cincinnati; a bit too far to drive, so I’m losing the freedom to leave when I want and back to stooping through regional jet doorways.</li>\r\n 	<li>And back to having my schedule jacked up by weather events thousands of miles away from me. As we’ve talked about before, the regional jet operators, affiliates that don’t have spare jets available to step in and wipe out delays a plane may encounter along their daily bunny hop schedule. Last week, my AA flight from CVG to ORD was a textbook example of this. At 12:30, on the way back from lunch, I got my first delay notice -- for a 6pm flight. It was just 20 minutes, so I didn’t think much of it. It was a nice day in both Cincinnati and Chicago, so I just chalked it up to standard ORD traffic. But then the delay started to stretch -- to 30 minutes, to 40 minutes, to an hour. I fired up FlightAware and used the “Where’s My Plane Now?” functionality to try and figure out what was going on. The nice thing about the FlightAware screen is it shows you the flight path and the current weather. My plane was traveling from Norfolk, VA to Miami, and then up to Cincinnati -- and I could see heavy storms all along the Southeast coast. The plane was late leaving Norfolk, and then was having to vector down the Florida Gulf Coast to avoid the storms over the Atlantic Coast. This wasn’t looking good.</li>\r\n 	<li>FlightAware also shows a 10-day history for a flight’s departure/arrival times. This American flight had only arrived on-time once; had also canceled once, and arrived late the other 8 times. With a bit of time to kill, I fired up Excel and calculated that this flight averaged an hour and 20 minute delay -- counting the one on-time flight, but not counting the cancellation (figuring out how to average in infinity was a bit more work that I was willing to tackle). This wasn’t really a one-off weather delay; it was a bad flight route. So as I’m wont to do, I hit American on Twitter -- “this flt has been delayed/cancelled 8 of the past 9 days. Kinda think AA needs to rethink the scheduling for this one”. I looked at the history of the United flight also leaving at 6pm -- one late flight in the past 10 days. It flies back and forth between ORD and CVG. Maybe not a great plan for the winter, but better than flying through the humid South in July and August. I’m switching. Besides, the beer selection in CVG won’t keep me occupied through too many more hour-long delays.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/beyond7-revelations/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Miss America</em></a> by Beyond 7</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul class=\"\">\r\n 	<li>Even in the midst of studio refurb, I managed to push out the long-promised Chicago Midway Layover Southside Taproom Tour video. These videos always take longer than I think, but it’s fun and I like the end result. One of the things I’ve liked about the craft beer explosion -- in addition, of course, to good beer -- is that searching out new microbreweries has taken me to parts of cities I never would’ve visited otherwise -- walking into a basement in Portland, Oregon wondering how in the hell they got these huge steel tanks down here; or coming out of the Paris Metro in the middle of a North African neighborhood. I hope this Midway video has some of that same feel -- skipping the parts of Chicago that make the tour guides or TV shows -- the baseball themepark of Wrigleyville, the lakefront, hipster enclaves of Wicker Park and Logan Square -- guiding folks to pass through Douglas Park, Pilsen, Bridgeport, and the Back of the Yards. If you haven’t seen it already, check it out. You can watch it on the TravelCommons Facebook page, or go to the TravelCommons web site and you can click through to it on YouTube. Robert Fenerty left a comment on YouTube -- “Might be an excellent way to help get my A List status renewed this year!” Which, I think, is an excellent idea…</li>\r\n 	<li>Rob Cheshire commented on the web site, talking about the Southside breweries I featured on the video --\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Thanks Mark! I will definitely build a visit to Marz and Lo-rez into my schedule for my August trip to Chicago. I am undecided about Whiner, which might be a bit too “European” in terms of beer styles for my tastes.I am a bit conflicted about Lagunitas, being part of the evil-Heineken Empire! I have no doubt that they have some great beers, and that the tasting room is a very cool spot.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Rob and I have trading thoughts on Chicago brewery in comments to TravelCommons web site posts and Untappd check ins for a couple of months leading up to his trip here. Little does he know that I’m going to hit him up the other way for suggestions for my quick visit to Copenhagen in September. Rob has started his own blog -- <a href=\"https://taproomadventure.blogspot.com/\">The Great Taproom Adventure</a> -- with his notes on the taprooms he visits.</li>\r\n 	<li>Keith Love -- “long-time listener, first-time caller” as he describes himself -- sent me a note. He and his son are hitting Chicago early this month -- maybe for Lollapalooza? You’d be surprised how many older folks go hard on that 4-day music festival. Keith asked me for some restaurant and taproom recommendations, which got me thinking that I should do a Chicago episode, but in lieu of that, here’s the list I built for Keith in case you’re passing through Chicago soon -\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Restaurant suggestions with good food/beer selections\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>The Publican (Fulton Market)</li>\r\n 	<li>Cruz Blanca (Randolph St)</li>\r\n 	<li>The Fountainhead (North Center)</li>\r\n 	<li>Hopleaf (Andersonville)</li>\r\n 	<li>Purple Pig (Michigan Ave)</li>\r\n 	<li>Eataly (River North; beer bar on the top floor)</li>\r\n 	<li>Fat Rice (Logan Square -- a bit of a cheat; OK beer, but food you won\'t find anywhere else)</li>\r\n 	<li>Wiener Circle (Lakeview -- even more of a cheat; no beer but a great char-Polish)</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Favorite Chicago taprooms -- this is more Northside focused since Keith said he was staying in River North\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Goose Island Taproom (on Fulton St, not the brewpub)</li>\r\n 	<li>Half Acre (on either Lincoln or the new, larger one further north on Balmoral)</li>\r\n 	<li>Revolution Brewery Taproom (on Kedzie, not the brewpub on Milwaukee)</li>\r\n 	<li>Ravenswood taproom crawl -- 4 taprooms on Ravenswood between Foster and Irving Park Rd</li>\r\n 	<li>DryHop (Lakeview - another cheat; more of a brewpub, but a fav of mine)</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Keith also asked if I have a favorite airport app to, as he said, “actually guide you through airports and their amenities/services.” I had to admit that I’m a bit more old-school and use the maps that are posted around, though I will use Untappd to find the airport bars that have the best beer selection, which is how I killed a bit of that CVG delay I talked about earlier. If anybody uses an airport app, please let me know and I’ll talk about it on the next episode.</li>\r\n 	<li>The stint in Cincinnati forces me to fly out of ORD first thing Monday morning, the worst part of the road warrior rush hour. I normally avoid Monday morning flights like the plague, but my schedule these past weeks has forced me into it. That first Monday, I gave myself an extra 30 minutes, figuring life is too short to hyperventilate in a TSA line. But even then, the line tailing out of the Terminal 3 PreCheck took my breath away -- half the way down the terminal and I couldn’t catch up to the end of it; it grew faster than I could walk. I finally was able to get in -- I may have cut someone off, I dunno, the end of the line was a bit nebulous, lot of people muddling around, eventually forming a coherent line. Kinda like the travelers version of post-Big Bang dust clouds eventually forming galaxies. Anyhow, I get into line and start walking back toward the PreCheck station, at a brisk pace, and I didn’t really stop until I stood at the little swinging gate, waiting for the next available agent to check my license. It was 5-7 minutes tops. It’s amazing how many passengers they can process with 9 agents checking ID and every screening machine running. And with a line that’s 90% experienced travelers. It was just this side of a precision drill squad. I was impressed.</li>\r\n 	<li>I haven’t spent much time in Cincinnati airport before. It’s a very nice airport, but feels a bit “overbuilt”, especially with Delta “de-hubbing” it after it merged with Northwest.There’s two terminals with a train running between them and to the main building. The train is fine, as airplane trains go -- no better or worse than Denver’s or Atlanta’s -- but it seems a lot shorter. Indeed, the walk between terminals is maybe 3 minutes. The train seems a bit superfluous, or that the Cincinnati airport is trying to punch above its weight. Though feeling a bit overbuilt, it’s doesn’t have the ghost town feeling that the Memphis airport had the last time I was there. There were concourses there where I didn’t see a soul. It too was a casualty of the Delta-Northwest merger, a Northwest hub that was shut down in favor of Delta’s superhub in Atlanta. Memphis has lost ⅔’s of its passenger traffic and is now spending millions to downsize, to shutdown and mothball those empty concourses. There’s a <a href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/23/us/memphis-airport.html\">good NY Times story</a> about this. I tweeted out a link while I was writing this, but will also put a link in the show notes.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> or our new <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a> at travelcommons -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/westexit-extra/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>On Condition of Anonymity</em></a> by the West Exit</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>How Bad is Business Travel For Your Health?</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I stumbled across an article in Harvard Business Review -- <a href=\"https://hbr.org/2018/05/just-how-bad-is-business-travel-for-your-health-heres-the-data\">Just How Bad is Business Travel for Your Health? Here’s the Data</a> -- by Dr Andrew Rundle, a pr ofessor of epidemiology at Columbia University. His bio says “his research focuses on the risks for, and consequences of, sedentary lifestyles and obesity.”\r\nThe article summarizes his recent research which boils down to\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Employees who spent 14 or more nights away from home per month had significantly higher body mass index scores and were significantly more likely to report clinical symptoms of anxiety, depression and alcohol dependence; no physical activity or exercise; smoking; and trouble sleeping. The odds of being obese were 92% higher for those who traveled 21 or more nights per month</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Yup, so tell me something I don’t know. It takes work, or “mindfulness” to be on-trend, to eat right, exercise, and go to bed at a reasonable time when the guardrails of your normal routine disappear. Rundle’s population is people who travel every week. In the US, many consultancies shoot for a “3-4-5” travel schedule for their full-time project staff -- 3 nights, 4 days on the road -- leaving Monday morning, returning Thursday night -- with the 5th day in the office or working from home. Depending on the number of weeks in the month, that’s 12 -15 nights/month.</li>\r\n 	<li>When I went into consulting and full-time travel, the change was immediate -- working late and then project team dinners rolled over my evening workout routine, eating out every meal blew up my regular diet, and waking up at 4am on Monday morning to catch the 6am flight to LaGuardia, so I could be at my midtown Manhattan client by 10am screwed up my sleep cycle for the next couple of days. I could see the effects on the guys in my “class” -- the guys who joined the firm the same fall that I did -- putting on weight, walking a bit slower through the airport, drinking a bit more at dinner, maybe missing an early morning meeting or call after staying out a bit too late.</li>\r\n 	<li>I made some adjustments -- moved to morning workouts, became more “mindful” about what I was eating -- ordering fish and vegetarian meals where I could (though there aren’t always great options for non-Big 3 proteins (non-beef, chicken, or pork) in places like Dover, OH, Ephrata, PA, or Huntsville, AL). Maybe this slowed the inevitable, but 10 years on, we were on a family vacation with my folks, a Caribbean cruise. One of the stops along the Yucatan, the Mayan Riviera as they were starting to call it, I walk out of the water to our chairs, my dad looks up at me and says “You’ve put a bit of weight on, haven’t you?” I would’ve blown him off, except that I knew it was true. My waist size was 2 inches bigger and I was carrying 20 lbs more than when I started. I was heading in the same direction as my colleagues, even though it was at a slower pace.</li>\r\n 	<li>I was able to reverse the trend, and I think one of the key reasons was by then, I was senior enough to have more control over my schedule. I was managing the projects rather than being managed. So I could relieve the expectations of nightly team dinners -- at least one night a week, everyone was on their own, and no pressure if you bagged out other nights. I’d turn in early on Monday nights when most of us had gotten up early to fly out. We’d pick hotels with good workout rooms and where we could walk to the client and to restaurants rather than drive. Where I could, I’d negotiate remote work weeks with the client -- save them expense money, and give our team a break from the airport. It took work to break out of the usual, the default behaviors -- that “mindfulness” thing again.</li>\r\n 	<li>Thinking back on it, I guess I’m surprised that the firms I was with expected me to figure this out on my own. There were always travel policies on spending limits, and using the corporate travel agency, and what receipts were needed, and when you could fly business class, but no real guidance/support on how to lead a somewhat healthy life on the road. Maybe because the people writing those policies weren’t traveling -- the accountants and HR managers were paying for their own meals and going home every night, maybe a bit jealous thinking we were living it up every night eating steak dinners and drinking bottles of wine. Which some of us were, because we weren’t mindful enough to think about another way.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/solace-medusa/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Subtle Vice</a> </em>by Solace</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Make Layovers Fun</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>One of the most sacred frequent traveler rules is Fly Direct. Be it winter with snow or summer with thunderstorms, adding that intermediate stop adds one more point of failure, one more opportunity for the airlines to screw up. But, with a bit of planning and an “adventuring” frame of mind, you can actually manufacture something good -- a mini-tour -- out of a connection. That has been the inspiration behind two TravelCommons videos -- the new MDW Layover Taproom Tour and the ORD Layover Excursion that I did almost 6 years ago -- and that is still getting regular hits on YouTube.</li>\r\n 	<li>To do it right, though, does take a bit of planning… and time. You have to factor in all the delay points -- getting off the plane, stashing your luggage if you carried on, getting to and from where you’re going, and then getting back through security when you return. For most airports, I think it’s tough to do a good layover tour in less than 4 hours -- this is supposed to be a fun daybreak, not another travel stressor.</li>\r\n 	<li>United Airlines used to have a series in their Hemispheres magazine called One City, Five Hours that would outline a 5-hour layover tour in a different city -- Reno, Albuquerque, Copenhagen, …. One of the early TravelCommons videos is me following their <a href=\"http://old.hemimag.us/2010/03/01/one-city-five-hours-frankfurt/\">Frankfurt tour</a> on a 6-hr layover between Mumbai and Chicago. Those article are tough to find, even with Google, but managed to dredge up the <a href=\"http://old.hemimag.us/2011/01/01/one-city-five-hours-copenhagen/\">Copenhagen one</a> from the Hemispheres archives and am going to give it a go at the end of this month.</li>\r\n 	<li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/06/24/podcast-130-notes-from-hungary/\">Episode 130</a> last year, I talked about how my son and I passed up a 90-minute connection in Vienna for an 8-hr one and then spent a Saturday eating schnitzel and drinking beer in the old section of town with a buddy of mine who came down from Poland.</li>\r\n 	<li>And I think that 5-8 hour span is about right. There are some exceptions -- the quick shopping jaunt from MSP to Mall of the Americas -- but even if you’re hitting the nearby Blue Lagoon on your Wow Air layover in Reykjavik, I’d still allow 4 hours, especially given the Wow check-in lines I stood in the last time I took flew them.\r\nJim McDonough felt that squeeze a few months ago. Commenting on the MDW Layover Facebook posting, Jim said</li>\r\n 	<li>We had a four hour layover at O\'Hare back in May on our way to Ireland. American did a schedule change that made a planned two hour layover into four. But we did not leave the airport. Somehow on international it didn\'t make sense. Had some bad \'free\' beer at the Admiral\'s Club.</li>\r\n 	<li>Yes, that would’ve been snug. Jim and his wife maybe could’ve swung down to Logan Square or Wicker Park -- both stops on the ORD subway line -- for a bite and a bit of a walkaround, but they would’ve needed to have a solid plan for that, tough with that last-minute schedule change.</li>\r\n 	<li>But even unplanned layovers can work out. Several years ago, my parents flew from Denver to Paducah, KY to visit my aunt and grandmother. As you can imagine, no direct flights so they connected through ORD. And, as you might guess, on the way home, their commuter flight was late out of Paducah and they missed a tight connection. My dad called me from the airport. It was New Year’s Eve night and we were having 3 or 4 couples over. “Get your luggage and book the flight out tomorrow,” I told him, “you can help me cook dinner.” I picked them up, brought them home, threw an apron at my dad, opened an early bottle of champagne, and we had a great time.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #143</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a> and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music is from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Magnatune</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_143.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #143 — How Bad is Business Travel For Your Health; Make Layovers Fun','','inherit','closed','closed','','2093-revision-v1','','','2018-08-09 22:02:56','2018-08-10 03:02:56','',2093,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/08/09/2093-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0);
INSERT INTO `wp_posts` VALUES
(2102,1,'2018-08-09 22:13:21','2018-08-10 03:13:21','[caption id=\"attachment_2100\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/20121212_195127000_iOS.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2100\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/20121212_195127000_iOS-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Duck squats are supposed to keep you healthy[/caption]\r\n\r\nNo long-distance travel this month. Instead, I\"m getting back into regional jets, and waiting out a long delay in Cincinnati has me wondering about American Eagle\'s flight scheduling algorithm. My flights into CVG cause me to think about the impact of losing hub status. CVG looks overbuilt, but MEM is spending money to shrink itself. A Harvard Business Review article about how frequent business travel leads to poor health choices emphasizes the need for \"mindfulness\" on the road. And the Midway Layover Taproom video gets me thinking about the time needed for a fun layover tour. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_143.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n<iframe src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/467065119&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"></iframe><!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #143:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you a spiffed up TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. The production bay has been somewhat reassembled -- less one piece of furniture in the name of decluttering -- with the walls now a real estate agent-approved shade of “greige” and the floors redone from cherry to a bit more of a walnut; bowing to the presumed tastes of the millennial buyer. It’s not bad, just different. Definitely lighter though.</li>\r\n 	<li>No spur-of-the-moment international trips in July; mostly just running around the Midwest, but re-vectoring from Wisconsin to Cincinnati; a bit too far to drive, so I’m losing the freedom to leave when I want and back to stooping through regional jet doorways.</li>\r\n 	<li>And back to having my schedule jacked up by weather events thousands of miles away from me. As we’ve talked about before, the regional jet operators, affiliates that don’t have spare jets available to step in and wipe out delays a plane may encounter along their daily bunny hop schedule. Last week, my AA flight from CVG to ORD was a textbook example of this. At 12:30, on the way back from lunch, I got my first delay notice -- for a 6pm flight. It was just 20 minutes, so I didn’t think much of it. It was a nice day in both Cincinnati and Chicago, so I just chalked it up to standard ORD traffic. But then the delay started to stretch -- to 30 minutes, to 40 minutes, to an hour. I fired up FlightAware and used the “Where’s My Plane Now?” functionality to try and figure out what was going on. The nice thing about the FlightAware screen is it shows you the flight path and the current weather. My plane was traveling from Norfolk, VA to Miami, and then up to Cincinnati -- and I could see heavy storms all along the Southeast coast. The plane was late leaving Norfolk, and then was having to vector down the Florida Gulf Coast to avoid the storms over the Atlantic Coast. This wasn’t looking good.</li>\r\n 	<li>FlightAware also shows a 10-day history for a flight’s departure/arrival times. This American flight had only arrived on-time once; had also canceled once, and arrived late the other 8 times. With a bit of time to kill, I fired up Excel and calculated that this flight averaged an hour and 20 minute delay -- counting the one on-time flight, but not counting the cancellation (figuring out how to average in infinity was a bit more work that I was willing to tackle). This wasn’t really a one-off weather delay; it was a bad flight route. So as I’m wont to do, I hit American on Twitter -- “this flt has been delayed/cancelled 8 of the past 9 days. Kinda think AA needs to rethink the scheduling for this one”. I looked at the history of the United flight also leaving at 6pm -- one late flight in the past 10 days. It flies back and forth between ORD and CVG. Maybe not a great plan for the winter, but better than flying through the humid South in July and August. I’m switching. Besides, the beer selection in CVG won’t keep me occupied through too many more hour-long delays.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/beyond7-revelations/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Miss America</em></a> by Beyond 7</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul class=\"\">\r\n 	<li>Even in the midst of studio refurb, I managed to push out the long-promised Chicago Midway Layover Southside Taproom Tour video. These videos always take longer than I think, but it’s fun and I like the end result. One of the things I’ve liked about the craft beer explosion -- in addition, of course, to good beer -- is that searching out new microbreweries has taken me to parts of cities I never would’ve visited otherwise -- walking into a basement in Portland, Oregon wondering how in the hell they got these huge steel tanks down here; or coming out of the Paris Metro in the middle of a North African neighborhood. I hope this Midway video has some of that same feel -- skipping the parts of Chicago that make the tour guides or TV shows -- the baseball themepark of Wrigleyville, the lakefront, hipster enclaves of Wicker Park and Logan Square -- guiding folks to pass through Douglas Park, Pilsen, Bridgeport, and the Back of the Yards. If you haven’t seen it already, check it out. You can watch it on the TravelCommons Facebook page, or go to the TravelCommons web site and you can click through to it on YouTube. Robert Fenerty left a comment on YouTube -- “Might be an excellent way to help get my A List status renewed this year!” Which, I think, is an excellent idea…</li>\r\n 	<li>Rob Cheshire commented on the web site, talking about the Southside breweries I featured on the video --\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Thanks Mark! I will definitely build a visit to Marz and Lo-rez into my schedule for my August trip to Chicago. I am undecided about Whiner, which might be a bit too “European” in terms of beer styles for my tastes.I am a bit conflicted about Lagunitas, being part of the evil-Heineken Empire! I have no doubt that they have some great beers, and that the tasting room is a very cool spot.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Rob and I have trading thoughts on Chicago brewery in comments to TravelCommons web site posts and Untappd check ins for a couple of months leading up to his trip here. Little does he know that I’m going to hit him up the other way for suggestions for my quick visit to Copenhagen in September. Rob has started his own blog -- <a href=\"https://taproomadventure.blogspot.com/\">The Great Taproom Adventure</a> -- with his notes on the taprooms he visits.</li>\r\n 	<li>Keith Love -- “long-time listener, first-time caller” as he describes himself -- sent me a note. He and his son are hitting Chicago early this month -- maybe for Lollapalooza? You’d be surprised how many older folks go hard on that 4-day music festival. Keith asked me for some restaurant and taproom recommendations, which got me thinking that I should do a Chicago episode, but in lieu of that, here’s the list I built for Keith in case you’re passing through Chicago soon -\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Restaurant suggestions with good food/beer selections\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>The Publican (Fulton Market)</li>\r\n 	<li>Cruz Blanca (Randolph St)</li>\r\n 	<li>The Fountainhead (North Center)</li>\r\n 	<li>Hopleaf (Andersonville)</li>\r\n 	<li>Purple Pig (Michigan Ave)</li>\r\n 	<li>Eataly (River North; beer bar on the top floor)</li>\r\n 	<li>Fat Rice (Logan Square -- a bit of a cheat; OK beer, but food you won\'t find anywhere else)</li>\r\n 	<li>Wiener Circle (Lakeview -- even more of a cheat; no beer but a great char-Polish)</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Favorite Chicago taprooms -- this is more Northside focused since Keith said he was staying in River North\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Goose Island Taproom (on Fulton St, not the brewpub)</li>\r\n 	<li>Half Acre (on either Lincoln or the new, larger one further north on Balmoral)</li>\r\n 	<li>Revolution Brewery Taproom (on Kedzie, not the brewpub on Milwaukee)</li>\r\n 	<li>Ravenswood taproom crawl -- 4 taprooms on Ravenswood between Foster and Irving Park Rd</li>\r\n 	<li>DryHop (Lakeview - another cheat; more of a brewpub, but a fav of mine)</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Keith also asked if I have a favorite airport app to, as he said, “actually guide you through airports and their amenities/services.” I had to admit that I’m a bit more old-school and use the maps that are posted around, though I will use Untappd to find the airport bars that have the best beer selection, which is how I killed a bit of that CVG delay I talked about earlier. If anybody uses an airport app, please let me know and I’ll talk about it on the next episode.</li>\r\n 	<li>The stint in Cincinnati forces me to fly out of ORD first thing Monday morning, the worst part of the road warrior rush hour. I normally avoid Monday morning flights like the plague, but my schedule these past weeks has forced me into it. That first Monday, I gave myself an extra 30 minutes, figuring life is too short to hyperventilate in a TSA line. But even then, the line tailing out of the Terminal 3 PreCheck took my breath away -- half the way down the terminal and I couldn’t catch up to the end of it; it grew faster than I could walk. I finally was able to get in -- I may have cut someone off, I dunno, the end of the line was a bit nebulous, lot of people muddling around, eventually forming a coherent line. Kinda like the travelers version of post-Big Bang dust clouds eventually forming galaxies. Anyhow, I get into line and start walking back toward the PreCheck station, at a brisk pace, and I didn’t really stop until I stood at the little swinging gate, waiting for the next available agent to check my license. It was 5-7 minutes tops. It’s amazing how many passengers they can process with 9 agents checking ID and every screening machine running. And with a line that’s 90% experienced travelers. It was just this side of a precision drill squad. I was impressed.</li>\r\n 	<li>I haven’t spent much time in Cincinnati airport before. It’s a very nice airport, but feels a bit “overbuilt”, especially with Delta “de-hubbing” it after it merged with Northwest.There’s two terminals with a train running between them and to the main building. The train is fine, as airplane trains go -- no better or worse than Denver’s or Atlanta’s -- but it seems a lot shorter. Indeed, the walk between terminals is maybe 3 minutes. The train seems a bit superfluous, or that the Cincinnati airport is trying to punch above its weight. Though feeling a bit overbuilt, it’s doesn’t have the ghost town feeling that the Memphis airport had the last time I was there. There were concourses there where I didn’t see a soul. It too was a casualty of the Delta-Northwest merger, a Northwest hub that was shut down in favor of Delta’s superhub in Atlanta. Memphis has lost ⅔’s of its passenger traffic and is now spending millions to downsize, to shutdown and mothball those empty concourses. There’s a <a href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/23/us/memphis-airport.html\">good NY Times story</a> about this. I tweeted out a link while I was writing this, but will also put a link in the show notes.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> or our new <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a> at travelcommons -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/westexit-extra/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>On Condition of Anonymity</em></a> by the West Exit</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>How Bad is Business Travel For Your Health?</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I stumbled across an article in Harvard Business Review -- <a href=\"https://hbr.org/2018/05/just-how-bad-is-business-travel-for-your-health-heres-the-data\">Just How Bad is Business Travel for Your Health? Here’s the Data</a> -- by Dr Andrew Rundle, a pr ofessor of epidemiology at Columbia University. His bio says “his research focuses on the risks for, and consequences of, sedentary lifestyles and obesity.”\r\nThe article summarizes his recent research which boils down to\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Employees who spent 14 or more nights away from home per month had significantly higher body mass index scores and were significantly more likely to report clinical symptoms of anxiety, depression and alcohol dependence; no physical activity or exercise; smoking; and trouble sleeping. The odds of being obese were 92% higher for those who traveled 21 or more nights per month</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Yup, so tell me something I don’t know. It takes work, or “mindfulness” to be on-trend, to eat right, exercise, and go to bed at a reasonable time when the guardrails of your normal routine disappear. Rundle’s population is people who travel every week. In the US, many consultancies shoot for a “3-4-5” travel schedule for their full-time project staff -- 3 nights, 4 days on the road -- leaving Monday morning, returning Thursday night -- with the 5th day in the office or working from home. Depending on the number of weeks in the month, that’s 12 -15 nights/month.</li>\r\n 	<li>When I went into consulting and full-time travel, the change was immediate -- working late and then project team dinners rolled over my evening workout routine, eating out every meal blew up my regular diet, and waking up at 4am on Monday morning to catch the 6am flight to LaGuardia, so I could be at my midtown Manhattan client by 10am screwed up my sleep cycle for the next couple of days. I could see the effects on the guys in my “class” -- the guys who joined the firm the same fall that I did -- putting on weight, walking a bit slower through the airport, drinking a bit more at dinner, maybe missing an early morning meeting or call after staying out a bit too late.</li>\r\n 	<li>I made some adjustments -- moved to morning workouts, became more “mindful” about what I was eating -- ordering fish and vegetarian meals where I could (though there aren’t always great options for non-Big 3 proteins (non-beef, chicken, or pork) in places like Dover, OH, Ephrata, PA, or Huntsville, AL). Maybe this slowed the inevitable, but 10 years on, we were on a family vacation with my folks, a Caribbean cruise. One of the stops along the Yucatan, the Mayan Riviera as they were starting to call it, I walk out of the water to our chairs, my dad looks up at me and says “You’ve put a bit of weight on, haven’t you?” I would’ve blown him off, except that I knew it was true. My waist size was 2 inches bigger and I was carrying 20 lbs more than when I started. I was heading in the same direction as my colleagues, even though it was at a slower pace.</li>\r\n 	<li>I was able to reverse the trend, and I think one of the key reasons was by then, I was senior enough to have more control over my schedule. I was managing the projects rather than being managed. So I could relieve the expectations of nightly team dinners -- at least one night a week, everyone was on their own, and no pressure if you bagged out other nights. I’d turn in early on Monday nights when most of us had gotten up early to fly out. We’d pick hotels with good workout rooms and where we could walk to the client and to restaurants rather than drive. Where I could, I’d negotiate remote work weeks with the client -- save them expense money, and give our team a break from the airport. It took work to break out of the usual, the default behaviors -- that “mindfulness” thing again.</li>\r\n 	<li>Thinking back on it, I guess I’m surprised that the firms I was with expected me to figure this out on my own. There were always travel policies on spending limits, and using the corporate travel agency, and what receipts were needed, and when you could fly business class, but no real guidance/support on how to lead a somewhat healthy life on the road. Maybe because the people writing those policies weren’t traveling -- the accountants and HR managers were paying for their own meals and going home every night, maybe a bit jealous thinking we were living it up every night eating steak dinners and drinking bottles of wine. Which some of us were, because we weren’t mindful enough to think about another way.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/solace-medusa/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Subtle Vice</a> </em>by Solace</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Make Layovers Fun</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>One of the most sacred frequent traveler rules is Fly Direct. Be it winter with snow or summer with thunderstorms, adding that intermediate stop adds one more point of failure, one more opportunity for the airlines to screw up. But, with a bit of planning and an “adventuring” frame of mind, you can actually manufacture something good -- a mini-tour -- out of a connection. That has been the inspiration behind two TravelCommons videos -- the new MDW Layover Taproom Tour and the ORD Layover Excursion that I did almost 6 years ago -- and that is still getting regular hits on YouTube.</li>\r\n 	<li>To do it right, though, does take a bit of planning… and time. You have to factor in all the delay points -- getting off the plane, stashing your luggage if you carried on, getting to and from where you’re going, and then getting back through security when you return. For most airports, I think it’s tough to do a good layover tour in less than 4 hours -- this is supposed to be a fun daybreak, not another travel stressor.</li>\r\n 	<li>United Airlines used to have a series in their Hemispheres magazine called One City, Five Hours that would outline a 5-hour layover tour in a different city -- Reno, Albuquerque, Copenhagen, …. One of the early TravelCommons videos is me following their <a href=\"http://old.hemimag.us/2010/03/01/one-city-five-hours-frankfurt/\">Frankfurt tour</a> on a 6-hr layover between Mumbai and Chicago. Those article are tough to find, even with Google, but managed to dredge up the <a href=\"http://old.hemimag.us/2011/01/01/one-city-five-hours-copenhagen/\">Copenhagen one</a> from the Hemispheres archives and am going to give it a go at the end of this month.</li>\r\n 	<li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/06/24/podcast-130-notes-from-hungary/\">Episode 130</a> last year, I talked about how my son and I passed up a 90-minute connection in Vienna for an 8-hr one and then spent a Saturday eating schnitzel and drinking beer in the old section of town with a buddy of mine who came down from Poland.</li>\r\n 	<li>And I think that 5-8 hour span is about right. There are some exceptions -- the quick shopping jaunt from MSP to Mall of the Americas -- but even if you’re hitting the nearby Blue Lagoon on your Wow Air layover in Reykjavik, I’d still allow 4 hours, especially given the Wow check-in lines I stood in the last time I took flew them.\r\nJim McDonough felt that squeeze a few months ago. Commenting on the MDW Layover Facebook posting, Jim said</li>\r\n 	<li>We had a four hour layover at O\'Hare back in May on our way to Ireland. American did a schedule change that made a planned two hour layover into four. But we did not leave the airport. Somehow on international it didn\'t make sense. Had some bad \'free\' beer at the Admiral\'s Club.</li>\r\n 	<li>Yes, that would’ve been snug. Jim and his wife maybe could’ve swung down to Logan Square or Wicker Park -- both stops on the ORD subway line -- for a bite and a bit of a walkaround, but they would’ve needed to have a solid plan for that, tough with that last-minute schedule change.</li>\r\n 	<li>But even unplanned layovers can work out. Several years ago, my parents flew from Denver to Paducah, KY to visit my aunt and grandmother. As you can imagine, no direct flights so they connected through ORD. And, as you might guess, on the way home, their commuter flight was late out of Paducah and they missed a tight connection. My dad called me from the airport. It was New Year’s Eve night and we were having 3 or 4 couples over. “Get your luggage and book the flight out tomorrow,” I told him, “you can help me cook dinner.” I picked them up, brought them home, threw an apron at my dad, opened an early bottle of champagne, and we had a great time.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #143</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a> and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music is from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Magnatune</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_143.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #143 — How Bad is Business Travel For Your Health; Make Layovers Fun','','inherit','closed','closed','','2093-revision-v1','','','2018-08-09 22:13:21','2018-08-10 03:13:21','',2093,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/08/09/2093-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2103,1,'2018-08-09 22:18:35','2018-08-10 03:18:35','[caption id=\"attachment_2100\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/20121212_195127000_iOS.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2100\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/20121212_195127000_iOS-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Duck squats are supposed to keep you healthy[/caption]\r\n\r\nNo long-distance travel this month. Instead, I\"m getting back into regional jets, and waiting out a long delay in Cincinnati has me wondering about American Eagle\'s flight scheduling algorithm. My flights into CVG cause me to think about the impact of losing hub status. CVG looks overbuilt, but MEM is spending money to shrink itself. A Harvard Business Review article about how frequent business travel leads to poor health choices emphasizes the need for \"mindfulness\" on the road. The Midway Layover Taproom video gets me thinking about the time needed for a fun layover tour. And I give a listener my Chicago restaurant and taproom recommendations. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_143.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n<iframe src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/483554862&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"></iframe><!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #143:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you a spiffed up TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. The production bay has been somewhat reassembled -- less one piece of furniture in the name of decluttering -- with the walls now a real estate agent-approved shade of “greige” and the floors redone from cherry to a bit more of a walnut; bowing to the presumed tastes of the millennial buyer. It’s not bad, just different. Definitely lighter though.</li>\r\n 	<li>No spur-of-the-moment international trips in July; mostly just running around the Midwest, but re-vectoring from Wisconsin to Cincinnati; a bit too far to drive, so I’m losing the freedom to leave when I want and back to stooping through regional jet doorways.</li>\r\n 	<li>And back to having my schedule jacked up by weather events thousands of miles away from me. As we’ve talked about before, the regional jet operators, affiliates that don’t have spare jets available to step in and wipe out delays a plane may encounter along their daily bunny hop schedule. Last week, my AA flight from CVG to ORD was a textbook example of this. At 12:30, on the way back from lunch, I got my first delay notice -- for a 6pm flight. It was just 20 minutes, so I didn’t think much of it. It was a nice day in both Cincinnati and Chicago, so I just chalked it up to standard ORD traffic. But then the delay started to stretch -- to 30 minutes, to 40 minutes, to an hour. I fired up FlightAware and used the “Where’s My Plane Now?” functionality to try and figure out what was going on. The nice thing about the FlightAware screen is it shows you the flight path and the current weather. My plane was traveling from Norfolk, VA to Miami, and then up to Cincinnati -- and I could see heavy storms all along the Southeast coast. The plane was late leaving Norfolk, and then was having to vector down the Florida Gulf Coast to avoid the storms over the Atlantic Coast. This wasn’t looking good.</li>\r\n 	<li>FlightAware also shows a 10-day history for a flight’s departure/arrival times. This American flight had only arrived on-time once; had also canceled once, and arrived late the other 8 times. With a bit of time to kill, I fired up Excel and calculated that this flight averaged an hour and 20 minute delay -- counting the one on-time flight, but not counting the cancellation (figuring out how to average in infinity was a bit more work that I was willing to tackle). This wasn’t really a one-off weather delay; it was a bad flight route. So as I’m wont to do, I hit American on Twitter -- “this flt has been delayed/cancelled 8 of the past 9 days. Kinda think AA needs to rethink the scheduling for this one”. I looked at the history of the United flight also leaving at 6pm -- one late flight in the past 10 days. It flies back and forth between ORD and CVG. Maybe not a great plan for the winter, but better than flying through the humid South in July and August. I’m switching. Besides, the beer selection in CVG won’t keep me occupied through too many more hour-long delays.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/beyond7-revelations/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Miss America</em></a> by Beyond 7</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul class=\"\">\r\n 	<li>Even in the midst of studio refurb, I managed to push out the long-promised Chicago Midway Layover Southside Taproom Tour video. These videos always take longer than I think, but it’s fun and I like the end result. One of the things I’ve liked about the craft beer explosion -- in addition, of course, to good beer -- is that searching out new microbreweries has taken me to parts of cities I never would’ve visited otherwise -- walking into a basement in Portland, Oregon wondering how in the hell they got these huge steel tanks down here; or coming out of the Paris Metro in the middle of a North African neighborhood. I hope this Midway video has some of that same feel -- skipping the parts of Chicago that make the tour guides or TV shows -- the baseball themepark of Wrigleyville, the lakefront, hipster enclaves of Wicker Park and Logan Square -- guiding folks to pass through Douglas Park, Pilsen, Bridgeport, and the Back of the Yards. If you haven’t seen it already, check it out. You can watch it on the TravelCommons Facebook page, or go to the TravelCommons web site and you can click through to it on YouTube. Robert Fenerty left a comment on YouTube -- “Might be an excellent way to help get my A List status renewed this year!” Which, I think, is an excellent idea…</li>\r\n 	<li>Rob Cheshire commented on the web site, talking about the Southside breweries I featured on the video --\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Thanks Mark! I will definitely build a visit to Marz and Lo-rez into my schedule for my August trip to Chicago. I am undecided about Whiner, which might be a bit too “European” in terms of beer styles for my tastes.I am a bit conflicted about Lagunitas, being part of the evil-Heineken Empire! I have no doubt that they have some great beers, and that the tasting room is a very cool spot.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Rob and I have trading thoughts on Chicago brewery in comments to TravelCommons web site posts and Untappd check ins for a couple of months leading up to his trip here. Little does he know that I’m going to hit him up the other way for suggestions for my quick visit to Copenhagen in September. Rob has started his own blog -- <a href=\"https://taproomadventure.blogspot.com/\">The Great Taproom Adventure</a> -- with his notes on the taprooms he visits.</li>\r\n 	<li>Keith Love -- “long-time listener, first-time caller” as he describes himself -- sent me a note. He and his son are hitting Chicago early this month -- maybe for Lollapalooza? You’d be surprised how many older folks go hard on that 4-day music festival. Keith asked me for some restaurant and taproom recommendations, which got me thinking that I should do a Chicago episode, but in lieu of that, here’s the list I built for Keith in case you’re passing through Chicago soon -\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Restaurant suggestions with good food/beer selections\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>The Publican (Fulton Market)</li>\r\n 	<li>Cruz Blanca (Randolph St)</li>\r\n 	<li>The Fountainhead (North Center)</li>\r\n 	<li>Hopleaf (Andersonville)</li>\r\n 	<li>Purple Pig (Michigan Ave)</li>\r\n 	<li>Eataly (River North; beer bar on the top floor)</li>\r\n 	<li>Fat Rice (Logan Square -- a bit of a cheat; OK beer, but food you won\'t find anywhere else)</li>\r\n 	<li>Wiener Circle (Lakeview -- even more of a cheat; no beer but a great char-Polish)</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Favorite Chicago taprooms -- this is more Northside focused since Keith said he was staying in River North\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Goose Island Taproom (on Fulton St, not the brewpub)</li>\r\n 	<li>Half Acre (on either Lincoln or the new, larger one further north on Balmoral)</li>\r\n 	<li>Revolution Brewery Taproom (on Kedzie, not the brewpub on Milwaukee)</li>\r\n 	<li>Ravenswood taproom crawl -- 4 taprooms on Ravenswood between Foster and Irving Park Rd</li>\r\n 	<li>DryHop (Lakeview - another cheat; more of a brewpub, but a fav of mine)</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Keith also asked if I have a favorite airport app to, as he said, “actually guide you through airports and their amenities/services.” I had to admit that I’m a bit more old-school and use the maps that are posted around, though I will use Untappd to find the airport bars that have the best beer selection, which is how I killed a bit of that CVG delay I talked about earlier. If anybody uses an airport app, please let me know and I’ll talk about it on the next episode.</li>\r\n 	<li>The stint in Cincinnati forces me to fly out of ORD first thing Monday morning, the worst part of the road warrior rush hour. I normally avoid Monday morning flights like the plague, but my schedule these past weeks has forced me into it. That first Monday, I gave myself an extra 30 minutes, figuring life is too short to hyperventilate in a TSA line. But even then, the line tailing out of the Terminal 3 PreCheck took my breath away -- half the way down the terminal and I couldn’t catch up to the end of it; it grew faster than I could walk. I finally was able to get in -- I may have cut someone off, I dunno, the end of the line was a bit nebulous, lot of people muddling around, eventually forming a coherent line. Kinda like the travelers version of post-Big Bang dust clouds eventually forming galaxies. Anyhow, I get into line and start walking back toward the PreCheck station, at a brisk pace, and I didn’t really stop until I stood at the little swinging gate, waiting for the next available agent to check my license. It was 5-7 minutes tops. It’s amazing how many passengers they can process with 9 agents checking ID and every screening machine running. And with a line that’s 90% experienced travelers. It was just this side of a precision drill squad. I was impressed.</li>\r\n 	<li>I haven’t spent much time in Cincinnati airport before. It’s a very nice airport, but feels a bit “overbuilt”, especially with Delta “de-hubbing” it after it merged with Northwest.There’s two terminals with a train running between them and to the main building. The train is fine, as airplane trains go -- no better or worse than Denver’s or Atlanta’s -- but it seems a lot shorter. Indeed, the walk between terminals is maybe 3 minutes. The train seems a bit superfluous, or that the Cincinnati airport is trying to punch above its weight. Though feeling a bit overbuilt, it’s doesn’t have the ghost town feeling that the Memphis airport had the last time I was there. There were concourses there where I didn’t see a soul. It too was a casualty of the Delta-Northwest merger, a Northwest hub that was shut down in favor of Delta’s superhub in Atlanta. Memphis has lost ⅔’s of its passenger traffic and is now spending millions to downsize, to shutdown and mothball those empty concourses. There’s a <a href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/23/us/memphis-airport.html\">good NY Times story</a> about this. I tweeted out a link while I was writing this, but will also put a link in the show notes.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> or our new <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a> at travelcommons -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/westexit-extra/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>On Condition of Anonymity</em></a> by the West Exit</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>How Bad is Business Travel For Your Health?</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I stumbled across an article in Harvard Business Review -- <a href=\"https://hbr.org/2018/05/just-how-bad-is-business-travel-for-your-health-heres-the-data\">Just How Bad is Business Travel for Your Health? Here’s the Data</a> -- by Dr Andrew Rundle, a pr ofessor of epidemiology at Columbia University. His bio says “his research focuses on the risks for, and consequences of, sedentary lifestyles and obesity.”\r\nThe article summarizes his recent research which boils down to\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Employees who spent 14 or more nights away from home per month had significantly higher body mass index scores and were significantly more likely to report clinical symptoms of anxiety, depression and alcohol dependence; no physical activity or exercise; smoking; and trouble sleeping. The odds of being obese were 92% higher for those who traveled 21 or more nights per month</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Yup, so tell me something I don’t know. It takes work, or “mindfulness” to be on-trend, to eat right, exercise, and go to bed at a reasonable time when the guardrails of your normal routine disappear. Rundle’s population is people who travel every week. In the US, many consultancies shoot for a “3-4-5” travel schedule for their full-time project staff -- 3 nights, 4 days on the road -- leaving Monday morning, returning Thursday night -- with the 5th day in the office or working from home. Depending on the number of weeks in the month, that’s 12 -15 nights/month.</li>\r\n 	<li>When I went into consulting and full-time travel, the change was immediate -- working late and then project team dinners rolled over my evening workout routine, eating out every meal blew up my regular diet, and waking up at 4am on Monday morning to catch the 6am flight to LaGuardia, so I could be at my midtown Manhattan client by 10am screwed up my sleep cycle for the next couple of days. I could see the effects on the guys in my “class” -- the guys who joined the firm the same fall that I did -- putting on weight, walking a bit slower through the airport, drinking a bit more at dinner, maybe missing an early morning meeting or call after staying out a bit too late.</li>\r\n 	<li>I made some adjustments -- moved to morning workouts, became more “mindful” about what I was eating -- ordering fish and vegetarian meals where I could (though there aren’t always great options for non-Big 3 proteins (non-beef, chicken, or pork) in places like Dover, OH, Ephrata, PA, or Huntsville, AL). Maybe this slowed the inevitable, but 10 years on, we were on a family vacation with my folks, a Caribbean cruise. One of the stops along the Yucatan, the Mayan Riviera as they were starting to call it, I walk out of the water to our chairs, my dad looks up at me and says “You’ve put a bit of weight on, haven’t you?” I would’ve blown him off, except that I knew it was true. My waist size was 2 inches bigger and I was carrying 20 lbs more than when I started. I was heading in the same direction as my colleagues, even though it was at a slower pace.</li>\r\n 	<li>I was able to reverse the trend, and I think one of the key reasons was by then, I was senior enough to have more control over my schedule. I was managing the projects rather than being managed. So I could relieve the expectations of nightly team dinners -- at least one night a week, everyone was on their own, and no pressure if you bagged out other nights. I’d turn in early on Monday nights when most of us had gotten up early to fly out. We’d pick hotels with good workout rooms and where we could walk to the client and to restaurants rather than drive. Where I could, I’d negotiate remote work weeks with the client -- save them expense money, and give our team a break from the airport. It took work to break out of the usual, the default behaviors -- that “mindfulness” thing again.</li>\r\n 	<li>Thinking back on it, I guess I’m surprised that the firms I was with expected me to figure this out on my own. There were always travel policies on spending limits, and using the corporate travel agency, and what receipts were needed, and when you could fly business class, but no real guidance/support on how to lead a somewhat healthy life on the road. Maybe because the people writing those policies weren’t traveling -- the accountants and HR managers were paying for their own meals and going home every night, maybe a bit jealous thinking we were living it up every night eating steak dinners and drinking bottles of wine. Which some of us were, because we weren’t mindful enough to think about another way.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/solace-medusa/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Subtle Vice</a> </em>by Solace</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Make Layovers Fun</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>One of the most sacred frequent traveler rules is Fly Direct. Be it winter with snow or summer with thunderstorms, adding that intermediate stop adds one more point of failure, one more opportunity for the airlines to screw up. But, with a bit of planning and an “adventuring” frame of mind, you can actually manufacture something good -- a mini-tour -- out of a connection. That has been the inspiration behind two TravelCommons videos -- the new MDW Layover Taproom Tour and the ORD Layover Excursion that I did almost 6 years ago -- and that is still getting regular hits on YouTube.</li>\r\n 	<li>To do it right, though, does take a bit of planning… and time. You have to factor in all the delay points -- getting off the plane, stashing your luggage if you carried on, getting to and from where you’re going, and then getting back through security when you return. For most airports, I think it’s tough to do a good layover tour in less than 4 hours -- this is supposed to be a fun daybreak, not another travel stressor.</li>\r\n 	<li>United Airlines used to have a series in their Hemispheres magazine called One City, Five Hours that would outline a 5-hour layover tour in a different city -- Reno, Albuquerque, Copenhagen, …. One of the early TravelCommons videos is me following their <a href=\"http://old.hemimag.us/2010/03/01/one-city-five-hours-frankfurt/\">Frankfurt tour</a> on a 6-hr layover between Mumbai and Chicago. Those article are tough to find, even with Google, but managed to dredge up the <a href=\"http://old.hemimag.us/2011/01/01/one-city-five-hours-copenhagen/\">Copenhagen one</a> from the Hemispheres archives and am going to give it a go at the end of this month.</li>\r\n 	<li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/06/24/podcast-130-notes-from-hungary/\">Episode 130</a> last year, I talked about how my son and I passed up a 90-minute connection in Vienna for an 8-hr one and then spent a Saturday eating schnitzel and drinking beer in the old section of town with a buddy of mine who came down from Poland.</li>\r\n 	<li>And I think that 5-8 hour span is about right. There are some exceptions -- the quick shopping jaunt from MSP to Mall of the Americas -- but even if you’re hitting the nearby Blue Lagoon on your Wow Air layover in Reykjavik, I’d still allow 4 hours, especially given the Wow check-in lines I stood in the last time I took flew them.\r\nJim McDonough felt that squeeze a few months ago. Commenting on the MDW Layover Facebook posting, Jim said</li>\r\n 	<li>We had a four hour layover at O\'Hare back in May on our way to Ireland. American did a schedule change that made a planned two hour layover into four. But we did not leave the airport. Somehow on international it didn\'t make sense. Had some bad \'free\' beer at the Admiral\'s Club.</li>\r\n 	<li>Yes, that would’ve been snug. Jim and his wife maybe could’ve swung down to Logan Square or Wicker Park -- both stops on the ORD subway line -- for a bite and a bit of a walkaround, but they would’ve needed to have a solid plan for that, tough with that last-minute schedule change.</li>\r\n 	<li>But even unplanned layovers can work out. Several years ago, my parents flew from Denver to Paducah, KY to visit my aunt and grandmother. As you can imagine, no direct flights so they connected through ORD. And, as you might guess, on the way home, their commuter flight was late out of Paducah and they missed a tight connection. My dad called me from the airport. It was New Year’s Eve night and we were having 3 or 4 couples over. “Get your luggage and book the flight out tomorrow,” I told him, “you can help me cook dinner.” I picked them up, brought them home, threw an apron at my dad, opened an early bottle of champagne, and we had a great time.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #143</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a> and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music is from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Magnatune</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_143.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #143 — How Bad is Business Travel For Your Health; Make Layovers Fun','','inherit','closed','closed','','2093-revision-v1','','','2018-08-09 22:18:35','2018-08-10 03:18:35','',2093,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/08/09/2093-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2104,1,'2018-08-09 22:28:10','2018-08-10 03:28:10','[caption id=\"attachment_1895\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/iStock-502842002.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1895\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/iStock-502842002-300x200.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"200\" /></a> A C-Note for you, and you, and you...[/caption]\r\n\r\nAfter traveling with younger colleagues who pay for everything with cards, I wonder if I\'m the last generation of cash payers. I also talk about the upcoming smart luggage ban on US airlines and a long Saturday afternoon trying to redeem some British Airways Avios points. All this, a new Uber driver story, and a few Christmas carols at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_136.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_136.mp3\"] <!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #136:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL on what has been a very light travel month, just one trip to New York and then back down to Charlottesville, VA before an early wrap-up of my 2017 travel. I wanted to avoid flying into LGA because of the construction, but UA’s EWR monopoly jacks the price difference way beyond what I can justify, so I gritted my teeth and booked the LGA flight. It was amazingly smooth for Monday morning rush hour in ORD. Walked straight into the PreCheck line. There were a ton of people there -- as is typical on a Monday morning, lots of professional travelers -- but everything moved smoothly. The TSA stations were fully staffed; there was a minimal number of amateur travelers in PreCheck, and so what appeared to be a very daunting line was an easy 5-minute exercise. After that, I walked straight up the Starbucks register and ordered a coffee, and had a easy walk down to the gate. We left ORD on-time and landed at LGA 30 minutes early! I checked my watch again to make sure it was right. On a good day, I consider an flight between ORD and LGA to be on-time if I’m not more than 30 minutes late. I’m not sure I’ve ever arrived early. Indeed, somebody sent me a press release last month with stats saying that Chicago-New York is second only to SF-LA in the list of most disrupted air routes. All this joyousness hit the wall, though -- almost literally -- when I walked out of LGA Terminal B smack into the cab line which, for those of you not familiar with LGA, should not be see when you walk out the front of Terminal B because the cab rank is on the side of Terminal B. Well, maybe they moved it for the construction. Nope, it was where it always has been. So my time budget balanced out -- 30-minute early arrival funded the 30-minute cab ride. Easy come, easy go.</li>\r\n 	<li>I was only in New York for Monday day -- arrived at 11am and left at 8pm -- which meant trying to find a cab on 5th Ave to take me to LGA during rush hour. Or used to. Whatever your opinions on Uber or ride sharing in general, the ability to easily get a ride from Manhattan to LGA without dancing into the street, hiding your luggage behind a trash can, and pleading with the one guy who finally stopped is justification enough for its existence. And I’m obviously not the only one who feels this way, so there are gobs of Uber drivers on, say, 5th Ave at rush hour, making it hard to spot your ride and easy to get into someone else’s. Monday night, I noticed a new option on the Uber screen that was showing my driver crawling toward me through Midtown traffic. “Click here to change the color of your driver’s Uber badge”. I clicked and got a color spectrum slider, which kept me occupied while I was waiting. I changed the color to red, then blue, then yellow, and then Uber said he was a block away, to some shade of lime green. I looked up, and there was an SUV with a lime green Uber badge in the window. I hopped in and off we went. I asked him how his evening was going. “Fine,” he said, “though I think this Uber light is acting up. Just now, it started changing all sorts of colors.”</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/copperhead/40520\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen</a> by copperhead (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: Admiral Bob, Javolenus , Sackjo22</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Roger Nash sent a note on Twitter with a pointer to the Transport for London’s new Oyster app. In the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/11/20/podcast-135-airport-bingo-new-old-travel-pc/\">last episode</a>, I talked about my growing stack of contactless -- tap ‘n’ go -- transit cards, and difference between re-loading my Chicago Ventra card with a smartphone app vs. having to queue at a machine to top up my Oyster card when we were in London last summer. TfL launched their Oyster app a few months back and seem to be aggressively rev’ing it to add features. The only problem for me -- it’ll only take a UK-based payment card. So I’ll have to sponge off my daughter if I want to skip the machine. That’ll be a fun role change…</li>\r\n 	<li>Also got a good run of comments on the Airport Bingo topic.\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>An anonymous comment asking “Since when do bingo cards have a story arc?” Fair point…</li>\r\n 	<li>Donna Smith Pleiman on Twitter suggested a square for “sweaty guy racing onto the plane at the last minute plops down next to you, proceeds to take his shoes off.” Yeah, that one happens a little too often -- because once is too often</li>\r\n 	<li>Rob said: I like the \"3-adjective rule\". I\'ve always said, \"If you have to inhale to finish your drink order... you don\'t actually like coffee.\" Good point, if you have to use circular breathing in the Starbucks line, you need to re-think your beverage choices.</li>\r\n 	<li>And Steve Frick built his own card in a post on his Back and Gone Again blog. “Since not everyone travels by air, we’re focusing on travel in general,” he says and then spins through his set of 25 spaces. I’ll post a <a href=\"http://www.hypeorlando.com/back-and-gone-again/2017/11/22/holiday-travel-bingo/\">link</a> to it in the show notes.</li>\r\n 	<li>And with Steve throwing down that challenge, I stole a couple of his squares so I could expand my Airport Bingo card to the full 25 spaces in a blog post on the TravelCommons site last week. Check it out; I hope it keeps you entertained on your trip to Grandma’s house.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>The smart luggage ban announced by Delta, American, and Alaska with the other US oligopoly members United and Southwest expected to follow shortly caused a bit of a Twitter storm. Next month, January 15 to be exact, smart luggage without removable batteries will be banned. And if your smart bag is checked, you have to remove battery before it goes in the hold -- which negates one of the key benefits pitched by smart bag sellers -- the ability to track your bag through built-in GPS and cellular data. No battery, and it’s just another bag left behind on the tarmac, or as one of my funnier Twitter followers @ThankYouLeetch replied that the airlines were hard at work -- “We\'re GOING to lose your bag, and we\'ll be damned if we let the likes of YOU find it! If you must know, we are just REALLY into this monopoly thing.\" Kinda blows if you just dropped $400 on one of these bags.</li>\r\n 	<li>This would seem to cause an existential problem for category pioneer Bluesmart because none of their bags -- the original one nor the recently released Series 2 -- have removable batteries. I backed Bluesmart’s initial Indiegogo campaign back in November 2014 -- longtime podcast listener Arnoud Heijnis <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/11/22/podcast-112-holiday-airport-etiquette-travel-tax-pile-up/\">pointed it out to me</a> -- and received my bag a year later. I reviewed it in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/12/podcast-120-where-do-guidebooks-fit-in-i-hate-shopping-for-suitcases/\">episode 120</a> after a couple of months of use -- my take: “I’m kinda “meh” on all the electronics, so it’s a nice enough hard-shell wheelie bag with a couple of bells and whistles that don’t necessarily wow me.” Though I did amend that “meh” in the very <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/05/30/podcast-121-tsa-lines-my-luggage-is-where/\">next episode</a> saying “the Bluesmart is the perfect carry-on size, it’s usually right above me in the plane cabin, so the location finder isn’t that valuable. Except when I have to gate check my bag on a small regional jet. On a recent Skywest flight, it was taking my bag a long time to show up at the gate after arriving. Hmmm, I pulled out my iPhone, hit the Location button on the Bluesmart app, and it showed me that my bag had updated its location a couple of minutes prior and was indeed here. A few minutes later, it showed up in the last tranche of bags heaved up into the jet bridge. Not critical functionality, but it moves up from “meh” to “kinda handy”.”</li>\r\n 	<li>The real pain for me is that I now have to shop for another suitcase which I really hate. I finally put my 10-year-old Victorinox bag out to pasture because the handle locked itself in the extended position, and so I’d switched over to my Bluesmart for these recent trips. My last flight back from CHO was on an American Eagle regional jet. I’m waiting along the side of a cold ORD bridge with about 20 other passengers for my bag. It comes out second because, even though there’s not First Class on this plane, I’ve clung to the yellow gate check tag that I got with a First Class upgrade last month. Sparky, the young gate agent, looks at my bag as he’s handing it to me and says “Is that a smart bag? Did you take the battery out of that?” “No, because I don’t have to until January 15,” I shot back. Don’t push it, American. You’re forcing me to scrap a 2-year-old bag; I got that. But don’t make me go luggage shopping the week before Christmas.</li>\r\n 	<li>One of the topics back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/11/22/podcast-125-uber-driver-stories-overseas-for-the-election/\">episode 125</a> was life stories from my Uber and Lyft drivers. I still do ask most of my drivers how they like driving, how long they’ve been doing it, and what else they do — if it’s not their full time gig. Last month, we were taking an Uber into the city on Saturday for a beer festival. The driver was great -- very personable guy. So I ask him about his gig. He’s been doing it full-time for 2 years now. Before that, he was a hotel manager. He quit because the stress was too much -- late night calls about guests, bedbug infestations,.... He said that driving Uber in Chicago was much less stressful. Think about next time you’re about to light into the assistant night manager about a missing towel -- their job is more stressful than driving full-time in bumper-to-bumper traffic. That was an eye-opener to me. I’ve gone out of my way to be more pleasant to front desk folks ever since.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/NiGiD/48586\">O Tannenbaum / Oh Christmas Tree</a> by Martijn de Boer (NiGiD) (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license.  Ft: Admiral Bob (admiralbob77)</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Is Cash is a Waning King?</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>As I said at the start of the show, my last trip this year was ORD to LGA to CHO. I didn’t arrive too late so there were a couple of cabs waiting -- no LGA-style lines, I just hopped in. It’s a $25 flat rate to downtown Charlottesville. We pulled up to my hotel, I gave the driver a 20 and a 10 and got out of the cab. “Cash? Thanks!” he said.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’ve said this before; I try to pay all of my cab fares in cash ever since one cab driver walked me through why he hates cards. There’s a timing problem-- he has to pay for gas, tolls, airport access fees, and the taxi company that day, but he doesn’t get his money until a couple of days later. And then there’s the high fees the processing companies charge taxi drivers.</li>\r\n 	<li>But when traveling with younger colleagues, I feel like I’m the last generation of cash payers. Not only do they pay for everything with a card, many of them don’t even carry cash. Maybe I’m just getting old, or maybe I remember when you couldn’t use cards everywhere.</li>\r\n 	<li>Especially in Europe in the late ‘80’s/early ‘90’s when I would be in a different country every day on sales calls with distributors. There weren’t international ATMs -- or really ATMs of any kind. We’d get a wallet full of American Express Travelers Checks before flying out and then typically cash a $100 check at the airport currency exchange after customs. This was before the euro, so we’d juggle D Marks, Belgian and French francs, British and Irish pounds, pesetas, lira,.... Almost all of the hotels we stayed in took credit cards -- except for this one random mom-&amp;-pop place outside of Munich; nice people but they screwed up my D Mark budget -- but not all restaurants and none of the taxis did. So our currency exit strategy -- so we didn’t pay double the exchange fees for having to go in and out of a currency that we might not use for another year or so -- was to throw down most of our excess cash at the hotel in the morning, saving enough for a sandwich, the cab back to the airport and a beer at the bar -- and then put on the Amex the balance of the hotel room. It usually worked well -- except for the one time that I mixed up the exchange rate between the Swedish krona and Swiss franc. Not an unreasonable mix up -- both countries start with an S and have a lot of snow -- but the krona exchange rate was about 6 to the dollar at that time while the Swiss franc was at 1.3 to the dollar. That one definitely screwed up my end-of-day cash strategy.</li>\r\n 	<li>But I absolutely understand the use case for going all plastic. First, you’re not having to float the money between travel and reimbursement. But I gotta think convenience is the bigger play. Many companies pipe their company card transactions straight into their expense reporting systems. Makes it incredibly easy -- log into Concur or whatever, assign each charge to an expense code and submit. Nothing forgotten and you’re done in 5 minutes. With cash, you have to remember what you spent, enter it, and probably submit a receipt too. I’ll never pay for my $2 ORD Starbucks coffee with my Amex card, but when the cab fare get above $50, even I’ll charge it.</li>\r\n 	<li>I do think it’s a bit of a generational thing, though. I remember my dad always walking around with a bunch of 50’s in a money clip in his pocket. And my kids always getting a $100 bill from their Hungarian grandparents for Christmas -- we’d call it the Eastern European C note. I now have a Venmo account, but I still like paying people back in cash. Feels like I need say “Get off my lawn” but I may not have completely aged out yet. When paying my daughter’s tuition at Univ of St Andrews, one sentence on the web site caught my eye -- “Ideally tuition and accommodation fees should not be paid in cash” -- which means that someone or multiple someones has done it. It’s not a travel expense, but the image of someone walking into the St Andrews bursar’s office and stacking piles of 100 pound notes just makes me smile. Makes me want to drop a C note on my next big cab ride.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/44580\"> What Child is This (Instrumental)</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license.  Ft: Jeris</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Don’t Make It Hard to Cash in on Loyalty</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Back in October, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/10/31/podcast-134-value-of-loyalty-need-those-5-stars/\">episode 134</a>, we talked about the value of loyalty. In November, JD Powers released their 2017 Airline Loyalty Program Satisfaction Study. Powers measured satisfaction “based on four factors (in order of importance): earning and redeeming rewards; program benefits; account management; and member communication”. Not a surprising list, and placing “redeeming awards” at the top makes sense since that’s sorta the core of a loyalty program -- here’s something to incent you to fly us more.</li>\r\n 	<li>A couple of years ago, in episode 116, I talked about why, for me, British Airways’ Avios program has been the worst program for redemptions. I had over 300,000 points sitting there because it never made sense to use them. When I’d price out an award ticket between Chicago and London, the addition cash I would owe for BA’s fuel surcharges (which made sense when oil was at $120/bbl, but much less so at $50) and Heathrow landing taxes would just about equal what I’d pay for a ticket with another airline -- so the miles were worth nothing. Not exactly a best practice for an airline loyalty program.</li>\r\n 	<li>But, when BA and Iberia, both owned by the same corporate parent, kinda combined their programs into, not a single but a sorta interchangeable Avios program, I thought there might be a way to finally get some value from my forlorn BA points. I said kinda interchangeable because I now have 2 Avios accounts -- a BA Avios account and an Iberia Avios account. And since I have had my Iberia Avios account for over 90 days, I can convert my BA Avios to Iberia Avios, which let me use points for a direct ORD-MAD flight this spring at a small fraction of the cash for fees and taxes that BA would charge.</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, good. I’ve found the flights, I’ve found the page on BA.com to transfer. I enter all the account info, press the button, and get a big red error screen. Hmmm… I try it a couple of more times, same result. Different browsers, same result. In incognito mode so there’s no legacy cookies, same result. Hmmm…</li>\r\n 	<li>So I dredge around BA’s site and find a technical support number. It’s Saturday afternoon Chicago time, but after a good bit of music, I get a live guy. And he’s a good guy. Here’s the problem, your name doesn’t match on your accounts -- it’s Mark Peacock on your BA account, and Mark Peacock Peacock on your Iberia account. You’ll need to call Iberia to change that, then the transfer will go through. OK, seems reasonable enough. So I call Iberia, again listen to music and again get a live person. Good guy, but he can’t help me. Here’s a number in Spain; give them a call. Which I do, a bit more music, and then another guy. We’ll need some documentation to make that change, send a picture of the first page of your passport to this Iberia email address and we’ll make the change.</li>\r\n 	<li>Lots of calls, spoke to some nice people, but I still can’t break these BA Avios points free. So I send the email, but I don’t expect this to get resolved soon. I open another beer and gear myself up for another fare search, but decide to give BA one more call. This time, I connect with a woman with a proper northern English accent. It felt like I’d somehow overflowed into a high status group; like when I was Global Services on United and agents picking up my calls were sitting in the corporate center near ORD and could make anything happen. I relate my tale of woe; “Oh, that’s no problem,” she says. Five minutes later, it’s done. Thanks to her, I got to redeem 100,000 Avios points and am feeling a bit more hopeful about the remaining balance. The only downside -- I didn’t get the woman’s name so I could give her a shout out. By the way, 3.5 weeks later and still no response to my email to Iberia.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #136</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_136.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #136 — Is Cash A Waning King; Don’t Make It Hard to Cash in on Loyalty','','inherit','closed','closed','','1894-revision-v1','','','2018-08-09 22:28:10','2018-08-10 03:28:10','',1894,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/08/09/1894-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2105,1,'2018-08-09 22:29:06','2018-08-10 03:29:06','[caption id=\"attachment_1925\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/IMG_20141210_231414.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1925\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/IMG_20141210_231414-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> How many nights to get Leopard Print status?[/caption]\r\n\r\nSo we\'re four weeks into the new year and 30-50% of us have already ditched our New Year\'s resolutions, but we still have time to get our 2018 travel status lined up. Over the holiday break, I bought a non-smart carry-on to replace my now-banned Bluesmart; I walk through my shopping criteria. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_137.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\nThanks to <a href=\"http://go.travelperk.com/travelcommons\">TravelPerk</a> for sponsoring this episode. \r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_137.mp3\"]<!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #137:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. This episode is sponsored by <a href=\"http://go.travelperk.com/travelcommons\">TravelPerk</a>, the #1 rated business travel tool on the Internet. It’s been a light travel month, just a drive down to Nashville, and a couple of trips over to Charlottesville, VA, which has been a nice break from what is otherwise turning out to be a brutally cold winter in Chicago. The day after New Years, I walked out of the house into a -10℉ morning -- not windchill, it was -10℉ ambient. Welcome to January. I had my team travel here last week for a 2018 kick-off meeting. No one accused us of boon-doggling. The guy from Phoenix did say he was filing an employee abuse claim though.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’ve found myself drinking less craft beer and much more Scotch whisky in this month; -10℉ is definitely brown liquor weather. Luckily, my daughter brought home a nice bottle of 18-year-old <a href=\"http://www.glenscotia.com/\">Glen Scotia</a> from Edinburgh for Christmas. I’ve made a sizable dent in it.</li>\r\n 	<li>On my first trip to Charlottesville, after being off the road for four weeks, it took me forever to gather up all the bits of my regular travel carry from around the house. Normally, my travel carry stays in my backpack and my suitcase; I buy duplicates of things like hair brushes and headphones just so I don’t need to pull them out of my bag. But for some reason, all discipline broke down over the holidays and my carefully curated travel carry was spread/spewed throughout the house. Luckily, my ride to ORD was 5 minutes late. I took my Bluesmart bag, squeezed in one last trip before American’s January 15th smart luggage ban took effect. I tweeted a picture of my Bluesmart before boarding. American replied “We\'re glad you\'re flying with us and appreciate your cooperation with our team.” My response -- “Not that I have much of a choice…” Especially with IATA recommending the ban to its 300 airline members. My new non-smart Victorinox bag arrived on my front porch before the ban clicked in, so once I shift everything from the Bluesmart to the Victorinox, I’ll power down the Bluesmart, delete its app from my iPhone, and consign it to the corner of the attic with all my other retired bags -- my own Land of Misfit Bags.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mactonite/29469\">Static</a> by Darkroom (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mactonite/29469 </span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Starting off the New Year, I did a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/01/01/looking-back-at-2017-the-highs-and-the-lows/\">blog post</a> summarizing some of the high and low points that we talked about in 2017. The high points? Things like Uber and Lyft driver stories, yet more craft beer taprooms, and Hertz’s President Circle Aisle. Low points? Airlines dragging passengers from planes, everybody lobbying for 5-star reviews, and, no surprise, the smart luggage ban.</li>\r\n 	<li>Allan Marko, not just a long-time TravelCommon’s listener, but probably one of the original listeners showed his roots by posting on the original comment channel -- the TravelCommons website\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Have had our Away luggage for only about six months prior to the battery ban. I really like the ‘smart’ charging feature. Luckily the Away battery is a nicely designed self-contained and easily removable unit (two screws; screwdriver included!) Now the battery lives in my backpack, and the luggage still usable.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\"></li>\r\n 	<li>Allan’s psychic capabilities are showing. I think Away is the only major smart bag that meets the airlines’ requirement for a removable battery. But for me, charging wasn’t the major use case for me. I’m typically fine with my Anker lipstick charger. And if I forget to recharge that, my Verizon mobile WiFi hotspot also doubles as a charger. For me, the GPS tracking was the main use case -- for those times I had to check my bag, it was nice to know that it had also made it to my destination -- a use case that requires power. Pull out the battery and no more tracking. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted.</li>\r\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\"></li>\r\n 	<li>Jim McDonough replied to the Twitter announcement of the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">last episode</a> where I wondered if I was the last generation of cash payers. Jim wrote\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I use cash a) at the local farmer’s market; b) pay for haircuts . . . having a hard time coming up with c)</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Jim, I dunno. Looking at your Twitter profile picture, you look like you could land in my generation. I apologize for using a card for anything under $20. Although I have to say that more and more microbrewery taprooms only take credit cards. I don’t apologize there; or at the self-service tills in Home Depot or Tesco’s -- mostly because there’s no one to apologize to even though they will take cash.</li>\r\n 	<li>Natalie on the British Airways social media team <a href=\"https://twitter.com/British_Airways/status/943550974102245376\">tweeted back</a> at me about the other topic on the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">last episode</a> -- about how hard it can be to cash in on loyalty points. You’ll remember that I talked about all the hassles I had in transferring Avios points from BA to Iberia, until I got a BA agent with solid northern accent. Natalie of BA said\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Hey Mark! Thanks for tagging us in your article. I\'m glad to hear that one of our \'Geordie\' colleagues was able to help you redeem some of your Avios. It\'s a shame you didn\'t catch her name though.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Absolutely it was a shame. She deserves huge props.</li>\r\n 	<li>In that same riff, I mentioned how my email to Iberia to clean up my name on my Iberia Plus account -- which might have been the root cause of my point transfer problem -- seemed to have fallen into a black hole. Well, apparently it didn’t. Soon after that episode, I got a letter from Iberia with a new card that had my correct name. That was nice. Would’ve been just a bit nicer if they’d hit the Reply button while handling the email and typed, I dunno, just 8 words -- “Got it fixed; new card in the mail” But it got done -- all of it, Avios points, non-stop ORD-MAD flight on points, and now, a card with my correct name.</li>\r\n 	<li>And that Iberia letter was probably one of the last surprises I got when I open the mailbox at home. Somehow, I’m not quite sure how, I signed up for a US Post Office service that sends me an email every morning with scanned images of letters I’m going to receive that day. When I got that first email, I was kinda “What the hell?”, but now I kinda like it, especially when I’m on the road. No more wondering what bills showed up, or during the holidays, who had sent us Christmas cards. It does kinda take the surprise out of opening the mailbox -- though not that there was much left since 90% of our physical mail is junk -- but it is kinda entertaining.</li>\r\n 	<li>Back in August, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/08/27/podcast-132-travel-apps-on-my-phone/\">episode #132</a> about the travel apps I have loaded on my phone, I talked about using the paid or “Pro” version of TripIt, and about how it was on the bubble for me because of how the airlines have improved the flight status notifications in their own apps. In 4 months since then, the airline apps have pretty consistently notified me of gate changes and delays faster than TripIt Pro. And so when my subscription ran out a few weeks ago, I ignored the renewal alerts. I’ll still use the free version -- I like the way TripIt consolidates separate plane, hotel, and rental car reservations into a single trip -- kinda replicating the itineraries your travel agent used to give you when they booked your entire trip. But paying $50 for what are now slower, redundant flight alerts? I’ll spend it on beer or brown liquor instead.</li>\r\n 	<li>I don’t know if it’s just me, but the cadence for boarding groups has gotten out of control. I think I was on a Delta flight where I was boarding group 1 or 2, but was the 4th or 5th group to board, after Delta One, and then Platinum Medallion, then Gold Medallion, Sky Team Elite -- it went on forever. American is a bit better -- only one non-numeric boarding group for the invite-only Concierge Key gang (remember George Clooney in Up In The Air) -- and then 1 through 9(!). I do love the announcement “If you don’t have a boarding group number, then board Group 7” which feels a bit random. Where it really becomes fun is on a regional jet, when the gate agent runs through this cadence for a plane with only 40-50 passengers and all the carry-on bags are gate… I mean valet checked. “Now boarding passengers in Group 1, Group 2, Group 3…” Four people board… “Groups 5, 6, 7, and the rest of you” followed by general scrum in front of the agent. I know the airlines have PhDs in psychology, sociology, and linear programming working on this stuff, but it continues to be a cluster</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>And thanks to this episode’s sponsor TravelPerk</li>\r\n 	<li>Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/11/20/podcast-135-airport-bingo-new-old-travel-pc/\">November episode</a>, I talked about American\'s last-minute cancellation of my night flight to Charlottesville and my ensuing scramble to find a replacement flight and to make sure the Hyatt Place didn\'t flush my reservation. But if I\'d booked with TravelPerk, they would\'ve done the scrambling for me.\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>This all-in-one business travel management tool includes a team of highly qualified agents ready to rescue disgruntled travelers from any scenario 24/7.</li>\r\n 	<li>It’s because of making magic happen in times like this that TravelPerk is now the #1 rated business travel tool on the internet.</li>\r\n 	<li>You\'ll love them because you can finally take control of your travel schedule, have freedom to book alternative accommodation like Airbnb, and have a built-in rescue team when stuff goes south. Remove some stress from the equation, go to <a href=\"http://go.travelperk.com/travelcommons\">go.travelperk.com/travelcommons</a> for a no-commitment test drive.</li>\r\n 	<li>It’s free forever if you to <a href=\"http://go.travelperk.com/travelcommons\">go.travelperk.com/travelcommons</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Psykick/52938\">Another Way</a> by Psykick (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Psykick/52938</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Plan for 2018 Travel Perks</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>So here we are, 4 weeks into the new year and anywhere from a third to a half of us have already ditched our New Year\'s resolutions and are now in full anticipation of Super Bowl queso dip. But while your dry January may have been washed out early, you still have time to get your 2018 travel perks in place.</li>\r\n 	<li>Almost all travel perks come from status in loyalty programs and all those status earning counts reset on Jan 1, so the first step is to match up what you think your 2018 travel plans will be to your loyalty programs. Any gaps? If you think you’ll start flying to Seattle (maybe helping to shill your hometown for Amazon’s HQ2), you’ll probably want to sign up for Alaskan Airlines Mileage Plan, where before, it might not have been worth the extra junk mail.</li>\r\n 	<li>Or if you’re already a member, do a status match. When I took a new CIO job some years back, all the hotels near our offices were Hilton brands. I had a Hilton\'s Honors card but just in basic blue as opposed to my top-of-the-line sparkly platinum Marriott card. After I hit the “reset my password” link on the Hilton website, I went straight to their status match page. Right at the top, it says “For the next 90 days,... we’ll match your elite status with any other loyalty program.” If you complete 4 or 8 stays over those 90 days, the match is good for the year. So rather than having to grind my way to Hilton status, I started enjoying it on Day 1. I had a friend do that with American -- parlay his United 1K status to Executive Platinum when he moved from Denver to Dallas. Much better than slumming in Boarding Group 5 until you clear the first status bar.</li>\r\n 	<li>Doing this, you also need to keep in mind the different ecosystems; the partnerships that tie travel companies together. It used to be just the international alliances -- Star, SkyTeam, OneWorld. When I knew I’d be traveling down to South Africa, racking up some serious business class mileage, I had two real options -- SAA out of JFK and IAD, or DL out of ATL. Living in Chicago, I chose SAA because they’re part of Star Alliance with United, and I’d get a lot more use from United status out of Chicago than I would Delta. And it’s getting even more combinatorial now with United and Marriott are status matching each other.</li>\r\n 	<li>And then there’s the credit cards -- both affinity (United and Chase Visa, American and Citi MasterCard) and non (Amex Platinum, Chase Sapphire Reserve). You gotta do the math. For example, Amex’s Platinum card is $550/year. But with that, you get Membership Rewards points that transfer to airlines and hotels, access to Delta lounges and Amex’s Centurion Lounges, which if you travel frequently to DFW, LAS, MIA, LGA, and now JFK, is great. They’re much better than, say American’s Admirals Clubs. I wish they had one in Chicago. Amex also picks up the $100 Global Entry or $85 PreCheck fee, gives you 10 GoGo WiFi sessions, $200 in Uber credit, and some other benefits. If you’ll use these benefits, that $550 can be a better deal than, say, the $95 that the United Chase will cost you. However, that United Chase will get you baggage fee waiver, two United Club passes, and status boarding. If you don’t travel a huge amount and live in a United hub like Houston, the United card could be a better deal. But you gotta think about your travel, do the math, and sign up for it now so you have all year to maximize the status benefits.</li>\r\n 	<li>And while you’re in this planning zone, do yourself a big favor sign up and make an appointment for Global Entry if you do international travel, or PreCheck if you’re mostly a domestic flyer. If it makes sense for you to get an Amex Platinum or Chase Sapphire Reserve card, it’ll be free. To me, TSA and Customs lines are still the worst part of travel. While you’re figuring out how to bump your status up your status on airlines and hotels, do yourself a favor and step out of those TSA and Customs lines too.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/flatwound/14476\">The Long Goodbye</a> by John Pazdan (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/flatwound/14476</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>How to Shop For A Suitcase</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>OK, perhaps a bit presumptuous of a title; perhaps it’s “How I shopped for a suitcase.” But before we go there, let’s summarize the set up from past episodes -- my 10-year old black Swiss Army carry-on rendered itself unusable before Thanksgiving when the handle became stuck in the extended position (luckily as I was getting in a car coming home from ORD and not while trying to stow it in an overhead while boarding), I hate shopping for suitcases so I recharge my Bluesmart smart bag and put it back into service in December only to have it banned from air travel as of last week.</li>\r\n 	<li>So now I’m forced to shop for a suitcase. Like any good consultant, I, of course, construct a prioritized list of evaluation criteria. First, it has to be a carry-on. Now that may seem a bit of a “duh”, but there is some ambiguity; the <a href=\"https://travel-made-simple.com/carry-on-size-chart/\">approved height</a> varies by airline between 19 and 22-inches. If I wanted to play it safe, I’d go for a 20-inch bag, but I’m also want to maximize how much I can carry-on. I tilt toward choosing space. Most US carriers accept a 22-inch bag and that’s mostly what I fly, and even when I’m on European carriers I usually have enough alliance status (my American Platinum status carrying over to OneWorld) to glide past the baggage sizer.</li>\r\n 	<li>Which leads to the second criterion -- it needs to be black. As I said in my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/10/18/ruthless-packing-tips/\">Ruthless Packing Tips post</a> in October, black not only makes you look thinner, it makes your bag look thinner to gate agents scanning for bag-sizer bait.</li>\r\n 	<li>Third, 2 wheels, not 4. This is a bit more of a personal preference. My Bluesmart is a 4-wheel spinner and my wife swears by hers, but because the 4 wheels have to extend from the bottom of the bag, spinners sacrifice packing space for agility, while 2-wheelers can embed their wheels up in the backplane of the bag. Again trying to maximize packing space, I go for the 2-wheeler, and with the biggest wheels I can find to make it an easier, smoother pull. I was kinda surprised how this limited my selection. Spinners definitely rule.</li>\r\n 	<li>My fourth criterion -- I wanted the inside of the suitcase to be as plain and empty as possible. No bunch of zip compartments, or built-in suit hangers, or ratcheting down clothes dividers; just a wide open box that free to structure how I want for each trip. I was surprised how tough this was to find. Indeed, in the end, I couldn’t find it and settled for a bag where I could detach the suit hanger and clothes divider and stash that stuff up in the Land of Misfit Bags next to the Bluesmart.</li>\r\n 	<li>Whittling through all that, I ended up buying a black Victorinox Werks Traveler 5.0 2-wheeler. Victorinox is what used to be Swiss Army; I figured if my last bag survived 10 years of hard mileage, that said something for durability. It was also one of the few where I could detach all the internal storage stuff. And it has that additional zipper to expand the width by an inch -- kinda like when you drop a notch on your belt after Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner; for those times when I’m flying home and have bought a few too many bottles of wine or brown liquor.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #137</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>Thanks again to TravelPerk for sponsoring this episode. Remember to go to <a href=\"http://go.travelperk.com/travelcommons\">go.travelperk.com/travelcommons</a> for a test drive</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_137.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #137 — New Year\'s Travel Status Tips; How to Shop for a Suitcase','','inherit','closed','closed','','1916-revision-v1','','','2018-08-09 22:29:06','2018-08-10 03:29:06','',1916,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/08/09/1916-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2106,1,'2018-08-14 11:25:22','2018-08-14 16:25:22','[caption id=\"attachment_1233\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"299\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/images.jpg\"><img class=\"size-full wp-image-1233\" title=\"Felix Baumgartner Losing United 1K Status (Redbull via YouTube)\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/images.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"299\" height=\"168\" /></a> Felix Baumgartner Losing United 1K Status (Redbull via YouTube)[/caption]\r\n\r\nTravel has been a bit less glamorous since I\'ve fallen from the top tier status, especially when I\'m doing \"stupid\" travel -- up-&amp;-backs across the continent in 48 hours. One of my recent flights was on a new United 737-900; the interior is a significant step up. Prepping for a vacation in Spain, I find it\'s easier and cheaper to get an unlocked phone to use with a local <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Subscriber identity module\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subscriber_identity_module\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"wikipedia noopener noreferrer\">SIM card</a>. And it wouldn\'t be a proper TravelCommons episode without a TSA story -- the fight over the new knife rules misses the point. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_104.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_104.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #104:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago. I was trying to get this written in time to do the show from the bathroom of the Vintage Plaza hotel in downtown Portland, or perhaps from the hottub that I found on the balcony of my room, but that just didn\'t come to pass.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’ve been on the road more than not since the last episode -- a couple of days in New York, 18 hours in Detroit, but mostly in Portland, OR. 4 trips since the last episode. So I\'ve experienced the full range of Portland weather -- 38 degrees and drizzle all the way to 58 degrees and drizzle. But I’m nowhere near close to tasting the full range of Oregon beers, no matter how hard I try. And the listeners who are friends on Untappd have seen how hard I\'ve been trying. My face has scrolled across the top of the digital menu at Bailey’s Taproom a few too many times.</li>\r\n 	<li>And though I joke about the weather (and who doesn\'t -- even the natives apologize) I enjoy flying in Portland, taking the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"MAX Light Rail\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAX_Light_Rail\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"wikipedia noopener noreferrer\">Max light rail</a> into the city center, and having a 10 min morning walk from the hotel to the office. No rental car, no traffic. There is the occasional street person, but they\'re much more polite than, say, the SF or Phila homeless.</li>\r\n 	<li>One of those Portland trips was in the midst of what I call “stupid” travel -- when I get committed to back-to-back meetings thousands of miles apart. I think I told the story a couple of years back when I did Chicago to London to Denver in two days. That was probably the stupidest trip I\'ve done. This one wasn\'t as bad -- Chicago to Portland to Detroit and then back to Chicago in two days.</li>\r\n 	<li>It went OK, as well as can be expected, right up until the last day. I had a breakfast meeting in lovely scenic <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Livonia, Michigan\" href=\"http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=42.4011111111,-83.3711111111&amp;spn=0.1,0.1&amp;q=42.4011111111,-83.3711111111 (Livonia%2C%20Michigan)&amp;t=h\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"geolocation noopener noreferrer\">Livonia, Michigan</a> -- a western suburb of Detroit -- that has the redeeming value of not being very far from the airport. Good thing because it started dumping snow that morning. Not a big problem. I called Amex Travel -- there’s an earlier flight to Chicago with seats available. I book it to the airport. Once there, I go up to the kiosk to change my flight, but it tells me that there’s no flight available. Hmmm... I walk up and down the concourse trying to find the right line to change my ticket. I have no status on Delta, so I can’t get into any of the Medallion lines. I’m not flying first class or internationally so I don’t qualify for those lines. I finally walk through an empty line that is for self-service baggage drop. Can you help me? She points to the kiosk -- you can make all your changes there. But I can’t. She shrugs and turns away. I’m trying to play nice and follow the rules, which has gotten me into a black hole bounded by poorly programmed kiosks and indifferent employees. Luckily, the baggage claim woman’s shrug is not shared by all of her co-workers. On another lap of the terminal, looking perplexed and annoyed, a couple of red-jacketed Delta employees stop me. I tell them my story and they take me directly to the front of a Medallion line and I’m taken care of. I thank them all multiple times and head to the gate.</li>\r\n 	<li>The flight is delayed 30 minutes because the inbound plane is late. Not surprising given the snow. No big deal. We finally board the plane. And wait. Now I know that deicing at Detroit Metro isn\'t done at the gate -- it’s done mid-field -- so I know we’re not waiting for the goop truck. Hmm... 30 minutes later, a maintenance guy shows up with a screwdriver to replace the latch on an overhead bin in first class that was stuck shut. Then we wait 20 minutes for the paperwork to clear, and then we head to deicing. I eventually got home 30 minutes earlier than if I had just stayed on my original flight. That’s the definition of stupid travel.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://ghosts.nin.com/main/home\"><em>7 Ghosts I</em></a> by <a title=\"Nine Inch Nails\" href=\"http://www.nin.com/\" rel=\"homepage\">Nine Inch Nails</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>A couple of Sundays ago, Chris Christensen of the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Amateur Traveler\" href=\"http://amateurtraveler.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"homepage noopener noreferrer\">Amateur Traveler</a> podcast pinged me on Google Talk. “What to be a guest on <a href=\"http://thisweekintravel.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">This Week in Travel</a> with Jen Leo and me?” “Sure, when?” “Now” And then an invite to a Google Hangout popped up. Oh, video! I had just finished working out. I grabbed a baseball cap before I clicked into the Hangout. It was a lot of fun -- Chris, Jen and another guest -- Corey Taratuta of the <a href=\"http://www.irishfireside.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Irish Fireside</a> podcast. After about an hour, we wrapped it up, but then when Chris went to save the Hangout, he couldn\'t find the button. He looked all over the console. Turns out he had set up the Hangout as private instead of public. So no recording and probably the smallest audience of This Week in Travel ever. The next night, Chris pinged me again -- Are you free? I have it set up correctly this time. And so we all popped back in. We started with a rundown of the week’s travel news headlines. Corey then talked about <a href=\"http://www.thegatheringireland.com/\">The Gathering</a>, which is not the latest teen vampire book, but instead is this year’s big tourist program in Ireland. Which reminded me of my favorite Ireland travel moment — running low on clean clothes during a post-graduate tour of Ireland, I found a laundromat next door to a pub in <a href=\"http://www.corkcity.ie/\">Cork</a>. And it was run by two very nice Irish women who took pity on me. They took care of my laundry while I had a couple of pints of Murphy’s stout. And yes, I did tip them. It’s a good fun. I have a <a title=\"Once More With Feeling…\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2013/03/06/once-more-with-feeling/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">link</a> to the YouTube video on the TravelCommons site. I’ll also put a link to the <a href=\"https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/134-that-feeling-deja-vu-corey/id327760888?i=135011815&amp;mt=2\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">audio podcast</a> in the show notes.</li>\r\n 	<li>In the<a title=\"Podcast #103 — Hospitality is Personal; Tablets Everywhere\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2013/01/24/podcast-103-hospitality-is-personal-tablets-everywhere/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"> last episode</a>, I talked about a post in a FlyerTalk thread that said “The content of the Travel Commons podcast is interesting, but the guy\'s voice is monotone and metronomically slow”. I said that it was probably from a former listener. Well, not true. The person, who asked me not to use their name, dropped me a note last week saying\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>“I’m still very much a regular listener and enjoy your podcasts! I’m Irish but living in China.</li>\r\n 	<li>“It’s tough for a single podcaster to inject variety and drama into his voice. By definition it ends being an unspontaneous scripted monologue. That’s why it’s always easier to listen to an ‘interview’ format or a ‘two friends chatting’ format”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>This is spot-on and the point was driven home to me again being one of four voices in “This Week in Travel”. And being part of four folks chatting, you’re not responsible for all the content. Trying to write 20-some odd minutes of interesting content is the main reason for the longish gaps between episodes. But, thanks for the note and I’m glad to hear that I’ve kept it interesting enough to keep you subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’m heading out to Madrid and Barcelona at the end of this week for Spring Break with my wife and daughter. We have some tours set up -- a market tour in Madrid suggested by Craig Martin from the <a href=\"http://indietravelpodcast.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Indie Travel</a> podcast and a wine tour in Priorat (my favorite Spanish wines) -- so I figured it would be handy to have a local Spanish phone number. I’ll often do this when we’re somewhere for more than a week -- bring an unlocked phone and buy a local SIM card. When we visited Cape Town, the pre-paid SIMs were sold at the checkout line next to the register -- gum, breath mints, SIM cards -- just another impulse buy. There were two or three brands. I was flipping through them trying to figure out which one to buy when the guy behind me in line tapped me on the shoulder -- “You looking to buy a SIM card?” Uh, yeah. “Don’t buy any of these. None of the numbers are good. I have better ones in my car.” Uh, OK.... So we bought our groceries and I followed the guy out to the parking lot. He opened his trunk and had about 50 SIM card packages. He started thumbing through them “Nah..., Nah..., Ah! Here’s a good number.” I honestly couldn\'t tell the difference between this one and the one I was looking at in the grocery store, but whatever. I gave him some rand, put the SIM into the <a href=\"http://www.motorola.com/mdirect/demos/how2_v551/V551G.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Motorola V551</a> that for some reason Cingular had shipped unlocked, and booked a table for dinner down the road. Very handy.</li>\r\n 	<li>I still have that V551 in a plastic bin, buried under a bunch of other semi-obsolete electronics that I keep thinking I’ll have use for, but no, it’s time has passed. When we’re in Spain, I’ll perhaps want to make a couple of calls, but will be more likely to be sending texts or getting directions or looking at a map or posting pictures -- not something that 7-8 year phone is going to handle. Looking around a unlocked smartphones, the market is getting a lot better. Google’s Nexus 4; BLU Products just announced a new Life series that looks good. Tempting, but I pulled out my old iPhone 4 outta my desk drawer and filled out AT&amp;T’s on-line unlock request. They spun on it a couple of days and then sent me an e-mail saying that I’d been approved. But then I needed to find a non-AT&amp;T microSIM to finish the unlock. I tried to cut down the Simple SIM that I’d used to unlock my iPhone 3G, but I must of clipped a contact because it didn\'t work. Then I saw a T-Mobile offer -- $1 dollar to have a microSIM shipped to my house. Done. It showed up a couple of days later. I dropped it into the 4, synced it to iTunes and it told me I was unlocked. I’ll buy a local SIM when I hit the ground in Madrid. However, unlike Cape Town, I understand that I need to register with my passport to buy one. Doesn\'t sound like I’ll be riffling through some guy’s trunk.</li>\r\n 	<li>And finally, we\'ve talked in the past about old planes. I talked about how I avoid flying American’s MD-80s. I ended up on Delta’s version on one leg of my Portland-Detroit flight. Must\'ve been an old Northwest plane because the interior looked like one of their renovated DC-9s, the predecessor to the MD-80. Quite a change when I walked onto a brand new United 737-900 on Monday for a flight back out to Portland. I think it still had a bit of that new plane smell. It had mood lighting and regular electrical plugs a la Virgin America; the push-up/sloping-up overhead bins a la 777. The air vents were some goofy leaf-like construct that took me a minute to figure out. But what caught my eye was what was missing -- there were no video screens anywhere. Was this a new trend -- was United cutting weight and maintenance costs, acknowledging the trend of passengers bringing their own entertainment devices? Uh, no. As we were pushing back, the flight attendant apologized for the lack of video. She said that the plane was so new, it hadn\'t yet had a chance to be retrofitted for in-flight entertainment yet. So much for trend spotting.</li>\r\n 	<li>But hey, If you spot a trend, or have a question, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- use the Voice Memo app on your iPhone or something like Easy Voice Recorder on your Android phone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">@mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em>Stupid Now</em> by <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/music/listeners/artistdetails.php?BandHash=be2a489f478e6d5335652fc8925eee03\">Bob Mould</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Status Free Fall</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>A couple of episodes ago, I talked about how my summer travel sabbatical was going to significantly impact frequent traveler statuses. I was reminded of that on Sunday, St Patrick’s Day, when I was playing <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pogues\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">The Pogues</a> and the song “If I should Fall from Grace with God”. For a couple of years, I was Global Services on United -- the top of the top of the Mileage Plus heap. It was rare I didn\'t get an upgrade. And when I consciously chose to sit in coach -- like when I was flying with my family -- flight attendants would come back, ask me why I was in the back, and then bring me free drinks from first class, which would generate quite a hairball of emotions with my wife -- some tangled mess of amusement and disgust.</li>\r\n 	<li>When I fell out of that rarefied air to just plain 1K, it was a bit of an adjustment -- where did all the kissing up go? But this year’s fall was going to be steeper -- from 1K to Premiere Silver, the lowest level of status. I was close to keeping Gold -- I probably should\'ve done a mileage run to the West Coast -- but the holidays crept up on me faster than I thought. United graciously offered a couple of times to sell me the 3 or 4 segments I needed for $650. I passed. And so I dropped to Silver on Feb 1. Just in time for me to start these Chicago-Portland hauls where United has the only convenient direct flights available. I get dropped down one boarding group -- from 1 to 2 -- which hasn\'t been a big deal. I haven’t had a problem finding overhead space. The bigger pain is not being able to pre-book Economy Plus seats for free. For all of United’s faults, the extra legroom of Economy Plus has always kept me coming back. But as Silver, I can’t book Economy Plus from free like I could as 1K. Now I either pay for it, or wait 24 hours before flight time when I can book it for free. I haven’t had a problem yet, but the ORD-PDX flights don’t seem to be the highest volume legs. Not a huge issue -- more of a discomfort than anything -- but when you’re spending 8-9 hours a week -- or more -- in a plane seat, a couple of extra inches starts to matter.</li>\r\n 	<li>It’s interesting, though, to compare United’s approach to the approach taken by hotel brands. I’d been Marriott top tier -- Platinum -- for many years -- earning it the hard way by spending 75 nights in the Ren Cen Marriott in downtown Detroit, a property legendary in its awfulness. When I changed jobs three years ago, Hilton properties were much more convenient to my offices and so I switched. That first year I made Hilton’s top tier -- Diamond -- and certainly didn\'t re-qualify for Marriott Platinum. But Marriott didn\'t drop me. They soft landed me, dropping me one status level a year. I appreciated that, and it kept me staying with them, even if not as frequently. And this year, Hilton kept me at Diamond even though I didn\'t meet their thresholds. I’m sure they’ll start to drop me next year, but they too will keep some business.</li>\r\n 	<li>And these programs are businesses. What started out as a way keep passengers loyalty in the early scary days of airline deregulation has turned into a cash-generating business in its own right. In 2010, it was estimated that Citibank paid American more than $1 billion for miles it distributed to AAdvantage credit card holders. Makes sense then that one of the first things American did when it filed for Chapter 11 was to tell everyone that their miles were safe. Employee pensions may take a haircut, but not AAdvantage balances.</li>\r\n 	<li>Now it’s one thing to be “de-statused” because I didn\'t thresholds, but it’s a whole other thing to get crammed down a peg because they make a new level above you. Now, this has been going on for a while. At the beginning of American’s AAdvantage program -- the original frequent flyer program -- there was only one status level -- Gold. And then they added a new level, Platinum. And then Executive Platinum as ways to further differentiate level of frequent fliers, and give them a new “brass ring” to chase. Kinda the original “gamification” play, but with early boarding instead of badges as the reward. Of course, if you’re just hitting the top of the old structure, you’re now down a peg when the new level gets created.</li>\r\n 	<li>Which you can understand for the annual award levels, but what about if it’s associated with a lifetime status award. United Million Mile fliers used to receive lifetime Premier Executive status -- the middle status akin to American’s Platinum level. Both these levels would earn 100% mileage bonuses -- earn 2 miles for each mile flown. American is still that way, but when United merged with Continental, Premier Exec became Premier Gold, the mileage bonus was reduced to 50% and a new level, Premier Platinum was inserted above it. If you’d invested dollars and time hitting a million miles on United, the return on that investment just got cut in half. And, of course, someone sued. And last month, the judge <a href=\"http://skift.com/2013/02/01/million-milers-frequent-flier-lawsuit-against-united-to-continue/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">rejected</a> United’s bid to throw the case out, saying “the court finds it plausible that defendant (United) had a contract with Million Miler members which differed from the contract they had with other Mileage Plus members.”</li>\r\n 	<li>So I guess if you\'ve been around long enough, even the airlines have to bring you in for a soft landing.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music --<em>When Irish Eyes are Burning</em> by <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/music/listeners/artistdetails.php?BandHash=a45aaee36685b61a392acf793155e127\">the Ike Reilly Assassination</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>TSA Knife Fight</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>The TSA’s announcement that they’ll allow small non-locking knives and various pieces of sports equipment past airport security checkpoints seemed to be executed with the agency’s typical obliviousness. They didn’t warn or try to pre-sell the idea to folks that have a stake in the decision -- airlines, flight attendants, even air marshals. Instead, they just dropped an announcement and expected everyone to just go along. Are they surprised that everyone is questioning their judgement? Remember, this is the one federal agency that’s more despised than the IRS.</li>\r\n 	<li>Even if the TSA’s threat analysis is correct, what good does it do to announce this change? I can’t remember the last time I was in a TSA line and heard someone say “Dammit, I should be allowed to take my pen knife (or hockey stick) on a plane!” People complain about taking their shoes off, they complain about having to dump their water out, but no one complains about having to leave their knife behind. And yet this is the issue the TSA decides to make a stand on. Sheer brilliance</li>\r\n 	<li>The sports equipment change -- that doesn’t make any sense to me. But the pen knife thing -- the better approach would’ve been to change the policy and not announce it. Anybody who’s observant has noticed that the TSA has eased up on semi-liquid toiletries. While you still can’t bring a full-sized bottle of shampoo onto a flight (and really, who needs to? Hotels provide an unlimited amount of toiletries and if you’re staying in a vacation rental, you’re going to the grocery store once you arrive, so buy it there), I haven’t had a screener pull out my hair stuff or a travel-sized toothpaste in years. They’re still technically forbidden and the screeners can still see them, but they’re rightly focused on more dangerous things. A more practical TSA would let their screeners ignore pen knives and leave it at that.</li>\r\n 	<li>The September 11th attacks changed many things -- including how passengers react to a terrorist attack. Before September 11th, the counsel to passengers was always to be passive, not to put yourselves in harms way. You’re just a bargaining chip. Let the professionals negotiate with the terrorists -- give them money, safe passage -- and odds were, you’ll get out OK. The attempted attacks after September 11th -- the shoe bomber, the underwear bomber -- were all subdued by the passengers around them. Nowadays, even unruly drunks get jumped and zip-tied by their fellow passengers. In this environment, I just don’t see someone taking down a 767 with the knife on a corkscrew.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917626811171154.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #104</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://nin.com/\">Nine Inch Nails</a> and the <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/\">Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_104.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #104 — Status Free Fall; TSA Knife Fight','','inherit','closed','closed','','1227-revision-v1','','','2018-08-14 11:25:22','2018-08-14 16:25:22','',1227,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/08/14/1227-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2107,1,'2018-08-14 11:28:49','2018-08-14 16:28:49','Recorded in the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago at the end of yet another busy travel month – Philadelphia, <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Portland\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/pacific-northwest/portland\">Portland</a>, Denver, Northern Virginia – but am home this week, keeping to one of my cardinal rules of travel – stay out of any airport Thanksgiving week. In this episode, I talk about a successful experiment of going PC-less on a trip to Portland and give the conclusion to last episode\'s story about my mother-in-law being stranded by <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"LOT Polish Airlines\" rel=\"homepage\" href=\"http://www.lot.com\">LOT Airlines</a>.  We have listener stories on accelerated boarding on international Delta flights and some tidbits of <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"British Airways\" rel=\"homepage\" href=\"http://www.ba.com\">British Airways</a> gossip on the cause of the 777 crash last January and the havoc around the Heathrow Terminal 5 opening. I then give my review of <a href=\"http://tripchill.com/main/\" target=\"_blank\">TripChill</a>, one of the new wave of web-based personal travel assistants, and share some travel tips sent in by listeners. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_69.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_69.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #69:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Recorded at the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago<a href=\"https://www.marriott.com/hotels/travel/phldt-philadelphia-marriott-downtown/\" target=\"_blank\"> </a></li>\r\n	<li>Lots of travel, but staying out of airports over the Thanksgiving week</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/twilightarchive-ritual/\" target=\"_blank\"><em>Flow of Know</em></a> by Twilight Archive</li>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n	<li>Booked a long weekend in Portland, Ore entirely on frequent traveler points -- somewhat at odds with the spate of media stories claiming that points are practically useless</li>\r\n	<li>Went PC-less on the Portland vacation -- operated only on my <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"iPhone\" rel=\"homepage\" href=\"http://www.apple.com/iphone\">iPhone</a> and BlackBerry</li>\r\n	<li>Apple has to fix the iPhone Safari browser -- it crashes all the time</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"http://www.kenokel.com/\" target=\"_self\">Ken Okel</a> provides an audio comment on his boarding experience on a recent international Delta flight</li>\r\n	<li>A listener provides some juicy tidbits of British Airways gossip picked up in a bar in <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Geneva\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/switzerland/geneva\">Geneva, Switzerland</a></li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/uniontrade-everyday/\" target=\"_blank\"><em>Violent and Beautiful</em></a> by the Union Trade</li>\r\n<strong>Travel Assistant in Your Pocket </strong></ul>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>There’s been some sort of mini-explosion of new web sites offering to be “your personal travel assistant\"; sites like <a href=\"http://tripchill.com/main/\" target=\"_blank\">TripChill</a>, <a href=\"http://tripit.com\" target=\"_blank\">Tripit</a> and <a href=\"http://yapta.com\" target=\"_blank\">Yapta</a></li>\r\n	<li>Been trying out TripChill’s service off and on since their launch last August. Wasn\'t impressed at first, but has gotten better</li>\r\n	<li>TripChill does a better job than any other site I\'ve seen in displaying flight alternatives</li>\r\n	<li>TripChill and its competitor Tripit have well-designed mobile web sites that quickly display your trip itinerary on a BlackBerry or iPhone</li>\r\n	<li>These travel assistant sites don’t seem to offer much new functionality, but they do offer convenience</li>\r\n	<li>Wo;; probably keep using TripChill, but as an addition to my travel tool box, not a replacement for something I already use</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/lizzi-love/\" target=\"_blank\"><em>Me</em></a> by Lizzi</li>\r\n<strong>Listener Travel Tips </strong></ul>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>One listener suggests a \"divide-&amp;-conquer\" strategy to packing</li>\r\n	<li>Another listener sings the praises of hotel sewing kits</li>\r\n	<li><a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Ian Morgan\" rel=\"wikipedia\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Morgan\">Ian Morgan</a> offers a solution to my problem of forgetting my hotel room number when I go work out -- dial it into my mobile phone</li>\r\n<strong>Closing\r\n</strong>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917639.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com\" target=\"_blank\">Magnatune</a></li>\r\n	<li>Feedback at comments@travelcommons.com or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_69.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<div class=\"zemanta-pixie\" style=\"margin-top: 10px; height: 15px;\"><img class=\"zemanta-pixie-img\" style=\"border: none; float: right;\" src=\"http://img.zemanta.com/pixy.gif?x-id=e918550e-0f77-4f0c-ba0c-bc06bcc59d12\" alt=\"\" /></div>','Podcast #69 - Pocket Travel Assistant; More Travel Tips','','inherit','closed','closed','','112-revision-v1','','','2018-08-14 11:28:49','2018-08-14 16:28:49','',112,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/08/14/112-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2108,1,'2018-08-14 11:29:21','2018-08-14 16:29:21','Recorded in the Philadelphia Marriott after a hectic travel month with two trips to Europe and a bunch of travel up and down the US East Coast.  In this episode, I talk about a bit of multi-modal travel -- some planes, trains, and automobile trips.  We have a trio of stories about playing \"travel roulette\" to avoid flight delays, and some listeners offer their favorite iPhone apps.  I then share some non-obvious, intermediate-skill travel tips -- a sort of Road Warrior 201-level class and close with some thoughts about enjoying the fall colors from up above. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_68.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_68.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #68:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Recorded in the <a href=\"https://www.marriott.com/hotels/travel/phldt-philadelphia-marriott-downtown/\" target=\"_blank\">Philadelphia, PA Marriott</a></li>\r\n	<li>Lots of multi-modal travel this month -- a National Express bus from Heathrow to Woking, lots of Amtrak Acelas up and down the East Coast</li>\r\n	<li>One of those \"<a title=\"IMDb Entry for \" href=\"http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093748/\" target=\"_blank\">Planes, Trains &amp; Automobiles</a>\" days had delays on every leg and every mode of transportation except walking</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/indidginus-seismic/\" target=\"_blank\">Superstring</a></em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/indidginus-seismic/\" target=\"_blank\"></a> by Indidginus</li>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n	<li>In Heathrow, many signs plastered on the screening machines said that I didn\'t need to take my laptop out of my briefcase for screening.  What do they know that the TSA doesn\'t?</li>\r\n	<li>Two travelers tell their \"travel roulette\" stories trying to avoid flight delays</li>\r\n	<li>Chris Truelove of <a href=\"http://www.globalbagtag.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Global Bag Tags</a> is happy with an external iPhone battery he bought on eBay. Listen to the <a href=\"http://www.indietravelpodcast.com/podcast/076-global-bag-tag-review/\" target=\"_blank\">Indie Travel Podcast</a> interview where Chris tells the story of lost luggage that led to the founding of his company</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/yoria-suerte/\"><em>Suerte Mijo</em></a> by Arthur Yoria</li>\r\n<strong>Road Warrior 201 </strong></ul>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>TravelCommons has always been about travel stories, hence I haven\'t done many \"travel tips\" segments</li>\r\n	<li>I\'m going to skip the usual travel tips and give you some advance tips -- tips I haven\'t seen/heard anywhere else</li>\r\n	<li>Tip #1 -- Know your flight, hotel and/or rental car reservation numbers and keep them immediately accessable on your BlackBerry or iPhone<a title=\"Wikipedia article on the Thai alphabet\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thai_alphabet\" target=\"_blank\"></a></li>\r\n	<li>Tip #2 -- When you can\'t get through to a customer service agent on the phone, choose the unpopular path on the phone tree -- Spanish language or International Travel</li>\r\n	<li>Tip #3 -- When shopping for flights, factor in the potential cost of missing a connection when choosing between direct and connecting flights</li>\r\n	<li>Tip #4 -- If you\'re flying one of those chisling airlines that charge $10 extra for an exit row seat, it\'s worth gritting your teeth and paying it for a flight over 90 minutes</li>\r\n	<li>Tip #5 -- When walking out of your hotel room for your morning workout, make your doorknow look unique in case you forget your room number</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/artemis-gravity/\" target=\"_blank\">Inception</a></em> by Artemis</li>\r\n<strong>Leaf Peeping from Above </strong></ul>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Beautiful colors on approach into Newark over the <a href=\"http://www.nps.gov/DEWA/\" target=\"_blank\">Delaware Water Gap</a> on a clear sunny day</li>\r\n	<li>Reminded me of \"<a title=\"Definition of pointillism\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointillism\" target=\"_blank\">pointillism</a>\" and <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Seurat\" target=\"_blank\">Seurat</a>\'s \"<a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunday_Afternoon_on_the_Island_of_La_Grande_Jatte\" target=\"_blank\">A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte</a>\"</li>\r\n<strong>Closing\r\n</strong>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917638.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com\" target=\"_blank\">Magnatune</a></li>\r\n	<li>Feedback at comments@travelcommons.com or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_68.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #68 - Advanced Travel Tips; Colors of Autumn','','inherit','closed','closed','','111-revision-v1','','','2018-08-14 11:29:21','2018-08-14 16:29:21','',111,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/08/14/111-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2109,1,'2018-08-14 11:29:59','2018-08-14 16:29:59','Recorded in the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago after a month of travel to and from the East Coast.  In this episode, a spur-of-the-moment train trip bypasses a huge air traffic control problem.  A listener story gets us talking about theft after you entrust your luggage to the folks behind the curtain.  I have fun saying the word <em>schadenfreude</em> -- German for \"taking pleasure in other\'s misfortunes\" -- while talking about the need to use <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"iPhone\" rel=\"homepage\" href=\"http://www.apple.com/iphone\">iPhones</a> and <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"BlackBerry\" rel=\"homepage\" href=\"http://www.blackberry.com\">BlackBerrys</a> to check the status of delayed flights.  I also give my thoughs on the iPhone after traveling with it for a month.  Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_67.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_67.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #67:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Recorded in the TravelCommons studios outside of <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Chicago\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/chicago\">Chicago, Illinois</a></li>\r\n	<li>No exotic travel this month -- just New York and <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Washington, DC\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/washington-dc\">Washington, DC</a></li>\r\n	<li>Last minute decision to take Amtrak\'s <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Acela Express\" rel=\"wikipedia\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acela_Express\">Acela Express</a> from NYC to DC meant I missed the delays caused by the <a href=\"http://www.eweek.com/c/a/IT-Infrastructure/Corrupt-File-Brought-Down-FAAs-Antiquated-IT-System/?kc=EWKNLNAV08282008STR4\" target=\"_blank\">crash</a> of the FAA\'s traffic tracking system</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- Bend and Not Break by <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/music/listeners/artistdetails.php?BandHash=bcd26803274d04274d5d253b2a9f7fff\" target=\"_blank\">Dashboard Confessional</a></li>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n	<li>A <a href=\"http://www.transparentsociety.com/wordpress/\" target=\"_blank\">listener</a> tells the story about her laptop bag being stolen after gate-checking it on a Delta commuter flight out of Richmond</li>\r\n	<li>I relate the <a href=\"http://www.queensda.org/newpressreleases/2008/september/riviello_acevedo_09_02_2008.pdf\" target=\"_blank\">story</a> of 2 American Airlines JFK baggage handlers with stealing 925 pieces of jewelry worth $280,000 from the checked suitcase of a jewelry dealer bound for LA.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Hollywood Homicide</em> by <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/music/listeners/artistdetails.php?BandHash=e09e260d6030c8da53cef085ca11edd2\" target=\"_blank\">The Frantic</a></li>\r\n<strong>Electronic Schadenfreude\r\n</strong></ul>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li><a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schadenfreude\" target=\"_blank\">Schadenfreude</a> -- German word for \"the pleasure taken from the misfortune of someone else</li>\r\n	<li>Side effect of wanted to make the right decision in changing a flight</li>\r\n	<li>4 weeks of delayed United flights in August had me jumping flights at the first sign of a delay<a title=\"Wikipedia article on the Thai alphabet\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thai_alphabet\" target=\"_blank\"></a></li>\r\n	<li>Electronic schadenfreude -- checking your iPhone or Blackberry the minute you hit the ground to see if your original flight is still on the ground</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Rings and Fences</em> by <a href=\"http://www.moochacha.net/blog/\" target=\"_blank\">Donna Maciocia</a><a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/music/listeners/artistdetails.php?BandHash=e09e260d6030c8da53cef085ca11edd2\" target=\"_blank\"> </a></li>\r\n<strong>Month With an iPhone\r\n</strong></ul>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Picked up a 16 GB 3G iPhone in August from the Apple store in <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Stamford, Connecticut\" rel=\"geolocation\" href=\"http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=41.0966666667,-73.5522222222&amp;spn=0.1,0.1&amp;q=41.0966666667,-73.5522222222 (Stamford%2C%20Connecticut)&amp;t=h\">Stamford, CT</a></li>\r\n	<li>Skipped the 1st generation 2G/Edge iPhone -- way too slow for the portable Internet access I wanted</li>\r\n	<li>Hasn\'t replaced my <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"TomTom\" rel=\"homepage\" href=\"http://www.tomtom.com\">TomTom</a> One, but checking real-time traffic conditions is great<a title=\"Wikipedia article on the Thai alphabet\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thai_alphabet\" target=\"_blank\"></a></li>\r\n	<li>iPhone Apps Store has some good stuff for a traveler -- <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=288429040&amp;mt=8\" target=\"_blank\">LinkedIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=287350070&amp;mt=8\" target=\"_blank\">Airport Status</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=284967867&amp;mt=8\" target=\"_blank\">Twinkle</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=287197884&amp;mt=8\" target=\"_blank\">Sol Free Solitaire</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=289894882&amp;mt=8\" target=\"_blank\">White Noise</a></li>\r\n	<li>The only downside is battery life</li>\r\n<strong>Closing\r\n</strong>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917637.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>Some bridge music from <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com\" target=\"_blank\">Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\r\n	<li>Feedback at comments@travelcommons.com or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_67.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<div class=\"zemanta-pixie\" style=\"margin-top: 10px; height: 15px;\"><img class=\"zemanta-pixie-img\" style=\"border: none; float: right;\" src=\"http://img.zemanta.com/pixy.gif?x-id=39edfe09-93d3-413b-88fd-e93472eeaadb\" alt=\"\" /></div>','Podcast #67 - Stolen Luggage; Month With an iPhone','','inherit','closed','closed','','107-revision-v1','','','2018-08-14 11:29:59','2018-08-14 16:29:59','',107,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/08/14/107-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2110,1,'2018-08-14 11:30:22','2018-08-14 16:30:22','Recorded in the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago after a couple of weeks in <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Thailand\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/thailand\">Thailand</a> and <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Singapore\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/singapore\">Singapore</a>.  In this episode, I talk about some of my experiences in <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Asia\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/asia\">Asia</a>, including a few travel (mis)adventures. We also talk about losing laptops in airports -- comments on a study claiming that 12,000 laptops are lost in airports every week, and thought on one particular lost laptop belonging to the Clear registered traveler program.  And a listener gives his in-flight impressions of Singapore Air\'s new A380. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_66.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_66.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #66:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Recorded in the TravelCommons studios outside of <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Chicago\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/chicago\">Chicago, Illinois</a></li>\r\n	<li>Business and personal travel has taken me all over -- Denver, Thailand, Singapore, <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Boston, New York\" rel=\"homepage\" href=\"http://www.townofboston.com/\">Boston, New York</a>, the Delaware Shore, and Philadelphia</li>\r\n	<li>United Airlines\' troubles and ORD weather make the flight back from Singapore even longer</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Planetenstaaten</em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/weigl-landwater/\">Philipp Weigl</a></li>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n	<li>A listener shares his recent experience flying to Tokyo in a <a title=\"Singapore Airlines A380\" href=\"http://www.businesstraveller.com/archive/2008/may-2008/tried-and-tested/flight-check-singapore-airlines-a380\" target=\"_blank\">Singapore Air Airbus A380</a></li>\r\n	<li>Lots of comments on the <a title=\"TravelCommons post on Ponemon Institute study\" href=\"http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2008/07/06/12000-laptops-lost-in-airports-every-week-hmmm/\" target=\"_blank\">post</a> about the <a title=\"Dell-Ponemon Institute Study on Lost Laptops\" href=\"http://www.dell.com/downloads/global/services/dell_lost_laptop_study.pdf\" target=\"_blank\">study</a> claiming that 12,000 laptops are lost in airports every week</li>\r\n	<li>Blogger Sean O\'Neill\'s follow-up <a href=\"http://current.newsweek.com/budgettravel/\" target=\"_blank\">research</a> on this study supports my initial skepticism</li>\r\n	<li><a title=\"Frick\'s World blog\" href=\"http://fricksworld.blogspot.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Steve Frick</a> wonders how someone doesn\'t notice that their bag is suddenly 7 lbs lighter</li>\r\n	<li>The Clear registered traveler program loses, and then finds, a laptop with applicants\' personal data</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>The Collider</em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/clayne-vi/\">C. Layne</a></li>\r\n<strong>Impressions of 1st Trip to Asia\r\n</strong></ul>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>My family\'s first trip to Asia, so we did \"Asia Lite\" -- <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Phuket Province\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/thailand/phuket-province\">Phuket, Thailand</a> and Singapore</li>\r\n	<li>If Southwest has \"cattle car\" boarding, then <a title=\"Air Asia\" href=\"http://www.airasia.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Air Asia</a> uses a stampede</li>\r\n	<li>Driving in Thailand would be difficult because I can\'t read the <a title=\"Wikipedia article on the Thai alphabet\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thai_alphabet\" target=\"_blank\">Thai alphabet</a></li>\r\n	<li>Surprised to have a deep discussion of the US presidential race with a Thai cab driver</li>\r\n	<li>The experience of eating <a title=\"Wikipedia article on durian\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Durian\" target=\"_blank\">durian</a> in Singapore is seared into my senses</li>\r\n<strong>Closing\r\n</strong>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917636.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\">Magnatune</a></li>\r\n	<li>Feedback at comments@travelcommons.com or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_66.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>\r\nTags:\r\n<div class=\"zemanta-pixie\" style=\"margin-top: 10px; height: 15px;\"><img class=\"zemanta-pixie-img\" style=\"border: none; float: right;\" src=\"http://img.zemanta.com/pixy.gif?x-id=0e61c639-9b4e-4f15-abaa-b856667a31fd\" alt=\"\" /></div>','Podcast #66 - Travel in Asia; Losing Laptops in Airports','','inherit','closed','closed','','105-revision-v1','','','2018-08-14 11:30:22','2018-08-14 16:30:22','',105,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/08/14/105-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2111,1,'2018-08-14 11:30:51','2018-08-14 16:30:51','Recorded in the TravelCommons studios outside of <a href=\"http://www.chicago2016.org/News/Pages/home.aspx\">Chicago</a> after taking a month\'s break. We see if there\'s anything to the TSA\'s recent attempts to reduce security line waits --  the Clear <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Registered Traveler\" rel=\"wikipedia\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Registered_Traveler\">Registered Traveler</a> and the Diamond Lane Self-Select programs. We also take a look at Southwest\'s attempts to attract more business travelers.  A listener story on traveling injured causes us to look into the cost trade-offs of air ambulance services, while another listener points us to the perfect song for the summer travel season. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_65.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_65.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #65:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Recorded in the TravelCommons studios outside of <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Chicago\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/chicago\">Chicago, Illinois</a></li>\r\n	<li>Other family \"creative\" obligations forced me to take a month off of the podcast</li>\r\n	<li>Playing around with the <a href=\"http://www.dopplr.com\">Dopplr</a> travel website -- it\'s not bad, but hasn\'t yet provided a serendipitous meet-up with other friends on the road</li>\r\n	<li>However, Dopplr helpfully totes up the <a href=\"http://blog.dopplr.com/2008/04/22/calculate-the-carbon-impact-of-your-travels-with-dopplr/\">carbon footprint for my travels</a></li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dl.nin.com/theslip/signup\"><em>Discipline</em></a> by Nine Inch Nails</li>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n	<li>Thanks to <a href=\"http://budacast.hu\">Drew Leifheit</a> for mentioning TravelCommons in his travel podcasting article <a href=\"http://www.vagabondish.com/travelcasting-travel-audio-guide/\"><em>Travelcasting: Lighten Your Backpack, Load Up Your iPod</em></a> on the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Vagabondish\" rel=\"homepage\" href=\"http://www.vagabondish.com\">Vagabondish</a> website</li>\r\n	<li>A listener shares his own \"traveling while injured\" story after listening to <a href=\"http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2007/06/08/podcast-54-traveling-injured-how-bad-is-travel-experience-really/\">episode #54</a></li>\r\n	<li>Air ambulance service like <a title=\"AirMed Service Programs\" href=\"http://www.airmed.com/our-services/plans.cfm\">AirMed </a>and <a title=\"MedJetAssist Service Plans\" href=\"http://medjetassistance.com/plans/regular.aspx\">MetJetAssist</a> offer insurance-like programs starting at $225/year</li>\r\n	<li>A listener points out a great <a title=\"TSA Theme Song\" href=\"http://www.crainium.net/jdjArchives/2005/04/tsa_theme_song.html\">song </a>for the summer travel season by the <a href=\"http://www.barandgrillsingers.com/\">Bar &amp; Grille Singers</a></li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>One</em> by <a title=\"Cargo Cult\'s Alchemy Album\" href=\"http://www.magnatune.com/artists/albums/cargo-alchemy/hifi_play\">Cargo Cult</a></li>\r\n<strong>New Ways to the Front of the Line\r\n</strong>\r\n	<li>Recently had first hand experience with the <a title=\"TSA Registered Traveler Program\" href=\"http://www.tsa.gov/approach/rt/index.shtm\">Registered Traveler</a> program and the <a title=\"TSA Expands Diamond-Lane Program\" href=\"http://www.tsa.gov/press/releases/2008/0502b.shtm\">Diamond Lane Self-Select</a> program</li>\r\n	<li>The Clear security line in <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"San Francisco International Airport\" rel=\"wikipedia\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_International_Airport\">San Francisco airport</a> (SFO) was empty, but the biometric checks made it take longer the regular 1st-Class/Premium Frequent Flier line</li>\r\n	<li>The Diamond Self-Select Program in <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Chicago Midway International Airport\" rel=\"wikipedia\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Midway_International_Airport\">Chicago Midway airport</a> (MDW) doesn\'t live up to its promise -- too many \"non-experts\" self-select into the black diamond line</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Magnified</em> by <a title=\"Very Large Array\'s Stuff Album\" href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/vla-stuff/hifi_play\">Very Large Array</a></li>\r\n<strong>Southwest Skips the Nickels &amp; Dimes </strong>\r\n	<li>Southwest Airline\'s <em>Fees Don\'t Fly With Us</em> <a title=\"Dallas Morning News story on Southwest\'s new ad campaign\" href=\"http://dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/bus/stories/053108dnbusairnickel.3633d88.html\">ad campaign</a> goes straight at the legacy carriers\' new-found love of add-on fees</li>\r\n	<li>Southwest is becoming more attractive to frequent business travelers</li>\r\n	<li>Their <a href=\"http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/southwest-airlines-introduces-business-fares/story.aspx?guid=%7B655C87D9-A7A1-47A8-9C1F-7657BE5306AD%7D\">Business Select program</a> removes the \"cattle-car\" boarding queue that everyone hated</li>\r\n	<li>Southwest\'s gate areas in Midway (MDW), Cleveland (CLE), and Balimore-Washington Int\'l (BWI) are impressive -- comfortable seats and lots of easy-to-find electrical outlets</li>\r\n	<li>But Southwest still can\'t match the value of the frequent flier awards I receive from United Airlines</li>\r\n<strong>Closing\r\n</strong>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917635.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://nin.com/\">Nine Inch Nails</a> and <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\">Magnatune</a></li>\r\n	<li>Feedback at comments@travelcommons.com or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_65.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<div class=\"zemanta-pixie\" style=\"margin-top: 10px; height: 15px;\"><img class=\"zemanta-pixie-img\" style=\"border: none; float: right;\" src=\"http://img.zemanta.com/pixy.gif?x-id=f76a73d0-ce33-4723-88fc-5d06f6780ebe\" alt=\"\" /></div>','Podcast #65 - New Ways to the Front of the Line; Southwest Skips Nickel & Dimes','','inherit','closed','closed','','101-revision-v1','','','2018-08-14 11:30:51','2018-08-14 16:30:51','',101,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/08/14/101-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2112,1,'2018-08-14 11:31:36','2018-08-14 16:31:36','Recorded in the Newark Liberty Airport Marriott in scenic Newark, NJ. We cover a lot of ground in this episode -- why business travel and Disney resorts don\'t mix, some choices that can make our personal air travel a bit greener, my experience with Southwest Airline\'s new Business Select program, and the reason I\'ve finally given up on Hertz. We also talk about the atrophying of wired connections -- the modem is gone; is Ethernet next? -- and the importance of Starbucks to the frequent traveler\'s work day. And finally, is bad airline service bringing back the need for traditional travel agents? Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_62.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n\r\n[audio:travelcommons_62.mp3][sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_62.mp3\"]<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #62:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Recorded in room 959 of the Newark Liberty Airport Marriott</li>\r\n	<li>A 2-day conference in Disney World reminds me that it\'s a great place for a family vacation, but a lousy place for business. No early check-in, no quiet place for a conference call -- I definitely didn\'t have a \"magical day\".</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/rompaey-eastern2/\"><em>Indian Blossom</em></a> by Ruben van Rompaey</li>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n	<li>Revisiting <a title=\"Peter Rukavina\'s blog\" href=\"http://ruk.ca/\">Peter Rukavina\'s</a> question from T/C #61 on how to reduce the environmental impact of air travel</li>\r\n	<li>Virgin Atlantic\'s <a href=\"http://www.usatoday.com/travel/flights/2008-02-24-biofueljet_N.htm?csp=34\">biofuel test flight</a> from London to Amsterdam received a lot of press -- as it was meant to do -- but biofuels are more about sustainability than reducing the carbon footprint of a plane flight.</li>\r\n	<li>Air France-KLM\'s <a href=\"http://developpement-durable.airfrance.com/FR/en/common/pdf/Rapport%20DD%202005-06_en.pdf\">2005-2006 Sustainable Development Report</a> provides statistics on the reduction of hydrocarbon and carbon monoxide emissions as a result of its fleet modernization program.</li>\r\n	<li>Three things an individual can do to reduce their in-flight carbon footprint -- choose the flight with the most efficient plane, take a direct flight, and fly into a less-congested secondary airport</li>\r\n	<li>I liked my recent experience with Southwest Airline\'s <a href=\"http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/southwest-airlines-introduces-business-fares/story.aspx?guid=%7B655C87D9-A7A1-47A8-9C1F-7657BE5306AD%7D\">Business Select program</a>.  For last minute travel, it gets me a better seat than I can usually get on airlines with reserved seats.</li>\r\n	<li>Had yet another beat-up high-mileage car from Hertz -- this time in Orlando.  When compared to the brand new Lincoln Moutaineer I received from Avis in Nashville, I\'ve decided to ditch Hertz for Avis.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://www.magnatune.com/artists/albums/williams-long/\"><em>Afternoon in the Sun</em></a> by John Williams</li>\r\n<strong>Evolution of Connectivity</strong>\r\n	<li>After mistaking the modem port on my ThinkPad for the Ethernet port, I couldn\'t remember the last time I used my modem</li>\r\n	<li>Apple\'s new MacBook Air lacks an Ethernet port, depending completely on Wi-Fi. Is Ethernet going the way of the modem -- at least on laptops?</li>\r\n	<li>For me, the big travel news wasn\'t the Delta-Northwest or United-Continental merger dances, but the <a href=\"http://wifinetnews.com/archives/008175.html\">announcement</a> that Starbucks is switching from its Wi-Fi partnership from T-Mobile to AT&amp;T.</li>\r\n	<li>Starbucks has become a watering hole, some new millennium oasis for the web Bedouins -- those of us working out of our “mobile offices”</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/westexit-modern/\"><em>Arsenal</em></a> is by The West Exit</li>\r\n<strong>Return of the Travel Agents?</strong>\r\n	<li>In the Web 1.0 days, the travel agent was the classic example of an industry being “disintermediated” by the web</li>\r\n	<li>However, when dealing with delayed or canceled flights, it usually takes talking to a person to get you home or to get you a refund.</li>\r\n	<li>If you’re on a single-carrier ticket – especially a carrier where you have status – you’re usually OK going direct. However, multi-carrier tickets are best worked through a travel agent</li>\r\n	<li>I used to use Orbitz or Travelocity for these tickets, but trying to get hold anyone there live to sort through a problem was near impossible</li>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917632.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from <a title=\"Magnatune\" href=\"http://magnatune.com/\">Magnatune</a></li>\r\n	<li>Feedback at comments@travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_62.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>\r\nTags:  <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/travel+podcast\">travel podcast</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/travel\">travel</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/business+travel\">business travel</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/Wi-Fi\">Wi-Fi</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/ethernet\">Ethernet</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/thinkpad\">ThinkPad</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/greenhouse+gases\">greenhouse gases</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/tooth+powder\">tooth powder</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/Southwest+Airlines\">Southwest Airlines</a>,<a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/Disney+World\"> Disney World</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/Air+France-KLM\">Air France-KLM</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/Hertz\">Hertz</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/Avis\">Avis</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/Starbucks\">Starbucks</a>, <a href=\"http://technorati.com/tag/T-Mobile\">T-Mobile</a>','Podcast #62 - Flying Green; Evolution of Connectivity; Return of the Travel Agent?','','inherit','closed','closed','','95-revision-v1','','','2018-08-14 11:31:36','2018-08-14 16:31:36','',95,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/08/14/95-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2113,1,'2018-08-14 11:32:06','2018-08-14 16:32:06','Recorded in the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago on a rare full week in town after trips to <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Amsterdam\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/the-netherlands/amsterdam\">Amsterdam</a> and <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Kansas City\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/great-plains/kansas-city\">Kansas City</a>.  In this episode, an unusual flight delay makes us think about embracing the delay rather than fighting it, and snatching a couple hour vacation in Amsterdam allows us to explore some high and low culture.  Listener comments include suggestions on easy-to-pack workout shoes and a question on how to make air travel greener. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_61.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_61.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #61:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Recorded in the TravelCommons studios outside <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Chicago\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/chicago\">Chicago, IL</a></li>\r\n	<li>Talking about January travel means talking about the weather; everybody’s been clobbered by the weather this month</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/buy_album.php?id=28EF83EE66BC30F7A29060F2EE7D5A63853661EE921AD0B5F46646F31FC53762518D71671346229B61068D83046F9760\"><em>Nu Love</em></a> by <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=59ADD660576A8DD437473F3662DA2A64FF449762E1BA4F7793D9221B486E5F31\">The Bex</a></li>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n	<li>Good response to last episode\'s request for suggestions on compact gym shoes</li>\r\n	<li>Dan Grabon suggests racing flats</li>\r\n	<li><a title=\"Frick\'s World\" href=\"http://fricksworld.blogspot.com/\">Steve Frick</a> suggests flaming <a title=\"Zappos.com\" href=\"http://www.zappos.com/n/p/dp/1633204.html\">Converse Chuck Taylor high tops</a></li>\r\n	<li>Urgency around the question lessened this month when the UK DoT relaxed its restrictions and now allows 2 pieces of carry-on</li>\r\n	<li><a title=\"Peter Rukavina\'s blog\" href=\"http://ruk.ca/\">Peter Rukavina</a> asks what frequent travelers think about the environmental impact of their traveling</li>\r\n	<li><a title=\"Virgin Atlantic Carbon Offset Article\" href=\"http://www.aboutmyplanet.com/climate-change/virgin-airlines-launch/\">Virgin Atlantic</a>, SAS, and <a title=\"FAQ on Continental\'s offset scheme\" href=\"http://www.continental.com/web/en-US/content/company/profile/environment_faq.aspx\">Continental</a> have announced carbon offset schemes</li>\r\n	<li>Some <a title=\"BusinessWeek article on TerraPass\" href=\"http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_13/b4027057.htm\">controversy</a> about the efficacy of carbon offset schemes</li>\r\n	<li>UK government’s Stern Report says that <a title=\"Stern Report\'s analysis of aviation impact on global warming\" href=\"http://www.sbac.co.uk/community/cms/content/preview/news_item_view.asp?i=14736&amp;t=0\">aviation CO<sub>2</sub> emissions</a> account for about 1.6% of global greenhouse gas emissions</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/buy_album.php?id=C28E7E6E86AA68440FF495227937622F853661EE921AD0B5F46646F31FC53762518D71671346229B61068D83046F9760\"><em>M4 (Part II)</em></a> by <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=1372C88AEC26DADFE416E71A587BFA89F55397894BB80F5E74747143A2524C8F\">Faunts</a></li>\r\n<strong><a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Zen\" rel=\"wikipedia\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen\">Zen</a> of Delays\r\n</strong>\r\n	<li>Listener pointed to a Conde Nast’s Portfolio.com <a title=\"What I Learned on the Road This Year\" href=\"http://www.portfolio.com/business-travel/seat-2B/2007/12/18/Best-Business-Travel-Lessons/comments\">article</a> titled “What I Learned on the Road This Year -- Traveling for business is a Zen practice: Keep your head down and take good notes”</li>\r\n	<li>Don’t know if it’s Zen, with its emphasis on mindful acceptance of the present moment, or ju jitsu, with its training on using your attacker’s energy against him – the sort of “bend like a willow, don’t break like the oak” thinking</li>\r\n	<li>This is, of course, completely antithetical to the concept of a “road warrior” – one who controls every aspect of their travel experience</li>\r\n	<li>My Amsterdam flight was delayed for 3 hours by a United baggage handler trying to take a shortcut <a title=\"TravelCommons blog article describing the incident\" href=\"http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2008/01/21/what-was-he-thinking/\"><em>underneath</em></a> our 767</li>\r\n	<li>Beer makes the Zen thing a whole lot easier</li>\r\n	<li>Flowing around the evening’s obstacles I ended up in a more comfortable place</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/buy_album.php?id=C760A5AF2DBCB13FBF16916A7E363799853661EE921AD0B5F46646F31FC53762518D71671346229B61068D83046F9760\"><em>Central Calm</em></a> is by <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=CC53C7D4D44C3D89C4F8289D6CF77E78FF449762E1BA4F7793D9221B486E5F31\">Skywards</a></li>\r\n<strong>Sneaking in a Vacation</strong>\r\n	<li>Past T/C episodes -- <a title=\"Podcast #16 - Squeezing in Tourism; Can We Stop Sharing?\" href=\"http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2005/10/01/podcast-16-squeezing-in-tourism-can-we-stop-sharing/\">#16</a> and <a title=\"Podcast #34 - 20-Minute Vacation, Making It Look Easy\" href=\"http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2006/03/04/podcast-34-20-minute-vacation-making-it-look-easy/\">#34</a> -- have talked about the importance to take advantage of travel to take a little time to yourself</li>\r\n	<li>Had a free afternoon in Amsterdam, so decided to walk around a bit</li>\r\n	<li>Focused on seeing just two things -- <a title=\"Van Gogh Museum\" href=\"http://www3.vangoghmuseum.nl/vgm/index.jsp\">Van Gogh Museum</a> and the <a title=\"Red Light District overview\" href=\"http://www.amsterdam.info/red-light-district/\">Red Light District</a></li>\r\n	<li>Thought about sampling the wares of one of the <a title=\"Amsterdam coffee houses\" href=\"http://www.amsterdam.info/coffeeshops/\">\"coffee houses\"</a> but then thought better of it</li>\r\n<strong>Closing\r\n</strong>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917631.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://iodapromonet.com/index.php\">IODA Promonet</a></li>\r\n	<li>Feedback at comments@travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_61.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<div class=\"zemanta-pixie\" style=\"margin-top: 10px; height: 15px;\"><img class=\"zemanta-pixie-img\" style=\"border: none; float: right;\" src=\"http://img.zemanta.com/pixy.gif?x-id=d44e20ff-11ac-4f10-8154-154bd04a2c90\" alt=\"\" /></div>','Podcast #61 - Zen of Delays; Sneaking in a Vacation','','inherit','closed','closed','','93-revision-v1','','','2018-08-14 11:32:06','2018-08-14 16:32:06','',93,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/08/14/93-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2114,1,'2018-08-14 11:32:44','2018-08-14 16:32:44','Recorded in the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago after I\'ve finished up my <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Business travel\" rel=\"wikipedia\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_travel\">business travel</a> for the year. Since a number of listeners aren\'t frequent travelers, we provide some tips on how to blend in, look like a pro, and generally reduce a little of the hassle of holiday travel. Also, GPS devices are hot for the holidays this year.  We talk about their good points and a few gotchas.  Listener comments include suggestions on public transit to Denver airport, another happy <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"JetBlue Airways\" rel=\"homepage\" href=\"http://www.jetblue.com/\">JetBlue</a> customer, and a call for help dealing with tight UK carry-on limits. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_60.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_60.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #60:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Recorded in the TravelCommon studios outside <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Chicago\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/chicago\">Chicago, IL</a></li>\r\n	<li>December is a funny time to travel -- light traffic the beginning of the month, crushing traffic at the end.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/magnacomp-christmas/\"><em>Angels we have heard on high</em></a> performed by James Edwards</li>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n	<li>A listener from Denver suggests <a href=\"http://www.rtd-denver.com/skyRide/\">skyRide</a> bus service as a cheap and comfortable way to get to <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Denver International Airport\" rel=\"homepage\" href=\"http://www.flydenver.com/\">Denver International Airport</a></li>\r\n	<li>A recent visitor to San Francisco agrees with episode #59\'s assessment of the BART system cloth seats -- they\'re gross.</li>\r\n	<li>A listener from Richmond, Virginia raves about the new JetBlue service into RIC</li>\r\n	<li>A listener from London mentions the <a href=\"http://www.bia.homeoffice.gov.uk/managingborders/technology/eborders/iris/\">Iris scan</a> speeds up immigration, but is looking for suggestions on how to handle the UK\'s restrictive one carry-on bag rule.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/magnacomp-christmas/\"><em>The First Noel</em></a> performed by Ralph Rousseau Meulenbroeks</li>\r\n<strong>Tips for Holiday Travel\r\n</strong>\r\n	<li>The most telling difference between an experienced and an amateur traveler is what the military calls “situational awareness”</li>\r\n	<li>The place where experience shows the most is in the security line</li>\r\n	<li>Tip #1 – Use the line to get prepared</li>\r\n	<li>Tip #2 – Never let the x-ray machine go hungry</li>\r\n	<li>Tip #3 – if you aren’t prepared, step aside until you are</li>\r\n	<li>These three tips all have one key similarity – consideration for others.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/shira-castle/\"><em>Christmas Day in the Morning</em></a> is by Shira Kammen</li>\r\n<strong>GPS as the Hot Travel Gift</strong>\r\n	<li><a href=\"http://adage.com/article?article_id=122751\">AdAge</a> magazine declared GPS as “hot for the holidays” with unit sales up 488% over last year.</li>\r\n	<li>Bought a refurbed <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"TomTom\" rel=\"homepage\" href=\"http://www.tomtom.com\">TomTom</a> One from <a href=\"http://www.buy.com/prod/tomtom-one-portable-gps-preloaded-map-of-us-canada-on-sd-card/q/loc/111/205833413.html\">Buy.com</a> for $160 a few months ago and it’s been great</li>\r\n	<li>Advantage over built-in units and rental car units is the ability to upload information.</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"http://www.tomtomforums.com/forumdisplay.php?f=14\">tomtomforums.com</a> and <a href=\"http://poiplaza.com\">poiplaza.com</a> have custom point-of-interest files for download.  I\'ve found the Starbucks file very useful.</li>\r\n	<li>However, GPS units will get it wrong on occasion.</li>\r\n<strong>Closing\r\n</strong>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917629.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\">Magnatune</a></li>\r\n	<li>Feedback at comments@travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_60.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<div class=\"zemanta-pixie\" style=\"margin-top: 10px; height: 15px;\"><img class=\"zemanta-pixie-img\" style=\"border: none; float: right;\" src=\"http://img.zemanta.com/pixy.gif?x-id=18fcc88f-9ece-44c9-9c97-4e3d9b340b32\" alt=\"\" /></div>','Podcast #60 - Tips for Holiday Travel; GPS as the Hot Travel Gift','','inherit','closed','closed','','89-revision-v1','','','2018-08-14 11:32:44','2018-08-14 16:32:44','',89,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/08/14/89-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2115,1,'2018-08-14 11:33:20','2018-08-14 16:33:20','Recorded in the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago in the middle of the one week a year I refuse to travel -- <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Thanksgiving\" rel=\"wikipedia\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thanksgiving\">Thanksgiving Day</a> week.  With environmental and economic reasons to reduce unneeded car trips, how easy is it to take a train to and from the airport? The answer is mixed and it doesn\'t look to get any better any time soon. We also talk about the deteriorating state of the rental car fleet -- which is making public transit look more attractive.  A listener sends in a comment on airport power station etiquette, and we talk about a collection of airline food menus from the past. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_59.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_59.mp3\"]<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #59:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Recorded in the TravelCommon studios outside <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Chicago\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/chicago\">Chicago, IL</a></li>\r\n	<li>No travel this week -- leaving the airports to the \"less experienced\" travelers</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/swivel-deep/\"><em>Arlos Auto Parts and Salvation</em></a> by Swivel Neck Jones</li>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n	<li>Received an e-mail from United the morning after a LAX-ORD flight that was delayed 3 hours. The e-mail gave a nice apology and 5,000 miles for my troubles.</li>\r\n	<li>A listener talks about his travails in finding working power outlets in airports and on airplanes</li>\r\n	<li>Northwestern University Library launched <a href=\"http://www.library.northwestern.edu/transportation/digital-collections/menus/index.html\">web access</a> to its collection of past airline menus. Talked about a 1969 United Airlines <a href=\"http://digital.library.northwestern.edu/inu-tmenu/tmenu-UA005.html\">menu</a> and a 1962 <a href=\"http://digital.library.northwestern.edu/inu-tmenu/tmenu-EAA001.html\">menu</a> from East Africa Airways.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/fuzz-messy/\"><em>Smiling Perspective</em></a> by General Fuzz</li>\r\n<strong>Trains to Planes</strong>\r\n	<li>What\'s the best way from Newark Airport to Manhattan?  It depends how much time and money you have, and it\'s an inverse relationship.</li>\r\n	<li>With lots of time, you can save money by taking the monorail over the marshes to a train station served by Amtrak and NJ Transit trains</li>\r\n	<li>It’s a pretty handy set up, but as with many – too many – plane-train connections, not intuitively obvious, not very user-friendly, at least for first time users</li>\r\n	<li>The \"gold standard\" of airport rail links remains the <a href=\"http://www.heathrowexpress.com/index.asp\">Heathrow Express</a> -- expensive, but convenient</li>\r\n	<li>Subway systems in <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Washington, DC\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/washington-dc\">Washington DC</a>, Chicago and Atlanta inexpensively deliver you directly to the terminal</li>\r\n	<li>Public pressure to locate new airports far away from population centers doesn\'t bode well for easy public transit links.  Denver\'s new airport may get a <a href=\"http://www.rtd-fastracks.com/ec_1\">rail link</a> by 2015.</li>\r\n	<li>Wikipedia has what looks like a good <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airport_rail_link\">listing</a> of global airport rail links.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/atek-phoenix/\"><em>Goa Life</em></a> by Ambient Teknology</li>\r\n<strong>Renting a Rambling Wreck</strong>\r\n	<li>I’ve received more 20,000+ mile cars from Hertz this year than ever before, and this is with some level of status in Hertz’s Gold Club.</li>\r\n	<li>A <em>Wall Street Journal</em> <a href=\"http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119137170889247162.html\">article</a> said that rental car companies are letting their fleets age an additional 2,000 miles</li>\r\n	<li>Another <em>WSJ</em> <a href=\"http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119500412182192191.html?mod=pj_main_hs_coll\">article</a> says that the drop in rental car customer satisfaction reported in the latest JD Powers <a href=\"http://www.jdpower.com/travel/ratings/rental-car-ratings\">survey</a> is linked to the aging fleet.</li>\r\n	<li>I switched to Avis until they tried to stick me with the repair cost of a previously damaged tail light</li>\r\n	<li>It\'s driving me to use cabs, limos, and public transit more often, even when more expensive and less convenient</li>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917627.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\">Magnatune</a><a href=\"http://www.brunomisonne.com\"> </a></li>\r\n	<li>Feedback at comments@travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_59.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<div class=\"zemanta-pixie\" style=\"margin-top: 10px; height: 15px;\"><img class=\"zemanta-pixie-img\" style=\"border: none; float: right;\" src=\"http://img.zemanta.com/pixy.gif?x-id=db56b112-e302-410c-a790-07076642da47\" alt=\"\" /></div>','Podcast #59 - Trains to Planes; Renting a Rambling Wreck','','inherit','closed','closed','','87-revision-v1','','','2018-08-14 11:33:20','2018-08-14 16:33:20','',87,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/08/14/87-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2116,1,'2018-08-14 11:33:50','2018-08-14 16:33:50','Recorded in the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Gaithersburg, Maryland\" rel=\"geolocation\" href=\"http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=39.1319444444,-77.2263888889&amp;spn=0.1,0.1&amp;q=39.1319444444,-77.2263888889 (Gaithersburg%2C%20Maryland)&amp;t=h\">Gaithersburg, MD</a> Marriott outside <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Washington, DC\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/washington-dc\">Washington, DC</a> at the end of an intense week of travel that had me flying from the East Coast to the West Coast and then back east again... on four different airlines.  With many airlines\' plummeting customer satisfaction scores, we ask the question \"Who raves about their airline?\" Recent trips allow me to do a \"seat-to-seat\" comparison of two high-buzz airlines -- <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"JetBlue Airways\" rel=\"homepage\" href=\"http://www.jetblue.com/\">JetBlue</a> and Virgin America.  Our recurring <em>Travel Tech</em> topic talks about replacing a laptop with the latest evolution of Nokia\'s Internet tablet, and hunting down power outlets in airports.  Also, a listener suggestion on local food in DC\'s <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport\" rel=\"homepage\" href=\"http://www.mwaa.com/national/\">Reagan National Airport</a> leads to frustration at missing a great burger. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_58.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_58.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #58:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Recorded in the Gaithersburg, MD Marriott outside Washington, DC</li>\r\n	<li>Had an extensive tour of East and West Coast airports over the past three weeks -- EWR, DCA, IAD, FLL, RDU, SNA, OAK, and SFO</li>\r\n	<li>Flying to the Northeast is much more painful than flying to the West Coast, even though the ORD-SFO flight is twice as long</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/junoon-infiniti/\">Nachoon Gi</a></em> by Junoon</li>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n	<li>Dave of the <a href=\"http://sandandtsunamis.blogspot.com\">Sand and Tsunamis blog</a> talked about hitting the <a href=\"http://www.fiveguys.com/\">Five Guys Famous Burger</a> stand in DC\'s Reagan National Airport.  I wanted to try it out on my DC trip last week.  Unfortunately, Five Guys is buried behind security in the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"US Airways\" rel=\"homepage\" href=\"http://www.usairways.com\">USAir</a> concourse and I was flying United</li>\r\n	<li>Chris Christensen of the <a href=\"http://AmateurTraveler.com\">Amateur Traveler</a> podcast sent along a review of TravelCommons from Acura Style magazine</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/lucas-divine/\">Old Mexico</a></em> by Jeffery Luck Lucas</li>\r\n<strong>Who Raves about Their Airline?</strong>\r\n	<li>Most of the airline customer satisfaction problems are with what used to be called \"legacy\" carriers, now called \"network\" carriers -- USAir, Northwest, Delta, American, United</li>\r\n	<li>Many elite fliers living in hub cities of network carriers (e.g., Philadelphia for USAir, Detroit for Northwest) complain about being \"trapped\"</li>\r\n	<li>A stark comparison to the ringing endorsement of JetBlue offered by Business Week\'s executive editor in this <a href=\"http://www.businessweek.com/mediacenter/podcasts/cover_stories/covercast_02_22_07.htm\">podcast</a></li>\r\n	<li>Virgin America still feels like they\'re in \"beta\" mode</li>\r\n	<li>JetBlue offers a great in-flight experience -- good leg room, choice of snacks, free <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"DirecTV\" rel=\"homepage\" href=\"http://www.directv.com\">DirecTV</a> in seatback screens -- but the ground experience in JFK is a hassle</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"http://udayantripathi.com\">Udayan Tripathi</a> describes his flight across the US on Frontier Airlines</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://www.brunomisonne.com/aviation%20music_003.htm\">Johannesburg airport tower party</a></em> by <a href=\"http://www.brunomisonne.com\">Bruno Misonne</a></li>\r\n<strong>Travel Tech Potpourri</strong>\r\n	<li><a href=\"http://marcloehrwald.com/\">Marc Löhrwald</a> is very satisfied with the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Nokia N800\" rel=\"wikipedia\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N800\">Nokia N800</a> as a PC replacement, and doesn\'t have to take it out of his briefcase when passing through security. He is, though, going to upgrade to the new N810</li>\r\n	<li>Finding power outlets in airports can be a bit of an Easter Egg hunt</li>\r\n	<li>O\'Hare\'s Terminal 1 has put in a number of free workstations with plenty of plugs at eye level</li>\r\n	<li>Other airports push their  pay-to-charge vending machines</li>\r\n	<li>Here\'s a <a href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/travelcommons/1736936801/\">picture</a> of the Medusa-like cell phone and PDA charger in <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Raleigh-Durham International Airport\" rel=\"homepage\" href=\"http://www.rdu.com\">Raleigh-Durham airport</a></li>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917626.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\">Magnatune</a> and <a href=\"http://www.brunomisonne.com\">Bruno Misonne</a></li>\r\n	<li>Feedback at comments@travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_58.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<div class=\"zemanta-pixie\" style=\"margin-top: 10px; height: 15px;\"><img class=\"zemanta-pixie-img\" style=\"border: none; float: right;\" src=\"http://img.zemanta.com/pixy.gif?x-id=a05e0981-4b26-4d98-80db-7abdb0b10cd0\" alt=\"\" /></div>','Podcast #58 - Who Raves About Their Airline; Powering Up in Airports','','inherit','closed','closed','','82-revision-v1','','','2018-08-14 11:33:50','2018-08-14 16:33:50','',82,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/08/14/82-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2117,1,'2018-08-14 11:34:22','2018-08-14 16:34:22','Recorded in the TravelCommons studio outside Chicago, I\'ve been bi-coastal since the last episode, bouncing between New York and San Francisco.  A side trip down to <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Philadelphia\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/pennsylvania/philadelphia\">Philadelphia</a> yields a great street-food breakfast when I take the time to walk outside my hotel. Delays in my flights between O\'Hare and <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"LaGuardia Airport\" rel=\"homepage\" href=\"http://www.laguardiaairport.com\">LaGuardia airports</a> cause me to dig for the FAA\'s latest airport capacity report and gnash my teeth against the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"NIMBY\" rel=\"wikipedia\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NIMBY\">NIMBYs</a> standing in the way of reasonable fixes.  Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_57.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_57.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #57:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Recorded in TravelCommons studio outside of Chicago, hopefully the <a href=\"http://www.chicago2016.org/\">home of the 2016 Summer Olympics</a></li>\r\n	<li>Continue to bounce between the East and West coasts</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/media/files/DJBLUE/11541\">Hear Me</a></em> by DJ Blue</li>\r\n	<li>Made United\'s top-tier status level in August. Get to walk on the red carpet all the time now, though it feels a bit dangerous cutting in front of other passengers</li>\r\n	<li>Not flying American that much anymore, so dropping my Admirals Club membership after 10 years</li>\r\n	<li>Leo Vegoda received a \"close\" patdown similar to the one I received in Schipol last month</li>\r\n	<li>Craig Martin of the <em><a href=\"http://www.indietravelpodcast.com\">Indie Travel Podcast</a></em> gives a suggestion on Bluetooth keyboards</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/media/files/savoyard/10743\">Madrugada</a></em> by Savoyard</li>\r\n	<li>After my morning workout in the Philadelphia Westin, I went for a walk looking for a breakfast place</li>\r\n	<li>Bought a real Philadelphia breakfast -- an egg, cheese, and <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrapple\">scrapple</a> sandwich from a lunch truck</li>\r\n	<li>Takes time to find real local fare</li>\r\n	<li>A <a href=\"http://www.usatoday.com/travel/flights/2007-08-27-local-food_N.htm\">USAToday article</a> says local restaurants make up 20% to 40% of all eateries at most big U.S. airports</li>\r\n	<li>On the same day, enjoyed a <a href=\"http://www.lancasterbrewing.com/HopHogIPA.html\">beer</a> in Philadelphia Airport from Lancaster County and an espresso in <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Washington Dulles International Airport\" rel=\"homepage\" href=\"http://www.mwaa.com/dulles/dulles.htm\">Washington Dulles airport</a> from a <a href=\"http://www.mayorgacoffee.com/index.php\">Maryland coffee roaster</a></li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/media/files/djlang59/10579\">Crazy Love</a></em> by DJ Lang</li>\r\n	<li>A trip from Chicago to New York gave me 2 hour delays each way, doubling the scheduled length of each flight</li>\r\n	<li>On my outbound flight, the United pilot sent back personal apologizes to top-tier status fliers, similar to his colleague who made the <a href=\"http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118826634834410559.html\">front page</a> of the <em>Wall Street Journal</em></li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20724859/\"><em>BusinessWeek</em> cover story</a> from earlier this month says the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Federal Aviation Administration\" rel=\"homepage\" href=\"http://www.faa.gov/\">Federal Aviation Administration</a> predicts there will be 1 billion people a year flying by 2015, a 36% increase from today</li>\r\n	<li>FAA\'s <a href=\"http://www.faa.gov/airports_airtraffic/airports/resources/publications/reports/media/fact_2.pdf\">FACT 2 study</a> predicts 18 airports will need additional capacity, and 7 metro areas will need additional capacity by 2015</li>\r\n	<li>The most important expansion -- the <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O\'Hare_International_Airport#Modernization_plan\">O\'Hare Modernization Program</a> -- is being held up by a <a href=\"http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-cemeterysuit_web_14sep14,0,2656304.story\">suit over moving a cemetery</a></li>\r\n	<li>NIMBY-ism is responsible for much of today\'s travel hassles</li>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917625.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org\">ccMixter</a></li>\r\n	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_57.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<div class=\"zemanta-pixie\" style=\"margin-top: 10px; height: 15px;\"><img class=\"zemanta-pixie-img\" style=\"border: none; float: right;\" src=\"http://img.zemanta.com/pixy.gif?x-id=f8c92c43-3b14-43d8-9d93-f25c79a93b3e\" alt=\"\" /></div>','Podcast #57 - Making Time for Local Fare; What’s Standing in the Way of Fixing Our Airports','','inherit','closed','closed','','80-revision-v1','','','2018-08-14 11:34:22','2018-08-14 16:34:22','',80,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/08/14/80-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2118,1,'2018-08-14 11:35:00','2018-08-14 16:35:00','Recorded in the Marriott Courtyard in <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Chapel Hill, North Carolina\" rel=\"geolocation\" href=\"http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=35.9288888889,-79.0394444444&amp;spn=0.1,0.1&amp;q=35.9288888889,-79.0394444444 (Chapel%20Hill%2C%20North%20Carolina)&amp;t=h\">Chapel Hill, North Carolina</a>, the current \"blogstorm\" about United Airlines\' poor customer service provides the data to calculate the true cost of connecting flights.  A recent combined business and family trip to <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"New York City\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/new-york-city\">New York City</a> makes me realize that my family isn\'t a burden in my travels, but instead an eyeopener.  Listeners comment on my recent blog posts; one uses Twitter to report his hotel broadband speed test results.    Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_55.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_55.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #55:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Recorded in Marriott Courtyard in Chapel Hill, NC</li>\r\n	<li>Been on a weekly commute to San Francisco, though did get in a combo business/family trip to New York the week before last</li>\r\n	<li>Have had very few problems flying to the Bay Area, but this last flight back from <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"LaGuardia Airport\" rel=\"wikipedia\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaGuardia_Airport\">LaGuardia</a> had us sitting on the runway for 3 hours</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Did We Make It</em> by <a href=\"http://www.caseydesmond.com/\">Casey Desmond</a></li>\r\n	<li>Drew Leifheit of the <a href=\"http://budacast.hu/\">Budacast</a> podcast recounts a fond childhood memory of eating pecan pie while flying Delta with his grandmother</li>\r\n	<li>John F corrects Barbara Higgins\' (United Airlines\' VP of customer experience) confusion between proactive and reactive customer service</li>\r\n	<li>Daniel Perez of the <a href=\"http://www.highmoonmedia.com/tgt/\">Gamer Traveler</a> Podcast is surprised to see US TSA agents in Amsterdam\'s <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Amsterdam Airport Schiphol\" rel=\"wikipedia\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amsterdam_Airport_Schiphol\">Schipol Airport</a></li>\r\n	<li>Mika Pyyhkala has been twittering his Speakeasy <a href=\"http://speakeasy.net/speedtest/\">broadband speed tests</a></li>\r\n	<li>Steve Frick of the Frick\'s World blog has inspired me to take pictures out my hotel room window and add them to Flickr\'s <a href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/tags/viewfromhere/\">View From Here</a> collection</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Throwing up on the plane</em> by <a href=\"http://www.myspace.com/electromagneticimpulses2\">Electromagnetic Impulses</a></li>\r\n	<li>Recent TravelCommons blog posts on United Airlines customer service got looped into the <a href=\"http://www.professorbainbridge.com/2007/06/united_customer.html\">edge</a> of a growing \"blogstorm\"</li>\r\n	<li>Articles in the <a href=\"http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/chi-sun_jammed_0610jun10,1,5280955.story\">Chicago Tribune</a> and <a href=\"http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/travel/2007-06-18-ual-service-usat_N.htm\">USAToday</a> have fueled the storm</li>\r\n	<li>The May 14th <a href=\"http://randomaccessbabble.blogspot.com/2007/05/dear-united-airlines-customer-service.html\">entry</a> in the Briana\'s Random Access Babble blog gives a detailed account of her efforts to fly from New York to Las Vegas to visit her family for the weekend; also a detailed accounting of her out-of-pocket costs caused by missed flight connections in Denver</li>\r\n	<li>We use Briana\'s cash outlay figures to calculate the true cost of a connecting flight</li>\r\n	<li>Leo Vegoda\'s recent missed connection experience in Washington\'s Dulles airport validates the findings reported in an International Herald Tribune <a href=\"http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/07/05/business/05late-web.php\">article</a> that says FAA flight delay statistics grossly understate the actual passenger delays</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Ghost</em> by <a href=\"http://www.hollowhorse.co.uk\">Hollow Horse</a></li>\r\n	<li>I don\'t seem to have to \"downshift\" as much anymore when traveling with my family</li>\r\n	<li>Traveling with my daughter has bumped me out of my usual rut</li>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917622.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from the <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com\">Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\r\n	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_55.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #55 - True Cost of Connecting; See More With The Family','','inherit','closed','closed','','77-revision-v1','','','2018-08-14 11:35:00','2018-08-14 16:35:00','',77,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/08/14/77-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2119,1,'2018-08-14 11:35:30','2018-08-14 16:35:30','Recorded in the Grand Geneva Resort and Spa, the former <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Playboy Club\" rel=\"wikipedia\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Playboy_Club\">Playboy Club</a>, in <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Lake Geneva, Wisconsin\" rel=\"wikipedia\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Geneva%2C_Wisconsin\">Lake Geneva, Wisconsin</a>, I talk about the travails of \"playing injured\" -- traveling while sick.  A listener comment makes me wonder if I\'m exaggerating the state of the US travel experience.  We get a good suggestion on how to wrestle with charging all those electronic devices we carry, and some detailed \"behind-the-scenes\" explanations of how air crews are treated by the TSA.   Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_54.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_54.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #54:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Recorded in Grand Geneva Resort and Spa in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin</li>\r\n	<li>Been on the road every week since my last podcast, mostly here in San Francisco</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/headroom-jetuton/\">Hejm</a></em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/headroom_project\">The Headroom Project</a></li>\r\n	<li>Thanks to everyone who told me that the podcast had been gone too long</li>\r\n	<li>Craig Martin of the <a href=\"http://indietravelpodcast.com/\">Indie Travel Podcast</a> sends along an audio comment with a great suggestion on how to avoid the \"outlet congestion\" I mentioned in TC #53</li>\r\n	<li>I\'ve found that for most electrical devices, you don\'t even need the power converter, just the plug adapter</li>\r\n	<li>Received two good answers to my question in TC#53 as to why an Oakland TSA screener allowed a Southwest flight attendant to keep her shoes going through the metal detector</li>\r\n	<li>This <a href=\"http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2007-06-04-workers_N.htm?csp=34\">USAToday article</a> suggests that airline and airport employees will face greater security measures as a result of the foiled JFK plot</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/falik-elvolution/\">Electric Butterfly</a></em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/falik\">Falik</a></li>\r\n	<li>All travel inconveniences pale when compared to getting sick or injured while traveling</li>\r\n	<li>Two weeks ago, I injured my back the morning before a flight to San Francisco</li>\r\n	<li>Worse was the experience of getting food poisoning in Lyon, France and still having to carry on with business the next day</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/seismic-afterburner/\">Snake Eyes</a></em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/seismic_anamoly\">Seismic Anomaly</a></li>\r\n	<li>An e-mail exchange with Udayan Tripathi got me to wondering if I exaggerate the problems with US domestic travel</li>\r\n	<li>The TSA isn\'t the most charming group, but they\'re no worse than the screeners in London\'s Heathrow airport</li>\r\n	<li>A <a href=\"http://www.usatoday.com/travel/flights/2007-06-04-airline-delays_N.htm\">USAToday article</a> this week reported that the number of passenger complaints to <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"United States Department of Transportation\" rel=\"homepage\" href=\"http://www.dot.gov\">US Dept of Transportation</a> in April about bad airline service had doubled from the year before</li>\r\n	<li>The service from US legacy carriers is worse than in other parts of the world, but the new US carriers (e.g., <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"JetBlue Airways\" rel=\"wikipedia\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JetBlue_Airways\">JetBlue</a>) offer better service than legacy or budget carriers elsewhere</li>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917620.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\">Magnatune</a></li>\r\n	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_54.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<div class=\"zemanta-pixie\" style=\"margin-top: 10px; height: 15px;\"><img class=\"zemanta-pixie-img\" style=\"border: none; float: right;\" src=\"http://img.zemanta.com/pixy.gif?x-id=6aa8640d-e1ed-4e9a-849c-286cd7281073\" alt=\"\" /></div>','Podcast #54 - Traveling Injured; How Bad Is Travel Experience Really?','','inherit','closed','closed','','74-revision-v1','','','2018-08-14 11:35:30','2018-08-14 16:35:30','',74,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/08/14/74-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2120,1,'2018-08-14 11:36:08','2018-08-14 16:36:08','Recorded in Marriott Courtyard in <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"San Francisco\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/san-francisco\">San Francisco</a>\'s SoMa district, I confess to some base emotions -- my inner child has been throwing tantrums now that American and United Airlines have taken away some of the special treatment they used to give their mid-tier status fliers.  I also had a bit of an awakening while on vacation with my family in <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"South Africa\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/south-africa\">South Africa</a> -- the number of electronic devices they carry has mushroomed and they suffer from bad Internet withdrawal.  We have a few stories about how diapers make for some \"smelly skies\", a listener finds great free bandwidth in Denver, and we feature some listener music.  Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_53.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_53.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #53:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Recorded in Marriott Courtyard in San Francisco\'s SoMa district</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Jazz Suite for Saxophone Quartet #1</em> by <a href=\"http://saxophonequartet.com/\">Vierung</a></li>\r\n	<li>Ed Vawter wrote in with about a young couple in the row behind him who stuffed their baby\'s dirty diaper in the seat-back pocket on a flight from Chicago to Portland</li>\r\n	<li>My breakfast on a South Africa Airways flight to <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Cape Town\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/south-africa/cape-town\">Cape Town</a> was spoiled by a young couple changing their baby\'s dirty diaper in the row in front of me</li>\r\n	<li>A listener staying at the Adam\'s Mark Hotel in Denver found their Internet service scored a smokin\' 4800 kbps down and 4100 kbps up on the <a href=\"http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest/links.php\">Speakeasy.net</a> bandwidth test</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Solen</em> by <a href=\"http://marcloehrwald.com/\">Marc Löhrwald</a></li>\r\n	<li>In past episodes, we\'ve talked about how many airlines are devaluing their mid-tier status levels</li>\r\n	<li>United has literally put out a red carpet for first class, and the top tier fliers – 1K and Global Services – and left the plain old tile line for everyone else</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail1749.html\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to IT Conversations podcast on <em>Creating Customer Loyalty</em></li>\r\n	<li>What started as a nice gesture from the manager of the JFK Courtyard backfired when they didn\'t live up to the expectations they created</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Hola Cape Town</em> by the Sivukile Marimba Band.  Here\'s a <a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/travelcommons/495032813/\">picture</a> I took of the band right before my daughter bought their CD</li>\r\n	<li>Most frequent travelers have a pretty finely tuned travel routine and are, for the most part, solitary figures, sort of throwbacks to the hunter-gatherers of pre-history</li>\r\n	<li>Traveling with their family requires some significant attitude adjustment</li>\r\n	<li>During our vacation to South Africa, I was completely taken aback by the number of electronic devices my family carried that needed recharging</li>\r\n	<li>The other think that struck me was my family coming almost unglued when deprived of their Internet access</li>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917618.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_53.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #53 - Wanting the Red Carpet; Family Travel Technology','','inherit','closed','closed','','70-revision-v1','','','2018-08-14 11:36:08','2018-08-14 16:36:08','',70,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/08/14/70-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2121,1,'2018-08-14 11:36:33','2018-08-14 16:36:33','Recorded in the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, we talk through some of the problems that have made <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"United Airlines\" rel=\"homepage\" href=\"http://www.united.com\">United Airlines</a>\' skies less friendly than their ads would like you to believe. This has definitely been the winter of United fliers\' discontent.  I also follow up on last episode\'s travel technology upgrade topic.  I\'ve now found a use for the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"3G\" rel=\"wikipedia\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3G\">3G technology</a> in my new Samsung phone, though not sure that Cingular would completely agree with it.  A group of listeners have good things to say about Amsterdam\'s <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Amsterdam Airport Schiphol\" rel=\"wikipedia\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amsterdam_Airport_Schiphol\">Schiphol airport</a>; another listener ponders the impact if the 2001 shoe bomber had tried to ignite some other piece of his wardrobe.  Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_52.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_52.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #52:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Recorded in the TravelCommons studios</li>\r\n	<li>Been running between the coasts for the past couple of weeks -- San Francisco to Orlando, and then San Francisco to New York</li>\r\n	<li>Was able to get out of a 4-day up-&amp;-back to <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Hong Kong\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/china/hong-kong\">Hong Kong</a> and am pretty happy about it</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/yongen-yello/\">Give You Up</a></em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/yongen\">Yongen</a></li>\r\n	<li>o	Drew Leifheit of the <a href=\"http://budacast.hu\">Budacast podcast</a> started a thread of commentary on Amsterdam\'s Schiphol airport</li>\r\n	<li>Thanks to Drew for the link from his interview with the Hungarian newspaper <a href=\"http://www.nol.hu/kultura/cikk/434237/\">Napszabadsag</a>. TravelCommons is the example for (travel) podcasts</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/anamar-transfado/\">Going on a River</a></em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/anamar\">Anamar</a></li>\r\n	<li>According to <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fado\">Wikipedia</a>, Fado is \"s a music genre ... characterized by mournful tunes and lyrics, often about the sea or the life of the poor.\"</li>\r\n	<li>This has been the winter of United Airlines\' fliers\' discontent</li>\r\n	<li>A front page <a href=\"http://www.usatoday.com/money/biztravel/2007-02-19-cheyenne-cover-usat_x.htm\">USAToday</a> story tells how United abandoned two planes of passengers in Cheyenne, Wyoming</li>\r\n	<li>A <a href=\"http://www.chicagotribune.com/travel/chi-070301bad-flight,1,5898109.story?ctrack=1&amp;cset=true\">Chicago Tribune</a> story gives the time line of a United ORD-SFO flight that sat on the runway for 8 hours before finally being cancelled</li>\r\n	<li>Leo Vegoda talks about a United passport snafu</li>\r\n	<li>JetBlue\'s CEO <a href=\"http://www.jetblue.com/about/ourcompany/flightlog/\">blogs</a> a complete <em>mea culpa</em> after their service meltdown; United\'s CEO is no where to be found</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/vla-stuff/\">Look Around</a></em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/vla\">Very Large Array</a></li>\r\n	<li>In T/C #51, I talked about how I upgraded most of my travel technology kit -- my laptop, my <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"IPod\" rel=\"wikipedia\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod\">iPod</a>, and my mobile phone</li>\r\n	<li>I hadn\'t found a use for my new phone\'s big selling point from Cingular -- fast data access on their new 3G network</li>\r\n	<li>A couple of weeks ago, I was at a financial services client with a completely locked-down computer network and cobbled together a 3G data connection using a copy of Samsung\'s PC Studio and an old Bluetooth USB dongle</li>\r\n	<li>This <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Macgyver\" rel=\"hulu\" href=\"http://www.cbs.com/classics/macgyver/video/\">McGyver</a> rig gave me 328 kbps down and 234 kbps up according to the <a href=\"http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest/links.php\">Speakeasy test</a> -- faster than some hotel WiFi spots I tested</li>\r\n	<li>What about using something like this to replace the ubiquitous $10/night Internet charge at Marriotts and Sheratons?</li>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917616.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\">Magnatune</a></li>\r\n	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_52.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<div class=\"zemanta-pixie\" style=\"margin-top: 10px; height: 15px;\"><img class=\"zemanta-pixie-img\" style=\"border: none; float: right;\" src=\"http://img.zemanta.com/pixy.gif?x-id=5909d3f4-1027-48de-8011-a1c15c9ca7ad\" alt=\"\" /></div>','Podcast #52 - Flying Friendless Skies; Latest Speed for the Road','','inherit','closed','closed','','69-revision-v1','','','2018-08-14 11:36:33','2018-08-14 16:36:33','',69,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/08/14/69-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2122,1,'2018-08-14 11:37:03','2018-08-14 16:37:03','Recorded in the SFO Marriott at the start of a trans-continental travel week, we talk about the need to \"re-balance\" your frequent traveler elite status at the beginning of the year -- should you re-up with your current airline or hotel, or move elsewhere?  I\'ve upgraded a good bit of my travel technology over the last couple of weeks.  I talk about my new toys and the reason travelers invest so much time personalizing these bits of circuitry.  One listener describes the inner workings of United Airline\'s standby queue, while another listener tells some stories of traveling in the Far North.    Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_51.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_51.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #51:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Recorded in the San Francisco Airport Marriott</li>\r\n	<li>Been traveling pretty much non-stop since January 3rd</li>\r\n	<li>Stayed in the San Francisco W Hotel a few weeks ago -- not the same place it was during the Internet \"Bubble\" years</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/williams-dusty/\">Steam Train</a></em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/john_williams\">John Williams</a></li>\r\n	<li>A listener describes the inner workings of United Airline\'s standby queue</li>\r\n	<li>Another listener talks about his travel experiences on Innu Mikun airlines in Canada\'s isolated northern regions</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/babylon-knives/\">Roots Fi Cool</a></em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/burning_babylon\">Burning Babylon</a></li>\r\n	<li>A listener talks about a recent flight from Newark to Chicago that was 90% elite fliers</li>\r\n	<li>At the beginning of the year, the elite status counters are re-set to zero -- you should think about where you want to \"invest\" your flight segments and hotel stays for the year</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/kokoon-berlin/\">It\'s Time Know</a></em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/kokoon\">the Kokoon</a></li>\r\n	<li>Passed my Motorola Razr down to my son and bought a Samsung A707 -- I like it as a phone, but haven\'t found much use for the 3G features</li>\r\n	<li>The hard drive on my 2-year-old U2 iPod died, so I upgraded to a new 5th-gen black iPod.  I like it, but what\'s with Apple\'s quality problems</li>\r\n	<li>Frequent travelers\' phone, PC, and iPod are the furniture of their virtual office, and so they tend to spend more time personalizing them than they do their real office</li>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917614.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\">Magnatune</a></li>\r\n	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_51.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #51 - Change Out Status; Upgrading Travel Technology','','inherit','closed','closed','','68-revision-v1','','','2018-08-14 11:37:03','2018-08-14 16:37:03','',68,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/08/14/68-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2123,1,'2018-08-14 11:37:31','2018-08-14 16:37:31','Recorded in the TravelCommons studio after hanging around home for the holidays.  I talk about yet another tough struggle to get home when a pre-Christmas blizzard shuts down Denver, a couple of listeners share their trials of sitting next to travelers with killer bad breath, and we talk about new class distinctions among frequent fliers with the emergence of the Super Elites.    Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_50.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_50.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #50:\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Recorded in the TravelCommons studios outside Chicago</li>\r\n	<li>Did a good bit of flying right before the holidays -- Memphis, New York, and SF twice in two-and-a-half weeks</li>\r\n	<li>Heading back out west this week after two weeks of doing nothing</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Flight</em> by <a href=\"http://www.freshmusic.co.za/\">Ga\'inja</a></li>\r\n	<li>Drew Leifheit of the <a href=\"http://budacast.hu/\">Budacast</a> podcast talks about killer bad breath when seated between two German brothers</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Rocky Road</em> by <a href=\"http://www.kcentricity.com/\">KCentric</a></li>\r\n	<li>My travel plans get derailed yet again by the second big winter storm of the season</li>\r\n	<li>The problem is not with Chicago this time, but with Denver</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Wilderness Dance</em> by <a href=\"http://www.snarkyavenger.com/\">DJ Squirrel King</a></li>\r\n	<li>In past podcasts, we\'ve talked about an \"explosion of elites\" devaluing of frequent flier status</li>\r\n	<li>Have started to see the airlines put more separation between their top-tier and mid-tier status levels</li>\r\n	<li>A <a href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/21/business/21warrior.html?ex=1321765200&amp;en=a67090fae4265899&amp;ei=5090&amp;partner=rssuserland&amp;emc=rss\">New York Times article</a> describes new levels of benefits for extreme frequent fliers</li>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917613.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from the <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/\">Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\r\n	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_50.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>','Podcast #50 - Yet Another Winter Storm, Travel Super Elites','','inherit','closed','closed','','64-revision-v1','','','2018-08-14 11:37:31','2018-08-14 16:37:31','',64,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/08/14/64-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2126,1,'2018-09-15 20:49:57','2018-09-16 01:49:57','[caption id=\"attachment_2128\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/IMG_0419.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2128\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/IMG_0419-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Greetings...[/caption]\n\nBack in front of the mic after 12 days of skipping across northern Europe -- Copenhagen, Brussels, and Scotland. In this episode, we get nostalgic about outside airports in California, talk about how a hospitality mentality is pervasive in hotels but not in restaurants, missing customer service responses from <a href=\"http://united.com\">United Airlines</a> and <a href=\"http://marriott.com\">Marriott</a>, and European perspectives about Chicago.  All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_144.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #144:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL after 12 days bunny hopping through Northern Europe -- first Copenhagen, then Brussels, and finally St Andrews, Scotland to drop my daughter off for her 4th and final year at University of St Andrews. Prior to that, I had a couple of US trips -- back to Charlottesville, VA -- always a nice place to visit -- and a day trip to Omaha. And while all my European flights last week were fine -- including the 40-min connection in Amsterdam that included a trip through passport control -- late August summer storms forced to call audibles on both trips. As opposed to last month, when my CVG-ORD flight was jacked up by storms in Miami, these flights were cratered by rain that I could see outside the window -- the terminal window or the airplane window.</li>\n 	<li>They both left me less than impressed by United’s notification service. The Monday of my Charlottesville flight, it had been steadily raining in Chicago -- heavily at times. I kept checking the status of the flight -- on-time, on-time on-time. Finally, I headed to ORD, got through security, and then checked again - 3 hour delay? Really, you only just figured that out an hour before departure time? Looking out the window, the rain wasn’t letting up. I could see where this was going. I grabbed dinner and then settled in at the gate to do some work. Every once in a while, I’d check the flight status in the United app -- 3-hr delay, 3-hr delay, 3-hr delay, then wait for it -- cancelled. I wasn’t surprised at the cancellation, but the lack of push notification. Normally, I’d get a message and an e-mail from Amex Travel. Nothing this time. Like I said, though, I wasn’t surprised, and I didn’t have a critical meeting the next morning in Charlottesville. United had “helpfully” booked the same flight out the next night, but a) I couldn’t lose a whole day at the client; and b) I felt United had lost the right to my money for this flight. So, I booked the next morning’s flight on American, caught a cab back home and slept that night in my own bed. Annoying, but, hey, I got over it.</li>\n 	<li>Next week’s trip to Omaha was on yet another rainy day. It was just a day trip, so I drove to ORD and saw the dark grey line of weather coming toward me. I mentally settled in for delay. This one, though, would be more problematic because I was flying into Omaha for a workshop, and flying out to Copenhagen the next evening. That dark grey line hit ORD as we were boarding, so I walked into that workshop about 30 minutes late. We walked outside at noon to grab lunch from a food truck. I could see an even darker grey line of weather. Back in the conference room, I’d check the United app every 30 minutes or so -- on-time, on-time, on-time, cancelled. What?! Again, no notice if I hadn’t been checking. And this was a bit more problematic than last week. I found earlier SW and American flights that weren’t cancelled. I gambled on the AA flight which left a bit later but would save me the crosstown MDW-ORD Uber ride to collect my car. I excused myself early from the workshop and headed back to the airport. Arriving late; leaving early. Not sure that’s the way to make a good first impression</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Zapac/25046\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><i>You are (funky mix)</i></a> by Zapac</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul class=\"\">\n 	<li>Steve Frick, a long time TravelCommons listener, left a note on the website about <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/08/09/podcast-143-how-bad-is-business-travel-for-your-health-make-layovers-fun/\">the last episode</a>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Lots of content as well as comments on this episode. Thoroughly enjoyed the Chicago Midway Layover Southside Taproom Tour video tour, when it comes to travel and Midway, though, all I can think about is delays.</li>\n 	<li>Chicago, I recently sent all the members of my tribe there sans, myself (Someone had to watch the dog, or vice-versa). When my wife travels she always checks baggage..... we\'ve only been married 8 years. Upon arrival, I grabbed her bag off the belt and it was unusually heavy. The reason it contained 2 six-packs of Revolution Brewery beer, God bless this woman.</li>\n 	<li>Travel and health, this one hit home. Somehow I\'ve managed to \"keep it tight\"... somewhat. I hired someone about three years ago, and while he doesn\'t drink he managed to partake in every meal that he was invited to. So much so that the rest of us had an over/under on how fast he could gain 30lbs (Yes, we\'re that cruel &amp; shallow). After two broken pants buttons, he managed to get control.</li>\n 	<li>Sorry for the long comment, but keep up the great work!</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Steve, thanks for that; no apologies needed. And you guys are not the only cruel and shallow ones. I may have told this story before, but I had a project in Memphis and one of the team members had kind of a similar problem as your new hire, except his weakness was barbecue ribs. The team would go out one night a week for ribs -- Corky’s, Central, Germantown Commissary, but then this guy would also do a take-out slab another night. The weight gain was obvious -- our over/under was when he topped 300 on his cholesterol reading.</li>\n 	<li>I was 1 for 2 last month on TravelCommons Chicago meet-ups. I wasn’t able to connect with Keith Love and his son when they were in town early in August, but I did meet up with Rob Cheshire and his UK crew for a bit of a taproom crawl on Chicago’s Near West Side on a Friday night at the end of the month. I even got Rob to relax his anti-AB InBev stance and spend an hour in the Goose Island taproom, complete with a round of Bourbon County Stout. At 14%, it’s a bit larger beer than you’d typically see in a UK pub.</li>\n 	<li>More telling, though, was the discussion I had with Drew, Rob’s friend on his first visit to the US. “Where are the dangerous parts of the city, where all the shootings are?” he asked. Fair question. Three weekends before, 66 people were shot in Chicago; 12 people died. “You’re fine here,” I told him, “but I wouldn’t want to go another mile west.” The next Thursday, I was sitting in a Copenhagen bar waiting out the rain -- my wife and daughter were waiting out the rain clothes shopping; to each their own -- and got talking to the bartender, a young woman who had never been to the US. “Where are you from?” she asked. “Chicago” “I read somewhere that’s the most dangerous city in the world.” I told her my experiences -- my family and I haven’t been impacted, but we also don’t hang out on the South or West sides where all the gang bullets are flying. But given the press about the August shootings, she asked a fair question. Both conversations got my attention; I’ve gotten a bit numb to all the gun violence reporting, which is not a good thing. Travel is all about getting different perspectives, even if they’re about your own home.</li>\n 	<li>In the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/08/09/podcast-143-how-bad-is-business-travel-for-your-health-make-layovers-fun/\">last episode</a>, I relayed Keith Love’s questions about good airport apps, ones that, he said, “actually guide you through airports and their amenities/services.” Chris Christensen of the Amateur Traveler Podcast dropped a lin e saying that he uses GateGuru, run by the same team that does SeatGuru. I haven’t tried it yet, but will download it and give it a go. Narita Airport in Tokyo is taking a different angle. Their free Wi-Fi service comes with a chatbot -- Bebot -- to help travelers. The press release didn’t give any chat samples -- “Bebot, where can I find a non-Asahi beer in this terminal?” “I’m sorry, there is none” -- but it could be useful -- or at least entertaining.</li>\n 	<li>Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/07/03/podcast-142-sleeping-in-business-class-changes-from-chinese-tourists/\">July episode</a>, I mentioned how tight the United Polaris business class seats were on the Triple 7’s that I took between ORD and Frankfurt. Last Monday, Irene and I flew a new American 787 back from London, and it didn’t seem any roomier. We flew back on miles, so were in the Main Cabin Extra section, but walking through Business Class to get there, I almost had to turn my body a bit to get down the aisle, and I’m not that big of a guy. When I got to my seat, the leg room was fine, even with the seat in front of me reclined. But the seats were narrow. The couple in the window and middle seats next to me were larger folks, and I could see it was a less-than-comfortable 8 hours for them.</li>\n 	<li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/08/09/podcast-143-how-bad-is-business-travel-for-your-health-make-layovers-fun/\">the last episode</a>, while not thrilled with American’s on-time performance between ORD and CVG, I was impressed by the customer service I got from their Twitter crew. Indeed, the next day, I added a final note to my tweet stream -- “BTW, while it was an operational failure last night, the Twitter customer service was not. I appreciated the delay explanation and backing me up on the next flight”. And any more, I typically get solid, timely service from Twitter customer service. Indeed, one constant on my Top 10 Travel Tips list is “Use Twitter as a Concierge Service”. So I was surprised when a colleague said to me “I gotta get some more followers so companies pay attention to me on Twitter”. He said he never gets any replies. Anybody else have this problem?</li>\n 	<li>Now while I get good quick responses from the airlines, my recent experience with Marriott was very different. I was trying to get the receipt/the folio from a stay in Colorado Springs. The e-mailed bill never came. Then I went to the website but the download link didn’t work. I submitted a folio request on the website and hit Marriott on Twitter. Twitter was faster, though it took them a full day to respond, which was better than the 12 days it took them to respond to my website query. Neither of which actually resulted in me getting a copy of my bill. I only got that when I gave up on all the digital channels and called the Colo Springs front desk. Now, I knew that would be the fastest way -- and it was; I got an e-mail from them in about 5 minutes. But I’m always interested in seeing how all the new channels work… or don’t. Maybe Marriott needs a chatbot...</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> or our new <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a> at travelcommons -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/35879\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><i>Two Guitars</i></a> by Admiral Bob</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>California Outside Airports</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>A college friend of mine posted a status on Facebook, saying that he was flying home to Boston from Long Beach Airport in Southern California. His comment -- “New favorite airport - outdoor terminals and boarding!!” It was an immediate shot of travel nostalgia for me. My first job out of school, in the mid-80’s, had me regularly traveling from Dallas to San Jose. My folks lived in Huntington Beach, CA and American had direct flights from DFW to Long Beach. So whenever I had to be in San Jose, I’d triangulate through Long Beach for the weekend -- fly in Friday afternoon, hang out on the beach for the weekend, and then catch a 7am Monday morning Alaskan Air flight out of Orange County to San Jose.</li>\n 	<li>I loved that triangle of airports -- LGB, SNA, and SJC. Compared to LAX or SFO, they were compact -- maybe even cozy, if you can apply that adjective to an airport and keep a straight face -- uncrowded, and all of them took advantage of the California climate to be outdoor airports. No jetways, and in LGB’s case, even the baggage carousel was outside. I remember the first time walking out to pick up my luggage at LGB, waiting by a palm tree for my bag to show up. This was right after surviving 2 of the coldest winters in Chicago while going to business school. LGB instantly became my favorite airport.</li>\n 	<li>When you arrived at SJC, the gate agent would meet you at the bottom of the steps and guide you under a covered walkway into the terminal -- almost like a Japanese tour guide, holding her clipboard up. I’d walk through the terminal to the car rental lot, to the little Hertz hut in the middle. I got to know the woman working in the hut, and in those days before Hertz Gold and President’s Circle, that’s all I needed to get an upgrade. Later trips through Palm Springs Airport -- pleasure rather than business -- and I loved that airport too, walking outdoors past the palm trees between terminals. Hard to imagine after 9/11 forced airports to harden their perimeters.</li>\n 	<li>SNA and SJC are no longer outside airports. Big renovations in the ‘90’s replaced the covered walkways with jetways, doing away with that one thing that made them a little special. The renovation of LGB’s terminal 6 years ago installed fire pits and outdoor dining, but no jetways. It’s still an outside airport, as is Palm Springs.</li>\n 	<li>Not that outdoor airports are California-only things. Charlottesville airport, which I’ve been frequenting over the past couple of years, is sort of a quarter to a half outdoors. There’s 4 gates -- 1 or 2 of them have jetways, the rest are outdoor boarding and baggage claim for gate-checked bags. And there’s a nice 2nd-floor outdoor terrace that I do phone calls from when it’s not too hot, or raining.</li>\n 	<li>One of the things I like about outdoor airports is there’s no waiting for gates. The plane lands, parks, they wheel up the stairs -- maybe even two; front and back if you’re lucky -- and off you go. No ORD treatment -- landing and then waiting 20 minutes for your gate to open up. However, the last time I flew into CHO, we landed and stopped short of the usual parking spot. The pilot keyed the mic -- “Our gate is full; we’ll have to wait a couple of minutes.” All us passengers looked at each other -- gate, what gate? Turns out he meant some fancy new ramp thing; instead of stairs, they pushed over some huge covered ramp, complete with a switchback so the descent wasn’t too steep. I dunno, call me old-school (or just old) but in my book, you have to have a proper set of stairs to be a true outdoor airport. Palm trees are optional, but highly recommended.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djlang59/22228\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><em>Garden Of The Forking</em></a><em> </em>by J.Lang</li>\n</ul>\n<b>Hospitality Mentality</b>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Nowadays, it seems that most hotels have got their front desk training pretty well down. I can’t remember the last time I hit an indifferent front desk person when checking in. And given the number of different hotels I stay in, it leads me to the conclusion that this, what I call, a hospitality mentality is a key part of their training, because, based on every other retail experience I have, I know I wouldn’t naturally run into this many nice people in a row. Not that I have a problem with this. It’s nice whenever I’m dragging myself into a hotel late because of flight delays or whatever, that the person checking me in is pleasant, wants to take care of me, walks out from behind the desk give me my key and to point me to the elevators, and seems genuinely concerned about my well-being. Even in hotels that otherwise are a bit “meh”, I find that my standard TripAdvisor review says “But the service was great.”</li>\n 	<li>Which is a huge contrast with the typical service I get at a restaurant where I would expect a hospitality mentality, but am surprised when I get it. Last Sunday night, Irene and I were overnighting in London on our way back from St Andrews, and walked to an Indian restaurant, <a href=\"http://www.dishoom.com/kings-cross/\">Dishoom</a>, up behind King’s Cross station. There was a queue outside the restaurant, typical for a popular place. A guy came out with an iPad, took our name, and told us it would be about a 30 minute wait. That was fine, we wanted a drink before dinner anyhow. They give us a pager -- again, typical stuff -- but now it gets a bit different. Instead of pointing us to a scrum around a bar, someone escorts us to two open seats, asks if the seats are OK for us, and right behind her was a waitress to take our order. Right at about 30 minutes, as we’re finishing our drinks, the pager goes off. We’re collecting our stuff to head back to the hostess stand when a guy walks over to us -- the same guy who took our name in line -- took our glasses and walked us to our table, chatting along the way -- where are you from, Oh I have friends in Chicago, how long are you in London…. We get to the table, but before we sit down, he asks us “Is this table OK for you?”</li>\n 	<li>I can’t remember the last time a busy restaurant asked me if I was happy with the table. Normally, the hostess expects you to be happy she actually seated you. The food was good, but what really impressed me about Dishoom that here was a big, mass-service restaurant with a hospitality mentality. Easy to do at a small place, or a Michelin-starred restaurant (though don’t get me started about French Laundry), but here, in London, a place not necessarily known for great customer service, they had it nailed. Oh, and the chicken curry -- they nailed that too.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #144</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a> and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_144.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #144 — Outside Airports; Hospitality Mentality','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-144-outside-airports-hospitality-mentality','','','2021-09-29 22:05:00','2021-09-30 03:05:00','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=2126',0,'post','',0),
(2127,1,'2018-09-14 21:59:33','2018-09-15 02:59:33','No long-distance travel this month. Instead, I\"m getting back into regional jets, and waiting out a long delay in Cincinnati has me wondering about American Eagle\'s flight scheduling algorithm. My flights into CVG cause me to think about the impact of losing hub status. CVG looks overbuilt, but MEM is spending money to shrink itself. A Harvard Business Review article about how frequent business travel leads to poor health choices emphasizes the need for \"mindfulness\" on the road. The Midway Layover Taproom video gets me thinking about the time needed for a fun layover tour. And I give a listener my Chicago restaurant and taproom recommendations. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_143.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n<iframe src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/483554862&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"></iframe><!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #144:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL after 12 days bunny hopping through Northern Europe -- first Copenhagen, then Brussels, and finally St Andrews, Scotland to drop my daughter off for her 4th and final year at University of St Andrews. Prior to that, I had a couple of US trips -- back to Charlottesville, VA -- always a nice place to visit -- and a day trip to Omaha. And while all my European flights last week were fine -- including the 40-min connection in Amsterdam that included a trip through passport control -- late August summer storms forced to call audibles on both trips. As opposed to last month, when my CVG-ORD flight was jacked up by storms in Miami, these flights were cratered by rain that I could see outside the window -- the terminal window or the airplane window.</li>\r\n 	<li>They both left me less than impressed by United’s notification service. The Monday of my Charlottesville flight, it had been steadily raining in Chicago -- heavily at times. I kept checking the status of the flight -- on-time, on-time on-time. Finally, I headed to ORD, got through security, and then checked again - 3 hour delay? Really, you only just figured that out an hour before departure time? Looking out the window, the rain wasn’t letting up. I could see where this was going. I grabbed dinner and then settled in at the gate to do some work. Every once in a while, I’d check the flight status in the United app -- 3-hr delay, 3-hr delay, 3-hr delay, then wait for it -- cancelled. I wasn’t surprised at the cancellation, but the lack of push notification. Normally, I’d get a message and an e-mail from Amex Travel. Nothing this time. Like I said, though, I wasn’t surprised, and I didn’t have a critical meeting the next morning in Charlottesville. United had “helpfully” booked the same flight out the next night, but a) I couldn’t lose a whole day at the client; and b) I felt United had lost the right to my money for this flight. So, I booked the next morning’s flight on American, caught a cab back home and slept that night in my own bed. Annoying, but, hey, I got over it.</li>\r\n 	<li>Next week’s trip to Omaha was on yet another rainy day. It was just a day trip, so I drove to ORD and saw the dark grey line of weather coming toward me. I mentally settled in for delay. This one, though, would be more problematic because I was flying into Omaha for a workshop, and flying out to Copenhagen the next evening. That dark grey line hit ORD as we were boarding, so I walked into that workshop about 30 minutes late. We walked outside at noon to grab lunch from a food truck. I could see an even darker grey line of weather. Back in the conference room, I’d check the United app every 30 minutes or so -- on-time, on-time, on-time, cancelled. What?! Again, no notice if I hadn’t been checking. And this was a bit more problematic than last week. I found earlier SW and American flights that weren’t cancelled. I gambled on the AA flight which left a bit later but would save me the crosstown MDW-ORD Uber ride to collect my car. I excused myself early from the workshop and headed back to the airport. Arriving late; leaving early. Not sure that’s the way to make a good first impression</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/beyond7-revelations/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Miss America</em></a> by Beyond 7</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul class=\"\">\r\n 	<li>Steve Frick, a long time TravelCommons listener, left a note on the website about <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/08/09/podcast-143-how-bad-is-business-travel-for-your-health-make-layovers-fun/\">the last episode</a>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Lots of content as well as comments on this episode. Thoroughly enjoyed the Chicago Midway Layover Southside Taproom Tour video tour, when it comes to travel and Midway, though, all I can think about is delays.</li>\r\n 	<li>Chicago, I recently sent all the members of my tribe there sans, myself (Someone had to watch the dog, or vice-versa). When my wife travels she always checks baggage..... we\'ve only been married 8 years. Upon arrival, I grabbed her bag off the belt and it was unusually heavy. The reason it contained 2 six-packs of Revolution Brewery beer, God bless this woman.</li>\r\n 	<li>Travel and health, this one hit home. Somehow I\'ve managed to \"keep it tight\"... somewhat. I hired someone about three years ago, and while he doesn\'t drink he managed to partake in every meal that he was invited to. So much so that the rest of us had an over/under on how fast he could gain 30lbs (Yes, we\'re that cruel &amp; shallow). After two broken pants buttons, he managed to get control.</li>\r\n 	<li>Sorry for the long comment, but keep up the great work!</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Steve, thanks for that; no apologies needed. And you guys are the only cruel and shallow ones. I may have told this story before, but I had a project in Memphis and one of the team members had kind of a similar problem as your new hire, except his weakness was barbecue ribs. The team would go out one night a week for ribs -- Corky’s, Central, Germantown Commissary, but then this guy would also do a take-out slab another night. The weight gain was obvious -- our over/under was when he topped 300 on his cholesterol reading.</li>\r\n 	<li>I was 1 for 2 last month on TravelCommons Chicago meet-ups. I wasn’t able to connect with Keith Love and his son when they were in town early in August, but I did meet up with Rob Cheshire and his UK crew for a bit of a taproom crawl on Chicago’s Near West Side on a Friday night at the end of the month. I even got Rob to relax his anti-AB InBev stance and spend an hour in the Goose Island taproom, complete with a round of Bourbon County Stout. At 14%, it’s a bit larger beer than you’d typically see in a UK pub.</li>\r\n 	<li>More telling, though, was the discussion I had with Drew, Rob’s friend on his first visit to the US. “Where are the dangerous parts of the city, where all the shootings are?” he asked. Fair question. Three weekends before, 66 people were shot in Chicago; 12 people died. “You’re fine here,” I told him, “but I wouldn’t want to go another mile west.” The next Thursday, I was sitting in a Copenhagen bar waiting out the rain -- my wife and daughter were waiting out the rain clothes shopping; to each their own -- and got talking to the bartender, a young woman who had never been to the US. “Where are you from?” she asked. “Chicago” “I read somewhere that’s the most dangerous city in the world.” I told her my experiences -- my family and I haven’t been impacted, but we also don’t hang out on the South or West sides where all the gang bullets are flying. But given the press about the August shootings, she asked a fair question. Both conversations got my attention; I’ve gotten a bit numb to all the gun violence reporting, which is not a good thing. Travel is all about getting different perspectives, even if they’re about your own home.</li>\r\n 	<li>In the last episode, I relayed Keith Love’s questions about good airport apps, ones that, he said, “actually guide you through airports and their amenities/services.” Chris Christensen of the Amateur Traveler Podcast dropped a line saying that he uses GateGuru, run by the same team that does SeatGuru. I haven’t tried it yet, but will download it and give it a go. Narita Airport in Tokyo is taking a different angle. Their free Wi-Fi service comes with a chatbot -- Bebot -- to help travelers. The press release didn’t give any chat samples -- “Bebot, where can I find a non-Asahi beer in this terminal?” “I’m sorry, there is none” -- but it could be useful -- or at least entertaining.</li>\r\n 	<li>Back in the July episode, I mentioned how tight the United Polaris business class seats were on the Triple 7’s that I took between ORD and Frankfurt. Last Monday, Irene and I flew a new American 787 back from London, and it didn’t seem any roomier. We flew back on miles, so were in the Main Cabin Extra section, but walking through Business Class to get there, I almost had to turn my body a bit to get down the aisle, and I’m not that big of a guy. When I got to my seat, the leg room was fine, even with the seat in front of me reclined. But the seats were narrow. The couple in the window and middle seats next to me were larger folks, and I could see it was a less-than-comfortable 8 hours for them.</li>\r\n 	<li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/08/09/podcast-143-how-bad-is-business-travel-for-your-health-make-layovers-fun/\">the last episode</a>, while not thrilled with American’s on-time performance between ORD and CVG, I was impressed by the customer service I got from their Twitter crew. Indeed, the next day, I added a final note to my tweet stream -- “BTW, while it was an operational failure last night, the Twitter customer service was not. I appreciated the delay explanation and backing me up on the next flight”. And any more, I typically get solid, timely service from Twitter customer service. Indeed, one constant on my Top 10 Travel Tips list is “Use Twitter as a Concierge Service”. So I was surprised when a colleague said to me “I gotta get some more followers so companies pay attention to me on Twitter”. He said he never gets any replies. Anybody else have this problem?</li>\r\n 	<li>Now while I get good quick responses from the airlines, my recent experience with Marriott was very different. I was trying to get the receipt/the folio from a stay in Colorado Springs. The e-mailed bill never came. Then I went to the website but the download link didn’t work. I submitted a folio request on the website and hit Marriott on Twitter. Twitter was faster, though it took them a full day to respond, which was better than the 12 days it took them to respond to my website query. Neither of which actually resulted in me getting a copy of my bill. I only got that when I gave up on all the digital channels and called the Colo Springs front desk. Now, I knew that would be the fastest way -- and it was; I got an e-mail from them in about 5 minutes. But I’m always interested in seeing how all the new channels work… or don’t. Maybe Marriott needs a chatbot...</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> or our new <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a> at travelcommons -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/westexit-extra/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>On Condition of Anonymity</em></a> by the West Exit</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>California Outside Airports</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>A college friend of mine posted a status on Facebook, saying that he was flying home to Boston from Long Beach Airport in Southern California. His comment -- “New favorite airport - outdoor terminals and boarding!!” It was an immediate shot of travel nostalgia for me. My first job out of school, in the mid-80’s, had me regularly traveling from Dallas to San Jose. My folks lived in Huntington Beach, CA and American had direct flights from DFW to Long Beach. So whenever I had to be in San Jose, I’d triangulate through Long Beach for the weekend -- fly in Friday afternoon, hang out on the beach for the weekend, and then catch a 7am Monday morning Alaskan Air flight out of Orange County to San Jose.</li>\r\n 	<li>I loved that triangle of airports -- LGB, SNA, and SJC. Compared to LAX or SFO, they were compact -- maybe even cozy, if you can apply that adjective to an airport and keep a straight face -- uncrowded, and all of them took advantage of the California climate to be outdoor airports. No jetways, and in LGB’s case, even the baggage carousel was outside. I remember the first time walking out to pick up my luggage at LGB, waiting by a palm tree for my bag to show up. This was right after surviving 2 of the coldest winters in Chicago while going to business school. LGB instantly became my favorite airport.</li>\r\n 	<li>When you arrived at SJC, the gate agent would meet you at the bottom of the steps and guide you under a covered walkway into the terminal -- almost like a Japanese tour guide, holding her clipboard up. I’d walk through the terminal to the car rental lot, to the little Hertz hut in the middle. I got to know the woman working in the hut, and in those days before Hertz Gold and President’s Circle, that’s all I needed to get an upgrade. Later trips through Palm Springs Airport -- pleasure rather than business -- and I loved that airport too, walking outdoors past the palm trees between terminals. Hard to imagine after 9/11 forced airports to harden their perimeters.</li>\r\n 	<li>SNA and SJC are no longer outside airports. Big renovations in the ‘90’s replaced the covered walkways with jetways, doing away with that one thing that made them a little special. The renovation of LGB’s terminal 6 years ago installed fire pits and outdoor dining, but no jetways. It’s still an outside airport, as is Palm Springs.</li>\r\n 	<li>Not that outdoor airports are California-only things. Charlottesville airport, which I’ve been frequenting over the past couple of years, is sort of a quarter to a half outdoors. There’s 4 gates -- 1 or 2 of them have jetways, the rest are outdoor boarding and baggage claim for gate-checked bags. And there’s a nice 2nd-floor outdoor terrace that I do phone calls from when it’s not too hot, or raining.</li>\r\n 	<li>One of the things I like about outdoor airports is there’s no waiting for gates. The plane lands, parks, they wheel up the stairs -- maybe even two; front and back if you’re lucky -- and off you go. No ORD treatment -- landing and then waiting 20 minutes for your gate to open up. However, the last time I flew into CHO, we landed and stopped short of the usual parking spot. The pilot keyed the mic -- “Our gate is full; we’ll have to wait a couple of minutes.” All us passengers looked at each other -- gate, what gate? Turns out he meant some fancy new ramp thing; instead of stairs, they pushed over some huge covered ramp, complete with a switchback so the descent wasn’t too steep. I dunno, call me old-school (or just old) but in my book, you have to have a proper set of stairs to be a true outdoor airport. Palm trees are optional, but highly recommended.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/solace-medusa/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Subtle Vice</a> </em>by Solace</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Hospitality Mentality</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Nowadays, it seems that most hotels have got their front desk training pretty well down. I can’t remember the last time I hit an indifferent front desk person when checking in. And given the number of different hotels I stay in, it leads me to the conclusion that this, what I call, a hospitality mentality is a key part of their training, because, based on every other retail experience I have, I know I wouldn’t naturally run into this many nice people in a row. Not that I have a problem with this. It’s nice whenever I’m dragging myself into a hotel late because of flight delays or whatever, that the person checking me in is pleasant, wants to take care of me, walks out from behind the desk give me my key and to point me to the elevators, and seems genuinely concerned about my well-being. Even in hotels that otherwise are a bit “meh”, I find that my standard TripAdvisor review says “But the service was great.”</li>\r\n 	<li>Which is a huge contrast with the typical service I get at a restaurant where I would expect a hospitality mentality, but am surprised when I get it. Last Sunday night, Irene and I were overnighting in London on our way back from St Andrews, and walked to an Indian restaurant, <a href=\"http://www.dishoom.com/kings-cross/\">Dishoom</a>, up behind King’s Cross station. There was a queue outside the restaurant, typical for a popular place. A guy came out with an iPad, took our name, and told us it would be about a 30 minute wait. That was fine, we wanted a drink before dinner anyhow. They give us a pager -- again, typical stuff -- but now it gets a bit different. Instead of pointing us to a scrum around a bar, someone escorts us to two open seats, asks if the seats are OK for us, and right behind her was a waitress to take our order. Right at about 30 minutes, as we’re finishing our drinks, the pager goes off. We’re collecting our stuff to head back to the hostess stand when a guy walks over to us -- the same guy who took our name in line -- took our glasses and walked us to our table, chatting along the way -- where are you from, Oh I have friends in Chicago, how long are you in London…. We get to the table, but before we sit down, he asks us “Is this table OK for you?”</li>\r\n 	<li>I can’t remember the last time a busy restaurant asked me if I was happy with the table. Normally, the hostess expects you to be happy she actually seated you. The food was good, but what really impressed me about Dishoom that here was a big, mass-service restaurant with a hospitality mentality. Easy to do at a small place, or a Michelin-starred restaurant (though don’t get me started about French Laundry), but here, in London, a place not necessarily known for great customer service, they had it nailed. Oh, and the chicken curry -- they nailed that too.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #144</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a> and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music is from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Magnatune</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_144.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #144 — Outside Airports; Hospitality Mentality','','inherit','closed','closed','','2126-revision-v1','','','2018-09-14 21:59:33','2018-09-15 02:59:33','',2126,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/09/14/2126-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2128,1,'2018-09-14 22:01:29','2018-09-15 03:01:29','','IMG_0419','Greetings...','inherit','open','closed','','img_0419','','','2018-09-14 22:02:15','2018-09-15 03:02:15','',2126,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/IMG_0419.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(2129,1,'2018-09-14 22:07:02','2018-09-15 03:07:02','[caption id=\"attachment_2128\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/IMG_0419.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2128\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/IMG_0419-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Greetings...[/caption]\r\n\r\nNo long-distance travel this month. Instead, I\"m getting back into regional jets, and waiting out a long delay in Cincinnati has me wondering about American Eagle\'s flight scheduling algorithm. My flights into CVG cause me to think about the impact of losing hub status. CVG looks overbuilt, but MEM is spending money to shrink itself. A Harvard Business Review article about how frequent business travel leads to poor health choices emphasizes the need for \"mindfulness\" on the road. The Midway Layover Taproom video gets me thinking about the time needed for a fun layover tour. And I give a listener my Chicago restaurant and taproom recommendations. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_143.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n<iframe src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/483554862&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"></iframe><!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #144:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL after 12 days bunny hopping through Northern Europe -- first Copenhagen, then Brussels, and finally St Andrews, Scotland to drop my daughter off for her 4th and final year at University of St Andrews. Prior to that, I had a couple of US trips -- back to Charlottesville, VA -- always a nice place to visit -- and a day trip to Omaha. And while all my European flights last week were fine -- including the 40-min connection in Amsterdam that included a trip through passport control -- late August summer storms forced to call audibles on both trips. As opposed to last month, when my CVG-ORD flight was jacked up by storms in Miami, these flights were cratered by rain that I could see outside the window -- the terminal window or the airplane window.</li>\r\n 	<li>They both left me less than impressed by United’s notification service. The Monday of my Charlottesville flight, it had been steadily raining in Chicago -- heavily at times. I kept checking the status of the flight -- on-time, on-time on-time. Finally, I headed to ORD, got through security, and then checked again - 3 hour delay? Really, you only just figured that out an hour before departure time? Looking out the window, the rain wasn’t letting up. I could see where this was going. I grabbed dinner and then settled in at the gate to do some work. Every once in a while, I’d check the flight status in the United app -- 3-hr delay, 3-hr delay, 3-hr delay, then wait for it -- cancelled. I wasn’t surprised at the cancellation, but the lack of push notification. Normally, I’d get a message and an e-mail from Amex Travel. Nothing this time. Like I said, though, I wasn’t surprised, and I didn’t have a critical meeting the next morning in Charlottesville. United had “helpfully” booked the same flight out the next night, but a) I couldn’t lose a whole day at the client; and b) I felt United had lost the right to my money for this flight. So, I booked the next morning’s flight on American, caught a cab back home and slept that night in my own bed. Annoying, but, hey, I got over it.</li>\r\n 	<li>Next week’s trip to Omaha was on yet another rainy day. It was just a day trip, so I drove to ORD and saw the dark grey line of weather coming toward me. I mentally settled in for delay. This one, though, would be more problematic because I was flying into Omaha for a workshop, and flying out to Copenhagen the next evening. That dark grey line hit ORD as we were boarding, so I walked into that workshop about 30 minutes late. We walked outside at noon to grab lunch from a food truck. I could see an even darker grey line of weather. Back in the conference room, I’d check the United app every 30 minutes or so -- on-time, on-time, on-time, cancelled. What?! Again, no notice if I hadn’t been checking. And this was a bit more problematic than last week. I found earlier SW and American flights that weren’t cancelled. I gambled on the AA flight which left a bit later but would save me the crosstown MDW-ORD Uber ride to collect my car. I excused myself early from the workshop and headed back to the airport. Arriving late; leaving early. Not sure that’s the way to make a good first impression</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/beyond7-revelations/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Miss America</em></a> by Beyond 7</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul class=\"\">\r\n 	<li>Steve Frick, a long time TravelCommons listener, left a note on the website about <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/08/09/podcast-143-how-bad-is-business-travel-for-your-health-make-layovers-fun/\">the last episode</a>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Lots of content as well as comments on this episode. Thoroughly enjoyed the Chicago Midway Layover Southside Taproom Tour video tour, when it comes to travel and Midway, though, all I can think about is delays.</li>\r\n 	<li>Chicago, I recently sent all the members of my tribe there sans, myself (Someone had to watch the dog, or vice-versa). When my wife travels she always checks baggage..... we\'ve only been married 8 years. Upon arrival, I grabbed her bag off the belt and it was unusually heavy. The reason it contained 2 six-packs of Revolution Brewery beer, God bless this woman.</li>\r\n 	<li>Travel and health, this one hit home. Somehow I\'ve managed to \"keep it tight\"... somewhat. I hired someone about three years ago, and while he doesn\'t drink he managed to partake in every meal that he was invited to. So much so that the rest of us had an over/under on how fast he could gain 30lbs (Yes, we\'re that cruel &amp; shallow). After two broken pants buttons, he managed to get control.</li>\r\n 	<li>Sorry for the long comment, but keep up the great work!</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Steve, thanks for that; no apologies needed. And you guys are the only cruel and shallow ones. I may have told this story before, but I had a project in Memphis and one of the team members had kind of a similar problem as your new hire, except his weakness was barbecue ribs. The team would go out one night a week for ribs -- Corky’s, Central, Germantown Commissary, but then this guy would also do a take-out slab another night. The weight gain was obvious -- our over/under was when he topped 300 on his cholesterol reading.</li>\r\n 	<li>I was 1 for 2 last month on TravelCommons Chicago meet-ups. I wasn’t able to connect with Keith Love and his son when they were in town early in August, but I did meet up with Rob Cheshire and his UK crew for a bit of a taproom crawl on Chicago’s Near West Side on a Friday night at the end of the month. I even got Rob to relax his anti-AB InBev stance and spend an hour in the Goose Island taproom, complete with a round of Bourbon County Stout. At 14%, it’s a bit larger beer than you’d typically see in a UK pub.</li>\r\n 	<li>More telling, though, was the discussion I had with Drew, Rob’s friend on his first visit to the US. “Where are the dangerous parts of the city, where all the shootings are?” he asked. Fair question. Three weekends before, 66 people were shot in Chicago; 12 people died. “You’re fine here,” I told him, “but I wouldn’t want to go another mile west.” The next Thursday, I was sitting in a Copenhagen bar waiting out the rain -- my wife and daughter were waiting out the rain clothes shopping; to each their own -- and got talking to the bartender, a young woman who had never been to the US. “Where are you from?” she asked. “Chicago” “I read somewhere that’s the most dangerous city in the world.” I told her my experiences -- my family and I haven’t been impacted, but we also don’t hang out on the South or West sides where all the gang bullets are flying. But given the press about the August shootings, she asked a fair question. Both conversations got my attention; I’ve gotten a bit numb to all the gun violence reporting, which is not a good thing. Travel is all about getting different perspectives, even if they’re about your own home.</li>\r\n 	<li>In the last episode, I relayed Keith Love’s questions about good airport apps, ones that, he said, “actually guide you through airports and their amenities/services.” Chris Christensen of the Amateur Traveler Podcast dropped a line saying that he uses GateGuru, run by the same team that does SeatGuru. I haven’t tried it yet, but will download it and give it a go. Narita Airport in Tokyo is taking a different angle. Their free Wi-Fi service comes with a chatbot -- Bebot -- to help travelers. The press release didn’t give any chat samples -- “Bebot, where can I find a non-Asahi beer in this terminal?” “I’m sorry, there is none” -- but it could be useful -- or at least entertaining.</li>\r\n 	<li>Back in the July episode, I mentioned how tight the United Polaris business class seats were on the Triple 7’s that I took between ORD and Frankfurt. Last Monday, Irene and I flew a new American 787 back from London, and it didn’t seem any roomier. We flew back on miles, so were in the Main Cabin Extra section, but walking through Business Class to get there, I almost had to turn my body a bit to get down the aisle, and I’m not that big of a guy. When I got to my seat, the leg room was fine, even with the seat in front of me reclined. But the seats were narrow. The couple in the window and middle seats next to me were larger folks, and I could see it was a less-than-comfortable 8 hours for them.</li>\r\n 	<li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/08/09/podcast-143-how-bad-is-business-travel-for-your-health-make-layovers-fun/\">the last episode</a>, while not thrilled with American’s on-time performance between ORD and CVG, I was impressed by the customer service I got from their Twitter crew. Indeed, the next day, I added a final note to my tweet stream -- “BTW, while it was an operational failure last night, the Twitter customer service was not. I appreciated the delay explanation and backing me up on the next flight”. And any more, I typically get solid, timely service from Twitter customer service. Indeed, one constant on my Top 10 Travel Tips list is “Use Twitter as a Concierge Service”. So I was surprised when a colleague said to me “I gotta get some more followers so companies pay attention to me on Twitter”. He said he never gets any replies. Anybody else have this problem?</li>\r\n 	<li>Now while I get good quick responses from the airlines, my recent experience with Marriott was very different. I was trying to get the receipt/the folio from a stay in Colorado Springs. The e-mailed bill never came. Then I went to the website but the download link didn’t work. I submitted a folio request on the website and hit Marriott on Twitter. Twitter was faster, though it took them a full day to respond, which was better than the 12 days it took them to respond to my website query. Neither of which actually resulted in me getting a copy of my bill. I only got that when I gave up on all the digital channels and called the Colo Springs front desk. Now, I knew that would be the fastest way -- and it was; I got an e-mail from them in about 5 minutes. But I’m always interested in seeing how all the new channels work… or don’t. Maybe Marriott needs a chatbot...</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> or our new <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a> at travelcommons -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/westexit-extra/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>On Condition of Anonymity</em></a> by the West Exit</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>California Outside Airports</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>A college friend of mine posted a status on Facebook, saying that he was flying home to Boston from Long Beach Airport in Southern California. His comment -- “New favorite airport - outdoor terminals and boarding!!” It was an immediate shot of travel nostalgia for me. My first job out of school, in the mid-80’s, had me regularly traveling from Dallas to San Jose. My folks lived in Huntington Beach, CA and American had direct flights from DFW to Long Beach. So whenever I had to be in San Jose, I’d triangulate through Long Beach for the weekend -- fly in Friday afternoon, hang out on the beach for the weekend, and then catch a 7am Monday morning Alaskan Air flight out of Orange County to San Jose.</li>\r\n 	<li>I loved that triangle of airports -- LGB, SNA, and SJC. Compared to LAX or SFO, they were compact -- maybe even cozy, if you can apply that adjective to an airport and keep a straight face -- uncrowded, and all of them took advantage of the California climate to be outdoor airports. No jetways, and in LGB’s case, even the baggage carousel was outside. I remember the first time walking out to pick up my luggage at LGB, waiting by a palm tree for my bag to show up. This was right after surviving 2 of the coldest winters in Chicago while going to business school. LGB instantly became my favorite airport.</li>\r\n 	<li>When you arrived at SJC, the gate agent would meet you at the bottom of the steps and guide you under a covered walkway into the terminal -- almost like a Japanese tour guide, holding her clipboard up. I’d walk through the terminal to the car rental lot, to the little Hertz hut in the middle. I got to know the woman working in the hut, and in those days before Hertz Gold and President’s Circle, that’s all I needed to get an upgrade. Later trips through Palm Springs Airport -- pleasure rather than business -- and I loved that airport too, walking outdoors past the palm trees between terminals. Hard to imagine after 9/11 forced airports to harden their perimeters.</li>\r\n 	<li>SNA and SJC are no longer outside airports. Big renovations in the ‘90’s replaced the covered walkways with jetways, doing away with that one thing that made them a little special. The renovation of LGB’s terminal 6 years ago installed fire pits and outdoor dining, but no jetways. It’s still an outside airport, as is Palm Springs.</li>\r\n 	<li>Not that outdoor airports are California-only things. Charlottesville airport, which I’ve been frequenting over the past couple of years, is sort of a quarter to a half outdoors. There’s 4 gates -- 1 or 2 of them have jetways, the rest are outdoor boarding and baggage claim for gate-checked bags. And there’s a nice 2nd-floor outdoor terrace that I do phone calls from when it’s not too hot, or raining.</li>\r\n 	<li>One of the things I like about outdoor airports is there’s no waiting for gates. The plane lands, parks, they wheel up the stairs -- maybe even two; front and back if you’re lucky -- and off you go. No ORD treatment -- landing and then waiting 20 minutes for your gate to open up. However, the last time I flew into CHO, we landed and stopped short of the usual parking spot. The pilot keyed the mic -- “Our gate is full; we’ll have to wait a couple of minutes.” All us passengers looked at each other -- gate, what gate? Turns out he meant some fancy new ramp thing; instead of stairs, they pushed over some huge covered ramp, complete with a switchback so the descent wasn’t too steep. I dunno, call me old-school (or just old) but in my book, you have to have a proper set of stairs to be a true outdoor airport. Palm trees are optional, but highly recommended.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/solace-medusa/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Subtle Vice</a> </em>by Solace</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Hospitality Mentality</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Nowadays, it seems that most hotels have got their front desk training pretty well down. I can’t remember the last time I hit an indifferent front desk person when checking in. And given the number of different hotels I stay in, it leads me to the conclusion that this, what I call, a hospitality mentality is a key part of their training, because, based on every other retail experience I have, I know I wouldn’t naturally run into this many nice people in a row. Not that I have a problem with this. It’s nice whenever I’m dragging myself into a hotel late because of flight delays or whatever, that the person checking me in is pleasant, wants to take care of me, walks out from behind the desk give me my key and to point me to the elevators, and seems genuinely concerned about my well-being. Even in hotels that otherwise are a bit “meh”, I find that my standard TripAdvisor review says “But the service was great.”</li>\r\n 	<li>Which is a huge contrast with the typical service I get at a restaurant where I would expect a hospitality mentality, but am surprised when I get it. Last Sunday night, Irene and I were overnighting in London on our way back from St Andrews, and walked to an Indian restaurant, <a href=\"http://www.dishoom.com/kings-cross/\">Dishoom</a>, up behind King’s Cross station. There was a queue outside the restaurant, typical for a popular place. A guy came out with an iPad, took our name, and told us it would be about a 30 minute wait. That was fine, we wanted a drink before dinner anyhow. They give us a pager -- again, typical stuff -- but now it gets a bit different. Instead of pointing us to a scrum around a bar, someone escorts us to two open seats, asks if the seats are OK for us, and right behind her was a waitress to take our order. Right at about 30 minutes, as we’re finishing our drinks, the pager goes off. We’re collecting our stuff to head back to the hostess stand when a guy walks over to us -- the same guy who took our name in line -- took our glasses and walked us to our table, chatting along the way -- where are you from, Oh I have friends in Chicago, how long are you in London…. We get to the table, but before we sit down, he asks us “Is this table OK for you?”</li>\r\n 	<li>I can’t remember the last time a busy restaurant asked me if I was happy with the table. Normally, the hostess expects you to be happy she actually seated you. The food was good, but what really impressed me about Dishoom that here was a big, mass-service restaurant with a hospitality mentality. Easy to do at a small place, or a Michelin-starred restaurant (though don’t get me started about French Laundry), but here, in London, a place not necessarily known for great customer service, they had it nailed. Oh, and the chicken curry -- they nailed that too.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #144</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a> and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music is from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Magnatune</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_144.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #144 — Outside Airports; Hospitality Mentality','','inherit','closed','closed','','2126-revision-v1','','','2018-09-14 22:07:02','2018-09-15 03:07:02','',2126,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/09/14/2126-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2130,1,'2018-09-15 06:06:24','2018-09-15 11:06:24','[caption id=\"attachment_2128\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/IMG_0419.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2128\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/IMG_0419-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Greetings...[/caption]\r\n\r\nBack in front of the mic after 12 days of skipping across northern Europe -- Copenhagen, Brussels, and Scotland. In this episode, we get nostalgic about outside airports in California, talk about how a hospitality mentality is pervasive in hotels but not in restaurants, missing customer service responses from <a href=\"http://united.com\">United Airlines</a> and <a href=\"http://marriott.com\">Marriott</a>, and European perspectives about Chicago.  All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_144.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n<iframe src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/483554862&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"></iframe><!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #144:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL after 12 days bunny hopping through Northern Europe -- first Copenhagen, then Brussels, and finally St Andrews, Scotland to drop my daughter off for her 4th and final year at University of St Andrews. Prior to that, I had a couple of US trips -- back to Charlottesville, VA -- always a nice place to visit -- and a day trip to Omaha. And while all my European flights last week were fine -- including the 40-min connection in Amsterdam that included a trip through passport control -- late August summer storms forced to call audibles on both trips. As opposed to last month, when my CVG-ORD flight was jacked up by storms in Miami, these flights were cratered by rain that I could see outside the window -- the terminal window or the airplane window.</li>\r\n 	<li>They both left me less than impressed by United’s notification service. The Monday of my Charlottesville flight, it had been steadily raining in Chicago -- heavily at times. I kept checking the status of the flight -- on-time, on-time on-time. Finally, I headed to ORD, got through security, and then checked again - 3 hour delay? Really, you only just figured that out an hour before departure time? Looking out the window, the rain wasn’t letting up. I could see where this was going. I grabbed dinner and then settled in at the gate to do some work. Every once in a while, I’d check the flight status in the United app -- 3-hr delay, 3-hr delay, 3-hr delay, then wait for it -- cancelled. I wasn’t surprised at the cancellation, but the lack of push notification. Normally, I’d get a message and an e-mail from Amex Travel. Nothing this time. Like I said, though, I wasn’t surprised, and I didn’t have a critical meeting the next morning in Charlottesville. United had “helpfully” booked the same flight out the next night, but a) I couldn’t lose a whole day at the client; and b) I felt United had lost the right to my money for this flight. So, I booked the next morning’s flight on American, caught a cab back home and slept that night in my own bed. Annoying, but, hey, I got over it.</li>\r\n 	<li>Next week’s trip to Omaha was on yet another rainy day. It was just a day trip, so I drove to ORD and saw the dark grey line of weather coming toward me. I mentally settled in for delay. This one, though, would be more problematic because I was flying into Omaha for a workshop, and flying out to Copenhagen the next evening. That dark grey line hit ORD as we were boarding, so I walked into that workshop about 30 minutes late. We walked outside at noon to grab lunch from a food truck. I could see an even darker grey line of weather. Back in the conference room, I’d check the United app every 30 minutes or so -- on-time, on-time, on-time, cancelled. What?! Again, no notice if I hadn’t been checking. And this was a bit more problematic than last week. I found earlier SW and American flights that weren’t cancelled. I gambled on the AA flight which left a bit later but would save me the crosstown MDW-ORD Uber ride to collect my car. I excused myself early from the workshop and headed back to the airport. Arriving late; leaving early. Not sure that’s the way to make a good first impression</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/beyond7-revelations/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Miss America</em></a> by Beyond 7</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul class=\"\">\r\n 	<li>Steve Frick, a long time TravelCommons listener, left a note on the website about <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/08/09/podcast-143-how-bad-is-business-travel-for-your-health-make-layovers-fun/\">the last episode</a>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Lots of content as well as comments on this episode. Thoroughly enjoyed the Chicago Midway Layover Southside Taproom Tour video tour, when it comes to travel and Midway, though, all I can think about is delays.</li>\r\n 	<li>Chicago, I recently sent all the members of my tribe there sans, myself (Someone had to watch the dog, or vice-versa). When my wife travels she always checks baggage..... we\'ve only been married 8 years. Upon arrival, I grabbed her bag off the belt and it was unusually heavy. The reason it contained 2 six-packs of Revolution Brewery beer, God bless this woman.</li>\r\n 	<li>Travel and health, this one hit home. Somehow I\'ve managed to \"keep it tight\"... somewhat. I hired someone about three years ago, and while he doesn\'t drink he managed to partake in every meal that he was invited to. So much so that the rest of us had an over/under on how fast he could gain 30lbs (Yes, we\'re that cruel &amp; shallow). After two broken pants buttons, he managed to get control.</li>\r\n 	<li>Sorry for the long comment, but keep up the great work!</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Steve, thanks for that; no apologies needed. And you guys are the only cruel and shallow ones. I may have told this story before, but I had a project in Memphis and one of the team members had kind of a similar problem as your new hire, except his weakness was barbecue ribs. The team would go out one night a week for ribs -- Corky’s, Central, Germantown Commissary, but then this guy would also do a take-out slab another night. The weight gain was obvious -- our over/under was when he topped 300 on his cholesterol reading.</li>\r\n 	<li>I was 1 for 2 last month on TravelCommons Chicago meet-ups. I wasn’t able to connect with Keith Love and his son when they were in town early in August, but I did meet up with Rob Cheshire and his UK crew for a bit of a taproom crawl on Chicago’s Near West Side on a Friday night at the end of the month. I even got Rob to relax his anti-AB InBev stance and spend an hour in the Goose Island taproom, complete with a round of Bourbon County Stout. At 14%, it’s a bit larger beer than you’d typically see in a UK pub.</li>\r\n 	<li>More telling, though, was the discussion I had with Drew, Rob’s friend on his first visit to the US. “Where are the dangerous parts of the city, where all the shootings are?” he asked. Fair question. Three weekends before, 66 people were shot in Chicago; 12 people died. “You’re fine here,” I told him, “but I wouldn’t want to go another mile west.” The next Thursday, I was sitting in a Copenhagen bar waiting out the rain -- my wife and daughter were waiting out the rain clothes shopping; to each their own -- and got talking to the bartender, a young woman who had never been to the US. “Where are you from?” she asked. “Chicago” “I read somewhere that’s the most dangerous city in the world.” I told her my experiences -- my family and I haven’t been impacted, but we also don’t hang out on the South or West sides where all the gang bullets are flying. But given the press about the August shootings, she asked a fair question. Both conversations got my attention; I’ve gotten a bit numb to all the gun violence reporting, which is not a good thing. Travel is all about getting different perspectives, even if they’re about your own home.</li>\r\n 	<li>In the last episode, I relayed Keith Love’s questions about good airport apps, ones that, he said, “actually guide you through airports and their amenities/services.” Chris Christensen of the Amateur Traveler Podcast dropped a line saying that he uses GateGuru, run by the same team that does SeatGuru. I haven’t tried it yet, but will download it and give it a go. Narita Airport in Tokyo is taking a different angle. Their free Wi-Fi service comes with a chatbot -- Bebot -- to help travelers. The press release didn’t give any chat samples -- “Bebot, where can I find a non-Asahi beer in this terminal?” “I’m sorry, there is none” -- but it could be useful -- or at least entertaining.</li>\r\n 	<li>Back in the July episode, I mentioned how tight the United Polaris business class seats were on the Triple 7’s that I took between ORD and Frankfurt. Last Monday, Irene and I flew a new American 787 back from London, and it didn’t seem any roomier. We flew back on miles, so were in the Main Cabin Extra section, but walking through Business Class to get there, I almost had to turn my body a bit to get down the aisle, and I’m not that big of a guy. When I got to my seat, the leg room was fine, even with the seat in front of me reclined. But the seats were narrow. The couple in the window and middle seats next to me were larger folks, and I could see it was a less-than-comfortable 8 hours for them.</li>\r\n 	<li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/08/09/podcast-143-how-bad-is-business-travel-for-your-health-make-layovers-fun/\">the last episode</a>, while not thrilled with American’s on-time performance between ORD and CVG, I was impressed by the customer service I got from their Twitter crew. Indeed, the next day, I added a final note to my tweet stream -- “BTW, while it was an operational failure last night, the Twitter customer service was not. I appreciated the delay explanation and backing me up on the next flight”. And any more, I typically get solid, timely service from Twitter customer service. Indeed, one constant on my Top 10 Travel Tips list is “Use Twitter as a Concierge Service”. So I was surprised when a colleague said to me “I gotta get some more followers so companies pay attention to me on Twitter”. He said he never gets any replies. Anybody else have this problem?</li>\r\n 	<li>Now while I get good quick responses from the airlines, my recent experience with Marriott was very different. I was trying to get the receipt/the folio from a stay in Colorado Springs. The e-mailed bill never came. Then I went to the website but the download link didn’t work. I submitted a folio request on the website and hit Marriott on Twitter. Twitter was faster, though it took them a full day to respond, which was better than the 12 days it took them to respond to my website query. Neither of which actually resulted in me getting a copy of my bill. I only got that when I gave up on all the digital channels and called the Colo Springs front desk. Now, I knew that would be the fastest way -- and it was; I got an e-mail from them in about 5 minutes. But I’m always interested in seeing how all the new channels work… or don’t. Maybe Marriott needs a chatbot...</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> or our new <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a> at travelcommons -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/westexit-extra/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>On Condition of Anonymity</em></a> by the West Exit</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>California Outside Airports</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>A college friend of mine posted a status on Facebook, saying that he was flying home to Boston from Long Beach Airport in Southern California. His comment -- “New favorite airport - outdoor terminals and boarding!!” It was an immediate shot of travel nostalgia for me. My first job out of school, in the mid-80’s, had me regularly traveling from Dallas to San Jose. My folks lived in Huntington Beach, CA and American had direct flights from DFW to Long Beach. So whenever I had to be in San Jose, I’d triangulate through Long Beach for the weekend -- fly in Friday afternoon, hang out on the beach for the weekend, and then catch a 7am Monday morning Alaskan Air flight out of Orange County to San Jose.</li>\r\n 	<li>I loved that triangle of airports -- LGB, SNA, and SJC. Compared to LAX or SFO, they were compact -- maybe even cozy, if you can apply that adjective to an airport and keep a straight face -- uncrowded, and all of them took advantage of the California climate to be outdoor airports. No jetways, and in LGB’s case, even the baggage carousel was outside. I remember the first time walking out to pick up my luggage at LGB, waiting by a palm tree for my bag to show up. This was right after surviving 2 of the coldest winters in Chicago while going to business school. LGB instantly became my favorite airport.</li>\r\n 	<li>When you arrived at SJC, the gate agent would meet you at the bottom of the steps and guide you under a covered walkway into the terminal -- almost like a Japanese tour guide, holding her clipboard up. I’d walk through the terminal to the car rental lot, to the little Hertz hut in the middle. I got to know the woman working in the hut, and in those days before Hertz Gold and President’s Circle, that’s all I needed to get an upgrade. Later trips through Palm Springs Airport -- pleasure rather than business -- and I loved that airport too, walking outdoors past the palm trees between terminals. Hard to imagine after 9/11 forced airports to harden their perimeters.</li>\r\n 	<li>SNA and SJC are no longer outside airports. Big renovations in the ‘90’s replaced the covered walkways with jetways, doing away with that one thing that made them a little special. The renovation of LGB’s terminal 6 years ago installed fire pits and outdoor dining, but no jetways. It’s still an outside airport, as is Palm Springs.</li>\r\n 	<li>Not that outdoor airports are California-only things. Charlottesville airport, which I’ve been frequenting over the past couple of years, is sort of a quarter to a half outdoors. There’s 4 gates -- 1 or 2 of them have jetways, the rest are outdoor boarding and baggage claim for gate-checked bags. And there’s a nice 2nd-floor outdoor terrace that I do phone calls from when it’s not too hot, or raining.</li>\r\n 	<li>One of the things I like about outdoor airports is there’s no waiting for gates. The plane lands, parks, they wheel up the stairs -- maybe even two; front and back if you’re lucky -- and off you go. No ORD treatment -- landing and then waiting 20 minutes for your gate to open up. However, the last time I flew into CHO, we landed and stopped short of the usual parking spot. The pilot keyed the mic -- “Our gate is full; we’ll have to wait a couple of minutes.” All us passengers looked at each other -- gate, what gate? Turns out he meant some fancy new ramp thing; instead of stairs, they pushed over some huge covered ramp, complete with a switchback so the descent wasn’t too steep. I dunno, call me old-school (or just old) but in my book, you have to have a proper set of stairs to be a true outdoor airport. Palm trees are optional, but highly recommended.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/solace-medusa/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Subtle Vice</a> </em>by Solace</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Hospitality Mentality</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Nowadays, it seems that most hotels have got their front desk training pretty well down. I can’t remember the last time I hit an indifferent front desk person when checking in. And given the number of different hotels I stay in, it leads me to the conclusion that this, what I call, a hospitality mentality is a key part of their training, because, based on every other retail experience I have, I know I wouldn’t naturally run into this many nice people in a row. Not that I have a problem with this. It’s nice whenever I’m dragging myself into a hotel late because of flight delays or whatever, that the person checking me in is pleasant, wants to take care of me, walks out from behind the desk give me my key and to point me to the elevators, and seems genuinely concerned about my well-being. Even in hotels that otherwise are a bit “meh”, I find that my standard TripAdvisor review says “But the service was great.”</li>\r\n 	<li>Which is a huge contrast with the typical service I get at a restaurant where I would expect a hospitality mentality, but am surprised when I get it. Last Sunday night, Irene and I were overnighting in London on our way back from St Andrews, and walked to an Indian restaurant, <a href=\"http://www.dishoom.com/kings-cross/\">Dishoom</a>, up behind King’s Cross station. There was a queue outside the restaurant, typical for a popular place. A guy came out with an iPad, took our name, and told us it would be about a 30 minute wait. That was fine, we wanted a drink before dinner anyhow. They give us a pager -- again, typical stuff -- but now it gets a bit different. Instead of pointing us to a scrum around a bar, someone escorts us to two open seats, asks if the seats are OK for us, and right behind her was a waitress to take our order. Right at about 30 minutes, as we’re finishing our drinks, the pager goes off. We’re collecting our stuff to head back to the hostess stand when a guy walks over to us -- the same guy who took our name in line -- took our glasses and walked us to our table, chatting along the way -- where are you from, Oh I have friends in Chicago, how long are you in London…. We get to the table, but before we sit down, he asks us “Is this table OK for you?”</li>\r\n 	<li>I can’t remember the last time a busy restaurant asked me if I was happy with the table. Normally, the hostess expects you to be happy she actually seated you. The food was good, but what really impressed me about Dishoom that here was a big, mass-service restaurant with a hospitality mentality. Easy to do at a small place, or a Michelin-starred restaurant (though don’t get me started about French Laundry), but here, in London, a place not necessarily known for great customer service, they had it nailed. Oh, and the chicken curry -- they nailed that too.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #144</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a> and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music is from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Magnatune</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_144.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #144 — Outside Airports; Hospitality Mentality','','inherit','closed','closed','','2126-revision-v1','','','2018-09-15 06:06:24','2018-09-15 11:06:24','',2126,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/09/15/2126-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2131,1,'2018-09-16 08:51:49','2018-09-16 13:51:49','[caption id=\"attachment_2128\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/IMG_0419.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2128\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/IMG_0419-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Greetings...[/caption]\r\n\r\nBack in front of the mic after 12 days of skipping across northern Europe -- Copenhagen, Brussels, and Scotland. In this episode, we get nostalgic about outside airports in California, talk about how a hospitality mentality is pervasive in hotels but not in restaurants, missing customer service responses from <a href=\"http://united.com\">United Airlines</a> and <a href=\"http://marriott.com\">Marriott</a>, and European perspectives about Chicago.  All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_144.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n<iframe src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/483554862&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"></iframe><!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #144:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL after 12 days bunny hopping through Northern Europe -- first Copenhagen, then Brussels, and finally St Andrews, Scotland to drop my daughter off for her 4th and final year at University of St Andrews. Prior to that, I had a couple of US trips -- back to Charlottesville, VA -- always a nice place to visit -- and a day trip to Omaha. And while all my European flights last week were fine -- including the 40-min connection in Amsterdam that included a trip through passport control -- late August summer storms forced to call audibles on both trips. As opposed to last month, when my CVG-ORD flight was jacked up by storms in Miami, these flights were cratered by rain that I could see outside the window -- the terminal window or the airplane window.</li>\r\n 	<li>They both left me less than impressed by United’s notification service. The Monday of my Charlottesville flight, it had been steadily raining in Chicago -- heavily at times. I kept checking the status of the flight -- on-time, on-time on-time. Finally, I headed to ORD, got through security, and then checked again - 3 hour delay? Really, you only just figured that out an hour before departure time? Looking out the window, the rain wasn’t letting up. I could see where this was going. I grabbed dinner and then settled in at the gate to do some work. Every once in a while, I’d check the flight status in the United app -- 3-hr delay, 3-hr delay, 3-hr delay, then wait for it -- cancelled. I wasn’t surprised at the cancellation, but the lack of push notification. Normally, I’d get a message and an e-mail from Amex Travel. Nothing this time. Like I said, though, I wasn’t surprised, and I didn’t have a critical meeting the next morning in Charlottesville. United had “helpfully” booked the same flight out the next night, but a) I couldn’t lose a whole day at the client; and b) I felt United had lost the right to my money for this flight. So, I booked the next morning’s flight on American, caught a cab back home and slept that night in my own bed. Annoying, but, hey, I got over it.</li>\r\n 	<li>Next week’s trip to Omaha was on yet another rainy day. It was just a day trip, so I drove to ORD and saw the dark grey line of weather coming toward me. I mentally settled in for delay. This one, though, would be more problematic because I was flying into Omaha for a workshop, and flying out to Copenhagen the next evening. That dark grey line hit ORD as we were boarding, so I walked into that workshop about 30 minutes late. We walked outside at noon to grab lunch from a food truck. I could see an even darker grey line of weather. Back in the conference room, I’d check the United app every 30 minutes or so -- on-time, on-time, on-time, cancelled. What?! Again, no notice if I hadn’t been checking. And this was a bit more problematic than last week. I found earlier SW and American flights that weren’t cancelled. I gambled on the AA flight which left a bit later but would save me the crosstown MDW-ORD Uber ride to collect my car. I excused myself early from the workshop and headed back to the airport. Arriving late; leaving early. Not sure that’s the way to make a good first impression</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Zapac/25046\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><i>You are (funky mix)</i></a> by Zapac</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul class=\"\">\r\n 	<li>Steve Frick, a long time TravelCommons listener, left a note on the website about <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/08/09/podcast-143-how-bad-is-business-travel-for-your-health-make-layovers-fun/\">the last episode</a>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Lots of content as well as comments on this episode. Thoroughly enjoyed the Chicago Midway Layover Southside Taproom Tour video tour, when it comes to travel and Midway, though, all I can think about is delays.</li>\r\n 	<li>Chicago, I recently sent all the members of my tribe there sans, myself (Someone had to watch the dog, or vice-versa). When my wife travels she always checks baggage..... we\'ve only been married 8 years. Upon arrival, I grabbed her bag off the belt and it was unusually heavy. The reason it contained 2 six-packs of Revolution Brewery beer, God bless this woman.</li>\r\n 	<li>Travel and health, this one hit home. Somehow I\'ve managed to \"keep it tight\"... somewhat. I hired someone about three years ago, and while he doesn\'t drink he managed to partake in every meal that he was invited to. So much so that the rest of us had an over/under on how fast he could gain 30lbs (Yes, we\'re that cruel &amp; shallow). After two broken pants buttons, he managed to get control.</li>\r\n 	<li>Sorry for the long comment, but keep up the great work!</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Steve, thanks for that; no apologies needed. And you guys are the only cruel and shallow ones. I may have told this story before, but I had a project in Memphis and one of the team members had kind of a similar problem as your new hire, except his weakness was barbecue ribs. The team would go out one night a week for ribs -- Corky’s, Central, Germantown Commissary, but then this guy would also do a take-out slab another night. The weight gain was obvious -- our over/under was when he topped 300 on his cholesterol reading.</li>\r\n 	<li>I was 1 for 2 last month on TravelCommons Chicago meet-ups. I wasn’t able to connect with Keith Love and his son when they were in town early in August, but I did meet up with Rob Cheshire and his UK crew for a bit of a taproom crawl on Chicago’s Near West Side on a Friday night at the end of the month. I even got Rob to relax his anti-AB InBev stance and spend an hour in the Goose Island taproom, complete with a round of Bourbon County Stout. At 14%, it’s a bit larger beer than you’d typically see in a UK pub.</li>\r\n 	<li>More telling, though, was the discussion I had with Drew, Rob’s friend on his first visit to the US. “Where are the dangerous parts of the city, where all the shootings are?” he asked. Fair question. Three weekends before, 66 people were shot in Chicago; 12 people died. “You’re fine here,” I told him, “but I wouldn’t want to go another mile west.” The next Thursday, I was sitting in a Copenhagen bar waiting out the rain -- my wife and daughter were waiting out the rain clothes shopping; to each their own -- and got talking to the bartender, a young woman who had never been to the US. “Where are you from?” she asked. “Chicago” “I read somewhere that’s the most dangerous city in the world.” I told her my experiences -- my family and I haven’t been impacted, but we also don’t hang out on the South or West sides where all the gang bullets are flying. But given the press about the August shootings, she asked a fair question. Both conversations got my attention; I’ve gotten a bit numb to all the gun violence reporting, which is not a good thing. Travel is all about getting different perspectives, even if they’re about your own home.</li>\r\n 	<li>In the last episode, I relayed Keith Love’s questions about good airport apps, ones that, he said, “actually guide you through airports and their amenities/services.” Chris Christensen of the Amateur Traveler Podcast dropped a line saying that he uses GateGuru, run by the same team that does SeatGuru. I haven’t tried it yet, but will download it and give it a go. Narita Airport in Tokyo is taking a different angle. Their free Wi-Fi service comes with a chatbot -- Bebot -- to help travelers. The press release didn’t give any chat samples -- “Bebot, where can I find a non-Asahi beer in this terminal?” “I’m sorry, there is none” -- but it could be useful -- or at least entertaining.</li>\r\n 	<li>Back in the July episode, I mentioned how tight the United Polaris business class seats were on the Triple 7’s that I took between ORD and Frankfurt. Last Monday, Irene and I flew a new American 787 back from London, and it didn’t seem any roomier. We flew back on miles, so were in the Main Cabin Extra section, but walking through Business Class to get there, I almost had to turn my body a bit to get down the aisle, and I’m not that big of a guy. When I got to my seat, the leg room was fine, even with the seat in front of me reclined. But the seats were narrow. The couple in the window and middle seats next to me were larger folks, and I could see it was a less-than-comfortable 8 hours for them.</li>\r\n 	<li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/08/09/podcast-143-how-bad-is-business-travel-for-your-health-make-layovers-fun/\">the last episode</a>, while not thrilled with American’s on-time performance between ORD and CVG, I was impressed by the customer service I got from their Twitter crew. Indeed, the next day, I added a final note to my tweet stream -- “BTW, while it was an operational failure last night, the Twitter customer service was not. I appreciated the delay explanation and backing me up on the next flight”. And any more, I typically get solid, timely service from Twitter customer service. Indeed, one constant on my Top 10 Travel Tips list is “Use Twitter as a Concierge Service”. So I was surprised when a colleague said to me “I gotta get some more followers so companies pay attention to me on Twitter”. He said he never gets any replies. Anybody else have this problem?</li>\r\n 	<li>Now while I get good quick responses from the airlines, my recent experience with Marriott was very different. I was trying to get the receipt/the folio from a stay in Colorado Springs. The e-mailed bill never came. Then I went to the website but the download link didn’t work. I submitted a folio request on the website and hit Marriott on Twitter. Twitter was faster, though it took them a full day to respond, which was better than the 12 days it took them to respond to my website query. Neither of which actually resulted in me getting a copy of my bill. I only got that when I gave up on all the digital channels and called the Colo Springs front desk. Now, I knew that would be the fastest way -- and it was; I got an e-mail from them in about 5 minutes. But I’m always interested in seeing how all the new channels work… or don’t. Maybe Marriott needs a chatbot...</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> or our new <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a> at travelcommons -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/35879\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><i>Two Guitars</i></a> by Admiral Bob</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>California Outside Airports</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>A college friend of mine posted a status on Facebook, saying that he was flying home to Boston from Long Beach Airport in Southern California. His comment -- “New favorite airport - outdoor terminals and boarding!!” It was an immediate shot of travel nostalgia for me. My first job out of school, in the mid-80’s, had me regularly traveling from Dallas to San Jose. My folks lived in Huntington Beach, CA and American had direct flights from DFW to Long Beach. So whenever I had to be in San Jose, I’d triangulate through Long Beach for the weekend -- fly in Friday afternoon, hang out on the beach for the weekend, and then catch a 7am Monday morning Alaskan Air flight out of Orange County to San Jose.</li>\r\n 	<li>I loved that triangle of airports -- LGB, SNA, and SJC. Compared to LAX or SFO, they were compact -- maybe even cozy, if you can apply that adjective to an airport and keep a straight face -- uncrowded, and all of them took advantage of the California climate to be outdoor airports. No jetways, and in LGB’s case, even the baggage carousel was outside. I remember the first time walking out to pick up my luggage at LGB, waiting by a palm tree for my bag to show up. This was right after surviving 2 of the coldest winters in Chicago while going to business school. LGB instantly became my favorite airport.</li>\r\n 	<li>When you arrived at SJC, the gate agent would meet you at the bottom of the steps and guide you under a covered walkway into the terminal -- almost like a Japanese tour guide, holding her clipboard up. I’d walk through the terminal to the car rental lot, to the little Hertz hut in the middle. I got to know the woman working in the hut, and in those days before Hertz Gold and President’s Circle, that’s all I needed to get an upgrade. Later trips through Palm Springs Airport -- pleasure rather than business -- and I loved that airport too, walking outdoors past the palm trees between terminals. Hard to imagine after 9/11 forced airports to harden their perimeters.</li>\r\n 	<li>SNA and SJC are no longer outside airports. Big renovations in the ‘90’s replaced the covered walkways with jetways, doing away with that one thing that made them a little special. The renovation of LGB’s terminal 6 years ago installed fire pits and outdoor dining, but no jetways. It’s still an outside airport, as is Palm Springs.</li>\r\n 	<li>Not that outdoor airports are California-only things. Charlottesville airport, which I’ve been frequenting over the past couple of years, is sort of a quarter to a half outdoors. There’s 4 gates -- 1 or 2 of them have jetways, the rest are outdoor boarding and baggage claim for gate-checked bags. And there’s a nice 2nd-floor outdoor terrace that I do phone calls from when it’s not too hot, or raining.</li>\r\n 	<li>One of the things I like about outdoor airports is there’s no waiting for gates. The plane lands, parks, they wheel up the stairs -- maybe even two; front and back if you’re lucky -- and off you go. No ORD treatment -- landing and then waiting 20 minutes for your gate to open up. However, the last time I flew into CHO, we landed and stopped short of the usual parking spot. The pilot keyed the mic -- “Our gate is full; we’ll have to wait a couple of minutes.” All us passengers looked at each other -- gate, what gate? Turns out he meant some fancy new ramp thing; instead of stairs, they pushed over some huge covered ramp, complete with a switchback so the descent wasn’t too steep. I dunno, call me old-school (or just old) but in my book, you have to have a proper set of stairs to be a true outdoor airport. Palm trees are optional, but highly recommended.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djlang59/22228\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Garden Of The Forking</em></a><em> </em>by J.Lang</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Hospitality Mentality</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Nowadays, it seems that most hotels have got their front desk training pretty well down. I can’t remember the last time I hit an indifferent front desk person when checking in. And given the number of different hotels I stay in, it leads me to the conclusion that this, what I call, a hospitality mentality is a key part of their training, because, based on every other retail experience I have, I know I wouldn’t naturally run into this many nice people in a row. Not that I have a problem with this. It’s nice whenever I’m dragging myself into a hotel late because of flight delays or whatever, that the person checking me in is pleasant, wants to take care of me, walks out from behind the desk give me my key and to point me to the elevators, and seems genuinely concerned about my well-being. Even in hotels that otherwise are a bit “meh”, I find that my standard TripAdvisor review says “But the service was great.”</li>\r\n 	<li>Which is a huge contrast with the typical service I get at a restaurant where I would expect a hospitality mentality, but am surprised when I get it. Last Sunday night, Irene and I were overnighting in London on our way back from St Andrews, and walked to an Indian restaurant, <a href=\"http://www.dishoom.com/kings-cross/\">Dishoom</a>, up behind King’s Cross station. There was a queue outside the restaurant, typical for a popular place. A guy came out with an iPad, took our name, and told us it would be about a 30 minute wait. That was fine, we wanted a drink before dinner anyhow. They give us a pager -- again, typical stuff -- but now it gets a bit different. Instead of pointing us to a scrum around a bar, someone escorts us to two open seats, asks if the seats are OK for us, and right behind her was a waitress to take our order. Right at about 30 minutes, as we’re finishing our drinks, the pager goes off. We’re collecting our stuff to head back to the hostess stand when a guy walks over to us -- the same guy who took our name in line -- took our glasses and walked us to our table, chatting along the way -- where are you from, Oh I have friends in Chicago, how long are you in London…. We get to the table, but before we sit down, he asks us “Is this table OK for you?”</li>\r\n 	<li>I can’t remember the last time a busy restaurant asked me if I was happy with the table. Normally, the hostess expects you to be happy she actually seated you. The food was good, but what really impressed me about Dishoom that here was a big, mass-service restaurant with a hospitality mentality. Easy to do at a small place, or a Michelin-starred restaurant (though don’t get me started about French Laundry), but here, in London, a place not necessarily known for great customer service, they had it nailed. Oh, and the chicken curry -- they nailed that too.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #144</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a> and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music is from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Magnatune</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_144.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #144 — Outside Airports; Hospitality Mentality','','inherit','closed','closed','','2126-revision-v1','','','2018-09-16 08:51:49','2018-09-16 13:51:49','',2126,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/09/16/2126-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2132,1,'2018-09-16 10:24:08','2018-09-16 15:24:08','[caption id=\"attachment_2128\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/IMG_0419.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2128\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/IMG_0419-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Greetings...[/caption]\r\n\r\nBack in front of the mic after 12 days of skipping across northern Europe -- Copenhagen, Brussels, and Scotland. In this episode, we get nostalgic about outside airports in California, talk about how a hospitality mentality is pervasive in hotels but not in restaurants, missing customer service responses from <a href=\"http://united.com\">United Airlines</a> and <a href=\"http://marriott.com\">Marriott</a>, and European perspectives about Chicago.  All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_144.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n<iframe src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/500700135&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"></iframe><!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #144:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL after 12 days bunny hopping through Northern Europe -- first Copenhagen, then Brussels, and finally St Andrews, Scotland to drop my daughter off for her 4th and final year at University of St Andrews. Prior to that, I had a couple of US trips -- back to Charlottesville, VA -- always a nice place to visit -- and a day trip to Omaha. And while all my European flights last week were fine -- including the 40-min connection in Amsterdam that included a trip through passport control -- late August summer storms forced to call audibles on both trips. As opposed to last month, when my CVG-ORD flight was jacked up by storms in Miami, these flights were cratered by rain that I could see outside the window -- the terminal window or the airplane window.</li>\r\n 	<li>They both left me less than impressed by United’s notification service. The Monday of my Charlottesville flight, it had been steadily raining in Chicago -- heavily at times. I kept checking the status of the flight -- on-time, on-time on-time. Finally, I headed to ORD, got through security, and then checked again - 3 hour delay? Really, you only just figured that out an hour before departure time? Looking out the window, the rain wasn’t letting up. I could see where this was going. I grabbed dinner and then settled in at the gate to do some work. Every once in a while, I’d check the flight status in the United app -- 3-hr delay, 3-hr delay, 3-hr delay, then wait for it -- cancelled. I wasn’t surprised at the cancellation, but the lack of push notification. Normally, I’d get a message and an e-mail from Amex Travel. Nothing this time. Like I said, though, I wasn’t surprised, and I didn’t have a critical meeting the next morning in Charlottesville. United had “helpfully” booked the same flight out the next night, but a) I couldn’t lose a whole day at the client; and b) I felt United had lost the right to my money for this flight. So, I booked the next morning’s flight on American, caught a cab back home and slept that night in my own bed. Annoying, but, hey, I got over it.</li>\r\n 	<li>Next week’s trip to Omaha was on yet another rainy day. It was just a day trip, so I drove to ORD and saw the dark grey line of weather coming toward me. I mentally settled in for delay. This one, though, would be more problematic because I was flying into Omaha for a workshop, and flying out to Copenhagen the next evening. That dark grey line hit ORD as we were boarding, so I walked into that workshop about 30 minutes late. We walked outside at noon to grab lunch from a food truck. I could see an even darker grey line of weather. Back in the conference room, I’d check the United app every 30 minutes or so -- on-time, on-time, on-time, cancelled. What?! Again, no notice if I hadn’t been checking. And this was a bit more problematic than last week. I found earlier SW and American flights that weren’t cancelled. I gambled on the AA flight which left a bit later but would save me the crosstown MDW-ORD Uber ride to collect my car. I excused myself early from the workshop and headed back to the airport. Arriving late; leaving early. Not sure that’s the way to make a good first impression</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Zapac/25046\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><i>You are (funky mix)</i></a> by Zapac</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul class=\"\">\r\n 	<li>Steve Frick, a long time TravelCommons listener, left a note on the website about <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/08/09/podcast-143-how-bad-is-business-travel-for-your-health-make-layovers-fun/\">the last episode</a>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Lots of content as well as comments on this episode. Thoroughly enjoyed the Chicago Midway Layover Southside Taproom Tour video tour, when it comes to travel and Midway, though, all I can think about is delays.</li>\r\n 	<li>Chicago, I recently sent all the members of my tribe there sans, myself (Someone had to watch the dog, or vice-versa). When my wife travels she always checks baggage..... we\'ve only been married 8 years. Upon arrival, I grabbed her bag off the belt and it was unusually heavy. The reason it contained 2 six-packs of Revolution Brewery beer, God bless this woman.</li>\r\n 	<li>Travel and health, this one hit home. Somehow I\'ve managed to \"keep it tight\"... somewhat. I hired someone about three years ago, and while he doesn\'t drink he managed to partake in every meal that he was invited to. So much so that the rest of us had an over/under on how fast he could gain 30lbs (Yes, we\'re that cruel &amp; shallow). After two broken pants buttons, he managed to get control.</li>\r\n 	<li>Sorry for the long comment, but keep up the great work!</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Steve, thanks for that; no apologies needed. And you guys are not the only cruel and shallow ones. I may have told this story before, but I had a project in Memphis and one of the team members had kind of a similar problem as your new hire, except his weakness was barbecue ribs. The team would go out one night a week for ribs -- Corky’s, Central, Germantown Commissary, but then this guy would also do a take-out slab another night. The weight gain was obvious -- our over/under was when he topped 300 on his cholesterol reading.</li>\r\n 	<li>I was 1 for 2 last month on TravelCommons Chicago meet-ups. I wasn’t able to connect with Keith Love and his son when they were in town early in August, but I did meet up with Rob Cheshire and his UK crew for a bit of a taproom crawl on Chicago’s Near West Side on a Friday night at the end of the month. I even got Rob to relax his anti-AB InBev stance and spend an hour in the Goose Island taproom, complete with a round of Bourbon County Stout. At 14%, it’s a bit larger beer than you’d typically see in a UK pub.</li>\r\n 	<li>More telling, though, was the discussion I had with Drew, Rob’s friend on his first visit to the US. “Where are the dangerous parts of the city, where all the shootings are?” he asked. Fair question. Three weekends before, 66 people were shot in Chicago; 12 people died. “You’re fine here,” I told him, “but I wouldn’t want to go another mile west.” The next Thursday, I was sitting in a Copenhagen bar waiting out the rain -- my wife and daughter were waiting out the rain clothes shopping; to each their own -- and got talking to the bartender, a young woman who had never been to the US. “Where are you from?” she asked. “Chicago” “I read somewhere that’s the most dangerous city in the world.” I told her my experiences -- my family and I haven’t been impacted, but we also don’t hang out on the South or West sides where all the gang bullets are flying. But given the press about the August shootings, she asked a fair question. Both conversations got my attention; I’ve gotten a bit numb to all the gun violence reporting, which is not a good thing. Travel is all about getting different perspectives, even if they’re about your own home.</li>\r\n 	<li>In the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/08/09/podcast-143-how-bad-is-business-travel-for-your-health-make-layovers-fun/\">last episode</a>, I relayed Keith Love’s questions about good airport apps, ones that, he said, “actually guide you through airports and their amenities/services.” Chris Christensen of the Amateur Traveler Podcast dropped a lin e saying that he uses GateGuru, run by the same team that does SeatGuru. I haven’t tried it yet, but will download it and give it a go. Narita Airport in Tokyo is taking a different angle. Their free Wi-Fi service comes with a chatbot -- Bebot -- to help travelers. The press release didn’t give any chat samples -- “Bebot, where can I find a non-Asahi beer in this terminal?” “I’m sorry, there is none” -- but it could be useful -- or at least entertaining.</li>\r\n 	<li>Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/07/03/podcast-142-sleeping-in-business-class-changes-from-chinese-tourists/\">July episode</a>, I mentioned how tight the United Polaris business class seats were on the Triple 7’s that I took between ORD and Frankfurt. Last Monday, Irene and I flew a new American 787 back from London, and it didn’t seem any roomier. We flew back on miles, so were in the Main Cabin Extra section, but walking through Business Class to get there, I almost had to turn my body a bit to get down the aisle, and I’m not that big of a guy. When I got to my seat, the leg room was fine, even with the seat in front of me reclined. But the seats were narrow. The couple in the window and middle seats next to me were larger folks, and I could see it was a less-than-comfortable 8 hours for them.</li>\r\n 	<li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/08/09/podcast-143-how-bad-is-business-travel-for-your-health-make-layovers-fun/\">the last episode</a>, while not thrilled with American’s on-time performance between ORD and CVG, I was impressed by the customer service I got from their Twitter crew. Indeed, the next day, I added a final note to my tweet stream -- “BTW, while it was an operational failure last night, the Twitter customer service was not. I appreciated the delay explanation and backing me up on the next flight”. And any more, I typically get solid, timely service from Twitter customer service. Indeed, one constant on my Top 10 Travel Tips list is “Use Twitter as a Concierge Service”. So I was surprised when a colleague said to me “I gotta get some more followers so companies pay attention to me on Twitter”. He said he never gets any replies. Anybody else have this problem?</li>\r\n 	<li>Now while I get good quick responses from the airlines, my recent experience with Marriott was very different. I was trying to get the receipt/the folio from a stay in Colorado Springs. The e-mailed bill never came. Then I went to the website but the download link didn’t work. I submitted a folio request on the website and hit Marriott on Twitter. Twitter was faster, though it took them a full day to respond, which was better than the 12 days it took them to respond to my website query. Neither of which actually resulted in me getting a copy of my bill. I only got that when I gave up on all the digital channels and called the Colo Springs front desk. Now, I knew that would be the fastest way -- and it was; I got an e-mail from them in about 5 minutes. But I’m always interested in seeing how all the new channels work… or don’t. Maybe Marriott needs a chatbot...</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> or our new <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a> at travelcommons -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/35879\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><i>Two Guitars</i></a> by Admiral Bob</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>California Outside Airports</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>A college friend of mine posted a status on Facebook, saying that he was flying home to Boston from Long Beach Airport in Southern California. His comment -- “New favorite airport - outdoor terminals and boarding!!” It was an immediate shot of travel nostalgia for me. My first job out of school, in the mid-80’s, had me regularly traveling from Dallas to San Jose. My folks lived in Huntington Beach, CA and American had direct flights from DFW to Long Beach. So whenever I had to be in San Jose, I’d triangulate through Long Beach for the weekend -- fly in Friday afternoon, hang out on the beach for the weekend, and then catch a 7am Monday morning Alaskan Air flight out of Orange County to San Jose.</li>\r\n 	<li>I loved that triangle of airports -- LGB, SNA, and SJC. Compared to LAX or SFO, they were compact -- maybe even cozy, if you can apply that adjective to an airport and keep a straight face -- uncrowded, and all of them took advantage of the California climate to be outdoor airports. No jetways, and in LGB’s case, even the baggage carousel was outside. I remember the first time walking out to pick up my luggage at LGB, waiting by a palm tree for my bag to show up. This was right after surviving 2 of the coldest winters in Chicago while going to business school. LGB instantly became my favorite airport.</li>\r\n 	<li>When you arrived at SJC, the gate agent would meet you at the bottom of the steps and guide you under a covered walkway into the terminal -- almost like a Japanese tour guide, holding her clipboard up. I’d walk through the terminal to the car rental lot, to the little Hertz hut in the middle. I got to know the woman working in the hut, and in those days before Hertz Gold and President’s Circle, that’s all I needed to get an upgrade. Later trips through Palm Springs Airport -- pleasure rather than business -- and I loved that airport too, walking outdoors past the palm trees between terminals. Hard to imagine after 9/11 forced airports to harden their perimeters.</li>\r\n 	<li>SNA and SJC are no longer outside airports. Big renovations in the ‘90’s replaced the covered walkways with jetways, doing away with that one thing that made them a little special. The renovation of LGB’s terminal 6 years ago installed fire pits and outdoor dining, but no jetways. It’s still an outside airport, as is Palm Springs.</li>\r\n 	<li>Not that outdoor airports are California-only things. Charlottesville airport, which I’ve been frequenting over the past couple of years, is sort of a quarter to a half outdoors. There’s 4 gates -- 1 or 2 of them have jetways, the rest are outdoor boarding and baggage claim for gate-checked bags. And there’s a nice 2nd-floor outdoor terrace that I do phone calls from when it’s not too hot, or raining.</li>\r\n 	<li>One of the things I like about outdoor airports is there’s no waiting for gates. The plane lands, parks, they wheel up the stairs -- maybe even two; front and back if you’re lucky -- and off you go. No ORD treatment -- landing and then waiting 20 minutes for your gate to open up. However, the last time I flew into CHO, we landed and stopped short of the usual parking spot. The pilot keyed the mic -- “Our gate is full; we’ll have to wait a couple of minutes.” All us passengers looked at each other -- gate, what gate? Turns out he meant some fancy new ramp thing; instead of stairs, they pushed over some huge covered ramp, complete with a switchback so the descent wasn’t too steep. I dunno, call me old-school (or just old) but in my book, you have to have a proper set of stairs to be a true outdoor airport. Palm trees are optional, but highly recommended.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djlang59/22228\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Garden Of The Forking</em></a><em> </em>by J.Lang</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Hospitality Mentality</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Nowadays, it seems that most hotels have got their front desk training pretty well down. I can’t remember the last time I hit an indifferent front desk person when checking in. And given the number of different hotels I stay in, it leads me to the conclusion that this, what I call, a hospitality mentality is a key part of their training, because, based on every other retail experience I have, I know I wouldn’t naturally run into this many nice people in a row. Not that I have a problem with this. It’s nice whenever I’m dragging myself into a hotel late because of flight delays or whatever, that the person checking me in is pleasant, wants to take care of me, walks out from behind the desk give me my key and to point me to the elevators, and seems genuinely concerned about my well-being. Even in hotels that otherwise are a bit “meh”, I find that my standard TripAdvisor review says “But the service was great.”</li>\r\n 	<li>Which is a huge contrast with the typical service I get at a restaurant where I would expect a hospitality mentality, but am surprised when I get it. Last Sunday night, Irene and I were overnighting in London on our way back from St Andrews, and walked to an Indian restaurant, <a href=\"http://www.dishoom.com/kings-cross/\">Dishoom</a>, up behind King’s Cross station. There was a queue outside the restaurant, typical for a popular place. A guy came out with an iPad, took our name, and told us it would be about a 30 minute wait. That was fine, we wanted a drink before dinner anyhow. They give us a pager -- again, typical stuff -- but now it gets a bit different. Instead of pointing us to a scrum around a bar, someone escorts us to two open seats, asks if the seats are OK for us, and right behind her was a waitress to take our order. Right at about 30 minutes, as we’re finishing our drinks, the pager goes off. We’re collecting our stuff to head back to the hostess stand when a guy walks over to us -- the same guy who took our name in line -- took our glasses and walked us to our table, chatting along the way -- where are you from, Oh I have friends in Chicago, how long are you in London…. We get to the table, but before we sit down, he asks us “Is this table OK for you?”</li>\r\n 	<li>I can’t remember the last time a busy restaurant asked me if I was happy with the table. Normally, the hostess expects you to be happy she actually seated you. The food was good, but what really impressed me about Dishoom that here was a big, mass-service restaurant with a hospitality mentality. Easy to do at a small place, or a Michelin-starred restaurant (though don’t get me started about French Laundry), but here, in London, a place not necessarily known for great customer service, they had it nailed. Oh, and the chicken curry -- they nailed that too.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #144</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a> and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music is from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Magnatune</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_144.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #144 — Outside Airports; Hospitality Mentality','','inherit','closed','closed','','2126-revision-v1','','','2018-09-16 10:24:08','2018-09-16 15:24:08','',2126,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/09/16/2126-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2133,1,'2018-09-16 10:25:59','2018-09-16 15:25:59','[caption id=\"attachment_2128\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/IMG_0419.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2128\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/IMG_0419-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Greetings...[/caption]\r\n\r\nBack in front of the mic after 12 days of skipping across northern Europe -- Copenhagen, Brussels, and Scotland. In this episode, we get nostalgic about outside airports in California, talk about how a hospitality mentality is pervasive in hotels but not in restaurants, missing customer service responses from <a href=\"http://united.com\">United Airlines</a> and <a href=\"http://marriott.com\">Marriott</a>, and European perspectives about Chicago.  All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_144.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n<iframe src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/500700135&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"></iframe><!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #144:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL after 12 days bunny hopping through Northern Europe -- first Copenhagen, then Brussels, and finally St Andrews, Scotland to drop my daughter off for her 4th and final year at University of St Andrews. Prior to that, I had a couple of US trips -- back to Charlottesville, VA -- always a nice place to visit -- and a day trip to Omaha. And while all my European flights last week were fine -- including the 40-min connection in Amsterdam that included a trip through passport control -- late August summer storms forced to call audibles on both trips. As opposed to last month, when my CVG-ORD flight was jacked up by storms in Miami, these flights were cratered by rain that I could see outside the window -- the terminal window or the airplane window.</li>\r\n 	<li>They both left me less than impressed by United’s notification service. The Monday of my Charlottesville flight, it had been steadily raining in Chicago -- heavily at times. I kept checking the status of the flight -- on-time, on-time on-time. Finally, I headed to ORD, got through security, and then checked again - 3 hour delay? Really, you only just figured that out an hour before departure time? Looking out the window, the rain wasn’t letting up. I could see where this was going. I grabbed dinner and then settled in at the gate to do some work. Every once in a while, I’d check the flight status in the United app -- 3-hr delay, 3-hr delay, 3-hr delay, then wait for it -- cancelled. I wasn’t surprised at the cancellation, but the lack of push notification. Normally, I’d get a message and an e-mail from Amex Travel. Nothing this time. Like I said, though, I wasn’t surprised, and I didn’t have a critical meeting the next morning in Charlottesville. United had “helpfully” booked the same flight out the next night, but a) I couldn’t lose a whole day at the client; and b) I felt United had lost the right to my money for this flight. So, I booked the next morning’s flight on American, caught a cab back home and slept that night in my own bed. Annoying, but, hey, I got over it.</li>\r\n 	<li>Next week’s trip to Omaha was on yet another rainy day. It was just a day trip, so I drove to ORD and saw the dark grey line of weather coming toward me. I mentally settled in for delay. This one, though, would be more problematic because I was flying into Omaha for a workshop, and flying out to Copenhagen the next evening. That dark grey line hit ORD as we were boarding, so I walked into that workshop about 30 minutes late. We walked outside at noon to grab lunch from a food truck. I could see an even darker grey line of weather. Back in the conference room, I’d check the United app every 30 minutes or so -- on-time, on-time, on-time, cancelled. What?! Again, no notice if I hadn’t been checking. And this was a bit more problematic than last week. I found earlier SW and American flights that weren’t cancelled. I gambled on the AA flight which left a bit later but would save me the crosstown MDW-ORD Uber ride to collect my car. I excused myself early from the workshop and headed back to the airport. Arriving late; leaving early. Not sure that’s the way to make a good first impression</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Zapac/25046\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><i>You are (funky mix)</i></a> by Zapac</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul class=\"\">\r\n 	<li>Steve Frick, a long time TravelCommons listener, left a note on the website about <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/08/09/podcast-143-how-bad-is-business-travel-for-your-health-make-layovers-fun/\">the last episode</a>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Lots of content as well as comments on this episode. Thoroughly enjoyed the Chicago Midway Layover Southside Taproom Tour video tour, when it comes to travel and Midway, though, all I can think about is delays.</li>\r\n 	<li>Chicago, I recently sent all the members of my tribe there sans, myself (Someone had to watch the dog, or vice-versa). When my wife travels she always checks baggage..... we\'ve only been married 8 years. Upon arrival, I grabbed her bag off the belt and it was unusually heavy. The reason it contained 2 six-packs of Revolution Brewery beer, God bless this woman.</li>\r\n 	<li>Travel and health, this one hit home. Somehow I\'ve managed to \"keep it tight\"... somewhat. I hired someone about three years ago, and while he doesn\'t drink he managed to partake in every meal that he was invited to. So much so that the rest of us had an over/under on how fast he could gain 30lbs (Yes, we\'re that cruel &amp; shallow). After two broken pants buttons, he managed to get control.</li>\r\n 	<li>Sorry for the long comment, but keep up the great work!</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Steve, thanks for that; no apologies needed. And you guys are not the only cruel and shallow ones. I may have told this story before, but I had a project in Memphis and one of the team members had kind of a similar problem as your new hire, except his weakness was barbecue ribs. The team would go out one night a week for ribs -- Corky’s, Central, Germantown Commissary, but then this guy would also do a take-out slab another night. The weight gain was obvious -- our over/under was when he topped 300 on his cholesterol reading.</li>\r\n 	<li>I was 1 for 2 last month on TravelCommons Chicago meet-ups. I wasn’t able to connect with Keith Love and his son when they were in town early in August, but I did meet up with Rob Cheshire and his UK crew for a bit of a taproom crawl on Chicago’s Near West Side on a Friday night at the end of the month. I even got Rob to relax his anti-AB InBev stance and spend an hour in the Goose Island taproom, complete with a round of Bourbon County Stout. At 14%, it’s a bit larger beer than you’d typically see in a UK pub.</li>\r\n 	<li>More telling, though, was the discussion I had with Drew, Rob’s friend on his first visit to the US. “Where are the dangerous parts of the city, where all the shootings are?” he asked. Fair question. Three weekends before, 66 people were shot in Chicago; 12 people died. “You’re fine here,” I told him, “but I wouldn’t want to go another mile west.” The next Thursday, I was sitting in a Copenhagen bar waiting out the rain -- my wife and daughter were waiting out the rain clothes shopping; to each their own -- and got talking to the bartender, a young woman who had never been to the US. “Where are you from?” she asked. “Chicago” “I read somewhere that’s the most dangerous city in the world.” I told her my experiences -- my family and I haven’t been impacted, but we also don’t hang out on the South or West sides where all the gang bullets are flying. But given the press about the August shootings, she asked a fair question. Both conversations got my attention; I’ve gotten a bit numb to all the gun violence reporting, which is not a good thing. Travel is all about getting different perspectives, even if they’re about your own home.</li>\r\n 	<li>In the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/08/09/podcast-143-how-bad-is-business-travel-for-your-health-make-layovers-fun/\">last episode</a>, I relayed Keith Love’s questions about good airport apps, ones that, he said, “actually guide you through airports and their amenities/services.” Chris Christensen of the Amateur Traveler Podcast dropped a lin e saying that he uses GateGuru, run by the same team that does SeatGuru. I haven’t tried it yet, but will download it and give it a go. Narita Airport in Tokyo is taking a different angle. Their free Wi-Fi service comes with a chatbot -- Bebot -- to help travelers. The press release didn’t give any chat samples -- “Bebot, where can I find a non-Asahi beer in this terminal?” “I’m sorry, there is none” -- but it could be useful -- or at least entertaining.</li>\r\n 	<li>Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/07/03/podcast-142-sleeping-in-business-class-changes-from-chinese-tourists/\">July episode</a>, I mentioned how tight the United Polaris business class seats were on the Triple 7’s that I took between ORD and Frankfurt. Last Monday, Irene and I flew a new American 787 back from London, and it didn’t seem any roomier. We flew back on miles, so were in the Main Cabin Extra section, but walking through Business Class to get there, I almost had to turn my body a bit to get down the aisle, and I’m not that big of a guy. When I got to my seat, the leg room was fine, even with the seat in front of me reclined. But the seats were narrow. The couple in the window and middle seats next to me were larger folks, and I could see it was a less-than-comfortable 8 hours for them.</li>\r\n 	<li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/08/09/podcast-143-how-bad-is-business-travel-for-your-health-make-layovers-fun/\">the last episode</a>, while not thrilled with American’s on-time performance between ORD and CVG, I was impressed by the customer service I got from their Twitter crew. Indeed, the next day, I added a final note to my tweet stream -- “BTW, while it was an operational failure last night, the Twitter customer service was not. I appreciated the delay explanation and backing me up on the next flight”. And any more, I typically get solid, timely service from Twitter customer service. Indeed, one constant on my Top 10 Travel Tips list is “Use Twitter as a Concierge Service”. So I was surprised when a colleague said to me “I gotta get some more followers so companies pay attention to me on Twitter”. He said he never gets any replies. Anybody else have this problem?</li>\r\n 	<li>Now while I get good quick responses from the airlines, my recent experience with Marriott was very different. I was trying to get the receipt/the folio from a stay in Colorado Springs. The e-mailed bill never came. Then I went to the website but the download link didn’t work. I submitted a folio request on the website and hit Marriott on Twitter. Twitter was faster, though it took them a full day to respond, which was better than the 12 days it took them to respond to my website query. Neither of which actually resulted in me getting a copy of my bill. I only got that when I gave up on all the digital channels and called the Colo Springs front desk. Now, I knew that would be the fastest way -- and it was; I got an e-mail from them in about 5 minutes. But I’m always interested in seeing how all the new channels work… or don’t. Maybe Marriott needs a chatbot...</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> or our new <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a> at travelcommons -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/35879\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><i>Two Guitars</i></a> by Admiral Bob</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>California Outside Airports</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>A college friend of mine posted a status on Facebook, saying that he was flying home to Boston from Long Beach Airport in Southern California. His comment -- “New favorite airport - outdoor terminals and boarding!!” It was an immediate shot of travel nostalgia for me. My first job out of school, in the mid-80’s, had me regularly traveling from Dallas to San Jose. My folks lived in Huntington Beach, CA and American had direct flights from DFW to Long Beach. So whenever I had to be in San Jose, I’d triangulate through Long Beach for the weekend -- fly in Friday afternoon, hang out on the beach for the weekend, and then catch a 7am Monday morning Alaskan Air flight out of Orange County to San Jose.</li>\r\n 	<li>I loved that triangle of airports -- LGB, SNA, and SJC. Compared to LAX or SFO, they were compact -- maybe even cozy, if you can apply that adjective to an airport and keep a straight face -- uncrowded, and all of them took advantage of the California climate to be outdoor airports. No jetways, and in LGB’s case, even the baggage carousel was outside. I remember the first time walking out to pick up my luggage at LGB, waiting by a palm tree for my bag to show up. This was right after surviving 2 of the coldest winters in Chicago while going to business school. LGB instantly became my favorite airport.</li>\r\n 	<li>When you arrived at SJC, the gate agent would meet you at the bottom of the steps and guide you under a covered walkway into the terminal -- almost like a Japanese tour guide, holding her clipboard up. I’d walk through the terminal to the car rental lot, to the little Hertz hut in the middle. I got to know the woman working in the hut, and in those days before Hertz Gold and President’s Circle, that’s all I needed to get an upgrade. Later trips through Palm Springs Airport -- pleasure rather than business -- and I loved that airport too, walking outdoors past the palm trees between terminals. Hard to imagine after 9/11 forced airports to harden their perimeters.</li>\r\n 	<li>SNA and SJC are no longer outside airports. Big renovations in the ‘90’s replaced the covered walkways with jetways, doing away with that one thing that made them a little special. The renovation of LGB’s terminal 6 years ago installed fire pits and outdoor dining, but no jetways. It’s still an outside airport, as is Palm Springs.</li>\r\n 	<li>Not that outdoor airports are California-only things. Charlottesville airport, which I’ve been frequenting over the past couple of years, is sort of a quarter to a half outdoors. There’s 4 gates -- 1 or 2 of them have jetways, the rest are outdoor boarding and baggage claim for gate-checked bags. And there’s a nice 2nd-floor outdoor terrace that I do phone calls from when it’s not too hot, or raining.</li>\r\n 	<li>One of the things I like about outdoor airports is there’s no waiting for gates. The plane lands, parks, they wheel up the stairs -- maybe even two; front and back if you’re lucky -- and off you go. No ORD treatment -- landing and then waiting 20 minutes for your gate to open up. However, the last time I flew into CHO, we landed and stopped short of the usual parking spot. The pilot keyed the mic -- “Our gate is full; we’ll have to wait a couple of minutes.” All us passengers looked at each other -- gate, what gate? Turns out he meant some fancy new ramp thing; instead of stairs, they pushed over some huge covered ramp, complete with a switchback so the descent wasn’t too steep. I dunno, call me old-school (or just old) but in my book, you have to have a proper set of stairs to be a true outdoor airport. Palm trees are optional, but highly recommended.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djlang59/22228\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Garden Of The Forking</em></a><em> </em>by J.Lang</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Hospitality Mentality</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Nowadays, it seems that most hotels have got their front desk training pretty well down. I can’t remember the last time I hit an indifferent front desk person when checking in. And given the number of different hotels I stay in, it leads me to the conclusion that this, what I call, a hospitality mentality is a key part of their training, because, based on every other retail experience I have, I know I wouldn’t naturally run into this many nice people in a row. Not that I have a problem with this. It’s nice whenever I’m dragging myself into a hotel late because of flight delays or whatever, that the person checking me in is pleasant, wants to take care of me, walks out from behind the desk give me my key and to point me to the elevators, and seems genuinely concerned about my well-being. Even in hotels that otherwise are a bit “meh”, I find that my standard TripAdvisor review says “But the service was great.”</li>\r\n 	<li>Which is a huge contrast with the typical service I get at a restaurant where I would expect a hospitality mentality, but am surprised when I get it. Last Sunday night, Irene and I were overnighting in London on our way back from St Andrews, and walked to an Indian restaurant, <a href=\"http://www.dishoom.com/kings-cross/\">Dishoom</a>, up behind King’s Cross station. There was a queue outside the restaurant, typical for a popular place. A guy came out with an iPad, took our name, and told us it would be about a 30 minute wait. That was fine, we wanted a drink before dinner anyhow. They give us a pager -- again, typical stuff -- but now it gets a bit different. Instead of pointing us to a scrum around a bar, someone escorts us to two open seats, asks if the seats are OK for us, and right behind her was a waitress to take our order. Right at about 30 minutes, as we’re finishing our drinks, the pager goes off. We’re collecting our stuff to head back to the hostess stand when a guy walks over to us -- the same guy who took our name in line -- took our glasses and walked us to our table, chatting along the way -- where are you from, Oh I have friends in Chicago, how long are you in London…. We get to the table, but before we sit down, he asks us “Is this table OK for you?”</li>\r\n 	<li>I can’t remember the last time a busy restaurant asked me if I was happy with the table. Normally, the hostess expects you to be happy she actually seated you. The food was good, but what really impressed me about Dishoom that here was a big, mass-service restaurant with a hospitality mentality. Easy to do at a small place, or a Michelin-starred restaurant (though don’t get me started about French Laundry), but here, in London, a place not necessarily known for great customer service, they had it nailed. Oh, and the chicken curry -- they nailed that too.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #144</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a> and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_144.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #144 — Outside Airports; Hospitality Mentality','','inherit','closed','closed','','2126-revision-v1','','','2018-09-16 10:25:59','2018-09-16 15:25:59','',2126,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/09/16/2126-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2134,1,'2018-09-16 10:27:55','2018-09-16 15:27:55','[caption id=\"attachment_1949\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/iStock-535339649.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1949\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/iStock-535339649-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> TSA! Look at What You\'ve Done to Me![/caption]\r\n\r\nFebruary is a tough time to be in the Midwest, so when my travel took me south, to New Orleans and then to Florida, there was no bitch tweeting about the TSA lines or flight delays. In this episode, I walk through how each change in airport security has pushed me to be more hipster and how we all want to understand the real cause of the flight delays that inconvenience us. Also a good bit of listener feedback extending the on-going luggage discussion. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_138.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_137.mp3\"]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #138:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. This has been a good travel month for me. Not too heavy, and all my travel had me headed south -- an important thing in February when you live in Chicago. The week before Mardi Gras, I headed down to New Orleans for a meeting. It easily could’ve been an overnight trip, but neither my wife nor I had been down in a while, so she came down with me. We caught some parades -- Nyx, Chaos, Muses -- ate way too much food, and except for a cold rain Wednesday night, had great weather. On Thursday, we were walking along the Mississippi back to the French Quarter from the Bywater neighborhood in bright sunshine and upper 60’s while Chicago was getting slammed with 8-12 inches of snow.</li>\r\n 	<li>When flew back to Chicago Friday night, we were able to thread the gap between the Friday end of that 8-12 inch drop and the start of the Saturday-Sunday 5-inch fall. Timing is everything. We came to the airport prepared for a long delay -- fully charged batteries, and muffaletta sandwiches and a mini king cake from Cochon Butcher. Southwest had cancelled this same flight the night before and that morning -- understandable given the snow -- so we didn’t think we wouldn’t get home; it was just going to be a question of how long. As it turned out, we were only an hour late, which given the weather, felt as good as on-time.</li>\r\n 	<li>Last week, I managed to point myself south again, this time to Florida -- Orlando and Miami -- and was able to skip two days of a heavy cold rain. The JW Marriott in Miami upgraded me to a room with a balcony on the 20th floor -- I didn’t have an ocean view, but I sat outside, 75 degrees, drinking a couple of beers, watching the sun go down, looking over to some of the rooftop bar action in the Brickell neighborhood. Miami is always an experience. It’s not the southernmost US big city, but rather the northernmost Latin American big city. I was reminded of that in the airport when I heard them paging someone in Spanish -- twice. They didn’t even bother wasting their time with English.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- Leviathan by Kirkoid (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Kirkoid/31109</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Lots of comments about luggage since the last episode, which makes sense -- the last episode was heavy on luggage talk between the continuing thread on the smart luggage ban and the suitcase buying tips which I then ported over to a blog post.\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>So, starting off, Allan Marko forwarded along the latest e-mails from Away luggage, one of the few smart bags with removable batteries and so not caught up in the smart luggage ban. Or so they thought until Delta decided to add their own twist to the ban. If the battery in the bag requires a tool to remove it -- which the original Away bag does -- you have to remove it from the bag before you board -- whether you’re carrying on the bag or gate-checking it. The later version of the Away bag has an ejectable pop-up battery which Delta thinks is OK. What a mess! This is what happens when engineers run amok -- and I can say that as a recovering engineer. These guys are going to keep tweaking and twisting this, which will just confuse gate agents and frustrate passengers -- which is why I’ve mothballed my smart bag and bought another Anker lipstick charger.</li>\r\n 	<li>Steve Frick hit the TravelCommons web site and left this comment -- “I replaced my luggage with the exact same bag as I had before, a TravelPro. It was an easy choice, I like you, wanted a simple bag. I knew my gear would fit, I already knew what to put in the outside pockets. One of the guys I work with recently bought and then returned a 4-wheel spinner. The reason for the return……. he discovered that most hotel parking lots weren’t level and each time he let go of the bag to raise the trunk lid his bag rolled away.” Steve, I had that same problem with my Bluesmart 4-wheeler, except in airports rather than parking lots. I’d put the Bluesmart against the wall in a restroom and it would wander away.</li>\r\n 	<li>Jerry Sarfati posted on the TravelCommons Facebook page -- “Mark, great episode as usual” Thanks, Jerry! “I had a different experience when choosing a new bag. I was stopped twice by American Airlines gate agents telling me my 22\" bag was too big. I’m in Group 2. So I settled for the 20\" Victorinox spinner.” I asked Jerry if they made him put it in a bag sizer. “Once only. It barely fit, and she said ‘too big, it must slide in easily, it must be checked’. Other time the agent said the sizer is missing, but ‘I can already see it won\'t fit’. I didn\'t want to argue and get thrown off the flight.” Jerry, that -- in technical travel terms -- is bullshit. I remember one time in Boston Logan, I got shunted over to the bag sizer by the Icelandic Air gate agent. And I knew I was on the bubble because this was the trip I’ve talked about a couple of times where I had to pack for 10 days between Iceland and Southern Spain in one carry-on. I grabbed that bag by the side handle, had it about chest high, and then drove it into the bag sizer with all my might. It was either going to fit, break the bag or blow apart the bag sizer. Luckily, it fit -- though the gate agent jumped back just a bit when the bag hit the bottom of the sizer. She let me carry it on. I flew 3 legs on American last week with my 22-incher and didn’t get a glance. But having said that, you made the right choice -- discretion is the better part of valor. Gate agents have complete discretion. Obey or get bounced. Too bad you got caught up by other folks’ power trips.</li>\r\n 	<li>Back on the web site, Robert Fenerty wrote “I want a four-wheel spinner; my wife loves hers. But I won’t get one, because I believe that bags with only two wheels have a bit more interior space than four-wheelers of the same length. That’s because the spinners can’t tuck into the side of the bag so you’re losing the inch or two between the middle of the spinner wheel and the top of the stem that attaches the spinner to the bottom of the bag. How’s that for OCD?” Robert, I’ll see your OCD and raise you! I pulled out a metal ruler and measured the ground clearance difference between my Victorinox 2-wheeler and my wife’s Samsonite 4-wheel spinner. I measured a 1.5-inch difference. Multiply that by the 14x9-inch base size gives you a 189 cubic inch cost for spinner agility. I look at that being one day’s worth of workout kit.</li>\r\n 	<li>Also on the web site, Jim McDonough wrote “My favorite bag was a Rick Steves 21” rollaboard that had just one compartment and two really good wheels. I used it for a decade and finally had problems with my wife’s bag (wheel fell apart) and the side of mine cracked from all the abuse. He doesn’t sell them any more, because it was a hair too big for European airlines. We are now using Samsonite spinners. They don’t hold as much as the old Rick bags. We only check bags when we are staying in one place for at least a week. Carrying on is simply liberating.” Liberating in a couple of ways -- not standing around waiting for the luggage carousel to start to get your bag, and not waiting around for it to stop to confirm that airline has lost it. I remember one trip where BA forced me to gate-check a bag, and then somehow lost it -- how you lose a bag in the, say, 50 ft between the jet bridge and baggage hold I’ll never know. The problem was -- I was in a different city every day. And so, they’d deliver the bag to my hotel the next morning after I’d already checked out and headed for my first meeting. This went on for a couple of days until I finally convinced them to leapfrog me and send it two stops one. Liberating myself from well-worn clothes -- I love it when I can find happiness in the small things.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Another reminder that Miami is a bit different -- the in-room coffee machine at the JW Marriott wasn’t the standard issue single cupper with Starbucks Pike Place filter disks (that, by the way, are always too big for the filter holder). Instead, it was an Illy espresso machine with its own special little capsules and branded demitasse cups. Took me a couple of tries to get the capsule properly situated, but after that, I ran through all 3, 4 (?) of the capsules in 15 minutes and was ready to attack the day.</li>\r\n 	<li>Last month, The Aviating Railfanner stopped by the TravelCommons YouTube page and left a comment on the 2012 video O\'Hare Layover Excursion: a 6-Hour Tour of Chicago saying “I think it would be a good idea to mention that the Randolph/Wabash station has been demolished and is now the Washington/Wabash station” Good point. Indeed, there are a more than a few things that have changed in the 5 years since I did that video. I stole the idea from the “One City, Five Hours” series that United used to have in their Hemisphere’s magazine. The locations are still good -- Wrigley Field, Millenium Park, the Picasso. I’m not sure in this age of Uber if the focus on the subway/the L is still valid. I may see if I can lightly edit this video -- insert some text to send people to the right station, and update the 1-day travel pass options -- and then think about some new options, like maybe a craft beer taproom-focused layover tour. There you go, One City, Five Taprooms and then come roaring back into the TSA line. Hmmm, I may need to rethink that one.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you’re thinking about any questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Ethereal (nop mix) by @nop (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Lancefield/34818</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Travel Is Turning Me Hipster</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Not wanting to turn this into the “Luggage Today” podcast, but when I was shifting things from my Bluesmart to my new Victorinox bag, I also restructured my toiletries kit. And as I was going through the contents -- what stays, what don’t I need anymore -- it struck me how much my travelling had changed something as basic as how I started my day.</li>\r\n 	<li>It started years, no decades ago -- sometime in the late ‘80’s or early ‘90’s. I was living in Philadelphia and flying to Europe pretty frequently, and at that time, the only real direct flight over the Atlantic (can I tell you how much I hate it when people say “The Pond”; it just puts my teeth on edge) was a BA 747 into Heathrow. Now, back then, I loved Heathrow. It was a great airport with fantastic connections. Now it’s an overcrowed shitshow that I avoid at all costs, but back then, it was great. Anyhow, at some point, Heathrow security required all electric devices to be pulled out for screening. Note I didn’t say “electronic”; this was before laptops and tablets and mobile phones were ubiquitous. No, this meant things like my electric razor had to be pulled out of my bag. Two go-rounds with Heathrow security and that Philips razor got jettisoned for a Gillette non-electric blade.</li>\r\n 	<li>Fast forward a decade-and-a-half to August 2006. I woke up in the SFO Marriott to the news of the foiled plot to blow up London-to-US flights by disguising separate explosive ingredients in soda bottles then then assembling and detonating them on board. I was trying to fly back the next day. Baggage check lines exploded when all the flyers with toothpaste, shaving cream, make-up -- pretty much everyone -- were made to check their bags. That weekend, I re-worked my toiletries kit -- hitting the local Whole Foods for tooth powder to replace toothpaste, hair wax for hair gel, and trading the shaving cream that I picked up in that last revamp for a badger hair shaving brush. I think this was the tipping point -- when my kit started to skew hipster.</li>\r\n 	<li>Fast forward another decade-and-a-half to this Christmas. My son gives me a selection of travel sized shaving soaps, each in their own tin container with a screw top. My daughter gives me a bottle of Lush toothy tabs -- kinda compressed tooth powder. These immediately go into my travel kit. My son forwards me a Massdrop buy for an Oristo razor -- a $100 version of my grandfather’s safety razor, precision engineered for a “very efficient yet non-aggressive shaving experience”. I think seriously about this. My toiletry kit has gone almost full hipster.</li>\r\n 	<li>And though I’ve slagged on the TSA for God knows how many episodes over the life of this podcast, I do have to thank them for one thing, keeping my toiletry kit from going full-on hipster, because I know they’ll never allow me to shift to shaving with a straight razor.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">My Flaming Heart by Wired Ant (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Wired_Ant/36862 Ft: Javolenus</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Every Delay Has a Story</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>In the last episode, I talked about why I dropped my subscription to TripIt’s paid “Pro” service -- the main benefit, live flight status notifications, was slower than the free notifications I was getting from the airlines themselves -- from American, United, and Delta. However, when we were idling in the New Orleans airport waiting on our flight back to Chicago, I found the Southwest delay notifications lagged way behind TripIt Pro. Not that I re-upped my TripIt Pro subscription; my wife forgot to cancel a 30-day trial she signed up for, so she now has a year’s subscription. I, instead, was using FlightAware, specifically the feature I’ve talked about in prior episodes that shows you where your plane is. From that I could see that the delay wasn’t because of the snow in Chicago; the plane was spending a lot of time on the ground in Ft Lauderdale, the stop before New Orleans. So I hit Twitter -- Why is flight 860 sitting in FLL so long? The reply -- “Hey, Mark. We know delays can be tough, and apologize for the inconvenience. It looks like Flight #860 is delayed due to inclement weather earlier in the day.” Perhaps a delay in Denver, but why the long ground turn in FLL? No answer.</li>\r\n 	<li>United announced a pilot program in January called “Every Flight Has A Story” where they’d push out much more detailed information on delayed flights -- rather than “Late Arriving Aircraft”, it would be “Our maintenance team is replacing an item on your plane and needs extra time to complete”. The pilot was scheduled for Houston and Phoenix. I haven’t seen much reaction to it, but at least for me, having some sense for the reason for a delay let’s me better figure out what I’m going to do next. I’m much less trusting of a newly posted departure time if I know the inbound plane is still on the ground, or if it’s a maintenance delay.</li>\r\n 	<li>Of course, some of those explanations could be a bit more embarrassing than others. Like for Southwest, a couple of days after our flight back to Chicago, they had to cancel more than 200 flights because they ran out of de-icing fluid at Midway airport. You get that notification, and you’re shaking your head as you dial up an airline that knows how to fly in the winter.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #138</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_138.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #138 — Travel Turning Me Hipster; Every Delay Has a Story','','inherit','closed','closed','','1947-revision-v1','','','2018-09-16 10:27:55','2018-09-16 15:27:55','',1947,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/09/16/1947-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2137,1,'2018-10-04 22:19:28','2018-10-05 03:19:28','Recorded in the Rancho Las Palmas Resort &amp; Spa near <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Palm Springs &amp; Coachella Valley\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/california/palm-springs-and-coachella-valley\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\">Palm Springs, CA</a>, we talk about a surprise at the rental car lot and some good and bad TSA experiences. My search for frequent flyer seats to South Africa leads to a discussion about how diversifying or concentrating your \"deposits\" into frequent travel programs yield different results. The Travel Tech segment reappears with two topics -- measuring differences in hotel bandwidth and some travelers\' love affairs with Bose noise-canceling headsets. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_48.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file. [sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_48.mp3\"]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #48:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Recorded in the Rancho Las Palmas Resort &amp; Spa in <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Rancho Mirage, California\" href=\"http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=33.7691666667,-116.421111111&amp;spn=0.1,0.1&amp;q=33.7691666667,-116.421111111 (Rancho%20Mirage%2C%20California)&amp;t=h\" rel=\"geolocation\">Rancho Mirage, CA</a> near Palm Springs</li>\r\n 	<li><a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Palm Springs International Airport\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm_Springs_International_Airport\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Palm Springs Airport</a> reminds me of San Jose and Santa Ana airports before their big renovations</li>\r\n 	<li>A Hertz mistake gave me a convertible Mustang instead of a Buick Lacrosse</li>\r\n 	<li><strong><a href=\"http://www.qdinformation.com/searching/2006/10/28/searching-the-internet-episode-012-voter-and-election-information/\">Direct Link</a></strong> to Ed Vawter\'s special election edition of <em>Searching the Internet</em> podcast</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/myles-marginal/\"><em>Gold and rose</em></a> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/myles_cochran\">Myles Cochran</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"http://online.wsj.com/article/SB116226062497308455.html?mod=Middle-Seat-Mailbox\">Monday\'s \"Middle Seat\" travel column</a> in <em><a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"The Wall Street Journal\" href=\"http://www.wsj.com/\" rel=\"homepage\">The Wall Street Journal</a></em> (subscription required) airs complaints from travelers who have had their toiletries discarded by overly strict TSA screeners</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"http://clothingcult.com/\">Hilary Baumann</a> tells of her recent TSA experience at <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Lexington\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/the-south/lexington\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\">Lexington, KY</a>\'s <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Blue Grass Airport\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Grass_Airport\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Blue Grass Airport</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/falik-dreams/\"><em>Ika</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.magnatune.com/artists/falik\">Falik</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Waited a bit long to score some frequent flyer tickets to <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Cape Town\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/south-africa/cape-town\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\">Cape Town, South Africa</a> for next March</li>\r\n 	<li>Started with American Airlines but they didn\'t have the inventory. Ended up with United Airlines, which is in the Star Alliance with South Africa Airways</li>\r\n 	<li>United first offered a \"back door\" itinerary through <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Hong Kong\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/china/hong-kong\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\">Hong Kong</a> and Singapore, but I chose the shorter route through Europe</li>\r\n 	<li>Having diversified my mileage across carriers let me make this switch</li>\r\n 	<li>I give up top tier status on one airline for this diversification strategy</li>\r\n 	<li>Depends on what you want -- flexibility to use miles or a better chance at first-class upgrades</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/cargo-alchemy/\"><em>Entry</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.magnatune.com/artists/cargo_cult\">Cargo Cult</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Been testing the speed of hotel broadband using the <a href=\"http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest/\">Speakeasy Speed Test</a> because it tests both upload and download speeds</li>\r\n 	<li>Upload speed is probably more important to business users e-mailing out big files than it is for residential users</li>\r\n 	<li>The afternoon downloads at the Downtown Houston Courtyard were 10 times faster than those in the evening</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/jag-cypress/\"><em>Homebound</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.magnatune.com/artists/jag\">Jag</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Lots of love in the airplanes for the <a href=\"http://www.bose.com/controller?event=VIEW_PRODUCT_PAGE_EVENT&amp;product=qc2_headphones_index\">Bose noise-cancelling headphones</a></li>\r\n 	<li>In the trade-off between comfort and compactness, I choose the Bose, but others go for in-ear \'phones like the <a href=\"http://www.shure.com/ProAudio/Products/PersonalMonitorSystems/us_pro_E3_content\">Shure E3</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids991769.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\">Magnatune</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_48.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<div class=\"zemanta-pixie\" style=\"margin-top: 10px; height: 15px;\"><img class=\"zemanta-pixie-img\" style=\"border: none; float: right;\" src=\"http://img.zemanta.com/pixy.gif?x-id=f03bb8e2-9da9-4e60-86ba-7a49cb622857\" alt=\"\" /></div>','Podcast #48 - Frequent Flyer Strategies, Measuring Hotel Bandwidth','','inherit','closed','closed','','59-revision-v1','','','2018-10-04 22:19:28','2018-10-05 03:19:28','',59,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/10/04/59-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2138,1,'2018-10-07 22:35:08','2018-10-08 03:35:08','[caption id=\"attachment_2141\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/IMG_0031.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2141\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/IMG_0031-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> How Much Extra For A Plate?[/caption]\n\nJust regular domestic business travel since the last podcast, trying to dodge Hurricane Florence to get back to Charlottesville.  Thinking back to last month\'s European travels, we talk about a tight connection through Amsterdam and some odd concierge lounge rules, which gets me thinking about hotel breakfasts. And a listener request for restaurant recommendations gets me thinking about the balance of visiting good and not-so-good restaurant towns. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_145.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #145:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL after 3 weeks of “normal” travel -- no vacation, no international travel, just a couple of trips to Charlottesville, VA on sandwiching a quick shot down to Dallas. And no delays. And empty seats beside me. Indeed, I even scored an upgrade on the late United flight from IAD to ORD, the long leg of one of my flights home from Charlottesville. Feels like we’re at the start of maybe a 6-week travel lull between the final end of summer vacations and the early starts of Thanksgiving travel.</li>\n 	<li>There was a bit of drama around the Charlottesville trip in the middle of September. I had to fly out Sunday night -- the weekend that Hurricane Florence hit the Carolina coast. The storm track forecast had Florence plowing west through the Carolinas and then taking a right hand turn at the Appalachians and heading north over Virginia. The question for me -- when would it make the turn; would my Sunday flight make it through before or after the turn or would Florence be in my way on Sunday? Thursday night and Friday, I spent a bit of time hitting the Refresh button on the <a href=\"https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/\">Nat’l Hurricane Center’s website</a>. By Friday, Florence had dropped a couple of category levels and slowed down, and by Saturday, I could see that my Sunday flight would beat Florence to Charlottesville. It was a smooth flight that Sunday, though Monday was a bit wet.</li>\n 	<li>Going through TSA Pre-Check in ORD that Sunday night, I watched a guy use the electronic boarding pass on his Apple Watch. It looked a bit awkward, and if you think about it, it’s understandable. Boarding pass readers face up; you put your boarding pass or phone face down on them to read. But a watch is on face up on the top of your wrist. So the guy ends up standing on his toes and twisting his arm around to get his Apple Watch face down on the reader. You’d think he would’ve shifted to his phone after that, but I saw him twist himself up again about 30 minutes later when boarding his flight. Seems like it would’ve been easier to spin the watch on his wrist so it was facing down -- at least until Apple fires up the old Steve Jobs distortion field to convince airports to reorient all their readers for the convenience of Apple Watch users.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- Dub the Uke by Kara Square (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mindmapthat/53340 Ft: DJ Vadim</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul class=\"\">\n 	<li>Allan Marko, a long-time listener and even longer-time friend, sent me an <a href=\"http://www.patentlyapple.com/patently-apple/2018/09/apple-salesforce-are-working-marriott-international-to-bring-homepods-to-hotel-rooms-to-assist-guests-with-services.html\">article</a> that dove into an interesting part of Apple’s new partnership with Salesforce. The two of them are working with Marriott to put Siri in hotel rooms. You could ask Siri to turn up the heat, order room service, or get an Uber through an Apple HomePod in the room. That’s the Apple piece of it. The Salesforce piece lets Siri remember what you asked her, say your room temperature, at the next Marriott. Useful or creepy? And how do you make sure you wipe Siri’s memory before the next guest checks into the room so you can’t ask her things like “Hey Siri, tell me all about the last guest that was here...” or “Order me the same sandwich the last guy ordered”. I dunno. I don’t even like using these new Enseo TVs to log into my own Netflix account, let alone having Marriott listening to me through a HomePod and remembering everything I mutter. Some guys are making a nice living selling shutters that you can stick over your laptop webcam. Are earplugs for hotel HomePods the next thing?</li>\n 	<li>In the<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/09/15/podcast-144-outside-airports-hospitality-mentality/\"> last episode</a>, I mentioned flying SAS from Chicago to Copenhagen. It was an odd schedule -- leaving Chicago around 10pm, arriving Copenhagen after 1 in the afternoon. Leaving that late and having a long taxi, I fell asleep before we left the ground, and before putting my phone in Airplane mode. I woke up, I dunno, an hour or so later, looked at my phone for the time, and noticed some new e-mails. Huh? That’s weird. And then I noticed that my phone didn’t say “No Service”; it was connected to some cellular service, which turned out to be SAS’s in-flight cellular service. And as opposed to in-flight WiFi which you usually have to log into, my iPhone automatically started roaming on the SAS cellular service, that then continued to check/pull e-mail for a couple of hours until I flipped it to airplane mode. I got my AT&amp;T mobile bill a couple of weeks back and ended up with a $25 roaming charge for those half-dozen meaningless e-mails. A pain, but not too painful. Unlike the guy four years ago who <a href=\"https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/11/18/that-1200-in-flight-wifi-bill-was-terrifyingly-real/\">rang up a $1,200 WiFi bill</a> on Singapore Air when he fell asleep with his data still connected.</li>\n 	<li>On the third leg of that trip, going from BRU to EDI, our best option was KLM through AMS. I’ve been in and out and through Schiphol a number of times over the past 20-some odd years and have always liked it. Nothing flashy, but it works -- not too big, reasonable facilities. Booking this BRU-EDI trip on the KLM website, I had two options -- a tight 40-min connection or a 2-hr one. While I don’t mind Schiphol, I wasn’t looking to make an afternoon of it. So I broke one of my cardinal travel rules -- never book a connection shorter than an hour -- and booked the 40-min connection, knowing that we had a back-up if it didn’t work out. One factor I didn’t completely think through was that we’d have to cross the Schengen border during those 40 minutes too. The first leg -- Brussels to Amsterdam -- was within Schengen so it was just like an domestic US flight -- no passport control, no customs. But in Schiphol, we had switch concourses and go through passport control because the UK is outside of Schengen. We made it through, though, with time to spare because - we walked real fast; like I said before, Schiphol isn’t that big, so switching concourses wasn’t a long walk; but most importantly, my wife spotted the “short connection” line at passport control. We had gotten in the regular line, but then we saw on a display screen that our EDI flight was classified a “short connection”, so we switched to the much shorter line -- I earned a “Hey” from a security guard when I ducked under the tape -- and quickly passed through what was a well-staffed and brisk passport control line (Munich Airport, you could take some lessons here). We get to the gate with more than enough time -- boarding hasn’t been called yet. So while we made the 40-minute connection, the question now was -- would the checked luggage make it? As we were queuing to board, I looked out the terminal window. There’s our plane, and there, next to the baggage loader, was Irene’s and Claire’s luggage -- stationary, not rolling along like in that YouTube video. A very good sign, but there wasn’t anybody loading luggage. As I walk up to board, I tap one of the KLM guys standing around. Pointing out the window, I say “See those bags on the tarmac? Those are ours. It would be great if they made it onto this plane.” He laughed -- him a bit more than me. I was happy to see them appear on the EDI baggage carousel.</li>\n 	<li>I’m thinking that I need another carry-on bag; something between my maximum legal size 22-incher and my leather duffel overnighter. On that BRU-EDI trip, I carried my 22-incher on, but not without agents at Brussels and Amsterdam challenging me, even after showing them it fit in their baggage sizer. A few weeks after that trip, KLM added an <a href=\"https://news.klm.com/klms-augmented-reality-hand-baggage-check-now-available-in-messenger/\">augmented reality baggage sizer</a> to their iPhone app. You fire up the app, point your iPhone camera at your bag and the app overlays a properly sized rectangle over your bag. If your bag is within the rectangle, you’re good to go. Would’ve been easier -- and much cooler -- than slamming my bag into those metal sizers, but somehow, with those gate agents, I don’t think the outcome would’ve been any different.</li>\n 	<li>OK, one last thing from that trip. The concierge lounges in both the Copenhagen Marriott and the London St Pancras Renaissance had prominent “rules” signs at their entrances, and one of those rules was a ban on “fitness clothes”. Now, this wasn’t a big deal on this trip because I was on vacation, and wasn’t toting work-out gear. My normal program when I’m on business travel is to get up before 6, work out, go straight to the lounge in my “fitness gear” for some breakfast while cooling down, then head back to my room to shower, change, and head out. Having to separate the cool down from breakfast would add 15-20 minutes to what is an already tight morning routine. So I hope that rule doesn’t spread to the US lounges. The rest of the rules seemed pretty reasonable, though one -- no wearing a bathrobe in the lounge -- seemed a bit superfluous. I’ve never seen someone walk into a concierge lounge in a bathrobe… until in Copenhagen at 3 in the afternoon with it not looking like there was anything on under the robe. So, OK, I’m now completely on-board with the no robe rule.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> or our new <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a> at travelcommons -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music — Emma by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/50905 Ft: Martijn de Boer</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Restaurant Karma</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Casey Milch sent me a note a few weeks back -- “Greetings. Love the podcast. I know you mention frequent trips to Charlottesville and I’m finding myself there every six weeks for work myself now. Any restaurant suggestions?”</li>\n 	<li>One of the compensations for getting on an airplane just about every week is that you get to try a lot of restaurants. Now, in the last episode, we talked about the downside of that -- rapid waistline expansion -- but if you’re thoughtful about it, and you like trying different food (I hate the word “foodie”), business travel has its benefits. I sent Casey a few recommendations -- Fitzroy, a meat place -- burger, double pork chop, fried chicken -- on the Main Street pedestrian mall; Lampo, a small Neapolitan pizza place with a big wood oven that is -- I forgot to tell Casey this -- a 5-minute walk from Champion Brewing Company’s taproom; and The Alley Light, a speakeasy in an small alcove (a bit too short to be a proper alley) with no sign though there is a light over the door, that took 3 tries to find the first time in the pouring rain, which led to the question “How many consultants does it take to work Google Maps”. Putting the list together for Casey reminded me that we hadn’t been to Alley Light in a while, so we ate there last Tuesday night -- found it on the first try this time -- and had roasted bone marrow, pork rillette, duck confit -- oh, and some carrots. So much for thoughtfulness.</li>\n 	<li>Charlottesville punches above its weight for good restaurants, maybe because of University of Virginia. The 2 ½ years I spent in New Orleans was one of definitely one of my food high points, especially when crawfish were in season. 3 months in Portland, OR was fun with the food truck scene, and of course, it is ground-zero for the craft beer explosion. Stays in Manhattan, San Francisco, and London were that much more enjoyable with someone else picking up the dinner tab. Indeed, in San Francisco, I used to stay in different hotels so I could try different neighborhood joints.</li>\n 	<li>But karma always seeks balance, and for all these great food locations, there have been other, let’s say, less-than-stunning places. Dover, OH -- about 30 miles south of Canton -- had, when I was doing a project there -- two places to eat -- an Arby’s and the lunch counter of the Walmart knock-off. And the Walmart knock-off was the better of the two. Oldsmar, FL was a bit too far outside of Tampa for us to head in for dinner every night, so the near-by Buffalo Wild Wings - B-Dubs - and Applebee’s were our best shots. And downtown Detroit in the early 2000’s, working, eating, and sleeping in the urban fortress that is the Renaissance Center was brutally monotonous.</li>\n 	<li>But even when in London and New York, we weren’t splurging on big meals every night. We have reasonable expense budgets that we have to live within. So again, we find balance -- one night we’re underspending at a dive (but good) pizza-by-the-slice joint, so that the next night, we eat at nice place. Some guys will extend balancing act to travel -- sucking up the inconvenience of a cheaper connecting flight to pay for better meals. One colleague told me -- “I’ll happily travel cheap to eat great food”</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music — Astral Travel by Astral (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Astral/44282</li>\n</ul>\n<b>Hotel Breakfasts</b>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Growing up, those of us of a certain age heard that breakfast is the most important meal of the day -- usually from a cereal commercial. I mentioned a bit early earlier my morning hotel pattern -- work out, hit the concierge lounge for breakfast and then get on with my day. Most lounge breakfasts are pretty industrial -- chafing dishes of stiff scrambled pasteurized eggs, thin slices of oven-baked bacon, vat of oatmeal, a few cartons of yogurt, and a bowl of fruit. It gets the day started. I may be judging it a bit harshly though. My daughter Claire loves those scrambled eggs. Go a little more upscale and you’ll see maybe a platter of smoked salmon, some sliced meats and cheeses, bran muffins…</li>\n 	<li>So when I see something different, it gets my attention. Like roasted green chiles in New Mexico, Albuquerque and Santa Fe, to season those scrambled eggs, or the King Cake at the Canal St Sheraton in New Orleans during Mardi Gras season. Now, it’s not the best king cake I’ve had - and my wife has dragged me through a king cake tasting crawl there, so I speak with some knowledge -- but I look forward to it whenever I’m there in the spring. I remember one morning I walked in -- no king cake! I found one of the staff -- “you guys stop doing king cake?!” “No! I didn’t know we were out.” And they immediately brought out a new one. Crisis averted!</li>\n 	<li>It doesn’t even have to be anything big. The Copenhagen Marriott lounge had rhubarb juice. As a kid, my mother made pies from rhubarb growing in our backyard, that I think her mother had planted. So something different and nostalgic all in one. Was it life-changing? Not necessarily, but I’d never seen it before.</li>\n 	<li>A little more life-changing was the bowl of bun bo hue that we got for breakfast when staying at a local, non-chain, hotel in Hue in central Vietnam. Kind of a spicier, funkier version of the pho you see in the US, and tougher to find here. Not like any hotel breakfast I’d had, and I immediately switched my breakfast choice over to it or pho for the rest of the trip.\nBack in May, when I was in Pune, we stayed at a Marriott Courtyard, a chain which, as I’ve complained about before in prior episodes, doesn’t have a concierge lounge but they had a nice breakfast buffet with what I guess is a typical two-track system -- one side with the usual Western breakfast foods, and the other side with Indian food. The waiter pointed me to the omelette station. I was about ready to order when I noticed another station to my right with what looked like a super-sized crepe griddle. “What’s that?” I asked. “Oh, that’s to make dosas.” “Cool, I have one of those.” “Do you know what a dosa is?” “Nope, but I’ll take one, however it normally comes.” I watched him make this foot-wide diameter stiff crepe, rolled it up and put it, sticking up out of a cup of some sort of stew or curry. I walk back to the table. Everyone else has eggs, bacon, toast, arranged horizontally on their plate. I’m the only one with a vertical breakfast. But I liked that. Kinda flying the flag for something different at breakfast .</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #145</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and now on <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_145.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #145 — Restaurant Karma; Hotel Breakfasts','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-145-restaurant-karma-hotel-breakfasts','','','2021-09-29 22:06:10','2021-09-30 03:06:10','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=2138',0,'post','',0),
(2140,1,'2018-10-06 17:49:48','2018-10-06 22:49:48','Back in front of the mic after 12 days of skipping across northern Europe -- Copenhagen, Brussels, and Scotland. In this episode, we get nostalgic about outside airports in California, talk about how a hospitality mentality is pervasive in hotels but not in restaurants, missing customer service responses from <a href=\"http://united.com\">United Airlines</a> and <a href=\"http://marriott.com\">Marriott</a>, and European perspectives about Chicago.  All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_144.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n<iframe src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/500700135&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"></iframe><!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #145:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL after 3 weeks of “normal” travel -- no vacation, no international travel, just a couple of trips to Charlottesville, VA on sandwiching a quick shot down to Dallas. And no delays. And empty seats beside me. Indeed, I even scored an upgrade on the late United flight from IAD to ORD, the long leg of one of my flights home from Charlottesville. Feels like we’re at the start of maybe a 6-week travel lull between the final end of summer vacations and the early starts of Thanksgiving travel.</li>\r\n 	<li>There was a bit of drama around the Charlottesville trip in the middle of September. I had to fly out Sunday night -- the weekend that Hurricane Florence hit the Carolina coast. The storm track forecast had Florence plowing west through the Carolinas and then taking a right hand turn at the Appalachians and heading north over Virginia. The question for me -- when would it make the turn; would my Sunday flight make it through before or after the turn or would Florence be in my way on Sunday? Thursday night and Friday, I spent a bit of time hitting the Refresh button on the <a href=\"https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/\">Nat’l Hurricane Center’s website</a>. By Friday, Florence had dropped a couple of category levels and slowed down, and by Saturday, I could see that my Sunday flight would beat Florence to Charlottesville. It was a smooth flight that Sunday, though Monday was a bit wet.</li>\r\n 	<li>Going through TSA Pre-Check in ORD that Sunday night, I watched a guy use the electronic boarding pass on his Apple Watch. It looked a bit awkward, and if you think about it, it’s understandable. Boarding pass readers face up; you put your boarding pass or phone face down on them to read. But a watch is on face up on the top of your wrist. So the guy ends up standing on his toes and twisting his arm around to get his Apple Watch face down on the reader. You’d think he would’ve shifted to his phone after that, but I saw him twist himself up again about 30 minutes later when boarding his flight. Seems like it would’ve been easier to spin the watch on his wrist so it was facing down -- at least until Apple fires up the old Steve Jobs distortion field to convince airports to reorient all their readers for the convenience of Apple Watch users.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Zapac/25046\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><i>You are (funky mix)</i></a> by Zapac</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul class=\"\">\r\n 	<li>Allan Marko, a long-time listener and even longer-time friend, sent me an <a href=\"http://www.patentlyapple.com/patently-apple/2018/09/apple-salesforce-are-working-marriott-international-to-bring-homepods-to-hotel-rooms-to-assist-guests-with-services.html\">article</a> that dove into an interesting part of Apple’s new partnership with Salesforce. The two of them are working with Marriott to put Siri in hotel rooms. You could ask Siri to turn up the heat, order room service, or get an Uber through an Apple HomePod in the room. That’s the Apple piece of it. The Salesforce piece lets Siri remember what you asked her, say your room temperature, at the next Marriott. Useful or creepy? And how do you make sure you wipe Siri’s memory before the next guest checks into the room so you can’t ask her things like “Hey Siri, tell me all about the last guest that was here...” or “Order me the same sandwich the last guy ordered”. I dunno. I don’t even like using these new Enseo TVs to log into my own Netflix account, let alone having Marriott listening to me through a HomePod and remembering everything I mutter. Some guys are making a nice living selling shutters that you can stick over your laptop webcam. Are earplugs for hotel HomePods the next thing?</li>\r\n 	<li>In the<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/09/15/podcast-144-outside-airports-hospitality-mentality/\"> last episode</a>, I mentioned flying SAS from Chicago to Copenhagen. It was an odd schedule -- leaving Chicago around 10pm, arriving Copenhagen after 1 in the afternoon. Leaving that late and having a long taxi, I fell asleep before we left the ground, and before putting my phone in Airplane mode. I woke up, I dunno, an hour or so later, looked at my phone for the time, and noticed some new e-mails. Huh? That’s weird. And then I noticed that my phone didn’t say “No Service”; it was connected to some cellular service, which turned out to be SAS’s in-flight cellular service. And as opposed to in-flight WiFi which you usually have to log into, my iPhone automatically started roaming on the SAS cellular service, that then continued to check/pull e-mail for a couple of hours until I flipped it to airplane mode. I got my AT&amp;T mobile bill a couple of weeks back and ended up with a $25 roaming charge for those half-dozen meaningless e-mails. A pain, but not too painful. Unlike the guy four years ago who <a href=\"https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/11/18/that-1200-in-flight-wifi-bill-was-terrifyingly-real/\">rang up a $1,200 WiFi bill</a> on Singapore Air when he fell asleep with his data still connected.</li>\r\n 	<li>On the third leg of that trip, going from BRU to EDI, our best option was KLM through AMS. I’ve been in and out and through Schiphol a number of times over the past 20-some odd years and have always liked it. Nothing flashy, but it works -- not too big, reasonable facilities. Booking this BRU-EDI trip on the KLM website, I had two options -- a tight 40-min connection or a 2-hr one. While I don’t mind Schiphol, I wasn’t looking to make an afternoon of it. So I broke one of my cardinal travel rules -- never book a connection shorter than an hour -- and booked the 40-min connection, knowing that we had a back-up if it didn’t work out. One factor I didn’t completely think through was that we’d have to cross the Schengen border during those 40 minutes too. The first leg -- Brussels to Amsterdam -- was within Schengen so it was just like an domestic US flight -- no passport control, no customs. But in Schiphol, we had switch concourses and go through passport control because the UK is outside of Schengen. We made it through, though, with time to spare because - we walked real fast; like I said before, Schiphol isn’t that big, so switching concourses wasn’t a long walk; but most importantly, my wife spotted the “short connection” line at passport control. We had gotten in the regular line, but then we saw on a display screen that our EDI flight was classified a “short connection”, so we switched to the much shorter line -- I earned a “Hey” from a security guard when I ducked under the tape -- and quickly passed through what was a well-staffed and brisk passport control line (Munich Airport, you could take some lessons here). We get to the gate with more than enough time -- boarding hasn’t been called yet. So while we made the 40-minute connection, the question now was -- would the checked luggage make it? As we were queuing to board, I looked out the terminal window. There’s our plane, and there, next to the baggage loader, was Irene’s and Claire’s luggage -- stationary, not rolling along like in that YouTube video. A very good sign, but there wasn’t anybody loading luggage. As I walk up to board, I tap one of the KLM guys standing around. Pointing out the window, I say “See those bags on the tarmac? Those are ours. It would be great if they made it onto this plane.” He laughed -- him a bit more than me. I was happy to see them appear on the EDI baggage carousel.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’m thinking that I need another carry-on bag; something between my maximum legal size 22-incher and my leather duffel overnighter. On that BRU-EDI trip, I carried my 22-incher on, but not without agents at Brussels and Amsterdam challenging me, even after showing them it fit in their baggage sizer. A few weeks after that trip, KLM added an <a href=\"https://news.klm.com/klms-augmented-reality-hand-baggage-check-now-available-in-messenger/\">augmented reality baggage sizer</a> to their iPhone app. You fire up the app, point your iPhone camera at your bag and the app overlays a properly sized rectangle over your bag. If your bag is within the rectangle, you’re good to go. Would’ve been easier -- and much cooler -- than slamming my bag into those metal sizers, but somehow, with those gate agents, I don’t think the outcome would’ve been any different.</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, one last thing from that trip. The concierge lounges in both the Copenhagen Marriott and the London St Pancras Renaissance had prominent “rules” signs at their entrances, and one of those rules was a ban on “fitness clothes”. Now, this wasn’t a big deal on this trip because I was on vacation, and wasn’t toting work-out gear. My normal program when I’m on business travel is to get up before 6, work out, go straight to the lounge in my “fitness gear” for some breakfast while cooling down, then head back to my room to shower, change, and head out. Having to separate the cool down from breakfast would add 15-20 minutes to what is an already tight morning routine. So I hope that rule doesn’t spread to the US lounges. The rest of the rules seemed pretty reasonable, though one -- no wearing a bathrobe in the lounge -- seemed a bit superfluous. I’ve never seen someone walk into a concierge lounge in a bathrobe… until in Copenhagen at 3 in the afternoon with it not looking like there was anything on under the robe. So, OK, I’m now completely on-board with the no robe rule.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> or our new <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a> at travelcommons -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/35879\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><i>Two Guitars</i></a> by Admiral Bob</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Restaurant Karma</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Casey Milch sent me a note a few weeks back -- “Greetings. Love the podcast. I know you mention frequent trips to Charlottesville and I’m finding myself there every six weeks for work myself now. Any restaurant suggestions?”</li>\r\n 	<li>One of the compensations for getting on an airplane just about every week is that you get to try a lot of restaurants. Now, in the last episode, we talked about the downside of that -- rapid waistline expansion -- but if you’re thoughtful about it, and you like trying different food (I hate the word “foodie”), business travel has its benefits. I sent Casey a few recommendations -- Fitzroy, a meat place -- burger, double pork chop, fried chicken -- on the Main Street pedestrian mall; Lampo, a small Neapolitan pizza place with a big wood oven that is -- I forgot to tell Casey this -- a 5-minute walk from Champion Brewing Company’s taproom; and The Alley Light, a speakeasy in an small alcove (a bit too short to be a proper alley) with no sign though there is a light over the door, that took 3 tries to find the first time in the pouring rain, which led to the question “How many consultants does it take to work Google Maps”. Putting the list together for Casey reminded me that we hadn’t been to Alley Light in a while, so we ate there last Tuesday night -- found it on the first try this time -- and had roasted bone marrow, pork rillette, duck confit -- oh, and some carrots. So much for thoughtfulness.</li>\r\n 	<li>Charlottesville punches above its weight for good restaurants, maybe because of University of Virginia. The 2 ½ years I spent in New Orleans was one of definitely one of my food high points, especially when crawfish were in season. 3 months in Portland, OR was fun with the food truck scene, and of course, it is ground-zero for the craft beer explosion. Stays in Manhattan, San Francisco, and London were that much more enjoyable with someone else picking up the dinner tab. Indeed, in San Francisco, I used to stay in different hotels so I could try different neighborhood joints.</li>\r\n 	<li>But karma always seeks balance, and for all these great food locations, there have been other, let’s say, less-than-stunning places. Dover, OH -- about 30 miles south of Canton -- had, when I was doing a project there -- two places to eat -- an Arby’s and the lunch counter of the Walmart knock-off. And the Walmart knock-off was the better of the two. Oldsmar, FL was a bit too far outside of Tampa for us to head in for dinner every night, so the near-by Buffalo Wild Wings - B-Dubs - and Applebee’s were our best shots. And downtown Detroit in the early 2000’s, working, eating, and sleeping in the urban fortress that is the Renaissance Center was brutally monotonous.</li>\r\n 	<li>But even when in London and New York, we weren’t splurging on big meals every night. We have reasonable expense budgets that we have to live within. So again, we find balance -- one night we’re underspending at a dive (but good) pizza-by-the-slice joint, so that the next night, we eat at nice place. Some guys will extend balancing act to travel -- sucking up the inconvenience of a cheaper connecting flight to pay for better meals. One colleague told me -- “I’ll happily travel cheap to eat great food”</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djlang59/22228\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Garden Of The Forking</em></a><em> </em>by J.Lang</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Hospitality Mentality</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Nowadays, it seems that most hotels have got their front desk training pretty well down. I can’t remember the last time I hit an indifferent front desk person when checking in. And given the number of different hotels I stay in, it leads me to the conclusion that this, what I call, a hospitality mentality is a key part of their training, because, based on every other retail experience I have, I know I wouldn’t naturally run into this many nice people in a row. Not that I have a problem with this. It’s nice whenever I’m dragging myself into a hotel late because of flight delays or whatever, that the person checking me in is pleasant, wants to take care of me, walks out from behind the desk give me my key and to point me to the elevators, and seems genuinely concerned about my well-being. Even in hotels that otherwise are a bit “meh”, I find that my standard TripAdvisor review says “But the service was great.”</li>\r\n 	<li>Which is a huge contrast with the typical service I get at a restaurant where I would expect a hospitality mentality, but am surprised when I get it. Last Sunday night, Irene and I were overnighting in London on our way back from St Andrews, and walked to an Indian restaurant, <a href=\"http://www.dishoom.com/kings-cross/\">Dishoom</a>, up behind King’s Cross station. There was a queue outside the restaurant, typical for a popular place. A guy came out with an iPad, took our name, and told us it would be about a 30 minute wait. That was fine, we wanted a drink before dinner anyhow. They give us a pager -- again, typical stuff -- but now it gets a bit different. Instead of pointing us to a scrum around a bar, someone escorts us to two open seats, asks if the seats are OK for us, and right behind her was a waitress to take our order. Right at about 30 minutes, as we’re finishing our drinks, the pager goes off. We’re collecting our stuff to head back to the hostess stand when a guy walks over to us -- the same guy who took our name in line -- took our glasses and walked us to our table, chatting along the way -- where are you from, Oh I have friends in Chicago, how long are you in London…. We get to the table, but before we sit down, he asks us “Is this table OK for you?”</li>\r\n 	<li>I can’t remember the last time a busy restaurant asked me if I was happy with the table. Normally, the hostess expects you to be happy she actually seated you. The food was good, but what really impressed me about Dishoom that here was a big, mass-service restaurant with a hospitality mentality. Easy to do at a small place, or a Michelin-starred restaurant (though don’t get me started about French Laundry), but here, in London, a place not necessarily known for great customer service, they had it nailed. Oh, and the chicken curry -- they nailed that too.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #145</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and now on <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_144.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #145 — Restaurant Karma;','','inherit','closed','closed','','2138-revision-v1','','','2018-10-06 17:49:48','2018-10-06 22:49:48','',2138,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/10/06/2138-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2141,1,'2018-10-06 18:39:20','2018-10-06 23:39:20','','IMG_0031','How Much Extra For A Plate?','inherit','open','closed','','img_0031','','','2018-10-06 18:39:36','2018-10-06 23:39:36','',2138,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/IMG_0031.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(2142,1,'2018-10-06 18:40:33','2018-10-06 23:40:33','[caption id=\"attachment_2141\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/IMG_0031.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2141\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/IMG_0031-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> How Much Extra For A Plate?[/caption]\r\n\r\nBack in front of the mic after 12 days of skipping across northern Europe -- Copenhagen, Brussels, and Scotland. In this episode, we get nostalgic about outside airports in California, talk about how a hospitality mentality is pervasive in hotels but not in restaurants, missing customer service responses from <a href=\"http://united.com\">United Airlines</a> and <a href=\"http://marriott.com\">Marriott</a>, and European perspectives about Chicago.  All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_144.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n<iframe src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/500700135&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"></iframe><!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #145:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL after 3 weeks of “normal” travel -- no vacation, no international travel, just a couple of trips to Charlottesville, VA on sandwiching a quick shot down to Dallas. And no delays. And empty seats beside me. Indeed, I even scored an upgrade on the late United flight from IAD to ORD, the long leg of one of my flights home from Charlottesville. Feels like we’re at the start of maybe a 6-week travel lull between the final end of summer vacations and the early starts of Thanksgiving travel.</li>\r\n 	<li>There was a bit of drama around the Charlottesville trip in the middle of September. I had to fly out Sunday night -- the weekend that Hurricane Florence hit the Carolina coast. The storm track forecast had Florence plowing west through the Carolinas and then taking a right hand turn at the Appalachians and heading north over Virginia. The question for me -- when would it make the turn; would my Sunday flight make it through before or after the turn or would Florence be in my way on Sunday? Thursday night and Friday, I spent a bit of time hitting the Refresh button on the <a href=\"https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/\">Nat’l Hurricane Center’s website</a>. By Friday, Florence had dropped a couple of category levels and slowed down, and by Saturday, I could see that my Sunday flight would beat Florence to Charlottesville. It was a smooth flight that Sunday, though Monday was a bit wet.</li>\r\n 	<li>Going through TSA Pre-Check in ORD that Sunday night, I watched a guy use the electronic boarding pass on his Apple Watch. It looked a bit awkward, and if you think about it, it’s understandable. Boarding pass readers face up; you put your boarding pass or phone face down on them to read. But a watch is on face up on the top of your wrist. So the guy ends up standing on his toes and twisting his arm around to get his Apple Watch face down on the reader. You’d think he would’ve shifted to his phone after that, but I saw him twist himself up again about 30 minutes later when boarding his flight. Seems like it would’ve been easier to spin the watch on his wrist so it was facing down -- at least until Apple fires up the old Steve Jobs distortion field to convince airports to reorient all their readers for the convenience of Apple Watch users.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Zapac/25046\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><i>You are (funky mix)</i></a> by Zapac</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul class=\"\">\r\n 	<li>Allan Marko, a long-time listener and even longer-time friend, sent me an <a href=\"http://www.patentlyapple.com/patently-apple/2018/09/apple-salesforce-are-working-marriott-international-to-bring-homepods-to-hotel-rooms-to-assist-guests-with-services.html\">article</a> that dove into an interesting part of Apple’s new partnership with Salesforce. The two of them are working with Marriott to put Siri in hotel rooms. You could ask Siri to turn up the heat, order room service, or get an Uber through an Apple HomePod in the room. That’s the Apple piece of it. The Salesforce piece lets Siri remember what you asked her, say your room temperature, at the next Marriott. Useful or creepy? And how do you make sure you wipe Siri’s memory before the next guest checks into the room so you can’t ask her things like “Hey Siri, tell me all about the last guest that was here...” or “Order me the same sandwich the last guy ordered”. I dunno. I don’t even like using these new Enseo TVs to log into my own Netflix account, let alone having Marriott listening to me through a HomePod and remembering everything I mutter. Some guys are making a nice living selling shutters that you can stick over your laptop webcam. Are earplugs for hotel HomePods the next thing?</li>\r\n 	<li>In the<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/09/15/podcast-144-outside-airports-hospitality-mentality/\"> last episode</a>, I mentioned flying SAS from Chicago to Copenhagen. It was an odd schedule -- leaving Chicago around 10pm, arriving Copenhagen after 1 in the afternoon. Leaving that late and having a long taxi, I fell asleep before we left the ground, and before putting my phone in Airplane mode. I woke up, I dunno, an hour or so later, looked at my phone for the time, and noticed some new e-mails. Huh? That’s weird. And then I noticed that my phone didn’t say “No Service”; it was connected to some cellular service, which turned out to be SAS’s in-flight cellular service. And as opposed to in-flight WiFi which you usually have to log into, my iPhone automatically started roaming on the SAS cellular service, that then continued to check/pull e-mail for a couple of hours until I flipped it to airplane mode. I got my AT&amp;T mobile bill a couple of weeks back and ended up with a $25 roaming charge for those half-dozen meaningless e-mails. A pain, but not too painful. Unlike the guy four years ago who <a href=\"https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/11/18/that-1200-in-flight-wifi-bill-was-terrifyingly-real/\">rang up a $1,200 WiFi bill</a> on Singapore Air when he fell asleep with his data still connected.</li>\r\n 	<li>On the third leg of that trip, going from BRU to EDI, our best option was KLM through AMS. I’ve been in and out and through Schiphol a number of times over the past 20-some odd years and have always liked it. Nothing flashy, but it works -- not too big, reasonable facilities. Booking this BRU-EDI trip on the KLM website, I had two options -- a tight 40-min connection or a 2-hr one. While I don’t mind Schiphol, I wasn’t looking to make an afternoon of it. So I broke one of my cardinal travel rules -- never book a connection shorter than an hour -- and booked the 40-min connection, knowing that we had a back-up if it didn’t work out. One factor I didn’t completely think through was that we’d have to cross the Schengen border during those 40 minutes too. The first leg -- Brussels to Amsterdam -- was within Schengen so it was just like an domestic US flight -- no passport control, no customs. But in Schiphol, we had switch concourses and go through passport control because the UK is outside of Schengen. We made it through, though, with time to spare because - we walked real fast; like I said before, Schiphol isn’t that big, so switching concourses wasn’t a long walk; but most importantly, my wife spotted the “short connection” line at passport control. We had gotten in the regular line, but then we saw on a display screen that our EDI flight was classified a “short connection”, so we switched to the much shorter line -- I earned a “Hey” from a security guard when I ducked under the tape -- and quickly passed through what was a well-staffed and brisk passport control line (Munich Airport, you could take some lessons here). We get to the gate with more than enough time -- boarding hasn’t been called yet. So while we made the 40-minute connection, the question now was -- would the checked luggage make it? As we were queuing to board, I looked out the terminal window. There’s our plane, and there, next to the baggage loader, was Irene’s and Claire’s luggage -- stationary, not rolling along like in that YouTube video. A very good sign, but there wasn’t anybody loading luggage. As I walk up to board, I tap one of the KLM guys standing around. Pointing out the window, I say “See those bags on the tarmac? Those are ours. It would be great if they made it onto this plane.” He laughed -- him a bit more than me. I was happy to see them appear on the EDI baggage carousel.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’m thinking that I need another carry-on bag; something between my maximum legal size 22-incher and my leather duffel overnighter. On that BRU-EDI trip, I carried my 22-incher on, but not without agents at Brussels and Amsterdam challenging me, even after showing them it fit in their baggage sizer. A few weeks after that trip, KLM added an <a href=\"https://news.klm.com/klms-augmented-reality-hand-baggage-check-now-available-in-messenger/\">augmented reality baggage sizer</a> to their iPhone app. You fire up the app, point your iPhone camera at your bag and the app overlays a properly sized rectangle over your bag. If your bag is within the rectangle, you’re good to go. Would’ve been easier -- and much cooler -- than slamming my bag into those metal sizers, but somehow, with those gate agents, I don’t think the outcome would’ve been any different.</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, one last thing from that trip. The concierge lounges in both the Copenhagen Marriott and the London St Pancras Renaissance had prominent “rules” signs at their entrances, and one of those rules was a ban on “fitness clothes”. Now, this wasn’t a big deal on this trip because I was on vacation, and wasn’t toting work-out gear. My normal program when I’m on business travel is to get up before 6, work out, go straight to the lounge in my “fitness gear” for some breakfast while cooling down, then head back to my room to shower, change, and head out. Having to separate the cool down from breakfast would add 15-20 minutes to what is an already tight morning routine. So I hope that rule doesn’t spread to the US lounges. The rest of the rules seemed pretty reasonable, though one -- no wearing a bathrobe in the lounge -- seemed a bit superfluous. I’ve never seen someone walk into a concierge lounge in a bathrobe… until in Copenhagen at 3 in the afternoon with it not looking like there was anything on under the robe. So, OK, I’m now completely on-board with the no robe rule.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> or our new <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a> at travelcommons -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/35879\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><i>Two Guitars</i></a> by Admiral Bob</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Restaurant Karma</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Casey Milch sent me a note a few weeks back -- “Greetings. Love the podcast. I know you mention frequent trips to Charlottesville and I’m finding myself there every six weeks for work myself now. Any restaurant suggestions?”</li>\r\n 	<li>One of the compensations for getting on an airplane just about every week is that you get to try a lot of restaurants. Now, in the last episode, we talked about the downside of that -- rapid waistline expansion -- but if you’re thoughtful about it, and you like trying different food (I hate the word “foodie”), business travel has its benefits. I sent Casey a few recommendations -- Fitzroy, a meat place -- burger, double pork chop, fried chicken -- on the Main Street pedestrian mall; Lampo, a small Neapolitan pizza place with a big wood oven that is -- I forgot to tell Casey this -- a 5-minute walk from Champion Brewing Company’s taproom; and The Alley Light, a speakeasy in an small alcove (a bit too short to be a proper alley) with no sign though there is a light over the door, that took 3 tries to find the first time in the pouring rain, which led to the question “How many consultants does it take to work Google Maps”. Putting the list together for Casey reminded me that we hadn’t been to Alley Light in a while, so we ate there last Tuesday night -- found it on the first try this time -- and had roasted bone marrow, pork rillette, duck confit -- oh, and some carrots. So much for thoughtfulness.</li>\r\n 	<li>Charlottesville punches above its weight for good restaurants, maybe because of University of Virginia. The 2 ½ years I spent in New Orleans was one of definitely one of my food high points, especially when crawfish were in season. 3 months in Portland, OR was fun with the food truck scene, and of course, it is ground-zero for the craft beer explosion. Stays in Manhattan, San Francisco, and London were that much more enjoyable with someone else picking up the dinner tab. Indeed, in San Francisco, I used to stay in different hotels so I could try different neighborhood joints.</li>\r\n 	<li>But karma always seeks balance, and for all these great food locations, there have been other, let’s say, less-than-stunning places. Dover, OH -- about 30 miles south of Canton -- had, when I was doing a project there -- two places to eat -- an Arby’s and the lunch counter of the Walmart knock-off. And the Walmart knock-off was the better of the two. Oldsmar, FL was a bit too far outside of Tampa for us to head in for dinner every night, so the near-by Buffalo Wild Wings - B-Dubs - and Applebee’s were our best shots. And downtown Detroit in the early 2000’s, working, eating, and sleeping in the urban fortress that is the Renaissance Center was brutally monotonous.</li>\r\n 	<li>But even when in London and New York, we weren’t splurging on big meals every night. We have reasonable expense budgets that we have to live within. So again, we find balance -- one night we’re underspending at a dive (but good) pizza-by-the-slice joint, so that the next night, we eat at nice place. Some guys will extend balancing act to travel -- sucking up the inconvenience of a cheaper connecting flight to pay for better meals. One colleague told me -- “I’ll happily travel cheap to eat great food”</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djlang59/22228\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Garden Of The Forking</em></a><em> </em>by J.Lang</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Hospitality Mentality</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Nowadays, it seems that most hotels have got their front desk training pretty well down. I can’t remember the last time I hit an indifferent front desk person when checking in. And given the number of different hotels I stay in, it leads me to the conclusion that this, what I call, a hospitality mentality is a key part of their training, because, based on every other retail experience I have, I know I wouldn’t naturally run into this many nice people in a row. Not that I have a problem with this. It’s nice whenever I’m dragging myself into a hotel late because of flight delays or whatever, that the person checking me in is pleasant, wants to take care of me, walks out from behind the desk give me my key and to point me to the elevators, and seems genuinely concerned about my well-being. Even in hotels that otherwise are a bit “meh”, I find that my standard TripAdvisor review says “But the service was great.”</li>\r\n 	<li>Which is a huge contrast with the typical service I get at a restaurant where I would expect a hospitality mentality, but am surprised when I get it. Last Sunday night, Irene and I were overnighting in London on our way back from St Andrews, and walked to an Indian restaurant, <a href=\"http://www.dishoom.com/kings-cross/\">Dishoom</a>, up behind King’s Cross station. There was a queue outside the restaurant, typical for a popular place. A guy came out with an iPad, took our name, and told us it would be about a 30 minute wait. That was fine, we wanted a drink before dinner anyhow. They give us a pager -- again, typical stuff -- but now it gets a bit different. Instead of pointing us to a scrum around a bar, someone escorts us to two open seats, asks if the seats are OK for us, and right behind her was a waitress to take our order. Right at about 30 minutes, as we’re finishing our drinks, the pager goes off. We’re collecting our stuff to head back to the hostess stand when a guy walks over to us -- the same guy who took our name in line -- took our glasses and walked us to our table, chatting along the way -- where are you from, Oh I have friends in Chicago, how long are you in London…. We get to the table, but before we sit down, he asks us “Is this table OK for you?”</li>\r\n 	<li>I can’t remember the last time a busy restaurant asked me if I was happy with the table. Normally, the hostess expects you to be happy she actually seated you. The food was good, but what really impressed me about Dishoom that here was a big, mass-service restaurant with a hospitality mentality. Easy to do at a small place, or a Michelin-starred restaurant (though don’t get me started about French Laundry), but here, in London, a place not necessarily known for great customer service, they had it nailed. Oh, and the chicken curry -- they nailed that too.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #145</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and now on <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_144.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #145 — Restaurant Karma;','','inherit','closed','closed','','2138-revision-v1','','','2018-10-06 18:40:33','2018-10-06 23:40:33','',2138,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/10/06/2138-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2143,1,'2018-10-06 20:16:07','2018-10-07 01:16:07','[caption id=\"attachment_2141\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/IMG_0031.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2141\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/IMG_0031-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> How Much Extra For A Plate?[/caption]\r\n\r\nBack in front of the mic after 12 days of skipping across northern Europe -- Copenhagen, Brussels, and Scotland. In this episode, we get nostalgic about outside airports in California, talk about how a hospitality mentality is pervasive in hotels but not in restaurants, missing customer service responses from <a href=\"http://united.com\">United Airlines</a> and <a href=\"http://marriott.com\">Marriott</a>, and European perspectives about Chicago.  All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_144.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n<iframe src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/500700135&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"></iframe><!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #145:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL after 3 weeks of “normal” travel -- no vacation, no international travel, just a couple of trips to Charlottesville, VA on sandwiching a quick shot down to Dallas. And no delays. And empty seats beside me. Indeed, I even scored an upgrade on the late United flight from IAD to ORD, the long leg of one of my flights home from Charlottesville. Feels like we’re at the start of maybe a 6-week travel lull between the final end of summer vacations and the early starts of Thanksgiving travel.</li>\r\n 	<li>There was a bit of drama around the Charlottesville trip in the middle of September. I had to fly out Sunday night -- the weekend that Hurricane Florence hit the Carolina coast. The storm track forecast had Florence plowing west through the Carolinas and then taking a right hand turn at the Appalachians and heading north over Virginia. The question for me -- when would it make the turn; would my Sunday flight make it through before or after the turn or would Florence be in my way on Sunday? Thursday night and Friday, I spent a bit of time hitting the Refresh button on the <a href=\"https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/\">Nat’l Hurricane Center’s website</a>. By Friday, Florence had dropped a couple of category levels and slowed down, and by Saturday, I could see that my Sunday flight would beat Florence to Charlottesville. It was a smooth flight that Sunday, though Monday was a bit wet.</li>\r\n 	<li>Going through TSA Pre-Check in ORD that Sunday night, I watched a guy use the electronic boarding pass on his Apple Watch. It looked a bit awkward, and if you think about it, it’s understandable. Boarding pass readers face up; you put your boarding pass or phone face down on them to read. But a watch is on face up on the top of your wrist. So the guy ends up standing on his toes and twisting his arm around to get his Apple Watch face down on the reader. You’d think he would’ve shifted to his phone after that, but I saw him twist himself up again about 30 minutes later when boarding his flight. Seems like it would’ve been easier to spin the watch on his wrist so it was facing down -- at least until Apple fires up the old Steve Jobs distortion field to convince airports to reorient all their readers for the convenience of Apple Watch users.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- Dub the Uke by Kara Square (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mindmapthat/53340 Ft: DJ Vadim</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul class=\"\">\r\n 	<li>Allan Marko, a long-time listener and even longer-time friend, sent me an <a href=\"http://www.patentlyapple.com/patently-apple/2018/09/apple-salesforce-are-working-marriott-international-to-bring-homepods-to-hotel-rooms-to-assist-guests-with-services.html\">article</a> that dove into an interesting part of Apple’s new partnership with Salesforce. The two of them are working with Marriott to put Siri in hotel rooms. You could ask Siri to turn up the heat, order room service, or get an Uber through an Apple HomePod in the room. That’s the Apple piece of it. The Salesforce piece lets Siri remember what you asked her, say your room temperature, at the next Marriott. Useful or creepy? And how do you make sure you wipe Siri’s memory before the next guest checks into the room so you can’t ask her things like “Hey Siri, tell me all about the last guest that was here...” or “Order me the same sandwich the last guy ordered”. I dunno. I don’t even like using these new Enseo TVs to log into my own Netflix account, let alone having Marriott listening to me through a HomePod and remembering everything I mutter. Some guys are making a nice living selling shutters that you can stick over your laptop webcam. Are earplugs for hotel HomePods the next thing?</li>\r\n 	<li>In the<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/09/15/podcast-144-outside-airports-hospitality-mentality/\"> last episode</a>, I mentioned flying SAS from Chicago to Copenhagen. It was an odd schedule -- leaving Chicago around 10pm, arriving Copenhagen after 1 in the afternoon. Leaving that late and having a long taxi, I fell asleep before we left the ground, and before putting my phone in Airplane mode. I woke up, I dunno, an hour or so later, looked at my phone for the time, and noticed some new e-mails. Huh? That’s weird. And then I noticed that my phone didn’t say “No Service”; it was connected to some cellular service, which turned out to be SAS’s in-flight cellular service. And as opposed to in-flight WiFi which you usually have to log into, my iPhone automatically started roaming on the SAS cellular service, that then continued to check/pull e-mail for a couple of hours until I flipped it to airplane mode. I got my AT&amp;T mobile bill a couple of weeks back and ended up with a $25 roaming charge for those half-dozen meaningless e-mails. A pain, but not too painful. Unlike the guy four years ago who <a href=\"https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/11/18/that-1200-in-flight-wifi-bill-was-terrifyingly-real/\">rang up a $1,200 WiFi bill</a> on Singapore Air when he fell asleep with his data still connected.</li>\r\n 	<li>On the third leg of that trip, going from BRU to EDI, our best option was KLM through AMS. I’ve been in and out and through Schiphol a number of times over the past 20-some odd years and have always liked it. Nothing flashy, but it works -- not too big, reasonable facilities. Booking this BRU-EDI trip on the KLM website, I had two options -- a tight 40-min connection or a 2-hr one. While I don’t mind Schiphol, I wasn’t looking to make an afternoon of it. So I broke one of my cardinal travel rules -- never book a connection shorter than an hour -- and booked the 40-min connection, knowing that we had a back-up if it didn’t work out. One factor I didn’t completely think through was that we’d have to cross the Schengen border during those 40 minutes too. The first leg -- Brussels to Amsterdam -- was within Schengen so it was just like an domestic US flight -- no passport control, no customs. But in Schiphol, we had switch concourses and go through passport control because the UK is outside of Schengen. We made it through, though, with time to spare because - we walked real fast; like I said before, Schiphol isn’t that big, so switching concourses wasn’t a long walk; but most importantly, my wife spotted the “short connection” line at passport control. We had gotten in the regular line, but then we saw on a display screen that our EDI flight was classified a “short connection”, so we switched to the much shorter line -- I earned a “Hey” from a security guard when I ducked under the tape -- and quickly passed through what was a well-staffed and brisk passport control line (Munich Airport, you could take some lessons here). We get to the gate with more than enough time -- boarding hasn’t been called yet. So while we made the 40-minute connection, the question now was -- would the checked luggage make it? As we were queuing to board, I looked out the terminal window. There’s our plane, and there, next to the baggage loader, was Irene’s and Claire’s luggage -- stationary, not rolling along like in that YouTube video. A very good sign, but there wasn’t anybody loading luggage. As I walk up to board, I tap one of the KLM guys standing around. Pointing out the window, I say “See those bags on the tarmac? Those are ours. It would be great if they made it onto this plane.” He laughed -- him a bit more than me. I was happy to see them appear on the EDI baggage carousel.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’m thinking that I need another carry-on bag; something between my maximum legal size 22-incher and my leather duffel overnighter. On that BRU-EDI trip, I carried my 22-incher on, but not without agents at Brussels and Amsterdam challenging me, even after showing them it fit in their baggage sizer. A few weeks after that trip, KLM added an <a href=\"https://news.klm.com/klms-augmented-reality-hand-baggage-check-now-available-in-messenger/\">augmented reality baggage sizer</a> to their iPhone app. You fire up the app, point your iPhone camera at your bag and the app overlays a properly sized rectangle over your bag. If your bag is within the rectangle, you’re good to go. Would’ve been easier -- and much cooler -- than slamming my bag into those metal sizers, but somehow, with those gate agents, I don’t think the outcome would’ve been any different.</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, one last thing from that trip. The concierge lounges in both the Copenhagen Marriott and the London St Pancras Renaissance had prominent “rules” signs at their entrances, and one of those rules was a ban on “fitness clothes”. Now, this wasn’t a big deal on this trip because I was on vacation, and wasn’t toting work-out gear. My normal program when I’m on business travel is to get up before 6, work out, go straight to the lounge in my “fitness gear” for some breakfast while cooling down, then head back to my room to shower, change, and head out. Having to separate the cool down from breakfast would add 15-20 minutes to what is an already tight morning routine. So I hope that rule doesn’t spread to the US lounges. The rest of the rules seemed pretty reasonable, though one -- no wearing a bathrobe in the lounge -- seemed a bit superfluous. I’ve never seen someone walk into a concierge lounge in a bathrobe… until in Copenhagen at 3 in the afternoon with it not looking like there was anything on under the robe. So, OK, I’m now completely on-board with the no robe rule.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> or our new <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a> at travelcommons -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — Emma by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/50905 Ft: Martijn de Boer</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Restaurant Karma</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Casey Milch sent me a note a few weeks back -- “Greetings. Love the podcast. I know you mention frequent trips to Charlottesville and I’m finding myself there every six weeks for work myself now. Any restaurant suggestions?”</li>\r\n 	<li>One of the compensations for getting on an airplane just about every week is that you get to try a lot of restaurants. Now, in the last episode, we talked about the downside of that -- rapid waistline expansion -- but if you’re thoughtful about it, and you like trying different food (I hate the word “foodie”), business travel has its benefits. I sent Casey a few recommendations -- Fitzroy, a meat place -- burger, double pork chop, fried chicken -- on the Main Street pedestrian mall; Lampo, a small Neapolitan pizza place with a big wood oven that is -- I forgot to tell Casey this -- a 5-minute walk from Champion Brewing Company’s taproom; and The Alley Light, a speakeasy in an small alcove (a bit too short to be a proper alley) with no sign though there is a light over the door, that took 3 tries to find the first time in the pouring rain, which led to the question “How many consultants does it take to work Google Maps”. Putting the list together for Casey reminded me that we hadn’t been to Alley Light in a while, so we ate there last Tuesday night -- found it on the first try this time -- and had roasted bone marrow, pork rillette, duck confit -- oh, and some carrots. So much for thoughtfulness.</li>\r\n 	<li>Charlottesville punches above its weight for good restaurants, maybe because of University of Virginia. The 2 ½ years I spent in New Orleans was one of definitely one of my food high points, especially when crawfish were in season. 3 months in Portland, OR was fun with the food truck scene, and of course, it is ground-zero for the craft beer explosion. Stays in Manhattan, San Francisco, and London were that much more enjoyable with someone else picking up the dinner tab. Indeed, in San Francisco, I used to stay in different hotels so I could try different neighborhood joints.</li>\r\n 	<li>But karma always seeks balance, and for all these great food locations, there have been other, let’s say, less-than-stunning places. Dover, OH -- about 30 miles south of Canton -- had, when I was doing a project there -- two places to eat -- an Arby’s and the lunch counter of the Walmart knock-off. And the Walmart knock-off was the better of the two. Oldsmar, FL was a bit too far outside of Tampa for us to head in for dinner every night, so the near-by Buffalo Wild Wings - B-Dubs - and Applebee’s were our best shots. And downtown Detroit in the early 2000’s, working, eating, and sleeping in the urban fortress that is the Renaissance Center was brutally monotonous.</li>\r\n 	<li>But even when in London and New York, we weren’t splurging on big meals every night. We have reasonable expense budgets that we have to live within. So again, we find balance -- one night we’re underspending at a dive (but good) pizza-by-the-slice joint, so that the next night, we eat at nice place. Some guys will extend balancing act to travel -- sucking up the inconvenience of a cheaper connecting flight to pay for better meals. One colleague told me -- “I’ll happily travel cheap to eat great food”</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — Astral Travel by Astral (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Astral/44282</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Hospitality Mentality</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Nowadays, it seems that most hotels have got their front desk training pretty well down. I can’t remember the last time I hit an indifferent front desk person when checking in. And given the number of different hotels I stay in, it leads me to the conclusion that this, what I call, a hospitality mentality is a key part of their training, because, based on every other retail experience I have, I know I wouldn’t naturally run into this many nice people in a row. Not that I have a problem with this. It’s nice whenever I’m dragging myself into a hotel late because of flight delays or whatever, that the person checking me in is pleasant, wants to take care of me, walks out from behind the desk give me my key and to point me to the elevators, and seems genuinely concerned about my well-being. Even in hotels that otherwise are a bit “meh”, I find that my standard TripAdvisor review says “But the service was great.”</li>\r\n 	<li>Which is a huge contrast with the typical service I get at a restaurant where I would expect a hospitality mentality, but am surprised when I get it. Last Sunday night, Irene and I were overnighting in London on our way back from St Andrews, and walked to an Indian restaurant, <a href=\"http://www.dishoom.com/kings-cross/\">Dishoom</a>, up behind King’s Cross station. There was a queue outside the restaurant, typical for a popular place. A guy came out with an iPad, took our name, and told us it would be about a 30 minute wait. That was fine, we wanted a drink before dinner anyhow. They give us a pager -- again, typical stuff -- but now it gets a bit different. Instead of pointing us to a scrum around a bar, someone escorts us to two open seats, asks if the seats are OK for us, and right behind her was a waitress to take our order. Right at about 30 minutes, as we’re finishing our drinks, the pager goes off. We’re collecting our stuff to head back to the hostess stand when a guy walks over to us -- the same guy who took our name in line -- took our glasses and walked us to our table, chatting along the way -- where are you from, Oh I have friends in Chicago, how long are you in London…. We get to the table, but before we sit down, he asks us “Is this table OK for you?”</li>\r\n 	<li>I can’t remember the last time a busy restaurant asked me if I was happy with the table. Normally, the hostess expects you to be happy she actually seated you. The food was good, but what really impressed me about Dishoom that here was a big, mass-service restaurant with a hospitality mentality. Easy to do at a small place, or a Michelin-starred restaurant (though don’t get me started about French Laundry), but here, in London, a place not necessarily known for great customer service, they had it nailed. Oh, and the chicken curry -- they nailed that too.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #145</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and now on <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_144.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #145 — Restaurant Karma;','','inherit','closed','closed','','2138-revision-v1','','','2018-10-06 20:16:07','2018-10-07 01:16:07','',2138,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/10/06/2138-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2144,1,'2018-10-06 20:16:40','2018-10-07 01:16:40','[caption id=\"attachment_2141\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/IMG_0031.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2141\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/IMG_0031-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> How Much Extra For A Plate?[/caption]\r\n\r\nBack in front of the mic after 12 days of skipping across northern Europe -- Copenhagen, Brussels, and Scotland. In this episode, we get nostalgic about outside airports in California, talk about how a hospitality mentality is pervasive in hotels but not in restaurants, missing customer service responses from <a href=\"http://united.com\">United Airlines</a> and <a href=\"http://marriott.com\">Marriott</a>, and European perspectives about Chicago.  All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_144.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n<iframe src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/500700135&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"></iframe><!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #145:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL after 3 weeks of “normal” travel -- no vacation, no international travel, just a couple of trips to Charlottesville, VA on sandwiching a quick shot down to Dallas. And no delays. And empty seats beside me. Indeed, I even scored an upgrade on the late United flight from IAD to ORD, the long leg of one of my flights home from Charlottesville. Feels like we’re at the start of maybe a 6-week travel lull between the final end of summer vacations and the early starts of Thanksgiving travel.</li>\r\n 	<li>There was a bit of drama around the Charlottesville trip in the middle of September. I had to fly out Sunday night -- the weekend that Hurricane Florence hit the Carolina coast. The storm track forecast had Florence plowing west through the Carolinas and then taking a right hand turn at the Appalachians and heading north over Virginia. The question for me -- when would it make the turn; would my Sunday flight make it through before or after the turn or would Florence be in my way on Sunday? Thursday night and Friday, I spent a bit of time hitting the Refresh button on the <a href=\"https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/\">Nat’l Hurricane Center’s website</a>. By Friday, Florence had dropped a couple of category levels and slowed down, and by Saturday, I could see that my Sunday flight would beat Florence to Charlottesville. It was a smooth flight that Sunday, though Monday was a bit wet.</li>\r\n 	<li>Going through TSA Pre-Check in ORD that Sunday night, I watched a guy use the electronic boarding pass on his Apple Watch. It looked a bit awkward, and if you think about it, it’s understandable. Boarding pass readers face up; you put your boarding pass or phone face down on them to read. But a watch is on face up on the top of your wrist. So the guy ends up standing on his toes and twisting his arm around to get his Apple Watch face down on the reader. You’d think he would’ve shifted to his phone after that, but I saw him twist himself up again about 30 minutes later when boarding his flight. Seems like it would’ve been easier to spin the watch on his wrist so it was facing down -- at least until Apple fires up the old Steve Jobs distortion field to convince airports to reorient all their readers for the convenience of Apple Watch users.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- Dub the Uke by Kara Square (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mindmapthat/53340 Ft: DJ Vadim</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul class=\"\">\r\n 	<li>Allan Marko, a long-time listener and even longer-time friend, sent me an <a href=\"http://www.patentlyapple.com/patently-apple/2018/09/apple-salesforce-are-working-marriott-international-to-bring-homepods-to-hotel-rooms-to-assist-guests-with-services.html\">article</a> that dove into an interesting part of Apple’s new partnership with Salesforce. The two of them are working with Marriott to put Siri in hotel rooms. You could ask Siri to turn up the heat, order room service, or get an Uber through an Apple HomePod in the room. That’s the Apple piece of it. The Salesforce piece lets Siri remember what you asked her, say your room temperature, at the next Marriott. Useful or creepy? And how do you make sure you wipe Siri’s memory before the next guest checks into the room so you can’t ask her things like “Hey Siri, tell me all about the last guest that was here...” or “Order me the same sandwich the last guy ordered”. I dunno. I don’t even like using these new Enseo TVs to log into my own Netflix account, let alone having Marriott listening to me through a HomePod and remembering everything I mutter. Some guys are making a nice living selling shutters that you can stick over your laptop webcam. Are earplugs for hotel HomePods the next thing?</li>\r\n 	<li>In the<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/09/15/podcast-144-outside-airports-hospitality-mentality/\"> last episode</a>, I mentioned flying SAS from Chicago to Copenhagen. It was an odd schedule -- leaving Chicago around 10pm, arriving Copenhagen after 1 in the afternoon. Leaving that late and having a long taxi, I fell asleep before we left the ground, and before putting my phone in Airplane mode. I woke up, I dunno, an hour or so later, looked at my phone for the time, and noticed some new e-mails. Huh? That’s weird. And then I noticed that my phone didn’t say “No Service”; it was connected to some cellular service, which turned out to be SAS’s in-flight cellular service. And as opposed to in-flight WiFi which you usually have to log into, my iPhone automatically started roaming on the SAS cellular service, that then continued to check/pull e-mail for a couple of hours until I flipped it to airplane mode. I got my AT&amp;T mobile bill a couple of weeks back and ended up with a $25 roaming charge for those half-dozen meaningless e-mails. A pain, but not too painful. Unlike the guy four years ago who <a href=\"https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/11/18/that-1200-in-flight-wifi-bill-was-terrifyingly-real/\">rang up a $1,200 WiFi bill</a> on Singapore Air when he fell asleep with his data still connected.</li>\r\n 	<li>On the third leg of that trip, going from BRU to EDI, our best option was KLM through AMS. I’ve been in and out and through Schiphol a number of times over the past 20-some odd years and have always liked it. Nothing flashy, but it works -- not too big, reasonable facilities. Booking this BRU-EDI trip on the KLM website, I had two options -- a tight 40-min connection or a 2-hr one. While I don’t mind Schiphol, I wasn’t looking to make an afternoon of it. So I broke one of my cardinal travel rules -- never book a connection shorter than an hour -- and booked the 40-min connection, knowing that we had a back-up if it didn’t work out. One factor I didn’t completely think through was that we’d have to cross the Schengen border during those 40 minutes too. The first leg -- Brussels to Amsterdam -- was within Schengen so it was just like an domestic US flight -- no passport control, no customs. But in Schiphol, we had switch concourses and go through passport control because the UK is outside of Schengen. We made it through, though, with time to spare because - we walked real fast; like I said before, Schiphol isn’t that big, so switching concourses wasn’t a long walk; but most importantly, my wife spotted the “short connection” line at passport control. We had gotten in the regular line, but then we saw on a display screen that our EDI flight was classified a “short connection”, so we switched to the much shorter line -- I earned a “Hey” from a security guard when I ducked under the tape -- and quickly passed through what was a well-staffed and brisk passport control line (Munich Airport, you could take some lessons here). We get to the gate with more than enough time -- boarding hasn’t been called yet. So while we made the 40-minute connection, the question now was -- would the checked luggage make it? As we were queuing to board, I looked out the terminal window. There’s our plane, and there, next to the baggage loader, was Irene’s and Claire’s luggage -- stationary, not rolling along like in that YouTube video. A very good sign, but there wasn’t anybody loading luggage. As I walk up to board, I tap one of the KLM guys standing around. Pointing out the window, I say “See those bags on the tarmac? Those are ours. It would be great if they made it onto this plane.” He laughed -- him a bit more than me. I was happy to see them appear on the EDI baggage carousel.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’m thinking that I need another carry-on bag; something between my maximum legal size 22-incher and my leather duffel overnighter. On that BRU-EDI trip, I carried my 22-incher on, but not without agents at Brussels and Amsterdam challenging me, even after showing them it fit in their baggage sizer. A few weeks after that trip, KLM added an <a href=\"https://news.klm.com/klms-augmented-reality-hand-baggage-check-now-available-in-messenger/\">augmented reality baggage sizer</a> to their iPhone app. You fire up the app, point your iPhone camera at your bag and the app overlays a properly sized rectangle over your bag. If your bag is within the rectangle, you’re good to go. Would’ve been easier -- and much cooler -- than slamming my bag into those metal sizers, but somehow, with those gate agents, I don’t think the outcome would’ve been any different.</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, one last thing from that trip. The concierge lounges in both the Copenhagen Marriott and the London St Pancras Renaissance had prominent “rules” signs at their entrances, and one of those rules was a ban on “fitness clothes”. Now, this wasn’t a big deal on this trip because I was on vacation, and wasn’t toting work-out gear. My normal program when I’m on business travel is to get up before 6, work out, go straight to the lounge in my “fitness gear” for some breakfast while cooling down, then head back to my room to shower, change, and head out. Having to separate the cool down from breakfast would add 15-20 minutes to what is an already tight morning routine. So I hope that rule doesn’t spread to the US lounges. The rest of the rules seemed pretty reasonable, though one -- no wearing a bathrobe in the lounge -- seemed a bit superfluous. I’ve never seen someone walk into a concierge lounge in a bathrobe… until in Copenhagen at 3 in the afternoon with it not looking like there was anything on under the robe. So, OK, I’m now completely on-board with the no robe rule.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> or our new <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a> at travelcommons -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — Emma by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/50905 Ft: Martijn de Boer</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Restaurant Karma</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Casey Milch sent me a note a few weeks back -- “Greetings. Love the podcast. I know you mention frequent trips to Charlottesville and I’m finding myself there every six weeks for work myself now. Any restaurant suggestions?”</li>\r\n 	<li>One of the compensations for getting on an airplane just about every week is that you get to try a lot of restaurants. Now, in the last episode, we talked about the downside of that -- rapid waistline expansion -- but if you’re thoughtful about it, and you like trying different food (I hate the word “foodie”), business travel has its benefits. I sent Casey a few recommendations -- Fitzroy, a meat place -- burger, double pork chop, fried chicken -- on the Main Street pedestrian mall; Lampo, a small Neapolitan pizza place with a big wood oven that is -- I forgot to tell Casey this -- a 5-minute walk from Champion Brewing Company’s taproom; and The Alley Light, a speakeasy in an small alcove (a bit too short to be a proper alley) with no sign though there is a light over the door, that took 3 tries to find the first time in the pouring rain, which led to the question “How many consultants does it take to work Google Maps”. Putting the list together for Casey reminded me that we hadn’t been to Alley Light in a while, so we ate there last Tuesday night -- found it on the first try this time -- and had roasted bone marrow, pork rillette, duck confit -- oh, and some carrots. So much for thoughtfulness.</li>\r\n 	<li>Charlottesville punches above its weight for good restaurants, maybe because of University of Virginia. The 2 ½ years I spent in New Orleans was one of definitely one of my food high points, especially when crawfish were in season. 3 months in Portland, OR was fun with the food truck scene, and of course, it is ground-zero for the craft beer explosion. Stays in Manhattan, San Francisco, and London were that much more enjoyable with someone else picking up the dinner tab. Indeed, in San Francisco, I used to stay in different hotels so I could try different neighborhood joints.</li>\r\n 	<li>But karma always seeks balance, and for all these great food locations, there have been other, let’s say, less-than-stunning places. Dover, OH -- about 30 miles south of Canton -- had, when I was doing a project there -- two places to eat -- an Arby’s and the lunch counter of the Walmart knock-off. And the Walmart knock-off was the better of the two. Oldsmar, FL was a bit too far outside of Tampa for us to head in for dinner every night, so the near-by Buffalo Wild Wings - B-Dubs - and Applebee’s were our best shots. And downtown Detroit in the early 2000’s, working, eating, and sleeping in the urban fortress that is the Renaissance Center was brutally monotonous.</li>\r\n 	<li>But even when in London and New York, we weren’t splurging on big meals every night. We have reasonable expense budgets that we have to live within. So again, we find balance -- one night we’re underspending at a dive (but good) pizza-by-the-slice joint, so that the next night, we eat at nice place. Some guys will extend balancing act to travel -- sucking up the inconvenience of a cheaper connecting flight to pay for better meals. One colleague told me -- “I’ll happily travel cheap to eat great food”</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — Astral Travel by Astral (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Astral/44282</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>xxx</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Nowadays, i</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #145</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and now on <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_144.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #145 — Restaurant Karma;','','inherit','closed','closed','','2138-revision-v1','','','2018-10-06 20:16:40','2018-10-07 01:16:40','',2138,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/10/06/2138-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2145,1,'2018-10-07 14:19:51','2018-10-07 19:19:51','[caption id=\"attachment_2141\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/IMG_0031.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2141\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/IMG_0031-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> How Much Extra For A Plate?[/caption]\r\n\r\nBack in front of the mic after 12 days of skipping across northern Europe -- Copenhagen, Brussels, and Scotland. In this episode, we get nostalgic about outside airports in California, talk about how a hospitality mentality is pervasive in hotels but not in restaurants, missing customer service responses from <a href=\"http://united.com\">United Airlines</a> and <a href=\"http://marriott.com\">Marriott</a>, and European perspectives about Chicago.  All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_144.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n<iframe src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/500700135&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"></iframe><!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #145:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL after 3 weeks of “normal” travel -- no vacation, no international travel, just a couple of trips to Charlottesville, VA on sandwiching a quick shot down to Dallas. And no delays. And empty seats beside me. Indeed, I even scored an upgrade on the late United flight from IAD to ORD, the long leg of one of my flights home from Charlottesville. Feels like we’re at the start of maybe a 6-week travel lull between the final end of summer vacations and the early starts of Thanksgiving travel.</li>\r\n 	<li>There was a bit of drama around the Charlottesville trip in the middle of September. I had to fly out Sunday night -- the weekend that Hurricane Florence hit the Carolina coast. The storm track forecast had Florence plowing west through the Carolinas and then taking a right hand turn at the Appalachians and heading north over Virginia. The question for me -- when would it make the turn; would my Sunday flight make it through before or after the turn or would Florence be in my way on Sunday? Thursday night and Friday, I spent a bit of time hitting the Refresh button on the <a href=\"https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/\">Nat’l Hurricane Center’s website</a>. By Friday, Florence had dropped a couple of category levels and slowed down, and by Saturday, I could see that my Sunday flight would beat Florence to Charlottesville. It was a smooth flight that Sunday, though Monday was a bit wet.</li>\r\n 	<li>Going through TSA Pre-Check in ORD that Sunday night, I watched a guy use the electronic boarding pass on his Apple Watch. It looked a bit awkward, and if you think about it, it’s understandable. Boarding pass readers face up; you put your boarding pass or phone face down on them to read. But a watch is on face up on the top of your wrist. So the guy ends up standing on his toes and twisting his arm around to get his Apple Watch face down on the reader. You’d think he would’ve shifted to his phone after that, but I saw him twist himself up again about 30 minutes later when boarding his flight. Seems like it would’ve been easier to spin the watch on his wrist so it was facing down -- at least until Apple fires up the old Steve Jobs distortion field to convince airports to reorient all their readers for the convenience of Apple Watch users.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- Dub the Uke by Kara Square (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mindmapthat/53340 Ft: DJ Vadim</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul class=\"\">\r\n 	<li>Allan Marko, a long-time listener and even longer-time friend, sent me an <a href=\"http://www.patentlyapple.com/patently-apple/2018/09/apple-salesforce-are-working-marriott-international-to-bring-homepods-to-hotel-rooms-to-assist-guests-with-services.html\">article</a> that dove into an interesting part of Apple’s new partnership with Salesforce. The two of them are working with Marriott to put Siri in hotel rooms. You could ask Siri to turn up the heat, order room service, or get an Uber through an Apple HomePod in the room. That’s the Apple piece of it. The Salesforce piece lets Siri remember what you asked her, say your room temperature, at the next Marriott. Useful or creepy? And how do you make sure you wipe Siri’s memory before the next guest checks into the room so you can’t ask her things like “Hey Siri, tell me all about the last guest that was here...” or “Order me the same sandwich the last guy ordered”. I dunno. I don’t even like using these new Enseo TVs to log into my own Netflix account, let alone having Marriott listening to me through a HomePod and remembering everything I mutter. Some guys are making a nice living selling shutters that you can stick over your laptop webcam. Are earplugs for hotel HomePods the next thing?</li>\r\n 	<li>In the<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/09/15/podcast-144-outside-airports-hospitality-mentality/\"> last episode</a>, I mentioned flying SAS from Chicago to Copenhagen. It was an odd schedule -- leaving Chicago around 10pm, arriving Copenhagen after 1 in the afternoon. Leaving that late and having a long taxi, I fell asleep before we left the ground, and before putting my phone in Airplane mode. I woke up, I dunno, an hour or so later, looked at my phone for the time, and noticed some new e-mails. Huh? That’s weird. And then I noticed that my phone didn’t say “No Service”; it was connected to some cellular service, which turned out to be SAS’s in-flight cellular service. And as opposed to in-flight WiFi which you usually have to log into, my iPhone automatically started roaming on the SAS cellular service, that then continued to check/pull e-mail for a couple of hours until I flipped it to airplane mode. I got my AT&amp;T mobile bill a couple of weeks back and ended up with a $25 roaming charge for those half-dozen meaningless e-mails. A pain, but not too painful. Unlike the guy four years ago who <a href=\"https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/11/18/that-1200-in-flight-wifi-bill-was-terrifyingly-real/\">rang up a $1,200 WiFi bill</a> on Singapore Air when he fell asleep with his data still connected.</li>\r\n 	<li>On the third leg of that trip, going from BRU to EDI, our best option was KLM through AMS. I’ve been in and out and through Schiphol a number of times over the past 20-some odd years and have always liked it. Nothing flashy, but it works -- not too big, reasonable facilities. Booking this BRU-EDI trip on the KLM website, I had two options -- a tight 40-min connection or a 2-hr one. While I don’t mind Schiphol, I wasn’t looking to make an afternoon of it. So I broke one of my cardinal travel rules -- never book a connection shorter than an hour -- and booked the 40-min connection, knowing that we had a back-up if it didn’t work out. One factor I didn’t completely think through was that we’d have to cross the Schengen border during those 40 minutes too. The first leg -- Brussels to Amsterdam -- was within Schengen so it was just like an domestic US flight -- no passport control, no customs. But in Schiphol, we had switch concourses and go through passport control because the UK is outside of Schengen. We made it through, though, with time to spare because - we walked real fast; like I said before, Schiphol isn’t that big, so switching concourses wasn’t a long walk; but most importantly, my wife spotted the “short connection” line at passport control. We had gotten in the regular line, but then we saw on a display screen that our EDI flight was classified a “short connection”, so we switched to the much shorter line -- I earned a “Hey” from a security guard when I ducked under the tape -- and quickly passed through what was a well-staffed and brisk passport control line (Munich Airport, you could take some lessons here). We get to the gate with more than enough time -- boarding hasn’t been called yet. So while we made the 40-minute connection, the question now was -- would the checked luggage make it? As we were queuing to board, I looked out the terminal window. There’s our plane, and there, next to the baggage loader, was Irene’s and Claire’s luggage -- stationary, not rolling along like in that YouTube video. A very good sign, but there wasn’t anybody loading luggage. As I walk up to board, I tap one of the KLM guys standing around. Pointing out the window, I say “See those bags on the tarmac? Those are ours. It would be great if they made it onto this plane.” He laughed -- him a bit more than me. I was happy to see them appear on the EDI baggage carousel.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’m thinking that I need another carry-on bag; something between my maximum legal size 22-incher and my leather duffel overnighter. On that BRU-EDI trip, I carried my 22-incher on, but not without agents at Brussels and Amsterdam challenging me, even after showing them it fit in their baggage sizer. A few weeks after that trip, KLM added an <a href=\"https://news.klm.com/klms-augmented-reality-hand-baggage-check-now-available-in-messenger/\">augmented reality baggage sizer</a> to their iPhone app. You fire up the app, point your iPhone camera at your bag and the app overlays a properly sized rectangle over your bag. If your bag is within the rectangle, you’re good to go. Would’ve been easier -- and much cooler -- than slamming my bag into those metal sizers, but somehow, with those gate agents, I don’t think the outcome would’ve been any different.</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, one last thing from that trip. The concierge lounges in both the Copenhagen Marriott and the London St Pancras Renaissance had prominent “rules” signs at their entrances, and one of those rules was a ban on “fitness clothes”. Now, this wasn’t a big deal on this trip because I was on vacation, and wasn’t toting work-out gear. My normal program when I’m on business travel is to get up before 6, work out, go straight to the lounge in my “fitness gear” for some breakfast while cooling down, then head back to my room to shower, change, and head out. Having to separate the cool down from breakfast would add 15-20 minutes to what is an already tight morning routine. So I hope that rule doesn’t spread to the US lounges. The rest of the rules seemed pretty reasonable, though one -- no wearing a bathrobe in the lounge -- seemed a bit superfluous. I’ve never seen someone walk into a concierge lounge in a bathrobe… until in Copenhagen at 3 in the afternoon with it not looking like there was anything on under the robe. So, OK, I’m now completely on-board with the no robe rule.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> or our new <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a> at travelcommons -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — Emma by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/50905 Ft: Martijn de Boer</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Restaurant Karma</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Casey Milch sent me a note a few weeks back -- “Greetings. Love the podcast. I know you mention frequent trips to Charlottesville and I’m finding myself there every six weeks for work myself now. Any restaurant suggestions?”</li>\r\n 	<li>One of the compensations for getting on an airplane just about every week is that you get to try a lot of restaurants. Now, in the last episode, we talked about the downside of that -- rapid waistline expansion -- but if you’re thoughtful about it, and you like trying different food (I hate the word “foodie”), business travel has its benefits. I sent Casey a few recommendations -- Fitzroy, a meat place -- burger, double pork chop, fried chicken -- on the Main Street pedestrian mall; Lampo, a small Neapolitan pizza place with a big wood oven that is -- I forgot to tell Casey this -- a 5-minute walk from Champion Brewing Company’s taproom; and The Alley Light, a speakeasy in an small alcove (a bit too short to be a proper alley) with no sign though there is a light over the door, that took 3 tries to find the first time in the pouring rain, which led to the question “How many consultants does it take to work Google Maps”. Putting the list together for Casey reminded me that we hadn’t been to Alley Light in a while, so we ate there last Tuesday night -- found it on the first try this time -- and had roasted bone marrow, pork rillette, duck confit -- oh, and some carrots. So much for thoughtfulness.</li>\r\n 	<li>Charlottesville punches above its weight for good restaurants, maybe because of University of Virginia. The 2 ½ years I spent in New Orleans was one of definitely one of my food high points, especially when crawfish were in season. 3 months in Portland, OR was fun with the food truck scene, and of course, it is ground-zero for the craft beer explosion. Stays in Manhattan, San Francisco, and London were that much more enjoyable with someone else picking up the dinner tab. Indeed, in San Francisco, I used to stay in different hotels so I could try different neighborhood joints.</li>\r\n 	<li>But karma always seeks balance, and for all these great food locations, there have been other, let’s say, less-than-stunning places. Dover, OH -- about 30 miles south of Canton -- had, when I was doing a project there -- two places to eat -- an Arby’s and the lunch counter of the Walmart knock-off. And the Walmart knock-off was the better of the two. Oldsmar, FL was a bit too far outside of Tampa for us to head in for dinner every night, so the near-by Buffalo Wild Wings - B-Dubs - and Applebee’s were our best shots. And downtown Detroit in the early 2000’s, working, eating, and sleeping in the urban fortress that is the Renaissance Center was brutally monotonous.</li>\r\n 	<li>But even when in London and New York, we weren’t splurging on big meals every night. We have reasonable expense budgets that we have to live within. So again, we find balance -- one night we’re underspending at a dive (but good) pizza-by-the-slice joint, so that the next night, we eat at nice place. Some guys will extend balancing act to travel -- sucking up the inconvenience of a cheaper connecting flight to pay for better meals. One colleague told me -- “I’ll happily travel cheap to eat great food”</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — Astral Travel by Astral (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Astral/44282</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Hotel Breakfasts</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Growing up, those of us of a certain age heard that breakfast is the most important meal of the day -- usually from a cereal commercial. I mentioned a bit early earlier my morning hotel pattern -- work out, hit the concierge lounge for breakfast and then get on with my day. Most lounge breakfasts are pretty industrial -- chafing dishes of stiff scrambled pasteurized eggs, thin slices of oven-baked bacon, vat of oatmeal, a few cartons of yogurt, and a bowl of fruit. It gets the day started. I may be judging it a bit harshly though. My daughter Claire loves those scrambled eggs. Go a little more upscale and you’ll see maybe a platter of smoked salmon, some sliced meats and cheeses, bran muffins…</li>\r\n 	<li>So when I see something different, it gets my attention. Like roasted green chiles in New Mexico, Albuquerque and Santa Fe, to season those scrambled eggs, or the King Cake at the Canal St Sheraton in New Orleans during Mardi Gras season. Now, it’s not the best king cake I’ve had - and my wife has dragged me through a king cake tasting crawl there, so I speak with some knowledge -- but I look forward to it whenever I’m there in the spring. I remember one morning I walked in -- no king cake! I found one of the staff -- “you guys stop doing king cake?!” “No! I didn’t know we were out.” And they immediately brought out a new one. Crisis averted!</li>\r\n 	<li>It doesn’t even have to be anything big. The Copenhagen Marriott lounge had rhubarb juice. As a kid, my mother made pies from rhubarb growing in our backyard, that I think her mother had planted. So something different and nostalgic all in one. Was it life-changing? Not necessarily, but I’d never seen it before.</li>\r\n 	<li>A little more life-changing was the bowl of bun bo hue that we got for breakfast when staying at a local, non-chain, hotel in Hue in central Vietnam. Kind of a spicier, funkier version of the pho you see in the US, and tougher to find here. Not like any hotel breakfast I’d had, and I immediately switched my breakfast choice over to it or pho for the rest of the trip.\r\nBack in May, when I was in Pune, we stayed at a Marriott Courtyard, a chain which, as I’ve complained about before in prior episodes, doesn’t have a concierge lounge but they had a nice breakfast buffet with what I guess is a typical two-track system -- one side with the usual Western breakfast foods, and the other side with Indian food. The waiter pointed me to the omelette station. I was about ready to order when I noticed another station to my right with what looked like a super-sized crepe griddle. “What’s that?” I asked. “Oh, that’s to make dosas.” “Cool, I have one of those.” “Do you know what a dosa is?” “Nope, but I’ll take one, however it normally comes.” I watched him make this foot-wide diameter stiff crepe, rolled it up and put it, sticking up out of a cup of some sort of stew or curry. I walk back to the table. Everyone else has eggs, bacon, toast, arranged horizontally on their plate. I’m the only one with a vertical breakfast. But I liked that. Kinda flying the flag for something different at breakfast .</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #145</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and now on <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_144.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #145 — Restaurant Karma;','','inherit','closed','closed','','2138-revision-v1','','','2018-10-07 14:19:51','2018-10-07 19:19:51','',2138,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/10/07/2138-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2146,1,'2018-10-07 14:24:07','2018-10-07 19:24:07','[caption id=\"attachment_2141\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/IMG_0031.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2141\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/IMG_0031-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> How Much Extra For A Plate?[/caption]\r\n\r\nBack in front of the mic after 12 days of skipping across northern Europe -- Copenhagen, Brussels, and Scotland. In this episode, we get nostalgic about outside airports in California, talk about how a hospitality mentality is pervasive in hotels but not in restaurants, missing customer service responses from <a href=\"http://united.com\">United Airlines</a> and <a href=\"http://marriott.com\">Marriott</a>, and European perspectives about Chicago.  All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_144.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n<iframe src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/500700135&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"></iframe><!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #145:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL after 3 weeks of “normal” travel -- no vacation, no international travel, just a couple of trips to Charlottesville, VA on sandwiching a quick shot down to Dallas. And no delays. And empty seats beside me. Indeed, I even scored an upgrade on the late United flight from IAD to ORD, the long leg of one of my flights home from Charlottesville. Feels like we’re at the start of maybe a 6-week travel lull between the final end of summer vacations and the early starts of Thanksgiving travel.</li>\r\n 	<li>There was a bit of drama around the Charlottesville trip in the middle of September. I had to fly out Sunday night -- the weekend that Hurricane Florence hit the Carolina coast. The storm track forecast had Florence plowing west through the Carolinas and then taking a right hand turn at the Appalachians and heading north over Virginia. The question for me -- when would it make the turn; would my Sunday flight make it through before or after the turn or would Florence be in my way on Sunday? Thursday night and Friday, I spent a bit of time hitting the Refresh button on the <a href=\"https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/\">Nat’l Hurricane Center’s website</a>. By Friday, Florence had dropped a couple of category levels and slowed down, and by Saturday, I could see that my Sunday flight would beat Florence to Charlottesville. It was a smooth flight that Sunday, though Monday was a bit wet.</li>\r\n 	<li>Going through TSA Pre-Check in ORD that Sunday night, I watched a guy use the electronic boarding pass on his Apple Watch. It looked a bit awkward, and if you think about it, it’s understandable. Boarding pass readers face up; you put your boarding pass or phone face down on them to read. But a watch is on face up on the top of your wrist. So the guy ends up standing on his toes and twisting his arm around to get his Apple Watch face down on the reader. You’d think he would’ve shifted to his phone after that, but I saw him twist himself up again about 30 minutes later when boarding his flight. Seems like it would’ve been easier to spin the watch on his wrist so it was facing down -- at least until Apple fires up the old Steve Jobs distortion field to convince airports to reorient all their readers for the convenience of Apple Watch users.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- Dub the Uke by Kara Square (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mindmapthat/53340 Ft: DJ Vadim</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul class=\"\">\r\n 	<li>Allan Marko, a long-time listener and even longer-time friend, sent me an <a href=\"http://www.patentlyapple.com/patently-apple/2018/09/apple-salesforce-are-working-marriott-international-to-bring-homepods-to-hotel-rooms-to-assist-guests-with-services.html\">article</a> that dove into an interesting part of Apple’s new partnership with Salesforce. The two of them are working with Marriott to put Siri in hotel rooms. You could ask Siri to turn up the heat, order room service, or get an Uber through an Apple HomePod in the room. That’s the Apple piece of it. The Salesforce piece lets Siri remember what you asked her, say your room temperature, at the next Marriott. Useful or creepy? And how do you make sure you wipe Siri’s memory before the next guest checks into the room so you can’t ask her things like “Hey Siri, tell me all about the last guest that was here...” or “Order me the same sandwich the last guy ordered”. I dunno. I don’t even like using these new Enseo TVs to log into my own Netflix account, let alone having Marriott listening to me through a HomePod and remembering everything I mutter. Some guys are making a nice living selling shutters that you can stick over your laptop webcam. Are earplugs for hotel HomePods the next thing?</li>\r\n 	<li>In the<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/09/15/podcast-144-outside-airports-hospitality-mentality/\"> last episode</a>, I mentioned flying SAS from Chicago to Copenhagen. It was an odd schedule -- leaving Chicago around 10pm, arriving Copenhagen after 1 in the afternoon. Leaving that late and having a long taxi, I fell asleep before we left the ground, and before putting my phone in Airplane mode. I woke up, I dunno, an hour or so later, looked at my phone for the time, and noticed some new e-mails. Huh? That’s weird. And then I noticed that my phone didn’t say “No Service”; it was connected to some cellular service, which turned out to be SAS’s in-flight cellular service. And as opposed to in-flight WiFi which you usually have to log into, my iPhone automatically started roaming on the SAS cellular service, that then continued to check/pull e-mail for a couple of hours until I flipped it to airplane mode. I got my AT&amp;T mobile bill a couple of weeks back and ended up with a $25 roaming charge for those half-dozen meaningless e-mails. A pain, but not too painful. Unlike the guy four years ago who <a href=\"https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/11/18/that-1200-in-flight-wifi-bill-was-terrifyingly-real/\">rang up a $1,200 WiFi bill</a> on Singapore Air when he fell asleep with his data still connected.</li>\r\n 	<li>On the third leg of that trip, going from BRU to EDI, our best option was KLM through AMS. I’ve been in and out and through Schiphol a number of times over the past 20-some odd years and have always liked it. Nothing flashy, but it works -- not too big, reasonable facilities. Booking this BRU-EDI trip on the KLM website, I had two options -- a tight 40-min connection or a 2-hr one. While I don’t mind Schiphol, I wasn’t looking to make an afternoon of it. So I broke one of my cardinal travel rules -- never book a connection shorter than an hour -- and booked the 40-min connection, knowing that we had a back-up if it didn’t work out. One factor I didn’t completely think through was that we’d have to cross the Schengen border during those 40 minutes too. The first leg -- Brussels to Amsterdam -- was within Schengen so it was just like an domestic US flight -- no passport control, no customs. But in Schiphol, we had switch concourses and go through passport control because the UK is outside of Schengen. We made it through, though, with time to spare because - we walked real fast; like I said before, Schiphol isn’t that big, so switching concourses wasn’t a long walk; but most importantly, my wife spotted the “short connection” line at passport control. We had gotten in the regular line, but then we saw on a display screen that our EDI flight was classified a “short connection”, so we switched to the much shorter line -- I earned a “Hey” from a security guard when I ducked under the tape -- and quickly passed through what was a well-staffed and brisk passport control line (Munich Airport, you could take some lessons here). We get to the gate with more than enough time -- boarding hasn’t been called yet. So while we made the 40-minute connection, the question now was -- would the checked luggage make it? As we were queuing to board, I looked out the terminal window. There’s our plane, and there, next to the baggage loader, was Irene’s and Claire’s luggage -- stationary, not rolling along like in that YouTube video. A very good sign, but there wasn’t anybody loading luggage. As I walk up to board, I tap one of the KLM guys standing around. Pointing out the window, I say “See those bags on the tarmac? Those are ours. It would be great if they made it onto this plane.” He laughed -- him a bit more than me. I was happy to see them appear on the EDI baggage carousel.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’m thinking that I need another carry-on bag; something between my maximum legal size 22-incher and my leather duffel overnighter. On that BRU-EDI trip, I carried my 22-incher on, but not without agents at Brussels and Amsterdam challenging me, even after showing them it fit in their baggage sizer. A few weeks after that trip, KLM added an <a href=\"https://news.klm.com/klms-augmented-reality-hand-baggage-check-now-available-in-messenger/\">augmented reality baggage sizer</a> to their iPhone app. You fire up the app, point your iPhone camera at your bag and the app overlays a properly sized rectangle over your bag. If your bag is within the rectangle, you’re good to go. Would’ve been easier -- and much cooler -- than slamming my bag into those metal sizers, but somehow, with those gate agents, I don’t think the outcome would’ve been any different.</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, one last thing from that trip. The concierge lounges in both the Copenhagen Marriott and the London St Pancras Renaissance had prominent “rules” signs at their entrances, and one of those rules was a ban on “fitness clothes”. Now, this wasn’t a big deal on this trip because I was on vacation, and wasn’t toting work-out gear. My normal program when I’m on business travel is to get up before 6, work out, go straight to the lounge in my “fitness gear” for some breakfast while cooling down, then head back to my room to shower, change, and head out. Having to separate the cool down from breakfast would add 15-20 minutes to what is an already tight morning routine. So I hope that rule doesn’t spread to the US lounges. The rest of the rules seemed pretty reasonable, though one -- no wearing a bathrobe in the lounge -- seemed a bit superfluous. I’ve never seen someone walk into a concierge lounge in a bathrobe… until in Copenhagen at 3 in the afternoon with it not looking like there was anything on under the robe. So, OK, I’m now completely on-board with the no robe rule.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> or our new <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a> at travelcommons -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — Emma by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/50905 Ft: Martijn de Boer</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Restaurant Karma</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Casey Milch sent me a note a few weeks back -- “Greetings. Love the podcast. I know you mention frequent trips to Charlottesville and I’m finding myself there every six weeks for work myself now. Any restaurant suggestions?”</li>\r\n 	<li>One of the compensations for getting on an airplane just about every week is that you get to try a lot of restaurants. Now, in the last episode, we talked about the downside of that -- rapid waistline expansion -- but if you’re thoughtful about it, and you like trying different food (I hate the word “foodie”), business travel has its benefits. I sent Casey a few recommendations -- Fitzroy, a meat place -- burger, double pork chop, fried chicken -- on the Main Street pedestrian mall; Lampo, a small Neapolitan pizza place with a big wood oven that is -- I forgot to tell Casey this -- a 5-minute walk from Champion Brewing Company’s taproom; and The Alley Light, a speakeasy in an small alcove (a bit too short to be a proper alley) with no sign though there is a light over the door, that took 3 tries to find the first time in the pouring rain, which led to the question “How many consultants does it take to work Google Maps”. Putting the list together for Casey reminded me that we hadn’t been to Alley Light in a while, so we ate there last Tuesday night -- found it on the first try this time -- and had roasted bone marrow, pork rillette, duck confit -- oh, and some carrots. So much for thoughtfulness.</li>\r\n 	<li>Charlottesville punches above its weight for good restaurants, maybe because of University of Virginia. The 2 ½ years I spent in New Orleans was one of definitely one of my food high points, especially when crawfish were in season. 3 months in Portland, OR was fun with the food truck scene, and of course, it is ground-zero for the craft beer explosion. Stays in Manhattan, San Francisco, and London were that much more enjoyable with someone else picking up the dinner tab. Indeed, in San Francisco, I used to stay in different hotels so I could try different neighborhood joints.</li>\r\n 	<li>But karma always seeks balance, and for all these great food locations, there have been other, let’s say, less-than-stunning places. Dover, OH -- about 30 miles south of Canton -- had, when I was doing a project there -- two places to eat -- an Arby’s and the lunch counter of the Walmart knock-off. And the Walmart knock-off was the better of the two. Oldsmar, FL was a bit too far outside of Tampa for us to head in for dinner every night, so the near-by Buffalo Wild Wings - B-Dubs - and Applebee’s were our best shots. And downtown Detroit in the early 2000’s, working, eating, and sleeping in the urban fortress that is the Renaissance Center was brutally monotonous.</li>\r\n 	<li>But even when in London and New York, we weren’t splurging on big meals every night. We have reasonable expense budgets that we have to live within. So again, we find balance -- one night we’re underspending at a dive (but good) pizza-by-the-slice joint, so that the next night, we eat at nice place. Some guys will extend balancing act to travel -- sucking up the inconvenience of a cheaper connecting flight to pay for better meals. One colleague told me -- “I’ll happily travel cheap to eat great food”</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — Astral Travel by Astral (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Astral/44282</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Hotel Breakfasts</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Growing up, those of us of a certain age heard that breakfast is the most important meal of the day -- usually from a cereal commercial. I mentioned a bit early earlier my morning hotel pattern -- work out, hit the concierge lounge for breakfast and then get on with my day. Most lounge breakfasts are pretty industrial -- chafing dishes of stiff scrambled pasteurized eggs, thin slices of oven-baked bacon, vat of oatmeal, a few cartons of yogurt, and a bowl of fruit. It gets the day started. I may be judging it a bit harshly though. My daughter Claire loves those scrambled eggs. Go a little more upscale and you’ll see maybe a platter of smoked salmon, some sliced meats and cheeses, bran muffins…</li>\r\n 	<li>So when I see something different, it gets my attention. Like roasted green chiles in New Mexico, Albuquerque and Santa Fe, to season those scrambled eggs, or the King Cake at the Canal St Sheraton in New Orleans during Mardi Gras season. Now, it’s not the best king cake I’ve had - and my wife has dragged me through a king cake tasting crawl there, so I speak with some knowledge -- but I look forward to it whenever I’m there in the spring. I remember one morning I walked in -- no king cake! I found one of the staff -- “you guys stop doing king cake?!” “No! I didn’t know we were out.” And they immediately brought out a new one. Crisis averted!</li>\r\n 	<li>It doesn’t even have to be anything big. The Copenhagen Marriott lounge had rhubarb juice. As a kid, my mother made pies from rhubarb growing in our backyard, that I think her mother had planted. So something different and nostalgic all in one. Was it life-changing? Not necessarily, but I’d never seen it before.</li>\r\n 	<li>A little more life-changing was the bowl of bun bo hue that we got for breakfast when staying at a local, non-chain, hotel in Hue in central Vietnam. Kind of a spicier, funkier version of the pho you see in the US, and tougher to find here. Not like any hotel breakfast I’d had, and I immediately switched my breakfast choice over to it or pho for the rest of the trip.\r\nBack in May, when I was in Pune, we stayed at a Marriott Courtyard, a chain which, as I’ve complained about before in prior episodes, doesn’t have a concierge lounge but they had a nice breakfast buffet with what I guess is a typical two-track system -- one side with the usual Western breakfast foods, and the other side with Indian food. The waiter pointed me to the omelette station. I was about ready to order when I noticed another station to my right with what looked like a super-sized crepe griddle. “What’s that?” I asked. “Oh, that’s to make dosas.” “Cool, I have one of those.” “Do you know what a dosa is?” “Nope, but I’ll take one, however it normally comes.” I watched him make this foot-wide diameter stiff crepe, rolled it up and put it, sticking up out of a cup of some sort of stew or curry. I walk back to the table. Everyone else has eggs, bacon, toast, arranged horizontally on their plate. I’m the only one with a vertical breakfast. But I liked that. Kinda flying the flag for something different at breakfast .</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #145</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and now on <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_144.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #145 — Restaurant Karma; Hotel Breakfasts','','inherit','closed','closed','','2138-revision-v1','','','2018-10-07 14:24:07','2018-10-07 19:24:07','',2138,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/10/07/2138-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2147,1,'2018-10-08 19:32:06','2018-10-09 00:32:06','[caption id=\"attachment_2141\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/IMG_0031.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2141\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/IMG_0031-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> How Much Extra For A Plate?[/caption]\r\n\r\nJust regular domestic business travel since the last podcast, trying to dodge Hurricane Florence to get back to Charlottesville.  Thinking back to last month\'s European travels, we talk about a tight connection through Amsterdam and some odd concierge lounge rules, which gets me thinking about hotel breakfasts. And a listener request for restaurant recommendations gets me thinking about the balance of visiting good and not-so-good restaurant towns. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_144.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n<iframe src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/511557468&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"></iframe><!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #145:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL after 3 weeks of “normal” travel -- no vacation, no international travel, just a couple of trips to Charlottesville, VA on sandwiching a quick shot down to Dallas. And no delays. And empty seats beside me. Indeed, I even scored an upgrade on the late United flight from IAD to ORD, the long leg of one of my flights home from Charlottesville. Feels like we’re at the start of maybe a 6-week travel lull between the final end of summer vacations and the early starts of Thanksgiving travel.</li>\r\n 	<li>There was a bit of drama around the Charlottesville trip in the middle of September. I had to fly out Sunday night -- the weekend that Hurricane Florence hit the Carolina coast. The storm track forecast had Florence plowing west through the Carolinas and then taking a right hand turn at the Appalachians and heading north over Virginia. The question for me -- when would it make the turn; would my Sunday flight make it through before or after the turn or would Florence be in my way on Sunday? Thursday night and Friday, I spent a bit of time hitting the Refresh button on the <a href=\"https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/\">Nat’l Hurricane Center’s website</a>. By Friday, Florence had dropped a couple of category levels and slowed down, and by Saturday, I could see that my Sunday flight would beat Florence to Charlottesville. It was a smooth flight that Sunday, though Monday was a bit wet.</li>\r\n 	<li>Going through TSA Pre-Check in ORD that Sunday night, I watched a guy use the electronic boarding pass on his Apple Watch. It looked a bit awkward, and if you think about it, it’s understandable. Boarding pass readers face up; you put your boarding pass or phone face down on them to read. But a watch is on face up on the top of your wrist. So the guy ends up standing on his toes and twisting his arm around to get his Apple Watch face down on the reader. You’d think he would’ve shifted to his phone after that, but I saw him twist himself up again about 30 minutes later when boarding his flight. Seems like it would’ve been easier to spin the watch on his wrist so it was facing down -- at least until Apple fires up the old Steve Jobs distortion field to convince airports to reorient all their readers for the convenience of Apple Watch users.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- Dub the Uke by Kara Square (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mindmapthat/53340 Ft: DJ Vadim</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul class=\"\">\r\n 	<li>Allan Marko, a long-time listener and even longer-time friend, sent me an <a href=\"http://www.patentlyapple.com/patently-apple/2018/09/apple-salesforce-are-working-marriott-international-to-bring-homepods-to-hotel-rooms-to-assist-guests-with-services.html\">article</a> that dove into an interesting part of Apple’s new partnership with Salesforce. The two of them are working with Marriott to put Siri in hotel rooms. You could ask Siri to turn up the heat, order room service, or get an Uber through an Apple HomePod in the room. That’s the Apple piece of it. The Salesforce piece lets Siri remember what you asked her, say your room temperature, at the next Marriott. Useful or creepy? And how do you make sure you wipe Siri’s memory before the next guest checks into the room so you can’t ask her things like “Hey Siri, tell me all about the last guest that was here...” or “Order me the same sandwich the last guy ordered”. I dunno. I don’t even like using these new Enseo TVs to log into my own Netflix account, let alone having Marriott listening to me through a HomePod and remembering everything I mutter. Some guys are making a nice living selling shutters that you can stick over your laptop webcam. Are earplugs for hotel HomePods the next thing?</li>\r\n 	<li>In the<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/09/15/podcast-144-outside-airports-hospitality-mentality/\"> last episode</a>, I mentioned flying SAS from Chicago to Copenhagen. It was an odd schedule -- leaving Chicago around 10pm, arriving Copenhagen after 1 in the afternoon. Leaving that late and having a long taxi, I fell asleep before we left the ground, and before putting my phone in Airplane mode. I woke up, I dunno, an hour or so later, looked at my phone for the time, and noticed some new e-mails. Huh? That’s weird. And then I noticed that my phone didn’t say “No Service”; it was connected to some cellular service, which turned out to be SAS’s in-flight cellular service. And as opposed to in-flight WiFi which you usually have to log into, my iPhone automatically started roaming on the SAS cellular service, that then continued to check/pull e-mail for a couple of hours until I flipped it to airplane mode. I got my AT&amp;T mobile bill a couple of weeks back and ended up with a $25 roaming charge for those half-dozen meaningless e-mails. A pain, but not too painful. Unlike the guy four years ago who <a href=\"https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/11/18/that-1200-in-flight-wifi-bill-was-terrifyingly-real/\">rang up a $1,200 WiFi bill</a> on Singapore Air when he fell asleep with his data still connected.</li>\r\n 	<li>On the third leg of that trip, going from BRU to EDI, our best option was KLM through AMS. I’ve been in and out and through Schiphol a number of times over the past 20-some odd years and have always liked it. Nothing flashy, but it works -- not too big, reasonable facilities. Booking this BRU-EDI trip on the KLM website, I had two options -- a tight 40-min connection or a 2-hr one. While I don’t mind Schiphol, I wasn’t looking to make an afternoon of it. So I broke one of my cardinal travel rules -- never book a connection shorter than an hour -- and booked the 40-min connection, knowing that we had a back-up if it didn’t work out. One factor I didn’t completely think through was that we’d have to cross the Schengen border during those 40 minutes too. The first leg -- Brussels to Amsterdam -- was within Schengen so it was just like an domestic US flight -- no passport control, no customs. But in Schiphol, we had switch concourses and go through passport control because the UK is outside of Schengen. We made it through, though, with time to spare because - we walked real fast; like I said before, Schiphol isn’t that big, so switching concourses wasn’t a long walk; but most importantly, my wife spotted the “short connection” line at passport control. We had gotten in the regular line, but then we saw on a display screen that our EDI flight was classified a “short connection”, so we switched to the much shorter line -- I earned a “Hey” from a security guard when I ducked under the tape -- and quickly passed through what was a well-staffed and brisk passport control line (Munich Airport, you could take some lessons here). We get to the gate with more than enough time -- boarding hasn’t been called yet. So while we made the 40-minute connection, the question now was -- would the checked luggage make it? As we were queuing to board, I looked out the terminal window. There’s our plane, and there, next to the baggage loader, was Irene’s and Claire’s luggage -- stationary, not rolling along like in that YouTube video. A very good sign, but there wasn’t anybody loading luggage. As I walk up to board, I tap one of the KLM guys standing around. Pointing out the window, I say “See those bags on the tarmac? Those are ours. It would be great if they made it onto this plane.” He laughed -- him a bit more than me. I was happy to see them appear on the EDI baggage carousel.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’m thinking that I need another carry-on bag; something between my maximum legal size 22-incher and my leather duffel overnighter. On that BRU-EDI trip, I carried my 22-incher on, but not without agents at Brussels and Amsterdam challenging me, even after showing them it fit in their baggage sizer. A few weeks after that trip, KLM added an <a href=\"https://news.klm.com/klms-augmented-reality-hand-baggage-check-now-available-in-messenger/\">augmented reality baggage sizer</a> to their iPhone app. You fire up the app, point your iPhone camera at your bag and the app overlays a properly sized rectangle over your bag. If your bag is within the rectangle, you’re good to go. Would’ve been easier -- and much cooler -- than slamming my bag into those metal sizers, but somehow, with those gate agents, I don’t think the outcome would’ve been any different.</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, one last thing from that trip. The concierge lounges in both the Copenhagen Marriott and the London St Pancras Renaissance had prominent “rules” signs at their entrances, and one of those rules was a ban on “fitness clothes”. Now, this wasn’t a big deal on this trip because I was on vacation, and wasn’t toting work-out gear. My normal program when I’m on business travel is to get up before 6, work out, go straight to the lounge in my “fitness gear” for some breakfast while cooling down, then head back to my room to shower, change, and head out. Having to separate the cool down from breakfast would add 15-20 minutes to what is an already tight morning routine. So I hope that rule doesn’t spread to the US lounges. The rest of the rules seemed pretty reasonable, though one -- no wearing a bathrobe in the lounge -- seemed a bit superfluous. I’ve never seen someone walk into a concierge lounge in a bathrobe… until in Copenhagen at 3 in the afternoon with it not looking like there was anything on under the robe. So, OK, I’m now completely on-board with the no robe rule.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> or our new <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a> at travelcommons -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — Emma by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/50905 Ft: Martijn de Boer</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Restaurant Karma</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Casey Milch sent me a note a few weeks back -- “Greetings. Love the podcast. I know you mention frequent trips to Charlottesville and I’m finding myself there every six weeks for work myself now. Any restaurant suggestions?”</li>\r\n 	<li>One of the compensations for getting on an airplane just about every week is that you get to try a lot of restaurants. Now, in the last episode, we talked about the downside of that -- rapid waistline expansion -- but if you’re thoughtful about it, and you like trying different food (I hate the word “foodie”), business travel has its benefits. I sent Casey a few recommendations -- Fitzroy, a meat place -- burger, double pork chop, fried chicken -- on the Main Street pedestrian mall; Lampo, a small Neapolitan pizza place with a big wood oven that is -- I forgot to tell Casey this -- a 5-minute walk from Champion Brewing Company’s taproom; and The Alley Light, a speakeasy in an small alcove (a bit too short to be a proper alley) with no sign though there is a light over the door, that took 3 tries to find the first time in the pouring rain, which led to the question “How many consultants does it take to work Google Maps”. Putting the list together for Casey reminded me that we hadn’t been to Alley Light in a while, so we ate there last Tuesday night -- found it on the first try this time -- and had roasted bone marrow, pork rillette, duck confit -- oh, and some carrots. So much for thoughtfulness.</li>\r\n 	<li>Charlottesville punches above its weight for good restaurants, maybe because of University of Virginia. The 2 ½ years I spent in New Orleans was one of definitely one of my food high points, especially when crawfish were in season. 3 months in Portland, OR was fun with the food truck scene, and of course, it is ground-zero for the craft beer explosion. Stays in Manhattan, San Francisco, and London were that much more enjoyable with someone else picking up the dinner tab. Indeed, in San Francisco, I used to stay in different hotels so I could try different neighborhood joints.</li>\r\n 	<li>But karma always seeks balance, and for all these great food locations, there have been other, let’s say, less-than-stunning places. Dover, OH -- about 30 miles south of Canton -- had, when I was doing a project there -- two places to eat -- an Arby’s and the lunch counter of the Walmart knock-off. And the Walmart knock-off was the better of the two. Oldsmar, FL was a bit too far outside of Tampa for us to head in for dinner every night, so the near-by Buffalo Wild Wings - B-Dubs - and Applebee’s were our best shots. And downtown Detroit in the early 2000’s, working, eating, and sleeping in the urban fortress that is the Renaissance Center was brutally monotonous.</li>\r\n 	<li>But even when in London and New York, we weren’t splurging on big meals every night. We have reasonable expense budgets that we have to live within. So again, we find balance -- one night we’re underspending at a dive (but good) pizza-by-the-slice joint, so that the next night, we eat at nice place. Some guys will extend balancing act to travel -- sucking up the inconvenience of a cheaper connecting flight to pay for better meals. One colleague told me -- “I’ll happily travel cheap to eat great food”</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — Astral Travel by Astral (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Astral/44282</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Hotel Breakfasts</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Growing up, those of us of a certain age heard that breakfast is the most important meal of the day -- usually from a cereal commercial. I mentioned a bit early earlier my morning hotel pattern -- work out, hit the concierge lounge for breakfast and then get on with my day. Most lounge breakfasts are pretty industrial -- chafing dishes of stiff scrambled pasteurized eggs, thin slices of oven-baked bacon, vat of oatmeal, a few cartons of yogurt, and a bowl of fruit. It gets the day started. I may be judging it a bit harshly though. My daughter Claire loves those scrambled eggs. Go a little more upscale and you’ll see maybe a platter of smoked salmon, some sliced meats and cheeses, bran muffins…</li>\r\n 	<li>So when I see something different, it gets my attention. Like roasted green chiles in New Mexico, Albuquerque and Santa Fe, to season those scrambled eggs, or the King Cake at the Canal St Sheraton in New Orleans during Mardi Gras season. Now, it’s not the best king cake I’ve had - and my wife has dragged me through a king cake tasting crawl there, so I speak with some knowledge -- but I look forward to it whenever I’m there in the spring. I remember one morning I walked in -- no king cake! I found one of the staff -- “you guys stop doing king cake?!” “No! I didn’t know we were out.” And they immediately brought out a new one. Crisis averted!</li>\r\n 	<li>It doesn’t even have to be anything big. The Copenhagen Marriott lounge had rhubarb juice. As a kid, my mother made pies from rhubarb growing in our backyard, that I think her mother had planted. So something different and nostalgic all in one. Was it life-changing? Not necessarily, but I’d never seen it before.</li>\r\n 	<li>A little more life-changing was the bowl of bun bo hue that we got for breakfast when staying at a local, non-chain, hotel in Hue in central Vietnam. Kind of a spicier, funkier version of the pho you see in the US, and tougher to find here. Not like any hotel breakfast I’d had, and I immediately switched my breakfast choice over to it or pho for the rest of the trip.\r\nBack in May, when I was in Pune, we stayed at a Marriott Courtyard, a chain which, as I’ve complained about before in prior episodes, doesn’t have a concierge lounge but they had a nice breakfast buffet with what I guess is a typical two-track system -- one side with the usual Western breakfast foods, and the other side with Indian food. The waiter pointed me to the omelette station. I was about ready to order when I noticed another station to my right with what looked like a super-sized crepe griddle. “What’s that?” I asked. “Oh, that’s to make dosas.” “Cool, I have one of those.” “Do you know what a dosa is?” “Nope, but I’ll take one, however it normally comes.” I watched him make this foot-wide diameter stiff crepe, rolled it up and put it, sticking up out of a cup of some sort of stew or curry. I walk back to the table. Everyone else has eggs, bacon, toast, arranged horizontally on their plate. I’m the only one with a vertical breakfast. But I liked that. Kinda flying the flag for something different at breakfast .</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #145</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and now on <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_144.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #145 — Restaurant Karma; Hotel Breakfasts','','inherit','closed','closed','','2138-revision-v1','','','2018-10-08 19:32:06','2018-10-09 00:32:06','',2138,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/10/08/2138-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2148,1,'2018-10-08 19:37:39','2018-10-09 00:37:39','<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/IMG_1145.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1009\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/IMG_1145-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>Returning to the mic after 10 days of food, wine, wind, rain, and snow in the north of Spain. I talk about traveling in Spain, and with my guest Coleman Collins about how to make the best coffee in your hotel room.  All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_139.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_139.mp3\"]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #139:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. Just got back Sunday night from 10 days in Spain -- about 4 days each in Madrid and San Sebastian, with a couple of days in the Rioja wine region in between. A friend on the East Coast sent me a note while I was in Spain -- “Good week to be out of town; we got whacked with yet another dump of snow.” Not quite. It’s been a cold Spring in Europe and Spain has been no different. Our first weekend in Madrid was in the upper 30’s/low 40’s with a mix of rain and wet snow. Which turned into just snow as we drove up to Rioja. Some of that drive reminded me of I-70 in the Colorado Rockies -- go into a tunnel with fine weather; come out of it to blowing snow. Having said that, it was nothing like the 7 or 9 or 14 inches that Winter Storm Toby dropped on the East Coast last week. And even with lousy weather, the food and the wine in Spain makes it hard to sustain any sort of cranky attitude, though it shorten up our pintxos crawl through Logroño.</li>\r\n 	<li>We flew Iberia to Madrid because: a) they have a non-stop flight from Chicago and b) as I mentioned <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">a few episodes ago</a>, I was finally able to burn off some of those Avios points that had been collecting cobwebs in my BA account. I decided to try Iberia’s Premium Economy service on the flight over. Most airlines are using this sorta “tweener” service to capture revenue from people willing to pay a bit more for some comfort, but aren’t willing to go the 2-300% Business Class uplift out of their own pocket. And it was truly a “tweener” service -- about 5 rows between the Business and regular Coach cabins, and coach seats with spacing and recline somewhere between domestic First Class and, say, United’s Economy Plus. The meal service was the same as Economy, but they served us first, and they gave us a little amenities kit with just the essentials -- earplugs, eye mask, socks, and a toothbrush. It was as-advertised -- Coach with a bit more space, which made for better napping on the 8-hour flight over. I’ve talked in past episodes that I really question the value-for-money with Business Class on Transatlantic flights, but this tweener class was a reasonable deal.</li>\r\n 	<li>The deeper recline of the Premium Economy seat also makes it easier for you to stay in your space when you sleep. On the way back, I was in regular Coach because -- well, I’m cheap and didn’t need to sleep. But the guy next to me did. He nodded off as soon as we left the ground, which meant he didn’t recline his seat, which meant that he started to list to port, toward my shoulder. This guy looked like he was the younger brother of Dos Equis’ “Most Interesting Man”. But there was no amount of interesting that was going to have him sleeping on my shoulder. Just as he was about to touch down on my shoulder, I gave our seat row a bit of a shake -- some single row turbulence. He startled awake, realized what he was doing, and immediately sat straight up. Stay upright, my friend.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">P.I.H.E. by Budapest BluesBoy (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hepepe/26362 Ft: Inna Barmash - Zhurbin</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Just a quick addendum to the luggage thread we’ve been running over the last couple of episodes. In the last episode Jerry Sarfati talked about downsizing from a 22 to a 20-inch carry-on bag because of the hassles he’d gotten from American Airlines gate agents. I mentioned then that I haven’t had any problems from American, and didn’t get pulled over on my Chicago-to-Madrid Iberia flight. Just goes to show you how much discretion gate agents have. I didn’t test it on the way back home -- 2 bottles bought in Rioja tasting rooms and a tin of olive oil tipped me way over the liquid limit.</li>\r\n 	<li>The EU’s no roaming rules also let me skip what had become our first day of European vacation ritual of burning a couple of hours in a phone store buying local SIM cards for our mobile phones. Instead, the week before we left, I fired up EE’s iPhone app and topped up our UK SIMs. Somewhere over the Bay of Biscay, after my breakfast tray was cleared, I swapped out my AT&amp;T SIM. Once on the ground, I turned on my phone and was good to go. And because the whole family has EE SIMs, it was easy to call each other when we got separated on our pintxos crawls. I know that everyone just messages nowadays, but I’m still one of those knuckledraggers who occasionally finds talking quicker than texting.</li>\r\n 	<li>While in Madrid, I also added to my subway “tap-n-go” card collection for €2.50 -- or about $3 at current exchange rates. The interesting twist on Madrid’s system is that you can tap up to 4 people through the turnstile with a single card, so I only had to buy one tap card for the whole family. I’d load it up with 10 rides -- which seemed to be the only option -- we’d line up behind one turnstile, then tap through and pass it back. Getting out, we just walked through the turnstile since the Madrid Metro fare system seems based on zones rather than start and ending stations. Just adding it to the growing stack...</li>\r\n 	<li>In past episodes, I’ve talked about how I’ve come to value the service I get from Hertz with President’s Club status. And so I rented a car from Hertz in Madrid for our drive up to Rioja for wine tasting and then over to San Sebastian and back. On Tuesday morning, we headed to Atocha train station, found the Hertz counter, and then I sent my family to get breakfast because I knew from past experience renting cars in Spain, that I was in for 30 minutes of hard upselling. It didn’t matter that I had already booked on-line at Hertz.com and selected the options I wanted, I was going to get sold. Mel, the Hertz agent, spoke excellent American English -- all the right terms, slang, colloquialisms. Telling me the rate I got was “crazy low” -- I’d used our corporate rate plus cashed in some Hertz points -- because I didn’t have any insurance. And then came the big push -- writing down big liability numbers, huge damage possibilities -- even though a lot of this was covered by our corporate rate and the credit card. After this, there was the upsell for the car -- did you know you booked a manual, can you drive a manual -- because, well, no Americans know how to work a clutch. I just smiled and nodded, and let Mel work through his spiel -- I had kinda hoped that my status would save me, but nope, there was no short-circuiting this. After he was done, I said “No” to everything. I finally got the keys just as my family finished breakfast, and then off we went. I would’ve been frustrated if I hadn’t expected it and budgeted time for it. Instead, I was just slightly weary. I’m glad my wife got me a coffee to-go.</li>\r\n 	<li>And in the seeming obligatory craft beer segment of TravelCommons, having the rental car let me hit the Basqueland Brewing Project taproom outside of San Sebastian. It had a very American feel to it -- winding through a light industrial area, finding the place by spotting the picnic tables in front of the open loading door, walking past the foosball table and shelves holding 20-kg sacks of malt, the fluorescent pink cord blocking access to the brewing area. And for good reason, the place is owned by 3 Americans. One of them was working the taps when we arrived. He quickly flipped from Spanish to English when we ordered. Originally from Baltimore, he came over 6 years ago when his wife wanted to move back home. Nice guy, good beer.</li>\r\n 	<li>Rob Cheshire, a TravelCommons listener and Untappd friend, hit the comments section on the last episode -- first, to egg me on about my comment in the last episode to do a One City, Five Taprooms layover video, and then about taprooms near Wrigley Field when he comes in to see the Reds play the Cubs. I managed to string together a 6-taproom crawl; he may need to break that up into a couple of rounds.</li>\r\n 	<li>And, to Rob’s first question, I actually will do a taproom layover video, but instead of basing it out of ORD like my last layover video, I’m going to do this one from MDW -- give those Southwest fliers some love. It’ll let me hit 4 taprooms that have opened in the past couple of years in what can only be described as the “post-industrial” landscape of Chicago’s near south side. It should be fun. Working on the scheduling now. Will shoot it in April. With the additional production time video requires, it might not get up until May, but I’ll keep everyone posted</li>\r\n 	<li>One last thing -- last week I tweeted out a link to a pretty rigorous study from the FlyHealthy Research Team out of Emory University in Atlanta about passenger movements on transcontinental flights and what it means for the spread of respiratory diseases. The team took 10 flights, logging passenger movements, taking air samples, and swabs of hard surfaces. I won’t go through the whole study -- I’ll put a <a href=\"http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/03/13/1711611115\">link</a> in the show notes for those who want to read it, which I encourage you to do; it’s very readable as scientific papers go -- but the main takeaways for me were: a) you really only have to be concerned about the people immediately in front, behind, and next to you -- a one-row radius; b) the people wiping down their trays, armrests, and seat belt buckles with Purell Wipes are wasting their time; and c) if you’re really worried, get a window seat in the front part of the plane and don’t leave it for the entire flight (which, as a side benefit, will also endear you to your row mates). As one who has called planes “flying petri dishes”, I was pleasantly surprised by the Emory team’s findings.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">~aether theories~ by Vidian (c) copyright 2018 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Vidian/57398 Ft: Gurdonark, White-throated Sparrow</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Brewing the Best Hotel Room Coffee</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Interview with Coleman Collins. His blog post on brewing hotel room coffee is <a href=\"https://roadwarrior.blog/hotel-room-coffee/\">here</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Tools of the Trade by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/56512 Ft: Abstract Audio, Mr Yesterday, Martijn de Boer, Speck</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Notes from Spain</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>This was our 4th spring trip to Spain. Our first trip we hit Madrid and Barcelona, the usual suspects. The next trip, we headed south to Andalucia -- Córdoba, Granada, Ronda, Seville -- during Semana Santa, Holy Week, and saw penitential processions every day in every town and city we visited, culminating in Holy Thursday night outside of Seville Cathedral. The last trip, in 2016, we headed back down South, but even further, taking a boat across the Straits of Gibraltar to Tangier, Morocco. For this trip, we gave up warm weather for some new territory -- Rioja and the Basque Country.</li>\r\n 	<li>As I said at the top of the show, for me, Spain is about food and wine. There’s certainly culture -- the Semana Santa processions are phenomenal cultural events, standing in front of the huge canvas of Picasso’s Guernica in the Reina Sofia in Madrid, the Mezquita in Cordoba,... -- but it’s the food and wine that keep bringing us back.</li>\r\n 	<li>On our first trip to Granada, we were staying in a Marriott -- maybe one of their AC properties -- in the middle of town. A great building; it had been a convent at one time. There was an interior courtyard; we had a nightcap there one night. 4 glasses of wine at the hotel bar -- figuring $12-15/glass, I’m waiting for a 40 euro tab. It was 12 euros -- I love this country.</li>\r\n 	<li>The pintxos crawl was the food center of this trip north, first in Logroño and then in San Sebastian, walking from bar to bar -- a glass of wine and a bite at each. It was a good mix of food. In Logroño, we started at a couple of dive-ier, more local places that focused on just one pintxos -- sauteed mushrooms at one, ground lamb sandwich at the next, the meat seared on a flat grill behind the bar, and then served on a bun with a great tasting green sauce -- and serving local Rioja wines, pulling the bottles from a bucket at the end of the bar. We then swung into a distinctly higher end place, complete with a Michelin sticker on the front door; more variety of food -- seared red tuna, pickled white anchovies, grilled octopus -- and the next level up of Rioja wines. Later in the week, in San Sebastian, when the weather turned a bit better, we could see the crawl pick up volume in the pedestrian streets of the old town; people still bundled up a bit, but taking their wine outside, and willing to walk to the next place rather than hunkering down for a couple of courses in the warmth.</li>\r\n 	<li>Cider is big in the Basque Country, though it’s drier, not as sweet as you get in the US or the UK. And during cider season -- January through April -- the siderias, the cider houses in the hills outside of San Sebastian, open up to serve cider streamed directly from the tap of huge chestnut wood barrels into your glass, and then the glass of the person behind you,... and a traditional menu of salt-cod omelette, fresh cod fried with peppers and onions, and damn big grilled t-bones served either standing up or at communal tables. We ended up sharing a meal with a busload of folks from just over the border in France. A couple dozen of us lined up as a worker manned the tap -- letting a thin stream of cider out. We lined up our wide-mouthed plastic tumblers about three feet away to impart a bit of fizz to the three fingers of cider that we caught before moving out of the stream to let it hit the tumbler that someone was holding right below ours.</li>\r\n 	<li>For a great food country, the food at Madrid airport, though, is a bit pedestrian. So to extend our food extravaganza for one more meal, we skip the “meh” restaurants and buy a package of the top-end iberian ham -- the bellota, from the free range Iberian pigs fattening up on acorns. We can’t bring it into the US, but it’s an 8-hour flight from Madrid to Chicago. That package never makes it as far at US landfall.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #139</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_139.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #139 — Brewing Best Hotel Room Coffee; Notes from Spain','','inherit','closed','closed','','1961-revision-v1','','','2018-10-08 19:37:39','2018-10-09 00:37:39','',1961,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/10/08/1961-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2149,1,'2018-10-08 19:44:23','2018-10-09 00:44:23','[caption id=\"attachment_2141\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/IMG_0031.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2141\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/IMG_0031-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> How Much Extra For A Plate?[/caption]\r\n\r\nJust regular domestic business travel since the last podcast, trying to dodge Hurricane Florence to get back to Charlottesville.  Thinking back to last month\'s European travels, we talk about a tight connection through Amsterdam and some odd concierge lounge rules, which gets me thinking about hotel breakfasts. And a listener request for restaurant recommendations gets me thinking about the balance of visiting good and not-so-good restaurant towns. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_145.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n<iframe src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/511557468&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"></iframe><!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #145:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL after 3 weeks of “normal” travel -- no vacation, no international travel, just a couple of trips to Charlottesville, VA on sandwiching a quick shot down to Dallas. And no delays. And empty seats beside me. Indeed, I even scored an upgrade on the late United flight from IAD to ORD, the long leg of one of my flights home from Charlottesville. Feels like we’re at the start of maybe a 6-week travel lull between the final end of summer vacations and the early starts of Thanksgiving travel.</li>\r\n 	<li>There was a bit of drama around the Charlottesville trip in the middle of September. I had to fly out Sunday night -- the weekend that Hurricane Florence hit the Carolina coast. The storm track forecast had Florence plowing west through the Carolinas and then taking a right hand turn at the Appalachians and heading north over Virginia. The question for me -- when would it make the turn; would my Sunday flight make it through before or after the turn or would Florence be in my way on Sunday? Thursday night and Friday, I spent a bit of time hitting the Refresh button on the <a href=\"https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/\">Nat’l Hurricane Center’s website</a>. By Friday, Florence had dropped a couple of category levels and slowed down, and by Saturday, I could see that my Sunday flight would beat Florence to Charlottesville. It was a smooth flight that Sunday, though Monday was a bit wet.</li>\r\n 	<li>Going through TSA Pre-Check in ORD that Sunday night, I watched a guy use the electronic boarding pass on his Apple Watch. It looked a bit awkward, and if you think about it, it’s understandable. Boarding pass readers face up; you put your boarding pass or phone face down on them to read. But a watch is on face up on the top of your wrist. So the guy ends up standing on his toes and twisting his arm around to get his Apple Watch face down on the reader. You’d think he would’ve shifted to his phone after that, but I saw him twist himself up again about 30 minutes later when boarding his flight. Seems like it would’ve been easier to spin the watch on his wrist so it was facing down -- at least until Apple fires up the old Steve Jobs distortion field to convince airports to reorient all their readers for the convenience of Apple Watch users.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- Dub the Uke by Kara Square (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mindmapthat/53340 Ft: DJ Vadim</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul class=\"\">\r\n 	<li>Allan Marko, a long-time listener and even longer-time friend, sent me an <a href=\"http://www.patentlyapple.com/patently-apple/2018/09/apple-salesforce-are-working-marriott-international-to-bring-homepods-to-hotel-rooms-to-assist-guests-with-services.html\">article</a> that dove into an interesting part of Apple’s new partnership with Salesforce. The two of them are working with Marriott to put Siri in hotel rooms. You could ask Siri to turn up the heat, order room service, or get an Uber through an Apple HomePod in the room. That’s the Apple piece of it. The Salesforce piece lets Siri remember what you asked her, say your room temperature, at the next Marriott. Useful or creepy? And how do you make sure you wipe Siri’s memory before the next guest checks into the room so you can’t ask her things like “Hey Siri, tell me all about the last guest that was here...” or “Order me the same sandwich the last guy ordered”. I dunno. I don’t even like using these new Enseo TVs to log into my own Netflix account, let alone having Marriott listening to me through a HomePod and remembering everything I mutter. Some guys are making a nice living selling shutters that you can stick over your laptop webcam. Are earplugs for hotel HomePods the next thing?</li>\r\n 	<li>In the<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/09/15/podcast-144-outside-airports-hospitality-mentality/\"> last episode</a>, I mentioned flying SAS from Chicago to Copenhagen. It was an odd schedule -- leaving Chicago around 10pm, arriving Copenhagen after 1 in the afternoon. Leaving that late and having a long taxi, I fell asleep before we left the ground, and before putting my phone in Airplane mode. I woke up, I dunno, an hour or so later, looked at my phone for the time, and noticed some new e-mails. Huh? That’s weird. And then I noticed that my phone didn’t say “No Service”; it was connected to some cellular service, which turned out to be SAS’s in-flight cellular service. And as opposed to in-flight WiFi which you usually have to log into, my iPhone automatically started roaming on the SAS cellular service, that then continued to check/pull e-mail for a couple of hours until I flipped it to airplane mode. I got my AT&amp;T mobile bill a couple of weeks back and ended up with a $25 roaming charge for those half-dozen meaningless e-mails. A pain, but not too painful. Unlike the guy four years ago who <a href=\"https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/11/18/that-1200-in-flight-wifi-bill-was-terrifyingly-real/\">rang up a $1,200 WiFi bill</a> on Singapore Air when he fell asleep with his data still connected.</li>\r\n 	<li>On the third leg of that trip, going from BRU to EDI, our best option was KLM through AMS. I’ve been in and out and through Schiphol a number of times over the past 20-some odd years and have always liked it. Nothing flashy, but it works -- not too big, reasonable facilities. Booking this BRU-EDI trip on the KLM website, I had two options -- a tight 40-min connection or a 2-hr one. While I don’t mind Schiphol, I wasn’t looking to make an afternoon of it. So I broke one of my cardinal travel rules -- never book a connection shorter than an hour -- and booked the 40-min connection, knowing that we had a back-up if it didn’t work out. One factor I didn’t completely think through was that we’d have to cross the Schengen border during those 40 minutes too. The first leg -- Brussels to Amsterdam -- was within Schengen so it was just like an domestic US flight -- no passport control, no customs. But in Schiphol, we had switch concourses and go through passport control because the UK is outside of Schengen. We made it through, though, with time to spare because - we walked real fast; like I said before, Schiphol isn’t that big, so switching concourses wasn’t a long walk; but most importantly, my wife spotted the “short connection” line at passport control. We had gotten in the regular line, but then we saw on a display screen that our EDI flight was classified a “short connection”, so we switched to the much shorter line -- I earned a “Hey” from a security guard when I ducked under the tape -- and quickly passed through what was a well-staffed and brisk passport control line (Munich Airport, you could take some lessons here). We get to the gate with more than enough time -- boarding hasn’t been called yet. So while we made the 40-minute connection, the question now was -- would the checked luggage make it? As we were queuing to board, I looked out the terminal window. There’s our plane, and there, next to the baggage loader, was Irene’s and Claire’s luggage -- stationary, not rolling along like in that YouTube video. A very good sign, but there wasn’t anybody loading luggage. As I walk up to board, I tap one of the KLM guys standing around. Pointing out the window, I say “See those bags on the tarmac? Those are ours. It would be great if they made it onto this plane.” He laughed -- him a bit more than me. I was happy to see them appear on the EDI baggage carousel.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’m thinking that I need another carry-on bag; something between my maximum legal size 22-incher and my leather duffel overnighter. On that BRU-EDI trip, I carried my 22-incher on, but not without agents at Brussels and Amsterdam challenging me, even after showing them it fit in their baggage sizer. A few weeks after that trip, KLM added an <a href=\"https://news.klm.com/klms-augmented-reality-hand-baggage-check-now-available-in-messenger/\">augmented reality baggage sizer</a> to their iPhone app. You fire up the app, point your iPhone camera at your bag and the app overlays a properly sized rectangle over your bag. If your bag is within the rectangle, you’re good to go. Would’ve been easier -- and much cooler -- than slamming my bag into those metal sizers, but somehow, with those gate agents, I don’t think the outcome would’ve been any different.</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, one last thing from that trip. The concierge lounges in both the Copenhagen Marriott and the London St Pancras Renaissance had prominent “rules” signs at their entrances, and one of those rules was a ban on “fitness clothes”. Now, this wasn’t a big deal on this trip because I was on vacation, and wasn’t toting work-out gear. My normal program when I’m on business travel is to get up before 6, work out, go straight to the lounge in my “fitness gear” for some breakfast while cooling down, then head back to my room to shower, change, and head out. Having to separate the cool down from breakfast would add 15-20 minutes to what is an already tight morning routine. So I hope that rule doesn’t spread to the US lounges. The rest of the rules seemed pretty reasonable, though one -- no wearing a bathrobe in the lounge -- seemed a bit superfluous. I’ve never seen someone walk into a concierge lounge in a bathrobe… until in Copenhagen at 3 in the afternoon with it not looking like there was anything on under the robe. So, OK, I’m now completely on-board with the no robe rule.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> or our new <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a> at travelcommons -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — Emma by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/50905 Ft: Martijn de Boer</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Restaurant Karma</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Casey Milch sent me a note a few weeks back -- “Greetings. Love the podcast. I know you mention frequent trips to Charlottesville and I’m finding myself there every six weeks for work myself now. Any restaurant suggestions?”</li>\r\n 	<li>One of the compensations for getting on an airplane just about every week is that you get to try a lot of restaurants. Now, in the last episode, we talked about the downside of that -- rapid waistline expansion -- but if you’re thoughtful about it, and you like trying different food (I hate the word “foodie”), business travel has its benefits. I sent Casey a few recommendations -- Fitzroy, a meat place -- burger, double pork chop, fried chicken -- on the Main Street pedestrian mall; Lampo, a small Neapolitan pizza place with a big wood oven that is -- I forgot to tell Casey this -- a 5-minute walk from Champion Brewing Company’s taproom; and The Alley Light, a speakeasy in an small alcove (a bit too short to be a proper alley) with no sign though there is a light over the door, that took 3 tries to find the first time in the pouring rain, which led to the question “How many consultants does it take to work Google Maps”. Putting the list together for Casey reminded me that we hadn’t been to Alley Light in a while, so we ate there last Tuesday night -- found it on the first try this time -- and had roasted bone marrow, pork rillette, duck confit -- oh, and some carrots. So much for thoughtfulness.</li>\r\n 	<li>Charlottesville punches above its weight for good restaurants, maybe because of University of Virginia. The 2 ½ years I spent in New Orleans was one of definitely one of my food high points, especially when crawfish were in season. 3 months in Portland, OR was fun with the food truck scene, and of course, it is ground-zero for the craft beer explosion. Stays in Manhattan, San Francisco, and London were that much more enjoyable with someone else picking up the dinner tab. Indeed, in San Francisco, I used to stay in different hotels so I could try different neighborhood joints.</li>\r\n 	<li>But karma always seeks balance, and for all these great food locations, there have been other, let’s say, less-than-stunning places. Dover, OH -- about 30 miles south of Canton -- had, when I was doing a project there -- two places to eat -- an Arby’s and the lunch counter of the Walmart knock-off. And the Walmart knock-off was the better of the two. Oldsmar, FL was a bit too far outside of Tampa for us to head in for dinner every night, so the near-by Buffalo Wild Wings - B-Dubs - and Applebee’s were our best shots. And downtown Detroit in the early 2000’s, working, eating, and sleeping in the urban fortress that is the Renaissance Center was brutally monotonous.</li>\r\n 	<li>But even when in London and New York, we weren’t splurging on big meals every night. We have reasonable expense budgets that we have to live within. So again, we find balance -- one night we’re underspending at a dive (but good) pizza-by-the-slice joint, so that the next night, we eat at nice place. Some guys will extend balancing act to travel -- sucking up the inconvenience of a cheaper connecting flight to pay for better meals. One colleague told me -- “I’ll happily travel cheap to eat great food”</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — Astral Travel by Astral (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Astral/44282</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Hotel Breakfasts</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Growing up, those of us of a certain age heard that breakfast is the most important meal of the day -- usually from a cereal commercial. I mentioned a bit early earlier my morning hotel pattern -- work out, hit the concierge lounge for breakfast and then get on with my day. Most lounge breakfasts are pretty industrial -- chafing dishes of stiff scrambled pasteurized eggs, thin slices of oven-baked bacon, vat of oatmeal, a few cartons of yogurt, and a bowl of fruit. It gets the day started. I may be judging it a bit harshly though. My daughter Claire loves those scrambled eggs. Go a little more upscale and you’ll see maybe a platter of smoked salmon, some sliced meats and cheeses, bran muffins…</li>\r\n 	<li>So when I see something different, it gets my attention. Like roasted green chiles in New Mexico, Albuquerque and Santa Fe, to season those scrambled eggs, or the King Cake at the Canal St Sheraton in New Orleans during Mardi Gras season. Now, it’s not the best king cake I’ve had - and my wife has dragged me through a king cake tasting crawl there, so I speak with some knowledge -- but I look forward to it whenever I’m there in the spring. I remember one morning I walked in -- no king cake! I found one of the staff -- “you guys stop doing king cake?!” “No! I didn’t know we were out.” And they immediately brought out a new one. Crisis averted!</li>\r\n 	<li>It doesn’t even have to be anything big. The Copenhagen Marriott lounge had rhubarb juice. As a kid, my mother made pies from rhubarb growing in our backyard, that I think her mother had planted. So something different and nostalgic all in one. Was it life-changing? Not necessarily, but I’d never seen it before.</li>\r\n 	<li>A little more life-changing was the bowl of bun bo hue that we got for breakfast when staying at a local, non-chain, hotel in Hue in central Vietnam. Kind of a spicier, funkier version of the pho you see in the US, and tougher to find here. Not like any hotel breakfast I’d had, and I immediately switched my breakfast choice over to it or pho for the rest of the trip.\r\nBack in May, when I was in Pune, we stayed at a Marriott Courtyard, a chain which, as I’ve complained about before in prior episodes, doesn’t have a concierge lounge but they had a nice breakfast buffet with what I guess is a typical two-track system -- one side with the usual Western breakfast foods, and the other side with Indian food. The waiter pointed me to the omelette station. I was about ready to order when I noticed another station to my right with what looked like a super-sized crepe griddle. “What’s that?” I asked. “Oh, that’s to make dosas.” “Cool, I have one of those.” “Do you know what a dosa is?” “Nope, but I’ll take one, however it normally comes.” I watched him make this foot-wide diameter stiff crepe, rolled it up and put it, sticking up out of a cup of some sort of stew or curry. I walk back to the table. Everyone else has eggs, bacon, toast, arranged horizontally on their plate. I’m the only one with a vertical breakfast. But I liked that. Kinda flying the flag for something different at breakfast .</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #145</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and now on <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_145.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #145 — Restaurant Karma; Hotel Breakfasts','','inherit','closed','closed','','2138-revision-v1','','','2018-10-08 19:44:23','2018-10-09 00:44:23','',2138,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/10/08/2138-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
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(2165,1,'2018-11-04 20:19:43','2018-11-05 01:19:43','','iTunes','','inherit','closed','closed','','1452-revision-v1','','','2018-11-04 20:19:43','2018-11-05 01:19:43','',1452,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/11/04/1452-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2167,1,'2018-11-20 18:05:56','2018-11-20 23:05:56','[caption id=\"attachment_2168\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2168\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> But I filled up the tank[/caption]\n\nGetting this posted just in time to give you something to listen to while jammed up in Thanksgiving traffic, be it on the road or in the airports. We talk about working the angles to maximize credit card benefits, which leads me to one more story from my fall trip to Europe -- a rental car scrape that my Chase Visa card just paid off. We also talk about the Wall Street Journal\'s new ranking of US airports and compare it to Skytrax\'s international rankings. And we wrap up with my Christmas gift suggestions for the frequent traveler on your list.  All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_146.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #146:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, trying to give you something to keep you entertained? Or at least occupied as you thread through the Thanksgiving travel traffic -- be it airports, trains, or roadways -- the forecasts are for a 5% increase over last year.</li>\n 	<li>I’ve been trying to get this episode done for the past 2 weeks, but I just haven’t been able to make it happen. Since we last spoke, I’ve been in the midst of a weekly commute between Chicago and Dallas. It’s the standard consultant commute -- leaving ORD Monday at 7am, leaving DFW Thursday at 5pm -- the consulting rush hour. The lounges are packed, the Starbucks line tails way back; no matter what status, you’re in a middle seat if you don’t book 3 weeks ahead of time, and for a mere Advantage Platinum person, there’s no chance of an upgrade. I do click through American’s website to request an upgrade every week -- more for the entertainment value than any expectation of getting a seat. This week, I was #35 on the upgrade list.</li>\n 	<li>The traffic between these 2 American hubs is pretty amazing. The first week of this commute, taking the 6:30p flight back to Chicago, it was a fully-packed 787 Dreamliner. So I’m thinking -- hey, I gotta have a good shot at an upgrade on this flight, with all the first and business class seats. Nope, though I did get up to the teens on the upgrade list -- #15 to be exact. I counted myself lucky to get out of a center seat at the last minute.</li>\n 	<li>I’m not a huge fan of DFW Airport. It’s a massive, spread-out place with a $4 toll charge to just to drive out of the place. The semi-circular terminals are also spread out affairs, with 3 security checkpoints arrayed around each perimeter, only one of which has PreCheck and really not well-marked. I tweeted that out in frustration a few weeks back after trundling around from checkpoint to checkpoint. The DFW Airport Twitter account quickly came back with a <a href=\"https://www.dfwairport.com/security/\">link</a> to their website that has the location and hours of each checkpoint, with the PreCheck one bolded. Very useful. I have bookmarked on my iPhone now.</li>\n 	<li>The next day, back in Chicago, I was downtown, getting a afternoon espresso jolt at Intelligentsia Coffee, not a completely full-on hipster joint -- there no turntable playing vintage vinyl -- but they are a bit fussy about their coffee. You place your order, they ask your name, and then you mill around a bit waiting for them to “craft” your coffee. I’m scrolling through e-mail, the barista is calling out names in the background. He calls out \"Marco\". Completely on reflex, my inner child responds \"Polo\" and not quietly or under my breath. The guy sitting across from me looks up from his MacBook and starts laughing. The guy getting his coffee, Marco, apparently, turns around and gives me a slightly nasty look. Or maybe just puzzled. Or more likely a bit of both.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/indidginus-seismic/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Superstring</a></em> by Indidginus</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul class=\"\">\n 	<li>Allan Marko, a long-time listener, posted a travel story on the TravelCommons Facebook page -\n<ul>\n 	<li>I flew from SFO to MUC with a colleague last month on UAL Business Class (my first trip on a 787 - nice plane, and decent service from the UA team) We had an early morning arrival, and an hour to kill before our transportation arrived. My colleague’s 1K status couldn’t get us into the Lufthansa Arrivals Lounge for showers. I pulled up the Priority Pass app on my iPhone (membership came with my Chase Sapphire Reserve Card) and saw there was an Atlantic Lounge over in Terminal 1 that had shower facilities. We took the bus over to Terminal 1 which serves many European, Middle East, and other second-tier airlines. Pulling out my physical Priority Pass card (as opposed to the one in the app) I got both of us into the lounge and their two shower rooms. The lounge only offered the basics and needed of refresh, but we were happy to find it that morning (including the free beer!).</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Allan, thanks for that, and good on you for figuring that all out. There are so many nooks and crannies in the card benefits world. There’s real value there, but you have to think about it and dig in a bit. The last time I used my Priority Pass (which I got with my Amex Platinum card) was last summer when I was connecting through DUB on my way to London. That lounge was similar to Allan’s MUC experience -- pretty basic, a bit threadbare, but a reasonable place for a cup of tea and breakfast. My son Andrew used his Priority Pass card (also from his Chase card) to get a $28 credit at a restaurant in BOS which paid for a pre-flight meal and a couple of beers. “For the two of us, I think we were due $56 credit, but we wanted to be able to board the plane, so we cut ourselves off.” A colleague of mine told me that, in LGA, after Amex’s Centurion Lounge closed, his UA Gold status got him into the Air Canada lounge to wait out the rest of a long flight delay. “I only thought they let in Star Alliance Gold passengers for international flights, but let me in for my LGA-ORD flight.” And then there’s things like the 10 Gogo in-flight WiFi passes that I get every year with my Platinum card that I never burn through, or the $200 in annual statement credit that I think I get on UA and am always surprised when I see the charge for the in-flight tapas box reversed. And I’m reminded that I gotta pay more attention to this stuff because I hate leaving money on the table.</li>\n 	<li>I will say that there are 2 good things about doing trunk line, hub-to-hub commute vs., say, my last regular commute, between ORD and Charlottesville, VA: great flight frequency -- between AA and UA, there’s a flight at most every hour and that’s not even looking at SWA’s schedule out of Love Field; and, no RJs, no regional jets. I had forgotten how nice it is to be able to stand up straight in the aisle, let alone in the toilet. I take happiness in the small things.</li>\n 	<li>I was talking to a colleague about this -- flying AA, and UA, and SWA based on the most convenient times and price, and then maybe equipment (avoiding those RJs when I can). He said “I’m always amazed at how promiscuous you are in your airline choices.” It was an interesting word choice; one that kinda speaks to how invested people can get in their travel choices. Though it can also be a bit of Stockholm Syndrome for folks who have to fly out of fortress hubs, like this colleague who is in a very conflicted relationship with United out of Newark. “I think you’re more right than me,” he said. He’s 1K on United, their top tier. I’m mid-tier on United and American. Comparing notes, he hasn’t gotten any more upgrades than me, and though I board after 1Ks (or Exec Platinums on AA), I haven’t yet had a problem finding overhead space, even on packed flights to DFW. I’ve said it before -- I don’t think there’s all that much difference between mid- and top-tier loyalty ranks; certainly not enough to take less convenient flights to earn the extra miles needed to stay top-tier.</li>\n 	<li>A study of US airport growth hit the TravelCommons inbox on Halloween, saying that the two airports with the biggest drop in traffic are Memphis and Cincinnati. We talked about this back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/08/09/podcast-143-how-bad-is-business-travel-for-your-health-make-layovers-fun/\">August episode</a> when I was flying in and out of Cincinnati for 4 weeks straight. Nice airport, but I said back then it felt a bit overbuilt, and how both it and Memphis felt empty after after being “de-hubbed” by Delta. I wasn’t wrong. This new survey ground through 10 years of FAA traffic data and came to the same conclusion. Memphis lost the most traffic, down 62%. Cincinnati was second, losing 51% of its traffic.</li>\n 	<li>So you can guess that neither made the Wall Street Journal’s ranking of the 20 largest US airports. Denver, Orlando and Phoenix at the top 3 finishers while the three NYC airports -- LaGuardia, JFK, and Newark -- brought up the rear, numbers 18, 19, and 20. Surprises? I dunno -- maybe that LaGuardia wasn’t in last place given all the construction disruptions, that LAX was higher at #9 than Minneapolis-St Paul at #11, and that O’Hare is one spot higher than San Francisco, 15 vs. 16. That’s probably as much to do with their methodology as anything - how they weighed all the different score components, things like on-time arrivals, average TSA wait, cost of on-prem parking, average ticket cost. It’s interesting, though, to compare this ranking with Skytrax’s ranking of global airports. Denver, the top US airport on both lists; at #28 on Skytrax’s list. Cincinnati is the second US airport on the Skytrax list at #34, which makes sense when you look at the methodologies. Skytrax is focused on the in-airport experience -- terminal seating, cleanliness, queue times, friendliness of staff. With these criteria, I don’t doubt that Cincinnati should rank high -- it’s probably helped by now being a bit overbuilt -- lots of space and fewer people to clean up after. The Journal’s is a bit more wide-ranging, looking both inside and outside the terminal, including things like average fares, rental-car taxes and fees, number of nonstop destinations and dominance of the largest airline to its rankings. I’ll put links to both in the show notes for those interesting in a deeper dive.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our new Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/yoria-suerte/\"><em>Suerte Mijo</em></a> by Arthur Yoria</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Rental Demolition Derby</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>I’ve rented a lot of cars in my business travel and have never crashed one. I drive them off the lot, use them for 3-4 days, fill them back up with gas, return them to the lot, and walk away. So when I picked up a car from Hertz at Edinburgh airport back in September, I skipped all the insurance coverages, took the keys to a brand new Toyota hybrid cross-over, and drove off the lot. This was my fourth September in a row renting from the Hertz and had never had an incident -- even when driving a manual on the left side of the road while shifting with my left hand -- well, other than a Fiat that dropped its transmission, but that wasn’t my fault. So, no need to waste the collision damage waiver charges.</li>\n 	<li>You can see where this is going. The next day, I was driving a narrow road in St Andrews, heading south out of town to go knock around the fishing villages on the north bank of the Firth of Forth. Roads in Scotland can get narrow. Driving the one-lane roads in the Highlands are an acquired talent, but this road is in a residential neighborhood, and I’ve driven it many times. So I couldn’t believe it when I heard a big thump as I drove past a van. Damn, I thought, had I drifted over to the left and popped the van’s rear view mirror? I pulled over and hopped out of the car. No, it was worse. There was a huge crease along the left side of the car; just missed the front wheel, so still driveable but very ugly. I walked down to the van. It belonged to a nearby community center. In a hurry to pick up kids from school, the driver had pulled out into me as I drove past. I pulled out an accident report form that Hertz had helpfully put in the glove compartment. We filled it out, skipped calling the police since no one was hurt.</li>\n 	<li>So, again, not my fault, but I’m still, a few days later, I’m turning in a car with a full tank and some extra body work. I point out the damage to the Hertz guy. He pulls up a different tab on his Samsung tablet -- click, click, click -- damage, front left wing; damage, front left door; damage, rear left door -- took a couple of pictures, and because I’d skipped the CDW, out burped the bill -- £780 or about $1,000. They ran it through on my Chase Sapphire Visa card.</li>\n 	<li>Which I gave to Hertz because, as I was poking through the nooks and crannies of the Chase website before I left home, I confirmed that card would cover UK rental car damage for rentals charged to it. The next week, back home, I found where to file a claim. They didn’t make it easy, but Google eventually uncovered it. I created a claim, uploaded a scan of the accident report, the Hertz receipt, and a couple of iPhone pictures of the damage. And then waited. The website said they’d take 2 weeks to review and get back to me. Three weeks later, I called. A guy said they’d sent me an email asking for two more documents from Hertz. Hmmm, never saw that, but who knows what gets caught up in the Spam filtering. They wanted a copy of the original Hertz agreement, which I had left in the car, and Hertz’s repair cost breakdown. OK, that was reasonable. I called Hertz and a very helpful woman put in a request and said get it in a week. Within a couple of days, Hertz sent me what I needed. I uploaded them to my claim and waited another 2 weeks. On Day 2 Weeks + 1, I called. A woman looked at my file, said it was still being reviewed by management, but said she’s put me on hold and ring them for status. Two minutes later, she picked up and they’d approved my claim. 48 hours later, the $1,000 showed up in my bank account. It took me a bit over 2 months, but Chase paid my claim with a minimum amount of hassle.</li>\n 	<li>Now, while I’ve had a good rental car record in Scotland, my record in Hungary is not quite clean. Indeed, every time I’ve driven there, it’s been something. The last time I drove, we were a couple of blocks away from the rental return next to the Marriott on the Danube. Pulling into an intersection after stopping at a Stop sign, a motorcycle messenger plowed into the front of my car, flew across the hood, and landed in the street on the other side of the intersection. Luckily, he was in a full helmet and leathers and unhurt. The rental car, not so lucky. The entire front end was ripped off. The rental car guy showed up as the police were finishing their report. I pulled out suitcases out of the trunk and gave him the key. He looked at the front of his car in disbelief. We wheeled our bags down the sidewalk to the Marriott because this time, I had bought the collision damage waiver.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/artemis-gravity/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Inception</a></em> by Artemis</li>\n</ul>\n<b>Traveler Gift Guide</b>\n<ul>\n 	<li>As we come into the Christmas shopping season, I thought it would be useful to pull together some suggestions for the frequent traveler in your life. Or, if you are the frequent traveler, a list of hints you might want to drop on family members looking for ideas.</li>\n 	<li>Top of the list is a good battery charger. Whatever the size or form factor -- slimline, lipstick, high-capacity brick -- having that second or third charge readily available is critical to get notified of gate changes and when you’re using electronic boarding passes. It saves you from stalking cleaning crews to find a live power outlet on your layover, or negotiating with your seatmate for possession of outlet between you. I’m always looking to shed weight, so I retired the heavy no-name pack I picked up in the depths of Beijing’s Pearl Street Market for an <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2Jrt83y\">Anker lipstick sized charger</a>. I bought three and gave one to my wife and daughter. It’s cheap peace of mind.</li>\n 	<li>On my shopping list, trying to catch up to what’s already a cold winter, is one of those puffy coats -- but one of the thin ones, like the <a href=\"https://www.patagonia.com/shop/nano-puff\">Patagonia Nano Puff</a>, one that will smoosh down to nothing in the front pocket of my suitcase, or will fit in the crevices of a jammed full overhead bin. Right next that on the list, a man’s scarf is an incredibly undervalued piece of intermediate winter wear. In an airplane cabin or hotel room where a coat is too much (especially in a middle seat), but there’s a draft that chills you, a scarf around the neck is just enough without being too much. You may have to teach him how to wear it, but you can have fun with colors.</li>\n 	<li>For someone just embarking on the road warrior life, how ‘bout a <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3k1E3Og\">black 20-inch hardsided carry-on</a>. Black not only makes you look thinner, it makes your bag look thinner to gate agents hunting for bag-sizer bait. Black also doesn’t show stains. A 20-incher should get on-board for 90% of airlines, and the hard sides are the easiest to get in and out of a bag sizer if the not-yet-statused traveler gets waylaid by an over-zealous gate agent.</li>\n 	<li>If you’re going big for someone -- or for those December babies, combining Christmas and birthday gifts -- noise canceling headphones are a statement gift. The good ones -- the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3mOrRC3\">Bose</a> or <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3kUfRyx\">Sonys</a> that make the drone of the jet engines disappear with the flick of a switch -- are a $300 number. But the drop in stress level and blood pressure that accompanies that flick of the switch -- you don’t realize how much that drone affects you until you turn on your Bose -- makes it worth the number. Everything in my briefcase has to earn its space. I’ve been carrying Bose headphones for, I dunno, 10, 15 years. They’re nowhere near compact, but I’ve never thought of leaving them behind.</li>\n 	<li>Another idea for the music -- or podcast lover, is a <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3oWPpXa\">small portable Bluetooth speaker</a>. I’ve started packing mine again for trips of a week or longer. For a couple of days, I’m fine with wearing headphones or using the phone speaker. But longer than that or if I’m with the family in, say, an Airbnb, I want something a bit more social. I’m still using my 6-year old Jambox speaker, the one that kinda created this category. The maker, Jawbone, went under last year, but the speaker still works. There are newer, better ones out there now, at all sorts of price points. The ones that can act as speaker phones are a nice to-have if they fit your budget.</li>\n 	<li>And finally, a stocking stuffer idea -- a travel notebook, something to jot down thoughts, ideas, observations, to do lists while waiting for the flight to board, the train to come, or the room to be made up. Nothing extravagant -- no leather embossed cover -- but it should be small enough to fit in a pocket, but substantial, something that can survive being knocked around in the bottom of a briefcase, and with paper quality that will hold onto those thoughts for a while. I used to use a <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3jOs3zq\">Moleskine 3½x5½” notebook</a> but have switched over a similar-sized A6 Clairefontaine. The soft cover fits better in a jeans back pocket, and the paper is more fountain-pen friendly. It’s $10 for a Moleskine, $7 for two Clairefontaines. Or go a bit more whimsical and get a 3-pack of Field Notes for $13. It’ll fit your budget and the stocking.</li>\n 	<li>So there you go, something to fit all sizes and budgets in time for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, or if you’re just killing time waiting for your Thanksgiving flight to leave.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #146</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and now on <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Magnatune</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_146.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #146 — Rental Demolition Derby; Traveler Gift Guide','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-146-rental-demolition-derby-traveler-gift-guide','','','2021-11-04 12:25:36','2021-11-04 17:25:36','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=2167',0,'post','',1),
(2168,1,'2018-11-20 00:03:40','2018-11-20 05:03:40','','DSC04229-1','But I filled up the tank','inherit','open','closed','','dsc04229-1','','','2018-11-20 00:04:07','2018-11-20 05:04:07','',2167,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(2169,1,'2018-11-20 00:08:22','2018-11-20 05:08:22','[caption id=\"attachment_2168\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2168\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> But I filled up the tank[/caption]\r\n\r\nJust regular domestic business travel since the last podcast, trying to dodge Hurricane Florence to get back to Charlottesville.  Thinking back to last month\'s European travels, we talk about a tight connection through Amsterdam and some odd concierge lounge rules, which gets me thinking about hotel breakfasts. And a listener request for restaurant recommendations gets me thinking about the balance of visiting good and not-so-good restaurant towns. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_146.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n<iframe src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/511557468&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"></iframe><!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #145:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, trying to give you something to keep you entertained? Or at least occupied as you thread through the Thanksgiving travel traffic -- be it airports, trains, or roadways -- the forecasts are for a 5% increase over last year.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’ve been trying to get this episode done for the past 2 weeks, but I just haven’t been able to make it happen. Since we last spoke, I’ve been in the midst of a weekly commute between Chicago and Dallas. It’s the standard consultant commute -- leaving ORD Monday at 7am, leaving DFW Thursday at 5pm -- the consulting rush hour. The lounges are packed, the Starbucks line tails way back; no matter what status, you’re in a middle seat if you don’t book 3 weeks ahead of time, and for a mere Advantage Platinum person, there’s no chance of an upgrade. I do click through American’s website to request an upgrade every week -- more for the entertainment value than any expectation of getting a seat. This week, I was #35 on the upgrade list.</li>\r\n 	<li>The traffic between these 2 American hubs is pretty amazing. The first week of this commute, taking the 6:30p flight back to Chicago, it was a fully-packed 787 Dreamliner. So I’m thinking -- hey, I gotta have a good shot at an upgrade on this flight, with all the first and business class seats. Nope, though I did get up to the teens on the upgrade list -- #15 to be exact. I counted myself lucky to get out of a center seat at the last minute.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’m not a huge fan of DFW Airport. It’s a massive, spread-out place with a $4 toll charge to just to drive out of the place. The semi-circular terminals are also spread out affairs, with 3 security checkpoints arrayed around each perimeter, only one of which has PreCheck and really not well-marked. I tweeted that out in frustration a few weeks back after trundling around from checkpoint to checkpoint. The DFW Airport Twitter account quickly came back with a link to their website that has the location and hours of each checkpoint, with the PreCheck one bolded. Very useful. I have bookmarked on my iPhone now.</li>\r\n 	<li>The next day, back in Chicago, I was downtown, getting a afternoon espresso jolt at Intelligentsia Coffee, not a completely full-on hipster joint -- there no turntable playing vintage vinyl -- but they are a bit fussy about their coffee. You place your order, they ask your name, and then you mill around a bit waiting for them to “craft” your coffee. I’m scrolling through e-mail, the barista is calling out names in the background. He calls out \"Marco\". Completely on reflex, my inner child responds \"Polo\" and not quietly or under my breath. The guy sitting across from me looks up from his MacBook and starts laughing. The guy getting his coffee, Marco, apparently, turns around and gives me a slightly nasty look. Or maybe just puzzled. Or more likely a bit of both.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- Dub the Uke by Kara Square (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mindmapthat/53340 Ft: DJ Vadim</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul class=\"\">\r\n 	<li>Allan Marko, a long-time listener, posted a travel story on the TravelCommons Facebook page -\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I flew from SFO to MUC with a colleague last month on UAL Business Class (my first trip on a 787 - nice plane, and decent service from the UA team) We had an early morning arrival, and an hour to kill before our transportation arrived. My colleague’s 1K status couldn’t get us into the Lufthansa Arrivals Lounge for showers. I pulled up the Priority Pass app on my iPhone (membership came with my Chase Sapphire Reserve Card) and saw there was an Atlantic Lounge over in Terminal 1 that had shower facilities. We took the bus over to Terminal 1 which serves many European, Middle East, and other second-tier airlines. Pulling out my physical Priority Pass card (as opposed to the one in the app) I got both of us into the lounge and their two shower rooms. The lounge only offered the basics and needed of refresh, but we were happy to find it that morning (including the free beer!).</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Allan, thanks for that, and good on you for figuring that all out. There are so many nooks and crannies in the card benefits world. There’s real value there, but you have to think about it and dig in a bit. The last time I used my Priority Pass (which I got with my Amex Platinum card) was last summer when I was connecting through DUB on my way to London. That lounge was similar to Allan’s MUC experience -- pretty basic, a bit threadbare, but a reasonable place for a cup of tea and breakfast. My son Andrew used his Priority Pass card (also from his Chase card) to get a $28 credit at a restaurant in BOS which paid for a pre-flight meal and a couple of beers. “For the two of us, I think we were due $56 credit, but we wanted to be able to board the plane, so we cut ourselves off.” A colleague of mine told me that, in LGA, after Amex’s Centurion Lounge closed, his UA Gold status got him into the Air Canada lounge to wait out the rest of a long flight delay. “I only thought they let in Star Alliance Gold passengers for international flights, but let me in for my LGA-ORD flight.” And then there’s things like the 10 Gogo in-flight WiFi passes that I get every year with my Platinum card that I never burn through, or the $200 in annual statement credit that I think I get on UA and am always surprised when I see the charge for the in-flight tapas box reversed. And I’m reminded that I gotta pay more attention to this stuff because I hate leaving money on the table.</li>\r\n 	<li>I will say that there are 2 good things about doing trunk line, hub-to-hub commute vs., say, my last regular commute, between ORD and Charlottesville, VA: great flight frequency -- between AA and UA, there’s a flight at most every hour and that’s not even looking at SWA’s schedule out of Love Field; and, no RJs, no regional jets. I had forgotten how nice it is to be able to stand up straight in the aisle, let alone in the toilet. I take happiness in the small things.</li>\r\n 	<li>I was talking to a colleague about this -- flying AA, and UA, and SWA based on the most convenient times and price, and then maybe equipment (avoiding those RJs when I can). He said “I’m always amazed at how promiscuous you are in your airline choices.” It was an interesting word choice; one that kinda speaks to how invested people can get in their travel choices. Though it can also be a bit of Stockholm Syndrome for folks who have to fly out of fortress hubs, like this colleague who is in a very conflicted relationship with United out of Newark. “I think you’re more right than me,” he said. He’s 1K on United, their top tier. I’m mid-tier on United and American. Comparing notes, he hasn’t gotten any more upgrades than me, and though I board after 1Ks (or Exec Platinums on AA), I haven’t yet had a problem finding overhead space, even on packed flights to DFW. I’ve said it before -- I don’t think there’s all that much difference between mid- and top-tier loyalty ranks; certainly not enough to take less convenient flights to earn the extra miles needed to stay top-tier.</li>\r\n 	<li>A study of US airport growth hit the TravelCommons inbox on Halloween, saying that the two airports with the biggest drop in traffic are Memphis and Cincinnati. We talked about this back in the August episode when I was flying in and out of Cincinnati for 4 weeks straight. Nice airport, but I said back then it felt a bit overbuilt, and how both it and Memphis felt empty after after being “de-hubbed” by Delta. I wasn’t wrong. This new survey ground through 10 years of FAA traffic data and came to the same conclusion. Memphis lost the most traffic, down 62%. Cincinnati was second, losing 51% of its traffic.</li>\r\n 	<li>So you can guess that neither made the Wall Street Journal’s ranking of the 20 largest US airports. Denver, Orlando and Phoenix at the top 3 finishers while the three NYC airports -- LaGuardia, JFK, and Newark -- brought up the rear, numbers 18, 19, and 20. Surprises? I dunno -- maybe that LaGuardia wasn’t in last place given all the construction disruptions, that LAX was higher at #9 than Minneapolis-St Paul at #11, and that O’Hare is one spot higher than San Francisco, 15 vs. 16. That’s probably as much to do with their methodology as anything - how they weighed all the different score components, things like on-time arrivals, average TSA wait, cost of on-prem parking, average ticket cost. It’s interesting, though, to compare this ranking with Skytrax’s ranking of global airports. Denver, the top US airport on both lists; at #28 on Skytrax’s list. Cincinnati is the second US airport on the Skytrax list at #34, which makes sense when you look at the methodologies. Skytrax is focused on the in-airport experience -- terminal seating, cleanliness, queue times, friendliness of staff. With these criteria, I don’t doubt that Cincinnati should rank high -- it’s probably helped by now being a bit overbuilt -- lots of space and fewer people to clean up after. The Journal’s is a bit more wide-ranging, looking both inside and outside the terminal, including things like average fares, rental-car taxes and fees, number of nonstop destinations and dominance of the largest airline to its rankings. I’ll put links to both in the show notes for those interesting in a deeper dive.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our new Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — Emma by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/50905 Ft: Martijn de Boer</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Restaurant Karma</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Casey Milch sent me a note a few weeks back -- “Greetings. Love the podcast. I know you mention frequent trips to Charlottesville and I’m finding myself there every six weeks for work myself now. Any restaurant suggestions?”</li>\r\n 	<li>One of the compensations for getting on an airplane just about every week is that you get to try a lot of restaurants. Now, in the last episode, we talked about the downside of that -- rapid waistline expansion -- but if you’re thoughtful about it, and you like trying different food (I hate the word “foodie”), business travel has its benefits. I sent Casey a few recommendations -- Fitzroy, a meat place -- burger, double pork chop, fried chicken -- on the Main Street pedestrian mall; Lampo, a small Neapolitan pizza place with a big wood oven that is -- I forgot to tell Casey this -- a 5-minute walk from Champion Brewing Company’s taproom; and The Alley Light, a speakeasy in an small alcove (a bit too short to be a proper alley) with no sign though there is a light over the door, that took 3 tries to find the first time in the pouring rain, which led to the question “How many consultants does it take to work Google Maps”. Putting the list together for Casey reminded me that we hadn’t been to Alley Light in a while, so we ate there last Tuesday night -- found it on the first try this time -- and had roasted bone marrow, pork rillette, duck confit -- oh, and some carrots. So much for thoughtfulness.</li>\r\n 	<li>Charlottesville punches above its weight for good restaurants, maybe because of University of Virginia. The 2 ½ years I spent in New Orleans was one of definitely one of my food high points, especially when crawfish were in season. 3 months in Portland, OR was fun with the food truck scene, and of course, it is ground-zero for the craft beer explosion. Stays in Manhattan, San Francisco, and London were that much more enjoyable with someone else picking up the dinner tab. Indeed, in San Francisco, I used to stay in different hotels so I could try different neighborhood joints.</li>\r\n 	<li>But karma always seeks balance, and for all these great food locations, there have been other, let’s say, less-than-stunning places. Dover, OH -- about 30 miles south of Canton -- had, when I was doing a project there -- two places to eat -- an Arby’s and the lunch counter of the Walmart knock-off. And the Walmart knock-off was the better of the two. Oldsmar, FL was a bit too far outside of Tampa for us to head in for dinner every night, so the near-by Buffalo Wild Wings - B-Dubs - and Applebee’s were our best shots. And downtown Detroit in the early 2000’s, working, eating, and sleeping in the urban fortress that is the Renaissance Center was brutally monotonous.</li>\r\n 	<li>But even when in London and New York, we weren’t splurging on big meals every night. We have reasonable expense budgets that we have to live within. So again, we find balance -- one night we’re underspending at a dive (but good) pizza-by-the-slice joint, so that the next night, we eat at nice place. Some guys will extend balancing act to travel -- sucking up the inconvenience of a cheaper connecting flight to pay for better meals. One colleague told me -- “I’ll happily travel cheap to eat great food”</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — Astral Travel by Astral (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Astral/44282</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Hotel Breakfasts</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Growing up, those of us of a certain age heard that breakfast is the most important meal of the day -- usually from a cereal commercial. I mentioned a bit early earlier my morning hotel pattern -- work out, hit the concierge lounge for breakfast and then get on with my day. Most lounge breakfasts are pretty industrial -- chafing dishes of stiff scrambled pasteurized eggs, thin slices of oven-baked bacon, vat of oatmeal, a few cartons of yogurt, and a bowl of fruit. It gets the day started. I may be judging it a bit harshly though. My daughter Claire loves those scrambled eggs. Go a little more upscale and you’ll see maybe a platter of smoked salmon, some sliced meats and cheeses, bran muffins…</li>\r\n 	<li>So when I see something different, it gets my attention. Like roasted green chiles in New Mexico, Albuquerque and Santa Fe, to season those scrambled eggs, or the King Cake at the Canal St Sheraton in New Orleans during Mardi Gras season. Now, it’s not the best king cake I’ve had - and my wife has dragged me through a king cake tasting crawl there, so I speak with some knowledge -- but I look forward to it whenever I’m there in the spring. I remember one morning I walked in -- no king cake! I found one of the staff -- “you guys stop doing king cake?!” “No! I didn’t know we were out.” And they immediately brought out a new one. Crisis averted!</li>\r\n 	<li>It doesn’t even have to be anything big. The Copenhagen Marriott lounge had rhubarb juice. As a kid, my mother made pies from rhubarb growing in our backyard, that I think her mother had planted. So something different and nostalgic all in one. Was it life-changing? Not necessarily, but I’d never seen it before.</li>\r\n 	<li>A little more life-changing was the bowl of bun bo hue that we got for breakfast when staying at a local, non-chain, hotel in Hue in central Vietnam. Kind of a spicier, funkier version of the pho you see in the US, and tougher to find here. Not like any hotel breakfast I’d had, and I immediately switched my breakfast choice over to it or pho for the rest of the trip.\r\nBack in May, when I was in Pune, we stayed at a Marriott Courtyard, a chain which, as I’ve complained about before in prior episodes, doesn’t have a concierge lounge but they had a nice breakfast buffet with what I guess is a typical two-track system -- one side with the usual Western breakfast foods, and the other side with Indian food. The waiter pointed me to the omelette station. I was about ready to order when I noticed another station to my right with what looked like a super-sized crepe griddle. “What’s that?” I asked. “Oh, that’s to make dosas.” “Cool, I have one of those.” “Do you know what a dosa is?” “Nope, but I’ll take one, however it normally comes.” I watched him make this foot-wide diameter stiff crepe, rolled it up and put it, sticking up out of a cup of some sort of stew or curry. I walk back to the table. Everyone else has eggs, bacon, toast, arranged horizontally on their plate. I’m the only one with a vertical breakfast. But I liked that. Kinda flying the flag for something different at breakfast .</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #145</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and now on <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_146.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #146 — Rental Demolition Derby; Traveler Gift Guide','','inherit','closed','closed','','2167-revision-v1','','','2018-11-20 00:08:22','2018-11-20 05:08:22','',2167,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/11/20/2167-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2170,1,'2018-11-20 00:13:14','2018-11-20 05:13:14','[caption id=\"attachment_2168\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2168\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> But I filled up the tank[/caption]\r\n\r\nJust regular domestic business travel since the last podcast, trying to dodge Hurricane Florence to get back to Charlottesville.  Thinking back to last month\'s European travels, we talk about a tight connection through Amsterdam and some odd concierge lounge rules, which gets me thinking about hotel breakfasts. And a listener request for restaurant recommendations gets me thinking about the balance of visiting good and not-so-good restaurant towns. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_146.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n<iframe src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/511557468&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"></iframe><!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #146:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, trying to give you something to keep you entertained? Or at least occupied as you thread through the Thanksgiving travel traffic -- be it airports, trains, or roadways -- the forecasts are for a 5% increase over last year.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’ve been trying to get this episode done for the past 2 weeks, but I just haven’t been able to make it happen. Since we last spoke, I’ve been in the midst of a weekly commute between Chicago and Dallas. It’s the standard consultant commute -- leaving ORD Monday at 7am, leaving DFW Thursday at 5pm -- the consulting rush hour. The lounges are packed, the Starbucks line tails way back; no matter what status, you’re in a middle seat if you don’t book 3 weeks ahead of time, and for a mere Advantage Platinum person, there’s no chance of an upgrade. I do click through American’s website to request an upgrade every week -- more for the entertainment value than any expectation of getting a seat. This week, I was #35 on the upgrade list.</li>\r\n 	<li>The traffic between these 2 American hubs is pretty amazing. The first week of this commute, taking the 6:30p flight back to Chicago, it was a fully-packed 787 Dreamliner. So I’m thinking -- hey, I gotta have a good shot at an upgrade on this flight, with all the first and business class seats. Nope, though I did get up to the teens on the upgrade list -- #15 to be exact. I counted myself lucky to get out of a center seat at the last minute.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’m not a huge fan of DFW Airport. It’s a massive, spread-out place with a $4 toll charge to just to drive out of the place. The semi-circular terminals are also spread out affairs, with 3 security checkpoints arrayed around each perimeter, only one of which has PreCheck and really not well-marked. I tweeted that out in frustration a few weeks back after trundling around from checkpoint to checkpoint. The DFW Airport Twitter account quickly came back with a link to their website that has the location and hours of each checkpoint, with the PreCheck one bolded. Very useful. I have bookmarked on my iPhone now.</li>\r\n 	<li>The next day, back in Chicago, I was downtown, getting a afternoon espresso jolt at Intelligentsia Coffee, not a completely full-on hipster joint -- there no turntable playing vintage vinyl -- but they are a bit fussy about their coffee. You place your order, they ask your name, and then you mill around a bit waiting for them to “craft” your coffee. I’m scrolling through e-mail, the barista is calling out names in the background. He calls out \"Marco\". Completely on reflex, my inner child responds \"Polo\" and not quietly or under my breath. The guy sitting across from me looks up from his MacBook and starts laughing. The guy getting his coffee, Marco, apparently, turns around and gives me a slightly nasty look. Or maybe just puzzled. Or more likely a bit of both.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- Dub the Uke by Kara Square (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mindmapthat/53340 Ft: DJ Vadim</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul class=\"\">\r\n 	<li>Allan Marko, a long-time listener, posted a travel story on the TravelCommons Facebook page -\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I flew from SFO to MUC with a colleague last month on UAL Business Class (my first trip on a 787 - nice plane, and decent service from the UA team) We had an early morning arrival, and an hour to kill before our transportation arrived. My colleague’s 1K status couldn’t get us into the Lufthansa Arrivals Lounge for showers. I pulled up the Priority Pass app on my iPhone (membership came with my Chase Sapphire Reserve Card) and saw there was an Atlantic Lounge over in Terminal 1 that had shower facilities. We took the bus over to Terminal 1 which serves many European, Middle East, and other second-tier airlines. Pulling out my physical Priority Pass card (as opposed to the one in the app) I got both of us into the lounge and their two shower rooms. The lounge only offered the basics and needed of refresh, but we were happy to find it that morning (including the free beer!).</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Allan, thanks for that, and good on you for figuring that all out. There are so many nooks and crannies in the card benefits world. There’s real value there, but you have to think about it and dig in a bit. The last time I used my Priority Pass (which I got with my Amex Platinum card) was last summer when I was connecting through DUB on my way to London. That lounge was similar to Allan’s MUC experience -- pretty basic, a bit threadbare, but a reasonable place for a cup of tea and breakfast. My son Andrew used his Priority Pass card (also from his Chase card) to get a $28 credit at a restaurant in BOS which paid for a pre-flight meal and a couple of beers. “For the two of us, I think we were due $56 credit, but we wanted to be able to board the plane, so we cut ourselves off.” A colleague of mine told me that, in LGA, after Amex’s Centurion Lounge closed, his UA Gold status got him into the Air Canada lounge to wait out the rest of a long flight delay. “I only thought they let in Star Alliance Gold passengers for international flights, but let me in for my LGA-ORD flight.” And then there’s things like the 10 Gogo in-flight WiFi passes that I get every year with my Platinum card that I never burn through, or the $200 in annual statement credit that I think I get on UA and am always surprised when I see the charge for the in-flight tapas box reversed. And I’m reminded that I gotta pay more attention to this stuff because I hate leaving money on the table.</li>\r\n 	<li>I will say that there are 2 good things about doing trunk line, hub-to-hub commute vs., say, my last regular commute, between ORD and Charlottesville, VA: great flight frequency -- between AA and UA, there’s a flight at most every hour and that’s not even looking at SWA’s schedule out of Love Field; and, no RJs, no regional jets. I had forgotten how nice it is to be able to stand up straight in the aisle, let alone in the toilet. I take happiness in the small things.</li>\r\n 	<li>I was talking to a colleague about this -- flying AA, and UA, and SWA based on the most convenient times and price, and then maybe equipment (avoiding those RJs when I can). He said “I’m always amazed at how promiscuous you are in your airline choices.” It was an interesting word choice; one that kinda speaks to how invested people can get in their travel choices. Though it can also be a bit of Stockholm Syndrome for folks who have to fly out of fortress hubs, like this colleague who is in a very conflicted relationship with United out of Newark. “I think you’re more right than me,” he said. He’s 1K on United, their top tier. I’m mid-tier on United and American. Comparing notes, he hasn’t gotten any more upgrades than me, and though I board after 1Ks (or Exec Platinums on AA), I haven’t yet had a problem finding overhead space, even on packed flights to DFW. I’ve said it before -- I don’t think there’s all that much difference between mid- and top-tier loyalty ranks; certainly not enough to take less convenient flights to earn the extra miles needed to stay top-tier.</li>\r\n 	<li>A study of US airport growth hit the TravelCommons inbox on Halloween, saying that the two airports with the biggest drop in traffic are Memphis and Cincinnati. We talked about this back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/08/09/podcast-143-how-bad-is-business-travel-for-your-health-make-layovers-fun/\">August episode</a> when I was flying in and out of Cincinnati for 4 weeks straight. Nice airport, but I said back then it felt a bit overbuilt, and how both it and Memphis felt empty after after being “de-hubbed” by Delta. I wasn’t wrong. This new survey ground through 10 years of FAA traffic data and came to the same conclusion. Memphis lost the most traffic, down 62%. Cincinnati was second, losing 51% of its traffic.</li>\r\n 	<li>So you can guess that neither made the Wall Street Journal’s ranking of the 20 largest US airports. Denver, Orlando and Phoenix at the top 3 finishers while the three NYC airports -- LaGuardia, JFK, and Newark -- brought up the rear, numbers 18, 19, and 20. Surprises? I dunno -- maybe that LaGuardia wasn’t in last place given all the construction disruptions, that LAX was higher at #9 than Minneapolis-St Paul at #11, and that O’Hare is one spot higher than San Francisco, 15 vs. 16. That’s probably as much to do with their methodology as anything - how they weighed all the different score components, things like on-time arrivals, average TSA wait, cost of on-prem parking, average ticket cost. It’s interesting, though, to compare this ranking with Skytrax’s ranking of global airports. Denver, the top US airport on both lists; at #28 on Skytrax’s list. Cincinnati is the second US airport on the Skytrax list at #34, which makes sense when you look at the methodologies. Skytrax is focused on the in-airport experience -- terminal seating, cleanliness, queue times, friendliness of staff. With these criteria, I don’t doubt that Cincinnati should rank high -- it’s probably helped by now being a bit overbuilt -- lots of space and fewer people to clean up after. The Journal’s is a bit more wide-ranging, looking both inside and outside the terminal, including things like average fares, rental-car taxes and fees, number of nonstop destinations and dominance of the largest airline to its rankings. I’ll put links to both in the show notes for those interesting in a deeper dive.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our new Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — Emma by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/50905 Ft: Martijn de Boer</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Rental Demolition Derby</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I’ve rented a lot of cars in my business travel and have never crashed one. I drive them off the lot, use them for 3-4 days, fill them back up with gas, return them to the lot, and walk away. So when I picked up a car from Hertz at Edinburgh airport back in September, I skipped all the insurance coverages, took the keys to a brand new Toyota hybrid cross-over, and drove off the lot. This was my fourth September in a row renting from the Hertz and had never had an incident -- even when driving a manual on the left side of the road while shifting with my left hand -- well, other than a Fiat that dropped its transmission, but that wasn’t my fault. So, no need to waste the collision damage waiver charges.</li>\r\n 	<li>You can see where this is going. The next day, I was driving a narrow road in St Andrews, heading south out of town to go knock around the fishing villages on the north bank of the Firth of Forth. Roads in Scotland can get narrow. Driving the one-lane roads in the Highlands are an acquired talent, but this road is in a residential neighborhood, and I’ve driven it many times. So I couldn’t believe it when I heard a big thump as I drove past a van. Damn, I thought, had I drifted over to the left and popped the van’s rear view mirror? I pulled over and hopped out of the car. No, it was worse. There was a huge crease along the left side of the car; just missed the front wheel, so still driveable but very ugly. I walked down to the van. It belonged to a nearby community center. In a hurry to pick up kids from school, the driver had pulled out into me as I drove past. I pulled out an accident report form that Hertz had helpfully put in the glove compartment. We filled it out, skipped calling the police since no one was hurt.</li>\r\n 	<li>So, again, not my fault, but I’m still, a few days later, I’m turning in a car with a full tank and some extra body work. I point out the damage to the Hertz guy. He pulls up a different tab on his Samsung tablet -- click, click, click -- damage, front left wing; damage, front left door; damage, rear left door -- took a couple of pictures, and because I’d skipped the CDW, out burped the bill -- £780 or about $1,000. They ran it through on my Chase Sapphire Visa card.</li>\r\n 	<li>Which I gave to Hertz because, as I was poking through the nooks and crannies of the Chase website before I left home, I confirmed that card would cover UK rental car damage for rentals charged to it. The next week, back home, I found where to file a claim. They didn’t make it easy, but Google eventually uncovered it. I created a claim, uploaded a scan of the accident report, the Hertz receipt, and a couple of iPhone pictures of the damage. And then waited. The website said they’d take 2 weeks to review and get back to me. Three weeks later, I called. A guy said they’d sent me an email asking for two more documents from Hertz. Hmmm, never saw that, but who knows what gets caught up in the Spam filtering. They wanted a copy of the original Hertz agreement, which I had left in the car, and Hertz’s repair cost breakdown. OK, that was reasonable. I called Hertz and a very helpful woman put in a request and said get it in a week. Within a couple of days, Hertz sent me what I needed. I uploaded them to my claim and waited another 2 weeks. On Day 2 Weeks + 1, I called. A woman looked at my file, said it was still being reviewed by management, but said she’s put me on hold and ring them for status. Two minutes later, she picked up and they’d approved my claim. 48 hours later, the $1,000 showed up in my bank account. It took me a bit over 2 months, but Chase paid my claim with a minimum amount of hassle.</li>\r\n 	<li>Now, while I’ve had a good rental car record in Scotland, my record in Hungary is not quite clean. Indeed, every time I’ve driven there, it’s been something. The last time I drove, we were a couple of blocks away from the rental return next to the Marriott on the Danube. Pulling into an intersection after stopping at a Stop sign, a motorcycle messenger plowed into the front of my car, flew across the hood, and landed in the street on the other side of the intersection. Luckily, he was in a full helmet and leathers and unhurt. The rental car, not so lucky. The entire front end was ripped off. The rental car guy showed up as the police were finishing their report. I pulled out suitcases out of the trunk and gave him the key. He looked at the front of his car in disbelief. We wheeled our bags down the sidewalk to the Marriott because this time, I had bought the collision damage waiver.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — Astral Travel by Astral (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Astral/44282</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Traveler Gift Guide</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>As we come into the Christmas shopping season, I thought it would be useful to pull together some suggestions for the frequent traveler in your life. Or, if you are the frequent traveler, a list of hints you might want to drop on family members looking for ideas.</li>\r\n 	<li>Top of the list is a good battery charger. Whatever the size or form factor -- slimline, lipstick, high-capacity brick -- having that second or third charge readily available is critical to get notified of gate changes and when you’re using electronic boarding passes. It saves you from stalking cleaning crews to find a live power outlet on your layover, or negotiating with your seatmate for possession of outlet between you. I’m always looking to shed weight, so I retired the heavy no-name pack I picked up in the depths of Beijing’s Pearl Street Market for an Anker lipstick sized charger. I bought three and gave one to my wife and daughter. It’s cheap piece of mind.</li>\r\n 	<li>On my shopping list, trying to catch up to what’s already a cold winter, is one of those puffy coats -- but one of the thin ones, like the Patagonia Nano Puff, one that will smoosh down to nothing in the front pocket of my suitcase, or will fit in the crevices of a jammed full overhead bin. Right next that on the list, a man’s scarf is an incredibly undervalued piece of intermediate winter wear. In an airplane cabin or hotel room where a coat is too much (especially in a middle seat), but there’s a draft that chills you, a scarf around the neck is just enough without being too much. You may have to teach him how to wear it, but you can have fun with colors.</li>\r\n 	<li>For someone just embarking on the road warrior life, how ‘bout a black 20-inch hardsided carry-on. Black not only makes you look thinner, it makes your bag look thinner to gate agents hunting for bag-sizer bait. Black also doesn’t show stains. A 20-incher should get on-board for 90% of airlines, and the hard sides are the easiest to get in and out of a bag sizer if the not-yet-statused traveler gets waylaid by an over-zealous gate agent.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you’re going big for someone -- or for those December babies, combining Christmas and birthday gifts -- noise canceling headphones are a statement gift. The good ones -- the Bose or Sonys that make the drone of the jet engines disappear with the flick of a switch -- are a $300 number. But the drop in stress level and blood pressure that accompanies that flick of the switch -- you don’t realize how much that drone affects you until you turn on your Bose -- makes it worth the number. Everything in my briefcase has to earn its space. I’ve been carrying Bose headphones for, I dunno, 10, 15 years. They’re nowhere near compact, but I’ve never thought of leaving them behind.</li>\r\n 	<li>Another idea for the music -- or podcast lover, is a small portable Bluetooth speaker. I’ve started packing mine again for trips of a week or longer. For a couple of days, I’m fine with wearing headphones or using the phone speaker. But longer than that or if I’m with the family in, say, an Airbnb, I want something a bit more social. I’m still using my 6-year old Jambox speaker, the one that kinda created this category. The maker, Jawbone, went under last year, but the speaker still works. There are newer, better ones out there now, at all sorts of price points. The ones that can act as speaker phones are a nice to-have if they fit your budget.</li>\r\n 	<li>And finally, a stocking stuffer idea -- a travel notebook, something to jot down thoughts, ideas, observations, to do lists while waiting for the flight to board, the train to come, or the room to be made up. Nothing extravagant -- no leather embossed cover -- but it should be small enough to fit in a pocket, but substantial, something that can survive being knocked around in the bottom of a briefcase, and with paper quality that will hold onto those thoughts for a while. I used to use a Moleskine 3½x5½” notebook but have switched over a similar-sized A6 Clairefontaine. The soft cover fits better in a jeans back pocket, and the paper is more fountain-pen friendly. It’s $10 for a Moleskine, $7 for two Clairefontaines. Or go a bit more whimsical and get a 3-pack of Field Notes for $13. It’ll fit your budget and the stocking.</li>\r\n 	<li>So there you go, something to fit all sizes and budgets in time for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, or if you’re just killing time waiting for your Thanksgiving flight to leave.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #146</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and now on <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_146.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #146 — Rental Demolition Derby; Traveler Gift Guide','','inherit','closed','closed','','2167-revision-v1','','','2018-11-20 00:13:14','2018-11-20 05:13:14','',2167,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/11/20/2167-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2171,1,'2018-11-20 00:30:05','2018-11-20 05:30:05','[caption id=\"attachment_2168\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2168\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> But I filled up the tank[/caption]\r\n\r\nGetting this posted just in time to give you something to listen to while jammed up in Thanksgiving traffic, be it on the road or in the airports. We talk about working the angles for credit card benefits, which leads me to one more story from my fall trip to Europe -- a rental car scrape that my Chase Visa card just paid off. We also talk about the Wall Street Journal\'s new ranking of US airports and compare it to Skytrax\'s international rankings. And we wrap up with my Christmas gift suggestions for the frequent traveler on your list.  All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_146.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n<iframe src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/511557468&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"></iframe><!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #146:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, trying to give you something to keep you entertained? Or at least occupied as you thread through the Thanksgiving travel traffic -- be it airports, trains, or roadways -- the forecasts are for a 5% increase over last year.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’ve been trying to get this episode done for the past 2 weeks, but I just haven’t been able to make it happen. Since we last spoke, I’ve been in the midst of a weekly commute between Chicago and Dallas. It’s the standard consultant commute -- leaving ORD Monday at 7am, leaving DFW Thursday at 5pm -- the consulting rush hour. The lounges are packed, the Starbucks line tails way back; no matter what status, you’re in a middle seat if you don’t book 3 weeks ahead of time, and for a mere Advantage Platinum person, there’s no chance of an upgrade. I do click through American’s website to request an upgrade every week -- more for the entertainment value than any expectation of getting a seat. This week, I was #35 on the upgrade list.</li>\r\n 	<li>The traffic between these 2 American hubs is pretty amazing. The first week of this commute, taking the 6:30p flight back to Chicago, it was a fully-packed 787 Dreamliner. So I’m thinking -- hey, I gotta have a good shot at an upgrade on this flight, with all the first and business class seats. Nope, though I did get up to the teens on the upgrade list -- #15 to be exact. I counted myself lucky to get out of a center seat at the last minute.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’m not a huge fan of DFW Airport. It’s a massive, spread-out place with a $4 toll charge to just to drive out of the place. The semi-circular terminals are also spread out affairs, with 3 security checkpoints arrayed around each perimeter, only one of which has PreCheck and really not well-marked. I tweeted that out in frustration a few weeks back after trundling around from checkpoint to checkpoint. The DFW Airport Twitter account quickly came back with a link to their website that has the location and hours of each checkpoint, with the PreCheck one bolded. Very useful. I have bookmarked on my iPhone now.</li>\r\n 	<li>The next day, back in Chicago, I was downtown, getting a afternoon espresso jolt at Intelligentsia Coffee, not a completely full-on hipster joint -- there no turntable playing vintage vinyl -- but they are a bit fussy about their coffee. You place your order, they ask your name, and then you mill around a bit waiting for them to “craft” your coffee. I’m scrolling through e-mail, the barista is calling out names in the background. He calls out \"Marco\". Completely on reflex, my inner child responds \"Polo\" and not quietly or under my breath. The guy sitting across from me looks up from his MacBook and starts laughing. The guy getting his coffee, Marco, apparently, turns around and gives me a slightly nasty look. Or maybe just puzzled. Or more likely a bit of both.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- Dub the Uke by Kara Square (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mindmapthat/53340 Ft: DJ Vadim</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul class=\"\">\r\n 	<li>Allan Marko, a long-time listener, posted a travel story on the TravelCommons Facebook page -\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I flew from SFO to MUC with a colleague last month on UAL Business Class (my first trip on a 787 - nice plane, and decent service from the UA team) We had an early morning arrival, and an hour to kill before our transportation arrived. My colleague’s 1K status couldn’t get us into the Lufthansa Arrivals Lounge for showers. I pulled up the Priority Pass app on my iPhone (membership came with my Chase Sapphire Reserve Card) and saw there was an Atlantic Lounge over in Terminal 1 that had shower facilities. We took the bus over to Terminal 1 which serves many European, Middle East, and other second-tier airlines. Pulling out my physical Priority Pass card (as opposed to the one in the app) I got both of us into the lounge and their two shower rooms. The lounge only offered the basics and needed of refresh, but we were happy to find it that morning (including the free beer!).</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Allan, thanks for that, and good on you for figuring that all out. There are so many nooks and crannies in the card benefits world. There’s real value there, but you have to think about it and dig in a bit. The last time I used my Priority Pass (which I got with my Amex Platinum card) was last summer when I was connecting through DUB on my way to London. That lounge was similar to Allan’s MUC experience -- pretty basic, a bit threadbare, but a reasonable place for a cup of tea and breakfast. My son Andrew used his Priority Pass card (also from his Chase card) to get a $28 credit at a restaurant in BOS which paid for a pre-flight meal and a couple of beers. “For the two of us, I think we were due $56 credit, but we wanted to be able to board the plane, so we cut ourselves off.” A colleague of mine told me that, in LGA, after Amex’s Centurion Lounge closed, his UA Gold status got him into the Air Canada lounge to wait out the rest of a long flight delay. “I only thought they let in Star Alliance Gold passengers for international flights, but let me in for my LGA-ORD flight.” And then there’s things like the 10 Gogo in-flight WiFi passes that I get every year with my Platinum card that I never burn through, or the $200 in annual statement credit that I think I get on UA and am always surprised when I see the charge for the in-flight tapas box reversed. And I’m reminded that I gotta pay more attention to this stuff because I hate leaving money on the table.</li>\r\n 	<li>I will say that there are 2 good things about doing trunk line, hub-to-hub commute vs., say, my last regular commute, between ORD and Charlottesville, VA: great flight frequency -- between AA and UA, there’s a flight at most every hour and that’s not even looking at SWA’s schedule out of Love Field; and, no RJs, no regional jets. I had forgotten how nice it is to be able to stand up straight in the aisle, let alone in the toilet. I take happiness in the small things.</li>\r\n 	<li>I was talking to a colleague about this -- flying AA, and UA, and SWA based on the most convenient times and price, and then maybe equipment (avoiding those RJs when I can). He said “I’m always amazed at how promiscuous you are in your airline choices.” It was an interesting word choice; one that kinda speaks to how invested people can get in their travel choices. Though it can also be a bit of Stockholm Syndrome for folks who have to fly out of fortress hubs, like this colleague who is in a very conflicted relationship with United out of Newark. “I think you’re more right than me,” he said. He’s 1K on United, their top tier. I’m mid-tier on United and American. Comparing notes, he hasn’t gotten any more upgrades than me, and though I board after 1Ks (or Exec Platinums on AA), I haven’t yet had a problem finding overhead space, even on packed flights to DFW. I’ve said it before -- I don’t think there’s all that much difference between mid- and top-tier loyalty ranks; certainly not enough to take less convenient flights to earn the extra miles needed to stay top-tier.</li>\r\n 	<li>A study of US airport growth hit the TravelCommons inbox on Halloween, saying that the two airports with the biggest drop in traffic are Memphis and Cincinnati. We talked about this back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/08/09/podcast-143-how-bad-is-business-travel-for-your-health-make-layovers-fun/\">August episode</a> when I was flying in and out of Cincinnati for 4 weeks straight. Nice airport, but I said back then it felt a bit overbuilt, and how both it and Memphis felt empty after after being “de-hubbed” by Delta. I wasn’t wrong. This new survey ground through 10 years of FAA traffic data and came to the same conclusion. Memphis lost the most traffic, down 62%. Cincinnati was second, losing 51% of its traffic.</li>\r\n 	<li>So you can guess that neither made the Wall Street Journal’s ranking of the 20 largest US airports. Denver, Orlando and Phoenix at the top 3 finishers while the three NYC airports -- LaGuardia, JFK, and Newark -- brought up the rear, numbers 18, 19, and 20. Surprises? I dunno -- maybe that LaGuardia wasn’t in last place given all the construction disruptions, that LAX was higher at #9 than Minneapolis-St Paul at #11, and that O’Hare is one spot higher than San Francisco, 15 vs. 16. That’s probably as much to do with their methodology as anything - how they weighed all the different score components, things like on-time arrivals, average TSA wait, cost of on-prem parking, average ticket cost. It’s interesting, though, to compare this ranking with Skytrax’s ranking of global airports. Denver, the top US airport on both lists; at #28 on Skytrax’s list. Cincinnati is the second US airport on the Skytrax list at #34, which makes sense when you look at the methodologies. Skytrax is focused on the in-airport experience -- terminal seating, cleanliness, queue times, friendliness of staff. With these criteria, I don’t doubt that Cincinnati should rank high -- it’s probably helped by now being a bit overbuilt -- lots of space and fewer people to clean up after. The Journal’s is a bit more wide-ranging, looking both inside and outside the terminal, including things like average fares, rental-car taxes and fees, number of nonstop destinations and dominance of the largest airline to its rankings. I’ll put links to both in the show notes for those interesting in a deeper dive.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our new Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — Emma by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/50905 Ft: Martijn de Boer</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Rental Demolition Derby</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I’ve rented a lot of cars in my business travel and have never crashed one. I drive them off the lot, use them for 3-4 days, fill them back up with gas, return them to the lot, and walk away. So when I picked up a car from Hertz at Edinburgh airport back in September, I skipped all the insurance coverages, took the keys to a brand new Toyota hybrid cross-over, and drove off the lot. This was my fourth September in a row renting from the Hertz and had never had an incident -- even when driving a manual on the left side of the road while shifting with my left hand -- well, other than a Fiat that dropped its transmission, but that wasn’t my fault. So, no need to waste the collision damage waiver charges.</li>\r\n 	<li>You can see where this is going. The next day, I was driving a narrow road in St Andrews, heading south out of town to go knock around the fishing villages on the north bank of the Firth of Forth. Roads in Scotland can get narrow. Driving the one-lane roads in the Highlands are an acquired talent, but this road is in a residential neighborhood, and I’ve driven it many times. So I couldn’t believe it when I heard a big thump as I drove past a van. Damn, I thought, had I drifted over to the left and popped the van’s rear view mirror? I pulled over and hopped out of the car. No, it was worse. There was a huge crease along the left side of the car; just missed the front wheel, so still driveable but very ugly. I walked down to the van. It belonged to a nearby community center. In a hurry to pick up kids from school, the driver had pulled out into me as I drove past. I pulled out an accident report form that Hertz had helpfully put in the glove compartment. We filled it out, skipped calling the police since no one was hurt.</li>\r\n 	<li>So, again, not my fault, but I’m still, a few days later, I’m turning in a car with a full tank and some extra body work. I point out the damage to the Hertz guy. He pulls up a different tab on his Samsung tablet -- click, click, click -- damage, front left wing; damage, front left door; damage, rear left door -- took a couple of pictures, and because I’d skipped the CDW, out burped the bill -- £780 or about $1,000. They ran it through on my Chase Sapphire Visa card.</li>\r\n 	<li>Which I gave to Hertz because, as I was poking through the nooks and crannies of the Chase website before I left home, I confirmed that card would cover UK rental car damage for rentals charged to it. The next week, back home, I found where to file a claim. They didn’t make it easy, but Google eventually uncovered it. I created a claim, uploaded a scan of the accident report, the Hertz receipt, and a couple of iPhone pictures of the damage. And then waited. The website said they’d take 2 weeks to review and get back to me. Three weeks later, I called. A guy said they’d sent me an email asking for two more documents from Hertz. Hmmm, never saw that, but who knows what gets caught up in the Spam filtering. They wanted a copy of the original Hertz agreement, which I had left in the car, and Hertz’s repair cost breakdown. OK, that was reasonable. I called Hertz and a very helpful woman put in a request and said get it in a week. Within a couple of days, Hertz sent me what I needed. I uploaded them to my claim and waited another 2 weeks. On Day 2 Weeks + 1, I called. A woman looked at my file, said it was still being reviewed by management, but said she’s put me on hold and ring them for status. Two minutes later, she picked up and they’d approved my claim. 48 hours later, the $1,000 showed up in my bank account. It took me a bit over 2 months, but Chase paid my claim with a minimum amount of hassle.</li>\r\n 	<li>Now, while I’ve had a good rental car record in Scotland, my record in Hungary is not quite clean. Indeed, every time I’ve driven there, it’s been something. The last time I drove, we were a couple of blocks away from the rental return next to the Marriott on the Danube. Pulling into an intersection after stopping at a Stop sign, a motorcycle messenger plowed into the front of my car, flew across the hood, and landed in the street on the other side of the intersection. Luckily, he was in a full helmet and leathers and unhurt. The rental car, not so lucky. The entire front end was ripped off. The rental car guy showed up as the police were finishing their report. I pulled out suitcases out of the trunk and gave him the key. He looked at the front of his car in disbelief. We wheeled our bags down the sidewalk to the Marriott because this time, I had bought the collision damage waiver.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — Astral Travel by Astral (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Astral/44282</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Traveler Gift Guide</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>As we come into the Christmas shopping season, I thought it would be useful to pull together some suggestions for the frequent traveler in your life. Or, if you are the frequent traveler, a list of hints you might want to drop on family members looking for ideas.</li>\r\n 	<li>Top of the list is a good battery charger. Whatever the size or form factor -- slimline, lipstick, high-capacity brick -- having that second or third charge readily available is critical to get notified of gate changes and when you’re using electronic boarding passes. It saves you from stalking cleaning crews to find a live power outlet on your layover, or negotiating with your seatmate for possession of outlet between you. I’m always looking to shed weight, so I retired the heavy no-name pack I picked up in the depths of Beijing’s Pearl Street Market for an Anker lipstick sized charger. I bought three and gave one to my wife and daughter. It’s cheap piece of mind.</li>\r\n 	<li>On my shopping list, trying to catch up to what’s already a cold winter, is one of those puffy coats -- but one of the thin ones, like the Patagonia Nano Puff, one that will smoosh down to nothing in the front pocket of my suitcase, or will fit in the crevices of a jammed full overhead bin. Right next that on the list, a man’s scarf is an incredibly undervalued piece of intermediate winter wear. In an airplane cabin or hotel room where a coat is too much (especially in a middle seat), but there’s a draft that chills you, a scarf around the neck is just enough without being too much. You may have to teach him how to wear it, but you can have fun with colors.</li>\r\n 	<li>For someone just embarking on the road warrior life, how ‘bout a black 20-inch hardsided carry-on. Black not only makes you look thinner, it makes your bag look thinner to gate agents hunting for bag-sizer bait. Black also doesn’t show stains. A 20-incher should get on-board for 90% of airlines, and the hard sides are the easiest to get in and out of a bag sizer if the not-yet-statused traveler gets waylaid by an over-zealous gate agent.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you’re going big for someone -- or for those December babies, combining Christmas and birthday gifts -- noise canceling headphones are a statement gift. The good ones -- the Bose or Sonys that make the drone of the jet engines disappear with the flick of a switch -- are a $300 number. But the drop in stress level and blood pressure that accompanies that flick of the switch -- you don’t realize how much that drone affects you until you turn on your Bose -- makes it worth the number. Everything in my briefcase has to earn its space. I’ve been carrying Bose headphones for, I dunno, 10, 15 years. They’re nowhere near compact, but I’ve never thought of leaving them behind.</li>\r\n 	<li>Another idea for the music -- or podcast lover, is a small portable Bluetooth speaker. I’ve started packing mine again for trips of a week or longer. For a couple of days, I’m fine with wearing headphones or using the phone speaker. But longer than that or if I’m with the family in, say, an Airbnb, I want something a bit more social. I’m still using my 6-year old Jambox speaker, the one that kinda created this category. The maker, Jawbone, went under last year, but the speaker still works. There are newer, better ones out there now, at all sorts of price points. The ones that can act as speaker phones are a nice to-have if they fit your budget.</li>\r\n 	<li>And finally, a stocking stuffer idea -- a travel notebook, something to jot down thoughts, ideas, observations, to do lists while waiting for the flight to board, the train to come, or the room to be made up. Nothing extravagant -- no leather embossed cover -- but it should be small enough to fit in a pocket, but substantial, something that can survive being knocked around in the bottom of a briefcase, and with paper quality that will hold onto those thoughts for a while. I used to use a Moleskine 3½x5½” notebook but have switched over a similar-sized A6 Clairefontaine. The soft cover fits better in a jeans back pocket, and the paper is more fountain-pen friendly. It’s $10 for a Moleskine, $7 for two Clairefontaines. Or go a bit more whimsical and get a 3-pack of Field Notes for $13. It’ll fit your budget and the stocking.</li>\r\n 	<li>So there you go, something to fit all sizes and budgets in time for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, or if you’re just killing time waiting for your Thanksgiving flight to leave.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #146</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and now on <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_146.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #146 — Rental Demolition Derby; Traveler Gift Guide','','inherit','closed','closed','','2167-revision-v1','','','2018-11-20 00:30:05','2018-11-20 05:30:05','',2167,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/11/20/2167-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2172,1,'2018-11-20 00:33:59','2018-11-20 05:33:59','[caption id=\"attachment_2168\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2168\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> But I filled up the tank[/caption]\r\n\r\nGetting this posted just in time to give you something to listen to while jammed up in Thanksgiving traffic, be it on the road or in the airports. We talk about working the angles to maximize credit card benefits, which leads me to one more story from my fall trip to Europe -- a rental car scrape that my Chase Visa card just paid off. We also talk about the Wall Street Journal\'s new ranking of US airports and compare it to Skytrax\'s international rankings. And we wrap up with my Christmas gift suggestions for the frequent traveler on your list.  All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_146.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n<iframe src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/511557468&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"></iframe><!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #146:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, trying to give you something to keep you entertained? Or at least occupied as you thread through the Thanksgiving travel traffic -- be it airports, trains, or roadways -- the forecasts are for a 5% increase over last year.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’ve been trying to get this episode done for the past 2 weeks, but I just haven’t been able to make it happen. Since we last spoke, I’ve been in the midst of a weekly commute between Chicago and Dallas. It’s the standard consultant commute -- leaving ORD Monday at 7am, leaving DFW Thursday at 5pm -- the consulting rush hour. The lounges are packed, the Starbucks line tails way back; no matter what status, you’re in a middle seat if you don’t book 3 weeks ahead of time, and for a mere Advantage Platinum person, there’s no chance of an upgrade. I do click through American’s website to request an upgrade every week -- more for the entertainment value than any expectation of getting a seat. This week, I was #35 on the upgrade list.</li>\r\n 	<li>The traffic between these 2 American hubs is pretty amazing. The first week of this commute, taking the 6:30p flight back to Chicago, it was a fully-packed 787 Dreamliner. So I’m thinking -- hey, I gotta have a good shot at an upgrade on this flight, with all the first and business class seats. Nope, though I did get up to the teens on the upgrade list -- #15 to be exact. I counted myself lucky to get out of a center seat at the last minute.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’m not a huge fan of DFW Airport. It’s a massive, spread-out place with a $4 toll charge to just to drive out of the place. The semi-circular terminals are also spread out affairs, with 3 security checkpoints arrayed around each perimeter, only one of which has PreCheck and really not well-marked. I tweeted that out in frustration a few weeks back after trundling around from checkpoint to checkpoint. The DFW Airport Twitter account quickly came back with a link to their website that has the location and hours of each checkpoint, with the PreCheck one bolded. Very useful. I have bookmarked on my iPhone now.</li>\r\n 	<li>The next day, back in Chicago, I was downtown, getting a afternoon espresso jolt at Intelligentsia Coffee, not a completely full-on hipster joint -- there no turntable playing vintage vinyl -- but they are a bit fussy about their coffee. You place your order, they ask your name, and then you mill around a bit waiting for them to “craft” your coffee. I’m scrolling through e-mail, the barista is calling out names in the background. He calls out \"Marco\". Completely on reflex, my inner child responds \"Polo\" and not quietly or under my breath. The guy sitting across from me looks up from his MacBook and starts laughing. The guy getting his coffee, Marco, apparently, turns around and gives me a slightly nasty look. Or maybe just puzzled. Or more likely a bit of both.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- Dub the Uke by Kara Square (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mindmapthat/53340 Ft: DJ Vadim</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul class=\"\">\r\n 	<li>Allan Marko, a long-time listener, posted a travel story on the TravelCommons Facebook page -\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I flew from SFO to MUC with a colleague last month on UAL Business Class (my first trip on a 787 - nice plane, and decent service from the UA team) We had an early morning arrival, and an hour to kill before our transportation arrived. My colleague’s 1K status couldn’t get us into the Lufthansa Arrivals Lounge for showers. I pulled up the Priority Pass app on my iPhone (membership came with my Chase Sapphire Reserve Card) and saw there was an Atlantic Lounge over in Terminal 1 that had shower facilities. We took the bus over to Terminal 1 which serves many European, Middle East, and other second-tier airlines. Pulling out my physical Priority Pass card (as opposed to the one in the app) I got both of us into the lounge and their two shower rooms. The lounge only offered the basics and needed of refresh, but we were happy to find it that morning (including the free beer!).</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Allan, thanks for that, and good on you for figuring that all out. There are so many nooks and crannies in the card benefits world. There’s real value there, but you have to think about it and dig in a bit. The last time I used my Priority Pass (which I got with my Amex Platinum card) was last summer when I was connecting through DUB on my way to London. That lounge was similar to Allan’s MUC experience -- pretty basic, a bit threadbare, but a reasonable place for a cup of tea and breakfast. My son Andrew used his Priority Pass card (also from his Chase card) to get a $28 credit at a restaurant in BOS which paid for a pre-flight meal and a couple of beers. “For the two of us, I think we were due $56 credit, but we wanted to be able to board the plane, so we cut ourselves off.” A colleague of mine told me that, in LGA, after Amex’s Centurion Lounge closed, his UA Gold status got him into the Air Canada lounge to wait out the rest of a long flight delay. “I only thought they let in Star Alliance Gold passengers for international flights, but let me in for my LGA-ORD flight.” And then there’s things like the 10 Gogo in-flight WiFi passes that I get every year with my Platinum card that I never burn through, or the $200 in annual statement credit that I think I get on UA and am always surprised when I see the charge for the in-flight tapas box reversed. And I’m reminded that I gotta pay more attention to this stuff because I hate leaving money on the table.</li>\r\n 	<li>I will say that there are 2 good things about doing trunk line, hub-to-hub commute vs., say, my last regular commute, between ORD and Charlottesville, VA: great flight frequency -- between AA and UA, there’s a flight at most every hour and that’s not even looking at SWA’s schedule out of Love Field; and, no RJs, no regional jets. I had forgotten how nice it is to be able to stand up straight in the aisle, let alone in the toilet. I take happiness in the small things.</li>\r\n 	<li>I was talking to a colleague about this -- flying AA, and UA, and SWA based on the most convenient times and price, and then maybe equipment (avoiding those RJs when I can). He said “I’m always amazed at how promiscuous you are in your airline choices.” It was an interesting word choice; one that kinda speaks to how invested people can get in their travel choices. Though it can also be a bit of Stockholm Syndrome for folks who have to fly out of fortress hubs, like this colleague who is in a very conflicted relationship with United out of Newark. “I think you’re more right than me,” he said. He’s 1K on United, their top tier. I’m mid-tier on United and American. Comparing notes, he hasn’t gotten any more upgrades than me, and though I board after 1Ks (or Exec Platinums on AA), I haven’t yet had a problem finding overhead space, even on packed flights to DFW. I’ve said it before -- I don’t think there’s all that much difference between mid- and top-tier loyalty ranks; certainly not enough to take less convenient flights to earn the extra miles needed to stay top-tier.</li>\r\n 	<li>A study of US airport growth hit the TravelCommons inbox on Halloween, saying that the two airports with the biggest drop in traffic are Memphis and Cincinnati. We talked about this back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/08/09/podcast-143-how-bad-is-business-travel-for-your-health-make-layovers-fun/\">August episode</a> when I was flying in and out of Cincinnati for 4 weeks straight. Nice airport, but I said back then it felt a bit overbuilt, and how both it and Memphis felt empty after after being “de-hubbed” by Delta. I wasn’t wrong. This new survey ground through 10 years of FAA traffic data and came to the same conclusion. Memphis lost the most traffic, down 62%. Cincinnati was second, losing 51% of its traffic.</li>\r\n 	<li>So you can guess that neither made the Wall Street Journal’s ranking of the 20 largest US airports. Denver, Orlando and Phoenix at the top 3 finishers while the three NYC airports -- LaGuardia, JFK, and Newark -- brought up the rear, numbers 18, 19, and 20. Surprises? I dunno -- maybe that LaGuardia wasn’t in last place given all the construction disruptions, that LAX was higher at #9 than Minneapolis-St Paul at #11, and that O’Hare is one spot higher than San Francisco, 15 vs. 16. That’s probably as much to do with their methodology as anything - how they weighed all the different score components, things like on-time arrivals, average TSA wait, cost of on-prem parking, average ticket cost. It’s interesting, though, to compare this ranking with Skytrax’s ranking of global airports. Denver, the top US airport on both lists; at #28 on Skytrax’s list. Cincinnati is the second US airport on the Skytrax list at #34, which makes sense when you look at the methodologies. Skytrax is focused on the in-airport experience -- terminal seating, cleanliness, queue times, friendliness of staff. With these criteria, I don’t doubt that Cincinnati should rank high -- it’s probably helped by now being a bit overbuilt -- lots of space and fewer people to clean up after. The Journal’s is a bit more wide-ranging, looking both inside and outside the terminal, including things like average fares, rental-car taxes and fees, number of nonstop destinations and dominance of the largest airline to its rankings. I’ll put links to both in the show notes for those interesting in a deeper dive.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our new Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — Emma by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/50905 Ft: Martijn de Boer</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Rental Demolition Derby</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I’ve rented a lot of cars in my business travel and have never crashed one. I drive them off the lot, use them for 3-4 days, fill them back up with gas, return them to the lot, and walk away. So when I picked up a car from Hertz at Edinburgh airport back in September, I skipped all the insurance coverages, took the keys to a brand new Toyota hybrid cross-over, and drove off the lot. This was my fourth September in a row renting from the Hertz and had never had an incident -- even when driving a manual on the left side of the road while shifting with my left hand -- well, other than a Fiat that dropped its transmission, but that wasn’t my fault. So, no need to waste the collision damage waiver charges.</li>\r\n 	<li>You can see where this is going. The next day, I was driving a narrow road in St Andrews, heading south out of town to go knock around the fishing villages on the north bank of the Firth of Forth. Roads in Scotland can get narrow. Driving the one-lane roads in the Highlands are an acquired talent, but this road is in a residential neighborhood, and I’ve driven it many times. So I couldn’t believe it when I heard a big thump as I drove past a van. Damn, I thought, had I drifted over to the left and popped the van’s rear view mirror? I pulled over and hopped out of the car. No, it was worse. There was a huge crease along the left side of the car; just missed the front wheel, so still driveable but very ugly. I walked down to the van. It belonged to a nearby community center. In a hurry to pick up kids from school, the driver had pulled out into me as I drove past. I pulled out an accident report form that Hertz had helpfully put in the glove compartment. We filled it out, skipped calling the police since no one was hurt.</li>\r\n 	<li>So, again, not my fault, but I’m still, a few days later, I’m turning in a car with a full tank and some extra body work. I point out the damage to the Hertz guy. He pulls up a different tab on his Samsung tablet -- click, click, click -- damage, front left wing; damage, front left door; damage, rear left door -- took a couple of pictures, and because I’d skipped the CDW, out burped the bill -- £780 or about $1,000. They ran it through on my Chase Sapphire Visa card.</li>\r\n 	<li>Which I gave to Hertz because, as I was poking through the nooks and crannies of the Chase website before I left home, I confirmed that card would cover UK rental car damage for rentals charged to it. The next week, back home, I found where to file a claim. They didn’t make it easy, but Google eventually uncovered it. I created a claim, uploaded a scan of the accident report, the Hertz receipt, and a couple of iPhone pictures of the damage. And then waited. The website said they’d take 2 weeks to review and get back to me. Three weeks later, I called. A guy said they’d sent me an email asking for two more documents from Hertz. Hmmm, never saw that, but who knows what gets caught up in the Spam filtering. They wanted a copy of the original Hertz agreement, which I had left in the car, and Hertz’s repair cost breakdown. OK, that was reasonable. I called Hertz and a very helpful woman put in a request and said get it in a week. Within a couple of days, Hertz sent me what I needed. I uploaded them to my claim and waited another 2 weeks. On Day 2 Weeks + 1, I called. A woman looked at my file, said it was still being reviewed by management, but said she’s put me on hold and ring them for status. Two minutes later, she picked up and they’d approved my claim. 48 hours later, the $1,000 showed up in my bank account. It took me a bit over 2 months, but Chase paid my claim with a minimum amount of hassle.</li>\r\n 	<li>Now, while I’ve had a good rental car record in Scotland, my record in Hungary is not quite clean. Indeed, every time I’ve driven there, it’s been something. The last time I drove, we were a couple of blocks away from the rental return next to the Marriott on the Danube. Pulling into an intersection after stopping at a Stop sign, a motorcycle messenger plowed into the front of my car, flew across the hood, and landed in the street on the other side of the intersection. Luckily, he was in a full helmet and leathers and unhurt. The rental car, not so lucky. The entire front end was ripped off. The rental car guy showed up as the police were finishing their report. I pulled out suitcases out of the trunk and gave him the key. He looked at the front of his car in disbelief. We wheeled our bags down the sidewalk to the Marriott because this time, I had bought the collision damage waiver.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — Astral Travel by Astral (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Astral/44282</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Traveler Gift Guide</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>As we come into the Christmas shopping season, I thought it would be useful to pull together some suggestions for the frequent traveler in your life. Or, if you are the frequent traveler, a list of hints you might want to drop on family members looking for ideas.</li>\r\n 	<li>Top of the list is a good battery charger. Whatever the size or form factor -- slimline, lipstick, high-capacity brick -- having that second or third charge readily available is critical to get notified of gate changes and when you’re using electronic boarding passes. It saves you from stalking cleaning crews to find a live power outlet on your layover, or negotiating with your seatmate for possession of outlet between you. I’m always looking to shed weight, so I retired the heavy no-name pack I picked up in the depths of Beijing’s Pearl Street Market for an Anker lipstick sized charger. I bought three and gave one to my wife and daughter. It’s cheap piece of mind.</li>\r\n 	<li>On my shopping list, trying to catch up to what’s already a cold winter, is one of those puffy coats -- but one of the thin ones, like the Patagonia Nano Puff, one that will smoosh down to nothing in the front pocket of my suitcase, or will fit in the crevices of a jammed full overhead bin. Right next that on the list, a man’s scarf is an incredibly undervalued piece of intermediate winter wear. In an airplane cabin or hotel room where a coat is too much (especially in a middle seat), but there’s a draft that chills you, a scarf around the neck is just enough without being too much. You may have to teach him how to wear it, but you can have fun with colors.</li>\r\n 	<li>For someone just embarking on the road warrior life, how ‘bout a black 20-inch hardsided carry-on. Black not only makes you look thinner, it makes your bag look thinner to gate agents hunting for bag-sizer bait. Black also doesn’t show stains. A 20-incher should get on-board for 90% of airlines, and the hard sides are the easiest to get in and out of a bag sizer if the not-yet-statused traveler gets waylaid by an over-zealous gate agent.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you’re going big for someone -- or for those December babies, combining Christmas and birthday gifts -- noise canceling headphones are a statement gift. The good ones -- the Bose or Sonys that make the drone of the jet engines disappear with the flick of a switch -- are a $300 number. But the drop in stress level and blood pressure that accompanies that flick of the switch -- you don’t realize how much that drone affects you until you turn on your Bose -- makes it worth the number. Everything in my briefcase has to earn its space. I’ve been carrying Bose headphones for, I dunno, 10, 15 years. They’re nowhere near compact, but I’ve never thought of leaving them behind.</li>\r\n 	<li>Another idea for the music -- or podcast lover, is a small portable Bluetooth speaker. I’ve started packing mine again for trips of a week or longer. For a couple of days, I’m fine with wearing headphones or using the phone speaker. But longer than that or if I’m with the family in, say, an Airbnb, I want something a bit more social. I’m still using my 6-year old Jambox speaker, the one that kinda created this category. The maker, Jawbone, went under last year, but the speaker still works. There are newer, better ones out there now, at all sorts of price points. The ones that can act as speaker phones are a nice to-have if they fit your budget.</li>\r\n 	<li>And finally, a stocking stuffer idea -- a travel notebook, something to jot down thoughts, ideas, observations, to do lists while waiting for the flight to board, the train to come, or the room to be made up. Nothing extravagant -- no leather embossed cover -- but it should be small enough to fit in a pocket, but substantial, something that can survive being knocked around in the bottom of a briefcase, and with paper quality that will hold onto those thoughts for a while. I used to use a Moleskine 3½x5½” notebook but have switched over a similar-sized A6 Clairefontaine. The soft cover fits better in a jeans back pocket, and the paper is more fountain-pen friendly. It’s $10 for a Moleskine, $7 for two Clairefontaines. Or go a bit more whimsical and get a 3-pack of Field Notes for $13. It’ll fit your budget and the stocking.</li>\r\n 	<li>So there you go, something to fit all sizes and budgets in time for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, or if you’re just killing time waiting for your Thanksgiving flight to leave.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #146</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and now on <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_146.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #146 — Rental Demolition Derby; Traveler Gift Guide','','inherit','closed','closed','','2167-revision-v1','','','2018-11-20 00:33:59','2018-11-20 05:33:59','',2167,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/11/20/2167-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2173,1,'2018-11-20 01:04:11','2018-11-20 06:04:11','[caption id=\"attachment_2168\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2168\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> But I filled up the tank[/caption]\r\n\r\nGetting this posted just in time to give you something to listen to while jammed up in Thanksgiving traffic, be it on the road or in the airports. We talk about working the angles to maximize credit card benefits, which leads me to one more story from my fall trip to Europe -- a rental car scrape that my Chase Visa card just paid off. We also talk about the Wall Street Journal\'s new ranking of US airports and compare it to Skytrax\'s international rankings. And we wrap up with my Christmas gift suggestions for the frequent traveler on your list.  All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_146.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n<iframe src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/511557468&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"></iframe><!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #146:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, trying to give you something to keep you entertained? Or at least occupied as you thread through the Thanksgiving travel traffic -- be it airports, trains, or roadways -- the forecasts are for a 5% increase over last year.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’ve been trying to get this episode done for the past 2 weeks, but I just haven’t been able to make it happen. Since we last spoke, I’ve been in the midst of a weekly commute between Chicago and Dallas. It’s the standard consultant commute -- leaving ORD Monday at 7am, leaving DFW Thursday at 5pm -- the consulting rush hour. The lounges are packed, the Starbucks line tails way back; no matter what status, you’re in a middle seat if you don’t book 3 weeks ahead of time, and for a mere Advantage Platinum person, there’s no chance of an upgrade. I do click through American’s website to request an upgrade every week -- more for the entertainment value than any expectation of getting a seat. This week, I was #35 on the upgrade list.</li>\r\n 	<li>The traffic between these 2 American hubs is pretty amazing. The first week of this commute, taking the 6:30p flight back to Chicago, it was a fully-packed 787 Dreamliner. So I’m thinking -- hey, I gotta have a good shot at an upgrade on this flight, with all the first and business class seats. Nope, though I did get up to the teens on the upgrade list -- #15 to be exact. I counted myself lucky to get out of a center seat at the last minute.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’m not a huge fan of DFW Airport. It’s a massive, spread-out place with a $4 toll charge to just to drive out of the place. The semi-circular terminals are also spread out affairs, with 3 security checkpoints arrayed around each perimeter, only one of which has PreCheck and really not well-marked. I tweeted that out in frustration a few weeks back after trundling around from checkpoint to checkpoint. The DFW Airport Twitter account quickly came back with a link to their website that has the location and hours of each checkpoint, with the PreCheck one bolded. Very useful. I have bookmarked on my iPhone now.</li>\r\n 	<li>The next day, back in Chicago, I was downtown, getting a afternoon espresso jolt at Intelligentsia Coffee, not a completely full-on hipster joint -- there no turntable playing vintage vinyl -- but they are a bit fussy about their coffee. You place your order, they ask your name, and then you mill around a bit waiting for them to “craft” your coffee. I’m scrolling through e-mail, the barista is calling out names in the background. He calls out \"Marco\". Completely on reflex, my inner child responds \"Polo\" and not quietly or under my breath. The guy sitting across from me looks up from his MacBook and starts laughing. The guy getting his coffee, Marco, apparently, turns around and gives me a slightly nasty look. Or maybe just puzzled. Or more likely a bit of both.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/indidginus-seismic/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Superstring</a></em> by Indidginus</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul class=\"\">\r\n 	<li>Allan Marko, a long-time listener, posted a travel story on the TravelCommons Facebook page -\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I flew from SFO to MUC with a colleague last month on UAL Business Class (my first trip on a 787 - nice plane, and decent service from the UA team) We had an early morning arrival, and an hour to kill before our transportation arrived. My colleague’s 1K status couldn’t get us into the Lufthansa Arrivals Lounge for showers. I pulled up the Priority Pass app on my iPhone (membership came with my Chase Sapphire Reserve Card) and saw there was an Atlantic Lounge over in Terminal 1 that had shower facilities. We took the bus over to Terminal 1 which serves many European, Middle East, and other second-tier airlines. Pulling out my physical Priority Pass card (as opposed to the one in the app) I got both of us into the lounge and their two shower rooms. The lounge only offered the basics and needed of refresh, but we were happy to find it that morning (including the free beer!).</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Allan, thanks for that, and good on you for figuring that all out. There are so many nooks and crannies in the card benefits world. There’s real value there, but you have to think about it and dig in a bit. The last time I used my Priority Pass (which I got with my Amex Platinum card) was last summer when I was connecting through DUB on my way to London. That lounge was similar to Allan’s MUC experience -- pretty basic, a bit threadbare, but a reasonable place for a cup of tea and breakfast. My son Andrew used his Priority Pass card (also from his Chase card) to get a $28 credit at a restaurant in BOS which paid for a pre-flight meal and a couple of beers. “For the two of us, I think we were due $56 credit, but we wanted to be able to board the plane, so we cut ourselves off.” A colleague of mine told me that, in LGA, after Amex’s Centurion Lounge closed, his UA Gold status got him into the Air Canada lounge to wait out the rest of a long flight delay. “I only thought they let in Star Alliance Gold passengers for international flights, but let me in for my LGA-ORD flight.” And then there’s things like the 10 Gogo in-flight WiFi passes that I get every year with my Platinum card that I never burn through, or the $200 in annual statement credit that I think I get on UA and am always surprised when I see the charge for the in-flight tapas box reversed. And I’m reminded that I gotta pay more attention to this stuff because I hate leaving money on the table.</li>\r\n 	<li>I will say that there are 2 good things about doing trunk line, hub-to-hub commute vs., say, my last regular commute, between ORD and Charlottesville, VA: great flight frequency -- between AA and UA, there’s a flight at most every hour and that’s not even looking at SWA’s schedule out of Love Field; and, no RJs, no regional jets. I had forgotten how nice it is to be able to stand up straight in the aisle, let alone in the toilet. I take happiness in the small things.</li>\r\n 	<li>I was talking to a colleague about this -- flying AA, and UA, and SWA based on the most convenient times and price, and then maybe equipment (avoiding those RJs when I can). He said “I’m always amazed at how promiscuous you are in your airline choices.” It was an interesting word choice; one that kinda speaks to how invested people can get in their travel choices. Though it can also be a bit of Stockholm Syndrome for folks who have to fly out of fortress hubs, like this colleague who is in a very conflicted relationship with United out of Newark. “I think you’re more right than me,” he said. He’s 1K on United, their top tier. I’m mid-tier on United and American. Comparing notes, he hasn’t gotten any more upgrades than me, and though I board after 1Ks (or Exec Platinums on AA), I haven’t yet had a problem finding overhead space, even on packed flights to DFW. I’ve said it before -- I don’t think there’s all that much difference between mid- and top-tier loyalty ranks; certainly not enough to take less convenient flights to earn the extra miles needed to stay top-tier.</li>\r\n 	<li>A study of US airport growth hit the TravelCommons inbox on Halloween, saying that the two airports with the biggest drop in traffic are Memphis and Cincinnati. We talked about this back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/08/09/podcast-143-how-bad-is-business-travel-for-your-health-make-layovers-fun/\">August episode</a> when I was flying in and out of Cincinnati for 4 weeks straight. Nice airport, but I said back then it felt a bit overbuilt, and how both it and Memphis felt empty after after being “de-hubbed” by Delta. I wasn’t wrong. This new survey ground through 10 years of FAA traffic data and came to the same conclusion. Memphis lost the most traffic, down 62%. Cincinnati was second, losing 51% of its traffic.</li>\r\n 	<li>So you can guess that neither made the Wall Street Journal’s ranking of the 20 largest US airports. Denver, Orlando and Phoenix at the top 3 finishers while the three NYC airports -- LaGuardia, JFK, and Newark -- brought up the rear, numbers 18, 19, and 20. Surprises? I dunno -- maybe that LaGuardia wasn’t in last place given all the construction disruptions, that LAX was higher at #9 than Minneapolis-St Paul at #11, and that O’Hare is one spot higher than San Francisco, 15 vs. 16. That’s probably as much to do with their methodology as anything - how they weighed all the different score components, things like on-time arrivals, average TSA wait, cost of on-prem parking, average ticket cost. It’s interesting, though, to compare this ranking with Skytrax’s ranking of global airports. Denver, the top US airport on both lists; at #28 on Skytrax’s list. Cincinnati is the second US airport on the Skytrax list at #34, which makes sense when you look at the methodologies. Skytrax is focused on the in-airport experience -- terminal seating, cleanliness, queue times, friendliness of staff. With these criteria, I don’t doubt that Cincinnati should rank high -- it’s probably helped by now being a bit overbuilt -- lots of space and fewer people to clean up after. The Journal’s is a bit more wide-ranging, looking both inside and outside the terminal, including things like average fares, rental-car taxes and fees, number of nonstop destinations and dominance of the largest airline to its rankings. I’ll put links to both in the show notes for those interesting in a deeper dive.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our new Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/yoria-suerte/\"><em>Suerte Mijo</em></a> by Arthur Yoria</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Rental Demolition Derby</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I’ve rented a lot of cars in my business travel and have never crashed one. I drive them off the lot, use them for 3-4 days, fill them back up with gas, return them to the lot, and walk away. So when I picked up a car from Hertz at Edinburgh airport back in September, I skipped all the insurance coverages, took the keys to a brand new Toyota hybrid cross-over, and drove off the lot. This was my fourth September in a row renting from the Hertz and had never had an incident -- even when driving a manual on the left side of the road while shifting with my left hand -- well, other than a Fiat that dropped its transmission, but that wasn’t my fault. So, no need to waste the collision damage waiver charges.</li>\r\n 	<li>You can see where this is going. The next day, I was driving a narrow road in St Andrews, heading south out of town to go knock around the fishing villages on the north bank of the Firth of Forth. Roads in Scotland can get narrow. Driving the one-lane roads in the Highlands are an acquired talent, but this road is in a residential neighborhood, and I’ve driven it many times. So I couldn’t believe it when I heard a big thump as I drove past a van. Damn, I thought, had I drifted over to the left and popped the van’s rear view mirror? I pulled over and hopped out of the car. No, it was worse. There was a huge crease along the left side of the car; just missed the front wheel, so still driveable but very ugly. I walked down to the van. It belonged to a nearby community center. In a hurry to pick up kids from school, the driver had pulled out into me as I drove past. I pulled out an accident report form that Hertz had helpfully put in the glove compartment. We filled it out, skipped calling the police since no one was hurt.</li>\r\n 	<li>So, again, not my fault, but I’m still, a few days later, I’m turning in a car with a full tank and some extra body work. I point out the damage to the Hertz guy. He pulls up a different tab on his Samsung tablet -- click, click, click -- damage, front left wing; damage, front left door; damage, rear left door -- took a couple of pictures, and because I’d skipped the CDW, out burped the bill -- £780 or about $1,000. They ran it through on my Chase Sapphire Visa card.</li>\r\n 	<li>Which I gave to Hertz because, as I was poking through the nooks and crannies of the Chase website before I left home, I confirmed that card would cover UK rental car damage for rentals charged to it. The next week, back home, I found where to file a claim. They didn’t make it easy, but Google eventually uncovered it. I created a claim, uploaded a scan of the accident report, the Hertz receipt, and a couple of iPhone pictures of the damage. And then waited. The website said they’d take 2 weeks to review and get back to me. Three weeks later, I called. A guy said they’d sent me an email asking for two more documents from Hertz. Hmmm, never saw that, but who knows what gets caught up in the Spam filtering. They wanted a copy of the original Hertz agreement, which I had left in the car, and Hertz’s repair cost breakdown. OK, that was reasonable. I called Hertz and a very helpful woman put in a request and said get it in a week. Within a couple of days, Hertz sent me what I needed. I uploaded them to my claim and waited another 2 weeks. On Day 2 Weeks + 1, I called. A woman looked at my file, said it was still being reviewed by management, but said she’s put me on hold and ring them for status. Two minutes later, she picked up and they’d approved my claim. 48 hours later, the $1,000 showed up in my bank account. It took me a bit over 2 months, but Chase paid my claim with a minimum amount of hassle.</li>\r\n 	<li>Now, while I’ve had a good rental car record in Scotland, my record in Hungary is not quite clean. Indeed, every time I’ve driven there, it’s been something. The last time I drove, we were a couple of blocks away from the rental return next to the Marriott on the Danube. Pulling into an intersection after stopping at a Stop sign, a motorcycle messenger plowed into the front of my car, flew across the hood, and landed in the street on the other side of the intersection. Luckily, he was in a full helmet and leathers and unhurt. The rental car, not so lucky. The entire front end was ripped off. The rental car guy showed up as the police were finishing their report. I pulled out suitcases out of the trunk and gave him the key. He looked at the front of his car in disbelief. We wheeled our bags down the sidewalk to the Marriott because this time, I had bought the collision damage waiver.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/artemis-gravity/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Inception</a></em> by Artemis</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Traveler Gift Guide</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>As we come into the Christmas shopping season, I thought it would be useful to pull together some suggestions for the frequent traveler in your life. Or, if you are the frequent traveler, a list of hints you might want to drop on family members looking for ideas.</li>\r\n 	<li>Top of the list is a good battery charger. Whatever the size or form factor -- slimline, lipstick, high-capacity brick -- having that second or third charge readily available is critical to get notified of gate changes and when you’re using electronic boarding passes. It saves you from stalking cleaning crews to find a live power outlet on your layover, or negotiating with your seatmate for possession of outlet between you. I’m always looking to shed weight, so I retired the heavy no-name pack I picked up in the depths of Beijing’s Pearl Street Market for an Anker lipstick sized charger. I bought three and gave one to my wife and daughter. It’s cheap piece of mind.</li>\r\n 	<li>On my shopping list, trying to catch up to what’s already a cold winter, is one of those puffy coats -- but one of the thin ones, like the Patagonia Nano Puff, one that will smoosh down to nothing in the front pocket of my suitcase, or will fit in the crevices of a jammed full overhead bin. Right next that on the list, a man’s scarf is an incredibly undervalued piece of intermediate winter wear. In an airplane cabin or hotel room where a coat is too much (especially in a middle seat), but there’s a draft that chills you, a scarf around the neck is just enough without being too much. You may have to teach him how to wear it, but you can have fun with colors.</li>\r\n 	<li>For someone just embarking on the road warrior life, how ‘bout a black 20-inch hardsided carry-on. Black not only makes you look thinner, it makes your bag look thinner to gate agents hunting for bag-sizer bait. Black also doesn’t show stains. A 20-incher should get on-board for 90% of airlines, and the hard sides are the easiest to get in and out of a bag sizer if the not-yet-statused traveler gets waylaid by an over-zealous gate agent.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you’re going big for someone -- or for those December babies, combining Christmas and birthday gifts -- noise canceling headphones are a statement gift. The good ones -- the Bose or Sonys that make the drone of the jet engines disappear with the flick of a switch -- are a $300 number. But the drop in stress level and blood pressure that accompanies that flick of the switch -- you don’t realize how much that drone affects you until you turn on your Bose -- makes it worth the number. Everything in my briefcase has to earn its space. I’ve been carrying Bose headphones for, I dunno, 10, 15 years. They’re nowhere near compact, but I’ve never thought of leaving them behind.</li>\r\n 	<li>Another idea for the music -- or podcast lover, is a small portable Bluetooth speaker. I’ve started packing mine again for trips of a week or longer. For a couple of days, I’m fine with wearing headphones or using the phone speaker. But longer than that or if I’m with the family in, say, an Airbnb, I want something a bit more social. I’m still using my 6-year old Jambox speaker, the one that kinda created this category. The maker, Jawbone, went under last year, but the speaker still works. There are newer, better ones out there now, at all sorts of price points. The ones that can act as speaker phones are a nice to-have if they fit your budget.</li>\r\n 	<li>And finally, a stocking stuffer idea -- a travel notebook, something to jot down thoughts, ideas, observations, to do lists while waiting for the flight to board, the train to come, or the room to be made up. Nothing extravagant -- no leather embossed cover -- but it should be small enough to fit in a pocket, but substantial, something that can survive being knocked around in the bottom of a briefcase, and with paper quality that will hold onto those thoughts for a while. I used to use a Moleskine 3½x5½” notebook but have switched over a similar-sized A6 Clairefontaine. The soft cover fits better in a jeans back pocket, and the paper is more fountain-pen friendly. It’s $10 for a Moleskine, $7 for two Clairefontaines. Or go a bit more whimsical and get a 3-pack of Field Notes for $13. It’ll fit your budget and the stocking.</li>\r\n 	<li>So there you go, something to fit all sizes and budgets in time for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, or if you’re just killing time waiting for your Thanksgiving flight to leave.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #146</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and now on <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Magnatune</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_146.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #146 — Rental Demolition Derby; Traveler Gift Guide','','inherit','closed','closed','','2167-revision-v1','','','2018-11-20 01:04:11','2018-11-20 06:04:11','',2167,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/11/20/2167-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2174,1,'2018-11-20 18:05:17','2018-11-20 23:05:17','[caption id=\"attachment_2168\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2168\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> But I filled up the tank[/caption]\r\n\r\nGetting this posted just in time to give you something to listen to while jammed up in Thanksgiving traffic, be it on the road or in the airports. We talk about working the angles to maximize credit card benefits, which leads me to one more story from my fall trip to Europe -- a rental car scrape that my Chase Visa card just paid off. We also talk about the Wall Street Journal\'s new ranking of US airports and compare it to Skytrax\'s international rankings. And we wrap up with my Christmas gift suggestions for the frequent traveler on your list.  All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_146.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/533121708&color=%23ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true\"></iframe><!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #146:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, trying to give you something to keep you entertained? Or at least occupied as you thread through the Thanksgiving travel traffic -- be it airports, trains, or roadways -- the forecasts are for a 5% increase over last year.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’ve been trying to get this episode done for the past 2 weeks, but I just haven’t been able to make it happen. Since we last spoke, I’ve been in the midst of a weekly commute between Chicago and Dallas. It’s the standard consultant commute -- leaving ORD Monday at 7am, leaving DFW Thursday at 5pm -- the consulting rush hour. The lounges are packed, the Starbucks line tails way back; no matter what status, you’re in a middle seat if you don’t book 3 weeks ahead of time, and for a mere Advantage Platinum person, there’s no chance of an upgrade. I do click through American’s website to request an upgrade every week -- more for the entertainment value than any expectation of getting a seat. This week, I was #35 on the upgrade list.</li>\r\n 	<li>The traffic between these 2 American hubs is pretty amazing. The first week of this commute, taking the 6:30p flight back to Chicago, it was a fully-packed 787 Dreamliner. So I’m thinking -- hey, I gotta have a good shot at an upgrade on this flight, with all the first and business class seats. Nope, though I did get up to the teens on the upgrade list -- #15 to be exact. I counted myself lucky to get out of a center seat at the last minute.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’m not a huge fan of DFW Airport. It’s a massive, spread-out place with a $4 toll charge to just to drive out of the place. The semi-circular terminals are also spread out affairs, with 3 security checkpoints arrayed around each perimeter, only one of which has PreCheck and really not well-marked. I tweeted that out in frustration a few weeks back after trundling around from checkpoint to checkpoint. The DFW Airport Twitter account quickly came back with a link to their website that has the location and hours of each checkpoint, with the PreCheck one bolded. Very useful. I have bookmarked on my iPhone now.</li>\r\n 	<li>The next day, back in Chicago, I was downtown, getting a afternoon espresso jolt at Intelligentsia Coffee, not a completely full-on hipster joint -- there no turntable playing vintage vinyl -- but they are a bit fussy about their coffee. You place your order, they ask your name, and then you mill around a bit waiting for them to “craft” your coffee. I’m scrolling through e-mail, the barista is calling out names in the background. He calls out \"Marco\". Completely on reflex, my inner child responds \"Polo\" and not quietly or under my breath. The guy sitting across from me looks up from his MacBook and starts laughing. The guy getting his coffee, Marco, apparently, turns around and gives me a slightly nasty look. Or maybe just puzzled. Or more likely a bit of both.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/indidginus-seismic/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Superstring</a></em> by Indidginus</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul class=\"\">\r\n 	<li>Allan Marko, a long-time listener, posted a travel story on the TravelCommons Facebook page -\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I flew from SFO to MUC with a colleague last month on UAL Business Class (my first trip on a 787 - nice plane, and decent service from the UA team) We had an early morning arrival, and an hour to kill before our transportation arrived. My colleague’s 1K status couldn’t get us into the Lufthansa Arrivals Lounge for showers. I pulled up the Priority Pass app on my iPhone (membership came with my Chase Sapphire Reserve Card) and saw there was an Atlantic Lounge over in Terminal 1 that had shower facilities. We took the bus over to Terminal 1 which serves many European, Middle East, and other second-tier airlines. Pulling out my physical Priority Pass card (as opposed to the one in the app) I got both of us into the lounge and their two shower rooms. The lounge only offered the basics and needed of refresh, but we were happy to find it that morning (including the free beer!).</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Allan, thanks for that, and good on you for figuring that all out. There are so many nooks and crannies in the card benefits world. There’s real value there, but you have to think about it and dig in a bit. The last time I used my Priority Pass (which I got with my Amex Platinum card) was last summer when I was connecting through DUB on my way to London. That lounge was similar to Allan’s MUC experience -- pretty basic, a bit threadbare, but a reasonable place for a cup of tea and breakfast. My son Andrew used his Priority Pass card (also from his Chase card) to get a $28 credit at a restaurant in BOS which paid for a pre-flight meal and a couple of beers. “For the two of us, I think we were due $56 credit, but we wanted to be able to board the plane, so we cut ourselves off.” A colleague of mine told me that, in LGA, after Amex’s Centurion Lounge closed, his UA Gold status got him into the Air Canada lounge to wait out the rest of a long flight delay. “I only thought they let in Star Alliance Gold passengers for international flights, but let me in for my LGA-ORD flight.” And then there’s things like the 10 Gogo in-flight WiFi passes that I get every year with my Platinum card that I never burn through, or the $200 in annual statement credit that I think I get on UA and am always surprised when I see the charge for the in-flight tapas box reversed. And I’m reminded that I gotta pay more attention to this stuff because I hate leaving money on the table.</li>\r\n 	<li>I will say that there are 2 good things about doing trunk line, hub-to-hub commute vs., say, my last regular commute, between ORD and Charlottesville, VA: great flight frequency -- between AA and UA, there’s a flight at most every hour and that’s not even looking at SWA’s schedule out of Love Field; and, no RJs, no regional jets. I had forgotten how nice it is to be able to stand up straight in the aisle, let alone in the toilet. I take happiness in the small things.</li>\r\n 	<li>I was talking to a colleague about this -- flying AA, and UA, and SWA based on the most convenient times and price, and then maybe equipment (avoiding those RJs when I can). He said “I’m always amazed at how promiscuous you are in your airline choices.” It was an interesting word choice; one that kinda speaks to how invested people can get in their travel choices. Though it can also be a bit of Stockholm Syndrome for folks who have to fly out of fortress hubs, like this colleague who is in a very conflicted relationship with United out of Newark. “I think you’re more right than me,” he said. He’s 1K on United, their top tier. I’m mid-tier on United and American. Comparing notes, he hasn’t gotten any more upgrades than me, and though I board after 1Ks (or Exec Platinums on AA), I haven’t yet had a problem finding overhead space, even on packed flights to DFW. I’ve said it before -- I don’t think there’s all that much difference between mid- and top-tier loyalty ranks; certainly not enough to take less convenient flights to earn the extra miles needed to stay top-tier.</li>\r\n 	<li>A study of US airport growth hit the TravelCommons inbox on Halloween, saying that the two airports with the biggest drop in traffic are Memphis and Cincinnati. We talked about this back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/08/09/podcast-143-how-bad-is-business-travel-for-your-health-make-layovers-fun/\">August episode</a> when I was flying in and out of Cincinnati for 4 weeks straight. Nice airport, but I said back then it felt a bit overbuilt, and how both it and Memphis felt empty after after being “de-hubbed” by Delta. I wasn’t wrong. This new survey ground through 10 years of FAA traffic data and came to the same conclusion. Memphis lost the most traffic, down 62%. Cincinnati was second, losing 51% of its traffic.</li>\r\n 	<li>So you can guess that neither made the Wall Street Journal’s ranking of the 20 largest US airports. Denver, Orlando and Phoenix at the top 3 finishers while the three NYC airports -- LaGuardia, JFK, and Newark -- brought up the rear, numbers 18, 19, and 20. Surprises? I dunno -- maybe that LaGuardia wasn’t in last place given all the construction disruptions, that LAX was higher at #9 than Minneapolis-St Paul at #11, and that O’Hare is one spot higher than San Francisco, 15 vs. 16. That’s probably as much to do with their methodology as anything - how they weighed all the different score components, things like on-time arrivals, average TSA wait, cost of on-prem parking, average ticket cost. It’s interesting, though, to compare this ranking with Skytrax’s ranking of global airports. Denver, the top US airport on both lists; at #28 on Skytrax’s list. Cincinnati is the second US airport on the Skytrax list at #34, which makes sense when you look at the methodologies. Skytrax is focused on the in-airport experience -- terminal seating, cleanliness, queue times, friendliness of staff. With these criteria, I don’t doubt that Cincinnati should rank high -- it’s probably helped by now being a bit overbuilt -- lots of space and fewer people to clean up after. The Journal’s is a bit more wide-ranging, looking both inside and outside the terminal, including things like average fares, rental-car taxes and fees, number of nonstop destinations and dominance of the largest airline to its rankings. I’ll put links to both in the show notes for those interesting in a deeper dive.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our new Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/yoria-suerte/\"><em>Suerte Mijo</em></a> by Arthur Yoria</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Rental Demolition Derby</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I’ve rented a lot of cars in my business travel and have never crashed one. I drive them off the lot, use them for 3-4 days, fill them back up with gas, return them to the lot, and walk away. So when I picked up a car from Hertz at Edinburgh airport back in September, I skipped all the insurance coverages, took the keys to a brand new Toyota hybrid cross-over, and drove off the lot. This was my fourth September in a row renting from the Hertz and had never had an incident -- even when driving a manual on the left side of the road while shifting with my left hand -- well, other than a Fiat that dropped its transmission, but that wasn’t my fault. So, no need to waste the collision damage waiver charges.</li>\r\n 	<li>You can see where this is going. The next day, I was driving a narrow road in St Andrews, heading south out of town to go knock around the fishing villages on the north bank of the Firth of Forth. Roads in Scotland can get narrow. Driving the one-lane roads in the Highlands are an acquired talent, but this road is in a residential neighborhood, and I’ve driven it many times. So I couldn’t believe it when I heard a big thump as I drove past a van. Damn, I thought, had I drifted over to the left and popped the van’s rear view mirror? I pulled over and hopped out of the car. No, it was worse. There was a huge crease along the left side of the car; just missed the front wheel, so still driveable but very ugly. I walked down to the van. It belonged to a nearby community center. In a hurry to pick up kids from school, the driver had pulled out into me as I drove past. I pulled out an accident report form that Hertz had helpfully put in the glove compartment. We filled it out, skipped calling the police since no one was hurt.</li>\r\n 	<li>So, again, not my fault, but I’m still, a few days later, I’m turning in a car with a full tank and some extra body work. I point out the damage to the Hertz guy. He pulls up a different tab on his Samsung tablet -- click, click, click -- damage, front left wing; damage, front left door; damage, rear left door -- took a couple of pictures, and because I’d skipped the CDW, out burped the bill -- £780 or about $1,000. They ran it through on my Chase Sapphire Visa card.</li>\r\n 	<li>Which I gave to Hertz because, as I was poking through the nooks and crannies of the Chase website before I left home, I confirmed that card would cover UK rental car damage for rentals charged to it. The next week, back home, I found where to file a claim. They didn’t make it easy, but Google eventually uncovered it. I created a claim, uploaded a scan of the accident report, the Hertz receipt, and a couple of iPhone pictures of the damage. And then waited. The website said they’d take 2 weeks to review and get back to me. Three weeks later, I called. A guy said they’d sent me an email asking for two more documents from Hertz. Hmmm, never saw that, but who knows what gets caught up in the Spam filtering. They wanted a copy of the original Hertz agreement, which I had left in the car, and Hertz’s repair cost breakdown. OK, that was reasonable. I called Hertz and a very helpful woman put in a request and said get it in a week. Within a couple of days, Hertz sent me what I needed. I uploaded them to my claim and waited another 2 weeks. On Day 2 Weeks + 1, I called. A woman looked at my file, said it was still being reviewed by management, but said she’s put me on hold and ring them for status. Two minutes later, she picked up and they’d approved my claim. 48 hours later, the $1,000 showed up in my bank account. It took me a bit over 2 months, but Chase paid my claim with a minimum amount of hassle.</li>\r\n 	<li>Now, while I’ve had a good rental car record in Scotland, my record in Hungary is not quite clean. Indeed, every time I’ve driven there, it’s been something. The last time I drove, we were a couple of blocks away from the rental return next to the Marriott on the Danube. Pulling into an intersection after stopping at a Stop sign, a motorcycle messenger plowed into the front of my car, flew across the hood, and landed in the street on the other side of the intersection. Luckily, he was in a full helmet and leathers and unhurt. The rental car, not so lucky. The entire front end was ripped off. The rental car guy showed up as the police were finishing their report. I pulled out suitcases out of the trunk and gave him the key. He looked at the front of his car in disbelief. We wheeled our bags down the sidewalk to the Marriott because this time, I had bought the collision damage waiver.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/artemis-gravity/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Inception</a></em> by Artemis</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Traveler Gift Guide</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>As we come into the Christmas shopping season, I thought it would be useful to pull together some suggestions for the frequent traveler in your life. Or, if you are the frequent traveler, a list of hints you might want to drop on family members looking for ideas.</li>\r\n 	<li>Top of the list is a good battery charger. Whatever the size or form factor -- slimline, lipstick, high-capacity brick -- having that second or third charge readily available is critical to get notified of gate changes and when you’re using electronic boarding passes. It saves you from stalking cleaning crews to find a live power outlet on your layover, or negotiating with your seatmate for possession of outlet between you. I’m always looking to shed weight, so I retired the heavy no-name pack I picked up in the depths of Beijing’s Pearl Street Market for an Anker lipstick sized charger. I bought three and gave one to my wife and daughter. It’s cheap piece of mind.</li>\r\n 	<li>On my shopping list, trying to catch up to what’s already a cold winter, is one of those puffy coats -- but one of the thin ones, like the Patagonia Nano Puff, one that will smoosh down to nothing in the front pocket of my suitcase, or will fit in the crevices of a jammed full overhead bin. Right next that on the list, a man’s scarf is an incredibly undervalued piece of intermediate winter wear. In an airplane cabin or hotel room where a coat is too much (especially in a middle seat), but there’s a draft that chills you, a scarf around the neck is just enough without being too much. You may have to teach him how to wear it, but you can have fun with colors.</li>\r\n 	<li>For someone just embarking on the road warrior life, how ‘bout a black 20-inch hardsided carry-on. Black not only makes you look thinner, it makes your bag look thinner to gate agents hunting for bag-sizer bait. Black also doesn’t show stains. A 20-incher should get on-board for 90% of airlines, and the hard sides are the easiest to get in and out of a bag sizer if the not-yet-statused traveler gets waylaid by an over-zealous gate agent.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you’re going big for someone -- or for those December babies, combining Christmas and birthday gifts -- noise canceling headphones are a statement gift. The good ones -- the Bose or Sonys that make the drone of the jet engines disappear with the flick of a switch -- are a $300 number. But the drop in stress level and blood pressure that accompanies that flick of the switch -- you don’t realize how much that drone affects you until you turn on your Bose -- makes it worth the number. Everything in my briefcase has to earn its space. I’ve been carrying Bose headphones for, I dunno, 10, 15 years. They’re nowhere near compact, but I’ve never thought of leaving them behind.</li>\r\n 	<li>Another idea for the music -- or podcast lover, is a small portable Bluetooth speaker. I’ve started packing mine again for trips of a week or longer. For a couple of days, I’m fine with wearing headphones or using the phone speaker. But longer than that or if I’m with the family in, say, an Airbnb, I want something a bit more social. I’m still using my 6-year old Jambox speaker, the one that kinda created this category. The maker, Jawbone, went under last year, but the speaker still works. There are newer, better ones out there now, at all sorts of price points. The ones that can act as speaker phones are a nice to-have if they fit your budget.</li>\r\n 	<li>And finally, a stocking stuffer idea -- a travel notebook, something to jot down thoughts, ideas, observations, to do lists while waiting for the flight to board, the train to come, or the room to be made up. Nothing extravagant -- no leather embossed cover -- but it should be small enough to fit in a pocket, but substantial, something that can survive being knocked around in the bottom of a briefcase, and with paper quality that will hold onto those thoughts for a while. I used to use a Moleskine 3½x5½” notebook but have switched over a similar-sized A6 Clairefontaine. The soft cover fits better in a jeans back pocket, and the paper is more fountain-pen friendly. It’s $10 for a Moleskine, $7 for two Clairefontaines. Or go a bit more whimsical and get a 3-pack of Field Notes for $13. It’ll fit your budget and the stocking.</li>\r\n 	<li>So there you go, something to fit all sizes and budgets in time for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, or if you’re just killing time waiting for your Thanksgiving flight to leave.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #146</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and now on <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Magnatune</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_146.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #146 — Rental Demolition Derby; Traveler Gift Guide','','inherit','closed','closed','','2167-revision-v1','','','2018-11-20 18:05:17','2018-11-20 23:05:17','',2167,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/11/20/2167-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2175,1,'2018-11-20 18:05:24','2018-11-20 23:05:24','[caption id=\"attachment_2168\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2168\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> But I filled up the tank[/caption]\r\n\r\nGetting this posted just in time to give you something to listen to while jammed up in Thanksgiving traffic, be it on the road or in the airports. We talk about working the angles to maximize credit card benefits, which leads me to one more story from my fall trip to Europe -- a rental car scrape that my Chase Visa card just paid off. We also talk about the Wall Street Journal\'s new ranking of US airports and compare it to Skytrax\'s international rankings. And we wrap up with my Christmas gift suggestions for the frequent traveler on your list.  All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_146.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n<iframe src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/533121708&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"></iframe><!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #146:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, trying to give you something to keep you entertained? Or at least occupied as you thread through the Thanksgiving travel traffic -- be it airports, trains, or roadways -- the forecasts are for a 5% increase over last year.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’ve been trying to get this episode done for the past 2 weeks, but I just haven’t been able to make it happen. Since we last spoke, I’ve been in the midst of a weekly commute between Chicago and Dallas. It’s the standard consultant commute -- leaving ORD Monday at 7am, leaving DFW Thursday at 5pm -- the consulting rush hour. The lounges are packed, the Starbucks line tails way back; no matter what status, you’re in a middle seat if you don’t book 3 weeks ahead of time, and for a mere Advantage Platinum person, there’s no chance of an upgrade. I do click through American’s website to request an upgrade every week -- more for the entertainment value than any expectation of getting a seat. This week, I was #35 on the upgrade list.</li>\r\n 	<li>The traffic between these 2 American hubs is pretty amazing. The first week of this commute, taking the 6:30p flight back to Chicago, it was a fully-packed 787 Dreamliner. So I’m thinking -- hey, I gotta have a good shot at an upgrade on this flight, with all the first and business class seats. Nope, though I did get up to the teens on the upgrade list -- #15 to be exact. I counted myself lucky to get out of a center seat at the last minute.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’m not a huge fan of DFW Airport. It’s a massive, spread-out place with a $4 toll charge to just to drive out of the place. The semi-circular terminals are also spread out affairs, with 3 security checkpoints arrayed around each perimeter, only one of which has PreCheck and really not well-marked. I tweeted that out in frustration a few weeks back after trundling around from checkpoint to checkpoint. The DFW Airport Twitter account quickly came back with a link to their website that has the location and hours of each checkpoint, with the PreCheck one bolded. Very useful. I have bookmarked on my iPhone now.</li>\r\n 	<li>The next day, back in Chicago, I was downtown, getting a afternoon espresso jolt at Intelligentsia Coffee, not a completely full-on hipster joint -- there no turntable playing vintage vinyl -- but they are a bit fussy about their coffee. You place your order, they ask your name, and then you mill around a bit waiting for them to “craft” your coffee. I’m scrolling through e-mail, the barista is calling out names in the background. He calls out \"Marco\". Completely on reflex, my inner child responds \"Polo\" and not quietly or under my breath. The guy sitting across from me looks up from his MacBook and starts laughing. The guy getting his coffee, Marco, apparently, turns around and gives me a slightly nasty look. Or maybe just puzzled. Or more likely a bit of both.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/indidginus-seismic/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Superstring</a></em> by Indidginus</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul class=\"\">\r\n 	<li>Allan Marko, a long-time listener, posted a travel story on the TravelCommons Facebook page -\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I flew from SFO to MUC with a colleague last month on UAL Business Class (my first trip on a 787 - nice plane, and decent service from the UA team) We had an early morning arrival, and an hour to kill before our transportation arrived. My colleague’s 1K status couldn’t get us into the Lufthansa Arrivals Lounge for showers. I pulled up the Priority Pass app on my iPhone (membership came with my Chase Sapphire Reserve Card) and saw there was an Atlantic Lounge over in Terminal 1 that had shower facilities. We took the bus over to Terminal 1 which serves many European, Middle East, and other second-tier airlines. Pulling out my physical Priority Pass card (as opposed to the one in the app) I got both of us into the lounge and their two shower rooms. The lounge only offered the basics and needed of refresh, but we were happy to find it that morning (including the free beer!).</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Allan, thanks for that, and good on you for figuring that all out. There are so many nooks and crannies in the card benefits world. There’s real value there, but you have to think about it and dig in a bit. The last time I used my Priority Pass (which I got with my Amex Platinum card) was last summer when I was connecting through DUB on my way to London. That lounge was similar to Allan’s MUC experience -- pretty basic, a bit threadbare, but a reasonable place for a cup of tea and breakfast. My son Andrew used his Priority Pass card (also from his Chase card) to get a $28 credit at a restaurant in BOS which paid for a pre-flight meal and a couple of beers. “For the two of us, I think we were due $56 credit, but we wanted to be able to board the plane, so we cut ourselves off.” A colleague of mine told me that, in LGA, after Amex’s Centurion Lounge closed, his UA Gold status got him into the Air Canada lounge to wait out the rest of a long flight delay. “I only thought they let in Star Alliance Gold passengers for international flights, but let me in for my LGA-ORD flight.” And then there’s things like the 10 Gogo in-flight WiFi passes that I get every year with my Platinum card that I never burn through, or the $200 in annual statement credit that I think I get on UA and am always surprised when I see the charge for the in-flight tapas box reversed. And I’m reminded that I gotta pay more attention to this stuff because I hate leaving money on the table.</li>\r\n 	<li>I will say that there are 2 good things about doing trunk line, hub-to-hub commute vs., say, my last regular commute, between ORD and Charlottesville, VA: great flight frequency -- between AA and UA, there’s a flight at most every hour and that’s not even looking at SWA’s schedule out of Love Field; and, no RJs, no regional jets. I had forgotten how nice it is to be able to stand up straight in the aisle, let alone in the toilet. I take happiness in the small things.</li>\r\n 	<li>I was talking to a colleague about this -- flying AA, and UA, and SWA based on the most convenient times and price, and then maybe equipment (avoiding those RJs when I can). He said “I’m always amazed at how promiscuous you are in your airline choices.” It was an interesting word choice; one that kinda speaks to how invested people can get in their travel choices. Though it can also be a bit of Stockholm Syndrome for folks who have to fly out of fortress hubs, like this colleague who is in a very conflicted relationship with United out of Newark. “I think you’re more right than me,” he said. He’s 1K on United, their top tier. I’m mid-tier on United and American. Comparing notes, he hasn’t gotten any more upgrades than me, and though I board after 1Ks (or Exec Platinums on AA), I haven’t yet had a problem finding overhead space, even on packed flights to DFW. I’ve said it before -- I don’t think there’s all that much difference between mid- and top-tier loyalty ranks; certainly not enough to take less convenient flights to earn the extra miles needed to stay top-tier.</li>\r\n 	<li>A study of US airport growth hit the TravelCommons inbox on Halloween, saying that the two airports with the biggest drop in traffic are Memphis and Cincinnati. We talked about this back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/08/09/podcast-143-how-bad-is-business-travel-for-your-health-make-layovers-fun/\">August episode</a> when I was flying in and out of Cincinnati for 4 weeks straight. Nice airport, but I said back then it felt a bit overbuilt, and how both it and Memphis felt empty after after being “de-hubbed” by Delta. I wasn’t wrong. This new survey ground through 10 years of FAA traffic data and came to the same conclusion. Memphis lost the most traffic, down 62%. Cincinnati was second, losing 51% of its traffic.</li>\r\n 	<li>So you can guess that neither made the Wall Street Journal’s ranking of the 20 largest US airports. Denver, Orlando and Phoenix at the top 3 finishers while the three NYC airports -- LaGuardia, JFK, and Newark -- brought up the rear, numbers 18, 19, and 20. Surprises? I dunno -- maybe that LaGuardia wasn’t in last place given all the construction disruptions, that LAX was higher at #9 than Minneapolis-St Paul at #11, and that O’Hare is one spot higher than San Francisco, 15 vs. 16. That’s probably as much to do with their methodology as anything - how they weighed all the different score components, things like on-time arrivals, average TSA wait, cost of on-prem parking, average ticket cost. It’s interesting, though, to compare this ranking with Skytrax’s ranking of global airports. Denver, the top US airport on both lists; at #28 on Skytrax’s list. Cincinnati is the second US airport on the Skytrax list at #34, which makes sense when you look at the methodologies. Skytrax is focused on the in-airport experience -- terminal seating, cleanliness, queue times, friendliness of staff. With these criteria, I don’t doubt that Cincinnati should rank high -- it’s probably helped by now being a bit overbuilt -- lots of space and fewer people to clean up after. The Journal’s is a bit more wide-ranging, looking both inside and outside the terminal, including things like average fares, rental-car taxes and fees, number of nonstop destinations and dominance of the largest airline to its rankings. I’ll put links to both in the show notes for those interesting in a deeper dive.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our new Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/yoria-suerte/\"><em>Suerte Mijo</em></a> by Arthur Yoria</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Rental Demolition Derby</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I’ve rented a lot of cars in my business travel and have never crashed one. I drive them off the lot, use them for 3-4 days, fill them back up with gas, return them to the lot, and walk away. So when I picked up a car from Hertz at Edinburgh airport back in September, I skipped all the insurance coverages, took the keys to a brand new Toyota hybrid cross-over, and drove off the lot. This was my fourth September in a row renting from the Hertz and had never had an incident -- even when driving a manual on the left side of the road while shifting with my left hand -- well, other than a Fiat that dropped its transmission, but that wasn’t my fault. So, no need to waste the collision damage waiver charges.</li>\r\n 	<li>You can see where this is going. The next day, I was driving a narrow road in St Andrews, heading south out of town to go knock around the fishing villages on the north bank of the Firth of Forth. Roads in Scotland can get narrow. Driving the one-lane roads in the Highlands are an acquired talent, but this road is in a residential neighborhood, and I’ve driven it many times. So I couldn’t believe it when I heard a big thump as I drove past a van. Damn, I thought, had I drifted over to the left and popped the van’s rear view mirror? I pulled over and hopped out of the car. No, it was worse. There was a huge crease along the left side of the car; just missed the front wheel, so still driveable but very ugly. I walked down to the van. It belonged to a nearby community center. In a hurry to pick up kids from school, the driver had pulled out into me as I drove past. I pulled out an accident report form that Hertz had helpfully put in the glove compartment. We filled it out, skipped calling the police since no one was hurt.</li>\r\n 	<li>So, again, not my fault, but I’m still, a few days later, I’m turning in a car with a full tank and some extra body work. I point out the damage to the Hertz guy. He pulls up a different tab on his Samsung tablet -- click, click, click -- damage, front left wing; damage, front left door; damage, rear left door -- took a couple of pictures, and because I’d skipped the CDW, out burped the bill -- £780 or about $1,000. They ran it through on my Chase Sapphire Visa card.</li>\r\n 	<li>Which I gave to Hertz because, as I was poking through the nooks and crannies of the Chase website before I left home, I confirmed that card would cover UK rental car damage for rentals charged to it. The next week, back home, I found where to file a claim. They didn’t make it easy, but Google eventually uncovered it. I created a claim, uploaded a scan of the accident report, the Hertz receipt, and a couple of iPhone pictures of the damage. And then waited. The website said they’d take 2 weeks to review and get back to me. Three weeks later, I called. A guy said they’d sent me an email asking for two more documents from Hertz. Hmmm, never saw that, but who knows what gets caught up in the Spam filtering. They wanted a copy of the original Hertz agreement, which I had left in the car, and Hertz’s repair cost breakdown. OK, that was reasonable. I called Hertz and a very helpful woman put in a request and said get it in a week. Within a couple of days, Hertz sent me what I needed. I uploaded them to my claim and waited another 2 weeks. On Day 2 Weeks + 1, I called. A woman looked at my file, said it was still being reviewed by management, but said she’s put me on hold and ring them for status. Two minutes later, she picked up and they’d approved my claim. 48 hours later, the $1,000 showed up in my bank account. It took me a bit over 2 months, but Chase paid my claim with a minimum amount of hassle.</li>\r\n 	<li>Now, while I’ve had a good rental car record in Scotland, my record in Hungary is not quite clean. Indeed, every time I’ve driven there, it’s been something. The last time I drove, we were a couple of blocks away from the rental return next to the Marriott on the Danube. Pulling into an intersection after stopping at a Stop sign, a motorcycle messenger plowed into the front of my car, flew across the hood, and landed in the street on the other side of the intersection. Luckily, he was in a full helmet and leathers and unhurt. The rental car, not so lucky. The entire front end was ripped off. The rental car guy showed up as the police were finishing their report. I pulled out suitcases out of the trunk and gave him the key. He looked at the front of his car in disbelief. We wheeled our bags down the sidewalk to the Marriott because this time, I had bought the collision damage waiver.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/artemis-gravity/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Inception</a></em> by Artemis</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Traveler Gift Guide</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>As we come into the Christmas shopping season, I thought it would be useful to pull together some suggestions for the frequent traveler in your life. Or, if you are the frequent traveler, a list of hints you might want to drop on family members looking for ideas.</li>\r\n 	<li>Top of the list is a good battery charger. Whatever the size or form factor -- slimline, lipstick, high-capacity brick -- having that second or third charge readily available is critical to get notified of gate changes and when you’re using electronic boarding passes. It saves you from stalking cleaning crews to find a live power outlet on your layover, or negotiating with your seatmate for possession of outlet between you. I’m always looking to shed weight, so I retired the heavy no-name pack I picked up in the depths of Beijing’s Pearl Street Market for an Anker lipstick sized charger. I bought three and gave one to my wife and daughter. It’s cheap piece of mind.</li>\r\n 	<li>On my shopping list, trying to catch up to what’s already a cold winter, is one of those puffy coats -- but one of the thin ones, like the Patagonia Nano Puff, one that will smoosh down to nothing in the front pocket of my suitcase, or will fit in the crevices of a jammed full overhead bin. Right next that on the list, a man’s scarf is an incredibly undervalued piece of intermediate winter wear. In an airplane cabin or hotel room where a coat is too much (especially in a middle seat), but there’s a draft that chills you, a scarf around the neck is just enough without being too much. You may have to teach him how to wear it, but you can have fun with colors.</li>\r\n 	<li>For someone just embarking on the road warrior life, how ‘bout a black 20-inch hardsided carry-on. Black not only makes you look thinner, it makes your bag look thinner to gate agents hunting for bag-sizer bait. Black also doesn’t show stains. A 20-incher should get on-board for 90% of airlines, and the hard sides are the easiest to get in and out of a bag sizer if the not-yet-statused traveler gets waylaid by an over-zealous gate agent.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you’re going big for someone -- or for those December babies, combining Christmas and birthday gifts -- noise canceling headphones are a statement gift. The good ones -- the Bose or Sonys that make the drone of the jet engines disappear with the flick of a switch -- are a $300 number. But the drop in stress level and blood pressure that accompanies that flick of the switch -- you don’t realize how much that drone affects you until you turn on your Bose -- makes it worth the number. Everything in my briefcase has to earn its space. I’ve been carrying Bose headphones for, I dunno, 10, 15 years. They’re nowhere near compact, but I’ve never thought of leaving them behind.</li>\r\n 	<li>Another idea for the music -- or podcast lover, is a small portable Bluetooth speaker. I’ve started packing mine again for trips of a week or longer. For a couple of days, I’m fine with wearing headphones or using the phone speaker. But longer than that or if I’m with the family in, say, an Airbnb, I want something a bit more social. I’m still using my 6-year old Jambox speaker, the one that kinda created this category. The maker, Jawbone, went under last year, but the speaker still works. There are newer, better ones out there now, at all sorts of price points. The ones that can act as speaker phones are a nice to-have if they fit your budget.</li>\r\n 	<li>And finally, a stocking stuffer idea -- a travel notebook, something to jot down thoughts, ideas, observations, to do lists while waiting for the flight to board, the train to come, or the room to be made up. Nothing extravagant -- no leather embossed cover -- but it should be small enough to fit in a pocket, but substantial, something that can survive being knocked around in the bottom of a briefcase, and with paper quality that will hold onto those thoughts for a while. I used to use a Moleskine 3½x5½” notebook but have switched over a similar-sized A6 Clairefontaine. The soft cover fits better in a jeans back pocket, and the paper is more fountain-pen friendly. It’s $10 for a Moleskine, $7 for two Clairefontaines. Or go a bit more whimsical and get a 3-pack of Field Notes for $13. It’ll fit your budget and the stocking.</li>\r\n 	<li>So there you go, something to fit all sizes and budgets in time for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, or if you’re just killing time waiting for your Thanksgiving flight to leave.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #146</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and now on <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Magnatune</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_146.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #146 — Rental Demolition Derby; Traveler Gift Guide','','inherit','closed','closed','','2167-revision-v1','','','2018-11-20 18:05:24','2018-11-20 23:05:24','',2167,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/11/20/2167-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2176,1,'2018-11-20 18:22:58','2018-11-20 23:22:58','[caption id=\"attachment_1985\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/6AB2DE86-7AE4-4DAF-AD9F-DEFB51F737E0-01.jpeg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1985\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/6AB2DE86-7AE4-4DAF-AD9F-DEFB51F737E0-01-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> The Look of Augmented Reality?[/caption]\r\n\r\nBroke out the mobile unit to record this episode in the Buckhead neighborhood of Atlanta; much warmer than getting caught in a spring snow storm in Milwaukee. When much of the travel tech news is about the latest phone apps, we talk about physical travel technology that we can touch and carry. <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">And when flying during the past two weeks, flight attendants\' safety demonstrations have become a bit more strident. </span>All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_140.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_140.mp3\"]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #140:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the Hyatt Place-Buckhead in Atlanta, GA missing what I hope is the long-delayed start of Spring finally showing up the Midwest. I have done damn little travel since the last episode -- a couple of drives to a client up north of Milwaukee, a quick trip to Minneapolis last week, and flight this morning down to Atlanta. I managed to avoid the foot of late April snow in Minnesota but got caught by 3-4 inches in Milwaukee. Luckily, I’d looked at the forecast before I left and, walking out to the garage, grabbed my LL Bean boots and threw them into the trunk of the car Which saved my dress shoes later that evening and the next morning on unshoveled walks and is is the good thing about driving; I didn’t have to worry about space constraints. I couldn’t have done the same thing flying to Minneapolis.</li>\r\n 	<li>I ended up flying Southwest to Minneapolis because: a) they were the cheapest flight out on Monday morning at short notice; and b) it let me meet an A-List challenge that Southwest had sent me at the beginning of the year -- fly 3 roundtrips by the end of April and get A-List for the rest of the year. Now, I don’t fly Southwest a whole lot, so I can’t completely justify what I pushed to do this challenge -- except just because it was a challenge, I guess. That, and it’ll make it easier for those times I end up on Southwest this year. I won’t have to pay the $12 for auto check-in or set an alarm to check in 24 hours before flight time -- both of which typically only get me in the second or “B” boarding group. Not an earth shattering perk, but anything that reduces travel hassles is a good thing.</li>\r\n 	<li>When I went Chicago Midway airport on last Monday to catch that flight, I ran into a new TSA trick -- funnel everyone through a single-file U-turn line to be sniffed a TSA agent and a dog, after people headed into either regular security or TSA PreCheck. Which, at 7am on a Monday morning, quickly pushed the security line back into the hallway toward the parking garage. So, after spending what looks like the $190 million a year the past couple of years on screening technology like those snazzy full-body scanners that people empty their pockets and line up for, the TSA is now having us line up for yet another a new screening technology -- but at least this technology is cute. And when was the last time you heard a traveler wanting to pet the body scanner.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/media/files/DJBLUE/11541\">Hear Me</a></em> by DJ Blue</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">A couple of things for those not following my Twitter or the TravelCommons Facebook page…</span>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>First, for those Amazon fans, Alexa will now play the latest episode of TravelCommons for you if you ask nicely. I got an Echo Spot in a schwag bag for a conference in January. I put it on the standing desk in my home office and started playing around with it. After listening to the WJS Minute Briefing as part of my Flash Briefing, I started thinking about how to get TravelCommons onto it. At first, I thought I was going to have to figure out how to build an Alexa skill, but digging a little deeper, I found out that the TuneIn app is sorta the default podcast player for Alexa. So after I got TravelCommons approved for TuneIn -- felt like they had an actual human check out my app -- it appeared on my Echo Spot. So if you say, “Alexa, play TravelCommons podcast”, she should play the latest episode for you. Check out the Facebook page or my Twitter feed for a quick video showing the magic happen</li>\r\n 	<li>Second, I took advantage of being in town and the crap April weather to do the filming for the Midway taproom tour layover video. As I mentioned in the last episode, the idea has been to feature an itinerary out of Chicago’s “other” airport -- what was Chicago’s original airport that morphed into the budget airline airport that morphed into Southwest Airlines’ biggest operation. We used Uber and Lyft to hit 4 taprooms in what can only be described as the “post-industrial” landscape of Chicago’s near south side. We started by driving past the Cook County prison en route to Lagunitas’ plant and taproom that’s built in an old steel mill. While New Belgium and Sierra Nevada landed their national expansions in the much more bucolic environs of the North Carolina Smoky Mountains, Lagunitas’ owner Tony Magee dropped his expansion in a dodgy part of Chicago. We then hit smaller scale, more local places that have repurposed old manufacturing plants in less-visited Chicago neighborhoods -- Lo Rez in Pilsen, Marz in what can charitably described as “lower” Bridgeport, and then ending up at Whiner Beer in the Back of the Yards neighborhood -- where the Chicago Stockyards used to be decades ago. I started working on production, but then looked at the calendar and knew that I only had time for either this episode or the video. And since I’ve worked hard on keeping a monthly cadence of podcast episodes, I kicked the video into next month. So watch Facebook, Twitter, and the web site for the post. Since it’s a bit more narrow scope, I don’t think I’ll put the video in the podcast feed; not sure the non-beer-drinking listeners will want some 100 meg video clogging up their internet.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>While sitting in the backseat of one of those Lyft rides, I noticed something new on the pink Lyft light that many drivers have in the middle of their dash. You always see the front of it -- the pink Lyft logo -- from the outside, through the front windshield. Glancing at the back of it from inside of the car, I something flash by. Looking more closely, I saw a little message scroll by - “15 min eta”. I saw it again in the Lyft car I took to MSP on last Tuesday. I asked the driver about it. He told me that Lyft sent it to him after he did 300 rides -- “bit of a status thing” he said. I told him about the Uber dash light that I saw in New York, that let me adjust the color of the light from the app -- I talked about this in a prior episode. He thought that was pretty cool too, but he liked Lyft, the company, better than Uber, and he appreciated his messaging light.</li>\r\n 	<li>All sorts of press releases drop into the TravelCommons mailbox, but the one announcing April 24, last Tuesday, as the first National Business Traveler Day caught my eye. I guess because it’s new, it hasn’t made it onto the National Day Calendar, a list of these sorts of designations. It’s a good choice of date, though, because there is only one national day listed on the 24th -- National Pigs-In-A-Blanket Day -- which, I can imagine, some First or Business Class flight attendants might reasonably associate with some sleeping business travelers. National Business Traveler Day was announced (created?) by “Upside Business Travel, the first online travel service built just for the do-it-yourself (DIY) business traveler” in recognition of “the important contributions made by business travelers to America\'s economy.” I dunno, this could go in so many snarky directions -- with the pigs-in-a-blanket thing as just a starter. I have to say, though, I felt very unrecognized when I walked into MSP Terminal 2 the afternoon of National Business Travelers Day -- an obvious frequent business traveler: wearing a black blazer, head-down on the iPhone, speedwalking to the furthest security checkpoint because it’s the only one with PreCheck. Nobody was gave me a thank-you, a flower, a hug, but then again, the first person I had contact with was an old, overweight but jolly TSA screener. Nice guy, but not sure I would’ve wanted a hug from him.</li>\r\n 	<li>And it could’ve been that MSP’s Terminal 2 which I’ll add to my list of ghetto terminals, the land of misbegotten travelers, which also includes ORD’s T2, Detroit’s North Terminal, Madrid’s 4S satellite terminal, Munich’s T2 satellite terminal… I’ve talked about this before. In fortress hubs, like ORD, DTW, and MSP, the terminals the hub airlines use is clean, bright, has lots of restaurant and shopping choices. Delta’s terminal in Detroit has an airy 2 or 3-story ceiling with a monorail train running the length of the terminal up at the top. The North terminal that every other airline is dumped into is the old terminal that Delta -- or actually Northwest left behind, with a bit of a clean up and 3 restaurants. Delta’s terminal in Minneapolis is the same story -- lots of shops and restaurants, a big craft beer bar, all with a bit of that North Woods feel. Terminal 2 - generic airport sterility, a Subway sandwich joint, a bar where all the handles were removed from the beer taps. And there’s no inside-security connections between these terminals in MSP and DTW if you want to check out the better side -- it’s a 10-minute bus ride and another pass through security. At least in ORD, you can walk from T2 to the American or United terminals and hit Rick Bayless’ Torta Frontera for great Mexican food or Goose Island for a good beer. On Tuesday, I was stuck in the Humphrey Terminal with my Subway sandwich and a choice of Bud Light or Blue Moon -- which maybe was fitting on National Business Traveler Day.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/media/files/savoyard/10743\">Madrugada</a></em> by Savoyard</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Travel Tech Gets Physical</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>In addition to press releases about National Business Travelers Day, I also get press releases announcing new funding rounds for travel startups. These things come in waves. Like the wave of companies building tour aggregation platforms. That investment thesis went -- because millennials are more into experiential travel, they’re more likely to spend money on something like a food tour or hang gliding; the market for travel experiences is fragmented making discovery and purchasing difficult; our platform will solve this problem by aggregating experience providers and providing world-class search and user experience. The latest wave seems to be about building platforms that “reduce the pain” of corporate business travel. In April, in addition to Upside’s National Business Traveler Day announcement, Rocketrip sent out a release about their $15 million funding round and TravelPerk, who sponsored our January episode, touted their $21 million round -- which sounds like, some 20+ years after Travelocity and Expedia hit the market, companies continue to spend millions of dollars trying to figure out how to replace travel agents.</li>\r\n 	<li>At times, it feels like much of the work on improving travel is virtual, about software -- new apps, new search platforms, better ways to spit out a single travel itinerary. But in spite of the venture capital mantra that “software is eating the world,” travel is inherently physical -- we want to move our bodies, our stuff from Point A to Point B, and most often back again. It seems like the ‘60’s were the golden age of this, when Boeing and Airbus’ predecessors and the Russians were designing and building supersonic planes. I really felt ancient the other day telling some Millennial staffers about, how way back when, Concorde would fly from JFK to LHR in less than 3 hrs. Now it seems that Boeing and Airbus are completely focused on cramming more people into subsonic flying buses. Logical, but not very aspirational. Now if all the work on hyperloops -- the test circuits, the design contests -- actually turns into something, and isn’t just high-tech hobbies for Elon Musk and Richard Branson -- we’ll be onto something.</li>\r\n 	<li>But in the meantime, in the space between now -- thinner, more uncomfortable plane seats and hotel keys that keep demagnetizing -- and the inspirational future -- us whizzing along in pods at 750 mph, doing LA to SF in 35 minutes without having to buy CO2 offsets to feel better about ourselves -- what are some of the physical things about to hit?</li>\r\n 	<li>One thing that seems to be finally hitting critical mass is real-time luggage tracking through RFID luggage tags. Logistics is another thing that’s hard, but it feels that airports and some airlines, Delta especially, have slogged through deploying enough RFID readers along the miles of luggage conveyor belts in the bowels of most of the airports they use, and then wiring it back in near real-time to their smartphone apps so that it’s useful. I’m hoping the combination of competitive pressure, falling equipment pricing, and government fines will push the rest of the airlines to follow suit. For me, real-time location tracking was the main use case for smart bags like BlueSmart. If I can get this through RFID tags, I’ll feel a lot less salty about the smart bag ban.</li>\r\n 	<li>Wearables also get a lot of buzz. Carnival Cruise Lines has been the latest, announcing their “Ocean Medallion” last year as a way to “personalize” your cruise experience -- and, of course, to make it easier to buy drinks on board. Nothing really new here. Disney’s been doing this forever; 20 years ago, I remember using a wristband at Northstar ski resort in Tahoe to track how many vertical feet we’d skied in a day, and to easily buy beers in the lodge. I’m wondering what happens here if the current noise about the use (and misuse) of personal data by Facebook and others resets people’s privacy vs. ease-of-use balance point rather than just blowing over. For me, it’s less about how the companies use the data (though I’m not completely unconcerned about this) and more about their inability to secure it. Seems like every couple of weeks, another travel company admits to some hack of, say, their point-of-sale system and the associated loss of millions of names and credit card numbers. Doesn’t incent me to let them track my movements and spending habits.</li>\r\n 	<li>AR/VR -- Augmented and virtual reality continues to buzz. I’ve talked about Google Translate’s AR feature -- point your camera at, say, a menu or washing machine, and it’ll display the translation over the original text in real-time. It’s not perfect -- the translations can rapidly change, sorta flicker between different interpretations, but it’s often “good enough”, and a whole lot quicker than banging in each menu entree. Google has tried to extend this real-time translation from visual to speech with their Pixel Bud headphones with much more Version 1.0 mixed results. I’m probably being way overly optimistic here, but if the Buds follow the same improvement trajectory, they could be pretty cool in 3 years’ time.</li>\r\n 	<li>It really gets buzzy when we move from AR to VR. A guy at a VR start-up talked to me about using VR in hotel rooms for what he called “social viewing”. Rather than watching, say Black Mirror on Netflix on your laptop or one of those Enseo TVs I’m seeing more and more of, you strap on a VR headset, as does your spouse or kids, and you’re all watching together in a virtual living room or virtual theater. And then there’s always the pitch -- why fly over to, say, Madrid to see Picasso’s Guernica in the Reina Sofia when you strap on a VR headset and “be” in the room instantly? Hey, remember how virtual reality turned out in The Matrix movies? Yeah, I think I’ll keep my travel physical.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/media/files/djlang59/10579\">Crazy Love</a></em> by DJ Lang</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>You <em>Will</em> Pay Attention to the Safety Briefing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>The selfie of passengers on Southwest flight 1380 not wearing the oxygen masks correctly went viral in the days after the engine explosion, along with the stories -- the guy telling the woman next to him that she didn’t need to squeeze the airbag, and the guy who logged into WiFi and Facebook Live before putting on his mask. The flight attendant interviews that seemingly every news outlet did dripped with schadenfreude -- no one ever pays attention to the safety videos or demonstrations, and look what happened!</li>\r\n 	<li>Improving airline safety records have let people grow numb as to how unnatural air travel is -- flying over 600 mph at 35,000 ft. Flight 1380 was the first accident-related fatality on a US airliner since 2009, and the Southwest’s first ever -- since it was founded in 1971.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’ll admit that I don’t pay attention to every demo, especially when I do multiple flights in a single week. I do typically look around me for the nearest exits -- in front and behind me -- because those can change pretty often with different seat configurations. I will pay attention, as a refresher, if I haven’t flown for a couple of weeks -- like last week’s flight to MSP. Or if it’s a plane I haven’t flown in a while, I’ll look at the seat back card -- like I did today when noticing I was in a Boeing 717, a pretty rare event for me.</li>\r\n 	<li>I have noticed that the flight attendants’ requests/demands for attention have become a bit more strident since 1380. On my Southwest flight back home from MSP last week, the flight attendant chanted “Nose and mouth; nose and mouth!”, eliciting some nervous laughter.</li>\r\n 	<li>The attendant on my Delta flight this morning was a bit more direct, perhaps fatalistic this morning. “Please pay attention! We’re doing this for you. But if you don’t want to watch us, well, I guess it’s your life…”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #140</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a> and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_140.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #140 — Travel Tech Gets Physical; Pay Attention to the Safety Briefing','','inherit','closed','closed','','1977-revision-v1','','','2018-11-20 18:22:58','2018-11-20 23:22:58','',1977,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/11/20/1977-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2177,1,'2018-11-20 19:00:43','2018-11-21 00:00:43','[caption id=\"attachment_2168\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2168\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> But I filled up the tank[/caption]\r\n\r\nGetting this posted just in time to give you something to listen to while jammed up in Thanksgiving traffic, be it on the road or in the airports. We talk about working the angles to maximize credit card benefits, which leads me to one more story from my fall trip to Europe -- a rental car scrape that my Chase Visa card just paid off. We also talk about the Wall Street Journal\'s new ranking of US airports and compare it to Skytrax\'s international rankings. And we wrap up with my Christmas gift suggestions for the frequent traveler on your list.  All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_146.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n<iframe src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/533121708&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"></iframe><!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #146:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, trying to give you something to keep you entertained? Or at least occupied as you thread through the Thanksgiving travel traffic -- be it airports, trains, or roadways -- the forecasts are for a 5% increase over last year.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’ve been trying to get this episode done for the past 2 weeks, but I just haven’t been able to make it happen. Since we last spoke, I’ve been in the midst of a weekly commute between Chicago and Dallas. It’s the standard consultant commute -- leaving ORD Monday at 7am, leaving DFW Thursday at 5pm -- the consulting rush hour. The lounges are packed, the Starbucks line tails way back; no matter what status, you’re in a middle seat if you don’t book 3 weeks ahead of time, and for a mere Advantage Platinum person, there’s no chance of an upgrade. I do click through American’s website to request an upgrade every week -- more for the entertainment value than any expectation of getting a seat. This week, I was #35 on the upgrade list.</li>\r\n 	<li>The traffic between these 2 American hubs is pretty amazing. The first week of this commute, taking the 6:30p flight back to Chicago, it was a fully-packed 787 Dreamliner. So I’m thinking -- hey, I gotta have a good shot at an upgrade on this flight, with all the first and business class seats. Nope, though I did get up to the teens on the upgrade list -- #15 to be exact. I counted myself lucky to get out of a center seat at the last minute.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’m not a huge fan of DFW Airport. It’s a massive, spread-out place with a $4 toll charge to just to drive out of the place. The semi-circular terminals are also spread out affairs, with 3 security checkpoints arrayed around each perimeter, only one of which has PreCheck and really not well-marked. I tweeted that out in frustration a few weeks back after trundling around from checkpoint to checkpoint. The DFW Airport Twitter account quickly came back with a <a href=\"https://www.dfwairport.com/security/\">link</a> to their website that has the location and hours of each checkpoint, with the PreCheck one bolded. Very useful. I have bookmarked on my iPhone now.</li>\r\n 	<li>The next day, back in Chicago, I was downtown, getting a afternoon espresso jolt at Intelligentsia Coffee, not a completely full-on hipster joint -- there no turntable playing vintage vinyl -- but they are a bit fussy about their coffee. You place your order, they ask your name, and then you mill around a bit waiting for them to “craft” your coffee. I’m scrolling through e-mail, the barista is calling out names in the background. He calls out \"Marco\". Completely on reflex, my inner child responds \"Polo\" and not quietly or under my breath. The guy sitting across from me looks up from his MacBook and starts laughing. The guy getting his coffee, Marco, apparently, turns around and gives me a slightly nasty look. Or maybe just puzzled. Or more likely a bit of both.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/indidginus-seismic/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Superstring</a></em> by Indidginus</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul class=\"\">\r\n 	<li>Allan Marko, a long-time listener, posted a travel story on the TravelCommons Facebook page -\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I flew from SFO to MUC with a colleague last month on UAL Business Class (my first trip on a 787 - nice plane, and decent service from the UA team) We had an early morning arrival, and an hour to kill before our transportation arrived. My colleague’s 1K status couldn’t get us into the Lufthansa Arrivals Lounge for showers. I pulled up the Priority Pass app on my iPhone (membership came with my Chase Sapphire Reserve Card) and saw there was an Atlantic Lounge over in Terminal 1 that had shower facilities. We took the bus over to Terminal 1 which serves many European, Middle East, and other second-tier airlines. Pulling out my physical Priority Pass card (as opposed to the one in the app) I got both of us into the lounge and their two shower rooms. The lounge only offered the basics and needed of refresh, but we were happy to find it that morning (including the free beer!).</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Allan, thanks for that, and good on you for figuring that all out. There are so many nooks and crannies in the card benefits world. There’s real value there, but you have to think about it and dig in a bit. The last time I used my Priority Pass (which I got with my Amex Platinum card) was last summer when I was connecting through DUB on my way to London. That lounge was similar to Allan’s MUC experience -- pretty basic, a bit threadbare, but a reasonable place for a cup of tea and breakfast. My son Andrew used his Priority Pass card (also from his Chase card) to get a $28 credit at a restaurant in BOS which paid for a pre-flight meal and a couple of beers. “For the two of us, I think we were due $56 credit, but we wanted to be able to board the plane, so we cut ourselves off.” A colleague of mine told me that, in LGA, after Amex’s Centurion Lounge closed, his UA Gold status got him into the Air Canada lounge to wait out the rest of a long flight delay. “I only thought they let in Star Alliance Gold passengers for international flights, but let me in for my LGA-ORD flight.” And then there’s things like the 10 Gogo in-flight WiFi passes that I get every year with my Platinum card that I never burn through, or the $200 in annual statement credit that I think I get on UA and am always surprised when I see the charge for the in-flight tapas box reversed. And I’m reminded that I gotta pay more attention to this stuff because I hate leaving money on the table.</li>\r\n 	<li>I will say that there are 2 good things about doing trunk line, hub-to-hub commute vs., say, my last regular commute, between ORD and Charlottesville, VA: great flight frequency -- between AA and UA, there’s a flight at most every hour and that’s not even looking at SWA’s schedule out of Love Field; and, no RJs, no regional jets. I had forgotten how nice it is to be able to stand up straight in the aisle, let alone in the toilet. I take happiness in the small things.</li>\r\n 	<li>I was talking to a colleague about this -- flying AA, and UA, and SWA based on the most convenient times and price, and then maybe equipment (avoiding those RJs when I can). He said “I’m always amazed at how promiscuous you are in your airline choices.” It was an interesting word choice; one that kinda speaks to how invested people can get in their travel choices. Though it can also be a bit of Stockholm Syndrome for folks who have to fly out of fortress hubs, like this colleague who is in a very conflicted relationship with United out of Newark. “I think you’re more right than me,” he said. He’s 1K on United, their top tier. I’m mid-tier on United and American. Comparing notes, he hasn’t gotten any more upgrades than me, and though I board after 1Ks (or Exec Platinums on AA), I haven’t yet had a problem finding overhead space, even on packed flights to DFW. I’ve said it before -- I don’t think there’s all that much difference between mid- and top-tier loyalty ranks; certainly not enough to take less convenient flights to earn the extra miles needed to stay top-tier.</li>\r\n 	<li>A study of US airport growth hit the TravelCommons inbox on Halloween, saying that the two airports with the biggest drop in traffic are Memphis and Cincinnati. We talked about this back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/08/09/podcast-143-how-bad-is-business-travel-for-your-health-make-layovers-fun/\">August episode</a> when I was flying in and out of Cincinnati for 4 weeks straight. Nice airport, but I said back then it felt a bit overbuilt, and how both it and Memphis felt empty after after being “de-hubbed” by Delta. I wasn’t wrong. This new survey ground through 10 years of FAA traffic data and came to the same conclusion. Memphis lost the most traffic, down 62%. Cincinnati was second, losing 51% of its traffic.</li>\r\n 	<li>So you can guess that neither made the Wall Street Journal’s ranking of the 20 largest US airports. Denver, Orlando and Phoenix at the top 3 finishers while the three NYC airports -- LaGuardia, JFK, and Newark -- brought up the rear, numbers 18, 19, and 20. Surprises? I dunno -- maybe that LaGuardia wasn’t in last place given all the construction disruptions, that LAX was higher at #9 than Minneapolis-St Paul at #11, and that O’Hare is one spot higher than San Francisco, 15 vs. 16. That’s probably as much to do with their methodology as anything - how they weighed all the different score components, things like on-time arrivals, average TSA wait, cost of on-prem parking, average ticket cost. It’s interesting, though, to compare this ranking with Skytrax’s ranking of global airports. Denver, the top US airport on both lists; at #28 on Skytrax’s list. Cincinnati is the second US airport on the Skytrax list at #34, which makes sense when you look at the methodologies. Skytrax is focused on the in-airport experience -- terminal seating, cleanliness, queue times, friendliness of staff. With these criteria, I don’t doubt that Cincinnati should rank high -- it’s probably helped by now being a bit overbuilt -- lots of space and fewer people to clean up after. The Journal’s is a bit more wide-ranging, looking both inside and outside the terminal, including things like average fares, rental-car taxes and fees, number of nonstop destinations and dominance of the largest airline to its rankings. I’ll put links to both in the show notes for those interesting in a deeper dive.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our new Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/yoria-suerte/\"><em>Suerte Mijo</em></a> by Arthur Yoria</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Rental Demolition Derby</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I’ve rented a lot of cars in my business travel and have never crashed one. I drive them off the lot, use them for 3-4 days, fill them back up with gas, return them to the lot, and walk away. So when I picked up a car from Hertz at Edinburgh airport back in September, I skipped all the insurance coverages, took the keys to a brand new Toyota hybrid cross-over, and drove off the lot. This was my fourth September in a row renting from the Hertz and had never had an incident -- even when driving a manual on the left side of the road while shifting with my left hand -- well, other than a Fiat that dropped its transmission, but that wasn’t my fault. So, no need to waste the collision damage waiver charges.</li>\r\n 	<li>You can see where this is going. The next day, I was driving a narrow road in St Andrews, heading south out of town to go knock around the fishing villages on the north bank of the Firth of Forth. Roads in Scotland can get narrow. Driving the one-lane roads in the Highlands are an acquired talent, but this road is in a residential neighborhood, and I’ve driven it many times. So I couldn’t believe it when I heard a big thump as I drove past a van. Damn, I thought, had I drifted over to the left and popped the van’s rear view mirror? I pulled over and hopped out of the car. No, it was worse. There was a huge crease along the left side of the car; just missed the front wheel, so still driveable but very ugly. I walked down to the van. It belonged to a nearby community center. In a hurry to pick up kids from school, the driver had pulled out into me as I drove past. I pulled out an accident report form that Hertz had helpfully put in the glove compartment. We filled it out, skipped calling the police since no one was hurt.</li>\r\n 	<li>So, again, not my fault, but I’m still, a few days later, I’m turning in a car with a full tank and some extra body work. I point out the damage to the Hertz guy. He pulls up a different tab on his Samsung tablet -- click, click, click -- damage, front left wing; damage, front left door; damage, rear left door -- took a couple of pictures, and because I’d skipped the CDW, out burped the bill -- £780 or about $1,000. They ran it through on my Chase Sapphire Visa card.</li>\r\n 	<li>Which I gave to Hertz because, as I was poking through the nooks and crannies of the Chase website before I left home, I confirmed that card would cover UK rental car damage for rentals charged to it. The next week, back home, I found where to file a claim. They didn’t make it easy, but Google eventually uncovered it. I created a claim, uploaded a scan of the accident report, the Hertz receipt, and a couple of iPhone pictures of the damage. And then waited. The website said they’d take 2 weeks to review and get back to me. Three weeks later, I called. A guy said they’d sent me an email asking for two more documents from Hertz. Hmmm, never saw that, but who knows what gets caught up in the Spam filtering. They wanted a copy of the original Hertz agreement, which I had left in the car, and Hertz’s repair cost breakdown. OK, that was reasonable. I called Hertz and a very helpful woman put in a request and said get it in a week. Within a couple of days, Hertz sent me what I needed. I uploaded them to my claim and waited another 2 weeks. On Day 2 Weeks + 1, I called. A woman looked at my file, said it was still being reviewed by management, but said she’s put me on hold and ring them for status. Two minutes later, she picked up and they’d approved my claim. 48 hours later, the $1,000 showed up in my bank account. It took me a bit over 2 months, but Chase paid my claim with a minimum amount of hassle.</li>\r\n 	<li>Now, while I’ve had a good rental car record in Scotland, my record in Hungary is not quite clean. Indeed, every time I’ve driven there, it’s been something. The last time I drove, we were a couple of blocks away from the rental return next to the Marriott on the Danube. Pulling into an intersection after stopping at a Stop sign, a motorcycle messenger plowed into the front of my car, flew across the hood, and landed in the street on the other side of the intersection. Luckily, he was in a full helmet and leathers and unhurt. The rental car, not so lucky. The entire front end was ripped off. The rental car guy showed up as the police were finishing their report. I pulled out suitcases out of the trunk and gave him the key. He looked at the front of his car in disbelief. We wheeled our bags down the sidewalk to the Marriott because this time, I had bought the collision damage waiver.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/artemis-gravity/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Inception</a></em> by Artemis</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Traveler Gift Guide</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>As we come into the Christmas shopping season, I thought it would be useful to pull together some suggestions for the frequent traveler in your life. Or, if you are the frequent traveler, a list of hints you might want to drop on family members looking for ideas.</li>\r\n 	<li>Top of the list is a good battery charger. Whatever the size or form factor -- slimline, lipstick, high-capacity brick -- having that second or third charge readily available is critical to get notified of gate changes and when you’re using electronic boarding passes. It saves you from stalking cleaning crews to find a live power outlet on your layover, or negotiating with your seatmate for possession of outlet between you. I’m always looking to shed weight, so I retired the heavy no-name pack I picked up in the depths of Beijing’s Pearl Street Market for an Anker lipstick sized charger. I bought three and gave one to my wife and daughter. It’s cheap piece of mind.</li>\r\n 	<li>On my shopping list, trying to catch up to what’s already a cold winter, is one of those puffy coats -- but one of the thin ones, like the Patagonia Nano Puff, one that will smoosh down to nothing in the front pocket of my suitcase, or will fit in the crevices of a jammed full overhead bin. Right next that on the list, a man’s scarf is an incredibly undervalued piece of intermediate winter wear. In an airplane cabin or hotel room where a coat is too much (especially in a middle seat), but there’s a draft that chills you, a scarf around the neck is just enough without being too much. You may have to teach him how to wear it, but you can have fun with colors.</li>\r\n 	<li>For someone just embarking on the road warrior life, how ‘bout a black 20-inch hardsided carry-on. Black not only makes you look thinner, it makes your bag look thinner to gate agents hunting for bag-sizer bait. Black also doesn’t show stains. A 20-incher should get on-board for 90% of airlines, and the hard sides are the easiest to get in and out of a bag sizer if the not-yet-statused traveler gets waylaid by an over-zealous gate agent.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you’re going big for someone -- or for those December babies, combining Christmas and birthday gifts -- noise canceling headphones are a statement gift. The good ones -- the Bose or Sonys that make the drone of the jet engines disappear with the flick of a switch -- are a $300 number. But the drop in stress level and blood pressure that accompanies that flick of the switch -- you don’t realize how much that drone affects you until you turn on your Bose -- makes it worth the number. Everything in my briefcase has to earn its space. I’ve been carrying Bose headphones for, I dunno, 10, 15 years. They’re nowhere near compact, but I’ve never thought of leaving them behind.</li>\r\n 	<li>Another idea for the music -- or podcast lover, is a small portable Bluetooth speaker. I’ve started packing mine again for trips of a week or longer. For a couple of days, I’m fine with wearing headphones or using the phone speaker. But longer than that or if I’m with the family in, say, an Airbnb, I want something a bit more social. I’m still using my 6-year old Jambox speaker, the one that kinda created this category. The maker, Jawbone, went under last year, but the speaker still works. There are newer, better ones out there now, at all sorts of price points. The ones that can act as speaker phones are a nice to-have if they fit your budget.</li>\r\n 	<li>And finally, a stocking stuffer idea -- a travel notebook, something to jot down thoughts, ideas, observations, to do lists while waiting for the flight to board, the train to come, or the room to be made up. Nothing extravagant -- no leather embossed cover -- but it should be small enough to fit in a pocket, but substantial, something that can survive being knocked around in the bottom of a briefcase, and with paper quality that will hold onto those thoughts for a while. I used to use a Moleskine 3½x5½” notebook but have switched over a similar-sized A6 Clairefontaine. The soft cover fits better in a jeans back pocket, and the paper is more fountain-pen friendly. It’s $10 for a Moleskine, $7 for two Clairefontaines. Or go a bit more whimsical and get a 3-pack of Field Notes for $13. It’ll fit your budget and the stocking.</li>\r\n 	<li>So there you go, something to fit all sizes and budgets in time for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, or if you’re just killing time waiting for your Thanksgiving flight to leave.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #146</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and now on <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Magnatune</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_146.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #146 — Rental Demolition Derby; Traveler Gift Guide','','inherit','closed','closed','','2167-revision-v1','','','2018-11-20 19:00:43','2018-11-21 00:00:43','',2167,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/11/20/2167-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2178,1,'2018-11-23 15:26:47','0000-00-00 00:00:00','<p>\n<strong>Save 60% OFF on MonsterInsights Pro &#8211; Limited Time Deal</strong></p>\n<p>Our annual sale is a great opportunity to unlock powerful MonsterInsights Pro features like Enhanced Ecommerce tracking (great for online stores), Form conversion tracking (great for business owners), Publishers Report (great for bloggers), Google AMP tracking, Banner Ads Tracking, Search Console Report, Custom Dimensions Reports (including author tracking, SEO score tracking, etc), and so much more. Don&#8217;t miss out!\n</p>\n<p><a href=\"https://www.monsterinsights.com/lite/?utm_source=wpdashboard&#038;utm_medium=amnotification&#038;utm_campaign=bf2018\" target=\"_blank\" class=\"button button-primary\">Claim Your Savings &#8211; Upgrade to MonsterInsights Pro &raquo;</a></p>\n','','','draft','closed','closed','','','','','2018-11-23 15:26:47','0000-00-00 00:00:00','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?post_type=amn_mi-lite&p=2178',0,'amn_mi-lite','',0),
(2181,1,'2018-12-07 16:35:30','2018-12-07 21:35:30','[caption id=\"attachment_1412\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/IMG_2794.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1412\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/IMG_2794-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Don\'t rub it in that you\'re going some place warm for Christmas\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Don\'t rub it in that you\'re going some place warm for Christmas[/caption]\r\n\r\nComing into the holiday travel season, every travel news outlet publishes their <a title=\"Top 10 Holiday Travel Tips\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2013/12/19/top-10-holiday-travel-tips/\">top travel tips</a>. Rather than repeat the typical \"pack light\" and \"give yourself extra time\" nostrums, I decided to create an advice list of what’s really the problem during holiday travel -- airport etiquette.\r\n\r\nThe challenge of holiday travel isn\'t necessarily the crowds; it’s the crowds of what some road warriors might call “clueless” travelers. I think “amateur” is certainly a more charitable and probably more accurate term. So for those amateur travelers or for those who\'ve been off the road for a bit and need a refresher, here’s a list of etiquette tips that some holiday time reinforcement...\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Let\'s start at the front of the airport with the security line. The TSA is pushing <a href=\"http://www.tsa.gov/tsa-precheck/frequently-asked-questions\">PreCheck</a>. You may get it on your boarding pass or a TSA person may randomly pull you out of the regular line and route you to the PreCheck line. It’s your lucky day! Don’t spoil it, though, by not knowing the PreCheck rules. Put your phone away and read the signs -- don’t take off your shoes, don’t pull your liquids out, keep your jacket on, …. Read the signs and don’t slow it down for everyone else.</li>\r\n 	<li>If getting to your gate involves a moving platform or an escalator, stand to the right because people are walking -- usually quickly -- on the left. Traveling with others, you’ll naturally want to stand abreast, but then you’re blocking everyone else. Don’t do it unless you want to get run over.</li>\r\n 	<li>When you hit the airport Starbucks for your pre-flight coffee, remember that this isn’t your neighborhood Starbucks run by friendly Starbucks-trained baristas. It’s run by Sodexo which doesn’t care quite as much about coffee training. And they’re not quite as efficient. And there are usually a lot of people behind you in line. Keep your order to 3 adjectives or less. Tall skim latte is good. The half-decaf 3-pump no-foam vente vanilla latte -- not so much.</li>\r\n 	<li>While queuing at the gate, don’t try to cheat on the boarding. Everyone’s looking at each others boarding passes, and airlines are telling their agents to get more strict. On almost every flight, I’ve seen the boarding agent direct someone over to the wall of shame to wait for their boarding group to be called. Don’t embarrass your family. Wait your turn.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you’re using an electronic boarding pass on your smartphone, turn off auto-rotate. If you don’t, odds are that your screen will start oscillating between portrait and landscape while you’re trying to get it on the electronic reader. You’ll delay the boarding line and quickly earn the enmity of your seatmates -- even before you sit shoulder-to-shoulder with them for 2-4 hours.</li>\r\n 	<li>And finally, and this is a big one, don’t put your small bag in the overhead. I don’t care if you checked a bag. Don’t be that person who puts a purse or a briefcase in the overhead. Show a little holiday spirit -- put ‘em under the seat in front of you and leave space for one more roller board for the poor urchins in Groups 3, 4 or 5. When that person’s bag doesn’t get dropped on a tight connection through DFW, and they’re able to sit down to Thanksgiving dinner in something other than day-old sweats, they’ll thank you.</li>\r\n</ul>','Travel Tips — Holiday Airport Etiquette','','inherit','closed','closed','','1410-revision-v1','','','2018-12-07 16:35:30','2018-12-07 21:35:30','',1410,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/12/07/1410-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2182,1,'2018-12-07 16:36:23','2018-12-07 21:36:23','[caption id=\"attachment_1412\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/IMG_2794.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1412\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/IMG_2794-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Don\'t rub it in that you\'re going some place warm for Christmas\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Don\'t rub it in that you\'re going some place warm for Christmas[/caption]\r\n\r\nComing into the holiday travel season, every travel news outlet publishes their <a title=\"Top 10 Holiday Travel Tips\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2013/12/19/top-10-holiday-travel-tips/\">top travel tips</a>. Rather than repeat the typical \"pack light\" and \"give yourself extra time\" nostrums, I decided to create an advice list of what’s really the problem during holiday travel -- airport etiquette.\r\n\r\nThe challenge of holiday travel isn\'t necessarily the crowds; it’s the crowds of what some road warriors might call “clueless” travelers. I think “amateur” is certainly a more charitable and probably more accurate term. So for those amateur travelers or for those who\'ve been off the road for a bit and need a refresher, here’s a list of etiquette tips that some holiday time reinforcement...\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Let\'s start at the front of the airport with the security line. The TSA is pushing <a href=\"http://www.tsa.gov/tsa-precheck/frequently-asked-questions\">PreCheck</a>. You may get it on your boarding pass or a TSA person may randomly pull you out of the regular line and route you to the PreCheck line. It’s your lucky day! Don’t spoil it, though, by not knowing the PreCheck rules. Put your phone away and read the signs -- don’t take off your shoes, don’t pull your liquids out, keep your jacket on, …. Read the signs and don’t slow it down for everyone else.</li>\r\n 	<li>If getting to your gate involves a moving platform or an escalator, stand to the right because people are walking -- usually quickly -- on the left. Traveling with others, you’ll naturally want to stand abreast, but then you’re blocking everyone else. Don’t do it unless you want to get run over.</li>\r\n 	<li>When you hit the airport Starbucks for your pre-flight coffee, remember that this isn’t your neighborhood Starbucks run by friendly Starbucks-trained baristas. It’s run by Sodexo which doesn’t care quite as much about coffee training. And they’re not quite as efficient. And there are usually a lot of people behind you in line. Keep your order to 3 adjectives or less. Tall skim latte is good. The half-decaf 3-pump no-foam vente vanilla latte -- not so much.</li>\r\n 	<li>While queuing at the gate, don’t try to cheat on the boarding. Everyone’s looking at each others boarding passes, and airlines are telling their agents to get more strict. On almost every flight, I’ve seen the boarding agent direct someone over to the wall of shame to wait for their boarding group to be called. Don’t embarrass your family. Wait your turn.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you’re using an electronic boarding pass on your smartphone, turn off auto-rotate. If you don’t, odds are that your screen will start oscillating between portrait and landscape while you’re trying to get it on the electronic reader. You’ll delay the boarding line and quickly earn the enmity of your seatmates -- even before you sit shoulder-to-shoulder with them for 2-4 hours.</li>\r\n 	<li>And finally, and this is a big one, don’t put your small bag in the overhead. I don’t care if you checked a bag. Don’t be that person who puts a purse or a briefcase in the overhead. Show a little holiday spirit -- put ‘em under the seat in front of you and leave space for one more roller board for the poor urchins in Groups 3, 4 or 5. When that person’s bag doesn’t get dropped on a tight connection through DFW, and they’re able to sit down to Thanksgiving dinner in something other than day-old sweats, they’ll thank you.</li>\r\n</ul>','Travel Tips — Holiday Airport Etiquette','','inherit','closed','closed','','1410-revision-v1','','','2018-12-07 16:36:23','2018-12-07 21:36:23','',1410,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/12/07/1410-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2183,1,'2018-12-07 16:37:11','2018-12-07 21:37:11','[caption id=\"attachment_1291\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/2013-12-10-07.55.43.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1291\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/2013-12-10-07.55.43-300x225.jpg\" alt=\"Tough travel day when the deicing fluid freezes\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\" /></a> Tough travel day when the deicing fluid freezes[/caption]\r\n\r\nSnow, ice, and cold temperatures have hit North America a lot earlier this year. With the crush of Christmas/New Years travel starting this weekend, here\'s the TravelCommons\' top holiday travel tips...\r\n<ol>\r\n 	<li><strong style=\"line-height: 1.5em;\">Fly Direct</strong><span style=\"line-height: 1.5em;\"> -- This is the top tip every time I put this list together. Holiday travel stacks up problems --  high passenger load factors combined with winter weather disruptions almost guarantees late arrivals and missed connections. Pay the extra $100 for a direct flight.</span></li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Skip the Tight Connection</strong> -- If you can\'t fly direct, give yourself enough time to survive a late inbound flight. Take the 90- or 120-minute connection. Worst case is you get to try some great <a href=\"http://www.rickbayless.com/restaurants/tortas.html\">Mexican food</a> in O\'Hare or <a href=\"http://ilovememphisblog.com/2012/04/eat-airport-barbecue/\">barbecue</a> in Memphis.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Catch the Early Flight </strong>-- Delays stack up as the day wears on.  As your airplane goes from airport to airport, the probability of it getting stuck increases.  Overnight, airlines have a chance to recover – late planes finally get their destinations and operations groups can reassign planes.  So while the last flight out can be a crap shoot, I\'ve rarely hit a delay on the first flight out.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Use Multiple Flight Tracking Apps</strong> -- Use your smartphone to keep track of gate changes and flight delays. Sign up for text notifications from your airline when you book your ticket. However,  I\'ve often experienced long delays with the airlines\' services or changes that were never sent out. So I also use <a href=\"http://tripit.com\">TripIt</a>, <a href=\"http://worldmate.com\">WorldMate</a>, and <a href=\"http://flightaware.com\">FlightAware</a>. It means multiple notices, but it also means I don\'t miss anything.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Use Twitter as a Concierge Service</strong> -- Most airlines have social media teams monitoring Twitter. Before you leave, find and follow your airline\'s Twitter customer service account. \"At naming\" them in a Tweet (e.g., \"<a dir=\"ltr\" href=\"https://twitter.com/united\">@united</a> what\'s happening with UA 4286 MSY-ORD that it\'s 1:45 hr delayed?\") usually gets a response in a couple of minutes. Following them allows you to exchange personal information such as record locator numbers via direct message (DM). It\'s usually faster than queuing up for a frazzled gate agent and the results can be better.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Carry On your Luggage</strong> -- Unless you\'re heading to the slopes for Christmas, everyone in your travel party should be able to fit into a carry-on sized bag. You can save $25/bag and increase the probability of having clean clothes at your destination. If you’re seating area 3 or higher, odds are there’s no overhead bin space for you. Let the agent gate-check the bag for you. You won’t have to pay a checked bag fee and it’s very unlikely that they’ll lose your bag – it’s only traveling a couple hundred feet from the jet bridge to the luggage hold.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Spread Clothes Across All Bags</strong> -- If you have to check your bags, split everyone\'s clothes across all the bags. It\'s rare for an airline to lose <em>all</em> of your checked bags.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Buy Status for 1 Person</strong> -- Airlines will sell you anything, including one-off access to the special security lines and early boarding calls normally earned by flying 25,000 miles. The airlines will tell you that everyone in your travel party needs to pony up for status. In practice though, if the lead adult\'s boarding pass shows priority/premiere access, the overworked minimum-wage airport staffers guarding the status security lanes will let the family tag along. And at the gate, I\'ve never seen a family split up across boarding groups.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Know Your Geography </strong>-- Knowing alternatives to your destination airport gives you more flexibility dealing with cancelled flights or missed connections. In New York, the LaGuardia to Newark pivot is easy, but others aren\'t so obvious.  Everyone knows that Chicago has two airports – O\'Hare and Midway.  But what about Milwaukee\'s Mitchell Field 80 miles north?  If PHL is in trouble, how many folks think about Harrisburg or BWI?  Or Sacramento as an alternative to SFO?  I think about alternatives in two rings – within 60 miles – SNA and LGB for LAX; and then within 100-120 miles, which now picks up Palm Springs and San Diego for LAX.  Someone will drive a couple of hours to pick you up if it means getting you to Christmas dinner on time.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>But above all, be realistic </strong> -- It\'s gonna be a zoo. Steel yourself; get your inner karma tuned for it. Pack a snack and a book, and practice deep cleansing breaths.</li>\r\n</ol>','Top 10 Holiday Travel Tips','','inherit','closed','closed','','1289-revision-v1','','','2018-12-07 16:37:11','2018-12-07 21:37:11','',1289,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/12/07/1289-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2184,1,'2018-12-07 16:38:40','2018-12-07 21:38:40','[caption id=\"attachment_499\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/514658906_24223535241.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-499\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/514658906_24223535241-300x194.jpg\" alt=\"Amtrak train rolls into Winter Park, USA by Rohan Travellin\" width=\"300\" height=\"194\" /></a> Amtrak train rolls into Winter Park, USA by Rohan Travellin[/caption]\r\n\r\nLast week\'s winter storms in the <a href=\"http://www.ctpost.com/news/article/State-survives-storm-that-buried-state-953587.php\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Northeast</a> and the <a href=\"http://www.usatoday.com/weather/storms/winter/2011-01-10-storm10_ST_N.htm\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">South</a> resulted in <a href=\"http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2011/0112/As-winter-storm-blasts-Northeast-70-percent-of-US-now-coated-in-snow\">70 percent</a> of the US being covered in snow -- shutting down airports across the region, canceling thousands of flights and trains.  So it seems like a good time to recap some of the travel tips we\'ve covered in past episodes of TravelCommons.\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li><strong>Fly Direct </strong>-- This is one of the most sacred frequent traveler rules. Even if you\'re connecting through Houston, an intermediate stop adds one more point of failure, one more opportunity for the airlines to screw up</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Skip the Tight Connection</strong> -- If you can\'t fly direct, step away from any connection that\'s less than 60 minutes.  Yes, we usually want to get to our destination in the shortest possible time, but accepting a connection of 1 hour or less…. Think about it – a 15-minute delay on your flight into a big hub like <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27hare_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Chicago</a> or <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denver_International_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Denver</a> or <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detroit_Metropolitan_Wayne_County_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Detroit</a> (as good as on-time in the winter for most airlines) and you’re sprinting across terminals and concourses just to beat the closing door.  A 1-hr connection is just asking for a stress attack and/or an overnight stay at the airport branch of the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Bates Motel\" href=\"http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092622/\" rel=\"imdb\">Bates Motel</a>.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Connect Through a Fun City</strong> -- Again, if you can\'t fly direct, connect through a place you might want to visit.  On those rare occasions where I’m forced to take a connection, I look at the flight choices and think – where would I not mind being stuck?</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Keep your Confirmation Numbers Handy</strong> -- When you’re talking to a gate agent or on the phone to a service rep, nothing signals that you’re an experienced traveler like offering up that confirmation number. I typically put my confirmation numbers in the Outlook appointment that then syncs to my <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"iPhone\" href=\"http://www.crunchbase.com/product/iphone\" rel=\"crunchbase\">iPhone</a>.  I put the airline confirmation number in the subject line right after the flight number, and then put the hotel and rental reservation numbers in the notes of the appointment.  One click and it’s all there.  You may have use different technologies, but have a system that gets you quickly to your confirmation numbers without having to sift through a pile of paper.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Take the Phone Tree Path Less Traveled</strong> -- If you have to call an airline or hotel and you don’t have a Platinum or Premiere status number to call, choose the unpopular path on the phone tree.  Travel companies don’t staff their customer service centers for peak loads – like the day when a Chicago blizzard cancels 400 flights.  It’s too expensive. So on those days, you’ll wait forever for an agent if you’ve followed the typical path down the phone tree.  On those days, choose the “Spanish” or “International Travel” option because everyone else is choosing English and domestic travel.  Once you connect with someone, they’ll take care of you.  They all work on the same systems in the same service centers.</li>\r\n</ul>','Winter Travel Tips -- Things to Remember When The Snow Starts Flying','','inherit','closed','closed','','500-revision-v1','','','2018-12-07 16:38:40','2018-12-07 21:38:40','',500,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/12/07/500-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2185,1,'2018-12-07 17:21:20','2018-12-07 22:21:20','[caption id=\"attachment_2186\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/IMG_0205.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2186\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/IMG_0205-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> I Think That\'s the Uber Pick-Up Spot[/caption]\n\nIt seems that the snow and cold temperatures settled into the northern part of the Northern Hemisphere a bit earlier than last year. With the crush of Christmas/New Years travel starting in a few weeks, here are the TravelCommons\' top holiday travel tips to get you started early on your travel prep...\n<ol>\n 	<li><strong>Fly Non-Stop —</strong>&nbsp;It\'s obvious because it\'s the cardinal rule of air travel. Holiday travel stacks up problems — &nbsp;high passenger load factors combined with winter weather disruptions almost guarantees late arrivals and missed connections. Even if you’re connecting through Houston, an intermediate stop adds one more point of failure, one more opportunity for the airlines to screw up. Pay the extra $100 for a non-stop flight.</li>\n 	<li><strong>Sign Up for TSA PreCheck&nbsp;— </strong>Gift yourself and spend the $85 on 5 years of time and hassle reduction.</li>\n 	<li><strong>Skip the Tight Connection&nbsp;—&nbsp; </strong>If you can’t fly non-stop, step away from any connection that’s less than 60 minutes. &nbsp;Yes, we usually want to get to our destination in the shortest possible time, but accepting a connection of 1 hour or less…. Think about it – a 15-minute delay on your flight into a big hub like <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27hare_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Chicago</a> or <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denver_International_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Denver</a> or <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detroit_Metropolitan_Wayne_County_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Detroit</a> (as good as on-time in the winter for most airlines) and you’re sprinting across terminals and concourses just to beat the closing door.&nbsp; A 1-hr connection is just asking for a stress attack and/or an overnight stay at the airport branch of the <a title=\"Bates Motel\" href=\"http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092622/\" rel=\"imdb\">Bates Motel</a>.</li>\n 	<li><strong>Catch the Early Flight&nbsp;</strong>—&nbsp;Delays stack up as the day wears on.&nbsp; As your airplane goes from airport to airport, the probability of it getting stuck increases. &nbsp;Overnight, airlines have a chance to recover – late planes finally get their destinations and operations groups can reassign planes.&nbsp; So while the last flight out can be a crap shoot, I rarely hit a delay on the first flight out.</li>\n 	<li><strong>Use Twitter as a Concierge Service</strong> — Most airlines have social media teams monitoring Twitter. Before you leave, find and follow your airline’s Twitter customer service account. “At naming” them in a Tweet (e.g., “<a dir=\"ltr\" href=\"https://twitter.com/united\">@united</a> what’s happening with UA 4286 MSY-ORD that it’s 1:45 hr delayed?”) usually gets a response in a couple of minutes. Following them allows you to exchange personal information such as record locator numbers via direct message (DM). It’s usually faster than queuing up for a frazzled gate agent and the results can be better.</li>\n 	<li><strong>Use Multiple Flight Tracking Apps</strong> — Use your smartphone to keep track of gate changes and flight delays. Sign up for text notifications from your airline when you book your ticket. However, &nbsp;I’ve often experienced long delays with the airlines’ services or notices that were never sent out. So I also use <a href=\"http://tripit.com/\">TripIt</a>, <a href=\"http://flightaware.com/\">FlightAware</a>, and <a href=\"http://flightstats.com\">FlightStats</a>. It means multiple notices, but it also means I don’t miss anything.</li>\n 	<li><strong>Bring a Battery Pack&nbsp;</strong>— Whatever the size or form factor -- slimline, lipstick, high-capacity brick -- having that second or third charge readily available is critical to get last-minute gate change notifications and when you’re using electronic boarding passes. It saves you from stalking cleaning crews to find a live power outlet on your layover, or negotiating with your seatmate for possession of outlet between you. It’s cheap peace of mind.</li>\n 	<li><strong>Carry On your Luggage</strong> -- Unless you\'re heading to the slopes for Christmas, everyone in your travel party should be able to fit into a carry-on sized bag. You can save $25/bag and increase the probability of having clean clothes at your destination. If you’re seating area 4 or higher, odds are there’s no overhead bin space for you. Let the agent gate-check the bag for you. You won’t have to pay a checked bag fee and it’s very unlikely that they’ll lose your bag – it’s only traveling a couple hundred feet from the jet bridge to the luggage hold.</li>\n 	<li><strong>Spread Clothes Across All Bags</strong> -- If you need to check your bags -- maybe you have to bring pre-wrapped gifts or a special bottle of wine for Christmas dinner --&nbsp; split everyone\'s clothes across all the bags. It\'s rare for an airline to lose&nbsp;<em>all</em> of your checked bags.</li>\n 	<li><strong>Know Your Geography&nbsp;</strong>-- Knowing alternatives to your destination airport gives you more flexibility dealing with cancelled flights or missed connections. In New York, the&nbsp;LaGuardia&nbsp;to Newark pivot is&nbsp;easy, but others aren\'t so obvious.&nbsp; Everyone knows that Chicago has two airports – O\'Hare and Midway.&nbsp; But what about Milwaukee\'s Mitchell Field 80 miles north? &nbsp;If PHL is in trouble, how many folks think about Harrisburg or Allentown?&nbsp; Or Sacramento as an alternative to SFO?&nbsp; I think about alternatives in two rings – within 60 miles – SNA and LGB for LAX; and then within 100-120 miles, which now picks up Palm Springs and San Diego for LAX.&nbsp; Someone will drive a couple of hours to pick you up if it means getting you to Christmas dinner on time.</li>\n</ol>\nBut above all, be realistic. It’s gonna be a zoo. Steel yourself; get your inner karma tuned for it. Pack a snack and a book, and practice deep cleansing breaths.','Top 10 Holiday Travel Tips','','publish','closed','closed','','top-10-holiday-travel-tips-3','','','2021-09-29 22:07:54','2021-09-30 03:07:54','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=2185',0,'post','',0),
(2186,1,'2018-12-07 16:43:58','2018-12-07 21:43:58','','IMG_0205','','inherit','open','closed','','img_0205','','','2019-08-14 13:44:30','2019-08-14 18:44:30','',2185,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/IMG_0205.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(2187,1,'2018-12-07 17:07:17','2018-12-07 22:07:17','[caption id=\"attachment_2186\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/IMG_0205.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2186\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/IMG_0205-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Is That Grandma\'s House?[/caption]\r\n\r\nIt seems that the snow and cold temperatures settled into the northern part of the Northern Hemisphere a bit earlier than last year. With the crush of Christmas/New Years travel starting in a few weeks, here are the TravelCommons\' top holiday travel tips to get you started early on your travel prep...\r\n<ol>\r\n 	<li><strong>Fly Non-Stop —</strong> It\'s obvious because it\'s the cardinal rule of air travel. Holiday travel stacks up problems —  high passenger load factors combined with winter weather disruptions almost guarantees late arrivals and missed connections. Even if you’re connecting through Houston, an intermediate stop adds one more point of failure, one more opportunity for the airlines to screw up. Pay the extra $100 for a non-stop flight.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Sign Up for TSA PreCheck — </strong>Gift yourself and spend the $85 on 5 years of time and hassle reduction.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Skip the Tight Connection —  </strong>If you can’t fly non-stop, step away from any connection that’s less than 60 minutes.  Yes, we usually want to get to our destination in the shortest possible time, but accepting a connection of 1 hour or less…. Think about it – a 15-minute delay on your flight into a big hub like <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27hare_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Chicago</a> or <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denver_International_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Denver</a> or <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detroit_Metropolitan_Wayne_County_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Detroit</a> (as good as on-time in the winter for most airlines) and you’re sprinting across terminals and concourses just to beat the closing door.  A 1-hr connection is just asking for a stress attack and/or an overnight stay at the airport branch of the <a title=\"Bates Motel\" href=\"http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092622/\" rel=\"imdb\">Bates Motel</a>.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Catch the Early Flight </strong>— Delays stack up as the day wears on.  As your airplane goes from airport to airport, the probability of it getting stuck increases.  Overnight, airlines have a chance to recover – late planes finally get their destinations and operations groups can reassign planes.  So while the last flight out can be a crap shoot, I rarely hit a delay on the first flight out.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Use Twitter as a Concierge Service</strong> — Most airlines have social media teams monitoring Twitter. Before you leave, find and follow your airline’s Twitter customer service account. “At naming” them in a Tweet (e.g., “<a dir=\"ltr\" href=\"https://twitter.com/united\">@united</a> what’s happening with UA 4286 MSY-ORD that it’s 1:45 hr delayed?”) usually gets a response in a couple of minutes. Following them allows you to exchange personal information such as record locator numbers via direct message (DM). It’s usually faster than queuing up for a frazzled gate agent and the results can be better.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Use Multiple Flight Tracking Apps</strong> — Use your smartphone to keep track of gate changes and flight delays. Sign up for text notifications from your airline when you book your ticket. However,  I’ve often experienced long delays with the airlines’ services or notices that were never sent out. So I also use <a href=\"http://tripit.com/\">TripIt</a>, <a href=\"http://flightaware.com/\">FlightAware</a>, and <a href=\"http://flightstats.com\">FlightStats</a>. It means multiple notices, but it also means I don’t miss anything.</li>\r\n 	<li></li>\r\n</ol>\r\n&nbsp;','Top 10 Holiday Travel Tips','','inherit','closed','closed','','2185-revision-v1','','','2018-12-07 17:07:17','2018-12-07 22:07:17','',2185,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/12/07/2185-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2188,1,'2018-12-07 17:09:48','2018-12-07 22:09:48','[caption id=\"attachment_2186\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/IMG_0205.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2186\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/IMG_0205-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Is That Grandma\'s House?[/caption]\r\n\r\nIt seems that the snow and cold temperatures settled into the northern part of the Northern Hemisphere a bit earlier than last year. With the crush of Christmas/New Years travel starting in a few weeks, here are the TravelCommons\' top holiday travel tips to get you started early on your travel prep...\r\n<ol>\r\n 	<li><strong>Fly Non-Stop —</strong> It\'s obvious because it\'s the cardinal rule of air travel. Holiday travel stacks up problems —  high passenger load factors combined with winter weather disruptions almost guarantees late arrivals and missed connections. Even if you’re connecting through Houston, an intermediate stop adds one more point of failure, one more opportunity for the airlines to screw up. Pay the extra $100 for a non-stop flight.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Sign Up for TSA PreCheck — </strong>Gift yourself and spend the $85 on 5 years of time and hassle reduction.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Skip the Tight Connection —  </strong>If you can’t fly non-stop, step away from any connection that’s less than 60 minutes.  Yes, we usually want to get to our destination in the shortest possible time, but accepting a connection of 1 hour or less…. Think about it – a 15-minute delay on your flight into a big hub like <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27hare_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Chicago</a> or <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denver_International_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Denver</a> or <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detroit_Metropolitan_Wayne_County_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Detroit</a> (as good as on-time in the winter for most airlines) and you’re sprinting across terminals and concourses just to beat the closing door.  A 1-hr connection is just asking for a stress attack and/or an overnight stay at the airport branch of the <a title=\"Bates Motel\" href=\"http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092622/\" rel=\"imdb\">Bates Motel</a>.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Catch the Early Flight </strong>— Delays stack up as the day wears on.  As your airplane goes from airport to airport, the probability of it getting stuck increases.  Overnight, airlines have a chance to recover – late planes finally get their destinations and operations groups can reassign planes.  So while the last flight out can be a crap shoot, I rarely hit a delay on the first flight out.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Use Twitter as a Concierge Service</strong> — Most airlines have social media teams monitoring Twitter. Before you leave, find and follow your airline’s Twitter customer service account. “At naming” them in a Tweet (e.g., “<a dir=\"ltr\" href=\"https://twitter.com/united\">@united</a> what’s happening with UA 4286 MSY-ORD that it’s 1:45 hr delayed?”) usually gets a response in a couple of minutes. Following them allows you to exchange personal information such as record locator numbers via direct message (DM). It’s usually faster than queuing up for a frazzled gate agent and the results can be better.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Use Multiple Flight Tracking Apps</strong> — Use your smartphone to keep track of gate changes and flight delays. Sign up for text notifications from your airline when you book your ticket. However,  I’ve often experienced long delays with the airlines’ services or notices that were never sent out. So I also use <a href=\"http://tripit.com/\">TripIt</a>, <a href=\"http://flightaware.com/\">FlightAware</a>, and <a href=\"http://flightstats.com\">FlightStats</a>. It means multiple notices, but it also means I don’t miss anything.</li>\r\n 	<li></li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Carry On your Luggage</strong> -- Unless you\'re heading to the slopes for Christmas, everyone in your travel party should be able to fit into a carry-on sized bag. You can save $25/bag and increase the probability of having clean clothes at your destination. If you’re seating area 3 or higher, odds are there’s no overhead bin space for you. Let the agent gate-check the bag for you. You won’t have to pay a checked bag fee and it’s very unlikely that they’ll lose your bag – it’s only traveling a couple hundred feet from the jet bridge to the luggage hold.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Spread Clothes Across All Bags</strong> -- If you have to check your bags, split everyone\'s clothes across all the bags. It\'s rare for an airline to lose <em>all</em> of your checked bags.</li>\r\n 	<li></li>\r\n</ol>\r\n&nbsp;','Top 10 Holiday Travel Tips','','inherit','closed','closed','','2185-revision-v1','','','2018-12-07 17:09:48','2018-12-07 22:09:48','',2185,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/12/07/2185-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2189,1,'2018-12-07 17:12:33','2018-12-07 22:12:33','[caption id=\"attachment_2186\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/IMG_0205.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2186\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/IMG_0205-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Is That Grandma\'s House?[/caption]\r\n\r\nIt seems that the snow and cold temperatures settled into the northern part of the Northern Hemisphere a bit earlier than last year. With the crush of Christmas/New Years travel starting in a few weeks, here are the TravelCommons\' top holiday travel tips to get you started early on your travel prep...\r\n<ol>\r\n 	<li><strong>Fly Non-Stop —</strong> It\'s obvious because it\'s the cardinal rule of air travel. Holiday travel stacks up problems —  high passenger load factors combined with winter weather disruptions almost guarantees late arrivals and missed connections. Even if you’re connecting through Houston, an intermediate stop adds one more point of failure, one more opportunity for the airlines to screw up. Pay the extra $100 for a non-stop flight.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Sign Up for TSA PreCheck — </strong>Gift yourself and spend the $85 on 5 years of time and hassle reduction.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Skip the Tight Connection —  </strong>If you can’t fly non-stop, step away from any connection that’s less than 60 minutes.  Yes, we usually want to get to our destination in the shortest possible time, but accepting a connection of 1 hour or less…. Think about it – a 15-minute delay on your flight into a big hub like <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27hare_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Chicago</a> or <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denver_International_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Denver</a> or <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detroit_Metropolitan_Wayne_County_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Detroit</a> (as good as on-time in the winter for most airlines) and you’re sprinting across terminals and concourses just to beat the closing door.  A 1-hr connection is just asking for a stress attack and/or an overnight stay at the airport branch of the <a title=\"Bates Motel\" href=\"http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092622/\" rel=\"imdb\">Bates Motel</a>.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Catch the Early Flight </strong>— Delays stack up as the day wears on.  As your airplane goes from airport to airport, the probability of it getting stuck increases.  Overnight, airlines have a chance to recover – late planes finally get their destinations and operations groups can reassign planes.  So while the last flight out can be a crap shoot, I rarely hit a delay on the first flight out.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Use Twitter as a Concierge Service</strong> — Most airlines have social media teams monitoring Twitter. Before you leave, find and follow your airline’s Twitter customer service account. “At naming” them in a Tweet (e.g., “<a dir=\"ltr\" href=\"https://twitter.com/united\">@united</a> what’s happening with UA 4286 MSY-ORD that it’s 1:45 hr delayed?”) usually gets a response in a couple of minutes. Following them allows you to exchange personal information such as record locator numbers via direct message (DM). It’s usually faster than queuing up for a frazzled gate agent and the results can be better.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Use Multiple Flight Tracking Apps</strong> — Use your smartphone to keep track of gate changes and flight delays. Sign up for text notifications from your airline when you book your ticket. However,  I’ve often experienced long delays with the airlines’ services or notices that were never sent out. So I also use <a href=\"http://tripit.com/\">TripIt</a>, <a href=\"http://flightaware.com/\">FlightAware</a>, and <a href=\"http://flightstats.com\">FlightStats</a>. It means multiple notices, but it also means I don’t miss anything.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Bring a Battery Charger </strong>— Whatever the size or form factor -- slimline, lipstick, high-capacity brick -- having that second or third charge readily available is critical to get notified of gate changes and when you’re using electronic boarding passes. It saves you from stalking cleaning crews to find a live power outlet on your layover, or negotiating with your seatmate for possession of outlet between you. It’s cheap piece of mind.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Carry On your Luggage</strong> -- Unless you\'re heading to the slopes for Christmas, everyone in your travel party should be able to fit into a carry-on sized bag. You can save $25/bag and increase the probability of having clean clothes at your destination. If you’re seating area 3 or higher, odds are there’s no overhead bin space for you. Let the agent gate-check the bag for you. You won’t have to pay a checked bag fee and it’s very unlikely that they’ll lose your bag – it’s only traveling a couple hundred feet from the jet bridge to the luggage hold.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Spread Clothes Across All Bags</strong> -- If you have to check your bags, split everyone\'s clothes across all the bags. It\'s rare for an airline to lose <em>all</em> of your checked bags.</li>\r\n 	<li></li>\r\n</ol>\r\n&nbsp;','Top 10 Holiday Travel Tips','','inherit','closed','closed','','2185-revision-v1','','','2018-12-07 17:12:33','2018-12-07 22:12:33','',2185,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/12/07/2185-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2190,1,'2018-12-07 17:15:04','2018-12-07 22:15:04','[caption id=\"attachment_2186\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/IMG_0205.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2186\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/IMG_0205-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Is That Grandma\'s House?[/caption]\r\n\r\nIt seems that the snow and cold temperatures settled into the northern part of the Northern Hemisphere a bit earlier than last year. With the crush of Christmas/New Years travel starting in a few weeks, here are the TravelCommons\' top holiday travel tips to get you started early on your travel prep...\r\n<ol>\r\n 	<li><strong>Fly Non-Stop —</strong> It\'s obvious because it\'s the cardinal rule of air travel. Holiday travel stacks up problems —  high passenger load factors combined with winter weather disruptions almost guarantees late arrivals and missed connections. Even if you’re connecting through Houston, an intermediate stop adds one more point of failure, one more opportunity for the airlines to screw up. Pay the extra $100 for a non-stop flight.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Sign Up for TSA PreCheck — </strong>Gift yourself and spend the $85 on 5 years of time and hassle reduction.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Skip the Tight Connection —  </strong>If you can’t fly non-stop, step away from any connection that’s less than 60 minutes.  Yes, we usually want to get to our destination in the shortest possible time, but accepting a connection of 1 hour or less…. Think about it – a 15-minute delay on your flight into a big hub like <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27hare_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Chicago</a> or <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denver_International_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Denver</a> or <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detroit_Metropolitan_Wayne_County_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Detroit</a> (as good as on-time in the winter for most airlines) and you’re sprinting across terminals and concourses just to beat the closing door.  A 1-hr connection is just asking for a stress attack and/or an overnight stay at the airport branch of the <a title=\"Bates Motel\" href=\"http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092622/\" rel=\"imdb\">Bates Motel</a>.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Catch the Early Flight </strong>— Delays stack up as the day wears on.  As your airplane goes from airport to airport, the probability of it getting stuck increases.  Overnight, airlines have a chance to recover – late planes finally get their destinations and operations groups can reassign planes.  So while the last flight out can be a crap shoot, I rarely hit a delay on the first flight out.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Use Twitter as a Concierge Service</strong> — Most airlines have social media teams monitoring Twitter. Before you leave, find and follow your airline’s Twitter customer service account. “At naming” them in a Tweet (e.g., “<a dir=\"ltr\" href=\"https://twitter.com/united\">@united</a> what’s happening with UA 4286 MSY-ORD that it’s 1:45 hr delayed?”) usually gets a response in a couple of minutes. Following them allows you to exchange personal information such as record locator numbers via direct message (DM). It’s usually faster than queuing up for a frazzled gate agent and the results can be better.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Use Multiple Flight Tracking Apps</strong> — Use your smartphone to keep track of gate changes and flight delays. Sign up for text notifications from your airline when you book your ticket. However,  I’ve often experienced long delays with the airlines’ services or notices that were never sent out. So I also use <a href=\"http://tripit.com/\">TripIt</a>, <a href=\"http://flightaware.com/\">FlightAware</a>, and <a href=\"http://flightstats.com\">FlightStats</a>. It means multiple notices, but it also means I don’t miss anything.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Bring a Battery Charger </strong>— Whatever the size or form factor -- slimline, lipstick, high-capacity brick -- having that second or third charge readily available is critical to get notified of gate changes and when you’re using electronic boarding passes. It saves you from stalking cleaning crews to find a live power outlet on your layover, or negotiating with your seatmate for possession of outlet between you. It’s cheap piece of mind.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Carry On your Luggage</strong> -- Unless you\'re heading to the slopes for Christmas, everyone in your travel party should be able to fit into a carry-on sized bag. You can save $25/bag and increase the probability of having clean clothes at your destination. If you’re seating area 3 or higher, odds are there’s no overhead bin space for you. Let the agent gate-check the bag for you. You won’t have to pay a checked bag fee and it’s very unlikely that they’ll lose your bag – it’s only traveling a couple hundred feet from the jet bridge to the luggage hold.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Spread Clothes Across All Bags</strong> -- If you have to check your bags, split everyone\'s clothes across all the bags. It\'s rare for an airline to lose <em>all</em> of your checked bags.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Know Your Geography </strong>-- Knowing alternatives to your destination airport gives you more flexibility dealing with cancelled flights or missed connections. In New York, the LaGuardia to Newark pivot is easy, but others aren\'t so obvious.  Everyone knows that Chicago has two airports – O\'Hare and Midway.  But what about Milwaukee\'s Mitchell Field 80 miles north?  If PHL is in trouble, how many folks think about Harrisburg or Allentown?  Or Sacramento as an alternative to SFO?  I think about alternatives in two rings – within 60 miles – SNA and LGB for LAX; and then within 100-120 miles, which now picks up Palm Springs and San Diego for LAX.  Someone will drive a couple of hours to pick you up if it means getting you to Christmas dinner on time.</li>\r\n</ol>\r\nBut above all, be realistic. It’s gonna be a zoo. Steel yourself; get your inner karma tuned for it. Pack a snack and a book, and practice deep cleansing breaths.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;','Top 10 Holiday Travel Tips','','inherit','closed','closed','','2185-revision-v1','','','2018-12-07 17:15:04','2018-12-07 22:15:04','',2185,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/12/07/2185-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2191,1,'2018-12-07 17:16:32','2018-12-07 22:16:32','[caption id=\"attachment_2186\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/IMG_0205.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2186\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/IMG_0205-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> I Think That\'s the Uber Pick-Up Spot[/caption]\r\n\r\nIt seems that the snow and cold temperatures settled into the northern part of the Northern Hemisphere a bit earlier than last year. With the crush of Christmas/New Years travel starting in a few weeks, here are the TravelCommons\' top holiday travel tips to get you started early on your travel prep...\r\n<ol>\r\n 	<li><strong>Fly Non-Stop —</strong> It\'s obvious because it\'s the cardinal rule of air travel. Holiday travel stacks up problems —  high passenger load factors combined with winter weather disruptions almost guarantees late arrivals and missed connections. Even if you’re connecting through Houston, an intermediate stop adds one more point of failure, one more opportunity for the airlines to screw up. Pay the extra $100 for a non-stop flight.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Sign Up for TSA PreCheck — </strong>Gift yourself and spend the $85 on 5 years of time and hassle reduction.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Skip the Tight Connection —  </strong>If you can’t fly non-stop, step away from any connection that’s less than 60 minutes.  Yes, we usually want to get to our destination in the shortest possible time, but accepting a connection of 1 hour or less…. Think about it – a 15-minute delay on your flight into a big hub like <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27hare_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Chicago</a> or <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denver_International_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Denver</a> or <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detroit_Metropolitan_Wayne_County_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Detroit</a> (as good as on-time in the winter for most airlines) and you’re sprinting across terminals and concourses just to beat the closing door.  A 1-hr connection is just asking for a stress attack and/or an overnight stay at the airport branch of the <a title=\"Bates Motel\" href=\"http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092622/\" rel=\"imdb\">Bates Motel</a>.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Catch the Early Flight </strong>— Delays stack up as the day wears on.  As your airplane goes from airport to airport, the probability of it getting stuck increases.  Overnight, airlines have a chance to recover – late planes finally get their destinations and operations groups can reassign planes.  So while the last flight out can be a crap shoot, I rarely hit a delay on the first flight out.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Use Twitter as a Concierge Service</strong> — Most airlines have social media teams monitoring Twitter. Before you leave, find and follow your airline’s Twitter customer service account. “At naming” them in a Tweet (e.g., “<a dir=\"ltr\" href=\"https://twitter.com/united\">@united</a> what’s happening with UA 4286 MSY-ORD that it’s 1:45 hr delayed?”) usually gets a response in a couple of minutes. Following them allows you to exchange personal information such as record locator numbers via direct message (DM). It’s usually faster than queuing up for a frazzled gate agent and the results can be better.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Use Multiple Flight Tracking Apps</strong> — Use your smartphone to keep track of gate changes and flight delays. Sign up for text notifications from your airline when you book your ticket. However,  I’ve often experienced long delays with the airlines’ services or notices that were never sent out. So I also use <a href=\"http://tripit.com/\">TripIt</a>, <a href=\"http://flightaware.com/\">FlightAware</a>, and <a href=\"http://flightstats.com\">FlightStats</a>. It means multiple notices, but it also means I don’t miss anything.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Bring a Battery Charger </strong>— Whatever the size or form factor -- slimline, lipstick, high-capacity brick -- having that second or third charge readily available is critical to get notified of gate changes and when you’re using electronic boarding passes. It saves you from stalking cleaning crews to find a live power outlet on your layover, or negotiating with your seatmate for possession of outlet between you. It’s cheap piece of mind.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Carry On your Luggage</strong> -- Unless you\'re heading to the slopes for Christmas, everyone in your travel party should be able to fit into a carry-on sized bag. You can save $25/bag and increase the probability of having clean clothes at your destination. If you’re seating area 3 or higher, odds are there’s no overhead bin space for you. Let the agent gate-check the bag for you. You won’t have to pay a checked bag fee and it’s very unlikely that they’ll lose your bag – it’s only traveling a couple hundred feet from the jet bridge to the luggage hold.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Spread Clothes Across All Bags</strong> -- If you have to check your bags, split everyone\'s clothes across all the bags. It\'s rare for an airline to lose <em>all</em> of your checked bags.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Know Your Geography </strong>-- Knowing alternatives to your destination airport gives you more flexibility dealing with cancelled flights or missed connections. In New York, the LaGuardia to Newark pivot is easy, but others aren\'t so obvious.  Everyone knows that Chicago has two airports – O\'Hare and Midway.  But what about Milwaukee\'s Mitchell Field 80 miles north?  If PHL is in trouble, how many folks think about Harrisburg or Allentown?  Or Sacramento as an alternative to SFO?  I think about alternatives in two rings – within 60 miles – SNA and LGB for LAX; and then within 100-120 miles, which now picks up Palm Springs and San Diego for LAX.  Someone will drive a couple of hours to pick you up if it means getting you to Christmas dinner on time.</li>\r\n</ol>\r\nBut above all, be realistic. It’s gonna be a zoo. Steel yourself; get your inner karma tuned for it. Pack a snack and a book, and practice deep cleansing breaths.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;','Top 10 Holiday Travel Tips','','inherit','closed','closed','','2185-revision-v1','','','2018-12-07 17:16:32','2018-12-07 22:16:32','',2185,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/12/07/2185-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2192,1,'2018-12-07 17:21:20','2018-12-07 22:21:20','[caption id=\"attachment_2186\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/IMG_0205.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2186\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/IMG_0205-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> I Think That\'s the Uber Pick-Up Spot[/caption]\r\n\r\nIt seems that the snow and cold temperatures settled into the northern part of the Northern Hemisphere a bit earlier than last year. With the crush of Christmas/New Years travel starting in a few weeks, here are the TravelCommons\' top holiday travel tips to get you started early on your travel prep...\r\n<ol>\r\n 	<li><strong>Fly Non-Stop —</strong> It\'s obvious because it\'s the cardinal rule of air travel. Holiday travel stacks up problems —  high passenger load factors combined with winter weather disruptions almost guarantees late arrivals and missed connections. Even if you’re connecting through Houston, an intermediate stop adds one more point of failure, one more opportunity for the airlines to screw up. Pay the extra $100 for a non-stop flight.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Sign Up for TSA PreCheck — </strong>Gift yourself and spend the $85 on 5 years of time and hassle reduction.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Skip the Tight Connection —  </strong>If you can’t fly non-stop, step away from any connection that’s less than 60 minutes.  Yes, we usually want to get to our destination in the shortest possible time, but accepting a connection of 1 hour or less…. Think about it – a 15-minute delay on your flight into a big hub like <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27hare_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Chicago</a> or <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denver_International_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Denver</a> or <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detroit_Metropolitan_Wayne_County_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Detroit</a> (as good as on-time in the winter for most airlines) and you’re sprinting across terminals and concourses just to beat the closing door.  A 1-hr connection is just asking for a stress attack and/or an overnight stay at the airport branch of the <a title=\"Bates Motel\" href=\"http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092622/\" rel=\"imdb\">Bates Motel</a>.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Catch the Early Flight </strong>— Delays stack up as the day wears on.  As your airplane goes from airport to airport, the probability of it getting stuck increases.  Overnight, airlines have a chance to recover – late planes finally get their destinations and operations groups can reassign planes.  So while the last flight out can be a crap shoot, I rarely hit a delay on the first flight out.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Use Twitter as a Concierge Service</strong> — Most airlines have social media teams monitoring Twitter. Before you leave, find and follow your airline’s Twitter customer service account. “At naming” them in a Tweet (e.g., “<a dir=\"ltr\" href=\"https://twitter.com/united\">@united</a> what’s happening with UA 4286 MSY-ORD that it’s 1:45 hr delayed?”) usually gets a response in a couple of minutes. Following them allows you to exchange personal information such as record locator numbers via direct message (DM). It’s usually faster than queuing up for a frazzled gate agent and the results can be better.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Use Multiple Flight Tracking Apps</strong> — Use your smartphone to keep track of gate changes and flight delays. Sign up for text notifications from your airline when you book your ticket. However,  I’ve often experienced long delays with the airlines’ services or notices that were never sent out. So I also use <a href=\"http://tripit.com/\">TripIt</a>, <a href=\"http://flightaware.com/\">FlightAware</a>, and <a href=\"http://flightstats.com\">FlightStats</a>. It means multiple notices, but it also means I don’t miss anything.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Bring a Battery Charger </strong>— Whatever the size or form factor -- slimline, lipstick, high-capacity brick -- having that second or third charge readily available is critical to get last-minute gate change notifications and when you’re using electronic boarding passes. It saves you from stalking cleaning crews to find a live power outlet on your layover, or negotiating with your seatmate for possession of outlet between you. It’s cheap piece of mind.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Carry On your Luggage</strong> -- Unless you\'re heading to the slopes for Christmas, everyone in your travel party should be able to fit into a carry-on sized bag. You can save $25/bag and increase the probability of having clean clothes at your destination. If you’re seating area 4 or higher, odds are there’s no overhead bin space for you. Let the agent gate-check the bag for you. You won’t have to pay a checked bag fee and it’s very unlikely that they’ll lose your bag – it’s only traveling a couple hundred feet from the jet bridge to the luggage hold.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Spread Clothes Across All Bags</strong> -- If you need to check your bags -- maybe you have to bring pre-wrapped gifts or a special bottle of wine for Christmas dinner --  split everyone\'s clothes across all the bags. It\'s rare for an airline to lose <em>all</em> of your checked bags.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Know Your Geography </strong>-- Knowing alternatives to your destination airport gives you more flexibility dealing with cancelled flights or missed connections. In New York, the LaGuardia to Newark pivot is easy, but others aren\'t so obvious.  Everyone knows that Chicago has two airports – O\'Hare and Midway.  But what about Milwaukee\'s Mitchell Field 80 miles north?  If PHL is in trouble, how many folks think about Harrisburg or Allentown?  Or Sacramento as an alternative to SFO?  I think about alternatives in two rings – within 60 miles – SNA and LGB for LAX; and then within 100-120 miles, which now picks up Palm Springs and San Diego for LAX.  Someone will drive a couple of hours to pick you up if it means getting you to Christmas dinner on time.</li>\r\n</ol>\r\nBut above all, be realistic. It’s gonna be a zoo. Steel yourself; get your inner karma tuned for it. Pack a snack and a book, and practice deep cleansing breaths.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;','Top 10 Holiday Travel Tips','','inherit','closed','closed','','2185-revision-v1','','','2018-12-07 17:21:20','2018-12-07 22:21:20','',2185,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/12/07/2185-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2193,1,'2018-12-08 17:32:51','2018-12-08 22:32:51','Mark Peacock has been a frequent business traveler for over 20 years. Beginning with his first flight on his first day of work (ORD to DFW), Mark has traveled extensively for high-tech companies and management consultancies.\r\n\r\n<img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/sa_head_shot.jpg\" alt=\"Mark Peacock Portrait\" width=\"200\" height=\"195\" align=\"left\" />The first TravelCommons podcast was recorded May 2005 in the bathroom of the Wardman Park Marriott in Washington, DC. TravelCommons was supposed to be a travel blog, an outlet for the travel journal entries Mark would jot down while waiting out flight delays. However, he soon combined those travel stories with his high school radio broadcasting experience to produce the \"Voice of the Traveler\" podcast.\r\n\r\nMark has lived in Chicago, Memphis, Louisville, Washington DC, the Bay Area, Dallas, Philadelphia, and Detroit. He is back in Chicago for the third time, where he lives with his wife and two children.','About Mark Peacock','','inherit','closed','closed','','85-revision-v1','','','2018-12-08 17:32:51','2018-12-08 22:32:51','',85,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/12/08/85-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2194,1,'2018-12-08 17:33:27','2018-12-08 22:33:27','Mark Peacock has been a frequent business traveler for over 30 years. Beginning with his first flight on his first day of work (ORD to DFW), Mark has traveled extensively for high-tech companies and management consultancies.\r\n\r\n<img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/sa_head_shot.jpg\" alt=\"Mark Peacock Portrait\" width=\"200\" height=\"195\" align=\"left\" />The first TravelCommons podcast was recorded May 2005 in the bathroom of the Wardman Park Marriott in Washington, DC. TravelCommons was supposed to be a travel blog, an outlet for the travel journal entries Mark would jot down while waiting out flight delays. However, he soon combined those travel stories with his high school radio broadcasting experience to produce the \"Voice of the Traveler\" podcast.\r\n\r\nMark has lived in Chicago, Memphis, Louisville, Washington DC, the Bay Area, Dallas, Philadelphia, and Detroit. He is back in Chicago for the third time, where he lives with his wife and two children.','About Mark Peacock','','inherit','closed','closed','','85-revision-v1','','','2018-12-08 17:33:27','2018-12-08 22:33:27','',85,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/12/08/85-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2196,1,'2018-12-15 18:18:22','2018-12-15 23:18:22','[caption id=\"attachment_2186\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/IMG_0205.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2186\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/IMG_0205-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> I Think That\'s the Uber Pick-Up Spot[/caption]\r\n\r\nIt seems that the snow and cold temperatures settled into the northern part of the Northern Hemisphere a bit earlier than last year. With the crush of Christmas/New Years travel starting in a few weeks, here are the TravelCommons\' top holiday travel tips to get you started early on your travel prep...\r\n<ol>\r\n 	<li><strong>Fly Non-Stop —</strong> It\'s obvious because it\'s the cardinal rule of air travel. Holiday travel stacks up problems —  high passenger load factors combined with winter weather disruptions almost guarantees late arrivals and missed connections. Even if you’re connecting through Houston, an intermediate stop adds one more point of failure, one more opportunity for the airlines to screw up. Pay the extra $100 for a non-stop flight.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Sign Up for TSA PreCheck — </strong>Gift yourself and spend the $85 on 5 years of time and hassle reduction.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Skip the Tight Connection —  </strong>If you can’t fly non-stop, step away from any connection that’s less than 60 minutes.  Yes, we usually want to get to our destination in the shortest possible time, but accepting a connection of 1 hour or less…. Think about it – a 15-minute delay on your flight into a big hub like <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27hare_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Chicago</a> or <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denver_International_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Denver</a> or <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detroit_Metropolitan_Wayne_County_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Detroit</a> (as good as on-time in the winter for most airlines) and you’re sprinting across terminals and concourses just to beat the closing door.  A 1-hr connection is just asking for a stress attack and/or an overnight stay at the airport branch of the <a title=\"Bates Motel\" href=\"http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092622/\" rel=\"imdb\">Bates Motel</a>.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Catch the Early Flight </strong>— Delays stack up as the day wears on.  As your airplane goes from airport to airport, the probability of it getting stuck increases.  Overnight, airlines have a chance to recover – late planes finally get their destinations and operations groups can reassign planes.  So while the last flight out can be a crap shoot, I rarely hit a delay on the first flight out.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Use Twitter as a Concierge Service</strong> — Most airlines have social media teams monitoring Twitter. Before you leave, find and follow your airline’s Twitter customer service account. “At naming” them in a Tweet (e.g., “<a dir=\"ltr\" href=\"https://twitter.com/united\">@united</a> what’s happening with UA 4286 MSY-ORD that it’s 1:45 hr delayed?”) usually gets a response in a couple of minutes. Following them allows you to exchange personal information such as record locator numbers via direct message (DM). It’s usually faster than queuing up for a frazzled gate agent and the results can be better.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Use Multiple Flight Tracking Apps</strong> — Use your smartphone to keep track of gate changes and flight delays. Sign up for text notifications from your airline when you book your ticket. However,  I’ve often experienced long delays with the airlines’ services or notices that were never sent out. So I also use <a href=\"http://tripit.com/\">TripIt</a>, <a href=\"http://flightaware.com/\">FlightAware</a>, and <a href=\"http://flightstats.com\">FlightStats</a>. It means multiple notices, but it also means I don’t miss anything.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Bring a Battery Pack </strong>— Whatever the size or form factor -- slimline, lipstick, high-capacity brick -- having that second or third charge readily available is critical to get last-minute gate change notifications and when you’re using electronic boarding passes. It saves you from stalking cleaning crews to find a live power outlet on your layover, or negotiating with your seatmate for possession of outlet between you. It’s cheap piece of mind.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Carry On your Luggage</strong> -- Unless you\'re heading to the slopes for Christmas, everyone in your travel party should be able to fit into a carry-on sized bag. You can save $25/bag and increase the probability of having clean clothes at your destination. If you’re seating area 4 or higher, odds are there’s no overhead bin space for you. Let the agent gate-check the bag for you. You won’t have to pay a checked bag fee and it’s very unlikely that they’ll lose your bag – it’s only traveling a couple hundred feet from the jet bridge to the luggage hold.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Spread Clothes Across All Bags</strong> -- If you need to check your bags -- maybe you have to bring pre-wrapped gifts or a special bottle of wine for Christmas dinner --  split everyone\'s clothes across all the bags. It\'s rare for an airline to lose <em>all</em> of your checked bags.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Know Your Geography </strong>-- Knowing alternatives to your destination airport gives you more flexibility dealing with cancelled flights or missed connections. In New York, the LaGuardia to Newark pivot is easy, but others aren\'t so obvious.  Everyone knows that Chicago has two airports – O\'Hare and Midway.  But what about Milwaukee\'s Mitchell Field 80 miles north?  If PHL is in trouble, how many folks think about Harrisburg or Allentown?  Or Sacramento as an alternative to SFO?  I think about alternatives in two rings – within 60 miles – SNA and LGB for LAX; and then within 100-120 miles, which now picks up Palm Springs and San Diego for LAX.  Someone will drive a couple of hours to pick you up if it means getting you to Christmas dinner on time.</li>\r\n</ol>\r\nBut above all, be realistic. It’s gonna be a zoo. Steel yourself; get your inner karma tuned for it. Pack a snack and a book, and practice deep cleansing breaths.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;','Top 10 Holiday Travel Tips','','inherit','closed','closed','','2185-revision-v1','','','2018-12-15 18:18:22','2018-12-15 23:18:22','',2185,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/12/15/2185-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2197,1,'2018-12-17 16:15:10','2018-12-17 21:15:10','','IMG_1158','I won\'t pass for an emotional support reindeer','inherit','open','closed','','img_1158','','','2018-12-17 16:37:09','2018-12-17 21:37:09','',2198,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/IMG_1158.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(2198,1,'2018-12-17 17:01:07','2018-12-17 22:01:07','[caption id=\"attachment_2197\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/IMG_1158.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2197\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/IMG_1158-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> I won\'t pass for an emotional support reindeer[/caption]\n\nTrying to wrap up travel for the year so I can hunker down in the TravelCommons bunker outside of Chicago and <em>not</em> worry about any forecasted snow. But for those of you who are traveling, here\'s an episode to keep you occupied in the airport, train, or car traffic. We talk about some travel tips that didn\'t make my Top 10 Tips blog post, the great experience of flying on Thanksgiving day, losing my tablet on that flight but soon recovering it, storming Las Vegas with 50,000 other Amazon Web Services users, and some thoughts from our trip to Santa Fe, New Mexico. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_147.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #147:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, trying to wind down the year’s travel. Was in Santa Fe, New Mexico for Thanksgiving, and then headed up to Las Vegas the next week for Amazon Web Service’s big annual conference, Re:Invent. Then did what I hoped was my last trip to Dallas, but we couldn’t corral all the cats, so I’m back down there next Weds for what will definitely be my last trip of the year.</li>\n 	<li>Irene and I flew out to Albuquerque 10am Thanksgiving morning and I have to say that it was one of the least stressful travel experiences I’ve ever had -- no traffic on the drive to ORD, no lines; I didn’t even have time to pull out my driver’s license before I hit the TSA podium. I walked straight through to a screening line. There were agents hanging around just looking for people to screen. The only line I stood in was the Starbucks. We even scored 1st-Class upgrades; the plane was only half full. I even think we left early. A very pleasant change from my ORD-DFW commute.</li>\n 	<li>The only real downside I noticed was when we hit the Hertz Presidents Club aisle in Albuquerque. It was pretty picked over, leaving behind an odd selection of Dodge vehicles -- the choice was between Dodge Challenger muscle cars or fully tricked out Ram Hemi king-cab pick-ups. I can’t say that I’ve ever faced quite that choice. The Challenger, with rear-wheel drive, wouldn’t be great if we got snow at elevation, but the Rams were just huge, and trying to parallel park that in Santa Fe would be an event. It took me a bit to decide. I went with the Challenger and hoped for clear skies.</li>\n 	<li>Well, there was one more downside that I didn’t discover until we unpacked in our little casita in Santa Fe that night. I’d left my Samsung tablet in that nice first-class seat. Not in the seat-back pocket; I always check there before leaving. There was a side compartment along the middle armrest that I’d put my tablet in when I folded up the table to hit the lav. Bad mistake. That compartment was deep, I couldn’t see the tablet; and I didn’t think to check it before deplaning.</li>\n 	<li>I hit Twitter, sending United a direct message asking about ABQ lost-and-found. I wanted to ping them to see if the cleaning crew had turn anything in since I’d be back at ABQ for our Monday morning flight to LAS. I’ve done this before when getting back coats that I’ve left in overhead compartments. The Twitter customer service agent instead sent me a link to a web form to fill out. I cooled my jets over the weekend and on Monday morning, swung by the United Baggage Services office to see if they had my tablet. Walked past the American Baggage Services office -- open; the Delta Baggage Services office -- open; to the United Baggage Services office -- closed. It was supposed to open at 9am. I waited for 15-20 minutes, and then had to head up to catch my Vegas flight. I wasn’t happy.</li>\n 	<li>Which changed that afternoon when I got a call from an unknown Cleveland number on my mobile. Robocallers have found my mobile number, so I usually let unrecognized numbers go straight to voicemail, but I remember Continental having a Cleveland hub before the United merger, so maybe this was a United person calling. And it was! “I think I have your tablet; could you verify your screensaver” It’s a wall painting of pink flamingos. “Yup, that’s it; we’ve got it” (Actually, it’s street art from Paris’ Montmartre neighborhood; you can see the picture on the TravelCommons’ Instagram feed). She told me that they no longer keep found items at the airports; they ship them the next day to centralized lost-&amp;-found centers for sorting and processing. So, even if the ABQ baggage services office had been open that morning, they wouldn’t have had my tablet; they probably shipped it to Cleveland that weekend.\nAfter I got off the phone, I got an e-mail with a link to pick a shipping method and pay. The day after I got home from Vegas, my flamingo’d tablet landed on my doorstep.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/copperhead/40520\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen</a> by copperhead (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: Admiral Bob, Javolenus , Sackjo22</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul class=\"\">\n 	<li>Couple of listener notes on the last episode. Nick Gassman wrote:\n<ul>\n 	<li>“When you were talking about car rental collision damage waiver, I took it to mean that that you pay the rental company for the insurance. It\'s much cheaper (at least in the UK) to purchase this separately. You can generally get it on a per-trip or annual basis, just like regular travel insurance.”</li>\n 	<li>Nick, good point on that. You get used to accepting the waiver on business travel because, for many corporate rates, it’s all rolled in or you’re just going to expense it. And for US domestic travel, at least for me, my regular auto insurance covers it. So that leaves international travel. Chase did a good job of handling the accident in the UK. But looking at a separate company is a good idea. May try that out the next time I rent in Spain.</li>\n 	<li>“And about BlueTooth speakers, you mentioned about using the speaker as an accessory for your phone - I assume you know that the Jambox can do this. I\'ve often used it at work in rooms with no speakerphone. I\'ve also now upgraded to the Bose Mini 2 Soundlink. It is heavier and slightly larger, but when going on holiday the difference in sound quality is significant and more than makes up for it.”</li>\n 	<li>Yup, I’ve used the Jambox for many conference calls though I’ve never checked the quality difference between it and the speaker, or maybe I should say the microphone on my iPhone. I’ve never swapped between them on a call and asked the person on the other end which is better. Something to try out on the next call where we’re waiting for the last person to join.</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Steve Frick picked up on something when I was talking about notebooks in last episode’s Traveler Gift Guide segment\n<ul>\n 	<li>“It sounds like you’ve also entered the “Fountain Pen Zone” as well. They’re like tattoos, you can’t have just one. I had used a Mont Blanc rollerball that I purchased in 1991, it’s been broken and repaired several times and it had been my go-to pen… until someone gave me a fountain pen. Now several years later I have a collection on fountain pens, as well as inks. Ughhhh just what I needed another obsession. Great episode!”</li>\n 	<li>Yup, I started with a plastic Waterman fountain pen that I bought many years ago on a business trip to Brussels. I just had that one pen for the longest time. But then I discovered the Internet, or more specifically, fountain pen forums and blogs and podcasts on the Internet. And, as you might guess, it went downhill pretty quickly. Sometimes my biggest decision of the morning is which color of ink to use that day. Which itself says something about the state of my daily choices...</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>I said earlier that I was in Vegas a few weeks back for the big Amazon Web Services convention. It was huge; 50,000 attendees, mostly pudgy, pasty-faced guys power walking up and down the strip, backpacks strapped down, ignoring the showgirls offering pictures so they wouldn’t be late to, say, the sold-out tutorial on best practices for ingesting streaming data from IoT devices into AWS’ new time series database. For me, that nerd-meets-baller dichotomy hit one morning at 7:30. I was in a marching nerd stream weaving through the casino floor of the MGM Grand when out from behind a slot machine a woman with a half-filled plastic glass shouted “Very impressive that you all have some place important to go this early.” No one broke stride. She shrugged and went back to her machine. There was a lot of walking, though, for that show. It was spread out from the MGM Grand up to the Venetian. The Health app on my iPhone clocked me at 10 miles of walking a day. Glad it wasn’t in the summer.</li>\n 	<li>I mentioned in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/05/31/podcast-141-when-you-think-the-tsa-is-bad-expired-money/\">an earlier episode</a> that I’d found a box of old European currency when cleaning off some shelves. It was from the late ‘80’s/early ‘90’s -- the pre-Euro days. I have some Belgian and French francs, a Deutsche mark, an Irish pound note, and an Italian 1000 lire note that I started using as a bookmark in my notebook. After one of these Amazon sessions, a young Italian woman looked over and commented on my lire bookmark. “Oh my God! I haven’t seen one of those in forever,” she said. She talked about her grandparents never really accepting that the lire was gone. “It’s good that we have the euro,” she said, “but it’ll never be the lire.” Which, remembering back 20-30 years ago, I thought might be a good thing, but decided not to say it; didn’t want to break her nostalgia. “I forgot how small it was!” she said.</li>\n 	<li>I was trading notes with friends a few weeks back after the Marriott hack was announced. It really is no longer a matter of if your personal data will be breached, but how often. A common theme across many of those Amazon talks was that mistakes will happen, so your cloud design should “limit the blast radius” of those mistakes. If I apply that same concept to website breaches (travel and otherwise), I’d freeze all my credit reports, have a unique password for each site, provide just the minimum amount of information required for a transaction, and I wouldn’t store/save credit card or other information with them. Indeed, if I really burrowed in, I’d use virtual credit card numbers from a bank that provides them. I’m pretty good except for the last one; I haven’t found a good bank that easily provides virtual card number. It all comes down to your personal trade-off point between resilience to a breach and convenience.</li>\n 	<li>With the Christmas season officially clicking in the day after Thanksgiving, TBS and TNT seem to have “Love Actually\" on power rotation every weekend. I like it; it’s a good Christmas movie. But picking up the end of it night while channel flipping in Santa Fe, I just couldn’t buy that scene toward the end when Liam Neeson encourages his stepson to breach Heathrow Airport security in the name of true love. I might be a bit of a Scrooge, but how does a 10-yr old kid commit a serious felony and not get gang-tackled at the gate and thrown into juvi? I dunno. Maybe I should stick to A Charlie Brown Christmas...</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our new Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/NiGiD/48586\">O Tannenbaum / Oh Christmas Tree</a> by Martijn de Boer (NiGiD) (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license.  Ft: Admiral Bob (admiralbob77)</span></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Holiday Travel Tips</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>I posted my kinda annual Top 10 Holiday Travel Tips a few weeks back. It feels like something I’m required to do to keep my status as a semi-professional travel blogger and podcaster. Not a lot of the flying tips have changed over the last few lists -- pay a bit extra to fly non-stop, don’t take tight connections, catch an early flight if you can, carry your luggage on if you can -- because not much has changed regarding air travel -- it’s a time when a huge bubble of travelers hit an infrastructure that is, for the most part, already operating near capacity and at the time of year when much of that capacity could get disrupted by weather. This year, US plane loads were over 80% -- as if you didn’t already know that hearing the constant refrain of gate agents and flight attendants - “This will be a completely full flight…” And no new airport or runway capacity has been added in the high traffic areas -- maybe since ORD finished spending a billion dollars straightening out its runways. The LGA renovation will hopefully eliminate the leaking roof and give us better food options, but after spending $8 billion dollars, there won’t be any new runway capacity.</li>\n 	<li>Having said that, I think the aggressive roll-out of TSA PreCheck has helped everyone -- the TSA, frequent travelers who’ve bought PreCheck (signing up for PreCheck moved up to #2 on this year’s list), and even the infrequent ones who haven’t -- by increasing security capacity by increasing “thru-put” for lack of a better term. Security seems to, on the whole, move along a bit brisker. Yes, there are still too many times when it doesn’t, but it’s been a while since we’ve seen a full-scale TSA meltdown causing people to miss flights.\nBringing your own battery pack cracked the top 10 for the first time this year at #7. It followed Use Twitter as a Concierge Service and Use Multiple Flight Tracking Apps at numbers 5 and 6 respectively. The more we rely on our smartphones for travel information, the more important power is. And when the holiday crowds are hovering over those Samsung or Verizon power towers, you want an alternative.</li>\n 	<li>A lot of the Top 10 lists I read end with a second list, of those things that didn’t quite make the Top 10. For me, some of those are:</li>\n 	<li><strong>Travel on the Actual Holiday</strong> - Our Thanksgiving flight out to Santa Fe reminded me of this tip. It didn’t make the Top 10 because not everyone can pull it off. Tough to fly or drive out Christmas morning if you have young kids, or if you have Italian in-laws who do the whole Feast of The Seven Fishes on Christmas Eve. But, if you can, it’s a quantum level decrease in travel stress. You’ll probably just glide through your travels.</li>\n 	<li><strong>Take Mass Transit to the Airport</strong> - Everybody worries about TSA lines, but just getting into the airport to be able to get into the TSA line can be a hassle. Airports with a single access road that goes past all the terminals -- think ORD, LAX, LGA -- can have 15-20 minute backups. When the construction at LGA first started, the backups were so bad, people were getting out of their cabs when they were still on the Grand Central Parkway and walking up the off ramps. Now, LGA doesn’t have mass transit access -- some of that $8 billion if for that -- but most airports do -- ORD, ATL, EWR and JFK, DCA,.... If it’s available, use it to skip at least one line.</li>\n 	<li>And my last “almost made it” tip, <strong>Bring Cash</strong> -- way back in episode #136, last December, I talked about what seems to be a generational split, maybe right around 30 or 35 -- old Millennials/youngster Gen X’s -- about the need to carry cash. No matter which side you sit on that split, it’s a fact that cash can get you out of a packed airport bar quicker than a card if you need to bolt for your flight -- maybe a delay got pulled up, your gate got moved to the next terminal, or you just misread the boarding time. Being able to lay down, say a twenty and 3 ones, on the bar with your check is a whole lot quicker than waiting for the waitress to show back up, take your card, walk to the back to run it, and then bring it back again for you to sign. This is where the Europeans with those mobile terminals are light-years ahead of us. But until we catch up -- which means we have to be trusted to remember a 4-digit PIN code -- bring cash so you can dash.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/44580\"> What Child is This (Instrumental)</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license.  Ft: Jeris</span></li>\n</ul>\n<b>Notes on Santa Fe</b>\n<ul>\n 	<li>As I mentioned earlier, Irene and I headed out to Santa Fe, New Mexico for the Thanksgiving holidays. Since both kids were gone, we figured “Why not?” And since I had to be in Vegas on Monday, it just made sense to head west.</li>\n 	<li>I’m going to do a full write-up on our trip in a blog post in a week or so; the first of a new series of Road Trip posts, where we’ll break the TravelCommons format a bit. Road Trip posts will be more about the destination than the journey -- things we did, places we stayed, ate, drank beer…. But here, just some notes.</li>\n 	<li>It had been a while since we’d been in Santa Fe -- maybe over 10 years; I haven’t paged back through my calendar to check -- but getting out of that Hertz Dodge Challenger that we’d blasted up I-25 -- the speed limit is 75 mph once you’re outside of Albuquerque -- I was immediately hit with the piñon smell, that unique pinewood smoke smell I only get in Santa Fe. I’ve been around a lot of pinewood fires in, say, Colorado and Arizona, but the piñon smoke billowing out of a kiva fireplace is a unique smell, and one that I love.\nVisiting Santa Fe, there’s an interesting mix of highbrow and lowbrow -- doing the Georgia O’Keefe museum and a run up Canyon Road through all the art galleries, or hunting the best green chile cheeseburger and then burning it off on a hike in the Sangre de Cristo mountains. This visit was all lowbrow.</li>\n 	<li>Friday, we did 1,700 vertical feet up the Atalaya Trail. The parking lot at the trailhead at St John’s College was pretty full, but the trail wasn’t crowded once we got going. It actually came in handy at times to see people - let us know we weren’t lost. There were some trail markings, but not to the extent we were used to in, say, the UK. 5 ½ hours later, we were sitting at the bar at Second St Brewing’s place in the Railyard district, replacing whatever calories we’d burned off with a green chile cheeseburger and a side of green chile cheese fries. Double lashings of american cheese, which I know is just a processed cheese food, but the creamy gooey-ness of it blended well with the chile bite, and a pint of one of the better American-made bitters I’ve had.</li>\n 	<li>Saturday, after hiking through Tent Rocks National Monument, we ended up on Guadalupe St, which feels like the lowbrow counterpart to the plaza or Canyon Road. We stopped in at Cowgirl BBQ for margaritas. During our last visit, I stole/borrowed their margarita recipe for my own. We worked through their margarita menu while listening to a group of local guys talk about taking dancing lessons and a woman at the bar telling us that, back in the ‘70’s when she moved to Santa Fe, cowboys still rode horses through town -- across the plaza and down Canyon Rd -- throwing cash down in Canyon Rd bars to buy rounds for the house.</li>\n 	<li>On Sunday, we walked down Canyon Road, looking into the sculpture gardens of all the art galleries. It seemed a popular Sunday morning stroll. I’d see some older couples -- older than me; at, say, the beginning of retirement, walking in high-end Western garb -- nice flat-brimmed hats, fur-trimmed duster coats. Kinda California money does cowboy. Would be interesting to see how those ‘70’s cowboys would fit in today.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #147</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and now on <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_147.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #147 — Holiday Travel Tips; Notes from Santa Fe','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-147-holiday-travel-tips-notes-from-santa-fe','','','2021-09-29 22:09:19','2021-09-30 03:09:19','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=2198',0,'post','',0),
(2199,1,'2018-12-17 16:38:34','2018-12-17 21:38:34','[caption id=\"attachment_2197\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/IMG_1158.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2197\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/IMG_1158-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> I won\'t pass for an emotional support reindeer[/caption]\r\nGetting this posted just in time to give you something to listen to while jammed up in Thanksgiving traffic, be it on the road or in the airports. We talk about working the angles to maximize credit card benefits, which leads me to one more story from my fall trip to Europe -- a rental car scrape that my Chase Visa card just paid off. We also talk about the Wall Street Journal\'s new ranking of US airports and compare it to Skytrax\'s international rankings. And we wrap up with my Christmas gift suggestions for the frequent traveler on your list.  All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_147.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n<iframe src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/533121708&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"></iframe><!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #147:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, trying to give you something to keep you entertained? Or at least occupied as you thread through the Thanksgiving travel traffic -- be it airports, trains, or roadways -- the forecasts are for a 5% increase over last year.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’ve been trying to get this episode done for the past 2 weeks, but I just haven’t been able to make it happen. Since we last spoke, I’ve been in the midst of a weekly commute between Chicago and Dallas. It’s the standard consultant commute -- leaving ORD Monday at 7am, leaving DFW Thursday at 5pm -- the consulting rush hour. The lounges are packed, the Starbucks line tails way back; no matter what status, you’re in a middle seat if you don’t book 3 weeks ahead of time, and for a mere Advantage Platinum person, there’s no chance of an upgrade. I do click through American’s website to request an upgrade every week -- more for the entertainment value than any expectation of getting a seat. This week, I was #35 on the upgrade list.</li>\r\n 	<li>The traffic between these 2 American hubs is pretty amazing. The first week of this commute, taking the 6:30p flight back to Chicago, it was a fully-packed 787 Dreamliner. So I’m thinking -- hey, I gotta have a good shot at an upgrade on this flight, with all the first and business class seats. Nope, though I did get up to the teens on the upgrade list -- #15 to be exact. I counted myself lucky to get out of a center seat at the last minute.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’m not a huge fan of DFW Airport. It’s a massive, spread-out place with a $4 toll charge to just to drive out of the place. The semi-circular terminals are also spread out affairs, with 3 security checkpoints arrayed around each perimeter, only one of which has PreCheck and really not well-marked. I tweeted that out in frustration a few weeks back after trundling around from checkpoint to checkpoint. The DFW Airport Twitter account quickly came back with a <a href=\"https://www.dfwairport.com/security/\">link</a> to their website that has the location and hours of each checkpoint, with the PreCheck one bolded. Very useful. I have bookmarked on my iPhone now.</li>\r\n 	<li>The next day, back in Chicago, I was downtown, getting a afternoon espresso jolt at Intelligentsia Coffee, not a completely full-on hipster joint -- there no turntable playing vintage vinyl -- but they are a bit fussy about their coffee. You place your order, they ask your name, and then you mill around a bit waiting for them to “craft” your coffee. I’m scrolling through e-mail, the barista is calling out names in the background. He calls out \"Marco\". Completely on reflex, my inner child responds \"Polo\" and not quietly or under my breath. The guy sitting across from me looks up from his MacBook and starts laughing. The guy getting his coffee, Marco, apparently, turns around and gives me a slightly nasty look. Or maybe just puzzled. Or more likely a bit of both.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/indidginus-seismic/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Superstring</a></em> by Indidginus</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul class=\"\">\r\n 	<li>Allan Marko, a long-time listener, posted a travel story on the TravelCommons Facebook page -\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I flew from SFO to MUC with a colleague last month on UAL Business Class (my first trip on a 787 - nice plane, and decent service from the UA team) We had an early morning arrival, and an hour to kill before our transportation arrived. My colleague’s 1K status couldn’t get us into the Lufthansa Arrivals Lounge for showers. I pulled up the Priority Pass app on my iPhone (membership came with my Chase Sapphire Reserve Card) and saw there was an Atlantic Lounge over in Terminal 1 that had shower facilities. We took the bus over to Terminal 1 which serves many European, Middle East, and other second-tier airlines. Pulling out my physical Priority Pass card (as opposed to the one in the app) I got both of us into the lounge and their two shower rooms. The lounge only offered the basics and needed of refresh, but we were happy to find it that morning (including the free beer!).</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Allan, thanks for that, and good on you for figuring that all out. There are so many nooks and crannies in the card benefits world. There’s real value there, but you have to think about it and dig in a bit. The last time I used my Priority Pass (which I got with my Amex Platinum card) was last summer when I was connecting through DUB on my way to London. That lounge was similar to Allan’s MUC experience -- pretty basic, a bit threadbare, but a reasonable place for a cup of tea and breakfast. My son Andrew used his Priority Pass card (also from his Chase card) to get a $28 credit at a restaurant in BOS which paid for a pre-flight meal and a couple of beers. “For the two of us, I think we were due $56 credit, but we wanted to be able to board the plane, so we cut ourselves off.” A colleague of mine told me that, in LGA, after Amex’s Centurion Lounge closed, his UA Gold status got him into the Air Canada lounge to wait out the rest of a long flight delay. “I only thought they let in Star Alliance Gold passengers for international flights, but let me in for my LGA-ORD flight.” And then there’s things like the 10 Gogo in-flight WiFi passes that I get every year with my Platinum card that I never burn through, or the $200 in annual statement credit that I think I get on UA and am always surprised when I see the charge for the in-flight tapas box reversed. And I’m reminded that I gotta pay more attention to this stuff because I hate leaving money on the table.</li>\r\n 	<li>I will say that there are 2 good things about doing trunk line, hub-to-hub commute vs., say, my last regular commute, between ORD and Charlottesville, VA: great flight frequency -- between AA and UA, there’s a flight at most every hour and that’s not even looking at SWA’s schedule out of Love Field; and, no RJs, no regional jets. I had forgotten how nice it is to be able to stand up straight in the aisle, let alone in the toilet. I take happiness in the small things.</li>\r\n 	<li>I was talking to a colleague about this -- flying AA, and UA, and SWA based on the most convenient times and price, and then maybe equipment (avoiding those RJs when I can). He said “I’m always amazed at how promiscuous you are in your airline choices.” It was an interesting word choice; one that kinda speaks to how invested people can get in their travel choices. Though it can also be a bit of Stockholm Syndrome for folks who have to fly out of fortress hubs, like this colleague who is in a very conflicted relationship with United out of Newark. “I think you’re more right than me,” he said. He’s 1K on United, their top tier. I’m mid-tier on United and American. Comparing notes, he hasn’t gotten any more upgrades than me, and though I board after 1Ks (or Exec Platinums on AA), I haven’t yet had a problem finding overhead space, even on packed flights to DFW. I’ve said it before -- I don’t think there’s all that much difference between mid- and top-tier loyalty ranks; certainly not enough to take less convenient flights to earn the extra miles needed to stay top-tier.</li>\r\n 	<li>A study of US airport growth hit the TravelCommons inbox on Halloween, saying that the two airports with the biggest drop in traffic are Memphis and Cincinnati. We talked about this back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/08/09/podcast-143-how-bad-is-business-travel-for-your-health-make-layovers-fun/\">August episode</a> when I was flying in and out of Cincinnati for 4 weeks straight. Nice airport, but I said back then it felt a bit overbuilt, and how both it and Memphis felt empty after after being “de-hubbed” by Delta. I wasn’t wrong. This new survey ground through 10 years of FAA traffic data and came to the same conclusion. Memphis lost the most traffic, down 62%. Cincinnati was second, losing 51% of its traffic.</li>\r\n 	<li>So you can guess that neither made the Wall Street Journal’s ranking of the 20 largest US airports. Denver, Orlando and Phoenix at the top 3 finishers while the three NYC airports -- LaGuardia, JFK, and Newark -- brought up the rear, numbers 18, 19, and 20. Surprises? I dunno -- maybe that LaGuardia wasn’t in last place given all the construction disruptions, that LAX was higher at #9 than Minneapolis-St Paul at #11, and that O’Hare is one spot higher than San Francisco, 15 vs. 16. That’s probably as much to do with their methodology as anything - how they weighed all the different score components, things like on-time arrivals, average TSA wait, cost of on-prem parking, average ticket cost. It’s interesting, though, to compare this ranking with Skytrax’s ranking of global airports. Denver, the top US airport on both lists; at #28 on Skytrax’s list. Cincinnati is the second US airport on the Skytrax list at #34, which makes sense when you look at the methodologies. Skytrax is focused on the in-airport experience -- terminal seating, cleanliness, queue times, friendliness of staff. With these criteria, I don’t doubt that Cincinnati should rank high -- it’s probably helped by now being a bit overbuilt -- lots of space and fewer people to clean up after. The Journal’s is a bit more wide-ranging, looking both inside and outside the terminal, including things like average fares, rental-car taxes and fees, number of nonstop destinations and dominance of the largest airline to its rankings. I’ll put links to both in the show notes for those interesting in a deeper dive.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our new Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/yoria-suerte/\"><em>Suerte Mijo</em></a> by Arthur Yoria</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Rental Demolition Derby</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I’ve rented a lot of cars in my business travel and have never crashed one. I drive them off the lot, use them for 3-4 days, fill them back up with gas, return them to the lot, and walk away. So when I picked up a car from Hertz at Edinburgh airport back in September, I skipped all the insurance coverages, took the keys to a brand new Toyota hybrid cross-over, and drove off the lot. This was my fourth September in a row renting from the Hertz and had never had an incident -- even when driving a manual on the left side of the road while shifting with my left hand -- well, other than a Fiat that dropped its transmission, but that wasn’t my fault. So, no need to waste the collision damage waiver charges.</li>\r\n 	<li>You can see where this is going. The next day, I was driving a narrow road in St Andrews, heading south out of town to go knock around the fishing villages on the north bank of the Firth of Forth. Roads in Scotland can get narrow. Driving the one-lane roads in the Highlands are an acquired talent, but this road is in a residential neighborhood, and I’ve driven it many times. So I couldn’t believe it when I heard a big thump as I drove past a van. Damn, I thought, had I drifted over to the left and popped the van’s rear view mirror? I pulled over and hopped out of the car. No, it was worse. There was a huge crease along the left side of the car; just missed the front wheel, so still driveable but very ugly. I walked down to the van. It belonged to a nearby community center. In a hurry to pick up kids from school, the driver had pulled out into me as I drove past. I pulled out an accident report form that Hertz had helpfully put in the glove compartment. We filled it out, skipped calling the police since no one was hurt.</li>\r\n 	<li>So, again, not my fault, but I’m still, a few days later, I’m turning in a car with a full tank and some extra body work. I point out the damage to the Hertz guy. He pulls up a different tab on his Samsung tablet -- click, click, click -- damage, front left wing; damage, front left door; damage, rear left door -- took a couple of pictures, and because I’d skipped the CDW, out burped the bill -- £780 or about $1,000. They ran it through on my Chase Sapphire Visa card.</li>\r\n 	<li>Which I gave to Hertz because, as I was poking through the nooks and crannies of the Chase website before I left home, I confirmed that card would cover UK rental car damage for rentals charged to it. The next week, back home, I found where to file a claim. They didn’t make it easy, but Google eventually uncovered it. I created a claim, uploaded a scan of the accident report, the Hertz receipt, and a couple of iPhone pictures of the damage. And then waited. The website said they’d take 2 weeks to review and get back to me. Three weeks later, I called. A guy said they’d sent me an email asking for two more documents from Hertz. Hmmm, never saw that, but who knows what gets caught up in the Spam filtering. They wanted a copy of the original Hertz agreement, which I had left in the car, and Hertz’s repair cost breakdown. OK, that was reasonable. I called Hertz and a very helpful woman put in a request and said get it in a week. Within a couple of days, Hertz sent me what I needed. I uploaded them to my claim and waited another 2 weeks. On Day 2 Weeks + 1, I called. A woman looked at my file, said it was still being reviewed by management, but said she’s put me on hold and ring them for status. Two minutes later, she picked up and they’d approved my claim. 48 hours later, the $1,000 showed up in my bank account. It took me a bit over 2 months, but Chase paid my claim with a minimum amount of hassle.</li>\r\n 	<li>Now, while I’ve had a good rental car record in Scotland, my record in Hungary is not quite clean. Indeed, every time I’ve driven there, it’s been something. The last time I drove, we were a couple of blocks away from the rental return next to the Marriott on the Danube. Pulling into an intersection after stopping at a Stop sign, a motorcycle messenger plowed into the front of my car, flew across the hood, and landed in the street on the other side of the intersection. Luckily, he was in a full helmet and leathers and unhurt. The rental car, not so lucky. The entire front end was ripped off. The rental car guy showed up as the police were finishing their report. I pulled out suitcases out of the trunk and gave him the key. He looked at the front of his car in disbelief. We wheeled our bags down the sidewalk to the Marriott because this time, I had bought the collision damage waiver.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/artemis-gravity/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Inception</a></em> by Artemis</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Traveler Gift Guide</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>As we come into the Christmas shopping season, I thought it would be useful to pull together some suggestions for the frequent traveler in your life. Or, if you are the frequent traveler, a list of hints you might want to drop on family members looking for ideas.</li>\r\n 	<li>Top of the list is a good battery charger. Whatever the size or form factor -- slimline, lipstick, high-capacity brick -- having that second or third charge readily available is critical to get notified of gate changes and when you’re using electronic boarding passes. It saves you from stalking cleaning crews to find a live power outlet on your layover, or negotiating with your seatmate for possession of outlet between you. I’m always looking to shed weight, so I retired the heavy no-name pack I picked up in the depths of Beijing’s Pearl Street Market for an Anker lipstick sized charger. I bought three and gave one to my wife and daughter. It’s cheap piece of mind.</li>\r\n 	<li>On my shopping list, trying to catch up to what’s already a cold winter, is one of those puffy coats -- but one of the thin ones, like the Patagonia Nano Puff, one that will smoosh down to nothing in the front pocket of my suitcase, or will fit in the crevices of a jammed full overhead bin. Right next that on the list, a man’s scarf is an incredibly undervalued piece of intermediate winter wear. In an airplane cabin or hotel room where a coat is too much (especially in a middle seat), but there’s a draft that chills you, a scarf around the neck is just enough without being too much. You may have to teach him how to wear it, but you can have fun with colors.</li>\r\n 	<li>For someone just embarking on the road warrior life, how ‘bout a black 20-inch hardsided carry-on. Black not only makes you look thinner, it makes your bag look thinner to gate agents hunting for bag-sizer bait. Black also doesn’t show stains. A 20-incher should get on-board for 90% of airlines, and the hard sides are the easiest to get in and out of a bag sizer if the not-yet-statused traveler gets waylaid by an over-zealous gate agent.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you’re going big for someone -- or for those December babies, combining Christmas and birthday gifts -- noise canceling headphones are a statement gift. The good ones -- the Bose or Sonys that make the drone of the jet engines disappear with the flick of a switch -- are a $300 number. But the drop in stress level and blood pressure that accompanies that flick of the switch -- you don’t realize how much that drone affects you until you turn on your Bose -- makes it worth the number. Everything in my briefcase has to earn its space. I’ve been carrying Bose headphones for, I dunno, 10, 15 years. They’re nowhere near compact, but I’ve never thought of leaving them behind.</li>\r\n 	<li>Another idea for the music -- or podcast lover, is a small portable Bluetooth speaker. I’ve started packing mine again for trips of a week or longer. For a couple of days, I’m fine with wearing headphones or using the phone speaker. But longer than that or if I’m with the family in, say, an Airbnb, I want something a bit more social. I’m still using my 6-year old Jambox speaker, the one that kinda created this category. The maker, Jawbone, went under last year, but the speaker still works. There are newer, better ones out there now, at all sorts of price points. The ones that can act as speaker phones are a nice to-have if they fit your budget.</li>\r\n 	<li>And finally, a stocking stuffer idea -- a travel notebook, something to jot down thoughts, ideas, observations, to do lists while waiting for the flight to board, the train to come, or the room to be made up. Nothing extravagant -- no leather embossed cover -- but it should be small enough to fit in a pocket, but substantial, something that can survive being knocked around in the bottom of a briefcase, and with paper quality that will hold onto those thoughts for a while. I used to use a Moleskine 3½x5½” notebook but have switched over a similar-sized A6 Clairefontaine. The soft cover fits better in a jeans back pocket, and the paper is more fountain-pen friendly. It’s $10 for a Moleskine, $7 for two Clairefontaines. Or go a bit more whimsical and get a 3-pack of Field Notes for $13. It’ll fit your budget and the stocking.</li>\r\n 	<li>So there you go, something to fit all sizes and budgets in time for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, or if you’re just killing time waiting for your Thanksgiving flight to leave.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #146</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and now on <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Magnatune</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_147.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #147 — Holiday Travel Tips; Notes from Santa Fe','','inherit','closed','closed','','2198-revision-v1','','','2018-12-17 16:38:34','2018-12-17 21:38:34','',2198,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/12/17/2198-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2201,1,'2018-12-17 16:44:22','2018-12-17 21:44:22','[caption id=\"attachment_2197\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/IMG_1158.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2197\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/IMG_1158-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> I won\'t pass for an emotional support reindeer[/caption]\r\n\r\nGetting this posted just in time to give you something to listen to while jammed up in Thanksgiving traffic, be it on the road or in the airports. We talk about working the angles to maximize credit card benefits, which leads me to one more story from my fall trip to Europe -- a rental car scrape that my Chase Visa card just paid off. We also talk about the Wall Street Journal\'s new ranking of US airports and compare it to Skytrax\'s international rankings. And we wrap up with my Christmas gift suggestions for the frequent traveler on your list.  All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_147.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n<iframe src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/533121708&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"></iframe><!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #147:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, trying to wind down the year’s travel. Was in Santa Fe, New Mexico for Thanksgiving, and then headed up to Las Vegas the next week for Amazon Web Service’s big annual conference, Re:Invent. Then did what I hoped was my last trip to Dallas, but we couldn’t corral all the cats, so I’m back down there next Weds for what will definitely be my last trip of the year.</li>\r\n 	<li>Irene and I flew out to Albuquerque 10am Thanksgiving morning and I have to say that it was one of the least stressful travel experiences I’ve ever had -- no traffic on the drive to ORD, no lines; I didn’t even have time to pull out my driver’s license before I hit the TSA podium. I walked straight through to a screening line. There were agents hanging around just looking for people to screen. The only line I stood in was the Starbucks. We even scored 1st-Class upgrades; the plane was only half full. I even think we left early. A very pleasant change from my ORD-DFW commute.</li>\r\n 	<li>The only real downside I noticed was when we hit the Hertz Presidents Club aisle in Albuquerque. It was pretty picked over, leaving behind an odd selection of Dodge vehicles -- the choice was between Dodge Challenger muscle cars or fully tricked out Ram Hemi king-cab pick-ups. I can’t say that I’ve ever faced quite that choice. The Challenger, with rear-wheel drive, wouldn’t be great if we got snow at elevation, but the Rams were just huge, and trying to parallel park that in Santa Fe would be an event. It took me a bit to decide. I went with the Challenger and hoped for clear skies.</li>\r\n 	<li>Well, there was one more downside that I didn’t discover until we unpacked in our little casita in Santa Fe that night. I’d left my Samsung tablet in that nice first-class seat. Not in the seat-back pocket; I always check there before leaving. There was a side compartment along the middle armrest that I’d put my tablet in when I folded up the table to hit the lav. Bad mistake. That compartment was deep, I couldn’t see the tablet; and I didn’t think to check it before deplaning.</li>\r\n 	<li>I hit Twitter, sending United a direct message asking about ABQ lost-and-found. I wanted to ping them to see if the cleaning crew had turn anything in since I’d be back at ABQ for our Monday morning flight to LAS. I’ve done this before when getting back coats that I’ve left in overhead compartments. The Twitter customer service agent instead sent me a link to a web form to fill out. I cooled my jets over the weekend and on Monday morning, swung by the United Baggage Services office to see if they had my tablet. Walked past the American Baggage Services office -- open; the Delta Baggage Services office -- open; to the United Baggage Services office -- closed. It was supposed to open at 9am. I waited for 15-20 minutes, and then had to head up to catch my Vegas flight. I wasn’t happy.</li>\r\n 	<li>Which changed that afternoon when I got a call from an unknown Cleveland number on my mobile. Robocallers have found my mobile number, so I usually let unrecognized numbers go straight to voicemail, but I remember Continental having a Cleveland hub before the United merger, so maybe this was a United person calling. And it was! “I think I have your tablet; could you verify your screensaver” It’s a wall painting of pink flamingos. “Yup, that’s it; we’ve got it” (Actually, it’s street art from Paris’ Montmartre neighborhood; you can see the picture on the TravelCommons’ Instagram feed). She told me that they no longer keep found items at the airports; they ship them the next day to centralized lost-&amp;-found centers for sorting and processing. So, even if the ABQ baggage services office had been open that morning, they wouldn’t have had my tablet; they probably shipped it to Cleveland that weekend.\r\nAfter I got off the phone, I got an e-mail with a link to pick a shipping method and pay. The day after I got home from Vegas, my flamingo’d tablet landed on my doorstep.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/copperhead/40520\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen</a> by copperhead (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: Admiral Bob, Javolenus , Sackjo22</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul class=\"\">\r\n 	<li>Couple of listener notes on the last episode. Nick Gassman wrote:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>“When you were talking about car rental collision damage waiver, I took it to mean that that you pay the rental company for the insurance. It\'s much cheaper (at least in the UK) to purchase this separately. You can generally get it on a per-trip or annual basis, just like regular travel insurance.”</li>\r\n 	<li>Nick, good point on that. You get used to accepting the waiver on business travel because, for many corporate rates, it’s all rolled in or you’re just going to expense it. And for US domestic travel, at least for me, my regular auto insurance covers it. So that leaves international travel. Chase did a good job of handling the accident in the UK. But looking at a separate company is a good idea. May try that out the next time I rent in Spain.</li>\r\n 	<li>“And about BlueTooth speakers, you mentioned about using the speaker as an accessory for your phone - I assume you know that the Jambox can do this. I\'ve often used it at work in rooms with no speakerphone. I\'ve also now upgraded to the Bose Mini 2 Soundlink. It is heavier and slightly larger, but when going on holiday the difference in sound quality is significant and more than makes up for it.”</li>\r\n 	<li>Yup, I’ve used the Jambox for many conference calls though I’ve never checked the quality difference between it and the speaker, or maybe I should say the microphone on my iPhone. I’ve never swapped between them on a call and asked the person on the other end which is better. Something to try out on the next call where we’re waiting for the last person to join.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Steve Frick picked up on something when I was talking about notebooks in last episode’s Traveler Gift Guide segment\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>“It sounds like you’ve also entered the “Fountain Pen Zone” as well. They’re like tattoos, you can’t have just one. I had used a Mont Blanc rollerball that I purchased in 1991, it’s been broken and repaired several times and it had been my go-to pen… until someone gave me a fountain pen. Now several years later I have a collection on fountain pens, as well as inks. Ughhhh just what I needed another obsession. Great episode!”</li>\r\n 	<li>Yup, I started with a plastic Waterman fountain pen that I bought many years ago on a business trip to Brussels. I just had that one pen for the longest time. But then I discovered the Internet, or more specifically, fountain pen forums and blogs and podcasts on the Internet. And, as you might guess, it went downhill pretty quickly. Sometimes my biggest decision of the morning is which color of ink to use that day. Which itself says something about the state of my daily choices...</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>I said earlier that I was in Vegas a few weeks back for the big Amazon Web Services convention. It was huge; 50,000 attendees, mostly pudgy, pasty-faced guys power walking up and down the strip, backpacks strapped down, ignoring the showgirls offering pictures so they wouldn’t be late to, say, the sold-out tutorial on best practices for ingesting streaming data from IoT devices into AWS’ new time series database. For me, that nerd-meets-baller dichotomy hit one morning at 7:30. I was in a marching nerd stream weaving through the casino floor of the MGM Grand when out from behind a slot machine a woman with a half-filled plastic glass shouted “Very impressive that you all have some place important to go this early.” No one broke stride. She shrugged and went back to her machine. There was a lot of walking, though, for that show. It was spread out from the MGM Grand up to the Venetian. The Health app on my iPhone clocked me at 10 miles of walking a day. Glad it wasn’t in the summer.</li>\r\n 	<li>I mentioned in an earlier episode that I’d found a box of old European currency when cleaning off some shelves. It was from the late ‘80’s/early ‘90’s -- the pre-Euro days. I have some Belgian and French francs, a Deutsche mark, an Irish pound note, and an Italian 1000 lire note that I started using as a bookmark in my notebook. After one of these Amazon sessions, a young Italian woman looked over and commented on my lire bookmark. “Oh my God! I haven’t seen one of those in forever,” she said. She talked about her grandparents never really accepting that the lire was gone. “It’s good that we have the euro,” she said, “but it’ll never be the lire.” Which, remembering back 20-30 years ago, I thought might be a good thing, but decided not to say it; didn’t want to break her nostalgia. “I forgot how small it was!” she said.</li>\r\n 	<li>I was trading notes with friends a few weeks back after the Marriott hack was announced. It really is no longer a matter of if your personal data will be breached, but how often. A common theme across many of those Amazon talks was that mistakes will happen, so your cloud design should “limit the blast radius” of those mistakes. If I apply that same concept to website breaches (travel and otherwise), I’d freeze all my credit reports, have a unique password for each site, provide just the minimum amount of information required for a transaction, and I wouldn’t store/save credit card or other information with them. Indeed, if I really burrowed in, I’d use virtual credit card numbers from a bank that provides them. I’m pretty good except for the last one; I haven’t found a good bank that easily provides virtual card number. It all comes down to your personal trade-off point between resilience to a breach and convenience.</li>\r\n 	<li>With the Christmas season officially clicking in the day after Thanksgiving, TBS and TNT seem to have “Love Actually\" on power rotation every weekend. I like it; it’s a good Christmas movie. But picking up the end of it night while channel flipping in Santa Fe, I just couldn’t buy that scene toward the end when Liam Neeson encourages his stepson to breach Heathrow Airport security in the name of true love. I might be a bit of a Scrooge, but how does a 10-yr old kid commit a serious felony and not get gang-tackled at the gate and thrown into juvi? I dunno. Maybe I should stick to A Charlie Brown Christmas...</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our new Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/NiGiD/48586\">O Tannenbaum / Oh Christmas Tree</a> by Martijn de Boer (NiGiD) (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license.  Ft: Admiral Bob (admiralbob77)</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Rental Demolition Derby</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I’ve rented a lot of cars in my business travel and have never crashed one. I drive them off the lot, use them for 3-4 days, fill them back up with gas, return them to the lot, and walk away. So when I picked up a car from Hertz at Edinburgh airport back in September, I skipped all the insurance coverages, took the keys to a brand new Toyota hybrid cross-over, and drove off the lot. This was my fourth September in a row renting from the Hertz and had never had an incident -- even when driving a manual on the left side of the road while shifting with my left hand -- well, other than a Fiat that dropped its transmission, but that wasn’t my fault. So, no need to waste the collision damage waiver charges.</li>\r\n 	<li>You can see where this is going. The next day, I was driving a narrow road in St Andrews, heading south out of town to go knock around the fishing villages on the north bank of the Firth of Forth. Roads in Scotland can get narrow. Driving the one-lane roads in the Highlands are an acquired talent, but this road is in a residential neighborhood, and I’ve driven it many times. So I couldn’t believe it when I heard a big thump as I drove past a van. Damn, I thought, had I drifted over to the left and popped the van’s rear view mirror? I pulled over and hopped out of the car. No, it was worse. There was a huge crease along the left side of the car; just missed the front wheel, so still driveable but very ugly. I walked down to the van. It belonged to a nearby community center. In a hurry to pick up kids from school, the driver had pulled out into me as I drove past. I pulled out an accident report form that Hertz had helpfully put in the glove compartment. We filled it out, skipped calling the police since no one was hurt.</li>\r\n 	<li>So, again, not my fault, but I’m still, a few days later, I’m turning in a car with a full tank and some extra body work. I point out the damage to the Hertz guy. He pulls up a different tab on his Samsung tablet -- click, click, click -- damage, front left wing; damage, front left door; damage, rear left door -- took a couple of pictures, and because I’d skipped the CDW, out burped the bill -- £780 or about $1,000. They ran it through on my Chase Sapphire Visa card.</li>\r\n 	<li>Which I gave to Hertz because, as I was poking through the nooks and crannies of the Chase website before I left home, I confirmed that card would cover UK rental car damage for rentals charged to it. The next week, back home, I found where to file a claim. They didn’t make it easy, but Google eventually uncovered it. I created a claim, uploaded a scan of the accident report, the Hertz receipt, and a couple of iPhone pictures of the damage. And then waited. The website said they’d take 2 weeks to review and get back to me. Three weeks later, I called. A guy said they’d sent me an email asking for two more documents from Hertz. Hmmm, never saw that, but who knows what gets caught up in the Spam filtering. They wanted a copy of the original Hertz agreement, which I had left in the car, and Hertz’s repair cost breakdown. OK, that was reasonable. I called Hertz and a very helpful woman put in a request and said get it in a week. Within a couple of days, Hertz sent me what I needed. I uploaded them to my claim and waited another 2 weeks. On Day 2 Weeks + 1, I called. A woman looked at my file, said it was still being reviewed by management, but said she’s put me on hold and ring them for status. Two minutes later, she picked up and they’d approved my claim. 48 hours later, the $1,000 showed up in my bank account. It took me a bit over 2 months, but Chase paid my claim with a minimum amount of hassle.</li>\r\n 	<li>Now, while I’ve had a good rental car record in Scotland, my record in Hungary is not quite clean. Indeed, every time I’ve driven there, it’s been something. The last time I drove, we were a couple of blocks away from the rental return next to the Marriott on the Danube. Pulling into an intersection after stopping at a Stop sign, a motorcycle messenger plowed into the front of my car, flew across the hood, and landed in the street on the other side of the intersection. Luckily, he was in a full helmet and leathers and unhurt. The rental car, not so lucky. The entire front end was ripped off. The rental car guy showed up as the police were finishing their report. I pulled out suitcases out of the trunk and gave him the key. He looked at the front of his car in disbelief. We wheeled our bags down the sidewalk to the Marriott because this time, I had bought the collision damage waiver.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/artemis-gravity/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Inception</a></em> by Artemis</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Traveler Gift Guide</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>As we come into the Christmas shopping season, I thought it would be useful to pull together some suggestions for the frequent traveler in your life. Or, if you are the frequent traveler, a list of hints you might want to drop on family members looking for ideas.</li>\r\n 	<li>Top of the list is a good battery charger. Whatever the size or form factor -- slimline, lipstick, high-capacity brick -- having that second or third charge readily available is critical to get notified of gate changes and when you’re using electronic boarding passes. It saves you from stalking cleaning crews to find a live power outlet on your layover, or negotiating with your seatmate for possession of outlet between you. I’m always looking to shed weight, so I retired the heavy no-name pack I picked up in the depths of Beijing’s Pearl Street Market for an Anker lipstick sized charger. I bought three and gave one to my wife and daughter. It’s cheap piece of mind.</li>\r\n 	<li>On my shopping list, trying to catch up to what’s already a cold winter, is one of those puffy coats -- but one of the thin ones, like the Patagonia Nano Puff, one that will smoosh down to nothing in the front pocket of my suitcase, or will fit in the crevices of a jammed full overhead bin. Right next that on the list, a man’s scarf is an incredibly undervalued piece of intermediate winter wear. In an airplane cabin or hotel room where a coat is too much (especially in a middle seat), but there’s a draft that chills you, a scarf around the neck is just enough without being too much. You may have to teach him how to wear it, but you can have fun with colors.</li>\r\n 	<li>For someone just embarking on the road warrior life, how ‘bout a black 20-inch hardsided carry-on. Black not only makes you look thinner, it makes your bag look thinner to gate agents hunting for bag-sizer bait. Black also doesn’t show stains. A 20-incher should get on-board for 90% of airlines, and the hard sides are the easiest to get in and out of a bag sizer if the not-yet-statused traveler gets waylaid by an over-zealous gate agent.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you’re going big for someone -- or for those December babies, combining Christmas and birthday gifts -- noise canceling headphones are a statement gift. The good ones -- the Bose or Sonys that make the drone of the jet engines disappear with the flick of a switch -- are a $300 number. But the drop in stress level and blood pressure that accompanies that flick of the switch -- you don’t realize how much that drone affects you until you turn on your Bose -- makes it worth the number. Everything in my briefcase has to earn its space. I’ve been carrying Bose headphones for, I dunno, 10, 15 years. They’re nowhere near compact, but I’ve never thought of leaving them behind.</li>\r\n 	<li>Another idea for the music -- or podcast lover, is a small portable Bluetooth speaker. I’ve started packing mine again for trips of a week or longer. For a couple of days, I’m fine with wearing headphones or using the phone speaker. But longer than that or if I’m with the family in, say, an Airbnb, I want something a bit more social. I’m still using my 6-year old Jambox speaker, the one that kinda created this category. The maker, Jawbone, went under last year, but the speaker still works. There are newer, better ones out there now, at all sorts of price points. The ones that can act as speaker phones are a nice to-have if they fit your budget.</li>\r\n 	<li>And finally, a stocking stuffer idea -- a travel notebook, something to jot down thoughts, ideas, observations, to do lists while waiting for the flight to board, the train to come, or the room to be made up. Nothing extravagant -- no leather embossed cover -- but it should be small enough to fit in a pocket, but substantial, something that can survive being knocked around in the bottom of a briefcase, and with paper quality that will hold onto those thoughts for a while. I used to use a Moleskine 3½x5½” notebook but have switched over a similar-sized A6 Clairefontaine. The soft cover fits better in a jeans back pocket, and the paper is more fountain-pen friendly. It’s $10 for a Moleskine, $7 for two Clairefontaines. Or go a bit more whimsical and get a 3-pack of Field Notes for $13. It’ll fit your budget and the stocking.</li>\r\n 	<li>So there you go, something to fit all sizes and budgets in time for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, or if you’re just killing time waiting for your Thanksgiving flight to leave.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #146</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and now on <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Magnatune</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_147.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #147 — Holiday Travel Tips; Notes from Santa Fe','','inherit','closed','closed','','2198-revision-v1','','','2018-12-17 16:44:22','2018-12-17 21:44:22','',2198,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/12/17/2198-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2202,1,'2018-12-17 16:47:54','2018-12-17 21:47:54','[caption id=\"attachment_2197\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/IMG_1158.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2197\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/IMG_1158-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> I won\'t pass for an emotional support reindeer[/caption]\r\n\r\nGetting this posted just in time to give you something to listen to while jammed up in Thanksgiving traffic, be it on the road or in the airports. We talk about working the angles to maximize credit card benefits, which leads me to one more story from my fall trip to Europe -- a rental car scrape that my Chase Visa card just paid off. We also talk about the Wall Street Journal\'s new ranking of US airports and compare it to Skytrax\'s international rankings. And we wrap up with my Christmas gift suggestions for the frequent traveler on your list.  All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_147.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n<iframe src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/533121708&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"></iframe><!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #147:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, trying to wind down the year’s travel. Was in Santa Fe, New Mexico for Thanksgiving, and then headed up to Las Vegas the next week for Amazon Web Service’s big annual conference, Re:Invent. Then did what I hoped was my last trip to Dallas, but we couldn’t corral all the cats, so I’m back down there next Weds for what will definitely be my last trip of the year.</li>\r\n 	<li>Irene and I flew out to Albuquerque 10am Thanksgiving morning and I have to say that it was one of the least stressful travel experiences I’ve ever had -- no traffic on the drive to ORD, no lines; I didn’t even have time to pull out my driver’s license before I hit the TSA podium. I walked straight through to a screening line. There were agents hanging around just looking for people to screen. The only line I stood in was the Starbucks. We even scored 1st-Class upgrades; the plane was only half full. I even think we left early. A very pleasant change from my ORD-DFW commute.</li>\r\n 	<li>The only real downside I noticed was when we hit the Hertz Presidents Club aisle in Albuquerque. It was pretty picked over, leaving behind an odd selection of Dodge vehicles -- the choice was between Dodge Challenger muscle cars or fully tricked out Ram Hemi king-cab pick-ups. I can’t say that I’ve ever faced quite that choice. The Challenger, with rear-wheel drive, wouldn’t be great if we got snow at elevation, but the Rams were just huge, and trying to parallel park that in Santa Fe would be an event. It took me a bit to decide. I went with the Challenger and hoped for clear skies.</li>\r\n 	<li>Well, there was one more downside that I didn’t discover until we unpacked in our little casita in Santa Fe that night. I’d left my Samsung tablet in that nice first-class seat. Not in the seat-back pocket; I always check there before leaving. There was a side compartment along the middle armrest that I’d put my tablet in when I folded up the table to hit the lav. Bad mistake. That compartment was deep, I couldn’t see the tablet; and I didn’t think to check it before deplaning.</li>\r\n 	<li>I hit Twitter, sending United a direct message asking about ABQ lost-and-found. I wanted to ping them to see if the cleaning crew had turn anything in since I’d be back at ABQ for our Monday morning flight to LAS. I’ve done this before when getting back coats that I’ve left in overhead compartments. The Twitter customer service agent instead sent me a link to a web form to fill out. I cooled my jets over the weekend and on Monday morning, swung by the United Baggage Services office to see if they had my tablet. Walked past the American Baggage Services office -- open; the Delta Baggage Services office -- open; to the United Baggage Services office -- closed. It was supposed to open at 9am. I waited for 15-20 minutes, and then had to head up to catch my Vegas flight. I wasn’t happy.</li>\r\n 	<li>Which changed that afternoon when I got a call from an unknown Cleveland number on my mobile. Robocallers have found my mobile number, so I usually let unrecognized numbers go straight to voicemail, but I remember Continental having a Cleveland hub before the United merger, so maybe this was a United person calling. And it was! “I think I have your tablet; could you verify your screensaver” It’s a wall painting of pink flamingos. “Yup, that’s it; we’ve got it” (Actually, it’s street art from Paris’ Montmartre neighborhood; you can see the picture on the TravelCommons’ Instagram feed). She told me that they no longer keep found items at the airports; they ship them the next day to centralized lost-&amp;-found centers for sorting and processing. So, even if the ABQ baggage services office had been open that morning, they wouldn’t have had my tablet; they probably shipped it to Cleveland that weekend.\r\nAfter I got off the phone, I got an e-mail with a link to pick a shipping method and pay. The day after I got home from Vegas, my flamingo’d tablet landed on my doorstep.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/copperhead/40520\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen</a> by copperhead (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: Admiral Bob, Javolenus , Sackjo22</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul class=\"\">\r\n 	<li>Couple of listener notes on the last episode. Nick Gassman wrote:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>“When you were talking about car rental collision damage waiver, I took it to mean that that you pay the rental company for the insurance. It\'s much cheaper (at least in the UK) to purchase this separately. You can generally get it on a per-trip or annual basis, just like regular travel insurance.”</li>\r\n 	<li>Nick, good point on that. You get used to accepting the waiver on business travel because, for many corporate rates, it’s all rolled in or you’re just going to expense it. And for US domestic travel, at least for me, my regular auto insurance covers it. So that leaves international travel. Chase did a good job of handling the accident in the UK. But looking at a separate company is a good idea. May try that out the next time I rent in Spain.</li>\r\n 	<li>“And about BlueTooth speakers, you mentioned about using the speaker as an accessory for your phone - I assume you know that the Jambox can do this. I\'ve often used it at work in rooms with no speakerphone. I\'ve also now upgraded to the Bose Mini 2 Soundlink. It is heavier and slightly larger, but when going on holiday the difference in sound quality is significant and more than makes up for it.”</li>\r\n 	<li>Yup, I’ve used the Jambox for many conference calls though I’ve never checked the quality difference between it and the speaker, or maybe I should say the microphone on my iPhone. I’ve never swapped between them on a call and asked the person on the other end which is better. Something to try out on the next call where we’re waiting for the last person to join.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Steve Frick picked up on something when I was talking about notebooks in last episode’s Traveler Gift Guide segment\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>“It sounds like you’ve also entered the “Fountain Pen Zone” as well. They’re like tattoos, you can’t have just one. I had used a Mont Blanc rollerball that I purchased in 1991, it’s been broken and repaired several times and it had been my go-to pen… until someone gave me a fountain pen. Now several years later I have a collection on fountain pens, as well as inks. Ughhhh just what I needed another obsession. Great episode!”</li>\r\n 	<li>Yup, I started with a plastic Waterman fountain pen that I bought many years ago on a business trip to Brussels. I just had that one pen for the longest time. But then I discovered the Internet, or more specifically, fountain pen forums and blogs and podcasts on the Internet. And, as you might guess, it went downhill pretty quickly. Sometimes my biggest decision of the morning is which color of ink to use that day. Which itself says something about the state of my daily choices...</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>I said earlier that I was in Vegas a few weeks back for the big Amazon Web Services convention. It was huge; 50,000 attendees, mostly pudgy, pasty-faced guys power walking up and down the strip, backpacks strapped down, ignoring the showgirls offering pictures so they wouldn’t be late to, say, the sold-out tutorial on best practices for ingesting streaming data from IoT devices into AWS’ new time series database. For me, that nerd-meets-baller dichotomy hit one morning at 7:30. I was in a marching nerd stream weaving through the casino floor of the MGM Grand when out from behind a slot machine a woman with a half-filled plastic glass shouted “Very impressive that you all have some place important to go this early.” No one broke stride. She shrugged and went back to her machine. There was a lot of walking, though, for that show. It was spread out from the MGM Grand up to the Venetian. The Health app on my iPhone clocked me at 10 miles of walking a day. Glad it wasn’t in the summer.</li>\r\n 	<li>I mentioned in an earlier episode that I’d found a box of old European currency when cleaning off some shelves. It was from the late ‘80’s/early ‘90’s -- the pre-Euro days. I have some Belgian and French francs, a Deutsche mark, an Irish pound note, and an Italian 1000 lire note that I started using as a bookmark in my notebook. After one of these Amazon sessions, a young Italian woman looked over and commented on my lire bookmark. “Oh my God! I haven’t seen one of those in forever,” she said. She talked about her grandparents never really accepting that the lire was gone. “It’s good that we have the euro,” she said, “but it’ll never be the lire.” Which, remembering back 20-30 years ago, I thought might be a good thing, but decided not to say it; didn’t want to break her nostalgia. “I forgot how small it was!” she said.</li>\r\n 	<li>I was trading notes with friends a few weeks back after the Marriott hack was announced. It really is no longer a matter of if your personal data will be breached, but how often. A common theme across many of those Amazon talks was that mistakes will happen, so your cloud design should “limit the blast radius” of those mistakes. If I apply that same concept to website breaches (travel and otherwise), I’d freeze all my credit reports, have a unique password for each site, provide just the minimum amount of information required for a transaction, and I wouldn’t store/save credit card or other information with them. Indeed, if I really burrowed in, I’d use virtual credit card numbers from a bank that provides them. I’m pretty good except for the last one; I haven’t found a good bank that easily provides virtual card number. It all comes down to your personal trade-off point between resilience to a breach and convenience.</li>\r\n 	<li>With the Christmas season officially clicking in the day after Thanksgiving, TBS and TNT seem to have “Love Actually\" on power rotation every weekend. I like it; it’s a good Christmas movie. But picking up the end of it night while channel flipping in Santa Fe, I just couldn’t buy that scene toward the end when Liam Neeson encourages his stepson to breach Heathrow Airport security in the name of true love. I might be a bit of a Scrooge, but how does a 10-yr old kid commit a serious felony and not get gang-tackled at the gate and thrown into juvi? I dunno. Maybe I should stick to A Charlie Brown Christmas...</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our new Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/NiGiD/48586\">O Tannenbaum / Oh Christmas Tree</a> by Martijn de Boer (NiGiD) (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license.  Ft: Admiral Bob (admiralbob77)</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Holiday Travel Tips</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I posted my kinda annual Top 10 Holiday Travel Tips a few weeks back. It feels like something I’m required to do to keep my status as a semi-professional travel blogger and podcaster. Not a lot of the flying tips have changed over the last few lists -- pay a bit extra to fly non-stop, don’t take tight connections, catch an early flight if you can, carry your luggage on if you can -- because not much has changed regarding air travel -- it’s a time when a huge bubble of travelers hit an infrastructure that is, for the most part, already operating near capacity and at the time of year when much of that capacity could get disrupted by weather. This year, US plane loads were over 80% -- as if you didn’t already know that hearing the constant refrain of gate agents and flight attendants - “This will be a completely full flight…” And no new airport or runway capacity has been added in the high traffic areas -- maybe since ORD finished spending a billion dollars straightening out its runways. The LGA renovation will hopefully eliminate the leaking roof and give us better food options, but after spending $8 billion dollars, there won’t be any new runway capacity.</li>\r\n 	<li>Having said that, I think the aggressive roll-out of TSA PreCheck has helped everyone -- the TSA, frequent travelers who’ve bought PreCheck (signing up for PreCheck moved up to #2 on this year’s list), and even the infrequent ones who haven’t -- by increasing security capacity by increasing “thru-put” for lack of a better term. Security seems to, on the whole, move along a bit brisker. Yes, there are still too many times when it doesn’t, but it’s been a while since we’ve seen a full-scale TSA meltdown causing people to miss flights.\r\nBringing your own battery pack cracked the top 10 for the first time this year at #7. It followed Use Twitter as a Concierge Service and Use Multiple Flight Tracking Apps at numbers 5 and 6 respectively. The more we rely on our smartphones for travel information, the more important power is. And when the holiday crowds are hovering over those Samsung or Verizon power towers, you want an alternative.</li>\r\n 	<li>A lot of the Top 10 lists I read end with a second list, of those things that didn’t quite make the Top 10. For me, some of those are:</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Travel on the Actual Holiday</strong> - Our Thanksgiving flight out to Santa Fe reminded me of this tip. It didn’t make the Top 10 because not everyone can pull it off. Tough to fly or drive out Christmas morning if you have young kids, or if you have Italian in-laws who do the whole Feast of The Seven Fishes on Christmas Eve. But, if you can, it’s a quantum level decrease in travel stress. You’ll probably just glide through your travels.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Take Mass Transit to the Airport</strong> - Everybody worries about TSA lines, but just getting into the airport to be able to get into the TSA line can be a hassle. Airports with a single access road that goes past all the terminals -- think ORD, LAX, LGA -- can have 15-20 minute backups. When the construction at LGA first started, the backups were so bad, people were getting out of their cabs when they were still on the Grand Central Parkway and walking up the off ramps. Now, LGA doesn’t have mass transit access -- some of that $8 billion if for that -- but most airports do -- ORD, ATL, EWR and JFK, DCA,.... If it’s available, use it to skip at least one line.</li>\r\n 	<li>And my last “almost made it” tip, <strong>Bring Cash</strong> -- way back in episode #136, last December, I talked about what seems to be a generational split, maybe right around 30 or 35 -- old Millennials/youngster Gen X’s -- about the need to carry cash. No matter which side you sit on that split, it’s a fact that cash can get you out of a packed airport bar quicker than a card if you need to bolt for your flight -- maybe a delay got pulled up, your gate got moved to the next terminal, or you just misread the boarding time. Being able to lay down, say a twenty and 3 ones, on the bar with your check is a whole lot quicker than waiting for the waitress to show back up, take your card, walk to the back to run it, and then bring it back again for you to sign. This is where the Europeans with those mobile terminals are light-years ahead of us. But until we catch up -- which means we have to be trusted to remember a 4-digit PIN code -- bring cash so you can dash.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/44580\"> What Child is This (Instrumental)</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license.  Ft: Jeris</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Notes on Santa Fe</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>As I mentioned earlier, Irene and I headed out to Santa Fe, New Mexico for the Thanksgiving holidays. Since both kids were gone, we figured “Why not?” And since I had to be in Vegas on Monday, it just made sense to head west.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’m going to do a full write-up on our trip in a blog post in a week or so; the first of a new series of Road Trip posts, where we’ll break the TravelCommons format a bit. Road Trip posts will be more about the destination than the journey -- things we did, places we stayed, ate, drank beer…. But here, just some notes.</li>\r\n 	<li>It had been a while since we’d been in Santa Fe -- maybe over 10 years; I haven’t paged back through my calendar to check -- but getting out of that Hertz Dodge Challenger that we’d blasted up I-25 -- the speed limit is 75 mph once you’re outside of Albuquerque -- I was immediately hit with the piñon smell, that unique pinewood smoke smell I only get in Santa Fe. I’ve been around a lot of pinewood fires in, say, Colorado and Arizona, but the piñon smoke billowing out of a kiva fireplace is a unique smell, and one that I love.\r\nVisiting Santa Fe, there’s an interesting mix of highbrow and lowbrow -- doing the Georgia O’Keefe museum and a run up Canyon Road through all the art galleries, or hunting the best green chile cheeseburger and then burning it off on a hike in the Sangre de Cristo mountains. This visit was all lowbrow.</li>\r\n 	<li>Friday, we did 1,700 vertical feet up the Atalaya Trail. The parking lot at the trailhead at St John’s College was pretty full, but the trail wasn’t crowded once we got going. It actually came in handy at times to see people - let us know we weren’t lost. There were some trail markings, but not to the extent we were used to in, say, the UK. 5 ½ hours later, we were sitting at the bar at Second St Brewing’s place in the Railyard district, replacing whatever calories we’d burned off with a green chile cheeseburger and a side of green chile cheese fries. Double lashings of american cheese, which I know is just a processed cheese food, but the creamy gooey-ness of it blended well with the chile bite, and a pint of one of the better American-made bitters I’ve had.</li>\r\n 	<li>Saturday, after hiking through Tent Rocks National Monument, we ended up on Guadalupe St, which feels like the lowbrow counterpart to the plaza or Canyon Road. We stopped in at Cowgirl BBQ for margaritas. During our last visit, I stole/borrowed their margarita recipe for my own. We worked through their margarita menu while listening to a group of local guys talk about taking dancing lessons and a woman at the bar telling us that, back in the ‘70’s when she moved to Santa Fe, cowboys still rode horses through town -- across the plaza and down Canyon Rd -- throwing cash down in Canyon Rd bars to buy rounds for the house.</li>\r\n 	<li>On Sunday, we walked down Canyon Road, looking into the sculpture gardens of all the art galleries. It seemed a popular Sunday morning stroll. I’d see some older couples -- older than me; at, say, the beginning of retirement, walking in high-end Western garb -- nice flat-brimmed hats, fur-trimmed duster coats. Kinda California money does cowboy. Would be interesting to see how those ‘70’s cowboys would fit in today.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #147</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and now on <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_147.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #147 — Holiday Travel Tips; Notes from Santa Fe','','inherit','closed','closed','','2198-revision-v1','','','2018-12-17 16:47:54','2018-12-17 21:47:54','',2198,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/12/17/2198-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2203,1,'2018-12-18 09:42:17','2018-12-18 14:42:17','[caption id=\"attachment_2197\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/IMG_1158.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2197\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/IMG_1158-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> I won\'t pass for an emotional support reindeer[/caption]\r\n\r\nTrying to wrap up travel for the year so I can hunker down in the TravelCommons bunker outside of Chicago and <em>not</em> worry about any forecasted snow. But for those of you who are traveling, here\'s an episode to keep you occupied in the airport, train, or car traffic. We talk about some travel tips that didn\'t make my Top 10 Tips blog post, the great experience of flying on Thanksgiving day, losing my tablet on that flight but soon recovering it, storming Las Vegas with 50,000 other Amazon Web Services users, and some thoughts from our trip to Santa Fe, New Mexico. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_147.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n<iframe src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/533121708&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"></iframe><!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #147:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, trying to wind down the year’s travel. Was in Santa Fe, New Mexico for Thanksgiving, and then headed up to Las Vegas the next week for Amazon Web Service’s big annual conference, Re:Invent. Then did what I hoped was my last trip to Dallas, but we couldn’t corral all the cats, so I’m back down there next Weds for what will definitely be my last trip of the year.</li>\r\n 	<li>Irene and I flew out to Albuquerque 10am Thanksgiving morning and I have to say that it was one of the least stressful travel experiences I’ve ever had -- no traffic on the drive to ORD, no lines; I didn’t even have time to pull out my driver’s license before I hit the TSA podium. I walked straight through to a screening line. There were agents hanging around just looking for people to screen. The only line I stood in was the Starbucks. We even scored 1st-Class upgrades; the plane was only half full. I even think we left early. A very pleasant change from my ORD-DFW commute.</li>\r\n 	<li>The only real downside I noticed was when we hit the Hertz Presidents Club aisle in Albuquerque. It was pretty picked over, leaving behind an odd selection of Dodge vehicles -- the choice was between Dodge Challenger muscle cars or fully tricked out Ram Hemi king-cab pick-ups. I can’t say that I’ve ever faced quite that choice. The Challenger, with rear-wheel drive, wouldn’t be great if we got snow at elevation, but the Rams were just huge, and trying to parallel park that in Santa Fe would be an event. It took me a bit to decide. I went with the Challenger and hoped for clear skies.</li>\r\n 	<li>Well, there was one more downside that I didn’t discover until we unpacked in our little casita in Santa Fe that night. I’d left my Samsung tablet in that nice first-class seat. Not in the seat-back pocket; I always check there before leaving. There was a side compartment along the middle armrest that I’d put my tablet in when I folded up the table to hit the lav. Bad mistake. That compartment was deep, I couldn’t see the tablet; and I didn’t think to check it before deplaning.</li>\r\n 	<li>I hit Twitter, sending United a direct message asking about ABQ lost-and-found. I wanted to ping them to see if the cleaning crew had turn anything in since I’d be back at ABQ for our Monday morning flight to LAS. I’ve done this before when getting back coats that I’ve left in overhead compartments. The Twitter customer service agent instead sent me a link to a web form to fill out. I cooled my jets over the weekend and on Monday morning, swung by the United Baggage Services office to see if they had my tablet. Walked past the American Baggage Services office -- open; the Delta Baggage Services office -- open; to the United Baggage Services office -- closed. It was supposed to open at 9am. I waited for 15-20 minutes, and then had to head up to catch my Vegas flight. I wasn’t happy.</li>\r\n 	<li>Which changed that afternoon when I got a call from an unknown Cleveland number on my mobile. Robocallers have found my mobile number, so I usually let unrecognized numbers go straight to voicemail, but I remember Continental having a Cleveland hub before the United merger, so maybe this was a United person calling. And it was! “I think I have your tablet; could you verify your screensaver” It’s a wall painting of pink flamingos. “Yup, that’s it; we’ve got it” (Actually, it’s street art from Paris’ Montmartre neighborhood; you can see the picture on the TravelCommons’ Instagram feed). She told me that they no longer keep found items at the airports; they ship them the next day to centralized lost-&amp;-found centers for sorting and processing. So, even if the ABQ baggage services office had been open that morning, they wouldn’t have had my tablet; they probably shipped it to Cleveland that weekend.\r\nAfter I got off the phone, I got an e-mail with a link to pick a shipping method and pay. The day after I got home from Vegas, my flamingo’d tablet landed on my doorstep.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/copperhead/40520\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen</a> by copperhead (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: Admiral Bob, Javolenus , Sackjo22</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul class=\"\">\r\n 	<li>Couple of listener notes on the last episode. Nick Gassman wrote:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>“When you were talking about car rental collision damage waiver, I took it to mean that that you pay the rental company for the insurance. It\'s much cheaper (at least in the UK) to purchase this separately. You can generally get it on a per-trip or annual basis, just like regular travel insurance.”</li>\r\n 	<li>Nick, good point on that. You get used to accepting the waiver on business travel because, for many corporate rates, it’s all rolled in or you’re just going to expense it. And for US domestic travel, at least for me, my regular auto insurance covers it. So that leaves international travel. Chase did a good job of handling the accident in the UK. But looking at a separate company is a good idea. May try that out the next time I rent in Spain.</li>\r\n 	<li>“And about BlueTooth speakers, you mentioned about using the speaker as an accessory for your phone - I assume you know that the Jambox can do this. I\'ve often used it at work in rooms with no speakerphone. I\'ve also now upgraded to the Bose Mini 2 Soundlink. It is heavier and slightly larger, but when going on holiday the difference in sound quality is significant and more than makes up for it.”</li>\r\n 	<li>Yup, I’ve used the Jambox for many conference calls though I’ve never checked the quality difference between it and the speaker, or maybe I should say the microphone on my iPhone. I’ve never swapped between them on a call and asked the person on the other end which is better. Something to try out on the next call where we’re waiting for the last person to join.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Steve Frick picked up on something when I was talking about notebooks in last episode’s Traveler Gift Guide segment\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>“It sounds like you’ve also entered the “Fountain Pen Zone” as well. They’re like tattoos, you can’t have just one. I had used a Mont Blanc rollerball that I purchased in 1991, it’s been broken and repaired several times and it had been my go-to pen… until someone gave me a fountain pen. Now several years later I have a collection on fountain pens, as well as inks. Ughhhh just what I needed another obsession. Great episode!”</li>\r\n 	<li>Yup, I started with a plastic Waterman fountain pen that I bought many years ago on a business trip to Brussels. I just had that one pen for the longest time. But then I discovered the Internet, or more specifically, fountain pen forums and blogs and podcasts on the Internet. And, as you might guess, it went downhill pretty quickly. Sometimes my biggest decision of the morning is which color of ink to use that day. Which itself says something about the state of my daily choices...</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>I said earlier that I was in Vegas a few weeks back for the big Amazon Web Services convention. It was huge; 50,000 attendees, mostly pudgy, pasty-faced guys power walking up and down the strip, backpacks strapped down, ignoring the showgirls offering pictures so they wouldn’t be late to, say, the sold-out tutorial on best practices for ingesting streaming data from IoT devices into AWS’ new time series database. For me, that nerd-meets-baller dichotomy hit one morning at 7:30. I was in a marching nerd stream weaving through the casino floor of the MGM Grand when out from behind a slot machine a woman with a half-filled plastic glass shouted “Very impressive that you all have some place important to go this early.” No one broke stride. She shrugged and went back to her machine. There was a lot of walking, though, for that show. It was spread out from the MGM Grand up to the Venetian. The Health app on my iPhone clocked me at 10 miles of walking a day. Glad it wasn’t in the summer.</li>\r\n 	<li>I mentioned in an earlier episode that I’d found a box of old European currency when cleaning off some shelves. It was from the late ‘80’s/early ‘90’s -- the pre-Euro days. I have some Belgian and French francs, a Deutsche mark, an Irish pound note, and an Italian 1000 lire note that I started using as a bookmark in my notebook. After one of these Amazon sessions, a young Italian woman looked over and commented on my lire bookmark. “Oh my God! I haven’t seen one of those in forever,” she said. She talked about her grandparents never really accepting that the lire was gone. “It’s good that we have the euro,” she said, “but it’ll never be the lire.” Which, remembering back 20-30 years ago, I thought might be a good thing, but decided not to say it; didn’t want to break her nostalgia. “I forgot how small it was!” she said.</li>\r\n 	<li>I was trading notes with friends a few weeks back after the Marriott hack was announced. It really is no longer a matter of if your personal data will be breached, but how often. A common theme across many of those Amazon talks was that mistakes will happen, so your cloud design should “limit the blast radius” of those mistakes. If I apply that same concept to website breaches (travel and otherwise), I’d freeze all my credit reports, have a unique password for each site, provide just the minimum amount of information required for a transaction, and I wouldn’t store/save credit card or other information with them. Indeed, if I really burrowed in, I’d use virtual credit card numbers from a bank that provides them. I’m pretty good except for the last one; I haven’t found a good bank that easily provides virtual card number. It all comes down to your personal trade-off point between resilience to a breach and convenience.</li>\r\n 	<li>With the Christmas season officially clicking in the day after Thanksgiving, TBS and TNT seem to have “Love Actually\" on power rotation every weekend. I like it; it’s a good Christmas movie. But picking up the end of it night while channel flipping in Santa Fe, I just couldn’t buy that scene toward the end when Liam Neeson encourages his stepson to breach Heathrow Airport security in the name of true love. I might be a bit of a Scrooge, but how does a 10-yr old kid commit a serious felony and not get gang-tackled at the gate and thrown into juvi? I dunno. Maybe I should stick to A Charlie Brown Christmas...</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our new Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/NiGiD/48586\">O Tannenbaum / Oh Christmas Tree</a> by Martijn de Boer (NiGiD) (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license.  Ft: Admiral Bob (admiralbob77)</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Holiday Travel Tips</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I posted my kinda annual Top 10 Holiday Travel Tips a few weeks back. It feels like something I’m required to do to keep my status as a semi-professional travel blogger and podcaster. Not a lot of the flying tips have changed over the last few lists -- pay a bit extra to fly non-stop, don’t take tight connections, catch an early flight if you can, carry your luggage on if you can -- because not much has changed regarding air travel -- it’s a time when a huge bubble of travelers hit an infrastructure that is, for the most part, already operating near capacity and at the time of year when much of that capacity could get disrupted by weather. This year, US plane loads were over 80% -- as if you didn’t already know that hearing the constant refrain of gate agents and flight attendants - “This will be a completely full flight…” And no new airport or runway capacity has been added in the high traffic areas -- maybe since ORD finished spending a billion dollars straightening out its runways. The LGA renovation will hopefully eliminate the leaking roof and give us better food options, but after spending $8 billion dollars, there won’t be any new runway capacity.</li>\r\n 	<li>Having said that, I think the aggressive roll-out of TSA PreCheck has helped everyone -- the TSA, frequent travelers who’ve bought PreCheck (signing up for PreCheck moved up to #2 on this year’s list), and even the infrequent ones who haven’t -- by increasing security capacity by increasing “thru-put” for lack of a better term. Security seems to, on the whole, move along a bit brisker. Yes, there are still too many times when it doesn’t, but it’s been a while since we’ve seen a full-scale TSA meltdown causing people to miss flights.\r\nBringing your own battery pack cracked the top 10 for the first time this year at #7. It followed Use Twitter as a Concierge Service and Use Multiple Flight Tracking Apps at numbers 5 and 6 respectively. The more we rely on our smartphones for travel information, the more important power is. And when the holiday crowds are hovering over those Samsung or Verizon power towers, you want an alternative.</li>\r\n 	<li>A lot of the Top 10 lists I read end with a second list, of those things that didn’t quite make the Top 10. For me, some of those are:</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Travel on the Actual Holiday</strong> - Our Thanksgiving flight out to Santa Fe reminded me of this tip. It didn’t make the Top 10 because not everyone can pull it off. Tough to fly or drive out Christmas morning if you have young kids, or if you have Italian in-laws who do the whole Feast of The Seven Fishes on Christmas Eve. But, if you can, it’s a quantum level decrease in travel stress. You’ll probably just glide through your travels.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Take Mass Transit to the Airport</strong> - Everybody worries about TSA lines, but just getting into the airport to be able to get into the TSA line can be a hassle. Airports with a single access road that goes past all the terminals -- think ORD, LAX, LGA -- can have 15-20 minute backups. When the construction at LGA first started, the backups were so bad, people were getting out of their cabs when they were still on the Grand Central Parkway and walking up the off ramps. Now, LGA doesn’t have mass transit access -- some of that $8 billion if for that -- but most airports do -- ORD, ATL, EWR and JFK, DCA,.... If it’s available, use it to skip at least one line.</li>\r\n 	<li>And my last “almost made it” tip, <strong>Bring Cash</strong> -- way back in episode #136, last December, I talked about what seems to be a generational split, maybe right around 30 or 35 -- old Millennials/youngster Gen X’s -- about the need to carry cash. No matter which side you sit on that split, it’s a fact that cash can get you out of a packed airport bar quicker than a card if you need to bolt for your flight -- maybe a delay got pulled up, your gate got moved to the next terminal, or you just misread the boarding time. Being able to lay down, say a twenty and 3 ones, on the bar with your check is a whole lot quicker than waiting for the waitress to show back up, take your card, walk to the back to run it, and then bring it back again for you to sign. This is where the Europeans with those mobile terminals are light-years ahead of us. But until we catch up -- which means we have to be trusted to remember a 4-digit PIN code -- bring cash so you can dash.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/44580\"> What Child is This (Instrumental)</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license.  Ft: Jeris</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Notes on Santa Fe</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>As I mentioned earlier, Irene and I headed out to Santa Fe, New Mexico for the Thanksgiving holidays. Since both kids were gone, we figured “Why not?” And since I had to be in Vegas on Monday, it just made sense to head west.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’m going to do a full write-up on our trip in a blog post in a week or so; the first of a new series of Road Trip posts, where we’ll break the TravelCommons format a bit. Road Trip posts will be more about the destination than the journey -- things we did, places we stayed, ate, drank beer…. But here, just some notes.</li>\r\n 	<li>It had been a while since we’d been in Santa Fe -- maybe over 10 years; I haven’t paged back through my calendar to check -- but getting out of that Hertz Dodge Challenger that we’d blasted up I-25 -- the speed limit is 75 mph once you’re outside of Albuquerque -- I was immediately hit with the piñon smell, that unique pinewood smoke smell I only get in Santa Fe. I’ve been around a lot of pinewood fires in, say, Colorado and Arizona, but the piñon smoke billowing out of a kiva fireplace is a unique smell, and one that I love.\r\nVisiting Santa Fe, there’s an interesting mix of highbrow and lowbrow -- doing the Georgia O’Keefe museum and a run up Canyon Road through all the art galleries, or hunting the best green chile cheeseburger and then burning it off on a hike in the Sangre de Cristo mountains. This visit was all lowbrow.</li>\r\n 	<li>Friday, we did 1,700 vertical feet up the Atalaya Trail. The parking lot at the trailhead at St John’s College was pretty full, but the trail wasn’t crowded once we got going. It actually came in handy at times to see people - let us know we weren’t lost. There were some trail markings, but not to the extent we were used to in, say, the UK. 5 ½ hours later, we were sitting at the bar at Second St Brewing’s place in the Railyard district, replacing whatever calories we’d burned off with a green chile cheeseburger and a side of green chile cheese fries. Double lashings of american cheese, which I know is just a processed cheese food, but the creamy gooey-ness of it blended well with the chile bite, and a pint of one of the better American-made bitters I’ve had.</li>\r\n 	<li>Saturday, after hiking through Tent Rocks National Monument, we ended up on Guadalupe St, which feels like the lowbrow counterpart to the plaza or Canyon Road. We stopped in at Cowgirl BBQ for margaritas. During our last visit, I stole/borrowed their margarita recipe for my own. We worked through their margarita menu while listening to a group of local guys talk about taking dancing lessons and a woman at the bar telling us that, back in the ‘70’s when she moved to Santa Fe, cowboys still rode horses through town -- across the plaza and down Canyon Rd -- throwing cash down in Canyon Rd bars to buy rounds for the house.</li>\r\n 	<li>On Sunday, we walked down Canyon Road, looking into the sculpture gardens of all the art galleries. It seemed a popular Sunday morning stroll. I’d see some older couples -- older than me; at, say, the beginning of retirement, walking in high-end Western garb -- nice flat-brimmed hats, fur-trimmed duster coats. Kinda California money does cowboy. Would be interesting to see how those ‘70’s cowboys would fit in today.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #147</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and now on <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_147.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #147 — Holiday Travel Tips; Notes from Santa Fe','','inherit','closed','closed','','2198-revision-v1','','','2018-12-18 09:42:17','2018-12-18 14:42:17','',2198,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/12/18/2198-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0);
INSERT INTO `wp_posts` VALUES
(2204,1,'2018-12-18 09:49:30','2018-12-18 14:49:30','[caption id=\"attachment_2197\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/IMG_1158.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2197\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/IMG_1158-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> I won\'t pass for an emotional support reindeer[/caption]\r\n\r\nTrying to wrap up travel for the year so I can hunker down in the TravelCommons bunker outside of Chicago and <em>not</em> worry about any forecasted snow. But for those of you who are traveling, here\'s an episode to keep you occupied in the airport, train, or car traffic. We talk about some travel tips that didn\'t make my Top 10 Tips blog post, the great experience of flying on Thanksgiving day, losing my tablet on that flight but soon recovering it, storming Las Vegas with 50,000 other Amazon Web Services users, and some thoughts from our trip to Santa Fe, New Mexico. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_147.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n<iframe src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/546788592&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"></iframe><!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #147:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, trying to wind down the year’s travel. Was in Santa Fe, New Mexico for Thanksgiving, and then headed up to Las Vegas the next week for Amazon Web Service’s big annual conference, Re:Invent. Then did what I hoped was my last trip to Dallas, but we couldn’t corral all the cats, so I’m back down there next Weds for what will definitely be my last trip of the year.</li>\r\n 	<li>Irene and I flew out to Albuquerque 10am Thanksgiving morning and I have to say that it was one of the least stressful travel experiences I’ve ever had -- no traffic on the drive to ORD, no lines; I didn’t even have time to pull out my driver’s license before I hit the TSA podium. I walked straight through to a screening line. There were agents hanging around just looking for people to screen. The only line I stood in was the Starbucks. We even scored 1st-Class upgrades; the plane was only half full. I even think we left early. A very pleasant change from my ORD-DFW commute.</li>\r\n 	<li>The only real downside I noticed was when we hit the Hertz Presidents Club aisle in Albuquerque. It was pretty picked over, leaving behind an odd selection of Dodge vehicles -- the choice was between Dodge Challenger muscle cars or fully tricked out Ram Hemi king-cab pick-ups. I can’t say that I’ve ever faced quite that choice. The Challenger, with rear-wheel drive, wouldn’t be great if we got snow at elevation, but the Rams were just huge, and trying to parallel park that in Santa Fe would be an event. It took me a bit to decide. I went with the Challenger and hoped for clear skies.</li>\r\n 	<li>Well, there was one more downside that I didn’t discover until we unpacked in our little casita in Santa Fe that night. I’d left my Samsung tablet in that nice first-class seat. Not in the seat-back pocket; I always check there before leaving. There was a side compartment along the middle armrest that I’d put my tablet in when I folded up the table to hit the lav. Bad mistake. That compartment was deep, I couldn’t see the tablet; and I didn’t think to check it before deplaning.</li>\r\n 	<li>I hit Twitter, sending United a direct message asking about ABQ lost-and-found. I wanted to ping them to see if the cleaning crew had turn anything in since I’d be back at ABQ for our Monday morning flight to LAS. I’ve done this before when getting back coats that I’ve left in overhead compartments. The Twitter customer service agent instead sent me a link to a web form to fill out. I cooled my jets over the weekend and on Monday morning, swung by the United Baggage Services office to see if they had my tablet. Walked past the American Baggage Services office -- open; the Delta Baggage Services office -- open; to the United Baggage Services office -- closed. It was supposed to open at 9am. I waited for 15-20 minutes, and then had to head up to catch my Vegas flight. I wasn’t happy.</li>\r\n 	<li>Which changed that afternoon when I got a call from an unknown Cleveland number on my mobile. Robocallers have found my mobile number, so I usually let unrecognized numbers go straight to voicemail, but I remember Continental having a Cleveland hub before the United merger, so maybe this was a United person calling. And it was! “I think I have your tablet; could you verify your screensaver” It’s a wall painting of pink flamingos. “Yup, that’s it; we’ve got it” (Actually, it’s street art from Paris’ Montmartre neighborhood; you can see the picture on the TravelCommons’ Instagram feed). She told me that they no longer keep found items at the airports; they ship them the next day to centralized lost-&amp;-found centers for sorting and processing. So, even if the ABQ baggage services office had been open that morning, they wouldn’t have had my tablet; they probably shipped it to Cleveland that weekend.\r\nAfter I got off the phone, I got an e-mail with a link to pick a shipping method and pay. The day after I got home from Vegas, my flamingo’d tablet landed on my doorstep.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/copperhead/40520\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen</a> by copperhead (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: Admiral Bob, Javolenus , Sackjo22</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul class=\"\">\r\n 	<li>Couple of listener notes on the last episode. Nick Gassman wrote:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>“When you were talking about car rental collision damage waiver, I took it to mean that that you pay the rental company for the insurance. It\'s much cheaper (at least in the UK) to purchase this separately. You can generally get it on a per-trip or annual basis, just like regular travel insurance.”</li>\r\n 	<li>Nick, good point on that. You get used to accepting the waiver on business travel because, for many corporate rates, it’s all rolled in or you’re just going to expense it. And for US domestic travel, at least for me, my regular auto insurance covers it. So that leaves international travel. Chase did a good job of handling the accident in the UK. But looking at a separate company is a good idea. May try that out the next time I rent in Spain.</li>\r\n 	<li>“And about BlueTooth speakers, you mentioned about using the speaker as an accessory for your phone - I assume you know that the Jambox can do this. I\'ve often used it at work in rooms with no speakerphone. I\'ve also now upgraded to the Bose Mini 2 Soundlink. It is heavier and slightly larger, but when going on holiday the difference in sound quality is significant and more than makes up for it.”</li>\r\n 	<li>Yup, I’ve used the Jambox for many conference calls though I’ve never checked the quality difference between it and the speaker, or maybe I should say the microphone on my iPhone. I’ve never swapped between them on a call and asked the person on the other end which is better. Something to try out on the next call where we’re waiting for the last person to join.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Steve Frick picked up on something when I was talking about notebooks in last episode’s Traveler Gift Guide segment\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>“It sounds like you’ve also entered the “Fountain Pen Zone” as well. They’re like tattoos, you can’t have just one. I had used a Mont Blanc rollerball that I purchased in 1991, it’s been broken and repaired several times and it had been my go-to pen… until someone gave me a fountain pen. Now several years later I have a collection on fountain pens, as well as inks. Ughhhh just what I needed another obsession. Great episode!”</li>\r\n 	<li>Yup, I started with a plastic Waterman fountain pen that I bought many years ago on a business trip to Brussels. I just had that one pen for the longest time. But then I discovered the Internet, or more specifically, fountain pen forums and blogs and podcasts on the Internet. And, as you might guess, it went downhill pretty quickly. Sometimes my biggest decision of the morning is which color of ink to use that day. Which itself says something about the state of my daily choices...</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>I said earlier that I was in Vegas a few weeks back for the big Amazon Web Services convention. It was huge; 50,000 attendees, mostly pudgy, pasty-faced guys power walking up and down the strip, backpacks strapped down, ignoring the showgirls offering pictures so they wouldn’t be late to, say, the sold-out tutorial on best practices for ingesting streaming data from IoT devices into AWS’ new time series database. For me, that nerd-meets-baller dichotomy hit one morning at 7:30. I was in a marching nerd stream weaving through the casino floor of the MGM Grand when out from behind a slot machine a woman with a half-filled plastic glass shouted “Very impressive that you all have some place important to go this early.” No one broke stride. She shrugged and went back to her machine. There was a lot of walking, though, for that show. It was spread out from the MGM Grand up to the Venetian. The Health app on my iPhone clocked me at 10 miles of walking a day. Glad it wasn’t in the summer.</li>\r\n 	<li>I mentioned in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/05/31/podcast-141-when-you-think-the-tsa-is-bad-expired-money/\">an earlier episode</a> that I’d found a box of old European currency when cleaning off some shelves. It was from the late ‘80’s/early ‘90’s -- the pre-Euro days. I have some Belgian and French francs, a Deutsche mark, an Irish pound note, and an Italian 1000 lire note that I started using as a bookmark in my notebook. After one of these Amazon sessions, a young Italian woman looked over and commented on my lire bookmark. “Oh my God! I haven’t seen one of those in forever,” she said. She talked about her grandparents never really accepting that the lire was gone. “It’s good that we have the euro,” she said, “but it’ll never be the lire.” Which, remembering back 20-30 years ago, I thought might be a good thing, but decided not to say it; didn’t want to break her nostalgia. “I forgot how small it was!” she said.</li>\r\n 	<li>I was trading notes with friends a few weeks back after the Marriott hack was announced. It really is no longer a matter of if your personal data will be breached, but how often. A common theme across many of those Amazon talks was that mistakes will happen, so your cloud design should “limit the blast radius” of those mistakes. If I apply that same concept to website breaches (travel and otherwise), I’d freeze all my credit reports, have a unique password for each site, provide just the minimum amount of information required for a transaction, and I wouldn’t store/save credit card or other information with them. Indeed, if I really burrowed in, I’d use virtual credit card numbers from a bank that provides them. I’m pretty good except for the last one; I haven’t found a good bank that easily provides virtual card number. It all comes down to your personal trade-off point between resilience to a breach and convenience.</li>\r\n 	<li>With the Christmas season officially clicking in the day after Thanksgiving, TBS and TNT seem to have “Love Actually\" on power rotation every weekend. I like it; it’s a good Christmas movie. But picking up the end of it night while channel flipping in Santa Fe, I just couldn’t buy that scene toward the end when Liam Neeson encourages his stepson to breach Heathrow Airport security in the name of true love. I might be a bit of a Scrooge, but how does a 10-yr old kid commit a serious felony and not get gang-tackled at the gate and thrown into juvi? I dunno. Maybe I should stick to A Charlie Brown Christmas...</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our new Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/NiGiD/48586\">O Tannenbaum / Oh Christmas Tree</a> by Martijn de Boer (NiGiD) (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license.  Ft: Admiral Bob (admiralbob77)</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Holiday Travel Tips</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I posted my kinda annual Top 10 Holiday Travel Tips a few weeks back. It feels like something I’m required to do to keep my status as a semi-professional travel blogger and podcaster. Not a lot of the flying tips have changed over the last few lists -- pay a bit extra to fly non-stop, don’t take tight connections, catch an early flight if you can, carry your luggage on if you can -- because not much has changed regarding air travel -- it’s a time when a huge bubble of travelers hit an infrastructure that is, for the most part, already operating near capacity and at the time of year when much of that capacity could get disrupted by weather. This year, US plane loads were over 80% -- as if you didn’t already know that hearing the constant refrain of gate agents and flight attendants - “This will be a completely full flight…” And no new airport or runway capacity has been added in the high traffic areas -- maybe since ORD finished spending a billion dollars straightening out its runways. The LGA renovation will hopefully eliminate the leaking roof and give us better food options, but after spending $8 billion dollars, there won’t be any new runway capacity.</li>\r\n 	<li>Having said that, I think the aggressive roll-out of TSA PreCheck has helped everyone -- the TSA, frequent travelers who’ve bought PreCheck (signing up for PreCheck moved up to #2 on this year’s list), and even the infrequent ones who haven’t -- by increasing security capacity by increasing “thru-put” for lack of a better term. Security seems to, on the whole, move along a bit brisker. Yes, there are still too many times when it doesn’t, but it’s been a while since we’ve seen a full-scale TSA meltdown causing people to miss flights.\r\nBringing your own battery pack cracked the top 10 for the first time this year at #7. It followed Use Twitter as a Concierge Service and Use Multiple Flight Tracking Apps at numbers 5 and 6 respectively. The more we rely on our smartphones for travel information, the more important power is. And when the holiday crowds are hovering over those Samsung or Verizon power towers, you want an alternative.</li>\r\n 	<li>A lot of the Top 10 lists I read end with a second list, of those things that didn’t quite make the Top 10. For me, some of those are:</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Travel on the Actual Holiday</strong> - Our Thanksgiving flight out to Santa Fe reminded me of this tip. It didn’t make the Top 10 because not everyone can pull it off. Tough to fly or drive out Christmas morning if you have young kids, or if you have Italian in-laws who do the whole Feast of The Seven Fishes on Christmas Eve. But, if you can, it’s a quantum level decrease in travel stress. You’ll probably just glide through your travels.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Take Mass Transit to the Airport</strong> - Everybody worries about TSA lines, but just getting into the airport to be able to get into the TSA line can be a hassle. Airports with a single access road that goes past all the terminals -- think ORD, LAX, LGA -- can have 15-20 minute backups. When the construction at LGA first started, the backups were so bad, people were getting out of their cabs when they were still on the Grand Central Parkway and walking up the off ramps. Now, LGA doesn’t have mass transit access -- some of that $8 billion if for that -- but most airports do -- ORD, ATL, EWR and JFK, DCA,.... If it’s available, use it to skip at least one line.</li>\r\n 	<li>And my last “almost made it” tip, <strong>Bring Cash</strong> -- way back in episode #136, last December, I talked about what seems to be a generational split, maybe right around 30 or 35 -- old Millennials/youngster Gen X’s -- about the need to carry cash. No matter which side you sit on that split, it’s a fact that cash can get you out of a packed airport bar quicker than a card if you need to bolt for your flight -- maybe a delay got pulled up, your gate got moved to the next terminal, or you just misread the boarding time. Being able to lay down, say a twenty and 3 ones, on the bar with your check is a whole lot quicker than waiting for the waitress to show back up, take your card, walk to the back to run it, and then bring it back again for you to sign. This is where the Europeans with those mobile terminals are light-years ahead of us. But until we catch up -- which means we have to be trusted to remember a 4-digit PIN code -- bring cash so you can dash.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/44580\"> What Child is This (Instrumental)</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license.  Ft: Jeris</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Notes on Santa Fe</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>As I mentioned earlier, Irene and I headed out to Santa Fe, New Mexico for the Thanksgiving holidays. Since both kids were gone, we figured “Why not?” And since I had to be in Vegas on Monday, it just made sense to head west.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’m going to do a full write-up on our trip in a blog post in a week or so; the first of a new series of Road Trip posts, where we’ll break the TravelCommons format a bit. Road Trip posts will be more about the destination than the journey -- things we did, places we stayed, ate, drank beer…. But here, just some notes.</li>\r\n 	<li>It had been a while since we’d been in Santa Fe -- maybe over 10 years; I haven’t paged back through my calendar to check -- but getting out of that Hertz Dodge Challenger that we’d blasted up I-25 -- the speed limit is 75 mph once you’re outside of Albuquerque -- I was immediately hit with the piñon smell, that unique pinewood smoke smell I only get in Santa Fe. I’ve been around a lot of pinewood fires in, say, Colorado and Arizona, but the piñon smoke billowing out of a kiva fireplace is a unique smell, and one that I love.\r\nVisiting Santa Fe, there’s an interesting mix of highbrow and lowbrow -- doing the Georgia O’Keefe museum and a run up Canyon Road through all the art galleries, or hunting the best green chile cheeseburger and then burning it off on a hike in the Sangre de Cristo mountains. This visit was all lowbrow.</li>\r\n 	<li>Friday, we did 1,700 vertical feet up the Atalaya Trail. The parking lot at the trailhead at St John’s College was pretty full, but the trail wasn’t crowded once we got going. It actually came in handy at times to see people - let us know we weren’t lost. There were some trail markings, but not to the extent we were used to in, say, the UK. 5 ½ hours later, we were sitting at the bar at Second St Brewing’s place in the Railyard district, replacing whatever calories we’d burned off with a green chile cheeseburger and a side of green chile cheese fries. Double lashings of american cheese, which I know is just a processed cheese food, but the creamy gooey-ness of it blended well with the chile bite, and a pint of one of the better American-made bitters I’ve had.</li>\r\n 	<li>Saturday, after hiking through Tent Rocks National Monument, we ended up on Guadalupe St, which feels like the lowbrow counterpart to the plaza or Canyon Road. We stopped in at Cowgirl BBQ for margaritas. During our last visit, I stole/borrowed their margarita recipe for my own. We worked through their margarita menu while listening to a group of local guys talk about taking dancing lessons and a woman at the bar telling us that, back in the ‘70’s when she moved to Santa Fe, cowboys still rode horses through town -- across the plaza and down Canyon Rd -- throwing cash down in Canyon Rd bars to buy rounds for the house.</li>\r\n 	<li>On Sunday, we walked down Canyon Road, looking into the sculpture gardens of all the art galleries. It seemed a popular Sunday morning stroll. I’d see some older couples -- older than me; at, say, the beginning of retirement, walking in high-end Western garb -- nice flat-brimmed hats, fur-trimmed duster coats. Kinda California money does cowboy. Would be interesting to see how those ‘70’s cowboys would fit in today.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #147</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and now on <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_147.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #147 — Holiday Travel Tips; Notes from Santa Fe','','inherit','closed','closed','','2198-revision-v1','','','2018-12-18 09:49:30','2018-12-18 14:49:30','',2198,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/12/18/2198-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2208,1,'2019-01-24 21:12:30','2019-01-25 02:12:30','[caption id=\"attachment_2211\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/20181125_005916392_iOS.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2211\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/20181125_005916392_iOS-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> In Search of a Killer Margarita[/caption]\n\nWe stopped for a moment to catch our breath and figure out how much longer to the top of the <a href=\"https://www.hikingproject.com/trail/7003499/atalaya-mountain-trail-170\">Atalaya Mountain Trail</a>. Yesterday, before we flew out to Santa Fe, we were at 700 ft above sea level. After 90 minutes of walking, I guessed we were at 8,000 ft and had another 1,100 ft to get to the top. Between the altitude and the snow on the trail from the night before, this hike was taking longer than we’d planned. I looked at my watch and told Irene, “If you want to hit the Black Friday artisan market, we need to head back now.” She took another breath. “Nope, we’re heading to the top.”\n\nForty minutes later, we stood on a rocky ledge looking down over Santa Fe with a group of Argentinians who’d passed us 10 minutes before. We took the obligatory selfie and sat down on the rocks to take in the view. The breakfast cook/owner of our B&amp;B had sold us on this trail. We cursed him on the way up when we slid through the snow and struggled to find the trail markings. But now, looking out over Santa Fe National Forest to the horizon line of a cloudless blue sky, we took those words back.\n\nSanta Fe visits can go highbrow -- the <a href=\"https://www.okeeffemuseum.org/\">Georgia O’Keefe museum</a> and a run up Canyon Road through all the art galleries -- or lowbrow -- hiking up mountain trails and hunting the best green chile cheeseburger. This trip was all lowbrow. <!--more Click Here To Keep Reading \"Road Trip — Lowbrow Santa Fe\" -->\n\nAnd after 20 minutes of taking in the views at the top of Atalaya Mountain, we had just two things in mind -- green chile cheeseburgers and beer. The 1,800 foot descent only sharpened our appetites. Five-and-a half hours after we’d started, we were sitting at the bar at <a href=\"https://www.secondstreetbrewery.com/the-railyard\">Second Street Brewing’s restaurant in the Railyard District</a>, replacing whatever calories we’d burned off with green chile cheeseburgers and a side of green chile cheese fries. Double lashings of american cheese, which I know I shouldn’t like because it isn’t really cheese, but the creamy gooey-ness of it blended well with the chile bite. We chased it down with a pint of their <a href=\"https://untappd.com/b/second-street-brewery-boneshaker-bitter/675872\">Boneshaker Bitter</a>, one of the better American-made ESBs I’ve had.\n\n[caption id=\"attachment_2224\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"640\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/20181123_193305944_iOS.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-2224 size-large\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/20181123_193305944_iOS-1024x418.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"640\" height=\"261\"></a> Top of the Atalaya Mountain Trail[/caption]\n\nIt was the end of November and the temperature was dropping as we made our way back to our B&amp;B, the <a href=\"https://farolito.com/\">El Farolito</a>. We had our own little <a href=\"https://farolito.com/galisteo-room-1/\">casita</a> out front. Walking in, we saw that housekeeping had the kiva fireplace ready for us, loaded with a triangle of <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyon_pine\">piñon</a> logs over some kindling and a stack of yesterday’s newspaper off to the side. The fire caught with one match (gotta love well-seasoned wood). As the smoke rose up the chimney, I walked back outside and was immediately hit with the<a href=\"https://www.outsidemodern.com/pinon-wood-the-best-firewood-for-chimineas-pinion-pinyon/\"> piñon smell</a>, that unique pinewood smoke smell I only get in Santa Fe. I’ve been around a lot of pinewood fires in, say, Colorado and Arizona, but the piñon smoke billowing out of a kiva fireplace is a unique smell; one that I love. It was a cold hike up the trail this morning; here was a little payback.\n\nThe next morning, after tucking into another great breakfast, El Farolito’s cook/owner/travel guide recommended we head out to <a href=\"https://www.blm.gov/visit/kktr\">Tent Rocks</a> for our next hike. It would be a completely different environment, hiking through towering volcanic rock formations rather than a forest, and at 600 ft, it would only be a third of yesterday’s climb. However, Tent Rocks is a popular place that caps the number of people it lets in. The forecast was for a sunny Saturday, so we needed to get on our way or risk waiting in line to get in.\n\nThis was made much easier by our choice of rental car. When we hit the Hertz Presidents’ Club aisle at Albuquerque airport Thursday afternoon, it was pretty picked over; just a very odd selection of Dodge vehicles -- Dodge Challenger muscle cars or fully tricked out Ram Hemi king-cab pick-ups. I can’t say that I’ve ever faced quite that choice at Hertz before. The Challenger, with rear-wheel drive, wouldn’t be great if we got snow at elevation, but the Rams were just huge, trying to parallel park one in downtown Santa Fe would be an event. I stood between them, went back and forth for a couple of minutes. “Just pick one,” Irene said, “it’s a rental car, not a life choice!” I went for the white Challenger and hoped for clear skies.\n\nAnd on this Saturday morning, that’s what we had -- and a 75 mph speed limit on the southbound stretch of I-25 between us and Tent Rocks. I put my foot into the Challenger and kept it there as we exited the interstate and drove down and west across a flat plateau on Rt 16. I didn’t ease up until we hit the residential streets of the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochiti,_New_Mexico\">Cochiti Pueblo reservation</a>. It was around 10:30 am when we turned onto the access road, expecting to hit the line of waiting cars. We were hugely relieved when we drove straight up to the entrance booth, paid the $5 fee, and continued on to the trail head parking.\n\n[caption id=\"attachment_2221\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"640\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/20181124_180015173_iOS.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-2221 size-large\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/20181124_180015173_iOS-1024x768.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"640\" height=\"480\"></a> Looking Down onto the Tent Rocks[/caption]\n\nWalking sideways and single file through the narrowest parts of the slot canyon at the start of the Canyon Trail, we immediately understood and appreciated the capacity limit. Without it, the trail would’ve hit gridlock. And we didn’t mind the times when we had to wait for a downhill group to clear a tight squeeze. It gave us time to look up and appreciate the rough beauty left behind by 6-7 million years of erosion.\n\nComing out of the slot canyon, we hit the steep section. “Do you think it’s worth it,” a dad asked, struggling up the incline with his daughter and a load of snacks on his back. When we got to the flat mesa on top, the answer was there spread out for us when we looked down onto the 90-foot tent rocks (<a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoodoo_(geology)\">hoodoos</a>), and then out across the Rio Grande Valley and to the Sangre de Cristo mountains in the distance. The temperature hit 50°F. We shed a couple of layers of clothing, dangled our legs off a rock ledge, drained our water bottles, and looked out with nothing between us and the horizon. It was our second day of cloudless blue skies and hundred mile vistas.\n\n<span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">When we drove out around 1pm, we passed a line of cars waiting at the entrance booth to get it. The line ended between signs estimating the wait time to be 30 and 60 minutes. I patted the Challenger’s dashboard.</span>\n\n[caption id=\"attachment_2219\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/20181124_212142086_iOS.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2219\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/20181124_212142086_iOS-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> Tapwall at Rowley Farmhouse Ales[/caption]\n\nDriving back to Santa Fe, we got off of I-25 an exit early and drove up Rt 14 through what felt like the real life Santa Fe. No art dealers and kachina shops; instead, the typical string of auto dealers, gas stations, and shopping centers anchored by Targets and drive-thru Starbucks. We were headed to <a href=\"https://www.rowleyfarmhouse.com/\">Rowley Farmhouse Ales</a> for another post-hike green chile cheeseburger. The Rowley burger was a bit more upscale than yesterday’s -- the menu namechecks local purveyors of the beef, bacon, and cheese (but not the green chile!) on the burger -- but still a very solid burger. The beer list was one of the strongest we’d seen. Flights of tasters let us sample Rowley’s own beers -- a nice range of IPAs, saisons, and sours -- and some of the local guest beers they also had on tap.\n\nThat evening, we walked over to Guadalupe Street, which feels like the lowbrow counterpart to the plaza or Canyon Road. We stopped first at <a href=\"http://www.cowgirlsantafe.com/\">Cowgirl BBQ</a> for some margarita nostalgia. On our first trip to Santa Fe, I was on the hunt for a great everyday margarita recipe and after a weekend of margarita tasting, we picked Cowgirl’s. We worked our way through their current margarita menu, listening to a group of local guys at the end of the bar talk to the bartender about taking dancing lessons. “God, I missed you guys,” the bartender said.\n\nWe walked a couple of blocks further down Guadalupe Street to <a href=\"https://tomasitas.com/\">Tomasita’s</a> for dinner. The alcove was full of families and big parties. The hostess gave the party of 6 in front of us a 2-hour wait. For Irene and I, just an hour. We headed to the bar to try their margaritas. When we were seated (15 minutes early!), we searched the menu for something different. Most of it was the standard enchilada and taco combo plates, but with a little patience, we found some unique dishes. <a href=\"https://www.cooksillustrated.com/articles/697-real-carne-adovada\"><em>Carne adovada</em></a>, the classic New Mexico pork and red chile braise, had a deep earthy chile flavor that made me seriously question my green chile fixation. I saw that we could have <em>chicos</em> as our side. “What are chicos?” I asked the waitress. “Oh, you’ll love them.” More of a recommendation than an explanation, but I ordered them anyway. Turned out that Tomasita’s&nbsp;<a href=\"https://highlandsranchfoodie.com/2016/01/beans-and-chicos-2/\">chicos</a> are a New Mexico spin on a Native American staple, whole beans mixed with whole corn kernels that have been steamed over a fire. The texture of the whole beans and the smoky sweet taste of the corn kernels were such an improvement over the pasty blandness of refried beans, I wondered why chicos weren’t the standard side. And in place of the usual tortillas, we got a basket of fresh sopapillas with honey butter. Nothing fancy; it was homestyle New Mexico cuisine.\n\nSunday morning looked like another bright blue day -- from what we could make out through the frosted window. Our legs felt a bit heavy after two days of walking up steep inclines so we decided to go for some flatter terrain, a walk through town. We walked along the <a href=\"http://www.walkrideusa.com/states/new-mexico/individual-trails/santa-fe-river-trail-new-mexico\">Santa Fe River Park</a>, looking down at the frozen trickle of what we assumed was the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Fe_River_(New_Mexico)\">Santa Fe River</a>. We veered up Canyon Road. None of the galleries were open yet, but there was enough sculpture in the front and side yards to fill our lowbrow culture quotient.\n\nBy noon, we had walked off last night’s dinner, so we circled back around to Alameda Street and headed back into town toward the plaza to find some lunch. We read the menus of the restaurants ringing the plaza. Nothing really excited us until I spotted a couple of food carts on the west edge of the plaza, a Mexican guy on the southwest corner selling tamales and a Nigerian guy on the northwest corner selling goat stew. I bought two tamales, beef with red chile and chicken with green chile. We crossed the street, ducked out of the wind, and scarfed down what were excellent tamales. It seemed the perfect lunch to end our lowbrow Santa Fe weekend.','Road Trip — Lowbrow Santa Fe','','publish','closed','closed','','road-trip-lowbrow-santa-fe','','https://www.outsidemodern.com/pinon-wood-the-best-firewood-for-chimineas-pinion-pinyon/\nhttps://highlandsranchfoodie.com/2016/01/beans-and-chicos-2/','2021-05-04 22:34:07','2021-05-05 03:34:07','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=2208',0,'post','',1),
(2209,1,'2019-01-23 19:30:01','2019-01-24 00:30:01','We stopped for a moment to catch our breath and figure out how much longer to the top of the <a href=\"https://www.hikingproject.com/trail/7003499/atalaya-mountain-trail-170\">Atalaya Mountain Trail</a>. Yesterday, before we flew out to Santa Fe, we were at 700 ft above sea level. After 90 minutes of walking, I guessed we were at 8,000 ft and had another 1,100 ft to get to the top. Between the altitude and the snow on the trail from the night before, this hike was taking longer than we’d planned. I looked at my watch and told Irene, “If you want to hit the Black Friday artisan market, we need to head back now.” She took another breath. “Nope, we’re heading to the top.”\r\n\r\nForty minutes later, we stood on a rocky ledge looking down over Santa Fe with a group of Argentinians who’d passed us 10 minutes before. We took the obligatory selfie and sat down on the rocks to take in the view. The breakfast cook/owner of our B&amp;B had sold us on this trail. We cursed him on the way up when we slid through the snow and struggled to find the trail markings. But now, looking out over Santa Fe National Forest to the horizon line of a cloudless blue sky, we took those words back.\r\n\r\nSanta Fe visits can go highbrow -- the <a href=\"https://www.okeeffemuseum.org/\">Georgia O’Keefe museum</a> and a run up Canyon Road through all the art galleries -- or lowbrow -- hiking up mountain trails and hunting the best green chile cheeseburger. This trip was all lowbrow. And after 20 minutes of taking in the views at the top of Atalaya Mountain, we had just two things in mind -- green chile cheeseburgers and beer. The 1,800 foot descent only sharpened our appetites. Five-and-a half hours after we’d started, we were sitting at the bar at <a href=\"https://www.secondstreetbrewery.com/the-railyard\">Second Street Brewing’s restaurant in the Railyard District</a>, replacing whatever calories we’d burned off with green chile cheeseburgers and a side of green chile cheese fries. Double lashings of american cheese, which I know I shouldn’t like because it isn’t really cheese, but the creamy gooey-ness of it blended well with the chile bite. We chased it down with a pint of their <a href=\"https://untappd.com/b/second-street-brewery-boneshaker-bitter/675872\">Boneshaker Bitter</a>, one of the better American-made ESBs I’ve had.\r\n\r\nIt was the end of November and the temperature was dropping as we made our way back to our B&amp;B, the <a href=\"https://farolito.com/\">El Farolito</a>. We had our own little <a href=\"https://farolito.com/galisteo-room-1/\">casita</a> out front. Walking in, we saw that housekeeping had the kiva fireplace ready for us, loaded with a triangle of <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyon_pine\">piñon</a> logs over some kindling and a stack of yesterday’s newspaper off to the side. The fire caught with one match (gotta love well-seasoned wood). As the smoke rose up the chimney, I walked back outside and was immediately hit with the<a href=\"https://www.outsidemodern.com/pinon-wood-the-best-firewood-for-chimineas-pinion-pinyon/\"> piñon smell</a>, that unique pinewood smoke smell I only get in Santa Fe. I’ve been around a lot of pinewood fires in, say, Colorado and Arizona, but the piñon smoke billowing out of a kiva fireplace is a unique smell; one that I love. It was a cold hike up the trail this morning; here was a little payback.\r\n\r\nThe next morning, after tucking into another great breakfast, El Farolito’s cook/owner/travel guide recommended we head out to <a href=\"https://www.blm.gov/visit/kktr\">Tent Rocks</a> for our next hike. It would be a completely different environment, hiking through towering volcanic rock formations rather than a forest, and at 600 ft, it would only be a third of yesterday’s climb. However, Tent Rocks is a popular place that caps the number of people it lets in. The forecast was for a sunny Saturday, so we needed to get on our way or risk waiting in line to get in.\r\n\r\nThis was made much easier by our choice of rental car. When we hit the Hertz Presidents’ Club aisle at Albuquerque airport Thursday afternoon, it was pretty picked over; just a very odd selection of Dodge vehicles -- Dodge Challenger muscle cars or fully tricked out Ram Hemi king-cab pick-ups. I can’t say that I’ve ever faced quite that choice at Hertz before. The Challenger, with rear-wheel drive, wouldn’t be great if we got snow at elevation, but the Rams were just huge, trying to parallel park one in downtown Santa Fe would be an event. I stood between them, went back and forth for a couple of minutes. “Just pick one,” Irene said, “it’s a rental car, not a life choice!” I went for the white Challenger and hoped for clear skies.\r\n\r\nAnd on this Saturday morning, that’s what we had -- and a 75 mph speed limit on the southbound stretch of I-25 between us and Tent Rocks. I put my foot into the Challenger and kept it there as we exited the interstate and drove down and west across a flat plateau on Rt 16. I didn’t ease up until we hit the residential streets of the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochiti,_New_Mexico\">Cochiti Pueblo reservation</a>. It was around 10:30 am when we turned onto the access road, expecting to hit the line of waiting cars. We were hugely relieved when we drove straight up to the entrance booth, paid the $5 fee, and continued on to the trail head parking.\r\n\r\nWalking sideways and single file through the narrowest parts of the slot canyon at the start of the Canyon Trail, we immediately understood and appreciated the capacity limit. Without it, the trail would’ve hit gridlock. And we didn’t mind the times when we had to wait for a downhill group to clear a tight squeeze. It gave us time to look up and appreciate the rough beauty left behind by 6-7 million years of erosion.\r\n\r\nComing out of the slot canyon, we hit the steep section. “Do you think it’s worth it,” a dad asked, struggling up the incline with his daughter and a load of snacks on his back. When we got to the flat mesa on top, the answer was there spread out for us when we looked down onto the 90-foot tent rocks (<a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoodoo_(geology)\">hoodoos</a>), and then out across the Rio Grande Valley and to the Sangre de Cristo mountains in the distance. The temperature hit 50°F. We shed a couple of layers of clothing, dangled our legs off a rock ledge, drained our water bottles, and looked out with nothing between us and the horizon. It was our second day of cloudless blue skies and hundred mile vistas.\r\n\r\nDriving back to Santa Fe, we got off of I-25 an exit early and drove up Rt 14 through what felt like the real life Santa Fe. No art dealers and kachina shops; instead, the typical string of auto dealers, gas stations, and shopping centers anchored by Targets and drive-thru Starbucks. We were headed to <a href=\"https://www.rowleyfarmhouse.com/\">Rowley Farmhouse Ales</a> for another post-hike green chile cheeseburger. The Rowley burger was a bit more upscale than yesterday’s -- the menu namechecks local purveyors of the beef, bacon, and cheese (but not the green chile!) on the burger -- but still a very solid burger. The beer list was one of the strongest we’d seen. Flights of tasters let us sample Rowley’s own beers -- a nice range of IPAs, saisons, and sours -- and some of the local guest beers they also had on tap.\r\n\r\nThat evening, we walked over to Guadalupe Street, which feels like the lowbrow counterpart to the plaza or Canyon Road. We stopped first at <a href=\"http://www.cowgirlsantafe.com/\">Cowgirl BBQ</a> for some margarita nostalgia. On our first trip to Santa Fe, I was on the hunt for a great everyday margarita recipe and after a weekend of margarita tasting, we picked Cowgirl’s. We worked our way through their current margarita menu, listening to a group of local guys at the end of the bar talk to the bartender about taking dancing lessons. “God, I missed you guys,” the bartender said.\r\n\r\nWe walked a couple of blocks further down Guadalupe Street to <a href=\"https://tomasitas.com/\">Tomasita’s</a> for dinner. The alcove was full of families and big parties. The hostess gave the party of 6 in front of us a 2-hour wait. For Irene and I, just an hour. We headed to the bar to try their margaritas. When we were seated (15 minutes early!), we searched the menu for something different. Most of it was the standard enchilada and taco combo plates, but with a little patience, we found some unique dishes. <em>Carne adovada</em>, the classic New Mexico pork and red chile braise, had a deep earthy chile flavor that made me seriously question my green chile fixation. Because we were there on a weekend night, we could order a side of <em>chicos</em>. A New Mexico spin on a Native American staple, Tomasita’s chicos are whole beans mixed with whole corn kernels that have been steamed over a fire. The texture of the whole beans and the smoky sweet taste of the corn kernels were such an improvement over the pasty blandness of refried beans, I wondered why the chicos weren’t the standard side. And in place of the usual tortillas, we got a basket of fresh sopapillas with honey butter.','Road Trip — Lowbrow Santa Fe','','inherit','closed','closed','','2208-revision-v1','','','2019-01-23 19:30:01','2019-01-24 00:30:01','',2208,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/01/23/2208-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2210,1,'2019-01-23 19:36:47','2019-01-24 00:36:47','We stopped for a moment to catch our breath and figure out how much longer to the top of the <a href=\"https://www.hikingproject.com/trail/7003499/atalaya-mountain-trail-170\">Atalaya Mountain Trail</a>. Yesterday, before we flew out to Santa Fe, we were at 700 ft above sea level. After 90 minutes of walking, I guessed we were at 8,000 ft and had another 1,100 ft to get to the top. Between the altitude and the snow on the trail from the night before, this hike was taking longer than we’d planned. I looked at my watch and told Irene, “If you want to hit the Black Friday artisan market, we need to head back now.” She took another breath. “Nope, we’re heading to the top.”\r\n\r\nForty minutes later, we stood on a rocky ledge looking down over Santa Fe with a group of Argentinians who’d passed us 10 minutes before. We took the obligatory selfie and sat down on the rocks to take in the view. The breakfast cook/owner of our B&amp;B had sold us on this trail. We cursed him on the way up when we slid through the snow and struggled to find the trail markings. But now, looking out over Santa Fe National Forest to the horizon line of a cloudless blue sky, we took those words back.\r\n\r\nSanta Fe visits can go highbrow -- the <a href=\"https://www.okeeffemuseum.org/\">Georgia O’Keefe museum</a> and a run up Canyon Road through all the art galleries -- or lowbrow -- hiking up mountain trails and hunting the best green chile cheeseburger. This trip was all lowbrow. And after 20 minutes of taking in the views at the top of Atalaya Mountain, we had just two things in mind -- green chile cheeseburgers and beer. The 1,800 foot descent only sharpened our appetites. Five-and-a half hours after we’d started, we were sitting at the bar at <a href=\"https://www.secondstreetbrewery.com/the-railyard\">Second Street Brewing’s restaurant in the Railyard District</a>, replacing whatever calories we’d burned off with green chile cheeseburgers and a side of green chile cheese fries. Double lashings of american cheese, which I know I shouldn’t like because it isn’t really cheese, but the creamy gooey-ness of it blended well with the chile bite. We chased it down with a pint of their <a href=\"https://untappd.com/b/second-street-brewery-boneshaker-bitter/675872\">Boneshaker Bitter</a>, one of the better American-made ESBs I’ve had.\r\n\r\nIt was the end of November and the temperature was dropping as we made our way back to our B&amp;B, the <a href=\"https://farolito.com/\">El Farolito</a>. We had our own little <a href=\"https://farolito.com/galisteo-room-1/\">casita</a> out front. Walking in, we saw that housekeeping had the kiva fireplace ready for us, loaded with a triangle of <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyon_pine\">piñon</a> logs over some kindling and a stack of yesterday’s newspaper off to the side. The fire caught with one match (gotta love well-seasoned wood). As the smoke rose up the chimney, I walked back outside and was immediately hit with the<a href=\"https://www.outsidemodern.com/pinon-wood-the-best-firewood-for-chimineas-pinion-pinyon/\"> piñon smell</a>, that unique pinewood smoke smell I only get in Santa Fe. I’ve been around a lot of pinewood fires in, say, Colorado and Arizona, but the piñon smoke billowing out of a kiva fireplace is a unique smell; one that I love. It was a cold hike up the trail this morning; here was a little payback.\r\n\r\nThe next morning, after tucking into another great breakfast, El Farolito’s cook/owner/travel guide recommended we head out to <a href=\"https://www.blm.gov/visit/kktr\">Tent Rocks</a> for our next hike. It would be a completely different environment, hiking through towering volcanic rock formations rather than a forest, and at 600 ft, it would only be a third of yesterday’s climb. However, Tent Rocks is a popular place that caps the number of people it lets in. The forecast was for a sunny Saturday, so we needed to get on our way or risk waiting in line to get in.\r\n\r\nThis was made much easier by our choice of rental car. When we hit the Hertz Presidents’ Club aisle at Albuquerque airport Thursday afternoon, it was pretty picked over; just a very odd selection of Dodge vehicles -- Dodge Challenger muscle cars or fully tricked out Ram Hemi king-cab pick-ups. I can’t say that I’ve ever faced quite that choice at Hertz before. The Challenger, with rear-wheel drive, wouldn’t be great if we got snow at elevation, but the Rams were just huge, trying to parallel park one in downtown Santa Fe would be an event. I stood between them, went back and forth for a couple of minutes. “Just pick one,” Irene said, “it’s a rental car, not a life choice!” I went for the white Challenger and hoped for clear skies.\r\n\r\nAnd on this Saturday morning, that’s what we had -- and a 75 mph speed limit on the southbound stretch of I-25 between us and Tent Rocks. I put my foot into the Challenger and kept it there as we exited the interstate and drove down and west across a flat plateau on Rt 16. I didn’t ease up until we hit the residential streets of the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochiti,_New_Mexico\">Cochiti Pueblo reservation</a>. It was around 10:30 am when we turned onto the access road, expecting to hit the line of waiting cars. We were hugely relieved when we drove straight up to the entrance booth, paid the $5 fee, and continued on to the trail head parking.\r\n\r\nWalking sideways and single file through the narrowest parts of the slot canyon at the start of the Canyon Trail, we immediately understood and appreciated the capacity limit. Without it, the trail would’ve hit gridlock. And we didn’t mind the times when we had to wait for a downhill group to clear a tight squeeze. It gave us time to look up and appreciate the rough beauty left behind by 6-7 million years of erosion.\r\n\r\nComing out of the slot canyon, we hit the steep section. “Do you think it’s worth it,” a dad asked, struggling up the incline with his daughter and a load of snacks on his back. When we got to the flat mesa on top, the answer was there spread out for us when we looked down onto the 90-foot tent rocks (<a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoodoo_(geology)\">hoodoos</a>), and then out across the Rio Grande Valley and to the Sangre de Cristo mountains in the distance. The temperature hit 50°F. We shed a couple of layers of clothing, dangled our legs off a rock ledge, drained our water bottles, and looked out with nothing between us and the horizon. It was our second day of cloudless blue skies and hundred mile vistas.\r\n\r\nDriving back to Santa Fe, we got off of I-25 an exit early and drove up Rt 14 through what felt like the real life Santa Fe. No art dealers and kachina shops; instead, the typical string of auto dealers, gas stations, and shopping centers anchored by Targets and drive-thru Starbucks. We were headed to <a href=\"https://www.rowleyfarmhouse.com/\">Rowley Farmhouse Ales</a> for another post-hike green chile cheeseburger. The Rowley burger was a bit more upscale than yesterday’s -- the menu namechecks local purveyors of the beef, bacon, and cheese (but not the green chile!) on the burger -- but still a very solid burger. The beer list was one of the strongest we’d seen. Flights of tasters let us sample Rowley’s own beers -- a nice range of IPAs, saisons, and sours -- and some of the local guest beers they also had on tap.\r\n\r\nThat evening, we walked over to Guadalupe Street, which feels like the lowbrow counterpart to the plaza or Canyon Road. We stopped first at <a href=\"http://www.cowgirlsantafe.com/\">Cowgirl BBQ</a> for some margarita nostalgia. On our first trip to Santa Fe, I was on the hunt for a great everyday margarita recipe and after a weekend of margarita tasting, we picked Cowgirl’s. We worked our way through their current margarita menu, listening to a group of local guys at the end of the bar talk to the bartender about taking dancing lessons. “God, I missed you guys,” the bartender said.\r\n\r\nWe walked a couple of blocks further down Guadalupe Street to <a href=\"https://tomasitas.com/\">Tomasita’s</a> for dinner. The alcove was full of families and big parties. The hostess gave the party of 6 in front of us a 2-hour wait. For Irene and I, just an hour. We headed to the bar to try their margaritas. When we were seated (15 minutes early!), we searched the menu for something different. Most of it was the standard enchilada and taco combo plates, but with a little patience, we found some unique dishes. <a href=\"https://www.cooksillustrated.com/articles/697-real-carne-adovada\"><em>Carne adovada</em></a>, the classic New Mexico pork and red chile braise, had a deep earthy chile flavor that made me seriously question my green chile fixation. Because we were there on a weekend night, we could order a side of <em>chicos</em>. A New Mexico spin on a Native American staple, Tomasita’s <a href=\"https://highlandsranchfoodie.com/2016/01/beans-and-chicos-2/\">chicos</a> are whole beans mixed with whole corn kernels that have been steamed over a fire. The texture of the whole beans and the smoky sweet taste of the corn kernels were such an improvement over the pasty blandness of refried beans, I wondered why the chicos weren’t the standard side. And in place of the usual tortillas, we got a basket of fresh sopapillas with honey butter.','Road Trip — Lowbrow Santa Fe','','inherit','closed','closed','','2208-revision-v1','','','2019-01-23 19:36:47','2019-01-24 00:36:47','',2208,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/01/23/2208-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2211,1,'2019-01-23 19:40:22','2019-01-24 00:40:22','','20181125_005916392_iOS','In Search of a Killer Margarita','inherit','open','closed','','20181125_005916392_ios','','','2019-01-23 19:41:02','2019-01-24 00:41:02','',2208,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/20181125_005916392_iOS.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(2212,1,'2019-01-23 19:42:54','2019-01-24 00:42:54','[caption id=\"attachment_2004\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/IMG_0464.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2004\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/IMG_0464-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Effects of Extended Exposure to TSA Scan[/caption]\r\n\r\nA last-minute trip to Pune, India provided more than enough material for this episode -- a visa dash, <em>very</em> hands-on airport security, worthless rupee notes, flight disruptions.... We also read the obits for a couple of smart bag companies and hear why MSP\'s T2 isn\'t so ghetto after all. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_141.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_141.mp3\"]<!--more-->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #141:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. Not much travel since the last episode -- just driving up to Wisconsin -- until last week when I did a 5-day trip with a client to Pune, India. Left ORD Friday night, landed in Frankfurt late Saturday morning, heard the announce a flight to Pune before my flight to Delhi. Arrived in Delhi at 1am Monday morning. Overnighted at the airport Radisson Blu (not a bad hotel), and then caught an afternoon Jet Airways flight to Pune. Note to self: you don’t always have to fly the client’s itinerary. In spite of all those legs, those multiple points of potential failure, everything went relatively smoothly.</li>\r\n 	<li>Not so much on the way home. The itinerary was to take an Air India flight from Pune to Delhi at 7pm Thursday night, then the United flight to Newark, getting back to ORD around 9:30. We passed on a 5:30p Jet Airways flight fearing Pune rush hour traffic. And that’s where the itinerary fell apart. While waiting for the client team to check their luggage -- I decided to ignore Air India’s 8 kg carry-on weight limit -- I get an e-mail from Air India with a 2 hr delay due to “operational reasons” which usually means a broken plane. Great. What was a reasonable 2½ layover was suddenly an unrealistic 30-minute dash off the plane, through the standard Indian airport itinerary check, then passport control, full patdown security, weave through the terminal and to the gate. And the inbound Air India plane hasn’t left Delhi yet. I call our Amex travel number -- any room on that Jet Airways flight because it hasn’t left yet. Nope, sold out. I briefly think about 3-hr drive to Mumbai but decide to keep heading to Delhi. I bang “flights DEL ORD May 24” into Google. I filter the Google Flights results for one-way and shortest duration, and then call Amex back. When the agent stopped after listing the limited United options -- I guess because it’s less work for them to keep me on the same airline -- I asked her to check on the non-United options that Google Flights listed. There’s the direct Air India flight to ORD getting in around 7:30a or a Lufthansa connection back through Frankfurt arriving around 1pm. I have her book both, knowing that I can cancel one well within the 24-hr no-penalty window.</li>\r\n 	<li>Pune Airport is a dump. I’m trying to think of a worse airport I’ve been in and I’m drawing a complete blank. Weak air conditioning failing to fight the 95 degree day, 3-4 food stands against the wall, and no bar. With nothing better to do, I bang “Air India ORD DEL business class review” into Google. The results were not kind. But I still think - how bad could it really be? This seems like a bad karma travel day; skipping the FRA connection, avoiding another point of failure, seems to be good idea. But then I finally got on the Air India plane to Delhi. It was also a complete dump. It was a bad 2 hrs; I couldn’t do another 15 hrs with them. I decided to risk the Frankfurt connection. At first it went well; breakfast beer and pretzel in the lounge, on-time boarding. But after boarding, we sat and sat. The captain came on. The good news? The luggage was finally loaded and the cargo doors buttoned up. The bad news? Our pushback time is an hour from now. There was nothing I could do. I pulled out my iPhone and buried myself in the zen of Solitaire. As it turned out, we didn’t take the full hour delay and the pilot juiced the engines so we arrived only 15 minutes late. And after looking at in-flight pictures from the gang that took the Air India direct flight, that 15 minute delay was trampled by the arrival of full-on schadenfreude. I had definitely made the right decision</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em>Gargantua</em> by Admiral Bob (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/46361 Ft: My Free Mickey, Martijn de Boer</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>The airlines’ smart bag ban claimed a couple of casualties this month. Bluesmart posted its blog obituary first -- “the banning of smart luggage with non-removable batteries put our company in an irreversibly difficult financial and business situation”. selling their IP, their intellectual property to TravelPro, one of the “legacy” suitcase brands they used to dismiss. A few weeks later, Raden posted a similar obit -- “We sincerely apologize to those who chose to travel with us, our intent was to add ease and simplicity to your travel experience and this unforeseen policy change has made this impossible.” Both companies said they’re no longer honoring warranties though Bluesmart says they’ll still provide some level of e-mail support. And the smartphone apps if you want to use your grounded bag on, say, a train or a bus. The bag maker Away is still in business, though, even developing a free kit that retrofits their first generation smart bag with an ejectable battery, making them compliant with the airlines’ rules.</li>\r\n 	<li>Gary Learned tweeted back a solid counter-argument on last episode’s rant on MSP’s Terminal 2. After waiting for a Southwest flight back to Chicago, I added it to my “ghetto terminal” list -- the terminals for non-hub airlines -- like O’Hare’s Terminal 2 and Detroit’s North Terminal. Gary has a different take, though. He writes -\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I respectfully disagree on MSP T2. Surdyks has some great taps and wine as well as good small bites. Barrio is a nice little Mexican local restaurant. I can go from car to gate in 5 min. Now MDW on the other hand …</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Car to gate in 5 minutes -- that’s a selling point right there that you won’t pick up Uber-ing in and out of a place. That used to be Midway before it blew up -- little parking lot in front of the terminal and walk right in. I won’t defend Midway now -- it’s a bit of a cluster, though I’m hoping that the pending reconstruction of the security concourse sort of “un-clusters” at least that part of it. Gary, thanks for giving us the contra view of MSP T2. I’ll give Barrio a try the next time I’m there.</li>\r\n 	<li>And since we’re talking about ghetto terminals, when choosing among the client-selected itineraries to India, a connection thru Munich was one of the options -- which long-time listeners know I immediately skipped. Skytrax again named Munich the top European airport. God only knows why, though I know they certainly didn’t ask me. Instead, I connected through Frankfurt, which while not a “wow-sy” airport, is efficient, not a hassle, and gets me on my way. Normally, I’m flying over to FRA from ORD and connecting to some place in Europe, often in the Schengen zone so I don’t have to go through passport control. Connecting to India, though, was a different matter. According to my iPhone’s Health app (admittedly not the most accurate), I walked 1.6 miles that Saturday morning between my ORD and DEL flights. I drug my bag down long corridors empty except for some black plastic chairs fixed in a semi-reclined position surrounded by black cloth cots. FRA airport really missed the chance to strategically locate some little beer stube kiosks along the way. I would’ve stopped at least a couple of times on that trek for some breakfast beers.</li>\r\n 	<li>The India trip was a bit of a last-minute thing which necessitated a scramble for a new Indian visa. This would be my 3rd Indian visa. My first one was a 5-year visa that I lost when my passport was stolen in Brussels. My second one was only for 6 months; I can’t remember why it was so short. This time, I decided to avoid future scrambles and apply for a 10-year visa. Because there’s an Indian consulate in Chicago, I didn’t have to hassle with postage or third-party passport services. The day before, I sent notes to our US HR department and the admin manager in our Hyderabad office asking for the necessary letters of guarantee and invitation, and then did the application online, printed it out and signed it, and then booked an appointment the next morning. I didn’t actually go to the consulate. I’ve always gone to an outsourced visa processing company that handled the front end administrivia, with, near as I can tell, the consulate just approving and signing the visas. Each visa has been with a different processor. For my first visa in 2010, I dropped my forms and passport off at an office in the morning, and received a text at the end of the day that it was ready. In 2014, a different processor gave my wife a hard time -- trying to upsell her on expedited handling charges that weren’t needed. This time, Cox and Kings was a surprisingly painless experience. I went in Thursday after lunch; there was no wait, the people were pleasant. End of day Thursday, I received an e-mail and a text telling me that my application had been processed and was heading to the consulate. On Friday morning, I received and e-mail and text saying that my application had arrived at the consulate. Another message at lunch said that it was being processes, and a last message on Friday said that it was back at Cox and Kings. Monday morning, another message told me it was being packaged up, followed by a message with a UPS tracking number. Tuesday afternoon, my passport landed on my front porch with my 10-year visa. I was incredibly impressed… and feeling a bit spoiled comparing this level of customer service to what my non-US friends tell me they have to go through to get a US visa.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em>A Foolish Game</em> by Zep Hurme (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/zep_hurme/46448</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>When You Think the TSA is Bad...</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>A week of flying around India is always a good sanity check for me -- that no matter what crankiness I’m have about the TSA, airport security in the US is so much easier than in India. When I was talking at the start of the episode about how the delay of our Pune-Delhi flight blew up the rest of our itinerary home, the main reason we immediately starting working alternative flights was because how long we knew it would take to work our way through the different layers of security in Delhi. It started when trying to make our way from domestic flight arrivals into the international departures area so we could re-ticket our flights. We had to pass through the usual itinerary check. I show the army guy the boarding pass for United flight we’d missed -- it was all I had. But since that flight had already left, he wasn’t going to let me through. Luckily, one of the group I was flying with was United Global Services, and two customer service staff had met us as we got off the Air India flight. Even then, it took her a good bit of time to explain the situation to the army guy and convince him to let me through. But for that, I would’ve been idling around baggage claim on my own trying to figure out how to get to a ticket counter.</li>\r\n 	<li>Passport control was pretty efficient, but the security scans -- not so much. After you unpack all your electronics and push everything through the X-ray machine, you walk through the metal detector for your gender -- different scanners for “Gents” and “Ladies” because there’s a full wanding and patdown on the other side. Indeed, the “Ladies” go into a little curtained booth for their patdown. Not normally too much of a hassle, unless the “Ladies” patdown line backs up, and a back up of women’s luggage in the X-ray machine is blocking mine -- which happened that evening. None of the security people moved to clear things. Nothing to do but stand there and wait. Our flight from Pune landed at Delhi at 11pm. When looking at flight alternatives, I’d seen an Air Canada flight leaving at 12:10pm and passed right by it. I knew there was no way we’d make that flight.</li>\r\n 	<li>The security checks in Frankfurt, while much more efficient, were still more than you’d get in the US. On the way over to India, after passing everything through the X-ray machine, I was intercepted after collecting my bags, directed over to a cubicle where all of my bags were swabbed and checked for explosives residue. All done with a German sense of politeness, but I was glad I wasn’t in a rush. On the connection back home, it was a different security line, with a body scanner instead of the walkthru metal detector. No big deal, but just different enough to be awkward. Instead of the TSA’s hands up “don’t shoot” pose, it was an arms down-elbows out pose, kinda like you’re holding luggage. The guy working the scanner was visibly annoyed that he had to instruct me on the pose -- to hold me arms further away from my body. But then there was no luggage swiping on the other side.</li>\r\n 	<li>Picking up my bags, I maneuvered around three officers cradling automatic rifles; they were standing there chatting, but watching. No big deal now, but I remember when I first starting traveling through Europe -- London Heathrow and Frankfurt in the mid- to late-’80’s and being taken aback by the army guys walking around with unslung M-16s and the like. This was pre-TSA time in the US, when it would be out-of-place to see anything more than a rent-a-cop in an airport terminal and you could still turn up 30 minutes before departure time and make your flight. Back then, the difference was eye-opening for a twenty-something traveler. Of course, none of us knew that it was a preview of what flying would be like 20 years later.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em>Melt Away</em> by Kara Square (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/mindmapthat/46605</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Expired Money</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>In last December’s episode, I talked about how I need to have some cash in my pocket when I travel. I know it’s a generational thing; many of my younger colleagues don’t carry any cash, but going “cash naked” just makes me nervous. Assuaging this anxiety on international travel means fills one of my desk drawers with random bits of currency. That’s not a big deal for countries that I or my family visit often. Before my daughter flew back to the UK for her spring semester at St Andrews, I rummaged through the desk and found a £20 note; it bought her breakfast when she landed in Edinburgh.</li>\r\n 	<li>But for countries I visit less often, the money just sits there. I have 350 Mexican pesos -- about $18 at today’s exchange rate; I can’t remember the last time I was in Mexico. I have 400 Chinese yuan -- over $60 -- left over from my last trip to Beijing 4 years ago. At the end of that trip, I thought I’d be going back within the year, so didn’t work hard to spend down those notes. But that next trip didn’t happen, and so there those yuan sit.</li>\r\n 	<li>Before the India trip, I hit the cash drawer and pulled out €12 in notes and coins from our trip to Spain last March, that was for my connections through Frankfurt, and 200 rupees -- about $30 -- left over from my 2014 trip to India. I didn’t spend any of the euros; I spent most of my time either walking through concourses or drinking beer in the Lufthansa lounge. But the rupees came in handy for tipping all the guys at the hotel who insisted on helping me with my carry-on bag. Here’s a 100 for you, and you, and you, and, oh, you too.</li>\r\n 	<li>One night in Pune, we were at the JW Marriott rooftop bar for hors d\'oeuvres and pre-dinner drinks. The catered bar on our side of the terrace has the usual Kingfisher beers. But then I saw someone on the other, the non-catered/public side of the terrace with a different, non-Kingfisher beer. It was a Bira 91 Blonde. I headed over to the main bar to get one. Now, because this was the main bar, not the catered one, I was going to have to pay for the Bira 91, but that wasn’t a problem because I had rupees in my pocket. Yes, they also would’ve taken my Amex card, but I had a 1,000 and a 500 rupee note that I needed to break for more luggage tips, so I laid the 1,000 note on the bar next to my check and then wandered over to the edge of the rooftop to look over the city. A couple minutes later, a guy taps me on the shoulder and gives me back my 1,000 rupees. The note was no good. And then I remembered. Back in Nov 2016, the Indian government made a snap announcement to replace the 500 and 1,000 rupee notes to fight counterfeiting. $20 of my rupees had expired while sitting in my desk drawer. Lots of apologizing, and I ended up pulling out my Amex card after all.</li>\r\n 	<li>When I got home, I took a deeper dive through my cash drawer. Luckily, I didn’t have any old £10 notes, the ones with Charles Darwin on them. He expired a couple of months ago in March, replaced by a new tenner with Jane Austen. I did find a 1,000 Italian lire note with Maria Montessori on the face, which must’ve been left over from, I dunno, maybe our 10th anniversary trip to Tuscany because lire notes were replaced with Euro notes in 2002. My 1,000 note was worth maybe half a euro, about 60 cents when it expired: not a big loss. But today, when I searched on eBay, I saw it selling for $2-3. That’s a 300-400% return. So maybe I’ll just stuff these rupee back in my drawer and check back in, oh, 2035 and make a killing.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #141</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a> and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_141.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #141 — When You Think the TSA is Bad...; Expired Money','','inherit','closed','closed','','1998-revision-v1','','','2019-01-23 19:42:54','2019-01-24 00:42:54','',1998,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/01/23/1998-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2213,1,'2019-01-23 19:43:00','2019-01-24 00:43:00','[caption id=\"attachment_2211\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/20181125_005916392_iOS.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2211\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/20181125_005916392_iOS-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> In Search of a Killer Margarita[/caption]\r\n\r\nWe stopped for a moment to catch our breath and figure out how much longer to the top of the <a href=\"https://www.hikingproject.com/trail/7003499/atalaya-mountain-trail-170\">Atalaya Mountain Trail</a>. Yesterday, before we flew out to Santa Fe, we were at 700 ft above sea level. After 90 minutes of walking, I guessed we were at 8,000 ft and had another 1,100 ft to get to the top. Between the altitude and the snow on the trail from the night before, this hike was taking longer than we’d planned. I looked at my watch and told Irene, “If you want to hit the Black Friday artisan market, we need to head back now.” She took another breath. “Nope, we’re heading to the top.”\r\n\r\nForty minutes later, we stood on a rocky ledge looking down over Santa Fe with a group of Argentinians who’d passed us 10 minutes before. We took the obligatory selfie and sat down on the rocks to take in the view. The breakfast cook/owner of our B&amp;B had sold us on this trail. We cursed him on the way up when we slid through the snow and struggled to find the trail markings. But now, looking out over Santa Fe National Forest to the horizon line of a cloudless blue sky, we took those words back.\r\n\r\nSanta Fe visits can go highbrow -- the <a href=\"https://www.okeeffemuseum.org/\">Georgia O’Keefe museum</a> and a run up Canyon Road through all the art galleries -- or lowbrow -- hiking up mountain trails and hunting the best green chile cheeseburger. This trip was all lowbrow. And after 20 minutes of taking in the views at the top of Atalaya Mountain, we had just two things in mind -- green chile cheeseburgers and beer. The 1,800 foot descent only sharpened our appetites. Five-and-a half hours after we’d started, we were sitting at the bar at <a href=\"https://www.secondstreetbrewery.com/the-railyard\">Second Street Brewing’s restaurant in the Railyard District</a>, replacing whatever calories we’d burned off with green chile cheeseburgers and a side of green chile cheese fries. Double lashings of american cheese, which I know I shouldn’t like because it isn’t really cheese, but the creamy gooey-ness of it blended well with the chile bite. We chased it down with a pint of their <a href=\"https://untappd.com/b/second-street-brewery-boneshaker-bitter/675872\">Boneshaker Bitter</a>, one of the better American-made ESBs I’ve had.\r\n\r\nIt was the end of November and the temperature was dropping as we made our way back to our B&amp;B, the <a href=\"https://farolito.com/\">El Farolito</a>. We had our own little <a href=\"https://farolito.com/galisteo-room-1/\">casita</a> out front. Walking in, we saw that housekeeping had the kiva fireplace ready for us, loaded with a triangle of <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyon_pine\">piñon</a> logs over some kindling and a stack of yesterday’s newspaper off to the side. The fire caught with one match (gotta love well-seasoned wood). As the smoke rose up the chimney, I walked back outside and was immediately hit with the<a href=\"https://www.outsidemodern.com/pinon-wood-the-best-firewood-for-chimineas-pinion-pinyon/\"> piñon smell</a>, that unique pinewood smoke smell I only get in Santa Fe. I’ve been around a lot of pinewood fires in, say, Colorado and Arizona, but the piñon smoke billowing out of a kiva fireplace is a unique smell; one that I love. It was a cold hike up the trail this morning; here was a little payback.\r\n\r\nThe next morning, after tucking into another great breakfast, El Farolito’s cook/owner/travel guide recommended we head out to <a href=\"https://www.blm.gov/visit/kktr\">Tent Rocks</a> for our next hike. It would be a completely different environment, hiking through towering volcanic rock formations rather than a forest, and at 600 ft, it would only be a third of yesterday’s climb. However, Tent Rocks is a popular place that caps the number of people it lets in. The forecast was for a sunny Saturday, so we needed to get on our way or risk waiting in line to get in.\r\n\r\nThis was made much easier by our choice of rental car. When we hit the Hertz Presidents’ Club aisle at Albuquerque airport Thursday afternoon, it was pretty picked over; just a very odd selection of Dodge vehicles -- Dodge Challenger muscle cars or fully tricked out Ram Hemi king-cab pick-ups. I can’t say that I’ve ever faced quite that choice at Hertz before. The Challenger, with rear-wheel drive, wouldn’t be great if we got snow at elevation, but the Rams were just huge, trying to parallel park one in downtown Santa Fe would be an event. I stood between them, went back and forth for a couple of minutes. “Just pick one,” Irene said, “it’s a rental car, not a life choice!” I went for the white Challenger and hoped for clear skies.\r\n\r\nAnd on this Saturday morning, that’s what we had -- and a 75 mph speed limit on the southbound stretch of I-25 between us and Tent Rocks. I put my foot into the Challenger and kept it there as we exited the interstate and drove down and west across a flat plateau on Rt 16. I didn’t ease up until we hit the residential streets of the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochiti,_New_Mexico\">Cochiti Pueblo reservation</a>. It was around 10:30 am when we turned onto the access road, expecting to hit the line of waiting cars. We were hugely relieved when we drove straight up to the entrance booth, paid the $5 fee, and continued on to the trail head parking.\r\n\r\nWalking sideways and single file through the narrowest parts of the slot canyon at the start of the Canyon Trail, we immediately understood and appreciated the capacity limit. Without it, the trail would’ve hit gridlock. And we didn’t mind the times when we had to wait for a downhill group to clear a tight squeeze. It gave us time to look up and appreciate the rough beauty left behind by 6-7 million years of erosion.\r\n\r\nComing out of the slot canyon, we hit the steep section. “Do you think it’s worth it,” a dad asked, struggling up the incline with his daughter and a load of snacks on his back. When we got to the flat mesa on top, the answer was there spread out for us when we looked down onto the 90-foot tent rocks (<a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoodoo_(geology)\">hoodoos</a>), and then out across the Rio Grande Valley and to the Sangre de Cristo mountains in the distance. The temperature hit 50°F. We shed a couple of layers of clothing, dangled our legs off a rock ledge, drained our water bottles, and looked out with nothing between us and the horizon. It was our second day of cloudless blue skies and hundred mile vistas.\r\n\r\nDriving back to Santa Fe, we got off of I-25 an exit early and drove up Rt 14 through what felt like the real life Santa Fe. No art dealers and kachina shops; instead, the typical string of auto dealers, gas stations, and shopping centers anchored by Targets and drive-thru Starbucks. We were headed to <a href=\"https://www.rowleyfarmhouse.com/\">Rowley Farmhouse Ales</a> for another post-hike green chile cheeseburger. The Rowley burger was a bit more upscale than yesterday’s -- the menu namechecks local purveyors of the beef, bacon, and cheese (but not the green chile!) on the burger -- but still a very solid burger. The beer list was one of the strongest we’d seen. Flights of tasters let us sample Rowley’s own beers -- a nice range of IPAs, saisons, and sours -- and some of the local guest beers they also had on tap.\r\n\r\nThat evening, we walked over to Guadalupe Street, which feels like the lowbrow counterpart to the plaza or Canyon Road. We stopped first at <a href=\"http://www.cowgirlsantafe.com/\">Cowgirl BBQ</a> for some margarita nostalgia. On our first trip to Santa Fe, I was on the hunt for a great everyday margarita recipe and after a weekend of margarita tasting, we picked Cowgirl’s. We worked our way through their current margarita menu, listening to a group of local guys at the end of the bar talk to the bartender about taking dancing lessons. “God, I missed you guys,” the bartender said.\r\n\r\nWe walked a couple of blocks further down Guadalupe Street to <a href=\"https://tomasitas.com/\">Tomasita’s</a> for dinner. The alcove was full of families and big parties. The hostess gave the party of 6 in front of us a 2-hour wait. For Irene and I, just an hour. We headed to the bar to try their margaritas. When we were seated (15 minutes early!), we searched the menu for something different. Most of it was the standard enchilada and taco combo plates, but with a little patience, we found some unique dishes. <a href=\"https://www.cooksillustrated.com/articles/697-real-carne-adovada\"><em>Carne adovada</em></a>, the classic New Mexico pork and red chile braise, had a deep earthy chile flavor that made me seriously question my green chile fixation. Because we were there on a weekend night, we could order a side of <em>chicos</em>. A New Mexico spin on a Native American staple, Tomasita’s <a href=\"https://highlandsranchfoodie.com/2016/01/beans-and-chicos-2/\">chicos</a> are whole beans mixed with whole corn kernels that have been steamed over a fire. The texture of the whole beans and the smoky sweet taste of the corn kernels were such an improvement over the pasty blandness of refried beans, I wondered why the chicos weren’t the standard side. And in place of the usual tortillas, we got a basket of fresh sopapillas with honey butter.','Road Trip — Lowbrow Santa Fe','','inherit','closed','closed','','2208-revision-v1','','','2019-01-23 19:43:00','2019-01-24 00:43:00','',2208,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/01/23/2208-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2215,1,'2019-01-23 19:47:17','2019-01-24 00:47:17','[caption id=\"attachment_619\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/3080840638_1e4963b285_z1.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-619\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/3080840638_1e4963b285_z1-300x200.jpg\" alt=\"Woman eating alone\" width=\"300\" height=\"200\" /></a> Eating alone at O\'Brian\'s Deli. © Ron Tamondong / Flickr[/caption]\r\n\r\nDinner time on my last visit to Philadelphia  and I was sitting at the bar of <a href=\"http://www.tintorestaurant.com/menu.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Tinto</a>, a Spanish restaurant in <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Philadelphia\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/pennsylvania/philadelphia\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\">Philadelphia</a>. My dinner was a couple of plates of <a href=\" http://www.spain.info/en_US/reportajes/las_tapas_sabores_de_lujo_para_todos_los_paladares.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">tapas</a> -- one of grilled octopus, another of sautéed wild mushrooms and caramelized shallots. I put in the order for mushrooms and shallots immediately after the couple two stools down got theirs. The smell was phenomenal. I had a couple of good glasses of Spanish red wine and 60-second bursts of conversation with the bartender about her favorite wines and how business was going in given the economy. General chitchat.\r\n\r\nIt was a great meal and a nice way to spend a couple of hours on my own outside of my hotel room, both important things for a frequent business traveler. And it got me to thinking about what makes for a good place for a solo traveler to eat on the road.\r\n\r\nFor many guys, this question doesn\'t take much thought. The sports bar concept might as well have been created for the solo guy traveler.  It has everything a guy needs: a good burger, large glasses of <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Coors Light\" href=\"http://www.coorslight.com\" rel=\"homepage\">Coors Light</a>, and walls of TV screens showing all <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Espn\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">ESPN</a> all the time – ESPN, ESPN-2, <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"ESPN3\" href=\"http://www.espn3.com\" rel=\"homepage\">ESPN-3</a>, ESPN-U, ESPN News…. But, while I like a good burger as much as the next guy (though I’ll chase it with something a bit more interesting than Coors Light), a regular diet of them is an express train to the angioplasty table.\r\n\r\nSo, outside the sports bar genre, what makes for a good dinner place for a solo traveler? Taking “good food” and “cleanliness” as table stakes, there are three things that come to mind:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li><strong>Availability. </strong>Can you get in at a reasonable time? While on the road, I don’t start thinking about dinner until, at the most, a couple of hours before I’m ready to eat.  Any place with a month or even a day waiting list for a seat doesn’t make the cut. I’m usually working all day and have more work to do in the evening, so I have a tight dining window – I’m trying to eat somewhere between 6 and 7pm.  At Tinto in Philly, I walked in – 7pm Thursday night – and was seated right away. In <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"San Francisco\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/san-francisco\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\">San Francisco</a> the week before, I had a 7:30pm reservation at the<a href=\"http://www.slanteddoor.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> Slanted Door</a>, a well-known pan-Asian restaurant, wasn\'t seated until 8:15, didn’t get out until 9:30, and still had documents to review before I could go to bed. It didn’t make for a relaxing meal.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Small plates. </strong>I like variety; I like to try multiple things on a menu. However, a solo diner ordering a standard sized starter and main course will end up with way too much food. So, you either lose out on variety by only ordering one dish, or you feel guilty for leaving behind a bunch of uneaten food. Or, probably most typically, you eat it all anyhow en route to the 20 extra pounds that many frequent travelers find themselves carrying. Small plates – either small servings like tapas or sushi, or the option to scale down an entrée portion – are the way to solve this problem.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Bar seating. </strong>When you’re eating by yourself, nothing puts an exclamation point on it like sitting alone at a table for 2… or 4. You sit there, staring ahead, or perhaps reading, or perhaps playing BrickBreaker on your BlackBerry until your food arrives. Then you wolf it down, because there’s really nothing else to do at the table, and then you pay up and leave. A pretty soulless transaction. Skip the \"table for one\" experience completely. Eating at the bar gives you some shot at human interaction, be it with the bartender or some of the people sitting beside you. The bartender is usually good for 3 or 4 dialog exchanges. And though it’s a bit riskier, there’s always the chance for a bit of a conversation with the other bar patrons. I\'m seeing more restaurants move this bar seating vibe down to table height with communal seating tables – long tables at which they seat multiple parties.  <a href=\"http://thepublicanrestaurant.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Publican</a> and <a href=\"http://www.avecrestaurant.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Avec</a> in Chicago and<a href=\"http://www.clydecommon.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> Clyde Common</a> in Portland are places where I’ve seen this.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\nNow, if restaurants would build their web sites in something other than Flash so that I can read their menus on my iPhone…\r\n','Table for One: Eating Alone on the Road','','inherit','closed','closed','','617-revision-v1','','','2019-01-23 19:47:17','2019-01-24 00:47:17','',617,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/01/23/617-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2216,1,'2019-01-23 19:55:19','2019-01-24 00:55:19','[caption id=\"attachment_2168\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2168\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> But I filled up the tank[/caption]\r\n\r\nGetting this posted just in time to give you something to listen to while jammed up in Thanksgiving traffic, be it on the road or in the airports. We talk about working the angles to maximize credit card benefits, which leads me to one more story from my fall trip to Europe -- a rental car scrape that my Chase Visa card just paid off. We also talk about the Wall Street Journal\'s new ranking of US airports and compare it to Skytrax\'s international rankings. And we wrap up with my Christmas gift suggestions for the frequent traveler on your list.  All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_146.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n<iframe src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/533121708&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"></iframe><!--more Click See To Read The Detailed Show Notes -->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #146:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, trying to give you something to keep you entertained? Or at least occupied as you thread through the Thanksgiving travel traffic -- be it airports, trains, or roadways -- the forecasts are for a 5% increase over last year.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’ve been trying to get this episode done for the past 2 weeks, but I just haven’t been able to make it happen. Since we last spoke, I’ve been in the midst of a weekly commute between Chicago and Dallas. It’s the standard consultant commute -- leaving ORD Monday at 7am, leaving DFW Thursday at 5pm -- the consulting rush hour. The lounges are packed, the Starbucks line tails way back; no matter what status, you’re in a middle seat if you don’t book 3 weeks ahead of time, and for a mere Advantage Platinum person, there’s no chance of an upgrade. I do click through American’s website to request an upgrade every week -- more for the entertainment value than any expectation of getting a seat. This week, I was #35 on the upgrade list.</li>\r\n 	<li>The traffic between these 2 American hubs is pretty amazing. The first week of this commute, taking the 6:30p flight back to Chicago, it was a fully-packed 787 Dreamliner. So I’m thinking -- hey, I gotta have a good shot at an upgrade on this flight, with all the first and business class seats. Nope, though I did get up to the teens on the upgrade list -- #15 to be exact. I counted myself lucky to get out of a center seat at the last minute.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’m not a huge fan of DFW Airport. It’s a massive, spread-out place with a $4 toll charge to just to drive out of the place. The semi-circular terminals are also spread out affairs, with 3 security checkpoints arrayed around each perimeter, only one of which has PreCheck and really not well-marked. I tweeted that out in frustration a few weeks back after trundling around from checkpoint to checkpoint. The DFW Airport Twitter account quickly came back with a <a href=\"https://www.dfwairport.com/security/\">link</a> to their website that has the location and hours of each checkpoint, with the PreCheck one bolded. Very useful. I have bookmarked on my iPhone now.</li>\r\n 	<li>The next day, back in Chicago, I was downtown, getting a afternoon espresso jolt at Intelligentsia Coffee, not a completely full-on hipster joint -- there no turntable playing vintage vinyl -- but they are a bit fussy about their coffee. You place your order, they ask your name, and then you mill around a bit waiting for them to “craft” your coffee. I’m scrolling through e-mail, the barista is calling out names in the background. He calls out \"Marco\". Completely on reflex, my inner child responds \"Polo\" and not quietly or under my breath. The guy sitting across from me looks up from his MacBook and starts laughing. The guy getting his coffee, Marco, apparently, turns around and gives me a slightly nasty look. Or maybe just puzzled. Or more likely a bit of both.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/indidginus-seismic/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Superstring</a></em> by Indidginus</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul class=\"\">\r\n 	<li>Allan Marko, a long-time listener, posted a travel story on the TravelCommons Facebook page -\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I flew from SFO to MUC with a colleague last month on UAL Business Class (my first trip on a 787 - nice plane, and decent service from the UA team) We had an early morning arrival, and an hour to kill before our transportation arrived. My colleague’s 1K status couldn’t get us into the Lufthansa Arrivals Lounge for showers. I pulled up the Priority Pass app on my iPhone (membership came with my Chase Sapphire Reserve Card) and saw there was an Atlantic Lounge over in Terminal 1 that had shower facilities. We took the bus over to Terminal 1 which serves many European, Middle East, and other second-tier airlines. Pulling out my physical Priority Pass card (as opposed to the one in the app) I got both of us into the lounge and their two shower rooms. The lounge only offered the basics and needed of refresh, but we were happy to find it that morning (including the free beer!).</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Allan, thanks for that, and good on you for figuring that all out. There are so many nooks and crannies in the card benefits world. There’s real value there, but you have to think about it and dig in a bit. The last time I used my Priority Pass (which I got with my Amex Platinum card) was last summer when I was connecting through DUB on my way to London. That lounge was similar to Allan’s MUC experience -- pretty basic, a bit threadbare, but a reasonable place for a cup of tea and breakfast. My son Andrew used his Priority Pass card (also from his Chase card) to get a $28 credit at a restaurant in BOS which paid for a pre-flight meal and a couple of beers. “For the two of us, I think we were due $56 credit, but we wanted to be able to board the plane, so we cut ourselves off.” A colleague of mine told me that, in LGA, after Amex’s Centurion Lounge closed, his UA Gold status got him into the Air Canada lounge to wait out the rest of a long flight delay. “I only thought they let in Star Alliance Gold passengers for international flights, but let me in for my LGA-ORD flight.” And then there’s things like the 10 Gogo in-flight WiFi passes that I get every year with my Platinum card that I never burn through, or the $200 in annual statement credit that I think I get on UA and am always surprised when I see the charge for the in-flight tapas box reversed. And I’m reminded that I gotta pay more attention to this stuff because I hate leaving money on the table.</li>\r\n 	<li>I will say that there are 2 good things about doing trunk line, hub-to-hub commute vs., say, my last regular commute, between ORD and Charlottesville, VA: great flight frequency -- between AA and UA, there’s a flight at most every hour and that’s not even looking at SWA’s schedule out of Love Field; and, no RJs, no regional jets. I had forgotten how nice it is to be able to stand up straight in the aisle, let alone in the toilet. I take happiness in the small things.</li>\r\n 	<li>I was talking to a colleague about this -- flying AA, and UA, and SWA based on the most convenient times and price, and then maybe equipment (avoiding those RJs when I can). He said “I’m always amazed at how promiscuous you are in your airline choices.” It was an interesting word choice; one that kinda speaks to how invested people can get in their travel choices. Though it can also be a bit of Stockholm Syndrome for folks who have to fly out of fortress hubs, like this colleague who is in a very conflicted relationship with United out of Newark. “I think you’re more right than me,” he said. He’s 1K on United, their top tier. I’m mid-tier on United and American. Comparing notes, he hasn’t gotten any more upgrades than me, and though I board after 1Ks (or Exec Platinums on AA), I haven’t yet had a problem finding overhead space, even on packed flights to DFW. I’ve said it before -- I don’t think there’s all that much difference between mid- and top-tier loyalty ranks; certainly not enough to take less convenient flights to earn the extra miles needed to stay top-tier.</li>\r\n 	<li>A study of US airport growth hit the TravelCommons inbox on Halloween, saying that the two airports with the biggest drop in traffic are Memphis and Cincinnati. We talked about this back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/08/09/podcast-143-how-bad-is-business-travel-for-your-health-make-layovers-fun/\">August episode</a> when I was flying in and out of Cincinnati for 4 weeks straight. Nice airport, but I said back then it felt a bit overbuilt, and how both it and Memphis felt empty after after being “de-hubbed” by Delta. I wasn’t wrong. This new survey ground through 10 years of FAA traffic data and came to the same conclusion. Memphis lost the most traffic, down 62%. Cincinnati was second, losing 51% of its traffic.</li>\r\n 	<li>So you can guess that neither made the Wall Street Journal’s ranking of the 20 largest US airports. Denver, Orlando and Phoenix at the top 3 finishers while the three NYC airports -- LaGuardia, JFK, and Newark -- brought up the rear, numbers 18, 19, and 20. Surprises? I dunno -- maybe that LaGuardia wasn’t in last place given all the construction disruptions, that LAX was higher at #9 than Minneapolis-St Paul at #11, and that O’Hare is one spot higher than San Francisco, 15 vs. 16. That’s probably as much to do with their methodology as anything - how they weighed all the different score components, things like on-time arrivals, average TSA wait, cost of on-prem parking, average ticket cost. It’s interesting, though, to compare this ranking with Skytrax’s ranking of global airports. Denver, the top US airport on both lists; at #28 on Skytrax’s list. Cincinnati is the second US airport on the Skytrax list at #34, which makes sense when you look at the methodologies. Skytrax is focused on the in-airport experience -- terminal seating, cleanliness, queue times, friendliness of staff. With these criteria, I don’t doubt that Cincinnati should rank high -- it’s probably helped by now being a bit overbuilt -- lots of space and fewer people to clean up after. The Journal’s is a bit more wide-ranging, looking both inside and outside the terminal, including things like average fares, rental-car taxes and fees, number of nonstop destinations and dominance of the largest airline to its rankings. I’ll put links to both in the show notes for those interesting in a deeper dive.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our new Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/yoria-suerte/\"><em>Suerte Mijo</em></a> by Arthur Yoria</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Rental Demolition Derby</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I’ve rented a lot of cars in my business travel and have never crashed one. I drive them off the lot, use them for 3-4 days, fill them back up with gas, return them to the lot, and walk away. So when I picked up a car from Hertz at Edinburgh airport back in September, I skipped all the insurance coverages, took the keys to a brand new Toyota hybrid cross-over, and drove off the lot. This was my fourth September in a row renting from the Hertz and had never had an incident -- even when driving a manual on the left side of the road while shifting with my left hand -- well, other than a Fiat that dropped its transmission, but that wasn’t my fault. So, no need to waste the collision damage waiver charges.</li>\r\n 	<li>You can see where this is going. The next day, I was driving a narrow road in St Andrews, heading south out of town to go knock around the fishing villages on the north bank of the Firth of Forth. Roads in Scotland can get narrow. Driving the one-lane roads in the Highlands are an acquired talent, but this road is in a residential neighborhood, and I’ve driven it many times. So I couldn’t believe it when I heard a big thump as I drove past a van. Damn, I thought, had I drifted over to the left and popped the van’s rear view mirror? I pulled over and hopped out of the car. No, it was worse. There was a huge crease along the left side of the car; just missed the front wheel, so still driveable but very ugly. I walked down to the van. It belonged to a nearby community center. In a hurry to pick up kids from school, the driver had pulled out into me as I drove past. I pulled out an accident report form that Hertz had helpfully put in the glove compartment. We filled it out, skipped calling the police since no one was hurt.</li>\r\n 	<li>So, again, not my fault, but I’m still, a few days later, I’m turning in a car with a full tank and some extra body work. I point out the damage to the Hertz guy. He pulls up a different tab on his Samsung tablet -- click, click, click -- damage, front left wing; damage, front left door; damage, rear left door -- took a couple of pictures, and because I’d skipped the CDW, out burped the bill -- £780 or about $1,000. They ran it through on my Chase Sapphire Visa card.</li>\r\n 	<li>Which I gave to Hertz because, as I was poking through the nooks and crannies of the Chase website before I left home, I confirmed that card would cover UK rental car damage for rentals charged to it. The next week, back home, I found where to file a claim. They didn’t make it easy, but Google eventually uncovered it. I created a claim, uploaded a scan of the accident report, the Hertz receipt, and a couple of iPhone pictures of the damage. And then waited. The website said they’d take 2 weeks to review and get back to me. Three weeks later, I called. A guy said they’d sent me an email asking for two more documents from Hertz. Hmmm, never saw that, but who knows what gets caught up in the Spam filtering. They wanted a copy of the original Hertz agreement, which I had left in the car, and Hertz’s repair cost breakdown. OK, that was reasonable. I called Hertz and a very helpful woman put in a request and said get it in a week. Within a couple of days, Hertz sent me what I needed. I uploaded them to my claim and waited another 2 weeks. On Day 2 Weeks + 1, I called. A woman looked at my file, said it was still being reviewed by management, but said she’s put me on hold and ring them for status. Two minutes later, she picked up and they’d approved my claim. 48 hours later, the $1,000 showed up in my bank account. It took me a bit over 2 months, but Chase paid my claim with a minimum amount of hassle.</li>\r\n 	<li>Now, while I’ve had a good rental car record in Scotland, my record in Hungary is not quite clean. Indeed, every time I’ve driven there, it’s been something. The last time I drove, we were a couple of blocks away from the rental return next to the Marriott on the Danube. Pulling into an intersection after stopping at a Stop sign, a motorcycle messenger plowed into the front of my car, flew across the hood, and landed in the street on the other side of the intersection. Luckily, he was in a full helmet and leathers and unhurt. The rental car, not so lucky. The entire front end was ripped off. The rental car guy showed up as the police were finishing their report. I pulled out suitcases out of the trunk and gave him the key. He looked at the front of his car in disbelief. We wheeled our bags down the sidewalk to the Marriott because this time, I had bought the collision damage waiver.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/artemis-gravity/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Inception</a></em> by Artemis</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Traveler Gift Guide</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>As we come into the Christmas shopping season, I thought it would be useful to pull together some suggestions for the frequent traveler in your life. Or, if you are the frequent traveler, a list of hints you might want to drop on family members looking for ideas.</li>\r\n 	<li>Top of the list is a good battery charger. Whatever the size or form factor -- slimline, lipstick, high-capacity brick -- having that second or third charge readily available is critical to get notified of gate changes and when you’re using electronic boarding passes. It saves you from stalking cleaning crews to find a live power outlet on your layover, or negotiating with your seatmate for possession of outlet between you. I’m always looking to shed weight, so I retired the heavy no-name pack I picked up in the depths of Beijing’s Pearl Street Market for an Anker lipstick sized charger. I bought three and gave one to my wife and daughter. It’s cheap piece of mind.</li>\r\n 	<li>On my shopping list, trying to catch up to what’s already a cold winter, is one of those puffy coats -- but one of the thin ones, like the Patagonia Nano Puff, one that will smoosh down to nothing in the front pocket of my suitcase, or will fit in the crevices of a jammed full overhead bin. Right next that on the list, a man’s scarf is an incredibly undervalued piece of intermediate winter wear. In an airplane cabin or hotel room where a coat is too much (especially in a middle seat), but there’s a draft that chills you, a scarf around the neck is just enough without being too much. You may have to teach him how to wear it, but you can have fun with colors.</li>\r\n 	<li>For someone just embarking on the road warrior life, how ‘bout a black 20-inch hardsided carry-on. Black not only makes you look thinner, it makes your bag look thinner to gate agents hunting for bag-sizer bait. Black also doesn’t show stains. A 20-incher should get on-board for 90% of airlines, and the hard sides are the easiest to get in and out of a bag sizer if the not-yet-statused traveler gets waylaid by an over-zealous gate agent.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you’re going big for someone -- or for those December babies, combining Christmas and birthday gifts -- noise canceling headphones are a statement gift. The good ones -- the Bose or Sonys that make the drone of the jet engines disappear with the flick of a switch -- are a $300 number. But the drop in stress level and blood pressure that accompanies that flick of the switch -- you don’t realize how much that drone affects you until you turn on your Bose -- makes it worth the number. Everything in my briefcase has to earn its space. I’ve been carrying Bose headphones for, I dunno, 10, 15 years. They’re nowhere near compact, but I’ve never thought of leaving them behind.</li>\r\n 	<li>Another idea for the music -- or podcast lover, is a small portable Bluetooth speaker. I’ve started packing mine again for trips of a week or longer. For a couple of days, I’m fine with wearing headphones or using the phone speaker. But longer than that or if I’m with the family in, say, an Airbnb, I want something a bit more social. I’m still using my 6-year old Jambox speaker, the one that kinda created this category. The maker, Jawbone, went under last year, but the speaker still works. There are newer, better ones out there now, at all sorts of price points. The ones that can act as speaker phones are a nice to-have if they fit your budget.</li>\r\n 	<li>And finally, a stocking stuffer idea -- a travel notebook, something to jot down thoughts, ideas, observations, to do lists while waiting for the flight to board, the train to come, or the room to be made up. Nothing extravagant -- no leather embossed cover -- but it should be small enough to fit in a pocket, but substantial, something that can survive being knocked around in the bottom of a briefcase, and with paper quality that will hold onto those thoughts for a while. I used to use a Moleskine 3½x5½” notebook but have switched over a similar-sized A6 Clairefontaine. The soft cover fits better in a jeans back pocket, and the paper is more fountain-pen friendly. It’s $10 for a Moleskine, $7 for two Clairefontaines. Or go a bit more whimsical and get a 3-pack of Field Notes for $13. It’ll fit your budget and the stocking.</li>\r\n 	<li>So there you go, something to fit all sizes and budgets in time for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, or if you’re just killing time waiting for your Thanksgiving flight to leave.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #146</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and now on <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Magnatune</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_146.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #146 — Rental Demolition Derby; Traveler Gift Guide','','inherit','closed','closed','','2167-revision-v1','','','2019-01-23 19:55:19','2019-01-24 00:55:19','',2167,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/01/23/2167-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2217,1,'2019-01-23 19:56:06','2019-01-24 00:56:06','[caption id=\"attachment_2168\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2168\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> But I filled up the tank[/caption]\r\n\r\nGetting this posted just in time to give you something to listen to while jammed up in Thanksgiving traffic, be it on the road or in the airports. We talk about working the angles to maximize credit card benefits, which leads me to one more story from my fall trip to Europe -- a rental car scrape that my Chase Visa card just paid off. We also talk about the Wall Street Journal\'s new ranking of US airports and compare it to Skytrax\'s international rankings. And we wrap up with my Christmas gift suggestions for the frequent traveler on your list.  All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_146.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n<iframe src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/533121708&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"></iframe><!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show Notes -->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #146:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, trying to give you something to keep you entertained? Or at least occupied as you thread through the Thanksgiving travel traffic -- be it airports, trains, or roadways -- the forecasts are for a 5% increase over last year.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’ve been trying to get this episode done for the past 2 weeks, but I just haven’t been able to make it happen. Since we last spoke, I’ve been in the midst of a weekly commute between Chicago and Dallas. It’s the standard consultant commute -- leaving ORD Monday at 7am, leaving DFW Thursday at 5pm -- the consulting rush hour. The lounges are packed, the Starbucks line tails way back; no matter what status, you’re in a middle seat if you don’t book 3 weeks ahead of time, and for a mere Advantage Platinum person, there’s no chance of an upgrade. I do click through American’s website to request an upgrade every week -- more for the entertainment value than any expectation of getting a seat. This week, I was #35 on the upgrade list.</li>\r\n 	<li>The traffic between these 2 American hubs is pretty amazing. The first week of this commute, taking the 6:30p flight back to Chicago, it was a fully-packed 787 Dreamliner. So I’m thinking -- hey, I gotta have a good shot at an upgrade on this flight, with all the first and business class seats. Nope, though I did get up to the teens on the upgrade list -- #15 to be exact. I counted myself lucky to get out of a center seat at the last minute.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’m not a huge fan of DFW Airport. It’s a massive, spread-out place with a $4 toll charge to just to drive out of the place. The semi-circular terminals are also spread out affairs, with 3 security checkpoints arrayed around each perimeter, only one of which has PreCheck and really not well-marked. I tweeted that out in frustration a few weeks back after trundling around from checkpoint to checkpoint. The DFW Airport Twitter account quickly came back with a <a href=\"https://www.dfwairport.com/security/\">link</a> to their website that has the location and hours of each checkpoint, with the PreCheck one bolded. Very useful. I have bookmarked on my iPhone now.</li>\r\n 	<li>The next day, back in Chicago, I was downtown, getting a afternoon espresso jolt at Intelligentsia Coffee, not a completely full-on hipster joint -- there no turntable playing vintage vinyl -- but they are a bit fussy about their coffee. You place your order, they ask your name, and then you mill around a bit waiting for them to “craft” your coffee. I’m scrolling through e-mail, the barista is calling out names in the background. He calls out \"Marco\". Completely on reflex, my inner child responds \"Polo\" and not quietly or under my breath. The guy sitting across from me looks up from his MacBook and starts laughing. The guy getting his coffee, Marco, apparently, turns around and gives me a slightly nasty look. Or maybe just puzzled. Or more likely a bit of both.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/indidginus-seismic/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Superstring</a></em> by Indidginus</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul class=\"\">\r\n 	<li>Allan Marko, a long-time listener, posted a travel story on the TravelCommons Facebook page -\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I flew from SFO to MUC with a colleague last month on UAL Business Class (my first trip on a 787 - nice plane, and decent service from the UA team) We had an early morning arrival, and an hour to kill before our transportation arrived. My colleague’s 1K status couldn’t get us into the Lufthansa Arrivals Lounge for showers. I pulled up the Priority Pass app on my iPhone (membership came with my Chase Sapphire Reserve Card) and saw there was an Atlantic Lounge over in Terminal 1 that had shower facilities. We took the bus over to Terminal 1 which serves many European, Middle East, and other second-tier airlines. Pulling out my physical Priority Pass card (as opposed to the one in the app) I got both of us into the lounge and their two shower rooms. The lounge only offered the basics and needed of refresh, but we were happy to find it that morning (including the free beer!).</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Allan, thanks for that, and good on you for figuring that all out. There are so many nooks and crannies in the card benefits world. There’s real value there, but you have to think about it and dig in a bit. The last time I used my Priority Pass (which I got with my Amex Platinum card) was last summer when I was connecting through DUB on my way to London. That lounge was similar to Allan’s MUC experience -- pretty basic, a bit threadbare, but a reasonable place for a cup of tea and breakfast. My son Andrew used his Priority Pass card (also from his Chase card) to get a $28 credit at a restaurant in BOS which paid for a pre-flight meal and a couple of beers. “For the two of us, I think we were due $56 credit, but we wanted to be able to board the plane, so we cut ourselves off.” A colleague of mine told me that, in LGA, after Amex’s Centurion Lounge closed, his UA Gold status got him into the Air Canada lounge to wait out the rest of a long flight delay. “I only thought they let in Star Alliance Gold passengers for international flights, but let me in for my LGA-ORD flight.” And then there’s things like the 10 Gogo in-flight WiFi passes that I get every year with my Platinum card that I never burn through, or the $200 in annual statement credit that I think I get on UA and am always surprised when I see the charge for the in-flight tapas box reversed. And I’m reminded that I gotta pay more attention to this stuff because I hate leaving money on the table.</li>\r\n 	<li>I will say that there are 2 good things about doing trunk line, hub-to-hub commute vs., say, my last regular commute, between ORD and Charlottesville, VA: great flight frequency -- between AA and UA, there’s a flight at most every hour and that’s not even looking at SWA’s schedule out of Love Field; and, no RJs, no regional jets. I had forgotten how nice it is to be able to stand up straight in the aisle, let alone in the toilet. I take happiness in the small things.</li>\r\n 	<li>I was talking to a colleague about this -- flying AA, and UA, and SWA based on the most convenient times and price, and then maybe equipment (avoiding those RJs when I can). He said “I’m always amazed at how promiscuous you are in your airline choices.” It was an interesting word choice; one that kinda speaks to how invested people can get in their travel choices. Though it can also be a bit of Stockholm Syndrome for folks who have to fly out of fortress hubs, like this colleague who is in a very conflicted relationship with United out of Newark. “I think you’re more right than me,” he said. He’s 1K on United, their top tier. I’m mid-tier on United and American. Comparing notes, he hasn’t gotten any more upgrades than me, and though I board after 1Ks (or Exec Platinums on AA), I haven’t yet had a problem finding overhead space, even on packed flights to DFW. I’ve said it before -- I don’t think there’s all that much difference between mid- and top-tier loyalty ranks; certainly not enough to take less convenient flights to earn the extra miles needed to stay top-tier.</li>\r\n 	<li>A study of US airport growth hit the TravelCommons inbox on Halloween, saying that the two airports with the biggest drop in traffic are Memphis and Cincinnati. We talked about this back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/08/09/podcast-143-how-bad-is-business-travel-for-your-health-make-layovers-fun/\">August episode</a> when I was flying in and out of Cincinnati for 4 weeks straight. Nice airport, but I said back then it felt a bit overbuilt, and how both it and Memphis felt empty after after being “de-hubbed” by Delta. I wasn’t wrong. This new survey ground through 10 years of FAA traffic data and came to the same conclusion. Memphis lost the most traffic, down 62%. Cincinnati was second, losing 51% of its traffic.</li>\r\n 	<li>So you can guess that neither made the Wall Street Journal’s ranking of the 20 largest US airports. Denver, Orlando and Phoenix at the top 3 finishers while the three NYC airports -- LaGuardia, JFK, and Newark -- brought up the rear, numbers 18, 19, and 20. Surprises? I dunno -- maybe that LaGuardia wasn’t in last place given all the construction disruptions, that LAX was higher at #9 than Minneapolis-St Paul at #11, and that O’Hare is one spot higher than San Francisco, 15 vs. 16. That’s probably as much to do with their methodology as anything - how they weighed all the different score components, things like on-time arrivals, average TSA wait, cost of on-prem parking, average ticket cost. It’s interesting, though, to compare this ranking with Skytrax’s ranking of global airports. Denver, the top US airport on both lists; at #28 on Skytrax’s list. Cincinnati is the second US airport on the Skytrax list at #34, which makes sense when you look at the methodologies. Skytrax is focused on the in-airport experience -- terminal seating, cleanliness, queue times, friendliness of staff. With these criteria, I don’t doubt that Cincinnati should rank high -- it’s probably helped by now being a bit overbuilt -- lots of space and fewer people to clean up after. The Journal’s is a bit more wide-ranging, looking both inside and outside the terminal, including things like average fares, rental-car taxes and fees, number of nonstop destinations and dominance of the largest airline to its rankings. I’ll put links to both in the show notes for those interesting in a deeper dive.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our new Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/yoria-suerte/\"><em>Suerte Mijo</em></a> by Arthur Yoria</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Rental Demolition Derby</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I’ve rented a lot of cars in my business travel and have never crashed one. I drive them off the lot, use them for 3-4 days, fill them back up with gas, return them to the lot, and walk away. So when I picked up a car from Hertz at Edinburgh airport back in September, I skipped all the insurance coverages, took the keys to a brand new Toyota hybrid cross-over, and drove off the lot. This was my fourth September in a row renting from the Hertz and had never had an incident -- even when driving a manual on the left side of the road while shifting with my left hand -- well, other than a Fiat that dropped its transmission, but that wasn’t my fault. So, no need to waste the collision damage waiver charges.</li>\r\n 	<li>You can see where this is going. The next day, I was driving a narrow road in St Andrews, heading south out of town to go knock around the fishing villages on the north bank of the Firth of Forth. Roads in Scotland can get narrow. Driving the one-lane roads in the Highlands are an acquired talent, but this road is in a residential neighborhood, and I’ve driven it many times. So I couldn’t believe it when I heard a big thump as I drove past a van. Damn, I thought, had I drifted over to the left and popped the van’s rear view mirror? I pulled over and hopped out of the car. No, it was worse. There was a huge crease along the left side of the car; just missed the front wheel, so still driveable but very ugly. I walked down to the van. It belonged to a nearby community center. In a hurry to pick up kids from school, the driver had pulled out into me as I drove past. I pulled out an accident report form that Hertz had helpfully put in the glove compartment. We filled it out, skipped calling the police since no one was hurt.</li>\r\n 	<li>So, again, not my fault, but I’m still, a few days later, I’m turning in a car with a full tank and some extra body work. I point out the damage to the Hertz guy. He pulls up a different tab on his Samsung tablet -- click, click, click -- damage, front left wing; damage, front left door; damage, rear left door -- took a couple of pictures, and because I’d skipped the CDW, out burped the bill -- £780 or about $1,000. They ran it through on my Chase Sapphire Visa card.</li>\r\n 	<li>Which I gave to Hertz because, as I was poking through the nooks and crannies of the Chase website before I left home, I confirmed that card would cover UK rental car damage for rentals charged to it. The next week, back home, I found where to file a claim. They didn’t make it easy, but Google eventually uncovered it. I created a claim, uploaded a scan of the accident report, the Hertz receipt, and a couple of iPhone pictures of the damage. And then waited. The website said they’d take 2 weeks to review and get back to me. Three weeks later, I called. A guy said they’d sent me an email asking for two more documents from Hertz. Hmmm, never saw that, but who knows what gets caught up in the Spam filtering. They wanted a copy of the original Hertz agreement, which I had left in the car, and Hertz’s repair cost breakdown. OK, that was reasonable. I called Hertz and a very helpful woman put in a request and said get it in a week. Within a couple of days, Hertz sent me what I needed. I uploaded them to my claim and waited another 2 weeks. On Day 2 Weeks + 1, I called. A woman looked at my file, said it was still being reviewed by management, but said she’s put me on hold and ring them for status. Two minutes later, she picked up and they’d approved my claim. 48 hours later, the $1,000 showed up in my bank account. It took me a bit over 2 months, but Chase paid my claim with a minimum amount of hassle.</li>\r\n 	<li>Now, while I’ve had a good rental car record in Scotland, my record in Hungary is not quite clean. Indeed, every time I’ve driven there, it’s been something. The last time I drove, we were a couple of blocks away from the rental return next to the Marriott on the Danube. Pulling into an intersection after stopping at a Stop sign, a motorcycle messenger plowed into the front of my car, flew across the hood, and landed in the street on the other side of the intersection. Luckily, he was in a full helmet and leathers and unhurt. The rental car, not so lucky. The entire front end was ripped off. The rental car guy showed up as the police were finishing their report. I pulled out suitcases out of the trunk and gave him the key. He looked at the front of his car in disbelief. We wheeled our bags down the sidewalk to the Marriott because this time, I had bought the collision damage waiver.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/artemis-gravity/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Inception</a></em> by Artemis</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Traveler Gift Guide</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>As we come into the Christmas shopping season, I thought it would be useful to pull together some suggestions for the frequent traveler in your life. Or, if you are the frequent traveler, a list of hints you might want to drop on family members looking for ideas.</li>\r\n 	<li>Top of the list is a good battery charger. Whatever the size or form factor -- slimline, lipstick, high-capacity brick -- having that second or third charge readily available is critical to get notified of gate changes and when you’re using electronic boarding passes. It saves you from stalking cleaning crews to find a live power outlet on your layover, or negotiating with your seatmate for possession of outlet between you. I’m always looking to shed weight, so I retired the heavy no-name pack I picked up in the depths of Beijing’s Pearl Street Market for an Anker lipstick sized charger. I bought three and gave one to my wife and daughter. It’s cheap piece of mind.</li>\r\n 	<li>On my shopping list, trying to catch up to what’s already a cold winter, is one of those puffy coats -- but one of the thin ones, like the Patagonia Nano Puff, one that will smoosh down to nothing in the front pocket of my suitcase, or will fit in the crevices of a jammed full overhead bin. Right next that on the list, a man’s scarf is an incredibly undervalued piece of intermediate winter wear. In an airplane cabin or hotel room where a coat is too much (especially in a middle seat), but there’s a draft that chills you, a scarf around the neck is just enough without being too much. You may have to teach him how to wear it, but you can have fun with colors.</li>\r\n 	<li>For someone just embarking on the road warrior life, how ‘bout a black 20-inch hardsided carry-on. Black not only makes you look thinner, it makes your bag look thinner to gate agents hunting for bag-sizer bait. Black also doesn’t show stains. A 20-incher should get on-board for 90% of airlines, and the hard sides are the easiest to get in and out of a bag sizer if the not-yet-statused traveler gets waylaid by an over-zealous gate agent.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you’re going big for someone -- or for those December babies, combining Christmas and birthday gifts -- noise canceling headphones are a statement gift. The good ones -- the Bose or Sonys that make the drone of the jet engines disappear with the flick of a switch -- are a $300 number. But the drop in stress level and blood pressure that accompanies that flick of the switch -- you don’t realize how much that drone affects you until you turn on your Bose -- makes it worth the number. Everything in my briefcase has to earn its space. I’ve been carrying Bose headphones for, I dunno, 10, 15 years. They’re nowhere near compact, but I’ve never thought of leaving them behind.</li>\r\n 	<li>Another idea for the music -- or podcast lover, is a small portable Bluetooth speaker. I’ve started packing mine again for trips of a week or longer. For a couple of days, I’m fine with wearing headphones or using the phone speaker. But longer than that or if I’m with the family in, say, an Airbnb, I want something a bit more social. I’m still using my 6-year old Jambox speaker, the one that kinda created this category. The maker, Jawbone, went under last year, but the speaker still works. There are newer, better ones out there now, at all sorts of price points. The ones that can act as speaker phones are a nice to-have if they fit your budget.</li>\r\n 	<li>And finally, a stocking stuffer idea -- a travel notebook, something to jot down thoughts, ideas, observations, to do lists while waiting for the flight to board, the train to come, or the room to be made up. Nothing extravagant -- no leather embossed cover -- but it should be small enough to fit in a pocket, but substantial, something that can survive being knocked around in the bottom of a briefcase, and with paper quality that will hold onto those thoughts for a while. I used to use a Moleskine 3½x5½” notebook but have switched over a similar-sized A6 Clairefontaine. The soft cover fits better in a jeans back pocket, and the paper is more fountain-pen friendly. It’s $10 for a Moleskine, $7 for two Clairefontaines. Or go a bit more whimsical and get a 3-pack of Field Notes for $13. It’ll fit your budget and the stocking.</li>\r\n 	<li>So there you go, something to fit all sizes and budgets in time for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, or if you’re just killing time waiting for your Thanksgiving flight to leave.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #146</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and now on <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Magnatune</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_146.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #146 — Rental Demolition Derby; Traveler Gift Guide','','inherit','closed','closed','','2167-revision-v1','','','2019-01-23 19:56:06','2019-01-24 00:56:06','',2167,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/01/23/2167-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2218,1,'2019-01-23 20:03:40','2019-01-24 01:03:40','[caption id=\"attachment_2211\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/20181125_005916392_iOS.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2211\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/20181125_005916392_iOS-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> In Search of a Killer Margarita[/caption]\r\n\r\nWe stopped for a moment to catch our breath and figure out how much longer to the top of the <a href=\"https://www.hikingproject.com/trail/7003499/atalaya-mountain-trail-170\">Atalaya Mountain Trail</a>. Yesterday, before we flew out to Santa Fe, we were at 700 ft above sea level. After 90 minutes of walking, I guessed we were at 8,000 ft and had another 1,100 ft to get to the top. Between the altitude and the snow on the trail from the night before, this hike was taking longer than we’d planned. I looked at my watch and told Irene, “If you want to hit the Black Friday artisan market, we need to head back now.” She took another breath. “Nope, we’re heading to the top.”\r\n\r\nForty minutes later, we stood on a rocky ledge looking down over Santa Fe with a group of Argentinians who’d passed us 10 minutes before. We took the obligatory selfie and sat down on the rocks to take in the view. The breakfast cook/owner of our B&amp;B had sold us on this trail. We cursed him on the way up when we slid through the snow and struggled to find the trail markings. But now, looking out over Santa Fe National Forest to the horizon line of a cloudless blue sky, we took those words back.\r\n\r\nSanta Fe visits can go highbrow -- the <a href=\"https://www.okeeffemuseum.org/\">Georgia O’Keefe museum</a> and a run up Canyon Road through all the art galleries -- or lowbrow -- hiking up mountain trails and hunting the best green chile cheeseburger. This trip was all lowbrow. <!--more Click Here To Keep Reading <em>Road Trip — Lowbrow Santa Fe</em> -->\r\n\r\nAnd after 20 minutes of taking in the views at the top of Atalaya Mountain, we had just two things in mind -- green chile cheeseburgers and beer. The 1,800 foot descent only sharpened our appetites. Five-and-a half hours after we’d started, we were sitting at the bar at <a href=\"https://www.secondstreetbrewery.com/the-railyard\">Second Street Brewing’s restaurant in the Railyard District</a>, replacing whatever calories we’d burned off with green chile cheeseburgers and a side of green chile cheese fries. Double lashings of american cheese, which I know I shouldn’t like because it isn’t really cheese, but the creamy gooey-ness of it blended well with the chile bite. We chased it down with a pint of their <a href=\"https://untappd.com/b/second-street-brewery-boneshaker-bitter/675872\">Boneshaker Bitter</a>, one of the better American-made ESBs I’ve had.\r\n\r\nIt was the end of November and the temperature was dropping as we made our way back to our B&amp;B, the <a href=\"https://farolito.com/\">El Farolito</a>. We had our own little <a href=\"https://farolito.com/galisteo-room-1/\">casita</a> out front. Walking in, we saw that housekeeping had the kiva fireplace ready for us, loaded with a triangle of <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyon_pine\">piñon</a> logs over some kindling and a stack of yesterday’s newspaper off to the side. The fire caught with one match (gotta love well-seasoned wood). As the smoke rose up the chimney, I walked back outside and was immediately hit with the<a href=\"https://www.outsidemodern.com/pinon-wood-the-best-firewood-for-chimineas-pinion-pinyon/\"> piñon smell</a>, that unique pinewood smoke smell I only get in Santa Fe. I’ve been around a lot of pinewood fires in, say, Colorado and Arizona, but the piñon smoke billowing out of a kiva fireplace is a unique smell; one that I love. It was a cold hike up the trail this morning; here was a little payback.\r\n\r\nThe next morning, after tucking into another great breakfast, El Farolito’s cook/owner/travel guide recommended we head out to <a href=\"https://www.blm.gov/visit/kktr\">Tent Rocks</a> for our next hike. It would be a completely different environment, hiking through towering volcanic rock formations rather than a forest, and at 600 ft, it would only be a third of yesterday’s climb. However, Tent Rocks is a popular place that caps the number of people it lets in. The forecast was for a sunny Saturday, so we needed to get on our way or risk waiting in line to get in.\r\n\r\nThis was made much easier by our choice of rental car. When we hit the Hertz Presidents’ Club aisle at Albuquerque airport Thursday afternoon, it was pretty picked over; just a very odd selection of Dodge vehicles -- Dodge Challenger muscle cars or fully tricked out Ram Hemi king-cab pick-ups. I can’t say that I’ve ever faced quite that choice at Hertz before. The Challenger, with rear-wheel drive, wouldn’t be great if we got snow at elevation, but the Rams were just huge, trying to parallel park one in downtown Santa Fe would be an event. I stood between them, went back and forth for a couple of minutes. “Just pick one,” Irene said, “it’s a rental car, not a life choice!” I went for the white Challenger and hoped for clear skies.\r\n\r\nAnd on this Saturday morning, that’s what we had -- and a 75 mph speed limit on the southbound stretch of I-25 between us and Tent Rocks. I put my foot into the Challenger and kept it there as we exited the interstate and drove down and west across a flat plateau on Rt 16. I didn’t ease up until we hit the residential streets of the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochiti,_New_Mexico\">Cochiti Pueblo reservation</a>. It was around 10:30 am when we turned onto the access road, expecting to hit the line of waiting cars. We were hugely relieved when we drove straight up to the entrance booth, paid the $5 fee, and continued on to the trail head parking.\r\n\r\nWalking sideways and single file through the narrowest parts of the slot canyon at the start of the Canyon Trail, we immediately understood and appreciated the capacity limit. Without it, the trail would’ve hit gridlock. And we didn’t mind the times when we had to wait for a downhill group to clear a tight squeeze. It gave us time to look up and appreciate the rough beauty left behind by 6-7 million years of erosion.\r\n\r\nComing out of the slot canyon, we hit the steep section. “Do you think it’s worth it,” a dad asked, struggling up the incline with his daughter and a load of snacks on his back. When we got to the flat mesa on top, the answer was there spread out for us when we looked down onto the 90-foot tent rocks (<a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoodoo_(geology)\">hoodoos</a>), and then out across the Rio Grande Valley and to the Sangre de Cristo mountains in the distance. The temperature hit 50°F. We shed a couple of layers of clothing, dangled our legs off a rock ledge, drained our water bottles, and looked out with nothing between us and the horizon. It was our second day of cloudless blue skies and hundred mile vistas.\r\n\r\nDriving back to Santa Fe, we got off of I-25 an exit early and drove up Rt 14 through what felt like the real life Santa Fe. No art dealers and kachina shops; instead, the typical string of auto dealers, gas stations, and shopping centers anchored by Targets and drive-thru Starbucks. We were headed to <a href=\"https://www.rowleyfarmhouse.com/\">Rowley Farmhouse Ales</a> for another post-hike green chile cheeseburger. The Rowley burger was a bit more upscale than yesterday’s -- the menu namechecks local purveyors of the beef, bacon, and cheese (but not the green chile!) on the burger -- but still a very solid burger. The beer list was one of the strongest we’d seen. Flights of tasters let us sample Rowley’s own beers -- a nice range of IPAs, saisons, and sours -- and some of the local guest beers they also had on tap.\r\n\r\nThat evening, we walked over to Guadalupe Street, which feels like the lowbrow counterpart to the plaza or Canyon Road. We stopped first at <a href=\"http://www.cowgirlsantafe.com/\">Cowgirl BBQ</a> for some margarita nostalgia. On our first trip to Santa Fe, I was on the hunt for a great everyday margarita recipe and after a weekend of margarita tasting, we picked Cowgirl’s. We worked our way through their current margarita menu, listening to a group of local guys at the end of the bar talk to the bartender about taking dancing lessons. “God, I missed you guys,” the bartender said.\r\n\r\nWe walked a couple of blocks further down Guadalupe Street to <a href=\"https://tomasitas.com/\">Tomasita’s</a> for dinner. The alcove was full of families and big parties. The hostess gave the party of 6 in front of us a 2-hour wait. For Irene and I, just an hour. We headed to the bar to try their margaritas. When we were seated (15 minutes early!), we searched the menu for something different. Most of it was the standard enchilada and taco combo plates, but with a little patience, we found some unique dishes. <a href=\"https://www.cooksillustrated.com/articles/697-real-carne-adovada\"><em>Carne adovada</em></a>, the classic New Mexico pork and red chile braise, had a deep earthy chile flavor that made me seriously question my green chile fixation. Because we were there on a weekend night, we could order a side of <em>chicos</em>. A New Mexico spin on a Native American staple, Tomasita’s <a href=\"https://highlandsranchfoodie.com/2016/01/beans-and-chicos-2/\">chicos</a> are whole beans mixed with whole corn kernels that have been steamed over a fire. The texture of the whole beans and the smoky sweet taste of the corn kernels were such an improvement over the pasty blandness of refried beans, I wondered why the chicos weren’t the standard side. And in place of the usual tortillas, we got a basket of fresh sopapillas with honey butter.','Road Trip — Lowbrow Santa Fe','','inherit','closed','closed','','2208-revision-v1','','','2019-01-23 20:03:40','2019-01-24 01:03:40','',2208,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/01/23/2208-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2219,1,'2019-01-23 20:04:53','2019-01-24 01:04:53','','20181124_212142086_iOS','Tapwall at Rowley Farmhouse Ales','inherit','open','closed','','20181124_212142086_ios','','','2019-01-23 20:05:23','2019-01-24 01:05:23','',2208,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/20181124_212142086_iOS.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(2220,1,'2019-01-23 20:07:14','2019-01-24 01:07:14','[caption id=\"attachment_2211\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/20181125_005916392_iOS.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2211\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/20181125_005916392_iOS-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> In Search of a Killer Margarita[/caption]\r\n\r\nWe stopped for a moment to catch our breath and figure out how much longer to the top of the <a href=\"https://www.hikingproject.com/trail/7003499/atalaya-mountain-trail-170\">Atalaya Mountain Trail</a>. Yesterday, before we flew out to Santa Fe, we were at 700 ft above sea level. After 90 minutes of walking, I guessed we were at 8,000 ft and had another 1,100 ft to get to the top. Between the altitude and the snow on the trail from the night before, this hike was taking longer than we’d planned. I looked at my watch and told Irene, “If you want to hit the Black Friday artisan market, we need to head back now.” She took another breath. “Nope, we’re heading to the top.”\r\n\r\nForty minutes later, we stood on a rocky ledge looking down over Santa Fe with a group of Argentinians who’d passed us 10 minutes before. We took the obligatory selfie and sat down on the rocks to take in the view. The breakfast cook/owner of our B&amp;B had sold us on this trail. We cursed him on the way up when we slid through the snow and struggled to find the trail markings. But now, looking out over Santa Fe National Forest to the horizon line of a cloudless blue sky, we took those words back.\r\n\r\nSanta Fe visits can go highbrow -- the <a href=\"https://www.okeeffemuseum.org/\">Georgia O’Keefe museum</a> and a run up Canyon Road through all the art galleries -- or lowbrow -- hiking up mountain trails and hunting the best green chile cheeseburger. This trip was all lowbrow. <!--more Click Here To Keep Reading &lt;em&gt;Road Trip — Lowbrow Santa Fe&lt;/em&gt; -->\r\n\r\nAnd after 20 minutes of taking in the views at the top of Atalaya Mountain, we had just two things in mind -- green chile cheeseburgers and beer. The 1,800 foot descent only sharpened our appetites. Five-and-a half hours after we’d started, we were sitting at the bar at <a href=\"https://www.secondstreetbrewery.com/the-railyard\">Second Street Brewing’s restaurant in the Railyard District</a>, replacing whatever calories we’d burned off with green chile cheeseburgers and a side of green chile cheese fries. Double lashings of american cheese, which I know I shouldn’t like because it isn’t really cheese, but the creamy gooey-ness of it blended well with the chile bite. We chased it down with a pint of their <a href=\"https://untappd.com/b/second-street-brewery-boneshaker-bitter/675872\">Boneshaker Bitter</a>, one of the better American-made ESBs I’ve had.\r\n\r\nIt was the end of November and the temperature was dropping as we made our way back to our B&amp;B, the <a href=\"https://farolito.com/\">El Farolito</a>. We had our own little <a href=\"https://farolito.com/galisteo-room-1/\">casita</a> out front. Walking in, we saw that housekeeping had the kiva fireplace ready for us, loaded with a triangle of <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyon_pine\">piñon</a> logs over some kindling and a stack of yesterday’s newspaper off to the side. The fire caught with one match (gotta love well-seasoned wood). As the smoke rose up the chimney, I walked back outside and was immediately hit with the<a href=\"https://www.outsidemodern.com/pinon-wood-the-best-firewood-for-chimineas-pinion-pinyon/\"> piñon smell</a>, that unique pinewood smoke smell I only get in Santa Fe. I’ve been around a lot of pinewood fires in, say, Colorado and Arizona, but the piñon smoke billowing out of a kiva fireplace is a unique smell; one that I love. It was a cold hike up the trail this morning; here was a little payback.\r\n\r\nThe next morning, after tucking into another great breakfast, El Farolito’s cook/owner/travel guide recommended we head out to <a href=\"https://www.blm.gov/visit/kktr\">Tent Rocks</a> for our next hike. It would be a completely different environment, hiking through towering volcanic rock formations rather than a forest, and at 600 ft, it would only be a third of yesterday’s climb. However, Tent Rocks is a popular place that caps the number of people it lets in. The forecast was for a sunny Saturday, so we needed to get on our way or risk waiting in line to get in.\r\n\r\nThis was made much easier by our choice of rental car. When we hit the Hertz Presidents’ Club aisle at Albuquerque airport Thursday afternoon, it was pretty picked over; just a very odd selection of Dodge vehicles -- Dodge Challenger muscle cars or fully tricked out Ram Hemi king-cab pick-ups. I can’t say that I’ve ever faced quite that choice at Hertz before. The Challenger, with rear-wheel drive, wouldn’t be great if we got snow at elevation, but the Rams were just huge, trying to parallel park one in downtown Santa Fe would be an event. I stood between them, went back and forth for a couple of minutes. “Just pick one,” Irene said, “it’s a rental car, not a life choice!” I went for the white Challenger and hoped for clear skies.\r\n\r\nAnd on this Saturday morning, that’s what we had -- and a 75 mph speed limit on the southbound stretch of I-25 between us and Tent Rocks. I put my foot into the Challenger and kept it there as we exited the interstate and drove down and west across a flat plateau on Rt 16. I didn’t ease up until we hit the residential streets of the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochiti,_New_Mexico\">Cochiti Pueblo reservation</a>. It was around 10:30 am when we turned onto the access road, expecting to hit the line of waiting cars. We were hugely relieved when we drove straight up to the entrance booth, paid the $5 fee, and continued on to the trail head parking.\r\n\r\nWalking sideways and single file through the narrowest parts of the slot canyon at the start of the Canyon Trail, we immediately understood and appreciated the capacity limit. Without it, the trail would’ve hit gridlock. And we didn’t mind the times when we had to wait for a downhill group to clear a tight squeeze. It gave us time to look up and appreciate the rough beauty left behind by 6-7 million years of erosion.\r\n\r\nComing out of the slot canyon, we hit the steep section. “Do you think it’s worth it,” a dad asked, struggling up the incline with his daughter and a load of snacks on his back. When we got to the flat mesa on top, the answer was there spread out for us when we looked down onto the 90-foot tent rocks (<a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoodoo_(geology)\">hoodoos</a>), and then out across the Rio Grande Valley and to the Sangre de Cristo mountains in the distance. The temperature hit 50°F. We shed a couple of layers of clothing, dangled our legs off a rock ledge, drained our water bottles, and looked out with nothing between us and the horizon. It was our second day of cloudless blue skies and hundred mile vistas.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_2219\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/20181124_212142086_iOS.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2219\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/20181124_212142086_iOS-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Tapwall at Rowley Farmhouse Ales[/caption]\r\n\r\nDriving back to Santa Fe, we got off of I-25 an exit early and drove up Rt 14 through what felt like the real life Santa Fe. No art dealers and kachina shops; instead, the typical string of auto dealers, gas stations, and shopping centers anchored by Targets and drive-thru Starbucks. We were headed to <a href=\"https://www.rowleyfarmhouse.com/\">Rowley Farmhouse Ales</a> for another post-hike green chile cheeseburger. The Rowley burger was a bit more upscale than yesterday’s -- the menu namechecks local purveyors of the beef, bacon, and cheese (but not the green chile!) on the burger -- but still a very solid burger. The beer list was one of the strongest we’d seen. Flights of tasters let us sample Rowley’s own beers -- a nice range of IPAs, saisons, and sours -- and some of the local guest beers they also had on tap.\r\n\r\nThat evening, we walked over to Guadalupe Street, which feels like the lowbrow counterpart to the plaza or Canyon Road. We stopped first at <a href=\"http://www.cowgirlsantafe.com/\">Cowgirl BBQ</a> for some margarita nostalgia. On our first trip to Santa Fe, I was on the hunt for a great everyday margarita recipe and after a weekend of margarita tasting, we picked Cowgirl’s. We worked our way through their current margarita menu, listening to a group of local guys at the end of the bar talk to the bartender about taking dancing lessons. “God, I missed you guys,” the bartender said.\r\n\r\nWe walked a couple of blocks further down Guadalupe Street to <a href=\"https://tomasitas.com/\">Tomasita’s</a> for dinner. The alcove was full of families and big parties. The hostess gave the party of 6 in front of us a 2-hour wait. For Irene and I, just an hour. We headed to the bar to try their margaritas. When we were seated (15 minutes early!), we searched the menu for something different. Most of it was the standard enchilada and taco combo plates, but with a little patience, we found some unique dishes. <a href=\"https://www.cooksillustrated.com/articles/697-real-carne-adovada\"><em>Carne adovada</em></a>, the classic New Mexico pork and red chile braise, had a deep earthy chile flavor that made me seriously question my green chile fixation. Because we were there on a weekend night, we could order a side of <em>chicos</em>. A New Mexico spin on a Native American staple, Tomasita’s <a href=\"https://highlandsranchfoodie.com/2016/01/beans-and-chicos-2/\">chicos</a> are whole beans mixed with whole corn kernels that have been steamed over a fire. The texture of the whole beans and the smoky sweet taste of the corn kernels were such an improvement over the pasty blandness of refried beans, I wondered why the chicos weren’t the standard side. And in place of the usual tortillas, we got a basket of fresh sopapillas with honey butter.','Road Trip — Lowbrow Santa Fe','','inherit','closed','closed','','2208-revision-v1','','','2019-01-23 20:07:14','2019-01-24 01:07:14','',2208,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/01/23/2208-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2221,1,'2019-01-23 20:11:13','2019-01-24 01:11:13','','20181124_180015173_iOS','Looking Down onto the Tent Rocks','inherit','open','closed','','20181124_180015173_ios','','','2019-01-23 20:24:12','2019-01-24 01:24:12','',2208,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/20181124_180015173_iOS.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(2222,1,'2019-01-23 20:11:24','2019-01-24 01:11:24','[caption id=\"attachment_2211\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/20181125_005916392_iOS.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2211\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/20181125_005916392_iOS-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> In Search of a Killer Margarita[/caption]\r\n\r\nWe stopped for a moment to catch our breath and figure out how much longer to the top of the <a href=\"https://www.hikingproject.com/trail/7003499/atalaya-mountain-trail-170\">Atalaya Mountain Trail</a>. Yesterday, before we flew out to Santa Fe, we were at 700 ft above sea level. After 90 minutes of walking, I guessed we were at 8,000 ft and had another 1,100 ft to get to the top. Between the altitude and the snow on the trail from the night before, this hike was taking longer than we’d planned. I looked at my watch and told Irene, “If you want to hit the Black Friday artisan market, we need to head back now.” She took another breath. “Nope, we’re heading to the top.”\r\n\r\nForty minutes later, we stood on a rocky ledge looking down over Santa Fe with a group of Argentinians who’d passed us 10 minutes before. We took the obligatory selfie and sat down on the rocks to take in the view. The breakfast cook/owner of our B&amp;B had sold us on this trail. We cursed him on the way up when we slid through the snow and struggled to find the trail markings. But now, looking out over Santa Fe National Forest to the horizon line of a cloudless blue sky, we took those words back.\r\n\r\nSanta Fe visits can go highbrow -- the <a href=\"https://www.okeeffemuseum.org/\">Georgia O’Keefe museum</a> and a run up Canyon Road through all the art galleries -- or lowbrow -- hiking up mountain trails and hunting the best green chile cheeseburger. This trip was all lowbrow. <!--more Click Here To Keep Reading &lt;em&gt;Road Trip — Lowbrow Santa Fe&lt;/em&gt; -->\r\n\r\nAnd after 20 minutes of taking in the views at the top of Atalaya Mountain, we had just two things in mind -- green chile cheeseburgers and beer. The 1,800 foot descent only sharpened our appetites. Five-and-a half hours after we’d started, we were sitting at the bar at <a href=\"https://www.secondstreetbrewery.com/the-railyard\">Second Street Brewing’s restaurant in the Railyard District</a>, replacing whatever calories we’d burned off with green chile cheeseburgers and a side of green chile cheese fries. Double lashings of american cheese, which I know I shouldn’t like because it isn’t really cheese, but the creamy gooey-ness of it blended well with the chile bite. We chased it down with a pint of their <a href=\"https://untappd.com/b/second-street-brewery-boneshaker-bitter/675872\">Boneshaker Bitter</a>, one of the better American-made ESBs I’ve had.\r\n\r\nIt was the end of November and the temperature was dropping as we made our way back to our B&amp;B, the <a href=\"https://farolito.com/\">El Farolito</a>. We had our own little <a href=\"https://farolito.com/galisteo-room-1/\">casita</a> out front. Walking in, we saw that housekeeping had the kiva fireplace ready for us, loaded with a triangle of <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyon_pine\">piñon</a> logs over some kindling and a stack of yesterday’s newspaper off to the side. The fire caught with one match (gotta love well-seasoned wood). As the smoke rose up the chimney, I walked back outside and was immediately hit with the<a href=\"https://www.outsidemodern.com/pinon-wood-the-best-firewood-for-chimineas-pinion-pinyon/\"> piñon smell</a>, that unique pinewood smoke smell I only get in Santa Fe. I’ve been around a lot of pinewood fires in, say, Colorado and Arizona, but the piñon smoke billowing out of a kiva fireplace is a unique smell; one that I love. It was a cold hike up the trail this morning; here was a little payback.\r\n\r\nThe next morning, after tucking into another great breakfast, El Farolito’s cook/owner/travel guide recommended we head out to <a href=\"https://www.blm.gov/visit/kktr\">Tent Rocks</a> for our next hike. It would be a completely different environment, hiking through towering volcanic rock formations rather than a forest, and at 600 ft, it would only be a third of yesterday’s climb. However, Tent Rocks is a popular place that caps the number of people it lets in. The forecast was for a sunny Saturday, so we needed to get on our way or risk waiting in line to get in.\r\n\r\nThis was made much easier by our choice of rental car. When we hit the Hertz Presidents’ Club aisle at Albuquerque airport Thursday afternoon, it was pretty picked over; just a very odd selection of Dodge vehicles -- Dodge Challenger muscle cars or fully tricked out Ram Hemi king-cab pick-ups. I can’t say that I’ve ever faced quite that choice at Hertz before. The Challenger, with rear-wheel drive, wouldn’t be great if we got snow at elevation, but the Rams were just huge, trying to parallel park one in downtown Santa Fe would be an event. I stood between them, went back and forth for a couple of minutes. “Just pick one,” Irene said, “it’s a rental car, not a life choice!” I went for the white Challenger and hoped for clear skies.\r\n\r\nAnd on this Saturday morning, that’s what we had -- and a 75 mph speed limit on the southbound stretch of I-25 between us and Tent Rocks. I put my foot into the Challenger and kept it there as we exited the interstate and drove down and west across a flat plateau on Rt 16. I didn’t ease up until we hit the residential streets of the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochiti,_New_Mexico\">Cochiti Pueblo reservation</a>. It was around 10:30 am when we turned onto the access road, expecting to hit the line of waiting cars. We were hugely relieved when we drove straight up to the entrance booth, paid the $5 fee, and continued on to the trail head parking.\r\n\r\nWalking sideways and single file through the narrowest parts of the slot canyon at the start of the Canyon Trail, we immediately understood and appreciated the capacity limit. Without it, the trail would’ve hit gridlock. And we didn’t mind the times when we had to wait for a downhill group to clear a tight squeeze. It gave us time to look up and appreciate the rough beauty left behind by 6-7 million years of erosion.\r\n\r\n<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/20181124_180015173_iOS.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-2221\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/20181124_180015173_iOS-300x225.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\" /></a>Coming out of the slot canyon, we hit the steep section. “Do you think it’s worth it,” a dad asked, struggling up the incline with his daughter and a load of snacks on his back. When we got to the flat mesa on top, the answer was there spread out for us when we looked down onto the 90-foot tent rocks (<a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoodoo_(geology)\">hoodoos</a>), and then out across the Rio Grande Valley and to the Sangre de Cristo mountains in the distance. The temperature hit 50°F. We shed a couple of layers of clothing, dangled our legs off a rock ledge, drained our water bottles, and looked out with nothing between us and the horizon. It was our second day of cloudless blue skies and hundred mile vistas.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_2219\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/20181124_212142086_iOS.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2219\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/20181124_212142086_iOS-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Tapwall at Rowley Farmhouse Ales[/caption]\r\n\r\nDriving back to Santa Fe, we got off of I-25 an exit early and drove up Rt 14 through what felt like the real life Santa Fe. No art dealers and kachina shops; instead, the typical string of auto dealers, gas stations, and shopping centers anchored by Targets and drive-thru Starbucks. We were headed to <a href=\"https://www.rowleyfarmhouse.com/\">Rowley Farmhouse Ales</a> for another post-hike green chile cheeseburger. The Rowley burger was a bit more upscale than yesterday’s -- the menu namechecks local purveyors of the beef, bacon, and cheese (but not the green chile!) on the burger -- but still a very solid burger. The beer list was one of the strongest we’d seen. Flights of tasters let us sample Rowley’s own beers -- a nice range of IPAs, saisons, and sours -- and some of the local guest beers they also had on tap.\r\n\r\nThat evening, we walked over to Guadalupe Street, which feels like the lowbrow counterpart to the plaza or Canyon Road. We stopped first at <a href=\"http://www.cowgirlsantafe.com/\">Cowgirl BBQ</a> for some margarita nostalgia. On our first trip to Santa Fe, I was on the hunt for a great everyday margarita recipe and after a weekend of margarita tasting, we picked Cowgirl’s. We worked our way through their current margarita menu, listening to a group of local guys at the end of the bar talk to the bartender about taking dancing lessons. “God, I missed you guys,” the bartender said.\r\n\r\nWe walked a couple of blocks further down Guadalupe Street to <a href=\"https://tomasitas.com/\">Tomasita’s</a> for dinner. The alcove was full of families and big parties. The hostess gave the party of 6 in front of us a 2-hour wait. For Irene and I, just an hour. We headed to the bar to try their margaritas. When we were seated (15 minutes early!), we searched the menu for something different. Most of it was the standard enchilada and taco combo plates, but with a little patience, we found some unique dishes. <a href=\"https://www.cooksillustrated.com/articles/697-real-carne-adovada\"><em>Carne adovada</em></a>, the classic New Mexico pork and red chile braise, had a deep earthy chile flavor that made me seriously question my green chile fixation. Because we were there on a weekend night, we could order a side of <em>chicos</em>. A New Mexico spin on a Native American staple, Tomasita’s <a href=\"https://highlandsranchfoodie.com/2016/01/beans-and-chicos-2/\">chicos</a> are whole beans mixed with whole corn kernels that have been steamed over a fire. The texture of the whole beans and the smoky sweet taste of the corn kernels were such an improvement over the pasty blandness of refried beans, I wondered why the chicos weren’t the standard side. And in place of the usual tortillas, we got a basket of fresh sopapillas with honey butter.','Road Trip — Lowbrow Santa Fe','','inherit','closed','closed','','2208-revision-v1','','','2019-01-23 20:11:24','2019-01-24 01:11:24','',2208,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/01/23/2208-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2223,1,'2019-01-23 20:12:26','2019-01-24 01:12:26','[caption id=\"attachment_2211\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/20181125_005916392_iOS.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2211\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/20181125_005916392_iOS-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> In Search of a Killer Margarita[/caption]\r\n\r\nWe stopped for a moment to catch our breath and figure out how much longer to the top of the <a href=\"https://www.hikingproject.com/trail/7003499/atalaya-mountain-trail-170\">Atalaya Mountain Trail</a>. Yesterday, before we flew out to Santa Fe, we were at 700 ft above sea level. After 90 minutes of walking, I guessed we were at 8,000 ft and had another 1,100 ft to get to the top. Between the altitude and the snow on the trail from the night before, this hike was taking longer than we’d planned. I looked at my watch and told Irene, “If you want to hit the Black Friday artisan market, we need to head back now.” She took another breath. “Nope, we’re heading to the top.”\r\n\r\nForty minutes later, we stood on a rocky ledge looking down over Santa Fe with a group of Argentinians who’d passed us 10 minutes before. We took the obligatory selfie and sat down on the rocks to take in the view. The breakfast cook/owner of our B&amp;B had sold us on this trail. We cursed him on the way up when we slid through the snow and struggled to find the trail markings. But now, looking out over Santa Fe National Forest to the horizon line of a cloudless blue sky, we took those words back.\r\n\r\nSanta Fe visits can go highbrow -- the <a href=\"https://www.okeeffemuseum.org/\">Georgia O’Keefe museum</a> and a run up Canyon Road through all the art galleries -- or lowbrow -- hiking up mountain trails and hunting the best green chile cheeseburger. This trip was all lowbrow. <!--more Click Here To Keep Reading &lt;em&gt;Road Trip — Lowbrow Santa Fe&lt;/em&gt; -->\r\n\r\nAnd after 20 minutes of taking in the views at the top of Atalaya Mountain, we had just two things in mind -- green chile cheeseburgers and beer. The 1,800 foot descent only sharpened our appetites. Five-and-a half hours after we’d started, we were sitting at the bar at <a href=\"https://www.secondstreetbrewery.com/the-railyard\">Second Street Brewing’s restaurant in the Railyard District</a>, replacing whatever calories we’d burned off with green chile cheeseburgers and a side of green chile cheese fries. Double lashings of american cheese, which I know I shouldn’t like because it isn’t really cheese, but the creamy gooey-ness of it blended well with the chile bite. We chased it down with a pint of their <a href=\"https://untappd.com/b/second-street-brewery-boneshaker-bitter/675872\">Boneshaker Bitter</a>, one of the better American-made ESBs I’ve had.\r\n\r\nIt was the end of November and the temperature was dropping as we made our way back to our B&amp;B, the <a href=\"https://farolito.com/\">El Farolito</a>. We had our own little <a href=\"https://farolito.com/galisteo-room-1/\">casita</a> out front. Walking in, we saw that housekeeping had the kiva fireplace ready for us, loaded with a triangle of <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyon_pine\">piñon</a> logs over some kindling and a stack of yesterday’s newspaper off to the side. The fire caught with one match (gotta love well-seasoned wood). As the smoke rose up the chimney, I walked back outside and was immediately hit with the<a href=\"https://www.outsidemodern.com/pinon-wood-the-best-firewood-for-chimineas-pinion-pinyon/\"> piñon smell</a>, that unique pinewood smoke smell I only get in Santa Fe. I’ve been around a lot of pinewood fires in, say, Colorado and Arizona, but the piñon smoke billowing out of a kiva fireplace is a unique smell; one that I love. It was a cold hike up the trail this morning; here was a little payback.\r\n\r\nThe next morning, after tucking into another great breakfast, El Farolito’s cook/owner/travel guide recommended we head out to <a href=\"https://www.blm.gov/visit/kktr\">Tent Rocks</a> for our next hike. It would be a completely different environment, hiking through towering volcanic rock formations rather than a forest, and at 600 ft, it would only be a third of yesterday’s climb. However, Tent Rocks is a popular place that caps the number of people it lets in. The forecast was for a sunny Saturday, so we needed to get on our way or risk waiting in line to get in.\r\n\r\nThis was made much easier by our choice of rental car. When we hit the Hertz Presidents’ Club aisle at Albuquerque airport Thursday afternoon, it was pretty picked over; just a very odd selection of Dodge vehicles -- Dodge Challenger muscle cars or fully tricked out Ram Hemi king-cab pick-ups. I can’t say that I’ve ever faced quite that choice at Hertz before. The Challenger, with rear-wheel drive, wouldn’t be great if we got snow at elevation, but the Rams were just huge, trying to parallel park one in downtown Santa Fe would be an event. I stood between them, went back and forth for a couple of minutes. “Just pick one,” Irene said, “it’s a rental car, not a life choice!” I went for the white Challenger and hoped for clear skies.\r\n\r\nAnd on this Saturday morning, that’s what we had -- and a 75 mph speed limit on the southbound stretch of I-25 between us and Tent Rocks. I put my foot into the Challenger and kept it there as we exited the interstate and drove down and west across a flat plateau on Rt 16. I didn’t ease up until we hit the residential streets of the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochiti,_New_Mexico\">Cochiti Pueblo reservation</a>. It was around 10:30 am when we turned onto the access road, expecting to hit the line of waiting cars. We were hugely relieved when we drove straight up to the entrance booth, paid the $5 fee, and continued on to the trail head parking.\r\n\r\n<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/20181124_180015173_iOS.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-2221\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/20181124_180015173_iOS-300x225.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\" /></a>Walking sideways and single file through the narrowest parts of the slot canyon at the start of the Canyon Trail, we immediately understood and appreciated the capacity limit. Without it, the trail would’ve hit gridlock. And we didn’t mind the times when we had to wait for a downhill group to clear a tight squeeze. It gave us time to look up and appreciate the rough beauty left behind by 6-7 million years of erosion.\r\n\r\nComing out of the slot canyon, we hit the steep section. “Do you think it’s worth it,” a dad asked, struggling up the incline with his daughter and a load of snacks on his back. When we got to the flat mesa on top, the answer was there spread out for us when we looked down onto the 90-foot tent rocks (<a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoodoo_(geology)\">hoodoos</a>), and then out across the Rio Grande Valley and to the Sangre de Cristo mountains in the distance. The temperature hit 50°F. We shed a couple of layers of clothing, dangled our legs off a rock ledge, drained our water bottles, and looked out with nothing between us and the horizon. It was our second day of cloudless blue skies and hundred mile vistas.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_2219\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/20181124_212142086_iOS.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2219\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/20181124_212142086_iOS-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Tapwall at Rowley Farmhouse Ales[/caption]\r\n\r\nDriving back to Santa Fe, we got off of I-25 an exit early and drove up Rt 14 through what felt like the real life Santa Fe. No art dealers and kachina shops; instead, the typical string of auto dealers, gas stations, and shopping centers anchored by Targets and drive-thru Starbucks. We were headed to <a href=\"https://www.rowleyfarmhouse.com/\">Rowley Farmhouse Ales</a> for another post-hike green chile cheeseburger. The Rowley burger was a bit more upscale than yesterday’s -- the menu namechecks local purveyors of the beef, bacon, and cheese (but not the green chile!) on the burger -- but still a very solid burger. The beer list was one of the strongest we’d seen. Flights of tasters let us sample Rowley’s own beers -- a nice range of IPAs, saisons, and sours -- and some of the local guest beers they also had on tap.\r\n\r\nThat evening, we walked over to Guadalupe Street, which feels like the lowbrow counterpart to the plaza or Canyon Road. We stopped first at <a href=\"http://www.cowgirlsantafe.com/\">Cowgirl BBQ</a> for some margarita nostalgia. On our first trip to Santa Fe, I was on the hunt for a great everyday margarita recipe and after a weekend of margarita tasting, we picked Cowgirl’s. We worked our way through their current margarita menu, listening to a group of local guys at the end of the bar talk to the bartender about taking dancing lessons. “God, I missed you guys,” the bartender said.\r\n\r\nWe walked a couple of blocks further down Guadalupe Street to <a href=\"https://tomasitas.com/\">Tomasita’s</a> for dinner. The alcove was full of families and big parties. The hostess gave the party of 6 in front of us a 2-hour wait. For Irene and I, just an hour. We headed to the bar to try their margaritas. When we were seated (15 minutes early!), we searched the menu for something different. Most of it was the standard enchilada and taco combo plates, but with a little patience, we found some unique dishes. <a href=\"https://www.cooksillustrated.com/articles/697-real-carne-adovada\"><em>Carne adovada</em></a>, the classic New Mexico pork and red chile braise, had a deep earthy chile flavor that made me seriously question my green chile fixation. Because we were there on a weekend night, we could order a side of <em>chicos</em>. A New Mexico spin on a Native American staple, Tomasita’s <a href=\"https://highlandsranchfoodie.com/2016/01/beans-and-chicos-2/\">chicos</a> are whole beans mixed with whole corn kernels that have been steamed over a fire. The texture of the whole beans and the smoky sweet taste of the corn kernels were such an improvement over the pasty blandness of refried beans, I wondered why the chicos weren’t the standard side. And in place of the usual tortillas, we got a basket of fresh sopapillas with honey butter.','Road Trip — Lowbrow Santa Fe','','inherit','closed','closed','','2208-revision-v1','','','2019-01-23 20:12:26','2019-01-24 01:12:26','',2208,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/01/23/2208-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2224,1,'2019-01-23 20:20:41','2019-01-24 01:20:41','','20181123_193305944_iOS','','inherit','open','closed','','20181123_193305944_ios','','','2019-01-23 20:20:41','2019-01-24 01:20:41','',2208,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/20181123_193305944_iOS.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(2225,1,'2019-01-23 20:21:49','2019-01-24 01:21:49','[caption id=\"attachment_2211\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/20181125_005916392_iOS.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2211\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/20181125_005916392_iOS-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> In Search of a Killer Margarita[/caption]\r\n\r\nWe stopped for a moment to catch our breath and figure out how much longer to the top of the <a href=\"https://www.hikingproject.com/trail/7003499/atalaya-mountain-trail-170\">Atalaya Mountain Trail</a>. Yesterday, before we flew out to Santa Fe, we were at 700 ft above sea level. After 90 minutes of walking, I guessed we were at 8,000 ft and had another 1,100 ft to get to the top. Between the altitude and the snow on the trail from the night before, this hike was taking longer than we’d planned. I looked at my watch and told Irene, “If you want to hit the Black Friday artisan market, we need to head back now.” She took another breath. “Nope, we’re heading to the top.”\r\n\r\nForty minutes later, we stood on a rocky ledge looking down over Santa Fe with a group of Argentinians who’d passed us 10 minutes before. We took the obligatory selfie and sat down on the rocks to take in the view. The breakfast cook/owner of our B&amp;B had sold us on this trail. We cursed him on the way up when we slid through the snow and struggled to find the trail markings. But now, looking out over Santa Fe National Forest to the horizon line of a cloudless blue sky, we took those words back.\r\n\r\nSanta Fe visits can go highbrow -- the <a href=\"https://www.okeeffemuseum.org/\">Georgia O’Keefe museum</a> and a run up Canyon Road through all the art galleries -- or lowbrow -- hiking up mountain trails and hunting the best green chile cheeseburger. This trip was all lowbrow. <!--more Click Here To Keep Reading &lt;em&gt;Road Trip — Lowbrow Santa Fe&lt;/em&gt; -->\r\n\r\nAnd after 20 minutes of taking in the views at the top of Atalaya Mountain, we had just two things in mind -- green chile cheeseburgers and beer. The 1,800 foot descent only sharpened our appetites. Five-and-a half hours after we’d started, we were sitting at the bar at <a href=\"https://www.secondstreetbrewery.com/the-railyard\">Second Street Brewing’s restaurant in the Railyard District</a>, replacing whatever calories we’d burned off with green chile cheeseburgers and a side of green chile cheese fries. Double lashings of american cheese, which I know I shouldn’t like because it isn’t really cheese, but the creamy gooey-ness of it blended well with the chile bite. We chased it down with a pint of their <a href=\"https://untappd.com/b/second-street-brewery-boneshaker-bitter/675872\">Boneshaker Bitter</a>, one of the better American-made ESBs I’ve had.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_2224\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"640\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/20181123_193305944_iOS.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-2224 size-large\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/20181123_193305944_iOS-1024x418.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"640\" height=\"261\" /></a> Top of the Atalaya Mountain Trail[/caption]\r\n\r\nIt was the end of November and the temperature was dropping as we made our way back to our B&amp;B, the <a href=\"https://farolito.com/\">El Farolito</a>. We had our own little <a href=\"https://farolito.com/galisteo-room-1/\">casita</a> out front. Walking in, we saw that housekeeping had the kiva fireplace ready for us, loaded with a triangle of <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyon_pine\">piñon</a> logs over some kindling and a stack of yesterday’s newspaper off to the side. The fire caught with one match (gotta love well-seasoned wood). As the smoke rose up the chimney, I walked back outside and was immediately hit with the<a href=\"https://www.outsidemodern.com/pinon-wood-the-best-firewood-for-chimineas-pinion-pinyon/\"> piñon smell</a>, that unique pinewood smoke smell I only get in Santa Fe. I’ve been around a lot of pinewood fires in, say, Colorado and Arizona, but the piñon smoke billowing out of a kiva fireplace is a unique smell; one that I love. It was a cold hike up the trail this morning; here was a little payback.\r\n\r\nThe next morning, after tucking into another great breakfast, El Farolito’s cook/owner/travel guide recommended we head out to <a href=\"https://www.blm.gov/visit/kktr\">Tent Rocks</a> for our next hike. It would be a completely different environment, hiking through towering volcanic rock formations rather than a forest, and at 600 ft, it would only be a third of yesterday’s climb. However, Tent Rocks is a popular place that caps the number of people it lets in. The forecast was for a sunny Saturday, so we needed to get on our way or risk waiting in line to get in.\r\n\r\nThis was made much easier by our choice of rental car. When we hit the Hertz Presidents’ Club aisle at Albuquerque airport Thursday afternoon, it was pretty picked over; just a very odd selection of Dodge vehicles -- Dodge Challenger muscle cars or fully tricked out Ram Hemi king-cab pick-ups. I can’t say that I’ve ever faced quite that choice at Hertz before. The Challenger, with rear-wheel drive, wouldn’t be great if we got snow at elevation, but the Rams were just huge, trying to parallel park one in downtown Santa Fe would be an event. I stood between them, went back and forth for a couple of minutes. “Just pick one,” Irene said, “it’s a rental car, not a life choice!” I went for the white Challenger and hoped for clear skies.\r\n\r\nAnd on this Saturday morning, that’s what we had -- and a 75 mph speed limit on the southbound stretch of I-25 between us and Tent Rocks. I put my foot into the Challenger and kept it there as we exited the interstate and drove down and west across a flat plateau on Rt 16. I didn’t ease up until we hit the residential streets of the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochiti,_New_Mexico\">Cochiti Pueblo reservation</a>. It was around 10:30 am when we turned onto the access road, expecting to hit the line of waiting cars. We were hugely relieved when we drove straight up to the entrance booth, paid the $5 fee, and continued on to the trail head parking.\r\n\r\n<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/20181124_180015173_iOS.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-2221\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/20181124_180015173_iOS-300x225.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\" /></a>Walking sideways and single file through the narrowest parts of the slot canyon at the start of the Canyon Trail, we immediately understood and appreciated the capacity limit. Without it, the trail would’ve hit gridlock. And we didn’t mind the times when we had to wait for a downhill group to clear a tight squeeze. It gave us time to look up and appreciate the rough beauty left behind by 6-7 million years of erosion.\r\n\r\nComing out of the slot canyon, we hit the steep section. “Do you think it’s worth it,” a dad asked, struggling up the incline with his daughter and a load of snacks on his back. When we got to the flat mesa on top, the answer was there spread out for us when we looked down onto the 90-foot tent rocks (<a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoodoo_(geology)\">hoodoos</a>), and then out across the Rio Grande Valley and to the Sangre de Cristo mountains in the distance. The temperature hit 50°F. We shed a couple of layers of clothing, dangled our legs off a rock ledge, drained our water bottles, and looked out with nothing between us and the horizon. It was our second day of cloudless blue skies and hundred mile vistas.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_2219\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/20181124_212142086_iOS.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2219\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/20181124_212142086_iOS-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Tapwall at Rowley Farmhouse Ales[/caption]\r\n\r\nDriving back to Santa Fe, we got off of I-25 an exit early and drove up Rt 14 through what felt like the real life Santa Fe. No art dealers and kachina shops; instead, the typical string of auto dealers, gas stations, and shopping centers anchored by Targets and drive-thru Starbucks. We were headed to <a href=\"https://www.rowleyfarmhouse.com/\">Rowley Farmhouse Ales</a> for another post-hike green chile cheeseburger. The Rowley burger was a bit more upscale than yesterday’s -- the menu namechecks local purveyors of the beef, bacon, and cheese (but not the green chile!) on the burger -- but still a very solid burger. The beer list was one of the strongest we’d seen. Flights of tasters let us sample Rowley’s own beers -- a nice range of IPAs, saisons, and sours -- and some of the local guest beers they also had on tap.\r\n\r\nThat evening, we walked over to Guadalupe Street, which feels like the lowbrow counterpart to the plaza or Canyon Road. We stopped first at <a href=\"http://www.cowgirlsantafe.com/\">Cowgirl BBQ</a> for some margarita nostalgia. On our first trip to Santa Fe, I was on the hunt for a great everyday margarita recipe and after a weekend of margarita tasting, we picked Cowgirl’s. We worked our way through their current margarita menu, listening to a group of local guys at the end of the bar talk to the bartender about taking dancing lessons. “God, I missed you guys,” the bartender said.\r\n\r\nWe walked a couple of blocks further down Guadalupe Street to <a href=\"https://tomasitas.com/\">Tomasita’s</a> for dinner. The alcove was full of families and big parties. The hostess gave the party of 6 in front of us a 2-hour wait. For Irene and I, just an hour. We headed to the bar to try their margaritas. When we were seated (15 minutes early!), we searched the menu for something different. Most of it was the standard enchilada and taco combo plates, but with a little patience, we found some unique dishes. <a href=\"https://www.cooksillustrated.com/articles/697-real-carne-adovada\"><em>Carne adovada</em></a>, the classic New Mexico pork and red chile braise, had a deep earthy chile flavor that made me seriously question my green chile fixation. Because we were there on a weekend night, we could order a side of <em>chicos</em>. A New Mexico spin on a Native American staple, Tomasita’s <a href=\"https://highlandsranchfoodie.com/2016/01/beans-and-chicos-2/\">chicos</a> are whole beans mixed with whole corn kernels that have been steamed over a fire. The texture of the whole beans and the smoky sweet taste of the corn kernels were such an improvement over the pasty blandness of refried beans, I wondered why the chicos weren’t the standard side. And in place of the usual tortillas, we got a basket of fresh sopapillas with honey butter.','Road Trip — Lowbrow Santa Fe','','inherit','closed','closed','','2208-revision-v1','','','2019-01-23 20:21:49','2019-01-24 01:21:49','',2208,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/01/23/2208-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2226,1,'2019-01-23 20:24:56','2019-01-24 01:24:56','[caption id=\"attachment_2211\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/20181125_005916392_iOS.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2211\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/20181125_005916392_iOS-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> In Search of a Killer Margarita[/caption]\r\n\r\nWe stopped for a moment to catch our breath and figure out how much longer to the top of the <a href=\"https://www.hikingproject.com/trail/7003499/atalaya-mountain-trail-170\">Atalaya Mountain Trail</a>. Yesterday, before we flew out to Santa Fe, we were at 700 ft above sea level. After 90 minutes of walking, I guessed we were at 8,000 ft and had another 1,100 ft to get to the top. Between the altitude and the snow on the trail from the night before, this hike was taking longer than we’d planned. I looked at my watch and told Irene, “If you want to hit the Black Friday artisan market, we need to head back now.” She took another breath. “Nope, we’re heading to the top.”\r\n\r\nForty minutes later, we stood on a rocky ledge looking down over Santa Fe with a group of Argentinians who’d passed us 10 minutes before. We took the obligatory selfie and sat down on the rocks to take in the view. The breakfast cook/owner of our B&amp;B had sold us on this trail. We cursed him on the way up when we slid through the snow and struggled to find the trail markings. But now, looking out over Santa Fe National Forest to the horizon line of a cloudless blue sky, we took those words back.\r\n\r\nSanta Fe visits can go highbrow -- the <a href=\"https://www.okeeffemuseum.org/\">Georgia O’Keefe museum</a> and a run up Canyon Road through all the art galleries -- or lowbrow -- hiking up mountain trails and hunting the best green chile cheeseburger. This trip was all lowbrow. <!--more Click Here To Keep Reading &lt;em&gt;Road Trip — Lowbrow Santa Fe&lt;/em&gt; -->\r\n\r\nAnd after 20 minutes of taking in the views at the top of Atalaya Mountain, we had just two things in mind -- green chile cheeseburgers and beer. The 1,800 foot descent only sharpened our appetites. Five-and-a half hours after we’d started, we were sitting at the bar at <a href=\"https://www.secondstreetbrewery.com/the-railyard\">Second Street Brewing’s restaurant in the Railyard District</a>, replacing whatever calories we’d burned off with green chile cheeseburgers and a side of green chile cheese fries. Double lashings of american cheese, which I know I shouldn’t like because it isn’t really cheese, but the creamy gooey-ness of it blended well with the chile bite. We chased it down with a pint of their <a href=\"https://untappd.com/b/second-street-brewery-boneshaker-bitter/675872\">Boneshaker Bitter</a>, one of the better American-made ESBs I’ve had.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_2224\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"640\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/20181123_193305944_iOS.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-2224 size-large\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/20181123_193305944_iOS-1024x418.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"640\" height=\"261\" /></a> Top of the Atalaya Mountain Trail[/caption]\r\n\r\nIt was the end of November and the temperature was dropping as we made our way back to our B&amp;B, the <a href=\"https://farolito.com/\">El Farolito</a>. We had our own little <a href=\"https://farolito.com/galisteo-room-1/\">casita</a> out front. Walking in, we saw that housekeeping had the kiva fireplace ready for us, loaded with a triangle of <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyon_pine\">piñon</a> logs over some kindling and a stack of yesterday’s newspaper off to the side. The fire caught with one match (gotta love well-seasoned wood). As the smoke rose up the chimney, I walked back outside and was immediately hit with the<a href=\"https://www.outsidemodern.com/pinon-wood-the-best-firewood-for-chimineas-pinion-pinyon/\"> piñon smell</a>, that unique pinewood smoke smell I only get in Santa Fe. I’ve been around a lot of pinewood fires in, say, Colorado and Arizona, but the piñon smoke billowing out of a kiva fireplace is a unique smell; one that I love. It was a cold hike up the trail this morning; here was a little payback.\r\n\r\nThe next morning, after tucking into another great breakfast, El Farolito’s cook/owner/travel guide recommended we head out to <a href=\"https://www.blm.gov/visit/kktr\">Tent Rocks</a> for our next hike. It would be a completely different environment, hiking through towering volcanic rock formations rather than a forest, and at 600 ft, it would only be a third of yesterday’s climb. However, Tent Rocks is a popular place that caps the number of people it lets in. The forecast was for a sunny Saturday, so we needed to get on our way or risk waiting in line to get in.\r\n\r\nThis was made much easier by our choice of rental car. When we hit the Hertz Presidents’ Club aisle at Albuquerque airport Thursday afternoon, it was pretty picked over; just a very odd selection of Dodge vehicles -- Dodge Challenger muscle cars or fully tricked out Ram Hemi king-cab pick-ups. I can’t say that I’ve ever faced quite that choice at Hertz before. The Challenger, with rear-wheel drive, wouldn’t be great if we got snow at elevation, but the Rams were just huge, trying to parallel park one in downtown Santa Fe would be an event. I stood between them, went back and forth for a couple of minutes. “Just pick one,” Irene said, “it’s a rental car, not a life choice!” I went for the white Challenger and hoped for clear skies.\r\n\r\nAnd on this Saturday morning, that’s what we had -- and a 75 mph speed limit on the southbound stretch of I-25 between us and Tent Rocks. I put my foot into the Challenger and kept it there as we exited the interstate and drove down and west across a flat plateau on Rt 16. I didn’t ease up until we hit the residential streets of the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochiti,_New_Mexico\">Cochiti Pueblo reservation</a>. It was around 10:30 am when we turned onto the access road, expecting to hit the line of waiting cars. We were hugely relieved when we drove straight up to the entrance booth, paid the $5 fee, and continued on to the trail head parking.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_2221\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/20181124_180015173_iOS.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-2221 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/20181124_180015173_iOS-300x225.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\" /></a> Looking Down onto the Tent Rocks[/caption]\r\n\r\nWalking sideways and single file through the narrowest parts of the slot canyon at the start of the Canyon Trail, we immediately understood and appreciated the capacity limit. Without it, the trail would’ve hit gridlock. And we didn’t mind the times when we had to wait for a downhill group to clear a tight squeeze. It gave us time to look up and appreciate the rough beauty left behind by 6-7 million years of erosion.\r\n\r\nComing out of the slot canyon, we hit the steep section. “Do you think it’s worth it,” a dad asked, struggling up the incline with his daughter and a load of snacks on his back. When we got to the flat mesa on top, the answer was there spread out for us when we looked down onto the 90-foot tent rocks (<a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoodoo_(geology)\">hoodoos</a>), and then out across the Rio Grande Valley and to the Sangre de Cristo mountains in the distance. The temperature hit 50°F. We shed a couple of layers of clothing, dangled our legs off a rock ledge, drained our water bottles, and looked out with nothing between us and the horizon. It was our second day of cloudless blue skies and hundred mile vistas.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_2219\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/20181124_212142086_iOS.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2219\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/20181124_212142086_iOS-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Tapwall at Rowley Farmhouse Ales[/caption]\r\n\r\nDriving back to Santa Fe, we got off of I-25 an exit early and drove up Rt 14 through what felt like the real life Santa Fe. No art dealers and kachina shops; instead, the typical string of auto dealers, gas stations, and shopping centers anchored by Targets and drive-thru Starbucks. We were headed to <a href=\"https://www.rowleyfarmhouse.com/\">Rowley Farmhouse Ales</a> for another post-hike green chile cheeseburger. The Rowley burger was a bit more upscale than yesterday’s -- the menu namechecks local purveyors of the beef, bacon, and cheese (but not the green chile!) on the burger -- but still a very solid burger. The beer list was one of the strongest we’d seen. Flights of tasters let us sample Rowley’s own beers -- a nice range of IPAs, saisons, and sours -- and some of the local guest beers they also had on tap.\r\n\r\nThat evening, we walked over to Guadalupe Street, which feels like the lowbrow counterpart to the plaza or Canyon Road. We stopped first at <a href=\"http://www.cowgirlsantafe.com/\">Cowgirl BBQ</a> for some margarita nostalgia. On our first trip to Santa Fe, I was on the hunt for a great everyday margarita recipe and after a weekend of margarita tasting, we picked Cowgirl’s. We worked our way through their current margarita menu, listening to a group of local guys at the end of the bar talk to the bartender about taking dancing lessons. “God, I missed you guys,” the bartender said.\r\n\r\nWe walked a couple of blocks further down Guadalupe Street to <a href=\"https://tomasitas.com/\">Tomasita’s</a> for dinner. The alcove was full of families and big parties. The hostess gave the party of 6 in front of us a 2-hour wait. For Irene and I, just an hour. We headed to the bar to try their margaritas. When we were seated (15 minutes early!), we searched the menu for something different. Most of it was the standard enchilada and taco combo plates, but with a little patience, we found some unique dishes. <a href=\"https://www.cooksillustrated.com/articles/697-real-carne-adovada\"><em>Carne adovada</em></a>, the classic New Mexico pork and red chile braise, had a deep earthy chile flavor that made me seriously question my green chile fixation. Because we were there on a weekend night, we could order a side of <em>chicos</em>. A New Mexico spin on a Native American staple, Tomasita’s <a href=\"https://highlandsranchfoodie.com/2016/01/beans-and-chicos-2/\">chicos</a> are whole beans mixed with whole corn kernels that have been steamed over a fire. The texture of the whole beans and the smoky sweet taste of the corn kernels were such an improvement over the pasty blandness of refried beans, I wondered why the chicos weren’t the standard side. And in place of the usual tortillas, we got a basket of fresh sopapillas with honey butter.','Road Trip — Lowbrow Santa Fe','','inherit','closed','closed','','2208-revision-v1','','','2019-01-23 20:24:56','2019-01-24 01:24:56','',2208,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/01/23/2208-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2227,1,'2019-01-23 20:25:51','2019-01-24 01:25:51','[caption id=\"attachment_2211\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/20181125_005916392_iOS.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2211\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/20181125_005916392_iOS-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> In Search of a Killer Margarita[/caption]\r\n\r\nWe stopped for a moment to catch our breath and figure out how much longer to the top of the <a href=\"https://www.hikingproject.com/trail/7003499/atalaya-mountain-trail-170\">Atalaya Mountain Trail</a>. Yesterday, before we flew out to Santa Fe, we were at 700 ft above sea level. After 90 minutes of walking, I guessed we were at 8,000 ft and had another 1,100 ft to get to the top. Between the altitude and the snow on the trail from the night before, this hike was taking longer than we’d planned. I looked at my watch and told Irene, “If you want to hit the Black Friday artisan market, we need to head back now.” She took another breath. “Nope, we’re heading to the top.”\r\n\r\nForty minutes later, we stood on a rocky ledge looking down over Santa Fe with a group of Argentinians who’d passed us 10 minutes before. We took the obligatory selfie and sat down on the rocks to take in the view. The breakfast cook/owner of our B&amp;B had sold us on this trail. We cursed him on the way up when we slid through the snow and struggled to find the trail markings. But now, looking out over Santa Fe National Forest to the horizon line of a cloudless blue sky, we took those words back.\r\n\r\nSanta Fe visits can go highbrow -- the <a href=\"https://www.okeeffemuseum.org/\">Georgia O’Keefe museum</a> and a run up Canyon Road through all the art galleries -- or lowbrow -- hiking up mountain trails and hunting the best green chile cheeseburger. This trip was all lowbrow. <!--more Click Here To Keep Reading &lt;em&gt;Road Trip — Lowbrow Santa Fe&lt;/em&gt; -->\r\n\r\nAnd after 20 minutes of taking in the views at the top of Atalaya Mountain, we had just two things in mind -- green chile cheeseburgers and beer. The 1,800 foot descent only sharpened our appetites. Five-and-a half hours after we’d started, we were sitting at the bar at <a href=\"https://www.secondstreetbrewery.com/the-railyard\">Second Street Brewing’s restaurant in the Railyard District</a>, replacing whatever calories we’d burned off with green chile cheeseburgers and a side of green chile cheese fries. Double lashings of american cheese, which I know I shouldn’t like because it isn’t really cheese, but the creamy gooey-ness of it blended well with the chile bite. We chased it down with a pint of their <a href=\"https://untappd.com/b/second-street-brewery-boneshaker-bitter/675872\">Boneshaker Bitter</a>, one of the better American-made ESBs I’ve had.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_2224\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"640\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/20181123_193305944_iOS.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-2224 size-large\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/20181123_193305944_iOS-1024x418.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"640\" height=\"261\" /></a> Top of the Atalaya Mountain Trail[/caption]\r\n\r\nIt was the end of November and the temperature was dropping as we made our way back to our B&amp;B, the <a href=\"https://farolito.com/\">El Farolito</a>. We had our own little <a href=\"https://farolito.com/galisteo-room-1/\">casita</a> out front. Walking in, we saw that housekeeping had the kiva fireplace ready for us, loaded with a triangle of <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyon_pine\">piñon</a> logs over some kindling and a stack of yesterday’s newspaper off to the side. The fire caught with one match (gotta love well-seasoned wood). As the smoke rose up the chimney, I walked back outside and was immediately hit with the<a href=\"https://www.outsidemodern.com/pinon-wood-the-best-firewood-for-chimineas-pinion-pinyon/\"> piñon smell</a>, that unique pinewood smoke smell I only get in Santa Fe. I’ve been around a lot of pinewood fires in, say, Colorado and Arizona, but the piñon smoke billowing out of a kiva fireplace is a unique smell; one that I love. It was a cold hike up the trail this morning; here was a little payback.\r\n\r\nThe next morning, after tucking into another great breakfast, El Farolito’s cook/owner/travel guide recommended we head out to <a href=\"https://www.blm.gov/visit/kktr\">Tent Rocks</a> for our next hike. It would be a completely different environment, hiking through towering volcanic rock formations rather than a forest, and at 600 ft, it would only be a third of yesterday’s climb. However, Tent Rocks is a popular place that caps the number of people it lets in. The forecast was for a sunny Saturday, so we needed to get on our way or risk waiting in line to get in.\r\n\r\nThis was made much easier by our choice of rental car. When we hit the Hertz Presidents’ Club aisle at Albuquerque airport Thursday afternoon, it was pretty picked over; just a very odd selection of Dodge vehicles -- Dodge Challenger muscle cars or fully tricked out Ram Hemi king-cab pick-ups. I can’t say that I’ve ever faced quite that choice at Hertz before. The Challenger, with rear-wheel drive, wouldn’t be great if we got snow at elevation, but the Rams were just huge, trying to parallel park one in downtown Santa Fe would be an event. I stood between them, went back and forth for a couple of minutes. “Just pick one,” Irene said, “it’s a rental car, not a life choice!” I went for the white Challenger and hoped for clear skies.\r\n\r\nAnd on this Saturday morning, that’s what we had -- and a 75 mph speed limit on the southbound stretch of I-25 between us and Tent Rocks. I put my foot into the Challenger and kept it there as we exited the interstate and drove down and west across a flat plateau on Rt 16. I didn’t ease up until we hit the residential streets of the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochiti,_New_Mexico\">Cochiti Pueblo reservation</a>. It was around 10:30 am when we turned onto the access road, expecting to hit the line of waiting cars. We were hugely relieved when we drove straight up to the entrance booth, paid the $5 fee, and continued on to the trail head parking.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_2221\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"640\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/20181124_180015173_iOS.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-2221 size-large\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/20181124_180015173_iOS-1024x768.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"640\" height=\"480\" /></a> Looking Down onto the Tent Rocks[/caption]\r\n\r\nWalking sideways and single file through the narrowest parts of the slot canyon at the start of the Canyon Trail, we immediately understood and appreciated the capacity limit. Without it, the trail would’ve hit gridlock. And we didn’t mind the times when we had to wait for a downhill group to clear a tight squeeze. It gave us time to look up and appreciate the rough beauty left behind by 6-7 million years of erosion.\r\n\r\nComing out of the slot canyon, we hit the steep section. “Do you think it’s worth it,” a dad asked, struggling up the incline with his daughter and a load of snacks on his back. When we got to the flat mesa on top, the answer was there spread out for us when we looked down onto the 90-foot tent rocks (<a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoodoo_(geology)\">hoodoos</a>), and then out across the Rio Grande Valley and to the Sangre de Cristo mountains in the distance. The temperature hit 50°F. We shed a couple of layers of clothing, dangled our legs off a rock ledge, drained our water bottles, and looked out with nothing between us and the horizon. It was our second day of cloudless blue skies and hundred mile vistas.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_2219\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/20181124_212142086_iOS.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2219\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/20181124_212142086_iOS-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Tapwall at Rowley Farmhouse Ales[/caption]\r\n\r\nDriving back to Santa Fe, we got off of I-25 an exit early and drove up Rt 14 through what felt like the real life Santa Fe. No art dealers and kachina shops; instead, the typical string of auto dealers, gas stations, and shopping centers anchored by Targets and drive-thru Starbucks. We were headed to <a href=\"https://www.rowleyfarmhouse.com/\">Rowley Farmhouse Ales</a> for another post-hike green chile cheeseburger. The Rowley burger was a bit more upscale than yesterday’s -- the menu namechecks local purveyors of the beef, bacon, and cheese (but not the green chile!) on the burger -- but still a very solid burger. The beer list was one of the strongest we’d seen. Flights of tasters let us sample Rowley’s own beers -- a nice range of IPAs, saisons, and sours -- and some of the local guest beers they also had on tap.\r\n\r\nThat evening, we walked over to Guadalupe Street, which feels like the lowbrow counterpart to the plaza or Canyon Road. We stopped first at <a href=\"http://www.cowgirlsantafe.com/\">Cowgirl BBQ</a> for some margarita nostalgia. On our first trip to Santa Fe, I was on the hunt for a great everyday margarita recipe and after a weekend of margarita tasting, we picked Cowgirl’s. We worked our way through their current margarita menu, listening to a group of local guys at the end of the bar talk to the bartender about taking dancing lessons. “God, I missed you guys,” the bartender said.\r\n\r\nWe walked a couple of blocks further down Guadalupe Street to <a href=\"https://tomasitas.com/\">Tomasita’s</a> for dinner. The alcove was full of families and big parties. The hostess gave the party of 6 in front of us a 2-hour wait. For Irene and I, just an hour. We headed to the bar to try their margaritas. When we were seated (15 minutes early!), we searched the menu for something different. Most of it was the standard enchilada and taco combo plates, but with a little patience, we found some unique dishes. <a href=\"https://www.cooksillustrated.com/articles/697-real-carne-adovada\"><em>Carne adovada</em></a>, the classic New Mexico pork and red chile braise, had a deep earthy chile flavor that made me seriously question my green chile fixation. Because we were there on a weekend night, we could order a side of <em>chicos</em>. A New Mexico spin on a Native American staple, Tomasita’s <a href=\"https://highlandsranchfoodie.com/2016/01/beans-and-chicos-2/\">chicos</a> are whole beans mixed with whole corn kernels that have been steamed over a fire. The texture of the whole beans and the smoky sweet taste of the corn kernels were such an improvement over the pasty blandness of refried beans, I wondered why the chicos weren’t the standard side. And in place of the usual tortillas, we got a basket of fresh sopapillas with honey butter.','Road Trip — Lowbrow Santa Fe','','inherit','closed','closed','','2208-revision-v1','','','2019-01-23 20:25:51','2019-01-24 01:25:51','',2208,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/01/23/2208-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2228,1,'2019-01-23 23:39:14','2019-01-24 04:39:14','[caption id=\"attachment_2211\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/20181125_005916392_iOS.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2211\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/20181125_005916392_iOS-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> In Search of a Killer Margarita[/caption]\r\n\r\nWe stopped for a moment to catch our breath and figure out how much longer to the top of the <a href=\"https://www.hikingproject.com/trail/7003499/atalaya-mountain-trail-170\">Atalaya Mountain Trail</a>. Yesterday, before we flew out to Santa Fe, we were at 700 ft above sea level. After 90 minutes of walking, I guessed we were at 8,000 ft and had another 1,100 ft to get to the top. Between the altitude and the snow on the trail from the night before, this hike was taking longer than we’d planned. I looked at my watch and told Irene, “If you want to hit the Black Friday artisan market, we need to head back now.” She took another breath. “Nope, we’re heading to the top.”\r\n\r\nForty minutes later, we stood on a rocky ledge looking down over Santa Fe with a group of Argentinians who’d passed us 10 minutes before. We took the obligatory selfie and sat down on the rocks to take in the view. The breakfast cook/owner of our B&amp;B had sold us on this trail. We cursed him on the way up when we slid through the snow and struggled to find the trail markings. But now, looking out over Santa Fe National Forest to the horizon line of a cloudless blue sky, we took those words back.\r\n\r\nSanta Fe visits can go highbrow -- the <a href=\"https://www.okeeffemuseum.org/\">Georgia O’Keefe museum</a> and a run up Canyon Road through all the art galleries -- or lowbrow -- hiking up mountain trails and hunting the best green chile cheeseburger. This trip was all lowbrow. <!--more Click Here To Keep Reading &lt;em&gt;Road Trip — Lowbrow Santa Fe&lt;/em&gt; -->\r\n\r\nAnd after 20 minutes of taking in the views at the top of Atalaya Mountain, we had just two things in mind -- green chile cheeseburgers and beer. The 1,800 foot descent only sharpened our appetites. Five-and-a half hours after we’d started, we were sitting at the bar at <a href=\"https://www.secondstreetbrewery.com/the-railyard\">Second Street Brewing’s restaurant in the Railyard District</a>, replacing whatever calories we’d burned off with green chile cheeseburgers and a side of green chile cheese fries. Double lashings of american cheese, which I know I shouldn’t like because it isn’t really cheese, but the creamy gooey-ness of it blended well with the chile bite. We chased it down with a pint of their <a href=\"https://untappd.com/b/second-street-brewery-boneshaker-bitter/675872\">Boneshaker Bitter</a>, one of the better American-made ESBs I’ve had.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_2224\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"640\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/20181123_193305944_iOS.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-2224 size-large\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/20181123_193305944_iOS-1024x418.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"640\" height=\"261\" /></a> Top of the Atalaya Mountain Trail[/caption]\r\n\r\nIt was the end of November and the temperature was dropping as we made our way back to our B&amp;B, the <a href=\"https://farolito.com/\">El Farolito</a>. We had our own little <a href=\"https://farolito.com/galisteo-room-1/\">casita</a> out front. Walking in, we saw that housekeeping had the kiva fireplace ready for us, loaded with a triangle of <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyon_pine\">piñon</a> logs over some kindling and a stack of yesterday’s newspaper off to the side. The fire caught with one match (gotta love well-seasoned wood). As the smoke rose up the chimney, I walked back outside and was immediately hit with the<a href=\"https://www.outsidemodern.com/pinon-wood-the-best-firewood-for-chimineas-pinion-pinyon/\"> piñon smell</a>, that unique pinewood smoke smell I only get in Santa Fe. I’ve been around a lot of pinewood fires in, say, Colorado and Arizona, but the piñon smoke billowing out of a kiva fireplace is a unique smell; one that I love. It was a cold hike up the trail this morning; here was a little payback.\r\n\r\nThe next morning, after tucking into another great breakfast, El Farolito’s cook/owner/travel guide recommended we head out to <a href=\"https://www.blm.gov/visit/kktr\">Tent Rocks</a> for our next hike. It would be a completely different environment, hiking through towering volcanic rock formations rather than a forest, and at 600 ft, it would only be a third of yesterday’s climb. However, Tent Rocks is a popular place that caps the number of people it lets in. The forecast was for a sunny Saturday, so we needed to get on our way or risk waiting in line to get in.\r\n\r\nThis was made much easier by our choice of rental car. When we hit the Hertz Presidents’ Club aisle at Albuquerque airport Thursday afternoon, it was pretty picked over; just a very odd selection of Dodge vehicles -- Dodge Challenger muscle cars or fully tricked out Ram Hemi king-cab pick-ups. I can’t say that I’ve ever faced quite that choice at Hertz before. The Challenger, with rear-wheel drive, wouldn’t be great if we got snow at elevation, but the Rams were just huge, trying to parallel park one in downtown Santa Fe would be an event. I stood between them, went back and forth for a couple of minutes. “Just pick one,” Irene said, “it’s a rental car, not a life choice!” I went for the white Challenger and hoped for clear skies.\r\n\r\nAnd on this Saturday morning, that’s what we had -- and a 75 mph speed limit on the southbound stretch of I-25 between us and Tent Rocks. I put my foot into the Challenger and kept it there as we exited the interstate and drove down and west across a flat plateau on Rt 16. I didn’t ease up until we hit the residential streets of the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochiti,_New_Mexico\">Cochiti Pueblo reservation</a>. It was around 10:30 am when we turned onto the access road, expecting to hit the line of waiting cars. We were hugely relieved when we drove straight up to the entrance booth, paid the $5 fee, and continued on to the trail head parking.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_2221\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"640\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/20181124_180015173_iOS.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-2221 size-large\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/20181124_180015173_iOS-1024x768.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"640\" height=\"480\" /></a> Looking Down onto the Tent Rocks[/caption]\r\n\r\nWalking sideways and single file through the narrowest parts of the slot canyon at the start of the Canyon Trail, we immediately understood and appreciated the capacity limit. Without it, the trail would’ve hit gridlock. And we didn’t mind the times when we had to wait for a downhill group to clear a tight squeeze. It gave us time to look up and appreciate the rough beauty left behind by 6-7 million years of erosion.\r\n\r\nComing out of the slot canyon, we hit the steep section. “Do you think it’s worth it,” a dad asked, struggling up the incline with his daughter and a load of snacks on his back. When we got to the flat mesa on top, the answer was there spread out for us when we looked down onto the 90-foot tent rocks (<a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoodoo_(geology)\">hoodoos</a>), and then out across the Rio Grande Valley and to the Sangre de Cristo mountains in the distance. The temperature hit 50°F. We shed a couple of layers of clothing, dangled our legs off a rock ledge, drained our water bottles, and looked out with nothing between us and the horizon. It was our second day of cloudless blue skies and hundred mile vistas.\r\n\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">When we drove out around 1pm, we passed a line of cars waiting at the entrance booth to get it. The line ended between signs estimating the wait time to be 30 and 60 minutes. I patted the Challenger’s dashboard.</span>\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_2219\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/20181124_212142086_iOS.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2219\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/20181124_212142086_iOS-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Tapwall at Rowley Farmhouse Ales[/caption]\r\n\r\nDriving back to Santa Fe, we got off of I-25 an exit early and drove up Rt 14 through what felt like the real life Santa Fe. No art dealers and kachina shops; instead, the typical string of auto dealers, gas stations, and shopping centers anchored by Targets and drive-thru Starbucks. We were headed to <a href=\"https://www.rowleyfarmhouse.com/\">Rowley Farmhouse Ales</a> for another post-hike green chile cheeseburger. The Rowley burger was a bit more upscale than yesterday’s -- the menu namechecks local purveyors of the beef, bacon, and cheese (but not the green chile!) on the burger -- but still a very solid burger. The beer list was one of the strongest we’d seen. Flights of tasters let us sample Rowley’s own beers -- a nice range of IPAs, saisons, and sours -- and some of the local guest beers they also had on tap.\r\n\r\nThat evening, we walked over to Guadalupe Street, which feels like the lowbrow counterpart to the plaza or Canyon Road. We stopped first at <a href=\"http://www.cowgirlsantafe.com/\">Cowgirl BBQ</a> for some margarita nostalgia. On our first trip to Santa Fe, I was on the hunt for a great everyday margarita recipe and after a weekend of margarita tasting, we picked Cowgirl’s. We worked our way through their current margarita menu, listening to a group of local guys at the end of the bar talk to the bartender about taking dancing lessons. “God, I missed you guys,” the bartender said.\r\n\r\nWe walked a couple of blocks further down Guadalupe Street to <a href=\"https://tomasitas.com/\">Tomasita’s</a> for dinner. The alcove was full of families and big parties. The hostess gave the party of 6 in front of us a 2-hour wait. For Irene and I, just an hour. We headed to the bar to try their margaritas. When we were seated (15 minutes early!), we searched the menu for something different. Most of it was the standard enchilada and taco combo plates, but with a little patience, we found some unique dishes. <a href=\"https://www.cooksillustrated.com/articles/697-real-carne-adovada\"><em>Carne adovada</em></a>, the classic New Mexico pork and red chile braise, had a deep earthy chile flavor that made me seriously question my green chile fixation. Because we were there on a weekend night, we could order a side of <em>chicos</em>. A New Mexico spin on a Native American staple, Tomasita’s <a href=\"https://highlandsranchfoodie.com/2016/01/beans-and-chicos-2/\">chicos</a> are whole beans mixed with whole corn kernels that have been steamed over a fire. The texture of the whole beans and the smoky sweet taste of the corn kernels were such an improvement over the pasty blandness of refried beans, I wondered why the chicos weren’t the standard side. And in place of the usual tortillas, we got a basket of fresh sopapillas with honey butter. <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Nothing fancy; it was homestyle New Mexico cuisine.</span>\r\n\r\nSunday morning','Road Trip — Lowbrow Santa Fe','','inherit','closed','closed','','2208-revision-v1','','','2019-01-23 23:39:14','2019-01-24 04:39:14','',2208,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/01/23/2208-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2229,1,'2019-01-24 21:12:30','2019-01-25 02:12:30','[caption id=\"attachment_2211\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/20181125_005916392_iOS.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2211\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/20181125_005916392_iOS-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> In Search of a Killer Margarita[/caption]\r\n\r\nWe stopped for a moment to catch our breath and figure out how much longer to the top of the <a href=\"https://www.hikingproject.com/trail/7003499/atalaya-mountain-trail-170\">Atalaya Mountain Trail</a>. Yesterday, before we flew out to Santa Fe, we were at 700 ft above sea level. After 90 minutes of walking, I guessed we were at 8,000 ft and had another 1,100 ft to get to the top. Between the altitude and the snow on the trail from the night before, this hike was taking longer than we’d planned. I looked at my watch and told Irene, “If you want to hit the Black Friday artisan market, we need to head back now.” She took another breath. “Nope, we’re heading to the top.”\r\n\r\nForty minutes later, we stood on a rocky ledge looking down over Santa Fe with a group of Argentinians who’d passed us 10 minutes before. We took the obligatory selfie and sat down on the rocks to take in the view. The breakfast cook/owner of our B&amp;B had sold us on this trail. We cursed him on the way up when we slid through the snow and struggled to find the trail markings. But now, looking out over Santa Fe National Forest to the horizon line of a cloudless blue sky, we took those words back.\r\n\r\nSanta Fe visits can go highbrow -- the <a href=\"https://www.okeeffemuseum.org/\">Georgia O’Keefe museum</a> and a run up Canyon Road through all the art galleries -- or lowbrow -- hiking up mountain trails and hunting the best green chile cheeseburger. This trip was all lowbrow. <!--more Click Here To Keep Reading &lt;em&gt;Road Trip — Lowbrow Santa Fe&lt;/em&gt; -->\r\n\r\nAnd after 20 minutes of taking in the views at the top of Atalaya Mountain, we had just two things in mind -- green chile cheeseburgers and beer. The 1,800 foot descent only sharpened our appetites. Five-and-a half hours after we’d started, we were sitting at the bar at <a href=\"https://www.secondstreetbrewery.com/the-railyard\">Second Street Brewing’s restaurant in the Railyard District</a>, replacing whatever calories we’d burned off with green chile cheeseburgers and a side of green chile cheese fries. Double lashings of american cheese, which I know I shouldn’t like because it isn’t really cheese, but the creamy gooey-ness of it blended well with the chile bite. We chased it down with a pint of their <a href=\"https://untappd.com/b/second-street-brewery-boneshaker-bitter/675872\">Boneshaker Bitter</a>, one of the better American-made ESBs I’ve had.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_2224\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"640\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/20181123_193305944_iOS.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-2224 size-large\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/20181123_193305944_iOS-1024x418.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"640\" height=\"261\" /></a> Top of the Atalaya Mountain Trail[/caption]\r\n\r\nIt was the end of November and the temperature was dropping as we made our way back to our B&amp;B, the <a href=\"https://farolito.com/\">El Farolito</a>. We had our own little <a href=\"https://farolito.com/galisteo-room-1/\">casita</a> out front. Walking in, we saw that housekeeping had the kiva fireplace ready for us, loaded with a triangle of <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyon_pine\">piñon</a> logs over some kindling and a stack of yesterday’s newspaper off to the side. The fire caught with one match (gotta love well-seasoned wood). As the smoke rose up the chimney, I walked back outside and was immediately hit with the<a href=\"https://www.outsidemodern.com/pinon-wood-the-best-firewood-for-chimineas-pinion-pinyon/\"> piñon smell</a>, that unique pinewood smoke smell I only get in Santa Fe. I’ve been around a lot of pinewood fires in, say, Colorado and Arizona, but the piñon smoke billowing out of a kiva fireplace is a unique smell; one that I love. It was a cold hike up the trail this morning; here was a little payback.\r\n\r\nThe next morning, after tucking into another great breakfast, El Farolito’s cook/owner/travel guide recommended we head out to <a href=\"https://www.blm.gov/visit/kktr\">Tent Rocks</a> for our next hike. It would be a completely different environment, hiking through towering volcanic rock formations rather than a forest, and at 600 ft, it would only be a third of yesterday’s climb. However, Tent Rocks is a popular place that caps the number of people it lets in. The forecast was for a sunny Saturday, so we needed to get on our way or risk waiting in line to get in.\r\n\r\nThis was made much easier by our choice of rental car. When we hit the Hertz Presidents’ Club aisle at Albuquerque airport Thursday afternoon, it was pretty picked over; just a very odd selection of Dodge vehicles -- Dodge Challenger muscle cars or fully tricked out Ram Hemi king-cab pick-ups. I can’t say that I’ve ever faced quite that choice at Hertz before. The Challenger, with rear-wheel drive, wouldn’t be great if we got snow at elevation, but the Rams were just huge, trying to parallel park one in downtown Santa Fe would be an event. I stood between them, went back and forth for a couple of minutes. “Just pick one,” Irene said, “it’s a rental car, not a life choice!” I went for the white Challenger and hoped for clear skies.\r\n\r\nAnd on this Saturday morning, that’s what we had -- and a 75 mph speed limit on the southbound stretch of I-25 between us and Tent Rocks. I put my foot into the Challenger and kept it there as we exited the interstate and drove down and west across a flat plateau on Rt 16. I didn’t ease up until we hit the residential streets of the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochiti,_New_Mexico\">Cochiti Pueblo reservation</a>. It was around 10:30 am when we turned onto the access road, expecting to hit the line of waiting cars. We were hugely relieved when we drove straight up to the entrance booth, paid the $5 fee, and continued on to the trail head parking.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_2221\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"640\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/20181124_180015173_iOS.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-2221 size-large\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/20181124_180015173_iOS-1024x768.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"640\" height=\"480\" /></a> Looking Down onto the Tent Rocks[/caption]\r\n\r\nWalking sideways and single file through the narrowest parts of the slot canyon at the start of the Canyon Trail, we immediately understood and appreciated the capacity limit. Without it, the trail would’ve hit gridlock. And we didn’t mind the times when we had to wait for a downhill group to clear a tight squeeze. It gave us time to look up and appreciate the rough beauty left behind by 6-7 million years of erosion.\r\n\r\nComing out of the slot canyon, we hit the steep section. “Do you think it’s worth it,” a dad asked, struggling up the incline with his daughter and a load of snacks on his back. When we got to the flat mesa on top, the answer was there spread out for us when we looked down onto the 90-foot tent rocks (<a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoodoo_(geology)\">hoodoos</a>), and then out across the Rio Grande Valley and to the Sangre de Cristo mountains in the distance. The temperature hit 50°F. We shed a couple of layers of clothing, dangled our legs off a rock ledge, drained our water bottles, and looked out with nothing between us and the horizon. It was our second day of cloudless blue skies and hundred mile vistas.\r\n\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">When we drove out around 1pm, we passed a line of cars waiting at the entrance booth to get it. The line ended between signs estimating the wait time to be 30 and 60 minutes. I patted the Challenger’s dashboard.</span>\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_2219\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/20181124_212142086_iOS.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2219\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/20181124_212142086_iOS-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Tapwall at Rowley Farmhouse Ales[/caption]\r\n\r\nDriving back to Santa Fe, we got off of I-25 an exit early and drove up Rt 14 through what felt like the real life Santa Fe. No art dealers and kachina shops; instead, the typical string of auto dealers, gas stations, and shopping centers anchored by Targets and drive-thru Starbucks. We were headed to <a href=\"https://www.rowleyfarmhouse.com/\">Rowley Farmhouse Ales</a> for another post-hike green chile cheeseburger. The Rowley burger was a bit more upscale than yesterday’s -- the menu namechecks local purveyors of the beef, bacon, and cheese (but not the green chile!) on the burger -- but still a very solid burger. The beer list was one of the strongest we’d seen. Flights of tasters let us sample Rowley’s own beers -- a nice range of IPAs, saisons, and sours -- and some of the local guest beers they also had on tap.\r\n\r\nThat evening, we walked over to Guadalupe Street, which feels like the lowbrow counterpart to the plaza or Canyon Road. We stopped first at <a href=\"http://www.cowgirlsantafe.com/\">Cowgirl BBQ</a> for some margarita nostalgia. On our first trip to Santa Fe, I was on the hunt for a great everyday margarita recipe and after a weekend of margarita tasting, we picked Cowgirl’s. We worked our way through their current margarita menu, listening to a group of local guys at the end of the bar talk to the bartender about taking dancing lessons. “God, I missed you guys,” the bartender said.\r\n\r\nWe walked a couple of blocks further down Guadalupe Street to <a href=\"https://tomasitas.com/\">Tomasita’s</a> for dinner. The alcove was full of families and big parties. The hostess gave the party of 6 in front of us a 2-hour wait. For Irene and I, just an hour. We headed to the bar to try their margaritas. When we were seated (15 minutes early!), we searched the menu for something different. Most of it was the standard enchilada and taco combo plates, but with a little patience, we found some unique dishes. <a href=\"https://www.cooksillustrated.com/articles/697-real-carne-adovada\"><em>Carne adovada</em></a>, the classic New Mexico pork and red chile braise, had a deep earthy chile flavor that made me seriously question my green chile fixation. I saw that we could have <em>chicos</em> as our side. “What are chicos?” I asked the waitress. “Oh, you’ll love them.” More of a recommendation than an explanation, but I ordered them anyway. Turned out that Tomasita’s <a href=\"https://highlandsranchfoodie.com/2016/01/beans-and-chicos-2/\">chicos</a> are a New Mexico spin on a Native American staple, whole beans mixed with whole corn kernels that have been steamed over a fire. The texture of the whole beans and the smoky sweet taste of the corn kernels were such an improvement over the pasty blandness of refried beans, I wondered why chicos weren’t the standard side. And in place of the usual tortillas, we got a basket of fresh sopapillas with honey butter. Nothing fancy; it was homestyle New Mexico cuisine.\r\n\r\nSunday morning looked like another bright blue day -- from what we could make out through the frosted window. Our legs felt a bit heavy after two days of walking up steep inclines so we decided to go for some flatter terrain, a walk through town. We walked along the <a href=\"http://www.walkrideusa.com/states/new-mexico/individual-trails/santa-fe-river-trail-new-mexico\">Santa Fe River Park</a>, looking down at the frozen trickle of what we assumed was the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Fe_River_(New_Mexico)\">Santa Fe River</a>. We veered up Canyon Road. None of the galleries were open yet, but there was enough sculpture in the front and side yards to fill our lowbrow culture quotient.\r\n\r\nBy noon, we had walked off last night’s dinner, so we circled back around to Alameda Street and headed back into town toward the plaza to find some lunch. We read the menus of the restaurants ringing the plaza. Nothing really excited us until I spotted a couple of food carts on the west edge of the plaza, a Mexican guy on the southwest corner selling tamales and a Nigerian guy on the northwest corner selling goat stew. I bought two tamales, beef with red chile and chicken with green chile. We crossed the street, ducked out of the wind, and scarfed down what were excellent tamales. It seemed the perfect lunch to end our lowbrow Santa Fe weekend.','Road Trip — Lowbrow Santa Fe','','inherit','closed','closed','','2208-revision-v1','','','2019-01-24 21:12:30','2019-01-25 02:12:30','',2208,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/01/24/2208-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2230,1,'2019-01-24 21:13:35','2019-01-25 02:13:35','[caption id=\"attachment_2211\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/20181125_005916392_iOS.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2211\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/20181125_005916392_iOS-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> In Search of a Killer Margarita[/caption]\r\n\r\nWe stopped for a moment to catch our breath and figure out how much longer to the top of the <a href=\"https://www.hikingproject.com/trail/7003499/atalaya-mountain-trail-170\">Atalaya Mountain Trail</a>. Yesterday, before we flew out to Santa Fe, we were at 700 ft above sea level. After 90 minutes of walking, I guessed we were at 8,000 ft and had another 1,100 ft to get to the top. Between the altitude and the snow on the trail from the night before, this hike was taking longer than we’d planned. I looked at my watch and told Irene, “If you want to hit the Black Friday artisan market, we need to head back now.” She took another breath. “Nope, we’re heading to the top.”\r\n\r\nForty minutes later, we stood on a rocky ledge looking down over Santa Fe with a group of Argentinians who’d passed us 10 minutes before. We took the obligatory selfie and sat down on the rocks to take in the view. The breakfast cook/owner of our B&amp;B had sold us on this trail. We cursed him on the way up when we slid through the snow and struggled to find the trail markings. But now, looking out over Santa Fe National Forest to the horizon line of a cloudless blue sky, we took those words back.\r\n\r\nSanta Fe visits can go highbrow -- the <a href=\"https://www.okeeffemuseum.org/\">Georgia O’Keefe museum</a> and a run up Canyon Road through all the art galleries -- or lowbrow -- hiking up mountain trails and hunting the best green chile cheeseburger. This trip was all lowbrow. <!--more Click Here To Keep Reading <em>Road Trip — Lowbrow Santa Fe</em> -->\r\n\r\nAnd after 20 minutes of taking in the views at the top of Atalaya Mountain, we had just two things in mind -- green chile cheeseburgers and beer. The 1,800 foot descent only sharpened our appetites. Five-and-a half hours after we’d started, we were sitting at the bar at <a href=\"https://www.secondstreetbrewery.com/the-railyard\">Second Street Brewing’s restaurant in the Railyard District</a>, replacing whatever calories we’d burned off with green chile cheeseburgers and a side of green chile cheese fries. Double lashings of american cheese, which I know I shouldn’t like because it isn’t really cheese, but the creamy gooey-ness of it blended well with the chile bite. We chased it down with a pint of their <a href=\"https://untappd.com/b/second-street-brewery-boneshaker-bitter/675872\">Boneshaker Bitter</a>, one of the better American-made ESBs I’ve had.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_2224\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"640\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/20181123_193305944_iOS.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-2224 size-large\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/20181123_193305944_iOS-1024x418.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"640\" height=\"261\" /></a> Top of the Atalaya Mountain Trail[/caption]\r\n\r\nIt was the end of November and the temperature was dropping as we made our way back to our B&amp;B, the <a href=\"https://farolito.com/\">El Farolito</a>. We had our own little <a href=\"https://farolito.com/galisteo-room-1/\">casita</a> out front. Walking in, we saw that housekeeping had the kiva fireplace ready for us, loaded with a triangle of <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyon_pine\">piñon</a> logs over some kindling and a stack of yesterday’s newspaper off to the side. The fire caught with one match (gotta love well-seasoned wood). As the smoke rose up the chimney, I walked back outside and was immediately hit with the<a href=\"https://www.outsidemodern.com/pinon-wood-the-best-firewood-for-chimineas-pinion-pinyon/\"> piñon smell</a>, that unique pinewood smoke smell I only get in Santa Fe. I’ve been around a lot of pinewood fires in, say, Colorado and Arizona, but the piñon smoke billowing out of a kiva fireplace is a unique smell; one that I love. It was a cold hike up the trail this morning; here was a little payback.\r\n\r\nThe next morning, after tucking into another great breakfast, El Farolito’s cook/owner/travel guide recommended we head out to <a href=\"https://www.blm.gov/visit/kktr\">Tent Rocks</a> for our next hike. It would be a completely different environment, hiking through towering volcanic rock formations rather than a forest, and at 600 ft, it would only be a third of yesterday’s climb. However, Tent Rocks is a popular place that caps the number of people it lets in. The forecast was for a sunny Saturday, so we needed to get on our way or risk waiting in line to get in.\r\n\r\nThis was made much easier by our choice of rental car. When we hit the Hertz Presidents’ Club aisle at Albuquerque airport Thursday afternoon, it was pretty picked over; just a very odd selection of Dodge vehicles -- Dodge Challenger muscle cars or fully tricked out Ram Hemi king-cab pick-ups. I can’t say that I’ve ever faced quite that choice at Hertz before. The Challenger, with rear-wheel drive, wouldn’t be great if we got snow at elevation, but the Rams were just huge, trying to parallel park one in downtown Santa Fe would be an event. I stood between them, went back and forth for a couple of minutes. “Just pick one,” Irene said, “it’s a rental car, not a life choice!” I went for the white Challenger and hoped for clear skies.\r\n\r\nAnd on this Saturday morning, that’s what we had -- and a 75 mph speed limit on the southbound stretch of I-25 between us and Tent Rocks. I put my foot into the Challenger and kept it there as we exited the interstate and drove down and west across a flat plateau on Rt 16. I didn’t ease up until we hit the residential streets of the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochiti,_New_Mexico\">Cochiti Pueblo reservation</a>. It was around 10:30 am when we turned onto the access road, expecting to hit the line of waiting cars. We were hugely relieved when we drove straight up to the entrance booth, paid the $5 fee, and continued on to the trail head parking.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_2221\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"640\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/20181124_180015173_iOS.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-2221 size-large\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/20181124_180015173_iOS-1024x768.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"640\" height=\"480\" /></a> Looking Down onto the Tent Rocks[/caption]\r\n\r\nWalking sideways and single file through the narrowest parts of the slot canyon at the start of the Canyon Trail, we immediately understood and appreciated the capacity limit. Without it, the trail would’ve hit gridlock. And we didn’t mind the times when we had to wait for a downhill group to clear a tight squeeze. It gave us time to look up and appreciate the rough beauty left behind by 6-7 million years of erosion.\r\n\r\nComing out of the slot canyon, we hit the steep section. “Do you think it’s worth it,” a dad asked, struggling up the incline with his daughter and a load of snacks on his back. When we got to the flat mesa on top, the answer was there spread out for us when we looked down onto the 90-foot tent rocks (<a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoodoo_(geology)\">hoodoos</a>), and then out across the Rio Grande Valley and to the Sangre de Cristo mountains in the distance. The temperature hit 50°F. We shed a couple of layers of clothing, dangled our legs off a rock ledge, drained our water bottles, and looked out with nothing between us and the horizon. It was our second day of cloudless blue skies and hundred mile vistas.\r\n\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">When we drove out around 1pm, we passed a line of cars waiting at the entrance booth to get it. The line ended between signs estimating the wait time to be 30 and 60 minutes. I patted the Challenger’s dashboard.</span>\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_2219\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/20181124_212142086_iOS.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2219\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/20181124_212142086_iOS-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Tapwall at Rowley Farmhouse Ales[/caption]\r\n\r\nDriving back to Santa Fe, we got off of I-25 an exit early and drove up Rt 14 through what felt like the real life Santa Fe. No art dealers and kachina shops; instead, the typical string of auto dealers, gas stations, and shopping centers anchored by Targets and drive-thru Starbucks. We were headed to <a href=\"https://www.rowleyfarmhouse.com/\">Rowley Farmhouse Ales</a> for another post-hike green chile cheeseburger. The Rowley burger was a bit more upscale than yesterday’s -- the menu namechecks local purveyors of the beef, bacon, and cheese (but not the green chile!) on the burger -- but still a very solid burger. The beer list was one of the strongest we’d seen. Flights of tasters let us sample Rowley’s own beers -- a nice range of IPAs, saisons, and sours -- and some of the local guest beers they also had on tap.\r\n\r\nThat evening, we walked over to Guadalupe Street, which feels like the lowbrow counterpart to the plaza or Canyon Road. We stopped first at <a href=\"http://www.cowgirlsantafe.com/\">Cowgirl BBQ</a> for some margarita nostalgia. On our first trip to Santa Fe, I was on the hunt for a great everyday margarita recipe and after a weekend of margarita tasting, we picked Cowgirl’s. We worked our way through their current margarita menu, listening to a group of local guys at the end of the bar talk to the bartender about taking dancing lessons. “God, I missed you guys,” the bartender said.\r\n\r\nWe walked a couple of blocks further down Guadalupe Street to <a href=\"https://tomasitas.com/\">Tomasita’s</a> for dinner. The alcove was full of families and big parties. The hostess gave the party of 6 in front of us a 2-hour wait. For Irene and I, just an hour. We headed to the bar to try their margaritas. When we were seated (15 minutes early!), we searched the menu for something different. Most of it was the standard enchilada and taco combo plates, but with a little patience, we found some unique dishes. <a href=\"https://www.cooksillustrated.com/articles/697-real-carne-adovada\"><em>Carne adovada</em></a>, the classic New Mexico pork and red chile braise, had a deep earthy chile flavor that made me seriously question my green chile fixation. I saw that we could have <em>chicos</em> as our side. “What are chicos?” I asked the waitress. “Oh, you’ll love them.” More of a recommendation than an explanation, but I ordered them anyway. Turned out that Tomasita’s <a href=\"https://highlandsranchfoodie.com/2016/01/beans-and-chicos-2/\">chicos</a> are a New Mexico spin on a Native American staple, whole beans mixed with whole corn kernels that have been steamed over a fire. The texture of the whole beans and the smoky sweet taste of the corn kernels were such an improvement over the pasty blandness of refried beans, I wondered why chicos weren’t the standard side. And in place of the usual tortillas, we got a basket of fresh sopapillas with honey butter. Nothing fancy; it was homestyle New Mexico cuisine.\r\n\r\nSunday morning looked like another bright blue day -- from what we could make out through the frosted window. Our legs felt a bit heavy after two days of walking up steep inclines so we decided to go for some flatter terrain, a walk through town. We walked along the <a href=\"http://www.walkrideusa.com/states/new-mexico/individual-trails/santa-fe-river-trail-new-mexico\">Santa Fe River Park</a>, looking down at the frozen trickle of what we assumed was the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Fe_River_(New_Mexico)\">Santa Fe River</a>. We veered up Canyon Road. None of the galleries were open yet, but there was enough sculpture in the front and side yards to fill our lowbrow culture quotient.\r\n\r\nBy noon, we had walked off last night’s dinner, so we circled back around to Alameda Street and headed back into town toward the plaza to find some lunch. We read the menus of the restaurants ringing the plaza. Nothing really excited us until I spotted a couple of food carts on the west edge of the plaza, a Mexican guy on the southwest corner selling tamales and a Nigerian guy on the northwest corner selling goat stew. I bought two tamales, beef with red chile and chicken with green chile. We crossed the street, ducked out of the wind, and scarfed down what were excellent tamales. It seemed the perfect lunch to end our lowbrow Santa Fe weekend.','Road Trip — Lowbrow Santa Fe','','inherit','closed','closed','','2208-revision-v1','','','2019-01-24 21:13:35','2019-01-25 02:13:35','',2208,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/01/24/2208-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2231,1,'2019-01-24 21:14:32','2019-01-25 02:14:32','[caption id=\"attachment_2211\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/20181125_005916392_iOS.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2211\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/20181125_005916392_iOS-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> In Search of a Killer Margarita[/caption]\r\n\r\nWe stopped for a moment to catch our breath and figure out how much longer to the top of the <a href=\"https://www.hikingproject.com/trail/7003499/atalaya-mountain-trail-170\">Atalaya Mountain Trail</a>. Yesterday, before we flew out to Santa Fe, we were at 700 ft above sea level. After 90 minutes of walking, I guessed we were at 8,000 ft and had another 1,100 ft to get to the top. Between the altitude and the snow on the trail from the night before, this hike was taking longer than we’d planned. I looked at my watch and told Irene, “If you want to hit the Black Friday artisan market, we need to head back now.” She took another breath. “Nope, we’re heading to the top.”\r\n\r\nForty minutes later, we stood on a rocky ledge looking down over Santa Fe with a group of Argentinians who’d passed us 10 minutes before. We took the obligatory selfie and sat down on the rocks to take in the view. The breakfast cook/owner of our B&amp;B had sold us on this trail. We cursed him on the way up when we slid through the snow and struggled to find the trail markings. But now, looking out over Santa Fe National Forest to the horizon line of a cloudless blue sky, we took those words back.\r\n\r\nSanta Fe visits can go highbrow -- the <a href=\"https://www.okeeffemuseum.org/\">Georgia O’Keefe museum</a> and a run up Canyon Road through all the art galleries -- or lowbrow -- hiking up mountain trails and hunting the best green chile cheeseburger. This trip was all lowbrow. <!--more Click Here To Keep Reading \"Road Trip — Lowbrow Santa Fe\" -->\r\n\r\nAnd after 20 minutes of taking in the views at the top of Atalaya Mountain, we had just two things in mind -- green chile cheeseburgers and beer. The 1,800 foot descent only sharpened our appetites. Five-and-a half hours after we’d started, we were sitting at the bar at <a href=\"https://www.secondstreetbrewery.com/the-railyard\">Second Street Brewing’s restaurant in the Railyard District</a>, replacing whatever calories we’d burned off with green chile cheeseburgers and a side of green chile cheese fries. Double lashings of american cheese, which I know I shouldn’t like because it isn’t really cheese, but the creamy gooey-ness of it blended well with the chile bite. We chased it down with a pint of their <a href=\"https://untappd.com/b/second-street-brewery-boneshaker-bitter/675872\">Boneshaker Bitter</a>, one of the better American-made ESBs I’ve had.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_2224\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"640\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/20181123_193305944_iOS.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-2224 size-large\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/20181123_193305944_iOS-1024x418.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"640\" height=\"261\" /></a> Top of the Atalaya Mountain Trail[/caption]\r\n\r\nIt was the end of November and the temperature was dropping as we made our way back to our B&amp;B, the <a href=\"https://farolito.com/\">El Farolito</a>. We had our own little <a href=\"https://farolito.com/galisteo-room-1/\">casita</a> out front. Walking in, we saw that housekeeping had the kiva fireplace ready for us, loaded with a triangle of <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyon_pine\">piñon</a> logs over some kindling and a stack of yesterday’s newspaper off to the side. The fire caught with one match (gotta love well-seasoned wood). As the smoke rose up the chimney, I walked back outside and was immediately hit with the<a href=\"https://www.outsidemodern.com/pinon-wood-the-best-firewood-for-chimineas-pinion-pinyon/\"> piñon smell</a>, that unique pinewood smoke smell I only get in Santa Fe. I’ve been around a lot of pinewood fires in, say, Colorado and Arizona, but the piñon smoke billowing out of a kiva fireplace is a unique smell; one that I love. It was a cold hike up the trail this morning; here was a little payback.\r\n\r\nThe next morning, after tucking into another great breakfast, El Farolito’s cook/owner/travel guide recommended we head out to <a href=\"https://www.blm.gov/visit/kktr\">Tent Rocks</a> for our next hike. It would be a completely different environment, hiking through towering volcanic rock formations rather than a forest, and at 600 ft, it would only be a third of yesterday’s climb. However, Tent Rocks is a popular place that caps the number of people it lets in. The forecast was for a sunny Saturday, so we needed to get on our way or risk waiting in line to get in.\r\n\r\nThis was made much easier by our choice of rental car. When we hit the Hertz Presidents’ Club aisle at Albuquerque airport Thursday afternoon, it was pretty picked over; just a very odd selection of Dodge vehicles -- Dodge Challenger muscle cars or fully tricked out Ram Hemi king-cab pick-ups. I can’t say that I’ve ever faced quite that choice at Hertz before. The Challenger, with rear-wheel drive, wouldn’t be great if we got snow at elevation, but the Rams were just huge, trying to parallel park one in downtown Santa Fe would be an event. I stood between them, went back and forth for a couple of minutes. “Just pick one,” Irene said, “it’s a rental car, not a life choice!” I went for the white Challenger and hoped for clear skies.\r\n\r\nAnd on this Saturday morning, that’s what we had -- and a 75 mph speed limit on the southbound stretch of I-25 between us and Tent Rocks. I put my foot into the Challenger and kept it there as we exited the interstate and drove down and west across a flat plateau on Rt 16. I didn’t ease up until we hit the residential streets of the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochiti,_New_Mexico\">Cochiti Pueblo reservation</a>. It was around 10:30 am when we turned onto the access road, expecting to hit the line of waiting cars. We were hugely relieved when we drove straight up to the entrance booth, paid the $5 fee, and continued on to the trail head parking.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_2221\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"640\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/20181124_180015173_iOS.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-2221 size-large\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/20181124_180015173_iOS-1024x768.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"640\" height=\"480\" /></a> Looking Down onto the Tent Rocks[/caption]\r\n\r\nWalking sideways and single file through the narrowest parts of the slot canyon at the start of the Canyon Trail, we immediately understood and appreciated the capacity limit. Without it, the trail would’ve hit gridlock. And we didn’t mind the times when we had to wait for a downhill group to clear a tight squeeze. It gave us time to look up and appreciate the rough beauty left behind by 6-7 million years of erosion.\r\n\r\nComing out of the slot canyon, we hit the steep section. “Do you think it’s worth it,” a dad asked, struggling up the incline with his daughter and a load of snacks on his back. When we got to the flat mesa on top, the answer was there spread out for us when we looked down onto the 90-foot tent rocks (<a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoodoo_(geology)\">hoodoos</a>), and then out across the Rio Grande Valley and to the Sangre de Cristo mountains in the distance. The temperature hit 50°F. We shed a couple of layers of clothing, dangled our legs off a rock ledge, drained our water bottles, and looked out with nothing between us and the horizon. It was our second day of cloudless blue skies and hundred mile vistas.\r\n\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">When we drove out around 1pm, we passed a line of cars waiting at the entrance booth to get it. The line ended between signs estimating the wait time to be 30 and 60 minutes. I patted the Challenger’s dashboard.</span>\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_2219\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/20181124_212142086_iOS.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2219\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/20181124_212142086_iOS-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Tapwall at Rowley Farmhouse Ales[/caption]\r\n\r\nDriving back to Santa Fe, we got off of I-25 an exit early and drove up Rt 14 through what felt like the real life Santa Fe. No art dealers and kachina shops; instead, the typical string of auto dealers, gas stations, and shopping centers anchored by Targets and drive-thru Starbucks. We were headed to <a href=\"https://www.rowleyfarmhouse.com/\">Rowley Farmhouse Ales</a> for another post-hike green chile cheeseburger. The Rowley burger was a bit more upscale than yesterday’s -- the menu namechecks local purveyors of the beef, bacon, and cheese (but not the green chile!) on the burger -- but still a very solid burger. The beer list was one of the strongest we’d seen. Flights of tasters let us sample Rowley’s own beers -- a nice range of IPAs, saisons, and sours -- and some of the local guest beers they also had on tap.\r\n\r\nThat evening, we walked over to Guadalupe Street, which feels like the lowbrow counterpart to the plaza or Canyon Road. We stopped first at <a href=\"http://www.cowgirlsantafe.com/\">Cowgirl BBQ</a> for some margarita nostalgia. On our first trip to Santa Fe, I was on the hunt for a great everyday margarita recipe and after a weekend of margarita tasting, we picked Cowgirl’s. We worked our way through their current margarita menu, listening to a group of local guys at the end of the bar talk to the bartender about taking dancing lessons. “God, I missed you guys,” the bartender said.\r\n\r\nWe walked a couple of blocks further down Guadalupe Street to <a href=\"https://tomasitas.com/\">Tomasita’s</a> for dinner. The alcove was full of families and big parties. The hostess gave the party of 6 in front of us a 2-hour wait. For Irene and I, just an hour. We headed to the bar to try their margaritas. When we were seated (15 minutes early!), we searched the menu for something different. Most of it was the standard enchilada and taco combo plates, but with a little patience, we found some unique dishes. <a href=\"https://www.cooksillustrated.com/articles/697-real-carne-adovada\"><em>Carne adovada</em></a>, the classic New Mexico pork and red chile braise, had a deep earthy chile flavor that made me seriously question my green chile fixation. I saw that we could have <em>chicos</em> as our side. “What are chicos?” I asked the waitress. “Oh, you’ll love them.” More of a recommendation than an explanation, but I ordered them anyway. Turned out that Tomasita’s <a href=\"https://highlandsranchfoodie.com/2016/01/beans-and-chicos-2/\">chicos</a> are a New Mexico spin on a Native American staple, whole beans mixed with whole corn kernels that have been steamed over a fire. The texture of the whole beans and the smoky sweet taste of the corn kernels were such an improvement over the pasty blandness of refried beans, I wondered why chicos weren’t the standard side. And in place of the usual tortillas, we got a basket of fresh sopapillas with honey butter. Nothing fancy; it was homestyle New Mexico cuisine.\r\n\r\nSunday morning looked like another bright blue day -- from what we could make out through the frosted window. Our legs felt a bit heavy after two days of walking up steep inclines so we decided to go for some flatter terrain, a walk through town. We walked along the <a href=\"http://www.walkrideusa.com/states/new-mexico/individual-trails/santa-fe-river-trail-new-mexico\">Santa Fe River Park</a>, looking down at the frozen trickle of what we assumed was the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Fe_River_(New_Mexico)\">Santa Fe River</a>. We veered up Canyon Road. None of the galleries were open yet, but there was enough sculpture in the front and side yards to fill our lowbrow culture quotient.\r\n\r\nBy noon, we had walked off last night’s dinner, so we circled back around to Alameda Street and headed back into town toward the plaza to find some lunch. We read the menus of the restaurants ringing the plaza. Nothing really excited us until I spotted a couple of food carts on the west edge of the plaza, a Mexican guy on the southwest corner selling tamales and a Nigerian guy on the northwest corner selling goat stew. I bought two tamales, beef with red chile and chicken with green chile. We crossed the street, ducked out of the wind, and scarfed down what were excellent tamales. It seemed the perfect lunch to end our lowbrow Santa Fe weekend.','Road Trip — Lowbrow Santa Fe','','inherit','closed','closed','','2208-revision-v1','','','2019-01-24 21:14:32','2019-01-25 02:14:32','',2208,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/01/24/2208-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2234,1,'2019-02-07 19:57:03','2019-02-08 00:57:03','[caption id=\"attachment_821\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/ipad-galaxy1.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-821\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/ipad-galaxy1-300x225.jpg\" alt=\"Apple iPad 2 and Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\" /></a> Tablet Wars[/caption]\r\n\r\nI walked out of the <a title=\"Google I/O 2011\" href=\"http://www.google.com/events/io/2011/index-live.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Google I/O</a> developers conference in May with a pre-release version of <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Samsung Group\" href=\"http://www.samsung.com/\" rel=\"homepage\">Samsung</a>\'s challenger to the iPad -- the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Samsung Galaxy Tab\" href=\"http://galaxytab.samsungmobile.com/\" rel=\"homepage\">Galaxy Tab</a> 10.1.  Rather than put it up for sale on eBay like many attendees, I decided to take it on the road with me.  I\'ve been traveling the last two months with both the Galaxy and an <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"iPad\" href=\"http://www.apple.com/ipad/\" rel=\"homepage\">iPad 2</a>, including a real pressure test -- two weeks in the UK without a laptop. Before Apple <a title=\"Apple yet again pushes for EU ban of Samsung Galaxy tablets, phones\" href=\"http://venturebeat.com/2011/08/19/apple-yet-again-pushes-for-eu-ban-of-samsung-galaxy-tablets-phones/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">blocks</a> Galaxy sales in any more countries, here are my hands-on impressions.\r\n\r\nBoth tablets are nice pieces of hardware.  A Google search will provide no end of detailed comparisons of the hardware specs.   But in the real world, it\'s a push.  The screen sizes are a bit different (the Galaxy has a bit more of an HD aspect ratio while the iPad’s dimensions are more like a sheet of paper), the Samsung is a few ounces lighter than the iPad, and the buttons are in different places.  There\'s no real difference -- they feel the same, both screens are beautiful, and their response times are great.\r\n\r\nAs you would expect, the iPad has a better selection of apps; the tablet version of Android (code named \"Honeycomb\") just launched while the iPad has been out for over a year.  However, for apps that I use, the difference isn\'t as significant as the raw iPad-vs.-Honeycomb numbers suggest.  Most of the apps that I use regularly -- Evernote, Kindle, USAToday, Pandora, Dropbox, Skype, Concur expense reporting, Angry Birds -- are all available for Android.\r\n\r\nEvernote and USAToday are the only Android tablet-specific ones (and are nicely done), but the others work fine.  The holes seem to be slowly filling in, but the coverage is uneven.  WebEx just released an Android app that runs on phones and tablets.  The Financial Times app looks great on the Samsung, but the apps from the Wall Street Journal and the Economist only run on the phone versions of Android (2.2 and 2.3, or \"Froyo\" and \"Gingerbread\" in Google\'s dessert-themed code names) and won\'t install on Honeycomb. Understandable for a 2½-month-old product, but still a problem for real-world users.\r\n\r\nComparing Apple’s <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"IOS (Apple)\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOS_%28Apple%29\" rel=\"wikipedia\">iOS</a> vs. Google’s <a title=\"Wikipedia entry on Android OS\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(operating_system)\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Android</a> and each system\'s built-in applications (e.g., browser, e-mail) seems to be less of a “better-worse” judgement and more a debate between two design philosophies.  The Apple experience is a locked-down one -- there’s only one place to get apps, the screen layout not very customizable, there’s no independent access to the file system, and it\'s tethered to iTunes (though this is expected to go away with the next release of iOS). This isn\'t necessarily bad -- it\'s a much more secure approach, most people never change the default settings on their technology and there’s a lot to be said for not letting users screw things up beyond recovery. It’s Apple’s point of view. It’s a valid one, but it does have some impact.\r\n\r\nWhile in the UK with just the iPad and Galaxy Tab, I wanted to replace my Facebook profile picture with one taken that afternoon in the Glengoyne Distillery. My daughter had taken the picture with my iPhone. Plunking around the Facebook iPhone app, I couldn’t find a way to change my profile. So I e-mailed the photo from my iPhone to my Gmail account.  Logging onto the Facebook site from the iPad Safari browser, I couldn’t save the picture from the Mail app to a place where the browser could access it. Opening up Gmail on the Samsung tablet, I could save the picture to the folder of my choice and then upload the picture from that folder to the Facebook site through the Android browser. Perhaps less safe, but I got done what I wanted.\r\n\r\nIt’s a little thing, but it illustrates why I found relying solely with the Android system -- being without my <a title=\"MacBook Air\" href=\"http://www.apple.com/macbookair/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">MacBook Air</a>-- easier than the iPad. The Android design philosophy is to give the users much greater control over their experience.  Which means I can spelunk around the file system, tweak the technical operations, create truly horrid screen designs, and view Flash-based web sites to my heart’s content.\r\n\r\nI like Android\'s widgets -- the ability to look at the screen and see new e-mails, Tweets, the temperature without having to open an app. But for enterprise users, the iPad does a much better job of sync\'ing mail, contacts, and calendars with the corporate-standard Microsoft Exchange infrastructure. It\'s interesting that my daughter who’s starting high school this year tends to pick up the Samsung tablet more than the iPad. It probably has to do with the fact that she has an <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Android (operating system)\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_%28operating_system%29\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Android phone</a>, but she seems to prefer the Google experience.\r\n\r\nThe iPad 2 is definitely a more polished experience.  It feels 1-2 releases ahead of the Android tablet -- which it is.  The Samsung tablet, though, keeps right up with Apple in hardware and fit-and-finish, and Android gives the advanced user the ability to customize it to his/her specific needs.  Final recommendation -- at the same price, I recommend casual/non-technical users to buy the iPad 2; there are no sharp edges on which they could cut a finger. But if you like to pop the hood on your technology, you won’t go wrong with the Samsung.\r\n<div class=\"zemanta-pixie\" style=\"margin-top: 10px; height: 15px;\"><img class=\"zemanta-pixie-img\" style=\"border: none; float: right;\" src=\"http://img.zemanta.com/pixy.gif?x-id=a6fa3e5a-f086-4119-b970-8dd36cc1d883\" alt=\"\" /></div>','iPad 2 vs. Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 -- Hands-On Impressions','','inherit','closed','closed','','811-revision-v1','','','2019-02-07 19:57:03','2019-02-08 00:57:03','',811,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/02/07/811-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2235,1,'2019-02-07 19:57:37','2019-02-08 00:57:37','[caption id=\"attachment_821\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/ipad-galaxy1.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-821\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/ipad-galaxy1-300x225.jpg\" alt=\"Apple iPad 2 and Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\" /></a> Tablet Wars[/caption]\r\n\r\nI walked out of the <a title=\"Google I/O 2011\" href=\"http://www.google.com/events/io/2011/index-live.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Google I/O</a> developers conference in May with a pre-release version of <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Samsung Group\" href=\"http://www.samsung.com/\" rel=\"homepage\">Samsung</a>\'s challenger to the iPad -- the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Samsung Galaxy Tab\" href=\"http://galaxytab.samsungmobile.com/\" rel=\"homepage\">Galaxy Tab</a> 10.1.  Rather than put it up for sale on eBay like many attendees, I decided to take it on the road with me.  I\'ve been traveling the last two months with both the Galaxy and an <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"iPad\" href=\"http://www.apple.com/ipad/\" rel=\"homepage\">iPad 2</a>, including a real pressure test -- two weeks in the UK without a laptop. Before Apple <a title=\"Apple yet again pushes for EU ban of Samsung Galaxy tablets, phones\" href=\"http://venturebeat.com/2011/08/19/apple-yet-again-pushes-for-eu-ban-of-samsung-galaxy-tablets-phones/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">blocks</a> Galaxy sales in any more countries, here are my hands-on impressions.\r\n\r\nBoth tablets are nice pieces of hardware.  A Google search will provide no end of detailed comparisons of the hardware specs.   But in the real world, it\'s a push.  The screen sizes are a bit different (the Galaxy has a bit more of an HD aspect ratio while the iPad’s dimensions are more like a sheet of paper), the Samsung is a few ounces lighter than the iPad, and the buttons are in different places.  There\'s no real difference -- they feel the same, both screens are beautiful, and their response times are great.\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\nAs you would expect, the iPad has a better selection of apps; the tablet version of Android (code named \"Honeycomb\") just launched while the iPad has been out for over a year.  However, for apps that I use, the difference isn\'t as significant as the raw iPad-vs.-Honeycomb numbers suggest.  Most of the apps that I use regularly -- Evernote, Kindle, USAToday, Pandora, Dropbox, Skype, Concur expense reporting, Angry Birds -- are all available for Android.\r\n\r\nEvernote and USAToday are the only Android tablet-specific ones (and are nicely done), but the others work fine.  The holes seem to be slowly filling in, but the coverage is uneven.  WebEx just released an Android app that runs on phones and tablets.  The Financial Times app looks great on the Samsung, but the apps from the Wall Street Journal and the Economist only run on the phone versions of Android (2.2 and 2.3, or \"Froyo\" and \"Gingerbread\" in Google\'s dessert-themed code names) and won\'t install on Honeycomb. Understandable for a 2½-month-old product, but still a problem for real-world users.\r\n\r\nComparing Apple’s <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"IOS (Apple)\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOS_%28Apple%29\" rel=\"wikipedia\">iOS</a> vs. Google’s <a title=\"Wikipedia entry on Android OS\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(operating_system)\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Android</a> and each system\'s built-in applications (e.g., browser, e-mail) seems to be less of a “better-worse” judgement and more a debate between two design philosophies.  The Apple experience is a locked-down one -- there’s only one place to get apps, the screen layout not very customizable, there’s no independent access to the file system, and it\'s tethered to iTunes (though this is expected to go away with the next release of iOS). This isn\'t necessarily bad -- it\'s a much more secure approach, most people never change the default settings on their technology and there’s a lot to be said for not letting users screw things up beyond recovery. It’s Apple’s point of view. It’s a valid one, but it does have some impact.\r\n\r\nWhile in the UK with just the iPad and Galaxy Tab, I wanted to replace my Facebook profile picture with one taken that afternoon in the Glengoyne Distillery. My daughter had taken the picture with my iPhone. Plunking around the Facebook iPhone app, I couldn’t find a way to change my profile. So I e-mailed the photo from my iPhone to my Gmail account.  Logging onto the Facebook site from the iPad Safari browser, I couldn’t save the picture from the Mail app to a place where the browser could access it. Opening up Gmail on the Samsung tablet, I could save the picture to the folder of my choice and then upload the picture from that folder to the Facebook site through the Android browser. Perhaps less safe, but I got done what I wanted.\r\n\r\nIt’s a little thing, but it illustrates why I found relying solely with the Android system -- being without my <a title=\"MacBook Air\" href=\"http://www.apple.com/macbookair/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">MacBook Air</a>-- easier than the iPad. The Android design philosophy is to give the users much greater control over their experience.  Which means I can spelunk around the file system, tweak the technical operations, create truly horrid screen designs, and view Flash-based web sites to my heart’s content.\r\n\r\nI like Android\'s widgets -- the ability to look at the screen and see new e-mails, Tweets, the temperature without having to open an app. But for enterprise users, the iPad does a much better job of sync\'ing mail, contacts, and calendars with the corporate-standard Microsoft Exchange infrastructure. It\'s interesting that my daughter who’s starting high school this year tends to pick up the Samsung tablet more than the iPad. It probably has to do with the fact that she has an <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Android (operating system)\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_%28operating_system%29\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Android phone</a>, but she seems to prefer the Google experience.\r\n\r\nThe iPad 2 is definitely a more polished experience.  It feels 1-2 releases ahead of the Android tablet -- which it is.  The Samsung tablet, though, keeps right up with Apple in hardware and fit-and-finish, and Android gives the advanced user the ability to customize it to his/her specific needs.  Final recommendation -- at the same price, I recommend casual/non-technical users to buy the iPad 2; there are no sharp edges on which they could cut a finger. But if you like to pop the hood on your technology, you won’t go wrong with the Samsung.\r\n<div class=\"zemanta-pixie\" style=\"margin-top: 10px; height: 15px;\"><img class=\"zemanta-pixie-img\" style=\"border: none; float: right;\" src=\"http://img.zemanta.com/pixy.gif?x-id=a6fa3e5a-f086-4119-b970-8dd36cc1d883\" alt=\"\" /></div>','iPad 2 vs. Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 -- Hands-On Impressions','','inherit','closed','closed','','811-revision-v1','','','2019-02-07 19:57:37','2019-02-08 00:57:37','',811,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/02/07/811-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2236,1,'2019-02-08 16:32:51','2019-02-08 21:32:51','Swinging through the West Coast, I recorded this podcast in the bathroom of the Orchard Hotel a block or two from the summit of Nob Hill in San Francisco. In this podcast, we talk about how the post-9/11 reduction in carry-ons has made packing for different business dress codes a real hassle. Is there an end to the \"shoe carnival\"? Recent news articles and a discussion with a TSA supervisor in Tampa suggest that a small bit of common sense may have infiltrated the TSA. And finally, a \"potpourri\" category -- collected odds-\'n\'-ends from discussion topics on the web site. Here\'s a <a href=\"./podcast/travelcommons_11.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_11.mp3\"]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #11:\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <em>Warmth</em> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Recorded in the bathroom of the <a href=\"http://www.theorchardhotel.com\">Orchard Hotel</a> in San Francisco on a cold August night</li>\r\n 	<li>Being featured in Adam Curry\'s <em>Podfinder</em> podcast doubled the number of TravelCommons subscribers in a week</li>\r\n 	<li>Having to dress in business formal <em>and</em> business casual in the same trip is a real hassle</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/12/AR2005081201557.html\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to a <em>Washington Post </em>article says that the new TSA director is thinking about changing the current shoe screening policy</li>\r\n 	<li>Good discussion with a reasonable TSA supervisor in Tampa</li>\r\n 	<li>More follow-up on in-flight internet service</li>\r\n 	<li><strong><a href=\"http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB112345285640807000,00.html?mod=technology_main_promo_right\">Direct link</a></strong> to a <em>Wall Street Journal</em> journal article (registration required) on a demo flight for Boeing\'s Connexion in-flight intenet service</li>\r\n 	<li>Following up on \"Hacking the Hotel Room\" from podcast #10, the new class of pocket wifi routers can provide a more secure hotel internet connection</li>\r\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"./podcast/travelcommons_11.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #11 - Business Dress Codes; Kinder, Gentler TSA?','','inherit','closed','closed','','14-revision-v1','','','2019-02-08 16:32:51','2019-02-08 21:32:51','',14,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/02/08/14-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2237,1,'2019-02-10 22:00:30','2019-02-11 03:00:30','[caption id=\"attachment_1291\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/2013-12-10-07.55.43.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1291\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/2013-12-10-07.55.43-300x225.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\"></a> Tough travel day when the deicing fluid freezes[/caption]\n\nFlying home into the teeth of the polar vortex that gave <a href=\"https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/01/31/frost-quakes-chicago-polar-vortex/2730412002/\">Chicago its coldest day since January 1985</a> took a bit of flight changing strategy and some incredibly dedicated United ramp workers. I get on-trend by \"<a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/kondo-ing-a-guru-of-organizing-becomes-a-verb-11547745648\">Kondo-ing</a>\" my old suitcases, worry about visiting Sweden as it rapidly goes cashless, and gather up some odds-‘n’-ends from travel notebook into a Jeopardy-like topic “Travel Potpourri”. All this and more at the&nbsp;<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_148.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #148:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, just trying to survive Nature’s mood swings -- 16 straight days of snow, the much publicized polar vortex cold last week followed by a four-day 73 degree temp rise -- from -22 on early Thursday morning (actual temperature; none of this wind chill guesstimating) to +51 degrees Monday afternoon, and then a 40-some degree drop back to the single digits by Friday. It’s climate change, alright. Just not all in the same direction. Last Wednesday was the second coldest day in Chicago history at -23 degrees. I was also here for the coldest day -- January 20, 1985 -- when it hit -27 degrees. I was just starting my last quarter at University of Chicago. It left an impression. After that, I didn’t interview with any Chicago companies. I took a job in Dallas and moved down in July -- to temperatures averaging in the 90’s. Brilliant</li>\n 	<li>I missed the wind-up to last week’s freeze fest. I flew out to New York on the Monday morning at the tail end of that 16-day snow fest. I had booked a Southwest flight from Chicago Midway to LaGuardia because Southwest now flies into the new renovated concourse in the otherwise Third World-ish Terminal B and, being that kind of travel geek, I wanted to check it out. Southwest had other plans though. Sunday late morning, about 18 hours before departure, Southwest emailed me that they were cancelling the flight. I was surprised at their proactivity, but it was a good thing, I guess, ‘cause it gave me time to move to United -- no new terminal experience, but a lot better flight frequency.</li>\n 	<li>Which turned out to be key on Wednesday, trying to fly home on that -23 degree day. Tuesday afternoon, I moved my flight home up from 3pm to 12 noon. I figured all the flights would be delayed and the later my flight, the worse the delay and the higher probability of cancellation. Looking at United’s flights, the 11am and 1pm flights were regional jets; the noon flight was a mainline Airbus. ORD was going to have to cut capacity on Weds -- the ground crews could only be outside for short stretches, especially the guys on the deicing trucks. I figured they’d cancel the smaller regional jets first, which meant they’d move the folks from the 11am and 1pm flights onto the noon flight, meaning that flight might be delayed, but United wouldn’t want to cancel it.</li>\n 	<li>And the next day, that’s pretty much how it played out. When I got to LaGuardia, those 11 and 1 flights were already cancelled. The noon flight still showed on-time, but checking the United and <a href=\"https://flightaware.com/\">FlightAware</a> apps, I could see that the Airbus was still in Chicago. That noon departure time was meaningless until that plane was in the air. I set up in the Amex Centurion Lounge, doing calls and emails, refreshing those apps every 10 minutes. The Airbus’ 8am departure time came and went, as did 9am, and 10am. It finally left around 10:40am Chicago time. I had lunch and a beer in the lounge -- the food in those Centurion lounges is good… and free -- and headed down for the gate. Walking down the concourse, I passed a Uniqlo vending machine selling “ultra light” down jackets for $70. (Amazing what they sell in airport vending machines) I thought for a moment about buying one to layer up when walking up the jet bridge in O’Hare. Given the extreme conditions, it was the most understandable 2½-hr delay I’ve ever had on United. I was incredibly grateful for the United ramp workers who were outside that day. I was happy to just get home that afternoon. Leaving the LGA Amex lounge for my gate, I ran into a Chicago colleague. He had 4 flights canceled on him already and, as I found out the next morning, didn’t get home until Thursday -- after going through Richmond. Good thing for him the Amex Lounge drinks are free too</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mghicks/18378\">Emily and the Djembe</a> by mghicks (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/nc-sampling+/1.0/\">Noncommercial Sampling Plus</a> license. Ft: Emily via Briareus</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>As promised, I expanded the Santa Fe topic in December’s episode to a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/01/24/road-trip-lowbrow-santa-fe/\">full 1,800-word post on the website</a> -- which might help explain why this episode slipped from the end of January to the beginning of February. The <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reader%27s_Digest_Condensed_Books\">Reader’s Digest condensed version</a> (my obligatory Baby Boomer cultural reference) goes something like this -- Friday: hike, drink beer, eat a green chile cheeseburger; Saturday: hike, drink beer, eat a green chile cheeseburger, then drink margaritas and eat local New Mexican dishes; Sunday: wake up a little later, walk rather than hike, eat tamales from a cart. I liked Steve Frick’s comment “When Road Warriors relax” on his retweet. I did try to write this a bit more like a travel article than a blog post -- more of a story than a sequential list of the places we went. But I did make sure to include links to all the good places we hit. If you haven’t already, give it a read and let me know your thoughts.</li>\n 	<li>When I was going through ORD in January, during the partial government shutdown, I thanked the TSA screeners for showing up even though they weren’t getting paid. If I’m reading the GSA salary band schedule correctly, the typical TSA screener makes between 29 and 44 grand a year. They could’ve called in sick to drive an Uber to make up for the missed paychecks, but they didn’t -- as opposed to Atlanta where I stood in some long PreCheck lines because of sick outs. Not that I blame the Atlanta TSA folks, but it made me appreciate the ORD TSA people even more.</li>\n 	<li>Right at about a year ago, I broke down and <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/01/25/podcast-137-new-years-travel-status-tips-how-to-shop-for-a-suitcase/\">bought a new Victorinox suitcase</a>. I had beat a grey Samsonite into submission after 2½ years of trundling across New Orleans sidewalks. My well-traveled Swiss Army roller became unusable when its retractable handle stuck in the extended position. And then my Bluesmart smart bag was banned from by airlines because its battery wouldn’t eject. A couple of weeks ago, my wife called me upstairs. “We’ve got to declutter this attic. You need to Kondo-ize your suitcases,” she said. Wha…? She pointed over to where I’d stashed the Samsonite, the Swiss Army roller, and the Bluesmart. “You should only keep the suitcases that spark joy,” she said. Again, wha…? How does a broken suitcase spark joy? “Exactly!” she said. I pulled the old luggage tags off and threw them in the garbage can before she forced me to binge watch that Netflix series.</li>\n 	<li>Over a year ago, way back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">episode #136</a> in December 2017, I talked about feeling like I’m the last generation of cash payers. My younger colleagues -- and my children -- not only do they pay for everything with a card, many of them don’t even carry cash. It’s <a href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/21/business/sweden-cashless-society.html\">happening even faster in Sweden</a>, where 95% of purchases by Millenials is electronic; to the point that half the country’s retailers think they’ll stop taking cash in 5-6 years. So I got a chuckle when long-time TravelCommons listener Allan Marko sent along this notice that he picked up while touring Laos last month -\n<ul>\n 	<li>“Please note that only new crisp notes are accepted in Laos. US$100 notes receiving a better exchange rate; US$ notes of the series number before 1996 as well as US$100 notes with the series number CB, dirty and/or damaged notes, or notes with any writing on it are not accepted in Laos. Please bring some small changes with you for your convenience.”</li>\n 	<li>Cash is king in Laos -- but only if it’s neat, tidy, and young</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Heading to LGA last Weds morning, traffic was bad in Manhattan and so the wait times for Uber and Lyft were a bit silly. So instead, I let the hotel doorman guide me over to a black car. I saw the driver tip him $10, but I didn’t care -- it was a nice clean car -- a Lexus hybrid -- and the driver knew the back ways to LGA, so we didn’t get jammed up on the highway. Everything was good -- until we parked outside of Terminal B. I had asked the doorman before getting in -- “Does he take a credit card?” “Oh yeah,” he said. And to give the driver credit, he tried to take my Amex, but for some reason his iPhone couldn’t get data at Terminal B Departures, which meant he couldn’t connect to Square, which meant he couldn’t take my card. After trying for 5 minutes, he went palms up. Lucky for him, I am a cash carrier and I had just enough to pay the fare. His tip? He’ll have to take that up with his mobile carrier.</li>\n 	<li>We were working on our Spring Break vacation a few weeks back -- we’re going to Brittany France at the end of March because, well, who needs sun and sand when you enjoy rain blowing in off the Atlantic? -- and the flights from Chicago to Paris were looking just ugly. So we started opening up the search filters a bit, looking at some extended layovers and overnight stays. If done right, it can be fun. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/06/24/podcast-130-notes-from-hungary/\">episode #130</a> (I seem to be digging deep into the archives on this episode), I talked about how my son Andrew and I skipped a reasonable 90-minute connection in Vienna airport for full-day 8-hr one; dropped our bags in held luggage and then hopped a cab to the city center for a beer-and-schnitzel crawl. On the way over to Paris, SAS showed an 8-hr layover in Stockholm. Hmmm… we hadn’t been there since 2006 when we went to Sweden to pick up my Saab convertible. But I remember Arlanda airport being a long haul from Stockholm. Would it take too long getting to and from Stockholm? Thankfully, no. It’s a 20-minute train ride, and the Arlanda Express runs every 15 minutes. So, we’re gearing up for this time for a beer-and-herring crawl thanks to a Stockholm Craft Beer Bar custom Google Map from TravelCommons listener and Untappd friend Rob Cheshire. Though this whole cashless Sweden thing has me a bit worried. I read that <a href=\"https://www.npr.org/2018/10/22/658808705/thousands-of-swedes-are-inserting-microchips-under-their-skin\">more than 4,000 Swedes have implanted microchips</a> in their hands to let them pay for things with just a wave. I’m hoping that I don’t have to have surgery to order a beer.</li>\n 	<li>On the way back, again, the direct flights, or even the 1-stops from Paris to the US were priced high, both in dollars and in points, and not having anything critical on the books for the Monday of our return, we looked at some overnight stays. We decided to skip London; our time in Brittany will span Brexit Day and so we thought, why risk it? The other overnight options that popped up were Frankfurt and... Vienna. I was in Frankfurt last summer, and while I’d done that Vienna layover 2 years ago, Irene hasn’t been in Vienna since 1992, and then, only in the train station making a connection to Budapest. So we bookend our Brittany vacation with a micro-vacations in Sweden and Austria, and save a little money in air fare -- which, to be honest, we’ll probably spend and then some in food and beer.</li>\n 	<li>Which would be better than taking up United on their offer to buy up from Premiere Gold to Premiere Platinum for $2,000. Not to say there aren’t some benefits from that jump -- jump one level up on the upgrade list, a little better bonus miles multiplier, though I don’t ever use my current 2-free-bag allotment, so bumping up to 3 doesn’t do me much. And now that Gold has been moved up to Boarding Group 1, it doesn’t give me a better shot at overhead space. I’ve said it before in previous episodes, I don’t think the incremental benefit from higher status is worth flying weird itineraries or inconvenient times. And it’s certainly not worth 2 grand.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our new Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Astral/44268\">Dreaming</a> by Astral (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Travel Potpourri for $200, Alex</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Doing a little start-of-the-year cleaning of my travel notebook. I always carry a 3½ x 5½ in notebook with me to jot down notes and thoughts. My current notebook is a stiff rather than a hard back so I don’t break it when I put it in the back pocket of my jeans, and has fountain-pen friendly Clairefontaine paper because, as I said in the last episode, it’s not like a lack for things to be fiddly about. This notebook has a couple of pages of letters and numbers written with different pens and inks, a few pages of Madrid beer bars with the ones we hit X’d, a half-dozen pages of really bad algebra when I was trying to help my daughter with a math test, and then the rest is bullet pointed blurbs, thoughts, observations that are the seed corn for the podcast.</li>\n 	<li>Sometimes, though, there’s just not enough in one of those thoughts to grow it into an episode topic, not enough to get it beyond the 10-20 words that are already there. So, for lack of coming up with anything better, here’s a bit of a ramble through those stunted seed corns. Yeah, I’m selling this pretty well. I can hear you all reaching for the Skip button already.</li>\n 	<li>Like, last fall when I was posing for my umpteenth identity badge at a new client, I thought I was given the camera a slight smile -- like a passport photo smile, not showing teeth but a pleasant look. The security guard turned the camera around -- it was deadpan neutral. If I hadn’t tried to smile, I would’ve been frowning. I reminded me to consciously make an effort to smile with folks like gate agents and TSA screeners because, as I get older, I must get more of a grumpy resting face. Which may explain some of the reaction I get from flight attendants.</li>\n 	<li>One thought that almost made it out of the notebook -- Hotels need to stop feeling the need to innovate in the bathroom. I remember writing this in the midst of a 4-day/3-hotel run where the taps and shower control in every hotel were different. I’m OK with innovating some parts of the room -- like dropping in some cool new coffee maker, or an interesting radio or TV, or even a weird chair -- but that’s gotta stop at the bathroom door. When I cross that threshold, I’m usually not completely awake, I’m often not wearing my glasses so can’t see real well if, indeed, I’ve actually turned on the light. And when I step in the shower, I’m definitely not wearing glasses, so small print instructions don’t go down well. I thought hotel showers had pretty much standardized on the single knob that turned on at Cold and got Hotter as you turned it clockwise, all the time delivering the same volume of water. But sometimes you move that knob back and forth to no effect, and you eventually figure out that you have to pull it to turn it on.&nbsp; The worst, though, are the controls that go in the wrong direction -- maybe counterclockwise, or push instead of pull. After I finally figure it out, I can understand what they were trying to do, and it might then make sense, but if it takes me more than 30 seconds to get my morning shower going, someone has failed -- and I don’t think it’s me.</li>\n 	<li>A year or so ago, when I was stuck for a half hour on a broken light rail train between the Atlanta terminals and the rental car center, I started wondering why the push for these trains; what’s the business case? ORD has shut down its train, the ATS, Airport Transit System, to modernize it and extend it to a new rental car center. The price? $800 million. PHX is spending $700 million to extend their SkyTrain to their rental car center. Tampa’s SkyConnect train that went in service last year cost over $400 million. And don’t get me started on Newark’s AirTrain. I mean, I get the need to cut down on diesel emissions from the rental buses, but it seems these airports could buy a whole lot of electric buses for less than that what their spending on a couple of miles of light rail. And when those trains break down, there’s no option but to wait -- no other train can pull up beside yours and take everyone onward. You’re stuck until they figure it out.</li>\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Well, we’ve cleaned out the Travel Potpourri category, Alex. Let\'s move on to Extreme Weather Delays for $200</span>.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #148</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and now on <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_148.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #148 — Travel Potpourri for $200, Alex','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-148-travel-potpourri-for-200-alex','','','2021-05-04 22:32:19','2021-05-05 03:32:19','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=2237',0,'post','',0),
(2238,1,'2019-02-09 19:52:25','2019-02-10 00:52:25','Trying to wrap up travel for the year so I can hunker down in the TravelCommons bunker outside of Chicago and <em>not</em> worry about any forecasted snow. But for those of you who are traveling, here\'s an episode to keep you occupied in the airport, train, or car traffic. We talk about some travel tips that didn\'t make my Top 10 Tips blog post, the great experience of flying on Thanksgiving day, losing my tablet on that flight but soon recovering it, storming Las Vegas with 50,000 other Amazon Web Services users, and some thoughts from our trip to Santa Fe, New Mexico. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_148.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n<iframe src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/546788592&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"></iframe><!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show Notes -->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #148:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, just trying to survive Nature’s mood swings -- 16 straight days of snow, the much publicized polar vortex cold last week followed by a four-day 73 degree temp rise -- from -22 on early Thursday morning (actual temperature; none of this wind chill guesstimating) to +51 degrees Monday afternoon, and then a 40-some degree drop back to the single digits by Friday. It’s climate change, alright. Just not all in the same direction. Last Wednesday was the second coldest day in Chicago history at -23 degrees. I was also here for the coldest day -- January 20, 1985 -- when it hit -27 degrees. I was just starting my last quarter at University of Chicago. It left an impression. After that, I didn’t interview with any Chicago companies. I took a job in Dallas and moved down in July -- to temperatures averaging in the 90’s. Brilliant</li>\r\n 	<li>I missed the wind-up to last week’s freeze fest. I flew out to New York on the Monday morning at the tail end of that 16-day snow fest. I had booked a Southwest flight from Chicago Midway to LaGuardia because Southwest now flies into the new renovated concourse in the otherwise Third World-ish Terminal B and, being that kind of travel geek, I wanted to check it out. Southwest had other plans though. Sunday late morning, about 18 hours before departure, Southwest emailed me that they were cancelling the flight. I was surprised at their proactivity, but it was a good thing, I guess, ‘cause it gave me time to move to United -- no new terminal experience, but a lot better flight frequency.</li>\r\n 	<li>Which turned out to be key on Wednesday, trying to fly home on that -23 degree day. Tuesday afternoon, I moved my flight home up from 3pm to 12 noon. I figured all the flights would be delayed and the later my flight, the worse the delay and the higher probability of cancellation. Looking at United’s flights, the 11am and 1pm flights were regional jets; the noon flight was a mainline Airbus. ORD was going to have to cut capacity on Weds -- the ground crews could only be outside for short stretches, especially the guys on the deicing trucks. I figured they’d cancel the smaller regional jets first, which meant they’d move the folks from the 11am and 1pm flights onto the noon flight, meaning that flight might be delayed, but United wouldn’t want to cancel it.</li>\r\n 	<li>And the next day, that’s pretty much how it played out. When I got to LaGuardia, those 11 and 1 flights were already cancelled. The noon flight still showed on-time, but checking the United and <a href=\"https://flightaware.com/\">FlightAware</a> apps, I could see that the Airbus was still in Chicago. That noon departure time was meaningless until that plane was in the air. I set up in the Amex Centurion Lounge, doing calls and emails, refreshing those apps every 10 minutes. The Airbus’ 8am departure time came and went, as did 9am, and 10am. It finally left around 10:40am Chicago time. I had lunch and a beer in the lounge -- the food in those Centurion lounges is good… and free -- and headed down for the gate. Walking down the concourse, I passed a Uniqlo vending machine selling “ultra light” down jackets for $70. (Amazing what they sell in airport vending machines) I thought for a moment about buying one to layer up when walking up the jet bridge in O’Hare. Given the extreme conditions, it was the most understandable 2½ hr delay I’ve ever had on United. I was incredibly grateful for the United ramp workers who were outside that day. I was happy to just get home that afternoon. Leaving the LGA Amex lounge for my gate, I ran into a Chicago colleague. He had 4 flights canceled on him already and, as I found out the next morning, didn’t get home until Thursday -- after going through Richmond. Good thing for him the Amex Lounge drinks are free too</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/copperhead/40520\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen</a> by copperhead (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: Admiral Bob, Javolenus , Sackjo22</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul class=\"ili-indent\">\r\n 	<li>As promised, I expanded the Santa Fe topic in December’s episode to a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/01/24/road-trip-lowbrow-santa-fe/\">full 1,800-word post on the website</a> -- which might help explain why this episode slipped from the end of January to the beginning of February. The <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reader%27s_Digest_Condensed_Books\">Reader’s Digest condensed version</a> (my obligatory Baby Boomer cultural reference) goes something like this -- Friday: hike, drink beer, eat a green chile cheeseburger; Saturday: hike, drink beer, eat a green chile cheeseburger, then drink margaritas and eat local New Mexican dishes; Sunday: wake up a little later, walk rather than hike, eat tamales from a cart. I liked Steve Frick’s comment “When Road Warriors relax” on his retweet. I did try to write this a bit more like a travel article than a blog post -- more of a story than a sequential list of the places we went. But I did make sure to include links to all the good places we hit. If you haven’t already, give it a read and let me know your thoughts.</li>\r\n 	<li>When I was going through ORD in January, during the partial government shutdown, I thanked the TSA screeners for showing up even though they weren’t getting paid. If I’m reading the GSA salary band schedule correctly, the typical TSA screener makes between 29 and 44 grand a year. They could’ve called in sick to drive an Uber to make up for the missed paychecks, but they didn’t -- as opposed to Atlanta where I stood in some long PreCheck lines because of sick outs. Not that I blame the Atlanta TSA folks, but it made me appreciate the ORD TSA people even more.</li>\r\n 	<li>Over a year ago, way back in episode #136 in December 2017, I talked about feeling like I’m the last generation of cash payers. My younger colleagues -- and my children -- not only do they pay for everything with a card, many of them don’t even carry cash. It’s <a href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/21/business/sweden-cashless-society.html\">happening even faster in Sweden</a>, where 95% of purchases by Millenials is electronic; to the point that half the country’s retailers think they’ll stop taking cash in 5-6 years. So I got a chuckle when long-time TravelCommons listener Allan Marko sent along this notice that he picked up while touring Laos last month -\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>“Please note that only new crisp notes are accepted in Laos. US$100 notes receiving a better exchange rate; US$ notes of the series number before 1996 as well as US$100 notes with the series number CB, dirty and/or damaged notes, or notes with any writing on it are not accepted in Laos. Please bring some small changes with you for your convenience.”</li>\r\n 	<li>Cash is king in Laos -- but only if it’s neat, tidy, and young</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Heading to LGA last Weds morning, traffic was bad in Manhattan and so the wait times for Uber and Lyft were a bit silly. So instead, I let the hotel doorman guide me over to a black car. I saw the driver tip him $10, but I didn’t care -- it was a nice clean car -- a Lexus hybrid -- and the driver knew the back ways to LGA, so we didn’t get jammed up on the highway. Everything was good -- until we parked outside of Terminal B. I had asked the doorman before getting in -- “Does he take a credit card?” “Oh yeah,” he said. And to give the driver credit, he tried to take my Amex, but for some reason his iPhone couldn’t get data at Terminal B Departures, which meant he couldn’t connect to Square, which meant he couldn’t take my card. After trying for 5 minutes, he went palms up. Lucky for him, I am a cash carrier and I had just enough to pay the fare. His tip? He’ll have to take that up with his mobile carrier.</li>\r\n 	<li>We were working on our Spring Break vacation a few weeks back -- we’re going to Brittany France at the end of March because, well, who needs sun and sand when you enjoy rain blowing in off the Atlantic? -- and the flights from Chicago to Paris were looking just ugly. So we started opening up the search filters a bit, looking at some extended layovers and overnight stays. If done right, it can be fun. Back in episode #130 (I seem to be digging deep into the archives on this episode), I talked about how my son Andrew and I skipped a reasonable 90-minute connection in Vienna airport for full-day 8-hr one; dropped our bags in held luggage and then hopped a cab to the city center for a beer-and-schnitzel crawl. On the way over to Paris, SAS showed an 8-hr layover in Stockholm. Hmmm… we hadn’t been there since 2006 when we went to Sweden to pick up my Saab convertible. But I remember Arlanda airport being a long haul from Stockholm. Would it take too long getting to and from Stockholm? Thankfully, no. It’s a 20-minute train ride, and the Arlanda Express runs every 15 minutes. So, we’re gearing up for this time for a beer-and-herring crawl thanks to a Stockholm Craft Beer Bar custom Google Map from TravelCommons listener and Untappd friend Rob Cheshire. Though this whole cashless Sweden thing has me a bit worried. I read that <a href=\"https://www.npr.org/2018/10/22/658808705/thousands-of-swedes-are-inserting-microchips-under-their-skin\">more than 4,000 Swedes have implanted microchips</a> in their hands to let them pay for things with just a wave. I’m hoping that I don’t have to have surgery to order a beer.</li>\r\n 	<li>On the way back, again, the direct flights, or even the 1-stops from Paris to the US were priced high, both in dollars and in points, and not having anything critical on the books for the Monday of our return, we looked at some overnight stays. We decided to skip London; our time in Brittany will span Brexit Day and so we thought, why risk it? The other overnight options that popped up were Frankfurt and... Vienna. I was in Frankfurt last summer, and while I’d done that Vienna layover 2 years ago, Irene hasn’t been in Vienna since 1992, and then, only in the train station making a connection to Budapest. So we bookend our Brittany vacation with a micro-vacations in Sweden and Austria, and save a little money in air fare -- which, to be honest, we’ll probably spend and then some in food and beer.</li>\r\n 	<li>Which would be better than taking up United on their offer to buy up from Premiere Gold to Premiere Platinum for $2,000. Not to say there aren’t some benefits from that jump -- jump one level up on the upgrade list, a little better bonus miles multiplier, though I don’t ever use my current 2-free-bag allotment, so bumping up to 3 doesn’t do me much. And now that Gold has been moved up to Boarding Group 1, it doesn’t give me a better shot at overhead space. I’ve said it before in previous episodes, I don’t think the incremental benefit from higher status is worth flying weird itineraries or inconvenient times. And it’s certainly not worth 2 grand.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our new Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/NiGiD/48586\">O Tannenbaum / Oh Christmas Tree</a> by Martijn de Boer (NiGiD) (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license.  Ft: Admiral Bob (admiralbob77)</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Holiday Travel Tips</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I posted my kinda annual Top 10 Holiday Travel Tips a few weeks back. It feels like something I’m required to do to keep my status as a semi-professional travel blogger and podcaster. Not a lot of the flying tips have changed over the last few lists -- pay a bit extra to fly non-stop, don’t take tight connections, catch an early flight if you can, carry your luggage on if you can -- because not much has changed regarding air travel -- it’s a time when a huge bubble of travelers hit an infrastructure that is, for the most part, already operating near capacity and at the time of year when much of that capacity could get disrupted by weather. This year, US plane loads were over 80% -- as if you didn’t already know that hearing the constant refrain of gate agents and flight attendants - “This will be a completely full flight…” And no new airport or runway capacity has been added in the high traffic areas -- maybe since ORD finished spending a billion dollars straightening out its runways. The LGA renovation will hopefully eliminate the leaking roof and give us better food options, but after spending $8 billion dollars, there won’t be any new runway capacity.</li>\r\n 	<li>Having said that, I think the aggressive roll-out of TSA PreCheck has helped everyone -- the TSA, frequent travelers who’ve bought PreCheck (signing up for PreCheck moved up to #2 on this year’s list), and even the infrequent ones who haven’t -- by increasing security capacity by increasing “thru-put” for lack of a better term. Security seems to, on the whole, move along a bit brisker. Yes, there are still too many times when it doesn’t, but it’s been a while since we’ve seen a full-scale TSA meltdown causing people to miss flights.\r\nBringing your own battery pack cracked the top 10 for the first time this year at #7. It followed Use Twitter as a Concierge Service and Use Multiple Flight Tracking Apps at numbers 5 and 6 respectively. The more we rely on our smartphones for travel information, the more important power is. And when the holiday crowds are hovering over those Samsung or Verizon power towers, you want an alternative.</li>\r\n 	<li>A lot of the Top 10 lists I read end with a second list, of those things that didn’t quite make the Top 10. For me, some of those are:</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Travel on the Actual Holiday</strong> - Our Thanksgiving flight out to Santa Fe reminded me of this tip. It didn’t make the Top 10 because not everyone can pull it off. Tough to fly or drive out Christmas morning if you have young kids, or if you have Italian in-laws who do the whole Feast of The Seven Fishes on Christmas Eve. But, if you can, it’s a quantum level decrease in travel stress. You’ll probably just glide through your travels.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Take Mass Transit to the Airport</strong> - Everybody worries about TSA lines, but just getting into the airport to be able to get into the TSA line can be a hassle. Airports with a single access road that goes past all the terminals -- think ORD, LAX, LGA -- can have 15-20 minute backups. When the construction at LGA first started, the backups were so bad, people were getting out of their cabs when they were still on the Grand Central Parkway and walking up the off ramps. Now, LGA doesn’t have mass transit access -- some of that $8 billion if for that -- but most airports do -- ORD, ATL, EWR and JFK, DCA,.... If it’s available, use it to skip at least one line.</li>\r\n 	<li>And my last “almost made it” tip, <strong>Bring Cash</strong> -- way back in episode #136, last December, I talked about what seems to be a generational split, maybe right around 30 or 35 -- old Millennials/youngster Gen X’s -- about the need to carry cash. No matter which side you sit on that split, it’s a fact that cash can get you out of a packed airport bar quicker than a card if you need to bolt for your flight -- maybe a delay got pulled up, your gate got moved to the next terminal, or you just misread the boarding time. Being able to lay down, say a twenty and 3 ones, on the bar with your check is a whole lot quicker than waiting for the waitress to show back up, take your card, walk to the back to run it, and then bring it back again for you to sign. This is where the Europeans with those mobile terminals are light-years ahead of us. But until we catch up -- which means we have to be trusted to remember a 4-digit PIN code -- bring cash so you can dash.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/44580\"> What Child is This (Instrumental)</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license.  Ft: Jeris</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Notes on Santa Fe</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>As I mentioned earlier, Irene and I headed out to Santa Fe, New Mexico for the Thanksgiving holidays. Since both kids were gone, we figured “Why not?” And since I had to be in Vegas on Monday, it just made sense to head west.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’m going to do a full write-up on our trip in a blog post in a week or so; the first of a new series of Road Trip posts, where we’ll break the TravelCommons format a bit. Road Trip posts will be more about the destination than the journey -- things we did, places we stayed, ate, drank beer…. But here, just some notes.</li>\r\n 	<li>It had been a while since we’d been in Santa Fe -- maybe over 10 years; I haven’t paged back through my calendar to check -- but getting out of that Hertz Dodge Challenger that we’d blasted up I-25 -- the speed limit is 75 mph once you’re outside of Albuquerque -- I was immediately hit with the piñon smell, that unique pinewood smoke smell I only get in Santa Fe. I’ve been around a lot of pinewood fires in, say, Colorado and Arizona, but the piñon smoke billowing out of a kiva fireplace is a unique smell, and one that I love.\r\nVisiting Santa Fe, there’s an interesting mix of highbrow and lowbrow -- doing the Georgia O’Keefe museum and a run up Canyon Road through all the art galleries, or hunting the best green chile cheeseburger and then burning it off on a hike in the Sangre de Cristo mountains. This visit was all lowbrow.</li>\r\n 	<li>Friday, we did 1,700 vertical feet up the Atalaya Trail. The parking lot at the trailhead at St John’s College was pretty full, but the trail wasn’t crowded once we got going. It actually came in handy at times to see people - let us know we weren’t lost. There were some trail markings, but not to the extent we were used to in, say, the UK. 5 ½ hours later, we were sitting at the bar at Second St Brewing’s place in the Railyard district, replacing whatever calories we’d burned off with a green chile cheeseburger and a side of green chile cheese fries. Double lashings of american cheese, which I know is just a processed cheese food, but the creamy gooey-ness of it blended well with the chile bite, and a pint of one of the better American-made bitters I’ve had.</li>\r\n 	<li>Saturday, after hiking through Tent Rocks National Monument, we ended up on Guadalupe St, which feels like the lowbrow counterpart to the plaza or Canyon Road. We stopped in at Cowgirl BBQ for margaritas. During our last visit, I stole/borrowed their margarita recipe for my own. We worked through their margarita menu while listening to a group of local guys talk about taking dancing lessons and a woman at the bar telling us that, back in the ‘70’s when she moved to Santa Fe, cowboys still rode horses through town -- across the plaza and down Canyon Rd -- throwing cash down in Canyon Rd bars to buy rounds for the house.</li>\r\n 	<li>On Sunday, we walked down Canyon Road, looking into the sculpture gardens of all the art galleries. It seemed a popular Sunday morning stroll. I’d see some older couples -- older than me; at, say, the beginning of retirement, walking in high-end Western garb -- nice flat-brimmed hats, fur-trimmed duster coats. Kinda California money does cowboy. Would be interesting to see how those ‘70’s cowboys would fit in today.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #147</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and now on <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_148.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #148 — Travel Potpourri for $200, Alex','','inherit','closed','closed','','2237-revision-v1','','','2019-02-09 19:52:25','2019-02-10 00:52:25','',2237,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/02/09/2237-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2239,1,'2019-02-09 19:54:38','2019-02-10 00:54:38','Trying to wrap up travel for the year so I can hunker down in the TravelCommons bunker outside of Chicago and <em>not</em> worry about any forecasted snow. But for those of you who are traveling, here\'s an episode to keep you occupied in the airport, train, or car traffic. We talk about some travel tips that didn\'t make my Top 10 Tips blog post, the great experience of flying on Thanksgiving day, losing my tablet on that flight but soon recovering it, storming Las Vegas with 50,000 other Amazon Web Services users, and some thoughts from our trip to Santa Fe, New Mexico. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_148.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n<iframe src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/546788592&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"></iframe><!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show Notes -->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #148:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, just trying to survive Nature’s mood swings -- 16 straight days of snow, the much publicized polar vortex cold last week followed by a four-day 73 degree temp rise -- from -22 on early Thursday morning (actual temperature; none of this wind chill guesstimating) to +51 degrees Monday afternoon, and then a 40-some degree drop back to the single digits by Friday. It’s climate change, alright. Just not all in the same direction. Last Wednesday was the second coldest day in Chicago history at -23 degrees. I was also here for the coldest day -- January 20, 1985 -- when it hit -27 degrees. I was just starting my last quarter at University of Chicago. It left an impression. After that, I didn’t interview with any Chicago companies. I took a job in Dallas and moved down in July -- to temperatures averaging in the 90’s. Brilliant</li>\r\n 	<li>I missed the wind-up to last week’s freeze fest. I flew out to New York on the Monday morning at the tail end of that 16-day snow fest. I had booked a Southwest flight from Chicago Midway to LaGuardia because Southwest now flies into the new renovated concourse in the otherwise Third World-ish Terminal B and, being that kind of travel geek, I wanted to check it out. Southwest had other plans though. Sunday late morning, about 18 hours before departure, Southwest emailed me that they were cancelling the flight. I was surprised at their proactivity, but it was a good thing, I guess, ‘cause it gave me time to move to United -- no new terminal experience, but a lot better flight frequency.</li>\r\n 	<li>Which turned out to be key on Wednesday, trying to fly home on that -23 degree day. Tuesday afternoon, I moved my flight home up from 3pm to 12 noon. I figured all the flights would be delayed and the later my flight, the worse the delay and the higher probability of cancellation. Looking at United’s flights, the 11am and 1pm flights were regional jets; the noon flight was a mainline Airbus. ORD was going to have to cut capacity on Weds -- the ground crews could only be outside for short stretches, especially the guys on the deicing trucks. I figured they’d cancel the smaller regional jets first, which meant they’d move the folks from the 11am and 1pm flights onto the noon flight, meaning that flight might be delayed, but United wouldn’t want to cancel it.</li>\r\n 	<li>And the next day, that’s pretty much how it played out. When I got to LaGuardia, those 11 and 1 flights were already cancelled. The noon flight still showed on-time, but checking the United and <a href=\"https://flightaware.com/\">FlightAware</a> apps, I could see that the Airbus was still in Chicago. That noon departure time was meaningless until that plane was in the air. I set up in the Amex Centurion Lounge, doing calls and emails, refreshing those apps every 10 minutes. The Airbus’ 8am departure time came and went, as did 9am, and 10am. It finally left around 10:40am Chicago time. I had lunch and a beer in the lounge -- the food in those Centurion lounges is good… and free -- and headed down for the gate. Walking down the concourse, I passed a Uniqlo vending machine selling “ultra light” down jackets for $70. (Amazing what they sell in airport vending machines) I thought for a moment about buying one to layer up when walking up the jet bridge in O’Hare. Given the extreme conditions, it was the most understandable 2½ hr delay I’ve ever had on United. I was incredibly grateful for the United ramp workers who were outside that day. I was happy to just get home that afternoon. Leaving the LGA Amex lounge for my gate, I ran into a Chicago colleague. He had 4 flights canceled on him already and, as I found out the next morning, didn’t get home until Thursday -- after going through Richmond. Good thing for him the Amex Lounge drinks are free too</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/copperhead/40520\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen</a> by copperhead (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: Admiral Bob, Javolenus , Sackjo22</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul class=\"ili-indent\">\r\n 	<li>As promised, I expanded the Santa Fe topic in December’s episode to a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/01/24/road-trip-lowbrow-santa-fe/\">full 1,800-word post on the website</a> -- which might help explain why this episode slipped from the end of January to the beginning of February. The <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reader%27s_Digest_Condensed_Books\">Reader’s Digest condensed version</a> (my obligatory Baby Boomer cultural reference) goes something like this -- Friday: hike, drink beer, eat a green chile cheeseburger; Saturday: hike, drink beer, eat a green chile cheeseburger, then drink margaritas and eat local New Mexican dishes; Sunday: wake up a little later, walk rather than hike, eat tamales from a cart. I liked Steve Frick’s comment “When Road Warriors relax” on his retweet. I did try to write this a bit more like a travel article than a blog post -- more of a story than a sequential list of the places we went. But I did make sure to include links to all the good places we hit. If you haven’t already, give it a read and let me know your thoughts.</li>\r\n 	<li>When I was going through ORD in January, during the partial government shutdown, I thanked the TSA screeners for showing up even though they weren’t getting paid. If I’m reading the GSA salary band schedule correctly, the typical TSA screener makes between 29 and 44 grand a year. They could’ve called in sick to drive an Uber to make up for the missed paychecks, but they didn’t -- as opposed to Atlanta where I stood in some long PreCheck lines because of sick outs. Not that I blame the Atlanta TSA folks, but it made me appreciate the ORD TSA people even more.</li>\r\n 	<li>Over a year ago, way back in episode #136 in December 2017, I talked about feeling like I’m the last generation of cash payers. My younger colleagues -- and my children -- not only do they pay for everything with a card, many of them don’t even carry cash. It’s <a href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/21/business/sweden-cashless-society.html\">happening even faster in Sweden</a>, where 95% of purchases by Millenials is electronic; to the point that half the country’s retailers think they’ll stop taking cash in 5-6 years. So I got a chuckle when long-time TravelCommons listener Allan Marko sent along this notice that he picked up while touring Laos last month -\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>“Please note that only new crisp notes are accepted in Laos. US$100 notes receiving a better exchange rate; US$ notes of the series number before 1996 as well as US$100 notes with the series number CB, dirty and/or damaged notes, or notes with any writing on it are not accepted in Laos. Please bring some small changes with you for your convenience.”</li>\r\n 	<li>Cash is king in Laos -- but only if it’s neat, tidy, and young</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Heading to LGA last Weds morning, traffic was bad in Manhattan and so the wait times for Uber and Lyft were a bit silly. So instead, I let the hotel doorman guide me over to a black car. I saw the driver tip him $10, but I didn’t care -- it was a nice clean car -- a Lexus hybrid -- and the driver knew the back ways to LGA, so we didn’t get jammed up on the highway. Everything was good -- until we parked outside of Terminal B. I had asked the doorman before getting in -- “Does he take a credit card?” “Oh yeah,” he said. And to give the driver credit, he tried to take my Amex, but for some reason his iPhone couldn’t get data at Terminal B Departures, which meant he couldn’t connect to Square, which meant he couldn’t take my card. After trying for 5 minutes, he went palms up. Lucky for him, I am a cash carrier and I had just enough to pay the fare. His tip? He’ll have to take that up with his mobile carrier.</li>\r\n 	<li>We were working on our Spring Break vacation a few weeks back -- we’re going to Brittany France at the end of March because, well, who needs sun and sand when you enjoy rain blowing in off the Atlantic? -- and the flights from Chicago to Paris were looking just ugly. So we started opening up the search filters a bit, looking at some extended layovers and overnight stays. If done right, it can be fun. Back in episode #130 (I seem to be digging deep into the archives on this episode), I talked about how my son Andrew and I skipped a reasonable 90-minute connection in Vienna airport for full-day 8-hr one; dropped our bags in held luggage and then hopped a cab to the city center for a beer-and-schnitzel crawl. On the way over to Paris, SAS showed an 8-hr layover in Stockholm. Hmmm… we hadn’t been there since 2006 when we went to Sweden to pick up my Saab convertible. But I remember Arlanda airport being a long haul from Stockholm. Would it take too long getting to and from Stockholm? Thankfully, no. It’s a 20-minute train ride, and the Arlanda Express runs every 15 minutes. So, we’re gearing up for this time for a beer-and-herring crawl thanks to a Stockholm Craft Beer Bar custom Google Map from TravelCommons listener and Untappd friend Rob Cheshire. Though this whole cashless Sweden thing has me a bit worried. I read that <a href=\"https://www.npr.org/2018/10/22/658808705/thousands-of-swedes-are-inserting-microchips-under-their-skin\">more than 4,000 Swedes have implanted microchips</a> in their hands to let them pay for things with just a wave. I’m hoping that I don’t have to have surgery to order a beer.</li>\r\n 	<li>On the way back, again, the direct flights, or even the 1-stops from Paris to the US were priced high, both in dollars and in points, and not having anything critical on the books for the Monday of our return, we looked at some overnight stays. We decided to skip London; our time in Brittany will span Brexit Day and so we thought, why risk it? The other overnight options that popped up were Frankfurt and... Vienna. I was in Frankfurt last summer, and while I’d done that Vienna layover 2 years ago, Irene hasn’t been in Vienna since 1992, and then, only in the train station making a connection to Budapest. So we bookend our Brittany vacation with a micro-vacations in Sweden and Austria, and save a little money in air fare -- which, to be honest, we’ll probably spend and then some in food and beer.</li>\r\n 	<li>Which would be better than taking up United on their offer to buy up from Premiere Gold to Premiere Platinum for $2,000. Not to say there aren’t some benefits from that jump -- jump one level up on the upgrade list, a little better bonus miles multiplier, though I don’t ever use my current 2-free-bag allotment, so bumping up to 3 doesn’t do me much. And now that Gold has been moved up to Boarding Group 1, it doesn’t give me a better shot at overhead space. I’ve said it before in previous episodes, I don’t think the incremental benefit from higher status is worth flying weird itineraries or inconvenient times. And it’s certainly not worth 2 grand.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our new Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/NiGiD/48586\">O Tannenbaum / Oh Christmas Tree</a> by Martijn de Boer (NiGiD) (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license.  Ft: Admiral Bob (admiralbob77)</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Travel Potpourri for $200, Alex</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Doing a little start-of-the-year cleaning of my travel notebook. I always carry a 3½ x 5½ in notebook with me to jot down notes and thoughts. My current notebook is a stiff rather than a hard back so I don’t break it when I put it in the back pocket of my jeans, and has fountain-pen friendly Clairefontaine paper because, as I said in the last episode, it’s not like a lack for things to be fiddly about. This notebook has a couple of pages of letters and numbers written with different pens and inks, a few pages of Madrid beer bars with the ones we hit X’d, a half-dozen pages of really bad algebra when I was trying to help my daughter with a math test, and then the rest is bullet pointed blurbs, thoughts, observations that are the seed corn for the podcast.</li>\r\n 	<li>Sometimes, though, there’s just not enough in one of those thoughts to grow it into an episode topic, not enough to get it beyond the 10-20 words that are already there. So, for lack of coming up with anything better, here’s a bit of a ramble through those stunted seed corns. Yeah, I’m selling this pretty well. I can hear you all reaching for the Skip button already.</li>\r\n 	<li>Like, last fall when I was posing for my umpteenth identity badge at a new client, I thought I was given the camera a slight smile -- like a passport photo smile, not showing teeth but a pleasant look. The security guard turned the camera around -- it was deadpan neutral. If I hadn’t tried to smile, I would’ve been frowning. I reminded me to consciously make an effort to smile with folks like gate agents and TSA screeners because, as I get older, I must get more of a grumpy resting face. Which may explain some of the reaction I get from flight attendants.</li>\r\n 	<li>One thought that almost made it out of the notebook -- Hotels need to stop feeling the need to innovate in the bathroom. I remember writing this in the midst of a 4-day/3-hotel run where the taps and shower control in every hotel were different. I’m OK with innovating some parts of the room -- like dropping in some cool new coffee maker, or an interesting radio or TV, or even a weird chair -- but that’s gotta stop at the bathroom door. When I cross that threshold, I’m usually not completely awake, I’m often not wearing my glasses so can’t see real well if, indeed, I’ve actually turned on the light. And when I step in the shower, I’m definitely not wearing glasses, so small print instructions don’t go down well. I thought hotel showers had pretty much standardized on the single knob that turned on at Cold and got Hotter as you turned it clockwise, all the time delivering the same volume of water. But sometimes you move that knob back and forth to no effect, and you eventually figure out that you have to pull it to turn it on. Or the water comes out of some handheld shower head, and now you have to search the hose for the value that switches to the high shower head. The worst, though, are the controls that go in the wrong direction -- maybe counterclockwise, or push instead of pull. After I finally figure it out, I can understand what they were trying to do, and it might then make sense, but if it takes me more than 30 seconds to get my morning shower going, someone has failed -- and I don’t think it’s me.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/44580\"> What Child is This (Instrumental)</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license.  Ft: Jeris</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #148</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and now on <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_148.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #148 — Travel Potpourri for $200, Alex','','inherit','closed','closed','','2237-revision-v1','','','2019-02-09 19:54:38','2019-02-10 00:54:38','',2237,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/02/09/2237-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2240,1,'2019-02-09 20:26:20','2019-02-10 01:26:20','“Throw me something” sign on ladder','IMG_0136','This is the closest thing Mardi Gras has to a business plan','inherit','open','closed','','img_0136','','','2026-03-09 09:28:06','2026-03-09 15:28:06','',2237,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/IMG_0136.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(2241,1,'2019-02-09 20:26:44','2019-02-10 01:26:44','<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/IMG_0136.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-2240\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/IMG_0136-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>Trying to wrap up travel for the year so I can hunker down in the TravelCommons bunker outside of Chicago and <em>not</em> worry about any forecasted snow. But for those of you who are traveling, here\'s an episode to keep you occupied in the airport, train, or car traffic. We talk about some travel tips that didn\'t make my Top 10 Tips blog post, the great experience of flying on Thanksgiving day, losing my tablet on that flight but soon recovering it, storming Las Vegas with 50,000 other Amazon Web Services users, and some thoughts from our trip to Santa Fe, New Mexico. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_148.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n<iframe src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/546788592&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"></iframe><!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show Notes -->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #148:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, just trying to survive Nature’s mood swings -- 16 straight days of snow, the much publicized polar vortex cold last week followed by a four-day 73 degree temp rise -- from -22 on early Thursday morning (actual temperature; none of this wind chill guesstimating) to +51 degrees Monday afternoon, and then a 40-some degree drop back to the single digits by Friday. It’s climate change, alright. Just not all in the same direction. Last Wednesday was the second coldest day in Chicago history at -23 degrees. I was also here for the coldest day -- January 20, 1985 -- when it hit -27 degrees. I was just starting my last quarter at University of Chicago. It left an impression. After that, I didn’t interview with any Chicago companies. I took a job in Dallas and moved down in July -- to temperatures averaging in the 90’s. Brilliant</li>\r\n 	<li>I missed the wind-up to last week’s freeze fest. I flew out to New York on the Monday morning at the tail end of that 16-day snow fest. I had booked a Southwest flight from Chicago Midway to LaGuardia because Southwest now flies into the new renovated concourse in the otherwise Third World-ish Terminal B and, being that kind of travel geek, I wanted to check it out. Southwest had other plans though. Sunday late morning, about 18 hours before departure, Southwest emailed me that they were cancelling the flight. I was surprised at their proactivity, but it was a good thing, I guess, ‘cause it gave me time to move to United -- no new terminal experience, but a lot better flight frequency.</li>\r\n 	<li>Which turned out to be key on Wednesday, trying to fly home on that -23 degree day. Tuesday afternoon, I moved my flight home up from 3pm to 12 noon. I figured all the flights would be delayed and the later my flight, the worse the delay and the higher probability of cancellation. Looking at United’s flights, the 11am and 1pm flights were regional jets; the noon flight was a mainline Airbus. ORD was going to have to cut capacity on Weds -- the ground crews could only be outside for short stretches, especially the guys on the deicing trucks. I figured they’d cancel the smaller regional jets first, which meant they’d move the folks from the 11am and 1pm flights onto the noon flight, meaning that flight might be delayed, but United wouldn’t want to cancel it.</li>\r\n 	<li>And the next day, that’s pretty much how it played out. When I got to LaGuardia, those 11 and 1 flights were already cancelled. The noon flight still showed on-time, but checking the United and <a href=\"https://flightaware.com/\">FlightAware</a> apps, I could see that the Airbus was still in Chicago. That noon departure time was meaningless until that plane was in the air. I set up in the Amex Centurion Lounge, doing calls and emails, refreshing those apps every 10 minutes. The Airbus’ 8am departure time came and went, as did 9am, and 10am. It finally left around 10:40am Chicago time. I had lunch and a beer in the lounge -- the food in those Centurion lounges is good… and free -- and headed down for the gate. Walking down the concourse, I passed a Uniqlo vending machine selling “ultra light” down jackets for $70. (Amazing what they sell in airport vending machines) I thought for a moment about buying one to layer up when walking up the jet bridge in O’Hare. Given the extreme conditions, it was the most understandable 2½ hr delay I’ve ever had on United. I was incredibly grateful for the United ramp workers who were outside that day. I was happy to just get home that afternoon. Leaving the LGA Amex lounge for my gate, I ran into a Chicago colleague. He had 4 flights canceled on him already and, as I found out the next morning, didn’t get home until Thursday -- after going through Richmond. Good thing for him the Amex Lounge drinks are free too</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/copperhead/40520\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen</a> by copperhead (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: Admiral Bob, Javolenus , Sackjo22</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul class=\"ili-indent\">\r\n 	<li>As promised, I expanded the Santa Fe topic in December’s episode to a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/01/24/road-trip-lowbrow-santa-fe/\">full 1,800-word post on the website</a> -- which might help explain why this episode slipped from the end of January to the beginning of February. The <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reader%27s_Digest_Condensed_Books\">Reader’s Digest condensed version</a> (my obligatory Baby Boomer cultural reference) goes something like this -- Friday: hike, drink beer, eat a green chile cheeseburger; Saturday: hike, drink beer, eat a green chile cheeseburger, then drink margaritas and eat local New Mexican dishes; Sunday: wake up a little later, walk rather than hike, eat tamales from a cart. I liked Steve Frick’s comment “When Road Warriors relax” on his retweet. I did try to write this a bit more like a travel article than a blog post -- more of a story than a sequential list of the places we went. But I did make sure to include links to all the good places we hit. If you haven’t already, give it a read and let me know your thoughts.</li>\r\n 	<li>When I was going through ORD in January, during the partial government shutdown, I thanked the TSA screeners for showing up even though they weren’t getting paid. If I’m reading the GSA salary band schedule correctly, the typical TSA screener makes between 29 and 44 grand a year. They could’ve called in sick to drive an Uber to make up for the missed paychecks, but they didn’t -- as opposed to Atlanta where I stood in some long PreCheck lines because of sick outs. Not that I blame the Atlanta TSA folks, but it made me appreciate the ORD TSA people even more.</li>\r\n 	<li>Over a year ago, way back in episode #136 in December 2017, I talked about feeling like I’m the last generation of cash payers. My younger colleagues -- and my children -- not only do they pay for everything with a card, many of them don’t even carry cash. It’s <a href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/21/business/sweden-cashless-society.html\">happening even faster in Sweden</a>, where 95% of purchases by Millenials is electronic; to the point that half the country’s retailers think they’ll stop taking cash in 5-6 years. So I got a chuckle when long-time TravelCommons listener Allan Marko sent along this notice that he picked up while touring Laos last month -\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>“Please note that only new crisp notes are accepted in Laos. US$100 notes receiving a better exchange rate; US$ notes of the series number before 1996 as well as US$100 notes with the series number CB, dirty and/or damaged notes, or notes with any writing on it are not accepted in Laos. Please bring some small changes with you for your convenience.”</li>\r\n 	<li>Cash is king in Laos -- but only if it’s neat, tidy, and young</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Heading to LGA last Weds morning, traffic was bad in Manhattan and so the wait times for Uber and Lyft were a bit silly. So instead, I let the hotel doorman guide me over to a black car. I saw the driver tip him $10, but I didn’t care -- it was a nice clean car -- a Lexus hybrid -- and the driver knew the back ways to LGA, so we didn’t get jammed up on the highway. Everything was good -- until we parked outside of Terminal B. I had asked the doorman before getting in -- “Does he take a credit card?” “Oh yeah,” he said. And to give the driver credit, he tried to take my Amex, but for some reason his iPhone couldn’t get data at Terminal B Departures, which meant he couldn’t connect to Square, which meant he couldn’t take my card. After trying for 5 minutes, he went palms up. Lucky for him, I am a cash carrier and I had just enough to pay the fare. His tip? He’ll have to take that up with his mobile carrier.</li>\r\n 	<li>We were working on our Spring Break vacation a few weeks back -- we’re going to Brittany France at the end of March because, well, who needs sun and sand when you enjoy rain blowing in off the Atlantic? -- and the flights from Chicago to Paris were looking just ugly. So we started opening up the search filters a bit, looking at some extended layovers and overnight stays. If done right, it can be fun. Back in episode #130 (I seem to be digging deep into the archives on this episode), I talked about how my son Andrew and I skipped a reasonable 90-minute connection in Vienna airport for full-day 8-hr one; dropped our bags in held luggage and then hopped a cab to the city center for a beer-and-schnitzel crawl. On the way over to Paris, SAS showed an 8-hr layover in Stockholm. Hmmm… we hadn’t been there since 2006 when we went to Sweden to pick up my Saab convertible. But I remember Arlanda airport being a long haul from Stockholm. Would it take too long getting to and from Stockholm? Thankfully, no. It’s a 20-minute train ride, and the Arlanda Express runs every 15 minutes. So, we’re gearing up for this time for a beer-and-herring crawl thanks to a Stockholm Craft Beer Bar custom Google Map from TravelCommons listener and Untappd friend Rob Cheshire. Though this whole cashless Sweden thing has me a bit worried. I read that <a href=\"https://www.npr.org/2018/10/22/658808705/thousands-of-swedes-are-inserting-microchips-under-their-skin\">more than 4,000 Swedes have implanted microchips</a> in their hands to let them pay for things with just a wave. I’m hoping that I don’t have to have surgery to order a beer.</li>\r\n 	<li>On the way back, again, the direct flights, or even the 1-stops from Paris to the US were priced high, both in dollars and in points, and not having anything critical on the books for the Monday of our return, we looked at some overnight stays. We decided to skip London; our time in Brittany will span Brexit Day and so we thought, why risk it? The other overnight options that popped up were Frankfurt and... Vienna. I was in Frankfurt last summer, and while I’d done that Vienna layover 2 years ago, Irene hasn’t been in Vienna since 1992, and then, only in the train station making a connection to Budapest. So we bookend our Brittany vacation with a micro-vacations in Sweden and Austria, and save a little money in air fare -- which, to be honest, we’ll probably spend and then some in food and beer.</li>\r\n 	<li>Which would be better than taking up United on their offer to buy up from Premiere Gold to Premiere Platinum for $2,000. Not to say there aren’t some benefits from that jump -- jump one level up on the upgrade list, a little better bonus miles multiplier, though I don’t ever use my current 2-free-bag allotment, so bumping up to 3 doesn’t do me much. And now that Gold has been moved up to Boarding Group 1, it doesn’t give me a better shot at overhead space. I’ve said it before in previous episodes, I don’t think the incremental benefit from higher status is worth flying weird itineraries or inconvenient times. And it’s certainly not worth 2 grand.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our new Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/NiGiD/48586\">O Tannenbaum / Oh Christmas Tree</a> by Martijn de Boer (NiGiD) (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license.  Ft: Admiral Bob (admiralbob77)</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Travel Potpourri for $200, Alex</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Doing a little start-of-the-year cleaning of my travel notebook. I always carry a 3½ x 5½ in notebook with me to jot down notes and thoughts. My current notebook is a stiff rather than a hard back so I don’t break it when I put it in the back pocket of my jeans, and has fountain-pen friendly Clairefontaine paper because, as I said in the last episode, it’s not like a lack for things to be fiddly about. This notebook has a couple of pages of letters and numbers written with different pens and inks, a few pages of Madrid beer bars with the ones we hit X’d, a half-dozen pages of really bad algebra when I was trying to help my daughter with a math test, and then the rest is bullet pointed blurbs, thoughts, observations that are the seed corn for the podcast.</li>\r\n 	<li>Sometimes, though, there’s just not enough in one of those thoughts to grow it into an episode topic, not enough to get it beyond the 10-20 words that are already there. So, for lack of coming up with anything better, here’s a bit of a ramble through those stunted seed corns. Yeah, I’m selling this pretty well. I can hear you all reaching for the Skip button already.</li>\r\n 	<li>Like, last fall when I was posing for my umpteenth identity badge at a new client, I thought I was given the camera a slight smile -- like a passport photo smile, not showing teeth but a pleasant look. The security guard turned the camera around -- it was deadpan neutral. If I hadn’t tried to smile, I would’ve been frowning. I reminded me to consciously make an effort to smile with folks like gate agents and TSA screeners because, as I get older, I must get more of a grumpy resting face. Which may explain some of the reaction I get from flight attendants.</li>\r\n 	<li>One thought that almost made it out of the notebook -- Hotels need to stop feeling the need to innovate in the bathroom. I remember writing this in the midst of a 4-day/3-hotel run where the taps and shower control in every hotel were different. I’m OK with innovating some parts of the room -- like dropping in some cool new coffee maker, or an interesting radio or TV, or even a weird chair -- but that’s gotta stop at the bathroom door. When I cross that threshold, I’m usually not completely awake, I’m often not wearing my glasses so can’t see real well if, indeed, I’ve actually turned on the light. And when I step in the shower, I’m definitely not wearing glasses, so small print instructions don’t go down well. I thought hotel showers had pretty much standardized on the single knob that turned on at Cold and got Hotter as you turned it clockwise, all the time delivering the same volume of water. But sometimes you move that knob back and forth to no effect, and you eventually figure out that you have to pull it to turn it on. Or the water comes out of some handheld shower head, and now you have to search the hose for the value that switches to the high shower head. The worst, though, are the controls that go in the wrong direction -- maybe counterclockwise, or push instead of pull. After I finally figure it out, I can understand what they were trying to do, and it might then make sense, but if it takes me more than 30 seconds to get my morning shower going, someone has failed -- and I don’t think it’s me.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/44580\"> What Child is This (Instrumental)</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license.  Ft: Jeris</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #148</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and now on <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_148.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #148 — Travel Potpourri for $200, Alex','','inherit','closed','closed','','2237-revision-v1','','','2019-02-09 20:26:44','2019-02-10 01:26:44','',2237,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/02/09/2237-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2242,1,'2019-02-09 22:55:30','2019-02-10 03:55:30','<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/IMG_0136.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-2240\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/IMG_0136-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>Trying to wrap up travel for the year so I can hunker down in the TravelCommons bunker outside of Chicago and <em>not</em> worry about any forecasted snow. But for those of you who are traveling, here\'s an episode to keep you occupied in the airport, train, or car traffic. We talk about some travel tips that didn\'t make my Top 10 Tips blog post, the great experience of flying on Thanksgiving day, losing my tablet on that flight but soon recovering it, storming Las Vegas with 50,000 other Amazon Web Services users, and some thoughts from our trip to Santa Fe, New Mexico. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_148.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n<iframe src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/546788592&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"></iframe><!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show Notes -->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #148:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, just trying to survive Nature’s mood swings -- 16 straight days of snow, the much publicized polar vortex cold last week followed by a four-day 73 degree temp rise -- from -22 on early Thursday morning (actual temperature; none of this wind chill guesstimating) to +51 degrees Monday afternoon, and then a 40-some degree drop back to the single digits by Friday. It’s climate change, alright. Just not all in the same direction. Last Wednesday was the second coldest day in Chicago history at -23 degrees. I was also here for the coldest day -- January 20, 1985 -- when it hit -27 degrees. I was just starting my last quarter at University of Chicago. It left an impression. After that, I didn’t interview with any Chicago companies. I took a job in Dallas and moved down in July -- to temperatures averaging in the 90’s. Brilliant</li>\r\n 	<li>I missed the wind-up to last week’s freeze fest. I flew out to New York on the Monday morning at the tail end of that 16-day snow fest. I had booked a Southwest flight from Chicago Midway to LaGuardia because Southwest now flies into the new renovated concourse in the otherwise Third World-ish Terminal B and, being that kind of travel geek, I wanted to check it out. Southwest had other plans though. Sunday late morning, about 18 hours before departure, Southwest emailed me that they were cancelling the flight. I was surprised at their proactivity, but it was a good thing, I guess, ‘cause it gave me time to move to United -- no new terminal experience, but a lot better flight frequency.</li>\r\n 	<li>Which turned out to be key on Wednesday, trying to fly home on that -23 degree day. Tuesday afternoon, I moved my flight home up from 3pm to 12 noon. I figured all the flights would be delayed and the later my flight, the worse the delay and the higher probability of cancellation. Looking at United’s flights, the 11am and 1pm flights were regional jets; the noon flight was a mainline Airbus. ORD was going to have to cut capacity on Weds -- the ground crews could only be outside for short stretches, especially the guys on the deicing trucks. I figured they’d cancel the smaller regional jets first, which meant they’d move the folks from the 11am and 1pm flights onto the noon flight, meaning that flight might be delayed, but United wouldn’t want to cancel it.</li>\r\n 	<li>And the next day, that’s pretty much how it played out. When I got to LaGuardia, those 11 and 1 flights were already cancelled. The noon flight still showed on-time, but checking the United and <a href=\"https://flightaware.com/\">FlightAware</a> apps, I could see that the Airbus was still in Chicago. That noon departure time was meaningless until that plane was in the air. I set up in the Amex Centurion Lounge, doing calls and emails, refreshing those apps every 10 minutes. The Airbus’ 8am departure time came and went, as did 9am, and 10am. It finally left around 10:40am Chicago time. I had lunch and a beer in the lounge -- the food in those Centurion lounges is good… and free -- and headed down for the gate. Walking down the concourse, I passed a Uniqlo vending machine selling “ultra light” down jackets for $70. (Amazing what they sell in airport vending machines) I thought for a moment about buying one to layer up when walking up the jet bridge in O’Hare. Given the extreme conditions, it was the most understandable 2½ hr delay I’ve ever had on United. I was incredibly grateful for the United ramp workers who were outside that day. I was happy to just get home that afternoon. Leaving the LGA Amex lounge for my gate, I ran into a Chicago colleague. He had 4 flights canceled on him already and, as I found out the next morning, didn’t get home until Thursday -- after going through Richmond. Good thing for him the Amex Lounge drinks are free too</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/copperhead/40520\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen</a> by copperhead (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: Admiral Bob, Javolenus , Sackjo22</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul class=\"ili-indent\">\r\n 	<li>As promised, I expanded the Santa Fe topic in December’s episode to a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/01/24/road-trip-lowbrow-santa-fe/\">full 1,800-word post on the website</a> -- which might help explain why this episode slipped from the end of January to the beginning of February. The <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reader%27s_Digest_Condensed_Books\">Reader’s Digest condensed version</a> (my obligatory Baby Boomer cultural reference) goes something like this -- Friday: hike, drink beer, eat a green chile cheeseburger; Saturday: hike, drink beer, eat a green chile cheeseburger, then drink margaritas and eat local New Mexican dishes; Sunday: wake up a little later, walk rather than hike, eat tamales from a cart. I liked Steve Frick’s comment “When Road Warriors relax” on his retweet. I did try to write this a bit more like a travel article than a blog post -- more of a story than a sequential list of the places we went. But I did make sure to include links to all the good places we hit. If you haven’t already, give it a read and let me know your thoughts.</li>\r\n 	<li>When I was going through ORD in January, during the partial government shutdown, I thanked the TSA screeners for showing up even though they weren’t getting paid. If I’m reading the GSA salary band schedule correctly, the typical TSA screener makes between 29 and 44 grand a year. They could’ve called in sick to drive an Uber to make up for the missed paychecks, but they didn’t -- as opposed to Atlanta where I stood in some long PreCheck lines because of sick outs. Not that I blame the Atlanta TSA folks, but it made me appreciate the ORD TSA people even more.</li>\r\n 	<li>Right at about a year ago, I broke down and <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/01/25/podcast-137-new-years-travel-status-tips-how-to-shop-for-a-suitcase/\">bought a new Victorinox suitcase</a>. I had beat a grey Samsonite into submission after 2½ years of trundling across New Orleans sidewalks. My well-traveled Swiss Army roller became unusable when its retractable handle stuck in the extended position. And then my Bluesmart smart bag was banned from by airlines because its battery wouldn’t eject. A couple of weeks ago, my wife called me upstairs. “We’ve got to declutter this attic. You need to Kondo-ize your suitcases,” she said. Wha…? She pointed over to where I’d stashed the Samsonite, the Swiss Army roller, and the Bluesmart. “You should only keep the suitcases that spark joy,” she said. Again, wha…? How does a broken suitcase spark joy? “Exactly!” she said. I pulled the old luggage tags off and threw them in the garbage can before she forced me to binge watch that Netflix series.</li>\r\n 	<li>Over a year ago, way back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">episode #136</a> in December 2017, I talked about feeling like I’m the last generation of cash payers. My younger colleagues -- and my children -- not only do they pay for everything with a card, many of them don’t even carry cash. It’s <a href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/21/business/sweden-cashless-society.html\">happening even faster in Sweden</a>, where 95% of purchases by Millenials is electronic; to the point that half the country’s retailers think they’ll stop taking cash in 5-6 years. So I got a chuckle when long-time TravelCommons listener Allan Marko sent along this notice that he picked up while touring Laos last month -\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>“Please note that only new crisp notes are accepted in Laos. US$100 notes receiving a better exchange rate; US$ notes of the series number before 1996 as well as US$100 notes with the series number CB, dirty and/or damaged notes, or notes with any writing on it are not accepted in Laos. Please bring some small changes with you for your convenience.”</li>\r\n 	<li>Cash is king in Laos -- but only if it’s neat, tidy, and young</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Heading to LGA last Weds morning, traffic was bad in Manhattan and so the wait times for Uber and Lyft were a bit silly. So instead, I let the hotel doorman guide me over to a black car. I saw the driver tip him $10, but I didn’t care -- it was a nice clean car -- a Lexus hybrid -- and the driver knew the back ways to LGA, so we didn’t get jammed up on the highway. Everything was good -- until we parked outside of Terminal B. I had asked the doorman before getting in -- “Does he take a credit card?” “Oh yeah,” he said. And to give the driver credit, he tried to take my Amex, but for some reason his iPhone couldn’t get data at Terminal B Departures, which meant he couldn’t connect to Square, which meant he couldn’t take my card. After trying for 5 minutes, he went palms up. Lucky for him, I am a cash carrier and I had just enough to pay the fare. His tip? He’ll have to take that up with his mobile carrier.</li>\r\n 	<li>We were working on our Spring Break vacation a few weeks back -- we’re going to Brittany France at the end of March because, well, who needs sun and sand when you enjoy rain blowing in off the Atlantic? -- and the flights from Chicago to Paris were looking just ugly. So we started opening up the search filters a bit, looking at some extended layovers and overnight stays. If done right, it can be fun. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/06/24/podcast-130-notes-from-hungary/\">episode #130</a> (I seem to be digging deep into the archives on this episode), I talked about how my son Andrew and I skipped a reasonable 90-minute connection in Vienna airport for full-day 8-hr one; dropped our bags in held luggage and then hopped a cab to the city center for a beer-and-schnitzel crawl. On the way over to Paris, SAS showed an 8-hr layover in Stockholm. Hmmm… we hadn’t been there since 2006 when we went to Sweden to pick up my Saab convertible. But I remember Arlanda airport being a long haul from Stockholm. Would it take too long getting to and from Stockholm? Thankfully, no. It’s a 20-minute train ride, and the Arlanda Express runs every 15 minutes. So, we’re gearing up for this time for a beer-and-herring crawl thanks to a Stockholm Craft Beer Bar custom Google Map from TravelCommons listener and Untappd friend Rob Cheshire. Though this whole cashless Sweden thing has me a bit worried. I read that <a href=\"https://www.npr.org/2018/10/22/658808705/thousands-of-swedes-are-inserting-microchips-under-their-skin\">more than 4,000 Swedes have implanted microchips</a> in their hands to let them pay for things with just a wave. I’m hoping that I don’t have to have surgery to order a beer.</li>\r\n 	<li>On the way back, again, the direct flights, or even the 1-stops from Paris to the US were priced high, both in dollars and in points, and not having anything critical on the books for the Monday of our return, we looked at some overnight stays. We decided to skip London; our time in Brittany will span Brexit Day and so we thought, why risk it? The other overnight options that popped up were Frankfurt and... Vienna. I was in Frankfurt last summer, and while I’d done that Vienna layover 2 years ago, Irene hasn’t been in Vienna since 1992, and then, only in the train station making a connection to Budapest. So we bookend our Brittany vacation with a micro-vacations in Sweden and Austria, and save a little money in air fare -- which, to be honest, we’ll probably spend and then some in food and beer.</li>\r\n 	<li>Which would be better than taking up United on their offer to buy up from Premiere Gold to Premiere Platinum for $2,000. Not to say there aren’t some benefits from that jump -- jump one level up on the upgrade list, a little better bonus miles multiplier, though I don’t ever use my current 2-free-bag allotment, so bumping up to 3 doesn’t do me much. And now that Gold has been moved up to Boarding Group 1, it doesn’t give me a better shot at overhead space. I’ve said it before in previous episodes, I don’t think the incremental benefit from higher status is worth flying weird itineraries or inconvenient times. And it’s certainly not worth 2 grand.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our new Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/NiGiD/48586\">O Tannenbaum / Oh Christmas Tree</a> by Martijn de Boer (NiGiD) (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license.  Ft: Admiral Bob (admiralbob77)</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Travel Potpourri for $200, Alex</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Doing a little start-of-the-year cleaning of my travel notebook. I always carry a 3½ x 5½ in notebook with me to jot down notes and thoughts. My current notebook is a stiff rather than a hard back so I don’t break it when I put it in the back pocket of my jeans, and has fountain-pen friendly Clairefontaine paper because, as I said in the last episode, it’s not like a lack for things to be fiddly about. This notebook has a couple of pages of letters and numbers written with different pens and inks, a few pages of Madrid beer bars with the ones we hit X’d, a half-dozen pages of really bad algebra when I was trying to help my daughter with a math test, and then the rest is bullet pointed blurbs, thoughts, observations that are the seed corn for the podcast.</li>\r\n 	<li>Sometimes, though, there’s just not enough in one of those thoughts to grow it into an episode topic, not enough to get it beyond the 10-20 words that are already there. So, for lack of coming up with anything better, here’s a bit of a ramble through those stunted seed corns. Yeah, I’m selling this pretty well. I can hear you all reaching for the Skip button already.</li>\r\n 	<li>Like, last fall when I was posing for my umpteenth identity badge at a new client, I thought I was given the camera a slight smile -- like a passport photo smile, not showing teeth but a pleasant look. The security guard turned the camera around -- it was deadpan neutral. If I hadn’t tried to smile, I would’ve been frowning. I reminded me to consciously make an effort to smile with folks like gate agents and TSA screeners because, as I get older, I must get more of a grumpy resting face. Which may explain some of the reaction I get from flight attendants.</li>\r\n 	<li>One thought that almost made it out of the notebook -- Hotels need to stop feeling the need to innovate in the bathroom. I remember writing this in the midst of a 4-day/3-hotel run where the taps and shower control in every hotel were different. I’m OK with innovating some parts of the room -- like dropping in some cool new coffee maker, or an interesting radio or TV, or even a weird chair -- but that’s gotta stop at the bathroom door. When I cross that threshold, I’m usually not completely awake, I’m often not wearing my glasses so can’t see real well if, indeed, I’ve actually turned on the light. And when I step in the shower, I’m definitely not wearing glasses, so small print instructions don’t go down well. I thought hotel showers had pretty much standardized on the single knob that turned on at Cold and got Hotter as you turned it clockwise, all the time delivering the same volume of water. But sometimes you move that knob back and forth to no effect, and you eventually figure out that you have to pull it to turn it on. Or the water comes out of some handheld shower head, and now you have to search the hose for the value that switches to the high shower head. The worst, though, are the controls that go in the wrong direction -- maybe counterclockwise, or push instead of pull. After I finally figure it out, I can understand what they were trying to do, and it might then make sense, but if it takes me more than 30 seconds to get my morning shower going, someone has failed -- and I don’t think it’s me.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/44580\"> What Child is This (Instrumental)</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license.  Ft: Jeris</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #148</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and now on <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_148.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #148 — Travel Potpourri for $200, Alex','','inherit','closed','closed','','2237-revision-v1','','','2019-02-09 22:55:30','2019-02-10 03:55:30','',2237,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/02/09/2237-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2243,1,'2019-02-10 09:14:00','2019-02-10 14:14:00','<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/IMG_0136.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-2240\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/IMG_0136-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>Trying to wrap up travel for the year so I can hunker down in the TravelCommons bunker outside of Chicago and <em>not</em> worry about any forecasted snow. But for those of you who are traveling, here\'s an episode to keep you occupied in the airport, train, or car traffic. We talk about some travel tips that didn\'t make my Top 10 Tips blog post, the great experience of flying on Thanksgiving day, losing my tablet on that flight but soon recovering it, storming Las Vegas with 50,000 other Amazon Web Services users, and some thoughts from our trip to Santa Fe, New Mexico. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_148.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n<iframe src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/546788592&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"></iframe><!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show Notes -->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #148:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, just trying to survive Nature’s mood swings -- 16 straight days of snow, the much publicized polar vortex cold last week followed by a four-day 73 degree temp rise -- from -22 on early Thursday morning (actual temperature; none of this wind chill guesstimating) to +51 degrees Monday afternoon, and then a 40-some degree drop back to the single digits by Friday. It’s climate change, alright. Just not all in the same direction. Last Wednesday was the second coldest day in Chicago history at -23 degrees. I was also here for the coldest day -- January 20, 1985 -- when it hit -27 degrees. I was just starting my last quarter at University of Chicago. It left an impression. After that, I didn’t interview with any Chicago companies. I took a job in Dallas and moved down in July -- to temperatures averaging in the 90’s. Brilliant</li>\r\n 	<li>I missed the wind-up to last week’s freeze fest. I flew out to New York on the Monday morning at the tail end of that 16-day snow fest. I had booked a Southwest flight from Chicago Midway to LaGuardia because Southwest now flies into the new renovated concourse in the otherwise Third World-ish Terminal B and, being that kind of travel geek, I wanted to check it out. Southwest had other plans though. Sunday late morning, about 18 hours before departure, Southwest emailed me that they were cancelling the flight. I was surprised at their proactivity, but it was a good thing, I guess, ‘cause it gave me time to move to United -- no new terminal experience, but a lot better flight frequency.</li>\r\n 	<li>Which turned out to be key on Wednesday, trying to fly home on that -23 degree day. Tuesday afternoon, I moved my flight home up from 3pm to 12 noon. I figured all the flights would be delayed and the later my flight, the worse the delay and the higher probability of cancellation. Looking at United’s flights, the 11am and 1pm flights were regional jets; the noon flight was a mainline Airbus. ORD was going to have to cut capacity on Weds -- the ground crews could only be outside for short stretches, especially the guys on the deicing trucks. I figured they’d cancel the smaller regional jets first, which meant they’d move the folks from the 11am and 1pm flights onto the noon flight, meaning that flight might be delayed, but United wouldn’t want to cancel it.</li>\r\n 	<li>And the next day, that’s pretty much how it played out. When I got to LaGuardia, those 11 and 1 flights were already cancelled. The noon flight still showed on-time, but checking the United and <a href=\"https://flightaware.com/\">FlightAware</a> apps, I could see that the Airbus was still in Chicago. That noon departure time was meaningless until that plane was in the air. I set up in the Amex Centurion Lounge, doing calls and emails, refreshing those apps every 10 minutes. The Airbus’ 8am departure time came and went, as did 9am, and 10am. It finally left around 10:40am Chicago time. I had lunch and a beer in the lounge -- the food in those Centurion lounges is good… and free -- and headed down for the gate. Walking down the concourse, I passed a Uniqlo vending machine selling “ultra light” down jackets for $70. (Amazing what they sell in airport vending machines) I thought for a moment about buying one to layer up when walking up the jet bridge in O’Hare. Given the extreme conditions, it was the most understandable 2½ hr delay I’ve ever had on United. I was incredibly grateful for the United ramp workers who were outside that day. I was happy to just get home that afternoon. Leaving the LGA Amex lounge for my gate, I ran into a Chicago colleague. He had 4 flights canceled on him already and, as I found out the next morning, didn’t get home until Thursday -- after going through Richmond. Good thing for him the Amex Lounge drinks are free too</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/coffeeeurope/28861\">The Silence of France &amp; Delma</a> by HEKTOR THILLET (coffeeeurope) (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.5/\">Attribution Noncommercial</a> license.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul class=\"ili-indent\">\r\n 	<li>As promised, I expanded the Santa Fe topic in December’s episode to a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/01/24/road-trip-lowbrow-santa-fe/\">full 1,800-word post on the website</a> -- which might help explain why this episode slipped from the end of January to the beginning of February. The <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reader%27s_Digest_Condensed_Books\">Reader’s Digest condensed version</a> (my obligatory Baby Boomer cultural reference) goes something like this -- Friday: hike, drink beer, eat a green chile cheeseburger; Saturday: hike, drink beer, eat a green chile cheeseburger, then drink margaritas and eat local New Mexican dishes; Sunday: wake up a little later, walk rather than hike, eat tamales from a cart. I liked Steve Frick’s comment “When Road Warriors relax” on his retweet. I did try to write this a bit more like a travel article than a blog post -- more of a story than a sequential list of the places we went. But I did make sure to include links to all the good places we hit. If you haven’t already, give it a read and let me know your thoughts.</li>\r\n 	<li>When I was going through ORD in January, during the partial government shutdown, I thanked the TSA screeners for showing up even though they weren’t getting paid. If I’m reading the GSA salary band schedule correctly, the typical TSA screener makes between 29 and 44 grand a year. They could’ve called in sick to drive an Uber to make up for the missed paychecks, but they didn’t -- as opposed to Atlanta where I stood in some long PreCheck lines because of sick outs. Not that I blame the Atlanta TSA folks, but it made me appreciate the ORD TSA people even more.</li>\r\n 	<li>Right at about a year ago, I broke down and <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/01/25/podcast-137-new-years-travel-status-tips-how-to-shop-for-a-suitcase/\">bought a new Victorinox suitcase</a>. I had beat a grey Samsonite into submission after 2½ years of trundling across New Orleans sidewalks. My well-traveled Swiss Army roller became unusable when its retractable handle stuck in the extended position. And then my Bluesmart smart bag was banned from by airlines because its battery wouldn’t eject. A couple of weeks ago, my wife called me upstairs. “We’ve got to declutter this attic. You need to Kondo-ize your suitcases,” she said. Wha…? She pointed over to where I’d stashed the Samsonite, the Swiss Army roller, and the Bluesmart. “You should only keep the suitcases that spark joy,” she said. Again, wha…? How does a broken suitcase spark joy? “Exactly!” she said. I pulled the old luggage tags off and threw them in the garbage can before she forced me to binge watch that Netflix series.</li>\r\n 	<li>Over a year ago, way back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">episode #136</a> in December 2017, I talked about feeling like I’m the last generation of cash payers. My younger colleagues -- and my children -- not only do they pay for everything with a card, many of them don’t even carry cash. It’s <a href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/21/business/sweden-cashless-society.html\">happening even faster in Sweden</a>, where 95% of purchases by Millenials is electronic; to the point that half the country’s retailers think they’ll stop taking cash in 5-6 years. So I got a chuckle when long-time TravelCommons listener Allan Marko sent along this notice that he picked up while touring Laos last month -\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>“Please note that only new crisp notes are accepted in Laos. US$100 notes receiving a better exchange rate; US$ notes of the series number before 1996 as well as US$100 notes with the series number CB, dirty and/or damaged notes, or notes with any writing on it are not accepted in Laos. Please bring some small changes with you for your convenience.”</li>\r\n 	<li>Cash is king in Laos -- but only if it’s neat, tidy, and young</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Heading to LGA last Weds morning, traffic was bad in Manhattan and so the wait times for Uber and Lyft were a bit silly. So instead, I let the hotel doorman guide me over to a black car. I saw the driver tip him $10, but I didn’t care -- it was a nice clean car -- a Lexus hybrid -- and the driver knew the back ways to LGA, so we didn’t get jammed up on the highway. Everything was good -- until we parked outside of Terminal B. I had asked the doorman before getting in -- “Does he take a credit card?” “Oh yeah,” he said. And to give the driver credit, he tried to take my Amex, but for some reason his iPhone couldn’t get data at Terminal B Departures, which meant he couldn’t connect to Square, which meant he couldn’t take my card. After trying for 5 minutes, he went palms up. Lucky for him, I am a cash carrier and I had just enough to pay the fare. His tip? He’ll have to take that up with his mobile carrier.</li>\r\n 	<li>We were working on our Spring Break vacation a few weeks back -- we’re going to Brittany France at the end of March because, well, who needs sun and sand when you enjoy rain blowing in off the Atlantic? -- and the flights from Chicago to Paris were looking just ugly. So we started opening up the search filters a bit, looking at some extended layovers and overnight stays. If done right, it can be fun. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/06/24/podcast-130-notes-from-hungary/\">episode #130</a> (I seem to be digging deep into the archives on this episode), I talked about how my son Andrew and I skipped a reasonable 90-minute connection in Vienna airport for full-day 8-hr one; dropped our bags in held luggage and then hopped a cab to the city center for a beer-and-schnitzel crawl. On the way over to Paris, SAS showed an 8-hr layover in Stockholm. Hmmm… we hadn’t been there since 2006 when we went to Sweden to pick up my Saab convertible. But I remember Arlanda airport being a long haul from Stockholm. Would it take too long getting to and from Stockholm? Thankfully, no. It’s a 20-minute train ride, and the Arlanda Express runs every 15 minutes. So, we’re gearing up for this time for a beer-and-herring crawl thanks to a Stockholm Craft Beer Bar custom Google Map from TravelCommons listener and Untappd friend Rob Cheshire. Though this whole cashless Sweden thing has me a bit worried. I read that <a href=\"https://www.npr.org/2018/10/22/658808705/thousands-of-swedes-are-inserting-microchips-under-their-skin\">more than 4,000 Swedes have implanted microchips</a> in their hands to let them pay for things with just a wave. I’m hoping that I don’t have to have surgery to order a beer.</li>\r\n 	<li>On the way back, again, the direct flights, or even the 1-stops from Paris to the US were priced high, both in dollars and in points, and not having anything critical on the books for the Monday of our return, we looked at some overnight stays. We decided to skip London; our time in Brittany will span Brexit Day and so we thought, why risk it? The other overnight options that popped up were Frankfurt and... Vienna. I was in Frankfurt last summer, and while I’d done that Vienna layover 2 years ago, Irene hasn’t been in Vienna since 1992, and then, only in the train station making a connection to Budapest. So we bookend our Brittany vacation with a micro-vacations in Sweden and Austria, and save a little money in air fare -- which, to be honest, we’ll probably spend and then some in food and beer.</li>\r\n 	<li>Which would be better than taking up United on their offer to buy up from Premiere Gold to Premiere Platinum for $2,000. Not to say there aren’t some benefits from that jump -- jump one level up on the upgrade list, a little better bonus miles multiplier, though I don’t ever use my current 2-free-bag allotment, so bumping up to 3 doesn’t do me much. And now that Gold has been moved up to Boarding Group 1, it doesn’t give me a better shot at overhead space. I’ve said it before in previous episodes, I don’t think the incremental benefit from higher status is worth flying weird itineraries or inconvenient times. And it’s certainly not worth 2 grand.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our new Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Astral/44268\">Dreaming</a> by Astral (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Travel Potpourri for $200, Alex</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Doing a little start-of-the-year cleaning of my travel notebook. I always carry a 3½ x 5½ in notebook with me to jot down notes and thoughts. My current notebook is a stiff rather than a hard back so I don’t break it when I put it in the back pocket of my jeans, and has fountain-pen friendly Clairefontaine paper because, as I said in the last episode, it’s not like a lack for things to be fiddly about. This notebook has a couple of pages of letters and numbers written with different pens and inks, a few pages of Madrid beer bars with the ones we hit X’d, a half-dozen pages of really bad algebra when I was trying to help my daughter with a math test, and then the rest is bullet pointed blurbs, thoughts, observations that are the seed corn for the podcast.</li>\r\n 	<li>Sometimes, though, there’s just not enough in one of those thoughts to grow it into an episode topic, not enough to get it beyond the 10-20 words that are already there. So, for lack of coming up with anything better, here’s a bit of a ramble through those stunted seed corns. Yeah, I’m selling this pretty well. I can hear you all reaching for the Skip button already.</li>\r\n 	<li>Like, last fall when I was posing for my umpteenth identity badge at a new client, I thought I was given the camera a slight smile -- like a passport photo smile, not showing teeth but a pleasant look. The security guard turned the camera around -- it was deadpan neutral. If I hadn’t tried to smile, I would’ve been frowning. I reminded me to consciously make an effort to smile with folks like gate agents and TSA screeners because, as I get older, I must get more of a grumpy resting face. Which may explain some of the reaction I get from flight attendants.</li>\r\n 	<li>One thought that almost made it out of the notebook -- Hotels need to stop feeling the need to innovate in the bathroom. I remember writing this in the midst of a 4-day/3-hotel run where the taps and shower control in every hotel were different. I’m OK with innovating some parts of the room -- like dropping in some cool new coffee maker, or an interesting radio or TV, or even a weird chair -- but that’s gotta stop at the bathroom door. When I cross that threshold, I’m usually not completely awake, I’m often not wearing my glasses so can’t see real well if, indeed, I’ve actually turned on the light. And when I step in the shower, I’m definitely not wearing glasses, so small print instructions don’t go down well. I thought hotel showers had pretty much standardized on the single knob that turned on at Cold and got Hotter as you turned it clockwise, all the time delivering the same volume of water. But sometimes you move that knob back and forth to no effect, and you eventually figure out that you have to pull it to turn it on.  The worst, though, are the controls that go in the wrong direction -- maybe counterclockwise, or push instead of pull. After I finally figure it out, I can understand what they were trying to do, and it might then make sense, but if it takes me more than 30 seconds to get my morning shower going, someone has failed -- and I don’t think it’s me.</li>\r\n 	<li>A year or so ago, when I was stuck for a half hour on a broken light rail train between the Atlanta terminals and the rental car center, I started wondering why the push for these trains; what’s the business case? ORD has shut down its train, the ATS, Airport Transit System, to modernize it and extend it to a new rental car center. The price? $800 million. PHX is spending $700 million to extend their SkyTrain to their rental car center. Tampa’s SkyConnect train that went in service last year cost over $400 million. And don’t get me started on Newark’s AirTrain. I mean, I get the need to cut down on diesel emissions from the rental buses, but it seems these airports could buy a whole lot of electric buses for less than that what their spending on a couple of miles of light rail. And when those trains break down, there’s no option but to wait -- no other train can pull up beside yours and take everyone onward. You’re stuck until they figure it out.</li>\r\n 	<li>Well, we’ve hit the bottom of the Travel Potpourri category.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #148</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and now on <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_148.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #148 — Travel Potpourri for $200, Alex','','inherit','closed','closed','','2237-revision-v1','','','2019-02-10 09:14:00','2019-02-10 14:14:00','',2237,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/02/10/2237-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2244,1,'2019-02-10 09:35:01','2019-02-10 14:35:01','[caption id=\"attachment_2197\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/IMG_1158.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2197\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/IMG_1158-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> I won\'t pass for an emotional support reindeer[/caption]\r\n\r\nTrying to wrap up travel for the year so I can hunker down in the TravelCommons bunker outside of Chicago and <em>not</em> worry about any forecasted snow. But for those of you who are traveling, here\'s an episode to keep you occupied in the airport, train, or car traffic. We talk about some travel tips that didn\'t make my Top 10 Tips blog post, the great experience of flying on Thanksgiving day, losing my tablet on that flight but soon recovering it, storming Las Vegas with 50,000 other Amazon Web Services users, and some thoughts from our trip to Santa Fe, New Mexico. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_147.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n<iframe src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/546788592&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"></iframe><!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show Notes -->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #147:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, trying to wind down the year’s travel. Was in Santa Fe, New Mexico for Thanksgiving, and then headed up to Las Vegas the next week for Amazon Web Service’s big annual conference, Re:Invent. Then did what I hoped was my last trip to Dallas, but we couldn’t corral all the cats, so I’m back down there next Weds for what will definitely be my last trip of the year.</li>\r\n 	<li>Irene and I flew out to Albuquerque 10am Thanksgiving morning and I have to say that it was one of the least stressful travel experiences I’ve ever had -- no traffic on the drive to ORD, no lines; I didn’t even have time to pull out my driver’s license before I hit the TSA podium. I walked straight through to a screening line. There were agents hanging around just looking for people to screen. The only line I stood in was the Starbucks. We even scored 1st-Class upgrades; the plane was only half full. I even think we left early. A very pleasant change from my ORD-DFW commute.</li>\r\n 	<li>The only real downside I noticed was when we hit the Hertz Presidents Club aisle in Albuquerque. It was pretty picked over, leaving behind an odd selection of Dodge vehicles -- the choice was between Dodge Challenger muscle cars or fully tricked out Ram Hemi king-cab pick-ups. I can’t say that I’ve ever faced quite that choice. The Challenger, with rear-wheel drive, wouldn’t be great if we got snow at elevation, but the Rams were just huge, and trying to parallel park that in Santa Fe would be an event. It took me a bit to decide. I went with the Challenger and hoped for clear skies.</li>\r\n 	<li>Well, there was one more downside that I didn’t discover until we unpacked in our little casita in Santa Fe that night. I’d left my Samsung tablet in that nice first-class seat. Not in the seat-back pocket; I always check there before leaving. There was a side compartment along the middle armrest that I’d put my tablet in when I folded up the table to hit the lav. Bad mistake. That compartment was deep, I couldn’t see the tablet; and I didn’t think to check it before deplaning.</li>\r\n 	<li>I hit Twitter, sending United a direct message asking about ABQ lost-and-found. I wanted to ping them to see if the cleaning crew had turn anything in since I’d be back at ABQ for our Monday morning flight to LAS. I’ve done this before when getting back coats that I’ve left in overhead compartments. The Twitter customer service agent instead sent me a link to a web form to fill out. I cooled my jets over the weekend and on Monday morning, swung by the United Baggage Services office to see if they had my tablet. Walked past the American Baggage Services office -- open; the Delta Baggage Services office -- open; to the United Baggage Services office -- closed. It was supposed to open at 9am. I waited for 15-20 minutes, and then had to head up to catch my Vegas flight. I wasn’t happy.</li>\r\n 	<li>Which changed that afternoon when I got a call from an unknown Cleveland number on my mobile. Robocallers have found my mobile number, so I usually let unrecognized numbers go straight to voicemail, but I remember Continental having a Cleveland hub before the United merger, so maybe this was a United person calling. And it was! “I think I have your tablet; could you verify your screensaver” It’s a wall painting of pink flamingos. “Yup, that’s it; we’ve got it” (Actually, it’s street art from Paris’ Montmartre neighborhood; you can see the picture on the TravelCommons’ Instagram feed). She told me that they no longer keep found items at the airports; they ship them the next day to centralized lost-&amp;-found centers for sorting and processing. So, even if the ABQ baggage services office had been open that morning, they wouldn’t have had my tablet; they probably shipped it to Cleveland that weekend.\r\nAfter I got off the phone, I got an e-mail with a link to pick a shipping method and pay. The day after I got home from Vegas, my flamingo’d tablet landed on my doorstep.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/copperhead/40520\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen</a> by copperhead (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: Admiral Bob, Javolenus , Sackjo22</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul class=\"\">\r\n 	<li>Couple of listener notes on the last episode. Nick Gassman wrote:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>“When you were talking about car rental collision damage waiver, I took it to mean that that you pay the rental company for the insurance. It\'s much cheaper (at least in the UK) to purchase this separately. You can generally get it on a per-trip or annual basis, just like regular travel insurance.”</li>\r\n 	<li>Nick, good point on that. You get used to accepting the waiver on business travel because, for many corporate rates, it’s all rolled in or you’re just going to expense it. And for US domestic travel, at least for me, my regular auto insurance covers it. So that leaves international travel. Chase did a good job of handling the accident in the UK. But looking at a separate company is a good idea. May try that out the next time I rent in Spain.</li>\r\n 	<li>“And about BlueTooth speakers, you mentioned about using the speaker as an accessory for your phone - I assume you know that the Jambox can do this. I\'ve often used it at work in rooms with no speakerphone. I\'ve also now upgraded to the Bose Mini 2 Soundlink. It is heavier and slightly larger, but when going on holiday the difference in sound quality is significant and more than makes up for it.”</li>\r\n 	<li>Yup, I’ve used the Jambox for many conference calls though I’ve never checked the quality difference between it and the speaker, or maybe I should say the microphone on my iPhone. I’ve never swapped between them on a call and asked the person on the other end which is better. Something to try out on the next call where we’re waiting for the last person to join.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Steve Frick picked up on something when I was talking about notebooks in last episode’s Traveler Gift Guide segment\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>“It sounds like you’ve also entered the “Fountain Pen Zone” as well. They’re like tattoos, you can’t have just one. I had used a Mont Blanc rollerball that I purchased in 1991, it’s been broken and repaired several times and it had been my go-to pen… until someone gave me a fountain pen. Now several years later I have a collection on fountain pens, as well as inks. Ughhhh just what I needed another obsession. Great episode!”</li>\r\n 	<li>Yup, I started with a plastic Waterman fountain pen that I bought many years ago on a business trip to Brussels. I just had that one pen for the longest time. But then I discovered the Internet, or more specifically, fountain pen forums and blogs and podcasts on the Internet. And, as you might guess, it went downhill pretty quickly. Sometimes my biggest decision of the morning is which color of ink to use that day. Which itself says something about the state of my daily choices...</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>I said earlier that I was in Vegas a few weeks back for the big Amazon Web Services convention. It was huge; 50,000 attendees, mostly pudgy, pasty-faced guys power walking up and down the strip, backpacks strapped down, ignoring the showgirls offering pictures so they wouldn’t be late to, say, the sold-out tutorial on best practices for ingesting streaming data from IoT devices into AWS’ new time series database. For me, that nerd-meets-baller dichotomy hit one morning at 7:30. I was in a marching nerd stream weaving through the casino floor of the MGM Grand when out from behind a slot machine a woman with a half-filled plastic glass shouted “Very impressive that you all have some place important to go this early.” No one broke stride. She shrugged and went back to her machine. There was a lot of walking, though, for that show. It was spread out from the MGM Grand up to the Venetian. The Health app on my iPhone clocked me at 10 miles of walking a day. Glad it wasn’t in the summer.</li>\r\n 	<li>I mentioned in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/05/31/podcast-141-when-you-think-the-tsa-is-bad-expired-money/\">an earlier episode</a> that I’d found a box of old European currency when cleaning off some shelves. It was from the late ‘80’s/early ‘90’s -- the pre-Euro days. I have some Belgian and French francs, a Deutsche mark, an Irish pound note, and an Italian 1000 lire note that I started using as a bookmark in my notebook. After one of these Amazon sessions, a young Italian woman looked over and commented on my lire bookmark. “Oh my God! I haven’t seen one of those in forever,” she said. She talked about her grandparents never really accepting that the lire was gone. “It’s good that we have the euro,” she said, “but it’ll never be the lire.” Which, remembering back 20-30 years ago, I thought might be a good thing, but decided not to say it; didn’t want to break her nostalgia. “I forgot how small it was!” she said.</li>\r\n 	<li>I was trading notes with friends a few weeks back after the Marriott hack was announced. It really is no longer a matter of if your personal data will be breached, but how often. A common theme across many of those Amazon talks was that mistakes will happen, so your cloud design should “limit the blast radius” of those mistakes. If I apply that same concept to website breaches (travel and otherwise), I’d freeze all my credit reports, have a unique password for each site, provide just the minimum amount of information required for a transaction, and I wouldn’t store/save credit card or other information with them. Indeed, if I really burrowed in, I’d use virtual credit card numbers from a bank that provides them. I’m pretty good except for the last one; I haven’t found a good bank that easily provides virtual card number. It all comes down to your personal trade-off point between resilience to a breach and convenience.</li>\r\n 	<li>With the Christmas season officially clicking in the day after Thanksgiving, TBS and TNT seem to have “Love Actually\" on power rotation every weekend. I like it; it’s a good Christmas movie. But picking up the end of it night while channel flipping in Santa Fe, I just couldn’t buy that scene toward the end when Liam Neeson encourages his stepson to breach Heathrow Airport security in the name of true love. I might be a bit of a Scrooge, but how does a 10-yr old kid commit a serious felony and not get gang-tackled at the gate and thrown into juvi? I dunno. Maybe I should stick to A Charlie Brown Christmas...</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our new Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/NiGiD/48586\">O Tannenbaum / Oh Christmas Tree</a> by Martijn de Boer (NiGiD) (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license.  Ft: Admiral Bob (admiralbob77)</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Holiday Travel Tips</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I posted my kinda annual Top 10 Holiday Travel Tips a few weeks back. It feels like something I’m required to do to keep my status as a semi-professional travel blogger and podcaster. Not a lot of the flying tips have changed over the last few lists -- pay a bit extra to fly non-stop, don’t take tight connections, catch an early flight if you can, carry your luggage on if you can -- because not much has changed regarding air travel -- it’s a time when a huge bubble of travelers hit an infrastructure that is, for the most part, already operating near capacity and at the time of year when much of that capacity could get disrupted by weather. This year, US plane loads were over 80% -- as if you didn’t already know that hearing the constant refrain of gate agents and flight attendants - “This will be a completely full flight…” And no new airport or runway capacity has been added in the high traffic areas -- maybe since ORD finished spending a billion dollars straightening out its runways. The LGA renovation will hopefully eliminate the leaking roof and give us better food options, but after spending $8 billion dollars, there won’t be any new runway capacity.</li>\r\n 	<li>Having said that, I think the aggressive roll-out of TSA PreCheck has helped everyone -- the TSA, frequent travelers who’ve bought PreCheck (signing up for PreCheck moved up to #2 on this year’s list), and even the infrequent ones who haven’t -- by increasing security capacity by increasing “thru-put” for lack of a better term. Security seems to, on the whole, move along a bit brisker. Yes, there are still too many times when it doesn’t, but it’s been a while since we’ve seen a full-scale TSA meltdown causing people to miss flights.\r\nBringing your own battery pack cracked the top 10 for the first time this year at #7. It followed Use Twitter as a Concierge Service and Use Multiple Flight Tracking Apps at numbers 5 and 6 respectively. The more we rely on our smartphones for travel information, the more important power is. And when the holiday crowds are hovering over those Samsung or Verizon power towers, you want an alternative.</li>\r\n 	<li>A lot of the Top 10 lists I read end with a second list, of those things that didn’t quite make the Top 10. For me, some of those are:</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Travel on the Actual Holiday</strong> - Our Thanksgiving flight out to Santa Fe reminded me of this tip. It didn’t make the Top 10 because not everyone can pull it off. Tough to fly or drive out Christmas morning if you have young kids, or if you have Italian in-laws who do the whole Feast of The Seven Fishes on Christmas Eve. But, if you can, it’s a quantum level decrease in travel stress. You’ll probably just glide through your travels.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Take Mass Transit to the Airport</strong> - Everybody worries about TSA lines, but just getting into the airport to be able to get into the TSA line can be a hassle. Airports with a single access road that goes past all the terminals -- think ORD, LAX, LGA -- can have 15-20 minute backups. When the construction at LGA first started, the backups were so bad, people were getting out of their cabs when they were still on the Grand Central Parkway and walking up the off ramps. Now, LGA doesn’t have mass transit access -- some of that $8 billion if for that -- but most airports do -- ORD, ATL, EWR and JFK, DCA,.... If it’s available, use it to skip at least one line.</li>\r\n 	<li>And my last “almost made it” tip, <strong>Bring Cash</strong> -- way back in episode #136, last December, I talked about what seems to be a generational split, maybe right around 30 or 35 -- old Millennials/youngster Gen X’s -- about the need to carry cash. No matter which side you sit on that split, it’s a fact that cash can get you out of a packed airport bar quicker than a card if you need to bolt for your flight -- maybe a delay got pulled up, your gate got moved to the next terminal, or you just misread the boarding time. Being able to lay down, say a twenty and 3 ones, on the bar with your check is a whole lot quicker than waiting for the waitress to show back up, take your card, walk to the back to run it, and then bring it back again for you to sign. This is where the Europeans with those mobile terminals are light-years ahead of us. But until we catch up -- which means we have to be trusted to remember a 4-digit PIN code -- bring cash so you can dash.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/44580\"> What Child is This (Instrumental)</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license.  Ft: Jeris</span></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<b>Notes on Santa Fe</b>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>As I mentioned earlier, Irene and I headed out to Santa Fe, New Mexico for the Thanksgiving holidays. Since both kids were gone, we figured “Why not?” And since I had to be in Vegas on Monday, it just made sense to head west.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’m going to do a full write-up on our trip in a blog post in a week or so; the first of a new series of Road Trip posts, where we’ll break the TravelCommons format a bit. Road Trip posts will be more about the destination than the journey -- things we did, places we stayed, ate, drank beer…. But here, just some notes.</li>\r\n 	<li>It had been a while since we’d been in Santa Fe -- maybe over 10 years; I haven’t paged back through my calendar to check -- but getting out of that Hertz Dodge Challenger that we’d blasted up I-25 -- the speed limit is 75 mph once you’re outside of Albuquerque -- I was immediately hit with the piñon smell, that unique pinewood smoke smell I only get in Santa Fe. I’ve been around a lot of pinewood fires in, say, Colorado and Arizona, but the piñon smoke billowing out of a kiva fireplace is a unique smell, and one that I love.\r\nVisiting Santa Fe, there’s an interesting mix of highbrow and lowbrow -- doing the Georgia O’Keefe museum and a run up Canyon Road through all the art galleries, or hunting the best green chile cheeseburger and then burning it off on a hike in the Sangre de Cristo mountains. This visit was all lowbrow.</li>\r\n 	<li>Friday, we did 1,700 vertical feet up the Atalaya Trail. The parking lot at the trailhead at St John’s College was pretty full, but the trail wasn’t crowded once we got going. It actually came in handy at times to see people - let us know we weren’t lost. There were some trail markings, but not to the extent we were used to in, say, the UK. 5 ½ hours later, we were sitting at the bar at Second St Brewing’s place in the Railyard district, replacing whatever calories we’d burned off with a green chile cheeseburger and a side of green chile cheese fries. Double lashings of american cheese, which I know is just a processed cheese food, but the creamy gooey-ness of it blended well with the chile bite, and a pint of one of the better American-made bitters I’ve had.</li>\r\n 	<li>Saturday, after hiking through Tent Rocks National Monument, we ended up on Guadalupe St, which feels like the lowbrow counterpart to the plaza or Canyon Road. We stopped in at Cowgirl BBQ for margaritas. During our last visit, I stole/borrowed their margarita recipe for my own. We worked through their margarita menu while listening to a group of local guys talk about taking dancing lessons and a woman at the bar telling us that, back in the ‘70’s when she moved to Santa Fe, cowboys still rode horses through town -- across the plaza and down Canyon Rd -- throwing cash down in Canyon Rd bars to buy rounds for the house.</li>\r\n 	<li>On Sunday, we walked down Canyon Road, looking into the sculpture gardens of all the art galleries. It seemed a popular Sunday morning stroll. I’d see some older couples -- older than me; at, say, the beginning of retirement, walking in high-end Western garb -- nice flat-brimmed hats, fur-trimmed duster coats. Kinda California money does cowboy. Would be interesting to see how those ‘70’s cowboys would fit in today.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #147</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and now on <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_147.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #147 — Holiday Travel Tips; Notes from Santa Fe','','inherit','closed','closed','','2198-revision-v1','','','2019-02-10 09:35:01','2019-02-10 14:35:01','',2198,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/02/10/2198-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2245,1,'2019-02-10 09:38:30','2019-02-10 14:38:30','[caption id=\"attachment_1291\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/2013-12-10-07.55.43.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1291\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/2013-12-10-07.55.43-300x225.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\" /></a> Tough travel day when the deicing fluid freezes[/caption]\r\n\r\nFlying home into the teeth of the polar vortex that gave Chicago its coldest day since January 1985 took a bit of flight changing strategy and some incredibly dedicated United ramp workers. I get on-trend by \"Kondo-izing\" my old suitcases, worry about visiting Sweden as it rapidly goes cashless, and gather up some odds-‘n’-ends from travel notebook into a Jeopardy-like topic “Travel Potpourri”. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_148.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n<iframe src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/546788592&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"></iframe><!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show Notes -->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #148:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, just trying to survive Nature’s mood swings -- 16 straight days of snow, the much publicized polar vortex cold last week followed by a four-day 73 degree temp rise -- from -22 on early Thursday morning (actual temperature; none of this wind chill guesstimating) to +51 degrees Monday afternoon, and then a 40-some degree drop back to the single digits by Friday. It’s climate change, alright. Just not all in the same direction. Last Wednesday was the second coldest day in Chicago history at -23 degrees. I was also here for the coldest day -- January 20, 1985 -- when it hit -27 degrees. I was just starting my last quarter at University of Chicago. It left an impression. After that, I didn’t interview with any Chicago companies. I took a job in Dallas and moved down in July -- to temperatures averaging in the 90’s. Brilliant</li>\r\n 	<li>I missed the wind-up to last week’s freeze fest. I flew out to New York on the Monday morning at the tail end of that 16-day snow fest. I had booked a Southwest flight from Chicago Midway to LaGuardia because Southwest now flies into the new renovated concourse in the otherwise Third World-ish Terminal B and, being that kind of travel geek, I wanted to check it out. Southwest had other plans though. Sunday late morning, about 18 hours before departure, Southwest emailed me that they were cancelling the flight. I was surprised at their proactivity, but it was a good thing, I guess, ‘cause it gave me time to move to United -- no new terminal experience, but a lot better flight frequency.</li>\r\n 	<li>Which turned out to be key on Wednesday, trying to fly home on that -23 degree day. Tuesday afternoon, I moved my flight home up from 3pm to 12 noon. I figured all the flights would be delayed and the later my flight, the worse the delay and the higher probability of cancellation. Looking at United’s flights, the 11am and 1pm flights were regional jets; the noon flight was a mainline Airbus. ORD was going to have to cut capacity on Weds -- the ground crews could only be outside for short stretches, especially the guys on the deicing trucks. I figured they’d cancel the smaller regional jets first, which meant they’d move the folks from the 11am and 1pm flights onto the noon flight, meaning that flight might be delayed, but United wouldn’t want to cancel it.</li>\r\n 	<li>And the next day, that’s pretty much how it played out. When I got to LaGuardia, those 11 and 1 flights were already cancelled. The noon flight still showed on-time, but checking the United and <a href=\"https://flightaware.com/\">FlightAware</a> apps, I could see that the Airbus was still in Chicago. That noon departure time was meaningless until that plane was in the air. I set up in the Amex Centurion Lounge, doing calls and emails, refreshing those apps every 10 minutes. The Airbus’ 8am departure time came and went, as did 9am, and 10am. It finally left around 10:40am Chicago time. I had lunch and a beer in the lounge -- the food in those Centurion lounges is good… and free -- and headed down for the gate. Walking down the concourse, I passed a Uniqlo vending machine selling “ultra light” down jackets for $70. (Amazing what they sell in airport vending machines) I thought for a moment about buying one to layer up when walking up the jet bridge in O’Hare. Given the extreme conditions, it was the most understandable 2½-hr delay I’ve ever had on United. I was incredibly grateful for the United ramp workers who were outside that day. I was happy to just get home that afternoon. Leaving the LGA Amex lounge for my gate, I ran into a Chicago colleague. He had 4 flights canceled on him already and, as I found out the next morning, didn’t get home until Thursday -- after going through Richmond. Good thing for him the Amex Lounge drinks are free too</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/coffeeeurope/28861\">The Silence of France &amp; Delma</a> by HEKTOR THILLET (coffeeeurope) (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.5/\">Attribution Noncommercial</a> license.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul class=\"ili-indent\">\r\n 	<li>As promised, I expanded the Santa Fe topic in December’s episode to a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/01/24/road-trip-lowbrow-santa-fe/\">full 1,800-word post on the website</a> -- which might help explain why this episode slipped from the end of January to the beginning of February. The <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reader%27s_Digest_Condensed_Books\">Reader’s Digest condensed version</a> (my obligatory Baby Boomer cultural reference) goes something like this -- Friday: hike, drink beer, eat a green chile cheeseburger; Saturday: hike, drink beer, eat a green chile cheeseburger, then drink margaritas and eat local New Mexican dishes; Sunday: wake up a little later, walk rather than hike, eat tamales from a cart. I liked Steve Frick’s comment “When Road Warriors relax” on his retweet. I did try to write this a bit more like a travel article than a blog post -- more of a story than a sequential list of the places we went. But I did make sure to include links to all the good places we hit. If you haven’t already, give it a read and let me know your thoughts.</li>\r\n 	<li>When I was going through ORD in January, during the partial government shutdown, I thanked the TSA screeners for showing up even though they weren’t getting paid. If I’m reading the GSA salary band schedule correctly, the typical TSA screener makes between 29 and 44 grand a year. They could’ve called in sick to drive an Uber to make up for the missed paychecks, but they didn’t -- as opposed to Atlanta where I stood in some long PreCheck lines because of sick outs. Not that I blame the Atlanta TSA folks, but it made me appreciate the ORD TSA people even more.</li>\r\n 	<li>Right at about a year ago, I broke down and <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/01/25/podcast-137-new-years-travel-status-tips-how-to-shop-for-a-suitcase/\">bought a new Victorinox suitcase</a>. I had beat a grey Samsonite into submission after 2½ years of trundling across New Orleans sidewalks. My well-traveled Swiss Army roller became unusable when its retractable handle stuck in the extended position. And then my Bluesmart smart bag was banned from by airlines because its battery wouldn’t eject. A couple of weeks ago, my wife called me upstairs. “We’ve got to declutter this attic. You need to Kondo-ize your suitcases,” she said. Wha…? She pointed over to where I’d stashed the Samsonite, the Swiss Army roller, and the Bluesmart. “You should only keep the suitcases that spark joy,” she said. Again, wha…? How does a broken suitcase spark joy? “Exactly!” she said. I pulled the old luggage tags off and threw them in the garbage can before she forced me to binge watch that Netflix series.</li>\r\n 	<li>Over a year ago, way back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">episode #136</a> in December 2017, I talked about feeling like I’m the last generation of cash payers. My younger colleagues -- and my children -- not only do they pay for everything with a card, many of them don’t even carry cash. It’s <a href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/21/business/sweden-cashless-society.html\">happening even faster in Sweden</a>, where 95% of purchases by Millenials is electronic; to the point that half the country’s retailers think they’ll stop taking cash in 5-6 years. So I got a chuckle when long-time TravelCommons listener Allan Marko sent along this notice that he picked up while touring Laos last month -\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>“Please note that only new crisp notes are accepted in Laos. US$100 notes receiving a better exchange rate; US$ notes of the series number before 1996 as well as US$100 notes with the series number CB, dirty and/or damaged notes, or notes with any writing on it are not accepted in Laos. Please bring some small changes with you for your convenience.”</li>\r\n 	<li>Cash is king in Laos -- but only if it’s neat, tidy, and young</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Heading to LGA last Weds morning, traffic was bad in Manhattan and so the wait times for Uber and Lyft were a bit silly. So instead, I let the hotel doorman guide me over to a black car. I saw the driver tip him $10, but I didn’t care -- it was a nice clean car -- a Lexus hybrid -- and the driver knew the back ways to LGA, so we didn’t get jammed up on the highway. Everything was good -- until we parked outside of Terminal B. I had asked the doorman before getting in -- “Does he take a credit card?” “Oh yeah,” he said. And to give the driver credit, he tried to take my Amex, but for some reason his iPhone couldn’t get data at Terminal B Departures, which meant he couldn’t connect to Square, which meant he couldn’t take my card. After trying for 5 minutes, he went palms up. Lucky for him, I am a cash carrier and I had just enough to pay the fare. His tip? He’ll have to take that up with his mobile carrier.</li>\r\n 	<li>We were working on our Spring Break vacation a few weeks back -- we’re going to Brittany France at the end of March because, well, who needs sun and sand when you enjoy rain blowing in off the Atlantic? -- and the flights from Chicago to Paris were looking just ugly. So we started opening up the search filters a bit, looking at some extended layovers and overnight stays. If done right, it can be fun. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/06/24/podcast-130-notes-from-hungary/\">episode #130</a> (I seem to be digging deep into the archives on this episode), I talked about how my son Andrew and I skipped a reasonable 90-minute connection in Vienna airport for full-day 8-hr one; dropped our bags in held luggage and then hopped a cab to the city center for a beer-and-schnitzel crawl. On the way over to Paris, SAS showed an 8-hr layover in Stockholm. Hmmm… we hadn’t been there since 2006 when we went to Sweden to pick up my Saab convertible. But I remember Arlanda airport being a long haul from Stockholm. Would it take too long getting to and from Stockholm? Thankfully, no. It’s a 20-minute train ride, and the Arlanda Express runs every 15 minutes. So, we’re gearing up for this time for a beer-and-herring crawl thanks to a Stockholm Craft Beer Bar custom Google Map from TravelCommons listener and Untappd friend Rob Cheshire. Though this whole cashless Sweden thing has me a bit worried. I read that <a href=\"https://www.npr.org/2018/10/22/658808705/thousands-of-swedes-are-inserting-microchips-under-their-skin\">more than 4,000 Swedes have implanted microchips</a> in their hands to let them pay for things with just a wave. I’m hoping that I don’t have to have surgery to order a beer.</li>\r\n 	<li>On the way back, again, the direct flights, or even the 1-stops from Paris to the US were priced high, both in dollars and in points, and not having anything critical on the books for the Monday of our return, we looked at some overnight stays. We decided to skip London; our time in Brittany will span Brexit Day and so we thought, why risk it? The other overnight options that popped up were Frankfurt and... Vienna. I was in Frankfurt last summer, and while I’d done that Vienna layover 2 years ago, Irene hasn’t been in Vienna since 1992, and then, only in the train station making a connection to Budapest. So we bookend our Brittany vacation with a micro-vacations in Sweden and Austria, and save a little money in air fare -- which, to be honest, we’ll probably spend and then some in food and beer.</li>\r\n 	<li>Which would be better than taking up United on their offer to buy up from Premiere Gold to Premiere Platinum for $2,000. Not to say there aren’t some benefits from that jump -- jump one level up on the upgrade list, a little better bonus miles multiplier, though I don’t ever use my current 2-free-bag allotment, so bumping up to 3 doesn’t do me much. And now that Gold has been moved up to Boarding Group 1, it doesn’t give me a better shot at overhead space. I’ve said it before in previous episodes, I don’t think the incremental benefit from higher status is worth flying weird itineraries or inconvenient times. And it’s certainly not worth 2 grand.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our new Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Astral/44268\">Dreaming</a> by Astral (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Travel Potpourri for $200, Alex</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Doing a little start-of-the-year cleaning of my travel notebook. I always carry a 3½ x 5½ in notebook with me to jot down notes and thoughts. My current notebook is a stiff rather than a hard back so I don’t break it when I put it in the back pocket of my jeans, and has fountain-pen friendly Clairefontaine paper because, as I said in the last episode, it’s not like a lack for things to be fiddly about. This notebook has a couple of pages of letters and numbers written with different pens and inks, a few pages of Madrid beer bars with the ones we hit X’d, a half-dozen pages of really bad algebra when I was trying to help my daughter with a math test, and then the rest is bullet pointed blurbs, thoughts, observations that are the seed corn for the podcast.</li>\r\n 	<li>Sometimes, though, there’s just not enough in one of those thoughts to grow it into an episode topic, not enough to get it beyond the 10-20 words that are already there. So, for lack of coming up with anything better, here’s a bit of a ramble through those stunted seed corns. Yeah, I’m selling this pretty well. I can hear you all reaching for the Skip button already.</li>\r\n 	<li>Like, last fall when I was posing for my umpteenth identity badge at a new client, I thought I was given the camera a slight smile -- like a passport photo smile, not showing teeth but a pleasant look. The security guard turned the camera around -- it was deadpan neutral. If I hadn’t tried to smile, I would’ve been frowning. I reminded me to consciously make an effort to smile with folks like gate agents and TSA screeners because, as I get older, I must get more of a grumpy resting face. Which may explain some of the reaction I get from flight attendants.</li>\r\n 	<li>One thought that almost made it out of the notebook -- Hotels need to stop feeling the need to innovate in the bathroom. I remember writing this in the midst of a 4-day/3-hotel run where the taps and shower control in every hotel were different. I’m OK with innovating some parts of the room -- like dropping in some cool new coffee maker, or an interesting radio or TV, or even a weird chair -- but that’s gotta stop at the bathroom door. When I cross that threshold, I’m usually not completely awake, I’m often not wearing my glasses so can’t see real well if, indeed, I’ve actually turned on the light. And when I step in the shower, I’m definitely not wearing glasses, so small print instructions don’t go down well. I thought hotel showers had pretty much standardized on the single knob that turned on at Cold and got Hotter as you turned it clockwise, all the time delivering the same volume of water. But sometimes you move that knob back and forth to no effect, and you eventually figure out that you have to pull it to turn it on.  The worst, though, are the controls that go in the wrong direction -- maybe counterclockwise, or push instead of pull. After I finally figure it out, I can understand what they were trying to do, and it might then make sense, but if it takes me more than 30 seconds to get my morning shower going, someone has failed -- and I don’t think it’s me.</li>\r\n 	<li>A year or so ago, when I was stuck for a half hour on a broken light rail train between the Atlanta terminals and the rental car center, I started wondering why the push for these trains; what’s the business case? ORD has shut down its train, the ATS, Airport Transit System, to modernize it and extend it to a new rental car center. The price? $800 million. PHX is spending $700 million to extend their SkyTrain to their rental car center. Tampa’s SkyConnect train that went in service last year cost over $400 million. And don’t get me started on Newark’s AirTrain. I mean, I get the need to cut down on diesel emissions from the rental buses, but it seems these airports could buy a whole lot of electric buses for less than that what their spending on a couple of miles of light rail. And when those trains break down, there’s no option but to wait -- no other train can pull up beside yours and take everyone onward. You’re stuck until they figure it out.</li>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Well, we’ve cleaned out the Travel Potpourri category, Alex. Let\'s move on to Extreme Weather Delays for $200</span>.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #148</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and now on <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_148.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #148 — Travel Potpourri for $200, Alex','','inherit','closed','closed','','2237-revision-v1','','','2019-02-10 09:38:30','2019-02-10 14:38:30','',2237,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/02/10/2237-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2246,1,'2019-02-10 11:16:20','2019-02-10 16:16:20','[caption id=\"attachment_1291\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/2013-12-10-07.55.43.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1291\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/2013-12-10-07.55.43-300x225.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\" /></a> Tough travel day when the deicing fluid freezes[/caption]\r\n\r\nFlying home into the teeth of the polar vortex that gave <a href=\"https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/01/31/frost-quakes-chicago-polar-vortex/2730412002/\">Chicago its coldest day since January 1985</a> took a bit of flight changing strategy and some incredibly dedicated United ramp workers. I get on-trend by \"<a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/kondo-ing-a-guru-of-organizing-becomes-a-verb-11547745648\">Kondo-ing</a>\" my old suitcases, worry about visiting Sweden as it rapidly goes cashless, and gather up some odds-‘n’-ends from travel notebook into a Jeopardy-like topic “Travel Potpourri”. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_148.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n<iframe src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/546788592&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"></iframe><!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show Notes -->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #148:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, just trying to survive Nature’s mood swings -- 16 straight days of snow, the much publicized polar vortex cold last week followed by a four-day 73 degree temp rise -- from -22 on early Thursday morning (actual temperature; none of this wind chill guesstimating) to +51 degrees Monday afternoon, and then a 40-some degree drop back to the single digits by Friday. It’s climate change, alright. Just not all in the same direction. Last Wednesday was the second coldest day in Chicago history at -23 degrees. I was also here for the coldest day -- January 20, 1985 -- when it hit -27 degrees. I was just starting my last quarter at University of Chicago. It left an impression. After that, I didn’t interview with any Chicago companies. I took a job in Dallas and moved down in July -- to temperatures averaging in the 90’s. Brilliant</li>\r\n 	<li>I missed the wind-up to last week’s freeze fest. I flew out to New York on the Monday morning at the tail end of that 16-day snow fest. I had booked a Southwest flight from Chicago Midway to LaGuardia because Southwest now flies into the new renovated concourse in the otherwise Third World-ish Terminal B and, being that kind of travel geek, I wanted to check it out. Southwest had other plans though. Sunday late morning, about 18 hours before departure, Southwest emailed me that they were cancelling the flight. I was surprised at their proactivity, but it was a good thing, I guess, ‘cause it gave me time to move to United -- no new terminal experience, but a lot better flight frequency.</li>\r\n 	<li>Which turned out to be key on Wednesday, trying to fly home on that -23 degree day. Tuesday afternoon, I moved my flight home up from 3pm to 12 noon. I figured all the flights would be delayed and the later my flight, the worse the delay and the higher probability of cancellation. Looking at United’s flights, the 11am and 1pm flights were regional jets; the noon flight was a mainline Airbus. ORD was going to have to cut capacity on Weds -- the ground crews could only be outside for short stretches, especially the guys on the deicing trucks. I figured they’d cancel the smaller regional jets first, which meant they’d move the folks from the 11am and 1pm flights onto the noon flight, meaning that flight might be delayed, but United wouldn’t want to cancel it.</li>\r\n 	<li>And the next day, that’s pretty much how it played out. When I got to LaGuardia, those 11 and 1 flights were already cancelled. The noon flight still showed on-time, but checking the United and <a href=\"https://flightaware.com/\">FlightAware</a> apps, I could see that the Airbus was still in Chicago. That noon departure time was meaningless until that plane was in the air. I set up in the Amex Centurion Lounge, doing calls and emails, refreshing those apps every 10 minutes. The Airbus’ 8am departure time came and went, as did 9am, and 10am. It finally left around 10:40am Chicago time. I had lunch and a beer in the lounge -- the food in those Centurion lounges is good… and free -- and headed down for the gate. Walking down the concourse, I passed a Uniqlo vending machine selling “ultra light” down jackets for $70. (Amazing what they sell in airport vending machines) I thought for a moment about buying one to layer up when walking up the jet bridge in O’Hare. Given the extreme conditions, it was the most understandable 2½-hr delay I’ve ever had on United. I was incredibly grateful for the United ramp workers who were outside that day. I was happy to just get home that afternoon. Leaving the LGA Amex lounge for my gate, I ran into a Chicago colleague. He had 4 flights canceled on him already and, as I found out the next morning, didn’t get home until Thursday -- after going through Richmond. Good thing for him the Amex Lounge drinks are free too</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/coffeeeurope/28861\">The Silence of France &amp; Delma</a> by HEKTOR THILLET (coffeeeurope) (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.5/\">Attribution Noncommercial</a> license.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul class=\"ili-indent\">\r\n 	<li>As promised, I expanded the Santa Fe topic in December’s episode to a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/01/24/road-trip-lowbrow-santa-fe/\">full 1,800-word post on the website</a> -- which might help explain why this episode slipped from the end of January to the beginning of February. The <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reader%27s_Digest_Condensed_Books\">Reader’s Digest condensed version</a> (my obligatory Baby Boomer cultural reference) goes something like this -- Friday: hike, drink beer, eat a green chile cheeseburger; Saturday: hike, drink beer, eat a green chile cheeseburger, then drink margaritas and eat local New Mexican dishes; Sunday: wake up a little later, walk rather than hike, eat tamales from a cart. I liked Steve Frick’s comment “When Road Warriors relax” on his retweet. I did try to write this a bit more like a travel article than a blog post -- more of a story than a sequential list of the places we went. But I did make sure to include links to all the good places we hit. If you haven’t already, give it a read and let me know your thoughts.</li>\r\n 	<li>When I was going through ORD in January, during the partial government shutdown, I thanked the TSA screeners for showing up even though they weren’t getting paid. If I’m reading the GSA salary band schedule correctly, the typical TSA screener makes between 29 and 44 grand a year. They could’ve called in sick to drive an Uber to make up for the missed paychecks, but they didn’t -- as opposed to Atlanta where I stood in some long PreCheck lines because of sick outs. Not that I blame the Atlanta TSA folks, but it made me appreciate the ORD TSA people even more.</li>\r\n 	<li>Right at about a year ago, I broke down and <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/01/25/podcast-137-new-years-travel-status-tips-how-to-shop-for-a-suitcase/\">bought a new Victorinox suitcase</a>. I had beat a grey Samsonite into submission after 2½ years of trundling across New Orleans sidewalks. My well-traveled Swiss Army roller became unusable when its retractable handle stuck in the extended position. And then my Bluesmart smart bag was banned from by airlines because its battery wouldn’t eject. A couple of weeks ago, my wife called me upstairs. “We’ve got to declutter this attic. You need to Kondo-ize your suitcases,” she said. Wha…? She pointed over to where I’d stashed the Samsonite, the Swiss Army roller, and the Bluesmart. “You should only keep the suitcases that spark joy,” she said. Again, wha…? How does a broken suitcase spark joy? “Exactly!” she said. I pulled the old luggage tags off and threw them in the garbage can before she forced me to binge watch that Netflix series.</li>\r\n 	<li>Over a year ago, way back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">episode #136</a> in December 2017, I talked about feeling like I’m the last generation of cash payers. My younger colleagues -- and my children -- not only do they pay for everything with a card, many of them don’t even carry cash. It’s <a href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/21/business/sweden-cashless-society.html\">happening even faster in Sweden</a>, where 95% of purchases by Millenials is electronic; to the point that half the country’s retailers think they’ll stop taking cash in 5-6 years. So I got a chuckle when long-time TravelCommons listener Allan Marko sent along this notice that he picked up while touring Laos last month -\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>“Please note that only new crisp notes are accepted in Laos. US$100 notes receiving a better exchange rate; US$ notes of the series number before 1996 as well as US$100 notes with the series number CB, dirty and/or damaged notes, or notes with any writing on it are not accepted in Laos. Please bring some small changes with you for your convenience.”</li>\r\n 	<li>Cash is king in Laos -- but only if it’s neat, tidy, and young</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Heading to LGA last Weds morning, traffic was bad in Manhattan and so the wait times for Uber and Lyft were a bit silly. So instead, I let the hotel doorman guide me over to a black car. I saw the driver tip him $10, but I didn’t care -- it was a nice clean car -- a Lexus hybrid -- and the driver knew the back ways to LGA, so we didn’t get jammed up on the highway. Everything was good -- until we parked outside of Terminal B. I had asked the doorman before getting in -- “Does he take a credit card?” “Oh yeah,” he said. And to give the driver credit, he tried to take my Amex, but for some reason his iPhone couldn’t get data at Terminal B Departures, which meant he couldn’t connect to Square, which meant he couldn’t take my card. After trying for 5 minutes, he went palms up. Lucky for him, I am a cash carrier and I had just enough to pay the fare. His tip? He’ll have to take that up with his mobile carrier.</li>\r\n 	<li>We were working on our Spring Break vacation a few weeks back -- we’re going to Brittany France at the end of March because, well, who needs sun and sand when you enjoy rain blowing in off the Atlantic? -- and the flights from Chicago to Paris were looking just ugly. So we started opening up the search filters a bit, looking at some extended layovers and overnight stays. If done right, it can be fun. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/06/24/podcast-130-notes-from-hungary/\">episode #130</a> (I seem to be digging deep into the archives on this episode), I talked about how my son Andrew and I skipped a reasonable 90-minute connection in Vienna airport for full-day 8-hr one; dropped our bags in held luggage and then hopped a cab to the city center for a beer-and-schnitzel crawl. On the way over to Paris, SAS showed an 8-hr layover in Stockholm. Hmmm… we hadn’t been there since 2006 when we went to Sweden to pick up my Saab convertible. But I remember Arlanda airport being a long haul from Stockholm. Would it take too long getting to and from Stockholm? Thankfully, no. It’s a 20-minute train ride, and the Arlanda Express runs every 15 minutes. So, we’re gearing up for this time for a beer-and-herring crawl thanks to a Stockholm Craft Beer Bar custom Google Map from TravelCommons listener and Untappd friend Rob Cheshire. Though this whole cashless Sweden thing has me a bit worried. I read that <a href=\"https://www.npr.org/2018/10/22/658808705/thousands-of-swedes-are-inserting-microchips-under-their-skin\">more than 4,000 Swedes have implanted microchips</a> in their hands to let them pay for things with just a wave. I’m hoping that I don’t have to have surgery to order a beer.</li>\r\n 	<li>On the way back, again, the direct flights, or even the 1-stops from Paris to the US were priced high, both in dollars and in points, and not having anything critical on the books for the Monday of our return, we looked at some overnight stays. We decided to skip London; our time in Brittany will span Brexit Day and so we thought, why risk it? The other overnight options that popped up were Frankfurt and... Vienna. I was in Frankfurt last summer, and while I’d done that Vienna layover 2 years ago, Irene hasn’t been in Vienna since 1992, and then, only in the train station making a connection to Budapest. So we bookend our Brittany vacation with a micro-vacations in Sweden and Austria, and save a little money in air fare -- which, to be honest, we’ll probably spend and then some in food and beer.</li>\r\n 	<li>Which would be better than taking up United on their offer to buy up from Premiere Gold to Premiere Platinum for $2,000. Not to say there aren’t some benefits from that jump -- jump one level up on the upgrade list, a little better bonus miles multiplier, though I don’t ever use my current 2-free-bag allotment, so bumping up to 3 doesn’t do me much. And now that Gold has been moved up to Boarding Group 1, it doesn’t give me a better shot at overhead space. I’ve said it before in previous episodes, I don’t think the incremental benefit from higher status is worth flying weird itineraries or inconvenient times. And it’s certainly not worth 2 grand.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our new Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Astral/44268\">Dreaming</a> by Astral (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Travel Potpourri for $200, Alex</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Doing a little start-of-the-year cleaning of my travel notebook. I always carry a 3½ x 5½ in notebook with me to jot down notes and thoughts. My current notebook is a stiff rather than a hard back so I don’t break it when I put it in the back pocket of my jeans, and has fountain-pen friendly Clairefontaine paper because, as I said in the last episode, it’s not like a lack for things to be fiddly about. This notebook has a couple of pages of letters and numbers written with different pens and inks, a few pages of Madrid beer bars with the ones we hit X’d, a half-dozen pages of really bad algebra when I was trying to help my daughter with a math test, and then the rest is bullet pointed blurbs, thoughts, observations that are the seed corn for the podcast.</li>\r\n 	<li>Sometimes, though, there’s just not enough in one of those thoughts to grow it into an episode topic, not enough to get it beyond the 10-20 words that are already there. So, for lack of coming up with anything better, here’s a bit of a ramble through those stunted seed corns. Yeah, I’m selling this pretty well. I can hear you all reaching for the Skip button already.</li>\r\n 	<li>Like, last fall when I was posing for my umpteenth identity badge at a new client, I thought I was given the camera a slight smile -- like a passport photo smile, not showing teeth but a pleasant look. The security guard turned the camera around -- it was deadpan neutral. If I hadn’t tried to smile, I would’ve been frowning. I reminded me to consciously make an effort to smile with folks like gate agents and TSA screeners because, as I get older, I must get more of a grumpy resting face. Which may explain some of the reaction I get from flight attendants.</li>\r\n 	<li>One thought that almost made it out of the notebook -- Hotels need to stop feeling the need to innovate in the bathroom. I remember writing this in the midst of a 4-day/3-hotel run where the taps and shower control in every hotel were different. I’m OK with innovating some parts of the room -- like dropping in some cool new coffee maker, or an interesting radio or TV, or even a weird chair -- but that’s gotta stop at the bathroom door. When I cross that threshold, I’m usually not completely awake, I’m often not wearing my glasses so can’t see real well if, indeed, I’ve actually turned on the light. And when I step in the shower, I’m definitely not wearing glasses, so small print instructions don’t go down well. I thought hotel showers had pretty much standardized on the single knob that turned on at Cold and got Hotter as you turned it clockwise, all the time delivering the same volume of water. But sometimes you move that knob back and forth to no effect, and you eventually figure out that you have to pull it to turn it on.  The worst, though, are the controls that go in the wrong direction -- maybe counterclockwise, or push instead of pull. After I finally figure it out, I can understand what they were trying to do, and it might then make sense, but if it takes me more than 30 seconds to get my morning shower going, someone has failed -- and I don’t think it’s me.</li>\r\n 	<li>A year or so ago, when I was stuck for a half hour on a broken light rail train between the Atlanta terminals and the rental car center, I started wondering why the push for these trains; what’s the business case? ORD has shut down its train, the ATS, Airport Transit System, to modernize it and extend it to a new rental car center. The price? $800 million. PHX is spending $700 million to extend their SkyTrain to their rental car center. Tampa’s SkyConnect train that went in service last year cost over $400 million. And don’t get me started on Newark’s AirTrain. I mean, I get the need to cut down on diesel emissions from the rental buses, but it seems these airports could buy a whole lot of electric buses for less than that what their spending on a couple of miles of light rail. And when those trains break down, there’s no option but to wait -- no other train can pull up beside yours and take everyone onward. You’re stuck until they figure it out.</li>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Well, we’ve cleaned out the Travel Potpourri category, Alex. Let\'s move on to Extreme Weather Delays for $200</span>.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #148</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and now on <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_148.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #148 — Travel Potpourri for $200, Alex','','inherit','closed','closed','','2237-revision-v1','','','2019-02-10 11:16:20','2019-02-10 16:16:20','',2237,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/02/10/2237-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2247,1,'2019-02-10 21:34:56','2019-02-11 02:34:56','[caption id=\"attachment_1291\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/2013-12-10-07.55.43.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1291\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/2013-12-10-07.55.43-300x225.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\" /></a> Tough travel day when the deicing fluid freezes[/caption]\r\n\r\nFlying home into the teeth of the polar vortex that gave <a href=\"https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/01/31/frost-quakes-chicago-polar-vortex/2730412002/\">Chicago its coldest day since January 1985</a> took a bit of flight changing strategy and some incredibly dedicated United ramp workers. I get on-trend by \"<a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/kondo-ing-a-guru-of-organizing-becomes-a-verb-11547745648\">Kondo-ing</a>\" my old suitcases, worry about visiting Sweden as it rapidly goes cashless, and gather up some odds-‘n’-ends from travel notebook into a Jeopardy-like topic “Travel Potpourri”. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_148.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n<iframe src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/546788592&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"></iframe><!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show Notes -->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #148:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, just trying to survive Nature’s mood swings -- 16 straight days of snow, the much publicized polar vortex cold last week followed by a four-day 73 degree temp rise -- from -22 on early Thursday morning (actual temperature; none of this wind chill guesstimating) to +51 degrees Monday afternoon, and then a 40-some degree drop back to the single digits by Friday. It’s climate change, alright. Just not all in the same direction. Last Wednesday was the second coldest day in Chicago history at -23 degrees. I was also here for the coldest day -- January 20, 1985 -- when it hit -27 degrees. I was just starting my last quarter at University of Chicago. It left an impression. After that, I didn’t interview with any Chicago companies. I took a job in Dallas and moved down in July -- to temperatures averaging in the 90’s. Brilliant</li>\r\n 	<li>I missed the wind-up to last week’s freeze fest. I flew out to New York on the Monday morning at the tail end of that 16-day snow fest. I had booked a Southwest flight from Chicago Midway to LaGuardia because Southwest now flies into the new renovated concourse in the otherwise Third World-ish Terminal B and, being that kind of travel geek, I wanted to check it out. Southwest had other plans though. Sunday late morning, about 18 hours before departure, Southwest emailed me that they were cancelling the flight. I was surprised at their proactivity, but it was a good thing, I guess, ‘cause it gave me time to move to United -- no new terminal experience, but a lot better flight frequency.</li>\r\n 	<li>Which turned out to be key on Wednesday, trying to fly home on that -23 degree day. Tuesday afternoon, I moved my flight home up from 3pm to 12 noon. I figured all the flights would be delayed and the later my flight, the worse the delay and the higher probability of cancellation. Looking at United’s flights, the 11am and 1pm flights were regional jets; the noon flight was a mainline Airbus. ORD was going to have to cut capacity on Weds -- the ground crews could only be outside for short stretches, especially the guys on the deicing trucks. I figured they’d cancel the smaller regional jets first, which meant they’d move the folks from the 11am and 1pm flights onto the noon flight, meaning that flight might be delayed, but United wouldn’t want to cancel it.</li>\r\n 	<li>And the next day, that’s pretty much how it played out. When I got to LaGuardia, those 11 and 1 flights were already cancelled. The noon flight still showed on-time, but checking the United and <a href=\"https://flightaware.com/\">FlightAware</a> apps, I could see that the Airbus was still in Chicago. That noon departure time was meaningless until that plane was in the air. I set up in the Amex Centurion Lounge, doing calls and emails, refreshing those apps every 10 minutes. The Airbus’ 8am departure time came and went, as did 9am, and 10am. It finally left around 10:40am Chicago time. I had lunch and a beer in the lounge -- the food in those Centurion lounges is good… and free -- and headed down for the gate. Walking down the concourse, I passed a Uniqlo vending machine selling “ultra light” down jackets for $70. (Amazing what they sell in airport vending machines) I thought for a moment about buying one to layer up when walking up the jet bridge in O’Hare. Given the extreme conditions, it was the most understandable 2½-hr delay I’ve ever had on United. I was incredibly grateful for the United ramp workers who were outside that day. I was happy to just get home that afternoon. Leaving the LGA Amex lounge for my gate, I ran into a Chicago colleague. He had 4 flights canceled on him already and, as I found out the next morning, didn’t get home until Thursday -- after going through Richmond. Good thing for him the Amex Lounge drinks are free too</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mghicks/18378\">Emily and the Djembe</a> by mghicks (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/nc-sampling+/1.0/\">Noncommercial Sampling Plus</a> license. Ft: Emily via Briareus</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul class=\"ili-indent\">\r\n 	<li>As promised, I expanded the Santa Fe topic in December’s episode to a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/01/24/road-trip-lowbrow-santa-fe/\">full 1,800-word post on the website</a> -- which might help explain why this episode slipped from the end of January to the beginning of February. The <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reader%27s_Digest_Condensed_Books\">Reader’s Digest condensed version</a> (my obligatory Baby Boomer cultural reference) goes something like this -- Friday: hike, drink beer, eat a green chile cheeseburger; Saturday: hike, drink beer, eat a green chile cheeseburger, then drink margaritas and eat local New Mexican dishes; Sunday: wake up a little later, walk rather than hike, eat tamales from a cart. I liked Steve Frick’s comment “When Road Warriors relax” on his retweet. I did try to write this a bit more like a travel article than a blog post -- more of a story than a sequential list of the places we went. But I did make sure to include links to all the good places we hit. If you haven’t already, give it a read and let me know your thoughts.</li>\r\n 	<li>When I was going through ORD in January, during the partial government shutdown, I thanked the TSA screeners for showing up even though they weren’t getting paid. If I’m reading the GSA salary band schedule correctly, the typical TSA screener makes between 29 and 44 grand a year. They could’ve called in sick to drive an Uber to make up for the missed paychecks, but they didn’t -- as opposed to Atlanta where I stood in some long PreCheck lines because of sick outs. Not that I blame the Atlanta TSA folks, but it made me appreciate the ORD TSA people even more.</li>\r\n 	<li>Right at about a year ago, I broke down and <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/01/25/podcast-137-new-years-travel-status-tips-how-to-shop-for-a-suitcase/\">bought a new Victorinox suitcase</a>. I had beat a grey Samsonite into submission after 2½ years of trundling across New Orleans sidewalks. My well-traveled Swiss Army roller became unusable when its retractable handle stuck in the extended position. And then my Bluesmart smart bag was banned from by airlines because its battery wouldn’t eject. A couple of weeks ago, my wife called me upstairs. “We’ve got to declutter this attic. You need to Kondo-ize your suitcases,” she said. Wha…? She pointed over to where I’d stashed the Samsonite, the Swiss Army roller, and the Bluesmart. “You should only keep the suitcases that spark joy,” she said. Again, wha…? How does a broken suitcase spark joy? “Exactly!” she said. I pulled the old luggage tags off and threw them in the garbage can before she forced me to binge watch that Netflix series.</li>\r\n 	<li>Over a year ago, way back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">episode #136</a> in December 2017, I talked about feeling like I’m the last generation of cash payers. My younger colleagues -- and my children -- not only do they pay for everything with a card, many of them don’t even carry cash. It’s <a href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/21/business/sweden-cashless-society.html\">happening even faster in Sweden</a>, where 95% of purchases by Millenials is electronic; to the point that half the country’s retailers think they’ll stop taking cash in 5-6 years. So I got a chuckle when long-time TravelCommons listener Allan Marko sent along this notice that he picked up while touring Laos last month -\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>“Please note that only new crisp notes are accepted in Laos. US$100 notes receiving a better exchange rate; US$ notes of the series number before 1996 as well as US$100 notes with the series number CB, dirty and/or damaged notes, or notes with any writing on it are not accepted in Laos. Please bring some small changes with you for your convenience.”</li>\r\n 	<li>Cash is king in Laos -- but only if it’s neat, tidy, and young</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Heading to LGA last Weds morning, traffic was bad in Manhattan and so the wait times for Uber and Lyft were a bit silly. So instead, I let the hotel doorman guide me over to a black car. I saw the driver tip him $10, but I didn’t care -- it was a nice clean car -- a Lexus hybrid -- and the driver knew the back ways to LGA, so we didn’t get jammed up on the highway. Everything was good -- until we parked outside of Terminal B. I had asked the doorman before getting in -- “Does he take a credit card?” “Oh yeah,” he said. And to give the driver credit, he tried to take my Amex, but for some reason his iPhone couldn’t get data at Terminal B Departures, which meant he couldn’t connect to Square, which meant he couldn’t take my card. After trying for 5 minutes, he went palms up. Lucky for him, I am a cash carrier and I had just enough to pay the fare. His tip? He’ll have to take that up with his mobile carrier.</li>\r\n 	<li>We were working on our Spring Break vacation a few weeks back -- we’re going to Brittany France at the end of March because, well, who needs sun and sand when you enjoy rain blowing in off the Atlantic? -- and the flights from Chicago to Paris were looking just ugly. So we started opening up the search filters a bit, looking at some extended layovers and overnight stays. If done right, it can be fun. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/06/24/podcast-130-notes-from-hungary/\">episode #130</a> (I seem to be digging deep into the archives on this episode), I talked about how my son Andrew and I skipped a reasonable 90-minute connection in Vienna airport for full-day 8-hr one; dropped our bags in held luggage and then hopped a cab to the city center for a beer-and-schnitzel crawl. On the way over to Paris, SAS showed an 8-hr layover in Stockholm. Hmmm… we hadn’t been there since 2006 when we went to Sweden to pick up my Saab convertible. But I remember Arlanda airport being a long haul from Stockholm. Would it take too long getting to and from Stockholm? Thankfully, no. It’s a 20-minute train ride, and the Arlanda Express runs every 15 minutes. So, we’re gearing up for this time for a beer-and-herring crawl thanks to a Stockholm Craft Beer Bar custom Google Map from TravelCommons listener and Untappd friend Rob Cheshire. Though this whole cashless Sweden thing has me a bit worried. I read that <a href=\"https://www.npr.org/2018/10/22/658808705/thousands-of-swedes-are-inserting-microchips-under-their-skin\">more than 4,000 Swedes have implanted microchips</a> in their hands to let them pay for things with just a wave. I’m hoping that I don’t have to have surgery to order a beer.</li>\r\n 	<li>On the way back, again, the direct flights, or even the 1-stops from Paris to the US were priced high, both in dollars and in points, and not having anything critical on the books for the Monday of our return, we looked at some overnight stays. We decided to skip London; our time in Brittany will span Brexit Day and so we thought, why risk it? The other overnight options that popped up were Frankfurt and... Vienna. I was in Frankfurt last summer, and while I’d done that Vienna layover 2 years ago, Irene hasn’t been in Vienna since 1992, and then, only in the train station making a connection to Budapest. So we bookend our Brittany vacation with a micro-vacations in Sweden and Austria, and save a little money in air fare -- which, to be honest, we’ll probably spend and then some in food and beer.</li>\r\n 	<li>Which would be better than taking up United on their offer to buy up from Premiere Gold to Premiere Platinum for $2,000. Not to say there aren’t some benefits from that jump -- jump one level up on the upgrade list, a little better bonus miles multiplier, though I don’t ever use my current 2-free-bag allotment, so bumping up to 3 doesn’t do me much. And now that Gold has been moved up to Boarding Group 1, it doesn’t give me a better shot at overhead space. I’ve said it before in previous episodes, I don’t think the incremental benefit from higher status is worth flying weird itineraries or inconvenient times. And it’s certainly not worth 2 grand.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our new Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Astral/44268\">Dreaming</a> by Astral (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Travel Potpourri for $200, Alex</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Doing a little start-of-the-year cleaning of my travel notebook. I always carry a 3½ x 5½ in notebook with me to jot down notes and thoughts. My current notebook is a stiff rather than a hard back so I don’t break it when I put it in the back pocket of my jeans, and has fountain-pen friendly Clairefontaine paper because, as I said in the last episode, it’s not like a lack for things to be fiddly about. This notebook has a couple of pages of letters and numbers written with different pens and inks, a few pages of Madrid beer bars with the ones we hit X’d, a half-dozen pages of really bad algebra when I was trying to help my daughter with a math test, and then the rest is bullet pointed blurbs, thoughts, observations that are the seed corn for the podcast.</li>\r\n 	<li>Sometimes, though, there’s just not enough in one of those thoughts to grow it into an episode topic, not enough to get it beyond the 10-20 words that are already there. So, for lack of coming up with anything better, here’s a bit of a ramble through those stunted seed corns. Yeah, I’m selling this pretty well. I can hear you all reaching for the Skip button already.</li>\r\n 	<li>Like, last fall when I was posing for my umpteenth identity badge at a new client, I thought I was given the camera a slight smile -- like a passport photo smile, not showing teeth but a pleasant look. The security guard turned the camera around -- it was deadpan neutral. If I hadn’t tried to smile, I would’ve been frowning. I reminded me to consciously make an effort to smile with folks like gate agents and TSA screeners because, as I get older, I must get more of a grumpy resting face. Which may explain some of the reaction I get from flight attendants.</li>\r\n 	<li>One thought that almost made it out of the notebook -- Hotels need to stop feeling the need to innovate in the bathroom. I remember writing this in the midst of a 4-day/3-hotel run where the taps and shower control in every hotel were different. I’m OK with innovating some parts of the room -- like dropping in some cool new coffee maker, or an interesting radio or TV, or even a weird chair -- but that’s gotta stop at the bathroom door. When I cross that threshold, I’m usually not completely awake, I’m often not wearing my glasses so can’t see real well if, indeed, I’ve actually turned on the light. And when I step in the shower, I’m definitely not wearing glasses, so small print instructions don’t go down well. I thought hotel showers had pretty much standardized on the single knob that turned on at Cold and got Hotter as you turned it clockwise, all the time delivering the same volume of water. But sometimes you move that knob back and forth to no effect, and you eventually figure out that you have to pull it to turn it on.  The worst, though, are the controls that go in the wrong direction -- maybe counterclockwise, or push instead of pull. After I finally figure it out, I can understand what they were trying to do, and it might then make sense, but if it takes me more than 30 seconds to get my morning shower going, someone has failed -- and I don’t think it’s me.</li>\r\n 	<li>A year or so ago, when I was stuck for a half hour on a broken light rail train between the Atlanta terminals and the rental car center, I started wondering why the push for these trains; what’s the business case? ORD has shut down its train, the ATS, Airport Transit System, to modernize it and extend it to a new rental car center. The price? $800 million. PHX is spending $700 million to extend their SkyTrain to their rental car center. Tampa’s SkyConnect train that went in service last year cost over $400 million. And don’t get me started on Newark’s AirTrain. I mean, I get the need to cut down on diesel emissions from the rental buses, but it seems these airports could buy a whole lot of electric buses for less than that what their spending on a couple of miles of light rail. And when those trains break down, there’s no option but to wait -- no other train can pull up beside yours and take everyone onward. You’re stuck until they figure it out.</li>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Well, we’ve cleaned out the Travel Potpourri category, Alex. Let\'s move on to Extreme Weather Delays for $200</span>.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #148</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and now on <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_148.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #148 — Travel Potpourri for $200, Alex','','inherit','closed','closed','','2237-revision-v1','','','2019-02-10 21:34:56','2019-02-11 02:34:56','',2237,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/02/10/2237-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2248,1,'2019-02-10 21:58:48','2019-02-11 02:58:48','[caption id=\"attachment_1291\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/2013-12-10-07.55.43.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1291\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/2013-12-10-07.55.43-300x225.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\" /></a> Tough travel day when the deicing fluid freezes[/caption]\r\n\r\nFlying home into the teeth of the polar vortex that gave <a href=\"https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/01/31/frost-quakes-chicago-polar-vortex/2730412002/\">Chicago its coldest day since January 1985</a> took a bit of flight changing strategy and some incredibly dedicated United ramp workers. I get on-trend by \"<a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/kondo-ing-a-guru-of-organizing-becomes-a-verb-11547745648\">Kondo-ing</a>\" my old suitcases, worry about visiting Sweden as it rapidly goes cashless, and gather up some odds-‘n’-ends from travel notebook into a Jeopardy-like topic “Travel Potpourri”. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_148.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n<iframe src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/573400857&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"></iframe><!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show Notes -->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #148:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, just trying to survive Nature’s mood swings -- 16 straight days of snow, the much publicized polar vortex cold last week followed by a four-day 73 degree temp rise -- from -22 on early Thursday morning (actual temperature; none of this wind chill guesstimating) to +51 degrees Monday afternoon, and then a 40-some degree drop back to the single digits by Friday. It’s climate change, alright. Just not all in the same direction. Last Wednesday was the second coldest day in Chicago history at -23 degrees. I was also here for the coldest day -- January 20, 1985 -- when it hit -27 degrees. I was just starting my last quarter at University of Chicago. It left an impression. After that, I didn’t interview with any Chicago companies. I took a job in Dallas and moved down in July -- to temperatures averaging in the 90’s. Brilliant</li>\r\n 	<li>I missed the wind-up to last week’s freeze fest. I flew out to New York on the Monday morning at the tail end of that 16-day snow fest. I had booked a Southwest flight from Chicago Midway to LaGuardia because Southwest now flies into the new renovated concourse in the otherwise Third World-ish Terminal B and, being that kind of travel geek, I wanted to check it out. Southwest had other plans though. Sunday late morning, about 18 hours before departure, Southwest emailed me that they were cancelling the flight. I was surprised at their proactivity, but it was a good thing, I guess, ‘cause it gave me time to move to United -- no new terminal experience, but a lot better flight frequency.</li>\r\n 	<li>Which turned out to be key on Wednesday, trying to fly home on that -23 degree day. Tuesday afternoon, I moved my flight home up from 3pm to 12 noon. I figured all the flights would be delayed and the later my flight, the worse the delay and the higher probability of cancellation. Looking at United’s flights, the 11am and 1pm flights were regional jets; the noon flight was a mainline Airbus. ORD was going to have to cut capacity on Weds -- the ground crews could only be outside for short stretches, especially the guys on the deicing trucks. I figured they’d cancel the smaller regional jets first, which meant they’d move the folks from the 11am and 1pm flights onto the noon flight, meaning that flight might be delayed, but United wouldn’t want to cancel it.</li>\r\n 	<li>And the next day, that’s pretty much how it played out. When I got to LaGuardia, those 11 and 1 flights were already cancelled. The noon flight still showed on-time, but checking the United and <a href=\"https://flightaware.com/\">FlightAware</a> apps, I could see that the Airbus was still in Chicago. That noon departure time was meaningless until that plane was in the air. I set up in the Amex Centurion Lounge, doing calls and emails, refreshing those apps every 10 minutes. The Airbus’ 8am departure time came and went, as did 9am, and 10am. It finally left around 10:40am Chicago time. I had lunch and a beer in the lounge -- the food in those Centurion lounges is good… and free -- and headed down for the gate. Walking down the concourse, I passed a Uniqlo vending machine selling “ultra light” down jackets for $70. (Amazing what they sell in airport vending machines) I thought for a moment about buying one to layer up when walking up the jet bridge in O’Hare. Given the extreme conditions, it was the most understandable 2½-hr delay I’ve ever had on United. I was incredibly grateful for the United ramp workers who were outside that day. I was happy to just get home that afternoon. Leaving the LGA Amex lounge for my gate, I ran into a Chicago colleague. He had 4 flights canceled on him already and, as I found out the next morning, didn’t get home until Thursday -- after going through Richmond. Good thing for him the Amex Lounge drinks are free too</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mghicks/18378\">Emily and the Djembe</a> by mghicks (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/nc-sampling+/1.0/\">Noncommercial Sampling Plus</a> license. Ft: Emily via Briareus</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul class=\"ili-indent\">\r\n 	<li>As promised, I expanded the Santa Fe topic in December’s episode to a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/01/24/road-trip-lowbrow-santa-fe/\">full 1,800-word post on the website</a> -- which might help explain why this episode slipped from the end of January to the beginning of February. The <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reader%27s_Digest_Condensed_Books\">Reader’s Digest condensed version</a> (my obligatory Baby Boomer cultural reference) goes something like this -- Friday: hike, drink beer, eat a green chile cheeseburger; Saturday: hike, drink beer, eat a green chile cheeseburger, then drink margaritas and eat local New Mexican dishes; Sunday: wake up a little later, walk rather than hike, eat tamales from a cart. I liked Steve Frick’s comment “When Road Warriors relax” on his retweet. I did try to write this a bit more like a travel article than a blog post -- more of a story than a sequential list of the places we went. But I did make sure to include links to all the good places we hit. If you haven’t already, give it a read and let me know your thoughts.</li>\r\n 	<li>When I was going through ORD in January, during the partial government shutdown, I thanked the TSA screeners for showing up even though they weren’t getting paid. If I’m reading the GSA salary band schedule correctly, the typical TSA screener makes between 29 and 44 grand a year. They could’ve called in sick to drive an Uber to make up for the missed paychecks, but they didn’t -- as opposed to Atlanta where I stood in some long PreCheck lines because of sick outs. Not that I blame the Atlanta TSA folks, but it made me appreciate the ORD TSA people even more.</li>\r\n 	<li>Right at about a year ago, I broke down and <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/01/25/podcast-137-new-years-travel-status-tips-how-to-shop-for-a-suitcase/\">bought a new Victorinox suitcase</a>. I had beat a grey Samsonite into submission after 2½ years of trundling across New Orleans sidewalks. My well-traveled Swiss Army roller became unusable when its retractable handle stuck in the extended position. And then my Bluesmart smart bag was banned from by airlines because its battery wouldn’t eject. A couple of weeks ago, my wife called me upstairs. “We’ve got to declutter this attic. You need to Kondo-ize your suitcases,” she said. Wha…? She pointed over to where I’d stashed the Samsonite, the Swiss Army roller, and the Bluesmart. “You should only keep the suitcases that spark joy,” she said. Again, wha…? How does a broken suitcase spark joy? “Exactly!” she said. I pulled the old luggage tags off and threw them in the garbage can before she forced me to binge watch that Netflix series.</li>\r\n 	<li>Over a year ago, way back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">episode #136</a> in December 2017, I talked about feeling like I’m the last generation of cash payers. My younger colleagues -- and my children -- not only do they pay for everything with a card, many of them don’t even carry cash. It’s <a href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/21/business/sweden-cashless-society.html\">happening even faster in Sweden</a>, where 95% of purchases by Millenials is electronic; to the point that half the country’s retailers think they’ll stop taking cash in 5-6 years. So I got a chuckle when long-time TravelCommons listener Allan Marko sent along this notice that he picked up while touring Laos last month -\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>“Please note that only new crisp notes are accepted in Laos. US$100 notes receiving a better exchange rate; US$ notes of the series number before 1996 as well as US$100 notes with the series number CB, dirty and/or damaged notes, or notes with any writing on it are not accepted in Laos. Please bring some small changes with you for your convenience.”</li>\r\n 	<li>Cash is king in Laos -- but only if it’s neat, tidy, and young</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Heading to LGA last Weds morning, traffic was bad in Manhattan and so the wait times for Uber and Lyft were a bit silly. So instead, I let the hotel doorman guide me over to a black car. I saw the driver tip him $10, but I didn’t care -- it was a nice clean car -- a Lexus hybrid -- and the driver knew the back ways to LGA, so we didn’t get jammed up on the highway. Everything was good -- until we parked outside of Terminal B. I had asked the doorman before getting in -- “Does he take a credit card?” “Oh yeah,” he said. And to give the driver credit, he tried to take my Amex, but for some reason his iPhone couldn’t get data at Terminal B Departures, which meant he couldn’t connect to Square, which meant he couldn’t take my card. After trying for 5 minutes, he went palms up. Lucky for him, I am a cash carrier and I had just enough to pay the fare. His tip? He’ll have to take that up with his mobile carrier.</li>\r\n 	<li>We were working on our Spring Break vacation a few weeks back -- we’re going to Brittany France at the end of March because, well, who needs sun and sand when you enjoy rain blowing in off the Atlantic? -- and the flights from Chicago to Paris were looking just ugly. So we started opening up the search filters a bit, looking at some extended layovers and overnight stays. If done right, it can be fun. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/06/24/podcast-130-notes-from-hungary/\">episode #130</a> (I seem to be digging deep into the archives on this episode), I talked about how my son Andrew and I skipped a reasonable 90-minute connection in Vienna airport for full-day 8-hr one; dropped our bags in held luggage and then hopped a cab to the city center for a beer-and-schnitzel crawl. On the way over to Paris, SAS showed an 8-hr layover in Stockholm. Hmmm… we hadn’t been there since 2006 when we went to Sweden to pick up my Saab convertible. But I remember Arlanda airport being a long haul from Stockholm. Would it take too long getting to and from Stockholm? Thankfully, no. It’s a 20-minute train ride, and the Arlanda Express runs every 15 minutes. So, we’re gearing up for this time for a beer-and-herring crawl thanks to a Stockholm Craft Beer Bar custom Google Map from TravelCommons listener and Untappd friend Rob Cheshire. Though this whole cashless Sweden thing has me a bit worried. I read that <a href=\"https://www.npr.org/2018/10/22/658808705/thousands-of-swedes-are-inserting-microchips-under-their-skin\">more than 4,000 Swedes have implanted microchips</a> in their hands to let them pay for things with just a wave. I’m hoping that I don’t have to have surgery to order a beer.</li>\r\n 	<li>On the way back, again, the direct flights, or even the 1-stops from Paris to the US were priced high, both in dollars and in points, and not having anything critical on the books for the Monday of our return, we looked at some overnight stays. We decided to skip London; our time in Brittany will span Brexit Day and so we thought, why risk it? The other overnight options that popped up were Frankfurt and... Vienna. I was in Frankfurt last summer, and while I’d done that Vienna layover 2 years ago, Irene hasn’t been in Vienna since 1992, and then, only in the train station making a connection to Budapest. So we bookend our Brittany vacation with a micro-vacations in Sweden and Austria, and save a little money in air fare -- which, to be honest, we’ll probably spend and then some in food and beer.</li>\r\n 	<li>Which would be better than taking up United on their offer to buy up from Premiere Gold to Premiere Platinum for $2,000. Not to say there aren’t some benefits from that jump -- jump one level up on the upgrade list, a little better bonus miles multiplier, though I don’t ever use my current 2-free-bag allotment, so bumping up to 3 doesn’t do me much. And now that Gold has been moved up to Boarding Group 1, it doesn’t give me a better shot at overhead space. I’ve said it before in previous episodes, I don’t think the incremental benefit from higher status is worth flying weird itineraries or inconvenient times. And it’s certainly not worth 2 grand.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our new Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Astral/44268\">Dreaming</a> by Astral (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Travel Potpourri for $200, Alex</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Doing a little start-of-the-year cleaning of my travel notebook. I always carry a 3½ x 5½ in notebook with me to jot down notes and thoughts. My current notebook is a stiff rather than a hard back so I don’t break it when I put it in the back pocket of my jeans, and has fountain-pen friendly Clairefontaine paper because, as I said in the last episode, it’s not like a lack for things to be fiddly about. This notebook has a couple of pages of letters and numbers written with different pens and inks, a few pages of Madrid beer bars with the ones we hit X’d, a half-dozen pages of really bad algebra when I was trying to help my daughter with a math test, and then the rest is bullet pointed blurbs, thoughts, observations that are the seed corn for the podcast.</li>\r\n 	<li>Sometimes, though, there’s just not enough in one of those thoughts to grow it into an episode topic, not enough to get it beyond the 10-20 words that are already there. So, for lack of coming up with anything better, here’s a bit of a ramble through those stunted seed corns. Yeah, I’m selling this pretty well. I can hear you all reaching for the Skip button already.</li>\r\n 	<li>Like, last fall when I was posing for my umpteenth identity badge at a new client, I thought I was given the camera a slight smile -- like a passport photo smile, not showing teeth but a pleasant look. The security guard turned the camera around -- it was deadpan neutral. If I hadn’t tried to smile, I would’ve been frowning. I reminded me to consciously make an effort to smile with folks like gate agents and TSA screeners because, as I get older, I must get more of a grumpy resting face. Which may explain some of the reaction I get from flight attendants.</li>\r\n 	<li>One thought that almost made it out of the notebook -- Hotels need to stop feeling the need to innovate in the bathroom. I remember writing this in the midst of a 4-day/3-hotel run where the taps and shower control in every hotel were different. I’m OK with innovating some parts of the room -- like dropping in some cool new coffee maker, or an interesting radio or TV, or even a weird chair -- but that’s gotta stop at the bathroom door. When I cross that threshold, I’m usually not completely awake, I’m often not wearing my glasses so can’t see real well if, indeed, I’ve actually turned on the light. And when I step in the shower, I’m definitely not wearing glasses, so small print instructions don’t go down well. I thought hotel showers had pretty much standardized on the single knob that turned on at Cold and got Hotter as you turned it clockwise, all the time delivering the same volume of water. But sometimes you move that knob back and forth to no effect, and you eventually figure out that you have to pull it to turn it on.  The worst, though, are the controls that go in the wrong direction -- maybe counterclockwise, or push instead of pull. After I finally figure it out, I can understand what they were trying to do, and it might then make sense, but if it takes me more than 30 seconds to get my morning shower going, someone has failed -- and I don’t think it’s me.</li>\r\n 	<li>A year or so ago, when I was stuck for a half hour on a broken light rail train between the Atlanta terminals and the rental car center, I started wondering why the push for these trains; what’s the business case? ORD has shut down its train, the ATS, Airport Transit System, to modernize it and extend it to a new rental car center. The price? $800 million. PHX is spending $700 million to extend their SkyTrain to their rental car center. Tampa’s SkyConnect train that went in service last year cost over $400 million. And don’t get me started on Newark’s AirTrain. I mean, I get the need to cut down on diesel emissions from the rental buses, but it seems these airports could buy a whole lot of electric buses for less than that what their spending on a couple of miles of light rail. And when those trains break down, there’s no option but to wait -- no other train can pull up beside yours and take everyone onward. You’re stuck until they figure it out.</li>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Well, we’ve cleaned out the Travel Potpourri category, Alex. Let\'s move on to Extreme Weather Delays for $200</span>.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #148</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and now on <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_148.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #148 — Travel Potpourri for $200, Alex','','inherit','closed','closed','','2237-revision-v1','','','2019-02-10 21:58:48','2019-02-11 02:58:48','',2237,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/02/10/2237-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2249,1,'2019-02-10 21:59:57','2019-02-11 02:59:57','[caption id=\"attachment_1291\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/2013-12-10-07.55.43.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1291\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/2013-12-10-07.55.43-300x225.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\" /></a> Tough travel day when the deicing fluid freezes[/caption]\r\n\r\nFlying home into the teeth of the polar vortex that gave <a href=\"https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/01/31/frost-quakes-chicago-polar-vortex/2730412002/\">Chicago its coldest day since January 1985</a> took a bit of flight changing strategy and some incredibly dedicated United ramp workers. I get on-trend by \"<a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/kondo-ing-a-guru-of-organizing-becomes-a-verb-11547745648\">Kondo-ing</a>\" my old suitcases, worry about visiting Sweden as it rapidly goes cashless, and gather up some odds-‘n’-ends from travel notebook into a Jeopardy-like topic “Travel Potpourri”. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_148.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n<iframe src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/573400857&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"></iframe><!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show Notes -->\r\n\r\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #148:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, just trying to survive Nature’s mood swings -- 16 straight days of snow, the much publicized polar vortex cold last week followed by a four-day 73 degree temp rise -- from -22 on early Thursday morning (actual temperature; none of this wind chill guesstimating) to +51 degrees Monday afternoon, and then a 40-some degree drop back to the single digits by Friday. It’s climate change, alright. Just not all in the same direction. Last Wednesday was the second coldest day in Chicago history at -23 degrees. I was also here for the coldest day -- January 20, 1985 -- when it hit -27 degrees. I was just starting my last quarter at University of Chicago. It left an impression. After that, I didn’t interview with any Chicago companies. I took a job in Dallas and moved down in July -- to temperatures averaging in the 90’s. Brilliant</li>\r\n 	<li>I missed the wind-up to last week’s freeze fest. I flew out to New York on the Monday morning at the tail end of that 16-day snow fest. I had booked a Southwest flight from Chicago Midway to LaGuardia because Southwest now flies into the new renovated concourse in the otherwise Third World-ish Terminal B and, being that kind of travel geek, I wanted to check it out. Southwest had other plans though. Sunday late morning, about 18 hours before departure, Southwest emailed me that they were cancelling the flight. I was surprised at their proactivity, but it was a good thing, I guess, ‘cause it gave me time to move to United -- no new terminal experience, but a lot better flight frequency.</li>\r\n 	<li>Which turned out to be key on Wednesday, trying to fly home on that -23 degree day. Tuesday afternoon, I moved my flight home up from 3pm to 12 noon. I figured all the flights would be delayed and the later my flight, the worse the delay and the higher probability of cancellation. Looking at United’s flights, the 11am and 1pm flights were regional jets; the noon flight was a mainline Airbus. ORD was going to have to cut capacity on Weds -- the ground crews could only be outside for short stretches, especially the guys on the deicing trucks. I figured they’d cancel the smaller regional jets first, which meant they’d move the folks from the 11am and 1pm flights onto the noon flight, meaning that flight might be delayed, but United wouldn’t want to cancel it.</li>\r\n 	<li>And the next day, that’s pretty much how it played out. When I got to LaGuardia, those 11 and 1 flights were already cancelled. The noon flight still showed on-time, but checking the United and <a href=\"https://flightaware.com/\">FlightAware</a> apps, I could see that the Airbus was still in Chicago. That noon departure time was meaningless until that plane was in the air. I set up in the Amex Centurion Lounge, doing calls and emails, refreshing those apps every 10 minutes. The Airbus’ 8am departure time came and went, as did 9am, and 10am. It finally left around 10:40am Chicago time. I had lunch and a beer in the lounge -- the food in those Centurion lounges is good… and free -- and headed down for the gate. Walking down the concourse, I passed a Uniqlo vending machine selling “ultra light” down jackets for $70. (Amazing what they sell in airport vending machines) I thought for a moment about buying one to layer up when walking up the jet bridge in O’Hare. Given the extreme conditions, it was the most understandable 2½-hr delay I’ve ever had on United. I was incredibly grateful for the United ramp workers who were outside that day. I was happy to just get home that afternoon. Leaving the LGA Amex lounge for my gate, I ran into a Chicago colleague. He had 4 flights canceled on him already and, as I found out the next morning, didn’t get home until Thursday -- after going through Richmond. Good thing for him the Amex Lounge drinks are free too</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mghicks/18378\">Emily and the Djembe</a> by mghicks (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/nc-sampling+/1.0/\">Noncommercial Sampling Plus</a> license. Ft: Emily via Briareus</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>As promised, I expanded the Santa Fe topic in December’s episode to a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/01/24/road-trip-lowbrow-santa-fe/\">full 1,800-word post on the website</a> -- which might help explain why this episode slipped from the end of January to the beginning of February. The <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reader%27s_Digest_Condensed_Books\">Reader’s Digest condensed version</a> (my obligatory Baby Boomer cultural reference) goes something like this -- Friday: hike, drink beer, eat a green chile cheeseburger; Saturday: hike, drink beer, eat a green chile cheeseburger, then drink margaritas and eat local New Mexican dishes; Sunday: wake up a little later, walk rather than hike, eat tamales from a cart. I liked Steve Frick’s comment “When Road Warriors relax” on his retweet. I did try to write this a bit more like a travel article than a blog post -- more of a story than a sequential list of the places we went. But I did make sure to include links to all the good places we hit. If you haven’t already, give it a read and let me know your thoughts.</li>\r\n 	<li>When I was going through ORD in January, during the partial government shutdown, I thanked the TSA screeners for showing up even though they weren’t getting paid. If I’m reading the GSA salary band schedule correctly, the typical TSA screener makes between 29 and 44 grand a year. They could’ve called in sick to drive an Uber to make up for the missed paychecks, but they didn’t -- as opposed to Atlanta where I stood in some long PreCheck lines because of sick outs. Not that I blame the Atlanta TSA folks, but it made me appreciate the ORD TSA people even more.</li>\r\n 	<li>Right at about a year ago, I broke down and <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/01/25/podcast-137-new-years-travel-status-tips-how-to-shop-for-a-suitcase/\">bought a new Victorinox suitcase</a>. I had beat a grey Samsonite into submission after 2½ years of trundling across New Orleans sidewalks. My well-traveled Swiss Army roller became unusable when its retractable handle stuck in the extended position. And then my Bluesmart smart bag was banned from by airlines because its battery wouldn’t eject. A couple of weeks ago, my wife called me upstairs. “We’ve got to declutter this attic. You need to Kondo-ize your suitcases,” she said. Wha…? She pointed over to where I’d stashed the Samsonite, the Swiss Army roller, and the Bluesmart. “You should only keep the suitcases that spark joy,” she said. Again, wha…? How does a broken suitcase spark joy? “Exactly!” she said. I pulled the old luggage tags off and threw them in the garbage can before she forced me to binge watch that Netflix series.</li>\r\n 	<li>Over a year ago, way back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">episode #136</a> in December 2017, I talked about feeling like I’m the last generation of cash payers. My younger colleagues -- and my children -- not only do they pay for everything with a card, many of them don’t even carry cash. It’s <a href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/21/business/sweden-cashless-society.html\">happening even faster in Sweden</a>, where 95% of purchases by Millenials is electronic; to the point that half the country’s retailers think they’ll stop taking cash in 5-6 years. So I got a chuckle when long-time TravelCommons listener Allan Marko sent along this notice that he picked up while touring Laos last month -\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>“Please note that only new crisp notes are accepted in Laos. US$100 notes receiving a better exchange rate; US$ notes of the series number before 1996 as well as US$100 notes with the series number CB, dirty and/or damaged notes, or notes with any writing on it are not accepted in Laos. Please bring some small changes with you for your convenience.”</li>\r\n 	<li>Cash is king in Laos -- but only if it’s neat, tidy, and young</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Heading to LGA last Weds morning, traffic was bad in Manhattan and so the wait times for Uber and Lyft were a bit silly. So instead, I let the hotel doorman guide me over to a black car. I saw the driver tip him $10, but I didn’t care -- it was a nice clean car -- a Lexus hybrid -- and the driver knew the back ways to LGA, so we didn’t get jammed up on the highway. Everything was good -- until we parked outside of Terminal B. I had asked the doorman before getting in -- “Does he take a credit card?” “Oh yeah,” he said. And to give the driver credit, he tried to take my Amex, but for some reason his iPhone couldn’t get data at Terminal B Departures, which meant he couldn’t connect to Square, which meant he couldn’t take my card. After trying for 5 minutes, he went palms up. Lucky for him, I am a cash carrier and I had just enough to pay the fare. His tip? He’ll have to take that up with his mobile carrier.</li>\r\n 	<li>We were working on our Spring Break vacation a few weeks back -- we’re going to Brittany France at the end of March because, well, who needs sun and sand when you enjoy rain blowing in off the Atlantic? -- and the flights from Chicago to Paris were looking just ugly. So we started opening up the search filters a bit, looking at some extended layovers and overnight stays. If done right, it can be fun. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/06/24/podcast-130-notes-from-hungary/\">episode #130</a> (I seem to be digging deep into the archives on this episode), I talked about how my son Andrew and I skipped a reasonable 90-minute connection in Vienna airport for full-day 8-hr one; dropped our bags in held luggage and then hopped a cab to the city center for a beer-and-schnitzel crawl. On the way over to Paris, SAS showed an 8-hr layover in Stockholm. Hmmm… we hadn’t been there since 2006 when we went to Sweden to pick up my Saab convertible. But I remember Arlanda airport being a long haul from Stockholm. Would it take too long getting to and from Stockholm? Thankfully, no. It’s a 20-minute train ride, and the Arlanda Express runs every 15 minutes. So, we’re gearing up for this time for a beer-and-herring crawl thanks to a Stockholm Craft Beer Bar custom Google Map from TravelCommons listener and Untappd friend Rob Cheshire. Though this whole cashless Sweden thing has me a bit worried. I read that <a href=\"https://www.npr.org/2018/10/22/658808705/thousands-of-swedes-are-inserting-microchips-under-their-skin\">more than 4,000 Swedes have implanted microchips</a> in their hands to let them pay for things with just a wave. I’m hoping that I don’t have to have surgery to order a beer.</li>\r\n 	<li>On the way back, again, the direct flights, or even the 1-stops from Paris to the US were priced high, both in dollars and in points, and not having anything critical on the books for the Monday of our return, we looked at some overnight stays. We decided to skip London; our time in Brittany will span Brexit Day and so we thought, why risk it? The other overnight options that popped up were Frankfurt and... Vienna. I was in Frankfurt last summer, and while I’d done that Vienna layover 2 years ago, Irene hasn’t been in Vienna since 1992, and then, only in the train station making a connection to Budapest. So we bookend our Brittany vacation with a micro-vacations in Sweden and Austria, and save a little money in air fare -- which, to be honest, we’ll probably spend and then some in food and beer.</li>\r\n 	<li>Which would be better than taking up United on their offer to buy up from Premiere Gold to Premiere Platinum for $2,000. Not to say there aren’t some benefits from that jump -- jump one level up on the upgrade list, a little better bonus miles multiplier, though I don’t ever use my current 2-free-bag allotment, so bumping up to 3 doesn’t do me much. And now that Gold has been moved up to Boarding Group 1, it doesn’t give me a better shot at overhead space. I’ve said it before in previous episodes, I don’t think the incremental benefit from higher status is worth flying weird itineraries or inconvenient times. And it’s certainly not worth 2 grand.</li>\r\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our new Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Astral/44268\">Dreaming</a> by Astral (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Travel Potpourri for $200, Alex</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Doing a little start-of-the-year cleaning of my travel notebook. I always carry a 3½ x 5½ in notebook with me to jot down notes and thoughts. My current notebook is a stiff rather than a hard back so I don’t break it when I put it in the back pocket of my jeans, and has fountain-pen friendly Clairefontaine paper because, as I said in the last episode, it’s not like a lack for things to be fiddly about. This notebook has a couple of pages of letters and numbers written with different pens and inks, a few pages of Madrid beer bars with the ones we hit X’d, a half-dozen pages of really bad algebra when I was trying to help my daughter with a math test, and then the rest is bullet pointed blurbs, thoughts, observations that are the seed corn for the podcast.</li>\r\n 	<li>Sometimes, though, there’s just not enough in one of those thoughts to grow it into an episode topic, not enough to get it beyond the 10-20 words that are already there. So, for lack of coming up with anything better, here’s a bit of a ramble through those stunted seed corns. Yeah, I’m selling this pretty well. I can hear you all reaching for the Skip button already.</li>\r\n 	<li>Like, last fall when I was posing for my umpteenth identity badge at a new client, I thought I was given the camera a slight smile -- like a passport photo smile, not showing teeth but a pleasant look. The security guard turned the camera around -- it was deadpan neutral. If I hadn’t tried to smile, I would’ve been frowning. I reminded me to consciously make an effort to smile with folks like gate agents and TSA screeners because, as I get older, I must get more of a grumpy resting face. Which may explain some of the reaction I get from flight attendants.</li>\r\n 	<li>One thought that almost made it out of the notebook -- Hotels need to stop feeling the need to innovate in the bathroom. I remember writing this in the midst of a 4-day/3-hotel run where the taps and shower control in every hotel were different. I’m OK with innovating some parts of the room -- like dropping in some cool new coffee maker, or an interesting radio or TV, or even a weird chair -- but that’s gotta stop at the bathroom door. When I cross that threshold, I’m usually not completely awake, I’m often not wearing my glasses so can’t see real well if, indeed, I’ve actually turned on the light. And when I step in the shower, I’m definitely not wearing glasses, so small print instructions don’t go down well. I thought hotel showers had pretty much standardized on the single knob that turned on at Cold and got Hotter as you turned it clockwise, all the time delivering the same volume of water. But sometimes you move that knob back and forth to no effect, and you eventually figure out that you have to pull it to turn it on.  The worst, though, are the controls that go in the wrong direction -- maybe counterclockwise, or push instead of pull. After I finally figure it out, I can understand what they were trying to do, and it might then make sense, but if it takes me more than 30 seconds to get my morning shower going, someone has failed -- and I don’t think it’s me.</li>\r\n 	<li>A year or so ago, when I was stuck for a half hour on a broken light rail train between the Atlanta terminals and the rental car center, I started wondering why the push for these trains; what’s the business case? ORD has shut down its train, the ATS, Airport Transit System, to modernize it and extend it to a new rental car center. The price? $800 million. PHX is spending $700 million to extend their SkyTrain to their rental car center. Tampa’s SkyConnect train that went in service last year cost over $400 million. And don’t get me started on Newark’s AirTrain. I mean, I get the need to cut down on diesel emissions from the rental buses, but it seems these airports could buy a whole lot of electric buses for less than that what their spending on a couple of miles of light rail. And when those trains break down, there’s no option but to wait -- no other train can pull up beside yours and take everyone onward. You’re stuck until they figure it out.</li>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Well, we’ve cleaned out the Travel Potpourri category, Alex. Let\'s move on to Extreme Weather Delays for $200</span>.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #148</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and now on <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_148.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #148 — Travel Potpourri for $200, Alex','','inherit','closed','closed','','2237-revision-v1','','','2019-02-10 21:59:57','2019-02-11 02:59:57','',2237,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/02/10/2237-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2252,1,'2019-03-01 08:29:27','2019-03-01 13:29:27','Here\'s the third TravelCommons podcast, each segment recorded in a different place. This week, after 7 flights in 5 days, I seem to be on quite a tear on the TSA. I talk about bad TSA experiences at Chicago Midway and good ones at O\'Hare, Tampa, and Columbus, OH. Also, I talk about using the iPod to reduce travel stress and the first Classic Travel Story-- about Cleveland travelers eager to get to Chicago. Here\'s a <a href=\"./podcast/travelcommons_3.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n\r\n[audio:travelcommons_3.mp3]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the shownotes from the third TravelCommons podcast:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <em>Warmth</em> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Tough travel week -- 7 flights and 4 cities in 5 days</li>\r\n 	<li>Recording from the bathroom of the Camelback Inn in Scottsdale, AZ</li>\r\n 	<li>Hot weather and turndown philosophy cards at the Camelback Inn</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<img src=\"./images/pix/phx_temp.jpg\" />\r\n<img src=\"http:travelcommons.com/images/pix/phx_philo.jpg\" />\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Rant on TSA screeners at Chicago Midway airport; compliments to the TSA screeners at Tampa and Columbus, OH</li>\r\n 	<li>Using my iPod to reduce travel stress</li>\r\n 	<li>First of a recurring feature -- Classic Travel Stories</li>\r\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"./podcast/travelcommons_3.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','TravelCommons Podcast #3','','inherit','closed','closed','','6-revision-v1','','','2019-03-01 08:29:27','2019-03-01 13:29:27','',6,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/01/6-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2253,1,'2019-03-01 08:32:36','2019-03-01 13:32:36','Here\'s the third TravelCommons podcast, each segment recorded in a different place. This week, after 7 flights in 5 days, I seem to be on quite a tear on the TSA. I talk about bad TSA experiences at Chicago Midway and good ones at O\'Hare, Tampa, and Columbus, OH. Also, I talk about using the iPod to reduce travel stress and the first Classic Travel Story-- about Cleveland travelers eager to get to Chicago. Here\'s a <a href=\"./podcast/travelcommons_3.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n\r\n[audio:travelcommons_3.mp3]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the shownotes from the third TravelCommons podcast:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <em>Warmth</em> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Tough travel week -- 7 flights and 4 cities in 5 days</li>\r\n 	<li>Recording from the bathroom of the Camelback Inn in Scottsdale, AZ</li>\r\n 	<li>Hot weather and turndown philosophy cards at the Camelback Inn</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<img src=\"./images/pix/phx_temp.jpg\" />\r\n<img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/images/pix/phx_philo.jpg\" />\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Rant on TSA screeners at Chicago Midway airport; compliments to the TSA screeners at Tampa and Columbus, OH</li>\r\n 	<li>Using my iPod to reduce travel stress</li>\r\n 	<li>First of a recurring feature -- Classic Travel Stories</li>\r\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"./podcast/travelcommons_3.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','TravelCommons Podcast #3','','inherit','closed','closed','','6-revision-v1','','','2019-03-01 08:32:36','2019-03-01 13:32:36','',6,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/01/6-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2254,1,'2019-03-01 08:33:01','2019-03-01 13:33:01','Here\'s the third TravelCommons podcast, each segment recorded in a different place. This week, after 7 flights in 5 days, I seem to be on quite a tear on the TSA. I talk about bad TSA experiences at Chicago Midway and good ones at O\'Hare, Tampa, and Columbus, OH. Also, I talk about using the iPod to reduce travel stress and the first Classic Travel Story-- about Cleveland travelers eager to get to Chicago. Here\'s a <a href=\"./podcast/travelcommons_3.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n\r\n[audio:travelcommons_3.mp3]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the shownotes from the third TravelCommons podcast:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <em>Warmth</em> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Tough travel week -- 7 flights and 4 cities in 5 days</li>\r\n 	<li>Recording from the bathroom of the Camelback Inn in Scottsdale, AZ</li>\r\n 	<li>Hot weather and turndown philosophy cards at the Camelback Inn</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/images/pix/phx_temp.jpg\" />\r\n<img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/images/pix/phx_philo.jpg\" />\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Rant on TSA screeners at Chicago Midway airport; compliments to the TSA screeners at Tampa and Columbus, OH</li>\r\n 	<li>Using my iPod to reduce travel stress</li>\r\n 	<li>First of a recurring feature -- Classic Travel Stories</li>\r\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"./podcast/travelcommons_3.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','TravelCommons Podcast #3','','inherit','closed','closed','','6-revision-v1','','','2019-03-01 08:33:01','2019-03-01 13:33:01','',6,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/01/6-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2256,1,'2019-03-01 08:35:55','2019-03-01 13:35:55','Here\'s the third TravelCommons podcast, each segment recorded in a different place. This week, after 7 flights in 5 days, I seem to be on quite a tear on the TSA. I talk about bad TSA experiences at Chicago Midway and good ones at O\'Hare, Tampa, and Columbus, OH. Also, I talk about using the iPod to reduce travel stress and the first Classic Travel Story-- about Cleveland travelers eager to get to Chicago. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_3.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_3.mp3\"]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the shownotes from the third TravelCommons podcast:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <em>Warmth</em> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Tough travel week -- 7 flights and 4 cities in 5 days</li>\r\n 	<li>Recording from the bathroom of the Camelback Inn in Scottsdale, AZ</li>\r\n 	<li>Hot weather and turndown philosophy cards at the Camelback Inn</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/images/pix/phx_temp.jpg\" />\r\n<img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/images/pix/phx_philo.jpg\" />\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Rant on TSA screeners at Chicago Midway airport; compliments to the TSA screeners at Tampa and Columbus, OH</li>\r\n 	<li>Using my iPod to reduce travel stress</li>\r\n 	<li>First of a recurring feature -- Classic Travel Stories</li>\r\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_3.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','TravelCommons Podcast #3','','inherit','closed','closed','','6-revision-v1','','','2019-03-01 08:35:55','2019-03-01 13:35:55','',6,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/01/6-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2257,1,'2019-03-01 08:38:33','2019-03-01 13:38:33','This week\'s TravelCommons podcast focuses on the good things about travel. Last week\'s podcast seemed a bit negative, so I try to bring a bit of balance this week. Recorded in the LAX Westin, I stow the laptop for a night and walk the Manhattan Beach, CA pier, reflect on a rare window seat ride on a flight out of Phoenix, and read from a friend\'s letter as he starts a new life in Sao Paulo. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_4.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_135.mp3\"]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the shownotes from the TravelCommons podcast #4:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <em>Warmth</em> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Recording from the bathroom of the LAX Westin in Los Angeles</li>\r\n 	<li>Made changes to the travelcommons.com website to allow everyone to leave comments about the podcasts</li>\r\n 	<li>Sounds from a walk down the Manhattan Beach, CA pier and the Manhattan Beach Brewing Company</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/images/pix/brew_pub_map.jpg\" />\r\n<img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/images/pix/brew_pub_menu.jpg\" />\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Looking out the window of a night flight from Phoenix to Chicago</li>\r\n 	<li>Somebody types \"Cabo San Lucas prostitutes\" into Yahoo and ends up at the travelcommons.com website!</li>\r\n 	<li>Business travel to Brazil causes a friend to chuck it all and move south</li>\r\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_4.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #4 - The Good Things About Travel','','inherit','closed','closed','','7-revision-v1','','','2019-03-01 08:38:33','2019-03-01 13:38:33','',7,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/01/7-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2258,1,'2019-03-01 08:47:38','2019-03-01 13:47:38','This week\'s TravelCommons podcast comes from the East Coast -- recorded in the Mystic Marriott in Groton, CT. This week, I talk about recent experiences with rental cars, airport celebrity sightings, and my efforts to get out of my travel ruts. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_5.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_5.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the shownotes from the TravelCommons podcast #5:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <em>Warmth</em> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Recording from the bathroom of the Mystic Marriott Resort &amp; Spa in Groton, CT</li>\r\n 	<li>Thanks for the person who compared me to Bob Newhart in a comment on Podcast Alley</li>\r\n 	<li>The right rental car can make all the difference on a trip</li>\r\n 	<li>Airport celebrity sightings -- Vin Diesel, Sean Penn, and Wynton Marsalis</li>\r\n 	<li>Recognizing and trying to break out of my travel ruts</li>\r\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_5.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #5 - Celebrities in Airports; The Right Car Rental','','inherit','closed','closed','','8-revision-v1','','','2019-03-01 08:47:38','2019-03-01 13:47:38','',8,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/01/8-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2259,1,'2019-03-01 08:48:08','2019-03-01 13:48:08','This week\'s TravelCommons podcast focuses on the good things about travel. Last week\'s podcast seemed a bit negative, so I try to bring a bit of balance this week. Recorded in the LAX Westin, I stow the laptop for a night and walk the Manhattan Beach, CA pier, reflect on a rare window seat ride on a flight out of Phoenix, and read from a friend\'s letter as he starts a new life in Sao Paulo. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_4.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_4.mp3\"]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the shownotes from the TravelCommons podcast #4:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <em>Warmth</em> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Recording from the bathroom of the LAX Westin in Los Angeles</li>\r\n 	<li>Made changes to the travelcommons.com website to allow everyone to leave comments about the podcasts</li>\r\n 	<li>Sounds from a walk down the Manhattan Beach, CA pier and the Manhattan Beach Brewing Company</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/images/pix/brew_pub_map.jpg\" />\r\n<img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/images/pix/brew_pub_menu.jpg\" />\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Looking out the window of a night flight from Phoenix to Chicago</li>\r\n 	<li>Somebody types \"Cabo San Lucas prostitutes\" into Yahoo and ends up at the travelcommons.com website!</li>\r\n 	<li>Business travel to Brazil causes a friend to chuck it all and move south</li>\r\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_4.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #4 - The Good Things About Travel','','inherit','closed','closed','','7-revision-v1','','','2019-03-01 08:48:08','2019-03-01 13:48:08','',7,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/01/7-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2260,1,'2019-03-01 08:49:28','2019-03-01 13:49:28','This week\'s TravelCommons podcast is an \"odds-\'n\'-ends\" podcast, following up on items from previous podcasts and answering questions from web boards and e-mails.  I follow-up on last week\'s Sean Penn sighting and read the reply I received from the TSA in response to my complaint about Chicago Midway airport.  Responding to a topic request on the Podcast Alley comment board, I give my thoughts about frequent flier programs.  Answering some e-mail questions, I describe my convoluted podcast recording workflow.  Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_6.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_6.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n<hr /> Here are the shownotes for TravelCommons podcast #6:\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <em>Warmth</em> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Recording in my living room in suburban Chicago</li>\r\n	<li>Follow-up on my Sean Penn SFO sighting</li>\r\n	<li>Received a response from the TSA to my Chicago Midway complaint</li>\r\n	<li>TSA screeners laughing it up after seeing Roberta Flack</li>\r\n	<li>Responding to a topic request on the Podcast Alley comment board regarding frequent flier programs</li>\r\n	<li>Answering e-mail questions on how I record my podcast</li>\r\n	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_6.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>','Podcast #6 - The TSA Talks Back','','inherit','closed','closed','','9-revision-v1','','','2019-03-01 08:49:28','2019-03-01 13:49:28','',9,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/01/9-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2261,1,'2019-03-01 08:50:44','2019-03-01 13:50:44','Here\'s the first TravelCommons podcast. Recorded in the Wardman Park Marriott in Washington, DC, I talk about Hungarian prostitutes, \"Puff the Magic Dragon\" security portals, and the 5 Boro Bike Ride in New York. Here\'s the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons-2005-05-14.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the file.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons-2005-05-14.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the shownotes from first TravelCommons podcast:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <em>Warmth</em> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>A podcast about the first-hand travel experiences of a road warrior</li>\r\n	<li>Recording in the bathroom of the Wardman Park Marriott in Northwest DC</li>\r\n	<li>Bad but typical experiences flying from O\'Hare to LaGuardia and then LaGuardia to Reagan National</li>\r\n	<li>Hungarian roadside prostitutes</li>\r\n	<li>New airport security \"sniffer\" screening machines</li>\r\n	<li>New York City\'s 5 Boro Bike Ride</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/21561359@N00/103092939/\"><strong>Direct Link</strong></a> to a cameraphone picture of the ride\'s start</li>\r\n	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons-2005-05-14.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','First TravelCommons Podcast','','inherit','closed','closed','','263-revision-v1','','','2019-03-01 08:50:44','2019-03-01 13:50:44','',263,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/01/263-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2262,1,'2019-03-01 08:51:52','2019-03-01 13:51:52','Here\'s the second TravelCommons podcast. This week, I talk about the evolution of the Southwest Airlines customer, the growth of travel meta-search sites such as Kayak and Sidestep, and how Mexicans vacation in Cabo San Lucas.  There\'s also a clip from fellow travel podcaster Curt Taylor of emptyseat.net.  Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_2.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_2.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n<hr /> Here are the shownotes from the second TravelCommons podcast:\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <em>Warmth</em> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>In town all week, but getting ready for killer travel next week -- 7 flights and 4 cities in 5 days</li>\r\n	<li>Interesting travel statistic from Curt Taylor at <a href=\"http://www.emptyseat.net/emptyseatblog/\">emptyseat.net</a></li>\r\n	<li>Changes to the typical passenger on Southwest Airlines</li>\r\n	<li>Growth of Travel Meta-Search Sites, such as Kayak, Sidestep, and Mobissimo</li>\r\n	<li>Differences between American and Mexican vacationers in Cabo San Lucas</li>\r\n	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_2.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>','TravelCommons Podcast #2','','inherit','closed','closed','','264-revision-v1','','','2019-03-01 08:51:52','2019-03-01 13:51:52','',264,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/01/264-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2264,1,'2019-03-01 08:55:29','2019-03-01 13:55:29','This TravelCommons podcast comes to you from my first day on vacation, recorded in the bathroom of the Novotel in Geneva, Switz.  I walk through the Internet technologies that I used to book a small non-chain hotel in the French Alps, talk about the sort of \"travel insurance\" that people believe they get from chosing well-known travel brands, and then reflect on the pleasures of unplanned wanderings -- trying to stay awake in Geneva and spending an afternoon at the World Beach <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tchoukball\">Tchoukball</a> Championship.  Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_8.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_8.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nSorry for the delay in posting the show notes, but my Internet connectivity was a bit spotty at time, and I am, after all, on vacation:\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <em>Warmth</em> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Recorded in the bathroom of the Novotel in Geneva, Switz</li>\r\n	<li>On a 2½-week vacation in Europe</li>\r\n	<li>Take the <em>Worst Airport</em> poll in the left column of this web site</li>\r\n	<li>Using all kinds of technology to book vacation hotels in France</li>\r\n	<li><em>Update</em> -- The Hotel Altiport was a great place in a beautiful setting above <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%A9ribel\">Meribel</a> and had a great staff</li>\r\n	<li><strong><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/travelcommons/103657248/\">Direct Link</a></strong> to a picture of the Hotel Altiport</li>\r\n	<li>Comfort in brands -- where to take risks and where to play it safe while traveling</li>\r\n	<li>Serendipity -- finding an unexpected prize when traveling</li>\r\n	<li><strong><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/travelcommons/103286072/\">Direct Link</a></strong> to a picture of the women\'s Beach Tchoukball finals</li>\r\n	<li>For those interested in tchoukball -- <a href=\"http://www.tchoukball.org/\">www.tchoukball.org</a></li>\r\n	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_8.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>','Podcast #8 - TravelCommons on Vacation','','inherit','closed','closed','','11-revision-v1','','','2019-03-01 08:55:29','2019-03-01 13:55:29','',11,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/01/11-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2266,1,'2019-03-01 08:58:35','2019-03-01 13:58:35','Finishing my vacation with a podcast from the bathroom of the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Budapest\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/hungary/budapest\">Budapest (Hungary)</a> Marriott, high above the <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danube\">Danube</a>.  The second vacation podcast focuses on differences between business and leisure travel -- how to \"downshift\" from business to leisure travel, balancing cost with risk when chosing a travel brand, and a Budapest traffic accident illustrates what business travelers take for granted.  Also, listener comments from podcast #8, and music/sounds from Budapest street festivals.  Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_9.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_9.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #9:\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <em>Warmth</em> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Recorded in the bathroom of <a href=\"http://hotels.lonelyplanet.com/hungary/budapest-r2097989/budapest-marriott-hotel-q1192767/\">Budapest Marriott</a></li>\r\n	<li>Finishing up a 2½-week vacation in Europe</li>\r\n	<li>The transition music in this podcast are iRiver recordings of Budapest street festival sounds</li>\r\n	<li>Listener comments about podcast #8</li>\r\n	<li>What does it take to \"downshift\" from the efficient cadence of a business traveler; how to enjoy the act of traveling?</li>\r\n	<li>Following up on the <em>Comfort in brands</em> topic from podcast #8</li>\r\n	<li>Two great experiences with non-brands -- the <a href=\"http://www.altiporthotel.com\">Hotel Altiport</a> in Meribel, France, and <a href=\"http://www.fox-autorent.com\">Fox Auto-Rent</a> in Budapest</li>\r\n	<li>Discount airlines taking over Budapest airport</li>\r\n	<li>A traffic accident points out some of the things that business travelers take for granted</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/travelcommons/103646966/\"><strong>Direct Link</strong></a> to a picture of the wrecked car</li>\r\n	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_9.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>','Podcast #9 - Wrapping Up the Vacation','','inherit','closed','closed','','12-revision-v1','','','2019-03-01 08:58:35','2019-03-01 13:58:35','',12,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/01/12-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2267,1,'2019-03-01 09:04:37','2019-03-01 14:04:37','The TravelCommons podcast is back on the East Coast in Boston.  Recorded in the bathroom of the Residence Inn in Charlestown, I talk about the tight summer travel market, strategies for eating alone without looking like a loser, and more Classic Travel Stories -- fun on Air Canada.  Also, e-mail and audio comments from listeners.  Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_7.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_7.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n<hr /> Here are the shownotes for TravelCommons podcast #7:\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <em>Warmth</em> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Recording in the bathroom of the Residence Inn in Charlestown, Mass</li>\r\n	<li>A great dinner in Boston\'s North End at Mamma Maria (<em><a href=\"http://www.mammamaria.com\">www.mammamaria.com</a></em>)</li>\r\n	<li>Any hotel suggestions for my vacation in Geneva, Switzerland or Albertville, France?</li>\r\n	<li>The first day of the new podcasting functionality in iTunes  is sending lots of new subscribers</li>\r\n	<li>The summer travel season is upon us and it\'s going to be a crowded one</li>\r\n	<li>Audio comment from Steve Frick of <a href=\"http://fricksworld.blogspot.com\">Frick\'s World</a></li>\r\n	<li>Strategies for dining alone on the road</li>\r\n	<li>Classic Travel Stories -- a trio of stories from Air Canada plane rides</li>\r\n	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_7.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>','Podcast #7 - Eating Alone; Classic Travel Stories','','inherit','closed','closed','','10-revision-v1','','','2019-03-01 09:04:37','2019-03-01 14:04:37','',10,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/01/10-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2268,1,'2019-03-01 09:06:32','2019-03-01 14:06:32','I\'m back in the US and back on the road -- ths time, though, on wheels, not in the air.  Recorded in the TravelCommons \"mobile studio\"  (a \'95 Chevy Blazer), this podcast talks about security risks of hotel Internet access, the hassle of replacing forgotten things while on the road, and, in the lastest edition of Classic Travel Stories, fun times in <em>really</em> small towns.  Also, a response to a listener\'s question regarding in-flight mobile phone usage and Internet services.  Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_10.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_10.mp3\"]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr /> Here are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #10:\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <em>Warmth</em> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Recorded in the TravelCommons \"mobile studio\" on a rather warm summer day</li>\r\n	<li>Back on the road; lots of flight delays due to summer weather</li>\r\n	<li>Listener question about in-flight mobile phone usage and Internet services</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"http://www.jdpa.com/studies_jdpower/pressrelease3.asp?ID=2005097\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the JD Power 2005 North American Hotel Guest Satisfaction survey</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"http://www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,68370,00.html\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the <em>Wired News</em> article on hotel TV hacking</li>\r\n	<li>One of the worst feelings on the road -- opening your suitcase to discover you\'ve forgotten something</li>\r\n	<li>Classic Travel Stories -- Finding creature comforts in <em>really</em> small towns</li>\r\n	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_10.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>','Podcast #10 - Hacking Hotel Rooms; Fun in Really Small Towns','','inherit','closed','closed','','13-revision-v1','','','2019-03-01 09:06:32','2019-03-01 14:06:32','',13,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/01/13-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2269,1,'2019-03-01 09:06:44','2019-03-01 14:06:44','I\'m back in the US and back on the road -- ths time, though, on wheels, not in the air.  Recorded in the TravelCommons \"mobile studio\"  (a \'95 Chevy Blazer), this podcast talks about security risks of hotel Internet access, the hassle of replacing forgotten things while on the road, and, in the latest edition of Classic Travel Stories, fun times in <em>really</em> small towns.  Also, a response to a listener\'s question regarding in-flight mobile phone usage and Internet services.  Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_10.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_10.mp3\"]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr /> Here are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #10:\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <em>Warmth</em> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Recorded in the TravelCommons \"mobile studio\" on a rather warm summer day</li>\r\n	<li>Back on the road; lots of flight delays due to summer weather</li>\r\n	<li>Listener question about in-flight mobile phone usage and Internet services</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"http://www.jdpa.com/studies_jdpower/pressrelease3.asp?ID=2005097\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the JD Power 2005 North American Hotel Guest Satisfaction survey</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"http://www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,68370,00.html\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the <em>Wired News</em> article on hotel TV hacking</li>\r\n	<li>One of the worst feelings on the road -- opening your suitcase to discover you\'ve forgotten something</li>\r\n	<li>Classic Travel Stories -- Finding creature comforts in <em>really</em> small towns</li>\r\n	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_10.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>','Podcast #10 - Hacking Hotel Rooms; Fun in Really Small Towns','','inherit','closed','closed','','13-revision-v1','','','2019-03-01 09:06:44','2019-03-01 14:06:44','',13,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/01/13-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2270,1,'2019-03-01 09:07:47','2019-03-01 14:07:47','Swinging through the West Coast, I recorded this podcast in the bathroom of the Orchard Hotel a block or two from the summit of Nob Hill in San Francisco. In this podcast, we talk about how the post-9/11 reduction in carry-ons has made packing for different business dress codes a real hassle. Is there an end to the \"shoe carnival\"? Recent news articles and a discussion with a TSA supervisor in Tampa suggest that a small bit of common sense may have infiltrated the TSA. And finally, a \"potpourri\" category -- collected odds-\'n\'-ends from discussion topics on the web site. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_11.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_11.mp3\"]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #11:\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <em>Warmth</em> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Recorded in the bathroom of the <a href=\"http://www.theorchardhotel.com\">Orchard Hotel</a> in San Francisco on a cold August night</li>\r\n 	<li>Being featured in Adam Curry\'s <em>Podfinder</em> podcast doubled the number of TravelCommons subscribers in a week</li>\r\n 	<li>Having to dress in business formal <em>and</em> business casual in the same trip is a real hassle</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/12/AR2005081201557.html\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to a <em>Washington Post </em>article says that the new TSA director is thinking about changing the current shoe screening policy</li>\r\n 	<li>Good discussion with a reasonable TSA supervisor in Tampa</li>\r\n 	<li>More follow-up on in-flight internet service</li>\r\n 	<li><strong><a href=\"http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB112345285640807000,00.html?mod=technology_main_promo_right\">Direct link</a></strong> to a <em>Wall Street Journal</em> journal article (registration required) on a demo flight for Boeing\'s Connexion in-flight internet service</li>\r\n 	<li>Following up on \"Hacking the Hotel Room\" from podcast #10, the new class of pocket wifi routers can provide a more secure hotel internet connection</li>\r\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"htp://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_11.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #11 - Business Dress Codes; Kinder, Gentler TSA?','','inherit','closed','closed','','14-revision-v1','','','2019-03-01 09:07:47','2019-03-01 14:07:47','',14,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/01/14-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2271,1,'2019-03-01 09:09:07','2019-03-01 14:09:07','Down in Florida this week, picking up a bit of the local heat and humidity.  Recorded in the bathroom of the Marriott Courtyard in Oldsmar, FL, somewhere between Tampa and Clearwater,  we talk about how travel skills are passed from parents to children, spotting some famous people in ORD and LAX, rare emotions in the Frequent Traveler screening line, and a review of travel podcasts.  Also, the final results of our Worst US Airport poll.   Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_12.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_12.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n<hr /> Here are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #12:\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <em>Warmth</em> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Recorded in the bathroom of the Oldsmar, FL Marriott Courtyard</li>\r\n	<li>Denver Int\'l Airport wins the <em>Worst US Airport</em> poll by one vote over LAX</li>\r\n	<li>Stories of how parents pass down business travel skills to their kids</li>\r\n	<li>Airport celebrity sightings -- Steve Case, Julie Delpy</li>\r\n	<li>Intense emotions in the Frequent Traveler screening line</li>\r\n	<li>A 2x2 matrix classifying travel podcasts</li>\r\n<img src=\"./images/pix/matrix.jpg\" />\r\n	<li><a href=\"http://www.emptyseat.net/emptyseatblog/\">The Emptyseat podcast</a></li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"http://www.connectedtraveler.com/blog/index.html\">The Connected Traveler</a></li>\r\n	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_12.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>','Podcast #12 - Emotions in the Screening Line; Other Travel Podcasts','','inherit','closed','closed','','15-revision-v1','','','2019-03-01 09:09:07','2019-03-01 14:09:07','',15,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/01/15-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2273,1,'2019-03-01 09:17:51','2019-03-01 14:17:51','A hurricane came between me and my meetings in Tampa, so I stayed home for an entire week.  This week\'s podcast has a bit of local flavor and sound, talking about how to spend rare time off the road, what we\'ll do for sleep, and introducing a new poll -- what\'s your favorite US airline?  Also, some pointers to people who are linking to the TravelCommons website.  Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_13.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_13.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n<hr /> Here are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #13:\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <em>Warmth</em> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Recorded in the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago</li>\r\n	<li>Thoughts going out to the folks in southern Mississippi who received the full force of Hurricane Katrina</li>\r\n	<li>Lots of feedback on last week\'s \"Generations of Travelers\" topic</li>\r\n	<li>Links to bloggers who point to TravelCommons -- <a href=\"http://www.mikebladon.com/blog/\">Mike Bladon</a> and <a href=\"http://hilary.fascinationdesign.com/\">Hilary Baumann</a></li>\r\n	<li>Catching up with the local flavors at home</li>\r\n<img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/images/pix/chicago_dog.jpg\" />\r\n	<li>The hunt for sleep</li>\r\n	<li>Revised final results of the Worst US Airport poll -- a tie between LAX and Denver</li>\r\n	<li>A new poll -- Your Favorite US Airline?</li>\r\n	<li>What makes you like an airline?</li>\r\n	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_13.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>','Podcast #13 - Enjoying Home; The Battle for Sleep','','inherit','closed','closed','','16-revision-v1','','','2019-03-01 09:17:51','2019-03-01 14:17:51','',16,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/01/16-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2274,1,'2019-03-01 09:19:07','2019-03-01 14:19:07','Traveling through the southeast US, I stopped long enough to record a podcast in the bathroom of the Durham, NC Marriott.  This week\'s podcast talks about two very different travel experiences at the opposite ends of Interstate 40; a special edition of Classic Travel Stories -- recollections from September 11, 2001 -- and the Scottish Band <a href=\"http://www.evangeline.org.uk/\"><em>Evangeline</em></a> talks about writing a great travel song.  Here\'s a <a href=\"travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_14.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_14.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n<hr /> Sorry for the delay in posting the show notes .  My home ISP, Comcast, has for some unknown decided to block the IP address to this site.  I\'ve filed a trouble ticket, but I think I can probably change providers faster than I can get Comcast to fix their internal routing screw-ups:\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <em>Warmth</em> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Recorded in the bathroom of Durham, NC Marriott</li>\r\n	<li>Hoping to get out of the Carolinas before Hurricane Ophelia decides to come ashore</li>\r\n	<li>Following up on T/C #12\'s review of other travel podcasts, Ed Vawter points to the <a href=\"http://joepodcaster.libsyn.com/\"><em>Fly With Me</em></a> podcast as one of his favorites</li>\r\n	<li>Completely different airport experiences at the ends of I-40</li>\r\n	<li>Classic Travel Stories -- Recollections from the week of September 11, 2001</li>\r\n	<li>First edition of Great Travel Songs -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=78941.463234299&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\">\r\n<strong>iTunes link</strong> to </a><img alt=\"icon\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by the Scottish Band <a href=\"http://www.evangeline.org.uk/\"><strong>Evangeline</strong></a></li>\r\n	<li>I found Evangeline on the <a href=\"http://tartanpodcast.com/\">Tartanpodcast</a></li>\r\n	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_14.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>','Podcast #14 - September 11th Travel Stories; Writing a Great Travel Song','','inherit','closed','closed','','17-revision-v1','','','2019-03-01 09:19:07','2019-03-01 14:19:07','',17,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/01/17-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2275,1,'2019-03-01 09:20:37','2019-03-01 14:20:37','Sorry for the delay in posting a new podcast, but I caught a nasty cold en route to San Francisco this week.  This week, a couple of friends and long-time podcast listeners let me buy them beers at the Shearton Fisherman\'s Wharf in exchange for their Classic Travel stories.  I also talk the change in attitude at United Airlines and, as airlines continue to \"de-content\" their cabins, there are two things left I really care about.  Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_15.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_15.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n<hr /> Here are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #15:\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Recording was a bit delayed by the cold I picked up on my flight out to SFO</li>\r\n	<li>Oracle World forces some bad hotel choices</li>\r\n	<li>A high school friend from Mobile, AL writes in with some first-hand observations on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina</li>\r\n	<li>Links to a podcast that points to TravelCommons -- <a href=\"http://teamtna.libsyn.com\"> The Team TnA Show</a></li>\r\n	<li>Begging for business -- United Airlines employees providing great service</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB112717780464345669,00.html?mod=travel%5Fleft%5Fcolumn%5Fhs\"><em>Wall Street Journal</em> article</a> (registration required) on the latest moves by legacy airlines to pull content out of their airplane cabins</li>\r\n	<li>There are two things I care about -- in-seat power supplies and in-flight magazines</li>\r\n	<li>Recorded in the bar of the Shearton-Fisherman\'s Wharf in SF, two friends tell their Classic Travel Stories about wanting the straight scoop about lightning</li>\r\n	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_15.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>','Podcast #15 - Begging for Business; Needing to Know at 35,000 ft','','inherit','closed','closed','','18-revision-v1','','','2019-03-01 09:20:37','2019-03-01 14:20:37','',18,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/01/18-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2276,1,'2019-03-01 09:22:29','2019-03-01 14:22:29','Bouncing around this week, I recorded this podcast in the bathroom of the Stamford, CT Marriott.  Visiting St Louis\'s Gateway Arch, we talk about wedging a bit of personal tourism into a packed business itinerary, how people keep mistaking physical closeness with personal closeness, and recounting some stories about mistakes even before the trip starts. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_16.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_16.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n<hr /> Here are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #16:\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Recorded in the bathroom of the Stamford, CT Marriott</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewArtist?artistId=75387518&amp;forceArtistPage=1\"><strong>Direct Link</strong></a> to iTunes page for the Scottish Band Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>Pocket tourism -- fitting a bit of personal tourism into the usual packed business travel itinerary</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"http://www.travelandleisure.com/invoke.cfm?ObjectID=93F3A055-3C2C-42BF-89C54855C05C0056\"><strong>Direct Link</strong></a> to the Travel + Leisure editorial</li>\r\n	<li>Touring the Gateway Arch in St Louis</li>\r\n<img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/images/pix/arch.jpg\" /><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/images/pix/arch_ticket.jpg\" />\r\n	<li>Too much personal information sharing in confined physical spaces</li>\r\n	<li>Two stories about mistaken trips to the airport</li>\r\n	<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/modules.php?op=modload&amp;name=News&amp;file=article&amp;sid=24&amp;mode=nested&amp;order=0&amp;thold=0\">Direct Link</a></strong> to the comments posted under Podcast #14</li>\r\n	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_16.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>','Podcast #16 - Squeezing in Tourism; Can We Stop Sharing?','','inherit','closed','closed','','19-revision-v1','','','2019-03-01 09:22:29','2019-03-01 14:22:29','',19,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/01/19-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2278,1,'2019-03-01 09:25:30','2019-03-01 14:25:30','Returning from a quick trip to <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Austin\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/austin\">Austin, TX</a>, this week\'s podcast talks about the 15-part Airworld series in <em>AdAge</em>, the behind-the-scenes view of why every airport looks the same.  A recent business trip to Detroit breaks through the state tourism propaganda and gets into the city\'s true nature.  Ignoring WC Fields\' advice, my kids make an appearance, giving their views of my travels. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_17.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_17.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #17:\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Tried to record this in the bathroom of the Austin Courtyard Marriott, but the exhaust fan wouldn\'t turn off</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Moonshiner</em> by Uncle Tupelo</li>\r\n	<li>John Birkhead of the <a href=\"http://desertcast.libsyn.com\"><strong>Desertcast</strong></a> podcast sends in his description of the new event for the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"2012 Summer Olympics\" rel=\"wikipedia\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Summer_Olympics\">2012 London Olympics</a> -- the Gatwick to Heathrow dash</li>\r\n	<li>Airworld -- our own little ecosystem</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>The Same Old Story</em> by <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Billie Holiday\" rel=\"wikipedia\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billie_Holiday\">Billie Holiday</a></li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"http://adage.com/news.cms?newsId=46093\"><strong>Direct Link</strong></a> to the Airworld series in AdAge <em>(registration required)</em></li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Lincoln Town</em> by John Hiatt</li>\r\n	<li>Business travel helps you \"break through\" to what\'s really happening in a place</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Walking in Your Footsteps</em> by the Police</li>\r\n	<li>My kids offer their opinions on my travel</li>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <em>Ramblin\' Man</em> by the Allman Brothers Band</li>\r\n	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_17.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>','Podcast #17 - Generic Airworld; Kids’ View of Dad’s Travels','','inherit','closed','closed','','20-revision-v1','','','2019-03-01 09:25:30','2019-03-01 14:25:30','',20,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/01/20-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2279,1,'2019-03-01 09:25:50','2019-03-01 14:25:50','Returning from a quick trip to <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/austin\">Austin, TX</a>, this week\'s podcast talks about the 15-part Airworld series in <em>AdAge</em>, the behind-the-scenes view of why every airport looks the same.  A recent business trip to Detroit breaks through the state tourism propaganda and gets into the city\'s true nature.  Ignoring WC Fields\' advice, my kids make an appearance, giving their views of my travels. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_17.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_17.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #17:\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Tried to record this in the bathroom of the Austin Courtyard Marriott, but the exhaust fan wouldn\'t turn off</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Moonshiner</em> by Uncle Tupelo</li>\r\n	<li>John Birkhead of the <a href=\"http://desertcast.libsyn.com\"><strong>Desertcast</strong></a> podcast sends in his description of the new event for the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"2012 Summer Olympics\" rel=\"wikipedia\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Summer_Olympics\">2012 London Olympics</a> -- the Gatwick to Heathrow dash</li>\r\n	<li>Airworld -- our own little ecosystem</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>The Same Old Story</em> by <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Billie Holiday\" rel=\"wikipedia\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billie_Holiday\">Billie Holiday</a></li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"http://adage.com/news.cms?newsId=46093\"><strong>Direct Link</strong></a> to the Airworld series in AdAge <em>(registration required)</em></li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Lincoln Town</em> by John Hiatt</li>\r\n	<li>Business travel helps you \"break through\" to what\'s really happening in a place</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Walking in Your Footsteps</em> by the Police</li>\r\n	<li>My kids offer their opinions on my travel</li>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <em>Ramblin\' Man</em> by the Allman Brothers Band</li>\r\n	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_17.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>','Podcast #17 - Generic Airworld; Kids’ View of Dad’s Travels','','inherit','closed','closed','','20-revision-v1','','','2019-03-01 09:25:50','2019-03-01 14:25:50','',20,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/01/20-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2281,1,'2019-03-01 09:29:41','2019-03-01 14:29:41','Emptying out my notebook with an odds-\'n-ends podcast. Traveling between <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/southwest/phoenix\">Phoenix</a>, <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/rocky-mountains/denver\">Denver</a> and <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/chicago\">Chicago</a> this week, I manage a 50-degree temperature drop and have the <a href=\"http://www.tsa.gov\">TSA</a> reject a checked chain saw. However, I haven\'t had to take my shoes off for two weeks -- are we seeing the end of the shoe carnival? We also talk about the fourth quarter tactics around re-up\'ing frequent traveler status, clothing problems, and update the results of our Best US Airline poll. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_18.mp3\"> <strong>link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_18.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #18:\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Triangulating through Phoenix and Denver -- crossing from sand to snow in an a day</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"www.tsa.gov/interweb/assetlibrary/Permitted_Prohibited_9_6_2005.pdf\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the TSA\'s Permitted and Prohibited list</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em>Soul Traveling</em> by the Australian band <a href=\"http://www.stingrayonline.com\">Stingray</a> from the <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com\">Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"http://www.mytravelreviews.blogspot.com/\">Direct link</a> to Gary Bembridge\'s <em>My Travel Reviews</em> podcast</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Hotel California\" href=\"http://www.amazon.com/Hotel-California-Eagles/dp/B000002GVO%3FSubscriptionId%3D0G81C5DAZ03ZR9WH9X82%26tag%3Dzemanta-20%26linkCode%3Dxm2%26camp%3D2025%26creative%3D165953%26creativeASIN%3DB000002GVO\" rel=\"amazon\">Hotel California</a></em> by the Eagles</li>\r\n 	<li>Requalifying for frequent flier and frequent sleeper programs</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Flyin\' Shoes</em> by Lyle Lovett</li>\r\n 	<li>End of the TSA shoe carnival?</li>\r\n 	<li>How do you test for \"travelability\" when buying clothes?</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Good is Good</em> by Sheryl Crow</li>\r\n 	<li>An update on our Best US Airline pol</li>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Ramblin\' Man</em> by the Allman Brothers Band</li>\r\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n 	<li>Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_18.mp3\"> <strong>link</strong></a> to the podcast file</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #18 - Trouble with Chain Saws; Sprint for Status','','inherit','closed','closed','','21-revision-v1','','','2019-03-01 09:29:41','2019-03-01 14:29:41','',21,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/01/21-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2283,1,'2019-03-01 09:32:48','2019-03-01 14:32:48','This week\'s <a href=\"http://technorati.com/blogs/podcast\">podcast</a> is recorded in the bathroom of the Marriott Courtyard in East Memphis. I talk about the autumn tree colors coming visible from airports up North and worry about catching avian flu while breathing the same air as 150 other travelers. I talk a bit about some changes in Memphis since my high school days and talk about how it remains a Southern city. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_19.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_19.mp3\"]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #19:\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Recorded in the bathroom of the Marriott Courtyard in <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/memphis\">Memphis, TN</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Jinxed myself by declaring \"End of the TSA Carnival\" in last week\'s podcast</li>\r\n 	<li>Listener explanation on why they voted for Midwest Airlines in the Favorite Airline poll</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em>When the Leaves Come Falling Down</em> by Van Morrison</li>\r\n 	<li>Autumn is a great time of the year to fly in and out of airports like Chicago-O\'Hare, Detroit and White Plains, NY, all of which have approaches that go over wooded areas</li>\r\n 	<li>Interesting comparison of the thread colors in US and Italian sewing kits</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>I\'m Like a Bird</em> by Nelly Furtado</li>\r\n 	<li>The bad cold I caught on my ORD-SFO flight (mentioned in podcast #15) has me worrying about catching bird flu</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/Bring-Family-John-Hiatt/dp/B000002GHH%3FSubscriptionId%3D0G81C5DAZ03ZR9WH9X82%26tag%3Dzemanta-20%26linkCode%3Dxm2%26camp%3D2025%26creative%3D165953%26creativeASIN%3DB000002GHH\">Memphis in the Meantime</a></em> by John Hiatt</li>\r\n 	<li>Spent time hitting the big non-Elvis tourist spots in Memphis -- eating dry-rub ribs at <a href=\"http://www.hogsfly.com\">the Rendezvous</a> and walked down an amazingly renovated <a href=\"http://www.bealestreet.com/home.html\">Beale Street</a>.</li>\r\n 	<li>A story about friendly Memphians at the end of a long night</li>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Ramblin\' Man</em> by the Allman Brothers Band</li>\r\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_19.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #19 - Colors in Travel; Visit to a Southern City','','inherit','closed','closed','','22-revision-v1','','','2019-03-01 09:32:48','2019-03-01 14:32:48','',22,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/01/22-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2284,1,'2019-03-01 09:34:59','2019-03-01 14:34:59','Recorded in the bathroom of Doubletree Club in <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Ana%2C_California\">Santa Ana, CA</a>, this week we focus on what\'s going on with the airlines.  A listener story about the trials of getting from Wisconsin to Pittsburgh shows the importance of person-to-person interactions to the <a href=\"http://technorati.com/blogs/travel\">travel</a> experience.  Does Northwest\'s latest cost cutting effort foreshadow the rise of the virtual airline?  Also, how to define boundaries of personal space at 35,000 feet. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_20.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_20.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #20:\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Recorded in the bathroom of the Doubletree Club Hotel in Santa Ana, CA</li>\r\n	<li>The Chicago White Sox and the World Series have made for some late nights this week</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"http://udayan71.blogspot.com/\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to Udayan Tripathi\'s <em>Life in London</em> podcast</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"http://hotelcoffee.blogspot.com/\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to Dan O\'Leary\'s  <em>HotelCoffee</em> podcast</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music --  <em>Before They Make Me Run</em> by The Rolling Stones</li>\r\n	<li>Listener\'s story about difficulties with United Airlines on a trip from Tokyo to Wisconsin to Pittsburgh to Philadelphia and back to Tokyo.</li>\r\n	<li>Cost cutting efforts that replace people with technology makes the remaining person-to-person interactions only that much more important</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Even Better Than the Real Thing</em> by U2</li>\r\n	<li>Northwest Airlines talks about outsourcing flight attendants</li>\r\n	<li>Is this a move toward a \"virtual\" airline?</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Whipping Post</em> by The Allman Brothers Band</li>\r\n	<li>How to define my personal space inside an airplane</li>\r\n	<li>A \"seat gripper\" invades my personal space</li>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <em>Ramblin\' Man</em> by the Allman Brothers Band</li>\r\n	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_20.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>','Podcast #20 - Travel is a People Business; Personal Space at 35,000 Ft','','inherit','closed','closed','','23-revision-v1','','','2019-03-01 09:34:59','2019-03-01 14:34:59','',23,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/01/23-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2285,1,'2019-03-01 09:37:25','2019-03-01 14:37:25','After a down-and-back trip to Tampa, this week\'s topics include thoughts on the recently announced changes to America West\'s and United\'s boarding schemes -- are they focusing on the right thing? Also, the need to stay home sometimes, and how <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Microsoft Research\" href=\"http://research.microsoft.com/\" rel=\"homepage\">Microsoft Research</a>\'s personal black box project might change the way we think about travel pictures. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_21.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_21.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the show notes from Travelcommons podcast #21:\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Flew down to Tampa for a Monday morning meeting</li>\r\n 	<li>Haven\'t written anything in my <a href=\"http://www.moleskinerie.com/\">Moleskine</a> travel journal -- this podcast seems to be monopolizing my creative time</li>\r\n 	<li>Thanks to all the listeners who are using the \"Recommend Us\" link on refer their friends to the podcast</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"http://clothingcult.com/?p=32\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to Hilary Baumann\'s Pant Rant on her <em>ClothingCult.com</em> blog</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music --  <em>I\'m Standing in Line</em> by John Lee Hooker</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"http://online.wsj.com/article/SB113089422321485853-search.html?KEYWORDS=airline+seating&amp;COLLECTION=wsjie/archive\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the <em>Wall Street Journal</em> article (subscription required) on America West\'s new \"reverse pyramid\" seating scheme</li>\r\n 	<li>Shouldn\'t they be spending their time on improving baggage handling?</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Wall of Death</em> by Richard &amp; Linda Thompson</li>\r\n 	<li>A friend and I are surprised to find ourselves both in town on a Wednesday</li>\r\n 	<li>I seem to hit the wall every 4-6 weeks and have to come off the road</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music --  <em>Pictures of You</em> by The Cure</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail451.html\"><em>IT Conversations</em> podcast</a> about Microsoft Research\'s <a href=\"http://research.microsoft.com/sendev/project_sensecam.aspx\">SenseCam research project</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"http://www.itconversations.com//clip.php?showid=451&amp;start=2:21&amp;stop=4:21\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to a excerpt of the <em>IT Conversations</em> podcast</li>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Ramblin\' Man</em> by the Allman Brothers Band</li>\r\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_21.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #21 - Science of Airline Boarding; New Ways for Travel Pictures','','inherit','closed','closed','','24-revision-v1','','','2019-03-01 09:37:25','2019-03-01 14:37:25','',24,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/01/24-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2286,1,'2019-03-01 09:38:58','2019-03-01 14:38:58','Another visit down to <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Memphis\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/memphis\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\">Memphis</a> prompts a confession about my obsession with pork barbeque and thoughts on how to find the best food in a new city. Other topics include \"voice of the travel company\" -- a letter from a British Airways manager gives his thoughts on the travel experiences of some TravelCommons listeners, and more Classic Travel Stories -- after-dinner stories about interrupted train trips in Eastern Europe. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_22.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_22.mp3\"]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons Podcast #22:\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Down in Memphis again at the beginning of the week</li>\r\n 	<li>Picture of the re-wrapped chain saw that caused problems in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/modules.php?op=modload&amp;name=News&amp;file=article&amp;sid=30&amp;mode=nested&amp;order=0&amp;thold=0\">Podcast #18</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<img src=\"./images/pix/tsa_chain_saw.jpg\" alt=\"\" />\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em>Damn Shame (Memphis Mix)</em> by <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Jay Farrar\" href=\"http://jayfarrar.net/\" rel=\"homepage\">Jay Farrar</a></li>\r\n 	<li>A British Airways manager provides his perspectives on the \"voice of the traveler\" stories in Podcasts #17 and #20</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://www.garageband.com/song?|pe1|S8LTM0LdsaSgZle_ZA\"><strong>GarageBand link</strong></a> to <em>Get Out of Memphis</em> by Chicago Kingsnakes</li>\r\n 	<li>Traveling to Memphis reveals an obsession</li>\r\n 	<li>Here\'s a picture of the Corky\'s pork barbeque plate in Memphis\'s airport<img src=\"./images/pix/mem_bbq_plate.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"http://www.chowhound.com/main.html\"><strong>Direct Link</strong></a> to the Chowhound.com website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>People Get Ready</em> by <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Jeff Beck\" href=\"http://www.jeffbeck.com\" rel=\"homepage\">Jeff Beck</a> and <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Rod Stewart\" href=\"http://www.rodstewart.com/\" rel=\"homepage\">Rod Stewart</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Classic Travel Stories -- Interrupted train trips in Slovakia and Hungary</li>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Ramblin\' Man</em> by the Allman Brothers Band</li>\r\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_22.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #22 - Other Side of the Ticket Counter; Finding Local Food','','inherit','closed','closed','','25-revision-v1','','','2019-03-01 09:38:58','2019-03-01 14:38:58','',25,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/01/25-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2287,1,'2019-03-01 09:40:56','2019-03-01 14:40:56','Another visit down to <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/memphis\">Memphis</a> prompts a confession about my obsession with pork barbecue and thoughts on how to find the best food in a new city. Other topics include \"voice of the travel company\" -- a letter from a British Airways manager gives his thoughts on the travel experiences of some TravelCommons listeners, and more Classic Travel Stories -- after-dinner stories about interrupted train trips in Eastern Europe. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_22.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_22.mp3\"]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons Podcast #22:\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Down in Memphis again at the beginning of the week</li>\r\n 	<li>Picture of the re-wrapped chain saw that caused problems in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/modules.php?op=modload&amp;name=News&amp;file=article&amp;sid=30&amp;mode=nested&amp;order=0&amp;thold=0\">Podcast #18</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/images/pix/tsa_chain_saw.jpg\" alt=\"\" />\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em>Damn Shame (Memphis Mix)</em> by <a href=\"http://jayfarrar.net/\">Jay Farrar</a></li>\r\n 	<li>A British Airways manager provides his perspectives on the \"voice of the traveler\" stories in Podcasts #17 and #20</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://www.garageband.com/song?|pe1|S8LTM0LdsaSgZle_ZA\"><strong>GarageBand link</strong></a> to <em>Get Out of Memphis</em> by Chicago Kingsnakes</li>\r\n 	<li>Traveling to Memphis reveals an obsession</li>\r\n 	<li>Here\'s a picture of the Corky\'s pork barbecue plate in Memphis\'s airport<img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/images/pix/mem_bbq_plate.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"http://www.chowhound.com/main.html\"><strong>Direct Link</strong></a> to the Chowhound.com website</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>People Get Ready</em> by <a href=\"http://www.jeffbeck.com\">Jeff Beck</a> and <a href=\"http://www.rodstewart.com/\">Rod Stewart</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Classic Travel Stories -- Interrupted train trips in Slovakia and Hungary</li>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Ramblin\' Man</em> by the Allman Brothers Band</li>\r\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_22.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #22 - Other Side of the Ticket Counter; Finding Local Food','','inherit','closed','closed','','25-revision-v1','','','2019-03-01 09:40:56','2019-03-01 14:40:56','',25,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/01/25-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2288,1,'2019-03-01 09:42:19','2019-03-01 14:42:19','This week\'s podcast is recorded in the bathroom of the Memphis Marriott. A day trip down to Indianapolis begs the question -- how do you make the decision between flying and driving? Then down in Memphis, a nightcap at the Marriott bar provides some entertaining scenes. Also, we discuss the right and wrong ways that companies use to control travel costs. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_23.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_23.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #23:\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Recorded in the bathroom of the Memphis Marriott</li>\r\n	<li>Traveled to Indy and Memphis this week</li>\r\n	<li>Please click through to the Listener Survey on the left side of the screen</li>\r\n	<li>Listener comments on the \"voice from the other side of the ticket counter\" from Podcast #22</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music -- <em>Delivery</em> by <a href=\"http://www.jenniferhelane.com/\">Jennifer Helane</a> from the <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com\">Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\r\n	<li>How to make the decision between flying and driving to Indianapolis</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Under Pressure</em> by David Bowie &amp; Queen</li>\r\n	<li>Increasing travel prices are prodding some companies to look at \"strategic sourcing\" their travel needs</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Noise -- Random sounds from the Blue Shoes bar in the Memphis Marriott</li>\r\n	<li>Regressing after spending too much time at hotel bars</li>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <em>Ramblin\' Man</em> by the Allman Brothers Band</li>\r\n	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_23.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>','Podcast #23 - Fly or Drive; Scenes from The Hotel Bar','','inherit','closed','closed','','26-revision-v1','','','2019-03-01 09:42:19','2019-03-01 14:42:19','',26,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/01/26-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2290,1,'2019-03-01 20:32:47','2019-03-02 01:32:47','Finally recorded in the <a href=\"http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=40.6247222222,-73.9522222222&amp;spn=0.1,0.1&amp;q=40.6247222222,-73.9522222222 (Brooklyn)&amp;t=h\">Brooklyn</a> Marriott in <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/new-york-city\">New York</a> after hauling my recording gear across the Atlantic to <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/the-netherlands/amsterdam\">Amsterdam</a>, over to Minneapolis, and finally to New York. In this episode, a number of listeners comment on airport security, we talk about breaking out of the \"travel bubble\" that insulates so many frequent travelers from the cities they visit, and I answer some listener questions on mileage credit cards and how to get the most out of frequent flier status. Also, at the end of the episode, we announce our 3rd Anniversary concert. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_64.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_64.mp3\"]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #64:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none\">\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Recorded in the Brooklyn Marriott after trying to find time to record it in Minneapolis and Haarlem, the Netherlands</li>\r\n 	<li>A medley of earlier TravelCommons hotel room introductions</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://ghosts.nin.com/main/home\"><em>7 Ghosts I</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.nin.com/\">Nine Inch Nails</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none\">\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Leo Vegoda inventories the security screening inconsistencies he\'s faced in China, the US, and Europe</li>\r\n 	<li>Enrolling in the <a href=\"http://www.flyclear.com/\">Clear</a> registered traveler program, I gave up images of my driver\'s license, passport, irises, and fingerprints</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"http://blog.transparentsociety.com/\">Lori Humm</a> and <a href=\"http://budacast.hu\">Drew Leifheit</a> agree that the nipple ring removal incident typifies the TSA\'s disregard for travelers</li>\r\n 	<li>I hate how far away the BWI and CLE rental car facilities are from the terminals. Makes me choose DCA over BWI</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>When Irish Eyes are Burning</em> by <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/music/listeners/artistdetails.php?BandHash=a45aaee36685b61a392acf793155e127\">the Ike Reilly Assassination</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Breaking the Travel Bubble</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none\">\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Sometimes I get tired of traveling within the travel bubble that frequent travelers often construct for themselves</li>\r\n 	<li>Staying in the Brooklyn Marriott, taking the subway from the Borough Hall stop in Brooklyn to the 32nd St stop on Park Ave certainly gets me up close and personal with a lot of NYC residents</li>\r\n 	<li>Taking the commuter train from Amsterdam to Utrecht, I was engulfed in a swarm of bicyclists – the commuters got off their train, hopped on their bicycles in the dark, drizzly, 40 degree January night, and rode home</li>\r\n 	<li>Some travelers like to stay in the same hotel every time they visit a city – the \"Cheers\" syndrome – you wanna go where everybody knows your name</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Stupid Now</em> by <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/music/listeners/artistdetails.php?BandHash=be2a489f478e6d5335652fc8925eee03\">Bob Mould</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Mark’s Travel Tips</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none\">\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Joy in Denver asked me if I use mileage credit cards. I primarily use <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Diners Club International\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diners_Club_International\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Diners Club</a> because it doesn\'t lock you into a single mileage program. I\'ve used it to \"top off\" other accounts, where I needed some extra mileage to meet an award level.</li>\r\n 	<li>I also have a Starbucks Duetto Visa card that I also use occasionally for business expenses</li>\r\n 	<li>Brian from <a href=\"http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=41.7480555556,-88.1655555556&amp;spn=0.1,0.1&amp;q=41.7480555556,-88.1655555556 (Naperville%2C%20Illinois)&amp;t=h\">Naperville, IL</a> recently earned Gold status on American and is wondering the best way to maximize the benefit</li>\r\n 	<li>Key benefits of this first status level are separate security lines and priority boarding</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing\r\n</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917634.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://nin.com/\">Nine Inch Nails</a> and the <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/\">Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Feedback at comments@travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_64.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #64 - Escaping the Travel Bubble; Mark\'s Travel Tips','','inherit','closed','closed','','99-revision-v1','','','2019-03-01 20:32:47','2019-03-02 01:32:47','',99,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/01/99-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2291,1,'2019-03-01 20:33:40','2019-03-02 01:33:40','Finally recorded in the <a href=\"http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=40.6247222222,-73.9522222222&amp;spn=0.1,0.1&amp;q=40.6247222222,-73.9522222222 (Brooklyn)&amp;t=h\">Brooklyn</a> Marriott in <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/new-york-city\">New York</a> after hauling my recording gear across the Atlantic to <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/the-netherlands/amsterdam\">Amsterdam</a>, over to Minneapolis, and finally to New York. In this episode, a number of listeners comment on airport security, we talk about breaking out of the \"travel bubble\" that insulates so many frequent travelers from the cities they visit, and I answer some listener questions on mileage credit cards and how to get the most out of frequent flier status. Also, at the end of the episode, we announce our 3rd Anniversary concert. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_64.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_64.mp3\"]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #64:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Recorded in the Brooklyn Marriott after trying to find time to record it in Minneapolis and Haarlem, the Netherlands</li>\r\n 	<li>A medley of earlier TravelCommons hotel room introductions</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://ghosts.nin.com/main/home\"><em>7 Ghosts I</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.nin.com/\">Nine Inch Nails</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Leo Vegoda inventories the security screening inconsistencies he\'s faced in China, the US, and Europe</li>\r\n 	<li>Enrolling in the <a href=\"http://www.flyclear.com/\">Clear</a> registered traveler program, I gave up images of my driver\'s license, passport, irises, and fingerprints</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"http://blog.transparentsociety.com/\">Lori Humm</a> and <a href=\"http://budacast.hu\">Drew Leifheit</a> agree that the nipple ring removal incident typifies the TSA\'s disregard for travelers</li>\r\n 	<li>I hate how far away the BWI and CLE rental car facilities are from the terminals. Makes me choose DCA over BWI</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>When Irish Eyes are Burning</em> by <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/music/listeners/artistdetails.php?BandHash=a45aaee36685b61a392acf793155e127\">the Ike Reilly Assassination</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Breaking the Travel Bubble</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Sometimes I get tired of traveling within the travel bubble that frequent travelers often construct for themselves</li>\r\n 	<li>Staying in the Brooklyn Marriott, taking the subway from the Borough Hall stop in Brooklyn to the 32nd St stop on Park Ave certainly gets me up close and personal with a lot of NYC residents</li>\r\n 	<li>Taking the commuter train from Amsterdam to Utrecht, I was engulfed in a swarm of bicyclists – the commuters got off their train, hopped on their bicycles in the dark, drizzly, 40 degree January night, and rode home</li>\r\n 	<li>Some travelers like to stay in the same hotel every time they visit a city – the \"Cheers\" syndrome – you wanna go where everybody knows your name</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Stupid Now</em> by <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/music/listeners/artistdetails.php?BandHash=be2a489f478e6d5335652fc8925eee03\">Bob Mould</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Mark’s Travel Tips</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Joy in Denver asked me if I use mileage credit cards. I primarily use <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Diners Club International\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diners_Club_International\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Diners Club</a> because it doesn\'t lock you into a single mileage program. I\'ve used it to \"top off\" other accounts, where I needed some extra mileage to meet an award level.</li>\r\n 	<li>I also have a Starbucks Duetto Visa card that I also use occasionally for business expenses</li>\r\n 	<li>Brian from <a href=\"http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=41.7480555556,-88.1655555556&amp;spn=0.1,0.1&amp;q=41.7480555556,-88.1655555556 (Naperville%2C%20Illinois)&amp;t=h\">Naperville, IL</a> recently earned Gold status on American and is wondering the best way to maximize the benefit</li>\r\n 	<li>Key benefits of this first status level are separate security lines and priority boarding</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing\r\n</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917634.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://nin.com/\">Nine Inch Nails</a> and the <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/\">Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Feedback at comments@travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_64.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #64 - Escaping the Travel Bubble; Mark\'s Travel Tips','','inherit','closed','closed','','99-revision-v1','','','2019-03-01 20:33:40','2019-03-02 01:33:40','',99,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/01/99-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2292,1,'2019-03-01 20:37:30','2019-03-02 01:37:30','After a down-and-back trip to Tampa, this week\'s topics include thoughts on the recently announced changes to America West\'s and United\'s boarding schemes -- are they focusing on the right thing? Also, the need to stay home sometimes, and how <a href=\"http://research.microsoft.com/\">Microsoft Research</a>\'s personal black box project might change the way we think about travel pictures. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_21.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_21.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the show notes from Travelcommons podcast #21:\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Flew down to Tampa for a Monday morning meeting</li>\r\n 	<li>Haven\'t written anything in my <a href=\"http://www.moleskinerie.com/\">Moleskine</a> travel journal -- this podcast seems to be monopolizing my creative time</li>\r\n 	<li>Thanks to all the listeners who are using the \"Recommend Us\" link on refer their friends to the podcast</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"http://clothingcult.com/?p=32\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to Hilary Baumann\'s Pant Rant on her <em>ClothingCult.com</em> blog</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music --  <em>I\'m Standing in Line</em> by John Lee Hooker</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"http://online.wsj.com/article/SB113089422321485853-search.html?KEYWORDS=airline+seating&amp;COLLECTION=wsjie/archive\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the <em>Wall Street Journal</em> article (subscription required) on America West\'s new \"reverse pyramid\" seating scheme</li>\r\n 	<li>Shouldn\'t they be spending their time on improving baggage handling?</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Wall of Death</em> by Richard &amp; Linda Thompson</li>\r\n 	<li>A friend and I are surprised to find ourselves both in town on a Wednesday</li>\r\n 	<li>I seem to hit the wall every 4-6 weeks and have to come off the road</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music --  <em>Pictures of You</em> by The Cure</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail451.html\"><em>IT Conversations</em> podcast</a> about Microsoft Research\'s <a href=\"http://research.microsoft.com/sendev/project_sensecam.aspx\">SenseCam research project</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"http://www.itconversations.com//clip.php?showid=451&amp;start=2:21&amp;stop=4:21\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to a excerpt of the <em>IT Conversations</em> podcast</li>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Ramblin\' Man</em> by the Allman Brothers Band</li>\r\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_21.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #21 - Science of Airline Boarding; New Ways for Travel Pictures','','inherit','closed','closed','','24-revision-v1','','','2019-03-01 20:37:30','2019-03-02 01:37:30','',24,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/01/24-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2293,1,'2019-03-01 20:42:04','2019-03-02 01:42:04','Back on the road after the Thanksgiving holiday, this week\'s podcast is recorded in the bathroom of the Durham, NC Marriott and edited in the RDU Admirals Club. A listener asks \"What do you miss when you travel?\" Also, some ideas on staying connected with the family -- replacing those random bits of conversation while on the road, and some careless moments with rental cars. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommon_24.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_24.mp3\"]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #24:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Recorded in the bathroom of the Durham, NC Marriott</li>\r\n 	<li>Paying for last week\'s holiday with a rough triangulation trip across Tampa, Memphis, and <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/the-south/the-triangle\">Raleigh-Durham</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Audio clip of an Atlanta-Hartsfield emergency alarm</li>\r\n 	<li>Here\'s the ClustrMap image showing web site traffic for the month of November<img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/images/pix/clustermap.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></li>\r\n 	<li>Please click through to the Listener Survey on the left side of the screen</li>\r\n 	<li>Another listener experience with <a href=\"http://www.ba.com\">British Airways</a> -- a positive one</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>A listener asks \"What do I miss when I travel?\"</li>\r\n 	<li>Recreating my morning routine in hotels</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Miss You</em> by the Rolling Stones</li>\r\n 	<li>The regular rhythms of conversation get disrupted when one party is on travel</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Fast Car</em> by Tracy Chapman</li>\r\n 	<li>A couple of stories about abusing rental cars</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/21561359@N00/103066097/\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to a picture of the Mustang speedometer in Phoenix</li>\r\n 	<li>Closing music --  <em>Ramblin\' Man</em> by the Allman Brothers Band</li>\r\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_24.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #24 - What Do You Miss When You Travel; Fun with Rental Cars','','inherit','closed','closed','','27-revision-v1','','','2019-03-01 20:42:04','2019-03-02 01:42:04','',27,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/01/27-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2295,1,'2019-03-01 20:46:52','2019-03-02 01:46:52','This week\'s podcast is recorded in the bathroom of the <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldsmar%2C_Florida\">Oldsmar, FL</a> Marriott. In the midst of a bunch of work and a tough travel itinerary, why am I surprised that I just can\'t get into the holiday spirit? A huge snowstorm blowing through <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/chicago\">Chicago</a> threatens to strand me in <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/memphis\">Memphis</a> -- until another traveler suggests driving the 550 miles home. And a Classic Travel Story from a former road warrior about finding love in a hotel bar. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_25.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_25.mp3\"]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #25:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Recorded in the bathroom of the Oldsmar, FL Courtyard</li>\r\n 	<li>Another tough travel week -- sleep deprivation from early morning flights, severe winter travel problems, and a whole lot of work</li>\r\n 	<li>Starting a 5-week sponsorship from <a href=\"http://expertflyer.com/travelcommons\">ExpertFlyer.com</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Steve Frick from <a href=\"http://fricksworld.blogspot.com/\">Frick\'s World</a> posts a great rental car comment on podcast #24</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music --  <em>I\'ll Be Home by Christmas</em> by <a href=\"http://elvis.com\">Elvis Presley</a></li>\r\n 	<li>I\'m having a tough time getting into the holiday spirit</li>\r\n 	<li>Maybe I\'ll have an \"espresso\" Christmas -- a concentrated, more intense holiday experience</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Run Run Rudolph</em> by <a href=\"http://www.dwightyoakam.com/\">Dwight Yoakam</a></li>\r\n 	<li>A winter storm in Chicago cancels flights and forces a decision -- wait \'til the morning or drive home tonight</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/images/pix/ord-mem.jpg\" alt=\"\" />\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <img alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Every Picture Tells a Story</em> by <a href=\"http://www.rodstewart.com/\">Rod Stewart</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Classic Travel Story -- Meeting a husband in a hotel bar</li>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Ramblin\' Man</em> by the Allman Brothers Band</li>\r\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommon_25.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #25 - Long Drive Home; Meeting Your Future in a Hotel Bar','','inherit','closed','closed','','28-revision-v1','','','2019-03-01 20:46:52','2019-03-02 01:46:52','',28,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/01/28-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2297,1,'2019-03-01 20:51:38','2019-03-02 01:51:38','Recorded in the bathroom of the <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/pennsylvania/philadelphia\">Philadelphia</a> Marriott, this week\'s podcast comes at the end of my last flight of the year -- a triangulation across <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/boston\">Boston</a>, <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/new-england/providence\">Providence, RI</a>, and Philadelphia. A light schedule let me catch a good lunch and dinner in Philadelphia. A weekend ski trip to <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/rocky-mountains/denver\">Denver</a> prompts thoughts on the disconnect between business travelers and resort hotels, and the increased number of non-frequent elite status travelers. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_26.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file. \r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_26.mp3\"]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #26:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Recorded in the bathroom of the Philadelphia Marriott</li>\r\n 	<li>Quick 3-day triangulation through the northeast -- Boston, Providence, and Philadelphia -- before settling in back home for the Christmas holidays</li>\r\n 	<li>Get a great Hertz rental car -- an <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infiniti_G\">Infiniti G35</a> -- and smoke the drive from Boston to Providence</li>\r\n 	<li>Had time for a couple of great solo meals in Philadelphia -- lunch at a counter in <a href=\"http://www.readingterminalmarket.org/\"> the Reading Terminal Market</a> and dinner at the sushi bar in<a href=\"http://www.morimotorestaurant.com\"> Morimoto</a></li>\r\n 	<li><strong><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/travelcommons/103281516/\">Direct Link</a></strong> to a picture of Tommy Dinic\'s lunch counter at the Reading Terminal Market</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/Changes-Latitudes-Attitudes-Jimmy-Buffett/dp/B000002PBN%3FSubscriptionId%3D0G81C5DAZ03ZR9WH9X82%26tag%3Dzemanta-20%26linkCode%3Dxm2%26camp%3D2025%26creative%3D165953%26creativeASIN%3DB000002PBN\">Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes</a></em> by <a href=\"http://margaritaville.com\">Jimmy Buffett</a></li>\r\n 	<li>The challenges of staying in a resort location while on business travel</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Brass in Pocket</em> by The Pretenders</li>\r\n 	<li>Predictions of growth in the numbers of elite status travelers</li>\r\n 	<li>Many of these new elites are qualifying through non-flying programs</li>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Ramblin\' Man</em> by the Allman Brothers Band</li>\r\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_26.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #26 - Business Travel Among Vacationers; Explosion of Elites','','inherit','closed','closed','','29-revision-v1','','','2019-03-01 20:51:38','2019-03-02 01:51:38','',29,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/01/29-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2299,1,'2019-03-01 20:54:26','2019-03-02 01:54:26','Spent the holiday week digging through the TravelCommon archives and assembled a \"Best of TravelCommons 2005\" episode. Starting with a medley of hotel bathrooms, we revisit some rants on the TSA, the 3-episode Sean Penn arc, and excerpts from some of the best stories of 2005. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_27.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_27.mp3\"]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #27:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Home for Christmas week, recover from a tough 4 weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas</li>\r\n 	<li>Thanks to everyone who has left, or tried to leave, a review on the TravelCommons page of iTunes</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>Medley of TravelCommons Hotel Bathroom studios</li>\r\n 	<li>from T/C #5 - Why I record in bathrooms</li>\r\n 	<li>Medley of TSA rants</li>\r\n 	<li>from T/C #5-7 - Sean Penn comments</li>\r\n 	<li>from T/C #7 - Steve Frick of <a href=\"http://fricksworld.blogspot.com\">Frick\'s World</a> is a little uncomfortable recording in the bathroom</li>\r\n 	<li>from T/C #14 - Willie Evans from the Scots Band <a href=\"http://www.evangeline.org.uk/\"><strong>Evangeline</strong></a> talks about writing a travel song</li>\r\n 	<li>from T/C #17 - My kids\' view of travel</li>\r\n 	<li>from T/C #20 - Allan Marko tells a story about rapid airplane repair</li>\r\n 	<li>from T/C #3 - Flyers from <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/great-lakes/cleveland\">Cleveland</a> to <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/chicago\">Chicago</a> looking for an early exit</li>\r\n 	<li>from T/C #11 - Packing light leaves no margin for error</li>\r\n 	<li>from T/C #23 - Patrons at the hotel bar drinking shots</li>\r\n 	<li>from T/C #19 - Different colors in <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/italy/emilia-romagna-and-san-marino/bologna\">Bologna, Italy</a></li>\r\n 	<li>from T/C #13 - Imaginative way to sleep on red-eyes</li>\r\n 	<li>from T/C #21 - Decisions on vacation photos</li>\r\n 	<li>from T/C #4 - Disappointed web search</li>\r\n 	<li>from T/C #24 - Fun with Rental Cars</li>\r\n 	<li>from T/C #7 - Air sickness without the bag</li>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Ramblin\' Man</em> by the Allman Brothers Band</li>\r\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_27.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #27 - Best of 2005','','inherit','closed','closed','','30-revision-v1','','','2019-03-01 20:54:26','2019-03-02 01:54:26','',30,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/01/30-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2300,1,'2019-03-01 20:58:08','2019-03-02 01:58:08','Coming to you this week once again from the Oldsmar, FL Courtyard, I\'m back on the road in the first week of the new year.  A listener asks about selecting a carry-on bag that meets the conflicting restrictions of airlines.  We also talk about the hassle of forgetting things and have a couple of Classic Travel Stories about airplane mechanical difficulties.  Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_28.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_28.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr /> Here are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #28:\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Recorded in the bathroom of the Oldsmar, FL Courtyard, near Tampa</li>\r\n	<li>Quick down-and-back trip to start the new year</li>\r\n	<li>Still more leisure travelers than business travelers a couple of days after the holidays</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail764.html\"><strong>Direct Link</strong></a> to the Ze Frank podcast on airline seatback emergency cards at IT Conversations</li>\r\n	<li>TSA seems to be back on the shoe warpath, now that they can\'t strip search people for lethal fingernail clippers</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Those Shoes</em> by The Eagles</li>\r\n	<li>A listener writes that the airline carry-on restrictions  are all over the place</li>\r\n	<li>European airlines seem to focus on weight, while US airlines only care if the bag will fit in the overhead bin</li>\r\n	<li>More important than anything else, pick a black bag</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Don\'t You (Forget About Me)</em> by Simple Minds</li>\r\n	<li>Just can\'t get into the travel groove</li>\r\n	<li>Forgot my toiletries kit and had to re-trace my grooming steps in the middle of the Oldsmar CVS so I could remember what I needed</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Every Picture Tells A Story</em> by Rod Steward</li>\r\n	<li>Classic Travel Stories -- Just a couple of mechanical difficulties</li>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <em>Ramblin\' Man</em> by the Allman Brothers Band</li>\r\n	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_28.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>','Podcast #28 - Controversy of Carry-On; Put Your Head Between Your Knees…','','inherit','closed','closed','','31-revision-v1','','','2019-03-01 20:58:08','2019-03-02 01:58:08','',31,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/01/31-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2301,1,'2019-03-01 21:00:07','2019-03-02 02:00:07','Recorded in the bathroom of the Bellagio in Las Vegas, this special \"Listeners\' Feedback\" edition is 100% listener content from e-mails and website comments.  I tell listener stories about carry-on luggage and troubled airplane landings, while two listeners take the mic to talk about the technology they use in their travels.  Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_29-96.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_29-96.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n\r\n<hr /> Here are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #29:\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Recorded in the bathroom of the Bellagio in Las Vegas</li>\r\n	<li>Two trips this week -- a quick trip to Memphis, and then out to Las Vegas through the end of the week</li>\r\n	<li>Highly recommend riding the Hertz bus in Memphis when Marvin is driving</li>\r\n	<li>I\'m not a big fan of business meetings in Vegas -- it\'s too geared for leisure travelers</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Carry On Regardless</em> by Van Morrison</li>\r\n	<li>Rich Wisco shares his luggage strategy.  <a href=\"http://richmanwisco.blogspot.com\"><strong>His blog</strong></a> has some good travel pictures</li>\r\n	<li>Chris from Tulsa describes an interesting carry-on weight test administered by Southwest</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>I Don\'t Like to Travel</em> by Byther Smith from the <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com\">Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\r\n	<li>Chris from Tulsa talks about harrowing approach into PHX</li>\r\n	<li>Allan Marko talks about getting his head between his knees on an approach to SNA</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>Travel Tech -- a new semi-regular topic about the technology that travelers use</li>\r\n	<li>I found the <a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/whatsinmybag/interesting/\"><em>whatsinmybag</em></a> Flickr collection on the <a href=\"http://fricksworld.blogspot.com/\">Frick\'s World blog</a> <a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/fricksworld/6408911/in/set-160005/\">(here\'s the picture of his bag)</a></li>\r\n	<li>Ed Vawter raves about the iGo power supply</li>\r\n	<li>Dan O\'Leary of the <a href=\"http://hotelcoffee.blogspot.com/\">HotelCoffee podcast</a> talks about his travel technology bundle</li>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <em>Ramblin\' Man</em> by the Allman Brothers Band</li>\r\n	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_29-96.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>','Podcast #29 - Special Listeners’ Feedback Show','','inherit','closed','closed','','32-revision-v1','','','2019-03-01 21:00:07','2019-03-02 02:00:07','',32,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/01/32-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2302,1,'2019-03-01 21:01:53','2019-03-02 02:01:53','Spent all week at home and ended up catching a cold from my son. This week\'s topics are spurred by listener e-mails and web postings. We talk about bad experiences with rude TSA screeners, some thoughts about travel toiletries, and the cost of broadband on the road. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_31.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_31.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n<hr /> Here are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #31:\r\n	<ul>\r\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Recorded in the TravelCommons studio in suburban Chicago</li>\r\n	<li>No travel this week, but making up for it next week with travel to Memphis, Phoenix, and LA</li>\r\n	<li>Go through the listener demographics from the Podtrac listener survey</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>State Trooper</em> by Bruce Springsteen</li>\r\n	<li><strong><a href=\"http://mfile.akamai.com/11649/wmv/pepsicoinc.download.akamai.com//11649/mm/sierra_mist/tv_ads/video/wand_100k.wmv\">Direct Link</a></strong> to the Sierra Mist Super Bowl commercial poking fun at TSA screeners</li>\r\n	<li>A listener tells about getting yelled at by a BWI TSA screener for attempting to take a pencil sharpener on a flight</li>\r\n	<li><strong><a href=\"http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4438273.stm\">Direct Link</a></strong> to a BBC web site article quoting a former TSA official about problems being caused by overzealous officers</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>A bad Gillette Super Bowl commercial for a 5-blade razor reminds me of the old Saturday Night Live sketch about how silly a 3-blade razor would be</li>\r\n	<li>A listener talks about how shopping for toiletries forces him to explore new cities</li>\r\n	<li>My advice is to keep it simple -- take only what you really need and leave the battery-powered stuff at home</li>\r\n	<li>No room for Metrosexuals in the Road Warrior ranks</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>The Shadowlands</em> by Ryan Adams</li>\r\n	<li>A listener thinks that hotel broadband charges are the latest in a growing trend of nickel-&amp;-dime charges</li>\r\n	<li>Many travelers are setting up free Wi-Fi \"bubbles\" with their travel wireless routers</li>\r\n	<li>Use the free program <a href=\"http://www.netstumbler.com\">NetStumbler</a> to find free \"bubbles\" before paying the hotel fees</li>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <em>Ramblin\' Man</em> by the Allman Brothers Band</li>\r\n	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_31.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #31 - TSA Rage, Woes of WiFi','','inherit','closed','closed','','33-revision-v1','','','2019-03-01 21:01:53','2019-03-02 02:01:53','',33,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/01/33-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2303,1,'2019-03-01 21:02:58','2019-03-02 02:02:58','Recorded in the Marriott Courtyard in Irvine, CA, this week\'s visits to old haunts in Memphis and Huntington Beach prompts thoughts on how traveling back home is different.  Also, we talk about experiences in searching for free WiFi hotspots, and a bit of puzzlement about the TSA\'s \'Registered Traveler\' program. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_32.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_32.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n<hr /> Here are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #32:\r\n	<ul>\r\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Recorded in the Marriott Courtyard Hotel in Irvine, CA</li>\r\n	<li>Finally received a bit of notice from American Airlines after hitting the 2 million mile mark in January</li>\r\n	<li>A listener writes in about his public transit experiences in Boston, London, and Geneva</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Fly, Fly, Fly</em> by Adrina Thorpe</li>\r\n	<li>\"Medley\" of past TravelCommons bathroom intros</li>\r\n	<li>Driving through Memphis checking out old houses and neighborhoods</li>\r\n	<li>Walking down Main Street and the pier in Huntington Beach, CA</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Beggarstown</em> by Hollow Horse</li>\r\n	<li>Two resources for free WiFi hot spots -- <a href=\"http://wififreespot.com\">wififreespot.com</a> and <a href=\"http://metrofreefi.com\">metrofreefi.com</a></li>\r\n	<li>Use the free program <a href=\"http://www.netstumbler.com\">NetStumbler</a> to search for hot spots</li>\r\n	<li>Mid-tier hotels are racing each other to light up their lobbies with free WiFi</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Homemade Hurricane</em> by amplifico</li>\r\n	<li>TSA\'a much delayed \"Registered Traveler\" program is in the spotlight again</li>\r\n	<li>Benefits you get for $80 fee and a background check is unclear</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com\">Podshow Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\r\n	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_32.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #32 - Traveling Home, Trolling for Free WiFi','','inherit','closed','closed','','34-revision-v1','','','2019-03-01 21:02:58','2019-03-02 02:02:58','',34,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/01/34-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2304,1,'2019-03-01 21:04:57','2019-03-02 02:04:57','Two trips but no hotels means this episode is recorded in the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago.  Rummaging through the virtual mailbag, I comment on listener e-mails and web site postings.  I also talk about finding some free WiFi in Houston\'s Bush International Airport and give a guided tour of my briefcase.  Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_33.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_33.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n<hr /> Here are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #33:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Recorded in the TravelCommons studios outside Chicago</li>\r\n	<li>Had a couple of down-&amp;-back day trips to Houston and Boston</li>\r\n	<li>Bad times in \"slum\" terminals</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Love Survives</em> by Lovespirals</li>\r\n	<li>A listener is interested in podcasts about travel, not tourism -- doesn\'t have time for touring</li>\r\n	<li>Another listener talks about begin subject to \"TSA Rage\" in Saipan</li>\r\n	<li>Chris Christensen of the <a href=\"http://amateurtraveler.com/\">Amateur Traveler Podcast</a> talks about his train-to-plane experiences</li>\r\n	<li>Peter Rukavina\'s <a href=\"http://www.ruk.ca\">ruk.ca</a> blog corrects my Canadian Maritimes geography</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Turn Around and Say Goodbye </em> by C.J. Chenier</li>\r\n	<li>Hanging outside or underneath Continential Airlines\' Presidents\' Club is a good spot to leech WiFi</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Shine </em> by Hungry Lucy</li>\r\n	<li>An audio tour of my briefcase</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/21561359@N00/102434287/\"><strong>Direct Link</strong></a> to annotated Flickr picture of what\'s in my briefcase</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com\">Podshow Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\r\n	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_33.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #33 - Listener Mailbag, What’s in My Briefcase?','','inherit','closed','closed','','35-revision-v1','','','2019-03-01 21:04:57','2019-03-02 02:04:57','',35,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/01/35-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2306,1,'2019-03-01 21:11:27','2019-03-02 02:11:27','Back in front of the microphone after a week off, it\'s been a light travel week. A quick down-&amp;-back to Tampa offers the opportunity to take a 20-minute vacation on the Gulf of Mexico.  A flight attendant on my flight back from Houston last week gives a smooth performance in passenger care, and a couple of listeners contribute to the latest installment of Travel Tech.  Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_34.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_34.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n<hr /> Here are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #34:\r\n	<ul>\r\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Back in the TravelCommons studios outside Chicago after a week off</li>\r\n	<li>Had a down-&amp;-back day trip to Tampa</li>\r\n	<li>Spending the rest of the week booking \"frequent driver\" points in the Chicago exurbs</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>10p Mix</em> by amplifico</li>\r\n	<li>My last trip to Tampa and I decided I needed to see the ocean -- at least once</li>\r\n	<li>Drove west from Oldsmar \'til I hit Dunedin</li>\r\n<img src=\"./images/pix/Oldsmar_map.jpg\" alt=\"Google Map of the Oldsmar area\" />\r\n	<li><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/travelcommons/107616114/\"><strong>Direct Link</strong></a> to a Flickr picture from the beach</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Emily C</em> by Fiasco</li>\r\n	<li>A flight attendant does a smooth job of handling a disgruntled passenger</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Keep Your Motor Running</em> by Dave Hole</li>\r\n	<li>Ed Vawter sent in audio comments about useful features on the United Airlines website and SeatGuru.com</li>\r\n	<li>Leo Vegoda finds his new Bose headphones very useful on his flight from London to Perth</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com\">Podshow Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\r\n	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_34.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #34 - 20-Minute Vacation, Making It Look Easy','','inherit','closed','closed','','36-revision-v1','','','2019-03-01 21:11:27','2019-03-02 02:11:27','',36,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/01/36-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2308,1,'2019-03-01 21:15:56','2019-03-02 02:15:56','Back after a longer-than-planned absence, this episode is recorded at the Laguna Cliffs Marriott in <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dana_Point%2C_California\">Dana Point, CA</a>.  We talk about the <a href=\"http://www.tsa.gov\">TSA</a>\'s return to a hard line on shoes, the thing I miss most when I\'m off the road, and the latest way for airlines to raise cash from their frequent flyer programs. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_35.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_35.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #35:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Recorded at the Laguna Cliffs Marriott, overlooking the Pacific Ocean in Southern California</li>\r\n	<li><strong><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/travelcommons/118543711/\">Direct Link</a></strong> to a Flickr picture looking out my hotel room window to the ocean</li>\r\n	<li>Apologize for the longer-than-intended absence -- caused by moving houses and then a crushing load of work</li>\r\n	<li>A stay in the <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_International_Airport\">SFO</a> Marriott gave me a sample of Marriott\'s new \"Revive\" bed -- nice but no threat to Westin\'s \"Heavenly Bed\"</li>\r\n	<li>Leo Vegoda talks about great flights on Quantas and a bad time in <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurt_Airport\">Frankfurt airport</a></li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Waking Hour</em> by <a href=\"http://www.lorenamire.com/\">Lorena Mire</a></li>\r\n	<li>The TSA seems to be going back to the bad old days of shoe fetish</li>\r\n	<li>In some airports, though, the abbreviated secondary search is quicker than putting your shoes back on</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>One Day</em> by <a href=\"http://www.hollowhorse.co.uk/\">Hollow Horse</a></li>\r\n	<li>Talked with two guys within two hours who both told me they were changing jobs to reduce their travel</li>\r\n	<li>I couldn\'t <em>not</em> travel -- I would miss the different things I see</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Clear My Head</em> by <a href=\"http://www.thefiasco.net/\">FIASCO</a></li>\r\n	<li>Chris Chufo sent in note about United\'s offer to sell Mileage Plus status through pre-paid airfare</li>\r\n	<li>There have always been ways to accelerate your path to status, but travel companies seem to now be publicizing them</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com\">Podshow Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\r\n	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_35.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #35 - What I Miss About Travel, Milking the Status Seekers','','inherit','closed','closed','','37-revision-v1','','','2019-03-01 21:15:56','2019-03-02 02:15:56','',37,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/01/37-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2309,1,'2019-03-01 21:18:06','2019-03-02 02:18:06','Recorded in the Orlando Downtown Marriott, I talk about a real rarity -- a planeful of happy people.  Also, the results of a recent study confirm that hotels are increasing their use of add-on fees and surcharges, and listener feedback about the timeliness of long-haul vs. commuter flights. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_36.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_36.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #36:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Recorded at the Orlando Downtown Marriott</li>\r\n	<li>Took a pass at staying in a Disney resort -- great for family vacations but not for business</li>\r\n	<li>A listener tells a story about a good experience traveling from <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/new-zealand\">New Zealand</a> to the UK</li>\r\n	<li>Another listener talks about clearing security in -40°C weather</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Carolina</em> by <a href=\"http:/http://www.jeremyhopkins.com//\">Jeremy Hopkins</a></li>\r\n	<li>Had a happy flight down to Mouse Land with a plane full of international travelers</li>\r\n	<li>A Japanese woman throws the flight attendant a curve by ordering an iced coffee</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Black Cup of Coffee</em> by <a href=\"http://myspace.com/askmewhen/\">Ask Me When</a></li>\r\n	<li>Parking fees at hotels are starting to get under my skin</li>\r\n	<li><strong><a href=\"http://www.hotelexecutive.com/newswire/pub/_12690.asp\">Direct Link</a></strong> -- PwC forecasts that hotel fees and surcharges will keep increasing in 2006</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by <a href=\"http://www.evangeline.org.uk\">Evangeline</a></li>\r\n	<li>Leo Vegoda sent in an audio comment about his recent experience on a commuter flight from <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/the-netherlands/amsterdam\">Amsterdam</a> to London</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com\">Podshow Music Network</a></li>\r\n	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_36.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n','Podcast #36 - Happiest Flight, Long and Short of It','','inherit','closed','closed','','38-revision-v1','','','2019-03-01 21:18:06','2019-03-02 02:18:06','',38,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/01/38-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2311,1,'2019-03-01 21:20:28','2019-03-02 02:20:28','Recorded in the <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Mateo%2C_California\">San Mateo, CA</a> Marriott, we work through a bunch of listener feedback and follow-up items, talk about what seems to be a general increase in the crankiness of frequent travelers -- for good cause or the whining of spoiled brats? -- and stumbling across what seemed to be the spontaneous break-out of a \"Fame\" episode in O\'Hare. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_37.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_37.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #37:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Recorded at the San Mateo, CA Marriott</li>\r\n	<li>Lots of flying over the past two weeks -- triangulating across SF and Atlanta last week; just SF this week</li>\r\n	<li>Ate dinner at <a href=\"http://www.mistraldining.com/lev1_restaurant.html\">Mistral Restaurant</a> in <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redwood_City%2C_California\">Redwood City, CA</a> -- the heart of Oracle land</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/download_track.php?id=CE7F00E4A147D957EAF4B39D80B3D884BF6DC2714AC89817905F6D823C3C58AA2D2BC4C1337AE3571166DB55DC19CD47\">A Rose Among Ruins (Guli Dar Wairaanahaa)</a></em> by <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=47006A4B4EB5D7804F4A3D1F2E26A25623ED5CBC6275EDCD211CEE7D57B96215\">The Afghan Music Project</a></li>\r\n	<li>Chris Christensen of the <a href=\"http://amateurtraveler.com/\">Amateur Traveler Podcast</a> comments on the Canadian traveler story in episode #36 -- -40° is the same in the in both the Fahrenheit and <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celsius\">Celsius</a> scales</li>\r\n	<li>Dan O\'Leary of the <a href=\"http://hotelcoffee.blogspot.com/\">HotelCoffee</a> podcast gives his thoughts on <a href=\"http://www.united.com\">United Airlines</a>\' Ted strategy</li>\r\n	<li>Allan Marko relates his recent experience with a business conference at <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/florida/orlando/sights/entertainment/walt-disney-world\">DisneyWorld</a>\'s Swan and Dolphin hotel</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/download_track.php?id=8C49C1D87D4423CD6B5680C66970A634CCD72C687652ECF3EB567A09D45DD6EE2D2BC4C1337AE3571166DB55DC19CD47\">The Point of Purchase</a></em> by <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=17CD797AF2C9A2E56269DAD9433E440623ED5CBC6275EDCD211CEE7D57B96215\">Harry Manx</a></li>\r\n	<li>Frequent travelers seem to be breaking out of the \"cone of silence\" to sound off on poor service</li>\r\n	<li>Lots of niggling problems during my stay at the San Mateo Marriott probably means I won\'t stay here again</li>\r\n	<li>United Airlines has <a href=\"http://ir.united.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=83680&amp;p=irol-newsArticle&amp;ID=844066&amp;highlight=\">named</a> a new VP of Customer Experience to improve how it interacts with travelers</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/download_track.php?id=CE7726A0F99EB44095D5130567DEDDB7F90A9BD8352B78EB3E13EB82943ACAEA2D2BC4C1337AE3571166DB55DC19CD47\"><em>Daddy Was A Preacher But Mama Was A Go-Go Girl</em></a> by Southern Culture On The Skids</li>\r\n	<li>Curt Taylor of the <a href=\"http://www.emptyseat.net/emptyseatblog/\">Empty Seat blog</a> pointed to   the Office Whisper<a href=\"http://www.officewhisper.com/blogs/businessdevolution/archive/2006/02/14/16.aspx\">article</a> about \"Slight-Status Travelers\"</li>\r\n	<li>A San Jose high school dance band launches into a spontaneous dance routine while waiting to board their flight home</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/travelcommons/134857554/\"><strong>Direct Link</strong></a> to a Flickr picture of the performance</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/images/pix/airport_dance.3gp\"><strong>Direct Link</strong></a> to a mobile phone video of the performance (in 3gp format; should be viewable with QuickTime)</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://promonet.iodalliance.com/\">IODA PROMONET</a></li>\r\n	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_37.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #37 - The Cranky Traveler, Spontaneous Entertainment','','inherit','closed','closed','','39-revision-v1','','','2019-03-01 21:20:28','2019-03-02 02:20:28','',39,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/01/39-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2313,1,'2019-03-01 21:24:36','2019-03-02 02:24:36','Recorded in the <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huntington_Beach%2C_California\">Huntington Beach, CA</a> Hilton Resort, I\'m once again triangulating across northern and southern California. My decision to by a new Saab convertible now has me planning an impromptu vacation to <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/sweden\">Sweden</a>, a place that has never been on the top of my vacation spots list.  Also, some travel stories about people who trust their GPS SatNavs a bit too much. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_38.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_38.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #38:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Recorded at the Huntington Beach, CA Hilton Resort</li>\r\n	<li>Triangulating between SF and LA for the second week</li>\r\n	<li>The 3-hour delay on my United LAX-ORD flight last week has me flying American this week</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Get Together</em> by <a href=\"http://tamaranile.com/\">T. Nile</a></li>\r\n	<li>David Chapman writes in to correct earlier comments regarding <a href=\"http://www.airnewzealand.co.nz\">Air New Zealand</a>\'s London-Auckland run via LAX.  The Air New Zealand press release can be found <a href=\"http://airnz.co.uk/aboutus/mediacentre/pressreleases/air_nz_announces_second_london_service_via_asia.htm\">here</a></li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Bored Out of My Mind</em> by <a href=\"http://hansyork.com/\">Hans York</a></li>\r\n	<li>Have decided to buy a <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saab_9-3\">Saab 9-3</a> Aero Convertible</li>\r\n	<li>Taking advantage of Saab\'s <a href=\"http://www.saabusa.com/saabjsp/europeandelivery/\"> European Delivery Option</a> means an unplanned vacation to Sweden</li>\r\n	<li>American Airlines did a great job of stitching together a last-minute itinerary with Aadvantage miles</li>\r\n	<li>Any suggestions on places to which I should drive in my new Saab while in Sweden?  Please send me suggestions at comments[at]travelcommons.com</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Sacred Place</em> by Gene Loveland</li>\r\n	<li>Some people seem to trust their GPS SatNav devices more than their own eyes</li>\r\n	<li>An out-of-sync Hertz NeverLost device caused some delays in Berkeley</li>\r\n	<li>Udayan Tripathi\'s latest <a href=\"http://www.udayantripathi.com/2006/04/life-in-london-42-25-april-2006.html\">Life In London </a> podcast talks about UK drivers heading into rivers at the direction of their SatNavs</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from the <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/\">Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\r\n	<li>Please pass along any suggestions for our 1-year anniversary show</li>\r\n	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_38.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #38 - The Accidental Vacation, Trusting Travel Technology','','inherit','closed','closed','','40-revision-v1','','','2019-03-01 21:24:36','2019-03-02 02:24:36','',40,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/01/40-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2314,1,'2019-03-01 21:26:58','2019-03-02 02:26:58','Once again coming to you from the West Coast, this time the Newport Beach, CA Marriott.  After a week off the road, I\'m bouncing again between San Francisco and Orange County.  Listener feedback from a hotel chain accountant on the hotel add-on charges and from an ex-Northwest Airlines loyalist.  We have a travel story about the unique view from the front of the airplane and a suggestion about how to load your iPod with new music.  Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_39.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_39.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n<hr /> Here are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #39:\r\n	<ul>\r\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Recorded at the Newport Beach, CA Marriott</li>\r\n	<li>Triangulating again (still?) between SF and LA</li>\r\n	<li>High airline occupancy leads to some digging to find the right flight to the Bay Area</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/download_track.php?id=A1F44F3B330BFBBD5C7863108B61B09977CADC67705C23C5AECA03FC6F2C0320A93C8CF03BBFAC71CD59B5710E25327F\" rel=\"nofollow\">La Tra (basephunk mix)</a></em> by <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/label.php?id=3AF558B2D658A22FFF10B13F9D87237D276517530C9606BA2CB20418C6A8B4CB\" rel=\"nofollow\">Omar Sosa</a></li>\r\n	<li>Doug give the hotel\'s view of increasing number of add-on charges discussed in T/C #36</li>\r\n	<li>A long loyal Northwest Airlines customer begins the defection to Sun Country</li>\r\n	<li>Thanks to <a href=\"http://rmfoto.blogspot.com/\">Ray Medina</a> for setting up the TravelCommons Frappr group</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/download_track.php?id=6E494292C6B4E14E784F04400EB2C54CE135E29730530171C5F931345CAA3733A93C8CF03BBFAC71CD59B5710E25327F\" rel=\"nofollow\">All Around</a></em>  by <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=AEF14840F87CD6C39BE8918AF693E89C276517530C9606BA2CB20418C6A8B4CB\" rel=\"nofollow\">Jel</a></li>\r\n	<li>Looking out the window while landing in Ireland is always a visual treat -- the bright green against the grey grabs your eyes</li>\r\n	<li>Mis-tagged passenger luggage leads to a long delay on a BA flight from Shannon to London-Heathrow</li>\r\n	<li>I end up in the cockpit telling the luggage\'s sad tale while we descend into Heathrow</li>\r\n	<li>The view from the front of the plane is such a completely different visual experience, I have a hard time getting through the story</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/download_track.php?id=39762D033AA7D415DE1BB614BC25CC248FFC9C2C87F5F8F94BFEABA4A2563317A93C8CF03BBFAC71CD59B5710E25327F\" rel=\"nofollow\">Various Stages</a></em> by <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=8913BD6C7DFA8B495260ABCCE092D7DCDA0387BCF4D6B4C03D24C64234934084\" rel=\"nofollow\">Great Lake Swimmers</a></li>\r\n	<li>Traveling involves a lot of time staring and waiting</li>\r\n	<li>I often use the time to sift through the massive music downloads from the South By Southwest (SXSW) Festival in Austin, TX</li>\r\n	<li><strong><a href=\"http://2006.sxsw.com/toolbox/schedules/ipod/\">Direct Link</a></strong> to the 2006 SXSW page with links to the BitTorrent files with the music and a short primer on using BitTorrent</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from the <a href=\"http://promonet.iodalliance.com/\">IODA Promonet</a></li>\r\n	<li>Please pass along any suggestions for our 1-year anniversary show</li>\r\n	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_39.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #39 - Looking Out The Front Window, Scoring New Music','','inherit','closed','closed','','41-revision-v1','','','2019-03-01 21:26:58','2019-03-02 02:26:58','',41,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/01/41-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2315,1,'2019-03-01 21:29:37','2019-03-02 02:29:37','Recorded in the Courtyard <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/boston/sights/square/copley-square\">Copley Square</a> in Boston, this special edition pulls the best of the first year of TravelCommons.  Starting with the \"bathroom medley\" -- the roll call of all the hotel bathrooms that have served as TravelCommons\' recording studios, we move on to excerpts from stories on topics such as the TSA, unusual activities in airport departure lounges, scary hotel rooms, and ranting cab drivers.  Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_40.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_40.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #40:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Recorded at the Copley Place Courtyard in <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/boston\">Boston, MA</a></li>\r\n	<li>Spent a few flights listening through the past 13 hours of TravelCommons episodes to select the \"greatest hits\" from the first year</li>\r\n	<li>from T/C #1 - Why listen to this podcast?</li>\r\n	<li>from T/C #33 - Listener feedback says that TravelCommons covers both the fun and the dreary bits of travel</li>\r\n	<li>Medley of TravelCommons hotel bathroom studios</li>\r\n	<li>from T/C #15 - Bad night at the Oakland Coliseum Days Inn</li>\r\n	<li>from T/C #13 - Listener story about nighttime noises in a Korean hotel room</li>\r\n	<li>from T/C #8 - Nervous night at the Golden Eagle Motel in <a href=\"http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=41.8302777778,-86.2508333333&amp;spn=0.1,0.1&amp;q=41.8302777778,-86.2508333333 (Niles%2C%20Michigan)&amp;t=h\">Niles, Michigan</a></li>\r\n	<li>Medley of TSA rants</li>\r\n	<li>from T/C #37 - Episode of <em>Fame</em> breaks out in O\'Hare</li>\r\n	<li>from T/C #20 - Allan Marko tells a story about rapid airplane repair</li>\r\n	<li>from T/C #18 - Pants problems</li>\r\n	<li>from T/C #16 - A chatty seat mate</li>\r\n	<li>from T/C #15 - <em>Skymall</em> magazine as a last resort</li>\r\n	<li>from T/C #7 - Air sickness without the bag</li>\r\n	<li>from T/C #34 - Behind shuffling snowbirds in Tampa</li>\r\n	<li>from T/C #14 - Raging parking generalissimo at LAX</li>\r\n	<li>from T/C #16 - Tactics for dealing with raging cab drivers</li>\r\n	<li>from T/C #24 - Fun with rental cars</li>\r\n	<li>from T/C #19 - Midnight car talk at the <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taco_Bell\">Taco Bell</a> drive-thru</li>\r\n	<li>from T/C #9 - Downshifting to leisure travel</li>\r\n	<li>from T/C #17 - My kids\' view of travel</li>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_40.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #40 - Looking Back Over The First Year','','inherit','closed','closed','','42-revision-v1','','','2019-03-01 21:29:37','2019-03-02 02:29:37','',42,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/01/42-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2316,1,'2019-03-01 21:30:40','2019-03-02 02:30:40','Enjoying a couple of weeks at home, in this episode we talk about the load level records being set by US airlines and its effects on travel courtesy.  Also, the challenge of finding the one thing you \"gotta do\" when you visit a new place.  Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_41.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_41.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n<hr /> Here are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #41:\r\n	<ul>\r\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Recorded in the suburban Chicago studios</li>\r\n	<li>Been in town for 2 weeks now, triangulating between home, rural Illinois, and my downtown Chicago office</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Wanna luv you</em> by <a href=\"http://www.henta.co.uk/\">Henta Ellis</a></li>\r\n	<li>Listener feedback on T/C #40, the first-year anniversary episode</li>\r\n	<li>Some surprising <a href=\"http://multichannelmerchant.com/mag/sale_skymall_soar_01012006/\">facts</a> about the SkyMall catalog</li>\r\n	<li>Geoff Slater talks about his good experience with American Airlines\' AAdvantage agents</li>\r\n	<li>Ed Vawter of the <a href=\"http://http://www.qdinformation.com/searching/\">Searching The Internet</a> podcast gives an audio review of Yahoo\'s Farechase travel meta-search site</li>\r\n	<li>T/C #2 discussed the love-hate relationship the travel industry has with these meta-search sites.  T/C #2 can be found in the archives under May 2005.  The meta-search topic is 10:50 minutes into the show</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Snub-Nosed Aardvark</em>  by <a href=\"http://podcast.penmachine.com/\">Derek K. Miller</a></li>\r\n	<li>The planes are full and are expected to be getting <a href=\"http://www.airlines.org/news/d.aspx?nid=10026\">fuller</a></li>\r\n	<li>Everybody who to Sociology 101 in college knows that crowding increases stress</li>\r\n	<li>Travel courtesies seem to be breaking down regarding overhead bin space</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Baja Taxi</em> by <a href=\"http://www.brain-buckit.com/\">Brain Buckit</a></li>\r\n	<li>When visiting some place new, always want to know \"What\'s the one thing I should do or see?\"</li>\r\n	<li>United Airlines\' <em>Hemispheres</em> magazine has a good feature -- <em><a href=\"http://www.hemispheresmagazine.com/3pd/three/default.htm\">Three Days in...</a></em> -- for finding those \"gotta do\'s\"</li>\r\n	<li>Listened to two Swedish podcasts to prepare for my vacation to Sweden -- the <a href=\"http://www.polarbearpodcast.com/\">Polarbear Podcast</a> and Radio Sweden\'s <a href=\"http://radiosweden.blogspot.com/\">news podcast</a>, but didn\'t find any \"gotta do\'s\"</li>\r\n	<li>Used my old standby <a href=\"http://chowhound.com\">Chowhound.com</a> to find some \"don\'t miss\" restaurants in Stockholm</li>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"http://ad.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/show?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;bids=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\" alt=\"icon\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from the <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/\">Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\r\n	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_41.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #41 - Full to the Brim, What’s the One Thing…?','','inherit','closed','closed','','43-revision-v1','','','2019-03-01 21:30:40','2019-03-02 02:30:40','',43,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/01/43-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2317,1,'2019-03-01 21:31:49','2019-03-02 02:31:49','Back in the San Francisco Marriott after my Swedish vacation, we play an ode to SkyMall magazine, talk about the amazing number of lines in Heathrow airport that were between us and the start of our vacation, and how with all these new boarding schemes, airlines are paying attention to the wrong things. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_42.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_42.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #42:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Recorded in the SFO Marriott</li>\r\n	<li>Back from the car-pick up vacation in Sweden and back on the road between Chicago and San Francisco</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>SkyMall</em> by <a href=\"http://www.jonathancoulton.com/2006/07/07/thing-a-week-40-skymall/\">Jonathan Coulton</a></li>\r\n	<li>Listener talks about using the usually dreaded \"SSSS\" on his boarding pass as a ticket to the security express lane</li>\r\n	<li>Ed Vawter of the <a href=\"http://http://www.qdinformation.com/searching/\">Searching The Internet</a> podcast talks about how moving overhead luggage pushes passengers to the edge</li>\r\n	<li>Allan Marko points out Hilton Hotel\'s announcement about new clock radios that allow MP3 players to be plugged directly into them</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Car Crash</em> by <a href=\"http://www.smalltownsleeper.com/\">Small Town Sleeper</a></li>\r\n	<li>My wife\'s observation -- \"This was a perfect vacation -- except for the flights at the beginning and the end\"</li>\r\n	<li>An amazing number of lines at Heathrow airport stood between us and the start of our vacation in Sweden</li>\r\n	<li>Only the last delay didn\'t bother me because it let me order another pint</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Hide and Seek</em> by <a href=\"http://www.lorenamire.com/\"> Lorena Mire</a></li>\r\n	<li>8 out of 8 US airlines have reported <a href=\"http://blogs.usatoday.com/sky/2006/07/big_airlines_no.html\">profitable second quarters</a></li>\r\n	<li>But much of the recent mail to TravelCommons has been about changes to airline boarding procedures</li>\r\n	<li>America West airlines started it off by using some mathematical models from Arizona State University to <a href=\"http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,70689-0.html\">design</a> their new approach</li>\r\n	<li>But Northwest Airlines has gone the other way, allow everyone to <a href=\"http://www.usatoday.com/travel/flights/2006-06-19-northwest-boarding_x.htm\">board at once</a></li>\r\n	<li>They both claim the same results -- saving 3-5 minutes in boarding time.  With so little benefit, perhaps they should be spending their time improving the flying experience instead, say by adding another flight attendant to busy flights or another ticket agent to cut down check-in lines.</li>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids99176.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from the <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/\">Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\r\n	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_42.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #42 - Waiting For A Good Time, Paying Attention to Boarding','','inherit','closed','closed','','44-revision-v1','','','2019-03-01 21:31:49','2019-03-02 02:31:49','',44,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/01/44-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2318,1,'2019-03-01 21:33:10','2019-03-02 02:33:10','Recorded in the TravelCommons studios, I look back on my trip through SFO as I try to navigate the new TSA rules on the first full day of the new regime and gird myself for 4 trips through the gauntlet this week.  A listener tops my Heathrow lines (queues?) story, and we compare and contrast European and US travel experiences. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_43.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_43.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #43:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Recorded in the TravelCommons studio outside of Chicago</li>\r\n	<li>Delayed recording this podcast so I could give you my personal experiences with the new TSA travel rules</li>\r\n	<li>Thursday morning\'s news is a mix of elation -- <em>glad they busted the plot</em> -- and dread -- <em>the flight home from SFO is going to be brutal</em></li>\r\n	<li>Some mundane concerns -- try to figure out how to salvage my nearly-new container of anti-perspirant gel</li>\r\n	<li>All for naught when a contractor decides that all wheeled bags need to be checked</li>\r\n	<li>The growing tediousness of travel wears on the frequent traveler -- no recovery time</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Persephone</em> by <a href=\"http://www.myspace.com/etherealvox\">Ethereal</a></li>\r\n	<li>Instead of recording my own podcast Thursday night, I was a guest on Chris Christensen\'s <em>Amateur Traveler</em> podcast talking about Chicago.  Here\'s a <a href=\"http://amateurtraveler.com/?p=841\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the episode\'s show notes.</li>\r\n	<li>Peter Rukavina sends in his own story of epic lines at Heathrow</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Ghost</em> by <a href=\"www.hollowhorse.co.uk\">Hollow Horse</a></li>\r\n	<li>Some contrasting impressions of travel in Europe and the US</li>\r\n	<li>Security screening is much less of a hassle in Europe</li>\r\n	<li>Although there are a number of exceptions, I think that, on the whole, US airports are nicer than European airports</li>\r\n	<li>US airlines\' \"no meals\" cost cutting has turned their planes into picnic grounds</li>\r\n	<li>Europeans dress nicer on planes, but Americans seem to dress nicer on trains</li>\r\n	<li>Just can\'t figure out why Europeans would travel thousands of miles in a bus</li>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids991766.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from the <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/\">Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\r\n	<li>Flying down to Houston and hoping to get through security with my toiletry kit intact -- replaced all my gels and pastes with powders</li>\r\n	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_43.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #43 - Here We Go Again, Old World vs. New','','inherit','closed','closed','','47-revision-v1','','','2019-03-01 21:33:10','2019-03-02 02:33:10','',47,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/01/47-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2319,1,'2019-03-01 21:34:52','2019-03-02 02:34:52','Recorded in the Courtyard in Northwest Houston, we look at the decisions forced on travelers by the TSA\'s restrictions around carry-on liquids and gels.  Is it a trade-off between safety and vanity?  Are frequent travelers really that shallow?  Also, I talk about how \"luggage economics\" made me trim my technology load when packing for my recent vacation in Sweden. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_44.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_44.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #44:\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Recorded in the Courtyard in Northwest Houston</li>\r\n	<li>Back in Houston again this week. Started last week in Houston and then went out to San Francisco where I was joined by my wife</li>\r\n	<li>Stayed at three Renaissance Hotels while in the Bay Area; my wife rated the sheets at the Renaissance Stanford Court on Nob Hill the best</li>\r\n	<li>TSA carry-on regulations are impacting the carry-out trade at Napa and Sonoma wineries -- <strong><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/travelcommons/228222015/\">direct link</a></strong> to a Flickr picture of a sign on the front door of <a href=\"http://www.arrowoodwinery.com/tastings.html\">Arrowood Winery</a></li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>That Ming Thing</em> by <a href=\"http://www.cageyhouse.com/\">Cagey House</a></li>\r\n	<li>The blog entries between episodes is generating some great comments and discussions, and seem to be a good complement to the podcasts</li>\r\n	<li>A listener tells the story of making top-tier status on Delta on an Atlanta-Omaha commuter jet run</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Break In</em> by <a href=\"http://www.podsafeaudio.com/jamroom/bands/1356/\">Mark Jungers</a></li>\r\n	<li>The TSA restrictions on carry-on liquids and gels forces travelers to choose between lost time and lost looks</li>\r\n	<li>The choice between checking luggage or leaving behind toiletries has much more impact on frequent travelers than on leisure travelers</li>\r\n	<li>Recapping the <em><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=51\">Debating States of Matter With The TSA</a></em> blog post</li>\r\n	<li>Listeners urge me to give Eco-Dent tooth powder another chance</li>\r\n	<li>The ban is much harder on women than men -- Hilary Baumann of the <em><a href=\"http://www.clothingcult.com/\"></a>Clothing Cult</em> blog totals up the cost of banned make-up</li>\r\n	<li>Commentators cast it as a safety vs. vanity choice, but no one feels that the TSA\'s new regime is making them any safer</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>When You Hide</em> by <a href=\"http://www.likewater.net/\"> Likewater</a></li>\r\n	<li>I lightened my technology load on my recent vacation in Sweden -- I left my laptop home</li>\r\n	<li>On last year\'s vacation to Switzerland, France and Hungary, I used it to store digital pictures, check e-mail, and produce TravelCommons episodes #8 and #9</li>\r\n	<li>Skipped making a vacation podcast and survived just fine with only my BlackBerry and my Motorola V551 mobile phone -- they \"just worked\"</li>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids991765.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from the <a href=\"http://www.podsafeaudio.com/\">Podsafe Audio</a></li>\r\n	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_44.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #44 - Dump Bucket of the Vanities, Leaving Behind the PC','','inherit','closed','closed','','51-revision-v1','','','2019-03-01 21:34:52','2019-03-02 02:34:52','',51,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/01/51-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2320,1,'2019-03-01 21:36:10','2019-03-02 02:36:10','Recorded in the <a href=\"http://hotels.lonelyplanet.com/usa/seattle-r2103717/renaissance-seattle-a-marriott-family-hotel-p1058600/\">Renaissance Madison Hotel</a> in downtown Seattle, we have some good stories about missing luggage.  I have some problems with Orbitz\'s live customer service, as well as an over-zealous TSA screener.  I recalculate my fly-vs.-drive threshold given the added hassles and airport time caused by the TSA\'s no-liquids security rules. Looking back at all this, I work hard to remind myself that there <em>are</em> some good things about travel.  Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_45.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_45.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #45:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Recorded in the Renaissance Madison Hotel in downtown Seattle</li>\r\n	<li>On a big 3-day triangulation -- Chicago-Houston-Seattle</li>\r\n	<li>Dreaded the Monday Continental flights, until I found that my complimentary Northwest Airlines Silver Elite status gave me status on Continental</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Trees</em> by <a href=\"http://tamaranile.com/\">Tamara Nile</a></li>\r\n	<li>Orbitz\'s fare matrix on the web is best-in-class, but their live customer service is at the bottom of the heap</li>\r\n	<li>Monday morning\'s TSA screener dove into my toiletry kit, only to be disappointed in her zeal to keep airplanes free of toothpaste</li>\r\n	<li>Check out Hilary Baumann\'s <a href=\"http://clothingcult.com/\"><em>ClothingCult</em> blog</a> for a <a href=\"http://clothingcult.com/?p=96\">list</a> of solid toiletry replacements so that you too can play \"Fool the Screener\"</li>\r\n	<li>Updated the fly-vs.-drive break-even point from T/C #23, taking into account the added hassles of the TSA no-liquids rules</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Can You Hear Me?</em> by <a href=\"http://www.thestirring.com/\">The Stirring</a></li>\r\n	<li>Looks like Congress and the Dept of Homeland Security want to keep the no-liquids ban in place for some time</li>\r\n	<li>These rules force more people to check luggage, pushing the system to its breaking point and causing <a href=\"http://www.usatoday.com/travel/news/2006-09-19-baggage-screening_x.htm\">security problems</a> of its own</li>\r\n	<li>Expect to wait at least 45 minutes for your luggage to appear at the end of your flight</li>\r\n	<li>Stories of lost luggage from Hilary Baumann and Chris Christensen of the <a href=\"http://amateurtraveler.com/\">Amateur Traveler</a> podcast</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Railroad Car</em> by <a href=\"http://www.sarashansky.com/\"> Sara Shansky</a></li>\r\n	<li>Scanning my blog posts over the past 30 days and you get the sense that the travel experience has taken a turn for the worse -- it\'s just a grind, a trial to be endured</li>\r\n	<li>Enjoyed finding the <a href=\"http://baytrail.abag.ca.gov/vtour/map2/access/Btsm2mb/Btsm2mb.htm\">Bay Trail</a> running along the back of the SFO Marriott</li>\r\n	<li><strong><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/travelcommons/248365281/\">Direct link</a></strong> to a Flickr picture of the City of Burlingame Shorebird Sanctuary</li>\r\n	<li>Last month\'s NPR Music podcast carried a <a href=\"http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5711563\">story</a> about <a href=\"http://www.petermulvey.com\">Peter Mulvey</a>, a \"modern-day troubadour\", in which he talks about loving travel</li>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids991762.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from the <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/\">Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\r\n	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_45.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #45 - Waiting for Luggage, Enjoying Travel','','inherit','closed','closed','','55-revision-v1','','','2019-03-01 21:36:10','2019-03-02 02:36:10','',55,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/01/55-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2321,1,'2019-03-01 21:37:23','2019-03-02 02:37:23','Recorded in the TravelCommons studios after a quick Chicago-San Francisco up-&amp;-back and a 4-day getaway to London with my mother and daughter.  We talk about the adjustment from BA Club World to AA domestic coach, the increased security precautions in London, and my continuing travails with tooth powder.  Then, we devote the rest of the podcast to listener travel stories -- one listener has to crawl into a DFW chute to free his luggage, another listener gets some extra beach time in Miami, I interject a story about the dangers of seat-back pockets, and another listener sends along suggestions for new travel words.  Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_47.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_27.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #47:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Recorded in the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago</li>\r\n	<li>Back in the saddle after a quick vacation to London</li>\r\n	<li>Tough transition from BA Club World to AA domestic coach</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://www.podsafeaudio.com/jamroom/play.php?band_id=1258&amp;song_id=4378&amp;mode=song_hifi\"><em>Shadows</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.podsafeaudio.com/jamroom/bands/1258/\">Antardhyan</a></li>\r\n	<li>ORD TSA screeners are <em>still</em> flummoxed by my Eco-Dent tooth powder, but the SFO screeners don\'t seem to have the same problem</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"http://www.udayantripathi.com/wordpress\">Udayan Tripathi</a> sent a <a href=\"http://www.boingboing.net/2006/09/27/tsa_calling_kip_hawl.html\">civic lesson</a> about how the TSA overrides the First Amendment</li>\r\n	<li>Saw a significant increase in security while in London last week</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://www.podsafeaudio.com/jamroom/play.php?band_id=1435&amp;song_id=5090&amp;mode=song_hifi\"><em>The Distance</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.podsafeaudio.com/jamroom/bands/1435/\">Scotland Barr and the Slow Drags</a></li>\r\n	<li>Listener story about delays in O\'Hare on the way to Tokyo and stuck luggage on the way back through Dallas-Ft Worth</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"http://fricksworld.blogspot.com/\">Steve Frick</a> discovers a bike trail behind the <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http://hamptoninn.hilton.com/en/hp/hotels/index.jhtml;jsessionid=VCTSM3FF2IYSACSGBIX222QKIYFCXUUC?ctyhocn=CAENWHX\">Hampton Inn in Columbia, SC</a></li>\r\n	<li>Listener request that airlines space out the delivery of the $5 lunch boxes</li>\r\n	<li>Story about a unique use for seat-back pockets on Air Tunisia</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"http://clothingcult.com/\">Hilary Baumann</a> sent along a <a href=\"http://dailycandy.com/article.jsp?ArticleId=27789&amp;city=15\">Daily Candy mailing</a> of their best made-up travel words</li>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids991767.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://podsafeaudio.com/\">PodSafe Audio</a></li>\r\n	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_47.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #47 - Listener Travel Stories','','inherit','closed','closed','','58-revision-v1','','','2019-03-01 21:37:23','2019-03-02 02:37:23','',58,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/01/58-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2323,1,'2019-03-01 21:45:34','2019-03-02 02:45:34','Recorded in the Rancho Las Palmas Resort &amp; Spa near <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/california/palm-springs-and-coachella-valley\">Palm Springs, CA</a>, we talk about a surprise at the rental car lot and some good and bad TSA experiences. My search for frequent flyer seats to South Africa leads to a discussion about how diversifying or concentrating your \"deposits\" into frequent travel programs yield different results. The Travel Tech segment reappears with two topics -- measuring differences in hotel bandwidth and some travelers\' love affairs with Bose noise-canceling headsets. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_48.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file. \r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_48.mp3\"]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #48:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Recorded in the Rancho Las Palmas Resort &amp; Spa in <a href=\"http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=33.7691666667,-116.421111111&amp;spn=0.1,0.1&amp;q=33.7691666667,-116.421111111 (Rancho%20Mirage%2C%20California)&amp;t=h\">Rancho Mirage, CA</a> near Palm Springs</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm_Springs_International_Airport\">Palm Springs Airport</a> reminds me of San Jose and Santa Ana airports before their big renovations</li>\r\n 	<li>A Hertz mistake gave me a convertible Mustang instead of a Buick Lacrosse</li>\r\n 	<li><strong><a href=\"http://www.qdinformation.com/searching/2006/10/28/searching-the-internet-episode-012-voter-and-election-information/\">Direct Link</a></strong> to Ed Vawter\'s special election edition of <em>Searching the Internet</em> podcast</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/myles-marginal/\"><em>Gold and rose</em></a> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/myles_cochran\">Myles Cochran</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"http://online.wsj.com/article/SB116226062497308455.html?mod=Middle-Seat-Mailbox\">Monday\'s \"Middle Seat\" travel column</a> in <em><a href=\"http://www.wsj.com/\">The Wall Street Journal</a></em> (subscription required) airs complaints from travelers who have had their toiletries discarded by overly strict TSA screeners</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"http://clothingcult.com/\">Hilary Baumann</a> tells of her recent TSA experience at <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/the-south/lexington\">Lexington, KY</a>\'s <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Grass_Airport\">Blue Grass Airport</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/falik-dreams/\"><em>Ika</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.magnatune.com/artists/falik\">Falik</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Waited a bit long to score some frequent flyer tickets to <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/south-africa/cape-town\">Cape Town, South Africa</a> for next March</li>\r\n 	<li>Started with American Airlines but they didn\'t have the inventory. Ended up with United Airlines, which is in the Star Alliance with South Africa Airways</li>\r\n 	<li>United first offered a \"back door\" itinerary through <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/china/hong-kong\">Hong Kong</a> and Singapore, but I chose the shorter route through Europe</li>\r\n 	<li>Having diversified my mileage across carriers let me make this switch</li>\r\n 	<li>I give up top tier status on one airline for this diversification strategy</li>\r\n 	<li>Depends on what you want -- flexibility to use miles or a better chance at first-class upgrades</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/cargo-alchemy/\"><em>Entry</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.magnatune.com/artists/cargo_cult\">Cargo Cult</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Been testing the speed of hotel broadband using the <a href=\"http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest/\">Speakeasy Speed Test</a> because it tests both upload and download speeds</li>\r\n 	<li>Upload speed is probably more important to business users e-mailing out big files than it is for residential users</li>\r\n 	<li>The afternoon downloads at the Downtown Houston Courtyard were 10 times faster than those in the evening</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/jag-cypress/\"><em>Homebound</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.magnatune.com/artists/jag\">Jag</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Lots of love in the airplanes for the <a href=\"http://www.bose.com/controller?event=VIEW_PRODUCT_PAGE_EVENT&amp;product=qc2_headphones_index\">Bose noise-cancelling headphones</a></li>\r\n 	<li>In the trade-off between comfort and compactness, I choose the Bose, but others go for in-ear \'phones like the <a href=\"http://www.shure.com/ProAudio/Products/PersonalMonitorSystems/us_pro_E3_content\">Shure E3</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids991769.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\">Magnatune</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_48.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #48 - Frequent Flyer Strategies, Measuring Hotel Bandwidth','','inherit','closed','closed','','59-revision-v1','','','2019-03-01 21:45:34','2019-03-02 02:45:34','',59,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/01/59-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2325,1,'2019-03-01 21:52:53','2019-03-02 02:52:53','Recorded in the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, we talk through some of the problems that have made <a href=\"http://www.united.com\">United Airlines</a>\' skies less friendly than their ads would like you to believe. This has definitely been the winter of United fliers\' discontent. I also follow up on last episode\'s travel technology upgrade topic. I\'ve now found a use for the <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3G\">3G technology</a> in my new Samsung phone, though not sure that Cingular would completely agree with it. A group of listeners have good things to say about Amsterdam\'s <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amsterdam_Airport_Schiphol\">Schiphol airport</a>; another listener ponders the impact if the 2001 shoe bomber had tried to ignite some other piece of his wardrobe. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_52.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_52.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #52:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Recorded in the TravelCommons studios</li>\r\n 	<li>Been running between the coasts for the past couple of weeks -- San Francisco to Orlando, and then San Francisco to New York</li>\r\n 	<li>Was able to get out of a 4-day up-&amp;-back to <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/china/hong-kong\">Hong Kong</a> and am pretty happy about it</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/yongen-yello/\">Give You Up</a></em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/yongen\">Yongen</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Drew Leifheit of the <a href=\"http://budacast.hu\">Budacast podcast</a> started a thread of commentary on Amsterdam\'s Schiphol airport</li>\r\n 	<li>Thanks to Drew for the link from his interview with the Hungarian newspaper <a href=\"http://www.nol.hu/kultura/cikk/434237/\">Napszabadsag</a>. TravelCommons is the example for (travel) podcasts</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/anamar-transfado/\">Going on a River</a></em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/anamar\">Anamar</a></li>\r\n 	<li>According to <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fado\">Wikipedia</a>, Fado is \"s a music genre ... characterized by mournful tunes and lyrics, often about the sea or the life of the poor.\"</li>\r\n 	<li>This has been the winter of United Airlines\' fliers\' discontent</li>\r\n 	<li>A front page <a href=\"http://www.usatoday.com/money/biztravel/2007-02-19-cheyenne-cover-usat_x.htm\">USAToday</a> story tells how United abandoned two planes of passengers in Cheyenne, Wyoming</li>\r\n 	<li>A <a href=\"http://www.chicagotribune.com/travel/chi-070301bad-flight,1,5898109.story?ctrack=1&amp;cset=true\">Chicago Tribune</a> story gives the time line of a United ORD-SFO flight that sat on the runway for 8 hours before finally being cancelled</li>\r\n 	<li>Leo Vegoda talks about a United passport snafu</li>\r\n 	<li>JetBlue\'s CEO <a href=\"http://www.jetblue.com/about/ourcompany/flightlog/\">blogs</a> a complete <em>mea culpa</em> after their service meltdown; United\'s CEO is no where to be found</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/vla-stuff/\">Look Around</a></em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/vla\">Very Large Array</a></li>\r\n 	<li>In T/C #51, I talked about how I upgraded most of my travel technology kit -- my laptop, my <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod\">iPod</a>, and my mobile phone</li>\r\n 	<li>I hadn\'t found a use for my new phone\'s big selling point from Cingular -- fast data access on their new 3G network</li>\r\n 	<li>A couple of weeks ago, I was at a financial services client with a completely locked-down computer network and cobbled together a 3G data connection using a copy of Samsung\'s PC Studio and an old Bluetooth USB dongle</li>\r\n 	<li>This <a href=\"http://www.cbs.com/classics/macgyver/video/\">McGyver</a> rig gave me 328 kbps down and 234 kbps up according to the <a href=\"http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest/links.php\">Speakeasy test</a> -- faster than some hotel WiFi spots I tested</li>\r\n 	<li>What about using something like this to replace the ubiquitous $10/night Internet charge at Marriotts and Sheratons?</li>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917616.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\">Magnatune</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_52.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #52 - Flying Friendless Skies; Latest Speed for the Road','','inherit','closed','closed','','69-revision-v1','','','2019-03-01 21:52:53','2019-03-02 02:52:53','',69,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/01/69-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2326,1,'2019-03-01 21:55:05','2019-03-02 02:55:05','Recorded in Marriott Courtyard in <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/san-francisco\">San Francisco</a>\'s SoMa district, I confess to some base emotions -- my inner child has been throwing tantrums now that American and United Airlines have taken away some of the special treatment they used to give their mid-tier status fliers.  I also had a bit of an awakening while on vacation with my family in <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/south-africa\">South Africa</a> -- the number of electronic devices they carry has mushroomed and they suffer from bad Internet withdrawal.  We have a few stories about how diapers make for some \"smelly skies\", a listener finds great free bandwidth in Denver, and we feature some listener music.  Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_53.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_53.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #53:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Recorded in Marriott Courtyard in San Francisco\'s SoMa district</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Jazz Suite for Saxophone Quartet #1</em> by <a href=\"http://saxophonequartet.com/\">Vierung</a></li>\r\n	<li>Ed Vawter wrote in with about a young couple in the row behind him who stuffed their baby\'s dirty diaper in the seat-back pocket on a flight from Chicago to Portland</li>\r\n	<li>My breakfast on a South Africa Airways flight to <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/south-africa/cape-town\">Cape Town</a> was spoiled by a young couple changing their baby\'s dirty diaper in the row in front of me</li>\r\n	<li>A listener staying at the Adam\'s Mark Hotel in Denver found their Internet service scored a smokin\' 4800 kbps down and 4100 kbps up on the <a href=\"http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest/links.php\">Speakeasy.net</a> bandwidth test</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Solen</em> by <a href=\"http://marcloehrwald.com/\">Marc Löhrwald</a></li>\r\n	<li>In past episodes, we\'ve talked about how many airlines are devaluing their mid-tier status levels</li>\r\n	<li>United has literally put out a red carpet for first class, and the top tier fliers – 1K and Global Services – and left the plain old tile line for everyone else</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail1749.html\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to IT Conversations podcast on <em>Creating Customer Loyalty</em></li>\r\n	<li>What started as a nice gesture from the manager of the JFK Courtyard backfired when they didn\'t live up to the expectations they created</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Hola Cape Town</em> by the Sivukile Marimba Band.  Here\'s a <a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/travelcommons/495032813/\">picture</a> I took of the band right before my daughter bought their CD</li>\r\n	<li>Most frequent travelers have a pretty finely tuned travel routine and are, for the most part, solitary figures, sort of throwbacks to the hunter-gatherers of pre-history</li>\r\n	<li>Traveling with their family requires some significant attitude adjustment</li>\r\n	<li>During our vacation to South Africa, I was completely taken aback by the number of electronic devices my family carried that needed recharging</li>\r\n	<li>The other think that struck me was my family coming almost unglued when deprived of their Internet access</li>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917618.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_53.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #53 - Wanting the Red Carpet; Family Travel Technology','','inherit','closed','closed','','70-revision-v1','','','2019-03-01 21:55:05','2019-03-02 02:55:05','',70,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/01/70-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2327,1,'2019-03-01 21:57:14','2019-03-02 02:57:14','Recorded in the Grand Geneva Resort and Spa, the former <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Playboy_Club\">Playboy Club</a>, in <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Geneva%2C_Wisconsin\">Lake Geneva, Wisconsin</a>, I talk about the travails of \"playing injured\" -- traveling while sick.  A listener comment makes me wonder if I\'m exaggerating the state of the US travel experience.  We get a good suggestion on how to wrestle with charging all those electronic devices we carry, and some detailed \"behind-the-scenes\" explanations of how air crews are treated by the TSA.   Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_54.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_54.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #54:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Recorded in Grand Geneva Resort and Spa in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin</li>\r\n	<li>Been on the road every week since my last podcast, mostly here in San Francisco</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/headroom-jetuton/\">Hejm</a></em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/headroom_project\">The Headroom Project</a></li>\r\n	<li>Thanks to everyone who told me that the podcast had been gone too long</li>\r\n	<li>Craig Martin of the <a href=\"http://indietravelpodcast.com/\">Indie Travel Podcast</a> sends along an audio comment with a great suggestion on how to avoid the \"outlet congestion\" I mentioned in TC #53</li>\r\n	<li>I\'ve found that for most electrical devices, you don\'t even need the power converter, just the plug adapter</li>\r\n	<li>Received two good answers to my question in TC#53 as to why an Oakland TSA screener allowed a Southwest flight attendant to keep her shoes going through the metal detector</li>\r\n	<li>This <a href=\"http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2007-06-04-workers_N.htm?csp=34\">USAToday article</a> suggests that airline and airport employees will face greater security measures as a result of the foiled JFK plot</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/falik-elvolution/\">Electric Butterfly</a></em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/falik\">Falik</a></li>\r\n	<li>All travel inconveniences pale when compared to getting sick or injured while traveling</li>\r\n	<li>Two weeks ago, I injured my back the morning before a flight to San Francisco</li>\r\n	<li>Worse was the experience of getting food poisoning in Lyon, France and still having to carry on with business the next day</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/seismic-afterburner/\">Snake Eyes</a></em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/seismic_anamoly\">Seismic Anomaly</a></li>\r\n	<li>An e-mail exchange with Udayan Tripathi got me to wondering if I exaggerate the problems with US domestic travel</li>\r\n	<li>The TSA isn\'t the most charming group, but they\'re no worse than the screeners in London\'s Heathrow airport</li>\r\n	<li>A <a href=\"http://www.usatoday.com/travel/flights/2007-06-04-airline-delays_N.htm\">USAToday article</a> this week reported that the number of passenger complaints to <a href=\"http://www.dot.gov\">US Dept of Transportation</a> in April about bad airline service had doubled from the year before</li>\r\n	<li>The service from US legacy carriers is worse than in other parts of the world, but the new US carriers (e.g., <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JetBlue_Airways\">JetBlue</a>) offer better service than legacy or budget carriers elsewhere</li>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917620.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\">Magnatune</a></li>\r\n	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_54.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #54 - Traveling Injured; How Bad Is Travel Experience Really?','','inherit','closed','closed','','74-revision-v1','','','2019-03-01 21:57:14','2019-03-02 02:57:14','',74,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/01/74-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2328,1,'2019-03-01 21:59:37','2019-03-02 02:59:37','Recorded in the Marriott Courtyard in <a href=\"http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=35.9288888889,-79.0394444444&amp;spn=0.1,0.1&amp;q=35.9288888889,-79.0394444444 (Chapel%20Hill%2C%20North%20Carolina)&amp;t=h\">Chapel Hill, North Carolina</a>, the current \"blogstorm\" about United Airlines\' poor customer service provides the data to calculate the true cost of connecting flights.  A recent combined business and family trip to <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/new-york-city\">New York City</a> makes me realize that my family isn\'t a burden in my travels, but instead an eyeopener.  Listeners comment on my recent blog posts; one uses Twitter to report his hotel broadband speed test results.    Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_55.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_55.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #55:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Recorded in Marriott Courtyard in Chapel Hill, NC</li>\r\n	<li>Been on a weekly commute to San Francisco, though did get in a combo business/family trip to New York the week before last</li>\r\n	<li>Have had very few problems flying to the Bay Area, but this last flight back from <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaGuardia_Airport\">LaGuardia</a> had us sitting on the runway for 3 hours</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Did We Make It</em> by <a href=\"http://www.caseydesmond.com/\">Casey Desmond</a></li>\r\n	<li>Drew Leifheit of the <a href=\"http://budacast.hu/\">Budacast</a> podcast recounts a fond childhood memory of eating pecan pie while flying Delta with his grandmother</li>\r\n	<li>John F corrects Barbara Higgins\' (United Airlines\' VP of customer experience) confusion between proactive and reactive customer service</li>\r\n	<li>Daniel Perez of the <a href=\"http://www.highmoonmedia.com/tgt/\">Gamer Traveler</a> Podcast is surprised to see US TSA agents in Amsterdam\'s <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amsterdam_Airport_Schiphol\">Schipol Airport</a></li>\r\n	<li>Mika Pyyhkala has been twittering his Speakeasy <a href=\"http://speakeasy.net/speedtest/\">broadband speed tests</a></li>\r\n	<li>Steve Frick of the Frick\'s World blog has inspired me to take pictures out my hotel room window and add them to Flickr\'s <a href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/tags/viewfromhere/\">View From Here</a> collection</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Throwing up on the plane</em> by <a href=\"http://www.myspace.com/electromagneticimpulses2\">Electromagnetic Impulses</a></li>\r\n	<li>Recent TravelCommons blog posts on United Airlines customer service got looped into the <a href=\"http://www.professorbainbridge.com/2007/06/united_customer.html\">edge</a> of a growing \"blogstorm\"</li>\r\n	<li>Articles in the <a href=\"http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/chi-sun_jammed_0610jun10,1,5280955.story\">Chicago Tribune</a> and <a href=\"http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/travel/2007-06-18-ual-service-usat_N.htm\">USAToday</a> have fueled the storm</li>\r\n	<li>The May 14th <a href=\"http://randomaccessbabble.blogspot.com/2007/05/dear-united-airlines-customer-service.html\">entry</a> in the Briana\'s Random Access Babble blog gives a detailed account of her efforts to fly from New York to Las Vegas to visit her family for the weekend; also a detailed accounting of her out-of-pocket costs caused by missed flight connections in Denver</li>\r\n	<li>We use Briana\'s cash outlay figures to calculate the true cost of a connecting flight</li>\r\n	<li>Leo Vegoda\'s recent missed connection experience in Washington\'s Dulles airport validates the findings reported in an International Herald Tribune <a href=\"http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/07/05/business/05late-web.php\">article</a> that says FAA flight delay statistics grossly understate the actual passenger delays</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Ghost</em> by <a href=\"http://www.hollowhorse.co.uk\">Hollow Horse</a></li>\r\n	<li>I don\'t seem to have to \"downshift\" as much anymore when traveling with my family</li>\r\n	<li>Traveling with my daughter has bumped me out of my usual rut</li>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917622.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from the <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com\">Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\r\n	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_55.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #55 - True Cost of Connecting; See More With The Family','','inherit','closed','closed','','77-revision-v1','','','2019-03-01 21:59:37','2019-03-02 02:59:37','',77,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/01/77-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2329,1,'2019-03-01 22:03:52','2019-03-02 03:03:52','Recorded in the <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_International_Airport\">San Francisco Airport</a> Marriott, a recent city-a-day business trip through Europe allowed me to do a first-hand comparison of the European air travel experience to the much maligned state of US air travel. We also update our thoughts on the state of mobile computing devices. Is it possible to travel \"PC-less\" yet, or are we still one release away from leaving the laptop at home? Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_56.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_56.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #56:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Recorded in SFO Marriott</li>\r\n	<li>July and August have been heavy travel months</li>\r\n	<li>Did Chicago\'s <a href=\"http://www.lateride.org/\">overnight bike ride</a> right before climbing on a plane for a city-a-day tour through Europe</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/download_track.php?id=CA84300ED431C297088FF88D72A178B3D5A6B8ADCC7B952E1A4A1E350BD450FA5840BD211C5180D7202C34D61CFFBC4F\" rel=\"nofollow\">Moving Forward</a></em> by <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=648F3E2C7F183297592F9B075C410E264C51054653F2D7CB016C2A94677CF9DF\" rel=\"nofollow\">Bitter:Sweet</a></li>\r\n	<li>Alan Lew of the <a href=\"http://www.TravelGeography.info\">Geography for Travelers podcast</a> recounts sightings of TSA agents in <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/china/hong-kong\">Hong Kong</a></li>\r\n	<li>Alan added pictures out his hotel room windows in Kuala Lumpur and <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/china/guangdong/guangzhou\">Guangzhou, China</a> to Flickr\'s <a href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/tags/viewfromhere/\">View From Here</a> photo stream. I added pictures out the windows of the Hilton Mainz and Paris Renaissance</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/download_track.php?id=B8FFD43EC56896775929CB3DCD2B1F2E5F6B3B0BE67F3AC30ED9588E915A88C55840BD211C5180D7202C34D61CFFBC4F\" rel=\"nofollow\">Scratch To Win</a></em> by <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=A540ACB4AF73C6EBAFA90EADEE4601D809748717F2419A98FB85DC7BD8639229\" rel=\"nofollow\">Ticklah</a></li>\r\n	<li>The poor state of the US air travel experience is the travel topic <em>de jure</em> this summer</li>\r\n	<li>My city-a-day business trip through Europe last month gave me a first-hand comparison of between the European and US air travel experiences</li>\r\n	<li>Spent more time in lines in European airports but had much fewer flight delays once on the plane</li>\r\n	<li>European gate agents and security screeners less polite than in the US, but airplanes were in better shape and the in-flight service much nicer</li>\r\n	<li>All in all, the European experience was better, but not by the margin I had expected</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/download_track.php?id=CA84300ED431C297088FF88D72A178B3D5A6B8ADCC7B952E1A4A1E350BD450FA5840BD211C5180D7202C34D61CFFBC4F\" rel=\"nofollow\">Une Rose Noire</a></em> by <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=39CD9773095D43710560ACD6950AC8F009748717F2419A98FB85DC7BD8639229\" rel=\"nofollow\">Paul Cargnello</a></li>\r\n	<li>Ed Vawter\'s latest episode of the <a href=\"http://www.qdinformation.com/searching/2007/07/09/searching-the-internet-episode-017-mobile-searching/\"><em>Searching the Internet</em> podcast</a> focuses on mobile search sites</li>\r\n	<li>My T-Mobile GSM Blackberry allows me to go PC-less if I only need to track e-mail</li>\r\n	<li>The Google Maps application for the Blackberry was very handy for finding a Paris restaurant recommended by a friend</li>\r\n	<li>Apple\'s iPhone can almost, but not quite, replace a PC</li>\r\n	<li>The high probability of a long flight delay means you want to bring along a device on which you can do real work -- a PC</li>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917624.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://promonet.iodalliance.com\">IODA Promonet</a></li>\r\n	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_56.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #56 - Lines Around the World; Shedding Some Electronic Weight','','inherit','closed','closed','','78-revision-v1','','','2019-03-01 22:03:52','2019-03-02 03:03:52','',78,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/01/78-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2331,1,'2019-03-01 22:09:59','2019-03-02 03:09:59','Recorded in the TravelCommons studio outside Chicago, I\'ve been bi-coastal since the last episode, bouncing between New York and San Francisco.  A side trip down to <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/pennsylvania/philadelphia\">Philadelphia</a> yields a great street-food breakfast when I take the time to walk outside my hotel. Delays in my flights between O\'Hare and <a href=\"http://www.laguardiaairport.com\">LaGuardia airports</a> cause me to dig for the FAA\'s latest airport capacity report and gnash my teeth against the <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NIMBY\">NIMBYs</a> standing in the way of reasonable fixes.  Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_57.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_57.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #57:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Recorded in TravelCommons studio outside of Chicago, hopefully the <a href=\"http://www.chicago2016.org/\">home of the 2016 Summer Olympics</a></li>\r\n	<li>Continue to bounce between the East and West coasts</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/media/files/DJBLUE/11541\">Hear Me</a></em> by DJ Blue</li>\r\n	<li>Made United\'s top-tier status level in August. Get to walk on the red carpet all the time now, though it feels a bit dangerous cutting in front of other passengers</li>\r\n	<li>Not flying American that much anymore, so dropping my Admirals Club membership after 10 years</li>\r\n	<li>Leo Vegoda received a \"close\" patdown similar to the one I received in Schipol last month</li>\r\n	<li>Craig Martin of the <em><a href=\"http://www.indietravelpodcast.com\">Indie Travel Podcast</a></em> gives a suggestion on Bluetooth keyboards</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/media/files/savoyard/10743\">Madrugada</a></em> by Savoyard</li>\r\n	<li>After my morning workout in the Philadelphia Westin, I went for a walk looking for a breakfast place</li>\r\n	<li>Bought a real Philadelphia breakfast -- an egg, cheese, and <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrapple\">scrapple</a> sandwich from a lunch truck</li>\r\n	<li>Takes time to find real local fare</li>\r\n	<li>A <a href=\"http://www.usatoday.com/travel/flights/2007-08-27-local-food_N.htm\">USAToday article</a> says local restaurants make up 20% to 40% of all eateries at most big U.S. airports</li>\r\n	<li>On the same day, enjoyed a <a href=\"http://www.lancasterbrewing.com/HopHogIPA.html\">beer</a> in Philadelphia Airport from Lancaster County and an espresso in <a href=\"http://www.mwaa.com/dulles/dulles.htm\">Washington Dulles airport</a> from a <a href=\"http://www.mayorgacoffee.com/index.php\">Maryland coffee roaster</a></li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/media/files/djlang59/10579\">Crazy Love</a></em> by DJ Lang</li>\r\n	<li>A trip from Chicago to New York gave me 2 hour delays each way, doubling the scheduled length of each flight</li>\r\n	<li>On my outbound flight, the United pilot sent back personal apologizes to top-tier status fliers, similar to his colleague who made the <a href=\"http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118826634834410559.html\">front page</a> of the <em>Wall Street Journal</em></li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20724859/\"><em>BusinessWeek</em> cover story</a> from earlier this month says the <a href=\"http://www.faa.gov/\">Federal Aviation Administration</a> predicts there will be 1 billion people a year flying by 2015, a 36% increase from today</li>\r\n	<li>FAA\'s <a href=\"http://www.faa.gov/airports_airtraffic/airports/resources/publications/reports/media/fact_2.pdf\">FACT 2 study</a> predicts 18 airports will need additional capacity, and 7 metro areas will need additional capacity by 2015</li>\r\n	<li>The most important expansion -- the <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O\'Hare_International_Airport#Modernization_plan\">O\'Hare Modernization Program</a> -- is being held up by a <a href=\"http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-cemeterysuit_web_14sep14,0,2656304.story\">suit over moving a cemetery</a></li>\r\n	<li>NIMBY-ism is responsible for much of today\'s travel hassles</li>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917625.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org\">ccMixter</a></li>\r\n	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_57.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #57 - Making Time for Local Fare; What’s Standing in the Way of Fixing Our Airports','','inherit','closed','closed','','80-revision-v1','','','2019-03-01 22:09:59','2019-03-02 03:09:59','',80,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/01/80-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2333,1,'2019-03-01 22:12:46','2019-03-02 03:12:46','Recorded in the <a href=\"http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=39.1319444444,-77.2263888889&amp;spn=0.1,0.1&amp;q=39.1319444444,-77.2263888889 (Gaithersburg%2C%20Maryland)&amp;t=h\">Gaithersburg, MD</a> Marriott outside <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/washington-dc\">Washington, DC</a> at the end of an intense week of travel that had me flying from the East Coast to the West Coast and then back east again... on four different airlines.  With many airlines\' plummeting customer satisfaction scores, we ask the question \"Who raves about their airline?\" Recent trips allow me to do a \"seat-to-seat\" comparison of two high-buzz airlines -- <a href=\"http://www.jetblue.com/\">JetBlue</a> and Virgin America.  Our recurring <em>Travel Tech</em> topic talks about replacing a laptop with the latest evolution of Nokia\'s Internet tablet, and hunting down power outlets in airports.  Also, a listener suggestion on local food in DC\'s <a href=\"http://www.mwaa.com/national/\">Reagan National Airport</a> leads to frustration at missing a great burger. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_58.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_58.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #58:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Recorded in the Gaithersburg, MD Marriott outside Washington, DC</li>\r\n	<li>Had an extensive tour of East and West Coast airports over the past three weeks -- EWR, DCA, IAD, FLL, RDU, SNA, OAK, and SFO</li>\r\n	<li>Flying to the Northeast is much more painful than flying to the West Coast, even though the ORD-SFO flight is twice as long</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/junoon-infiniti/\">Nachoon Gi</a></em> by Junoon</li>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n	<li>Dave of the <a href=\"http://sandandtsunamis.blogspot.com\">Sand and Tsunamis blog</a> talked about hitting the <a href=\"http://www.fiveguys.com/\">Five Guys Famous Burger</a> stand in DC\'s Reagan National Airport.  I wanted to try it out on my DC trip last week.  Unfortunately, Five Guys is buried behind security in the <a href=\"http://www.usairways.com\">USAir</a> concourse and I was flying United</li>\r\n	<li>Chris Christensen of the <a href=\"http://AmateurTraveler.com\">Amateur Traveler</a> podcast sent along a review of TravelCommons from Acura Style magazine</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/lucas-divine/\">Old Mexico</a></em> by Jeffery Luck Lucas</li>\r\n<strong>Who Raves about Their Airline?</strong>\r\n	<li>Most of the airline customer satisfaction problems are with what used to be called \"legacy\" carriers, now called \"network\" carriers -- USAir, Northwest, Delta, American, United</li>\r\n	<li>Many elite fliers living in hub cities of network carriers (e.g., Philadelphia for USAir, Detroit for Northwest) complain about being \"trapped\"</li>\r\n	<li>A stark comparison to the ringing endorsement of JetBlue offered by Business Week\'s executive editor in this <a href=\"http://www.businessweek.com/mediacenter/podcasts/cover_stories/covercast_02_22_07.htm\">podcast</a></li>\r\n	<li>Virgin America still feels like they\'re in \"beta\" mode</li>\r\n	<li>JetBlue offers a great in-flight experience -- good leg room, choice of snacks, free <a href=\"http://www.directv.com\">DirecTV</a> in seatback screens -- but the ground experience in JFK is a hassle</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"http://udayantripathi.com\">Udayan Tripathi</a> describes his flight across the US on Frontier Airlines</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://www.brunomisonne.com/aviation%20music_003.htm\">Johannesburg airport tower party</a></em> by <a href=\"http://www.brunomisonne.com\">Bruno Misonne</a></li>\r\n<strong>Travel Tech Potpourri</strong>\r\n	<li><a href=\"http://marcloehrwald.com/\">Marc Löhrwald</a> is very satisfied with the <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N800\">Nokia N800</a> as a PC replacement, and doesn\'t have to take it out of his briefcase when passing through security. He is, though, going to upgrade to the new N810</li>\r\n	<li>Finding power outlets in airports can be a bit of an Easter Egg hunt</li>\r\n	<li>O\'Hare\'s Terminal 1 has put in a number of free workstations with plenty of plugs at eye level</li>\r\n	<li>Other airports push their  pay-to-charge vending machines</li>\r\n	<li>Here\'s a <a href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/travelcommons/1736936801/\">picture</a> of the Medusa-like cell phone and PDA charger in <a href=\"http://www.rdu.com\">Raleigh-Durham airport</a></li>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917626.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\">Magnatune</a> and <a href=\"http://www.brunomisonne.com\">Bruno Misonne</a></li>\r\n	<li>Feedback at comments@travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_58.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #58 - Who Raves About Their Airline; Powering Up in Airports','','inherit','closed','closed','','82-revision-v1','','','2019-03-01 22:12:46','2019-03-02 03:12:46','',82,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/01/82-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2334,1,'2019-03-01 22:14:27','2019-03-02 03:14:27','Recorded in the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago in the middle of the one week a year I refuse to travel -- <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thanksgiving\">Thanksgiving Day</a> week.  With environmental and economic reasons to reduce unneeded car trips, how easy is it to take a train to and from the airport? The answer is mixed and it doesn\'t look to get any better any time soon. We also talk about the deteriorating state of the rental car fleet -- which is making public transit look more attractive.  A listener sends in a comment on airport power station etiquette, and we talk about a collection of airline food menus from the past. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_59.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_59.mp3\"]<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #59:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Recorded in the TravelCommon studios outside <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/chicago\">Chicago, IL</a></li>\r\n	<li>No travel this week -- leaving the airports to the \"less experienced\" travelers</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/swivel-deep/\"><em>Arlos Auto Parts and Salvation</em></a> by Swivel Neck Jones</li>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n	<li>Received an e-mail from United the morning after a LAX-ORD flight that was delayed 3 hours. The e-mail gave a nice apology and 5,000 miles for my troubles.</li>\r\n	<li>A listener talks about his travails in finding working power outlets in airports and on airplanes</li>\r\n	<li>Northwestern University Library launched <a href=\"http://www.library.northwestern.edu/transportation/digital-collections/menus/index.html\">web access</a> to its collection of past airline menus. Talked about a 1969 United Airlines <a href=\"http://digital.library.northwestern.edu/inu-tmenu/tmenu-UA005.html\">menu</a> and a 1962 <a href=\"http://digital.library.northwestern.edu/inu-tmenu/tmenu-EAA001.html\">menu</a> from East Africa Airways.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/fuzz-messy/\"><em>Smiling Perspective</em></a> by General Fuzz</li>\r\n<strong>Trains to Planes</strong>\r\n	<li>What\'s the best way from Newark Airport to Manhattan?  It depends how much time and money you have, and it\'s an inverse relationship.</li>\r\n	<li>With lots of time, you can save money by taking the monorail over the marshes to a train station served by Amtrak and NJ Transit trains</li>\r\n	<li>It’s a pretty handy set up, but as with many – too many – plane-train connections, not intuitively obvious, not very user-friendly, at least for first time users</li>\r\n	<li>The \"gold standard\" of airport rail links remains the <a href=\"http://www.heathrowexpress.com/index.asp\">Heathrow Express</a> -- expensive, but convenient</li>\r\n	<li>Subway systems in <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/washington-dc\">Washington DC</a>, Chicago and Atlanta inexpensively deliver you directly to the terminal</li>\r\n	<li>Public pressure to locate new airports far away from population centers doesn\'t bode well for easy public transit links.  Denver\'s new airport may get a <a href=\"http://www.rtd-fastracks.com/ec_1\">rail link</a> by 2015.</li>\r\n	<li>Wikipedia has what looks like a good <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airport_rail_link\">listing</a> of global airport rail links.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/atek-phoenix/\"><em>Goa Life</em></a> by Ambient Teknology</li>\r\n<strong>Renting a Rambling Wreck</strong>\r\n	<li>I’ve received more 20,000+ mile cars from Hertz this year than ever before, and this is with some level of status in Hertz’s Gold Club.</li>\r\n	<li>A <em>Wall Street Journal</em> <a href=\"http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119137170889247162.html\">article</a> said that rental car companies are letting their fleets age an additional 2,000 miles</li>\r\n	<li>Another <em>WSJ</em> <a href=\"http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119500412182192191.html?mod=pj_main_hs_coll\">article</a> says that the drop in rental car customer satisfaction reported in the latest JD Powers <a href=\"http://www.jdpower.com/travel/ratings/rental-car-ratings\">survey</a> is linked to the aging fleet.</li>\r\n	<li>I switched to Avis until they tried to stick me with the repair cost of a previously damaged tail light</li>\r\n	<li>It\'s driving me to use cabs, limos, and public transit more often, even when more expensive and less convenient</li>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917627.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\">Magnatune</a><a href=\"http://www.brunomisonne.com\"> </a></li>\r\n	<li>Feedback at comments@travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_59.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #59 - Trains to Planes; Renting a Rambling Wreck','','inherit','closed','closed','','87-revision-v1','','','2019-03-01 22:14:27','2019-03-02 03:14:27','',87,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/01/87-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2335,1,'2019-03-01 22:16:23','2019-03-02 03:16:23','Recorded in the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago after I\'ve finished up my <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_travel\">business travel</a> for the year. Since a number of listeners aren\'t frequent travelers, we provide some tips on how to blend in, look like a pro, and generally reduce a little of the hassle of holiday travel. Also, GPS devices are hot for the holidays this year.  We talk about their good points and a few gotchas.  Listener comments include suggestions on public transit to Denver airport, another happy <a href=\"http://www.jetblue.com/\">JetBlue</a> customer, and a call for help dealing with tight UK carry-on limits. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_60.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_60.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #60:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Recorded in the TravelCommon studios outside <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/chicago\">Chicago, IL</a></li>\r\n	<li>December is a funny time to travel -- light traffic the beginning of the month, crushing traffic at the end.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/magnacomp-christmas/\"><em>Angels we have heard on high</em></a> performed by James Edwards</li>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n	<li>A listener from Denver suggests <a href=\"http://www.rtd-denver.com/skyRide/\">skyRide</a> bus service as a cheap and comfortable way to get to <a href=\"http://www.flydenver.com/\">Denver International Airport</a></li>\r\n	<li>A recent visitor to San Francisco agrees with episode #59\'s assessment of the BART system cloth seats -- they\'re gross.</li>\r\n	<li>A listener from Richmond, Virginia raves about the new JetBlue service into RIC</li>\r\n	<li>A listener from London mentions the <a href=\"http://www.bia.homeoffice.gov.uk/managingborders/technology/eborders/iris/\">Iris scan</a> speeds up immigration, but is looking for suggestions on how to handle the UK\'s restrictive one carry-on bag rule.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/magnacomp-christmas/\"><em>The First Noel</em></a> performed by Ralph Rousseau Meulenbroeks</li>\r\n<strong>Tips for Holiday Travel\r\n</strong>\r\n	<li>The most telling difference between an experienced and an amateur traveler is what the military calls “situational awareness”</li>\r\n	<li>The place where experience shows the most is in the security line</li>\r\n	<li>Tip #1 – Use the line to get prepared</li>\r\n	<li>Tip #2 – Never let the x-ray machine go hungry</li>\r\n	<li>Tip #3 – if you aren’t prepared, step aside until you are</li>\r\n	<li>These three tips all have one key similarity – consideration for others.</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/shira-castle/\"><em>Christmas Day in the Morning</em></a> is by Shira Kammen</li>\r\n<strong>GPS as the Hot Travel Gift</strong>\r\n	<li><a href=\"http://adage.com/article?article_id=122751\">AdAge</a> magazine declared GPS as “hot for the holidays” with unit sales up 488% over last year.</li>\r\n	<li>Bought a refurbed <a href=\"http://www.tomtom.com\">TomTom</a> One from <a href=\"http://www.buy.com/prod/tomtom-one-portable-gps-preloaded-map-of-us-canada-on-sd-card/q/loc/111/205833413.html\">Buy.com</a> for $160 a few months ago and it’s been great</li>\r\n	<li>Advantage over built-in units and rental car units is the ability to upload information.</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"http://www.tomtomforums.com/forumdisplay.php?f=14\">tomtomforums.com</a> and <a href=\"http://poiplaza.com\">poiplaza.com</a> have custom point-of-interest files for download.  I\'ve found the Starbucks file very useful.</li>\r\n	<li>However, GPS units will get it wrong on occasion.</li>\r\n<strong>Closing\r\n</strong>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917629.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\">Magnatune</a></li>\r\n	<li>Feedback at comments@travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_60.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #60 - Tips for Holiday Travel; GPS as the Hot Travel Gift','','inherit','closed','closed','','89-revision-v1','','','2019-03-01 22:16:23','2019-03-02 03:16:23','',89,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/01/89-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2337,1,'2019-03-01 22:19:11','2019-03-02 03:19:11','Recorded in the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago on a rare full week in town after trips to <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/the-netherlands/amsterdam\">Amsterdam</a> and <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/great-plains/kansas-city\">Kansas City</a>.  In this episode, an unusual flight delay makes us think about embracing the delay rather than fighting it, and snatching a couple hour vacation in Amsterdam allows us to explore some high and low culture.  Listener comments include suggestions on easy-to-pack workout shoes and a question on how to make air travel greener. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_61.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_61.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #61:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Recorded in the TravelCommons studios outside <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/chicago\">Chicago, IL</a></li>\r\n	<li>Talking about January travel means talking about the weather; everybody’s been clobbered by the weather this month</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/buy_album.php?id=28EF83EE66BC30F7A29060F2EE7D5A63853661EE921AD0B5F46646F31FC53762518D71671346229B61068D83046F9760\"><em>Nu Love</em></a> by <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=59ADD660576A8DD437473F3662DA2A64FF449762E1BA4F7793D9221B486E5F31\">The Bex</a></li>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n	<li>Good response to last episode\'s request for suggestions on compact gym shoes</li>\r\n	<li>Dan Grabon suggests racing flats</li>\r\n	<li><a title=\"Frick\'s World\" href=\"http://fricksworld.blogspot.com/\">Steve Frick</a> suggests flaming <a title=\"Zappos.com\" href=\"http://www.zappos.com/n/p/dp/1633204.html\">Converse Chuck Taylor high tops</a></li>\r\n	<li>Urgency around the question lessened this month when the UK DoT relaxed its restrictions and now allows 2 pieces of carry-on</li>\r\n	<li><a title=\"Peter Rukavina\'s blog\" href=\"http://ruk.ca/\">Peter Rukavina</a> asks what frequent travelers think about the environmental impact of their traveling</li>\r\n	<li><a title=\"Virgin Atlantic Carbon Offset Article\" href=\"http://www.aboutmyplanet.com/climate-change/virgin-airlines-launch/\">Virgin Atlantic</a>, SAS, and <a title=\"FAQ on Continental\'s offset scheme\" href=\"http://www.continental.com/web/en-US/content/company/profile/environment_faq.aspx\">Continental</a> have announced carbon offset schemes</li>\r\n	<li>Some <a title=\"BusinessWeek article on TerraPass\" href=\"http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_13/b4027057.htm\">controversy</a> about the efficacy of carbon offset schemes</li>\r\n	<li>UK government’s Stern Report says that <a title=\"Stern Report\'s analysis of aviation impact on global warming\" href=\"http://www.sbac.co.uk/community/cms/content/preview/news_item_view.asp?i=14736&amp;t=0\">aviation CO<sub>2</sub> emissions</a> account for about 1.6% of global greenhouse gas emissions</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/buy_album.php?id=C28E7E6E86AA68440FF495227937622F853661EE921AD0B5F46646F31FC53762518D71671346229B61068D83046F9760\"><em>M4 (Part II)</em></a> by <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=1372C88AEC26DADFE416E71A587BFA89F55397894BB80F5E74747143A2524C8F\">Faunts</a></li>\r\n<strong><a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen\">Zen</a> of Delays\r\n</strong>\r\n	<li>Listener pointed to a Conde Nast’s Portfolio.com <a title=\"What I Learned on the Road This Year\" href=\"http://www.portfolio.com/business-travel/seat-2B/2007/12/18/Best-Business-Travel-Lessons/comments\">article</a> titled “What I Learned on the Road This Year -- Traveling for business is a Zen practice: Keep your head down and take good notes”</li>\r\n	<li>Don’t know if it’s Zen, with its emphasis on mindful acceptance of the present moment, or ju jitsu, with its training on using your attacker’s energy against him – the sort of “bend like a willow, don’t break like the oak” thinking</li>\r\n	<li>This is, of course, completely antithetical to the concept of a “road warrior” – one who controls every aspect of their travel experience</li>\r\n	<li>My Amsterdam flight was delayed for 3 hours by a United baggage handler trying to take a shortcut <a title=\"TravelCommons blog article describing the incident\" href=\"http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2008/01/21/what-was-he-thinking/\"><em>underneath</em></a> our 767</li>\r\n	<li>Beer makes the Zen thing a whole lot easier</li>\r\n	<li>Flowing around the evening’s obstacles I ended up in a more comfortable place</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/buy_album.php?id=C760A5AF2DBCB13FBF16916A7E363799853661EE921AD0B5F46646F31FC53762518D71671346229B61068D83046F9760\"><em>Central Calm</em></a> is by <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=CC53C7D4D44C3D89C4F8289D6CF77E78FF449762E1BA4F7793D9221B486E5F31\">Skywards</a></li>\r\n<strong>Sneaking in a Vacation</strong>\r\n	<li>Past T/C episodes -- <a title=\"Podcast #16 - Squeezing in Tourism; Can We Stop Sharing?\" href=\"http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2005/10/01/podcast-16-squeezing-in-tourism-can-we-stop-sharing/\">#16</a> and <a title=\"Podcast #34 - 20-Minute Vacation, Making It Look Easy\" href=\"http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2006/03/04/podcast-34-20-minute-vacation-making-it-look-easy/\">#34</a> -- have talked about the importance to take advantage of travel to take a little time to yourself</li>\r\n	<li>Had a free afternoon in Amsterdam, so decided to walk around a bit</li>\r\n	<li>Focused on seeing just two things -- <a title=\"Van Gogh Museum\" href=\"http://www3.vangoghmuseum.nl/vgm/index.jsp\">Van Gogh Museum</a> and the <a title=\"Red Light District overview\" href=\"http://www.amsterdam.info/red-light-district/\">Red Light District</a></li>\r\n	<li>Thought about sampling the wares of one of the <a title=\"Amsterdam coffee houses\" href=\"http://www.amsterdam.info/coffeeshops/\">\"coffee houses\"</a> but then thought better of it</li>\r\n<strong>Closing\r\n</strong>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917631.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://iodapromonet.com/index.php\">IODA Promonet</a></li>\r\n	<li>Feedback at comments@travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_61.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #61 - Zen of Delays; Sneaking in a Vacation','','inherit','closed','closed','','93-revision-v1','','','2019-03-01 22:19:11','2019-03-02 03:19:11','',93,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/01/93-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2339,1,'2019-03-01 22:23:01','2019-03-02 03:23:01','Recorded in the Newark Liberty Airport Marriott in scenic Newark, NJ. We cover a lot of ground in this episode -- why business travel and Disney resorts don\'t mix, some choices that can make our personal air travel a bit greener, my experience with Southwest Airline\'s new Business Select program, and the reason I\'ve finally given up on Hertz. We also talk about the atrophying of wired connections -- the modem is gone; is Ethernet next? -- and the importance of Starbucks to the frequent traveler\'s work day. And finally, is bad airline service bringing back the need for traditional travel agents? Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_62.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_62.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #62:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none\">\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Recorded in room 959 of the Newark Liberty Airport Marriott</li>\r\n 	<li>A 2-day conference in Disney World reminds me that it\'s a great place for a family vacation, but a lousy place for business. No early check-in, no quiet place for a conference call -- I definitely didn\'t have a \"magical day\".</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/rompaey-eastern2/\"><em>Indian Blossom</em></a> by Ruben van Rompaey</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none\">\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Revisiting <a title=\"Peter Rukavina\'s blog\" href=\"http://ruk.ca/\">Peter Rukavina\'s</a> question from T/C #61 on how to reduce the environmental impact of air travel</li>\r\n 	<li>Virgin Atlantic\'s <a href=\"http://www.usatoday.com/travel/flights/2008-02-24-biofueljet_N.htm?csp=34\">biofuel test flight</a> from London to Amsterdam received a lot of press -- as it was meant to do -- but biofuels are more about sustainability than reducing the carbon footprint of a plane flight.</li>\r\n 	<li>Air France-KLM\'s <a href=\"http://developpement-durable.airfrance.com/FR/en/common/pdf/Rapport%20DD%202005-06_en.pdf\">2005-2006 Sustainable Development Report</a> provides statistics on the reduction of hydrocarbon and carbon monoxide emissions as a result of its fleet modernization program.</li>\r\n 	<li>Three things an individual can do to reduce their in-flight carbon footprint -- choose the flight with the most efficient plane, take a direct flight, and fly into a less-congested secondary airport</li>\r\n 	<li>I liked my recent experience with Southwest Airline\'s <a href=\"http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/southwest-airlines-introduces-business-fares/story.aspx?guid=%7B655C87D9-A7A1-47A8-9C1F-7657BE5306AD%7D\">Business Select program</a>. For last minute travel, it gets me a better seat than I can usually get on airlines with reserved seats.</li>\r\n 	<li>Had yet another beat-up high-mileage car from Hertz -- this time in Orlando. When compared to the brand new Lincoln Mountaineer I received from Avis in Nashville, I\'ve decided to ditch Hertz for Avis.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://www.magnatune.com/artists/albums/williams-long/\"><em>Afternoon in the Sun</em></a> by John Williams</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Evolution of Connectivity</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none\">\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>After mistaking the modem port on my ThinkPad for the Ethernet port, I couldn\'t remember the last time I used my modem</li>\r\n 	<li>Apple\'s new MacBook Air lacks an Ethernet port, depending completely on Wi-Fi. Is Ethernet going the way of the modem -- at least on laptops?</li>\r\n 	<li>For me, the big travel news wasn\'t the Delta-Northwest or United-Continental merger dances, but the <a href=\"http://wifinetnews.com/archives/008175.html\">announcement</a> that Starbucks is switching from its Wi-Fi partnership from T-Mobile to AT&amp;T.</li>\r\n 	<li>Starbucks has become a watering hole, some new millennium oasis for the web Bedouins -- those of us working out of our “mobile offices”</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/westexit-modern/\"><em>Arsenal</em></a> is by The West Exit</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Return of the Travel Agents?</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none\">\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>In the Web 1.0 days, the travel agent was the classic example of an industry being “disintermediated” by the web</li>\r\n 	<li>However, when dealing with delayed or canceled flights, it usually takes talking to a person to get you home or to get you a refund.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you’re on a single-carrier ticket – especially a carrier where you have status – you’re usually OK going direct. However, multi-carrier tickets are best worked through a travel agent</li>\r\n 	<li>I used to use Orbitz or Travelocity for these tickets, but trying to get hold anyone there live to sort through a problem was near impossible</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917632.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a title=\"Magnatune\" href=\"http://magnatune.com/\">Magnatune</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Feedback at comments@travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_62.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #62 - Flying Green; Evolution of Connectivity; Return of the Travel Agent?','','inherit','closed','closed','','95-revision-v1','','','2019-03-01 22:23:01','2019-03-02 03:23:01','',95,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/01/95-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2341,1,'2019-03-01 22:31:42','2019-03-02 03:31:42','Recorded in the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago after a week of skiing in Colorado. In this episode, we talk about some of the difficulties faced by today\'s frequent travelers. A listener gives a blow-by-blow account of the myriad of lines he faced trying to get home from Newark. Another listener relates about the challenges of attending a business conference in a hotel full of 50+ year-old women. We talk about how lengthy delays on the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"New York City\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/new-york-city\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\">New York</a>-to-Chicago route are giving regular travelers a dazed look that might be called the \"733-Mile Stare\". And I have to comment on a couple of recent <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Transportation Security Administration\" href=\"http://www.tsa.gov\" rel=\"homepage\">TSA</a> incidents. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_63.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_63.mp3\"]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #63:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Recorded in the TravelCommons studios outside <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Chicago\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/chicago\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\">Chicago, IL</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Just got back from a week\'s skiing in Breckenridge and A-Basin in Colorado</li>\r\n 	<li>Wanted to check out the TSA\'s new Diamond Lane program that its <a href=\"http://www.tsa.gov/blog/2008/03/diamonds-are-passengers-best-friend.html\">blog claims</a> is a huge success. However, the security line with the old system was much shorter.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://ghosts.nin.com/main/home\"><em>3 Ghosts I</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.nin.com/\">Nine Inch Nails</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li><a title=\"Evan Sparks\' blog on the 5-passenger AA ORD-LHR flight\" href=\"http://evansparks.wordpress.com/2008/03/05/and-emissions-trading-would-have-helped-here-how/\">Evan Sparks’ Aviation Policy Blog</a> picked up the <a title=\"Daily Telegraph story on the AA ORD-LHR flight\" href=\"http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?view=DETAILS&amp;grid=&amp;xml=/news/2008/03/05/nplane105.xml\">story</a> of a Feb 9th <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"American Airlines\" href=\"http://www.aa.com/\" rel=\"homepage\">American Airlines</a> flight from Chicago to London that carried only 5 passengers and the resulting ruckus raised by environmental groups.</li>\r\n 	<li><a title=\"Gary Learned\'s blog\" href=\"http://seat6d.tumblr.com/\">Gary Learned</a> tells about attending a business conference in the <a href=\"http://hotels.lonelyplanet.com/usa/nashville-r2102050/gaylord-opryland-resort-and-spa-p1045418/\">Gaylord Opryland</a> at the same time as 5,000 <a title=\"The Red Hat Society Website\" href=\"http://www.redhatsociety.com/\">Red Hats</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a title=\"Saurab Bhargava\'s web site\" href=\"http://www.saurabbhargava.com/\">Saurab Bhargava</a> sends along his account of a particularly bad day in Newark</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/buy_album.php?id=08E508A6096F11910641E13331B70EED6DFA5BB929282F731E19BBAFA8F08FFD686BD99DD86BA0D5E844DD5536E1AEFB\" rel=\"nofollow\"><em>Ghost Hardware</em></a> by Burial</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>The 733-Mile Stare\r\n</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>During the <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War\">Vietnam War</a>, the “thousand-yard stare” described the dazed look, the unfocused straight-ahead gaze of the front-line soldier</li>\r\n 	<li>Regular travelers on the Chicago-to-New York run are starting to develop their own dazed look as they try to fight through delays, and cancellations to get home or get to an important meeting</li>\r\n 	<li>Call it the \"733-mile stare\" – the flight mileage between ORD and LGA</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"http://www.usatoday.com/\">USA Today</a> <a title=\"10 Busiest Round Trip Routes\" href=\"http://www.usatoday.com/travel/flights/2008-03-25-air-routes_N.htm\">article</a> said that, based on 2007 passenger counts, the ORD-LGA route was the 3rd busiest in the country</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a title=\"MP3 Download\" href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/download_track.php?id=0E74C6FEB7390D18D02B4B399668093172F6C8CC66DDC09D90A3BF7DDA436823CFAC859AE2B2C73E46A278A4950E1030\">Lonely Dog Blues</a></em> by <a title=\"Tobin James\' Web Site\" href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/label.php?id=2A3449F03E7B8462FF74407B60F0C4B0A30A0CBE880C61DE37E3B342387F0643\">Tobin James</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>TSA Can\'t Help Themselves</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>USA Today <a title=\"Flier angry after TSA makes her remove nipple ring\" href=\"http://www.usatoday.com/travel/flights/2008-03-28-tsa-nipple-ring_N.htm\">article</a> on TSA forcing a woman to remove nipple rings</li>\r\n 	<li>TSA posted a statement on their <a title=\"TSA Press Release Justifying Nipple Ring Removal\" href=\"http://www.tsa.gov/press/happenings/lubbock.shtm\">website</a> and <a title=\"TSA Blog Post Justifying Nipple Ring Removal\" href=\"http://www.tsa.gov/blog/2008/03/tsa-and-piercings.html\">blog</a> saying that the screeners “properly followed procedures” and that they were “acting to protect the passengers and crews of the flights departing Lubbock that day.”</li>\r\n 	<li>Watched a TSA officer in Chicago-O\'Hare help a confused Chinese couple find their connecting flight.</li>\r\n 	<li>Why can\'t the TSA act more like the ORD officer and spend less time justifying stupid decisions like those in Lubbock?</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing\r\n</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917633.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://iodapromonet.com/index.php\">IODA Promonet</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Feedback at comments@travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_63.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #63 - The 733-Mile Stare; TSA Can\'t Help Themselves','','inherit','closed','closed','','97-revision-v1','','','2019-03-01 22:31:42','2019-03-02 03:31:42','',97,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/01/97-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2342,1,'2019-03-01 22:35:18','2019-03-02 03:35:18','Recorded in the TravelCommons studios outside of <a href=\"http://www.chicago2016.org/News/Pages/home.aspx\">Chicago</a> after taking a month\'s break. We see if there\'s anything to the TSA\'s recent attempts to reduce security line waits --  the Clear <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Registered_Traveler\">Registered Traveler</a> and the Diamond Lane Self-Select programs. We also take a look at Southwest\'s attempts to attract more business travelers.  A listener story on traveling injured causes us to look into the cost trade-offs of air ambulance services, while another listener points us to the perfect song for the summer travel season. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_65.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_65.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #65:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Recorded in the TravelCommons studios outside of <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/chicago\">Chicago, Illinois</a></li>\r\n	<li>Other family \"creative\" obligations forced me to take a month off of the podcast</li>\r\n	<li>Playing around with the <a href=\"http://www.dopplr.com\">Dopplr</a> travel website -- it\'s not bad, but hasn\'t yet provided a serendipitous meet-up with other friends on the road</li>\r\n	<li>However, Dopplr helpfully totes up the <a href=\"http://blog.dopplr.com/2008/04/22/calculate-the-carbon-impact-of-your-travels-with-dopplr/\">carbon footprint for my travels</a></li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dl.nin.com/theslip/signup\"><em>Discipline</em></a> by Nine Inch Nails</li>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n	<li>Thanks to <a href=\"http://budacast.hu\">Drew Leifheit</a> for mentioning TravelCommons in his travel podcasting article <a href=\"http://www.vagabondish.com/travelcasting-travel-audio-guide/\"><em>Travelcasting: Lighten Your Backpack, Load Up Your iPod</em></a> on the <a href=\"http://www.vagabondish.com\">Vagabondish</a> website</li>\r\n	<li>A listener shares his own \"traveling while injured\" story after listening to <a href=\"http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2007/06/08/podcast-54-traveling-injured-how-bad-is-travel-experience-really/\">episode #54</a></li>\r\n	<li>Air ambulance service like <a title=\"AirMed Service Programs\" href=\"http://www.airmed.com/our-services/plans.cfm\">AirMed </a>and <a title=\"MedJetAssist Service Plans\" href=\"http://medjetassistance.com/plans/regular.aspx\">MetJetAssist</a> offer insurance-like programs starting at $225/year</li>\r\n	<li>A listener points out a great <a title=\"TSA Theme Song\" href=\"http://www.crainium.net/jdjArchives/2005/04/tsa_theme_song.html\">song </a>for the summer travel season by the <a href=\"http://www.barandgrillsingers.com/\">Bar &amp; Grille Singers</a></li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>One</em> by <a title=\"Cargo Cult\'s Alchemy Album\" href=\"http://www.magnatune.com/artists/albums/cargo-alchemy/hifi_play\">Cargo Cult</a></li>\r\n<strong>New Ways to the Front of the Line\r\n</strong>\r\n	<li>Recently had first hand experience with the <a title=\"TSA Registered Traveler Program\" href=\"http://www.tsa.gov/approach/rt/index.shtm\">Registered Traveler</a> program and the <a title=\"TSA Expands Diamond-Lane Program\" href=\"http://www.tsa.gov/press/releases/2008/0502b.shtm\">Diamond Lane Self-Select</a> program</li>\r\n	<li>The Clear security line in <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_International_Airport\">San Francisco airport</a> (SFO) was empty, but the biometric checks made it take longer the regular 1st-Class/Premium Frequent Flier line</li>\r\n	<li>The Diamond Self-Select Program in <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Midway_International_Airport\">Chicago Midway airport</a> (MDW) doesn\'t live up to its promise -- too many \"non-experts\" self-select into the black diamond line</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Magnified</em> by <a title=\"Very Large Array\'s Stuff Album\" href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/vla-stuff/hifi_play\">Very Large Array</a></li>\r\n<strong>Southwest Skips the Nickels &amp; Dimes </strong>\r\n	<li>Southwest Airline\'s <em>Fees Don\'t Fly With Us</em> <a title=\"Dallas Morning News story on Southwest\'s new ad campaign\" href=\"http://dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/bus/stories/053108dnbusairnickel.3633d88.html\">ad campaign</a> goes straight at the legacy carriers\' new-found love of add-on fees</li>\r\n	<li>Southwest is becoming more attractive to frequent business travelers</li>\r\n	<li>Their <a href=\"http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/southwest-airlines-introduces-business-fares/story.aspx?guid=%7B655C87D9-A7A1-47A8-9C1F-7657BE5306AD%7D\">Business Select program</a> removes the \"cattle-car\" boarding queue that everyone hated</li>\r\n	<li>Southwest\'s gate areas in Midway (MDW), Cleveland (CLE), and Balimore-Washington Int\'l (BWI) are impressive -- comfortable seats and lots of easy-to-find electrical outlets</li>\r\n	<li>But Southwest still can\'t match the value of the frequent flier awards I receive from United Airlines</li>\r\n<strong>Closing\r\n</strong>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917635.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://nin.com/\">Nine Inch Nails</a> and <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\">Magnatune</a></li>\r\n	<li>Feedback at comments@travelcommons.com or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_65.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #65 - New Ways to the Front of the Line; Southwest Skips Nickel & Dimes','','inherit','closed','closed','','101-revision-v1','','','2019-03-01 22:35:18','2019-03-02 03:35:18','',101,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/01/101-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2344,1,'2019-03-01 22:41:53','2019-03-02 03:41:53','Recorded in the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago after a couple of weeks in <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/thailand\">Thailand</a> and <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/singapore\">Singapore</a>.  In this episode, I talk about some of my experiences in <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/asia\">Asia</a>, including a few travel (mis)adventures. We also talk about losing laptops in airports -- comments on a study claiming that 12,000 laptops are lost in airports every week, and thought on one particular lost laptop belonging to the Clear registered traveler program.  And a listener gives his in-flight impressions of Singapore Air\'s new A380. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_66.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_66.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #66:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Recorded in the TravelCommons studios outside of <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/chicago\">Chicago, Illinois</a></li>\r\n	<li>Business and personal travel has taken me all over -- Denver, Thailand, Singapore, <a href=\"http://www.townofboston.com/\">Boston, New York</a>, the Delaware Shore, and Philadelphia</li>\r\n	<li>United Airlines\' troubles and ORD weather make the flight back from Singapore even longer</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Planetenstaaten</em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/weigl-landwater/\">Philipp Weigl</a></li>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n	<li>A listener shares his recent experience flying to Tokyo in a <a title=\"Singapore Airlines A380\" href=\"http://www.businesstraveller.com/archive/2008/may-2008/tried-and-tested/flight-check-singapore-airlines-a380\" target=\"_blank\">Singapore Air Airbus A380</a></li>\r\n	<li>Lots of comments on the <a title=\"TravelCommons post on Ponemon Institute study\" href=\"http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2008/07/06/12000-laptops-lost-in-airports-every-week-hmmm/\" target=\"_blank\">post</a> about the <a title=\"Dell-Ponemon Institute Study on Lost Laptops\" href=\"http://www.dell.com/downloads/global/services/dell_lost_laptop_study.pdf\" target=\"_blank\">study</a> claiming that 12,000 laptops are lost in airports every week</li>\r\n	<li>Blogger Sean O\'Neill\'s follow-up <a href=\"http://current.newsweek.com/budgettravel/\" target=\"_blank\">research</a> on this study supports my initial skepticism</li>\r\n	<li><a title=\"Frick\'s World blog\" href=\"http://fricksworld.blogspot.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Steve Frick</a> wonders how someone doesn\'t notice that their bag is suddenly 7 lbs lighter</li>\r\n	<li>The Clear registered traveler program loses, and then finds, a laptop with applicants\' personal data</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>The Collider</em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/clayne-vi/\">C. Layne</a></li>\r\n<strong>Impressions of 1st Trip to Asia\r\n</strong></ul>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>My family\'s first trip to Asia, so we did \"Asia Lite\" -- <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/thailand/phuket-province\">Phuket, Thailand</a> and Singapore</li>\r\n	<li>If Southwest has \"cattle car\" boarding, then <a href=\"http://www.airasia.com/\">Air Asia</a> uses a stampede</li>\r\n	<li>Driving in Thailand would be difficult because I can\'t read the <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thai_alphabet\">Thai alphabet</a></li>\r\n	<li>Surprised to have a deep discussion of the US presidential race with a Thai cab driver</li>\r\n	<li>The experience of eating <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Durian\">durian</a> in Singapore is seared into my senses</li>\r\n<strong>Closing\r\n</strong>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917636.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\">Magnatune</a></li>\r\n	<li>Feedback at comments@travelcommons.com or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_66.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #66 - Travel in Asia; Losing Laptops in Airports','','inherit','closed','closed','','105-revision-v1','','','2019-03-01 22:41:53','2019-03-02 03:41:53','',105,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/01/105-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2346,1,'2019-03-01 22:49:44','2019-03-02 03:49:44','Recorded in the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago after a month of travel to and from the East Coast. In this episode, a spur-of-the-moment train trip bypasses a huge air traffic control problem.  A listener story gets us talking about theft after you entrust your luggage to the folks behind the curtain. I have fun saying the word <em>schadenfreude</em> -- German for \"taking pleasure in other\'s misfortunes\" -- while talking about the need to use <a href=\"http://www.apple.com/iphone\">iPhones</a> and <a href=\"http://www.blackberry.com\">BlackBerrys</a> to check the status of delayed flights.  I also give my thoughs on the iPhone after traveling with it for a month.  Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_67.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_67.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #67:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Recorded in the TravelCommons studios outside of <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/chicago\">Chicago, Illinois</a></li>\r\n 	<li>No exotic travel this month -- just New York and <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/washington-dc\">Washington, DC</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Last minute decision to take Amtrak\'s <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acela_Express\">Acela Express</a> from NYC to DC meant I missed the delays caused by the <a href=\"http://www.eweek.com/c/a/IT-Infrastructure/Corrupt-File-Brought-Down-FAAs-Antiquated-IT-System/?kc=EWKNLNAV08282008STR4\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">crash</a> of the FAA\'s traffic tracking system</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- Bend and Not Break by <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/music/listeners/artistdetails.php?BandHash=bcd26803274d04274d5d253b2a9f7fff\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Dashboard Confessional</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>A <a href=\"http://www.transparentsociety.com/wordpress/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">listener</a> tells the story about her laptop bag being stolen after gate-checking it on a Delta commuter flight out of Richmond</li>\r\n 	<li>I relate the <a href=\"http://www.queensda.org/newpressreleases/2008/september/riviello_acevedo_09_02_2008.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">story</a> of 2 American Airlines JFK baggage handlers with stealing 925 pieces of jewelry worth $280,000 from the checked suitcase of a jewelry dealer bound for LA.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Hollywood Homicide</em> by <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/music/listeners/artistdetails.php?BandHash=e09e260d6030c8da53cef085ca11edd2\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">The Frantic</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Electronic Schadenfreude\r\n</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schadenfreude\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Schadenfreude</a> -- German word for \"the pleasure taken from the misfortune of someone else</li>\r\n 	<li>Side effect of wanted to make the right decision in changing a flight</li>\r\n 	<li>4 weeks of delayed United flights in August had me jumping flights at the first sign of a delay</li>\r\n 	<li>Electronic schadenfreude -- checking your iPhone or Blackberry the minute you hit the ground to see if your original flight is still on the ground</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Rings and Fences</em> by <a href=\"http://www.moochacha.net/blog/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Donna Maciocia</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Month With an iPhone\r\n</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Picked up a 16 GB 3G iPhone in August from the Apple store in <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Stamford, Connecticut\" href=\"http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=41.0966666667,-73.5522222222&amp;spn=0.1,0.1&amp;q=41.0966666667,-73.5522222222 (Stamford%2C%20Connecticut)&amp;t=h\" rel=\"geolocation\">Stamford, CT</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Skipped the 1st generation 2G/Edge iPhone -- way too slow for the portable Internet access I wanted</li>\r\n 	<li>Hasn\'t replaced my <a href=\"http://www.tomtom.com\">TomTom</a> One, but checking real-time traffic conditions is great</li>\r\n 	<li>iPhone Apps Store has some good stuff for a traveler -- <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=288429040&amp;mt=8\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">LinkedIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=287350070&amp;mt=8\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Airport Status</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=284967867&amp;mt=8\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Twinkle</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=287197884&amp;mt=8\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Sol Free Solitaire</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=289894882&amp;mt=8\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">White Noise</a></li>\r\n 	<li>The only downside is battery life</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing\r\n</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917637.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>Some bridge music from <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Feedback at comments@travelcommons.com or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_67.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #67 - Stolen Luggage; Month With an iPhone','','inherit','closed','closed','','107-revision-v1','','','2019-03-01 22:49:44','2019-03-02 03:49:44','',107,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/01/107-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2348,1,'2019-03-01 22:52:27','2019-03-02 03:52:27','Recorded in the Philadelphia Marriott after a hectic travel month with two trips to Europe and a bunch of travel up and down the US East Coast.  In this episode, I talk about a bit of multi-modal travel -- some planes, trains, and automobile trips.  We have a trio of stories about playing \"travel roulette\" to avoid flight delays, and some listeners offer their favorite iPhone apps.  I then share some non-obvious, intermediate-skill travel tips -- a sort of Road Warrior 201-level class and close with some thoughts about enjoying the fall colors from up above. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_68.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_68.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #68:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Recorded in the <a href=\"https://www.marriott.com/hotels/travel/phldt-philadelphia-marriott-downtown/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Philadelphia, PA Marriott</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Lots of multi-modal travel this month -- a National Express bus from Heathrow to Woking, lots of Amtrak Acelas up and down the East Coast</li>\r\n 	<li>One of those \"<a title=\"IMDb Entry for \" href=\"http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093748/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Planes, Trains &amp; Automobiles</a>\" days had delays on every leg and every mode of transportation except walking</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/indidginus-seismic/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Superstring</a></em> by Indidginus</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>In Heathrow, many signs plastered on the screening machines said that I didn\'t need to take my laptop out of my briefcase for screening.  What do they know that the TSA doesn\'t?</li>\r\n 	<li>Two travelers tell their \"travel roulette\" stories trying to avoid flight delays</li>\r\n 	<li>Chris Truelove of <a href=\"http://www.globalbagtag.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Global Bag Tags</a> is happy with an external iPhone battery he bought on eBay. Listen to the <a href=\"http://www.indietravelpodcast.com/podcast/076-global-bag-tag-review/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Indie Travel Podcast</a> interview where Chris tells the story of lost luggage that led to the founding of his company</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/yoria-suerte/\"><em>Suerte Mijo</em></a> by Arthur Yoria</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Road Warrior 201 </strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>TravelCommons has always been about travel stories, hence I haven\'t done many \"travel tips\" segments</li>\r\n 	<li>I\'m going to skip the usual travel tips and give you some advance tips -- tips I haven\'t seen/heard anywhere else</li>\r\n 	<li>Tip #1 -- Know your flight, hotel and/or rental car reservation numbers and keep them immediately accessible on your BlackBerry or iPhone</li>\r\n 	<li>Tip #2 -- When you can\'t get through to a customer service agent on the phone, choose the unpopular path on the phone tree -- Spanish language or International Travel</li>\r\n 	<li>Tip #3 -- When shopping for flights, factor in the potential cost of missing a connection when choosing between direct and connecting flights</li>\r\n 	<li>Tip #4 -- If you\'re flying one of those chisling airlines that charge $10 extra for an exit row seat, it\'s worth gritting your teeth and paying it for a flight over 90 minutes</li>\r\n 	<li>Tip #5 -- When walking out of your hotel room for your morning workout, make your doorknow look unique in case you forget your room number</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/artemis-gravity/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Inception</a></em> by Artemis</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Leaf Peeping from Above </strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Beautiful colors on approach into Newark over the <a href=\"http://www.nps.gov/DEWA/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Delaware Water Gap</a> on a clear sunny day</li>\r\n 	<li>Reminded me of \"<a title=\"Definition of pointillism\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointillism\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">pointillism</a>\" and <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Seurat\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Seurat</a>\'s \"<a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunday_Afternoon_on_the_Island_of_La_Grande_Jatte\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte</a>\"</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing\r\n</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917638.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Magnatune</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Feedback at comments@travelcommons.com or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_68.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #68 - Advanced Travel Tips; Colors of Autumn','','inherit','closed','closed','','111-revision-v1','','','2019-03-01 22:52:27','2019-03-02 03:52:27','',111,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/01/111-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2350,1,'2019-03-01 22:58:39','2019-03-02 03:58:39','Recorded in the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago at the end of yet another busy travel month – Philadelphia, <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/pacific-northwest/portland\">Portland</a>, Denver, Northern Virginia – but am home this week, keeping to one of my cardinal rules of travel – stay out of any airport Thanksgiving week. In this episode, I talk about a successful experiment of going PC-less on a trip to Portland and give the conclusion to last episode\'s story about my mother-in-law being stranded by <a href=\"http://www.lot.com\">LOT Airlines</a>.  We have listener stories on accelerated boarding on international Delta flights and some tidbits of <a href=\"http://www.ba.com\">British Airways</a> gossip on the cause of the 777 crash last January and the havoc around the Heathrow Terminal 5 opening. I then give my review of <a href=\"http://tripchill.com/main/\" target=\"_blank\">TripChill</a>, one of the new wave of web-based personal travel assistants, and share some travel tips sent in by listeners. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_69.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_69.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #69:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n	<li>Recorded at the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago<a href=\"https://www.marriott.com/hotels/travel/phldt-philadelphia-marriott-downtown/\" target=\"_blank\"> </a></li>\r\n	<li>Lots of travel, but staying out of airports over the Thanksgiving week</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/twilightarchive-ritual/\" target=\"_blank\"><em>Flow of Know</em></a> by Twilight Archive</li>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n	<li>Booked a long weekend in Portland, Ore entirely on frequent traveler points -- somewhat at odds with the spate of media stories claiming that points are practically useless</li>\r\n	<li>Went PC-less on the Portland vacation -- operated only on my <a href=\"http://www.apple.com/iphone\">iPhone</a> and BlackBerry</li>\r\n	<li>Apple has to fix the iPhone Safari browser -- it crashes all the time</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"http://www.kenokel.com/\" target=\"_self\">Ken Okel</a> provides an audio comment on his boarding experience on a recent international Delta flight</li>\r\n	<li>A listener provides some juicy tidbits of British Airways gossip picked up in a bar in <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/switzerland/geneva\">Geneva, Switzerland</a></li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/uniontrade-everyday/\" target=\"_blank\"><em>Violent and Beautiful</em></a> by the Union Trade</li>\r\n<strong>Travel Assistant in Your Pocket </strong></ul>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>There’s been some sort of mini-explosion of new web sites offering to be “your personal travel assistant\"; sites like <a href=\"http://tripchill.com/main/\" target=\"_blank\">TripChill</a>, <a href=\"http://tripit.com\" target=\"_blank\">Tripit</a> and <a href=\"http://yapta.com\" target=\"_blank\">Yapta</a></li>\r\n	<li>Been trying out TripChill’s service off and on since their launch last August. Wasn\'t impressed at first, but has gotten better</li>\r\n	<li>TripChill does a better job than any other site I\'ve seen in displaying flight alternatives</li>\r\n	<li>TripChill and its competitor Tripit have well-designed mobile web sites that quickly display your trip itinerary on a BlackBerry or iPhone</li>\r\n	<li>These travel assistant sites don’t seem to offer much new functionality, but they do offer convenience</li>\r\n	<li>Wo;; probably keep using TripChill, but as an addition to my travel tool box, not a replacement for something I already use</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/lizzi-love/\" target=\"_blank\"><em>Me</em></a> by Lizzi</li>\r\n<strong>Listener Travel Tips </strong></ul>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>One listener suggests a \"divide-&amp;-conquer\" strategy to packing</li>\r\n	<li>Another listener sings the praises of hotel sewing kits</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Morgan\">Ian Morgan</a> offers a solution to my problem of forgetting my hotel room number when I go work out -- dial it into my mobile phone</li>\r\n<strong>Closing\r\n</strong>\r\n	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917639.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com\" target=\"_blank\">Magnatune</a></li>\r\n	<li>Feedback at comments@travelcommons.com or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_69.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #69 - Pocket Travel Assistant; More Travel Tips','','inherit','closed','closed','','112-revision-v1','','','2019-03-01 22:58:39','2019-03-02 03:58:39','',112,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/01/112-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2352,1,'2019-03-01 23:02:10','2019-03-02 04:02:10','Recorded in the TravelCommons studios outside of <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/chicago\">Chicago</a> after finishing up my travel for the year. But there was a good bit of travel before the year-end, including one of the craziest/stupidest(?) itineraries I\'ve done in a long time -- Chicago-London-Denver in a little more than a day. Many of the subsequent Twitter comments I received asked that perpetual question -- Why travel when you can <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videoconferencing\">video conference</a>? Traveling to a business-formal office for the first time in 10 years causes me to investigate different methods in packing a suit. And the December storms that have snarled air traffic across the upper two-thirds of the US have me singing the praises of <a href=\"http://flightstats.com\">Flightstats</a>. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_70.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_70.mp3\"]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #70:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Recorded at the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, done for travel for the year</li>\r\n 	<li>Not before a completely stupid itinerary -- Chicago to London to Denver in a day-&amp;-a-half</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Greensleeves</em> by <a href=\"http://www.georgefletcher.com/\">Tequila Mockingbirds</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Difficult \"travel roulette\" story from Ian Morgan about trying to get from <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/china/hong-kong\">Hong Kong</a> to Sydney</li>\r\n 	<li>Linda Martin of the <a href=\"http://indietravelpodcast.com/\">Indie Travel Podcast</a> reflects back on her college psych studies and concludes that the hustling around involved in \"travel roulette\" is actually better for you than sitting helpless on a delayed flight</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"http://ruk.ca/\">Peter Rukavina</a> agrees that there\'s still value in frequent flier programs after scoring a last-minute direct flight from Charlottetown (PEI) to Boston on Thanksgiving weekend using the minimum amount of <a href=\"http://www.aeroplan.com/landing/process.do?lang=E\">Aeroplan</a> miles</li>\r\n 	<li>Experiencing a lot of pushback from taxi drivers when trying to charge my fare on a credit card. Are others seeing the same thing?</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Please Come Home for Christmas </em> by <a href=\"http://oppenheimermusic.co.uk/\">Oppenheimer</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Packing a Suit</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Always see more suits on flights headed east from Chicago than on flights heading west</li>\r\n 	<li>Have managed to avoid having to wear a suit -- much easier to wear a blazer and pack a couple of pair of pants in my rolling bag</li>\r\n 	<li>New client in Philadelphia requires me to suit up -- need to learn to fold a suit so I can keep using my rolling bag</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"http://www.google.com/search?q=packing+a+suit&amp;hl=en\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Google search</a> reveals a consensus around two different ways</li>\r\n 	<li>One <a href=\"http://www.menswearhouse.com/aboutus/fashion/articles.jsp?articleID=1408474395561309&amp;browsePage=3&amp;FOLDER%3C%3Efolder_id=1408474395564053&amp;ASSORTMENT%3C%3East_id=94653&amp;bmUID=1197642683816\">approach</a> is to turn the jacket inside out and fold it in half</li>\r\n 	<li>The second <a href=\"http://www.essortment.com/travel/travelfoldsuit_trgk.htm\">approach</a> – I can’t figure out exactly how they’re doing it – but it seems like some sort of suit coat origami</li>\r\n 	<li>I\'ve ended it up with my own simple method – fold the jacket in half along the back seam, accordion-fold it in thirds, putting clothes in the folds – boxed shirts from the cleaners work the best</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Merry Christmas Baby</em> by <a href=\"http://topcatrecords.com/\">Calvin Owens</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Why travel when you can videoconference? </strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>When I “twittered” or “tweeted” – pick your Web 2.0 verb – about traveling to London for a 2-hr meeting, the @ replies asked why I didn\'t use videoconferencing or <a href=\"http://webex.com/\">webex</a>?</li>\r\n 	<li>Had done all the prior meetings by teleconference</li>\r\n 	<li>But this was the final meeting and we were delivering some tough messages. And call me “old school”, but bad news is best delivered personally, face-to-face</li>\r\n 	<li>Gartner\'s latest “Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies” <a href=\"http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/mgmt/2D07F8BED99F6D70CC2574A60004AD10\">report</a> says “video telepresence”, their <a href=\"http://blog.gartner.com/blog/index.php?itemid=1969&amp;catid=51\">term</a> for a sort of high-def, IMAX-like videoconferencing set-up that supports “virtual meetings”, as “being on the brink of widespread adoption</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>I’ll Be Home for Christmas</em> by <a href=\"http://www.katimac.com/\">Kati Mac</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Outsmarting winter flight delays</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Winter travel -- usually not a question of <em>are</em> you going to be delayed, but by how much? Or worse, are you going to get canceled?</li>\r\n 	<li>I use <a href=\"http://flightstats.com\">Flightstats.com</a>\'s Track Flight Status by Route travel tool to predict problems</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917641.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from the <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com\">Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Feedback at comments@travelcommons.com or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_70.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #70 - Packing a Suit, Videoconference over Travel, Watching Winter Flight Delays','','inherit','closed','closed','','113-revision-v1','','','2019-03-01 23:02:10','2019-03-02 04:02:10','',113,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/01/113-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2354,1,'2019-03-01 23:07:36','2019-03-02 04:07:36','Recorded in the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, back doing my thing to support the travel industry with lots of travel in January. We talk about some recent TSA observations, good and bad; my latest spin of the \"travel roulette\" wheel, trading the plane for a train in an East Coast snow storm; a look back at last year\'s travel courtesy of <a href=\"http://blog.dopplr.com/2009/01/15/dopplr-presents-the-personal-annual-report-2008-freshly-generated-for-you-and-barack-obama/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Dopplr\'s Personal Annual Report</a>; and being saved by duct tape while flying the tatty skies of United. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_71.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_71.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #71:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Recorded at the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago</li>\r\n 	<li>Back doing my thing to support the travel industry, visiting Washington DC, Denver, Phoenix, San Francisco, Stamford, CT, and Jackson, MI</li>\r\n 	<li>Noticing a lot more passengers paying attention to the pre-flight safety demo since the US Air Hudson River splashdown</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Beneath the Skin</em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/birdy-alter/\">Jerry Berlongieri</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Belated shout-out to Tim Grubb of <a href=\"http://www.sizeoflife.com/blog/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">The Size of Life blog</a> -- \"lifestyle news and reviews for the big and tall man\"</li>\r\n 	<li>Tim is doing a series of <a href=\"http://www.sizeoflife.com/blog/?cat=8\" target=\"_self\">articles</a> on \"Flying the (Big &amp; Tall) Friendly Skies\". The <a href=\"http://seatguru.com\" target=\"_self\">SeatGuru</a> map he uses as an illustration points out the best coach seat for a big &amp; tall man -- the window seat on the second exit row of a United Airbus 319</li>\r\n 	<li>The new <a href=\"http://www.phl.org/news/081230.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">security checkpoint</a> for Philadelphia Airport\'s Terminal\'s D and E replace a near-medieval set-up with a much better experience</li>\r\n 	<li>Watched the TSA do a full body patdown on <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_George\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Cardinal Francis George</a>, the 72-yr-old Catholic Archbishop of Chicago.  Couldn\'t that screener\'s time been used more productively checking out someone who could <em>actually</em> be a threat?</li>\r\n 	<li>Lost a recent game of \"travel roulette\". Moved from the Shuttle to Amtrak\'s Acela Express to avoid delays from an East Coast snow storm. The train ended up 2½ hours late because of equipment problems caused by the snow.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Hurt Me So I Can Walk Away </em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/joy-float/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Michael Joy</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Looking Back at Last Year\'s Travel\r\n</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"http://dopplr.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Dopplr</a> sent me a 2008 Personal Annual Report on my travel last year</li>\r\n 	<li>Has some interesting factoids, such as my \"personal velocity\" in 2008 was the same as that of a squirrel</li>\r\n 	<li>And that my 2008 carbon footprint was equivalent to 2.3 Hummers</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><img class=\"aligncenter\" src=\"http://thepeacocks.net/hummer.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"194\" height=\"139\" /></p>\r\n\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Of course, they could have used, say a Mercedes Benz S-600 sedan, which gets worse mileage than a Hummer H3, but I guess chest-pounding about big gas-guzzling American SUVs is easier self-awareness about big gas-guzzling Euro sedans – especially when your company is based in Helsinki.</li>\r\n 	<li>The factoid that grabbed my attention was this one – “In 2008, you spent 214 days at home; 152 days traveling”</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><img class=\"aligncenter\" src=\"http://thepeacocks.net/days_home.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"149\" height=\"65\" /></p>\r\n\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Bulletproof</em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/musicinside-forces/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Music Inside</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Flying the Tatty Skies of United </strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>My ORD-PHX flight was almost scuttled by a broken luggage bin door.  Here\'s the <a href=\"http://twinkle.tapulous.com/index.php?hash=ec89f28fab5481c60449e1ed4b91fe1ca5f9b1c6\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">photo</a> of the mechanic fixing it with duct tape</li>\r\n 	<li>Those of us who spend a good bit of time flying United know that duct tape is not an uncommon sight. United is fraying around the edges.</li>\r\n 	<li>United is the only major US airline to not have any current orders placed with any aircraft manufacturer</li>\r\n 	<li>And the service has gotten a bit frayed around the edges. The <a href=\"http://www.theacsi.org/index.php?option=com_content&amp;task=view&amp;id=149&amp;Itemid=157&amp;c=United+Airlines+(UAL+Corporation)&amp;i=Airlines\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">2008 American Customer Satisfaction Index</a> has United ahead of only US Airways</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"http://crankyflier.com/2008/11/20/united-gets-beaten-down-over-phocuswright-presentation-on-customer-experience\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Brett Snyder</a> was at a travel industry conference last November where a United executive gave a talk titled <em>Customer Experience and Flying: Not an Oxymoron</em> and admitted that United would be \"overstretching\" if they tried to be as good as Singapore Air or Virgin Atlantic</li>\r\n 	<li>Was refused entry to United\'s London-Heathrow business class arrivals lounge because I was flying on an upgraded coach ticket, not a full-fare business class ticket</li>\r\n 	<li>United\'s employees continue to hold together their frayed company by reaching out to passengers</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"http://ad.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/show?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;bids=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Magnatune</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Feedback at comments@travelcommons.com or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_71.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #71 - Winter Travel, Last Year\'s Travel, Tatty United','','inherit','closed','closed','','115-revision-v1','','','2019-03-01 23:07:36','2019-03-02 04:07:36','',115,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/01/115-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2355,1,'2019-03-01 23:12:06','2019-03-02 04:12:06','Recorded somewhere over the Atlantic in the business class toilet of a South African Airways A340 and the <a href=\"http://www.proteahotels.com/the-rosebank.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Rosebank Hotel</a> in Johannesburg at the start of a week\'s stay in South Africa. We talk about inconsistent rules for mobile devices on planes, the value of renewing my CLEAR registered traveler membership, the three things that make a restaurant a great place to eat solo, and listener suggestions on the one thing you never want to hear on a flight. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_73.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_73.mp3\"]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #73:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Recorded in the business class toilet of a South African Airways A340 and the <a href=\"http://www.proteahotels.com/the-rosebank.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Rosebank Hotel</a> in Johannesburg</li>\r\n 	<li>En route to a week\'s business trip in South Africa</li>\r\n 	<li>Trips earlier this month saw very empty airports -- right up to Spring Break time, when they filled up with families and strollers</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Stinky Dog</em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/musicinside-forces/\">Music Inside</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"http://seat6d.com/\">Denrael</a> commented on Twitter that there are at least 5 iPhone apps available to keep track of your hotel room number -- free ones like <a href=\"http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=304561585&amp;mt=8\">Room</a> and paid ones like <a href=\"http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=309106848&amp;mt=8\">Zimmer</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Reached new heights of electronics inconsistency on my JFK-JNB SAA flight. After the stop in Dakar, Senegal, the purser announced that all smart phones – and he specifically named iPhones, Nokia E-series, Blackberries – were not allowed to be used in flight – even when put in Airplane mode</li>\r\n 	<li>Returning from SFO, one passenger decided that he was the electronics “hall monitor” and started yelling across the cabin at another passenger to turn off his “crackberry” as we were approaching ORD</li>\r\n 	<li>My <a href=\"http://flyclear.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">CLEAR</a> registered traveler card came in handy when in JFK\'s Terminal 4, but still haven\'t used it enough to justify the $179/yr fee</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Locovenido</em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/falik-dreams/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Falik</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Eating on the Road\r\n</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Eating a great dinner by myself at the bar of <a href=\"http://www.tintorestaurant.com/\">Tinto</a> in Philadelphia got me thinking about what makes for a good place to eat solo while on the road</li>\r\n 	<li>The sports bar might as well have been created just for solo guy travelers</li>\r\n 	<li>Outside the sports bar genre, what makes for a good place for a solo traveler? Taking “good food” and “cleanliness” as table stakes, there are 3 things -- availability, small plates, and bar seating</li>\r\n 	<li>Two nice-to-haves -- ability to make a reservation on <a href=\"http://opentable.com\">Open Table</a> and a web site built with something other than Flash so I can read the menu on my iPhone</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Just Don’t</em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/liebig-severed/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Lie Big</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>More Things You Never Want To Hear</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>In last month’s episode, we featured a listener\'s question – “What is the one thing you never want to hear on a flight?” and asked for your input</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"http://thehappyheadlines.com/\">Dawn Owens</a> offered “God, I should NOT have eaten that!”</li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"http://fricksworld.blogspot.com/\">Steve Frick</a> said “I don\'t ever want to hear the pilot say ‘I\'m so tired I could just crash’”</li>\r\n 	<li>Greg B said the “one thing that I never want to hear at any stage of the flight ... ‘BRACE FOR IMPACT’”</li>\r\n 	<li>Steve F gave two suggestions – \"The smoke in the cabin is nothing to be concerned about\" and \"We have an FAA inspection team riding along with us, so we will doing everything by the book\"</li>\r\n 	<li>Michael Golden offers a non verbal thing you don\'t want to hear – shutting down an engine while taxiing out</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"http://ad.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/show?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;bids=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Magnatune</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Feedback at comments@travelcommons.com or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_73.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #73 - Eating Alone on The Road, More Things You Never Want to Hear','','inherit','closed','closed','','122-revision-v1','','','2019-03-01 23:12:06','2019-03-02 04:12:06','',122,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/01/122-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2356,1,'2019-03-01 23:19:59','2019-03-02 04:19:59','Again in Washington, DC, I\'m back on the road after two weeks at home. As my Twitter followers know, this trip didn\'t get off to the best start -- a 2 hour delay caused by yet another broken United Airlines plane. Listener comments continue the threads on in-flight bans on smartphones and falling prices of in-flight Wi-Fi. The collapse of the Clear Registered Traveler program makes me nervous about who has my fingerprints and iris scans. And, after my plane finally got into the air, I thought about what I miss when I\'m off the road. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_77.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_77.mp3\"]\r\n\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #77:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Recorded in the Convention Center Courtyard in downtown Washington, DC</li>\r\n 	<li>On a bit of an Amtrak bunny hop up the US East Coast -- DC to Phila to NYC</li>\r\n 	<li>Most of my travel in August has been personal -- Aspen, CO and Door County, WI</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/music/listeners/artistdetails.php?BandHash=00168e9762768c8f9a16a59343f973d0\">People Go A Lotta Nerve</a></em> by Neko Case</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Timo from Tampere, Finland wrote in about Ryanair not allowing any use of smartphones -- even in flight or airplane mode -- on a flight from Tampere, Finland to \"the misleadingly named Frankfurt Hahn airport\"</li>\r\n 	<li>Ryanair -- what a mess with all their add-on charges and anti-customer service</li>\r\n 	<li>Interesting that Ryanair severely limits the use of smartphones while simultaneously trying to launch an in-flight mobile phone call service</li>\r\n 	<li>South African Airways plans to <a href=\"http://www.itweb.co.za/sections/telecoms/2008/0808281033.asp\">petition</a> the SA Civil Aviation Authority to allow smart phones to be used in “flight” mode</li>\r\n 	<li>Recent WSJ.com <a href=\"http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203706604574374571364228440.html\">article</a> discusses the results of Alaska Air Wi-Fi pricing tests. In-flight wi-fi is very price-sensitive. Will carriers get the return they need on their investment in fleet-wide wi-fi rollouts?</li>\r\n 	<li>New celebrity sightings -- <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> followers know that I recently ate a couple of tables away from Lance Armstrong and shared a 1st Class row with LeAnne Rimes on a flight to LAX</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/music/listeners/artistdetails.php?BandHash=747b6ccf16c7202fd38068d510c11fd2\">Give It Up</a></em> by Jimmy Mancus</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>My, What Pretty Eyes You Have!</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Federal judge <a href=\"http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/08/defunct-airport-fast-pass-company-banned-from-selling-customer-biometrics/\">ruled</a> Clear Registered Traveler can’t sell its former customers’ biometric data – the fingerprints and iris scans that were used to identify travelers at checkpoint machines at airports across the country.</li>\r\n 	<li>What’s the best way to destroy my Clear card? My biometric data was stored on the card\'s smart chip</li>\r\n 	<li>But what about the biometric data stored with Clear and the TSA? I just want my data destroyed, but two US Congressmen want it <a href=\"http://fcw.com/articles/2009/08/21/lawmakers-urge-tsa-not-to-destroy-registered-traveler-data.aspx?sc_lang=en\">kept</a> around.</li>\r\n 	<li>I\'ve learned a lesson -- I\'ll never give the government this kind of data again.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/music/listeners/artistdetails.php?BandHash=155e0ac479805586bd2cbef2e5c44ddd\">Orange Blossoms</a></em> by JJ Grey and Mofro</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>What I Miss When I’m Off The Road</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Not much this evening -- first flight in two weeks and it’s delayed for 2½ hours because of a broken nose gear steering mechanism.</li>\r\n 	<li>Will <em>somebody</em> explain the United Airlines the benefits of preventative maintenance? What good is being super top-tier elite on an airline that can’t get their planes in the air? It’s getting so bad, I don’t know why they bother setting a departure and arrival time. Just put an AM or PM on the board and shoot for the best.</li>\r\n 	<li>What I miss most when not traveling is the variety -- seeing and experiencing different things each day. While I loved sleeping in my own bed and not having to do the TSA shuffle, two weeks of the same train ride into the same office, seeing the same skyline (though I love the Chicago skyline), eating at the same lunch places started the soles of my feet itching.</li>\r\n 	<li>You also get a better understanding of other people when you spend time with them face-to-face. While you can do a lot over a voice or video conference, there’s nothing like being there in person to get an appreciation for the differences, the challenges, and the personalities.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"http://ad.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/show?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;bids=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge music from the <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com\">Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Feedback at comments@travelcommons.com or right here in the comments section below</li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_77.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #77 – Keeping Traveler Data Private, What I Miss When Off The Road','','inherit','closed','closed','','161-revision-v1','','','2019-03-01 23:19:59','2019-03-02 04:19:59','',161,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/01/161-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2357,1,'2019-03-01 23:23:48','2019-03-02 04:23:48','Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, Illinois at the start of what\'s looking like 6 weeks of straight travel. In this episode, we talk about the need to have a place to blow off steam after a frustrating day of travel, and how the distractions of cell phone calls have caused me to leave a trail of personal belongings behind in hotel and airplanes across the country. Finally, while getting a knowing chuckle out of  the trailer for the upcoming movie <a href=\"http://www.theupintheairmovie.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Up In The Air</em></a> where George Clooney plays an uber-frequent traveler, the movie\'s theme about using travel to run away from relationships isn\'t all that fictional.\r\n\r\nHere\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_78.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_78.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript from TravelCommons podcast #78:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, Illinois. It was a light travel week for me this week – just out to Philadelphia for Tuesday, Weds, and Thurs and then back to Chicago, but a heavy work week, which unfortunately pushed this episode of TC out from my intended recording date of Weds, Sept 30th to today.</li>\r\n 	<li>Looking at my calendar, I find myself in the midst of one of my 6-week-straight sets of travel. It started 2 weeks ago when I had to be in LA and DC the same week – I just hate doing the transcon thing in the middle of the week. Last week was Philadelphia and NYC – not too bad. Next week, DC and Boston, then another week in Philadelphia, and then another LA and DC week. The way it’s looking, I’m going to be traveling every week until Thanksgiving.</li>\r\n 	<li>Which is, of course, the perfect time for my suitcase to break. I think I mentioned a couple episodes ago that the bearing on one of the wheels is shot, giving me a nice “Squeak, Squeak” soundtrack as I walk down the airport concourse or go trundling through a prospect’s office space as I did last week in NYC. It was embarrassing – lots of “prairie dogging” – heads popping up from the cube field, looking to see who’s making that annoying sound. There’s a sure-fire sales technique for you.</li>\r\n 	<li>But now one of the handle supports has broken, making the suitcase twist every time I pull it onto a plane or cross a street, and making it just about impossible to attach my computer bag to it. So I’m going to have to suck it up and buy a new suitcase.</li>\r\n 	<li>It’s not like I haven’t gotten a lot of mileage out of this bag – 6 years at, say, 100,000 miles a year. Or that it cost me a lot – maybe $200 at a TJ Maxx. And it’s held up better than a colleague’s $700 Tumi – his is only 4 yrs old and last week dropped an entire wheel sub-assembly – the wheel and all the surrounding bits that keep it in the bag – while he was sprinting for a flight in LGA.</li>\r\n 	<li>No, it’s just the hassle. And how excited can you get shopping for my umpteenth black 22-inch rolling bag. Maybe I’ll go for a new color – something that will stand out in the overhead bin, something that will express some individuality – something like, I dunno, navy blue!</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/seldon-circles/\"><em>Making Circles</em></a> by the Seldon Plan</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Sometimes when you’re traveling and things start to go sideways, you want to vent – just blow off your frustration – but to whom? Certainly not to any airline personnel – at best, you’ll be ignored; at worst, you’ll be kicked off the plane and/or arrested. If you’re traveling with a colleague, you can kvetch a bit, but too much and you look like a whiner – not a reputation that will propel you far up the career ladder.</li>\r\n 	<li>For me, Twitter has become a little bolt hole into which I can scream my frustrations – from broken United planes to the conga line of frustrations that is Washington’s Dulles airport, I package my woes up in 140 characters and shove them into the Twitter-verse. Has probably made a few of you guys “un-follow” me, but that’s OK. It’s a small price to avoid getting busted by those gentle and caring guys who populate the Chicago police force.</li>\r\n 	<li>For Lori Humm, a longtime TravelCommons listener, the TravelCommons comments section can provide a needed outlet. Reacting to the latest addition to the TSA’s security play-acting, Lori writes...</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<blockquote>\r\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\">Mark - I\'m about to lose my mind. Apparently, my airport, Richmond, is about to be the test bed for ANOTHER level of security. We already have the body scanning machines and now this – screening of powders.</p>\r\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\">I\'d love to hear your thoughts on the addition of powders to security, especially given your pride (and constant defense of) your tooth powder! I moved to using all powder cosmetics to avoid carrying any liquids at all, and am starting to resign myself to being make-up free if that\'s what it take to avoid being sidelined for additional screening.</p>\r\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\">By the way - still doing the Richmond-to-Baton Rouge weekly haul - this makes my 15th month. If that doesn\'t make someone lose their mind, this additional screening certainly will.</p>\r\n</blockquote>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>You know the TSA just doesn’t get it when they announced the powder screening as <a href=\"http://www.tsa.gov/press/releases/2009/0908.shtm\"><em>Implementing New Enhanced Threat Detection Capability</em></a> . In the TSA’s blog, Blogger Bob, as defensive and oblivious as usual, <a href=\"http://www.tsa.gov/blog/2009/09/new-procedures-for-traveling-with.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">says</a> “We haven’t received any specific threats that led us to this new procedure” , but we thought it made sense to put in place some new annoyances for travelers and get some practice in before the holidays. Just kidding – about the last bit. Blogger Bob did actually write that, unlike the liquid ban, there’s nothing specific that caused them to launch this powder parade accompaniment to the shoe carnival. I’m not so sure that my snarky annoyance comment is too far from the truth.</li>\r\n 	<li>But, having said that, I’ve yet to see anybody get flagged over for a powder check. I have seen a bit of an increase in random wipe-&amp;-tests – the guy behind me Tuesday at Midway had his shoes wiped and I had my computer bag wiped at ORD last month, but that’s not a big thing. No unpacking and re-packing bags, no rustling through your toiletries kit – just a couple wipes on the outside surface with a test pad and they run it through what I guess is some sort of spectrograph. Takes 1 minute – they’re usually done before I get my shoes re-tied.</li>\r\n 	<li>I gotta say, though, that the tougher part of that note is the 15 straight months of flying between Richmond and Baton Rouge. I may complain a bit about flying from LA to DC, but 15 months of connecting through Atlanta, think about it – Hartsfield twice a week – I’m not sure anybody should be hassling Lori about anything.</li>\r\n 	<li>And the final follow-up, we’ve have an ongoing thread through it seems like most of this year’s episodes about in-flight electronics. Flying out here to Philadelphia on Southwest Tuesday morning – OK, I know that I said that I wouldn’t fly SW again for a long time after they left me hanging in Little Rock, but they’ve got a double credit promo going right how and I have 12 flight credits in the bank, so with this trip, I’ll get the 4 more credits I need for a free ticket, which I’ll then give to my mother for a spring trip to visit us, so, in the vein of “don’t cut your nose off to spite your face”, suck it up if you’re close to a free ticket.</li>\r\n 	<li>So, anyhow, in the back of SW’s in-flight magazine, they had the best layout of allowed in-flight electronics of any airline. Whereas the South Africa Airlines rules about no in-flight smartphones was buried halfway into a paragraph full of rules, Southwest has a nice graphic layout that has 3 sections – Always Allowed, Allowed Above 10,000 ft, and Never Allowed – really nice. Nothing really controversial – Smart phones in Airline or Game mode are in the Allowed Above 10,000 ft section. However, I was surprised to see Noise-Cancelling Headphones in the Always Allowed section. Given that these have “on-off” switches, most by-the-book flight attendants see the red light on my Bose cans and tell me to switch them off. But on SW, I guess, they’re good through the entire flight. But still, one more example of the lack of consistency in rules – which I’ll say is one of the main drivers of traveler frustration.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a question, a story, a comment – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com, you can send me a Twitter message at @mpeacock, or you can post them on the web site at T/C.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/eliyahu-wind/\">Oh Yeah</a></em> by Eliyahu Sills</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Lost in Distraction</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>We’ve talked in a number of episodes about things being left behind by travelers – the study about the number of laptops left behind in airports, people walking away from TSA checkpoints without their shoes, the overflowing box of power adaptors that just about every hotel can pull out when you ask to borrow one.</li>\r\n 	<li>A couple of weeks ago, when unpacking from my last New York trip, I discovered that I’d left a pair of olive slacks in my hotel room. It was one of those “head smacking” moments – how could I be so stupid?</li>\r\n 	<li>Sometimes I feel like I’m leaving a little trail of belongings behind me as I travel.</li>\r\n 	<li>Most are small – pens, books, magazines, enough toiletries to make up a couple of complete kits.</li>\r\n 	<li>But some are big – the olive slacks, my original pair of Bose headphones, an entire suitcase in the trunk of a cab.</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, I’m not sweating the books or the tooth brush, but, come on – an entire suitcase? Other than creeping senility, what’s my problem?</li>\r\n 	<li>At least for me, it’s answering my cell phone. Every time I’ve forgotten something big, it’s been because of a phone call.</li>\r\n 	<li>The Bose headphones? My flight had landed in SFO, I was standing up, pulling my suitcase out of the overhead and the phone rings. Of course I answer it, and now I’m juggling my phone, my jacket, my suitcase, my briefcase while trying to slide out into the aisle. Distracted, I completely forget about the headphones in the seatback pocket. I don’t remember them until the next day when they’re long gone, a birthday present for the son or daughter of one of the cleaning crew.</li>\r\n 	<li>My olive slacks? One of those days when I just couldn’t get out of my hotel room because of serial phone calls. The phone rings, I answer it, 15-minute conversation, I hang up, re-start my packing, only to have the phone ring again. Another 15-minute conversation, then another call comes in on call waiting. I look at my watch – damn, I gotta get out of this hotel room if I’m going to make my flight home. I didn’t do my usual room scan and walked out light one of my favorite pair of pants.</li>\r\n 	<li>When I’m not distracted, I’m usually pretty methodical about leaving hotels or planes. I think my wife thinks that my hotel routine is border-line obsessive-compulsive. I empty the bathroom out, pack up my toiletries, then go back in, check around, turn off the light and close the door. Then, over to the bed, I throw all the pillows on the floor (which, sometimes is 8 or 9 pillows), snap the bedspread to send any hidden socks flying.</li>\r\n 	<li>Then, clear all the flat surfaces – it either goes with me or, like the room service menu, goes into a drawer. This is how I didn’t leave behind my iPhone charger this past week. I was clearing off the desk, which ends up being a tangle of hotel modem wires, lamp cords, promotional material, and my own tangle of electronics. I thought I had everything packed, but was making one more scan – cleaning off the flat surfaces so I could give the room one last scan. And there, as I was clearing off the desk, I found I had forgotten to pack my iPhone charger. I had missed seeing it in the midst of the Ethernet cord coming out of the hotel modem.</li>\r\n 	<li>Coming off a plane, I tick through a mental inventory, even patting myself down to make sure I have my wallet and iPhone. I look, but don’t put my hands into the seat back pocket – it can be ugly in there.</li>\r\n 	<li>But all this takes some concentration – avoid getting lost in distraction.</li>\r\n 	<li>I was thinking about this the other day when one of those iPhone commercials came on. There’s an app for this; there’s an app for that. I thought “if there’s an app for everything, there’s gotta be one to keep from getting distracted.” Then I realized there is one – kinda – and it’s built right in. It’s the Off button.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/liquid-seventythree/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Is That Called Love</a> </em> by Liquid Zen</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>A Movie About Us</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>&lt;1st audio clip from trailer&gt;</li>\r\n 	<li>I love that line – “I fly 350,000 miles a year; it’s 250,000 miles to the moon.” From the latest trailer for “Up in the Air”, a movie with George Clooney starring as a consultant who fires people. He’s good at his job, which keeps him on the road over 300 days a year. He lives – thrives -- in “Airworld”, the travel bubble we’ve talked about on prior episodes where frequent travelers seem to float over the places they visit, insulated by airline clubs and hotel concierge lounges and special lines that whoosh the statused elite along to their next destination.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’ll post a <a href=\"www.theupintheairmovie.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">link</a> to the movie’s web site. It’s just starting the fall film festival cycle, building word-of-mouth for its release during the Christmas season.</li>\r\n 	<li>The trailer has some good lines, like this advice on security line strategy that Clooney’s seasoned traveler gives to a newly-minted Ivy League grad</li>\r\n 	<li>&lt;2nd audio clip from trailer&gt;</li>\r\n 	<li>Going through both trailers on the movie’s website, you can see the premise is a bit deeper. The George Clooney character is using his frequent flying lifestyle to avoid relationships – nothing too heavy</li>\r\n 	<li>&lt;3rd audio clip from trailer&gt;</li>\r\n 	<li>While fictional, there’s more than a bit of truth to this. I’ve know a number of guys – and not the gender-neutral Midwest “guys”; they’re all men – over my career who used the need to leave Sunday night for LA or to stay over the weekend in Europe as ways to avoid problems at home – or, once divorced – which all of these guys eventually were – used the same excuses to avoid the barren new apartments.</li>\r\n 	<li>Oftentimes when talking to new consultants, giving them some thoughts, some advice about the traveling lifestyle that is part and parcel of consulting, I talk less about who to avoid in the security lines and more about the need to manage their personal lives with at least the same amount of effort as they do their frequent flyer statuses. I know I shouldn’t be, but I’m always surprised by the number of guys who don’t.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"http://ad.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/show?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;bids=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #78</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>The bridge music is from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Magnatune</a>, the <em>we are not evil</em> label . Making Circles by the Seldon Plan, Oh Yeah by Eliyahu Sills, and Is That Called Love by Liquid Zen. You can find these and more at <a href=\"http://magnatune.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">magnatunes.com</a>.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or MP3 file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to @mpeacock on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_78.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #78 – Lost in Distraction, Movie About Us','','inherit','closed','closed','','168-revision-v1','','','2019-03-01 23:23:48','2019-03-02 04:23:48','',168,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/01/168-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2358,1,'2019-03-01 23:25:33','2019-03-02 04:25:33','Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, Illinois at the end of one of those travel weeks where I lost control of my schedule – DC to Dallas to Houston to LA. In this episode, we talk about the problems with LAX security, my choices for <em>white noise</em> when I\'m trying to sleep on an airplane, and the reasons why I\'m skipping rental cars. I also talk with <a href=\"http://www.boingo.com/\">Boingo</a> WiFi about the choices frequent travelers are making in going wireless. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_79.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_79.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript from TravelCommons podcast #79:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, Illinois, at the end of one of those travel weeks where I lost control of my schedule – the 6am flight to DC on Monday, the 6:30am flight to Houston on Tuesday by way of Dallas, the 6:30pm flight to LA, and then, refusing to take the red-eye, returning home Friday afternoon. Makes next week’s 4 days in Washington seem like a cake walk.</li>\r\n 	<li>Seems like I’m getting more of those.Two weeks ago, my travel week was Monday in Stamford, CT; Tuesday in Providence, RI; Wednesday in Philadelphia; Thursday back in Chicago, and then Friday in San Diego, returning at 6:30am Saturday courtesy of the red eye. I used to be able to sleep on red eyes, but not so much anymore. And with a flight time between LAX and ORD of less than 4 hrs, there’s not a lot of time for sleep – even after scoring a first class upgrade. I was pretty worthless on Saturday – I went straight to bed after getting home and then took a nap later in the afternoon. The red-eye is false economy – I’m not saving time; just snowplowing the problem into the next day. Hence, my lack of enthusiasm for another red-eye this week.</li>\r\n 	<li>I will say this, though. With winter coming in Chicago, I’m starting to look around for <em>strategically</em> located clients – Miami, Phoenix, LA. There are times when travel does have its rewards.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/clayne-potemkin/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>You Are The Reason</em></a> by C. Layne</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Robert Fenerty dropped us a line giving his point-of-view on many of the things covered in the last TravelCommons episode:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Mark, aboard a flight to Prague, and with 5 weeks of international travel ahead of me, I\'m also peering ahead to Thanksgiving. On the other hand, I\'ll soon have United 1k status and am looking forward to seeing Versailles, Madrid, and the Dominican Republic. As for keeping touch with my family, I really enjoy giving people a \"Skype tour\" of my hotel room. I find that the wet running clothes or the ironing board next to the TV provide an easy segue to the events of the day. I\'m lucky enough to have a client that pays for resort hotels, so there\'s usually something interesting to see and talk about. That could be a dinner plate-sized showerhead or a view of a golf course.</li>\r\n 	<li>As for losing things and making mistakes, my weakness is at the moments of transition. As I leave the car to enter the shuttle, my mind is racing ahead to claim check, the coupon, the passport, and the luggage in the trunk. But not the headlights, which I\'ve left on. Perhaps the answer is to pause, consider the requirements of the moment, and not the future. Incidentally, the parking attendant who jumped my car told me about a Prius that idled on and off in their parking lot for a week before running out of gas.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Bob, thanks for the note. Reading your itinerary -- Versailles, Madrid, and the Dominican Republic – I get a bit jealous. But then I recall times when I had trip itineraries of Paris, London, Dublin, Zurich and other folks would say “Oh, that’s so glamorous”, but the reality was that I was spending my days in Paris, London, Dublin, and Zurich in conference rooms that looked very much like conference rooms in Cleveland, Nashville, Indianapolis, and Atlanta – except with different brands of bottled water and no air-conditioning. Of course, I’m hoping Robert is doing a much better job of work-life balance than I did.</li>\r\n 	<li>Leo Vegoda “@-signed” me on a Tweet from Seoul’s Inchon airport. Leo wrote – “Check in &amp; security at ICN a breeze. Noodles and beancurd delicious. LAX are you listening?”</li>\r\n 	<li>I was thinking about this when I walked into LAX Friday morning for my flight back to Chicago. The lines in Terminal 7 were a zoo at all the screening stations. It looked like a number of Japanese and Mexican tourists weren’t completely clear on the TSA’s 3-1-1 liquid carry-on limits. I saw 1 TSA screener fill an entire gray bin with liquids – toothpaste, shampoo, water bottle, sour cream (?) – from one family. Another woman kept unlocking and relocking her pink rolling bag to pull things out – first, her PC, then a bottle of water, then a jar of honey (?). It was not pretty.</li>\r\n 	<li>Of course, a big part of this is LAX with all its little terminals hanging off the access road, and none of them with enough real estate to house a proper screening set up.</li>\r\n 	<li>Walking into this, I took a deep breath – I wasn’t tight on time, but shuffling through security lines wasn’t the way I wanted to start the day. Sometimes when the main floor of Terminal 7 is bad, I’ll go up to the screening station on the bridge over from the parking garage. I went to ask Airserv women – the contractors at the start of the line checking boarding passes – if that line was any shorter and she spotted the Global Services mark on my United boarding pass and said “But you’re Global Services so you don’t have to worry about that.” She took my boarding pass and driver’s license, walked me past all the lines, dropped the line tape, gave my boarding pass to the TSA guy and escorted me right to an X-ray machine. It was the ultimate – and very timely – line cut. No noodles and beancurd like Leo had (a bit too early for that), but it did give me time to grab a cappuccino before getting on my flight home. And reinforced, once again, the value of being “super elite”</li>\r\n 	<li>I’ve talked in past podcasts about using white noise applications to drown out the cabin noise that my Bose noise-canceling headphones don’t cover. I use a couple of applications on my iPhone – <a href=\"http://www.tmsoft.com/iphone-whitenoise.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">White Noise</a> and <a href=\"http://www.naturespace.com/iphone.php\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Naturespace</a>. White Noise was the first one I used – I liked their Amazon rain forest.</li>\r\n 	<li>But then I flipped over to Naturespace because I thought the stereo quality, “aural spacing” of the sound in the headphones was a good bit better. But now I’m back to White Noise after the latest upgrade because I really like one of the new sounds – the Tibetan Singing Bowl.</li>\r\n 	<li>Maybe it’s just me, but this is the perfect white noise for me. Others I’ve played it for thought it sounded like a huge swarm of mosquitoes, but it’s come in very handy on the string of 6am Monday morning flights I recently had.</li>\r\n 	<li>And just a quick note, for those of you who check out the show notes, I’ve switched over from summary bullet points to more of a transcript. It’s a lot more words, but actually a good bit easier for me. Since the show is usually just me talking – as opposed to many other shows that are interviews or conversations among multiple hosts – I script out a good bit of my show. That may be disappointing to those who thought I was naturally this glib, but it saves me a <em>lot</em> of post-production time – editing out ums, ahs, and narrative dead-ends. Since I have the script, I figured that copy-pasting it is easier than trying to summarize it – sort of the show notes version of Mark Twain’s “I’d have written a shorter letter if I had the time”. So anyhow, starting with TravelCommons #78, you can wade through the gory details of each show by clicking through the “Read the rest of this entry” to the show notes page.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a question, a story, a comment – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com, you can send me a Twitter message at @mpeacock, or you can post them on the web site at travelcommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/seldon-lost/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Fire In The Day\'s Field</em></a> by the Seldon Plan</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Skipping the Rental Car\r\n</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Two weeks ago, I had to get from downtown Washington DC to a Northern Virginia suburb for a client dinner. I looked at the <a href=\"http://www.wmata.com/rail/maps/map.cfm\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Metro map</a>, rang up some car services, but finally gritted my teeth and rented a car. That’s pretty much my attitude toward car rentals these days — the choice of last resort. It wasn’t always this way. But with cost and fee increases, shrinking fleets, and more inconvenient locations, I work hard to skip the rental car counter.</li>\r\n 	<li>The biggest issue is cost. Rental car prices have <a href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/28/travel/28prac.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">soared</a> — increasing an average of 60-70% over last year. But prices are just part of the story. Additional fees and taxes can add another 50% to the number that finally hits your credit card. The concession recovery fee that airports and train stations charge is usually one of the bigger charges. Avis hit me with 11.11% concession recovery fees on recent trips through Seattle-Tacoma and LAX airports, and a 10% fee for renting at Philadelphia’s 30th Street train station. Picking up the car in town doesn’t always dodge this fee. Hertz leveled a 13% concession recovery fee on a rental from the San Francisco Marriott hotel. On top of that, the rental companies add on a customer facility charge, a vehicle licensing fee, and an energy recovery fee. And then the state and local governments’ turn. My Sea-Tac rental receipt shows a 9.5% sales tax plus a 9.7% rental tax. California adds 3.5% tourism assessment fee. My Philadelphia rental had 4% passenger car rental tax (split between the state and the city) plus a $2/day state surcharge. Just across these four examples, fees and taxes added 27-51% to the final cost of my rental.</li>\r\n 	<li>Another problem is being able to get a car. The easiest way for rental car companies to make more money is to increase each car’s utilization — the number of days it’s rented. Makes sense, but when demand for cars increases just a bit, the pickings start to get slim. Last month, I flew from LAX to Washington-Dulles and planned to rent a car because it would be a bit cheaper than the round-trip cost of a cab to/from DC. I landed at Dulles around midnight. Wheeling my bag across the empty Avis Preferred parking spaces, I saw a huge Ford F150 4×4 King Cab pick-up truck. ”They can’t be serious,” I thought. Oh yes, they were — that was their idea of the intermediate size car I had requested. This wasn’t going to fit in a parking garage in downtown DC. I walked back to the rental bus and asked the driver to take me to the taxi line.</li>\r\n 	<li>Of course, the drive back to the airport taxi line wasn’t a short one because airport authorities have been aggressively relocating rental car companies to “improved” consolidated facilities that are a 15-20 minute drive from the airport. Frequent travelers work hard to reduce the time spent getting from one point to another — maintaining airline status so they can use the short security line, carrying on their bags so they don’t have to wait by the luggage carousel. Renting a car used to be a quick transaction — walk off the plane, across to the parking lot, and into your rental car. It’s still that way at smaller airports like Nashville and Little Rock, but at airports like Cleveland, Baltimore-Washington, and Phoenix, you need to pack a lunch.</li>\r\n 	<li>I used to enjoy renting cars. Now, I avoid it. Hikes in prices and fees have made taxis and private car services more competitive, and moves to push rental lots way off property have made the alternatives a lot more convenient. Last year, at the tipping point where the cost of rental car was the same or maybe even a bit more than the cost of a taxi, I’d take the rental car. I enjoyed the flexibility of having a car, and even looked forward to finding a fun car in the Avis lot or under the Hertz Gold canopy. Now, I’ll pay extra to avoid them. While I work every year to make sure I keep my Marriott Platinum status, I fell out of Hertz’s President’s Circle without a care.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/fernwood-sangita/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">White Oak</a> </em> by Fernwood</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>The Best Way to Drop Wires\r\n</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Working in airplanes, airports, hotels, Starbucks, and the back seats of taxis, frequent travelers are always trying to figure out the best way to work wirelessly.</li>\r\n 	<li>This week, <a href=\"http://www.boingo.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Boingo</a> introduced an <a href=\"http://mobile.boingo.com/download/client.php?client=blackberry\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">app</a> on the BlackBerry platform for its WiFi service. At first, I didn’t think much of it, but then I got thinking – why would I want WiFi if I have 3G? I see more and more 3G modems hanging off of laptops. Is WiFi fading out?</li>\r\n 	<li>I spoke with <a href=\"http://www.linkedin.com/in/christiangunning\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Christian Gunning</a> of Boingo and asked him just this question as I was sitting in Houston-Hobby airport waiting for my flight to LA</li>\r\n 	<li>“It’s not an either/or,” he said, “the two technologies are complimentary.” In high-traffic/high-“loiter” areas like airports, 3G cells get maxed out by people entertaining themselves with streaming multimedia. While one cell can handle 600 voice calls, data quickly consumes those slots, pushing the capacity down to 50-80 calls. Moving that streaming data over to a Boingo WiFi hot spot gives much better throughput.</li>\r\n 	<li>Makes sense, but what about the cost? I can get a 3G mobile plan from AT&amp;T or Verizon for $60/month. I can get close to that in a couple of days with WiFi – paying $10 for a day pass in the airport, another $10 at Starbucks, and then another $10 in the hotel at night.</li>\r\n 	<li>Christian pointed out that Boingo’s monthly WiFi plan costs $10 for unlimited bandwidth – as compared to the 5GB caps typical for 3G modems –covers 58 airports, Starbucks, McDonald’s, and many hotels. Their smartphone plan – for iPhones and Blackberries – is 2 bucks cheaper. And as they continue to sign reciprocal agreements with other network companies, their coverage expands.</li>\r\n 	<li>He makes a compelling case for the continued relevance of WiFi – it’s built into every recent laptop, its higher bandwidth is better for multimedia, and the performance isn’t as variable as 3G.</li>\r\n 	<li>My cut at it is – unfortunately, a frequent traveler needs both. WiFi is great when you’re sitting in an airport or in a Starbucks; it’s no good when you’re inside the airplane waiting to take off or in long cab ride – because you’ve sworn off rental cars – or in a hotel with lousy broadband, because it’s not just 3G cells that can get flooded with streaming videos of , uh, artistic content.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"http://ad.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/show?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;bids=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #79</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>The bridge music is from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Magnatune</a>, the <em>we are not evil</em> label. <em>You Are the Reason</em> by C Layne, <em>Fire in the Day’s Field</em> by the Seldon Plan, and <em>White Oak</em> by Fernwood. You can find these and more at <a href=\"http://magnatune.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">magnatunes.com</a>.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or MP3 file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to @mpeacock on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_79.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #79 – Skipping Rental Cars, WiFi or 3G?','','inherit','closed','closed','','191-revision-v1','','','2019-03-01 23:25:33','2019-03-02 04:25:33','',191,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/01/191-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2359,1,'2019-03-01 23:27:07','2019-03-02 04:27:07','Coming to you today from the Courtyard Hotel just across from Philadelphia\'s City Hall in the midst of a last quick trip before leaving the airports to the Thanksgiving traveling crush. In this episode, we talk about ways of keeping track of travel receipts and an airport theft ring that targeted black luggage bags. I update last year\'s \"Road Warrior 201\" tips for this holiday travel season, and have an interview with the creator of <em><a href=\"http://vimeo.com/7167640\">Frequent Flyer</a></em>, a new documentary about mileage junkies. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_80.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_80.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript from TravelCommons podcast #80:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you today from the Courtyard in Downtown Philadelphia – just kitty corner from the amazing piece of architecture that is Philadelphia’s City Hall. Whether you think it’s impressive or impressively kitsch, there are few city halls that are so “in the center of things” as Philadelphia’s.</li>\r\n 	<li>The Thanksgiving travel season just seems to keep getting longer – more smeared out. Walking to my car in ORD last Friday afternoon after three incessantly rainy days in Seattle, I could see the holiday traffic already starting to build – lots of families, small kids pulling junior-sized rolling bags. I dunno, if you’re going to have your kid play business traveler, why not go all the way, get them a black or charcoal grey half-sized Tumi and let them feel the power the way that the primary colors of the Dora the Explorer bag will never let them experience.</li>\r\n 	<li>Me, I just want to feel the power of that tryptophan high from Thanksgiving Day turkey, maybe extending it with leftovers through the weekend, just being a couch slug until next Monday, when I have to fight with the tail end of the smeared-out holiday travel traffic and head back west again.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/beyond7-revelations/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Miss America</em></a> by Beyond 7</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Just to continue on my rental car rant from the last episode, I booked a car a couple of weeks ago in LAX -- $19 daily rate, but with an additional $15 in taxes &amp; surcharges. 44% of the total cost was taxes &amp; surcharges. Go figure.</li>\r\n 	<li>Arnoud Heijnis, a long time T/C listener, sent me a note earlier this month with the subject line – Expense Mayhem:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Work has forced me in to being a frequent traveller and although I’ve got most basics down and start to enjoy the efficiency I have made my own. However there is one thing that I still need to master. It may sound simple and you might think “what’s the deal” but I have a challenge doing and keeping track of my expenses.</li>\r\n 	<li>I know most people carry one of those transparent filing sleeves, as do I, however I continuously get caught off guard, especially when going from trip in to trip, which my company wants to see split. I have tried many things, apps for the iPhone, apps for the BlackBerry, different filing folders etc. But haven’t gotten to a system which is really satisfactory to me.</li>\r\n 	<li>My challenge is that I have receipts coming in from events in the evening when I don’t have my laptop bag at hand, at the airport, hotels, different settings etc. When I finally hit my desk for the two days of doing expenses I try to decipher the mayhem of receipts, hotel bills, car rental printouts etc. I’m usually pretty successful however feel that I’m not as efficient as I could be.</li>\r\n 	<li>I was wondering if you could enlighten me with some tips and tricks from a seasoned traveller</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Arnoud, thanks for the question. Keeping track of your travel expenses, and then getting them accurately into whatever system your company uses for reimbursement is a question close to the hearts and wallets of every frequent traveler. I average $5-10,000/month in travel expenses, so it’s real money to me. And there’s more than once where I missed filing a couple hundred dollar receipt, which then reinforces that uncertainty – am I getting paid back for everything I buy?</li>\r\n 	<li>I’m probably at the low-tech end of the scale. I use the transparent sleeves that Arnoud mentions, as well as a specific sleeve in my wallet that’s reserved for receipts I collect when I don’t have my briefcase with me – for taxi receipts, parking receipts, restaurant receipts. I also keep a business card in there (because it’s a nice fit) where I jot down cash expenditures – these are the ones I forget the most.</li>\r\n 	<li>I’ve known a couple of folks who’ve tried <a href=\"http://www.evernote.com/\">Evernote</a> on their iPhones – taking a picture of a receipt and then tagging it with the right project or account. I dunno – I keep thinking about trying it, but it never gets above the B level on my to-do list, which means it doesn’t get done.</li>\r\n 	<li>The method of capture, though, isn’t near as important as the discipline of doing data entry every day, or every other day max. You can re-create your day, even yesterday in your mind. But wait ‘til the weekend, and, unless you’re an elephant, you’re hosed. I get into trouble when I wait ‘til the end of the week to bang in my expenses. Every other day over an end-of-the–day beer is a best practice for me.</li>\r\n 	<li>If any other listeners have suggestions for Arnoud, please send them in or post them as comments to the website.</li>\r\n 	<li>Leo Vegoda sent me a <a href=\"http://www.abc15.com/content/news/phoenixmetro/central/story/Valley-couple-officially-charged-for-stealing/dKpV4Yry1EOFWqDe80dDrg.cspx\">link</a> to a story from the beginning of November about a Phoenix couple that’ve been stealing luggage from SkyHarbor airport since <em>2005</em>! The couple is accused of stealing nearly 1,000 items. After searching the couple’s 14-room home, a Phoenix detective said “there were suitcases everywhere. Floor to ceiling. Everywhere”.</li>\r\n 	<li>In his note, Leo pointed out an interesting fact in the story – “Most of the luggage is reportedly black and similar looking” – referring to my riff on replacing my squeaky wheeled bag – “not sure if going for black sounds like a good idea”</li>\r\n 	<li>It definitely wasn’t a good idea for a new colleague. Vishal was traveling to every week to DC for a project – the usual consulting grind – take the 6am American flight from O’Hare to Reagan National, catch the Metro to the client, crank all day, check into the hotel around 7, go out to dinner, and then hit the sack. So it was probably around 9:30 or 10pm when Vishal finally discovered that he’d pulled someone else’s black roller bag – same color, same model -- out of the overhead bin of the morning flight – some 12-13 hours ago.</li>\r\n 	<li>Sometime the next day, Vishal got reconnected with his black bag. He found the owner’s business card in one of the front pockets (an important travel tip for you new road warriors out there) and connected with him at lunch. Over the past two podcasts, we’ve talked about forgetting things in that moment of transition – when you’re leaving the plane or the rental car. Facing an overhead bin full of black bags after getting up at 3:30am to make the 6am flight… That afternoon, Vishal walked down to a tourist store in DC, bought himself a little red &amp; blue Obama bandana and tied it around the handle of his bag. Not a political statement. In this case, I think the “Change” on the bandana refers to fresh underwear.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a question, a story, a comment – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com, you can send me a Twitter message at @mpeacock, or you can post them on the web site at travelcommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/westexit-extra/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>On Condition of Anonymity</em></a> by the West Exit</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Holiday Travel Tips\r\n</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>A little over a year ago – episode #68 to be precise – I did a piece that I called “Road Warrior 201” where I skipped the usual tips – don’t check luggage unless you absolutely have to, wear loafers or slip-on shoes make security screening easier – and gave some of my intermediate level, I guess non-obvious tips. Listening to the holiday travel tips in the most recent <a href=\"http://indietravelpodcast.com/podcast/winter-vacation-holiday-travel-guide/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">episode</a> of Craig and Linda Martin’s Indie Travel Podcast – where they gave the TravelCommons podcast a nice shout-out – made me think about re-visiting the topic in time for the holiday travel season.</li>\r\n 	<li>Over my last couple of trips – returning from Seattle and this flight out to Phila – I paid attention to the families, the ones getting a jump on the Thanksgiving holiday. The families that made it through the terminal and through security were the ones who were paying attention. The parents took advantage of the time in the security lines and prepped their kids. They had the Nintendos already put away in the backpacks, their coats off and their shoe laces undone. They got their kids’ attention – putting away the Nintendos is probably a good help – told them what they needed to do, so that when the kids got to the screening station, they weren’t wandering around -- they were loading up their bins and ready to walk through the metal detector. Even the most hardened business traveler will give a family with young kids a break if they look like they’re trying. So the tip – make good use of the long security lines – get prepared.</li>\r\n 	<li>One of the “201” tips from last year’s podcast was to factor in the potential costs of a missed connection due to weather – when you’re responsible for room and board – when choosing between a connecting or a direct flight. If you tried, but you’re stuck with a connection, as we come into the winter season – at least in the Northern Hemisphere – give that connection a bit of space. In hubs like Denver or Dallas, airlines will offer connection times of as little as 45 minutes. Don’t take it! Think about it – that means you have 15 minutes to get off your plane packed with once-a-year holiday travelers, weave through the terminal packed with families wandering along four-a-breast, and find your gate before your flight begins to board. Any sort of traffic or weather delay and that 15 minutes is gone. Give yourself a holiday break and save the stress -- go for the 90-minute connection. Worst case, you have an extra 45 minutes to read a book or grab a beer. Cheap insurance against sleeping on the airport floor.</li>\r\n 	<li>Another stress reliever – if you’re on a direct flight or on the final leg to your designation, don’t sweat about getting your carry-on into the cabin. On winter holiday flights, if you’re seating area 3 or higher – odds are, between winter coats and packed flights – there’s no overhead bin space for you. Let the agent gate-check the bag for you. You won’t have to pay a checked bag fee and it’s very unlikely that they’ll lose your bag – it’s only traveling a couple hundred feet from the jet bridge to the luggage bay. Yes, it’ll add 30-45 minutes at the end of your trip waiting at the luggage carousel, but popping a vein in frustration will shorten your life at lot more than that.</li>\r\n 	<li>Another “201” tip from last year -- if you have to call an airline or hotel and you don’t have a special status 1K or Platinum number, choose the unpopular path on the phone tree. Travel companies don’t staff their customer service centers for peak loads – like the day when a Chicago blizzard cancels 400 flights. It’s too expensive. So on those days, you’ll wait forever for an agent if you’ve followed the typical path down the phone tree. On those days, choose the “Spanish” or “Int’l Travel” option because most everyone else is choosing English and domestic travel. Once you connect with someone, they’ll take care of you. They all work on the same systems in the same service centers.</li>\r\n 	<li>But, above all, be realistic – it’s going to be crowded. Steel yourself for it, get your inner karma tuned for it, and give yourself extra time. Figure out how much time it’ll take and add another 50%. At worst, you’ll have some extra time to watch the planes take off. But it’ll allow you to breathe a bit easier when the snow begins to fall</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/solace-medusa/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Subtle Vice</a> </em> by Solace</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong><em>Frequent Flyer</em> -- The Documentary\r\n</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>In episode #78, we talked about the upcoming movie <em><a href=\"http://www.theupintheairmovie.com/\">Up In The Air</a></em>, where George Clooney stars as an extreme frequent flyer. Dave of the <a href=\"http://www.sandandtsunamis.com/\">Sand and Tsunamis</a> blog left a comment on the TravelCommons website pointing to a 20-minute documentary about “mileage junkies” called, fittingly enough, Frequent Flyer. I caught up with the creator, Gabriel Leigh, over Skype and talked to him about his film.</li>\r\n 	<li><em>Interview with Gabriel Leigh</em></li>\r\n 	<li>Gabriel’s documentary <em>Frequent Flyer</em> can be <a href=\"http://vimeo.com/7167640\">found</a> on the Vimeo video site. And on Weds, Nov 25th, a 13-minute <a href=\"http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/rough/2009/11/30000_feet_freq.html\">version</a> of the film will be on the PBS FrontLine site. Watch it – I think you’ll enjoy it.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"http://ad.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/show?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;bids=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #80</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>The bridge music is from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Magnatune</a>, the <em>we are not evil</em> label. <em>Miss America</em> by Beyond 7, <em>On Condition of Anonymity</em> by the West End, and <em>Subtle Vice</em> by Solace. You can find these and more at <a href=\"http://magnatune.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">magnatunes.com</a>.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or MP3 file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to @mpeacock on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_80.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #80 – Holiday Travel Tips; Frequent Flyer Documentary','','inherit','closed','closed','','198-revision-v1','','','2019-03-01 23:27:07','2019-03-02 04:27:07','',198,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/01/198-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2360,1,'2019-03-01 23:31:21','2019-03-02 04:31:21','Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago. In this episode, listeners add to our list of \"Road Warrior 201\" tips for this holiday travel season, I give my impressions of the new George Clooney movie <em>Up in the Air</em>,and gather up some stories about airport security into a Jeopardy-like topic I call \"Security Potpourri\". Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_81.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\r\n\r\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_81.mp3\"]\r\n<!--more-->\r\n\r\n<hr />\r\n\r\nHere are the transcript from TravelCommons podcast #81:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\r\n 	<li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, Illinois, back in town after a quick trip to a very snowy Philadelphia. My wife was a bit iffy about this trip – “It would be very bad if you got trapped in Phila.” But while it was a miserable weekend for travelers coming out of the East Coast, watching the stream of Twitter updates from United Airlines on Sunday, I could see them bringing the airports back on line on Sunday. Come Monday, I think there was more snow on the sidewalks of Center City Phila than on the runways at the airport. Phila was lousy at snow removal when I lived there during the late ‘80’s and it didn’t look like they’d improved much since then.</li>\r\n 	<li>This week continues my string of flight weeks. I’ve been flying to somewhere every week since Labor Day week – the first week of September. Since the November episode, I’ve been bouncing across the country -- Phoenix, New York, LA and multiple visits to Philadelphia. I haven’t looked at my calendar, but I think at 4 months, this is the longest streak of flight weeks that I’ve had.</li>\r\n 	<li>In past TravelCommons episodes at this time of the year, I’d be saying that I was done traveling for the year and looking forward to lying around the house for 2 weeks. But this year is different. I won’t get a chance to break the streak – but at least it won’t be for work</li>\r\n 	<li>We’re going to burn off some frequent flier and frequent sleeper points the week after Christmas – heading to Honolulu and then to Kauai.</li>\r\n 	<li>We hadn’t really planned it. Then United launched a weird little “stealth” promotion. I got an e-mail saying that they had reserved a number of seats for mileage awards on the morning flight from Chicago to Honolulu on the 26th (Boxing Day for those in the Commonwealth) and on the afternoon flight returning on the 2nd. They were opening a special web portal at 9am on a certain day to take seat requests – 1st come, 1st serve. Then, 2 days later, they’d send you an e-mail letting you know how many seats you got, after which you had two days to call a special number and book the seats or lose them. Weird, but getting prime-time seats to Hawaii at 40,000 miles a seat – it seemed a good deal.</li>\r\n 	<li>And as it so happened, on the appointed day and the appointed hour when the portal opened, I was not traveling, but instead, sitting in a project room in front of my PC with a solid network connection. I put my request in for 4 seats and got ‘em. So, after Christmas, instead of scraping ice, we’ll be eating it – shaved ice, that is.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>I\'ll Be Home by Christmas</em> by <a href=\"http://www.katimac.com/kati_home.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Kati Mac</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Skye Ho, a long time T/C listener, pointed me to a <a href=\"http://www.theonion.com/content/news/united_airlines_exploring\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">story</a> in the Onion that I think is very apropos for the holiday travel season – “In its ongoing effort to cut transportation costs and boost profits, United Airlines announced Tuesday that it was exploring the feasibility of herding passengers into planes and stacking them like cordwood from floor to ceiling.”</li>\r\n 	<li>\"Research shows that we lose millions of dollars each month by having them all sit upright in individual seats for the duration of the flight,\" said CEO Glenn F. Tilton, speaking to reporters at United Airlines\' corporate headquarters. \"However, if we were to remove these seats, we could just sort of stack them all in there, one by one, as they file into the plane.\" My flight home last week from LAX and my flight out to PHL Monday morning felt like pilot tests for this concept.</li>\r\n 	<li>On the website, Ray Medina responded to Arnoud Heijnis’ request for help in managing expense receipts. Ray writes –\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>My company uses SAP for our expenses. I carry an envelope to every trip with the name of the customer. Throughout the day, I place the receipts in my wallet. Then, every night I enter the information into SAP and move the receipts from my wallet to the envelope so the wallet is cleared for the next day. When I return from my trip, I scan the receipts to submit to my company along with the SAP expense summary. After I submit everything, I put the envelope in my filling cabinet.</li>\r\n 	<li>It takes time to get the routine down, but once you have it, you have it!</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Thanks Ray. That’s pretty much my system, except that my company uses Oracle and I’m lucky enough to have a secretary who makes copies of the receipts for me. Other than that, my workflow is pretty much the same.</li>\r\n 	<li>Since the last episode, I’ve been trying <a href=\"http://www.evernote.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Evernote</a> on my iPhone – taking a picture of the receipt and tagging it with a couple of words. Actually, I think I lasted only about 3 days. Getting out of a cab, calculating a tip, getting my bags, checking to make sure that I didn’t forget anything (remember the thread we had going for a couple of episodes about forgetting stuff in these transitions)… taking a picture of the cab receipt was just about the last thing on my mind. I found it easier to just be disciplined about recording receipts every day or so.</li>\r\n 	<li>Building on last episode’s holiday travel tips, a number of listeners posted some good “201” tips – the next level up from Travel Tips 101</li>\r\n 	<li>Lori Humm writes\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Don\'t just pick your seat when you book your ticket; pay attention to the size of the airplane. Most of the regional jets can\'t even fit a rollerbag briefcase. Every week I watch people shake their heads in disbelief as they board the plane and realize that there really is no room. And no, there\'s also no room under the seat. Carry the laptop separate in a padded sleeve and be willing to surrender the bag to gate check. (Full disclosure: I\'m the one that got my laptop stolen last year because I didn\'t grab it out of my bag at gate check.)</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Leo Vegoda writes\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>If you cannot get a direct flight but have a choice of transit airports then choose carefully. For instance, while in past years there might not have been much difference between changing at ORD or a New York area airport on a West coast to East coast flight, ORD is definitely the best choice this year. Fewer flights and a new runway mean its on-time rankings have risen quite a bit.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Ian Morgan writes\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>I agree wholeheartedly with your point about allowing a bit of extra time at this time of the year. It still amazes me how many of my colleagues try to do a 40 minute connection in Frankfurt in December!!</li>\r\n 	<li>The simple thing that I always do is to Google the place I am going to see what\'s on. Not only can it be interesting to experience different local festivities if you have a bit of downtime, it can also make the difference between missing a flight or meeting or making it on time. If there is a large festival on in the city centre, or a demonstration planned, you are going to need to allow more time to get to/from your meeting/hotel etc. Indeed, when in Athens last January, I was aware that there were almost daily clashes with police in the city centre: I changed my hotel to a downtown location. At least this way it means that you aren\'t sat watching a cab meter clock up whatever local currency is in use, and you don\'t have to endure the cab driver\'s personal take on the situation after getting off a longhaul flight!</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</li>\r\n 	<li>Thanks to Lori, Leo and Ian for those tips –definitely 201-level “been there, done that so you don’t have to” –type advice. Good stuff.</li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a question, a story, a comment – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com, you can send me a Twitter message at @mpeacock, or you can post them on the web site at travelcommons.com.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://www.musicalley.com/music/listeners/artistdetails.php?BandHash=b962a3af0d6bd40bee9dfd260e23f37b\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Blue Christmas</em></a> by Tom Keiffer</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Up In the Airworld\r\n</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>In episode #78, we talked about the upcoming movie Up In The Air, where George Clooney stars as an extreme frequent flyer.</li>\r\n 	<li>Ever since the preview trailers hit the Web, people have been asking me — “Is this what your life is like?” So, a couple of Fridays ago, my wife and I found the one theater in Chicago showing Up in the Air (it’s in very limited release until Christmas).</li>\r\n 	<li>Watching the opening sequence — a montage of Ryan Bingham, the character played by George Clooney, going through his well-practiced drill of packing, checking in, and getting through security – grabbed me immediately. Pack up, zip zip zip, walk with purpose through the terminal, hit the premium check-in kiosk (which was a bit of an off-note, because any self-respecting road warrior prints their boarding pass at home so they can go directly to the security line), let the overcoat and blazer drop off your shoulders in one motion… It was like watching a replay of my Monday mornings -- but with a much more attractive version of me.</li>\r\n 	<li>As the movie continued, I started to pick up some niggling reality problems — international business class lie-flat seats on an MD-80, an underground tram in O’Hare, Bingham doesn’t forget his hotel room number, but every time we see him going into a hotel room (usually in the company of his love interest Alex, played by Vera Farmiga) we see him juggling a half-dozen room keys – you’d think he’d pitch them during check out like the rest of us. But, except for the fact that none of Bingham’s flights seem to be delayed, the film does a good job of capturing the highs and lows of frequent business travelers.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bingham’s lifestyle — 322 days on the road, leaving him “43 miserable days at home” in Omaha — is a common one for young road warriors. Bingham’s empty apartment in Omaha looks almost exactly like my first apartment in Dallas, except that Bingham’s has more stuff – I had a futon and a stereo in the living room, and a mattress and box spring on the floor.</li>\r\n 	<li>Most young frequent travelers enjoy this freedom for 3-5 years — I’ve had staff flying to, say, Amsterdam for the weekend instead going back to an empty apartment in Chicago, or, when on a project in Europe, use their home leave allowance to visit Morocco rather than their belongings in Cleveland. But eventually, they settle into relationships and a more settled way of life.</li>\r\n 	<li>I do know a number of guys, though, (and they are all men) who never make that transition. They continue to live their lives in the air, using business dinners and client meetings as stand-ins for more meaningful relationships; motion – a meeting in Orlando, a dinner in Tampa, another meeting in New York, a dinner in Philadelphia – as a reason for being – as Bingham says “we’re sharks, not swans.” Their biggest fear is the same as Bingham’s — that one day the music will stop, the travel will end, and that they’ll be in stuck in an empty apartment with no way out.</li>\r\n 	<li>In one of Bingham’s motivational talks, he says “Relationships are the heaviest components of your life”, counseling his audience to avoid them because they slow you down. You can’t live a life in the air when you’re weighed down by relationships.</li>\r\n 	<li>If the front half of the movie snaps with the efficiency of a frequent traveler, the back half shows the dark side. Millions of frequent flier miles later, Bingham is dragging himself through airports with a little less crispness, weighed down by disappointment and loneliness. The melancholy air that pervades the movie is real. It is the same sense of melancholy that rules airports late on a Friday night -- when the real-world Binghams are walking off their planes, looking forward to nothing more than their Monday morning flights out.</li>\r\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Walk A Thousand Miles </em> by <a href=\"http://www.matthewebel.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Matthew Ebel</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Security Potpourri\r\n</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>It’s the last episode of the year or maybe I’m getting a bit of an early jump on the “hang loose” ethos of Hawaii, but I had some bits-and -pieces of recent experiences with airport security that I can’t get “grow up” into a stand-alone topic, so instead, here’s a bit of a Jeopardy-like “potpourri” topic.</li>\r\n 	<li>Last year – July of 2008 to be exact – the Ponemon Institute – any relation to Pokemon? – issued a research report that claimed 12,000 laptops are lost every week in US airports. I wrote a <a href=\"http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2008/07/06/12000-laptops-lost-in-airports-every-week-hmmm/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">post</a> that was a bit skeptical of the numbers – “I’ve never lost a laptop,” I wrote, “and I don’t know anyone who has lost one in an airport. I know people who’ve had them stolen out of rental cars, who’ve left them in a plane’s overhead bin, but no one who has lost one in an airport.”</li>\r\n 	<li>That is, until one of my recent trips out of ORD when I watched an older gentleman in front of me in security put on his shoes and walk off to his gate. Repacking my briefcase, I saw his PC sitting there – lost and forlorn – in a grey bin.</li>\r\n 	<li>I know how it happened. He had unpacked everything on the X-ray belt and headed over to the metal detector, but was sent back because he still had his shoes on. I saw a yellow Lufthansa boarding pass in his hand and guessed that he was European – used to taking his belt off, but not his shoes. I had already started feeding my bags into the X-ray, so we slotted his shoes between my bins. On the other side of security, he must’ve been distracted by trying to find his shoes and forgot about his laptop.</li>\r\n 	<li>I flagged down a TSA screener, pointed out the forgotten PC and the gentleman walking away down the terminal. She ran after the man and brought him back. He looked at the PC, then opened his briefcase – nice PC sleeve, but it was missing a key component. The TSA screener looked at me and said, “Thank you soo much”. I sensed that I saved her the hassle of filling out a lot of paper work.</li>\r\n 	<li>I recently paid $30 to avoid my own TSA hassles. My Illinois driver’s license was up for renewal and, because I hadn’t run into anything in that past 4 years, all I had to do was send in a form and they’d mail me back a 4-year renewal sticker to put on the back of my license. Nice, convenient service – except that the last time I did that, I spent the next 4 years telling TSA screeners and rental car booth bodies that – no, my license hasn’t expired, flip it over and you’ll see the renewal. It’s not really their fault – they’re just reacting to an expiry date on the face of the license. But avoiding that explanation every week for the next 4 years… it seemed worth it to make the extra visit to the DMV. The only downside – other than the $30 – a really bad driver’s license picture that will stick with me for the next 4 years.</li>\r\n 	<li>And then, on one of my recent trips to LAX, I was standing outside Terminal 7 waiting for the Avis bus, and an airport cop tells me to “move down a bit”. There’s a suspicious package sitting on the bench nearby. Suspicious? How far down did I need to move? The cops didn’t look too worried – they were standing right by it. Their dog didn’t look like he was reacting to anything. So I slid down half the island behind a big concrete truss – far enough, I figured, to miss the major force of any blast, but not so far that I’d miss the rental bus.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>Closing</strong>\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"http://ad.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/show?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;bids=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\r\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #81</li>\r\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\r\n 	<li>The bridge music is from <a href=\"http://music.mevio.com\">Mevio’s Music Alley</a></li>\r\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or MP3 file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to @mpeacock on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\r\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\r\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_81.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\r\n</ul>','Podcast #81 – More Travel Tips; Up in The Air; Security Stories','','inherit','closed','closed','','219-revision-v1','','','2019-03-01 23:31:21','2019-03-02 04:31:21','',219,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/01/219-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2363,1,'2019-03-17 16:23:14','2019-03-17 21:23:14','[caption id=\"attachment_2141\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/IMG_0031.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2141\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/IMG_0031-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> How Much Extra For A Plate?[/caption]\n\nJust regular domestic business travel since the last podcast, trying to dodge Hurricane Florence to get back to Charlottesville.&nbsp; Thinking back to last month\'s European travels, we talk about a tight connection through Amsterdam and some odd concierge lounge rules, which gets me thinking about hotel breakfasts. And a listener request for restaurant recommendations gets me thinking about the balance of visiting good and not-so-good restaurant towns. All this and more at the&nbsp;<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_145.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n<iframe src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/511557468&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"></iframe><!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show Notes -->\n\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #145:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL after 3 weeks of “normal” travel -- no vacation, no international travel, just a couple of trips to Charlottesville, VA on sandwiching a quick shot down to Dallas. And no delays. And empty seats beside me. Indeed, I even scored an upgrade on the late United flight from IAD to ORD, the long leg of one of my flights home from Charlottesville. Feels like we’re at the start of maybe a 6-week travel lull between the final end of summer vacations and the early starts of Thanksgiving travel.</li>\n 	<li>There was a bit of drama around the Charlottesville trip in the middle of September. I had to fly out Sunday night -- the weekend that Hurricane Florence hit the Carolina coast. The storm track forecast had Florence plowing west through the Carolinas and then taking a right hand turn at the Appalachians and heading north over Virginia. The question for me -- when would it make the turn; would my Sunday flight make it through before or after the turn or would Florence be in my way on Sunday? Thursday night and Friday, I spent a bit of time hitting the Refresh button on the <a href=\"https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/\">Nat’l Hurricane Center’s website</a>. By Friday, Florence had dropped a couple of category levels and slowed down, and by Saturday, I could see that my Sunday flight would beat Florence to Charlottesville. It was a smooth flight that Sunday, though Monday was a bit wet.</li>\n 	<li>Going through TSA Pre-Check in ORD that Sunday night, I watched a guy use the electronic boarding pass on his Apple Watch. It looked a bit awkward, and if you think about it, it’s understandable. Boarding pass readers face up; you put your boarding pass or phone face down on them to read. But a watch is on face up on the top of your wrist. So the guy ends up standing on his toes and twisting his arm around to get his Apple Watch face down on the reader. You’d think he would’ve shifted to his phone after that, but I saw him twist himself up again about 30 minutes later when boarding his flight. Seems like it would’ve been easier to spin the watch on his wrist so it was facing down -- at least until Apple fires up the old Steve Jobs distortion field to convince airports to reorient all their readers for the convenience of Apple Watch users.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music --&nbsp;Dub the Uke by Kara Square (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mindmapthat/53340 Ft: DJ Vadim</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul class=\"\">\n 	<li>Allan Marko, a long-time listener and even longer-time friend, sent me an <a href=\"http://www.patentlyapple.com/patently-apple/2018/09/apple-salesforce-are-working-marriott-international-to-bring-homepods-to-hotel-rooms-to-assist-guests-with-services.html\">article</a> that dove into an interesting part of Apple’s new partnership with Salesforce. The two of them are working with Marriott to put Siri in hotel rooms. You could ask Siri to turn up the heat, order room service, or get an Uber through an Apple HomePod in the room. That’s the Apple piece of it. The Salesforce piece lets Siri remember what you asked her, say your room temperature, at the next Marriott. Useful or creepy? And how do you make sure you wipe Siri’s memory before the next guest checks into the room so you can’t ask her things like “Hey Siri, tell me all about the last guest that was here...” or “Order me the same sandwich the last guy ordered”. I dunno. I don’t even like using these new Enseo TVs to log into my own Netflix account, let alone having Marriott listening to me through a HomePod and remembering everything I mutter. Some guys are making a nice living selling shutters that you can stick over your laptop webcam. Are earplugs for hotel HomePods the next thing?</li>\n 	<li>In the<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/09/15/podcast-144-outside-airports-hospitality-mentality/\"> last episode</a>, I mentioned flying SAS from Chicago to Copenhagen. It was an odd schedule -- leaving Chicago around 10pm, arriving Copenhagen after 1 in the afternoon. Leaving that late and having a long taxi, I fell asleep before we left the ground, and before putting my phone in Airplane mode. I woke up, I dunno, an hour or so later, looked at my phone for the time, and noticed some new e-mails. Huh? That’s weird. And then I noticed that my phone didn’t say “No Service”; it was connected to some cellular service, which turned out to be SAS’s in-flight cellular service. And as opposed to in-flight WiFi which you usually have to log into, my iPhone automatically started roaming on the SAS cellular service, that then continued to check/pull e-mail for a couple of hours until I flipped it to airplane mode. I got my AT&amp;T mobile bill a couple of weeks back and ended up with a $25 roaming charge for those half-dozen meaningless e-mails. A pain, but not too painful. Unlike the guy four years ago who <a href=\"https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/11/18/that-1200-in-flight-wifi-bill-was-terrifyingly-real/\">rang up a $1,200 WiFi bill</a> on Singapore Air when he fell asleep with his data still connected.</li>\n 	<li>On the third leg of that trip, going from BRU to EDI, our best option was KLM through AMS. I’ve been in and out and through Schiphol a number of times over the past 20-some odd years and have always liked it. Nothing flashy, but it works -- not too big, reasonable facilities. Booking this BRU-EDI trip on the KLM website, I had two options -- a tight 40-min connection or a 2-hr one. While I don’t mind Schiphol, I wasn’t looking to make an afternoon of it. So I broke one of my cardinal travel rules -- never book a connection shorter than an hour -- and booked the 40-min connection, knowing that we had a back-up if it didn’t work out. One factor I didn’t completely think through was that we’d have to cross the Schengen border during those 40 minutes too. The first leg -- Brussels to Amsterdam -- was within Schengen so it was just like an domestic US flight -- no passport control, no customs. But in Schiphol, we had switch concourses and go through passport control because the UK is outside of Schengen. We made it through, though, with time to spare because - we walked real fast; like I said before, Schiphol isn’t that big, so switching concourses wasn’t a long walk; but most importantly, my wife spotted the “short connection” line at passport control. We had gotten in the regular line, but then we saw on a display screen that our EDI flight was classified a “short connection”, so we switched to the much shorter line -- I earned a “Hey” from a security guard when I ducked under the tape -- and quickly passed through what was a well-staffed and brisk passport control line (Munich Airport, you could take some lessons here). We get to the gate with more than enough time -- boarding hasn’t been called yet. So while we made the 40-minute connection, the question now was -- would the checked luggage make it? As we were queuing to board, I looked out the terminal window. There’s our plane, and there, next to the baggage loader, was Irene’s and Claire’s luggage -- stationary, not rolling along like in that YouTube video. A very good sign, but there wasn’t anybody loading luggage. As I walk up to board, I tap one of the KLM guys standing around. Pointing out the window, I say “See those bags on the tarmac? Those are ours. It would be great if they made it onto this plane.” He laughed -- him a bit more than me. I was happy to see them appear on the EDI baggage carousel.</li>\n 	<li>I’m thinking that I need another carry-on bag; something between my maximum legal size 22-incher and my leather duffel overnighter. On that BRU-EDI trip, I carried my 22-incher on, but not without agents at Brussels and Amsterdam challenging me, even after showing them it fit in their baggage sizer. A few weeks after that trip, KLM added an <a href=\"https://news.klm.com/klms-augmented-reality-hand-baggage-check-now-available-in-messenger/\">augmented reality baggage sizer</a> to their iPhone app. You fire up the app, point your iPhone camera at your bag and the app overlays a properly sized rectangle over your bag. If your bag is within the rectangle, you’re good to go. Would’ve been easier -- and much cooler -- than slamming my bag into those metal sizers, but somehow, with those gate agents, I don’t think the outcome would’ve been any different.</li>\n 	<li>OK, one last thing from that trip. The concierge lounges in both the Copenhagen Marriott and the London St Pancras Renaissance had prominent “rules” signs at their entrances, and one of those rules was a ban on “fitness clothes”. Now, this wasn’t a big deal on this trip because I was on vacation, and wasn’t toting work-out gear. My normal program when I’m on business travel is to get up before 6, work out, go straight to the lounge in my “fitness gear” for some breakfast while cooling down, then head back to my room to shower, change, and head out. Having to separate the cool down from breakfast would add 15-20 minutes to what is an already tight morning routine. So I hope that rule doesn’t spread to the US lounges. The rest of the rules seemed pretty reasonable, though one -- no wearing a bathrobe in the lounge -- seemed a bit superfluous. I’ve never seen someone walk into a concierge lounge in a bathrobe… until in Copenhagen at 3 in the afternoon with it not looking like there was anything on under the robe. So, OK, I’m now completely on-board with the no robe rule.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> or our new <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a> at travelcommons -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;Emma by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/50905 Ft: Martijn de Boer</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Restaurant Karma</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Casey Milch sent me a note a few weeks back -- “Greetings. Love the podcast. I know you mention frequent trips to Charlottesville and I’m finding myself there every six weeks for work myself now. Any restaurant suggestions?”</li>\n 	<li>One of the compensations for getting on an airplane just about every week is that you get to try a lot of restaurants. Now, in the last episode, we talked about the downside of that -- rapid waistline expansion -- but if you’re thoughtful about it, and you like trying different food (I hate the word “foodie”), business travel has its benefits. I sent Casey a few recommendations -- Fitzroy, a meat place -- burger, double pork chop, fried chicken -- on the Main Street pedestrian mall; Lampo, a small Neapolitan pizza place with a big wood oven that is -- I forgot to tell Casey this -- a 5-minute walk from Champion Brewing Company’s taproom; and The Alley Light, a speakeasy in an small alcove (a bit too short to be a proper alley) with no sign though there is a light over the door, that took 3 tries to find the first time in the pouring rain, which led to the question “How many consultants does it take to work Google Maps”. Putting the list together for Casey reminded me that we hadn’t been to Alley Light in a while, so we ate there last Tuesday night -- found it on the first try this time -- and had roasted bone marrow, pork rillette, duck confit -- oh, and some carrots. So much for thoughtfulness.</li>\n 	<li>Charlottesville punches above its weight for good restaurants, maybe because of University of Virginia. The 2 ½ years I spent in New Orleans was one of definitely one of my food high points, especially when crawfish were in season. 3 months in Portland, OR was fun with the food truck scene, and of course, it is ground-zero for the craft beer explosion. Stays in Manhattan, San Francisco, and London were that much more enjoyable with someone else picking up the dinner tab. Indeed, in San Francisco, I used to stay in different hotels so I could try different neighborhood joints.</li>\n 	<li>But karma always seeks balance, and for all these great food locations, there have been other, let’s say, less-than-stunning places. Dover, OH -- about 30 miles south of Canton -- had, when I was doing a project there -- two places to eat -- an Arby’s and the lunch counter of the Walmart knock-off. And the Walmart knock-off was the better of the two. Oldsmar, FL was a bit too far outside of Tampa for us to head in for dinner every night, so the near-by Buffalo Wild Wings - B-Dubs - and Applebee’s were our best shots. And downtown Detroit in the early 2000’s, working, eating, and sleeping in the urban fortress that is the Renaissance Center was brutally monotonous.</li>\n 	<li>But even when in London and New York, we weren’t splurging on big meals every night. We have reasonable expense budgets that we have to live within. So again, we find balance -- one night we’re underspending at a dive (but good) pizza-by-the-slice joint, so that the next night, we eat at nice place. Some guys will extend balancing act to travel -- sucking up the inconvenience of a cheaper connecting flight to pay for better meals. One colleague told me -- “I’ll happily travel cheap to eat great food”</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;Astral Travel by Astral (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Astral/44282</li>\n</ul>\n<b>Hotel Breakfasts</b>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Growing up, those of us of a certain age heard that breakfast is the most important meal of the day -- usually from a cereal commercial. I mentioned a bit early earlier my morning hotel pattern -- work out, hit the concierge lounge for breakfast and then get on with my day. Most lounge breakfasts are pretty industrial -- chafing dishes of stiff scrambled pasteurized eggs, thin slices of oven-baked bacon, vat of oatmeal, a few cartons of yogurt, and a bowl of fruit. It gets the day started. I may be judging it a bit harshly though. My daughter Claire loves those scrambled eggs. Go a little more upscale and you’ll see maybe a platter of smoked salmon, some sliced meats and cheeses, bran muffins…</li>\n 	<li>So when I see something different, it gets my attention. Like roasted green chiles in New Mexico, Albuquerque and Santa Fe, to season those scrambled eggs, or the King Cake at the Canal St Sheraton in New Orleans during Mardi Gras season. Now, it’s not the best king cake I’ve had - and my wife has dragged me through a king cake tasting crawl there, so I speak with some knowledge -- but I look forward to it whenever I’m there in the spring. I remember one morning I walked in -- no king cake! I found one of the staff -- “you guys stop doing king cake?!” “No! I didn’t know we were out.” And they immediately brought out a new one. Crisis averted!</li>\n 	<li>It doesn’t even have to be anything big. The Copenhagen Marriott lounge had rhubarb juice. As a kid, my mother made pies from rhubarb growing in our backyard, that I think her mother had planted. So something different and nostalgic all in one. Was it life-changing? Not necessarily, but I’d never seen it before.</li>\n 	<li>A little more life-changing was the bowl of bun bo hue that we got for breakfast when staying at a local, non-chain, hotel in Hue in central Vietnam. Kind of a spicier, funkier version of the pho you see in the US, and tougher to find here. Not like any hotel breakfast I’d had, and I immediately switched my breakfast choice over to it or pho for the rest of the trip.\nBack in May, when I was in Pune, we stayed at a Marriott Courtyard, a chain which, as I’ve complained about before in prior episodes, doesn’t have a concierge lounge but they had a nice breakfast buffet with what I guess is a typical two-track system -- one side with the usual Western breakfast foods, and the other side with Indian food. The waiter pointed me to the omelette station. I was about ready to order when I noticed another station to my right with what looked like a super-sized crepe griddle. “What’s that?” I asked. “Oh, that’s to make dosas.” “Cool, I have one of those.” “Do you know what a dosa is?” “Nope, but I’ll take one, however it normally comes.” I watched him make this foot-wide diameter stiff crepe, rolled it up and put it, sticking up out of a cup of some sort of stew or curry. I walk back to the table. Everyone else has eggs, bacon, toast, arranged horizontally on their plate. I’m the only one with a vertical breakfast. But I liked that. Kinda flying the flag for something different at breakfast .</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #145</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and now on <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_145.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #145 — Restaurant Karma; Hotel Breakfasts','','inherit','closed','closed','','2138-revision-v1','','','2019-03-17 16:23:14','2019-03-17 21:23:14','',2138,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/17/2138-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2364,1,'2019-03-17 16:23:54','2019-03-17 21:23:54','[caption id=\"attachment_2128\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/IMG_0419.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2128\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/IMG_0419-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> Greetings...[/caption]\n\nBack in front of the mic after 12 days of skipping across northern Europe -- Copenhagen, Brussels, and Scotland. In this episode, we get nostalgic about outside airports in California, talk about how a hospitality mentality is pervasive in hotels but not in restaurants, missing customer service responses from <a href=\"http://united.com\">United Airlines</a> and <a href=\"http://marriott.com\">Marriott</a>, and European perspectives about Chicago.&nbsp; All this and more at the&nbsp;<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_144.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n<iframe src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/500700135&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"></iframe><!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show Notes -->\n\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #144:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL after 12 days bunny hopping through Northern Europe -- first Copenhagen, then Brussels, and finally St Andrews, Scotland to drop my daughter off for her 4th and final year at University of St Andrews. Prior to that, I had a couple of US trips -- back to Charlottesville, VA -- always a nice place to visit -- and a day trip to Omaha. And while all my European flights last week were fine -- including the 40-min connection in Amsterdam that included a trip through passport control -- late August summer storms forced to call audibles on both trips. As opposed to last month, when my CVG-ORD flight was jacked up by storms in Miami, these flights were cratered by rain that I could see outside the window -- the terminal window or the airplane window.</li>\n 	<li>They both left me less than impressed by United’s notification service. The Monday of my Charlottesville flight, it had been steadily raining in Chicago -- heavily at times. I kept checking the status of the flight -- on-time, on-time on-time. Finally, I headed to ORD, got through security, and then checked again - 3 hour delay? Really, you only just figured that out an hour before departure time? Looking out the window, the rain wasn’t letting up. I could see where this was going. I grabbed dinner and then settled in at the gate to do some work. Every once in a while, I’d check the flight status in the United app -- 3-hr delay, 3-hr delay, 3-hr delay, then wait for it -- cancelled. I wasn’t surprised at the cancellation, but the lack of push notification. Normally, I’d get a message and an e-mail from Amex Travel. Nothing this time. Like I said, though, I wasn’t surprised, and I didn’t have a critical meeting the next morning in Charlottesville. United had “helpfully” booked the same flight out the next night, but a) I couldn’t lose a whole day at the client; and b) I felt United had lost the right to my money for this flight. So, I booked the next morning’s flight on American, caught a cab back home and slept that night in my own bed. Annoying, but, hey, I got over it.</li>\n 	<li>Next week’s trip to Omaha was on yet another rainy day. It was just a day trip, so I drove to ORD and saw the dark grey line of weather coming toward me. I mentally settled in for delay. This one, though, would be more problematic because I was flying into Omaha for a workshop, and flying out to Copenhagen the next evening. That dark grey line hit ORD as we were boarding, so I walked into that workshop about 30 minutes late. We walked outside at noon to grab lunch from a food truck. I could see an even darker grey line of weather. Back in the conference room, I’d check the United app every 30 minutes or so -- on-time, on-time, on-time, cancelled. What?! Again, no notice if I hadn’t been checking. And this was a bit more problematic than last week. I found earlier SW and American flights that weren’t cancelled. I gambled on the AA flight which left a bit later but would save me the crosstown MDW-ORD Uber ride to collect my car. I excused myself early from the workshop and headed back to the airport. Arriving late; leaving early. Not sure that’s the way to make a good first impression</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Zapac/25046\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><i>You are (funky mix)</i></a>&nbsp;by Zapac</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul class=\"\">\n 	<li>Steve Frick, a long time TravelCommons listener, left a note on the website about <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/08/09/podcast-143-how-bad-is-business-travel-for-your-health-make-layovers-fun/\">the last episode</a>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Lots of content as well as comments on this episode. Thoroughly enjoyed the Chicago Midway Layover Southside Taproom Tour video tour, when it comes to travel and Midway, though, all I can think about is delays.</li>\n 	<li>Chicago, I recently sent all the members of my tribe there sans, myself (Someone had to watch the dog, or vice-versa). When my wife travels she always checks baggage..... we\'ve only been married 8 years. Upon arrival, I grabbed her bag off the belt and it was unusually heavy. The reason it contained 2 six-packs of Revolution Brewery beer, God bless this woman.</li>\n 	<li>Travel and health, this one hit home. Somehow I\'ve managed to \"keep it tight\"... somewhat. I hired someone about three years ago, and while he doesn\'t drink he managed to partake in every meal that he was invited to. So much so that the rest of us had an over/under on how fast he could gain 30lbs (Yes, we\'re that cruel &amp; shallow). After two broken pants buttons, he managed to get control.</li>\n 	<li>Sorry for the long comment, but keep up the great work!</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Steve, thanks for that; no apologies needed. And you guys are not the only cruel and shallow ones. I may have told this story before, but I had a project in Memphis and one of the team members had kind of a similar problem as your new hire, except his weakness was barbecue ribs. The team would go out one night a week for ribs -- Corky’s, Central, Germantown Commissary, but then this guy would also do a take-out slab another night. The weight gain was obvious -- our over/under was when he topped 300 on his cholesterol reading.</li>\n 	<li>I was 1 for 2 last month on TravelCommons Chicago meet-ups. I wasn’t able to connect with Keith Love and his son when they were in town early in August, but I did meet up with Rob Cheshire and his UK crew for a bit of a taproom crawl on Chicago’s Near West Side on a Friday night at the end of the month. I even got Rob to relax his anti-AB InBev stance and spend an hour in the Goose Island taproom, complete with a round of Bourbon County Stout. At 14%, it’s a bit larger beer than you’d typically see in a UK pub.</li>\n 	<li>More telling, though, was the discussion I had with Drew, Rob’s friend on his first visit to the US. “Where are the dangerous parts of the city, where all the shootings are?” he asked. Fair question. Three weekends before, 66 people were shot in Chicago; 12 people died. “You’re fine here,” I told him, “but I wouldn’t want to go another mile west.” The next Thursday, I was sitting in a Copenhagen bar waiting out the rain -- my wife and daughter were waiting out the rain clothes shopping; to each their own -- and got talking to the bartender, a young woman who had never been to the US. “Where are you from?” she asked. “Chicago” “I read somewhere that’s the most dangerous city in the world.” I told her my experiences -- my family and I haven’t been impacted, but we also don’t hang out on the South or West sides where all the gang bullets are flying. But given the press about the August shootings, she asked a fair question. Both conversations got my attention; I’ve gotten a bit numb to all the gun violence reporting, which is not a good thing. Travel is all about getting different perspectives, even if they’re about your own home.</li>\n 	<li>In the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/08/09/podcast-143-how-bad-is-business-travel-for-your-health-make-layovers-fun/\">last episode</a>, I relayed Keith Love’s questions about good airport apps, ones that, he said, “actually guide you through airports and their amenities/services.” Chris Christensen of the Amateur Traveler Podcast dropped a lin e saying that he uses GateGuru, run by the same team that does SeatGuru. I haven’t tried it yet, but will download it and give it a go. Narita Airport in Tokyo is taking a different angle. Their free Wi-Fi service comes with a chatbot -- Bebot -- to help travelers. The press release didn’t give any chat samples -- “Bebot, where can I find a non-Asahi beer in this terminal?” “I’m sorry, there is none” -- but it could be useful -- or at least entertaining.</li>\n 	<li>Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/07/03/podcast-142-sleeping-in-business-class-changes-from-chinese-tourists/\">July episode</a>, I mentioned how tight the United Polaris business class seats were on the Triple 7’s that I took between ORD and Frankfurt. Last Monday, Irene and I flew a new American 787 back from London, and it didn’t seem any roomier. We flew back on miles, so were in the Main Cabin Extra section, but walking through Business Class to get there, I almost had to turn my body a bit to get down the aisle, and I’m not that big of a guy. When I got to my seat, the leg room was fine, even with the seat in front of me reclined. But the seats were narrow. The couple in the window and middle seats next to me were larger folks, and I could see it was a less-than-comfortable 8 hours for them.</li>\n 	<li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/08/09/podcast-143-how-bad-is-business-travel-for-your-health-make-layovers-fun/\">the last episode</a>, while not thrilled with American’s on-time performance between ORD and CVG, I was impressed by the customer service I got from their Twitter crew. Indeed, the next day, I added a final note to my tweet stream -- “BTW, while it was an operational failure last night, the Twitter customer service was not. I appreciated the delay explanation and backing me up on the next flight”. And any more, I typically get solid, timely service from Twitter customer service. Indeed, one constant on my Top 10 Travel Tips list is “Use Twitter as a Concierge Service”. So I was surprised when a colleague said to me “I gotta get some more followers so companies pay attention to me on Twitter”. He said he never gets any replies. Anybody else have this problem?</li>\n 	<li>Now while I get good quick responses from the airlines, my recent experience with Marriott was very different. I was trying to get the receipt/the folio from a stay in Colorado Springs. The e-mailed bill never came. Then I went to the website but the download link didn’t work. I submitted a folio request on the website and hit Marriott on Twitter. Twitter was faster, though it took them a full day to respond, which was better than the 12 days it took them to respond to my website query. Neither of which actually resulted in me getting a copy of my bill. I only got that when I gave up on all the digital channels and called the Colo Springs front desk. Now, I knew that would be the fastest way -- and it was; I got an e-mail from them in about 5 minutes. But I’m always interested in seeing how all the new channels work… or don’t. Maybe Marriott needs a chatbot...</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> or our new <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a> at travelcommons -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/35879\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><i>Two Guitars</i></a>&nbsp;by Admiral Bob</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>California Outside Airports</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>A college friend of mine posted a status on Facebook, saying that he was flying home to Boston from Long Beach Airport in Southern California. His comment -- “New favorite airport - outdoor terminals and boarding!!” It was an immediate shot of travel nostalgia for me. My first job out of school, in the mid-80’s, had me regularly traveling from Dallas to San Jose. My folks lived in Huntington Beach, CA and American had direct flights from DFW to Long Beach. So whenever I had to be in San Jose, I’d triangulate through Long Beach for the weekend -- fly in Friday afternoon, hang out on the beach for the weekend, and then catch a 7am Monday morning Alaskan Air flight out of Orange County to San Jose.</li>\n 	<li>I loved that triangle of airports -- LGB, SNA, and SJC. Compared to LAX or SFO, they were compact -- maybe even cozy, if you can apply that adjective to an airport and keep a straight face -- uncrowded, and all of them took advantage of the California climate to be outdoor airports. No jetways, and in LGB’s case, even the baggage carousel was outside. I remember the first time walking out to pick up my luggage at LGB, waiting by a palm tree for my bag to show up. This was right after surviving 2 of the coldest winters in Chicago while going to business school. LGB instantly became my favorite airport.</li>\n 	<li>When you arrived at SJC, the gate agent would meet you at the bottom of the steps and guide you under a covered walkway into the terminal -- almost like a Japanese tour guide, holding her clipboard up. I’d walk through the terminal to the car rental lot, to the little Hertz hut in the middle. I got to know the woman working in the hut, and in those days before Hertz Gold and President’s Circle, that’s all I needed to get an upgrade. Later trips through Palm Springs Airport -- pleasure rather than business -- and I loved that airport too, walking outdoors past the palm trees between terminals. Hard to imagine after 9/11 forced airports to harden their perimeters.</li>\n 	<li>SNA and SJC are no longer outside airports. Big renovations in the ‘90’s replaced the covered walkways with jetways, doing away with that one thing that made them a little special. The renovation of LGB’s terminal 6 years ago installed fire pits and outdoor dining, but no jetways. It’s still an outside airport, as is Palm Springs.</li>\n 	<li>Not that outdoor airports are California-only things. Charlottesville airport, which I’ve been frequenting over the past couple of years, is sort of a quarter to a half outdoors. There’s 4 gates -- 1 or 2 of them have jetways, the rest are outdoor boarding and baggage claim for gate-checked bags. And there’s a nice 2nd-floor outdoor terrace that I do phone calls from when it’s not too hot, or raining.</li>\n 	<li>One of the things I like about outdoor airports is there’s no waiting for gates. The plane lands, parks, they wheel up the stairs -- maybe even two; front and back if you’re lucky -- and off you go. No ORD treatment -- landing and then waiting 20 minutes for your gate to open up. However, the last time I flew into CHO, we landed and stopped short of the usual parking spot. The pilot keyed the mic -- “Our gate is full; we’ll have to wait a couple of minutes.” All us passengers looked at each other -- gate, what gate? Turns out he meant some fancy new ramp thing; instead of stairs, they pushed over some huge covered ramp, complete with a switchback so the descent wasn’t too steep. I dunno, call me old-school (or just old) but in my book, you have to have a proper set of stairs to be a true outdoor airport. Palm trees are optional, but highly recommended.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djlang59/22228\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><em>Garden Of The Forking</em></a><em>&nbsp;</em>by J.Lang</li>\n</ul>\n<b>Hospitality Mentality</b>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Nowadays, it seems that most hotels have got their front desk training pretty well down. I can’t remember the last time I hit an indifferent front desk person when checking in. And given the number of different hotels I stay in, it leads me to the conclusion that this, what I call, a hospitality mentality is a key part of their training, because, based on every other retail experience I have, I know I wouldn’t naturally run into this many nice people in a row. Not that I have a problem with this. It’s nice whenever I’m dragging myself into a hotel late because of flight delays or whatever, that the person checking me in is pleasant, wants to take care of me, walks out from behind the desk give me my key and to point me to the elevators, and seems genuinely concerned about my well-being. Even in hotels that otherwise are a bit “meh”, I find that my standard TripAdvisor review says “But the service was great.”</li>\n 	<li>Which is a huge contrast with the typical service I get at a restaurant where I would expect a hospitality mentality, but am surprised when I get it. Last Sunday night, Irene and I were overnighting in London on our way back from St Andrews, and walked to an Indian restaurant, <a href=\"http://www.dishoom.com/kings-cross/\">Dishoom</a>, up behind King’s Cross station. There was a queue outside the restaurant, typical for a popular place. A guy came out with an iPad, took our name, and told us it would be about a 30 minute wait. That was fine, we wanted a drink before dinner anyhow. They give us a pager -- again, typical stuff -- but now it gets a bit different. Instead of pointing us to a scrum around a bar, someone escorts us to two open seats, asks if the seats are OK for us, and right behind her was a waitress to take our order. Right at about 30 minutes, as we’re finishing our drinks, the pager goes off. We’re collecting our stuff to head back to the hostess stand when a guy walks over to us -- the same guy who took our name in line -- took our glasses and walked us to our table, chatting along the way -- where are you from, Oh I have friends in Chicago, how long are you in London…. We get to the table, but before we sit down, he asks us “Is this table OK for you?”</li>\n 	<li>I can’t remember the last time a busy restaurant asked me if I was happy with the table. Normally, the hostess expects you to be happy she actually seated you. The food was good, but what really impressed me about Dishoom that here was a big, mass-service restaurant with a hospitality mentality. Easy to do at a small place, or a Michelin-starred restaurant (though don’t get me started about French Laundry), but here, in London, a place not necessarily known for great customer service, they had it nailed. Oh, and the chicken curry -- they nailed that too.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #144</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a> and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_144.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #144 — Outside Airports; Hospitality Mentality','','inherit','closed','closed','','2126-revision-v1','','','2019-03-17 16:23:54','2019-03-17 21:23:54','',2126,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/17/2126-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2365,1,'2019-03-17 16:24:31','2019-03-17 21:24:31','[caption id=\"attachment_2100\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/20121212_195127000_iOS.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2100\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/20121212_195127000_iOS-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> Duck squats are supposed to keep you healthy[/caption]\n\nNo long-distance travel this month. Instead, I\"m getting back into regional jets, and waiting out a long delay in Cincinnati has me wondering about American Eagle\'s flight scheduling algorithm. My flights into CVG cause me to think about the impact of losing hub status. CVG looks overbuilt, but MEM is spending money to shrink itself. A Harvard Business Review article about how frequent business travel leads to poor health choices emphasizes the need for \"mindfulness\" on the road. The Midway Layover Taproom video gets me thinking about the time needed for a fun layover tour. And I give a listener my Chicago restaurant and taproom recommendations. All this and more at the&nbsp;<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_143.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n<iframe src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/483554862&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"></iframe><!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show Notes -->\n\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #143:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you a spiffed up TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. The production bay has been somewhat reassembled -- less one piece of furniture in the name of decluttering -- with the walls now a real estate agent-approved shade of “greige” and the floors redone from cherry to a bit more of a walnut; bowing to the presumed tastes of the millennial buyer. It’s not bad, just different. Definitely lighter though.</li>\n 	<li>No spur-of-the-moment international trips in July; mostly just running around the Midwest, but re-vectoring from Wisconsin to Cincinnati; a bit too far to drive, so I’m losing the freedom to leave when I want and back to stooping through regional jet doorways.</li>\n 	<li>And back to having my schedule jacked up by weather events thousands of miles away from me. As we’ve talked about before, the regional jet operators, affiliates that don’t have spare jets available to step in and wipe out delays a plane may encounter along their daily bunny hop schedule. Last week, my AA flight from CVG to ORD was a textbook example of this. At 12:30, on the way back from lunch, I got my first delay notice -- for a 6pm flight. It was just 20 minutes, so I didn’t think much of it. It was a nice day in both Cincinnati and Chicago, so I just chalked it up to standard ORD traffic. But then the delay started to stretch -- to 30 minutes, to 40 minutes, to an hour. I fired up FlightAware and used the “Where’s My Plane Now?” functionality to try and figure out what was going on. The nice thing about the FlightAware screen is it shows you the flight path and the current weather. My plane was traveling from Norfolk, VA to Miami, and then up to Cincinnati -- and I could see heavy storms all along the Southeast coast. The plane was late leaving Norfolk, and then was having to vector down the Florida Gulf Coast to avoid the storms over the Atlantic Coast. This wasn’t looking good.</li>\n 	<li>FlightAware also shows a 10-day history for a flight’s departure/arrival times. This American flight had only arrived on-time once; had also canceled once, and arrived late the other 8 times. With a bit of time to kill, I fired up Excel and calculated that this flight averaged an hour and 20 minute delay -- counting the one on-time flight, but not counting the cancellation (figuring out how to average in infinity was a bit more work that I was willing to tackle). This wasn’t really a one-off weather delay; it was a bad flight route. So as I’m wont to do, I hit American on Twitter -- “this flt has been delayed/cancelled 8 of the past 9 days. Kinda think AA needs to rethink the scheduling for this one”. I looked at the history of the United flight also leaving at 6pm -- one late flight in the past 10 days. It flies back and forth between ORD and CVG. Maybe not a great plan for the winter, but better than flying through the humid South in July and August. I’m switching. Besides, the beer selection in CVG won’t keep me occupied through too many more hour-long delays.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/beyond7-revelations/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><em>Miss America</em></a>&nbsp;by Beyond 7</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul class=\"\">\n 	<li>Even in the midst of studio refurb, I managed to push out the long-promised Chicago Midway Layover Southside Taproom Tour video. These videos always take longer than I think, but it’s fun and I like the end result. One of the things I’ve liked about the craft beer explosion -- in addition, of course, to good beer -- is that searching out new microbreweries has taken me to parts of cities I never would’ve visited otherwise -- walking into a basement in Portland, Oregon wondering how in the hell they got these huge steel tanks down here; or coming out of the Paris Metro in the middle of a North African neighborhood. I hope this Midway video has some of that same feel -- skipping the parts of Chicago that make the tour guides or TV shows -- the baseball themepark of Wrigleyville, the lakefront, hipster enclaves of Wicker Park and Logan Square -- guiding folks to pass through Douglas Park, Pilsen, Bridgeport, and the Back of the Yards. If you haven’t seen it already, check it out. You can watch it on the TravelCommons Facebook page, or go to the TravelCommons web site and you can click through to it on YouTube. Robert Fenerty left a comment on YouTube -- “Might be an excellent way to help get my A List status renewed this year!” Which, I think, is an excellent idea…</li>\n 	<li>Rob Cheshire commented on the web site, talking about the Southside breweries I featured on the video --\n<ul>\n 	<li>Thanks Mark! I will definitely build a visit to Marz and Lo-rez into my schedule for my August trip to Chicago. I am undecided about Whiner, which might be a bit too “European” in terms of beer styles for my tastes.I am a bit conflicted about Lagunitas, being part of the evil-Heineken Empire! I have no doubt that they have some great beers, and that the tasting room is a very cool spot.</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Rob and I have trading thoughts on Chicago brewery in comments to TravelCommons web site posts and Untappd check ins for a couple of months leading up to his trip here. Little does he know that I’m going to hit him up the other way for suggestions for my quick visit to Copenhagen in September. Rob has started his own blog -- <a href=\"https://taproomadventure.blogspot.com/\">The Great Taproom Adventure</a> -- with his notes on the taprooms he visits.</li>\n 	<li>Keith Love -- “long-time listener, first-time caller” as he describes himself -- sent me a note. He and his son are hitting Chicago early this month -- maybe for Lollapalooza? You’d be surprised how many older folks go hard on that 4-day music festival. Keith asked me for some restaurant and taproom recommendations, which got me thinking that I should do a Chicago episode, but in lieu of that, here’s the list I built for Keith in case you’re passing through Chicago soon -\n<ul>\n 	<li>Restaurant suggestions with good food/beer selections\n<ul>\n 	<li>The Publican (Fulton Market)</li>\n 	<li>Cruz Blanca (Randolph St)</li>\n 	<li>The Fountainhead (North Center)</li>\n 	<li>Hopleaf (Andersonville)</li>\n 	<li>Purple Pig (Michigan Ave)</li>\n 	<li>Eataly (River North; beer bar on the top floor)</li>\n 	<li>Fat Rice (Logan Square -- a bit of a cheat; OK beer, but food you won\'t find anywhere else)</li>\n 	<li>Wiener Circle (Lakeview -- even more of a cheat; no beer but a great char-Polish)</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Favorite Chicago taprooms -- this is more Northside focused since Keith said he was staying in River North\n<ul>\n 	<li>Goose Island Taproom (on Fulton St, not the brewpub)</li>\n 	<li>Half Acre (on either Lincoln or the new, larger one further north on Balmoral)</li>\n 	<li>Revolution Brewery Taproom (on Kedzie, not the brewpub on Milwaukee)</li>\n 	<li>Ravenswood taproom crawl -- 4 taprooms on Ravenswood between Foster and Irving Park Rd</li>\n 	<li>DryHop (Lakeview - another cheat; more of a brewpub, but a fav of mine)</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Keith also asked if I have a favorite airport app to, as he said, “actually guide you through airports and their amenities/services.” I had to admit that I’m a bit more old-school and use the maps that are posted around, though I will use Untappd to find the airport bars that have the best beer selection, which is how I killed a bit of that CVG delay I talked about earlier. If anybody uses an airport app, please let me know and I’ll talk about it on the next episode.</li>\n 	<li>The stint in Cincinnati forces me to fly out of ORD first thing Monday morning, the worst part of the road warrior rush hour. I normally avoid Monday morning flights like the plague, but my schedule these past weeks has forced me into it. That first Monday, I gave myself an extra 30 minutes, figuring life is too short to hyperventilate in a TSA line. But even then, the line tailing out of the Terminal 3 PreCheck took my breath away -- half the way down the terminal and I couldn’t catch up to the end of it; it grew faster than I could walk. I finally was able to get in -- I may have cut someone off, I dunno, the end of the line was a bit nebulous, lot of people muddling around, eventually forming a coherent line. Kinda like the travelers version of post-Big Bang dust clouds eventually forming galaxies. Anyhow, I get into line and start walking back toward the PreCheck station, at a brisk pace, and I didn’t really stop until I stood at the little swinging gate, waiting for the next available agent to check my license. It was 5-7 minutes tops. It’s amazing how many passengers they can process with 9 agents checking ID and every screening machine running. And with a line that’s 90% experienced travelers. It was just this side of a precision drill squad. I was impressed.</li>\n 	<li>I haven’t spent much time in Cincinnati airport before. It’s a very nice airport, but feels a bit “overbuilt”, especially with Delta “de-hubbing” it after it merged with Northwest.There’s two terminals with a train running between them and to the main building. The train is fine, as airplane trains go -- no better or worse than Denver’s or Atlanta’s -- but it seems a lot shorter. Indeed, the walk between terminals is maybe 3 minutes. The train seems a bit superfluous, or that the Cincinnati airport is trying to punch above its weight. Though feeling a bit overbuilt, it’s doesn’t have the ghost town feeling that the Memphis airport had the last time I was there. There were concourses there where I didn’t see a soul. It too was a casualty of the Delta-Northwest merger, a Northwest hub that was shut down in favor of Delta’s superhub in Atlanta. Memphis has lost ⅔’s of its passenger traffic and is now spending millions to downsize, to shutdown and mothball those empty concourses. There’s a <a href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/23/us/memphis-airport.html\">good NY Times story</a> about this. I tweeted out a link while I was writing this, but will also put a link in the show notes.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> or our new <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a> at travelcommons -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/westexit-extra/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><em>On Condition of Anonymity</em></a>&nbsp;by the West Exit</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>How Bad is Business Travel For Your Health?</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>I stumbled across an article in Harvard Business Review -- <a href=\"https://hbr.org/2018/05/just-how-bad-is-business-travel-for-your-health-heres-the-data\">Just How Bad is Business Travel for Your Health? Here’s the Data</a> -- by Dr Andrew Rundle, a pr ofessor of epidemiology at Columbia University. His bio says “his research focuses on the risks for, and consequences of, sedentary lifestyles and obesity.”\nThe article summarizes his recent research which boils down to\n<ul>\n 	<li>Employees who spent 14 or more nights away from home per month had significantly higher body mass index scores and were significantly more likely to report clinical symptoms of anxiety, depression and alcohol dependence; no physical activity or exercise; smoking; and trouble sleeping. The odds of being obese were 92% higher for those who traveled 21 or more nights per month</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Yup, so tell me something I don’t know. It takes work, or “mindfulness” to be on-trend, to eat right, exercise, and go to bed at a reasonable time when the guardrails of your normal routine disappear. Rundle’s population is people who travel every week. In the US, many consultancies shoot for a “3-4-5” travel schedule for their full-time project staff -- 3 nights, 4 days on the road -- leaving Monday morning, returning Thursday night -- with the 5th day in the office or working from home. Depending on the number of weeks in the month, that’s 12 -15 nights/month.</li>\n 	<li>When I went into consulting and full-time travel, the change was immediate -- working late and then project team dinners rolled over my evening workout routine, eating out every meal blew up my regular diet, and waking up at 4am on Monday morning to catch the 6am flight to LaGuardia, so I could be at my midtown Manhattan client by 10am screwed up my sleep cycle for the next couple of days. I could see the effects on the guys in my “class” -- the guys who joined the firm the same fall that I did -- putting on weight, walking a bit slower through the airport, drinking a bit more at dinner, maybe missing an early morning meeting or call after staying out a bit too late.</li>\n 	<li>I made some adjustments -- moved to morning workouts, became more “mindful” about what I was eating -- ordering fish and vegetarian meals where I could (though there aren’t always great options for non-Big 3 proteins (non-beef, chicken, or pork) in places like Dover, OH, Ephrata, PA, or Huntsville, AL). Maybe this slowed the inevitable, but 10 years on, we were on a family vacation with my folks, a Caribbean cruise. One of the stops along the Yucatan, the Mayan Riviera as they were starting to call it, I walk out of the water to our chairs, my dad looks up at me and says “You’ve put a bit of weight on, haven’t you?” I would’ve blown him off, except that I knew it was true. My waist size was 2 inches bigger and I was carrying 20 lbs more than when I started. I was heading in the same direction as my colleagues, even though it was at a slower pace.</li>\n 	<li>I was able to reverse the trend, and I think one of the key reasons was by then, I was senior enough to have more control over my schedule. I was managing the projects rather than being managed. So I could relieve the expectations of nightly team dinners -- at least one night a week, everyone was on their own, and no pressure if you bagged out other nights. I’d turn in early on Monday nights when most of us had gotten up early to fly out. We’d pick hotels with good workout rooms and where we could walk to the client and to restaurants rather than drive. Where I could, I’d negotiate remote work weeks with the client -- save them expense money, and give our team a break from the airport. It took work to break out of the usual, the default behaviors -- that “mindfulness” thing again.</li>\n 	<li>Thinking back on it, I guess I’m surprised that the firms I was with expected me to figure this out on my own. There were always travel policies on spending limits, and using the corporate travel agency, and what receipts were needed, and when you could fly business class, but no real guidance/support on how to lead a somewhat healthy life on the road. Maybe because the people writing those policies weren’t traveling -- the accountants and HR managers were paying for their own meals and going home every night, maybe a bit jealous thinking we were living it up every night eating steak dinners and drinking bottles of wine. Which some of us were, because we weren’t mindful enough to think about another way.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/solace-medusa/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Subtle Vice</a>&nbsp;</em>by Solace</li>\n</ul>\n<b>Make Layovers Fun</b>\n<ul>\n 	<li>One of the most sacred frequent traveler rules is Fly Direct. Be it winter with snow or summer with thunderstorms, adding that intermediate stop adds one more point of failure, one more opportunity for the airlines to screw up. But, with a bit of planning and an “adventuring” frame of mind, you can actually manufacture something good -- a mini-tour -- out of a connection. That has been the inspiration behind two TravelCommons videos -- the new MDW Layover Taproom Tour and the ORD Layover Excursion that I did almost 6 years ago -- and that is still getting regular hits on YouTube.</li>\n 	<li>To do it right, though, does take a bit of planning… and time. You have to factor in all the delay points -- getting off the plane, stashing your luggage if you carried on, getting to and from where you’re going, and then getting back through security when you return. For most airports, I think it’s tough to do a good layover tour in less than 4 hours -- this is supposed to be a fun daybreak, not another travel stressor.</li>\n 	<li>United Airlines used to have a series in their Hemispheres magazine called One City, Five Hours that would outline a 5-hour layover tour in a different city -- Reno, Albuquerque, Copenhagen, …. One of the early TravelCommons videos is me following their <a href=\"http://old.hemimag.us/2010/03/01/one-city-five-hours-frankfurt/\">Frankfurt tour</a> on a 6-hr layover between Mumbai and Chicago. Those article are tough to find, even with Google, but managed to dredge up the <a href=\"http://old.hemimag.us/2011/01/01/one-city-five-hours-copenhagen/\">Copenhagen one</a> from the Hemispheres archives and am going to give it a go at the end of this month.</li>\n 	<li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/06/24/podcast-130-notes-from-hungary/\">Episode 130</a> last year, I talked about how my son and I passed up a 90-minute connection in Vienna for an 8-hr one and then spent a Saturday eating schnitzel and drinking beer in the old section of town with a buddy of mine who came down from Poland.</li>\n 	<li>And I think that 5-8 hour span is about right. There are some exceptions -- the quick shopping jaunt from MSP to Mall of the Americas -- but even if you’re hitting the nearby Blue Lagoon on your Wow Air layover in Reykjavik, I’d still allow 4 hours, especially given the Wow check-in lines I stood in the last time I took flew them.\nJim McDonough felt that squeeze a few months ago. Commenting on the MDW Layover Facebook posting, Jim said</li>\n 	<li>We had a four hour layover at O\'Hare back in May on our way to Ireland. American did a schedule change that made a planned two hour layover into four. But we did not leave the airport. Somehow on international it didn\'t make sense. Had some bad \'free\' beer at the Admiral\'s Club.</li>\n 	<li>Yes, that would’ve been snug. Jim and his wife maybe could’ve swung down to Logan Square or Wicker Park -- both stops on the ORD subway line -- for a bite and a bit of a walkaround, but they would’ve needed to have a solid plan for that, tough with that last-minute schedule change.</li>\n 	<li>But even unplanned layovers can work out. Several years ago, my parents flew from Denver to Paducah, KY to visit my aunt and grandmother. As you can imagine, no direct flights so they connected through ORD. And, as you might guess, on the way home, their commuter flight was late out of Paducah and they missed a tight connection. My dad called me from the airport. It was New Year’s Eve night and we were having 3 or 4 couples over. “Get your luggage and book the flight out tomorrow,” I told him, “you can help me cook dinner.” I picked them up, brought them home, threw an apron at my dad, opened an early bottle of champagne, and we had a great time.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #143</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a> and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music is from&nbsp;<a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Magnatune</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_143.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #143 — How Bad is Business Travel For Your Health; Make Layovers Fun','','inherit','closed','closed','','2093-revision-v1','','','2019-03-17 16:24:31','2019-03-17 21:24:31','',2093,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/17/2093-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2366,1,'2019-03-17 20:47:30','2019-03-18 01:47:30','[caption id=\"attachment_2044\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/2018-06-22-20.15.56-1.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2044\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/2018-06-22-20.15.56-1-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> What\'s the Chinese character for \"wurst\"?[/caption]\n\nYet another last-minute long-distance trip, this time to Frankfurt, Germany, lets me check out United Airlines\' new business class service, and think again about the value for those expensive lie-flat seats. Seeing a new Chinese menu at a favorite wurst stand in the old part of Frankfurt reminds me of the changes driven by the new wave of Chinese tourists. I also read recent PR pitches for a new smart bag and a business traveler\'s biohack. All this and more at the&nbsp;<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_142.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_142.mp3\"<!--more-->\n\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #142:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you from a rather jumbled up TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. Been playing “furniture jenga” for the past couple of weeks as we do a lot of deferred maintenance before trying to relocate the studios into Chicago. The recording studio is jammed full and the regular production bay has been taken out of commission, hence me missing my usual end-of-month posting and slipping into the first week of July.</li>\n 	<li>June’s travel cadence was almost a complete rinse-and-repeat of May’s. A few day drives up to Wisconsin, pretty easy -- until I had to make a last-minute trip to Germany with about 36-hour notice -- leave Weds night, land Thurs morning, meet with the client Thursday afternoon, lead a workshop Friday, fly home Saturday morning. I booked an eye-bleedingly expensive last-minute business class ticket because I needed to work and get some sleep on the flight over, which United was kind enough to convert into a 1st-class seat on the Weds flight, giving me more than enough space to eat and work simultaneously.</li>\n 	<li>Though shorter notice than last month’s India trip, it was a bit easier -- no last-minute visa dash, and I got to walk out of the airport in Frankfurt this time rather than transferring to another 8-hour flight. And thanks to Google Maps, I was able to find a non-stop local train from the station in the basement of Frankfurt airport (just finding that was a win for Google) to the station just outside the client’s headquarters for about €8. And because the train ticketing machine could do contactless, I just dinged it with my iPhone rather than having to wrestle with my US Amex card not having a PIN. All in all, it was as painless as a last-minute 8,000-mile trip can be. And not having to push furniture around for 3 days -- that was a nice bonus...</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music --&nbsp;<em><a href=\"http://www.nimbitmusic.com/saurabbhargava\">Exit</a></em> by Saurab Bhargava</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>The bumper music is from Saurab Bhargava, a long-time listener and longer-time friend and colleague who said in a note “Took some time on the cruise to catch up on some TravelCommons podcasts. Glad you\'re still keeping the rhythm on that!” I have been working to keep a regular monthly cadence. I’ve managed to keep it up for a year, which is why I’m a bit put off with myself for missing my June deadline. Though I have to tell you, the combination of a flash trip to Germany, studio reconfiguration, and the World Cup hasn’t helped -- especially the World Cup. Maybe now that we’re in the knockout round, and there’s only 2 games in a day, I’ll double up on episodes in July.</li>\n 	<li>Being World Cup-literate was very handy while in Germany. Good for making small talk with the client, and Friday night in Frankfurt, every bar seemed to have found half-a-dozen big screens a piece and stood them up everywhere inside and outside. It was easy to keep up with the matches, even when walking down the street. And this wasn’t even for the German team; it was Nigeria-Iceland and Switzerland-Serbia -- not even in Germany’s group. Good reminder of how big a deal it is outside the US.</li>\n 	<li>Long-time listener Geoffrey Greene pinged me on Facebook to let me know that TravelCommons is on the new Google Podcast app. I think I mentioned some time back, that I’ve been having problems with Google Play picking up TravelCommons ever since they started with podcasts. I’d filled out all the forms, submitted the RSS feed, but there was some error somewhere. Finding someone somewhere in Google support to resolve that has been on my to-do list for a while. I still need to get that sorted, but I’m glad to know the problem hasn’t carried over to the new app. I also need to update the website with links to all the places where people can subscribe to TravelCommons. Yet another line on the to-do list.</li>\n 	<li>Continuing the ongoing thread about smart bags… in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/05/31/podcast-141-when-you-think-the-tsa-is-bad-expired-money/\">last episode</a>, I talked about 2 smart bag manufacturers going out of business. But this past week, sifting through the PR pitches in the TravelCommons mail bag, I saw this -- “First Smart Luggage Safe to Fly Worldwide”. Plevo -- who thinks of these names? -- claims to be “the first smart luggage in the world that was designed to be safe to fly around the world” with “a removable battery pack, GPS Tracking, Smart Lock, Built-in Digital Scale, distance alerts and a Travel Assistant App”. OK, this is interesting. I head over to the inevitable Kickstarter page and check out the video. Very slick, but it didn’t answer what is the key question for smart bags -- how does Plevo provide location tracking and connect to the app when the battery pack is removed? Briana, the PR person, told me the Plevo bags have 2 batteries -- a removable Lithium battery pack and a permanent Nickel battery that takes over when the Li battery is removed. Elegant solution. The risk, though, is when that elegance breaks down in the face of a harried gate agent that doesn’t have the time to work through the safety differences between Li and Ni batteries, and just finds it easier to say “No”.&nbsp; No problem getting past the UA gate agent in Frankfurt with my low-tech leather bag I bought in Italy a few years ago on our 25th anniversary. Checking my passport, she looked down -- “That’s a great bag!” she said. Sometimes, simpler is better.</li>\n 	<li>Another PR pitch that caught my eye, but in a less positive way, was titled “A Travel Hack Every Business Traveler Should Know About”. I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty much done with growth hackers and lifehackers and especially travel hackers. I’m old enough to remember when a hack was an ugly bit of code that managed to get a system running, but it wasn’t something that anyone was proud of. But I digress. I was killing time in United’s very nice new ORD Polaris business class lounge waiting for my Frankfurt flight, so I took the bail and opened it up. “With more executives turning to food as a biohack,” I’m regretting this click already, “an airport meal that fits with your food lifestyle can be hard to find.” The pitch was for Ample, a powdered, rehydrateable drinkable meal that’s TSA-compliant and “packed with on-trend ingredients like MCTs from coconut oil, fiber, probiotics, micronutrients from chlorella, and protein from grass-fed whey and collagen.” MCT’s, a Google search tells me, are medium-chain triglycerides that are good for you in a whole bunch of ways, I guess. Ample reduces decision fatigue -- “Just like Zuck never needs to decide what to wear, deciding what to eat at an airport is a piece of decision fatigue that you just don\'t need” and makes it easier to follow “a ketogenic lifestyle”. Feeling the onset of buzzword fatigue, I set my phone down, walked over to the bar, abandoned any hope of achieving ketosis, and pointed to the Revolution Brewing Anti-Hero IPA draft handle.</li>\n 	<li>I didn’t mention this in the last episode, but before I headed out on my India trip, I hit the AT&amp;T website to see if India is included in their international plan (it is) and to get one of their international data packages since I wasn’t going to have time to figure out the local SIM market. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the data limit of their base $60 offering has been bumped from 300MB to 1GB sometime in the last 2 years, and way up from 100MB back in 2011. The last time I used AT&amp;T’s international plan was March 2016 during a 4-day trip in Iceland. I turned cellular access off on just about every app except Google Maps and only just squeaked through without topping the 300MB limit. 1GB is a whole lot roomier. I had no problems in India. I don’t know when that limit got bumped up, but good on AT&amp;T for making that base plan much more realistic.</li>\n 	<li>This is about the time when I have the obligatory craft beer comment, and you’d think that coming off a trip to Germany, I’d be full of them. And at the end of the day on Thursday, after taking a 20-minute nap to catch my second or third wind, I headed out looking exactly for that -- a bierstube with some local beers and maybe a wurst platter. Walking around near the hotel, there wasn’t much -- it was kind of a dead plaza with some pizza and doner kebab places. One nice restaurant, but nothing special. I pulled out Google Maps and started scrolling around, zooming in and out looking for some beer places. I don’t see many of those, but I keep seeing wineries pop up south of me. So I start walking. 15 minutes, I hit one of the wineries and walk in. What’s with all the wineries, I ask? “You’re in one of the largest wine producing regions in Germany,” the guy nicely explained. “I’m getting ready for a big wine dinner right now, but stop in tomorrow if you want to taste our wines.” I’d be leaving for Frankfurt tomorrow, but I thanked him. So now, I’m looking for wine. It was after 5, and all the other wineries I passed looked closed, but I found a restaurant with what looked like a good local wine list and a nice courtyard. The waitress made some recommendations -- “This is a nice wine from our next door neighbor” We struggled a little bit figuring out the translation for the daily special on the chalkboard, but with dueling smartphone searches, we figured it out -- it was a local dish of spit-roasted pork. It was a nice surprise; a nice ending to the first day of what I thought was going to be just a Bataan death march of a trip. Which it would’ve been if I’d stayed in my hotel room rehydrating my third bottle of Ample ketogenic liquid so I could slog through another 50 emails on my way to zero inbox nirvana.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> or our new <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a> at travelcommons -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://www.nimbitmusic.com/saurabbhargava\">Yours in Mine</a> </em>by Saurab Bhargava</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Sleeping in Business Class</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>The trips to India and Germany put me back in international business class for the first time in a while. In past episodes, I’ve been ambivalent about the value for money for business class -- is the extra space and the better meal service worth the $5-6,000 uplift? On these trips, I kinda think “Yes” because neither trip had any slack in the schedule -- I’d be landing and going directly into meetings, so those lie-flat business class seats were what I really needed so I could get some amount of quality sleep.</li>\n 	<li>The start of both trips was a United flight from ORD to FRA. United has made a big deal of upgrading their international business class, even giving it a new name -- Polaris. And they’re building separate Polaris lounges, so it you’re flying international First or Business, no more slumming in the crowded Red Carpet clubs. The Polaris lounges are nice -- everything is free, good beer and wine selection -- even a cocktail list -- and a nice buffet. They’re probably the best business class lounges I hit on either trip, better than the variety of Lufthansa lounges I hit in Frankfurt. And United is pushing them. The Polaris lounge in ORD is in the far concourse, Concourse C, which makes sense; that’s where most of United’s international flights leave from. In June, though, my flight to Frankfurt left out of the B Concourse, so I went into the Red Carpet club right across from the gate. The guy at the desk looked at my ticket -- “Oh, you want to go to the Polaris Lounge. It’s about a 15 minute walk, but it’s definitely worth it.”</li>\n 	<li>Walking on the United Triple 7 though, you could feel United packing as much as they could in that business class with a 2-4-2 seat configuration -- only just slightly less packed than the 3-4-3 seating on the other side of the curtain in Economy. I’d never seen two middle seats in business class before. Business class in the Lufthansa A380s between Frankfurt and India were 2-2-2 -- no middle seats. Now on my flight over in May, I had the aisle and a couple had the middle two seats, so not too bad, and they were good folks. I felt bad for the husband during the night, though, when I had my seat in full lie-flat mode. When he needed to hit the toilet at night, he had to kinda vault me.</li>\n 	<li>On my last flight back from Frankfurt, a good-sized guy had the middle seat next to me. I’d guess he was a former football player, still in good shape, but taller and broader than the average build that United had sized these Polaris pods for. He said that the flight over, he couldn’t lay flat; it felt like a coffin, so he just reclined it and catnapped, which kinda defeated the purpose of hitting the ground running. I could sympathize. I’m not that broad, but I had to drop the aisle-side armrest in my pod to be able to comfortably fit. Kinda nice service, but definitely snug.</li>\n 	<li>The Lufthansa business class lounges lacked the pizzazz of United’s lounges. But one thing that was new to me… the flights to India went out of a different concourse in Frankfurt -- on the last episode, I talked about the mile-&amp;-a-half walk and the extra security -- and here, they boarded the A380 first and business classes straight from the lounge. No walking down to the gate and idling around with the economy classes. They had gate agents and kiosks in the club. I set down my beer, had my boarding pass scanned, and then walked down the jetway to the plane.</li>\n 	<li>Once on-board, Lufthansa’s A380s were definitely roomier than United’s Triple 7’s -- maybe a bigger plane, maybe because they weren’t trying to cram 8 people across. With only 6 people across, the lie-flat seats were more comfortable, not as “coffin-ish” as United’s. Indeed, maybe a little too comfortable. A guy in the row behind me on my flight to Delhi must’ve gone deep in sleep because he snored -- loudly, really sawing wood -- for a couple of hours. The one time I wouldn’t have minded a little turbulence to jostle the plane. But good for him, he was definitely getting his money’s worth from Business Class.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://www.nimbitmusic.com/saurabbhargava\">Through The Line</a> </em>by Saurab Bhargava</li>\n</ul>\n<b>Changes from Chinese Tourists</b>\n<ul>\n 	<li>The last night I was in Germany, Friday night, I stayed in Frankfurt so I’d have just a 20-minute cab ride to the airport for my 8:15am flight. It had been 7 years since I’d walked around the city -- back in 2011 when I did a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/05/01/video-2-one-city-five-hours-frankfurt/\">TravelCommons video</a>, retracing the “1 City, 5 Hours” article about Frankfurt in United’s seatback magazine. I walked down to the Romer area - a big open square surrounded by historic buildings -- and over to a sausage, a wurst stand that I’d eaten at in the past. They’d added a new menu -- the German menu was now on the ground, under the ordering window; the new menu at eye level was in Chinese.</li>\n 	<li>The travel press has been talking about the impending growth of Chinese tourism for a bit now. I’ve seen the tour buses full of Chinese travelers for some time -- back in 2016 when my son and I were in Iceland, it became a bit of a game for us to stay ahead of those buses, and then in Frankfurt, down in a basement applewine pub off some back alley, I was the only non-Asian person there. But now, I’m noticing more, I dunno, systemic or infrastructure changes being driven by Chinese tourism. Not just Chinese menus but also seeing restaurants in the US and Europe accepting Chinese mobile payments - WeChat and Alipay. And some folks in the hotel business will say that the push to provide free wi-fi, mobile apps and family-sized rooms is driven, in some ways, by what Chinese tourists are looking for. Makes sense. Last year, there were 130 million outbound Chinese tourists, a big number but only 10% of the population of China. There’s a lot more to come.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #142</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a> and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from from Saurab Bhargava’s album <em>Chromatique</em>.&nbsp; The tracks were <em>Exit</em>, <em>Yours In Mine</em>, and <em>Through The Line</em>. &nbsp;Here\'s an Amazon <a href=\"https://www.amazon.com/Chromatique-Saurab-Bhargava/dp/B004R7W3O8\">link&nbsp;</a>where you can buy the album.</li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_142.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #142 — Sleeping in Business Class; Changes from Chinese Tourists','','inherit','closed','closed','','2042-revision-v1','','','2019-03-17 20:47:30','2019-03-18 01:47:30','',2042,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/17/2042-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2367,1,'2019-03-17 20:48:43','2019-03-18 01:48:43','[caption id=\"attachment_2044\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/2018-06-22-20.15.56-1.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2044\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/2018-06-22-20.15.56-1-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> What\'s the Chinese character for \"wurst\"?[/caption]\n\nYet another last-minute long-distance trip, this time to Frankfurt, Germany, lets me check out United Airlines\' new business class service, and think again about the value for those expensive lie-flat seats. Seeing a new Chinese menu at a favorite wurst stand in the old part of Frankfurt reminds me of the changes driven by the new wave of Chinese tourists. I also read recent PR pitches for a new smart bag and a business traveler\'s biohack. All this and more at the&nbsp;<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_142.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_142.mp3\"]<!--more-->\n\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #142:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you from a rather jumbled up TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. Been playing “furniture jenga” for the past couple of weeks as we do a lot of deferred maintenance before trying to relocate the studios into Chicago. The recording studio is jammed full and the regular production bay has been taken out of commission, hence me missing my usual end-of-month posting and slipping into the first week of July.</li>\n 	<li>June’s travel cadence was almost a complete rinse-and-repeat of May’s. A few day drives up to Wisconsin, pretty easy -- until I had to make a last-minute trip to Germany with about 36-hour notice -- leave Weds night, land Thurs morning, meet with the client Thursday afternoon, lead a workshop Friday, fly home Saturday morning. I booked an eye-bleedingly expensive last-minute business class ticket because I needed to work and get some sleep on the flight over, which United was kind enough to convert into a 1st-class seat on the Weds flight, giving me more than enough space to eat and work simultaneously.</li>\n 	<li>Though shorter notice than last month’s India trip, it was a bit easier -- no last-minute visa dash, and I got to walk out of the airport in Frankfurt this time rather than transferring to another 8-hour flight. And thanks to Google Maps, I was able to find a non-stop local train from the station in the basement of Frankfurt airport (just finding that was a win for Google) to the station just outside the client’s headquarters for about €8. And because the train ticketing machine could do contactless, I just dinged it with my iPhone rather than having to wrestle with my US Amex card not having a PIN. All in all, it was as painless as a last-minute 8,000-mile trip can be. And not having to push furniture around for 3 days -- that was a nice bonus...</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music --&nbsp;<em><a href=\"http://www.nimbitmusic.com/saurabbhargava\">Exit</a></em> by Saurab Bhargava</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>The bumper music is from Saurab Bhargava, a long-time listener and longer-time friend and colleague who said in a note “Took some time on the cruise to catch up on some TravelCommons podcasts. Glad you\'re still keeping the rhythm on that!” I have been working to keep a regular monthly cadence. I’ve managed to keep it up for a year, which is why I’m a bit put off with myself for missing my June deadline. Though I have to tell you, the combination of a flash trip to Germany, studio reconfiguration, and the World Cup hasn’t helped -- especially the World Cup. Maybe now that we’re in the knockout round, and there’s only 2 games in a day, I’ll double up on episodes in July.</li>\n 	<li>Being World Cup-literate was very handy while in Germany. Good for making small talk with the client, and Friday night in Frankfurt, every bar seemed to have found half-a-dozen big screens a piece and stood them up everywhere inside and outside. It was easy to keep up with the matches, even when walking down the street. And this wasn’t even for the German team; it was Nigeria-Iceland and Switzerland-Serbia -- not even in Germany’s group. Good reminder of how big a deal it is outside the US.</li>\n 	<li>Long-time listener Geoffrey Greene pinged me on Facebook to let me know that TravelCommons is on the new Google Podcast app. I think I mentioned some time back, that I’ve been having problems with Google Play picking up TravelCommons ever since they started with podcasts. I’d filled out all the forms, submitted the RSS feed, but there was some error somewhere. Finding someone somewhere in Google support to resolve that has been on my to-do list for a while. I still need to get that sorted, but I’m glad to know the problem hasn’t carried over to the new app. I also need to update the website with links to all the places where people can subscribe to TravelCommons. Yet another line on the to-do list.</li>\n 	<li>Continuing the ongoing thread about smart bags… in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/05/31/podcast-141-when-you-think-the-tsa-is-bad-expired-money/\">last episode</a>, I talked about 2 smart bag manufacturers going out of business. But this past week, sifting through the PR pitches in the TravelCommons mail bag, I saw this -- “First Smart Luggage Safe to Fly Worldwide”. Plevo -- who thinks of these names? -- claims to be “the first smart luggage in the world that was designed to be safe to fly around the world” with “a removable battery pack, GPS Tracking, Smart Lock, Built-in Digital Scale, distance alerts and a Travel Assistant App”. OK, this is interesting. I head over to the inevitable Kickstarter page and check out the video. Very slick, but it didn’t answer what is the key question for smart bags -- how does Plevo provide location tracking and connect to the app when the battery pack is removed? Briana, the PR person, told me the Plevo bags have 2 batteries -- a removable Lithium battery pack and a permanent Nickel battery that takes over when the Li battery is removed. Elegant solution. The risk, though, is when that elegance breaks down in the face of a harried gate agent that doesn’t have the time to work through the safety differences between Li and Ni batteries, and just finds it easier to say “No”.&nbsp; No problem getting past the UA gate agent in Frankfurt with my low-tech leather bag I bought in Italy a few years ago on our 25th anniversary. Checking my passport, she looked down -- “That’s a great bag!” she said. Sometimes, simpler is better.</li>\n 	<li>Another PR pitch that caught my eye, but in a less positive way, was titled “A Travel Hack Every Business Traveler Should Know About”. I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty much done with growth hackers and lifehackers and especially travel hackers. I’m old enough to remember when a hack was an ugly bit of code that managed to get a system running, but it wasn’t something that anyone was proud of. But I digress. I was killing time in United’s very nice new ORD Polaris business class lounge waiting for my Frankfurt flight, so I took the bail and opened it up. “With more executives turning to food as a biohack,” I’m regretting this click already, “an airport meal that fits with your food lifestyle can be hard to find.” The pitch was for Ample, a powdered, rehydrateable drinkable meal that’s TSA-compliant and “packed with on-trend ingredients like MCTs from coconut oil, fiber, probiotics, micronutrients from chlorella, and protein from grass-fed whey and collagen.” MCT’s, a Google search tells me, are medium-chain triglycerides that are good for you in a whole bunch of ways, I guess. Ample reduces decision fatigue -- “Just like Zuck never needs to decide what to wear, deciding what to eat at an airport is a piece of decision fatigue that you just don\'t need” and makes it easier to follow “a ketogenic lifestyle”. Feeling the onset of buzzword fatigue, I set my phone down, walked over to the bar, abandoned any hope of achieving ketosis, and pointed to the Revolution Brewing Anti-Hero IPA draft handle.</li>\n 	<li>I didn’t mention this in the last episode, but before I headed out on my India trip, I hit the AT&amp;T website to see if India is included in their international plan (it is) and to get one of their international data packages since I wasn’t going to have time to figure out the local SIM market. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the data limit of their base $60 offering has been bumped from 300MB to 1GB sometime in the last 2 years, and way up from 100MB back in 2011. The last time I used AT&amp;T’s international plan was March 2016 during a 4-day trip in Iceland. I turned cellular access off on just about every app except Google Maps and only just squeaked through without topping the 300MB limit. 1GB is a whole lot roomier. I had no problems in India. I don’t know when that limit got bumped up, but good on AT&amp;T for making that base plan much more realistic.</li>\n 	<li>This is about the time when I have the obligatory craft beer comment, and you’d think that coming off a trip to Germany, I’d be full of them. And at the end of the day on Thursday, after taking a 20-minute nap to catch my second or third wind, I headed out looking exactly for that -- a bierstube with some local beers and maybe a wurst platter. Walking around near the hotel, there wasn’t much -- it was kind of a dead plaza with some pizza and doner kebab places. One nice restaurant, but nothing special. I pulled out Google Maps and started scrolling around, zooming in and out looking for some beer places. I don’t see many of those, but I keep seeing wineries pop up south of me. So I start walking. 15 minutes, I hit one of the wineries and walk in. What’s with all the wineries, I ask? “You’re in one of the largest wine producing regions in Germany,” the guy nicely explained. “I’m getting ready for a big wine dinner right now, but stop in tomorrow if you want to taste our wines.” I’d be leaving for Frankfurt tomorrow, but I thanked him. So now, I’m looking for wine. It was after 5, and all the other wineries I passed looked closed, but I found a restaurant with what looked like a good local wine list and a nice courtyard. The waitress made some recommendations -- “This is a nice wine from our next door neighbor” We struggled a little bit figuring out the translation for the daily special on the chalkboard, but with dueling smartphone searches, we figured it out -- it was a local dish of spit-roasted pork. It was a nice surprise; a nice ending to the first day of what I thought was going to be just a Bataan death march of a trip. Which it would’ve been if I’d stayed in my hotel room rehydrating my third bottle of Ample ketogenic liquid so I could slog through another 50 emails on my way to zero inbox nirvana.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> or our new <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a> at travelcommons -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://www.nimbitmusic.com/saurabbhargava\">Yours in Mine</a> </em>by Saurab Bhargava</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Sleeping in Business Class</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>The trips to India and Germany put me back in international business class for the first time in a while. In past episodes, I’ve been ambivalent about the value for money for business class -- is the extra space and the better meal service worth the $5-6,000 uplift? On these trips, I kinda think “Yes” because neither trip had any slack in the schedule -- I’d be landing and going directly into meetings, so those lie-flat business class seats were what I really needed so I could get some amount of quality sleep.</li>\n 	<li>The start of both trips was a United flight from ORD to FRA. United has made a big deal of upgrading their international business class, even giving it a new name -- Polaris. And they’re building separate Polaris lounges, so it you’re flying international First or Business, no more slumming in the crowded Red Carpet clubs. The Polaris lounges are nice -- everything is free, good beer and wine selection -- even a cocktail list -- and a nice buffet. They’re probably the best business class lounges I hit on either trip, better than the variety of Lufthansa lounges I hit in Frankfurt. And United is pushing them. The Polaris lounge in ORD is in the far concourse, Concourse C, which makes sense; that’s where most of United’s international flights leave from. In June, though, my flight to Frankfurt left out of the B Concourse, so I went into the Red Carpet club right across from the gate. The guy at the desk looked at my ticket -- “Oh, you want to go to the Polaris Lounge. It’s about a 15 minute walk, but it’s definitely worth it.”</li>\n 	<li>Walking on the United Triple 7 though, you could feel United packing as much as they could in that business class with a 2-4-2 seat configuration -- only just slightly less packed than the 3-4-3 seating on the other side of the curtain in Economy. I’d never seen two middle seats in business class before. Business class in the Lufthansa A380s between Frankfurt and India were 2-2-2 -- no middle seats. Now on my flight over in May, I had the aisle and a couple had the middle two seats, so not too bad, and they were good folks. I felt bad for the husband during the night, though, when I had my seat in full lie-flat mode. When he needed to hit the toilet at night, he had to kinda vault me.</li>\n 	<li>On my last flight back from Frankfurt, a good-sized guy had the middle seat next to me. I’d guess he was a former football player, still in good shape, but taller and broader than the average build that United had sized these Polaris pods for. He said that the flight over, he couldn’t lay flat; it felt like a coffin, so he just reclined it and catnapped, which kinda defeated the purpose of hitting the ground running. I could sympathize. I’m not that broad, but I had to drop the aisle-side armrest in my pod to be able to comfortably fit. Kinda nice service, but definitely snug.</li>\n 	<li>The Lufthansa business class lounges lacked the pizzazz of United’s lounges. But one thing that was new to me… the flights to India went out of a different concourse in Frankfurt -- on the last episode, I talked about the mile-&amp;-a-half walk and the extra security -- and here, they boarded the A380 first and business classes straight from the lounge. No walking down to the gate and idling around with the economy classes. They had gate agents and kiosks in the club. I set down my beer, had my boarding pass scanned, and then walked down the jetway to the plane.</li>\n 	<li>Once on-board, Lufthansa’s A380s were definitely roomier than United’s Triple 7’s -- maybe a bigger plane, maybe because they weren’t trying to cram 8 people across. With only 6 people across, the lie-flat seats were more comfortable, not as “coffin-ish” as United’s. Indeed, maybe a little too comfortable. A guy in the row behind me on my flight to Delhi must’ve gone deep in sleep because he snored -- loudly, really sawing wood -- for a couple of hours. The one time I wouldn’t have minded a little turbulence to jostle the plane. But good for him, he was definitely getting his money’s worth from Business Class.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://www.nimbitmusic.com/saurabbhargava\">Through The Line</a> </em>by Saurab Bhargava</li>\n</ul>\n<b>Changes from Chinese Tourists</b>\n<ul>\n 	<li>The last night I was in Germany, Friday night, I stayed in Frankfurt so I’d have just a 20-minute cab ride to the airport for my 8:15am flight. It had been 7 years since I’d walked around the city -- back in 2011 when I did a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/05/01/video-2-one-city-five-hours-frankfurt/\">TravelCommons video</a>, retracing the “1 City, 5 Hours” article about Frankfurt in United’s seatback magazine. I walked down to the Romer area - a big open square surrounded by historic buildings -- and over to a sausage, a wurst stand that I’d eaten at in the past. They’d added a new menu -- the German menu was now on the ground, under the ordering window; the new menu at eye level was in Chinese.</li>\n 	<li>The travel press has been talking about the impending growth of Chinese tourism for a bit now. I’ve seen the tour buses full of Chinese travelers for some time -- back in 2016 when my son and I were in Iceland, it became a bit of a game for us to stay ahead of those buses, and then in Frankfurt, down in a basement applewine pub off some back alley, I was the only non-Asian person there. But now, I’m noticing more, I dunno, systemic or infrastructure changes being driven by Chinese tourism. Not just Chinese menus but also seeing restaurants in the US and Europe accepting Chinese mobile payments - WeChat and Alipay. And some folks in the hotel business will say that the push to provide free wi-fi, mobile apps and family-sized rooms is driven, in some ways, by what Chinese tourists are looking for. Makes sense. Last year, there were 130 million outbound Chinese tourists, a big number but only 10% of the population of China. There’s a lot more to come.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #142</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a> and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from from Saurab Bhargava’s album <em>Chromatique</em>.&nbsp; The tracks were <em>Exit</em>, <em>Yours In Mine</em>, and <em>Through The Line</em>. &nbsp;Here\'s an Amazon <a href=\"https://www.amazon.com/Chromatique-Saurab-Bhargava/dp/B004R7W3O8\">link&nbsp;</a>where you can buy the album.</li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_142.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #142 — Sleeping in Business Class; Changes from Chinese Tourists','','inherit','closed','closed','','2042-revision-v1','','','2019-03-17 20:48:43','2019-03-18 01:48:43','',2042,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/17/2042-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0);
INSERT INTO `wp_posts` VALUES
(2368,1,'2019-03-17 20:49:30','2019-03-18 01:49:30','[caption id=\"attachment_2044\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/2018-06-22-20.15.56-1.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2044\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/2018-06-22-20.15.56-1-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> What\'s the Chinese character for \"wurst\"?[/caption]\n\nYet another last-minute long-distance trip, this time to Frankfurt, Germany, lets me check out United Airlines\' new business class service, and think again about the value for those expensive lie-flat seats. Seeing a new Chinese menu at a favorite wurst stand in the old part of Frankfurt reminds me of the changes driven by the new wave of Chinese tourists. I also read recent PR pitches for a new smart bag and a business traveler\'s biohack. All this and more at the&nbsp;<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_142.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_142.mp3\"]\n<!--more-->\n\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #142:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you from a rather jumbled up TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. Been playing “furniture jenga” for the past couple of weeks as we do a lot of deferred maintenance before trying to relocate the studios into Chicago. The recording studio is jammed full and the regular production bay has been taken out of commission, hence me missing my usual end-of-month posting and slipping into the first week of July.</li>\n 	<li>June’s travel cadence was almost a complete rinse-and-repeat of May’s. A few day drives up to Wisconsin, pretty easy -- until I had to make a last-minute trip to Germany with about 36-hour notice -- leave Weds night, land Thurs morning, meet with the client Thursday afternoon, lead a workshop Friday, fly home Saturday morning. I booked an eye-bleedingly expensive last-minute business class ticket because I needed to work and get some sleep on the flight over, which United was kind enough to convert into a 1st-class seat on the Weds flight, giving me more than enough space to eat and work simultaneously.</li>\n 	<li>Though shorter notice than last month’s India trip, it was a bit easier -- no last-minute visa dash, and I got to walk out of the airport in Frankfurt this time rather than transferring to another 8-hour flight. And thanks to Google Maps, I was able to find a non-stop local train from the station in the basement of Frankfurt airport (just finding that was a win for Google) to the station just outside the client’s headquarters for about €8. And because the train ticketing machine could do contactless, I just dinged it with my iPhone rather than having to wrestle with my US Amex card not having a PIN. All in all, it was as painless as a last-minute 8,000-mile trip can be. And not having to push furniture around for 3 days -- that was a nice bonus...</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music --&nbsp;<em><a href=\"http://www.nimbitmusic.com/saurabbhargava\">Exit</a></em> by Saurab Bhargava</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>The bumper music is from Saurab Bhargava, a long-time listener and longer-time friend and colleague who said in a note “Took some time on the cruise to catch up on some TravelCommons podcasts. Glad you\'re still keeping the rhythm on that!” I have been working to keep a regular monthly cadence. I’ve managed to keep it up for a year, which is why I’m a bit put off with myself for missing my June deadline. Though I have to tell you, the combination of a flash trip to Germany, studio reconfiguration, and the World Cup hasn’t helped -- especially the World Cup. Maybe now that we’re in the knockout round, and there’s only 2 games in a day, I’ll double up on episodes in July.</li>\n 	<li>Being World Cup-literate was very handy while in Germany. Good for making small talk with the client, and Friday night in Frankfurt, every bar seemed to have found half-a-dozen big screens a piece and stood them up everywhere inside and outside. It was easy to keep up with the matches, even when walking down the street. And this wasn’t even for the German team; it was Nigeria-Iceland and Switzerland-Serbia -- not even in Germany’s group. Good reminder of how big a deal it is outside the US.</li>\n 	<li>Long-time listener Geoffrey Greene pinged me on Facebook to let me know that TravelCommons is on the new Google Podcast app. I think I mentioned some time back, that I’ve been having problems with Google Play picking up TravelCommons ever since they started with podcasts. I’d filled out all the forms, submitted the RSS feed, but there was some error somewhere. Finding someone somewhere in Google support to resolve that has been on my to-do list for a while. I still need to get that sorted, but I’m glad to know the problem hasn’t carried over to the new app. I also need to update the website with links to all the places where people can subscribe to TravelCommons. Yet another line on the to-do list.</li>\n 	<li>Continuing the ongoing thread about smart bags… in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/05/31/podcast-141-when-you-think-the-tsa-is-bad-expired-money/\">last episode</a>, I talked about 2 smart bag manufacturers going out of business. But this past week, sifting through the PR pitches in the TravelCommons mail bag, I saw this -- “First Smart Luggage Safe to Fly Worldwide”. Plevo -- who thinks of these names? -- claims to be “the first smart luggage in the world that was designed to be safe to fly around the world” with “a removable battery pack, GPS Tracking, Smart Lock, Built-in Digital Scale, distance alerts and a Travel Assistant App”. OK, this is interesting. I head over to the inevitable Kickstarter page and check out the video. Very slick, but it didn’t answer what is the key question for smart bags -- how does Plevo provide location tracking and connect to the app when the battery pack is removed? Briana, the PR person, told me the Plevo bags have 2 batteries -- a removable Lithium battery pack and a permanent Nickel battery that takes over when the Li battery is removed. Elegant solution. The risk, though, is when that elegance breaks down in the face of a harried gate agent that doesn’t have the time to work through the safety differences between Li and Ni batteries, and just finds it easier to say “No”.&nbsp; No problem getting past the UA gate agent in Frankfurt with my low-tech leather bag I bought in Italy a few years ago on our 25th anniversary. Checking my passport, she looked down -- “That’s a great bag!” she said. Sometimes, simpler is better.</li>\n 	<li>Another PR pitch that caught my eye, but in a less positive way, was titled “A Travel Hack Every Business Traveler Should Know About”. I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty much done with growth hackers and lifehackers and especially travel hackers. I’m old enough to remember when a hack was an ugly bit of code that managed to get a system running, but it wasn’t something that anyone was proud of. But I digress. I was killing time in United’s very nice new ORD Polaris business class lounge waiting for my Frankfurt flight, so I took the bail and opened it up. “With more executives turning to food as a biohack,” I’m regretting this click already, “an airport meal that fits with your food lifestyle can be hard to find.” The pitch was for Ample, a powdered, rehydrateable drinkable meal that’s TSA-compliant and “packed with on-trend ingredients like MCTs from coconut oil, fiber, probiotics, micronutrients from chlorella, and protein from grass-fed whey and collagen.” MCT’s, a Google search tells me, are medium-chain triglycerides that are good for you in a whole bunch of ways, I guess. Ample reduces decision fatigue -- “Just like Zuck never needs to decide what to wear, deciding what to eat at an airport is a piece of decision fatigue that you just don\'t need” and makes it easier to follow “a ketogenic lifestyle”. Feeling the onset of buzzword fatigue, I set my phone down, walked over to the bar, abandoned any hope of achieving ketosis, and pointed to the Revolution Brewing Anti-Hero IPA draft handle.</li>\n 	<li>I didn’t mention this in the last episode, but before I headed out on my India trip, I hit the AT&amp;T website to see if India is included in their international plan (it is) and to get one of their international data packages since I wasn’t going to have time to figure out the local SIM market. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the data limit of their base $60 offering has been bumped from 300MB to 1GB sometime in the last 2 years, and way up from 100MB back in 2011. The last time I used AT&amp;T’s international plan was March 2016 during a 4-day trip in Iceland. I turned cellular access off on just about every app except Google Maps and only just squeaked through without topping the 300MB limit. 1GB is a whole lot roomier. I had no problems in India. I don’t know when that limit got bumped up, but good on AT&amp;T for making that base plan much more realistic.</li>\n 	<li>This is about the time when I have the obligatory craft beer comment, and you’d think that coming off a trip to Germany, I’d be full of them. And at the end of the day on Thursday, after taking a 20-minute nap to catch my second or third wind, I headed out looking exactly for that -- a bierstube with some local beers and maybe a wurst platter. Walking around near the hotel, there wasn’t much -- it was kind of a dead plaza with some pizza and doner kebab places. One nice restaurant, but nothing special. I pulled out Google Maps and started scrolling around, zooming in and out looking for some beer places. I don’t see many of those, but I keep seeing wineries pop up south of me. So I start walking. 15 minutes, I hit one of the wineries and walk in. What’s with all the wineries, I ask? “You’re in one of the largest wine producing regions in Germany,” the guy nicely explained. “I’m getting ready for a big wine dinner right now, but stop in tomorrow if you want to taste our wines.” I’d be leaving for Frankfurt tomorrow, but I thanked him. So now, I’m looking for wine. It was after 5, and all the other wineries I passed looked closed, but I found a restaurant with what looked like a good local wine list and a nice courtyard. The waitress made some recommendations -- “This is a nice wine from our next door neighbor” We struggled a little bit figuring out the translation for the daily special on the chalkboard, but with dueling smartphone searches, we figured it out -- it was a local dish of spit-roasted pork. It was a nice surprise; a nice ending to the first day of what I thought was going to be just a Bataan death march of a trip. Which it would’ve been if I’d stayed in my hotel room rehydrating my third bottle of Ample ketogenic liquid so I could slog through another 50 emails on my way to zero inbox nirvana.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> or our new <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a> at travelcommons -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://www.nimbitmusic.com/saurabbhargava\">Yours in Mine</a> </em>by Saurab Bhargava</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Sleeping in Business Class</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>The trips to India and Germany put me back in international business class for the first time in a while. In past episodes, I’ve been ambivalent about the value for money for business class -- is the extra space and the better meal service worth the $5-6,000 uplift? On these trips, I kinda think “Yes” because neither trip had any slack in the schedule -- I’d be landing and going directly into meetings, so those lie-flat business class seats were what I really needed so I could get some amount of quality sleep.</li>\n 	<li>The start of both trips was a United flight from ORD to FRA. United has made a big deal of upgrading their international business class, even giving it a new name -- Polaris. And they’re building separate Polaris lounges, so it you’re flying international First or Business, no more slumming in the crowded Red Carpet clubs. The Polaris lounges are nice -- everything is free, good beer and wine selection -- even a cocktail list -- and a nice buffet. They’re probably the best business class lounges I hit on either trip, better than the variety of Lufthansa lounges I hit in Frankfurt. And United is pushing them. The Polaris lounge in ORD is in the far concourse, Concourse C, which makes sense; that’s where most of United’s international flights leave from. In June, though, my flight to Frankfurt left out of the B Concourse, so I went into the Red Carpet club right across from the gate. The guy at the desk looked at my ticket -- “Oh, you want to go to the Polaris Lounge. It’s about a 15 minute walk, but it’s definitely worth it.”</li>\n 	<li>Walking on the United Triple 7 though, you could feel United packing as much as they could in that business class with a 2-4-2 seat configuration -- only just slightly less packed than the 3-4-3 seating on the other side of the curtain in Economy. I’d never seen two middle seats in business class before. Business class in the Lufthansa A380s between Frankfurt and India were 2-2-2 -- no middle seats. Now on my flight over in May, I had the aisle and a couple had the middle two seats, so not too bad, and they were good folks. I felt bad for the husband during the night, though, when I had my seat in full lie-flat mode. When he needed to hit the toilet at night, he had to kinda vault me.</li>\n 	<li>On my last flight back from Frankfurt, a good-sized guy had the middle seat next to me. I’d guess he was a former football player, still in good shape, but taller and broader than the average build that United had sized these Polaris pods for. He said that the flight over, he couldn’t lay flat; it felt like a coffin, so he just reclined it and catnapped, which kinda defeated the purpose of hitting the ground running. I could sympathize. I’m not that broad, but I had to drop the aisle-side armrest in my pod to be able to comfortably fit. Kinda nice service, but definitely snug.</li>\n 	<li>The Lufthansa business class lounges lacked the pizzazz of United’s lounges. But one thing that was new to me… the flights to India went out of a different concourse in Frankfurt -- on the last episode, I talked about the mile-&amp;-a-half walk and the extra security -- and here, they boarded the A380 first and business classes straight from the lounge. No walking down to the gate and idling around with the economy classes. They had gate agents and kiosks in the club. I set down my beer, had my boarding pass scanned, and then walked down the jetway to the plane.</li>\n 	<li>Once on-board, Lufthansa’s A380s were definitely roomier than United’s Triple 7’s -- maybe a bigger plane, maybe because they weren’t trying to cram 8 people across. With only 6 people across, the lie-flat seats were more comfortable, not as “coffin-ish” as United’s. Indeed, maybe a little too comfortable. A guy in the row behind me on my flight to Delhi must’ve gone deep in sleep because he snored -- loudly, really sawing wood -- for a couple of hours. The one time I wouldn’t have minded a little turbulence to jostle the plane. But good for him, he was definitely getting his money’s worth from Business Class.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://www.nimbitmusic.com/saurabbhargava\">Through The Line</a> </em>by Saurab Bhargava</li>\n</ul>\n<b>Changes from Chinese Tourists</b>\n<ul>\n 	<li>The last night I was in Germany, Friday night, I stayed in Frankfurt so I’d have just a 20-minute cab ride to the airport for my 8:15am flight. It had been 7 years since I’d walked around the city -- back in 2011 when I did a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/05/01/video-2-one-city-five-hours-frankfurt/\">TravelCommons video</a>, retracing the “1 City, 5 Hours” article about Frankfurt in United’s seatback magazine. I walked down to the Romer area - a big open square surrounded by historic buildings -- and over to a sausage, a wurst stand that I’d eaten at in the past. They’d added a new menu -- the German menu was now on the ground, under the ordering window; the new menu at eye level was in Chinese.</li>\n 	<li>The travel press has been talking about the impending growth of Chinese tourism for a bit now. I’ve seen the tour buses full of Chinese travelers for some time -- back in 2016 when my son and I were in Iceland, it became a bit of a game for us to stay ahead of those buses, and then in Frankfurt, down in a basement applewine pub off some back alley, I was the only non-Asian person there. But now, I’m noticing more, I dunno, systemic or infrastructure changes being driven by Chinese tourism. Not just Chinese menus but also seeing restaurants in the US and Europe accepting Chinese mobile payments - WeChat and Alipay. And some folks in the hotel business will say that the push to provide free wi-fi, mobile apps and family-sized rooms is driven, in some ways, by what Chinese tourists are looking for. Makes sense. Last year, there were 130 million outbound Chinese tourists, a big number but only 10% of the population of China. There’s a lot more to come.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #142</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a> and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from from Saurab Bhargava’s album <em>Chromatique</em>.&nbsp; The tracks were <em>Exit</em>, <em>Yours In Mine</em>, and <em>Through The Line</em>. &nbsp;Here\'s an Amazon <a href=\"https://www.amazon.com/Chromatique-Saurab-Bhargava/dp/B004R7W3O8\">link&nbsp;</a>where you can buy the album.</li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_142.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #142 — Sleeping in Business Class; Changes from Chinese Tourists','','inherit','closed','closed','','2042-revision-v1','','','2019-03-17 20:49:30','2019-03-18 01:49:30','',2042,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/17/2042-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2369,1,'2019-03-17 20:51:03','2019-03-18 01:51:03','[caption id=\"attachment_2004\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/IMG_0464.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2004\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/IMG_0464-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> Effects of Extended Exposure to TSA Scan[/caption]\n\nA last-minute trip to Pune, India provided more than enough material for this episode -- a visa dash, <em>very</em> hands-on airport security, worthless rupee notes, flight disruptions.... We also read the obits for a couple of smart bag companies and hear why MSP\'s T2 isn\'t so ghetto after all. All this and more at the&nbsp;<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_141.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_141.mp3\"]\n\n<!--more-->\n\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #141:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. Not much travel since the last episode -- just driving up to Wisconsin -- until last week when I did a 5-day trip with a client to Pune, India. Left ORD Friday night, landed in Frankfurt late Saturday morning, heard the announce a flight to Pune before my flight to Delhi. Arrived in Delhi at 1am Monday morning. Overnighted at the airport Radisson Blu (not a bad hotel), and then caught an afternoon Jet Airways flight to Pune. Note to self: you don’t always have to fly the client’s itinerary. In spite of all those legs, those multiple points of potential failure, everything went relatively smoothly.</li>\n 	<li>Not so much on the way home. The itinerary was to take an Air India flight from Pune to Delhi at 7pm Thursday night, then the United flight to Newark, getting back to ORD around 9:30. We passed on a 5:30p Jet Airways flight fearing Pune rush hour traffic. And that’s where the itinerary fell apart. While waiting for the client team to check their luggage -- I decided to ignore Air India’s 8 kg carry-on weight limit -- I get an e-mail from Air India with a 2 hr delay due to “operational reasons” which usually means a broken plane. Great. What was a reasonable 2½ layover was suddenly an unrealistic 30-minute dash off the plane, through the standard Indian airport itinerary check, then passport control, full patdown security, weave through the terminal and to the gate. And the inbound Air India plane hasn’t left Delhi yet. I call our Amex travel number -- any room on that Jet Airways flight because it hasn’t left yet. Nope, sold out. I briefly think about 3-hr drive to Mumbai but decide to keep heading to Delhi. I bang “flights DEL ORD May 24” into Google. I filter the Google Flights results for one-way and shortest duration, and then call Amex back. When the agent stopped after listing the limited United options -- I guess because it’s less work for them to keep me on the same airline -- I asked her to check on the non-United options that Google Flights listed. There’s the direct Air India flight to ORD getting in around 7:30a or a Lufthansa connection back through Frankfurt arriving around 1pm. I have her book both, knowing that I can cancel one well within the 24-hr no-penalty window.</li>\n 	<li>Pune Airport is a dump. I’m trying to think of a worse airport I’ve been in and I’m drawing a complete blank. Weak air conditioning failing to fight the 95 degree day, 3-4 food stands against the wall, and no bar. With nothing better to do, I bang “Air India ORD DEL business class review” into Google. The results were not kind. But I still think - how bad could it really be? This seems like a bad karma travel day; skipping the FRA connection, avoiding another point of failure, seems to be good idea. But then I finally got on the Air India plane to Delhi. It was also a complete dump. It was a bad 2 hrs; I couldn’t do another 15 hrs with them. I decided to risk the Frankfurt connection. At first it went well; breakfast beer and pretzel in the lounge, on-time boarding. But after boarding, we sat and sat. The captain came on. The good news? The luggage was finally loaded and the cargo doors buttoned up. The bad news? Our pushback time is an hour from now. There was nothing I could do. I pulled out my iPhone and buried myself in the zen of Solitaire. As it turned out, we didn’t take the full hour delay and the pilot juiced the engines so we arrived only 15 minutes late. And after looking at in-flight pictures from the gang that took the Air India direct flight, that 15 minute delay was trampled by the arrival of full-on schadenfreude. I had definitely made the right decision</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<em>Gargantua</em> by Admiral Bob (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/46361 Ft: My Free Mickey, Martijn de Boer</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>The airlines’ smart bag ban claimed a couple of casualties this month. Bluesmart posted its blog obituary first -- “the banning of smart luggage with non-removable batteries put our company in an irreversibly difficult financial and business situation”. selling their IP, their intellectual property to TravelPro, one of the “legacy” suitcase brands they used to dismiss. A few weeks later, Raden posted a similar obit -- “We sincerely apologize to those who chose to travel with us, our intent was to add ease and simplicity to your travel experience and this unforeseen policy change has made this impossible.” Both companies said they’re no longer honoring warranties though Bluesmart says they’ll still provide some level of e-mail support. And the smartphone apps if you want to use your grounded bag on, say, a train or a bus. The bag maker Away is still in business, though, even developing a free kit that retrofits their first generation smart bag with an ejectable battery, making them compliant with the airlines’ rules.</li>\n 	<li>Gary Learned tweeted back a solid counter-argument on last episode’s rant on MSP’s Terminal 2. After waiting for a Southwest flight back to Chicago, I added it to my “ghetto terminal” list -- the terminals for non-hub airlines -- like O’Hare’s Terminal 2 and Detroit’s North Terminal. Gary has a different take, though. He writes -\n<ul>\n 	<li>I respectfully disagree on MSP T2. Surdyks has some great taps and wine as well as good small bites. Barrio is a nice little Mexican local restaurant. I can go from car to gate in 5 min. Now MDW on the other hand …</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Car to gate in 5 minutes -- that’s a selling point right there that you won’t pick up Uber-ing in and out of a place. That used to be Midway before it blew up -- little parking lot in front of the terminal and walk right in. I won’t defend Midway now -- it’s a bit of a cluster, though I’m hoping that the pending reconstruction of the security concourse sort of “un-clusters” at least that part of it. Gary, thanks for giving us the contra view of MSP T2. I’ll give Barrio a try the next time I’m there.</li>\n 	<li>And since we’re talking about ghetto terminals, when choosing among the client-selected itineraries to India, a connection thru Munich was one of the options -- which long-time listeners know I immediately skipped. Skytrax again named Munich the top European airport. God only knows why, though I know they certainly didn’t ask me. Instead, I connected through Frankfurt, which while not a “wow-sy” airport, is efficient, not a hassle, and gets me on my way. Normally, I’m flying over to FRA from ORD and connecting to some place in Europe, often in the Schengen zone so I don’t have to go through passport control. Connecting to India, though, was a different matter. According to my iPhone’s Health app (admittedly not the most accurate), I walked 1.6 miles that Saturday morning between my ORD and DEL flights. I drug my bag down long corridors empty except for some black plastic chairs fixed in a semi-reclined position surrounded by black cloth cots. FRA airport really missed the chance to strategically locate some little beer stube kiosks along the way. I would’ve stopped at least a couple of times on that trek for some breakfast beers.</li>\n 	<li>The India trip was a bit of a last-minute thing which necessitated a scramble for a new Indian visa. This would be my 3rd Indian visa. My first one was a 5-year visa that I lost when my passport was stolen in Brussels. My second one was only for 6 months; I can’t remember why it was so short. This time, I decided to avoid future scrambles and apply for a 10-year visa. Because there’s an Indian consulate in Chicago, I didn’t have to hassle with postage or third-party passport services. The day before, I sent notes to our US HR department and the admin manager in our Hyderabad office asking for the necessary letters of guarantee and invitation, and then did the application online, printed it out and signed it, and then booked an appointment the next morning. I didn’t actually go to the consulate. I’ve always gone to an outsourced visa processing company that handled the front end administrivia, with, near as I can tell, the consulate just approving and signing the visas. Each visa has been with a different processor. For my first visa in 2010, I dropped my forms and passport off at an office in the morning, and received a text at the end of the day that it was ready. In 2014, a different processor gave my wife a hard time -- trying to upsell her on expedited handling charges that weren’t needed. This time, Cox and Kings was a surprisingly painless experience. I went in Thursday after lunch; there was no wait, the people were pleasant. End of day Thursday, I received an e-mail and a text telling me that my application had been processed and was heading to the consulate. On Friday morning, I received and e-mail and text saying that my application had arrived at the consulate. Another message at lunch said that it was being processes, and a last message on Friday said that it was back at Cox and Kings. Monday morning, another message told me it was being packaged up, followed by a message with a UPS tracking number. Tuesday afternoon, my passport landed on my front porch with my 10-year visa. I was incredibly impressed… and feeling a bit spoiled comparing this level of customer service to what my non-US friends tell me they have to go through to get a US visa.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em>A Foolish Game</em> by Zep Hurme&nbsp;(c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license.&nbsp;http://ccmixter.org/files/zep_hurme/46448</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>When You Think the TSA is Bad...</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>A week of flying around India is always a good sanity check for me -- that no matter what crankiness I’m have about the TSA, airport security in the US is so much easier than in India. When I was talking at the start of the episode about how the delay of our Pune-Delhi flight blew up the rest of our itinerary home, the main reason we immediately starting working alternative flights was because how long we knew it would take to work our way through the different layers of security in Delhi. It started when trying to make our way from domestic flight arrivals into the international departures area so we could re-ticket our flights. We had to pass through the usual itinerary check. I show the army guy the boarding pass for United flight we’d missed -- it was all I had. But since that flight had already left, he wasn’t going to let me through. Luckily, one of the group I was flying with was United Global Services, and two customer service staff had met us as we got off the Air India flight. Even then, it took her a good bit of time to explain the situation to the army guy and convince him to let me through. But for that, I would’ve been idling around baggage claim on my own trying to figure out how to get to a ticket counter.</li>\n 	<li>Passport control was pretty efficient, but the security scans -- not so much. After you unpack all your electronics and push everything through the X-ray machine, you walk through the metal detector for your gender -- different scanners for “Gents” and “Ladies” because there’s a full wanding and patdown on the other side. Indeed, the “Ladies” go into a little curtained booth for their patdown. Not normally too much of a hassle, unless the “Ladies” patdown line backs up, and a back up of women’s luggage in the X-ray machine is blocking mine -- which happened that evening. None of the security people moved to clear things. Nothing to do but stand there and wait. Our flight from Pune landed at Delhi at 11pm. When looking at flight alternatives, I’d seen an Air Canada flight leaving at 12:10pm and passed right by it. I knew there was no way we’d make that flight.</li>\n 	<li>The security checks in Frankfurt, while much more efficient, were still more than you’d get in the US. On the way over to India, after passing everything through the X-ray machine, I was intercepted after collecting my bags, directed over to a cubicle where all of my bags were swabbed and checked for explosives residue. All done with a German sense of politeness, but I was glad I wasn’t in a rush. On the connection back home, it was a different security line, with a body scanner instead of the walkthru metal detector. No big deal, but just different enough to be awkward. Instead of the TSA’s hands up “don’t shoot” pose, it was an arms down-elbows out pose, kinda like you’re holding luggage. The guy working the scanner was visibly annoyed that he had to instruct me on the pose -- to hold me arms further away from my body. But then there was no luggage swiping on the other side.</li>\n 	<li>Picking up my bags, I maneuvered around three officers cradling automatic rifles; they were standing there chatting, but watching. No big deal now, but I remember when I first starting traveling through Europe -- London Heathrow and Frankfurt in the mid- to late-’80’s and being taken aback by the army guys walking around with unslung M-16s and the like. This was pre-TSA time in the US, when it would be out-of-place to see anything more than a rent-a-cop in an airport terminal and you could still turn up 30 minutes before departure time and make your flight. Back then, the difference was eye-opening for a twenty-something traveler. Of course, none of us knew that it was a preview of what flying would be like 20 years later.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<em>Melt Away</em>&nbsp;by Kara Square (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp;http://ccmixter.org/files/mindmapthat/46605</li>\n</ul>\n<b>Expired Money</b>\n<ul>\n 	<li>In last December’s episode, I talked about how I need to have some cash in my pocket when I travel. I know it’s a generational thing; many of my younger colleagues don’t carry any cash, but going “cash naked” just makes me nervous. Assuaging this anxiety on international travel means fills one of my desk drawers with random bits of currency. That’s not a big deal for countries that I or my family visit often. Before my daughter flew back to the UK for her spring semester at St Andrews, I rummaged through the desk and found a £20 note; it bought her breakfast when she landed in Edinburgh.</li>\n 	<li>But for countries I visit less often, the money just sits there. I have 350 Mexican pesos -- about $18 at today’s exchange rate; I can’t remember the last time I was in Mexico. I have 400 Chinese yuan -- over $60 -- left over from my last trip to Beijing 4 years ago. At the end of that trip, I thought I’d be going back within the year, so didn’t work hard to spend down those notes. But that next trip didn’t happen, and so there those yuan sit.</li>\n 	<li>Before the India trip, I hit the cash drawer and pulled out €12 in notes and coins from our trip to Spain last March, that was for my connections through Frankfurt, and 200 rupees -- about $30 -- left over from my 2014 trip to India. I didn’t spend any of the euros; I spent most of my time either walking through concourses or drinking beer in the Lufthansa lounge. But the rupees came in handy for tipping all the guys at the hotel who insisted on helping me with my carry-on bag. Here’s a 100 for you, and you, and you, and, oh, you too.</li>\n 	<li>One night in Pune, we were at the JW Marriott rooftop bar for hors d\'oeuvres and pre-dinner drinks. The catered bar on our side of the terrace has the usual Kingfisher beers. But then I saw someone on the other, the non-catered/public side of the terrace with a different, non-Kingfisher beer. It was a Bira 91 Blonde. I headed over to the main bar to get one. Now, because this was the main bar, not the catered one, I was going to have to pay for the Bira 91, but that wasn’t a problem because I had rupees in my pocket. Yes, they also would’ve taken my Amex card, but I had a 1,000 and a 500 rupee note that I needed to break for more luggage tips, so I laid the 1,000 note on the bar next to my check and then wandered over to the edge of the rooftop to look over the city. A couple minutes later, a guy taps me on the shoulder and gives me back my 1,000 rupees. The note was no good. And then I remembered. Back in Nov 2016, the Indian government made a snap announcement to replace the 500 and 1,000 rupee notes to fight counterfeiting. $20 of my rupees had expired while sitting in my desk drawer. Lots of apologizing, and I ended up pulling out my Amex card after all.</li>\n 	<li>When I got home, I took a deeper dive through my cash drawer. Luckily, I didn’t have any old £10 notes, the ones with Charles Darwin on them. He expired a couple of months ago in March, replaced by a new tenner with Jane Austen. I did find a 1,000 Italian lire note with Maria Montessori on the face, which must’ve been left over from, I dunno, maybe our 10th anniversary trip to Tuscany because lire notes were replaced with Euro notes in 2002. My 1,000 note was worth maybe half a euro, about 60 cents when it expired: not a big loss. But today, when I searched on eBay, I saw it selling for $2-3. That’s a 300-400% return. So maybe I’ll just stuff these rupee back in my drawer and check back in, oh, 2035 and make a killing.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #141</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a> and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_141.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #141 — When You Think the TSA is Bad...; Expired Money','','inherit','closed','closed','','1998-revision-v1','','','2019-03-17 20:51:03','2019-03-18 01:51:03','',1998,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/17/1998-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2370,1,'2019-03-17 20:51:41','2019-03-18 01:51:41','[caption id=\"attachment_1925\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/IMG_20141210_231414.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1925\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/IMG_20141210_231414-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> How many nights to get Leopard Print status?[/caption]\n\nSo we\'re four weeks into the new year and 30-50% of us have already ditched our New Year\'s resolutions, but we still have time to get our 2018 travel status lined up. Over the holiday break, I bought a non-smart carry-on to replace my now-banned Bluesmart; I walk through my shopping criteria. All this and more at the&nbsp;<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_137.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\nThanks to <a href=\"http://go.travelperk.com/travelcommons\">TravelPerk</a> for sponsoring this episode.\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_137.mp3\"]\n\n<!--more-->\n\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #137:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. This episode is sponsored by <a href=\"http://go.travelperk.com/travelcommons\">TravelPerk</a>, the #1 rated business travel tool on the Internet. It’s been a light travel month, just a drive down to Nashville, and a couple of trips over to Charlottesville, VA, which has been a nice break from what is otherwise turning out to be a brutally cold winter in Chicago. The day after New Years, I walked out of the house into a -10℉ morning -- not windchill, it was -10℉ ambient. Welcome to January. I had my team travel here last week for a 2018 kick-off meeting. No one accused us of boon-doggling. The guy from Phoenix did say he was filing an employee abuse claim though.</li>\n 	<li>I’ve found myself drinking less craft beer and much more Scotch whisky in this month; -10℉ is definitely brown liquor weather. Luckily, my daughter brought home a nice bottle of 18-year-old <a href=\"http://www.glenscotia.com/\">Glen Scotia</a> from Edinburgh for Christmas. I’ve made a sizable dent in it.</li>\n 	<li>On my first trip to Charlottesville, after being off the road for four weeks, it took me forever to gather up all the bits of my regular travel carry from around the house. Normally, my travel carry stays in my backpack and my suitcase; I buy duplicates of things like hair brushes and headphones just so I don’t need to pull them out of my bag. But for some reason, all discipline broke down over the holidays and my carefully curated travel carry was spread/spewed throughout the house. Luckily, my ride to ORD was 5 minutes late. I took my Bluesmart bag, squeezed in one last trip before American’s January 15th smart luggage ban took effect. I tweeted a picture of my Bluesmart before boarding. American replied “We\'re glad you\'re flying with us and appreciate your cooperation with our team.” My response -- “Not that I have much of a choice…” Especially with IATA recommending the ban to its 300 airline members. My new non-smart Victorinox bag arrived on my front porch before the ban clicked in, so once I shift everything from the Bluesmart to the Victorinox, I’ll power down the Bluesmart, delete its app from my iPhone, and consign it to the corner of the attic with all my other retired bags -- my own Land of Misfit Bags.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mactonite/29469\">Static</a> by Darkroom (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mactonite/29469 </span></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Starting off the New Year, I did a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/01/01/looking-back-at-2017-the-highs-and-the-lows/\">blog post</a> summarizing some of the high and low points that we talked about in 2017. The high points? Things like Uber and Lyft driver stories, yet more craft beer taprooms, and Hertz’s President Circle Aisle. Low points? Airlines dragging passengers from planes, everybody lobbying for 5-star reviews, and, no surprise, the smart luggage ban.</li>\n 	<li>Allan Marko, not just a long-time TravelCommon’s listener, but probably one of the original listeners showed his roots by posting on the original comment channel -- the TravelCommons website\n<ul>\n 	<li>Have had our Away luggage for only about six months prior to the battery ban. I really like the ‘smart’ charging feature. Luckily the Away battery is a nicely designed self-contained and easily removable unit (two screws; screwdriver included!) Now the battery lives in my backpack, and the luggage still usable.</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\"></li>\n 	<li>Allan’s psychic capabilities are showing. I think Away is the only major smart bag that meets the airlines’ requirement for a removable battery. But for me, charging wasn’t the major use case for me. I’m typically fine with my Anker lipstick charger. And if I forget to recharge that, my Verizon mobile WiFi hotspot also doubles as a charger. For me, the GPS tracking was the main use case -- for those times I had to check my bag, it was nice to know that it had also made it to my destination -- a use case that requires power. Pull out the battery and no more tracking. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted.</li>\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\"></li>\n 	<li>Jim McDonough replied to the Twitter announcement of the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">last episode</a> where I wondered if I was the last generation of cash payers. Jim wrote\n<ul>\n 	<li>I use cash a) at the local farmer’s market; b) pay for haircuts . . . having a hard time coming up with c)</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Jim, I dunno. Looking at your Twitter profile picture, you look like you could land in my generation. I apologize for using a card for anything under $20. Although I have to say that more and more microbrewery taprooms only take credit cards. I don’t apologize there; or at the self-service tills in Home Depot or Tesco’s -- mostly because there’s no one to apologize to even though they will take cash.</li>\n 	<li>Natalie on the British Airways social media team <a href=\"https://twitter.com/British_Airways/status/943550974102245376\">tweeted back</a> at me about the other topic on the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">last episode</a> -- about how hard it can be to cash in on loyalty points. You’ll remember that I talked about all the hassles I had in transferring Avios points from BA to Iberia, until I got a BA agent with solid northern accent. Natalie of BA said\n<ul>\n 	<li>Hey Mark! Thanks for tagging us in your article. I\'m glad to hear that one of our \'Geordie\' colleagues was able to help you redeem some of your Avios. It\'s a shame you didn\'t catch her name though.</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Absolutely it was a shame. She deserves huge props.</li>\n 	<li>In that same riff, I mentioned how my email to Iberia to clean up my name on my Iberia Plus account -- which might have been the root cause of my point transfer problem -- seemed to have fallen into a black hole. Well, apparently it didn’t. Soon after that episode, I got a letter from Iberia with a new card that had my correct name. That was nice. Would’ve been just a bit nicer if they’d hit the Reply button while handling the email and typed, I dunno, just 8 words -- “Got it fixed; new card in the mail” But it got done -- all of it, Avios points, non-stop ORD-MAD flight on points, and now, a card with my correct name.</li>\n 	<li>And that Iberia letter was probably one of the last surprises I got when I open the mailbox at home. Somehow, I’m not quite sure how, I signed up for a US Post Office service that sends me an email every morning with scanned images of letters I’m going to receive that day. When I got that first email, I was kinda “What the hell?”, but now I kinda like it, especially when I’m on the road. No more wondering what bills showed up, or during the holidays, who had sent us Christmas cards. It does kinda take the surprise out of opening the mailbox -- though not that there was much left since 90% of our physical mail is junk -- but it is kinda entertaining.</li>\n 	<li>Back in August, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/08/27/podcast-132-travel-apps-on-my-phone/\">episode #132</a> about the travel apps I have loaded on my phone, I talked about using the paid or “Pro” version of TripIt, and about how it was on the bubble for me because of how the airlines have improved the flight status notifications in their own apps. In 4 months since then, the airline apps have pretty consistently notified me of gate changes and delays faster than TripIt Pro. And so when my subscription ran out a few weeks ago, I ignored the renewal alerts. I’ll still use the free version -- I like the way TripIt consolidates separate plane, hotel, and rental car reservations into a single trip -- kinda replicating the itineraries your travel agent used to give you when they booked your entire trip. But paying $50 for what are now slower, redundant flight alerts? I’ll spend it on beer or brown liquor instead.</li>\n 	<li>I don’t know if it’s just me, but the cadence for boarding groups has gotten out of control. I think I was on a Delta flight where I was boarding group 1 or 2, but was the 4th or 5th group to board, after Delta One, and then Platinum Medallion, then Gold Medallion, Sky Team Elite -- it went on forever. American is a bit better -- only one non-numeric boarding group for the invite-only Concierge Key gang (remember George Clooney in Up In The Air) -- and then 1 through 9(!). I do love the announcement “If you don’t have a boarding group number, then board Group 7” which feels a bit random. Where it really becomes fun is on a regional jet, when the gate agent runs through this cadence for a plane with only 40-50 passengers and all the carry-on bags are gate… I mean valet checked. “Now boarding passengers in Group 1, Group 2, Group 3…” Four people board… “Groups 5, 6, 7, and the rest of you” followed by general scrum in front of the agent. I know the airlines have PhDs in psychology, sociology, and linear programming working on this stuff, but it continues to be a cluster</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>And thanks to this episode’s sponsor TravelPerk</li>\n 	<li>Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/11/20/podcast-135-airport-bingo-new-old-travel-pc/\">November episode</a>, I talked about American\'s last-minute cancellation of my night flight to Charlottesville and my ensuing scramble to find a replacement flight and to make sure the Hyatt Place didn\'t flush my reservation. But if I\'d booked with TravelPerk, they would\'ve done the scrambling for me.\n<ul>\n 	<li>This all-in-one business travel management tool includes a team of highly qualified agents ready to rescue disgruntled travelers from any scenario 24/7.</li>\n 	<li>It’s because of making magic happen in times like this that TravelPerk is now the #1 rated business travel tool on the internet.</li>\n 	<li>You\'ll love them because you can finally take control of your travel schedule, have freedom to book alternative accommodation like Airbnb, and have a built-in rescue team when stuff goes south. Remove some stress from the equation, go to <a href=\"http://go.travelperk.com/travelcommons\">go.travelperk.com/travelcommons</a> for a no-commitment test drive.</li>\n 	<li>It’s free forever if you to <a href=\"http://go.travelperk.com/travelcommons\">go.travelperk.com/travelcommons</a></li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Psykick/52938\">Another Way</a> by Psykick (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Psykick/52938</span></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Plan for 2018 Travel Perks</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>So here we are, 4 weeks into the new year and anywhere from a third to a half of us have already ditched our New Year\'s resolutions and are now in full anticipation of Super Bowl queso dip. But while your dry January may have been washed out early, you still have time to get your 2018 travel perks in place.</li>\n 	<li>Almost all travel perks come from status in loyalty programs and all those status earning counts reset on Jan 1, so the first step is to match up what you think your 2018 travel plans will be to your loyalty programs. Any gaps? If you think you’ll start flying to Seattle (maybe helping to shill your hometown for Amazon’s HQ2), you’ll probably want to sign up for Alaskan Airlines Mileage Plan, where before, it might not have been worth the extra junk mail.</li>\n 	<li>Or if you’re already a member, do a status match. When I took a new CIO job some years back, all the hotels near our offices were Hilton brands. I had a Hilton\'s Honors card but just in basic blue as opposed to my top-of-the-line sparkly platinum Marriott card. After I hit the “reset my password” link on the Hilton website, I went straight to their status match page. Right at the top, it says “For the next 90 days,... we’ll match your elite status with any other loyalty program.” If you complete 4 or 8 stays over those 90 days, the match is good for the year. So rather than having to grind my way to Hilton status, I started enjoying it on Day 1. I had a friend do that with American -- parlay his United 1K status to Executive Platinum when he moved from Denver to Dallas. Much better than slumming in Boarding Group 5 until you clear the first status bar.</li>\n 	<li>Doing this, you also need to keep in mind the different ecosystems; the partnerships that tie travel companies together. It used to be just the international alliances -- Star, SkyTeam, OneWorld. When I knew I’d be traveling down to South Africa, racking up some serious business class mileage, I had two real options -- SAA out of JFK and IAD, or DL out of ATL. Living in Chicago, I chose SAA because they’re part of Star Alliance with United, and I’d get a lot more use from United status out of Chicago than I would Delta. And it’s getting even more combinatorial now with United and Marriott are status matching each other.</li>\n 	<li>And then there’s the credit cards -- both affinity (United and Chase Visa, American and Citi MasterCard) and non (Amex Platinum, Chase Sapphire Reserve). You gotta do the math. For example, Amex’s Platinum card is $550/year. But with that, you get Membership Rewards points that transfer to airlines and hotels, access to Delta lounges and Amex’s Centurion Lounges, which if you travel frequently to DFW, LAS, MIA, LGA, and now JFK, is great. They’re much better than, say American’s Admirals Clubs. I wish they had one in Chicago. Amex also picks up the $100 Global Entry or $85 PreCheck fee, gives you 10 GoGo WiFi sessions, $200 in Uber credit, and some other benefits. If you’ll use these benefits, that $550 can be a better deal than, say, the $95 that the United Chase will cost you. However, that United Chase will get you baggage fee waiver, two United Club passes, and status boarding. If you don’t travel a huge amount and live in a United hub like Houston, the United card could be a better deal. But you gotta think about your travel, do the math, and sign up for it now so you have all year to maximize the status benefits.</li>\n 	<li>And while you’re in this planning zone, do yourself a big favor sign up and make an appointment for Global Entry if you do international travel, or PreCheck if you’re mostly a domestic flyer. If it makes sense for you to get an Amex Platinum or Chase Sapphire Reserve card, it’ll be free. To me, TSA and Customs lines are still the worst part of travel. While you’re figuring out how to bump your status up your status on airlines and hotels, do yourself a favor and step out of those TSA and Customs lines too.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/flatwound/14476\">The Long Goodbye</a> by John Pazdan (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/flatwound/14476</span></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>How to Shop For A Suitcase</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>OK, perhaps a bit presumptuous of a title; perhaps it’s “How I shopped for a suitcase.” But before we go there, let’s summarize the set up from past episodes -- my 10-year old black Swiss Army carry-on rendered itself unusable before Thanksgiving when the handle became stuck in the extended position (luckily as I was getting in a car coming home from ORD and not while trying to stow it in an overhead while boarding), I hate shopping for suitcases so I recharge my Bluesmart smart bag and put it back into service in December only to have it banned from air travel as of last week.</li>\n 	<li>So now I’m forced to shop for a suitcase. Like any good consultant, I, of course, construct a prioritized list of evaluation criteria. First, it has to be a carry-on. Now that may seem a bit of a “duh”, but there is some ambiguity; the <a href=\"https://travel-made-simple.com/carry-on-size-chart/\">approved height</a> varies by airline between 19 and 22-inches. If I wanted to play it safe, I’d go for a 20-inch bag, but I’m also want to maximize how much I can carry-on. I tilt toward choosing space. Most US carriers accept a 22-inch bag and that’s mostly what I fly, and even when I’m on European carriers I usually have enough alliance status (my American Platinum status carrying over to OneWorld) to glide past the baggage sizer.</li>\n 	<li>Which leads to the second criterion -- it needs to be black. As I said in my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/10/18/ruthless-packing-tips/\">Ruthless Packing Tips post</a> in October, black not only makes you look thinner, it makes your bag look thinner to gate agents scanning for bag-sizer bait.</li>\n 	<li>Third, 2 wheels, not 4. This is a bit more of a personal preference. My Bluesmart is a 4-wheel spinner and my wife swears by hers, but because the 4 wheels have to extend from the bottom of the bag, spinners sacrifice packing space for agility, while 2-wheelers can embed their wheels up in the backplane of the bag. Again trying to maximize packing space, I go for the 2-wheeler, and with the biggest wheels I can find to make it an easier, smoother pull. I was kinda surprised how this limited my selection. Spinners definitely rule.</li>\n 	<li>My fourth criterion -- I wanted the inside of the suitcase to be as plain and empty as possible. No bunch of zip compartments, or built-in suit hangers, or ratcheting down clothes dividers; just a wide open box that free to structure how I want for each trip. I was surprised how tough this was to find. Indeed, in the end, I couldn’t find it and settled for a bag where I could detach the suit hanger and clothes divider and stash that stuff up in the Land of Misfit Bags next to the Bluesmart.</li>\n 	<li>Whittling through all that, I ended up buying a black Victorinox Werks Traveler 5.0 2-wheeler. Victorinox is what used to be Swiss Army; I figured if my last bag survived 10 years of hard mileage, that said something for durability. It was also one of the few where I could detach all the internal storage stuff. And it has that additional zipper to expand the width by an inch -- kinda like when you drop a notch on your belt after Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner; for those times when I’m flying home and have bought a few too many bottles of wine or brown liquor.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #137</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>Thanks again to TravelPerk for sponsoring this episode. Remember to go to <a href=\"http://go.travelperk.com/travelcommons\">go.travelperk.com/travelcommons</a> for a test drive</li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_137.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #137 — New Year\'s Travel Status Tips; How to Shop for a Suitcase','','inherit','closed','closed','','1916-revision-v1','','','2019-03-17 20:51:41','2019-03-18 01:51:41','',1916,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/17/1916-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2372,1,'2019-03-18 21:03:55','2019-03-19 02:03:55','Down in Florida this week, picking up a bit of the local heat and humidity. Recorded in the bathroom of the Marriott Courtyard in Oldsmar, FL, somewhere between Tampa and Clearwater, we talk about how travel skills are passed from parents to children, spotting some famous people in ORD and LAX, rare emotions in the Frequent Traveler screening line, and a review of travel podcasts. Also, the final results of our Worst US Airport poll. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_12.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file\n\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_12.mp3\"]\n<!--more-->\n\n<hr>\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #12:\n\n&nbsp;\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <em>Warmth</em> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in the bathroom of the Oldsmar, FL Marriott Courtyard</li>\n 	<li>Denver Int\'l Airport wins the <em>Worst US Airport</em> poll by one vote over LAX</li>\n 	<li>Stories of how parents pass down business travel skills to their kids</li>\n 	<li>Airport celebrity sightings -- Steve Case, Julie Delpy</li>\n 	<li>Intense emotions in the Frequent Traveler screening line</li>\n 	<li>A 2x2 matrix classifying travel podcasts</li>\n</ul>\n<img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/images/pix/matrix.jpg\">\n<ul>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://www.emptyseat.net/emptyseatblog/\">The Emptyseat podcast</a></li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://www.connectedtraveler.com/blog/index.html\">The Connected Traveler</a></li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_12.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #12 - Emotions in the Screening Line; Other Travel Podcasts','','inherit','closed','closed','','15-revision-v1','','','2019-03-18 21:03:55','2019-03-19 02:03:55','',15,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/18/15-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2373,1,'2019-03-19 19:53:33','2019-03-20 00:53:33','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":2382,\"width\":300,\"height\":300} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright is-resized\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/DSC_5715-1024x1024.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2382\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"/><figcaption>Not Looking Friendly for a Solo Diner</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I dusted off the mobile rig to record this episode in Happy Valley, the home of Penn State. And I am kinda happy with some travel to Phoenix and Florida to thaw me out after Chicago\'s run in with the polar vortex. In this episode, I talk about budget airlines, stepping down in Hertz status, why I bought physical guidebooks for a trip to France, the challenges of being a solo diner, and then dig into the archives for a classic travel story. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_149.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #149:</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the Hyatt Place in State College, PA, feeling a bit more positive about life after a couple of warm weather getaways -- an afternoon meeting in Phoenix that I happily turned into a 3-day stay by flying in early for a “prep” session and staying late “in case our session ran long”; and then a long weekend with friends on the Gulf side of Florida. It was a nice break to walk outside without layering up coats, and scarves, and hats, and without taking an Arctic blast in the face. Not that it was toasty in Phoenix, but I was walking around downtown in a blazer, passing people -- natives, I’d guess -- in puffy down jackets. Not that they were wrong; it’s just that my reference point was that -22 degree polar vortex day. </li><li>Reminds me of a time many years ago when I was doing a project in J’burg South Africa in July -- our summer, their winter. We’re going to a restaurant for dinner. The inside is full, but the outside tables are available. The owner apologizes, offers to bring us blankets. My colleague from Detroit is wearing a polo shirt; I’m in dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up. “Thanks, but we’re fine,” we tell him. Halfway through the meal, he comes out, offering to move us inside now that a table has freed up. He’s wearing a parka. “No, really, we’re OK,” we tell him. Different reference points on what’s cold.</li><li>Both trips -- out to Phoenix and down to Ft Myers airport, were full of young families, also getting away from the cold, maybe to stay with parents/ grandparents who’d retired in more reasonable climes. I flew Southwest to Phoenix and United to Ft Myers, and I came to appreciate what, before this, was, to me, an undiscovered benefit of Southwest’s open seating. Because I was in the B boarding group, those families with young children boarded before me. Walking down the aisle, I could spot the crying babies -- there, and there, and there -- and could just keep walking, until I was behind them all. Sure, I was in the back of the plane, and it took me a while to deplane, but that was a very small price I was willing to pay for 3 hours of relative peace. </li><li>Bridge Music — <em>Paint the Sky</em> by Hans Atom (c) 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/hansatom/50718 Ft: Miss Judged </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>In past episodes, we talked about the bare bones budget airlines -- Spirit and Frontier in the US; Ryanair and EasyJet in Europe, and Wow Air and Norwegian as the second coming of Laker Airways, doing Transatlantic budget flights. Of those, I’ve flown Frontier, EasyJet, and Wow Air which, as a group, seems like the less severe set of the budgets. Ryanair and Spirit always seem to have a harder edge about the “budget-ness.” And then there’s their impact on the mainline carriers -- United, American, and Delta’s basic economy fares. Usually, when I look at a mainline carrier’s basic economy fare, the difference vs. their regular economy fare isn’t big enough to make up extra hassles. But booking our trip down to Florida, the difference on United was over $100 a ticket. Irene and I figured we could put up with a few hassles for over $200. But as dug a bit further, we didn’t find as many hassles as we thought. Because we’re both United Gold, there was no limitation on carry-on bags and we boarded in the usual Group 1. The only downgrade was that we had to pay to reserve seats and we couldn’t book them in Economy Plus -- the aisles with the extra legroom. Even after paying for reserved seats, we still saved enough to pay for a couple of nice dinners of grilled grouper. </li><li>Our friends who joined us from Milwaukee flew down on American through DFW without a hassle. Their flight back -- a direct to Milwaukee on Frontier -- not so much. Their flight was supposed to leave at 7:45pm. Around lunch, they received a note that their flight was delayed by 5 hours. What? We checked that again. We pulled up the FlightAware app, searched for their flight, and then started walked its planned flight legs back, hitting the “Where’s My Plane?” button until we found it -- still on the ground in Milwaukee 6 hours after its scheduled departure time. The weather wasn’t that bad, so it had to be a maintenance problem, which is a huge problem when flying budget and regional airlines because their model is to bounce a plane from place to place rather than flying it out of a hub where they could swap out a busted plane if need be. So that 6 hour delay was going to cascade through that day’s schedule. Our friends finally left Ft Myers at 2:45am. Which is something I’ve noticed about Frontier -- I’ve never seen them cancel a flight no matter how late they leave. A regional airline would’ve cancelled that flight way earlier, but not Frontier. I don’t know how their crews don’t time out, but I kinda admire them for getting you home no matter what time. Would be way better <em>not </em> to take a 7-hr delay, but at least they get you home.</li><li>This year, I got dropped a status level on Hertz, from President’s Circle down to Five Star. I didn’t do 20 rentals last year, and I missed an offer back in December to pay some points to keep my status. But, I can’t say that I notice the downgrade too much. When I was in Phoenix, I snagged a great Chrysler 300 with custom black rims. In Ft Myers, I got a brand new GMC Terrain SUV that held 4 adults very comfortable… Though I have to say that the Terrain through me for a loop when I got in. I’ve rented all sort of different cars. I get in, pair my phone to the Bluetooh, adjust the mirrors, put it in Drive, and pull out. With the Terrain, I was good with all of that right up until the “put it in Drive” step. I look down at the console -- no gear shift, no gear dial (the Chrysler experience talking). Then grab the stalk on the right side of the steering column and turn on the windshield wipers. I’m looking all over -- “WTF? Where is the damn gear shift?” From the back seat, Kristin points under the climate control “It’s right there”. And then I see, a line of buttons -- P, R, N, D. I push the D button and off we go. The last time I saw a push button gear selector was when I was a kid, riding in somebody’s old Plymouth. I mean, come on GMC, do we really need <em>another</em> type of gear selection? Searching the Internet later for the Terrain’s gear buttons yields a whole slew of “Worst Shifter Design” article featuring these buttons. I don’t know which was worse -- the actual buttons or me, the alpha road warrior, getting back seat instructions on how to put a rental car in gear.</li><li>Another new thing I learned at Hertz Ft Myers -- besides where to find gear buttons -- is that, for Hertz Gold customers, there’s no additional driver fee for your spouse. I’ve been in Hertz Gold since it started, but I never connected to this benefit. It’s saves real money -- additional driver fees can run $10/day -- and hassle. Another reason to like the Hertz Gold program.</li><li>TravelCommons made our little local newspaper in an installment of their “Ask The Expert” series with the sub-headline “How can travel be more relaxing and fun?”  When Sandy, the reporter, emailed me to schedule the interview, she wanted to talk about advice for successful spring break travel. So I started off talking about how those spring break families should avoid traveling during road warrior rush hours -- Monday mornings and Thursday evenings. “Boarding a plane filled with busy professionals can quickly rob you of that pre-vacation high,” Sandy wrote, “Peacock advise leisure travelers to avoid sharing a plane with these potential buzzkills.” Such as me. The last thing a family heading for Disney wants to encounter is people like me powering down the concourse. I also recounted some of the tips that you’ve seen in my Top Holiday Travel Tips posts -- fly early in the day, avoid regional jets, and no one-and-done outfits so you can get everything you need into a carry-on. And I talked about turning long layovers into mini-vacations with our upcoming Stockholm layover as an example. Of course, I didn’t mention that a lot of these layovers turn into taproom crawls, like in last year’s video of the Midway layover taproom tour, and potentially this Stockholm stop thanks to TravelCommons’ listener Rob Cheshire’s custom Google map. No, I figured than might be a bit much for our nice local paper. Sandy turned our 45-minute conversation into a nice article. I posted a picture of the article on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">TravelCommons Facebook page</a> since they don’t seem to put their issues on-line. </li><li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/12/podcast-120-where-do-guidebooks-fit-in-i-hate-shopping-for-suitcases/\">episode #120</a>, back in March 2016, I asked the question -- Where do physical guidebooks fit in the world of apps, review websites, social media, and podcasts? Back then, I was planning Andrew’s and my visit to Iceland. Now, getting ready to head over to Brittany, France for 10 days, I bought two physical guidebooks to take with us. Irene wanted DK’s Eyewitness Travel; it was her favorite out of the stack of guidebooks she checked out of the library. While I did a throwback, picked up our go-to book from our PK (pre-kids) days of travel, Michelin’s Green Guide. The DK book is definitely more visually punchy, but I figured Michelin, a French company, should have Brittany covered pretty well, and they published this new edition just last month. Maybe I’m getting lazy in my old age, but I’m kinda glad to have everything in one spot -- a bit of local history, touring maps, city guides -- rather than having to rummage through multiple PDFs in an Evernote folder. However, I took a pass on Amazon’s recommended add-on of Michelin’s Brittany Road and Tourist Map No. 512. I’ve topped up my local SIM for 2.5 GB of mobile data; I’m sticking with Google Maps. I maybe old school, but I’m not going back to the Dark Ages.</li><li>And if you have any travel rants, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or  Instagram  at travelcommons -- or  post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com. </li><li>Bridge Music — <em>Perfect Stranger</em> by stellarartwars (c) 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/stellarartwars/45510 Ft: TheDice </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Dining Single</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Our daughter Claire is heading down to London for her first week of Spring Break and will then meet us in Paris for our Brittany trip.  Planning it, we got talking about eating alone on the road. Years ago, it used to be more awkward - escorted to the small table off in the corner, a server a bit ticked off at the small check and therefore small tip. You’d read the newspaper or a book between courses to keep yourself occupied, wrap it up pretty quickly and head back to the hotel.</li><li>For guy travelers, the sports bar was (and still is) the exception to that rule. Fine, sit me in a booth alone as long as I have a clear view of walls of TV screens showing all ESPN all the time – ESPN, ESPN-2, ESPN-3, ESPN-U, ESPN News… No need for a book, especially over the next few weeks watching the opening rounds of the NCAA tournaments when I can watch a couple of games at once. Rush out? Hell no, give me another large Coors Light, we haven’t even hit half time.</li><li>Most restaurants now serve a full menu at the bar, complete with a full set up -- placemats, maybe a bread basket. Might be a touch cramped at happy hour, but it’s usually nice to be in the main flow of things rather than off in the corner. The trend toward shared plates , while getting a bit tired when dining with a group (“OK, what can we all agree on?”) works great for the single diner. If I want a bit of variety without overeating, I now have choices beyond sushi or tapas bars. Not that those are bad choices. I have no doubt that Claire will find her way to the bar at Barrafina in Soho.</li><li>Sitting at the bar also gave you a chance for a little social interaction, some serendipity; with the bartender, maybe with the guy sitting next to you. Some years ago, on my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/08/14/food-and-drink-highlights-from-my-drive-south/\">2,100-mile circle tour through the South</a>, a guy next to me at a Louisville bar told me to check out a restaurant in the not-yet-hip Bywater neighborhood in New Orleans; turned out to be a great recommendation. But I get less and less of that as people eat and just interact with their smartphones. Maybe Claire wouldn’t be keen on random bar conversations, but I kinda miss it.</li><li>Nowadays, where I do find that interaction is microbrewery taprooms. Sure, people still have their phones out to check their tasting flight into Untappd, but there’s an acceptance, almost an expectation, that people will “nerd out” about hops and malt and yeast esters with each other and with folks behind the bar. During one of my Dallas trips, I found my way to Grapevine Craft Brewing on a rainy Weds night. The brewmaster was pulling the taps, passing out some barrel samples, and we all spinning our beer nerd propellers real hard.</li><li>Bridge Music — <em>Foolish Game</em> by copperhead (c) 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/copperhead/46390 Ft: Snowflake,Sackjo22 </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><b>From The Travel Story Archives -- Airlines Need To Tell Us More</b></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Prepping for that interview with the local paper had me spelunking deep into the TravelCommons archives, fixing some broken links and listening to some of those early shows for the first time in a long time. A couple of things struck me -- the really poor sound quality I got from the little iRiver MP3 recorder that I was using, and how good some of those early travel stories were.</li><li> So here’s one from<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/09/24/podcast-15-begging-for-business-needing-to-know-at-35000-ft/\"> episode #15</a>, very long-time TC listener Allan Marko talking about wanting to know just a little bit more about what an airline maintenance guy is doing.  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #149</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_149.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #149 — Dining Single; Airlines Need To Tell Us More','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-149-dining-single-airlines-need-to-tell-us-more','','','2021-12-10 11:51:44','2021-12-10 16:51:44','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=2373',0,'post','',0),
(2375,1,'2019-03-19 21:14:24','2019-03-20 02:14:24','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Trying to wrap up travel for the year so I can hunker down in the TravelCommons bunker outside of Chicago and&nbsp;<em>not</em> worry about any forecasted snow. But for those of you who are traveling, here\'s an episode to keep you occupied in the airport, train, or car traffic. We talk about some travel tips that didn\'t make my Top 10 Tips blog post, the great experience of flying on Thanksgiving day, losing my tablet on that flight but soon recovering it, storming Las Vegas with 50,000 other Amazon Web Services users, and some thoughts from our trip to Santa Fe, New Mexico. All this and more at the&nbsp;<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_147.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<figure><iframe src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/546788592&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\"></iframe></figure>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more -->\n<!--more-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #149:</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, trying to wind down the year’s travel. Was in Santa Fe, New Mexico for Thanksgiving, and then headed up to Las Vegas the next week for Amazon Web Service’s big annual conference, Re:Invent. Then did what I hoped was my last trip to Dallas, but we couldn’t corral all the cats, so I’m back down there next Weds for what will definitely be my last trip of the year.</li><li>Irene and I flew out to Albuquerque 10am Thanksgiving morning and I have to say that it was one of the least stressful travel experiences I’ve ever had -- no traffic on the drive to ORD, no lines; I didn’t even have time to pull out my driver’s license before I hit the TSA podium. I walked straight through to a screening line. There were agents hanging around just looking for people to screen. The only line I stood in was the Starbucks. We even scored 1st-Class upgrades; the plane was only half full. I even think we left early. A very pleasant change from my ORD-DFW commute.</li><li>The only real downside I noticed was when we hit the Hertz Presidents Club aisle in Albuquerque. It was pretty picked over, leaving behind an odd selection of Dodge vehicles -- the choice was between Dodge Challenger muscle cars or fully tricked out Ram Hemi king-cab pick-ups. I can’t say that I’ve ever faced quite that choice. The Challenger, with rear-wheel drive, wouldn’t be great if we got snow at elevation, but the Rams were just huge, and trying to parallel park that in Santa Fe would be an event. It took me a bit to decide. I went with the Challenger and hoped for clear skies.</li><li>Well, there was one more downside that I didn’t discover until we unpacked in our little casita in Santa Fe that night. I’d left my Samsung tablet in that nice first-class seat. Not in the seat-back pocket; I always check there before leaving. There was a side compartment along the middle armrest that I’d put my tablet in when I folded up the table to hit the lav. Bad mistake. That compartment was deep, I couldn’t see the tablet; and I didn’t think to check it before deplaning.</li><li>I hit Twitter, sending United a direct message asking about ABQ lost-and-found. I wanted to ping them to see if the cleaning crew had turn anything in since I’d be back at ABQ for our Monday morning flight to LAS. I’ve done this before when getting back coats that I’ve left in overhead compartments. The Twitter customer service agent instead sent me a link to a web form to fill out. I cooled my jets over the weekend and on Monday morning, swung by the United Baggage Services office to see if they had my tablet. Walked past the American Baggage Services office -- open; the Delta Baggage Services office -- open; to the United Baggage Services office -- closed. It was supposed to open at 9am. I waited for 15-20 minutes, and then had to head up to catch my Vegas flight. I wasn’t happy.</li><li>Which changed that afternoon when I got a call from an unknown Cleveland number on my mobile. Robocallers have found my mobile number, so I usually let unrecognized numbers go straight to voicemail, but I remember Continental having a Cleveland hub before the United merger, so maybe this was a United person calling. And it was! “I think I have your tablet; could you verify your screensaver” It’s a wall painting of pink flamingos. “Yup, that’s it; we’ve got it” (Actually, it’s street art from Paris’ Montmartre neighborhood; you can see the picture on the TravelCommons’ Instagram feed). She told me that they no longer keep found items at the airports; they ship them the next day to centralized lost-&amp;-found centers for sorting and processing. So, even if the ABQ baggage services office had been open that morning, they wouldn’t have had my tablet; they probably shipped it to Cleveland that weekend.<br>After I got off the phone, I got an e-mail with a link to pick a shipping method and pay. The day after I got home from Vegas, my flamingo’d tablet landed on my doorstep.</li><li>Bridge Music --&nbsp;<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/copperhead/40520\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen</a> by copperhead (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: Admiral Bob, Javolenus , Sackjo22</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Couple of listener notes on the last episode. Nick Gassman wrote:\n<ul><li>“When you were talking about car rental collision damage waiver, I took it to mean that that you pay the rental company for the insurance. It\'s much cheaper (at least in the UK) to purchase this separately. You can generally get it on a per-trip or annual basis, just like regular travel insurance.”</li><li>Nick, good point on that. You get used to accepting the waiver on business travel because, for many corporate rates, it’s all rolled in or you’re just going to expense it. And for US domestic travel, at least for me, my regular auto insurance covers it. So that leaves international travel. Chase did a good job of handling the accident in the UK. But looking at a separate company is a good idea. May try that out the next time I rent in Spain.</li><li>“And about BlueTooth speakers, you mentioned about using the speaker as an accessory for your phone - I assume you know that the Jambox can do this. I\'ve often used it at work in rooms with no speakerphone. I\'ve also now upgraded to the Bose Mini 2 Soundlink. It is heavier and slightly larger, but when going on holiday the difference in sound quality is significant and more than makes up for it.”</li><li>Yup, I’ve used the Jambox for many conference calls though I’ve never checked the quality difference between it and the speaker, or maybe I should say the microphone on my iPhone. I’ve never swapped between them on a call and asked the person on the other end which is better. Something to try out on the next call where we’re waiting for the last person to join.</li></ul>\n</li><li>Steve Frick picked up on something when I was talking about notebooks in last episode’s Traveler Gift Guide segment\n<ul><li>“It sounds like you’ve also entered the “Fountain Pen Zone” as well. They’re like tattoos, you can’t have just one. I had used a Mont Blanc rollerball that I purchased in 1991, it’s been broken and repaired several times and it had been my go-to pen… until someone gave me a fountain pen. Now several years later I have a collection on fountain pens, as well as inks. Ughhhh just what I needed another obsession. Great episode!”</li><li>Yup, I started with a plastic Waterman fountain pen that I bought many years ago on a business trip to Brussels. I just had that one pen for the longest time. But then I discovered the Internet, or more specifically, fountain pen forums and blogs and podcasts on the Internet. And, as you might guess, it went downhill pretty quickly. Sometimes my biggest decision of the morning is which color of ink to use that day. Which itself says something about the state of my daily choices...</li></ul>\n</li><li>I said earlier that I was in Vegas a few weeks back for the big Amazon Web Services convention. It was huge; 50,000 attendees, mostly pudgy, pasty-faced guys power walking up and down the strip, backpacks strapped down, ignoring the showgirls offering pictures so they wouldn’t be late to, say, the sold-out tutorial on best practices for ingesting streaming data from IoT devices into AWS’ new time series database. For me, that nerd-meets-baller dichotomy hit one morning at 7:30. I was in a marching nerd stream weaving through the casino floor of the MGM Grand when out from behind a slot machine a woman with a half-filled plastic glass shouted “Very impressive that you all have some place important to go this early.” No one broke stride. She shrugged and went back to her machine. There was a lot of walking, though, for that show. It was spread out from the MGM Grand up to the Venetian. The Health app on my iPhone clocked me at 10 miles of walking a day. Glad it wasn’t in the summer.</li><li>I mentioned in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/05/31/podcast-141-when-you-think-the-tsa-is-bad-expired-money/\">an earlier episode</a> that I’d found a box of old European currency when cleaning off some shelves. It was from the late ‘80’s/early ‘90’s -- the pre-Euro days. I have some Belgian and French francs, a Deutsche mark, an Irish pound note, and an Italian 1000 lire note that I started using as a bookmark in my notebook. After one of these Amazon sessions, a young Italian woman looked over and commented on my lire bookmark. “Oh my God! I haven’t seen one of those in forever,” she said. She talked about her grandparents never really accepting that the lire was gone. “It’s good that we have the euro,” she said, “but it’ll never be the lire.” Which, remembering back 20-30 years ago, I thought might be a good thing, but decided not to say it; didn’t want to break her nostalgia. “I forgot how small it was!” she said.</li><li>I was trading notes with friends a few weeks back after the Marriott hack was announced. It really is no longer a matter of if your personal data will be breached, but how often. A common theme across many of those Amazon talks was that mistakes will happen, so your cloud design should “limit the blast radius” of those mistakes. If I apply that same concept to website breaches (travel and otherwise), I’d freeze all my credit reports, have a unique password for each site, provide just the minimum amount of information required for a transaction, and I wouldn’t store/save credit card or other information with them. Indeed, if I really burrowed in, I’d use virtual credit card numbers from a bank that provides them. I’m pretty good except for the last one; I haven’t found a good bank that easily provides virtual card number. It all comes down to your personal trade-off point between resilience to a breach and convenience.</li><li>With the Christmas season officially clicking in the day after Thanksgiving, TBS and TNT seem to have “Love Actually\" on power rotation every weekend. I like it; it’s a good Christmas movie. But picking up the end of it night while channel flipping in Santa Fe, I just couldn’t buy that scene toward the end when Liam Neeson encourages his stepson to breach Heathrow Airport security in the name of true love. I might be a bit of a Scrooge, but how does a 10-yr old kid commit a serious felony and not get gang-tackled at the gate and thrown into juvi? I dunno. Maybe I should stick to A Charlie Brown Christmas...</li><li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our new Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/NiGiD/48586\">O Tannenbaum / Oh Christmas Tree</a> by Martijn de Boer (NiGiD) (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial &nbsp;(3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: Admiral Bob (admiralbob77)</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Holiday Travel Tips</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I posted my kinda annual Top 10 Holiday Travel Tips a few weeks back. It feels like something I’m required to do to keep my status as a semi-professional travel blogger and podcaster. Not a lot of the flying tips have changed over the last few lists -- pay a bit extra to fly non-stop, don’t take tight connections, catch an early flight if you can, carry your luggage on if you can -- because not much has changed regarding air travel -- it’s a time when a huge bubble of travelers hit an infrastructure that is, for the most part, already operating near capacity and at the time of year when much of that capacity could get disrupted by weather. This year, US plane loads were over 80% -- as if you didn’t already know that hearing the constant refrain of gate agents and flight attendants - “This will be a completely full flight…” And no new airport or runway capacity has been added in the high traffic areas -- maybe since ORD finished spending a billion dollars straightening out its runways. The LGA renovation will hopefully eliminate the leaking roof and give us better food options, but after spending $8 billion dollars, there won’t be any new runway capacity.</li><li>Having said that, I think the aggressive roll-out of TSA PreCheck has helped everyone -- the TSA, frequent travelers who’ve bought PreCheck (signing up for PreCheck moved up to #2 on this year’s list), and even the infrequent ones who haven’t -- by increasing security capacity by increasing “thru-put” for lack of a better term. Security seems to, on the whole, move along a bit brisker. Yes, there are still too many times when it doesn’t, but it’s been a while since we’ve seen a full-scale TSA meltdown causing people to miss flights.<br>Bringing your own battery pack cracked the top 10 for the first time this year at #7. It followed Use Twitter as a Concierge Service and Use Multiple Flight Tracking Apps at numbers 5 and 6 respectively. The more we rely on our smartphones for travel information, the more important power is. And when the holiday crowds are hovering over those Samsung or Verizon power towers, you want an alternative.</li><li>A lot of the Top 10 lists I read end with a second list, of those things that didn’t quite make the Top 10. For me, some of those are:</li><li><strong>Travel on the Actual Holiday</strong> - Our Thanksgiving flight out to Santa Fe reminded me of this tip. It didn’t make the Top 10 because not everyone can pull it off. Tough to fly or drive out Christmas morning if you have young kids, or if you have Italian in-laws who do the whole Feast of The Seven Fishes on Christmas Eve. But, if you can, it’s a quantum level decrease in travel stress. You’ll probably just glide through your travels.</li><li><strong>Take Mass Transit to the Airport</strong> - Everybody worries about TSA lines, but just getting into the airport to be able to get into the TSA line can be a hassle. Airports with a single access road that goes past all the terminals -- think ORD, LAX, LGA -- can have 15-20 minute backups. When the construction at LGA first started, the backups were so bad, people were getting out of their cabs when they were still on the Grand Central Parkway and walking up the off ramps. Now, LGA doesn’t have mass transit access -- some of that $8 billion if for that -- but most airports do -- ORD, ATL, EWR and JFK, DCA,.... If it’s available, use it to skip at least one line.</li><li>And my last “almost made it” tip, <strong>Bring Cash</strong> -- way back in episode #136, last December, I talked about what seems to be a generational split, maybe right around 30 or 35 -- old Millennials/youngster Gen X’s -- about the need to carry cash. No matter which side you sit on that split, it’s a fact that cash can get you out of a packed airport bar quicker than a card if you need to bolt for your flight -- maybe a delay got pulled up, your gate got moved to the next terminal, or you just misread the boarding time. Being able to lay down, say a twenty and 3 ones, on the bar with your check is a whole lot quicker than waiting for the waitress to show back up, take your card, walk to the back to run it, and then bring it back again for you to sign. This is where the Europeans with those mobile terminals are light-years ahead of us. But until we catch up -- which means we have to be trusted to remember a 4-digit PIN code -- bring cash so you can dash.</li><li>Bridge music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/44580\"> What Child is This (Instrumental)</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial &nbsp;(3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: Jeris</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Notes on Santa Fe</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>As I mentioned earlier, Irene and I headed out to Santa Fe, New Mexico for the Thanksgiving holidays. Since both kids were gone, we figured “Why not?” And since I had to be in Vegas on Monday, it just made sense to head west.</li><li>I’m going to do a full write-up on our trip in a blog post in a week or so; the first of a new series of Road Trip posts, where we’ll break the TravelCommons format a bit. Road Trip posts will be more about the destination than the journey -- things we did, places we stayed, ate, drank beer…. But here, just some notes.</li><li>It had been a while since we’d been in Santa Fe -- maybe over 10 years; I haven’t paged back through my calendar to check -- but getting out of that Hertz Dodge Challenger that we’d blasted up I-25 -- the speed limit is 75 mph once you’re outside of Albuquerque -- I was immediately hit with the piñon smell, that unique pinewood smoke smell I only get in Santa Fe. I’ve been around a lot of pinewood fires in, say, Colorado and Arizona, but the piñon smoke billowing out of a kiva fireplace is a unique smell, and one that I love.<br>Visiting Santa Fe, there’s an interesting mix of highbrow and lowbrow -- doing the Georgia O’Keefe museum and a run up Canyon Road through all the art galleries, or hunting the best green chile cheeseburger and then burning it off on a hike in the Sangre de Cristo mountains. This visit was all lowbrow.</li><li>Friday, we did 1,700 vertical feet up the Atalaya Trail. The parking lot at the trailhead at St John’s College was pretty full, but the trail wasn’t crowded once we got going. It actually came in handy at times to see people - let us know we weren’t lost. There were some trail markings, but not to the extent we were used to in, say, the UK. 5 ½ hours later, we were sitting at the bar at Second St Brewing’s place in the Railyard district, replacing whatever calories we’d burned off with a green chile cheeseburger and a side of green chile cheese fries. Double lashings of american cheese, which I know is just a processed cheese food, but the creamy gooey-ness of it blended well with the chile bite, and a pint of one of the better American-made bitters I’ve had.</li><li>Saturday, after hiking through Tent Rocks National Monument, we ended up on Guadalupe St, which feels like the lowbrow counterpart to the plaza or Canyon Road. We stopped in at Cowgirl BBQ for margaritas. During our last visit, I stole/borrowed their margarita recipe for my own. We worked through their margarita menu while listening to a group of local guys talk about taking dancing lessons and a woman at the bar telling us that, back in the ‘70’s when she moved to Santa Fe, cowboys still rode horses through town -- across the plaza and down Canyon Rd -- throwing cash down in Canyon Rd bars to buy rounds for the house.</li><li>On Sunday, we walked down Canyon Road, looking into the sculpture gardens of all the art galleries. It seemed a popular Sunday morning stroll. I’d see some older couples -- older than me; at, say, the beginning of retirement, walking in high-end Western garb -- nice flat-brimmed hats, fur-trimmed duster coats. Kinda California money does cowboy. Would be interesting to see how those ‘70’s cowboys would fit in today.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #147</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li>Find&nbsp;TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and now on <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_147.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #149 — Dining Single; Airlines Need To Tell Us More','','inherit','closed','closed','','2373-revision-v1','','','2019-03-19 21:14:24','2019-03-20 02:14:24','',2373,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/19/2373-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2378,1,'2019-03-19 21:19:51','2019-03-20 02:19:51','<!-- wp:html -->\n[caption id=\"attachment_2197\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/IMG_1158.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2197\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/IMG_1158-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> I won\'t pass for an emotional support reindeer[/caption]\n<p>Trying to wrap up travel for the year so I can hunker down in the TravelCommons bunker outside of Chicago and <em>not</em> worry about any forecasted snow. But for those of you who are traveling, here\'s an episode to keep you occupied in the airport, train, or car traffic. We talk about some travel tips that didn\'t make my Top 10 Tips blog post, the great experience of flying on Thanksgiving day, losing my tablet on that flight but soon recovering it, storming Las Vegas with 50,000 other Amazon Web Services users, and some thoughts from our trip to Santa Fe, New Mexico. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_147.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<p><iframe src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/546788592&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"></iframe><!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show Notes --></p>\n<p>Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #147:</p>\n<ul>\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, trying to wind down the year’s travel. Was in Santa Fe, New Mexico for Thanksgiving, and then headed up to Las Vegas the next week for Amazon Web Service’s big annual conference, Re:Invent. Then did what I hoped was my last trip to Dallas, but we couldn’t corral all the cats, so I’m back down there next Weds for what will definitely be my last trip of the year.</li>\n<li>Irene and I flew out to Albuquerque 10am Thanksgiving morning and I have to say that it was one of the least stressful travel experiences I’ve ever had -- no traffic on the drive to ORD, no lines; I didn’t even have time to pull out my driver’s license before I hit the TSA podium. I walked straight through to a screening line. There were agents hanging around just looking for people to screen. The only line I stood in was the Starbucks. We even scored 1st-Class upgrades; the plane was only half full. I even think we left early. A very pleasant change from my ORD-DFW commute.</li>\n<li>The only real downside I noticed was when we hit the Hertz Presidents Club aisle in Albuquerque. It was pretty picked over, leaving behind an odd selection of Dodge vehicles -- the choice was between Dodge Challenger muscle cars or fully tricked out Ram Hemi king-cab pick-ups. I can’t say that I’ve ever faced quite that choice. The Challenger, with rear-wheel drive, wouldn’t be great if we got snow at elevation, but the Rams were just huge, and trying to parallel park that in Santa Fe would be an event. It took me a bit to decide. I went with the Challenger and hoped for clear skies.</li>\n<li>Well, there was one more downside that I didn’t discover until we unpacked in our little casita in Santa Fe that night. I’d left my Samsung tablet in that nice first-class seat. Not in the seat-back pocket; I always check there before leaving. There was a side compartment along the middle armrest that I’d put my tablet in when I folded up the table to hit the lav. Bad mistake. That compartment was deep, I couldn’t see the tablet; and I didn’t think to check it before deplaning.</li>\n<li>I hit Twitter, sending United a direct message asking about ABQ lost-and-found. I wanted to ping them to see if the cleaning crew had turn anything in since I’d be back at ABQ for our Monday morning flight to LAS. I’ve done this before when getting back coats that I’ve left in overhead compartments. The Twitter customer service agent instead sent me a link to a web form to fill out. I cooled my jets over the weekend and on Monday morning, swung by the United Baggage Services office to see if they had my tablet. Walked past the American Baggage Services office -- open; the Delta Baggage Services office -- open; to the United Baggage Services office -- closed. It was supposed to open at 9am. I waited for 15-20 minutes, and then had to head up to catch my Vegas flight. I wasn’t happy.</li>\n<li>Which changed that afternoon when I got a call from an unknown Cleveland number on my mobile. Robocallers have found my mobile number, so I usually let unrecognized numbers go straight to voicemail, but I remember Continental having a Cleveland hub before the United merger, so maybe this was a United person calling. And it was! “I think I have your tablet; could you verify your screensaver” It’s a wall painting of pink flamingos. “Yup, that’s it; we’ve got it” (Actually, it’s street art from Paris’ Montmartre neighborhood; you can see the picture on the TravelCommons’ Instagram feed). She told me that they no longer keep found items at the airports; they ship them the next day to centralized lost-&amp;-found centers for sorting and processing. So, even if the ABQ baggage services office had been open that morning, they wouldn’t have had my tablet; they probably shipped it to Cleveland that weekend.<br />After I got off the phone, I got an e-mail with a link to pick a shipping method and pay. The day after I got home from Vegas, my flamingo’d tablet landed on my doorstep.</li>\n<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/copperhead/40520\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen</a> by copperhead (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: Admiral Bob, Javolenus , Sackjo22</li>\n</ul>\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<ul class=\"\">\n<li>Couple of listener notes on the last episode. Nick Gassman wrote:\n<ul>\n<li>“When you were talking about car rental collision damage waiver, I took it to mean that that you pay the rental company for the insurance. It\'s much cheaper (at least in the UK) to purchase this separately. You can generally get it on a per-trip or annual basis, just like regular travel insurance.”</li>\n<li>Nick, good point on that. You get used to accepting the waiver on business travel because, for many corporate rates, it’s all rolled in or you’re just going to expense it. And for US domestic travel, at least for me, my regular auto insurance covers it. So that leaves international travel. Chase did a good job of handling the accident in the UK. But looking at a separate company is a good idea. May try that out the next time I rent in Spain.</li>\n<li>“And about BlueTooth speakers, you mentioned about using the speaker as an accessory for your phone - I assume you know that the Jambox can do this. I\'ve often used it at work in rooms with no speakerphone. I\'ve also now upgraded to the Bose Mini 2 Soundlink. It is heavier and slightly larger, but when going on holiday the difference in sound quality is significant and more than makes up for it.”</li>\n<li>Yup, I’ve used the Jambox for many conference calls though I’ve never checked the quality difference between it and the speaker, or maybe I should say the microphone on my iPhone. I’ve never swapped between them on a call and asked the person on the other end which is better. Something to try out on the next call where we’re waiting for the last person to join.</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n<li>Steve Frick picked up on something when I was talking about notebooks in last episode’s Traveler Gift Guide segment\n<ul>\n<li>“It sounds like you’ve also entered the “Fountain Pen Zone” as well. They’re like tattoos, you can’t have just one. I had used a Mont Blanc rollerball that I purchased in 1991, it’s been broken and repaired several times and it had been my go-to pen… until someone gave me a fountain pen. Now several years later I have a collection on fountain pens, as well as inks. Ughhhh just what I needed another obsession. Great episode!”</li>\n<li>Yup, I started with a plastic Waterman fountain pen that I bought many years ago on a business trip to Brussels. I just had that one pen for the longest time. But then I discovered the Internet, or more specifically, fountain pen forums and blogs and podcasts on the Internet. And, as you might guess, it went downhill pretty quickly. Sometimes my biggest decision of the morning is which color of ink to use that day. Which itself says something about the state of my daily choices...</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n<li>I said earlier that I was in Vegas a few weeks back for the big Amazon Web Services convention. It was huge; 50,000 attendees, mostly pudgy, pasty-faced guys power walking up and down the strip, backpacks strapped down, ignoring the showgirls offering pictures so they wouldn’t be late to, say, the sold-out tutorial on best practices for ingesting streaming data from IoT devices into AWS’ new time series database. For me, that nerd-meets-baller dichotomy hit one morning at 7:30. I was in a marching nerd stream weaving through the casino floor of the MGM Grand when out from behind a slot machine a woman with a half-filled plastic glass shouted “Very impressive that you all have some place important to go this early.” No one broke stride. She shrugged and went back to her machine. There was a lot of walking, though, for that show. It was spread out from the MGM Grand up to the Venetian. The Health app on my iPhone clocked me at 10 miles of walking a day. Glad it wasn’t in the summer.</li>\n<li>I mentioned in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/05/31/podcast-141-when-you-think-the-tsa-is-bad-expired-money/\">an earlier episode</a> that I’d found a box of old European currency when cleaning off some shelves. It was from the late ‘80’s/early ‘90’s -- the pre-Euro days. I have some Belgian and French francs, a Deutsche mark, an Irish pound note, and an Italian 1000 lire note that I started using as a bookmark in my notebook. After one of these Amazon sessions, a young Italian woman looked over and commented on my lire bookmark. “Oh my God! I haven’t seen one of those in forever,” she said. She talked about her grandparents never really accepting that the lire was gone. “It’s good that we have the euro,” she said, “but it’ll never be the lire.” Which, remembering back 20-30 years ago, I thought might be a good thing, but decided not to say it; didn’t want to break her nostalgia. “I forgot how small it was!” she said.</li>\n<li>I was trading notes with friends a few weeks back after the Marriott hack was announced. It really is no longer a matter of if your personal data will be breached, but how often. A common theme across many of those Amazon talks was that mistakes will happen, so your cloud design should “limit the blast radius” of those mistakes. If I apply that same concept to website breaches (travel and otherwise), I’d freeze all my credit reports, have a unique password for each site, provide just the minimum amount of information required for a transaction, and I wouldn’t store/save credit card or other information with them. Indeed, if I really burrowed in, I’d use virtual credit card numbers from a bank that provides them. I’m pretty good except for the last one; I haven’t found a good bank that easily provides virtual card number. It all comes down to your personal trade-off point between resilience to a breach and convenience.</li>\n<li>With the Christmas season officially clicking in the day after Thanksgiving, TBS and TNT seem to have “Love Actually\" on power rotation every weekend. I like it; it’s a good Christmas movie. But picking up the end of it night while channel flipping in Santa Fe, I just couldn’t buy that scene toward the end when Liam Neeson encourages his stepson to breach Heathrow Airport security in the name of true love. I might be a bit of a Scrooge, but how does a 10-yr old kid commit a serious felony and not get gang-tackled at the gate and thrown into juvi? I dunno. Maybe I should stick to A Charlie Brown Christmas...</li>\n<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our new Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/NiGiD/48586\">O Tannenbaum / Oh Christmas Tree</a> by Martijn de Boer (NiGiD) (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license.  Ft: Admiral Bob (admiralbob77)</span></li>\n</ul>\n<p><strong>Holiday Travel Tips</strong></p>\n<ul>\n<li>I posted my kinda annual Top 10 Holiday Travel Tips a few weeks back. It feels like something I’m required to do to keep my status as a semi-professional travel blogger and podcaster. Not a lot of the flying tips have changed over the last few lists -- pay a bit extra to fly non-stop, don’t take tight connections, catch an early flight if you can, carry your luggage on if you can -- because not much has changed regarding air travel -- it’s a time when a huge bubble of travelers hit an infrastructure that is, for the most part, already operating near capacity and at the time of year when much of that capacity could get disrupted by weather. This year, US plane loads were over 80% -- as if you didn’t already know that hearing the constant refrain of gate agents and flight attendants - “This will be a completely full flight…” And no new airport or runway capacity has been added in the high traffic areas -- maybe since ORD finished spending a billion dollars straightening out its runways. The LGA renovation will hopefully eliminate the leaking roof and give us better food options, but after spending $8 billion dollars, there won’t be any new runway capacity.</li>\n<li>Having said that, I think the aggressive roll-out of TSA PreCheck has helped everyone -- the TSA, frequent travelers who’ve bought PreCheck (signing up for PreCheck moved up to #2 on this year’s list), and even the infrequent ones who haven’t -- by increasing security capacity by increasing “thru-put” for lack of a better term. Security seems to, on the whole, move along a bit brisker. Yes, there are still too many times when it doesn’t, but it’s been a while since we’ve seen a full-scale TSA meltdown causing people to miss flights.<br />Bringing your own battery pack cracked the top 10 for the first time this year at #7. It followed Use Twitter as a Concierge Service and Use Multiple Flight Tracking Apps at numbers 5 and 6 respectively. The more we rely on our smartphones for travel information, the more important power is. And when the holiday crowds are hovering over those Samsung or Verizon power towers, you want an alternative.</li>\n<li>A lot of the Top 10 lists I read end with a second list, of those things that didn’t quite make the Top 10. For me, some of those are:</li>\n<li><strong>Travel on the Actual Holiday</strong> - Our Thanksgiving flight out to Santa Fe reminded me of this tip. It didn’t make the Top 10 because not everyone can pull it off. Tough to fly or drive out Christmas morning if you have young kids, or if you have Italian in-laws who do the whole Feast of The Seven Fishes on Christmas Eve. But, if you can, it’s a quantum level decrease in travel stress. You’ll probably just glide through your travels.</li>\n<li><strong>Take Mass Transit to the Airport</strong> - Everybody worries about TSA lines, but just getting into the airport to be able to get into the TSA line can be a hassle. Airports with a single access road that goes past all the terminals -- think ORD, LAX, LGA -- can have 15-20 minute backups. When the construction at LGA first started, the backups were so bad, people were getting out of their cabs when they were still on the Grand Central Parkway and walking up the off ramps. Now, LGA doesn’t have mass transit access -- some of that $8 billion if for that -- but most airports do -- ORD, ATL, EWR and JFK, DCA,.... If it’s available, use it to skip at least one line.</li>\n<li>And my last “almost made it” tip, <strong>Bring Cash</strong> -- way back in episode #136, last December, I talked about what seems to be a generational split, maybe right around 30 or 35 -- old Millennials/youngster Gen X’s -- about the need to carry cash. No matter which side you sit on that split, it’s a fact that cash can get you out of a packed airport bar quicker than a card if you need to bolt for your flight -- maybe a delay got pulled up, your gate got moved to the next terminal, or you just misread the boarding time. Being able to lay down, say a twenty and 3 ones, on the bar with your check is a whole lot quicker than waiting for the waitress to show back up, take your card, walk to the back to run it, and then bring it back again for you to sign. This is where the Europeans with those mobile terminals are light-years ahead of us. But until we catch up -- which means we have to be trusted to remember a 4-digit PIN code -- bring cash so you can dash.</li>\n<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/44580\"> What Child is This (Instrumental)</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license.  Ft: Jeris</span></li>\n</ul>\n<p><b>Notes on Santa Fe</b></p>\n<ul>\n<li>As I mentioned earlier, Irene and I headed out to Santa Fe, New Mexico for the Thanksgiving holidays. Since both kids were gone, we figured “Why not?” And since I had to be in Vegas on Monday, it just made sense to head west.</li>\n<li>I’m going to do a full write-up on our trip in a blog post in a week or so; the first of a new series of Road Trip posts, where we’ll break the TravelCommons format a bit. Road Trip posts will be more about the destination than the journey -- things we did, places we stayed, ate, drank beer…. But here, just some notes.</li>\n<li>It had been a while since we’d been in Santa Fe -- maybe over 10 years; I haven’t paged back through my calendar to check -- but getting out of that Hertz Dodge Challenger that we’d blasted up I-25 -- the speed limit is 75 mph once you’re outside of Albuquerque -- I was immediately hit with the piñon smell, that unique pinewood smoke smell I only get in Santa Fe. I’ve been around a lot of pinewood fires in, say, Colorado and Arizona, but the piñon smoke billowing out of a kiva fireplace is a unique smell, and one that I love.<br />Visiting Santa Fe, there’s an interesting mix of highbrow and lowbrow -- doing the Georgia O’Keefe museum and a run up Canyon Road through all the art galleries, or hunting the best green chile cheeseburger and then burning it off on a hike in the Sangre de Cristo mountains. This visit was all lowbrow.</li>\n<li>Friday, we did 1,700 vertical feet up the Atalaya Trail. The parking lot at the trailhead at St John’s College was pretty full, but the trail wasn’t crowded once we got going. It actually came in handy at times to see people - let us know we weren’t lost. There were some trail markings, but not to the extent we were used to in, say, the UK. 5 ½ hours later, we were sitting at the bar at Second St Brewing’s place in the Railyard district, replacing whatever calories we’d burned off with a green chile cheeseburger and a side of green chile cheese fries. Double lashings of american cheese, which I know is just a processed cheese food, but the creamy gooey-ness of it blended well with the chile bite, and a pint of one of the better American-made bitters I’ve had.</li>\n<li>Saturday, after hiking through Tent Rocks National Monument, we ended up on Guadalupe St, which feels like the lowbrow counterpart to the plaza or Canyon Road. We stopped in at Cowgirl BBQ for margaritas. During our last visit, I stole/borrowed their margarita recipe for my own. We worked through their margarita menu while listening to a group of local guys talk about taking dancing lessons and a woman at the bar telling us that, back in the ‘70’s when she moved to Santa Fe, cowboys still rode horses through town -- across the plaza and down Canyon Rd -- throwing cash down in Canyon Rd bars to buy rounds for the house.</li>\n<li>On Sunday, we walked down Canyon Road, looking into the sculpture gardens of all the art galleries. It seemed a popular Sunday morning stroll. I’d see some older couples -- older than me; at, say, the beginning of retirement, walking in high-end Western garb -- nice flat-brimmed hats, fur-trimmed duster coats. Kinda California money does cowboy. Would be interesting to see how those ‘70’s cowboys would fit in today.</li>\n</ul>\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<ul>\n<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #147</li>\n<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and now on <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li>\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_147.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>\n<!-- /wp:html -->','Podcast #149 — Dining Single; Airlines Need To Tell Us More','','inherit','closed','closed','','2373-revision-v1','','','2019-03-19 21:19:51','2019-03-20 02:19:51','',2373,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/19/2373-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2380,1,'2019-03-19 21:31:02','2019-03-20 02:31:02','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Trying to wrap up travel for the year so I can hunker down in the TravelCommons bunker outside of Chicago and&nbsp;<em>not</em> worry about any forecasted snow. But for those of you who are traveling, here\'s an episode to keep you occupied in the airport, train, or car traffic. We talk about some travel tips that didn\'t make my Top 10 Tips blog post, the great experience of flying on Thanksgiving day, losing my tablet on that flight but soon recovering it, storming Las Vegas with 50,000 other Amazon Web Services users, and some thoughts from our trip to Santa Fe, New Mexico. All this and more at the&nbsp;<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_147.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<figure><iframe src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/546788592&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"></iframe></figure>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show Notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show Notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #149:</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the Hyatt Place in State College, PA, feeling a bit more positive about life after a couple of warm weather getaways -- an afternoon meeting in Phoenix that I happily turned into a 3-day stay by flying in early for a “prep” session and staying late “in case our session ran long”; and then a long weekend with friends on the Gulf side of Florida. It was a nice break to walk outside without layering up coats, and scarves, and hats, and without taking an Arctic blast in the face. Not that it was toasty in Phoenix, but I was walking around downtown in a blazer, passing people -- natives, I’d guess -- in puffy down jackets. Not that they were wrong; it’s just that my reference point was that -22 degree polar vortex day. </li><li>Reminds me of a time many years ago when I was doing a project in J’burg South Africa in July -- our summer, their winter. We’re going to a restaurant for dinner. The inside is full, but the outside tables are available. The owner apologizes, offers to bring us blankets. My colleague from Detroit is wearing a polo shirt; I’m in dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up. “Thanks, but we’re fine,” we tell him. Halfway through the meal, he comes out, offering to move us inside now that a table has freed up. He’s wearing a parka. “No, really, we’re OK,” we tell him. Different reference points on what’s cold.</li><li>Both trips -- out to Phoenix and down to Ft Myers airport, were full of young families, also getting away from the cold, maybe to stay with parents/ grandparents who’d retired in more reasonable climes. I flew Southwest to Phoenix and United to Ft Myers, and I came to appreciate what, before this, was, to me, an undiscovered benefit of Southwest’s open seating. Because I was in the B boarding group, those families with young children boarded before me. Walking down the aisle, I could spot the crying babies -- there, and there, and there -- and could just keep walking, until I was behind them all. Sure, I was in the back of the plane, and it took me a while to deplane, but that was a very small price I was willing to pay for 3 hours of relative peace. </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>In past episodes, we talked about the bare bones budget airlines -- Spirit and Frontier in the US; Ryanair and EasyJet in Europe, and Wow Air and Norwegian as the second coming of Laker Airways, doing TransAtlantic budget flight. Of those, I’ve flown Frontier, EasyJet, and Wow Air which, as a group, seems like the less severe set of the budgets. Ryanair and Spirit always seem to have a harder edge about the “budget-ness.” And then there’s their impact on the mainline carriers -- United, American, and Delta’s basic economy fares. Usually, when I look at a mainline carrier’s basic economy fare, the difference vs. their regular economy fare isn’t big enough to make up extra hassles. But booking our trip down to Florida, the difference on United was over $100 a ticket. Irene and I figured we could put up with a few hassles for over $200. But as dug a bit further, we didn’t find as many hassles as we thought. Because we’re both United Gold, there was no limitation on carry-on bags and we boarded in the usual Group 1. The only downgrade was that we had to pay to reserve seats and we couldn’t book them in Economy Plus -- the aisles with the extra legroom. Even after paying for reserved seats, we still saved enough to pay for a couple of nice dinners of grilled grouper. </li><li>Our friends who joined us from Milwaukee flew down on American through DFW without a hassle. Their flight back -- a direct to Milwaukee on Frontier -- not so much. Their flight was supposed to leave at 7:45pm. Around lunch, they received a note that their flight was delayed by 5 hours. What? We checked that again. We pulled up the FlightAware app, searched for their flight, and then started walked its planned flight legs back, hitting the “Where’s My Plane?” button until we found it -- still on the ground in Milwaukee 6 hours after its scheduled departure time. The weather wasn’t that bad, so it had to be a maintenance problem, which is a huge problem when flying budget and regional airlines because their model is to bounce a plane from place to place rather than flying it out of a hub where they could swap out a busted plane if need be. So that 6 hour delay was going to cascade through that day’s schedule. Our friends finally left Ft Myers at 2:45am. Which is something I’ve noticed about Frontier -- I’ve never seen them cancel a flight no matter how late they leave. A regional airline would’ve cancelled that flight way earlier, but not Frontier. I don’t know how their crews don’t time out, but I kinda admire them for getting you home no matter what time. Would be way better <em>not </em> to take a 7-hr delay, but at least they get you home.</li><li>This year, I got dropped a status level on Hertz, from President’s Circle down to Five Star. I didn’t do 20 rentals last year, and I missed an offer back in December to pay some points to keep my status. But, I can’t say that I notice the downgrade too much. When I was in Phoenix, I snagged a great Chrysler 300 with custom black rims. In Ft Myers, I got a brand new GMC Terrain SUV that held 4 adults very comfortable… Though I have to say that the Terrain through me for a loop when I got in. I’ve rented all sort of different cars. I get in, pair my phone to the phone, adjust the mirrors, put it in Drive, and pull out. With the Terrain, I was good with all of that right up until the “put it in Drive” step. I look down at the console -- no gear shift, no gear dial (the Chrysler experience talking). Then grab the stalk on the right side of the steering column and turn on the windshield wipers. I’m looking all over -- “WTF? Where is the damn gear shift?” From the back seat, Kristin points under the climate control “It’s right there”. And then I see, a line of buttons -- P, R, N, D. I push the D button and off we go. The last time I say push button gear selectors was when I was a kid, riding in somebody’s old Plymouth. I mean, come on GMC, do we really need <em>another</em> type of gear selection? Searching the Internet later for the Terrain’s gear buttons yields a whole slew of “Worst Shifter Design” article featuring these buttons. I don’t know which was worse -- the actual buttons or me, the alpha road warrior, getting back seat instructions on how to put a rental car in gear.</li><li>Another new thing I learned at Hertz Ft Myers -- besides where to find gear buttons -- is that, for Hertz Gold customers, there’s no additional driver fee for your spouse. I’ve been in Hertz Gold since it started, but I never connected to this benefit. It’s saves real money -- additional driver fees can run $10/day -- and hassle. Another reason to like the Hertz Gold program.</li><li>TravelCommons made our little local newspaper in an installment of their “Ask The Expert” series with the sub-headline “How can travel be more relaxing and fun?”  When Sandy, the reporter, emailed me to schedule the interview, she wanted to talk about advice for successful spring break travel. So I started off talking about how those spring break families should avoid traveling during road warrior rush hours -- Monday mornings and Thursday evenings. “Boarding a plane filled with busy professionals can quickly rob you of that pre-vacation high,” Sandy wrote, “Peacock advise leisure travelers to avoid sharing a plane with these potential buzzkills.” Such as me. The last thing a family heading for Disney wants to encounter is people like me powering down the concourse. I also recounted some of the tips that you’ve seen in my Top Holiday Travel Tips posts -- fly early in the day, avoid regional jets, and no one-and-done outfits so you can get everything you need into a carry-on. And I talked about turning long layovers into mini-vacations with our upcoming Stockholm layover as an example. Of course, I didn’t mention that a lot of these layovers turn into taproom crawls, like in last year’s video of the Midway layover taproom tour, and potentially this Stockholm stop thanks to TravelCommons’ listener Rob Cheshire’s custom Google map. No, I figured than might be a bit much for our nice local paper. Sandy turned our 45-minute conversation into a nice article. I posted a picture of the article on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">TravelCommons Facebook page</a> since they don’t seem to put their issues on-line. </li><li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/12/podcast-120-where-do-guidebooks-fit-in-i-hate-shopping-for-suitcases/\">episode #120</a>, back in March 2016, I asked the question -- Where do physical guidebooks fit in the world of apps, review websites, social media, and podcasts? Back then, I was planning Andrew’s and my visit to Iceland. Now, getting ready to head over to Brittany, France for 10 days, I bought two physical guidebooks to take with us. Irene wanted DK’s Eyewitness Travel; it was her favorite out of the stack of guidebooks she checked out of the library. While I did a throwback, picked up our go-to book from our PK (pre-kids) days of travel, Michelin’s Green Guide. The DK book is definitely more visually punchy, but I figured Michelin, a French company, should have Brittany covered pretty well, and they published this new edition just last month. Maybe I’m getting lazy in my old age, but I’m kinda glad to have everything in one spot -- a bit of local history, touring maps, city guides -- rather than having to rummage through multiple PDFs in an Evernote folder. However, I took a pass on Amazon’s recommended add-on of Michelin’s Brittany Road and Tourist Map No. 512. I’ve topped up my local SIM for 2.5 GB of mobile data; I’m sticking with Google Maps. I maybe old school, but I’m not going back to the Dark Ages.</li><li>And if you have any travel rants, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our new Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com. </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Dining Single</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Our daughter Claire is heading down to London for her first week of Spring Break and will then meet us in Paris for our Brittany trip. &nbsp;Planning it, we got talking about eating alone on the road. Years ago, it used to be more awkward - escorted to the small table off in the corner, a server a bit ticked off at the small check and therefore small tip. You’d read the newspaper or a book between courses to keep yourself occupied, wrap it up pretty quickly and head back to the hotel.</li><li>For guy travelers, the sports bar was (and still is) the exception to that rule. Fine, sit me in a booth alone as long as I have a clear view of walls of TV screens showing all ESPN all the time – ESPN, ESPN-2, ESPN-3, ESPN-U, ESPN News… No need for a book, especially over the next few weeks watching the opening rounds of the NCAA tournaments when I can watch a couple of games at once. Rush out? Hell no, give me another large Coors Light, we haven’t even hit half time.</li><li>Most restaurants now serve a full menu at the bar, complete with a full set up -- placemats, maybe a bread basket. Might be a touch cramped at happy hour, but it’s usually nice to be in the main flow of things rather than off in the corner. The trend toward shared plates , while getting a bit tired when dining with a group (“OK, what can we all agree on?”) works great for the single diner. If I want a bit of variety without overeating, I now have choices beyond sushi or tapas bars. Not that those are bad choices. I have no doubt that Claire will find her way to the bar at Barrafina in Soho.</li><li>Sitting at the bar also gave you a chance for a little social interaction, some serendipity; with the bartender, maybe with the guy sitting next to you. Some years ago, on my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/08/14/food-and-drink-highlights-from-my-drive-south/\">2,100-mile circle tour through the South</a>, a guy next to me at a Louisville bar told me to check out a restaurant in the not-yet-hip Bywater neighborhood in New Orleans; turned out to be a great recommendation. But I get less and less of that as people eat and just interact with their smartphones. Maybe Claire wouldn’t be keen on random bar conversations, but I kinda miss it.</li><li>Nowadays, where I do find that interaction is microbrewery taprooms. Sure, people still have their phones out to check their tasting flight into Untappd, but there’s an acceptance, almost an expectation, that people will “nerd out” about hops and malt and yeast esters with each other and with folks behind the bar. During one of my Dallas trips, I found my way to Grapevine Craft Brewing on a rainy Weds night. The brewmaster was pulling the taps, passing out some barrel samples, and we all spinning our beer nerd propellers real hard.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><b>From The Travel Story Archives -- Airlines Need To Tell Us More</b></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Prepping for that interview with the local paper had me spelunking deep into the TravelCommons archives, fixing some broken links and listening to some of those early shows for the first time in a long time. A couple of things struck me -- the really poor sound quality I got from the little iRiver MP3 recorder that I was using, and how good some of those early travel stories were.</li><li> So here’s one from<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/09/24/podcast-15-begging-for-business-needing-to-know-at-35000-ft/\"> episode #15</a>, very long-time TC listener Allan Marko talking about wanting to know just a little bit more about what an airline maintenance guy is doing.  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #149</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_147.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #149 — Dining Single; Airlines Need To Tell Us More','','inherit','closed','closed','','2373-revision-v1','','','2019-03-19 21:31:02','2019-03-20 02:31:02','',2373,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/19/2373-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2381,1,'2019-03-19 21:34:05','2019-03-20 02:34:05','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Trying to wrap up travel for the year so I can hunker down in the TravelCommons bunker outside of Chicago and&nbsp;<em>not</em> worry about any forecasted snow. But for those of you who are traveling, here\'s an episode to keep you occupied in the airport, train, or car traffic. We talk about some travel tips that didn\'t make my Top 10 Tips blog post, the great experience of flying on Thanksgiving day, losing my tablet on that flight but soon recovering it, storming Las Vegas with 50,000 other Amazon Web Services users, and some thoughts from our trip to Santa Fe, New Mexico. All this and more at the&nbsp;<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_147.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<figure><iframe src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/546788592&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"></iframe></figure>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show Notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show Notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #149:</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the Hyatt Place in State College, PA, feeling a bit more positive about life after a couple of warm weather getaways -- an afternoon meeting in Phoenix that I happily turned into a 3-day stay by flying in early for a “prep” session and staying late “in case our session ran long”; and then a long weekend with friends on the Gulf side of Florida. It was a nice break to walk outside without layering up coats, and scarves, and hats, and without taking an Arctic blast in the face. Not that it was toasty in Phoenix, but I was walking around downtown in a blazer, passing people -- natives, I’d guess -- in puffy down jackets. Not that they were wrong; it’s just that my reference point was that -22 degree polar vortex day. </li><li>Reminds me of a time many years ago when I was doing a project in J’burg South Africa in July -- our summer, their winter. We’re going to a restaurant for dinner. The inside is full, but the outside tables are available. The owner apologizes, offers to bring us blankets. My colleague from Detroit is wearing a polo shirt; I’m in dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up. “Thanks, but we’re fine,” we tell him. Halfway through the meal, he comes out, offering to move us inside now that a table has freed up. He’s wearing a parka. “No, really, we’re OK,” we tell him. Different reference points on what’s cold.</li><li>Both trips -- out to Phoenix and down to Ft Myers airport, were full of young families, also getting away from the cold, maybe to stay with parents/ grandparents who’d retired in more reasonable climes. I flew Southwest to Phoenix and United to Ft Myers, and I came to appreciate what, before this, was, to me, an undiscovered benefit of Southwest’s open seating. Because I was in the B boarding group, those families with young children boarded before me. Walking down the aisle, I could spot the crying babies -- there, and there, and there -- and could just keep walking, until I was behind them all. Sure, I was in the back of the plane, and it took me a while to deplane, but that was a very small price I was willing to pay for 3 hours of relative peace. </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>In past episodes, we talked about the bare bones budget airlines -- Spirit and Frontier in the US; Ryanair and EasyJet in Europe, and Wow Air and Norwegian as the second coming of Laker Airways, doing TransAtlantic budget flight. Of those, I’ve flown Frontier, EasyJet, and Wow Air which, as a group, seems like the less severe set of the budgets. Ryanair and Spirit always seem to have a harder edge about the “budget-ness.” And then there’s their impact on the mainline carriers -- United, American, and Delta’s basic economy fares. Usually, when I look at a mainline carrier’s basic economy fare, the difference vs. their regular economy fare isn’t big enough to make up extra hassles. But booking our trip down to Florida, the difference on United was over $100 a ticket. Irene and I figured we could put up with a few hassles for over $200. But as dug a bit further, we didn’t find as many hassles as we thought. Because we’re both United Gold, there was no limitation on carry-on bags and we boarded in the usual Group 1. The only downgrade was that we had to pay to reserve seats and we couldn’t book them in Economy Plus -- the aisles with the extra legroom. Even after paying for reserved seats, we still saved enough to pay for a couple of nice dinners of grilled grouper. </li><li>Our friends who joined us from Milwaukee flew down on American through DFW without a hassle. Their flight back -- a direct to Milwaukee on Frontier -- not so much. Their flight was supposed to leave at 7:45pm. Around lunch, they received a note that their flight was delayed by 5 hours. What? We checked that again. We pulled up the FlightAware app, searched for their flight, and then started walked its planned flight legs back, hitting the “Where’s My Plane?” button until we found it -- still on the ground in Milwaukee 6 hours after its scheduled departure time. The weather wasn’t that bad, so it had to be a maintenance problem, which is a huge problem when flying budget and regional airlines because their model is to bounce a plane from place to place rather than flying it out of a hub where they could swap out a busted plane if need be. So that 6 hour delay was going to cascade through that day’s schedule. Our friends finally left Ft Myers at 2:45am. Which is something I’ve noticed about Frontier -- I’ve never seen them cancel a flight no matter how late they leave. A regional airline would’ve cancelled that flight way earlier, but not Frontier. I don’t know how their crews don’t time out, but I kinda admire them for getting you home no matter what time. Would be way better <em>not </em>&nbsp;to take a 7-hr delay, but at least they get you home.</li><li>This year, I got dropped a status level on Hertz, from President’s Circle down to Five Star. I didn’t do 20 rentals last year, and I missed an offer back in December to pay some points to keep my status. But, I can’t say that I notice the downgrade too much. When I was in Phoenix, I snagged a great Chrysler 300 with custom black rims. In Ft Myers, I got a brand new GMC Terrain SUV that held 4 adults very comfortable… Though I have to say that the Terrain through me for a loop when I got in. I’ve rented all sort of different cars. I get in, pair my phone to the phone, adjust the mirrors, put it in Drive, and pull out. With the Terrain, I was good with all of that right up until the “put it in Drive” step. I look down at the console -- no gear shift, no gear dial (the Chrysler experience talking). Then grab the stalk on the right side of the steering column and turn on the windshield wipers. I’m looking all over -- “WTF? Where is the damn gear shift?” From the back seat, Kristin points under the climate control “It’s right there”. And then I see, a line of buttons -- P, R, N, D. I push the D button and off we go. The last time I say push button gear selectors was when I was a kid, riding in somebody’s old Plymouth. I mean, come on GMC, do we really need <em>another</em> type of gear selection? Searching the Internet later for the Terrain’s gear buttons yields a whole slew of “Worst Shifter Design” article featuring these buttons. I don’t know which was worse -- the actual buttons or me, the alpha road warrior, getting back seat instructions on how to put a rental car in gear.</li><li>Another new thing I learned at Hertz Ft Myers -- besides where to find gear buttons -- is that, for Hertz Gold customers, there’s no additional driver fee for your spouse. I’ve been in Hertz Gold since it started, but I never connected to this benefit. It’s saves real money -- additional driver fees can run $10/day -- and hassle. Another reason to like the Hertz Gold program.</li><li>TravelCommons made our little local newspaper in an installment of their “Ask The Expert” series with the sub-headline “How can travel be more relaxing and fun?” &nbsp;When Sandy, the reporter, emailed me to schedule the interview, she wanted to talk about advice for successful spring break travel. So I started off talking about how those spring break families should avoid traveling during road warrior rush hours -- Monday mornings and Thursday evenings. “Boarding a plane filled with busy professionals can quickly rob you of that pre-vacation high,” Sandy wrote, “Peacock advise leisure travelers to avoid sharing a plane with these potential buzzkills.” Such as me. The last thing a family heading for Disney wants to encounter is people like me powering down the concourse. I also recounted some of the tips that you’ve seen in my Top Holiday Travel Tips posts -- fly early in the day, avoid regional jets, and no one-and-done outfits so you can get everything you need into a carry-on. And I talked about turning long layovers into mini-vacations with our upcoming Stockholm layover as an example. Of course, I didn’t mention that a lot of these layovers turn into taproom crawls, like in last year’s video of the Midway layover taproom tour, and potentially this Stockholm stop thanks to TravelCommons’ listener Rob Cheshire’s custom Google map. No, I figured than might be a bit much for our nice local paper. Sandy turned our 45-minute conversation into a nice article. I posted a picture of the article on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">TravelCommons Facebook page</a> since they don’t seem to put their issues on-line. </li><li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/12/podcast-120-where-do-guidebooks-fit-in-i-hate-shopping-for-suitcases/\">episode #120</a>, back in March 2016, I asked the question -- Where do physical guidebooks fit in the world of apps, review websites, social media, and podcasts? Back then, I was planning Andrew’s and my visit to Iceland. Now, getting ready to head over to Brittany, France for 10 days, I bought two physical guidebooks to take with us. Irene wanted DK’s Eyewitness Travel; it was her favorite out of the stack of guidebooks she checked out of the library. While I did a throwback, picked up our go-to book from our PK (pre-kids) days of travel, Michelin’s Green Guide. The DK book is definitely more visually punchy, but I figured Michelin, a French company, should have Brittany covered pretty well, and they published this new edition just last month. Maybe I’m getting lazy in my old age, but I’m kinda glad to have everything in one spot -- a bit of local history, touring maps, city guides -- rather than having to rummage through multiple PDFs in an Evernote folder. However, I took a pass on Amazon’s recommended add-on of Michelin’s Brittany Road and Tourist Map No. 512. I’ve topped up my local SIM for 2.5 GB of mobile data; I’m sticking with Google Maps. I maybe old school, but I’m not going back to the Dark Ages.</li><li>And if you have any travel rants, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. &nbsp;The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our new Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com. </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Dining Single</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Our daughter Claire is heading down to London for her first week of Spring Break and will then meet us in Paris for our Brittany trip. &nbsp;Planning it, we got talking about eating alone on the road. Years ago, it used to be more awkward - escorted to the small table off in the corner, a server a bit ticked off at the small check and therefore small tip. You’d read the newspaper or a book between courses to keep yourself occupied, wrap it up pretty quickly and head back to the hotel.</li><li>For guy travelers, the sports bar was (and still is) the exception to that rule. Fine, sit me in a booth alone as long as I have a clear view of walls of TV screens showing all ESPN all the time – ESPN, ESPN-2, ESPN-3, ESPN-U, ESPN News… No need for a book, especially over the next few weeks watching the opening rounds of the NCAA tournaments when I can watch a couple of games at once. Rush out? Hell no, give me another large Coors Light, we haven’t even hit half time.</li><li>Most restaurants now serve a full menu at the bar, complete with a full set up -- placemats, maybe a bread basket. Might be a touch cramped at happy hour, but it’s usually nice to be in the main flow of things rather than off in the corner. The trend toward shared plates , while getting a bit tired when dining with a group (“OK, what can we all agree on?”) works great for the single diner. If I want a bit of variety without overeating, I now have choices beyond sushi or tapas bars. Not that those are bad choices. I have no doubt that Claire will find her way to the bar at Barrafina in Soho.</li><li>Sitting at the bar also gave you a chance for a little social interaction, some serendipity; with the bartender, maybe with the guy sitting next to you. Some years ago, on my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/08/14/food-and-drink-highlights-from-my-drive-south/\">2,100-mile circle tour through the South</a>, a guy next to me at a Louisville bar told me to check out a restaurant in the not-yet-hip Bywater neighborhood in New Orleans; turned out to be a great recommendation. But I get less and less of that as people eat and just interact with their smartphones. Maybe Claire wouldn’t be keen on random bar conversations, but I kinda miss it.</li><li>Nowadays, where I do find that interaction is microbrewery taprooms. Sure, people still have their phones out to check their tasting flight into Untappd, but there’s an acceptance, almost an expectation, that people will “nerd out” about hops and malt and yeast esters with each other and with folks behind the bar. During one of my Dallas trips, I found my way to Grapevine Craft Brewing on a rainy Weds night. The brewmaster was pulling the taps, passing out some barrel samples, and we all spinning our beer nerd propellers real hard.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><b>From The Travel Story Archives -- Airlines Need To Tell Us More</b></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Prepping for that interview with the local paper had me spelunking deep into the TravelCommons archives, fixing some broken links and listening to some of those early shows for the first time in a long time. A couple of things struck me -- the really poor sound quality I got from the little iRiver MP3 recorder that I was using, and how good some of those early travel stories were.</li><li> So here’s one from<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/09/24/podcast-15-begging-for-business-needing-to-know-at-35000-ft/\"> episode #15</a>, very long-time TC listener Allan Marko talking about wanting to know just a little bit more about what an airline maintenance guy is doing.  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #149</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_147.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #149 — Dining Single; Airlines Need To Tell Us More','','inherit','closed','closed','','2373-revision-v1','','','2019-03-19 21:34:05','2019-03-20 02:34:05','',2373,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/19/2373-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2382,1,'2019-03-20 15:45:09','2019-03-20 20:45:09','','DSC_5715','Not Looking Friendly for a Solo Diner','inherit','open','closed','','dsc_5715','','','2019-03-20 15:51:48','2019-03-20 20:51:48','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/DSC_5715.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(2383,1,'2019-03-20 15:50:24','2019-03-20 20:50:24','<!-- wp:html -->\n[caption id=\"attachment_1291\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/2013-12-10-07.55.43.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1291\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/2013-12-10-07.55.43-300x225.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\" /></a> Tough travel day when the deicing fluid freezes[/caption]<p>Trying to wrap up travel for the year so I can hunker down in the TravelCommons bunker outside of Chicago and&nbsp;<em>not</em> worry about any forecasted snow. But for those of you who are traveling, here\'s an episode to keep you occupied in the airport, train, or car traffic. We talk about some travel tips that didn\'t make my Top 10 Tips blog post, the great experience of flying on Thanksgiving day, losing my tablet on that flight but soon recovering it, storming Las Vegas with 50,000 other Amazon Web Services users, and some thoughts from our trip to Santa Fe, New Mexico. All this and more at the&nbsp;<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_147.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<figure><iframe src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/546788592&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"></iframe></figure>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show Notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show Notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #149:</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the Hyatt Place in State College, PA, feeling a bit more positive about life after a couple of warm weather getaways -- an afternoon meeting in Phoenix that I happily turned into a 3-day stay by flying in early for a “prep” session and staying late “in case our session ran long”; and then a long weekend with friends on the Gulf side of Florida. It was a nice break to walk outside without layering up coats, and scarves, and hats, and without taking an Arctic blast in the face. Not that it was toasty in Phoenix, but I was walking around downtown in a blazer, passing people -- natives, I’d guess -- in puffy down jackets. Not that they were wrong; it’s just that my reference point was that -22 degree polar vortex day. </li><li>Reminds me of a time many years ago when I was doing a project in J’burg South Africa in July -- our summer, their winter. We’re going to a restaurant for dinner. The inside is full, but the outside tables are available. The owner apologizes, offers to bring us blankets. My colleague from Detroit is wearing a polo shirt; I’m in dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up. “Thanks, but we’re fine,” we tell him. Halfway through the meal, he comes out, offering to move us inside now that a table has freed up. He’s wearing a parka. “No, really, we’re OK,” we tell him. Different reference points on what’s cold.</li><li>Both trips -- out to Phoenix and down to Ft Myers airport, were full of young families, also getting away from the cold, maybe to stay with parents/ grandparents who’d retired in more reasonable climes. I flew Southwest to Phoenix and United to Ft Myers, and I came to appreciate what, before this, was, to me, an undiscovered benefit of Southwest’s open seating. Because I was in the B boarding group, those families with young children boarded before me. Walking down the aisle, I could spot the crying babies -- there, and there, and there -- and could just keep walking, until I was behind them all. Sure, I was in the back of the plane, and it took me a while to deplane, but that was a very small price I was willing to pay for 3 hours of relative peace. </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>In past episodes, we talked about the bare bones budget airlines -- Spirit and Frontier in the US; Ryanair and EasyJet in Europe, and Wow Air and Norwegian as the second coming of Laker Airways, doing TransAtlantic budget flight. Of those, I’ve flown Frontier, EasyJet, and Wow Air which, as a group, seems like the less severe set of the budgets. Ryanair and Spirit always seem to have a harder edge about the “budget-ness.” And then there’s their impact on the mainline carriers -- United, American, and Delta’s basic economy fares. Usually, when I look at a mainline carrier’s basic economy fare, the difference vs. their regular economy fare isn’t big enough to make up extra hassles. But booking our trip down to Florida, the difference on United was over $100 a ticket. Irene and I figured we could put up with a few hassles for over $200. But as dug a bit further, we didn’t find as many hassles as we thought. Because we’re both United Gold, there was no limitation on carry-on bags and we boarded in the usual Group 1. The only downgrade was that we had to pay to reserve seats and we couldn’t book them in Economy Plus -- the aisles with the extra legroom. Even after paying for reserved seats, we still saved enough to pay for a couple of nice dinners of grilled grouper. </li><li>Our friends who joined us from Milwaukee flew down on American through DFW without a hassle. Their flight back -- a direct to Milwaukee on Frontier -- not so much. Their flight was supposed to leave at 7:45pm. Around lunch, they received a note that their flight was delayed by 5 hours. What? We checked that again. We pulled up the FlightAware app, searched for their flight, and then started walked its planned flight legs back, hitting the “Where’s My Plane?” button until we found it -- still on the ground in Milwaukee 6 hours after its scheduled departure time. The weather wasn’t that bad, so it had to be a maintenance problem, which is a huge problem when flying budget and regional airlines because their model is to bounce a plane from place to place rather than flying it out of a hub where they could swap out a busted plane if need be. So that 6 hour delay was going to cascade through that day’s schedule. Our friends finally left Ft Myers at 2:45am. Which is something I’ve noticed about Frontier -- I’ve never seen them cancel a flight no matter how late they leave. A regional airline would’ve cancelled that flight way earlier, but not Frontier. I don’t know how their crews don’t time out, but I kinda admire them for getting you home no matter what time. Would be way better <em>not </em>&nbsp;to take a 7-hr delay, but at least they get you home.</li><li>This year, I got dropped a status level on Hertz, from President’s Circle down to Five Star. I didn’t do 20 rentals last year, and I missed an offer back in December to pay some points to keep my status. But, I can’t say that I notice the downgrade too much. When I was in Phoenix, I snagged a great Chrysler 300 with custom black rims. In Ft Myers, I got a brand new GMC Terrain SUV that held 4 adults very comfortable… Though I have to say that the Terrain through me for a loop when I got in. I’ve rented all sort of different cars. I get in, pair my phone to the phone, adjust the mirrors, put it in Drive, and pull out. With the Terrain, I was good with all of that right up until the “put it in Drive” step. I look down at the console -- no gear shift, no gear dial (the Chrysler experience talking). Then grab the stalk on the right side of the steering column and turn on the windshield wipers. I’m looking all over -- “WTF? Where is the damn gear shift?” From the back seat, Kristin points under the climate control “It’s right there”. And then I see, a line of buttons -- P, R, N, D. I push the D button and off we go. The last time I say push button gear selectors was when I was a kid, riding in somebody’s old Plymouth. I mean, come on GMC, do we really need <em>another</em> type of gear selection? Searching the Internet later for the Terrain’s gear buttons yields a whole slew of “Worst Shifter Design” article featuring these buttons. I don’t know which was worse -- the actual buttons or me, the alpha road warrior, getting back seat instructions on how to put a rental car in gear.</li><li>Another new thing I learned at Hertz Ft Myers -- besides where to find gear buttons -- is that, for Hertz Gold customers, there’s no additional driver fee for your spouse. I’ve been in Hertz Gold since it started, but I never connected to this benefit. It’s saves real money -- additional driver fees can run $10/day -- and hassle. Another reason to like the Hertz Gold program.</li><li>TravelCommons made our little local newspaper in an installment of their “Ask The Expert” series with the sub-headline “How can travel be more relaxing and fun?” &nbsp;When Sandy, the reporter, emailed me to schedule the interview, she wanted to talk about advice for successful spring break travel. So I started off talking about how those spring break families should avoid traveling during road warrior rush hours -- Monday mornings and Thursday evenings. “Boarding a plane filled with busy professionals can quickly rob you of that pre-vacation high,” Sandy wrote, “Peacock advise leisure travelers to avoid sharing a plane with these potential buzzkills.” Such as me. The last thing a family heading for Disney wants to encounter is people like me powering down the concourse. I also recounted some of the tips that you’ve seen in my Top Holiday Travel Tips posts -- fly early in the day, avoid regional jets, and no one-and-done outfits so you can get everything you need into a carry-on. And I talked about turning long layovers into mini-vacations with our upcoming Stockholm layover as an example. Of course, I didn’t mention that a lot of these layovers turn into taproom crawls, like in last year’s video of the Midway layover taproom tour, and potentially this Stockholm stop thanks to TravelCommons’ listener Rob Cheshire’s custom Google map. No, I figured than might be a bit much for our nice local paper. Sandy turned our 45-minute conversation into a nice article. I posted a picture of the article on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">TravelCommons Facebook page</a> since they don’t seem to put their issues on-line. </li><li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/12/podcast-120-where-do-guidebooks-fit-in-i-hate-shopping-for-suitcases/\">episode #120</a>, back in March 2016, I asked the question -- Where do physical guidebooks fit in the world of apps, review websites, social media, and podcasts? Back then, I was planning Andrew’s and my visit to Iceland. Now, getting ready to head over to Brittany, France for 10 days, I bought two physical guidebooks to take with us. Irene wanted DK’s Eyewitness Travel; it was her favorite out of the stack of guidebooks she checked out of the library. While I did a throwback, picked up our go-to book from our PK (pre-kids) days of travel, Michelin’s Green Guide. The DK book is definitely more visually punchy, but I figured Michelin, a French company, should have Brittany covered pretty well, and they published this new edition just last month. Maybe I’m getting lazy in my old age, but I’m kinda glad to have everything in one spot -- a bit of local history, touring maps, city guides -- rather than having to rummage through multiple PDFs in an Evernote folder. However, I took a pass on Amazon’s recommended add-on of Michelin’s Brittany Road and Tourist Map No. 512. I’ve topped up my local SIM for 2.5 GB of mobile data; I’m sticking with Google Maps. I maybe old school, but I’m not going back to the Dark Ages.</li><li>And if you have any travel rants, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. &nbsp;The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our new Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com. </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Dining Single</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Our daughter Claire is heading down to London for her first week of Spring Break and will then meet us in Paris for our Brittany trip. &nbsp;Planning it, we got talking about eating alone on the road. Years ago, it used to be more awkward - escorted to the small table off in the corner, a server a bit ticked off at the small check and therefore small tip. You’d read the newspaper or a book between courses to keep yourself occupied, wrap it up pretty quickly and head back to the hotel.</li><li>For guy travelers, the sports bar was (and still is) the exception to that rule. Fine, sit me in a booth alone as long as I have a clear view of walls of TV screens showing all ESPN all the time – ESPN, ESPN-2, ESPN-3, ESPN-U, ESPN News… No need for a book, especially over the next few weeks watching the opening rounds of the NCAA tournaments when I can watch a couple of games at once. Rush out? Hell no, give me another large Coors Light, we haven’t even hit half time.</li><li>Most restaurants now serve a full menu at the bar, complete with a full set up -- placemats, maybe a bread basket. Might be a touch cramped at happy hour, but it’s usually nice to be in the main flow of things rather than off in the corner. The trend toward shared plates , while getting a bit tired when dining with a group (“OK, what can we all agree on?”) works great for the single diner. If I want a bit of variety without overeating, I now have choices beyond sushi or tapas bars. Not that those are bad choices. I have no doubt that Claire will find her way to the bar at Barrafina in Soho.</li><li>Sitting at the bar also gave you a chance for a little social interaction, some serendipity; with the bartender, maybe with the guy sitting next to you. Some years ago, on my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/08/14/food-and-drink-highlights-from-my-drive-south/\">2,100-mile circle tour through the South</a>, a guy next to me at a Louisville bar told me to check out a restaurant in the not-yet-hip Bywater neighborhood in New Orleans; turned out to be a great recommendation. But I get less and less of that as people eat and just interact with their smartphones. Maybe Claire wouldn’t be keen on random bar conversations, but I kinda miss it.</li><li>Nowadays, where I do find that interaction is microbrewery taprooms. Sure, people still have their phones out to check their tasting flight into Untappd, but there’s an acceptance, almost an expectation, that people will “nerd out” about hops and malt and yeast esters with each other and with folks behind the bar. During one of my Dallas trips, I found my way to Grapevine Craft Brewing on a rainy Weds night. The brewmaster was pulling the taps, passing out some barrel samples, and we all spinning our beer nerd propellers real hard.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><b>From The Travel Story Archives -- Airlines Need To Tell Us More</b></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Prepping for that interview with the local paper had me spelunking deep into the TravelCommons archives, fixing some broken links and listening to some of those early shows for the first time in a long time. A couple of things struck me -- the really poor sound quality I got from the little iRiver MP3 recorder that I was using, and how good some of those early travel stories were.</li><li> So here’s one from<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/09/24/podcast-15-begging-for-business-needing-to-know-at-35000-ft/\"> episode #15</a>, very long-time TC listener Allan Marko talking about wanting to know just a little bit more about what an airline maintenance guy is doing.  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #149</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_147.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #149 — Dining Single; Airlines Need To Tell Us More','','inherit','closed','closed','','2373-revision-v1','','','2019-03-20 15:50:24','2019-03-20 20:50:24','',2373,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/20/2373-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2385,1,'2019-03-20 15:54:05','2019-03-20 20:54:05','<!-- wp:image {\"id\":2382,\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/DSC_5715-1024x1024.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2382\"/><figcaption>Not Looking Friendly for a Solo Diner</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/DSC_5715-1024x1024.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2382\"/><figcaption>Not Looking Friendly for a Solo Diner</figcaption></figure></div><p>Trying to wrap up travel for the year so I can hunker down in the TravelCommons bunker outside of Chicago and&nbsp;<em>not</em> worry about any forecasted snow. But for those of you who are traveling, here\'s an episode to keep you occupied in the airport, train, or car traffic. We talk about some travel tips that didn\'t make my Top 10 Tips blog post, the great experience of flying on Thanksgiving day, losing my tablet on that flight but soon recovering it, storming Las Vegas with 50,000 other Amazon Web Services users, and some thoughts from our trip to Santa Fe, New Mexico. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_147.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<figure><iframe src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/546788592&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"></iframe></figure>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show Notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show Notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #149:</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the Hyatt Place in State College, PA, feeling a bit more positive about life after a couple of warm weather getaways -- an afternoon meeting in Phoenix that I happily turned into a 3-day stay by flying in early for a “prep” session and staying late “in case our session ran long”; and then a long weekend with friends on the Gulf side of Florida. It was a nice break to walk outside without layering up coats, and scarves, and hats, and without taking an Arctic blast in the face. Not that it was toasty in Phoenix, but I was walking around downtown in a blazer, passing people -- natives, I’d guess -- in puffy down jackets. Not that they were wrong; it’s just that my reference point was that -22 degree polar vortex day. </li><li>Reminds me of a time many years ago when I was doing a project in J’burg South Africa in July -- our summer, their winter. We’re going to a restaurant for dinner. The inside is full, but the outside tables are available. The owner apologizes, offers to bring us blankets. My colleague from Detroit is wearing a polo shirt; I’m in dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up. “Thanks, but we’re fine,” we tell him. Halfway through the meal, he comes out, offering to move us inside now that a table has freed up. He’s wearing a parka. “No, really, we’re OK,” we tell him. Different reference points on what’s cold.</li><li>Both trips -- out to Phoenix and down to Ft Myers airport, were full of young families, also getting away from the cold, maybe to stay with parents/ grandparents who’d retired in more reasonable climes. I flew Southwest to Phoenix and United to Ft Myers, and I came to appreciate what, before this, was, to me, an undiscovered benefit of Southwest’s open seating. Because I was in the B boarding group, those families with young children boarded before me. Walking down the aisle, I could spot the crying babies -- there, and there, and there -- and could just keep walking, until I was behind them all. Sure, I was in the back of the plane, and it took me a while to deplane, but that was a very small price I was willing to pay for 3 hours of relative peace. </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>In past episodes, we talked about the bare bones budget airlines -- Spirit and Frontier in the US; Ryanair and EasyJet in Europe, and Wow Air and Norwegian as the second coming of Laker Airways, doing TransAtlantic budget flight. Of those, I’ve flown Frontier, EasyJet, and Wow Air which, as a group, seems like the less severe set of the budgets. Ryanair and Spirit always seem to have a harder edge about the “budget-ness.” And then there’s their impact on the mainline carriers -- United, American, and Delta’s basic economy fares. Usually, when I look at a mainline carrier’s basic economy fare, the difference vs. their regular economy fare isn’t big enough to make up extra hassles. But booking our trip down to Florida, the difference on United was over $100 a ticket. Irene and I figured we could put up with a few hassles for over $200. But as dug a bit further, we didn’t find as many hassles as we thought. Because we’re both United Gold, there was no limitation on carry-on bags and we boarded in the usual Group 1. The only downgrade was that we had to pay to reserve seats and we couldn’t book them in Economy Plus -- the aisles with the extra legroom. Even after paying for reserved seats, we still saved enough to pay for a couple of nice dinners of grilled grouper. </li><li>Our friends who joined us from Milwaukee flew down on American through DFW without a hassle. Their flight back -- a direct to Milwaukee on Frontier -- not so much. Their flight was supposed to leave at 7:45pm. Around lunch, they received a note that their flight was delayed by 5 hours. What? We checked that again. We pulled up the FlightAware app, searched for their flight, and then started walked its planned flight legs back, hitting the “Where’s My Plane?” button until we found it -- still on the ground in Milwaukee 6 hours after its scheduled departure time. The weather wasn’t that bad, so it had to be a maintenance problem, which is a huge problem when flying budget and regional airlines because their model is to bounce a plane from place to place rather than flying it out of a hub where they could swap out a busted plane if need be. So that 6 hour delay was going to cascade through that day’s schedule. Our friends finally left Ft Myers at 2:45am. Which is something I’ve noticed about Frontier -- I’ve never seen them cancel a flight no matter how late they leave. A regional airline would’ve cancelled that flight way earlier, but not Frontier. I don’t know how their crews don’t time out, but I kinda admire them for getting you home no matter what time. Would be way better <em>not </em>&nbsp;to take a 7-hr delay, but at least they get you home.</li><li>This year, I got dropped a status level on Hertz, from President’s Circle down to Five Star. I didn’t do 20 rentals last year, and I missed an offer back in December to pay some points to keep my status. But, I can’t say that I notice the downgrade too much. When I was in Phoenix, I snagged a great Chrysler 300 with custom black rims. In Ft Myers, I got a brand new GMC Terrain SUV that held 4 adults very comfortable… Though I have to say that the Terrain through me for a loop when I got in. I’ve rented all sort of different cars. I get in, pair my phone to the phone, adjust the mirrors, put it in Drive, and pull out. With the Terrain, I was good with all of that right up until the “put it in Drive” step. I look down at the console -- no gear shift, no gear dial (the Chrysler experience talking). Then grab the stalk on the right side of the steering column and turn on the windshield wipers. I’m looking all over -- “WTF? Where is the damn gear shift?” From the back seat, Kristin points under the climate control “It’s right there”. And then I see, a line of buttons -- P, R, N, D. I push the D button and off we go. The last time I say push button gear selectors was when I was a kid, riding in somebody’s old Plymouth. I mean, come on GMC, do we really need <em>another</em> type of gear selection? Searching the Internet later for the Terrain’s gear buttons yields a whole slew of “Worst Shifter Design” article featuring these buttons. I don’t know which was worse -- the actual buttons or me, the alpha road warrior, getting back seat instructions on how to put a rental car in gear.</li><li>Another new thing I learned at Hertz Ft Myers -- besides where to find gear buttons -- is that, for Hertz Gold customers, there’s no additional driver fee for your spouse. I’ve been in Hertz Gold since it started, but I never connected to this benefit. It’s saves real money -- additional driver fees can run $10/day -- and hassle. Another reason to like the Hertz Gold program.</li><li>TravelCommons made our little local newspaper in an installment of their “Ask The Expert” series with the sub-headline “How can travel be more relaxing and fun?” &nbsp;When Sandy, the reporter, emailed me to schedule the interview, she wanted to talk about advice for successful spring break travel. So I started off talking about how those spring break families should avoid traveling during road warrior rush hours -- Monday mornings and Thursday evenings. “Boarding a plane filled with busy professionals can quickly rob you of that pre-vacation high,” Sandy wrote, “Peacock advise leisure travelers to avoid sharing a plane with these potential buzzkills.” Such as me. The last thing a family heading for Disney wants to encounter is people like me powering down the concourse. I also recounted some of the tips that you’ve seen in my Top Holiday Travel Tips posts -- fly early in the day, avoid regional jets, and no one-and-done outfits so you can get everything you need into a carry-on. And I talked about turning long layovers into mini-vacations with our upcoming Stockholm layover as an example. Of course, I didn’t mention that a lot of these layovers turn into taproom crawls, like in last year’s video of the Midway layover taproom tour, and potentially this Stockholm stop thanks to TravelCommons’ listener Rob Cheshire’s custom Google map. No, I figured than might be a bit much for our nice local paper. Sandy turned our 45-minute conversation into a nice article. I posted a picture of the article on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">TravelCommons Facebook page</a> since they don’t seem to put their issues on-line. </li><li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/12/podcast-120-where-do-guidebooks-fit-in-i-hate-shopping-for-suitcases/\">episode #120</a>, back in March 2016, I asked the question -- Where do physical guidebooks fit in the world of apps, review websites, social media, and podcasts? Back then, I was planning Andrew’s and my visit to Iceland. Now, getting ready to head over to Brittany, France for 10 days, I bought two physical guidebooks to take with us. Irene wanted DK’s Eyewitness Travel; it was her favorite out of the stack of guidebooks she checked out of the library. While I did a throwback, picked up our go-to book from our PK (pre-kids) days of travel, Michelin’s Green Guide. The DK book is definitely more visually punchy, but I figured Michelin, a French company, should have Brittany covered pretty well, and they published this new edition just last month. Maybe I’m getting lazy in my old age, but I’m kinda glad to have everything in one spot -- a bit of local history, touring maps, city guides -- rather than having to rummage through multiple PDFs in an Evernote folder. However, I took a pass on Amazon’s recommended add-on of Michelin’s Brittany Road and Tourist Map No. 512. I’ve topped up my local SIM for 2.5 GB of mobile data; I’m sticking with Google Maps. I maybe old school, but I’m not going back to the Dark Ages.</li><li>And if you have any travel rants, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. &nbsp;The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our new Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com. </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Dining Single</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Our daughter Claire is heading down to London for her first week of Spring Break and will then meet us in Paris for our Brittany trip. &nbsp;Planning it, we got talking about eating alone on the road. Years ago, it used to be more awkward - escorted to the small table off in the corner, a server a bit ticked off at the small check and therefore small tip. You’d read the newspaper or a book between courses to keep yourself occupied, wrap it up pretty quickly and head back to the hotel.</li><li>For guy travelers, the sports bar was (and still is) the exception to that rule. Fine, sit me in a booth alone as long as I have a clear view of walls of TV screens showing all ESPN all the time – ESPN, ESPN-2, ESPN-3, ESPN-U, ESPN News… No need for a book, especially over the next few weeks watching the opening rounds of the NCAA tournaments when I can watch a couple of games at once. Rush out? Hell no, give me another large Coors Light, we haven’t even hit half time.</li><li>Most restaurants now serve a full menu at the bar, complete with a full set up -- placemats, maybe a bread basket. Might be a touch cramped at happy hour, but it’s usually nice to be in the main flow of things rather than off in the corner. The trend toward shared plates , while getting a bit tired when dining with a group (“OK, what can we all agree on?”) works great for the single diner. If I want a bit of variety without overeating, I now have choices beyond sushi or tapas bars. Not that those are bad choices. I have no doubt that Claire will find her way to the bar at Barrafina in Soho.</li><li>Sitting at the bar also gave you a chance for a little social interaction, some serendipity; with the bartender, maybe with the guy sitting next to you. Some years ago, on my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/08/14/food-and-drink-highlights-from-my-drive-south/\">2,100-mile circle tour through the South</a>, a guy next to me at a Louisville bar told me to check out a restaurant in the not-yet-hip Bywater neighborhood in New Orleans; turned out to be a great recommendation. But I get less and less of that as people eat and just interact with their smartphones. Maybe Claire wouldn’t be keen on random bar conversations, but I kinda miss it.</li><li>Nowadays, where I do find that interaction is microbrewery taprooms. Sure, people still have their phones out to check their tasting flight into Untappd, but there’s an acceptance, almost an expectation, that people will “nerd out” about hops and malt and yeast esters with each other and with folks behind the bar. During one of my Dallas trips, I found my way to Grapevine Craft Brewing on a rainy Weds night. The brewmaster was pulling the taps, passing out some barrel samples, and we all spinning our beer nerd propellers real hard.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><b>From The Travel Story Archives -- Airlines Need To Tell Us More</b></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Prepping for that interview with the local paper had me spelunking deep into the TravelCommons archives, fixing some broken links and listening to some of those early shows for the first time in a long time. A couple of things struck me -- the really poor sound quality I got from the little iRiver MP3 recorder that I was using, and how good some of those early travel stories were.</li><li> So here’s one from<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/09/24/podcast-15-begging-for-business-needing-to-know-at-35000-ft/\"> episode #15</a>, very long-time TC listener Allan Marko talking about wanting to know just a little bit more about what an airline maintenance guy is doing.  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #149</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_147.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #149 — Dining Single; Airlines Need To Tell Us More','','inherit','closed','closed','','2373-revision-v1','','','2019-03-20 15:54:05','2019-03-20 20:54:05','',2373,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/20/2373-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2386,1,'2019-03-20 16:01:26','2019-03-20 21:01:26','<!-- wp:image {\"id\":2382,\"align\":\"right\",\"width\":300,\"height\":300} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright is-resized\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/DSC_5715-1024x1024.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2382\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"/><figcaption>Not Looking Friendly for a Solo Diner</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Trying to wrap up travel for the year so I can hunker down in the TravelCommons bunker outside of Chicago and <em>not</em> worry about any forecasted snow. But for those of you who are traveling, here\'s an episode to keep you occupied in the airport, train, or car traffic. We talk about some travel tips that didn\'t make my Top 10 Tips blog post, the great experience of flying on Thanksgiving day, losing my tablet on that flight but soon recovering it, storming Las Vegas with 50,000 other Amazon Web Services users, and some thoughts from our trip to Santa Fe, New Mexico. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_147.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<figure><iframe src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/546788592&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"></iframe></figure>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show Notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show Notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #149:</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the Hyatt Place in State College, PA, feeling a bit more positive about life after a couple of warm weather getaways -- an afternoon meeting in Phoenix that I happily turned into a 3-day stay by flying in early for a “prep” session and staying late “in case our session ran long”; and then a long weekend with friends on the Gulf side of Florida. It was a nice break to walk outside without layering up coats, and scarves, and hats, and without taking an Arctic blast in the face. Not that it was toasty in Phoenix, but I was walking around downtown in a blazer, passing people -- natives, I’d guess -- in puffy down jackets. Not that they were wrong; it’s just that my reference point was that -22 degree polar vortex day. </li><li>Reminds me of a time many years ago when I was doing a project in J’burg South Africa in July -- our summer, their winter. We’re going to a restaurant for dinner. The inside is full, but the outside tables are available. The owner apologizes, offers to bring us blankets. My colleague from Detroit is wearing a polo shirt; I’m in dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up. “Thanks, but we’re fine,” we tell him. Halfway through the meal, he comes out, offering to move us inside now that a table has freed up. He’s wearing a parka. “No, really, we’re OK,” we tell him. Different reference points on what’s cold.</li><li>Both trips -- out to Phoenix and down to Ft Myers airport, were full of young families, also getting away from the cold, maybe to stay with parents/ grandparents who’d retired in more reasonable climes. I flew Southwest to Phoenix and United to Ft Myers, and I came to appreciate what, before this, was, to me, an undiscovered benefit of Southwest’s open seating. Because I was in the B boarding group, those families with young children boarded before me. Walking down the aisle, I could spot the crying babies -- there, and there, and there -- and could just keep walking, until I was behind them all. Sure, I was in the back of the plane, and it took me a while to deplane, but that was a very small price I was willing to pay for 3 hours of relative peace. </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>In past episodes, we talked about the bare bones budget airlines -- Spirit and Frontier in the US; Ryanair and EasyJet in Europe, and Wow Air and Norwegian as the second coming of Laker Airways, doing TransAtlantic budget flight. Of those, I’ve flown Frontier, EasyJet, and Wow Air which, as a group, seems like the less severe set of the budgets. Ryanair and Spirit always seem to have a harder edge about the “budget-ness.” And then there’s their impact on the mainline carriers -- United, American, and Delta’s basic economy fares. Usually, when I look at a mainline carrier’s basic economy fare, the difference vs. their regular economy fare isn’t big enough to make up extra hassles. But booking our trip down to Florida, the difference on United was over $100 a ticket. Irene and I figured we could put up with a few hassles for over $200. But as dug a bit further, we didn’t find as many hassles as we thought. Because we’re both United Gold, there was no limitation on carry-on bags and we boarded in the usual Group 1. The only downgrade was that we had to pay to reserve seats and we couldn’t book them in Economy Plus -- the aisles with the extra legroom. Even after paying for reserved seats, we still saved enough to pay for a couple of nice dinners of grilled grouper. </li><li>Our friends who joined us from Milwaukee flew down on American through DFW without a hassle. Their flight back -- a direct to Milwaukee on Frontier -- not so much. Their flight was supposed to leave at 7:45pm. Around lunch, they received a note that their flight was delayed by 5 hours. What? We checked that again. We pulled up the FlightAware app, searched for their flight, and then started walked its planned flight legs back, hitting the “Where’s My Plane?” button until we found it -- still on the ground in Milwaukee 6 hours after its scheduled departure time. The weather wasn’t that bad, so it had to be a maintenance problem, which is a huge problem when flying budget and regional airlines because their model is to bounce a plane from place to place rather than flying it out of a hub where they could swap out a busted plane if need be. So that 6 hour delay was going to cascade through that day’s schedule. Our friends finally left Ft Myers at 2:45am. Which is something I’ve noticed about Frontier -- I’ve never seen them cancel a flight no matter how late they leave. A regional airline would’ve cancelled that flight way earlier, but not Frontier. I don’t know how their crews don’t time out, but I kinda admire them for getting you home no matter what time. Would be way better <em>not </em>&nbsp;to take a 7-hr delay, but at least they get you home.</li><li>This year, I got dropped a status level on Hertz, from President’s Circle down to Five Star. I didn’t do 20 rentals last year, and I missed an offer back in December to pay some points to keep my status. But, I can’t say that I notice the downgrade too much. When I was in Phoenix, I snagged a great Chrysler 300 with custom black rims. In Ft Myers, I got a brand new GMC Terrain SUV that held 4 adults very comfortable… Though I have to say that the Terrain through me for a loop when I got in. I’ve rented all sort of different cars. I get in, pair my phone to the phone, adjust the mirrors, put it in Drive, and pull out. With the Terrain, I was good with all of that right up until the “put it in Drive” step. I look down at the console -- no gear shift, no gear dial (the Chrysler experience talking). Then grab the stalk on the right side of the steering column and turn on the windshield wipers. I’m looking all over -- “WTF? Where is the damn gear shift?” From the back seat, Kristin points under the climate control “It’s right there”. And then I see, a line of buttons -- P, R, N, D. I push the D button and off we go. The last time I say push button gear selectors was when I was a kid, riding in somebody’s old Plymouth. I mean, come on GMC, do we really need <em>another</em> type of gear selection? Searching the Internet later for the Terrain’s gear buttons yields a whole slew of “Worst Shifter Design” article featuring these buttons. I don’t know which was worse -- the actual buttons or me, the alpha road warrior, getting back seat instructions on how to put a rental car in gear.</li><li>Another new thing I learned at Hertz Ft Myers -- besides where to find gear buttons -- is that, for Hertz Gold customers, there’s no additional driver fee for your spouse. I’ve been in Hertz Gold since it started, but I never connected to this benefit. It’s saves real money -- additional driver fees can run $10/day -- and hassle. Another reason to like the Hertz Gold program.</li><li>TravelCommons made our little local newspaper in an installment of their “Ask The Expert” series with the sub-headline “How can travel be more relaxing and fun?” &nbsp;When Sandy, the reporter, emailed me to schedule the interview, she wanted to talk about advice for successful spring break travel. So I started off talking about how those spring break families should avoid traveling during road warrior rush hours -- Monday mornings and Thursday evenings. “Boarding a plane filled with busy professionals can quickly rob you of that pre-vacation high,” Sandy wrote, “Peacock advise leisure travelers to avoid sharing a plane with these potential buzzkills.” Such as me. The last thing a family heading for Disney wants to encounter is people like me powering down the concourse. I also recounted some of the tips that you’ve seen in my Top Holiday Travel Tips posts -- fly early in the day, avoid regional jets, and no one-and-done outfits so you can get everything you need into a carry-on. And I talked about turning long layovers into mini-vacations with our upcoming Stockholm layover as an example. Of course, I didn’t mention that a lot of these layovers turn into taproom crawls, like in last year’s video of the Midway layover taproom tour, and potentially this Stockholm stop thanks to TravelCommons’ listener Rob Cheshire’s custom Google map. No, I figured than might be a bit much for our nice local paper. Sandy turned our 45-minute conversation into a nice article. I posted a picture of the article on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">TravelCommons Facebook page</a> since they don’t seem to put their issues on-line. </li><li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/12/podcast-120-where-do-guidebooks-fit-in-i-hate-shopping-for-suitcases/\">episode #120</a>, back in March 2016, I asked the question -- Where do physical guidebooks fit in the world of apps, review websites, social media, and podcasts? Back then, I was planning Andrew’s and my visit to Iceland. Now, getting ready to head over to Brittany, France for 10 days, I bought two physical guidebooks to take with us. Irene wanted DK’s Eyewitness Travel; it was her favorite out of the stack of guidebooks she checked out of the library. While I did a throwback, picked up our go-to book from our PK (pre-kids) days of travel, Michelin’s Green Guide. The DK book is definitely more visually punchy, but I figured Michelin, a French company, should have Brittany covered pretty well, and they published this new edition just last month. Maybe I’m getting lazy in my old age, but I’m kinda glad to have everything in one spot -- a bit of local history, touring maps, city guides -- rather than having to rummage through multiple PDFs in an Evernote folder. However, I took a pass on Amazon’s recommended add-on of Michelin’s Brittany Road and Tourist Map No. 512. I’ve topped up my local SIM for 2.5 GB of mobile data; I’m sticking with Google Maps. I maybe old school, but I’m not going back to the Dark Ages.</li><li>And if you have any travel rants, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. &nbsp;The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our new Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com. </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Dining Single</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Our daughter Claire is heading down to London for her first week of Spring Break and will then meet us in Paris for our Brittany trip. &nbsp;Planning it, we got talking about eating alone on the road. Years ago, it used to be more awkward - escorted to the small table off in the corner, a server a bit ticked off at the small check and therefore small tip. You’d read the newspaper or a book between courses to keep yourself occupied, wrap it up pretty quickly and head back to the hotel.</li><li>For guy travelers, the sports bar was (and still is) the exception to that rule. Fine, sit me in a booth alone as long as I have a clear view of walls of TV screens showing all ESPN all the time – ESPN, ESPN-2, ESPN-3, ESPN-U, ESPN News… No need for a book, especially over the next few weeks watching the opening rounds of the NCAA tournaments when I can watch a couple of games at once. Rush out? Hell no, give me another large Coors Light, we haven’t even hit half time.</li><li>Most restaurants now serve a full menu at the bar, complete with a full set up -- placemats, maybe a bread basket. Might be a touch cramped at happy hour, but it’s usually nice to be in the main flow of things rather than off in the corner. The trend toward shared plates , while getting a bit tired when dining with a group (“OK, what can we all agree on?”) works great for the single diner. If I want a bit of variety without overeating, I now have choices beyond sushi or tapas bars. Not that those are bad choices. I have no doubt that Claire will find her way to the bar at Barrafina in Soho.</li><li>Sitting at the bar also gave you a chance for a little social interaction, some serendipity; with the bartender, maybe with the guy sitting next to you. Some years ago, on my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/08/14/food-and-drink-highlights-from-my-drive-south/\">2,100-mile circle tour through the South</a>, a guy next to me at a Louisville bar told me to check out a restaurant in the not-yet-hip Bywater neighborhood in New Orleans; turned out to be a great recommendation. But I get less and less of that as people eat and just interact with their smartphones. Maybe Claire wouldn’t be keen on random bar conversations, but I kinda miss it.</li><li>Nowadays, where I do find that interaction is microbrewery taprooms. Sure, people still have their phones out to check their tasting flight into Untappd, but there’s an acceptance, almost an expectation, that people will “nerd out” about hops and malt and yeast esters with each other and with folks behind the bar. During one of my Dallas trips, I found my way to Grapevine Craft Brewing on a rainy Weds night. The brewmaster was pulling the taps, passing out some barrel samples, and we all spinning our beer nerd propellers real hard.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><b>From The Travel Story Archives -- Airlines Need To Tell Us More</b></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Prepping for that interview with the local paper had me spelunking deep into the TravelCommons archives, fixing some broken links and listening to some of those early shows for the first time in a long time. A couple of things struck me -- the really poor sound quality I got from the little iRiver MP3 recorder that I was using, and how good some of those early travel stories were.</li><li> So here’s one from<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/09/24/podcast-15-begging-for-business-needing-to-know-at-35000-ft/\"> episode #15</a>, very long-time TC listener Allan Marko talking about wanting to know just a little bit more about what an airline maintenance guy is doing.  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #149</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_147.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #149 — Dining Single; Airlines Need To Tell Us More','','inherit','closed','closed','','2373-revision-v1','','','2019-03-20 16:01:26','2019-03-20 21:01:26','',2373,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/20/2373-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2387,1,'2019-03-20 16:31:17','2019-03-20 21:31:17','<!-- wp:image {\"id\":2382,\"align\":\"right\",\"width\":300,\"height\":300} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright is-resized\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/DSC_5715-1024x1024.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2382\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"/><figcaption>Not Looking Friendly for a Solo Diner</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Pulled out the mobile rig to record this episode in Happy Valley, the home of Penn State. And I am kinda happy with some travel to Phoenix and Florida to thaw me out after Chicago\'s run in with the polar vortex. In this episode, I talk about budget airlines, stepping down in Hertz status, why I bought physical guidebooks for a trip to France, the challenges of being a solo diner, and then dig into the archives for a classic travel story. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_149.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<figure><iframe src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/546788592&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"></iframe></figure>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show Notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show Notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #149:</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the Hyatt Place in State College, PA, feeling a bit more positive about life after a couple of warm weather getaways -- an afternoon meeting in Phoenix that I happily turned into a 3-day stay by flying in early for a “prep” session and staying late “in case our session ran long”; and then a long weekend with friends on the Gulf side of Florida. It was a nice break to walk outside without layering up coats, and scarves, and hats, and without taking an Arctic blast in the face. Not that it was toasty in Phoenix, but I was walking around downtown in a blazer, passing people -- natives, I’d guess -- in puffy down jackets. Not that they were wrong; it’s just that my reference point was that -22 degree polar vortex day. </li><li>Reminds me of a time many years ago when I was doing a project in J’burg South Africa in July -- our summer, their winter. We’re going to a restaurant for dinner. The inside is full, but the outside tables are available. The owner apologizes, offers to bring us blankets. My colleague from Detroit is wearing a polo shirt; I’m in dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up. “Thanks, but we’re fine,” we tell him. Halfway through the meal, he comes out, offering to move us inside now that a table has freed up. He’s wearing a parka. “No, really, we’re OK,” we tell him. Different reference points on what’s cold.</li><li>Both trips -- out to Phoenix and down to Ft Myers airport, were full of young families, also getting away from the cold, maybe to stay with parents/ grandparents who’d retired in more reasonable climes. I flew Southwest to Phoenix and United to Ft Myers, and I came to appreciate what, before this, was, to me, an undiscovered benefit of Southwest’s open seating. Because I was in the B boarding group, those families with young children boarded before me. Walking down the aisle, I could spot the crying babies -- there, and there, and there -- and could just keep walking, until I was behind them all. Sure, I was in the back of the plane, and it took me a while to deplane, but that was a very small price I was willing to pay for 3 hours of relative peace. </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>In past episodes, we talked about the bare bones budget airlines -- Spirit and Frontier in the US; Ryanair and EasyJet in Europe, and Wow Air and Norwegian as the second coming of Laker Airways, doing TransAtlantic budget flight. Of those, I’ve flown Frontier, EasyJet, and Wow Air which, as a group, seems like the less severe set of the budgets. Ryanair and Spirit always seem to have a harder edge about the “budget-ness.” And then there’s their impact on the mainline carriers -- United, American, and Delta’s basic economy fares. Usually, when I look at a mainline carrier’s basic economy fare, the difference vs. their regular economy fare isn’t big enough to make up extra hassles. But booking our trip down to Florida, the difference on United was over $100 a ticket. Irene and I figured we could put up with a few hassles for over $200. But as dug a bit further, we didn’t find as many hassles as we thought. Because we’re both United Gold, there was no limitation on carry-on bags and we boarded in the usual Group 1. The only downgrade was that we had to pay to reserve seats and we couldn’t book them in Economy Plus -- the aisles with the extra legroom. Even after paying for reserved seats, we still saved enough to pay for a couple of nice dinners of grilled grouper. </li><li>Our friends who joined us from Milwaukee flew down on American through DFW without a hassle. Their flight back -- a direct to Milwaukee on Frontier -- not so much. Their flight was supposed to leave at 7:45pm. Around lunch, they received a note that their flight was delayed by 5 hours. What? We checked that again. We pulled up the FlightAware app, searched for their flight, and then started walked its planned flight legs back, hitting the “Where’s My Plane?” button until we found it -- still on the ground in Milwaukee 6 hours after its scheduled departure time. The weather wasn’t that bad, so it had to be a maintenance problem, which is a huge problem when flying budget and regional airlines because their model is to bounce a plane from place to place rather than flying it out of a hub where they could swap out a busted plane if need be. So that 6 hour delay was going to cascade through that day’s schedule. Our friends finally left Ft Myers at 2:45am. Which is something I’ve noticed about Frontier -- I’ve never seen them cancel a flight no matter how late they leave. A regional airline would’ve cancelled that flight way earlier, but not Frontier. I don’t know how their crews don’t time out, but I kinda admire them for getting you home no matter what time. Would be way better <em>not </em>&nbsp;to take a 7-hr delay, but at least they get you home.</li><li>This year, I got dropped a status level on Hertz, from President’s Circle down to Five Star. I didn’t do 20 rentals last year, and I missed an offer back in December to pay some points to keep my status. But, I can’t say that I notice the downgrade too much. When I was in Phoenix, I snagged a great Chrysler 300 with custom black rims. In Ft Myers, I got a brand new GMC Terrain SUV that held 4 adults very comfortable… Though I have to say that the Terrain through me for a loop when I got in. I’ve rented all sort of different cars. I get in, pair my phone to the phone, adjust the mirrors, put it in Drive, and pull out. With the Terrain, I was good with all of that right up until the “put it in Drive” step. I look down at the console -- no gear shift, no gear dial (the Chrysler experience talking). Then grab the stalk on the right side of the steering column and turn on the windshield wipers. I’m looking all over -- “WTF? Where is the damn gear shift?” From the back seat, Kristin points under the climate control “It’s right there”. And then I see, a line of buttons -- P, R, N, D. I push the D button and off we go. The last time I say push button gear selectors was when I was a kid, riding in somebody’s old Plymouth. I mean, come on GMC, do we really need <em>another</em> type of gear selection? Searching the Internet later for the Terrain’s gear buttons yields a whole slew of “Worst Shifter Design” article featuring these buttons. I don’t know which was worse -- the actual buttons or me, the alpha road warrior, getting back seat instructions on how to put a rental car in gear.</li><li>Another new thing I learned at Hertz Ft Myers -- besides where to find gear buttons -- is that, for Hertz Gold customers, there’s no additional driver fee for your spouse. I’ve been in Hertz Gold since it started, but I never connected to this benefit. It’s saves real money -- additional driver fees can run $10/day -- and hassle. Another reason to like the Hertz Gold program.</li><li>TravelCommons made our little local newspaper in an installment of their “Ask The Expert” series with the sub-headline “How can travel be more relaxing and fun?” &nbsp;When Sandy, the reporter, emailed me to schedule the interview, she wanted to talk about advice for successful spring break travel. So I started off talking about how those spring break families should avoid traveling during road warrior rush hours -- Monday mornings and Thursday evenings. “Boarding a plane filled with busy professionals can quickly rob you of that pre-vacation high,” Sandy wrote, “Peacock advise leisure travelers to avoid sharing a plane with these potential buzzkills.” Such as me. The last thing a family heading for Disney wants to encounter is people like me powering down the concourse. I also recounted some of the tips that you’ve seen in my Top Holiday Travel Tips posts -- fly early in the day, avoid regional jets, and no one-and-done outfits so you can get everything you need into a carry-on. And I talked about turning long layovers into mini-vacations with our upcoming Stockholm layover as an example. Of course, I didn’t mention that a lot of these layovers turn into taproom crawls, like in last year’s video of the Midway layover taproom tour, and potentially this Stockholm stop thanks to TravelCommons’ listener Rob Cheshire’s custom Google map. No, I figured than might be a bit much for our nice local paper. Sandy turned our 45-minute conversation into a nice article. I posted a picture of the article on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">TravelCommons Facebook page</a> since they don’t seem to put their issues on-line. </li><li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/12/podcast-120-where-do-guidebooks-fit-in-i-hate-shopping-for-suitcases/\">episode #120</a>, back in March 2016, I asked the question -- Where do physical guidebooks fit in the world of apps, review websites, social media, and podcasts? Back then, I was planning Andrew’s and my visit to Iceland. Now, getting ready to head over to Brittany, France for 10 days, I bought two physical guidebooks to take with us. Irene wanted DK’s Eyewitness Travel; it was her favorite out of the stack of guidebooks she checked out of the library. While I did a throwback, picked up our go-to book from our PK (pre-kids) days of travel, Michelin’s Green Guide. The DK book is definitely more visually punchy, but I figured Michelin, a French company, should have Brittany covered pretty well, and they published this new edition just last month. Maybe I’m getting lazy in my old age, but I’m kinda glad to have everything in one spot -- a bit of local history, touring maps, city guides -- rather than having to rummage through multiple PDFs in an Evernote folder. However, I took a pass on Amazon’s recommended add-on of Michelin’s Brittany Road and Tourist Map No. 512. I’ve topped up my local SIM for 2.5 GB of mobile data; I’m sticking with Google Maps. I maybe old school, but I’m not going back to the Dark Ages.</li><li>And if you have any travel rants, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. &nbsp;The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our new Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com. </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Dining Single</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Our daughter Claire is heading down to London for her first week of Spring Break and will then meet us in Paris for our Brittany trip. &nbsp;Planning it, we got talking about eating alone on the road. Years ago, it used to be more awkward - escorted to the small table off in the corner, a server a bit ticked off at the small check and therefore small tip. You’d read the newspaper or a book between courses to keep yourself occupied, wrap it up pretty quickly and head back to the hotel.</li><li>For guy travelers, the sports bar was (and still is) the exception to that rule. Fine, sit me in a booth alone as long as I have a clear view of walls of TV screens showing all ESPN all the time – ESPN, ESPN-2, ESPN-3, ESPN-U, ESPN News… No need for a book, especially over the next few weeks watching the opening rounds of the NCAA tournaments when I can watch a couple of games at once. Rush out? Hell no, give me another large Coors Light, we haven’t even hit half time.</li><li>Most restaurants now serve a full menu at the bar, complete with a full set up -- placemats, maybe a bread basket. Might be a touch cramped at happy hour, but it’s usually nice to be in the main flow of things rather than off in the corner. The trend toward shared plates , while getting a bit tired when dining with a group (“OK, what can we all agree on?”) works great for the single diner. If I want a bit of variety without overeating, I now have choices beyond sushi or tapas bars. Not that those are bad choices. I have no doubt that Claire will find her way to the bar at Barrafina in Soho.</li><li>Sitting at the bar also gave you a chance for a little social interaction, some serendipity; with the bartender, maybe with the guy sitting next to you. Some years ago, on my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/08/14/food-and-drink-highlights-from-my-drive-south/\">2,100-mile circle tour through the South</a>, a guy next to me at a Louisville bar told me to check out a restaurant in the not-yet-hip Bywater neighborhood in New Orleans; turned out to be a great recommendation. But I get less and less of that as people eat and just interact with their smartphones. Maybe Claire wouldn’t be keen on random bar conversations, but I kinda miss it.</li><li>Nowadays, where I do find that interaction is microbrewery taprooms. Sure, people still have their phones out to check their tasting flight into Untappd, but there’s an acceptance, almost an expectation, that people will “nerd out” about hops and malt and yeast esters with each other and with folks behind the bar. During one of my Dallas trips, I found my way to Grapevine Craft Brewing on a rainy Weds night. The brewmaster was pulling the taps, passing out some barrel samples, and we all spinning our beer nerd propellers real hard.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><b>From The Travel Story Archives -- Airlines Need To Tell Us More</b></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Prepping for that interview with the local paper had me spelunking deep into the TravelCommons archives, fixing some broken links and listening to some of those early shows for the first time in a long time. A couple of things struck me -- the really poor sound quality I got from the little iRiver MP3 recorder that I was using, and how good some of those early travel stories were.</li><li> So here’s one from<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/09/24/podcast-15-begging-for-business-needing-to-know-at-35000-ft/\"> episode #15</a>, very long-time TC listener Allan Marko talking about wanting to know just a little bit more about what an airline maintenance guy is doing.  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #149</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_147.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #149 — Dining Single; Airlines Need To Tell Us More','','inherit','closed','closed','','2373-revision-v1','','','2019-03-20 16:31:17','2019-03-20 21:31:17','',2373,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/20/2373-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2388,1,'2019-03-20 19:49:19','2019-03-21 00:49:19','Spent the holiday week digging through the TravelCommon archives and assembled a \"Best of TravelCommons 2005\" episode. Starting with a medley of hotel bathrooms, we revisit some rants on the TSA, the 3-episode Sean Penn arc, and excerpts from some of the best stories of 2005. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_27.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_27.mp3\"]\n\n<!--more-->\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #27:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Home for Christmas week, recover from a tough 4 weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas</li>\n 	<li>Thanks to everyone who has left, or tried to leave, a review on the TravelCommons page of iTunes</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>Medley of TravelCommons Hotel Bathroom studios</li>\n 	<li>from T/C #5 - Why I record in bathrooms</li>\n 	<li>Medley of TSA rants</li>\n 	<li>from T/C #5-7 - Sean Penn comments</li>\n 	<li>from T/C #7 - Steve Frick of <a href=\"http://fricksworld.blogspot.com\">Frick\'s World</a> is a little uncomfortable recording in the bathroom</li>\n 	<li>from T/C #14 - Willie Evans from the Scots Band <a href=\"http://www.evangeline.org.uk/\"><strong>Evangeline</strong></a> talks about writing a travel song</li>\n 	<li>from T/C #17 - My kids\' view of travel</li>\n 	<li>from T/C #15 - Allan Marko tells a story about rapid airplane repair</li>\n 	<li>from T/C #3 - Flyers from <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/great-lakes/cleveland\">Cleveland</a> to <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/chicago\">Chicago</a> looking for an early exit</li>\n 	<li>from T/C #11 - Packing light leaves no margin for error</li>\n 	<li>from T/C #23 - Patrons at the hotel bar drinking shots</li>\n 	<li>from T/C #19 - Different colors in <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/italy/emilia-romagna-and-san-marino/bologna\">Bologna, Italy</a></li>\n 	<li>from T/C #13 - Imaginative way to sleep on red-eyes</li>\n 	<li>from T/C #21 - Decisions on vacation photos</li>\n 	<li>from T/C #4 - Disappointed web search</li>\n 	<li>from T/C #24 - Fun with Rental Cars</li>\n 	<li>from T/C #7 - Air sickness without the bag</li>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Ramblin\' Man</em> by the Allman Brothers Band</li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_27.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #27 - Best of 2005','','inherit','closed','closed','','30-revision-v1','','','2019-03-20 19:49:19','2019-03-21 00:49:19','',30,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/20/30-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2389,1,'2019-03-20 19:51:06','2019-03-21 00:51:06','<!-- wp:image {\"id\":2382,\"align\":\"right\",\"width\":300,\"height\":300} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright is-resized\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/DSC_5715-1024x1024.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2382\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"/><figcaption>Not Looking Friendly for a Solo Diner</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Pulled out the mobile rig to record this episode in Happy Valley, the home of Penn State. And I am kinda happy with some travel to Phoenix and Florida to thaw me out after Chicago\'s run in with the polar vortex. In this episode, I talk about budget airlines, stepping down in Hertz status, why I bought physical guidebooks for a trip to France, the challenges of being a solo diner, and then dig into the archives for a classic travel story. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_149.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<figure><iframe src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/546788592&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"></iframe></figure>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show Notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show Notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #149:</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the Hyatt Place in State College, PA, feeling a bit more positive about life after a couple of warm weather getaways -- an afternoon meeting in Phoenix that I happily turned into a 3-day stay by flying in early for a “prep” session and staying late “in case our session ran long”; and then a long weekend with friends on the Gulf side of Florida. It was a nice break to walk outside without layering up coats, and scarves, and hats, and without taking an Arctic blast in the face. Not that it was toasty in Phoenix, but I was walking around downtown in a blazer, passing people -- natives, I’d guess -- in puffy down jackets. Not that they were wrong; it’s just that my reference point was that -22 degree polar vortex day. </li><li>Reminds me of a time many years ago when I was doing a project in J’burg South Africa in July -- our summer, their winter. We’re going to a restaurant for dinner. The inside is full, but the outside tables are available. The owner apologizes, offers to bring us blankets. My colleague from Detroit is wearing a polo shirt; I’m in dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up. “Thanks, but we’re fine,” we tell him. Halfway through the meal, he comes out, offering to move us inside now that a table has freed up. He’s wearing a parka. “No, really, we’re OK,” we tell him. Different reference points on what’s cold.</li><li>Both trips -- out to Phoenix and down to Ft Myers airport, were full of young families, also getting away from the cold, maybe to stay with parents/ grandparents who’d retired in more reasonable climes. I flew Southwest to Phoenix and United to Ft Myers, and I came to appreciate what, before this, was, to me, an undiscovered benefit of Southwest’s open seating. Because I was in the B boarding group, those families with young children boarded before me. Walking down the aisle, I could spot the crying babies -- there, and there, and there -- and could just keep walking, until I was behind them all. Sure, I was in the back of the plane, and it took me a while to deplane, but that was a very small price I was willing to pay for 3 hours of relative peace. </li><li> Bridge Music — <em>Paint the Sky</em> by Hans Atom (c) 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/hansatom/50718 Ft: Miss Judged </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>In past episodes, we talked about the bare bones budget airlines -- Spirit and Frontier in the US; Ryanair and EasyJet in Europe, and Wow Air and Norwegian as the second coming of Laker Airways, doing TransAtlantic budget flight. Of those, I’ve flown Frontier, EasyJet, and Wow Air which, as a group, seems like the less severe set of the budgets. Ryanair and Spirit always seem to have a harder edge about the “budget-ness.” And then there’s their impact on the mainline carriers -- United, American, and Delta’s basic economy fares. Usually, when I look at a mainline carrier’s basic economy fare, the difference vs. their regular economy fare isn’t big enough to make up extra hassles. But booking our trip down to Florida, the difference on United was over $100 a ticket. Irene and I figured we could put up with a few hassles for over $200. But as dug a bit further, we didn’t find as many hassles as we thought. Because we’re both United Gold, there was no limitation on carry-on bags and we boarded in the usual Group 1. The only downgrade was that we had to pay to reserve seats and we couldn’t book them in Economy Plus -- the aisles with the extra legroom. Even after paying for reserved seats, we still saved enough to pay for a couple of nice dinners of grilled grouper. </li><li>Our friends who joined us from Milwaukee flew down on American through DFW without a hassle. Their flight back -- a direct to Milwaukee on Frontier -- not so much. Their flight was supposed to leave at 7:45pm. Around lunch, they received a note that their flight was delayed by 5 hours. What? We checked that again. We pulled up the FlightAware app, searched for their flight, and then started walked its planned flight legs back, hitting the “Where’s My Plane?” button until we found it -- still on the ground in Milwaukee 6 hours after its scheduled departure time. The weather wasn’t that bad, so it had to be a maintenance problem, which is a huge problem when flying budget and regional airlines because their model is to bounce a plane from place to place rather than flying it out of a hub where they could swap out a busted plane if need be. So that 6 hour delay was going to cascade through that day’s schedule. Our friends finally left Ft Myers at 2:45am. Which is something I’ve noticed about Frontier -- I’ve never seen them cancel a flight no matter how late they leave. A regional airline would’ve cancelled that flight way earlier, but not Frontier. I don’t know how their crews don’t time out, but I kinda admire them for getting you home no matter what time. Would be way better <em>not </em> to take a 7-hr delay, but at least they get you home.</li><li>This year, I got dropped a status level on Hertz, from President’s Circle down to Five Star. I didn’t do 20 rentals last year, and I missed an offer back in December to pay some points to keep my status. But, I can’t say that I notice the downgrade too much. When I was in Phoenix, I snagged a great Chrysler 300 with custom black rims. In Ft Myers, I got a brand new GMC Terrain SUV that held 4 adults very comfortable… Though I have to say that the Terrain through me for a loop when I got in. I’ve rented all sort of different cars. I get in, pair my phone to the phone, adjust the mirrors, put it in Drive, and pull out. With the Terrain, I was good with all of that right up until the “put it in Drive” step. I look down at the console -- no gear shift, no gear dial (the Chrysler experience talking). Then grab the stalk on the right side of the steering column and turn on the windshield wipers. I’m looking all over -- “WTF? Where is the damn gear shift?” From the back seat, Kristin points under the climate control “It’s right there”. And then I see, a line of buttons -- P, R, N, D. I push the D button and off we go. The last time I say push button gear selectors was when I was a kid, riding in somebody’s old Plymouth. I mean, come on GMC, do we really need <em>another</em> type of gear selection? Searching the Internet later for the Terrain’s gear buttons yields a whole slew of “Worst Shifter Design” article featuring these buttons. I don’t know which was worse -- the actual buttons or me, the alpha road warrior, getting back seat instructions on how to put a rental car in gear.</li><li>Another new thing I learned at Hertz Ft Myers -- besides where to find gear buttons -- is that, for Hertz Gold customers, there’s no additional driver fee for your spouse. I’ve been in Hertz Gold since it started, but I never connected to this benefit. It’s saves real money -- additional driver fees can run $10/day -- and hassle. Another reason to like the Hertz Gold program.</li><li>TravelCommons made our little local newspaper in an installment of their “Ask The Expert” series with the sub-headline “How can travel be more relaxing and fun?”  When Sandy, the reporter, emailed me to schedule the interview, she wanted to talk about advice for successful spring break travel. So I started off talking about how those spring break families should avoid traveling during road warrior rush hours -- Monday mornings and Thursday evenings. “Boarding a plane filled with busy professionals can quickly rob you of that pre-vacation high,” Sandy wrote, “Peacock advise leisure travelers to avoid sharing a plane with these potential buzzkills.” Such as me. The last thing a family heading for Disney wants to encounter is people like me powering down the concourse. I also recounted some of the tips that you’ve seen in my Top Holiday Travel Tips posts -- fly early in the day, avoid regional jets, and no one-and-done outfits so you can get everything you need into a carry-on. And I talked about turning long layovers into mini-vacations with our upcoming Stockholm layover as an example. Of course, I didn’t mention that a lot of these layovers turn into taproom crawls, like in last year’s video of the Midway layover taproom tour, and potentially this Stockholm stop thanks to TravelCommons’ listener Rob Cheshire’s custom Google map. No, I figured than might be a bit much for our nice local paper. Sandy turned our 45-minute conversation into a nice article. I posted a picture of the article on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">TravelCommons Facebook page</a> since they don’t seem to put their issues on-line. </li><li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/12/podcast-120-where-do-guidebooks-fit-in-i-hate-shopping-for-suitcases/\">episode #120</a>, back in March 2016, I asked the question -- Where do physical guidebooks fit in the world of apps, review websites, social media, and podcasts? Back then, I was planning Andrew’s and my visit to Iceland. Now, getting ready to head over to Brittany, France for 10 days, I bought two physical guidebooks to take with us. Irene wanted DK’s Eyewitness Travel; it was her favorite out of the stack of guidebooks she checked out of the library. While I did a throwback, picked up our go-to book from our PK (pre-kids) days of travel, Michelin’s Green Guide. The DK book is definitely more visually punchy, but I figured Michelin, a French company, should have Brittany covered pretty well, and they published this new edition just last month. Maybe I’m getting lazy in my old age, but I’m kinda glad to have everything in one spot -- a bit of local history, touring maps, city guides -- rather than having to rummage through multiple PDFs in an Evernote folder. However, I took a pass on Amazon’s recommended add-on of Michelin’s Brittany Road and Tourist Map No. 512. I’ve topped up my local SIM for 2.5 GB of mobile data; I’m sticking with Google Maps. I maybe old school, but I’m not going back to the Dark Ages.</li><li>And if you have any travel rants, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or  Instagram  at travelcommons -- or  post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com. </li><li> Bridge Music — <em>Perfect Stranger</em> by stellarartwars (c) 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/stellarartwars/45510 Ft: TheDice </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Dining Single</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Our daughter Claire is heading down to London for her first week of Spring Break and will then meet us in Paris for our Brittany trip.  Planning it, we got talking about eating alone on the road. Years ago, it used to be more awkward - escorted to the small table off in the corner, a server a bit ticked off at the small check and therefore small tip. You’d read the newspaper or a book between courses to keep yourself occupied, wrap it up pretty quickly and head back to the hotel.</li><li>For guy travelers, the sports bar was (and still is) the exception to that rule. Fine, sit me in a booth alone as long as I have a clear view of walls of TV screens showing all ESPN all the time – ESPN, ESPN-2, ESPN-3, ESPN-U, ESPN News… No need for a book, especially over the next few weeks watching the opening rounds of the NCAA tournaments when I can watch a couple of games at once. Rush out? Hell no, give me another large Coors Light, we haven’t even hit half time.</li><li>Most restaurants now serve a full menu at the bar, complete with a full set up -- placemats, maybe a bread basket. Might be a touch cramped at happy hour, but it’s usually nice to be in the main flow of things rather than off in the corner. The trend toward shared plates , while getting a bit tired when dining with a group (“OK, what can we all agree on?”) works great for the single diner. If I want a bit of variety without overeating, I now have choices beyond sushi or tapas bars. Not that those are bad choices. I have no doubt that Claire will find her way to the bar at Barrafina in Soho.</li><li>Sitting at the bar also gave you a chance for a little social interaction, some serendipity; with the bartender, maybe with the guy sitting next to you. Some years ago, on my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/08/14/food-and-drink-highlights-from-my-drive-south/\">2,100-mile circle tour through the South</a>, a guy next to me at a Louisville bar told me to check out a restaurant in the not-yet-hip Bywater neighborhood in New Orleans; turned out to be a great recommendation. But I get less and less of that as people eat and just interact with their smartphones. Maybe Claire wouldn’t be keen on random bar conversations, but I kinda miss it.</li><li>Nowadays, where I do find that interaction is microbrewery taprooms. Sure, people still have their phones out to check their tasting flight into Untappd, but there’s an acceptance, almost an expectation, that people will “nerd out” about hops and malt and yeast esters with each other and with folks behind the bar. During one of my Dallas trips, I found my way to Grapevine Craft Brewing on a rainy Weds night. The brewmaster was pulling the taps, passing out some barrel samples, and we all spinning our beer nerd propellers real hard.</li><li> Bridge Music — <em>Foolish Game</em> by copperhead (c) 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/copperhead/46390 Ft: Snowflake,Sackjo22 </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><b>From The Travel Story Archives -- Airlines Need To Tell Us More</b></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Prepping for that interview with the local paper had me spelunking deep into the TravelCommons archives, fixing some broken links and listening to some of those early shows for the first time in a long time. A couple of things struck me -- the really poor sound quality I got from the little iRiver MP3 recorder that I was using, and how good some of those early travel stories were.</li><li> So here’s one from<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/09/24/podcast-15-begging-for-business-needing-to-know-at-35000-ft/\"> episode #15</a>, very long-time TC listener Allan Marko talking about wanting to know just a little bit more about what an airline maintenance guy is doing.  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #149</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_147.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #149 — Dining Single; Airlines Need To Tell Us More','','inherit','closed','closed','','2373-revision-v1','','','2019-03-20 19:51:06','2019-03-21 00:51:06','',2373,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/20/2373-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2390,1,'2019-03-20 19:53:33','2019-03-21 00:53:33','<!-- wp:image {\"id\":2382,\"align\":\"right\",\"width\":300,\"height\":300} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright is-resized\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/DSC_5715-1024x1024.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2382\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"/><figcaption>Not Looking Friendly for a Solo Diner</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I dusted off the mobile rig to record this episode in Happy Valley, the home of Penn State. And I am kinda happy with some travel to Phoenix and Florida to thaw me out after Chicago\'s run in with the polar vortex. In this episode, I talk about budget airlines, stepping down in Hertz status, why I bought physical guidebooks for a trip to France, the challenges of being a solo diner, and then dig into the archives for a classic travel story. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_149.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<figure><iframe src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/546788592&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"></iframe></figure>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show Notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show Notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #149:</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the Hyatt Place in State College, PA, feeling a bit more positive about life after a couple of warm weather getaways -- an afternoon meeting in Phoenix that I happily turned into a 3-day stay by flying in early for a “prep” session and staying late “in case our session ran long”; and then a long weekend with friends on the Gulf side of Florida. It was a nice break to walk outside without layering up coats, and scarves, and hats, and without taking an Arctic blast in the face. Not that it was toasty in Phoenix, but I was walking around downtown in a blazer, passing people -- natives, I’d guess -- in puffy down jackets. Not that they were wrong; it’s just that my reference point was that -22 degree polar vortex day. </li><li>Reminds me of a time many years ago when I was doing a project in J’burg South Africa in July -- our summer, their winter. We’re going to a restaurant for dinner. The inside is full, but the outside tables are available. The owner apologizes, offers to bring us blankets. My colleague from Detroit is wearing a polo shirt; I’m in dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up. “Thanks, but we’re fine,” we tell him. Halfway through the meal, he comes out, offering to move us inside now that a table has freed up. He’s wearing a parka. “No, really, we’re OK,” we tell him. Different reference points on what’s cold.</li><li>Both trips -- out to Phoenix and down to Ft Myers airport, were full of young families, also getting away from the cold, maybe to stay with parents/ grandparents who’d retired in more reasonable climes. I flew Southwest to Phoenix and United to Ft Myers, and I came to appreciate what, before this, was, to me, an undiscovered benefit of Southwest’s open seating. Because I was in the B boarding group, those families with young children boarded before me. Walking down the aisle, I could spot the crying babies -- there, and there, and there -- and could just keep walking, until I was behind them all. Sure, I was in the back of the plane, and it took me a while to deplane, but that was a very small price I was willing to pay for 3 hours of relative peace. </li><li> Bridge Music — <em>Paint the Sky</em> by Hans Atom (c) 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/hansatom/50718 Ft: Miss Judged </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>In past episodes, we talked about the bare bones budget airlines -- Spirit and Frontier in the US; Ryanair and EasyJet in Europe, and Wow Air and Norwegian as the second coming of Laker Airways, doing TransAtlantic budget flight. Of those, I’ve flown Frontier, EasyJet, and Wow Air which, as a group, seems like the less severe set of the budgets. Ryanair and Spirit always seem to have a harder edge about the “budget-ness.” And then there’s their impact on the mainline carriers -- United, American, and Delta’s basic economy fares. Usually, when I look at a mainline carrier’s basic economy fare, the difference vs. their regular economy fare isn’t big enough to make up extra hassles. But booking our trip down to Florida, the difference on United was over $100 a ticket. Irene and I figured we could put up with a few hassles for over $200. But as dug a bit further, we didn’t find as many hassles as we thought. Because we’re both United Gold, there was no limitation on carry-on bags and we boarded in the usual Group 1. The only downgrade was that we had to pay to reserve seats and we couldn’t book them in Economy Plus -- the aisles with the extra legroom. Even after paying for reserved seats, we still saved enough to pay for a couple of nice dinners of grilled grouper. </li><li>Our friends who joined us from Milwaukee flew down on American through DFW without a hassle. Their flight back -- a direct to Milwaukee on Frontier -- not so much. Their flight was supposed to leave at 7:45pm. Around lunch, they received a note that their flight was delayed by 5 hours. What? We checked that again. We pulled up the FlightAware app, searched for their flight, and then started walked its planned flight legs back, hitting the “Where’s My Plane?” button until we found it -- still on the ground in Milwaukee 6 hours after its scheduled departure time. The weather wasn’t that bad, so it had to be a maintenance problem, which is a huge problem when flying budget and regional airlines because their model is to bounce a plane from place to place rather than flying it out of a hub where they could swap out a busted plane if need be. So that 6 hour delay was going to cascade through that day’s schedule. Our friends finally left Ft Myers at 2:45am. Which is something I’ve noticed about Frontier -- I’ve never seen them cancel a flight no matter how late they leave. A regional airline would’ve cancelled that flight way earlier, but not Frontier. I don’t know how their crews don’t time out, but I kinda admire them for getting you home no matter what time. Would be way better <em>not </em> to take a 7-hr delay, but at least they get you home.</li><li>This year, I got dropped a status level on Hertz, from President’s Circle down to Five Star. I didn’t do 20 rentals last year, and I missed an offer back in December to pay some points to keep my status. But, I can’t say that I notice the downgrade too much. When I was in Phoenix, I snagged a great Chrysler 300 with custom black rims. In Ft Myers, I got a brand new GMC Terrain SUV that held 4 adults very comfortable… Though I have to say that the Terrain through me for a loop when I got in. I’ve rented all sort of different cars. I get in, pair my phone to the phone, adjust the mirrors, put it in Drive, and pull out. With the Terrain, I was good with all of that right up until the “put it in Drive” step. I look down at the console -- no gear shift, no gear dial (the Chrysler experience talking). Then grab the stalk on the right side of the steering column and turn on the windshield wipers. I’m looking all over -- “WTF? Where is the damn gear shift?” From the back seat, Kristin points under the climate control “It’s right there”. And then I see, a line of buttons -- P, R, N, D. I push the D button and off we go. The last time I say push button gear selectors was when I was a kid, riding in somebody’s old Plymouth. I mean, come on GMC, do we really need <em>another</em> type of gear selection? Searching the Internet later for the Terrain’s gear buttons yields a whole slew of “Worst Shifter Design” article featuring these buttons. I don’t know which was worse -- the actual buttons or me, the alpha road warrior, getting back seat instructions on how to put a rental car in gear.</li><li>Another new thing I learned at Hertz Ft Myers -- besides where to find gear buttons -- is that, for Hertz Gold customers, there’s no additional driver fee for your spouse. I’ve been in Hertz Gold since it started, but I never connected to this benefit. It’s saves real money -- additional driver fees can run $10/day -- and hassle. Another reason to like the Hertz Gold program.</li><li>TravelCommons made our little local newspaper in an installment of their “Ask The Expert” series with the sub-headline “How can travel be more relaxing and fun?”  When Sandy, the reporter, emailed me to schedule the interview, she wanted to talk about advice for successful spring break travel. So I started off talking about how those spring break families should avoid traveling during road warrior rush hours -- Monday mornings and Thursday evenings. “Boarding a plane filled with busy professionals can quickly rob you of that pre-vacation high,” Sandy wrote, “Peacock advise leisure travelers to avoid sharing a plane with these potential buzzkills.” Such as me. The last thing a family heading for Disney wants to encounter is people like me powering down the concourse. I also recounted some of the tips that you’ve seen in my Top Holiday Travel Tips posts -- fly early in the day, avoid regional jets, and no one-and-done outfits so you can get everything you need into a carry-on. And I talked about turning long layovers into mini-vacations with our upcoming Stockholm layover as an example. Of course, I didn’t mention that a lot of these layovers turn into taproom crawls, like in last year’s video of the Midway layover taproom tour, and potentially this Stockholm stop thanks to TravelCommons’ listener Rob Cheshire’s custom Google map. No, I figured than might be a bit much for our nice local paper. Sandy turned our 45-minute conversation into a nice article. I posted a picture of the article on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">TravelCommons Facebook page</a> since they don’t seem to put their issues on-line. </li><li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/12/podcast-120-where-do-guidebooks-fit-in-i-hate-shopping-for-suitcases/\">episode #120</a>, back in March 2016, I asked the question -- Where do physical guidebooks fit in the world of apps, review websites, social media, and podcasts? Back then, I was planning Andrew’s and my visit to Iceland. Now, getting ready to head over to Brittany, France for 10 days, I bought two physical guidebooks to take with us. Irene wanted DK’s Eyewitness Travel; it was her favorite out of the stack of guidebooks she checked out of the library. While I did a throwback, picked up our go-to book from our PK (pre-kids) days of travel, Michelin’s Green Guide. The DK book is definitely more visually punchy, but I figured Michelin, a French company, should have Brittany covered pretty well, and they published this new edition just last month. Maybe I’m getting lazy in my old age, but I’m kinda glad to have everything in one spot -- a bit of local history, touring maps, city guides -- rather than having to rummage through multiple PDFs in an Evernote folder. However, I took a pass on Amazon’s recommended add-on of Michelin’s Brittany Road and Tourist Map No. 512. I’ve topped up my local SIM for 2.5 GB of mobile data; I’m sticking with Google Maps. I maybe old school, but I’m not going back to the Dark Ages.</li><li>And if you have any travel rants, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or  Instagram  at travelcommons -- or  post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com. </li><li> Bridge Music — <em>Perfect Stranger</em> by stellarartwars (c) 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/stellarartwars/45510 Ft: TheDice </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Dining Single</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Our daughter Claire is heading down to London for her first week of Spring Break and will then meet us in Paris for our Brittany trip.  Planning it, we got talking about eating alone on the road. Years ago, it used to be more awkward - escorted to the small table off in the corner, a server a bit ticked off at the small check and therefore small tip. You’d read the newspaper or a book between courses to keep yourself occupied, wrap it up pretty quickly and head back to the hotel.</li><li>For guy travelers, the sports bar was (and still is) the exception to that rule. Fine, sit me in a booth alone as long as I have a clear view of walls of TV screens showing all ESPN all the time – ESPN, ESPN-2, ESPN-3, ESPN-U, ESPN News… No need for a book, especially over the next few weeks watching the opening rounds of the NCAA tournaments when I can watch a couple of games at once. Rush out? Hell no, give me another large Coors Light, we haven’t even hit half time.</li><li>Most restaurants now serve a full menu at the bar, complete with a full set up -- placemats, maybe a bread basket. Might be a touch cramped at happy hour, but it’s usually nice to be in the main flow of things rather than off in the corner. The trend toward shared plates , while getting a bit tired when dining with a group (“OK, what can we all agree on?”) works great for the single diner. If I want a bit of variety without overeating, I now have choices beyond sushi or tapas bars. Not that those are bad choices. I have no doubt that Claire will find her way to the bar at Barrafina in Soho.</li><li>Sitting at the bar also gave you a chance for a little social interaction, some serendipity; with the bartender, maybe with the guy sitting next to you. Some years ago, on my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/08/14/food-and-drink-highlights-from-my-drive-south/\">2,100-mile circle tour through the South</a>, a guy next to me at a Louisville bar told me to check out a restaurant in the not-yet-hip Bywater neighborhood in New Orleans; turned out to be a great recommendation. But I get less and less of that as people eat and just interact with their smartphones. Maybe Claire wouldn’t be keen on random bar conversations, but I kinda miss it.</li><li>Nowadays, where I do find that interaction is microbrewery taprooms. Sure, people still have their phones out to check their tasting flight into Untappd, but there’s an acceptance, almost an expectation, that people will “nerd out” about hops and malt and yeast esters with each other and with folks behind the bar. During one of my Dallas trips, I found my way to Grapevine Craft Brewing on a rainy Weds night. The brewmaster was pulling the taps, passing out some barrel samples, and we all spinning our beer nerd propellers real hard.</li><li> Bridge Music — <em>Foolish Game</em> by copperhead (c) 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/copperhead/46390 Ft: Snowflake,Sackjo22 </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><b>From The Travel Story Archives -- Airlines Need To Tell Us More</b></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Prepping for that interview with the local paper had me spelunking deep into the TravelCommons archives, fixing some broken links and listening to some of those early shows for the first time in a long time. A couple of things struck me -- the really poor sound quality I got from the little iRiver MP3 recorder that I was using, and how good some of those early travel stories were.</li><li> So here’s one from<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/09/24/podcast-15-begging-for-business-needing-to-know-at-35000-ft/\"> episode #15</a>, very long-time TC listener Allan Marko talking about wanting to know just a little bit more about what an airline maintenance guy is doing.  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #149</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_147.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #149 — Dining Single; Airlines Need To Tell Us More','','inherit','closed','closed','','2373-revision-v1','','','2019-03-20 19:53:33','2019-03-21 00:53:33','',2373,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/20/2373-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2391,1,'2019-03-20 20:29:20','2019-03-21 01:29:20','<!-- wp:image {\"id\":2382,\"align\":\"right\",\"width\":300,\"height\":300} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright is-resized\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/DSC_5715-1024x1024.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2382\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"/><figcaption>Not Looking Friendly for a Solo Diner</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I dusted off the mobile rig to record this episode in Happy Valley, the home of Penn State. And I am kinda happy with some travel to Phoenix and Florida to thaw me out after Chicago\'s run in with the polar vortex. In this episode, I talk about budget airlines, stepping down in Hertz status, why I bought physical guidebooks for a trip to France, the challenges of being a solo diner, and then dig into the archives for a classic travel story. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_149.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<figure><iframe src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/546788592&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"></iframe></figure>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show Notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show Notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #149:</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the Hyatt Place in State College, PA, feeling a bit more positive about life after a couple of warm weather getaways -- an afternoon meeting in Phoenix that I happily turned into a 3-day stay by flying in early for a “prep” session and staying late “in case our session ran long”; and then a long weekend with friends on the Gulf side of Florida. It was a nice break to walk outside without layering up coats, and scarves, and hats, and without taking an Arctic blast in the face. Not that it was toasty in Phoenix, but I was walking around downtown in a blazer, passing people -- natives, I’d guess -- in puffy down jackets. Not that they were wrong; it’s just that my reference point was that -22 degree polar vortex day. </li><li>Reminds me of a time many years ago when I was doing a project in J’burg South Africa in July -- our summer, their winter. We’re going to a restaurant for dinner. The inside is full, but the outside tables are available. The owner apologizes, offers to bring us blankets. My colleague from Detroit is wearing a polo shirt; I’m in dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up. “Thanks, but we’re fine,” we tell him. Halfway through the meal, he comes out, offering to move us inside now that a table has freed up. He’s wearing a parka. “No, really, we’re OK,” we tell him. Different reference points on what’s cold.</li><li>Both trips -- out to Phoenix and down to Ft Myers airport, were full of young families, also getting away from the cold, maybe to stay with parents/ grandparents who’d retired in more reasonable climes. I flew Southwest to Phoenix and United to Ft Myers, and I came to appreciate what, before this, was, to me, an undiscovered benefit of Southwest’s open seating. Because I was in the B boarding group, those families with young children boarded before me. Walking down the aisle, I could spot the crying babies -- there, and there, and there -- and could just keep walking, until I was behind them all. Sure, I was in the back of the plane, and it took me a while to deplane, but that was a very small price I was willing to pay for 3 hours of relative peace. </li><li> Bridge Music — <em>Paint the Sky</em> by Hans Atom (c) 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/hansatom/50718 Ft: Miss Judged </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>In past episodes, we talked about the bare bones budget airlines -- Spirit and Frontier in the US; Ryanair and EasyJet in Europe, and Wow Air and Norwegian as the second coming of Laker Airways, doing TransAtlantic budget flight. Of those, I’ve flown Frontier, EasyJet, and Wow Air which, as a group, seems like the less severe set of the budgets. Ryanair and Spirit always seem to have a harder edge about the “budget-ness.” And then there’s their impact on the mainline carriers -- United, American, and Delta’s basic economy fares. Usually, when I look at a mainline carrier’s basic economy fare, the difference vs. their regular economy fare isn’t big enough to make up extra hassles. But booking our trip down to Florida, the difference on United was over $100 a ticket. Irene and I figured we could put up with a few hassles for over $200. But as dug a bit further, we didn’t find as many hassles as we thought. Because we’re both United Gold, there was no limitation on carry-on bags and we boarded in the usual Group 1. The only downgrade was that we had to pay to reserve seats and we couldn’t book them in Economy Plus -- the aisles with the extra legroom. Even after paying for reserved seats, we still saved enough to pay for a couple of nice dinners of grilled grouper. </li><li>Our friends who joined us from Milwaukee flew down on American through DFW without a hassle. Their flight back -- a direct to Milwaukee on Frontier -- not so much. Their flight was supposed to leave at 7:45pm. Around lunch, they received a note that their flight was delayed by 5 hours. What? We checked that again. We pulled up the FlightAware app, searched for their flight, and then started walked its planned flight legs back, hitting the “Where’s My Plane?” button until we found it -- still on the ground in Milwaukee 6 hours after its scheduled departure time. The weather wasn’t that bad, so it had to be a maintenance problem, which is a huge problem when flying budget and regional airlines because their model is to bounce a plane from place to place rather than flying it out of a hub where they could swap out a busted plane if need be. So that 6 hour delay was going to cascade through that day’s schedule. Our friends finally left Ft Myers at 2:45am. Which is something I’ve noticed about Frontier -- I’ve never seen them cancel a flight no matter how late they leave. A regional airline would’ve cancelled that flight way earlier, but not Frontier. I don’t know how their crews don’t time out, but I kinda admire them for getting you home no matter what time. Would be way better <em>not </em> to take a 7-hr delay, but at least they get you home.</li><li>This year, I got dropped a status level on Hertz, from President’s Circle down to Five Star. I didn’t do 20 rentals last year, and I missed an offer back in December to pay some points to keep my status. But, I can’t say that I notice the downgrade too much. When I was in Phoenix, I snagged a great Chrysler 300 with custom black rims. In Ft Myers, I got a brand new GMC Terrain SUV that held 4 adults very comfortable… Though I have to say that the Terrain through me for a loop when I got in. I’ve rented all sort of different cars. I get in, pair my phone to the Bluetooh, adjust the mirrors, put it in Drive, and pull out. With the Terrain, I was good with all of that right up until the “put it in Drive” step. I look down at the console -- no gear shift, no gear dial (the Chrysler experience talking). Then grab the stalk on the right side of the steering column and turn on the windshield wipers. I’m looking all over -- “WTF? Where is the damn gear shift?” From the back seat, Kristin points under the climate control “It’s right there”. And then I see, a line of buttons -- P, R, N, D. I push the D button and off we go. The last time I say push button gear selectors was when I was a kid, riding in somebody’s old Plymouth. I mean, come on GMC, do we really need <em>another</em> type of gear selection? Searching the Internet later for the Terrain’s gear buttons yields a whole slew of “Worst Shifter Design” article featuring these buttons. I don’t know which was worse -- the actual buttons or me, the alpha road warrior, getting back seat instructions on how to put a rental car in gear.</li><li>Another new thing I learned at Hertz Ft Myers -- besides where to find gear buttons -- is that, for Hertz Gold customers, there’s no additional driver fee for your spouse. I’ve been in Hertz Gold since it started, but I never connected to this benefit. It’s saves real money -- additional driver fees can run $10/day -- and hassle. Another reason to like the Hertz Gold program.</li><li>TravelCommons made our little local newspaper in an installment of their “Ask The Expert” series with the sub-headline “How can travel be more relaxing and fun?”  When Sandy, the reporter, emailed me to schedule the interview, she wanted to talk about advice for successful spring break travel. So I started off talking about how those spring break families should avoid traveling during road warrior rush hours -- Monday mornings and Thursday evenings. “Boarding a plane filled with busy professionals can quickly rob you of that pre-vacation high,” Sandy wrote, “Peacock advise leisure travelers to avoid sharing a plane with these potential buzzkills.” Such as me. The last thing a family heading for Disney wants to encounter is people like me powering down the concourse. I also recounted some of the tips that you’ve seen in my Top Holiday Travel Tips posts -- fly early in the day, avoid regional jets, and no one-and-done outfits so you can get everything you need into a carry-on. And I talked about turning long layovers into mini-vacations with our upcoming Stockholm layover as an example. Of course, I didn’t mention that a lot of these layovers turn into taproom crawls, like in last year’s video of the Midway layover taproom tour, and potentially this Stockholm stop thanks to TravelCommons’ listener Rob Cheshire’s custom Google map. No, I figured than might be a bit much for our nice local paper. Sandy turned our 45-minute conversation into a nice article. I posted a picture of the article on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">TravelCommons Facebook page</a> since they don’t seem to put their issues on-line. </li><li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/12/podcast-120-where-do-guidebooks-fit-in-i-hate-shopping-for-suitcases/\">episode #120</a>, back in March 2016, I asked the question -- Where do physical guidebooks fit in the world of apps, review websites, social media, and podcasts? Back then, I was planning Andrew’s and my visit to Iceland. Now, getting ready to head over to Brittany, France for 10 days, I bought two physical guidebooks to take with us. Irene wanted DK’s Eyewitness Travel; it was her favorite out of the stack of guidebooks she checked out of the library. While I did a throwback, picked up our go-to book from our PK (pre-kids) days of travel, Michelin’s Green Guide. The DK book is definitely more visually punchy, but I figured Michelin, a French company, should have Brittany covered pretty well, and they published this new edition just last month. Maybe I’m getting lazy in my old age, but I’m kinda glad to have everything in one spot -- a bit of local history, touring maps, city guides -- rather than having to rummage through multiple PDFs in an Evernote folder. However, I took a pass on Amazon’s recommended add-on of Michelin’s Brittany Road and Tourist Map No. 512. I’ve topped up my local SIM for 2.5 GB of mobile data; I’m sticking with Google Maps. I maybe old school, but I’m not going back to the Dark Ages.</li><li>And if you have any travel rants, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or  Instagram  at travelcommons -- or  post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com. </li><li> Bridge Music — <em>Perfect Stranger</em> by stellarartwars (c) 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/stellarartwars/45510 Ft: TheDice </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Dining Single</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Our daughter Claire is heading down to London for her first week of Spring Break and will then meet us in Paris for our Brittany trip.  Planning it, we got talking about eating alone on the road. Years ago, it used to be more awkward - escorted to the small table off in the corner, a server a bit ticked off at the small check and therefore small tip. You’d read the newspaper or a book between courses to keep yourself occupied, wrap it up pretty quickly and head back to the hotel.</li><li>For guy travelers, the sports bar was (and still is) the exception to that rule. Fine, sit me in a booth alone as long as I have a clear view of walls of TV screens showing all ESPN all the time – ESPN, ESPN-2, ESPN-3, ESPN-U, ESPN News… No need for a book, especially over the next few weeks watching the opening rounds of the NCAA tournaments when I can watch a couple of games at once. Rush out? Hell no, give me another large Coors Light, we haven’t even hit half time.</li><li>Most restaurants now serve a full menu at the bar, complete with a full set up -- placemats, maybe a bread basket. Might be a touch cramped at happy hour, but it’s usually nice to be in the main flow of things rather than off in the corner. The trend toward shared plates , while getting a bit tired when dining with a group (“OK, what can we all agree on?”) works great for the single diner. If I want a bit of variety without overeating, I now have choices beyond sushi or tapas bars. Not that those are bad choices. I have no doubt that Claire will find her way to the bar at Barrafina in Soho.</li><li>Sitting at the bar also gave you a chance for a little social interaction, some serendipity; with the bartender, maybe with the guy sitting next to you. Some years ago, on my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/08/14/food-and-drink-highlights-from-my-drive-south/\">2,100-mile circle tour through the South</a>, a guy next to me at a Louisville bar told me to check out a restaurant in the not-yet-hip Bywater neighborhood in New Orleans; turned out to be a great recommendation. But I get less and less of that as people eat and just interact with their smartphones. Maybe Claire wouldn’t be keen on random bar conversations, but I kinda miss it.</li><li>Nowadays, where I do find that interaction is microbrewery taprooms. Sure, people still have their phones out to check their tasting flight into Untappd, but there’s an acceptance, almost an expectation, that people will “nerd out” about hops and malt and yeast esters with each other and with folks behind the bar. During one of my Dallas trips, I found my way to Grapevine Craft Brewing on a rainy Weds night. The brewmaster was pulling the taps, passing out some barrel samples, and we all spinning our beer nerd propellers real hard.</li><li> Bridge Music — <em>Foolish Game</em> by copperhead (c) 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/copperhead/46390 Ft: Snowflake,Sackjo22 </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><b>From The Travel Story Archives -- Airlines Need To Tell Us More</b></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Prepping for that interview with the local paper had me spelunking deep into the TravelCommons archives, fixing some broken links and listening to some of those early shows for the first time in a long time. A couple of things struck me -- the really poor sound quality I got from the little iRiver MP3 recorder that I was using, and how good some of those early travel stories were.</li><li> So here’s one from<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/09/24/podcast-15-begging-for-business-needing-to-know-at-35000-ft/\"> episode #15</a>, very long-time TC listener Allan Marko talking about wanting to know just a little bit more about what an airline maintenance guy is doing.  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #149</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_147.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #149 — Dining Single; Airlines Need To Tell Us More','','inherit','closed','closed','','2373-revision-v1','','','2019-03-20 20:29:20','2019-03-21 01:29:20','',2373,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/20/2373-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2392,1,'2019-03-20 21:38:53','2019-03-21 02:38:53','<!-- wp:image {\"id\":2382,\"align\":\"right\",\"width\":300,\"height\":300} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright is-resized\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/DSC_5715-1024x1024.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2382\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"/><figcaption>Not Looking Friendly for a Solo Diner</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I dusted off the mobile rig to record this episode in Happy Valley, the home of Penn State. And I am kinda happy with some travel to Phoenix and Florida to thaw me out after Chicago\'s run in with the polar vortex. In this episode, I talk about budget airlines, stepping down in Hertz status, why I bought physical guidebooks for a trip to France, the challenges of being a solo diner, and then dig into the archives for a classic travel story. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_149.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/593337933&color=%23ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true\"></iframe>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show Notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show Notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #149:</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the Hyatt Place in State College, PA, feeling a bit more positive about life after a couple of warm weather getaways -- an afternoon meeting in Phoenix that I happily turned into a 3-day stay by flying in early for a “prep” session and staying late “in case our session ran long”; and then a long weekend with friends on the Gulf side of Florida. It was a nice break to walk outside without layering up coats, and scarves, and hats, and without taking an Arctic blast in the face. Not that it was toasty in Phoenix, but I was walking around downtown in a blazer, passing people -- natives, I’d guess -- in puffy down jackets. Not that they were wrong; it’s just that my reference point was that -22 degree polar vortex day. </li><li>Reminds me of a time many years ago when I was doing a project in J’burg South Africa in July -- our summer, their winter. We’re going to a restaurant for dinner. The inside is full, but the outside tables are available. The owner apologizes, offers to bring us blankets. My colleague from Detroit is wearing a polo shirt; I’m in dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up. “Thanks, but we’re fine,” we tell him. Halfway through the meal, he comes out, offering to move us inside now that a table has freed up. He’s wearing a parka. “No, really, we’re OK,” we tell him. Different reference points on what’s cold.</li><li>Both trips -- out to Phoenix and down to Ft Myers airport, were full of young families, also getting away from the cold, maybe to stay with parents/ grandparents who’d retired in more reasonable climes. I flew Southwest to Phoenix and United to Ft Myers, and I came to appreciate what, before this, was, to me, an undiscovered benefit of Southwest’s open seating. Because I was in the B boarding group, those families with young children boarded before me. Walking down the aisle, I could spot the crying babies -- there, and there, and there -- and could just keep walking, until I was behind them all. Sure, I was in the back of the plane, and it took me a while to deplane, but that was a very small price I was willing to pay for 3 hours of relative peace. </li><li> Bridge Music — <em>Paint the Sky</em> by Hans Atom (c) 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/hansatom/50718 Ft: Miss Judged </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>In past episodes, we talked about the bare bones budget airlines -- Spirit and Frontier in the US; Ryanair and EasyJet in Europe, and Wow Air and Norwegian as the second coming of Laker Airways, doing TransAtlantic budget flight. Of those, I’ve flown Frontier, EasyJet, and Wow Air which, as a group, seems like the less severe set of the budgets. Ryanair and Spirit always seem to have a harder edge about the “budget-ness.” And then there’s their impact on the mainline carriers -- United, American, and Delta’s basic economy fares. Usually, when I look at a mainline carrier’s basic economy fare, the difference vs. their regular economy fare isn’t big enough to make up extra hassles. But booking our trip down to Florida, the difference on United was over $100 a ticket. Irene and I figured we could put up with a few hassles for over $200. But as dug a bit further, we didn’t find as many hassles as we thought. Because we’re both United Gold, there was no limitation on carry-on bags and we boarded in the usual Group 1. The only downgrade was that we had to pay to reserve seats and we couldn’t book them in Economy Plus -- the aisles with the extra legroom. Even after paying for reserved seats, we still saved enough to pay for a couple of nice dinners of grilled grouper. </li><li>Our friends who joined us from Milwaukee flew down on American through DFW without a hassle. Their flight back -- a direct to Milwaukee on Frontier -- not so much. Their flight was supposed to leave at 7:45pm. Around lunch, they received a note that their flight was delayed by 5 hours. What? We checked that again. We pulled up the FlightAware app, searched for their flight, and then started walked its planned flight legs back, hitting the “Where’s My Plane?” button until we found it -- still on the ground in Milwaukee 6 hours after its scheduled departure time. The weather wasn’t that bad, so it had to be a maintenance problem, which is a huge problem when flying budget and regional airlines because their model is to bounce a plane from place to place rather than flying it out of a hub where they could swap out a busted plane if need be. So that 6 hour delay was going to cascade through that day’s schedule. Our friends finally left Ft Myers at 2:45am. Which is something I’ve noticed about Frontier -- I’ve never seen them cancel a flight no matter how late they leave. A regional airline would’ve cancelled that flight way earlier, but not Frontier. I don’t know how their crews don’t time out, but I kinda admire them for getting you home no matter what time. Would be way better <em>not </em> to take a 7-hr delay, but at least they get you home.</li><li>This year, I got dropped a status level on Hertz, from President’s Circle down to Five Star. I didn’t do 20 rentals last year, and I missed an offer back in December to pay some points to keep my status. But, I can’t say that I notice the downgrade too much. When I was in Phoenix, I snagged a great Chrysler 300 with custom black rims. In Ft Myers, I got a brand new GMC Terrain SUV that held 4 adults very comfortable… Though I have to say that the Terrain through me for a loop when I got in. I’ve rented all sort of different cars. I get in, pair my phone to the Bluetooh, adjust the mirrors, put it in Drive, and pull out. With the Terrain, I was good with all of that right up until the “put it in Drive” step. I look down at the console -- no gear shift, no gear dial (the Chrysler experience talking). Then grab the stalk on the right side of the steering column and turn on the windshield wipers. I’m looking all over -- “WTF? Where is the damn gear shift?” From the back seat, Kristin points under the climate control “It’s right there”. And then I see, a line of buttons -- P, R, N, D. I push the D button and off we go. The last time I saw a push button gear selector was when I was a kid, riding in somebody’s old Plymouth. I mean, come on GMC, do we really need <em>another</em> type of gear selection? Searching the Internet later for the Terrain’s gear buttons yields a whole slew of “Worst Shifter Design” article featuring these buttons. I don’t know which was worse -- the actual buttons or me, the alpha road warrior, getting back seat instructions on how to put a rental car in gear.</li><li>Another new thing I learned at Hertz Ft Myers -- besides where to find gear buttons -- is that, for Hertz Gold customers, there’s no additional driver fee for your spouse. I’ve been in Hertz Gold since it started, but I never connected to this benefit. It’s saves real money -- additional driver fees can run $10/day -- and hassle. Another reason to like the Hertz Gold program.</li><li>TravelCommons made our little local newspaper in an installment of their “Ask The Expert” series with the sub-headline “How can travel be more relaxing and fun?”  When Sandy, the reporter, emailed me to schedule the interview, she wanted to talk about advice for successful spring break travel. So I started off talking about how those spring break families should avoid traveling during road warrior rush hours -- Monday mornings and Thursday evenings. “Boarding a plane filled with busy professionals can quickly rob you of that pre-vacation high,” Sandy wrote, “Peacock advise leisure travelers to avoid sharing a plane with these potential buzzkills.” Such as me. The last thing a family heading for Disney wants to encounter is people like me powering down the concourse. I also recounted some of the tips that you’ve seen in my Top Holiday Travel Tips posts -- fly early in the day, avoid regional jets, and no one-and-done outfits so you can get everything you need into a carry-on. And I talked about turning long layovers into mini-vacations with our upcoming Stockholm layover as an example. Of course, I didn’t mention that a lot of these layovers turn into taproom crawls, like in last year’s video of the Midway layover taproom tour, and potentially this Stockholm stop thanks to TravelCommons’ listener Rob Cheshire’s custom Google map. No, I figured than might be a bit much for our nice local paper. Sandy turned our 45-minute conversation into a nice article. I posted a picture of the article on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">TravelCommons Facebook page</a> since they don’t seem to put their issues on-line. </li><li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/12/podcast-120-where-do-guidebooks-fit-in-i-hate-shopping-for-suitcases/\">episode #120</a>, back in March 2016, I asked the question -- Where do physical guidebooks fit in the world of apps, review websites, social media, and podcasts? Back then, I was planning Andrew’s and my visit to Iceland. Now, getting ready to head over to Brittany, France for 10 days, I bought two physical guidebooks to take with us. Irene wanted DK’s Eyewitness Travel; it was her favorite out of the stack of guidebooks she checked out of the library. While I did a throwback, picked up our go-to book from our PK (pre-kids) days of travel, Michelin’s Green Guide. The DK book is definitely more visually punchy, but I figured Michelin, a French company, should have Brittany covered pretty well, and they published this new edition just last month. Maybe I’m getting lazy in my old age, but I’m kinda glad to have everything in one spot -- a bit of local history, touring maps, city guides -- rather than having to rummage through multiple PDFs in an Evernote folder. However, I took a pass on Amazon’s recommended add-on of Michelin’s Brittany Road and Tourist Map No. 512. I’ve topped up my local SIM for 2.5 GB of mobile data; I’m sticking with Google Maps. I maybe old school, but I’m not going back to the Dark Ages.</li><li>And if you have any travel rants, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or  Instagram  at travelcommons -- or  post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com. </li><li> Bridge Music — <em>Perfect Stranger</em> by stellarartwars (c) 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/stellarartwars/45510 Ft: TheDice </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Dining Single</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Our daughter Claire is heading down to London for her first week of Spring Break and will then meet us in Paris for our Brittany trip.  Planning it, we got talking about eating alone on the road. Years ago, it used to be more awkward - escorted to the small table off in the corner, a server a bit ticked off at the small check and therefore small tip. You’d read the newspaper or a book between courses to keep yourself occupied, wrap it up pretty quickly and head back to the hotel.</li><li>For guy travelers, the sports bar was (and still is) the exception to that rule. Fine, sit me in a booth alone as long as I have a clear view of walls of TV screens showing all ESPN all the time – ESPN, ESPN-2, ESPN-3, ESPN-U, ESPN News… No need for a book, especially over the next few weeks watching the opening rounds of the NCAA tournaments when I can watch a couple of games at once. Rush out? Hell no, give me another large Coors Light, we haven’t even hit half time.</li><li>Most restaurants now serve a full menu at the bar, complete with a full set up -- placemats, maybe a bread basket. Might be a touch cramped at happy hour, but it’s usually nice to be in the main flow of things rather than off in the corner. The trend toward shared plates , while getting a bit tired when dining with a group (“OK, what can we all agree on?”) works great for the single diner. If I want a bit of variety without overeating, I now have choices beyond sushi or tapas bars. Not that those are bad choices. I have no doubt that Claire will find her way to the bar at Barrafina in Soho.</li><li>Sitting at the bar also gave you a chance for a little social interaction, some serendipity; with the bartender, maybe with the guy sitting next to you. Some years ago, on my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/08/14/food-and-drink-highlights-from-my-drive-south/\">2,100-mile circle tour through the South</a>, a guy next to me at a Louisville bar told me to check out a restaurant in the not-yet-hip Bywater neighborhood in New Orleans; turned out to be a great recommendation. But I get less and less of that as people eat and just interact with their smartphones. Maybe Claire wouldn’t be keen on random bar conversations, but I kinda miss it.</li><li>Nowadays, where I do find that interaction is microbrewery taprooms. Sure, people still have their phones out to check their tasting flight into Untappd, but there’s an acceptance, almost an expectation, that people will “nerd out” about hops and malt and yeast esters with each other and with folks behind the bar. During one of my Dallas trips, I found my way to Grapevine Craft Brewing on a rainy Weds night. The brewmaster was pulling the taps, passing out some barrel samples, and we all spinning our beer nerd propellers real hard.</li><li> Bridge Music — <em>Foolish Game</em> by copperhead (c) 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/copperhead/46390 Ft: Snowflake,Sackjo22 </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><b>From The Travel Story Archives -- Airlines Need To Tell Us More</b></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Prepping for that interview with the local paper had me spelunking deep into the TravelCommons archives, fixing some broken links and listening to some of those early shows for the first time in a long time. A couple of things struck me -- the really poor sound quality I got from the little iRiver MP3 recorder that I was using, and how good some of those early travel stories were.</li><li> So here’s one from<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/09/24/podcast-15-begging-for-business-needing-to-know-at-35000-ft/\"> episode #15</a>, very long-time TC listener Allan Marko talking about wanting to know just a little bit more about what an airline maintenance guy is doing.  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #149</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_147.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #149 — Dining Single; Airlines Need To Tell Us More','','inherit','closed','closed','','2373-revision-v1','','','2019-03-20 21:38:53','2019-03-21 02:38:53','',2373,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/20/2373-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2394,1,'2019-03-20 21:46:19','2019-03-21 02:46:19','[caption id=\"attachment_2100\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/20121212_195127000_iOS.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2100\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/20121212_195127000_iOS-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> Duck squats are supposed to keep you healthy[/caption]\n\nNo long-distance travel this month. Instead, I\"m getting back into regional jets, and waiting out a long delay in Cincinnati has me wondering about American Eagle\'s flight scheduling algorithm. My flights into CVG cause me to think about the impact of losing hub status. CVG looks overbuilt, but MEM is spending money to shrink itself. A Harvard Business Review article about how frequent business travel leads to poor health choices emphasizes the need for \"mindfulness\" on the road. The Midway Layover Taproom video gets me thinking about the time needed for a fun layover tour. And I give a listener my Chicago restaurant and taproom recommendations. All this and more at the&nbsp;<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_143.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_143.mp3\"]<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show Notes -->\n\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #143:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you a spiffed up TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. The production bay has been somewhat reassembled -- less one piece of furniture in the name of decluttering -- with the walls now a real estate agent-approved shade of “greige” and the floors redone from cherry to a bit more of a walnut; bowing to the presumed tastes of the millennial buyer. It’s not bad, just different. Definitely lighter though.</li>\n 	<li>No spur-of-the-moment international trips in July; mostly just running around the Midwest, but re-vectoring from Wisconsin to Cincinnati; a bit too far to drive, so I’m losing the freedom to leave when I want and back to stooping through regional jet doorways.</li>\n 	<li>And back to having my schedule jacked up by weather events thousands of miles away from me. As we’ve talked about before, the regional jet operators, affiliates that don’t have spare jets available to step in and wipe out delays a plane may encounter along their daily bunny hop schedule. Last week, my AA flight from CVG to ORD was a textbook example of this. At 12:30, on the way back from lunch, I got my first delay notice -- for a 6pm flight. It was just 20 minutes, so I didn’t think much of it. It was a nice day in both Cincinnati and Chicago, so I just chalked it up to standard ORD traffic. But then the delay started to stretch -- to 30 minutes, to 40 minutes, to an hour. I fired up FlightAware and used the “Where’s My Plane Now?” functionality to try and figure out what was going on. The nice thing about the FlightAware screen is it shows you the flight path and the current weather. My plane was traveling from Norfolk, VA to Miami, and then up to Cincinnati -- and I could see heavy storms all along the Southeast coast. The plane was late leaving Norfolk, and then was having to vector down the Florida Gulf Coast to avoid the storms over the Atlantic Coast. This wasn’t looking good.</li>\n 	<li>FlightAware also shows a 10-day history for a flight’s departure/arrival times. This American flight had only arrived on-time once; had also canceled once, and arrived late the other 8 times. With a bit of time to kill, I fired up Excel and calculated that this flight averaged an hour and 20 minute delay -- counting the one on-time flight, but not counting the cancellation (figuring out how to average in infinity was a bit more work that I was willing to tackle). This wasn’t really a one-off weather delay; it was a bad flight route. So as I’m wont to do, I hit American on Twitter -- “this flt has been delayed/cancelled 8 of the past 9 days. Kinda think AA needs to rethink the scheduling for this one”. I looked at the history of the United flight also leaving at 6pm -- one late flight in the past 10 days. It flies back and forth between ORD and CVG. Maybe not a great plan for the winter, but better than flying through the humid South in July and August. I’m switching. Besides, the beer selection in CVG won’t keep me occupied through too many more hour-long delays.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/beyond7-revelations/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><em>Miss America</em></a>&nbsp;by Beyond 7</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul class=\"\">\n 	<li>Even in the midst of studio refurb, I managed to push out the long-promised Chicago Midway Layover Southside Taproom Tour video. These videos always take longer than I think, but it’s fun and I like the end result. One of the things I’ve liked about the craft beer explosion -- in addition, of course, to good beer -- is that searching out new microbreweries has taken me to parts of cities I never would’ve visited otherwise -- walking into a basement in Portland, Oregon wondering how in the hell they got these huge steel tanks down here; or coming out of the Paris Metro in the middle of a North African neighborhood. I hope this Midway video has some of that same feel -- skipping the parts of Chicago that make the tour guides or TV shows -- the baseball themepark of Wrigleyville, the lakefront, hipster enclaves of Wicker Park and Logan Square -- guiding folks to pass through Douglas Park, Pilsen, Bridgeport, and the Back of the Yards. If you haven’t seen it already, check it out. You can watch it on the TravelCommons Facebook page, or go to the TravelCommons web site and you can click through to it on YouTube. Robert Fenerty left a comment on YouTube -- “Might be an excellent way to help get my A List status renewed this year!” Which, I think, is an excellent idea…</li>\n 	<li>Rob Cheshire commented on the web site, talking about the Southside breweries I featured on the video --\n<ul>\n 	<li>Thanks Mark! I will definitely build a visit to Marz and Lo-rez into my schedule for my August trip to Chicago. I am undecided about Whiner, which might be a bit too “European” in terms of beer styles for my tastes.I am a bit conflicted about Lagunitas, being part of the evil-Heineken Empire! I have no doubt that they have some great beers, and that the tasting room is a very cool spot.</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Rob and I have trading thoughts on Chicago brewery in comments to TravelCommons web site posts and Untappd check ins for a couple of months leading up to his trip here. Little does he know that I’m going to hit him up the other way for suggestions for my quick visit to Copenhagen in September. Rob has started his own blog -- <a href=\"https://taproomadventure.blogspot.com/\">The Great Taproom Adventure</a> -- with his notes on the taprooms he visits.</li>\n 	<li>Keith Love -- “long-time listener, first-time caller” as he describes himself -- sent me a note. He and his son are hitting Chicago early this month -- maybe for Lollapalooza? You’d be surprised how many older folks go hard on that 4-day music festival. Keith asked me for some restaurant and taproom recommendations, which got me thinking that I should do a Chicago episode, but in lieu of that, here’s the list I built for Keith in case you’re passing through Chicago soon -\n<ul>\n 	<li>Restaurant suggestions with good food/beer selections\n<ul>\n 	<li>The Publican (Fulton Market)</li>\n 	<li>Cruz Blanca (Randolph St)</li>\n 	<li>The Fountainhead (North Center)</li>\n 	<li>Hopleaf (Andersonville)</li>\n 	<li>Purple Pig (Michigan Ave)</li>\n 	<li>Eataly (River North; beer bar on the top floor)</li>\n 	<li>Fat Rice (Logan Square -- a bit of a cheat; OK beer, but food you won\'t find anywhere else)</li>\n 	<li>Wiener Circle (Lakeview -- even more of a cheat; no beer but a great char-Polish)</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Favorite Chicago taprooms -- this is more Northside focused since Keith said he was staying in River North\n<ul>\n 	<li>Goose Island Taproom (on Fulton St, not the brewpub)</li>\n 	<li>Half Acre (on either Lincoln or the new, larger one further north on Balmoral)</li>\n 	<li>Revolution Brewery Taproom (on Kedzie, not the brewpub on Milwaukee)</li>\n 	<li>Ravenswood taproom crawl -- 4 taprooms on Ravenswood between Foster and Irving Park Rd</li>\n 	<li>DryHop (Lakeview - another cheat; more of a brewpub, but a fav of mine)</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Keith also asked if I have a favorite airport app to, as he said, “actually guide you through airports and their amenities/services.” I had to admit that I’m a bit more old-school and use the maps that are posted around, though I will use Untappd to find the airport bars that have the best beer selection, which is how I killed a bit of that CVG delay I talked about earlier. If anybody uses an airport app, please let me know and I’ll talk about it on the next episode.</li>\n 	<li>The stint in Cincinnati forces me to fly out of ORD first thing Monday morning, the worst part of the road warrior rush hour. I normally avoid Monday morning flights like the plague, but my schedule these past weeks has forced me into it. That first Monday, I gave myself an extra 30 minutes, figuring life is too short to hyperventilate in a TSA line. But even then, the line tailing out of the Terminal 3 PreCheck took my breath away -- half the way down the terminal and I couldn’t catch up to the end of it; it grew faster than I could walk. I finally was able to get in -- I may have cut someone off, I dunno, the end of the line was a bit nebulous, lot of people muddling around, eventually forming a coherent line. Kinda like the travelers version of post-Big Bang dust clouds eventually forming galaxies. Anyhow, I get into line and start walking back toward the PreCheck station, at a brisk pace, and I didn’t really stop until I stood at the little swinging gate, waiting for the next available agent to check my license. It was 5-7 minutes tops. It’s amazing how many passengers they can process with 9 agents checking ID and every screening machine running. And with a line that’s 90% experienced travelers. It was just this side of a precision drill squad. I was impressed.</li>\n 	<li>I haven’t spent much time in Cincinnati airport before. It’s a very nice airport, but feels a bit “overbuilt”, especially with Delta “de-hubbing” it after it merged with Northwest.There’s two terminals with a train running between them and to the main building. The train is fine, as airplane trains go -- no better or worse than Denver’s or Atlanta’s -- but it seems a lot shorter. Indeed, the walk between terminals is maybe 3 minutes. The train seems a bit superfluous, or that the Cincinnati airport is trying to punch above its weight. Though feeling a bit overbuilt, it’s doesn’t have the ghost town feeling that the Memphis airport had the last time I was there. There were concourses there where I didn’t see a soul. It too was a casualty of the Delta-Northwest merger, a Northwest hub that was shut down in favor of Delta’s superhub in Atlanta. Memphis has lost ⅔’s of its passenger traffic and is now spending millions to downsize, to shutdown and mothball those empty concourses. There’s a <a href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/23/us/memphis-airport.html\">good NY Times story</a> about this. I tweeted out a link while I was writing this, but will also put a link in the show notes.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> or our new <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a> at travelcommons -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/westexit-extra/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><em>On Condition of Anonymity</em></a>&nbsp;by the West Exit</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>How Bad is Business Travel For Your Health?</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>I stumbled across an article in Harvard Business Review -- <a href=\"https://hbr.org/2018/05/just-how-bad-is-business-travel-for-your-health-heres-the-data\">Just How Bad is Business Travel for Your Health? Here’s the Data</a> -- by Dr Andrew Rundle, a pr ofessor of epidemiology at Columbia University. His bio says “his research focuses on the risks for, and consequences of, sedentary lifestyles and obesity.”\nThe article summarizes his recent research which boils down to&nbsp;\n<ul>\n 	<li>Employees who spent 14 or more nights away from home per month had significantly higher body mass index scores and were significantly more likely to report clinical symptoms of anxiety, depression and alcohol dependence; no physical activity or exercise; smoking; and trouble sleeping. The odds of being obese were 92% higher for those who traveled 21 or more nights per month</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Yup, so tell me something I don’t know. It takes work, or “mindfulness” to be on-trend, to eat right, exercise, and go to bed at a reasonable time when the guardrails of your normal routine disappear. Rundle’s population is people who travel every week. In the US, many consultancies shoot for a “3-4-5” travel schedule for their full-time project staff -- 3 nights, 4 days on the road -- leaving Monday morning, returning Thursday night -- with the 5th day in the office or working from home. Depending on the number of weeks in the month, that’s 12 -15 nights/month.</li>\n 	<li>When I went into consulting and full-time travel, the change was immediate -- working late and then project team dinners rolled over my evening workout routine, eating out every meal blew up my regular diet, and waking up at 4am on Monday morning to catch the 6am flight to LaGuardia, so I could be at my midtown Manhattan client by 10am screwed up my sleep cycle for the next couple of days. I could see the effects on the guys in my “class” -- the guys who joined the firm the same fall that I did -- putting on weight, walking a bit slower through the airport, drinking a bit more at dinner, maybe missing an early morning meeting or call after staying out a bit too late.</li>\n 	<li>I made some adjustments -- moved to morning workouts, became more “mindful” about what I was eating -- ordering fish and vegetarian meals where I could (though there aren’t always great options for non-Big 3 proteins (non-beef, chicken, or pork) in places like Dover, OH, Ephrata, PA, or Huntsville, AL). Maybe this slowed the inevitable, but 10 years on, we were on a family vacation with my folks, a Caribbean cruise. One of the stops along the Yucatan, the Mayan Riviera as they were starting to call it, I walk out of the water to our chairs, my dad looks up at me and says “You’ve put a bit of weight on, haven’t you?” I would’ve blown him off, except that I knew it was true. My waist size was 2 inches bigger and I was carrying 20 lbs more than when I started. I was heading in the same direction as my colleagues, even though it was at a slower pace.</li>\n 	<li>I was able to reverse the trend, and I think one of the key reasons was by then, I was senior enough to have more control over my schedule. I was managing the projects rather than being managed. So I could relieve the expectations of nightly team dinners -- at least one night a week, everyone was on their own, and no pressure if you bagged out other nights. I’d turn in early on Monday nights when most of us had gotten up early to fly out. We’d pick hotels with good workout rooms and where we could walk to the client and to restaurants rather than drive. Where I could, I’d negotiate remote work weeks with the client -- save them expense money, and give our team a break from the airport. It took work to break out of the usual, the default behaviors -- that “mindfulness” thing again.</li>\n 	<li>Thinking back on it, I guess I’m surprised that the firms I was with expected me to figure this out on my own. There were always travel policies on spending limits, and using the corporate travel agency, and what receipts were needed, and when you could fly business class, but no real guidance/support on how to lead a somewhat healthy life on the road. Maybe because the people writing those policies weren’t traveling -- the accountants and HR managers were paying for their own meals and going home every night, maybe a bit jealous thinking we were living it up every night eating steak dinners and drinking bottles of wine. Which some of us were, because we weren’t mindful enough to think about another way.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/solace-medusa/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Subtle Vice</a>&nbsp;</em>by Solace</li>\n</ul>\n<b>Make Layovers Fun</b>\n<ul>\n 	<li>One of the most sacred frequent traveler rules is Fly Direct. Be it winter with snow or summer with thunderstorms, adding that intermediate stop adds one more point of failure, one more opportunity for the airlines to screw up. But, with a bit of planning and an “adventuring” frame of mind, you can actually manufacture something good -- a mini-tour -- out of a connection. That has been the inspiration behind two TravelCommons videos -- the new MDW Layover Taproom Tour and the ORD Layover Excursion that I did almost 6 years ago -- and that is still getting regular hits on YouTube.</li>\n 	<li>To do it right, though, does take a bit of planning… and time. You have to factor in all the delay points -- getting off the plane, stashing your luggage if you carried on, getting to and from where you’re going, and then getting back through security when you return. For most airports, I think it’s tough to do a good layover tour in less than 4 hours -- this is supposed to be a fun daybreak, not another travel stressor.</li>\n 	<li>United Airlines used to have a series in their Hemispheres magazine called One City, Five Hours that would outline a 5-hour layover tour in a different city -- Reno, Albuquerque, Copenhagen, …. One of the early TravelCommons videos is me following their <a href=\"http://old.hemimag.us/2010/03/01/one-city-five-hours-frankfurt/\">Frankfurt tour</a> on a 6-hr layover between Mumbai and Chicago. Those article are tough to find, even with Google, but managed to dredge up the <a href=\"http://old.hemimag.us/2011/01/01/one-city-five-hours-copenhagen/\">Copenhagen one</a> from the Hemispheres archives and am going to give it a go at the end of this month.</li>\n 	<li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/06/24/podcast-130-notes-from-hungary/\">Episode 130</a> last year, I talked about how my son and I passed up a 90-minute connection in Vienna for an 8-hr one and then spent a Saturday eating schnitzel and drinking beer in the old section of town with a buddy of mine who came down from Poland.</li>\n 	<li>And I think that 5-8 hour span is about right. There are some exceptions -- the quick shopping jaunt from MSP to Mall of the Americas -- but even if you’re hitting the nearby Blue Lagoon on your Wow Air layover in Reykjavik, I’d still allow 4 hours, especially given the Wow check-in lines I stood in the last time I took flew them.\nJim McDonough felt that squeeze a few months ago. Commenting on the MDW Layover Facebook posting, Jim said</li>\n 	<li>We had a four hour layover at O\'Hare back in May on our way to Ireland. American did a schedule change that made a planned two hour layover into four. But we did not leave the airport. Somehow on international it didn\'t make sense. Had some bad \'free\' beer at the Admiral\'s Club.</li>\n 	<li>Yes, that would’ve been snug. Jim and his wife maybe could’ve swung down to Logan Square or Wicker Park -- both stops on the ORD subway line -- for a bite and a bit of a walkaround, but they would’ve needed to have a solid plan for that, tough with that last-minute schedule change.</li>\n 	<li>But even unplanned layovers can work out. Several years ago, my parents flew from Denver to Paducah, KY to visit my aunt and grandmother. As you can imagine, no direct flights so they connected through ORD. And, as you might guess, on the way home, their commuter flight was late out of Paducah and they missed a tight connection. My dad called me from the airport. It was New Year’s Eve night and we were having 3 or 4 couples over. “Get your luggage and book the flight out tomorrow,” I told him, “you can help me cook dinner.” I picked them up, brought them home, threw an apron at my dad, opened an early bottle of champagne, and we had a great time.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #143</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a> and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music is from&nbsp;<a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Magnatune</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_143.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #143 — How Bad is Business Travel For Your Health; Make Layovers Fun','','inherit','closed','closed','','2093-revision-v1','','','2019-03-20 21:46:19','2019-03-21 02:46:19','',2093,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/20/2093-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2396,1,'2019-03-20 21:47:57','2019-03-21 02:47:57','[caption id=\"attachment_2100\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/20121212_195127000_iOS.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2100\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/20121212_195127000_iOS-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Duck squats are supposed to keep you healthy[/caption]\n\nNo long-distance travel this month. Instead, I\"m getting back into regional jets, and waiting out a long delay in Cincinnati has me wondering about American Eagle\'s flight scheduling algorithm. My flights into CVG cause me to think about the impact of losing hub status. CVG looks overbuilt, but MEM is spending money to shrink itself. A Harvard Business Review article about how frequent business travel leads to poor health choices emphasizes the need for \"mindfulness\" on the road. The Midway Layover Taproom video gets me thinking about the time needed for a fun layover tour. And I give a listener my Chicago restaurant and taproom recommendations. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_143.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_143.mp3\"]\n\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show Notes -->\n\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #143:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you a spiffed up TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. The production bay has been somewhat reassembled -- less one piece of furniture in the name of decluttering -- with the walls now a real estate agent-approved shade of “greige” and the floors redone from cherry to a bit more of a walnut; bowing to the presumed tastes of the millennial buyer. It’s not bad, just different. Definitely lighter though.</li>\n 	<li>No spur-of-the-moment international trips in July; mostly just running around the Midwest, but re-vectoring from Wisconsin to Cincinnati; a bit too far to drive, so I’m losing the freedom to leave when I want and back to stooping through regional jet doorways.</li>\n 	<li>And back to having my schedule jacked up by weather events thousands of miles away from me. As we’ve talked about before, the regional jet operators, affiliates that don’t have spare jets available to step in and wipe out delays a plane may encounter along their daily bunny hop schedule. Last week, my AA flight from CVG to ORD was a textbook example of this. At 12:30, on the way back from lunch, I got my first delay notice -- for a 6pm flight. It was just 20 minutes, so I didn’t think much of it. It was a nice day in both Cincinnati and Chicago, so I just chalked it up to standard ORD traffic. But then the delay started to stretch -- to 30 minutes, to 40 minutes, to an hour. I fired up FlightAware and used the “Where’s My Plane Now?” functionality to try and figure out what was going on. The nice thing about the FlightAware screen is it shows you the flight path and the current weather. My plane was traveling from Norfolk, VA to Miami, and then up to Cincinnati -- and I could see heavy storms all along the Southeast coast. The plane was late leaving Norfolk, and then was having to vector down the Florida Gulf Coast to avoid the storms over the Atlantic Coast. This wasn’t looking good.</li>\n 	<li>FlightAware also shows a 10-day history for a flight’s departure/arrival times. This American flight had only arrived on-time once; had also canceled once, and arrived late the other 8 times. With a bit of time to kill, I fired up Excel and calculated that this flight averaged an hour and 20 minute delay -- counting the one on-time flight, but not counting the cancellation (figuring out how to average in infinity was a bit more work that I was willing to tackle). This wasn’t really a one-off weather delay; it was a bad flight route. So as I’m wont to do, I hit American on Twitter -- “this flt has been delayed/cancelled 8 of the past 9 days. Kinda think AA needs to rethink the scheduling for this one”. I looked at the history of the United flight also leaving at 6pm -- one late flight in the past 10 days. It flies back and forth between ORD and CVG. Maybe not a great plan for the winter, but better than flying through the humid South in July and August. I’m switching. Besides, the beer selection in CVG won’t keep me occupied through too many more hour-long delays.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/beyond7-revelations/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><em>Miss America</em></a> by Beyond 7</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul class=\"\">\n 	<li>Even in the midst of studio refurb, I managed to push out the long-promised Chicago Midway Layover Southside Taproom Tour video. These videos always take longer than I think, but it’s fun and I like the end result. One of the things I’ve liked about the craft beer explosion -- in addition, of course, to good beer -- is that searching out new microbreweries has taken me to parts of cities I never would’ve visited otherwise -- walking into a basement in Portland, Oregon wondering how in the hell they got these huge steel tanks down here; or coming out of the Paris Metro in the middle of a North African neighborhood. I hope this Midway video has some of that same feel -- skipping the parts of Chicago that make the tour guides or TV shows -- the baseball themepark of Wrigleyville, the lakefront, hipster enclaves of Wicker Park and Logan Square -- guiding folks to pass through Douglas Park, Pilsen, Bridgeport, and the Back of the Yards. If you haven’t seen it already, check it out. You can watch it on the TravelCommons Facebook page, or go to the TravelCommons web site and you can click through to it on YouTube. Robert Fenerty left a comment on YouTube -- “Might be an excellent way to help get my A List status renewed this year!” Which, I think, is an excellent idea…</li>\n 	<li>Rob Cheshire commented on the web site, talking about the Southside breweries I featured on the video --\n<ul>\n 	<li>Thanks Mark! I will definitely build a visit to Marz and Lo-rez into my schedule for my August trip to Chicago. I am undecided about Whiner, which might be a bit too “European” in terms of beer styles for my tastes.I am a bit conflicted about Lagunitas, being part of the evil-Heineken Empire! I have no doubt that they have some great beers, and that the tasting room is a very cool spot.</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Rob and I have trading thoughts on Chicago brewery in comments to TravelCommons web site posts and Untappd check ins for a couple of months leading up to his trip here. Little does he know that I’m going to hit him up the other way for suggestions for my quick visit to Copenhagen in September. Rob has started his own blog -- <a href=\"https://taproomadventure.blogspot.com/\">The Great Taproom Adventure</a> -- with his notes on the taprooms he visits.</li>\n 	<li>Keith Love -- “long-time listener, first-time caller” as he describes himself -- sent me a note. He and his son are hitting Chicago early this month -- maybe for Lollapalooza? You’d be surprised how many older folks go hard on that 4-day music festival. Keith asked me for some restaurant and taproom recommendations, which got me thinking that I should do a Chicago episode, but in lieu of that, here’s the list I built for Keith in case you’re passing through Chicago soon -\n<ul>\n 	<li>Restaurant suggestions with good food/beer selections\n<ul>\n 	<li>The Publican (Fulton Market)</li>\n 	<li>Cruz Blanca (Randolph St)</li>\n 	<li>The Fountainhead (North Center)</li>\n 	<li>Hopleaf (Andersonville)</li>\n 	<li>Purple Pig (Michigan Ave)</li>\n 	<li>Eataly (River North; beer bar on the top floor)</li>\n 	<li>Fat Rice (Logan Square -- a bit of a cheat; OK beer, but food you won\'t find anywhere else)</li>\n 	<li>Wiener Circle (Lakeview -- even more of a cheat; no beer but a great char-Polish)</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Favorite Chicago taprooms -- this is more Northside focused since Keith said he was staying in River North\n<ul>\n 	<li>Goose Island Taproom (on Fulton St, not the brewpub)</li>\n 	<li>Half Acre (on either Lincoln or the new, larger one further north on Balmoral)</li>\n 	<li>Revolution Brewery Taproom (on Kedzie, not the brewpub on Milwaukee)</li>\n 	<li>Ravenswood taproom crawl -- 4 taprooms on Ravenswood between Foster and Irving Park Rd</li>\n 	<li>DryHop (Lakeview - another cheat; more of a brewpub, but a fav of mine)</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Keith also asked if I have a favorite airport app to, as he said, “actually guide you through airports and their amenities/services.” I had to admit that I’m a bit more old-school and use the maps that are posted around, though I will use Untappd to find the airport bars that have the best beer selection, which is how I killed a bit of that CVG delay I talked about earlier. If anybody uses an airport app, please let me know and I’ll talk about it on the next episode.</li>\n 	<li>The stint in Cincinnati forces me to fly out of ORD first thing Monday morning, the worst part of the road warrior rush hour. I normally avoid Monday morning flights like the plague, but my schedule these past weeks has forced me into it. That first Monday, I gave myself an extra 30 minutes, figuring life is too short to hyperventilate in a TSA line. But even then, the line tailing out of the Terminal 3 PreCheck took my breath away -- half the way down the terminal and I couldn’t catch up to the end of it; it grew faster than I could walk. I finally was able to get in -- I may have cut someone off, I dunno, the end of the line was a bit nebulous, lot of people muddling around, eventually forming a coherent line. Kinda like the travelers version of post-Big Bang dust clouds eventually forming galaxies. Anyhow, I get into line and start walking back toward the PreCheck station, at a brisk pace, and I didn’t really stop until I stood at the little swinging gate, waiting for the next available agent to check my license. It was 5-7 minutes tops. It’s amazing how many passengers they can process with 9 agents checking ID and every screening machine running. And with a line that’s 90% experienced travelers. It was just this side of a precision drill squad. I was impressed.</li>\n 	<li>I haven’t spent much time in Cincinnati airport before. It’s a very nice airport, but feels a bit “overbuilt”, especially with Delta “de-hubbing” it after it merged with Northwest.There’s two terminals with a train running between them and to the main building. The train is fine, as airplane trains go -- no better or worse than Denver’s or Atlanta’s -- but it seems a lot shorter. Indeed, the walk between terminals is maybe 3 minutes. The train seems a bit superfluous, or that the Cincinnati airport is trying to punch above its weight. Though feeling a bit overbuilt, it’s doesn’t have the ghost town feeling that the Memphis airport had the last time I was there. There were concourses there where I didn’t see a soul. It too was a casualty of the Delta-Northwest merger, a Northwest hub that was shut down in favor of Delta’s superhub in Atlanta. Memphis has lost ⅔’s of its passenger traffic and is now spending millions to downsize, to shutdown and mothball those empty concourses. There’s a <a href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/23/us/memphis-airport.html\">good NY Times story</a> about this. I tweeted out a link while I was writing this, but will also put a link in the show notes.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> or our new <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a> at travelcommons -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/westexit-extra/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><em>On Condition of Anonymity</em></a> by the West Exit</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>How Bad is Business Travel For Your Health?</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>I stumbled across an article in Harvard Business Review -- <a href=\"https://hbr.org/2018/05/just-how-bad-is-business-travel-for-your-health-heres-the-data\">Just How Bad is Business Travel for Your Health? Here’s the Data</a> -- by Dr Andrew Rundle, a pr ofessor of epidemiology at Columbia University. His bio says “his research focuses on the risks for, and consequences of, sedentary lifestyles and obesity.”\nThe article summarizes his recent research which boils down to\n<ul>\n 	<li>Employees who spent 14 or more nights away from home per month had significantly higher body mass index scores and were significantly more likely to report clinical symptoms of anxiety, depression and alcohol dependence; no physical activity or exercise; smoking; and trouble sleeping. The odds of being obese were 92% higher for those who traveled 21 or more nights per month</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Yup, so tell me something I don’t know. It takes work, or “mindfulness” to be on-trend, to eat right, exercise, and go to bed at a reasonable time when the guardrails of your normal routine disappear. Rundle’s population is people who travel every week. In the US, many consultancies shoot for a “3-4-5” travel schedule for their full-time project staff -- 3 nights, 4 days on the road -- leaving Monday morning, returning Thursday night -- with the 5th day in the office or working from home. Depending on the number of weeks in the month, that’s 12 -15 nights/month.</li>\n 	<li>When I went into consulting and full-time travel, the change was immediate -- working late and then project team dinners rolled over my evening workout routine, eating out every meal blew up my regular diet, and waking up at 4am on Monday morning to catch the 6am flight to LaGuardia, so I could be at my midtown Manhattan client by 10am screwed up my sleep cycle for the next couple of days. I could see the effects on the guys in my “class” -- the guys who joined the firm the same fall that I did -- putting on weight, walking a bit slower through the airport, drinking a bit more at dinner, maybe missing an early morning meeting or call after staying out a bit too late.</li>\n 	<li>I made some adjustments -- moved to morning workouts, became more “mindful” about what I was eating -- ordering fish and vegetarian meals where I could (though there aren’t always great options for non-Big 3 proteins (non-beef, chicken, or pork) in places like Dover, OH, Ephrata, PA, or Huntsville, AL). Maybe this slowed the inevitable, but 10 years on, we were on a family vacation with my folks, a Caribbean cruise. One of the stops along the Yucatan, the Mayan Riviera as they were starting to call it, I walk out of the water to our chairs, my dad looks up at me and says “You’ve put a bit of weight on, haven’t you?” I would’ve blown him off, except that I knew it was true. My waist size was 2 inches bigger and I was carrying 20 lbs more than when I started. I was heading in the same direction as my colleagues, even though it was at a slower pace.</li>\n 	<li>I was able to reverse the trend, and I think one of the key reasons was by then, I was senior enough to have more control over my schedule. I was managing the projects rather than being managed. So I could relieve the expectations of nightly team dinners -- at least one night a week, everyone was on their own, and no pressure if you bagged out other nights. I’d turn in early on Monday nights when most of us had gotten up early to fly out. We’d pick hotels with good workout rooms and where we could walk to the client and to restaurants rather than drive. Where I could, I’d negotiate remote work weeks with the client -- save them expense money, and give our team a break from the airport. It took work to break out of the usual, the default behaviors -- that “mindfulness” thing again.</li>\n 	<li>Thinking back on it, I guess I’m surprised that the firms I was with expected me to figure this out on my own. There were always travel policies on spending limits, and using the corporate travel agency, and what receipts were needed, and when you could fly business class, but no real guidance/support on how to lead a somewhat healthy life on the road. Maybe because the people writing those policies weren’t traveling -- the accountants and HR managers were paying for their own meals and going home every night, maybe a bit jealous thinking we were living it up every night eating steak dinners and drinking bottles of wine. Which some of us were, because we weren’t mindful enough to think about another way.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/solace-medusa/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Subtle Vice</a> </em>by Solace</li>\n</ul>\n<b>Make Layovers Fun</b>\n<ul>\n 	<li>One of the most sacred frequent traveler rules is Fly Direct. Be it winter with snow or summer with thunderstorms, adding that intermediate stop adds one more point of failure, one more opportunity for the airlines to screw up. But, with a bit of planning and an “adventuring” frame of mind, you can actually manufacture something good -- a mini-tour -- out of a connection. That has been the inspiration behind two TravelCommons videos -- the new MDW Layover Taproom Tour and the ORD Layover Excursion that I did almost 6 years ago -- and that is still getting regular hits on YouTube.</li>\n 	<li>To do it right, though, does take a bit of planning… and time. You have to factor in all the delay points -- getting off the plane, stashing your luggage if you carried on, getting to and from where you’re going, and then getting back through security when you return. For most airports, I think it’s tough to do a good layover tour in less than 4 hours -- this is supposed to be a fun daybreak, not another travel stressor.</li>\n 	<li>United Airlines used to have a series in their Hemispheres magazine called One City, Five Hours that would outline a 5-hour layover tour in a different city -- Reno, Albuquerque, Copenhagen, …. One of the early TravelCommons videos is me following their <a href=\"http://old.hemimag.us/2010/03/01/one-city-five-hours-frankfurt/\">Frankfurt tour</a> on a 6-hr layover between Mumbai and Chicago. Those article are tough to find, even with Google, but managed to dredge up the <a href=\"http://old.hemimag.us/2011/01/01/one-city-five-hours-copenhagen/\">Copenhagen one</a> from the Hemispheres archives and am going to give it a go at the end of this month.</li>\n 	<li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/06/24/podcast-130-notes-from-hungary/\">Episode 130</a> last year, I talked about how my son and I passed up a 90-minute connection in Vienna for an 8-hr one and then spent a Saturday eating schnitzel and drinking beer in the old section of town with a buddy of mine who came down from Poland.</li>\n 	<li>And I think that 5-8 hour span is about right. There are some exceptions -- the quick shopping jaunt from MSP to Mall of the Americas -- but even if you’re hitting the nearby Blue Lagoon on your Wow Air layover in Reykjavik, I’d still allow 4 hours, especially given the Wow check-in lines I stood in the last time I took flew them.\nJim McDonough felt that squeeze a few months ago. Commenting on the MDW Layover Facebook posting, Jim said</li>\n 	<li>We had a four hour layover at O\'Hare back in May on our way to Ireland. American did a schedule change that made a planned two hour layover into four. But we did not leave the airport. Somehow on international it didn\'t make sense. Had some bad \'free\' beer at the Admiral\'s Club.</li>\n 	<li>Yes, that would’ve been snug. Jim and his wife maybe could’ve swung down to Logan Square or Wicker Park -- both stops on the ORD subway line -- for a bite and a bit of a walkaround, but they would’ve needed to have a solid plan for that, tough with that last-minute schedule change.</li>\n 	<li>But even unplanned layovers can work out. Several years ago, my parents flew from Denver to Paducah, KY to visit my aunt and grandmother. As you can imagine, no direct flights so they connected through ORD. And, as you might guess, on the way home, their commuter flight was late out of Paducah and they missed a tight connection. My dad called me from the airport. It was New Year’s Eve night and we were having 3 or 4 couples over. “Get your luggage and book the flight out tomorrow,” I told him, “you can help me cook dinner.” I picked them up, brought them home, threw an apron at my dad, opened an early bottle of champagne, and we had a great time.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #143</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a> and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music is from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Magnatune</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_143.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #143 — How Bad is Business Travel For Your Health; Make Layovers Fun','','inherit','closed','closed','','2093-revision-v1','','','2019-03-20 21:47:57','2019-03-21 02:47:57','',2093,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/20/2093-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2397,1,'2019-03-20 21:50:44','2019-03-21 02:50:44','<!-- wp:image {\"id\":2382,\"align\":\"right\",\"width\":300,\"height\":300} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright is-resized\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/DSC_5715-1024x1024.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2382\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"/><figcaption>Not Looking Friendly for a Solo Diner</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I dusted off the mobile rig to record this episode in Happy Valley, the home of Penn State. And I am kinda happy with some travel to Phoenix and Florida to thaw me out after Chicago\'s run in with the polar vortex. In this episode, I talk about budget airlines, stepping down in Hertz status, why I bought physical guidebooks for a trip to France, the challenges of being a solo diner, and then dig into the archives for a classic travel story. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_149.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/593337933&color=%23ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true\"></iframe>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show Notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show Notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #149:</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the Hyatt Place in State College, PA, feeling a bit more positive about life after a couple of warm weather getaways -- an afternoon meeting in Phoenix that I happily turned into a 3-day stay by flying in early for a “prep” session and staying late “in case our session ran long”; and then a long weekend with friends on the Gulf side of Florida. It was a nice break to walk outside without layering up coats, and scarves, and hats, and without taking an Arctic blast in the face. Not that it was toasty in Phoenix, but I was walking around downtown in a blazer, passing people -- natives, I’d guess -- in puffy down jackets. Not that they were wrong; it’s just that my reference point was that -22 degree polar vortex day. </li><li>Reminds me of a time many years ago when I was doing a project in J’burg South Africa in July -- our summer, their winter. We’re going to a restaurant for dinner. The inside is full, but the outside tables are available. The owner apologizes, offers to bring us blankets. My colleague from Detroit is wearing a polo shirt; I’m in dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up. “Thanks, but we’re fine,” we tell him. Halfway through the meal, he comes out, offering to move us inside now that a table has freed up. He’s wearing a parka. “No, really, we’re OK,” we tell him. Different reference points on what’s cold.</li><li>Both trips -- out to Phoenix and down to Ft Myers airport, were full of young families, also getting away from the cold, maybe to stay with parents/ grandparents who’d retired in more reasonable climes. I flew Southwest to Phoenix and United to Ft Myers, and I came to appreciate what, before this, was, to me, an undiscovered benefit of Southwest’s open seating. Because I was in the B boarding group, those families with young children boarded before me. Walking down the aisle, I could spot the crying babies -- there, and there, and there -- and could just keep walking, until I was behind them all. Sure, I was in the back of the plane, and it took me a while to deplane, but that was a very small price I was willing to pay for 3 hours of relative peace. </li><li> Bridge Music — <em>Paint the Sky</em> by Hans Atom (c) 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/hansatom/50718 Ft: Miss Judged </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>In past episodes, we talked about the bare bones budget airlines -- Spirit and Frontier in the US; Ryanair and EasyJet in Europe, and Wow Air and Norwegian as the second coming of Laker Airways, doing TransAtlantic budget flight. Of those, I’ve flown Frontier, EasyJet, and Wow Air which, as a group, seems like the less severe set of the budgets. Ryanair and Spirit always seem to have a harder edge about the “budget-ness.” And then there’s their impact on the mainline carriers -- United, American, and Delta’s basic economy fares. Usually, when I look at a mainline carrier’s basic economy fare, the difference vs. their regular economy fare isn’t big enough to make up extra hassles. But booking our trip down to Florida, the difference on United was over $100 a ticket. Irene and I figured we could put up with a few hassles for over $200. But as dug a bit further, we didn’t find as many hassles as we thought. Because we’re both United Gold, there was no limitation on carry-on bags and we boarded in the usual Group 1. The only downgrade was that we had to pay to reserve seats and we couldn’t book them in Economy Plus -- the aisles with the extra legroom. Even after paying for reserved seats, we still saved enough to pay for a couple of nice dinners of grilled grouper. </li><li>Our friends who joined us from Milwaukee flew down on American through DFW without a hassle. Their flight back -- a direct to Milwaukee on Frontier -- not so much. Their flight was supposed to leave at 7:45pm. Around lunch, they received a note that their flight was delayed by 5 hours. What? We checked that again. We pulled up the FlightAware app, searched for their flight, and then started walked its planned flight legs back, hitting the “Where’s My Plane?” button until we found it -- still on the ground in Milwaukee 6 hours after its scheduled departure time. The weather wasn’t that bad, so it had to be a maintenance problem, which is a huge problem when flying budget and regional airlines because their model is to bounce a plane from place to place rather than flying it out of a hub where they could swap out a busted plane if need be. So that 6 hour delay was going to cascade through that day’s schedule. Our friends finally left Ft Myers at 2:45am. Which is something I’ve noticed about Frontier -- I’ve never seen them cancel a flight no matter how late they leave. A regional airline would’ve cancelled that flight way earlier, but not Frontier. I don’t know how their crews don’t time out, but I kinda admire them for getting you home no matter what time. Would be way better <em>not </em> to take a 7-hr delay, but at least they get you home.</li><li>This year, I got dropped a status level on Hertz, from President’s Circle down to Five Star. I didn’t do 20 rentals last year, and I missed an offer back in December to pay some points to keep my status. But, I can’t say that I notice the downgrade too much. When I was in Phoenix, I snagged a great Chrysler 300 with custom black rims. In Ft Myers, I got a brand new GMC Terrain SUV that held 4 adults very comfortable… Though I have to say that the Terrain through me for a loop when I got in. I’ve rented all sort of different cars. I get in, pair my phone to the Bluetooh, adjust the mirrors, put it in Drive, and pull out. With the Terrain, I was good with all of that right up until the “put it in Drive” step. I look down at the console -- no gear shift, no gear dial (the Chrysler experience talking). Then grab the stalk on the right side of the steering column and turn on the windshield wipers. I’m looking all over -- “WTF? Where is the damn gear shift?” From the back seat, Kristin points under the climate control “It’s right there”. And then I see, a line of buttons -- P, R, N, D. I push the D button and off we go. The last time I saw a push button gear selector was when I was a kid, riding in somebody’s old Plymouth. I mean, come on GMC, do we really need <em>another</em> type of gear selection? Searching the Internet later for the Terrain’s gear buttons yields a whole slew of “Worst Shifter Design” article featuring these buttons. I don’t know which was worse -- the actual buttons or me, the alpha road warrior, getting back seat instructions on how to put a rental car in gear.</li><li>Another new thing I learned at Hertz Ft Myers -- besides where to find gear buttons -- is that, for Hertz Gold customers, there’s no additional driver fee for your spouse. I’ve been in Hertz Gold since it started, but I never connected to this benefit. It’s saves real money -- additional driver fees can run $10/day -- and hassle. Another reason to like the Hertz Gold program.</li><li>TravelCommons made our little local newspaper in an installment of their “Ask The Expert” series with the sub-headline “How can travel be more relaxing and fun?”  When Sandy, the reporter, emailed me to schedule the interview, she wanted to talk about advice for successful spring break travel. So I started off talking about how those spring break families should avoid traveling during road warrior rush hours -- Monday mornings and Thursday evenings. “Boarding a plane filled with busy professionals can quickly rob you of that pre-vacation high,” Sandy wrote, “Peacock advise leisure travelers to avoid sharing a plane with these potential buzzkills.” Such as me. The last thing a family heading for Disney wants to encounter is people like me powering down the concourse. I also recounted some of the tips that you’ve seen in my Top Holiday Travel Tips posts -- fly early in the day, avoid regional jets, and no one-and-done outfits so you can get everything you need into a carry-on. And I talked about turning long layovers into mini-vacations with our upcoming Stockholm layover as an example. Of course, I didn’t mention that a lot of these layovers turn into taproom crawls, like in last year’s video of the Midway layover taproom tour, and potentially this Stockholm stop thanks to TravelCommons’ listener Rob Cheshire’s custom Google map. No, I figured than might be a bit much for our nice local paper. Sandy turned our 45-minute conversation into a nice article. I posted a picture of the article on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">TravelCommons Facebook page</a> since they don’t seem to put their issues on-line. </li><li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/12/podcast-120-where-do-guidebooks-fit-in-i-hate-shopping-for-suitcases/\">episode #120</a>, back in March 2016, I asked the question -- Where do physical guidebooks fit in the world of apps, review websites, social media, and podcasts? Back then, I was planning Andrew’s and my visit to Iceland. Now, getting ready to head over to Brittany, France for 10 days, I bought two physical guidebooks to take with us. Irene wanted DK’s Eyewitness Travel; it was her favorite out of the stack of guidebooks she checked out of the library. While I did a throwback, picked up our go-to book from our PK (pre-kids) days of travel, Michelin’s Green Guide. The DK book is definitely more visually punchy, but I figured Michelin, a French company, should have Brittany covered pretty well, and they published this new edition just last month. Maybe I’m getting lazy in my old age, but I’m kinda glad to have everything in one spot -- a bit of local history, touring maps, city guides -- rather than having to rummage through multiple PDFs in an Evernote folder. However, I took a pass on Amazon’s recommended add-on of Michelin’s Brittany Road and Tourist Map No. 512. I’ve topped up my local SIM for 2.5 GB of mobile data; I’m sticking with Google Maps. I maybe old school, but I’m not going back to the Dark Ages.</li><li>And if you have any travel rants, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or  Instagram  at travelcommons -- or  post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com. </li><li> Bridge Music — <em>Perfect Stranger</em> by stellarartwars (c) 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/stellarartwars/45510 Ft: TheDice </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Dining Single</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Our daughter Claire is heading down to London for her first week of Spring Break and will then meet us in Paris for our Brittany trip.  Planning it, we got talking about eating alone on the road. Years ago, it used to be more awkward - escorted to the small table off in the corner, a server a bit ticked off at the small check and therefore small tip. You’d read the newspaper or a book between courses to keep yourself occupied, wrap it up pretty quickly and head back to the hotel.</li><li>For guy travelers, the sports bar was (and still is) the exception to that rule. Fine, sit me in a booth alone as long as I have a clear view of walls of TV screens showing all ESPN all the time – ESPN, ESPN-2, ESPN-3, ESPN-U, ESPN News… No need for a book, especially over the next few weeks watching the opening rounds of the NCAA tournaments when I can watch a couple of games at once. Rush out? Hell no, give me another large Coors Light, we haven’t even hit half time.</li><li>Most restaurants now serve a full menu at the bar, complete with a full set up -- placemats, maybe a bread basket. Might be a touch cramped at happy hour, but it’s usually nice to be in the main flow of things rather than off in the corner. The trend toward shared plates , while getting a bit tired when dining with a group (“OK, what can we all agree on?”) works great for the single diner. If I want a bit of variety without overeating, I now have choices beyond sushi or tapas bars. Not that those are bad choices. I have no doubt that Claire will find her way to the bar at Barrafina in Soho.</li><li>Sitting at the bar also gave you a chance for a little social interaction, some serendipity; with the bartender, maybe with the guy sitting next to you. Some years ago, on my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/08/14/food-and-drink-highlights-from-my-drive-south/\">2,100-mile circle tour through the South</a>, a guy next to me at a Louisville bar told me to check out a restaurant in the not-yet-hip Bywater neighborhood in New Orleans; turned out to be a great recommendation. But I get less and less of that as people eat and just interact with their smartphones. Maybe Claire wouldn’t be keen on random bar conversations, but I kinda miss it.</li><li>Nowadays, where I do find that interaction is microbrewery taprooms. Sure, people still have their phones out to check their tasting flight into Untappd, but there’s an acceptance, almost an expectation, that people will “nerd out” about hops and malt and yeast esters with each other and with folks behind the bar. During one of my Dallas trips, I found my way to Grapevine Craft Brewing on a rainy Weds night. The brewmaster was pulling the taps, passing out some barrel samples, and we all spinning our beer nerd propellers real hard.</li><li> Bridge Music — <em>Foolish Game</em> by copperhead (c) 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/copperhead/46390 Ft: Snowflake,Sackjo22 </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><b>From The Travel Story Archives -- Airlines Need To Tell Us More</b></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Prepping for that interview with the local paper had me spelunking deep into the TravelCommons archives, fixing some broken links and listening to some of those early shows for the first time in a long time. A couple of things struck me -- the really poor sound quality I got from the little iRiver MP3 recorder that I was using, and how good some of those early travel stories were.</li><li> So here’s one from<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/09/24/podcast-15-begging-for-business-needing-to-know-at-35000-ft/\"> episode #15</a>, very long-time TC listener Allan Marko talking about wanting to know just a little bit more about what an airline maintenance guy is doing.  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #149</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_147.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #149 — Dining Single; Airlines Need To Tell Us More','','inherit','closed','closed','','2373-revision-v1','','','2019-03-20 21:50:44','2019-03-21 02:50:44','',2373,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/20/2373-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2398,1,'2019-03-20 21:51:40','2019-03-21 02:51:40','<!-- wp:image {\"id\":2382,\"align\":\"right\",\"width\":300,\"height\":300} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright is-resized\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/DSC_5715-1024x1024.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2382\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"/><figcaption>Not Looking Friendly for a Solo Diner</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I dusted off the mobile rig to record this episode in Happy Valley, the home of Penn State. And I am kinda happy with some travel to Phoenix and Florida to thaw me out after Chicago\'s run in with the polar vortex. In this episode, I talk about budget airlines, stepping down in Hertz status, why I bought physical guidebooks for a trip to France, the challenges of being a solo diner, and then dig into the archives for a classic travel story. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_149.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/593337933&color=%23ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true\"></iframe>\n<p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show Notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show Notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #149:</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the Hyatt Place in State College, PA, feeling a bit more positive about life after a couple of warm weather getaways -- an afternoon meeting in Phoenix that I happily turned into a 3-day stay by flying in early for a “prep” session and staying late “in case our session ran long”; and then a long weekend with friends on the Gulf side of Florida. It was a nice break to walk outside without layering up coats, and scarves, and hats, and without taking an Arctic blast in the face. Not that it was toasty in Phoenix, but I was walking around downtown in a blazer, passing people -- natives, I’d guess -- in puffy down jackets. Not that they were wrong; it’s just that my reference point was that -22 degree polar vortex day. </li><li>Reminds me of a time many years ago when I was doing a project in J’burg South Africa in July -- our summer, their winter. We’re going to a restaurant for dinner. The inside is full, but the outside tables are available. The owner apologizes, offers to bring us blankets. My colleague from Detroit is wearing a polo shirt; I’m in dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up. “Thanks, but we’re fine,” we tell him. Halfway through the meal, he comes out, offering to move us inside now that a table has freed up. He’s wearing a parka. “No, really, we’re OK,” we tell him. Different reference points on what’s cold.</li><li>Both trips -- out to Phoenix and down to Ft Myers airport, were full of young families, also getting away from the cold, maybe to stay with parents/ grandparents who’d retired in more reasonable climes. I flew Southwest to Phoenix and United to Ft Myers, and I came to appreciate what, before this, was, to me, an undiscovered benefit of Southwest’s open seating. Because I was in the B boarding group, those families with young children boarded before me. Walking down the aisle, I could spot the crying babies -- there, and there, and there -- and could just keep walking, until I was behind them all. Sure, I was in the back of the plane, and it took me a while to deplane, but that was a very small price I was willing to pay for 3 hours of relative peace. </li><li> Bridge Music — <em>Paint the Sky</em> by Hans Atom (c) 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/hansatom/50718 Ft: Miss Judged </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>In past episodes, we talked about the bare bones budget airlines -- Spirit and Frontier in the US; Ryanair and EasyJet in Europe, and Wow Air and Norwegian as the second coming of Laker Airways, doing TransAtlantic budget flight. Of those, I’ve flown Frontier, EasyJet, and Wow Air which, as a group, seems like the less severe set of the budgets. Ryanair and Spirit always seem to have a harder edge about the “budget-ness.” And then there’s their impact on the mainline carriers -- United, American, and Delta’s basic economy fares. Usually, when I look at a mainline carrier’s basic economy fare, the difference vs. their regular economy fare isn’t big enough to make up extra hassles. But booking our trip down to Florida, the difference on United was over $100 a ticket. Irene and I figured we could put up with a few hassles for over $200. But as dug a bit further, we didn’t find as many hassles as we thought. Because we’re both United Gold, there was no limitation on carry-on bags and we boarded in the usual Group 1. The only downgrade was that we had to pay to reserve seats and we couldn’t book them in Economy Plus -- the aisles with the extra legroom. Even after paying for reserved seats, we still saved enough to pay for a couple of nice dinners of grilled grouper. </li><li>Our friends who joined us from Milwaukee flew down on American through DFW without a hassle. Their flight back -- a direct to Milwaukee on Frontier -- not so much. Their flight was supposed to leave at 7:45pm. Around lunch, they received a note that their flight was delayed by 5 hours. What? We checked that again. We pulled up the FlightAware app, searched for their flight, and then started walked its planned flight legs back, hitting the “Where’s My Plane?” button until we found it -- still on the ground in Milwaukee 6 hours after its scheduled departure time. The weather wasn’t that bad, so it had to be a maintenance problem, which is a huge problem when flying budget and regional airlines because their model is to bounce a plane from place to place rather than flying it out of a hub where they could swap out a busted plane if need be. So that 6 hour delay was going to cascade through that day’s schedule. Our friends finally left Ft Myers at 2:45am. Which is something I’ve noticed about Frontier -- I’ve never seen them cancel a flight no matter how late they leave. A regional airline would’ve cancelled that flight way earlier, but not Frontier. I don’t know how their crews don’t time out, but I kinda admire them for getting you home no matter what time. Would be way better <em>not </em> to take a 7-hr delay, but at least they get you home.</li><li>This year, I got dropped a status level on Hertz, from President’s Circle down to Five Star. I didn’t do 20 rentals last year, and I missed an offer back in December to pay some points to keep my status. But, I can’t say that I notice the downgrade too much. When I was in Phoenix, I snagged a great Chrysler 300 with custom black rims. In Ft Myers, I got a brand new GMC Terrain SUV that held 4 adults very comfortable… Though I have to say that the Terrain through me for a loop when I got in. I’ve rented all sort of different cars. I get in, pair my phone to the Bluetooh, adjust the mirrors, put it in Drive, and pull out. With the Terrain, I was good with all of that right up until the “put it in Drive” step. I look down at the console -- no gear shift, no gear dial (the Chrysler experience talking). Then grab the stalk on the right side of the steering column and turn on the windshield wipers. I’m looking all over -- “WTF? Where is the damn gear shift?” From the back seat, Kristin points under the climate control “It’s right there”. And then I see, a line of buttons -- P, R, N, D. I push the D button and off we go. The last time I saw a push button gear selector was when I was a kid, riding in somebody’s old Plymouth. I mean, come on GMC, do we really need <em>another</em> type of gear selection? Searching the Internet later for the Terrain’s gear buttons yields a whole slew of “Worst Shifter Design” article featuring these buttons. I don’t know which was worse -- the actual buttons or me, the alpha road warrior, getting back seat instructions on how to put a rental car in gear.</li><li>Another new thing I learned at Hertz Ft Myers -- besides where to find gear buttons -- is that, for Hertz Gold customers, there’s no additional driver fee for your spouse. I’ve been in Hertz Gold since it started, but I never connected to this benefit. It’s saves real money -- additional driver fees can run $10/day -- and hassle. Another reason to like the Hertz Gold program.</li><li>TravelCommons made our little local newspaper in an installment of their “Ask The Expert” series with the sub-headline “How can travel be more relaxing and fun?”  When Sandy, the reporter, emailed me to schedule the interview, she wanted to talk about advice for successful spring break travel. So I started off talking about how those spring break families should avoid traveling during road warrior rush hours -- Monday mornings and Thursday evenings. “Boarding a plane filled with busy professionals can quickly rob you of that pre-vacation high,” Sandy wrote, “Peacock advise leisure travelers to avoid sharing a plane with these potential buzzkills.” Such as me. The last thing a family heading for Disney wants to encounter is people like me powering down the concourse. I also recounted some of the tips that you’ve seen in my Top Holiday Travel Tips posts -- fly early in the day, avoid regional jets, and no one-and-done outfits so you can get everything you need into a carry-on. And I talked about turning long layovers into mini-vacations with our upcoming Stockholm layover as an example. Of course, I didn’t mention that a lot of these layovers turn into taproom crawls, like in last year’s video of the Midway layover taproom tour, and potentially this Stockholm stop thanks to TravelCommons’ listener Rob Cheshire’s custom Google map. No, I figured than might be a bit much for our nice local paper. Sandy turned our 45-minute conversation into a nice article. I posted a picture of the article on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">TravelCommons Facebook page</a> since they don’t seem to put their issues on-line. </li><li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/12/podcast-120-where-do-guidebooks-fit-in-i-hate-shopping-for-suitcases/\">episode #120</a>, back in March 2016, I asked the question -- Where do physical guidebooks fit in the world of apps, review websites, social media, and podcasts? Back then, I was planning Andrew’s and my visit to Iceland. Now, getting ready to head over to Brittany, France for 10 days, I bought two physical guidebooks to take with us. Irene wanted DK’s Eyewitness Travel; it was her favorite out of the stack of guidebooks she checked out of the library. While I did a throwback, picked up our go-to book from our PK (pre-kids) days of travel, Michelin’s Green Guide. The DK book is definitely more visually punchy, but I figured Michelin, a French company, should have Brittany covered pretty well, and they published this new edition just last month. Maybe I’m getting lazy in my old age, but I’m kinda glad to have everything in one spot -- a bit of local history, touring maps, city guides -- rather than having to rummage through multiple PDFs in an Evernote folder. However, I took a pass on Amazon’s recommended add-on of Michelin’s Brittany Road and Tourist Map No. 512. I’ve topped up my local SIM for 2.5 GB of mobile data; I’m sticking with Google Maps. I maybe old school, but I’m not going back to the Dark Ages.</li><li>And if you have any travel rants, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or  Instagram  at travelcommons -- or  post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com. </li><li> Bridge Music — <em>Perfect Stranger</em> by stellarartwars (c) 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/stellarartwars/45510 Ft: TheDice </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Dining Single</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Our daughter Claire is heading down to London for her first week of Spring Break and will then meet us in Paris for our Brittany trip.  Planning it, we got talking about eating alone on the road. Years ago, it used to be more awkward - escorted to the small table off in the corner, a server a bit ticked off at the small check and therefore small tip. You’d read the newspaper or a book between courses to keep yourself occupied, wrap it up pretty quickly and head back to the hotel.</li><li>For guy travelers, the sports bar was (and still is) the exception to that rule. Fine, sit me in a booth alone as long as I have a clear view of walls of TV screens showing all ESPN all the time – ESPN, ESPN-2, ESPN-3, ESPN-U, ESPN News… No need for a book, especially over the next few weeks watching the opening rounds of the NCAA tournaments when I can watch a couple of games at once. Rush out? Hell no, give me another large Coors Light, we haven’t even hit half time.</li><li>Most restaurants now serve a full menu at the bar, complete with a full set up -- placemats, maybe a bread basket. Might be a touch cramped at happy hour, but it’s usually nice to be in the main flow of things rather than off in the corner. The trend toward shared plates , while getting a bit tired when dining with a group (“OK, what can we all agree on?”) works great for the single diner. If I want a bit of variety without overeating, I now have choices beyond sushi or tapas bars. Not that those are bad choices. I have no doubt that Claire will find her way to the bar at Barrafina in Soho.</li><li>Sitting at the bar also gave you a chance for a little social interaction, some serendipity; with the bartender, maybe with the guy sitting next to you. Some years ago, on my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/08/14/food-and-drink-highlights-from-my-drive-south/\">2,100-mile circle tour through the South</a>, a guy next to me at a Louisville bar told me to check out a restaurant in the not-yet-hip Bywater neighborhood in New Orleans; turned out to be a great recommendation. But I get less and less of that as people eat and just interact with their smartphones. Maybe Claire wouldn’t be keen on random bar conversations, but I kinda miss it.</li><li>Nowadays, where I do find that interaction is microbrewery taprooms. Sure, people still have their phones out to check their tasting flight into Untappd, but there’s an acceptance, almost an expectation, that people will “nerd out” about hops and malt and yeast esters with each other and with folks behind the bar. During one of my Dallas trips, I found my way to Grapevine Craft Brewing on a rainy Weds night. The brewmaster was pulling the taps, passing out some barrel samples, and we all spinning our beer nerd propellers real hard.</li><li> Bridge Music — <em>Foolish Game</em> by copperhead (c) 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/copperhead/46390 Ft: Snowflake,Sackjo22 </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><b>From The Travel Story Archives -- Airlines Need To Tell Us More</b></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Prepping for that interview with the local paper had me spelunking deep into the TravelCommons archives, fixing some broken links and listening to some of those early shows for the first time in a long time. A couple of things struck me -- the really poor sound quality I got from the little iRiver MP3 recorder that I was using, and how good some of those early travel stories were.</li><li> So here’s one from<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/09/24/podcast-15-begging-for-business-needing-to-know-at-35000-ft/\"> episode #15</a>, very long-time TC listener Allan Marko talking about wanting to know just a little bit more about what an airline maintenance guy is doing.  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #149</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_147.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #149 — Dining Single; Airlines Need To Tell Us More','','inherit','closed','closed','','2373-revision-v1','','','2019-03-20 21:51:40','2019-03-21 02:51:40','',2373,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/20/2373-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2402,1,'2019-04-22 22:37:38','2019-04-23 03:37:38','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":2404} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/CoeazhcUMAAhyQN-300x251.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2404\"/><figcaption>This guy looks familiar...</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It\'s been a tough month for travel. Not quite to Book of Job-level torment, but two of this month\'s three trips spiraled into head-shaking metaphysical “What the hell is going on here” questioning of my decision to get out of bed that morning. I walk through the travel gods\' fun and games, as well as some new data on regional jet delays and buying a new travel bag.  All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_150.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #150: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, as the weather begins to stagger unsteadily toward Spring -- 74 degrees on Monday, 5.3 inches of snow (thundersnow!) on Sunday, then back up into the 70’s two days later.  April 14 -- over 5 inches of snow, over 1,000 flights cancelled. A nasty surprise for folks who thought it would be safe to connect through ORD, but just validates a Chicago truism -- don’t put the snow gear away until after Tax Day. Yup, welcome to the Midwest.</li><li>Have done a <em>chunk</em> of travel -- there’s a unit of measure for you -- since the last episode. A 2-day trip that hit 4 airports in the first day -- Chicago-Midway, Las Vegas, Houston-Hobby, and Nashville. The next week, I squoze in a trip to a new airport - State College, PA -- before heading out on vacation to Brittany, France. The squeeze wasn’t too tight -- flew back from State College on Weds night and left on vacation Thursday night -- but I did scout out a couple of backups in case the United Express regional jet went AWOL; a hour or so drive down to Harrisburg, a couple hour drive over to Pittsburgh. Luckily, I didn’t need them. United Express was having a good day, and therefore, so did I.</li><li>The next day’s flight to Paris on SAS by way of Stockholm went fine. We got in on time, found the left luggage lockers, and then the express train into the city all without much hassle. Arlanda Airport is comfortably sized and has good signage. The only real problem was that we got into center city Stockholm too early -- around 8:30am -- and nothing was really open. So we coffee’d up at one place, had some cardamom pastries at another, and generally puttered around until things started opening up an hour or so later. It was a sunny, if brisk, day, so walking around the Gamla Stan and Sodermalm was nice. </li><li>I always chuckle a bit when going through De Gaulle Airport, passing through the tangle of flat escalator walkway tubes that bridge the levels and open center of Terminal 1. The walkways are a bit awkward with wheeled luggage -- going down and then up. An airport porter in front of us let a wheelchair go free on the downhill span -- took a moment for it to register that it was empty -- then it rolled back to him on the uphill. No knock against him; it was the end of the day.</li><li>The next day, we caught the train out to Brittany, to Saint Malo. We walked out of the train station and across the street to Europcar for what was one of the easiest rental car pick-ups I’ve ever had in Europe. No scare-tactic insurance upselling -- just a look at my driver’s license and a quick pointer to where I could find the car in the train station parking lot. Five minutes, max. And dropping off the car a week later at Rennes train station? Absolutely the easiest rental drop-off -- gave the guy the keys and a receipt showing I’d filled up the car and I was done. No waiting for him to go inspect the car, just a handshake and “Have a good day”. </li><li>The next day wasn’t near as carefree, but we’ll talk about that in a few minutes.</li><li>Bridge Music — <em>Countryside Summer Joyride</em> by Kara Square (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mindmapthat/56281 Ft: Javolenus</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I’ve been not-quite-hating on, but certainly have been down on regional jets for quite some time on this podcast. Given a choice, I recommend people avoid them -- not because of their size, but their schedule dependability. Because the regional airlines’ model is to bounce a plane from place to place rather than route through hubs, they never recover from weather or mechanical delays. Those delays just cascade through the rest of the day. Now there often aren’t alternatives. Hence my earlier comment about needing backup plans for my regional jet flight home from State College. My flight was at the end of the day, the most vulnerable time to delays. Given my personal experience,  I wasn’t surprised to read that US Dept of Transportation data showed that regional flights were 2-4 times more likely to be cancelled than mainline flights. The Chicago Tribune dug into the DOT data and found flights operated by Delta’s regional partners were 4 times more likely to be canceled than flights operated by Delta, while American Eagle and United Express were 2-3 times more likely to cancel flights than their mainline partners. You can’t avoid regional jets when going to places like State College or Charlottesville, VA or Appleton, WI -- but you can when flying to LGA or DFW or MSY. And in those cases, unless those RJ flights have exactly the schedule I need, I’ll suffer a bit of inconvenience for a lot more dependability.</li><li>On our travels through Brittany earlier this month, I found that we were getting a large number of “card declined” messages when trying to use our Chase Sapphire Visa card -- at gas stations, stores, and in Paris when I tried to use my Uber app. Now this isn’t a new card -- we’ve had it for over 5 years -- and it’s not the first time we’ve used it on travels in Europe. But Chase fraud algorithm seems more sensitive, throwing more false positives, and no way to update things. On the way out of Brest, I pulled into a Total gas station to fill up on our way to the Crozon peninsula. We’d be there for a couple of days of hiking and I wasn’t sure many gas stations we’d see (turned out that I didn’t need to worry). I pull up to a pump, tap the Chase Visa, get a decline. Insert the card into the reader; get another decline. I do the same drill with my Citi MasterCard with the same result. However, I immediately get a fraud alert from Citi. I hit the big green “Yes” button on the e-mail -- as in, “Yes, I do recognize this charge” -- get an “all clear” response back, tap my Citi card again and fill up my tank. All this time, we get nothing from Chase. I open the Chase app on my phone; nothing there either. Same thing in Paris when I needed an Uber fast (more on that in a bit). Chase declined, but my Amex Platinum card went through. For me, it was just annoying; I always carry a full set of cards when traveling -- a Visa and a MasterCard from different banks, and an Amex -- because single points of failure when traveling are bad -- I don’t want to be left hanging if one bank or one card processor drops their network or loses a data center. Oh, and I also carry cash. But, as we’ve <a aria-label=\"talked (opens in a new tab)\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/02/10/podcast-148-travel-potpourri-for-200-alex/\" target=\"_blank\">talked</a> <a aria-label=\"about (opens in a new tab)\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/12/17/podcast-147-holiday-travel-tips-notes-from-santa-fe/\" target=\"_blank\">about</a> <a aria-label=\"before (opens in a new tab)\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\" target=\"_blank\">before</a>, that’s ‘cause I’m old-school.</li><li>Brittany was a touring vacation, so we were moving every couple of days or so -- packing, unpacking, repacking. During one of those repacking sessions, maybe in Morgat on the Crozon peninsula -- I couldn’t find my Bose headphone case, which had my Bose headphones, in my backpack -- and I didn’t remember pulling out. Where the hell did they go, I asked myself. I pull everything out of my backpack and -- oh, there they are; they had slipped behind my camera bag in the bottom of my backpack. How did I lose my headphones in my backpack, you may ask -- and rightfully so because it really sounds stupid. Probably the same reason I lost a Google tablet in there a few years back -- too much black. The Bose case is black, the interior of Timbuk 2 backpack is black, my eyes aren’t as good as they used to be… I’d been toying around with getting a new bag, more of a messenger style -- that I could sling over one shoulder and with a bit better waterproofing. And, after this little panic drill, a non-black interior. I ended up getting a small Timbuk 2 Classic messenger bag from the Outlet section of REI.com for $50. It’s not too big -- holds my 11-inch MacBook Air, a couple of notebooks, an umbrella -- and has a bright yellow interior. I haven’t lost anything in it yet -- but I don’t trust myself. Maybe I need to get, like a white umbrella, and spray paint my Bose case red. I love black, but maybe I’ve taken that color palette a bit too far.</li><li>And if you have any travel rants, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a aria-label=\"mpeacock (opens in a new tab)\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a aria-label=\"Facebook page (opens in a new tab)\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Facebook page</a> or our Instagram account at <a aria-label=\" (opens in a new tab)\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Travelcommons</a> -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music —  <em>Jester of the Golden Apocalypse</em> by Super_Sigil (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Super_Sigil/34750 </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Travel Interruptus</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A Greek tragedy in three acts where the travel gods toy with our anti-hero for fun and entertainment</li><li>OK, maybe not quite that bad, not quite Book of Job-level torment, but two out of the three trips I’ve taken in the past month spiraled into head-shaking metaphysical “What the hell is going on here” questioning of my decision to get out of bed that morning.</li><li><em>Act 1</em> - My Midway-Vegas-Nashville travel day. This trip didn’t start out to be stupid. It started as an easy day trip to downtown Nashville for a sales call. So many people are abandoning Chicago for Nashville, Southwest has non-stop flights every 90 minutes, so no problem with flight times. That works out fine -- until someone books a sales call the prior afternoon -- in Las Vegas. Hmmm, how do I get from Vegas after 4pm Pacific to Nashville in time for a meeting the next morning Central time? Southwest is about the only choice, connecting through either Denver or Houston. I go for the more direct routing through Denver -- my first mistake.</li><li>Because, as it turned out, the March “bomb cyclone” -- what the Weather Channel helpfully named “Winter Storm Ulmer” (who or what is an Ulmer?) -- was going to shut down DIA that day with 80 mph winds. I got an e-mail from Southwest the day before canceling my connection through Denver -- understandable -- but nothing else, no rebooking, just “We’re leaving you in Vegas” -- which I’ve found tends to be Southwest’s MO -- pleasantly unhelpful. Especially when the website errored out when I tried to find an alternate routing to Nashville, and the automated message answering their 800 number was estimating 80-some minute hold times. After about 45 minutes, between banging on the website, our corporate Concur app, and tweeting at their customer service, I managed to get re-routed through Houston, safely south of the bomb cyclone.</li><li>The next morning, I show up at the gate at Midway to find my 8am flight to Vegas delayed by 2 hours -- mechanical on the plane here meant they had to bring in a new plane and crew from somewhere else. Annoying, but not critical; I’d get into Vegas at noon for a 2pm meeting. I get another coffee, log into the Boingo hotspot and clear some emails. 9:40, we line up and board. And wait. Then the captain keys the mike, pauses (never a good sign) and then starts talking - he didn’t have time to do the walkaround before we boarded because they came in late. When they did, they noticed a problem with the front strut. Maintenance is looking at it, don’t know if they can fix it, but they need everyone off the plane. So we deplane for what is now my 2nd maintenance delay. We idle around the gate area. 10:30 and nothing. I start looking at my watch. If I’m don’t get into Vegas by 1pm, there won’t be enough time to get to my 2pm meeting, and so I shouldn’t get on the plane. Then they start to re-board us. What time will we get in? 12:20. OK, I’ll board. We all get back on -- and for the most part retaking the seats we had, in spite of Southwest’s open seating. We are creatures of habit. I’m surprised no one moo’d. We’re all on, and we wait. The mike keys. There’s a slight moan rather than a moo from the cabin. We’re waiting on the paperwork. It’s always paperwork. I’m looking at my watch. It’s past 11am Central and the door is still open. A 4-hour flight means we’re now coming up against that 1pm Pacific arrive time. Do I stay on the plane? A couple minutes more and my decision is made for me; they close the door. I lean back, put on my headphones and hope for no headwinds. We get to the gate at 1:02pm. Vegas is always a maze; there’s no straight walkways; they always want to vector you through a thicket of slot machines. I head to the cab rank -- shorter walk and no waiting -- and I get a guy with a heavy foot. I’m at the client 5 minutes before the meeting. That was a bit too close.</li><li>My return trip to the airport and the flight to Houston are uneventful, not even any turbulence as we skirt that bomb cyclone. We get into Hobby maybe even a bit early. I grab a beer and then head over to the gate. They call boarding - just half the A group -- 1-30 -- because that’s all there is on this late flight to Nashville. The gate agent scans the boarding passes, saying “You’re in Row 3, you’re in Row 4, you’re in Row 5….”  We get all get in our separate rows, and then wait. The captain keys the mike, pauses, and then says “This plane had a bird strike on the nose on landing. There’s no damage, but Maintenance has to pull the nose cone off for a visual inspection. It’ll take about an hour, so you’re free to get off the plane.” But by now, everything in the airport was closed. “My 3rd maintenance delay of the day. Unbelievable!” I tweet out in frustrustration. Except that iPhone autocorrect turned “delay” into “deejay”. Hilary Baumann pointed it out with a nice emoji-laden tweet that gave me a good chuckle. I finally got to my Nashville hotel around 1:30 in the morning. I looked at the time, shook my head, and went to bed.</li><li>Bridge Music —  South Texas Cowboy Blues by texasradiofish (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/texasradiofish/52030 Ft: unreal_dm, ElRon XChile</li><li><em>Act 2</em> - A couple of weeks later, on Sunday in Rennes, France. We wheeled our luggage the 2 blocks from our AirBnB to Rennes train station for the TGV to CDG. We stood with everyone else, looking up at the departure board waiting for the track to be posted. Departure time came closer and still no track -- not a good sign. The crowd grew larger. There was an announcement in French and a scrolling message at the bottom of the departure screen. Irene banged it into Google Translate. The gist of it -- a bomb threat had been phoned into SCNF, the train company, and all the trains in and out of Paris were halted. Given France’s recent history with terrorism, it was a reasonable response, but still…. They finally start posting delay times -- 40 mins, then over an hour, but then it shrinks back. I pull up Google Maps. The drive to CDG is showing about the same time as the train, but we’d be in control of our own destiny. I walk down to the rental car offices. It’s Sunday morning; they’re all closed. They won’t open until the afternoon; too late for us to drive and make our flights. </li><li>Time continues to tick by, past the departure time for our flight. I call United -- any other options? I get a phenomenally helpful agent. I can hear the keystrokes. Nothing else today Sunday, nor tomorrow, Monday. I wasn’t surprised about nothing available today, but was about the next day -- until I got a text from Andrew. He was on this morning’s United flight to Chicago which just cancelled for a hydraulic problem and rebooked on tomorrow’s flight -- which explains the lack of seats for us. I took the Tuesday seats. Now would we get to CDG in time for Claire’s EasyJet flight to Edinburgh so she can make class the next day. The trains finally start moving. We head down and board our train. And then wait, and wait some  more. And then the train starts moving. I look at my watch. I think Claire will be OK. </li><li>Until we come to a stop in the middle of a rail yard. I watch a couple of guys walk past our car -- maybe a visual inspection? After a bit, we start moving -- backwards. The conductor keys the mike, and makes an announcement in rapid French that we can’t pick up. I open Google Maps. I see we’re off to the east of Paris but can’t tell if we’re moving in the right direction. Until we pull into the next station -- it’s for EuroDisney. I find our train route on the SCNF website and see this is one of the stops en route to CDG, so we’re going in the right direction. We get to CDG by 3pm, which means Claire can make her flight. Andrew comes over from the Airport Hilton, where United is putting him up for the night, and we head down to Paris for another dinner together. There are, after all, worse cities to have to spend an extra day or two.</li><li>Bridge Music —  <em>Parisian </em>Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ </li><li><em>Act 3</em> - Tuesday morning, Paris. Our forced layover in Paris yesterday had been a beautiful day, sunny and warm. We walked through the Marais, south across Ile de la Cite, taking the obligatory selfie in front of Notre Dame that we pulled out at looked at two weeks later during the news coverage of the fire, and then rattled around the Latin Quarter looking for a place with outdoor seating and a nice rosé. This morning, though, not so beautiful. It was dumping rain. So rather than trundle our luggage 10 min to the Metro stop, I decide to order an Uber -- which takes a try or two when Chase declines my Visa again; and I switch over to Amex. A nice black Mercedes picks us up and heads for Les Halles -- or at least tries to. The traffic is a crawl at best. I watch our buffer time tick away and we’re not  getting any closer. After sitting through a couple of traffic light cycles without clearing the intersection, we grab our bags and make for Les Halles on foot. We get there, a bit wet. We’re able to skip the ticket booth line; I have enough euros for the self-service machine, because it’s that or a chip-&amp;-pin card we don’t have. We get on the train. I look at my watch - we should have enough time to check our bags (bringing back some liquids), clear security, and get to the gate without too much more agita.</li><li>Until the train slows to a stop between stops. The conductor keys the mike, and makes an announcement in rapid French. I look at the other passengers. They don’t seem too agitated. I figure it’s some congestion on the track ahead. And, sure enough, we start moving after a couple of minutes. But at the next stop, the train doors stay open and a train employee come on, saying in French <em>and</em> English -- everyone has to get off, catch a bus outside the station to another station, then catch a different train to the airport. We head down the bus stop. There’s no one there to help; just a couple hundred people milling around.</li><li>Now I’m worried. We have no time to figure this out. The taxi stand is mobbed, I fire up Uber - 19-minute wait. Lyft? They’re not in Paris. I google to find taxi company but before I call, I try Uber one more time -- a 5-minute wait for a €60 fare. I hit the order button -- and then again after I swap over to Amex. €60 for a 15-minute ride to CDG is tough, but it’s cheaper than another night in a hotel. We get to the United desk 2 minutes before luggage check closes for our flight. The agent radioed down, checked in our bags, and then gave us the CDG version of Fast Track, so we could sidestep the long passport control and security lines. We board, sit down, but don’t really settle in until the plane leaves the ground. And when we’re finally at ORD, standing by the luggage carousel, our bags are the first ones to come out.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #150</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_150.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<p><!--EndFragment--></p>\n<p></p>','Podcast #150 — Travel Interruptus','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-150-travel-interruptus','','','2021-11-12 12:16:21','2021-11-12 17:16:21','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=2402',0,'post','',0),
(2403,1,'2019-04-22 18:20:51','2019-04-22 23:20:51','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>\n\nI dusted off the mobile rig to record this episode in Happy Valley, the home of Penn State. And I am kinda happy with some travel to Phoenix and Florida to thaw me out after Chicago\'s run in with the polar vortex. In this episode, I talk about budget airlines, stepping down in Hertz status, why I bought physical guidebooks for a trip to France, the challenges of being a solo diner, and then dig into the archives for a classic travel story. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_149.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #150 — Travel Interruptus','','inherit','closed','closed','','2402-revision-v1','','','2019-04-22 18:20:51','2019-04-22 23:20:51','',2402,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/2402-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2404,1,'2019-04-22 18:21:45','2019-04-22 23:21:45','','CoeazhcUMAAhyQN','This guy looks familiar...','inherit','open','closed','','coeazhcumaahyqn','','','2019-04-22 18:25:51','2019-04-22 23:25:51','',2402,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/CoeazhcUMAAhyQN.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(2407,1,'2019-04-22 18:25:29','2019-04-22 23:25:29','<!-- wp:image {\"id\":2404,\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/CoeazhcUMAAhyQN-300x251.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2404\"/><figcaption>This guy looks familiar...</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>\n\nI dusted off the mobile rig to record this episode in Happy Valley, the home of Penn State. And I am kinda happy with some travel to Phoenix and Florida to thaw me out after Chicago\'s run in with the polar vortex. In this episode, I talk about budget airlines, stepping down in Hertz status, why I bought physical guidebooks for a trip to France, the challenges of being a solo diner, and then dig into the archives for a classic travel story. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_149.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #150 — Travel Interruptus','','inherit','closed','closed','','2402-revision-v1','','','2019-04-22 18:25:29','2019-04-22 23:25:29','',2402,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/2402-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2408,1,'2019-04-22 18:27:36','2019-04-22 23:27:36','<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show Notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show Notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->','More-Click Here to Read The List','','publish','closed','closed','','untitled-reusable-block','','','2021-01-31 22:07:02','2021-02-01 03:07:02','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/untitled-reusable-block/',0,'wp_block','',0),
(2410,1,'2019-04-22 18:29:29','2019-04-22 23:29:29','<!-- wp:image {\"id\":2404,\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/CoeazhcUMAAhyQN-300x251.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2404\"/><figcaption>This guy looks familiar...</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> I dusted off the mobile rig to record this episode in Happy Valley, the home of Penn State. And I am kinda happy with some travel to Phoenix and Florida to thaw me out after Chicago\'s run in with the polar vortex. In this episode, I talk about budget airlines, stepping down in Hertz status, why I bought physical guidebooks for a trip to France, the challenges of being a solo diner, and then dig into the archives for a classic travel story. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_149.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:block {\"ref\":2408} /-->','Podcast #150 — Travel Interruptus','','inherit','closed','closed','','2402-revision-v1','','','2019-04-22 18:29:29','2019-04-22 23:29:29','',2402,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/2402-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2411,1,'2019-04-22 18:40:13','2019-04-22 23:40:13','<!-- wp:image {\"id\":2404,\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/CoeazhcUMAAhyQN-300x251.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2404\"/><figcaption>This guy looks familiar...</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> I dusted off the mobile rig to record this episode in Happy Valley, the home of Penn State. And I am kinda happy with some travel to Phoenix and Florida to thaw me out after Chicago\'s run in with the polar vortex. In this episode, I talk about budget airlines, stepping down in Hertz status, why I bought physical guidebooks for a trip to France, the challenges of being a solo diner, and then dig into the archives for a classic travel story. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_149.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:block {\"ref\":2408} /-->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #150: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, as the weather begins to stagger unsteadily toward Spring -- 74 degrees on Monday, 5.3 inches of snow (thundersnow!) on Sunday, then back up into the 70’s two days later. &nbsp;April 14 -- over 5 inches of snow, over 1,000 flights cancelled. A nasty surprise for folks who thought it would be safe to connect through ORD, but just validates a Chicago truism -- don’t put the snow gear away until after Tax Day. Yup, welcome to the Midwest.</li><li>Have done a <em>chunk</em> of travel -- there’s a unit of measure for you -- since the last episode. A 2-day trip that hit 4 airports in the first day -- Chicago-Midway, Las Vegas, Houston-Hobby, and Nashville. The next week, I squoze in a trip to a new airport - State College, PA -- before heading out on vacation to Brittany, France. The squeeze wasn’t too tight -- flew back from State College on Weds night and left on vacation Thursday night -- but I did scout out a couple of backups in case the United Express regional jet went AWOL; a hour or so drive down to Harrisburg, a couple hour drive over to Pittsburgh. Luckily, I didn’t need them. United Express was having a good day, and therefore, so did I.</li><li>The next day’s flight to Paris on SAS by way of Stockholm went fine. We got in on time, found the left luggage lockers, and then the express train into the city all without much hassle. Arlanda Airport is comfortably sized and has good signage. The only real problem was that we got into center city Stockholm too early -- around 8:30am -- and nothing was really open. So we coffee’d up at one place, had some cardamom pastries at another, and generally puttered around until things started opening up an hour or so later. It was a sunny, if brisk, day, so walking around the Gamla Stan and Sodermalm was nice. </li><li>I always chuckle a bit when going through De Gaulle Airport, passing through the tangle of flat escalator walkway tubes that bridge the levels and open center of Terminal 1. The walkways are a bit awkward with wheeled luggage -- going down and then up. An airport porter in front of us let a wheelchair go free on the downhill span -- took a moment for it to register that it was empty -- then it rolled back to him on the uphill. No knock against him; it was the end of the day.</li><li>The next day, we caught the train out to Brittany, to Saint Malo. We walked out of the train station and across the street to Europcar for what was one of the easiest rental car pick-ups I’ve ever had in Europe. No scare-tactic insurance upselling -- just a look at my driver’s license and a quick pointer to where I could find the car in the train station parking lot. Five minutes, max. And dropping off the car a week later at Rennes train station? Absolutely the easiest rental drop-off -- gave the guy the keys and a receipt showing I’d filled up the car and I was done. No waiting for him to go inspect the car, just a handshake and “Have a good day”. </li><li>The next day wasn’t near as carefree, but we’ll talk about that in a few minutes.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I’ve been not-quite-hating on, but certainly have been down on regional jets for quite some time on this podcast. Given a choice, I recommend people avoid them -- not because of their size, but their schedule dependability. Because the regional airlines’ model is to bounce a plane from place to place rather than route through hubs, they never recover from weather or mechanical delays. Those delays just cascade through the rest of the day. Now there often aren’t alternatives. Hence my earlier comment about needing backup plans for my regional jet flight home from State College. My flight was at the end of the day, the most vulnerable time to delays. Given my personal experience,  I wasn’t surprised to read that US Dept of Transportation data showed that regional flights were 2-4 times more likely to be cancelled than mainline flights. The Chicago Tribune dug into the DOT data and found flights operated by Delta’s regional partners were 4 times more likely to be canceled than flights operated by Delta, while American Eagle and United Express were 2-3 times more likely to cancel flights than their mainline partners. You can’t avoid regional jets when going to places like State College or Charlottesville, VA or Appleton, WI -- but you can when flying to LGA or DFW or MSY. And in those cases, unless those RJ flights have exactly the schedule I need, I’ll suffer a bit of inconvenience for a lot more dependability.</li><li>On our travels through Brittany earlier this month, I found that we were getting a large number of “card declined” messages when trying to use our Chase Sapphire Visa card -- at gas stations, stores, and in Paris when I tried to use my Uber app. Now this isn’t a new card -- we’ve had it for over 5 years -- and it’s not the first time we’ve used it on travels in Europe. But Chase fraud algorithm seems more sensitive, throwing more false positives, and no way to update things. On the way out of Brest, I pulled into a Total gas station to fill up on our way to the Crozon peninsula. We’d be there for a couple of days of hiking and I wasn’t sure many gas stations we’d see (turned out that I didn’t need to worry). I pull up to a pump, tap the Chase Visa, get a decline. Insert the card into the reader; get another decline. I do the same drill with my Citi MasterCard with the same result. However, I immediately get a fraud alert from Citi. I hit the big green “Yes” button on the e-mail -- as in, “Yes, I do recognize this charge” -- get an “all clear” response back, tap my Citi card again and fill up my tank. All this time, we get nothing from Chase. I open the Chase app on my phone; nothing there either. Same thing in Paris when I needed an Uber fast (more on that in a bit). Chase declined, but my Amex Platinum card went through. For me, it was just annoying; I always carry a full set of cards when traveling -- a Visa and a MasterCard from different banks, and an Amex -- because single points of failure when traveling are bad -- I don’t want to be left hanging if one bank or one card processor drops their network or loses a data center. Oh, and I also carry cash. But, as we’ve talked about before, that’s ‘cause I’m old-school.</li><li>Brittany was a touring vacation, so we were moving every couple of days or so -- packing, unpacking, repacking. During one of those repacking sessions, maybe in Morgat on the Crozon peninsula -- I couldn’t find my Bose headphone case, which had my Bose headphones, in my backpack -- and I didn’t remember pulling out. Where the hell did they go, I asked myself. I pull everything out of my backpack and -- oh, there they are; they had slipped behind my camera bag in the bottom of my backpack. How did I lose my headphones in my backpack, you may ask -- and rightfully so because it really sounds stupid. Probably the same reason I lost a Google tablet in there a few years back -- too much black. The Bose case is black, the interior of Timbuk 2 backpack is black, my eyes aren’t as good as they used to be… I’d been toying around with getting a new bag, more of a messenger style -- that I could sling over one shoulder and with a bit better waterproofing. And, after this little panic drill, a non-black interior. I ended up getting a small Timbuk 2 Classic messenger bag from the Outlet section of REI.com for $50. It’s not too big -- holds my 11-inch MacBook Air, a couple of notebooks, an umbrella -- and has a bright yellow interior. I haven’t lost anything in it yet -- but I don’t trust myself. Maybe I need to get, like a white umbrella, and spray paint my Bose case red. I love black, but maybe I’ve taken that color palette a bit too far.</li><li>And if you have any travel rants, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"mpeacock (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Facebook page (opens in a new tab)\">Facebook page</a> or our Instagram account at <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\" (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Travelcommons</a> -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li></li><li>In past episodes, we talked about the bare bones budget airlines -- Spirit and Frontier in the US; Ryanair and EasyJet in Europe, and Wow Air and Norwegian as the second coming of Laker Airways, doing TransAtlantic budget flight. Of those, I’ve flown Frontier, EasyJet, and Wow Air which, as a group, seems like the less severe set of the budgets. Ryanair and Spirit always seem to have a harder edge about the “budget-ness.” And then there’s their impact on the mainline carriers -- United, American, and Delta’s basic economy fares. Usually, when I look at a mainline carrier’s basic economy fare, the difference vs. their regular economy fare isn’t big enough to make up extra hassles. But booking our trip down to Florida, the difference on United was over $100 a ticket. Irene and I figured we could put up with a few hassles for over $200. But as dug a bit further, we didn’t find as many hassles as we thought. Because we’re both United Gold, there was no limitation on carry-on bags and we boarded in the usual Group 1. The only downgrade was that we had to pay to reserve seats and we couldn’t book them in Economy Plus -- the aisles with the extra legroom. Even after paying for reserved seats, we still saved enough to pay for a couple of nice dinners of grilled grouper. </li><li>Our friends who joined us from Milwaukee flew down on American through DFW without a hassle. Their flight back -- a direct to Milwaukee on Frontier -- not so much. Their flight was supposed to leave at 7:45pm. Around lunch, they received a note that their flight was delayed by 5 hours. What? We checked that again. We pulled up the FlightAware app, searched for their flight, and then started walked its planned flight legs back, hitting the “Where’s My Plane?” button until we found it -- still on the ground in Milwaukee 6 hours after its scheduled departure time. The weather wasn’t that bad, so it had to be a maintenance problem, which is a huge problem when flying budget and regional airlines because their model is to bounce a plane from place to place rather than flying it out of a hub where they could swap out a busted plane if need be. So that 6 hour delay was going to cascade through that day’s schedule. Our friends finally left Ft Myers at 2:45am. Which is something I’ve noticed about Frontier -- I’ve never seen them cancel a flight no matter how late they leave. A regional airline would’ve cancelled that flight way earlier, but not Frontier. I don’t know how their crews don’t time out, but I kinda admire them for getting you home no matter what time. Would be way better <em>not </em> to take a 7-hr delay, but at least they get you home.</li><li>This year, I got dropped a status level on Hertz, from President’s Circle down to Five Star. I didn’t do 20 rentals last year, and I missed an offer back in December to pay some points to keep my status. But, I can’t say that I notice the downgrade too much. When I was in Phoenix, I snagged a great Chrysler 300 with custom black rims. In Ft Myers, I got a brand new GMC Terrain SUV that held 4 adults very comfortable… Though I have to say that the Terrain through me for a loop when I got in. I’ve rented all sort of different cars. I get in, pair my phone to the Bluetooh, adjust the mirrors, put it in Drive, and pull out. With the Terrain, I was good with all of that right up until the “put it in Drive” step. I look down at the console -- no gear shift, no gear dial (the Chrysler experience talking). Then grab the stalk on the right side of the steering column and turn on the windshield wipers. I’m looking all over -- “WTF? Where is the damn gear shift?” From the back seat, Kristin points under the climate control “It’s right there”. And then I see, a line of buttons -- P, R, N, D. I push the D button and off we go. The last time I saw a push button gear selector was when I was a kid, riding in somebody’s old Plymouth. I mean, come on GMC, do we really need <em>another</em> type of gear selection? Searching the Internet later for the Terrain’s gear buttons yields a whole slew of “Worst Shifter Design” article featuring these buttons. I don’t know which was worse -- the actual buttons or me, the alpha road warrior, getting back seat instructions on how to put a rental car in gear.</li><li>Another new thing I learned at Hertz Ft Myers -- besides where to find gear buttons -- is that, for Hertz Gold customers, there’s no additional driver fee for your spouse. I’ve been in Hertz Gold since it started, but I never connected to this benefit. It’s saves real money -- additional driver fees can run $10/day -- and hassle. Another reason to like the Hertz Gold program.</li><li>TravelCommons made our little local newspaper in an installment of their “Ask The Expert” series with the sub-headline “How can travel be more relaxing and fun?”  When Sandy, the reporter, emailed me to schedule the interview, she wanted to talk about advice for successful spring break travel. So I started off talking about how those spring break families should avoid traveling during road warrior rush hours -- Monday mornings and Thursday evenings. “Boarding a plane filled with busy professionals can quickly rob you of that pre-vacation high,” Sandy wrote, “Peacock advise leisure travelers to avoid sharing a plane with these potential buzzkills.” Such as me. The last thing a family heading for Disney wants to encounter is people like me powering down the concourse. I also recounted some of the tips that you’ve seen in my Top Holiday Travel Tips posts -- fly early in the day, avoid regional jets, and no one-and-done outfits so you can get everything you need into a carry-on. And I talked about turning long layovers into mini-vacations with our upcoming Stockholm layover as an example. Of course, I didn’t mention that a lot of these layovers turn into taproom crawls, like in last year’s video of the Midway layover taproom tour, and potentially this Stockholm stop thanks to TravelCommons’ listener Rob Cheshire’s custom Google map. No, I figured than might be a bit much for our nice local paper. Sandy turned our 45-minute conversation into a nice article. I posted a picture of the article on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">TravelCommons Facebook page</a> since they don’t seem to put their issues on-line. </li><li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/12/podcast-120-where-do-guidebooks-fit-in-i-hate-shopping-for-suitcases/\">episode #120</a>, back in March 2016, I asked the question -- Where do physical guidebooks fit in the world of apps, review websites, social media, and podcasts? Back then, I was planning Andrew’s and my visit to Iceland. Now, getting ready to head over to Brittany, France for 10 days, I bought two physical guidebooks to take with us. Irene wanted DK’s Eyewitness Travel; it was her favorite out of the stack of guidebooks she checked out of the library. While I did a throwback, picked up our go-to book from our PK (pre-kids) days of travel, Michelin’s Green Guide. The DK book is definitely more visually punchy, but I figured Michelin, a French company, should have Brittany covered pretty well, and they published this new edition just last month. Maybe I’m getting lazy in my old age, but I’m kinda glad to have everything in one spot -- a bit of local history, touring maps, city guides -- rather than having to rummage through multiple PDFs in an Evernote folder. However, I took a pass on Amazon’s recommended add-on of Michelin’s Brittany Road and Tourist Map No. 512. I’ve topped up my local SIM for 2.5 GB of mobile data; I’m sticking with Google Maps. I maybe old school, but I’m not going back to the Dark Ages.</li><li>And if you have any travel rants, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or  Instagram  at travelcommons -- or  post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com. </li><li> Bridge Music — <em>Perfect Stranger</em> by stellarartwars (c) 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/stellarartwars/45510 Ft: TheDice </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Dining Single</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Our daughter Claire is heading down to London for her first week of Spring Break and will then meet us in Paris for our Brittany trip. &nbsp;Planning it, we got talking about eating alone on the road. Years ago, it used to be more awkward - escorted to the small table off in the corner, a server a bit ticked off at the small check and therefore small tip. You’d read the newspaper or a book between courses to keep yourself occupied, wrap it up pretty quickly and head back to the hotel.</li><li>For guy travelers, the sports bar was (and still is) the exception to that rule. Fine, sit me in a booth alone as long as I have a clear view of walls of TV screens showing all ESPN all the time – ESPN, ESPN-2, ESPN-3, ESPN-U, ESPN News… No need for a book, especially over the next few weeks watching the opening rounds of the NCAA tournaments when I can watch a couple of games at once. Rush out? Hell no, give me another large Coors Light, we haven’t even hit half time.</li><li>Most restaurants now serve a full menu at the bar, complete with a full set up -- placemats, maybe a bread basket. Might be a touch cramped at happy hour, but it’s usually nice to be in the main flow of things rather than off in the corner. The trend toward shared plates , while getting a bit tired when dining with a group (“OK, what can we all agree on?”) works great for the single diner. If I want a bit of variety without overeating, I now have choices beyond sushi or tapas bars. Not that those are bad choices. I have no doubt that Claire will find her way to the bar at Barrafina in Soho.</li><li>Sitting at the bar also gave you a chance for a little social interaction, some serendipity; with the bartender, maybe with the guy sitting next to you. Some years ago, on my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/08/14/food-and-drink-highlights-from-my-drive-south/\">2,100-mile circle tour through the South</a>, a guy next to me at a Louisville bar told me to check out a restaurant in the not-yet-hip Bywater neighborhood in New Orleans; turned out to be a great recommendation. But I get less and less of that as people eat and just interact with their smartphones. Maybe Claire wouldn’t be keen on random bar conversations, but I kinda miss it.</li><li>Nowadays, where I do find that interaction is microbrewery taprooms. Sure, people still have their phones out to check their tasting flight into Untappd, but there’s an acceptance, almost an expectation, that people will “nerd out” about hops and malt and yeast esters with each other and with folks behind the bar. During one of my Dallas trips, I found my way to Grapevine Craft Brewing on a rainy Weds night. The brewmaster was pulling the taps, passing out some barrel samples, and we all spinning our beer nerd propellers real hard.</li><li> Bridge Music —&nbsp;<em>Foolish Game</em>&nbsp;by copperhead (c) 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/copperhead/46390 Ft: Snowflake,Sackjo22 </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><b>From The Travel Story Archives -- Airlines Need To Tell Us More</b></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Prepping for that interview with the local paper had me spelunking deep into the TravelCommons archives, fixing some broken links and listening to some of those early shows for the first time in a long time. A couple of things struck me -- the really poor sound quality I got from the little iRiver MP3 recorder that I was using, and how good some of those early travel stories were.</li><li> So here’s one from<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/09/24/podcast-15-begging-for-business-needing-to-know-at-35000-ft/\"> episode #15</a>, very long-time TC listener Allan Marko talking about wanting to know just a little bit more about what an airline maintenance guy is doing.  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #149</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_147.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<p><!--EndFragment--><br>\n<br>\n</p>','Podcast #150 — Travel Interruptus','','inherit','closed','closed','','2402-revision-v1','','','2019-04-22 18:40:13','2019-04-22 23:40:13','',2402,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/2402-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2412,1,'2019-04-22 18:43:29','2019-04-22 23:43:29','<!-- wp:image {\"id\":2404,\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/CoeazhcUMAAhyQN-300x251.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2404\"/><figcaption>This guy looks familiar...</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> I dusted off the mobile rig to record this episode in Happy Valley, the home of Penn State. And I am kinda happy with some travel to Phoenix and Florida to thaw me out after Chicago\'s run in with the polar vortex. In this episode, I talk about budget airlines, stepping down in Hertz status, why I bought physical guidebooks for a trip to France, the challenges of being a solo diner, and then dig into the archives for a classic travel story. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_149.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:block {\"ref\":2408} /-->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #150: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, as the weather begins to stagger unsteadily toward Spring -- 74 degrees on Monday, 5.3 inches of snow (thundersnow!) on Sunday, then back up into the 70’s two days later. &nbsp;April 14 -- over 5 inches of snow, over 1,000 flights cancelled. A nasty surprise for folks who thought it would be safe to connect through ORD, but just validates a Chicago truism -- don’t put the snow gear away until after Tax Day. Yup, welcome to the Midwest.</li><li>Have done a <em>chunk</em> of travel -- there’s a unit of measure for you -- since the last episode. A 2-day trip that hit 4 airports in the first day -- Chicago-Midway, Las Vegas, Houston-Hobby, and Nashville. The next week, I squoze in a trip to a new airport - State College, PA -- before heading out on vacation to Brittany, France. The squeeze wasn’t too tight -- flew back from State College on Weds night and left on vacation Thursday night -- but I did scout out a couple of backups in case the United Express regional jet went AWOL; a hour or so drive down to Harrisburg, a couple hour drive over to Pittsburgh. Luckily, I didn’t need them. United Express was having a good day, and therefore, so did I.</li><li>The next day’s flight to Paris on SAS by way of Stockholm went fine. We got in on time, found the left luggage lockers, and then the express train into the city all without much hassle. Arlanda Airport is comfortably sized and has good signage. The only real problem was that we got into center city Stockholm too early -- around 8:30am -- and nothing was really open. So we coffee’d up at one place, had some cardamom pastries at another, and generally puttered around until things started opening up an hour or so later. It was a sunny, if brisk, day, so walking around the Gamla Stan and Sodermalm was nice. </li><li>I always chuckle a bit when going through De Gaulle Airport, passing through the tangle of flat escalator walkway tubes that bridge the levels and open center of Terminal 1. The walkways are a bit awkward with wheeled luggage -- going down and then up. An airport porter in front of us let a wheelchair go free on the downhill span -- took a moment for it to register that it was empty -- then it rolled back to him on the uphill. No knock against him; it was the end of the day.</li><li>The next day, we caught the train out to Brittany, to Saint Malo. We walked out of the train station and across the street to Europcar for what was one of the easiest rental car pick-ups I’ve ever had in Europe. No scare-tactic insurance upselling -- just a look at my driver’s license and a quick pointer to where I could find the car in the train station parking lot. Five minutes, max. And dropping off the car a week later at Rennes train station? Absolutely the easiest rental drop-off -- gave the guy the keys and a receipt showing I’d filled up the car and I was done. No waiting for him to go inspect the car, just a handshake and “Have a good day”. </li><li>The next day wasn’t near as carefree, but we’ll talk about that in a few minutes.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I’ve been not-quite-hating on, but certainly have been down on regional jets for quite some time on this podcast. Given a choice, I recommend people avoid them -- not because of their size, but their schedule dependability. Because the regional airlines’ model is to bounce a plane from place to place rather than route through hubs, they never recover from weather or mechanical delays. Those delays just cascade through the rest of the day. Now there often aren’t alternatives. Hence my earlier comment about needing backup plans for my regional jet flight home from State College. My flight was at the end of the day, the most vulnerable time to delays. Given my personal experience,  I wasn’t surprised to read that US Dept of Transportation data showed that regional flights were 2-4 times more likely to be cancelled than mainline flights. The Chicago Tribune dug into the DOT data and found flights operated by Delta’s regional partners were 4 times more likely to be canceled than flights operated by Delta, while American Eagle and United Express were 2-3 times more likely to cancel flights than their mainline partners. You can’t avoid regional jets when going to places like State College or Charlottesville, VA or Appleton, WI -- but you can when flying to LGA or DFW or MSY. And in those cases, unless those RJ flights have exactly the schedule I need, I’ll suffer a bit of inconvenience for a lot more dependability.</li><li>On our travels through Brittany earlier this month, I found that we were getting a large number of “card declined” messages when trying to use our Chase Sapphire Visa card -- at gas stations, stores, and in Paris when I tried to use my Uber app. Now this isn’t a new card -- we’ve had it for over 5 years -- and it’s not the first time we’ve used it on travels in Europe. But Chase fraud algorithm seems more sensitive, throwing more false positives, and no way to update things. On the way out of Brest, I pulled into a Total gas station to fill up on our way to the Crozon peninsula. We’d be there for a couple of days of hiking and I wasn’t sure many gas stations we’d see (turned out that I didn’t need to worry). I pull up to a pump, tap the Chase Visa, get a decline. Insert the card into the reader; get another decline. I do the same drill with my Citi MasterCard with the same result. However, I immediately get a fraud alert from Citi. I hit the big green “Yes” button on the e-mail -- as in, “Yes, I do recognize this charge” -- get an “all clear” response back, tap my Citi card again and fill up my tank. All this time, we get nothing from Chase. I open the Chase app on my phone; nothing there either. Same thing in Paris when I needed an Uber fast (more on that in a bit). Chase declined, but my Amex Platinum card went through. For me, it was just annoying; I always carry a full set of cards when traveling -- a Visa and a MasterCard from different banks, and an Amex -- because single points of failure when traveling are bad -- I don’t want to be left hanging if one bank or one card processor drops their network or loses a data center. Oh, and I also carry cash. But, as we’ve talked about before, that’s ‘cause I’m old-school.</li><li>Brittany was a touring vacation, so we were moving every couple of days or so -- packing, unpacking, repacking. During one of those repacking sessions, maybe in Morgat on the Crozon peninsula -- I couldn’t find my Bose headphone case, which had my Bose headphones, in my backpack -- and I didn’t remember pulling out. Where the hell did they go, I asked myself. I pull everything out of my backpack and -- oh, there they are; they had slipped behind my camera bag in the bottom of my backpack. How did I lose my headphones in my backpack, you may ask -- and rightfully so because it really sounds stupid. Probably the same reason I lost a Google tablet in there a few years back -- too much black. The Bose case is black, the interior of Timbuk 2 backpack is black, my eyes aren’t as good as they used to be… I’d been toying around with getting a new bag, more of a messenger style -- that I could sling over one shoulder and with a bit better waterproofing. And, after this little panic drill, a non-black interior. I ended up getting a small Timbuk 2 Classic messenger bag from the Outlet section of REI.com for $50. It’s not too big -- holds my 11-inch MacBook Air, a couple of notebooks, an umbrella -- and has a bright yellow interior. I haven’t lost anything in it yet -- but I don’t trust myself. Maybe I need to get, like a white umbrella, and spray paint my Bose case red. I love black, but maybe I’ve taken that color palette a bit too far.</li><li>And if you have any travel rants, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"mpeacock (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Facebook page (opens in a new tab)\">Facebook page</a> or our Instagram account at <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\" (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Travelcommons</a> -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Travel Interruptus</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A Greek tragedy in three acts where the travel gods toy with our anti-hero for fun and entertainment</li><li>OK, maybe not quite that bad, not quite Book of Job-level torment, but two out of the three trips I’ve taken in the past month spiraled into head-shaking metaphysical “What the hell is going on here” questioning of my decision to get out of bed that morning.</li><li><em>Act 1</em> - My Midway-Vegas-Nashville travel day. This trip didn’t start out to be stupid. It started as an easy day trip to downtown Nashville for a sales call. So many people are abandoning Chicago for Nashville, Southwest has non-stop flights every 90 minutes, so no problem with flight times. That works out fine -- until someone books a sales call the prior afternoon -- in Las Vegas. Hmmm, how do I get from Vegas after 4pm Pacific to Nashville in time for a meeting the next morning Central time? Southwest is about the only choice, connecting through either Denver or Houston. I go for the more direct routing through Denver -- my first mistake.</li><li>Because, as it turned out, the March “bomb cyclone” -- what the Weather Channel helpfully named “Winter Storm Ulmer” (who or what is an Ulmer?) -- was going to shut down DIA that day with 80 mph winds. I got an e-mail from Southwest the day before canceling my connection through Denver -- understandable -- but nothing else, no rebooking, just “We’re leaving you in Vegas” -- which I’ve found tends to be Southwest’s MO -- pleasantly unhelpful. Especially when the website errored out when I tried to find an alternate routing to Nashville, and the automated message answering their 800 number was estimating 80-some minute hold times. After about 45 minutes, between banging on the website, our corporate Concur app, and tweeting at their customer service, I managed to get re-routed through Houston, safely south of the bomb cyclone.</li><li>The next morning, I show up at the gate at Midway to find my 8am flight to Vegas delayed by 2 hours -- mechanical on the plane here meant they had to bring in a new plane and crew from somewhere else. Annoying, but not critical; I’d get into Vegas at noon for a 2pm meeting. I get another coffee, log into the Boingo hotspot and clear some emails. 9:40, we line up and board. And wait. Then the captain keys the mike, pauses (never a good sign) and then starts talking - he didn’t have time to do the walkaround before we boarded because they came in late. When they did, they noticed a problem with the front strut. Maintenance is looking at it, don’t know if they can fix it, but they need everyone off the plane. So we deplane for what is now my 2nd maintenance delay. We idle around the gate area. 10:30 and nothing. I start looking at my watch. If I’m don’t get into Vegas by 1pm, there won’t be enough time to get to my 2pm meeting, and so I shouldn’t get on the plane. Then they start to re-board us. What time will we get in? 12:20. OK, I’ll board. We all get back on -- and for the most part retaking the seats we had, in spite of Southwest’s open seating. We are creatures of habit. I’m surprised no one moo’d. We’re all on, and we wait. The mike keys. There’s a slight moan rather than a moo from the cabin. We’re waiting on the paperwork. It’s always paperwork. I’m looking at my watch. It’s past 11am Central and the door is still open. A 4-hour flight means we’re now coming up against that 1pm Pacific arrive time. Do I stay on the plane? A couple minutes more and my decision is made for me; they close the door. I lean back, put on my headphones and hope for no headwinds. We get to the gate at 1:02pm. Vegas is always a maze; there’s no straight walkways; they always want to vector you through a thicket of slot machines. I head to the cab rank -- shorter walk and no waiting -- and I get a guy with a heavy foot. I’m at the client 5 minutes before the meeting. That was a bit too close.</li><li>My return trip to the airport and the flight to Houston are uneventful, not even any turbulence as we skirt that bomb cyclone. We get into Hobby maybe even a bit early. I grab a beer and then head over to the gate. They call boarding - just half the A group -- 1-30 -- because that’s all there is on this late flight to Nashville. The gate agent scans the boarding passes, saying “You’re in Row 3, you’re in Row 4, you’re in Row 5….” &nbsp;We get all get in our separate rows, and then wait. The captain keys the mike, pauses, and then says “This plane had a bird strike on the nose on landing. There’s no damage, but Maintenance has to pull the nose cone off for a visual inspection. It’ll take about an hour, so you’re free to get off the plane.” But by now, everything in the airport was closed. “My 3rd maintenance delay of the day. Unbelievable!” I tweet out in frustrustration. Except that iPhone autocorrect turned “delay” into “deejay”. Hilary Baumann pointed it out with a nice emoji-laden tweet that gave me a good chuckle. I finally got to my Nashville hotel around 1:30 in the morning. I looked at the time, shook my head, and went to bed.</li><li><em>Act 2</em> - A couple of weeks later, on Sunday in Rennes, France. We wheeled our luggage the 2 blocks from our AirBnB to Rennes train station for the TGV to CDG. We stood with everyone else, looking up at the departure board waiting for the track to be posted. Departure time came closer and still no track -- not a good sign. The crowd grew larger. There was an announcement in French and a scrolling message at the bottom of the departure screen. Irene banged it into Google Translate. The gist of it -- a bomb threat had been phoned into SCNF, the train company, and all the trains in and out of Paris were halted. Given France’s recent history with terrorism, it was a reasonable response, but still…. They finally start posting delay times -- 40 mins, then over an hour, but then it shrinks back. I pull up Google Maps. The drive to CDG is showing about the same time as the train, but we’d be in control of our own destiny. I walk down to the rental car offices. It’s Sunday morning; they’re all closed. They won’t open until the afternoon; too late for us to drive and make our flights. </li><li>Time continues to tick by, past the departure time for our flight. I call United -- any other options? I get a phenomenally helpful agent. I can hear the keystrokes. Nothing else today Sunday, nor tomorrow, Monday. I wasn’t surprised about nothing available today, but was about the next day -- until I got a text from Andrew. He was on this morning’s United flight to Chicago which just cancelled for a hydraulic problem and rebooked on tomorrow’s flight -- which explains the lack of seats for us. I took the Tuesday seats. Now would we get to CDG in time for Claire’s EasyJet flight to Edinburgh so she can make class the next day. The trains finally start moving. We head down and board our train. And then wait, and wait some &nbsp;more. And then the train starts moving. I look at my watch. I think Claire will be OK. </li><li>Until we come to a stop in the middle of a rail yard. I watch a couple of guys walk past our car -- maybe a visual inspection? After a bit, we start moving -- backwards. The conductor keys the mike, and makes an announcement in rapid French that we can’t pick up. I open Google Maps. I see we’re off to the east of Paris but can’t tell if we’re moving in the right direction. Until we pull into the next station -- it’s for EuroDisney. I find our train route on the SCNF website and see this is one of the stops en route to CDG, so we’re going in the right direction. We get to CDG by 3pm, which means Claire can make her flight. Andrew comes over from the Airport Hilton, where United is putting him up for the night, and we head down to Paris for another dinner together. There are, after all, worse cities to have to spend an extra day or two.</li><li><em>Act 3</em> - Tuesday morning, Paris. Our forced layover in Paris yesterday had been a beautiful day, &nbsp;sunny and warm. We walked through the Marais, south across Ile de la Cite, taking the obligatory selfie in front of Notre Dame that we pulled out at looked at two weeks later during the news coverage of the fire, and then rattled around the Latin Quarter looking for a place with outdoor seating and a nice rosé. This morning, though, not so beautiful. It was dumping rain. So rather than trundle our luggage 10 min to the Metro stop, I decide to order an Uber -- which takes a try or two when Chase declines my Visa again; and I switch over to Amex. A nice black Mercedes picks us up and heads for Les Halles -- or at least tries to. The traffic is a crawl at best. I watch our buffer time tick away and we’re not &nbsp;getting any closer. After sitting through a couple of traffic light cycles without clearing the intersection, we grab our bags and make for Les Halles on foot. We get there, a bit wet. We’re able to skip the ticket booth line; I have enough euros for the self-service machine, because it’s that or a chip-&amp;-pin card we don’t have. We get on the train. I look at my watch - we should have enough time to check our bags (bringing back some liquids), clear security, and get to the gate without too much more agita.</li><li>Until the train slows to a stop between stops. The conductor keys the mike, and makes an announcement in rapid French. I look at the other passengers. They don’t seem too agitated. I figure it’s some congestion on the track ahead. And, sure enough, we start moving after a couple of minutes. But at the next stop, the train doors stay open and a train employee come on, saying in French <em>and</em> English -- everyone has to get off, catch a bus outside the station to another station, then catch a different train to the airport. We head down the bus stop. There’s no one there to help; just a couple hundred people milling around.</li><li>Now I’m worried. We have no time to figure this out. The taxi stand is mobbed, I fire up Uber - 19-minute wait. Lyft? They’re not in Paris. I google to find taxi company but before I call, I try Uber one more time -- a 5-minute wait for a €60 fare. I hit the order button -- and then again after I swap over to Amex. €60 for a 15-minute ride to CDG is tough, but it’s cheaper than another night in a hotel. We get to the United desk 2 minutes before luggage check closes for our flight. The agent radioed down, checked in our bags, and then gave us the CDG version of Fast Track, so we could sidestep the long passport control and security lines. We board, sit down, but don’t really settle in until the plane leaves the ground. And when we’re finally at ORD, standing by the luggage carousel, our bags are the first ones to come out.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #150</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_147.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<p><!--EndFragment--><br>\n<br>\n</p>','Podcast #150 — Travel Interruptus','','inherit','closed','closed','','2402-revision-v1','','','2019-04-22 18:43:29','2019-04-22 23:43:29','',2402,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/2402-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2413,1,'2019-04-22 18:46:31','2019-04-22 23:46:31','<!-- wp:image {\"id\":2404,\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/CoeazhcUMAAhyQN-300x251.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2404\"/><figcaption>This guy looks familiar...</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> I dusted off the mobile rig to record this episode in Happy Valley, the home of Penn State. And I am kinda happy with some travel to Phoenix and Florida to thaw me out after Chicago\'s run in with the polar vortex. In this episode, I talk about budget airlines, stepping down in Hertz status, why I bought physical guidebooks for a trip to France, the challenges of being a solo diner, and then dig into the archives for a classic travel story. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_149.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:block {\"ref\":2408} /-->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #150: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, as the weather begins to stagger unsteadily toward Spring -- 74 degrees on Monday, 5.3 inches of snow (thundersnow!) on Sunday, then back up into the 70’s two days later. &nbsp;April 14 -- over 5 inches of snow, over 1,000 flights cancelled. A nasty surprise for folks who thought it would be safe to connect through ORD, but just validates a Chicago truism -- don’t put the snow gear away until after Tax Day. Yup, welcome to the Midwest.</li><li>Have done a <em>chunk</em> of travel -- there’s a unit of measure for you -- since the last episode. A 2-day trip that hit 4 airports in the first day -- Chicago-Midway, Las Vegas, Houston-Hobby, and Nashville. The next week, I squoze in a trip to a new airport - State College, PA -- before heading out on vacation to Brittany, France. The squeeze wasn’t too tight -- flew back from State College on Weds night and left on vacation Thursday night -- but I did scout out a couple of backups in case the United Express regional jet went AWOL; a hour or so drive down to Harrisburg, a couple hour drive over to Pittsburgh. Luckily, I didn’t need them. United Express was having a good day, and therefore, so did I.</li><li>The next day’s flight to Paris on SAS by way of Stockholm went fine. We got in on time, found the left luggage lockers, and then the express train into the city all without much hassle. Arlanda Airport is comfortably sized and has good signage. The only real problem was that we got into center city Stockholm too early -- around 8:30am -- and nothing was really open. So we coffee’d up at one place, had some cardamom pastries at another, and generally puttered around until things started opening up an hour or so later. It was a sunny, if brisk, day, so walking around the Gamla Stan and Sodermalm was nice. </li><li>I always chuckle a bit when going through De Gaulle Airport, passing through the tangle of flat escalator walkway tubes that bridge the levels and open center of Terminal 1. The walkways are a bit awkward with wheeled luggage -- going down and then up. An airport porter in front of us let a wheelchair go free on the downhill span -- took a moment for it to register that it was empty -- then it rolled back to him on the uphill. No knock against him; it was the end of the day.</li><li>The next day, we caught the train out to Brittany, to Saint Malo. We walked out of the train station and across the street to Europcar for what was one of the easiest rental car pick-ups I’ve ever had in Europe. No scare-tactic insurance upselling -- just a look at my driver’s license and a quick pointer to where I could find the car in the train station parking lot. Five minutes, max. And dropping off the car a week later at Rennes train station? Absolutely the easiest rental drop-off -- gave the guy the keys and a receipt showing I’d filled up the car and I was done. No waiting for him to go inspect the car, just a handshake and “Have a good day”. </li><li>The next day wasn’t near as carefree, but we’ll talk about that in a few minutes.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I’ve been not-quite-hating on, but certainly have been down on regional jets for quite some time on this podcast. Given a choice, I recommend people avoid them -- not because of their size, but their schedule dependability. Because the regional airlines’ model is to bounce a plane from place to place rather than route through hubs, they never recover from weather or mechanical delays. Those delays just cascade through the rest of the day. Now there often aren’t alternatives. Hence my earlier comment about needing backup plans for my regional jet flight home from State College. My flight was at the end of the day, the most vulnerable time to delays. Given my personal experience,  I wasn’t surprised to read that US Dept of Transportation data showed that regional flights were 2-4 times more likely to be cancelled than mainline flights. The Chicago Tribune dug into the DOT data and found flights operated by Delta’s regional partners were 4 times more likely to be canceled than flights operated by Delta, while American Eagle and United Express were 2-3 times more likely to cancel flights than their mainline partners. You can’t avoid regional jets when going to places like State College or Charlottesville, VA or Appleton, WI -- but you can when flying to LGA or DFW or MSY. And in those cases, unless those RJ flights have exactly the schedule I need, I’ll suffer a bit of inconvenience for a lot more dependability.</li><li>On our travels through Brittany earlier this month, I found that we were getting a large number of “card declined” messages when trying to use our Chase Sapphire Visa card -- at gas stations, stores, and in Paris when I tried to use my Uber app. Now this isn’t a new card -- we’ve had it for over 5 years -- and it’s not the first time we’ve used it on travels in Europe. But Chase fraud algorithm seems more sensitive, throwing more false positives, and no way to update things. On the way out of Brest, I pulled into a Total gas station to fill up on our way to the Crozon peninsula. We’d be there for a couple of days of hiking and I wasn’t sure many gas stations we’d see (turned out that I didn’t need to worry). I pull up to a pump, tap the Chase Visa, get a decline. Insert the card into the reader; get another decline. I do the same drill with my Citi MasterCard with the same result. However, I immediately get a fraud alert from Citi. I hit the big green “Yes” button on the e-mail -- as in, “Yes, I do recognize this charge” -- get an “all clear” response back, tap my Citi card again and fill up my tank. All this time, we get nothing from Chase. I open the Chase app on my phone; nothing there either. Same thing in Paris when I needed an Uber fast (more on that in a bit). Chase declined, but my Amex Platinum card went through. For me, it was just annoying; I always carry a full set of cards when traveling -- a Visa and a MasterCard from different banks, and an Amex -- because single points of failure when traveling are bad -- I don’t want to be left hanging if one bank or one card processor drops their network or loses a data center. Oh, and I also carry cash. But, as we’ve <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"talked (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/02/10/podcast-148-travel-potpourri-for-200-alex/\" target=\"_blank\">talked</a> <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"about (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/12/17/podcast-147-holiday-travel-tips-notes-from-santa-fe/\" target=\"_blank\">about</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"before (opens in a new tab)\">before</a>, that’s ‘cause I’m old-school.</li><li>Brittany was a touring vacation, so we were moving every couple of days or so -- packing, unpacking, repacking. During one of those repacking sessions, maybe in Morgat on the Crozon peninsula -- I couldn’t find my Bose headphone case, which had my Bose headphones, in my backpack -- and I didn’t remember pulling out. Where the hell did they go, I asked myself. I pull everything out of my backpack and -- oh, there they are; they had slipped behind my camera bag in the bottom of my backpack. How did I lose my headphones in my backpack, you may ask -- and rightfully so because it really sounds stupid. Probably the same reason I lost a Google tablet in there a few years back -- too much black. The Bose case is black, the interior of Timbuk 2 backpack is black, my eyes aren’t as good as they used to be… I’d been toying around with getting a new bag, more of a messenger style -- that I could sling over one shoulder and with a bit better waterproofing. And, after this little panic drill, a non-black interior. I ended up getting a small Timbuk 2 Classic messenger bag from the Outlet section of REI.com for $50. It’s not too big -- holds my 11-inch MacBook Air, a couple of notebooks, an umbrella -- and has a bright yellow interior. I haven’t lost anything in it yet -- but I don’t trust myself. Maybe I need to get, like a white umbrella, and spray paint my Bose case red. I love black, but maybe I’ve taken that color palette a bit too far.</li><li>And if you have any travel rants, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"mpeacock (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Facebook page (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Facebook page</a> or our Instagram account at <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\" (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Travelcommons</a> -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Travel Interruptus</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A Greek tragedy in three acts where the travel gods toy with our anti-hero for fun and entertainment</li><li>OK, maybe not quite that bad, not quite Book of Job-level torment, but two out of the three trips I’ve taken in the past month spiraled into head-shaking metaphysical “What the hell is going on here” questioning of my decision to get out of bed that morning.</li><li><em>Act 1</em> - My Midway-Vegas-Nashville travel day. This trip didn’t start out to be stupid. It started as an easy day trip to downtown Nashville for a sales call. So many people are abandoning Chicago for Nashville, Southwest has non-stop flights every 90 minutes, so no problem with flight times. That works out fine -- until someone books a sales call the prior afternoon -- in Las Vegas. Hmmm, how do I get from Vegas after 4pm Pacific to Nashville in time for a meeting the next morning Central time? Southwest is about the only choice, connecting through either Denver or Houston. I go for the more direct routing through Denver -- my first mistake.</li><li>Because, as it turned out, the March “bomb cyclone” -- what the Weather Channel helpfully named “Winter Storm Ulmer” (who or what is an Ulmer?) -- was going to shut down DIA that day with 80 mph winds. I got an e-mail from Southwest the day before canceling my connection through Denver -- understandable -- but nothing else, no rebooking, just “We’re leaving you in Vegas” -- which I’ve found tends to be Southwest’s MO -- pleasantly unhelpful. Especially when the website errored out when I tried to find an alternate routing to Nashville, and the automated message answering their 800 number was estimating 80-some minute hold times. After about 45 minutes, between banging on the website, our corporate Concur app, and tweeting at their customer service, I managed to get re-routed through Houston, safely south of the bomb cyclone.</li><li>The next morning, I show up at the gate at Midway to find my 8am flight to Vegas delayed by 2 hours -- mechanical on the plane here meant they had to bring in a new plane and crew from somewhere else. Annoying, but not critical; I’d get into Vegas at noon for a 2pm meeting. I get another coffee, log into the Boingo hotspot and clear some emails. 9:40, we line up and board. And wait. Then the captain keys the mike, pauses (never a good sign) and then starts talking - he didn’t have time to do the walkaround before we boarded because they came in late. When they did, they noticed a problem with the front strut. Maintenance is looking at it, don’t know if they can fix it, but they need everyone off the plane. So we deplane for what is now my 2nd maintenance delay. We idle around the gate area. 10:30 and nothing. I start looking at my watch. If I’m don’t get into Vegas by 1pm, there won’t be enough time to get to my 2pm meeting, and so I shouldn’t get on the plane. Then they start to re-board us. What time will we get in? 12:20. OK, I’ll board. We all get back on -- and for the most part retaking the seats we had, in spite of Southwest’s open seating. We are creatures of habit. I’m surprised no one moo’d. We’re all on, and we wait. The mike keys. There’s a slight moan rather than a moo from the cabin. We’re waiting on the paperwork. It’s always paperwork. I’m looking at my watch. It’s past 11am Central and the door is still open. A 4-hour flight means we’re now coming up against that 1pm Pacific arrive time. Do I stay on the plane? A couple minutes more and my decision is made for me; they close the door. I lean back, put on my headphones and hope for no headwinds. We get to the gate at 1:02pm. Vegas is always a maze; there’s no straight walkways; they always want to vector you through a thicket of slot machines. I head to the cab rank -- shorter walk and no waiting -- and I get a guy with a heavy foot. I’m at the client 5 minutes before the meeting. That was a bit too close.</li><li>My return trip to the airport and the flight to Houston are uneventful, not even any turbulence as we skirt that bomb cyclone. We get into Hobby maybe even a bit early. I grab a beer and then head over to the gate. They call boarding - just half the A group -- 1-30 -- because that’s all there is on this late flight to Nashville. The gate agent scans the boarding passes, saying “You’re in Row 3, you’re in Row 4, you’re in Row 5….” &nbsp;We get all get in our separate rows, and then wait. The captain keys the mike, pauses, and then says “This plane had a bird strike on the nose on landing. There’s no damage, but Maintenance has to pull the nose cone off for a visual inspection. It’ll take about an hour, so you’re free to get off the plane.” But by now, everything in the airport was closed. “My 3rd maintenance delay of the day. Unbelievable!” I tweet out in frustrustration. Except that iPhone autocorrect turned “delay” into “deejay”. Hilary Baumann pointed it out with a nice emoji-laden tweet that gave me a good chuckle. I finally got to my Nashville hotel around 1:30 in the morning. I looked at the time, shook my head, and went to bed.</li><li><em>Act 2</em> - A couple of weeks later, on Sunday in Rennes, France. We wheeled our luggage the 2 blocks from our AirBnB to Rennes train station for the TGV to CDG. We stood with everyone else, looking up at the departure board waiting for the track to be posted. Departure time came closer and still no track -- not a good sign. The crowd grew larger. There was an announcement in French and a scrolling message at the bottom of the departure screen. Irene banged it into Google Translate. The gist of it -- a bomb threat had been phoned into SCNF, the train company, and all the trains in and out of Paris were halted. Given France’s recent history with terrorism, it was a reasonable response, but still…. They finally start posting delay times -- 40 mins, then over an hour, but then it shrinks back. I pull up Google Maps. The drive to CDG is showing about the same time as the train, but we’d be in control of our own destiny. I walk down to the rental car offices. It’s Sunday morning; they’re all closed. They won’t open until the afternoon; too late for us to drive and make our flights. </li><li>Time continues to tick by, past the departure time for our flight. I call United -- any other options? I get a phenomenally helpful agent. I can hear the keystrokes. Nothing else today Sunday, nor tomorrow, Monday. I wasn’t surprised about nothing available today, but was about the next day -- until I got a text from Andrew. He was on this morning’s United flight to Chicago which just cancelled for a hydraulic problem and rebooked on tomorrow’s flight -- which explains the lack of seats for us. I took the Tuesday seats. Now would we get to CDG in time for Claire’s EasyJet flight to Edinburgh so she can make class the next day. The trains finally start moving. We head down and board our train. And then wait, and wait some &nbsp;more. And then the train starts moving. I look at my watch. I think Claire will be OK. </li><li>Until we come to a stop in the middle of a rail yard. I watch a couple of guys walk past our car -- maybe a visual inspection? After a bit, we start moving -- backwards. The conductor keys the mike, and makes an announcement in rapid French that we can’t pick up. I open Google Maps. I see we’re off to the east of Paris but can’t tell if we’re moving in the right direction. Until we pull into the next station -- it’s for EuroDisney. I find our train route on the SCNF website and see this is one of the stops en route to CDG, so we’re going in the right direction. We get to CDG by 3pm, which means Claire can make her flight. Andrew comes over from the Airport Hilton, where United is putting him up for the night, and we head down to Paris for another dinner together. There are, after all, worse cities to have to spend an extra day or two.</li><li><em>Act 3</em> - Tuesday morning, Paris. Our forced layover in Paris yesterday had been a beautiful day, &nbsp;sunny and warm. We walked through the Marais, south across Ile de la Cite, taking the obligatory selfie in front of Notre Dame that we pulled out at looked at two weeks later during the news coverage of the fire, and then rattled around the Latin Quarter looking for a place with outdoor seating and a nice rosé. This morning, though, not so beautiful. It was dumping rain. So rather than trundle our luggage 10 min to the Metro stop, I decide to order an Uber -- which takes a try or two when Chase declines my Visa again; and I switch over to Amex. A nice black Mercedes picks us up and heads for Les Halles -- or at least tries to. The traffic is a crawl at best. I watch our buffer time tick away and we’re not &nbsp;getting any closer. After sitting through a couple of traffic light cycles without clearing the intersection, we grab our bags and make for Les Halles on foot. We get there, a bit wet. We’re able to skip the ticket booth line; I have enough euros for the self-service machine, because it’s that or a chip-&amp;-pin card we don’t have. We get on the train. I look at my watch - we should have enough time to check our bags (bringing back some liquids), clear security, and get to the gate without too much more agita.</li><li>Until the train slows to a stop between stops. The conductor keys the mike, and makes an announcement in rapid French. I look at the other passengers. They don’t seem too agitated. I figure it’s some congestion on the track ahead. And, sure enough, we start moving after a couple of minutes. But at the next stop, the train doors stay open and a train employee come on, saying in French <em>and</em> English -- everyone has to get off, catch a bus outside the station to another station, then catch a different train to the airport. We head down the bus stop. There’s no one there to help; just a couple hundred people milling around.</li><li>Now I’m worried. We have no time to figure this out. The taxi stand is mobbed, I fire up Uber - 19-minute wait. Lyft? They’re not in Paris. I google to find taxi company but before I call, I try Uber one more time -- a 5-minute wait for a €60 fare. I hit the order button -- and then again after I swap over to Amex. €60 for a 15-minute ride to CDG is tough, but it’s cheaper than another night in a hotel. We get to the United desk 2 minutes before luggage check closes for our flight. The agent radioed down, checked in our bags, and then gave us the CDG version of Fast Track, so we could sidestep the long passport control and security lines. We board, sit down, but don’t really settle in until the plane leaves the ground. And when we’re finally at ORD, standing by the luggage carousel, our bags are the first ones to come out.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #150</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_147.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<p><!--EndFragment--><br>\n<br>\n</p>','Podcast #150 — Travel Interruptus','','inherit','closed','closed','','2402-revision-v1','','','2019-04-22 18:46:31','2019-04-22 23:46:31','',2402,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/2402-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2414,1,'2019-04-22 19:06:13','2019-04-23 00:06:13','<!-- wp:image {\"id\":2404,\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/CoeazhcUMAAhyQN-300x251.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2404\"/><figcaption>This guy looks familiar...</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> I dusted off the mobile rig to record this episode in Happy Valley, the home of Penn State. And I am kinda happy with some travel to Phoenix and Florida to thaw me out after Chicago\'s run in with the polar vortex. In this episode, I talk about budget airlines, stepping down in Hertz status, why I bought physical guidebooks for a trip to France, the challenges of being a solo diner, and then dig into the archives for a classic travel story. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_149.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:block {\"ref\":2408} /-->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #150: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, as the weather begins to stagger unsteadily toward Spring -- 74 degrees on Monday, 5.3 inches of snow (thundersnow!) on Sunday, then back up into the 70’s two days later. &nbsp;April 14 -- over 5 inches of snow, over 1,000 flights cancelled. A nasty surprise for folks who thought it would be safe to connect through ORD, but just validates a Chicago truism -- don’t put the snow gear away until after Tax Day. Yup, welcome to the Midwest.</li><li>Have done a <em>chunk</em> of travel -- there’s a unit of measure for you -- since the last episode. A 2-day trip that hit 4 airports in the first day -- Chicago-Midway, Las Vegas, Houston-Hobby, and Nashville. The next week, I squoze in a trip to a new airport - State College, PA -- before heading out on vacation to Brittany, France. The squeeze wasn’t too tight -- flew back from State College on Weds night and left on vacation Thursday night -- but I did scout out a couple of backups in case the United Express regional jet went AWOL; a hour or so drive down to Harrisburg, a couple hour drive over to Pittsburgh. Luckily, I didn’t need them. United Express was having a good day, and therefore, so did I.</li><li>The next day’s flight to Paris on SAS by way of Stockholm went fine. We got in on time, found the left luggage lockers, and then the express train into the city all without much hassle. Arlanda Airport is comfortably sized and has good signage. The only real problem was that we got into center city Stockholm too early -- around 8:30am -- and nothing was really open. So we coffee’d up at one place, had some cardamom pastries at another, and generally puttered around until things started opening up an hour or so later. It was a sunny, if brisk, day, so walking around the Gamla Stan and Sodermalm was nice. </li><li>I always chuckle a bit when going through De Gaulle Airport, passing through the tangle of flat escalator walkway tubes that bridge the levels and open center of Terminal 1. The walkways are a bit awkward with wheeled luggage -- going down and then up. An airport porter in front of us let a wheelchair go free on the downhill span -- took a moment for it to register that it was empty -- then it rolled back to him on the uphill. No knock against him; it was the end of the day.</li><li>The next day, we caught the train out to Brittany, to Saint Malo. We walked out of the train station and across the street to Europcar for what was one of the easiest rental car pick-ups I’ve ever had in Europe. No scare-tactic insurance upselling -- just a look at my driver’s license and a quick pointer to where I could find the car in the train station parking lot. Five minutes, max. And dropping off the car a week later at Rennes train station? Absolutely the easiest rental drop-off -- gave the guy the keys and a receipt showing I’d filled up the car and I was done. No waiting for him to go inspect the car, just a handshake and “Have a good day”. </li><li>The next day wasn’t near as carefree, but we’ll talk about that in a few minutes.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I’ve been not-quite-hating on, but certainly have been down on regional jets for quite some time on this podcast. Given a choice, I recommend people avoid them -- not because of their size, but their schedule dependability. Because the regional airlines’ model is to bounce a plane from place to place rather than route through hubs, they never recover from weather or mechanical delays. Those delays just cascade through the rest of the day. Now there often aren’t alternatives. Hence my earlier comment about needing backup plans for my regional jet flight home from State College. My flight was at the end of the day, the most vulnerable time to delays. Given my personal experience,  I wasn’t surprised to read that US Dept of Transportation data showed that regional flights were 2-4 times more likely to be cancelled than mainline flights. The Chicago Tribune dug into the DOT data and found flights operated by Delta’s regional partners were 4 times more likely to be canceled than flights operated by Delta, while American Eagle and United Express were 2-3 times more likely to cancel flights than their mainline partners. You can’t avoid regional jets when going to places like State College or Charlottesville, VA or Appleton, WI -- but you can when flying to LGA or DFW or MSY. And in those cases, unless those RJ flights have exactly the schedule I need, I’ll suffer a bit of inconvenience for a lot more dependability.</li><li>On our travels through Brittany earlier this month, I found that we were getting a large number of “card declined” messages when trying to use our Chase Sapphire Visa card -- at gas stations, stores, and in Paris when I tried to use my Uber app. Now this isn’t a new card -- we’ve had it for over 5 years -- and it’s not the first time we’ve used it on travels in Europe. But Chase fraud algorithm seems more sensitive, throwing more false positives, and no way to update things. On the way out of Brest, I pulled into a Total gas station to fill up on our way to the Crozon peninsula. We’d be there for a couple of days of hiking and I wasn’t sure many gas stations we’d see (turned out that I didn’t need to worry). I pull up to a pump, tap the Chase Visa, get a decline. Insert the card into the reader; get another decline. I do the same drill with my Citi MasterCard with the same result. However, I immediately get a fraud alert from Citi. I hit the big green “Yes” button on the e-mail -- as in, “Yes, I do recognize this charge” -- get an “all clear” response back, tap my Citi card again and fill up my tank. All this time, we get nothing from Chase. I open the Chase app on my phone; nothing there either. Same thing in Paris when I needed an Uber fast (more on that in a bit). Chase declined, but my Amex Platinum card went through. For me, it was just annoying; I always carry a full set of cards when traveling -- a Visa and a MasterCard from different banks, and an Amex -- because single points of failure when traveling are bad -- I don’t want to be left hanging if one bank or one card processor drops their network or loses a data center. Oh, and I also carry cash. But, as we’ve <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"talked (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/02/10/podcast-148-travel-potpourri-for-200-alex/\" target=\"_blank\">talked</a> <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"about (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/12/17/podcast-147-holiday-travel-tips-notes-from-santa-fe/\" target=\"_blank\">about</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"before (opens in a new tab)\">before</a>, that’s ‘cause I’m old-school.</li><li>Brittany was a touring vacation, so we were moving every couple of days or so -- packing, unpacking, repacking. During one of those repacking sessions, maybe in Morgat on the Crozon peninsula -- I couldn’t find my Bose headphone case, which had my Bose headphones, in my backpack -- and I didn’t remember pulling out. Where the hell did they go, I asked myself. I pull everything out of my backpack and -- oh, there they are; they had slipped behind my camera bag in the bottom of my backpack. How did I lose my headphones in my backpack, you may ask -- and rightfully so because it really sounds stupid. Probably the same reason I lost a Google tablet in there a few years back -- too much black. The Bose case is black, the interior of Timbuk 2 backpack is black, my eyes aren’t as good as they used to be… I’d been toying around with getting a new bag, more of a messenger style -- that I could sling over one shoulder and with a bit better waterproofing. And, after this little panic drill, a non-black interior. I ended up getting a small Timbuk 2 Classic messenger bag from the Outlet section of REI.com for $50. It’s not too big -- holds my 11-inch MacBook Air, a couple of notebooks, an umbrella -- and has a bright yellow interior. I haven’t lost anything in it yet -- but I don’t trust myself. Maybe I need to get, like a white umbrella, and spray paint my Bose case red. I love black, but maybe I’ve taken that color palette a bit too far.</li><li>And if you have any travel rants, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"mpeacock (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Facebook page (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Facebook page</a> or our Instagram account at <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\" (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Travelcommons</a> -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Travel Interruptus</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A Greek tragedy in three acts where the travel gods toy with our anti-hero for fun and entertainment</li><li>OK, maybe not quite that bad, not quite Book of Job-level torment, but two out of the three trips I’ve taken in the past month spiraled into head-shaking metaphysical “What the hell is going on here” questioning of my decision to get out of bed that morning.</li><li><em>Act 1</em> - My Midway-Vegas-Nashville travel day. This trip didn’t start out to be stupid. It started as an easy day trip to downtown Nashville for a sales call. So many people are abandoning Chicago for Nashville, Southwest has non-stop flights every 90 minutes, so no problem with flight times. That works out fine -- until someone books a sales call the prior afternoon -- in Las Vegas. Hmmm, how do I get from Vegas after 4pm Pacific to Nashville in time for a meeting the next morning Central time? Southwest is about the only choice, connecting through either Denver or Houston. I go for the more direct routing through Denver -- my first mistake.</li><li>Because, as it turned out, the March “bomb cyclone” -- what the Weather Channel helpfully named “Winter Storm Ulmer” (who or what is an Ulmer?) -- was going to shut down DIA that day with 80 mph winds. I got an e-mail from Southwest the day before canceling my connection through Denver -- understandable -- but nothing else, no rebooking, just “We’re leaving you in Vegas” -- which I’ve found tends to be Southwest’s MO -- pleasantly unhelpful. Especially when the website errored out when I tried to find an alternate routing to Nashville, and the automated message answering their 800 number was estimating 80-some minute hold times. After about 45 minutes, between banging on the website, our corporate Concur app, and tweeting at their customer service, I managed to get re-routed through Houston, safely south of the bomb cyclone.</li><li>The next morning, I show up at the gate at Midway to find my 8am flight to Vegas delayed by 2 hours -- mechanical on the plane here meant they had to bring in a new plane and crew from somewhere else. Annoying, but not critical; I’d get into Vegas at noon for a 2pm meeting. I get another coffee, log into the Boingo hotspot and clear some emails. 9:40, we line up and board. And wait. Then the captain keys the mike, pauses (never a good sign) and then starts talking - he didn’t have time to do the walkaround before we boarded because they came in late. When they did, they noticed a problem with the front strut. Maintenance is looking at it, don’t know if they can fix it, but they need everyone off the plane. So we deplane for what is now my 2nd maintenance delay. We idle around the gate area. 10:30 and nothing. I start looking at my watch. If I’m don’t get into Vegas by 1pm, there won’t be enough time to get to my 2pm meeting, and so I shouldn’t get on the plane. Then they start to re-board us. What time will we get in? 12:20. OK, I’ll board. We all get back on -- and for the most part retaking the seats we had, in spite of Southwest’s open seating. We are creatures of habit. I’m surprised no one moo’d. We’re all on, and we wait. The mike keys. There’s a slight moan rather than a moo from the cabin. We’re waiting on the paperwork. It’s always paperwork. I’m looking at my watch. It’s past 11am Central and the door is still open. A 4-hour flight means we’re now coming up against that 1pm Pacific arrive time. Do I stay on the plane? A couple minutes more and my decision is made for me; they close the door. I lean back, put on my headphones and hope for no headwinds. We get to the gate at 1:02pm. Vegas is always a maze; there’s no straight walkways; they always want to vector you through a thicket of slot machines. I head to the cab rank -- shorter walk and no waiting -- and I get a guy with a heavy foot. I’m at the client 5 minutes before the meeting. That was a bit too close.</li><li>My return trip to the airport and the flight to Houston are uneventful, not even any turbulence as we skirt that bomb cyclone. We get into Hobby maybe even a bit early. I grab a beer and then head over to the gate. They call boarding - just half the A group -- 1-30 -- because that’s all there is on this late flight to Nashville. The gate agent scans the boarding passes, saying “You’re in Row 3, you’re in Row 4, you’re in Row 5….”  We get all get in our separate rows, and then wait. The captain keys the mike, pauses, and then says “This plane had a bird strike on the nose on landing. There’s no damage, but Maintenance has to pull the nose cone off for a visual inspection. It’ll take about an hour, so you’re free to get off the plane.” But by now, everything in the airport was closed. “My 3rd maintenance delay of the day. Unbelievable!” I tweet out in frustrustration. Except that iPhone autocorrect turned “delay” into “deejay”. Hilary Baumann pointed it out with a nice emoji-laden tweet that gave me a good chuckle. I finally got to my Nashville hotel around 1:30 in the morning. I looked at the time, shook my head, and went to bed.</li><li> Bridge Music —  South Texas Cowboy Blues by texasradiofish (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/texasradiofish/52030 Ft: unreal_dm, ElRon XChile</li><li><em>Act 2</em> - A couple of weeks later, on Sunday in Rennes, France. We wheeled our luggage the 2 blocks from our AirBnB to Rennes train station for the TGV to CDG. We stood with everyone else, looking up at the departure board waiting for the track to be posted. Departure time came closer and still no track -- not a good sign. The crowd grew larger. There was an announcement in French and a scrolling message at the bottom of the departure screen. Irene banged it into Google Translate. The gist of it -- a bomb threat had been phoned into SCNF, the train company, and all the trains in and out of Paris were halted. Given France’s recent history with terrorism, it was a reasonable response, but still…. They finally start posting delay times -- 40 mins, then over an hour, but then it shrinks back. I pull up Google Maps. The drive to CDG is showing about the same time as the train, but we’d be in control of our own destiny. I walk down to the rental car offices. It’s Sunday morning; they’re all closed. They won’t open until the afternoon; too late for us to drive and make our flights. </li><li>Time continues to tick by, past the departure time for our flight. I call United -- any other options? I get a phenomenally helpful agent. I can hear the keystrokes. Nothing else today Sunday, nor tomorrow, Monday. I wasn’t surprised about nothing available today, but was about the next day -- until I got a text from Andrew. He was on this morning’s United flight to Chicago which just cancelled for a hydraulic problem and rebooked on tomorrow’s flight -- which explains the lack of seats for us. I took the Tuesday seats. Now would we get to CDG in time for Claire’s EasyJet flight to Edinburgh so she can make class the next day. The trains finally start moving. We head down and board our train. And then wait, and wait some  more. And then the train starts moving. I look at my watch. I think Claire will be OK. </li><li>Until we come to a stop in the middle of a rail yard. I watch a couple of guys walk past our car -- maybe a visual inspection? After a bit, we start moving -- backwards. The conductor keys the mike, and makes an announcement in rapid French that we can’t pick up. I open Google Maps. I see we’re off to the east of Paris but can’t tell if we’re moving in the right direction. Until we pull into the next station -- it’s for EuroDisney. I find our train route on the SCNF website and see this is one of the stops en route to CDG, so we’re going in the right direction. We get to CDG by 3pm, which means Claire can make her flight. Andrew comes over from the Airport Hilton, where United is putting him up for the night, and we head down to Paris for another dinner together. There are, after all, worse cities to have to spend an extra day or two.</li><li> Bridge Music —  <em>Parisian </em>Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)<br> Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License<br> http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><em>Act 3</em> - Tuesday morning, Paris. Our forced layover in Paris yesterday had been a beautiful day,  sunny and warm. We walked through the Marais, south across Ile de la Cite, taking the obligatory selfie in front of Notre Dame that we pulled out at looked at two weeks later during the news coverage of the fire, and then rattled around the Latin Quarter looking for a place with outdoor seating and a nice rosé. This morning, though, not so beautiful. It was dumping rain. So rather than trundle our luggage 10 min to the Metro stop, I decide to order an Uber -- which takes a try or two when Chase declines my Visa again; and I switch over to Amex. A nice black Mercedes picks us up and heads for Les Halles -- or at least tries to. The traffic is a crawl at best. I watch our buffer time tick away and we’re not  getting any closer. After sitting through a couple of traffic light cycles without clearing the intersection, we grab our bags and make for Les Halles on foot. We get there, a bit wet. We’re able to skip the ticket booth line; I have enough euros for the self-service machine, because it’s that or a chip-&amp;-pin card we don’t have. We get on the train. I look at my watch - we should have enough time to check our bags (bringing back some liquids), clear security, and get to the gate without too much more agita.</li><li>Until the train slows to a stop between stops. The conductor keys the mike, and makes an announcement in rapid French. I look at the other passengers. They don’t seem too agitated. I figure it’s some congestion on the track ahead. And, sure enough, we start moving after a couple of minutes. But at the next stop, the train doors stay open and a train employee come on, saying in French <em>and</em> English -- everyone has to get off, catch a bus outside the station to another station, then catch a different train to the airport. We head down the bus stop. There’s no one there to help; just a couple hundred people milling around.</li><li>Now I’m worried. We have no time to figure this out. The taxi stand is mobbed, I fire up Uber - 19-minute wait. Lyft? They’re not in Paris. I google to find taxi company but before I call, I try Uber one more time -- a 5-minute wait for a €60 fare. I hit the order button -- and then again after I swap over to Amex. €60 for a 15-minute ride to CDG is tough, but it’s cheaper than another night in a hotel. We get to the United desk 2 minutes before luggage check closes for our flight. The agent radioed down, checked in our bags, and then gave us the CDG version of Fast Track, so we could sidestep the long passport control and security lines. We board, sit down, but don’t really settle in until the plane leaves the ground. And when we’re finally at ORD, standing by the luggage carousel, our bags are the first ones to come out.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #150</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li></li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_147.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<p><!--EndFragment--><br>\n<br>\n</p>','Podcast #150 — Travel Interruptus','','inherit','closed','closed','','2402-revision-v1','','','2019-04-22 19:06:13','2019-04-23 00:06:13','',2402,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/2402-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2415,1,'2019-04-22 19:06:57','2019-04-23 00:06:57','<!-- wp:image {\"id\":2404,\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/CoeazhcUMAAhyQN-300x251.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2404\"/><figcaption>This guy looks familiar...</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> I dusted off the mobile rig to record this episode in Happy Valley, the home of Penn State. And I am kinda happy with some travel to Phoenix and Florida to thaw me out after Chicago\'s run in with the polar vortex. In this episode, I talk about budget airlines, stepping down in Hertz status, why I bought physical guidebooks for a trip to France, the challenges of being a solo diner, and then dig into the archives for a classic travel story. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_149.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:block {\"ref\":2408} /-->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #150: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, as the weather begins to stagger unsteadily toward Spring -- 74 degrees on Monday, 5.3 inches of snow (thundersnow!) on Sunday, then back up into the 70’s two days later.  April 14 -- over 5 inches of snow, over 1,000 flights cancelled. A nasty surprise for folks who thought it would be safe to connect through ORD, but just validates a Chicago truism -- don’t put the snow gear away until after Tax Day. Yup, welcome to the Midwest.</li><li>Have done a <em>chunk</em> of travel -- there’s a unit of measure for you -- since the last episode. A 2-day trip that hit 4 airports in the first day -- Chicago-Midway, Las Vegas, Houston-Hobby, and Nashville. The next week, I squoze in a trip to a new airport - State College, PA -- before heading out on vacation to Brittany, France. The squeeze wasn’t too tight -- flew back from State College on Weds night and left on vacation Thursday night -- but I did scout out a couple of backups in case the United Express regional jet went AWOL; a hour or so drive down to Harrisburg, a couple hour drive over to Pittsburgh. Luckily, I didn’t need them. United Express was having a good day, and therefore, so did I.</li><li>The next day’s flight to Paris on SAS by way of Stockholm went fine. We got in on time, found the left luggage lockers, and then the express train into the city all without much hassle. Arlanda Airport is comfortably sized and has good signage. The only real problem was that we got into center city Stockholm too early -- around 8:30am -- and nothing was really open. So we coffee’d up at one place, had some cardamom pastries at another, and generally puttered around until things started opening up an hour or so later. It was a sunny, if brisk, day, so walking around the Gamla Stan and Sodermalm was nice. </li><li>I always chuckle a bit when going through De Gaulle Airport, passing through the tangle of flat escalator walkway tubes that bridge the levels and open center of Terminal 1. The walkways are a bit awkward with wheeled luggage -- going down and then up. An airport porter in front of us let a wheelchair go free on the downhill span -- took a moment for it to register that it was empty -- then it rolled back to him on the uphill. No knock against him; it was the end of the day.</li><li>The next day, we caught the train out to Brittany, to Saint Malo. We walked out of the train station and across the street to Europcar for what was one of the easiest rental car pick-ups I’ve ever had in Europe. No scare-tactic insurance upselling -- just a look at my driver’s license and a quick pointer to where I could find the car in the train station parking lot. Five minutes, max. And dropping off the car a week later at Rennes train station? Absolutely the easiest rental drop-off -- gave the guy the keys and a receipt showing I’d filled up the car and I was done. No waiting for him to go inspect the car, just a handshake and “Have a good day”. </li><li>The next day wasn’t near as carefree, but we’ll talk about that in a few minutes.</li><li> Bridge Music — <em>Perfect Stranger</em> by stellarartwars (c) 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/stellarartwars/45510 Ft: TheDice  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I’ve been not-quite-hating on, but certainly have been down on regional jets for quite some time on this podcast. Given a choice, I recommend people avoid them -- not because of their size, but their schedule dependability. Because the regional airlines’ model is to bounce a plane from place to place rather than route through hubs, they never recover from weather or mechanical delays. Those delays just cascade through the rest of the day. Now there often aren’t alternatives. Hence my earlier comment about needing backup plans for my regional jet flight home from State College. My flight was at the end of the day, the most vulnerable time to delays. Given my personal experience,  I wasn’t surprised to read that US Dept of Transportation data showed that regional flights were 2-4 times more likely to be cancelled than mainline flights. The Chicago Tribune dug into the DOT data and found flights operated by Delta’s regional partners were 4 times more likely to be canceled than flights operated by Delta, while American Eagle and United Express were 2-3 times more likely to cancel flights than their mainline partners. You can’t avoid regional jets when going to places like State College or Charlottesville, VA or Appleton, WI -- but you can when flying to LGA or DFW or MSY. And in those cases, unless those RJ flights have exactly the schedule I need, I’ll suffer a bit of inconvenience for a lot more dependability.</li><li>On our travels through Brittany earlier this month, I found that we were getting a large number of “card declined” messages when trying to use our Chase Sapphire Visa card -- at gas stations, stores, and in Paris when I tried to use my Uber app. Now this isn’t a new card -- we’ve had it for over 5 years -- and it’s not the first time we’ve used it on travels in Europe. But Chase fraud algorithm seems more sensitive, throwing more false positives, and no way to update things. On the way out of Brest, I pulled into a Total gas station to fill up on our way to the Crozon peninsula. We’d be there for a couple of days of hiking and I wasn’t sure many gas stations we’d see (turned out that I didn’t need to worry). I pull up to a pump, tap the Chase Visa, get a decline. Insert the card into the reader; get another decline. I do the same drill with my Citi MasterCard with the same result. However, I immediately get a fraud alert from Citi. I hit the big green “Yes” button on the e-mail -- as in, “Yes, I do recognize this charge” -- get an “all clear” response back, tap my Citi card again and fill up my tank. All this time, we get nothing from Chase. I open the Chase app on my phone; nothing there either. Same thing in Paris when I needed an Uber fast (more on that in a bit). Chase declined, but my Amex Platinum card went through. For me, it was just annoying; I always carry a full set of cards when traveling -- a Visa and a MasterCard from different banks, and an Amex -- because single points of failure when traveling are bad -- I don’t want to be left hanging if one bank or one card processor drops their network or loses a data center. Oh, and I also carry cash. But, as we’ve <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"talked (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/02/10/podcast-148-travel-potpourri-for-200-alex/\" target=\"_blank\">talked</a> <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"about (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/12/17/podcast-147-holiday-travel-tips-notes-from-santa-fe/\" target=\"_blank\">about</a> <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"before (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\" target=\"_blank\">before</a>, that’s ‘cause I’m old-school.</li><li>Brittany was a touring vacation, so we were moving every couple of days or so -- packing, unpacking, repacking. During one of those repacking sessions, maybe in Morgat on the Crozon peninsula -- I couldn’t find my Bose headphone case, which had my Bose headphones, in my backpack -- and I didn’t remember pulling out. Where the hell did they go, I asked myself. I pull everything out of my backpack and -- oh, there they are; they had slipped behind my camera bag in the bottom of my backpack. How did I lose my headphones in my backpack, you may ask -- and rightfully so because it really sounds stupid. Probably the same reason I lost a Google tablet in there a few years back -- too much black. The Bose case is black, the interior of Timbuk 2 backpack is black, my eyes aren’t as good as they used to be… I’d been toying around with getting a new bag, more of a messenger style -- that I could sling over one shoulder and with a bit better waterproofing. And, after this little panic drill, a non-black interior. I ended up getting a small Timbuk 2 Classic messenger bag from the Outlet section of REI.com for $50. It’s not too big -- holds my 11-inch MacBook Air, a couple of notebooks, an umbrella -- and has a bright yellow interior. I haven’t lost anything in it yet -- but I don’t trust myself. Maybe I need to get, like a white umbrella, and spray paint my Bose case red. I love black, but maybe I’ve taken that color palette a bit too far.</li><li>And if you have any travel rants, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"mpeacock (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Facebook page (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Facebook page</a> or our Instagram account at <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\" (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Travelcommons</a> -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li> Bridge Music — <em>Perfect Stranger</em> by stellarartwars (c) 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/stellarartwars/45510 Ft: TheDice  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Travel Interruptus</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A Greek tragedy in three acts where the travel gods toy with our anti-hero for fun and entertainment</li><li>OK, maybe not quite that bad, not quite Book of Job-level torment, but two out of the three trips I’ve taken in the past month spiraled into head-shaking metaphysical “What the hell is going on here” questioning of my decision to get out of bed that morning.</li><li><em>Act 1</em> - My Midway-Vegas-Nashville travel day. This trip didn’t start out to be stupid. It started as an easy day trip to downtown Nashville for a sales call. So many people are abandoning Chicago for Nashville, Southwest has non-stop flights every 90 minutes, so no problem with flight times. That works out fine -- until someone books a sales call the prior afternoon -- in Las Vegas. Hmmm, how do I get from Vegas after 4pm Pacific to Nashville in time for a meeting the next morning Central time? Southwest is about the only choice, connecting through either Denver or Houston. I go for the more direct routing through Denver -- my first mistake.</li><li>Because, as it turned out, the March “bomb cyclone” -- what the Weather Channel helpfully named “Winter Storm Ulmer” (who or what is an Ulmer?) -- was going to shut down DIA that day with 80 mph winds. I got an e-mail from Southwest the day before canceling my connection through Denver -- understandable -- but nothing else, no rebooking, just “We’re leaving you in Vegas” -- which I’ve found tends to be Southwest’s MO -- pleasantly unhelpful. Especially when the website errored out when I tried to find an alternate routing to Nashville, and the automated message answering their 800 number was estimating 80-some minute hold times. After about 45 minutes, between banging on the website, our corporate Concur app, and tweeting at their customer service, I managed to get re-routed through Houston, safely south of the bomb cyclone.</li><li>The next morning, I show up at the gate at Midway to find my 8am flight to Vegas delayed by 2 hours -- mechanical on the plane here meant they had to bring in a new plane and crew from somewhere else. Annoying, but not critical; I’d get into Vegas at noon for a 2pm meeting. I get another coffee, log into the Boingo hotspot and clear some emails. 9:40, we line up and board. And wait. Then the captain keys the mike, pauses (never a good sign) and then starts talking - he didn’t have time to do the walkaround before we boarded because they came in late. When they did, they noticed a problem with the front strut. Maintenance is looking at it, don’t know if they can fix it, but they need everyone off the plane. So we deplane for what is now my 2nd maintenance delay. We idle around the gate area. 10:30 and nothing. I start looking at my watch. If I’m don’t get into Vegas by 1pm, there won’t be enough time to get to my 2pm meeting, and so I shouldn’t get on the plane. Then they start to re-board us. What time will we get in? 12:20. OK, I’ll board. We all get back on -- and for the most part retaking the seats we had, in spite of Southwest’s open seating. We are creatures of habit. I’m surprised no one moo’d. We’re all on, and we wait. The mike keys. There’s a slight moan rather than a moo from the cabin. We’re waiting on the paperwork. It’s always paperwork. I’m looking at my watch. It’s past 11am Central and the door is still open. A 4-hour flight means we’re now coming up against that 1pm Pacific arrive time. Do I stay on the plane? A couple minutes more and my decision is made for me; they close the door. I lean back, put on my headphones and hope for no headwinds. We get to the gate at 1:02pm. Vegas is always a maze; there’s no straight walkways; they always want to vector you through a thicket of slot machines. I head to the cab rank -- shorter walk and no waiting -- and I get a guy with a heavy foot. I’m at the client 5 minutes before the meeting. That was a bit too close.</li><li>My return trip to the airport and the flight to Houston are uneventful, not even any turbulence as we skirt that bomb cyclone. We get into Hobby maybe even a bit early. I grab a beer and then head over to the gate. They call boarding - just half the A group -- 1-30 -- because that’s all there is on this late flight to Nashville. The gate agent scans the boarding passes, saying “You’re in Row 3, you’re in Row 4, you’re in Row 5….”  We get all get in our separate rows, and then wait. The captain keys the mike, pauses, and then says “This plane had a bird strike on the nose on landing. There’s no damage, but Maintenance has to pull the nose cone off for a visual inspection. It’ll take about an hour, so you’re free to get off the plane.” But by now, everything in the airport was closed. “My 3rd maintenance delay of the day. Unbelievable!” I tweet out in frustrustration. Except that iPhone autocorrect turned “delay” into “deejay”. Hilary Baumann pointed it out with a nice emoji-laden tweet that gave me a good chuckle. I finally got to my Nashville hotel around 1:30 in the morning. I looked at the time, shook my head, and went to bed.</li><li> Bridge Music —  South Texas Cowboy Blues by texasradiofish (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/texasradiofish/52030 Ft: unreal_dm, ElRon XChile</li><li><em>Act 2</em> - A couple of weeks later, on Sunday in Rennes, France. We wheeled our luggage the 2 blocks from our AirBnB to Rennes train station for the TGV to CDG. We stood with everyone else, looking up at the departure board waiting for the track to be posted. Departure time came closer and still no track -- not a good sign. The crowd grew larger. There was an announcement in French and a scrolling message at the bottom of the departure screen. Irene banged it into Google Translate. The gist of it -- a bomb threat had been phoned into SCNF, the train company, and all the trains in and out of Paris were halted. Given France’s recent history with terrorism, it was a reasonable response, but still…. They finally start posting delay times -- 40 mins, then over an hour, but then it shrinks back. I pull up Google Maps. The drive to CDG is showing about the same time as the train, but we’d be in control of our own destiny. I walk down to the rental car offices. It’s Sunday morning; they’re all closed. They won’t open until the afternoon; too late for us to drive and make our flights. </li><li>Time continues to tick by, past the departure time for our flight. I call United -- any other options? I get a phenomenally helpful agent. I can hear the keystrokes. Nothing else today Sunday, nor tomorrow, Monday. I wasn’t surprised about nothing available today, but was about the next day -- until I got a text from Andrew. He was on this morning’s United flight to Chicago which just cancelled for a hydraulic problem and rebooked on tomorrow’s flight -- which explains the lack of seats for us. I took the Tuesday seats. Now would we get to CDG in time for Claire’s EasyJet flight to Edinburgh so she can make class the next day. The trains finally start moving. We head down and board our train. And then wait, and wait some  more. And then the train starts moving. I look at my watch. I think Claire will be OK. </li><li>Until we come to a stop in the middle of a rail yard. I watch a couple of guys walk past our car -- maybe a visual inspection? After a bit, we start moving -- backwards. The conductor keys the mike, and makes an announcement in rapid French that we can’t pick up. I open Google Maps. I see we’re off to the east of Paris but can’t tell if we’re moving in the right direction. Until we pull into the next station -- it’s for EuroDisney. I find our train route on the SCNF website and see this is one of the stops en route to CDG, so we’re going in the right direction. We get to CDG by 3pm, which means Claire can make her flight. Andrew comes over from the Airport Hilton, where United is putting him up for the night, and we head down to Paris for another dinner together. There are, after all, worse cities to have to spend an extra day or two.</li><li> Bridge Music —  <em>Parisian </em>Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)<br> Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License<br> http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><em>Act 3</em> - Tuesday morning, Paris. Our forced layover in Paris yesterday had been a beautiful day,  sunny and warm. We walked through the Marais, south across Ile de la Cite, taking the obligatory selfie in front of Notre Dame that we pulled out at looked at two weeks later during the news coverage of the fire, and then rattled around the Latin Quarter looking for a place with outdoor seating and a nice rosé. This morning, though, not so beautiful. It was dumping rain. So rather than trundle our luggage 10 min to the Metro stop, I decide to order an Uber -- which takes a try or two when Chase declines my Visa again; and I switch over to Amex. A nice black Mercedes picks us up and heads for Les Halles -- or at least tries to. The traffic is a crawl at best. I watch our buffer time tick away and we’re not  getting any closer. After sitting through a couple of traffic light cycles without clearing the intersection, we grab our bags and make for Les Halles on foot. We get there, a bit wet. We’re able to skip the ticket booth line; I have enough euros for the self-service machine, because it’s that or a chip-&amp;-pin card we don’t have. We get on the train. I look at my watch - we should have enough time to check our bags (bringing back some liquids), clear security, and get to the gate without too much more agita.</li><li>Until the train slows to a stop between stops. The conductor keys the mike, and makes an announcement in rapid French. I look at the other passengers. They don’t seem too agitated. I figure it’s some congestion on the track ahead. And, sure enough, we start moving after a couple of minutes. But at the next stop, the train doors stay open and a train employee come on, saying in French <em>and</em> English -- everyone has to get off, catch a bus outside the station to another station, then catch a different train to the airport. We head down the bus stop. There’s no one there to help; just a couple hundred people milling around.</li><li>Now I’m worried. We have no time to figure this out. The taxi stand is mobbed, I fire up Uber - 19-minute wait. Lyft? They’re not in Paris. I google to find taxi company but before I call, I try Uber one more time -- a 5-minute wait for a €60 fare. I hit the order button -- and then again after I swap over to Amex. €60 for a 15-minute ride to CDG is tough, but it’s cheaper than another night in a hotel. We get to the United desk 2 minutes before luggage check closes for our flight. The agent radioed down, checked in our bags, and then gave us the CDG version of Fast Track, so we could sidestep the long passport control and security lines. We board, sit down, but don’t really settle in until the plane leaves the ground. And when we’re finally at ORD, standing by the luggage carousel, our bags are the first ones to come out.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #150</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li></li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_147.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<p><!--EndFragment--><br>\n<br>\n</p>','Podcast #150 — Travel Interruptus','','inherit','closed','closed','','2402-revision-v1','','','2019-04-22 19:06:57','2019-04-23 00:06:57','',2402,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/2402-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2416,1,'2019-04-22 19:10:31','2019-04-23 00:10:31','<!-- wp:image {\"id\":2404,\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/CoeazhcUMAAhyQN-300x251.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2404\"/><figcaption>This guy looks familiar...</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> I dusted off the mobile rig to record this episode in Happy Valley, the home of Penn State. And I am kinda happy with some travel to Phoenix and Florida to thaw me out after Chicago\'s run in with the polar vortex. In this episode, I talk about budget airlines, stepping down in Hertz status, why I bought physical guidebooks for a trip to France, the challenges of being a solo diner, and then dig into the archives for a classic travel story. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_149.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:block {\"ref\":2408} /-->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #150: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, as the weather begins to stagger unsteadily toward Spring -- 74 degrees on Monday, 5.3 inches of snow (thundersnow!) on Sunday, then back up into the 70’s two days later.  April 14 -- over 5 inches of snow, over 1,000 flights cancelled. A nasty surprise for folks who thought it would be safe to connect through ORD, but just validates a Chicago truism -- don’t put the snow gear away until after Tax Day. Yup, welcome to the Midwest.</li><li>Have done a <em>chunk</em> of travel -- there’s a unit of measure for you -- since the last episode. A 2-day trip that hit 4 airports in the first day -- Chicago-Midway, Las Vegas, Houston-Hobby, and Nashville. The next week, I squoze in a trip to a new airport - State College, PA -- before heading out on vacation to Brittany, France. The squeeze wasn’t too tight -- flew back from State College on Weds night and left on vacation Thursday night -- but I did scout out a couple of backups in case the United Express regional jet went AWOL; a hour or so drive down to Harrisburg, a couple hour drive over to Pittsburgh. Luckily, I didn’t need them. United Express was having a good day, and therefore, so did I.</li><li>The next day’s flight to Paris on SAS by way of Stockholm went fine. We got in on time, found the left luggage lockers, and then the express train into the city all without much hassle. Arlanda Airport is comfortably sized and has good signage. The only real problem was that we got into center city Stockholm too early -- around 8:30am -- and nothing was really open. So we coffee’d up at one place, had some cardamom pastries at another, and generally puttered around until things started opening up an hour or so later. It was a sunny, if brisk, day, so walking around the Gamla Stan and Sodermalm was nice. </li><li>I always chuckle a bit when going through De Gaulle Airport, passing through the tangle of flat escalator walkway tubes that bridge the levels and open center of Terminal 1. The walkways are a bit awkward with wheeled luggage -- going down and then up. An airport porter in front of us let a wheelchair go free on the downhill span -- took a moment for it to register that it was empty -- then it rolled back to him on the uphill. No knock against him; it was the end of the day.</li><li>The next day, we caught the train out to Brittany, to Saint Malo. We walked out of the train station and across the street to Europcar for what was one of the easiest rental car pick-ups I’ve ever had in Europe. No scare-tactic insurance upselling -- just a look at my driver’s license and a quick pointer to where I could find the car in the train station parking lot. Five minutes, max. And dropping off the car a week later at Rennes train station? Absolutely the easiest rental drop-off -- gave the guy the keys and a receipt showing I’d filled up the car and I was done. No waiting for him to go inspect the car, just a handshake and “Have a good day”. </li><li>The next day wasn’t near as carefree, but we’ll talk about that in a few minutes.</li><li> Bridge Music — <em>Countryside Summer Joyride</em> by Kara Square (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mindmapthat/56281 Ft: Javolenus</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I’ve been not-quite-hating on, but certainly have been down on regional jets for quite some time on this podcast. Given a choice, I recommend people avoid them -- not because of their size, but their schedule dependability. Because the regional airlines’ model is to bounce a plane from place to place rather than route through hubs, they never recover from weather or mechanical delays. Those delays just cascade through the rest of the day. Now there often aren’t alternatives. Hence my earlier comment about needing backup plans for my regional jet flight home from State College. My flight was at the end of the day, the most vulnerable time to delays. Given my personal experience,  I wasn’t surprised to read that US Dept of Transportation data showed that regional flights were 2-4 times more likely to be cancelled than mainline flights. The Chicago Tribune dug into the DOT data and found flights operated by Delta’s regional partners were 4 times more likely to be canceled than flights operated by Delta, while American Eagle and United Express were 2-3 times more likely to cancel flights than their mainline partners. You can’t avoid regional jets when going to places like State College or Charlottesville, VA or Appleton, WI -- but you can when flying to LGA or DFW or MSY. And in those cases, unless those RJ flights have exactly the schedule I need, I’ll suffer a bit of inconvenience for a lot more dependability.</li><li>On our travels through Brittany earlier this month, I found that we were getting a large number of “card declined” messages when trying to use our Chase Sapphire Visa card -- at gas stations, stores, and in Paris when I tried to use my Uber app. Now this isn’t a new card -- we’ve had it for over 5 years -- and it’s not the first time we’ve used it on travels in Europe. But Chase fraud algorithm seems more sensitive, throwing more false positives, and no way to update things. On the way out of Brest, I pulled into a Total gas station to fill up on our way to the Crozon peninsula. We’d be there for a couple of days of hiking and I wasn’t sure many gas stations we’d see (turned out that I didn’t need to worry). I pull up to a pump, tap the Chase Visa, get a decline. Insert the card into the reader; get another decline. I do the same drill with my Citi MasterCard with the same result. However, I immediately get a fraud alert from Citi. I hit the big green “Yes” button on the e-mail -- as in, “Yes, I do recognize this charge” -- get an “all clear” response back, tap my Citi card again and fill up my tank. All this time, we get nothing from Chase. I open the Chase app on my phone; nothing there either. Same thing in Paris when I needed an Uber fast (more on that in a bit). Chase declined, but my Amex Platinum card went through. For me, it was just annoying; I always carry a full set of cards when traveling -- a Visa and a MasterCard from different banks, and an Amex -- because single points of failure when traveling are bad -- I don’t want to be left hanging if one bank or one card processor drops their network or loses a data center. Oh, and I also carry cash. But, as we’ve <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"talked (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/02/10/podcast-148-travel-potpourri-for-200-alex/\" target=\"_blank\">talked</a> <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"about (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/12/17/podcast-147-holiday-travel-tips-notes-from-santa-fe/\" target=\"_blank\">about</a> <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"before (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\" target=\"_blank\">before</a>, that’s ‘cause I’m old-school.</li><li>Brittany was a touring vacation, so we were moving every couple of days or so -- packing, unpacking, repacking. During one of those repacking sessions, maybe in Morgat on the Crozon peninsula -- I couldn’t find my Bose headphone case, which had my Bose headphones, in my backpack -- and I didn’t remember pulling out. Where the hell did they go, I asked myself. I pull everything out of my backpack and -- oh, there they are; they had slipped behind my camera bag in the bottom of my backpack. How did I lose my headphones in my backpack, you may ask -- and rightfully so because it really sounds stupid. Probably the same reason I lost a Google tablet in there a few years back -- too much black. The Bose case is black, the interior of Timbuk 2 backpack is black, my eyes aren’t as good as they used to be… I’d been toying around with getting a new bag, more of a messenger style -- that I could sling over one shoulder and with a bit better waterproofing. And, after this little panic drill, a non-black interior. I ended up getting a small Timbuk 2 Classic messenger bag from the Outlet section of REI.com for $50. It’s not too big -- holds my 11-inch MacBook Air, a couple of notebooks, an umbrella -- and has a bright yellow interior. I haven’t lost anything in it yet -- but I don’t trust myself. Maybe I need to get, like a white umbrella, and spray paint my Bose case red. I love black, but maybe I’ve taken that color palette a bit too far.</li><li>And if you have any travel rants, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"mpeacock (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Facebook page (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Facebook page</a> or our Instagram account at <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\" (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Travelcommons</a> -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li> Bridge Music —  <em>Jester of the Golden Apocalypse</em> by Super_Sigil (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Super_Sigil/34750 </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Travel Interruptus</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A Greek tragedy in three acts where the travel gods toy with our anti-hero for fun and entertainment</li><li>OK, maybe not quite that bad, not quite Book of Job-level torment, but two out of the three trips I’ve taken in the past month spiraled into head-shaking metaphysical “What the hell is going on here” questioning of my decision to get out of bed that morning.</li><li><em>Act 1</em> - My Midway-Vegas-Nashville travel day. This trip didn’t start out to be stupid. It started as an easy day trip to downtown Nashville for a sales call. So many people are abandoning Chicago for Nashville, Southwest has non-stop flights every 90 minutes, so no problem with flight times. That works out fine -- until someone books a sales call the prior afternoon -- in Las Vegas. Hmmm, how do I get from Vegas after 4pm Pacific to Nashville in time for a meeting the next morning Central time? Southwest is about the only choice, connecting through either Denver or Houston. I go for the more direct routing through Denver -- my first mistake.</li><li>Because, as it turned out, the March “bomb cyclone” -- what the Weather Channel helpfully named “Winter Storm Ulmer” (who or what is an Ulmer?) -- was going to shut down DIA that day with 80 mph winds. I got an e-mail from Southwest the day before canceling my connection through Denver -- understandable -- but nothing else, no rebooking, just “We’re leaving you in Vegas” -- which I’ve found tends to be Southwest’s MO -- pleasantly unhelpful. Especially when the website errored out when I tried to find an alternate routing to Nashville, and the automated message answering their 800 number was estimating 80-some minute hold times. After about 45 minutes, between banging on the website, our corporate Concur app, and tweeting at their customer service, I managed to get re-routed through Houston, safely south of the bomb cyclone.</li><li>The next morning, I show up at the gate at Midway to find my 8am flight to Vegas delayed by 2 hours -- mechanical on the plane here meant they had to bring in a new plane and crew from somewhere else. Annoying, but not critical; I’d get into Vegas at noon for a 2pm meeting. I get another coffee, log into the Boingo hotspot and clear some emails. 9:40, we line up and board. And wait. Then the captain keys the mike, pauses (never a good sign) and then starts talking - he didn’t have time to do the walkaround before we boarded because they came in late. When they did, they noticed a problem with the front strut. Maintenance is looking at it, don’t know if they can fix it, but they need everyone off the plane. So we deplane for what is now my 2nd maintenance delay. We idle around the gate area. 10:30 and nothing. I start looking at my watch. If I’m don’t get into Vegas by 1pm, there won’t be enough time to get to my 2pm meeting, and so I shouldn’t get on the plane. Then they start to re-board us. What time will we get in? 12:20. OK, I’ll board. We all get back on -- and for the most part retaking the seats we had, in spite of Southwest’s open seating. We are creatures of habit. I’m surprised no one moo’d. We’re all on, and we wait. The mike keys. There’s a slight moan rather than a moo from the cabin. We’re waiting on the paperwork. It’s always paperwork. I’m looking at my watch. It’s past 11am Central and the door is still open. A 4-hour flight means we’re now coming up against that 1pm Pacific arrive time. Do I stay on the plane? A couple minutes more and my decision is made for me; they close the door. I lean back, put on my headphones and hope for no headwinds. We get to the gate at 1:02pm. Vegas is always a maze; there’s no straight walkways; they always want to vector you through a thicket of slot machines. I head to the cab rank -- shorter walk and no waiting -- and I get a guy with a heavy foot. I’m at the client 5 minutes before the meeting. That was a bit too close.</li><li>My return trip to the airport and the flight to Houston are uneventful, not even any turbulence as we skirt that bomb cyclone. We get into Hobby maybe even a bit early. I grab a beer and then head over to the gate. They call boarding - just half the A group -- 1-30 -- because that’s all there is on this late flight to Nashville. The gate agent scans the boarding passes, saying “You’re in Row 3, you’re in Row 4, you’re in Row 5….”  We get all get in our separate rows, and then wait. The captain keys the mike, pauses, and then says “This plane had a bird strike on the nose on landing. There’s no damage, but Maintenance has to pull the nose cone off for a visual inspection. It’ll take about an hour, so you’re free to get off the plane.” But by now, everything in the airport was closed. “My 3rd maintenance delay of the day. Unbelievable!” I tweet out in frustrustration. Except that iPhone autocorrect turned “delay” into “deejay”. Hilary Baumann pointed it out with a nice emoji-laden tweet that gave me a good chuckle. I finally got to my Nashville hotel around 1:30 in the morning. I looked at the time, shook my head, and went to bed.</li><li> Bridge Music —  South Texas Cowboy Blues by texasradiofish (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/texasradiofish/52030 Ft: unreal_dm, ElRon XChile</li><li><em>Act 2</em> - A couple of weeks later, on Sunday in Rennes, France. We wheeled our luggage the 2 blocks from our AirBnB to Rennes train station for the TGV to CDG. We stood with everyone else, looking up at the departure board waiting for the track to be posted. Departure time came closer and still no track -- not a good sign. The crowd grew larger. There was an announcement in French and a scrolling message at the bottom of the departure screen. Irene banged it into Google Translate. The gist of it -- a bomb threat had been phoned into SCNF, the train company, and all the trains in and out of Paris were halted. Given France’s recent history with terrorism, it was a reasonable response, but still…. They finally start posting delay times -- 40 mins, then over an hour, but then it shrinks back. I pull up Google Maps. The drive to CDG is showing about the same time as the train, but we’d be in control of our own destiny. I walk down to the rental car offices. It’s Sunday morning; they’re all closed. They won’t open until the afternoon; too late for us to drive and make our flights. </li><li>Time continues to tick by, past the departure time for our flight. I call United -- any other options? I get a phenomenally helpful agent. I can hear the keystrokes. Nothing else today Sunday, nor tomorrow, Monday. I wasn’t surprised about nothing available today, but was about the next day -- until I got a text from Andrew. He was on this morning’s United flight to Chicago which just cancelled for a hydraulic problem and rebooked on tomorrow’s flight -- which explains the lack of seats for us. I took the Tuesday seats. Now would we get to CDG in time for Claire’s EasyJet flight to Edinburgh so she can make class the next day. The trains finally start moving. We head down and board our train. And then wait, and wait some  more. And then the train starts moving. I look at my watch. I think Claire will be OK. </li><li>Until we come to a stop in the middle of a rail yard. I watch a couple of guys walk past our car -- maybe a visual inspection? After a bit, we start moving -- backwards. The conductor keys the mike, and makes an announcement in rapid French that we can’t pick up. I open Google Maps. I see we’re off to the east of Paris but can’t tell if we’re moving in the right direction. Until we pull into the next station -- it’s for EuroDisney. I find our train route on the SCNF website and see this is one of the stops en route to CDG, so we’re going in the right direction. We get to CDG by 3pm, which means Claire can make her flight. Andrew comes over from the Airport Hilton, where United is putting him up for the night, and we head down to Paris for another dinner together. There are, after all, worse cities to have to spend an extra day or two.</li><li> Bridge Music —  <em>Parisian </em>Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)<br> Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License<br> http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><em>Act 3</em> - Tuesday morning, Paris. Our forced layover in Paris yesterday had been a beautiful day,  sunny and warm. We walked through the Marais, south across Ile de la Cite, taking the obligatory selfie in front of Notre Dame that we pulled out at looked at two weeks later during the news coverage of the fire, and then rattled around the Latin Quarter looking for a place with outdoor seating and a nice rosé. This morning, though, not so beautiful. It was dumping rain. So rather than trundle our luggage 10 min to the Metro stop, I decide to order an Uber -- which takes a try or two when Chase declines my Visa again; and I switch over to Amex. A nice black Mercedes picks us up and heads for Les Halles -- or at least tries to. The traffic is a crawl at best. I watch our buffer time tick away and we’re not  getting any closer. After sitting through a couple of traffic light cycles without clearing the intersection, we grab our bags and make for Les Halles on foot. We get there, a bit wet. We’re able to skip the ticket booth line; I have enough euros for the self-service machine, because it’s that or a chip-&amp;-pin card we don’t have. We get on the train. I look at my watch - we should have enough time to check our bags (bringing back some liquids), clear security, and get to the gate without too much more agita.</li><li>Until the train slows to a stop between stops. The conductor keys the mike, and makes an announcement in rapid French. I look at the other passengers. They don’t seem too agitated. I figure it’s some congestion on the track ahead. And, sure enough, we start moving after a couple of minutes. But at the next stop, the train doors stay open and a train employee come on, saying in French <em>and</em> English -- everyone has to get off, catch a bus outside the station to another station, then catch a different train to the airport. We head down the bus stop. There’s no one there to help; just a couple hundred people milling around.</li><li>Now I’m worried. We have no time to figure this out. The taxi stand is mobbed, I fire up Uber - 19-minute wait. Lyft? They’re not in Paris. I google to find taxi company but before I call, I try Uber one more time -- a 5-minute wait for a €60 fare. I hit the order button -- and then again after I swap over to Amex. €60 for a 15-minute ride to CDG is tough, but it’s cheaper than another night in a hotel. We get to the United desk 2 minutes before luggage check closes for our flight. The agent radioed down, checked in our bags, and then gave us the CDG version of Fast Track, so we could sidestep the long passport control and security lines. We board, sit down, but don’t really settle in until the plane leaves the ground. And when we’re finally at ORD, standing by the luggage carousel, our bags are the first ones to come out.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #150</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li></li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_147.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<p><!--EndFragment--><br>\n<br>\n</p>','Podcast #150 — Travel Interruptus','','inherit','closed','closed','','2402-revision-v1','','','2019-04-22 19:10:31','2019-04-23 00:10:31','',2402,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/2402-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2417,1,'2019-04-22 22:22:15','2019-04-23 03:22:15','<!-- wp:image {\"id\":2404,\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/CoeazhcUMAAhyQN-300x251.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2404\"/><figcaption>This guy looks familiar...</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> I dusted off the mobile rig to record this episode in Happy Valley, the home of Penn State. And I am kinda happy with some travel to Phoenix and Florida to thaw me out after Chicago\'s run in with the polar vortex. In this episode, I talk about budget airlines, stepping down in Hertz status, why I bought physical guidebooks for a trip to France, the challenges of being a solo diner, and then dig into the archives for a classic travel story. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_150.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:block {\"ref\":2408} /-->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #150: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, as the weather begins to stagger unsteadily toward Spring -- 74 degrees on Monday, 5.3 inches of snow (thundersnow!) on Sunday, then back up into the 70’s two days later.  April 14 -- over 5 inches of snow, over 1,000 flights cancelled. A nasty surprise for folks who thought it would be safe to connect through ORD, but just validates a Chicago truism -- don’t put the snow gear away until after Tax Day. Yup, welcome to the Midwest.</li><li>Have done a <em>chunk</em> of travel -- there’s a unit of measure for you -- since the last episode. A 2-day trip that hit 4 airports in the first day -- Chicago-Midway, Las Vegas, Houston-Hobby, and Nashville. The next week, I squoze in a trip to a new airport - State College, PA -- before heading out on vacation to Brittany, France. The squeeze wasn’t too tight -- flew back from State College on Weds night and left on vacation Thursday night -- but I did scout out a couple of backups in case the United Express regional jet went AWOL; a hour or so drive down to Harrisburg, a couple hour drive over to Pittsburgh. Luckily, I didn’t need them. United Express was having a good day, and therefore, so did I.</li><li>The next day’s flight to Paris on SAS by way of Stockholm went fine. We got in on time, found the left luggage lockers, and then the express train into the city all without much hassle. Arlanda Airport is comfortably sized and has good signage. The only real problem was that we got into center city Stockholm too early -- around 8:30am -- and nothing was really open. So we coffee’d up at one place, had some cardamom pastries at another, and generally puttered around until things started opening up an hour or so later. It was a sunny, if brisk, day, so walking around the Gamla Stan and Sodermalm was nice. </li><li>I always chuckle a bit when going through De Gaulle Airport, passing through the tangle of flat escalator walkway tubes that bridge the levels and open center of Terminal 1. The walkways are a bit awkward with wheeled luggage -- going down and then up. An airport porter in front of us let a wheelchair go free on the downhill span -- took a moment for it to register that it was empty -- then it rolled back to him on the uphill. No knock against him; it was the end of the day.</li><li>The next day, we caught the train out to Brittany, to Saint Malo. We walked out of the train station and across the street to Europcar for what was one of the easiest rental car pick-ups I’ve ever had in Europe. No scare-tactic insurance upselling -- just a look at my driver’s license and a quick pointer to where I could find the car in the train station parking lot. Five minutes, max. And dropping off the car a week later at Rennes train station? Absolutely the easiest rental drop-off -- gave the guy the keys and a receipt showing I’d filled up the car and I was done. No waiting for him to go inspect the car, just a handshake and “Have a good day”. </li><li>The next day wasn’t near as carefree, but we’ll talk about that in a few minutes.</li><li> Bridge Music — <em>Countryside Summer Joyride</em> by Kara Square (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mindmapthat/56281 Ft: Javolenus</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I’ve been not-quite-hating on, but certainly have been down on regional jets for quite some time on this podcast. Given a choice, I recommend people avoid them -- not because of their size, but their schedule dependability. Because the regional airlines’ model is to bounce a plane from place to place rather than route through hubs, they never recover from weather or mechanical delays. Those delays just cascade through the rest of the day. Now there often aren’t alternatives. Hence my earlier comment about needing backup plans for my regional jet flight home from State College. My flight was at the end of the day, the most vulnerable time to delays. Given my personal experience,  I wasn’t surprised to read that US Dept of Transportation data showed that regional flights were 2-4 times more likely to be cancelled than mainline flights. The Chicago Tribune dug into the DOT data and found flights operated by Delta’s regional partners were 4 times more likely to be canceled than flights operated by Delta, while American Eagle and United Express were 2-3 times more likely to cancel flights than their mainline partners. You can’t avoid regional jets when going to places like State College or Charlottesville, VA or Appleton, WI -- but you can when flying to LGA or DFW or MSY. And in those cases, unless those RJ flights have exactly the schedule I need, I’ll suffer a bit of inconvenience for a lot more dependability.</li><li>On our travels through Brittany earlier this month, I found that we were getting a large number of “card declined” messages when trying to use our Chase Sapphire Visa card -- at gas stations, stores, and in Paris when I tried to use my Uber app. Now this isn’t a new card -- we’ve had it for over 5 years -- and it’s not the first time we’ve used it on travels in Europe. But Chase fraud algorithm seems more sensitive, throwing more false positives, and no way to update things. On the way out of Brest, I pulled into a Total gas station to fill up on our way to the Crozon peninsula. We’d be there for a couple of days of hiking and I wasn’t sure many gas stations we’d see (turned out that I didn’t need to worry). I pull up to a pump, tap the Chase Visa, get a decline. Insert the card into the reader; get another decline. I do the same drill with my Citi MasterCard with the same result. However, I immediately get a fraud alert from Citi. I hit the big green “Yes” button on the e-mail -- as in, “Yes, I do recognize this charge” -- get an “all clear” response back, tap my Citi card again and fill up my tank. All this time, we get nothing from Chase. I open the Chase app on my phone; nothing there either. Same thing in Paris when I needed an Uber fast (more on that in a bit). Chase declined, but my Amex Platinum card went through. For me, it was just annoying; I always carry a full set of cards when traveling -- a Visa and a MasterCard from different banks, and an Amex -- because single points of failure when traveling are bad -- I don’t want to be left hanging if one bank or one card processor drops their network or loses a data center. Oh, and I also carry cash. But, as we’ve <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"talked (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/02/10/podcast-148-travel-potpourri-for-200-alex/\" target=\"_blank\">talked</a> <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"about (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/12/17/podcast-147-holiday-travel-tips-notes-from-santa-fe/\" target=\"_blank\">about</a> <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"before (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\" target=\"_blank\">before</a>, that’s ‘cause I’m old-school.</li><li>Brittany was a touring vacation, so we were moving every couple of days or so -- packing, unpacking, repacking. During one of those repacking sessions, maybe in Morgat on the Crozon peninsula -- I couldn’t find my Bose headphone case, which had my Bose headphones, in my backpack -- and I didn’t remember pulling out. Where the hell did they go, I asked myself. I pull everything out of my backpack and -- oh, there they are; they had slipped behind my camera bag in the bottom of my backpack. How did I lose my headphones in my backpack, you may ask -- and rightfully so because it really sounds stupid. Probably the same reason I lost a Google tablet in there a few years back -- too much black. The Bose case is black, the interior of Timbuk 2 backpack is black, my eyes aren’t as good as they used to be… I’d been toying around with getting a new bag, more of a messenger style -- that I could sling over one shoulder and with a bit better waterproofing. And, after this little panic drill, a non-black interior. I ended up getting a small Timbuk 2 Classic messenger bag from the Outlet section of REI.com for $50. It’s not too big -- holds my 11-inch MacBook Air, a couple of notebooks, an umbrella -- and has a bright yellow interior. I haven’t lost anything in it yet -- but I don’t trust myself. Maybe I need to get, like a white umbrella, and spray paint my Bose case red. I love black, but maybe I’ve taken that color palette a bit too far.</li><li>And if you have any travel rants, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"mpeacock (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Facebook page (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Facebook page</a> or our Instagram account at <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\" (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Travelcommons</a> -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li> Bridge Music —  <em>Jester of the Golden Apocalypse</em> by Super_Sigil (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Super_Sigil/34750 </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Travel Interruptus</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A Greek tragedy in three acts where the travel gods toy with our anti-hero for fun and entertainment</li><li>OK, maybe not quite that bad, not quite Book of Job-level torment, but two out of the three trips I’ve taken in the past month spiraled into head-shaking metaphysical “What the hell is going on here” questioning of my decision to get out of bed that morning.</li><li><em>Act 1</em> - My Midway-Vegas-Nashville travel day. This trip didn’t start out to be stupid. It started as an easy day trip to downtown Nashville for a sales call. So many people are abandoning Chicago for Nashville, Southwest has non-stop flights every 90 minutes, so no problem with flight times. That works out fine -- until someone books a sales call the prior afternoon -- in Las Vegas. Hmmm, how do I get from Vegas after 4pm Pacific to Nashville in time for a meeting the next morning Central time? Southwest is about the only choice, connecting through either Denver or Houston. I go for the more direct routing through Denver -- my first mistake.</li><li>Because, as it turned out, the March “bomb cyclone” -- what the Weather Channel helpfully named “Winter Storm Ulmer” (who or what is an Ulmer?) -- was going to shut down DIA that day with 80 mph winds. I got an e-mail from Southwest the day before canceling my connection through Denver -- understandable -- but nothing else, no rebooking, just “We’re leaving you in Vegas” -- which I’ve found tends to be Southwest’s MO -- pleasantly unhelpful. Especially when the website errored out when I tried to find an alternate routing to Nashville, and the automated message answering their 800 number was estimating 80-some minute hold times. After about 45 minutes, between banging on the website, our corporate Concur app, and tweeting at their customer service, I managed to get re-routed through Houston, safely south of the bomb cyclone.</li><li>The next morning, I show up at the gate at Midway to find my 8am flight to Vegas delayed by 2 hours -- mechanical on the plane here meant they had to bring in a new plane and crew from somewhere else. Annoying, but not critical; I’d get into Vegas at noon for a 2pm meeting. I get another coffee, log into the Boingo hotspot and clear some emails. 9:40, we line up and board. And wait. Then the captain keys the mike, pauses (never a good sign) and then starts talking - he didn’t have time to do the walkaround before we boarded because they came in late. When they did, they noticed a problem with the front strut. Maintenance is looking at it, don’t know if they can fix it, but they need everyone off the plane. So we deplane for what is now my 2nd maintenance delay. We idle around the gate area. 10:30 and nothing. I start looking at my watch. If I’m don’t get into Vegas by 1pm, there won’t be enough time to get to my 2pm meeting, and so I shouldn’t get on the plane. Then they start to re-board us. What time will we get in? 12:20. OK, I’ll board. We all get back on -- and for the most part retaking the seats we had, in spite of Southwest’s open seating. We are creatures of habit. I’m surprised no one moo’d. We’re all on, and we wait. The mike keys. There’s a slight moan rather than a moo from the cabin. We’re waiting on the paperwork. It’s always paperwork. I’m looking at my watch. It’s past 11am Central and the door is still open. A 4-hour flight means we’re now coming up against that 1pm Pacific arrive time. Do I stay on the plane? A couple minutes more and my decision is made for me; they close the door. I lean back, put on my headphones and hope for no headwinds. We get to the gate at 1:02pm. Vegas is always a maze; there’s no straight walkways; they always want to vector you through a thicket of slot machines. I head to the cab rank -- shorter walk and no waiting -- and I get a guy with a heavy foot. I’m at the client 5 minutes before the meeting. That was a bit too close.</li><li>My return trip to the airport and the flight to Houston are uneventful, not even any turbulence as we skirt that bomb cyclone. We get into Hobby maybe even a bit early. I grab a beer and then head over to the gate. They call boarding - just half the A group -- 1-30 -- because that’s all there is on this late flight to Nashville. The gate agent scans the boarding passes, saying “You’re in Row 3, you’re in Row 4, you’re in Row 5….”  We get all get in our separate rows, and then wait. The captain keys the mike, pauses, and then says “This plane had a bird strike on the nose on landing. There’s no damage, but Maintenance has to pull the nose cone off for a visual inspection. It’ll take about an hour, so you’re free to get off the plane.” But by now, everything in the airport was closed. “My 3rd maintenance delay of the day. Unbelievable!” I tweet out in frustrustration. Except that iPhone autocorrect turned “delay” into “deejay”. Hilary Baumann pointed it out with a nice emoji-laden tweet that gave me a good chuckle. I finally got to my Nashville hotel around 1:30 in the morning. I looked at the time, shook my head, and went to bed.</li><li> Bridge Music —  South Texas Cowboy Blues by texasradiofish (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/texasradiofish/52030 Ft: unreal_dm, ElRon XChile</li><li><em>Act 2</em> - A couple of weeks later, on Sunday in Rennes, France. We wheeled our luggage the 2 blocks from our AirBnB to Rennes train station for the TGV to CDG. We stood with everyone else, looking up at the departure board waiting for the track to be posted. Departure time came closer and still no track -- not a good sign. The crowd grew larger. There was an announcement in French and a scrolling message at the bottom of the departure screen. Irene banged it into Google Translate. The gist of it -- a bomb threat had been phoned into SCNF, the train company, and all the trains in and out of Paris were halted. Given France’s recent history with terrorism, it was a reasonable response, but still…. They finally start posting delay times -- 40 mins, then over an hour, but then it shrinks back. I pull up Google Maps. The drive to CDG is showing about the same time as the train, but we’d be in control of our own destiny. I walk down to the rental car offices. It’s Sunday morning; they’re all closed. They won’t open until the afternoon; too late for us to drive and make our flights. </li><li>Time continues to tick by, past the departure time for our flight. I call United -- any other options? I get a phenomenally helpful agent. I can hear the keystrokes. Nothing else today Sunday, nor tomorrow, Monday. I wasn’t surprised about nothing available today, but was about the next day -- until I got a text from Andrew. He was on this morning’s United flight to Chicago which just cancelled for a hydraulic problem and rebooked on tomorrow’s flight -- which explains the lack of seats for us. I took the Tuesday seats. Now would we get to CDG in time for Claire’s EasyJet flight to Edinburgh so she can make class the next day. The trains finally start moving. We head down and board our train. And then wait, and wait some  more. And then the train starts moving. I look at my watch. I think Claire will be OK. </li><li>Until we come to a stop in the middle of a rail yard. I watch a couple of guys walk past our car -- maybe a visual inspection? After a bit, we start moving -- backwards. The conductor keys the mike, and makes an announcement in rapid French that we can’t pick up. I open Google Maps. I see we’re off to the east of Paris but can’t tell if we’re moving in the right direction. Until we pull into the next station -- it’s for EuroDisney. I find our train route on the SCNF website and see this is one of the stops en route to CDG, so we’re going in the right direction. We get to CDG by 3pm, which means Claire can make her flight. Andrew comes over from the Airport Hilton, where United is putting him up for the night, and we head down to Paris for another dinner together. There are, after all, worse cities to have to spend an extra day or two.</li><li> Bridge Music —  <em>Parisian </em>Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)<br> Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License<br> http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><em>Act 3</em> - Tuesday morning, Paris. Our forced layover in Paris yesterday had been a beautiful day,  sunny and warm. We walked through the Marais, south across Ile de la Cite, taking the obligatory selfie in front of Notre Dame that we pulled out at looked at two weeks later during the news coverage of the fire, and then rattled around the Latin Quarter looking for a place with outdoor seating and a nice rosé. This morning, though, not so beautiful. It was dumping rain. So rather than trundle our luggage 10 min to the Metro stop, I decide to order an Uber -- which takes a try or two when Chase declines my Visa again; and I switch over to Amex. A nice black Mercedes picks us up and heads for Les Halles -- or at least tries to. The traffic is a crawl at best. I watch our buffer time tick away and we’re not  getting any closer. After sitting through a couple of traffic light cycles without clearing the intersection, we grab our bags and make for Les Halles on foot. We get there, a bit wet. We’re able to skip the ticket booth line; I have enough euros for the self-service machine, because it’s that or a chip-&amp;-pin card we don’t have. We get on the train. I look at my watch - we should have enough time to check our bags (bringing back some liquids), clear security, and get to the gate without too much more agita.</li><li>Until the train slows to a stop between stops. The conductor keys the mike, and makes an announcement in rapid French. I look at the other passengers. They don’t seem too agitated. I figure it’s some congestion on the track ahead. And, sure enough, we start moving after a couple of minutes. But at the next stop, the train doors stay open and a train employee come on, saying in French <em>and</em> English -- everyone has to get off, catch a bus outside the station to another station, then catch a different train to the airport. We head down the bus stop. There’s no one there to help; just a couple hundred people milling around.</li><li>Now I’m worried. We have no time to figure this out. The taxi stand is mobbed, I fire up Uber - 19-minute wait. Lyft? They’re not in Paris. I google to find taxi company but before I call, I try Uber one more time -- a 5-minute wait for a €60 fare. I hit the order button -- and then again after I swap over to Amex. €60 for a 15-minute ride to CDG is tough, but it’s cheaper than another night in a hotel. We get to the United desk 2 minutes before luggage check closes for our flight. The agent radioed down, checked in our bags, and then gave us the CDG version of Fast Track, so we could sidestep the long passport control and security lines. We board, sit down, but don’t really settle in until the plane leaves the ground. And when we’re finally at ORD, standing by the luggage carousel, our bags are the first ones to come out.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #150</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li></li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_150.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<p><!--EndFragment--><br>\n<br>\n</p>','Podcast #150 — Travel Interruptus','','inherit','closed','closed','','2402-revision-v1','','','2019-04-22 22:22:15','2019-04-23 03:22:15','',2402,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/2402-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2418,1,'2019-04-22 22:28:36','2019-04-23 03:28:36','<!-- wp:image {\"id\":2404,\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/CoeazhcUMAAhyQN-300x251.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2404\"/><figcaption>This guy looks familiar...</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> It\'s been a tough month for travel. Not quite to Book of Job-level torment, but two of this month\'s three trips spiraled into head-shaking metaphysical “What the hell is going on here” questioning of my decision to get out of bed that morning. I walk through the travel gods\' fun and games, as well as some new data on regional jet delays and buying a new travel bag.  All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_150.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:block {\"ref\":2408} /-->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #150: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, as the weather begins to stagger unsteadily toward Spring -- 74 degrees on Monday, 5.3 inches of snow (thundersnow!) on Sunday, then back up into the 70’s two days later.  April 14 -- over 5 inches of snow, over 1,000 flights cancelled. A nasty surprise for folks who thought it would be safe to connect through ORD, but just validates a Chicago truism -- don’t put the snow gear away until after Tax Day. Yup, welcome to the Midwest.</li><li>Have done a <em>chunk</em> of travel -- there’s a unit of measure for you -- since the last episode. A 2-day trip that hit 4 airports in the first day -- Chicago-Midway, Las Vegas, Houston-Hobby, and Nashville. The next week, I squoze in a trip to a new airport - State College, PA -- before heading out on vacation to Brittany, France. The squeeze wasn’t too tight -- flew back from State College on Weds night and left on vacation Thursday night -- but I did scout out a couple of backups in case the United Express regional jet went AWOL; a hour or so drive down to Harrisburg, a couple hour drive over to Pittsburgh. Luckily, I didn’t need them. United Express was having a good day, and therefore, so did I.</li><li>The next day’s flight to Paris on SAS by way of Stockholm went fine. We got in on time, found the left luggage lockers, and then the express train into the city all without much hassle. Arlanda Airport is comfortably sized and has good signage. The only real problem was that we got into center city Stockholm too early -- around 8:30am -- and nothing was really open. So we coffee’d up at one place, had some cardamom pastries at another, and generally puttered around until things started opening up an hour or so later. It was a sunny, if brisk, day, so walking around the Gamla Stan and Sodermalm was nice. </li><li>I always chuckle a bit when going through De Gaulle Airport, passing through the tangle of flat escalator walkway tubes that bridge the levels and open center of Terminal 1. The walkways are a bit awkward with wheeled luggage -- going down and then up. An airport porter in front of us let a wheelchair go free on the downhill span -- took a moment for it to register that it was empty -- then it rolled back to him on the uphill. No knock against him; it was the end of the day.</li><li>The next day, we caught the train out to Brittany, to Saint Malo. We walked out of the train station and across the street to Europcar for what was one of the easiest rental car pick-ups I’ve ever had in Europe. No scare-tactic insurance upselling -- just a look at my driver’s license and a quick pointer to where I could find the car in the train station parking lot. Five minutes, max. And dropping off the car a week later at Rennes train station? Absolutely the easiest rental drop-off -- gave the guy the keys and a receipt showing I’d filled up the car and I was done. No waiting for him to go inspect the car, just a handshake and “Have a good day”. </li><li>The next day wasn’t near as carefree, but we’ll talk about that in a few minutes.</li><li> Bridge Music — <em>Countryside Summer Joyride</em> by Kara Square (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mindmapthat/56281 Ft: Javolenus</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I’ve been not-quite-hating on, but certainly have been down on regional jets for quite some time on this podcast. Given a choice, I recommend people avoid them -- not because of their size, but their schedule dependability. Because the regional airlines’ model is to bounce a plane from place to place rather than route through hubs, they never recover from weather or mechanical delays. Those delays just cascade through the rest of the day. Now there often aren’t alternatives. Hence my earlier comment about needing backup plans for my regional jet flight home from State College. My flight was at the end of the day, the most vulnerable time to delays. Given my personal experience,  I wasn’t surprised to read that US Dept of Transportation data showed that regional flights were 2-4 times more likely to be cancelled than mainline flights. The Chicago Tribune dug into the DOT data and found flights operated by Delta’s regional partners were 4 times more likely to be canceled than flights operated by Delta, while American Eagle and United Express were 2-3 times more likely to cancel flights than their mainline partners. You can’t avoid regional jets when going to places like State College or Charlottesville, VA or Appleton, WI -- but you can when flying to LGA or DFW or MSY. And in those cases, unless those RJ flights have exactly the schedule I need, I’ll suffer a bit of inconvenience for a lot more dependability.</li><li>On our travels through Brittany earlier this month, I found that we were getting a large number of “card declined” messages when trying to use our Chase Sapphire Visa card -- at gas stations, stores, and in Paris when I tried to use my Uber app. Now this isn’t a new card -- we’ve had it for over 5 years -- and it’s not the first time we’ve used it on travels in Europe. But Chase fraud algorithm seems more sensitive, throwing more false positives, and no way to update things. On the way out of Brest, I pulled into a Total gas station to fill up on our way to the Crozon peninsula. We’d be there for a couple of days of hiking and I wasn’t sure many gas stations we’d see (turned out that I didn’t need to worry). I pull up to a pump, tap the Chase Visa, get a decline. Insert the card into the reader; get another decline. I do the same drill with my Citi MasterCard with the same result. However, I immediately get a fraud alert from Citi. I hit the big green “Yes” button on the e-mail -- as in, “Yes, I do recognize this charge” -- get an “all clear” response back, tap my Citi card again and fill up my tank. All this time, we get nothing from Chase. I open the Chase app on my phone; nothing there either. Same thing in Paris when I needed an Uber fast (more on that in a bit). Chase declined, but my Amex Platinum card went through. For me, it was just annoying; I always carry a full set of cards when traveling -- a Visa and a MasterCard from different banks, and an Amex -- because single points of failure when traveling are bad -- I don’t want to be left hanging if one bank or one card processor drops their network or loses a data center. Oh, and I also carry cash. But, as we’ve <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"talked (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/02/10/podcast-148-travel-potpourri-for-200-alex/\" target=\"_blank\">talked</a> <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"about (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/12/17/podcast-147-holiday-travel-tips-notes-from-santa-fe/\" target=\"_blank\">about</a> <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"before (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\" target=\"_blank\">before</a>, that’s ‘cause I’m old-school.</li><li>Brittany was a touring vacation, so we were moving every couple of days or so -- packing, unpacking, repacking. During one of those repacking sessions, maybe in Morgat on the Crozon peninsula -- I couldn’t find my Bose headphone case, which had my Bose headphones, in my backpack -- and I didn’t remember pulling out. Where the hell did they go, I asked myself. I pull everything out of my backpack and -- oh, there they are; they had slipped behind my camera bag in the bottom of my backpack. How did I lose my headphones in my backpack, you may ask -- and rightfully so because it really sounds stupid. Probably the same reason I lost a Google tablet in there a few years back -- too much black. The Bose case is black, the interior of Timbuk 2 backpack is black, my eyes aren’t as good as they used to be… I’d been toying around with getting a new bag, more of a messenger style -- that I could sling over one shoulder and with a bit better waterproofing. And, after this little panic drill, a non-black interior. I ended up getting a small Timbuk 2 Classic messenger bag from the Outlet section of REI.com for $50. It’s not too big -- holds my 11-inch MacBook Air, a couple of notebooks, an umbrella -- and has a bright yellow interior. I haven’t lost anything in it yet -- but I don’t trust myself. Maybe I need to get, like a white umbrella, and spray paint my Bose case red. I love black, but maybe I’ve taken that color palette a bit too far.</li><li>And if you have any travel rants, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"mpeacock (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Facebook page (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Facebook page</a> or our Instagram account at <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\" (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Travelcommons</a> -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li> Bridge Music —  <em>Jester of the Golden Apocalypse</em> by Super_Sigil (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Super_Sigil/34750 </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Travel Interruptus</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A Greek tragedy in three acts where the travel gods toy with our anti-hero for fun and entertainment</li><li>OK, maybe not quite that bad, not quite Book of Job-level torment, but two out of the three trips I’ve taken in the past month spiraled into head-shaking metaphysical “What the hell is going on here” questioning of my decision to get out of bed that morning.</li><li><em>Act 1</em> - My Midway-Vegas-Nashville travel day. This trip didn’t start out to be stupid. It started as an easy day trip to downtown Nashville for a sales call. So many people are abandoning Chicago for Nashville, Southwest has non-stop flights every 90 minutes, so no problem with flight times. That works out fine -- until someone books a sales call the prior afternoon -- in Las Vegas. Hmmm, how do I get from Vegas after 4pm Pacific to Nashville in time for a meeting the next morning Central time? Southwest is about the only choice, connecting through either Denver or Houston. I go for the more direct routing through Denver -- my first mistake.</li><li>Because, as it turned out, the March “bomb cyclone” -- what the Weather Channel helpfully named “Winter Storm Ulmer” (who or what is an Ulmer?) -- was going to shut down DIA that day with 80 mph winds. I got an e-mail from Southwest the day before canceling my connection through Denver -- understandable -- but nothing else, no rebooking, just “We’re leaving you in Vegas” -- which I’ve found tends to be Southwest’s MO -- pleasantly unhelpful. Especially when the website errored out when I tried to find an alternate routing to Nashville, and the automated message answering their 800 number was estimating 80-some minute hold times. After about 45 minutes, between banging on the website, our corporate Concur app, and tweeting at their customer service, I managed to get re-routed through Houston, safely south of the bomb cyclone.</li><li>The next morning, I show up at the gate at Midway to find my 8am flight to Vegas delayed by 2 hours -- mechanical on the plane here meant they had to bring in a new plane and crew from somewhere else. Annoying, but not critical; I’d get into Vegas at noon for a 2pm meeting. I get another coffee, log into the Boingo hotspot and clear some emails. 9:40, we line up and board. And wait. Then the captain keys the mike, pauses (never a good sign) and then starts talking - he didn’t have time to do the walkaround before we boarded because they came in late. When they did, they noticed a problem with the front strut. Maintenance is looking at it, don’t know if they can fix it, but they need everyone off the plane. So we deplane for what is now my 2nd maintenance delay. We idle around the gate area. 10:30 and nothing. I start looking at my watch. If I’m don’t get into Vegas by 1pm, there won’t be enough time to get to my 2pm meeting, and so I shouldn’t get on the plane. Then they start to re-board us. What time will we get in? 12:20. OK, I’ll board. We all get back on -- and for the most part retaking the seats we had, in spite of Southwest’s open seating. We are creatures of habit. I’m surprised no one moo’d. We’re all on, and we wait. The mike keys. There’s a slight moan rather than a moo from the cabin. We’re waiting on the paperwork. It’s always paperwork. I’m looking at my watch. It’s past 11am Central and the door is still open. A 4-hour flight means we’re now coming up against that 1pm Pacific arrive time. Do I stay on the plane? A couple minutes more and my decision is made for me; they close the door. I lean back, put on my headphones and hope for no headwinds. We get to the gate at 1:02pm. Vegas is always a maze; there’s no straight walkways; they always want to vector you through a thicket of slot machines. I head to the cab rank -- shorter walk and no waiting -- and I get a guy with a heavy foot. I’m at the client 5 minutes before the meeting. That was a bit too close.</li><li>My return trip to the airport and the flight to Houston are uneventful, not even any turbulence as we skirt that bomb cyclone. We get into Hobby maybe even a bit early. I grab a beer and then head over to the gate. They call boarding - just half the A group -- 1-30 -- because that’s all there is on this late flight to Nashville. The gate agent scans the boarding passes, saying “You’re in Row 3, you’re in Row 4, you’re in Row 5….”  We get all get in our separate rows, and then wait. The captain keys the mike, pauses, and then says “This plane had a bird strike on the nose on landing. There’s no damage, but Maintenance has to pull the nose cone off for a visual inspection. It’ll take about an hour, so you’re free to get off the plane.” But by now, everything in the airport was closed. “My 3rd maintenance delay of the day. Unbelievable!” I tweet out in frustrustration. Except that iPhone autocorrect turned “delay” into “deejay”. Hilary Baumann pointed it out with a nice emoji-laden tweet that gave me a good chuckle. I finally got to my Nashville hotel around 1:30 in the morning. I looked at the time, shook my head, and went to bed.</li><li> Bridge Music —  South Texas Cowboy Blues by texasradiofish (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/texasradiofish/52030 Ft: unreal_dm, ElRon XChile</li><li><em>Act 2</em> - A couple of weeks later, on Sunday in Rennes, France. We wheeled our luggage the 2 blocks from our AirBnB to Rennes train station for the TGV to CDG. We stood with everyone else, looking up at the departure board waiting for the track to be posted. Departure time came closer and still no track -- not a good sign. The crowd grew larger. There was an announcement in French and a scrolling message at the bottom of the departure screen. Irene banged it into Google Translate. The gist of it -- a bomb threat had been phoned into SCNF, the train company, and all the trains in and out of Paris were halted. Given France’s recent history with terrorism, it was a reasonable response, but still…. They finally start posting delay times -- 40 mins, then over an hour, but then it shrinks back. I pull up Google Maps. The drive to CDG is showing about the same time as the train, but we’d be in control of our own destiny. I walk down to the rental car offices. It’s Sunday morning; they’re all closed. They won’t open until the afternoon; too late for us to drive and make our flights. </li><li>Time continues to tick by, past the departure time for our flight. I call United -- any other options? I get a phenomenally helpful agent. I can hear the keystrokes. Nothing else today Sunday, nor tomorrow, Monday. I wasn’t surprised about nothing available today, but was about the next day -- until I got a text from Andrew. He was on this morning’s United flight to Chicago which just cancelled for a hydraulic problem and rebooked on tomorrow’s flight -- which explains the lack of seats for us. I took the Tuesday seats. Now would we get to CDG in time for Claire’s EasyJet flight to Edinburgh so she can make class the next day. The trains finally start moving. We head down and board our train. And then wait, and wait some  more. And then the train starts moving. I look at my watch. I think Claire will be OK. </li><li>Until we come to a stop in the middle of a rail yard. I watch a couple of guys walk past our car -- maybe a visual inspection? After a bit, we start moving -- backwards. The conductor keys the mike, and makes an announcement in rapid French that we can’t pick up. I open Google Maps. I see we’re off to the east of Paris but can’t tell if we’re moving in the right direction. Until we pull into the next station -- it’s for EuroDisney. I find our train route on the SCNF website and see this is one of the stops en route to CDG, so we’re going in the right direction. We get to CDG by 3pm, which means Claire can make her flight. Andrew comes over from the Airport Hilton, where United is putting him up for the night, and we head down to Paris for another dinner together. There are, after all, worse cities to have to spend an extra day or two.</li><li> Bridge Music —  <em>Parisian </em>Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)<br> Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License<br> http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><em>Act 3</em> - Tuesday morning, Paris. Our forced layover in Paris yesterday had been a beautiful day,  sunny and warm. We walked through the Marais, south across Ile de la Cite, taking the obligatory selfie in front of Notre Dame that we pulled out at looked at two weeks later during the news coverage of the fire, and then rattled around the Latin Quarter looking for a place with outdoor seating and a nice rosé. This morning, though, not so beautiful. It was dumping rain. So rather than trundle our luggage 10 min to the Metro stop, I decide to order an Uber -- which takes a try or two when Chase declines my Visa again; and I switch over to Amex. A nice black Mercedes picks us up and heads for Les Halles -- or at least tries to. The traffic is a crawl at best. I watch our buffer time tick away and we’re not  getting any closer. After sitting through a couple of traffic light cycles without clearing the intersection, we grab our bags and make for Les Halles on foot. We get there, a bit wet. We’re able to skip the ticket booth line; I have enough euros for the self-service machine, because it’s that or a chip-&amp;-pin card we don’t have. We get on the train. I look at my watch - we should have enough time to check our bags (bringing back some liquids), clear security, and get to the gate without too much more agita.</li><li>Until the train slows to a stop between stops. The conductor keys the mike, and makes an announcement in rapid French. I look at the other passengers. They don’t seem too agitated. I figure it’s some congestion on the track ahead. And, sure enough, we start moving after a couple of minutes. But at the next stop, the train doors stay open and a train employee come on, saying in French <em>and</em> English -- everyone has to get off, catch a bus outside the station to another station, then catch a different train to the airport. We head down the bus stop. There’s no one there to help; just a couple hundred people milling around.</li><li>Now I’m worried. We have no time to figure this out. The taxi stand is mobbed, I fire up Uber - 19-minute wait. Lyft? They’re not in Paris. I google to find taxi company but before I call, I try Uber one more time -- a 5-minute wait for a €60 fare. I hit the order button -- and then again after I swap over to Amex. €60 for a 15-minute ride to CDG is tough, but it’s cheaper than another night in a hotel. We get to the United desk 2 minutes before luggage check closes for our flight. The agent radioed down, checked in our bags, and then gave us the CDG version of Fast Track, so we could sidestep the long passport control and security lines. We board, sit down, but don’t really settle in until the plane leaves the ground. And when we’re finally at ORD, standing by the luggage carousel, our bags are the first ones to come out.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #150</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li></li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_150.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<p><!--EndFragment--><br>\n<br>\n</p>','Podcast #150 — Travel Interruptus','','inherit','closed','closed','','2402-revision-v1','','','2019-04-22 22:28:36','2019-04-23 03:28:36','',2402,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/2402-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2419,1,'2019-04-22 22:30:08','2019-04-23 03:30:08','<!-- wp:image {\"id\":2404,\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/CoeazhcUMAAhyQN-300x251.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2404\"/><figcaption>This guy looks familiar...</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> It\'s been a tough month for travel. Not quite to Book of Job-level torment, but two of this month\'s three trips spiraled into head-shaking metaphysical “What the hell is going on here” questioning of my decision to get out of bed that morning. I walk through the travel gods\' fun and games, as well as some new data on regional jet delays and buying a new travel bag.  All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_150.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<figure><iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/610046667&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe></figure>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:block {\"ref\":2408} /-->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #150: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, as the weather begins to stagger unsteadily toward Spring -- 74 degrees on Monday, 5.3 inches of snow (thundersnow!) on Sunday, then back up into the 70’s two days later.  April 14 -- over 5 inches of snow, over 1,000 flights cancelled. A nasty surprise for folks who thought it would be safe to connect through ORD, but just validates a Chicago truism -- don’t put the snow gear away until after Tax Day. Yup, welcome to the Midwest.</li><li>Have done a <em>chunk</em> of travel -- there’s a unit of measure for you -- since the last episode. A 2-day trip that hit 4 airports in the first day -- Chicago-Midway, Las Vegas, Houston-Hobby, and Nashville. The next week, I squoze in a trip to a new airport - State College, PA -- before heading out on vacation to Brittany, France. The squeeze wasn’t too tight -- flew back from State College on Weds night and left on vacation Thursday night -- but I did scout out a couple of backups in case the United Express regional jet went AWOL; a hour or so drive down to Harrisburg, a couple hour drive over to Pittsburgh. Luckily, I didn’t need them. United Express was having a good day, and therefore, so did I.</li><li>The next day’s flight to Paris on SAS by way of Stockholm went fine. We got in on time, found the left luggage lockers, and then the express train into the city all without much hassle. Arlanda Airport is comfortably sized and has good signage. The only real problem was that we got into center city Stockholm too early -- around 8:30am -- and nothing was really open. So we coffee’d up at one place, had some cardamom pastries at another, and generally puttered around until things started opening up an hour or so later. It was a sunny, if brisk, day, so walking around the Gamla Stan and Sodermalm was nice. </li><li>I always chuckle a bit when going through De Gaulle Airport, passing through the tangle of flat escalator walkway tubes that bridge the levels and open center of Terminal 1. The walkways are a bit awkward with wheeled luggage -- going down and then up. An airport porter in front of us let a wheelchair go free on the downhill span -- took a moment for it to register that it was empty -- then it rolled back to him on the uphill. No knock against him; it was the end of the day.</li><li>The next day, we caught the train out to Brittany, to Saint Malo. We walked out of the train station and across the street to Europcar for what was one of the easiest rental car pick-ups I’ve ever had in Europe. No scare-tactic insurance upselling -- just a look at my driver’s license and a quick pointer to where I could find the car in the train station parking lot. Five minutes, max. And dropping off the car a week later at Rennes train station? Absolutely the easiest rental drop-off -- gave the guy the keys and a receipt showing I’d filled up the car and I was done. No waiting for him to go inspect the car, just a handshake and “Have a good day”. </li><li>The next day wasn’t near as carefree, but we’ll talk about that in a few minutes.</li><li> Bridge Music — <em>Countryside Summer Joyride</em> by Kara Square (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mindmapthat/56281 Ft: Javolenus</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I’ve been not-quite-hating on, but certainly have been down on regional jets for quite some time on this podcast. Given a choice, I recommend people avoid them -- not because of their size, but their schedule dependability. Because the regional airlines’ model is to bounce a plane from place to place rather than route through hubs, they never recover from weather or mechanical delays. Those delays just cascade through the rest of the day. Now there often aren’t alternatives. Hence my earlier comment about needing backup plans for my regional jet flight home from State College. My flight was at the end of the day, the most vulnerable time to delays. Given my personal experience,  I wasn’t surprised to read that US Dept of Transportation data showed that regional flights were 2-4 times more likely to be cancelled than mainline flights. The Chicago Tribune dug into the DOT data and found flights operated by Delta’s regional partners were 4 times more likely to be canceled than flights operated by Delta, while American Eagle and United Express were 2-3 times more likely to cancel flights than their mainline partners. You can’t avoid regional jets when going to places like State College or Charlottesville, VA or Appleton, WI -- but you can when flying to LGA or DFW or MSY. And in those cases, unless those RJ flights have exactly the schedule I need, I’ll suffer a bit of inconvenience for a lot more dependability.</li><li>On our travels through Brittany earlier this month, I found that we were getting a large number of “card declined” messages when trying to use our Chase Sapphire Visa card -- at gas stations, stores, and in Paris when I tried to use my Uber app. Now this isn’t a new card -- we’ve had it for over 5 years -- and it’s not the first time we’ve used it on travels in Europe. But Chase fraud algorithm seems more sensitive, throwing more false positives, and no way to update things. On the way out of Brest, I pulled into a Total gas station to fill up on our way to the Crozon peninsula. We’d be there for a couple of days of hiking and I wasn’t sure many gas stations we’d see (turned out that I didn’t need to worry). I pull up to a pump, tap the Chase Visa, get a decline. Insert the card into the reader; get another decline. I do the same drill with my Citi MasterCard with the same result. However, I immediately get a fraud alert from Citi. I hit the big green “Yes” button on the e-mail -- as in, “Yes, I do recognize this charge” -- get an “all clear” response back, tap my Citi card again and fill up my tank. All this time, we get nothing from Chase. I open the Chase app on my phone; nothing there either. Same thing in Paris when I needed an Uber fast (more on that in a bit). Chase declined, but my Amex Platinum card went through. For me, it was just annoying; I always carry a full set of cards when traveling -- a Visa and a MasterCard from different banks, and an Amex -- because single points of failure when traveling are bad -- I don’t want to be left hanging if one bank or one card processor drops their network or loses a data center. Oh, and I also carry cash. But, as we’ve <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"talked (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/02/10/podcast-148-travel-potpourri-for-200-alex/\" target=\"_blank\">talked</a> <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"about (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/12/17/podcast-147-holiday-travel-tips-notes-from-santa-fe/\" target=\"_blank\">about</a> <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"before (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\" target=\"_blank\">before</a>, that’s ‘cause I’m old-school.</li><li>Brittany was a touring vacation, so we were moving every couple of days or so -- packing, unpacking, repacking. During one of those repacking sessions, maybe in Morgat on the Crozon peninsula -- I couldn’t find my Bose headphone case, which had my Bose headphones, in my backpack -- and I didn’t remember pulling out. Where the hell did they go, I asked myself. I pull everything out of my backpack and -- oh, there they are; they had slipped behind my camera bag in the bottom of my backpack. How did I lose my headphones in my backpack, you may ask -- and rightfully so because it really sounds stupid. Probably the same reason I lost a Google tablet in there a few years back -- too much black. The Bose case is black, the interior of Timbuk 2 backpack is black, my eyes aren’t as good as they used to be… I’d been toying around with getting a new bag, more of a messenger style -- that I could sling over one shoulder and with a bit better waterproofing. And, after this little panic drill, a non-black interior. I ended up getting a small Timbuk 2 Classic messenger bag from the Outlet section of REI.com for $50. It’s not too big -- holds my 11-inch MacBook Air, a couple of notebooks, an umbrella -- and has a bright yellow interior. I haven’t lost anything in it yet -- but I don’t trust myself. Maybe I need to get, like a white umbrella, and spray paint my Bose case red. I love black, but maybe I’ve taken that color palette a bit too far.</li><li>And if you have any travel rants, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"mpeacock (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Facebook page (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Facebook page</a> or our Instagram account at <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\" (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Travelcommons</a> -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li> Bridge Music —  <em>Jester of the Golden Apocalypse</em> by Super_Sigil (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Super_Sigil/34750 </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Travel Interruptus</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A Greek tragedy in three acts where the travel gods toy with our anti-hero for fun and entertainment</li><li>OK, maybe not quite that bad, not quite Book of Job-level torment, but two out of the three trips I’ve taken in the past month spiraled into head-shaking metaphysical “What the hell is going on here” questioning of my decision to get out of bed that morning.</li><li><em>Act 1</em> - My Midway-Vegas-Nashville travel day. This trip didn’t start out to be stupid. It started as an easy day trip to downtown Nashville for a sales call. So many people are abandoning Chicago for Nashville, Southwest has non-stop flights every 90 minutes, so no problem with flight times. That works out fine -- until someone books a sales call the prior afternoon -- in Las Vegas. Hmmm, how do I get from Vegas after 4pm Pacific to Nashville in time for a meeting the next morning Central time? Southwest is about the only choice, connecting through either Denver or Houston. I go for the more direct routing through Denver -- my first mistake.</li><li>Because, as it turned out, the March “bomb cyclone” -- what the Weather Channel helpfully named “Winter Storm Ulmer” (who or what is an Ulmer?) -- was going to shut down DIA that day with 80 mph winds. I got an e-mail from Southwest the day before canceling my connection through Denver -- understandable -- but nothing else, no rebooking, just “We’re leaving you in Vegas” -- which I’ve found tends to be Southwest’s MO -- pleasantly unhelpful. Especially when the website errored out when I tried to find an alternate routing to Nashville, and the automated message answering their 800 number was estimating 80-some minute hold times. After about 45 minutes, between banging on the website, our corporate Concur app, and tweeting at their customer service, I managed to get re-routed through Houston, safely south of the bomb cyclone.</li><li>The next morning, I show up at the gate at Midway to find my 8am flight to Vegas delayed by 2 hours -- mechanical on the plane here meant they had to bring in a new plane and crew from somewhere else. Annoying, but not critical; I’d get into Vegas at noon for a 2pm meeting. I get another coffee, log into the Boingo hotspot and clear some emails. 9:40, we line up and board. And wait. Then the captain keys the mike, pauses (never a good sign) and then starts talking - he didn’t have time to do the walkaround before we boarded because they came in late. When they did, they noticed a problem with the front strut. Maintenance is looking at it, don’t know if they can fix it, but they need everyone off the plane. So we deplane for what is now my 2nd maintenance delay. We idle around the gate area. 10:30 and nothing. I start looking at my watch. If I’m don’t get into Vegas by 1pm, there won’t be enough time to get to my 2pm meeting, and so I shouldn’t get on the plane. Then they start to re-board us. What time will we get in? 12:20. OK, I’ll board. We all get back on -- and for the most part retaking the seats we had, in spite of Southwest’s open seating. We are creatures of habit. I’m surprised no one moo’d. We’re all on, and we wait. The mike keys. There’s a slight moan rather than a moo from the cabin. We’re waiting on the paperwork. It’s always paperwork. I’m looking at my watch. It’s past 11am Central and the door is still open. A 4-hour flight means we’re now coming up against that 1pm Pacific arrive time. Do I stay on the plane? A couple minutes more and my decision is made for me; they close the door. I lean back, put on my headphones and hope for no headwinds. We get to the gate at 1:02pm. Vegas is always a maze; there’s no straight walkways; they always want to vector you through a thicket of slot machines. I head to the cab rank -- shorter walk and no waiting -- and I get a guy with a heavy foot. I’m at the client 5 minutes before the meeting. That was a bit too close.</li><li>My return trip to the airport and the flight to Houston are uneventful, not even any turbulence as we skirt that bomb cyclone. We get into Hobby maybe even a bit early. I grab a beer and then head over to the gate. They call boarding - just half the A group -- 1-30 -- because that’s all there is on this late flight to Nashville. The gate agent scans the boarding passes, saying “You’re in Row 3, you’re in Row 4, you’re in Row 5….”  We get all get in our separate rows, and then wait. The captain keys the mike, pauses, and then says “This plane had a bird strike on the nose on landing. There’s no damage, but Maintenance has to pull the nose cone off for a visual inspection. It’ll take about an hour, so you’re free to get off the plane.” But by now, everything in the airport was closed. “My 3rd maintenance delay of the day. Unbelievable!” I tweet out in frustrustration. Except that iPhone autocorrect turned “delay” into “deejay”. Hilary Baumann pointed it out with a nice emoji-laden tweet that gave me a good chuckle. I finally got to my Nashville hotel around 1:30 in the morning. I looked at the time, shook my head, and went to bed.</li><li> Bridge Music —  South Texas Cowboy Blues by texasradiofish (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/texasradiofish/52030 Ft: unreal_dm, ElRon XChile</li><li><em>Act 2</em> - A couple of weeks later, on Sunday in Rennes, France. We wheeled our luggage the 2 blocks from our AirBnB to Rennes train station for the TGV to CDG. We stood with everyone else, looking up at the departure board waiting for the track to be posted. Departure time came closer and still no track -- not a good sign. The crowd grew larger. There was an announcement in French and a scrolling message at the bottom of the departure screen. Irene banged it into Google Translate. The gist of it -- a bomb threat had been phoned into SCNF, the train company, and all the trains in and out of Paris were halted. Given France’s recent history with terrorism, it was a reasonable response, but still…. They finally start posting delay times -- 40 mins, then over an hour, but then it shrinks back. I pull up Google Maps. The drive to CDG is showing about the same time as the train, but we’d be in control of our own destiny. I walk down to the rental car offices. It’s Sunday morning; they’re all closed. They won’t open until the afternoon; too late for us to drive and make our flights. </li><li>Time continues to tick by, past the departure time for our flight. I call United -- any other options? I get a phenomenally helpful agent. I can hear the keystrokes. Nothing else today Sunday, nor tomorrow, Monday. I wasn’t surprised about nothing available today, but was about the next day -- until I got a text from Andrew. He was on this morning’s United flight to Chicago which just cancelled for a hydraulic problem and rebooked on tomorrow’s flight -- which explains the lack of seats for us. I took the Tuesday seats. Now would we get to CDG in time for Claire’s EasyJet flight to Edinburgh so she can make class the next day. The trains finally start moving. We head down and board our train. And then wait, and wait some  more. And then the train starts moving. I look at my watch. I think Claire will be OK. </li><li>Until we come to a stop in the middle of a rail yard. I watch a couple of guys walk past our car -- maybe a visual inspection? After a bit, we start moving -- backwards. The conductor keys the mike, and makes an announcement in rapid French that we can’t pick up. I open Google Maps. I see we’re off to the east of Paris but can’t tell if we’re moving in the right direction. Until we pull into the next station -- it’s for EuroDisney. I find our train route on the SCNF website and see this is one of the stops en route to CDG, so we’re going in the right direction. We get to CDG by 3pm, which means Claire can make her flight. Andrew comes over from the Airport Hilton, where United is putting him up for the night, and we head down to Paris for another dinner together. There are, after all, worse cities to have to spend an extra day or two.</li><li> Bridge Music —  <em>Parisian </em>Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)<br> Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License<br> http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><em>Act 3</em> - Tuesday morning, Paris. Our forced layover in Paris yesterday had been a beautiful day,  sunny and warm. We walked through the Marais, south across Ile de la Cite, taking the obligatory selfie in front of Notre Dame that we pulled out at looked at two weeks later during the news coverage of the fire, and then rattled around the Latin Quarter looking for a place with outdoor seating and a nice rosé. This morning, though, not so beautiful. It was dumping rain. So rather than trundle our luggage 10 min to the Metro stop, I decide to order an Uber -- which takes a try or two when Chase declines my Visa again; and I switch over to Amex. A nice black Mercedes picks us up and heads for Les Halles -- or at least tries to. The traffic is a crawl at best. I watch our buffer time tick away and we’re not  getting any closer. After sitting through a couple of traffic light cycles without clearing the intersection, we grab our bags and make for Les Halles on foot. We get there, a bit wet. We’re able to skip the ticket booth line; I have enough euros for the self-service machine, because it’s that or a chip-&amp;-pin card we don’t have. We get on the train. I look at my watch - we should have enough time to check our bags (bringing back some liquids), clear security, and get to the gate without too much more agita.</li><li>Until the train slows to a stop between stops. The conductor keys the mike, and makes an announcement in rapid French. I look at the other passengers. They don’t seem too agitated. I figure it’s some congestion on the track ahead. And, sure enough, we start moving after a couple of minutes. But at the next stop, the train doors stay open and a train employee come on, saying in French <em>and</em> English -- everyone has to get off, catch a bus outside the station to another station, then catch a different train to the airport. We head down the bus stop. There’s no one there to help; just a couple hundred people milling around.</li><li>Now I’m worried. We have no time to figure this out. The taxi stand is mobbed, I fire up Uber - 19-minute wait. Lyft? They’re not in Paris. I google to find taxi company but before I call, I try Uber one more time -- a 5-minute wait for a €60 fare. I hit the order button -- and then again after I swap over to Amex. €60 for a 15-minute ride to CDG is tough, but it’s cheaper than another night in a hotel. We get to the United desk 2 minutes before luggage check closes for our flight. The agent radioed down, checked in our bags, and then gave us the CDG version of Fast Track, so we could sidestep the long passport control and security lines. We board, sit down, but don’t really settle in until the plane leaves the ground. And when we’re finally at ORD, standing by the luggage carousel, our bags are the first ones to come out.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #150</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li></li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_150.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<p><!--EndFragment--><br>\n<br>\n</p>','Podcast #150 — Travel Interruptus','','inherit','closed','closed','','2402-revision-v1','','','2019-04-22 22:30:08','2019-04-23 03:30:08','',2402,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/2402-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2420,1,'2019-04-22 22:31:27','2019-04-23 03:31:27','<!-- wp:image {\"id\":2382,\"align\":\"right\",\"width\":300,\"height\":300} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright is-resized\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/DSC_5715-1024x1024.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2382\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"/><figcaption>Not Looking Friendly for a Solo Diner</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I dusted off the mobile rig to record this episode in Happy Valley, the home of Penn State. And I am kinda happy with some travel to Phoenix and Florida to thaw me out after Chicago\'s run in with the polar vortex. In this episode, I talk about budget airlines, stepping down in Hertz status, why I bought physical guidebooks for a trip to France, the challenges of being a solo diner, and then dig into the archives for a classic travel story. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_149.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/593337933&color=%23ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true\"></iframe>\n<p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show Notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show Notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #149:</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the Hyatt Place in State College, PA, feeling a bit more positive about life after a couple of warm weather getaways -- an afternoon meeting in Phoenix that I happily turned into a 3-day stay by flying in early for a “prep” session and staying late “in case our session ran long”; and then a long weekend with friends on the Gulf side of Florida. It was a nice break to walk outside without layering up coats, and scarves, and hats, and without taking an Arctic blast in the face. Not that it was toasty in Phoenix, but I was walking around downtown in a blazer, passing people -- natives, I’d guess -- in puffy down jackets. Not that they were wrong; it’s just that my reference point was that -22 degree polar vortex day. </li><li>Reminds me of a time many years ago when I was doing a project in J’burg South Africa in July -- our summer, their winter. We’re going to a restaurant for dinner. The inside is full, but the outside tables are available. The owner apologizes, offers to bring us blankets. My colleague from Detroit is wearing a polo shirt; I’m in dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up. “Thanks, but we’re fine,” we tell him. Halfway through the meal, he comes out, offering to move us inside now that a table has freed up. He’s wearing a parka. “No, really, we’re OK,” we tell him. Different reference points on what’s cold.</li><li>Both trips -- out to Phoenix and down to Ft Myers airport, were full of young families, also getting away from the cold, maybe to stay with parents/ grandparents who’d retired in more reasonable climes. I flew Southwest to Phoenix and United to Ft Myers, and I came to appreciate what, before this, was, to me, an undiscovered benefit of Southwest’s open seating. Because I was in the B boarding group, those families with young children boarded before me. Walking down the aisle, I could spot the crying babies -- there, and there, and there -- and could just keep walking, until I was behind them all. Sure, I was in the back of the plane, and it took me a while to deplane, but that was a very small price I was willing to pay for 3 hours of relative peace. </li><li> Bridge Music —&nbsp;<em>Paint the Sky</em>&nbsp;by Hans Atom (c) 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/hansatom/50718 Ft: Miss Judged </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>In past episodes, we talked about the bare bones budget airlines -- Spirit and Frontier in the US; Ryanair and EasyJet in Europe, and Wow Air and Norwegian as the second coming of Laker Airways, doing TransAtlantic budget flight. Of those, I’ve flown Frontier, EasyJet, and Wow Air which, as a group, seems like the less severe set of the budgets. Ryanair and Spirit always seem to have a harder edge about the “budget-ness.” And then there’s their impact on the mainline carriers -- United, American, and Delta’s basic economy fares. Usually, when I look at a mainline carrier’s basic economy fare, the difference vs. their regular economy fare isn’t big enough to make up extra hassles. But booking our trip down to Florida, the difference on United was over $100 a ticket. Irene and I figured we could put up with a few hassles for over $200. But as dug a bit further, we didn’t find as many hassles as we thought. Because we’re both United Gold, there was no limitation on carry-on bags and we boarded in the usual Group 1. The only downgrade was that we had to pay to reserve seats and we couldn’t book them in Economy Plus -- the aisles with the extra legroom. Even after paying for reserved seats, we still saved enough to pay for a couple of nice dinners of grilled grouper. </li><li>Our friends who joined us from Milwaukee flew down on American through DFW without a hassle. Their flight back -- a direct to Milwaukee on Frontier -- not so much. Their flight was supposed to leave at 7:45pm. Around lunch, they received a note that their flight was delayed by 5 hours. What? We checked that again. We pulled up the FlightAware app, searched for their flight, and then started walked its planned flight legs back, hitting the “Where’s My Plane?” button until we found it -- still on the ground in Milwaukee 6 hours after its scheduled departure time. The weather wasn’t that bad, so it had to be a maintenance problem, which is a huge problem when flying budget and regional airlines because their model is to bounce a plane from place to place rather than flying it out of a hub where they could swap out a busted plane if need be. So that 6 hour delay was going to cascade through that day’s schedule. Our friends finally left Ft Myers at 2:45am. Which is something I’ve noticed about Frontier -- I’ve never seen them cancel a flight no matter how late they leave. A regional airline would’ve cancelled that flight way earlier, but not Frontier. I don’t know how their crews don’t time out, but I kinda admire them for getting you home no matter what time. Would be way better <em>not </em>&nbsp;to take a 7-hr delay, but at least they get you home.</li><li>This year, I got dropped a status level on Hertz, from President’s Circle down to Five Star. I didn’t do 20 rentals last year, and I missed an offer back in December to pay some points to keep my status. But, I can’t say that I notice the downgrade too much. When I was in Phoenix, I snagged a great Chrysler 300 with custom black rims. In Ft Myers, I got a brand new GMC Terrain SUV that held 4 adults very comfortable… Though I have to say that the Terrain through me for a loop when I got in. I’ve rented all sort of different cars. I get in, pair my phone to the Bluetooh, adjust the mirrors, put it in Drive, and pull out. With the Terrain, I was good with all of that right up until the “put it in Drive” step. I look down at the console -- no gear shift, no gear dial (the Chrysler experience talking). Then grab the stalk on the right side of the steering column and turn on the windshield wipers. I’m looking all over -- “WTF? Where is the damn gear shift?” From the back seat, Kristin points under the climate control “It’s right there”. And then I see, a line of buttons -- P, R, N, D. I push the D button and off we go. The last time I saw a push button gear selector was when I was a kid, riding in somebody’s old Plymouth. I mean, come on GMC, do we really need <em>another</em> type of gear selection? Searching the Internet later for the Terrain’s gear buttons yields a whole slew of “Worst Shifter Design” article featuring these buttons. I don’t know which was worse -- the actual buttons or me, the alpha road warrior, getting back seat instructions on how to put a rental car in gear.</li><li>Another new thing I learned at Hertz Ft Myers -- besides where to find gear buttons -- is that, for Hertz Gold customers, there’s no additional driver fee for your spouse. I’ve been in Hertz Gold since it started, but I never connected to this benefit. It’s saves real money -- additional driver fees can run $10/day -- and hassle. Another reason to like the Hertz Gold program.</li><li>TravelCommons made our little local newspaper in an installment of their “Ask The Expert” series with the sub-headline “How can travel be more relaxing and fun?” &nbsp;When Sandy, the reporter, emailed me to schedule the interview, she wanted to talk about advice for successful spring break travel. So I started off talking about how those spring break families should avoid traveling during road warrior rush hours -- Monday mornings and Thursday evenings. “Boarding a plane filled with busy professionals can quickly rob you of that pre-vacation high,” Sandy wrote, “Peacock advise leisure travelers to avoid sharing a plane with these potential buzzkills.” Such as me. The last thing a family heading for Disney wants to encounter is people like me powering down the concourse. I also recounted some of the tips that you’ve seen in my Top Holiday Travel Tips posts -- fly early in the day, avoid regional jets, and no one-and-done outfits so you can get everything you need into a carry-on. And I talked about turning long layovers into mini-vacations with our upcoming Stockholm layover as an example. Of course, I didn’t mention that a lot of these layovers turn into taproom crawls, like in last year’s video of the Midway layover taproom tour, and potentially this Stockholm stop thanks to TravelCommons’ listener Rob Cheshire’s custom Google map. No, I figured than might be a bit much for our nice local paper. Sandy turned our 45-minute conversation into a nice article. I posted a picture of the article on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">TravelCommons Facebook page</a> since they don’t seem to put their issues on-line. </li><li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/12/podcast-120-where-do-guidebooks-fit-in-i-hate-shopping-for-suitcases/\">episode #120</a>, back in March 2016, I asked the question -- Where do physical guidebooks fit in the world of apps, review websites, social media, and podcasts? Back then, I was planning Andrew’s and my visit to Iceland. Now, getting ready to head over to Brittany, France for 10 days, I bought two physical guidebooks to take with us. Irene wanted DK’s Eyewitness Travel; it was her favorite out of the stack of guidebooks she checked out of the library. While I did a throwback, picked up our go-to book from our PK (pre-kids) days of travel, Michelin’s Green Guide. The DK book is definitely more visually punchy, but I figured Michelin, a French company, should have Brittany covered pretty well, and they published this new edition just last month. Maybe I’m getting lazy in my old age, but I’m kinda glad to have everything in one spot -- a bit of local history, touring maps, city guides -- rather than having to rummage through multiple PDFs in an Evernote folder. However, I took a pass on Amazon’s recommended add-on of Michelin’s Brittany Road and Tourist Map No. 512. I’ve topped up my local SIM for 2.5 GB of mobile data; I’m sticking with Google Maps. I maybe old school, but I’m not going back to the Dark Ages.</li><li>And if you have any travel rants, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. &nbsp;The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or  Instagram  at travelcommons -- or  post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com. </li><li> Bridge Music —&nbsp;<em>Perfect Stranger</em>&nbsp;by stellarartwars (c) 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/stellarartwars/45510 Ft: TheDice </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Dining Single</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Our daughter Claire is heading down to London for her first week of Spring Break and will then meet us in Paris for our Brittany trip. &nbsp;Planning it, we got talking about eating alone on the road. Years ago, it used to be more awkward - escorted to the small table off in the corner, a server a bit ticked off at the small check and therefore small tip. You’d read the newspaper or a book between courses to keep yourself occupied, wrap it up pretty quickly and head back to the hotel.</li><li>For guy travelers, the sports bar was (and still is) the exception to that rule. Fine, sit me in a booth alone as long as I have a clear view of walls of TV screens showing all ESPN all the time – ESPN, ESPN-2, ESPN-3, ESPN-U, ESPN News… No need for a book, especially over the next few weeks watching the opening rounds of the NCAA tournaments when I can watch a couple of games at once. Rush out? Hell no, give me another large Coors Light, we haven’t even hit half time.</li><li>Most restaurants now serve a full menu at the bar, complete with a full set up -- placemats, maybe a bread basket. Might be a touch cramped at happy hour, but it’s usually nice to be in the main flow of things rather than off in the corner. The trend toward shared plates , while getting a bit tired when dining with a group (“OK, what can we all agree on?”) works great for the single diner. If I want a bit of variety without overeating, I now have choices beyond sushi or tapas bars. Not that those are bad choices. I have no doubt that Claire will find her way to the bar at Barrafina in Soho.</li><li>Sitting at the bar also gave you a chance for a little social interaction, some serendipity; with the bartender, maybe with the guy sitting next to you. Some years ago, on my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/08/14/food-and-drink-highlights-from-my-drive-south/\">2,100-mile circle tour through the South</a>, a guy next to me at a Louisville bar told me to check out a restaurant in the not-yet-hip Bywater neighborhood in New Orleans; turned out to be a great recommendation. But I get less and less of that as people eat and just interact with their smartphones. Maybe Claire wouldn’t be keen on random bar conversations, but I kinda miss it.</li><li>Nowadays, where I do find that interaction is microbrewery taprooms. Sure, people still have their phones out to check their tasting flight into Untappd, but there’s an acceptance, almost an expectation, that people will “nerd out” about hops and malt and yeast esters with each other and with folks behind the bar. During one of my Dallas trips, I found my way to Grapevine Craft Brewing on a rainy Weds night. The brewmaster was pulling the taps, passing out some barrel samples, and we all spinning our beer nerd propellers real hard.</li><li> Bridge Music —&nbsp;<em>Foolish Game</em>&nbsp;by copperhead (c) 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/copperhead/46390 Ft: Snowflake,Sackjo22 </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><b>From The Travel Story Archives -- Airlines Need To Tell Us More</b></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Prepping for that interview with the local paper had me spelunking deep into the TravelCommons archives, fixing some broken links and listening to some of those early shows for the first time in a long time. A couple of things struck me -- the really poor sound quality I got from the little iRiver MP3 recorder that I was using, and how good some of those early travel stories were.</li><li> So here’s one from<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/09/24/podcast-15-begging-for-business-needing-to-know-at-35000-ft/\"> episode #15</a>, very long-time TC listener Allan Marko talking about wanting to know just a little bit more about what an airline maintenance guy is doing.  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #149</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_149.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #149 — Dining Single; Airlines Need To Tell Us More','','inherit','closed','closed','','2373-revision-v1','','','2019-04-22 22:31:27','2019-04-23 03:31:27','',2373,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/2373-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2421,1,'2019-04-22 22:34:52','2019-04-23 03:34:52','<!-- wp:image {\"id\":2404,\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/CoeazhcUMAAhyQN-300x251.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2404\"/><figcaption>This guy looks familiar...</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It\'s been a tough month for travel. Not quite to Book of Job-level torment, but two of this month\'s three trips spiraled into head-shaking metaphysical “What the hell is going on here” questioning of my decision to get out of bed that morning. I walk through the travel gods\' fun and games, as well as some new data on regional jet delays and buying a new travel bag.  All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_150.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<figure><iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/610046667&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe></figure>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:block {\"ref\":2408} /-->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #150: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, as the weather begins to stagger unsteadily toward Spring -- 74 degrees on Monday, 5.3 inches of snow (thundersnow!) on Sunday, then back up into the 70’s two days later.  April 14 -- over 5 inches of snow, over 1,000 flights cancelled. A nasty surprise for folks who thought it would be safe to connect through ORD, but just validates a Chicago truism -- don’t put the snow gear away until after Tax Day. Yup, welcome to the Midwest.</li><li>Have done a <em>chunk</em> of travel -- there’s a unit of measure for you -- since the last episode. A 2-day trip that hit 4 airports in the first day -- Chicago-Midway, Las Vegas, Houston-Hobby, and Nashville. The next week, I squoze in a trip to a new airport - State College, PA -- before heading out on vacation to Brittany, France. The squeeze wasn’t too tight -- flew back from State College on Weds night and left on vacation Thursday night -- but I did scout out a couple of backups in case the United Express regional jet went AWOL; a hour or so drive down to Harrisburg, a couple hour drive over to Pittsburgh. Luckily, I didn’t need them. United Express was having a good day, and therefore, so did I.</li><li>The next day’s flight to Paris on SAS by way of Stockholm went fine. We got in on time, found the left luggage lockers, and then the express train into the city all without much hassle. Arlanda Airport is comfortably sized and has good signage. The only real problem was that we got into center city Stockholm too early -- around 8:30am -- and nothing was really open. So we coffee’d up at one place, had some cardamom pastries at another, and generally puttered around until things started opening up an hour or so later. It was a sunny, if brisk, day, so walking around the Gamla Stan and Sodermalm was nice. </li><li>I always chuckle a bit when going through De Gaulle Airport, passing through the tangle of flat escalator walkway tubes that bridge the levels and open center of Terminal 1. The walkways are a bit awkward with wheeled luggage -- going down and then up. An airport porter in front of us let a wheelchair go free on the downhill span -- took a moment for it to register that it was empty -- then it rolled back to him on the uphill. No knock against him; it was the end of the day.</li><li>The next day, we caught the train out to Brittany, to Saint Malo. We walked out of the train station and across the street to Europcar for what was one of the easiest rental car pick-ups I’ve ever had in Europe. No scare-tactic insurance upselling -- just a look at my driver’s license and a quick pointer to where I could find the car in the train station parking lot. Five minutes, max. And dropping off the car a week later at Rennes train station? Absolutely the easiest rental drop-off -- gave the guy the keys and a receipt showing I’d filled up the car and I was done. No waiting for him to go inspect the car, just a handshake and “Have a good day”. </li><li>The next day wasn’t near as carefree, but we’ll talk about that in a few minutes.</li><li> Bridge Music — <em>Countryside Summer Joyride</em> by Kara Square (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mindmapthat/56281 Ft: Javolenus</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I’ve been not-quite-hating on, but certainly have been down on regional jets for quite some time on this podcast. Given a choice, I recommend people avoid them -- not because of their size, but their schedule dependability. Because the regional airlines’ model is to bounce a plane from place to place rather than route through hubs, they never recover from weather or mechanical delays. Those delays just cascade through the rest of the day. Now there often aren’t alternatives. Hence my earlier comment about needing backup plans for my regional jet flight home from State College. My flight was at the end of the day, the most vulnerable time to delays. Given my personal experience,  I wasn’t surprised to read that US Dept of Transportation data showed that regional flights were 2-4 times more likely to be cancelled than mainline flights. The Chicago Tribune dug into the DOT data and found flights operated by Delta’s regional partners were 4 times more likely to be canceled than flights operated by Delta, while American Eagle and United Express were 2-3 times more likely to cancel flights than their mainline partners. You can’t avoid regional jets when going to places like State College or Charlottesville, VA or Appleton, WI -- but you can when flying to LGA or DFW or MSY. And in those cases, unless those RJ flights have exactly the schedule I need, I’ll suffer a bit of inconvenience for a lot more dependability.</li><li>On our travels through Brittany earlier this month, I found that we were getting a large number of “card declined” messages when trying to use our Chase Sapphire Visa card -- at gas stations, stores, and in Paris when I tried to use my Uber app. Now this isn’t a new card -- we’ve had it for over 5 years -- and it’s not the first time we’ve used it on travels in Europe. But Chase fraud algorithm seems more sensitive, throwing more false positives, and no way to update things. On the way out of Brest, I pulled into a Total gas station to fill up on our way to the Crozon peninsula. We’d be there for a couple of days of hiking and I wasn’t sure many gas stations we’d see (turned out that I didn’t need to worry). I pull up to a pump, tap the Chase Visa, get a decline. Insert the card into the reader; get another decline. I do the same drill with my Citi MasterCard with the same result. However, I immediately get a fraud alert from Citi. I hit the big green “Yes” button on the e-mail -- as in, “Yes, I do recognize this charge” -- get an “all clear” response back, tap my Citi card again and fill up my tank. All this time, we get nothing from Chase. I open the Chase app on my phone; nothing there either. Same thing in Paris when I needed an Uber fast (more on that in a bit). Chase declined, but my Amex Platinum card went through. For me, it was just annoying; I always carry a full set of cards when traveling -- a Visa and a MasterCard from different banks, and an Amex -- because single points of failure when traveling are bad -- I don’t want to be left hanging if one bank or one card processor drops their network or loses a data center. Oh, and I also carry cash. But, as we’ve <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"talked (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/02/10/podcast-148-travel-potpourri-for-200-alex/\" target=\"_blank\">talked</a> <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"about (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/12/17/podcast-147-holiday-travel-tips-notes-from-santa-fe/\" target=\"_blank\">about</a> <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"before (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\" target=\"_blank\">before</a>, that’s ‘cause I’m old-school.</li><li>Brittany was a touring vacation, so we were moving every couple of days or so -- packing, unpacking, repacking. During one of those repacking sessions, maybe in Morgat on the Crozon peninsula -- I couldn’t find my Bose headphone case, which had my Bose headphones, in my backpack -- and I didn’t remember pulling out. Where the hell did they go, I asked myself. I pull everything out of my backpack and -- oh, there they are; they had slipped behind my camera bag in the bottom of my backpack. How did I lose my headphones in my backpack, you may ask -- and rightfully so because it really sounds stupid. Probably the same reason I lost a Google tablet in there a few years back -- too much black. The Bose case is black, the interior of Timbuk 2 backpack is black, my eyes aren’t as good as they used to be… I’d been toying around with getting a new bag, more of a messenger style -- that I could sling over one shoulder and with a bit better waterproofing. And, after this little panic drill, a non-black interior. I ended up getting a small Timbuk 2 Classic messenger bag from the Outlet section of REI.com for $50. It’s not too big -- holds my 11-inch MacBook Air, a couple of notebooks, an umbrella -- and has a bright yellow interior. I haven’t lost anything in it yet -- but I don’t trust myself. Maybe I need to get, like a white umbrella, and spray paint my Bose case red. I love black, but maybe I’ve taken that color palette a bit too far.</li><li>And if you have any travel rants, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"mpeacock (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Facebook page (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Facebook page</a> or our Instagram account at <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\" (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Travelcommons</a> -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li> Bridge Music —  <em>Jester of the Golden Apocalypse</em> by Super_Sigil (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Super_Sigil/34750 </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Travel Interruptus</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A Greek tragedy in three acts where the travel gods toy with our anti-hero for fun and entertainment</li><li>OK, maybe not quite that bad, not quite Book of Job-level torment, but two out of the three trips I’ve taken in the past month spiraled into head-shaking metaphysical “What the hell is going on here” questioning of my decision to get out of bed that morning.</li><li><em>Act 1</em> - My Midway-Vegas-Nashville travel day. This trip didn’t start out to be stupid. It started as an easy day trip to downtown Nashville for a sales call. So many people are abandoning Chicago for Nashville, Southwest has non-stop flights every 90 minutes, so no problem with flight times. That works out fine -- until someone books a sales call the prior afternoon -- in Las Vegas. Hmmm, how do I get from Vegas after 4pm Pacific to Nashville in time for a meeting the next morning Central time? Southwest is about the only choice, connecting through either Denver or Houston. I go for the more direct routing through Denver -- my first mistake.</li><li>Because, as it turned out, the March “bomb cyclone” -- what the Weather Channel helpfully named “Winter Storm Ulmer” (who or what is an Ulmer?) -- was going to shut down DIA that day with 80 mph winds. I got an e-mail from Southwest the day before canceling my connection through Denver -- understandable -- but nothing else, no rebooking, just “We’re leaving you in Vegas” -- which I’ve found tends to be Southwest’s MO -- pleasantly unhelpful. Especially when the website errored out when I tried to find an alternate routing to Nashville, and the automated message answering their 800 number was estimating 80-some minute hold times. After about 45 minutes, between banging on the website, our corporate Concur app, and tweeting at their customer service, I managed to get re-routed through Houston, safely south of the bomb cyclone.</li><li>The next morning, I show up at the gate at Midway to find my 8am flight to Vegas delayed by 2 hours -- mechanical on the plane here meant they had to bring in a new plane and crew from somewhere else. Annoying, but not critical; I’d get into Vegas at noon for a 2pm meeting. I get another coffee, log into the Boingo hotspot and clear some emails. 9:40, we line up and board. And wait. Then the captain keys the mike, pauses (never a good sign) and then starts talking - he didn’t have time to do the walkaround before we boarded because they came in late. When they did, they noticed a problem with the front strut. Maintenance is looking at it, don’t know if they can fix it, but they need everyone off the plane. So we deplane for what is now my 2nd maintenance delay. We idle around the gate area. 10:30 and nothing. I start looking at my watch. If I’m don’t get into Vegas by 1pm, there won’t be enough time to get to my 2pm meeting, and so I shouldn’t get on the plane. Then they start to re-board us. What time will we get in? 12:20. OK, I’ll board. We all get back on -- and for the most part retaking the seats we had, in spite of Southwest’s open seating. We are creatures of habit. I’m surprised no one moo’d. We’re all on, and we wait. The mike keys. There’s a slight moan rather than a moo from the cabin. We’re waiting on the paperwork. It’s always paperwork. I’m looking at my watch. It’s past 11am Central and the door is still open. A 4-hour flight means we’re now coming up against that 1pm Pacific arrive time. Do I stay on the plane? A couple minutes more and my decision is made for me; they close the door. I lean back, put on my headphones and hope for no headwinds. We get to the gate at 1:02pm. Vegas is always a maze; there’s no straight walkways; they always want to vector you through a thicket of slot machines. I head to the cab rank -- shorter walk and no waiting -- and I get a guy with a heavy foot. I’m at the client 5 minutes before the meeting. That was a bit too close.</li><li>My return trip to the airport and the flight to Houston are uneventful, not even any turbulence as we skirt that bomb cyclone. We get into Hobby maybe even a bit early. I grab a beer and then head over to the gate. They call boarding - just half the A group -- 1-30 -- because that’s all there is on this late flight to Nashville. The gate agent scans the boarding passes, saying “You’re in Row 3, you’re in Row 4, you’re in Row 5….”  We get all get in our separate rows, and then wait. The captain keys the mike, pauses, and then says “This plane had a bird strike on the nose on landing. There’s no damage, but Maintenance has to pull the nose cone off for a visual inspection. It’ll take about an hour, so you’re free to get off the plane.” But by now, everything in the airport was closed. “My 3rd maintenance delay of the day. Unbelievable!” I tweet out in frustrustration. Except that iPhone autocorrect turned “delay” into “deejay”. Hilary Baumann pointed it out with a nice emoji-laden tweet that gave me a good chuckle. I finally got to my Nashville hotel around 1:30 in the morning. I looked at the time, shook my head, and went to bed.</li><li> Bridge Music —  South Texas Cowboy Blues by texasradiofish (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/texasradiofish/52030 Ft: unreal_dm, ElRon XChile</li><li><em>Act 2</em> - A couple of weeks later, on Sunday in Rennes, France. We wheeled our luggage the 2 blocks from our AirBnB to Rennes train station for the TGV to CDG. We stood with everyone else, looking up at the departure board waiting for the track to be posted. Departure time came closer and still no track -- not a good sign. The crowd grew larger. There was an announcement in French and a scrolling message at the bottom of the departure screen. Irene banged it into Google Translate. The gist of it -- a bomb threat had been phoned into SCNF, the train company, and all the trains in and out of Paris were halted. Given France’s recent history with terrorism, it was a reasonable response, but still…. They finally start posting delay times -- 40 mins, then over an hour, but then it shrinks back. I pull up Google Maps. The drive to CDG is showing about the same time as the train, but we’d be in control of our own destiny. I walk down to the rental car offices. It’s Sunday morning; they’re all closed. They won’t open until the afternoon; too late for us to drive and make our flights. </li><li>Time continues to tick by, past the departure time for our flight. I call United -- any other options? I get a phenomenally helpful agent. I can hear the keystrokes. Nothing else today Sunday, nor tomorrow, Monday. I wasn’t surprised about nothing available today, but was about the next day -- until I got a text from Andrew. He was on this morning’s United flight to Chicago which just cancelled for a hydraulic problem and rebooked on tomorrow’s flight -- which explains the lack of seats for us. I took the Tuesday seats. Now would we get to CDG in time for Claire’s EasyJet flight to Edinburgh so she can make class the next day. The trains finally start moving. We head down and board our train. And then wait, and wait some  more. And then the train starts moving. I look at my watch. I think Claire will be OK. </li><li>Until we come to a stop in the middle of a rail yard. I watch a couple of guys walk past our car -- maybe a visual inspection? After a bit, we start moving -- backwards. The conductor keys the mike, and makes an announcement in rapid French that we can’t pick up. I open Google Maps. I see we’re off to the east of Paris but can’t tell if we’re moving in the right direction. Until we pull into the next station -- it’s for EuroDisney. I find our train route on the SCNF website and see this is one of the stops en route to CDG, so we’re going in the right direction. We get to CDG by 3pm, which means Claire can make her flight. Andrew comes over from the Airport Hilton, where United is putting him up for the night, and we head down to Paris for another dinner together. There are, after all, worse cities to have to spend an extra day or two.</li><li> Bridge Music —  <em>Parisian </em>Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)<br> Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License<br> http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><em>Act 3</em> - Tuesday morning, Paris. Our forced layover in Paris yesterday had been a beautiful day,  sunny and warm. We walked through the Marais, south across Ile de la Cite, taking the obligatory selfie in front of Notre Dame that we pulled out at looked at two weeks later during the news coverage of the fire, and then rattled around the Latin Quarter looking for a place with outdoor seating and a nice rosé. This morning, though, not so beautiful. It was dumping rain. So rather than trundle our luggage 10 min to the Metro stop, I decide to order an Uber -- which takes a try or two when Chase declines my Visa again; and I switch over to Amex. A nice black Mercedes picks us up and heads for Les Halles -- or at least tries to. The traffic is a crawl at best. I watch our buffer time tick away and we’re not  getting any closer. After sitting through a couple of traffic light cycles without clearing the intersection, we grab our bags and make for Les Halles on foot. We get there, a bit wet. We’re able to skip the ticket booth line; I have enough euros for the self-service machine, because it’s that or a chip-&amp;-pin card we don’t have. We get on the train. I look at my watch - we should have enough time to check our bags (bringing back some liquids), clear security, and get to the gate without too much more agita.</li><li>Until the train slows to a stop between stops. The conductor keys the mike, and makes an announcement in rapid French. I look at the other passengers. They don’t seem too agitated. I figure it’s some congestion on the track ahead. And, sure enough, we start moving after a couple of minutes. But at the next stop, the train doors stay open and a train employee come on, saying in French <em>and</em> English -- everyone has to get off, catch a bus outside the station to another station, then catch a different train to the airport. We head down the bus stop. There’s no one there to help; just a couple hundred people milling around.</li><li>Now I’m worried. We have no time to figure this out. The taxi stand is mobbed, I fire up Uber - 19-minute wait. Lyft? They’re not in Paris. I google to find taxi company but before I call, I try Uber one more time -- a 5-minute wait for a €60 fare. I hit the order button -- and then again after I swap over to Amex. €60 for a 15-minute ride to CDG is tough, but it’s cheaper than another night in a hotel. We get to the United desk 2 minutes before luggage check closes for our flight. The agent radioed down, checked in our bags, and then gave us the CDG version of Fast Track, so we could sidestep the long passport control and security lines. We board, sit down, but don’t really settle in until the plane leaves the ground. And when we’re finally at ORD, standing by the luggage carousel, our bags are the first ones to come out.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #150</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_150.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<p><!--EndFragment--><br>\n<br>\n</p>','Podcast #150 — Travel Interruptus','','inherit','closed','closed','','2402-revision-v1','','','2019-04-22 22:34:52','2019-04-23 03:34:52','',2402,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/2402-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2422,1,'2019-04-22 22:39:44','2019-04-23 03:39:44','<!-- wp:image {\"id\":2404,\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/CoeazhcUMAAhyQN-300x251.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2404\"/><figcaption>This guy looks familiar...</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It\'s been a tough month for travel. Not quite to Book of Job-level torment, but two of this month\'s three trips spiraled into head-shaking metaphysical “What the hell is going on here” questioning of my decision to get out of bed that morning. I walk through the travel gods\' fun and games, as well as some new data on regional jet delays and buying a new travel bag.  All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_150.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<figure><iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/610046667&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe></figure>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To read the Detailed Show Notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To read the Detailed Show Notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #150: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, as the weather begins to stagger unsteadily toward Spring -- 74 degrees on Monday, 5.3 inches of snow (thundersnow!) on Sunday, then back up into the 70’s two days later. &nbsp;April 14 -- over 5 inches of snow, over 1,000 flights cancelled. A nasty surprise for folks who thought it would be safe to connect through ORD, but just validates a Chicago truism -- don’t put the snow gear away until after Tax Day. Yup, welcome to the Midwest.</li><li>Have done a <em>chunk</em> of travel -- there’s a unit of measure for you -- since the last episode. A 2-day trip that hit 4 airports in the first day -- Chicago-Midway, Las Vegas, Houston-Hobby, and Nashville. The next week, I squoze in a trip to a new airport - State College, PA -- before heading out on vacation to Brittany, France. The squeeze wasn’t too tight -- flew back from State College on Weds night and left on vacation Thursday night -- but I did scout out a couple of backups in case the United Express regional jet went AWOL; a hour or so drive down to Harrisburg, a couple hour drive over to Pittsburgh. Luckily, I didn’t need them. United Express was having a good day, and therefore, so did I.</li><li>The next day’s flight to Paris on SAS by way of Stockholm went fine. We got in on time, found the left luggage lockers, and then the express train into the city all without much hassle. Arlanda Airport is comfortably sized and has good signage. The only real problem was that we got into center city Stockholm too early -- around 8:30am -- and nothing was really open. So we coffee’d up at one place, had some cardamom pastries at another, and generally puttered around until things started opening up an hour or so later. It was a sunny, if brisk, day, so walking around the Gamla Stan and Sodermalm was nice. </li><li>I always chuckle a bit when going through De Gaulle Airport, passing through the tangle of flat escalator walkway tubes that bridge the levels and open center of Terminal 1. The walkways are a bit awkward with wheeled luggage -- going down and then up. An airport porter in front of us let a wheelchair go free on the downhill span -- took a moment for it to register that it was empty -- then it rolled back to him on the uphill. No knock against him; it was the end of the day.</li><li>The next day, we caught the train out to Brittany, to Saint Malo. We walked out of the train station and across the street to Europcar for what was one of the easiest rental car pick-ups I’ve ever had in Europe. No scare-tactic insurance upselling -- just a look at my driver’s license and a quick pointer to where I could find the car in the train station parking lot. Five minutes, max. And dropping off the car a week later at Rennes train station? Absolutely the easiest rental drop-off -- gave the guy the keys and a receipt showing I’d filled up the car and I was done. No waiting for him to go inspect the car, just a handshake and “Have a good day”. </li><li>The next day wasn’t near as carefree, but we’ll talk about that in a few minutes.</li><li> Bridge Music — <em>Countryside Summer Joyride</em> by Kara Square (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mindmapthat/56281 Ft: Javolenus</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I’ve been not-quite-hating on, but certainly have been down on regional jets for quite some time on this podcast. Given a choice, I recommend people avoid them -- not because of their size, but their schedule dependability. Because the regional airlines’ model is to bounce a plane from place to place rather than route through hubs, they never recover from weather or mechanical delays. Those delays just cascade through the rest of the day. Now there often aren’t alternatives. Hence my earlier comment about needing backup plans for my regional jet flight home from State College. My flight was at the end of the day, the most vulnerable time to delays. Given my personal experience, &nbsp;I wasn’t surprised to read that US Dept of Transportation data showed that regional flights were 2-4 times more likely to be cancelled than mainline flights. The Chicago Tribune dug into the DOT data and found flights operated by Delta’s regional partners were 4 times more likely to be canceled than flights operated by Delta, while American Eagle and United Express were 2-3 times more likely to cancel flights than their mainline partners. You can’t avoid regional jets when going to places like State College or Charlottesville, VA or Appleton, WI -- but you can when flying to LGA or DFW or MSY. And in those cases, unless those RJ flights have exactly the schedule I need, I’ll suffer a bit of inconvenience for a lot more dependability.</li><li>On our travels through Brittany earlier this month, I found that we were getting a large number of “card declined” messages when trying to use our Chase Sapphire Visa card -- at gas stations, stores, and in Paris when I tried to use my Uber app. Now this isn’t a new card -- we’ve had it for over 5 years -- and it’s not the first time we’ve used it on travels in Europe. But Chase fraud algorithm seems more sensitive, throwing more false positives, and no way to update things. On the way out of Brest, I pulled into a Total gas station to fill up on our way to the Crozon peninsula. We’d be there for a couple of days of hiking and I wasn’t sure many gas stations we’d see (turned out that I didn’t need to worry). I pull up to a pump, tap the Chase Visa, get a decline. Insert the card into the reader; get another decline. I do the same drill with my Citi MasterCard with the same result. However, I immediately get a fraud alert from Citi. I hit the big green “Yes” button on the e-mail -- as in, “Yes, I do recognize this charge” -- get an “all clear” response back, tap my Citi card again and fill up my tank. All this time, we get nothing from Chase. I open the Chase app on my phone; nothing there either. Same thing in Paris when I needed an Uber fast (more on that in a bit). Chase declined, but my Amex Platinum card went through. For me, it was just annoying; I always carry a full set of cards when traveling -- a Visa and a MasterCard from different banks, and an Amex -- because single points of failure when traveling are bad -- I don’t want to be left hanging if one bank or one card processor drops their network or loses a data center. Oh, and I also carry cash. But, as we’ve <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"talked (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/02/10/podcast-148-travel-potpourri-for-200-alex/\" target=\"_blank\">talked</a> <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"about (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/12/17/podcast-147-holiday-travel-tips-notes-from-santa-fe/\" target=\"_blank\">about</a> <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"before (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\" target=\"_blank\">before</a>, that’s ‘cause I’m old-school.</li><li>Brittany was a touring vacation, so we were moving every couple of days or so -- packing, unpacking, repacking. During one of those repacking sessions, maybe in Morgat on the Crozon peninsula -- I couldn’t find my Bose headphone case, which had my Bose headphones, in my backpack -- and I didn’t remember pulling out. Where the hell did they go, I asked myself. I pull everything out of my backpack and -- oh, there they are; they had slipped behind my camera bag in the bottom of my backpack. How did I lose my headphones in my backpack, you may ask -- and rightfully so because it really sounds stupid. Probably the same reason I lost a Google tablet in there a few years back -- too much black. The Bose case is black, the interior of Timbuk 2 backpack is black, my eyes aren’t as good as they used to be… I’d been toying around with getting a new bag, more of a messenger style -- that I could sling over one shoulder and with a bit better waterproofing. And, after this little panic drill, a non-black interior. I ended up getting a small Timbuk 2 Classic messenger bag from the Outlet section of REI.com for $50. It’s not too big -- holds my 11-inch MacBook Air, a couple of notebooks, an umbrella -- and has a bright yellow interior. I haven’t lost anything in it yet -- but I don’t trust myself. Maybe I need to get, like a white umbrella, and spray paint my Bose case red. I love black, but maybe I’ve taken that color palette a bit too far.</li><li>And if you have any travel rants, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. &nbsp;The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"mpeacock (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Facebook page (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Facebook page</a> or our Instagram account at <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\" (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Travelcommons</a> -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li> Bridge Music —  <em>Jester of the Golden Apocalypse</em> by Super_Sigil (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Super_Sigil/34750 </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Travel Interruptus</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A Greek tragedy in three acts where the travel gods toy with our anti-hero for fun and entertainment</li><li>OK, maybe not quite that bad, not quite Book of Job-level torment, but two out of the three trips I’ve taken in the past month spiraled into head-shaking metaphysical “What the hell is going on here” questioning of my decision to get out of bed that morning.</li><li><em>Act 1</em> - My Midway-Vegas-Nashville travel day. This trip didn’t start out to be stupid. It started as an easy day trip to downtown Nashville for a sales call. So many people are abandoning Chicago for Nashville, Southwest has non-stop flights every 90 minutes, so no problem with flight times. That works out fine -- until someone books a sales call the prior afternoon -- in Las Vegas. Hmmm, how do I get from Vegas after 4pm Pacific to Nashville in time for a meeting the next morning Central time? Southwest is about the only choice, connecting through either Denver or Houston. I go for the more direct routing through Denver -- my first mistake.</li><li>Because, as it turned out, the March “bomb cyclone” -- what the Weather Channel helpfully named “Winter Storm Ulmer” (who or what is an Ulmer?) -- was going to shut down DIA that day with 80 mph winds. I got an e-mail from Southwest the day before canceling my connection through Denver -- understandable -- but nothing else, no rebooking, just “We’re leaving you in Vegas” -- which I’ve found tends to be Southwest’s MO -- pleasantly unhelpful. Especially when the website errored out when I tried to find an alternate routing to Nashville, and the automated message answering their 800 number was estimating 80-some minute hold times. After about 45 minutes, between banging on the website, our corporate Concur app, and tweeting at their customer service, I managed to get re-routed through Houston, safely south of the bomb cyclone.</li><li>The next morning, I show up at the gate at Midway to find my 8am flight to Vegas delayed by 2 hours -- mechanical on the plane here meant they had to bring in a new plane and crew from somewhere else. Annoying, but not critical; I’d get into Vegas at noon for a 2pm meeting. I get another coffee, log into the Boingo hotspot and clear some emails. 9:40, we line up and board. And wait. Then the captain keys the mike, pauses (never a good sign) and then starts talking - he didn’t have time to do the walkaround before we boarded because they came in late. When they did, they noticed a problem with the front strut. Maintenance is looking at it, don’t know if they can fix it, but they need everyone off the plane. So we deplane for what is now my 2nd maintenance delay. We idle around the gate area. 10:30 and nothing. I start looking at my watch. If I’m don’t get into Vegas by 1pm, there won’t be enough time to get to my 2pm meeting, and so I shouldn’t get on the plane. Then they start to re-board us. What time will we get in? 12:20. OK, I’ll board. We all get back on -- and for the most part retaking the seats we had, in spite of Southwest’s open seating. We are creatures of habit. I’m surprised no one moo’d. We’re all on, and we wait. The mike keys. There’s a slight moan rather than a moo from the cabin. We’re waiting on the paperwork. It’s always paperwork. I’m looking at my watch. It’s past 11am Central and the door is still open. A 4-hour flight means we’re now coming up against that 1pm Pacific arrive time. Do I stay on the plane? A couple minutes more and my decision is made for me; they close the door. I lean back, put on my headphones and hope for no headwinds. We get to the gate at 1:02pm. Vegas is always a maze; there’s no straight walkways; they always want to vector you through a thicket of slot machines. I head to the cab rank -- shorter walk and no waiting -- and I get a guy with a heavy foot. I’m at the client 5 minutes before the meeting. That was a bit too close.</li><li>My return trip to the airport and the flight to Houston are uneventful, not even any turbulence as we skirt that bomb cyclone. We get into Hobby maybe even a bit early. I grab a beer and then head over to the gate. They call boarding - just half the A group -- 1-30 -- because that’s all there is on this late flight to Nashville. The gate agent scans the boarding passes, saying “You’re in Row 3, you’re in Row 4, you’re in Row 5….” &nbsp;We get all get in our separate rows, and then wait. The captain keys the mike, pauses, and then says “This plane had a bird strike on the nose on landing. There’s no damage, but Maintenance has to pull the nose cone off for a visual inspection. It’ll take about an hour, so you’re free to get off the plane.” But by now, everything in the airport was closed. “My 3rd maintenance delay of the day. Unbelievable!” I tweet out in frustrustration. Except that iPhone autocorrect turned “delay” into “deejay”. Hilary Baumann pointed it out with a nice emoji-laden tweet that gave me a good chuckle. I finally got to my Nashville hotel around 1:30 in the morning. I looked at the time, shook my head, and went to bed.</li><li> Bridge Music —  South Texas Cowboy Blues by texasradiofish (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/texasradiofish/52030 Ft: unreal_dm, ElRon XChile</li><li><em>Act 2</em> - A couple of weeks later, on Sunday in Rennes, France. We wheeled our luggage the 2 blocks from our AirBnB to Rennes train station for the TGV to CDG. We stood with everyone else, looking up at the departure board waiting for the track to be posted. Departure time came closer and still no track -- not a good sign. The crowd grew larger. There was an announcement in French and a scrolling message at the bottom of the departure screen. Irene banged it into Google Translate. The gist of it -- a bomb threat had been phoned into SCNF, the train company, and all the trains in and out of Paris were halted. Given France’s recent history with terrorism, it was a reasonable response, but still…. They finally start posting delay times -- 40 mins, then over an hour, but then it shrinks back. I pull up Google Maps. The drive to CDG is showing about the same time as the train, but we’d be in control of our own destiny. I walk down to the rental car offices. It’s Sunday morning; they’re all closed. They won’t open until the afternoon; too late for us to drive and make our flights. </li><li>Time continues to tick by, past the departure time for our flight. I call United -- any other options? I get a phenomenally helpful agent. I can hear the keystrokes. Nothing else today Sunday, nor tomorrow, Monday. I wasn’t surprised about nothing available today, but was about the next day -- until I got a text from Andrew. He was on this morning’s United flight to Chicago which just cancelled for a hydraulic problem and rebooked on tomorrow’s flight -- which explains the lack of seats for us. I took the Tuesday seats. Now would we get to CDG in time for Claire’s EasyJet flight to Edinburgh so she can make class the next day. The trains finally start moving. We head down and board our train. And then wait, and wait some &nbsp;more. And then the train starts moving. I look at my watch. I think Claire will be OK. </li><li>Until we come to a stop in the middle of a rail yard. I watch a couple of guys walk past our car -- maybe a visual inspection? After a bit, we start moving -- backwards. The conductor keys the mike, and makes an announcement in rapid French that we can’t pick up. I open Google Maps. I see we’re off to the east of Paris but can’t tell if we’re moving in the right direction. Until we pull into the next station -- it’s for EuroDisney. I find our train route on the SCNF website and see this is one of the stops en route to CDG, so we’re going in the right direction. We get to CDG by 3pm, which means Claire can make her flight. Andrew comes over from the Airport Hilton, where United is putting him up for the night, and we head down to Paris for another dinner together. There are, after all, worse cities to have to spend an extra day or two.</li><li> Bridge Music —  <em>Parisian </em>Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)<br> Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License<br> http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><em>Act 3</em> - Tuesday morning, Paris. Our forced layover in Paris yesterday had been a beautiful day, &nbsp;sunny and warm. We walked through the Marais, south across Ile de la Cite, taking the obligatory selfie in front of Notre Dame that we pulled out at looked at two weeks later during the news coverage of the fire, and then rattled around the Latin Quarter looking for a place with outdoor seating and a nice rosé. This morning, though, not so beautiful. It was dumping rain. So rather than trundle our luggage 10 min to the Metro stop, I decide to order an Uber -- which takes a try or two when Chase declines my Visa again; and I switch over to Amex. A nice black Mercedes picks us up and heads for Les Halles -- or at least tries to. The traffic is a crawl at best. I watch our buffer time tick away and we’re not &nbsp;getting any closer. After sitting through a couple of traffic light cycles without clearing the intersection, we grab our bags and make for Les Halles on foot. We get there, a bit wet. We’re able to skip the ticket booth line; I have enough euros for the self-service machine, because it’s that or a chip-&amp;-pin card we don’t have. We get on the train. I look at my watch - we should have enough time to check our bags (bringing back some liquids), clear security, and get to the gate without too much more agita.</li><li>Until the train slows to a stop between stops. The conductor keys the mike, and makes an announcement in rapid French. I look at the other passengers. They don’t seem too agitated. I figure it’s some congestion on the track ahead. And, sure enough, we start moving after a couple of minutes. But at the next stop, the train doors stay open and a train employee come on, saying in French <em>and</em> English -- everyone has to get off, catch a bus outside the station to another station, then catch a different train to the airport. We head down the bus stop. There’s no one there to help; just a couple hundred people milling around.</li><li>Now I’m worried. We have no time to figure this out. The taxi stand is mobbed, I fire up Uber - 19-minute wait. Lyft? They’re not in Paris. I google to find taxi company but before I call, I try Uber one more time -- a 5-minute wait for a €60 fare. I hit the order button -- and then again after I swap over to Amex. €60 for a 15-minute ride to CDG is tough, but it’s cheaper than another night in a hotel. We get to the United desk 2 minutes before luggage check closes for our flight. The agent radioed down, checked in our bags, and then gave us the CDG version of Fast Track, so we could sidestep the long passport control and security lines. We board, sit down, but don’t really settle in until the plane leaves the ground. And when we’re finally at ORD, standing by the luggage carousel, our bags are the first ones to come out.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #150</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_150.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<p><!--EndFragment--></p>\n<p></p>','Podcast #150 — Travel Interruptus','','inherit','closed','closed','','2402-revision-v1','','','2019-04-22 22:39:44','2019-04-23 03:39:44','',2402,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/2402-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2423,1,'2019-04-22 22:41:38','2019-04-23 03:41:38','<!-- wp:image {\"id\":2404,\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/CoeazhcUMAAhyQN-300x251.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2404\"/><figcaption>This guy looks familiar...</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It\'s been a tough month for travel. Not quite to Book of Job-level torment, but two of this month\'s three trips spiraled into head-shaking metaphysical “What the hell is going on here” questioning of my decision to get out of bed that morning. I walk through the travel gods\' fun and games, as well as some new data on regional jet delays and buying a new travel bag.  All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_150.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<figure><figure><iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/610046667&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe></figure></figure>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To read the Detailed Show Notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To read the Detailed Show Notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #150: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, as the weather begins to stagger unsteadily toward Spring -- 74 degrees on Monday, 5.3 inches of snow (thundersnow!) on Sunday, then back up into the 70’s two days later. &nbsp;April 14 -- over 5 inches of snow, over 1,000 flights cancelled. A nasty surprise for folks who thought it would be safe to connect through ORD, but just validates a Chicago truism -- don’t put the snow gear away until after Tax Day. Yup, welcome to the Midwest.</li><li>Have done a <em>chunk</em> of travel -- there’s a unit of measure for you -- since the last episode. A 2-day trip that hit 4 airports in the first day -- Chicago-Midway, Las Vegas, Houston-Hobby, and Nashville. The next week, I squoze in a trip to a new airport - State College, PA -- before heading out on vacation to Brittany, France. The squeeze wasn’t too tight -- flew back from State College on Weds night and left on vacation Thursday night -- but I did scout out a couple of backups in case the United Express regional jet went AWOL; a hour or so drive down to Harrisburg, a couple hour drive over to Pittsburgh. Luckily, I didn’t need them. United Express was having a good day, and therefore, so did I.</li><li>The next day’s flight to Paris on SAS by way of Stockholm went fine. We got in on time, found the left luggage lockers, and then the express train into the city all without much hassle. Arlanda Airport is comfortably sized and has good signage. The only real problem was that we got into center city Stockholm too early -- around 8:30am -- and nothing was really open. So we coffee’d up at one place, had some cardamom pastries at another, and generally puttered around until things started opening up an hour or so later. It was a sunny, if brisk, day, so walking around the Gamla Stan and Sodermalm was nice. </li><li>I always chuckle a bit when going through De Gaulle Airport, passing through the tangle of flat escalator walkway tubes that bridge the levels and open center of Terminal 1. The walkways are a bit awkward with wheeled luggage -- going down and then up. An airport porter in front of us let a wheelchair go free on the downhill span -- took a moment for it to register that it was empty -- then it rolled back to him on the uphill. No knock against him; it was the end of the day.</li><li>The next day, we caught the train out to Brittany, to Saint Malo. We walked out of the train station and across the street to Europcar for what was one of the easiest rental car pick-ups I’ve ever had in Europe. No scare-tactic insurance upselling -- just a look at my driver’s license and a quick pointer to where I could find the car in the train station parking lot. Five minutes, max. And dropping off the car a week later at Rennes train station? Absolutely the easiest rental drop-off -- gave the guy the keys and a receipt showing I’d filled up the car and I was done. No waiting for him to go inspect the car, just a handshake and “Have a good day”. </li><li>The next day wasn’t near as carefree, but we’ll talk about that in a few minutes.</li><li> Bridge Music — <em>Countryside Summer Joyride</em> by Kara Square (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mindmapthat/56281 Ft: Javolenus</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I’ve been not-quite-hating on, but certainly have been down on regional jets for quite some time on this podcast. Given a choice, I recommend people avoid them -- not because of their size, but their schedule dependability. Because the regional airlines’ model is to bounce a plane from place to place rather than route through hubs, they never recover from weather or mechanical delays. Those delays just cascade through the rest of the day. Now there often aren’t alternatives. Hence my earlier comment about needing backup plans for my regional jet flight home from State College. My flight was at the end of the day, the most vulnerable time to delays. Given my personal experience, &nbsp;I wasn’t surprised to read that US Dept of Transportation data showed that regional flights were 2-4 times more likely to be cancelled than mainline flights. The Chicago Tribune dug into the DOT data and found flights operated by Delta’s regional partners were 4 times more likely to be canceled than flights operated by Delta, while American Eagle and United Express were 2-3 times more likely to cancel flights than their mainline partners. You can’t avoid regional jets when going to places like State College or Charlottesville, VA or Appleton, WI -- but you can when flying to LGA or DFW or MSY. And in those cases, unless those RJ flights have exactly the schedule I need, I’ll suffer a bit of inconvenience for a lot more dependability.</li><li>On our travels through Brittany earlier this month, I found that we were getting a large number of “card declined” messages when trying to use our Chase Sapphire Visa card -- at gas stations, stores, and in Paris when I tried to use my Uber app. Now this isn’t a new card -- we’ve had it for over 5 years -- and it’s not the first time we’ve used it on travels in Europe. But Chase fraud algorithm seems more sensitive, throwing more false positives, and no way to update things. On the way out of Brest, I pulled into a Total gas station to fill up on our way to the Crozon peninsula. We’d be there for a couple of days of hiking and I wasn’t sure many gas stations we’d see (turned out that I didn’t need to worry). I pull up to a pump, tap the Chase Visa, get a decline. Insert the card into the reader; get another decline. I do the same drill with my Citi MasterCard with the same result. However, I immediately get a fraud alert from Citi. I hit the big green “Yes” button on the e-mail -- as in, “Yes, I do recognize this charge” -- get an “all clear” response back, tap my Citi card again and fill up my tank. All this time, we get nothing from Chase. I open the Chase app on my phone; nothing there either. Same thing in Paris when I needed an Uber fast (more on that in a bit). Chase declined, but my Amex Platinum card went through. For me, it was just annoying; I always carry a full set of cards when traveling -- a Visa and a MasterCard from different banks, and an Amex -- because single points of failure when traveling are bad -- I don’t want to be left hanging if one bank or one card processor drops their network or loses a data center. Oh, and I also carry cash. But, as we’ve <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"talked (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/02/10/podcast-148-travel-potpourri-for-200-alex/\" target=\"_blank\">talked</a> <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"about (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/12/17/podcast-147-holiday-travel-tips-notes-from-santa-fe/\" target=\"_blank\">about</a> <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"before (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\" target=\"_blank\">before</a>, that’s ‘cause I’m old-school.</li><li>Brittany was a touring vacation, so we were moving every couple of days or so -- packing, unpacking, repacking. During one of those repacking sessions, maybe in Morgat on the Crozon peninsula -- I couldn’t find my Bose headphone case, which had my Bose headphones, in my backpack -- and I didn’t remember pulling out. Where the hell did they go, I asked myself. I pull everything out of my backpack and -- oh, there they are; they had slipped behind my camera bag in the bottom of my backpack. How did I lose my headphones in my backpack, you may ask -- and rightfully so because it really sounds stupid. Probably the same reason I lost a Google tablet in there a few years back -- too much black. The Bose case is black, the interior of Timbuk 2 backpack is black, my eyes aren’t as good as they used to be… I’d been toying around with getting a new bag, more of a messenger style -- that I could sling over one shoulder and with a bit better waterproofing. And, after this little panic drill, a non-black interior. I ended up getting a small Timbuk 2 Classic messenger bag from the Outlet section of REI.com for $50. It’s not too big -- holds my 11-inch MacBook Air, a couple of notebooks, an umbrella -- and has a bright yellow interior. I haven’t lost anything in it yet -- but I don’t trust myself. Maybe I need to get, like a white umbrella, and spray paint my Bose case red. I love black, but maybe I’ve taken that color palette a bit too far.</li><li>And if you have any travel rants, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. &nbsp;The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"mpeacock (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Facebook page (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Facebook page</a> or our Instagram account at <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\" (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Travelcommons</a> -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li> Bridge Music —  <em>Jester of the Golden Apocalypse</em> by Super_Sigil (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Super_Sigil/34750 </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Travel Interruptus</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A Greek tragedy in three acts where the travel gods toy with our anti-hero for fun and entertainment</li><li>OK, maybe not quite that bad, not quite Book of Job-level torment, but two out of the three trips I’ve taken in the past month spiraled into head-shaking metaphysical “What the hell is going on here” questioning of my decision to get out of bed that morning.</li><li><em>Act 1</em> - My Midway-Vegas-Nashville travel day. This trip didn’t start out to be stupid. It started as an easy day trip to downtown Nashville for a sales call. So many people are abandoning Chicago for Nashville, Southwest has non-stop flights every 90 minutes, so no problem with flight times. That works out fine -- until someone books a sales call the prior afternoon -- in Las Vegas. Hmmm, how do I get from Vegas after 4pm Pacific to Nashville in time for a meeting the next morning Central time? Southwest is about the only choice, connecting through either Denver or Houston. I go for the more direct routing through Denver -- my first mistake.</li><li>Because, as it turned out, the March “bomb cyclone” -- what the Weather Channel helpfully named “Winter Storm Ulmer” (who or what is an Ulmer?) -- was going to shut down DIA that day with 80 mph winds. I got an e-mail from Southwest the day before canceling my connection through Denver -- understandable -- but nothing else, no rebooking, just “We’re leaving you in Vegas” -- which I’ve found tends to be Southwest’s MO -- pleasantly unhelpful. Especially when the website errored out when I tried to find an alternate routing to Nashville, and the automated message answering their 800 number was estimating 80-some minute hold times. After about 45 minutes, between banging on the website, our corporate Concur app, and tweeting at their customer service, I managed to get re-routed through Houston, safely south of the bomb cyclone.</li><li>The next morning, I show up at the gate at Midway to find my 8am flight to Vegas delayed by 2 hours -- mechanical on the plane here meant they had to bring in a new plane and crew from somewhere else. Annoying, but not critical; I’d get into Vegas at noon for a 2pm meeting. I get another coffee, log into the Boingo hotspot and clear some emails. 9:40, we line up and board. And wait. Then the captain keys the mike, pauses (never a good sign) and then starts talking - he didn’t have time to do the walkaround before we boarded because they came in late. When they did, they noticed a problem with the front strut. Maintenance is looking at it, don’t know if they can fix it, but they need everyone off the plane. So we deplane for what is now my 2nd maintenance delay. We idle around the gate area. 10:30 and nothing. I start looking at my watch. If I’m don’t get into Vegas by 1pm, there won’t be enough time to get to my 2pm meeting, and so I shouldn’t get on the plane. Then they start to re-board us. What time will we get in? 12:20. OK, I’ll board. We all get back on -- and for the most part retaking the seats we had, in spite of Southwest’s open seating. We are creatures of habit. I’m surprised no one moo’d. We’re all on, and we wait. The mike keys. There’s a slight moan rather than a moo from the cabin. We’re waiting on the paperwork. It’s always paperwork. I’m looking at my watch. It’s past 11am Central and the door is still open. A 4-hour flight means we’re now coming up against that 1pm Pacific arrive time. Do I stay on the plane? A couple minutes more and my decision is made for me; they close the door. I lean back, put on my headphones and hope for no headwinds. We get to the gate at 1:02pm. Vegas is always a maze; there’s no straight walkways; they always want to vector you through a thicket of slot machines. I head to the cab rank -- shorter walk and no waiting -- and I get a guy with a heavy foot. I’m at the client 5 minutes before the meeting. That was a bit too close.</li><li>My return trip to the airport and the flight to Houston are uneventful, not even any turbulence as we skirt that bomb cyclone. We get into Hobby maybe even a bit early. I grab a beer and then head over to the gate. They call boarding - just half the A group -- 1-30 -- because that’s all there is on this late flight to Nashville. The gate agent scans the boarding passes, saying “You’re in Row 3, you’re in Row 4, you’re in Row 5….” &nbsp;We get all get in our separate rows, and then wait. The captain keys the mike, pauses, and then says “This plane had a bird strike on the nose on landing. There’s no damage, but Maintenance has to pull the nose cone off for a visual inspection. It’ll take about an hour, so you’re free to get off the plane.” But by now, everything in the airport was closed. “My 3rd maintenance delay of the day. Unbelievable!” I tweet out in frustrustration. Except that iPhone autocorrect turned “delay” into “deejay”. Hilary Baumann pointed it out with a nice emoji-laden tweet that gave me a good chuckle. I finally got to my Nashville hotel around 1:30 in the morning. I looked at the time, shook my head, and went to bed.</li><li> Bridge Music —  South Texas Cowboy Blues by texasradiofish (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/texasradiofish/52030 Ft: unreal_dm, ElRon XChile</li><li><em>Act 2</em> - A couple of weeks later, on Sunday in Rennes, France. We wheeled our luggage the 2 blocks from our AirBnB to Rennes train station for the TGV to CDG. We stood with everyone else, looking up at the departure board waiting for the track to be posted. Departure time came closer and still no track -- not a good sign. The crowd grew larger. There was an announcement in French and a scrolling message at the bottom of the departure screen. Irene banged it into Google Translate. The gist of it -- a bomb threat had been phoned into SCNF, the train company, and all the trains in and out of Paris were halted. Given France’s recent history with terrorism, it was a reasonable response, but still…. They finally start posting delay times -- 40 mins, then over an hour, but then it shrinks back. I pull up Google Maps. The drive to CDG is showing about the same time as the train, but we’d be in control of our own destiny. I walk down to the rental car offices. It’s Sunday morning; they’re all closed. They won’t open until the afternoon; too late for us to drive and make our flights. </li><li>Time continues to tick by, past the departure time for our flight. I call United -- any other options? I get a phenomenally helpful agent. I can hear the keystrokes. Nothing else today Sunday, nor tomorrow, Monday. I wasn’t surprised about nothing available today, but was about the next day -- until I got a text from Andrew. He was on this morning’s United flight to Chicago which just cancelled for a hydraulic problem and rebooked on tomorrow’s flight -- which explains the lack of seats for us. I took the Tuesday seats. Now would we get to CDG in time for Claire’s EasyJet flight to Edinburgh so she can make class the next day. The trains finally start moving. We head down and board our train. And then wait, and wait some &nbsp;more. And then the train starts moving. I look at my watch. I think Claire will be OK. </li><li>Until we come to a stop in the middle of a rail yard. I watch a couple of guys walk past our car -- maybe a visual inspection? After a bit, we start moving -- backwards. The conductor keys the mike, and makes an announcement in rapid French that we can’t pick up. I open Google Maps. I see we’re off to the east of Paris but can’t tell if we’re moving in the right direction. Until we pull into the next station -- it’s for EuroDisney. I find our train route on the SCNF website and see this is one of the stops en route to CDG, so we’re going in the right direction. We get to CDG by 3pm, which means Claire can make her flight. Andrew comes over from the Airport Hilton, where United is putting him up for the night, and we head down to Paris for another dinner together. There are, after all, worse cities to have to spend an extra day or two.</li><li> Bridge Music —  <em>Parisian </em>Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)<br> Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License<br> http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><em>Act 3</em> - Tuesday morning, Paris. Our forced layover in Paris yesterday had been a beautiful day, &nbsp;sunny and warm. We walked through the Marais, south across Ile de la Cite, taking the obligatory selfie in front of Notre Dame that we pulled out at looked at two weeks later during the news coverage of the fire, and then rattled around the Latin Quarter looking for a place with outdoor seating and a nice rosé. This morning, though, not so beautiful. It was dumping rain. So rather than trundle our luggage 10 min to the Metro stop, I decide to order an Uber -- which takes a try or two when Chase declines my Visa again; and I switch over to Amex. A nice black Mercedes picks us up and heads for Les Halles -- or at least tries to. The traffic is a crawl at best. I watch our buffer time tick away and we’re not &nbsp;getting any closer. After sitting through a couple of traffic light cycles without clearing the intersection, we grab our bags and make for Les Halles on foot. We get there, a bit wet. We’re able to skip the ticket booth line; I have enough euros for the self-service machine, because it’s that or a chip-&amp;-pin card we don’t have. We get on the train. I look at my watch - we should have enough time to check our bags (bringing back some liquids), clear security, and get to the gate without too much more agita.</li><li>Until the train slows to a stop between stops. The conductor keys the mike, and makes an announcement in rapid French. I look at the other passengers. They don’t seem too agitated. I figure it’s some congestion on the track ahead. And, sure enough, we start moving after a couple of minutes. But at the next stop, the train doors stay open and a train employee come on, saying in French <em>and</em> English -- everyone has to get off, catch a bus outside the station to another station, then catch a different train to the airport. We head down the bus stop. There’s no one there to help; just a couple hundred people milling around.</li><li>Now I’m worried. We have no time to figure this out. The taxi stand is mobbed, I fire up Uber - 19-minute wait. Lyft? They’re not in Paris. I google to find taxi company but before I call, I try Uber one more time -- a 5-minute wait for a €60 fare. I hit the order button -- and then again after I swap over to Amex. €60 for a 15-minute ride to CDG is tough, but it’s cheaper than another night in a hotel. We get to the United desk 2 minutes before luggage check closes for our flight. The agent radioed down, checked in our bags, and then gave us the CDG version of Fast Track, so we could sidestep the long passport control and security lines. We board, sit down, but don’t really settle in until the plane leaves the ground. And when we’re finally at ORD, standing by the luggage carousel, our bags are the first ones to come out.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #150</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_150.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<p><!--EndFragment--></p>\n<p></p>','Podcast #150 — Travel Interruptus','','inherit','closed','closed','','2402-revision-v1','','','2019-04-22 22:41:38','2019-04-23 03:41:38','',2402,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/2402-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2424,1,'2019-04-22 22:42:36','2019-04-23 03:42:36','<!-- wp:image {\"id\":2404,\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/CoeazhcUMAAhyQN-300x251.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2404\"/><figcaption>This guy looks familiar...</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It\'s been a tough month for travel. Not quite to Book of Job-level torment, but two of this month\'s three trips spiraled into head-shaking metaphysical “What the hell is going on here” questioning of my decision to get out of bed that morning. I walk through the travel gods\' fun and games, as well as some new data on regional jet delays and buying a new travel bag.  All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_150.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<figure><iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/610046667&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe></figure>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To read the Detailed Show Notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To read the Detailed Show Notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #150: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, as the weather begins to stagger unsteadily toward Spring -- 74 degrees on Monday, 5.3 inches of snow (thundersnow!) on Sunday, then back up into the 70’s two days later. &nbsp;April 14 -- over 5 inches of snow, over 1,000 flights cancelled. A nasty surprise for folks who thought it would be safe to connect through ORD, but just validates a Chicago truism -- don’t put the snow gear away until after Tax Day. Yup, welcome to the Midwest.</li><li>Have done a <em>chunk</em> of travel -- there’s a unit of measure for you -- since the last episode. A 2-day trip that hit 4 airports in the first day -- Chicago-Midway, Las Vegas, Houston-Hobby, and Nashville. The next week, I squoze in a trip to a new airport - State College, PA -- before heading out on vacation to Brittany, France. The squeeze wasn’t too tight -- flew back from State College on Weds night and left on vacation Thursday night -- but I did scout out a couple of backups in case the United Express regional jet went AWOL; a hour or so drive down to Harrisburg, a couple hour drive over to Pittsburgh. Luckily, I didn’t need them. United Express was having a good day, and therefore, so did I.</li><li>The next day’s flight to Paris on SAS by way of Stockholm went fine. We got in on time, found the left luggage lockers, and then the express train into the city all without much hassle. Arlanda Airport is comfortably sized and has good signage. The only real problem was that we got into center city Stockholm too early -- around 8:30am -- and nothing was really open. So we coffee’d up at one place, had some cardamom pastries at another, and generally puttered around until things started opening up an hour or so later. It was a sunny, if brisk, day, so walking around the Gamla Stan and Sodermalm was nice. </li><li>I always chuckle a bit when going through De Gaulle Airport, passing through the tangle of flat escalator walkway tubes that bridge the levels and open center of Terminal 1. The walkways are a bit awkward with wheeled luggage -- going down and then up. An airport porter in front of us let a wheelchair go free on the downhill span -- took a moment for it to register that it was empty -- then it rolled back to him on the uphill. No knock against him; it was the end of the day.</li><li>The next day, we caught the train out to Brittany, to Saint Malo. We walked out of the train station and across the street to Europcar for what was one of the easiest rental car pick-ups I’ve ever had in Europe. No scare-tactic insurance upselling -- just a look at my driver’s license and a quick pointer to where I could find the car in the train station parking lot. Five minutes, max. And dropping off the car a week later at Rennes train station? Absolutely the easiest rental drop-off -- gave the guy the keys and a receipt showing I’d filled up the car and I was done. No waiting for him to go inspect the car, just a handshake and “Have a good day”. </li><li>The next day wasn’t near as carefree, but we’ll talk about that in a few minutes.</li><li> Bridge Music — <em>Countryside Summer Joyride</em> by Kara Square (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mindmapthat/56281 Ft: Javolenus</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I’ve been not-quite-hating on, but certainly have been down on regional jets for quite some time on this podcast. Given a choice, I recommend people avoid them -- not because of their size, but their schedule dependability. Because the regional airlines’ model is to bounce a plane from place to place rather than route through hubs, they never recover from weather or mechanical delays. Those delays just cascade through the rest of the day. Now there often aren’t alternatives. Hence my earlier comment about needing backup plans for my regional jet flight home from State College. My flight was at the end of the day, the most vulnerable time to delays. Given my personal experience, &nbsp;I wasn’t surprised to read that US Dept of Transportation data showed that regional flights were 2-4 times more likely to be cancelled than mainline flights. The Chicago Tribune dug into the DOT data and found flights operated by Delta’s regional partners were 4 times more likely to be canceled than flights operated by Delta, while American Eagle and United Express were 2-3 times more likely to cancel flights than their mainline partners. You can’t avoid regional jets when going to places like State College or Charlottesville, VA or Appleton, WI -- but you can when flying to LGA or DFW or MSY. And in those cases, unless those RJ flights have exactly the schedule I need, I’ll suffer a bit of inconvenience for a lot more dependability.</li><li>On our travels through Brittany earlier this month, I found that we were getting a large number of “card declined” messages when trying to use our Chase Sapphire Visa card -- at gas stations, stores, and in Paris when I tried to use my Uber app. Now this isn’t a new card -- we’ve had it for over 5 years -- and it’s not the first time we’ve used it on travels in Europe. But Chase fraud algorithm seems more sensitive, throwing more false positives, and no way to update things. On the way out of Brest, I pulled into a Total gas station to fill up on our way to the Crozon peninsula. We’d be there for a couple of days of hiking and I wasn’t sure many gas stations we’d see (turned out that I didn’t need to worry). I pull up to a pump, tap the Chase Visa, get a decline. Insert the card into the reader; get another decline. I do the same drill with my Citi MasterCard with the same result. However, I immediately get a fraud alert from Citi. I hit the big green “Yes” button on the e-mail -- as in, “Yes, I do recognize this charge” -- get an “all clear” response back, tap my Citi card again and fill up my tank. All this time, we get nothing from Chase. I open the Chase app on my phone; nothing there either. Same thing in Paris when I needed an Uber fast (more on that in a bit). Chase declined, but my Amex Platinum card went through. For me, it was just annoying; I always carry a full set of cards when traveling -- a Visa and a MasterCard from different banks, and an Amex -- because single points of failure when traveling are bad -- I don’t want to be left hanging if one bank or one card processor drops their network or loses a data center. Oh, and I also carry cash. But, as we’ve <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"talked (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/02/10/podcast-148-travel-potpourri-for-200-alex/\" target=\"_blank\">talked</a> <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"about (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/12/17/podcast-147-holiday-travel-tips-notes-from-santa-fe/\" target=\"_blank\">about</a> <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"before (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\" target=\"_blank\">before</a>, that’s ‘cause I’m old-school.</li><li>Brittany was a touring vacation, so we were moving every couple of days or so -- packing, unpacking, repacking. During one of those repacking sessions, maybe in Morgat on the Crozon peninsula -- I couldn’t find my Bose headphone case, which had my Bose headphones, in my backpack -- and I didn’t remember pulling out. Where the hell did they go, I asked myself. I pull everything out of my backpack and -- oh, there they are; they had slipped behind my camera bag in the bottom of my backpack. How did I lose my headphones in my backpack, you may ask -- and rightfully so because it really sounds stupid. Probably the same reason I lost a Google tablet in there a few years back -- too much black. The Bose case is black, the interior of Timbuk 2 backpack is black, my eyes aren’t as good as they used to be… I’d been toying around with getting a new bag, more of a messenger style -- that I could sling over one shoulder and with a bit better waterproofing. And, after this little panic drill, a non-black interior. I ended up getting a small Timbuk 2 Classic messenger bag from the Outlet section of REI.com for $50. It’s not too big -- holds my 11-inch MacBook Air, a couple of notebooks, an umbrella -- and has a bright yellow interior. I haven’t lost anything in it yet -- but I don’t trust myself. Maybe I need to get, like a white umbrella, and spray paint my Bose case red. I love black, but maybe I’ve taken that color palette a bit too far.</li><li>And if you have any travel rants, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. &nbsp;The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"mpeacock (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Facebook page (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Facebook page</a> or our Instagram account at <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\" (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Travelcommons</a> -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li> Bridge Music —  <em>Jester of the Golden Apocalypse</em> by Super_Sigil (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Super_Sigil/34750 </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Travel Interruptus</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A Greek tragedy in three acts where the travel gods toy with our anti-hero for fun and entertainment</li><li>OK, maybe not quite that bad, not quite Book of Job-level torment, but two out of the three trips I’ve taken in the past month spiraled into head-shaking metaphysical “What the hell is going on here” questioning of my decision to get out of bed that morning.</li><li><em>Act 1</em> - My Midway-Vegas-Nashville travel day. This trip didn’t start out to be stupid. It started as an easy day trip to downtown Nashville for a sales call. So many people are abandoning Chicago for Nashville, Southwest has non-stop flights every 90 minutes, so no problem with flight times. That works out fine -- until someone books a sales call the prior afternoon -- in Las Vegas. Hmmm, how do I get from Vegas after 4pm Pacific to Nashville in time for a meeting the next morning Central time? Southwest is about the only choice, connecting through either Denver or Houston. I go for the more direct routing through Denver -- my first mistake.</li><li>Because, as it turned out, the March “bomb cyclone” -- what the Weather Channel helpfully named “Winter Storm Ulmer” (who or what is an Ulmer?) -- was going to shut down DIA that day with 80 mph winds. I got an e-mail from Southwest the day before canceling my connection through Denver -- understandable -- but nothing else, no rebooking, just “We’re leaving you in Vegas” -- which I’ve found tends to be Southwest’s MO -- pleasantly unhelpful. Especially when the website errored out when I tried to find an alternate routing to Nashville, and the automated message answering their 800 number was estimating 80-some minute hold times. After about 45 minutes, between banging on the website, our corporate Concur app, and tweeting at their customer service, I managed to get re-routed through Houston, safely south of the bomb cyclone.</li><li>The next morning, I show up at the gate at Midway to find my 8am flight to Vegas delayed by 2 hours -- mechanical on the plane here meant they had to bring in a new plane and crew from somewhere else. Annoying, but not critical; I’d get into Vegas at noon for a 2pm meeting. I get another coffee, log into the Boingo hotspot and clear some emails. 9:40, we line up and board. And wait. Then the captain keys the mike, pauses (never a good sign) and then starts talking - he didn’t have time to do the walkaround before we boarded because they came in late. When they did, they noticed a problem with the front strut. Maintenance is looking at it, don’t know if they can fix it, but they need everyone off the plane. So we deplane for what is now my 2nd maintenance delay. We idle around the gate area. 10:30 and nothing. I start looking at my watch. If I’m don’t get into Vegas by 1pm, there won’t be enough time to get to my 2pm meeting, and so I shouldn’t get on the plane. Then they start to re-board us. What time will we get in? 12:20. OK, I’ll board. We all get back on -- and for the most part retaking the seats we had, in spite of Southwest’s open seating. We are creatures of habit. I’m surprised no one moo’d. We’re all on, and we wait. The mike keys. There’s a slight moan rather than a moo from the cabin. We’re waiting on the paperwork. It’s always paperwork. I’m looking at my watch. It’s past 11am Central and the door is still open. A 4-hour flight means we’re now coming up against that 1pm Pacific arrive time. Do I stay on the plane? A couple minutes more and my decision is made for me; they close the door. I lean back, put on my headphones and hope for no headwinds. We get to the gate at 1:02pm. Vegas is always a maze; there’s no straight walkways; they always want to vector you through a thicket of slot machines. I head to the cab rank -- shorter walk and no waiting -- and I get a guy with a heavy foot. I’m at the client 5 minutes before the meeting. That was a bit too close.</li><li>My return trip to the airport and the flight to Houston are uneventful, not even any turbulence as we skirt that bomb cyclone. We get into Hobby maybe even a bit early. I grab a beer and then head over to the gate. They call boarding - just half the A group -- 1-30 -- because that’s all there is on this late flight to Nashville. The gate agent scans the boarding passes, saying “You’re in Row 3, you’re in Row 4, you’re in Row 5….” &nbsp;We get all get in our separate rows, and then wait. The captain keys the mike, pauses, and then says “This plane had a bird strike on the nose on landing. There’s no damage, but Maintenance has to pull the nose cone off for a visual inspection. It’ll take about an hour, so you’re free to get off the plane.” But by now, everything in the airport was closed. “My 3rd maintenance delay of the day. Unbelievable!” I tweet out in frustrustration. Except that iPhone autocorrect turned “delay” into “deejay”. Hilary Baumann pointed it out with a nice emoji-laden tweet that gave me a good chuckle. I finally got to my Nashville hotel around 1:30 in the morning. I looked at the time, shook my head, and went to bed.</li><li> Bridge Music —  South Texas Cowboy Blues by texasradiofish (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/texasradiofish/52030 Ft: unreal_dm, ElRon XChile</li><li><em>Act 2</em> - A couple of weeks later, on Sunday in Rennes, France. We wheeled our luggage the 2 blocks from our AirBnB to Rennes train station for the TGV to CDG. We stood with everyone else, looking up at the departure board waiting for the track to be posted. Departure time came closer and still no track -- not a good sign. The crowd grew larger. There was an announcement in French and a scrolling message at the bottom of the departure screen. Irene banged it into Google Translate. The gist of it -- a bomb threat had been phoned into SCNF, the train company, and all the trains in and out of Paris were halted. Given France’s recent history with terrorism, it was a reasonable response, but still…. They finally start posting delay times -- 40 mins, then over an hour, but then it shrinks back. I pull up Google Maps. The drive to CDG is showing about the same time as the train, but we’d be in control of our own destiny. I walk down to the rental car offices. It’s Sunday morning; they’re all closed. They won’t open until the afternoon; too late for us to drive and make our flights. </li><li>Time continues to tick by, past the departure time for our flight. I call United -- any other options? I get a phenomenally helpful agent. I can hear the keystrokes. Nothing else today Sunday, nor tomorrow, Monday. I wasn’t surprised about nothing available today, but was about the next day -- until I got a text from Andrew. He was on this morning’s United flight to Chicago which just cancelled for a hydraulic problem and rebooked on tomorrow’s flight -- which explains the lack of seats for us. I took the Tuesday seats. Now would we get to CDG in time for Claire’s EasyJet flight to Edinburgh so she can make class the next day. The trains finally start moving. We head down and board our train. And then wait, and wait some &nbsp;more. And then the train starts moving. I look at my watch. I think Claire will be OK. </li><li>Until we come to a stop in the middle of a rail yard. I watch a couple of guys walk past our car -- maybe a visual inspection? After a bit, we start moving -- backwards. The conductor keys the mike, and makes an announcement in rapid French that we can’t pick up. I open Google Maps. I see we’re off to the east of Paris but can’t tell if we’re moving in the right direction. Until we pull into the next station -- it’s for EuroDisney. I find our train route on the SCNF website and see this is one of the stops en route to CDG, so we’re going in the right direction. We get to CDG by 3pm, which means Claire can make her flight. Andrew comes over from the Airport Hilton, where United is putting him up for the night, and we head down to Paris for another dinner together. There are, after all, worse cities to have to spend an extra day or two.</li><li> Bridge Music —  <em>Parisian </em>Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)<br> Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License<br> http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><em>Act 3</em> - Tuesday morning, Paris. Our forced layover in Paris yesterday had been a beautiful day, &nbsp;sunny and warm. We walked through the Marais, south across Ile de la Cite, taking the obligatory selfie in front of Notre Dame that we pulled out at looked at two weeks later during the news coverage of the fire, and then rattled around the Latin Quarter looking for a place with outdoor seating and a nice rosé. This morning, though, not so beautiful. It was dumping rain. So rather than trundle our luggage 10 min to the Metro stop, I decide to order an Uber -- which takes a try or two when Chase declines my Visa again; and I switch over to Amex. A nice black Mercedes picks us up and heads for Les Halles -- or at least tries to. The traffic is a crawl at best. I watch our buffer time tick away and we’re not &nbsp;getting any closer. After sitting through a couple of traffic light cycles without clearing the intersection, we grab our bags and make for Les Halles on foot. We get there, a bit wet. We’re able to skip the ticket booth line; I have enough euros for the self-service machine, because it’s that or a chip-&amp;-pin card we don’t have. We get on the train. I look at my watch - we should have enough time to check our bags (bringing back some liquids), clear security, and get to the gate without too much more agita.</li><li>Until the train slows to a stop between stops. The conductor keys the mike, and makes an announcement in rapid French. I look at the other passengers. They don’t seem too agitated. I figure it’s some congestion on the track ahead. And, sure enough, we start moving after a couple of minutes. But at the next stop, the train doors stay open and a train employee come on, saying in French <em>and</em> English -- everyone has to get off, catch a bus outside the station to another station, then catch a different train to the airport. We head down the bus stop. There’s no one there to help; just a couple hundred people milling around.</li><li>Now I’m worried. We have no time to figure this out. The taxi stand is mobbed, I fire up Uber - 19-minute wait. Lyft? They’re not in Paris. I google to find taxi company but before I call, I try Uber one more time -- a 5-minute wait for a €60 fare. I hit the order button -- and then again after I swap over to Amex. €60 for a 15-minute ride to CDG is tough, but it’s cheaper than another night in a hotel. We get to the United desk 2 minutes before luggage check closes for our flight. The agent radioed down, checked in our bags, and then gave us the CDG version of Fast Track, so we could sidestep the long passport control and security lines. We board, sit down, but don’t really settle in until the plane leaves the ground. And when we’re finally at ORD, standing by the luggage carousel, our bags are the first ones to come out.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #150</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_150.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<p><!--EndFragment--></p>\n<p></p>','Podcast #150 — Travel Interruptus','','inherit','closed','closed','','2402-revision-v1','','','2019-04-22 22:42:36','2019-04-23 03:42:36','',2402,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/2402-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2425,1,'2019-04-22 22:45:05','2019-04-23 03:45:05','<!-- wp:image {\"id\":2404,\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/CoeazhcUMAAhyQN-300x251.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2404\"/><figcaption>This guy looks familiar...</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It\'s been a tough month for travel. Not quite to Book of Job-level torment, but two of this month\'s three trips spiraled into head-shaking metaphysical “What the hell is going on here” questioning of my decision to get out of bed that morning. I walk through the travel gods\' fun and games, as well as some new data on regional jet delays and buying a new travel bag.  All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_150.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/610046667&color=%23ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true\"></iframe>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To read the Detailed Show Notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To read the Detailed Show Notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #150: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, as the weather begins to stagger unsteadily toward Spring -- 74 degrees on Monday, 5.3 inches of snow (thundersnow!) on Sunday, then back up into the 70’s two days later. &nbsp;April 14 -- over 5 inches of snow, over 1,000 flights cancelled. A nasty surprise for folks who thought it would be safe to connect through ORD, but just validates a Chicago truism -- don’t put the snow gear away until after Tax Day. Yup, welcome to the Midwest.</li><li>Have done a <em>chunk</em> of travel -- there’s a unit of measure for you -- since the last episode. A 2-day trip that hit 4 airports in the first day -- Chicago-Midway, Las Vegas, Houston-Hobby, and Nashville. The next week, I squoze in a trip to a new airport - State College, PA -- before heading out on vacation to Brittany, France. The squeeze wasn’t too tight -- flew back from State College on Weds night and left on vacation Thursday night -- but I did scout out a couple of backups in case the United Express regional jet went AWOL; a hour or so drive down to Harrisburg, a couple hour drive over to Pittsburgh. Luckily, I didn’t need them. United Express was having a good day, and therefore, so did I.</li><li>The next day’s flight to Paris on SAS by way of Stockholm went fine. We got in on time, found the left luggage lockers, and then the express train into the city all without much hassle. Arlanda Airport is comfortably sized and has good signage. The only real problem was that we got into center city Stockholm too early -- around 8:30am -- and nothing was really open. So we coffee’d up at one place, had some cardamom pastries at another, and generally puttered around until things started opening up an hour or so later. It was a sunny, if brisk, day, so walking around the Gamla Stan and Sodermalm was nice. </li><li>I always chuckle a bit when going through De Gaulle Airport, passing through the tangle of flat escalator walkway tubes that bridge the levels and open center of Terminal 1. The walkways are a bit awkward with wheeled luggage -- going down and then up. An airport porter in front of us let a wheelchair go free on the downhill span -- took a moment for it to register that it was empty -- then it rolled back to him on the uphill. No knock against him; it was the end of the day.</li><li>The next day, we caught the train out to Brittany, to Saint Malo. We walked out of the train station and across the street to Europcar for what was one of the easiest rental car pick-ups I’ve ever had in Europe. No scare-tactic insurance upselling -- just a look at my driver’s license and a quick pointer to where I could find the car in the train station parking lot. Five minutes, max. And dropping off the car a week later at Rennes train station? Absolutely the easiest rental drop-off -- gave the guy the keys and a receipt showing I’d filled up the car and I was done. No waiting for him to go inspect the car, just a handshake and “Have a good day”. </li><li>The next day wasn’t near as carefree, but we’ll talk about that in a few minutes.</li><li> Bridge Music — <em>Countryside Summer Joyride</em> by Kara Square (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mindmapthat/56281 Ft: Javolenus</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I’ve been not-quite-hating on, but certainly have been down on regional jets for quite some time on this podcast. Given a choice, I recommend people avoid them -- not because of their size, but their schedule dependability. Because the regional airlines’ model is to bounce a plane from place to place rather than route through hubs, they never recover from weather or mechanical delays. Those delays just cascade through the rest of the day. Now there often aren’t alternatives. Hence my earlier comment about needing backup plans for my regional jet flight home from State College. My flight was at the end of the day, the most vulnerable time to delays. Given my personal experience, &nbsp;I wasn’t surprised to read that US Dept of Transportation data showed that regional flights were 2-4 times more likely to be cancelled than mainline flights. The Chicago Tribune dug into the DOT data and found flights operated by Delta’s regional partners were 4 times more likely to be canceled than flights operated by Delta, while American Eagle and United Express were 2-3 times more likely to cancel flights than their mainline partners. You can’t avoid regional jets when going to places like State College or Charlottesville, VA or Appleton, WI -- but you can when flying to LGA or DFW or MSY. And in those cases, unless those RJ flights have exactly the schedule I need, I’ll suffer a bit of inconvenience for a lot more dependability.</li><li>On our travels through Brittany earlier this month, I found that we were getting a large number of “card declined” messages when trying to use our Chase Sapphire Visa card -- at gas stations, stores, and in Paris when I tried to use my Uber app. Now this isn’t a new card -- we’ve had it for over 5 years -- and it’s not the first time we’ve used it on travels in Europe. But Chase fraud algorithm seems more sensitive, throwing more false positives, and no way to update things. On the way out of Brest, I pulled into a Total gas station to fill up on our way to the Crozon peninsula. We’d be there for a couple of days of hiking and I wasn’t sure many gas stations we’d see (turned out that I didn’t need to worry). I pull up to a pump, tap the Chase Visa, get a decline. Insert the card into the reader; get another decline. I do the same drill with my Citi MasterCard with the same result. However, I immediately get a fraud alert from Citi. I hit the big green “Yes” button on the e-mail -- as in, “Yes, I do recognize this charge” -- get an “all clear” response back, tap my Citi card again and fill up my tank. All this time, we get nothing from Chase. I open the Chase app on my phone; nothing there either. Same thing in Paris when I needed an Uber fast (more on that in a bit). Chase declined, but my Amex Platinum card went through. For me, it was just annoying; I always carry a full set of cards when traveling -- a Visa and a MasterCard from different banks, and an Amex -- because single points of failure when traveling are bad -- I don’t want to be left hanging if one bank or one card processor drops their network or loses a data center. Oh, and I also carry cash. But, as we’ve <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"talked (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/02/10/podcast-148-travel-potpourri-for-200-alex/\" target=\"_blank\">talked</a> <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"about (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/12/17/podcast-147-holiday-travel-tips-notes-from-santa-fe/\" target=\"_blank\">about</a> <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"before (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\" target=\"_blank\">before</a>, that’s ‘cause I’m old-school.</li><li>Brittany was a touring vacation, so we were moving every couple of days or so -- packing, unpacking, repacking. During one of those repacking sessions, maybe in Morgat on the Crozon peninsula -- I couldn’t find my Bose headphone case, which had my Bose headphones, in my backpack -- and I didn’t remember pulling out. Where the hell did they go, I asked myself. I pull everything out of my backpack and -- oh, there they are; they had slipped behind my camera bag in the bottom of my backpack. How did I lose my headphones in my backpack, you may ask -- and rightfully so because it really sounds stupid. Probably the same reason I lost a Google tablet in there a few years back -- too much black. The Bose case is black, the interior of Timbuk 2 backpack is black, my eyes aren’t as good as they used to be… I’d been toying around with getting a new bag, more of a messenger style -- that I could sling over one shoulder and with a bit better waterproofing. And, after this little panic drill, a non-black interior. I ended up getting a small Timbuk 2 Classic messenger bag from the Outlet section of REI.com for $50. It’s not too big -- holds my 11-inch MacBook Air, a couple of notebooks, an umbrella -- and has a bright yellow interior. I haven’t lost anything in it yet -- but I don’t trust myself. Maybe I need to get, like a white umbrella, and spray paint my Bose case red. I love black, but maybe I’ve taken that color palette a bit too far.</li><li>And if you have any travel rants, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. &nbsp;The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"mpeacock (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Facebook page (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Facebook page</a> or our Instagram account at <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\" (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Travelcommons</a> -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li> Bridge Music —  <em>Jester of the Golden Apocalypse</em> by Super_Sigil (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Super_Sigil/34750 </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Travel Interruptus</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A Greek tragedy in three acts where the travel gods toy with our anti-hero for fun and entertainment</li><li>OK, maybe not quite that bad, not quite Book of Job-level torment, but two out of the three trips I’ve taken in the past month spiraled into head-shaking metaphysical “What the hell is going on here” questioning of my decision to get out of bed that morning.</li><li><em>Act 1</em> - My Midway-Vegas-Nashville travel day. This trip didn’t start out to be stupid. It started as an easy day trip to downtown Nashville for a sales call. So many people are abandoning Chicago for Nashville, Southwest has non-stop flights every 90 minutes, so no problem with flight times. That works out fine -- until someone books a sales call the prior afternoon -- in Las Vegas. Hmmm, how do I get from Vegas after 4pm Pacific to Nashville in time for a meeting the next morning Central time? Southwest is about the only choice, connecting through either Denver or Houston. I go for the more direct routing through Denver -- my first mistake.</li><li>Because, as it turned out, the March “bomb cyclone” -- what the Weather Channel helpfully named “Winter Storm Ulmer” (who or what is an Ulmer?) -- was going to shut down DIA that day with 80 mph winds. I got an e-mail from Southwest the day before canceling my connection through Denver -- understandable -- but nothing else, no rebooking, just “We’re leaving you in Vegas” -- which I’ve found tends to be Southwest’s MO -- pleasantly unhelpful. Especially when the website errored out when I tried to find an alternate routing to Nashville, and the automated message answering their 800 number was estimating 80-some minute hold times. After about 45 minutes, between banging on the website, our corporate Concur app, and tweeting at their customer service, I managed to get re-routed through Houston, safely south of the bomb cyclone.</li><li>The next morning, I show up at the gate at Midway to find my 8am flight to Vegas delayed by 2 hours -- mechanical on the plane here meant they had to bring in a new plane and crew from somewhere else. Annoying, but not critical; I’d get into Vegas at noon for a 2pm meeting. I get another coffee, log into the Boingo hotspot and clear some emails. 9:40, we line up and board. And wait. Then the captain keys the mike, pauses (never a good sign) and then starts talking - he didn’t have time to do the walkaround before we boarded because they came in late. When they did, they noticed a problem with the front strut. Maintenance is looking at it, don’t know if they can fix it, but they need everyone off the plane. So we deplane for what is now my 2nd maintenance delay. We idle around the gate area. 10:30 and nothing. I start looking at my watch. If I’m don’t get into Vegas by 1pm, there won’t be enough time to get to my 2pm meeting, and so I shouldn’t get on the plane. Then they start to re-board us. What time will we get in? 12:20. OK, I’ll board. We all get back on -- and for the most part retaking the seats we had, in spite of Southwest’s open seating. We are creatures of habit. I’m surprised no one moo’d. We’re all on, and we wait. The mike keys. There’s a slight moan rather than a moo from the cabin. We’re waiting on the paperwork. It’s always paperwork. I’m looking at my watch. It’s past 11am Central and the door is still open. A 4-hour flight means we’re now coming up against that 1pm Pacific arrive time. Do I stay on the plane? A couple minutes more and my decision is made for me; they close the door. I lean back, put on my headphones and hope for no headwinds. We get to the gate at 1:02pm. Vegas is always a maze; there’s no straight walkways; they always want to vector you through a thicket of slot machines. I head to the cab rank -- shorter walk and no waiting -- and I get a guy with a heavy foot. I’m at the client 5 minutes before the meeting. That was a bit too close.</li><li>My return trip to the airport and the flight to Houston are uneventful, not even any turbulence as we skirt that bomb cyclone. We get into Hobby maybe even a bit early. I grab a beer and then head over to the gate. They call boarding - just half the A group -- 1-30 -- because that’s all there is on this late flight to Nashville. The gate agent scans the boarding passes, saying “You’re in Row 3, you’re in Row 4, you’re in Row 5….” &nbsp;We get all get in our separate rows, and then wait. The captain keys the mike, pauses, and then says “This plane had a bird strike on the nose on landing. There’s no damage, but Maintenance has to pull the nose cone off for a visual inspection. It’ll take about an hour, so you’re free to get off the plane.” But by now, everything in the airport was closed. “My 3rd maintenance delay of the day. Unbelievable!” I tweet out in frustrustration. Except that iPhone autocorrect turned “delay” into “deejay”. Hilary Baumann pointed it out with a nice emoji-laden tweet that gave me a good chuckle. I finally got to my Nashville hotel around 1:30 in the morning. I looked at the time, shook my head, and went to bed.</li><li> Bridge Music —  South Texas Cowboy Blues by texasradiofish (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/texasradiofish/52030 Ft: unreal_dm, ElRon XChile</li><li><em>Act 2</em> - A couple of weeks later, on Sunday in Rennes, France. We wheeled our luggage the 2 blocks from our AirBnB to Rennes train station for the TGV to CDG. We stood with everyone else, looking up at the departure board waiting for the track to be posted. Departure time came closer and still no track -- not a good sign. The crowd grew larger. There was an announcement in French and a scrolling message at the bottom of the departure screen. Irene banged it into Google Translate. The gist of it -- a bomb threat had been phoned into SCNF, the train company, and all the trains in and out of Paris were halted. Given France’s recent history with terrorism, it was a reasonable response, but still…. They finally start posting delay times -- 40 mins, then over an hour, but then it shrinks back. I pull up Google Maps. The drive to CDG is showing about the same time as the train, but we’d be in control of our own destiny. I walk down to the rental car offices. It’s Sunday morning; they’re all closed. They won’t open until the afternoon; too late for us to drive and make our flights. </li><li>Time continues to tick by, past the departure time for our flight. I call United -- any other options? I get a phenomenally helpful agent. I can hear the keystrokes. Nothing else today Sunday, nor tomorrow, Monday. I wasn’t surprised about nothing available today, but was about the next day -- until I got a text from Andrew. He was on this morning’s United flight to Chicago which just cancelled for a hydraulic problem and rebooked on tomorrow’s flight -- which explains the lack of seats for us. I took the Tuesday seats. Now would we get to CDG in time for Claire’s EasyJet flight to Edinburgh so she can make class the next day. The trains finally start moving. We head down and board our train. And then wait, and wait some &nbsp;more. And then the train starts moving. I look at my watch. I think Claire will be OK. </li><li>Until we come to a stop in the middle of a rail yard. I watch a couple of guys walk past our car -- maybe a visual inspection? After a bit, we start moving -- backwards. The conductor keys the mike, and makes an announcement in rapid French that we can’t pick up. I open Google Maps. I see we’re off to the east of Paris but can’t tell if we’re moving in the right direction. Until we pull into the next station -- it’s for EuroDisney. I find our train route on the SCNF website and see this is one of the stops en route to CDG, so we’re going in the right direction. We get to CDG by 3pm, which means Claire can make her flight. Andrew comes over from the Airport Hilton, where United is putting him up for the night, and we head down to Paris for another dinner together. There are, after all, worse cities to have to spend an extra day or two.</li><li> Bridge Music —  <em>Parisian </em>Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)<br> Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License<br> http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><em>Act 3</em> - Tuesday morning, Paris. Our forced layover in Paris yesterday had been a beautiful day, &nbsp;sunny and warm. We walked through the Marais, south across Ile de la Cite, taking the obligatory selfie in front of Notre Dame that we pulled out at looked at two weeks later during the news coverage of the fire, and then rattled around the Latin Quarter looking for a place with outdoor seating and a nice rosé. This morning, though, not so beautiful. It was dumping rain. So rather than trundle our luggage 10 min to the Metro stop, I decide to order an Uber -- which takes a try or two when Chase declines my Visa again; and I switch over to Amex. A nice black Mercedes picks us up and heads for Les Halles -- or at least tries to. The traffic is a crawl at best. I watch our buffer time tick away and we’re not &nbsp;getting any closer. After sitting through a couple of traffic light cycles without clearing the intersection, we grab our bags and make for Les Halles on foot. We get there, a bit wet. We’re able to skip the ticket booth line; I have enough euros for the self-service machine, because it’s that or a chip-&amp;-pin card we don’t have. We get on the train. I look at my watch - we should have enough time to check our bags (bringing back some liquids), clear security, and get to the gate without too much more agita.</li><li>Until the train slows to a stop between stops. The conductor keys the mike, and makes an announcement in rapid French. I look at the other passengers. They don’t seem too agitated. I figure it’s some congestion on the track ahead. And, sure enough, we start moving after a couple of minutes. But at the next stop, the train doors stay open and a train employee come on, saying in French <em>and</em> English -- everyone has to get off, catch a bus outside the station to another station, then catch a different train to the airport. We head down the bus stop. There’s no one there to help; just a couple hundred people milling around.</li><li>Now I’m worried. We have no time to figure this out. The taxi stand is mobbed, I fire up Uber - 19-minute wait. Lyft? They’re not in Paris. I google to find taxi company but before I call, I try Uber one more time -- a 5-minute wait for a €60 fare. I hit the order button -- and then again after I swap over to Amex. €60 for a 15-minute ride to CDG is tough, but it’s cheaper than another night in a hotel. We get to the United desk 2 minutes before luggage check closes for our flight. The agent radioed down, checked in our bags, and then gave us the CDG version of Fast Track, so we could sidestep the long passport control and security lines. We board, sit down, but don’t really settle in until the plane leaves the ground. And when we’re finally at ORD, standing by the luggage carousel, our bags are the first ones to come out.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #150</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_150.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<p><!--EndFragment--></p>\n<p></p>','Podcast #150 — Travel Interruptus','','inherit','closed','closed','','2402-revision-v1','','','2019-04-22 22:45:05','2019-04-23 03:45:05','',2402,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/2402-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2426,1,'2019-04-22 22:45:56','2019-04-23 03:45:56','<!-- wp:image {\"id\":2404,\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/CoeazhcUMAAhyQN-300x251.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2404\"/><figcaption>This guy looks familiar...</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It\'s been a tough month for travel. Not quite to Book of Job-level torment, but two of this month\'s three trips spiraled into head-shaking metaphysical “What the hell is going on here” questioning of my decision to get out of bed that morning. I walk through the travel gods\' fun and games, as well as some new data on regional jet delays and buying a new travel bag.  All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_150.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/610046667&color=%23ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true\"></iframe>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:block {\"ref\":2408} /-->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To read the Detailed Show Notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To read the Detailed Show Notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #150: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, as the weather begins to stagger unsteadily toward Spring -- 74 degrees on Monday, 5.3 inches of snow (thundersnow!) on Sunday, then back up into the 70’s two days later. &nbsp;April 14 -- over 5 inches of snow, over 1,000 flights cancelled. A nasty surprise for folks who thought it would be safe to connect through ORD, but just validates a Chicago truism -- don’t put the snow gear away until after Tax Day. Yup, welcome to the Midwest.</li><li>Have done a <em>chunk</em> of travel -- there’s a unit of measure for you -- since the last episode. A 2-day trip that hit 4 airports in the first day -- Chicago-Midway, Las Vegas, Houston-Hobby, and Nashville. The next week, I squoze in a trip to a new airport - State College, PA -- before heading out on vacation to Brittany, France. The squeeze wasn’t too tight -- flew back from State College on Weds night and left on vacation Thursday night -- but I did scout out a couple of backups in case the United Express regional jet went AWOL; a hour or so drive down to Harrisburg, a couple hour drive over to Pittsburgh. Luckily, I didn’t need them. United Express was having a good day, and therefore, so did I.</li><li>The next day’s flight to Paris on SAS by way of Stockholm went fine. We got in on time, found the left luggage lockers, and then the express train into the city all without much hassle. Arlanda Airport is comfortably sized and has good signage. The only real problem was that we got into center city Stockholm too early -- around 8:30am -- and nothing was really open. So we coffee’d up at one place, had some cardamom pastries at another, and generally puttered around until things started opening up an hour or so later. It was a sunny, if brisk, day, so walking around the Gamla Stan and Sodermalm was nice. </li><li>I always chuckle a bit when going through De Gaulle Airport, passing through the tangle of flat escalator walkway tubes that bridge the levels and open center of Terminal 1. The walkways are a bit awkward with wheeled luggage -- going down and then up. An airport porter in front of us let a wheelchair go free on the downhill span -- took a moment for it to register that it was empty -- then it rolled back to him on the uphill. No knock against him; it was the end of the day.</li><li>The next day, we caught the train out to Brittany, to Saint Malo. We walked out of the train station and across the street to Europcar for what was one of the easiest rental car pick-ups I’ve ever had in Europe. No scare-tactic insurance upselling -- just a look at my driver’s license and a quick pointer to where I could find the car in the train station parking lot. Five minutes, max. And dropping off the car a week later at Rennes train station? Absolutely the easiest rental drop-off -- gave the guy the keys and a receipt showing I’d filled up the car and I was done. No waiting for him to go inspect the car, just a handshake and “Have a good day”. </li><li>The next day wasn’t near as carefree, but we’ll talk about that in a few minutes.</li><li> Bridge Music — <em>Countryside Summer Joyride</em> by Kara Square (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mindmapthat/56281 Ft: Javolenus</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I’ve been not-quite-hating on, but certainly have been down on regional jets for quite some time on this podcast. Given a choice, I recommend people avoid them -- not because of their size, but their schedule dependability. Because the regional airlines’ model is to bounce a plane from place to place rather than route through hubs, they never recover from weather or mechanical delays. Those delays just cascade through the rest of the day. Now there often aren’t alternatives. Hence my earlier comment about needing backup plans for my regional jet flight home from State College. My flight was at the end of the day, the most vulnerable time to delays. Given my personal experience, &nbsp;I wasn’t surprised to read that US Dept of Transportation data showed that regional flights were 2-4 times more likely to be cancelled than mainline flights. The Chicago Tribune dug into the DOT data and found flights operated by Delta’s regional partners were 4 times more likely to be canceled than flights operated by Delta, while American Eagle and United Express were 2-3 times more likely to cancel flights than their mainline partners. You can’t avoid regional jets when going to places like State College or Charlottesville, VA or Appleton, WI -- but you can when flying to LGA or DFW or MSY. And in those cases, unless those RJ flights have exactly the schedule I need, I’ll suffer a bit of inconvenience for a lot more dependability.</li><li>On our travels through Brittany earlier this month, I found that we were getting a large number of “card declined” messages when trying to use our Chase Sapphire Visa card -- at gas stations, stores, and in Paris when I tried to use my Uber app. Now this isn’t a new card -- we’ve had it for over 5 years -- and it’s not the first time we’ve used it on travels in Europe. But Chase fraud algorithm seems more sensitive, throwing more false positives, and no way to update things. On the way out of Brest, I pulled into a Total gas station to fill up on our way to the Crozon peninsula. We’d be there for a couple of days of hiking and I wasn’t sure many gas stations we’d see (turned out that I didn’t need to worry). I pull up to a pump, tap the Chase Visa, get a decline. Insert the card into the reader; get another decline. I do the same drill with my Citi MasterCard with the same result. However, I immediately get a fraud alert from Citi. I hit the big green “Yes” button on the e-mail -- as in, “Yes, I do recognize this charge” -- get an “all clear” response back, tap my Citi card again and fill up my tank. All this time, we get nothing from Chase. I open the Chase app on my phone; nothing there either. Same thing in Paris when I needed an Uber fast (more on that in a bit). Chase declined, but my Amex Platinum card went through. For me, it was just annoying; I always carry a full set of cards when traveling -- a Visa and a MasterCard from different banks, and an Amex -- because single points of failure when traveling are bad -- I don’t want to be left hanging if one bank or one card processor drops their network or loses a data center. Oh, and I also carry cash. But, as we’ve <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"talked (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/02/10/podcast-148-travel-potpourri-for-200-alex/\" target=\"_blank\">talked</a> <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"about (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/12/17/podcast-147-holiday-travel-tips-notes-from-santa-fe/\" target=\"_blank\">about</a> <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"before (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\" target=\"_blank\">before</a>, that’s ‘cause I’m old-school.</li><li>Brittany was a touring vacation, so we were moving every couple of days or so -- packing, unpacking, repacking. During one of those repacking sessions, maybe in Morgat on the Crozon peninsula -- I couldn’t find my Bose headphone case, which had my Bose headphones, in my backpack -- and I didn’t remember pulling out. Where the hell did they go, I asked myself. I pull everything out of my backpack and -- oh, there they are; they had slipped behind my camera bag in the bottom of my backpack. How did I lose my headphones in my backpack, you may ask -- and rightfully so because it really sounds stupid. Probably the same reason I lost a Google tablet in there a few years back -- too much black. The Bose case is black, the interior of Timbuk 2 backpack is black, my eyes aren’t as good as they used to be… I’d been toying around with getting a new bag, more of a messenger style -- that I could sling over one shoulder and with a bit better waterproofing. And, after this little panic drill, a non-black interior. I ended up getting a small Timbuk 2 Classic messenger bag from the Outlet section of REI.com for $50. It’s not too big -- holds my 11-inch MacBook Air, a couple of notebooks, an umbrella -- and has a bright yellow interior. I haven’t lost anything in it yet -- but I don’t trust myself. Maybe I need to get, like a white umbrella, and spray paint my Bose case red. I love black, but maybe I’ve taken that color palette a bit too far.</li><li>And if you have any travel rants, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. &nbsp;The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"mpeacock (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Facebook page (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Facebook page</a> or our Instagram account at <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\" (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Travelcommons</a> -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li> Bridge Music —  <em>Jester of the Golden Apocalypse</em> by Super_Sigil (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Super_Sigil/34750 </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Travel Interruptus</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A Greek tragedy in three acts where the travel gods toy with our anti-hero for fun and entertainment</li><li>OK, maybe not quite that bad, not quite Book of Job-level torment, but two out of the three trips I’ve taken in the past month spiraled into head-shaking metaphysical “What the hell is going on here” questioning of my decision to get out of bed that morning.</li><li><em>Act 1</em> - My Midway-Vegas-Nashville travel day. This trip didn’t start out to be stupid. It started as an easy day trip to downtown Nashville for a sales call. So many people are abandoning Chicago for Nashville, Southwest has non-stop flights every 90 minutes, so no problem with flight times. That works out fine -- until someone books a sales call the prior afternoon -- in Las Vegas. Hmmm, how do I get from Vegas after 4pm Pacific to Nashville in time for a meeting the next morning Central time? Southwest is about the only choice, connecting through either Denver or Houston. I go for the more direct routing through Denver -- my first mistake.</li><li>Because, as it turned out, the March “bomb cyclone” -- what the Weather Channel helpfully named “Winter Storm Ulmer” (who or what is an Ulmer?) -- was going to shut down DIA that day with 80 mph winds. I got an e-mail from Southwest the day before canceling my connection through Denver -- understandable -- but nothing else, no rebooking, just “We’re leaving you in Vegas” -- which I’ve found tends to be Southwest’s MO -- pleasantly unhelpful. Especially when the website errored out when I tried to find an alternate routing to Nashville, and the automated message answering their 800 number was estimating 80-some minute hold times. After about 45 minutes, between banging on the website, our corporate Concur app, and tweeting at their customer service, I managed to get re-routed through Houston, safely south of the bomb cyclone.</li><li>The next morning, I show up at the gate at Midway to find my 8am flight to Vegas delayed by 2 hours -- mechanical on the plane here meant they had to bring in a new plane and crew from somewhere else. Annoying, but not critical; I’d get into Vegas at noon for a 2pm meeting. I get another coffee, log into the Boingo hotspot and clear some emails. 9:40, we line up and board. And wait. Then the captain keys the mike, pauses (never a good sign) and then starts talking - he didn’t have time to do the walkaround before we boarded because they came in late. When they did, they noticed a problem with the front strut. Maintenance is looking at it, don’t know if they can fix it, but they need everyone off the plane. So we deplane for what is now my 2nd maintenance delay. We idle around the gate area. 10:30 and nothing. I start looking at my watch. If I’m don’t get into Vegas by 1pm, there won’t be enough time to get to my 2pm meeting, and so I shouldn’t get on the plane. Then they start to re-board us. What time will we get in? 12:20. OK, I’ll board. We all get back on -- and for the most part retaking the seats we had, in spite of Southwest’s open seating. We are creatures of habit. I’m surprised no one moo’d. We’re all on, and we wait. The mike keys. There’s a slight moan rather than a moo from the cabin. We’re waiting on the paperwork. It’s always paperwork. I’m looking at my watch. It’s past 11am Central and the door is still open. A 4-hour flight means we’re now coming up against that 1pm Pacific arrive time. Do I stay on the plane? A couple minutes more and my decision is made for me; they close the door. I lean back, put on my headphones and hope for no headwinds. We get to the gate at 1:02pm. Vegas is always a maze; there’s no straight walkways; they always want to vector you through a thicket of slot machines. I head to the cab rank -- shorter walk and no waiting -- and I get a guy with a heavy foot. I’m at the client 5 minutes before the meeting. That was a bit too close.</li><li>My return trip to the airport and the flight to Houston are uneventful, not even any turbulence as we skirt that bomb cyclone. We get into Hobby maybe even a bit early. I grab a beer and then head over to the gate. They call boarding - just half the A group -- 1-30 -- because that’s all there is on this late flight to Nashville. The gate agent scans the boarding passes, saying “You’re in Row 3, you’re in Row 4, you’re in Row 5….” &nbsp;We get all get in our separate rows, and then wait. The captain keys the mike, pauses, and then says “This plane had a bird strike on the nose on landing. There’s no damage, but Maintenance has to pull the nose cone off for a visual inspection. It’ll take about an hour, so you’re free to get off the plane.” But by now, everything in the airport was closed. “My 3rd maintenance delay of the day. Unbelievable!” I tweet out in frustrustration. Except that iPhone autocorrect turned “delay” into “deejay”. Hilary Baumann pointed it out with a nice emoji-laden tweet that gave me a good chuckle. I finally got to my Nashville hotel around 1:30 in the morning. I looked at the time, shook my head, and went to bed.</li><li> Bridge Music —  South Texas Cowboy Blues by texasradiofish (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/texasradiofish/52030 Ft: unreal_dm, ElRon XChile</li><li><em>Act 2</em> - A couple of weeks later, on Sunday in Rennes, France. We wheeled our luggage the 2 blocks from our AirBnB to Rennes train station for the TGV to CDG. We stood with everyone else, looking up at the departure board waiting for the track to be posted. Departure time came closer and still no track -- not a good sign. The crowd grew larger. There was an announcement in French and a scrolling message at the bottom of the departure screen. Irene banged it into Google Translate. The gist of it -- a bomb threat had been phoned into SCNF, the train company, and all the trains in and out of Paris were halted. Given France’s recent history with terrorism, it was a reasonable response, but still…. They finally start posting delay times -- 40 mins, then over an hour, but then it shrinks back. I pull up Google Maps. The drive to CDG is showing about the same time as the train, but we’d be in control of our own destiny. I walk down to the rental car offices. It’s Sunday morning; they’re all closed. They won’t open until the afternoon; too late for us to drive and make our flights. </li><li>Time continues to tick by, past the departure time for our flight. I call United -- any other options? I get a phenomenally helpful agent. I can hear the keystrokes. Nothing else today Sunday, nor tomorrow, Monday. I wasn’t surprised about nothing available today, but was about the next day -- until I got a text from Andrew. He was on this morning’s United flight to Chicago which just cancelled for a hydraulic problem and rebooked on tomorrow’s flight -- which explains the lack of seats for us. I took the Tuesday seats. Now would we get to CDG in time for Claire’s EasyJet flight to Edinburgh so she can make class the next day. The trains finally start moving. We head down and board our train. And then wait, and wait some &nbsp;more. And then the train starts moving. I look at my watch. I think Claire will be OK. </li><li>Until we come to a stop in the middle of a rail yard. I watch a couple of guys walk past our car -- maybe a visual inspection? After a bit, we start moving -- backwards. The conductor keys the mike, and makes an announcement in rapid French that we can’t pick up. I open Google Maps. I see we’re off to the east of Paris but can’t tell if we’re moving in the right direction. Until we pull into the next station -- it’s for EuroDisney. I find our train route on the SCNF website and see this is one of the stops en route to CDG, so we’re going in the right direction. We get to CDG by 3pm, which means Claire can make her flight. Andrew comes over from the Airport Hilton, where United is putting him up for the night, and we head down to Paris for another dinner together. There are, after all, worse cities to have to spend an extra day or two.</li><li> Bridge Music —  <em>Parisian </em>Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)<br> Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License<br> http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><em>Act 3</em> - Tuesday morning, Paris. Our forced layover in Paris yesterday had been a beautiful day, &nbsp;sunny and warm. We walked through the Marais, south across Ile de la Cite, taking the obligatory selfie in front of Notre Dame that we pulled out at looked at two weeks later during the news coverage of the fire, and then rattled around the Latin Quarter looking for a place with outdoor seating and a nice rosé. This morning, though, not so beautiful. It was dumping rain. So rather than trundle our luggage 10 min to the Metro stop, I decide to order an Uber -- which takes a try or two when Chase declines my Visa again; and I switch over to Amex. A nice black Mercedes picks us up and heads for Les Halles -- or at least tries to. The traffic is a crawl at best. I watch our buffer time tick away and we’re not &nbsp;getting any closer. After sitting through a couple of traffic light cycles without clearing the intersection, we grab our bags and make for Les Halles on foot. We get there, a bit wet. We’re able to skip the ticket booth line; I have enough euros for the self-service machine, because it’s that or a chip-&amp;-pin card we don’t have. We get on the train. I look at my watch - we should have enough time to check our bags (bringing back some liquids), clear security, and get to the gate without too much more agita.</li><li>Until the train slows to a stop between stops. The conductor keys the mike, and makes an announcement in rapid French. I look at the other passengers. They don’t seem too agitated. I figure it’s some congestion on the track ahead. And, sure enough, we start moving after a couple of minutes. But at the next stop, the train doors stay open and a train employee come on, saying in French <em>and</em> English -- everyone has to get off, catch a bus outside the station to another station, then catch a different train to the airport. We head down the bus stop. There’s no one there to help; just a couple hundred people milling around.</li><li>Now I’m worried. We have no time to figure this out. The taxi stand is mobbed, I fire up Uber - 19-minute wait. Lyft? They’re not in Paris. I google to find taxi company but before I call, I try Uber one more time -- a 5-minute wait for a €60 fare. I hit the order button -- and then again after I swap over to Amex. €60 for a 15-minute ride to CDG is tough, but it’s cheaper than another night in a hotel. We get to the United desk 2 minutes before luggage check closes for our flight. The agent radioed down, checked in our bags, and then gave us the CDG version of Fast Track, so we could sidestep the long passport control and security lines. We board, sit down, but don’t really settle in until the plane leaves the ground. And when we’re finally at ORD, standing by the luggage carousel, our bags are the first ones to come out.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #150</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_150.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<p><!--EndFragment--></p>\n<p></p>','Podcast #150 — Travel Interruptus','','inherit','closed','closed','','2402-revision-v1','','','2019-04-22 22:45:56','2019-04-23 03:45:56','',2402,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/2402-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2427,1,'2019-04-22 22:46:40','2019-04-23 03:46:40','<!-- wp:image {\"id\":2404,\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/CoeazhcUMAAhyQN-300x251.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2404\"/><figcaption>This guy looks familiar...</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It\'s been a tough month for travel. Not quite to Book of Job-level torment, but two of this month\'s three trips spiraled into head-shaking metaphysical “What the hell is going on here” questioning of my decision to get out of bed that morning. I walk through the travel gods\' fun and games, as well as some new data on regional jet delays and buying a new travel bag.  All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_150.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<p>&lt;iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/610046667&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"&gt;&lt;/iframe&gt;</p>\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To read the Detailed Show Notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To read the Detailed Show Notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #150: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, as the weather begins to stagger unsteadily toward Spring -- 74 degrees on Monday, 5.3 inches of snow (thundersnow!) on Sunday, then back up into the 70’s two days later. &nbsp;April 14 -- over 5 inches of snow, over 1,000 flights cancelled. A nasty surprise for folks who thought it would be safe to connect through ORD, but just validates a Chicago truism -- don’t put the snow gear away until after Tax Day. Yup, welcome to the Midwest.</li><li>Have done a <em>chunk</em> of travel -- there’s a unit of measure for you -- since the last episode. A 2-day trip that hit 4 airports in the first day -- Chicago-Midway, Las Vegas, Houston-Hobby, and Nashville. The next week, I squoze in a trip to a new airport - State College, PA -- before heading out on vacation to Brittany, France. The squeeze wasn’t too tight -- flew back from State College on Weds night and left on vacation Thursday night -- but I did scout out a couple of backups in case the United Express regional jet went AWOL; a hour or so drive down to Harrisburg, a couple hour drive over to Pittsburgh. Luckily, I didn’t need them. United Express was having a good day, and therefore, so did I.</li><li>The next day’s flight to Paris on SAS by way of Stockholm went fine. We got in on time, found the left luggage lockers, and then the express train into the city all without much hassle. Arlanda Airport is comfortably sized and has good signage. The only real problem was that we got into center city Stockholm too early -- around 8:30am -- and nothing was really open. So we coffee’d up at one place, had some cardamom pastries at another, and generally puttered around until things started opening up an hour or so later. It was a sunny, if brisk, day, so walking around the Gamla Stan and Sodermalm was nice. </li><li>I always chuckle a bit when going through De Gaulle Airport, passing through the tangle of flat escalator walkway tubes that bridge the levels and open center of Terminal 1. The walkways are a bit awkward with wheeled luggage -- going down and then up. An airport porter in front of us let a wheelchair go free on the downhill span -- took a moment for it to register that it was empty -- then it rolled back to him on the uphill. No knock against him; it was the end of the day.</li><li>The next day, we caught the train out to Brittany, to Saint Malo. We walked out of the train station and across the street to Europcar for what was one of the easiest rental car pick-ups I’ve ever had in Europe. No scare-tactic insurance upselling -- just a look at my driver’s license and a quick pointer to where I could find the car in the train station parking lot. Five minutes, max. And dropping off the car a week later at Rennes train station? Absolutely the easiest rental drop-off -- gave the guy the keys and a receipt showing I’d filled up the car and I was done. No waiting for him to go inspect the car, just a handshake and “Have a good day”. </li><li>The next day wasn’t near as carefree, but we’ll talk about that in a few minutes.</li><li> Bridge Music — <em>Countryside Summer Joyride</em> by Kara Square (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mindmapthat/56281 Ft: Javolenus</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I’ve been not-quite-hating on, but certainly have been down on regional jets for quite some time on this podcast. Given a choice, I recommend people avoid them -- not because of their size, but their schedule dependability. Because the regional airlines’ model is to bounce a plane from place to place rather than route through hubs, they never recover from weather or mechanical delays. Those delays just cascade through the rest of the day. Now there often aren’t alternatives. Hence my earlier comment about needing backup plans for my regional jet flight home from State College. My flight was at the end of the day, the most vulnerable time to delays. Given my personal experience, &nbsp;I wasn’t surprised to read that US Dept of Transportation data showed that regional flights were 2-4 times more likely to be cancelled than mainline flights. The Chicago Tribune dug into the DOT data and found flights operated by Delta’s regional partners were 4 times more likely to be canceled than flights operated by Delta, while American Eagle and United Express were 2-3 times more likely to cancel flights than their mainline partners. You can’t avoid regional jets when going to places like State College or Charlottesville, VA or Appleton, WI -- but you can when flying to LGA or DFW or MSY. And in those cases, unless those RJ flights have exactly the schedule I need, I’ll suffer a bit of inconvenience for a lot more dependability.</li><li>On our travels through Brittany earlier this month, I found that we were getting a large number of “card declined” messages when trying to use our Chase Sapphire Visa card -- at gas stations, stores, and in Paris when I tried to use my Uber app. Now this isn’t a new card -- we’ve had it for over 5 years -- and it’s not the first time we’ve used it on travels in Europe. But Chase fraud algorithm seems more sensitive, throwing more false positives, and no way to update things. On the way out of Brest, I pulled into a Total gas station to fill up on our way to the Crozon peninsula. We’d be there for a couple of days of hiking and I wasn’t sure many gas stations we’d see (turned out that I didn’t need to worry). I pull up to a pump, tap the Chase Visa, get a decline. Insert the card into the reader; get another decline. I do the same drill with my Citi MasterCard with the same result. However, I immediately get a fraud alert from Citi. I hit the big green “Yes” button on the e-mail -- as in, “Yes, I do recognize this charge” -- get an “all clear” response back, tap my Citi card again and fill up my tank. All this time, we get nothing from Chase. I open the Chase app on my phone; nothing there either. Same thing in Paris when I needed an Uber fast (more on that in a bit). Chase declined, but my Amex Platinum card went through. For me, it was just annoying; I always carry a full set of cards when traveling -- a Visa and a MasterCard from different banks, and an Amex -- because single points of failure when traveling are bad -- I don’t want to be left hanging if one bank or one card processor drops their network or loses a data center. Oh, and I also carry cash. But, as we’ve <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"talked (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/02/10/podcast-148-travel-potpourri-for-200-alex/\" target=\"_blank\">talked</a> <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"about (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/12/17/podcast-147-holiday-travel-tips-notes-from-santa-fe/\" target=\"_blank\">about</a> <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"before (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\" target=\"_blank\">before</a>, that’s ‘cause I’m old-school.</li><li>Brittany was a touring vacation, so we were moving every couple of days or so -- packing, unpacking, repacking. During one of those repacking sessions, maybe in Morgat on the Crozon peninsula -- I couldn’t find my Bose headphone case, which had my Bose headphones, in my backpack -- and I didn’t remember pulling out. Where the hell did they go, I asked myself. I pull everything out of my backpack and -- oh, there they are; they had slipped behind my camera bag in the bottom of my backpack. How did I lose my headphones in my backpack, you may ask -- and rightfully so because it really sounds stupid. Probably the same reason I lost a Google tablet in there a few years back -- too much black. The Bose case is black, the interior of Timbuk 2 backpack is black, my eyes aren’t as good as they used to be… I’d been toying around with getting a new bag, more of a messenger style -- that I could sling over one shoulder and with a bit better waterproofing. And, after this little panic drill, a non-black interior. I ended up getting a small Timbuk 2 Classic messenger bag from the Outlet section of REI.com for $50. It’s not too big -- holds my 11-inch MacBook Air, a couple of notebooks, an umbrella -- and has a bright yellow interior. I haven’t lost anything in it yet -- but I don’t trust myself. Maybe I need to get, like a white umbrella, and spray paint my Bose case red. I love black, but maybe I’ve taken that color palette a bit too far.</li><li>And if you have any travel rants, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. &nbsp;The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"mpeacock (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Facebook page (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Facebook page</a> or our Instagram account at <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\" (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Travelcommons</a> -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li> Bridge Music —  <em>Jester of the Golden Apocalypse</em> by Super_Sigil (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Super_Sigil/34750 </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Travel Interruptus</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A Greek tragedy in three acts where the travel gods toy with our anti-hero for fun and entertainment</li><li>OK, maybe not quite that bad, not quite Book of Job-level torment, but two out of the three trips I’ve taken in the past month spiraled into head-shaking metaphysical “What the hell is going on here” questioning of my decision to get out of bed that morning.</li><li><em>Act 1</em> - My Midway-Vegas-Nashville travel day. This trip didn’t start out to be stupid. It started as an easy day trip to downtown Nashville for a sales call. So many people are abandoning Chicago for Nashville, Southwest has non-stop flights every 90 minutes, so no problem with flight times. That works out fine -- until someone books a sales call the prior afternoon -- in Las Vegas. Hmmm, how do I get from Vegas after 4pm Pacific to Nashville in time for a meeting the next morning Central time? Southwest is about the only choice, connecting through either Denver or Houston. I go for the more direct routing through Denver -- my first mistake.</li><li>Because, as it turned out, the March “bomb cyclone” -- what the Weather Channel helpfully named “Winter Storm Ulmer” (who or what is an Ulmer?) -- was going to shut down DIA that day with 80 mph winds. I got an e-mail from Southwest the day before canceling my connection through Denver -- understandable -- but nothing else, no rebooking, just “We’re leaving you in Vegas” -- which I’ve found tends to be Southwest’s MO -- pleasantly unhelpful. Especially when the website errored out when I tried to find an alternate routing to Nashville, and the automated message answering their 800 number was estimating 80-some minute hold times. After about 45 minutes, between banging on the website, our corporate Concur app, and tweeting at their customer service, I managed to get re-routed through Houston, safely south of the bomb cyclone.</li><li>The next morning, I show up at the gate at Midway to find my 8am flight to Vegas delayed by 2 hours -- mechanical on the plane here meant they had to bring in a new plane and crew from somewhere else. Annoying, but not critical; I’d get into Vegas at noon for a 2pm meeting. I get another coffee, log into the Boingo hotspot and clear some emails. 9:40, we line up and board. And wait. Then the captain keys the mike, pauses (never a good sign) and then starts talking - he didn’t have time to do the walkaround before we boarded because they came in late. When they did, they noticed a problem with the front strut. Maintenance is looking at it, don’t know if they can fix it, but they need everyone off the plane. So we deplane for what is now my 2nd maintenance delay. We idle around the gate area. 10:30 and nothing. I start looking at my watch. If I’m don’t get into Vegas by 1pm, there won’t be enough time to get to my 2pm meeting, and so I shouldn’t get on the plane. Then they start to re-board us. What time will we get in? 12:20. OK, I’ll board. We all get back on -- and for the most part retaking the seats we had, in spite of Southwest’s open seating. We are creatures of habit. I’m surprised no one moo’d. We’re all on, and we wait. The mike keys. There’s a slight moan rather than a moo from the cabin. We’re waiting on the paperwork. It’s always paperwork. I’m looking at my watch. It’s past 11am Central and the door is still open. A 4-hour flight means we’re now coming up against that 1pm Pacific arrive time. Do I stay on the plane? A couple minutes more and my decision is made for me; they close the door. I lean back, put on my headphones and hope for no headwinds. We get to the gate at 1:02pm. Vegas is always a maze; there’s no straight walkways; they always want to vector you through a thicket of slot machines. I head to the cab rank -- shorter walk and no waiting -- and I get a guy with a heavy foot. I’m at the client 5 minutes before the meeting. That was a bit too close.</li><li>My return trip to the airport and the flight to Houston are uneventful, not even any turbulence as we skirt that bomb cyclone. We get into Hobby maybe even a bit early. I grab a beer and then head over to the gate. They call boarding - just half the A group -- 1-30 -- because that’s all there is on this late flight to Nashville. The gate agent scans the boarding passes, saying “You’re in Row 3, you’re in Row 4, you’re in Row 5….” &nbsp;We get all get in our separate rows, and then wait. The captain keys the mike, pauses, and then says “This plane had a bird strike on the nose on landing. There’s no damage, but Maintenance has to pull the nose cone off for a visual inspection. It’ll take about an hour, so you’re free to get off the plane.” But by now, everything in the airport was closed. “My 3rd maintenance delay of the day. Unbelievable!” I tweet out in frustrustration. Except that iPhone autocorrect turned “delay” into “deejay”. Hilary Baumann pointed it out with a nice emoji-laden tweet that gave me a good chuckle. I finally got to my Nashville hotel around 1:30 in the morning. I looked at the time, shook my head, and went to bed.</li><li> Bridge Music —  South Texas Cowboy Blues by texasradiofish (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/texasradiofish/52030 Ft: unreal_dm, ElRon XChile</li><li><em>Act 2</em> - A couple of weeks later, on Sunday in Rennes, France. We wheeled our luggage the 2 blocks from our AirBnB to Rennes train station for the TGV to CDG. We stood with everyone else, looking up at the departure board waiting for the track to be posted. Departure time came closer and still no track -- not a good sign. The crowd grew larger. There was an announcement in French and a scrolling message at the bottom of the departure screen. Irene banged it into Google Translate. The gist of it -- a bomb threat had been phoned into SCNF, the train company, and all the trains in and out of Paris were halted. Given France’s recent history with terrorism, it was a reasonable response, but still…. They finally start posting delay times -- 40 mins, then over an hour, but then it shrinks back. I pull up Google Maps. The drive to CDG is showing about the same time as the train, but we’d be in control of our own destiny. I walk down to the rental car offices. It’s Sunday morning; they’re all closed. They won’t open until the afternoon; too late for us to drive and make our flights. </li><li>Time continues to tick by, past the departure time for our flight. I call United -- any other options? I get a phenomenally helpful agent. I can hear the keystrokes. Nothing else today Sunday, nor tomorrow, Monday. I wasn’t surprised about nothing available today, but was about the next day -- until I got a text from Andrew. He was on this morning’s United flight to Chicago which just cancelled for a hydraulic problem and rebooked on tomorrow’s flight -- which explains the lack of seats for us. I took the Tuesday seats. Now would we get to CDG in time for Claire’s EasyJet flight to Edinburgh so she can make class the next day. The trains finally start moving. We head down and board our train. And then wait, and wait some &nbsp;more. And then the train starts moving. I look at my watch. I think Claire will be OK. </li><li>Until we come to a stop in the middle of a rail yard. I watch a couple of guys walk past our car -- maybe a visual inspection? After a bit, we start moving -- backwards. The conductor keys the mike, and makes an announcement in rapid French that we can’t pick up. I open Google Maps. I see we’re off to the east of Paris but can’t tell if we’re moving in the right direction. Until we pull into the next station -- it’s for EuroDisney. I find our train route on the SCNF website and see this is one of the stops en route to CDG, so we’re going in the right direction. We get to CDG by 3pm, which means Claire can make her flight. Andrew comes over from the Airport Hilton, where United is putting him up for the night, and we head down to Paris for another dinner together. There are, after all, worse cities to have to spend an extra day or two.</li><li> Bridge Music —  <em>Parisian </em>Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)<br> Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License<br> http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><em>Act 3</em> - Tuesday morning, Paris. Our forced layover in Paris yesterday had been a beautiful day, &nbsp;sunny and warm. We walked through the Marais, south across Ile de la Cite, taking the obligatory selfie in front of Notre Dame that we pulled out at looked at two weeks later during the news coverage of the fire, and then rattled around the Latin Quarter looking for a place with outdoor seating and a nice rosé. This morning, though, not so beautiful. It was dumping rain. So rather than trundle our luggage 10 min to the Metro stop, I decide to order an Uber -- which takes a try or two when Chase declines my Visa again; and I switch over to Amex. A nice black Mercedes picks us up and heads for Les Halles -- or at least tries to. The traffic is a crawl at best. I watch our buffer time tick away and we’re not &nbsp;getting any closer. After sitting through a couple of traffic light cycles without clearing the intersection, we grab our bags and make for Les Halles on foot. We get there, a bit wet. We’re able to skip the ticket booth line; I have enough euros for the self-service machine, because it’s that or a chip-&amp;-pin card we don’t have. We get on the train. I look at my watch - we should have enough time to check our bags (bringing back some liquids), clear security, and get to the gate without too much more agita.</li><li>Until the train slows to a stop between stops. The conductor keys the mike, and makes an announcement in rapid French. I look at the other passengers. They don’t seem too agitated. I figure it’s some congestion on the track ahead. And, sure enough, we start moving after a couple of minutes. But at the next stop, the train doors stay open and a train employee come on, saying in French <em>and</em> English -- everyone has to get off, catch a bus outside the station to another station, then catch a different train to the airport. We head down the bus stop. There’s no one there to help; just a couple hundred people milling around.</li><li>Now I’m worried. We have no time to figure this out. The taxi stand is mobbed, I fire up Uber - 19-minute wait. Lyft? They’re not in Paris. I google to find taxi company but before I call, I try Uber one more time -- a 5-minute wait for a €60 fare. I hit the order button -- and then again after I swap over to Amex. €60 for a 15-minute ride to CDG is tough, but it’s cheaper than another night in a hotel. We get to the United desk 2 minutes before luggage check closes for our flight. The agent radioed down, checked in our bags, and then gave us the CDG version of Fast Track, so we could sidestep the long passport control and security lines. We board, sit down, but don’t really settle in until the plane leaves the ground. And when we’re finally at ORD, standing by the luggage carousel, our bags are the first ones to come out.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #150</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_150.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<p><!--EndFragment--></p>\n<p></p>','Podcast #150 — Travel Interruptus','','inherit','closed','closed','','2402-revision-v1','','','2019-04-22 22:46:40','2019-04-23 03:46:40','',2402,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/2402-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2428,1,'2019-04-22 22:47:20','2019-04-23 03:47:20','<!-- wp:image {\"id\":2404,\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/CoeazhcUMAAhyQN-300x251.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2404\"/><figcaption>This guy looks familiar...</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It\'s been a tough month for travel. Not quite to Book of Job-level torment, but two of this month\'s three trips spiraled into head-shaking metaphysical “What the hell is going on here” questioning of my decision to get out of bed that morning. I walk through the travel gods\' fun and games, as well as some new data on regional jet delays and buying a new travel bag.  All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_150.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/610046667&color=%23ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true\"></iframe>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:block {\"ref\":2408} /-->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To read the Detailed Show Notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To read the Detailed Show Notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #150: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, as the weather begins to stagger unsteadily toward Spring -- 74 degrees on Monday, 5.3 inches of snow (thundersnow!) on Sunday, then back up into the 70’s two days later. &nbsp;April 14 -- over 5 inches of snow, over 1,000 flights cancelled. A nasty surprise for folks who thought it would be safe to connect through ORD, but just validates a Chicago truism -- don’t put the snow gear away until after Tax Day. Yup, welcome to the Midwest.</li><li>Have done a <em>chunk</em> of travel -- there’s a unit of measure for you -- since the last episode. A 2-day trip that hit 4 airports in the first day -- Chicago-Midway, Las Vegas, Houston-Hobby, and Nashville. The next week, I squoze in a trip to a new airport - State College, PA -- before heading out on vacation to Brittany, France. The squeeze wasn’t too tight -- flew back from State College on Weds night and left on vacation Thursday night -- but I did scout out a couple of backups in case the United Express regional jet went AWOL; a hour or so drive down to Harrisburg, a couple hour drive over to Pittsburgh. Luckily, I didn’t need them. United Express was having a good day, and therefore, so did I.</li><li>The next day’s flight to Paris on SAS by way of Stockholm went fine. We got in on time, found the left luggage lockers, and then the express train into the city all without much hassle. Arlanda Airport is comfortably sized and has good signage. The only real problem was that we got into center city Stockholm too early -- around 8:30am -- and nothing was really open. So we coffee’d up at one place, had some cardamom pastries at another, and generally puttered around until things started opening up an hour or so later. It was a sunny, if brisk, day, so walking around the Gamla Stan and Sodermalm was nice. </li><li>I always chuckle a bit when going through De Gaulle Airport, passing through the tangle of flat escalator walkway tubes that bridge the levels and open center of Terminal 1. The walkways are a bit awkward with wheeled luggage -- going down and then up. An airport porter in front of us let a wheelchair go free on the downhill span -- took a moment for it to register that it was empty -- then it rolled back to him on the uphill. No knock against him; it was the end of the day.</li><li>The next day, we caught the train out to Brittany, to Saint Malo. We walked out of the train station and across the street to Europcar for what was one of the easiest rental car pick-ups I’ve ever had in Europe. No scare-tactic insurance upselling -- just a look at my driver’s license and a quick pointer to where I could find the car in the train station parking lot. Five minutes, max. And dropping off the car a week later at Rennes train station? Absolutely the easiest rental drop-off -- gave the guy the keys and a receipt showing I’d filled up the car and I was done. No waiting for him to go inspect the car, just a handshake and “Have a good day”. </li><li>The next day wasn’t near as carefree, but we’ll talk about that in a few minutes.</li><li> Bridge Music — <em>Countryside Summer Joyride</em> by Kara Square (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mindmapthat/56281 Ft: Javolenus</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I’ve been not-quite-hating on, but certainly have been down on regional jets for quite some time on this podcast. Given a choice, I recommend people avoid them -- not because of their size, but their schedule dependability. Because the regional airlines’ model is to bounce a plane from place to place rather than route through hubs, they never recover from weather or mechanical delays. Those delays just cascade through the rest of the day. Now there often aren’t alternatives. Hence my earlier comment about needing backup plans for my regional jet flight home from State College. My flight was at the end of the day, the most vulnerable time to delays. Given my personal experience, &nbsp;I wasn’t surprised to read that US Dept of Transportation data showed that regional flights were 2-4 times more likely to be cancelled than mainline flights. The Chicago Tribune dug into the DOT data and found flights operated by Delta’s regional partners were 4 times more likely to be canceled than flights operated by Delta, while American Eagle and United Express were 2-3 times more likely to cancel flights than their mainline partners. You can’t avoid regional jets when going to places like State College or Charlottesville, VA or Appleton, WI -- but you can when flying to LGA or DFW or MSY. And in those cases, unless those RJ flights have exactly the schedule I need, I’ll suffer a bit of inconvenience for a lot more dependability.</li><li>On our travels through Brittany earlier this month, I found that we were getting a large number of “card declined” messages when trying to use our Chase Sapphire Visa card -- at gas stations, stores, and in Paris when I tried to use my Uber app. Now this isn’t a new card -- we’ve had it for over 5 years -- and it’s not the first time we’ve used it on travels in Europe. But Chase fraud algorithm seems more sensitive, throwing more false positives, and no way to update things. On the way out of Brest, I pulled into a Total gas station to fill up on our way to the Crozon peninsula. We’d be there for a couple of days of hiking and I wasn’t sure many gas stations we’d see (turned out that I didn’t need to worry). I pull up to a pump, tap the Chase Visa, get a decline. Insert the card into the reader; get another decline. I do the same drill with my Citi MasterCard with the same result. However, I immediately get a fraud alert from Citi. I hit the big green “Yes” button on the e-mail -- as in, “Yes, I do recognize this charge” -- get an “all clear” response back, tap my Citi card again and fill up my tank. All this time, we get nothing from Chase. I open the Chase app on my phone; nothing there either. Same thing in Paris when I needed an Uber fast (more on that in a bit). Chase declined, but my Amex Platinum card went through. For me, it was just annoying; I always carry a full set of cards when traveling -- a Visa and a MasterCard from different banks, and an Amex -- because single points of failure when traveling are bad -- I don’t want to be left hanging if one bank or one card processor drops their network or loses a data center. Oh, and I also carry cash. But, as we’ve <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"talked (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/02/10/podcast-148-travel-potpourri-for-200-alex/\" target=\"_blank\">talked</a> <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"about (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/12/17/podcast-147-holiday-travel-tips-notes-from-santa-fe/\" target=\"_blank\">about</a> <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"before (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\" target=\"_blank\">before</a>, that’s ‘cause I’m old-school.</li><li>Brittany was a touring vacation, so we were moving every couple of days or so -- packing, unpacking, repacking. During one of those repacking sessions, maybe in Morgat on the Crozon peninsula -- I couldn’t find my Bose headphone case, which had my Bose headphones, in my backpack -- and I didn’t remember pulling out. Where the hell did they go, I asked myself. I pull everything out of my backpack and -- oh, there they are; they had slipped behind my camera bag in the bottom of my backpack. How did I lose my headphones in my backpack, you may ask -- and rightfully so because it really sounds stupid. Probably the same reason I lost a Google tablet in there a few years back -- too much black. The Bose case is black, the interior of Timbuk 2 backpack is black, my eyes aren’t as good as they used to be… I’d been toying around with getting a new bag, more of a messenger style -- that I could sling over one shoulder and with a bit better waterproofing. And, after this little panic drill, a non-black interior. I ended up getting a small Timbuk 2 Classic messenger bag from the Outlet section of REI.com for $50. It’s not too big -- holds my 11-inch MacBook Air, a couple of notebooks, an umbrella -- and has a bright yellow interior. I haven’t lost anything in it yet -- but I don’t trust myself. Maybe I need to get, like a white umbrella, and spray paint my Bose case red. I love black, but maybe I’ve taken that color palette a bit too far.</li><li>And if you have any travel rants, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. &nbsp;The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"mpeacock (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Facebook page (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Facebook page</a> or our Instagram account at <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\" (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Travelcommons</a> -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li> Bridge Music —  <em>Jester of the Golden Apocalypse</em> by Super_Sigil (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Super_Sigil/34750 </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Travel Interruptus</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A Greek tragedy in three acts where the travel gods toy with our anti-hero for fun and entertainment</li><li>OK, maybe not quite that bad, not quite Book of Job-level torment, but two out of the three trips I’ve taken in the past month spiraled into head-shaking metaphysical “What the hell is going on here” questioning of my decision to get out of bed that morning.</li><li><em>Act 1</em> - My Midway-Vegas-Nashville travel day. This trip didn’t start out to be stupid. It started as an easy day trip to downtown Nashville for a sales call. So many people are abandoning Chicago for Nashville, Southwest has non-stop flights every 90 minutes, so no problem with flight times. That works out fine -- until someone books a sales call the prior afternoon -- in Las Vegas. Hmmm, how do I get from Vegas after 4pm Pacific to Nashville in time for a meeting the next morning Central time? Southwest is about the only choice, connecting through either Denver or Houston. I go for the more direct routing through Denver -- my first mistake.</li><li>Because, as it turned out, the March “bomb cyclone” -- what the Weather Channel helpfully named “Winter Storm Ulmer” (who or what is an Ulmer?) -- was going to shut down DIA that day with 80 mph winds. I got an e-mail from Southwest the day before canceling my connection through Denver -- understandable -- but nothing else, no rebooking, just “We’re leaving you in Vegas” -- which I’ve found tends to be Southwest’s MO -- pleasantly unhelpful. Especially when the website errored out when I tried to find an alternate routing to Nashville, and the automated message answering their 800 number was estimating 80-some minute hold times. After about 45 minutes, between banging on the website, our corporate Concur app, and tweeting at their customer service, I managed to get re-routed through Houston, safely south of the bomb cyclone.</li><li>The next morning, I show up at the gate at Midway to find my 8am flight to Vegas delayed by 2 hours -- mechanical on the plane here meant they had to bring in a new plane and crew from somewhere else. Annoying, but not critical; I’d get into Vegas at noon for a 2pm meeting. I get another coffee, log into the Boingo hotspot and clear some emails. 9:40, we line up and board. And wait. Then the captain keys the mike, pauses (never a good sign) and then starts talking - he didn’t have time to do the walkaround before we boarded because they came in late. When they did, they noticed a problem with the front strut. Maintenance is looking at it, don’t know if they can fix it, but they need everyone off the plane. So we deplane for what is now my 2nd maintenance delay. We idle around the gate area. 10:30 and nothing. I start looking at my watch. If I’m don’t get into Vegas by 1pm, there won’t be enough time to get to my 2pm meeting, and so I shouldn’t get on the plane. Then they start to re-board us. What time will we get in? 12:20. OK, I’ll board. We all get back on -- and for the most part retaking the seats we had, in spite of Southwest’s open seating. We are creatures of habit. I’m surprised no one moo’d. We’re all on, and we wait. The mike keys. There’s a slight moan rather than a moo from the cabin. We’re waiting on the paperwork. It’s always paperwork. I’m looking at my watch. It’s past 11am Central and the door is still open. A 4-hour flight means we’re now coming up against that 1pm Pacific arrive time. Do I stay on the plane? A couple minutes more and my decision is made for me; they close the door. I lean back, put on my headphones and hope for no headwinds. We get to the gate at 1:02pm. Vegas is always a maze; there’s no straight walkways; they always want to vector you through a thicket of slot machines. I head to the cab rank -- shorter walk and no waiting -- and I get a guy with a heavy foot. I’m at the client 5 minutes before the meeting. That was a bit too close.</li><li>My return trip to the airport and the flight to Houston are uneventful, not even any turbulence as we skirt that bomb cyclone. We get into Hobby maybe even a bit early. I grab a beer and then head over to the gate. They call boarding - just half the A group -- 1-30 -- because that’s all there is on this late flight to Nashville. The gate agent scans the boarding passes, saying “You’re in Row 3, you’re in Row 4, you’re in Row 5….” &nbsp;We get all get in our separate rows, and then wait. The captain keys the mike, pauses, and then says “This plane had a bird strike on the nose on landing. There’s no damage, but Maintenance has to pull the nose cone off for a visual inspection. It’ll take about an hour, so you’re free to get off the plane.” But by now, everything in the airport was closed. “My 3rd maintenance delay of the day. Unbelievable!” I tweet out in frustrustration. Except that iPhone autocorrect turned “delay” into “deejay”. Hilary Baumann pointed it out with a nice emoji-laden tweet that gave me a good chuckle. I finally got to my Nashville hotel around 1:30 in the morning. I looked at the time, shook my head, and went to bed.</li><li> Bridge Music —  South Texas Cowboy Blues by texasradiofish (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/texasradiofish/52030 Ft: unreal_dm, ElRon XChile</li><li><em>Act 2</em> - A couple of weeks later, on Sunday in Rennes, France. We wheeled our luggage the 2 blocks from our AirBnB to Rennes train station for the TGV to CDG. We stood with everyone else, looking up at the departure board waiting for the track to be posted. Departure time came closer and still no track -- not a good sign. The crowd grew larger. There was an announcement in French and a scrolling message at the bottom of the departure screen. Irene banged it into Google Translate. The gist of it -- a bomb threat had been phoned into SCNF, the train company, and all the trains in and out of Paris were halted. Given France’s recent history with terrorism, it was a reasonable response, but still…. They finally start posting delay times -- 40 mins, then over an hour, but then it shrinks back. I pull up Google Maps. The drive to CDG is showing about the same time as the train, but we’d be in control of our own destiny. I walk down to the rental car offices. It’s Sunday morning; they’re all closed. They won’t open until the afternoon; too late for us to drive and make our flights. </li><li>Time continues to tick by, past the departure time for our flight. I call United -- any other options? I get a phenomenally helpful agent. I can hear the keystrokes. Nothing else today Sunday, nor tomorrow, Monday. I wasn’t surprised about nothing available today, but was about the next day -- until I got a text from Andrew. He was on this morning’s United flight to Chicago which just cancelled for a hydraulic problem and rebooked on tomorrow’s flight -- which explains the lack of seats for us. I took the Tuesday seats. Now would we get to CDG in time for Claire’s EasyJet flight to Edinburgh so she can make class the next day. The trains finally start moving. We head down and board our train. And then wait, and wait some &nbsp;more. And then the train starts moving. I look at my watch. I think Claire will be OK. </li><li>Until we come to a stop in the middle of a rail yard. I watch a couple of guys walk past our car -- maybe a visual inspection? After a bit, we start moving -- backwards. The conductor keys the mike, and makes an announcement in rapid French that we can’t pick up. I open Google Maps. I see we’re off to the east of Paris but can’t tell if we’re moving in the right direction. Until we pull into the next station -- it’s for EuroDisney. I find our train route on the SCNF website and see this is one of the stops en route to CDG, so we’re going in the right direction. We get to CDG by 3pm, which means Claire can make her flight. Andrew comes over from the Airport Hilton, where United is putting him up for the night, and we head down to Paris for another dinner together. There are, after all, worse cities to have to spend an extra day or two.</li><li> Bridge Music —  <em>Parisian </em>Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)<br> Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License<br> http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><em>Act 3</em> - Tuesday morning, Paris. Our forced layover in Paris yesterday had been a beautiful day, &nbsp;sunny and warm. We walked through the Marais, south across Ile de la Cite, taking the obligatory selfie in front of Notre Dame that we pulled out at looked at two weeks later during the news coverage of the fire, and then rattled around the Latin Quarter looking for a place with outdoor seating and a nice rosé. This morning, though, not so beautiful. It was dumping rain. So rather than trundle our luggage 10 min to the Metro stop, I decide to order an Uber -- which takes a try or two when Chase declines my Visa again; and I switch over to Amex. A nice black Mercedes picks us up and heads for Les Halles -- or at least tries to. The traffic is a crawl at best. I watch our buffer time tick away and we’re not &nbsp;getting any closer. After sitting through a couple of traffic light cycles without clearing the intersection, we grab our bags and make for Les Halles on foot. We get there, a bit wet. We’re able to skip the ticket booth line; I have enough euros for the self-service machine, because it’s that or a chip-&amp;-pin card we don’t have. We get on the train. I look at my watch - we should have enough time to check our bags (bringing back some liquids), clear security, and get to the gate without too much more agita.</li><li>Until the train slows to a stop between stops. The conductor keys the mike, and makes an announcement in rapid French. I look at the other passengers. They don’t seem too agitated. I figure it’s some congestion on the track ahead. And, sure enough, we start moving after a couple of minutes. But at the next stop, the train doors stay open and a train employee come on, saying in French <em>and</em> English -- everyone has to get off, catch a bus outside the station to another station, then catch a different train to the airport. We head down the bus stop. There’s no one there to help; just a couple hundred people milling around.</li><li>Now I’m worried. We have no time to figure this out. The taxi stand is mobbed, I fire up Uber - 19-minute wait. Lyft? They’re not in Paris. I google to find taxi company but before I call, I try Uber one more time -- a 5-minute wait for a €60 fare. I hit the order button -- and then again after I swap over to Amex. €60 for a 15-minute ride to CDG is tough, but it’s cheaper than another night in a hotel. We get to the United desk 2 minutes before luggage check closes for our flight. The agent radioed down, checked in our bags, and then gave us the CDG version of Fast Track, so we could sidestep the long passport control and security lines. We board, sit down, but don’t really settle in until the plane leaves the ground. And when we’re finally at ORD, standing by the luggage carousel, our bags are the first ones to come out.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #150</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_150.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<p><!--EndFragment--></p>\n<p></p>','Podcast #150 — Travel Interruptus','','inherit','closed','closed','','2402-revision-v1','','','2019-04-22 22:47:20','2019-04-23 03:47:20','',2402,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/2402-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2429,1,'2019-04-22 22:47:28','2019-04-23 03:47:28','<!-- wp:image {\"id\":2404,\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/CoeazhcUMAAhyQN-300x251.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2404\"/><figcaption>This guy looks familiar...</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It\'s been a tough month for travel. Not quite to Book of Job-level torment, but two of this month\'s three trips spiraled into head-shaking metaphysical “What the hell is going on here” questioning of my decision to get out of bed that morning. I walk through the travel gods\' fun and games, as well as some new data on regional jet delays and buying a new travel bag.  All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_150.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/610046667&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:block {\"ref\":2408} /-->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To read the Detailed Show Notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To read the Detailed Show Notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #150: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, as the weather begins to stagger unsteadily toward Spring -- 74 degrees on Monday, 5.3 inches of snow (thundersnow!) on Sunday, then back up into the 70’s two days later. &nbsp;April 14 -- over 5 inches of snow, over 1,000 flights cancelled. A nasty surprise for folks who thought it would be safe to connect through ORD, but just validates a Chicago truism -- don’t put the snow gear away until after Tax Day. Yup, welcome to the Midwest.</li><li>Have done a <em>chunk</em> of travel -- there’s a unit of measure for you -- since the last episode. A 2-day trip that hit 4 airports in the first day -- Chicago-Midway, Las Vegas, Houston-Hobby, and Nashville. The next week, I squoze in a trip to a new airport - State College, PA -- before heading out on vacation to Brittany, France. The squeeze wasn’t too tight -- flew back from State College on Weds night and left on vacation Thursday night -- but I did scout out a couple of backups in case the United Express regional jet went AWOL; a hour or so drive down to Harrisburg, a couple hour drive over to Pittsburgh. Luckily, I didn’t need them. United Express was having a good day, and therefore, so did I.</li><li>The next day’s flight to Paris on SAS by way of Stockholm went fine. We got in on time, found the left luggage lockers, and then the express train into the city all without much hassle. Arlanda Airport is comfortably sized and has good signage. The only real problem was that we got into center city Stockholm too early -- around 8:30am -- and nothing was really open. So we coffee’d up at one place, had some cardamom pastries at another, and generally puttered around until things started opening up an hour or so later. It was a sunny, if brisk, day, so walking around the Gamla Stan and Sodermalm was nice. </li><li>I always chuckle a bit when going through De Gaulle Airport, passing through the tangle of flat escalator walkway tubes that bridge the levels and open center of Terminal 1. The walkways are a bit awkward with wheeled luggage -- going down and then up. An airport porter in front of us let a wheelchair go free on the downhill span -- took a moment for it to register that it was empty -- then it rolled back to him on the uphill. No knock against him; it was the end of the day.</li><li>The next day, we caught the train out to Brittany, to Saint Malo. We walked out of the train station and across the street to Europcar for what was one of the easiest rental car pick-ups I’ve ever had in Europe. No scare-tactic insurance upselling -- just a look at my driver’s license and a quick pointer to where I could find the car in the train station parking lot. Five minutes, max. And dropping off the car a week later at Rennes train station? Absolutely the easiest rental drop-off -- gave the guy the keys and a receipt showing I’d filled up the car and I was done. No waiting for him to go inspect the car, just a handshake and “Have a good day”. </li><li>The next day wasn’t near as carefree, but we’ll talk about that in a few minutes.</li><li> Bridge Music — <em>Countryside Summer Joyride</em> by Kara Square (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mindmapthat/56281 Ft: Javolenus</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I’ve been not-quite-hating on, but certainly have been down on regional jets for quite some time on this podcast. Given a choice, I recommend people avoid them -- not because of their size, but their schedule dependability. Because the regional airlines’ model is to bounce a plane from place to place rather than route through hubs, they never recover from weather or mechanical delays. Those delays just cascade through the rest of the day. Now there often aren’t alternatives. Hence my earlier comment about needing backup plans for my regional jet flight home from State College. My flight was at the end of the day, the most vulnerable time to delays. Given my personal experience, &nbsp;I wasn’t surprised to read that US Dept of Transportation data showed that regional flights were 2-4 times more likely to be cancelled than mainline flights. The Chicago Tribune dug into the DOT data and found flights operated by Delta’s regional partners were 4 times more likely to be canceled than flights operated by Delta, while American Eagle and United Express were 2-3 times more likely to cancel flights than their mainline partners. You can’t avoid regional jets when going to places like State College or Charlottesville, VA or Appleton, WI -- but you can when flying to LGA or DFW or MSY. And in those cases, unless those RJ flights have exactly the schedule I need, I’ll suffer a bit of inconvenience for a lot more dependability.</li><li>On our travels through Brittany earlier this month, I found that we were getting a large number of “card declined” messages when trying to use our Chase Sapphire Visa card -- at gas stations, stores, and in Paris when I tried to use my Uber app. Now this isn’t a new card -- we’ve had it for over 5 years -- and it’s not the first time we’ve used it on travels in Europe. But Chase fraud algorithm seems more sensitive, throwing more false positives, and no way to update things. On the way out of Brest, I pulled into a Total gas station to fill up on our way to the Crozon peninsula. We’d be there for a couple of days of hiking and I wasn’t sure many gas stations we’d see (turned out that I didn’t need to worry). I pull up to a pump, tap the Chase Visa, get a decline. Insert the card into the reader; get another decline. I do the same drill with my Citi MasterCard with the same result. However, I immediately get a fraud alert from Citi. I hit the big green “Yes” button on the e-mail -- as in, “Yes, I do recognize this charge” -- get an “all clear” response back, tap my Citi card again and fill up my tank. All this time, we get nothing from Chase. I open the Chase app on my phone; nothing there either. Same thing in Paris when I needed an Uber fast (more on that in a bit). Chase declined, but my Amex Platinum card went through. For me, it was just annoying; I always carry a full set of cards when traveling -- a Visa and a MasterCard from different banks, and an Amex -- because single points of failure when traveling are bad -- I don’t want to be left hanging if one bank or one card processor drops their network or loses a data center. Oh, and I also carry cash. But, as we’ve <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"talked (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/02/10/podcast-148-travel-potpourri-for-200-alex/\" target=\"_blank\">talked</a> <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"about (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/12/17/podcast-147-holiday-travel-tips-notes-from-santa-fe/\" target=\"_blank\">about</a> <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"before (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\" target=\"_blank\">before</a>, that’s ‘cause I’m old-school.</li><li>Brittany was a touring vacation, so we were moving every couple of days or so -- packing, unpacking, repacking. During one of those repacking sessions, maybe in Morgat on the Crozon peninsula -- I couldn’t find my Bose headphone case, which had my Bose headphones, in my backpack -- and I didn’t remember pulling out. Where the hell did they go, I asked myself. I pull everything out of my backpack and -- oh, there they are; they had slipped behind my camera bag in the bottom of my backpack. How did I lose my headphones in my backpack, you may ask -- and rightfully so because it really sounds stupid. Probably the same reason I lost a Google tablet in there a few years back -- too much black. The Bose case is black, the interior of Timbuk 2 backpack is black, my eyes aren’t as good as they used to be… I’d been toying around with getting a new bag, more of a messenger style -- that I could sling over one shoulder and with a bit better waterproofing. And, after this little panic drill, a non-black interior. I ended up getting a small Timbuk 2 Classic messenger bag from the Outlet section of REI.com for $50. It’s not too big -- holds my 11-inch MacBook Air, a couple of notebooks, an umbrella -- and has a bright yellow interior. I haven’t lost anything in it yet -- but I don’t trust myself. Maybe I need to get, like a white umbrella, and spray paint my Bose case red. I love black, but maybe I’ve taken that color palette a bit too far.</li><li>And if you have any travel rants, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. &nbsp;The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"mpeacock (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Facebook page (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Facebook page</a> or our Instagram account at <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\" (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Travelcommons</a> -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li> Bridge Music —  <em>Jester of the Golden Apocalypse</em> by Super_Sigil (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Super_Sigil/34750 </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Travel Interruptus</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A Greek tragedy in three acts where the travel gods toy with our anti-hero for fun and entertainment</li><li>OK, maybe not quite that bad, not quite Book of Job-level torment, but two out of the three trips I’ve taken in the past month spiraled into head-shaking metaphysical “What the hell is going on here” questioning of my decision to get out of bed that morning.</li><li><em>Act 1</em> - My Midway-Vegas-Nashville travel day. This trip didn’t start out to be stupid. It started as an easy day trip to downtown Nashville for a sales call. So many people are abandoning Chicago for Nashville, Southwest has non-stop flights every 90 minutes, so no problem with flight times. That works out fine -- until someone books a sales call the prior afternoon -- in Las Vegas. Hmmm, how do I get from Vegas after 4pm Pacific to Nashville in time for a meeting the next morning Central time? Southwest is about the only choice, connecting through either Denver or Houston. I go for the more direct routing through Denver -- my first mistake.</li><li>Because, as it turned out, the March “bomb cyclone” -- what the Weather Channel helpfully named “Winter Storm Ulmer” (who or what is an Ulmer?) -- was going to shut down DIA that day with 80 mph winds. I got an e-mail from Southwest the day before canceling my connection through Denver -- understandable -- but nothing else, no rebooking, just “We’re leaving you in Vegas” -- which I’ve found tends to be Southwest’s MO -- pleasantly unhelpful. Especially when the website errored out when I tried to find an alternate routing to Nashville, and the automated message answering their 800 number was estimating 80-some minute hold times. After about 45 minutes, between banging on the website, our corporate Concur app, and tweeting at their customer service, I managed to get re-routed through Houston, safely south of the bomb cyclone.</li><li>The next morning, I show up at the gate at Midway to find my 8am flight to Vegas delayed by 2 hours -- mechanical on the plane here meant they had to bring in a new plane and crew from somewhere else. Annoying, but not critical; I’d get into Vegas at noon for a 2pm meeting. I get another coffee, log into the Boingo hotspot and clear some emails. 9:40, we line up and board. And wait. Then the captain keys the mike, pauses (never a good sign) and then starts talking - he didn’t have time to do the walkaround before we boarded because they came in late. When they did, they noticed a problem with the front strut. Maintenance is looking at it, don’t know if they can fix it, but they need everyone off the plane. So we deplane for what is now my 2nd maintenance delay. We idle around the gate area. 10:30 and nothing. I start looking at my watch. If I’m don’t get into Vegas by 1pm, there won’t be enough time to get to my 2pm meeting, and so I shouldn’t get on the plane. Then they start to re-board us. What time will we get in? 12:20. OK, I’ll board. We all get back on -- and for the most part retaking the seats we had, in spite of Southwest’s open seating. We are creatures of habit. I’m surprised no one moo’d. We’re all on, and we wait. The mike keys. There’s a slight moan rather than a moo from the cabin. We’re waiting on the paperwork. It’s always paperwork. I’m looking at my watch. It’s past 11am Central and the door is still open. A 4-hour flight means we’re now coming up against that 1pm Pacific arrive time. Do I stay on the plane? A couple minutes more and my decision is made for me; they close the door. I lean back, put on my headphones and hope for no headwinds. We get to the gate at 1:02pm. Vegas is always a maze; there’s no straight walkways; they always want to vector you through a thicket of slot machines. I head to the cab rank -- shorter walk and no waiting -- and I get a guy with a heavy foot. I’m at the client 5 minutes before the meeting. That was a bit too close.</li><li>My return trip to the airport and the flight to Houston are uneventful, not even any turbulence as we skirt that bomb cyclone. We get into Hobby maybe even a bit early. I grab a beer and then head over to the gate. They call boarding - just half the A group -- 1-30 -- because that’s all there is on this late flight to Nashville. The gate agent scans the boarding passes, saying “You’re in Row 3, you’re in Row 4, you’re in Row 5….” &nbsp;We get all get in our separate rows, and then wait. The captain keys the mike, pauses, and then says “This plane had a bird strike on the nose on landing. There’s no damage, but Maintenance has to pull the nose cone off for a visual inspection. It’ll take about an hour, so you’re free to get off the plane.” But by now, everything in the airport was closed. “My 3rd maintenance delay of the day. Unbelievable!” I tweet out in frustrustration. Except that iPhone autocorrect turned “delay” into “deejay”. Hilary Baumann pointed it out with a nice emoji-laden tweet that gave me a good chuckle. I finally got to my Nashville hotel around 1:30 in the morning. I looked at the time, shook my head, and went to bed.</li><li> Bridge Music —  South Texas Cowboy Blues by texasradiofish (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/texasradiofish/52030 Ft: unreal_dm, ElRon XChile</li><li><em>Act 2</em> - A couple of weeks later, on Sunday in Rennes, France. We wheeled our luggage the 2 blocks from our AirBnB to Rennes train station for the TGV to CDG. We stood with everyone else, looking up at the departure board waiting for the track to be posted. Departure time came closer and still no track -- not a good sign. The crowd grew larger. There was an announcement in French and a scrolling message at the bottom of the departure screen. Irene banged it into Google Translate. The gist of it -- a bomb threat had been phoned into SCNF, the train company, and all the trains in and out of Paris were halted. Given France’s recent history with terrorism, it was a reasonable response, but still…. They finally start posting delay times -- 40 mins, then over an hour, but then it shrinks back. I pull up Google Maps. The drive to CDG is showing about the same time as the train, but we’d be in control of our own destiny. I walk down to the rental car offices. It’s Sunday morning; they’re all closed. They won’t open until the afternoon; too late for us to drive and make our flights. </li><li>Time continues to tick by, past the departure time for our flight. I call United -- any other options? I get a phenomenally helpful agent. I can hear the keystrokes. Nothing else today Sunday, nor tomorrow, Monday. I wasn’t surprised about nothing available today, but was about the next day -- until I got a text from Andrew. He was on this morning’s United flight to Chicago which just cancelled for a hydraulic problem and rebooked on tomorrow’s flight -- which explains the lack of seats for us. I took the Tuesday seats. Now would we get to CDG in time for Claire’s EasyJet flight to Edinburgh so she can make class the next day. The trains finally start moving. We head down and board our train. And then wait, and wait some &nbsp;more. And then the train starts moving. I look at my watch. I think Claire will be OK. </li><li>Until we come to a stop in the middle of a rail yard. I watch a couple of guys walk past our car -- maybe a visual inspection? After a bit, we start moving -- backwards. The conductor keys the mike, and makes an announcement in rapid French that we can’t pick up. I open Google Maps. I see we’re off to the east of Paris but can’t tell if we’re moving in the right direction. Until we pull into the next station -- it’s for EuroDisney. I find our train route on the SCNF website and see this is one of the stops en route to CDG, so we’re going in the right direction. We get to CDG by 3pm, which means Claire can make her flight. Andrew comes over from the Airport Hilton, where United is putting him up for the night, and we head down to Paris for another dinner together. There are, after all, worse cities to have to spend an extra day or two.</li><li> Bridge Music —  <em>Parisian </em>Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)<br> Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License<br> http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><em>Act 3</em> - Tuesday morning, Paris. Our forced layover in Paris yesterday had been a beautiful day, &nbsp;sunny and warm. We walked through the Marais, south across Ile de la Cite, taking the obligatory selfie in front of Notre Dame that we pulled out at looked at two weeks later during the news coverage of the fire, and then rattled around the Latin Quarter looking for a place with outdoor seating and a nice rosé. This morning, though, not so beautiful. It was dumping rain. So rather than trundle our luggage 10 min to the Metro stop, I decide to order an Uber -- which takes a try or two when Chase declines my Visa again; and I switch over to Amex. A nice black Mercedes picks us up and heads for Les Halles -- or at least tries to. The traffic is a crawl at best. I watch our buffer time tick away and we’re not &nbsp;getting any closer. After sitting through a couple of traffic light cycles without clearing the intersection, we grab our bags and make for Les Halles on foot. We get there, a bit wet. We’re able to skip the ticket booth line; I have enough euros for the self-service machine, because it’s that or a chip-&amp;-pin card we don’t have. We get on the train. I look at my watch - we should have enough time to check our bags (bringing back some liquids), clear security, and get to the gate without too much more agita.</li><li>Until the train slows to a stop between stops. The conductor keys the mike, and makes an announcement in rapid French. I look at the other passengers. They don’t seem too agitated. I figure it’s some congestion on the track ahead. And, sure enough, we start moving after a couple of minutes. But at the next stop, the train doors stay open and a train employee come on, saying in French <em>and</em> English -- everyone has to get off, catch a bus outside the station to another station, then catch a different train to the airport. We head down the bus stop. There’s no one there to help; just a couple hundred people milling around.</li><li>Now I’m worried. We have no time to figure this out. The taxi stand is mobbed, I fire up Uber - 19-minute wait. Lyft? They’re not in Paris. I google to find taxi company but before I call, I try Uber one more time -- a 5-minute wait for a €60 fare. I hit the order button -- and then again after I swap over to Amex. €60 for a 15-minute ride to CDG is tough, but it’s cheaper than another night in a hotel. We get to the United desk 2 minutes before luggage check closes for our flight. The agent radioed down, checked in our bags, and then gave us the CDG version of Fast Track, so we could sidestep the long passport control and security lines. We board, sit down, but don’t really settle in until the plane leaves the ground. And when we’re finally at ORD, standing by the luggage carousel, our bags are the first ones to come out.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #150</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_150.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<p><!--EndFragment--></p>\n<p></p>','Podcast #150 — Travel Interruptus','','inherit','closed','closed','','2402-revision-v1','','','2019-04-22 22:47:28','2019-04-23 03:47:28','',2402,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/2402-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2430,1,'2019-04-22 22:49:26','2019-04-23 03:49:26','<!-- wp:image {\"id\":2404,\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/CoeazhcUMAAhyQN-300x251.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2404\"/><figcaption>This guy looks familiar...</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It\'s been a tough month for travel. Not quite to Book of Job-level torment, but two of this month\'s three trips spiraled into head-shaking metaphysical “What the hell is going on here” questioning of my decision to get out of bed that morning. I walk through the travel gods\' fun and games, as well as some new data on regional jet delays and buying a new travel bag.  All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_150.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/610046667&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To read the Detailed Show Notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To read the Detailed Show Notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #150: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, as the weather begins to stagger unsteadily toward Spring -- 74 degrees on Monday, 5.3 inches of snow (thundersnow!) on Sunday, then back up into the 70’s two days later. &nbsp;April 14 -- over 5 inches of snow, over 1,000 flights cancelled. A nasty surprise for folks who thought it would be safe to connect through ORD, but just validates a Chicago truism -- don’t put the snow gear away until after Tax Day. Yup, welcome to the Midwest.</li><li>Have done a <em>chunk</em> of travel -- there’s a unit of measure for you -- since the last episode. A 2-day trip that hit 4 airports in the first day -- Chicago-Midway, Las Vegas, Houston-Hobby, and Nashville. The next week, I squoze in a trip to a new airport - State College, PA -- before heading out on vacation to Brittany, France. The squeeze wasn’t too tight -- flew back from State College on Weds night and left on vacation Thursday night -- but I did scout out a couple of backups in case the United Express regional jet went AWOL; a hour or so drive down to Harrisburg, a couple hour drive over to Pittsburgh. Luckily, I didn’t need them. United Express was having a good day, and therefore, so did I.</li><li>The next day’s flight to Paris on SAS by way of Stockholm went fine. We got in on time, found the left luggage lockers, and then the express train into the city all without much hassle. Arlanda Airport is comfortably sized and has good signage. The only real problem was that we got into center city Stockholm too early -- around 8:30am -- and nothing was really open. So we coffee’d up at one place, had some cardamom pastries at another, and generally puttered around until things started opening up an hour or so later. It was a sunny, if brisk, day, so walking around the Gamla Stan and Sodermalm was nice. </li><li>I always chuckle a bit when going through De Gaulle Airport, passing through the tangle of flat escalator walkway tubes that bridge the levels and open center of Terminal 1. The walkways are a bit awkward with wheeled luggage -- going down and then up. An airport porter in front of us let a wheelchair go free on the downhill span -- took a moment for it to register that it was empty -- then it rolled back to him on the uphill. No knock against him; it was the end of the day.</li><li>The next day, we caught the train out to Brittany, to Saint Malo. We walked out of the train station and across the street to Europcar for what was one of the easiest rental car pick-ups I’ve ever had in Europe. No scare-tactic insurance upselling -- just a look at my driver’s license and a quick pointer to where I could find the car in the train station parking lot. Five minutes, max. And dropping off the car a week later at Rennes train station? Absolutely the easiest rental drop-off -- gave the guy the keys and a receipt showing I’d filled up the car and I was done. No waiting for him to go inspect the car, just a handshake and “Have a good day”. </li><li>The next day wasn’t near as carefree, but we’ll talk about that in a few minutes.</li><li> Bridge Music — <em>Countryside Summer Joyride</em> by Kara Square (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mindmapthat/56281 Ft: Javolenus</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I’ve been not-quite-hating on, but certainly have been down on regional jets for quite some time on this podcast. Given a choice, I recommend people avoid them -- not because of their size, but their schedule dependability. Because the regional airlines’ model is to bounce a plane from place to place rather than route through hubs, they never recover from weather or mechanical delays. Those delays just cascade through the rest of the day. Now there often aren’t alternatives. Hence my earlier comment about needing backup plans for my regional jet flight home from State College. My flight was at the end of the day, the most vulnerable time to delays. Given my personal experience, &nbsp;I wasn’t surprised to read that US Dept of Transportation data showed that regional flights were 2-4 times more likely to be cancelled than mainline flights. The Chicago Tribune dug into the DOT data and found flights operated by Delta’s regional partners were 4 times more likely to be canceled than flights operated by Delta, while American Eagle and United Express were 2-3 times more likely to cancel flights than their mainline partners. You can’t avoid regional jets when going to places like State College or Charlottesville, VA or Appleton, WI -- but you can when flying to LGA or DFW or MSY. And in those cases, unless those RJ flights have exactly the schedule I need, I’ll suffer a bit of inconvenience for a lot more dependability.</li><li>On our travels through Brittany earlier this month, I found that we were getting a large number of “card declined” messages when trying to use our Chase Sapphire Visa card -- at gas stations, stores, and in Paris when I tried to use my Uber app. Now this isn’t a new card -- we’ve had it for over 5 years -- and it’s not the first time we’ve used it on travels in Europe. But Chase fraud algorithm seems more sensitive, throwing more false positives, and no way to update things. On the way out of Brest, I pulled into a Total gas station to fill up on our way to the Crozon peninsula. We’d be there for a couple of days of hiking and I wasn’t sure many gas stations we’d see (turned out that I didn’t need to worry). I pull up to a pump, tap the Chase Visa, get a decline. Insert the card into the reader; get another decline. I do the same drill with my Citi MasterCard with the same result. However, I immediately get a fraud alert from Citi. I hit the big green “Yes” button on the e-mail -- as in, “Yes, I do recognize this charge” -- get an “all clear” response back, tap my Citi card again and fill up my tank. All this time, we get nothing from Chase. I open the Chase app on my phone; nothing there either. Same thing in Paris when I needed an Uber fast (more on that in a bit). Chase declined, but my Amex Platinum card went through. For me, it was just annoying; I always carry a full set of cards when traveling -- a Visa and a MasterCard from different banks, and an Amex -- because single points of failure when traveling are bad -- I don’t want to be left hanging if one bank or one card processor drops their network or loses a data center. Oh, and I also carry cash. But, as we’ve <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"talked (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/02/10/podcast-148-travel-potpourri-for-200-alex/\" target=\"_blank\">talked</a> <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"about (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/12/17/podcast-147-holiday-travel-tips-notes-from-santa-fe/\" target=\"_blank\">about</a> <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"before (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\" target=\"_blank\">before</a>, that’s ‘cause I’m old-school.</li><li>Brittany was a touring vacation, so we were moving every couple of days or so -- packing, unpacking, repacking. During one of those repacking sessions, maybe in Morgat on the Crozon peninsula -- I couldn’t find my Bose headphone case, which had my Bose headphones, in my backpack -- and I didn’t remember pulling out. Where the hell did they go, I asked myself. I pull everything out of my backpack and -- oh, there they are; they had slipped behind my camera bag in the bottom of my backpack. How did I lose my headphones in my backpack, you may ask -- and rightfully so because it really sounds stupid. Probably the same reason I lost a Google tablet in there a few years back -- too much black. The Bose case is black, the interior of Timbuk 2 backpack is black, my eyes aren’t as good as they used to be… I’d been toying around with getting a new bag, more of a messenger style -- that I could sling over one shoulder and with a bit better waterproofing. And, after this little panic drill, a non-black interior. I ended up getting a small Timbuk 2 Classic messenger bag from the Outlet section of REI.com for $50. It’s not too big -- holds my 11-inch MacBook Air, a couple of notebooks, an umbrella -- and has a bright yellow interior. I haven’t lost anything in it yet -- but I don’t trust myself. Maybe I need to get, like a white umbrella, and spray paint my Bose case red. I love black, but maybe I’ve taken that color palette a bit too far.</li><li>And if you have any travel rants, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. &nbsp;The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"mpeacock (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Facebook page (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Facebook page</a> or our Instagram account at <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\" (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Travelcommons</a> -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li> Bridge Music —  <em>Jester of the Golden Apocalypse</em> by Super_Sigil (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Super_Sigil/34750 </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Travel Interruptus</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A Greek tragedy in three acts where the travel gods toy with our anti-hero for fun and entertainment</li><li>OK, maybe not quite that bad, not quite Book of Job-level torment, but two out of the three trips I’ve taken in the past month spiraled into head-shaking metaphysical “What the hell is going on here” questioning of my decision to get out of bed that morning.</li><li><em>Act 1</em> - My Midway-Vegas-Nashville travel day. This trip didn’t start out to be stupid. It started as an easy day trip to downtown Nashville for a sales call. So many people are abandoning Chicago for Nashville, Southwest has non-stop flights every 90 minutes, so no problem with flight times. That works out fine -- until someone books a sales call the prior afternoon -- in Las Vegas. Hmmm, how do I get from Vegas after 4pm Pacific to Nashville in time for a meeting the next morning Central time? Southwest is about the only choice, connecting through either Denver or Houston. I go for the more direct routing through Denver -- my first mistake.</li><li>Because, as it turned out, the March “bomb cyclone” -- what the Weather Channel helpfully named “Winter Storm Ulmer” (who or what is an Ulmer?) -- was going to shut down DIA that day with 80 mph winds. I got an e-mail from Southwest the day before canceling my connection through Denver -- understandable -- but nothing else, no rebooking, just “We’re leaving you in Vegas” -- which I’ve found tends to be Southwest’s MO -- pleasantly unhelpful. Especially when the website errored out when I tried to find an alternate routing to Nashville, and the automated message answering their 800 number was estimating 80-some minute hold times. After about 45 minutes, between banging on the website, our corporate Concur app, and tweeting at their customer service, I managed to get re-routed through Houston, safely south of the bomb cyclone.</li><li>The next morning, I show up at the gate at Midway to find my 8am flight to Vegas delayed by 2 hours -- mechanical on the plane here meant they had to bring in a new plane and crew from somewhere else. Annoying, but not critical; I’d get into Vegas at noon for a 2pm meeting. I get another coffee, log into the Boingo hotspot and clear some emails. 9:40, we line up and board. And wait. Then the captain keys the mike, pauses (never a good sign) and then starts talking - he didn’t have time to do the walkaround before we boarded because they came in late. When they did, they noticed a problem with the front strut. Maintenance is looking at it, don’t know if they can fix it, but they need everyone off the plane. So we deplane for what is now my 2nd maintenance delay. We idle around the gate area. 10:30 and nothing. I start looking at my watch. If I’m don’t get into Vegas by 1pm, there won’t be enough time to get to my 2pm meeting, and so I shouldn’t get on the plane. Then they start to re-board us. What time will we get in? 12:20. OK, I’ll board. We all get back on -- and for the most part retaking the seats we had, in spite of Southwest’s open seating. We are creatures of habit. I’m surprised no one moo’d. We’re all on, and we wait. The mike keys. There’s a slight moan rather than a moo from the cabin. We’re waiting on the paperwork. It’s always paperwork. I’m looking at my watch. It’s past 11am Central and the door is still open. A 4-hour flight means we’re now coming up against that 1pm Pacific arrive time. Do I stay on the plane? A couple minutes more and my decision is made for me; they close the door. I lean back, put on my headphones and hope for no headwinds. We get to the gate at 1:02pm. Vegas is always a maze; there’s no straight walkways; they always want to vector you through a thicket of slot machines. I head to the cab rank -- shorter walk and no waiting -- and I get a guy with a heavy foot. I’m at the client 5 minutes before the meeting. That was a bit too close.</li><li>My return trip to the airport and the flight to Houston are uneventful, not even any turbulence as we skirt that bomb cyclone. We get into Hobby maybe even a bit early. I grab a beer and then head over to the gate. They call boarding - just half the A group -- 1-30 -- because that’s all there is on this late flight to Nashville. The gate agent scans the boarding passes, saying “You’re in Row 3, you’re in Row 4, you’re in Row 5….” &nbsp;We get all get in our separate rows, and then wait. The captain keys the mike, pauses, and then says “This plane had a bird strike on the nose on landing. There’s no damage, but Maintenance has to pull the nose cone off for a visual inspection. It’ll take about an hour, so you’re free to get off the plane.” But by now, everything in the airport was closed. “My 3rd maintenance delay of the day. Unbelievable!” I tweet out in frustrustration. Except that iPhone autocorrect turned “delay” into “deejay”. Hilary Baumann pointed it out with a nice emoji-laden tweet that gave me a good chuckle. I finally got to my Nashville hotel around 1:30 in the morning. I looked at the time, shook my head, and went to bed.</li><li> Bridge Music —  South Texas Cowboy Blues by texasradiofish (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/texasradiofish/52030 Ft: unreal_dm, ElRon XChile</li><li><em>Act 2</em> - A couple of weeks later, on Sunday in Rennes, France. We wheeled our luggage the 2 blocks from our AirBnB to Rennes train station for the TGV to CDG. We stood with everyone else, looking up at the departure board waiting for the track to be posted. Departure time came closer and still no track -- not a good sign. The crowd grew larger. There was an announcement in French and a scrolling message at the bottom of the departure screen. Irene banged it into Google Translate. The gist of it -- a bomb threat had been phoned into SCNF, the train company, and all the trains in and out of Paris were halted. Given France’s recent history with terrorism, it was a reasonable response, but still…. They finally start posting delay times -- 40 mins, then over an hour, but then it shrinks back. I pull up Google Maps. The drive to CDG is showing about the same time as the train, but we’d be in control of our own destiny. I walk down to the rental car offices. It’s Sunday morning; they’re all closed. They won’t open until the afternoon; too late for us to drive and make our flights. </li><li>Time continues to tick by, past the departure time for our flight. I call United -- any other options? I get a phenomenally helpful agent. I can hear the keystrokes. Nothing else today Sunday, nor tomorrow, Monday. I wasn’t surprised about nothing available today, but was about the next day -- until I got a text from Andrew. He was on this morning’s United flight to Chicago which just cancelled for a hydraulic problem and rebooked on tomorrow’s flight -- which explains the lack of seats for us. I took the Tuesday seats. Now would we get to CDG in time for Claire’s EasyJet flight to Edinburgh so she can make class the next day. The trains finally start moving. We head down and board our train. And then wait, and wait some &nbsp;more. And then the train starts moving. I look at my watch. I think Claire will be OK. </li><li>Until we come to a stop in the middle of a rail yard. I watch a couple of guys walk past our car -- maybe a visual inspection? After a bit, we start moving -- backwards. The conductor keys the mike, and makes an announcement in rapid French that we can’t pick up. I open Google Maps. I see we’re off to the east of Paris but can’t tell if we’re moving in the right direction. Until we pull into the next station -- it’s for EuroDisney. I find our train route on the SCNF website and see this is one of the stops en route to CDG, so we’re going in the right direction. We get to CDG by 3pm, which means Claire can make her flight. Andrew comes over from the Airport Hilton, where United is putting him up for the night, and we head down to Paris for another dinner together. There are, after all, worse cities to have to spend an extra day or two.</li><li> Bridge Music —  <em>Parisian </em>Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)<br> Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License<br> http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><em>Act 3</em> - Tuesday morning, Paris. Our forced layover in Paris yesterday had been a beautiful day, &nbsp;sunny and warm. We walked through the Marais, south across Ile de la Cite, taking the obligatory selfie in front of Notre Dame that we pulled out at looked at two weeks later during the news coverage of the fire, and then rattled around the Latin Quarter looking for a place with outdoor seating and a nice rosé. This morning, though, not so beautiful. It was dumping rain. So rather than trundle our luggage 10 min to the Metro stop, I decide to order an Uber -- which takes a try or two when Chase declines my Visa again; and I switch over to Amex. A nice black Mercedes picks us up and heads for Les Halles -- or at least tries to. The traffic is a crawl at best. I watch our buffer time tick away and we’re not &nbsp;getting any closer. After sitting through a couple of traffic light cycles without clearing the intersection, we grab our bags and make for Les Halles on foot. We get there, a bit wet. We’re able to skip the ticket booth line; I have enough euros for the self-service machine, because it’s that or a chip-&amp;-pin card we don’t have. We get on the train. I look at my watch - we should have enough time to check our bags (bringing back some liquids), clear security, and get to the gate without too much more agita.</li><li>Until the train slows to a stop between stops. The conductor keys the mike, and makes an announcement in rapid French. I look at the other passengers. They don’t seem too agitated. I figure it’s some congestion on the track ahead. And, sure enough, we start moving after a couple of minutes. But at the next stop, the train doors stay open and a train employee come on, saying in French <em>and</em> English -- everyone has to get off, catch a bus outside the station to another station, then catch a different train to the airport. We head down the bus stop. There’s no one there to help; just a couple hundred people milling around.</li><li>Now I’m worried. We have no time to figure this out. The taxi stand is mobbed, I fire up Uber - 19-minute wait. Lyft? They’re not in Paris. I google to find taxi company but before I call, I try Uber one more time -- a 5-minute wait for a €60 fare. I hit the order button -- and then again after I swap over to Amex. €60 for a 15-minute ride to CDG is tough, but it’s cheaper than another night in a hotel. We get to the United desk 2 minutes before luggage check closes for our flight. The agent radioed down, checked in our bags, and then gave us the CDG version of Fast Track, so we could sidestep the long passport control and security lines. We board, sit down, but don’t really settle in until the plane leaves the ground. And when we’re finally at ORD, standing by the luggage carousel, our bags are the first ones to come out.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #150</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_150.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<p><!--EndFragment--></p>\n<p></p>','Podcast #150 — Travel Interruptus','','inherit','closed','closed','','2402-revision-v1','','','2019-04-22 22:49:26','2019-04-23 03:49:26','',2402,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/2402-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2431,1,'2019-04-22 22:50:30','2019-04-23 03:50:30','<!-- wp:image {\"id\":2404,\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/CoeazhcUMAAhyQN-300x251.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2404\"/><figcaption>This guy looks familiar...</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It\'s been a tough month for travel. Not quite to Book of Job-level torment, but two of this month\'s three trips spiraled into head-shaking metaphysical “What the hell is going on here” questioning of my decision to get out of bed that morning. I walk through the travel gods\' fun and games, as well as some new data on regional jet delays and buying a new travel bag.  All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_150.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/610046667&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To read the Detailed Show Notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To read the Detailed Show Notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #150: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, as the weather begins to stagger unsteadily toward Spring -- 74 degrees on Monday, 5.3 inches of snow (thundersnow!) on Sunday, then back up into the 70’s two days later. &nbsp;April 14 -- over 5 inches of snow, over 1,000 flights cancelled. A nasty surprise for folks who thought it would be safe to connect through ORD, but just validates a Chicago truism -- don’t put the snow gear away until after Tax Day. Yup, welcome to the Midwest.</li><li>Have done a <em>chunk</em> of travel -- there’s a unit of measure for you -- since the last episode. A 2-day trip that hit 4 airports in the first day -- Chicago-Midway, Las Vegas, Houston-Hobby, and Nashville. The next week, I squoze in a trip to a new airport - State College, PA -- before heading out on vacation to Brittany, France. The squeeze wasn’t too tight -- flew back from State College on Weds night and left on vacation Thursday night -- but I did scout out a couple of backups in case the United Express regional jet went AWOL; a hour or so drive down to Harrisburg, a couple hour drive over to Pittsburgh. Luckily, I didn’t need them. United Express was having a good day, and therefore, so did I.</li><li>The next day’s flight to Paris on SAS by way of Stockholm went fine. We got in on time, found the left luggage lockers, and then the express train into the city all without much hassle. Arlanda Airport is comfortably sized and has good signage. The only real problem was that we got into center city Stockholm too early -- around 8:30am -- and nothing was really open. So we coffee’d up at one place, had some cardamom pastries at another, and generally puttered around until things started opening up an hour or so later. It was a sunny, if brisk, day, so walking around the Gamla Stan and Sodermalm was nice. </li><li>I always chuckle a bit when going through De Gaulle Airport, passing through the tangle of flat escalator walkway tubes that bridge the levels and open center of Terminal 1. The walkways are a bit awkward with wheeled luggage -- going down and then up. An airport porter in front of us let a wheelchair go free on the downhill span -- took a moment for it to register that it was empty -- then it rolled back to him on the uphill. No knock against him; it was the end of the day.</li><li>The next day, we caught the train out to Brittany, to Saint Malo. We walked out of the train station and across the street to Europcar for what was one of the easiest rental car pick-ups I’ve ever had in Europe. No scare-tactic insurance upselling -- just a look at my driver’s license and a quick pointer to where I could find the car in the train station parking lot. Five minutes, max. And dropping off the car a week later at Rennes train station? Absolutely the easiest rental drop-off -- gave the guy the keys and a receipt showing I’d filled up the car and I was done. No waiting for him to go inspect the car, just a handshake and “Have a good day”. </li><li>The next day wasn’t near as carefree, but we’ll talk about that in a few minutes.</li><li> Bridge Music — <em>Countryside Summer Joyride</em> by Kara Square (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mindmapthat/56281 Ft: Javolenus</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I’ve been not-quite-hating on, but certainly have been down on regional jets for quite some time on this podcast. Given a choice, I recommend people avoid them -- not because of their size, but their schedule dependability. Because the regional airlines’ model is to bounce a plane from place to place rather than route through hubs, they never recover from weather or mechanical delays. Those delays just cascade through the rest of the day. Now there often aren’t alternatives. Hence my earlier comment about needing backup plans for my regional jet flight home from State College. My flight was at the end of the day, the most vulnerable time to delays. Given my personal experience, &nbsp;I wasn’t surprised to read that US Dept of Transportation data showed that regional flights were 2-4 times more likely to be cancelled than mainline flights. The Chicago Tribune dug into the DOT data and found flights operated by Delta’s regional partners were 4 times more likely to be canceled than flights operated by Delta, while American Eagle and United Express were 2-3 times more likely to cancel flights than their mainline partners. You can’t avoid regional jets when going to places like State College or Charlottesville, VA or Appleton, WI -- but you can when flying to LGA or DFW or MSY. And in those cases, unless those RJ flights have exactly the schedule I need, I’ll suffer a bit of inconvenience for a lot more dependability.</li><li>On our travels through Brittany earlier this month, I found that we were getting a large number of “card declined” messages when trying to use our Chase Sapphire Visa card -- at gas stations, stores, and in Paris when I tried to use my Uber app. Now this isn’t a new card -- we’ve had it for over 5 years -- and it’s not the first time we’ve used it on travels in Europe. But Chase fraud algorithm seems more sensitive, throwing more false positives, and no way to update things. On the way out of Brest, I pulled into a Total gas station to fill up on our way to the Crozon peninsula. We’d be there for a couple of days of hiking and I wasn’t sure many gas stations we’d see (turned out that I didn’t need to worry). I pull up to a pump, tap the Chase Visa, get a decline. Insert the card into the reader; get another decline. I do the same drill with my Citi MasterCard with the same result. However, I immediately get a fraud alert from Citi. I hit the big green “Yes” button on the e-mail -- as in, “Yes, I do recognize this charge” -- get an “all clear” response back, tap my Citi card again and fill up my tank. All this time, we get nothing from Chase. I open the Chase app on my phone; nothing there either. Same thing in Paris when I needed an Uber fast (more on that in a bit). Chase declined, but my Amex Platinum card went through. For me, it was just annoying; I always carry a full set of cards when traveling -- a Visa and a MasterCard from different banks, and an Amex -- because single points of failure when traveling are bad -- I don’t want to be left hanging if one bank or one card processor drops their network or loses a data center. Oh, and I also carry cash. But, as we’ve <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"talked (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/02/10/podcast-148-travel-potpourri-for-200-alex/\" target=\"_blank\">talked</a> <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"about (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/12/17/podcast-147-holiday-travel-tips-notes-from-santa-fe/\" target=\"_blank\">about</a> <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"before (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\" target=\"_blank\">before</a>, that’s ‘cause I’m old-school.</li><li>Brittany was a touring vacation, so we were moving every couple of days or so -- packing, unpacking, repacking. During one of those repacking sessions, maybe in Morgat on the Crozon peninsula -- I couldn’t find my Bose headphone case, which had my Bose headphones, in my backpack -- and I didn’t remember pulling out. Where the hell did they go, I asked myself. I pull everything out of my backpack and -- oh, there they are; they had slipped behind my camera bag in the bottom of my backpack. How did I lose my headphones in my backpack, you may ask -- and rightfully so because it really sounds stupid. Probably the same reason I lost a Google tablet in there a few years back -- too much black. The Bose case is black, the interior of Timbuk 2 backpack is black, my eyes aren’t as good as they used to be… I’d been toying around with getting a new bag, more of a messenger style -- that I could sling over one shoulder and with a bit better waterproofing. And, after this little panic drill, a non-black interior. I ended up getting a small Timbuk 2 Classic messenger bag from the Outlet section of REI.com for $50. It’s not too big -- holds my 11-inch MacBook Air, a couple of notebooks, an umbrella -- and has a bright yellow interior. I haven’t lost anything in it yet -- but I don’t trust myself. Maybe I need to get, like a white umbrella, and spray paint my Bose case red. I love black, but maybe I’ve taken that color palette a bit too far.</li><li>And if you have any travel rants, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. &nbsp;The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"mpeacock (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Facebook page (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Facebook page</a> or our Instagram account at <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\" (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Travelcommons</a> -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li> Bridge Music —  <em>Jester of the Golden Apocalypse</em> by Super_Sigil (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Super_Sigil/34750 </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Travel Interruptus</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A Greek tragedy in three acts where the travel gods toy with our anti-hero for fun and entertainment</li><li>OK, maybe not quite that bad, not quite Book of Job-level torment, but two out of the three trips I’ve taken in the past month spiraled into head-shaking metaphysical “What the hell is going on here” questioning of my decision to get out of bed that morning.</li><li><em>Act 1</em> - My Midway-Vegas-Nashville travel day. This trip didn’t start out to be stupid. It started as an easy day trip to downtown Nashville for a sales call. So many people are abandoning Chicago for Nashville, Southwest has non-stop flights every 90 minutes, so no problem with flight times. That works out fine -- until someone books a sales call the prior afternoon -- in Las Vegas. Hmmm, how do I get from Vegas after 4pm Pacific to Nashville in time for a meeting the next morning Central time? Southwest is about the only choice, connecting through either Denver or Houston. I go for the more direct routing through Denver -- my first mistake.</li><li>Because, as it turned out, the March “bomb cyclone” -- what the Weather Channel helpfully named “Winter Storm Ulmer” (who or what is an Ulmer?) -- was going to shut down DIA that day with 80 mph winds. I got an e-mail from Southwest the day before canceling my connection through Denver -- understandable -- but nothing else, no rebooking, just “We’re leaving you in Vegas” -- which I’ve found tends to be Southwest’s MO -- pleasantly unhelpful. Especially when the website errored out when I tried to find an alternate routing to Nashville, and the automated message answering their 800 number was estimating 80-some minute hold times. After about 45 minutes, between banging on the website, our corporate Concur app, and tweeting at their customer service, I managed to get re-routed through Houston, safely south of the bomb cyclone.</li><li>The next morning, I show up at the gate at Midway to find my 8am flight to Vegas delayed by 2 hours -- mechanical on the plane here meant they had to bring in a new plane and crew from somewhere else. Annoying, but not critical; I’d get into Vegas at noon for a 2pm meeting. I get another coffee, log into the Boingo hotspot and clear some emails. 9:40, we line up and board. And wait. Then the captain keys the mike, pauses (never a good sign) and then starts talking - he didn’t have time to do the walkaround before we boarded because they came in late. When they did, they noticed a problem with the front strut. Maintenance is looking at it, don’t know if they can fix it, but they need everyone off the plane. So we deplane for what is now my 2nd maintenance delay. We idle around the gate area. 10:30 and nothing. I start looking at my watch. If I’m don’t get into Vegas by 1pm, there won’t be enough time to get to my 2pm meeting, and so I shouldn’t get on the plane. Then they start to re-board us. What time will we get in? 12:20. OK, I’ll board. We all get back on -- and for the most part retaking the seats we had, in spite of Southwest’s open seating. We are creatures of habit. I’m surprised no one moo’d. We’re all on, and we wait. The mike keys. There’s a slight moan rather than a moo from the cabin. We’re waiting on the paperwork. It’s always paperwork. I’m looking at my watch. It’s past 11am Central and the door is still open. A 4-hour flight means we’re now coming up against that 1pm Pacific arrive time. Do I stay on the plane? A couple minutes more and my decision is made for me; they close the door. I lean back, put on my headphones and hope for no headwinds. We get to the gate at 1:02pm. Vegas is always a maze; there’s no straight walkways; they always want to vector you through a thicket of slot machines. I head to the cab rank -- shorter walk and no waiting -- and I get a guy with a heavy foot. I’m at the client 5 minutes before the meeting. That was a bit too close.</li><li>My return trip to the airport and the flight to Houston are uneventful, not even any turbulence as we skirt that bomb cyclone. We get into Hobby maybe even a bit early. I grab a beer and then head over to the gate. They call boarding - just half the A group -- 1-30 -- because that’s all there is on this late flight to Nashville. The gate agent scans the boarding passes, saying “You’re in Row 3, you’re in Row 4, you’re in Row 5….” &nbsp;We get all get in our separate rows, and then wait. The captain keys the mike, pauses, and then says “This plane had a bird strike on the nose on landing. There’s no damage, but Maintenance has to pull the nose cone off for a visual inspection. It’ll take about an hour, so you’re free to get off the plane.” But by now, everything in the airport was closed. “My 3rd maintenance delay of the day. Unbelievable!” I tweet out in frustrustration. Except that iPhone autocorrect turned “delay” into “deejay”. Hilary Baumann pointed it out with a nice emoji-laden tweet that gave me a good chuckle. I finally got to my Nashville hotel around 1:30 in the morning. I looked at the time, shook my head, and went to bed.</li><li> Bridge Music —  South Texas Cowboy Blues by texasradiofish (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/texasradiofish/52030 Ft: unreal_dm, ElRon XChile</li><li><em>Act 2</em> - A couple of weeks later, on Sunday in Rennes, France. We wheeled our luggage the 2 blocks from our AirBnB to Rennes train station for the TGV to CDG. We stood with everyone else, looking up at the departure board waiting for the track to be posted. Departure time came closer and still no track -- not a good sign. The crowd grew larger. There was an announcement in French and a scrolling message at the bottom of the departure screen. Irene banged it into Google Translate. The gist of it -- a bomb threat had been phoned into SCNF, the train company, and all the trains in and out of Paris were halted. Given France’s recent history with terrorism, it was a reasonable response, but still…. They finally start posting delay times -- 40 mins, then over an hour, but then it shrinks back. I pull up Google Maps. The drive to CDG is showing about the same time as the train, but we’d be in control of our own destiny. I walk down to the rental car offices. It’s Sunday morning; they’re all closed. They won’t open until the afternoon; too late for us to drive and make our flights. </li><li>Time continues to tick by, past the departure time for our flight. I call United -- any other options? I get a phenomenally helpful agent. I can hear the keystrokes. Nothing else today Sunday, nor tomorrow, Monday. I wasn’t surprised about nothing available today, but was about the next day -- until I got a text from Andrew. He was on this morning’s United flight to Chicago which just cancelled for a hydraulic problem and rebooked on tomorrow’s flight -- which explains the lack of seats for us. I took the Tuesday seats. Now would we get to CDG in time for Claire’s EasyJet flight to Edinburgh so she can make class the next day. The trains finally start moving. We head down and board our train. And then wait, and wait some &nbsp;more. And then the train starts moving. I look at my watch. I think Claire will be OK. </li><li>Until we come to a stop in the middle of a rail yard. I watch a couple of guys walk past our car -- maybe a visual inspection? After a bit, we start moving -- backwards. The conductor keys the mike, and makes an announcement in rapid French that we can’t pick up. I open Google Maps. I see we’re off to the east of Paris but can’t tell if we’re moving in the right direction. Until we pull into the next station -- it’s for EuroDisney. I find our train route on the SCNF website and see this is one of the stops en route to CDG, so we’re going in the right direction. We get to CDG by 3pm, which means Claire can make her flight. Andrew comes over from the Airport Hilton, where United is putting him up for the night, and we head down to Paris for another dinner together. There are, after all, worse cities to have to spend an extra day or two.</li><li> Bridge Music —  <em>Parisian </em>Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)<br> Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License<br> http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><em>Act 3</em> - Tuesday morning, Paris. Our forced layover in Paris yesterday had been a beautiful day, &nbsp;sunny and warm. We walked through the Marais, south across Ile de la Cite, taking the obligatory selfie in front of Notre Dame that we pulled out at looked at two weeks later during the news coverage of the fire, and then rattled around the Latin Quarter looking for a place with outdoor seating and a nice rosé. This morning, though, not so beautiful. It was dumping rain. So rather than trundle our luggage 10 min to the Metro stop, I decide to order an Uber -- which takes a try or two when Chase declines my Visa again; and I switch over to Amex. A nice black Mercedes picks us up and heads for Les Halles -- or at least tries to. The traffic is a crawl at best. I watch our buffer time tick away and we’re not &nbsp;getting any closer. After sitting through a couple of traffic light cycles without clearing the intersection, we grab our bags and make for Les Halles on foot. We get there, a bit wet. We’re able to skip the ticket booth line; I have enough euros for the self-service machine, because it’s that or a chip-&amp;-pin card we don’t have. We get on the train. I look at my watch - we should have enough time to check our bags (bringing back some liquids), clear security, and get to the gate without too much more agita.</li><li>Until the train slows to a stop between stops. The conductor keys the mike, and makes an announcement in rapid French. I look at the other passengers. They don’t seem too agitated. I figure it’s some congestion on the track ahead. And, sure enough, we start moving after a couple of minutes. But at the next stop, the train doors stay open and a train employee come on, saying in French <em>and</em> English -- everyone has to get off, catch a bus outside the station to another station, then catch a different train to the airport. We head down the bus stop. There’s no one there to help; just a couple hundred people milling around.</li><li>Now I’m worried. We have no time to figure this out. The taxi stand is mobbed, I fire up Uber - 19-minute wait. Lyft? They’re not in Paris. I google to find taxi company but before I call, I try Uber one more time -- a 5-minute wait for a €60 fare. I hit the order button -- and then again after I swap over to Amex. €60 for a 15-minute ride to CDG is tough, but it’s cheaper than another night in a hotel. We get to the United desk 2 minutes before luggage check closes for our flight. The agent radioed down, checked in our bags, and then gave us the CDG version of Fast Track, so we could sidestep the long passport control and security lines. We board, sit down, but don’t really settle in until the plane leaves the ground. And when we’re finally at ORD, standing by the luggage carousel, our bags are the first ones to come out.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #150</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_150.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<p><!--EndFragment--></p>\n<p></p>','Podcast #150 — Travel Interruptus','','inherit','closed','closed','','2402-revision-v1','','','2019-04-22 22:50:30','2019-04-23 03:50:30','',2402,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/2402-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2432,1,'2019-04-22 22:52:20','2019-04-23 03:52:20','<!-- wp:image {\"id\":2404,\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/CoeazhcUMAAhyQN-300x251.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2404\"/><figcaption>This guy looks familiar...</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It\'s been a tough month for travel. Not quite to Book of Job-level torment, but two of this month\'s three trips spiraled into head-shaking metaphysical “What the hell is going on here” questioning of my decision to get out of bed that morning. I walk through the travel gods\' fun and games, as well as some new data on regional jet delays and buying a new travel bag.  All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_150.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/610046667&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To read the Detailed Show Notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To read the Detailed Show Notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #150: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, as the weather begins to stagger unsteadily toward Spring -- 74 degrees on Monday, 5.3 inches of snow (thundersnow!) on Sunday, then back up into the 70’s two days later. &nbsp;April 14 -- over 5 inches of snow, over 1,000 flights cancelled. A nasty surprise for folks who thought it would be safe to connect through ORD, but just validates a Chicago truism -- don’t put the snow gear away until after Tax Day. Yup, welcome to the Midwest.</li><li>Have done a <em>chunk</em> of travel -- there’s a unit of measure for you -- since the last episode. A 2-day trip that hit 4 airports in the first day -- Chicago-Midway, Las Vegas, Houston-Hobby, and Nashville. The next week, I squoze in a trip to a new airport - State College, PA -- before heading out on vacation to Brittany, France. The squeeze wasn’t too tight -- flew back from State College on Weds night and left on vacation Thursday night -- but I did scout out a couple of backups in case the United Express regional jet went AWOL; a hour or so drive down to Harrisburg, a couple hour drive over to Pittsburgh. Luckily, I didn’t need them. United Express was having a good day, and therefore, so did I.</li><li>The next day’s flight to Paris on SAS by way of Stockholm went fine. We got in on time, found the left luggage lockers, and then the express train into the city all without much hassle. Arlanda Airport is comfortably sized and has good signage. The only real problem was that we got into center city Stockholm too early -- around 8:30am -- and nothing was really open. So we coffee’d up at one place, had some cardamom pastries at another, and generally puttered around until things started opening up an hour or so later. It was a sunny, if brisk, day, so walking around the Gamla Stan and Sodermalm was nice. </li><li>I always chuckle a bit when going through De Gaulle Airport, passing through the tangle of flat escalator walkway tubes that bridge the levels and open center of Terminal 1. The walkways are a bit awkward with wheeled luggage -- going down and then up. An airport porter in front of us let a wheelchair go free on the downhill span -- took a moment for it to register that it was empty -- then it rolled back to him on the uphill. No knock against him; it was the end of the day.</li><li>The next day, we caught the train out to Brittany, to Saint Malo. We walked out of the train station and across the street to Europcar for what was one of the easiest rental car pick-ups I’ve ever had in Europe. No scare-tactic insurance upselling -- just a look at my driver’s license and a quick pointer to where I could find the car in the train station parking lot. Five minutes, max. And dropping off the car a week later at Rennes train station? Absolutely the easiest rental drop-off -- gave the guy the keys and a receipt showing I’d filled up the car and I was done. No waiting for him to go inspect the car, just a handshake and “Have a good day”. </li><li>The next day wasn’t near as carefree, but we’ll talk about that in a few minutes.</li><li> Bridge Music — <em>Countryside Summer Joyride</em> by Kara Square (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mindmapthat/56281 Ft: Javolenus</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I’ve been not-quite-hating on, but certainly have been down on regional jets for quite some time on this podcast. Given a choice, I recommend people avoid them -- not because of their size, but their schedule dependability. Because the regional airlines’ model is to bounce a plane from place to place rather than route through hubs, they never recover from weather or mechanical delays. Those delays just cascade through the rest of the day. Now there often aren’t alternatives. Hence my earlier comment about needing backup plans for my regional jet flight home from State College. My flight was at the end of the day, the most vulnerable time to delays. Given my personal experience, &nbsp;I wasn’t surprised to read that US Dept of Transportation data showed that regional flights were 2-4 times more likely to be cancelled than mainline flights. The Chicago Tribune dug into the DOT data and found flights operated by Delta’s regional partners were 4 times more likely to be canceled than flights operated by Delta, while American Eagle and United Express were 2-3 times more likely to cancel flights than their mainline partners. You can’t avoid regional jets when going to places like State College or Charlottesville, VA or Appleton, WI -- but you can when flying to LGA or DFW or MSY. And in those cases, unless those RJ flights have exactly the schedule I need, I’ll suffer a bit of inconvenience for a lot more dependability.</li><li>On our travels through Brittany earlier this month, I found that we were getting a large number of “card declined” messages when trying to use our Chase Sapphire Visa card -- at gas stations, stores, and in Paris when I tried to use my Uber app. Now this isn’t a new card -- we’ve had it for over 5 years -- and it’s not the first time we’ve used it on travels in Europe. But Chase fraud algorithm seems more sensitive, throwing more false positives, and no way to update things. On the way out of Brest, I pulled into a Total gas station to fill up on our way to the Crozon peninsula. We’d be there for a couple of days of hiking and I wasn’t sure many gas stations we’d see (turned out that I didn’t need to worry). I pull up to a pump, tap the Chase Visa, get a decline. Insert the card into the reader; get another decline. I do the same drill with my Citi MasterCard with the same result. However, I immediately get a fraud alert from Citi. I hit the big green “Yes” button on the e-mail -- as in, “Yes, I do recognize this charge” -- get an “all clear” response back, tap my Citi card again and fill up my tank. All this time, we get nothing from Chase. I open the Chase app on my phone; nothing there either. Same thing in Paris when I needed an Uber fast (more on that in a bit). Chase declined, but my Amex Platinum card went through. For me, it was just annoying; I always carry a full set of cards when traveling -- a Visa and a MasterCard from different banks, and an Amex -- because single points of failure when traveling are bad -- I don’t want to be left hanging if one bank or one card processor drops their network or loses a data center. Oh, and I also carry cash. But, as we’ve <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"talked (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/02/10/podcast-148-travel-potpourri-for-200-alex/\" target=\"_blank\">talked</a> <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"about (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/12/17/podcast-147-holiday-travel-tips-notes-from-santa-fe/\" target=\"_blank\">about</a> <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"before (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\" target=\"_blank\">before</a>, that’s ‘cause I’m old-school.</li><li>Brittany was a touring vacation, so we were moving every couple of days or so -- packing, unpacking, repacking. During one of those repacking sessions, maybe in Morgat on the Crozon peninsula -- I couldn’t find my Bose headphone case, which had my Bose headphones, in my backpack -- and I didn’t remember pulling out. Where the hell did they go, I asked myself. I pull everything out of my backpack and -- oh, there they are; they had slipped behind my camera bag in the bottom of my backpack. How did I lose my headphones in my backpack, you may ask -- and rightfully so because it really sounds stupid. Probably the same reason I lost a Google tablet in there a few years back -- too much black. The Bose case is black, the interior of Timbuk 2 backpack is black, my eyes aren’t as good as they used to be… I’d been toying around with getting a new bag, more of a messenger style -- that I could sling over one shoulder and with a bit better waterproofing. And, after this little panic drill, a non-black interior. I ended up getting a small Timbuk 2 Classic messenger bag from the Outlet section of REI.com for $50. It’s not too big -- holds my 11-inch MacBook Air, a couple of notebooks, an umbrella -- and has a bright yellow interior. I haven’t lost anything in it yet -- but I don’t trust myself. Maybe I need to get, like a white umbrella, and spray paint my Bose case red. I love black, but maybe I’ve taken that color palette a bit too far.</li><li>And if you have any travel rants, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. &nbsp;The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"mpeacock (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Facebook page (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Facebook page</a> or our Instagram account at <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\" (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Travelcommons</a> -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li> Bridge Music —  <em>Jester of the Golden Apocalypse</em> by Super_Sigil (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Super_Sigil/34750 </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Travel Interruptus</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A Greek tragedy in three acts where the travel gods toy with our anti-hero for fun and entertainment</li><li>OK, maybe not quite that bad, not quite Book of Job-level torment, but two out of the three trips I’ve taken in the past month spiraled into head-shaking metaphysical “What the hell is going on here” questioning of my decision to get out of bed that morning.</li><li><em>Act 1</em> - My Midway-Vegas-Nashville travel day. This trip didn’t start out to be stupid. It started as an easy day trip to downtown Nashville for a sales call. So many people are abandoning Chicago for Nashville, Southwest has non-stop flights every 90 minutes, so no problem with flight times. That works out fine -- until someone books a sales call the prior afternoon -- in Las Vegas. Hmmm, how do I get from Vegas after 4pm Pacific to Nashville in time for a meeting the next morning Central time? Southwest is about the only choice, connecting through either Denver or Houston. I go for the more direct routing through Denver -- my first mistake.</li><li>Because, as it turned out, the March “bomb cyclone” -- what the Weather Channel helpfully named “Winter Storm Ulmer” (who or what is an Ulmer?) -- was going to shut down DIA that day with 80 mph winds. I got an e-mail from Southwest the day before canceling my connection through Denver -- understandable -- but nothing else, no rebooking, just “We’re leaving you in Vegas” -- which I’ve found tends to be Southwest’s MO -- pleasantly unhelpful. Especially when the website errored out when I tried to find an alternate routing to Nashville, and the automated message answering their 800 number was estimating 80-some minute hold times. After about 45 minutes, between banging on the website, our corporate Concur app, and tweeting at their customer service, I managed to get re-routed through Houston, safely south of the bomb cyclone.</li><li>The next morning, I show up at the gate at Midway to find my 8am flight to Vegas delayed by 2 hours -- mechanical on the plane here meant they had to bring in a new plane and crew from somewhere else. Annoying, but not critical; I’d get into Vegas at noon for a 2pm meeting. I get another coffee, log into the Boingo hotspot and clear some emails. 9:40, we line up and board. And wait. Then the captain keys the mike, pauses (never a good sign) and then starts talking - he didn’t have time to do the walkaround before we boarded because they came in late. When they did, they noticed a problem with the front strut. Maintenance is looking at it, don’t know if they can fix it, but they need everyone off the plane. So we deplane for what is now my 2nd maintenance delay. We idle around the gate area. 10:30 and nothing. I start looking at my watch. If I’m don’t get into Vegas by 1pm, there won’t be enough time to get to my 2pm meeting, and so I shouldn’t get on the plane. Then they start to re-board us. What time will we get in? 12:20. OK, I’ll board. We all get back on -- and for the most part retaking the seats we had, in spite of Southwest’s open seating. We are creatures of habit. I’m surprised no one moo’d. We’re all on, and we wait. The mike keys. There’s a slight moan rather than a moo from the cabin. We’re waiting on the paperwork. It’s always paperwork. I’m looking at my watch. It’s past 11am Central and the door is still open. A 4-hour flight means we’re now coming up against that 1pm Pacific arrive time. Do I stay on the plane? A couple minutes more and my decision is made for me; they close the door. I lean back, put on my headphones and hope for no headwinds. We get to the gate at 1:02pm. Vegas is always a maze; there’s no straight walkways; they always want to vector you through a thicket of slot machines. I head to the cab rank -- shorter walk and no waiting -- and I get a guy with a heavy foot. I’m at the client 5 minutes before the meeting. That was a bit too close.</li><li>My return trip to the airport and the flight to Houston are uneventful, not even any turbulence as we skirt that bomb cyclone. We get into Hobby maybe even a bit early. I grab a beer and then head over to the gate. They call boarding - just half the A group -- 1-30 -- because that’s all there is on this late flight to Nashville. The gate agent scans the boarding passes, saying “You’re in Row 3, you’re in Row 4, you’re in Row 5….” &nbsp;We get all get in our separate rows, and then wait. The captain keys the mike, pauses, and then says “This plane had a bird strike on the nose on landing. There’s no damage, but Maintenance has to pull the nose cone off for a visual inspection. It’ll take about an hour, so you’re free to get off the plane.” But by now, everything in the airport was closed. “My 3rd maintenance delay of the day. Unbelievable!” I tweet out in frustrustration. Except that iPhone autocorrect turned “delay” into “deejay”. Hilary Baumann pointed it out with a nice emoji-laden tweet that gave me a good chuckle. I finally got to my Nashville hotel around 1:30 in the morning. I looked at the time, shook my head, and went to bed.</li><li> Bridge Music —  South Texas Cowboy Blues by texasradiofish (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/texasradiofish/52030 Ft: unreal_dm, ElRon XChile</li><li><em>Act 2</em> - A couple of weeks later, on Sunday in Rennes, France. We wheeled our luggage the 2 blocks from our AirBnB to Rennes train station for the TGV to CDG. We stood with everyone else, looking up at the departure board waiting for the track to be posted. Departure time came closer and still no track -- not a good sign. The crowd grew larger. There was an announcement in French and a scrolling message at the bottom of the departure screen. Irene banged it into Google Translate. The gist of it -- a bomb threat had been phoned into SCNF, the train company, and all the trains in and out of Paris were halted. Given France’s recent history with terrorism, it was a reasonable response, but still…. They finally start posting delay times -- 40 mins, then over an hour, but then it shrinks back. I pull up Google Maps. The drive to CDG is showing about the same time as the train, but we’d be in control of our own destiny. I walk down to the rental car offices. It’s Sunday morning; they’re all closed. They won’t open until the afternoon; too late for us to drive and make our flights. </li><li>Time continues to tick by, past the departure time for our flight. I call United -- any other options? I get a phenomenally helpful agent. I can hear the keystrokes. Nothing else today Sunday, nor tomorrow, Monday. I wasn’t surprised about nothing available today, but was about the next day -- until I got a text from Andrew. He was on this morning’s United flight to Chicago which just cancelled for a hydraulic problem and rebooked on tomorrow’s flight -- which explains the lack of seats for us. I took the Tuesday seats. Now would we get to CDG in time for Claire’s EasyJet flight to Edinburgh so she can make class the next day. The trains finally start moving. We head down and board our train. And then wait, and wait some &nbsp;more. And then the train starts moving. I look at my watch. I think Claire will be OK. </li><li>Until we come to a stop in the middle of a rail yard. I watch a couple of guys walk past our car -- maybe a visual inspection? After a bit, we start moving -- backwards. The conductor keys the mike, and makes an announcement in rapid French that we can’t pick up. I open Google Maps. I see we’re off to the east of Paris but can’t tell if we’re moving in the right direction. Until we pull into the next station -- it’s for EuroDisney. I find our train route on the SCNF website and see this is one of the stops en route to CDG, so we’re going in the right direction. We get to CDG by 3pm, which means Claire can make her flight. Andrew comes over from the Airport Hilton, where United is putting him up for the night, and we head down to Paris for another dinner together. There are, after all, worse cities to have to spend an extra day or two.</li><li> Bridge Music —  <em>Parisian </em>Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)<br> Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License<br> http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><em>Act 3</em> - Tuesday morning, Paris. Our forced layover in Paris yesterday had been a beautiful day, &nbsp;sunny and warm. We walked through the Marais, south across Ile de la Cite, taking the obligatory selfie in front of Notre Dame that we pulled out at looked at two weeks later during the news coverage of the fire, and then rattled around the Latin Quarter looking for a place with outdoor seating and a nice rosé. This morning, though, not so beautiful. It was dumping rain. So rather than trundle our luggage 10 min to the Metro stop, I decide to order an Uber -- which takes a try or two when Chase declines my Visa again; and I switch over to Amex. A nice black Mercedes picks us up and heads for Les Halles -- or at least tries to. The traffic is a crawl at best. I watch our buffer time tick away and we’re not &nbsp;getting any closer. After sitting through a couple of traffic light cycles without clearing the intersection, we grab our bags and make for Les Halles on foot. We get there, a bit wet. We’re able to skip the ticket booth line; I have enough euros for the self-service machine, because it’s that or a chip-&amp;-pin card we don’t have. We get on the train. I look at my watch - we should have enough time to check our bags (bringing back some liquids), clear security, and get to the gate without too much more agita.</li><li>Until the train slows to a stop between stops. The conductor keys the mike, and makes an announcement in rapid French. I look at the other passengers. They don’t seem too agitated. I figure it’s some congestion on the track ahead. And, sure enough, we start moving after a couple of minutes. But at the next stop, the train doors stay open and a train employee come on, saying in French <em>and</em> English -- everyone has to get off, catch a bus outside the station to another station, then catch a different train to the airport. We head down the bus stop. There’s no one there to help; just a couple hundred people milling around.</li><li>Now I’m worried. We have no time to figure this out. The taxi stand is mobbed, I fire up Uber - 19-minute wait. Lyft? They’re not in Paris. I google to find taxi company but before I call, I try Uber one more time -- a 5-minute wait for a €60 fare. I hit the order button -- and then again after I swap over to Amex. €60 for a 15-minute ride to CDG is tough, but it’s cheaper than another night in a hotel. We get to the United desk 2 minutes before luggage check closes for our flight. The agent radioed down, checked in our bags, and then gave us the CDG version of Fast Track, so we could sidestep the long passport control and security lines. We board, sit down, but don’t really settle in until the plane leaves the ground. And when we’re finally at ORD, standing by the luggage carousel, our bags are the first ones to come out.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #150</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_150.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<p><!--EndFragment--></p>\n<p></p>','Podcast #150 — Travel Interruptus','','inherit','closed','closed','','2402-revision-v1','','','2019-04-22 22:52:20','2019-04-23 03:52:20','',2402,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/2402-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2434,1,'2019-04-22 22:59:25','2019-04-23 03:59:25','[caption id=\"attachment_2128\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/IMG_0419.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2128\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/IMG_0419-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Greetings...[/caption]\n\nBack in front of the mic after 12 days of skipping across northern Europe -- Copenhagen, Brussels, and Scotland. In this episode, we get nostalgic about outside airports in California, talk about how a hospitality mentality is pervasive in hotels but not in restaurants, missing customer service responses from <a href=\"http://united.com\">United Airlines</a> and <a href=\"http://marriott.com\">Marriott</a>, and European perspectives about Chicago.  All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_144.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_144.mp3\"]\n\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show Notes -->\n\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #144:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL after 12 days bunny hopping through Northern Europe -- first Copenhagen, then Brussels, and finally St Andrews, Scotland to drop my daughter off for her 4th and final year at University of St Andrews. Prior to that, I had a couple of US trips -- back to Charlottesville, VA -- always a nice place to visit -- and a day trip to Omaha. And while all my European flights last week were fine -- including the 40-min connection in Amsterdam that included a trip through passport control -- late August summer storms forced to call audibles on both trips. As opposed to last month, when my CVG-ORD flight was jacked up by storms in Miami, these flights were cratered by rain that I could see outside the window -- the terminal window or the airplane window.</li>\n 	<li>They both left me less than impressed by United’s notification service. The Monday of my Charlottesville flight, it had been steadily raining in Chicago -- heavily at times. I kept checking the status of the flight -- on-time, on-time on-time. Finally, I headed to ORD, got through security, and then checked again - 3 hour delay? Really, you only just figured that out an hour before departure time? Looking out the window, the rain wasn’t letting up. I could see where this was going. I grabbed dinner and then settled in at the gate to do some work. Every once in a while, I’d check the flight status in the United app -- 3-hr delay, 3-hr delay, 3-hr delay, then wait for it -- cancelled. I wasn’t surprised at the cancellation, but the lack of push notification. Normally, I’d get a message and an e-mail from Amex Travel. Nothing this time. Like I said, though, I wasn’t surprised, and I didn’t have a critical meeting the next morning in Charlottesville. United had “helpfully” booked the same flight out the next night, but a) I couldn’t lose a whole day at the client; and b) I felt United had lost the right to my money for this flight. So, I booked the next morning’s flight on American, caught a cab back home and slept that night in my own bed. Annoying, but, hey, I got over it.</li>\n 	<li>Next week’s trip to Omaha was on yet another rainy day. It was just a day trip, so I drove to ORD and saw the dark grey line of weather coming toward me. I mentally settled in for delay. This one, though, would be more problematic because I was flying into Omaha for a workshop, and flying out to Copenhagen the next evening. That dark grey line hit ORD as we were boarding, so I walked into that workshop about 30 minutes late. We walked outside at noon to grab lunch from a food truck. I could see an even darker grey line of weather. Back in the conference room, I’d check the United app every 30 minutes or so -- on-time, on-time, on-time, cancelled. What?! Again, no notice if I hadn’t been checking. And this was a bit more problematic than last week. I found earlier SW and American flights that weren’t cancelled. I gambled on the AA flight which left a bit later but would save me the crosstown MDW-ORD Uber ride to collect my car. I excused myself early from the workshop and headed back to the airport. Arriving late; leaving early. Not sure that’s the way to make a good first impression</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Zapac/25046\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><i>You are (funky mix)</i></a> by Zapac</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul class=\"\">\n 	<li>Steve Frick, a long time TravelCommons listener, left a note on the website about <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/08/09/podcast-143-how-bad-is-business-travel-for-your-health-make-layovers-fun/\">the last episode</a>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Lots of content as well as comments on this episode. Thoroughly enjoyed the Chicago Midway Layover Southside Taproom Tour video tour, when it comes to travel and Midway, though, all I can think about is delays.</li>\n 	<li>Chicago, I recently sent all the members of my tribe there sans, myself (Someone had to watch the dog, or vice-versa). When my wife travels she always checks baggage..... we\'ve only been married 8 years. Upon arrival, I grabbed her bag off the belt and it was unusually heavy. The reason it contained 2 six-packs of Revolution Brewery beer, God bless this woman.</li>\n 	<li>Travel and health, this one hit home. Somehow I\'ve managed to \"keep it tight\"... somewhat. I hired someone about three years ago, and while he doesn\'t drink he managed to partake in every meal that he was invited to. So much so that the rest of us had an over/under on how fast he could gain 30lbs (Yes, we\'re that cruel &amp; shallow). After two broken pants buttons, he managed to get control.</li>\n 	<li>Sorry for the long comment, but keep up the great work!</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Steve, thanks for that; no apologies needed. And you guys are not the only cruel and shallow ones. I may have told this story before, but I had a project in Memphis and one of the team members had kind of a similar problem as your new hire, except his weakness was barbecue ribs. The team would go out one night a week for ribs -- Corky’s, Central, Germantown Commissary, but then this guy would also do a take-out slab another night. The weight gain was obvious -- our over/under was when he topped 300 on his cholesterol reading.</li>\n 	<li>I was 1 for 2 last month on TravelCommons Chicago meet-ups. I wasn’t able to connect with Keith Love and his son when they were in town early in August, but I did meet up with Rob Cheshire and his UK crew for a bit of a taproom crawl on Chicago’s Near West Side on a Friday night at the end of the month. I even got Rob to relax his anti-AB InBev stance and spend an hour in the Goose Island taproom, complete with a round of Bourbon County Stout. At 14%, it’s a bit larger beer than you’d typically see in a UK pub.</li>\n 	<li>More telling, though, was the discussion I had with Drew, Rob’s friend on his first visit to the US. “Where are the dangerous parts of the city, where all the shootings are?” he asked. Fair question. Three weekends before, 66 people were shot in Chicago; 12 people died. “You’re fine here,” I told him, “but I wouldn’t want to go another mile west.” The next Thursday, I was sitting in a Copenhagen bar waiting out the rain -- my wife and daughter were waiting out the rain clothes shopping; to each their own -- and got talking to the bartender, a young woman who had never been to the US. “Where are you from?” she asked. “Chicago” “I read somewhere that’s the most dangerous city in the world.” I told her my experiences -- my family and I haven’t been impacted, but we also don’t hang out on the South or West sides where all the gang bullets are flying. But given the press about the August shootings, she asked a fair question. Both conversations got my attention; I’ve gotten a bit numb to all the gun violence reporting, which is not a good thing. Travel is all about getting different perspectives, even if they’re about your own home.</li>\n 	<li>In the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/08/09/podcast-143-how-bad-is-business-travel-for-your-health-make-layovers-fun/\">last episode</a>, I relayed Keith Love’s questions about good airport apps, ones that, he said, “actually guide you through airports and their amenities/services.” Chris Christensen of the Amateur Traveler Podcast dropped a lin e saying that he uses GateGuru, run by the same team that does SeatGuru. I haven’t tried it yet, but will download it and give it a go. Narita Airport in Tokyo is taking a different angle. Their free Wi-Fi service comes with a chatbot -- Bebot -- to help travelers. The press release didn’t give any chat samples -- “Bebot, where can I find a non-Asahi beer in this terminal?” “I’m sorry, there is none” -- but it could be useful -- or at least entertaining.</li>\n 	<li>Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/07/03/podcast-142-sleeping-in-business-class-changes-from-chinese-tourists/\">July episode</a>, I mentioned how tight the United Polaris business class seats were on the Triple 7’s that I took between ORD and Frankfurt. Last Monday, Irene and I flew a new American 787 back from London, and it didn’t seem any roomier. We flew back on miles, so were in the Main Cabin Extra section, but walking through Business Class to get there, I almost had to turn my body a bit to get down the aisle, and I’m not that big of a guy. When I got to my seat, the leg room was fine, even with the seat in front of me reclined. But the seats were narrow. The couple in the window and middle seats next to me were larger folks, and I could see it was a less-than-comfortable 8 hours for them.</li>\n 	<li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/08/09/podcast-143-how-bad-is-business-travel-for-your-health-make-layovers-fun/\">the last episode</a>, while not thrilled with American’s on-time performance between ORD and CVG, I was impressed by the customer service I got from their Twitter crew. Indeed, the next day, I added a final note to my tweet stream -- “BTW, while it was an operational failure last night, the Twitter customer service was not. I appreciated the delay explanation and backing me up on the next flight”. And any more, I typically get solid, timely service from Twitter customer service. Indeed, one constant on my Top 10 Travel Tips list is “Use Twitter as a Concierge Service”. So I was surprised when a colleague said to me “I gotta get some more followers so companies pay attention to me on Twitter”. He said he never gets any replies. Anybody else have this problem?</li>\n 	<li>Now while I get good quick responses from the airlines, my recent experience with Marriott was very different. I was trying to get the receipt/the folio from a stay in Colorado Springs. The e-mailed bill never came. Then I went to the website but the download link didn’t work. I submitted a folio request on the website and hit Marriott on Twitter. Twitter was faster, though it took them a full day to respond, which was better than the 12 days it took them to respond to my website query. Neither of which actually resulted in me getting a copy of my bill. I only got that when I gave up on all the digital channels and called the Colo Springs front desk. Now, I knew that would be the fastest way -- and it was; I got an e-mail from them in about 5 minutes. But I’m always interested in seeing how all the new channels work… or don’t. Maybe Marriott needs a chatbot...</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> or our new <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a> at travelcommons -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/35879\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><i>Two Guitars</i></a> by Admiral Bob</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>California Outside Airports</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>A college friend of mine posted a status on Facebook, saying that he was flying home to Boston from Long Beach Airport in Southern California. His comment -- “New favorite airport - outdoor terminals and boarding!!” It was an immediate shot of travel nostalgia for me. My first job out of school, in the mid-80’s, had me regularly traveling from Dallas to San Jose. My folks lived in Huntington Beach, CA and American had direct flights from DFW to Long Beach. So whenever I had to be in San Jose, I’d triangulate through Long Beach for the weekend -- fly in Friday afternoon, hang out on the beach for the weekend, and then catch a 7am Monday morning Alaskan Air flight out of Orange County to San Jose.</li>\n 	<li>I loved that triangle of airports -- LGB, SNA, and SJC. Compared to LAX or SFO, they were compact -- maybe even cozy, if you can apply that adjective to an airport and keep a straight face -- uncrowded, and all of them took advantage of the California climate to be outdoor airports. No jetways, and in LGB’s case, even the baggage carousel was outside. I remember the first time walking out to pick up my luggage at LGB, waiting by a palm tree for my bag to show up. This was right after surviving 2 of the coldest winters in Chicago while going to business school. LGB instantly became my favorite airport.</li>\n 	<li>When you arrived at SJC, the gate agent would meet you at the bottom of the steps and guide you under a covered walkway into the terminal -- almost like a Japanese tour guide, holding her clipboard up. I’d walk through the terminal to the car rental lot, to the little Hertz hut in the middle. I got to know the woman working in the hut, and in those days before Hertz Gold and President’s Circle, that’s all I needed to get an upgrade. Later trips through Palm Springs Airport -- pleasure rather than business -- and I loved that airport too, walking outdoors past the palm trees between terminals. Hard to imagine after 9/11 forced airports to harden their perimeters.</li>\n 	<li>SNA and SJC are no longer outside airports. Big renovations in the ‘90’s replaced the covered walkways with jetways, doing away with that one thing that made them a little special. The renovation of LGB’s terminal 6 years ago installed fire pits and outdoor dining, but no jetways. It’s still an outside airport, as is Palm Springs.</li>\n 	<li>Not that outdoor airports are California-only things. Charlottesville airport, which I’ve been frequenting over the past couple of years, is sort of a quarter to a half outdoors. There’s 4 gates -- 1 or 2 of them have jetways, the rest are outdoor boarding and baggage claim for gate-checked bags. And there’s a nice 2nd-floor outdoor terrace that I do phone calls from when it’s not too hot, or raining.</li>\n 	<li>One of the things I like about outdoor airports is there’s no waiting for gates. The plane lands, parks, they wheel up the stairs -- maybe even two; front and back if you’re lucky -- and off you go. No ORD treatment -- landing and then waiting 20 minutes for your gate to open up. However, the last time I flew into CHO, we landed and stopped short of the usual parking spot. The pilot keyed the mic -- “Our gate is full; we’ll have to wait a couple of minutes.” All us passengers looked at each other -- gate, what gate? Turns out he meant some fancy new ramp thing; instead of stairs, they pushed over some huge covered ramp, complete with a switchback so the descent wasn’t too steep. I dunno, call me old-school (or just old) but in my book, you have to have a proper set of stairs to be a true outdoor airport. Palm trees are optional, but highly recommended.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djlang59/22228\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><em>Garden Of The Forking</em></a><em> </em>by J.Lang</li>\n</ul>\n<b>Hospitality Mentality</b>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Nowadays, it seems that most hotels have got their front desk training pretty well down. I can’t remember the last time I hit an indifferent front desk person when checking in. And given the number of different hotels I stay in, it leads me to the conclusion that this, what I call, a hospitality mentality is a key part of their training, because, based on every other retail experience I have, I know I wouldn’t naturally run into this many nice people in a row. Not that I have a problem with this. It’s nice whenever I’m dragging myself into a hotel late because of flight delays or whatever, that the person checking me in is pleasant, wants to take care of me, walks out from behind the desk give me my key and to point me to the elevators, and seems genuinely concerned about my well-being. Even in hotels that otherwise are a bit “meh”, I find that my standard TripAdvisor review says “But the service was great.”</li>\n 	<li>Which is a huge contrast with the typical service I get at a restaurant where I would expect a hospitality mentality, but am surprised when I get it. Last Sunday night, Irene and I were overnighting in London on our way back from St Andrews, and walked to an Indian restaurant, <a href=\"http://www.dishoom.com/kings-cross/\">Dishoom</a>, up behind King’s Cross station. There was a queue outside the restaurant, typical for a popular place. A guy came out with an iPad, took our name, and told us it would be about a 30 minute wait. That was fine, we wanted a drink before dinner anyhow. They give us a pager -- again, typical stuff -- but now it gets a bit different. Instead of pointing us to a scrum around a bar, someone escorts us to two open seats, asks if the seats are OK for us, and right behind her was a waitress to take our order. Right at about 30 minutes, as we’re finishing our drinks, the pager goes off. We’re collecting our stuff to head back to the hostess stand when a guy walks over to us -- the same guy who took our name in line -- took our glasses and walked us to our table, chatting along the way -- where are you from, Oh I have friends in Chicago, how long are you in London…. We get to the table, but before we sit down, he asks us “Is this table OK for you?”</li>\n 	<li>I can’t remember the last time a busy restaurant asked me if I was happy with the table. Normally, the hostess expects you to be happy she actually seated you. The food was good, but what really impressed me about Dishoom that here was a big, mass-service restaurant with a hospitality mentality. Easy to do at a small place, or a Michelin-starred restaurant (though don’t get me started about French Laundry), but here, in London, a place not necessarily known for great customer service, they had it nailed. Oh, and the chicken curry -- they nailed that too.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #144</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a> and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_144.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #144 — Outside Airports; Hospitality Mentality','','inherit','closed','closed','','2126-revision-v1','','','2019-04-22 22:59:25','2019-04-23 03:59:25','',2126,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/2126-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2436,1,'2019-05-07 22:36:53','2019-05-08 03:36:53','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\">\n[caption id=\"attachment_2439\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/oysters_and_evian_bottles.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-2439 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/oysters_and_evian_bottles-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Cancale Oysters with a nice Evian Sancerre[/caption]\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p>Squeezing in another episode before moving the TravelCommons studios, we talk with <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mylaocoon\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Candid Wueest</span></a> of Symantec about websites that leak traveler data and what we can do to protect ourselves. I talk about yet more frustration with the <a href=\"http://avios.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Avios</a> frequent flyer program, while a listener writes in about his great experience with <a href=\"https://www.getfreebird.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Freebird</a>, a new flight rebooking service. I wrap up talking about great street food we had while touring Brittany, France last month. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_151.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #151: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, for the last time…. Not the last time for TravelCommons, just the last time for the studios “outside of Chicago”. We’re picking up stakes and moving about 20 miles east-northeast to Chicago’s Lakeview neighborhood. Hence the reason for the short-cycle on this episode. We’ll be breaking down and packing up the studio and production bay next week and probably won’t have everything reassembled until the end of the month. The recording isn’t really the issue -- I could always go back to my roots and find a spare bathroom to record in. It’s more about the production. I’m not sure I want to shrink my workflow down from a beefy dual 22-inch monitor Windows 10 mini-tower rig to my 2014 vintage 11-inch MacBook Air.</li><li>Being consumed by the move logistics vortex also means I haven’t done any real travel in the 2 weeks since the last episode -- but, given my most recent travel experiences, as laid out in last episode’s <em>Travel Interruptus</em> epic, I’ve appreciated the break. Especially when yet another yet another April snowstorm that blew up 700 flights last weekend. Instead, I’ve been wrestling once again with Avios -- the British Airways, Iberia, and now Aer Lingus frequent flyer program -- trying to book a Chicago-Dublin-Edinburgh Aer Lingus itinerary for my daughter’s graduation from University of St Andrews next month. I’ve been pretty <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/08/26/podcast-116-traveling-thru-japan-luggage-trends/\">vocal</a> about my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">challenges</a> with Avios over the years. In this go-around, the first wackiness was just trying to use the Avios website. To search for flights, you need to log in with your BA, Iberia, or Aer Lingus credentials. I try with all three; and fail with all three. Seems that the passwords given out by BA and Iberia don’t meet Avios’ security rules, so they fail. I assumed the username for my Aer Lingus account was my email address and the password seemed strong enough, but that kept failing too. Finally, after digging around my Aer Lingus profile, I found a separate username, which I’d never seen or used before, and <em>that</em> worked. Finally through the gate and onto the second wackiness -- the difference between the value of an Avios point on the Aer Lingus and Avios web sites. The award offers on both sites were points + cash. Taking the “market rate” for the ticket (pulled from Expedia), subtracting out the required cash payment, and dividing by the number of required Avios points gives the value of the Avios point for that award offer. My rule of thumb is -- get at least 2 cents/point or pay cash. The Aer Lingus site valued an Avios point at 0.7 cents while the Avios site hit my 2-cent minimum. I couldn’t quite understand that 65% difference, but I booked our tickets on the wonkier Avios site before it went away. If I remember anything from my University of Chicago business school courses, it’s that markets are efficient; 65% price differences don’t last forever. Though in this case, that difference may linger because the Avios website makes it so damn hard to find. </li><li>Bridge Music — <em>Lakeside Jam</em> by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/55998 </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Veteran TravelCommons listener Mika Pyyhkala sent in a note this week talking about his great experience with a flight rebooking service, <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Freebird (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"http://getfreebird.com\" target=\"_blank\">Freebird</a>. Mika writes:<ul><li>I was flying with a companion from (Wichita) ICT-STL and STL-DTW. &nbsp;Just as the plane was descending to DTW, I received text messages from WN and Freebird that STL-DTW on WN had been cancelled. &nbsp;Freebird then manually advised that the only flight for that day was a DL STL-DTW, and they were going to book it in case I wanted it; if they waited longer there might not be enough time to issue the new ticket on Delta through their travel agent. &nbsp;They just asked me to confirm that I in fact wanted the Delta ticket.  </li><li>I confirmed we wanted the 2 Delta tickets, and by the time the door opened in STL we had a confirmation number to check in for the Delta flight leaving in 47 minutes. We got seats together on the Delta flight that were assigned by the Freebird process, and they even gave us free drinks!</li><li>I think we actually arrived in DTW a few minutes earlier than we were scheduled on the original flight, and it made for a great travel story and adventure! &nbsp;This was my first time using Freebird as well!</li><li>It costs $19 to protect a one way trip per traveler. &nbsp;It’s simple to work with them: unlike insurance, there are no claim forms, long waits, or papers to sign</li></ul></li><li>Mika, thanks for this. I hadn’t heard of Freebird before Mika’s note. Hitting their website, they’re selling their service to companies, travel agencies, and to individual travelers. Clicking through to a TechCrunch article about them, it says they’re also talking to Amex and Citibank about including Freebird as a credit card benefit. The article quotes the CEO, Ethan Bernstein - “It’s funny what happens when people deal with uncertainty; uncertainty is the worst. As soon you give people information, human support and technology to help them solve their problems, they experience the event so much differently.” &nbsp;Which is exactly right. Certainty lets you plan; uncertainty just leaves you to stew… and drink at the airport bar… and eat bad airport food… and bitch Tweet. Yup, uncertainty leads to lots of bad things</li><li>One more-fun-than-necessarily-good thing on last month’s trip was getting to try out an alpha version of a new augmented reality feature for Google Maps. I used it first in Stockholm; we got off the Arlanda Express at the Central Train station and wanted make our way over to the <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Östermalms Saluhall (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.ostermalmshallen.se/en/\" target=\"_blank\">Östermalms Saluhall</a> for lunch. When I chose “Walking” as our transport mode, a “Start AR” button showed up next to the usual button to start the directions. With AR, I’d hold my phone up, the display would use the camera to show the streetscape in front of me with the &nbsp;directions -- street names, arrows -- overlaid on the real-time image. I thought it was a nice add; reduced any ambiguity about where the next turn was. One interesting feature -- when I started walking, the screen dimmed and a message popped up telling me to stop looking at the phone and look straight ahead. All in all, it’s kinda fun. At least I thought so; Andrew and Irene seemed much less impressed. It worked very well for what was billed as an alpha product. It’ll be interesting to see how it develops, and how fast Google rolls it out.</li><li>But even without a broader AR roll-out, Google Maps seems on track to become the next “<a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"super app (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://skift.com/2019/04/16/google-maps-is-ready-to-transform-the-world-of-superapps-a-skift-deep-dive/\" target=\"_blank\">super app</a>” -- sorta the Western counterpart to China’s WeChat -- the first “super app”, a Swiss Army Knife-kind of “it does everything” app. Now Google Maps isn’t to that level -- yet -- but it is growing. It started as a mapping app, then added driving directions, then ride share -- showing Uber and Lyft prices, then public transit directions with real-time arrival times, replacing the core use case for apps like Transit. Then the “Explore Nearby” became more prominent -- which, for me, has supplanted Yelp when looking for a restaurant because it’s so much more convenient, and with deep links to OpenTable for reservations; and for nearby hotels, direct booking links to Expedia and Booking.com. I wasn’t surprised when I saw a stat that those “Near Me” searches grew 150 percent the last year. I’m not quite sure what I think about this -- loving a free service that keeps becoming more valuable vs. becoming more enslaved to the Google overlords. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/08/27/podcast-132-travel-apps-on-my-phone/\">episode #132</a>, I listed all the travel apps on my smartphone, and Google Maps was the most important -- “Indeed, it’s the only travel app with its own screen real estate rather than sharing space in the Travel folder,” I said. And it only keeps getting more indispensable.</li><li>Thinking back to our last day in Paris when both Ubers that we ordered were nice black Mercedes, I couldn’t help thinking how the quality of US Uber and Lyft vehicles has slipped. I remember when I started using Uber in 4-5 years ago, the cars were pristine. I remember working in Baltimore one summer; I was more than happy to wait 5 minutes for an Uber rather than take one of the cabs waiting at the stand right outside the building I was in. Those cabs were so beat up, so full of trash, and most of the time, without working air conditioning. Today, cabs haven’t gotten much cleaner, but Uber and Lyft seem to be lowering their standards. I dunno if it’s because of falling unemployment rates or trying to keep up with growth or squeezing driver pay to improve their post-IPO margins -- or all of the above -- but I’m seeing a real drop in quality.</li><li>Long-time TravelCommons listeners will recall that I’ve spent a lot of time in New Orleans airport and other than serving beer in go cups French Quarter-style so you can walk around the terminal with it, there’s not much good to say about it. Especially with regards to food and restaurants. For such a great food town to have such mediocre airport concessions has always been beyond me. But then again, the original terminal was built in 1959, and then expanded in the mid-70’s and mid-90’s. The new $1 billion replacement terminal was originally scheduled to open last year during New Orleans’ tricentennial, but that then slipped to February of this year, then to May, and now to a “to be determined” date sometime in the fall. The restaurant selection is supposed to be much better but I hope they don’t change that beer policy though. One time, waiting out yet another thunderstorm delay, I’d bought a beer and was standing by the gate drinking it because the bar was full. American called boarding and I walked up to the gate. The agent stopped me -- “You can drink that beer anywhere in the airport -- except on the jetway.” I looked down; I’d forgotten that I was still carrying that beer. I stepped to the side, chugged it, and then got on the plane. Felt like a very New Orleans thing to do.</li><li>And if you have any travel rants, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. &nbsp;The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Facebook page</a> or our Instagram account at <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Travelcommons</a> -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music —  <em>A Thousand And None</em> by Speck (c) copyright 2018 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/speck/57256 Ft: Mr_Yesterday</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Traveler Data Leaks</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Interview with <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mylaocoon\">Candid Wueest</a>, Principal Threat Researcher at Symantec and author of a blog post titled <a href=\"https://www.symantec.com/blogs/threat-intelligence/hotel-websites-leak-guest-data\"><em>Two in Three Hotel Websites Leak Guest Booking Details and Allow Access to Personal Data</em></a></li><li>Bridge Music —  <em>dazed </em>by Jeris (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/VJ_Memes/39456 Ft: airtone</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Brittany Street Food</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I’ll write a proper “Road Trip” post about our Brittany trip later this spring, after we get settled in the new digs, but after streaming a few episodes of Netflix’s “Street Food” series, I started thinking about some of the Breton street food we enjoyed while touring last month. If you’ve seen any of the Netflix series, you know that it’s more about the vendors than the food. But my French trails off after “oui,” “non,” “merci,” and “S\'il vous plaît” so I wasn’t able to get much of the vendor’s life stories. So this will be all about the food.</li><li>The first place we stayed was <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancale\">Cancale</a>, and we went there for one reason - oysters. Like people have been doing for 300-some odd years. When the tide is out, you can see miles of oyster beds with big farm tractors moving through the rows, hauling out trailers of oysters. Lining the ramp where the tractors drive up out of the beds is a little oyster market -- 8 stalls selling oysters fresh from the beds for €5-6/dozen. After adding another couple of euros for shucking, a half lemon and the use of a plastic platter, we’d have our afternoon snack -- sitting on the sea wall by the market, slurping through a couple dozen very briny oysters while watching the tractors work, and then pitching the empty shells back onto the beach for the seagulls to pick through. Our first afternoon, we only had a couple of cans of beer in our jacket pocket. The next couple of afternoons, we’d pour a nice white wine into some empty Evian bottles (Claire and I preferred a Sancerre) and make sure we had a good supply of wet wipes. We didn’t miss an afternoon on that sea wall while in Cancale.</li><li>Buckwheat is a big thing in Brittany. It’s been grown in Brittany for half a millennium or more, and for almost that long, it seems, has been turned into a <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galette\">galette</a>. a buckwheat crêpe. But a crêpe in form and shape only. Instead of a soft white wheat flour crêpe filled with jam or Nutella, the galette is crisper/firmer and savory. Fine on its own smeared with Breton butter, or with egg and cheese and ham inside. We got into Concarneau, on the southwest coast of Brittany about an hour before the weekly Friday outdoor market closed. &nbsp;I counted a half-dozen galette trucks. We walked up to the closest one. The cook was finishing up what looked like a weekend’s worth of galettes for the person in front of us -- flipping them, then pulling them off two hot metal disks, buttering them, and adding them to the stack. It was Friday in Lent, so I went for the egg, onion, and cheese galette. The creaminess of the cheese played nicely against the nutty graininess of the buckwheat.</li><li>The next day we drove to Rennes, our last stop in Brittany. We dropped the rental car at the train station and took the subway to Place des Lices for the huge Saturday market. We walked down from the subway station, through the fruit and vegetable stands lining the street -- beautiful stuff, but we’re leaving the next day, so we’re not doing a lot of green grocery shopping. There, between the two market halls, is a collection of food trucks; about 70% of them selling what we were looking for -- <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galette-saucisse\">galette-saucisse</a> -- the classic Breton street food that is pretty much what the straight translation from French to English suggests -- a sausage in a galette. Kinda like a Breton hot dog, it’s a cooked pork sausage wrapped in a cool galette, maybe with some grilled onions and dijon mustard added. There were lines tailing back from all the trucks serving these. A local guy pointed one truck out to Irene -- “They’re the best”, he said. She and Claire stood in queue while Andrew and I searched for drinks. Around the corner, we found a local cider maker; a couple of tables surrounded by crates of cider bottles. Through a mangled bit of Franglais, we bought a bottle of dry cider that had stayed cool in the shade and four cups, and got back to the food truck line just in time to be handed my galette-saucisse. After finishing the sausage and cider, I swung past the cider stand to give him the empty bottle -- kinda in-person recycling. There wasn’t much time to catch up on his life story, but it was a sunny Saturday and he had a full line; looked like he was having a good day.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #151</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_151.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<p><!--EndFragment--></p>\n<p></p>','Podcast #151 — Traveler Data Leaks; Brittany Street Food','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-151-traveler-data-leaks-brittany-street-food','','','2021-09-30 12:32:30','2021-09-30 17:32:30','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=2436',0,'post','',0),
(2437,1,'2019-05-03 22:03:15','2019-05-04 03:03:15','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>\n\nIt\'s been a tough month for travel. Not quite to Book of Job-level torment, but two of this month\'s three trips spiraled into head-shaking metaphysical “What the hell is going on here” questioning of my decision to get out of bed that morning. I walk through the travel gods\' fun and games, as well as some new data on regional jet delays and buying a new travel bag.  All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_150.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below. \n\n</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<p><br>\n<br>\n<!--StartFragment--></p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #151: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, for the last time…. Not the last time for TravelCommons, just the last time for the studios “outside of Chicago”. We’re picking up stakes and moving about 20 miles east-northeast to Chicago’s Lakeview neighborhood. Hence the reason for the short-cycle on this episode. We’ll be breaking down and packing up the studio and production bay next week and probably won’t have everything reassembled until the end of the month. The recording isn’t really the issue -- I could always go back to my roots and find a spare bathroom to record in. It’s more about the production. I’m not sure I want to shrink my workflow down from a beefy dual 22-inch monitor Windows 10 mini-tower rig to my 2014 vintage 11-inch MacBook Air.</li><li>Being consumed by the move logistics vortex also means I haven’t done any real travel in the 2 weeks since the last episode -- but, given my most recent travel experiences, as laid out in last episode’s <em>Travel Interruptus</em> epic, I’ve appreciated the break. Especially when yet another yet another April snowstorm that blew up 700 flights last weekend. Instead, I’ve been wrestling once again with Avios -- the British Airways, Iberia, and now Aer Lingus frequent flyer program -- trying to book a Chicago-Dublin-Edinburgh Aer Lingus itinerary for my daughter’s graduation from University of St Andrews next month. I’ve been pretty <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/08/26/podcast-116-traveling-thru-japan-luggage-trends/\">vocal</a> about my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">challenges</a> with Avios over the years. In this go-around, the first wackiness was just trying to use the Avios website. To search for flights, you need to log in with your BA, Iberia, or Aer Lingus credentials. I try with all three; and fail with all three. Seems that the passwords given out by BA and Iberia don’t meet Avios’ security rules, so they fail. I assumed the username for my Aer Lingus account was my email address and the password seemed strong enough, but that kept failing too. Finally, after digging around my Aer Lingus profile, I found a separate username, which I’d never seen or used before, and <em>that</em> worked. Finally through the gate and onto the second wackiness -- the difference between the value of an Avios point on the Aer Lingus and Avios web sites. The award offers on both sites were points + cash. Taking the “market rate” for the ticket (pulled from Expedia), subtracting out the required cash payment, and dividing by the number of required Avios points gives the value of the Avios point for that award offer. My rule of thumb is -- get at least 2 cents/point or pay cash. The Aer Lingus site valued an Avios point at 0.7 cents while the Avios site hit my 2-cent minimum. I couldn’t quite understand that 65% difference, but I booked our tickets on the wonkier Avios site before it went away. If I remember anything from my University of Chicago business school courses, it’s that markets are efficient; 65% price differences don’t last forever. Though in this case, that difference may linger because the Avios website makes it so damn hard to find. </li><li> Bridge Music — <em>Countryside Summer Joyride</em> by Kara Square (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mindmapthat/56281 Ft: Javolenus </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Veteran TravelCommons listener Mika Pyyhkala sent in a note this week talking about his great experience with a flight rebooking service, <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Freebird (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"http://getfreebird.com\" target=\"_blank\">Freebird</a>. Mika writes:<ul><li>I was flying with a companion from (Wichita) ICT-STL and STL-DTW.  Just as the plane was descending to DTW, I received text messages from WN and Freebird that STL-DTW on WN had been cancelled.  Freebird then manually advised that the only flight for that day was a DL STL-DTW, and they were going to book it in case I wanted it; if they waited longer there might not be enough time to issue the new ticket on Delta through their travel agent.  They just asked me to confirm that I in fact wanted the Delta ticket.  </li><li>I confirmed we wanted the 2 Delta tickets, and by the time the door opened in STL we had a confirmation number to check in for the Delta flight leaving in 47 minutes. We got seats together on the Delta flight that were assigned by the Freebird process, and they even gave us free drinks!</li><li>I think we actually arrived in DTW a few minutes earlier than we were scheduled on the original flight, and it made for a great travel story and adventure!  This was my first time using Freebird as well!</li><li>It costs $19 to protect a one way trip per traveler.  It’s simple to work with them: unlike insurance, there are no claim forms, long waits, or papers to sign</li></ul></li><li>Mika, thanks for this. I hadn’t heard of Freebird before Mika’s note. Hitting their website, they’re selling their service to companies, travel agencies, and to individual travelers. Clicking through to a TechCrunch article about them, it says they’re also talking to Amex and Citibank about including Freebird as a credit card benefit. The article quotes the CEO, Ethan Bernstein - “It’s funny what happens when people deal with uncertainty; uncertainty is the worst. As soon you give people information, human support and technology to help them solve their problems, they experience the event so much differently.”  Which is exactly right. Certainty lets you plan; uncertainty just leaves you to stew… and drink at the airport bar… and eat bad airport food… and bitch Tweet. Yup, uncertainty leads to lots of bad things</li><li>One more-fun-than-necessarily-good thing on last month’s trip was getting to try out an alpha version of a new augmented reality feature for Google Maps. I used it first in Stockholm; we got off the Arlanda Express at the Central Train station and wanted make our way over to the Östermalms Saluhall for lunch. When I chose “Walking” as our transport mode, a “Start AR” button showed up next to the usual button to start the directions. With AR, I’d hold my phone up, the display would use the camera to show the streetscape in front of me with the  directions -- street names, arrows -- overlaid on the real-time image. I thought it was a nice add; reduced any ambiguity about where the next turn was. One interesting feature -- when I started walking, the screen dimmed and a message popped up telling me to stop looking at the phone and look straight ahead. All in all, it’s kinda fun. At least I thought so; Andrew and Irene seemed much less impressed. It worked very well for what was billed as an alpha product. It’ll be interesting to see how it develops, and how fast Google rolls it out.</li><li> And if you have any travel rants, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Facebook page</a> or our Instagram account at <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Travelcommons</a> -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.<br> Bridge Music —  <em>Jester of the Golden Apocalypse</em> by Super_Sigil (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Super_Sigil/34750  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Traveler Data Leaks</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A Greek </li><li>Bridge Music —  South Texas Cowboy Blues by texasradiofish (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/texasradiofish/52030 Ft: unreal_dm, ElRon XChile</li><li><em>Act 2</em> - A couple of weeks later, on Sunday in Rennes, France. We wheeled our luggage the 2 blocks from our AirBnB to Rennes train station for the TGV to CDG. We stood with everyone else, looking up at the departure board waiting for the track to be posted. Departure time came closer and still no track -- not a good sign. The crowd grew larger. There was an announcement in French and a scrolling message at the bottom of the departure screen. Irene banged it into Google Translate. The gist of it -- a bomb threat had been phoned into SCNF, the train company, and all the trains in and out of Paris were halted. Given France’s recent history with terrorism, it was a reasonable response, but still…. They finally start posting delay times -- 40 mins, then over an hour, but then it shrinks back. I pull up Google Maps. The drive to CDG is showing about the same time as the train, but we’d be in control of our own destiny. I walk down to the rental car offices. It’s Sunday morning; they’re all closed. They won’t open until the afternoon; too late for us to drive and make our flights. </li><li>Time continues to tick by, past the departure time for our flight. I call United -- any other options? I get a phenomenally helpful agent. I can hear the keystrokes. Nothing else today Sunday, nor tomorrow, Monday. I wasn’t surprised about nothing available today, but was about the next day -- until I got a text from Andrew. He was on this morning’s United flight to Chicago which just cancelled for a hydraulic problem and rebooked on tomorrow’s flight -- which explains the lack of seats for us. I took the Tuesday seats. Now would we get to CDG in time for Claire’s EasyJet flight to Edinburgh so she can make class the next day. The trains finally start moving. We head down and board our train. And then wait, and wait some  more. And then the train starts moving. I look at my watch. I think Claire will be OK. </li><li>Until we come to a stop in the middle of a rail yard. I watch a couple of guys walk past our car -- maybe a visual inspection? After a bit, we start moving -- backwards. The conductor keys the mike, and makes an announcement in rapid French that we can’t pick up. I open Google Maps. I see we’re off to the east of Paris but can’t tell if we’re moving in the right direction. Until we pull into the next station -- it’s for EuroDisney. I find our train route on the SCNF website and see this is one of the stops en route to CDG, so we’re going in the right direction. We get to CDG by 3pm, which means Claire can make her flight. Andrew comes over from the Airport Hilton, where United is putting him up for the night, and we head down to Paris for another dinner together. There are, after all, worse cities to have to spend an extra day or two.</li><li> Bridge Music —  <em>Parisian </em>Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)<br> Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License<br> http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Brittany Street Food</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Until the train s</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #151</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_151.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<p><!--EndFragment--><br /><br /></p>','Podcast #151 — Traveler Data Leaks; Brittany Street Food','','inherit','closed','closed','','2436-revision-v1','','','2019-05-03 22:03:15','2019-05-04 03:03:15','',2436,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/03/2436-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0);
INSERT INTO `wp_posts` VALUES
(2438,1,'2019-05-03 22:49:59','2019-05-04 03:49:59','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>\n\nIt\'s been a tough month for travel. Not quite to Book of Job-level torment, but two of this month\'s three trips spiraled into head-shaking metaphysical “What the hell is going on here” questioning of my decision to get out of bed that morning. I walk through the travel gods\' fun and games, as well as some new data on regional jet delays and buying a new travel bag.  All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_150.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below. \n\n</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<p>\n</p><p><!--StartFragment--></p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #151: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, for the last time…. Not the last time for TravelCommons, just the last time for the studios “outside of Chicago”. We’re picking up stakes and moving about 20 miles east-northeast to Chicago’s Lakeview neighborhood. Hence the reason for the short-cycle on this episode. We’ll be breaking down and packing up the studio and production bay next week and probably won’t have everything reassembled until the end of the month. The recording isn’t really the issue -- I could always go back to my roots and find a spare bathroom to record in. It’s more about the production. I’m not sure I want to shrink my workflow down from a beefy dual 22-inch monitor Windows 10 mini-tower rig to my 2014 vintage 11-inch MacBook Air.</li><li>Being consumed by the move logistics vortex also means I haven’t done any real travel in the 2 weeks since the last episode -- but, given my most recent travel experiences, as laid out in last episode’s <em>Travel Interruptus</em> epic, I’ve appreciated the break. Especially when yet another yet another April snowstorm that blew up 700 flights last weekend. Instead, I’ve been wrestling once again with Avios -- the British Airways, Iberia, and now Aer Lingus frequent flyer program -- trying to book a Chicago-Dublin-Edinburgh Aer Lingus itinerary for my daughter’s graduation from University of St Andrews next month. I’ve been pretty <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/08/26/podcast-116-traveling-thru-japan-luggage-trends/\">vocal</a> about my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">challenges</a> with Avios over the years. In this go-around, the first wackiness was just trying to use the Avios website. To search for flights, you need to log in with your BA, Iberia, or Aer Lingus credentials. I try with all three; and fail with all three. Seems that the passwords given out by BA and Iberia don’t meet Avios’ security rules, so they fail. I assumed the username for my Aer Lingus account was my email address and the password seemed strong enough, but that kept failing too. Finally, after digging around my Aer Lingus profile, I found a separate username, which I’d never seen or used before, and <em>that</em> worked. Finally through the gate and onto the second wackiness -- the difference between the value of an Avios point on the Aer Lingus and Avios web sites. The award offers on both sites were points + cash. Taking the “market rate” for the ticket (pulled from Expedia), subtracting out the required cash payment, and dividing by the number of required Avios points gives the value of the Avios point for that award offer. My rule of thumb is -- get at least 2 cents/point or pay cash. The Aer Lingus site valued an Avios point at 0.7 cents while the Avios site hit my 2-cent minimum. I couldn’t quite understand that 65% difference, but I booked our tickets on the wonkier Avios site before it went away. If I remember anything from my University of Chicago business school courses, it’s that markets are efficient; 65% price differences don’t last forever. Though in this case, that difference may linger because the Avios website makes it so damn hard to find. </li><li> Bridge Music — <em>Countryside Summer Joyride</em> by Kara Square (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mindmapthat/56281 Ft: Javolenus </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Veteran TravelCommons listener Mika Pyyhkala sent in a note this week talking about his great experience with a flight rebooking service, <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Freebird (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"http://getfreebird.com\" target=\"_blank\">Freebird</a>. Mika writes:<ul><li>I was flying with a companion from (Wichita) ICT-STL and STL-DTW. &nbsp;Just as the plane was descending to DTW, I received text messages from WN and Freebird that STL-DTW on WN had been cancelled. &nbsp;Freebird then manually advised that the only flight for that day was a DL STL-DTW, and they were going to book it in case I wanted it; if they waited longer there might not be enough time to issue the new ticket on Delta through their travel agent. &nbsp;They just asked me to confirm that I in fact wanted the Delta ticket.  </li><li>I confirmed we wanted the 2 Delta tickets, and by the time the door opened in STL we had a confirmation number to check in for the Delta flight leaving in 47 minutes. We got seats together on the Delta flight that were assigned by the Freebird process, and they even gave us free drinks!</li><li>I think we actually arrived in DTW a few minutes earlier than we were scheduled on the original flight, and it made for a great travel story and adventure! &nbsp;This was my first time using Freebird as well!</li><li>It costs $19 to protect a one way trip per traveler. &nbsp;It’s simple to work with them: unlike insurance, there are no claim forms, long waits, or papers to sign</li></ul></li><li>Mika, thanks for this. I hadn’t heard of Freebird before Mika’s note. Hitting their website, they’re selling their service to companies, travel agencies, and to individual travelers. Clicking through to a TechCrunch article about them, it says they’re also talking to Amex and Citibank about including Freebird as a credit card benefit. The article quotes the CEO, Ethan Bernstein - “It’s funny what happens when people deal with uncertainty; uncertainty is the worst. As soon you give people information, human support and technology to help them solve their problems, they experience the event so much differently.” &nbsp;Which is exactly right. Certainty lets you plan; uncertainty just leaves you to stew… and drink at the airport bar… and eat bad airport food… and bitch Tweet. Yup, uncertainty leads to lots of bad things</li><li>One more-fun-than-necessarily-good thing on last month’s trip was getting to try out an alpha version of a new augmented reality feature for Google Maps. I used it first in Stockholm; we got off the Arlanda Express at the Central Train station and wanted make our way over to the Östermalms Saluhall for lunch. When I chose “Walking” as our transport mode, a “Start AR” button showed up next to the usual button to start the directions. With AR, I’d hold my phone up, the display would use the camera to show the streetscape in front of me with the &nbsp;directions -- street names, arrows -- overlaid on the real-time image. I thought it was a nice add; reduced any ambiguity about where the next turn was. One interesting feature -- when I started walking, the screen dimmed and a message popped up telling me to stop looking at the phone and look straight ahead. All in all, it’s kinda fun. At least I thought so; Andrew and Irene seemed much less impressed. It worked very well for what was billed as an alpha product. It’ll be interesting to see how it develops, and how fast Google rolls it out.</li><li> And if you have any travel rants, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. &nbsp;The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Facebook page</a> or our Instagram account at <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Travelcommons</a> -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.<br> Bridge Music —  <em>Jester of the Golden Apocalypse</em> by Super_Sigil (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Super_Sigil/34750  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Traveler Data Leaks</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A Greek </li><li>Bridge Music —  South Texas Cowboy Blues by texasradiofish (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/texasradiofish/52030 Ft: unreal_dm, ElRon XChile</li><li><em>Act 2</em> - A couple of weeks later, on Sunday in Rennes, France. We wheeled our luggage the 2 blocks from our AirBnB to Rennes train station for the TGV to CDG. We stood with everyone else, looking up at the departure board waiting for the track to be posted. Departure time came closer and still no track -- not a good sign. The crowd grew larger. There was an announcement in French and a scrolling message at the bottom of the departure screen. Irene banged it into Google Translate. The gist of it -- a bomb threat had been phoned into SCNF, the train company, and all the trains in and out of Paris were halted. Given France’s recent history with terrorism, it was a reasonable response, but still…. They finally start posting delay times -- 40 mins, then over an hour, but then it shrinks back. I pull up Google Maps. The drive to CDG is showing about the same time as the train, but we’d be in control of our own destiny. I walk down to the rental car offices. It’s Sunday morning; they’re all closed. They won’t open until the afternoon; too late for us to drive and make our flights. </li><li>Time continues to tick by, past the departure time for our flight. I call United -- any other options? I get a phenomenally helpful agent. I can hear the keystrokes. Nothing else today Sunday, nor tomorrow, Monday. I wasn’t surprised about nothing available today, but was about the next day -- until I got a text from Andrew. He was on this morning’s United flight to Chicago which just cancelled for a hydraulic problem and rebooked on tomorrow’s flight -- which explains the lack of seats for us. I took the Tuesday seats. Now would we get to CDG in time for Claire’s EasyJet flight to Edinburgh so she can make class the next day. The trains finally start moving. We head down and board our train. And then wait, and wait some &nbsp;more. And then the train starts moving. I look at my watch. I think Claire will be OK. </li><li>Until we come to a stop in the middle of a rail yard. I watch a couple of guys walk past our car -- maybe a visual inspection? After a bit, we start moving -- backwards. The conductor keys the mike, and makes an announcement in rapid French that we can’t pick up. I open Google Maps. I see we’re off to the east of Paris but can’t tell if we’re moving in the right direction. Until we pull into the next station -- it’s for EuroDisney. I find our train route on the SCNF website and see this is one of the stops en route to CDG, so we’re going in the right direction. We get to CDG by 3pm, which means Claire can make her flight. Andrew comes over from the Airport Hilton, where United is putting him up for the night, and we head down to Paris for another dinner together. There are, after all, worse cities to have to spend an extra day or two.</li><li> Bridge Music —  <em>Parisian </em>Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)<br> Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License<br> http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Brittany Street Food</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Until the train s</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #151</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_151.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<p><!--EndFragment--></p>\n<p></p>','Podcast #151 — Traveler Data Leaks; Brittany Street Food','','inherit','closed','closed','','2436-revision-v1','','','2019-05-03 22:49:59','2019-05-04 03:49:59','',2436,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/03/2436-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2439,1,'2019-05-03 22:51:22','2019-05-04 03:51:22','','oysters_and_evian_bottles','Cancale Oysters with a nice Evian Sancerre','inherit','open','closed','','oysters_and_evian_bottles','','','2021-03-15 14:13:41','2021-03-15 19:13:41','',2436,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/oysters_and_evian_bottles.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(2440,1,'2019-05-03 22:52:27','2019-05-04 03:52:27','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>\n\nIt\'s been a tough month for travel. Not quite to Book of Job-level torment, but two of this month\'s three trips spiraled into head-shaking metaphysical “What the hell is going on here” questioning of my decision to get out of bed that morning. I walk through the travel gods\' fun and games, as well as some new data on regional jet delays and buying a new travel bag.  All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_150.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below. \n\n</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":2439,\"width\":300,\"height\":300} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image is-resized\"><img src=\"https://i0.wp.com/travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/oysters_and_evian_bottles.jpg?fit=640%2C640\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2439\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"/><figcaption>Cancale Oysters with a nice Evian Sancerre</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<p>\n</p><p><!--StartFragment--></p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #151: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, for the last time…. Not the last time for TravelCommons, just the last time for the studios “outside of Chicago”. We’re picking up stakes and moving about 20 miles east-northeast to Chicago’s Lakeview neighborhood. Hence the reason for the short-cycle on this episode. We’ll be breaking down and packing up the studio and production bay next week and probably won’t have everything reassembled until the end of the month. The recording isn’t really the issue -- I could always go back to my roots and find a spare bathroom to record in. It’s more about the production. I’m not sure I want to shrink my workflow down from a beefy dual 22-inch monitor Windows 10 mini-tower rig to my 2014 vintage 11-inch MacBook Air.</li><li>Being consumed by the move logistics vortex also means I haven’t done any real travel in the 2 weeks since the last episode -- but, given my most recent travel experiences, as laid out in last episode’s <em>Travel Interruptus</em> epic, I’ve appreciated the break. Especially when yet another yet another April snowstorm that blew up 700 flights last weekend. Instead, I’ve been wrestling once again with Avios -- the British Airways, Iberia, and now Aer Lingus frequent flyer program -- trying to book a Chicago-Dublin-Edinburgh Aer Lingus itinerary for my daughter’s graduation from University of St Andrews next month. I’ve been pretty <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/08/26/podcast-116-traveling-thru-japan-luggage-trends/\">vocal</a> about my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">challenges</a> with Avios over the years. In this go-around, the first wackiness was just trying to use the Avios website. To search for flights, you need to log in with your BA, Iberia, or Aer Lingus credentials. I try with all three; and fail with all three. Seems that the passwords given out by BA and Iberia don’t meet Avios’ security rules, so they fail. I assumed the username for my Aer Lingus account was my email address and the password seemed strong enough, but that kept failing too. Finally, after digging around my Aer Lingus profile, I found a separate username, which I’d never seen or used before, and <em>that</em> worked. Finally through the gate and onto the second wackiness -- the difference between the value of an Avios point on the Aer Lingus and Avios web sites. The award offers on both sites were points + cash. Taking the “market rate” for the ticket (pulled from Expedia), subtracting out the required cash payment, and dividing by the number of required Avios points gives the value of the Avios point for that award offer. My rule of thumb is -- get at least 2 cents/point or pay cash. The Aer Lingus site valued an Avios point at 0.7 cents while the Avios site hit my 2-cent minimum. I couldn’t quite understand that 65% difference, but I booked our tickets on the wonkier Avios site before it went away. If I remember anything from my University of Chicago business school courses, it’s that markets are efficient; 65% price differences don’t last forever. Though in this case, that difference may linger because the Avios website makes it so damn hard to find. </li><li> Bridge Music — <em>Countryside Summer Joyride</em> by Kara Square (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mindmapthat/56281 Ft: Javolenus </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Veteran TravelCommons listener Mika Pyyhkala sent in a note this week talking about his great experience with a flight rebooking service, <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Freebird (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"http://getfreebird.com\" target=\"_blank\">Freebird</a>. Mika writes:<ul><li>I was flying with a companion from (Wichita) ICT-STL and STL-DTW. &nbsp;Just as the plane was descending to DTW, I received text messages from WN and Freebird that STL-DTW on WN had been cancelled. &nbsp;Freebird then manually advised that the only flight for that day was a DL STL-DTW, and they were going to book it in case I wanted it; if they waited longer there might not be enough time to issue the new ticket on Delta through their travel agent. &nbsp;They just asked me to confirm that I in fact wanted the Delta ticket.  </li><li>I confirmed we wanted the 2 Delta tickets, and by the time the door opened in STL we had a confirmation number to check in for the Delta flight leaving in 47 minutes. We got seats together on the Delta flight that were assigned by the Freebird process, and they even gave us free drinks!</li><li>I think we actually arrived in DTW a few minutes earlier than we were scheduled on the original flight, and it made for a great travel story and adventure! &nbsp;This was my first time using Freebird as well!</li><li>It costs $19 to protect a one way trip per traveler. &nbsp;It’s simple to work with them: unlike insurance, there are no claim forms, long waits, or papers to sign</li></ul></li><li>Mika, thanks for this. I hadn’t heard of Freebird before Mika’s note. Hitting their website, they’re selling their service to companies, travel agencies, and to individual travelers. Clicking through to a TechCrunch article about them, it says they’re also talking to Amex and Citibank about including Freebird as a credit card benefit. The article quotes the CEO, Ethan Bernstein - “It’s funny what happens when people deal with uncertainty; uncertainty is the worst. As soon you give people information, human support and technology to help them solve their problems, they experience the event so much differently.” &nbsp;Which is exactly right. Certainty lets you plan; uncertainty just leaves you to stew… and drink at the airport bar… and eat bad airport food… and bitch Tweet. Yup, uncertainty leads to lots of bad things</li><li>One more-fun-than-necessarily-good thing on last month’s trip was getting to try out an alpha version of a new augmented reality feature for Google Maps. I used it first in Stockholm; we got off the Arlanda Express at the Central Train station and wanted make our way over to the Östermalms Saluhall for lunch. When I chose “Walking” as our transport mode, a “Start AR” button showed up next to the usual button to start the directions. With AR, I’d hold my phone up, the display would use the camera to show the streetscape in front of me with the &nbsp;directions -- street names, arrows -- overlaid on the real-time image. I thought it was a nice add; reduced any ambiguity about where the next turn was. One interesting feature -- when I started walking, the screen dimmed and a message popped up telling me to stop looking at the phone and look straight ahead. All in all, it’s kinda fun. At least I thought so; Andrew and Irene seemed much less impressed. It worked very well for what was billed as an alpha product. It’ll be interesting to see how it develops, and how fast Google rolls it out.</li><li> And if you have any travel rants, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. &nbsp;The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Facebook page</a> or our Instagram account at <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Travelcommons</a> -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.<br> Bridge Music —  <em>Jester of the Golden Apocalypse</em> by Super_Sigil (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Super_Sigil/34750  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Traveler Data Leaks</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A Greek </li><li>Bridge Music —  South Texas Cowboy Blues by texasradiofish (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/texasradiofish/52030 Ft: unreal_dm, ElRon XChile</li><li><em>Act 2</em> - A couple of weeks later, on Sunday in Rennes, France. We wheeled our luggage the 2 blocks from our AirBnB to Rennes train station for the TGV to CDG. We stood with everyone else, looking up at the departure board waiting for the track to be posted. Departure time came closer and still no track -- not a good sign. The crowd grew larger. There was an announcement in French and a scrolling message at the bottom of the departure screen. Irene banged it into Google Translate. The gist of it -- a bomb threat had been phoned into SCNF, the train company, and all the trains in and out of Paris were halted. Given France’s recent history with terrorism, it was a reasonable response, but still…. They finally start posting delay times -- 40 mins, then over an hour, but then it shrinks back. I pull up Google Maps. The drive to CDG is showing about the same time as the train, but we’d be in control of our own destiny. I walk down to the rental car offices. It’s Sunday morning; they’re all closed. They won’t open until the afternoon; too late for us to drive and make our flights. </li><li>Time continues to tick by, past the departure time for our flight. I call United -- any other options? I get a phenomenally helpful agent. I can hear the keystrokes. Nothing else today Sunday, nor tomorrow, Monday. I wasn’t surprised about nothing available today, but was about the next day -- until I got a text from Andrew. He was on this morning’s United flight to Chicago which just cancelled for a hydraulic problem and rebooked on tomorrow’s flight -- which explains the lack of seats for us. I took the Tuesday seats. Now would we get to CDG in time for Claire’s EasyJet flight to Edinburgh so she can make class the next day. The trains finally start moving. We head down and board our train. And then wait, and wait some &nbsp;more. And then the train starts moving. I look at my watch. I think Claire will be OK. </li><li>Until we come to a stop in the middle of a rail yard. I watch a couple of guys walk past our car -- maybe a visual inspection? After a bit, we start moving -- backwards. The conductor keys the mike, and makes an announcement in rapid French that we can’t pick up. I open Google Maps. I see we’re off to the east of Paris but can’t tell if we’re moving in the right direction. Until we pull into the next station -- it’s for EuroDisney. I find our train route on the SCNF website and see this is one of the stops en route to CDG, so we’re going in the right direction. We get to CDG by 3pm, which means Claire can make her flight. Andrew comes over from the Airport Hilton, where United is putting him up for the night, and we head down to Paris for another dinner together. There are, after all, worse cities to have to spend an extra day or two.</li><li> Bridge Music —  <em>Parisian </em>Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)<br> Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License<br> http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Brittany Street Food</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Until the train s</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #151</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_151.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<p><!--EndFragment--></p>\n<p></p>','Podcast #151 — Traveler Data Leaks; Brittany Street Food','','inherit','closed','closed','','2436-revision-v1','','','2019-05-03 22:52:27','2019-05-04 03:52:27','',2436,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/03/2436-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2441,1,'2019-05-03 22:53:32','2019-05-04 03:53:32','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>\n\nIt\'s been a tough month for travel. Not quite to Book of Job-level torment, but two of this month\'s three trips spiraled into head-shaking metaphysical “What the hell is going on here” questioning of my decision to get out of bed that morning. I walk through the travel gods\' fun and games, as well as some new data on regional jet delays and buying a new travel bag.  All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_150.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below. \n\n</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":2439,\"align\":\"right\",\"width\":300,\"height\":300} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright is-resized\"><img src=\"https://i0.wp.com/travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/oysters_and_evian_bottles.jpg?fit=640%2C640\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2439\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"/><figcaption>Cancale Oysters with a nice Evian Sancerre</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<p></p>\n<p><!--StartFragment--></p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #151: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, for the last time…. Not the last time for TravelCommons, just the last time for the studios “outside of Chicago”. We’re picking up stakes and moving about 20 miles east-northeast to Chicago’s Lakeview neighborhood. Hence the reason for the short-cycle on this episode. We’ll be breaking down and packing up the studio and production bay next week and probably won’t have everything reassembled until the end of the month. The recording isn’t really the issue -- I could always go back to my roots and find a spare bathroom to record in. It’s more about the production. I’m not sure I want to shrink my workflow down from a beefy dual 22-inch monitor Windows 10 mini-tower rig to my 2014 vintage 11-inch MacBook Air.</li><li>Being consumed by the move logistics vortex also means I haven’t done any real travel in the 2 weeks since the last episode -- but, given my most recent travel experiences, as laid out in last episode’s <em>Travel Interruptus</em> epic, I’ve appreciated the break. Especially when yet another yet another April snowstorm that blew up 700 flights last weekend. Instead, I’ve been wrestling once again with Avios -- the British Airways, Iberia, and now Aer Lingus frequent flyer program -- trying to book a Chicago-Dublin-Edinburgh Aer Lingus itinerary for my daughter’s graduation from University of St Andrews next month. I’ve been pretty <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/08/26/podcast-116-traveling-thru-japan-luggage-trends/\">vocal</a> about my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">challenges</a> with Avios over the years. In this go-around, the first wackiness was just trying to use the Avios website. To search for flights, you need to log in with your BA, Iberia, or Aer Lingus credentials. I try with all three; and fail with all three. Seems that the passwords given out by BA and Iberia don’t meet Avios’ security rules, so they fail. I assumed the username for my Aer Lingus account was my email address and the password seemed strong enough, but that kept failing too. Finally, after digging around my Aer Lingus profile, I found a separate username, which I’d never seen or used before, and <em>that</em> worked. Finally through the gate and onto the second wackiness -- the difference between the value of an Avios point on the Aer Lingus and Avios web sites. The award offers on both sites were points + cash. Taking the “market rate” for the ticket (pulled from Expedia), subtracting out the required cash payment, and dividing by the number of required Avios points gives the value of the Avios point for that award offer. My rule of thumb is -- get at least 2 cents/point or pay cash. The Aer Lingus site valued an Avios point at 0.7 cents while the Avios site hit my 2-cent minimum. I couldn’t quite understand that 65% difference, but I booked our tickets on the wonkier Avios site before it went away. If I remember anything from my University of Chicago business school courses, it’s that markets are efficient; 65% price differences don’t last forever. Though in this case, that difference may linger because the Avios website makes it so damn hard to find. </li><li> Bridge Music — <em>Countryside Summer Joyride</em> by Kara Square (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mindmapthat/56281 Ft: Javolenus </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Veteran TravelCommons listener Mika Pyyhkala sent in a note this week talking about his great experience with a flight rebooking service, <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Freebird (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"http://getfreebird.com\" target=\"_blank\">Freebird</a>. Mika writes:<ul><li>I was flying with a companion from (Wichita) ICT-STL and STL-DTW. &nbsp;Just as the plane was descending to DTW, I received text messages from WN and Freebird that STL-DTW on WN had been cancelled. &nbsp;Freebird then manually advised that the only flight for that day was a DL STL-DTW, and they were going to book it in case I wanted it; if they waited longer there might not be enough time to issue the new ticket on Delta through their travel agent. &nbsp;They just asked me to confirm that I in fact wanted the Delta ticket.  </li><li>I confirmed we wanted the 2 Delta tickets, and by the time the door opened in STL we had a confirmation number to check in for the Delta flight leaving in 47 minutes. We got seats together on the Delta flight that were assigned by the Freebird process, and they even gave us free drinks!</li><li>I think we actually arrived in DTW a few minutes earlier than we were scheduled on the original flight, and it made for a great travel story and adventure! &nbsp;This was my first time using Freebird as well!</li><li>It costs $19 to protect a one way trip per traveler. &nbsp;It’s simple to work with them: unlike insurance, there are no claim forms, long waits, or papers to sign</li></ul></li><li>Mika, thanks for this. I hadn’t heard of Freebird before Mika’s note. Hitting their website, they’re selling their service to companies, travel agencies, and to individual travelers. Clicking through to a TechCrunch article about them, it says they’re also talking to Amex and Citibank about including Freebird as a credit card benefit. The article quotes the CEO, Ethan Bernstein - “It’s funny what happens when people deal with uncertainty; uncertainty is the worst. As soon you give people information, human support and technology to help them solve their problems, they experience the event so much differently.” &nbsp;Which is exactly right. Certainty lets you plan; uncertainty just leaves you to stew… and drink at the airport bar… and eat bad airport food… and bitch Tweet. Yup, uncertainty leads to lots of bad things</li><li>One more-fun-than-necessarily-good thing on last month’s trip was getting to try out an alpha version of a new augmented reality feature for Google Maps. I used it first in Stockholm; we got off the Arlanda Express at the Central Train station and wanted make our way over to the Östermalms Saluhall for lunch. When I chose “Walking” as our transport mode, a “Start AR” button showed up next to the usual button to start the directions. With AR, I’d hold my phone up, the display would use the camera to show the streetscape in front of me with the &nbsp;directions -- street names, arrows -- overlaid on the real-time image. I thought it was a nice add; reduced any ambiguity about where the next turn was. One interesting feature -- when I started walking, the screen dimmed and a message popped up telling me to stop looking at the phone and look straight ahead. All in all, it’s kinda fun. At least I thought so; Andrew and Irene seemed much less impressed. It worked very well for what was billed as an alpha product. It’ll be interesting to see how it develops, and how fast Google rolls it out.</li><li> And if you have any travel rants, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. &nbsp;The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Facebook page</a> or our Instagram account at <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Travelcommons</a> -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.<br> Bridge Music —  <em>Jester of the Golden Apocalypse</em> by Super_Sigil (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Super_Sigil/34750  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Traveler Data Leaks</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A Greek </li><li>Bridge Music —  South Texas Cowboy Blues by texasradiofish (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/texasradiofish/52030 Ft: unreal_dm, ElRon XChile</li><li><em>Act 2</em> - A couple of weeks later, on Sunday in Rennes, France. We wheeled our luggage the 2 blocks from our AirBnB to Rennes train station for the TGV to CDG. We stood with everyone else, looking up at the departure board waiting for the track to be posted. Departure time came closer and still no track -- not a good sign. The crowd grew larger. There was an announcement in French and a scrolling message at the bottom of the departure screen. Irene banged it into Google Translate. The gist of it -- a bomb threat had been phoned into SCNF, the train company, and all the trains in and out of Paris were halted. Given France’s recent history with terrorism, it was a reasonable response, but still…. They finally start posting delay times -- 40 mins, then over an hour, but then it shrinks back. I pull up Google Maps. The drive to CDG is showing about the same time as the train, but we’d be in control of our own destiny. I walk down to the rental car offices. It’s Sunday morning; they’re all closed. They won’t open until the afternoon; too late for us to drive and make our flights. </li><li>Time continues to tick by, past the departure time for our flight. I call United -- any other options? I get a phenomenally helpful agent. I can hear the keystrokes. Nothing else today Sunday, nor tomorrow, Monday. I wasn’t surprised about nothing available today, but was about the next day -- until I got a text from Andrew. He was on this morning’s United flight to Chicago which just cancelled for a hydraulic problem and rebooked on tomorrow’s flight -- which explains the lack of seats for us. I took the Tuesday seats. Now would we get to CDG in time for Claire’s EasyJet flight to Edinburgh so she can make class the next day. The trains finally start moving. We head down and board our train. And then wait, and wait some &nbsp;more. And then the train starts moving. I look at my watch. I think Claire will be OK. </li><li>Until we come to a stop in the middle of a rail yard. I watch a couple of guys walk past our car -- maybe a visual inspection? After a bit, we start moving -- backwards. The conductor keys the mike, and makes an announcement in rapid French that we can’t pick up. I open Google Maps. I see we’re off to the east of Paris but can’t tell if we’re moving in the right direction. Until we pull into the next station -- it’s for EuroDisney. I find our train route on the SCNF website and see this is one of the stops en route to CDG, so we’re going in the right direction. We get to CDG by 3pm, which means Claire can make her flight. Andrew comes over from the Airport Hilton, where United is putting him up for the night, and we head down to Paris for another dinner together. There are, after all, worse cities to have to spend an extra day or two.</li><li> Bridge Music —  <em>Parisian </em>Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)<br> Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License<br> http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Brittany Street Food</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Until the train s</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #151</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_151.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<p><!--EndFragment--></p>\n<p></p>','Podcast #151 — Traveler Data Leaks; Brittany Street Food','','inherit','closed','closed','','2436-revision-v1','','','2019-05-03 22:53:32','2019-05-04 03:53:32','',2436,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/03/2436-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2442,1,'2019-05-03 22:56:19','2019-05-04 03:56:19','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>\n\nIt\'s been a tough month for travel. Not quite to Book of Job-level torment, but two of this month\'s three trips spiraled into head-shaking metaphysical “What the hell is going on here” questioning of my decision to get out of bed that morning. I walk through the travel gods\' fun and games, as well as some new data on regional jet delays and buying a new travel bag.  All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_150.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below. \n\n</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Untitled Reusable Block','','publish','closed','closed','','untitled-reusable-block-2','','','2019-05-03 22:56:19','2019-05-04 03:56:19','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/03/untitled-reusable-block-2/',0,'wp_block','',0),
(2443,1,'2019-05-03 22:56:51','2019-05-04 03:56:51','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>\n\nIt\'s been a tough month for travel. Not quite to Book of Job-level torment, but two of this month\'s three trips spiraled into head-shaking metaphysical “What the hell is going on here” questioning of my decision to get out of bed that morning. I walk through the travel gods\' fun and games, as well as some new data on regional jet delays and buying a new travel bag.  All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_150.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below. \n\n</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:block {\"ref\":2408} /-->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #151: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, for the last time…. Not the last time for TravelCommons, just the last time for the studios “outside of Chicago”. We’re picking up stakes and moving about 20 miles east-northeast to Chicago’s Lakeview neighborhood. Hence the reason for the short-cycle on this episode. We’ll be breaking down and packing up the studio and production bay next week and probably won’t have everything reassembled until the end of the month. The recording isn’t really the issue -- I could always go back to my roots and find a spare bathroom to record in. It’s more about the production. I’m not sure I want to shrink my workflow down from a beefy dual 22-inch monitor Windows 10 mini-tower rig to my 2014 vintage 11-inch MacBook Air.</li><li>Being consumed by the move logistics vortex also means I haven’t done any real travel in the 2 weeks since the last episode -- but, given my most recent travel experiences, as laid out in last episode’s <em>Travel Interruptus</em> epic, I’ve appreciated the break. Especially when yet another yet another April snowstorm that blew up 700 flights last weekend. Instead, I’ve been wrestling once again with Avios -- the British Airways, Iberia, and now Aer Lingus frequent flyer program -- trying to book a Chicago-Dublin-Edinburgh Aer Lingus itinerary for my daughter’s graduation from University of St Andrews next month. I’ve been pretty <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/08/26/podcast-116-traveling-thru-japan-luggage-trends/\">vocal</a> about my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">challenges</a> with Avios over the years. In this go-around, the first wackiness was just trying to use the Avios website. To search for flights, you need to log in with your BA, Iberia, or Aer Lingus credentials. I try with all three; and fail with all three. Seems that the passwords given out by BA and Iberia don’t meet Avios’ security rules, so they fail. I assumed the username for my Aer Lingus account was my email address and the password seemed strong enough, but that kept failing too. Finally, after digging around my Aer Lingus profile, I found a separate username, which I’d never seen or used before, and <em>that</em> worked. Finally through the gate and onto the second wackiness -- the difference between the value of an Avios point on the Aer Lingus and Avios web sites. The award offers on both sites were points + cash. Taking the “market rate” for the ticket (pulled from Expedia), subtracting out the required cash payment, and dividing by the number of required Avios points gives the value of the Avios point for that award offer. My rule of thumb is -- get at least 2 cents/point or pay cash. The Aer Lingus site valued an Avios point at 0.7 cents while the Avios site hit my 2-cent minimum. I couldn’t quite understand that 65% difference, but I booked our tickets on the wonkier Avios site before it went away. If I remember anything from my University of Chicago business school courses, it’s that markets are efficient; 65% price differences don’t last forever. Though in this case, that difference may linger because the Avios website makes it so damn hard to find. </li><li> Bridge Music — <em>Countryside Summer Joyride</em> by Kara Square (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mindmapthat/56281 Ft: Javolenus </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Veteran TravelCommons listener Mika Pyyhkala sent in a note this week talking about his great experience with a flight rebooking service, <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Freebird (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"http://getfreebird.com\" target=\"_blank\">Freebird</a>. Mika writes:<ul><li>I was flying with a companion from (Wichita) ICT-STL and STL-DTW. &nbsp;Just as the plane was descending to DTW, I received text messages from WN and Freebird that STL-DTW on WN had been cancelled. &nbsp;Freebird then manually advised that the only flight for that day was a DL STL-DTW, and they were going to book it in case I wanted it; if they waited longer there might not be enough time to issue the new ticket on Delta through their travel agent. &nbsp;They just asked me to confirm that I in fact wanted the Delta ticket.  </li><li>I confirmed we wanted the 2 Delta tickets, and by the time the door opened in STL we had a confirmation number to check in for the Delta flight leaving in 47 minutes. We got seats together on the Delta flight that were assigned by the Freebird process, and they even gave us free drinks!</li><li>I think we actually arrived in DTW a few minutes earlier than we were scheduled on the original flight, and it made for a great travel story and adventure! &nbsp;This was my first time using Freebird as well!</li><li>It costs $19 to protect a one way trip per traveler. &nbsp;It’s simple to work with them: unlike insurance, there are no claim forms, long waits, or papers to sign</li></ul></li><li>Mika, thanks for this. I hadn’t heard of Freebird before Mika’s note. Hitting their website, they’re selling their service to companies, travel agencies, and to individual travelers. Clicking through to a TechCrunch article about them, it says they’re also talking to Amex and Citibank about including Freebird as a credit card benefit. The article quotes the CEO, Ethan Bernstein - “It’s funny what happens when people deal with uncertainty; uncertainty is the worst. As soon you give people information, human support and technology to help them solve their problems, they experience the event so much differently.” &nbsp;Which is exactly right. Certainty lets you plan; uncertainty just leaves you to stew… and drink at the airport bar… and eat bad airport food… and bitch Tweet. Yup, uncertainty leads to lots of bad things</li><li>One more-fun-than-necessarily-good thing on last month’s trip was getting to try out an alpha version of a new augmented reality feature for Google Maps. I used it first in Stockholm; we got off the Arlanda Express at the Central Train station and wanted make our way over to the Östermalms Saluhall for lunch. When I chose “Walking” as our transport mode, a “Start AR” button showed up next to the usual button to start the directions. With AR, I’d hold my phone up, the display would use the camera to show the streetscape in front of me with the &nbsp;directions -- street names, arrows -- overlaid on the real-time image. I thought it was a nice add; reduced any ambiguity about where the next turn was. One interesting feature -- when I started walking, the screen dimmed and a message popped up telling me to stop looking at the phone and look straight ahead. All in all, it’s kinda fun. At least I thought so; Andrew and Irene seemed much less impressed. It worked very well for what was billed as an alpha product. It’ll be interesting to see how it develops, and how fast Google rolls it out.</li><li> And if you have any travel rants, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. &nbsp;The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Facebook page</a> or our Instagram account at <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Travelcommons</a> -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.<br> Bridge Music —  <em>Jester of the Golden Apocalypse</em> by Super_Sigil (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Super_Sigil/34750  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Traveler Data Leaks</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A Greek </li><li>Bridge Music —  South Texas Cowboy Blues by texasradiofish (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/texasradiofish/52030 Ft: unreal_dm, ElRon XChile</li><li><em>Act 2</em> - A couple of weeks later, on Sunday in Rennes, France. We wheeled our luggage the 2 blocks from our AirBnB to Rennes train station for the TGV to CDG. We stood with everyone else, looking up at the departure board waiting for the track to be posted. Departure time came closer and still no track -- not a good sign. The crowd grew larger. There was an announcement in French and a scrolling message at the bottom of the departure screen. Irene banged it into Google Translate. The gist of it -- a bomb threat had been phoned into SCNF, the train company, and all the trains in and out of Paris were halted. Given France’s recent history with terrorism, it was a reasonable response, but still…. They finally start posting delay times -- 40 mins, then over an hour, but then it shrinks back. I pull up Google Maps. The drive to CDG is showing about the same time as the train, but we’d be in control of our own destiny. I walk down to the rental car offices. It’s Sunday morning; they’re all closed. They won’t open until the afternoon; too late for us to drive and make our flights. </li><li>Time continues to tick by, past the departure time for our flight. I call United -- any other options? I get a phenomenally helpful agent. I can hear the keystrokes. Nothing else today Sunday, nor tomorrow, Monday. I wasn’t surprised about nothing available today, but was about the next day -- until I got a text from Andrew. He was on this morning’s United flight to Chicago which just cancelled for a hydraulic problem and rebooked on tomorrow’s flight -- which explains the lack of seats for us. I took the Tuesday seats. Now would we get to CDG in time for Claire’s EasyJet flight to Edinburgh so she can make class the next day. The trains finally start moving. We head down and board our train. And then wait, and wait some &nbsp;more. And then the train starts moving. I look at my watch. I think Claire will be OK. </li><li>Until we come to a stop in the middle of a rail yard. I watch a couple of guys walk past our car -- maybe a visual inspection? After a bit, we start moving -- backwards. The conductor keys the mike, and makes an announcement in rapid French that we can’t pick up. I open Google Maps. I see we’re off to the east of Paris but can’t tell if we’re moving in the right direction. Until we pull into the next station -- it’s for EuroDisney. I find our train route on the SCNF website and see this is one of the stops en route to CDG, so we’re going in the right direction. We get to CDG by 3pm, which means Claire can make her flight. Andrew comes over from the Airport Hilton, where United is putting him up for the night, and we head down to Paris for another dinner together. There are, after all, worse cities to have to spend an extra day or two.</li><li> Bridge Music —  <em>Parisian </em>Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)<br> Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License<br> http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Brittany Street Food</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Until the train s</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #151</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_151.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<p><!--EndFragment--></p>\n<p></p>','Podcast #151 — Traveler Data Leaks; Brittany Street Food','','inherit','closed','closed','','2436-revision-v1','','','2019-05-03 22:56:51','2019-05-04 03:56:51','',2436,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/03/2436-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2445,1,'2019-05-03 22:59:47','2019-05-04 03:59:47','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>\n\nIt\'s been a tough month for travel. Not quite to Book of Job-level torment, but two of this month\'s three trips spiraled into head-shaking metaphysical “What the hell is going on here” questioning of my decision to get out of bed that morning. I walk through the travel gods\' fun and games, as well as some new data on regional jet delays and buying a new travel bag.  All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_150.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below. \n\n</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #151: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, for the last time…. Not the last time for TravelCommons, just the last time for the studios “outside of Chicago”. We’re picking up stakes and moving about 20 miles east-northeast to Chicago’s Lakeview neighborhood. Hence the reason for the short-cycle on this episode. We’ll be breaking down and packing up the studio and production bay next week and probably won’t have everything reassembled until the end of the month. The recording isn’t really the issue -- I could always go back to my roots and find a spare bathroom to record in. It’s more about the production. I’m not sure I want to shrink my workflow down from a beefy dual 22-inch monitor Windows 10 mini-tower rig to my 2014 vintage 11-inch MacBook Air.</li><li>Being consumed by the move logistics vortex also means I haven’t done any real travel in the 2 weeks since the last episode -- but, given my most recent travel experiences, as laid out in last episode’s <em>Travel Interruptus</em> epic, I’ve appreciated the break. Especially when yet another yet another April snowstorm that blew up 700 flights last weekend. Instead, I’ve been wrestling once again with Avios -- the British Airways, Iberia, and now Aer Lingus frequent flyer program -- trying to book a Chicago-Dublin-Edinburgh Aer Lingus itinerary for my daughter’s graduation from University of St Andrews next month. I’ve been pretty <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/08/26/podcast-116-traveling-thru-japan-luggage-trends/\">vocal</a> about my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">challenges</a> with Avios over the years. In this go-around, the first wackiness was just trying to use the Avios website. To search for flights, you need to log in with your BA, Iberia, or Aer Lingus credentials. I try with all three; and fail with all three. Seems that the passwords given out by BA and Iberia don’t meet Avios’ security rules, so they fail. I assumed the username for my Aer Lingus account was my email address and the password seemed strong enough, but that kept failing too. Finally, after digging around my Aer Lingus profile, I found a separate username, which I’d never seen or used before, and <em>that</em> worked. Finally through the gate and onto the second wackiness -- the difference between the value of an Avios point on the Aer Lingus and Avios web sites. The award offers on both sites were points + cash. Taking the “market rate” for the ticket (pulled from Expedia), subtracting out the required cash payment, and dividing by the number of required Avios points gives the value of the Avios point for that award offer. My rule of thumb is -- get at least 2 cents/point or pay cash. The Aer Lingus site valued an Avios point at 0.7 cents while the Avios site hit my 2-cent minimum. I couldn’t quite understand that 65% difference, but I booked our tickets on the wonkier Avios site before it went away. If I remember anything from my University of Chicago business school courses, it’s that markets are efficient; 65% price differences don’t last forever. Though in this case, that difference may linger because the Avios website makes it so damn hard to find. </li><li> Bridge Music — <em>Countryside Summer Joyride</em> by Kara Square (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mindmapthat/56281 Ft: Javolenus </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Veteran TravelCommons listener Mika Pyyhkala sent in a note this week talking about his great experience with a flight rebooking service, <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Freebird (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"http://getfreebird.com\" target=\"_blank\">Freebird</a>. Mika writes:<ul><li>I was flying with a companion from (Wichita) ICT-STL and STL-DTW. &nbsp;Just as the plane was descending to DTW, I received text messages from WN and Freebird that STL-DTW on WN had been cancelled. &nbsp;Freebird then manually advised that the only flight for that day was a DL STL-DTW, and they were going to book it in case I wanted it; if they waited longer there might not be enough time to issue the new ticket on Delta through their travel agent. &nbsp;They just asked me to confirm that I in fact wanted the Delta ticket.  </li><li>I confirmed we wanted the 2 Delta tickets, and by the time the door opened in STL we had a confirmation number to check in for the Delta flight leaving in 47 minutes. We got seats together on the Delta flight that were assigned by the Freebird process, and they even gave us free drinks!</li><li>I think we actually arrived in DTW a few minutes earlier than we were scheduled on the original flight, and it made for a great travel story and adventure! &nbsp;This was my first time using Freebird as well!</li><li>It costs $19 to protect a one way trip per traveler. &nbsp;It’s simple to work with them: unlike insurance, there are no claim forms, long waits, or papers to sign</li></ul></li><li>Mika, thanks for this. I hadn’t heard of Freebird before Mika’s note. Hitting their website, they’re selling their service to companies, travel agencies, and to individual travelers. Clicking through to a TechCrunch article about them, it says they’re also talking to Amex and Citibank about including Freebird as a credit card benefit. The article quotes the CEO, Ethan Bernstein - “It’s funny what happens when people deal with uncertainty; uncertainty is the worst. As soon you give people information, human support and technology to help them solve their problems, they experience the event so much differently.” &nbsp;Which is exactly right. Certainty lets you plan; uncertainty just leaves you to stew… and drink at the airport bar… and eat bad airport food… and bitch Tweet. Yup, uncertainty leads to lots of bad things</li><li>One more-fun-than-necessarily-good thing on last month’s trip was getting to try out an alpha version of a new augmented reality feature for Google Maps. I used it first in Stockholm; we got off the Arlanda Express at the Central Train station and wanted make our way over to the Östermalms Saluhall for lunch. When I chose “Walking” as our transport mode, a “Start AR” button showed up next to the usual button to start the directions. With AR, I’d hold my phone up, the display would use the camera to show the streetscape in front of me with the &nbsp;directions -- street names, arrows -- overlaid on the real-time image. I thought it was a nice add; reduced any ambiguity about where the next turn was. One interesting feature -- when I started walking, the screen dimmed and a message popped up telling me to stop looking at the phone and look straight ahead. All in all, it’s kinda fun. At least I thought so; Andrew and Irene seemed much less impressed. It worked very well for what was billed as an alpha product. It’ll be interesting to see how it develops, and how fast Google rolls it out.</li><li> And if you have any travel rants, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. &nbsp;The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Facebook page</a> or our Instagram account at <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Travelcommons</a> -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.<br> Bridge Music —  <em>Jester of the Golden Apocalypse</em> by Super_Sigil (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Super_Sigil/34750  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Traveler Data Leaks</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A Greek </li><li>Bridge Music —  South Texas Cowboy Blues by texasradiofish (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/texasradiofish/52030 Ft: unreal_dm, ElRon XChile</li><li><em>Act 2</em> - A couple of weeks later, on Sunday in Rennes, France. We wheeled our luggage the 2 blocks from our AirBnB to Rennes train station for the TGV to CDG. We stood with everyone else, looking up at the departure board waiting for the track to be posted. Departure time came closer and still no track -- not a good sign. The crowd grew larger. There was an announcement in French and a scrolling message at the bottom of the departure screen. Irene banged it into Google Translate. The gist of it -- a bomb threat had been phoned into SCNF, the train company, and all the trains in and out of Paris were halted. Given France’s recent history with terrorism, it was a reasonable response, but still…. They finally start posting delay times -- 40 mins, then over an hour, but then it shrinks back. I pull up Google Maps. The drive to CDG is showing about the same time as the train, but we’d be in control of our own destiny. I walk down to the rental car offices. It’s Sunday morning; they’re all closed. They won’t open until the afternoon; too late for us to drive and make our flights. </li><li>Time continues to tick by, past the departure time for our flight. I call United -- any other options? I get a phenomenally helpful agent. I can hear the keystrokes. Nothing else today Sunday, nor tomorrow, Monday. I wasn’t surprised about nothing available today, but was about the next day -- until I got a text from Andrew. He was on this morning’s United flight to Chicago which just cancelled for a hydraulic problem and rebooked on tomorrow’s flight -- which explains the lack of seats for us. I took the Tuesday seats. Now would we get to CDG in time for Claire’s EasyJet flight to Edinburgh so she can make class the next day. The trains finally start moving. We head down and board our train. And then wait, and wait some &nbsp;more. And then the train starts moving. I look at my watch. I think Claire will be OK. </li><li>Until we come to a stop in the middle of a rail yard. I watch a couple of guys walk past our car -- maybe a visual inspection? After a bit, we start moving -- backwards. The conductor keys the mike, and makes an announcement in rapid French that we can’t pick up. I open Google Maps. I see we’re off to the east of Paris but can’t tell if we’re moving in the right direction. Until we pull into the next station -- it’s for EuroDisney. I find our train route on the SCNF website and see this is one of the stops en route to CDG, so we’re going in the right direction. We get to CDG by 3pm, which means Claire can make her flight. Andrew comes over from the Airport Hilton, where United is putting him up for the night, and we head down to Paris for another dinner together. There are, after all, worse cities to have to spend an extra day or two.</li><li> Bridge Music —  <em>Parisian </em>Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)<br> Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License<br> http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Brittany Street Food</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Until the train s</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #151</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_151.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<p><!--EndFragment--></p>\n<p> </p>','Podcast #151 — Traveler Data Leaks; Brittany Street Food','','inherit','closed','closed','','2436-revision-v1','','','2019-05-03 22:59:47','2019-05-04 03:59:47','',2436,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/03/2436-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2447,1,'2019-05-03 23:02:56','2019-05-04 04:02:56','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><img class=\"wp-image-2439\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/oysters_and_evian_bottles-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" />\n<figcaption>Cancale Oysters with a nice Evian Sancerre</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p>It\'s been a tough month for travel. Not quite to Book of Job-level torment, but two of this month\'s three trips spiraled into head-shaking metaphysical “What the hell is going on here” questioning of my decision to get out of bed that morning. I walk through the travel gods\' fun and games, as well as some new data on regional jet delays and buying a new travel bag. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_151.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":2439,\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright\"><img alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2439\"/></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #151: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, for the last time…. Not the last time for TravelCommons, just the last time for the studios “outside of Chicago”. We’re picking up stakes and moving about 20 miles east-northeast to Chicago’s Lakeview neighborhood. Hence the reason for the short-cycle on this episode. We’ll be breaking down and packing up the studio and production bay next week and probably won’t have everything reassembled until the end of the month. The recording isn’t really the issue -- I could always go back to my roots and find a spare bathroom to record in. It’s more about the production. I’m not sure I want to shrink my workflow down from a beefy dual 22-inch monitor Windows 10 mini-tower rig to my 2014 vintage 11-inch MacBook Air.</li><li>Being consumed by the move logistics vortex also means I haven’t done any real travel in the 2 weeks since the last episode -- but, given my most recent travel experiences, as laid out in last episode’s <em>Travel Interruptus</em> epic, I’ve appreciated the break. Especially when yet another yet another April snowstorm that blew up 700 flights last weekend. Instead, I’ve been wrestling once again with Avios -- the British Airways, Iberia, and now Aer Lingus frequent flyer program -- trying to book a Chicago-Dublin-Edinburgh Aer Lingus itinerary for my daughter’s graduation from University of St Andrews next month. I’ve been pretty <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/08/26/podcast-116-traveling-thru-japan-luggage-trends/\">vocal</a> about my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">challenges</a> with Avios over the years. In this go-around, the first wackiness was just trying to use the Avios website. To search for flights, you need to log in with your BA, Iberia, or Aer Lingus credentials. I try with all three; and fail with all three. Seems that the passwords given out by BA and Iberia don’t meet Avios’ security rules, so they fail. I assumed the username for my Aer Lingus account was my email address and the password seemed strong enough, but that kept failing too. Finally, after digging around my Aer Lingus profile, I found a separate username, which I’d never seen or used before, and <em>that</em> worked. Finally through the gate and onto the second wackiness -- the difference between the value of an Avios point on the Aer Lingus and Avios web sites. The award offers on both sites were points + cash. Taking the “market rate” for the ticket (pulled from Expedia), subtracting out the required cash payment, and dividing by the number of required Avios points gives the value of the Avios point for that award offer. My rule of thumb is -- get at least 2 cents/point or pay cash. The Aer Lingus site valued an Avios point at 0.7 cents while the Avios site hit my 2-cent minimum. I couldn’t quite understand that 65% difference, but I booked our tickets on the wonkier Avios site before it went away. If I remember anything from my University of Chicago business school courses, it’s that markets are efficient; 65% price differences don’t last forever. Though in this case, that difference may linger because the Avios website makes it so damn hard to find. </li><li> Bridge Music — <em>Countryside Summer Joyride</em> by Kara Square (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mindmapthat/56281 Ft: Javolenus </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Veteran TravelCommons listener Mika Pyyhkala sent in a note this week talking about his great experience with a flight rebooking service, <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Freebird (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"http://getfreebird.com\" target=\"_blank\">Freebird</a>. Mika writes:<ul><li>I was flying with a companion from (Wichita) ICT-STL and STL-DTW. &nbsp;Just as the plane was descending to DTW, I received text messages from WN and Freebird that STL-DTW on WN had been cancelled. &nbsp;Freebird then manually advised that the only flight for that day was a DL STL-DTW, and they were going to book it in case I wanted it; if they waited longer there might not be enough time to issue the new ticket on Delta through their travel agent. &nbsp;They just asked me to confirm that I in fact wanted the Delta ticket.  </li><li>I confirmed we wanted the 2 Delta tickets, and by the time the door opened in STL we had a confirmation number to check in for the Delta flight leaving in 47 minutes. We got seats together on the Delta flight that were assigned by the Freebird process, and they even gave us free drinks!</li><li>I think we actually arrived in DTW a few minutes earlier than we were scheduled on the original flight, and it made for a great travel story and adventure! &nbsp;This was my first time using Freebird as well!</li><li>It costs $19 to protect a one way trip per traveler. &nbsp;It’s simple to work with them: unlike insurance, there are no claim forms, long waits, or papers to sign</li></ul></li><li>Mika, thanks for this. I hadn’t heard of Freebird before Mika’s note. Hitting their website, they’re selling their service to companies, travel agencies, and to individual travelers. Clicking through to a TechCrunch article about them, it says they’re also talking to Amex and Citibank about including Freebird as a credit card benefit. The article quotes the CEO, Ethan Bernstein - “It’s funny what happens when people deal with uncertainty; uncertainty is the worst. As soon you give people information, human support and technology to help them solve their problems, they experience the event so much differently.” &nbsp;Which is exactly right. Certainty lets you plan; uncertainty just leaves you to stew… and drink at the airport bar… and eat bad airport food… and bitch Tweet. Yup, uncertainty leads to lots of bad things</li><li>One more-fun-than-necessarily-good thing on last month’s trip was getting to try out an alpha version of a new augmented reality feature for Google Maps. I used it first in Stockholm; we got off the Arlanda Express at the Central Train station and wanted make our way over to the Östermalms Saluhall for lunch. When I chose “Walking” as our transport mode, a “Start AR” button showed up next to the usual button to start the directions. With AR, I’d hold my phone up, the display would use the camera to show the streetscape in front of me with the &nbsp;directions -- street names, arrows -- overlaid on the real-time image. I thought it was a nice add; reduced any ambiguity about where the next turn was. One interesting feature -- when I started walking, the screen dimmed and a message popped up telling me to stop looking at the phone and look straight ahead. All in all, it’s kinda fun. At least I thought so; Andrew and Irene seemed much less impressed. It worked very well for what was billed as an alpha product. It’ll be interesting to see how it develops, and how fast Google rolls it out.</li><li> And if you have any travel rants, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. &nbsp;The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Facebook page</a> or our Instagram account at <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Travelcommons</a> -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.<br> Bridge Music —  <em>Jester of the Golden Apocalypse</em> by Super_Sigil (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Super_Sigil/34750  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Traveler Data Leaks</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A Greek </li><li>Bridge Music —  South Texas Cowboy Blues by texasradiofish (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/texasradiofish/52030 Ft: unreal_dm, ElRon XChile</li><li><em>Act 2</em> - A couple of weeks later, on Sunday in Rennes, France. We wheeled our luggage the 2 blocks from our AirBnB to Rennes train station for the TGV to CDG. We stood with everyone else, looking up at the departure board waiting for the track to be posted. Departure time came closer and still no track -- not a good sign. The crowd grew larger. There was an announcement in French and a scrolling message at the bottom of the departure screen. Irene banged it into Google Translate. The gist of it -- a bomb threat had been phoned into SCNF, the train company, and all the trains in and out of Paris were halted. Given France’s recent history with terrorism, it was a reasonable response, but still…. They finally start posting delay times -- 40 mins, then over an hour, but then it shrinks back. I pull up Google Maps. The drive to CDG is showing about the same time as the train, but we’d be in control of our own destiny. I walk down to the rental car offices. It’s Sunday morning; they’re all closed. They won’t open until the afternoon; too late for us to drive and make our flights. </li><li>Time continues to tick by, past the departure time for our flight. I call United -- any other options? I get a phenomenally helpful agent. I can hear the keystrokes. Nothing else today Sunday, nor tomorrow, Monday. I wasn’t surprised about nothing available today, but was about the next day -- until I got a text from Andrew. He was on this morning’s United flight to Chicago which just cancelled for a hydraulic problem and rebooked on tomorrow’s flight -- which explains the lack of seats for us. I took the Tuesday seats. Now would we get to CDG in time for Claire’s EasyJet flight to Edinburgh so she can make class the next day. The trains finally start moving. We head down and board our train. And then wait, and wait some &nbsp;more. And then the train starts moving. I look at my watch. I think Claire will be OK. </li><li>Until we come to a stop in the middle of a rail yard. I watch a couple of guys walk past our car -- maybe a visual inspection? After a bit, we start moving -- backwards. The conductor keys the mike, and makes an announcement in rapid French that we can’t pick up. I open Google Maps. I see we’re off to the east of Paris but can’t tell if we’re moving in the right direction. Until we pull into the next station -- it’s for EuroDisney. I find our train route on the SCNF website and see this is one of the stops en route to CDG, so we’re going in the right direction. We get to CDG by 3pm, which means Claire can make her flight. Andrew comes over from the Airport Hilton, where United is putting him up for the night, and we head down to Paris for another dinner together. There are, after all, worse cities to have to spend an extra day or two.</li><li> Bridge Music —  <em>Parisian </em>Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)<br> Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License<br> http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Brittany Street Food</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Until the train s</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #151</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_151.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<p><!--EndFragment--></p>\n<p> </p>','Podcast #151 — Traveler Data Leaks; Brittany Street Food','','inherit','closed','closed','','2436-revision-v1','','','2019-05-03 23:02:56','2019-05-04 04:02:56','',2436,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/03/2436-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2448,1,'2019-05-03 23:03:15','2019-05-04 04:03:15','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><img class=\"wp-image-2439\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/oysters_and_evian_bottles-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" />\n<figcaption>Cancale Oysters with a nice Evian Sancerre</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p>It\'s been a tough month for travel. Not quite to Book of Job-level torment, but two of this month\'s three trips spiraled into head-shaking metaphysical “What the hell is going on here” questioning of my decision to get out of bed that morning. I walk through the travel gods\' fun and games, as well as some new data on regional jet delays and buying a new travel bag. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_151.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #151: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, for the last time…. Not the last time for TravelCommons, just the last time for the studios “outside of Chicago”. We’re picking up stakes and moving about 20 miles east-northeast to Chicago’s Lakeview neighborhood. Hence the reason for the short-cycle on this episode. We’ll be breaking down and packing up the studio and production bay next week and probably won’t have everything reassembled until the end of the month. The recording isn’t really the issue -- I could always go back to my roots and find a spare bathroom to record in. It’s more about the production. I’m not sure I want to shrink my workflow down from a beefy dual 22-inch monitor Windows 10 mini-tower rig to my 2014 vintage 11-inch MacBook Air.</li><li>Being consumed by the move logistics vortex also means I haven’t done any real travel in the 2 weeks since the last episode -- but, given my most recent travel experiences, as laid out in last episode’s <em>Travel Interruptus</em> epic, I’ve appreciated the break. Especially when yet another yet another April snowstorm that blew up 700 flights last weekend. Instead, I’ve been wrestling once again with Avios -- the British Airways, Iberia, and now Aer Lingus frequent flyer program -- trying to book a Chicago-Dublin-Edinburgh Aer Lingus itinerary for my daughter’s graduation from University of St Andrews next month. I’ve been pretty <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/08/26/podcast-116-traveling-thru-japan-luggage-trends/\">vocal</a> about my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">challenges</a> with Avios over the years. In this go-around, the first wackiness was just trying to use the Avios website. To search for flights, you need to log in with your BA, Iberia, or Aer Lingus credentials. I try with all three; and fail with all three. Seems that the passwords given out by BA and Iberia don’t meet Avios’ security rules, so they fail. I assumed the username for my Aer Lingus account was my email address and the password seemed strong enough, but that kept failing too. Finally, after digging around my Aer Lingus profile, I found a separate username, which I’d never seen or used before, and <em>that</em> worked. Finally through the gate and onto the second wackiness -- the difference between the value of an Avios point on the Aer Lingus and Avios web sites. The award offers on both sites were points + cash. Taking the “market rate” for the ticket (pulled from Expedia), subtracting out the required cash payment, and dividing by the number of required Avios points gives the value of the Avios point for that award offer. My rule of thumb is -- get at least 2 cents/point or pay cash. The Aer Lingus site valued an Avios point at 0.7 cents while the Avios site hit my 2-cent minimum. I couldn’t quite understand that 65% difference, but I booked our tickets on the wonkier Avios site before it went away. If I remember anything from my University of Chicago business school courses, it’s that markets are efficient; 65% price differences don’t last forever. Though in this case, that difference may linger because the Avios website makes it so damn hard to find. </li><li> Bridge Music — <em>Countryside Summer Joyride</em> by Kara Square (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mindmapthat/56281 Ft: Javolenus </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Veteran TravelCommons listener Mika Pyyhkala sent in a note this week talking about his great experience with a flight rebooking service, <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Freebird (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"http://getfreebird.com\" target=\"_blank\">Freebird</a>. Mika writes:<ul><li>I was flying with a companion from (Wichita) ICT-STL and STL-DTW. &nbsp;Just as the plane was descending to DTW, I received text messages from WN and Freebird that STL-DTW on WN had been cancelled. &nbsp;Freebird then manually advised that the only flight for that day was a DL STL-DTW, and they were going to book it in case I wanted it; if they waited longer there might not be enough time to issue the new ticket on Delta through their travel agent. &nbsp;They just asked me to confirm that I in fact wanted the Delta ticket.  </li><li>I confirmed we wanted the 2 Delta tickets, and by the time the door opened in STL we had a confirmation number to check in for the Delta flight leaving in 47 minutes. We got seats together on the Delta flight that were assigned by the Freebird process, and they even gave us free drinks!</li><li>I think we actually arrived in DTW a few minutes earlier than we were scheduled on the original flight, and it made for a great travel story and adventure! &nbsp;This was my first time using Freebird as well!</li><li>It costs $19 to protect a one way trip per traveler. &nbsp;It’s simple to work with them: unlike insurance, there are no claim forms, long waits, or papers to sign</li></ul></li><li>Mika, thanks for this. I hadn’t heard of Freebird before Mika’s note. Hitting their website, they’re selling their service to companies, travel agencies, and to individual travelers. Clicking through to a TechCrunch article about them, it says they’re also talking to Amex and Citibank about including Freebird as a credit card benefit. The article quotes the CEO, Ethan Bernstein - “It’s funny what happens when people deal with uncertainty; uncertainty is the worst. As soon you give people information, human support and technology to help them solve their problems, they experience the event so much differently.” &nbsp;Which is exactly right. Certainty lets you plan; uncertainty just leaves you to stew… and drink at the airport bar… and eat bad airport food… and bitch Tweet. Yup, uncertainty leads to lots of bad things</li><li>One more-fun-than-necessarily-good thing on last month’s trip was getting to try out an alpha version of a new augmented reality feature for Google Maps. I used it first in Stockholm; we got off the Arlanda Express at the Central Train station and wanted make our way over to the Östermalms Saluhall for lunch. When I chose “Walking” as our transport mode, a “Start AR” button showed up next to the usual button to start the directions. With AR, I’d hold my phone up, the display would use the camera to show the streetscape in front of me with the &nbsp;directions -- street names, arrows -- overlaid on the real-time image. I thought it was a nice add; reduced any ambiguity about where the next turn was. One interesting feature -- when I started walking, the screen dimmed and a message popped up telling me to stop looking at the phone and look straight ahead. All in all, it’s kinda fun. At least I thought so; Andrew and Irene seemed much less impressed. It worked very well for what was billed as an alpha product. It’ll be interesting to see how it develops, and how fast Google rolls it out.</li><li> And if you have any travel rants, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. &nbsp;The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Facebook page</a> or our Instagram account at <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Travelcommons</a> -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.<br> Bridge Music —  <em>Jester of the Golden Apocalypse</em> by Super_Sigil (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Super_Sigil/34750  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Traveler Data Leaks</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A Greek </li><li>Bridge Music —  South Texas Cowboy Blues by texasradiofish (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/texasradiofish/52030 Ft: unreal_dm, ElRon XChile</li><li><em>Act 2</em> - A couple of weeks later, on Sunday in Rennes, France. We wheeled our luggage the 2 blocks from our AirBnB to Rennes train station for the TGV to CDG. We stood with everyone else, looking up at the departure board waiting for the track to be posted. Departure time came closer and still no track -- not a good sign. The crowd grew larger. There was an announcement in French and a scrolling message at the bottom of the departure screen. Irene banged it into Google Translate. The gist of it -- a bomb threat had been phoned into SCNF, the train company, and all the trains in and out of Paris were halted. Given France’s recent history with terrorism, it was a reasonable response, but still…. They finally start posting delay times -- 40 mins, then over an hour, but then it shrinks back. I pull up Google Maps. The drive to CDG is showing about the same time as the train, but we’d be in control of our own destiny. I walk down to the rental car offices. It’s Sunday morning; they’re all closed. They won’t open until the afternoon; too late for us to drive and make our flights. </li><li>Time continues to tick by, past the departure time for our flight. I call United -- any other options? I get a phenomenally helpful agent. I can hear the keystrokes. Nothing else today Sunday, nor tomorrow, Monday. I wasn’t surprised about nothing available today, but was about the next day -- until I got a text from Andrew. He was on this morning’s United flight to Chicago which just cancelled for a hydraulic problem and rebooked on tomorrow’s flight -- which explains the lack of seats for us. I took the Tuesday seats. Now would we get to CDG in time for Claire’s EasyJet flight to Edinburgh so she can make class the next day. The trains finally start moving. We head down and board our train. And then wait, and wait some &nbsp;more. And then the train starts moving. I look at my watch. I think Claire will be OK. </li><li>Until we come to a stop in the middle of a rail yard. I watch a couple of guys walk past our car -- maybe a visual inspection? After a bit, we start moving -- backwards. The conductor keys the mike, and makes an announcement in rapid French that we can’t pick up. I open Google Maps. I see we’re off to the east of Paris but can’t tell if we’re moving in the right direction. Until we pull into the next station -- it’s for EuroDisney. I find our train route on the SCNF website and see this is one of the stops en route to CDG, so we’re going in the right direction. We get to CDG by 3pm, which means Claire can make her flight. Andrew comes over from the Airport Hilton, where United is putting him up for the night, and we head down to Paris for another dinner together. There are, after all, worse cities to have to spend an extra day or two.</li><li> Bridge Music —  <em>Parisian </em>Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)<br> Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License<br> http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Brittany Street Food</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Until the train s</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #151</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_151.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<p><!--EndFragment--></p>\n<p> </p>','Podcast #151 — Traveler Data Leaks; Brittany Street Food','','inherit','closed','closed','','2436-revision-v1','','','2019-05-03 23:03:15','2019-05-04 04:03:15','',2436,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/03/2436-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2449,1,'2019-05-04 14:46:25','2019-05-04 19:46:25','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><img class=\"wp-image-2439\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/oysters_and_evian_bottles-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\"><figcaption>Cancale Oysters with a nice Evian Sancerre</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>It\'s been a tough month for travel. Not quite to Book of Job-level torment, but two of this month\'s three trips spiraled into head-shaking metaphysical “What the hell is going on here” questioning of my decision to get out of bed that morning. I walk through the travel gods\' fun and games, as well as some new data on regional jet delays and buying a new travel bag. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_151.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #151: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, for the last time…. Not the last time for TravelCommons, just the last time for the studios “outside of Chicago”. We’re picking up stakes and moving about 20 miles east-northeast to Chicago’s Lakeview neighborhood. Hence the reason for the short-cycle on this episode. We’ll be breaking down and packing up the studio and production bay next week and probably won’t have everything reassembled until the end of the month. The recording isn’t really the issue -- I could always go back to my roots and find a spare bathroom to record in. It’s more about the production. I’m not sure I want to shrink my workflow down from a beefy dual 22-inch monitor Windows 10 mini-tower rig to my 2014 vintage 11-inch MacBook Air.</li><li>Being consumed by the move logistics vortex also means I haven’t done any real travel in the 2 weeks since the last episode -- but, given my most recent travel experiences, as laid out in last episode’s <em>Travel Interruptus</em> epic, I’ve appreciated the break. Especially when yet another yet another April snowstorm that blew up 700 flights last weekend. Instead, I’ve been wrestling once again with Avios -- the British Airways, Iberia, and now Aer Lingus frequent flyer program -- trying to book a Chicago-Dublin-Edinburgh Aer Lingus itinerary for my daughter’s graduation from University of St Andrews next month. I’ve been pretty <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/08/26/podcast-116-traveling-thru-japan-luggage-trends/\">vocal</a> about my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">challenges</a> with Avios over the years. In this go-around, the first wackiness was just trying to use the Avios website. To search for flights, you need to log in with your BA, Iberia, or Aer Lingus credentials. I try with all three; and fail with all three. Seems that the passwords given out by BA and Iberia don’t meet Avios’ security rules, so they fail. I assumed the username for my Aer Lingus account was my email address and the password seemed strong enough, but that kept failing too. Finally, after digging around my Aer Lingus profile, I found a separate username, which I’d never seen or used before, and <em>that</em> worked. Finally through the gate and onto the second wackiness -- the difference between the value of an Avios point on the Aer Lingus and Avios web sites. The award offers on both sites were points + cash. Taking the “market rate” for the ticket (pulled from Expedia), subtracting out the required cash payment, and dividing by the number of required Avios points gives the value of the Avios point for that award offer. My rule of thumb is -- get at least 2 cents/point or pay cash. The Aer Lingus site valued an Avios point at 0.7 cents while the Avios site hit my 2-cent minimum. I couldn’t quite understand that 65% difference, but I booked our tickets on the wonkier Avios site before it went away. If I remember anything from my University of Chicago business school courses, it’s that markets are efficient; 65% price differences don’t last forever. Though in this case, that difference may linger because the Avios website makes it so damn hard to find. </li><li></li><li> Bridge Music — <em>Countryside Summer Joyride</em> by Kara Square (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mindmapthat/56281 Ft: Javolenus </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Veteran TravelCommons listener Mika Pyyhkala sent in a note this week talking about his great experience with a flight rebooking service, <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Freebird (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"http://getfreebird.com\" target=\"_blank\">Freebird</a>. Mika writes:<ul><li>I was flying with a companion from (Wichita) ICT-STL and STL-DTW.  Just as the plane was descending to DTW, I received text messages from WN and Freebird that STL-DTW on WN had been cancelled.  Freebird then manually advised that the only flight for that day was a DL STL-DTW, and they were going to book it in case I wanted it; if they waited longer there might not be enough time to issue the new ticket on Delta through their travel agent.  They just asked me to confirm that I in fact wanted the Delta ticket.  </li><li>I confirmed we wanted the 2 Delta tickets, and by the time the door opened in STL we had a confirmation number to check in for the Delta flight leaving in 47 minutes. We got seats together on the Delta flight that were assigned by the Freebird process, and they even gave us free drinks!</li><li>I think we actually arrived in DTW a few minutes earlier than we were scheduled on the original flight, and it made for a great travel story and adventure!  This was my first time using Freebird as well!</li><li>It costs $19 to protect a one way trip per traveler.  It’s simple to work with them: unlike insurance, there are no claim forms, long waits, or papers to sign</li></ul></li><li>Mika, thanks for this. I hadn’t heard of Freebird before Mika’s note. Hitting their website, they’re selling their service to companies, travel agencies, and to individual travelers. Clicking through to a TechCrunch article about them, it says they’re also talking to Amex and Citibank about including Freebird as a credit card benefit. The article quotes the CEO, Ethan Bernstein - “It’s funny what happens when people deal with uncertainty; uncertainty is the worst. As soon you give people information, human support and technology to help them solve their problems, they experience the event so much differently.”  Which is exactly right. Certainty lets you plan; uncertainty just leaves you to stew… and drink at the airport bar… and eat bad airport food… and bitch Tweet. Yup, uncertainty leads to lots of bad things</li><li>One more-fun-than-necessarily-good thing on last month’s trip was getting to try out an alpha version of a new augmented reality feature for Google Maps. I used it first in Stockholm; we got off the Arlanda Express at the Central Train station and wanted make our way over to the Östermalms Saluhall for lunch. When I chose “Walking” as our transport mode, a “Start AR” button showed up next to the usual button to start the directions. With AR, I’d hold my phone up, the display would use the camera to show the streetscape in front of me with the  directions -- street names, arrows -- overlaid on the real-time image. I thought it was a nice add; reduced any ambiguity about where the next turn was. One interesting feature -- when I started walking, the screen dimmed and a message popped up telling me to stop looking at the phone and look straight ahead. All in all, it’s kinda fun. At least I thought so; Andrew and Irene seemed much less impressed. It worked very well for what was billed as an alpha product. It’ll be interesting to see how it develops, and how fast Google rolls it out.</li><li>But even without a broader AR roll-out, Google Maps seems on track to become the next “super app” -- sorta the Western counterpart to China’s WeChat -- the first “super app”, a Swiss Army Knife-kind of “it does everything” app. Now Google Maps isn’t to that level -- yet -- but it is growing. It started as a mapping app, then added driving directions, then ride share -- showing Uber and Lyft prices, then public transit directions with real-time arrival times, replacing the core use case for apps like Transit. Then the “Explore Nearby” became more prominent -- which, for me, has supplanted Yelp when looking for a restaurant because it’s so much more convenient, and with deep links to OpenTable for reservations; and for nearby hotels, direct booking links to Expedia and Booking.com. I wasn’t surprised when I saw a stat that those “Near Me” searches grew 150 percent the last year. I’m not quite sure what I think about this -- loving a free service that keeps becoming more valuable vs. becoming more enslaved to the Google overlords. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/08/27/podcast-132-travel-apps-on-my-phone/\">episode #132</a>, I listed all the travel apps on my smartphone, and Google Maps was the most important -- “Indeed, it’s the only travel app with its own screen real estate rather than sharing space in the Travel folder,” I said. And it only keeps getting more indispensable.</li><li> And if you have any travel rants, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Facebook page</a> or our Instagram account at <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Travelcommons</a> -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.<br> Bridge Music —  <em>Jester of the Golden Apocalypse</em> by Super_Sigil (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Super_Sigil/34750  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Traveler Data Leaks</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A Greek </li><li>Bridge Music —  South Texas Cowboy Blues by texasradiofish (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/texasradiofish/52030 Ft: unreal_dm, ElRon XChile</li><li><em>Act 2</em> - A couple of weeks later, on Sunday in Rennes, France. We wheeled our luggage the 2 blocks from our AirBnB to Rennes train station for the TGV to CDG. We stood with everyone else, looking up at the departure board waiting for the track to be posted. Departure time came closer and still no track -- not a good sign. The crowd grew larger. There was an announcement in French and a scrolling message at the bottom of the departure screen. Irene banged it into Google Translate. The gist of it -- a bomb threat had been phoned into SCNF, the train company, and all the trains in and out of Paris were halted. Given France’s recent history with terrorism, it was a reasonable response, but still…. They finally start posting delay times -- 40 mins, then over an hour, but then it shrinks back. I pull up Google Maps. The drive to CDG is showing about the same time as the train, but we’d be in control of our own destiny. I walk down to the rental car offices. It’s Sunday morning; they’re all closed. They won’t open until the afternoon; too late for us to drive and make our flights. </li><li>Time continues to tick by, past the departure time for our flight. I call United -- any other options? I get a phenomenally helpful agent. I can hear the keystrokes. Nothing else today Sunday, nor tomorrow, Monday. I wasn’t surprised about nothing available today, but was about the next day -- until I got a text from Andrew. He was on this morning’s United flight to Chicago which just cancelled for a hydraulic problem and rebooked on tomorrow’s flight -- which explains the lack of seats for us. I took the Tuesday seats. Now would we get to CDG in time for Claire’s EasyJet flight to Edinburgh so she can make class the next day. The trains finally start moving. We head down and board our train. And then wait, and wait some &nbsp;more. And then the train starts moving. I look at my watch. I think Claire will be OK. </li><li>Until we come to a stop in the middle of a rail yard. I watch a couple of guys walk past our car -- maybe a visual inspection? After a bit, we start moving -- backwards. The conductor keys the mike, and makes an announcement in rapid French that we can’t pick up. I open Google Maps. I see we’re off to the east of Paris but can’t tell if we’re moving in the right direction. Until we pull into the next station -- it’s for EuroDisney. I find our train route on the SCNF website and see this is one of the stops en route to CDG, so we’re going in the right direction. We get to CDG by 3pm, which means Claire can make her flight. Andrew comes over from the Airport Hilton, where United is putting him up for the night, and we head down to Paris for another dinner together. There are, after all, worse cities to have to spend an extra day or two.</li><li> Bridge Music —  <em>Parisian </em>Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)<br> Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License<br> http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Brittany Street Food</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Until the train s</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #151</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_151.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<p><!--EndFragment--></p>\n<p></p>','Podcast #151 — Traveler Data Leaks; Brittany Street Food','','inherit','closed','closed','','2436-revision-v1','','','2019-05-04 14:46:25','2019-05-04 19:46:25','',2436,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/04/2436-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2450,1,'2019-05-04 15:34:52','2019-05-04 20:34:52','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><img class=\"wp-image-2439\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/oysters_and_evian_bottles-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\"><figcaption>Cancale Oysters with a nice Evian Sancerre</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>It\'s been a tough month for travel. Not quite to Book of Job-level torment, but two of this month\'s three trips spiraled into head-shaking metaphysical “What the hell is going on here” questioning of my decision to get out of bed that morning. I walk through the travel gods\' fun and games, as well as some new data on regional jet delays and buying a new travel bag. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_151.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #151: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, for the last time…. Not the last time for TravelCommons, just the last time for the studios “outside of Chicago”. We’re picking up stakes and moving about 20 miles east-northeast to Chicago’s Lakeview neighborhood. Hence the reason for the short-cycle on this episode. We’ll be breaking down and packing up the studio and production bay next week and probably won’t have everything reassembled until the end of the month. The recording isn’t really the issue -- I could always go back to my roots and find a spare bathroom to record in. It’s more about the production. I’m not sure I want to shrink my workflow down from a beefy dual 22-inch monitor Windows 10 mini-tower rig to my 2014 vintage 11-inch MacBook Air.</li><li>Being consumed by the move logistics vortex also means I haven’t done any real travel in the 2 weeks since the last episode -- but, given my most recent travel experiences, as laid out in last episode’s <em>Travel Interruptus</em> epic, I’ve appreciated the break. Especially when yet another yet another April snowstorm that blew up 700 flights last weekend. Instead, I’ve been wrestling once again with Avios -- the British Airways, Iberia, and now Aer Lingus frequent flyer program -- trying to book a Chicago-Dublin-Edinburgh Aer Lingus itinerary for my daughter’s graduation from University of St Andrews next month. I’ve been pretty <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/08/26/podcast-116-traveling-thru-japan-luggage-trends/\">vocal</a> about my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">challenges</a> with Avios over the years. In this go-around, the first wackiness was just trying to use the Avios website. To search for flights, you need to log in with your BA, Iberia, or Aer Lingus credentials. I try with all three; and fail with all three. Seems that the passwords given out by BA and Iberia don’t meet Avios’ security rules, so they fail. I assumed the username for my Aer Lingus account was my email address and the password seemed strong enough, but that kept failing too. Finally, after digging around my Aer Lingus profile, I found a separate username, which I’d never seen or used before, and <em>that</em> worked. Finally through the gate and onto the second wackiness -- the difference between the value of an Avios point on the Aer Lingus and Avios web sites. The award offers on both sites were points + cash. Taking the “market rate” for the ticket (pulled from Expedia), subtracting out the required cash payment, and dividing by the number of required Avios points gives the value of the Avios point for that award offer. My rule of thumb is -- get at least 2 cents/point or pay cash. The Aer Lingus site valued an Avios point at 0.7 cents while the Avios site hit my 2-cent minimum. I couldn’t quite understand that 65% difference, but I booked our tickets on the wonkier Avios site before it went away. If I remember anything from my University of Chicago business school courses, it’s that markets are efficient; 65% price differences don’t last forever. Though in this case, that difference may linger because the Avios website makes it so damn hard to find. </li><li></li><li> Bridge Music — <em>Countryside Summer Joyride</em> by Kara Square (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mindmapthat/56281 Ft: Javolenus </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Veteran TravelCommons listener Mika Pyyhkala sent in a note this week talking about his great experience with a flight rebooking service, <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Freebird (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"http://getfreebird.com\" target=\"_blank\">Freebird</a>. Mika writes:<ul><li>I was flying with a companion from (Wichita) ICT-STL and STL-DTW.  Just as the plane was descending to DTW, I received text messages from WN and Freebird that STL-DTW on WN had been cancelled.  Freebird then manually advised that the only flight for that day was a DL STL-DTW, and they were going to book it in case I wanted it; if they waited longer there might not be enough time to issue the new ticket on Delta through their travel agent.  They just asked me to confirm that I in fact wanted the Delta ticket.  </li><li>I confirmed we wanted the 2 Delta tickets, and by the time the door opened in STL we had a confirmation number to check in for the Delta flight leaving in 47 minutes. We got seats together on the Delta flight that were assigned by the Freebird process, and they even gave us free drinks!</li><li>I think we actually arrived in DTW a few minutes earlier than we were scheduled on the original flight, and it made for a great travel story and adventure!  This was my first time using Freebird as well!</li><li>It costs $19 to protect a one way trip per traveler.  It’s simple to work with them: unlike insurance, there are no claim forms, long waits, or papers to sign</li></ul></li><li>Mika, thanks for this. I hadn’t heard of Freebird before Mika’s note. Hitting their website, they’re selling their service to companies, travel agencies, and to individual travelers. Clicking through to a TechCrunch article about them, it says they’re also talking to Amex and Citibank about including Freebird as a credit card benefit. The article quotes the CEO, Ethan Bernstein - “It’s funny what happens when people deal with uncertainty; uncertainty is the worst. As soon you give people information, human support and technology to help them solve their problems, they experience the event so much differently.”  Which is exactly right. Certainty lets you plan; uncertainty just leaves you to stew… and drink at the airport bar… and eat bad airport food… and bitch Tweet. Yup, uncertainty leads to lots of bad things</li><li>One more-fun-than-necessarily-good thing on last month’s trip was getting to try out an alpha version of a new augmented reality feature for Google Maps. I used it first in Stockholm; we got off the Arlanda Express at the Central Train station and wanted make our way over to the Östermalms Saluhall for lunch. When I chose “Walking” as our transport mode, a “Start AR” button showed up next to the usual button to start the directions. With AR, I’d hold my phone up, the display would use the camera to show the streetscape in front of me with the  directions -- street names, arrows -- overlaid on the real-time image. I thought it was a nice add; reduced any ambiguity about where the next turn was. One interesting feature -- when I started walking, the screen dimmed and a message popped up telling me to stop looking at the phone and look straight ahead. All in all, it’s kinda fun. At least I thought so; Andrew and Irene seemed much less impressed. It worked very well for what was billed as an alpha product. It’ll be interesting to see how it develops, and how fast Google rolls it out.</li><li>But even without a broader AR roll-out, Google Maps seems on track to become the next “super app” -- sorta the Western counterpart to China’s WeChat -- the first “super app”, a Swiss Army Knife-kind of “it does everything” app. Now Google Maps isn’t to that level -- yet -- but it is growing. It started as a mapping app, then added driving directions, then ride share -- showing Uber and Lyft prices, then public transit directions with real-time arrival times, replacing the core use case for apps like Transit. Then the “Explore Nearby” became more prominent -- which, for me, has supplanted Yelp when looking for a restaurant because it’s so much more convenient, and with deep links to OpenTable for reservations; and for nearby hotels, direct booking links to Expedia and Booking.com. I wasn’t surprised when I saw a stat that those “Near Me” searches grew 150 percent the last year. I’m not quite sure what I think about this -- loving a free service that keeps becoming more valuable vs. becoming more enslaved to the Google overlords. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/08/27/podcast-132-travel-apps-on-my-phone/\">episode #132</a>, I listed all the travel apps on my smartphone, and Google Maps was the most important -- “Indeed, it’s the only travel app with its own screen real estate rather than sharing space in the Travel folder,” I said. And it only keeps getting more indispensable.</li><li> And if you have any travel rants, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Facebook page</a> or our Instagram account at <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Travelcommons</a> -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.<br> Bridge Music —  <em>Jester of the Golden Apocalypse</em> by Super_Sigil (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Super_Sigil/34750  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Traveler Data Leaks</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Interview with <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mylaocoon\">Candid Wueest</a>, Principal Threat Researcher at Symantec and author of a blog post titled <a href=\"https://www.symantec.com/blogs/threat-intelligence/hotel-websites-leak-guest-data\"><em>Two in Three Hotel Websites Leak Guest Booking Details and Allow Access to Personal Data</em></a></li><li>Bridge Music —  South Texas Cowboy Blues by texasradiofish (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/texasradiofish/52030 Ft: unreal_dm, ElRon XChile</li><li><em>Act 2</em> - A couple of weeks later, on Sunday in Rennes, France. We wheeled our luggage the 2 blocks from our AirBnB to Rennes train station for the TGV to CDG. We stood with everyone else, looking up at the departure board waiting for the track to be posted. Departure time came closer and still no track -- not a good sign. The crowd grew larger. There was an announcement in French and a scrolling message at the bottom of the departure screen. Irene banged it into Google Translate. The gist of it -- a bomb threat had been phoned into SCNF, the train company, and all the trains in and out of Paris were halted. Given France’s recent history with terrorism, it was a reasonable response, but still…. They finally start posting delay times -- 40 mins, then over an hour, but then it shrinks back. I pull up Google Maps. The drive to CDG is showing about the same time as the train, but we’d be in control of our own destiny. I walk down to the rental car offices. It’s Sunday morning; they’re all closed. They won’t open until the afternoon; too late for us to drive and make our flights. </li><li>Time continues to tick by, past the departure time for our flight. I call United -- any other options? I get a phenomenally helpful agent. I can hear the keystrokes. Nothing else today Sunday, nor tomorrow, Monday. I wasn’t surprised about nothing available today, but was about the next day -- until I got a text from Andrew. He was on this morning’s United flight to Chicago which just cancelled for a hydraulic problem and rebooked on tomorrow’s flight -- which explains the lack of seats for us. I took the Tuesday seats. Now would we get to CDG in time for Claire’s EasyJet flight to Edinburgh so she can make class the next day. The trains finally start moving. We head down and board our train. And then wait, and wait some  more. And then the train starts moving. I look at my watch. I think Claire will be OK. </li><li>Until we come to a stop in the middle of a rail yard. I watch a couple of guys walk past our car -- maybe a visual inspection? After a bit, we start moving -- backwards. The conductor keys the mike, and makes an announcement in rapid French that we can’t pick up. I open Google Maps. I see we’re off to the east of Paris but can’t tell if we’re moving in the right direction. Until we pull into the next station -- it’s for EuroDisney. I find our train route on the SCNF website and see this is one of the stops en route to CDG, so we’re going in the right direction. We get to CDG by 3pm, which means Claire can make her flight. Andrew comes over from the Airport Hilton, where United is putting him up for the night, and we head down to Paris for another dinner together. There are, after all, worse cities to have to spend an extra day or two.</li><li> Bridge Music —  <em>Parisian </em>Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)<br> Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License<br> http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Brittany Street Food</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Until the train s</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #151</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_151.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<p><!--EndFragment--></p>\n<p></p>','Podcast #151 — Traveler Data Leaks; Brittany Street Food','','inherit','closed','closed','','2436-revision-v1','','','2019-05-04 15:34:52','2019-05-04 20:34:52','',2436,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/04/2436-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2451,1,'2019-05-05 18:47:47','2019-05-05 23:47:47','[caption id=\"attachment_1273\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/IMG_2455.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-1273 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/IMG_2455-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Morning-Prince Canal, Jordaan\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Quiet Sunday Morning Before the Tour Boats Invade the Prinsengracht[/caption]\n\nBack in front of the mic after summer vacation, I\'ve continued the heavy travel schedule -- New Orleans mostly with a week in Amsterdam for a family vacation. I talk about the exposure of staying in a houseboat on an Amsterdam canal and run through my personal \"Best of\" list. Flying out of the Gulf Coast in the summer with its afternoon thunderstorms has forced me to become a weather geek. I run through the weather apps I religiously use. Bad weather also caught up with me in Europe, but Lufthansa did a great job of taking care of us. I\'m still in love with TSA\'s PreCheck. I may make Southwest\'s A-List once PreCheck comes to <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Chicago Midway International Airport\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Midway_International_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener wikipedia noreferrer\">Chicago-Midway airport</a>. And we wrap with restaurant trends seen at this year\'s National Restaurant Association show. All this and more  at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_106.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_106.mp3\"]\n\n<!--more-->\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #106:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Back in the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago. I sorta took the summer off -- working, biking, reading, drinking beer. Nothing really exciting, which meant, I guess, that I didn\'t have anything new to podcast about.</li>\n 	<li>Which doesn\'t mean I haven\'t been traveling. I\'ve been in the air almost every week since the last episode -- New Orleans mostly, with a few trips to Houston, and a week in Amsterdam for a family vacation.</li>\n 	<li>The New Orleans trips have taught me a key life lesson -- don’t try to fly out of the Gulf Coast after 4:30pm in the summer. New Orleans in the summer is 91 degrees and 91% humidity. And so you sit in the airport terminal and watch the line of thunderstorms cross the runway at about 4pm -- just bucketing down rain with lightning strikes that keep the ground crews inside. That’s about the time you walk over and get another beer ‘cause you’re going to be there for a while.</li>\n 	<li>Of course, it could be worse. You could be on one of the planes that managed to land right before the squall line hit. You’re sitting on a plane that’s pulled up to the gate, but you can get off because there’s no one to pull the jet bridge up because of the lighting. You get the same wait, but no beer.</li>\n 	<li>So if you don’t want to torture yourself, you don’t fly out late afternoon, but the other problem is that, after 7pm, MSY is a ghost town. The last flight that will get me to Chicago -- even with a connection, leaves at 6:30. Save for the odd SW hop to Houston, there’s nothing going.</li>\n 	<li>So, if I have a late afternoon meeting, I have to stay overnight. And then head over to the French Quarter, or the Garden District, or the Bywater district for a cocktail and some fresh oysters, maybe a bit of gumbo or cochon… OK, so maybe the lack of late night flights home isn\'t so bad after all.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/djlang59/37792\">Drops of H2O (The Filtered Water Treatment)</a></em> by J Lang</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>So all this dodging summer Gulf storms has made weather apps join airline and trip mgmt apps in the critical travel apps folder on my <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"iPhone\" href=\"http://www.apple.com/iphone\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"homepage noopener noreferrer\">iPhone</a> and Nexus 7. Actually, it starts on my laptop where I have <a href=\"http://weatherspark.com/#!dashboard;a=USA/LA/New_Orleans\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">WeatherSpark </a>on an open tab at all times. In one browser window, I get radar, temperature and precipitation forecasts. On my iPhone, it’s <a href=\"http://forecast.io/#/f/40.7142,-74.0064\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Forecast</a> and the rebuilt Yahoo Weather apps which really represent two ends of the design spectrum. Forecast has very minimal aesthetic -- lot of white space; focused quickly giving you what it thinks most people want to know -- what’s the forecast for the next hour; and the next 24 hours. Tapping and reveals current weather conditions -- humidity, pressure, wind; another tap the 7 day forecast; tap one of those days drills down to its hourly temperature and precip forecast. Yahoo Weather is less tappy -- you start with current conditions and a big picture from Flickr and then scroll down for forecasts and a radar map. On my Nexus 7, <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Skymotion\" href=\"http://skymotion.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"homepage noopener noreferrer\">SkyMotion</a> is focused on short-term forecasting -- it gives me current conditions and a forecast as far ahead as it can see (No Rain for the next 115 min) and then counts down the next forecast -- I have mine set to update every 5 minutes. I tend to triangulate across all of them for sort of a consensus forecast, but that’s because, in trying to get home at a reasonable time every week, I\'ve become a bit obsessive about the weather.</li>\n 	<li>Maps, of course, are the critical travel app. And I don\'t know about you guys, but for me Apple Maps is still lousy. I hadn\'t used Apple Maps ever since Google launched their IOS Maps app, but a few weeks back, landing at ORD, I was in a rush to get directions and travel time to a meeting. The address was in the appt so I just clicked on it and it popped up Apple Maps. A couple of clicks and I had directions, or so I thought. As I skimmed the turns, I thought \"This can\'t be right\". I looked at the address in the pin -- it was Michigan Ave in <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Evanston, Illinois\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evanston%2C_Illinois\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener wikipedia noreferrer\">Evanston, IL</a> not Chicago -- even though the address on the appointment included Chicago. So I manually edited the address, specifically typing in Chicago and hit Return. But Apple still wanted to send me to Evanston. I re-opened the appointment, copied the address, pasted it into Google Maps and I headed to Chicago.</li>\n 	<li>Playing around later that day, I found that Apple Maps just isn\'t as smart as Google Maps about my location. Standing in the Loop, I put a street address into Google Maps -- 525 Monroe -- and Google assumes that, since I\'m in standing in downtown Chicago, I want to find 525 W Monroe in Chicago. Apple Maps will tell me \"Address not found\" if I don\'t specify Chicago. Remember when this whole debacle started -- Tim Cook said Maps would get better the more people used it. I haven\'t seen it, but thanks to Google, I\'m not too worried.</li>\n 	<li>In the last <a title=\"Podcast #105 — Traveling in Spain; Return of the Hotel Lobby?\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2013/05/30/podcast-105-traveling-in-spain-return-of-the-hotel-lobby/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">two</a> <a title=\"Podcast #104 — Status Free Fall; TSA Knife Fight\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2013/03/19/podcast-104-status-free-fall-tsa-knife-fight/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">episodes</a>, I talked about, when traveling internationally, buying a SIM card in country to save on voice and data roaming charges. In Amsterdam, the story was no different. After landing in <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amsterdam_Airport_Schiphol\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Schiphol</a>, I searched out the <a href=\"http://www.lebara.nl/?isoCode=en_GB\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Lebara Mobile</a> booth in the shadow of the Burger King. It wasn\'t the biggest booth, so it took me a bit. But once I found it, it took the guy all of 5 minutes to get my unlocked AT&amp;T iPhone 4 registered on the KPN network. For €20 (about $26) I got 1 GB of data, unlimited texts, and enough voice minutes to make a half-dozen restaurant reservations. Compare that to $30 for 120 MB of international data.  The web site <a href=\"http://prepaidwithdata.wikia.com/\">http://prepaidwithdata.wikia.com</a> is a great site to prepaid plan comparisons. Should be a top bookmark for any international traveler.</li>\n 	<li>The Saturday we flew back from Amsterdam was the one day of bad weather -- rain and low clouds. I’d booked our flights using United miles, so while the flight over from Chicago was a non-stop United flight, the flight back was on Lufthansa with a connection through Frankfurt. We got to Schiphol a bit early, and seeing delays, we tried to get on an earlier flight to Frankfurt. We weren\'t the only ones with idea; the flight was full. “No worries,” said the counter agent, “your flight is only delayed 20 minutes. You’ll still have an hour to make your connection.” 45 minutes later, the delay is now an hour. “No worries,” the gate agent said, “you’ll still have 20 minutes to make your connection.” I study her face for signs of irony or sarcasm, but I don’t detect any. Boarding time comes and goes and we’re still in the gate area. The fuel truck is MIA and we can’t board while the plane is being fueled. I’d already talked to United. The connection we will now miss is the last flight to the US from Frankfurt and there’s no room on any nearby United flights to the US until Monday. I figure there’s a better chance of us getting to the US from Frankfurt, Lufthansa’s main hub, than Schiphol. We board the flight knowing we’ll be overnighting in Frankfurt.</li>\n 	<li>On approach to Frankfurt, the flight attendant reads off all the connecting flights -- the gates for the connections that are still make-able, and the rebookings for those that weren\'t -- more information than I typically hear on a delayed flight into ORD. According to this, we were rebooked on the next morning’s flight to ORD, which was great news because United said it was booked up. We head over to Lufthansa’s customer service desk. Not much of a line. The agent quickly finds us in the system, looks at me, my wife and my two kids and says, “So you’ll need two or four rooms this evening?” “Two will be fine,” I tell him. He gives us vouchers for two rooms at an airport hotel, which includes €20 a piece for dinner, and also includes breakfast. All on Lufthansa. And remember, we were flying on award miles. Now think about this for a minute. If this was the US, we would’ve been told “It’s weather. Not our fault. You’re on your own.” And re-booking on award miles? I think we would’ve ranked lower than non-revenue employees. All of this, plus the really nice service in coach on the way back to Chicago has my wife telling me -- the next time we book flights with United miles, avoid them; book all the legs on Lufthansa.</li>\n 	<li>One thing United does do right, though, is TSA PreCheck. As I’ve said in previous podcasts, PreCheck is wonderful thing -- keep your shoes and belt on, keep your liquids and PC in your bag, stroll through the metal detector; no full body irradiation, everybody -- the passengers and the TSA agents -- are happy and smiling, there’s a rainbow over the exit of the X-ray machine, and a sparkly unicorn happily gives you your bags at the end. OK, I exaggerate -- but just a bit. Anyhow, TSA PreCheck is a wonderful thing and United does a good job of it in ORD and IAH. American, though, seems to have its challenges. Their PreCheck line at ORD can get very long -- not quite sure why -- and now somehow, they’ve screwed up my PreCheck status because on my last 3 flights to New Orleans, I’ve been shunted over to the regular status line. Missing the unicorns and rainbows, I called up American. Yes, I know that PreCheck is not guaranteed and that randomly I’ll have to go through the regular line -- it’s happened before, but not three trips in a row. I got shunted between Customer Service and the Platinum Desk -- don’t understand it; everything looks fine. A Twitter conversation with American earlier this week asked that I compare the name on my AAdvantage account with my Global Entry account. I also looked at my United account. Both Global Entry and United have my middle name spelled out; my American account just has my middle initial. I updated my American account -- we’ll see if this solves the problem.</li>\n 	<li>On a recent flight down to New Orleans, I took Southwest out of MDW. No PreCheck there. And with all the families and leisure travelers who use MDW, and the way security is configured -- everyone funnels into a single massive multi-lane security checkpoint -- I avoid MDW at all costs. So during this rare flight through, I asked a TSA guy when they’d be getting PreCheck. “End of the year,” he said. “They’ve been reconfiguring a bunch of lanes on the right hand side to handle it.” Well, now. I had just spent 20 minutes getting through security vs. what is usually 5 minutes in United’s ORD PreCheck line. I might be a lot more accepting of a Southwest flight with PreCheck.  Provided that Southwest doesn’t do PreCheck just for its A List members.</li>\n 	<li>And finally, I had a nice social media serendipity moment last month. I was at the Oak Park Microbrew and Food Review. I think this was the 6th year was on, but the first time I’d gone. It was a spur of the moment thing, so I was by myself. I was checking in my first couple of beers on Untappd, which is something like beer geek Foursquare. And up pops a comment on one of my check-ins -- “Come find me, I’m in a Red Hat Linux hat”. Another <a href=\"http://www.untappd.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Untappd </a>friend, and long time podcast listener Rob Auch was there too. It wasn’t too crowded yet, so we managed to find each other fairly quickly, and then hung out for an hour or so tasting beer together. It’s kinda fun when the virtual world intersects the real world.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any travel observations, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/Zapac/26047\">Test Drive</a></em> by Zapac</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Summer Vacation in Amsterdam</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>I\'ve been burning through the award miles recently -- I drained the American bank for a spring break trip to Spain, so it was United’s turn for summer vacation. Since my daughter got to choose the spring break location, my son got the choice for summer. We could only carve out a week, so Asia was out which nixed his usual choice of Japan. Let’s look at Europe “but”, I said as he was opening his mouth, “not Russia. I might be interested in St Petersburg as part of a Baltic thing, but for the rest of Russia, no thanks. You can do that on your own dime.” “Fine,” he said, “then Amsterdam”.</li>\n 	<li>Really? Why? “I dunno; just a place I want to go.” OK. Actually, as I thought about it, I got more interested in it. I’ve done a good bit of work around Amsterdam -- in Haarlem, Utrecht. I’ve flown in and out of Schiphol a bunch of times, but save for one windy afternoon, never really spent any time in the city itself. This could be fun.</li>\n 	<li>As I mentioned in the <a title=\"Podcast #105 — Traveling in Spain; Return of the Hotel Lobby?\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2013/05/30/podcast-105-traveling-in-spain-return-of-the-hotel-lobby/\">last episode</a>, we’ve pretty much converted from hotel rooms to vacation rentals for our family vacations. For about the same price as two hotel rooms, we get that and more -- a kitchen, living room -- places to sit and hang out other than beds and concierge lounges. We also like to shop in local markets. And with a kitchen, this is a lot more fun. We get to buy and try things rather than just doing grocery tourism.</li>\n 	<li>Normally, this works out very well. But the end of July was warmer than normal in Europe. We had expected weather in the mid-70’s -- we got high 80’s during the day and maybe dipping into the mid-70’s at night. Wouldn’t be bad if we were staying at a hotel with air conditioning, but we had decided to do something a bit more local -- we rented a houseboat on the Prince’s Canal. Which didn’t come with air conditioning -- nor great cross-ventilation since you’re kinda down below street -- and breeze level in the canals.</li>\n 	<li>The first morning in the houseboat, I woke up and headed to the kitchen to figure out the Nespresso coffee machine. I opened the canal side door and windows to let in the morning breeze and started rummaging around for the coffee capsules. I heard a noise behind me; I turned and saw one of those big canal tour boats passing within a couple feet of our houseboat; full of tourists, wielding cameras, many pointed through our open door, looking straight at me in my boxers. I waved -- really, what else could I do? -- pressed the Brew button on the Nespresso, and headed back to the bedroom for a t-shirt and a pair of shorts. A bit of a shock at first, it became a game for us the rest of the trip. Now purposely walking around in the most colorful boxers my son and I could find; pointing our cameras back at the tour boats. The tour boat traffic on the Canal was heavy -- I posted a Vine video on my Twitter feed of passing tour boats  -- but that was part of the fun. We would hang out on the little porch at the end of the day, eating some cheese, drinking a beer. It felt like we were part of the Amsterdam vibe, not just observing it.</li>\n 	<li>One of the best days of the week, though, was spent turning the tables -- piloting ourselves through the canals and peeping into the other houseboats. Social media serendipity hit again, this time through Twitter -- by way of Untappd, again. Arnoud Heijnis, a long-time TravelCommons listener, follows me on Twitter. Untappd pushes beer drinking badges to Twitter. Arnoud sees the Weiss beer badge I earned from a check-in at some canal-side bar and shoots me a great e-mail with a fantastic list of suggestions. The one that immediately catches my eye is renting a boat for your own canal tour. I get on line, book a boat, hit the grocery store from some snacks and walk to the rental place in Westerpark. We hop in an aluminum boat with an electric outboard motor, lay on the bottom of the boat to clear what we’re told is the lowest canal bridge in Amsterdam, and then go out for a 3-hr cruise. Bopping around the canals, dodging the big tour boats -- it was a great time.</li>\n 	<li>We also spent a couple of days being part of the bicycling culture in Amsterdam. I think it’s impossible to say you’ve truly visited Amsterdam without renting a bike and spending the day cycling around. I’ve spent time in Portland, OR, Seattle, and Boulder, CO -- three of the top US biking cities in US -- and they pale compared to Amsterdam. Until you get in the midst of it, you can’t really appreciate that bicycles are on the top of the Amsterdam transit pyramid -- cyclists, then motorists, then pedestrians.The bicycle lanes near the Central Station are the craziest -- a mosh pit of cyclists and foreign pedestrians coming out of the train station sprinting for their lives across car and bike lines, chased by honking horns and ringing bells. But get outside town a bit, as we did biking up to Marken Island, and it settles down a lot. And it’s pretty easy cycling -- except for bridges, the country is pancake flat.</li>\n 	<li>Other tips?\n<ul>\n 	<li>I already mentioned hitting the Lebara stand in Schiphol for the “€20 for a gig of mobile data” plan</li>\n 	<li>The train into Amsterdam from Schiphol is dead simple -- take it if you’re staying in the city, but be ready -- it’s so dead simple that it gets crowded.</li>\n 	<li>The family and I loved the Van Gogh Museum -- it’s rare to be able to trace an artist’s development in such detail. But understand that a lot of other people love it too. Go on-line and book a specific date and time for your visit. It’s a lot shorter wait.</li>\n 	<li>Skip the new “Heineken Experience”. It’s just not worth the money. Hit <a href=\"http://www.brouwerijhetij.nl/homepage/zomerblond-6/\">Brouwerij \'t IJ</a> on one of your bike rides. Drink better beer outside under a windmill. Or hit <a href=\"http://www.arendsnest.nl/\">Proeflokaal Arendsnest</a> in the Jordaan district for their selection of Dutch microbrews</li>\n 	<li>We stayed in the Jordaan district and definitely recommend it. We hit the <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noordermarkt\">Noordermarkt</a> farmers’ market on Saturday to stock the houseboat kitchen, shopped down <a href=\"http://www.iamsterdam.com/en-GB/experience/about-amsterdam/areas/featured-areas/haarlemmerstraat-haarlemmerdijk\">Haarlemmerstraat </a>, stopped in at the neighborhood restaurants and bars. We found it the right mix of happening but not too raucous -- which, from walking down the Damrak or around the Red Light district, seem to put us in the minority.</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/Pitx/19513\">Black Rainbow</a></em> by Pitx</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Restaurant Trends</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>This week’s trip to Atlanta will make it 9 straight weeks that I’ve been on travel. So not only do I get to know airports, and airplanes, and hotels, but also restaurants. And for the past couple of years, I’ve attended the<a href=\"http://www.restaurant.org/Home\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"> National Restaurant Association</a>\'s’ <a href=\"http://show.restaurant.org/Home\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">annual show</a> in Chicago to walk the floor and see what trends we can expect to see when we’re eating on the road.</li>\n 	<li>In <a title=\"Podcast #98 — Stolen Luggage &amp; Passports; Restaurants Want Your Smartphone\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/05/20/podcast-98-stolen-luggage-restaurants-want-your-smartphone/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">episode #98</a>, I talked about last year’s show, where technology seemed to be the trend -- mobile apps to let you pay your tab, iPad digital menus, smartphones replacing pagers for queued-up guests,.... This year there was still a technology bent -- yet more permutations on digital menus (though this time featuring cheaper Android tablets as well as iPads) and a whole lot of social apps -- seems everyone wants me to check-in, upload pictures, and leave comments (good ones, I assume) on their site. I gotta tell you, though, I sorta full up with social networks. Personally, I have zero interest in donating free content to yet another social network.  Twitter, Facebook, Untappd, Foodspotting, TripAdvisor, and now a friend just talked me into Yelp. That’s it -- I’m over-socialed.</li>\n 	<li>Luckily this year’s NRA floor -- remember, I said Restaurant, not Rifle Association -- had, well maybe not new food trends, but some clearer, perhaps more consensus trends. Two that jumped out at me were Mediterranean and Japanese foods. Now, I know, how new is Mediterranean? But if in years past, Mediterranean was a label used to push more expensive Italian food, I felt like I saw more of the Mediterranean this year -- specifically, more of the Eastern Mediterranean -- Greek, Turkish, Lebanese. Different, interesting flavors -- sumac, pomegranate, tahini; less basil, more oregano; less pork, more lamb. Nothing against Italian -- I love it -- but anything that brings more flavor choices, I’m all for.</li>\n 	<li>Japanese flavors also had a big presence this year. But not sushi -- although someone was demoing a very cool automatic sushi maker. Instead, it was about the broader spectrum of Japanese flavors -- noodles, green teas, and umami -- the newest basic taste -- sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and now umami -- sort of a meaty, savory taste that is at the core of many Japanese flavors. Japanese noodles seem to be all the rage now -- ramen, udon, soba, …. On the floor of the show, a Japanese company had an entire automated noodle making assembly line running. Watching those big fat udon noodle roll off made me hungry.</li>\n 	<li>Anything that adds variety is a great thing. I remember some years back traveling every week to <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_John,_New_Brunswick\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">St John, NB</a>. I won’t bore you with the hassles of getting there from Chicago -- suffice it to say that, with no customs in St John airport, it wasn’t a simple trip. St John is a nice town, but the choices were a bit limited. Monday night, we’d have salmon -- very fresh, very good. Tuesday, we’d have mussels -- over from nearby Prince Edward’s Island, again very fresh, very good. Wednesday, we’d have a hamburger -- less fresh, but washed down with fresh Moosehead beer from next door Nova Scotia. Thursday -- well, it was back to the salmon -- still fresh, perhaps a little less good.</li>\n 	<li>I’m certainly not having that problem on my weekly commutes to New Orleans, but for those travelers heading to less culinarily interesting destinations, I hope the variety I saw on the floor of the Restaurant show reaches you real soon.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917626811171154.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #106</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org\">ccMixter</a></li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_106.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #106 — Summer Vacation in Amsterdam; Restaurant Trends','','inherit','closed','closed','','1265-revision-v1','','','2019-05-05 18:47:47','2019-05-05 23:47:47','',1265,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/05/1265-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2452,1,'2019-05-05 18:56:43','2019-05-05 23:56:43','[caption id=\"attachment_827\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/071.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-827 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/071-300x202.jpg\" alt=\"Downtown Brooklyn. People return to Brooklyn over the Manhattan Bridge still in shock, after fleeing from the attack on the World Trade Center. © Joseph Rodríguez\" width=\"300\" height=\"202\" /></a> Downtown Brooklyn. People return to Brooklyn over the Manhattan Bridge still in shock, after fleeing from the attack on the World Trade Center. © Joseph Rodríguez[/caption]\n\nComing up to the 10th anniversary of the September 11th terrorist attacks, I repeat a segment from the September 2005 <a title=\"Podcast #14 – September 11th Travel Stories; Writing a Great Travel Song\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/09/14/podcast-14-september-11th-travel-stories-writing-a-great-travel-song/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">episode</a> that tells the stories of travelers trying to get back home when all planes were grounded and all US borders were closed after the attacks. Also, we finish up the two-part review of new Google technology with observations after taking a Samsung Chromebook on the road for a month this summer. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_93.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_93.mp3\"]','Podcast #93 — Travel Stories from September 11th; Traveling with a Google Chromebook','','inherit','closed','closed','','825-revision-v1','','','2019-05-05 18:56:43','2019-05-05 23:56:43','',825,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/05/825-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2454,1,'2019-05-07 17:59:08','2019-05-07 22:59:08','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><img class=\"wp-image-2439\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/oysters_and_evian_bottles-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\"><figcaption>Cancale Oysters with a nice Evian Sancerre</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>It\'s been a tough month for travel. Not quite to Book of Job-level torment, but two of this month\'s three trips spiraled into head-shaking metaphysical “What the hell is going on here” questioning of my decision to get out of bed that morning. I walk through the travel gods\' fun and games, as well as some new data on regional jet delays and buying a new travel bag. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_151.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #151: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, for the last time…. Not the last time for TravelCommons, just the last time for the studios “outside of Chicago”. We’re picking up stakes and moving about 20 miles east-northeast to Chicago’s Lakeview neighborhood. Hence the reason for the short-cycle on this episode. We’ll be breaking down and packing up the studio and production bay next week and probably won’t have everything reassembled until the end of the month. The recording isn’t really the issue -- I could always go back to my roots and find a spare bathroom to record in. It’s more about the production. I’m not sure I want to shrink my workflow down from a beefy dual 22-inch monitor Windows 10 mini-tower rig to my 2014 vintage 11-inch MacBook Air.</li><li>Being consumed by the move logistics vortex also means I haven’t done any real travel in the 2 weeks since the last episode -- but, given my most recent travel experiences, as laid out in last episode’s <em>Travel Interruptus</em> epic, I’ve appreciated the break. Especially when yet another yet another April snowstorm that blew up 700 flights last weekend. Instead, I’ve been wrestling once again with Avios -- the British Airways, Iberia, and now Aer Lingus frequent flyer program -- trying to book a Chicago-Dublin-Edinburgh Aer Lingus itinerary for my daughter’s graduation from University of St Andrews next month. I’ve been pretty <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/08/26/podcast-116-traveling-thru-japan-luggage-trends/\">vocal</a> about my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">challenges</a> with Avios over the years. In this go-around, the first wackiness was just trying to use the Avios website. To search for flights, you need to log in with your BA, Iberia, or Aer Lingus credentials. I try with all three; and fail with all three. Seems that the passwords given out by BA and Iberia don’t meet Avios’ security rules, so they fail. I assumed the username for my Aer Lingus account was my email address and the password seemed strong enough, but that kept failing too. Finally, after digging around my Aer Lingus profile, I found a separate username, which I’d never seen or used before, and <em>that</em> worked. Finally through the gate and onto the second wackiness -- the difference between the value of an Avios point on the Aer Lingus and Avios web sites. The award offers on both sites were points + cash. Taking the “market rate” for the ticket (pulled from Expedia), subtracting out the required cash payment, and dividing by the number of required Avios points gives the value of the Avios point for that award offer. My rule of thumb is -- get at least 2 cents/point or pay cash. The Aer Lingus site valued an Avios point at 0.7 cents while the Avios site hit my 2-cent minimum. I couldn’t quite understand that 65% difference, but I booked our tickets on the wonkier Avios site before it went away. If I remember anything from my University of Chicago business school courses, it’s that markets are efficient; 65% price differences don’t last forever. Though in this case, that difference may linger because the Avios website makes it so damn hard to find. </li><li></li><li> Bridge Music — <em>Countryside Summer Joyride</em> by Kara Square (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mindmapthat/56281 Ft: Javolenus </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Veteran TravelCommons listener Mika Pyyhkala sent in a note this week talking about his great experience with a flight rebooking service, <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Freebird (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"http://getfreebird.com\" target=\"_blank\">Freebird</a>. Mika writes:<ul><li>I was flying with a companion from (Wichita) ICT-STL and STL-DTW.  Just as the plane was descending to DTW, I received text messages from WN and Freebird that STL-DTW on WN had been cancelled.  Freebird then manually advised that the only flight for that day was a DL STL-DTW, and they were going to book it in case I wanted it; if they waited longer there might not be enough time to issue the new ticket on Delta through their travel agent.  They just asked me to confirm that I in fact wanted the Delta ticket.  </li><li>I confirmed we wanted the 2 Delta tickets, and by the time the door opened in STL we had a confirmation number to check in for the Delta flight leaving in 47 minutes. We got seats together on the Delta flight that were assigned by the Freebird process, and they even gave us free drinks!</li><li>I think we actually arrived in DTW a few minutes earlier than we were scheduled on the original flight, and it made for a great travel story and adventure!  This was my first time using Freebird as well!</li><li>It costs $19 to protect a one way trip per traveler.  It’s simple to work with them: unlike insurance, there are no claim forms, long waits, or papers to sign</li></ul></li><li>Mika, thanks for this. I hadn’t heard of Freebird before Mika’s note. Hitting their website, they’re selling their service to companies, travel agencies, and to individual travelers. Clicking through to a TechCrunch article about them, it says they’re also talking to Amex and Citibank about including Freebird as a credit card benefit. The article quotes the CEO, Ethan Bernstein - “It’s funny what happens when people deal with uncertainty; uncertainty is the worst. As soon you give people information, human support and technology to help them solve their problems, they experience the event so much differently.”  Which is exactly right. Certainty lets you plan; uncertainty just leaves you to stew… and drink at the airport bar… and eat bad airport food… and bitch Tweet. Yup, uncertainty leads to lots of bad things</li><li>One more-fun-than-necessarily-good thing on last month’s trip was getting to try out an alpha version of a new augmented reality feature for Google Maps. I used it first in Stockholm; we got off the Arlanda Express at the Central Train station and wanted make our way over to the <a href=\"https://www.ostermalmshallen.se/en/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Östermalms Saluhall (opens in a new tab)\">Östermalms Saluhall</a> for lunch. When I chose “Walking” as our transport mode, a “Start AR” button showed up next to the usual button to start the directions. With AR, I’d hold my phone up, the display would use the camera to show the streetscape in front of me with the  directions -- street names, arrows -- overlaid on the real-time image. I thought it was a nice add; reduced any ambiguity about where the next turn was. One interesting feature -- when I started walking, the screen dimmed and a message popped up telling me to stop looking at the phone and look straight ahead. All in all, it’s kinda fun. At least I thought so; Andrew and Irene seemed much less impressed. It worked very well for what was billed as an alpha product. It’ll be interesting to see how it develops, and how fast Google rolls it out.</li><li>But even without a broader AR roll-out, Google Maps seems on track to become the next “<a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"super app (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://skift.com/2019/04/16/google-maps-is-ready-to-transform-the-world-of-superapps-a-skift-deep-dive/\" target=\"_blank\">super app</a>” -- sorta the Western counterpart to China’s WeChat -- the first “super app”, a Swiss Army Knife-kind of “it does everything” app. Now Google Maps isn’t to that level -- yet -- but it is growing. It started as a mapping app, then added driving directions, then ride share -- showing Uber and Lyft prices, then public transit directions with real-time arrival times, replacing the core use case for apps like Transit. Then the “Explore Nearby” became more prominent -- which, for me, has supplanted Yelp when looking for a restaurant because it’s so much more convenient, and with deep links to OpenTable for reservations; and for nearby hotels, direct booking links to Expedia and Booking.com. I wasn’t surprised when I saw a stat that those “Near Me” searches grew 150 percent the last year. I’m not quite sure what I think about this -- loving a free service that keeps becoming more valuable vs. becoming more enslaved to the Google overlords. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/08/27/podcast-132-travel-apps-on-my-phone/\">episode #132</a>, I listed all the travel apps on my smartphone, and Google Maps was the most important -- “Indeed, it’s the only travel app with its own screen real estate rather than sharing space in the Travel folder,” I said. And it only keeps getting more indispensable.</li><li>Thinking back to our last day in Paris when both Ubers that we ordered were nice black Mercedes, I couldn’t help thinking how the quality of US Uber and Lyft vehicles has slipped. I remember when I started using Uber in 4-5 years ago, the cars were pristine. I remember working in Baltimore one summer; I was more than happy to wait 5 minutes for an Uber rather than take one of the cabs waiting at the stand right outside the building I was in. Those cabs were so beat up, so full of trash, and most of the time, without working air conditioning. Today, cabs haven’t gotten much cleaner, but Uber and Lyft seem to be lowering their standards. I dunno if it’s because of falling unemployment rates or trying to keep up with growth or squeezing driver pay to improve their post-IPO margins -- or all of the above -- but I’m seeing a real drop in quality.</li><li>Long-time TravelCommons listeners will recall that I’ve spent a lot of time in New Orleans airport and other than serving beer in go cups French Quarter-style so you can walk around the terminal with it, there’s not much good to say about it. Especially with regards to food and restaurants. For such a great food town to have such mediocre airport concessions has always been beyond me. But then again, the original terminal was built in 1959, and then expanded in the mid-70’s and mid-90’s. The new $1 billion replacement terminal was originally scheduled to open last year during New Orleans’ tricentennial, but that then slipped to February of this year, then to May, and now to a “to be determined” date sometime in the fall. The restaurant selection is supposed to be much better but I hope they don’t change that beer policy though. One time, waiting out yet another thunderstorm delay, I’d bought a beer and was standing by the gate drinking it because the bar was full. American called boarding and I walked up to the gate. The agent stopped me -- “You can drink that beer anywhere in the airport -- except on the jetway.” I looked down; I’d forgotten that I was still carrying that beer. I stepped to the side, chugged it, and then got on the plane. Felt like a very New Orleans thing to do.</li><li> And if you have any travel rants, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Facebook page</a> or our Instagram account at <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Travelcommons</a> -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.<br> Bridge Music —  <em>Jester of the Golden Apocalypse</em> by Super_Sigil (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Super_Sigil/34750  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Traveler Data Leaks</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Interview with <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mylaocoon\">Candid Wueest</a>, Principal Threat Researcher at Symantec and author of a blog post titled <a href=\"https://www.symantec.com/blogs/threat-intelligence/hotel-websites-leak-guest-data\"><em>Two in Three Hotel Websites Leak Guest Booking Details and Allow Access to Personal Data</em></a></li><li>Bridge Music —  South Texas Cowboy Blues by texasradiofish (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/texasradiofish/52030 Ft: unreal_dm, ElRon XChile</li><li></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Brittany Street Food</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I’ll write a proper “Road Trip” post about our Brittany trip later this spring, after we get settled in the new digs, but after streaming a few episodes of Netflix’s “Street Food” series, I started thinking about some of the Breton street food we enjoyed while touring last month. If you’ve seen any of the Netflix series, you know that it’s more about the vendors than the food. But my French trails off after “oui,” “non,” “merci,” and “S\'il vous plaît” so I wasn’t able to get much of the vendor’s life stories. So this will be all about the food.</li><li>The first place we stayed was <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancale\">Cancale</a>, and we went there for one reason - oysters. Like people have been doing for 300-some odd years. When the tide is out, you can see miles of oyster beds with big farm tractors moving through the rows, hauling out trailers of oysters. Lining the ramp where the tractors drive up out of the beds is a little oyster market -- 8 stalls selling oysters fresh from the beds for €5-6/dozen. After adding another couple of euros for shucking, a half lemon and the use of a plastic platter, we’d have our afternoon snack -- sitting on the sea wall by the market, slurping through a couple dozen very briny oysters while watching the tractors work, and then pitching the empty shells back onto the beach for the seagulls to pick through. Our first afternoon, we only had a couple of cans of beer in our jacket pocket. The next couple of afternoons, we’d pour a nice white wine into some empty Evian bottles (Claire and I preferred a Sancerre) and make sure we had a good supply of wet wipes. We didn’t miss an afternoon on that sea wall while in Cancale.</li><li>Buckwheat is a big thing in Brittany. It’s been grown in Brittany for half a millennium or more, and for almost that long, it seems, has been turned into a <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galette\">galette</a>. a buckwheat crêpe. But a crêpe in form and shape only. Instead of a soft white wheat flour crêpe filled with jam or Nutella, the galette is crisper/firmer and savory. Fine on its own smeared with Breton butter, or with egg and cheese and ham inside. We got into Concarneau, on the southwest coast of Brittany about an hour before the weekly Friday outdoor market closed.  I counted a half-dozen galette trucks. We walked up to the closest one. The cook was finishing up what looked like a weekend’s worth of galettes for the person in front of us -- flipping them, then pulling them off two hot metal disks, buttering them, and adding them to the stack. It was Friday in Lent, so I went for the egg, onion, and cheese galette. The creaminess of the cheese played nicely against the nutty graininess of the buckwheat.</li><li>The next day we drove to Rennes, our last stop in Brittany. We dropped the rental car at the train station and took the subway to Place des Lices for the huge Saturday market. We walked down from the subway station, through the fruit and vegetable stands lining the street -- beautiful stuff, but we’re leaving the next day, so we’re not doing a lot of green grocery shopping. There, between the two market halls, is a collection of food trucks; about 70% of them selling what we were looking for -- <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galette-saucisse\">galette-saucisse</a> -- the classic Breton street food that is pretty much what the straight translation from French to English suggests -- a sausage in a galette. Kinda like a Breton hot dog, it’s a cooked pork sausage wrapped in a cool galette, maybe with some grilled onions and dijon mustard added. There were lines tailing back from all the trucks serving these. A local guy pointed one truck out to Irene -- “They’re the best”, he said. She and Claire stood in queue while Andrew and I searched for drinks. Around the corner, we found a local cider maker; a couple of tables surrounded by crates of cider bottles. Through a mangled bit of Franglais, we bought a bottle of dry cider that had stayed cool in the shade and four cups, and got back to the food truck line just in time to be handed my galette-saucisse. After finishing the sausage and cider, I swung past the cider stand to give him the empty bottle -- kinda in-person recycling. There wasn’t much time to catch up on his life story, but it was a sunny Saturday and he had a full line; looked like he was having a good day.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #151</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_151.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<p><!--EndFragment--></p>\n<p></p>','Podcast #151 — Traveler Data Leaks; Brittany Street Food','','inherit','closed','closed','','2436-revision-v1','','','2019-05-07 17:59:08','2019-05-07 22:59:08','',2436,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/2436-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2455,1,'2019-05-07 22:15:24','2019-05-08 03:15:24','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><img class=\"wp-image-2439\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/oysters_and_evian_bottles-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\"><figcaption>Cancale Oysters with a nice Evian Sancerre</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>It\'s been a tough month for travel. Not quite to Book of Job-level torment, but two of this month\'s three trips spiraled into head-shaking metaphysical “What the hell is going on here” questioning of my decision to get out of bed that morning. I walk through the travel gods\' fun and games, as well as some new data on regional jet delays and buying a new travel bag. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_151.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #151: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, for the last time…. Not the last time for TravelCommons, just the last time for the studios “outside of Chicago”. We’re picking up stakes and moving about 20 miles east-northeast to Chicago’s Lakeview neighborhood. Hence the reason for the short-cycle on this episode. We’ll be breaking down and packing up the studio and production bay next week and probably won’t have everything reassembled until the end of the month. The recording isn’t really the issue -- I could always go back to my roots and find a spare bathroom to record in. It’s more about the production. I’m not sure I want to shrink my workflow down from a beefy dual 22-inch monitor Windows 10 mini-tower rig to my 2014 vintage 11-inch MacBook Air.</li><li>Being consumed by the move logistics vortex also means I haven’t done any real travel in the 2 weeks since the last episode -- but, given my most recent travel experiences, as laid out in last episode’s <em>Travel Interruptus</em> epic, I’ve appreciated the break. Especially when yet another yet another April snowstorm that blew up 700 flights last weekend. Instead, I’ve been wrestling once again with Avios -- the British Airways, Iberia, and now Aer Lingus frequent flyer program -- trying to book a Chicago-Dublin-Edinburgh Aer Lingus itinerary for my daughter’s graduation from University of St Andrews next month. I’ve been pretty <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/08/26/podcast-116-traveling-thru-japan-luggage-trends/\">vocal</a> about my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">challenges</a> with Avios over the years. In this go-around, the first wackiness was just trying to use the Avios website. To search for flights, you need to log in with your BA, Iberia, or Aer Lingus credentials. I try with all three; and fail with all three. Seems that the passwords given out by BA and Iberia don’t meet Avios’ security rules, so they fail. I assumed the username for my Aer Lingus account was my email address and the password seemed strong enough, but that kept failing too. Finally, after digging around my Aer Lingus profile, I found a separate username, which I’d never seen or used before, and <em>that</em> worked. Finally through the gate and onto the second wackiness -- the difference between the value of an Avios point on the Aer Lingus and Avios web sites. The award offers on both sites were points + cash. Taking the “market rate” for the ticket (pulled from Expedia), subtracting out the required cash payment, and dividing by the number of required Avios points gives the value of the Avios point for that award offer. My rule of thumb is -- get at least 2 cents/point or pay cash. The Aer Lingus site valued an Avios point at 0.7 cents while the Avios site hit my 2-cent minimum. I couldn’t quite understand that 65% difference, but I booked our tickets on the wonkier Avios site before it went away. If I remember anything from my University of Chicago business school courses, it’s that markets are efficient; 65% price differences don’t last forever. Though in this case, that difference may linger because the Avios website makes it so damn hard to find. </li><li>Bridge Music — <em>Lakeside Jam</em> by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/55998 </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Veteran TravelCommons listener Mika Pyyhkala sent in a note this week talking about his great experience with a flight rebooking service, <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Freebird (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"http://getfreebird.com\" target=\"_blank\">Freebird</a>. Mika writes:<ul><li>I was flying with a companion from (Wichita) ICT-STL and STL-DTW. &nbsp;Just as the plane was descending to DTW, I received text messages from WN and Freebird that STL-DTW on WN had been cancelled. &nbsp;Freebird then manually advised that the only flight for that day was a DL STL-DTW, and they were going to book it in case I wanted it; if they waited longer there might not be enough time to issue the new ticket on Delta through their travel agent. &nbsp;They just asked me to confirm that I in fact wanted the Delta ticket.  </li><li>I confirmed we wanted the 2 Delta tickets, and by the time the door opened in STL we had a confirmation number to check in for the Delta flight leaving in 47 minutes. We got seats together on the Delta flight that were assigned by the Freebird process, and they even gave us free drinks!</li><li>I think we actually arrived in DTW a few minutes earlier than we were scheduled on the original flight, and it made for a great travel story and adventure! &nbsp;This was my first time using Freebird as well!</li><li>It costs $19 to protect a one way trip per traveler. &nbsp;It’s simple to work with them: unlike insurance, there are no claim forms, long waits, or papers to sign</li></ul></li><li>Mika, thanks for this. I hadn’t heard of Freebird before Mika’s note. Hitting their website, they’re selling their service to companies, travel agencies, and to individual travelers. Clicking through to a TechCrunch article about them, it says they’re also talking to Amex and Citibank about including Freebird as a credit card benefit. The article quotes the CEO, Ethan Bernstein - “It’s funny what happens when people deal with uncertainty; uncertainty is the worst. As soon you give people information, human support and technology to help them solve their problems, they experience the event so much differently.” &nbsp;Which is exactly right. Certainty lets you plan; uncertainty just leaves you to stew… and drink at the airport bar… and eat bad airport food… and bitch Tweet. Yup, uncertainty leads to lots of bad things</li><li>One more-fun-than-necessarily-good thing on last month’s trip was getting to try out an alpha version of a new augmented reality feature for Google Maps. I used it first in Stockholm; we got off the Arlanda Express at the Central Train station and wanted make our way over to the <a href=\"https://www.ostermalmshallen.se/en/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Östermalms Saluhall (opens in a new tab)\">Östermalms Saluhall</a> for lunch. When I chose “Walking” as our transport mode, a “Start AR” button showed up next to the usual button to start the directions. With AR, I’d hold my phone up, the display would use the camera to show the streetscape in front of me with the &nbsp;directions -- street names, arrows -- overlaid on the real-time image. I thought it was a nice add; reduced any ambiguity about where the next turn was. One interesting feature -- when I started walking, the screen dimmed and a message popped up telling me to stop looking at the phone and look straight ahead. All in all, it’s kinda fun. At least I thought so; Andrew and Irene seemed much less impressed. It worked very well for what was billed as an alpha product. It’ll be interesting to see how it develops, and how fast Google rolls it out.</li><li>But even without a broader AR roll-out, Google Maps seems on track to become the next “<a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"super app (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://skift.com/2019/04/16/google-maps-is-ready-to-transform-the-world-of-superapps-a-skift-deep-dive/\" target=\"_blank\">super app</a>” -- sorta the Western counterpart to China’s WeChat -- the first “super app”, a Swiss Army Knife-kind of “it does everything” app. Now Google Maps isn’t to that level -- yet -- but it is growing. It started as a mapping app, then added driving directions, then ride share -- showing Uber and Lyft prices, then public transit directions with real-time arrival times, replacing the core use case for apps like Transit. Then the “Explore Nearby” became more prominent -- which, for me, has supplanted Yelp when looking for a restaurant because it’s so much more convenient, and with deep links to OpenTable for reservations; and for nearby hotels, direct booking links to Expedia and Booking.com. I wasn’t surprised when I saw a stat that those “Near Me” searches grew 150 percent the last year. I’m not quite sure what I think about this -- loving a free service that keeps becoming more valuable vs. becoming more enslaved to the Google overlords. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/08/27/podcast-132-travel-apps-on-my-phone/\">episode #132</a>, I listed all the travel apps on my smartphone, and Google Maps was the most important -- “Indeed, it’s the only travel app with its own screen real estate rather than sharing space in the Travel folder,” I said. And it only keeps getting more indispensable.</li><li>Thinking back to our last day in Paris when both Ubers that we ordered were nice black Mercedes, I couldn’t help thinking how the quality of US Uber and Lyft vehicles has slipped. I remember when I started using Uber in 4-5 years ago, the cars were pristine. I remember working in Baltimore one summer; I was more than happy to wait 5 minutes for an Uber rather than take one of the cabs waiting at the stand right outside the building I was in. Those cabs were so beat up, so full of trash, and most of the time, without working air conditioning. Today, cabs haven’t gotten much cleaner, but Uber and Lyft seem to be lowering their standards. I dunno if it’s because of falling unemployment rates or trying to keep up with growth or squeezing driver pay to improve their post-IPO margins -- or all of the above -- but I’m seeing a real drop in quality.</li><li>Long-time TravelCommons listeners will recall that I’ve spent a lot of time in New Orleans airport and other than serving beer in go cups French Quarter-style so you can walk around the terminal with it, there’s not much good to say about it. Especially with regards to food and restaurants. For such a great food town to have such mediocre airport concessions has always been beyond me. But then again, the original terminal was built in 1959, and then expanded in the mid-70’s and mid-90’s. The new $1 billion replacement terminal was originally scheduled to open last year during New Orleans’ tricentennial, but that then slipped to February of this year, then to May, and now to a “to be determined” date sometime in the fall. The restaurant selection is supposed to be much better but I hope they don’t change that beer policy though. One time, waiting out yet another thunderstorm delay, I’d bought a beer and was standing by the gate drinking it because the bar was full. American called boarding and I walked up to the gate. The agent stopped me -- “You can drink that beer anywhere in the airport -- except on the jetway.” I looked down; I’d forgotten that I was still carrying that beer. I stepped to the side, chugged it, and then got on the plane. Felt like a very New Orleans thing to do.</li><li> And if you have any travel rants, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. &nbsp;The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Facebook page</a> or our Instagram account at <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Travelcommons</a> -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.<br> Bridge Music —  <em>Jester of the Golden Apocalypse</em> by Super_Sigil (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Super_Sigil/34750  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Traveler Data Leaks</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Interview with <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mylaocoon\">Candid Wueest</a>, Principal Threat Researcher at Symantec and author of a blog post titled <a href=\"https://www.symantec.com/blogs/threat-intelligence/hotel-websites-leak-guest-data\"><em>Two in Three Hotel Websites Leak Guest Booking Details and Allow Access to Personal Data</em></a></li><li>Bridge Music —  South Texas Cowboy Blues by texasradiofish (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/texasradiofish/52030 Ft: unreal_dm, ElRon XChile</li><li></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Brittany Street Food</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I’ll write a proper “Road Trip” post about our Brittany trip later this spring, after we get settled in the new digs, but after streaming a few episodes of Netflix’s “Street Food” series, I started thinking about some of the Breton street food we enjoyed while touring last month. If you’ve seen any of the Netflix series, you know that it’s more about the vendors than the food. But my French trails off after “oui,” “non,” “merci,” and “S\'il vous plaît” so I wasn’t able to get much of the vendor’s life stories. So this will be all about the food.</li><li>The first place we stayed was <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancale\">Cancale</a>, and we went there for one reason - oysters. Like people have been doing for 300-some odd years. When the tide is out, you can see miles of oyster beds with big farm tractors moving through the rows, hauling out trailers of oysters. Lining the ramp where the tractors drive up out of the beds is a little oyster market -- 8 stalls selling oysters fresh from the beds for €5-6/dozen. After adding another couple of euros for shucking, a half lemon and the use of a plastic platter, we’d have our afternoon snack -- sitting on the sea wall by the market, slurping through a couple dozen very briny oysters while watching the tractors work, and then pitching the empty shells back onto the beach for the seagulls to pick through. Our first afternoon, we only had a couple of cans of beer in our jacket pocket. The next couple of afternoons, we’d pour a nice white wine into some empty Evian bottles (Claire and I preferred a Sancerre) and make sure we had a good supply of wet wipes. We didn’t miss an afternoon on that sea wall while in Cancale.</li><li>Buckwheat is a big thing in Brittany. It’s been grown in Brittany for half a millennium or more, and for almost that long, it seems, has been turned into a <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galette\">galette</a>. a buckwheat crêpe. But a crêpe in form and shape only. Instead of a soft white wheat flour crêpe filled with jam or Nutella, the galette is crisper/firmer and savory. Fine on its own smeared with Breton butter, or with egg and cheese and ham inside. We got into Concarneau, on the southwest coast of Brittany about an hour before the weekly Friday outdoor market closed. &nbsp;I counted a half-dozen galette trucks. We walked up to the closest one. The cook was finishing up what looked like a weekend’s worth of galettes for the person in front of us -- flipping them, then pulling them off two hot metal disks, buttering them, and adding them to the stack. It was Friday in Lent, so I went for the egg, onion, and cheese galette. The creaminess of the cheese played nicely against the nutty graininess of the buckwheat.</li><li>The next day we drove to Rennes, our last stop in Brittany. We dropped the rental car at the train station and took the subway to Place des Lices for the huge Saturday market. We walked down from the subway station, through the fruit and vegetable stands lining the street -- beautiful stuff, but we’re leaving the next day, so we’re not doing a lot of green grocery shopping. There, between the two market halls, is a collection of food trucks; about 70% of them selling what we were looking for -- <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galette-saucisse\">galette-saucisse</a> -- the classic Breton street food that is pretty much what the straight translation from French to English suggests -- a sausage in a galette. Kinda like a Breton hot dog, it’s a cooked pork sausage wrapped in a cool galette, maybe with some grilled onions and dijon mustard added. There were lines tailing back from all the trucks serving these. A local guy pointed one truck out to Irene -- “They’re the best”, he said. She and Claire stood in queue while Andrew and I searched for drinks. Around the corner, we found a local cider maker; a couple of tables surrounded by crates of cider bottles. Through a mangled bit of Franglais, we bought a bottle of dry cider that had stayed cool in the shade and four cups, and got back to the food truck line just in time to be handed my galette-saucisse. After finishing the sausage and cider, I swung past the cider stand to give him the empty bottle -- kinda in-person recycling. There wasn’t much time to catch up on his life story, but it was a sunny Saturday and he had a full line; looked like he was having a good day.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #151</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_151.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<p><!--EndFragment--></p>\n<p></p>','Podcast #151 — Traveler Data Leaks; Brittany Street Food','','inherit','closed','closed','','2436-revision-v1','','','2019-05-07 22:15:24','2019-05-08 03:15:24','',2436,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/2436-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2456,1,'2019-05-07 22:17:13','2019-05-08 03:17:13','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><img class=\"wp-image-2439\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/oysters_and_evian_bottles-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\"><figcaption>Cancale Oysters with a nice Evian Sancerre</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>It\'s been a tough month for travel. Not quite to Book of Job-level torment, but two of this month\'s three trips spiraled into head-shaking metaphysical “What the hell is going on here” questioning of my decision to get out of bed that morning. I walk through the travel gods\' fun and games, as well as some new data on regional jet delays and buying a new travel bag. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_151.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #151: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, for the last time…. Not the last time for TravelCommons, just the last time for the studios “outside of Chicago”. We’re picking up stakes and moving about 20 miles east-northeast to Chicago’s Lakeview neighborhood. Hence the reason for the short-cycle on this episode. We’ll be breaking down and packing up the studio and production bay next week and probably won’t have everything reassembled until the end of the month. The recording isn’t really the issue -- I could always go back to my roots and find a spare bathroom to record in. It’s more about the production. I’m not sure I want to shrink my workflow down from a beefy dual 22-inch monitor Windows 10 mini-tower rig to my 2014 vintage 11-inch MacBook Air.</li><li>Being consumed by the move logistics vortex also means I haven’t done any real travel in the 2 weeks since the last episode -- but, given my most recent travel experiences, as laid out in last episode’s <em>Travel Interruptus</em> epic, I’ve appreciated the break. Especially when yet another yet another April snowstorm that blew up 700 flights last weekend. Instead, I’ve been wrestling once again with Avios -- the British Airways, Iberia, and now Aer Lingus frequent flyer program -- trying to book a Chicago-Dublin-Edinburgh Aer Lingus itinerary for my daughter’s graduation from University of St Andrews next month. I’ve been pretty <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/08/26/podcast-116-traveling-thru-japan-luggage-trends/\">vocal</a> about my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">challenges</a> with Avios over the years. In this go-around, the first wackiness was just trying to use the Avios website. To search for flights, you need to log in with your BA, Iberia, or Aer Lingus credentials. I try with all three; and fail with all three. Seems that the passwords given out by BA and Iberia don’t meet Avios’ security rules, so they fail. I assumed the username for my Aer Lingus account was my email address and the password seemed strong enough, but that kept failing too. Finally, after digging around my Aer Lingus profile, I found a separate username, which I’d never seen or used before, and <em>that</em> worked. Finally through the gate and onto the second wackiness -- the difference between the value of an Avios point on the Aer Lingus and Avios web sites. The award offers on both sites were points + cash. Taking the “market rate” for the ticket (pulled from Expedia), subtracting out the required cash payment, and dividing by the number of required Avios points gives the value of the Avios point for that award offer. My rule of thumb is -- get at least 2 cents/point or pay cash. The Aer Lingus site valued an Avios point at 0.7 cents while the Avios site hit my 2-cent minimum. I couldn’t quite understand that 65% difference, but I booked our tickets on the wonkier Avios site before it went away. If I remember anything from my University of Chicago business school courses, it’s that markets are efficient; 65% price differences don’t last forever. Though in this case, that difference may linger because the Avios website makes it so damn hard to find. </li><li>Bridge Music — <em>Lakeside Jam</em> by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/55998 </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Veteran TravelCommons listener Mika Pyyhkala sent in a note this week talking about his great experience with a flight rebooking service, <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Freebird (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"http://getfreebird.com\" target=\"_blank\">Freebird</a>. Mika writes:<ul><li>I was flying with a companion from (Wichita) ICT-STL and STL-DTW.  Just as the plane was descending to DTW, I received text messages from WN and Freebird that STL-DTW on WN had been cancelled.  Freebird then manually advised that the only flight for that day was a DL STL-DTW, and they were going to book it in case I wanted it; if they waited longer there might not be enough time to issue the new ticket on Delta through their travel agent.  They just asked me to confirm that I in fact wanted the Delta ticket.  </li><li>I confirmed we wanted the 2 Delta tickets, and by the time the door opened in STL we had a confirmation number to check in for the Delta flight leaving in 47 minutes. We got seats together on the Delta flight that were assigned by the Freebird process, and they even gave us free drinks!</li><li>I think we actually arrived in DTW a few minutes earlier than we were scheduled on the original flight, and it made for a great travel story and adventure!  This was my first time using Freebird as well!</li><li>It costs $19 to protect a one way trip per traveler.  It’s simple to work with them: unlike insurance, there are no claim forms, long waits, or papers to sign</li></ul></li><li>Mika, thanks for this. I hadn’t heard of Freebird before Mika’s note. Hitting their website, they’re selling their service to companies, travel agencies, and to individual travelers. Clicking through to a TechCrunch article about them, it says they’re also talking to Amex and Citibank about including Freebird as a credit card benefit. The article quotes the CEO, Ethan Bernstein - “It’s funny what happens when people deal with uncertainty; uncertainty is the worst. As soon you give people information, human support and technology to help them solve their problems, they experience the event so much differently.”  Which is exactly right. Certainty lets you plan; uncertainty just leaves you to stew… and drink at the airport bar… and eat bad airport food… and bitch Tweet. Yup, uncertainty leads to lots of bad things</li><li>One more-fun-than-necessarily-good thing on last month’s trip was getting to try out an alpha version of a new augmented reality feature for Google Maps. I used it first in Stockholm; we got off the Arlanda Express at the Central Train station and wanted make our way over to the <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Östermalms Saluhall (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.ostermalmshallen.se/en/\" target=\"_blank\">Östermalms Saluhall</a> for lunch. When I chose “Walking” as our transport mode, a “Start AR” button showed up next to the usual button to start the directions. With AR, I’d hold my phone up, the display would use the camera to show the streetscape in front of me with the  directions -- street names, arrows -- overlaid on the real-time image. I thought it was a nice add; reduced any ambiguity about where the next turn was. One interesting feature -- when I started walking, the screen dimmed and a message popped up telling me to stop looking at the phone and look straight ahead. All in all, it’s kinda fun. At least I thought so; Andrew and Irene seemed much less impressed. It worked very well for what was billed as an alpha product. It’ll be interesting to see how it develops, and how fast Google rolls it out.</li><li>But even without a broader AR roll-out, Google Maps seems on track to become the next “<a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"super app (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://skift.com/2019/04/16/google-maps-is-ready-to-transform-the-world-of-superapps-a-skift-deep-dive/\" target=\"_blank\">super app</a>” -- sorta the Western counterpart to China’s WeChat -- the first “super app”, a Swiss Army Knife-kind of “it does everything” app. Now Google Maps isn’t to that level -- yet -- but it is growing. It started as a mapping app, then added driving directions, then ride share -- showing Uber and Lyft prices, then public transit directions with real-time arrival times, replacing the core use case for apps like Transit. Then the “Explore Nearby” became more prominent -- which, for me, has supplanted Yelp when looking for a restaurant because it’s so much more convenient, and with deep links to OpenTable for reservations; and for nearby hotels, direct booking links to Expedia and Booking.com. I wasn’t surprised when I saw a stat that those “Near Me” searches grew 150 percent the last year. I’m not quite sure what I think about this -- loving a free service that keeps becoming more valuable vs. becoming more enslaved to the Google overlords. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/08/27/podcast-132-travel-apps-on-my-phone/\">episode #132</a>, I listed all the travel apps on my smartphone, and Google Maps was the most important -- “Indeed, it’s the only travel app with its own screen real estate rather than sharing space in the Travel folder,” I said. And it only keeps getting more indispensable.</li><li>Thinking back to our last day in Paris when both Ubers that we ordered were nice black Mercedes, I couldn’t help thinking how the quality of US Uber and Lyft vehicles has slipped. I remember when I started using Uber in 4-5 years ago, the cars were pristine. I remember working in Baltimore one summer; I was more than happy to wait 5 minutes for an Uber rather than take one of the cabs waiting at the stand right outside the building I was in. Those cabs were so beat up, so full of trash, and most of the time, without working air conditioning. Today, cabs haven’t gotten much cleaner, but Uber and Lyft seem to be lowering their standards. I dunno if it’s because of falling unemployment rates or trying to keep up with growth or squeezing driver pay to improve their post-IPO margins -- or all of the above -- but I’m seeing a real drop in quality.</li><li>Long-time TravelCommons listeners will recall that I’ve spent a lot of time in New Orleans airport and other than serving beer in go cups French Quarter-style so you can walk around the terminal with it, there’s not much good to say about it. Especially with regards to food and restaurants. For such a great food town to have such mediocre airport concessions has always been beyond me. But then again, the original terminal was built in 1959, and then expanded in the mid-70’s and mid-90’s. The new $1 billion replacement terminal was originally scheduled to open last year during New Orleans’ tricentennial, but that then slipped to February of this year, then to May, and now to a “to be determined” date sometime in the fall. The restaurant selection is supposed to be much better but I hope they don’t change that beer policy though. One time, waiting out yet another thunderstorm delay, I’d bought a beer and was standing by the gate drinking it because the bar was full. American called boarding and I walked up to the gate. The agent stopped me -- “You can drink that beer anywhere in the airport -- except on the jetway.” I looked down; I’d forgotten that I was still carrying that beer. I stepped to the side, chugged it, and then got on the plane. Felt like a very New Orleans thing to do.</li><li> And if you have any travel rants, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Facebook page</a> or our Instagram account at <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Travelcommons</a> -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music —  <em>A Thousand And None</em> by Speck (c) copyright 2018 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/speck/57256 Ft: Mr_Yesterday</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Traveler Data Leaks</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Interview with <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mylaocoon\">Candid Wueest</a>, Principal Threat Researcher at Symantec and author of a blog post titled <a href=\"https://www.symantec.com/blogs/threat-intelligence/hotel-websites-leak-guest-data\"><em>Two in Three Hotel Websites Leak Guest Booking Details and Allow Access to Personal Data</em></a></li><li>Bridge Music —  South Texas Cowboy Blues by texasradiofish (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/texasradiofish/52030 Ft: unreal_dm, ElRon XChile</li><li></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Brittany Street Food</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I’ll write a proper “Road Trip” post about our Brittany trip later this spring, after we get settled in the new digs, but after streaming a few episodes of Netflix’s “Street Food” series, I started thinking about some of the Breton street food we enjoyed while touring last month. If you’ve seen any of the Netflix series, you know that it’s more about the vendors than the food. But my French trails off after “oui,” “non,” “merci,” and “S\'il vous plaît” so I wasn’t able to get much of the vendor’s life stories. So this will be all about the food.</li><li>The first place we stayed was <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancale\">Cancale</a>, and we went there for one reason - oysters. Like people have been doing for 300-some odd years. When the tide is out, you can see miles of oyster beds with big farm tractors moving through the rows, hauling out trailers of oysters. Lining the ramp where the tractors drive up out of the beds is a little oyster market -- 8 stalls selling oysters fresh from the beds for €5-6/dozen. After adding another couple of euros for shucking, a half lemon and the use of a plastic platter, we’d have our afternoon snack -- sitting on the sea wall by the market, slurping through a couple dozen very briny oysters while watching the tractors work, and then pitching the empty shells back onto the beach for the seagulls to pick through. Our first afternoon, we only had a couple of cans of beer in our jacket pocket. The next couple of afternoons, we’d pour a nice white wine into some empty Evian bottles (Claire and I preferred a Sancerre) and make sure we had a good supply of wet wipes. We didn’t miss an afternoon on that sea wall while in Cancale.</li><li>Buckwheat is a big thing in Brittany. It’s been grown in Brittany for half a millennium or more, and for almost that long, it seems, has been turned into a <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galette\">galette</a>. a buckwheat crêpe. But a crêpe in form and shape only. Instead of a soft white wheat flour crêpe filled with jam or Nutella, the galette is crisper/firmer and savory. Fine on its own smeared with Breton butter, or with egg and cheese and ham inside. We got into Concarneau, on the southwest coast of Brittany about an hour before the weekly Friday outdoor market closed. &nbsp;I counted a half-dozen galette trucks. We walked up to the closest one. The cook was finishing up what looked like a weekend’s worth of galettes for the person in front of us -- flipping them, then pulling them off two hot metal disks, buttering them, and adding them to the stack. It was Friday in Lent, so I went for the egg, onion, and cheese galette. The creaminess of the cheese played nicely against the nutty graininess of the buckwheat.</li><li>The next day we drove to Rennes, our last stop in Brittany. We dropped the rental car at the train station and took the subway to Place des Lices for the huge Saturday market. We walked down from the subway station, through the fruit and vegetable stands lining the street -- beautiful stuff, but we’re leaving the next day, so we’re not doing a lot of green grocery shopping. There, between the two market halls, is a collection of food trucks; about 70% of them selling what we were looking for -- <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galette-saucisse\">galette-saucisse</a> -- the classic Breton street food that is pretty much what the straight translation from French to English suggests -- a sausage in a galette. Kinda like a Breton hot dog, it’s a cooked pork sausage wrapped in a cool galette, maybe with some grilled onions and dijon mustard added. There were lines tailing back from all the trucks serving these. A local guy pointed one truck out to Irene -- “They’re the best”, he said. She and Claire stood in queue while Andrew and I searched for drinks. Around the corner, we found a local cider maker; a couple of tables surrounded by crates of cider bottles. Through a mangled bit of Franglais, we bought a bottle of dry cider that had stayed cool in the shade and four cups, and got back to the food truck line just in time to be handed my galette-saucisse. After finishing the sausage and cider, I swung past the cider stand to give him the empty bottle -- kinda in-person recycling. There wasn’t much time to catch up on his life story, but it was a sunny Saturday and he had a full line; looked like he was having a good day.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #151</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_151.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<p><!--EndFragment--></p>\n<p></p>','Podcast #151 — Traveler Data Leaks; Brittany Street Food','','inherit','closed','closed','','2436-revision-v1','','','2019-05-07 22:17:13','2019-05-08 03:17:13','',2436,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/2436-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2457,1,'2019-05-07 22:18:23','2019-05-08 03:18:23','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><img class=\"wp-image-2439\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/oysters_and_evian_bottles-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\"><figcaption>Cancale Oysters with a nice Evian Sancerre</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>It\'s been a tough month for travel. Not quite to Book of Job-level torment, but two of this month\'s three trips spiraled into head-shaking metaphysical “What the hell is going on here” questioning of my decision to get out of bed that morning. I walk through the travel gods\' fun and games, as well as some new data on regional jet delays and buying a new travel bag. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_151.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #151: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, for the last time…. Not the last time for TravelCommons, just the last time for the studios “outside of Chicago”. We’re picking up stakes and moving about 20 miles east-northeast to Chicago’s Lakeview neighborhood. Hence the reason for the short-cycle on this episode. We’ll be breaking down and packing up the studio and production bay next week and probably won’t have everything reassembled until the end of the month. The recording isn’t really the issue -- I could always go back to my roots and find a spare bathroom to record in. It’s more about the production. I’m not sure I want to shrink my workflow down from a beefy dual 22-inch monitor Windows 10 mini-tower rig to my 2014 vintage 11-inch MacBook Air.</li><li>Being consumed by the move logistics vortex also means I haven’t done any real travel in the 2 weeks since the last episode -- but, given my most recent travel experiences, as laid out in last episode’s <em>Travel Interruptus</em> epic, I’ve appreciated the break. Especially when yet another yet another April snowstorm that blew up 700 flights last weekend. Instead, I’ve been wrestling once again with Avios -- the British Airways, Iberia, and now Aer Lingus frequent flyer program -- trying to book a Chicago-Dublin-Edinburgh Aer Lingus itinerary for my daughter’s graduation from University of St Andrews next month. I’ve been pretty <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/08/26/podcast-116-traveling-thru-japan-luggage-trends/\">vocal</a> about my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">challenges</a> with Avios over the years. In this go-around, the first wackiness was just trying to use the Avios website. To search for flights, you need to log in with your BA, Iberia, or Aer Lingus credentials. I try with all three; and fail with all three. Seems that the passwords given out by BA and Iberia don’t meet Avios’ security rules, so they fail. I assumed the username for my Aer Lingus account was my email address and the password seemed strong enough, but that kept failing too. Finally, after digging around my Aer Lingus profile, I found a separate username, which I’d never seen or used before, and <em>that</em> worked. Finally through the gate and onto the second wackiness -- the difference between the value of an Avios point on the Aer Lingus and Avios web sites. The award offers on both sites were points + cash. Taking the “market rate” for the ticket (pulled from Expedia), subtracting out the required cash payment, and dividing by the number of required Avios points gives the value of the Avios point for that award offer. My rule of thumb is -- get at least 2 cents/point or pay cash. The Aer Lingus site valued an Avios point at 0.7 cents while the Avios site hit my 2-cent minimum. I couldn’t quite understand that 65% difference, but I booked our tickets on the wonkier Avios site before it went away. If I remember anything from my University of Chicago business school courses, it’s that markets are efficient; 65% price differences don’t last forever. Though in this case, that difference may linger because the Avios website makes it so damn hard to find. </li><li>Bridge Music — <em>Lakeside Jam</em> by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/55998 </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Veteran TravelCommons listener Mika Pyyhkala sent in a note this week talking about his great experience with a flight rebooking service, <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Freebird (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"http://getfreebird.com\" target=\"_blank\">Freebird</a>. Mika writes:<ul><li>I was flying with a companion from (Wichita) ICT-STL and STL-DTW. &nbsp;Just as the plane was descending to DTW, I received text messages from WN and Freebird that STL-DTW on WN had been cancelled. &nbsp;Freebird then manually advised that the only flight for that day was a DL STL-DTW, and they were going to book it in case I wanted it; if they waited longer there might not be enough time to issue the new ticket on Delta through their travel agent. &nbsp;They just asked me to confirm that I in fact wanted the Delta ticket.  </li><li>I confirmed we wanted the 2 Delta tickets, and by the time the door opened in STL we had a confirmation number to check in for the Delta flight leaving in 47 minutes. We got seats together on the Delta flight that were assigned by the Freebird process, and they even gave us free drinks!</li><li>I think we actually arrived in DTW a few minutes earlier than we were scheduled on the original flight, and it made for a great travel story and adventure! &nbsp;This was my first time using Freebird as well!</li><li>It costs $19 to protect a one way trip per traveler. &nbsp;It’s simple to work with them: unlike insurance, there are no claim forms, long waits, or papers to sign</li></ul></li><li>Mika, thanks for this. I hadn’t heard of Freebird before Mika’s note. Hitting their website, they’re selling their service to companies, travel agencies, and to individual travelers. Clicking through to a TechCrunch article about them, it says they’re also talking to Amex and Citibank about including Freebird as a credit card benefit. The article quotes the CEO, Ethan Bernstein - “It’s funny what happens when people deal with uncertainty; uncertainty is the worst. As soon you give people information, human support and technology to help them solve their problems, they experience the event so much differently.” &nbsp;Which is exactly right. Certainty lets you plan; uncertainty just leaves you to stew… and drink at the airport bar… and eat bad airport food… and bitch Tweet. Yup, uncertainty leads to lots of bad things</li><li>One more-fun-than-necessarily-good thing on last month’s trip was getting to try out an alpha version of a new augmented reality feature for Google Maps. I used it first in Stockholm; we got off the Arlanda Express at the Central Train station and wanted make our way over to the <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Östermalms Saluhall (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.ostermalmshallen.se/en/\" target=\"_blank\">Östermalms Saluhall</a> for lunch. When I chose “Walking” as our transport mode, a “Start AR” button showed up next to the usual button to start the directions. With AR, I’d hold my phone up, the display would use the camera to show the streetscape in front of me with the &nbsp;directions -- street names, arrows -- overlaid on the real-time image. I thought it was a nice add; reduced any ambiguity about where the next turn was. One interesting feature -- when I started walking, the screen dimmed and a message popped up telling me to stop looking at the phone and look straight ahead. All in all, it’s kinda fun. At least I thought so; Andrew and Irene seemed much less impressed. It worked very well for what was billed as an alpha product. It’ll be interesting to see how it develops, and how fast Google rolls it out.</li><li>But even without a broader AR roll-out, Google Maps seems on track to become the next “<a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"super app (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://skift.com/2019/04/16/google-maps-is-ready-to-transform-the-world-of-superapps-a-skift-deep-dive/\" target=\"_blank\">super app</a>” -- sorta the Western counterpart to China’s WeChat -- the first “super app”, a Swiss Army Knife-kind of “it does everything” app. Now Google Maps isn’t to that level -- yet -- but it is growing. It started as a mapping app, then added driving directions, then ride share -- showing Uber and Lyft prices, then public transit directions with real-time arrival times, replacing the core use case for apps like Transit. Then the “Explore Nearby” became more prominent -- which, for me, has supplanted Yelp when looking for a restaurant because it’s so much more convenient, and with deep links to OpenTable for reservations; and for nearby hotels, direct booking links to Expedia and Booking.com. I wasn’t surprised when I saw a stat that those “Near Me” searches grew 150 percent the last year. I’m not quite sure what I think about this -- loving a free service that keeps becoming more valuable vs. becoming more enslaved to the Google overlords. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/08/27/podcast-132-travel-apps-on-my-phone/\">episode #132</a>, I listed all the travel apps on my smartphone, and Google Maps was the most important -- “Indeed, it’s the only travel app with its own screen real estate rather than sharing space in the Travel folder,” I said. And it only keeps getting more indispensable.</li><li>Thinking back to our last day in Paris when both Ubers that we ordered were nice black Mercedes, I couldn’t help thinking how the quality of US Uber and Lyft vehicles has slipped. I remember when I started using Uber in 4-5 years ago, the cars were pristine. I remember working in Baltimore one summer; I was more than happy to wait 5 minutes for an Uber rather than take one of the cabs waiting at the stand right outside the building I was in. Those cabs were so beat up, so full of trash, and most of the time, without working air conditioning. Today, cabs haven’t gotten much cleaner, but Uber and Lyft seem to be lowering their standards. I dunno if it’s because of falling unemployment rates or trying to keep up with growth or squeezing driver pay to improve their post-IPO margins -- or all of the above -- but I’m seeing a real drop in quality.</li><li>Long-time TravelCommons listeners will recall that I’ve spent a lot of time in New Orleans airport and other than serving beer in go cups French Quarter-style so you can walk around the terminal with it, there’s not much good to say about it. Especially with regards to food and restaurants. For such a great food town to have such mediocre airport concessions has always been beyond me. But then again, the original terminal was built in 1959, and then expanded in the mid-70’s and mid-90’s. The new $1 billion replacement terminal was originally scheduled to open last year during New Orleans’ tricentennial, but that then slipped to February of this year, then to May, and now to a “to be determined” date sometime in the fall. The restaurant selection is supposed to be much better but I hope they don’t change that beer policy though. One time, waiting out yet another thunderstorm delay, I’d bought a beer and was standing by the gate drinking it because the bar was full. American called boarding and I walked up to the gate. The agent stopped me -- “You can drink that beer anywhere in the airport -- except on the jetway.” I looked down; I’d forgotten that I was still carrying that beer. I stepped to the side, chugged it, and then got on the plane. Felt like a very New Orleans thing to do.</li><li> And if you have any travel rants, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. &nbsp;The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Facebook page</a> or our Instagram account at <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Travelcommons</a> -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music —  <em>A Thousand And None</em> by Speck (c) copyright 2018 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/speck/57256 Ft: Mr_Yesterday</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Traveler Data Leaks</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Interview with <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mylaocoon\">Candid Wueest</a>, Principal Threat Researcher at Symantec and author of a blog post titled <a href=\"https://www.symantec.com/blogs/threat-intelligence/hotel-websites-leak-guest-data\"><em>Two in Three Hotel Websites Leak Guest Booking Details and Allow Access to Personal Data</em></a></li><li>Bridge Music —  <em>dazed </em>by Jeris (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/VJ_Memes/39456 Ft: airtone</li><li></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Brittany Street Food</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I’ll write a proper “Road Trip” post about our Brittany trip later this spring, after we get settled in the new digs, but after streaming a few episodes of Netflix’s “Street Food” series, I started thinking about some of the Breton street food we enjoyed while touring last month. If you’ve seen any of the Netflix series, you know that it’s more about the vendors than the food. But my French trails off after “oui,” “non,” “merci,” and “S\'il vous plaît” so I wasn’t able to get much of the vendor’s life stories. So this will be all about the food.</li><li>The first place we stayed was <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancale\">Cancale</a>, and we went there for one reason - oysters. Like people have been doing for 300-some odd years. When the tide is out, you can see miles of oyster beds with big farm tractors moving through the rows, hauling out trailers of oysters. Lining the ramp where the tractors drive up out of the beds is a little oyster market -- 8 stalls selling oysters fresh from the beds for €5-6/dozen. After adding another couple of euros for shucking, a half lemon and the use of a plastic platter, we’d have our afternoon snack -- sitting on the sea wall by the market, slurping through a couple dozen very briny oysters while watching the tractors work, and then pitching the empty shells back onto the beach for the seagulls to pick through. Our first afternoon, we only had a couple of cans of beer in our jacket pocket. The next couple of afternoons, we’d pour a nice white wine into some empty Evian bottles (Claire and I preferred a Sancerre) and make sure we had a good supply of wet wipes. We didn’t miss an afternoon on that sea wall while in Cancale.</li><li>Buckwheat is a big thing in Brittany. It’s been grown in Brittany for half a millennium or more, and for almost that long, it seems, has been turned into a <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galette\">galette</a>. a buckwheat crêpe. But a crêpe in form and shape only. Instead of a soft white wheat flour crêpe filled with jam or Nutella, the galette is crisper/firmer and savory. Fine on its own smeared with Breton butter, or with egg and cheese and ham inside. We got into Concarneau, on the southwest coast of Brittany about an hour before the weekly Friday outdoor market closed. &nbsp;I counted a half-dozen galette trucks. We walked up to the closest one. The cook was finishing up what looked like a weekend’s worth of galettes for the person in front of us -- flipping them, then pulling them off two hot metal disks, buttering them, and adding them to the stack. It was Friday in Lent, so I went for the egg, onion, and cheese galette. The creaminess of the cheese played nicely against the nutty graininess of the buckwheat.</li><li>The next day we drove to Rennes, our last stop in Brittany. We dropped the rental car at the train station and took the subway to Place des Lices for the huge Saturday market. We walked down from the subway station, through the fruit and vegetable stands lining the street -- beautiful stuff, but we’re leaving the next day, so we’re not doing a lot of green grocery shopping. There, between the two market halls, is a collection of food trucks; about 70% of them selling what we were looking for -- <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galette-saucisse\">galette-saucisse</a> -- the classic Breton street food that is pretty much what the straight translation from French to English suggests -- a sausage in a galette. Kinda like a Breton hot dog, it’s a cooked pork sausage wrapped in a cool galette, maybe with some grilled onions and dijon mustard added. There were lines tailing back from all the trucks serving these. A local guy pointed one truck out to Irene -- “They’re the best”, he said. She and Claire stood in queue while Andrew and I searched for drinks. Around the corner, we found a local cider maker; a couple of tables surrounded by crates of cider bottles. Through a mangled bit of Franglais, we bought a bottle of dry cider that had stayed cool in the shade and four cups, and got back to the food truck line just in time to be handed my galette-saucisse. After finishing the sausage and cider, I swung past the cider stand to give him the empty bottle -- kinda in-person recycling. There wasn’t much time to catch up on his life story, but it was a sunny Saturday and he had a full line; looked like he was having a good day.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #151</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_151.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<p><!--EndFragment--></p>\n<p></p>','Podcast #151 — Traveler Data Leaks; Brittany Street Food','','inherit','closed','closed','','2436-revision-v1','','','2019-05-07 22:18:23','2019-05-08 03:18:23','',2436,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/2436-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2458,1,'2019-05-07 22:20:33','2019-05-08 03:20:33','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><img class=\"wp-image-2439\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/oysters_and_evian_bottles-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\"><figcaption>Cancale Oysters with a nice Evian Sancerre</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>It\'s been a tough month for travel. Not quite to Book of Job-level torment, but two of this month\'s three trips spiraled into head-shaking metaphysical “What the hell is going on here” questioning of my decision to get out of bed that morning. I walk through the travel gods\' fun and games, as well as some new data on regional jet delays and buying a new travel bag. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_151.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<p>&lt;iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/617322609&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"&gt;&lt;/iframe&gt;</p>\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #151: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, for the last time…. Not the last time for TravelCommons, just the last time for the studios “outside of Chicago”. We’re picking up stakes and moving about 20 miles east-northeast to Chicago’s Lakeview neighborhood. Hence the reason for the short-cycle on this episode. We’ll be breaking down and packing up the studio and production bay next week and probably won’t have everything reassembled until the end of the month. The recording isn’t really the issue -- I could always go back to my roots and find a spare bathroom to record in. It’s more about the production. I’m not sure I want to shrink my workflow down from a beefy dual 22-inch monitor Windows 10 mini-tower rig to my 2014 vintage 11-inch MacBook Air.</li><li>Being consumed by the move logistics vortex also means I haven’t done any real travel in the 2 weeks since the last episode -- but, given my most recent travel experiences, as laid out in last episode’s <em>Travel Interruptus</em> epic, I’ve appreciated the break. Especially when yet another yet another April snowstorm that blew up 700 flights last weekend. Instead, I’ve been wrestling once again with Avios -- the British Airways, Iberia, and now Aer Lingus frequent flyer program -- trying to book a Chicago-Dublin-Edinburgh Aer Lingus itinerary for my daughter’s graduation from University of St Andrews next month. I’ve been pretty <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/08/26/podcast-116-traveling-thru-japan-luggage-trends/\">vocal</a> about my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">challenges</a> with Avios over the years. In this go-around, the first wackiness was just trying to use the Avios website. To search for flights, you need to log in with your BA, Iberia, or Aer Lingus credentials. I try with all three; and fail with all three. Seems that the passwords given out by BA and Iberia don’t meet Avios’ security rules, so they fail. I assumed the username for my Aer Lingus account was my email address and the password seemed strong enough, but that kept failing too. Finally, after digging around my Aer Lingus profile, I found a separate username, which I’d never seen or used before, and <em>that</em> worked. Finally through the gate and onto the second wackiness -- the difference between the value of an Avios point on the Aer Lingus and Avios web sites. The award offers on both sites were points + cash. Taking the “market rate” for the ticket (pulled from Expedia), subtracting out the required cash payment, and dividing by the number of required Avios points gives the value of the Avios point for that award offer. My rule of thumb is -- get at least 2 cents/point or pay cash. The Aer Lingus site valued an Avios point at 0.7 cents while the Avios site hit my 2-cent minimum. I couldn’t quite understand that 65% difference, but I booked our tickets on the wonkier Avios site before it went away. If I remember anything from my University of Chicago business school courses, it’s that markets are efficient; 65% price differences don’t last forever. Though in this case, that difference may linger because the Avios website makes it so damn hard to find. </li><li>Bridge Music — <em>Lakeside Jam</em> by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/55998 </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Veteran TravelCommons listener Mika Pyyhkala sent in a note this week talking about his great experience with a flight rebooking service, <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Freebird (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"http://getfreebird.com\" target=\"_blank\">Freebird</a>. Mika writes:<ul><li>I was flying with a companion from (Wichita) ICT-STL and STL-DTW. &nbsp;Just as the plane was descending to DTW, I received text messages from WN and Freebird that STL-DTW on WN had been cancelled. &nbsp;Freebird then manually advised that the only flight for that day was a DL STL-DTW, and they were going to book it in case I wanted it; if they waited longer there might not be enough time to issue the new ticket on Delta through their travel agent. &nbsp;They just asked me to confirm that I in fact wanted the Delta ticket.  </li><li>I confirmed we wanted the 2 Delta tickets, and by the time the door opened in STL we had a confirmation number to check in for the Delta flight leaving in 47 minutes. We got seats together on the Delta flight that were assigned by the Freebird process, and they even gave us free drinks!</li><li>I think we actually arrived in DTW a few minutes earlier than we were scheduled on the original flight, and it made for a great travel story and adventure! &nbsp;This was my first time using Freebird as well!</li><li>It costs $19 to protect a one way trip per traveler. &nbsp;It’s simple to work with them: unlike insurance, there are no claim forms, long waits, or papers to sign</li></ul></li><li>Mika, thanks for this. I hadn’t heard of Freebird before Mika’s note. Hitting their website, they’re selling their service to companies, travel agencies, and to individual travelers. Clicking through to a TechCrunch article about them, it says they’re also talking to Amex and Citibank about including Freebird as a credit card benefit. The article quotes the CEO, Ethan Bernstein - “It’s funny what happens when people deal with uncertainty; uncertainty is the worst. As soon you give people information, human support and technology to help them solve their problems, they experience the event so much differently.” &nbsp;Which is exactly right. Certainty lets you plan; uncertainty just leaves you to stew… and drink at the airport bar… and eat bad airport food… and bitch Tweet. Yup, uncertainty leads to lots of bad things</li><li>One more-fun-than-necessarily-good thing on last month’s trip was getting to try out an alpha version of a new augmented reality feature for Google Maps. I used it first in Stockholm; we got off the Arlanda Express at the Central Train station and wanted make our way over to the <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Östermalms Saluhall (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.ostermalmshallen.se/en/\" target=\"_blank\">Östermalms Saluhall</a> for lunch. When I chose “Walking” as our transport mode, a “Start AR” button showed up next to the usual button to start the directions. With AR, I’d hold my phone up, the display would use the camera to show the streetscape in front of me with the &nbsp;directions -- street names, arrows -- overlaid on the real-time image. I thought it was a nice add; reduced any ambiguity about where the next turn was. One interesting feature -- when I started walking, the screen dimmed and a message popped up telling me to stop looking at the phone and look straight ahead. All in all, it’s kinda fun. At least I thought so; Andrew and Irene seemed much less impressed. It worked very well for what was billed as an alpha product. It’ll be interesting to see how it develops, and how fast Google rolls it out.</li><li>But even without a broader AR roll-out, Google Maps seems on track to become the next “<a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"super app (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://skift.com/2019/04/16/google-maps-is-ready-to-transform-the-world-of-superapps-a-skift-deep-dive/\" target=\"_blank\">super app</a>” -- sorta the Western counterpart to China’s WeChat -- the first “super app”, a Swiss Army Knife-kind of “it does everything” app. Now Google Maps isn’t to that level -- yet -- but it is growing. It started as a mapping app, then added driving directions, then ride share -- showing Uber and Lyft prices, then public transit directions with real-time arrival times, replacing the core use case for apps like Transit. Then the “Explore Nearby” became more prominent -- which, for me, has supplanted Yelp when looking for a restaurant because it’s so much more convenient, and with deep links to OpenTable for reservations; and for nearby hotels, direct booking links to Expedia and Booking.com. I wasn’t surprised when I saw a stat that those “Near Me” searches grew 150 percent the last year. I’m not quite sure what I think about this -- loving a free service that keeps becoming more valuable vs. becoming more enslaved to the Google overlords. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/08/27/podcast-132-travel-apps-on-my-phone/\">episode #132</a>, I listed all the travel apps on my smartphone, and Google Maps was the most important -- “Indeed, it’s the only travel app with its own screen real estate rather than sharing space in the Travel folder,” I said. And it only keeps getting more indispensable.</li><li>Thinking back to our last day in Paris when both Ubers that we ordered were nice black Mercedes, I couldn’t help thinking how the quality of US Uber and Lyft vehicles has slipped. I remember when I started using Uber in 4-5 years ago, the cars were pristine. I remember working in Baltimore one summer; I was more than happy to wait 5 minutes for an Uber rather than take one of the cabs waiting at the stand right outside the building I was in. Those cabs were so beat up, so full of trash, and most of the time, without working air conditioning. Today, cabs haven’t gotten much cleaner, but Uber and Lyft seem to be lowering their standards. I dunno if it’s because of falling unemployment rates or trying to keep up with growth or squeezing driver pay to improve their post-IPO margins -- or all of the above -- but I’m seeing a real drop in quality.</li><li>Long-time TravelCommons listeners will recall that I’ve spent a lot of time in New Orleans airport and other than serving beer in go cups French Quarter-style so you can walk around the terminal with it, there’s not much good to say about it. Especially with regards to food and restaurants. For such a great food town to have such mediocre airport concessions has always been beyond me. But then again, the original terminal was built in 1959, and then expanded in the mid-70’s and mid-90’s. The new $1 billion replacement terminal was originally scheduled to open last year during New Orleans’ tricentennial, but that then slipped to February of this year, then to May, and now to a “to be determined” date sometime in the fall. The restaurant selection is supposed to be much better but I hope they don’t change that beer policy though. One time, waiting out yet another thunderstorm delay, I’d bought a beer and was standing by the gate drinking it because the bar was full. American called boarding and I walked up to the gate. The agent stopped me -- “You can drink that beer anywhere in the airport -- except on the jetway.” I looked down; I’d forgotten that I was still carrying that beer. I stepped to the side, chugged it, and then got on the plane. Felt like a very New Orleans thing to do.</li><li> And if you have any travel rants, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. &nbsp;The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Facebook page</a> or our Instagram account at <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Travelcommons</a> -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music —  <em>A Thousand And None</em> by Speck (c) copyright 2018 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/speck/57256 Ft: Mr_Yesterday</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Traveler Data Leaks</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Interview with <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mylaocoon\">Candid Wueest</a>, Principal Threat Researcher at Symantec and author of a blog post titled <a href=\"https://www.symantec.com/blogs/threat-intelligence/hotel-websites-leak-guest-data\"><em>Two in Three Hotel Websites Leak Guest Booking Details and Allow Access to Personal Data</em></a></li><li>Bridge Music —  <em>dazed </em>by Jeris (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/VJ_Memes/39456 Ft: airtone</li><li></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Brittany Street Food</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I’ll write a proper “Road Trip” post about our Brittany trip later this spring, after we get settled in the new digs, but after streaming a few episodes of Netflix’s “Street Food” series, I started thinking about some of the Breton street food we enjoyed while touring last month. If you’ve seen any of the Netflix series, you know that it’s more about the vendors than the food. But my French trails off after “oui,” “non,” “merci,” and “S\'il vous plaît” so I wasn’t able to get much of the vendor’s life stories. So this will be all about the food.</li><li>The first place we stayed was <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancale\">Cancale</a>, and we went there for one reason - oysters. Like people have been doing for 300-some odd years. When the tide is out, you can see miles of oyster beds with big farm tractors moving through the rows, hauling out trailers of oysters. Lining the ramp where the tractors drive up out of the beds is a little oyster market -- 8 stalls selling oysters fresh from the beds for €5-6/dozen. After adding another couple of euros for shucking, a half lemon and the use of a plastic platter, we’d have our afternoon snack -- sitting on the sea wall by the market, slurping through a couple dozen very briny oysters while watching the tractors work, and then pitching the empty shells back onto the beach for the seagulls to pick through. Our first afternoon, we only had a couple of cans of beer in our jacket pocket. The next couple of afternoons, we’d pour a nice white wine into some empty Evian bottles (Claire and I preferred a Sancerre) and make sure we had a good supply of wet wipes. We didn’t miss an afternoon on that sea wall while in Cancale.</li><li>Buckwheat is a big thing in Brittany. It’s been grown in Brittany for half a millennium or more, and for almost that long, it seems, has been turned into a <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galette\">galette</a>. a buckwheat crêpe. But a crêpe in form and shape only. Instead of a soft white wheat flour crêpe filled with jam or Nutella, the galette is crisper/firmer and savory. Fine on its own smeared with Breton butter, or with egg and cheese and ham inside. We got into Concarneau, on the southwest coast of Brittany about an hour before the weekly Friday outdoor market closed. &nbsp;I counted a half-dozen galette trucks. We walked up to the closest one. The cook was finishing up what looked like a weekend’s worth of galettes for the person in front of us -- flipping them, then pulling them off two hot metal disks, buttering them, and adding them to the stack. It was Friday in Lent, so I went for the egg, onion, and cheese galette. The creaminess of the cheese played nicely against the nutty graininess of the buckwheat.</li><li>The next day we drove to Rennes, our last stop in Brittany. We dropped the rental car at the train station and took the subway to Place des Lices for the huge Saturday market. We walked down from the subway station, through the fruit and vegetable stands lining the street -- beautiful stuff, but we’re leaving the next day, so we’re not doing a lot of green grocery shopping. There, between the two market halls, is a collection of food trucks; about 70% of them selling what we were looking for -- <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galette-saucisse\">galette-saucisse</a> -- the classic Breton street food that is pretty much what the straight translation from French to English suggests -- a sausage in a galette. Kinda like a Breton hot dog, it’s a cooked pork sausage wrapped in a cool galette, maybe with some grilled onions and dijon mustard added. There were lines tailing back from all the trucks serving these. A local guy pointed one truck out to Irene -- “They’re the best”, he said. She and Claire stood in queue while Andrew and I searched for drinks. Around the corner, we found a local cider maker; a couple of tables surrounded by crates of cider bottles. Through a mangled bit of Franglais, we bought a bottle of dry cider that had stayed cool in the shade and four cups, and got back to the food truck line just in time to be handed my galette-saucisse. After finishing the sausage and cider, I swung past the cider stand to give him the empty bottle -- kinda in-person recycling. There wasn’t much time to catch up on his life story, but it was a sunny Saturday and he had a full line; looked like he was having a good day.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #151</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_151.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<p><!--EndFragment--></p>\n<p></p>','Podcast #151 — Traveler Data Leaks; Brittany Street Food','','inherit','closed','closed','','2436-revision-v1','','','2019-05-07 22:20:33','2019-05-08 03:20:33','',2436,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/2436-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2459,1,'2019-05-07 22:20:50','2019-05-08 03:20:50','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><img class=\"wp-image-2439\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/oysters_and_evian_bottles-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" />\n<figcaption>Cancale Oysters with a nice Evian Sancerre</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p>It\'s been a tough month for travel. Not quite to Book of Job-level torment, but two of this month\'s three trips spiraled into head-shaking metaphysical “What the hell is going on here” questioning of my decision to get out of bed that morning. I walk through the travel gods\' fun and games, as well as some new data on regional jet delays and buying a new travel bag. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_151.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<p>&lt;iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/617322609&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"&gt;&lt;/iframe&gt;</p>\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #151: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, for the last time…. Not the last time for TravelCommons, just the last time for the studios “outside of Chicago”. We’re picking up stakes and moving about 20 miles east-northeast to Chicago’s Lakeview neighborhood. Hence the reason for the short-cycle on this episode. We’ll be breaking down and packing up the studio and production bay next week and probably won’t have everything reassembled until the end of the month. The recording isn’t really the issue -- I could always go back to my roots and find a spare bathroom to record in. It’s more about the production. I’m not sure I want to shrink my workflow down from a beefy dual 22-inch monitor Windows 10 mini-tower rig to my 2014 vintage 11-inch MacBook Air.</li><li>Being consumed by the move logistics vortex also means I haven’t done any real travel in the 2 weeks since the last episode -- but, given my most recent travel experiences, as laid out in last episode’s <em>Travel Interruptus</em> epic, I’ve appreciated the break. Especially when yet another yet another April snowstorm that blew up 700 flights last weekend. Instead, I’ve been wrestling once again with Avios -- the British Airways, Iberia, and now Aer Lingus frequent flyer program -- trying to book a Chicago-Dublin-Edinburgh Aer Lingus itinerary for my daughter’s graduation from University of St Andrews next month. I’ve been pretty <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/08/26/podcast-116-traveling-thru-japan-luggage-trends/\">vocal</a> about my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">challenges</a> with Avios over the years. In this go-around, the first wackiness was just trying to use the Avios website. To search for flights, you need to log in with your BA, Iberia, or Aer Lingus credentials. I try with all three; and fail with all three. Seems that the passwords given out by BA and Iberia don’t meet Avios’ security rules, so they fail. I assumed the username for my Aer Lingus account was my email address and the password seemed strong enough, but that kept failing too. Finally, after digging around my Aer Lingus profile, I found a separate username, which I’d never seen or used before, and <em>that</em> worked. Finally through the gate and onto the second wackiness -- the difference between the value of an Avios point on the Aer Lingus and Avios web sites. The award offers on both sites were points + cash. Taking the “market rate” for the ticket (pulled from Expedia), subtracting out the required cash payment, and dividing by the number of required Avios points gives the value of the Avios point for that award offer. My rule of thumb is -- get at least 2 cents/point or pay cash. The Aer Lingus site valued an Avios point at 0.7 cents while the Avios site hit my 2-cent minimum. I couldn’t quite understand that 65% difference, but I booked our tickets on the wonkier Avios site before it went away. If I remember anything from my University of Chicago business school courses, it’s that markets are efficient; 65% price differences don’t last forever. Though in this case, that difference may linger because the Avios website makes it so damn hard to find. </li><li>Bridge Music — <em>Lakeside Jam</em> by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/55998 </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Veteran TravelCommons listener Mika Pyyhkala sent in a note this week talking about his great experience with a flight rebooking service, <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Freebird (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"http://getfreebird.com\" target=\"_blank\">Freebird</a>. Mika writes:<ul><li>I was flying with a companion from (Wichita) ICT-STL and STL-DTW. &nbsp;Just as the plane was descending to DTW, I received text messages from WN and Freebird that STL-DTW on WN had been cancelled. &nbsp;Freebird then manually advised that the only flight for that day was a DL STL-DTW, and they were going to book it in case I wanted it; if they waited longer there might not be enough time to issue the new ticket on Delta through their travel agent. &nbsp;They just asked me to confirm that I in fact wanted the Delta ticket.  </li><li>I confirmed we wanted the 2 Delta tickets, and by the time the door opened in STL we had a confirmation number to check in for the Delta flight leaving in 47 minutes. We got seats together on the Delta flight that were assigned by the Freebird process, and they even gave us free drinks!</li><li>I think we actually arrived in DTW a few minutes earlier than we were scheduled on the original flight, and it made for a great travel story and adventure! &nbsp;This was my first time using Freebird as well!</li><li>It costs $19 to protect a one way trip per traveler. &nbsp;It’s simple to work with them: unlike insurance, there are no claim forms, long waits, or papers to sign</li></ul></li><li>Mika, thanks for this. I hadn’t heard of Freebird before Mika’s note. Hitting their website, they’re selling their service to companies, travel agencies, and to individual travelers. Clicking through to a TechCrunch article about them, it says they’re also talking to Amex and Citibank about including Freebird as a credit card benefit. The article quotes the CEO, Ethan Bernstein - “It’s funny what happens when people deal with uncertainty; uncertainty is the worst. As soon you give people information, human support and technology to help them solve their problems, they experience the event so much differently.” &nbsp;Which is exactly right. Certainty lets you plan; uncertainty just leaves you to stew… and drink at the airport bar… and eat bad airport food… and bitch Tweet. Yup, uncertainty leads to lots of bad things</li><li>One more-fun-than-necessarily-good thing on last month’s trip was getting to try out an alpha version of a new augmented reality feature for Google Maps. I used it first in Stockholm; we got off the Arlanda Express at the Central Train station and wanted make our way over to the <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Östermalms Saluhall (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.ostermalmshallen.se/en/\" target=\"_blank\">Östermalms Saluhall</a> for lunch. When I chose “Walking” as our transport mode, a “Start AR” button showed up next to the usual button to start the directions. With AR, I’d hold my phone up, the display would use the camera to show the streetscape in front of me with the &nbsp;directions -- street names, arrows -- overlaid on the real-time image. I thought it was a nice add; reduced any ambiguity about where the next turn was. One interesting feature -- when I started walking, the screen dimmed and a message popped up telling me to stop looking at the phone and look straight ahead. All in all, it’s kinda fun. At least I thought so; Andrew and Irene seemed much less impressed. It worked very well for what was billed as an alpha product. It’ll be interesting to see how it develops, and how fast Google rolls it out.</li><li>But even without a broader AR roll-out, Google Maps seems on track to become the next “<a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"super app (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://skift.com/2019/04/16/google-maps-is-ready-to-transform-the-world-of-superapps-a-skift-deep-dive/\" target=\"_blank\">super app</a>” -- sorta the Western counterpart to China’s WeChat -- the first “super app”, a Swiss Army Knife-kind of “it does everything” app. Now Google Maps isn’t to that level -- yet -- but it is growing. It started as a mapping app, then added driving directions, then ride share -- showing Uber and Lyft prices, then public transit directions with real-time arrival times, replacing the core use case for apps like Transit. Then the “Explore Nearby” became more prominent -- which, for me, has supplanted Yelp when looking for a restaurant because it’s so much more convenient, and with deep links to OpenTable for reservations; and for nearby hotels, direct booking links to Expedia and Booking.com. I wasn’t surprised when I saw a stat that those “Near Me” searches grew 150 percent the last year. I’m not quite sure what I think about this -- loving a free service that keeps becoming more valuable vs. becoming more enslaved to the Google overlords. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/08/27/podcast-132-travel-apps-on-my-phone/\">episode #132</a>, I listed all the travel apps on my smartphone, and Google Maps was the most important -- “Indeed, it’s the only travel app with its own screen real estate rather than sharing space in the Travel folder,” I said. And it only keeps getting more indispensable.</li><li>Thinking back to our last day in Paris when both Ubers that we ordered were nice black Mercedes, I couldn’t help thinking how the quality of US Uber and Lyft vehicles has slipped. I remember when I started using Uber in 4-5 years ago, the cars were pristine. I remember working in Baltimore one summer; I was more than happy to wait 5 minutes for an Uber rather than take one of the cabs waiting at the stand right outside the building I was in. Those cabs were so beat up, so full of trash, and most of the time, without working air conditioning. Today, cabs haven’t gotten much cleaner, but Uber and Lyft seem to be lowering their standards. I dunno if it’s because of falling unemployment rates or trying to keep up with growth or squeezing driver pay to improve their post-IPO margins -- or all of the above -- but I’m seeing a real drop in quality.</li><li>Long-time TravelCommons listeners will recall that I’ve spent a lot of time in New Orleans airport and other than serving beer in go cups French Quarter-style so you can walk around the terminal with it, there’s not much good to say about it. Especially with regards to food and restaurants. For such a great food town to have such mediocre airport concessions has always been beyond me. But then again, the original terminal was built in 1959, and then expanded in the mid-70’s and mid-90’s. The new $1 billion replacement terminal was originally scheduled to open last year during New Orleans’ tricentennial, but that then slipped to February of this year, then to May, and now to a “to be determined” date sometime in the fall. The restaurant selection is supposed to be much better but I hope they don’t change that beer policy though. One time, waiting out yet another thunderstorm delay, I’d bought a beer and was standing by the gate drinking it because the bar was full. American called boarding and I walked up to the gate. The agent stopped me -- “You can drink that beer anywhere in the airport -- except on the jetway.” I looked down; I’d forgotten that I was still carrying that beer. I stepped to the side, chugged it, and then got on the plane. Felt like a very New Orleans thing to do.</li><li> And if you have any travel rants, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. &nbsp;The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Facebook page</a> or our Instagram account at <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Travelcommons</a> -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music —  <em>A Thousand And None</em> by Speck (c) copyright 2018 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/speck/57256 Ft: Mr_Yesterday</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Traveler Data Leaks</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Interview with <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mylaocoon\">Candid Wueest</a>, Principal Threat Researcher at Symantec and author of a blog post titled <a href=\"https://www.symantec.com/blogs/threat-intelligence/hotel-websites-leak-guest-data\"><em>Two in Three Hotel Websites Leak Guest Booking Details and Allow Access to Personal Data</em></a></li><li>Bridge Music —  <em>dazed </em>by Jeris (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/VJ_Memes/39456 Ft: airtone</li><li></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Brittany Street Food</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I’ll write a proper “Road Trip” post about our Brittany trip later this spring, after we get settled in the new digs, but after streaming a few episodes of Netflix’s “Street Food” series, I started thinking about some of the Breton street food we enjoyed while touring last month. If you’ve seen any of the Netflix series, you know that it’s more about the vendors than the food. But my French trails off after “oui,” “non,” “merci,” and “S\'il vous plaît” so I wasn’t able to get much of the vendor’s life stories. So this will be all about the food.</li><li>The first place we stayed was <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancale\">Cancale</a>, and we went there for one reason - oysters. Like people have been doing for 300-some odd years. When the tide is out, you can see miles of oyster beds with big farm tractors moving through the rows, hauling out trailers of oysters. Lining the ramp where the tractors drive up out of the beds is a little oyster market -- 8 stalls selling oysters fresh from the beds for €5-6/dozen. After adding another couple of euros for shucking, a half lemon and the use of a plastic platter, we’d have our afternoon snack -- sitting on the sea wall by the market, slurping through a couple dozen very briny oysters while watching the tractors work, and then pitching the empty shells back onto the beach for the seagulls to pick through. Our first afternoon, we only had a couple of cans of beer in our jacket pocket. The next couple of afternoons, we’d pour a nice white wine into some empty Evian bottles (Claire and I preferred a Sancerre) and make sure we had a good supply of wet wipes. We didn’t miss an afternoon on that sea wall while in Cancale.</li><li>Buckwheat is a big thing in Brittany. It’s been grown in Brittany for half a millennium or more, and for almost that long, it seems, has been turned into a <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galette\">galette</a>. a buckwheat crêpe. But a crêpe in form and shape only. Instead of a soft white wheat flour crêpe filled with jam or Nutella, the galette is crisper/firmer and savory. Fine on its own smeared with Breton butter, or with egg and cheese and ham inside. We got into Concarneau, on the southwest coast of Brittany about an hour before the weekly Friday outdoor market closed. &nbsp;I counted a half-dozen galette trucks. We walked up to the closest one. The cook was finishing up what looked like a weekend’s worth of galettes for the person in front of us -- flipping them, then pulling them off two hot metal disks, buttering them, and adding them to the stack. It was Friday in Lent, so I went for the egg, onion, and cheese galette. The creaminess of the cheese played nicely against the nutty graininess of the buckwheat.</li><li>The next day we drove to Rennes, our last stop in Brittany. We dropped the rental car at the train station and took the subway to Place des Lices for the huge Saturday market. We walked down from the subway station, through the fruit and vegetable stands lining the street -- beautiful stuff, but we’re leaving the next day, so we’re not doing a lot of green grocery shopping. There, between the two market halls, is a collection of food trucks; about 70% of them selling what we were looking for -- <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galette-saucisse\">galette-saucisse</a> -- the classic Breton street food that is pretty much what the straight translation from French to English suggests -- a sausage in a galette. Kinda like a Breton hot dog, it’s a cooked pork sausage wrapped in a cool galette, maybe with some grilled onions and dijon mustard added. There were lines tailing back from all the trucks serving these. A local guy pointed one truck out to Irene -- “They’re the best”, he said. She and Claire stood in queue while Andrew and I searched for drinks. Around the corner, we found a local cider maker; a couple of tables surrounded by crates of cider bottles. Through a mangled bit of Franglais, we bought a bottle of dry cider that had stayed cool in the shade and four cups, and got back to the food truck line just in time to be handed my galette-saucisse. After finishing the sausage and cider, I swung past the cider stand to give him the empty bottle -- kinda in-person recycling. There wasn’t much time to catch up on his life story, but it was a sunny Saturday and he had a full line; looked like he was having a good day.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #151</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_151.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<p><!--EndFragment--></p>\n<p></p>','Podcast #151 — Traveler Data Leaks; Brittany Street Food','','inherit','closed','closed','','2436-revision-v1','','','2019-05-07 22:20:50','2019-05-08 03:20:50','',2436,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/2436-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2460,1,'2019-05-07 22:21:53','2019-05-08 03:21:53','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><img class=\"wp-image-2439\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/oysters_and_evian_bottles-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" />\n<figcaption>Cancale Oysters with a nice Evian Sancerre</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p>It\'s been a tough month for travel. Not quite to Book of Job-level torment, but two of this month\'s three trips spiraled into head-shaking metaphysical “What the hell is going on here” questioning of my decision to get out of bed that morning. I walk through the travel gods\' fun and games, as well as some new data on regional jet delays and buying a new travel bag. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_151.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/617322609&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"&gt;&lt;/iframe>\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #151: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, for the last time…. Not the last time for TravelCommons, just the last time for the studios “outside of Chicago”. We’re picking up stakes and moving about 20 miles east-northeast to Chicago’s Lakeview neighborhood. Hence the reason for the short-cycle on this episode. We’ll be breaking down and packing up the studio and production bay next week and probably won’t have everything reassembled until the end of the month. The recording isn’t really the issue -- I could always go back to my roots and find a spare bathroom to record in. It’s more about the production. I’m not sure I want to shrink my workflow down from a beefy dual 22-inch monitor Windows 10 mini-tower rig to my 2014 vintage 11-inch MacBook Air.</li><li>Being consumed by the move logistics vortex also means I haven’t done any real travel in the 2 weeks since the last episode -- but, given my most recent travel experiences, as laid out in last episode’s <em>Travel Interruptus</em> epic, I’ve appreciated the break. Especially when yet another yet another April snowstorm that blew up 700 flights last weekend. Instead, I’ve been wrestling once again with Avios -- the British Airways, Iberia, and now Aer Lingus frequent flyer program -- trying to book a Chicago-Dublin-Edinburgh Aer Lingus itinerary for my daughter’s graduation from University of St Andrews next month. I’ve been pretty <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/08/26/podcast-116-traveling-thru-japan-luggage-trends/\">vocal</a> about my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">challenges</a> with Avios over the years. In this go-around, the first wackiness was just trying to use the Avios website. To search for flights, you need to log in with your BA, Iberia, or Aer Lingus credentials. I try with all three; and fail with all three. Seems that the passwords given out by BA and Iberia don’t meet Avios’ security rules, so they fail. I assumed the username for my Aer Lingus account was my email address and the password seemed strong enough, but that kept failing too. Finally, after digging around my Aer Lingus profile, I found a separate username, which I’d never seen or used before, and <em>that</em> worked. Finally through the gate and onto the second wackiness -- the difference between the value of an Avios point on the Aer Lingus and Avios web sites. The award offers on both sites were points + cash. Taking the “market rate” for the ticket (pulled from Expedia), subtracting out the required cash payment, and dividing by the number of required Avios points gives the value of the Avios point for that award offer. My rule of thumb is -- get at least 2 cents/point or pay cash. The Aer Lingus site valued an Avios point at 0.7 cents while the Avios site hit my 2-cent minimum. I couldn’t quite understand that 65% difference, but I booked our tickets on the wonkier Avios site before it went away. If I remember anything from my University of Chicago business school courses, it’s that markets are efficient; 65% price differences don’t last forever. Though in this case, that difference may linger because the Avios website makes it so damn hard to find. </li><li>Bridge Music — <em>Lakeside Jam</em> by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/55998 </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Veteran TravelCommons listener Mika Pyyhkala sent in a note this week talking about his great experience with a flight rebooking service, <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Freebird (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"http://getfreebird.com\" target=\"_blank\">Freebird</a>. Mika writes:<ul><li>I was flying with a companion from (Wichita) ICT-STL and STL-DTW. &nbsp;Just as the plane was descending to DTW, I received text messages from WN and Freebird that STL-DTW on WN had been cancelled. &nbsp;Freebird then manually advised that the only flight for that day was a DL STL-DTW, and they were going to book it in case I wanted it; if they waited longer there might not be enough time to issue the new ticket on Delta through their travel agent. &nbsp;They just asked me to confirm that I in fact wanted the Delta ticket.  </li><li>I confirmed we wanted the 2 Delta tickets, and by the time the door opened in STL we had a confirmation number to check in for the Delta flight leaving in 47 minutes. We got seats together on the Delta flight that were assigned by the Freebird process, and they even gave us free drinks!</li><li>I think we actually arrived in DTW a few minutes earlier than we were scheduled on the original flight, and it made for a great travel story and adventure! &nbsp;This was my first time using Freebird as well!</li><li>It costs $19 to protect a one way trip per traveler. &nbsp;It’s simple to work with them: unlike insurance, there are no claim forms, long waits, or papers to sign</li></ul></li><li>Mika, thanks for this. I hadn’t heard of Freebird before Mika’s note. Hitting their website, they’re selling their service to companies, travel agencies, and to individual travelers. Clicking through to a TechCrunch article about them, it says they’re also talking to Amex and Citibank about including Freebird as a credit card benefit. The article quotes the CEO, Ethan Bernstein - “It’s funny what happens when people deal with uncertainty; uncertainty is the worst. As soon you give people information, human support and technology to help them solve their problems, they experience the event so much differently.” &nbsp;Which is exactly right. Certainty lets you plan; uncertainty just leaves you to stew… and drink at the airport bar… and eat bad airport food… and bitch Tweet. Yup, uncertainty leads to lots of bad things</li><li>One more-fun-than-necessarily-good thing on last month’s trip was getting to try out an alpha version of a new augmented reality feature for Google Maps. I used it first in Stockholm; we got off the Arlanda Express at the Central Train station and wanted make our way over to the <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Östermalms Saluhall (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.ostermalmshallen.se/en/\" target=\"_blank\">Östermalms Saluhall</a> for lunch. When I chose “Walking” as our transport mode, a “Start AR” button showed up next to the usual button to start the directions. With AR, I’d hold my phone up, the display would use the camera to show the streetscape in front of me with the &nbsp;directions -- street names, arrows -- overlaid on the real-time image. I thought it was a nice add; reduced any ambiguity about where the next turn was. One interesting feature -- when I started walking, the screen dimmed and a message popped up telling me to stop looking at the phone and look straight ahead. All in all, it’s kinda fun. At least I thought so; Andrew and Irene seemed much less impressed. It worked very well for what was billed as an alpha product. It’ll be interesting to see how it develops, and how fast Google rolls it out.</li><li>But even without a broader AR roll-out, Google Maps seems on track to become the next “<a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"super app (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://skift.com/2019/04/16/google-maps-is-ready-to-transform-the-world-of-superapps-a-skift-deep-dive/\" target=\"_blank\">super app</a>” -- sorta the Western counterpart to China’s WeChat -- the first “super app”, a Swiss Army Knife-kind of “it does everything” app. Now Google Maps isn’t to that level -- yet -- but it is growing. It started as a mapping app, then added driving directions, then ride share -- showing Uber and Lyft prices, then public transit directions with real-time arrival times, replacing the core use case for apps like Transit. Then the “Explore Nearby” became more prominent -- which, for me, has supplanted Yelp when looking for a restaurant because it’s so much more convenient, and with deep links to OpenTable for reservations; and for nearby hotels, direct booking links to Expedia and Booking.com. I wasn’t surprised when I saw a stat that those “Near Me” searches grew 150 percent the last year. I’m not quite sure what I think about this -- loving a free service that keeps becoming more valuable vs. becoming more enslaved to the Google overlords. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/08/27/podcast-132-travel-apps-on-my-phone/\">episode #132</a>, I listed all the travel apps on my smartphone, and Google Maps was the most important -- “Indeed, it’s the only travel app with its own screen real estate rather than sharing space in the Travel folder,” I said. And it only keeps getting more indispensable.</li><li>Thinking back to our last day in Paris when both Ubers that we ordered were nice black Mercedes, I couldn’t help thinking how the quality of US Uber and Lyft vehicles has slipped. I remember when I started using Uber in 4-5 years ago, the cars were pristine. I remember working in Baltimore one summer; I was more than happy to wait 5 minutes for an Uber rather than take one of the cabs waiting at the stand right outside the building I was in. Those cabs were so beat up, so full of trash, and most of the time, without working air conditioning. Today, cabs haven’t gotten much cleaner, but Uber and Lyft seem to be lowering their standards. I dunno if it’s because of falling unemployment rates or trying to keep up with growth or squeezing driver pay to improve their post-IPO margins -- or all of the above -- but I’m seeing a real drop in quality.</li><li>Long-time TravelCommons listeners will recall that I’ve spent a lot of time in New Orleans airport and other than serving beer in go cups French Quarter-style so you can walk around the terminal with it, there’s not much good to say about it. Especially with regards to food and restaurants. For such a great food town to have such mediocre airport concessions has always been beyond me. But then again, the original terminal was built in 1959, and then expanded in the mid-70’s and mid-90’s. The new $1 billion replacement terminal was originally scheduled to open last year during New Orleans’ tricentennial, but that then slipped to February of this year, then to May, and now to a “to be determined” date sometime in the fall. The restaurant selection is supposed to be much better but I hope they don’t change that beer policy though. One time, waiting out yet another thunderstorm delay, I’d bought a beer and was standing by the gate drinking it because the bar was full. American called boarding and I walked up to the gate. The agent stopped me -- “You can drink that beer anywhere in the airport -- except on the jetway.” I looked down; I’d forgotten that I was still carrying that beer. I stepped to the side, chugged it, and then got on the plane. Felt like a very New Orleans thing to do.</li><li> And if you have any travel rants, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. &nbsp;The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Facebook page</a> or our Instagram account at <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Travelcommons</a> -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music —  <em>A Thousand And None</em> by Speck (c) copyright 2018 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/speck/57256 Ft: Mr_Yesterday</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Traveler Data Leaks</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Interview with <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mylaocoon\">Candid Wueest</a>, Principal Threat Researcher at Symantec and author of a blog post titled <a href=\"https://www.symantec.com/blogs/threat-intelligence/hotel-websites-leak-guest-data\"><em>Two in Three Hotel Websites Leak Guest Booking Details and Allow Access to Personal Data</em></a></li><li>Bridge Music —  <em>dazed </em>by Jeris (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/VJ_Memes/39456 Ft: airtone</li><li></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Brittany Street Food</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I’ll write a proper “Road Trip” post about our Brittany trip later this spring, after we get settled in the new digs, but after streaming a few episodes of Netflix’s “Street Food” series, I started thinking about some of the Breton street food we enjoyed while touring last month. If you’ve seen any of the Netflix series, you know that it’s more about the vendors than the food. But my French trails off after “oui,” “non,” “merci,” and “S\'il vous plaît” so I wasn’t able to get much of the vendor’s life stories. So this will be all about the food.</li><li>The first place we stayed was <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancale\">Cancale</a>, and we went there for one reason - oysters. Like people have been doing for 300-some odd years. When the tide is out, you can see miles of oyster beds with big farm tractors moving through the rows, hauling out trailers of oysters. Lining the ramp where the tractors drive up out of the beds is a little oyster market -- 8 stalls selling oysters fresh from the beds for €5-6/dozen. After adding another couple of euros for shucking, a half lemon and the use of a plastic platter, we’d have our afternoon snack -- sitting on the sea wall by the market, slurping through a couple dozen very briny oysters while watching the tractors work, and then pitching the empty shells back onto the beach for the seagulls to pick through. Our first afternoon, we only had a couple of cans of beer in our jacket pocket. The next couple of afternoons, we’d pour a nice white wine into some empty Evian bottles (Claire and I preferred a Sancerre) and make sure we had a good supply of wet wipes. We didn’t miss an afternoon on that sea wall while in Cancale.</li><li>Buckwheat is a big thing in Brittany. It’s been grown in Brittany for half a millennium or more, and for almost that long, it seems, has been turned into a <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galette\">galette</a>. a buckwheat crêpe. But a crêpe in form and shape only. Instead of a soft white wheat flour crêpe filled with jam or Nutella, the galette is crisper/firmer and savory. Fine on its own smeared with Breton butter, or with egg and cheese and ham inside. We got into Concarneau, on the southwest coast of Brittany about an hour before the weekly Friday outdoor market closed. &nbsp;I counted a half-dozen galette trucks. We walked up to the closest one. The cook was finishing up what looked like a weekend’s worth of galettes for the person in front of us -- flipping them, then pulling them off two hot metal disks, buttering them, and adding them to the stack. It was Friday in Lent, so I went for the egg, onion, and cheese galette. The creaminess of the cheese played nicely against the nutty graininess of the buckwheat.</li><li>The next day we drove to Rennes, our last stop in Brittany. We dropped the rental car at the train station and took the subway to Place des Lices for the huge Saturday market. We walked down from the subway station, through the fruit and vegetable stands lining the street -- beautiful stuff, but we’re leaving the next day, so we’re not doing a lot of green grocery shopping. There, between the two market halls, is a collection of food trucks; about 70% of them selling what we were looking for -- <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galette-saucisse\">galette-saucisse</a> -- the classic Breton street food that is pretty much what the straight translation from French to English suggests -- a sausage in a galette. Kinda like a Breton hot dog, it’s a cooked pork sausage wrapped in a cool galette, maybe with some grilled onions and dijon mustard added. There were lines tailing back from all the trucks serving these. A local guy pointed one truck out to Irene -- “They’re the best”, he said. She and Claire stood in queue while Andrew and I searched for drinks. Around the corner, we found a local cider maker; a couple of tables surrounded by crates of cider bottles. Through a mangled bit of Franglais, we bought a bottle of dry cider that had stayed cool in the shade and four cups, and got back to the food truck line just in time to be handed my galette-saucisse. After finishing the sausage and cider, I swung past the cider stand to give him the empty bottle -- kinda in-person recycling. There wasn’t much time to catch up on his life story, but it was a sunny Saturday and he had a full line; looked like he was having a good day.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #151</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_151.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<p><!--EndFragment--></p>\n<p></p>','Podcast #151 — Traveler Data Leaks; Brittany Street Food','','inherit','closed','closed','','2436-revision-v1','','','2019-05-07 22:21:53','2019-05-08 03:21:53','',2436,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/2436-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2461,1,'2019-05-07 22:30:56','2019-05-08 03:30:56','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><img class=\"wp-image-2439\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/oysters_and_evian_bottles-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" />\n<figcaption>Cancale Oysters with a nice Evian Sancerre</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p>Squeezing in another episode before moving the TravelCommons studios, we talk with <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mylaocoon\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Candid Wueest</span></a> of Symantec about websites that leak traveler data and what we can do to protect ourselves. I talk about yet more frustration with the <a href=\"http://avios.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Avios</a> frequent flyer program, while a listener writes in about his great experience with <a href=\"https://www.getfreebird.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Freebird</a>, a new flight rebooking service. I wrap up talking about great street food we had while touring Brittany, France last month. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_151.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/617322609&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"&gt;&lt;/iframe>\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #151: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, for the last time…. Not the last time for TravelCommons, just the last time for the studios “outside of Chicago”. We’re picking up stakes and moving about 20 miles east-northeast to Chicago’s Lakeview neighborhood. Hence the reason for the short-cycle on this episode. We’ll be breaking down and packing up the studio and production bay next week and probably won’t have everything reassembled until the end of the month. The recording isn’t really the issue -- I could always go back to my roots and find a spare bathroom to record in. It’s more about the production. I’m not sure I want to shrink my workflow down from a beefy dual 22-inch monitor Windows 10 mini-tower rig to my 2014 vintage 11-inch MacBook Air.</li><li>Being consumed by the move logistics vortex also means I haven’t done any real travel in the 2 weeks since the last episode -- but, given my most recent travel experiences, as laid out in last episode’s <em>Travel Interruptus</em> epic, I’ve appreciated the break. Especially when yet another yet another April snowstorm that blew up 700 flights last weekend. Instead, I’ve been wrestling once again with Avios -- the British Airways, Iberia, and now Aer Lingus frequent flyer program -- trying to book a Chicago-Dublin-Edinburgh Aer Lingus itinerary for my daughter’s graduation from University of St Andrews next month. I’ve been pretty <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/08/26/podcast-116-traveling-thru-japan-luggage-trends/\">vocal</a> about my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">challenges</a> with Avios over the years. In this go-around, the first wackiness was just trying to use the Avios website. To search for flights, you need to log in with your BA, Iberia, or Aer Lingus credentials. I try with all three; and fail with all three. Seems that the passwords given out by BA and Iberia don’t meet Avios’ security rules, so they fail. I assumed the username for my Aer Lingus account was my email address and the password seemed strong enough, but that kept failing too. Finally, after digging around my Aer Lingus profile, I found a separate username, which I’d never seen or used before, and <em>that</em> worked. Finally through the gate and onto the second wackiness -- the difference between the value of an Avios point on the Aer Lingus and Avios web sites. The award offers on both sites were points + cash. Taking the “market rate” for the ticket (pulled from Expedia), subtracting out the required cash payment, and dividing by the number of required Avios points gives the value of the Avios point for that award offer. My rule of thumb is -- get at least 2 cents/point or pay cash. The Aer Lingus site valued an Avios point at 0.7 cents while the Avios site hit my 2-cent minimum. I couldn’t quite understand that 65% difference, but I booked our tickets on the wonkier Avios site before it went away. If I remember anything from my University of Chicago business school courses, it’s that markets are efficient; 65% price differences don’t last forever. Though in this case, that difference may linger because the Avios website makes it so damn hard to find. </li><li>Bridge Music — <em>Lakeside Jam</em> by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/55998 </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Veteran TravelCommons listener Mika Pyyhkala sent in a note this week talking about his great experience with a flight rebooking service, <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Freebird (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"http://getfreebird.com\" target=\"_blank\">Freebird</a>. Mika writes:<ul><li>I was flying with a companion from (Wichita) ICT-STL and STL-DTW. &nbsp;Just as the plane was descending to DTW, I received text messages from WN and Freebird that STL-DTW on WN had been cancelled. &nbsp;Freebird then manually advised that the only flight for that day was a DL STL-DTW, and they were going to book it in case I wanted it; if they waited longer there might not be enough time to issue the new ticket on Delta through their travel agent. &nbsp;They just asked me to confirm that I in fact wanted the Delta ticket.  </li><li>I confirmed we wanted the 2 Delta tickets, and by the time the door opened in STL we had a confirmation number to check in for the Delta flight leaving in 47 minutes. We got seats together on the Delta flight that were assigned by the Freebird process, and they even gave us free drinks!</li><li>I think we actually arrived in DTW a few minutes earlier than we were scheduled on the original flight, and it made for a great travel story and adventure! &nbsp;This was my first time using Freebird as well!</li><li>It costs $19 to protect a one way trip per traveler. &nbsp;It’s simple to work with them: unlike insurance, there are no claim forms, long waits, or papers to sign</li></ul></li><li>Mika, thanks for this. I hadn’t heard of Freebird before Mika’s note. Hitting their website, they’re selling their service to companies, travel agencies, and to individual travelers. Clicking through to a TechCrunch article about them, it says they’re also talking to Amex and Citibank about including Freebird as a credit card benefit. The article quotes the CEO, Ethan Bernstein - “It’s funny what happens when people deal with uncertainty; uncertainty is the worst. As soon you give people information, human support and technology to help them solve their problems, they experience the event so much differently.” &nbsp;Which is exactly right. Certainty lets you plan; uncertainty just leaves you to stew… and drink at the airport bar… and eat bad airport food… and bitch Tweet. Yup, uncertainty leads to lots of bad things</li><li>One more-fun-than-necessarily-good thing on last month’s trip was getting to try out an alpha version of a new augmented reality feature for Google Maps. I used it first in Stockholm; we got off the Arlanda Express at the Central Train station and wanted make our way over to the <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Östermalms Saluhall (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.ostermalmshallen.se/en/\" target=\"_blank\">Östermalms Saluhall</a> for lunch. When I chose “Walking” as our transport mode, a “Start AR” button showed up next to the usual button to start the directions. With AR, I’d hold my phone up, the display would use the camera to show the streetscape in front of me with the &nbsp;directions -- street names, arrows -- overlaid on the real-time image. I thought it was a nice add; reduced any ambiguity about where the next turn was. One interesting feature -- when I started walking, the screen dimmed and a message popped up telling me to stop looking at the phone and look straight ahead. All in all, it’s kinda fun. At least I thought so; Andrew and Irene seemed much less impressed. It worked very well for what was billed as an alpha product. It’ll be interesting to see how it develops, and how fast Google rolls it out.</li><li>But even without a broader AR roll-out, Google Maps seems on track to become the next “<a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"super app (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://skift.com/2019/04/16/google-maps-is-ready-to-transform-the-world-of-superapps-a-skift-deep-dive/\" target=\"_blank\">super app</a>” -- sorta the Western counterpart to China’s WeChat -- the first “super app”, a Swiss Army Knife-kind of “it does everything” app. Now Google Maps isn’t to that level -- yet -- but it is growing. It started as a mapping app, then added driving directions, then ride share -- showing Uber and Lyft prices, then public transit directions with real-time arrival times, replacing the core use case for apps like Transit. Then the “Explore Nearby” became more prominent -- which, for me, has supplanted Yelp when looking for a restaurant because it’s so much more convenient, and with deep links to OpenTable for reservations; and for nearby hotels, direct booking links to Expedia and Booking.com. I wasn’t surprised when I saw a stat that those “Near Me” searches grew 150 percent the last year. I’m not quite sure what I think about this -- loving a free service that keeps becoming more valuable vs. becoming more enslaved to the Google overlords. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/08/27/podcast-132-travel-apps-on-my-phone/\">episode #132</a>, I listed all the travel apps on my smartphone, and Google Maps was the most important -- “Indeed, it’s the only travel app with its own screen real estate rather than sharing space in the Travel folder,” I said. And it only keeps getting more indispensable.</li><li>Thinking back to our last day in Paris when both Ubers that we ordered were nice black Mercedes, I couldn’t help thinking how the quality of US Uber and Lyft vehicles has slipped. I remember when I started using Uber in 4-5 years ago, the cars were pristine. I remember working in Baltimore one summer; I was more than happy to wait 5 minutes for an Uber rather than take one of the cabs waiting at the stand right outside the building I was in. Those cabs were so beat up, so full of trash, and most of the time, without working air conditioning. Today, cabs haven’t gotten much cleaner, but Uber and Lyft seem to be lowering their standards. I dunno if it’s because of falling unemployment rates or trying to keep up with growth or squeezing driver pay to improve their post-IPO margins -- or all of the above -- but I’m seeing a real drop in quality.</li><li>Long-time TravelCommons listeners will recall that I’ve spent a lot of time in New Orleans airport and other than serving beer in go cups French Quarter-style so you can walk around the terminal with it, there’s not much good to say about it. Especially with regards to food and restaurants. For such a great food town to have such mediocre airport concessions has always been beyond me. But then again, the original terminal was built in 1959, and then expanded in the mid-70’s and mid-90’s. The new $1 billion replacement terminal was originally scheduled to open last year during New Orleans’ tricentennial, but that then slipped to February of this year, then to May, and now to a “to be determined” date sometime in the fall. The restaurant selection is supposed to be much better but I hope they don’t change that beer policy though. One time, waiting out yet another thunderstorm delay, I’d bought a beer and was standing by the gate drinking it because the bar was full. American called boarding and I walked up to the gate. The agent stopped me -- “You can drink that beer anywhere in the airport -- except on the jetway.” I looked down; I’d forgotten that I was still carrying that beer. I stepped to the side, chugged it, and then got on the plane. Felt like a very New Orleans thing to do.</li><li> And if you have any travel rants, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. &nbsp;The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Facebook page</a> or our Instagram account at <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Travelcommons</a> -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music —  <em>A Thousand And None</em> by Speck (c) copyright 2018 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/speck/57256 Ft: Mr_Yesterday</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Traveler Data Leaks</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Interview with <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mylaocoon\">Candid Wueest</a>, Principal Threat Researcher at Symantec and author of a blog post titled <a href=\"https://www.symantec.com/blogs/threat-intelligence/hotel-websites-leak-guest-data\"><em>Two in Three Hotel Websites Leak Guest Booking Details and Allow Access to Personal Data</em></a></li><li>Bridge Music —  <em>dazed </em>by Jeris (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/VJ_Memes/39456 Ft: airtone</li><li></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Brittany Street Food</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I’ll write a proper “Road Trip” post about our Brittany trip later this spring, after we get settled in the new digs, but after streaming a few episodes of Netflix’s “Street Food” series, I started thinking about some of the Breton street food we enjoyed while touring last month. If you’ve seen any of the Netflix series, you know that it’s more about the vendors than the food. But my French trails off after “oui,” “non,” “merci,” and “S\'il vous plaît” so I wasn’t able to get much of the vendor’s life stories. So this will be all about the food.</li><li>The first place we stayed was <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancale\">Cancale</a>, and we went there for one reason - oysters. Like people have been doing for 300-some odd years. When the tide is out, you can see miles of oyster beds with big farm tractors moving through the rows, hauling out trailers of oysters. Lining the ramp where the tractors drive up out of the beds is a little oyster market -- 8 stalls selling oysters fresh from the beds for €5-6/dozen. After adding another couple of euros for shucking, a half lemon and the use of a plastic platter, we’d have our afternoon snack -- sitting on the sea wall by the market, slurping through a couple dozen very briny oysters while watching the tractors work, and then pitching the empty shells back onto the beach for the seagulls to pick through. Our first afternoon, we only had a couple of cans of beer in our jacket pocket. The next couple of afternoons, we’d pour a nice white wine into some empty Evian bottles (Claire and I preferred a Sancerre) and make sure we had a good supply of wet wipes. We didn’t miss an afternoon on that sea wall while in Cancale.</li><li>Buckwheat is a big thing in Brittany. It’s been grown in Brittany for half a millennium or more, and for almost that long, it seems, has been turned into a <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galette\">galette</a>. a buckwheat crêpe. But a crêpe in form and shape only. Instead of a soft white wheat flour crêpe filled with jam or Nutella, the galette is crisper/firmer and savory. Fine on its own smeared with Breton butter, or with egg and cheese and ham inside. We got into Concarneau, on the southwest coast of Brittany about an hour before the weekly Friday outdoor market closed. &nbsp;I counted a half-dozen galette trucks. We walked up to the closest one. The cook was finishing up what looked like a weekend’s worth of galettes for the person in front of us -- flipping them, then pulling them off two hot metal disks, buttering them, and adding them to the stack. It was Friday in Lent, so I went for the egg, onion, and cheese galette. The creaminess of the cheese played nicely against the nutty graininess of the buckwheat.</li><li>The next day we drove to Rennes, our last stop in Brittany. We dropped the rental car at the train station and took the subway to Place des Lices for the huge Saturday market. We walked down from the subway station, through the fruit and vegetable stands lining the street -- beautiful stuff, but we’re leaving the next day, so we’re not doing a lot of green grocery shopping. There, between the two market halls, is a collection of food trucks; about 70% of them selling what we were looking for -- <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galette-saucisse\">galette-saucisse</a> -- the classic Breton street food that is pretty much what the straight translation from French to English suggests -- a sausage in a galette. Kinda like a Breton hot dog, it’s a cooked pork sausage wrapped in a cool galette, maybe with some grilled onions and dijon mustard added. There were lines tailing back from all the trucks serving these. A local guy pointed one truck out to Irene -- “They’re the best”, he said. She and Claire stood in queue while Andrew and I searched for drinks. Around the corner, we found a local cider maker; a couple of tables surrounded by crates of cider bottles. Through a mangled bit of Franglais, we bought a bottle of dry cider that had stayed cool in the shade and four cups, and got back to the food truck line just in time to be handed my galette-saucisse. After finishing the sausage and cider, I swung past the cider stand to give him the empty bottle -- kinda in-person recycling. There wasn’t much time to catch up on his life story, but it was a sunny Saturday and he had a full line; looked like he was having a good day.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #151</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_151.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<p><!--EndFragment--></p>\n<p></p>','Podcast #151 — Traveler Data Leaks; Brittany Street Food','','inherit','closed','closed','','2436-revision-v1','','','2019-05-07 22:30:56','2019-05-08 03:30:56','',2436,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/2436-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2462,1,'2019-05-07 22:36:53','2019-05-08 03:36:53','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><img class=\"wp-image-2439\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/oysters_and_evian_bottles-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" />\n<figcaption>Cancale Oysters with a nice Evian Sancerre</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p>Squeezing in another episode before moving the TravelCommons studios, we talk with <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mylaocoon\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Candid Wueest</span></a> of Symantec about websites that leak traveler data and what we can do to protect ourselves. I talk about yet more frustration with the <a href=\"http://avios.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Avios</a> frequent flyer program, while a listener writes in about his great experience with <a href=\"https://www.getfreebird.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Freebird</a>, a new flight rebooking service. I wrap up talking about great street food we had while touring Brittany, France last month. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_151.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/617322609&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"&gt;&lt;/iframe>\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #151: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, for the last time…. Not the last time for TravelCommons, just the last time for the studios “outside of Chicago”. We’re picking up stakes and moving about 20 miles east-northeast to Chicago’s Lakeview neighborhood. Hence the reason for the short-cycle on this episode. We’ll be breaking down and packing up the studio and production bay next week and probably won’t have everything reassembled until the end of the month. The recording isn’t really the issue -- I could always go back to my roots and find a spare bathroom to record in. It’s more about the production. I’m not sure I want to shrink my workflow down from a beefy dual 22-inch monitor Windows 10 mini-tower rig to my 2014 vintage 11-inch MacBook Air.</li><li>Being consumed by the move logistics vortex also means I haven’t done any real travel in the 2 weeks since the last episode -- but, given my most recent travel experiences, as laid out in last episode’s <em>Travel Interruptus</em> epic, I’ve appreciated the break. Especially when yet another yet another April snowstorm that blew up 700 flights last weekend. Instead, I’ve been wrestling once again with Avios -- the British Airways, Iberia, and now Aer Lingus frequent flyer program -- trying to book a Chicago-Dublin-Edinburgh Aer Lingus itinerary for my daughter’s graduation from University of St Andrews next month. I’ve been pretty <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/08/26/podcast-116-traveling-thru-japan-luggage-trends/\">vocal</a> about my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">challenges</a> with Avios over the years. In this go-around, the first wackiness was just trying to use the Avios website. To search for flights, you need to log in with your BA, Iberia, or Aer Lingus credentials. I try with all three; and fail with all three. Seems that the passwords given out by BA and Iberia don’t meet Avios’ security rules, so they fail. I assumed the username for my Aer Lingus account was my email address and the password seemed strong enough, but that kept failing too. Finally, after digging around my Aer Lingus profile, I found a separate username, which I’d never seen or used before, and <em>that</em> worked. Finally through the gate and onto the second wackiness -- the difference between the value of an Avios point on the Aer Lingus and Avios web sites. The award offers on both sites were points + cash. Taking the “market rate” for the ticket (pulled from Expedia), subtracting out the required cash payment, and dividing by the number of required Avios points gives the value of the Avios point for that award offer. My rule of thumb is -- get at least 2 cents/point or pay cash. The Aer Lingus site valued an Avios point at 0.7 cents while the Avios site hit my 2-cent minimum. I couldn’t quite understand that 65% difference, but I booked our tickets on the wonkier Avios site before it went away. If I remember anything from my University of Chicago business school courses, it’s that markets are efficient; 65% price differences don’t last forever. Though in this case, that difference may linger because the Avios website makes it so damn hard to find. </li><li>Bridge Music — <em>Lakeside Jam</em> by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/55998 </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Veteran TravelCommons listener Mika Pyyhkala sent in a note this week talking about his great experience with a flight rebooking service, <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Freebird (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"http://getfreebird.com\" target=\"_blank\">Freebird</a>. Mika writes:<ul><li>I was flying with a companion from (Wichita) ICT-STL and STL-DTW.  Just as the plane was descending to DTW, I received text messages from WN and Freebird that STL-DTW on WN had been cancelled.  Freebird then manually advised that the only flight for that day was a DL STL-DTW, and they were going to book it in case I wanted it; if they waited longer there might not be enough time to issue the new ticket on Delta through their travel agent.  They just asked me to confirm that I in fact wanted the Delta ticket.  </li><li>I confirmed we wanted the 2 Delta tickets, and by the time the door opened in STL we had a confirmation number to check in for the Delta flight leaving in 47 minutes. We got seats together on the Delta flight that were assigned by the Freebird process, and they even gave us free drinks!</li><li>I think we actually arrived in DTW a few minutes earlier than we were scheduled on the original flight, and it made for a great travel story and adventure!  This was my first time using Freebird as well!</li><li>It costs $19 to protect a one way trip per traveler.  It’s simple to work with them: unlike insurance, there are no claim forms, long waits, or papers to sign</li></ul></li><li>Mika, thanks for this. I hadn’t heard of Freebird before Mika’s note. Hitting their website, they’re selling their service to companies, travel agencies, and to individual travelers. Clicking through to a TechCrunch article about them, it says they’re also talking to Amex and Citibank about including Freebird as a credit card benefit. The article quotes the CEO, Ethan Bernstein - “It’s funny what happens when people deal with uncertainty; uncertainty is the worst. As soon you give people information, human support and technology to help them solve their problems, they experience the event so much differently.”  Which is exactly right. Certainty lets you plan; uncertainty just leaves you to stew… and drink at the airport bar… and eat bad airport food… and bitch Tweet. Yup, uncertainty leads to lots of bad things</li><li>One more-fun-than-necessarily-good thing on last month’s trip was getting to try out an alpha version of a new augmented reality feature for Google Maps. I used it first in Stockholm; we got off the Arlanda Express at the Central Train station and wanted make our way over to the <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Östermalms Saluhall (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.ostermalmshallen.se/en/\" target=\"_blank\">Östermalms Saluhall</a> for lunch. When I chose “Walking” as our transport mode, a “Start AR” button showed up next to the usual button to start the directions. With AR, I’d hold my phone up, the display would use the camera to show the streetscape in front of me with the  directions -- street names, arrows -- overlaid on the real-time image. I thought it was a nice add; reduced any ambiguity about where the next turn was. One interesting feature -- when I started walking, the screen dimmed and a message popped up telling me to stop looking at the phone and look straight ahead. All in all, it’s kinda fun. At least I thought so; Andrew and Irene seemed much less impressed. It worked very well for what was billed as an alpha product. It’ll be interesting to see how it develops, and how fast Google rolls it out.</li><li>But even without a broader AR roll-out, Google Maps seems on track to become the next “<a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"super app (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://skift.com/2019/04/16/google-maps-is-ready-to-transform-the-world-of-superapps-a-skift-deep-dive/\" target=\"_blank\">super app</a>” -- sorta the Western counterpart to China’s WeChat -- the first “super app”, a Swiss Army Knife-kind of “it does everything” app. Now Google Maps isn’t to that level -- yet -- but it is growing. It started as a mapping app, then added driving directions, then ride share -- showing Uber and Lyft prices, then public transit directions with real-time arrival times, replacing the core use case for apps like Transit. Then the “Explore Nearby” became more prominent -- which, for me, has supplanted Yelp when looking for a restaurant because it’s so much more convenient, and with deep links to OpenTable for reservations; and for nearby hotels, direct booking links to Expedia and Booking.com. I wasn’t surprised when I saw a stat that those “Near Me” searches grew 150 percent the last year. I’m not quite sure what I think about this -- loving a free service that keeps becoming more valuable vs. becoming more enslaved to the Google overlords. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/08/27/podcast-132-travel-apps-on-my-phone/\">episode #132</a>, I listed all the travel apps on my smartphone, and Google Maps was the most important -- “Indeed, it’s the only travel app with its own screen real estate rather than sharing space in the Travel folder,” I said. And it only keeps getting more indispensable.</li><li>Thinking back to our last day in Paris when both Ubers that we ordered were nice black Mercedes, I couldn’t help thinking how the quality of US Uber and Lyft vehicles has slipped. I remember when I started using Uber in 4-5 years ago, the cars were pristine. I remember working in Baltimore one summer; I was more than happy to wait 5 minutes for an Uber rather than take one of the cabs waiting at the stand right outside the building I was in. Those cabs were so beat up, so full of trash, and most of the time, without working air conditioning. Today, cabs haven’t gotten much cleaner, but Uber and Lyft seem to be lowering their standards. I dunno if it’s because of falling unemployment rates or trying to keep up with growth or squeezing driver pay to improve their post-IPO margins -- or all of the above -- but I’m seeing a real drop in quality.</li><li>Long-time TravelCommons listeners will recall that I’ve spent a lot of time in New Orleans airport and other than serving beer in go cups French Quarter-style so you can walk around the terminal with it, there’s not much good to say about it. Especially with regards to food and restaurants. For such a great food town to have such mediocre airport concessions has always been beyond me. But then again, the original terminal was built in 1959, and then expanded in the mid-70’s and mid-90’s. The new $1 billion replacement terminal was originally scheduled to open last year during New Orleans’ tricentennial, but that then slipped to February of this year, then to May, and now to a “to be determined” date sometime in the fall. The restaurant selection is supposed to be much better but I hope they don’t change that beer policy though. One time, waiting out yet another thunderstorm delay, I’d bought a beer and was standing by the gate drinking it because the bar was full. American called boarding and I walked up to the gate. The agent stopped me -- “You can drink that beer anywhere in the airport -- except on the jetway.” I looked down; I’d forgotten that I was still carrying that beer. I stepped to the side, chugged it, and then got on the plane. Felt like a very New Orleans thing to do.</li><li>And if you have any travel rants, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Facebook page</a> or our Instagram account at <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Travelcommons</a> -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music —  <em>A Thousand And None</em> by Speck (c) copyright 2018 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/speck/57256 Ft: Mr_Yesterday</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Traveler Data Leaks</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Interview with <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mylaocoon\">Candid Wueest</a>, Principal Threat Researcher at Symantec and author of a blog post titled <a href=\"https://www.symantec.com/blogs/threat-intelligence/hotel-websites-leak-guest-data\"><em>Two in Three Hotel Websites Leak Guest Booking Details and Allow Access to Personal Data</em></a></li><li>Bridge Music —  <em>dazed </em>by Jeris (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/VJ_Memes/39456 Ft: airtone</li><li></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Brittany Street Food</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I’ll write a proper “Road Trip” post about our Brittany trip later this spring, after we get settled in the new digs, but after streaming a few episodes of Netflix’s “Street Food” series, I started thinking about some of the Breton street food we enjoyed while touring last month. If you’ve seen any of the Netflix series, you know that it’s more about the vendors than the food. But my French trails off after “oui,” “non,” “merci,” and “S\'il vous plaît” so I wasn’t able to get much of the vendor’s life stories. So this will be all about the food.</li><li>The first place we stayed was <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancale\">Cancale</a>, and we went there for one reason - oysters. Like people have been doing for 300-some odd years. When the tide is out, you can see miles of oyster beds with big farm tractors moving through the rows, hauling out trailers of oysters. Lining the ramp where the tractors drive up out of the beds is a little oyster market -- 8 stalls selling oysters fresh from the beds for €5-6/dozen. After adding another couple of euros for shucking, a half lemon and the use of a plastic platter, we’d have our afternoon snack -- sitting on the sea wall by the market, slurping through a couple dozen very briny oysters while watching the tractors work, and then pitching the empty shells back onto the beach for the seagulls to pick through. Our first afternoon, we only had a couple of cans of beer in our jacket pocket. The next couple of afternoons, we’d pour a nice white wine into some empty Evian bottles (Claire and I preferred a Sancerre) and make sure we had a good supply of wet wipes. We didn’t miss an afternoon on that sea wall while in Cancale.</li><li>Buckwheat is a big thing in Brittany. It’s been grown in Brittany for half a millennium or more, and for almost that long, it seems, has been turned into a <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galette\">galette</a>. a buckwheat crêpe. But a crêpe in form and shape only. Instead of a soft white wheat flour crêpe filled with jam or Nutella, the galette is crisper/firmer and savory. Fine on its own smeared with Breton butter, or with egg and cheese and ham inside. We got into Concarneau, on the southwest coast of Brittany about an hour before the weekly Friday outdoor market closed. &nbsp;I counted a half-dozen galette trucks. We walked up to the closest one. The cook was finishing up what looked like a weekend’s worth of galettes for the person in front of us -- flipping them, then pulling them off two hot metal disks, buttering them, and adding them to the stack. It was Friday in Lent, so I went for the egg, onion, and cheese galette. The creaminess of the cheese played nicely against the nutty graininess of the buckwheat.</li><li>The next day we drove to Rennes, our last stop in Brittany. We dropped the rental car at the train station and took the subway to Place des Lices for the huge Saturday market. We walked down from the subway station, through the fruit and vegetable stands lining the street -- beautiful stuff, but we’re leaving the next day, so we’re not doing a lot of green grocery shopping. There, between the two market halls, is a collection of food trucks; about 70% of them selling what we were looking for -- <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galette-saucisse\">galette-saucisse</a> -- the classic Breton street food that is pretty much what the straight translation from French to English suggests -- a sausage in a galette. Kinda like a Breton hot dog, it’s a cooked pork sausage wrapped in a cool galette, maybe with some grilled onions and dijon mustard added. There were lines tailing back from all the trucks serving these. A local guy pointed one truck out to Irene -- “They’re the best”, he said. She and Claire stood in queue while Andrew and I searched for drinks. Around the corner, we found a local cider maker; a couple of tables surrounded by crates of cider bottles. Through a mangled bit of Franglais, we bought a bottle of dry cider that had stayed cool in the shade and four cups, and got back to the food truck line just in time to be handed my galette-saucisse. After finishing the sausage and cider, I swung past the cider stand to give him the empty bottle -- kinda in-person recycling. There wasn’t much time to catch up on his life story, but it was a sunny Saturday and he had a full line; looked like he was having a good day.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #151</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_151.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<p><!--EndFragment--></p>\n<p></p>','Podcast #151 — Traveler Data Leaks; Brittany Street Food','','inherit','closed','closed','','2436-revision-v1','','','2019-05-07 22:36:53','2019-05-08 03:36:53','',2436,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/2436-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2463,1,'2019-05-07 22:39:57','2019-05-08 03:39:57','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><img class=\"wp-image-2439\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/oysters_and_evian_bottles-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" />\n<figcaption>Cancale Oysters with a nice Evian Sancerre</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p>Squeezing in another episode before moving the TravelCommons studios, we talk with <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mylaocoon\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Candid Wueest</span></a> of Symantec about websites that leak traveler data and what we can do to protect ourselves. I talk about yet more frustration with the <a href=\"http://avios.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Avios</a> frequent flyer program, while a listener writes in about his great experience with <a href=\"https://www.getfreebird.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Freebird</a>, a new flight rebooking service. I wrap up talking about great street food we had while touring Brittany, France last month. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_151.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<p><iframe src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/617322609&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"></iframe></p>\n<p> </p>\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #151: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, for the last time…. Not the last time for TravelCommons, just the last time for the studios “outside of Chicago”. We’re picking up stakes and moving about 20 miles east-northeast to Chicago’s Lakeview neighborhood. Hence the reason for the short-cycle on this episode. We’ll be breaking down and packing up the studio and production bay next week and probably won’t have everything reassembled until the end of the month. The recording isn’t really the issue -- I could always go back to my roots and find a spare bathroom to record in. It’s more about the production. I’m not sure I want to shrink my workflow down from a beefy dual 22-inch monitor Windows 10 mini-tower rig to my 2014 vintage 11-inch MacBook Air.</li><li>Being consumed by the move logistics vortex also means I haven’t done any real travel in the 2 weeks since the last episode -- but, given my most recent travel experiences, as laid out in last episode’s <em>Travel Interruptus</em> epic, I’ve appreciated the break. Especially when yet another yet another April snowstorm that blew up 700 flights last weekend. Instead, I’ve been wrestling once again with Avios -- the British Airways, Iberia, and now Aer Lingus frequent flyer program -- trying to book a Chicago-Dublin-Edinburgh Aer Lingus itinerary for my daughter’s graduation from University of St Andrews next month. I’ve been pretty <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/08/26/podcast-116-traveling-thru-japan-luggage-trends/\">vocal</a> about my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">challenges</a> with Avios over the years. In this go-around, the first wackiness was just trying to use the Avios website. To search for flights, you need to log in with your BA, Iberia, or Aer Lingus credentials. I try with all three; and fail with all three. Seems that the passwords given out by BA and Iberia don’t meet Avios’ security rules, so they fail. I assumed the username for my Aer Lingus account was my email address and the password seemed strong enough, but that kept failing too. Finally, after digging around my Aer Lingus profile, I found a separate username, which I’d never seen or used before, and <em>that</em> worked. Finally through the gate and onto the second wackiness -- the difference between the value of an Avios point on the Aer Lingus and Avios web sites. The award offers on both sites were points + cash. Taking the “market rate” for the ticket (pulled from Expedia), subtracting out the required cash payment, and dividing by the number of required Avios points gives the value of the Avios point for that award offer. My rule of thumb is -- get at least 2 cents/point or pay cash. The Aer Lingus site valued an Avios point at 0.7 cents while the Avios site hit my 2-cent minimum. I couldn’t quite understand that 65% difference, but I booked our tickets on the wonkier Avios site before it went away. If I remember anything from my University of Chicago business school courses, it’s that markets are efficient; 65% price differences don’t last forever. Though in this case, that difference may linger because the Avios website makes it so damn hard to find. </li><li>Bridge Music — <em>Lakeside Jam</em> by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/55998 </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Veteran TravelCommons listener Mika Pyyhkala sent in a note this week talking about his great experience with a flight rebooking service, <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Freebird (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"http://getfreebird.com\" target=\"_blank\">Freebird</a>. Mika writes:<ul><li>I was flying with a companion from (Wichita) ICT-STL and STL-DTW. &nbsp;Just as the plane was descending to DTW, I received text messages from WN and Freebird that STL-DTW on WN had been cancelled. &nbsp;Freebird then manually advised that the only flight for that day was a DL STL-DTW, and they were going to book it in case I wanted it; if they waited longer there might not be enough time to issue the new ticket on Delta through their travel agent. &nbsp;They just asked me to confirm that I in fact wanted the Delta ticket.  </li><li>I confirmed we wanted the 2 Delta tickets, and by the time the door opened in STL we had a confirmation number to check in for the Delta flight leaving in 47 minutes. We got seats together on the Delta flight that were assigned by the Freebird process, and they even gave us free drinks!</li><li>I think we actually arrived in DTW a few minutes earlier than we were scheduled on the original flight, and it made for a great travel story and adventure! &nbsp;This was my first time using Freebird as well!</li><li>It costs $19 to protect a one way trip per traveler. &nbsp;It’s simple to work with them: unlike insurance, there are no claim forms, long waits, or papers to sign</li></ul></li><li>Mika, thanks for this. I hadn’t heard of Freebird before Mika’s note. Hitting their website, they’re selling their service to companies, travel agencies, and to individual travelers. Clicking through to a TechCrunch article about them, it says they’re also talking to Amex and Citibank about including Freebird as a credit card benefit. The article quotes the CEO, Ethan Bernstein - “It’s funny what happens when people deal with uncertainty; uncertainty is the worst. As soon you give people information, human support and technology to help them solve their problems, they experience the event so much differently.” &nbsp;Which is exactly right. Certainty lets you plan; uncertainty just leaves you to stew… and drink at the airport bar… and eat bad airport food… and bitch Tweet. Yup, uncertainty leads to lots of bad things</li><li>One more-fun-than-necessarily-good thing on last month’s trip was getting to try out an alpha version of a new augmented reality feature for Google Maps. I used it first in Stockholm; we got off the Arlanda Express at the Central Train station and wanted make our way over to the <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Östermalms Saluhall (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.ostermalmshallen.se/en/\" target=\"_blank\">Östermalms Saluhall</a> for lunch. When I chose “Walking” as our transport mode, a “Start AR” button showed up next to the usual button to start the directions. With AR, I’d hold my phone up, the display would use the camera to show the streetscape in front of me with the &nbsp;directions -- street names, arrows -- overlaid on the real-time image. I thought it was a nice add; reduced any ambiguity about where the next turn was. One interesting feature -- when I started walking, the screen dimmed and a message popped up telling me to stop looking at the phone and look straight ahead. All in all, it’s kinda fun. At least I thought so; Andrew and Irene seemed much less impressed. It worked very well for what was billed as an alpha product. It’ll be interesting to see how it develops, and how fast Google rolls it out.</li><li>But even without a broader AR roll-out, Google Maps seems on track to become the next “<a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"super app (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://skift.com/2019/04/16/google-maps-is-ready-to-transform-the-world-of-superapps-a-skift-deep-dive/\" target=\"_blank\">super app</a>” -- sorta the Western counterpart to China’s WeChat -- the first “super app”, a Swiss Army Knife-kind of “it does everything” app. Now Google Maps isn’t to that level -- yet -- but it is growing. It started as a mapping app, then added driving directions, then ride share -- showing Uber and Lyft prices, then public transit directions with real-time arrival times, replacing the core use case for apps like Transit. Then the “Explore Nearby” became more prominent -- which, for me, has supplanted Yelp when looking for a restaurant because it’s so much more convenient, and with deep links to OpenTable for reservations; and for nearby hotels, direct booking links to Expedia and Booking.com. I wasn’t surprised when I saw a stat that those “Near Me” searches grew 150 percent the last year. I’m not quite sure what I think about this -- loving a free service that keeps becoming more valuable vs. becoming more enslaved to the Google overlords. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/08/27/podcast-132-travel-apps-on-my-phone/\">episode #132</a>, I listed all the travel apps on my smartphone, and Google Maps was the most important -- “Indeed, it’s the only travel app with its own screen real estate rather than sharing space in the Travel folder,” I said. And it only keeps getting more indispensable.</li><li>Thinking back to our last day in Paris when both Ubers that we ordered were nice black Mercedes, I couldn’t help thinking how the quality of US Uber and Lyft vehicles has slipped. I remember when I started using Uber in 4-5 years ago, the cars were pristine. I remember working in Baltimore one summer; I was more than happy to wait 5 minutes for an Uber rather than take one of the cabs waiting at the stand right outside the building I was in. Those cabs were so beat up, so full of trash, and most of the time, without working air conditioning. Today, cabs haven’t gotten much cleaner, but Uber and Lyft seem to be lowering their standards. I dunno if it’s because of falling unemployment rates or trying to keep up with growth or squeezing driver pay to improve their post-IPO margins -- or all of the above -- but I’m seeing a real drop in quality.</li><li>Long-time TravelCommons listeners will recall that I’ve spent a lot of time in New Orleans airport and other than serving beer in go cups French Quarter-style so you can walk around the terminal with it, there’s not much good to say about it. Especially with regards to food and restaurants. For such a great food town to have such mediocre airport concessions has always been beyond me. But then again, the original terminal was built in 1959, and then expanded in the mid-70’s and mid-90’s. The new $1 billion replacement terminal was originally scheduled to open last year during New Orleans’ tricentennial, but that then slipped to February of this year, then to May, and now to a “to be determined” date sometime in the fall. The restaurant selection is supposed to be much better but I hope they don’t change that beer policy though. One time, waiting out yet another thunderstorm delay, I’d bought a beer and was standing by the gate drinking it because the bar was full. American called boarding and I walked up to the gate. The agent stopped me -- “You can drink that beer anywhere in the airport -- except on the jetway.” I looked down; I’d forgotten that I was still carrying that beer. I stepped to the side, chugged it, and then got on the plane. Felt like a very New Orleans thing to do.</li><li>And if you have any travel rants, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. &nbsp;The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Facebook page</a> or our Instagram account at <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Travelcommons</a> -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music —  <em>A Thousand And None</em> by Speck (c) copyright 2018 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/speck/57256 Ft: Mr_Yesterday</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Traveler Data Leaks</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Interview with <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mylaocoon\">Candid Wueest</a>, Principal Threat Researcher at Symantec and author of a blog post titled <a href=\"https://www.symantec.com/blogs/threat-intelligence/hotel-websites-leak-guest-data\"><em>Two in Three Hotel Websites Leak Guest Booking Details and Allow Access to Personal Data</em></a></li><li>Bridge Music —  <em>dazed </em>by Jeris (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/VJ_Memes/39456 Ft: airtone</li><li></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Brittany Street Food</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I’ll write a proper “Road Trip” post about our Brittany trip later this spring, after we get settled in the new digs, but after streaming a few episodes of Netflix’s “Street Food” series, I started thinking about some of the Breton street food we enjoyed while touring last month. If you’ve seen any of the Netflix series, you know that it’s more about the vendors than the food. But my French trails off after “oui,” “non,” “merci,” and “S\'il vous plaît” so I wasn’t able to get much of the vendor’s life stories. So this will be all about the food.</li><li>The first place we stayed was <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancale\">Cancale</a>, and we went there for one reason - oysters. Like people have been doing for 300-some odd years. When the tide is out, you can see miles of oyster beds with big farm tractors moving through the rows, hauling out trailers of oysters. Lining the ramp where the tractors drive up out of the beds is a little oyster market -- 8 stalls selling oysters fresh from the beds for €5-6/dozen. After adding another couple of euros for shucking, a half lemon and the use of a plastic platter, we’d have our afternoon snack -- sitting on the sea wall by the market, slurping through a couple dozen very briny oysters while watching the tractors work, and then pitching the empty shells back onto the beach for the seagulls to pick through. Our first afternoon, we only had a couple of cans of beer in our jacket pocket. The next couple of afternoons, we’d pour a nice white wine into some empty Evian bottles (Claire and I preferred a Sancerre) and make sure we had a good supply of wet wipes. We didn’t miss an afternoon on that sea wall while in Cancale.</li><li>Buckwheat is a big thing in Brittany. It’s been grown in Brittany for half a millennium or more, and for almost that long, it seems, has been turned into a <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galette\">galette</a>. a buckwheat crêpe. But a crêpe in form and shape only. Instead of a soft white wheat flour crêpe filled with jam or Nutella, the galette is crisper/firmer and savory. Fine on its own smeared with Breton butter, or with egg and cheese and ham inside. We got into Concarneau, on the southwest coast of Brittany about an hour before the weekly Friday outdoor market closed. &nbsp;I counted a half-dozen galette trucks. We walked up to the closest one. The cook was finishing up what looked like a weekend’s worth of galettes for the person in front of us -- flipping them, then pulling them off two hot metal disks, buttering them, and adding them to the stack. It was Friday in Lent, so I went for the egg, onion, and cheese galette. The creaminess of the cheese played nicely against the nutty graininess of the buckwheat.</li><li>The next day we drove to Rennes, our last stop in Brittany. We dropped the rental car at the train station and took the subway to Place des Lices for the huge Saturday market. We walked down from the subway station, through the fruit and vegetable stands lining the street -- beautiful stuff, but we’re leaving the next day, so we’re not doing a lot of green grocery shopping. There, between the two market halls, is a collection of food trucks; about 70% of them selling what we were looking for -- <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galette-saucisse\">galette-saucisse</a> -- the classic Breton street food that is pretty much what the straight translation from French to English suggests -- a sausage in a galette. Kinda like a Breton hot dog, it’s a cooked pork sausage wrapped in a cool galette, maybe with some grilled onions and dijon mustard added. There were lines tailing back from all the trucks serving these. A local guy pointed one truck out to Irene -- “They’re the best”, he said. She and Claire stood in queue while Andrew and I searched for drinks. Around the corner, we found a local cider maker; a couple of tables surrounded by crates of cider bottles. Through a mangled bit of Franglais, we bought a bottle of dry cider that had stayed cool in the shade and four cups, and got back to the food truck line just in time to be handed my galette-saucisse. After finishing the sausage and cider, I swung past the cider stand to give him the empty bottle -- kinda in-person recycling. There wasn’t much time to catch up on his life story, but it was a sunny Saturday and he had a full line; looked like he was having a good day.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #151</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_151.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<p><!--EndFragment--></p>\n<p></p>','Podcast #151 — Traveler Data Leaks; Brittany Street Food','','inherit','closed','closed','','2436-revision-v1','','','2019-05-07 22:39:57','2019-05-08 03:39:57','',2436,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/2436-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2465,1,'2019-05-07 22:41:39','2019-05-08 03:41:39','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><img class=\"wp-image-2439\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/oysters_and_evian_bottles-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" />\n<figcaption>Cancale Oysters with a nice Evian Sancerre</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p>Squeezing in another episode before moving the TravelCommons studios, we talk with <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mylaocoon\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Candid Wueest</span></a> of Symantec about websites that leak traveler data and what we can do to protect ourselves. I talk about yet more frustration with the <a href=\"http://avios.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Avios</a> frequent flyer program, while a listener writes in about his great experience with <a href=\"https://www.getfreebird.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Freebird</a>, a new flight rebooking service. I wrap up talking about great street food we had while touring Brittany, France last month. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_151.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/617322609&color=%23ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true\"></iframe>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #151: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, for the last time…. Not the last time for TravelCommons, just the last time for the studios “outside of Chicago”. We’re picking up stakes and moving about 20 miles east-northeast to Chicago’s Lakeview neighborhood. Hence the reason for the short-cycle on this episode. We’ll be breaking down and packing up the studio and production bay next week and probably won’t have everything reassembled until the end of the month. The recording isn’t really the issue -- I could always go back to my roots and find a spare bathroom to record in. It’s more about the production. I’m not sure I want to shrink my workflow down from a beefy dual 22-inch monitor Windows 10 mini-tower rig to my 2014 vintage 11-inch MacBook Air.</li><li>Being consumed by the move logistics vortex also means I haven’t done any real travel in the 2 weeks since the last episode -- but, given my most recent travel experiences, as laid out in last episode’s <em>Travel Interruptus</em> epic, I’ve appreciated the break. Especially when yet another yet another April snowstorm that blew up 700 flights last weekend. Instead, I’ve been wrestling once again with Avios -- the British Airways, Iberia, and now Aer Lingus frequent flyer program -- trying to book a Chicago-Dublin-Edinburgh Aer Lingus itinerary for my daughter’s graduation from University of St Andrews next month. I’ve been pretty <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/08/26/podcast-116-traveling-thru-japan-luggage-trends/\">vocal</a> about my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">challenges</a> with Avios over the years. In this go-around, the first wackiness was just trying to use the Avios website. To search for flights, you need to log in with your BA, Iberia, or Aer Lingus credentials. I try with all three; and fail with all three. Seems that the passwords given out by BA and Iberia don’t meet Avios’ security rules, so they fail. I assumed the username for my Aer Lingus account was my email address and the password seemed strong enough, but that kept failing too. Finally, after digging around my Aer Lingus profile, I found a separate username, which I’d never seen or used before, and <em>that</em> worked. Finally through the gate and onto the second wackiness -- the difference between the value of an Avios point on the Aer Lingus and Avios web sites. The award offers on both sites were points + cash. Taking the “market rate” for the ticket (pulled from Expedia), subtracting out the required cash payment, and dividing by the number of required Avios points gives the value of the Avios point for that award offer. My rule of thumb is -- get at least 2 cents/point or pay cash. The Aer Lingus site valued an Avios point at 0.7 cents while the Avios site hit my 2-cent minimum. I couldn’t quite understand that 65% difference, but I booked our tickets on the wonkier Avios site before it went away. If I remember anything from my University of Chicago business school courses, it’s that markets are efficient; 65% price differences don’t last forever. Though in this case, that difference may linger because the Avios website makes it so damn hard to find. </li><li>Bridge Music — <em>Lakeside Jam</em> by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/55998 </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Veteran TravelCommons listener Mika Pyyhkala sent in a note this week talking about his great experience with a flight rebooking service, <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Freebird (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"http://getfreebird.com\" target=\"_blank\">Freebird</a>. Mika writes:<ul><li>I was flying with a companion from (Wichita) ICT-STL and STL-DTW. &nbsp;Just as the plane was descending to DTW, I received text messages from WN and Freebird that STL-DTW on WN had been cancelled. &nbsp;Freebird then manually advised that the only flight for that day was a DL STL-DTW, and they were going to book it in case I wanted it; if they waited longer there might not be enough time to issue the new ticket on Delta through their travel agent. &nbsp;They just asked me to confirm that I in fact wanted the Delta ticket.  </li><li>I confirmed we wanted the 2 Delta tickets, and by the time the door opened in STL we had a confirmation number to check in for the Delta flight leaving in 47 minutes. We got seats together on the Delta flight that were assigned by the Freebird process, and they even gave us free drinks!</li><li>I think we actually arrived in DTW a few minutes earlier than we were scheduled on the original flight, and it made for a great travel story and adventure! &nbsp;This was my first time using Freebird as well!</li><li>It costs $19 to protect a one way trip per traveler. &nbsp;It’s simple to work with them: unlike insurance, there are no claim forms, long waits, or papers to sign</li></ul></li><li>Mika, thanks for this. I hadn’t heard of Freebird before Mika’s note. Hitting their website, they’re selling their service to companies, travel agencies, and to individual travelers. Clicking through to a TechCrunch article about them, it says they’re also talking to Amex and Citibank about including Freebird as a credit card benefit. The article quotes the CEO, Ethan Bernstein - “It’s funny what happens when people deal with uncertainty; uncertainty is the worst. As soon you give people information, human support and technology to help them solve their problems, they experience the event so much differently.” &nbsp;Which is exactly right. Certainty lets you plan; uncertainty just leaves you to stew… and drink at the airport bar… and eat bad airport food… and bitch Tweet. Yup, uncertainty leads to lots of bad things</li><li>One more-fun-than-necessarily-good thing on last month’s trip was getting to try out an alpha version of a new augmented reality feature for Google Maps. I used it first in Stockholm; we got off the Arlanda Express at the Central Train station and wanted make our way over to the <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Östermalms Saluhall (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.ostermalmshallen.se/en/\" target=\"_blank\">Östermalms Saluhall</a> for lunch. When I chose “Walking” as our transport mode, a “Start AR” button showed up next to the usual button to start the directions. With AR, I’d hold my phone up, the display would use the camera to show the streetscape in front of me with the &nbsp;directions -- street names, arrows -- overlaid on the real-time image. I thought it was a nice add; reduced any ambiguity about where the next turn was. One interesting feature -- when I started walking, the screen dimmed and a message popped up telling me to stop looking at the phone and look straight ahead. All in all, it’s kinda fun. At least I thought so; Andrew and Irene seemed much less impressed. It worked very well for what was billed as an alpha product. It’ll be interesting to see how it develops, and how fast Google rolls it out.</li><li>But even without a broader AR roll-out, Google Maps seems on track to become the next “<a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"super app (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://skift.com/2019/04/16/google-maps-is-ready-to-transform-the-world-of-superapps-a-skift-deep-dive/\" target=\"_blank\">super app</a>” -- sorta the Western counterpart to China’s WeChat -- the first “super app”, a Swiss Army Knife-kind of “it does everything” app. Now Google Maps isn’t to that level -- yet -- but it is growing. It started as a mapping app, then added driving directions, then ride share -- showing Uber and Lyft prices, then public transit directions with real-time arrival times, replacing the core use case for apps like Transit. Then the “Explore Nearby” became more prominent -- which, for me, has supplanted Yelp when looking for a restaurant because it’s so much more convenient, and with deep links to OpenTable for reservations; and for nearby hotels, direct booking links to Expedia and Booking.com. I wasn’t surprised when I saw a stat that those “Near Me” searches grew 150 percent the last year. I’m not quite sure what I think about this -- loving a free service that keeps becoming more valuable vs. becoming more enslaved to the Google overlords. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/08/27/podcast-132-travel-apps-on-my-phone/\">episode #132</a>, I listed all the travel apps on my smartphone, and Google Maps was the most important -- “Indeed, it’s the only travel app with its own screen real estate rather than sharing space in the Travel folder,” I said. And it only keeps getting more indispensable.</li><li>Thinking back to our last day in Paris when both Ubers that we ordered were nice black Mercedes, I couldn’t help thinking how the quality of US Uber and Lyft vehicles has slipped. I remember when I started using Uber in 4-5 years ago, the cars were pristine. I remember working in Baltimore one summer; I was more than happy to wait 5 minutes for an Uber rather than take one of the cabs waiting at the stand right outside the building I was in. Those cabs were so beat up, so full of trash, and most of the time, without working air conditioning. Today, cabs haven’t gotten much cleaner, but Uber and Lyft seem to be lowering their standards. I dunno if it’s because of falling unemployment rates or trying to keep up with growth or squeezing driver pay to improve their post-IPO margins -- or all of the above -- but I’m seeing a real drop in quality.</li><li>Long-time TravelCommons listeners will recall that I’ve spent a lot of time in New Orleans airport and other than serving beer in go cups French Quarter-style so you can walk around the terminal with it, there’s not much good to say about it. Especially with regards to food and restaurants. For such a great food town to have such mediocre airport concessions has always been beyond me. But then again, the original terminal was built in 1959, and then expanded in the mid-70’s and mid-90’s. The new $1 billion replacement terminal was originally scheduled to open last year during New Orleans’ tricentennial, but that then slipped to February of this year, then to May, and now to a “to be determined” date sometime in the fall. The restaurant selection is supposed to be much better but I hope they don’t change that beer policy though. One time, waiting out yet another thunderstorm delay, I’d bought a beer and was standing by the gate drinking it because the bar was full. American called boarding and I walked up to the gate. The agent stopped me -- “You can drink that beer anywhere in the airport -- except on the jetway.” I looked down; I’d forgotten that I was still carrying that beer. I stepped to the side, chugged it, and then got on the plane. Felt like a very New Orleans thing to do.</li><li>And if you have any travel rants, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. &nbsp;The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Facebook page</a> or our Instagram account at <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Travelcommons</a> -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music —  <em>A Thousand And None</em> by Speck (c) copyright 2018 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/speck/57256 Ft: Mr_Yesterday</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Traveler Data Leaks</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Interview with <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mylaocoon\">Candid Wueest</a>, Principal Threat Researcher at Symantec and author of a blog post titled <a href=\"https://www.symantec.com/blogs/threat-intelligence/hotel-websites-leak-guest-data\"><em>Two in Three Hotel Websites Leak Guest Booking Details and Allow Access to Personal Data</em></a></li><li>Bridge Music —  <em>dazed </em>by Jeris (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/VJ_Memes/39456 Ft: airtone</li><li></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Brittany Street Food</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I’ll write a proper “Road Trip” post about our Brittany trip later this spring, after we get settled in the new digs, but after streaming a few episodes of Netflix’s “Street Food” series, I started thinking about some of the Breton street food we enjoyed while touring last month. If you’ve seen any of the Netflix series, you know that it’s more about the vendors than the food. But my French trails off after “oui,” “non,” “merci,” and “S\'il vous plaît” so I wasn’t able to get much of the vendor’s life stories. So this will be all about the food.</li><li>The first place we stayed was <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancale\">Cancale</a>, and we went there for one reason - oysters. Like people have been doing for 300-some odd years. When the tide is out, you can see miles of oyster beds with big farm tractors moving through the rows, hauling out trailers of oysters. Lining the ramp where the tractors drive up out of the beds is a little oyster market -- 8 stalls selling oysters fresh from the beds for €5-6/dozen. After adding another couple of euros for shucking, a half lemon and the use of a plastic platter, we’d have our afternoon snack -- sitting on the sea wall by the market, slurping through a couple dozen very briny oysters while watching the tractors work, and then pitching the empty shells back onto the beach for the seagulls to pick through. Our first afternoon, we only had a couple of cans of beer in our jacket pocket. The next couple of afternoons, we’d pour a nice white wine into some empty Evian bottles (Claire and I preferred a Sancerre) and make sure we had a good supply of wet wipes. We didn’t miss an afternoon on that sea wall while in Cancale.</li><li>Buckwheat is a big thing in Brittany. It’s been grown in Brittany for half a millennium or more, and for almost that long, it seems, has been turned into a <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galette\">galette</a>. a buckwheat crêpe. But a crêpe in form and shape only. Instead of a soft white wheat flour crêpe filled with jam or Nutella, the galette is crisper/firmer and savory. Fine on its own smeared with Breton butter, or with egg and cheese and ham inside. We got into Concarneau, on the southwest coast of Brittany about an hour before the weekly Friday outdoor market closed. &nbsp;I counted a half-dozen galette trucks. We walked up to the closest one. The cook was finishing up what looked like a weekend’s worth of galettes for the person in front of us -- flipping them, then pulling them off two hot metal disks, buttering them, and adding them to the stack. It was Friday in Lent, so I went for the egg, onion, and cheese galette. The creaminess of the cheese played nicely against the nutty graininess of the buckwheat.</li><li>The next day we drove to Rennes, our last stop in Brittany. We dropped the rental car at the train station and took the subway to Place des Lices for the huge Saturday market. We walked down from the subway station, through the fruit and vegetable stands lining the street -- beautiful stuff, but we’re leaving the next day, so we’re not doing a lot of green grocery shopping. There, between the two market halls, is a collection of food trucks; about 70% of them selling what we were looking for -- <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galette-saucisse\">galette-saucisse</a> -- the classic Breton street food that is pretty much what the straight translation from French to English suggests -- a sausage in a galette. Kinda like a Breton hot dog, it’s a cooked pork sausage wrapped in a cool galette, maybe with some grilled onions and dijon mustard added. There were lines tailing back from all the trucks serving these. A local guy pointed one truck out to Irene -- “They’re the best”, he said. She and Claire stood in queue while Andrew and I searched for drinks. Around the corner, we found a local cider maker; a couple of tables surrounded by crates of cider bottles. Through a mangled bit of Franglais, we bought a bottle of dry cider that had stayed cool in the shade and four cups, and got back to the food truck line just in time to be handed my galette-saucisse. After finishing the sausage and cider, I swung past the cider stand to give him the empty bottle -- kinda in-person recycling. There wasn’t much time to catch up on his life story, but it was a sunny Saturday and he had a full line; looked like he was having a good day.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #151</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_151.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<p><!--EndFragment--></p>\n<p></p>','Podcast #151 — Traveler Data Leaks; Brittany Street Food','','inherit','closed','closed','','2436-revision-v1','','','2019-05-07 22:41:39','2019-05-08 03:41:39','',2436,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/2436-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2466,1,'2019-05-07 22:41:59','2019-05-08 03:41:59','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><img class=\"wp-image-2439\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/oysters_and_evian_bottles-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" />\n<figcaption>Cancale Oysters with a nice Evian Sancerre</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p>Squeezing in another episode before moving the TravelCommons studios, we talk with <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mylaocoon\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Candid Wueest</span></a> of Symantec about websites that leak traveler data and what we can do to protect ourselves. I talk about yet more frustration with the <a href=\"http://avios.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Avios</a> frequent flyer program, while a listener writes in about his great experience with <a href=\"https://www.getfreebird.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Freebird</a>, a new flight rebooking service. I wrap up talking about great street food we had while touring Brittany, France last month. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_151.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/617322609&color=%23ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #151: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, for the last time…. Not the last time for TravelCommons, just the last time for the studios “outside of Chicago”. We’re picking up stakes and moving about 20 miles east-northeast to Chicago’s Lakeview neighborhood. Hence the reason for the short-cycle on this episode. We’ll be breaking down and packing up the studio and production bay next week and probably won’t have everything reassembled until the end of the month. The recording isn’t really the issue -- I could always go back to my roots and find a spare bathroom to record in. It’s more about the production. I’m not sure I want to shrink my workflow down from a beefy dual 22-inch monitor Windows 10 mini-tower rig to my 2014 vintage 11-inch MacBook Air.</li><li>Being consumed by the move logistics vortex also means I haven’t done any real travel in the 2 weeks since the last episode -- but, given my most recent travel experiences, as laid out in last episode’s <em>Travel Interruptus</em> epic, I’ve appreciated the break. Especially when yet another yet another April snowstorm that blew up 700 flights last weekend. Instead, I’ve been wrestling once again with Avios -- the British Airways, Iberia, and now Aer Lingus frequent flyer program -- trying to book a Chicago-Dublin-Edinburgh Aer Lingus itinerary for my daughter’s graduation from University of St Andrews next month. I’ve been pretty <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/08/26/podcast-116-traveling-thru-japan-luggage-trends/\">vocal</a> about my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">challenges</a> with Avios over the years. In this go-around, the first wackiness was just trying to use the Avios website. To search for flights, you need to log in with your BA, Iberia, or Aer Lingus credentials. I try with all three; and fail with all three. Seems that the passwords given out by BA and Iberia don’t meet Avios’ security rules, so they fail. I assumed the username for my Aer Lingus account was my email address and the password seemed strong enough, but that kept failing too. Finally, after digging around my Aer Lingus profile, I found a separate username, which I’d never seen or used before, and <em>that</em> worked. Finally through the gate and onto the second wackiness -- the difference between the value of an Avios point on the Aer Lingus and Avios web sites. The award offers on both sites were points + cash. Taking the “market rate” for the ticket (pulled from Expedia), subtracting out the required cash payment, and dividing by the number of required Avios points gives the value of the Avios point for that award offer. My rule of thumb is -- get at least 2 cents/point or pay cash. The Aer Lingus site valued an Avios point at 0.7 cents while the Avios site hit my 2-cent minimum. I couldn’t quite understand that 65% difference, but I booked our tickets on the wonkier Avios site before it went away. If I remember anything from my University of Chicago business school courses, it’s that markets are efficient; 65% price differences don’t last forever. Though in this case, that difference may linger because the Avios website makes it so damn hard to find. </li><li>Bridge Music — <em>Lakeside Jam</em> by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/55998 </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Veteran TravelCommons listener Mika Pyyhkala sent in a note this week talking about his great experience with a flight rebooking service, <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Freebird (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"http://getfreebird.com\" target=\"_blank\">Freebird</a>. Mika writes:<ul><li>I was flying with a companion from (Wichita) ICT-STL and STL-DTW. &nbsp;Just as the plane was descending to DTW, I received text messages from WN and Freebird that STL-DTW on WN had been cancelled. &nbsp;Freebird then manually advised that the only flight for that day was a DL STL-DTW, and they were going to book it in case I wanted it; if they waited longer there might not be enough time to issue the new ticket on Delta through their travel agent. &nbsp;They just asked me to confirm that I in fact wanted the Delta ticket.  </li><li>I confirmed we wanted the 2 Delta tickets, and by the time the door opened in STL we had a confirmation number to check in for the Delta flight leaving in 47 minutes. We got seats together on the Delta flight that were assigned by the Freebird process, and they even gave us free drinks!</li><li>I think we actually arrived in DTW a few minutes earlier than we were scheduled on the original flight, and it made for a great travel story and adventure! &nbsp;This was my first time using Freebird as well!</li><li>It costs $19 to protect a one way trip per traveler. &nbsp;It’s simple to work with them: unlike insurance, there are no claim forms, long waits, or papers to sign</li></ul></li><li>Mika, thanks for this. I hadn’t heard of Freebird before Mika’s note. Hitting their website, they’re selling their service to companies, travel agencies, and to individual travelers. Clicking through to a TechCrunch article about them, it says they’re also talking to Amex and Citibank about including Freebird as a credit card benefit. The article quotes the CEO, Ethan Bernstein - “It’s funny what happens when people deal with uncertainty; uncertainty is the worst. As soon you give people information, human support and technology to help them solve their problems, they experience the event so much differently.” &nbsp;Which is exactly right. Certainty lets you plan; uncertainty just leaves you to stew… and drink at the airport bar… and eat bad airport food… and bitch Tweet. Yup, uncertainty leads to lots of bad things</li><li>One more-fun-than-necessarily-good thing on last month’s trip was getting to try out an alpha version of a new augmented reality feature for Google Maps. I used it first in Stockholm; we got off the Arlanda Express at the Central Train station and wanted make our way over to the <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Östermalms Saluhall (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.ostermalmshallen.se/en/\" target=\"_blank\">Östermalms Saluhall</a> for lunch. When I chose “Walking” as our transport mode, a “Start AR” button showed up next to the usual button to start the directions. With AR, I’d hold my phone up, the display would use the camera to show the streetscape in front of me with the &nbsp;directions -- street names, arrows -- overlaid on the real-time image. I thought it was a nice add; reduced any ambiguity about where the next turn was. One interesting feature -- when I started walking, the screen dimmed and a message popped up telling me to stop looking at the phone and look straight ahead. All in all, it’s kinda fun. At least I thought so; Andrew and Irene seemed much less impressed. It worked very well for what was billed as an alpha product. It’ll be interesting to see how it develops, and how fast Google rolls it out.</li><li>But even without a broader AR roll-out, Google Maps seems on track to become the next “<a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"super app (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://skift.com/2019/04/16/google-maps-is-ready-to-transform-the-world-of-superapps-a-skift-deep-dive/\" target=\"_blank\">super app</a>” -- sorta the Western counterpart to China’s WeChat -- the first “super app”, a Swiss Army Knife-kind of “it does everything” app. Now Google Maps isn’t to that level -- yet -- but it is growing. It started as a mapping app, then added driving directions, then ride share -- showing Uber and Lyft prices, then public transit directions with real-time arrival times, replacing the core use case for apps like Transit. Then the “Explore Nearby” became more prominent -- which, for me, has supplanted Yelp when looking for a restaurant because it’s so much more convenient, and with deep links to OpenTable for reservations; and for nearby hotels, direct booking links to Expedia and Booking.com. I wasn’t surprised when I saw a stat that those “Near Me” searches grew 150 percent the last year. I’m not quite sure what I think about this -- loving a free service that keeps becoming more valuable vs. becoming more enslaved to the Google overlords. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/08/27/podcast-132-travel-apps-on-my-phone/\">episode #132</a>, I listed all the travel apps on my smartphone, and Google Maps was the most important -- “Indeed, it’s the only travel app with its own screen real estate rather than sharing space in the Travel folder,” I said. And it only keeps getting more indispensable.</li><li>Thinking back to our last day in Paris when both Ubers that we ordered were nice black Mercedes, I couldn’t help thinking how the quality of US Uber and Lyft vehicles has slipped. I remember when I started using Uber in 4-5 years ago, the cars were pristine. I remember working in Baltimore one summer; I was more than happy to wait 5 minutes for an Uber rather than take one of the cabs waiting at the stand right outside the building I was in. Those cabs were so beat up, so full of trash, and most of the time, without working air conditioning. Today, cabs haven’t gotten much cleaner, but Uber and Lyft seem to be lowering their standards. I dunno if it’s because of falling unemployment rates or trying to keep up with growth or squeezing driver pay to improve their post-IPO margins -- or all of the above -- but I’m seeing a real drop in quality.</li><li>Long-time TravelCommons listeners will recall that I’ve spent a lot of time in New Orleans airport and other than serving beer in go cups French Quarter-style so you can walk around the terminal with it, there’s not much good to say about it. Especially with regards to food and restaurants. For such a great food town to have such mediocre airport concessions has always been beyond me. But then again, the original terminal was built in 1959, and then expanded in the mid-70’s and mid-90’s. The new $1 billion replacement terminal was originally scheduled to open last year during New Orleans’ tricentennial, but that then slipped to February of this year, then to May, and now to a “to be determined” date sometime in the fall. The restaurant selection is supposed to be much better but I hope they don’t change that beer policy though. One time, waiting out yet another thunderstorm delay, I’d bought a beer and was standing by the gate drinking it because the bar was full. American called boarding and I walked up to the gate. The agent stopped me -- “You can drink that beer anywhere in the airport -- except on the jetway.” I looked down; I’d forgotten that I was still carrying that beer. I stepped to the side, chugged it, and then got on the plane. Felt like a very New Orleans thing to do.</li><li>And if you have any travel rants, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. &nbsp;The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Facebook page</a> or our Instagram account at <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Travelcommons</a> -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music —  <em>A Thousand And None</em> by Speck (c) copyright 2018 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/speck/57256 Ft: Mr_Yesterday</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Traveler Data Leaks</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Interview with <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mylaocoon\">Candid Wueest</a>, Principal Threat Researcher at Symantec and author of a blog post titled <a href=\"https://www.symantec.com/blogs/threat-intelligence/hotel-websites-leak-guest-data\"><em>Two in Three Hotel Websites Leak Guest Booking Details and Allow Access to Personal Data</em></a></li><li>Bridge Music —  <em>dazed </em>by Jeris (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/VJ_Memes/39456 Ft: airtone</li><li></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Brittany Street Food</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I’ll write a proper “Road Trip” post about our Brittany trip later this spring, after we get settled in the new digs, but after streaming a few episodes of Netflix’s “Street Food” series, I started thinking about some of the Breton street food we enjoyed while touring last month. If you’ve seen any of the Netflix series, you know that it’s more about the vendors than the food. But my French trails off after “oui,” “non,” “merci,” and “S\'il vous plaît” so I wasn’t able to get much of the vendor’s life stories. So this will be all about the food.</li><li>The first place we stayed was <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancale\">Cancale</a>, and we went there for one reason - oysters. Like people have been doing for 300-some odd years. When the tide is out, you can see miles of oyster beds with big farm tractors moving through the rows, hauling out trailers of oysters. Lining the ramp where the tractors drive up out of the beds is a little oyster market -- 8 stalls selling oysters fresh from the beds for €5-6/dozen. After adding another couple of euros for shucking, a half lemon and the use of a plastic platter, we’d have our afternoon snack -- sitting on the sea wall by the market, slurping through a couple dozen very briny oysters while watching the tractors work, and then pitching the empty shells back onto the beach for the seagulls to pick through. Our first afternoon, we only had a couple of cans of beer in our jacket pocket. The next couple of afternoons, we’d pour a nice white wine into some empty Evian bottles (Claire and I preferred a Sancerre) and make sure we had a good supply of wet wipes. We didn’t miss an afternoon on that sea wall while in Cancale.</li><li>Buckwheat is a big thing in Brittany. It’s been grown in Brittany for half a millennium or more, and for almost that long, it seems, has been turned into a <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galette\">galette</a>. a buckwheat crêpe. But a crêpe in form and shape only. Instead of a soft white wheat flour crêpe filled with jam or Nutella, the galette is crisper/firmer and savory. Fine on its own smeared with Breton butter, or with egg and cheese and ham inside. We got into Concarneau, on the southwest coast of Brittany about an hour before the weekly Friday outdoor market closed. &nbsp;I counted a half-dozen galette trucks. We walked up to the closest one. The cook was finishing up what looked like a weekend’s worth of galettes for the person in front of us -- flipping them, then pulling them off two hot metal disks, buttering them, and adding them to the stack. It was Friday in Lent, so I went for the egg, onion, and cheese galette. The creaminess of the cheese played nicely against the nutty graininess of the buckwheat.</li><li>The next day we drove to Rennes, our last stop in Brittany. We dropped the rental car at the train station and took the subway to Place des Lices for the huge Saturday market. We walked down from the subway station, through the fruit and vegetable stands lining the street -- beautiful stuff, but we’re leaving the next day, so we’re not doing a lot of green grocery shopping. There, between the two market halls, is a collection of food trucks; about 70% of them selling what we were looking for -- <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galette-saucisse\">galette-saucisse</a> -- the classic Breton street food that is pretty much what the straight translation from French to English suggests -- a sausage in a galette. Kinda like a Breton hot dog, it’s a cooked pork sausage wrapped in a cool galette, maybe with some grilled onions and dijon mustard added. There were lines tailing back from all the trucks serving these. A local guy pointed one truck out to Irene -- “They’re the best”, he said. She and Claire stood in queue while Andrew and I searched for drinks. Around the corner, we found a local cider maker; a couple of tables surrounded by crates of cider bottles. Through a mangled bit of Franglais, we bought a bottle of dry cider that had stayed cool in the shade and four cups, and got back to the food truck line just in time to be handed my galette-saucisse. After finishing the sausage and cider, I swung past the cider stand to give him the empty bottle -- kinda in-person recycling. There wasn’t much time to catch up on his life story, but it was a sunny Saturday and he had a full line; looked like he was having a good day.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #151</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_151.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<p><!--EndFragment--></p>\n<p></p>','Podcast #151 — Traveler Data Leaks; Brittany Street Food','','inherit','closed','closed','','2436-revision-v1','','','2019-05-07 22:41:59','2019-05-08 03:41:59','',2436,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/2436-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2467,1,'2019-05-07 22:44:12','2019-05-08 03:44:12','[caption id=\"attachment_2141\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/IMG_0031.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2141\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/IMG_0031-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> How Much Extra For A Plate?[/caption]\n\nJust regular domestic business travel since the last podcast, trying to dodge Hurricane Florence to get back to Charlottesville.&nbsp; Thinking back to last month\'s European travels, we talk about a tight connection through Amsterdam and some odd concierge lounge rules, which gets me thinking about hotel breakfasts. And a listener request for restaurant recommendations gets me thinking about the balance of visiting good and not-so-good restaurant towns. All this and more at the&nbsp;<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_145.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_143.mp3\"]<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show Notes -->\n\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #145:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL after 3 weeks of “normal” travel -- no vacation, no international travel, just a couple of trips to Charlottesville, VA on sandwiching a quick shot down to Dallas. And no delays. And empty seats beside me. Indeed, I even scored an upgrade on the late United flight from IAD to ORD, the long leg of one of my flights home from Charlottesville. Feels like we’re at the start of maybe a 6-week travel lull between the final end of summer vacations and the early starts of Thanksgiving travel.</li>\n 	<li>There was a bit of drama around the Charlottesville trip in the middle of September. I had to fly out Sunday night -- the weekend that Hurricane Florence hit the Carolina coast. The storm track forecast had Florence plowing west through the Carolinas and then taking a right hand turn at the Appalachians and heading north over Virginia. The question for me -- when would it make the turn; would my Sunday flight make it through before or after the turn or would Florence be in my way on Sunday? Thursday night and Friday, I spent a bit of time hitting the Refresh button on the <a href=\"https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/\">Nat’l Hurricane Center’s website</a>. By Friday, Florence had dropped a couple of category levels and slowed down, and by Saturday, I could see that my Sunday flight would beat Florence to Charlottesville. It was a smooth flight that Sunday, though Monday was a bit wet.</li>\n 	<li>Going through TSA Pre-Check in ORD that Sunday night, I watched a guy use the electronic boarding pass on his Apple Watch. It looked a bit awkward, and if you think about it, it’s understandable. Boarding pass readers face up; you put your boarding pass or phone face down on them to read. But a watch is on face up on the top of your wrist. So the guy ends up standing on his toes and twisting his arm around to get his Apple Watch face down on the reader. You’d think he would’ve shifted to his phone after that, but I saw him twist himself up again about 30 minutes later when boarding his flight. Seems like it would’ve been easier to spin the watch on his wrist so it was facing down -- at least until Apple fires up the old Steve Jobs distortion field to convince airports to reorient all their readers for the convenience of Apple Watch users.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music --&nbsp;Dub the Uke by Kara Square (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mindmapthat/53340 Ft: DJ Vadim</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul class=\"\">\n 	<li>Allan Marko, a long-time listener and even longer-time friend, sent me an <a href=\"http://www.patentlyapple.com/patently-apple/2018/09/apple-salesforce-are-working-marriott-international-to-bring-homepods-to-hotel-rooms-to-assist-guests-with-services.html\">article</a> that dove into an interesting part of Apple’s new partnership with Salesforce. The two of them are working with Marriott to put Siri in hotel rooms. You could ask Siri to turn up the heat, order room service, or get an Uber through an Apple HomePod in the room. That’s the Apple piece of it. The Salesforce piece lets Siri remember what you asked her, say your room temperature, at the next Marriott. Useful or creepy? And how do you make sure you wipe Siri’s memory before the next guest checks into the room so you can’t ask her things like “Hey Siri, tell me all about the last guest that was here...” or “Order me the same sandwich the last guy ordered”. I dunno. I don’t even like using these new Enseo TVs to log into my own Netflix account, let alone having Marriott listening to me through a HomePod and remembering everything I mutter. Some guys are making a nice living selling shutters that you can stick over your laptop webcam. Are earplugs for hotel HomePods the next thing?</li>\n 	<li>In the<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/09/15/podcast-144-outside-airports-hospitality-mentality/\"> last episode</a>, I mentioned flying SAS from Chicago to Copenhagen. It was an odd schedule -- leaving Chicago around 10pm, arriving Copenhagen after 1 in the afternoon. Leaving that late and having a long taxi, I fell asleep before we left the ground, and before putting my phone in Airplane mode. I woke up, I dunno, an hour or so later, looked at my phone for the time, and noticed some new e-mails. Huh? That’s weird. And then I noticed that my phone didn’t say “No Service”; it was connected to some cellular service, which turned out to be SAS’s in-flight cellular service. And as opposed to in-flight WiFi which you usually have to log into, my iPhone automatically started roaming on the SAS cellular service, that then continued to check/pull e-mail for a couple of hours until I flipped it to airplane mode. I got my AT&amp;T mobile bill a couple of weeks back and ended up with a $25 roaming charge for those half-dozen meaningless e-mails. A pain, but not too painful. Unlike the guy four years ago who <a href=\"https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/11/18/that-1200-in-flight-wifi-bill-was-terrifyingly-real/\">rang up a $1,200 WiFi bill</a> on Singapore Air when he fell asleep with his data still connected.</li>\n 	<li>On the third leg of that trip, going from BRU to EDI, our best option was KLM through AMS. I’ve been in and out and through Schiphol a number of times over the past 20-some odd years and have always liked it. Nothing flashy, but it works -- not too big, reasonable facilities. Booking this BRU-EDI trip on the KLM website, I had two options -- a tight 40-min connection or a 2-hr one. While I don’t mind Schiphol, I wasn’t looking to make an afternoon of it. So I broke one of my cardinal travel rules -- never book a connection shorter than an hour -- and booked the 40-min connection, knowing that we had a back-up if it didn’t work out. One factor I didn’t completely think through was that we’d have to cross the Schengen border during those 40 minutes too. The first leg -- Brussels to Amsterdam -- was within Schengen so it was just like an domestic US flight -- no passport control, no customs. But in Schiphol, we had switch concourses and go through passport control because the UK is outside of Schengen. We made it through, though, with time to spare because - we walked real fast; like I said before, Schiphol isn’t that big, so switching concourses wasn’t a long walk; but most importantly, my wife spotted the “short connection” line at passport control. We had gotten in the regular line, but then we saw on a display screen that our EDI flight was classified a “short connection”, so we switched to the much shorter line -- I earned a “Hey” from a security guard when I ducked under the tape -- and quickly passed through what was a well-staffed and brisk passport control line (Munich Airport, you could take some lessons here). We get to the gate with more than enough time -- boarding hasn’t been called yet. So while we made the 40-minute connection, the question now was -- would the checked luggage make it? As we were queuing to board, I looked out the terminal window. There’s our plane, and there, next to the baggage loader, was Irene’s and Claire’s luggage -- stationary, not rolling along like in that YouTube video. A very good sign, but there wasn’t anybody loading luggage. As I walk up to board, I tap one of the KLM guys standing around. Pointing out the window, I say “See those bags on the tarmac? Those are ours. It would be great if they made it onto this plane.” He laughed -- him a bit more than me. I was happy to see them appear on the EDI baggage carousel.</li>\n 	<li>I’m thinking that I need another carry-on bag; something between my maximum legal size 22-incher and my leather duffel overnighter. On that BRU-EDI trip, I carried my 22-incher on, but not without agents at Brussels and Amsterdam challenging me, even after showing them it fit in their baggage sizer. A few weeks after that trip, KLM added an <a href=\"https://news.klm.com/klms-augmented-reality-hand-baggage-check-now-available-in-messenger/\">augmented reality baggage sizer</a> to their iPhone app. You fire up the app, point your iPhone camera at your bag and the app overlays a properly sized rectangle over your bag. If your bag is within the rectangle, you’re good to go. Would’ve been easier -- and much cooler -- than slamming my bag into those metal sizers, but somehow, with those gate agents, I don’t think the outcome would’ve been any different.</li>\n 	<li>OK, one last thing from that trip. The concierge lounges in both the Copenhagen Marriott and the London St Pancras Renaissance had prominent “rules” signs at their entrances, and one of those rules was a ban on “fitness clothes”. Now, this wasn’t a big deal on this trip because I was on vacation, and wasn’t toting work-out gear. My normal program when I’m on business travel is to get up before 6, work out, go straight to the lounge in my “fitness gear” for some breakfast while cooling down, then head back to my room to shower, change, and head out. Having to separate the cool down from breakfast would add 15-20 minutes to what is an already tight morning routine. So I hope that rule doesn’t spread to the US lounges. The rest of the rules seemed pretty reasonable, though one -- no wearing a bathrobe in the lounge -- seemed a bit superfluous. I’ve never seen someone walk into a concierge lounge in a bathrobe… until in Copenhagen at 3 in the afternoon with it not looking like there was anything on under the robe. So, OK, I’m now completely on-board with the no robe rule.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> or our new <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a> at travelcommons -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;Emma by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/50905 Ft: Martijn de Boer</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Restaurant Karma</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Casey Milch sent me a note a few weeks back -- “Greetings. Love the podcast. I know you mention frequent trips to Charlottesville and I’m finding myself there every six weeks for work myself now. Any restaurant suggestions?”</li>\n 	<li>One of the compensations for getting on an airplane just about every week is that you get to try a lot of restaurants. Now, in the last episode, we talked about the downside of that -- rapid waistline expansion -- but if you’re thoughtful about it, and you like trying different food (I hate the word “foodie”), business travel has its benefits. I sent Casey a few recommendations -- Fitzroy, a meat place -- burger, double pork chop, fried chicken -- on the Main Street pedestrian mall; Lampo, a small Neapolitan pizza place with a big wood oven that is -- I forgot to tell Casey this -- a 5-minute walk from Champion Brewing Company’s taproom; and The Alley Light, a speakeasy in an small alcove (a bit too short to be a proper alley) with no sign though there is a light over the door, that took 3 tries to find the first time in the pouring rain, which led to the question “How many consultants does it take to work Google Maps”. Putting the list together for Casey reminded me that we hadn’t been to Alley Light in a while, so we ate there last Tuesday night -- found it on the first try this time -- and had roasted bone marrow, pork rillette, duck confit -- oh, and some carrots. So much for thoughtfulness.</li>\n 	<li>Charlottesville punches above its weight for good restaurants, maybe because of University of Virginia. The 2 ½ years I spent in New Orleans was one of definitely one of my food high points, especially when crawfish were in season. 3 months in Portland, OR was fun with the food truck scene, and of course, it is ground-zero for the craft beer explosion. Stays in Manhattan, San Francisco, and London were that much more enjoyable with someone else picking up the dinner tab. Indeed, in San Francisco, I used to stay in different hotels so I could try different neighborhood joints.</li>\n 	<li>But karma always seeks balance, and for all these great food locations, there have been other, let’s say, less-than-stunning places. Dover, OH -- about 30 miles south of Canton -- had, when I was doing a project there -- two places to eat -- an Arby’s and the lunch counter of the Walmart knock-off. And the Walmart knock-off was the better of the two. Oldsmar, FL was a bit too far outside of Tampa for us to head in for dinner every night, so the near-by Buffalo Wild Wings - B-Dubs - and Applebee’s were our best shots. And downtown Detroit in the early 2000’s, working, eating, and sleeping in the urban fortress that is the Renaissance Center was brutally monotonous.</li>\n 	<li>But even when in London and New York, we weren’t splurging on big meals every night. We have reasonable expense budgets that we have to live within. So again, we find balance -- one night we’re underspending at a dive (but good) pizza-by-the-slice joint, so that the next night, we eat at nice place. Some guys will extend balancing act to travel -- sucking up the inconvenience of a cheaper connecting flight to pay for better meals. One colleague told me -- “I’ll happily travel cheap to eat great food”</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;Astral Travel by Astral (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Astral/44282</li>\n</ul>\n<b>Hotel Breakfasts</b>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Growing up, those of us of a certain age heard that breakfast is the most important meal of the day -- usually from a cereal commercial. I mentioned a bit early earlier my morning hotel pattern -- work out, hit the concierge lounge for breakfast and then get on with my day. Most lounge breakfasts are pretty industrial -- chafing dishes of stiff scrambled pasteurized eggs, thin slices of oven-baked bacon, vat of oatmeal, a few cartons of yogurt, and a bowl of fruit. It gets the day started. I may be judging it a bit harshly though. My daughter Claire loves those scrambled eggs. Go a little more upscale and you’ll see maybe a platter of smoked salmon, some sliced meats and cheeses, bran muffins…</li>\n 	<li>So when I see something different, it gets my attention. Like roasted green chiles in New Mexico, Albuquerque and Santa Fe, to season those scrambled eggs, or the King Cake at the Canal St Sheraton in New Orleans during Mardi Gras season. Now, it’s not the best king cake I’ve had - and my wife has dragged me through a king cake tasting crawl there, so I speak with some knowledge -- but I look forward to it whenever I’m there in the spring. I remember one morning I walked in -- no king cake! I found one of the staff -- “you guys stop doing king cake?!” “No! I didn’t know we were out.” And they immediately brought out a new one. Crisis averted!</li>\n 	<li>It doesn’t even have to be anything big. The Copenhagen Marriott lounge had rhubarb juice. As a kid, my mother made pies from rhubarb growing in our backyard, that I think her mother had planted. So something different and nostalgic all in one. Was it life-changing? Not necessarily, but I’d never seen it before.</li>\n 	<li>A little more life-changing was the bowl of bun bo hue that we got for breakfast when staying at a local, non-chain, hotel in Hue in central Vietnam. Kind of a spicier, funkier version of the pho you see in the US, and tougher to find here. Not like any hotel breakfast I’d had, and I immediately switched my breakfast choice over to it or pho for the rest of the trip.\nBack in May, when I was in Pune, we stayed at a Marriott Courtyard, a chain which, as I’ve complained about before in prior episodes, doesn’t have a concierge lounge but they had a nice breakfast buffet with what I guess is a typical two-track system -- one side with the usual Western breakfast foods, and the other side with Indian food. The waiter pointed me to the omelette station. I was about ready to order when I noticed another station to my right with what looked like a super-sized crepe griddle. “What’s that?” I asked. “Oh, that’s to make dosas.” “Cool, I have one of those.” “Do you know what a dosa is?” “Nope, but I’ll take one, however it normally comes.” I watched him make this foot-wide diameter stiff crepe, rolled it up and put it, sticking up out of a cup of some sort of stew or curry. I walk back to the table. Everyone else has eggs, bacon, toast, arranged horizontally on their plate. I’m the only one with a vertical breakfast. But I liked that. Kinda flying the flag for something different at breakfast .</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #145</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and now on <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_145.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #145 — Restaurant Karma; Hotel Breakfasts','','inherit','closed','closed','','2138-revision-v1','','','2019-05-07 22:44:12','2019-05-08 03:44:12','',2138,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/2138-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2468,1,'2019-05-07 22:45:09','2019-05-08 03:45:09','[caption id=\"attachment_2141\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/IMG_0031.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2141\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/IMG_0031-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> How Much Extra For A Plate?[/caption]\n\nJust regular domestic business travel since the last podcast, trying to dodge Hurricane Florence to get back to Charlottesville.  Thinking back to last month\'s European travels, we talk about a tight connection through Amsterdam and some odd concierge lounge rules, which gets me thinking about hotel breakfasts. And a listener request for restaurant recommendations gets me thinking about the balance of visiting good and not-so-good restaurant towns. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_145.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_143.mp3\"]\n\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show Notes -->\n\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #145:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL after 3 weeks of “normal” travel -- no vacation, no international travel, just a couple of trips to Charlottesville, VA on sandwiching a quick shot down to Dallas. And no delays. And empty seats beside me. Indeed, I even scored an upgrade on the late United flight from IAD to ORD, the long leg of one of my flights home from Charlottesville. Feels like we’re at the start of maybe a 6-week travel lull between the final end of summer vacations and the early starts of Thanksgiving travel.</li>\n 	<li>There was a bit of drama around the Charlottesville trip in the middle of September. I had to fly out Sunday night -- the weekend that Hurricane Florence hit the Carolina coast. The storm track forecast had Florence plowing west through the Carolinas and then taking a right hand turn at the Appalachians and heading north over Virginia. The question for me -- when would it make the turn; would my Sunday flight make it through before or after the turn or would Florence be in my way on Sunday? Thursday night and Friday, I spent a bit of time hitting the Refresh button on the <a href=\"https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/\">Nat’l Hurricane Center’s website</a>. By Friday, Florence had dropped a couple of category levels and slowed down, and by Saturday, I could see that my Sunday flight would beat Florence to Charlottesville. It was a smooth flight that Sunday, though Monday was a bit wet.</li>\n 	<li>Going through TSA Pre-Check in ORD that Sunday night, I watched a guy use the electronic boarding pass on his Apple Watch. It looked a bit awkward, and if you think about it, it’s understandable. Boarding pass readers face up; you put your boarding pass or phone face down on them to read. But a watch is on face up on the top of your wrist. So the guy ends up standing on his toes and twisting his arm around to get his Apple Watch face down on the reader. You’d think he would’ve shifted to his phone after that, but I saw him twist himself up again about 30 minutes later when boarding his flight. Seems like it would’ve been easier to spin the watch on his wrist so it was facing down -- at least until Apple fires up the old Steve Jobs distortion field to convince airports to reorient all their readers for the convenience of Apple Watch users.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- Dub the Uke by Kara Square (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mindmapthat/53340 Ft: DJ Vadim</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul class=\"\">\n 	<li>Allan Marko, a long-time listener and even longer-time friend, sent me an <a href=\"http://www.patentlyapple.com/patently-apple/2018/09/apple-salesforce-are-working-marriott-international-to-bring-homepods-to-hotel-rooms-to-assist-guests-with-services.html\">article</a> that dove into an interesting part of Apple’s new partnership with Salesforce. The two of them are working with Marriott to put Siri in hotel rooms. You could ask Siri to turn up the heat, order room service, or get an Uber through an Apple HomePod in the room. That’s the Apple piece of it. The Salesforce piece lets Siri remember what you asked her, say your room temperature, at the next Marriott. Useful or creepy? And how do you make sure you wipe Siri’s memory before the next guest checks into the room so you can’t ask her things like “Hey Siri, tell me all about the last guest that was here...” or “Order me the same sandwich the last guy ordered”. I dunno. I don’t even like using these new Enseo TVs to log into my own Netflix account, let alone having Marriott listening to me through a HomePod and remembering everything I mutter. Some guys are making a nice living selling shutters that you can stick over your laptop webcam. Are earplugs for hotel HomePods the next thing?</li>\n 	<li>In the<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/09/15/podcast-144-outside-airports-hospitality-mentality/\"> last episode</a>, I mentioned flying SAS from Chicago to Copenhagen. It was an odd schedule -- leaving Chicago around 10pm, arriving Copenhagen after 1 in the afternoon. Leaving that late and having a long taxi, I fell asleep before we left the ground, and before putting my phone in Airplane mode. I woke up, I dunno, an hour or so later, looked at my phone for the time, and noticed some new e-mails. Huh? That’s weird. And then I noticed that my phone didn’t say “No Service”; it was connected to some cellular service, which turned out to be SAS’s in-flight cellular service. And as opposed to in-flight WiFi which you usually have to log into, my iPhone automatically started roaming on the SAS cellular service, that then continued to check/pull e-mail for a couple of hours until I flipped it to airplane mode. I got my AT&amp;T mobile bill a couple of weeks back and ended up with a $25 roaming charge for those half-dozen meaningless e-mails. A pain, but not too painful. Unlike the guy four years ago who <a href=\"https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/11/18/that-1200-in-flight-wifi-bill-was-terrifyingly-real/\">rang up a $1,200 WiFi bill</a> on Singapore Air when he fell asleep with his data still connected.</li>\n 	<li>On the third leg of that trip, going from BRU to EDI, our best option was KLM through AMS. I’ve been in and out and through Schiphol a number of times over the past 20-some odd years and have always liked it. Nothing flashy, but it works -- not too big, reasonable facilities. Booking this BRU-EDI trip on the KLM website, I had two options -- a tight 40-min connection or a 2-hr one. While I don’t mind Schiphol, I wasn’t looking to make an afternoon of it. So I broke one of my cardinal travel rules -- never book a connection shorter than an hour -- and booked the 40-min connection, knowing that we had a back-up if it didn’t work out. One factor I didn’t completely think through was that we’d have to cross the Schengen border during those 40 minutes too. The first leg -- Brussels to Amsterdam -- was within Schengen so it was just like an domestic US flight -- no passport control, no customs. But in Schiphol, we had switch concourses and go through passport control because the UK is outside of Schengen. We made it through, though, with time to spare because - we walked real fast; like I said before, Schiphol isn’t that big, so switching concourses wasn’t a long walk; but most importantly, my wife spotted the “short connection” line at passport control. We had gotten in the regular line, but then we saw on a display screen that our EDI flight was classified a “short connection”, so we switched to the much shorter line -- I earned a “Hey” from a security guard when I ducked under the tape -- and quickly passed through what was a well-staffed and brisk passport control line (Munich Airport, you could take some lessons here). We get to the gate with more than enough time -- boarding hasn’t been called yet. So while we made the 40-minute connection, the question now was -- would the checked luggage make it? As we were queuing to board, I looked out the terminal window. There’s our plane, and there, next to the baggage loader, was Irene’s and Claire’s luggage -- stationary, not rolling along like in that YouTube video. A very good sign, but there wasn’t anybody loading luggage. As I walk up to board, I tap one of the KLM guys standing around. Pointing out the window, I say “See those bags on the tarmac? Those are ours. It would be great if they made it onto this plane.” He laughed -- him a bit more than me. I was happy to see them appear on the EDI baggage carousel.</li>\n 	<li>I’m thinking that I need another carry-on bag; something between my maximum legal size 22-incher and my leather duffel overnighter. On that BRU-EDI trip, I carried my 22-incher on, but not without agents at Brussels and Amsterdam challenging me, even after showing them it fit in their baggage sizer. A few weeks after that trip, KLM added an <a href=\"https://news.klm.com/klms-augmented-reality-hand-baggage-check-now-available-in-messenger/\">augmented reality baggage sizer</a> to their iPhone app. You fire up the app, point your iPhone camera at your bag and the app overlays a properly sized rectangle over your bag. If your bag is within the rectangle, you’re good to go. Would’ve been easier -- and much cooler -- than slamming my bag into those metal sizers, but somehow, with those gate agents, I don’t think the outcome would’ve been any different.</li>\n 	<li>OK, one last thing from that trip. The concierge lounges in both the Copenhagen Marriott and the London St Pancras Renaissance had prominent “rules” signs at their entrances, and one of those rules was a ban on “fitness clothes”. Now, this wasn’t a big deal on this trip because I was on vacation, and wasn’t toting work-out gear. My normal program when I’m on business travel is to get up before 6, work out, go straight to the lounge in my “fitness gear” for some breakfast while cooling down, then head back to my room to shower, change, and head out. Having to separate the cool down from breakfast would add 15-20 minutes to what is an already tight morning routine. So I hope that rule doesn’t spread to the US lounges. The rest of the rules seemed pretty reasonable, though one -- no wearing a bathrobe in the lounge -- seemed a bit superfluous. I’ve never seen someone walk into a concierge lounge in a bathrobe… until in Copenhagen at 3 in the afternoon with it not looking like there was anything on under the robe. So, OK, I’m now completely on-board with the no robe rule.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> or our new <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a> at travelcommons -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music — Emma by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/50905 Ft: Martijn de Boer</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Restaurant Karma</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Casey Milch sent me a note a few weeks back -- “Greetings. Love the podcast. I know you mention frequent trips to Charlottesville and I’m finding myself there every six weeks for work myself now. Any restaurant suggestions?”</li>\n 	<li>One of the compensations for getting on an airplane just about every week is that you get to try a lot of restaurants. Now, in the last episode, we talked about the downside of that -- rapid waistline expansion -- but if you’re thoughtful about it, and you like trying different food (I hate the word “foodie”), business travel has its benefits. I sent Casey a few recommendations -- Fitzroy, a meat place -- burger, double pork chop, fried chicken -- on the Main Street pedestrian mall; Lampo, a small Neapolitan pizza place with a big wood oven that is -- I forgot to tell Casey this -- a 5-minute walk from Champion Brewing Company’s taproom; and The Alley Light, a speakeasy in an small alcove (a bit too short to be a proper alley) with no sign though there is a light over the door, that took 3 tries to find the first time in the pouring rain, which led to the question “How many consultants does it take to work Google Maps”. Putting the list together for Casey reminded me that we hadn’t been to Alley Light in a while, so we ate there last Tuesday night -- found it on the first try this time -- and had roasted bone marrow, pork rillette, duck confit -- oh, and some carrots. So much for thoughtfulness.</li>\n 	<li>Charlottesville punches above its weight for good restaurants, maybe because of University of Virginia. The 2 ½ years I spent in New Orleans was one of definitely one of my food high points, especially when crawfish were in season. 3 months in Portland, OR was fun with the food truck scene, and of course, it is ground-zero for the craft beer explosion. Stays in Manhattan, San Francisco, and London were that much more enjoyable with someone else picking up the dinner tab. Indeed, in San Francisco, I used to stay in different hotels so I could try different neighborhood joints.</li>\n 	<li>But karma always seeks balance, and for all these great food locations, there have been other, let’s say, less-than-stunning places. Dover, OH -- about 30 miles south of Canton -- had, when I was doing a project there -- two places to eat -- an Arby’s and the lunch counter of the Walmart knock-off. And the Walmart knock-off was the better of the two. Oldsmar, FL was a bit too far outside of Tampa for us to head in for dinner every night, so the near-by Buffalo Wild Wings - B-Dubs - and Applebee’s were our best shots. And downtown Detroit in the early 2000’s, working, eating, and sleeping in the urban fortress that is the Renaissance Center was brutally monotonous.</li>\n 	<li>But even when in London and New York, we weren’t splurging on big meals every night. We have reasonable expense budgets that we have to live within. So again, we find balance -- one night we’re underspending at a dive (but good) pizza-by-the-slice joint, so that the next night, we eat at nice place. Some guys will extend balancing act to travel -- sucking up the inconvenience of a cheaper connecting flight to pay for better meals. One colleague told me -- “I’ll happily travel cheap to eat great food”</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music — Astral Travel by Astral (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Astral/44282</li>\n</ul>\n<b>Hotel Breakfasts</b>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Growing up, those of us of a certain age heard that breakfast is the most important meal of the day -- usually from a cereal commercial. I mentioned a bit early earlier my morning hotel pattern -- work out, hit the concierge lounge for breakfast and then get on with my day. Most lounge breakfasts are pretty industrial -- chafing dishes of stiff scrambled pasteurized eggs, thin slices of oven-baked bacon, vat of oatmeal, a few cartons of yogurt, and a bowl of fruit. It gets the day started. I may be judging it a bit harshly though. My daughter Claire loves those scrambled eggs. Go a little more upscale and you’ll see maybe a platter of smoked salmon, some sliced meats and cheeses, bran muffins…</li>\n 	<li>So when I see something different, it gets my attention. Like roasted green chiles in New Mexico, Albuquerque and Santa Fe, to season those scrambled eggs, or the King Cake at the Canal St Sheraton in New Orleans during Mardi Gras season. Now, it’s not the best king cake I’ve had - and my wife has dragged me through a king cake tasting crawl there, so I speak with some knowledge -- but I look forward to it whenever I’m there in the spring. I remember one morning I walked in -- no king cake! I found one of the staff -- “you guys stop doing king cake?!” “No! I didn’t know we were out.” And they immediately brought out a new one. Crisis averted!</li>\n 	<li>It doesn’t even have to be anything big. The Copenhagen Marriott lounge had rhubarb juice. As a kid, my mother made pies from rhubarb growing in our backyard, that I think her mother had planted. So something different and nostalgic all in one. Was it life-changing? Not necessarily, but I’d never seen it before.</li>\n 	<li>A little more life-changing was the bowl of bun bo hue that we got for breakfast when staying at a local, non-chain, hotel in Hue in central Vietnam. Kind of a spicier, funkier version of the pho you see in the US, and tougher to find here. Not like any hotel breakfast I’d had, and I immediately switched my breakfast choice over to it or pho for the rest of the trip.\nBack in May, when I was in Pune, we stayed at a Marriott Courtyard, a chain which, as I’ve complained about before in prior episodes, doesn’t have a concierge lounge but they had a nice breakfast buffet with what I guess is a typical two-track system -- one side with the usual Western breakfast foods, and the other side with Indian food. The waiter pointed me to the omelette station. I was about ready to order when I noticed another station to my right with what looked like a super-sized crepe griddle. “What’s that?” I asked. “Oh, that’s to make dosas.” “Cool, I have one of those.” “Do you know what a dosa is?” “Nope, but I’ll take one, however it normally comes.” I watched him make this foot-wide diameter stiff crepe, rolled it up and put it, sticking up out of a cup of some sort of stew or curry. I walk back to the table. Everyone else has eggs, bacon, toast, arranged horizontally on their plate. I’m the only one with a vertical breakfast. But I liked that. Kinda flying the flag for something different at breakfast .</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #145</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and now on <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_145.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #145 — Restaurant Karma; Hotel Breakfasts','','inherit','closed','closed','','2138-revision-v1','','','2019-05-07 22:45:09','2019-05-08 03:45:09','',2138,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/2138-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2469,1,'2019-05-07 22:54:47','2019-05-08 03:54:47','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><img class=\"wp-image-2439\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/oysters_and_evian_bottles-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\"><figcaption>Cancale Oysters with a nice Evian Sancerre</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>Squeezing in another episode before moving the TravelCommons studios, we talk with <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mylaocoon\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Candid Wueest</span></a> of Symantec about websites that leak traveler data and what we can do to protect ourselves. I talk about yet more frustration with the <a href=\"http://avios.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Avios</a> frequent flyer program, while a listener writes in about his great experience with <a href=\"https://www.getfreebird.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Freebird</a>, a new flight rebooking service. I wrap up talking about great street food we had while touring Brittany, France last month. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_151.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/617322609&color=%23ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #151: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, for the last time…. Not the last time for TravelCommons, just the last time for the studios “outside of Chicago”. We’re picking up stakes and moving about 20 miles east-northeast to Chicago’s Lakeview neighborhood. Hence the reason for the short-cycle on this episode. We’ll be breaking down and packing up the studio and production bay next week and probably won’t have everything reassembled until the end of the month. The recording isn’t really the issue -- I could always go back to my roots and find a spare bathroom to record in. It’s more about the production. I’m not sure I want to shrink my workflow down from a beefy dual 22-inch monitor Windows 10 mini-tower rig to my 2014 vintage 11-inch MacBook Air.</li><li>Being consumed by the move logistics vortex also means I haven’t done any real travel in the 2 weeks since the last episode -- but, given my most recent travel experiences, as laid out in last episode’s <em>Travel Interruptus</em> epic, I’ve appreciated the break. Especially when yet another yet another April snowstorm that blew up 700 flights last weekend. Instead, I’ve been wrestling once again with Avios -- the British Airways, Iberia, and now Aer Lingus frequent flyer program -- trying to book a Chicago-Dublin-Edinburgh Aer Lingus itinerary for my daughter’s graduation from University of St Andrews next month. I’ve been pretty <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/08/26/podcast-116-traveling-thru-japan-luggage-trends/\">vocal</a> about my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">challenges</a> with Avios over the years. In this go-around, the first wackiness was just trying to use the Avios website. To search for flights, you need to log in with your BA, Iberia, or Aer Lingus credentials. I try with all three; and fail with all three. Seems that the passwords given out by BA and Iberia don’t meet Avios’ security rules, so they fail. I assumed the username for my Aer Lingus account was my email address and the password seemed strong enough, but that kept failing too. Finally, after digging around my Aer Lingus profile, I found a separate username, which I’d never seen or used before, and <em>that</em> worked. Finally through the gate and onto the second wackiness -- the difference between the value of an Avios point on the Aer Lingus and Avios web sites. The award offers on both sites were points + cash. Taking the “market rate” for the ticket (pulled from Expedia), subtracting out the required cash payment, and dividing by the number of required Avios points gives the value of the Avios point for that award offer. My rule of thumb is -- get at least 2 cents/point or pay cash. The Aer Lingus site valued an Avios point at 0.7 cents while the Avios site hit my 2-cent minimum. I couldn’t quite understand that 65% difference, but I booked our tickets on the wonkier Avios site before it went away. If I remember anything from my University of Chicago business school courses, it’s that markets are efficient; 65% price differences don’t last forever. Though in this case, that difference may linger because the Avios website makes it so damn hard to find. </li><li>Bridge Music — <em>Lakeside Jam</em> by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/55998 </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Veteran TravelCommons listener Mika Pyyhkala sent in a note this week talking about his great experience with a flight rebooking service, <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Freebird (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"http://getfreebird.com\" target=\"_blank\">Freebird</a>. Mika writes:<ul><li>I was flying with a companion from (Wichita) ICT-STL and STL-DTW. &nbsp;Just as the plane was descending to DTW, I received text messages from WN and Freebird that STL-DTW on WN had been cancelled. &nbsp;Freebird then manually advised that the only flight for that day was a DL STL-DTW, and they were going to book it in case I wanted it; if they waited longer there might not be enough time to issue the new ticket on Delta through their travel agent. &nbsp;They just asked me to confirm that I in fact wanted the Delta ticket.  </li><li>I confirmed we wanted the 2 Delta tickets, and by the time the door opened in STL we had a confirmation number to check in for the Delta flight leaving in 47 minutes. We got seats together on the Delta flight that were assigned by the Freebird process, and they even gave us free drinks!</li><li>I think we actually arrived in DTW a few minutes earlier than we were scheduled on the original flight, and it made for a great travel story and adventure! &nbsp;This was my first time using Freebird as well!</li><li>It costs $19 to protect a one way trip per traveler. &nbsp;It’s simple to work with them: unlike insurance, there are no claim forms, long waits, or papers to sign</li></ul></li><li>Mika, thanks for this. I hadn’t heard of Freebird before Mika’s note. Hitting their website, they’re selling their service to companies, travel agencies, and to individual travelers. Clicking through to a TechCrunch article about them, it says they’re also talking to Amex and Citibank about including Freebird as a credit card benefit. The article quotes the CEO, Ethan Bernstein - “It’s funny what happens when people deal with uncertainty; uncertainty is the worst. As soon you give people information, human support and technology to help them solve their problems, they experience the event so much differently.” &nbsp;Which is exactly right. Certainty lets you plan; uncertainty just leaves you to stew… and drink at the airport bar… and eat bad airport food… and bitch Tweet. Yup, uncertainty leads to lots of bad things</li><li>One more-fun-than-necessarily-good thing on last month’s trip was getting to try out an alpha version of a new augmented reality feature for Google Maps. I used it first in Stockholm; we got off the Arlanda Express at the Central Train station and wanted make our way over to the <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Östermalms Saluhall (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.ostermalmshallen.se/en/\" target=\"_blank\">Östermalms Saluhall</a> for lunch. When I chose “Walking” as our transport mode, a “Start AR” button showed up next to the usual button to start the directions. With AR, I’d hold my phone up, the display would use the camera to show the streetscape in front of me with the &nbsp;directions -- street names, arrows -- overlaid on the real-time image. I thought it was a nice add; reduced any ambiguity about where the next turn was. One interesting feature -- when I started walking, the screen dimmed and a message popped up telling me to stop looking at the phone and look straight ahead. All in all, it’s kinda fun. At least I thought so; Andrew and Irene seemed much less impressed. It worked very well for what was billed as an alpha product. It’ll be interesting to see how it develops, and how fast Google rolls it out.</li><li>But even without a broader AR roll-out, Google Maps seems on track to become the next “<a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"super app (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://skift.com/2019/04/16/google-maps-is-ready-to-transform-the-world-of-superapps-a-skift-deep-dive/\" target=\"_blank\">super app</a>” -- sorta the Western counterpart to China’s WeChat -- the first “super app”, a Swiss Army Knife-kind of “it does everything” app. Now Google Maps isn’t to that level -- yet -- but it is growing. It started as a mapping app, then added driving directions, then ride share -- showing Uber and Lyft prices, then public transit directions with real-time arrival times, replacing the core use case for apps like Transit. Then the “Explore Nearby” became more prominent -- which, for me, has supplanted Yelp when looking for a restaurant because it’s so much more convenient, and with deep links to OpenTable for reservations; and for nearby hotels, direct booking links to Expedia and Booking.com. I wasn’t surprised when I saw a stat that those “Near Me” searches grew 150 percent the last year. I’m not quite sure what I think about this -- loving a free service that keeps becoming more valuable vs. becoming more enslaved to the Google overlords. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/08/27/podcast-132-travel-apps-on-my-phone/\">episode #132</a>, I listed all the travel apps on my smartphone, and Google Maps was the most important -- “Indeed, it’s the only travel app with its own screen real estate rather than sharing space in the Travel folder,” I said. And it only keeps getting more indispensable.</li><li>Thinking back to our last day in Paris when both Ubers that we ordered were nice black Mercedes, I couldn’t help thinking how the quality of US Uber and Lyft vehicles has slipped. I remember when I started using Uber in 4-5 years ago, the cars were pristine. I remember working in Baltimore one summer; I was more than happy to wait 5 minutes for an Uber rather than take one of the cabs waiting at the stand right outside the building I was in. Those cabs were so beat up, so full of trash, and most of the time, without working air conditioning. Today, cabs haven’t gotten much cleaner, but Uber and Lyft seem to be lowering their standards. I dunno if it’s because of falling unemployment rates or trying to keep up with growth or squeezing driver pay to improve their post-IPO margins -- or all of the above -- but I’m seeing a real drop in quality.</li><li>Long-time TravelCommons listeners will recall that I’ve spent a lot of time in New Orleans airport and other than serving beer in go cups French Quarter-style so you can walk around the terminal with it, there’s not much good to say about it. Especially with regards to food and restaurants. For such a great food town to have such mediocre airport concessions has always been beyond me. But then again, the original terminal was built in 1959, and then expanded in the mid-70’s and mid-90’s. The new $1 billion replacement terminal was originally scheduled to open last year during New Orleans’ tricentennial, but that then slipped to February of this year, then to May, and now to a “to be determined” date sometime in the fall. The restaurant selection is supposed to be much better but I hope they don’t change that beer policy though. One time, waiting out yet another thunderstorm delay, I’d bought a beer and was standing by the gate drinking it because the bar was full. American called boarding and I walked up to the gate. The agent stopped me -- “You can drink that beer anywhere in the airport -- except on the jetway.” I looked down; I’d forgotten that I was still carrying that beer. I stepped to the side, chugged it, and then got on the plane. Felt like a very New Orleans thing to do.</li><li>And if you have any travel rants, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. &nbsp;The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Facebook page</a> or our Instagram account at <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Travelcommons</a> -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music —  <em>A Thousand And None</em> by Speck (c) copyright 2018 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/speck/57256 Ft: Mr_Yesterday</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Traveler Data Leaks</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Interview with <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mylaocoon\">Candid Wueest</a>, Principal Threat Researcher at Symantec and author of a blog post titled <a href=\"https://www.symantec.com/blogs/threat-intelligence/hotel-websites-leak-guest-data\"><em>Two in Three Hotel Websites Leak Guest Booking Details and Allow Access to Personal Data</em></a></li><li>Bridge Music —  <em>dazed </em>by Jeris (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/VJ_Memes/39456 Ft: airtone</li><li></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Brittany Street Food</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I’ll write a proper “Road Trip” post about our Brittany trip later this spring, after we get settled in the new digs, but after streaming a few episodes of Netflix’s “Street Food” series, I started thinking about some of the Breton street food we enjoyed while touring last month. If you’ve seen any of the Netflix series, you know that it’s more about the vendors than the food. But my French trails off after “oui,” “non,” “merci,” and “S\'il vous plaît” so I wasn’t able to get much of the vendor’s life stories. So this will be all about the food.</li><li>The first place we stayed was <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancale\">Cancale</a>, and we went there for one reason - oysters. Like people have been doing for 300-some odd years. When the tide is out, you can see miles of oyster beds with big farm tractors moving through the rows, hauling out trailers of oysters. Lining the ramp where the tractors drive up out of the beds is a little oyster market -- 8 stalls selling oysters fresh from the beds for €5-6/dozen. After adding another couple of euros for shucking, a half lemon and the use of a plastic platter, we’d have our afternoon snack -- sitting on the sea wall by the market, slurping through a couple dozen very briny oysters while watching the tractors work, and then pitching the empty shells back onto the beach for the seagulls to pick through. Our first afternoon, we only had a couple of cans of beer in our jacket pocket. The next couple of afternoons, we’d pour a nice white wine into some empty Evian bottles (Claire and I preferred a Sancerre) and make sure we had a good supply of wet wipes. We didn’t miss an afternoon on that sea wall while in Cancale.</li><li>Buckwheat is a big thing in Brittany. It’s been grown in Brittany for half a millennium or more, and for almost that long, it seems, has been turned into a <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galette\">galette</a>. a buckwheat crêpe. But a crêpe in form and shape only. Instead of a soft white wheat flour crêpe filled with jam or Nutella, the galette is crisper/firmer and savory. Fine on its own smeared with Breton butter, or with egg and cheese and ham inside. We got into Concarneau, on the southwest coast of Brittany about an hour before the weekly Friday outdoor market closed. &nbsp;I counted a half-dozen galette trucks. We walked up to the closest one. The cook was finishing up what looked like a weekend’s worth of galettes for the person in front of us -- flipping them, then pulling them off two hot metal disks, buttering them, and adding them to the stack. It was Friday in Lent, so I went for the egg, onion, and cheese galette. The creaminess of the cheese played nicely against the nutty graininess of the buckwheat.</li><li>The next day we drove to Rennes, our last stop in Brittany. We dropped the rental car at the train station and took the subway to Place des Lices for the huge Saturday market. We walked down from the subway station, through the fruit and vegetable stands lining the street -- beautiful stuff, but we’re leaving the next day, so we’re not doing a lot of green grocery shopping. There, between the two market halls, is a collection of food trucks; about 70% of them selling what we were looking for -- <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galette-saucisse\">galette-saucisse</a> -- the classic Breton street food that is pretty much what the straight translation from French to English suggests -- a sausage in a galette. Kinda like a Breton hot dog, it’s a cooked pork sausage wrapped in a cool galette, maybe with some grilled onions and dijon mustard added. There were lines tailing back from all the trucks serving these. A local guy pointed one truck out to Irene -- “They’re the best”, he said. She and Claire stood in queue while Andrew and I searched for drinks. Around the corner, we found a local cider maker; a couple of tables surrounded by crates of cider bottles. Through a mangled bit of Franglais, we bought a bottle of dry cider that had stayed cool in the shade and four cups, and got back to the food truck line just in time to be handed my galette-saucisse. After finishing the sausage and cider, I swung past the cider stand to give him the empty bottle -- kinda in-person recycling. There wasn’t much time to catch up on his life story, but it was a sunny Saturday and he had a full line; looked like he was having a good day.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #151</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_151.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<p><!--EndFragment--></p>\n<p></p>','Podcast #151 — Traveler Data Leaks; Brittany Street Food','','inherit','closed','closed','','2436-revision-v1','','','2019-05-07 22:54:47','2019-05-08 03:54:47','',2436,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/2436-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2470,1,'2019-05-10 10:34:52','2019-05-10 15:34:52','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><img class=\"wp-image-2439\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/oysters_and_evian_bottles-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\"><figcaption>Cancale Oysters with a nice Evian Sancerre</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>Squeezing in another episode before moving the TravelCommons studios, we talk with <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mylaocoon\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Candid Wueest</span></a> of Symantec about websites that leak traveler data and what we can do to protect ourselves. I talk about yet more frustration with the <a href=\"http://avios.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Avios</a> frequent flyer program, while a listener writes in about his great experience with <a href=\"https://www.getfreebird.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Freebird</a>, a new flight rebooking service. I wrap up talking about great street food we had while touring Brittany, France last month. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_151.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/617322609&color=%23ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #151: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, for the last time…. Not the last time for TravelCommons, just the last time for the studios “outside of Chicago”. We’re picking up stakes and moving about 20 miles east-northeast to Chicago’s Lakeview neighborhood. Hence the reason for the short-cycle on this episode. We’ll be breaking down and packing up the studio and production bay next week and probably won’t have everything reassembled until the end of the month. The recording isn’t really the issue -- I could always go back to my roots and find a spare bathroom to record in. It’s more about the production. I’m not sure I want to shrink my workflow down from a beefy dual 22-inch monitor Windows 10 mini-tower rig to my 2014 vintage 11-inch MacBook Air.</li><li>Being consumed by the move logistics vortex also means I haven’t done any real travel in the 2 weeks since the last episode -- but, given my most recent travel experiences, as laid out in last episode’s <em>Travel Interruptus</em> epic, I’ve appreciated the break. Especially when yet another yet another April snowstorm that blew up 700 flights last weekend. Instead, I’ve been wrestling once again with Avios -- the British Airways, Iberia, and now Aer Lingus frequent flyer program -- trying to book a Chicago-Dublin-Edinburgh Aer Lingus itinerary for my daughter’s graduation from University of St Andrews next month. I’ve been pretty <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/08/26/podcast-116-traveling-thru-japan-luggage-trends/\">vocal</a> about my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">challenges</a> with Avios over the years. In this go-around, the first wackiness was just trying to use the Avios website. To search for flights, you need to log in with your BA, Iberia, or Aer Lingus credentials. I try with all three; and fail with all three. Seems that the passwords given out by BA and Iberia don’t meet Avios’ security rules, so they fail. I assumed the username for my Aer Lingus account was my email address and the password seemed strong enough, but that kept failing too. Finally, after digging around my Aer Lingus profile, I found a separate username, which I’d never seen or used before, and <em>that</em> worked. Finally through the gate and onto the second wackiness -- the difference between the value of an Avios point on the Aer Lingus and Avios web sites. The award offers on both sites were points + cash. Taking the “market rate” for the ticket (pulled from Expedia), subtracting out the required cash payment, and dividing by the number of required Avios points gives the value of the Avios point for that award offer. My rule of thumb is -- get at least 2 cents/point or pay cash. The Aer Lingus site valued an Avios point at 0.7 cents while the Avios site hit my 2-cent minimum. I couldn’t quite understand that 65% difference, but I booked our tickets on the wonkier Avios site before it went away. If I remember anything from my University of Chicago business school courses, it’s that markets are efficient; 65% price differences don’t last forever. Though in this case, that difference may linger because the Avios website makes it so damn hard to find. </li><li>Bridge Music — <em>Lakeside Jam</em> by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/55998 </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Veteran TravelCommons listener Mika Pyyhkala sent in a note this week talking about his great experience with a flight rebooking service, <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Freebird (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"http://getfreebird.com\" target=\"_blank\">Freebird</a>. Mika writes:<ul><li>I was flying with a companion from (Wichita) ICT-STL and STL-DTW. &nbsp;Just as the plane was descending to DTW, I received text messages from WN and Freebird that STL-DTW on WN had been cancelled. &nbsp;Freebird then manually advised that the only flight for that day was a DL STL-DTW, and they were going to book it in case I wanted it; if they waited longer there might not be enough time to issue the new ticket on Delta through their travel agent. &nbsp;They just asked me to confirm that I in fact wanted the Delta ticket.  </li><li>I confirmed we wanted the 2 Delta tickets, and by the time the door opened in STL we had a confirmation number to check in for the Delta flight leaving in 47 minutes. We got seats together on the Delta flight that were assigned by the Freebird process, and they even gave us free drinks!</li><li>I think we actually arrived in DTW a few minutes earlier than we were scheduled on the original flight, and it made for a great travel story and adventure! &nbsp;This was my first time using Freebird as well!</li><li>It costs $19 to protect a one way trip per traveler. &nbsp;It’s simple to work with them: unlike insurance, there are no claim forms, long waits, or papers to sign</li></ul></li><li>Mika, thanks for this. I hadn’t heard of Freebird before Mika’s note. Hitting their website, they’re selling their service to companies, travel agencies, and to individual travelers. Clicking through to a TechCrunch article about them, it says they’re also talking to Amex and Citibank about including Freebird as a credit card benefit. The article quotes the CEO, Ethan Bernstein - “It’s funny what happens when people deal with uncertainty; uncertainty is the worst. As soon you give people information, human support and technology to help them solve their problems, they experience the event so much differently.” &nbsp;Which is exactly right. Certainty lets you plan; uncertainty just leaves you to stew… and drink at the airport bar… and eat bad airport food… and bitch Tweet. Yup, uncertainty leads to lots of bad things</li><li>One more-fun-than-necessarily-good thing on last month’s trip was getting to try out an alpha version of a new augmented reality feature for Google Maps. I used it first in Stockholm; we got off the Arlanda Express at the Central Train station and wanted make our way over to the <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Östermalms Saluhall (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.ostermalmshallen.se/en/\" target=\"_blank\">Östermalms Saluhall</a> for lunch. When I chose “Walking” as our transport mode, a “Start AR” button showed up next to the usual button to start the directions. With AR, I’d hold my phone up, the display would use the camera to show the streetscape in front of me with the &nbsp;directions -- street names, arrows -- overlaid on the real-time image. I thought it was a nice add; reduced any ambiguity about where the next turn was. One interesting feature -- when I started walking, the screen dimmed and a message popped up telling me to stop looking at the phone and look straight ahead. All in all, it’s kinda fun. At least I thought so; Andrew and Irene seemed much less impressed. It worked very well for what was billed as an alpha product. It’ll be interesting to see how it develops, and how fast Google rolls it out.</li><li>But even without a broader AR roll-out, Google Maps seems on track to become the next “<a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"super app (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://skift.com/2019/04/16/google-maps-is-ready-to-transform-the-world-of-superapps-a-skift-deep-dive/\" target=\"_blank\">super app</a>” -- sorta the Western counterpart to China’s WeChat -- the first “super app”, a Swiss Army Knife-kind of “it does everything” app. Now Google Maps isn’t to that level -- yet -- but it is growing. It started as a mapping app, then added driving directions, then ride share -- showing Uber and Lyft prices, then public transit directions with real-time arrival times, replacing the core use case for apps like Transit. Then the “Explore Nearby” became more prominent -- which, for me, has supplanted Yelp when looking for a restaurant because it’s so much more convenient, and with deep links to OpenTable for reservations; and for nearby hotels, direct booking links to Expedia and Booking.com. I wasn’t surprised when I saw a stat that those “Near Me” searches grew 150 percent the last year. I’m not quite sure what I think about this -- loving a free service that keeps becoming more valuable vs. becoming more enslaved to the Google overlords. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/08/27/podcast-132-travel-apps-on-my-phone/\">episode #132</a>, I listed all the travel apps on my smartphone, and Google Maps was the most important -- “Indeed, it’s the only travel app with its own screen real estate rather than sharing space in the Travel folder,” I said. And it only keeps getting more indispensable.</li><li>Thinking back to our last day in Paris when both Ubers that we ordered were nice black Mercedes, I couldn’t help thinking how the quality of US Uber and Lyft vehicles has slipped. I remember when I started using Uber in 4-5 years ago, the cars were pristine. I remember working in Baltimore one summer; I was more than happy to wait 5 minutes for an Uber rather than take one of the cabs waiting at the stand right outside the building I was in. Those cabs were so beat up, so full of trash, and most of the time, without working air conditioning. Today, cabs haven’t gotten much cleaner, but Uber and Lyft seem to be lowering their standards. I dunno if it’s because of falling unemployment rates or trying to keep up with growth or squeezing driver pay to improve their post-IPO margins -- or all of the above -- but I’m seeing a real drop in quality.</li><li>Long-time TravelCommons listeners will recall that I’ve spent a lot of time in New Orleans airport and other than serving beer in go cups French Quarter-style so you can walk around the terminal with it, there’s not much good to say about it. Especially with regards to food and restaurants. For such a great food town to have such mediocre airport concessions has always been beyond me. But then again, the original terminal was built in 1959, and then expanded in the mid-70’s and mid-90’s. The new $1 billion replacement terminal was originally scheduled to open last year during New Orleans’ tricentennial, but that then slipped to February of this year, then to May, and now to a “to be determined” date sometime in the fall. The restaurant selection is supposed to be much better but I hope they don’t change that beer policy though. One time, waiting out yet another thunderstorm delay, I’d bought a beer and was standing by the gate drinking it because the bar was full. American called boarding and I walked up to the gate. The agent stopped me -- “You can drink that beer anywhere in the airport -- except on the jetway.” I looked down; I’d forgotten that I was still carrying that beer. I stepped to the side, chugged it, and then got on the plane. Felt like a very New Orleans thing to do.</li><li>And if you have any travel rants, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. &nbsp;The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Facebook page</a> or our Instagram account at <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Travelcommons</a> -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music —  <em>A Thousand And None</em> by Speck (c) copyright 2018 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/speck/57256 Ft: Mr_Yesterday</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Traveler Data Leaks</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Interview with <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mylaocoon\">Candid Wueest</a>, Principal Threat Researcher at Symantec and author of a blog post titled <a href=\"https://www.symantec.com/blogs/threat-intelligence/hotel-websites-leak-guest-data\"><em>Two in Three Hotel Websites Leak Guest Booking Details and Allow Access to Personal Data</em></a></li><li>Bridge Music —  <em>dazed </em>by Jeris (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/VJ_Memes/39456 Ft: airtone</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Brittany Street Food</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I’ll write a proper “Road Trip” post about our Brittany trip later this spring, after we get settled in the new digs, but after streaming a few episodes of Netflix’s “Street Food” series, I started thinking about some of the Breton street food we enjoyed while touring last month. If you’ve seen any of the Netflix series, you know that it’s more about the vendors than the food. But my French trails off after “oui,” “non,” “merci,” and “S\'il vous plaît” so I wasn’t able to get much of the vendor’s life stories. So this will be all about the food.</li><li>The first place we stayed was <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancale\">Cancale</a>, and we went there for one reason - oysters. Like people have been doing for 300-some odd years. When the tide is out, you can see miles of oyster beds with big farm tractors moving through the rows, hauling out trailers of oysters. Lining the ramp where the tractors drive up out of the beds is a little oyster market -- 8 stalls selling oysters fresh from the beds for €5-6/dozen. After adding another couple of euros for shucking, a half lemon and the use of a plastic platter, we’d have our afternoon snack -- sitting on the sea wall by the market, slurping through a couple dozen very briny oysters while watching the tractors work, and then pitching the empty shells back onto the beach for the seagulls to pick through. Our first afternoon, we only had a couple of cans of beer in our jacket pocket. The next couple of afternoons, we’d pour a nice white wine into some empty Evian bottles (Claire and I preferred a Sancerre) and make sure we had a good supply of wet wipes. We didn’t miss an afternoon on that sea wall while in Cancale.</li><li>Buckwheat is a big thing in Brittany. It’s been grown in Brittany for half a millennium or more, and for almost that long, it seems, has been turned into a <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galette\">galette</a>. a buckwheat crêpe. But a crêpe in form and shape only. Instead of a soft white wheat flour crêpe filled with jam or Nutella, the galette is crisper/firmer and savory. Fine on its own smeared with Breton butter, or with egg and cheese and ham inside. We got into Concarneau, on the southwest coast of Brittany about an hour before the weekly Friday outdoor market closed. &nbsp;I counted a half-dozen galette trucks. We walked up to the closest one. The cook was finishing up what looked like a weekend’s worth of galettes for the person in front of us -- flipping them, then pulling them off two hot metal disks, buttering them, and adding them to the stack. It was Friday in Lent, so I went for the egg, onion, and cheese galette. The creaminess of the cheese played nicely against the nutty graininess of the buckwheat.</li><li>The next day we drove to Rennes, our last stop in Brittany. We dropped the rental car at the train station and took the subway to Place des Lices for the huge Saturday market. We walked down from the subway station, through the fruit and vegetable stands lining the street -- beautiful stuff, but we’re leaving the next day, so we’re not doing a lot of green grocery shopping. There, between the two market halls, is a collection of food trucks; about 70% of them selling what we were looking for -- <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galette-saucisse\">galette-saucisse</a> -- the classic Breton street food that is pretty much what the straight translation from French to English suggests -- a sausage in a galette. Kinda like a Breton hot dog, it’s a cooked pork sausage wrapped in a cool galette, maybe with some grilled onions and dijon mustard added. There were lines tailing back from all the trucks serving these. A local guy pointed one truck out to Irene -- “They’re the best”, he said. She and Claire stood in queue while Andrew and I searched for drinks. Around the corner, we found a local cider maker; a couple of tables surrounded by crates of cider bottles. Through a mangled bit of Franglais, we bought a bottle of dry cider that had stayed cool in the shade and four cups, and got back to the food truck line just in time to be handed my galette-saucisse. After finishing the sausage and cider, I swung past the cider stand to give him the empty bottle -- kinda in-person recycling. There wasn’t much time to catch up on his life story, but it was a sunny Saturday and he had a full line; looked like he was having a good day.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #151</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_151.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<p><!--EndFragment--></p>\n<p></p>','Podcast #151 — Traveler Data Leaks; Brittany Street Food','','inherit','closed','closed','','2436-revision-v1','','','2019-05-10 10:34:52','2019-05-10 15:34:52','',2436,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/10/2436-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2473,1,'2019-06-15 09:51:09','2019-06-15 14:51:09','[caption id=\"attachment_1273\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/IMG_2455.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-1273 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/IMG_2455-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Morning-Prince Canal, Jordaan\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Quiet Sunday Morning Before the Tour Boats Invade the Prinsengracht[/caption]\n\nBack in front of the mic after summer vacation, I\'ve continued the heavy travel schedule -- New Orleans mostly with a week in Amsterdam for a family vacation. I talk about the exposure of staying in a houseboat on an Amsterdam canal and run through my personal \"Best of\" list. Flying out of the Gulf Coast in the summer with its afternoon thunderstorms has forced me to become a weather geek. I run through the weather apps I religiously use. Bad weather also caught up with me in Europe, but Lufthansa did a great job of taking care of us. I\'m still in love with TSA\'s PreCheck. I may make Southwest\'s A-List once PreCheck comes to <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Chicago Midway International Airport\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Midway_International_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener wikipedia noreferrer\">Chicago-Midway airport</a>. And we wrap with restaurant trends seen at this year\'s National Restaurant Association show. All this and more  at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_106.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_106.mp3\"]\n\n<!--more-->\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #106:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Back in the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago. I sorta took the summer off -- working, biking, reading, drinking beer. Nothing really exciting, which meant, I guess, that I didn\'t have anything new to podcast about.</li>\n 	<li>Which doesn\'t mean I haven\'t been traveling. I\'ve been in the air almost every week since the last episode -- New Orleans mostly, with a few trips to Houston, and a week in Amsterdam for a family vacation.</li>\n 	<li>The New Orleans trips have taught me a key life lesson -- don’t try to fly out of the Gulf Coast after 4:30pm in the summer. New Orleans in the summer is 91 degrees and 91% humidity. And so you sit in the airport terminal and watch the line of thunderstorms cross the runway at about 4pm -- just bucketing down rain with lightning strikes that keep the ground crews inside. That’s about the time you walk over and get another beer ‘cause you’re going to be there for a while.</li>\n 	<li>Of course, it could be worse. You could be on one of the planes that managed to land right before the squall line hit. You’re sitting on a plane that’s pulled up to the gate, but you can get off because there’s no one to pull the jet bridge up because of the lighting. You get the same wait, but no beer.</li>\n 	<li>So if you don’t want to torture yourself, you don’t fly out late afternoon, but the other problem is that, after 7pm, MSY is a ghost town. The last flight that will get me to Chicago -- even with a connection, leaves at 6:30. Save for the odd SW hop to Houston, there’s nothing going.</li>\n 	<li>So, if I have a late afternoon meeting, I have to stay overnight. And then head over to the French Quarter, or the Garden District, or the Bywater district for a cocktail and some fresh oysters, maybe a bit of gumbo or cochon… OK, so maybe the lack of late night flights home isn\'t so bad after all.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/djlang59/37792\">Drops of H2O (The Filtered Water Treatment)</a></em> by J Lang</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>So all this dodging summer Gulf storms has made weather apps join airline and trip mgmt apps in the critical travel apps folder on my <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"iPhone\" href=\"http://www.apple.com/iphone\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"homepage noopener noreferrer\">iPhone</a> and Nexus 7. Actually, it starts on my laptop where I have <a href=\"http://weatherspark.com/#!dashboard;a=USA/LA/New_Orleans\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">WeatherSpark </a>on an open tab at all times. In one browser window, I get radar, temperature and precipitation forecasts. On my iPhone, it’s <a href=\"http://forecast.io/#/f/40.7142,-74.0064\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Forecast</a> and the rebuilt Yahoo Weather apps which really represent two ends of the design spectrum. Forecast has very minimal aesthetic -- lot of white space; focused quickly giving you what it thinks most people want to know -- what’s the forecast for the next hour; and the next 24 hours. Tapping and reveals current weather conditions -- humidity, pressure, wind; another tap the 7 day forecast; tap one of those days drills down to its hourly temperature and precip forecast. Yahoo Weather is less tappy -- you start with current conditions and a big picture from Flickr and then scroll down for forecasts and a radar map. On my Nexus 7, <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Skymotion\" href=\"http://skymotion.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"homepage noopener noreferrer\">SkyMotion</a> is focused on short-term forecasting -- it gives me current conditions and a forecast as far ahead as it can see (No Rain for the next 115 min) and then counts down the next forecast -- I have mine set to update every 5 minutes. I tend to triangulate across all of them for sort of a consensus forecast, but that’s because, in trying to get home at a reasonable time every week, I\'ve become a bit obsessive about the weather.</li>\n 	<li>Maps, of course, are the critical travel app. And I don\'t know about you guys, but for me Apple Maps is still lousy. I hadn\'t used Apple Maps ever since Google launched their IOS Maps app, but a few weeks back, landing at ORD, I was in a rush to get directions and travel time to a meeting. The address was in the appt so I just clicked on it and it popped up Apple Maps. A couple of clicks and I had directions, or so I thought. As I skimmed the turns, I thought \"This can\'t be right\". I looked at the address in the pin -- it was Michigan Ave in <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Evanston, Illinois\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evanston%2C_Illinois\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener wikipedia noreferrer\">Evanston, IL</a> not Chicago -- even though the address on the appointment included Chicago. So I manually edited the address, specifically typing in Chicago and hit Return. But Apple still wanted to send me to Evanston. I re-opened the appointment, copied the address, pasted it into Google Maps and I headed to Chicago.</li>\n 	<li>Playing around later that day, I found that Apple Maps just isn\'t as smart as Google Maps about my location. Standing in the Loop, I put a street address into Google Maps -- 525 Monroe -- and Google assumes that, since I\'m in standing in downtown Chicago, I want to find 525 W Monroe in Chicago. Apple Maps will tell me \"Address not found\" if I don\'t specify Chicago. Remember when this whole debacle started -- Tim Cook said Maps would get better the more people used it. I haven\'t seen it, but thanks to Google, I\'m not too worried.</li>\n 	<li>In the last <a title=\"Podcast #105 — Traveling in Spain; Return of the Hotel Lobby?\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2013/05/30/podcast-105-traveling-in-spain-return-of-the-hotel-lobby/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">two</a> <a title=\"Podcast #104 — Status Free Fall; TSA Knife Fight\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2013/03/19/podcast-104-status-free-fall-tsa-knife-fight/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">episodes</a>, I talked about, when traveling internationally, buying a SIM card in country to save on voice and data roaming charges. In Amsterdam, the story was no different. After landing in <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amsterdam_Airport_Schiphol\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Schiphol</a>, I searched out the <a href=\"http://www.lebara.nl/?isoCode=en_GB\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Lebara Mobile</a> booth in the shadow of the Burger King. It wasn\'t the biggest booth, so it took me a bit. But once I found it, it took the guy all of 5 minutes to get my unlocked AT&amp;T iPhone 4 registered on the KPN network. For €20 (about $26) I got 1 GB of data, unlimited texts, and enough voice minutes to make a half-dozen restaurant reservations. Compare that to $30 for 120 MB of international data.  The web site <a href=\"http://prepaidwithdata.wikia.com/\">http://prepaidwithdata.wikia.com</a> is a great site to prepaid plan comparisons. Should be a top bookmark for any international traveler.</li>\n 	<li>The Saturday we flew back from Amsterdam was the one day of bad weather -- rain and low clouds. I’d booked our flights using United miles, so while the flight over from Chicago was a non-stop United flight, the flight back was on Lufthansa with a connection through Frankfurt. We got to Schiphol a bit early, and seeing delays, we tried to get on an earlier flight to Frankfurt. We weren\'t the only ones with idea; the flight was full. “No worries,” said the counter agent, “your flight is only delayed 20 minutes. You’ll still have an hour to make your connection.” 45 minutes later, the delay is now an hour. “No worries,” the gate agent said, “you’ll still have 20 minutes to make your connection.” I study her face for signs of irony or sarcasm, but I don’t detect any. Boarding time comes and goes and we’re still in the gate area. The fuel truck is MIA and we can’t board while the plane is being fueled. I’d already talked to United. The connection we will now miss is the last flight to the US from Frankfurt and there’s no room on any nearby United flights to the US until Monday. I figure there’s a better chance of us getting to the US from Frankfurt, Lufthansa’s main hub, than Schiphol. We board the flight knowing we’ll be overnighting in Frankfurt.</li>\n 	<li>On approach to Frankfurt, the flight attendant reads off all the connecting flights -- the gates for the connections that are still make-able, and the rebookings for those that weren\'t -- more information than I typically hear on a delayed flight into ORD. According to this, we were rebooked on the next morning’s flight to ORD, which was great news because United said it was booked up. We head over to Lufthansa’s customer service desk. Not much of a line. The agent quickly finds us in the system, looks at me, my wife and my two kids and says, “So you’ll need two or four rooms this evening?” “Two will be fine,” I tell him. He gives us vouchers for two rooms at an airport hotel, which includes €20 a piece for dinner, and also includes breakfast. All on Lufthansa. And remember, we were flying on award miles. Now think about this for a minute. If this was the US, we would’ve been told “It’s weather. Not our fault. You’re on your own.” And re-booking on award miles? I think we would’ve ranked lower than non-revenue employees. All of this, plus the really nice service in coach on the way back to Chicago has my wife telling me -- the next time we book flights with United miles, avoid them; book all the legs on Lufthansa.</li>\n 	<li>One thing United does do right, though, is TSA PreCheck. As I’ve said in previous podcasts, PreCheck is wonderful thing -- keep your shoes and belt on, keep your liquids and PC in your bag, stroll through the metal detector; no full body irradiation, everybody -- the passengers and the TSA agents -- are happy and smiling, there’s a rainbow over the exit of the X-ray machine, and a sparkly unicorn happily gives you your bags at the end. OK, I exaggerate -- but just a bit. Anyhow, TSA PreCheck is a wonderful thing and United does a good job of it in ORD and IAH. American, though, seems to have its challenges. Their PreCheck line at ORD can get very long -- not quite sure why -- and now somehow, they’ve screwed up my PreCheck status because on my last 3 flights to New Orleans, I’ve been shunted over to the regular status line. Missing the unicorns and rainbows, I called up American. Yes, I know that PreCheck is not guaranteed and that randomly I’ll have to go through the regular line -- it’s happened before, but not three trips in a row. I got shunted between Customer Service and the Platinum Desk -- don’t understand it; everything looks fine. A Twitter conversation with American earlier this week asked that I compare the name on my AAdvantage account with my Global Entry account. I also looked at my United account. Both Global Entry and United have my middle name spelled out; my American account just has my middle initial. I updated my American account -- we’ll see if this solves the problem.</li>\n 	<li>On a recent flight down to New Orleans, I took Southwest out of MDW. No PreCheck there. And with all the families and leisure travelers who use MDW, and the way security is configured -- everyone funnels into a single massive multi-lane security checkpoint -- I avoid MDW at all costs. So during this rare flight through, I asked a TSA guy when they’d be getting PreCheck. “End of the year,” he said. “They’ve been reconfiguring a bunch of lanes on the right hand side to handle it.” Well, now. I had just spent 20 minutes getting through security vs. what is usually 5 minutes in United’s ORD PreCheck line. I might be a lot more accepting of a Southwest flight with PreCheck.  Provided that Southwest doesn’t do PreCheck just for its A List members.</li>\n 	<li>And finally, I had a nice social media serendipity moment last month. I was at the Oak Park Microbrew and Food Review. I think this was the 6th year was on, but the first time I’d gone. It was a spur of the moment thing, so I was by myself. I was checking in my first couple of beers on Untappd, which is something like beer geek Foursquare. And up pops a comment on one of my check-ins -- “Come find me, I’m in a Red Hat Linux hat”. Another <a href=\"http://www.untappd.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Untappd </a>friend, and long time podcast listener Rob Auch was there too. It wasn’t too crowded yet, so we managed to find each other fairly quickly, and then hung out for an hour or so tasting beer together. It’s kinda fun when the virtual world intersects the real world.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any travel observations, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/Zapac/26047\">Test Drive</a></em> by Zapac</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Summer Vacation in Amsterdam</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>I\'ve been burning through the award miles recently -- I drained the American bank for a spring break trip to Spain, so it was United’s turn for summer vacation. Since my daughter got to choose the spring break location, my son got the choice for summer. We could only carve out a week, so Asia was out which nixed his usual choice of Japan. Let’s look at Europe “but”, I said as he was opening his mouth, “not Russia. I might be interested in St Petersburg as part of a Baltic thing, but for the rest of Russia, no thanks. You can do that on your own dime.” “Fine,” he said, “then Amsterdam”.</li>\n 	<li>Really? Why? “I dunno; just a place I want to go.” OK. Actually, as I thought about it, I got more interested in it. I’ve done a good bit of work around Amsterdam -- in Haarlem, Utrecht. I’ve flown in and out of Schiphol a bunch of times, but save for one windy afternoon, never really spent any time in the city itself. This could be fun.</li>\n 	<li>As I mentioned in the <a title=\"Podcast #105 — Traveling in Spain; Return of the Hotel Lobby?\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2013/05/30/podcast-105-traveling-in-spain-return-of-the-hotel-lobby/\">last episode</a>, we’ve pretty much converted from hotel rooms to vacation rentals for our family vacations. For about the same price as two hotel rooms, we get that and more -- a kitchen, living room -- places to sit and hang out other than beds and concierge lounges. We also like to shop in local markets. And with a kitchen, this is a lot more fun. We get to buy and try things rather than just doing grocery tourism.</li>\n 	<li>Normally, this works out very well. But the end of July was warmer than normal in Europe. We had expected weather in the mid-70’s -- we got high 80’s during the day and maybe dipping into the mid-70’s at night. Wouldn’t be bad if we were staying at a hotel with air conditioning, but we had decided to do something a bit more local -- we rented a houseboat on the Prince’s Canal. Which didn’t come with air conditioning -- nor great cross-ventilation since you’re kinda down below street -- and breeze level in the canals.</li>\n 	<li>The first morning in the houseboat, I woke up and headed to the kitchen to figure out the Nespresso coffee machine. I opened the canal side door and windows to let in the morning breeze and started rummaging around for the coffee capsules. I heard a noise behind me; I turned and saw one of those big canal tour boats passing within a couple feet of our houseboat; full of tourists, wielding cameras, many pointed through our open door, looking straight at me in my boxers. I waved -- really, what else could I do? -- pressed the Brew button on the Nespresso, and headed back to the bedroom for a t-shirt and a pair of shorts. A bit of a shock at first, it became a game for us the rest of the trip. Now purposely walking around in the most colorful boxers my son and I could find; pointing our cameras back at the tour boats. The tour boat traffic on the Canal was heavy -- I posted a Vine video on my Twitter feed of passing tour boats  -- but that was part of the fun. We would hang out on the little porch at the end of the day, eating some cheese, drinking a beer. It felt like we were part of the Amsterdam vibe, not just observing it.</li>\n 	<li>One of the best days of the week, though, was spent turning the tables -- piloting ourselves through the canals and peeping into the other houseboats. Social media serendipity hit again, this time through Twitter -- by way of Untappd, again. Arnoud Heijnis, a long-time TravelCommons listener, follows me on Twitter. Untappd pushes beer drinking badges to Twitter. Arnoud sees the Weiss beer badge I earned from a check-in at some canal-side bar and shoots me a great e-mail with a fantastic list of suggestions. The one that immediately catches my eye is renting a boat for your own canal tour. I get on line, book a boat, hit the grocery store from some snacks and walk to the rental place in Westerpark. We hop in an aluminum boat with an electric outboard motor, lay on the bottom of the boat to clear what we’re told is the lowest canal bridge in Amsterdam, and then go out for a 3-hr cruise. Bopping around the canals, dodging the big tour boats -- it was a great time.</li>\n 	<li>We also spent a couple of days being part of the bicycling culture in Amsterdam. I think it’s impossible to say you’ve truly visited Amsterdam without renting a bike and spending the day cycling around. I’ve spent time in Portland, OR, Seattle, and Boulder, CO -- three of the top US biking cities in US -- and they pale compared to Amsterdam. Until you get in the midst of it, you can’t really appreciate that bicycles are on the top of the Amsterdam transit pyramid -- cyclists, then motorists, then pedestrians.The bicycle lanes near the Central Station are the craziest -- a mosh pit of cyclists and foreign pedestrians coming out of the train station sprinting for their lives across car and bike lines, chased by honking horns and ringing bells. But get outside town a bit, as we did biking up to Marken Island, and it settles down a lot. And it’s pretty easy cycling -- except for bridges, the country is pancake flat.</li>\n 	<li>Other tips?\n<ul>\n 	<li>I already mentioned hitting the Lebara stand in Schiphol for the “€20 for a gig of mobile data” plan</li>\n 	<li>The train into Amsterdam from Schiphol is dead simple -- take it if you’re staying in the city, but be ready -- it’s so dead simple that it gets crowded.</li>\n 	<li>The family and I loved the Van Gogh Museum -- it’s rare to be able to trace an artist’s development in such detail. But understand that a lot of other people love it too. Go on-line and book a specific date and time for your visit. It’s a lot shorter wait.</li>\n 	<li>Skip the new “Heineken Experience”. It’s just not worth the money. Hit <a href=\"http://www.brouwerijhetij.nl/homepage/zomerblond-6/\">Brouwerij \'t IJ</a> on one of your bike rides. Drink better beer outside under a windmill. Or hit <a href=\"http://www.arendsnest.nl/\">Proeflokaal Arendsnest</a> in the Jordaan district for their selection of Dutch microbrews</li>\n 	<li>We stayed in the Jordaan district and definitely recommend it. We hit the <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noordermarkt\">Noordermarkt</a> farmers’ market on Saturday to stock the houseboat kitchen, shopped down <a href=\"http://www.iamsterdam.com/en-GB/experience/about-amsterdam/areas/featured-areas/haarlemmerstraat-haarlemmerdijk\">Haarlemmerstraat </a>, stopped in at the neighborhood restaurants and bars. We found it the right mix of happening but not too raucous -- which, from walking down the Damrak or around the Red Light district, seem to put us in the minority.</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/Pitx/19513\">Black Rainbow</a></em> by Pitx</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Restaurant Trends</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>This week’s trip to Atlanta will make it 9 straight weeks that I’ve been on travel. So not only do I get to know airports, and airplanes, and hotels, but also restaurants. And for the past couple of years, I’ve attended the<a href=\"http://www.restaurant.org/Home\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"> National Restaurant Association</a>\'s’ <a href=\"http://show.restaurant.org/Home\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">annual show</a> in Chicago to walk the floor and see what trends we can expect to see when we’re eating on the road.</li>\n 	<li>In <a title=\"Podcast #98 — Stolen Luggage &amp; Passports; Restaurants Want Your Smartphone\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/05/20/podcast-98-stolen-luggage-restaurants-want-your-smartphone/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">episode #98</a>, I talked about last year’s show, where technology seemed to be the trend -- mobile apps to let you pay your tab, iPad digital menus, smartphones replacing pagers for queued-up guests,.... This year there was still a technology bent -- yet more permutations on digital menus (though this time featuring cheaper Android tablets as well as iPads) and a whole lot of social apps -- seems everyone wants me to check-in, upload pictures, and leave comments (good ones, I assume) on their site. I gotta tell you, though, I sorta full up with social networks. Personally, I have zero interest in donating free content to yet another social network.  Twitter, Facebook, Untappd, Foodspotting, TripAdvisor, and now a friend just talked me into Yelp. That’s it -- I’m over-socialed.</li>\n 	<li>Luckily this year’s NRA floor -- remember, I said Restaurant, not Rifle Association -- had, well maybe not new food trends, but some clearer, perhaps more consensus trends. Two that jumped out at me were Mediterranean and Japanese foods. Now, I know, how new is Mediterranean? But if in years past, Mediterranean was a label used to push more expensive Italian food, I felt like I saw more of the Mediterranean this year -- specifically, more of the Eastern Mediterranean -- Greek, Turkish, Lebanese. Different, interesting flavors -- sumac, pomegranate, tahini; less basil, more oregano; less pork, more lamb. Nothing against Italian -- I love it -- but anything that brings more flavor choices, I’m all for.</li>\n 	<li>Japanese flavors also had a big presence this year. But not sushi -- although someone was demoing a very cool automatic sushi maker. Instead, it was about the broader spectrum of Japanese flavors -- noodles, green teas, and umami -- the newest basic taste -- sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and now umami -- sort of a meaty, savory taste that is at the core of many Japanese flavors. Japanese noodles seem to be all the rage now -- ramen, udon, soba, …. On the floor of the show, a Japanese company had an entire automated noodle making assembly line running. Watching those big fat udon noodle roll off made me hungry.</li>\n 	<li>Anything that adds variety is a great thing. I remember some years back traveling every week to <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_John,_New_Brunswick\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">St John, NB</a>. I won’t bore you with the hassles of getting there from Chicago -- suffice it to say that, with no customs in St John airport, it wasn’t a simple trip. St John is a nice town, but the choices were a bit limited. Monday night, we’d have salmon -- very fresh, very good. Tuesday, we’d have mussels -- over from nearby Prince Edward’s Island, again very fresh, very good. Wednesday, we’d have a hamburger -- less fresh, but washed down with fresh Moosehead beer from next door Nova Scotia. Thursday -- well, it was back to the salmon -- still fresh, perhaps a little less good.</li>\n 	<li>I’m certainly not having that problem on my weekly commutes to New Orleans, but for those travelers heading to less culinarily interesting destinations, I hope the variety I saw on the floor of the Restaurant show reaches you real soon.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917626811171154.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #106</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org\">ccMixter</a></li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_106.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #106 — Summer Vacation in Amsterdam; Restaurant Trends','','inherit','closed','closed','','1265-revision-v1','','','2019-06-15 09:51:09','2019-06-15 14:51:09','',1265,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/06/15/1265-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2474,1,'2019-06-16 22:30:44','2019-06-17 03:30:44','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\">\n<p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/IMG_0449.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2482 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/IMG_0449-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a></p>\n<figcaption>Latest in Sustainable Food Delivery </figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p>Moving the TravelCommons studios kept me mostly off the road this month except for a quick trip to Nashville, but staying out of restaurants has helped me finally drop the last bit of Christmas weight. We talk about the \"earn and burn\" strategy for frequent travel awards; answer a listener\'s question on how to keep from being overwhelmed when arriving in a new city, and new restaurant trends from the floor of the National Restaurant Association\'s big show. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_152.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #152: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the new TravelCommons studios <em>in</em> Chicago, IL. The move went surprisingly smoothly -- nothing lost, nothing destroyed on the 20-mile trip in from the western suburbs. Have the production bay rebuilt and now trying out the new studio set-up, so we’ll see how this sounds. </li><li>Which also means I haven’t done much travel since the last episode; just a quick trip last week down to Nashville. But the move downtown meant I had to rethink some of my travel patterns -- not how to get to and from Nashville, but how to get to and from Chicago Midway airport. We’ve said before in many episodes, most (all?) frequent travelers are all about optimizing the standard parts of their journey -- what’s the most efficient way to get to the airport, when to leave -- optimizing the trade-off between sleep and getting to the gate when status pre-boarding is announced. In the old digs, I had a pretty predictable 25-30 minute drive to either O’Hare or Midway, and long-term relationship with a dependable driver. Which meant answering the “when do I need leave for the airport” question was a mindless exercise -- subtract 90 minutes from the departure time and send a text to my guy the night before. But now it’s a kinda predictable 60-minute public transit ride or a very unpredictable 35-60-minute Uber/Lyft ride with even more unpredictable wait times and surge pricing, especially when catching a morning flight. Actually, for this 3-day trip, I think it would’ve been cheaper to drive and park, even with the City of Chicago’s latest parking taxes.</li><li>The Southwest flights between Midway and Nashville were a bit odd because the pilots kept everyone in their seats for the entire flight due to “expected turbulence” - of which there was absolutely none. Though I thought it was interesting that the pilot on our return trip said “We may ask our flight attendants to remain seated so we can fly faster and pick up some time.” It’s an hour-and-20-minute flight, so not too long to stay seated as long as you didn’t drop a couple of beers at the bar right before boarding. But it also meant I didn’t get a chance to use some of the free drink coupons Southwest sent me last month. I should’ve followed the advice of a Nashville Airport billboard that was posted right above the Southwest gate -- “Before Wheels Up, Whiskey up.”</li><li>Bridge Music — &nbsp;<em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/content/Per/Per_-_DLDN_Instrumental.mp3\" target=\"_blank\">DLDN Instrumental</a></em>&nbsp;by St Paul</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Because the trip to Nashville was personal travel, I used award points where I could -- Hyatt for our hotel and Hertz for the rental car. The only reason I didn’t use Southwest points was because I was burning off a $100 customer satisfaction certificate Southwest sent me as comp for one of their 3 delayed flights I talked about in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/podcast-150-travel-interruptus/\">Travel Interruptus episode</a> a couple of months back. We’ve talked about how to use awards many times over the years. And while the tactics may change a bit, my overall strategy has been pretty consistent -- use them rather than save them, or “earn and burn” as some folks say. I know a lot of travelers who save them -- hoard them -- thinking of them as their travel savings account -- or perhaps a badge of honor -- “I have 2 million American Airline points” to which I think (and try not to say) “that are going to get you a lot less the longer you keep holding them”. Because &nbsp;rather than increasing in value by earning interest, they can suddenly decrease in value when United or BA or Marriott or, a couple of weeks ago, Hertz decide to redo their awards charts. And, for all the luvvy words in those announcements about “increasing the value” of their programs, I’ve never seen one of those changes <em>increase</em> the value of the points. At the end of May, Hertz published -- without any warning or announcement -- a new award chart that increased the point cost for daily and weekly rentals by 11-36 percent. Back in March, Marriott added a new top hotel category with a 42% higher per-night award cost -- 85,000 points a night for the properties that moved into the new Category 8 vs. 60,000 points when they were in 7. And most of the properties that got that 42% bump were resort properties -- the ones you’d most likely want to use your points on. In November, United will eliminate their award charts altogether, following Delta and Southwest in moving to dynamic pricing. Pick your slogan - “Earn and burn”; “Use ‘em or lose ‘em”. Though I think I like “you deserve a break today” better. Plan a vacation and burn your points before the companies do.</li><li>Even though &nbsp;I haven’t traveled much since <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/podcast-151-traveler-data-leaks-brittany-street-food/\">the last episode</a>, I’ve still been thinking a lot about travel - specifically, laying out our trip at the back half of this month -- a week in Ireland and then heading over to Scotland for Claire’s graduation from Univ of St Andrews. I talked in the last episode about wrestling with the Avios website to book our flights, but with that done, I got consumed by packing and moving and unpacking, and sorta lost track of the other reservations that we needed for our week in Ireland. That insight landed on me pretty hard the Tuesday after Memorial Day when I looked at my calendar and started seeing June dates. I got nothing -- no car, no places to sleep. And it’s not like the end of June is low season in Ireland. Back in March, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/19/podcast-149-dining-single-airlines-need-to-tell-us-more/\">episode 149</a>, I talked about how we dug deep when planning our spring break trip to Brittany -- buying guidebooks, scouring web sites, .... But we had never been there before. My planning for Ireland is a lot more impromptu because, back in the early ‘90’s, I spent a lot of time in Cork for business, and while the country has no doubt changed a lot in the past 20-some odd years, I had a sense of what I wanted to see and a bit of an itinerary in mind -- spend most of the week hubbing out of Galway, going south to County Clare and north to the Connemara, and then heading over to Dublin for the weekend before flying over to Edinburgh. I found myself spending most of my time spelunking through TripAdvisor. First, in the Ireland forum trying to figure out the right rental car strategy. My default strategy -- go with Hertz and leverage my US status if anything goes sideways -- wouldn’t work because Hertz has franchised its name in Ireland to another company. Also, rental car insurance seems to be a bit unique there; using your credit card to cover damages like on my last trip to St Andrews apparently requires a letter from your card issuer and is still a particular hassle at the counter. Then there was the sifting through the Manichean universe of TripAdvisor reviews -- a bipolar split between 5-star “everything is fantabulous” and 1-star “it’s a complete dump and I’m sure the maid spit in my water glass” write-ups. I tend to the more forgiving end of that spectrum. I don’t think you should slam a place for a problem if you didn’t tell them about it and give them a chance to fix it. I also try to have reasonable expectations; you’re not going to get psychic/transcendent levels of service for $100/night. It took me a solid day-and-a-half of screen time, but we now have a bed for each night and a set of wheels to get us there. </li><li>Being off the road for a month has helped me drop a nagging 7-8 lbs that I put on over Christmas and until now -- 5-6 months later -- haven’t been able to drop. We’ve talked in past episodes how easy it is to put weight on when traveling -- eating 3 meals a day in restaurants, or worse on the run in airports, makes portion control difficult, as well as eating more vegetables than fries. But even when you’ve chosen, say, the fish instead of the burger, you’re still someone else’s mercy for how it’s cooked. This light bulb lit for me while watching <em><a href=\"https://www.netflix.com/title/81028317\">The Chef Show</a></em><a href=\"https://www.netflix.com/title/81028317\"> on Netflix</a> over the weekend. It’s a great cooking show. It stars Jon Favreau, director of the Iron Man movies, and Roy Choi, who was one of the first gourmet food truck guys in LA; you’d track them down on Twitter for fantastic Korean-Mexican tacos. These guys worked together on Favreau’s <em>Chef </em>movie a few years back and then got back together for this Netflix series. In the second episode, they’re cooking in Atlanta with Ford Fry at his restaurant, The Optimist. They’re making a Shrimp Toast dish that easily uses over a stick of butter to cook and sauce 5 large shrimp. They joke about the amount of butter and salt restaurants use -- “When they say ‘no salt’...,” Favreau asks Choi, Choi responds “...we add twice as much”. And then they add another half-stick of butter to the shrimp pan. I’m sure it tastes great, but it was an “a-ha” moment -- how, even when you think you’re ordering healthy, the guys in the back are focused on taste, not counting calories for you.</li><li>After our move, I’ve cranked through most of the change of addresses, but haven’t yet done my drivers license. But that one will take a little more work because my current Illinois drivers license isn’t a Real ID license -- it doesn’t have the gold star in the upper right corner. It’s not a problem right now, but in 16 months from now, October 2020, when the TSA says it will fully enforce the 2005 Real ID act -- 15 years later, for real this time, no more extensions or waivers -- and so will no longer accept non-compliant IDs at airports. Getting a Real ID license requires more documentation -- proof of my Social Security Number and two documents with our new address -- like a utility bill or a bank statement, which could be a bit of a challenge now that we get most everything electronically. Now, I could just skip it and use my passport or Global Entry card (if I could find it) instead. But that would mean I’d have to remember to bring one more thing with me to the airport, which is never a best practice. Not critical -- I have 16 months to get around to it -- though probably not something to wait until the last minute on. The Illinois DMV isn’t the quickest, most nimble organization on its best days. I can only imagine what it’ll be like come, say August or September 2020, when it gets crushed with people without passports looking to swap their drivers licenses before the October 1 deadline.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com. </li><li>Bridge Music —  &nbsp;<em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/content/oldDog/oldDog_-_Goodbye_sooner_or_later.mp3\" target=\"_blank\">Goodbye Sooner or Later</a></em>&nbsp;by oldDog    </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Overwhelmed By Travel</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Cristine Danielson, a long-time friend and first time listener, asked me after listening to the last episode “I’d love to hear how you get acclimatized to a new city from the moment you leave the gate. I always feel overwhelmed” &nbsp;That pulled me up short. I had never really thought about it that way. I’ve been traveling heavily coming up on 35 years; I’ve been traveling longer than I haven’t. I started when I was too young and seemingly indestructible to know any better, and now, I have enough travel experience, routines, rhythms &nbsp;-- patterns I called them earlier -- and status that, even when gutting through <em><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/podcast-150-travel-interruptus/\">Travel Interruptus</a></em>, things seem more inconvenient than overwhelming.</li><li>One of the most important things for me is having enough money in my pocket to handle what could come my way. At the end of the last century -- the 1990’s to be exact -- I was doing a lot of bunny hop trips through Europe -- Sweden one day, Switzerland the next, then Germany, then the UK …. This was pre-ATMs, pre-Euro, pre-mobile phones, and for many places in Europe, pre-widespread acceptance of credit cards. Truly the travel dark ages. So, my routine would be to exit Customs, head straight to the Currency Exchange, and cash a $100 American Express travelers check so I would have enough local cash for, say a coffee and a cab. Having that cash in my pocket settled me a bit; maybe gave me a sense of some control, no matter how illusionary it might be. Today, I head straight for an ATM instead of the Currency Exchange and, as I said a few episodes back, make sure I have a “full house” of credit cards -- a Visa and MasterCard from different banks, and an Amex. And it’s not just when I’m out of the country. Even in the US, I’m a lot more comfortable traveling when I have 5 or 10 $20’s in my wallet.</li><li>After my wallet comes my phone. Modern travel is all about the smartphone app -- is my plane on time, where’s the hotel, what train line do I need? My whole <em><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/podcast-150-travel-interruptus/\">Travel Interruptus</a></em> tale would’ve been much worse than “inconvenient” without smartphone connectivity. I wouldn’t have been able to tweet at Southwest customer service, I wouldn’t have been able to find a decent hotel in Paris when the train delays made us miss our flight home, I wouldn’t have been able to book that God-awful expensive Uber that got us to CDG just in time to make our flight. Back in the last century, I would’ve searched for a pay phone, pulled out my phone card, and rung up the travel agency. Even today, if I’m ringing up a travel agency instead of doing it on my own, when was the last time you saw a working pay phone? </li><li>Those are the mechanics of travel, but what about fitting in to the place you’ve arrived? I talked about how business travelers especially tend to float above everything in a “<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2008/04/29/podcast-64-escaping-the-travel-bubble-marks-travel-tips/\">travel bubble</a>”. You walk out -- of the plane with enough status, otherwise baggage claim -- and find someone holding a sign with your name who’s job is to give you a bottle of water and whisk you past the things that might be disconcerting, overwhelming. When that bubble pops, unexpectedly, and drops you into the day-to-day reality of the place you are; that decompression can be overwhelming. </li><li>The closest I came to an overwhelming experience was not arriving in a place, but trying to leave. A colleague and I wrapped up our day in Pune, India and were flying home from Mumbai that night, but on different flights; his leaving a couple of hours earlier than mine. For some reason, the person arranging our trip had us taking cars from Pune to Mumbai instead of flying. Well, OK. It wasn’t a bad drive -- actually a bit scenic -- right until we hit Mumbai traffic. We get to the international terminal, we pull our bags from the trunk, and make our way thru the general chaos of people and push carts and food vendors to the entrance. &nbsp;We both have our itineraries out and ready for inspection. My colleague goes first -- the officer looks at it and waves him through. I hand over my itinerary and follow my colleague. Except I can’t. I can’t go into the terminal; I’m too early. I’m now back out in the chaos with nowhere to go -- our car is long gone, I have no idea where Mumbai Airport is in relation to anything -- is there a hotel nearby. I don’t have a working mobile phone to ring anyone. I’m just standing around, with hundreds of other people trying to get in, or saying good-bye to someone trying to get in, or waiting for someone to come out. I walked up and down the sidewalk in front of the terminal, looking for something -- a phone, a bench. I find a door. I look in -- it’s a lounge for people waiting for arriving passengers. There’s a big plexiglass wall separating baggage claim. But more importantly, it has seats, is air conditioned, and has a restroom. I walk in -- except I can’t. I need a ticket. Where do I get that? Back out and around the corner. I find the ticket window. It’s a couple hundred rupee -- $2-3. I reach into my pocket and pull out my last bit of cash -- a 500 rupee note. Things got a lot less overwhelming.</li><li>Bridge Music —   &nbsp;<em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/content/Zapac/Zapac_-_Test_Drive.mp3\" target=\"_blank\">Test Drive</a>&nbsp;</em>by Zapac </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>New and Old Restaurant Trends</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Last month, I hit the <a href=\"https://restaurant.org/Home\">National Restaurant Association</a>’s <a href=\"https://www.nationalrestaurantshow.com/\">annual show</a> in Chicago’s McCormick Place convention center. If you need reminding of how big the restaurant business is in the US, this show is <em>huge</em>. I was interested to see what’s new and what has stayed the same since the last time I went, 4 years ago. </li><li>What’s new - Walking the aisles, I was immediately struck by the number of booths showing delivery containers. They were everywhere. Talking to a couple of vendors, they said some hotels are seeing huge growth in Doordash and Grubhub deliveries eating into their restaurant and room service revenues (all puns intended). And since they’re seeing it being driven by the new generation of new travelers -- the Millennial and Gen-Z travelers -- they think it’s more of a trend than a blip, yet another revenue stream lost to traveler technology -- like when they lost long-distance phone calls to cell phones, and then pay TV revenue to PCs and iPads running Netflix and YouTube. So many hotels, especially the lower end ones, are dropping food service altogether. But this collides head on with sustainability concerns -- the growth in delivery means a growth in styrofoam containers and plastic bags. And so I’d walk past, say, two booths back-to-back -- the first selling traditional containers; the second pushing compostable paper and bioplastics. These new containers looked good; except when I tried to use a paper straw on a frozen margarita sample that someone pushed on me. That was a complete fail.</li><li>Also saw a number of established ethnic food companies trying to branch out into new/hotter ethnic spaces. Kronos, for example, is one of the main companies selling Greek gyros meat. In their booth, they were sampling gyros, but also new chicken al pastor and Korean barbeque products. Cultural appropriation or trying to stay in business by catering to those darn Millennials and Gen Z’ers. I dunno, but a Kronos guy told me that 90% of their business still comes from gyros. Which kinda rang true when I looked at which sample booths had the longest lines -- hot dogs from Vienna Beef and Nathan’s and grilled cheese sandwiches from Tillamook Cheddar. </li><li>That being said, there were a lot of vendors selling Asian products -- primarily Japanese and Korean -- continuing the trend I’ve seen at the show. Digital is still big, but the focus seemed to have shifted from smartphone apps to \\ interfacing with those delivery services -- updating menus and getting orders automatically into their point-of-sale systems -- and more efficiently managing social media. I saw a Yelp booth for the first time at the show. It was a good-sized booth -- nicely carpeted, with tables full of phones running their app. But it was pretty empty -- mostly populated by Yelp employees. Gave me a good idea of how the restaurateurs were rating Yelp’s booth.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #152</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_152.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<p><!--EndFragment--></p>','Podcast #152 — Overwhelming Travel; New & Old Restaurant Trends','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-152-overwhelming-travel-new-old-restaurant-trends','','','2021-09-30 12:33:13','2021-09-30 17:33:13','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=2474',0,'post','',0),
(2476,1,'2019-06-15 11:34:44','2019-06-15 16:34:44','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><img class=\"wp-image-2439\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/oysters_and_evian_bottles-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" />\n<figcaption>Cancale Oysters with a nice Evian Sancerre</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p>Squeezing in another episode before moving the TravelCommons studios, we talk with <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mylaocoon\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Candid Wueest</span></a> of Symantec about websites that leak traveler data and what we can do to protect ourselves. I talk about yet more frustration with the <a href=\"http://avios.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Avios</a> frequent flyer program, while a listener writes in about his great experience with <a href=\"https://www.getfreebird.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Freebird</a>, a new flight rebooking service. I wrap up talking about great street food we had while touring Brittany, France last month. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_152.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/617322609&color=%23ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #152: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, for the last time…. Not the last time for TravelCommons, just the last time for the studios “outside of Chicago”. We’re picking up stakes and moving about 20 miles east-northeast to Chicago’s Lakeview neighborhood. Hence the reason for the short-cycle on this episode. We’ll be breaking down and packing up the studio and production bay next week and probably won’t have everything reassembled until the end of the month. The recording isn’t really the issue -- I could always go back to my roots and find a spare bathroom to record in. It’s more about the production. I’m not sure I want to shrink my workflow down from a beefy dual 22-inch monitor Windows 10 mini-tower rig to my 2014 vintage 11-inch MacBook Air.</li><li>Being consumed by the move logistics vortex also means I haven’t done any real travel in the 2 weeks since the last episode -- but, given my most recent travel experiences, as laid out in last episode’s <em>Travel Interruptus</em> epic, I’ve appreciated the break. Especially when yet another yet another April snowstorm that blew up 700 flights last weekend. Instead, I’ve been wrestling once again with Avios -- the British Airways, Iberia, and now Aer Lingus frequent flyer program -- trying to book a Chicago-Dublin-Edinburgh Aer Lingus itinerary for my daughter’s graduation from University of St Andrews next month. I’ve been pretty <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/08/26/podcast-116-traveling-thru-japan-luggage-trends/\">vocal</a> about my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">challenges</a> with Avios over the years. In this go-around, the first wackiness was just trying to use the Avios website. To search for flights, you need to log in with your BA, Iberia, or Aer Lingus credentials. I try with all three; and fail with all three. Seems that the passwords given out by BA and Iberia don’t meet Avios’ security rules, so they fail. I assumed the username for my Aer Lingus account was my email address and the password seemed strong enough, but that kept failing too. Finally, after digging around my Aer Lingus profile, I found a separate username, which I’d never seen or used before, and <em>that</em> worked. Finally through the gate and onto the second wackiness -- the difference between the value of an Avios point on the Aer Lingus and Avios web sites. The award offers on both sites were points + cash. Taking the “market rate” for the ticket (pulled from Expedia), subtracting out the required cash payment, and dividing by the number of required Avios points gives the value of the Avios point for that award offer. My rule of thumb is -- get at least 2 cents/point or pay cash. The Aer Lingus site valued an Avios point at 0.7 cents while the Avios site hit my 2-cent minimum. I couldn’t quite understand that 65% difference, but I booked our tickets on the wonkier Avios site before it went away. If I remember anything from my University of Chicago business school courses, it’s that markets are efficient; 65% price differences don’t last forever. Though in this case, that difference may linger because the Avios website makes it so damn hard to find. </li><li>Bridge Music — <em>Lakeside Jam</em> by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/55998 </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Veteran TravelCommons listener Mika Pyyhkala sent in a note this week talking about his great experience with a flight rebooking service, <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Freebird (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"http://getfreebird.com\" target=\"_blank\">Freebird</a>. Mika writes:<ul><li>I was flying with a companion from (Wichita) ICT-STL and STL-DTW. &nbsp;Just as the plane was descending to DTW, I received text messages from WN and Freebird that STL-DTW on WN had been cancelled. &nbsp;Freebird then manually advised that the only flight for that day was a DL STL-DTW, and they were going to book it in case I wanted it; if they waited longer there might not be enough time to issue the new ticket on Delta through their travel agent. &nbsp;They just asked me to confirm that I in fact wanted the Delta ticket.  </li><li>I confirmed we wanted the 2 Delta tickets, and by the time the door opened in STL we had a confirmation number to check in for the Delta flight leaving in 47 minutes. We got seats together on the Delta flight that were assigned by the Freebird process, and they even gave us free drinks!</li><li>I think we actually arrived in DTW a few minutes earlier than we were scheduled on the original flight, and it made for a great travel story and adventure! &nbsp;This was my first time using Freebird as well!</li><li>It costs $19 to protect a one way trip per traveler. &nbsp;It’s simple to work with them: unlike insurance, there are no claim forms, long waits, or papers to sign</li></ul></li><li>Mika, thanks for this. I hadn’t heard of Freebird before Mika’s note. Hitting their website, they’re selling their service to companies, travel agencies, and to individual travelers. Clicking through to a TechCrunch article about them, it says they’re also talking to Amex and Citibank about including Freebird as a credit card benefit. The article quotes the CEO, Ethan Bernstein - “It’s funny what happens when people deal with uncertainty; uncertainty is the worst. As soon you give people information, human support and technology to help them solve their problems, they experience the event so much differently.” &nbsp;Which is exactly right. Certainty lets you plan; uncertainty just leaves you to stew… and drink at the airport bar… and eat bad airport food… and bitch Tweet. Yup, uncertainty leads to lots of bad things</li><li>One more-fun-than-necessarily-good thing on last month’s trip was getting to try out an alpha version of a new augmented reality feature for Google Maps. I used it first in Stockholm; we got off the Arlanda Express at the Central Train station and wanted make our way over to the <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Östermalms Saluhall (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.ostermalmshallen.se/en/\" target=\"_blank\">Östermalms Saluhall</a> for lunch. When I chose “Walking” as our transport mode, a “Start AR” button showed up next to the usual button to start the directions. With AR, I’d hold my phone up, the display would use the camera to show the streetscape in front of me with the &nbsp;directions -- street names, arrows -- overlaid on the real-time image. I thought it was a nice add; reduced any ambiguity about where the next turn was. One interesting feature -- when I started walking, the screen dimmed and a message popped up telling me to stop looking at the phone and look straight ahead. All in all, it’s kinda fun. At least I thought so; Andrew and Irene seemed much less impressed. It worked very well for what was billed as an alpha product. It’ll be interesting to see how it develops, and how fast Google rolls it out.</li><li>But even without a broader AR roll-out, Google Maps seems on track to become the next “<a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"super app (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://skift.com/2019/04/16/google-maps-is-ready-to-transform-the-world-of-superapps-a-skift-deep-dive/\" target=\"_blank\">super app</a>” -- sorta the Western counterpart to China’s WeChat -- the first “super app”, a Swiss Army Knife-kind of “it does everything” app. Now Google Maps isn’t to that level -- yet -- but it is growing. It started as a mapping app, then added driving directions, then ride share -- showing Uber and Lyft prices, then public transit directions with real-time arrival times, replacing the core use case for apps like Transit. Then the “Explore Nearby” became more prominent -- which, for me, has supplanted Yelp when looking for a restaurant because it’s so much more convenient, and with deep links to OpenTable for reservations; and for nearby hotels, direct booking links to Expedia and Booking.com. I wasn’t surprised when I saw a stat that those “Near Me” searches grew 150 percent the last year. I’m not quite sure what I think about this -- loving a free service that keeps becoming more valuable vs. becoming more enslaved to the Google overlords. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/08/27/podcast-132-travel-apps-on-my-phone/\">episode #132</a>, I listed all the travel apps on my smartphone, and Google Maps was the most important -- “Indeed, it’s the only travel app with its own screen real estate rather than sharing space in the Travel folder,” I said. And it only keeps getting more indispensable.</li><li>Thinking back to our last day in Paris when both Ubers that we ordered were nice black Mercedes, I couldn’t help thinking how the quality of US Uber and Lyft vehicles has slipped. I remember when I started using Uber in 4-5 years ago, the cars were pristine. I remember working in Baltimore one summer; I was more than happy to wait 5 minutes for an Uber rather than take one of the cabs waiting at the stand right outside the building I was in. Those cabs were so beat up, so full of trash, and most of the time, without working air conditioning. Today, cabs haven’t gotten much cleaner, but Uber and Lyft seem to be lowering their standards. I dunno if it’s because of falling unemployment rates or trying to keep up with growth or squeezing driver pay to improve their post-IPO margins -- or all of the above -- but I’m seeing a real drop in quality.</li><li>Long-time TravelCommons listeners will recall that I’ve spent a lot of time in New Orleans airport and other than serving beer in go cups French Quarter-style so you can walk around the terminal with it, there’s not much good to say about it. Especially with regards to food and restaurants. For such a great food town to have such mediocre airport concessions has always been beyond me. But then again, the original terminal was built in 1959, and then expanded in the mid-70’s and mid-90’s. The new $1 billion replacement terminal was originally scheduled to open last year during New Orleans’ tricentennial, but that then slipped to February of this year, then to May, and now to a “to be determined” date sometime in the fall. The restaurant selection is supposed to be much better but I hope they don’t change that beer policy though. One time, waiting out yet another thunderstorm delay, I’d bought a beer and was standing by the gate drinking it because the bar was full. American called boarding and I walked up to the gate. The agent stopped me -- “You can drink that beer anywhere in the airport -- except on the jetway.” I looked down; I’d forgotten that I was still carrying that beer. I stepped to the side, chugged it, and then got on the plane. Felt like a very New Orleans thing to do.</li><li>And if you have any travel rants, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. &nbsp;The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Facebook page</a> or our Instagram account at <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Travelcommons</a> -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music —  <em>A Thousand And None</em> by Speck (c) copyright 2018 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/speck/57256 Ft: Mr_Yesterday</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Overwhelmed By Travel</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Interview with <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mylaocoon\">Candid Wueest</a>, Principal Threat Researcher at Symantec and author of a blog post titled <a href=\"https://www.symantec.com/blogs/threat-intelligence/hotel-websites-leak-guest-data\"><em>Two in Three Hotel Websites Leak Guest Booking Details and Allow Access to Personal Data</em></a></li><li>Bridge Music —  <em>dazed </em>by Jeris (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/VJ_Memes/39456 Ft: airtone</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>New and Old Restaurant Trends</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I’ll write a proper “Road Trip” post about our Brittany trip later this spring, after we get settled in the new digs, but after streaming a few episodes of Netflix’s “Street Food” series, I started thinking about some of the Breton street food we enjoyed while touring last month. If you’ve seen any of the Netflix series, you know that it’s more about the vendors than the food. But my French trails off after “oui,” “non,” “merci,” and “S\'il vous plaît” so I wasn’t able to get much of the vendor’s life stories. So this will be all about the food.</li><li>The first place we stayed was <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancale\">Cancale</a>, and we went there for one reason - oysters. Like people have been doing for 300-some odd years. When the tide is out, you can see miles of oyster beds with big farm tractors moving through the rows, hauling out trailers of oysters. Lining the ramp where the tractors drive up out of the beds is a little oyster market -- 8 stalls selling oysters fresh from the beds for €5-6/dozen. After adding another couple of euros for shucking, a half lemon and the use of a plastic platter, we’d have our afternoon snack -- sitting on the sea wall by the market, slurping through a couple dozen very briny oysters while watching the tractors work, and then pitching the empty shells back onto the beach for the seagulls to pick through. Our first afternoon, we only had a couple of cans of beer in our jacket pocket. The next couple of afternoons, we’d pour a nice white wine into some empty Evian bottles (Claire and I preferred a Sancerre) and make sure we had a good supply of wet wipes. We didn’t miss an afternoon on that sea wall while in Cancale.</li><li>Buckwheat is a big thing in Brittany. It’s been grown in Brittany for half a millennium or more, and for almost that long, it seems, has been turned into a <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galette\">galette</a>. a buckwheat crêpe. But a crêpe in form and shape only. Instead of a soft white wheat flour crêpe filled with jam or Nutella, the galette is crisper/firmer and savory. Fine on its own smeared with Breton butter, or with egg and cheese and ham inside. We got into Concarneau, on the southwest coast of Brittany about an hour before the weekly Friday outdoor market closed. &nbsp;I counted a half-dozen galette trucks. We walked up to the closest one. The cook was finishing up what looked like a weekend’s worth of galettes for the person in front of us -- flipping them, then pulling them off two hot metal disks, buttering them, and adding them to the stack. It was Friday in Lent, so I went for the egg, onion, and cheese galette. The creaminess of the cheese played nicely against the nutty graininess of the buckwheat.</li><li>The next day we drove to Rennes, our last stop in Brittany. We dropped the rental car at the train station and took the subway to Place des Lices for the huge Saturday market. We walked down from the subway station, through the fruit and vegetable stands lining the street -- beautiful stuff, but we’re leaving the next day, so we’re not doing a lot of green grocery shopping. There, between the two market halls, is a collection of food trucks; about 70% of them selling what we were looking for -- <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galette-saucisse\">galette-saucisse</a> -- the classic Breton street food that is pretty much what the straight translation from French to English suggests -- a sausage in a galette. Kinda like a Breton hot dog, it’s a cooked pork sausage wrapped in a cool galette, maybe with some grilled onions and dijon mustard added. There were lines tailing back from all the trucks serving these. A local guy pointed one truck out to Irene -- “They’re the best”, he said. She and Claire stood in queue while Andrew and I searched for drinks. Around the corner, we found a local cider maker; a couple of tables surrounded by crates of cider bottles. Through a mangled bit of Franglais, we bought a bottle of dry cider that had stayed cool in the shade and four cups, and got back to the food truck line just in time to be handed my galette-saucisse. After finishing the sausage and cider, I swung past the cider stand to give him the empty bottle -- kinda in-person recycling. There wasn’t much time to catch up on his life story, but it was a sunny Saturday and he had a full line; looked like he was having a good day.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #152</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_152.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<p><!--EndFragment--><br>\n<br>\n</p>','Podcast #152 — Overwhelming Travel; New & Old Restaurant Trends','','inherit','closed','closed','','2474-revision-v1','','','2019-06-15 11:34:44','2019-06-15 16:34:44','',2474,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/06/15/2474-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2477,1,'2019-06-15 11:42:38','2019-06-15 16:42:38','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><img class=\"wp-image-2439\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/oysters_and_evian_bottles-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" />\n<figcaption>Cancale Oysters with a nice Evian Sancerre</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p>Squeezing in another episode before moving the TravelCommons studios, we talk with <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mylaocoon\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Candid Wueest</span></a> of Symantec about websites that leak traveler data and what we can do to protect ourselves. I talk about yet more frustration with the <a href=\"http://avios.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Avios</a> frequent flyer program, while a listener writes in about his great experience with <a href=\"https://www.getfreebird.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Freebird</a>, a new flight rebooking service. I wrap up talking about great street food we had while touring Brittany, France last month. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_152.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/617322609&color=%23ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #152: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the new TravelCommons studios <em>in</em> Chicago, IL. The move went surprisingly smoothly -- nothing lost, nothing destroyed on the 20-mile trip in from the western suburbs. Have the production bay rebuilt and now trying out the new studio set-up, so we’ll see how this sounds. </li><li>Which also means I haven’t done much travel since the last episode; just a quick trip last week down to Nashville. But the move downtown meant I had to rethink some of my travel patterns -- not how to get to and from Nashville, but how to get to and from Chicago Midway airport. We’ve said before in many episodes, most (all?) frequent travelers are all about optimizing the standard parts of their journey -- what’s the most efficient way to get to the airport, when to leave -- optimizing the trade-off between sleep and getting to the gate when status pre-boarding is announced. In the old digs, I had a pretty predictable 25-30 minute drive to either O’Hare or Midway, and long-term relationship with a dependable driver. Which meant answering the “when do I need leave for the airport” question was a mindless exercise -- subtract 90 minutes from the departure time and send a text to my guy the night before. But now it’s a kinda predictable 60-minute public transit ride or a very unpredictable 35-60-minute Uber/Lyft ride with even more unpredictable wait times and surge pricing, especially when catching a morning flight. Actually, for this 3-day trip, I think it would’ve been cheaper to drive and park, even with the City of Chicago’s latest parking taxes.</li><li>The Southwest flights between Midway and Nashville were a bit odd because the pilots kept everyone in their seats for the entire flight due to “expected turbulence” - of which there was absolutely none. Though I thought it was interesting that the pilot on our return trip said “We may ask our flight attendants to remain seated so we can fly faster and pick up some time.” It’s an hour-and-20-minute flight, so not too long to stay seated as long as you didn’t drop a couple of beers at the bar right before boarding. But it also meant I didn’t get a chance to use some of the free drink coupons Southwest sent me last month. I should’ve followed the advice of a Nashville Airport billboard that was posted right above the Southwest gate -- “Before Wheels Up, Whiskey up.”</li><li>Bridge Music — <em>Lakeside Jam</em> by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/55998 </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Veteran TravelCommons listener Mika Pyyhkala sent in a note this week talking about his great experience with a flight rebooking service, <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Freebird (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"http://getfreebird.com\" target=\"_blank\">Freebird</a>. Mika writes:<ul><li>I was flying with a companion from (Wichita) ICT-STL and STL-DTW. &nbsp;Just as the plane was descending to DTW, I received text messages from WN and Freebird that STL-DTW on WN had been cancelled. &nbsp;Freebird then manually advised that the only flight for that day was a DL STL-DTW, and they were going to book it in case I wanted it; if they waited longer there might not be enough time to issue the new ticket on Delta through their travel agent. &nbsp;They just asked me to confirm that I in fact wanted the Delta ticket.  </li><li>I confirmed we wanted the 2 Delta tickets, and by the time the door opened in STL we had a confirmation number to check in for the Delta flight leaving in 47 minutes. We got seats together on the Delta flight that were assigned by the Freebird process, and they even gave us free drinks!</li><li>I think we actually arrived in DTW a few minutes earlier than we were scheduled on the original flight, and it made for a great travel story and adventure! &nbsp;This was my first time using Freebird as well!</li><li>It costs $19 to protect a one way trip per traveler. &nbsp;It’s simple to work with them: unlike insurance, there are no claim forms, long waits, or papers to sign</li></ul></li><li>Mika, thanks for this. I hadn’t heard of Freebird before Mika’s note. Hitting their website, they’re selling their service to companies, travel agencies, and to individual travelers. Clicking through to a TechCrunch article about them, it says they’re also talking to Amex and Citibank about including Freebird as a credit card benefit. The article quotes the CEO, Ethan Bernstein - “It’s funny what happens when people deal with uncertainty; uncertainty is the worst. As soon you give people information, human support and technology to help them solve their problems, they experience the event so much differently.” &nbsp;Which is exactly right. Certainty lets you plan; uncertainty just leaves you to stew… and drink at the airport bar… and eat bad airport food… and bitch Tweet. Yup, uncertainty leads to lots of bad things</li><li>One more-fun-than-necessarily-good thing on last month’s trip was getting to try out an alpha version of a new augmented reality feature for Google Maps. I used it first in Stockholm; we got off the Arlanda Express at the Central Train station and wanted make our way over to the <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Östermalms Saluhall (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.ostermalmshallen.se/en/\" target=\"_blank\">Östermalms Saluhall</a> for lunch. When I chose “Walking” as our transport mode, a “Start AR” button showed up next to the usual button to start the directions. With AR, I’d hold my phone up, the display would use the camera to show the streetscape in front of me with the &nbsp;directions -- street names, arrows -- overlaid on the real-time image. I thought it was a nice add; reduced any ambiguity about where the next turn was. One interesting feature -- when I started walking, the screen dimmed and a message popped up telling me to stop looking at the phone and look straight ahead. All in all, it’s kinda fun. At least I thought so; Andrew and Irene seemed much less impressed. It worked very well for what was billed as an alpha product. It’ll be interesting to see how it develops, and how fast Google rolls it out.</li><li>But even without a broader AR roll-out, Google Maps seems on track to become the next “<a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"super app (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://skift.com/2019/04/16/google-maps-is-ready-to-transform-the-world-of-superapps-a-skift-deep-dive/\" target=\"_blank\">super app</a>” -- sorta the Western counterpart to China’s WeChat -- the first “super app”, a Swiss Army Knife-kind of “it does everything” app. Now Google Maps isn’t to that level -- yet -- but it is growing. It started as a mapping app, then added driving directions, then ride share -- showing Uber and Lyft prices, then public transit directions with real-time arrival times, replacing the core use case for apps like Transit. Then the “Explore Nearby” became more prominent -- which, for me, has supplanted Yelp when looking for a restaurant because it’s so much more convenient, and with deep links to OpenTable for reservations; and for nearby hotels, direct booking links to Expedia and Booking.com. I wasn’t surprised when I saw a stat that those “Near Me” searches grew 150 percent the last year. I’m not quite sure what I think about this -- loving a free service that keeps becoming more valuable vs. becoming more enslaved to the Google overlords. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/08/27/podcast-132-travel-apps-on-my-phone/\">episode #132</a>, I listed all the travel apps on my smartphone, and Google Maps was the most important -- “Indeed, it’s the only travel app with its own screen real estate rather than sharing space in the Travel folder,” I said. And it only keeps getting more indispensable.</li><li>Thinking back to our last day in Paris when both Ubers that we ordered were nice black Mercedes, I couldn’t help thinking how the quality of US Uber and Lyft vehicles has slipped. I remember when I started using Uber in 4-5 years ago, the cars were pristine. I remember working in Baltimore one summer; I was more than happy to wait 5 minutes for an Uber rather than take one of the cabs waiting at the stand right outside the building I was in. Those cabs were so beat up, so full of trash, and most of the time, without working air conditioning. Today, cabs haven’t gotten much cleaner, but Uber and Lyft seem to be lowering their standards. I dunno if it’s because of falling unemployment rates or trying to keep up with growth or squeezing driver pay to improve their post-IPO margins -- or all of the above -- but I’m seeing a real drop in quality.</li><li>Long-time TravelCommons listeners will recall that I’ve spent a lot of time in New Orleans airport and other than serving beer in go cups French Quarter-style so you can walk around the terminal with it, there’s not much good to say about it. Especially with regards to food and restaurants. For such a great food town to have such mediocre airport concessions has always been beyond me. But then again, the original terminal was built in 1959, and then expanded in the mid-70’s and mid-90’s. The new $1 billion replacement terminal was originally scheduled to open last year during New Orleans’ tricentennial, but that then slipped to February of this year, then to May, and now to a “to be determined” date sometime in the fall. The restaurant selection is supposed to be much better but I hope they don’t change that beer policy though. One time, waiting out yet another thunderstorm delay, I’d bought a beer and was standing by the gate drinking it because the bar was full. American called boarding and I walked up to the gate. The agent stopped me -- “You can drink that beer anywhere in the airport -- except on the jetway.” I looked down; I’d forgotten that I was still carrying that beer. I stepped to the side, chugged it, and then got on the plane. Felt like a very New Orleans thing to do.</li><li>And if you have any travel rants, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. &nbsp;The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Facebook page</a> or our Instagram account at <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Travelcommons</a> -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music —  <em>A Thousand And None</em> by Speck (c) copyright 2018 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/speck/57256 Ft: Mr_Yesterday</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Overwhelmed By Travel</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Interview with <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mylaocoon\">Candid Wueest</a>, Principal Threat Researcher at Symantec and author of a blog post titled <a href=\"https://www.symantec.com/blogs/threat-intelligence/hotel-websites-leak-guest-data\"><em>Two in Three Hotel Websites Leak Guest Booking Details and Allow Access to Personal Data</em></a></li><li>Bridge Music —  <em>dazed </em>by Jeris (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/VJ_Memes/39456 Ft: airtone</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>New and Old Restaurant Trends</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I’ll write a proper “Road Trip” post about our Brittany trip later this spring, after we get settled in the new digs, but after streaming a few episodes of Netflix’s “Street Food” series, I started thinking about some of the Breton street food we enjoyed while touring last month. If you’ve seen any of the Netflix series, you know that it’s more about the vendors than the food. But my French trails off after “oui,” “non,” “merci,” and “S\'il vous plaît” so I wasn’t able to get much of the vendor’s life stories. So this will be all about the food.</li><li>The first place we stayed was <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancale\">Cancale</a>, and we went there for one reason - oysters. Like people have been doing for 300-some odd years. When the tide is out, you can see miles of oyster beds with big farm tractors moving through the rows, hauling out trailers of oysters. Lining the ramp where the tractors drive up out of the beds is a little oyster market -- 8 stalls selling oysters fresh from the beds for €5-6/dozen. After adding another couple of euros for shucking, a half lemon and the use of a plastic platter, we’d have our afternoon snack -- sitting on the sea wall by the market, slurping through a couple dozen very briny oysters while watching the tractors work, and then pitching the empty shells back onto the beach for the seagulls to pick through. Our first afternoon, we only had a couple of cans of beer in our jacket pocket. The next couple of afternoons, we’d pour a nice white wine into some empty Evian bottles (Claire and I preferred a Sancerre) and make sure we had a good supply of wet wipes. We didn’t miss an afternoon on that sea wall while in Cancale.</li><li>Buckwheat is a big thing in Brittany. It’s been grown in Brittany for half a millennium or more, and for almost that long, it seems, has been turned into a <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galette\">galette</a>. a buckwheat crêpe. But a crêpe in form and shape only. Instead of a soft white wheat flour crêpe filled with jam or Nutella, the galette is crisper/firmer and savory. Fine on its own smeared with Breton butter, or with egg and cheese and ham inside. We got into Concarneau, on the southwest coast of Brittany about an hour before the weekly Friday outdoor market closed. &nbsp;I counted a half-dozen galette trucks. We walked up to the closest one. The cook was finishing up what looked like a weekend’s worth of galettes for the person in front of us -- flipping them, then pulling them off two hot metal disks, buttering them, and adding them to the stack. It was Friday in Lent, so I went for the egg, onion, and cheese galette. The creaminess of the cheese played nicely against the nutty graininess of the buckwheat.</li><li>The next day we drove to Rennes, our last stop in Brittany. We dropped the rental car at the train station and took the subway to Place des Lices for the huge Saturday market. We walked down from the subway station, through the fruit and vegetable stands lining the street -- beautiful stuff, but we’re leaving the next day, so we’re not doing a lot of green grocery shopping. There, between the two market halls, is a collection of food trucks; about 70% of them selling what we were looking for -- <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galette-saucisse\">galette-saucisse</a> -- the classic Breton street food that is pretty much what the straight translation from French to English suggests -- a sausage in a galette. Kinda like a Breton hot dog, it’s a cooked pork sausage wrapped in a cool galette, maybe with some grilled onions and dijon mustard added. There were lines tailing back from all the trucks serving these. A local guy pointed one truck out to Irene -- “They’re the best”, he said. She and Claire stood in queue while Andrew and I searched for drinks. Around the corner, we found a local cider maker; a couple of tables surrounded by crates of cider bottles. Through a mangled bit of Franglais, we bought a bottle of dry cider that had stayed cool in the shade and four cups, and got back to the food truck line just in time to be handed my galette-saucisse. After finishing the sausage and cider, I swung past the cider stand to give him the empty bottle -- kinda in-person recycling. There wasn’t much time to catch up on his life story, but it was a sunny Saturday and he had a full line; looked like he was having a good day.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #152</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_152.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<p><!--EndFragment--><br>\n<br>\n</p>','Podcast #152 — Overwhelming Travel; New & Old Restaurant Trends','','inherit','closed','closed','','2474-revision-v1','','','2019-06-15 11:42:38','2019-06-15 16:42:38','',2474,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/06/15/2474-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2478,1,'2019-06-15 11:49:51','2019-06-15 16:49:51','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><img class=\"wp-image-2439\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/oysters_and_evian_bottles-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" />\n<figcaption>Cancale Oysters with a nice Evian Sancerre</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p>Squeezing in another episode before moving the TravelCommons studios, we talk with <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mylaocoon\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Candid Wueest</span></a> of Symantec about websites that leak traveler data and what we can do to protect ourselves. I talk about yet more frustration with the <a href=\"http://avios.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Avios</a> frequent flyer program, while a listener writes in about his great experience with <a href=\"https://www.getfreebird.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Freebird</a>, a new flight rebooking service. I wrap up talking about great street food we had while touring Brittany, France last month. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_152.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/617322609&color=%23ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #152: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the new TravelCommons studios <em>in</em> Chicago, IL. The move went surprisingly smoothly -- nothing lost, nothing destroyed on the 20-mile trip in from the western suburbs. Have the production bay rebuilt and now trying out the new studio set-up, so we’ll see how this sounds. </li><li>Which also means I haven’t done much travel since the last episode; just a quick trip last week down to Nashville. But the move downtown meant I had to rethink some of my travel patterns -- not how to get to and from Nashville, but how to get to and from Chicago Midway airport. We’ve said before in many episodes, most (all?) frequent travelers are all about optimizing the standard parts of their journey -- what’s the most efficient way to get to the airport, when to leave -- optimizing the trade-off between sleep and getting to the gate when status pre-boarding is announced. In the old digs, I had a pretty predictable 25-30 minute drive to either O’Hare or Midway, and long-term relationship with a dependable driver. Which meant answering the “when do I need leave for the airport” question was a mindless exercise -- subtract 90 minutes from the departure time and send a text to my guy the night before. But now it’s a kinda predictable 60-minute public transit ride or a very unpredictable 35-60-minute Uber/Lyft ride with even more unpredictable wait times and surge pricing, especially when catching a morning flight. Actually, for this 3-day trip, I think it would’ve been cheaper to drive and park, even with the City of Chicago’s latest parking taxes.</li><li>The Southwest flights between Midway and Nashville were a bit odd because the pilots kept everyone in their seats for the entire flight due to “expected turbulence” - of which there was absolutely none. Though I thought it was interesting that the pilot on our return trip said “We may ask our flight attendants to remain seated so we can fly faster and pick up some time.” It’s an hour-and-20-minute flight, so not too long to stay seated as long as you didn’t drop a couple of beers at the bar right before boarding. But it also meant I didn’t get a chance to use some of the free drink coupons Southwest sent me last month. I should’ve followed the advice of a Nashville Airport billboard that was posted right above the Southwest gate -- “Before Wheels Up, Whiskey up.”</li><li>Bridge Music — <em>Lakeside Jam</em> by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/55998 </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Because the trip to Nashville was personal travel, I used award points where I could -- Hyatt for our hotel and Hertz for the rental car. The only reason I didn’t use Southwest points was because I was burning off a $100 customer satisfaction certificate Southwest sent me as comp for one of their 3 delayed flights I talked about in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/podcast-150-travel-interruptus/\">Travel Interruptus episode</a> a couple of months back. We’ve talked about how to use awards many times over the years. And while the tactics may change a bit, my overall strategy has been pretty consistent -- use them rather than save them, or “earn and burn” as some folks say. I know a lot of travelers who save them -- hoard them -- thinking of them as their travel savings account -- or perhaps a badge of honor -- “I have 2 million American Airline points” to which I think (and try not to say) “that are going to get you a lot less the longer you keep holding them”. Because  rather than increasing in value by earning interest, they can suddenly decrease in value when United or BA or Marriott or, a couple of weeks ago, Hertz decide to redo their awards charts. And, for all the luvvy words in those announcements about “increasing the value” of their programs, I’ve never seen one of those changes <em>increase</em> the value of the points. At the end of May, Hertz published -- without any warning or announcement -- a new award chart that increased the point cost for daily and weekly rentals by 11-36 percent. Back in March, Marriott added a new top hotel category with a 42% higher per-night award cost -- 85,000 points a night for the properties that moved into the new Category 8 vs. 60,000 points when they were in 7. And most of the properties that got that 42% bump were resort properties -- the ones you’d most likely want to use your points on. In November, United will eliminate their award charts altogether, following Delta and Southwest in moving to dynamic pricing. Pick your slogan - “Earn and burn”; “Use ‘em or lose ‘em”. Though I think I like “you deserve a break today” better. Plan a vacation and burn your points before the companies do.</li><li>Even though  I haven’t traveled much since <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/podcast-151-traveler-data-leaks-brittany-street-food/\">the last episode</a>, I’ve still been thinking a lot about travel - specifically, laying out our trip at the back half of this month -- a week in Ireland and then heading over to Scotland for Claire’s graduation from Univ of St Andrews. I talked in the last episode about wrestling with the Avios website to book our flights, but with that done, I got consumed by packing and moving and unpacking, and sorta lost track of the other reservations that we needed for our week in Ireland. That insight landed on me pretty hard the Tuesday after Memorial Day when I looked at my calendar and started seeing June dates. I got nothing -- no car, no places to sleep. And it’s not like the end of June is low season in Ireland. Back in March, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/19/podcast-149-dining-single-airlines-need-to-tell-us-more/\">episode 149</a>, I talked about how we dug deep when planning our spring break trip to Brittany -- buying guidebooks, scouring web sites, .... But we had never been there before. My planning for Ireland is a lot more impromptu because, back in the early ‘90’s, I spent a lot of time in Cork for business, and while the country has no doubt changed a lot in the past 20-some odd years, I had a sense of what I wanted to see and a bit of an itinerary in mind -- spend most of the week hubbing out of Galway, going south to County Clare and north to the Connemara, and then heading over to Dublin for the weekend before flying over to Edinburgh. I found myself spending most of my time spelunking through TripAdvisor. First, in the Ireland forum trying to figure out the right rental car strategy. My default strategy -- go with Hertz and leverage my US status if anything goes sideways -- wouldn’t work because Hertz has franchised its name in Ireland to another company. Also, rental car insurance seems to be a bit unique there; using your credit card to cover damages like on my last trip to St Andrews apparently requires a letter from your card issuer and is still a particular hassle at the counter. Then there was the sifting through the Manichean universe of TripAdvisor reviews -- a bipolar split between 5-star “everything is fantabulous” and 1-star “it’s a complete dump and I’m sure the maid spit in my water glass” write-ups. I tend to the more forgiving end of that spectrum. I don’t think you should slam a place for a problem if you didn’t tell them about it and give them a chance to fix it. I also try to have reasonable expectations; you’re not going to get psychic/transcendent levels of service for $100/night. It took me a solid day-and-a-half of screen time, but we now have a bed for each night and a set of wheels to get us there. </li><li>Being off the road for a month has helped me drop a nagging 7-8 lbs that I put on over Christmas and until now -- 5-6 months later -- haven’t been able to drop. We’ve talked in past episodes how easy it is to put weight on when traveling -- eating 3 meals a day in restaurants, or worse on the run in airports, makes portion control difficult, as well as eating more vegetables than fries. But even when you’ve chosen, say, the fish instead of the burger, you’re still someone else’s mercy for how it’s cooked. This light bulb lit for me while watching <em><a href=\"https://www.netflix.com/title/81028317\">The Chef Show</a></em><a href=\"https://www.netflix.com/title/81028317\"> on Netflix</a> over the weekend. It’s a great cooking show. It stars Jon Favreau, director of the Iron Man movies, and Roy Choi, who was one of the first gourmet food truck guys in LA; you’d track them down on Twitter for fantastic Korean-Mexican tacos. These guys worked together on Favreau’s <em>Chef </em>movie a few years back and then got back together for this Netflix series. In the second episode, they’re cooking in Atlanta with Ford Fry at his restaurant, The Optimist. They’re making a Shrimp Toast dish that easily uses over a stick of butter to cook and sauce 5 large shrimp. They joke about the amount of butter and salt restaurants use -- “When they say ‘no salt’...,” Favreau asks Choi, Choi responds “...we add twice as much”. And then they add another half-stick of butter to the shrimp pan. I’m sure it tastes great, but it was an “a-ha” moment -- how, even when you think you’re ordering healthy, the guys in the back are focused on taste, not counting calories for you.</li><li>After our move, I’ve cranked through most of the change of addresses, but haven’t yet done my drivers license. But that one will take a little more work because my current Illinois drivers license isn’t a Real ID license -- it doesn’t have the gold star in the upper right corner. It’s not a problem right now, but in 16 months from now, October 2020, when the TSA says it will fully enforce the 2005 Real ID act -- 15 years later, for real this time, no more extensions or waivers -- and so will no longer accept non-compliant IDs at airports. Getting a Real ID license requires more documentation -- proof of my Social Security Number and two documents with our new address -- like a utility bill or a bank statement, which could be a bit of a challenge now that we get most everything electronically. Now, I could just skip it and use my passport or Global Entry card (if I could find it) instead. But that would mean I’d have to remember to bring one more thing with me to the airport, which is never a best practice. Not critical -- I have 16 months to get around to it -- though probably not something to wait until the last minute on. The Illinois DMV isn’t the quickest, most nimble organization on its best days. I can only imagine what it’ll be like come, say August or September 2020, when it gets crushed with people without passports looking to swap their drivers licenses before the October 1 deadline.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com. </li><li>Bridge Music —  <em>A Thousand And None</em> by Speck (c) copyright 2018 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/speck/57256 Ft: Mr_Yesterday </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Overwhelmed By Travel</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Interview with <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mylaocoon\">Candid Wueest</a>, Principal Threat Researcher at Symantec and author of a blog post titled <a href=\"https://www.symantec.com/blogs/threat-intelligence/hotel-websites-leak-guest-data\"><em>Two in Three Hotel Websites Leak Guest Booking Details and Allow Access to Personal Data</em></a></li><li>Bridge Music —  <em>dazed </em>by Jeris (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/VJ_Memes/39456 Ft: airtone</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>New and Old Restaurant Trends</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I’ll write a proper “Road Trip” post about our Brittany trip later this spring, after we get settled in the new digs, but after streaming a few episodes of Netflix’s “Street Food” series, I started thinking about some of the Breton street food we enjoyed while touring last month. If you’ve seen any of the Netflix series, you know that it’s more about the vendors than the food. But my French trails off after “oui,” “non,” “merci,” and “S\'il vous plaît” so I wasn’t able to get much of the vendor’s life stories. So this will be all about the food.</li><li>The first place we stayed was <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancale\">Cancale</a>, and we went there for one reason - oysters. Like people have been doing for 300-some odd years. When the tide is out, you can see miles of oyster beds with big farm tractors moving through the rows, hauling out trailers of oysters. Lining the ramp where the tractors drive up out of the beds is a little oyster market -- 8 stalls selling oysters fresh from the beds for €5-6/dozen. After adding another couple of euros for shucking, a half lemon and the use of a plastic platter, we’d have our afternoon snack -- sitting on the sea wall by the market, slurping through a couple dozen very briny oysters while watching the tractors work, and then pitching the empty shells back onto the beach for the seagulls to pick through. Our first afternoon, we only had a couple of cans of beer in our jacket pocket. The next couple of afternoons, we’d pour a nice white wine into some empty Evian bottles (Claire and I preferred a Sancerre) and make sure we had a good supply of wet wipes. We didn’t miss an afternoon on that sea wall while in Cancale.</li><li>Buckwheat is a big thing in Brittany. It’s been grown in Brittany for half a millennium or more, and for almost that long, it seems, has been turned into a <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galette\">galette</a>. a buckwheat crêpe. But a crêpe in form and shape only. Instead of a soft white wheat flour crêpe filled with jam or Nutella, the galette is crisper/firmer and savory. Fine on its own smeared with Breton butter, or with egg and cheese and ham inside. We got into Concarneau, on the southwest coast of Brittany about an hour before the weekly Friday outdoor market closed. &nbsp;I counted a half-dozen galette trucks. We walked up to the closest one. The cook was finishing up what looked like a weekend’s worth of galettes for the person in front of us -- flipping them, then pulling them off two hot metal disks, buttering them, and adding them to the stack. It was Friday in Lent, so I went for the egg, onion, and cheese galette. The creaminess of the cheese played nicely against the nutty graininess of the buckwheat.</li><li>The next day we drove to Rennes, our last stop in Brittany. We dropped the rental car at the train station and took the subway to Place des Lices for the huge Saturday market. We walked down from the subway station, through the fruit and vegetable stands lining the street -- beautiful stuff, but we’re leaving the next day, so we’re not doing a lot of green grocery shopping. There, between the two market halls, is a collection of food trucks; about 70% of them selling what we were looking for -- <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galette-saucisse\">galette-saucisse</a> -- the classic Breton street food that is pretty much what the straight translation from French to English suggests -- a sausage in a galette. Kinda like a Breton hot dog, it’s a cooked pork sausage wrapped in a cool galette, maybe with some grilled onions and dijon mustard added. There were lines tailing back from all the trucks serving these. A local guy pointed one truck out to Irene -- “They’re the best”, he said. She and Claire stood in queue while Andrew and I searched for drinks. Around the corner, we found a local cider maker; a couple of tables surrounded by crates of cider bottles. Through a mangled bit of Franglais, we bought a bottle of dry cider that had stayed cool in the shade and four cups, and got back to the food truck line just in time to be handed my galette-saucisse. After finishing the sausage and cider, I swung past the cider stand to give him the empty bottle -- kinda in-person recycling. There wasn’t much time to catch up on his life story, but it was a sunny Saturday and he had a full line; looked like he was having a good day.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #152</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_152.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<p><!--EndFragment--><br>\n<br>\n</p>','Podcast #152 — Overwhelming Travel; New & Old Restaurant Trends','','inherit','closed','closed','','2474-revision-v1','','','2019-06-15 11:49:51','2019-06-15 16:49:51','',2474,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/06/15/2474-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2479,1,'2019-06-15 11:52:46','2019-06-15 16:52:46','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><img class=\"wp-image-2439\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/oysters_and_evian_bottles-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" />\n<figcaption>Cancale Oysters with a nice Evian Sancerre</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p>Squeezing in another episode before moving the TravelCommons studios, we talk with <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mylaocoon\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Candid Wueest</span></a> of Symantec about websites that leak traveler data and what we can do to protect ourselves. I talk about yet more frustration with the <a href=\"http://avios.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Avios</a> frequent flyer program, while a listener writes in about his great experience with <a href=\"https://www.getfreebird.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Freebird</a>, a new flight rebooking service. I wrap up talking about great street food we had while touring Brittany, France last month. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_152.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/617322609&color=%23ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #152: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the new TravelCommons studios <em>in</em> Chicago, IL. The move went surprisingly smoothly -- nothing lost, nothing destroyed on the 20-mile trip in from the western suburbs. Have the production bay rebuilt and now trying out the new studio set-up, so we’ll see how this sounds. </li><li>Which also means I haven’t done much travel since the last episode; just a quick trip last week down to Nashville. But the move downtown meant I had to rethink some of my travel patterns -- not how to get to and from Nashville, but how to get to and from Chicago Midway airport. We’ve said before in many episodes, most (all?) frequent travelers are all about optimizing the standard parts of their journey -- what’s the most efficient way to get to the airport, when to leave -- optimizing the trade-off between sleep and getting to the gate when status pre-boarding is announced. In the old digs, I had a pretty predictable 25-30 minute drive to either O’Hare or Midway, and long-term relationship with a dependable driver. Which meant answering the “when do I need leave for the airport” question was a mindless exercise -- subtract 90 minutes from the departure time and send a text to my guy the night before. But now it’s a kinda predictable 60-minute public transit ride or a very unpredictable 35-60-minute Uber/Lyft ride with even more unpredictable wait times and surge pricing, especially when catching a morning flight. Actually, for this 3-day trip, I think it would’ve been cheaper to drive and park, even with the City of Chicago’s latest parking taxes.</li><li>The Southwest flights between Midway and Nashville were a bit odd because the pilots kept everyone in their seats for the entire flight due to “expected turbulence” - of which there was absolutely none. Though I thought it was interesting that the pilot on our return trip said “We may ask our flight attendants to remain seated so we can fly faster and pick up some time.” It’s an hour-and-20-minute flight, so not too long to stay seated as long as you didn’t drop a couple of beers at the bar right before boarding. But it also meant I didn’t get a chance to use some of the free drink coupons Southwest sent me last month. I should’ve followed the advice of a Nashville Airport billboard that was posted right above the Southwest gate -- “Before Wheels Up, Whiskey up.”</li><li>Bridge Music — <em>Lakeside Jam</em> by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/55998 </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Because the trip to Nashville was personal travel, I used award points where I could -- Hyatt for our hotel and Hertz for the rental car. The only reason I didn’t use Southwest points was because I was burning off a $100 customer satisfaction certificate Southwest sent me as comp for one of their 3 delayed flights I talked about in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/podcast-150-travel-interruptus/\">Travel Interruptus episode</a> a couple of months back. We’ve talked about how to use awards many times over the years. And while the tactics may change a bit, my overall strategy has been pretty consistent -- use them rather than save them, or “earn and burn” as some folks say. I know a lot of travelers who save them -- hoard them -- thinking of them as their travel savings account -- or perhaps a badge of honor -- “I have 2 million American Airline points” to which I think (and try not to say) “that are going to get you a lot less the longer you keep holding them”. Because  rather than increasing in value by earning interest, they can suddenly decrease in value when United or BA or Marriott or, a couple of weeks ago, Hertz decide to redo their awards charts. And, for all the luvvy words in those announcements about “increasing the value” of their programs, I’ve never seen one of those changes <em>increase</em> the value of the points. At the end of May, Hertz published -- without any warning or announcement -- a new award chart that increased the point cost for daily and weekly rentals by 11-36 percent. Back in March, Marriott added a new top hotel category with a 42% higher per-night award cost -- 85,000 points a night for the properties that moved into the new Category 8 vs. 60,000 points when they were in 7. And most of the properties that got that 42% bump were resort properties -- the ones you’d most likely want to use your points on. In November, United will eliminate their award charts altogether, following Delta and Southwest in moving to dynamic pricing. Pick your slogan - “Earn and burn”; “Use ‘em or lose ‘em”. Though I think I like “you deserve a break today” better. Plan a vacation and burn your points before the companies do.</li><li>Even though  I haven’t traveled much since <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/podcast-151-traveler-data-leaks-brittany-street-food/\">the last episode</a>, I’ve still been thinking a lot about travel - specifically, laying out our trip at the back half of this month -- a week in Ireland and then heading over to Scotland for Claire’s graduation from Univ of St Andrews. I talked in the last episode about wrestling with the Avios website to book our flights, but with that done, I got consumed by packing and moving and unpacking, and sorta lost track of the other reservations that we needed for our week in Ireland. That insight landed on me pretty hard the Tuesday after Memorial Day when I looked at my calendar and started seeing June dates. I got nothing -- no car, no places to sleep. And it’s not like the end of June is low season in Ireland. Back in March, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/19/podcast-149-dining-single-airlines-need-to-tell-us-more/\">episode 149</a>, I talked about how we dug deep when planning our spring break trip to Brittany -- buying guidebooks, scouring web sites, .... But we had never been there before. My planning for Ireland is a lot more impromptu because, back in the early ‘90’s, I spent a lot of time in Cork for business, and while the country has no doubt changed a lot in the past 20-some odd years, I had a sense of what I wanted to see and a bit of an itinerary in mind -- spend most of the week hubbing out of Galway, going south to County Clare and north to the Connemara, and then heading over to Dublin for the weekend before flying over to Edinburgh. I found myself spending most of my time spelunking through TripAdvisor. First, in the Ireland forum trying to figure out the right rental car strategy. My default strategy -- go with Hertz and leverage my US status if anything goes sideways -- wouldn’t work because Hertz has franchised its name in Ireland to another company. Also, rental car insurance seems to be a bit unique there; using your credit card to cover damages like on my last trip to St Andrews apparently requires a letter from your card issuer and is still a particular hassle at the counter. Then there was the sifting through the Manichean universe of TripAdvisor reviews -- a bipolar split between 5-star “everything is fantabulous” and 1-star “it’s a complete dump and I’m sure the maid spit in my water glass” write-ups. I tend to the more forgiving end of that spectrum. I don’t think you should slam a place for a problem if you didn’t tell them about it and give them a chance to fix it. I also try to have reasonable expectations; you’re not going to get psychic/transcendent levels of service for $100/night. It took me a solid day-and-a-half of screen time, but we now have a bed for each night and a set of wheels to get us there. </li><li>Being off the road for a month has helped me drop a nagging 7-8 lbs that I put on over Christmas and until now -- 5-6 months later -- haven’t been able to drop. We’ve talked in past episodes how easy it is to put weight on when traveling -- eating 3 meals a day in restaurants, or worse on the run in airports, makes portion control difficult, as well as eating more vegetables than fries. But even when you’ve chosen, say, the fish instead of the burger, you’re still someone else’s mercy for how it’s cooked. This light bulb lit for me while watching <em><a href=\"https://www.netflix.com/title/81028317\">The Chef Show</a></em><a href=\"https://www.netflix.com/title/81028317\"> on Netflix</a> over the weekend. It’s a great cooking show. It stars Jon Favreau, director of the Iron Man movies, and Roy Choi, who was one of the first gourmet food truck guys in LA; you’d track them down on Twitter for fantastic Korean-Mexican tacos. These guys worked together on Favreau’s <em>Chef </em>movie a few years back and then got back together for this Netflix series. In the second episode, they’re cooking in Atlanta with Ford Fry at his restaurant, The Optimist. They’re making a Shrimp Toast dish that easily uses over a stick of butter to cook and sauce 5 large shrimp. They joke about the amount of butter and salt restaurants use -- “When they say ‘no salt’...,” Favreau asks Choi, Choi responds “...we add twice as much”. And then they add another half-stick of butter to the shrimp pan. I’m sure it tastes great, but it was an “a-ha” moment -- how, even when you think you’re ordering healthy, the guys in the back are focused on taste, not counting calories for you.</li><li>After our move, I’ve cranked through most of the change of addresses, but haven’t yet done my drivers license. But that one will take a little more work because my current Illinois drivers license isn’t a Real ID license -- it doesn’t have the gold star in the upper right corner. It’s not a problem right now, but in 16 months from now, October 2020, when the TSA says it will fully enforce the 2005 Real ID act -- 15 years later, for real this time, no more extensions or waivers -- and so will no longer accept non-compliant IDs at airports. Getting a Real ID license requires more documentation -- proof of my Social Security Number and two documents with our new address -- like a utility bill or a bank statement, which could be a bit of a challenge now that we get most everything electronically. Now, I could just skip it and use my passport or Global Entry card (if I could find it) instead. But that would mean I’d have to remember to bring one more thing with me to the airport, which is never a best practice. Not critical -- I have 16 months to get around to it -- though probably not something to wait until the last minute on. The Illinois DMV isn’t the quickest, most nimble organization on its best days. I can only imagine what it’ll be like come, say August or September 2020, when it gets crushed with people without passports looking to swap their drivers licenses before the October 1 deadline.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com. </li><li>Bridge Music —  <em>A Thousand And None</em> by Speck (c) copyright 2018 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/speck/57256 Ft: Mr_Yesterday </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Overwhelmed By Travel</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Cristine Danielson, a long-time friend and first time listener, asked me after listening to the last episode “I’d love to hear how you get acclimatized to a new city from the moment you leave the gate. I always feel overwhelmed”  That pulled me up short. I had never really thought about it that way. I’ve been traveling heavily coming up on 35 years; I’ve been traveling longer than I haven’t. I started when I was too young and seemingly indestructible to know any better, and now, I have enough travel experience, routines, rhythms  -- patterns I called them earlier -- and status that, even when gutting through <em><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/podcast-150-travel-interruptus/\">Travel Interruptus</a></em>, things seem more inconvenient than overwhelming.</li><li>One of the most important things for me is having enough money in my pocket to handle what could come my way. At the end of the last century -- the 1990’s to be exact -- I was doing a lot of bunny hop trips through Europe -- Sweden one day, Switzerland the next, then Germany, then the UK …. This was pre-ATMs, pre-Euro, pre-mobile phones, and for many places in Europe, pre-widespread acceptance of credit cards. Truly the travel dark ages. So, my routine would be to exit Customs, head straight to the Currency Exchange, and cash a $100 American Express travelers check so I would have enough local cash for, say a coffee and a cab. Having that cash in my pocket settled me a bit; maybe gave me a sense of some control, no matter how illusionary it might be. Today, I head straight for an ATM instead of the Currency Exchange and, as I said a few episodes back, make sure I have a “full house” of credit cards -- a Visa and MasterCard from different banks, and an Amex. And it’s not just when I’m out of the country. Even in the US, I’m a lot more comfortable traveling when I have 5 or 10 $20’s in my wallet.</li><li>After my wallet comes my phone. Modern travel is all about the smartphone app -- is my plane on time, where’s the hotel, what train line do I need? My whole <em><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/podcast-150-travel-interruptus/\">Travel Interruptus</a></em> tale would’ve been much worse than “inconvenient” without smartphone connectivity. I wouldn’t have been able to tweet at Southwest customer service, I wouldn’t have been able to find a decent hotel in Paris when the train delays made us miss our flight home, I wouldn’t have been able to book that God-awful expensive Uber that got us to CDG just in time to make our flight. Back in the last century, I would’ve searched for a pay phone, pulled out my phone card, and rung up the travel agency. Even today, if I’m ringing up a travel agency instead of doing it on my own, when was the last time you saw a working pay phone? </li><li>Those are the mechanics of travel, but what about fitting in to the place you’ve arrived? I talked about how business travelers especially tend to float above everything in a “<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2008/04/29/podcast-64-escaping-the-travel-bubble-marks-travel-tips/\">travel bubble</a>”. You walk out -- of the plane with enough status, otherwise baggage claim -- and find someone holding a sign with your name who’s job is to give you a bottle of water and whisk you past the things that might be disconcerting, overwhelming. When that bubble pops, unexpectedly, and drops you into the day-to-day reality of the place you are; that decompression can be overwhelming. </li><li>The closest I came to an overwhelming experience was not arriving in a place, but trying to leave. A colleague and I wrapped up our day in Pune, India and were flying home from Mumbai that night, but on different flights; his leaving a couple of hours earlier than mine. For some reason, the person arranging our trip had us taking cars from Pune to Mumbai instead of flying. Well, OK. It wasn’t a bad drive -- actually a bit scenic -- right until we hit Mumbai traffic. We get to the international terminal, we pull our bags from the trunk, and make our way thru the general chaos of people and push carts and food vendors to the entrance.  We both have our itineraries out and ready for inspection. My colleague goes first -- the officer looks at it and waves him through. I hand over my itinerary and follow my colleague. Except I can’t. I can’t go into the terminal; I’m too early. I’m now back out in the chaos with nowhere to go -- our car is long gone, I have no idea where Mumbai Airport is in relation to anything -- is there a hotel nearby. I don’t have a working mobile phone to ring anyone. I’m just standing around, with hundreds of other people trying to get in, or saying good-bye to someone trying to get in, or waiting for someone to come out. I walked up and down the sidewalk in front of the terminal, looking for something -- a phone, a bench. I find a door. I look in -- it’s a lounge for people waiting for arriving passengers. There’s a big plexiglass wall separating baggage claim. But more importantly, it has seats, is air conditioned, and has a restroom. I walk in -- except I can’t. I need a ticket. Where do I get that? Back out and around the corner. I find the ticket window. It’s a couple hundred rupee -- $2-3. I reach into my pocket and pull out my last bit of cash -- a 500 rupee note. Things got a lot less overwhelming.</li><li>Bridge Music —  <em>dazed </em>by Jeris (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/VJ_Memes/39456 Ft: airtone</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>New and Old Restaurant Trends</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I’ll write a proper “Road Trip” post about our Brittany trip later this spring, after we get settled in the new digs, but after streaming a few episodes of Netflix’s “Street Food” series, I started thinking about some of the Breton street food we enjoyed while touring last month. If you’ve seen any of the Netflix series, you know that it’s more about the vendors than the food. But my French trails off after “oui,” “non,” “merci,” and “S\'il vous plaît” so I wasn’t able to get much of the vendor’s life stories. So this will be all about the food.</li><li>The first place we stayed was <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancale\">Cancale</a>, and we went there for one reason - oysters. Like people have been doing for 300-some odd years. When the tide is out, you can see miles of oyster beds with big farm tractors moving through the rows, hauling out trailers of oysters. Lining the ramp where the tractors drive up out of the beds is a little oyster market -- 8 stalls selling oysters fresh from the beds for €5-6/dozen. After adding another couple of euros for shucking, a half lemon and the use of a plastic platter, we’d have our afternoon snack -- sitting on the sea wall by the market, slurping through a couple dozen very briny oysters while watching the tractors work, and then pitching the empty shells back onto the beach for the seagulls to pick through. Our first afternoon, we only had a couple of cans of beer in our jacket pocket. The next couple of afternoons, we’d pour a nice white wine into some empty Evian bottles (Claire and I preferred a Sancerre) and make sure we had a good supply of wet wipes. We didn’t miss an afternoon on that sea wall while in Cancale.</li><li>Buckwheat is a big thing in Brittany. It’s been grown in Brittany for half a millennium or more, and for almost that long, it seems, has been turned into a <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galette\">galette</a>. a buckwheat crêpe. But a crêpe in form and shape only. Instead of a soft white wheat flour crêpe filled with jam or Nutella, the galette is crisper/firmer and savory. Fine on its own smeared with Breton butter, or with egg and cheese and ham inside. We got into Concarneau, on the southwest coast of Brittany about an hour before the weekly Friday outdoor market closed. &nbsp;I counted a half-dozen galette trucks. We walked up to the closest one. The cook was finishing up what looked like a weekend’s worth of galettes for the person in front of us -- flipping them, then pulling them off two hot metal disks, buttering them, and adding them to the stack. It was Friday in Lent, so I went for the egg, onion, and cheese galette. The creaminess of the cheese played nicely against the nutty graininess of the buckwheat.</li><li>The next day we drove to Rennes, our last stop in Brittany. We dropped the rental car at the train station and took the subway to Place des Lices for the huge Saturday market. We walked down from the subway station, through the fruit and vegetable stands lining the street -- beautiful stuff, but we’re leaving the next day, so we’re not doing a lot of green grocery shopping. There, between the two market halls, is a collection of food trucks; about 70% of them selling what we were looking for -- <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galette-saucisse\">galette-saucisse</a> -- the classic Breton street food that is pretty much what the straight translation from French to English suggests -- a sausage in a galette. Kinda like a Breton hot dog, it’s a cooked pork sausage wrapped in a cool galette, maybe with some grilled onions and dijon mustard added. There were lines tailing back from all the trucks serving these. A local guy pointed one truck out to Irene -- “They’re the best”, he said. She and Claire stood in queue while Andrew and I searched for drinks. Around the corner, we found a local cider maker; a couple of tables surrounded by crates of cider bottles. Through a mangled bit of Franglais, we bought a bottle of dry cider that had stayed cool in the shade and four cups, and got back to the food truck line just in time to be handed my galette-saucisse. After finishing the sausage and cider, I swung past the cider stand to give him the empty bottle -- kinda in-person recycling. There wasn’t much time to catch up on his life story, but it was a sunny Saturday and he had a full line; looked like he was having a good day.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #152</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_152.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<p><!--EndFragment--><br>\n<br>\n</p>','Podcast #152 — Overwhelming Travel; New & Old Restaurant Trends','','inherit','closed','closed','','2474-revision-v1','','','2019-06-15 11:52:46','2019-06-15 16:52:46','',2474,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/06/15/2474-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2480,1,'2019-06-15 11:54:19','2019-06-15 16:54:19','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><img class=\"wp-image-2439\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/oysters_and_evian_bottles-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" />\n<figcaption>Cancale Oysters with a nice Evian Sancerre</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p>Squeezing in another episode before moving the TravelCommons studios, we talk with <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mylaocoon\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Candid Wueest</span></a> of Symantec about websites that leak traveler data and what we can do to protect ourselves. I talk about yet more frustration with the <a href=\"http://avios.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Avios</a> frequent flyer program, while a listener writes in about his great experience with <a href=\"https://www.getfreebird.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Freebird</a>, a new flight rebooking service. I wrap up talking about great street food we had while touring Brittany, France last month. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_152.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/617322609&color=%23ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #152: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the new TravelCommons studios <em>in</em> Chicago, IL. The move went surprisingly smoothly -- nothing lost, nothing destroyed on the 20-mile trip in from the western suburbs. Have the production bay rebuilt and now trying out the new studio set-up, so we’ll see how this sounds. </li><li>Which also means I haven’t done much travel since the last episode; just a quick trip last week down to Nashville. But the move downtown meant I had to rethink some of my travel patterns -- not how to get to and from Nashville, but how to get to and from Chicago Midway airport. We’ve said before in many episodes, most (all?) frequent travelers are all about optimizing the standard parts of their journey -- what’s the most efficient way to get to the airport, when to leave -- optimizing the trade-off between sleep and getting to the gate when status pre-boarding is announced. In the old digs, I had a pretty predictable 25-30 minute drive to either O’Hare or Midway, and long-term relationship with a dependable driver. Which meant answering the “when do I need leave for the airport” question was a mindless exercise -- subtract 90 minutes from the departure time and send a text to my guy the night before. But now it’s a kinda predictable 60-minute public transit ride or a very unpredictable 35-60-minute Uber/Lyft ride with even more unpredictable wait times and surge pricing, especially when catching a morning flight. Actually, for this 3-day trip, I think it would’ve been cheaper to drive and park, even with the City of Chicago’s latest parking taxes.</li><li>The Southwest flights between Midway and Nashville were a bit odd because the pilots kept everyone in their seats for the entire flight due to “expected turbulence” - of which there was absolutely none. Though I thought it was interesting that the pilot on our return trip said “We may ask our flight attendants to remain seated so we can fly faster and pick up some time.” It’s an hour-and-20-minute flight, so not too long to stay seated as long as you didn’t drop a couple of beers at the bar right before boarding. But it also meant I didn’t get a chance to use some of the free drink coupons Southwest sent me last month. I should’ve followed the advice of a Nashville Airport billboard that was posted right above the Southwest gate -- “Before Wheels Up, Whiskey up.”</li><li>Bridge Music — <em>Lakeside Jam</em> by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/55998 </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Because the trip to Nashville was personal travel, I used award points where I could -- Hyatt for our hotel and Hertz for the rental car. The only reason I didn’t use Southwest points was because I was burning off a $100 customer satisfaction certificate Southwest sent me as comp for one of their 3 delayed flights I talked about in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/podcast-150-travel-interruptus/\">Travel Interruptus episode</a> a couple of months back. We’ve talked about how to use awards many times over the years. And while the tactics may change a bit, my overall strategy has been pretty consistent -- use them rather than save them, or “earn and burn” as some folks say. I know a lot of travelers who save them -- hoard them -- thinking of them as their travel savings account -- or perhaps a badge of honor -- “I have 2 million American Airline points” to which I think (and try not to say) “that are going to get you a lot less the longer you keep holding them”. Because  rather than increasing in value by earning interest, they can suddenly decrease in value when United or BA or Marriott or, a couple of weeks ago, Hertz decide to redo their awards charts. And, for all the luvvy words in those announcements about “increasing the value” of their programs, I’ve never seen one of those changes <em>increase</em> the value of the points. At the end of May, Hertz published -- without any warning or announcement -- a new award chart that increased the point cost for daily and weekly rentals by 11-36 percent. Back in March, Marriott added a new top hotel category with a 42% higher per-night award cost -- 85,000 points a night for the properties that moved into the new Category 8 vs. 60,000 points when they were in 7. And most of the properties that got that 42% bump were resort properties -- the ones you’d most likely want to use your points on. In November, United will eliminate their award charts altogether, following Delta and Southwest in moving to dynamic pricing. Pick your slogan - “Earn and burn”; “Use ‘em or lose ‘em”. Though I think I like “you deserve a break today” better. Plan a vacation and burn your points before the companies do.</li><li>Even though  I haven’t traveled much since <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/podcast-151-traveler-data-leaks-brittany-street-food/\">the last episode</a>, I’ve still been thinking a lot about travel - specifically, laying out our trip at the back half of this month -- a week in Ireland and then heading over to Scotland for Claire’s graduation from Univ of St Andrews. I talked in the last episode about wrestling with the Avios website to book our flights, but with that done, I got consumed by packing and moving and unpacking, and sorta lost track of the other reservations that we needed for our week in Ireland. That insight landed on me pretty hard the Tuesday after Memorial Day when I looked at my calendar and started seeing June dates. I got nothing -- no car, no places to sleep. And it’s not like the end of June is low season in Ireland. Back in March, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/19/podcast-149-dining-single-airlines-need-to-tell-us-more/\">episode 149</a>, I talked about how we dug deep when planning our spring break trip to Brittany -- buying guidebooks, scouring web sites, .... But we had never been there before. My planning for Ireland is a lot more impromptu because, back in the early ‘90’s, I spent a lot of time in Cork for business, and while the country has no doubt changed a lot in the past 20-some odd years, I had a sense of what I wanted to see and a bit of an itinerary in mind -- spend most of the week hubbing out of Galway, going south to County Clare and north to the Connemara, and then heading over to Dublin for the weekend before flying over to Edinburgh. I found myself spending most of my time spelunking through TripAdvisor. First, in the Ireland forum trying to figure out the right rental car strategy. My default strategy -- go with Hertz and leverage my US status if anything goes sideways -- wouldn’t work because Hertz has franchised its name in Ireland to another company. Also, rental car insurance seems to be a bit unique there; using your credit card to cover damages like on my last trip to St Andrews apparently requires a letter from your card issuer and is still a particular hassle at the counter. Then there was the sifting through the Manichean universe of TripAdvisor reviews -- a bipolar split between 5-star “everything is fantabulous” and 1-star “it’s a complete dump and I’m sure the maid spit in my water glass” write-ups. I tend to the more forgiving end of that spectrum. I don’t think you should slam a place for a problem if you didn’t tell them about it and give them a chance to fix it. I also try to have reasonable expectations; you’re not going to get psychic/transcendent levels of service for $100/night. It took me a solid day-and-a-half of screen time, but we now have a bed for each night and a set of wheels to get us there. </li><li>Being off the road for a month has helped me drop a nagging 7-8 lbs that I put on over Christmas and until now -- 5-6 months later -- haven’t been able to drop. We’ve talked in past episodes how easy it is to put weight on when traveling -- eating 3 meals a day in restaurants, or worse on the run in airports, makes portion control difficult, as well as eating more vegetables than fries. But even when you’ve chosen, say, the fish instead of the burger, you’re still someone else’s mercy for how it’s cooked. This light bulb lit for me while watching <em><a href=\"https://www.netflix.com/title/81028317\">The Chef Show</a></em><a href=\"https://www.netflix.com/title/81028317\"> on Netflix</a> over the weekend. It’s a great cooking show. It stars Jon Favreau, director of the Iron Man movies, and Roy Choi, who was one of the first gourmet food truck guys in LA; you’d track them down on Twitter for fantastic Korean-Mexican tacos. These guys worked together on Favreau’s <em>Chef </em>movie a few years back and then got back together for this Netflix series. In the second episode, they’re cooking in Atlanta with Ford Fry at his restaurant, The Optimist. They’re making a Shrimp Toast dish that easily uses over a stick of butter to cook and sauce 5 large shrimp. They joke about the amount of butter and salt restaurants use -- “When they say ‘no salt’...,” Favreau asks Choi, Choi responds “...we add twice as much”. And then they add another half-stick of butter to the shrimp pan. I’m sure it tastes great, but it was an “a-ha” moment -- how, even when you think you’re ordering healthy, the guys in the back are focused on taste, not counting calories for you.</li><li>After our move, I’ve cranked through most of the change of addresses, but haven’t yet done my drivers license. But that one will take a little more work because my current Illinois drivers license isn’t a Real ID license -- it doesn’t have the gold star in the upper right corner. It’s not a problem right now, but in 16 months from now, October 2020, when the TSA says it will fully enforce the 2005 Real ID act -- 15 years later, for real this time, no more extensions or waivers -- and so will no longer accept non-compliant IDs at airports. Getting a Real ID license requires more documentation -- proof of my Social Security Number and two documents with our new address -- like a utility bill or a bank statement, which could be a bit of a challenge now that we get most everything electronically. Now, I could just skip it and use my passport or Global Entry card (if I could find it) instead. But that would mean I’d have to remember to bring one more thing with me to the airport, which is never a best practice. Not critical -- I have 16 months to get around to it -- though probably not something to wait until the last minute on. The Illinois DMV isn’t the quickest, most nimble organization on its best days. I can only imagine what it’ll be like come, say August or September 2020, when it gets crushed with people without passports looking to swap their drivers licenses before the October 1 deadline.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com. </li><li>Bridge Music —  <em>A Thousand And None</em> by Speck (c) copyright 2018 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/speck/57256 Ft: Mr_Yesterday </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Overwhelmed By Travel</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Cristine Danielson, a long-time friend and first time listener, asked me after listening to the last episode “I’d love to hear how you get acclimatized to a new city from the moment you leave the gate. I always feel overwhelmed”  That pulled me up short. I had never really thought about it that way. I’ve been traveling heavily coming up on 35 years; I’ve been traveling longer than I haven’t. I started when I was too young and seemingly indestructible to know any better, and now, I have enough travel experience, routines, rhythms  -- patterns I called them earlier -- and status that, even when gutting through <em><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/podcast-150-travel-interruptus/\">Travel Interruptus</a></em>, things seem more inconvenient than overwhelming.</li><li>One of the most important things for me is having enough money in my pocket to handle what could come my way. At the end of the last century -- the 1990’s to be exact -- I was doing a lot of bunny hop trips through Europe -- Sweden one day, Switzerland the next, then Germany, then the UK …. This was pre-ATMs, pre-Euro, pre-mobile phones, and for many places in Europe, pre-widespread acceptance of credit cards. Truly the travel dark ages. So, my routine would be to exit Customs, head straight to the Currency Exchange, and cash a $100 American Express travelers check so I would have enough local cash for, say a coffee and a cab. Having that cash in my pocket settled me a bit; maybe gave me a sense of some control, no matter how illusionary it might be. Today, I head straight for an ATM instead of the Currency Exchange and, as I said a few episodes back, make sure I have a “full house” of credit cards -- a Visa and MasterCard from different banks, and an Amex. And it’s not just when I’m out of the country. Even in the US, I’m a lot more comfortable traveling when I have 5 or 10 $20’s in my wallet.</li><li>After my wallet comes my phone. Modern travel is all about the smartphone app -- is my plane on time, where’s the hotel, what train line do I need? My whole <em><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/podcast-150-travel-interruptus/\">Travel Interruptus</a></em> tale would’ve been much worse than “inconvenient” without smartphone connectivity. I wouldn’t have been able to tweet at Southwest customer service, I wouldn’t have been able to find a decent hotel in Paris when the train delays made us miss our flight home, I wouldn’t have been able to book that God-awful expensive Uber that got us to CDG just in time to make our flight. Back in the last century, I would’ve searched for a pay phone, pulled out my phone card, and rung up the travel agency. Even today, if I’m ringing up a travel agency instead of doing it on my own, when was the last time you saw a working pay phone? </li><li>Those are the mechanics of travel, but what about fitting in to the place you’ve arrived? I talked about how business travelers especially tend to float above everything in a “<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2008/04/29/podcast-64-escaping-the-travel-bubble-marks-travel-tips/\">travel bubble</a>”. You walk out -- of the plane with enough status, otherwise baggage claim -- and find someone holding a sign with your name who’s job is to give you a bottle of water and whisk you past the things that might be disconcerting, overwhelming. When that bubble pops, unexpectedly, and drops you into the day-to-day reality of the place you are; that decompression can be overwhelming. </li><li>The closest I came to an overwhelming experience was not arriving in a place, but trying to leave. A colleague and I wrapped up our day in Pune, India and were flying home from Mumbai that night, but on different flights; his leaving a couple of hours earlier than mine. For some reason, the person arranging our trip had us taking cars from Pune to Mumbai instead of flying. Well, OK. It wasn’t a bad drive -- actually a bit scenic -- right until we hit Mumbai traffic. We get to the international terminal, we pull our bags from the trunk, and make our way thru the general chaos of people and push carts and food vendors to the entrance.  We both have our itineraries out and ready for inspection. My colleague goes first -- the officer looks at it and waves him through. I hand over my itinerary and follow my colleague. Except I can’t. I can’t go into the terminal; I’m too early. I’m now back out in the chaos with nowhere to go -- our car is long gone, I have no idea where Mumbai Airport is in relation to anything -- is there a hotel nearby. I don’t have a working mobile phone to ring anyone. I’m just standing around, with hundreds of other people trying to get in, or saying good-bye to someone trying to get in, or waiting for someone to come out. I walked up and down the sidewalk in front of the terminal, looking for something -- a phone, a bench. I find a door. I look in -- it’s a lounge for people waiting for arriving passengers. There’s a big plexiglass wall separating baggage claim. But more importantly, it has seats, is air conditioned, and has a restroom. I walk in -- except I can’t. I need a ticket. Where do I get that? Back out and around the corner. I find the ticket window. It’s a couple hundred rupee -- $2-3. I reach into my pocket and pull out my last bit of cash -- a 500 rupee note. Things got a lot less overwhelming.</li><li>Bridge Music —  <em>dazed </em>by Jeris (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/VJ_Memes/39456 Ft: airtone</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>New and Old Restaurant Trends</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Last month, I hit the <a href=\"https://restaurant.org/Home\">National Restaurant Association</a>’s <a href=\"https://www.nationalrestaurantshow.com/\">annual show</a> in Chicago’s McCormick Place convention center. If you need reminding of how big the restaurant business is in the US, this show is <em>huge</em>. I was interested to see what’s new and what has stayed the same since the last time I went, 4 years ago. </li><li>What’s new - Walking the aisles, I was immediately struck by the number of booths showing delivery containers. They were everywhere. Talking to a couple of vendors, they said some hotels are seeing huge growth in Doordash and Grubhub deliveries eating into their restaurant and room service revenues (all puns intended). And since they’re seeing it being driven by the new generation of new travelers -- the Millennial and Gen-Z travelers -- they think it’s more of a trend than a blip, yet another revenue stream lost to traveler technology -- like when they lost long-distance phone calls to cell phones, and then pay TV revenue to PCs and iPads running Netflix and YouTube. So many hotels, especially the lower end ones, are dropping food service altogether. But this collides head on with sustainability concerns -- the growth in delivery means a growth in styrofoam containers and plastic bags. And so I’d walk past, say, two booths back-to-back -- the first selling traditional containers; the second pushing compostable paper and bioplastics. These new containers looked good; except when I tried to use a paper straw on a frozen margarita sample that someone pushed on me. That was a complete fail.</li><li>Also saw a number of established ethnic food companies trying to branch out into new/hotter ethnic spaces. Kronos, for example, is one of the main companies selling Greek gyros meat. In their booth, they were sampling gyros, but also new chicken al pastor and Korean barbeque products. Cultural appropriation or trying to stay in business by catering to those darn Millennials and Gen Z’ers. I dunno, but a Kronos guy told me that 90% of their business still comes from gyros. Which kinda rang true when I looked at which sample booths had the longest lines -- hot dogs from Vienna Beef and Nathan’s and grilled cheese sandwiches from Tillamook Cheddar. </li><li>That being said, there were a lot of vendors selling Asian products -- primarily Japanese and Korean -- continuing the trend I’ve seen at the show. Digital is still big, but the focus seemed to have shifted from smartphone apps to \\ interfacing with those delivery services -- updating menus and getting orders automatically into their point-of-sale systems -- and more efficiently managing social media. I saw a Yelp booth for the first time at the show. It was a good-sized booth -- nicely carpeted, with tables full of phones running their app. But it was pretty empty -- mostly populated by Yelp employees. Gave me a good idea of how the restaurateurs were rating Yelp’s booth.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #152</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_152.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<p><!--EndFragment--><br>\n<br>\n</p>','Podcast #152 — Overwhelming Travel; New & Old Restaurant Trends','','inherit','closed','closed','','2474-revision-v1','','','2019-06-15 11:54:19','2019-06-15 16:54:19','',2474,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/06/15/2474-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2481,1,'2019-06-15 11:54:41','2019-06-15 16:54:41','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><img class=\"wp-image-2439\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/oysters_and_evian_bottles-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" />\n<figcaption>Cancale Oysters with a nice Evian Sancerre</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p>Squeezing  All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_152.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/617322609&color=%23ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #152: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the new TravelCommons studios <em>in</em> Chicago, IL. The move went surprisingly smoothly -- nothing lost, nothing destroyed on the 20-mile trip in from the western suburbs. Have the production bay rebuilt and now trying out the new studio set-up, so we’ll see how this sounds. </li><li>Which also means I haven’t done much travel since the last episode; just a quick trip last week down to Nashville. But the move downtown meant I had to rethink some of my travel patterns -- not how to get to and from Nashville, but how to get to and from Chicago Midway airport. We’ve said before in many episodes, most (all?) frequent travelers are all about optimizing the standard parts of their journey -- what’s the most efficient way to get to the airport, when to leave -- optimizing the trade-off between sleep and getting to the gate when status pre-boarding is announced. In the old digs, I had a pretty predictable 25-30 minute drive to either O’Hare or Midway, and long-term relationship with a dependable driver. Which meant answering the “when do I need leave for the airport” question was a mindless exercise -- subtract 90 minutes from the departure time and send a text to my guy the night before. But now it’s a kinda predictable 60-minute public transit ride or a very unpredictable 35-60-minute Uber/Lyft ride with even more unpredictable wait times and surge pricing, especially when catching a morning flight. Actually, for this 3-day trip, I think it would’ve been cheaper to drive and park, even with the City of Chicago’s latest parking taxes.</li><li>The Southwest flights between Midway and Nashville were a bit odd because the pilots kept everyone in their seats for the entire flight due to “expected turbulence” - of which there was absolutely none. Though I thought it was interesting that the pilot on our return trip said “We may ask our flight attendants to remain seated so we can fly faster and pick up some time.” It’s an hour-and-20-minute flight, so not too long to stay seated as long as you didn’t drop a couple of beers at the bar right before boarding. But it also meant I didn’t get a chance to use some of the free drink coupons Southwest sent me last month. I should’ve followed the advice of a Nashville Airport billboard that was posted right above the Southwest gate -- “Before Wheels Up, Whiskey up.”</li><li>Bridge Music — <em>Lakeside Jam</em> by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/55998 </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Because the trip to Nashville was personal travel, I used award points where I could -- Hyatt for our hotel and Hertz for the rental car. The only reason I didn’t use Southwest points was because I was burning off a $100 customer satisfaction certificate Southwest sent me as comp for one of their 3 delayed flights I talked about in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/podcast-150-travel-interruptus/\">Travel Interruptus episode</a> a couple of months back. We’ve talked about how to use awards many times over the years. And while the tactics may change a bit, my overall strategy has been pretty consistent -- use them rather than save them, or “earn and burn” as some folks say. I know a lot of travelers who save them -- hoard them -- thinking of them as their travel savings account -- or perhaps a badge of honor -- “I have 2 million American Airline points” to which I think (and try not to say) “that are going to get you a lot less the longer you keep holding them”. Because  rather than increasing in value by earning interest, they can suddenly decrease in value when United or BA or Marriott or, a couple of weeks ago, Hertz decide to redo their awards charts. And, for all the luvvy words in those announcements about “increasing the value” of their programs, I’ve never seen one of those changes <em>increase</em> the value of the points. At the end of May, Hertz published -- without any warning or announcement -- a new award chart that increased the point cost for daily and weekly rentals by 11-36 percent. Back in March, Marriott added a new top hotel category with a 42% higher per-night award cost -- 85,000 points a night for the properties that moved into the new Category 8 vs. 60,000 points when they were in 7. And most of the properties that got that 42% bump were resort properties -- the ones you’d most likely want to use your points on. In November, United will eliminate their award charts altogether, following Delta and Southwest in moving to dynamic pricing. Pick your slogan - “Earn and burn”; “Use ‘em or lose ‘em”. Though I think I like “you deserve a break today” better. Plan a vacation and burn your points before the companies do.</li><li>Even though  I haven’t traveled much since <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/podcast-151-traveler-data-leaks-brittany-street-food/\">the last episode</a>, I’ve still been thinking a lot about travel - specifically, laying out our trip at the back half of this month -- a week in Ireland and then heading over to Scotland for Claire’s graduation from Univ of St Andrews. I talked in the last episode about wrestling with the Avios website to book our flights, but with that done, I got consumed by packing and moving and unpacking, and sorta lost track of the other reservations that we needed for our week in Ireland. That insight landed on me pretty hard the Tuesday after Memorial Day when I looked at my calendar and started seeing June dates. I got nothing -- no car, no places to sleep. And it’s not like the end of June is low season in Ireland. Back in March, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/19/podcast-149-dining-single-airlines-need-to-tell-us-more/\">episode 149</a>, I talked about how we dug deep when planning our spring break trip to Brittany -- buying guidebooks, scouring web sites, .... But we had never been there before. My planning for Ireland is a lot more impromptu because, back in the early ‘90’s, I spent a lot of time in Cork for business, and while the country has no doubt changed a lot in the past 20-some odd years, I had a sense of what I wanted to see and a bit of an itinerary in mind -- spend most of the week hubbing out of Galway, going south to County Clare and north to the Connemara, and then heading over to Dublin for the weekend before flying over to Edinburgh. I found myself spending most of my time spelunking through TripAdvisor. First, in the Ireland forum trying to figure out the right rental car strategy. My default strategy -- go with Hertz and leverage my US status if anything goes sideways -- wouldn’t work because Hertz has franchised its name in Ireland to another company. Also, rental car insurance seems to be a bit unique there; using your credit card to cover damages like on my last trip to St Andrews apparently requires a letter from your card issuer and is still a particular hassle at the counter. Then there was the sifting through the Manichean universe of TripAdvisor reviews -- a bipolar split between 5-star “everything is fantabulous” and 1-star “it’s a complete dump and I’m sure the maid spit in my water glass” write-ups. I tend to the more forgiving end of that spectrum. I don’t think you should slam a place for a problem if you didn’t tell them about it and give them a chance to fix it. I also try to have reasonable expectations; you’re not going to get psychic/transcendent levels of service for $100/night. It took me a solid day-and-a-half of screen time, but we now have a bed for each night and a set of wheels to get us there. </li><li>Being off the road for a month has helped me drop a nagging 7-8 lbs that I put on over Christmas and until now -- 5-6 months later -- haven’t been able to drop. We’ve talked in past episodes how easy it is to put weight on when traveling -- eating 3 meals a day in restaurants, or worse on the run in airports, makes portion control difficult, as well as eating more vegetables than fries. But even when you’ve chosen, say, the fish instead of the burger, you’re still someone else’s mercy for how it’s cooked. This light bulb lit for me while watching <em><a href=\"https://www.netflix.com/title/81028317\">The Chef Show</a></em><a href=\"https://www.netflix.com/title/81028317\"> on Netflix</a> over the weekend. It’s a great cooking show. It stars Jon Favreau, director of the Iron Man movies, and Roy Choi, who was one of the first gourmet food truck guys in LA; you’d track them down on Twitter for fantastic Korean-Mexican tacos. These guys worked together on Favreau’s <em>Chef </em>movie a few years back and then got back together for this Netflix series. In the second episode, they’re cooking in Atlanta with Ford Fry at his restaurant, The Optimist. They’re making a Shrimp Toast dish that easily uses over a stick of butter to cook and sauce 5 large shrimp. They joke about the amount of butter and salt restaurants use -- “When they say ‘no salt’...,” Favreau asks Choi, Choi responds “...we add twice as much”. And then they add another half-stick of butter to the shrimp pan. I’m sure it tastes great, but it was an “a-ha” moment -- how, even when you think you’re ordering healthy, the guys in the back are focused on taste, not counting calories for you.</li><li>After our move, I’ve cranked through most of the change of addresses, but haven’t yet done my drivers license. But that one will take a little more work because my current Illinois drivers license isn’t a Real ID license -- it doesn’t have the gold star in the upper right corner. It’s not a problem right now, but in 16 months from now, October 2020, when the TSA says it will fully enforce the 2005 Real ID act -- 15 years later, for real this time, no more extensions or waivers -- and so will no longer accept non-compliant IDs at airports. Getting a Real ID license requires more documentation -- proof of my Social Security Number and two documents with our new address -- like a utility bill or a bank statement, which could be a bit of a challenge now that we get most everything electronically. Now, I could just skip it and use my passport or Global Entry card (if I could find it) instead. But that would mean I’d have to remember to bring one more thing with me to the airport, which is never a best practice. Not critical -- I have 16 months to get around to it -- though probably not something to wait until the last minute on. The Illinois DMV isn’t the quickest, most nimble organization on its best days. I can only imagine what it’ll be like come, say August or September 2020, when it gets crushed with people without passports looking to swap their drivers licenses before the October 1 deadline.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com. </li><li>Bridge Music —  <em>A Thousand And None</em> by Speck (c) copyright 2018 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/speck/57256 Ft: Mr_Yesterday </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Overwhelmed By Travel</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Cristine Danielson, a long-time friend and first time listener, asked me after listening to the last episode “I’d love to hear how you get acclimatized to a new city from the moment you leave the gate. I always feel overwhelmed”  That pulled me up short. I had never really thought about it that way. I’ve been traveling heavily coming up on 35 years; I’ve been traveling longer than I haven’t. I started when I was too young and seemingly indestructible to know any better, and now, I have enough travel experience, routines, rhythms  -- patterns I called them earlier -- and status that, even when gutting through <em><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/podcast-150-travel-interruptus/\">Travel Interruptus</a></em>, things seem more inconvenient than overwhelming.</li><li>One of the most important things for me is having enough money in my pocket to handle what could come my way. At the end of the last century -- the 1990’s to be exact -- I was doing a lot of bunny hop trips through Europe -- Sweden one day, Switzerland the next, then Germany, then the UK …. This was pre-ATMs, pre-Euro, pre-mobile phones, and for many places in Europe, pre-widespread acceptance of credit cards. Truly the travel dark ages. So, my routine would be to exit Customs, head straight to the Currency Exchange, and cash a $100 American Express travelers check so I would have enough local cash for, say a coffee and a cab. Having that cash in my pocket settled me a bit; maybe gave me a sense of some control, no matter how illusionary it might be. Today, I head straight for an ATM instead of the Currency Exchange and, as I said a few episodes back, make sure I have a “full house” of credit cards -- a Visa and MasterCard from different banks, and an Amex. And it’s not just when I’m out of the country. Even in the US, I’m a lot more comfortable traveling when I have 5 or 10 $20’s in my wallet.</li><li>After my wallet comes my phone. Modern travel is all about the smartphone app -- is my plane on time, where’s the hotel, what train line do I need? My whole <em><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/podcast-150-travel-interruptus/\">Travel Interruptus</a></em> tale would’ve been much worse than “inconvenient” without smartphone connectivity. I wouldn’t have been able to tweet at Southwest customer service, I wouldn’t have been able to find a decent hotel in Paris when the train delays made us miss our flight home, I wouldn’t have been able to book that God-awful expensive Uber that got us to CDG just in time to make our flight. Back in the last century, I would’ve searched for a pay phone, pulled out my phone card, and rung up the travel agency. Even today, if I’m ringing up a travel agency instead of doing it on my own, when was the last time you saw a working pay phone? </li><li>Those are the mechanics of travel, but what about fitting in to the place you’ve arrived? I talked about how business travelers especially tend to float above everything in a “<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2008/04/29/podcast-64-escaping-the-travel-bubble-marks-travel-tips/\">travel bubble</a>”. You walk out -- of the plane with enough status, otherwise baggage claim -- and find someone holding a sign with your name who’s job is to give you a bottle of water and whisk you past the things that might be disconcerting, overwhelming. When that bubble pops, unexpectedly, and drops you into the day-to-day reality of the place you are; that decompression can be overwhelming. </li><li>The closest I came to an overwhelming experience was not arriving in a place, but trying to leave. A colleague and I wrapped up our day in Pune, India and were flying home from Mumbai that night, but on different flights; his leaving a couple of hours earlier than mine. For some reason, the person arranging our trip had us taking cars from Pune to Mumbai instead of flying. Well, OK. It wasn’t a bad drive -- actually a bit scenic -- right until we hit Mumbai traffic. We get to the international terminal, we pull our bags from the trunk, and make our way thru the general chaos of people and push carts and food vendors to the entrance.  We both have our itineraries out and ready for inspection. My colleague goes first -- the officer looks at it and waves him through. I hand over my itinerary and follow my colleague. Except I can’t. I can’t go into the terminal; I’m too early. I’m now back out in the chaos with nowhere to go -- our car is long gone, I have no idea where Mumbai Airport is in relation to anything -- is there a hotel nearby. I don’t have a working mobile phone to ring anyone. I’m just standing around, with hundreds of other people trying to get in, or saying good-bye to someone trying to get in, or waiting for someone to come out. I walked up and down the sidewalk in front of the terminal, looking for something -- a phone, a bench. I find a door. I look in -- it’s a lounge for people waiting for arriving passengers. There’s a big plexiglass wall separating baggage claim. But more importantly, it has seats, is air conditioned, and has a restroom. I walk in -- except I can’t. I need a ticket. Where do I get that? Back out and around the corner. I find the ticket window. It’s a couple hundred rupee -- $2-3. I reach into my pocket and pull out my last bit of cash -- a 500 rupee note. Things got a lot less overwhelming.</li><li>Bridge Music —  <em>dazed </em>by Jeris (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/VJ_Memes/39456 Ft: airtone</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>New and Old Restaurant Trends</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Last month, I hit the <a href=\"https://restaurant.org/Home\">National Restaurant Association</a>’s <a href=\"https://www.nationalrestaurantshow.com/\">annual show</a> in Chicago’s McCormick Place convention center. If you need reminding of how big the restaurant business is in the US, this show is <em>huge</em>. I was interested to see what’s new and what has stayed the same since the last time I went, 4 years ago. </li><li>What’s new - Walking the aisles, I was immediately struck by the number of booths showing delivery containers. They were everywhere. Talking to a couple of vendors, they said some hotels are seeing huge growth in Doordash and Grubhub deliveries eating into their restaurant and room service revenues (all puns intended). And since they’re seeing it being driven by the new generation of new travelers -- the Millennial and Gen-Z travelers -- they think it’s more of a trend than a blip, yet another revenue stream lost to traveler technology -- like when they lost long-distance phone calls to cell phones, and then pay TV revenue to PCs and iPads running Netflix and YouTube. So many hotels, especially the lower end ones, are dropping food service altogether. But this collides head on with sustainability concerns -- the growth in delivery means a growth in styrofoam containers and plastic bags. And so I’d walk past, say, two booths back-to-back -- the first selling traditional containers; the second pushing compostable paper and bioplastics. These new containers looked good; except when I tried to use a paper straw on a frozen margarita sample that someone pushed on me. That was a complete fail.</li><li>Also saw a number of established ethnic food companies trying to branch out into new/hotter ethnic spaces. Kronos, for example, is one of the main companies selling Greek gyros meat. In their booth, they were sampling gyros, but also new chicken al pastor and Korean barbeque products. Cultural appropriation or trying to stay in business by catering to those darn Millennials and Gen Z’ers. I dunno, but a Kronos guy told me that 90% of their business still comes from gyros. Which kinda rang true when I looked at which sample booths had the longest lines -- hot dogs from Vienna Beef and Nathan’s and grilled cheese sandwiches from Tillamook Cheddar. </li><li>That being said, there were a lot of vendors selling Asian products -- primarily Japanese and Korean -- continuing the trend I’ve seen at the show. Digital is still big, but the focus seemed to have shifted from smartphone apps to \\ interfacing with those delivery services -- updating menus and getting orders automatically into their point-of-sale systems -- and more efficiently managing social media. I saw a Yelp booth for the first time at the show. It was a good-sized booth -- nicely carpeted, with tables full of phones running their app. But it was pretty empty -- mostly populated by Yelp employees. Gave me a good idea of how the restaurateurs were rating Yelp’s booth.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #152</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_152.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<p><!--EndFragment--><br>\n<br>\n</p>','Podcast #152 — Overwhelming Travel; New & Old Restaurant Trends','','inherit','closed','closed','','2474-revision-v1','','','2019-06-15 11:54:41','2019-06-15 16:54:41','',2474,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/06/15/2474-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2482,1,'2019-06-15 13:50:34','2019-06-15 18:50:34','','IMG_0449','Latest in Sustainable Food Delivery Containers','inherit','open','closed','','img_0449','','','2019-06-15 13:51:02','2019-06-15 18:51:02','',2474,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/IMG_0449.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(2483,1,'2019-06-15 13:51:52','2019-06-15 18:51:52','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\">\n<p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/IMG_0449.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2482 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/IMG_0449-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a></p>\n<br />\n<figcaption>Latest in Sustainable Food Delivery </figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p>Squeezing  All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_152.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/617322609&color=%23ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #152: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the new TravelCommons studios <em>in</em> Chicago, IL. The move went surprisingly smoothly -- nothing lost, nothing destroyed on the 20-mile trip in from the western suburbs. Have the production bay rebuilt and now trying out the new studio set-up, so we’ll see how this sounds. </li><li>Which also means I haven’t done much travel since the last episode; just a quick trip last week down to Nashville. But the move downtown meant I had to rethink some of my travel patterns -- not how to get to and from Nashville, but how to get to and from Chicago Midway airport. We’ve said before in many episodes, most (all?) frequent travelers are all about optimizing the standard parts of their journey -- what’s the most efficient way to get to the airport, when to leave -- optimizing the trade-off between sleep and getting to the gate when status pre-boarding is announced. In the old digs, I had a pretty predictable 25-30 minute drive to either O’Hare or Midway, and long-term relationship with a dependable driver. Which meant answering the “when do I need leave for the airport” question was a mindless exercise -- subtract 90 minutes from the departure time and send a text to my guy the night before. But now it’s a kinda predictable 60-minute public transit ride or a very unpredictable 35-60-minute Uber/Lyft ride with even more unpredictable wait times and surge pricing, especially when catching a morning flight. Actually, for this 3-day trip, I think it would’ve been cheaper to drive and park, even with the City of Chicago’s latest parking taxes.</li><li>The Southwest flights between Midway and Nashville were a bit odd because the pilots kept everyone in their seats for the entire flight due to “expected turbulence” - of which there was absolutely none. Though I thought it was interesting that the pilot on our return trip said “We may ask our flight attendants to remain seated so we can fly faster and pick up some time.” It’s an hour-and-20-minute flight, so not too long to stay seated as long as you didn’t drop a couple of beers at the bar right before boarding. But it also meant I didn’t get a chance to use some of the free drink coupons Southwest sent me last month. I should’ve followed the advice of a Nashville Airport billboard that was posted right above the Southwest gate -- “Before Wheels Up, Whiskey up.”</li><li>Bridge Music — <em>Lakeside Jam</em> by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/55998 </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Because the trip to Nashville was personal travel, I used award points where I could -- Hyatt for our hotel and Hertz for the rental car. The only reason I didn’t use Southwest points was because I was burning off a $100 customer satisfaction certificate Southwest sent me as comp for one of their 3 delayed flights I talked about in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/podcast-150-travel-interruptus/\">Travel Interruptus episode</a> a couple of months back. We’ve talked about how to use awards many times over the years. And while the tactics may change a bit, my overall strategy has been pretty consistent -- use them rather than save them, or “earn and burn” as some folks say. I know a lot of travelers who save them -- hoard them -- thinking of them as their travel savings account -- or perhaps a badge of honor -- “I have 2 million American Airline points” to which I think (and try not to say) “that are going to get you a lot less the longer you keep holding them”. Because  rather than increasing in value by earning interest, they can suddenly decrease in value when United or BA or Marriott or, a couple of weeks ago, Hertz decide to redo their awards charts. And, for all the luvvy words in those announcements about “increasing the value” of their programs, I’ve never seen one of those changes <em>increase</em> the value of the points. At the end of May, Hertz published -- without any warning or announcement -- a new award chart that increased the point cost for daily and weekly rentals by 11-36 percent. Back in March, Marriott added a new top hotel category with a 42% higher per-night award cost -- 85,000 points a night for the properties that moved into the new Category 8 vs. 60,000 points when they were in 7. And most of the properties that got that 42% bump were resort properties -- the ones you’d most likely want to use your points on. In November, United will eliminate their award charts altogether, following Delta and Southwest in moving to dynamic pricing. Pick your slogan - “Earn and burn”; “Use ‘em or lose ‘em”. Though I think I like “you deserve a break today” better. Plan a vacation and burn your points before the companies do.</li><li>Even though  I haven’t traveled much since <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/podcast-151-traveler-data-leaks-brittany-street-food/\">the last episode</a>, I’ve still been thinking a lot about travel - specifically, laying out our trip at the back half of this month -- a week in Ireland and then heading over to Scotland for Claire’s graduation from Univ of St Andrews. I talked in the last episode about wrestling with the Avios website to book our flights, but with that done, I got consumed by packing and moving and unpacking, and sorta lost track of the other reservations that we needed for our week in Ireland. That insight landed on me pretty hard the Tuesday after Memorial Day when I looked at my calendar and started seeing June dates. I got nothing -- no car, no places to sleep. And it’s not like the end of June is low season in Ireland. Back in March, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/19/podcast-149-dining-single-airlines-need-to-tell-us-more/\">episode 149</a>, I talked about how we dug deep when planning our spring break trip to Brittany -- buying guidebooks, scouring web sites, .... But we had never been there before. My planning for Ireland is a lot more impromptu because, back in the early ‘90’s, I spent a lot of time in Cork for business, and while the country has no doubt changed a lot in the past 20-some odd years, I had a sense of what I wanted to see and a bit of an itinerary in mind -- spend most of the week hubbing out of Galway, going south to County Clare and north to the Connemara, and then heading over to Dublin for the weekend before flying over to Edinburgh. I found myself spending most of my time spelunking through TripAdvisor. First, in the Ireland forum trying to figure out the right rental car strategy. My default strategy -- go with Hertz and leverage my US status if anything goes sideways -- wouldn’t work because Hertz has franchised its name in Ireland to another company. Also, rental car insurance seems to be a bit unique there; using your credit card to cover damages like on my last trip to St Andrews apparently requires a letter from your card issuer and is still a particular hassle at the counter. Then there was the sifting through the Manichean universe of TripAdvisor reviews -- a bipolar split between 5-star “everything is fantabulous” and 1-star “it’s a complete dump and I’m sure the maid spit in my water glass” write-ups. I tend to the more forgiving end of that spectrum. I don’t think you should slam a place for a problem if you didn’t tell them about it and give them a chance to fix it. I also try to have reasonable expectations; you’re not going to get psychic/transcendent levels of service for $100/night. It took me a solid day-and-a-half of screen time, but we now have a bed for each night and a set of wheels to get us there. </li><li>Being off the road for a month has helped me drop a nagging 7-8 lbs that I put on over Christmas and until now -- 5-6 months later -- haven’t been able to drop. We’ve talked in past episodes how easy it is to put weight on when traveling -- eating 3 meals a day in restaurants, or worse on the run in airports, makes portion control difficult, as well as eating more vegetables than fries. But even when you’ve chosen, say, the fish instead of the burger, you’re still someone else’s mercy for how it’s cooked. This light bulb lit for me while watching <em><a href=\"https://www.netflix.com/title/81028317\">The Chef Show</a></em><a href=\"https://www.netflix.com/title/81028317\"> on Netflix</a> over the weekend. It’s a great cooking show. It stars Jon Favreau, director of the Iron Man movies, and Roy Choi, who was one of the first gourmet food truck guys in LA; you’d track them down on Twitter for fantastic Korean-Mexican tacos. These guys worked together on Favreau’s <em>Chef </em>movie a few years back and then got back together for this Netflix series. In the second episode, they’re cooking in Atlanta with Ford Fry at his restaurant, The Optimist. They’re making a Shrimp Toast dish that easily uses over a stick of butter to cook and sauce 5 large shrimp. They joke about the amount of butter and salt restaurants use -- “When they say ‘no salt’...,” Favreau asks Choi, Choi responds “...we add twice as much”. And then they add another half-stick of butter to the shrimp pan. I’m sure it tastes great, but it was an “a-ha” moment -- how, even when you think you’re ordering healthy, the guys in the back are focused on taste, not counting calories for you.</li><li>After our move, I’ve cranked through most of the change of addresses, but haven’t yet done my drivers license. But that one will take a little more work because my current Illinois drivers license isn’t a Real ID license -- it doesn’t have the gold star in the upper right corner. It’s not a problem right now, but in 16 months from now, October 2020, when the TSA says it will fully enforce the 2005 Real ID act -- 15 years later, for real this time, no more extensions or waivers -- and so will no longer accept non-compliant IDs at airports. Getting a Real ID license requires more documentation -- proof of my Social Security Number and two documents with our new address -- like a utility bill or a bank statement, which could be a bit of a challenge now that we get most everything electronically. Now, I could just skip it and use my passport or Global Entry card (if I could find it) instead. But that would mean I’d have to remember to bring one more thing with me to the airport, which is never a best practice. Not critical -- I have 16 months to get around to it -- though probably not something to wait until the last minute on. The Illinois DMV isn’t the quickest, most nimble organization on its best days. I can only imagine what it’ll be like come, say August or September 2020, when it gets crushed with people without passports looking to swap their drivers licenses before the October 1 deadline.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com. </li><li>Bridge Music —  <em>A Thousand And None</em> by Speck (c) copyright 2018 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/speck/57256 Ft: Mr_Yesterday </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Overwhelmed By Travel</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Cristine Danielson, a long-time friend and first time listener, asked me after listening to the last episode “I’d love to hear how you get acclimatized to a new city from the moment you leave the gate. I always feel overwhelmed”  That pulled me up short. I had never really thought about it that way. I’ve been traveling heavily coming up on 35 years; I’ve been traveling longer than I haven’t. I started when I was too young and seemingly indestructible to know any better, and now, I have enough travel experience, routines, rhythms  -- patterns I called them earlier -- and status that, even when gutting through <em><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/podcast-150-travel-interruptus/\">Travel Interruptus</a></em>, things seem more inconvenient than overwhelming.</li><li>One of the most important things for me is having enough money in my pocket to handle what could come my way. At the end of the last century -- the 1990’s to be exact -- I was doing a lot of bunny hop trips through Europe -- Sweden one day, Switzerland the next, then Germany, then the UK …. This was pre-ATMs, pre-Euro, pre-mobile phones, and for many places in Europe, pre-widespread acceptance of credit cards. Truly the travel dark ages. So, my routine would be to exit Customs, head straight to the Currency Exchange, and cash a $100 American Express travelers check so I would have enough local cash for, say a coffee and a cab. Having that cash in my pocket settled me a bit; maybe gave me a sense of some control, no matter how illusionary it might be. Today, I head straight for an ATM instead of the Currency Exchange and, as I said a few episodes back, make sure I have a “full house” of credit cards -- a Visa and MasterCard from different banks, and an Amex. And it’s not just when I’m out of the country. Even in the US, I’m a lot more comfortable traveling when I have 5 or 10 $20’s in my wallet.</li><li>After my wallet comes my phone. Modern travel is all about the smartphone app -- is my plane on time, where’s the hotel, what train line do I need? My whole <em><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/podcast-150-travel-interruptus/\">Travel Interruptus</a></em> tale would’ve been much worse than “inconvenient” without smartphone connectivity. I wouldn’t have been able to tweet at Southwest customer service, I wouldn’t have been able to find a decent hotel in Paris when the train delays made us miss our flight home, I wouldn’t have been able to book that God-awful expensive Uber that got us to CDG just in time to make our flight. Back in the last century, I would’ve searched for a pay phone, pulled out my phone card, and rung up the travel agency. Even today, if I’m ringing up a travel agency instead of doing it on my own, when was the last time you saw a working pay phone? </li><li>Those are the mechanics of travel, but what about fitting in to the place you’ve arrived? I talked about how business travelers especially tend to float above everything in a “<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2008/04/29/podcast-64-escaping-the-travel-bubble-marks-travel-tips/\">travel bubble</a>”. You walk out -- of the plane with enough status, otherwise baggage claim -- and find someone holding a sign with your name who’s job is to give you a bottle of water and whisk you past the things that might be disconcerting, overwhelming. When that bubble pops, unexpectedly, and drops you into the day-to-day reality of the place you are; that decompression can be overwhelming. </li><li>The closest I came to an overwhelming experience was not arriving in a place, but trying to leave. A colleague and I wrapped up our day in Pune, India and were flying home from Mumbai that night, but on different flights; his leaving a couple of hours earlier than mine. For some reason, the person arranging our trip had us taking cars from Pune to Mumbai instead of flying. Well, OK. It wasn’t a bad drive -- actually a bit scenic -- right until we hit Mumbai traffic. We get to the international terminal, we pull our bags from the trunk, and make our way thru the general chaos of people and push carts and food vendors to the entrance.  We both have our itineraries out and ready for inspection. My colleague goes first -- the officer looks at it and waves him through. I hand over my itinerary and follow my colleague. Except I can’t. I can’t go into the terminal; I’m too early. I’m now back out in the chaos with nowhere to go -- our car is long gone, I have no idea where Mumbai Airport is in relation to anything -- is there a hotel nearby. I don’t have a working mobile phone to ring anyone. I’m just standing around, with hundreds of other people trying to get in, or saying good-bye to someone trying to get in, or waiting for someone to come out. I walked up and down the sidewalk in front of the terminal, looking for something -- a phone, a bench. I find a door. I look in -- it’s a lounge for people waiting for arriving passengers. There’s a big plexiglass wall separating baggage claim. But more importantly, it has seats, is air conditioned, and has a restroom. I walk in -- except I can’t. I need a ticket. Where do I get that? Back out and around the corner. I find the ticket window. It’s a couple hundred rupee -- $2-3. I reach into my pocket and pull out my last bit of cash -- a 500 rupee note. Things got a lot less overwhelming.</li><li>Bridge Music —  <em>dazed </em>by Jeris (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/VJ_Memes/39456 Ft: airtone</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>New and Old Restaurant Trends</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Last month, I hit the <a href=\"https://restaurant.org/Home\">National Restaurant Association</a>’s <a href=\"https://www.nationalrestaurantshow.com/\">annual show</a> in Chicago’s McCormick Place convention center. If you need reminding of how big the restaurant business is in the US, this show is <em>huge</em>. I was interested to see what’s new and what has stayed the same since the last time I went, 4 years ago. </li><li>What’s new - Walking the aisles, I was immediately struck by the number of booths showing delivery containers. They were everywhere. Talking to a couple of vendors, they said some hotels are seeing huge growth in Doordash and Grubhub deliveries eating into their restaurant and room service revenues (all puns intended). And since they’re seeing it being driven by the new generation of new travelers -- the Millennial and Gen-Z travelers -- they think it’s more of a trend than a blip, yet another revenue stream lost to traveler technology -- like when they lost long-distance phone calls to cell phones, and then pay TV revenue to PCs and iPads running Netflix and YouTube. So many hotels, especially the lower end ones, are dropping food service altogether. But this collides head on with sustainability concerns -- the growth in delivery means a growth in styrofoam containers and plastic bags. And so I’d walk past, say, two booths back-to-back -- the first selling traditional containers; the second pushing compostable paper and bioplastics. These new containers looked good; except when I tried to use a paper straw on a frozen margarita sample that someone pushed on me. That was a complete fail.</li><li>Also saw a number of established ethnic food companies trying to branch out into new/hotter ethnic spaces. Kronos, for example, is one of the main companies selling Greek gyros meat. In their booth, they were sampling gyros, but also new chicken al pastor and Korean barbeque products. Cultural appropriation or trying to stay in business by catering to those darn Millennials and Gen Z’ers. I dunno, but a Kronos guy told me that 90% of their business still comes from gyros. Which kinda rang true when I looked at which sample booths had the longest lines -- hot dogs from Vienna Beef and Nathan’s and grilled cheese sandwiches from Tillamook Cheddar. </li><li>That being said, there were a lot of vendors selling Asian products -- primarily Japanese and Korean -- continuing the trend I’ve seen at the show. Digital is still big, but the focus seemed to have shifted from smartphone apps to \\ interfacing with those delivery services -- updating menus and getting orders automatically into their point-of-sale systems -- and more efficiently managing social media. I saw a Yelp booth for the first time at the show. It was a good-sized booth -- nicely carpeted, with tables full of phones running their app. But it was pretty empty -- mostly populated by Yelp employees. Gave me a good idea of how the restaurateurs were rating Yelp’s booth.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #152</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_152.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<p><!--EndFragment--><br>\n<br>\n</p>','Podcast #152 — Overwhelming Travel; New & Old Restaurant Trends','','inherit','closed','closed','','2474-revision-v1','','','2019-06-15 13:51:52','2019-06-15 18:51:52','',2474,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/06/15/2474-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2484,1,'2019-06-15 14:17:17','2019-06-15 19:17:17','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\">\n<p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/IMG_0449.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2482 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/IMG_0449-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a></p>\n<br />\n<figcaption>Latest in Sustainable Food Delivery </figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p>Squeezing  All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_152.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/617322609&color=%23ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #152: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the new TravelCommons studios <em>in</em> Chicago, IL. The move went surprisingly smoothly -- nothing lost, nothing destroyed on the 20-mile trip in from the western suburbs. Have the production bay rebuilt and now trying out the new studio set-up, so we’ll see how this sounds. </li><li>Which also means I haven’t done much travel since the last episode; just a quick trip last week down to Nashville. But the move downtown meant I had to rethink some of my travel patterns -- not how to get to and from Nashville, but how to get to and from Chicago Midway airport. We’ve said before in many episodes, most (all?) frequent travelers are all about optimizing the standard parts of their journey -- what’s the most efficient way to get to the airport, when to leave -- optimizing the trade-off between sleep and getting to the gate when status pre-boarding is announced. In the old digs, I had a pretty predictable 25-30 minute drive to either O’Hare or Midway, and long-term relationship with a dependable driver. Which meant answering the “when do I need leave for the airport” question was a mindless exercise -- subtract 90 minutes from the departure time and send a text to my guy the night before. But now it’s a kinda predictable 60-minute public transit ride or a very unpredictable 35-60-minute Uber/Lyft ride with even more unpredictable wait times and surge pricing, especially when catching a morning flight. Actually, for this 3-day trip, I think it would’ve been cheaper to drive and park, even with the City of Chicago’s latest parking taxes.</li><li>The Southwest flights between Midway and Nashville were a bit odd because the pilots kept everyone in their seats for the entire flight due to “expected turbulence” - of which there was absolutely none. Though I thought it was interesting that the pilot on our return trip said “We may ask our flight attendants to remain seated so we can fly faster and pick up some time.” It’s an hour-and-20-minute flight, so not too long to stay seated as long as you didn’t drop a couple of beers at the bar right before boarding. But it also meant I didn’t get a chance to use some of the free drink coupons Southwest sent me last month. I should’ve followed the advice of a Nashville Airport billboard that was posted right above the Southwest gate -- “Before Wheels Up, Whiskey up.”</li><li>Bridge Music —  <em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/content/Per/Per_-_DLDN_Instrumental.mp3\" target=\"_blank\">DLDN Instrumental</a></em> by St Paul</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Because the trip to Nashville was personal travel, I used award points where I could -- Hyatt for our hotel and Hertz for the rental car. The only reason I didn’t use Southwest points was because I was burning off a $100 customer satisfaction certificate Southwest sent me as comp for one of their 3 delayed flights I talked about in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/podcast-150-travel-interruptus/\">Travel Interruptus episode</a> a couple of months back. We’ve talked about how to use awards many times over the years. And while the tactics may change a bit, my overall strategy has been pretty consistent -- use them rather than save them, or “earn and burn” as some folks say. I know a lot of travelers who save them -- hoard them -- thinking of them as their travel savings account -- or perhaps a badge of honor -- “I have 2 million American Airline points” to which I think (and try not to say) “that are going to get you a lot less the longer you keep holding them”. Because  rather than increasing in value by earning interest, they can suddenly decrease in value when United or BA or Marriott or, a couple of weeks ago, Hertz decide to redo their awards charts. And, for all the luvvy words in those announcements about “increasing the value” of their programs, I’ve never seen one of those changes <em>increase</em> the value of the points. At the end of May, Hertz published -- without any warning or announcement -- a new award chart that increased the point cost for daily and weekly rentals by 11-36 percent. Back in March, Marriott added a new top hotel category with a 42% higher per-night award cost -- 85,000 points a night for the properties that moved into the new Category 8 vs. 60,000 points when they were in 7. And most of the properties that got that 42% bump were resort properties -- the ones you’d most likely want to use your points on. In November, United will eliminate their award charts altogether, following Delta and Southwest in moving to dynamic pricing. Pick your slogan - “Earn and burn”; “Use ‘em or lose ‘em”. Though I think I like “you deserve a break today” better. Plan a vacation and burn your points before the companies do.</li><li>Even though  I haven’t traveled much since <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/podcast-151-traveler-data-leaks-brittany-street-food/\">the last episode</a>, I’ve still been thinking a lot about travel - specifically, laying out our trip at the back half of this month -- a week in Ireland and then heading over to Scotland for Claire’s graduation from Univ of St Andrews. I talked in the last episode about wrestling with the Avios website to book our flights, but with that done, I got consumed by packing and moving and unpacking, and sorta lost track of the other reservations that we needed for our week in Ireland. That insight landed on me pretty hard the Tuesday after Memorial Day when I looked at my calendar and started seeing June dates. I got nothing -- no car, no places to sleep. And it’s not like the end of June is low season in Ireland. Back in March, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/19/podcast-149-dining-single-airlines-need-to-tell-us-more/\">episode 149</a>, I talked about how we dug deep when planning our spring break trip to Brittany -- buying guidebooks, scouring web sites, .... But we had never been there before. My planning for Ireland is a lot more impromptu because, back in the early ‘90’s, I spent a lot of time in Cork for business, and while the country has no doubt changed a lot in the past 20-some odd years, I had a sense of what I wanted to see and a bit of an itinerary in mind -- spend most of the week hubbing out of Galway, going south to County Clare and north to the Connemara, and then heading over to Dublin for the weekend before flying over to Edinburgh. I found myself spending most of my time spelunking through TripAdvisor. First, in the Ireland forum trying to figure out the right rental car strategy. My default strategy -- go with Hertz and leverage my US status if anything goes sideways -- wouldn’t work because Hertz has franchised its name in Ireland to another company. Also, rental car insurance seems to be a bit unique there; using your credit card to cover damages like on my last trip to St Andrews apparently requires a letter from your card issuer and is still a particular hassle at the counter. Then there was the sifting through the Manichean universe of TripAdvisor reviews -- a bipolar split between 5-star “everything is fantabulous” and 1-star “it’s a complete dump and I’m sure the maid spit in my water glass” write-ups. I tend to the more forgiving end of that spectrum. I don’t think you should slam a place for a problem if you didn’t tell them about it and give them a chance to fix it. I also try to have reasonable expectations; you’re not going to get psychic/transcendent levels of service for $100/night. It took me a solid day-and-a-half of screen time, but we now have a bed for each night and a set of wheels to get us there. </li><li>Being off the road for a month has helped me drop a nagging 7-8 lbs that I put on over Christmas and until now -- 5-6 months later -- haven’t been able to drop. We’ve talked in past episodes how easy it is to put weight on when traveling -- eating 3 meals a day in restaurants, or worse on the run in airports, makes portion control difficult, as well as eating more vegetables than fries. But even when you’ve chosen, say, the fish instead of the burger, you’re still someone else’s mercy for how it’s cooked. This light bulb lit for me while watching <em><a href=\"https://www.netflix.com/title/81028317\">The Chef Show</a></em><a href=\"https://www.netflix.com/title/81028317\"> on Netflix</a> over the weekend. It’s a great cooking show. It stars Jon Favreau, director of the Iron Man movies, and Roy Choi, who was one of the first gourmet food truck guys in LA; you’d track them down on Twitter for fantastic Korean-Mexican tacos. These guys worked together on Favreau’s <em>Chef </em>movie a few years back and then got back together for this Netflix series. In the second episode, they’re cooking in Atlanta with Ford Fry at his restaurant, The Optimist. They’re making a Shrimp Toast dish that easily uses over a stick of butter to cook and sauce 5 large shrimp. They joke about the amount of butter and salt restaurants use -- “When they say ‘no salt’...,” Favreau asks Choi, Choi responds “...we add twice as much”. And then they add another half-stick of butter to the shrimp pan. I’m sure it tastes great, but it was an “a-ha” moment -- how, even when you think you’re ordering healthy, the guys in the back are focused on taste, not counting calories for you.</li><li>After our move, I’ve cranked through most of the change of addresses, but haven’t yet done my drivers license. But that one will take a little more work because my current Illinois drivers license isn’t a Real ID license -- it doesn’t have the gold star in the upper right corner. It’s not a problem right now, but in 16 months from now, October 2020, when the TSA says it will fully enforce the 2005 Real ID act -- 15 years later, for real this time, no more extensions or waivers -- and so will no longer accept non-compliant IDs at airports. Getting a Real ID license requires more documentation -- proof of my Social Security Number and two documents with our new address -- like a utility bill or a bank statement, which could be a bit of a challenge now that we get most everything electronically. Now, I could just skip it and use my passport or Global Entry card (if I could find it) instead. But that would mean I’d have to remember to bring one more thing with me to the airport, which is never a best practice. Not critical -- I have 16 months to get around to it -- though probably not something to wait until the last minute on. The Illinois DMV isn’t the quickest, most nimble organization on its best days. I can only imagine what it’ll be like come, say August or September 2020, when it gets crushed with people without passports looking to swap their drivers licenses before the October 1 deadline.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com. </li><li>Bridge Music —    <em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/content/Zapac/Zapac_-_Test_Drive.mp3\" target=\"_blank\">Test Drive</a> </em>by Zapac  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Overwhelmed By Travel</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Cristine Danielson, a long-time friend and first time listener, asked me after listening to the last episode “I’d love to hear how you get acclimatized to a new city from the moment you leave the gate. I always feel overwhelmed”  That pulled me up short. I had never really thought about it that way. I’ve been traveling heavily coming up on 35 years; I’ve been traveling longer than I haven’t. I started when I was too young and seemingly indestructible to know any better, and now, I have enough travel experience, routines, rhythms  -- patterns I called them earlier -- and status that, even when gutting through <em><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/podcast-150-travel-interruptus/\">Travel Interruptus</a></em>, things seem more inconvenient than overwhelming.</li><li>One of the most important things for me is having enough money in my pocket to handle what could come my way. At the end of the last century -- the 1990’s to be exact -- I was doing a lot of bunny hop trips through Europe -- Sweden one day, Switzerland the next, then Germany, then the UK …. This was pre-ATMs, pre-Euro, pre-mobile phones, and for many places in Europe, pre-widespread acceptance of credit cards. Truly the travel dark ages. So, my routine would be to exit Customs, head straight to the Currency Exchange, and cash a $100 American Express travelers check so I would have enough local cash for, say a coffee and a cab. Having that cash in my pocket settled me a bit; maybe gave me a sense of some control, no matter how illusionary it might be. Today, I head straight for an ATM instead of the Currency Exchange and, as I said a few episodes back, make sure I have a “full house” of credit cards -- a Visa and MasterCard from different banks, and an Amex. And it’s not just when I’m out of the country. Even in the US, I’m a lot more comfortable traveling when I have 5 or 10 $20’s in my wallet.</li><li>After my wallet comes my phone. Modern travel is all about the smartphone app -- is my plane on time, where’s the hotel, what train line do I need? My whole <em><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/podcast-150-travel-interruptus/\">Travel Interruptus</a></em> tale would’ve been much worse than “inconvenient” without smartphone connectivity. I wouldn’t have been able to tweet at Southwest customer service, I wouldn’t have been able to find a decent hotel in Paris when the train delays made us miss our flight home, I wouldn’t have been able to book that God-awful expensive Uber that got us to CDG just in time to make our flight. Back in the last century, I would’ve searched for a pay phone, pulled out my phone card, and rung up the travel agency. Even today, if I’m ringing up a travel agency instead of doing it on my own, when was the last time you saw a working pay phone? </li><li>Those are the mechanics of travel, but what about fitting in to the place you’ve arrived? I talked about how business travelers especially tend to float above everything in a “<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2008/04/29/podcast-64-escaping-the-travel-bubble-marks-travel-tips/\">travel bubble</a>”. You walk out -- of the plane with enough status, otherwise baggage claim -- and find someone holding a sign with your name who’s job is to give you a bottle of water and whisk you past the things that might be disconcerting, overwhelming. When that bubble pops, unexpectedly, and drops you into the day-to-day reality of the place you are; that decompression can be overwhelming. </li><li>The closest I came to an overwhelming experience was not arriving in a place, but trying to leave. A colleague and I wrapped up our day in Pune, India and were flying home from Mumbai that night, but on different flights; his leaving a couple of hours earlier than mine. For some reason, the person arranging our trip had us taking cars from Pune to Mumbai instead of flying. Well, OK. It wasn’t a bad drive -- actually a bit scenic -- right until we hit Mumbai traffic. We get to the international terminal, we pull our bags from the trunk, and make our way thru the general chaos of people and push carts and food vendors to the entrance.  We both have our itineraries out and ready for inspection. My colleague goes first -- the officer looks at it and waves him through. I hand over my itinerary and follow my colleague. Except I can’t. I can’t go into the terminal; I’m too early. I’m now back out in the chaos with nowhere to go -- our car is long gone, I have no idea where Mumbai Airport is in relation to anything -- is there a hotel nearby. I don’t have a working mobile phone to ring anyone. I’m just standing around, with hundreds of other people trying to get in, or saying good-bye to someone trying to get in, or waiting for someone to come out. I walked up and down the sidewalk in front of the terminal, looking for something -- a phone, a bench. I find a door. I look in -- it’s a lounge for people waiting for arriving passengers. There’s a big plexiglass wall separating baggage claim. But more importantly, it has seats, is air conditioned, and has a restroom. I walk in -- except I can’t. I need a ticket. Where do I get that? Back out and around the corner. I find the ticket window. It’s a couple hundred rupee -- $2-3. I reach into my pocket and pull out my last bit of cash -- a 500 rupee note. Things got a lot less overwhelming.</li><li>Bridge Music —   <em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/content/oldDog/oldDog_-_Goodbye_sooner_or_later.mp3\" target=\"_blank\">Goodbye Sooner or Later</a></em> by oldDog </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>New and Old Restaurant Trends</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Last month, I hit the <a href=\"https://restaurant.org/Home\">National Restaurant Association</a>’s <a href=\"https://www.nationalrestaurantshow.com/\">annual show</a> in Chicago’s McCormick Place convention center. If you need reminding of how big the restaurant business is in the US, this show is <em>huge</em>. I was interested to see what’s new and what has stayed the same since the last time I went, 4 years ago. </li><li>What’s new - Walking the aisles, I was immediately struck by the number of booths showing delivery containers. They were everywhere. Talking to a couple of vendors, they said some hotels are seeing huge growth in Doordash and Grubhub deliveries eating into their restaurant and room service revenues (all puns intended). And since they’re seeing it being driven by the new generation of new travelers -- the Millennial and Gen-Z travelers -- they think it’s more of a trend than a blip, yet another revenue stream lost to traveler technology -- like when they lost long-distance phone calls to cell phones, and then pay TV revenue to PCs and iPads running Netflix and YouTube. So many hotels, especially the lower end ones, are dropping food service altogether. But this collides head on with sustainability concerns -- the growth in delivery means a growth in styrofoam containers and plastic bags. And so I’d walk past, say, two booths back-to-back -- the first selling traditional containers; the second pushing compostable paper and bioplastics. These new containers looked good; except when I tried to use a paper straw on a frozen margarita sample that someone pushed on me. That was a complete fail.</li><li>Also saw a number of established ethnic food companies trying to branch out into new/hotter ethnic spaces. Kronos, for example, is one of the main companies selling Greek gyros meat. In their booth, they were sampling gyros, but also new chicken al pastor and Korean barbeque products. Cultural appropriation or trying to stay in business by catering to those darn Millennials and Gen Z’ers. I dunno, but a Kronos guy told me that 90% of their business still comes from gyros. Which kinda rang true when I looked at which sample booths had the longest lines -- hot dogs from Vienna Beef and Nathan’s and grilled cheese sandwiches from Tillamook Cheddar. </li><li>That being said, there were a lot of vendors selling Asian products -- primarily Japanese and Korean -- continuing the trend I’ve seen at the show. Digital is still big, but the focus seemed to have shifted from smartphone apps to \\ interfacing with those delivery services -- updating menus and getting orders automatically into their point-of-sale systems -- and more efficiently managing social media. I saw a Yelp booth for the first time at the show. It was a good-sized booth -- nicely carpeted, with tables full of phones running their app. But it was pretty empty -- mostly populated by Yelp employees. Gave me a good idea of how the restaurateurs were rating Yelp’s booth.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #152</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_152.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<p><!--EndFragment--><br>\n<br>\n</p>','Podcast #152 — Overwhelming Travel; New & Old Restaurant Trends','','inherit','closed','closed','','2474-revision-v1','','','2019-06-15 14:17:17','2019-06-15 19:17:17','',2474,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/06/15/2474-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2485,1,'2019-06-15 14:38:35','2019-06-15 19:38:35','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\">\n<p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/IMG_0449.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2482 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/IMG_0449-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a></p>\n<p> </p>\n<figcaption>Latest in Sustainable Food Delivery </figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p>Squeezing  All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_152.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/617322609&color=%23ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #152: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the new TravelCommons studios <em>in</em> Chicago, IL. The move went surprisingly smoothly -- nothing lost, nothing destroyed on the 20-mile trip in from the western suburbs. Have the production bay rebuilt and now trying out the new studio set-up, so we’ll see how this sounds. </li><li>Which also means I haven’t done much travel since the last episode; just a quick trip last week down to Nashville. But the move downtown meant I had to rethink some of my travel patterns -- not how to get to and from Nashville, but how to get to and from Chicago Midway airport. We’ve said before in many episodes, most (all?) frequent travelers are all about optimizing the standard parts of their journey -- what’s the most efficient way to get to the airport, when to leave -- optimizing the trade-off between sleep and getting to the gate when status pre-boarding is announced. In the old digs, I had a pretty predictable 25-30 minute drive to either O’Hare or Midway, and long-term relationship with a dependable driver. Which meant answering the “when do I need leave for the airport” question was a mindless exercise -- subtract 90 minutes from the departure time and send a text to my guy the night before. But now it’s a kinda predictable 60-minute public transit ride or a very unpredictable 35-60-minute Uber/Lyft ride with even more unpredictable wait times and surge pricing, especially when catching a morning flight. Actually, for this 3-day trip, I think it would’ve been cheaper to drive and park, even with the City of Chicago’s latest parking taxes.</li><li>The Southwest flights between Midway and Nashville were a bit odd because the pilots kept everyone in their seats for the entire flight due to “expected turbulence” - of which there was absolutely none. Though I thought it was interesting that the pilot on our return trip said “We may ask our flight attendants to remain seated so we can fly faster and pick up some time.” It’s an hour-and-20-minute flight, so not too long to stay seated as long as you didn’t drop a couple of beers at the bar right before boarding. But it also meant I didn’t get a chance to use some of the free drink coupons Southwest sent me last month. I should’ve followed the advice of a Nashville Airport billboard that was posted right above the Southwest gate -- “Before Wheels Up, Whiskey up.”</li><li>Bridge Music — &nbsp;<em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/content/Per/Per_-_DLDN_Instrumental.mp3\" target=\"_blank\">DLDN Instrumental</a></em>&nbsp;by St Paul</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Because the trip to Nashville was personal travel, I used award points where I could -- Hyatt for our hotel and Hertz for the rental car. The only reason I didn’t use Southwest points was because I was burning off a $100 customer satisfaction certificate Southwest sent me as comp for one of their 3 delayed flights I talked about in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/podcast-150-travel-interruptus/\">Travel Interruptus episode</a> a couple of months back. We’ve talked about how to use awards many times over the years. And while the tactics may change a bit, my overall strategy has been pretty consistent -- use them rather than save them, or “earn and burn” as some folks say. I know a lot of travelers who save them -- hoard them -- thinking of them as their travel savings account -- or perhaps a badge of honor -- “I have 2 million American Airline points” to which I think (and try not to say) “that are going to get you a lot less the longer you keep holding them”. Because &nbsp;rather than increasing in value by earning interest, they can suddenly decrease in value when United or BA or Marriott or, a couple of weeks ago, Hertz decide to redo their awards charts. And, for all the luvvy words in those announcements about “increasing the value” of their programs, I’ve never seen one of those changes <em>increase</em> the value of the points. At the end of May, Hertz published -- without any warning or announcement -- a new award chart that increased the point cost for daily and weekly rentals by 11-36 percent. Back in March, Marriott added a new top hotel category with a 42% higher per-night award cost -- 85,000 points a night for the properties that moved into the new Category 8 vs. 60,000 points when they were in 7. And most of the properties that got that 42% bump were resort properties -- the ones you’d most likely want to use your points on. In November, United will eliminate their award charts altogether, following Delta and Southwest in moving to dynamic pricing. Pick your slogan - “Earn and burn”; “Use ‘em or lose ‘em”. Though I think I like “you deserve a break today” better. Plan a vacation and burn your points before the companies do.</li><li>Even though &nbsp;I haven’t traveled much since <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/podcast-151-traveler-data-leaks-brittany-street-food/\">the last episode</a>, I’ve still been thinking a lot about travel - specifically, laying out our trip at the back half of this month -- a week in Ireland and then heading over to Scotland for Claire’s graduation from Univ of St Andrews. I talked in the last episode about wrestling with the Avios website to book our flights, but with that done, I got consumed by packing and moving and unpacking, and sorta lost track of the other reservations that we needed for our week in Ireland. That insight landed on me pretty hard the Tuesday after Memorial Day when I looked at my calendar and started seeing June dates. I got nothing -- no car, no places to sleep. And it’s not like the end of June is low season in Ireland. Back in March, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/19/podcast-149-dining-single-airlines-need-to-tell-us-more/\">episode 149</a>, I talked about how we dug deep when planning our spring break trip to Brittany -- buying guidebooks, scouring web sites, .... But we had never been there before. My planning for Ireland is a lot more impromptu because, back in the early ‘90’s, I spent a lot of time in Cork for business, and while the country has no doubt changed a lot in the past 20-some odd years, I had a sense of what I wanted to see and a bit of an itinerary in mind -- spend most of the week hubbing out of Galway, going south to County Clare and north to the Connemara, and then heading over to Dublin for the weekend before flying over to Edinburgh. I found myself spending most of my time spelunking through TripAdvisor. First, in the Ireland forum trying to figure out the right rental car strategy. My default strategy -- go with Hertz and leverage my US status if anything goes sideways -- wouldn’t work because Hertz has franchised its name in Ireland to another company. Also, rental car insurance seems to be a bit unique there; using your credit card to cover damages like on my last trip to St Andrews apparently requires a letter from your card issuer and is still a particular hassle at the counter. Then there was the sifting through the Manichean universe of TripAdvisor reviews -- a bipolar split between 5-star “everything is fantabulous” and 1-star “it’s a complete dump and I’m sure the maid spit in my water glass” write-ups. I tend to the more forgiving end of that spectrum. I don’t think you should slam a place for a problem if you didn’t tell them about it and give them a chance to fix it. I also try to have reasonable expectations; you’re not going to get psychic/transcendent levels of service for $100/night. It took me a solid day-and-a-half of screen time, but we now have a bed for each night and a set of wheels to get us there. </li><li>Being off the road for a month has helped me drop a nagging 7-8 lbs that I put on over Christmas and until now -- 5-6 months later -- haven’t been able to drop. We’ve talked in past episodes how easy it is to put weight on when traveling -- eating 3 meals a day in restaurants, or worse on the run in airports, makes portion control difficult, as well as eating more vegetables than fries. But even when you’ve chosen, say, the fish instead of the burger, you’re still someone else’s mercy for how it’s cooked. This light bulb lit for me while watching <em><a href=\"https://www.netflix.com/title/81028317\">The Chef Show</a></em><a href=\"https://www.netflix.com/title/81028317\"> on Netflix</a> over the weekend. It’s a great cooking show. It stars Jon Favreau, director of the Iron Man movies, and Roy Choi, who was one of the first gourmet food truck guys in LA; you’d track them down on Twitter for fantastic Korean-Mexican tacos. These guys worked together on Favreau’s <em>Chef </em>movie a few years back and then got back together for this Netflix series. In the second episode, they’re cooking in Atlanta with Ford Fry at his restaurant, The Optimist. They’re making a Shrimp Toast dish that easily uses over a stick of butter to cook and sauce 5 large shrimp. They joke about the amount of butter and salt restaurants use -- “When they say ‘no salt’...,” Favreau asks Choi, Choi responds “...we add twice as much”. And then they add another half-stick of butter to the shrimp pan. I’m sure it tastes great, but it was an “a-ha” moment -- how, even when you think you’re ordering healthy, the guys in the back are focused on taste, not counting calories for you.</li><li>After our move, I’ve cranked through most of the change of addresses, but haven’t yet done my drivers license. But that one will take a little more work because my current Illinois drivers license isn’t a Real ID license -- it doesn’t have the gold star in the upper right corner. It’s not a problem right now, but in 16 months from now, October 2020, when the TSA says it will fully enforce the 2005 Real ID act -- 15 years later, for real this time, no more extensions or waivers -- and so will no longer accept non-compliant IDs at airports. Getting a Real ID license requires more documentation -- proof of my Social Security Number and two documents with our new address -- like a utility bill or a bank statement, which could be a bit of a challenge now that we get most everything electronically. Now, I could just skip it and use my passport or Global Entry card (if I could find it) instead. But that would mean I’d have to remember to bring one more thing with me to the airport, which is never a best practice. Not critical -- I have 16 months to get around to it -- though probably not something to wait until the last minute on. The Illinois DMV isn’t the quickest, most nimble organization on its best days. I can only imagine what it’ll be like come, say August or September 2020, when it gets crushed with people without passports looking to swap their drivers licenses before the October 1 deadline.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com. </li><li>Bridge Music —   &nbsp;<em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/content/Zapac/Zapac_-_Test_Drive.mp3\" target=\"_blank\">Test Drive</a>&nbsp;</em>by Zapac  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Overwhelmed By Travel</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Cristine Danielson, a long-time friend and first time listener, asked me after listening to the last episode “I’d love to hear how you get acclimatized to a new city from the moment you leave the gate. I always feel overwhelmed” &nbsp;That pulled me up short. I had never really thought about it that way. I’ve been traveling heavily coming up on 35 years; I’ve been traveling longer than I haven’t. I started when I was too young and seemingly indestructible to know any better, and now, I have enough travel experience, routines, rhythms &nbsp;-- patterns I called them earlier -- and status that, even when gutting through <em><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/podcast-150-travel-interruptus/\">Travel Interruptus</a></em>, things seem more inconvenient than overwhelming.</li><li>One of the most important things for me is having enough money in my pocket to handle what could come my way. At the end of the last century -- the 1990’s to be exact -- I was doing a lot of bunny hop trips through Europe -- Sweden one day, Switzerland the next, then Germany, then the UK …. This was pre-ATMs, pre-Euro, pre-mobile phones, and for many places in Europe, pre-widespread acceptance of credit cards. Truly the travel dark ages. So, my routine would be to exit Customs, head straight to the Currency Exchange, and cash a $100 American Express travelers check so I would have enough local cash for, say a coffee and a cab. Having that cash in my pocket settled me a bit; maybe gave me a sense of some control, no matter how illusionary it might be. Today, I head straight for an ATM instead of the Currency Exchange and, as I said a few episodes back, make sure I have a “full house” of credit cards -- a Visa and MasterCard from different banks, and an Amex. And it’s not just when I’m out of the country. Even in the US, I’m a lot more comfortable traveling when I have 5 or 10 $20’s in my wallet.</li><li>After my wallet comes my phone. Modern travel is all about the smartphone app -- is my plane on time, where’s the hotel, what train line do I need? My whole <em><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/podcast-150-travel-interruptus/\">Travel Interruptus</a></em> tale would’ve been much worse than “inconvenient” without smartphone connectivity. I wouldn’t have been able to tweet at Southwest customer service, I wouldn’t have been able to find a decent hotel in Paris when the train delays made us miss our flight home, I wouldn’t have been able to book that God-awful expensive Uber that got us to CDG just in time to make our flight. Back in the last century, I would’ve searched for a pay phone, pulled out my phone card, and rung up the travel agency. Even today, if I’m ringing up a travel agency instead of doing it on my own, when was the last time you saw a working pay phone? </li><li>Those are the mechanics of travel, but what about fitting in to the place you’ve arrived? I talked about how business travelers especially tend to float above everything in a “<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2008/04/29/podcast-64-escaping-the-travel-bubble-marks-travel-tips/\">travel bubble</a>”. You walk out -- of the plane with enough status, otherwise baggage claim -- and find someone holding a sign with your name who’s job is to give you a bottle of water and whisk you past the things that might be disconcerting, overwhelming. When that bubble pops, unexpectedly, and drops you into the day-to-day reality of the place you are; that decompression can be overwhelming. </li><li>The closest I came to an overwhelming experience was not arriving in a place, but trying to leave. A colleague and I wrapped up our day in Pune, India and were flying home from Mumbai that night, but on different flights; his leaving a couple of hours earlier than mine. For some reason, the person arranging our trip had us taking cars from Pune to Mumbai instead of flying. Well, OK. It wasn’t a bad drive -- actually a bit scenic -- right until we hit Mumbai traffic. We get to the international terminal, we pull our bags from the trunk, and make our way thru the general chaos of people and push carts and food vendors to the entrance. &nbsp;We both have our itineraries out and ready for inspection. My colleague goes first -- the officer looks at it and waves him through. I hand over my itinerary and follow my colleague. Except I can’t. I can’t go into the terminal; I’m too early. I’m now back out in the chaos with nowhere to go -- our car is long gone, I have no idea where Mumbai Airport is in relation to anything -- is there a hotel nearby. I don’t have a working mobile phone to ring anyone. I’m just standing around, with hundreds of other people trying to get in, or saying good-bye to someone trying to get in, or waiting for someone to come out. I walked up and down the sidewalk in front of the terminal, looking for something -- a phone, a bench. I find a door. I look in -- it’s a lounge for people waiting for arriving passengers. There’s a big plexiglass wall separating baggage claim. But more importantly, it has seats, is air conditioned, and has a restroom. I walk in -- except I can’t. I need a ticket. Where do I get that? Back out and around the corner. I find the ticket window. It’s a couple hundred rupee -- $2-3. I reach into my pocket and pull out my last bit of cash -- a 500 rupee note. Things got a lot less overwhelming.</li><li>Bridge Music —  &nbsp;<em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/content/oldDog/oldDog_-_Goodbye_sooner_or_later.mp3\" target=\"_blank\">Goodbye Sooner or Later</a></em>&nbsp;by oldDog </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>New and Old Restaurant Trends</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Last month, I hit the <a href=\"https://restaurant.org/Home\">National Restaurant Association</a>’s <a href=\"https://www.nationalrestaurantshow.com/\">annual show</a> in Chicago’s McCormick Place convention center. If you need reminding of how big the restaurant business is in the US, this show is <em>huge</em>. I was interested to see what’s new and what has stayed the same since the last time I went, 4 years ago. </li><li>What’s new - Walking the aisles, I was immediately struck by the number of booths showing delivery containers. They were everywhere. Talking to a couple of vendors, they said some hotels are seeing huge growth in Doordash and Grubhub deliveries eating into their restaurant and room service revenues (all puns intended). And since they’re seeing it being driven by the new generation of new travelers -- the Millennial and Gen-Z travelers -- they think it’s more of a trend than a blip, yet another revenue stream lost to traveler technology -- like when they lost long-distance phone calls to cell phones, and then pay TV revenue to PCs and iPads running Netflix and YouTube. So many hotels, especially the lower end ones, are dropping food service altogether. But this collides head on with sustainability concerns -- the growth in delivery means a growth in styrofoam containers and plastic bags. And so I’d walk past, say, two booths back-to-back -- the first selling traditional containers; the second pushing compostable paper and bioplastics. These new containers looked good; except when I tried to use a paper straw on a frozen margarita sample that someone pushed on me. That was a complete fail.</li><li>Also saw a number of established ethnic food companies trying to branch out into new/hotter ethnic spaces. Kronos, for example, is one of the main companies selling Greek gyros meat. In their booth, they were sampling gyros, but also new chicken al pastor and Korean barbeque products. Cultural appropriation or trying to stay in business by catering to those darn Millennials and Gen Z’ers. I dunno, but a Kronos guy told me that 90% of their business still comes from gyros. Which kinda rang true when I looked at which sample booths had the longest lines -- hot dogs from Vienna Beef and Nathan’s and grilled cheese sandwiches from Tillamook Cheddar. </li><li>That being said, there were a lot of vendors selling Asian products -- primarily Japanese and Korean -- continuing the trend I’ve seen at the show. Digital is still big, but the focus seemed to have shifted from smartphone apps to \\ interfacing with those delivery services -- updating menus and getting orders automatically into their point-of-sale systems -- and more efficiently managing social media. I saw a Yelp booth for the first time at the show. It was a good-sized booth -- nicely carpeted, with tables full of phones running their app. But it was pretty empty -- mostly populated by Yelp employees. Gave me a good idea of how the restaurateurs were rating Yelp’s booth.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #152</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_152.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<p><!--EndFragment--></p>','Podcast #152 — Overwhelming Travel; New & Old Restaurant Trends','','inherit','closed','closed','','2474-revision-v1','','','2019-06-15 14:38:35','2019-06-15 19:38:35','',2474,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/06/15/2474-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2486,1,'2019-06-16 19:10:32','2019-06-17 00:10:32','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\">\n<p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/IMG_0449.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2482 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/IMG_0449-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a></p>\n<p> </p>\n<figcaption>Latest in Sustainable Food Delivery </figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p>Squeezing  All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_152.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/617322609&color=%23ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #152: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the new TravelCommons studios <em>in</em> Chicago, IL. The move went surprisingly smoothly -- nothing lost, nothing destroyed on the 20-mile trip in from the western suburbs. Have the production bay rebuilt and now trying out the new studio set-up, so we’ll see how this sounds. </li><li>Which also means I haven’t done much travel since the last episode; just a quick trip last week down to Nashville. But the move downtown meant I had to rethink some of my travel patterns -- not how to get to and from Nashville, but how to get to and from Chicago Midway airport. We’ve said before in many episodes, most (all?) frequent travelers are all about optimizing the standard parts of their journey -- what’s the most efficient way to get to the airport, when to leave -- optimizing the trade-off between sleep and getting to the gate when status pre-boarding is announced. In the old digs, I had a pretty predictable 25-30 minute drive to either O’Hare or Midway, and long-term relationship with a dependable driver. Which meant answering the “when do I need leave for the airport” question was a mindless exercise -- subtract 90 minutes from the departure time and send a text to my guy the night before. But now it’s a kinda predictable 60-minute public transit ride or a very unpredictable 35-60-minute Uber/Lyft ride with even more unpredictable wait times and surge pricing, especially when catching a morning flight. Actually, for this 3-day trip, I think it would’ve been cheaper to drive and park, even with the City of Chicago’s latest parking taxes.</li><li>The Southwest flights between Midway and Nashville were a bit odd because the pilots kept everyone in their seats for the entire flight due to “expected turbulence” - of which there was absolutely none. Though I thought it was interesting that the pilot on our return trip said “We may ask our flight attendants to remain seated so we can fly faster and pick up some time.” It’s an hour-and-20-minute flight, so not too long to stay seated as long as you didn’t drop a couple of beers at the bar right before boarding. But it also meant I didn’t get a chance to use some of the free drink coupons Southwest sent me last month. I should’ve followed the advice of a Nashville Airport billboard that was posted right above the Southwest gate -- “Before Wheels Up, Whiskey up.”</li><li>Bridge Music — &nbsp;<em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/content/Per/Per_-_DLDN_Instrumental.mp3\" target=\"_blank\">DLDN Instrumental</a></em>&nbsp;by St Paul</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Because the trip to Nashville was personal travel, I used award points where I could -- Hyatt for our hotel and Hertz for the rental car. The only reason I didn’t use Southwest points was because I was burning off a $100 customer satisfaction certificate Southwest sent me as comp for one of their 3 delayed flights I talked about in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/podcast-150-travel-interruptus/\">Travel Interruptus episode</a> a couple of months back. We’ve talked about how to use awards many times over the years. And while the tactics may change a bit, my overall strategy has been pretty consistent -- use them rather than save them, or “earn and burn” as some folks say. I know a lot of travelers who save them -- hoard them -- thinking of them as their travel savings account -- or perhaps a badge of honor -- “I have 2 million American Airline points” to which I think (and try not to say) “that are going to get you a lot less the longer you keep holding them”. Because  rather than increasing in value by earning interest, they can suddenly decrease in value when United or BA or Marriott or, a couple of weeks ago, Hertz decide to redo their awards charts. And, for all the luvvy words in those announcements about “increasing the value” of their programs, I’ve never seen one of those changes <em>increase</em> the value of the points. At the end of May, Hertz published -- without any warning or announcement -- a new award chart that increased the point cost for daily and weekly rentals by 11-36 percent. Back in March, Marriott added a new top hotel category with a 42% higher per-night award cost -- 85,000 points a night for the properties that moved into the new Category 8 vs. 60,000 points when they were in 7. And most of the properties that got that 42% bump were resort properties -- the ones you’d most likely want to use your points on. In November, United will eliminate their award charts altogether, following Delta and Southwest in moving to dynamic pricing. Pick your slogan - “Earn and burn”; “Use ‘em or lose ‘em”. Though I think I like “you deserve a break today” better. Plan a vacation and burn your points before the companies do.</li><li>Even though  I haven’t traveled much since <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/podcast-151-traveler-data-leaks-brittany-street-food/\">the last episode</a>, I’ve still been thinking a lot about travel - specifically, laying out our trip at the back half of this month -- a week in Ireland and then heading over to Scotland for Claire’s graduation from Univ of St Andrews. I talked in the last episode about wrestling with the Avios website to book our flights, but with that done, I got consumed by packing and moving and unpacking, and sorta lost track of the other reservations that we needed for our week in Ireland. That insight landed on me pretty hard the Tuesday after Memorial Day when I looked at my calendar and started seeing June dates. I got nothing -- no car, no places to sleep. And it’s not like the end of June is low season in Ireland. Back in March, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/19/podcast-149-dining-single-airlines-need-to-tell-us-more/\">episode 149</a>, I talked about how we dug deep when planning our spring break trip to Brittany -- buying guidebooks, scouring web sites, .... But we had never been there before. My planning for Ireland is a lot more impromptu because, back in the early ‘90’s, I spent a lot of time in Cork for business, and while the country has no doubt changed a lot in the past 20-some odd years, I had a sense of what I wanted to see and a bit of an itinerary in mind -- spend most of the week hubbing out of Galway, going south to County Clare and north to the Connemara, and then heading over to Dublin for the weekend before flying over to Edinburgh. I found myself spending most of my time spelunking through TripAdvisor. First, in the Ireland forum trying to figure out the right rental car strategy. My default strategy -- go with Hertz and leverage my US status if anything goes sideways -- wouldn’t work because Hertz has franchised its name in Ireland to another company. Also, rental car insurance seems to be a bit unique there; using your credit card to cover damages like on my last trip to St Andrews apparently requires a letter from your card issuer and is still a particular hassle at the counter. Then there was the sifting through the Manichean universe of TripAdvisor reviews -- a bipolar split between 5-star “everything is fantabulous” and 1-star “it’s a complete dump and I’m sure the maid spit in my water glass” write-ups. I tend to the more forgiving end of that spectrum. I don’t think you should slam a place for a problem if you didn’t tell them about it and give them a chance to fix it. I also try to have reasonable expectations; you’re not going to get psychic/transcendent levels of service for $100/night. It took me a solid day-and-a-half of screen time, but we now have a bed for each night and a set of wheels to get us there. </li><li>Being off the road for a month has helped me drop a nagging 7-8 lbs that I put on over Christmas and until now -- 5-6 months later -- haven’t been able to drop. We’ve talked in past episodes how easy it is to put weight on when traveling -- eating 3 meals a day in restaurants, or worse on the run in airports, makes portion control difficult, as well as eating more vegetables than fries. But even when you’ve chosen, say, the fish instead of the burger, you’re still someone else’s mercy for how it’s cooked. This light bulb lit for me while watching <em><a href=\"https://www.netflix.com/title/81028317\">The Chef Show</a></em><a href=\"https://www.netflix.com/title/81028317\"> on Netflix</a> over the weekend. It’s a great cooking show. It stars Jon Favreau, director of the Iron Man movies, and Roy Choi, who was one of the first gourmet food truck guys in LA; you’d track them down on Twitter for fantastic Korean-Mexican tacos. These guys worked together on Favreau’s <em>Chef </em>movie a few years back and then got back together for this Netflix series. In the second episode, they’re cooking in Atlanta with Ford Fry at his restaurant, The Optimist. They’re making a Shrimp Toast dish that easily uses over a stick of butter to cook and sauce 5 large shrimp. They joke about the amount of butter and salt restaurants use -- “When they say ‘no salt’...,” Favreau asks Choi, Choi responds “...we add twice as much”. And then they add another half-stick of butter to the shrimp pan. I’m sure it tastes great, but it was an “a-ha” moment -- how, even when you think you’re ordering healthy, the guys in the back are focused on taste, not counting calories for you.</li><li>After our move, I’ve cranked through most of the change of addresses, but haven’t yet done my drivers license. But that one will take a little more work because my current Illinois drivers license isn’t a Real ID license -- it doesn’t have the gold star in the upper right corner. It’s not a problem right now, but in 16 months from now, October 2020, when the TSA says it will fully enforce the 2005 Real ID act -- 15 years later, for real this time, no more extensions or waivers -- and so will no longer accept non-compliant IDs at airports. Getting a Real ID license requires more documentation -- proof of my Social Security Number and two documents with our new address -- like a utility bill or a bank statement, which could be a bit of a challenge now that we get most everything electronically. Now, I could just skip it and use my passport or Global Entry card (if I could find it) instead. But that would mean I’d have to remember to bring one more thing with me to the airport, which is never a best practice. Not critical -- I have 16 months to get around to it -- though probably not something to wait until the last minute on. The Illinois DMV isn’t the quickest, most nimble organization on its best days. I can only imagine what it’ll be like come, say August or September 2020, when it gets crushed with people without passports looking to swap their drivers licenses before the October 1 deadline.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com. </li><li>Bridge Music —   <em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/content/oldDog/oldDog_-_Goodbye_sooner_or_later.mp3\" target=\"_blank\">Goodbye Sooner or Later</a></em> by oldDog  </li><li>Bridge Music —    <em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/content/Zapac/Zapac_-_Test_Drive.mp3\" target=\"_blank\">Test Drive</a> </em>by Zapac  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Overwhelmed By Travel</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Cristine Danielson, a long-time friend and first time listener, asked me after listening to the last episode “I’d love to hear how you get acclimatized to a new city from the moment you leave the gate. I always feel overwhelmed”  That pulled me up short. I had never really thought about it that way. I’ve been traveling heavily coming up on 35 years; I’ve been traveling longer than I haven’t. I started when I was too young and seemingly indestructible to know any better, and now, I have enough travel experience, routines, rhythms  -- patterns I called them earlier -- and status that, even when gutting through <em><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/podcast-150-travel-interruptus/\">Travel Interruptus</a></em>, things seem more inconvenient than overwhelming.</li><li>One of the most important things for me is having enough money in my pocket to handle what could come my way. At the end of the last century -- the 1990’s to be exact -- I was doing a lot of bunny hop trips through Europe -- Sweden one day, Switzerland the next, then Germany, then the UK …. This was pre-ATMs, pre-Euro, pre-mobile phones, and for many places in Europe, pre-widespread acceptance of credit cards. Truly the travel dark ages. So, my routine would be to exit Customs, head straight to the Currency Exchange, and cash a $100 American Express travelers check so I would have enough local cash for, say a coffee and a cab. Having that cash in my pocket settled me a bit; maybe gave me a sense of some control, no matter how illusionary it might be. Today, I head straight for an ATM instead of the Currency Exchange and, as I said a few episodes back, make sure I have a “full house” of credit cards -- a Visa and MasterCard from different banks, and an Amex. And it’s not just when I’m out of the country. Even in the US, I’m a lot more comfortable traveling when I have 5 or 10 $20’s in my wallet.</li><li>After my wallet comes my phone. Modern travel is all about the smartphone app -- is my plane on time, where’s the hotel, what train line do I need? My whole <em><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/podcast-150-travel-interruptus/\">Travel Interruptus</a></em> tale would’ve been much worse than “inconvenient” without smartphone connectivity. I wouldn’t have been able to tweet at Southwest customer service, I wouldn’t have been able to find a decent hotel in Paris when the train delays made us miss our flight home, I wouldn’t have been able to book that God-awful expensive Uber that got us to CDG just in time to make our flight. Back in the last century, I would’ve searched for a pay phone, pulled out my phone card, and rung up the travel agency. Even today, if I’m ringing up a travel agency instead of doing it on my own, when was the last time you saw a working pay phone? </li><li>Those are the mechanics of travel, but what about fitting in to the place you’ve arrived? I talked about how business travelers especially tend to float above everything in a “<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2008/04/29/podcast-64-escaping-the-travel-bubble-marks-travel-tips/\">travel bubble</a>”. You walk out -- of the plane with enough status, otherwise baggage claim -- and find someone holding a sign with your name who’s job is to give you a bottle of water and whisk you past the things that might be disconcerting, overwhelming. When that bubble pops, unexpectedly, and drops you into the day-to-day reality of the place you are; that decompression can be overwhelming. </li><li>The closest I came to an overwhelming experience was not arriving in a place, but trying to leave. A colleague and I wrapped up our day in Pune, India and were flying home from Mumbai that night, but on different flights; his leaving a couple of hours earlier than mine. For some reason, the person arranging our trip had us taking cars from Pune to Mumbai instead of flying. Well, OK. It wasn’t a bad drive -- actually a bit scenic -- right until we hit Mumbai traffic. We get to the international terminal, we pull our bags from the trunk, and make our way thru the general chaos of people and push carts and food vendors to the entrance.  We both have our itineraries out and ready for inspection. My colleague goes first -- the officer looks at it and waves him through. I hand over my itinerary and follow my colleague. Except I can’t. I can’t go into the terminal; I’m too early. I’m now back out in the chaos with nowhere to go -- our car is long gone, I have no idea where Mumbai Airport is in relation to anything -- is there a hotel nearby. I don’t have a working mobile phone to ring anyone. I’m just standing around, with hundreds of other people trying to get in, or saying good-bye to someone trying to get in, or waiting for someone to come out. I walked up and down the sidewalk in front of the terminal, looking for something -- a phone, a bench. I find a door. I look in -- it’s a lounge for people waiting for arriving passengers. There’s a big plexiglass wall separating baggage claim. But more importantly, it has seats, is air conditioned, and has a restroom. I walk in -- except I can’t. I need a ticket. Where do I get that? Back out and around the corner. I find the ticket window. It’s a couple hundred rupee -- $2-3. I reach into my pocket and pull out my last bit of cash -- a 500 rupee note. Things got a lot less overwhelming.</li><li>Bridge Music —    <em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/content/Zapac/Zapac_-_Test_Drive.mp3\" target=\"_blank\">Test Drive</a> </em>by Zapac </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>New and Old Restaurant Trends</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Last month, I hit the <a href=\"https://restaurant.org/Home\">National Restaurant Association</a>’s <a href=\"https://www.nationalrestaurantshow.com/\">annual show</a> in Chicago’s McCormick Place convention center. If you need reminding of how big the restaurant business is in the US, this show is <em>huge</em>. I was interested to see what’s new and what has stayed the same since the last time I went, 4 years ago. </li><li>What’s new - Walking the aisles, I was immediately struck by the number of booths showing delivery containers. They were everywhere. Talking to a couple of vendors, they said some hotels are seeing huge growth in Doordash and Grubhub deliveries eating into their restaurant and room service revenues (all puns intended). And since they’re seeing it being driven by the new generation of new travelers -- the Millennial and Gen-Z travelers -- they think it’s more of a trend than a blip, yet another revenue stream lost to traveler technology -- like when they lost long-distance phone calls to cell phones, and then pay TV revenue to PCs and iPads running Netflix and YouTube. So many hotels, especially the lower end ones, are dropping food service altogether. But this collides head on with sustainability concerns -- the growth in delivery means a growth in styrofoam containers and plastic bags. And so I’d walk past, say, two booths back-to-back -- the first selling traditional containers; the second pushing compostable paper and bioplastics. These new containers looked good; except when I tried to use a paper straw on a frozen margarita sample that someone pushed on me. That was a complete fail.</li><li>Also saw a number of established ethnic food companies trying to branch out into new/hotter ethnic spaces. Kronos, for example, is one of the main companies selling Greek gyros meat. In their booth, they were sampling gyros, but also new chicken al pastor and Korean barbeque products. Cultural appropriation or trying to stay in business by catering to those darn Millennials and Gen Z’ers. I dunno, but a Kronos guy told me that 90% of their business still comes from gyros. Which kinda rang true when I looked at which sample booths had the longest lines -- hot dogs from Vienna Beef and Nathan’s and grilled cheese sandwiches from Tillamook Cheddar. </li><li>That being said, there were a lot of vendors selling Asian products -- primarily Japanese and Korean -- continuing the trend I’ve seen at the show. Digital is still big, but the focus seemed to have shifted from smartphone apps to \\ interfacing with those delivery services -- updating menus and getting orders automatically into their point-of-sale systems -- and more efficiently managing social media. I saw a Yelp booth for the first time at the show. It was a good-sized booth -- nicely carpeted, with tables full of phones running their app. But it was pretty empty -- mostly populated by Yelp employees. Gave me a good idea of how the restaurateurs were rating Yelp’s booth.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #152</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_152.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<p><!--EndFragment--></p>','Podcast #152 — Overwhelming Travel; New & Old Restaurant Trends','','inherit','closed','closed','','2474-revision-v1','','','2019-06-16 19:10:32','2019-06-17 00:10:32','',2474,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/06/16/2474-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2487,1,'2019-06-16 19:17:34','2019-06-17 00:17:34','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\">\n<p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/IMG_0449.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2482 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/IMG_0449-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a></p>\n<figcaption>Latest in Sustainable Food Delivery&nbsp;</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>Squeezing &nbsp;All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_152.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/617322609&color=%23ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #152: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the new TravelCommons studios <em>in</em> Chicago, IL. The move went surprisingly smoothly -- nothing lost, nothing destroyed on the 20-mile trip in from the western suburbs. Have the production bay rebuilt and now trying out the new studio set-up, so we’ll see how this sounds. </li><li>Which also means I haven’t done much travel since the last episode; just a quick trip last week down to Nashville. But the move downtown meant I had to rethink some of my travel patterns -- not how to get to and from Nashville, but how to get to and from Chicago Midway airport. We’ve said before in many episodes, most (all?) frequent travelers are all about optimizing the standard parts of their journey -- what’s the most efficient way to get to the airport, when to leave -- optimizing the trade-off between sleep and getting to the gate when status pre-boarding is announced. In the old digs, I had a pretty predictable 25-30 minute drive to either O’Hare or Midway, and long-term relationship with a dependable driver. Which meant answering the “when do I need leave for the airport” question was a mindless exercise -- subtract 90 minutes from the departure time and send a text to my guy the night before. But now it’s a kinda predictable 60-minute public transit ride or a very unpredictable 35-60-minute Uber/Lyft ride with even more unpredictable wait times and surge pricing, especially when catching a morning flight. Actually, for this 3-day trip, I think it would’ve been cheaper to drive and park, even with the City of Chicago’s latest parking taxes.</li><li>The Southwest flights between Midway and Nashville were a bit odd because the pilots kept everyone in their seats for the entire flight due to “expected turbulence” - of which there was absolutely none. Though I thought it was interesting that the pilot on our return trip said “We may ask our flight attendants to remain seated so we can fly faster and pick up some time.” It’s an hour-and-20-minute flight, so not too long to stay seated as long as you didn’t drop a couple of beers at the bar right before boarding. But it also meant I didn’t get a chance to use some of the free drink coupons Southwest sent me last month. I should’ve followed the advice of a Nashville Airport billboard that was posted right above the Southwest gate -- “Before Wheels Up, Whiskey up.”</li><li>Bridge Music — &nbsp;<em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/content/Per/Per_-_DLDN_Instrumental.mp3\" target=\"_blank\">DLDN Instrumental</a></em>&nbsp;by St Paul</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Because the trip to Nashville was personal travel, I used award points where I could -- Hyatt for our hotel and Hertz for the rental car. The only reason I didn’t use Southwest points was because I was burning off a $100 customer satisfaction certificate Southwest sent me as comp for one of their 3 delayed flights I talked about in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/podcast-150-travel-interruptus/\">Travel Interruptus episode</a> a couple of months back. We’ve talked about how to use awards many times over the years. And while the tactics may change a bit, my overall strategy has been pretty consistent -- use them rather than save them, or “earn and burn” as some folks say. I know a lot of travelers who save them -- hoard them -- thinking of them as their travel savings account -- or perhaps a badge of honor -- “I have 2 million American Airline points” to which I think (and try not to say) “that are going to get you a lot less the longer you keep holding them”. Because  rather than increasing in value by earning interest, they can suddenly decrease in value when United or BA or Marriott or, a couple of weeks ago, Hertz decide to redo their awards charts. And, for all the luvvy words in those announcements about “increasing the value” of their programs, I’ve never seen one of those changes <em>increase</em> the value of the points. At the end of May, Hertz published -- without any warning or announcement -- a new award chart that increased the point cost for daily and weekly rentals by 11-36 percent. Back in March, Marriott added a new top hotel category with a 42% higher per-night award cost -- 85,000 points a night for the properties that moved into the new Category 8 vs. 60,000 points when they were in 7. And most of the properties that got that 42% bump were resort properties -- the ones you’d most likely want to use your points on. In November, United will eliminate their award charts altogether, following Delta and Southwest in moving to dynamic pricing. Pick your slogan - “Earn and burn”; “Use ‘em or lose ‘em”. Though I think I like “you deserve a break today” better. Plan a vacation and burn your points before the companies do.</li><li>Even though  I haven’t traveled much since <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/podcast-151-traveler-data-leaks-brittany-street-food/\">the last episode</a>, I’ve still been thinking a lot about travel - specifically, laying out our trip at the back half of this month -- a week in Ireland and then heading over to Scotland for Claire’s graduation from Univ of St Andrews. I talked in the last episode about wrestling with the Avios website to book our flights, but with that done, I got consumed by packing and moving and unpacking, and sorta lost track of the other reservations that we needed for our week in Ireland. That insight landed on me pretty hard the Tuesday after Memorial Day when I looked at my calendar and started seeing June dates. I got nothing -- no car, no places to sleep. And it’s not like the end of June is low season in Ireland. Back in March, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/19/podcast-149-dining-single-airlines-need-to-tell-us-more/\">episode 149</a>, I talked about how we dug deep when planning our spring break trip to Brittany -- buying guidebooks, scouring web sites, .... But we had never been there before. My planning for Ireland is a lot more impromptu because, back in the early ‘90’s, I spent a lot of time in Cork for business, and while the country has no doubt changed a lot in the past 20-some odd years, I had a sense of what I wanted to see and a bit of an itinerary in mind -- spend most of the week hubbing out of Galway, going south to County Clare and north to the Connemara, and then heading over to Dublin for the weekend before flying over to Edinburgh. I found myself spending most of my time spelunking through TripAdvisor. First, in the Ireland forum trying to figure out the right rental car strategy. My default strategy -- go with Hertz and leverage my US status if anything goes sideways -- wouldn’t work because Hertz has franchised its name in Ireland to another company. Also, rental car insurance seems to be a bit unique there; using your credit card to cover damages like on my last trip to St Andrews apparently requires a letter from your card issuer and is still a particular hassle at the counter. Then there was the sifting through the Manichean universe of TripAdvisor reviews -- a bipolar split between 5-star “everything is fantabulous” and 1-star “it’s a complete dump and I’m sure the maid spit in my water glass” write-ups. I tend to the more forgiving end of that spectrum. I don’t think you should slam a place for a problem if you didn’t tell them about it and give them a chance to fix it. I also try to have reasonable expectations; you’re not going to get psychic/transcendent levels of service for $100/night. It took me a solid day-and-a-half of screen time, but we now have a bed for each night and a set of wheels to get us there. </li><li>Being off the road for a month has helped me drop a nagging 7-8 lbs that I put on over Christmas and until now -- 5-6 months later -- haven’t been able to drop. We’ve talked in past episodes how easy it is to put weight on when traveling -- eating 3 meals a day in restaurants, or worse on the run in airports, makes portion control difficult, as well as eating more vegetables than fries. But even when you’ve chosen, say, the fish instead of the burger, you’re still someone else’s mercy for how it’s cooked. This light bulb lit for me while watching <em><a href=\"https://www.netflix.com/title/81028317\">The Chef Show</a></em><a href=\"https://www.netflix.com/title/81028317\"> on Netflix</a> over the weekend. It’s a great cooking show. It stars Jon Favreau, director of the Iron Man movies, and Roy Choi, who was one of the first gourmet food truck guys in LA; you’d track them down on Twitter for fantastic Korean-Mexican tacos. These guys worked together on Favreau’s <em>Chef </em>movie a few years back and then got back together for this Netflix series. In the second episode, they’re cooking in Atlanta with Ford Fry at his restaurant, The Optimist. They’re making a Shrimp Toast dish that easily uses over a stick of butter to cook and sauce 5 large shrimp. They joke about the amount of butter and salt restaurants use -- “When they say ‘no salt’...,” Favreau asks Choi, Choi responds “...we add twice as much”. And then they add another half-stick of butter to the shrimp pan. I’m sure it tastes great, but it was an “a-ha” moment -- how, even when you think you’re ordering healthy, the guys in the back are focused on taste, not counting calories for you.</li><li>After our move, I’ve cranked through most of the change of addresses, but haven’t yet done my drivers license. But that one will take a little more work because my current Illinois drivers license isn’t a Real ID license -- it doesn’t have the gold star in the upper right corner. It’s not a problem right now, but in 16 months from now, October 2020, when the TSA says it will fully enforce the 2005 Real ID act -- 15 years later, for real this time, no more extensions or waivers -- and so will no longer accept non-compliant IDs at airports. Getting a Real ID license requires more documentation -- proof of my Social Security Number and two documents with our new address -- like a utility bill or a bank statement, which could be a bit of a challenge now that we get most everything electronically. Now, I could just skip it and use my passport or Global Entry card (if I could find it) instead. But that would mean I’d have to remember to bring one more thing with me to the airport, which is never a best practice. Not critical -- I have 16 months to get around to it -- though probably not something to wait until the last minute on. The Illinois DMV isn’t the quickest, most nimble organization on its best days. I can only imagine what it’ll be like come, say August or September 2020, when it gets crushed with people without passports looking to swap their drivers licenses before the October 1 deadline.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com. </li><li>Bridge Music —   <em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/content/oldDog/oldDog_-_Goodbye_sooner_or_later.mp3\" target=\"_blank\">Goodbye Sooner or Later</a></em> by oldDog    </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Overwhelmed By Travel</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Cristine Danielson, a long-time friend and first time listener, asked me after listening to the last episode “I’d love to hear how you get acclimatized to a new city from the moment you leave the gate. I always feel overwhelmed” &nbsp;That pulled me up short. I had never really thought about it that way. I’ve been traveling heavily coming up on 35 years; I’ve been traveling longer than I haven’t. I started when I was too young and seemingly indestructible to know any better, and now, I have enough travel experience, routines, rhythms &nbsp;-- patterns I called them earlier -- and status that, even when gutting through <em><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/podcast-150-travel-interruptus/\">Travel Interruptus</a></em>, things seem more inconvenient than overwhelming.</li><li>One of the most important things for me is having enough money in my pocket to handle what could come my way. At the end of the last century -- the 1990’s to be exact -- I was doing a lot of bunny hop trips through Europe -- Sweden one day, Switzerland the next, then Germany, then the UK …. This was pre-ATMs, pre-Euro, pre-mobile phones, and for many places in Europe, pre-widespread acceptance of credit cards. Truly the travel dark ages. So, my routine would be to exit Customs, head straight to the Currency Exchange, and cash a $100 American Express travelers check so I would have enough local cash for, say a coffee and a cab. Having that cash in my pocket settled me a bit; maybe gave me a sense of some control, no matter how illusionary it might be. Today, I head straight for an ATM instead of the Currency Exchange and, as I said a few episodes back, make sure I have a “full house” of credit cards -- a Visa and MasterCard from different banks, and an Amex. And it’s not just when I’m out of the country. Even in the US, I’m a lot more comfortable traveling when I have 5 or 10 $20’s in my wallet.</li><li>After my wallet comes my phone. Modern travel is all about the smartphone app -- is my plane on time, where’s the hotel, what train line do I need? My whole <em><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/podcast-150-travel-interruptus/\">Travel Interruptus</a></em> tale would’ve been much worse than “inconvenient” without smartphone connectivity. I wouldn’t have been able to tweet at Southwest customer service, I wouldn’t have been able to find a decent hotel in Paris when the train delays made us miss our flight home, I wouldn’t have been able to book that God-awful expensive Uber that got us to CDG just in time to make our flight. Back in the last century, I would’ve searched for a pay phone, pulled out my phone card, and rung up the travel agency. Even today, if I’m ringing up a travel agency instead of doing it on my own, when was the last time you saw a working pay phone? </li><li>Those are the mechanics of travel, but what about fitting in to the place you’ve arrived? I talked about how business travelers especially tend to float above everything in a “<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2008/04/29/podcast-64-escaping-the-travel-bubble-marks-travel-tips/\">travel bubble</a>”. You walk out -- of the plane with enough status, otherwise baggage claim -- and find someone holding a sign with your name who’s job is to give you a bottle of water and whisk you past the things that might be disconcerting, overwhelming. When that bubble pops, unexpectedly, and drops you into the day-to-day reality of the place you are; that decompression can be overwhelming. </li><li>The closest I came to an overwhelming experience was not arriving in a place, but trying to leave. A colleague and I wrapped up our day in Pune, India and were flying home from Mumbai that night, but on different flights; his leaving a couple of hours earlier than mine. For some reason, the person arranging our trip had us taking cars from Pune to Mumbai instead of flying. Well, OK. It wasn’t a bad drive -- actually a bit scenic -- right until we hit Mumbai traffic. We get to the international terminal, we pull our bags from the trunk, and make our way thru the general chaos of people and push carts and food vendors to the entrance. &nbsp;We both have our itineraries out and ready for inspection. My colleague goes first -- the officer looks at it and waves him through. I hand over my itinerary and follow my colleague. Except I can’t. I can’t go into the terminal; I’m too early. I’m now back out in the chaos with nowhere to go -- our car is long gone, I have no idea where Mumbai Airport is in relation to anything -- is there a hotel nearby. I don’t have a working mobile phone to ring anyone. I’m just standing around, with hundreds of other people trying to get in, or saying good-bye to someone trying to get in, or waiting for someone to come out. I walked up and down the sidewalk in front of the terminal, looking for something -- a phone, a bench. I find a door. I look in -- it’s a lounge for people waiting for arriving passengers. There’s a big plexiglass wall separating baggage claim. But more importantly, it has seats, is air conditioned, and has a restroom. I walk in -- except I can’t. I need a ticket. Where do I get that? Back out and around the corner. I find the ticket window. It’s a couple hundred rupee -- $2-3. I reach into my pocket and pull out my last bit of cash -- a 500 rupee note. Things got a lot less overwhelming.</li><li>Bridge Music —   &nbsp;<em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/content/Zapac/Zapac_-_Test_Drive.mp3\" target=\"_blank\">Test Drive</a>&nbsp;</em>by Zapac </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>New and Old Restaurant Trends</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Last month, I hit the <a href=\"https://restaurant.org/Home\">National Restaurant Association</a>’s <a href=\"https://www.nationalrestaurantshow.com/\">annual show</a> in Chicago’s McCormick Place convention center. If you need reminding of how big the restaurant business is in the US, this show is <em>huge</em>. I was interested to see what’s new and what has stayed the same since the last time I went, 4 years ago. </li><li>What’s new - Walking the aisles, I was immediately struck by the number of booths showing delivery containers. They were everywhere. Talking to a couple of vendors, they said some hotels are seeing huge growth in Doordash and Grubhub deliveries eating into their restaurant and room service revenues (all puns intended). And since they’re seeing it being driven by the new generation of new travelers -- the Millennial and Gen-Z travelers -- they think it’s more of a trend than a blip, yet another revenue stream lost to traveler technology -- like when they lost long-distance phone calls to cell phones, and then pay TV revenue to PCs and iPads running Netflix and YouTube. So many hotels, especially the lower end ones, are dropping food service altogether. But this collides head on with sustainability concerns -- the growth in delivery means a growth in styrofoam containers and plastic bags. And so I’d walk past, say, two booths back-to-back -- the first selling traditional containers; the second pushing compostable paper and bioplastics. These new containers looked good; except when I tried to use a paper straw on a frozen margarita sample that someone pushed on me. That was a complete fail.</li><li>Also saw a number of established ethnic food companies trying to branch out into new/hotter ethnic spaces. Kronos, for example, is one of the main companies selling Greek gyros meat. In their booth, they were sampling gyros, but also new chicken al pastor and Korean barbeque products. Cultural appropriation or trying to stay in business by catering to those darn Millennials and Gen Z’ers. I dunno, but a Kronos guy told me that 90% of their business still comes from gyros. Which kinda rang true when I looked at which sample booths had the longest lines -- hot dogs from Vienna Beef and Nathan’s and grilled cheese sandwiches from Tillamook Cheddar. </li><li>That being said, there were a lot of vendors selling Asian products -- primarily Japanese and Korean -- continuing the trend I’ve seen at the show. Digital is still big, but the focus seemed to have shifted from smartphone apps to \\ interfacing with those delivery services -- updating menus and getting orders automatically into their point-of-sale systems -- and more efficiently managing social media. I saw a Yelp booth for the first time at the show. It was a good-sized booth -- nicely carpeted, with tables full of phones running their app. But it was pretty empty -- mostly populated by Yelp employees. Gave me a good idea of how the restaurateurs were rating Yelp’s booth.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #152</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_152.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<p><!--EndFragment--></p>','Podcast #152 — Overwhelming Travel; New & Old Restaurant Trends','','inherit','closed','closed','','2474-revision-v1','','','2019-06-16 19:17:34','2019-06-17 00:17:34','',2474,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/06/16/2474-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2488,1,'2019-06-16 22:21:56','2019-06-17 03:21:56','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\">\n<p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/IMG_0449.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2482 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/IMG_0449-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a></p><figcaption>Latest in Sustainable Food Delivery&nbsp;</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>Moving the TravelCommons studios kept me mostly off the road this month except for a quick trip to Nashville, but staying out of restaurants has helped me finally drop the last bit of Christmas weight. We talk about the \"earn and burn\" strategy for frequent travel awards; answer a listener\'s question on how to keep from being overwhelmed when arriving in a new city, and new restaurant trends from the floor of the National Restaurant Association\'s big show. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_152.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/637754409&color=%23ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #152: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the new TravelCommons studios <em>in</em> Chicago, IL. The move went surprisingly smoothly -- nothing lost, nothing destroyed on the 20-mile trip in from the western suburbs. Have the production bay rebuilt and now trying out the new studio set-up, so we’ll see how this sounds. </li><li>Which also means I haven’t done much travel since the last episode; just a quick trip last week down to Nashville. But the move downtown meant I had to rethink some of my travel patterns -- not how to get to and from Nashville, but how to get to and from Chicago Midway airport. We’ve said before in many episodes, most (all?) frequent travelers are all about optimizing the standard parts of their journey -- what’s the most efficient way to get to the airport, when to leave -- optimizing the trade-off between sleep and getting to the gate when status pre-boarding is announced. In the old digs, I had a pretty predictable 25-30 minute drive to either O’Hare or Midway, and long-term relationship with a dependable driver. Which meant answering the “when do I need leave for the airport” question was a mindless exercise -- subtract 90 minutes from the departure time and send a text to my guy the night before. But now it’s a kinda predictable 60-minute public transit ride or a very unpredictable 35-60-minute Uber/Lyft ride with even more unpredictable wait times and surge pricing, especially when catching a morning flight. Actually, for this 3-day trip, I think it would’ve been cheaper to drive and park, even with the City of Chicago’s latest parking taxes.</li><li>The Southwest flights between Midway and Nashville were a bit odd because the pilots kept everyone in their seats for the entire flight due to “expected turbulence” - of which there was absolutely none. Though I thought it was interesting that the pilot on our return trip said “We may ask our flight attendants to remain seated so we can fly faster and pick up some time.” It’s an hour-and-20-minute flight, so not too long to stay seated as long as you didn’t drop a couple of beers at the bar right before boarding. But it also meant I didn’t get a chance to use some of the free drink coupons Southwest sent me last month. I should’ve followed the advice of a Nashville Airport billboard that was posted right above the Southwest gate -- “Before Wheels Up, Whiskey up.”</li><li>Bridge Music — &nbsp;<em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/content/Per/Per_-_DLDN_Instrumental.mp3\" target=\"_blank\">DLDN Instrumental</a></em>&nbsp;by St Paul</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Because the trip to Nashville was personal travel, I used award points where I could -- Hyatt for our hotel and Hertz for the rental car. The only reason I didn’t use Southwest points was because I was burning off a $100 customer satisfaction certificate Southwest sent me as comp for one of their 3 delayed flights I talked about in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/podcast-150-travel-interruptus/\">Travel Interruptus episode</a> a couple of months back. We’ve talked about how to use awards many times over the years. And while the tactics may change a bit, my overall strategy has been pretty consistent -- use them rather than save them, or “earn and burn” as some folks say. I know a lot of travelers who save them -- hoard them -- thinking of them as their travel savings account -- or perhaps a badge of honor -- “I have 2 million American Airline points” to which I think (and try not to say) “that are going to get you a lot less the longer you keep holding them”. Because &nbsp;rather than increasing in value by earning interest, they can suddenly decrease in value when United or BA or Marriott or, a couple of weeks ago, Hertz decide to redo their awards charts. And, for all the luvvy words in those announcements about “increasing the value” of their programs, I’ve never seen one of those changes <em>increase</em> the value of the points. At the end of May, Hertz published -- without any warning or announcement -- a new award chart that increased the point cost for daily and weekly rentals by 11-36 percent. Back in March, Marriott added a new top hotel category with a 42% higher per-night award cost -- 85,000 points a night for the properties that moved into the new Category 8 vs. 60,000 points when they were in 7. And most of the properties that got that 42% bump were resort properties -- the ones you’d most likely want to use your points on. In November, United will eliminate their award charts altogether, following Delta and Southwest in moving to dynamic pricing. Pick your slogan - “Earn and burn”; “Use ‘em or lose ‘em”. Though I think I like “you deserve a break today” better. Plan a vacation and burn your points before the companies do.</li><li>Even though &nbsp;I haven’t traveled much since <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/podcast-151-traveler-data-leaks-brittany-street-food/\">the last episode</a>, I’ve still been thinking a lot about travel - specifically, laying out our trip at the back half of this month -- a week in Ireland and then heading over to Scotland for Claire’s graduation from Univ of St Andrews. I talked in the last episode about wrestling with the Avios website to book our flights, but with that done, I got consumed by packing and moving and unpacking, and sorta lost track of the other reservations that we needed for our week in Ireland. That insight landed on me pretty hard the Tuesday after Memorial Day when I looked at my calendar and started seeing June dates. I got nothing -- no car, no places to sleep. And it’s not like the end of June is low season in Ireland. Back in March, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/19/podcast-149-dining-single-airlines-need-to-tell-us-more/\">episode 149</a>, I talked about how we dug deep when planning our spring break trip to Brittany -- buying guidebooks, scouring web sites, .... But we had never been there before. My planning for Ireland is a lot more impromptu because, back in the early ‘90’s, I spent a lot of time in Cork for business, and while the country has no doubt changed a lot in the past 20-some odd years, I had a sense of what I wanted to see and a bit of an itinerary in mind -- spend most of the week hubbing out of Galway, going south to County Clare and north to the Connemara, and then heading over to Dublin for the weekend before flying over to Edinburgh. I found myself spending most of my time spelunking through TripAdvisor. First, in the Ireland forum trying to figure out the right rental car strategy. My default strategy -- go with Hertz and leverage my US status if anything goes sideways -- wouldn’t work because Hertz has franchised its name in Ireland to another company. Also, rental car insurance seems to be a bit unique there; using your credit card to cover damages like on my last trip to St Andrews apparently requires a letter from your card issuer and is still a particular hassle at the counter. Then there was the sifting through the Manichean universe of TripAdvisor reviews -- a bipolar split between 5-star “everything is fantabulous” and 1-star “it’s a complete dump and I’m sure the maid spit in my water glass” write-ups. I tend to the more forgiving end of that spectrum. I don’t think you should slam a place for a problem if you didn’t tell them about it and give them a chance to fix it. I also try to have reasonable expectations; you’re not going to get psychic/transcendent levels of service for $100/night. It took me a solid day-and-a-half of screen time, but we now have a bed for each night and a set of wheels to get us there. </li><li>Being off the road for a month has helped me drop a nagging 7-8 lbs that I put on over Christmas and until now -- 5-6 months later -- haven’t been able to drop. We’ve talked in past episodes how easy it is to put weight on when traveling -- eating 3 meals a day in restaurants, or worse on the run in airports, makes portion control difficult, as well as eating more vegetables than fries. But even when you’ve chosen, say, the fish instead of the burger, you’re still someone else’s mercy for how it’s cooked. This light bulb lit for me while watching <em><a href=\"https://www.netflix.com/title/81028317\">The Chef Show</a></em><a href=\"https://www.netflix.com/title/81028317\"> on Netflix</a> over the weekend. It’s a great cooking show. It stars Jon Favreau, director of the Iron Man movies, and Roy Choi, who was one of the first gourmet food truck guys in LA; you’d track them down on Twitter for fantastic Korean-Mexican tacos. These guys worked together on Favreau’s <em>Chef </em>movie a few years back and then got back together for this Netflix series. In the second episode, they’re cooking in Atlanta with Ford Fry at his restaurant, The Optimist. They’re making a Shrimp Toast dish that easily uses over a stick of butter to cook and sauce 5 large shrimp. They joke about the amount of butter and salt restaurants use -- “When they say ‘no salt’...,” Favreau asks Choi, Choi responds “...we add twice as much”. And then they add another half-stick of butter to the shrimp pan. I’m sure it tastes great, but it was an “a-ha” moment -- how, even when you think you’re ordering healthy, the guys in the back are focused on taste, not counting calories for you.</li><li>After our move, I’ve cranked through most of the change of addresses, but haven’t yet done my drivers license. But that one will take a little more work because my current Illinois drivers license isn’t a Real ID license -- it doesn’t have the gold star in the upper right corner. It’s not a problem right now, but in 16 months from now, October 2020, when the TSA says it will fully enforce the 2005 Real ID act -- 15 years later, for real this time, no more extensions or waivers -- and so will no longer accept non-compliant IDs at airports. Getting a Real ID license requires more documentation -- proof of my Social Security Number and two documents with our new address -- like a utility bill or a bank statement, which could be a bit of a challenge now that we get most everything electronically. Now, I could just skip it and use my passport or Global Entry card (if I could find it) instead. But that would mean I’d have to remember to bring one more thing with me to the airport, which is never a best practice. Not critical -- I have 16 months to get around to it -- though probably not something to wait until the last minute on. The Illinois DMV isn’t the quickest, most nimble organization on its best days. I can only imagine what it’ll be like come, say August or September 2020, when it gets crushed with people without passports looking to swap their drivers licenses before the October 1 deadline.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com. </li><li>Bridge Music —  &nbsp;<em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/content/oldDog/oldDog_-_Goodbye_sooner_or_later.mp3\" target=\"_blank\">Goodbye Sooner or Later</a></em>&nbsp;by oldDog    </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Overwhelmed By Travel</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Cristine Danielson, a long-time friend and first time listener, asked me after listening to the last episode “I’d love to hear how you get acclimatized to a new city from the moment you leave the gate. I always feel overwhelmed” &nbsp;That pulled me up short. I had never really thought about it that way. I’ve been traveling heavily coming up on 35 years; I’ve been traveling longer than I haven’t. I started when I was too young and seemingly indestructible to know any better, and now, I have enough travel experience, routines, rhythms &nbsp;-- patterns I called them earlier -- and status that, even when gutting through <em><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/podcast-150-travel-interruptus/\">Travel Interruptus</a></em>, things seem more inconvenient than overwhelming.</li><li>One of the most important things for me is having enough money in my pocket to handle what could come my way. At the end of the last century -- the 1990’s to be exact -- I was doing a lot of bunny hop trips through Europe -- Sweden one day, Switzerland the next, then Germany, then the UK …. This was pre-ATMs, pre-Euro, pre-mobile phones, and for many places in Europe, pre-widespread acceptance of credit cards. Truly the travel dark ages. So, my routine would be to exit Customs, head straight to the Currency Exchange, and cash a $100 American Express travelers check so I would have enough local cash for, say a coffee and a cab. Having that cash in my pocket settled me a bit; maybe gave me a sense of some control, no matter how illusionary it might be. Today, I head straight for an ATM instead of the Currency Exchange and, as I said a few episodes back, make sure I have a “full house” of credit cards -- a Visa and MasterCard from different banks, and an Amex. And it’s not just when I’m out of the country. Even in the US, I’m a lot more comfortable traveling when I have 5 or 10 $20’s in my wallet.</li><li>After my wallet comes my phone. Modern travel is all about the smartphone app -- is my plane on time, where’s the hotel, what train line do I need? My whole <em><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/podcast-150-travel-interruptus/\">Travel Interruptus</a></em> tale would’ve been much worse than “inconvenient” without smartphone connectivity. I wouldn’t have been able to tweet at Southwest customer service, I wouldn’t have been able to find a decent hotel in Paris when the train delays made us miss our flight home, I wouldn’t have been able to book that God-awful expensive Uber that got us to CDG just in time to make our flight. Back in the last century, I would’ve searched for a pay phone, pulled out my phone card, and rung up the travel agency. Even today, if I’m ringing up a travel agency instead of doing it on my own, when was the last time you saw a working pay phone? </li><li>Those are the mechanics of travel, but what about fitting in to the place you’ve arrived? I talked about how business travelers especially tend to float above everything in a “<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2008/04/29/podcast-64-escaping-the-travel-bubble-marks-travel-tips/\">travel bubble</a>”. You walk out -- of the plane with enough status, otherwise baggage claim -- and find someone holding a sign with your name who’s job is to give you a bottle of water and whisk you past the things that might be disconcerting, overwhelming. When that bubble pops, unexpectedly, and drops you into the day-to-day reality of the place you are; that decompression can be overwhelming. </li><li>The closest I came to an overwhelming experience was not arriving in a place, but trying to leave. A colleague and I wrapped up our day in Pune, India and were flying home from Mumbai that night, but on different flights; his leaving a couple of hours earlier than mine. For some reason, the person arranging our trip had us taking cars from Pune to Mumbai instead of flying. Well, OK. It wasn’t a bad drive -- actually a bit scenic -- right until we hit Mumbai traffic. We get to the international terminal, we pull our bags from the trunk, and make our way thru the general chaos of people and push carts and food vendors to the entrance. &nbsp;We both have our itineraries out and ready for inspection. My colleague goes first -- the officer looks at it and waves him through. I hand over my itinerary and follow my colleague. Except I can’t. I can’t go into the terminal; I’m too early. I’m now back out in the chaos with nowhere to go -- our car is long gone, I have no idea where Mumbai Airport is in relation to anything -- is there a hotel nearby. I don’t have a working mobile phone to ring anyone. I’m just standing around, with hundreds of other people trying to get in, or saying good-bye to someone trying to get in, or waiting for someone to come out. I walked up and down the sidewalk in front of the terminal, looking for something -- a phone, a bench. I find a door. I look in -- it’s a lounge for people waiting for arriving passengers. There’s a big plexiglass wall separating baggage claim. But more importantly, it has seats, is air conditioned, and has a restroom. I walk in -- except I can’t. I need a ticket. Where do I get that? Back out and around the corner. I find the ticket window. It’s a couple hundred rupee -- $2-3. I reach into my pocket and pull out my last bit of cash -- a 500 rupee note. Things got a lot less overwhelming.</li><li>Bridge Music —   &nbsp;<em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/content/Zapac/Zapac_-_Test_Drive.mp3\" target=\"_blank\">Test Drive</a>&nbsp;</em>by Zapac </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>New and Old Restaurant Trends</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Last month, I hit the <a href=\"https://restaurant.org/Home\">National Restaurant Association</a>’s <a href=\"https://www.nationalrestaurantshow.com/\">annual show</a> in Chicago’s McCormick Place convention center. If you need reminding of how big the restaurant business is in the US, this show is <em>huge</em>. I was interested to see what’s new and what has stayed the same since the last time I went, 4 years ago. </li><li>What’s new - Walking the aisles, I was immediately struck by the number of booths showing delivery containers. They were everywhere. Talking to a couple of vendors, they said some hotels are seeing huge growth in Doordash and Grubhub deliveries eating into their restaurant and room service revenues (all puns intended). And since they’re seeing it being driven by the new generation of new travelers -- the Millennial and Gen-Z travelers -- they think it’s more of a trend than a blip, yet another revenue stream lost to traveler technology -- like when they lost long-distance phone calls to cell phones, and then pay TV revenue to PCs and iPads running Netflix and YouTube. So many hotels, especially the lower end ones, are dropping food service altogether. But this collides head on with sustainability concerns -- the growth in delivery means a growth in styrofoam containers and plastic bags. And so I’d walk past, say, two booths back-to-back -- the first selling traditional containers; the second pushing compostable paper and bioplastics. These new containers looked good; except when I tried to use a paper straw on a frozen margarita sample that someone pushed on me. That was a complete fail.</li><li>Also saw a number of established ethnic food companies trying to branch out into new/hotter ethnic spaces. Kronos, for example, is one of the main companies selling Greek gyros meat. In their booth, they were sampling gyros, but also new chicken al pastor and Korean barbeque products. Cultural appropriation or trying to stay in business by catering to those darn Millennials and Gen Z’ers. I dunno, but a Kronos guy told me that 90% of their business still comes from gyros. Which kinda rang true when I looked at which sample booths had the longest lines -- hot dogs from Vienna Beef and Nathan’s and grilled cheese sandwiches from Tillamook Cheddar. </li><li>That being said, there were a lot of vendors selling Asian products -- primarily Japanese and Korean -- continuing the trend I’ve seen at the show. Digital is still big, but the focus seemed to have shifted from smartphone apps to \\ interfacing with those delivery services -- updating menus and getting orders automatically into their point-of-sale systems -- and more efficiently managing social media. I saw a Yelp booth for the first time at the show. It was a good-sized booth -- nicely carpeted, with tables full of phones running their app. But it was pretty empty -- mostly populated by Yelp employees. Gave me a good idea of how the restaurateurs were rating Yelp’s booth.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #152</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_152.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<p><!--EndFragment--></p>','Podcast #152 — Overwhelming Travel; New & Old Restaurant Trends','','inherit','closed','closed','','2474-revision-v1','','','2019-06-16 22:21:56','2019-06-17 03:21:56','',2474,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/06/16/2474-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2489,1,'2019-06-16 22:31:44','2019-06-17 03:31:44','[caption id=\"attachment_2186\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/IMG_0205.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2186\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/IMG_0205-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> I Think That\'s the Uber Pick-Up Spot[/caption]\r\n\r\nIt seems that the snow and cold temperatures settled into the northern part of the Northern Hemisphere a bit earlier than last year. With the crush of Christmas/New Years travel starting in a few weeks, here are the TravelCommons\' top holiday travel tips to get you started early on your travel prep...\r\n<ol>\r\n 	<li><strong>Fly Non-Stop —</strong> It\'s obvious because it\'s the cardinal rule of air travel. Holiday travel stacks up problems —  high passenger load factors combined with winter weather disruptions almost guarantees late arrivals and missed connections. Even if you’re connecting through Houston, an intermediate stop adds one more point of failure, one more opportunity for the airlines to screw up. Pay the extra $100 for a non-stop flight.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Sign Up for TSA PreCheck — </strong>Gift yourself and spend the $85 on 5 years of time and hassle reduction.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Skip the Tight Connection —  </strong>If you can’t fly non-stop, step away from any connection that’s less than 60 minutes.  Yes, we usually want to get to our destination in the shortest possible time, but accepting a connection of 1 hour or less…. Think about it – a 15-minute delay on your flight into a big hub like <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27hare_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Chicago</a> or <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denver_International_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Denver</a> or <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detroit_Metropolitan_Wayne_County_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Detroit</a> (as good as on-time in the winter for most airlines) and you’re sprinting across terminals and concourses just to beat the closing door.  A 1-hr connection is just asking for a stress attack and/or an overnight stay at the airport branch of the <a title=\"Bates Motel\" href=\"http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092622/\" rel=\"imdb\">Bates Motel</a>.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Catch the Early Flight </strong>— Delays stack up as the day wears on.  As your airplane goes from airport to airport, the probability of it getting stuck increases.  Overnight, airlines have a chance to recover – late planes finally get their destinations and operations groups can reassign planes.  So while the last flight out can be a crap shoot, I rarely hit a delay on the first flight out.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Use Twitter as a Concierge Service</strong> — Most airlines have social media teams monitoring Twitter. Before you leave, find and follow your airline’s Twitter customer service account. “At naming” them in a Tweet (e.g., “<a dir=\"ltr\" href=\"https://twitter.com/united\">@united</a> what’s happening with UA 4286 MSY-ORD that it’s 1:45 hr delayed?”) usually gets a response in a couple of minutes. Following them allows you to exchange personal information such as record locator numbers via direct message (DM). It’s usually faster than queuing up for a frazzled gate agent and the results can be better.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Use Multiple Flight Tracking Apps</strong> — Use your smartphone to keep track of gate changes and flight delays. Sign up for text notifications from your airline when you book your ticket. However,  I’ve often experienced long delays with the airlines’ services or notices that were never sent out. So I also use <a href=\"http://tripit.com/\">TripIt</a>, <a href=\"http://flightaware.com/\">FlightAware</a>, and <a href=\"http://flightstats.com\">FlightStats</a>. It means multiple notices, but it also means I don’t miss anything.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Bring a Battery Pack </strong>— Whatever the size or form factor -- slimline, lipstick, high-capacity brick -- having that second or third charge readily available is critical to get last-minute gate change notifications and when you’re using electronic boarding passes. It saves you from stalking cleaning crews to find a live power outlet on your layover, or negotiating with your seatmate for possession of outlet between you. It’s cheap piece of mind.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Carry On your Luggage</strong> -- Unless you\'re heading to the slopes for Christmas, everyone in your travel party should be able to fit into a carry-on sized bag. You can save $25/bag and increase the probability of having clean clothes at your destination. If you’re seating area 4 or higher, odds are there’s no overhead bin space for you. Let the agent gate-check the bag for you. You won’t have to pay a checked bag fee and it’s very unlikely that they’ll lose your bag – it’s only traveling a couple hundred feet from the jet bridge to the luggage hold.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Spread Clothes Across All Bags</strong> -- If you need to check your bags -- maybe you have to bring pre-wrapped gifts or a special bottle of wine for Christmas dinner --  split everyone\'s clothes across all the bags. It\'s rare for an airline to lose <em>all</em> of your checked bags.</li>\r\n 	<li><strong>Know Your Geography </strong>-- Knowing alternatives to your destination airport gives you more flexibility dealing with cancelled flights or missed connections. In New York, the LaGuardia to Newark pivot is easy, but others aren\'t so obvious.  Everyone knows that Chicago has two airports – O\'Hare and Midway.  But what about Milwaukee\'s Mitchell Field 80 miles north?  If PHL is in trouble, how many folks think about Harrisburg or Allentown?  Or Sacramento as an alternative to SFO?  I think about alternatives in two rings – within 60 miles – SNA and LGB for LAX; and then within 100-120 miles, which now picks up Palm Springs and San Diego for LAX.  Someone will drive a couple of hours to pick you up if it means getting you to Christmas dinner on time.</li>\r\n</ol>\r\nBut above all, be realistic. It’s gonna be a zoo. Steel yourself; get your inner karma tuned for it. Pack a snack and a book, and practice deep cleansing breaths.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;','Top 10 Holiday Travel Tips','','inherit','closed','closed','','2185-revision-v1','','','2019-06-16 22:31:44','2019-06-17 03:31:44','',2185,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/06/16/2185-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2490,1,'2019-06-16 22:32:54','2019-06-17 03:32:54','[caption id=\"attachment_2141\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/IMG_0031.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2141\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/IMG_0031-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> How Much Extra For A Plate?[/caption]\n\nJust regular domestic business travel since the last podcast, trying to dodge Hurricane Florence to get back to Charlottesville.&nbsp; Thinking back to last month\'s European travels, we talk about a tight connection through Amsterdam and some odd concierge lounge rules, which gets me thinking about hotel breakfasts. And a listener request for restaurant recommendations gets me thinking about the balance of visiting good and not-so-good restaurant towns. All this and more at the&nbsp;<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_145.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_145.mp3\"]\n\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show Notes -->\n\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #145:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL after 3 weeks of “normal” travel -- no vacation, no international travel, just a couple of trips to Charlottesville, VA on sandwiching a quick shot down to Dallas. And no delays. And empty seats beside me. Indeed, I even scored an upgrade on the late United flight from IAD to ORD, the long leg of one of my flights home from Charlottesville. Feels like we’re at the start of maybe a 6-week travel lull between the final end of summer vacations and the early starts of Thanksgiving travel.</li>\n 	<li>There was a bit of drama around the Charlottesville trip in the middle of September. I had to fly out Sunday night -- the weekend that Hurricane Florence hit the Carolina coast. The storm track forecast had Florence plowing west through the Carolinas and then taking a right hand turn at the Appalachians and heading north over Virginia. The question for me -- when would it make the turn; would my Sunday flight make it through before or after the turn or would Florence be in my way on Sunday? Thursday night and Friday, I spent a bit of time hitting the Refresh button on the <a href=\"https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/\">Nat’l Hurricane Center’s website</a>. By Friday, Florence had dropped a couple of category levels and slowed down, and by Saturday, I could see that my Sunday flight would beat Florence to Charlottesville. It was a smooth flight that Sunday, though Monday was a bit wet.</li>\n 	<li>Going through TSA Pre-Check in ORD that Sunday night, I watched a guy use the electronic boarding pass on his Apple Watch. It looked a bit awkward, and if you think about it, it’s understandable. Boarding pass readers face up; you put your boarding pass or phone face down on them to read. But a watch is on face up on the top of your wrist. So the guy ends up standing on his toes and twisting his arm around to get his Apple Watch face down on the reader. You’d think he would’ve shifted to his phone after that, but I saw him twist himself up again about 30 minutes later when boarding his flight. Seems like it would’ve been easier to spin the watch on his wrist so it was facing down -- at least until Apple fires up the old Steve Jobs distortion field to convince airports to reorient all their readers for the convenience of Apple Watch users.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music --&nbsp;Dub the Uke by Kara Square (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mindmapthat/53340 Ft: DJ Vadim</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul class=\"\">\n 	<li>Allan Marko, a long-time listener and even longer-time friend, sent me an <a href=\"http://www.patentlyapple.com/patently-apple/2018/09/apple-salesforce-are-working-marriott-international-to-bring-homepods-to-hotel-rooms-to-assist-guests-with-services.html\">article</a> that dove into an interesting part of Apple’s new partnership with Salesforce. The two of them are working with Marriott to put Siri in hotel rooms. You could ask Siri to turn up the heat, order room service, or get an Uber through an Apple HomePod in the room. That’s the Apple piece of it. The Salesforce piece lets Siri remember what you asked her, say your room temperature, at the next Marriott. Useful or creepy? And how do you make sure you wipe Siri’s memory before the next guest checks into the room so you can’t ask her things like “Hey Siri, tell me all about the last guest that was here...” or “Order me the same sandwich the last guy ordered”. I dunno. I don’t even like using these new Enseo TVs to log into my own Netflix account, let alone having Marriott listening to me through a HomePod and remembering everything I mutter. Some guys are making a nice living selling shutters that you can stick over your laptop webcam. Are earplugs for hotel HomePods the next thing?</li>\n 	<li>In the<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/09/15/podcast-144-outside-airports-hospitality-mentality/\"> last episode</a>, I mentioned flying SAS from Chicago to Copenhagen. It was an odd schedule -- leaving Chicago around 10pm, arriving Copenhagen after 1 in the afternoon. Leaving that late and having a long taxi, I fell asleep before we left the ground, and before putting my phone in Airplane mode. I woke up, I dunno, an hour or so later, looked at my phone for the time, and noticed some new e-mails. Huh? That’s weird. And then I noticed that my phone didn’t say “No Service”; it was connected to some cellular service, which turned out to be SAS’s in-flight cellular service. And as opposed to in-flight WiFi which you usually have to log into, my iPhone automatically started roaming on the SAS cellular service, that then continued to check/pull e-mail for a couple of hours until I flipped it to airplane mode. I got my AT&amp;T mobile bill a couple of weeks back and ended up with a $25 roaming charge for those half-dozen meaningless e-mails. A pain, but not too painful. Unlike the guy four years ago who <a href=\"https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/11/18/that-1200-in-flight-wifi-bill-was-terrifyingly-real/\">rang up a $1,200 WiFi bill</a> on Singapore Air when he fell asleep with his data still connected.</li>\n 	<li>On the third leg of that trip, going from BRU to EDI, our best option was KLM through AMS. I’ve been in and out and through Schiphol a number of times over the past 20-some odd years and have always liked it. Nothing flashy, but it works -- not too big, reasonable facilities. Booking this BRU-EDI trip on the KLM website, I had two options -- a tight 40-min connection or a 2-hr one. While I don’t mind Schiphol, I wasn’t looking to make an afternoon of it. So I broke one of my cardinal travel rules -- never book a connection shorter than an hour -- and booked the 40-min connection, knowing that we had a back-up if it didn’t work out. One factor I didn’t completely think through was that we’d have to cross the Schengen border during those 40 minutes too. The first leg -- Brussels to Amsterdam -- was within Schengen so it was just like an domestic US flight -- no passport control, no customs. But in Schiphol, we had switch concourses and go through passport control because the UK is outside of Schengen. We made it through, though, with time to spare because - we walked real fast; like I said before, Schiphol isn’t that big, so switching concourses wasn’t a long walk; but most importantly, my wife spotted the “short connection” line at passport control. We had gotten in the regular line, but then we saw on a display screen that our EDI flight was classified a “short connection”, so we switched to the much shorter line -- I earned a “Hey” from a security guard when I ducked under the tape -- and quickly passed through what was a well-staffed and brisk passport control line (Munich Airport, you could take some lessons here). We get to the gate with more than enough time -- boarding hasn’t been called yet. So while we made the 40-minute connection, the question now was -- would the checked luggage make it? As we were queuing to board, I looked out the terminal window. There’s our plane, and there, next to the baggage loader, was Irene’s and Claire’s luggage -- stationary, not rolling along like in that YouTube video. A very good sign, but there wasn’t anybody loading luggage. As I walk up to board, I tap one of the KLM guys standing around. Pointing out the window, I say “See those bags on the tarmac? Those are ours. It would be great if they made it onto this plane.” He laughed -- him a bit more than me. I was happy to see them appear on the EDI baggage carousel.</li>\n 	<li>I’m thinking that I need another carry-on bag; something between my maximum legal size 22-incher and my leather duffel overnighter. On that BRU-EDI trip, I carried my 22-incher on, but not without agents at Brussels and Amsterdam challenging me, even after showing them it fit in their baggage sizer. A few weeks after that trip, KLM added an <a href=\"https://news.klm.com/klms-augmented-reality-hand-baggage-check-now-available-in-messenger/\">augmented reality baggage sizer</a> to their iPhone app. You fire up the app, point your iPhone camera at your bag and the app overlays a properly sized rectangle over your bag. If your bag is within the rectangle, you’re good to go. Would’ve been easier -- and much cooler -- than slamming my bag into those metal sizers, but somehow, with those gate agents, I don’t think the outcome would’ve been any different.</li>\n 	<li>OK, one last thing from that trip. The concierge lounges in both the Copenhagen Marriott and the London St Pancras Renaissance had prominent “rules” signs at their entrances, and one of those rules was a ban on “fitness clothes”. Now, this wasn’t a big deal on this trip because I was on vacation, and wasn’t toting work-out gear. My normal program when I’m on business travel is to get up before 6, work out, go straight to the lounge in my “fitness gear” for some breakfast while cooling down, then head back to my room to shower, change, and head out. Having to separate the cool down from breakfast would add 15-20 minutes to what is an already tight morning routine. So I hope that rule doesn’t spread to the US lounges. The rest of the rules seemed pretty reasonable, though one -- no wearing a bathrobe in the lounge -- seemed a bit superfluous. I’ve never seen someone walk into a concierge lounge in a bathrobe… until in Copenhagen at 3 in the afternoon with it not looking like there was anything on under the robe. So, OK, I’m now completely on-board with the no robe rule.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> or our new <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a> at travelcommons -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;Emma by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/50905 Ft: Martijn de Boer</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Restaurant Karma</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Casey Milch sent me a note a few weeks back -- “Greetings. Love the podcast. I know you mention frequent trips to Charlottesville and I’m finding myself there every six weeks for work myself now. Any restaurant suggestions?”</li>\n 	<li>One of the compensations for getting on an airplane just about every week is that you get to try a lot of restaurants. Now, in the last episode, we talked about the downside of that -- rapid waistline expansion -- but if you’re thoughtful about it, and you like trying different food (I hate the word “foodie”), business travel has its benefits. I sent Casey a few recommendations -- Fitzroy, a meat place -- burger, double pork chop, fried chicken -- on the Main Street pedestrian mall; Lampo, a small Neapolitan pizza place with a big wood oven that is -- I forgot to tell Casey this -- a 5-minute walk from Champion Brewing Company’s taproom; and The Alley Light, a speakeasy in an small alcove (a bit too short to be a proper alley) with no sign though there is a light over the door, that took 3 tries to find the first time in the pouring rain, which led to the question “How many consultants does it take to work Google Maps”. Putting the list together for Casey reminded me that we hadn’t been to Alley Light in a while, so we ate there last Tuesday night -- found it on the first try this time -- and had roasted bone marrow, pork rillette, duck confit -- oh, and some carrots. So much for thoughtfulness.</li>\n 	<li>Charlottesville punches above its weight for good restaurants, maybe because of University of Virginia. The 2 ½ years I spent in New Orleans was one of definitely one of my food high points, especially when crawfish were in season. 3 months in Portland, OR was fun with the food truck scene, and of course, it is ground-zero for the craft beer explosion. Stays in Manhattan, San Francisco, and London were that much more enjoyable with someone else picking up the dinner tab. Indeed, in San Francisco, I used to stay in different hotels so I could try different neighborhood joints.</li>\n 	<li>But karma always seeks balance, and for all these great food locations, there have been other, let’s say, less-than-stunning places. Dover, OH -- about 30 miles south of Canton -- had, when I was doing a project there -- two places to eat -- an Arby’s and the lunch counter of the Walmart knock-off. And the Walmart knock-off was the better of the two. Oldsmar, FL was a bit too far outside of Tampa for us to head in for dinner every night, so the near-by Buffalo Wild Wings - B-Dubs - and Applebee’s were our best shots. And downtown Detroit in the early 2000’s, working, eating, and sleeping in the urban fortress that is the Renaissance Center was brutally monotonous.</li>\n 	<li>But even when in London and New York, we weren’t splurging on big meals every night. We have reasonable expense budgets that we have to live within. So again, we find balance -- one night we’re underspending at a dive (but good) pizza-by-the-slice joint, so that the next night, we eat at nice place. Some guys will extend balancing act to travel -- sucking up the inconvenience of a cheaper connecting flight to pay for better meals. One colleague told me -- “I’ll happily travel cheap to eat great food”</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;Astral Travel by Astral (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Astral/44282</li>\n</ul>\n<b>Hotel Breakfasts</b>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Growing up, those of us of a certain age heard that breakfast is the most important meal of the day -- usually from a cereal commercial. I mentioned a bit early earlier my morning hotel pattern -- work out, hit the concierge lounge for breakfast and then get on with my day. Most lounge breakfasts are pretty industrial -- chafing dishes of stiff scrambled pasteurized eggs, thin slices of oven-baked bacon, vat of oatmeal, a few cartons of yogurt, and a bowl of fruit. It gets the day started. I may be judging it a bit harshly though. My daughter Claire loves those scrambled eggs. Go a little more upscale and you’ll see maybe a platter of smoked salmon, some sliced meats and cheeses, bran muffins…</li>\n 	<li>So when I see something different, it gets my attention. Like roasted green chiles in New Mexico, Albuquerque and Santa Fe, to season those scrambled eggs, or the King Cake at the Canal St Sheraton in New Orleans during Mardi Gras season. Now, it’s not the best king cake I’ve had - and my wife has dragged me through a king cake tasting crawl there, so I speak with some knowledge -- but I look forward to it whenever I’m there in the spring. I remember one morning I walked in -- no king cake! I found one of the staff -- “you guys stop doing king cake?!” “No! I didn’t know we were out.” And they immediately brought out a new one. Crisis averted!</li>\n 	<li>It doesn’t even have to be anything big. The Copenhagen Marriott lounge had rhubarb juice. As a kid, my mother made pies from rhubarb growing in our backyard, that I think her mother had planted. So something different and nostalgic all in one. Was it life-changing? Not necessarily, but I’d never seen it before.</li>\n 	<li>A little more life-changing was the bowl of bun bo hue that we got for breakfast when staying at a local, non-chain, hotel in Hue in central Vietnam. Kind of a spicier, funkier version of the pho you see in the US, and tougher to find here. Not like any hotel breakfast I’d had, and I immediately switched my breakfast choice over to it or pho for the rest of the trip.\nBack in May, when I was in Pune, we stayed at a Marriott Courtyard, a chain which, as I’ve complained about before in prior episodes, doesn’t have a concierge lounge but they had a nice breakfast buffet with what I guess is a typical two-track system -- one side with the usual Western breakfast foods, and the other side with Indian food. The waiter pointed me to the omelette station. I was about ready to order when I noticed another station to my right with what looked like a super-sized crepe griddle. “What’s that?” I asked. “Oh, that’s to make dosas.” “Cool, I have one of those.” “Do you know what a dosa is?” “Nope, but I’ll take one, however it normally comes.” I watched him make this foot-wide diameter stiff crepe, rolled it up and put it, sticking up out of a cup of some sort of stew or curry. I walk back to the table. Everyone else has eggs, bacon, toast, arranged horizontally on their plate. I’m the only one with a vertical breakfast. But I liked that. Kinda flying the flag for something different at breakfast .</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #145</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and now on <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_145.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #145 — Restaurant Karma; Hotel Breakfasts','','inherit','closed','closed','','2138-revision-v1','','','2019-06-16 22:32:54','2019-06-17 03:32:54','',2138,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/06/16/2138-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2491,1,'2019-06-16 22:34:11','2019-06-17 03:34:11','[caption id=\"attachment_2168\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2168\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> But I filled up the tank[/caption]\n\nGetting this posted just in time to give you something to listen to while jammed up in Thanksgiving traffic, be it on the road or in the airports. We talk about working the angles to maximize credit card benefits, which leads me to one more story from my fall trip to Europe -- a rental car scrape that my Chase Visa card just paid off. We also talk about the Wall Street Journal\'s new ranking of US airports and compare it to Skytrax\'s international rankings. And we wrap up with my Christmas gift suggestions for the frequent traveler on your list.&nbsp; All this and more at the&nbsp;<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_146.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_146.mp3\"]\n\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show Notes -->\n\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #146:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, trying to give you something to keep you entertained? Or at least occupied as you thread through the Thanksgiving travel traffic -- be it airports, trains, or roadways -- the forecasts are for a 5% increase over last year.</li>\n 	<li>I’ve been trying to get this episode done for the past 2 weeks, but I just haven’t been able to make it happen. Since we last spoke, I’ve been in the midst of a weekly commute between Chicago and Dallas. It’s the standard consultant commute -- leaving ORD Monday at 7am, leaving DFW Thursday at 5pm -- the consulting rush hour. The lounges are packed, the Starbucks line tails way back; no matter what status, you’re in a middle seat if you don’t book 3 weeks ahead of time, and for a mere Advantage Platinum person, there’s no chance of an upgrade. I do click through American’s website to request an upgrade every week -- more for the entertainment value than any expectation of getting a seat. This week, I was #35 on the upgrade list.</li>\n 	<li>The traffic between these 2 American hubs is pretty amazing. The first week of this commute, taking the 6:30p flight back to Chicago, it was a fully-packed 787 Dreamliner. So I’m thinking -- hey, I gotta have a good shot at an upgrade on this flight, with all the first and business class seats. Nope, though I did get up to the teens on the upgrade list -- #15 to be exact. I counted myself lucky to get out of a center seat at the last minute.</li>\n 	<li>I’m not a huge fan of DFW Airport. It’s a massive, spread-out place with a $4 toll charge to just to drive out of the place. The semi-circular terminals are also spread out affairs, with 3 security checkpoints arrayed around each perimeter, only one of which has PreCheck and really not well-marked. I tweeted that out in frustration a few weeks back after trundling around from checkpoint to checkpoint. The DFW Airport Twitter account quickly came back with a <a href=\"https://www.dfwairport.com/security/\">link</a> to their website that has the location and hours of each checkpoint, with the PreCheck one bolded. Very useful. I have bookmarked on my iPhone now.</li>\n 	<li>The next day, back in Chicago, I was downtown, getting a afternoon espresso jolt at Intelligentsia Coffee, not a completely full-on hipster joint -- there no turntable playing vintage vinyl -- but they are a bit fussy about their coffee. You place your order, they ask your name, and then you mill around a bit waiting for them to “craft” your coffee. I’m scrolling through e-mail, the barista is calling out names in the background. He calls out \"Marco\". Completely on reflex, my inner child responds \"Polo\" and not quietly or under my breath. The guy sitting across from me looks up from his MacBook and starts laughing. The guy getting his coffee, Marco, apparently, turns around and gives me a slightly nasty look. Or maybe just puzzled. Or more likely a bit of both.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/indidginus-seismic/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Superstring</a></em> by Indidginus</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul class=\"\">\n 	<li>Allan Marko, a long-time listener, posted a travel story on the TravelCommons Facebook page -\n<ul>\n 	<li>I flew from SFO to MUC with a colleague last month on UAL Business Class (my first trip on a 787 - nice plane, and decent service from the UA team) We had an early morning arrival, and an hour to kill before our transportation arrived. My colleague’s 1K status couldn’t get us into the Lufthansa Arrivals Lounge for showers. I pulled up the Priority Pass app on my iPhone (membership came with my Chase Sapphire Reserve Card) and saw there was an Atlantic Lounge over in Terminal 1 that had shower facilities. We took the bus over to Terminal 1 which serves many European, Middle East, and other second-tier airlines. Pulling out my physical Priority Pass card (as opposed to the one in the app) I got both of us into the lounge and their two shower rooms. The lounge only offered the basics and needed of refresh, but we were happy to find it that morning (including the free beer!).</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Allan, thanks for that, and good on you for figuring that all out. There are so many nooks and crannies in the card benefits world. There’s real value there, but you have to think about it and dig in a bit. The last time I used my Priority Pass (which I got with my Amex Platinum card) was last summer when I was connecting through DUB on my way to London. That lounge was similar to Allan’s MUC experience -- pretty basic, a bit threadbare, but a reasonable place for a cup of tea and breakfast. My son Andrew used his Priority Pass card (also from his Chase card) to get a $28 credit at a restaurant in BOS which paid for a pre-flight meal and a couple of beers. “For the two of us, I think we were due $56 credit, but we wanted to be able to board the plane, so we cut ourselves off.” A colleague of mine told me that, in LGA, after Amex’s Centurion Lounge closed, his UA Gold status got him into the Air Canada lounge to wait out the rest of a long flight delay. “I only thought they let in Star Alliance Gold passengers for international flights, but let me in for my LGA-ORD flight.” And then there’s things like the 10 Gogo in-flight WiFi passes that I get every year with my Platinum card that I never burn through, or the $200 in annual statement credit that I think I get on UA and am always surprised when I see the charge for the in-flight tapas box reversed. And I’m reminded that I gotta pay more attention to this stuff because I hate leaving money on the table.</li>\n 	<li>I will say that there are 2 good things about doing trunk line, hub-to-hub commute vs., say, my last regular commute, between ORD and Charlottesville, VA: great flight frequency -- between AA and UA, there’s a flight at most every hour and that’s not even looking at SWA’s schedule out of Love Field; and, no RJs, no regional jets. I had forgotten how nice it is to be able to stand up straight in the aisle, let alone in the toilet. I take happiness in the small things.</li>\n 	<li>I was talking to a colleague about this -- flying AA, and UA, and SWA based on the most convenient times and price, and then maybe equipment (avoiding those RJs when I can). He said “I’m always amazed at how promiscuous you are in your airline choices.” It was an interesting word choice; one that kinda speaks to how invested people can get in their travel choices. Though it can also be a bit of Stockholm Syndrome for folks who have to fly out of fortress hubs, like this colleague who is in a very conflicted relationship with United out of Newark. “I think you’re more right than me,” he said. He’s 1K on United, their top tier. I’m mid-tier on United and American. Comparing notes, he hasn’t gotten any more upgrades than me, and though I board after 1Ks (or Exec Platinums on AA), I haven’t yet had a problem finding overhead space, even on packed flights to DFW. I’ve said it before -- I don’t think there’s all that much difference between mid- and top-tier loyalty ranks; certainly not enough to take less convenient flights to earn the extra miles needed to stay top-tier.</li>\n 	<li>A study of US airport growth hit the TravelCommons inbox on Halloween, saying that the two airports with the biggest drop in traffic are Memphis and Cincinnati. We talked about this back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/08/09/podcast-143-how-bad-is-business-travel-for-your-health-make-layovers-fun/\">August episode</a> when I was flying in and out of Cincinnati for 4 weeks straight. Nice airport, but I said back then it felt a bit overbuilt, and how both it and Memphis felt empty after after being “de-hubbed” by Delta. I wasn’t wrong. This new survey ground through 10 years of FAA traffic data and came to the same conclusion. Memphis lost the most traffic, down 62%. Cincinnati was second, losing 51% of its traffic.</li>\n 	<li>So you can guess that neither made the Wall Street Journal’s ranking of the 20 largest US airports. Denver, Orlando and Phoenix at the top 3 finishers while the three NYC airports -- LaGuardia, JFK, and Newark -- brought up the rear, numbers 18, 19, and 20. Surprises? I dunno -- maybe that LaGuardia wasn’t in last place given all the construction disruptions, that LAX was higher at #9 than Minneapolis-St Paul at #11, and that O’Hare is one spot higher than San Francisco, 15 vs. 16. That’s probably as much to do with their methodology as anything - how they weighed all the different score components, things like on-time arrivals, average TSA wait, cost of on-prem parking, average ticket cost. It’s interesting, though, to compare this ranking with Skytrax’s ranking of global airports. Denver, the top US airport on both lists; at #28 on Skytrax’s list. Cincinnati is the second US airport on the Skytrax list at #34, which makes sense when you look at the methodologies. Skytrax is focused on the in-airport experience -- terminal seating, cleanliness, queue times, friendliness of staff. With these criteria, I don’t doubt that Cincinnati should rank high -- it’s probably helped by now being a bit overbuilt -- lots of space and fewer people to clean up after. The Journal’s is a bit more wide-ranging, looking both inside and outside the terminal, including things like average fares, rental-car taxes and fees, number of nonstop destinations and dominance of the largest airline to its rankings. I’ll put links to both in the show notes for those interesting in a deeper dive.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our new Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/yoria-suerte/\"><em>Suerte Mijo</em></a> by Arthur Yoria</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Rental Demolition Derby</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>I’ve rented a lot of cars in my business travel and have never crashed one. I drive them off the lot, use them for 3-4 days, fill them back up with gas, return them to the lot, and walk away. So when I picked up a car from Hertz at Edinburgh airport back in September, I skipped all the insurance coverages, took the keys to a brand new Toyota hybrid cross-over, and drove off the lot. This was my fourth September in a row renting from the Hertz and had never had an incident -- even when driving a manual on the left side of the road while shifting with my left hand -- well, other than a Fiat that dropped its transmission, but that wasn’t my fault. So, no need to waste the collision damage waiver charges.</li>\n 	<li>You can see where this is going. The next day, I was driving a narrow road in St Andrews, heading south out of town to go knock around the fishing villages on the north bank of the Firth of Forth. Roads in Scotland can get narrow. Driving the one-lane roads in the Highlands are an acquired talent, but this road is in a residential neighborhood, and I’ve driven it many times. So I couldn’t believe it when I heard a big thump as I drove past a van. Damn, I thought, had I drifted over to the left and popped the van’s rear view mirror? I pulled over and hopped out of the car. No, it was worse. There was a huge crease along the left side of the car; just missed the front wheel, so still driveable but very ugly. I walked down to the van. It belonged to a nearby community center. In a hurry to pick up kids from school, the driver had pulled out into me as I drove past. I pulled out an accident report form that Hertz had helpfully put in the glove compartment. We filled it out, skipped calling the police since no one was hurt.</li>\n 	<li>So, again, not my fault, but I’m still, a few days later, I’m turning in a car with a full tank and some extra body work. I point out the damage to the Hertz guy. He pulls up a different tab on his Samsung tablet -- click, click, click -- damage, front left wing; damage, front left door; damage, rear left door -- took a couple of pictures, and because I’d skipped the CDW, out burped the bill -- £780 or about $1,000. They ran it through on my Chase Sapphire Visa card.</li>\n 	<li>Which I gave to Hertz because, as I was poking through the nooks and crannies of the Chase website before I left home, I confirmed that card would cover UK rental car damage for rentals charged to it. The next week, back home, I found where to file a claim. They didn’t make it easy, but Google eventually uncovered it. I created a claim, uploaded a scan of the accident report, the Hertz receipt, and a couple of iPhone pictures of the damage. And then waited. The website said they’d take 2 weeks to review and get back to me. Three weeks later, I called. A guy said they’d sent me an email asking for two more documents from Hertz. Hmmm, never saw that, but who knows what gets caught up in the Spam filtering. They wanted a copy of the original Hertz agreement, which I had left in the car, and Hertz’s repair cost breakdown. OK, that was reasonable. I called Hertz and a very helpful woman put in a request and said get it in a week. Within a couple of days, Hertz sent me what I needed. I uploaded them to my claim and waited another 2 weeks. On Day 2 Weeks + 1, I called. A woman looked at my file, said it was still being reviewed by management, but said she’s put me on hold and ring them for status. Two minutes later, she picked up and they’d approved my claim. 48 hours later, the $1,000 showed up in my bank account. It took me a bit over 2 months, but Chase paid my claim with a minimum amount of hassle.</li>\n 	<li>Now, while I’ve had a good rental car record in Scotland, my record in Hungary is not quite clean. Indeed, every time I’ve driven there, it’s been something. The last time I drove, we were a couple of blocks away from the rental return next to the Marriott on the Danube. Pulling into an intersection after stopping at a Stop sign, a motorcycle messenger plowed into the front of my car, flew across the hood, and landed in the street on the other side of the intersection. Luckily, he was in a full helmet and leathers and unhurt. The rental car, not so lucky. The entire front end was ripped off. The rental car guy showed up as the police were finishing their report. I pulled out suitcases out of the trunk and gave him the key. He looked at the front of his car in disbelief. We wheeled our bags down the sidewalk to the Marriott because this time, I had bought the collision damage waiver.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/artemis-gravity/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Inception</a></em> by Artemis</li>\n</ul>\n<b>Traveler Gift&nbsp;Guide</b>\n<ul>\n 	<li>As we come into the Christmas shopping season, I thought it would be useful to pull together some suggestions for the frequent traveler in your life. Or, if you are the frequent traveler, a list of hints you might want to drop on family members looking for ideas.</li>\n 	<li>Top of the list is a good battery charger. Whatever the size or form factor -- slimline, lipstick, high-capacity brick -- having that second or third charge readily available is critical to get notified of gate changes and when you’re using electronic boarding passes. It saves you from stalking cleaning crews to find a live power outlet on your layover, or negotiating with your seatmate for possession of outlet between you. I’m always looking to shed weight, so I retired the heavy no-name pack I picked up in the depths of Beijing’s Pearl Street Market for an Anker lipstick sized charger. I bought three and gave one to my wife and daughter. It’s cheap piece of mind.</li>\n 	<li>On my shopping list, trying to catch up to what’s already a cold winter, is one of those puffy coats -- but one of the thin ones, like the Patagonia Nano Puff, one that will smoosh down to nothing in the front pocket of my suitcase, or will fit in the crevices of a jammed full overhead bin. Right next that on the list, a man’s scarf is an incredibly undervalued piece of intermediate winter wear. In an airplane cabin or hotel room where a coat is too much (especially in a middle seat), but there’s a draft that chills you, a scarf around the neck is just enough without being too much. You may have to teach him how to wear it, but you can have fun with colors.</li>\n 	<li>For someone just embarking on the road warrior life, how ‘bout a black 20-inch hardsided carry-on. Black not only makes you look thinner, it makes your bag look thinner to gate agents hunting for bag-sizer bait. Black also doesn’t show stains. A 20-incher should get on-board for 90% of airlines, and the hard sides are the easiest to get in and out of a bag sizer if the not-yet-statused traveler gets waylaid by an over-zealous gate agent.</li>\n 	<li>If you’re going big for someone -- or for those December babies, combining Christmas and birthday gifts -- noise canceling headphones are a statement gift. The good ones -- the Bose or Sonys that make the drone of the jet engines disappear with the flick of a switch -- are a $300 number. But the drop in stress level and blood pressure that accompanies that flick of the switch -- you don’t realize how much that drone affects you until you turn on your Bose -- makes it worth the number. Everything in my briefcase has to earn its space. I’ve been carrying Bose headphones for, I dunno, 10, 15 years. They’re nowhere near compact, but I’ve never thought of leaving them behind.</li>\n 	<li>Another idea for the music -- or podcast lover, is a small portable Bluetooth speaker. I’ve started packing mine again for trips of a week or longer. For a couple of days, I’m fine with wearing headphones or using the phone speaker. But longer than that or if I’m with the family in, say, an Airbnb, I want something a bit more social. I’m still using my 6-year old Jambox speaker, the one that kinda created this category. The maker, Jawbone, went under last year, but the speaker still works. There are newer, better ones out there now, at all sorts of price points. The ones that can act as speaker phones are a nice to-have if they fit your budget.</li>\n 	<li>And finally, a stocking stuffer idea -- a travel notebook, something to jot down thoughts, ideas, observations, to do lists while waiting for the flight to board, the train to come, or the room to be made up. Nothing extravagant -- no leather embossed cover -- but it should be small enough to fit in a pocket, but substantial, something that can survive being knocked around in the bottom of a briefcase, and with paper quality that will hold onto those thoughts for a while. I used to use a Moleskine 3½x5½” notebook but have switched over a similar-sized A6 Clairefontaine. The soft cover fits better in a jeans back pocket, and the paper is more fountain-pen friendly. It’s $10 for a Moleskine, $7 for two Clairefontaines. Or go a bit more whimsical and get a 3-pack of Field Notes for $13. It’ll fit your budget and the stocking.</li>\n 	<li>So there you go, something to fit all sizes and budgets in time for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, or if you’re just killing time waiting for your Thanksgiving flight to leave.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #146</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and now on <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Magnatune</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_146.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #146 — Rental Demolition Derby; Traveler Gift Guide','','inherit','closed','closed','','2167-revision-v1','','','2019-06-16 22:34:11','2019-06-17 03:34:11','',2167,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/06/16/2167-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2494,1,'2019-07-26 22:05:11','2019-07-27 03:05:11','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\">\n<p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Cracked-mirror-square.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2482 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Cracked-mirror-square-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a></p><figcaption>What\'s Behind Me Is Not Important</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>Going upscale, recording in the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/1871Chicago/photos/we-have-a-new-podcast-studio-big-thanks-to-1871-company-parkergale-capital-for-h/1116900888351884/\">podcast studio</a> at the <a href=\"https://1871.com/\">1871 tech incubator</a> in Chicago, I talk about my surprising smooth 2-week trip in Ireland and Scotland. We also note the retirement (finally!) of American Airlines\' MD-80 jet, a very interesting new social media app, talk about how algorithms are changing the way we travel, and the melancholy of leaving familiar places for the last time.&nbsp; All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_153.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #153: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the podcast studio in the 1871 tech incubator in Chicago, IL. I have to say that this is the most professional studio I’ve recorded in since my high-school radio days in Memphis. I mentor here once a month and so get to use this bang-up studio. This sound ought to be phenomenal. It’s a few weeks after our 2-week Celtic jaunt -- a week touring in Ireland and a week of graduation festivities at University of St Andrews in Scotland. I’ve talked a bit about the planning for this trip in the past couple of episodes -- wrestling through the Avios website to kludge together flights on Aer Lingus and burn off some of my Avios balance that’s been sitting around for, I dunno, 5-10 years; and trying to sift through the horror stories of Irish car rentals. There were a whole lot of places where this trip could’ve gone bad… but it didn’t. The flights on Aer Lingus were fine; nothing special, but they were serviceable. Our Budget Car rental experience was the same -- a basic Renault compact with 30,000 km on it, but no issues with the folks on either the pick-up or the drop-off in Dublin airport. All the places I booked in Ireland were fine -- the B&amp;Bs on the west coast were great; the hotel in Dublin was, again, serviceable. And, we didn’t really have any rain to speak of until our last day in Dublin.</li><li>The flights between Dublin and Edinburgh were on turboprop planes -- ATR-72-600s to be exact. I can’t remember the last time I was on a prop plane -- even the quick 30-min hops I’d do occasionally between IAD and CHO are on Embraer jets. But I remember way back in my early flying days, American Eagle used to fly a lot of these ATRs. Once those props started turning, I popped on my Bose noise-cancelling headphones. Those American Eagle ATRs were one of the main reasons I invested in my first pair of Bose.</li><li>But other than a bit of a rainy walk to and from that plane in DUB and EDI, they were fine flights. Indeed, if there was any hiccup, it was on arrival in DUB from ORD.  We’d checked luggage, even though one of my regular top travel tips is to carry on. I knew the plane was full, and since Aer Lingus isn’t part of OneWorld or StarAlliance, neither my American nor my United status was going to get us pre-boarded. Rather than worrying about having to jockey for overhead space, we checked our bags - and anyways, it was free; it was included in the fare. So, low-hassle boarding. In DUB, I stood at the luggage carousel, watched it heave out a dozen or so bags, and then nothing. No worries; seen that before; the guys must be driving the tug back to the plane. And then the carousel stopped. Not too worried; seen that before too; just saving a little energy. And then the lights above us went out.  OK, this is a new one. I have to say that I started to worry a bit -- until I saw our pilot also looking around for his luggage. After 20 minutes, the lights came on and the carousel started burping up bags again. And there was a simultaneous sigh of relief from all the chaperones accompanying the half-dozen student trips that had packed this flight.</li><li> Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/Loveshadow/26219\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><em>SP*ANK Vox</em></a> by Loveshadow (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/Loveshadow/26219 </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Biggest travel news -- at least to me -- since the last episode -- American announced the retirement (finally!) of the last of its MD-80s, the “Super 80s” or the “Mad Dog 80s” with the last revenue flight planned for Sept 4th from DFW to ORD. Which for me is very apropos because I spent a <em>lot</em> of time in the mid-80\'s flying MD-80\'s between those two AA hubs. I thought the 737 Max grounding might delay the final MD-80 flight, but it looks like American has scrounged up enough 737-800s to fill the gap. I posted American’s announcement on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page. Jim McDonough commented - “Flew the Mad Dog many, many times. My wife and I would select row 9 on the 2 seat side, flying, usually, DFW/SAN. She’s tiny, so I felt like I was in first class.” The left-hand 2-seat side was great for couples -- got a window and an aisle seat without having to guess if the center seat would be filled. But then you had to deal with the short overhead bins on that side where you could only fit your bag in sideways, and usually no power supply. The cigarette style power adapters were on the other side, the 3-seat side, but only in every <em>other</em> row. It was a unique plane...</li><li>Back in May, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/podcast-151-traveler-data-leaks-brittany-street-food/\">episode 151</a>, TravelCommons listener Mika Pyyhkala sent in a note about his great experience with a flight rebooking service, Freebird. This week, I was booking a trip to CHO on the Amex Travel site with my Platinum card. At the end of the booking, it offered me free Freebird coverage for the trip. I had to check a box to opt in, so I read the fine print closely to make sure it was really free, but it was. Seems Freebird and Amex are doing a free trial. Don’t know how long it lasts, but I’ll opt in -- with the hope that I don’t actually have to use it.</li><li>Some bits ‘n’ bobs observations from my Ireland-Scotland trip…</li><li>Like so many other folks, I’m carrying my own water bottle on flights. I started last fall. The big Amazon Web Services conference gave everyone a refillable water bottle, replacing barrels of iced single-use water bottles with refilling stations. Most airports now have refilling spigots next to regular water fountains. Irene has carried one forever. It came in handy when Aer Lingus wanted to charge her €3 for water on one of our flights. Now, I lost that original AWS water bottles a few months back -- matching my usual 6-month time-before-loss metric. No big deal; it was just a plastic bottle with a screw-on cap. But I wanted a new one. So for Fathers’ Day, Claire gave me a new souped-up 20 oz. water bottle with a push-button pop-up drinking spout and a carabiner loop -- very nice. I pulled it out during one of our Aer Lingus flights, skipping their €3 charge, hit the button for the spout and immediately get hit square between the eyes with a fat stream of water from my bottle-now-turned-water fountain. Apparently this new fancy water bottle seals airtight, meaning the water in the bottle stayed at ground pressure while our cabin was now lower, at something between 6 and 8,000 ft. I’m used to that with foil-sealed yogurts, but not my water bottle. A surprise not just for me, but also the Irish guy next to me who was napping before he caught some shrapnel from my portable water cannon.</li><li>One of the things I look forward to when staying at bed-&amp;-breakfasts in the UK and Ireland are… the breakfasts. And the breakfasts we had in Ireland were at least one order of magnitude better than the best concierge lounge fare at a Marriott -- which may be damning with faint praise, but I don’t mean to, we had great breakfasts. For most of our time on the west coast, we hubbed out of Galway, staying in the same place for 3 nights, or more importantly, 3 breakfasts. The first morning was easy; the full cooked breakfast -- eggs, bacon, sausage, black and white pudding, tomatoes, mushrooms, baked beans, and toast. We were doing a good bit of hiking that day and I wasn’t hungry until 3. Doing that two days in a row, though, felt like I was tempting fate -- or at least an arterial blockage. So the next morning, I went with the healthier choice -- oatmeal porridge. The presentation is pretty typical -- a big bowl of porridge with little cups of raisins, brown sugar, and cream. I mix in the raisins, a touch of the brown sugar, and a bit of the cream to loosen up the porridge. Except it doesn’t smell like cream. I taste it -- it’s Bailey\'s Irish Cream. I dump the rest of it in. I figure porridge with a Bailey’s topper is kinda the Irish version of a Bloody Mary.</li><li>One of the big differences for me between renting a car in the US and in Europe is the pre-car inspection. You get the keys, the rental agreement, and a form showing the condition of the car before you take if off the lot -- pre-existing dings and scratches. I always give this form to Irene -- she’s much pickier than I am. She walks around the car, making note of anything missing, while I figure out the rear-view mirrors and pairing my iPhone to the entertainment system. So I was kinda surprised to get an e-mail from Hertz before getting on our flight to EDI with a bunch of pictures of a Kia wagon. Here was our car; here was the documentation of its condition. We walked straight to the car, loaded up the luggage and drove off. No walkaround inspection. It makes sense. We had gotten to the point, on our last couple of rentals, where we were taking pictures of dings and scratches as well as marking them on the form. Now here, Hertz was doing it for us. Not sure if I got this because I have Hertz Gold, but it certainly was a big improvement in the rental experience -- though I still had to figure out how to pair my phone.</li><li>The timing on international connections in Europe always feels a little bit of a crap shoot because there doesn’t seem to be a consistent rule about having to pass thru security again. Amsterdam, no security. Frankfurt, no security for a European connection, but security if you’re flying to, say, India or the Middle East. London, security every time, maybe even a couple of additional passes just for kicks. Dublin, though, had a new twist. Go thru the usual drill -- pull out your electronics, take off your belt, push your bags thru the X-ray machine, but then -- where’s the metal detector? Just walk past the security guy and put my PC back in my bag. I looked back. There was a metal detector all the way at the end of the security hall, but only one. The rest of us were acting like we were walking thru a metal detector, except there wasn’t one. That was just odd.</li><li>We were in Scotland for Claire’s graduation from University of St Andrews. Hanging around, drinking beer with folks a couple of generations younger than you -- this group was right on the Millennial/Gen Z boundary -- is always an educational experience. But when the conversation turned to their new favorite app -- <a href=\"https://apps.apple.com/us/app/poop-map-pin-and-track/id1303269455\">Poop</a> <a href=\"https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.poopmap&amp;hl=en_US\">Map</a> -- I thought they were leading this old guy on. An app where you and your friends share the places you’ve pooped, complete with star ratings and comments, seemed too much like an Onion headline -- social media taken to the absurd extreme. Except is wasn’t satire; it was real. They all pulled out their phones, fired up the app, and showed me their check-ins. OK, then. But I think checking in beers on Untappd is as far as I want to go.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com. </li><li>Bridge Music —  &nbsp;<em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/trifonic/445\" target=\"_blank\">Bored on Your Backside</a></em> by Trifonic     </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Travel by Algorithm</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>On the rainy Monday we flew from DUB to EDI, I drove us downtown to meet some friends for the day. The rain was beginning to muck up traffic, so I was kinda glued to Google Maps to help route us around some of the traffic tie ups, which meant we weren’t on the usual route take in from the airport, which meant I was just about completely dependent on Google; completely trusting that algorithm. Which was kinda broken when I followed Google’s directions through a warning sign and onto a “Buses Only” road. Google directed me to keep driving down the road, but since I was only a single-decker Kia wagon, I didn’t think any attempt to masquerade as a bus was going to survive our first police encounter. So I took the first left (much easier when driving on the left side of the road) hoping the algorithm would produce a bit more legal routing.</li><li>Not overly shocking. There have been a steady stream of stories for years about GPSs leading people astray -- this was a topic way back in the early days of&nbsp; TravelCommons, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2006/05/04/podcast-38-the-accidental-vacation-trusting-travel-technology/\">episode #36</a> in 2006 to be exact, when they were called SatNavs, I told the story of making a dash to SFO after a sales meeting. I’m riding shotgun, tracking our progress on a one of those <em>paper</em> maps that Hertz used to put in every car. But we also had a Hertz NeverLost. It seemed about 10 seconds slow to me. I spotted our turn on I-580, but Hertz said nothing. “Turn,” I said. “No,” Brian said, “You need to trust the technology.” And so when Hertz said to turn 10 seconds later, he did -- right into a gas station. Not as bad as stories of people driving across closed bridges, into rivers, up unpaved mountain roads… But in the subsequent 13 years, with SatNav, now GPS, moving from our cars to our pockets, we’re lean on those algorithms more than ever. Now living in Chicago, I haven’t bothered to learn any of the public transit routes; I just use Google Maps or the Transit app to tell me what bus to catch when.</li><li>Sometimes I’ll use Hipmunk to look at flight options to a new city, or a place I haven’t been in a while. They promote their Agony sort, where their algorithm rates flight by a combination of price, duration, # of stops, and dependability. I’m heading back to CHO and since I haven’t been out there for 6 months, I hit Hipmunk to check out American’s and United’s current flight offerings, scrolled down from the non-stops thru the 1-stops. I thought it was interesting, though, that Hipmunk’s algorithm scored a 24-hr hour Amtrak ride with a 3-hr layover in DC’s Union Station as less agonizing than a 6-hr 2-stop trip on United Express with connections in Columbus and IAD. But given some of my United Express experiences, who am I to second-guess that algorithm?</li><li>One of the things I liked about the soon-to-be-turned-off Google Trips app, is how it would auto-magically generate itinerary recommendations for a city. It would pick out points of interest with high Google review scores, and then combine the hours each would be open from the business listing with the typical amount of time people would stay there, and location and traffic data from Google Maps to generate the best itinerary. This fascinated me. It sucked my into a click hole of academic papers presented at the International Conference on the Practice and Theory of Automated Timetabling and the International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining talking about how the “Tourist Trip Design Problem (TTDP) is a route-planning problem on multiple Points of Interest. TTDP can be considered as an extension of the classical problem of Team Orienteering Problem with Time Windows.” I want to use this to automatically generate microbrewery taproom crawls but the math made my eyes bleed.</li><li>But back to that rainy day in Edinburgh, Google Maps redeemed itself at the end of the day. There was so much rain that Monday, our usual path out of the city, the A90, was at a complete standstill because of flooded underpasses, and stalled cars that tried to make it thru the flooded underpasses. Google Maps guided us past a gridlocked traffic circle, winding us through some apartment complexes, bypassing the flooded parts, and putting us right onto the M90 so we could head out to St Andrews. Better travel through algorithms.</li><li>Bridge Music —   &nbsp; <em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/hepepe/21074\" target=\"_blank\">Bogi Beat Budapest</a> </em>by KarmaHacker  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Leaving Places Behind</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Driving out of St Andrews that last time was a bit melancholy. We’d spent the last 4 September there, saw things change -- restaurants open and close, Edinburgh airport get spiffier -- but also the familiar things stay the same -- <a href=\"http://keysbar.co.uk/\">The Keys</a>, my favorite dive whisky bar; <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"St Andrews Brewing Company (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.standrewsbrewingcompany.com/\" target=\"_blank\">St Andrews Brewing Company</a> or “Stabco” as my daughter would call it, always with a great beer selection from across the UK; and <a href=\"https://jahangirstandrews.co.uk/\">Jahangir</a>, an Indian restaurant we found our first year because they were the only place we could find a table that Friday night... and we kept going back because they had great food and we never couldn’t get a table</li><li>The melancholy was that we probably wouldn’t be back; at least not for a long time. It’s out-of-the-way -- which is part of its charm, but it’s why we probably won’t be back for a while.</li><li>I felt the same way when I finished a project in Portland, Oregon some years back. I was in Portland every week for 3-4 months and got to know it pretty well. I explored new places, but developed some favorite spots I’d hit every week -- <a href=\"https://www.clydecommon.com/\">Clyde Commons</a> for dinner at the bar, <a href=\"https://www.baileystaproom.com/\">Bailey’s Taproom</a> with a new beer selection every week. When that project ended, I knew I wouldn’t be back to Portland for a long time -- as opposed to New York or San Francisco. Wrapping up a project there, not really a big deal because there’s enough business to bring me back. New Orleans was kinda in the middle. I’d been there almost non-stop for 3-4 years, but while I didn’t think business would bring me down there again, it’s not out of the way, and I’d be down often for vacations or conventions -- which is how it’s turned out.</li><li>Some of that melancholy comes from regret -- from things you always meant to do but never made time for -- “I’ll do that next time,” you’d say to yourself, but never get to it. The last time I was in Charlottesville, VA, I was finishing up what had been another 3-4 year stream of work and wasn’t sure when I’d be back. For me, Charlottesville was a bit like St Andrews, an out-of-the-way college town (though only a 2-hr flight from Chicago rather than an 8-10 hour fly-and-drive) and wasn’t sure when -- if ever -- I’d get back. Over those years, I’d always plan to take a half-day and drive the 15 minutes from the client to <a href=\"https://www.monticello.org/\">Monticello</a>, Thomas Jefferson’s home, and take the tour. It’s always written up as a must-see, and I’m right here. But every time I was going to do it, something would come up, and I’d say “I’ll do that next time.” And so here I was, the last time -- I didn’t know when the next time would be. And I really didn’t have much time in my schedule, but after lunch one day, I walked out, taking calls all the way to the Monticello parking lot, and then turned off my phone and had a great tour. And flew out the next morning without that regret.&nbsp;</li><li>But now 6 months later, I’m heading back to Charlottesville. So maybe I’ll get back to St Andrews sooner than I thought. Maybe I should see if <a href=\"https://www.standrewsbrewingcompany.com/\">Stabco</a> needs an old-guy bartender.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #153</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_153.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #153 — Travel By Algorithm; Leaving Places Behind','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-153-travel-by-algorithm-leaving-places-behind','','','2022-03-28 09:05:31','2022-03-28 14:05:31','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=2494',0,'post','',0),
(2496,1,'2019-07-27 17:36:09','2019-07-27 22:36:09','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\">\n<p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/IMG_0449.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2482 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/IMG_0449-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a></p>\n<figcaption>Latest in Sustainable Food Delivery </figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p>Moving the TravelCommons studios kept me mostly off the road this month except for a quick trip to Nashville, but staying out of restaurants has helped me finally drop the last bit of Christmas weight. We talk about the \"earn and burn\" strategy for frequent travel awards; answer a listener\'s question on how to keep from being overwhelmed when arriving in a new city, and new restaurant trends from the floor of the National Restaurant Association\'s big show. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_153.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/637754409&color=%23ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #153: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the podcast studio in the 1871 tech incubator in Chicago, IL. I have to say that this is the most professional studio I’ve recorded in since my high-school radio days in Memphis. I mentor here once a month and so get to use this bang-up studio. This sound ought to be phenomenal. It’s a few weeks after our 2-week Celtic jaunt -- a week touring in Ireland and a week of graduation festivities at University of St Andrews in Scotland. I’ve talked a bit about the planning for this trip in the past couple of episodes -- wrestling through the Avios website to kludge together flights on Aer Lingus and burn off some of my Avios balance that’s been sitting around for, I dunno, 5-10 years; and trying to sift through the horror stories of Irish car rentals. There were a whole lot of places where this trip could’ve gone bad… but it didn’t. The flights on Aer Lingus were fine; nothing special, but they were serviceable. Our Budget Car rental experience was the same -- a basic Renault compact with 30,000 km on it, but no issues with the folks on either the pick-up or the drop-off in Dublin airport. All the places I booked in Ireland were fine -- the B&amp;Bs on the west coast were great; the hotel in Dublin was, again, serviceable. And, we didn’t really have any rain to speak of until our last day in Dublin.</li><li>The flights between Dublin and Edinburgh were on turboprop planes -- ATR-72-600s to be exact. I can’t remember the last time I was on a prop plane -- even the quick 30-min hops I’d do occasionally between IAD and CHO are on Embraer jets. But I remember way back in my early flying days, American Eagle used to fly a lot of these ATRs. Once those props started turning, I popped on my Bose noise-cancelling headphones. Those American Eagle ATRs were one of the main reasons I invested in my first pair of Bose.</li><li>But other than a bit of a rainy walk to and from that plane in DUB and EDI, they were fine flights. Indeed, if there was any hiccup, it was on arrival in DUB from ORD.  We’d checked luggage, even though one of my regular top travel tips is to carry on. I knew the plane was full, and since Aer Lingus isn’t part of OneWorld or StarAlliance, neither my American nor my United status was going to get us pre-boarded. Rather than worrying about having to jockey for overhead space, we checked our bags - and anyways, it was free; it was included in the fare. So, low-hassle boarding. In DUB, I stood at the luggage carousel, watched it heave out a dozen or so bags, and then nothing. No worries; seen that before; the guys must be driving the tug back to the plane. And then the carousel stopped. Not too worried; seen that before too; just saving a little energy. And then the lights above us went out.  OK, this is a new one. I have to say that I started to worry a bit -- until I saw our pilot also looking around for his luggage. After 20 minutes, the lights came on and the carousel started burping up bags again. And there was a simultaneous sigh of relief from all the chaperones accompanying the half-dozen student trips that had packed this flight.</li><li>Bridge Music —  <em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/content/Per/Per_-_DLDN_Instrumental.mp3\" target=\"_blank\">DLDN Instrumental</a></em> by St Paul</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Biggest travel news -- at least to me -- since the last episode -- American announced the retirement (finally!) of the last of its MD-80s, the “Super 80s” or the “Mad Dog 80s” with the last revenue flight planned for Sept 4th from DFW to ORD. Which for me is very apropos because I spent a <em>lot</em> of time in the mid-80\'s flying MD-80\'s between those two AA hubs. I thought the 737 Max grounding might delay the final MD-80 flight, but it looks like American has scrounged up enough 737-800s to fill the gap. I posted American’s announcement on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page. Jim McDonough commented - “Flew the Mad Dog many, many times. My wife and I would select row 9 on the 2 seat side, flying, usually, DFW/SAN. She’s tiny, so I felt like I was in first class.” The left-hand 2-seat side was great for couples -- got a window and an aisle seat without having to guess if the center seat would be filled. But then you had to deal with the short overhead bins on that side where you could only fit your bag in sideways, and usually no power supply. The cigarette style power adapters were on the other side, the 3-seat side, but only in every <em>other</em> row. It was a unique plane...</li><li>Back in May, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/podcast-151-traveler-data-leaks-brittany-street-food/\">episode 151</a>, TravelCommons listener Mika Pyyhkala sent in a note about his great experience with a flight rebooking service, Freebird. This week, I was booking a trip to CHO on the Amex Travel site with my Platinum card. At the end of the booking, it offered me free Freebird coverage for the trip. I had to check a box to opt in, so I read the fine print closely to make sure it was really free, but it was. Seems Freebird and Amex are doing a free trial. Don’t know how long it lasts, but I’ll opt in -- with the hope that I don’t actually have to use it.</li><li>Some bits ‘n’ bobs observations from my Ireland-Scotland trip…</li><li>Like so many other folks, I’m carrying my own water bottle on flights. I started last fall. The big Amazon Web Services conference gave everyone a refillable water bottle, replacing barrels of iced single-use water bottles with refilling stations. Most airports now have refilling spigots next to regular water fountains. Irene has carried one forever. It came in handy when Aer Lingus wanted to charge her €3 for water on one of our flights. Now, I lost that original AWS water bottles a few months back -- matching my usual 6-month time-before-loss metric. No big deal; it was just a plastic bottle with a screw-on cap. But I wanted a new one. So for Fathers’ Day, Claire gave me a new souped-up 20 oz. water bottle with a push-button pop-up drinking spout and a carabiner loop -- very nice. I pulled it out during one of our Aer Lingus flights, skipping their €3 charge, hit the button for the spout and immediately get hit square between the eyes with a fat stream of water from my bottle-now-turned-water fountain. Apparently this new fancy water bottle seals airtight, meaning the water in the bottle stayed at ground pressure while our cabin was now lower, at something between 6 and 8,000 ft. I’m used to that with foil-sealed yogurts, but not my water bottle. A surprise not just for me, but also the Irish guy next to me who was napping before he caught some shrapnel from my portable water cannon.</li><li>One of the things I look forward to when staying at bed-&amp;-breakfasts in the UK and Ireland are… the breakfasts. And the breakfasts we had in Ireland were at least one order of magnitude better than the best concierge lounge fare at a Marriott -- which may be damning with faint praise, but I don’t mean to, we had great breakfasts. For most of our time on the west coast, we hubbed out of Galway, staying in the same place for 3 nights, or more importantly, 3 breakfasts. The first morning was easy; the full cooked breakfast -- eggs, bacon, sausage, black and white pudding, tomatoes, mushrooms, baked beans, and toast. We were doing a good bit of hiking that day and I wasn’t hungry until 3. Doing that two days in a row, though, felt like I was tempting fate -- or at least an arterial blockage. So the next morning, I went with the healthier choice -- oatmeal porridge. The presentation is pretty typical -- a big bowl of porridge with little cups of raisins, brown sugar, and cream. I mix in the raisins, a touch of the brown sugar, and a bit of the cream to loosen up the porridge. Except it doesn’t smell like cream. I taste it -- it’s Bailey\'s Irish Cream. I dump the rest of it in. I figure porridge with a Bailey’s topper is kinda the Irish version of a Bloody Mary.</li><li>One of the big differences for me between renting a car in the US and in Europe is the pre-car inspection. You get the keys, the rental agreement, and a form showing the condition of the car before you take if off the lot -- pre-existing dings and scratches. I always give this form to Irene -- she’s much pickier than I am. She walks around the car, making note of anything missing, while I figure out the rear-view mirrors and pairing my iPhone to the entertainment system. So I was kinda surprised to get an e-mail from Hertz before getting on our flight to EDI with a bunch of pictures of a Kia wagon. Here was our car; here was the documentation of its condition. We walked straight to the car, loaded up the luggage and drove off. No walkaround inspection. It makes sense. We had gotten to the point, on our last couple of rentals, where we were taking pictures of dings and scratches as well as marking them on the form. Now here, Hertz was doing it for us. Not sure if I got this because I have Hertz Gold, but it certainly was a big improvement in the rental experience -- though I still had to figure out how to pair my phone.</li><li>The timing on international connections in Europe always feels a little bit of a crap shoot because there doesn’t seem to be a consistent rule about having to pass thru security again. Amsterdam, no security. Frankfurt, no security for a European connection, but security if you’re flying to, say, India or the Middle East. London, security every time, maybe even a couple of additional passes just for kicks. Dublin, though, had a new twist. Go thru the usual drill -- pull out your electronics, take off your belt, push your bags thru the X-ray machine, but then -- where’s the metal detector? Just walk past the security guy and put my PC back in my bag. I looked back. There was a metal detector all the way at the end of the security hall, but only one. The rest of us were acting like we were walking thru a metal detector, except there wasn’t one. That was just odd.</li><li>We were in Scotland for Claire’s graduation from University of St Andrews. Hanging around, drinking beer with folks a couple of generations younger than you -- this group was right on the Millennial/Gen Z boundary -- is always an educational experience. But when the conversation turned to their new favorite app -- Poop Map -- I thought they were leading this old guy on. An app where you and your friends share the places you’ve pooped, complete with star ratings and comments, seemed too much like an Onion headline -- social media taken to the absurd extreme. Except is wasn’t satire; it was real. They all pulled out their phones, fired up the app, and showed me their check-ins. OK, then. But I think checking in beers on Untappd is as far as I want to go.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com. </li><li>Bridge Music —   <em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/content/oldDog/oldDog_-_Goodbye_sooner_or_later.mp3\" target=\"_blank\">Goodbye Sooner or Later</a></em> by oldDog    </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Travel by Algorithm</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>On the rainy Monday we flew from DUB to EDI, I drove us downtown to meet some friends for the day. The rain was beginning to muck up traffic, so I was kinda glued to Google Maps to help route us around some of the traffic tie ups, which meant we weren’t on the usual route take in from the airport, which meant I was just about completely dependent on Google; completely trusting that algorithm. Which was kinda broken when I followed Google’s directions through a warning sign and onto a “Buses Only” road. Google directed me to keep driving down the road, but since I was only a single-decker Kia wagon, I didn’t think any attempt to masquerade as a bus was going to survive our first police encounter. So I took the first left (much easier when driving on the left side of the road) hoping the algorithm would produce a bit more legal routing.</li><li>Not overly shocking. There have been a steady stream of stories for years about GPSs leading people astray -- this was a topic way back in the early days of  TravelCommons, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2006/05/04/podcast-38-the-accidental-vacation-trusting-travel-technology/\">episode #36</a> in 2006 to be exact, when they were called SatNavs, I told the story of making a dash to SFO after a sales meeting. I’m riding shotgun, tracking our progress on a one of those <em>paper</em> maps that Hertz used to put in every car. But we also had a Hertz NeverLost. It seemed about 10 seconds slow to me. I spotted our turn on I-580, but Hertz said nothing. “Turn,” I said. “No,” Brian said, “You need to trust the technology.” And so when Hertz said to turn 10 seconds later, he did -- right into a gas station. Not as bad as stories of people driving across closed bridges, into rivers, up unpaved mountain roads… But in the subsequent 13 years, with SatNav, now GPS, moving from our cars to our pockets, we’re lean on those algorithms more than ever. Now living in Chicago, I haven’t bothered to learn any of the public transit routes; I just use Google Maps or the Transit app to tell me what bus to catch when.</li><li>Sometimes I’ll use Hipmunk to look at flight options to a new city, or a place I haven’t been in a while. They promote their Agony sort, where their algorithm rates flight by a combination of price, duration, # of stops, and dependability. I’m heading back to CHO and since I haven’t been out there for 6 months, I hit Hipmunk to check out American’s and United’s current flight offerings, scrolled down from the non-stops thru the 1-stops. I thought it was interesting, though, that Hipmunk’s algorithm scored a 24-hr hour Amtrak ride with a 3-hr layover in DC’s Union Station as less agonizing than a 6-hr 2-stop trip on United Express with connections in Columbus and IAD. But given some of my United Express experiences, who am I to second-guess that algorithm?</li><li>One of the things I liked about the soon-to-be-turned-off Google Trips app, is how it would auto-magically generate itinerary recommendations for a city. It would pick out points of interest with high Google review scores, and then combine the hours each would be open from the business listing with the typical amount of time people would stay there, and location and traffic data from Google Maps to generate the best itinerary. This fascinated me. It sucked my into a click hole of academic papers presented at the International Conference on the Practice and Theory of Automated Timetabling and the International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining talking about how the “Tourist Trip Design Problem (TTDP) is a route-planning problem on multiple Points of Interest. TTDP can be considered as an extension of the classical problem of Team Orienteering Problem with Time Windows.” I want to use this to automatically generate microbrewery taproom crawls but the math made my eyes bleed.</li><li>But back to that rainy day in Edinburgh, Google Maps redeemed itself at the end of the day. There was so much rain that Monday, our usual path out of the city, the A90, was at a complete standstill because of flooded underpasses, and stalled cars that tried to make it thru the flooded underpasses. Google Maps guided us past a gridlocked traffic circle, winding us through some apartment complexes, bypassing the flooded parts, and putting us right onto the M90 so we could head out to St Andrews. Better travel through algorithms.</li><li>Bridge Music —    <em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/content/Zapac/Zapac_-_Test_Drive.mp3\" target=\"_blank\">Test Drive</a> </em>by Zapac </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Leaving Places Behind</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Driving out of St Andrews that last time was a bit melancholy. We’d spent the last 4 September there, saw things change -- restaurants open and close, Edinburgh airport get spiffier -- but also the familiar things stay the same -- <a href=\"http://keysbar.co.uk/\">The Keys</a>, my favorite dive whisky bar; <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"St Andrews Brewing Company (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.standrewsbrewingcompany.com/\" target=\"_blank\">St Andrews Brewing Company</a> or “Stabco” as my daughter would call it, always with a great beer selection from across the UK; and <a href=\"https://jahangirstandrews.co.uk/\">Jahangir</a>, an Indian restaurant we found our first year because they were the only place we could find a table that Friday night... and we kept going back because they had great food and we never couldn’t get a table</li><li>The melancholy was that we probably wouldn’t be back; at least not for a long time. It’s out-of-the-way -- which is part of its charm, but it’s why we probably won’t be back for a while.</li><li>I felt the same way when I finished a project in Portland, Oregon some years back. I was in Portland every week for 3-4 months and got to know it pretty well. I explored new places, but developed some favorite spots I’d hit every week -- <a href=\"https://www.clydecommon.com/\">Clyde Commons</a> for dinner at the bar, <a href=\"https://www.baileystaproom.com/\">Bailey’s Taproom</a> with a new beer selection every week. When that project ended, I knew I wouldn’t be back to Portland for a long time -- as opposed to New York or San Francisco. Wrapping up a project there, not really a big deal because there’s enough business to bring me back. New Orleans was kinda in the middle. I’d been there almost non-stop for 3-4 years, but while I didn’t think business would bring me down there again, it’s not out of the way, and I’d be down often for vacations or conventions -- which is how it’s turned out.</li><li>Some of that melancholy comes from regret -- from things you always meant to do but never made time for -- “I’ll do that next time,” you’d say to yourself, but never get to it. The last time I was in Charlottesville, VA, I was finishing up what had been another 3-4 year stream of work and wasn’t sure when I’d be back. For me, Charlottesville was a bit like St Andrews, an out-of-the-way college town (though only a 2-hr flight from Chicago rather than an 8-10 hour fly-and-drive) and wasn’t sure when -- if ever -- I’d get back. Over those years, I’d always plan to take a half-day and drive the 15 minutes from the client to <a href=\"https://www.monticello.org/\">Monticello</a>, Thomas Jefferson’s home, and take the tour. It’s always written up as a must-see, and I’m right here. But every time I was going to do it, something would come up, and I’d say “I’ll do that next time.” And so here I was, the last time -- I didn’t know when the next time would be. And I really didn’t have much time in my schedule, but after lunch one day, I walked out, taking calls all the way to the Monticello parking lot, and then turned off my phone and had a great tour. And flew out the next morning without that regret. </li><li>But now 6 months later, I’m heading back to Charlottesville. So maybe I’ll get back to St Andrews sooner than I thought. Maybe I should see if <a href=\"https://www.standrewsbrewingcompany.com/\">Stabco</a> needs an old-guy bartender.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #153</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_153.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<p><!--EndFragment--></p>','Podcast #153 — Travel By Algorithm; Leaving Places Behind','','inherit','closed','closed','','2494-revision-v1','','','2019-07-27 17:36:09','2019-07-27 22:36:09','',2494,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/07/27/2494-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2497,1,'2019-07-27 17:39:37','2019-07-27 22:39:37','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\">\n<p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/IMG_0449.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2482 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/IMG_0449-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a></p>\n<figcaption>Latest in Sustainable Food Delivery </figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p>Moving the TravelCommons studios kept me mostly off the road this month except for a quick trip to Nashville, but staying out of restaurants has helped me finally drop the last bit of Christmas weight. We talk about the \"earn and burn\" strategy for frequent travel awards; answer a listener\'s question on how to keep from being overwhelmed when arriving in a new city, and new restaurant trends from the floor of the National Restaurant Association\'s big show. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_153.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/637754409&color=%23ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #153: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the podcast studio in the 1871 tech incubator in Chicago, IL. I have to say that this is the most professional studio I’ve recorded in since my high-school radio days in Memphis. I mentor here once a month and so get to use this bang-up studio. This sound ought to be phenomenal. It’s a few weeks after our 2-week Celtic jaunt -- a week touring in Ireland and a week of graduation festivities at University of St Andrews in Scotland. I’ve talked a bit about the planning for this trip in the past couple of episodes -- wrestling through the Avios website to kludge together flights on Aer Lingus and burn off some of my Avios balance that’s been sitting around for, I dunno, 5-10 years; and trying to sift through the horror stories of Irish car rentals. There were a whole lot of places where this trip could’ve gone bad… but it didn’t. The flights on Aer Lingus were fine; nothing special, but they were serviceable. Our Budget Car rental experience was the same -- a basic Renault compact with 30,000 km on it, but no issues with the folks on either the pick-up or the drop-off in Dublin airport. All the places I booked in Ireland were fine -- the B&amp;Bs on the west coast were great; the hotel in Dublin was, again, serviceable. And, we didn’t really have any rain to speak of until our last day in Dublin.</li><li>The flights between Dublin and Edinburgh were on turboprop planes -- ATR-72-600s to be exact. I can’t remember the last time I was on a prop plane -- even the quick 30-min hops I’d do occasionally between IAD and CHO are on Embraer jets. But I remember way back in my early flying days, American Eagle used to fly a lot of these ATRs. Once those props started turning, I popped on my Bose noise-cancelling headphones. Those American Eagle ATRs were one of the main reasons I invested in my first pair of Bose.</li><li>But other than a bit of a rainy walk to and from that plane in DUB and EDI, they were fine flights. Indeed, if there was any hiccup, it was on arrival in DUB from ORD.  We’d checked luggage, even though one of my regular top travel tips is to carry on. I knew the plane was full, and since Aer Lingus isn’t part of OneWorld or StarAlliance, neither my American nor my United status was going to get us pre-boarded. Rather than worrying about having to jockey for overhead space, we checked our bags - and anyways, it was free; it was included in the fare. So, low-hassle boarding. In DUB, I stood at the luggage carousel, watched it heave out a dozen or so bags, and then nothing. No worries; seen that before; the guys must be driving the tug back to the plane. And then the carousel stopped. Not too worried; seen that before too; just saving a little energy. And then the lights above us went out.  OK, this is a new one. I have to say that I started to worry a bit -- until I saw our pilot also looking around for his luggage. After 20 minutes, the lights came on and the carousel started burping up bags again. And there was a simultaneous sigh of relief from all the chaperones accompanying the half-dozen student trips that had packed this flight.</li><li>Bridge Music —  <em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/content/Per/Per_-_DLDN_Instrumental.mp3\" target=\"_blank\">DLDN Instrumental</a></em> by St Paul</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Biggest travel news -- at least to me -- since the last episode -- American announced the retirement (finally!) of the last of its MD-80s, the “Super 80s” or the “Mad Dog 80s” with the last revenue flight planned for Sept 4th from DFW to ORD. Which for me is very apropos because I spent a <em>lot</em> of time in the mid-80\'s flying MD-80\'s between those two AA hubs. I thought the 737 Max grounding might delay the final MD-80 flight, but it looks like American has scrounged up enough 737-800s to fill the gap. I posted American’s announcement on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page. Jim McDonough commented - “Flew the Mad Dog many, many times. My wife and I would select row 9 on the 2 seat side, flying, usually, DFW/SAN. She’s tiny, so I felt like I was in first class.” The left-hand 2-seat side was great for couples -- got a window and an aisle seat without having to guess if the center seat would be filled. But then you had to deal with the short overhead bins on that side where you could only fit your bag in sideways, and usually no power supply. The cigarette style power adapters were on the other side, the 3-seat side, but only in every <em>other</em> row. It was a unique plane...</li><li>Back in May, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/podcast-151-traveler-data-leaks-brittany-street-food/\">episode 151</a>, TravelCommons listener Mika Pyyhkala sent in a note about his great experience with a flight rebooking service, Freebird. This week, I was booking a trip to CHO on the Amex Travel site with my Platinum card. At the end of the booking, it offered me free Freebird coverage for the trip. I had to check a box to opt in, so I read the fine print closely to make sure it was really free, but it was. Seems Freebird and Amex are doing a free trial. Don’t know how long it lasts, but I’ll opt in -- with the hope that I don’t actually have to use it.</li><li>Some bits ‘n’ bobs observations from my Ireland-Scotland trip…</li><li>Like so many other folks, I’m carrying my own water bottle on flights. I started last fall. The big Amazon Web Services conference gave everyone a refillable water bottle, replacing barrels of iced single-use water bottles with refilling stations. Most airports now have refilling spigots next to regular water fountains. Irene has carried one forever. It came in handy when Aer Lingus wanted to charge her €3 for water on one of our flights. Now, I lost that original AWS water bottles a few months back -- matching my usual 6-month time-before-loss metric. No big deal; it was just a plastic bottle with a screw-on cap. But I wanted a new one. So for Fathers’ Day, Claire gave me a new souped-up 20 oz. water bottle with a push-button pop-up drinking spout and a carabiner loop -- very nice. I pulled it out during one of our Aer Lingus flights, skipping their €3 charge, hit the button for the spout and immediately get hit square between the eyes with a fat stream of water from my bottle-now-turned-water fountain. Apparently this new fancy water bottle seals airtight, meaning the water in the bottle stayed at ground pressure while our cabin was now lower, at something between 6 and 8,000 ft. I’m used to that with foil-sealed yogurts, but not my water bottle. A surprise not just for me, but also the Irish guy next to me who was napping before he caught some shrapnel from my portable water cannon.</li><li>One of the things I look forward to when staying at bed-&amp;-breakfasts in the UK and Ireland are… the breakfasts. And the breakfasts we had in Ireland were at least one order of magnitude better than the best concierge lounge fare at a Marriott -- which may be damning with faint praise, but I don’t mean to, we had great breakfasts. For most of our time on the west coast, we hubbed out of Galway, staying in the same place for 3 nights, or more importantly, 3 breakfasts. The first morning was easy; the full cooked breakfast -- eggs, bacon, sausage, black and white pudding, tomatoes, mushrooms, baked beans, and toast. We were doing a good bit of hiking that day and I wasn’t hungry until 3. Doing that two days in a row, though, felt like I was tempting fate -- or at least an arterial blockage. So the next morning, I went with the healthier choice -- oatmeal porridge. The presentation is pretty typical -- a big bowl of porridge with little cups of raisins, brown sugar, and cream. I mix in the raisins, a touch of the brown sugar, and a bit of the cream to loosen up the porridge. Except it doesn’t smell like cream. I taste it -- it’s Bailey\'s Irish Cream. I dump the rest of it in. I figure porridge with a Bailey’s topper is kinda the Irish version of a Bloody Mary.</li><li>One of the big differences for me between renting a car in the US and in Europe is the pre-car inspection. You get the keys, the rental agreement, and a form showing the condition of the car before you take if off the lot -- pre-existing dings and scratches. I always give this form to Irene -- she’s much pickier than I am. She walks around the car, making note of anything missing, while I figure out the rear-view mirrors and pairing my iPhone to the entertainment system. So I was kinda surprised to get an e-mail from Hertz before getting on our flight to EDI with a bunch of pictures of a Kia wagon. Here was our car; here was the documentation of its condition. We walked straight to the car, loaded up the luggage and drove off. No walkaround inspection. It makes sense. We had gotten to the point, on our last couple of rentals, where we were taking pictures of dings and scratches as well as marking them on the form. Now here, Hertz was doing it for us. Not sure if I got this because I have Hertz Gold, but it certainly was a big improvement in the rental experience -- though I still had to figure out how to pair my phone.</li><li>The timing on international connections in Europe always feels a little bit of a crap shoot because there doesn’t seem to be a consistent rule about having to pass thru security again. Amsterdam, no security. Frankfurt, no security for a European connection, but security if you’re flying to, say, India or the Middle East. London, security every time, maybe even a couple of additional passes just for kicks. Dublin, though, had a new twist. Go thru the usual drill -- pull out your electronics, take off your belt, push your bags thru the X-ray machine, but then -- where’s the metal detector? Just walk past the security guy and put my PC back in my bag. I looked back. There was a metal detector all the way at the end of the security hall, but only one. The rest of us were acting like we were walking thru a metal detector, except there wasn’t one. That was just odd.</li><li>We were in Scotland for Claire’s graduation from University of St Andrews. Hanging around, drinking beer with folks a couple of generations younger than you -- this group was right on the Millennial/Gen Z boundary -- is always an educational experience. But when the conversation turned to their new favorite app -- <a href=\"https://apps.apple.com/us/app/poop-map-pin-and-track/id1303269455\">Poop</a> <a href=\"https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.poopmap&amp;hl=en_US\">Map</a> -- I thought they were leading this old guy on. An app where you and your friends share the places you’ve pooped, complete with star ratings and comments, seemed too much like an Onion headline -- social media taken to the absurd extreme. Except is wasn’t satire; it was real. They all pulled out their phones, fired up the app, and showed me their check-ins. OK, then. But I think checking in beers on Untappd is as far as I want to go.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com. </li><li>Bridge Music —   <em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/content/oldDog/oldDog_-_Goodbye_sooner_or_later.mp3\" target=\"_blank\">Goodbye Sooner or Later</a></em> by oldDog    </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Travel by Algorithm</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>On the rainy Monday we flew from DUB to EDI, I drove us downtown to meet some friends for the day. The rain was beginning to muck up traffic, so I was kinda glued to Google Maps to help route us around some of the traffic tie ups, which meant we weren’t on the usual route take in from the airport, which meant I was just about completely dependent on Google; completely trusting that algorithm. Which was kinda broken when I followed Google’s directions through a warning sign and onto a “Buses Only” road. Google directed me to keep driving down the road, but since I was only a single-decker Kia wagon, I didn’t think any attempt to masquerade as a bus was going to survive our first police encounter. So I took the first left (much easier when driving on the left side of the road) hoping the algorithm would produce a bit more legal routing.</li><li>Not overly shocking. There have been a steady stream of stories for years about GPSs leading people astray -- this was a topic way back in the early days of  TravelCommons, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2006/05/04/podcast-38-the-accidental-vacation-trusting-travel-technology/\">episode #36</a> in 2006 to be exact, when they were called SatNavs, I told the story of making a dash to SFO after a sales meeting. I’m riding shotgun, tracking our progress on a one of those <em>paper</em> maps that Hertz used to put in every car. But we also had a Hertz NeverLost. It seemed about 10 seconds slow to me. I spotted our turn on I-580, but Hertz said nothing. “Turn,” I said. “No,” Brian said, “You need to trust the technology.” And so when Hertz said to turn 10 seconds later, he did -- right into a gas station. Not as bad as stories of people driving across closed bridges, into rivers, up unpaved mountain roads… But in the subsequent 13 years, with SatNav, now GPS, moving from our cars to our pockets, we’re lean on those algorithms more than ever. Now living in Chicago, I haven’t bothered to learn any of the public transit routes; I just use Google Maps or the Transit app to tell me what bus to catch when.</li><li>Sometimes I’ll use Hipmunk to look at flight options to a new city, or a place I haven’t been in a while. They promote their Agony sort, where their algorithm rates flight by a combination of price, duration, # of stops, and dependability. I’m heading back to CHO and since I haven’t been out there for 6 months, I hit Hipmunk to check out American’s and United’s current flight offerings, scrolled down from the non-stops thru the 1-stops. I thought it was interesting, though, that Hipmunk’s algorithm scored a 24-hr hour Amtrak ride with a 3-hr layover in DC’s Union Station as less agonizing than a 6-hr 2-stop trip on United Express with connections in Columbus and IAD. But given some of my United Express experiences, who am I to second-guess that algorithm?</li><li>One of the things I liked about the soon-to-be-turned-off Google Trips app, is how it would auto-magically generate itinerary recommendations for a city. It would pick out points of interest with high Google review scores, and then combine the hours each would be open from the business listing with the typical amount of time people would stay there, and location and traffic data from Google Maps to generate the best itinerary. This fascinated me. It sucked my into a click hole of academic papers presented at the International Conference on the Practice and Theory of Automated Timetabling and the International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining talking about how the “Tourist Trip Design Problem (TTDP) is a route-planning problem on multiple Points of Interest. TTDP can be considered as an extension of the classical problem of Team Orienteering Problem with Time Windows.” I want to use this to automatically generate microbrewery taproom crawls but the math made my eyes bleed.</li><li>But back to that rainy day in Edinburgh, Google Maps redeemed itself at the end of the day. There was so much rain that Monday, our usual path out of the city, the A90, was at a complete standstill because of flooded underpasses, and stalled cars that tried to make it thru the flooded underpasses. Google Maps guided us past a gridlocked traffic circle, winding us through some apartment complexes, bypassing the flooded parts, and putting us right onto the M90 so we could head out to St Andrews. Better travel through algorithms.</li><li>Bridge Music —    <em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/content/Zapac/Zapac_-_Test_Drive.mp3\" target=\"_blank\">Test Drive</a> </em>by Zapac </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Leaving Places Behind</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Driving out of St Andrews that last time was a bit melancholy. We’d spent the last 4 September there, saw things change -- restaurants open and close, Edinburgh airport get spiffier -- but also the familiar things stay the same -- <a href=\"http://keysbar.co.uk/\">The Keys</a>, my favorite dive whisky bar; <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"St Andrews Brewing Company (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.standrewsbrewingcompany.com/\" target=\"_blank\">St Andrews Brewing Company</a> or “Stabco” as my daughter would call it, always with a great beer selection from across the UK; and <a href=\"https://jahangirstandrews.co.uk/\">Jahangir</a>, an Indian restaurant we found our first year because they were the only place we could find a table that Friday night... and we kept going back because they had great food and we never couldn’t get a table</li><li>The melancholy was that we probably wouldn’t be back; at least not for a long time. It’s out-of-the-way -- which is part of its charm, but it’s why we probably won’t be back for a while.</li><li>I felt the same way when I finished a project in Portland, Oregon some years back. I was in Portland every week for 3-4 months and got to know it pretty well. I explored new places, but developed some favorite spots I’d hit every week -- <a href=\"https://www.clydecommon.com/\">Clyde Commons</a> for dinner at the bar, <a href=\"https://www.baileystaproom.com/\">Bailey’s Taproom</a> with a new beer selection every week. When that project ended, I knew I wouldn’t be back to Portland for a long time -- as opposed to New York or San Francisco. Wrapping up a project there, not really a big deal because there’s enough business to bring me back. New Orleans was kinda in the middle. I’d been there almost non-stop for 3-4 years, but while I didn’t think business would bring me down there again, it’s not out of the way, and I’d be down often for vacations or conventions -- which is how it’s turned out.</li><li>Some of that melancholy comes from regret -- from things you always meant to do but never made time for -- “I’ll do that next time,” you’d say to yourself, but never get to it. The last time I was in Charlottesville, VA, I was finishing up what had been another 3-4 year stream of work and wasn’t sure when I’d be back. For me, Charlottesville was a bit like St Andrews, an out-of-the-way college town (though only a 2-hr flight from Chicago rather than an 8-10 hour fly-and-drive) and wasn’t sure when -- if ever -- I’d get back. Over those years, I’d always plan to take a half-day and drive the 15 minutes from the client to <a href=\"https://www.monticello.org/\">Monticello</a>, Thomas Jefferson’s home, and take the tour. It’s always written up as a must-see, and I’m right here. But every time I was going to do it, something would come up, and I’d say “I’ll do that next time.” And so here I was, the last time -- I didn’t know when the next time would be. And I really didn’t have much time in my schedule, but after lunch one day, I walked out, taking calls all the way to the Monticello parking lot, and then turned off my phone and had a great tour. And flew out the next morning without that regret. </li><li>But now 6 months later, I’m heading back to Charlottesville. So maybe I’ll get back to St Andrews sooner than I thought. Maybe I should see if <a href=\"https://www.standrewsbrewingcompany.com/\">Stabco</a> needs an old-guy bartender.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #153</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_153.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<p><!--EndFragment--></p>','Podcast #153 — Travel By Algorithm; Leaving Places Behind','','inherit','closed','closed','','2494-revision-v1','','','2019-07-27 17:39:37','2019-07-27 22:39:37','',2494,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/07/27/2494-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2498,1,'2019-07-27 20:36:03','2019-07-28 01:36:03','','Cracked mirror-square','What\'s Behind Me Is Not Important','inherit','open','closed','','cracked-mirror-square','','','2019-07-27 20:36:21','2019-07-28 01:36:21','',2494,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Cracked-mirror-square.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(2499,1,'2019-07-27 20:40:10','2019-07-28 01:40:10','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\">\n<p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Cracked-mirror-square.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2482 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Cracked-mirror-square-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a></p><figcaption>What\'s Behind Me Is Not Important</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>Moving the TravelCommons studios kept me mostly off the road this month except for a quick trip to Nashville, but staying out of restaurants has helped me finally drop the last bit of Christmas weight. We talk about the \"earn and burn\" strategy for frequent travel awards; answer a listener\'s question on how to keep from being overwhelmed when arriving in a new city, and new restaurant trends from the floor of the National Restaurant Association\'s big show. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_153.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/637754409&color=%23ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #153: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the podcast studio in the 1871 tech incubator in Chicago, IL. I have to say that this is the most professional studio I’ve recorded in since my high-school radio days in Memphis. I mentor here once a month and so get to use this bang-up studio. This sound ought to be phenomenal. It’s a few weeks after our 2-week Celtic jaunt -- a week touring in Ireland and a week of graduation festivities at University of St Andrews in Scotland. I’ve talked a bit about the planning for this trip in the past couple of episodes -- wrestling through the Avios website to kludge together flights on Aer Lingus and burn off some of my Avios balance that’s been sitting around for, I dunno, 5-10 years; and trying to sift through the horror stories of Irish car rentals. There were a whole lot of places where this trip could’ve gone bad… but it didn’t. The flights on Aer Lingus were fine; nothing special, but they were serviceable. Our Budget Car rental experience was the same -- a basic Renault compact with 30,000 km on it, but no issues with the folks on either the pick-up or the drop-off in Dublin airport. All the places I booked in Ireland were fine -- the B&amp;Bs on the west coast were great; the hotel in Dublin was, again, serviceable. And, we didn’t really have any rain to speak of until our last day in Dublin.</li><li>The flights between Dublin and Edinburgh were on turboprop planes -- ATR-72-600s to be exact. I can’t remember the last time I was on a prop plane -- even the quick 30-min hops I’d do occasionally between IAD and CHO are on Embraer jets. But I remember way back in my early flying days, American Eagle used to fly a lot of these ATRs. Once those props started turning, I popped on my Bose noise-cancelling headphones. Those American Eagle ATRs were one of the main reasons I invested in my first pair of Bose.</li><li>But other than a bit of a rainy walk to and from that plane in DUB and EDI, they were fine flights. Indeed, if there was any hiccup, it was on arrival in DUB from ORD.&nbsp; We’d checked luggage, even though one of my regular top travel tips is to carry on. I knew the plane was full, and since Aer Lingus isn’t part of OneWorld or StarAlliance, neither my American nor my United status was going to get us pre-boarded. Rather than worrying about having to jockey for overhead space, we checked our bags - and anyways, it was free; it was included in the fare. So, low-hassle boarding. In DUB, I stood at the luggage carousel, watched it heave out a dozen or so bags, and then nothing. No worries; seen that before; the guys must be driving the tug back to the plane. And then the carousel stopped. Not too worried; seen that before too; just saving a little energy. And then the lights above us went out.&nbsp; OK, this is a new one. I have to say that I started to worry a bit -- until I saw our pilot also looking around for his luggage. After 20 minutes, the lights came on and the carousel started burping up bags again. And there was a simultaneous sigh of relief from all the chaperones accompanying the half-dozen student trips that had packed this flight.</li><li>Bridge Music — &nbsp;<em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/content/Per/Per_-_DLDN_Instrumental.mp3\" target=\"_blank\">DLDN Instrumental</a></em>&nbsp;by St Paul</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Biggest travel news -- at least to me -- since the last episode -- American announced the retirement (finally!) of the last of its MD-80s, the “Super 80s” or the “Mad Dog 80s” with the last revenue flight planned for Sept 4th from DFW to ORD. Which for me is very apropos because I spent a <em>lot</em> of time in the mid-80\'s flying MD-80\'s between those two AA hubs. I thought the 737 Max grounding might delay the final MD-80 flight, but it looks like American has scrounged up enough 737-800s to fill the gap. I posted American’s announcement on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page. Jim McDonough commented - “Flew the Mad Dog many, many times. My wife and I would select row 9 on the 2 seat side, flying, usually, DFW/SAN. She’s tiny, so I felt like I was in first class.” The left-hand 2-seat side was great for couples -- got a window and an aisle seat without having to guess if the center seat would be filled. But then you had to deal with the short overhead bins on that side where you could only fit your bag in sideways, and usually no power supply. The cigarette style power adapters were on the other side, the 3-seat side, but only in every <em>other</em> row. It was a unique plane...</li><li>Back in May, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/podcast-151-traveler-data-leaks-brittany-street-food/\">episode 151</a>, TravelCommons listener Mika Pyyhkala sent in a note about his great experience with a flight rebooking service, Freebird. This week, I was booking a trip to CHO on the Amex Travel site with my Platinum card. At the end of the booking, it offered me free Freebird coverage for the trip. I had to check a box to opt in, so I read the fine print closely to make sure it was really free, but it was. Seems Freebird and Amex are doing a free trial. Don’t know how long it lasts, but I’ll opt in -- with the hope that I don’t actually have to use it.</li><li>Some bits ‘n’ bobs observations from my Ireland-Scotland trip…</li><li>Like so many other folks, I’m carrying my own water bottle on flights. I started last fall. The big Amazon Web Services conference gave everyone a refillable water bottle, replacing barrels of iced single-use water bottles with refilling stations. Most airports now have refilling spigots next to regular water fountains. Irene has carried one forever. It came in handy when Aer Lingus wanted to charge her €3 for water on one of our flights. Now, I lost that original AWS water bottles a few months back -- matching my usual 6-month time-before-loss metric. No big deal; it was just a plastic bottle with a screw-on cap. But I wanted a new one. So for Fathers’ Day, Claire gave me a new souped-up 20 oz. water bottle with a push-button pop-up drinking spout and a carabiner loop -- very nice. I pulled it out during one of our Aer Lingus flights, skipping their €3 charge, hit the button for the spout and immediately get hit square between the eyes with a fat stream of water from my bottle-now-turned-water fountain. Apparently this new fancy water bottle seals airtight, meaning the water in the bottle stayed at ground pressure while our cabin was now lower, at something between 6 and 8,000 ft. I’m used to that with foil-sealed yogurts, but not my water bottle. A surprise not just for me, but also the Irish guy next to me who was napping before he caught some shrapnel from my portable water cannon.</li><li>One of the things I look forward to when staying at bed-&amp;-breakfasts in the UK and Ireland are… the breakfasts. And the breakfasts we had in Ireland were at least one order of magnitude better than the best concierge lounge fare at a Marriott -- which may be damning with faint praise, but I don’t mean to, we had great breakfasts. For most of our time on the west coast, we hubbed out of Galway, staying in the same place for 3 nights, or more importantly, 3 breakfasts. The first morning was easy; the full cooked breakfast -- eggs, bacon, sausage, black and white pudding, tomatoes, mushrooms, baked beans, and toast. We were doing a good bit of hiking that day and I wasn’t hungry until 3. Doing that two days in a row, though, felt like I was tempting fate -- or at least an arterial blockage. So the next morning, I went with the healthier choice -- oatmeal porridge. The presentation is pretty typical -- a big bowl of porridge with little cups of raisins, brown sugar, and cream. I mix in the raisins, a touch of the brown sugar, and a bit of the cream to loosen up the porridge. Except it doesn’t smell like cream. I taste it -- it’s Bailey\'s Irish Cream. I dump the rest of it in. I figure porridge with a Bailey’s topper is kinda the Irish version of a Bloody Mary.</li><li>One of the big differences for me between renting a car in the US and in Europe is the pre-car inspection. You get the keys, the rental agreement, and a form showing the condition of the car before you take if off the lot -- pre-existing dings and scratches. I always give this form to Irene -- she’s much pickier than I am. She walks around the car, making note of anything missing, while I figure out the rear-view mirrors and pairing my iPhone to the entertainment system. So I was kinda surprised to get an e-mail from Hertz before getting on our flight to EDI with a bunch of pictures of a Kia wagon. Here was our car; here was the documentation of its condition. We walked straight to the car, loaded up the luggage and drove off. No walkaround inspection. It makes sense. We had gotten to the point, on our last couple of rentals, where we were taking pictures of dings and scratches as well as marking them on the form. Now here, Hertz was doing it for us. Not sure if I got this because I have Hertz Gold, but it certainly was a big improvement in the rental experience -- though I still had to figure out how to pair my phone.</li><li>The timing on international connections in Europe always feels a little bit of a crap shoot because there doesn’t seem to be a consistent rule about having to pass thru security again. Amsterdam, no security. Frankfurt, no security for a European connection, but security if you’re flying to, say, India or the Middle East. London, security every time, maybe even a couple of additional passes just for kicks. Dublin, though, had a new twist. Go thru the usual drill -- pull out your electronics, take off your belt, push your bags thru the X-ray machine, but then -- where’s the metal detector? Just walk past the security guy and put my PC back in my bag. I looked back. There was a metal detector all the way at the end of the security hall, but only one. The rest of us were acting like we were walking thru a metal detector, except there wasn’t one. That was just odd.</li><li>We were in Scotland for Claire’s graduation from University of St Andrews. Hanging around, drinking beer with folks a couple of generations younger than you -- this group was right on the Millennial/Gen Z boundary -- is always an educational experience. But when the conversation turned to their new favorite app -- <a href=\"https://apps.apple.com/us/app/poop-map-pin-and-track/id1303269455\">Poop</a> <a href=\"https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.poopmap&amp;hl=en_US\">Map</a> -- I thought they were leading this old guy on. An app where you and your friends share the places you’ve pooped, complete with star ratings and comments, seemed too much like an Onion headline -- social media taken to the absurd extreme. Except is wasn’t satire; it was real. They all pulled out their phones, fired up the app, and showed me their check-ins. OK, then. But I think checking in beers on Untappd is as far as I want to go.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com. </li><li>Bridge Music —  &nbsp;<em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/content/oldDog/oldDog_-_Goodbye_sooner_or_later.mp3\" target=\"_blank\">Goodbye Sooner or Later</a></em>&nbsp;by oldDog    </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Travel by Algorithm</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>On the rainy Monday we flew from DUB to EDI, I drove us downtown to meet some friends for the day. The rain was beginning to muck up traffic, so I was kinda glued to Google Maps to help route us around some of the traffic tie ups, which meant we weren’t on the usual route take in from the airport, which meant I was just about completely dependent on Google; completely trusting that algorithm. Which was kinda broken when I followed Google’s directions through a warning sign and onto a “Buses Only” road. Google directed me to keep driving down the road, but since I was only a single-decker Kia wagon, I didn’t think any attempt to masquerade as a bus was going to survive our first police encounter. So I took the first left (much easier when driving on the left side of the road) hoping the algorithm would produce a bit more legal routing.</li><li>Not overly shocking. There have been a steady stream of stories for years about GPSs leading people astray -- this was a topic way back in the early days of&nbsp; TravelCommons, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2006/05/04/podcast-38-the-accidental-vacation-trusting-travel-technology/\">episode #36</a> in 2006 to be exact, when they were called SatNavs, I told the story of making a dash to SFO after a sales meeting. I’m riding shotgun, tracking our progress on a one of those <em>paper</em> maps that Hertz used to put in every car. But we also had a Hertz NeverLost. It seemed about 10 seconds slow to me. I spotted our turn on I-580, but Hertz said nothing. “Turn,” I said. “No,” Brian said, “You need to trust the technology.” And so when Hertz said to turn 10 seconds later, he did -- right into a gas station. Not as bad as stories of people driving across closed bridges, into rivers, up unpaved mountain roads… But in the subsequent 13 years, with SatNav, now GPS, moving from our cars to our pockets, we’re lean on those algorithms more than ever. Now living in Chicago, I haven’t bothered to learn any of the public transit routes; I just use Google Maps or the Transit app to tell me what bus to catch when.</li><li>Sometimes I’ll use Hipmunk to look at flight options to a new city, or a place I haven’t been in a while. They promote their Agony sort, where their algorithm rates flight by a combination of price, duration, # of stops, and dependability. I’m heading back to CHO and since I haven’t been out there for 6 months, I hit Hipmunk to check out American’s and United’s current flight offerings, scrolled down from the non-stops thru the 1-stops. I thought it was interesting, though, that Hipmunk’s algorithm scored a 24-hr hour Amtrak ride with a 3-hr layover in DC’s Union Station as less agonizing than a 6-hr 2-stop trip on United Express with connections in Columbus and IAD. But given some of my United Express experiences, who am I to second-guess that algorithm?</li><li>One of the things I liked about the soon-to-be-turned-off Google Trips app, is how it would auto-magically generate itinerary recommendations for a city. It would pick out points of interest with high Google review scores, and then combine the hours each would be open from the business listing with the typical amount of time people would stay there, and location and traffic data from Google Maps to generate the best itinerary. This fascinated me. It sucked my into a click hole of academic papers presented at the International Conference on the Practice and Theory of Automated Timetabling and the International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining talking about how the “Tourist Trip Design Problem (TTDP) is a route-planning problem on multiple Points of Interest. TTDP can be considered as an extension of the classical problem of Team Orienteering Problem with Time Windows.” I want to use this to automatically generate microbrewery taproom crawls but the math made my eyes bleed.</li><li>But back to that rainy day in Edinburgh, Google Maps redeemed itself at the end of the day. There was so much rain that Monday, our usual path out of the city, the A90, was at a complete standstill because of flooded underpasses, and stalled cars that tried to make it thru the flooded underpasses. Google Maps guided us past a gridlocked traffic circle, winding us through some apartment complexes, bypassing the flooded parts, and putting us right onto the M90 so we could head out to St Andrews. Better travel through algorithms.</li><li>Bridge Music —   &nbsp;<em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/content/Zapac/Zapac_-_Test_Drive.mp3\" target=\"_blank\">Test Drive</a>&nbsp;</em>by Zapac </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Leaving Places Behind</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Driving out of St Andrews that last time was a bit melancholy. We’d spent the last 4 September there, saw things change -- restaurants open and close, Edinburgh airport get spiffier -- but also the familiar things stay the same -- <a href=\"http://keysbar.co.uk/\">The Keys</a>, my favorite dive whisky bar; <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"St Andrews Brewing Company (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.standrewsbrewingcompany.com/\" target=\"_blank\">St Andrews Brewing Company</a> or “Stabco” as my daughter would call it, always with a great beer selection from across the UK; and <a href=\"https://jahangirstandrews.co.uk/\">Jahangir</a>, an Indian restaurant we found our first year because they were the only place we could find a table that Friday night... and we kept going back because they had great food and we never couldn’t get a table</li><li>The melancholy was that we probably wouldn’t be back; at least not for a long time. It’s out-of-the-way -- which is part of its charm, but it’s why we probably won’t be back for a while.</li><li>I felt the same way when I finished a project in Portland, Oregon some years back. I was in Portland every week for 3-4 months and got to know it pretty well. I explored new places, but developed some favorite spots I’d hit every week -- <a href=\"https://www.clydecommon.com/\">Clyde Commons</a> for dinner at the bar, <a href=\"https://www.baileystaproom.com/\">Bailey’s Taproom</a> with a new beer selection every week. When that project ended, I knew I wouldn’t be back to Portland for a long time -- as opposed to New York or San Francisco. Wrapping up a project there, not really a big deal because there’s enough business to bring me back. New Orleans was kinda in the middle. I’d been there almost non-stop for 3-4 years, but while I didn’t think business would bring me down there again, it’s not out of the way, and I’d be down often for vacations or conventions -- which is how it’s turned out.</li><li>Some of that melancholy comes from regret -- from things you always meant to do but never made time for -- “I’ll do that next time,” you’d say to yourself, but never get to it. The last time I was in Charlottesville, VA, I was finishing up what had been another 3-4 year stream of work and wasn’t sure when I’d be back. For me, Charlottesville was a bit like St Andrews, an out-of-the-way college town (though only a 2-hr flight from Chicago rather than an 8-10 hour fly-and-drive) and wasn’t sure when -- if ever -- I’d get back. Over those years, I’d always plan to take a half-day and drive the 15 minutes from the client to <a href=\"https://www.monticello.org/\">Monticello</a>, Thomas Jefferson’s home, and take the tour. It’s always written up as a must-see, and I’m right here. But every time I was going to do it, something would come up, and I’d say “I’ll do that next time.” And so here I was, the last time -- I didn’t know when the next time would be. And I really didn’t have much time in my schedule, but after lunch one day, I walked out, taking calls all the way to the Monticello parking lot, and then turned off my phone and had a great tour. And flew out the next morning without that regret.&nbsp;</li><li>But now 6 months later, I’m heading back to Charlottesville. So maybe I’ll get back to St Andrews sooner than I thought. Maybe I should see if <a href=\"https://www.standrewsbrewingcompany.com/\">Stabco</a> needs an old-guy bartender.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #153</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_153.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<p><!--EndFragment--></p>','Podcast #153 — Travel By Algorithm; Leaving Places Behind','','inherit','closed','closed','','2494-revision-v1','','','2019-07-27 20:40:10','2019-07-28 01:40:10','',2494,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/07/27/2494-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2501,1,'2019-07-28 09:07:09','2019-07-28 14:07:09','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\">\n<p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Cracked-mirror-square.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2482 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Cracked-mirror-square-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a></p><figcaption>What\'s Behind Me Is Not Important</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>Moving the TravelCommons studios kept me mostly off the road this month except for a quick trip to Nashville, but staying out of restaurants has helped me finally drop the last bit of Christmas weight. We talk about the \"earn and burn\" strategy for frequent travel awards; answer a listener\'s question on how to keep from being overwhelmed when arriving in a new city, and new restaurant trends from the floor of the National Restaurant Association\'s big show. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_153.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/637754409&color=%23ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #153: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the podcast studio in the 1871 tech incubator in Chicago, IL. I have to say that this is the most professional studio I’ve recorded in since my high-school radio days in Memphis. I mentor here once a month and so get to use this bang-up studio. This sound ought to be phenomenal. It’s a few weeks after our 2-week Celtic jaunt -- a week touring in Ireland and a week of graduation festivities at University of St Andrews in Scotland. I’ve talked a bit about the planning for this trip in the past couple of episodes -- wrestling through the Avios website to kludge together flights on Aer Lingus and burn off some of my Avios balance that’s been sitting around for, I dunno, 5-10 years; and trying to sift through the horror stories of Irish car rentals. There were a whole lot of places where this trip could’ve gone bad… but it didn’t. The flights on Aer Lingus were fine; nothing special, but they were serviceable. Our Budget Car rental experience was the same -- a basic Renault compact with 30,000 km on it, but no issues with the folks on either the pick-up or the drop-off in Dublin airport. All the places I booked in Ireland were fine -- the B&amp;Bs on the west coast were great; the hotel in Dublin was, again, serviceable. And, we didn’t really have any rain to speak of until our last day in Dublin.</li><li>The flights between Dublin and Edinburgh were on turboprop planes -- ATR-72-600s to be exact. I can’t remember the last time I was on a prop plane -- even the quick 30-min hops I’d do occasionally between IAD and CHO are on Embraer jets. But I remember way back in my early flying days, American Eagle used to fly a lot of these ATRs. Once those props started turning, I popped on my Bose noise-cancelling headphones. Those American Eagle ATRs were one of the main reasons I invested in my first pair of Bose.</li><li>But other than a bit of a rainy walk to and from that plane in DUB and EDI, they were fine flights. Indeed, if there was any hiccup, it was on arrival in DUB from ORD.  We’d checked luggage, even though one of my regular top travel tips is to carry on. I knew the plane was full, and since Aer Lingus isn’t part of OneWorld or StarAlliance, neither my American nor my United status was going to get us pre-boarded. Rather than worrying about having to jockey for overhead space, we checked our bags - and anyways, it was free; it was included in the fare. So, low-hassle boarding. In DUB, I stood at the luggage carousel, watched it heave out a dozen or so bags, and then nothing. No worries; seen that before; the guys must be driving the tug back to the plane. And then the carousel stopped. Not too worried; seen that before too; just saving a little energy. And then the lights above us went out.  OK, this is a new one. I have to say that I started to worry a bit -- until I saw our pilot also looking around for his luggage. After 20 minutes, the lights came on and the carousel started burping up bags again. And there was a simultaneous sigh of relief from all the chaperones accompanying the half-dozen student trips that had packed this flight.</li><li> Bridge Music -- <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/Loveshadow/26219\" target=\"_blank\"><em>SP*ANK Vox</em></a> by Loveshadow </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Biggest travel news -- at least to me -- since the last episode -- American announced the retirement (finally!) of the last of its MD-80s, the “Super 80s” or the “Mad Dog 80s” with the last revenue flight planned for Sept 4th from DFW to ORD. Which for me is very apropos because I spent a <em>lot</em> of time in the mid-80\'s flying MD-80\'s between those two AA hubs. I thought the 737 Max grounding might delay the final MD-80 flight, but it looks like American has scrounged up enough 737-800s to fill the gap. I posted American’s announcement on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page. Jim McDonough commented - “Flew the Mad Dog many, many times. My wife and I would select row 9 on the 2 seat side, flying, usually, DFW/SAN. She’s tiny, so I felt like I was in first class.” The left-hand 2-seat side was great for couples -- got a window and an aisle seat without having to guess if the center seat would be filled. But then you had to deal with the short overhead bins on that side where you could only fit your bag in sideways, and usually no power supply. The cigarette style power adapters were on the other side, the 3-seat side, but only in every <em>other</em> row. It was a unique plane...</li><li>Back in May, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/podcast-151-traveler-data-leaks-brittany-street-food/\">episode 151</a>, TravelCommons listener Mika Pyyhkala sent in a note about his great experience with a flight rebooking service, Freebird. This week, I was booking a trip to CHO on the Amex Travel site with my Platinum card. At the end of the booking, it offered me free Freebird coverage for the trip. I had to check a box to opt in, so I read the fine print closely to make sure it was really free, but it was. Seems Freebird and Amex are doing a free trial. Don’t know how long it lasts, but I’ll opt in -- with the hope that I don’t actually have to use it.</li><li>Some bits ‘n’ bobs observations from my Ireland-Scotland trip…</li><li>Like so many other folks, I’m carrying my own water bottle on flights. I started last fall. The big Amazon Web Services conference gave everyone a refillable water bottle, replacing barrels of iced single-use water bottles with refilling stations. Most airports now have refilling spigots next to regular water fountains. Irene has carried one forever. It came in handy when Aer Lingus wanted to charge her €3 for water on one of our flights. Now, I lost that original AWS water bottles a few months back -- matching my usual 6-month time-before-loss metric. No big deal; it was just a plastic bottle with a screw-on cap. But I wanted a new one. So for Fathers’ Day, Claire gave me a new souped-up 20 oz. water bottle with a push-button pop-up drinking spout and a carabiner loop -- very nice. I pulled it out during one of our Aer Lingus flights, skipping their €3 charge, hit the button for the spout and immediately get hit square between the eyes with a fat stream of water from my bottle-now-turned-water fountain. Apparently this new fancy water bottle seals airtight, meaning the water in the bottle stayed at ground pressure while our cabin was now lower, at something between 6 and 8,000 ft. I’m used to that with foil-sealed yogurts, but not my water bottle. A surprise not just for me, but also the Irish guy next to me who was napping before he caught some shrapnel from my portable water cannon.</li><li>One of the things I look forward to when staying at bed-&amp;-breakfasts in the UK and Ireland are… the breakfasts. And the breakfasts we had in Ireland were at least one order of magnitude better than the best concierge lounge fare at a Marriott -- which may be damning with faint praise, but I don’t mean to, we had great breakfasts. For most of our time on the west coast, we hubbed out of Galway, staying in the same place for 3 nights, or more importantly, 3 breakfasts. The first morning was easy; the full cooked breakfast -- eggs, bacon, sausage, black and white pudding, tomatoes, mushrooms, baked beans, and toast. We were doing a good bit of hiking that day and I wasn’t hungry until 3. Doing that two days in a row, though, felt like I was tempting fate -- or at least an arterial blockage. So the next morning, I went with the healthier choice -- oatmeal porridge. The presentation is pretty typical -- a big bowl of porridge with little cups of raisins, brown sugar, and cream. I mix in the raisins, a touch of the brown sugar, and a bit of the cream to loosen up the porridge. Except it doesn’t smell like cream. I taste it -- it’s Bailey\'s Irish Cream. I dump the rest of it in. I figure porridge with a Bailey’s topper is kinda the Irish version of a Bloody Mary.</li><li>One of the big differences for me between renting a car in the US and in Europe is the pre-car inspection. You get the keys, the rental agreement, and a form showing the condition of the car before you take if off the lot -- pre-existing dings and scratches. I always give this form to Irene -- she’s much pickier than I am. She walks around the car, making note of anything missing, while I figure out the rear-view mirrors and pairing my iPhone to the entertainment system. So I was kinda surprised to get an e-mail from Hertz before getting on our flight to EDI with a bunch of pictures of a Kia wagon. Here was our car; here was the documentation of its condition. We walked straight to the car, loaded up the luggage and drove off. No walkaround inspection. It makes sense. We had gotten to the point, on our last couple of rentals, where we were taking pictures of dings and scratches as well as marking them on the form. Now here, Hertz was doing it for us. Not sure if I got this because I have Hertz Gold, but it certainly was a big improvement in the rental experience -- though I still had to figure out how to pair my phone.</li><li>The timing on international connections in Europe always feels a little bit of a crap shoot because there doesn’t seem to be a consistent rule about having to pass thru security again. Amsterdam, no security. Frankfurt, no security for a European connection, but security if you’re flying to, say, India or the Middle East. London, security every time, maybe even a couple of additional passes just for kicks. Dublin, though, had a new twist. Go thru the usual drill -- pull out your electronics, take off your belt, push your bags thru the X-ray machine, but then -- where’s the metal detector? Just walk past the security guy and put my PC back in my bag. I looked back. There was a metal detector all the way at the end of the security hall, but only one. The rest of us were acting like we were walking thru a metal detector, except there wasn’t one. That was just odd.</li><li>We were in Scotland for Claire’s graduation from University of St Andrews. Hanging around, drinking beer with folks a couple of generations younger than you -- this group was right on the Millennial/Gen Z boundary -- is always an educational experience. But when the conversation turned to their new favorite app -- <a href=\"https://apps.apple.com/us/app/poop-map-pin-and-track/id1303269455\">Poop</a> <a href=\"https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.poopmap&amp;hl=en_US\">Map</a> -- I thought they were leading this old guy on. An app where you and your friends share the places you’ve pooped, complete with star ratings and comments, seemed too much like an Onion headline -- social media taken to the absurd extreme. Except is wasn’t satire; it was real. They all pulled out their phones, fired up the app, and showed me their check-ins. OK, then. But I think checking in beers on Untappd is as far as I want to go.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com. </li><li>Bridge Music —   <em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/trifonic/445\" target=\"_blank\">Bored on Your Backside</a></em> by Trifonic     </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Travel by Algorithm</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>On the rainy Monday we flew from DUB to EDI, I drove us downtown to meet some friends for the day. The rain was beginning to muck up traffic, so I was kinda glued to Google Maps to help route us around some of the traffic tie ups, which meant we weren’t on the usual route take in from the airport, which meant I was just about completely dependent on Google; completely trusting that algorithm. Which was kinda broken when I followed Google’s directions through a warning sign and onto a “Buses Only” road. Google directed me to keep driving down the road, but since I was only a single-decker Kia wagon, I didn’t think any attempt to masquerade as a bus was going to survive our first police encounter. So I took the first left (much easier when driving on the left side of the road) hoping the algorithm would produce a bit more legal routing.</li><li>Not overly shocking. There have been a steady stream of stories for years about GPSs leading people astray -- this was a topic way back in the early days of  TravelCommons, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2006/05/04/podcast-38-the-accidental-vacation-trusting-travel-technology/\">episode #36</a> in 2006 to be exact, when they were called SatNavs, I told the story of making a dash to SFO after a sales meeting. I’m riding shotgun, tracking our progress on a one of those <em>paper</em> maps that Hertz used to put in every car. But we also had a Hertz NeverLost. It seemed about 10 seconds slow to me. I spotted our turn on I-580, but Hertz said nothing. “Turn,” I said. “No,” Brian said, “You need to trust the technology.” And so when Hertz said to turn 10 seconds later, he did -- right into a gas station. Not as bad as stories of people driving across closed bridges, into rivers, up unpaved mountain roads… But in the subsequent 13 years, with SatNav, now GPS, moving from our cars to our pockets, we’re lean on those algorithms more than ever. Now living in Chicago, I haven’t bothered to learn any of the public transit routes; I just use Google Maps or the Transit app to tell me what bus to catch when.</li><li>Sometimes I’ll use Hipmunk to look at flight options to a new city, or a place I haven’t been in a while. They promote their Agony sort, where their algorithm rates flight by a combination of price, duration, # of stops, and dependability. I’m heading back to CHO and since I haven’t been out there for 6 months, I hit Hipmunk to check out American’s and United’s current flight offerings, scrolled down from the non-stops thru the 1-stops. I thought it was interesting, though, that Hipmunk’s algorithm scored a 24-hr hour Amtrak ride with a 3-hr layover in DC’s Union Station as less agonizing than a 6-hr 2-stop trip on United Express with connections in Columbus and IAD. But given some of my United Express experiences, who am I to second-guess that algorithm?</li><li>One of the things I liked about the soon-to-be-turned-off Google Trips app, is how it would auto-magically generate itinerary recommendations for a city. It would pick out points of interest with high Google review scores, and then combine the hours each would be open from the business listing with the typical amount of time people would stay there, and location and traffic data from Google Maps to generate the best itinerary. This fascinated me. It sucked my into a click hole of academic papers presented at the International Conference on the Practice and Theory of Automated Timetabling and the International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining talking about how the “Tourist Trip Design Problem (TTDP) is a route-planning problem on multiple Points of Interest. TTDP can be considered as an extension of the classical problem of Team Orienteering Problem with Time Windows.” I want to use this to automatically generate microbrewery taproom crawls but the math made my eyes bleed.</li><li>But back to that rainy day in Edinburgh, Google Maps redeemed itself at the end of the day. There was so much rain that Monday, our usual path out of the city, the A90, was at a complete standstill because of flooded underpasses, and stalled cars that tried to make it thru the flooded underpasses. Google Maps guided us past a gridlocked traffic circle, winding us through some apartment complexes, bypassing the flooded parts, and putting us right onto the M90 so we could head out to St Andrews. Better travel through algorithms.</li><li>Bridge Music —     <em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/hepepe/21074\" target=\"_blank\">Bogi Beat Budapest</a> </em>by KarmaHacker  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Leaving Places Behind</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Driving out of St Andrews that last time was a bit melancholy. We’d spent the last 4 September there, saw things change -- restaurants open and close, Edinburgh airport get spiffier -- but also the familiar things stay the same -- <a href=\"http://keysbar.co.uk/\">The Keys</a>, my favorite dive whisky bar; <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"St Andrews Brewing Company (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.standrewsbrewingcompany.com/\" target=\"_blank\">St Andrews Brewing Company</a> or “Stabco” as my daughter would call it, always with a great beer selection from across the UK; and <a href=\"https://jahangirstandrews.co.uk/\">Jahangir</a>, an Indian restaurant we found our first year because they were the only place we could find a table that Friday night... and we kept going back because they had great food and we never couldn’t get a table</li><li>The melancholy was that we probably wouldn’t be back; at least not for a long time. It’s out-of-the-way -- which is part of its charm, but it’s why we probably won’t be back for a while.</li><li>I felt the same way when I finished a project in Portland, Oregon some years back. I was in Portland every week for 3-4 months and got to know it pretty well. I explored new places, but developed some favorite spots I’d hit every week -- <a href=\"https://www.clydecommon.com/\">Clyde Commons</a> for dinner at the bar, <a href=\"https://www.baileystaproom.com/\">Bailey’s Taproom</a> with a new beer selection every week. When that project ended, I knew I wouldn’t be back to Portland for a long time -- as opposed to New York or San Francisco. Wrapping up a project there, not really a big deal because there’s enough business to bring me back. New Orleans was kinda in the middle. I’d been there almost non-stop for 3-4 years, but while I didn’t think business would bring me down there again, it’s not out of the way, and I’d be down often for vacations or conventions -- which is how it’s turned out.</li><li>Some of that melancholy comes from regret -- from things you always meant to do but never made time for -- “I’ll do that next time,” you’d say to yourself, but never get to it. The last time I was in Charlottesville, VA, I was finishing up what had been another 3-4 year stream of work and wasn’t sure when I’d be back. For me, Charlottesville was a bit like St Andrews, an out-of-the-way college town (though only a 2-hr flight from Chicago rather than an 8-10 hour fly-and-drive) and wasn’t sure when -- if ever -- I’d get back. Over those years, I’d always plan to take a half-day and drive the 15 minutes from the client to <a href=\"https://www.monticello.org/\">Monticello</a>, Thomas Jefferson’s home, and take the tour. It’s always written up as a must-see, and I’m right here. But every time I was going to do it, something would come up, and I’d say “I’ll do that next time.” And so here I was, the last time -- I didn’t know when the next time would be. And I really didn’t have much time in my schedule, but after lunch one day, I walked out, taking calls all the way to the Monticello parking lot, and then turned off my phone and had a great tour. And flew out the next morning without that regret.&nbsp;</li><li>But now 6 months later, I’m heading back to Charlottesville. So maybe I’ll get back to St Andrews sooner than I thought. Maybe I should see if <a href=\"https://www.standrewsbrewingcompany.com/\">Stabco</a> needs an old-guy bartender.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #153</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_153.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<p><!--EndFragment--></p>','Podcast #153 — Travel By Algorithm; Leaving Places Behind','','inherit','closed','closed','','2494-revision-v1','','','2019-07-28 09:07:09','2019-07-28 14:07:09','',2494,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/07/28/2494-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0);
INSERT INTO `wp_posts` VALUES
(2502,1,'2019-07-28 09:58:22','2019-07-28 14:58:22','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\">\n<p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Cracked-mirror-square.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2482 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Cracked-mirror-square-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a></p><figcaption>What\'s Behind Me Is Not Important</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>Going upscale, recording in the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/1871Chicago/photos/we-have-a-new-podcast-studio-big-thanks-to-1871-company-parkergale-capital-for-h/1116900888351884/\">podcast studio</a> at the <a href=\"https://1871.com/\">1871 tech incubator</a> in Chicago, I talk about my surprising smooth 2-week trip in Ireland and Scotland. We also note the retirement (finally!) of American Airlines\' MD-80 jet, a very interesting new social media app, talk about how algorithms are changing the way we travel, and the melancholy of leaving familiar places for the last time.&nbsp; All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_153.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/657617519&color=%23ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #153: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the podcast studio in the 1871 tech incubator in Chicago, IL. I have to say that this is the most professional studio I’ve recorded in since my high-school radio days in Memphis. I mentor here once a month and so get to use this bang-up studio. This sound ought to be phenomenal. It’s a few weeks after our 2-week Celtic jaunt -- a week touring in Ireland and a week of graduation festivities at University of St Andrews in Scotland. I’ve talked a bit about the planning for this trip in the past couple of episodes -- wrestling through the Avios website to kludge together flights on Aer Lingus and burn off some of my Avios balance that’s been sitting around for, I dunno, 5-10 years; and trying to sift through the horror stories of Irish car rentals. There were a whole lot of places where this trip could’ve gone bad… but it didn’t. The flights on Aer Lingus were fine; nothing special, but they were serviceable. Our Budget Car rental experience was the same -- a basic Renault compact with 30,000 km on it, but no issues with the folks on either the pick-up or the drop-off in Dublin airport. All the places I booked in Ireland were fine -- the B&amp;Bs on the west coast were great; the hotel in Dublin was, again, serviceable. And, we didn’t really have any rain to speak of until our last day in Dublin.</li><li>The flights between Dublin and Edinburgh were on turboprop planes -- ATR-72-600s to be exact. I can’t remember the last time I was on a prop plane -- even the quick 30-min hops I’d do occasionally between IAD and CHO are on Embraer jets. But I remember way back in my early flying days, American Eagle used to fly a lot of these ATRs. Once those props started turning, I popped on my Bose noise-cancelling headphones. Those American Eagle ATRs were one of the main reasons I invested in my first pair of Bose.</li><li>But other than a bit of a rainy walk to and from that plane in DUB and EDI, they were fine flights. Indeed, if there was any hiccup, it was on arrival in DUB from ORD.&nbsp; We’d checked luggage, even though one of my regular top travel tips is to carry on. I knew the plane was full, and since Aer Lingus isn’t part of OneWorld or StarAlliance, neither my American nor my United status was going to get us pre-boarded. Rather than worrying about having to jockey for overhead space, we checked our bags - and anyways, it was free; it was included in the fare. So, low-hassle boarding. In DUB, I stood at the luggage carousel, watched it heave out a dozen or so bags, and then nothing. No worries; seen that before; the guys must be driving the tug back to the plane. And then the carousel stopped. Not too worried; seen that before too; just saving a little energy. And then the lights above us went out.&nbsp; OK, this is a new one. I have to say that I started to worry a bit -- until I saw our pilot also looking around for his luggage. After 20 minutes, the lights came on and the carousel started burping up bags again. And there was a simultaneous sigh of relief from all the chaperones accompanying the half-dozen student trips that had packed this flight.</li><li> Bridge Music -- <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/Loveshadow/26219\" target=\"_blank\"><em>SP*ANK Vox</em></a> by Loveshadow </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Biggest travel news -- at least to me -- since the last episode -- American announced the retirement (finally!) of the last of its MD-80s, the “Super 80s” or the “Mad Dog 80s” with the last revenue flight planned for Sept 4th from DFW to ORD. Which for me is very apropos because I spent a <em>lot</em> of time in the mid-80\'s flying MD-80\'s between those two AA hubs. I thought the 737 Max grounding might delay the final MD-80 flight, but it looks like American has scrounged up enough 737-800s to fill the gap. I posted American’s announcement on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page. Jim McDonough commented - “Flew the Mad Dog many, many times. My wife and I would select row 9 on the 2 seat side, flying, usually, DFW/SAN. She’s tiny, so I felt like I was in first class.” The left-hand 2-seat side was great for couples -- got a window and an aisle seat without having to guess if the center seat would be filled. But then you had to deal with the short overhead bins on that side where you could only fit your bag in sideways, and usually no power supply. The cigarette style power adapters were on the other side, the 3-seat side, but only in every <em>other</em> row. It was a unique plane...</li><li>Back in May, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/podcast-151-traveler-data-leaks-brittany-street-food/\">episode 151</a>, TravelCommons listener Mika Pyyhkala sent in a note about his great experience with a flight rebooking service, Freebird. This week, I was booking a trip to CHO on the Amex Travel site with my Platinum card. At the end of the booking, it offered me free Freebird coverage for the trip. I had to check a box to opt in, so I read the fine print closely to make sure it was really free, but it was. Seems Freebird and Amex are doing a free trial. Don’t know how long it lasts, but I’ll opt in -- with the hope that I don’t actually have to use it.</li><li>Some bits ‘n’ bobs observations from my Ireland-Scotland trip…</li><li>Like so many other folks, I’m carrying my own water bottle on flights. I started last fall. The big Amazon Web Services conference gave everyone a refillable water bottle, replacing barrels of iced single-use water bottles with refilling stations. Most airports now have refilling spigots next to regular water fountains. Irene has carried one forever. It came in handy when Aer Lingus wanted to charge her €3 for water on one of our flights. Now, I lost that original AWS water bottles a few months back -- matching my usual 6-month time-before-loss metric. No big deal; it was just a plastic bottle with a screw-on cap. But I wanted a new one. So for Fathers’ Day, Claire gave me a new souped-up 20 oz. water bottle with a push-button pop-up drinking spout and a carabiner loop -- very nice. I pulled it out during one of our Aer Lingus flights, skipping their €3 charge, hit the button for the spout and immediately get hit square between the eyes with a fat stream of water from my bottle-now-turned-water fountain. Apparently this new fancy water bottle seals airtight, meaning the water in the bottle stayed at ground pressure while our cabin was now lower, at something between 6 and 8,000 ft. I’m used to that with foil-sealed yogurts, but not my water bottle. A surprise not just for me, but also the Irish guy next to me who was napping before he caught some shrapnel from my portable water cannon.</li><li>One of the things I look forward to when staying at bed-&amp;-breakfasts in the UK and Ireland are… the breakfasts. And the breakfasts we had in Ireland were at least one order of magnitude better than the best concierge lounge fare at a Marriott -- which may be damning with faint praise, but I don’t mean to, we had great breakfasts. For most of our time on the west coast, we hubbed out of Galway, staying in the same place for 3 nights, or more importantly, 3 breakfasts. The first morning was easy; the full cooked breakfast -- eggs, bacon, sausage, black and white pudding, tomatoes, mushrooms, baked beans, and toast. We were doing a good bit of hiking that day and I wasn’t hungry until 3. Doing that two days in a row, though, felt like I was tempting fate -- or at least an arterial blockage. So the next morning, I went with the healthier choice -- oatmeal porridge. The presentation is pretty typical -- a big bowl of porridge with little cups of raisins, brown sugar, and cream. I mix in the raisins, a touch of the brown sugar, and a bit of the cream to loosen up the porridge. Except it doesn’t smell like cream. I taste it -- it’s Bailey\'s Irish Cream. I dump the rest of it in. I figure porridge with a Bailey’s topper is kinda the Irish version of a Bloody Mary.</li><li>One of the big differences for me between renting a car in the US and in Europe is the pre-car inspection. You get the keys, the rental agreement, and a form showing the condition of the car before you take if off the lot -- pre-existing dings and scratches. I always give this form to Irene -- she’s much pickier than I am. She walks around the car, making note of anything missing, while I figure out the rear-view mirrors and pairing my iPhone to the entertainment system. So I was kinda surprised to get an e-mail from Hertz before getting on our flight to EDI with a bunch of pictures of a Kia wagon. Here was our car; here was the documentation of its condition. We walked straight to the car, loaded up the luggage and drove off. No walkaround inspection. It makes sense. We had gotten to the point, on our last couple of rentals, where we were taking pictures of dings and scratches as well as marking them on the form. Now here, Hertz was doing it for us. Not sure if I got this because I have Hertz Gold, but it certainly was a big improvement in the rental experience -- though I still had to figure out how to pair my phone.</li><li>The timing on international connections in Europe always feels a little bit of a crap shoot because there doesn’t seem to be a consistent rule about having to pass thru security again. Amsterdam, no security. Frankfurt, no security for a European connection, but security if you’re flying to, say, India or the Middle East. London, security every time, maybe even a couple of additional passes just for kicks. Dublin, though, had a new twist. Go thru the usual drill -- pull out your electronics, take off your belt, push your bags thru the X-ray machine, but then -- where’s the metal detector? Just walk past the security guy and put my PC back in my bag. I looked back. There was a metal detector all the way at the end of the security hall, but only one. The rest of us were acting like we were walking thru a metal detector, except there wasn’t one. That was just odd.</li><li>We were in Scotland for Claire’s graduation from University of St Andrews. Hanging around, drinking beer with folks a couple of generations younger than you -- this group was right on the Millennial/Gen Z boundary -- is always an educational experience. But when the conversation turned to their new favorite app -- <a href=\"https://apps.apple.com/us/app/poop-map-pin-and-track/id1303269455\">Poop</a> <a href=\"https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.poopmap&amp;hl=en_US\">Map</a> -- I thought they were leading this old guy on. An app where you and your friends share the places you’ve pooped, complete with star ratings and comments, seemed too much like an Onion headline -- social media taken to the absurd extreme. Except is wasn’t satire; it was real. They all pulled out their phones, fired up the app, and showed me their check-ins. OK, then. But I think checking in beers on Untappd is as far as I want to go.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com. </li><li>Bridge Music —  &nbsp;<em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/trifonic/445\" target=\"_blank\">Bored on Your Backside</a></em> by Trifonic     </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Travel by Algorithm</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>On the rainy Monday we flew from DUB to EDI, I drove us downtown to meet some friends for the day. The rain was beginning to muck up traffic, so I was kinda glued to Google Maps to help route us around some of the traffic tie ups, which meant we weren’t on the usual route take in from the airport, which meant I was just about completely dependent on Google; completely trusting that algorithm. Which was kinda broken when I followed Google’s directions through a warning sign and onto a “Buses Only” road. Google directed me to keep driving down the road, but since I was only a single-decker Kia wagon, I didn’t think any attempt to masquerade as a bus was going to survive our first police encounter. So I took the first left (much easier when driving on the left side of the road) hoping the algorithm would produce a bit more legal routing.</li><li>Not overly shocking. There have been a steady stream of stories for years about GPSs leading people astray -- this was a topic way back in the early days of&nbsp; TravelCommons, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2006/05/04/podcast-38-the-accidental-vacation-trusting-travel-technology/\">episode #36</a> in 2006 to be exact, when they were called SatNavs, I told the story of making a dash to SFO after a sales meeting. I’m riding shotgun, tracking our progress on a one of those <em>paper</em> maps that Hertz used to put in every car. But we also had a Hertz NeverLost. It seemed about 10 seconds slow to me. I spotted our turn on I-580, but Hertz said nothing. “Turn,” I said. “No,” Brian said, “You need to trust the technology.” And so when Hertz said to turn 10 seconds later, he did -- right into a gas station. Not as bad as stories of people driving across closed bridges, into rivers, up unpaved mountain roads… But in the subsequent 13 years, with SatNav, now GPS, moving from our cars to our pockets, we’re lean on those algorithms more than ever. Now living in Chicago, I haven’t bothered to learn any of the public transit routes; I just use Google Maps or the Transit app to tell me what bus to catch when.</li><li>Sometimes I’ll use Hipmunk to look at flight options to a new city, or a place I haven’t been in a while. They promote their Agony sort, where their algorithm rates flight by a combination of price, duration, # of stops, and dependability. I’m heading back to CHO and since I haven’t been out there for 6 months, I hit Hipmunk to check out American’s and United’s current flight offerings, scrolled down from the non-stops thru the 1-stops. I thought it was interesting, though, that Hipmunk’s algorithm scored a 24-hr hour Amtrak ride with a 3-hr layover in DC’s Union Station as less agonizing than a 6-hr 2-stop trip on United Express with connections in Columbus and IAD. But given some of my United Express experiences, who am I to second-guess that algorithm?</li><li>One of the things I liked about the soon-to-be-turned-off Google Trips app, is how it would auto-magically generate itinerary recommendations for a city. It would pick out points of interest with high Google review scores, and then combine the hours each would be open from the business listing with the typical amount of time people would stay there, and location and traffic data from Google Maps to generate the best itinerary. This fascinated me. It sucked my into a click hole of academic papers presented at the International Conference on the Practice and Theory of Automated Timetabling and the International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining talking about how the “Tourist Trip Design Problem (TTDP) is a route-planning problem on multiple Points of Interest. TTDP can be considered as an extension of the classical problem of Team Orienteering Problem with Time Windows.” I want to use this to automatically generate microbrewery taproom crawls but the math made my eyes bleed.</li><li>But back to that rainy day in Edinburgh, Google Maps redeemed itself at the end of the day. There was so much rain that Monday, our usual path out of the city, the A90, was at a complete standstill because of flooded underpasses, and stalled cars that tried to make it thru the flooded underpasses. Google Maps guided us past a gridlocked traffic circle, winding us through some apartment complexes, bypassing the flooded parts, and putting us right onto the M90 so we could head out to St Andrews. Better travel through algorithms.</li><li>Bridge Music —   &nbsp; <em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/hepepe/21074\" target=\"_blank\">Bogi Beat Budapest</a> </em>by KarmaHacker  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Leaving Places Behind</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Driving out of St Andrews that last time was a bit melancholy. We’d spent the last 4 September there, saw things change -- restaurants open and close, Edinburgh airport get spiffier -- but also the familiar things stay the same -- <a href=\"http://keysbar.co.uk/\">The Keys</a>, my favorite dive whisky bar; <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"St Andrews Brewing Company (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.standrewsbrewingcompany.com/\" target=\"_blank\">St Andrews Brewing Company</a> or “Stabco” as my daughter would call it, always with a great beer selection from across the UK; and <a href=\"https://jahangirstandrews.co.uk/\">Jahangir</a>, an Indian restaurant we found our first year because they were the only place we could find a table that Friday night... and we kept going back because they had great food and we never couldn’t get a table</li><li>The melancholy was that we probably wouldn’t be back; at least not for a long time. It’s out-of-the-way -- which is part of its charm, but it’s why we probably won’t be back for a while.</li><li>I felt the same way when I finished a project in Portland, Oregon some years back. I was in Portland every week for 3-4 months and got to know it pretty well. I explored new places, but developed some favorite spots I’d hit every week -- <a href=\"https://www.clydecommon.com/\">Clyde Commons</a> for dinner at the bar, <a href=\"https://www.baileystaproom.com/\">Bailey’s Taproom</a> with a new beer selection every week. When that project ended, I knew I wouldn’t be back to Portland for a long time -- as opposed to New York or San Francisco. Wrapping up a project there, not really a big deal because there’s enough business to bring me back. New Orleans was kinda in the middle. I’d been there almost non-stop for 3-4 years, but while I didn’t think business would bring me down there again, it’s not out of the way, and I’d be down often for vacations or conventions -- which is how it’s turned out.</li><li>Some of that melancholy comes from regret -- from things you always meant to do but never made time for -- “I’ll do that next time,” you’d say to yourself, but never get to it. The last time I was in Charlottesville, VA, I was finishing up what had been another 3-4 year stream of work and wasn’t sure when I’d be back. For me, Charlottesville was a bit like St Andrews, an out-of-the-way college town (though only a 2-hr flight from Chicago rather than an 8-10 hour fly-and-drive) and wasn’t sure when -- if ever -- I’d get back. Over those years, I’d always plan to take a half-day and drive the 15 minutes from the client to <a href=\"https://www.monticello.org/\">Monticello</a>, Thomas Jefferson’s home, and take the tour. It’s always written up as a must-see, and I’m right here. But every time I was going to do it, something would come up, and I’d say “I’ll do that next time.” And so here I was, the last time -- I didn’t know when the next time would be. And I really didn’t have much time in my schedule, but after lunch one day, I walked out, taking calls all the way to the Monticello parking lot, and then turned off my phone and had a great tour. And flew out the next morning without that regret.&nbsp;</li><li>But now 6 months later, I’m heading back to Charlottesville. So maybe I’ll get back to St Andrews sooner than I thought. Maybe I should see if <a href=\"https://www.standrewsbrewingcompany.com/\">Stabco</a> needs an old-guy bartender.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #153</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_153.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<p><!--EndFragment--></p>','Podcast #153 — Travel By Algorithm; Leaving Places Behind','','inherit','closed','closed','','2494-revision-v1','','','2019-07-28 09:58:22','2019-07-28 14:58:22','',2494,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/07/28/2494-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2503,1,'2019-07-28 10:05:10','2019-07-28 15:05:10','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\">\n<p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Cracked-mirror-square.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2482 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Cracked-mirror-square-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a></p>\n<figcaption>What\'s Behind Me Is Not Important</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p>Going upscale, recording in the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/1871Chicago/photos/we-have-a-new-podcast-studio-big-thanks-to-1871-company-parkergale-capital-for-h/1116900888351884/\">podcast studio</a> at the <a href=\"https://1871.com/\">1871 tech incubator</a> in Chicago, I talk about my surprising smooth 2-week trip in Ireland and Scotland. We also note the retirement (finally!) of American Airlines\' MD-80 jet, a very interesting new social media app, talk about how algorithms are changing the way we travel, and the melancholy of leaving familiar places for the last time.  All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_153.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/657617519&color=%23ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #153: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the podcast studio in the 1871 tech incubator in Chicago, IL. I have to say that this is the most professional studio I’ve recorded in since my high-school radio days in Memphis. I mentor here once a month and so get to use this bang-up studio. This sound ought to be phenomenal. It’s a few weeks after our 2-week Celtic jaunt -- a week touring in Ireland and a week of graduation festivities at University of St Andrews in Scotland. I’ve talked a bit about the planning for this trip in the past couple of episodes -- wrestling through the Avios website to kludge together flights on Aer Lingus and burn off some of my Avios balance that’s been sitting around for, I dunno, 5-10 years; and trying to sift through the horror stories of Irish car rentals. There were a whole lot of places where this trip could’ve gone bad… but it didn’t. The flights on Aer Lingus were fine; nothing special, but they were serviceable. Our Budget Car rental experience was the same -- a basic Renault compact with 30,000 km on it, but no issues with the folks on either the pick-up or the drop-off in Dublin airport. All the places I booked in Ireland were fine -- the B&amp;Bs on the west coast were great; the hotel in Dublin was, again, serviceable. And, we didn’t really have any rain to speak of until our last day in Dublin.</li><li>The flights between Dublin and Edinburgh were on turboprop planes -- ATR-72-600s to be exact. I can’t remember the last time I was on a prop plane -- even the quick 30-min hops I’d do occasionally between IAD and CHO are on Embraer jets. But I remember way back in my early flying days, American Eagle used to fly a lot of these ATRs. Once those props started turning, I popped on my Bose noise-cancelling headphones. Those American Eagle ATRs were one of the main reasons I invested in my first pair of Bose.</li><li>But other than a bit of a rainy walk to and from that plane in DUB and EDI, they were fine flights. Indeed, if there was any hiccup, it was on arrival in DUB from ORD.&nbsp; We’d checked luggage, even though one of my regular top travel tips is to carry on. I knew the plane was full, and since Aer Lingus isn’t part of OneWorld or StarAlliance, neither my American nor my United status was going to get us pre-boarded. Rather than worrying about having to jockey for overhead space, we checked our bags - and anyways, it was free; it was included in the fare. So, low-hassle boarding. In DUB, I stood at the luggage carousel, watched it heave out a dozen or so bags, and then nothing. No worries; seen that before; the guys must be driving the tug back to the plane. And then the carousel stopped. Not too worried; seen that before too; just saving a little energy. And then the lights above us went out.&nbsp; OK, this is a new one. I have to say that I started to worry a bit -- until I saw our pilot also looking around for his luggage. After 20 minutes, the lights came on and the carousel started burping up bags again. And there was a simultaneous sigh of relief from all the chaperones accompanying the half-dozen student trips that had packed this flight.</li><li> Bridge Music -- <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/Loveshadow/26219\" target=\"_blank\"><em>SP*ANK Vox</em></a> by Loveshadow </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Biggest travel news -- at least to me -- since the last episode -- American announced the retirement (finally!) of the last of its MD-80s, the “Super 80s” or the “Mad Dog 80s” with the last revenue flight planned for Sept 4th from DFW to ORD. Which for me is very apropos because I spent a <em>lot</em> of time in the mid-80\'s flying MD-80\'s between those two AA hubs. I thought the 737 Max grounding might delay the final MD-80 flight, but it looks like American has scrounged up enough 737-800s to fill the gap. I posted American’s announcement on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page. Jim McDonough commented - “Flew the Mad Dog many, many times. My wife and I would select row 9 on the 2 seat side, flying, usually, DFW/SAN. She’s tiny, so I felt like I was in first class.” The left-hand 2-seat side was great for couples -- got a window and an aisle seat without having to guess if the center seat would be filled. But then you had to deal with the short overhead bins on that side where you could only fit your bag in sideways, and usually no power supply. The cigarette style power adapters were on the other side, the 3-seat side, but only in every <em>other</em> row. It was a unique plane...</li><li>Back in May, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/podcast-151-traveler-data-leaks-brittany-street-food/\">episode 151</a>, TravelCommons listener Mika Pyyhkala sent in a note about his great experience with a flight rebooking service, Freebird. This week, I was booking a trip to CHO on the Amex Travel site with my Platinum card. At the end of the booking, it offered me free Freebird coverage for the trip. I had to check a box to opt in, so I read the fine print closely to make sure it was really free, but it was. Seems Freebird and Amex are doing a free trial. Don’t know how long it lasts, but I’ll opt in -- with the hope that I don’t actually have to use it.</li><li>Some bits ‘n’ bobs observations from my Ireland-Scotland trip…</li><li>Like so many other folks, I’m carrying my own water bottle on flights. I started last fall. The big Amazon Web Services conference gave everyone a refillable water bottle, replacing barrels of iced single-use water bottles with refilling stations. Most airports now have refilling spigots next to regular water fountains. Irene has carried one forever. It came in handy when Aer Lingus wanted to charge her €3 for water on one of our flights. Now, I lost that original AWS water bottles a few months back -- matching my usual 6-month time-before-loss metric. No big deal; it was just a plastic bottle with a screw-on cap. But I wanted a new one. So for Fathers’ Day, Claire gave me a new souped-up 20 oz. water bottle with a push-button pop-up drinking spout and a carabiner loop -- very nice. I pulled it out during one of our Aer Lingus flights, skipping their €3 charge, hit the button for the spout and immediately get hit square between the eyes with a fat stream of water from my bottle-now-turned-water fountain. Apparently this new fancy water bottle seals airtight, meaning the water in the bottle stayed at ground pressure while our cabin was now lower, at something between 6 and 8,000 ft. I’m used to that with foil-sealed yogurts, but not my water bottle. A surprise not just for me, but also the Irish guy next to me who was napping before he caught some shrapnel from my portable water cannon.</li><li>One of the things I look forward to when staying at bed-&amp;-breakfasts in the UK and Ireland are… the breakfasts. And the breakfasts we had in Ireland were at least one order of magnitude better than the best concierge lounge fare at a Marriott -- which may be damning with faint praise, but I don’t mean to, we had great breakfasts. For most of our time on the west coast, we hubbed out of Galway, staying in the same place for 3 nights, or more importantly, 3 breakfasts. The first morning was easy; the full cooked breakfast -- eggs, bacon, sausage, black and white pudding, tomatoes, mushrooms, baked beans, and toast. We were doing a good bit of hiking that day and I wasn’t hungry until 3. Doing that two days in a row, though, felt like I was tempting fate -- or at least an arterial blockage. So the next morning, I went with the healthier choice -- oatmeal porridge. The presentation is pretty typical -- a big bowl of porridge with little cups of raisins, brown sugar, and cream. I mix in the raisins, a touch of the brown sugar, and a bit of the cream to loosen up the porridge. Except it doesn’t smell like cream. I taste it -- it’s Bailey\'s Irish Cream. I dump the rest of it in. I figure porridge with a Bailey’s topper is kinda the Irish version of a Bloody Mary.</li><li>One of the big differences for me between renting a car in the US and in Europe is the pre-car inspection. You get the keys, the rental agreement, and a form showing the condition of the car before you take if off the lot -- pre-existing dings and scratches. I always give this form to Irene -- she’s much pickier than I am. She walks around the car, making note of anything missing, while I figure out the rear-view mirrors and pairing my iPhone to the entertainment system. So I was kinda surprised to get an e-mail from Hertz before getting on our flight to EDI with a bunch of pictures of a Kia wagon. Here was our car; here was the documentation of its condition. We walked straight to the car, loaded up the luggage and drove off. No walkaround inspection. It makes sense. We had gotten to the point, on our last couple of rentals, where we were taking pictures of dings and scratches as well as marking them on the form. Now here, Hertz was doing it for us. Not sure if I got this because I have Hertz Gold, but it certainly was a big improvement in the rental experience -- though I still had to figure out how to pair my phone.</li><li>The timing on international connections in Europe always feels a little bit of a crap shoot because there doesn’t seem to be a consistent rule about having to pass thru security again. Amsterdam, no security. Frankfurt, no security for a European connection, but security if you’re flying to, say, India or the Middle East. London, security every time, maybe even a couple of additional passes just for kicks. Dublin, though, had a new twist. Go thru the usual drill -- pull out your electronics, take off your belt, push your bags thru the X-ray machine, but then -- where’s the metal detector? Just walk past the security guy and put my PC back in my bag. I looked back. There was a metal detector all the way at the end of the security hall, but only one. The rest of us were acting like we were walking thru a metal detector, except there wasn’t one. That was just odd.</li><li>We were in Scotland for Claire’s graduation from University of St Andrews. Hanging around, drinking beer with folks a couple of generations younger than you -- this group was right on the Millennial/Gen Z boundary -- is always an educational experience. But when the conversation turned to their new favorite app -- <a href=\"https://apps.apple.com/us/app/poop-map-pin-and-track/id1303269455\">Poop</a> <a href=\"https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.poopmap&amp;hl=en_US\">Map</a> -- I thought they were leading this old guy on. An app where you and your friends share the places you’ve pooped, complete with star ratings and comments, seemed too much like an Onion headline -- social media taken to the absurd extreme. Except is wasn’t satire; it was real. They all pulled out their phones, fired up the app, and showed me their check-ins. OK, then. But I think checking in beers on Untappd is as far as I want to go.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com. </li><li>Bridge Music —  &nbsp;<em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/trifonic/445\" target=\"_blank\">Bored on Your Backside</a></em> by Trifonic     </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Travel by Algorithm</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>On the rainy Monday we flew from DUB to EDI, I drove us downtown to meet some friends for the day. The rain was beginning to muck up traffic, so I was kinda glued to Google Maps to help route us around some of the traffic tie ups, which meant we weren’t on the usual route take in from the airport, which meant I was just about completely dependent on Google; completely trusting that algorithm. Which was kinda broken when I followed Google’s directions through a warning sign and onto a “Buses Only” road. Google directed me to keep driving down the road, but since I was only a single-decker Kia wagon, I didn’t think any attempt to masquerade as a bus was going to survive our first police encounter. So I took the first left (much easier when driving on the left side of the road) hoping the algorithm would produce a bit more legal routing.</li><li>Not overly shocking. There have been a steady stream of stories for years about GPSs leading people astray -- this was a topic way back in the early days of&nbsp; TravelCommons, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2006/05/04/podcast-38-the-accidental-vacation-trusting-travel-technology/\">episode #36</a> in 2006 to be exact, when they were called SatNavs, I told the story of making a dash to SFO after a sales meeting. I’m riding shotgun, tracking our progress on a one of those <em>paper</em> maps that Hertz used to put in every car. But we also had a Hertz NeverLost. It seemed about 10 seconds slow to me. I spotted our turn on I-580, but Hertz said nothing. “Turn,” I said. “No,” Brian said, “You need to trust the technology.” And so when Hertz said to turn 10 seconds later, he did -- right into a gas station. Not as bad as stories of people driving across closed bridges, into rivers, up unpaved mountain roads… But in the subsequent 13 years, with SatNav, now GPS, moving from our cars to our pockets, we’re lean on those algorithms more than ever. Now living in Chicago, I haven’t bothered to learn any of the public transit routes; I just use Google Maps or the Transit app to tell me what bus to catch when.</li><li>Sometimes I’ll use Hipmunk to look at flight options to a new city, or a place I haven’t been in a while. They promote their Agony sort, where their algorithm rates flight by a combination of price, duration, # of stops, and dependability. I’m heading back to CHO and since I haven’t been out there for 6 months, I hit Hipmunk to check out American’s and United’s current flight offerings, scrolled down from the non-stops thru the 1-stops. I thought it was interesting, though, that Hipmunk’s algorithm scored a 24-hr hour Amtrak ride with a 3-hr layover in DC’s Union Station as less agonizing than a 6-hr 2-stop trip on United Express with connections in Columbus and IAD. But given some of my United Express experiences, who am I to second-guess that algorithm?</li><li>One of the things I liked about the soon-to-be-turned-off Google Trips app, is how it would auto-magically generate itinerary recommendations for a city. It would pick out points of interest with high Google review scores, and then combine the hours each would be open from the business listing with the typical amount of time people would stay there, and location and traffic data from Google Maps to generate the best itinerary. This fascinated me. It sucked my into a click hole of academic papers presented at the International Conference on the Practice and Theory of Automated Timetabling and the International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining talking about how the “Tourist Trip Design Problem (TTDP) is a route-planning problem on multiple Points of Interest. TTDP can be considered as an extension of the classical problem of Team Orienteering Problem with Time Windows.” I want to use this to automatically generate microbrewery taproom crawls but the math made my eyes bleed.</li><li>But back to that rainy day in Edinburgh, Google Maps redeemed itself at the end of the day. There was so much rain that Monday, our usual path out of the city, the A90, was at a complete standstill because of flooded underpasses, and stalled cars that tried to make it thru the flooded underpasses. Google Maps guided us past a gridlocked traffic circle, winding us through some apartment complexes, bypassing the flooded parts, and putting us right onto the M90 so we could head out to St Andrews. Better travel through algorithms.</li><li>Bridge Music —   &nbsp; <em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/hepepe/21074\" target=\"_blank\">Bogi Beat Budapest</a> </em>by KarmaHacker  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Leaving Places Behind</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Driving out of St Andrews that last time was a bit melancholy. We’d spent the last 4 September there, saw things change -- restaurants open and close, Edinburgh airport get spiffier -- but also the familiar things stay the same -- <a href=\"http://keysbar.co.uk/\">The Keys</a>, my favorite dive whisky bar; <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"St Andrews Brewing Company (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.standrewsbrewingcompany.com/\" target=\"_blank\">St Andrews Brewing Company</a> or “Stabco” as my daughter would call it, always with a great beer selection from across the UK; and <a href=\"https://jahangirstandrews.co.uk/\">Jahangir</a>, an Indian restaurant we found our first year because they were the only place we could find a table that Friday night... and we kept going back because they had great food and we never couldn’t get a table</li><li>The melancholy was that we probably wouldn’t be back; at least not for a long time. It’s out-of-the-way -- which is part of its charm, but it’s why we probably won’t be back for a while.</li><li>I felt the same way when I finished a project in Portland, Oregon some years back. I was in Portland every week for 3-4 months and got to know it pretty well. I explored new places, but developed some favorite spots I’d hit every week -- <a href=\"https://www.clydecommon.com/\">Clyde Commons</a> for dinner at the bar, <a href=\"https://www.baileystaproom.com/\">Bailey’s Taproom</a> with a new beer selection every week. When that project ended, I knew I wouldn’t be back to Portland for a long time -- as opposed to New York or San Francisco. Wrapping up a project there, not really a big deal because there’s enough business to bring me back. New Orleans was kinda in the middle. I’d been there almost non-stop for 3-4 years, but while I didn’t think business would bring me down there again, it’s not out of the way, and I’d be down often for vacations or conventions -- which is how it’s turned out.</li><li>Some of that melancholy comes from regret -- from things you always meant to do but never made time for -- “I’ll do that next time,” you’d say to yourself, but never get to it. The last time I was in Charlottesville, VA, I was finishing up what had been another 3-4 year stream of work and wasn’t sure when I’d be back. For me, Charlottesville was a bit like St Andrews, an out-of-the-way college town (though only a 2-hr flight from Chicago rather than an 8-10 hour fly-and-drive) and wasn’t sure when -- if ever -- I’d get back. Over those years, I’d always plan to take a half-day and drive the 15 minutes from the client to <a href=\"https://www.monticello.org/\">Monticello</a>, Thomas Jefferson’s home, and take the tour. It’s always written up as a must-see, and I’m right here. But every time I was going to do it, something would come up, and I’d say “I’ll do that next time.” And so here I was, the last time -- I didn’t know when the next time would be. And I really didn’t have much time in my schedule, but after lunch one day, I walked out, taking calls all the way to the Monticello parking lot, and then turned off my phone and had a great tour. And flew out the next morning without that regret.&nbsp;</li><li>But now 6 months later, I’m heading back to Charlottesville. So maybe I’ll get back to St Andrews sooner than I thought. Maybe I should see if <a href=\"https://www.standrewsbrewingcompany.com/\">Stabco</a> needs an old-guy bartender.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #153</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_153.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<p><!--EndFragment--></p>','Podcast #153 — Travel By Algorithm; Leaving Places Behind','','inherit','closed','closed','','2494-revision-v1','','','2019-07-28 10:05:10','2019-07-28 15:05:10','',2494,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/07/28/2494-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2504,1,'2019-07-28 10:06:01','2019-07-28 15:06:01','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\">\n<p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Cracked-mirror-square.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2482 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Cracked-mirror-square-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a></p><figcaption>What\'s Behind Me Is Not Important</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>Going upscale, recording in the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/1871Chicago/photos/we-have-a-new-podcast-studio-big-thanks-to-1871-company-parkergale-capital-for-h/1116900888351884/\">podcast studio</a> at the <a href=\"https://1871.com/\">1871 tech incubator</a> in Chicago, I talk about my surprising smooth 2-week trip in Ireland and Scotland. We also note the retirement (finally!) of American Airlines\' MD-80 jet, a very interesting new social media app, talk about how algorithms are changing the way we travel, and the melancholy of leaving familiar places for the last time.&nbsp; All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_153.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/657617519&color=%23ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #153: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the podcast studio in the 1871 tech incubator in Chicago, IL. I have to say that this is the most professional studio I’ve recorded in since my high-school radio days in Memphis. I mentor here once a month and so get to use this bang-up studio. This sound ought to be phenomenal. It’s a few weeks after our 2-week Celtic jaunt -- a week touring in Ireland and a week of graduation festivities at University of St Andrews in Scotland. I’ve talked a bit about the planning for this trip in the past couple of episodes -- wrestling through the Avios website to kludge together flights on Aer Lingus and burn off some of my Avios balance that’s been sitting around for, I dunno, 5-10 years; and trying to sift through the horror stories of Irish car rentals. There were a whole lot of places where this trip could’ve gone bad… but it didn’t. The flights on Aer Lingus were fine; nothing special, but they were serviceable. Our Budget Car rental experience was the same -- a basic Renault compact with 30,000 km on it, but no issues with the folks on either the pick-up or the drop-off in Dublin airport. All the places I booked in Ireland were fine -- the B&amp;Bs on the west coast were great; the hotel in Dublin was, again, serviceable. And, we didn’t really have any rain to speak of until our last day in Dublin.</li><li>The flights between Dublin and Edinburgh were on turboprop planes -- ATR-72-600s to be exact. I can’t remember the last time I was on a prop plane -- even the quick 30-min hops I’d do occasionally between IAD and CHO are on Embraer jets. But I remember way back in my early flying days, American Eagle used to fly a lot of these ATRs. Once those props started turning, I popped on my Bose noise-cancelling headphones. Those American Eagle ATRs were one of the main reasons I invested in my first pair of Bose.</li><li>But other than a bit of a rainy walk to and from that plane in DUB and EDI, they were fine flights. Indeed, if there was any hiccup, it was on arrival in DUB from ORD.&nbsp; We’d checked luggage, even though one of my regular top travel tips is to carry on. I knew the plane was full, and since Aer Lingus isn’t part of OneWorld or StarAlliance, neither my American nor my United status was going to get us pre-boarded. Rather than worrying about having to jockey for overhead space, we checked our bags - and anyways, it was free; it was included in the fare. So, low-hassle boarding. In DUB, I stood at the luggage carousel, watched it heave out a dozen or so bags, and then nothing. No worries; seen that before; the guys must be driving the tug back to the plane. And then the carousel stopped. Not too worried; seen that before too; just saving a little energy. And then the lights above us went out.&nbsp; OK, this is a new one. I have to say that I started to worry a bit -- until I saw our pilot also looking around for his luggage. After 20 minutes, the lights came on and the carousel started burping up bags again. And there was a simultaneous sigh of relief from all the chaperones accompanying the half-dozen student trips that had packed this flight.</li><li> Bridge Music -- <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/Loveshadow/26219\" target=\"_blank\"><em>SP*ANK Vox</em></a> by Loveshadow </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Biggest travel news -- at least to me -- since the last episode -- American announced the retirement (finally!) of the last of its MD-80s, the “Super 80s” or the “Mad Dog 80s” with the last revenue flight planned for Sept 4th from DFW to ORD. Which for me is very apropos because I spent a <em>lot</em> of time in the mid-80\'s flying MD-80\'s between those two AA hubs. I thought the 737 Max grounding might delay the final MD-80 flight, but it looks like American has scrounged up enough 737-800s to fill the gap. I posted American’s announcement on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page. Jim McDonough commented - “Flew the Mad Dog many, many times. My wife and I would select row 9 on the 2 seat side, flying, usually, DFW/SAN. She’s tiny, so I felt like I was in first class.” The left-hand 2-seat side was great for couples -- got a window and an aisle seat without having to guess if the center seat would be filled. But then you had to deal with the short overhead bins on that side where you could only fit your bag in sideways, and usually no power supply. The cigarette style power adapters were on the other side, the 3-seat side, but only in every <em>other</em> row. It was a unique plane...</li><li>Back in May, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/podcast-151-traveler-data-leaks-brittany-street-food/\">episode 151</a>, TravelCommons listener Mika Pyyhkala sent in a note about his great experience with a flight rebooking service, Freebird. This week, I was booking a trip to CHO on the Amex Travel site with my Platinum card. At the end of the booking, it offered me free Freebird coverage for the trip. I had to check a box to opt in, so I read the fine print closely to make sure it was really free, but it was. Seems Freebird and Amex are doing a free trial. Don’t know how long it lasts, but I’ll opt in -- with the hope that I don’t actually have to use it.</li><li>Some bits ‘n’ bobs observations from my Ireland-Scotland trip…</li><li>Like so many other folks, I’m carrying my own water bottle on flights. I started last fall. The big Amazon Web Services conference gave everyone a refillable water bottle, replacing barrels of iced single-use water bottles with refilling stations. Most airports now have refilling spigots next to regular water fountains. Irene has carried one forever. It came in handy when Aer Lingus wanted to charge her €3 for water on one of our flights. Now, I lost that original AWS water bottles a few months back -- matching my usual 6-month time-before-loss metric. No big deal; it was just a plastic bottle with a screw-on cap. But I wanted a new one. So for Fathers’ Day, Claire gave me a new souped-up 20 oz. water bottle with a push-button pop-up drinking spout and a carabiner loop -- very nice. I pulled it out during one of our Aer Lingus flights, skipping their €3 charge, hit the button for the spout and immediately get hit square between the eyes with a fat stream of water from my bottle-now-turned-water fountain. Apparently this new fancy water bottle seals airtight, meaning the water in the bottle stayed at ground pressure while our cabin was now lower, at something between 6 and 8,000 ft. I’m used to that with foil-sealed yogurts, but not my water bottle. A surprise not just for me, but also the Irish guy next to me who was napping before he caught some shrapnel from my portable water cannon.</li><li>One of the things I look forward to when staying at bed-&amp;-breakfasts in the UK and Ireland are… the breakfasts. And the breakfasts we had in Ireland were at least one order of magnitude better than the best concierge lounge fare at a Marriott -- which may be damning with faint praise, but I don’t mean to, we had great breakfasts. For most of our time on the west coast, we hubbed out of Galway, staying in the same place for 3 nights, or more importantly, 3 breakfasts. The first morning was easy; the full cooked breakfast -- eggs, bacon, sausage, black and white pudding, tomatoes, mushrooms, baked beans, and toast. We were doing a good bit of hiking that day and I wasn’t hungry until 3. Doing that two days in a row, though, felt like I was tempting fate -- or at least an arterial blockage. So the next morning, I went with the healthier choice -- oatmeal porridge. The presentation is pretty typical -- a big bowl of porridge with little cups of raisins, brown sugar, and cream. I mix in the raisins, a touch of the brown sugar, and a bit of the cream to loosen up the porridge. Except it doesn’t smell like cream. I taste it -- it’s Bailey\'s Irish Cream. I dump the rest of it in. I figure porridge with a Bailey’s topper is kinda the Irish version of a Bloody Mary.</li><li>One of the big differences for me between renting a car in the US and in Europe is the pre-car inspection. You get the keys, the rental agreement, and a form showing the condition of the car before you take if off the lot -- pre-existing dings and scratches. I always give this form to Irene -- she’s much pickier than I am. She walks around the car, making note of anything missing, while I figure out the rear-view mirrors and pairing my iPhone to the entertainment system. So I was kinda surprised to get an e-mail from Hertz before getting on our flight to EDI with a bunch of pictures of a Kia wagon. Here was our car; here was the documentation of its condition. We walked straight to the car, loaded up the luggage and drove off. No walkaround inspection. It makes sense. We had gotten to the point, on our last couple of rentals, where we were taking pictures of dings and scratches as well as marking them on the form. Now here, Hertz was doing it for us. Not sure if I got this because I have Hertz Gold, but it certainly was a big improvement in the rental experience -- though I still had to figure out how to pair my phone.</li><li>The timing on international connections in Europe always feels a little bit of a crap shoot because there doesn’t seem to be a consistent rule about having to pass thru security again. Amsterdam, no security. Frankfurt, no security for a European connection, but security if you’re flying to, say, India or the Middle East. London, security every time, maybe even a couple of additional passes just for kicks. Dublin, though, had a new twist. Go thru the usual drill -- pull out your electronics, take off your belt, push your bags thru the X-ray machine, but then -- where’s the metal detector? Just walk past the security guy and put my PC back in my bag. I looked back. There was a metal detector all the way at the end of the security hall, but only one. The rest of us were acting like we were walking thru a metal detector, except there wasn’t one. That was just odd.</li><li>We were in Scotland for Claire’s graduation from University of St Andrews. Hanging around, drinking beer with folks a couple of generations younger than you -- this group was right on the Millennial/Gen Z boundary -- is always an educational experience. But when the conversation turned to their new favorite app -- <a href=\"https://apps.apple.com/us/app/poop-map-pin-and-track/id1303269455\">Poop</a> <a href=\"https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.poopmap&amp;hl=en_US\">Map</a> -- I thought they were leading this old guy on. An app where you and your friends share the places you’ve pooped, complete with star ratings and comments, seemed too much like an Onion headline -- social media taken to the absurd extreme. Except is wasn’t satire; it was real. They all pulled out their phones, fired up the app, and showed me their check-ins. OK, then. But I think checking in beers on Untappd is as far as I want to go.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com. </li><li>Bridge Music —  &nbsp;<em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/trifonic/445\" target=\"_blank\">Bored on Your Backside</a></em> by Trifonic     </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Travel by Algorithm</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>On the rainy Monday we flew from DUB to EDI, I drove us downtown to meet some friends for the day. The rain was beginning to muck up traffic, so I was kinda glued to Google Maps to help route us around some of the traffic tie ups, which meant we weren’t on the usual route take in from the airport, which meant I was just about completely dependent on Google; completely trusting that algorithm. Which was kinda broken when I followed Google’s directions through a warning sign and onto a “Buses Only” road. Google directed me to keep driving down the road, but since I was only a single-decker Kia wagon, I didn’t think any attempt to masquerade as a bus was going to survive our first police encounter. So I took the first left (much easier when driving on the left side of the road) hoping the algorithm would produce a bit more legal routing.</li><li>Not overly shocking. There have been a steady stream of stories for years about GPSs leading people astray -- this was a topic way back in the early days of&nbsp; TravelCommons, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2006/05/04/podcast-38-the-accidental-vacation-trusting-travel-technology/\">episode #36</a> in 2006 to be exact, when they were called SatNavs, I told the story of making a dash to SFO after a sales meeting. I’m riding shotgun, tracking our progress on a one of those <em>paper</em> maps that Hertz used to put in every car. But we also had a Hertz NeverLost. It seemed about 10 seconds slow to me. I spotted our turn on I-580, but Hertz said nothing. “Turn,” I said. “No,” Brian said, “You need to trust the technology.” And so when Hertz said to turn 10 seconds later, he did -- right into a gas station. Not as bad as stories of people driving across closed bridges, into rivers, up unpaved mountain roads… But in the subsequent 13 years, with SatNav, now GPS, moving from our cars to our pockets, we’re lean on those algorithms more than ever. Now living in Chicago, I haven’t bothered to learn any of the public transit routes; I just use Google Maps or the Transit app to tell me what bus to catch when.</li><li>Sometimes I’ll use Hipmunk to look at flight options to a new city, or a place I haven’t been in a while. They promote their Agony sort, where their algorithm rates flight by a combination of price, duration, # of stops, and dependability. I’m heading back to CHO and since I haven’t been out there for 6 months, I hit Hipmunk to check out American’s and United’s current flight offerings, scrolled down from the non-stops thru the 1-stops. I thought it was interesting, though, that Hipmunk’s algorithm scored a 24-hr hour Amtrak ride with a 3-hr layover in DC’s Union Station as less agonizing than a 6-hr 2-stop trip on United Express with connections in Columbus and IAD. But given some of my United Express experiences, who am I to second-guess that algorithm?</li><li>One of the things I liked about the soon-to-be-turned-off Google Trips app, is how it would auto-magically generate itinerary recommendations for a city. It would pick out points of interest with high Google review scores, and then combine the hours each would be open from the business listing with the typical amount of time people would stay there, and location and traffic data from Google Maps to generate the best itinerary. This fascinated me. It sucked my into a click hole of academic papers presented at the International Conference on the Practice and Theory of Automated Timetabling and the International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining talking about how the “Tourist Trip Design Problem (TTDP) is a route-planning problem on multiple Points of Interest. TTDP can be considered as an extension of the classical problem of Team Orienteering Problem with Time Windows.” I want to use this to automatically generate microbrewery taproom crawls but the math made my eyes bleed.</li><li>But back to that rainy day in Edinburgh, Google Maps redeemed itself at the end of the day. There was so much rain that Monday, our usual path out of the city, the A90, was at a complete standstill because of flooded underpasses, and stalled cars that tried to make it thru the flooded underpasses. Google Maps guided us past a gridlocked traffic circle, winding us through some apartment complexes, bypassing the flooded parts, and putting us right onto the M90 so we could head out to St Andrews. Better travel through algorithms.</li><li>Bridge Music —   &nbsp; <em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/hepepe/21074\" target=\"_blank\">Bogi Beat Budapest</a> </em>by KarmaHacker  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Leaving Places Behind</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Driving out of St Andrews that last time was a bit melancholy. We’d spent the last 4 September there, saw things change -- restaurants open and close, Edinburgh airport get spiffier -- but also the familiar things stay the same -- <a href=\"http://keysbar.co.uk/\">The Keys</a>, my favorite dive whisky bar; <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"St Andrews Brewing Company (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.standrewsbrewingcompany.com/\" target=\"_blank\">St Andrews Brewing Company</a> or “Stabco” as my daughter would call it, always with a great beer selection from across the UK; and <a href=\"https://jahangirstandrews.co.uk/\">Jahangir</a>, an Indian restaurant we found our first year because they were the only place we could find a table that Friday night... and we kept going back because they had great food and we never couldn’t get a table</li><li>The melancholy was that we probably wouldn’t be back; at least not for a long time. It’s out-of-the-way -- which is part of its charm, but it’s why we probably won’t be back for a while.</li><li>I felt the same way when I finished a project in Portland, Oregon some years back. I was in Portland every week for 3-4 months and got to know it pretty well. I explored new places, but developed some favorite spots I’d hit every week -- <a href=\"https://www.clydecommon.com/\">Clyde Commons</a> for dinner at the bar, <a href=\"https://www.baileystaproom.com/\">Bailey’s Taproom</a> with a new beer selection every week. When that project ended, I knew I wouldn’t be back to Portland for a long time -- as opposed to New York or San Francisco. Wrapping up a project there, not really a big deal because there’s enough business to bring me back. New Orleans was kinda in the middle. I’d been there almost non-stop for 3-4 years, but while I didn’t think business would bring me down there again, it’s not out of the way, and I’d be down often for vacations or conventions -- which is how it’s turned out.</li><li>Some of that melancholy comes from regret -- from things you always meant to do but never made time for -- “I’ll do that next time,” you’d say to yourself, but never get to it. The last time I was in Charlottesville, VA, I was finishing up what had been another 3-4 year stream of work and wasn’t sure when I’d be back. For me, Charlottesville was a bit like St Andrews, an out-of-the-way college town (though only a 2-hr flight from Chicago rather than an 8-10 hour fly-and-drive) and wasn’t sure when -- if ever -- I’d get back. Over those years, I’d always plan to take a half-day and drive the 15 minutes from the client to <a href=\"https://www.monticello.org/\">Monticello</a>, Thomas Jefferson’s home, and take the tour. It’s always written up as a must-see, and I’m right here. But every time I was going to do it, something would come up, and I’d say “I’ll do that next time.” And so here I was, the last time -- I didn’t know when the next time would be. And I really didn’t have much time in my schedule, but after lunch one day, I walked out, taking calls all the way to the Monticello parking lot, and then turned off my phone and had a great tour. And flew out the next morning without that regret.&nbsp;</li><li>But now 6 months later, I’m heading back to Charlottesville. So maybe I’ll get back to St Andrews sooner than I thought. Maybe I should see if <a href=\"https://www.standrewsbrewingcompany.com/\">Stabco</a> needs an old-guy bartender.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #153</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_153.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<p><!--EndFragment--></p>','Podcast #153 — Travel By Algorithm; Leaving Places Behind','','inherit','closed','closed','','2494-revision-v1','','','2019-07-28 10:06:01','2019-07-28 15:06:01','',2494,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/07/28/2494-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2506,1,'2019-07-28 10:25:17','2019-07-28 15:25:17','[caption id=\"attachment_2197\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/IMG_1158.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2197\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/IMG_1158-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> I won\'t pass for an emotional support reindeer[/caption]\n\nTrying to wrap up travel for the year so I can hunker down in the TravelCommons bunker outside of Chicago and&nbsp;<em>not</em> worry about any forecasted snow. But for those of you who are traveling, here\'s an episode to keep you occupied in the airport, train, or car traffic. We talk about some travel tips that didn\'t make my Top 10 Tips blog post, the great experience of flying on Thanksgiving day, losing my tablet on that flight but soon recovering it, storming Las Vegas with 50,000 other Amazon Web Services users, and some thoughts from our trip to Santa Fe, New Mexico. All this and more at the&nbsp;<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_147.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_147.mp3\"]\n\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show Notes -->\n\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #147:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, trying to wind down the year’s travel. Was in Santa Fe, New Mexico for Thanksgiving, and then headed up to Las Vegas the next week for Amazon Web Service’s big annual conference, Re:Invent. Then did what I hoped was my last trip to Dallas, but we couldn’t corral all the cats, so I’m back down there next Weds for what will definitely be my last trip of the year.</li>\n 	<li>Irene and I flew out to Albuquerque 10am Thanksgiving morning and I have to say that it was one of the least stressful travel experiences I’ve ever had -- no traffic on the drive to ORD, no lines; I didn’t even have time to pull out my driver’s license before I hit the TSA podium. I walked straight through to a screening line. There were agents hanging around just looking for people to screen. The only line I stood in was the Starbucks. We even scored 1st-Class upgrades; the plane was only half full. I even think we left early. A very pleasant change from my ORD-DFW commute.</li>\n 	<li>The only real downside I noticed was when we hit the Hertz Presidents Club aisle in Albuquerque. It was pretty picked over, leaving behind an odd selection of Dodge vehicles -- the choice was between Dodge Challenger muscle cars or fully tricked out Ram Hemi king-cab pick-ups. I can’t say that I’ve ever faced quite that choice. The Challenger, with rear-wheel drive, wouldn’t be great if we got snow at elevation, but the Rams were just huge, and trying to parallel park that in Santa Fe would be an event. It took me a bit to decide. I went with the Challenger and hoped for clear skies.</li>\n 	<li>Well, there was one more downside that I didn’t discover until we unpacked in our little casita in Santa Fe that night. I’d left my Samsung tablet in that nice first-class seat. Not in the seat-back pocket; I always check there before leaving. There was a side compartment along the middle armrest that I’d put my tablet in when I folded up the table to hit the lav. Bad mistake. That compartment was deep, I couldn’t see the tablet; and I didn’t think to check it before deplaning.</li>\n 	<li>I hit Twitter, sending United a direct message asking about ABQ lost-and-found. I wanted to ping them to see if the cleaning crew had turn anything in since I’d be back at ABQ for our Monday morning flight to LAS. I’ve done this before when getting back coats that I’ve left in overhead compartments. The Twitter customer service agent instead sent me a link to a web form to fill out. I cooled my jets over the weekend and on Monday morning, swung by the United Baggage Services office to see if they had my tablet. Walked past the American Baggage Services office -- open; the Delta Baggage Services office -- open; to the United Baggage Services office -- closed. It was supposed to open at 9am. I waited for 15-20 minutes, and then had to head up to catch my Vegas flight. I wasn’t happy.</li>\n 	<li>Which changed that afternoon when I got a call from an unknown Cleveland number on my mobile. Robocallers have found my mobile number, so I usually let unrecognized numbers go straight to voicemail, but I remember Continental having a Cleveland hub before the United merger, so maybe this was a United person calling. And it was! “I think I have your tablet; could you verify your screensaver” It’s a wall painting of pink flamingos. “Yup, that’s it; we’ve got it” (Actually, it’s street art from Paris’ Montmartre neighborhood; you can see the picture on the TravelCommons’ Instagram feed). She told me that they no longer keep found items at the airports; they ship them the next day to centralized lost-&amp;-found centers for sorting and processing. So, even if the ABQ baggage services office had been open that morning, they wouldn’t have had my tablet; they probably shipped it to Cleveland that weekend.\nAfter I got off the phone, I got an e-mail with a link to pick a shipping method and pay. The day after I got home from Vegas, my flamingo’d tablet landed on my doorstep.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music --&nbsp;<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/copperhead/40520\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen</a> by copperhead (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: Admiral Bob, Javolenus , Sackjo22</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul class=\"\">\n 	<li>Couple of listener notes on the last episode. Nick Gassman wrote:\n<ul>\n 	<li>“When you were talking about car rental collision damage waiver, I took it to mean that that you pay the rental company for the insurance. It\'s much cheaper (at least in the UK) to purchase this separately. You can generally get it on a per-trip or annual basis, just like regular travel insurance.”</li>\n 	<li>Nick, good point on that. You get used to accepting the waiver on business travel because, for many corporate rates, it’s all rolled in or you’re just going to expense it. And for US domestic travel, at least for me, my regular auto insurance covers it. So that leaves international travel. Chase did a good job of handling the accident in the UK. But looking at a separate company is a good idea. May try that out the next time I rent in Spain.</li>\n 	<li>“And about BlueTooth speakers, you mentioned about using the speaker as an accessory for your phone - I assume you know that the Jambox can do this. I\'ve often used it at work in rooms with no speakerphone. I\'ve also now upgraded to the Bose Mini 2 Soundlink. It is heavier and slightly larger, but when going on holiday the difference in sound quality is significant and more than makes up for it.”</li>\n 	<li>Yup, I’ve used the Jambox for many conference calls though I’ve never checked the quality difference between it and the speaker, or maybe I should say the microphone on my iPhone. I’ve never swapped between them on a call and asked the person on the other end which is better. Something to try out on the next call where we’re waiting for the last person to join.</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Steve Frick picked up on something when I was talking about notebooks in last episode’s Traveler Gift Guide segment\n<ul>\n 	<li>“It sounds like you’ve also entered the “Fountain Pen Zone” as well. They’re like tattoos, you can’t have just one. I had used a Mont Blanc rollerball that I purchased in 1991, it’s been broken and repaired several times and it had been my go-to pen… until someone gave me a fountain pen. Now several years later I have a collection on fountain pens, as well as inks. Ughhhh just what I needed another obsession. Great episode!”</li>\n 	<li>Yup, I started with a plastic Waterman fountain pen that I bought many years ago on a business trip to Brussels. I just had that one pen for the longest time. But then I discovered the Internet, or more specifically, fountain pen forums and blogs and podcasts on the Internet. And, as you might guess, it went downhill pretty quickly. Sometimes my biggest decision of the morning is which color of ink to use that day. Which itself says something about the state of my daily choices...</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>I said earlier that I was in Vegas a few weeks back for the big Amazon Web Services convention. It was huge; 50,000 attendees, mostly pudgy, pasty-faced guys power walking up and down the strip, backpacks strapped down, ignoring the showgirls offering pictures so they wouldn’t be late to, say, the sold-out tutorial on best practices for ingesting streaming data from IoT devices into AWS’ new time series database. For me, that nerd-meets-baller dichotomy hit one morning at 7:30. I was in a marching nerd stream weaving through the casino floor of the MGM Grand when out from behind a slot machine a woman with a half-filled plastic glass shouted “Very impressive that you all have some place important to go this early.” No one broke stride. She shrugged and went back to her machine. There was a lot of walking, though, for that show. It was spread out from the MGM Grand up to the Venetian. The Health app on my iPhone clocked me at 10 miles of walking a day. Glad it wasn’t in the summer.</li>\n 	<li>I mentioned in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/05/31/podcast-141-when-you-think-the-tsa-is-bad-expired-money/\">an earlier episode</a> that I’d found a box of old European currency when cleaning off some shelves. It was from the late ‘80’s/early ‘90’s -- the pre-Euro days. I have some Belgian and French francs, a Deutsche mark, an Irish pound note, and an Italian 1000 lire note that I started using as a bookmark in my notebook. After one of these Amazon sessions, a young Italian woman looked over and commented on my lire bookmark. “Oh my God! I haven’t seen one of those in forever,” she said. She talked about her grandparents never really accepting that the lire was gone. “It’s good that we have the euro,” she said, “but it’ll never be the lire.” Which, remembering back 20-30 years ago, I thought might be a good thing, but decided not to say it; didn’t want to break her nostalgia. “I forgot how small it was!” she said.</li>\n 	<li>I was trading notes with friends a few weeks back after the Marriott hack was announced. It really is no longer a matter of if your personal data will be breached, but how often. A common theme across many of those Amazon talks was that mistakes will happen, so your cloud design should “limit the blast radius” of those mistakes. If I apply that same concept to website breaches (travel and otherwise), I’d freeze all my credit reports, have a unique password for each site, provide just the minimum amount of information required for a transaction, and I wouldn’t store/save credit card or other information with them. Indeed, if I really burrowed in, I’d use virtual credit card numbers from a bank that provides them. I’m pretty good except for the last one; I haven’t found a good bank that easily provides virtual card number. It all comes down to your personal trade-off point between resilience to a breach and convenience.</li>\n 	<li>With the Christmas season officially clicking in the day after Thanksgiving, TBS and TNT seem to have “Love Actually\" on power rotation every weekend. I like it; it’s a good Christmas movie. But picking up the end of it night while channel flipping in Santa Fe, I just couldn’t buy that scene toward the end when Liam Neeson encourages his stepson to breach Heathrow Airport security in the name of true love. I might be a bit of a Scrooge, but how does a 10-yr old kid commit a serious felony and not get gang-tackled at the gate and thrown into juvi? I dunno. Maybe I should stick to A Charlie Brown Christmas...</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our new Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/NiGiD/48586\">O Tannenbaum / Oh Christmas Tree</a> by Martijn de Boer (NiGiD) (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial &nbsp;(3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: Admiral Bob (admiralbob77)</span></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Holiday Travel Tips</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>I posted my kinda annual Top 10 Holiday Travel Tips a few weeks back. It feels like something I’m required to do to keep my status as a semi-professional travel blogger and podcaster. Not a lot of the flying tips have changed over the last few lists -- pay a bit extra to fly non-stop, don’t take tight connections, catch an early flight if you can, carry your luggage on if you can -- because not much has changed regarding air travel -- it’s a time when a huge bubble of travelers hit an infrastructure that is, for the most part, already operating near capacity and at the time of year when much of that capacity could get disrupted by weather. This year, US plane loads were over 80% -- as if you didn’t already know that hearing the constant refrain of gate agents and flight attendants - “This will be a completely full flight…” And no new airport or runway capacity has been added in the high traffic areas -- maybe since ORD finished spending a billion dollars straightening out its runways. The LGA renovation will hopefully eliminate the leaking roof and give us better food options, but after spending $8 billion dollars, there won’t be any new runway capacity.</li>\n 	<li>Having said that, I think the aggressive roll-out of TSA PreCheck has helped everyone -- the TSA, frequent travelers who’ve bought PreCheck (signing up for PreCheck moved up to #2 on this year’s list), and even the infrequent ones who haven’t -- by increasing security capacity by increasing “thru-put” for lack of a better term. Security seems to, on the whole, move along a bit brisker. Yes, there are still too many times when it doesn’t, but it’s been a while since we’ve seen a full-scale TSA meltdown causing people to miss flights.\nBringing your own battery pack cracked the top 10 for the first time this year at #7. It followed Use Twitter as a Concierge Service and Use Multiple Flight Tracking Apps at numbers 5 and 6 respectively. The more we rely on our smartphones for travel information, the more important power is. And when the holiday crowds are hovering over those Samsung or Verizon power towers, you want an alternative.</li>\n 	<li>A lot of the Top 10 lists I read end with a second list, of those things that didn’t quite make the Top 10. For me, some of those are:</li>\n 	<li><strong>Travel on the Actual Holiday</strong> - Our Thanksgiving flight out to Santa Fe reminded me of this tip. It didn’t make the Top 10 because not everyone can pull it off. Tough to fly or drive out Christmas morning if you have young kids, or if you have Italian in-laws who do the whole Feast of The Seven Fishes on Christmas Eve. But, if you can, it’s a quantum level decrease in travel stress. You’ll probably just glide through your travels.</li>\n 	<li><strong>Take Mass Transit to the Airport</strong> - Everybody worries about TSA lines, but just getting into the airport to be able to get into the TSA line can be a hassle. Airports with a single access road that goes past all the terminals -- think ORD, LAX, LGA -- can have 15-20 minute backups. When the construction at LGA first started, the backups were so bad, people were getting out of their cabs when they were still on the Grand Central Parkway and walking up the off ramps. Now, LGA doesn’t have mass transit access -- some of that $8 billion if for that -- but most airports do -- ORD, ATL, EWR and JFK, DCA,.... If it’s available, use it to skip at least one line.</li>\n 	<li>And my last “almost made it” tip, <strong>Bring Cash</strong> -- way back in episode #136, last December, I talked about what seems to be a generational split, maybe right around 30 or 35 -- old Millennials/youngster Gen X’s -- about the need to carry cash. No matter which side you sit on that split, it’s a fact that cash can get you out of a packed airport bar quicker than a card if you need to bolt for your flight -- maybe a delay got pulled up, your gate got moved to the next terminal, or you just misread the boarding time. Being able to lay down, say a twenty and 3 ones, on the bar with your check is a whole lot quicker than waiting for the waitress to show back up, take your card, walk to the back to run it, and then bring it back again for you to sign. This is where the Europeans with those mobile terminals are light-years ahead of us. But until we catch up -- which means we have to be trusted to remember a 4-digit PIN code -- bring cash so you can dash.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/44580\"> What Child is This (Instrumental)</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial &nbsp;(3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: Jeris</span></li>\n</ul>\n<b>Notes on Santa Fe</b>\n<ul>\n 	<li>As I mentioned earlier, Irene and I headed out to Santa Fe, New Mexico for the Thanksgiving holidays. Since both kids were gone, we figured “Why not?” And since I had to be in Vegas on Monday, it just made sense to head west.</li>\n 	<li>I’m going to do a full write-up on our trip in a blog post in a week or so; the first of a new series of Road Trip posts, where we’ll break the TravelCommons format a bit. Road Trip posts will be more about the destination than the journey -- things we did, places we stayed, ate, drank beer…. But here, just some notes.</li>\n 	<li>It had been a while since we’d been in Santa Fe -- maybe over 10 years; I haven’t paged back through my calendar to check -- but getting out of that Hertz Dodge Challenger that we’d blasted up I-25 -- the speed limit is 75 mph once you’re outside of Albuquerque -- I was immediately hit with the piñon smell, that unique pinewood smoke smell I only get in Santa Fe. I’ve been around a lot of pinewood fires in, say, Colorado and Arizona, but the piñon smoke billowing out of a kiva fireplace is a unique smell, and one that I love.\nVisiting Santa Fe, there’s an interesting mix of highbrow and lowbrow -- doing the Georgia O’Keefe museum and a run up Canyon Road through all the art galleries, or hunting the best green chile cheeseburger and then burning it off on a hike in the Sangre de Cristo mountains. This visit was all lowbrow.</li>\n 	<li>Friday, we did 1,700 vertical feet up the Atalaya Trail. The parking lot at the trailhead at St John’s College was pretty full, but the trail wasn’t crowded once we got going. It actually came in handy at times to see people - let us know we weren’t lost. There were some trail markings, but not to the extent we were used to in, say, the UK. 5 ½ hours later, we were sitting at the bar at Second St Brewing’s place in the Railyard district, replacing whatever calories we’d burned off with a green chile cheeseburger and a side of green chile cheese fries. Double lashings of american cheese, which I know is just a processed cheese food, but the creamy gooey-ness of it blended well with the chile bite, and a pint of one of the better American-made bitters I’ve had.</li>\n 	<li>Saturday, after hiking through Tent Rocks National Monument, we ended up on Guadalupe St, which feels like the lowbrow counterpart to the plaza or Canyon Road. We stopped in at Cowgirl BBQ for margaritas. During our last visit, I stole/borrowed their margarita recipe for my own. We worked through their margarita menu while listening to a group of local guys talk about taking dancing lessons and a woman at the bar telling us that, back in the ‘70’s when she moved to Santa Fe, cowboys still rode horses through town -- across the plaza and down Canyon Rd -- throwing cash down in Canyon Rd bars to buy rounds for the house.</li>\n 	<li>On Sunday, we walked down Canyon Road, looking into the sculpture gardens of all the art galleries. It seemed a popular Sunday morning stroll. I’d see some older couples -- older than me; at, say, the beginning of retirement, walking in high-end Western garb -- nice flat-brimmed hats, fur-trimmed duster coats. Kinda California money does cowboy. Would be interesting to see how those ‘70’s cowboys would fit in today.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #147</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and now on <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_147.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #147 — Holiday Travel Tips; Notes from Santa Fe','','inherit','closed','closed','','2198-revision-v1','','','2019-07-28 10:25:17','2019-07-28 15:25:17','',2198,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/07/28/2198-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2508,1,'2019-08-13 22:30:39','2019-08-14 03:30:39','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\">\n<p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/666C6507-4DEA-4808-9C1B-D3F828805BC8.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2521 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/666C6507-4DEA-4808-9C1B-D3F828805BC8-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a></p>\n<figcaption>The moment of truth</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p>Breaking out the mobile rig to record this episode in the Residence Inn in downtown Charlottesville, VA. Summer storms let me test Freebird\'s re-booking service, I wrestle with AT&amp;T so I can use my iPhone\'s dual SIM capability on my trip to Krakow and Budapest, booking more relaxed flight itineraries lets me call an audible when Uber and Lyft prices surge into the stratosphere, which gets me thinking -- will we still love those rideshare companies when they\'re no longer cheaper than taxis?  All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_154.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #154: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the Residence Inn just off the Main St pedestrian mall in downtown Charlottesville, VA, leaving behind last episode’s multi-mic, big mixer board, sound-baffled podcast studio to go old-school, back to the TravelCommons roots with the mobile rig in a hotel room. I was thinking about going way back and recording it in the bathroom, but there’s a noisy exhaust fan that I can’t figure out how to turn off. There may be a bit of traffic noise in the background, and maybe even some thunder if the black clouds out my window live up to their potential. This episode will be one of the shorter ones. I’m trying to get it in before Irene and I head out to Krakow and Budapest Thursday night.</li><li>This is my fourth week back in Charlottesville in Chicago, IL. Not much has changed since my last commute back at the end of last year. American Eagle and United Express have a couple of direct regional jets a day from Chicago, and when weather knocks those flights out, Richmond is an hour-and-a-bit drive to the east, or Washington-Dulles is 2 hours north as a last resort. It’s still a 5-gate airport; the bar in the middle still has a surprisingly decent local craft beer selection. The bartender still recognizes me, though she still asks for my ID each time I sit at the bar. So not much has changed at CHO.&nbsp;</li><li>However, my approach to flying there has a bit. I’ve talked about this in prior episodes; I’ve always planned my travel to maximize my time at home, with my family. Given a choice between flying out the night before or taking a 7am flight out the day of, I’d take the latter. The trade-off, though, is travel plans that don’t deal well with travel delays -- a 2-hour flight delay the night before is annoying but won’t make me miss a meeting; that same delay the morning of my meeting may mean I won’t need to take that flight. And I’ve had all that happen with my flights to Charlottesville. So this time, with the kids graduated and moved out, and now that we’ve downsized from a house to a city apartment, my wife thinking I’m underfoot a bit too much, the need to maximize my time at home has… eased a bit. So I’m booking more... resilient itineraries -- flying out the night before, staying over an extra day so I can fly out after lunch, before the summer humidity spools up the afternoon thunderstorms…. Which was paid off last week when thunderstorms in <em>Chicago</em> had my evening flight to CHO posting a 3 hour delay by noon. I had more than enough time to swing my endpoint from CHO to RIC (all done pretty seamlessly thru the United app, which I found pretty impressive). My travel plans may not be as optimized as before… or maybe they are, but for different things, like cutting down on stress and my need to bitch tweet.</li><li>Bridge Music -- One for Me by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/21492 Ft: Haskel </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>We’ve had a thread over a couple of episodes about <a href=\"http://getfreebird.com/\">Freebird</a>, a flight rebooking service. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/podcast-151-traveler-data-leaks-brittany-street-food/\">episode 151</a>, TravelCommons listener Mika Pyyhkala sent in a note about his great experience with them, how they picked up a Southwest flight cancellation and rebooked him on Delta while he was still in the air on his first Southwest leg. Saved him a huge disruption; well worth, he said, the $19/leg fee. I mentioned in the last episode that Amex Travel has been offering free coverage for flights I book on their site with my Platinum card. So Freebird has been covering these last few trips to Charlottesville. I get a text the night before and the morning of my flights assuring me that Freebird is monitoring them. And when last week’s outbound 6pm flight started posting delays at noon, I got texts letting me know they were monitoring the delay, but it hadn’t yet tripped their 4-hour trigger.&nbsp; But knowing that there weren’t going to be many alternative flights to RIC or IAD later in the evening, I didn’t feel comfortable waiting for United to push over 4 hours -- and then cancel -- and so moved myself to their 6pm Richmond flight -- which was on-time -- getting me into my hotel around 10pm after an hour Uber ride. And then, indulging in a bit of travel schadenfreude, I kept tracking the ORD-CHO flight on <a href=\"https://flightaware.com/\">FlightAware</a>. It finally took off at 11pm Central – 5 hrs late -- arriving CHO at 2am Eastern. So it did eventually cross Freebird’s 4-hour threshold, but I’m not sure if it was in time to catch an alternative flight. So, I’m glad I switched it myself. I dunno, maybe tight connections rather than thinly traveled direct routes is the better use case for Freebird</li><li>Also back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/podcast-151-traveler-data-leaks-brittany-street-food/\">episode 151</a>, I talked about trying out the alpha version of augmented reality directions in Google Maps, where you hold up your phone and the display uses the camera to show the streetscape in front of you with the&nbsp; directions -- street names, arrows -- overlaid on the real-time image. I thought it was kinda cool; Irene and the kids were less than impressed. But you can judge for yourself because Google <a href=\"https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/08/google-launches-live-view-ar-walking-directions-for-google-maps/\">announced last week</a> that they’ve widened the feature to a public beta. Give it a try and let me know what you think</li><li>Fast forward one whole episode -- from <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/podcast-151-traveler-data-leaks-brittany-street-food/\">151</a> in May to <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/06/16/podcast-152-overwhelming-travel-new-old-restaurant-trends/\">152</a> in June -- which really was a big jump because, right after recording episode <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/podcast-151-traveler-data-leaks-brittany-street-food/\">151</a>, we moved from the big house in the suburbs to a 60% smaller high-rise apartment on the lakefront -- but in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/06/16/podcast-152-overwhelming-travel-new-old-restaurant-trends/\">episode 152</a>, I talked about having to recalibrate how I’d get to the airport. I had my guy who’d pick me up for a 30-minute ride to ORD or MDW… But no more. Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve started to get a feel for it -- 45-50 minutes to ORD, but figure an hour for weird traffic. And in the morning, figure a 10-minute wait for an Uber or Lyft, and a tab with tip around $40-$45. So this Monday at 5am, I fire up Lyft and Uber while drinking my morning cup of tea to see what’s going on -- $110 on Uber and $60 on Lyft. What the hell is going on? Well, maybe all the drivers are sleeping in, so I shower, get dressed, gather all my worldly belongings, and check again -- $120 on Uber; $57 on Lyft. I hit the Lyft button and wait -- and wait and wait. Then someone accepts the ride, and cancels. Guess he didn’t want to go to ORD. So I fire up <a href=\"https://transitapp.com/\">Transit</a>, my favorite mass transit app. It’s developed in Montreal and does mass transit routing in a huge number of cities in the US and Canada. And in Chicago, it also covers Divvy bike share and constructs Lyft-to-mass transit routing. I fired it up thinking that, if I couldn’t get a Lyft to ORD, then maybe I could get one to the nearest Blue Line L stop and take the subway the rest of the way. But even it couldn’t find a Lyft. But, it showed that, across the street from our flat, a bus will pick me up and, 18 stops later, drop me at the L stop. I got nothing else going -- actually, I did but it would involve waking Irene up at&nbsp; now 5:40am for a ride to ORD, truly a last resort. I wheel my luggage across the street. Four minutes later, the bus shows up. There’s me and another guy -- no problem putting my luggage on the seat next to me. And we make pretty good time -- not a lot of people waiting at bus stops at 6am, and the traffic is pretty clear too. All told, we stop maybe 6 times and have 8 people on the bus at its most crowded.  I had to wait another 5 minutes for the L and, at 6:40, it was more crowded; almost everyone had an ORD badge around their neck -- pilots, flight attendants, ground staff -- except for a few passenger-looking folk like me. All told, it took me about an hour -- maybe 10 minutes longer than Uber and Lyft were quoting. But at $2.50 vs. $60 or $120, it seemed like I made out on the deal.</li><li>Also in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/06/16/podcast-152-overwhelming-travel-new-old-restaurant-trends/\">episode 152</a>, I talked about “earning and burning” frequent traveler points rather than saving them because airlines and hotels keep playing with redemption levels and rules that reduce the value of the points. Jim McDonough tweeted me with a contra view -<ul><li>Regarding frequent flyer miles and how they don\'t appreciate over time - I still like to keep some around in case we need to travel for family emergency situations. The walk-up fare does not compete with the $25 charge to book a frequent flyer mile ticket last minute.</li></ul></li><li>Jim, that’s a good point, but I wonder if that strategy still works as more airlines move from fixed awards schedules to dynamic point pricing -- Southwest, Delta, and soon United -- where point price for a flight climes as remaining ticket prices do. Does it still make sense to pay with points?</li><li>As I said earlier, Irene and I are heading out Thursday night for a weekend in Krakow, Poland and then heading down to Budapest for a mix of touring and visits with Irene’s family. So, I thought this was as good a time as any to try out <a href=\"https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT209044\">my iPhone’s dual SIM capability.</a> Up to now, my usual procedure is to transfer my US AT&amp;T SIM to an old HTC One phone and then put my UK EE SIM in my iPhone Xs (usually sometime in flight in that panic drill between them clearing the breakfast tray and packing everything up for final descent) if I’m going to an EU country or when I pick one up after we land. I do this because local data is <em>hugely</em> cheaper than an AT&amp;T international plan - the EE pay-as-you-go plan I got is £10, or $12 with this week’s Brexit exchange rate discount, for 3 GB of data, 100 minutes of voice, and unlimited texts. But I still want my US number to ring thru in case someone back home needs to reach me and doesn’t know I’m out of the country. I don’t carry both phones with me, though. I have the iPhone with me during the day, using the local SIM to run Google Maps and the like. The HTC stays in the hotel room and I check it for messages when we get back at night.</li><li>But with its dual SIM capabilities, I should be able to do this with just my iPhone. However, the iPhone has only one physical SIM slot; the second is an internal eSIM, like the ones Apple uses in their cellular Apple Watch. So to make this work, I had to get AT&amp;T to transfer my US number from its physical SIM to the eSIM in the phone. My first stop was the local AT&amp;T store. I explained to the store guy what I wanted to do. He looked at me for a moment and said, “Uh, I’m new; I don’t know how to do that. But I can give you an eSIM card if you want.” OK, that’s a start. He riffled around his desk drawer. “I don’t have one here. I’ll have to go in the back. But I’m the only one here today, so you’ll have to go outside so I can lock up while I’m in the back.” Interesting. I walked down the street to grab a bite rather than idle outside the door. I came back. He handed me the card, “Here you go, but I don’t know if this will work…” I went home and hit the AT&amp;T web site. I spelunked around the site until I found the chat link and fired it up. The person on the other end knew what needed to be done. I gave her a few numbers off the card, then pointed the camera at the card’s QR code and it added to plan to my iPhone. Now, the chat agent said that they’ll have to do a bit of provisioning at the back end. She’d text me when it was done. Irene and I went out to dinner; no text and no activation. So the next morning, I hit chat again and this time stuck with the guy until the provisioning was complete. Then I pulled out the AT&amp;T SIM and put in the EE SIM, and immediately got a text from EE telling me their US roaming charges. I also got a whole new set of selections under the Cellular section under Settings. Which line did I want to use for voice, for data, for iMessage and FaceTime. I spent some time on Apple’s FAQ pages trying to figure out which scenario works for me. My guess is that it’ll take me a bit of trial and error -- and self-inflected AT&amp;T international charges -- to really figure this out.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com. </li><li>Bridge Music —  &nbsp; Fall to pieces - Silence by mika (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mika/24945 Ft: Colab      </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Will We Still Love Uber When The Prices Go Up?</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><a href=\"https://www.reuters.com/article/us-lyft-results/lyft-sees-ride-hailing-price-war-easing-sending-uber-and-lyft-shares-up-idUSKCN1UX2BQ\">Lyft’s chief financial officer Brian Roberts said, during last week’s earnings call, that pricing was becoming “more rational.”</a> “Rational pricing” is CFO-speak for “more predictably higher.” <a href=\"https://www.marketwatch.com/story/lyft-and-uber-are-giving-investors-what-they-want-which-is-bad-for-the-rest-of-us-2019-08-08\">Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, during his earnings call, said, “We and Lyft are big-time competitors here and have been for some period of time, but for now we’re seeing, generally, category positions that are stable. We are focused on improving profitability in this market.”</a>&nbsp; Which is CEO-speak for “we’re no longer going to slash prices to buy market share.”</li><li>We all knew this time would come -- at least the rational ones. Uber lost $5.2 billion in the second quarter while the smaller Lyft lost a mere $644 million last quarter. Investors are going to let you torch large piles of cash for only so long. Hence the topic question -- will we stay with Uber and Lyft even when they’re not a bargain anymore?</li><li>I’ve been talking about this with frequent travelers I know, or sit next to at bars, or bump into waiting for an Uber at O’Hare. One school of thought is that the Uber/Lyft experience is better than your typical cab, so even at the same price, you’d still order an Uber. You can order it on your phone rather than running into the street, trying to flag down a passing cab. Indeed, I’ve always said that, for me, Uber’s prime use case is getting a ride from midtown Manhattan to LGA at the end of the day a somewhat sane experience. Before Uber, I’d be practically dancing into 5th Ave, hiding my luggage behind a trash can because if a cabbie saw you wanted to go to LGA, they’d accelerate by you. I tried the cab company’s iPhone app last time I was in New York. It failed miserably.</li><li>Adding Uber and Lyft drivers to the transit mix means you can get a car ride from somewhere outside the usual downtown and tourist spots. I remember pre-Uber New Orleans, getting a cab anywhere other than between the airport and the French Quarter was near impossible. One night for dinner, we decided to go to a Mid-City restaurant, <a href=\"http://toupsmeatery.com/\">Toups Meatery</a>. Phenomenal place. The owner, Isaac Toups, later made it to the finals of the <em>Top Chef </em>cooking show. He didn’t win, but was voted “fan favorite”. And his food was our favorite too. The only problem -- getting a cab back to the Sheraton on Canal St from his Mid-City location. The hostess called 3 cab companies and we waited 20 minutes for a 15-minute ride. And that driver told us, “Yup, all most cab drivers want to do is make the easy money, driving between the airport and the hotels”</li><li>There’s also fare predictability -- you see the price to get from, say, downtown Chicago to O’Hare before committing to the ride. No more meter anxiety, watching the number run up in traffic. And the accompanying “Will I have enough cash to pay” or “Will this guy’s credit card machine work?” anxiety. With Uber and Lyft drivers following GPS apps, there’s no more “am I being taken the long way around to run up the meter” anxiety, or depending on your cab driver’s knowledge to take the fast way, or having them punt it to you with the “bridge or tunnel” question I often get from LGA cabs. The technology helps avoid a lot of the bad experiences we’ve had with taxi cab rides.</li><li>I used to say that Uber and Lyft cars are nicer, but their bar has slipped as they’re scrambling for drivers in a full-employment economy. An Uber I took last week was missing the door armrest; a Lyft that Irene took had the front right quarter-panel held on with duct tape. These are exceptions, though a bit more common that a couple of years ago. But they’re still a damn sight better than the beat-to-hell Baltimore cabs that would sit at the cab ranks in the Inner Harbor. I only did that once, because the cab rank was right outside the client’s building and I was late leaving for the airport. The back seat was full of old newspapers and other crap, and there was no air conditioning -- on a July afternoon. After that, I’d stand there, looking at the cabs, while waiting 5 minutes for an Uber to show up.</li><li>The place I most often take a cab rather than waiting for an Uber is the airport. And here, it’s not really about price, it’s convenience. The cab ranks are usually right at the terminal exit, while the rideshare pickup spot can be an Easter Egg hunt (Vegas), a 15-minute walk to the back 40 (Atlanta) or a confusing scrum of screaming traffic cops (Chicago Midway). Vegas and LGA especially -- catching a cab is so much easier than a rideshare. Here at CHO also -- it’s a flat rate into town that’s about the same as Uber and Lyft and the cabs are in decent shape, so if one’s there, there’s no reason to wait.</li><li>And I could be wrong, but it feels like the pricing discussion is mostly a US thing. <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/podcast-150-travel-interruptus/\">In Paris last Spring</a>, none of the Ubers were “rideshares”; they were all black car livery companies with professional drivers. Near as I could tell, Uber was just another dispatch system for them. In Lisbon a few years back, I couldn’t tell if they were true rideshares, but the pricing was the same as taxis, and there were more taxis so less wait. We took the path of least resistance and hailed cabs.</li><li>The rough consensus of my completely unrepresentative polling was - ride sharing got traction because it was cheaper, but now the technology gives such a better experience that I’d even pay a premium over a taxi -- but I wouldn’t want to tell Lyft or Uber that. But what they said on those earnings calls, I think they already know that.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #154</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_154.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<p><!--EndFragment--></p>','Podcast #154 — Will We Still Love Uber When The Prices Go Up?','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-154-will-we-still-love-uber-when-the-prices-go-up','','','2021-09-30 12:35:05','2021-09-30 17:35:05','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=2508',0,'post','',1),
(2509,1,'2019-08-14 08:21:37','2019-08-14 13:21:37','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\">\n<p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Cracked-mirror-square.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2482 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Cracked-mirror-square-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a></p><figcaption>What\'s Behind Me Is Not Important</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>Going upscale, recording in the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/1871Chicago/photos/we-have-a-new-podcast-studio-big-thanks-to-1871-company-parkergale-capital-for-h/1116900888351884/\">podcast studio</a> at the <a href=\"https://1871.com/\">1871 tech incubator</a> in Chicago, I talk about my surprising smooth 2-week trip in Ireland and Scotland. We also note the retirement (finally!) of American Airlines\' MD-80 jet, a very interesting new social media app, talk about how algorithms are changing the way we travel, and the melancholy of leaving familiar places for the last time.&nbsp; All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_153.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/657617519&color=%23ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #154: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the Residence Inn just off the Main St pedestrian mall in downtown Charlottesville, VA, leaving behind last episode’s multi-mic, big mixer board, sound-baffled podcast studio to go old-school, back to the TravelCommons roots with the mobile rig in a hotel room. I was thinking about going way back and recording it in the bathroom, but there’s a noisy exhaust fan that I can’t figure out how to turn off. There may be a bit of traffic noise in the background, and maybe even some thunder if the black clouds out my window live up to their potential. This episode will be one of the shorter ones. I’m trying to get it in before Irene and I head out to Krakow and Budapest Thursday night.</li><li>This is my fourth week back in Charlottesville in Chicago, IL. Not much has changed since my last commute back at the end of last year. American Eagle and United Express have a couple of direct regional jets a day from Chicago, and when weather knocks those flights out, Richmond is an hour-and-a-bit drive to the east, or Washington-Dulles is 2 hours north as a last resort. It’s still a 5-gate airport; the bar in the middle still has a surprisingly decent local craft beer selection. The bartender still recognizes me, though she still asks for my ID each time I sit at the bar. So not much has changed at CHO. </li><li>However, my approach to flying there has a bit. I’ve talked about this in prior episodes; I’ve always planned my travel to maximize my time at home, with my family. Given a choice between flying out the night before or taking a 7am flight out the day of, I’d take the latter. The trade-off, though, is travel plans that don’t deal well with travel delays -- a 2-hour flight delay the night before is annoying but won’t make me miss a meeting; that same delay the morning of my meeting may mean I won’t need to take that flight. And I’ve had all that happen with my flights to Charlottesville. So this time, with the kids graduated and moved out, and now that we’ve downsized from a house to a city apartment, my wife thinking I’m underfoot a bit too much, the need to maximize my time at home has… eased a bit. So I’m booking more... resilient itineraries -- flying out the night before, staying over an extra day so I can fly out after lunch, before the summer humidity spools up the afternoon thunderstorms…. Which was paid off last week when thunderstorms in <em>Chicago</em> had my evening flight to CHO posting a 3 hour delay by noon. I had more than enough time to swing my endpoint from CHO to RIC (all done pretty seamlessly thru the United app, which I found pretty impressive). My travel plans may not be as optimized as before… or maybe they are, but for different things, like cutting down on stress and my need to bitch tweet.</li><li> Bridge Music -- <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/Loveshadow/26219\" target=\"_blank\"><em>SP*ANK Vox</em></a> by Loveshadow </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>We’ve had a thread over a couple of episodes about <a href=\"http://getfreebird.com/\">Freebird</a>, a flight rebooking service. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/podcast-151-traveler-data-leaks-brittany-street-food/\">episode 151</a>, TravelCommons listener Mika Pyyhkala sent in a note about his great experience with them, how they picked up a Southwest flight cancellation and rebooked him on Delta while he was still in the air on his first Southwest leg. Saved him a huge disruption; well worth, he said, the $19/leg fee. I mentioned in the last episode that Amex Travel has been offering free coverage for flights I book on their site with my Platinum card. So Freebird has been covering these last few trips to Charlottesville. I get a text the night before and the morning of my flights assuring me that Freebird is monitoring them. And when last week’s outbound 6pm flight started posting delays at noon, I got texts letting me know they were monitoring the delay, but it hadn’t yet tripped their 4-hour trigger.  But knowing that there weren’t going to be many alternative flights to RIC or IAD later in the evening, I didn’t feel comfortable waiting for United to push over 4 hours -- and then cancel -- and so moved myself to their 6pm Richmond flight -- which was on-time -- getting me into my hotel around 10pm after an hour Uber ride. And then, indulging in a bit of travel schadenfreude, I kept tracking the ORD-CHO flight on <a href=\"https://flightaware.com/\">FlightAware</a>. It finally took off at 11pm Central – 5 hrs late -- arriving CHO at 2am Eastern. So it did eventually cross Freebird’s 4-hour threshold, but I’m not sure if it was in time to catch an alternative flight. So, I’m glad I switched it myself. I dunno, maybe tight connections rather than thinly traveled direct routes is the better use case for Freebird</li><li>Also back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/podcast-151-traveler-data-leaks-brittany-street-food/\">episode 151</a>, I talked about trying out the alpha version of augmented reality directions in Google Maps, where you hold up your phone and the display uses the camera to show the streetscape in front of you with the  directions -- street names, arrows -- overlaid on the real-time image. I thought it was kinda cool; Irene and the kids were less than impressed. But you can judge for yourself because Google <a href=\"https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/08/google-launches-live-view-ar-walking-directions-for-google-maps/\">announced last week</a> that they’ve widened the feature to a public beta. Give it a try and let me know what you think</li><li>Fast forward one whole episode -- from <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/podcast-151-traveler-data-leaks-brittany-street-food/\">151</a> in May to <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/06/16/podcast-152-overwhelming-travel-new-old-restaurant-trends/\">152</a> in June -- which really was a big jump because, right after recording episode <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/podcast-151-traveler-data-leaks-brittany-street-food/\">151</a>, we moved from the big house in the suburbs to a 60% smaller high-rise apartment on the lakefront -- but in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/06/16/podcast-152-overwhelming-travel-new-old-restaurant-trends/\">episode 152</a>, I talked about having to recalibrate how I’d get to the airport. I had my guy who’d pick me up for a 30-minute ride to ORD or MDW… But no more. Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve started to get a feel for it -- 45-50 minutes to ORD, but figure an hour for weird traffic. And in the morning, figure a 10-minute wait for an Uber or Lyft, and a tab with tip around $40-$45. So this Monday at 5am, I fire up Lyft and Uber while drinking my morning cup of tea to see what’s going on -- $110 on Uber and $60 on Lyft. What the hell is going on? Well, maybe all the drivers are sleeping in, so I shower, get dressed, gather all my worldly belongings, and check again -- $120 on Uber; $57 on Lyft. I hit the Lyft button and wait -- and wait and wait. Then someone accepts the ride, and cancels. Guess he didn’t want to go to ORD. So I fire up <a href=\"https://transitapp.com/\">Transit</a>, my favorite mass transit app. It’s developed in Montreal and does mass transit routing in a huge number of cities in the US and Canada. And in Chicago, it also covers Divvy bike share and constructs Lyft-to-mass transit routing. I fired it up thinking that, if I couldn’t get a Lyft to ORD, then maybe I could get one to the nearest Blue Line L stop and take the subway the rest of the way. But even it couldn’t find a Lyft. But, it showed that, across the street from our flat, a bus will pick me up and, 18 stops later, drop me at the L stop. I got nothing else going -- actually, I did but it would involve waking Irene up at  now 5:40am for a ride to ORD, truly a last resort. I wheel my luggage across the street. Four minutes later, the bus shows up. There’s me and another guy -- no problem putting my luggage on the seat next to me. And we make pretty good time -- not a lot of people waiting at bus stops at 6am, and the traffic is pretty clear too. All told, we stop maybe 6 times and have 8 people on the bus at its most crowded.  I had to wait another 5 minutes for the L and, at 6:40, it was more crowded; almost everyone had an ORD badge around their neck -- pilots, flight attendants, ground staff -- except for a few passenger-looking folk like me. All told, it took me about an hour -- maybe 10 minutes longer than Uber and Lyft were quoting. But at $2.50 vs. $60 or $120, it seemed like I made out on the deal.</li><li>Also in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/06/16/podcast-152-overwhelming-travel-new-old-restaurant-trends/\">episode 152</a>, I talked about “earning and burning” frequent traveler points rather than saving them because airlines and hotels keep playing with redemption levels and rules that reduce the value of the points. Jim McDonough tweeted me with a contra view -<ul><li>Regarding frequent flyer miles and how they don\'t appreciate over time - I still like to keep some around in case we need to travel for family emergency situations. The walk-up fare does not compete with the $25 charge to book a frequent flyer mile ticket last minute.</li></ul></li><li>Jim, that’s a good point, but I wonder if that strategy still works as more airlines move from fixed awards schedules to dynamic point pricing -- Southwest, Delta, and soon United -- where point price for a flight climes as remaining ticket prices do. Does it still make sense to pay with points?</li><li>As I said earlier, Irene and I are heading out Thursday night for a weekend in Krakow, Poland and then heading down to Budapest for a mix of touring and visits with Irene’s family. So, I thought this was as good a time as any to try out <a href=\"https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT209044\">my iPhone’s dual SIM capability.</a> Up to now, my usual procedure is to transfer my US AT&amp;T SIM to an old HTC One phone and then put my UK EE SIM in my iPhone Xs (usually sometime in flight in that panic drill between them clearing the breakfast tray and packing everything up for final descent) if I’m going to an EU country or when I pick one up after we land. I do this because local data is <em>hugely</em> cheaper than an AT&amp;T international plan - the EE pay-as-you-go plan I got is £10, or $12 with this week’s Brexit exchange rate discount, for 3 GB of data, 100 minutes of voice, and unlimited texts. But I still want my US number to ring thru in case someone back home needs to reach me and doesn’t know I’m out of the country. I don’t carry both phones with me, though. I have the iPhone with me during the day, using the local SIM to run Google Maps and the like. The HTC stays in the hotel room and I check it for messages when we get back at night.</li><li>But with its dual SIM capabilities, I should be able to do this with just my iPhone. However, the iPhone has only one physical SIM slot; the second is an internal eSIM, like the ones Apple uses in their cellular Apple Watch. So to make this work, I had to get AT&amp;T to transfer my US number from its physical SIM to the eSIM in the phone. My first stop was the local AT&amp;T store. I explained to the store guy what I wanted to do. He looked at me for a moment and said, “Uh, I’m new; I don’t know how to do that. But I can give you an eSIM card if you want.” OK, that’s a start. He riffled around his desk drawer. “I don’t have one here. I’ll have to go in the back. But I’m the only one here today, so you’ll have to go outside so I can lock up while I’m in the back.” Interesting. I walked down the street to grab a bite rather than idle outside the door. I came back. He handed me the card, “Here you go, but I don’t know if this will work…” I went home and hit the AT&amp;T web site. I spelunked around the site until I found the chat link and fired it up. The person on the other end knew what needed to be done. I gave her a few numbers off the card, then pointed the camera at the card’s QR code and it added to plan to my iPhone. Now, the chat agent said that they’ll have to do a bit of provisioning at the back end. She’d text me when it was done. Irene and I went out to dinner; no text and no activation. So the next morning, I hit chat again and this time stuck with the guy until the provisioning was complete. Then I pulled out the AT&amp;T SIM and put in the EE SIM, and immediately got a text from EE telling me their US roaming charges. I also got a whole new set of selections under the Cellular section under Settings. Which line did I want to use for voice, for data, for iMessage and FaceTime. I spent some time on Apple’s FAQ pages trying to figure out which scenario works for me. My guess is that it’ll take me a bit of trial and error -- and self-inflected AT&amp;T international charges -- to really figure this out.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com. </li><li>Bridge Music —   <em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/trifonic/445\" target=\"_blank\">Bored on Your Backside</a></em> by Trifonic     </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Will We Still Love Uber When The Prices Go Up?</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><a href=\"https://www.reuters.com/article/us-lyft-results/lyft-sees-ride-hailing-price-war-easing-sending-uber-and-lyft-shares-up-idUSKCN1UX2BQ\">Lyft’s chief financial officer Brian Roberts said, during last week’s earnings call, that pricing was becoming “more rational.”</a> “Rational pricing” is CFO-speak for “more predictably higher.” <a href=\"https://www.marketwatch.com/story/lyft-and-uber-are-giving-investors-what-they-want-which-is-bad-for-the-rest-of-us-2019-08-08\">Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, during his earnings call, said, “We and Lyft are big-time competitors here and have been for some period of time, but for now we’re seeing, generally, category positions that are stable. We are focused on improving profitability in this market.”</a>  Which is CEO-speak for “we’re no longer going to slash prices to buy market share.”</li><li>We all knew this time would come -- at least the rational ones. Uber lost $5.2 billion in the second quarter while the smaller Lyft lost a mere $644 million last quarter. Investors are going to let you torch large piles of cash for only so long. Hence the topic question -- will we stay with Uber and Lyft even when they’re not a bargain anymore?</li><li>I’ve been talking about this with frequent travelers I know, or sit next to at bars, or bump into waiting for an Uber at O’Hare. One school of thought is that the Uber/Lyft experience is better than your typical cab, so even at the same price, you’d still order an Uber. You can order it on your phone rather than running into the street, trying to flag down a passing cab. Indeed, I’ve always said that, for me, Uber’s prime use case is getting a ride from midtown Manhattan to LGA at the end of the day a somewhat sane experience. Before Uber, I’d be practically dancing into 5th Ave, hiding my luggage behind a trash can because if a cabbie saw you wanted to go to LGA, they’d accelerate by you. I tried the cab company’s iPhone app last time I was in New York. It failed miserably.</li><li>Adding Uber and Lyft drivers to the transit mix means you can get a car ride from somewhere outside the usual downtown and tourist spots. I remember pre-Uber New Orleans, getting a cab anywhere other than between the airport and the French Quarter was near impossible. One night for dinner, we decided to go to a Mid-City restaurant, <a href=\"http://toupsmeatery.com/\">Toups Meatery</a>. Phenomenal place. The owner, Isaac Toups, later made it to the finals of the <em>Top Chef </em>cooking show. He didn’t win, but was voted “fan favorite”. And his food was our favorite too. The only problem -- getting a cab back to the Sheraton on Canal St from his Mid-City location. The hostess called 3 cab companies and we waited 20 minutes for a 15-minute ride. And that driver told us, “Yup, all most cab drivers want to do is make the easy money, driving between the airport and the hotels”</li><li>There’s also fare predictability -- you see the price to get from, say, downtown Chicago to O’Hare before committing to the ride. No more meter anxiety, watching the number run up in traffic. And the accompanying “Will I have enough cash to pay” or “Will this guy’s credit card machine work?” anxiety. With Uber and Lyft drivers following GPS apps, there’s no more “am I being taken the long way around to run up the meter” anxiety, or depending on your cab driver’s knowledge to take the fast way, or having them punt it to you with the “bridge or tunnel” question I often get from LGA cabs. The technology helps avoid a lot of the bad experiences we’ve had with taxi cab rides.</li><li>I used to say that Uber and Lyft cars are nicer, but their bar has slipped as they’re scrambling for drivers in a full-employment economy. An Uber I took last week was missing the door armrest; a Lyft that Irene took had the front right quarter-panel held on with duct tape. These are exceptions, though a bit more common that a couple of years ago. But they’re still a damn sight better than the beat-to-hell Baltimore cabs that would sit at the cab ranks in the Inner Harbor. I only did that once, because the cab rank was right outside the client’s building and I was late leaving for the airport. The back seat was full of old newspapers and other crap, and there was no air conditioning -- on a July afternoon. After that, I’d stand there, looking at the cabs, while waiting 5 minutes for an Uber to show up.</li><li>The place I most often take a cab rather than waiting for an Uber is the airport. And here, it’s not really about price, it’s convenience. The cab ranks are usually right at the terminal exit, while the rideshare pickup spot can be an Easter Egg hunt (Vegas), a 15-minute walk to the back 40 (Atlanta) or a confusing scrum of screaming traffic cops (Chicago Midway). Vegas and LGA especially -- catching a cab is so much easier than a rideshare. Here at CHO also -- it’s a flat rate into town that’s about the same as Uber and Lyft and the cabs are in decent shape, so if one’s there, there’s no reason to wait.</li><li>And I could be wrong, but it feels like the pricing discussion is mostly a US thing. <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/podcast-150-travel-interruptus/\">In Paris last Spring</a>, none of the Ubers were “rideshares”; they were all black car livery companies with professional drivers. Near as I could tell, Uber was just another dispatch system for them. In Lisbon a few years back, I couldn’t tell if they were true rideshares, but the pricing was the same as taxis, and there were more taxis so less wait. We took the path of least resistance and hailed cabs.</li><li>The rough consensus of my completely unrepresentative polling was - ride sharing got traction because it was cheaper, but now the technology gives such a better experience that I’d even pay a premium over a taxi -- but I wouldn’t want to tell Lyft or Uber that. But what they said on those earnings calls, I think they already know that.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #154</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_153.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<p><!--EndFragment--></p>','Podcast #154 — Will We Still Love Uber When The Prices Go Up?','','inherit','closed','closed','','2508-revision-v1','','','2019-08-14 08:21:37','2019-08-14 13:21:37','',2508,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/08/14/2508-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2510,1,'2019-08-14 08:22:59','2019-08-14 13:22:59','<!-- wp:image {\"id\":2404,\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/CoeazhcUMAAhyQN-300x251.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2404\"/><figcaption>This guy looks familiar...</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It\'s been a tough month for travel. Not quite to Book of Job-level torment, but two of this month\'s three trips spiraled into head-shaking metaphysical “What the hell is going on here” questioning of my decision to get out of bed that morning. I walk through the travel gods\' fun and games, as well as some new data on regional jet delays and buying a new travel bag.  All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_150.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/610046667&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To read the Detailed Show Notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To read the Detailed Show Notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #150: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, as the weather begins to stagger unsteadily toward Spring -- 74 degrees on Monday, 5.3 inches of snow (thundersnow!) on Sunday, then back up into the 70’s two days later. &nbsp;April 14 -- over 5 inches of snow, over 1,000 flights cancelled. A nasty surprise for folks who thought it would be safe to connect through ORD, but just validates a Chicago truism -- don’t put the snow gear away until after Tax Day. Yup, welcome to the Midwest.</li><li>Have done a <em>chunk</em> of travel -- there’s a unit of measure for you -- since the last episode. A 2-day trip that hit 4 airports in the first day -- Chicago-Midway, Las Vegas, Houston-Hobby, and Nashville. The next week, I squoze in a trip to a new airport - State College, PA -- before heading out on vacation to Brittany, France. The squeeze wasn’t too tight -- flew back from State College on Weds night and left on vacation Thursday night -- but I did scout out a couple of backups in case the United Express regional jet went AWOL; a hour or so drive down to Harrisburg, a couple hour drive over to Pittsburgh. Luckily, I didn’t need them. United Express was having a good day, and therefore, so did I.</li><li>The next day’s flight to Paris on SAS by way of Stockholm went fine. We got in on time, found the left luggage lockers, and then the express train into the city all without much hassle. Arlanda Airport is comfortably sized and has good signage. The only real problem was that we got into center city Stockholm too early -- around 8:30am -- and nothing was really open. So we coffee’d up at one place, had some cardamom pastries at another, and generally puttered around until things started opening up an hour or so later. It was a sunny, if brisk, day, so walking around the Gamla Stan and Sodermalm was nice. </li><li>I always chuckle a bit when going through De Gaulle Airport, passing through the tangle of flat escalator walkway tubes that bridge the levels and open center of Terminal 1. The walkways are a bit awkward with wheeled luggage -- going down and then up. An airport porter in front of us let a wheelchair go free on the downhill span -- took a moment for it to register that it was empty -- then it rolled back to him on the uphill. No knock against him; it was the end of the day.</li><li>The next day, we caught the train out to Brittany, to Saint Malo. We walked out of the train station and across the street to Europcar for what was one of the easiest rental car pick-ups I’ve ever had in Europe. No scare-tactic insurance upselling -- just a look at my driver’s license and a quick pointer to where I could find the car in the train station parking lot. Five minutes, max. And dropping off the car a week later at Rennes train station? Absolutely the easiest rental drop-off -- gave the guy the keys and a receipt showing I’d filled up the car and I was done. No waiting for him to go inspect the car, just a handshake and “Have a good day”. </li><li>The next day wasn’t near as carefree, but we’ll talk about that in a few minutes.</li><li> Bridge Music — <em>Countryside Summer Joyride</em> by Kara Square (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mindmapthat/56281 Ft: Javolenus</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I’ve been not-quite-hating on, but certainly have been down on regional jets for quite some time on this podcast. Given a choice, I recommend people avoid them -- not because of their size, but their schedule dependability. Because the regional airlines’ model is to bounce a plane from place to place rather than route through hubs, they never recover from weather or mechanical delays. Those delays just cascade through the rest of the day. Now there often aren’t alternatives. Hence my earlier comment about needing backup plans for my regional jet flight home from State College. My flight was at the end of the day, the most vulnerable time to delays. Given my personal experience, &nbsp;I wasn’t surprised to read that US Dept of Transportation data showed that regional flights were 2-4 times more likely to be cancelled than mainline flights. The Chicago Tribune dug into the DOT data and found flights operated by Delta’s regional partners were 4 times more likely to be canceled than flights operated by Delta, while American Eagle and United Express were 2-3 times more likely to cancel flights than their mainline partners. You can’t avoid regional jets when going to places like State College or Charlottesville, VA or Appleton, WI -- but you can when flying to LGA or DFW or MSY. And in those cases, unless those RJ flights have exactly the schedule I need, I’ll suffer a bit of inconvenience for a lot more dependability.</li><li>On our travels through Brittany earlier this month, I found that we were getting a large number of “card declined” messages when trying to use our Chase Sapphire Visa card -- at gas stations, stores, and in Paris when I tried to use my Uber app. Now this isn’t a new card -- we’ve had it for over 5 years -- and it’s not the first time we’ve used it on travels in Europe. But Chase fraud algorithm seems more sensitive, throwing more false positives, and no way to update things. On the way out of Brest, I pulled into a Total gas station to fill up on our way to the Crozon peninsula. We’d be there for a couple of days of hiking and I wasn’t sure many gas stations we’d see (turned out that I didn’t need to worry). I pull up to a pump, tap the Chase Visa, get a decline. Insert the card into the reader; get another decline. I do the same drill with my Citi MasterCard with the same result. However, I immediately get a fraud alert from Citi. I hit the big green “Yes” button on the e-mail -- as in, “Yes, I do recognize this charge” -- get an “all clear” response back, tap my Citi card again and fill up my tank. All this time, we get nothing from Chase. I open the Chase app on my phone; nothing there either. Same thing in Paris when I needed an Uber fast (more on that in a bit). Chase declined, but my Amex Platinum card went through. For me, it was just annoying; I always carry a full set of cards when traveling -- a Visa and a MasterCard from different banks, and an Amex -- because single points of failure when traveling are bad -- I don’t want to be left hanging if one bank or one card processor drops their network or loses a data center. Oh, and I also carry cash. But, as we’ve <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"talked (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/02/10/podcast-148-travel-potpourri-for-200-alex/\" target=\"_blank\">talked</a> <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"about (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/12/17/podcast-147-holiday-travel-tips-notes-from-santa-fe/\" target=\"_blank\">about</a> <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"before (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\" target=\"_blank\">before</a>, that’s ‘cause I’m old-school.</li><li>Brittany was a touring vacation, so we were moving every couple of days or so -- packing, unpacking, repacking. During one of those repacking sessions, maybe in Morgat on the Crozon peninsula -- I couldn’t find my Bose headphone case, which had my Bose headphones, in my backpack -- and I didn’t remember pulling out. Where the hell did they go, I asked myself. I pull everything out of my backpack and -- oh, there they are; they had slipped behind my camera bag in the bottom of my backpack. How did I lose my headphones in my backpack, you may ask -- and rightfully so because it really sounds stupid. Probably the same reason I lost a Google tablet in there a few years back -- too much black. The Bose case is black, the interior of Timbuk 2 backpack is black, my eyes aren’t as good as they used to be… I’d been toying around with getting a new bag, more of a messenger style -- that I could sling over one shoulder and with a bit better waterproofing. And, after this little panic drill, a non-black interior. I ended up getting a small Timbuk 2 Classic messenger bag from the Outlet section of REI.com for $50. It’s not too big -- holds my 11-inch MacBook Air, a couple of notebooks, an umbrella -- and has a bright yellow interior. I haven’t lost anything in it yet -- but I don’t trust myself. Maybe I need to get, like a white umbrella, and spray paint my Bose case red. I love black, but maybe I’ve taken that color palette a bit too far.</li><li>And if you have any travel rants, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. &nbsp;The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"mpeacock (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Facebook page (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Facebook page</a> or our Instagram account at <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\" (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Travelcommons</a> -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li> Bridge Music —  <em>Jester of the Golden Apocalypse</em> by Super_Sigil (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Super_Sigil/34750 </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Travel Interruptus</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A Greek tragedy in three acts where the travel gods toy with our anti-hero for fun and entertainment</li><li>OK, maybe not quite that bad, not quite Book of Job-level torment, but two out of the three trips I’ve taken in the past month spiraled into head-shaking metaphysical “What the hell is going on here” questioning of my decision to get out of bed that morning.</li><li><em>Act 1</em> - My Midway-Vegas-Nashville travel day. This trip didn’t start out to be stupid. It started as an easy day trip to downtown Nashville for a sales call. So many people are abandoning Chicago for Nashville, Southwest has non-stop flights every 90 minutes, so no problem with flight times. That works out fine -- until someone books a sales call the prior afternoon -- in Las Vegas. Hmmm, how do I get from Vegas after 4pm Pacific to Nashville in time for a meeting the next morning Central time? Southwest is about the only choice, connecting through either Denver or Houston. I go for the more direct routing through Denver -- my first mistake.</li><li>Because, as it turned out, the March “bomb cyclone” -- what the Weather Channel helpfully named “Winter Storm Ulmer” (who or what is an Ulmer?) -- was going to shut down DIA that day with 80 mph winds. I got an e-mail from Southwest the day before canceling my connection through Denver -- understandable -- but nothing else, no rebooking, just “We’re leaving you in Vegas” -- which I’ve found tends to be Southwest’s MO -- pleasantly unhelpful. Especially when the website errored out when I tried to find an alternate routing to Nashville, and the automated message answering their 800 number was estimating 80-some minute hold times. After about 45 minutes, between banging on the website, our corporate Concur app, and tweeting at their customer service, I managed to get re-routed through Houston, safely south of the bomb cyclone.</li><li>The next morning, I show up at the gate at Midway to find my 8am flight to Vegas delayed by 2 hours -- mechanical on the plane here meant they had to bring in a new plane and crew from somewhere else. Annoying, but not critical; I’d get into Vegas at noon for a 2pm meeting. I get another coffee, log into the Boingo hotspot and clear some emails. 9:40, we line up and board. And wait. Then the captain keys the mike, pauses (never a good sign) and then starts talking - he didn’t have time to do the walkaround before we boarded because they came in late. When they did, they noticed a problem with the front strut. Maintenance is looking at it, don’t know if they can fix it, but they need everyone off the plane. So we deplane for what is now my 2nd maintenance delay. We idle around the gate area. 10:30 and nothing. I start looking at my watch. If I’m don’t get into Vegas by 1pm, there won’t be enough time to get to my 2pm meeting, and so I shouldn’t get on the plane. Then they start to re-board us. What time will we get in? 12:20. OK, I’ll board. We all get back on -- and for the most part retaking the seats we had, in spite of Southwest’s open seating. We are creatures of habit. I’m surprised no one moo’d. We’re all on, and we wait. The mike keys. There’s a slight moan rather than a moo from the cabin. We’re waiting on the paperwork. It’s always paperwork. I’m looking at my watch. It’s past 11am Central and the door is still open. A 4-hour flight means we’re now coming up against that 1pm Pacific arrive time. Do I stay on the plane? A couple minutes more and my decision is made for me; they close the door. I lean back, put on my headphones and hope for no headwinds. We get to the gate at 1:02pm. Vegas is always a maze; there’s no straight walkways; they always want to vector you through a thicket of slot machines. I head to the cab rank -- shorter walk and no waiting -- and I get a guy with a heavy foot. I’m at the client 5 minutes before the meeting. That was a bit too close.</li><li>My return trip to the airport and the flight to Houston are uneventful, not even any turbulence as we skirt that bomb cyclone. We get into Hobby maybe even a bit early. I grab a beer and then head over to the gate. They call boarding - just half the A group -- 1-30 -- because that’s all there is on this late flight to Nashville. The gate agent scans the boarding passes, saying “You’re in Row 3, you’re in Row 4, you’re in Row 5….”  We get all get in our separate rows, and then wait. The captain keys the mike, pauses, and then says “This plane had a bird strike on the nose on landing. There’s no damage, but Maintenance has to pull the nose cone off for a visual inspection. It’ll take about an hour, so you’re free to get off the plane.” But by now, everything in the airport was closed. “My 3rd maintenance delay of the day. Unbelievable!” I tweet out in frustrustration. Except that iPhone autocorrect turned “delay” into “deejay”. Hilary Baumann pointed it out with a nice emoji-laden tweet that gave me a good chuckle. I finally got to my Nashville hotel around 1:30 in the morning. I looked at the time, shook my head, and went to bed.</li><li> Bridge Music —  South Texas Cowboy Blues by texasradiofish (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/texasradiofish/52030 Ft: unreal_dm, ElRon XChile</li><li><em>Act 2</em> - A couple of weeks later, on Sunday in Rennes, France. We wheeled our luggage the 2 blocks from our AirBnB to Rennes train station for the TGV to CDG. We stood with everyone else, looking up at the departure board waiting for the track to be posted. Departure time came closer and still no track -- not a good sign. The crowd grew larger. There was an announcement in French and a scrolling message at the bottom of the departure screen. Irene banged it into Google Translate. The gist of it -- a bomb threat had been phoned into SCNF, the train company, and all the trains in and out of Paris were halted. Given France’s recent history with terrorism, it was a reasonable response, but still…. They finally start posting delay times -- 40 mins, then over an hour, but then it shrinks back. I pull up Google Maps. The drive to CDG is showing about the same time as the train, but we’d be in control of our own destiny. I walk down to the rental car offices. It’s Sunday morning; they’re all closed. They won’t open until the afternoon; too late for us to drive and make our flights. </li><li>Time continues to tick by, past the departure time for our flight. I call United -- any other options? I get a phenomenally helpful agent. I can hear the keystrokes. Nothing else today Sunday, nor tomorrow, Monday. I wasn’t surprised about nothing available today, but was about the next day -- until I got a text from Andrew. He was on this morning’s United flight to Chicago which just cancelled for a hydraulic problem and rebooked on tomorrow’s flight -- which explains the lack of seats for us. I took the Tuesday seats. Now would we get to CDG in time for Claire’s EasyJet flight to Edinburgh so she can make class the next day. The trains finally start moving. We head down and board our train. And then wait, and wait some  more. And then the train starts moving. I look at my watch. I think Claire will be OK. </li><li>Until we come to a stop in the middle of a rail yard. I watch a couple of guys walk past our car -- maybe a visual inspection? After a bit, we start moving -- backwards. The conductor keys the mike, and makes an announcement in rapid French that we can’t pick up. I open Google Maps. I see we’re off to the east of Paris but can’t tell if we’re moving in the right direction. Until we pull into the next station -- it’s for EuroDisney. I find our train route on the SCNF website and see this is one of the stops en route to CDG, so we’re going in the right direction. We get to CDG by 3pm, which means Claire can make her flight. Andrew comes over from the Airport Hilton, where United is putting him up for the night, and we head down to Paris for another dinner together. There are, after all, worse cities to have to spend an extra day or two.</li><li> Bridge Music —  <em>Parisian </em>Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)<br> Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License<br> http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ </li><li><em>Act 3</em> - Tuesday morning, Paris. Our forced layover in Paris yesterday had been a beautiful day, sunny and warm. We walked through the Marais, south across Ile de la Cite, taking the obligatory selfie in front of Notre Dame that we pulled out at looked at two weeks later during the news coverage of the fire, and then rattled around the Latin Quarter looking for a place with outdoor seating and a nice rosé. This morning, though, not so beautiful. It was dumping rain. So rather than trundle our luggage 10 min to the Metro stop, I decide to order an Uber -- which takes a try or two when Chase declines my Visa again; and I switch over to Amex. A nice black Mercedes picks us up and heads for Les Halles -- or at least tries to. The traffic is a crawl at best. I watch our buffer time tick away and we’re not  getting any closer. After sitting through a couple of traffic light cycles without clearing the intersection, we grab our bags and make for Les Halles on foot. We get there, a bit wet. We’re able to skip the ticket booth line; I have enough euros for the self-service machine, because it’s that or a chip-&amp;-pin card we don’t have. We get on the train. I look at my watch - we should have enough time to check our bags (bringing back some liquids), clear security, and get to the gate without too much more agita.</li><li>Until the train slows to a stop between stops. The conductor keys the mike, and makes an announcement in rapid French. I look at the other passengers. They don’t seem too agitated. I figure it’s some congestion on the track ahead. And, sure enough, we start moving after a couple of minutes. But at the next stop, the train doors stay open and a train employee come on, saying in French <em>and</em> English -- everyone has to get off, catch a bus outside the station to another station, then catch a different train to the airport. We head down the bus stop. There’s no one there to help; just a couple hundred people milling around.</li><li>Now I’m worried. We have no time to figure this out. The taxi stand is mobbed, I fire up Uber - 19-minute wait. Lyft? They’re not in Paris. I google to find taxi company but before I call, I try Uber one more time -- a 5-minute wait for a €60 fare. I hit the order button -- and then again after I swap over to Amex. €60 for a 15-minute ride to CDG is tough, but it’s cheaper than another night in a hotel. We get to the United desk 2 minutes before luggage check closes for our flight. The agent radioed down, checked in our bags, and then gave us the CDG version of Fast Track, so we could sidestep the long passport control and security lines. We board, sit down, but don’t really settle in until the plane leaves the ground. And when we’re finally at ORD, standing by the luggage carousel, our bags are the first ones to come out.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #150</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_150.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<p><!--EndFragment--></p>\n<p></p>','Podcast #150 — Travel Interruptus','','inherit','closed','closed','','2402-revision-v1','','','2019-08-14 08:22:59','2019-08-14 13:22:59','',2402,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/08/14/2402-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2511,1,'2019-08-14 08:27:01','2019-08-14 13:27:01','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\">\n<p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Cracked-mirror-square.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2482 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Cracked-mirror-square-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a></p><figcaption>What\'s Behind Me Is Not Important</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>Going upscale, recording in the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/1871Chicago/photos/we-have-a-new-podcast-studio-big-thanks-to-1871-company-parkergale-capital-for-h/1116900888351884/\">podcast studio</a> at the <a href=\"https://1871.com/\">1871 tech incubator</a> in Chicago, I talk about my surprising smooth 2-week trip in Ireland and Scotland. We also note the retirement (finally!) of American Airlines\' MD-80 jet, a very interesting new social media app, talk about how algorithms are changing the way we travel, and the melancholy of leaving familiar places for the last time.&nbsp; All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_153.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/657617519&color=%23ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #154: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the Residence Inn just off the Main St pedestrian mall in downtown Charlottesville, VA, leaving behind last episode’s multi-mic, big mixer board, sound-baffled podcast studio to go old-school, back to the TravelCommons roots with the mobile rig in a hotel room. I was thinking about going way back and recording it in the bathroom, but there’s a noisy exhaust fan that I can’t figure out how to turn off. There may be a bit of traffic noise in the background, and maybe even some thunder if the black clouds out my window live up to their potential. This episode will be one of the shorter ones. I’m trying to get it in before Irene and I head out to Krakow and Budapest Thursday night.</li><li>This is my fourth week back in Charlottesville in Chicago, IL. Not much has changed since my last commute back at the end of last year. American Eagle and United Express have a couple of direct regional jets a day from Chicago, and when weather knocks those flights out, Richmond is an hour-and-a-bit drive to the east, or Washington-Dulles is 2 hours north as a last resort. It’s still a 5-gate airport; the bar in the middle still has a surprisingly decent local craft beer selection. The bartender still recognizes me, though she still asks for my ID each time I sit at the bar. So not much has changed at CHO.&nbsp;</li><li>However, my approach to flying there has a bit. I’ve talked about this in prior episodes; I’ve always planned my travel to maximize my time at home, with my family. Given a choice between flying out the night before or taking a 7am flight out the day of, I’d take the latter. The trade-off, though, is travel plans that don’t deal well with travel delays -- a 2-hour flight delay the night before is annoying but won’t make me miss a meeting; that same delay the morning of my meeting may mean I won’t need to take that flight. And I’ve had all that happen with my flights to Charlottesville. So this time, with the kids graduated and moved out, and now that we’ve downsized from a house to a city apartment, my wife thinking I’m underfoot a bit too much, the need to maximize my time at home has… eased a bit. So I’m booking more... resilient itineraries -- flying out the night before, staying over an extra day so I can fly out after lunch, before the summer humidity spools up the afternoon thunderstorms…. Which was paid off last week when thunderstorms in <em>Chicago</em> had my evening flight to CHO posting a 3 hour delay by noon. I had more than enough time to swing my endpoint from CHO to RIC (all done pretty seamlessly thru the United app, which I found pretty impressive). My travel plans may not be as optimized as before… or maybe they are, but for different things, like cutting down on stress and my need to bitch tweet.</li><li> Bridge Music -- <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/Loveshadow/26219\" target=\"_blank\"><em>SP*ANK Vox</em></a> by Loveshadow </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>We’ve had a thread over a couple of episodes about <a href=\"http://getfreebird.com/\">Freebird</a>, a flight rebooking service. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/podcast-151-traveler-data-leaks-brittany-street-food/\">episode 151</a>, TravelCommons listener Mika Pyyhkala sent in a note about his great experience with them, how they picked up a Southwest flight cancellation and rebooked him on Delta while he was still in the air on his first Southwest leg. Saved him a huge disruption; well worth, he said, the $19/leg fee. I mentioned in the last episode that Amex Travel has been offering free coverage for flights I book on their site with my Platinum card. So Freebird has been covering these last few trips to Charlottesville. I get a text the night before and the morning of my flights assuring me that Freebird is monitoring them. And when last week’s outbound 6pm flight started posting delays at noon, I got texts letting me know they were monitoring the delay, but it hadn’t yet tripped their 4-hour trigger.&nbsp; But knowing that there weren’t going to be many alternative flights to RIC or IAD later in the evening, I didn’t feel comfortable waiting for United to push over 4 hours -- and then cancel -- and so moved myself to their 6pm Richmond flight -- which was on-time -- getting me into my hotel around 10pm after an hour Uber ride. And then, indulging in a bit of travel schadenfreude, I kept tracking the ORD-CHO flight on <a href=\"https://flightaware.com/\">FlightAware</a>. It finally took off at 11pm Central – 5 hrs late -- arriving CHO at 2am Eastern. So it did eventually cross Freebird’s 4-hour threshold, but I’m not sure if it was in time to catch an alternative flight. So, I’m glad I switched it myself. I dunno, maybe tight connections rather than thinly traveled direct routes is the better use case for Freebird</li><li>Also back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/podcast-151-traveler-data-leaks-brittany-street-food/\">episode 151</a>, I talked about trying out the alpha version of augmented reality directions in Google Maps, where you hold up your phone and the display uses the camera to show the streetscape in front of you with the&nbsp; directions -- street names, arrows -- overlaid on the real-time image. I thought it was kinda cool; Irene and the kids were less than impressed. But you can judge for yourself because Google <a href=\"https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/08/google-launches-live-view-ar-walking-directions-for-google-maps/\">announced last week</a> that they’ve widened the feature to a public beta. Give it a try and let me know what you think</li><li>Fast forward one whole episode -- from <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/podcast-151-traveler-data-leaks-brittany-street-food/\">151</a> in May to <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/06/16/podcast-152-overwhelming-travel-new-old-restaurant-trends/\">152</a> in June -- which really was a big jump because, right after recording episode <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/podcast-151-traveler-data-leaks-brittany-street-food/\">151</a>, we moved from the big house in the suburbs to a 60% smaller high-rise apartment on the lakefront -- but in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/06/16/podcast-152-overwhelming-travel-new-old-restaurant-trends/\">episode 152</a>, I talked about having to recalibrate how I’d get to the airport. I had my guy who’d pick me up for a 30-minute ride to ORD or MDW… But no more. Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve started to get a feel for it -- 45-50 minutes to ORD, but figure an hour for weird traffic. And in the morning, figure a 10-minute wait for an Uber or Lyft, and a tab with tip around $40-$45. So this Monday at 5am, I fire up Lyft and Uber while drinking my morning cup of tea to see what’s going on -- $110 on Uber and $60 on Lyft. What the hell is going on? Well, maybe all the drivers are sleeping in, so I shower, get dressed, gather all my worldly belongings, and check again -- $120 on Uber; $57 on Lyft. I hit the Lyft button and wait -- and wait and wait. Then someone accepts the ride, and cancels. Guess he didn’t want to go to ORD. So I fire up <a href=\"https://transitapp.com/\">Transit</a>, my favorite mass transit app. It’s developed in Montreal and does mass transit routing in a huge number of cities in the US and Canada. And in Chicago, it also covers Divvy bike share and constructs Lyft-to-mass transit routing. I fired it up thinking that, if I couldn’t get a Lyft to ORD, then maybe I could get one to the nearest Blue Line L stop and take the subway the rest of the way. But even it couldn’t find a Lyft. But, it showed that, across the street from our flat, a bus will pick me up and, 18 stops later, drop me at the L stop. I got nothing else going -- actually, I did but it would involve waking Irene up at&nbsp; now 5:40am for a ride to ORD, truly a last resort. I wheel my luggage across the street. Four minutes later, the bus shows up. There’s me and another guy -- no problem putting my luggage on the seat next to me. And we make pretty good time -- not a lot of people waiting at bus stops at 6am, and the traffic is pretty clear too. All told, we stop maybe 6 times and have 8 people on the bus at its most crowded.  I had to wait another 5 minutes for the L and, at 6:40, it was more crowded; almost everyone had an ORD badge around their neck -- pilots, flight attendants, ground staff -- except for a few passenger-looking folk like me. All told, it took me about an hour -- maybe 10 minutes longer than Uber and Lyft were quoting. But at $2.50 vs. $60 or $120, it seemed like I made out on the deal.</li><li>Also in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/06/16/podcast-152-overwhelming-travel-new-old-restaurant-trends/\">episode 152</a>, I talked about “earning and burning” frequent traveler points rather than saving them because airlines and hotels keep playing with redemption levels and rules that reduce the value of the points. Jim McDonough tweeted me with a contra view -<ul><li>Regarding frequent flyer miles and how they don\'t appreciate over time - I still like to keep some around in case we need to travel for family emergency situations. The walk-up fare does not compete with the $25 charge to book a frequent flyer mile ticket last minute.</li></ul></li><li>Jim, that’s a good point, but I wonder if that strategy still works as more airlines move from fixed awards schedules to dynamic point pricing -- Southwest, Delta, and soon United -- where point price for a flight climes as remaining ticket prices do. Does it still make sense to pay with points?</li><li>As I said earlier, Irene and I are heading out Thursday night for a weekend in Krakow, Poland and then heading down to Budapest for a mix of touring and visits with Irene’s family. So, I thought this was as good a time as any to try out <a href=\"https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT209044\">my iPhone’s dual SIM capability.</a> Up to now, my usual procedure is to transfer my US AT&amp;T SIM to an old HTC One phone and then put my UK EE SIM in my iPhone Xs (usually sometime in flight in that panic drill between them clearing the breakfast tray and packing everything up for final descent) if I’m going to an EU country or when I pick one up after we land. I do this because local data is <em>hugely</em> cheaper than an AT&amp;T international plan - the EE pay-as-you-go plan I got is £10, or $12 with this week’s Brexit exchange rate discount, for 3 GB of data, 100 minutes of voice, and unlimited texts. But I still want my US number to ring thru in case someone back home needs to reach me and doesn’t know I’m out of the country. I don’t carry both phones with me, though. I have the iPhone with me during the day, using the local SIM to run Google Maps and the like. The HTC stays in the hotel room and I check it for messages when we get back at night.</li><li>But with its dual SIM capabilities, I should be able to do this with just my iPhone. However, the iPhone has only one physical SIM slot; the second is an internal eSIM, like the ones Apple uses in their cellular Apple Watch. So to make this work, I had to get AT&amp;T to transfer my US number from its physical SIM to the eSIM in the phone. My first stop was the local AT&amp;T store. I explained to the store guy what I wanted to do. He looked at me for a moment and said, “Uh, I’m new; I don’t know how to do that. But I can give you an eSIM card if you want.” OK, that’s a start. He riffled around his desk drawer. “I don’t have one here. I’ll have to go in the back. But I’m the only one here today, so you’ll have to go outside so I can lock up while I’m in the back.” Interesting. I walked down the street to grab a bite rather than idle outside the door. I came back. He handed me the card, “Here you go, but I don’t know if this will work…” I went home and hit the AT&amp;T web site. I spelunked around the site until I found the chat link and fired it up. The person on the other end knew what needed to be done. I gave her a few numbers off the card, then pointed the camera at the card’s QR code and it added to plan to my iPhone. Now, the chat agent said that they’ll have to do a bit of provisioning at the back end. She’d text me when it was done. Irene and I went out to dinner; no text and no activation. So the next morning, I hit chat again and this time stuck with the guy until the provisioning was complete. Then I pulled out the AT&amp;T SIM and put in the EE SIM, and immediately got a text from EE telling me their US roaming charges. I also got a whole new set of selections under the Cellular section under Settings. Which line did I want to use for voice, for data, for iMessage and FaceTime. I spent some time on Apple’s FAQ pages trying to figure out which scenario works for me. My guess is that it’ll take me a bit of trial and error -- and self-inflected AT&amp;T international charges -- to really figure this out.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com. </li><li>Bridge Music —  &nbsp;<em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/trifonic/445\" target=\"_blank\">Bored on Your Backside</a></em> by Trifonic     </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Will We Still Love Uber When The Prices Go Up?</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><a href=\"https://www.reuters.com/article/us-lyft-results/lyft-sees-ride-hailing-price-war-easing-sending-uber-and-lyft-shares-up-idUSKCN1UX2BQ\">Lyft’s chief financial officer Brian Roberts said, during last week’s earnings call, that pricing was becoming “more rational.”</a> “Rational pricing” is CFO-speak for “more predictably higher.” <a href=\"https://www.marketwatch.com/story/lyft-and-uber-are-giving-investors-what-they-want-which-is-bad-for-the-rest-of-us-2019-08-08\">Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, during his earnings call, said, “We and Lyft are big-time competitors here and have been for some period of time, but for now we’re seeing, generally, category positions that are stable. We are focused on improving profitability in this market.”</a>&nbsp; Which is CEO-speak for “we’re no longer going to slash prices to buy market share.”</li><li>We all knew this time would come -- at least the rational ones. Uber lost $5.2 billion in the second quarter while the smaller Lyft lost a mere $644 million last quarter. Investors are going to let you torch large piles of cash for only so long. Hence the topic question -- will we stay with Uber and Lyft even when they’re not a bargain anymore?</li><li>I’ve been talking about this with frequent travelers I know, or sit next to at bars, or bump into waiting for an Uber at O’Hare. One school of thought is that the Uber/Lyft experience is better than your typical cab, so even at the same price, you’d still order an Uber. You can order it on your phone rather than running into the street, trying to flag down a passing cab. Indeed, I’ve always said that, for me, Uber’s prime use case is getting a ride from midtown Manhattan to LGA at the end of the day a somewhat sane experience. Before Uber, I’d be practically dancing into 5th Ave, hiding my luggage behind a trash can because if a cabbie saw you wanted to go to LGA, they’d accelerate by you. I tried the cab company’s iPhone app last time I was in New York. It failed miserably.</li><li>Adding Uber and Lyft drivers to the transit mix means you can get a car ride from somewhere outside the usual downtown and tourist spots. I remember pre-Uber New Orleans, getting a cab anywhere other than between the airport and the French Quarter was near impossible. One night for dinner, we decided to go to a Mid-City restaurant, <a href=\"http://toupsmeatery.com/\">Toups Meatery</a>. Phenomenal place. The owner, Isaac Toups, later made it to the finals of the <em>Top Chef </em>cooking show. He didn’t win, but was voted “fan favorite”. And his food was our favorite too. The only problem -- getting a cab back to the Sheraton on Canal St from his Mid-City location. The hostess called 3 cab companies and we waited 20 minutes for a 15-minute ride. And that driver told us, “Yup, all most cab drivers want to do is make the easy money, driving between the airport and the hotels”</li><li>There’s also fare predictability -- you see the price to get from, say, downtown Chicago to O’Hare before committing to the ride. No more meter anxiety, watching the number run up in traffic. And the accompanying “Will I have enough cash to pay” or “Will this guy’s credit card machine work?” anxiety. With Uber and Lyft drivers following GPS apps, there’s no more “am I being taken the long way around to run up the meter” anxiety, or depending on your cab driver’s knowledge to take the fast way, or having them punt it to you with the “bridge or tunnel” question I often get from LGA cabs. The technology helps avoid a lot of the bad experiences we’ve had with taxi cab rides.</li><li>I used to say that Uber and Lyft cars are nicer, but their bar has slipped as they’re scrambling for drivers in a full-employment economy. An Uber I took last week was missing the door armrest; a Lyft that Irene took had the front right quarter-panel held on with duct tape. These are exceptions, though a bit more common that a couple of years ago. But they’re still a damn sight better than the beat-to-hell Baltimore cabs that would sit at the cab ranks in the Inner Harbor. I only did that once, because the cab rank was right outside the client’s building and I was late leaving for the airport. The back seat was full of old newspapers and other crap, and there was no air conditioning -- on a July afternoon. After that, I’d stand there, looking at the cabs, while waiting 5 minutes for an Uber to show up.</li><li>The place I most often take a cab rather than waiting for an Uber is the airport. And here, it’s not really about price, it’s convenience. The cab ranks are usually right at the terminal exit, while the rideshare pickup spot can be an Easter Egg hunt (Vegas), a 15-minute walk to the back 40 (Atlanta) or a confusing scrum of screaming traffic cops (Chicago Midway). Vegas and LGA especially -- catching a cab is so much easier than a rideshare. Here at CHO also -- it’s a flat rate into town that’s about the same as Uber and Lyft and the cabs are in decent shape, so if one’s there, there’s no reason to wait.</li><li>And I could be wrong, but it feels like the pricing discussion is mostly a US thing. <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/podcast-150-travel-interruptus/\">In Paris last Spring</a>, none of the Ubers were “rideshares”; they were all black car livery companies with professional drivers. Near as I could tell, Uber was just another dispatch system for them. In Lisbon a few years back, I couldn’t tell if they were true rideshares, but the pricing was the same as taxis, and there were more taxis so less wait. We took the path of least resistance and hailed cabs.</li><li>The rough consensus of my completely unrepresentative polling was - ride sharing got traction because it was cheaper, but now the technology gives such a better experience that I’d even pay a premium over a taxi -- but I wouldn’t want to tell Lyft or Uber that. But what they said on those earnings calls, I think they already know that.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #154</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_153.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<p><!--EndFragment--></p>','Podcast #154 — Will We Still Love Uber When The Prices Go Up?','','inherit','closed','closed','','2508-revision-v1','','','2019-08-14 08:27:01','2019-08-14 13:27:01','',2508,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/08/14/2508-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2512,1,'2019-08-14 09:35:46','2019-08-14 14:35:46','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\">\n<p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Cracked-mirror-square.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2482 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Cracked-mirror-square-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a></p>\n<figcaption>What\'s Behind Me Is Not Important</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p>Breaking out the mobile rig to record this episode in the Residence Inn in downtown Charlottesville, VA. Summer storms let me test Freebird\'s re-booking service, I wrestle with AT&amp;T so I can use my iPhone\'s dual SIM capability on my trip to Krakow and Budapest, booking more relaxed flight itineraries lets me call an audible when Uber and Lyft prices surge into the stratosphere, which gets me thinking -- will we still love those rideshare companies when they\'re no longer cheaper than taxis?  All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_154.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/657617519&color=%23ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #154: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the Residence Inn just off the Main St pedestrian mall in downtown Charlottesville, VA, leaving behind last episode’s multi-mic, big mixer board, sound-baffled podcast studio to go old-school, back to the TravelCommons roots with the mobile rig in a hotel room. I was thinking about going way back and recording it in the bathroom, but there’s a noisy exhaust fan that I can’t figure out how to turn off. There may be a bit of traffic noise in the background, and maybe even some thunder if the black clouds out my window live up to their potential. This episode will be one of the shorter ones. I’m trying to get it in before Irene and I head out to Krakow and Budapest Thursday night.</li><li>This is my fourth week back in Charlottesville in Chicago, IL. Not much has changed since my last commute back at the end of last year. American Eagle and United Express have a couple of direct regional jets a day from Chicago, and when weather knocks those flights out, Richmond is an hour-and-a-bit drive to the east, or Washington-Dulles is 2 hours north as a last resort. It’s still a 5-gate airport; the bar in the middle still has a surprisingly decent local craft beer selection. The bartender still recognizes me, though she still asks for my ID each time I sit at the bar. So not much has changed at CHO.&nbsp;</li><li>However, my approach to flying there has a bit. I’ve talked about this in prior episodes; I’ve always planned my travel to maximize my time at home, with my family. Given a choice between flying out the night before or taking a 7am flight out the day of, I’d take the latter. The trade-off, though, is travel plans that don’t deal well with travel delays -- a 2-hour flight delay the night before is annoying but won’t make me miss a meeting; that same delay the morning of my meeting may mean I won’t need to take that flight. And I’ve had all that happen with my flights to Charlottesville. So this time, with the kids graduated and moved out, and now that we’ve downsized from a house to a city apartment, my wife thinking I’m underfoot a bit too much, the need to maximize my time at home has… eased a bit. So I’m booking more... resilient itineraries -- flying out the night before, staying over an extra day so I can fly out after lunch, before the summer humidity spools up the afternoon thunderstorms…. Which was paid off last week when thunderstorms in <em>Chicago</em> had my evening flight to CHO posting a 3 hour delay by noon. I had more than enough time to swing my endpoint from CHO to RIC (all done pretty seamlessly thru the United app, which I found pretty impressive). My travel plans may not be as optimized as before… or maybe they are, but for different things, like cutting down on stress and my need to bitch tweet.</li><li> Bridge Music -- <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/Loveshadow/26219\" target=\"_blank\"><em>SP*ANK Vox</em></a> by Loveshadow </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>We’ve had a thread over a couple of episodes about <a href=\"http://getfreebird.com/\">Freebird</a>, a flight rebooking service. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/podcast-151-traveler-data-leaks-brittany-street-food/\">episode 151</a>, TravelCommons listener Mika Pyyhkala sent in a note about his great experience with them, how they picked up a Southwest flight cancellation and rebooked him on Delta while he was still in the air on his first Southwest leg. Saved him a huge disruption; well worth, he said, the $19/leg fee. I mentioned in the last episode that Amex Travel has been offering free coverage for flights I book on their site with my Platinum card. So Freebird has been covering these last few trips to Charlottesville. I get a text the night before and the morning of my flights assuring me that Freebird is monitoring them. And when last week’s outbound 6pm flight started posting delays at noon, I got texts letting me know they were monitoring the delay, but it hadn’t yet tripped their 4-hour trigger.&nbsp; But knowing that there weren’t going to be many alternative flights to RIC or IAD later in the evening, I didn’t feel comfortable waiting for United to push over 4 hours -- and then cancel -- and so moved myself to their 6pm Richmond flight -- which was on-time -- getting me into my hotel around 10pm after an hour Uber ride. And then, indulging in a bit of travel schadenfreude, I kept tracking the ORD-CHO flight on <a href=\"https://flightaware.com/\">FlightAware</a>. It finally took off at 11pm Central – 5 hrs late -- arriving CHO at 2am Eastern. So it did eventually cross Freebird’s 4-hour threshold, but I’m not sure if it was in time to catch an alternative flight. So, I’m glad I switched it myself. I dunno, maybe tight connections rather than thinly traveled direct routes is the better use case for Freebird</li><li>Also back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/podcast-151-traveler-data-leaks-brittany-street-food/\">episode 151</a>, I talked about trying out the alpha version of augmented reality directions in Google Maps, where you hold up your phone and the display uses the camera to show the streetscape in front of you with the&nbsp; directions -- street names, arrows -- overlaid on the real-time image. I thought it was kinda cool; Irene and the kids were less than impressed. But you can judge for yourself because Google <a href=\"https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/08/google-launches-live-view-ar-walking-directions-for-google-maps/\">announced last week</a> that they’ve widened the feature to a public beta. Give it a try and let me know what you think</li><li>Fast forward one whole episode -- from <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/podcast-151-traveler-data-leaks-brittany-street-food/\">151</a> in May to <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/06/16/podcast-152-overwhelming-travel-new-old-restaurant-trends/\">152</a> in June -- which really was a big jump because, right after recording episode <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/podcast-151-traveler-data-leaks-brittany-street-food/\">151</a>, we moved from the big house in the suburbs to a 60% smaller high-rise apartment on the lakefront -- but in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/06/16/podcast-152-overwhelming-travel-new-old-restaurant-trends/\">episode 152</a>, I talked about having to recalibrate how I’d get to the airport. I had my guy who’d pick me up for a 30-minute ride to ORD or MDW… But no more. Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve started to get a feel for it -- 45-50 minutes to ORD, but figure an hour for weird traffic. And in the morning, figure a 10-minute wait for an Uber or Lyft, and a tab with tip around $40-$45. So this Monday at 5am, I fire up Lyft and Uber while drinking my morning cup of tea to see what’s going on -- $110 on Uber and $60 on Lyft. What the hell is going on? Well, maybe all the drivers are sleeping in, so I shower, get dressed, gather all my worldly belongings, and check again -- $120 on Uber; $57 on Lyft. I hit the Lyft button and wait -- and wait and wait. Then someone accepts the ride, and cancels. Guess he didn’t want to go to ORD. So I fire up <a href=\"https://transitapp.com/\">Transit</a>, my favorite mass transit app. It’s developed in Montreal and does mass transit routing in a huge number of cities in the US and Canada. And in Chicago, it also covers Divvy bike share and constructs Lyft-to-mass transit routing. I fired it up thinking that, if I couldn’t get a Lyft to ORD, then maybe I could get one to the nearest Blue Line L stop and take the subway the rest of the way. But even it couldn’t find a Lyft. But, it showed that, across the street from our flat, a bus will pick me up and, 18 stops later, drop me at the L stop. I got nothing else going -- actually, I did but it would involve waking Irene up at&nbsp; now 5:40am for a ride to ORD, truly a last resort. I wheel my luggage across the street. Four minutes later, the bus shows up. There’s me and another guy -- no problem putting my luggage on the seat next to me. And we make pretty good time -- not a lot of people waiting at bus stops at 6am, and the traffic is pretty clear too. All told, we stop maybe 6 times and have 8 people on the bus at its most crowded.  I had to wait another 5 minutes for the L and, at 6:40, it was more crowded; almost everyone had an ORD badge around their neck -- pilots, flight attendants, ground staff -- except for a few passenger-looking folk like me. All told, it took me about an hour -- maybe 10 minutes longer than Uber and Lyft were quoting. But at $2.50 vs. $60 or $120, it seemed like I made out on the deal.</li><li>Also in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/06/16/podcast-152-overwhelming-travel-new-old-restaurant-trends/\">episode 152</a>, I talked about “earning and burning” frequent traveler points rather than saving them because airlines and hotels keep playing with redemption levels and rules that reduce the value of the points. Jim McDonough tweeted me with a contra view -<ul><li>Regarding frequent flyer miles and how they don\'t appreciate over time - I still like to keep some around in case we need to travel for family emergency situations. The walk-up fare does not compete with the $25 charge to book a frequent flyer mile ticket last minute.</li></ul></li><li>Jim, that’s a good point, but I wonder if that strategy still works as more airlines move from fixed awards schedules to dynamic point pricing -- Southwest, Delta, and soon United -- where point price for a flight climes as remaining ticket prices do. Does it still make sense to pay with points?</li><li>As I said earlier, Irene and I are heading out Thursday night for a weekend in Krakow, Poland and then heading down to Budapest for a mix of touring and visits with Irene’s family. So, I thought this was as good a time as any to try out <a href=\"https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT209044\">my iPhone’s dual SIM capability.</a> Up to now, my usual procedure is to transfer my US AT&amp;T SIM to an old HTC One phone and then put my UK EE SIM in my iPhone Xs (usually sometime in flight in that panic drill between them clearing the breakfast tray and packing everything up for final descent) if I’m going to an EU country or when I pick one up after we land. I do this because local data is <em>hugely</em> cheaper than an AT&amp;T international plan - the EE pay-as-you-go plan I got is £10, or $12 with this week’s Brexit exchange rate discount, for 3 GB of data, 100 minutes of voice, and unlimited texts. But I still want my US number to ring thru in case someone back home needs to reach me and doesn’t know I’m out of the country. I don’t carry both phones with me, though. I have the iPhone with me during the day, using the local SIM to run Google Maps and the like. The HTC stays in the hotel room and I check it for messages when we get back at night.</li><li>But with its dual SIM capabilities, I should be able to do this with just my iPhone. However, the iPhone has only one physical SIM slot; the second is an internal eSIM, like the ones Apple uses in their cellular Apple Watch. So to make this work, I had to get AT&amp;T to transfer my US number from its physical SIM to the eSIM in the phone. My first stop was the local AT&amp;T store. I explained to the store guy what I wanted to do. He looked at me for a moment and said, “Uh, I’m new; I don’t know how to do that. But I can give you an eSIM card if you want.” OK, that’s a start. He riffled around his desk drawer. “I don’t have one here. I’ll have to go in the back. But I’m the only one here today, so you’ll have to go outside so I can lock up while I’m in the back.” Interesting. I walked down the street to grab a bite rather than idle outside the door. I came back. He handed me the card, “Here you go, but I don’t know if this will work…” I went home and hit the AT&amp;T web site. I spelunked around the site until I found the chat link and fired it up. The person on the other end knew what needed to be done. I gave her a few numbers off the card, then pointed the camera at the card’s QR code and it added to plan to my iPhone. Now, the chat agent said that they’ll have to do a bit of provisioning at the back end. She’d text me when it was done. Irene and I went out to dinner; no text and no activation. So the next morning, I hit chat again and this time stuck with the guy until the provisioning was complete. Then I pulled out the AT&amp;T SIM and put in the EE SIM, and immediately got a text from EE telling me their US roaming charges. I also got a whole new set of selections under the Cellular section under Settings. Which line did I want to use for voice, for data, for iMessage and FaceTime. I spent some time on Apple’s FAQ pages trying to figure out which scenario works for me. My guess is that it’ll take me a bit of trial and error -- and self-inflected AT&amp;T international charges -- to really figure this out.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com. </li><li>Bridge Music —  &nbsp;<em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/trifonic/445\" target=\"_blank\">Bored on Your Backside</a></em> by Trifonic     </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Will We Still Love Uber When The Prices Go Up?</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><a href=\"https://www.reuters.com/article/us-lyft-results/lyft-sees-ride-hailing-price-war-easing-sending-uber-and-lyft-shares-up-idUSKCN1UX2BQ\">Lyft’s chief financial officer Brian Roberts said, during last week’s earnings call, that pricing was becoming “more rational.”</a> “Rational pricing” is CFO-speak for “more predictably higher.” <a href=\"https://www.marketwatch.com/story/lyft-and-uber-are-giving-investors-what-they-want-which-is-bad-for-the-rest-of-us-2019-08-08\">Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, during his earnings call, said, “We and Lyft are big-time competitors here and have been for some period of time, but for now we’re seeing, generally, category positions that are stable. We are focused on improving profitability in this market.”</a>&nbsp; Which is CEO-speak for “we’re no longer going to slash prices to buy market share.”</li><li>We all knew this time would come -- at least the rational ones. Uber lost $5.2 billion in the second quarter while the smaller Lyft lost a mere $644 million last quarter. Investors are going to let you torch large piles of cash for only so long. Hence the topic question -- will we stay with Uber and Lyft even when they’re not a bargain anymore?</li><li>I’ve been talking about this with frequent travelers I know, or sit next to at bars, or bump into waiting for an Uber at O’Hare. One school of thought is that the Uber/Lyft experience is better than your typical cab, so even at the same price, you’d still order an Uber. You can order it on your phone rather than running into the street, trying to flag down a passing cab. Indeed, I’ve always said that, for me, Uber’s prime use case is getting a ride from midtown Manhattan to LGA at the end of the day a somewhat sane experience. Before Uber, I’d be practically dancing into 5th Ave, hiding my luggage behind a trash can because if a cabbie saw you wanted to go to LGA, they’d accelerate by you. I tried the cab company’s iPhone app last time I was in New York. It failed miserably.</li><li>Adding Uber and Lyft drivers to the transit mix means you can get a car ride from somewhere outside the usual downtown and tourist spots. I remember pre-Uber New Orleans, getting a cab anywhere other than between the airport and the French Quarter was near impossible. One night for dinner, we decided to go to a Mid-City restaurant, <a href=\"http://toupsmeatery.com/\">Toups Meatery</a>. Phenomenal place. The owner, Isaac Toups, later made it to the finals of the <em>Top Chef </em>cooking show. He didn’t win, but was voted “fan favorite”. And his food was our favorite too. The only problem -- getting a cab back to the Sheraton on Canal St from his Mid-City location. The hostess called 3 cab companies and we waited 20 minutes for a 15-minute ride. And that driver told us, “Yup, all most cab drivers want to do is make the easy money, driving between the airport and the hotels”</li><li>There’s also fare predictability -- you see the price to get from, say, downtown Chicago to O’Hare before committing to the ride. No more meter anxiety, watching the number run up in traffic. And the accompanying “Will I have enough cash to pay” or “Will this guy’s credit card machine work?” anxiety. With Uber and Lyft drivers following GPS apps, there’s no more “am I being taken the long way around to run up the meter” anxiety, or depending on your cab driver’s knowledge to take the fast way, or having them punt it to you with the “bridge or tunnel” question I often get from LGA cabs. The technology helps avoid a lot of the bad experiences we’ve had with taxi cab rides.</li><li>I used to say that Uber and Lyft cars are nicer, but their bar has slipped as they’re scrambling for drivers in a full-employment economy. An Uber I took last week was missing the door armrest; a Lyft that Irene took had the front right quarter-panel held on with duct tape. These are exceptions, though a bit more common that a couple of years ago. But they’re still a damn sight better than the beat-to-hell Baltimore cabs that would sit at the cab ranks in the Inner Harbor. I only did that once, because the cab rank was right outside the client’s building and I was late leaving for the airport. The back seat was full of old newspapers and other crap, and there was no air conditioning -- on a July afternoon. After that, I’d stand there, looking at the cabs, while waiting 5 minutes for an Uber to show up.</li><li>The place I most often take a cab rather than waiting for an Uber is the airport. And here, it’s not really about price, it’s convenience. The cab ranks are usually right at the terminal exit, while the rideshare pickup spot can be an Easter Egg hunt (Vegas), a 15-minute walk to the back 40 (Atlanta) or a confusing scrum of screaming traffic cops (Chicago Midway). Vegas and LGA especially -- catching a cab is so much easier than a rideshare. Here at CHO also -- it’s a flat rate into town that’s about the same as Uber and Lyft and the cabs are in decent shape, so if one’s there, there’s no reason to wait.</li><li>And I could be wrong, but it feels like the pricing discussion is mostly a US thing. <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/podcast-150-travel-interruptus/\">In Paris last Spring</a>, none of the Ubers were “rideshares”; they were all black car livery companies with professional drivers. Near as I could tell, Uber was just another dispatch system for them. In Lisbon a few years back, I couldn’t tell if they were true rideshares, but the pricing was the same as taxis, and there were more taxis so less wait. We took the path of least resistance and hailed cabs.</li><li>The rough consensus of my completely unrepresentative polling was - ride sharing got traction because it was cheaper, but now the technology gives such a better experience that I’d even pay a premium over a taxi -- but I wouldn’t want to tell Lyft or Uber that. But what they said on those earnings calls, I think they already know that.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #154</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_153.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<p><!--EndFragment--></p>','Podcast #154 — Will We Still Love Uber When The Prices Go Up?','','inherit','closed','closed','','2508-revision-v1','','','2019-08-14 09:35:46','2019-08-14 14:35:46','',2508,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/08/14/2508-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2513,1,'2019-08-14 09:41:55','2019-08-14 14:41:55','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\">\n<p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Cracked-mirror-square.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2482 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Cracked-mirror-square-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a></p>\n<figcaption>What\'s Behind Me Is Not Important</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p>Breaking out the mobile rig to record this episode in the Residence Inn in downtown Charlottesville, VA. Summer storms let me test Freebird\'s re-booking service, I wrestle with AT&amp;T so I can use my iPhone\'s dual SIM capability on my trip to Krakow and Budapest, booking more relaxed flight itineraries lets me call an audible when Uber and Lyft prices surge into the stratosphere, which gets me thinking -- will we still love those rideshare companies when they\'re no longer cheaper than taxis?  All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_154.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/657617519&color=%23ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #154: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the Residence Inn just off the Main St pedestrian mall in downtown Charlottesville, VA, leaving behind last episode’s multi-mic, big mixer board, sound-baffled podcast studio to go old-school, back to the TravelCommons roots with the mobile rig in a hotel room. I was thinking about going way back and recording it in the bathroom, but there’s a noisy exhaust fan that I can’t figure out how to turn off. There may be a bit of traffic noise in the background, and maybe even some thunder if the black clouds out my window live up to their potential. This episode will be one of the shorter ones. I’m trying to get it in before Irene and I head out to Krakow and Budapest Thursday night.</li><li>This is my fourth week back in Charlottesville in Chicago, IL. Not much has changed since my last commute back at the end of last year. American Eagle and United Express have a couple of direct regional jets a day from Chicago, and when weather knocks those flights out, Richmond is an hour-and-a-bit drive to the east, or Washington-Dulles is 2 hours north as a last resort. It’s still a 5-gate airport; the bar in the middle still has a surprisingly decent local craft beer selection. The bartender still recognizes me, though she still asks for my ID each time I sit at the bar. So not much has changed at CHO.&nbsp;</li><li>However, my approach to flying there has a bit. I’ve talked about this in prior episodes; I’ve always planned my travel to maximize my time at home, with my family. Given a choice between flying out the night before or taking a 7am flight out the day of, I’d take the latter. The trade-off, though, is travel plans that don’t deal well with travel delays -- a 2-hour flight delay the night before is annoying but won’t make me miss a meeting; that same delay the morning of my meeting may mean I won’t need to take that flight. And I’ve had all that happen with my flights to Charlottesville. So this time, with the kids graduated and moved out, and now that we’ve downsized from a house to a city apartment, my wife thinking I’m underfoot a bit too much, the need to maximize my time at home has… eased a bit. So I’m booking more... resilient itineraries -- flying out the night before, staying over an extra day so I can fly out after lunch, before the summer humidity spools up the afternoon thunderstorms…. Which was paid off last week when thunderstorms in <em>Chicago</em> had my evening flight to CHO posting a 3 hour delay by noon. I had more than enough time to swing my endpoint from CHO to RIC (all done pretty seamlessly thru the United app, which I found pretty impressive). My travel plans may not be as optimized as before… or maybe they are, but for different things, like cutting down on stress and my need to bitch tweet.</li><li> Bridge Music -- <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/Loveshadow/26219\" target=\"_blank\"><em>SP*ANK Vox</em></a> by Loveshadow </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>We’ve had a thread over a couple of episodes about <a href=\"http://getfreebird.com/\">Freebird</a>, a flight rebooking service. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/podcast-151-traveler-data-leaks-brittany-street-food/\">episode 151</a>, TravelCommons listener Mika Pyyhkala sent in a note about his great experience with them, how they picked up a Southwest flight cancellation and rebooked him on Delta while he was still in the air on his first Southwest leg. Saved him a huge disruption; well worth, he said, the $19/leg fee. I mentioned in the last episode that Amex Travel has been offering free coverage for flights I book on their site with my Platinum card. So Freebird has been covering these last few trips to Charlottesville. I get a text the night before and the morning of my flights assuring me that Freebird is monitoring them. And when last week’s outbound 6pm flight started posting delays at noon, I got texts letting me know they were monitoring the delay, but it hadn’t yet tripped their 4-hour trigger.&nbsp; But knowing that there weren’t going to be many alternative flights to RIC or IAD later in the evening, I didn’t feel comfortable waiting for United to push over 4 hours -- and then cancel -- and so moved myself to their 6pm Richmond flight -- which was on-time -- getting me into my hotel around 10pm after an hour Uber ride. And then, indulging in a bit of travel schadenfreude, I kept tracking the ORD-CHO flight on <a href=\"https://flightaware.com/\">FlightAware</a>. It finally took off at 11pm Central – 5 hrs late -- arriving CHO at 2am Eastern. So it did eventually cross Freebird’s 4-hour threshold, but I’m not sure if it was in time to catch an alternative flight. So, I’m glad I switched it myself. I dunno, maybe tight connections rather than thinly traveled direct routes is the better use case for Freebird</li><li>Also back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/podcast-151-traveler-data-leaks-brittany-street-food/\">episode 151</a>, I talked about trying out the alpha version of augmented reality directions in Google Maps, where you hold up your phone and the display uses the camera to show the streetscape in front of you with the&nbsp; directions -- street names, arrows -- overlaid on the real-time image. I thought it was kinda cool; Irene and the kids were less than impressed. But you can judge for yourself because Google <a href=\"https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/08/google-launches-live-view-ar-walking-directions-for-google-maps/\">announced last week</a> that they’ve widened the feature to a public beta. Give it a try and let me know what you think</li><li>Fast forward one whole episode -- from <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/podcast-151-traveler-data-leaks-brittany-street-food/\">151</a> in May to <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/06/16/podcast-152-overwhelming-travel-new-old-restaurant-trends/\">152</a> in June -- which really was a big jump because, right after recording episode <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/podcast-151-traveler-data-leaks-brittany-street-food/\">151</a>, we moved from the big house in the suburbs to a 60% smaller high-rise apartment on the lakefront -- but in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/06/16/podcast-152-overwhelming-travel-new-old-restaurant-trends/\">episode 152</a>, I talked about having to recalibrate how I’d get to the airport. I had my guy who’d pick me up for a 30-minute ride to ORD or MDW… But no more. Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve started to get a feel for it -- 45-50 minutes to ORD, but figure an hour for weird traffic. And in the morning, figure a 10-minute wait for an Uber or Lyft, and a tab with tip around $40-$45. So this Monday at 5am, I fire up Lyft and Uber while drinking my morning cup of tea to see what’s going on -- $110 on Uber and $60 on Lyft. What the hell is going on? Well, maybe all the drivers are sleeping in, so I shower, get dressed, gather all my worldly belongings, and check again -- $120 on Uber; $57 on Lyft. I hit the Lyft button and wait -- and wait and wait. Then someone accepts the ride, and cancels. Guess he didn’t want to go to ORD. So I fire up <a href=\"https://transitapp.com/\">Transit</a>, my favorite mass transit app. It’s developed in Montreal and does mass transit routing in a huge number of cities in the US and Canada. And in Chicago, it also covers Divvy bike share and constructs Lyft-to-mass transit routing. I fired it up thinking that, if I couldn’t get a Lyft to ORD, then maybe I could get one to the nearest Blue Line L stop and take the subway the rest of the way. But even it couldn’t find a Lyft. But, it showed that, across the street from our flat, a bus will pick me up and, 18 stops later, drop me at the L stop. I got nothing else going -- actually, I did but it would involve waking Irene up at&nbsp; now 5:40am for a ride to ORD, truly a last resort. I wheel my luggage across the street. Four minutes later, the bus shows up. There’s me and another guy -- no problem putting my luggage on the seat next to me. And we make pretty good time -- not a lot of people waiting at bus stops at 6am, and the traffic is pretty clear too. All told, we stop maybe 6 times and have 8 people on the bus at its most crowded.  I had to wait another 5 minutes for the L and, at 6:40, it was more crowded; almost everyone had an ORD badge around their neck -- pilots, flight attendants, ground staff -- except for a few passenger-looking folk like me. All told, it took me about an hour -- maybe 10 minutes longer than Uber and Lyft were quoting. But at $2.50 vs. $60 or $120, it seemed like I made out on the deal.</li><li>Also in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/06/16/podcast-152-overwhelming-travel-new-old-restaurant-trends/\">episode 152</a>, I talked about “earning and burning” frequent traveler points rather than saving them because airlines and hotels keep playing with redemption levels and rules that reduce the value of the points. Jim McDonough tweeted me with a contra view -<ul><li>Regarding frequent flyer miles and how they don\'t appreciate over time - I still like to keep some around in case we need to travel for family emergency situations. The walk-up fare does not compete with the $25 charge to book a frequent flyer mile ticket last minute.</li></ul></li><li>Jim, that’s a good point, but I wonder if that strategy still works as more airlines move from fixed awards schedules to dynamic point pricing -- Southwest, Delta, and soon United -- where point price for a flight climes as remaining ticket prices do. Does it still make sense to pay with points?</li><li>As I said earlier, Irene and I are heading out Thursday night for a weekend in Krakow, Poland and then heading down to Budapest for a mix of touring and visits with Irene’s family. So, I thought this was as good a time as any to try out <a href=\"https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT209044\">my iPhone’s dual SIM capability.</a> Up to now, my usual procedure is to transfer my US AT&amp;T SIM to an old HTC One phone and then put my UK EE SIM in my iPhone Xs (usually sometime in flight in that panic drill between them clearing the breakfast tray and packing everything up for final descent) if I’m going to an EU country or when I pick one up after we land. I do this because local data is <em>hugely</em> cheaper than an AT&amp;T international plan - the EE pay-as-you-go plan I got is £10, or $12 with this week’s Brexit exchange rate discount, for 3 GB of data, 100 minutes of voice, and unlimited texts. But I still want my US number to ring thru in case someone back home needs to reach me and doesn’t know I’m out of the country. I don’t carry both phones with me, though. I have the iPhone with me during the day, using the local SIM to run Google Maps and the like. The HTC stays in the hotel room and I check it for messages when we get back at night.</li><li>But with its dual SIM capabilities, I should be able to do this with just my iPhone. However, the iPhone has only one physical SIM slot; the second is an internal eSIM, like the ones Apple uses in their cellular Apple Watch. So to make this work, I had to get AT&amp;T to transfer my US number from its physical SIM to the eSIM in the phone. My first stop was the local AT&amp;T store. I explained to the store guy what I wanted to do. He looked at me for a moment and said, “Uh, I’m new; I don’t know how to do that. But I can give you an eSIM card if you want.” OK, that’s a start. He riffled around his desk drawer. “I don’t have one here. I’ll have to go in the back. But I’m the only one here today, so you’ll have to go outside so I can lock up while I’m in the back.” Interesting. I walked down the street to grab a bite rather than idle outside the door. I came back. He handed me the card, “Here you go, but I don’t know if this will work…” I went home and hit the AT&amp;T web site. I spelunked around the site until I found the chat link and fired it up. The person on the other end knew what needed to be done. I gave her a few numbers off the card, then pointed the camera at the card’s QR code and it added to plan to my iPhone. Now, the chat agent said that they’ll have to do a bit of provisioning at the back end. She’d text me when it was done. Irene and I went out to dinner; no text and no activation. So the next morning, I hit chat again and this time stuck with the guy until the provisioning was complete. Then I pulled out the AT&amp;T SIM and put in the EE SIM, and immediately got a text from EE telling me their US roaming charges. I also got a whole new set of selections under the Cellular section under Settings. Which line did I want to use for voice, for data, for iMessage and FaceTime. I spent some time on Apple’s FAQ pages trying to figure out which scenario works for me. My guess is that it’ll take me a bit of trial and error -- and self-inflected AT&amp;T international charges -- to really figure this out.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com. </li><li>Bridge Music —  &nbsp;<em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/trifonic/445\" target=\"_blank\">Bored on Your Backside</a></em> by Trifonic     </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Will We Still Love Uber When The Prices Go Up?</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><a href=\"https://www.reuters.com/article/us-lyft-results/lyft-sees-ride-hailing-price-war-easing-sending-uber-and-lyft-shares-up-idUSKCN1UX2BQ\">Lyft’s chief financial officer Brian Roberts said, during last week’s earnings call, that pricing was becoming “more rational.”</a> “Rational pricing” is CFO-speak for “more predictably higher.” <a href=\"https://www.marketwatch.com/story/lyft-and-uber-are-giving-investors-what-they-want-which-is-bad-for-the-rest-of-us-2019-08-08\">Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, during his earnings call, said, “We and Lyft are big-time competitors here and have been for some period of time, but for now we’re seeing, generally, category positions that are stable. We are focused on improving profitability in this market.”</a>&nbsp; Which is CEO-speak for “we’re no longer going to slash prices to buy market share.”</li><li>We all knew this time would come -- at least the rational ones. Uber lost $5.2 billion in the second quarter while the smaller Lyft lost a mere $644 million last quarter. Investors are going to let you torch large piles of cash for only so long. Hence the topic question -- will we stay with Uber and Lyft even when they’re not a bargain anymore?</li><li>I’ve been talking about this with frequent travelers I know, or sit next to at bars, or bump into waiting for an Uber at O’Hare. One school of thought is that the Uber/Lyft experience is better than your typical cab, so even at the same price, you’d still order an Uber. You can order it on your phone rather than running into the street, trying to flag down a passing cab. Indeed, I’ve always said that, for me, Uber’s prime use case is getting a ride from midtown Manhattan to LGA at the end of the day a somewhat sane experience. Before Uber, I’d be practically dancing into 5th Ave, hiding my luggage behind a trash can because if a cabbie saw you wanted to go to LGA, they’d accelerate by you. I tried the cab company’s iPhone app last time I was in New York. It failed miserably.</li><li>Adding Uber and Lyft drivers to the transit mix means you can get a car ride from somewhere outside the usual downtown and tourist spots. I remember pre-Uber New Orleans, getting a cab anywhere other than between the airport and the French Quarter was near impossible. One night for dinner, we decided to go to a Mid-City restaurant, <a href=\"http://toupsmeatery.com/\">Toups Meatery</a>. Phenomenal place. The owner, Isaac Toups, later made it to the finals of the <em>Top Chef </em>cooking show. He didn’t win, but was voted “fan favorite”. And his food was our favorite too. The only problem -- getting a cab back to the Sheraton on Canal St from his Mid-City location. The hostess called 3 cab companies and we waited 20 minutes for a 15-minute ride. And that driver told us, “Yup, all most cab drivers want to do is make the easy money, driving between the airport and the hotels”</li><li>There’s also fare predictability -- you see the price to get from, say, downtown Chicago to O’Hare before committing to the ride. No more meter anxiety, watching the number run up in traffic. And the accompanying “Will I have enough cash to pay” or “Will this guy’s credit card machine work?” anxiety. With Uber and Lyft drivers following GPS apps, there’s no more “am I being taken the long way around to run up the meter” anxiety, or depending on your cab driver’s knowledge to take the fast way, or having them punt it to you with the “bridge or tunnel” question I often get from LGA cabs. The technology helps avoid a lot of the bad experiences we’ve had with taxi cab rides.</li><li>I used to say that Uber and Lyft cars are nicer, but their bar has slipped as they’re scrambling for drivers in a full-employment economy. An Uber I took last week was missing the door armrest; a Lyft that Irene took had the front right quarter-panel held on with duct tape. These are exceptions, though a bit more common that a couple of years ago. But they’re still a damn sight better than the beat-to-hell Baltimore cabs that would sit at the cab ranks in the Inner Harbor. I only did that once, because the cab rank was right outside the client’s building and I was late leaving for the airport. The back seat was full of old newspapers and other crap, and there was no air conditioning -- on a July afternoon. After that, I’d stand there, looking at the cabs, while waiting 5 minutes for an Uber to show up.</li><li>The place I most often take a cab rather than waiting for an Uber is the airport. And here, it’s not really about price, it’s convenience. The cab ranks are usually right at the terminal exit, while the rideshare pickup spot can be an Easter Egg hunt (Vegas), a 15-minute walk to the back 40 (Atlanta) or a confusing scrum of screaming traffic cops (Chicago Midway). Vegas and LGA especially -- catching a cab is so much easier than a rideshare. Here at CHO also -- it’s a flat rate into town that’s about the same as Uber and Lyft and the cabs are in decent shape, so if one’s there, there’s no reason to wait.</li><li>And I could be wrong, but it feels like the pricing discussion is mostly a US thing. <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/podcast-150-travel-interruptus/\">In Paris last Spring</a>, none of the Ubers were “rideshares”; they were all black car livery companies with professional drivers. Near as I could tell, Uber was just another dispatch system for them. In Lisbon a few years back, I couldn’t tell if they were true rideshares, but the pricing was the same as taxis, and there were more taxis so less wait. We took the path of least resistance and hailed cabs.</li><li>The rough consensus of my completely unrepresentative polling was - ride sharing got traction because it was cheaper, but now the technology gives such a better experience that I’d even pay a premium over a taxi -- but I wouldn’t want to tell Lyft or Uber that. But what they said on those earnings calls, I think they already know that.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #154</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_154.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<p><!--EndFragment--></p>','Podcast #154 — Will We Still Love Uber When The Prices Go Up?','','inherit','closed','closed','','2508-revision-v1','','','2019-08-14 09:41:55','2019-08-14 14:41:55','',2508,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/08/14/2508-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2514,1,'2019-08-14 13:44:39','2019-08-14 18:44:39','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\">\n<p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/IMG_0205.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2186 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/IMG_0205-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a></p>\n<figcaption>I Think That’s the Uber Pick-Up Spot</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p>Breaking out the mobile rig to record this episode in the Residence Inn in downtown Charlottesville, VA. Summer storms let me test Freebird\'s re-booking service, I wrestle with AT&amp;T so I can use my iPhone\'s dual SIM capability on my trip to Krakow and Budapest, booking more relaxed flight itineraries lets me call an audible when Uber and Lyft prices surge into the stratosphere, which gets me thinking -- will we still love those rideshare companies when they\'re no longer cheaper than taxis?  All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_154.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/657617519&color=%23ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #154: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the Residence Inn just off the Main St pedestrian mall in downtown Charlottesville, VA, leaving behind last episode’s multi-mic, big mixer board, sound-baffled podcast studio to go old-school, back to the TravelCommons roots with the mobile rig in a hotel room. I was thinking about going way back and recording it in the bathroom, but there’s a noisy exhaust fan that I can’t figure out how to turn off. There may be a bit of traffic noise in the background, and maybe even some thunder if the black clouds out my window live up to their potential. This episode will be one of the shorter ones. I’m trying to get it in before Irene and I head out to Krakow and Budapest Thursday night.</li><li>This is my fourth week back in Charlottesville in Chicago, IL. Not much has changed since my last commute back at the end of last year. American Eagle and United Express have a couple of direct regional jets a day from Chicago, and when weather knocks those flights out, Richmond is an hour-and-a-bit drive to the east, or Washington-Dulles is 2 hours north as a last resort. It’s still a 5-gate airport; the bar in the middle still has a surprisingly decent local craft beer selection. The bartender still recognizes me, though she still asks for my ID each time I sit at the bar. So not much has changed at CHO.&nbsp;</li><li>However, my approach to flying there has a bit. I’ve talked about this in prior episodes; I’ve always planned my travel to maximize my time at home, with my family. Given a choice between flying out the night before or taking a 7am flight out the day of, I’d take the latter. The trade-off, though, is travel plans that don’t deal well with travel delays -- a 2-hour flight delay the night before is annoying but won’t make me miss a meeting; that same delay the morning of my meeting may mean I won’t need to take that flight. And I’ve had all that happen with my flights to Charlottesville. So this time, with the kids graduated and moved out, and now that we’ve downsized from a house to a city apartment, my wife thinking I’m underfoot a bit too much, the need to maximize my time at home has… eased a bit. So I’m booking more... resilient itineraries -- flying out the night before, staying over an extra day so I can fly out after lunch, before the summer humidity spools up the afternoon thunderstorms…. Which was paid off last week when thunderstorms in <em>Chicago</em> had my evening flight to CHO posting a 3 hour delay by noon. I had more than enough time to swing my endpoint from CHO to RIC (all done pretty seamlessly thru the United app, which I found pretty impressive). My travel plans may not be as optimized as before… or maybe they are, but for different things, like cutting down on stress and my need to bitch tweet.</li><li> Bridge Music -- <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/Loveshadow/26219\" target=\"_blank\"><em>SP*ANK Vox</em></a> by Loveshadow </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>We’ve had a thread over a couple of episodes about <a href=\"http://getfreebird.com/\">Freebird</a>, a flight rebooking service. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/podcast-151-traveler-data-leaks-brittany-street-food/\">episode 151</a>, TravelCommons listener Mika Pyyhkala sent in a note about his great experience with them, how they picked up a Southwest flight cancellation and rebooked him on Delta while he was still in the air on his first Southwest leg. Saved him a huge disruption; well worth, he said, the $19/leg fee. I mentioned in the last episode that Amex Travel has been offering free coverage for flights I book on their site with my Platinum card. So Freebird has been covering these last few trips to Charlottesville. I get a text the night before and the morning of my flights assuring me that Freebird is monitoring them. And when last week’s outbound 6pm flight started posting delays at noon, I got texts letting me know they were monitoring the delay, but it hadn’t yet tripped their 4-hour trigger.&nbsp; But knowing that there weren’t going to be many alternative flights to RIC or IAD later in the evening, I didn’t feel comfortable waiting for United to push over 4 hours -- and then cancel -- and so moved myself to their 6pm Richmond flight -- which was on-time -- getting me into my hotel around 10pm after an hour Uber ride. And then, indulging in a bit of travel schadenfreude, I kept tracking the ORD-CHO flight on <a href=\"https://flightaware.com/\">FlightAware</a>. It finally took off at 11pm Central – 5 hrs late -- arriving CHO at 2am Eastern. So it did eventually cross Freebird’s 4-hour threshold, but I’m not sure if it was in time to catch an alternative flight. So, I’m glad I switched it myself. I dunno, maybe tight connections rather than thinly traveled direct routes is the better use case for Freebird</li><li>Also back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/podcast-151-traveler-data-leaks-brittany-street-food/\">episode 151</a>, I talked about trying out the alpha version of augmented reality directions in Google Maps, where you hold up your phone and the display uses the camera to show the streetscape in front of you with the&nbsp; directions -- street names, arrows -- overlaid on the real-time image. I thought it was kinda cool; Irene and the kids were less than impressed. But you can judge for yourself because Google <a href=\"https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/08/google-launches-live-view-ar-walking-directions-for-google-maps/\">announced last week</a> that they’ve widened the feature to a public beta. Give it a try and let me know what you think</li><li>Fast forward one whole episode -- from <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/podcast-151-traveler-data-leaks-brittany-street-food/\">151</a> in May to <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/06/16/podcast-152-overwhelming-travel-new-old-restaurant-trends/\">152</a> in June -- which really was a big jump because, right after recording episode <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/podcast-151-traveler-data-leaks-brittany-street-food/\">151</a>, we moved from the big house in the suburbs to a 60% smaller high-rise apartment on the lakefront -- but in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/06/16/podcast-152-overwhelming-travel-new-old-restaurant-trends/\">episode 152</a>, I talked about having to recalibrate how I’d get to the airport. I had my guy who’d pick me up for a 30-minute ride to ORD or MDW… But no more. Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve started to get a feel for it -- 45-50 minutes to ORD, but figure an hour for weird traffic. And in the morning, figure a 10-minute wait for an Uber or Lyft, and a tab with tip around $40-$45. So this Monday at 5am, I fire up Lyft and Uber while drinking my morning cup of tea to see what’s going on -- $110 on Uber and $60 on Lyft. What the hell is going on? Well, maybe all the drivers are sleeping in, so I shower, get dressed, gather all my worldly belongings, and check again -- $120 on Uber; $57 on Lyft. I hit the Lyft button and wait -- and wait and wait. Then someone accepts the ride, and cancels. Guess he didn’t want to go to ORD. So I fire up <a href=\"https://transitapp.com/\">Transit</a>, my favorite mass transit app. It’s developed in Montreal and does mass transit routing in a huge number of cities in the US and Canada. And in Chicago, it also covers Divvy bike share and constructs Lyft-to-mass transit routing. I fired it up thinking that, if I couldn’t get a Lyft to ORD, then maybe I could get one to the nearest Blue Line L stop and take the subway the rest of the way. But even it couldn’t find a Lyft. But, it showed that, across the street from our flat, a bus will pick me up and, 18 stops later, drop me at the L stop. I got nothing else going -- actually, I did but it would involve waking Irene up at&nbsp; now 5:40am for a ride to ORD, truly a last resort. I wheel my luggage across the street. Four minutes later, the bus shows up. There’s me and another guy -- no problem putting my luggage on the seat next to me. And we make pretty good time -- not a lot of people waiting at bus stops at 6am, and the traffic is pretty clear too. All told, we stop maybe 6 times and have 8 people on the bus at its most crowded.  I had to wait another 5 minutes for the L and, at 6:40, it was more crowded; almost everyone had an ORD badge around their neck -- pilots, flight attendants, ground staff -- except for a few passenger-looking folk like me. All told, it took me about an hour -- maybe 10 minutes longer than Uber and Lyft were quoting. But at $2.50 vs. $60 or $120, it seemed like I made out on the deal.</li><li>Also in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/06/16/podcast-152-overwhelming-travel-new-old-restaurant-trends/\">episode 152</a>, I talked about “earning and burning” frequent traveler points rather than saving them because airlines and hotels keep playing with redemption levels and rules that reduce the value of the points. Jim McDonough tweeted me with a contra view -<ul><li>Regarding frequent flyer miles and how they don\'t appreciate over time - I still like to keep some around in case we need to travel for family emergency situations. The walk-up fare does not compete with the $25 charge to book a frequent flyer mile ticket last minute.</li></ul></li><li>Jim, that’s a good point, but I wonder if that strategy still works as more airlines move from fixed awards schedules to dynamic point pricing -- Southwest, Delta, and soon United -- where point price for a flight climes as remaining ticket prices do. Does it still make sense to pay with points?</li><li>As I said earlier, Irene and I are heading out Thursday night for a weekend in Krakow, Poland and then heading down to Budapest for a mix of touring and visits with Irene’s family. So, I thought this was as good a time as any to try out <a href=\"https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT209044\">my iPhone’s dual SIM capability.</a> Up to now, my usual procedure is to transfer my US AT&amp;T SIM to an old HTC One phone and then put my UK EE SIM in my iPhone Xs (usually sometime in flight in that panic drill between them clearing the breakfast tray and packing everything up for final descent) if I’m going to an EU country or when I pick one up after we land. I do this because local data is <em>hugely</em> cheaper than an AT&amp;T international plan - the EE pay-as-you-go plan I got is £10, or $12 with this week’s Brexit exchange rate discount, for 3 GB of data, 100 minutes of voice, and unlimited texts. But I still want my US number to ring thru in case someone back home needs to reach me and doesn’t know I’m out of the country. I don’t carry both phones with me, though. I have the iPhone with me during the day, using the local SIM to run Google Maps and the like. The HTC stays in the hotel room and I check it for messages when we get back at night.</li><li>But with its dual SIM capabilities, I should be able to do this with just my iPhone. However, the iPhone has only one physical SIM slot; the second is an internal eSIM, like the ones Apple uses in their cellular Apple Watch. So to make this work, I had to get AT&amp;T to transfer my US number from its physical SIM to the eSIM in the phone. My first stop was the local AT&amp;T store. I explained to the store guy what I wanted to do. He looked at me for a moment and said, “Uh, I’m new; I don’t know how to do that. But I can give you an eSIM card if you want.” OK, that’s a start. He riffled around his desk drawer. “I don’t have one here. I’ll have to go in the back. But I’m the only one here today, so you’ll have to go outside so I can lock up while I’m in the back.” Interesting. I walked down the street to grab a bite rather than idle outside the door. I came back. He handed me the card, “Here you go, but I don’t know if this will work…” I went home and hit the AT&amp;T web site. I spelunked around the site until I found the chat link and fired it up. The person on the other end knew what needed to be done. I gave her a few numbers off the card, then pointed the camera at the card’s QR code and it added to plan to my iPhone. Now, the chat agent said that they’ll have to do a bit of provisioning at the back end. She’d text me when it was done. Irene and I went out to dinner; no text and no activation. So the next morning, I hit chat again and this time stuck with the guy until the provisioning was complete. Then I pulled out the AT&amp;T SIM and put in the EE SIM, and immediately got a text from EE telling me their US roaming charges. I also got a whole new set of selections under the Cellular section under Settings. Which line did I want to use for voice, for data, for iMessage and FaceTime. I spent some time on Apple’s FAQ pages trying to figure out which scenario works for me. My guess is that it’ll take me a bit of trial and error -- and self-inflected AT&amp;T international charges -- to really figure this out.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com. </li><li>Bridge Music —  &nbsp;<em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/trifonic/445\" target=\"_blank\">Bored on Your Backside</a></em> by Trifonic     </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Will We Still Love Uber When The Prices Go Up?</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><a href=\"https://www.reuters.com/article/us-lyft-results/lyft-sees-ride-hailing-price-war-easing-sending-uber-and-lyft-shares-up-idUSKCN1UX2BQ\">Lyft’s chief financial officer Brian Roberts said, during last week’s earnings call, that pricing was becoming “more rational.”</a> “Rational pricing” is CFO-speak for “more predictably higher.” <a href=\"https://www.marketwatch.com/story/lyft-and-uber-are-giving-investors-what-they-want-which-is-bad-for-the-rest-of-us-2019-08-08\">Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, during his earnings call, said, “We and Lyft are big-time competitors here and have been for some period of time, but for now we’re seeing, generally, category positions that are stable. We are focused on improving profitability in this market.”</a>&nbsp; Which is CEO-speak for “we’re no longer going to slash prices to buy market share.”</li><li>We all knew this time would come -- at least the rational ones. Uber lost $5.2 billion in the second quarter while the smaller Lyft lost a mere $644 million last quarter. Investors are going to let you torch large piles of cash for only so long. Hence the topic question -- will we stay with Uber and Lyft even when they’re not a bargain anymore?</li><li>I’ve been talking about this with frequent travelers I know, or sit next to at bars, or bump into waiting for an Uber at O’Hare. One school of thought is that the Uber/Lyft experience is better than your typical cab, so even at the same price, you’d still order an Uber. You can order it on your phone rather than running into the street, trying to flag down a passing cab. Indeed, I’ve always said that, for me, Uber’s prime use case is getting a ride from midtown Manhattan to LGA at the end of the day a somewhat sane experience. Before Uber, I’d be practically dancing into 5th Ave, hiding my luggage behind a trash can because if a cabbie saw you wanted to go to LGA, they’d accelerate by you. I tried the cab company’s iPhone app last time I was in New York. It failed miserably.</li><li>Adding Uber and Lyft drivers to the transit mix means you can get a car ride from somewhere outside the usual downtown and tourist spots. I remember pre-Uber New Orleans, getting a cab anywhere other than between the airport and the French Quarter was near impossible. One night for dinner, we decided to go to a Mid-City restaurant, <a href=\"http://toupsmeatery.com/\">Toups Meatery</a>. Phenomenal place. The owner, Isaac Toups, later made it to the finals of the <em>Top Chef </em>cooking show. He didn’t win, but was voted “fan favorite”. And his food was our favorite too. The only problem -- getting a cab back to the Sheraton on Canal St from his Mid-City location. The hostess called 3 cab companies and we waited 20 minutes for a 15-minute ride. And that driver told us, “Yup, all most cab drivers want to do is make the easy money, driving between the airport and the hotels”</li><li>There’s also fare predictability -- you see the price to get from, say, downtown Chicago to O’Hare before committing to the ride. No more meter anxiety, watching the number run up in traffic. And the accompanying “Will I have enough cash to pay” or “Will this guy’s credit card machine work?” anxiety. With Uber and Lyft drivers following GPS apps, there’s no more “am I being taken the long way around to run up the meter” anxiety, or depending on your cab driver’s knowledge to take the fast way, or having them punt it to you with the “bridge or tunnel” question I often get from LGA cabs. The technology helps avoid a lot of the bad experiences we’ve had with taxi cab rides.</li><li>I used to say that Uber and Lyft cars are nicer, but their bar has slipped as they’re scrambling for drivers in a full-employment economy. An Uber I took last week was missing the door armrest; a Lyft that Irene took had the front right quarter-panel held on with duct tape. These are exceptions, though a bit more common that a couple of years ago. But they’re still a damn sight better than the beat-to-hell Baltimore cabs that would sit at the cab ranks in the Inner Harbor. I only did that once, because the cab rank was right outside the client’s building and I was late leaving for the airport. The back seat was full of old newspapers and other crap, and there was no air conditioning -- on a July afternoon. After that, I’d stand there, looking at the cabs, while waiting 5 minutes for an Uber to show up.</li><li>The place I most often take a cab rather than waiting for an Uber is the airport. And here, it’s not really about price, it’s convenience. The cab ranks are usually right at the terminal exit, while the rideshare pickup spot can be an Easter Egg hunt (Vegas), a 15-minute walk to the back 40 (Atlanta) or a confusing scrum of screaming traffic cops (Chicago Midway). Vegas and LGA especially -- catching a cab is so much easier than a rideshare. Here at CHO also -- it’s a flat rate into town that’s about the same as Uber and Lyft and the cabs are in decent shape, so if one’s there, there’s no reason to wait.</li><li>And I could be wrong, but it feels like the pricing discussion is mostly a US thing. <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/podcast-150-travel-interruptus/\">In Paris last Spring</a>, none of the Ubers were “rideshares”; they were all black car livery companies with professional drivers. Near as I could tell, Uber was just another dispatch system for them. In Lisbon a few years back, I couldn’t tell if they were true rideshares, but the pricing was the same as taxis, and there were more taxis so less wait. We took the path of least resistance and hailed cabs.</li><li>The rough consensus of my completely unrepresentative polling was - ride sharing got traction because it was cheaper, but now the technology gives such a better experience that I’d even pay a premium over a taxi -- but I wouldn’t want to tell Lyft or Uber that. But what they said on those earnings calls, I think they already know that.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #154</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_154.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<p><!--EndFragment--></p>','Podcast #154 — Will We Still Love Uber When The Prices Go Up?','','inherit','closed','closed','','2508-revision-v1','','','2019-08-14 13:44:39','2019-08-14 18:44:39','',2508,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/08/14/2508-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2515,1,'2019-08-14 13:57:59','2019-08-14 18:57:59','[caption id=\"attachment_1291\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/2013-12-10-07.55.43.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1291\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/2013-12-10-07.55.43-300x225.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\"></a> Tough travel day when the deicing fluid freezes[/caption]\n\nFlying home into the teeth of the polar vortex that gave <a href=\"https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/01/31/frost-quakes-chicago-polar-vortex/2730412002/\">Chicago its coldest day since January 1985</a> took a bit of flight changing strategy and some incredibly dedicated United ramp workers. I get on-trend by \"<a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/kondo-ing-a-guru-of-organizing-becomes-a-verb-11547745648\">Kondo-ing</a>\" my old suitcases, worry about visiting Sweden as it rapidly goes cashless, and gather up some odds-‘n’-ends from travel notebook into a Jeopardy-like topic “Travel Potpourri”. All this and more at the&nbsp;<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_148.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n<iframe src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/573400857&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"></iframe><!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show Notes -->\n\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #148:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, just trying to survive Nature’s mood swings -- 16 straight days of snow, the much publicized polar vortex cold last week followed by a four-day 73 degree temp rise -- from -22 on early Thursday morning (actual temperature; none of this wind chill guesstimating) to +51 degrees Monday afternoon, and then a 40-some degree drop back to the single digits by Friday. It’s climate change, alright. Just not all in the same direction. Last Wednesday was the second coldest day in Chicago history at -23 degrees. I was also here for the coldest day -- January 20, 1985 -- when it hit -27 degrees. I was just starting my last quarter at University of Chicago. It left an impression. After that, I didn’t interview with any Chicago companies. I took a job in Dallas and moved down in July -- to temperatures averaging in the 90’s. Brilliant</li>\n 	<li>I missed the wind-up to last week’s freeze fest. I flew out to New York on the Monday morning at the tail end of that 16-day snow fest. I had booked a Southwest flight from Chicago Midway to LaGuardia because Southwest now flies into the new renovated concourse in the otherwise Third World-ish Terminal B and, being that kind of travel geek, I wanted to check it out. Southwest had other plans though. Sunday late morning, about 18 hours before departure, Southwest emailed me that they were cancelling the flight. I was surprised at their proactivity, but it was a good thing, I guess, ‘cause it gave me time to move to United -- no new terminal experience, but a lot better flight frequency.</li>\n 	<li>Which turned out to be key on Wednesday, trying to fly home on that -23 degree day. Tuesday afternoon, I moved my flight home up from 3pm to 12 noon. I figured all the flights would be delayed and the later my flight, the worse the delay and the higher probability of cancellation. Looking at United’s flights, the 11am and 1pm flights were regional jets; the noon flight was a mainline Airbus. ORD was going to have to cut capacity on Weds -- the ground crews could only be outside for short stretches, especially the guys on the deicing trucks. I figured they’d cancel the smaller regional jets first, which meant they’d move the folks from the 11am and 1pm flights onto the noon flight, meaning that flight might be delayed, but United wouldn’t want to cancel it.</li>\n 	<li>And the next day, that’s pretty much how it played out. When I got to LaGuardia, those 11 and 1 flights were already cancelled. The noon flight still showed on-time, but checking the United and <a href=\"https://flightaware.com/\">FlightAware</a> apps, I could see that the Airbus was still in Chicago. That noon departure time was meaningless until that plane was in the air. I set up in the Amex Centurion Lounge, doing calls and emails, refreshing those apps every 10 minutes. The Airbus’ 8am departure time came and went, as did 9am, and 10am. It finally left around 10:40am Chicago time. I had lunch and a beer in the lounge -- the food in those Centurion lounges is good… and free -- and headed down for the gate. Walking down the concourse, I passed a Uniqlo vending machine selling “ultra light” down jackets for $70. (Amazing what they sell in airport vending machines) I thought for a moment about buying one to layer up when walking up the jet bridge in O’Hare. Given the extreme conditions, it was the most understandable 2½-hr delay I’ve ever had on United. I was incredibly grateful for the United ramp workers who were outside that day. I was happy to just get home that afternoon. Leaving the LGA Amex lounge for my gate, I ran into a Chicago colleague. He had 4 flights canceled on him already and, as I found out the next morning, didn’t get home until Thursday -- after going through Richmond. Good thing for him the Amex Lounge drinks are free too</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mghicks/18378\">Emily and the Djembe</a> by mghicks (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/nc-sampling+/1.0/\">Noncommercial Sampling Plus</a> license. Ft: Emily via Briareus</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>As promised, I expanded the Santa Fe topic in December’s episode to a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/01/24/road-trip-lowbrow-santa-fe/\">full 1,800-word post on the website</a> -- which might help explain why this episode slipped from the end of January to the beginning of February. The <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reader%27s_Digest_Condensed_Books\">Reader’s Digest condensed version</a> (my obligatory Baby Boomer cultural reference) goes something like this -- Friday: hike, drink beer, eat a green chile cheeseburger; Saturday: hike, drink beer, eat a green chile cheeseburger, then drink margaritas and eat local New Mexican dishes; Sunday: wake up a little later, walk rather than hike, eat tamales from a cart. I liked Steve Frick’s comment “When Road Warriors relax” on his retweet. I did try to write this a bit more like a travel article than a blog post -- more of a story than a sequential list of the places we went. But I did make sure to include links to all the good places we hit. If you haven’t already, give it a read and let me know your thoughts.</li>\n 	<li>When I was going through ORD in January, during the partial government shutdown, I thanked the TSA screeners for showing up even though they weren’t getting paid. If I’m reading the GSA salary band schedule correctly, the typical TSA screener makes between 29 and 44 grand a year. They could’ve called in sick to drive an Uber to make up for the missed paychecks, but they didn’t -- as opposed to Atlanta where I stood in some long PreCheck lines because of sick outs. Not that I blame the Atlanta TSA folks, but it made me appreciate the ORD TSA people even more.</li>\n 	<li>Right at about a year ago, I broke down and <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/01/25/podcast-137-new-years-travel-status-tips-how-to-shop-for-a-suitcase/\">bought a new Victorinox suitcase</a>. I had beat a grey Samsonite into submission after 2½ years of trundling across New Orleans sidewalks. My well-traveled Swiss Army roller became unusable when its retractable handle stuck in the extended position. And then my Bluesmart smart bag was banned from by airlines because its battery wouldn’t eject. A couple of weeks ago, my wife called me upstairs. “We’ve got to declutter this attic. You need to Kondo-ize your suitcases,” she said. Wha…? She pointed over to where I’d stashed the Samsonite, the Swiss Army roller, and the Bluesmart. “You should only keep the suitcases that spark joy,” she said. Again, wha…? How does a broken suitcase spark joy? “Exactly!” she said. I pulled the old luggage tags off and threw them in the garbage can before she forced me to binge watch that Netflix series.</li>\n 	<li>Over a year ago, way back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">episode #136</a> in December 2017, I talked about feeling like I’m the last generation of cash payers. My younger colleagues -- and my children -- not only do they pay for everything with a card, many of them don’t even carry cash. It’s <a href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/21/business/sweden-cashless-society.html\">happening even faster in Sweden</a>, where 95% of purchases by Millenials is electronic; to the point that half the country’s retailers think they’ll stop taking cash in 5-6 years. So I got a chuckle when long-time TravelCommons listener Allan Marko sent along this notice that he picked up while touring Laos last month -\n<ul>\n 	<li>“Please note that only new crisp notes are accepted in Laos. US$100 notes receiving a better exchange rate; US$ notes of the series number before 1996 as well as US$100 notes with the series number CB, dirty and/or damaged notes, or notes with any writing on it are not accepted in Laos. Please bring some small changes with you for your convenience.”</li>\n 	<li>Cash is king in Laos -- but only if it’s neat, tidy, and young</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Heading to LGA last Weds morning, traffic was bad in Manhattan and so the wait times for Uber and Lyft were a bit silly. So instead, I let the hotel doorman guide me over to a black car. I saw the driver tip him $10, but I didn’t care -- it was a nice clean car -- a Lexus hybrid -- and the driver knew the back ways to LGA, so we didn’t get jammed up on the highway. Everything was good -- until we parked outside of Terminal B. I had asked the doorman before getting in -- “Does he take a credit card?” “Oh yeah,” he said. And to give the driver credit, he tried to take my Amex, but for some reason his iPhone couldn’t get data at Terminal B Departures, which meant he couldn’t connect to Square, which meant he couldn’t take my card. After trying for 5 minutes, he went palms up. Lucky for him, I am a cash carrier and I had just enough to pay the fare. His tip? He’ll have to take that up with his mobile carrier.</li>\n 	<li>We were working on our Spring Break vacation a few weeks back -- we’re going to Brittany France at the end of March because, well, who needs sun and sand when you enjoy rain blowing in off the Atlantic? -- and the flights from Chicago to Paris were looking just ugly. So we started opening up the search filters a bit, looking at some extended layovers and overnight stays. If done right, it can be fun. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/06/24/podcast-130-notes-from-hungary/\">episode #130</a> (I seem to be digging deep into the archives on this episode), I talked about how my son Andrew and I skipped a reasonable 90-minute connection in Vienna airport for full-day 8-hr one; dropped our bags in held luggage and then hopped a cab to the city center for a beer-and-schnitzel crawl. On the way over to Paris, SAS showed an 8-hr layover in Stockholm. Hmmm… we hadn’t been there since 2006 when we went to Sweden to pick up my Saab convertible. But I remember Arlanda airport being a long haul from Stockholm. Would it take too long getting to and from Stockholm? Thankfully, no. It’s a 20-minute train ride, and the Arlanda Express runs every 15 minutes. So, we’re gearing up for this time for a beer-and-herring crawl thanks to a Stockholm Craft Beer Bar custom Google Map from TravelCommons listener and Untappd friend Rob Cheshire. Though this whole cashless Sweden thing has me a bit worried. I read that <a href=\"https://www.npr.org/2018/10/22/658808705/thousands-of-swedes-are-inserting-microchips-under-their-skin\">more than 4,000 Swedes have implanted microchips</a> in their hands to let them pay for things with just a wave. I’m hoping that I don’t have to have surgery to order a beer.</li>\n 	<li>On the way back, again, the direct flights, or even the 1-stops from Paris to the US were priced high, both in dollars and in points, and not having anything critical on the books for the Monday of our return, we looked at some overnight stays. We decided to skip London; our time in Brittany will span Brexit Day and so we thought, why risk it? The other overnight options that popped up were Frankfurt and... Vienna. I was in Frankfurt last summer, and while I’d done that Vienna layover 2 years ago, Irene hasn’t been in Vienna since 1992, and then, only in the train station making a connection to Budapest. So we bookend our Brittany vacation with a micro-vacations in Sweden and Austria, and save a little money in air fare -- which, to be honest, we’ll probably spend and then some in food and beer.</li>\n 	<li>Which would be better than taking up United on their offer to buy up from Premiere Gold to Premiere Platinum for $2,000. Not to say there aren’t some benefits from that jump -- jump one level up on the upgrade list, a little better bonus miles multiplier, though I don’t ever use my current 2-free-bag allotment, so bumping up to 3 doesn’t do me much. And now that Gold has been moved up to Boarding Group 1, it doesn’t give me a better shot at overhead space. I’ve said it before in previous episodes, I don’t think the incremental benefit from higher status is worth flying weird itineraries or inconvenient times. And it’s certainly not worth 2 grand.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our new Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Astral/44268\">Dreaming</a> by Astral (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Travel Potpourri for $200, Alex</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Doing a little start-of-the-year cleaning of my travel notebook. I always carry a 3½ x 5½ in notebook with me to jot down notes and thoughts. My current notebook is a stiff rather than a hard back so I don’t break it when I put it in the back pocket of my jeans, and has fountain-pen friendly Clairefontaine paper because, as I said in the last episode, it’s not like a lack for things to be fiddly about. This notebook has a couple of pages of letters and numbers written with different pens and inks, a few pages of Madrid beer bars with the ones we hit X’d, a half-dozen pages of really bad algebra when I was trying to help my daughter with a math test, and then the rest is bullet pointed blurbs, thoughts, observations that are the seed corn for the podcast.</li>\n 	<li>Sometimes, though, there’s just not enough in one of those thoughts to grow it into an episode topic, not enough to get it beyond the 10-20 words that are already there. So, for lack of coming up with anything better, here’s a bit of a ramble through those stunted seed corns. Yeah, I’m selling this pretty well. I can hear you all reaching for the Skip button already.</li>\n 	<li>Like, last fall when I was posing for my umpteenth identity badge at a new client, I thought I was given the camera a slight smile -- like a passport photo smile, not showing teeth but a pleasant look. The security guard turned the camera around -- it was deadpan neutral. If I hadn’t tried to smile, I would’ve been frowning. I reminded me to consciously make an effort to smile with folks like gate agents and TSA screeners because, as I get older, I must get more of a grumpy resting face. Which may explain some of the reaction I get from flight attendants.</li>\n 	<li>One thought that almost made it out of the notebook -- Hotels need to stop feeling the need to innovate in the bathroom. I remember writing this in the midst of a 4-day/3-hotel run where the taps and shower control in every hotel were different. I’m OK with innovating some parts of the room -- like dropping in some cool new coffee maker, or an interesting radio or TV, or even a weird chair -- but that’s gotta stop at the bathroom door. When I cross that threshold, I’m usually not completely awake, I’m often not wearing my glasses so can’t see real well if, indeed, I’ve actually turned on the light. And when I step in the shower, I’m definitely not wearing glasses, so small print instructions don’t go down well. I thought hotel showers had pretty much standardized on the single knob that turned on at Cold and got Hotter as you turned it clockwise, all the time delivering the same volume of water. But sometimes you move that knob back and forth to no effect, and you eventually figure out that you have to pull it to turn it on.&nbsp; The worst, though, are the controls that go in the wrong direction -- maybe counterclockwise, or push instead of pull. After I finally figure it out, I can understand what they were trying to do, and it might then make sense, but if it takes me more than 30 seconds to get my morning shower going, someone has failed -- and I don’t think it’s me.</li>\n 	<li>A year or so ago, when I was stuck for a half hour on a broken light rail train between the Atlanta terminals and the rental car center, I started wondering why the push for these trains; what’s the business case? ORD has shut down its train, the ATS, Airport Transit System, to modernize it and extend it to a new rental car center. The price? $800 million. PHX is spending $700 million to extend their SkyTrain to their rental car center. Tampa’s SkyConnect train that went in service last year cost over $400 million. And don’t get me started on Newark’s AirTrain. I mean, I get the need to cut down on diesel emissions from the rental buses, but it seems these airports could buy a whole lot of electric buses for less than that what their spending on a couple of miles of light rail. And when those trains break down, there’s no option but to wait -- no other train can pull up beside yours and take everyone onward. You’re stuck until they figure it out.</li>\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Well, we’ve cleaned out the Travel Potpourri category, Alex. Let\'s move on to Extreme Weather Delays for $200</span>.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #148</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and now on <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_148.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #148 — Travel Potpourri for $200, Alex','','inherit','closed','closed','','2237-revision-v1','','','2019-08-14 13:57:59','2019-08-14 18:57:59','',2237,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/08/14/2237-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2516,1,'2019-08-14 13:58:41','2019-08-14 18:58:41','[caption id=\"attachment_1291\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/2013-12-10-07.55.43.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1291\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/2013-12-10-07.55.43-300x225.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\"></a> Tough travel day when the deicing fluid freezes[/caption]\n\nFlying home into the teeth of the polar vortex that gave <a href=\"https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/01/31/frost-quakes-chicago-polar-vortex/2730412002/\">Chicago its coldest day since January 1985</a> took a bit of flight changing strategy and some incredibly dedicated United ramp workers. I get on-trend by \"<a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/kondo-ing-a-guru-of-organizing-becomes-a-verb-11547745648\">Kondo-ing</a>\" my old suitcases, worry about visiting Sweden as it rapidly goes cashless, and gather up some odds-‘n’-ends from travel notebook into a Jeopardy-like topic “Travel Potpourri”. All this and more at the&nbsp;<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_148.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_148.mp3\"]\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show Notes -->\n\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #148:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, just trying to survive Nature’s mood swings -- 16 straight days of snow, the much publicized polar vortex cold last week followed by a four-day 73 degree temp rise -- from -22 on early Thursday morning (actual temperature; none of this wind chill guesstimating) to +51 degrees Monday afternoon, and then a 40-some degree drop back to the single digits by Friday. It’s climate change, alright. Just not all in the same direction. Last Wednesday was the second coldest day in Chicago history at -23 degrees. I was also here for the coldest day -- January 20, 1985 -- when it hit -27 degrees. I was just starting my last quarter at University of Chicago. It left an impression. After that, I didn’t interview with any Chicago companies. I took a job in Dallas and moved down in July -- to temperatures averaging in the 90’s. Brilliant</li>\n 	<li>I missed the wind-up to last week’s freeze fest. I flew out to New York on the Monday morning at the tail end of that 16-day snow fest. I had booked a Southwest flight from Chicago Midway to LaGuardia because Southwest now flies into the new renovated concourse in the otherwise Third World-ish Terminal B and, being that kind of travel geek, I wanted to check it out. Southwest had other plans though. Sunday late morning, about 18 hours before departure, Southwest emailed me that they were cancelling the flight. I was surprised at their proactivity, but it was a good thing, I guess, ‘cause it gave me time to move to United -- no new terminal experience, but a lot better flight frequency.</li>\n 	<li>Which turned out to be key on Wednesday, trying to fly home on that -23 degree day. Tuesday afternoon, I moved my flight home up from 3pm to 12 noon. I figured all the flights would be delayed and the later my flight, the worse the delay and the higher probability of cancellation. Looking at United’s flights, the 11am and 1pm flights were regional jets; the noon flight was a mainline Airbus. ORD was going to have to cut capacity on Weds -- the ground crews could only be outside for short stretches, especially the guys on the deicing trucks. I figured they’d cancel the smaller regional jets first, which meant they’d move the folks from the 11am and 1pm flights onto the noon flight, meaning that flight might be delayed, but United wouldn’t want to cancel it.</li>\n 	<li>And the next day, that’s pretty much how it played out. When I got to LaGuardia, those 11 and 1 flights were already cancelled. The noon flight still showed on-time, but checking the United and <a href=\"https://flightaware.com/\">FlightAware</a> apps, I could see that the Airbus was still in Chicago. That noon departure time was meaningless until that plane was in the air. I set up in the Amex Centurion Lounge, doing calls and emails, refreshing those apps every 10 minutes. The Airbus’ 8am departure time came and went, as did 9am, and 10am. It finally left around 10:40am Chicago time. I had lunch and a beer in the lounge -- the food in those Centurion lounges is good… and free -- and headed down for the gate. Walking down the concourse, I passed a Uniqlo vending machine selling “ultra light” down jackets for $70. (Amazing what they sell in airport vending machines) I thought for a moment about buying one to layer up when walking up the jet bridge in O’Hare. Given the extreme conditions, it was the most understandable 2½-hr delay I’ve ever had on United. I was incredibly grateful for the United ramp workers who were outside that day. I was happy to just get home that afternoon. Leaving the LGA Amex lounge for my gate, I ran into a Chicago colleague. He had 4 flights canceled on him already and, as I found out the next morning, didn’t get home until Thursday -- after going through Richmond. Good thing for him the Amex Lounge drinks are free too</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mghicks/18378\">Emily and the Djembe</a> by mghicks (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/nc-sampling+/1.0/\">Noncommercial Sampling Plus</a> license. Ft: Emily via Briareus</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>As promised, I expanded the Santa Fe topic in December’s episode to a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/01/24/road-trip-lowbrow-santa-fe/\">full 1,800-word post on the website</a> -- which might help explain why this episode slipped from the end of January to the beginning of February. The <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reader%27s_Digest_Condensed_Books\">Reader’s Digest condensed version</a> (my obligatory Baby Boomer cultural reference) goes something like this -- Friday: hike, drink beer, eat a green chile cheeseburger; Saturday: hike, drink beer, eat a green chile cheeseburger, then drink margaritas and eat local New Mexican dishes; Sunday: wake up a little later, walk rather than hike, eat tamales from a cart. I liked Steve Frick’s comment “When Road Warriors relax” on his retweet. I did try to write this a bit more like a travel article than a blog post -- more of a story than a sequential list of the places we went. But I did make sure to include links to all the good places we hit. If you haven’t already, give it a read and let me know your thoughts.</li>\n 	<li>When I was going through ORD in January, during the partial government shutdown, I thanked the TSA screeners for showing up even though they weren’t getting paid. If I’m reading the GSA salary band schedule correctly, the typical TSA screener makes between 29 and 44 grand a year. They could’ve called in sick to drive an Uber to make up for the missed paychecks, but they didn’t -- as opposed to Atlanta where I stood in some long PreCheck lines because of sick outs. Not that I blame the Atlanta TSA folks, but it made me appreciate the ORD TSA people even more.</li>\n 	<li>Right at about a year ago, I broke down and <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/01/25/podcast-137-new-years-travel-status-tips-how-to-shop-for-a-suitcase/\">bought a new Victorinox suitcase</a>. I had beat a grey Samsonite into submission after 2½ years of trundling across New Orleans sidewalks. My well-traveled Swiss Army roller became unusable when its retractable handle stuck in the extended position. And then my Bluesmart smart bag was banned from by airlines because its battery wouldn’t eject. A couple of weeks ago, my wife called me upstairs. “We’ve got to declutter this attic. You need to Kondo-ize your suitcases,” she said. Wha…? She pointed over to where I’d stashed the Samsonite, the Swiss Army roller, and the Bluesmart. “You should only keep the suitcases that spark joy,” she said. Again, wha…? How does a broken suitcase spark joy? “Exactly!” she said. I pulled the old luggage tags off and threw them in the garbage can before she forced me to binge watch that Netflix series.</li>\n 	<li>Over a year ago, way back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">episode #136</a> in December 2017, I talked about feeling like I’m the last generation of cash payers. My younger colleagues -- and my children -- not only do they pay for everything with a card, many of them don’t even carry cash. It’s <a href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/21/business/sweden-cashless-society.html\">happening even faster in Sweden</a>, where 95% of purchases by Millenials is electronic; to the point that half the country’s retailers think they’ll stop taking cash in 5-6 years. So I got a chuckle when long-time TravelCommons listener Allan Marko sent along this notice that he picked up while touring Laos last month -\n<ul>\n 	<li>“Please note that only new crisp notes are accepted in Laos. US$100 notes receiving a better exchange rate; US$ notes of the series number before 1996 as well as US$100 notes with the series number CB, dirty and/or damaged notes, or notes with any writing on it are not accepted in Laos. Please bring some small changes with you for your convenience.”</li>\n 	<li>Cash is king in Laos -- but only if it’s neat, tidy, and young</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Heading to LGA last Weds morning, traffic was bad in Manhattan and so the wait times for Uber and Lyft were a bit silly. So instead, I let the hotel doorman guide me over to a black car. I saw the driver tip him $10, but I didn’t care -- it was a nice clean car -- a Lexus hybrid -- and the driver knew the back ways to LGA, so we didn’t get jammed up on the highway. Everything was good -- until we parked outside of Terminal B. I had asked the doorman before getting in -- “Does he take a credit card?” “Oh yeah,” he said. And to give the driver credit, he tried to take my Amex, but for some reason his iPhone couldn’t get data at Terminal B Departures, which meant he couldn’t connect to Square, which meant he couldn’t take my card. After trying for 5 minutes, he went palms up. Lucky for him, I am a cash carrier and I had just enough to pay the fare. His tip? He’ll have to take that up with his mobile carrier.</li>\n 	<li>We were working on our Spring Break vacation a few weeks back -- we’re going to Brittany France at the end of March because, well, who needs sun and sand when you enjoy rain blowing in off the Atlantic? -- and the flights from Chicago to Paris were looking just ugly. So we started opening up the search filters a bit, looking at some extended layovers and overnight stays. If done right, it can be fun. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/06/24/podcast-130-notes-from-hungary/\">episode #130</a> (I seem to be digging deep into the archives on this episode), I talked about how my son Andrew and I skipped a reasonable 90-minute connection in Vienna airport for full-day 8-hr one; dropped our bags in held luggage and then hopped a cab to the city center for a beer-and-schnitzel crawl. On the way over to Paris, SAS showed an 8-hr layover in Stockholm. Hmmm… we hadn’t been there since 2006 when we went to Sweden to pick up my Saab convertible. But I remember Arlanda airport being a long haul from Stockholm. Would it take too long getting to and from Stockholm? Thankfully, no. It’s a 20-minute train ride, and the Arlanda Express runs every 15 minutes. So, we’re gearing up for this time for a beer-and-herring crawl thanks to a Stockholm Craft Beer Bar custom Google Map from TravelCommons listener and Untappd friend Rob Cheshire. Though this whole cashless Sweden thing has me a bit worried. I read that <a href=\"https://www.npr.org/2018/10/22/658808705/thousands-of-swedes-are-inserting-microchips-under-their-skin\">more than 4,000 Swedes have implanted microchips</a> in their hands to let them pay for things with just a wave. I’m hoping that I don’t have to have surgery to order a beer.</li>\n 	<li>On the way back, again, the direct flights, or even the 1-stops from Paris to the US were priced high, both in dollars and in points, and not having anything critical on the books for the Monday of our return, we looked at some overnight stays. We decided to skip London; our time in Brittany will span Brexit Day and so we thought, why risk it? The other overnight options that popped up were Frankfurt and... Vienna. I was in Frankfurt last summer, and while I’d done that Vienna layover 2 years ago, Irene hasn’t been in Vienna since 1992, and then, only in the train station making a connection to Budapest. So we bookend our Brittany vacation with a micro-vacations in Sweden and Austria, and save a little money in air fare -- which, to be honest, we’ll probably spend and then some in food and beer.</li>\n 	<li>Which would be better than taking up United on their offer to buy up from Premiere Gold to Premiere Platinum for $2,000. Not to say there aren’t some benefits from that jump -- jump one level up on the upgrade list, a little better bonus miles multiplier, though I don’t ever use my current 2-free-bag allotment, so bumping up to 3 doesn’t do me much. And now that Gold has been moved up to Boarding Group 1, it doesn’t give me a better shot at overhead space. I’ve said it before in previous episodes, I don’t think the incremental benefit from higher status is worth flying weird itineraries or inconvenient times. And it’s certainly not worth 2 grand.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our new Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Astral/44268\">Dreaming</a> by Astral (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Travel Potpourri for $200, Alex</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Doing a little start-of-the-year cleaning of my travel notebook. I always carry a 3½ x 5½ in notebook with me to jot down notes and thoughts. My current notebook is a stiff rather than a hard back so I don’t break it when I put it in the back pocket of my jeans, and has fountain-pen friendly Clairefontaine paper because, as I said in the last episode, it’s not like a lack for things to be fiddly about. This notebook has a couple of pages of letters and numbers written with different pens and inks, a few pages of Madrid beer bars with the ones we hit X’d, a half-dozen pages of really bad algebra when I was trying to help my daughter with a math test, and then the rest is bullet pointed blurbs, thoughts, observations that are the seed corn for the podcast.</li>\n 	<li>Sometimes, though, there’s just not enough in one of those thoughts to grow it into an episode topic, not enough to get it beyond the 10-20 words that are already there. So, for lack of coming up with anything better, here’s a bit of a ramble through those stunted seed corns. Yeah, I’m selling this pretty well. I can hear you all reaching for the Skip button already.</li>\n 	<li>Like, last fall when I was posing for my umpteenth identity badge at a new client, I thought I was given the camera a slight smile -- like a passport photo smile, not showing teeth but a pleasant look. The security guard turned the camera around -- it was deadpan neutral. If I hadn’t tried to smile, I would’ve been frowning. I reminded me to consciously make an effort to smile with folks like gate agents and TSA screeners because, as I get older, I must get more of a grumpy resting face. Which may explain some of the reaction I get from flight attendants.</li>\n 	<li>One thought that almost made it out of the notebook -- Hotels need to stop feeling the need to innovate in the bathroom. I remember writing this in the midst of a 4-day/3-hotel run where the taps and shower control in every hotel were different. I’m OK with innovating some parts of the room -- like dropping in some cool new coffee maker, or an interesting radio or TV, or even a weird chair -- but that’s gotta stop at the bathroom door. When I cross that threshold, I’m usually not completely awake, I’m often not wearing my glasses so can’t see real well if, indeed, I’ve actually turned on the light. And when I step in the shower, I’m definitely not wearing glasses, so small print instructions don’t go down well. I thought hotel showers had pretty much standardized on the single knob that turned on at Cold and got Hotter as you turned it clockwise, all the time delivering the same volume of water. But sometimes you move that knob back and forth to no effect, and you eventually figure out that you have to pull it to turn it on.&nbsp; The worst, though, are the controls that go in the wrong direction -- maybe counterclockwise, or push instead of pull. After I finally figure it out, I can understand what they were trying to do, and it might then make sense, but if it takes me more than 30 seconds to get my morning shower going, someone has failed -- and I don’t think it’s me.</li>\n 	<li>A year or so ago, when I was stuck for a half hour on a broken light rail train between the Atlanta terminals and the rental car center, I started wondering why the push for these trains; what’s the business case? ORD has shut down its train, the ATS, Airport Transit System, to modernize it and extend it to a new rental car center. The price? $800 million. PHX is spending $700 million to extend their SkyTrain to their rental car center. Tampa’s SkyConnect train that went in service last year cost over $400 million. And don’t get me started on Newark’s AirTrain. I mean, I get the need to cut down on diesel emissions from the rental buses, but it seems these airports could buy a whole lot of electric buses for less than that what their spending on a couple of miles of light rail. And when those trains break down, there’s no option but to wait -- no other train can pull up beside yours and take everyone onward. You’re stuck until they figure it out.</li>\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Well, we’ve cleaned out the Travel Potpourri category, Alex. Let\'s move on to Extreme Weather Delays for $200</span>.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #148</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and now on <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_148.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #148 — Travel Potpourri for $200, Alex','','inherit','closed','closed','','2237-revision-v1','','','2019-08-14 13:58:41','2019-08-14 18:58:41','',2237,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/08/14/2237-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2517,1,'2019-08-14 14:00:29','2019-08-14 19:00:29','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_1291\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/2013-12-10-07.55.43.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1291\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/2013-12-10-07.55.43-300x225.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\"></a> Tough travel day when the deicing fluid freezes[/caption]</p>\n<p>Flying home into the teeth of the polar vortex that gave <a href=\"https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/01/31/frost-quakes-chicago-polar-vortex/2730412002/\">Chicago its coldest day since January 1985</a> took a bit of flight changing strategy and some incredibly dedicated United ramp workers. I get on-trend by \"<a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/kondo-ing-a-guru-of-organizing-becomes-a-verb-11547745648\">Kondo-ing</a>\" my old suitcases, worry about visiting Sweden as it rapidly goes cashless, and gather up some odds-‘n’-ends from travel notebook into a Jeopardy-like topic “Travel Potpourri”. All this and more at the&nbsp;<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_148.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<p>[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_148.mp3\"]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<p>Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #148:</p>\n<ul>\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, just trying to survive Nature’s mood swings -- 16 straight days of snow, the much publicized polar vortex cold last week followed by a four-day 73 degree temp rise -- from -22 on early Thursday morning (actual temperature; none of this wind chill guesstimating) to +51 degrees Monday afternoon, and then a 40-some degree drop back to the single digits by Friday. It’s climate change, alright. Just not all in the same direction. Last Wednesday was the second coldest day in Chicago history at -23 degrees. I was also here for the coldest day -- January 20, 1985 -- when it hit -27 degrees. I was just starting my last quarter at University of Chicago. It left an impression. After that, I didn’t interview with any Chicago companies. I took a job in Dallas and moved down in July -- to temperatures averaging in the 90’s. Brilliant</li>\n<li>I missed the wind-up to last week’s freeze fest. I flew out to New York on the Monday morning at the tail end of that 16-day snow fest. I had booked a Southwest flight from Chicago Midway to LaGuardia because Southwest now flies into the new renovated concourse in the otherwise Third World-ish Terminal B and, being that kind of travel geek, I wanted to check it out. Southwest had other plans though. Sunday late morning, about 18 hours before departure, Southwest emailed me that they were cancelling the flight. I was surprised at their proactivity, but it was a good thing, I guess, ‘cause it gave me time to move to United -- no new terminal experience, but a lot better flight frequency.</li>\n<li>Which turned out to be key on Wednesday, trying to fly home on that -23 degree day. Tuesday afternoon, I moved my flight home up from 3pm to 12 noon. I figured all the flights would be delayed and the later my flight, the worse the delay and the higher probability of cancellation. Looking at United’s flights, the 11am and 1pm flights were regional jets; the noon flight was a mainline Airbus. ORD was going to have to cut capacity on Weds -- the ground crews could only be outside for short stretches, especially the guys on the deicing trucks. I figured they’d cancel the smaller regional jets first, which meant they’d move the folks from the 11am and 1pm flights onto the noon flight, meaning that flight might be delayed, but United wouldn’t want to cancel it.</li>\n<li>And the next day, that’s pretty much how it played out. When I got to LaGuardia, those 11 and 1 flights were already cancelled. The noon flight still showed on-time, but checking the United and <a href=\"https://flightaware.com/\">FlightAware</a> apps, I could see that the Airbus was still in Chicago. That noon departure time was meaningless until that plane was in the air. I set up in the Amex Centurion Lounge, doing calls and emails, refreshing those apps every 10 minutes. The Airbus’ 8am departure time came and went, as did 9am, and 10am. It finally left around 10:40am Chicago time. I had lunch and a beer in the lounge -- the food in those Centurion lounges is good… and free -- and headed down for the gate. Walking down the concourse, I passed a Uniqlo vending machine selling “ultra light” down jackets for $70. (Amazing what they sell in airport vending machines) I thought for a moment about buying one to layer up when walking up the jet bridge in O’Hare. Given the extreme conditions, it was the most understandable 2½-hr delay I’ve ever had on United. I was incredibly grateful for the United ramp workers who were outside that day. I was happy to just get home that afternoon. Leaving the LGA Amex lounge for my gate, I ran into a Chicago colleague. He had 4 flights canceled on him already and, as I found out the next morning, didn’t get home until Thursday -- after going through Richmond. Good thing for him the Amex Lounge drinks are free too</li>\n<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mghicks/18378\">Emily and the Djembe</a> by mghicks (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/nc-sampling+/1.0/\">Noncommercial Sampling Plus</a> license. Ft: Emily via Briareus</li>\n</ul>\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<ul>\n<li>As promised, I expanded the Santa Fe topic in December’s episode to a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/01/24/road-trip-lowbrow-santa-fe/\">full 1,800-word post on the website</a> -- which might help explain why this episode slipped from the end of January to the beginning of February. The <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reader%27s_Digest_Condensed_Books\">Reader’s Digest condensed version</a> (my obligatory Baby Boomer cultural reference) goes something like this -- Friday: hike, drink beer, eat a green chile cheeseburger; Saturday: hike, drink beer, eat a green chile cheeseburger, then drink margaritas and eat local New Mexican dishes; Sunday: wake up a little later, walk rather than hike, eat tamales from a cart. I liked Steve Frick’s comment “When Road Warriors relax” on his retweet. I did try to write this a bit more like a travel article than a blog post -- more of a story than a sequential list of the places we went. But I did make sure to include links to all the good places we hit. If you haven’t already, give it a read and let me know your thoughts.</li>\n<li>When I was going through ORD in January, during the partial government shutdown, I thanked the TSA screeners for showing up even though they weren’t getting paid. If I’m reading the GSA salary band schedule correctly, the typical TSA screener makes between 29 and 44 grand a year. They could’ve called in sick to drive an Uber to make up for the missed paychecks, but they didn’t -- as opposed to Atlanta where I stood in some long PreCheck lines because of sick outs. Not that I blame the Atlanta TSA folks, but it made me appreciate the ORD TSA people even more.</li>\n<li>Right at about a year ago, I broke down and <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/01/25/podcast-137-new-years-travel-status-tips-how-to-shop-for-a-suitcase/\">bought a new Victorinox suitcase</a>. I had beat a grey Samsonite into submission after 2½ years of trundling across New Orleans sidewalks. My well-traveled Swiss Army roller became unusable when its retractable handle stuck in the extended position. And then my Bluesmart smart bag was banned from by airlines because its battery wouldn’t eject. A couple of weeks ago, my wife called me upstairs. “We’ve got to declutter this attic. You need to Kondo-ize your suitcases,” she said. Wha…? She pointed over to where I’d stashed the Samsonite, the Swiss Army roller, and the Bluesmart. “You should only keep the suitcases that spark joy,” she said. Again, wha…? How does a broken suitcase spark joy? “Exactly!” she said. I pulled the old luggage tags off and threw them in the garbage can before she forced me to binge watch that Netflix series.</li>\n<li>Over a year ago, way back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">episode #136</a> in December 2017, I talked about feeling like I’m the last generation of cash payers. My younger colleagues -- and my children -- not only do they pay for everything with a card, many of them don’t even carry cash. It’s <a href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/21/business/sweden-cashless-society.html\">happening even faster in Sweden</a>, where 95% of purchases by Millenials is electronic; to the point that half the country’s retailers think they’ll stop taking cash in 5-6 years. So I got a chuckle when long-time TravelCommons listener Allan Marko sent along this notice that he picked up while touring Laos last month -\n<ul>\n<li>“Please note that only new crisp notes are accepted in Laos. US$100 notes receiving a better exchange rate; US$ notes of the series number before 1996 as well as US$100 notes with the series number CB, dirty and/or damaged notes, or notes with any writing on it are not accepted in Laos. Please bring some small changes with you for your convenience.”</li>\n<li>Cash is king in Laos -- but only if it’s neat, tidy, and young</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n<li>Heading to LGA last Weds morning, traffic was bad in Manhattan and so the wait times for Uber and Lyft were a bit silly. So instead, I let the hotel doorman guide me over to a black car. I saw the driver tip him $10, but I didn’t care -- it was a nice clean car -- a Lexus hybrid -- and the driver knew the back ways to LGA, so we didn’t get jammed up on the highway. Everything was good -- until we parked outside of Terminal B. I had asked the doorman before getting in -- “Does he take a credit card?” “Oh yeah,” he said. And to give the driver credit, he tried to take my Amex, but for some reason his iPhone couldn’t get data at Terminal B Departures, which meant he couldn’t connect to Square, which meant he couldn’t take my card. After trying for 5 minutes, he went palms up. Lucky for him, I am a cash carrier and I had just enough to pay the fare. His tip? He’ll have to take that up with his mobile carrier.</li>\n<li>We were working on our Spring Break vacation a few weeks back -- we’re going to Brittany France at the end of March because, well, who needs sun and sand when you enjoy rain blowing in off the Atlantic? -- and the flights from Chicago to Paris were looking just ugly. So we started opening up the search filters a bit, looking at some extended layovers and overnight stays. If done right, it can be fun. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/06/24/podcast-130-notes-from-hungary/\">episode #130</a> (I seem to be digging deep into the archives on this episode), I talked about how my son Andrew and I skipped a reasonable 90-minute connection in Vienna airport for full-day 8-hr one; dropped our bags in held luggage and then hopped a cab to the city center for a beer-and-schnitzel crawl. On the way over to Paris, SAS showed an 8-hr layover in Stockholm. Hmmm… we hadn’t been there since 2006 when we went to Sweden to pick up my Saab convertible. But I remember Arlanda airport being a long haul from Stockholm. Would it take too long getting to and from Stockholm? Thankfully, no. It’s a 20-minute train ride, and the Arlanda Express runs every 15 minutes. So, we’re gearing up for this time for a beer-and-herring crawl thanks to a Stockholm Craft Beer Bar custom Google Map from TravelCommons listener and Untappd friend Rob Cheshire. Though this whole cashless Sweden thing has me a bit worried. I read that <a href=\"https://www.npr.org/2018/10/22/658808705/thousands-of-swedes-are-inserting-microchips-under-their-skin\">more than 4,000 Swedes have implanted microchips</a> in their hands to let them pay for things with just a wave. I’m hoping that I don’t have to have surgery to order a beer.</li>\n<li>On the way back, again, the direct flights, or even the 1-stops from Paris to the US were priced high, both in dollars and in points, and not having anything critical on the books for the Monday of our return, we looked at some overnight stays. We decided to skip London; our time in Brittany will span Brexit Day and so we thought, why risk it? The other overnight options that popped up were Frankfurt and... Vienna. I was in Frankfurt last summer, and while I’d done that Vienna layover 2 years ago, Irene hasn’t been in Vienna since 1992, and then, only in the train station making a connection to Budapest. So we bookend our Brittany vacation with a micro-vacations in Sweden and Austria, and save a little money in air fare -- which, to be honest, we’ll probably spend and then some in food and beer.</li>\n<li>Which would be better than taking up United on their offer to buy up from Premiere Gold to Premiere Platinum for $2,000. Not to say there aren’t some benefits from that jump -- jump one level up on the upgrade list, a little better bonus miles multiplier, though I don’t ever use my current 2-free-bag allotment, so bumping up to 3 doesn’t do me much. And now that Gold has been moved up to Boarding Group 1, it doesn’t give me a better shot at overhead space. I’ve said it before in previous episodes, I don’t think the incremental benefit from higher status is worth flying weird itineraries or inconvenient times. And it’s certainly not worth 2 grand.</li>\n<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our new Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n<li>Bridge music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Astral/44268\">Dreaming</a> by Astral (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license.</li>\n</ul>\n<p><strong>Travel Potpourri for $200, Alex</strong></p>\n<ul>\n<li>Doing a little start-of-the-year cleaning of my travel notebook. I always carry a 3½ x 5½ in notebook with me to jot down notes and thoughts. My current notebook is a stiff rather than a hard back so I don’t break it when I put it in the back pocket of my jeans, and has fountain-pen friendly Clairefontaine paper because, as I said in the last episode, it’s not like a lack for things to be fiddly about. This notebook has a couple of pages of letters and numbers written with different pens and inks, a few pages of Madrid beer bars with the ones we hit X’d, a half-dozen pages of really bad algebra when I was trying to help my daughter with a math test, and then the rest is bullet pointed blurbs, thoughts, observations that are the seed corn for the podcast.</li>\n<li>Sometimes, though, there’s just not enough in one of those thoughts to grow it into an episode topic, not enough to get it beyond the 10-20 words that are already there. So, for lack of coming up with anything better, here’s a bit of a ramble through those stunted seed corns. Yeah, I’m selling this pretty well. I can hear you all reaching for the Skip button already.</li>\n<li>Like, last fall when I was posing for my umpteenth identity badge at a new client, I thought I was given the camera a slight smile -- like a passport photo smile, not showing teeth but a pleasant look. The security guard turned the camera around -- it was deadpan neutral. If I hadn’t tried to smile, I would’ve been frowning. I reminded me to consciously make an effort to smile with folks like gate agents and TSA screeners because, as I get older, I must get more of a grumpy resting face. Which may explain some of the reaction I get from flight attendants.</li>\n<li>One thought that almost made it out of the notebook -- Hotels need to stop feeling the need to innovate in the bathroom. I remember writing this in the midst of a 4-day/3-hotel run where the taps and shower control in every hotel were different. I’m OK with innovating some parts of the room -- like dropping in some cool new coffee maker, or an interesting radio or TV, or even a weird chair -- but that’s gotta stop at the bathroom door. When I cross that threshold, I’m usually not completely awake, I’m often not wearing my glasses so can’t see real well if, indeed, I’ve actually turned on the light. And when I step in the shower, I’m definitely not wearing glasses, so small print instructions don’t go down well. I thought hotel showers had pretty much standardized on the single knob that turned on at Cold and got Hotter as you turned it clockwise, all the time delivering the same volume of water. But sometimes you move that knob back and forth to no effect, and you eventually figure out that you have to pull it to turn it on.&nbsp; The worst, though, are the controls that go in the wrong direction -- maybe counterclockwise, or push instead of pull. After I finally figure it out, I can understand what they were trying to do, and it might then make sense, but if it takes me more than 30 seconds to get my morning shower going, someone has failed -- and I don’t think it’s me.</li>\n<li>A year or so ago, when I was stuck for a half hour on a broken light rail train between the Atlanta terminals and the rental car center, I started wondering why the push for these trains; what’s the business case? ORD has shut down its train, the ATS, Airport Transit System, to modernize it and extend it to a new rental car center. The price? $800 million. PHX is spending $700 million to extend their SkyTrain to their rental car center. Tampa’s SkyConnect train that went in service last year cost over $400 million. And don’t get me started on Newark’s AirTrain. I mean, I get the need to cut down on diesel emissions from the rental buses, but it seems these airports could buy a whole lot of electric buses for less than that what their spending on a couple of miles of light rail. And when those trains break down, there’s no option but to wait -- no other train can pull up beside yours and take everyone onward. You’re stuck until they figure it out.</li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Well, we’ve cleaned out the Travel Potpourri category, Alex. Let\'s move on to Extreme Weather Delays for $200</span>.</li>\n</ul>\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<ul>\n<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #148</li>\n<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and now on <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li>\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_148.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #148 — Travel Potpourri for $200, Alex','','inherit','closed','closed','','2237-revision-v1','','','2019-08-14 14:00:29','2019-08-14 19:00:29','',2237,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/08/14/2237-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2518,1,'2019-08-14 23:05:45','2019-08-15 04:05:45','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\">\n<p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/IMG_0205.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2186 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/IMG_0205-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a></p><figcaption>I Think That’s the Uber Pick-Up Spot</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>Breaking out the mobile rig to record this episode in the Residence Inn in downtown Charlottesville, VA. Summer storms let me test Freebird\'s re-booking service, I wrestle with AT&amp;T so I can use my iPhone\'s dual SIM capability on my trip to Krakow and Budapest, booking more relaxed flight itineraries lets me call an audible when Uber and Lyft prices surge into the stratosphere, which gets me thinking -- will we still love those rideshare companies when they\'re no longer cheaper than taxis?&nbsp; All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_154.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/657617519&color=%23ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #154: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the Residence Inn just off the Main St pedestrian mall in downtown Charlottesville, VA, leaving behind last episode’s multi-mic, big mixer board, sound-baffled podcast studio to go old-school, back to the TravelCommons roots with the mobile rig in a hotel room. I was thinking about going way back and recording it in the bathroom, but there’s a noisy exhaust fan that I can’t figure out how to turn off. There may be a bit of traffic noise in the background, and maybe even some thunder if the black clouds out my window live up to their potential. This episode will be one of the shorter ones. I’m trying to get it in before Irene and I head out to Krakow and Budapest Thursday night.</li><li>This is my fourth week back in Charlottesville in Chicago, IL. Not much has changed since my last commute back at the end of last year. American Eagle and United Express have a couple of direct regional jets a day from Chicago, and when weather knocks those flights out, Richmond is an hour-and-a-bit drive to the east, or Washington-Dulles is 2 hours north as a last resort. It’s still a 5-gate airport; the bar in the middle still has a surprisingly decent local craft beer selection. The bartender still recognizes me, though she still asks for my ID each time I sit at the bar. So not much has changed at CHO. </li><li>However, my approach to flying there has a bit. I’ve talked about this in prior episodes; I’ve always planned my travel to maximize my time at home, with my family. Given a choice between flying out the night before or taking a 7am flight out the day of, I’d take the latter. The trade-off, though, is travel plans that don’t deal well with travel delays -- a 2-hour flight delay the night before is annoying but won’t make me miss a meeting; that same delay the morning of my meeting may mean I won’t need to take that flight. And I’ve had all that happen with my flights to Charlottesville. So this time, with the kids graduated and moved out, and now that we’ve downsized from a house to a city apartment, my wife thinking I’m underfoot a bit too much, the need to maximize my time at home has… eased a bit. So I’m booking more... resilient itineraries -- flying out the night before, staying over an extra day so I can fly out after lunch, before the summer humidity spools up the afternoon thunderstorms…. Which was paid off last week when thunderstorms in <em>Chicago</em> had my evening flight to CHO posting a 3 hour delay by noon. I had more than enough time to swing my endpoint from CHO to RIC (all done pretty seamlessly thru the United app, which I found pretty impressive). My travel plans may not be as optimized as before… or maybe they are, but for different things, like cutting down on stress and my need to bitch tweet.</li><li> Bridge Music -- One for Me by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/21492 Ft: Haskel </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>We’ve had a thread over a couple of episodes about <a href=\"http://getfreebird.com/\">Freebird</a>, a flight rebooking service. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/podcast-151-traveler-data-leaks-brittany-street-food/\">episode 151</a>, TravelCommons listener Mika Pyyhkala sent in a note about his great experience with them, how they picked up a Southwest flight cancellation and rebooked him on Delta while he was still in the air on his first Southwest leg. Saved him a huge disruption; well worth, he said, the $19/leg fee. I mentioned in the last episode that Amex Travel has been offering free coverage for flights I book on their site with my Platinum card. So Freebird has been covering these last few trips to Charlottesville. I get a text the night before and the morning of my flights assuring me that Freebird is monitoring them. And when last week’s outbound 6pm flight started posting delays at noon, I got texts letting me know they were monitoring the delay, but it hadn’t yet tripped their 4-hour trigger.  But knowing that there weren’t going to be many alternative flights to RIC or IAD later in the evening, I didn’t feel comfortable waiting for United to push over 4 hours -- and then cancel -- and so moved myself to their 6pm Richmond flight -- which was on-time -- getting me into my hotel around 10pm after an hour Uber ride. And then, indulging in a bit of travel schadenfreude, I kept tracking the ORD-CHO flight on <a href=\"https://flightaware.com/\">FlightAware</a>. It finally took off at 11pm Central – 5 hrs late -- arriving CHO at 2am Eastern. So it did eventually cross Freebird’s 4-hour threshold, but I’m not sure if it was in time to catch an alternative flight. So, I’m glad I switched it myself. I dunno, maybe tight connections rather than thinly traveled direct routes is the better use case for Freebird</li><li>Also back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/podcast-151-traveler-data-leaks-brittany-street-food/\">episode 151</a>, I talked about trying out the alpha version of augmented reality directions in Google Maps, where you hold up your phone and the display uses the camera to show the streetscape in front of you with the  directions -- street names, arrows -- overlaid on the real-time image. I thought it was kinda cool; Irene and the kids were less than impressed. But you can judge for yourself because Google <a href=\"https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/08/google-launches-live-view-ar-walking-directions-for-google-maps/\">announced last week</a> that they’ve widened the feature to a public beta. Give it a try and let me know what you think</li><li>Fast forward one whole episode -- from <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/podcast-151-traveler-data-leaks-brittany-street-food/\">151</a> in May to <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/06/16/podcast-152-overwhelming-travel-new-old-restaurant-trends/\">152</a> in June -- which really was a big jump because, right after recording episode <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/podcast-151-traveler-data-leaks-brittany-street-food/\">151</a>, we moved from the big house in the suburbs to a 60% smaller high-rise apartment on the lakefront -- but in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/06/16/podcast-152-overwhelming-travel-new-old-restaurant-trends/\">episode 152</a>, I talked about having to recalibrate how I’d get to the airport. I had my guy who’d pick me up for a 30-minute ride to ORD or MDW… But no more. Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve started to get a feel for it -- 45-50 minutes to ORD, but figure an hour for weird traffic. And in the morning, figure a 10-minute wait for an Uber or Lyft, and a tab with tip around $40-$45. So this Monday at 5am, I fire up Lyft and Uber while drinking my morning cup of tea to see what’s going on -- $110 on Uber and $60 on Lyft. What the hell is going on? Well, maybe all the drivers are sleeping in, so I shower, get dressed, gather all my worldly belongings, and check again -- $120 on Uber; $57 on Lyft. I hit the Lyft button and wait -- and wait and wait. Then someone accepts the ride, and cancels. Guess he didn’t want to go to ORD. So I fire up <a href=\"https://transitapp.com/\">Transit</a>, my favorite mass transit app. It’s developed in Montreal and does mass transit routing in a huge number of cities in the US and Canada. And in Chicago, it also covers Divvy bike share and constructs Lyft-to-mass transit routing. I fired it up thinking that, if I couldn’t get a Lyft to ORD, then maybe I could get one to the nearest Blue Line L stop and take the subway the rest of the way. But even it couldn’t find a Lyft. But, it showed that, across the street from our flat, a bus will pick me up and, 18 stops later, drop me at the L stop. I got nothing else going -- actually, I did but it would involve waking Irene up at  now 5:40am for a ride to ORD, truly a last resort. I wheel my luggage across the street. Four minutes later, the bus shows up. There’s me and another guy -- no problem putting my luggage on the seat next to me. And we make pretty good time -- not a lot of people waiting at bus stops at 6am, and the traffic is pretty clear too. All told, we stop maybe 6 times and have 8 people on the bus at its most crowded.  I had to wait another 5 minutes for the L and, at 6:40, it was more crowded; almost everyone had an ORD badge around their neck -- pilots, flight attendants, ground staff -- except for a few passenger-looking folk like me. All told, it took me about an hour -- maybe 10 minutes longer than Uber and Lyft were quoting. But at $2.50 vs. $60 or $120, it seemed like I made out on the deal.</li><li>Also in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/06/16/podcast-152-overwhelming-travel-new-old-restaurant-trends/\">episode 152</a>, I talked about “earning and burning” frequent traveler points rather than saving them because airlines and hotels keep playing with redemption levels and rules that reduce the value of the points. Jim McDonough tweeted me with a contra view -<ul><li>Regarding frequent flyer miles and how they don\'t appreciate over time - I still like to keep some around in case we need to travel for family emergency situations. The walk-up fare does not compete with the $25 charge to book a frequent flyer mile ticket last minute.</li></ul></li><li>Jim, that’s a good point, but I wonder if that strategy still works as more airlines move from fixed awards schedules to dynamic point pricing -- Southwest, Delta, and soon United -- where point price for a flight climes as remaining ticket prices do. Does it still make sense to pay with points?</li><li>As I said earlier, Irene and I are heading out Thursday night for a weekend in Krakow, Poland and then heading down to Budapest for a mix of touring and visits with Irene’s family. So, I thought this was as good a time as any to try out <a href=\"https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT209044\">my iPhone’s dual SIM capability.</a> Up to now, my usual procedure is to transfer my US AT&amp;T SIM to an old HTC One phone and then put my UK EE SIM in my iPhone Xs (usually sometime in flight in that panic drill between them clearing the breakfast tray and packing everything up for final descent) if I’m going to an EU country or when I pick one up after we land. I do this because local data is <em>hugely</em> cheaper than an AT&amp;T international plan - the EE pay-as-you-go plan I got is £10, or $12 with this week’s Brexit exchange rate discount, for 3 GB of data, 100 minutes of voice, and unlimited texts. But I still want my US number to ring thru in case someone back home needs to reach me and doesn’t know I’m out of the country. I don’t carry both phones with me, though. I have the iPhone with me during the day, using the local SIM to run Google Maps and the like. The HTC stays in the hotel room and I check it for messages when we get back at night.</li><li>But with its dual SIM capabilities, I should be able to do this with just my iPhone. However, the iPhone has only one physical SIM slot; the second is an internal eSIM, like the ones Apple uses in their cellular Apple Watch. So to make this work, I had to get AT&amp;T to transfer my US number from its physical SIM to the eSIM in the phone. My first stop was the local AT&amp;T store. I explained to the store guy what I wanted to do. He looked at me for a moment and said, “Uh, I’m new; I don’t know how to do that. But I can give you an eSIM card if you want.” OK, that’s a start. He riffled around his desk drawer. “I don’t have one here. I’ll have to go in the back. But I’m the only one here today, so you’ll have to go outside so I can lock up while I’m in the back.” Interesting. I walked down the street to grab a bite rather than idle outside the door. I came back. He handed me the card, “Here you go, but I don’t know if this will work…” I went home and hit the AT&amp;T web site. I spelunked around the site until I found the chat link and fired it up. The person on the other end knew what needed to be done. I gave her a few numbers off the card, then pointed the camera at the card’s QR code and it added to plan to my iPhone. Now, the chat agent said that they’ll have to do a bit of provisioning at the back end. She’d text me when it was done. Irene and I went out to dinner; no text and no activation. So the next morning, I hit chat again and this time stuck with the guy until the provisioning was complete. Then I pulled out the AT&amp;T SIM and put in the EE SIM, and immediately got a text from EE telling me their US roaming charges. I also got a whole new set of selections under the Cellular section under Settings. Which line did I want to use for voice, for data, for iMessage and FaceTime. I spent some time on Apple’s FAQ pages trying to figure out which scenario works for me. My guess is that it’ll take me a bit of trial and error -- and self-inflected AT&amp;T international charges -- to really figure this out.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com. </li><li>Bridge Music —    Fall to pieces - Silence by mika (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mika/24945 Ft: Colab      </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Will We Still Love Uber When The Prices Go Up?</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><a href=\"https://www.reuters.com/article/us-lyft-results/lyft-sees-ride-hailing-price-war-easing-sending-uber-and-lyft-shares-up-idUSKCN1UX2BQ\">Lyft’s chief financial officer Brian Roberts said, during last week’s earnings call, that pricing was becoming “more rational.”</a> “Rational pricing” is CFO-speak for “more predictably higher.” <a href=\"https://www.marketwatch.com/story/lyft-and-uber-are-giving-investors-what-they-want-which-is-bad-for-the-rest-of-us-2019-08-08\">Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, during his earnings call, said, “We and Lyft are big-time competitors here and have been for some period of time, but for now we’re seeing, generally, category positions that are stable. We are focused on improving profitability in this market.”</a>&nbsp; Which is CEO-speak for “we’re no longer going to slash prices to buy market share.”</li><li>We all knew this time would come -- at least the rational ones. Uber lost $5.2 billion in the second quarter while the smaller Lyft lost a mere $644 million last quarter. Investors are going to let you torch large piles of cash for only so long. Hence the topic question -- will we stay with Uber and Lyft even when they’re not a bargain anymore?</li><li>I’ve been talking about this with frequent travelers I know, or sit next to at bars, or bump into waiting for an Uber at O’Hare. One school of thought is that the Uber/Lyft experience is better than your typical cab, so even at the same price, you’d still order an Uber. You can order it on your phone rather than running into the street, trying to flag down a passing cab. Indeed, I’ve always said that, for me, Uber’s prime use case is getting a ride from midtown Manhattan to LGA at the end of the day a somewhat sane experience. Before Uber, I’d be practically dancing into 5th Ave, hiding my luggage behind a trash can because if a cabbie saw you wanted to go to LGA, they’d accelerate by you. I tried the cab company’s iPhone app last time I was in New York. It failed miserably.</li><li>Adding Uber and Lyft drivers to the transit mix means you can get a car ride from somewhere outside the usual downtown and tourist spots. I remember pre-Uber New Orleans, getting a cab anywhere other than between the airport and the French Quarter was near impossible. One night for dinner, we decided to go to a Mid-City restaurant, <a href=\"http://toupsmeatery.com/\">Toups Meatery</a>. Phenomenal place. The owner, Isaac Toups, later made it to the finals of the <em>Top Chef </em>cooking show. He didn’t win, but was voted “fan favorite”. And his food was our favorite too. The only problem -- getting a cab back to the Sheraton on Canal St from his Mid-City location. The hostess called 3 cab companies and we waited 20 minutes for a 15-minute ride. And that driver told us, “Yup, all most cab drivers want to do is make the easy money, driving between the airport and the hotels”</li><li>There’s also fare predictability -- you see the price to get from, say, downtown Chicago to O’Hare before committing to the ride. No more meter anxiety, watching the number run up in traffic. And the accompanying “Will I have enough cash to pay” or “Will this guy’s credit card machine work?” anxiety. With Uber and Lyft drivers following GPS apps, there’s no more “am I being taken the long way around to run up the meter” anxiety, or depending on your cab driver’s knowledge to take the fast way, or having them punt it to you with the “bridge or tunnel” question I often get from LGA cabs. The technology helps avoid a lot of the bad experiences we’ve had with taxi cab rides.</li><li>I used to say that Uber and Lyft cars are nicer, but their bar has slipped as they’re scrambling for drivers in a full-employment economy. An Uber I took last week was missing the door armrest; a Lyft that Irene took had the front right quarter-panel held on with duct tape. These are exceptions, though a bit more common that a couple of years ago. But they’re still a damn sight better than the beat-to-hell Baltimore cabs that would sit at the cab ranks in the Inner Harbor. I only did that once, because the cab rank was right outside the client’s building and I was late leaving for the airport. The back seat was full of old newspapers and other crap, and there was no air conditioning -- on a July afternoon. After that, I’d stand there, looking at the cabs, while waiting 5 minutes for an Uber to show up.</li><li>The place I most often take a cab rather than waiting for an Uber is the airport. And here, it’s not really about price, it’s convenience. The cab ranks are usually right at the terminal exit, while the rideshare pickup spot can be an Easter Egg hunt (Vegas), a 15-minute walk to the back 40 (Atlanta) or a confusing scrum of screaming traffic cops (Chicago Midway). Vegas and LGA especially -- catching a cab is so much easier than a rideshare. Here at CHO also -- it’s a flat rate into town that’s about the same as Uber and Lyft and the cabs are in decent shape, so if one’s there, there’s no reason to wait.</li><li>And I could be wrong, but it feels like the pricing discussion is mostly a US thing. <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/podcast-150-travel-interruptus/\">In Paris last Spring</a>, none of the Ubers were “rideshares”; they were all black car livery companies with professional drivers. Near as I could tell, Uber was just another dispatch system for them. In Lisbon a few years back, I couldn’t tell if they were true rideshares, but the pricing was the same as taxis, and there were more taxis so less wait. We took the path of least resistance and hailed cabs.</li><li>The rough consensus of my completely unrepresentative polling was - ride sharing got traction because it was cheaper, but now the technology gives such a better experience that I’d even pay a premium over a taxi -- but I wouldn’t want to tell Lyft or Uber that. But what they said on those earnings calls, I think they already know that.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #154</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_154.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<p><!--EndFragment--></p>','Podcast #154 — Will We Still Love Uber When The Prices Go Up?','','inherit','closed','closed','','2508-revision-v1','','','2019-08-14 23:05:45','2019-08-15 04:05:45','',2508,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/08/14/2508-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2519,1,'2019-08-14 23:37:00','2019-08-15 04:37:00','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\">\n<p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/IMG_0205.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2186 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/IMG_0205-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a></p><figcaption>I Think That’s the Uber Pick-Up Spot</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>Breaking out the mobile rig to record this episode in the Residence Inn in downtown Charlottesville, VA. Summer storms let me test Freebird\'s re-booking service, I wrestle with AT&amp;T so I can use my iPhone\'s dual SIM capability on my trip to Krakow and Budapest, booking more relaxed flight itineraries lets me call an audible when Uber and Lyft prices surge into the stratosphere, which gets me thinking -- will we still love those rideshare companies when they\'re no longer cheaper than taxis?&nbsp; All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_154.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/666005807&color=%23ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #154: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the Residence Inn just off the Main St pedestrian mall in downtown Charlottesville, VA, leaving behind last episode’s multi-mic, big mixer board, sound-baffled podcast studio to go old-school, back to the TravelCommons roots with the mobile rig in a hotel room. I was thinking about going way back and recording it in the bathroom, but there’s a noisy exhaust fan that I can’t figure out how to turn off. There may be a bit of traffic noise in the background, and maybe even some thunder if the black clouds out my window live up to their potential. This episode will be one of the shorter ones. I’m trying to get it in before Irene and I head out to Krakow and Budapest Thursday night.</li><li>This is my fourth week back in Charlottesville in Chicago, IL. Not much has changed since my last commute back at the end of last year. American Eagle and United Express have a couple of direct regional jets a day from Chicago, and when weather knocks those flights out, Richmond is an hour-and-a-bit drive to the east, or Washington-Dulles is 2 hours north as a last resort. It’s still a 5-gate airport; the bar in the middle still has a surprisingly decent local craft beer selection. The bartender still recognizes me, though she still asks for my ID each time I sit at the bar. So not much has changed at CHO.&nbsp;</li><li>However, my approach to flying there has a bit. I’ve talked about this in prior episodes; I’ve always planned my travel to maximize my time at home, with my family. Given a choice between flying out the night before or taking a 7am flight out the day of, I’d take the latter. The trade-off, though, is travel plans that don’t deal well with travel delays -- a 2-hour flight delay the night before is annoying but won’t make me miss a meeting; that same delay the morning of my meeting may mean I won’t need to take that flight. And I’ve had all that happen with my flights to Charlottesville. So this time, with the kids graduated and moved out, and now that we’ve downsized from a house to a city apartment, my wife thinking I’m underfoot a bit too much, the need to maximize my time at home has… eased a bit. So I’m booking more... resilient itineraries -- flying out the night before, staying over an extra day so I can fly out after lunch, before the summer humidity spools up the afternoon thunderstorms…. Which was paid off last week when thunderstorms in <em>Chicago</em> had my evening flight to CHO posting a 3 hour delay by noon. I had more than enough time to swing my endpoint from CHO to RIC (all done pretty seamlessly thru the United app, which I found pretty impressive). My travel plans may not be as optimized as before… or maybe they are, but for different things, like cutting down on stress and my need to bitch tweet.</li><li> Bridge Music -- One for Me by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/21492 Ft: Haskel </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>We’ve had a thread over a couple of episodes about <a href=\"http://getfreebird.com/\">Freebird</a>, a flight rebooking service. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/podcast-151-traveler-data-leaks-brittany-street-food/\">episode 151</a>, TravelCommons listener Mika Pyyhkala sent in a note about his great experience with them, how they picked up a Southwest flight cancellation and rebooked him on Delta while he was still in the air on his first Southwest leg. Saved him a huge disruption; well worth, he said, the $19/leg fee. I mentioned in the last episode that Amex Travel has been offering free coverage for flights I book on their site with my Platinum card. So Freebird has been covering these last few trips to Charlottesville. I get a text the night before and the morning of my flights assuring me that Freebird is monitoring them. And when last week’s outbound 6pm flight started posting delays at noon, I got texts letting me know they were monitoring the delay, but it hadn’t yet tripped their 4-hour trigger.&nbsp; But knowing that there weren’t going to be many alternative flights to RIC or IAD later in the evening, I didn’t feel comfortable waiting for United to push over 4 hours -- and then cancel -- and so moved myself to their 6pm Richmond flight -- which was on-time -- getting me into my hotel around 10pm after an hour Uber ride. And then, indulging in a bit of travel schadenfreude, I kept tracking the ORD-CHO flight on <a href=\"https://flightaware.com/\">FlightAware</a>. It finally took off at 11pm Central – 5 hrs late -- arriving CHO at 2am Eastern. So it did eventually cross Freebird’s 4-hour threshold, but I’m not sure if it was in time to catch an alternative flight. So, I’m glad I switched it myself. I dunno, maybe tight connections rather than thinly traveled direct routes is the better use case for Freebird</li><li>Also back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/podcast-151-traveler-data-leaks-brittany-street-food/\">episode 151</a>, I talked about trying out the alpha version of augmented reality directions in Google Maps, where you hold up your phone and the display uses the camera to show the streetscape in front of you with the&nbsp; directions -- street names, arrows -- overlaid on the real-time image. I thought it was kinda cool; Irene and the kids were less than impressed. But you can judge for yourself because Google <a href=\"https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/08/google-launches-live-view-ar-walking-directions-for-google-maps/\">announced last week</a> that they’ve widened the feature to a public beta. Give it a try and let me know what you think</li><li>Fast forward one whole episode -- from <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/podcast-151-traveler-data-leaks-brittany-street-food/\">151</a> in May to <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/06/16/podcast-152-overwhelming-travel-new-old-restaurant-trends/\">152</a> in June -- which really was a big jump because, right after recording episode <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/podcast-151-traveler-data-leaks-brittany-street-food/\">151</a>, we moved from the big house in the suburbs to a 60% smaller high-rise apartment on the lakefront -- but in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/06/16/podcast-152-overwhelming-travel-new-old-restaurant-trends/\">episode 152</a>, I talked about having to recalibrate how I’d get to the airport. I had my guy who’d pick me up for a 30-minute ride to ORD or MDW… But no more. Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve started to get a feel for it -- 45-50 minutes to ORD, but figure an hour for weird traffic. And in the morning, figure a 10-minute wait for an Uber or Lyft, and a tab with tip around $40-$45. So this Monday at 5am, I fire up Lyft and Uber while drinking my morning cup of tea to see what’s going on -- $110 on Uber and $60 on Lyft. What the hell is going on? Well, maybe all the drivers are sleeping in, so I shower, get dressed, gather all my worldly belongings, and check again -- $120 on Uber; $57 on Lyft. I hit the Lyft button and wait -- and wait and wait. Then someone accepts the ride, and cancels. Guess he didn’t want to go to ORD. So I fire up <a href=\"https://transitapp.com/\">Transit</a>, my favorite mass transit app. It’s developed in Montreal and does mass transit routing in a huge number of cities in the US and Canada. And in Chicago, it also covers Divvy bike share and constructs Lyft-to-mass transit routing. I fired it up thinking that, if I couldn’t get a Lyft to ORD, then maybe I could get one to the nearest Blue Line L stop and take the subway the rest of the way. But even it couldn’t find a Lyft. But, it showed that, across the street from our flat, a bus will pick me up and, 18 stops later, drop me at the L stop. I got nothing else going -- actually, I did but it would involve waking Irene up at&nbsp; now 5:40am for a ride to ORD, truly a last resort. I wheel my luggage across the street. Four minutes later, the bus shows up. There’s me and another guy -- no problem putting my luggage on the seat next to me. And we make pretty good time -- not a lot of people waiting at bus stops at 6am, and the traffic is pretty clear too. All told, we stop maybe 6 times and have 8 people on the bus at its most crowded.  I had to wait another 5 minutes for the L and, at 6:40, it was more crowded; almost everyone had an ORD badge around their neck -- pilots, flight attendants, ground staff -- except for a few passenger-looking folk like me. All told, it took me about an hour -- maybe 10 minutes longer than Uber and Lyft were quoting. But at $2.50 vs. $60 or $120, it seemed like I made out on the deal.</li><li>Also in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/06/16/podcast-152-overwhelming-travel-new-old-restaurant-trends/\">episode 152</a>, I talked about “earning and burning” frequent traveler points rather than saving them because airlines and hotels keep playing with redemption levels and rules that reduce the value of the points. Jim McDonough tweeted me with a contra view -<ul><li>Regarding frequent flyer miles and how they don\'t appreciate over time - I still like to keep some around in case we need to travel for family emergency situations. The walk-up fare does not compete with the $25 charge to book a frequent flyer mile ticket last minute.</li></ul></li><li>Jim, that’s a good point, but I wonder if that strategy still works as more airlines move from fixed awards schedules to dynamic point pricing -- Southwest, Delta, and soon United -- where point price for a flight climes as remaining ticket prices do. Does it still make sense to pay with points?</li><li>As I said earlier, Irene and I are heading out Thursday night for a weekend in Krakow, Poland and then heading down to Budapest for a mix of touring and visits with Irene’s family. So, I thought this was as good a time as any to try out <a href=\"https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT209044\">my iPhone’s dual SIM capability.</a> Up to now, my usual procedure is to transfer my US AT&amp;T SIM to an old HTC One phone and then put my UK EE SIM in my iPhone Xs (usually sometime in flight in that panic drill between them clearing the breakfast tray and packing everything up for final descent) if I’m going to an EU country or when I pick one up after we land. I do this because local data is <em>hugely</em> cheaper than an AT&amp;T international plan - the EE pay-as-you-go plan I got is £10, or $12 with this week’s Brexit exchange rate discount, for 3 GB of data, 100 minutes of voice, and unlimited texts. But I still want my US number to ring thru in case someone back home needs to reach me and doesn’t know I’m out of the country. I don’t carry both phones with me, though. I have the iPhone with me during the day, using the local SIM to run Google Maps and the like. The HTC stays in the hotel room and I check it for messages when we get back at night.</li><li>But with its dual SIM capabilities, I should be able to do this with just my iPhone. However, the iPhone has only one physical SIM slot; the second is an internal eSIM, like the ones Apple uses in their cellular Apple Watch. So to make this work, I had to get AT&amp;T to transfer my US number from its physical SIM to the eSIM in the phone. My first stop was the local AT&amp;T store. I explained to the store guy what I wanted to do. He looked at me for a moment and said, “Uh, I’m new; I don’t know how to do that. But I can give you an eSIM card if you want.” OK, that’s a start. He riffled around his desk drawer. “I don’t have one here. I’ll have to go in the back. But I’m the only one here today, so you’ll have to go outside so I can lock up while I’m in the back.” Interesting. I walked down the street to grab a bite rather than idle outside the door. I came back. He handed me the card, “Here you go, but I don’t know if this will work…” I went home and hit the AT&amp;T web site. I spelunked around the site until I found the chat link and fired it up. The person on the other end knew what needed to be done. I gave her a few numbers off the card, then pointed the camera at the card’s QR code and it added to plan to my iPhone. Now, the chat agent said that they’ll have to do a bit of provisioning at the back end. She’d text me when it was done. Irene and I went out to dinner; no text and no activation. So the next morning, I hit chat again and this time stuck with the guy until the provisioning was complete. Then I pulled out the AT&amp;T SIM and put in the EE SIM, and immediately got a text from EE telling me their US roaming charges. I also got a whole new set of selections under the Cellular section under Settings. Which line did I want to use for voice, for data, for iMessage and FaceTime. I spent some time on Apple’s FAQ pages trying to figure out which scenario works for me. My guess is that it’ll take me a bit of trial and error -- and self-inflected AT&amp;T international charges -- to really figure this out.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com. </li><li>Bridge Music —  &nbsp; Fall to pieces - Silence by mika (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mika/24945 Ft: Colab      </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Will We Still Love Uber When The Prices Go Up?</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><a href=\"https://www.reuters.com/article/us-lyft-results/lyft-sees-ride-hailing-price-war-easing-sending-uber-and-lyft-shares-up-idUSKCN1UX2BQ\">Lyft’s chief financial officer Brian Roberts said, during last week’s earnings call, that pricing was becoming “more rational.”</a> “Rational pricing” is CFO-speak for “more predictably higher.” <a href=\"https://www.marketwatch.com/story/lyft-and-uber-are-giving-investors-what-they-want-which-is-bad-for-the-rest-of-us-2019-08-08\">Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, during his earnings call, said, “We and Lyft are big-time competitors here and have been for some period of time, but for now we’re seeing, generally, category positions that are stable. We are focused on improving profitability in this market.”</a>&nbsp; Which is CEO-speak for “we’re no longer going to slash prices to buy market share.”</li><li>We all knew this time would come -- at least the rational ones. Uber lost $5.2 billion in the second quarter while the smaller Lyft lost a mere $644 million last quarter. Investors are going to let you torch large piles of cash for only so long. Hence the topic question -- will we stay with Uber and Lyft even when they’re not a bargain anymore?</li><li>I’ve been talking about this with frequent travelers I know, or sit next to at bars, or bump into waiting for an Uber at O’Hare. One school of thought is that the Uber/Lyft experience is better than your typical cab, so even at the same price, you’d still order an Uber. You can order it on your phone rather than running into the street, trying to flag down a passing cab. Indeed, I’ve always said that, for me, Uber’s prime use case is getting a ride from midtown Manhattan to LGA at the end of the day a somewhat sane experience. Before Uber, I’d be practically dancing into 5th Ave, hiding my luggage behind a trash can because if a cabbie saw you wanted to go to LGA, they’d accelerate by you. I tried the cab company’s iPhone app last time I was in New York. It failed miserably.</li><li>Adding Uber and Lyft drivers to the transit mix means you can get a car ride from somewhere outside the usual downtown and tourist spots. I remember pre-Uber New Orleans, getting a cab anywhere other than between the airport and the French Quarter was near impossible. One night for dinner, we decided to go to a Mid-City restaurant, <a href=\"http://toupsmeatery.com/\">Toups Meatery</a>. Phenomenal place. The owner, Isaac Toups, later made it to the finals of the <em>Top Chef </em>cooking show. He didn’t win, but was voted “fan favorite”. And his food was our favorite too. The only problem -- getting a cab back to the Sheraton on Canal St from his Mid-City location. The hostess called 3 cab companies and we waited 20 minutes for a 15-minute ride. And that driver told us, “Yup, all most cab drivers want to do is make the easy money, driving between the airport and the hotels”</li><li>There’s also fare predictability -- you see the price to get from, say, downtown Chicago to O’Hare before committing to the ride. No more meter anxiety, watching the number run up in traffic. And the accompanying “Will I have enough cash to pay” or “Will this guy’s credit card machine work?” anxiety. With Uber and Lyft drivers following GPS apps, there’s no more “am I being taken the long way around to run up the meter” anxiety, or depending on your cab driver’s knowledge to take the fast way, or having them punt it to you with the “bridge or tunnel” question I often get from LGA cabs. The technology helps avoid a lot of the bad experiences we’ve had with taxi cab rides.</li><li>I used to say that Uber and Lyft cars are nicer, but their bar has slipped as they’re scrambling for drivers in a full-employment economy. An Uber I took last week was missing the door armrest; a Lyft that Irene took had the front right quarter-panel held on with duct tape. These are exceptions, though a bit more common that a couple of years ago. But they’re still a damn sight better than the beat-to-hell Baltimore cabs that would sit at the cab ranks in the Inner Harbor. I only did that once, because the cab rank was right outside the client’s building and I was late leaving for the airport. The back seat was full of old newspapers and other crap, and there was no air conditioning -- on a July afternoon. After that, I’d stand there, looking at the cabs, while waiting 5 minutes for an Uber to show up.</li><li>The place I most often take a cab rather than waiting for an Uber is the airport. And here, it’s not really about price, it’s convenience. The cab ranks are usually right at the terminal exit, while the rideshare pickup spot can be an Easter Egg hunt (Vegas), a 15-minute walk to the back 40 (Atlanta) or a confusing scrum of screaming traffic cops (Chicago Midway). Vegas and LGA especially -- catching a cab is so much easier than a rideshare. Here at CHO also -- it’s a flat rate into town that’s about the same as Uber and Lyft and the cabs are in decent shape, so if one’s there, there’s no reason to wait.</li><li>And I could be wrong, but it feels like the pricing discussion is mostly a US thing. <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/podcast-150-travel-interruptus/\">In Paris last Spring</a>, none of the Ubers were “rideshares”; they were all black car livery companies with professional drivers. Near as I could tell, Uber was just another dispatch system for them. In Lisbon a few years back, I couldn’t tell if they were true rideshares, but the pricing was the same as taxis, and there were more taxis so less wait. We took the path of least resistance and hailed cabs.</li><li>The rough consensus of my completely unrepresentative polling was - ride sharing got traction because it was cheaper, but now the technology gives such a better experience that I’d even pay a premium over a taxi -- but I wouldn’t want to tell Lyft or Uber that. But what they said on those earnings calls, I think they already know that.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #154</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_154.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<p><!--EndFragment--></p>','Podcast #154 — Will We Still Love Uber When The Prices Go Up?','','inherit','closed','closed','','2508-revision-v1','','','2019-08-14 23:37:00','2019-08-15 04:37:00','',2508,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/08/14/2508-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2521,1,'2019-08-16 12:11:50','2019-08-16 17:11:50','','666C6507-4DEA-4808-9C1B-D3F828805BC8','','inherit','open','closed','','666c6507-4dea-4808-9c1b-d3f828805bc8','','','2019-08-16 12:11:50','2019-08-16 17:11:50','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/666C6507-4DEA-4808-9C1B-D3F828805BC8.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(2522,1,'2019-08-16 12:13:18','2019-08-16 17:13:18','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\">\n<p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/666C6507-4DEA-4808-9C1B-D3F828805BC8.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2521 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/666C6507-4DEA-4808-9C1B-D3F828805BC8-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a></p>\n<figcaption>The moment of truth</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p>Breaking out the mobile rig to record this episode in the Residence Inn in downtown Charlottesville, VA. Summer storms let me test Freebird\'s re-booking service, I wrestle with AT&amp;T so I can use my iPhone\'s dual SIM capability on my trip to Krakow and Budapest, booking more relaxed flight itineraries lets me call an audible when Uber and Lyft prices surge into the stratosphere, which gets me thinking -- will we still love those rideshare companies when they\'re no longer cheaper than taxis?  All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_154.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/666005807&color=%23ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #154: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the Residence Inn just off the Main St pedestrian mall in downtown Charlottesville, VA, leaving behind last episode’s multi-mic, big mixer board, sound-baffled podcast studio to go old-school, back to the TravelCommons roots with the mobile rig in a hotel room. I was thinking about going way back and recording it in the bathroom, but there’s a noisy exhaust fan that I can’t figure out how to turn off. There may be a bit of traffic noise in the background, and maybe even some thunder if the black clouds out my window live up to their potential. This episode will be one of the shorter ones. I’m trying to get it in before Irene and I head out to Krakow and Budapest Thursday night.</li><li>This is my fourth week back in Charlottesville in Chicago, IL. Not much has changed since my last commute back at the end of last year. American Eagle and United Express have a couple of direct regional jets a day from Chicago, and when weather knocks those flights out, Richmond is an hour-and-a-bit drive to the east, or Washington-Dulles is 2 hours north as a last resort. It’s still a 5-gate airport; the bar in the middle still has a surprisingly decent local craft beer selection. The bartender still recognizes me, though she still asks for my ID each time I sit at the bar. So not much has changed at CHO.&nbsp;</li><li>However, my approach to flying there has a bit. I’ve talked about this in prior episodes; I’ve always planned my travel to maximize my time at home, with my family. Given a choice between flying out the night before or taking a 7am flight out the day of, I’d take the latter. The trade-off, though, is travel plans that don’t deal well with travel delays -- a 2-hour flight delay the night before is annoying but won’t make me miss a meeting; that same delay the morning of my meeting may mean I won’t need to take that flight. And I’ve had all that happen with my flights to Charlottesville. So this time, with the kids graduated and moved out, and now that we’ve downsized from a house to a city apartment, my wife thinking I’m underfoot a bit too much, the need to maximize my time at home has… eased a bit. So I’m booking more... resilient itineraries -- flying out the night before, staying over an extra day so I can fly out after lunch, before the summer humidity spools up the afternoon thunderstorms…. Which was paid off last week when thunderstorms in <em>Chicago</em> had my evening flight to CHO posting a 3 hour delay by noon. I had more than enough time to swing my endpoint from CHO to RIC (all done pretty seamlessly thru the United app, which I found pretty impressive). My travel plans may not be as optimized as before… or maybe they are, but for different things, like cutting down on stress and my need to bitch tweet.</li><li> Bridge Music -- One for Me by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/21492 Ft: Haskel </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>We’ve had a thread over a couple of episodes about <a href=\"http://getfreebird.com/\">Freebird</a>, a flight rebooking service. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/podcast-151-traveler-data-leaks-brittany-street-food/\">episode 151</a>, TravelCommons listener Mika Pyyhkala sent in a note about his great experience with them, how they picked up a Southwest flight cancellation and rebooked him on Delta while he was still in the air on his first Southwest leg. Saved him a huge disruption; well worth, he said, the $19/leg fee. I mentioned in the last episode that Amex Travel has been offering free coverage for flights I book on their site with my Platinum card. So Freebird has been covering these last few trips to Charlottesville. I get a text the night before and the morning of my flights assuring me that Freebird is monitoring them. And when last week’s outbound 6pm flight started posting delays at noon, I got texts letting me know they were monitoring the delay, but it hadn’t yet tripped their 4-hour trigger.&nbsp; But knowing that there weren’t going to be many alternative flights to RIC or IAD later in the evening, I didn’t feel comfortable waiting for United to push over 4 hours -- and then cancel -- and so moved myself to their 6pm Richmond flight -- which was on-time -- getting me into my hotel around 10pm after an hour Uber ride. And then, indulging in a bit of travel schadenfreude, I kept tracking the ORD-CHO flight on <a href=\"https://flightaware.com/\">FlightAware</a>. It finally took off at 11pm Central – 5 hrs late -- arriving CHO at 2am Eastern. So it did eventually cross Freebird’s 4-hour threshold, but I’m not sure if it was in time to catch an alternative flight. So, I’m glad I switched it myself. I dunno, maybe tight connections rather than thinly traveled direct routes is the better use case for Freebird</li><li>Also back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/podcast-151-traveler-data-leaks-brittany-street-food/\">episode 151</a>, I talked about trying out the alpha version of augmented reality directions in Google Maps, where you hold up your phone and the display uses the camera to show the streetscape in front of you with the&nbsp; directions -- street names, arrows -- overlaid on the real-time image. I thought it was kinda cool; Irene and the kids were less than impressed. But you can judge for yourself because Google <a href=\"https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/08/google-launches-live-view-ar-walking-directions-for-google-maps/\">announced last week</a> that they’ve widened the feature to a public beta. Give it a try and let me know what you think</li><li>Fast forward one whole episode -- from <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/podcast-151-traveler-data-leaks-brittany-street-food/\">151</a> in May to <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/06/16/podcast-152-overwhelming-travel-new-old-restaurant-trends/\">152</a> in June -- which really was a big jump because, right after recording episode <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/podcast-151-traveler-data-leaks-brittany-street-food/\">151</a>, we moved from the big house in the suburbs to a 60% smaller high-rise apartment on the lakefront -- but in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/06/16/podcast-152-overwhelming-travel-new-old-restaurant-trends/\">episode 152</a>, I talked about having to recalibrate how I’d get to the airport. I had my guy who’d pick me up for a 30-minute ride to ORD or MDW… But no more. Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve started to get a feel for it -- 45-50 minutes to ORD, but figure an hour for weird traffic. And in the morning, figure a 10-minute wait for an Uber or Lyft, and a tab with tip around $40-$45. So this Monday at 5am, I fire up Lyft and Uber while drinking my morning cup of tea to see what’s going on -- $110 on Uber and $60 on Lyft. What the hell is going on? Well, maybe all the drivers are sleeping in, so I shower, get dressed, gather all my worldly belongings, and check again -- $120 on Uber; $57 on Lyft. I hit the Lyft button and wait -- and wait and wait. Then someone accepts the ride, and cancels. Guess he didn’t want to go to ORD. So I fire up <a href=\"https://transitapp.com/\">Transit</a>, my favorite mass transit app. It’s developed in Montreal and does mass transit routing in a huge number of cities in the US and Canada. And in Chicago, it also covers Divvy bike share and constructs Lyft-to-mass transit routing. I fired it up thinking that, if I couldn’t get a Lyft to ORD, then maybe I could get one to the nearest Blue Line L stop and take the subway the rest of the way. But even it couldn’t find a Lyft. But, it showed that, across the street from our flat, a bus will pick me up and, 18 stops later, drop me at the L stop. I got nothing else going -- actually, I did but it would involve waking Irene up at&nbsp; now 5:40am for a ride to ORD, truly a last resort. I wheel my luggage across the street. Four minutes later, the bus shows up. There’s me and another guy -- no problem putting my luggage on the seat next to me. And we make pretty good time -- not a lot of people waiting at bus stops at 6am, and the traffic is pretty clear too. All told, we stop maybe 6 times and have 8 people on the bus at its most crowded.  I had to wait another 5 minutes for the L and, at 6:40, it was more crowded; almost everyone had an ORD badge around their neck -- pilots, flight attendants, ground staff -- except for a few passenger-looking folk like me. All told, it took me about an hour -- maybe 10 minutes longer than Uber and Lyft were quoting. But at $2.50 vs. $60 or $120, it seemed like I made out on the deal.</li><li>Also in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/06/16/podcast-152-overwhelming-travel-new-old-restaurant-trends/\">episode 152</a>, I talked about “earning and burning” frequent traveler points rather than saving them because airlines and hotels keep playing with redemption levels and rules that reduce the value of the points. Jim McDonough tweeted me with a contra view -<ul><li>Regarding frequent flyer miles and how they don\'t appreciate over time - I still like to keep some around in case we need to travel for family emergency situations. The walk-up fare does not compete with the $25 charge to book a frequent flyer mile ticket last minute.</li></ul></li><li>Jim, that’s a good point, but I wonder if that strategy still works as more airlines move from fixed awards schedules to dynamic point pricing -- Southwest, Delta, and soon United -- where point price for a flight climes as remaining ticket prices do. Does it still make sense to pay with points?</li><li>As I said earlier, Irene and I are heading out Thursday night for a weekend in Krakow, Poland and then heading down to Budapest for a mix of touring and visits with Irene’s family. So, I thought this was as good a time as any to try out <a href=\"https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT209044\">my iPhone’s dual SIM capability.</a> Up to now, my usual procedure is to transfer my US AT&amp;T SIM to an old HTC One phone and then put my UK EE SIM in my iPhone Xs (usually sometime in flight in that panic drill between them clearing the breakfast tray and packing everything up for final descent) if I’m going to an EU country or when I pick one up after we land. I do this because local data is <em>hugely</em> cheaper than an AT&amp;T international plan - the EE pay-as-you-go plan I got is £10, or $12 with this week’s Brexit exchange rate discount, for 3 GB of data, 100 minutes of voice, and unlimited texts. But I still want my US number to ring thru in case someone back home needs to reach me and doesn’t know I’m out of the country. I don’t carry both phones with me, though. I have the iPhone with me during the day, using the local SIM to run Google Maps and the like. The HTC stays in the hotel room and I check it for messages when we get back at night.</li><li>But with its dual SIM capabilities, I should be able to do this with just my iPhone. However, the iPhone has only one physical SIM slot; the second is an internal eSIM, like the ones Apple uses in their cellular Apple Watch. So to make this work, I had to get AT&amp;T to transfer my US number from its physical SIM to the eSIM in the phone. My first stop was the local AT&amp;T store. I explained to the store guy what I wanted to do. He looked at me for a moment and said, “Uh, I’m new; I don’t know how to do that. But I can give you an eSIM card if you want.” OK, that’s a start. He riffled around his desk drawer. “I don’t have one here. I’ll have to go in the back. But I’m the only one here today, so you’ll have to go outside so I can lock up while I’m in the back.” Interesting. I walked down the street to grab a bite rather than idle outside the door. I came back. He handed me the card, “Here you go, but I don’t know if this will work…” I went home and hit the AT&amp;T web site. I spelunked around the site until I found the chat link and fired it up. The person on the other end knew what needed to be done. I gave her a few numbers off the card, then pointed the camera at the card’s QR code and it added to plan to my iPhone. Now, the chat agent said that they’ll have to do a bit of provisioning at the back end. She’d text me when it was done. Irene and I went out to dinner; no text and no activation. So the next morning, I hit chat again and this time stuck with the guy until the provisioning was complete. Then I pulled out the AT&amp;T SIM and put in the EE SIM, and immediately got a text from EE telling me their US roaming charges. I also got a whole new set of selections under the Cellular section under Settings. Which line did I want to use for voice, for data, for iMessage and FaceTime. I spent some time on Apple’s FAQ pages trying to figure out which scenario works for me. My guess is that it’ll take me a bit of trial and error -- and self-inflected AT&amp;T international charges -- to really figure this out.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com. </li><li>Bridge Music —  &nbsp; Fall to pieces - Silence by mika (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mika/24945 Ft: Colab      </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Will We Still Love Uber When The Prices Go Up?</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><a href=\"https://www.reuters.com/article/us-lyft-results/lyft-sees-ride-hailing-price-war-easing-sending-uber-and-lyft-shares-up-idUSKCN1UX2BQ\">Lyft’s chief financial officer Brian Roberts said, during last week’s earnings call, that pricing was becoming “more rational.”</a> “Rational pricing” is CFO-speak for “more predictably higher.” <a href=\"https://www.marketwatch.com/story/lyft-and-uber-are-giving-investors-what-they-want-which-is-bad-for-the-rest-of-us-2019-08-08\">Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, during his earnings call, said, “We and Lyft are big-time competitors here and have been for some period of time, but for now we’re seeing, generally, category positions that are stable. We are focused on improving profitability in this market.”</a>&nbsp; Which is CEO-speak for “we’re no longer going to slash prices to buy market share.”</li><li>We all knew this time would come -- at least the rational ones. Uber lost $5.2 billion in the second quarter while the smaller Lyft lost a mere $644 million last quarter. Investors are going to let you torch large piles of cash for only so long. Hence the topic question -- will we stay with Uber and Lyft even when they’re not a bargain anymore?</li><li>I’ve been talking about this with frequent travelers I know, or sit next to at bars, or bump into waiting for an Uber at O’Hare. One school of thought is that the Uber/Lyft experience is better than your typical cab, so even at the same price, you’d still order an Uber. You can order it on your phone rather than running into the street, trying to flag down a passing cab. Indeed, I’ve always said that, for me, Uber’s prime use case is getting a ride from midtown Manhattan to LGA at the end of the day a somewhat sane experience. Before Uber, I’d be practically dancing into 5th Ave, hiding my luggage behind a trash can because if a cabbie saw you wanted to go to LGA, they’d accelerate by you. I tried the cab company’s iPhone app last time I was in New York. It failed miserably.</li><li>Adding Uber and Lyft drivers to the transit mix means you can get a car ride from somewhere outside the usual downtown and tourist spots. I remember pre-Uber New Orleans, getting a cab anywhere other than between the airport and the French Quarter was near impossible. One night for dinner, we decided to go to a Mid-City restaurant, <a href=\"http://toupsmeatery.com/\">Toups Meatery</a>. Phenomenal place. The owner, Isaac Toups, later made it to the finals of the <em>Top Chef </em>cooking show. He didn’t win, but was voted “fan favorite”. And his food was our favorite too. The only problem -- getting a cab back to the Sheraton on Canal St from his Mid-City location. The hostess called 3 cab companies and we waited 20 minutes for a 15-minute ride. And that driver told us, “Yup, all most cab drivers want to do is make the easy money, driving between the airport and the hotels”</li><li>There’s also fare predictability -- you see the price to get from, say, downtown Chicago to O’Hare before committing to the ride. No more meter anxiety, watching the number run up in traffic. And the accompanying “Will I have enough cash to pay” or “Will this guy’s credit card machine work?” anxiety. With Uber and Lyft drivers following GPS apps, there’s no more “am I being taken the long way around to run up the meter” anxiety, or depending on your cab driver’s knowledge to take the fast way, or having them punt it to you with the “bridge or tunnel” question I often get from LGA cabs. The technology helps avoid a lot of the bad experiences we’ve had with taxi cab rides.</li><li>I used to say that Uber and Lyft cars are nicer, but their bar has slipped as they’re scrambling for drivers in a full-employment economy. An Uber I took last week was missing the door armrest; a Lyft that Irene took had the front right quarter-panel held on with duct tape. These are exceptions, though a bit more common that a couple of years ago. But they’re still a damn sight better than the beat-to-hell Baltimore cabs that would sit at the cab ranks in the Inner Harbor. I only did that once, because the cab rank was right outside the client’s building and I was late leaving for the airport. The back seat was full of old newspapers and other crap, and there was no air conditioning -- on a July afternoon. After that, I’d stand there, looking at the cabs, while waiting 5 minutes for an Uber to show up.</li><li>The place I most often take a cab rather than waiting for an Uber is the airport. And here, it’s not really about price, it’s convenience. The cab ranks are usually right at the terminal exit, while the rideshare pickup spot can be an Easter Egg hunt (Vegas), a 15-minute walk to the back 40 (Atlanta) or a confusing scrum of screaming traffic cops (Chicago Midway). Vegas and LGA especially -- catching a cab is so much easier than a rideshare. Here at CHO also -- it’s a flat rate into town that’s about the same as Uber and Lyft and the cabs are in decent shape, so if one’s there, there’s no reason to wait.</li><li>And I could be wrong, but it feels like the pricing discussion is mostly a US thing. <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/podcast-150-travel-interruptus/\">In Paris last Spring</a>, none of the Ubers were “rideshares”; they were all black car livery companies with professional drivers. Near as I could tell, Uber was just another dispatch system for them. In Lisbon a few years back, I couldn’t tell if they were true rideshares, but the pricing was the same as taxis, and there were more taxis so less wait. We took the path of least resistance and hailed cabs.</li><li>The rough consensus of my completely unrepresentative polling was - ride sharing got traction because it was cheaper, but now the technology gives such a better experience that I’d even pay a premium over a taxi -- but I wouldn’t want to tell Lyft or Uber that. But what they said on those earnings calls, I think they already know that.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #154</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_154.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<p><!--EndFragment--></p>','Podcast #154 — Will We Still Love Uber When The Prices Go Up?','','inherit','closed','closed','','2508-revision-v1','','','2019-08-16 12:13:18','2019-08-16 17:13:18','',2508,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/08/16/2508-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2523,1,'2019-08-16 12:16:01','2019-08-16 17:16:01','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\">\n<p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/666C6507-4DEA-4808-9C1B-D3F828805BC8.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2521 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/666C6507-4DEA-4808-9C1B-D3F828805BC8-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a></p><figcaption>The moment of truth</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>Breaking out the mobile rig to record this episode in the Residence Inn in downtown Charlottesville, VA. Summer storms let me test Freebird\'s re-booking service, I wrestle with AT&amp;T so I can use my iPhone\'s dual SIM capability on my trip to Krakow and Budapest, booking more relaxed flight itineraries lets me call an audible when Uber and Lyft prices surge into the stratosphere, which gets me thinking -- will we still love those rideshare companies when they\'re no longer cheaper than taxis?&nbsp; All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_154.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"300\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/666005807&color=%23ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true&visual=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #154: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the Residence Inn just off the Main St pedestrian mall in downtown Charlottesville, VA, leaving behind last episode’s multi-mic, big mixer board, sound-baffled podcast studio to go old-school, back to the TravelCommons roots with the mobile rig in a hotel room. I was thinking about going way back and recording it in the bathroom, but there’s a noisy exhaust fan that I can’t figure out how to turn off. There may be a bit of traffic noise in the background, and maybe even some thunder if the black clouds out my window live up to their potential. This episode will be one of the shorter ones. I’m trying to get it in before Irene and I head out to Krakow and Budapest Thursday night.</li><li>This is my fourth week back in Charlottesville in Chicago, IL. Not much has changed since my last commute back at the end of last year. American Eagle and United Express have a couple of direct regional jets a day from Chicago, and when weather knocks those flights out, Richmond is an hour-and-a-bit drive to the east, or Washington-Dulles is 2 hours north as a last resort. It’s still a 5-gate airport; the bar in the middle still has a surprisingly decent local craft beer selection. The bartender still recognizes me, though she still asks for my ID each time I sit at the bar. So not much has changed at CHO.&nbsp;</li><li>However, my approach to flying there has a bit. I’ve talked about this in prior episodes; I’ve always planned my travel to maximize my time at home, with my family. Given a choice between flying out the night before or taking a 7am flight out the day of, I’d take the latter. The trade-off, though, is travel plans that don’t deal well with travel delays -- a 2-hour flight delay the night before is annoying but won’t make me miss a meeting; that same delay the morning of my meeting may mean I won’t need to take that flight. And I’ve had all that happen with my flights to Charlottesville. So this time, with the kids graduated and moved out, and now that we’ve downsized from a house to a city apartment, my wife thinking I’m underfoot a bit too much, the need to maximize my time at home has… eased a bit. So I’m booking more... resilient itineraries -- flying out the night before, staying over an extra day so I can fly out after lunch, before the summer humidity spools up the afternoon thunderstorms…. Which was paid off last week when thunderstorms in <em>Chicago</em> had my evening flight to CHO posting a 3 hour delay by noon. I had more than enough time to swing my endpoint from CHO to RIC (all done pretty seamlessly thru the United app, which I found pretty impressive). My travel plans may not be as optimized as before… or maybe they are, but for different things, like cutting down on stress and my need to bitch tweet.</li><li> Bridge Music -- One for Me by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/21492 Ft: Haskel </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>We’ve had a thread over a couple of episodes about <a href=\"http://getfreebird.com/\">Freebird</a>, a flight rebooking service. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/podcast-151-traveler-data-leaks-brittany-street-food/\">episode 151</a>, TravelCommons listener Mika Pyyhkala sent in a note about his great experience with them, how they picked up a Southwest flight cancellation and rebooked him on Delta while he was still in the air on his first Southwest leg. Saved him a huge disruption; well worth, he said, the $19/leg fee. I mentioned in the last episode that Amex Travel has been offering free coverage for flights I book on their site with my Platinum card. So Freebird has been covering these last few trips to Charlottesville. I get a text the night before and the morning of my flights assuring me that Freebird is monitoring them. And when last week’s outbound 6pm flight started posting delays at noon, I got texts letting me know they were monitoring the delay, but it hadn’t yet tripped their 4-hour trigger.&nbsp; But knowing that there weren’t going to be many alternative flights to RIC or IAD later in the evening, I didn’t feel comfortable waiting for United to push over 4 hours -- and then cancel -- and so moved myself to their 6pm Richmond flight -- which was on-time -- getting me into my hotel around 10pm after an hour Uber ride. And then, indulging in a bit of travel schadenfreude, I kept tracking the ORD-CHO flight on <a href=\"https://flightaware.com/\">FlightAware</a>. It finally took off at 11pm Central – 5 hrs late -- arriving CHO at 2am Eastern. So it did eventually cross Freebird’s 4-hour threshold, but I’m not sure if it was in time to catch an alternative flight. So, I’m glad I switched it myself. I dunno, maybe tight connections rather than thinly traveled direct routes is the better use case for Freebird</li><li>Also back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/podcast-151-traveler-data-leaks-brittany-street-food/\">episode 151</a>, I talked about trying out the alpha version of augmented reality directions in Google Maps, where you hold up your phone and the display uses the camera to show the streetscape in front of you with the&nbsp; directions -- street names, arrows -- overlaid on the real-time image. I thought it was kinda cool; Irene and the kids were less than impressed. But you can judge for yourself because Google <a href=\"https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/08/google-launches-live-view-ar-walking-directions-for-google-maps/\">announced last week</a> that they’ve widened the feature to a public beta. Give it a try and let me know what you think</li><li>Fast forward one whole episode -- from <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/podcast-151-traveler-data-leaks-brittany-street-food/\">151</a> in May to <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/06/16/podcast-152-overwhelming-travel-new-old-restaurant-trends/\">152</a> in June -- which really was a big jump because, right after recording episode <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/podcast-151-traveler-data-leaks-brittany-street-food/\">151</a>, we moved from the big house in the suburbs to a 60% smaller high-rise apartment on the lakefront -- but in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/06/16/podcast-152-overwhelming-travel-new-old-restaurant-trends/\">episode 152</a>, I talked about having to recalibrate how I’d get to the airport. I had my guy who’d pick me up for a 30-minute ride to ORD or MDW… But no more. Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve started to get a feel for it -- 45-50 minutes to ORD, but figure an hour for weird traffic. And in the morning, figure a 10-minute wait for an Uber or Lyft, and a tab with tip around $40-$45. So this Monday at 5am, I fire up Lyft and Uber while drinking my morning cup of tea to see what’s going on -- $110 on Uber and $60 on Lyft. What the hell is going on? Well, maybe all the drivers are sleeping in, so I shower, get dressed, gather all my worldly belongings, and check again -- $120 on Uber; $57 on Lyft. I hit the Lyft button and wait -- and wait and wait. Then someone accepts the ride, and cancels. Guess he didn’t want to go to ORD. So I fire up <a href=\"https://transitapp.com/\">Transit</a>, my favorite mass transit app. It’s developed in Montreal and does mass transit routing in a huge number of cities in the US and Canada. And in Chicago, it also covers Divvy bike share and constructs Lyft-to-mass transit routing. I fired it up thinking that, if I couldn’t get a Lyft to ORD, then maybe I could get one to the nearest Blue Line L stop and take the subway the rest of the way. But even it couldn’t find a Lyft. But, it showed that, across the street from our flat, a bus will pick me up and, 18 stops later, drop me at the L stop. I got nothing else going -- actually, I did but it would involve waking Irene up at&nbsp; now 5:40am for a ride to ORD, truly a last resort. I wheel my luggage across the street. Four minutes later, the bus shows up. There’s me and another guy -- no problem putting my luggage on the seat next to me. And we make pretty good time -- not a lot of people waiting at bus stops at 6am, and the traffic is pretty clear too. All told, we stop maybe 6 times and have 8 people on the bus at its most crowded.  I had to wait another 5 minutes for the L and, at 6:40, it was more crowded; almost everyone had an ORD badge around their neck -- pilots, flight attendants, ground staff -- except for a few passenger-looking folk like me. All told, it took me about an hour -- maybe 10 minutes longer than Uber and Lyft were quoting. But at $2.50 vs. $60 or $120, it seemed like I made out on the deal.</li><li>Also in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/06/16/podcast-152-overwhelming-travel-new-old-restaurant-trends/\">episode 152</a>, I talked about “earning and burning” frequent traveler points rather than saving them because airlines and hotels keep playing with redemption levels and rules that reduce the value of the points. Jim McDonough tweeted me with a contra view -<ul><li>Regarding frequent flyer miles and how they don\'t appreciate over time - I still like to keep some around in case we need to travel for family emergency situations. The walk-up fare does not compete with the $25 charge to book a frequent flyer mile ticket last minute.</li></ul></li><li>Jim, that’s a good point, but I wonder if that strategy still works as more airlines move from fixed awards schedules to dynamic point pricing -- Southwest, Delta, and soon United -- where point price for a flight climes as remaining ticket prices do. Does it still make sense to pay with points?</li><li>As I said earlier, Irene and I are heading out Thursday night for a weekend in Krakow, Poland and then heading down to Budapest for a mix of touring and visits with Irene’s family. So, I thought this was as good a time as any to try out <a href=\"https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT209044\">my iPhone’s dual SIM capability.</a> Up to now, my usual procedure is to transfer my US AT&amp;T SIM to an old HTC One phone and then put my UK EE SIM in my iPhone Xs (usually sometime in flight in that panic drill between them clearing the breakfast tray and packing everything up for final descent) if I’m going to an EU country or when I pick one up after we land. I do this because local data is <em>hugely</em> cheaper than an AT&amp;T international plan - the EE pay-as-you-go plan I got is £10, or $12 with this week’s Brexit exchange rate discount, for 3 GB of data, 100 minutes of voice, and unlimited texts. But I still want my US number to ring thru in case someone back home needs to reach me and doesn’t know I’m out of the country. I don’t carry both phones with me, though. I have the iPhone with me during the day, using the local SIM to run Google Maps and the like. The HTC stays in the hotel room and I check it for messages when we get back at night.</li><li>But with its dual SIM capabilities, I should be able to do this with just my iPhone. However, the iPhone has only one physical SIM slot; the second is an internal eSIM, like the ones Apple uses in their cellular Apple Watch. So to make this work, I had to get AT&amp;T to transfer my US number from its physical SIM to the eSIM in the phone. My first stop was the local AT&amp;T store. I explained to the store guy what I wanted to do. He looked at me for a moment and said, “Uh, I’m new; I don’t know how to do that. But I can give you an eSIM card if you want.” OK, that’s a start. He riffled around his desk drawer. “I don’t have one here. I’ll have to go in the back. But I’m the only one here today, so you’ll have to go outside so I can lock up while I’m in the back.” Interesting. I walked down the street to grab a bite rather than idle outside the door. I came back. He handed me the card, “Here you go, but I don’t know if this will work…” I went home and hit the AT&amp;T web site. I spelunked around the site until I found the chat link and fired it up. The person on the other end knew what needed to be done. I gave her a few numbers off the card, then pointed the camera at the card’s QR code and it added to plan to my iPhone. Now, the chat agent said that they’ll have to do a bit of provisioning at the back end. She’d text me when it was done. Irene and I went out to dinner; no text and no activation. So the next morning, I hit chat again and this time stuck with the guy until the provisioning was complete. Then I pulled out the AT&amp;T SIM and put in the EE SIM, and immediately got a text from EE telling me their US roaming charges. I also got a whole new set of selections under the Cellular section under Settings. Which line did I want to use for voice, for data, for iMessage and FaceTime. I spent some time on Apple’s FAQ pages trying to figure out which scenario works for me. My guess is that it’ll take me a bit of trial and error -- and self-inflected AT&amp;T international charges -- to really figure this out.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com. </li><li>Bridge Music —  &nbsp; Fall to pieces - Silence by mika (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mika/24945 Ft: Colab      </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Will We Still Love Uber When The Prices Go Up?</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><a href=\"https://www.reuters.com/article/us-lyft-results/lyft-sees-ride-hailing-price-war-easing-sending-uber-and-lyft-shares-up-idUSKCN1UX2BQ\">Lyft’s chief financial officer Brian Roberts said, during last week’s earnings call, that pricing was becoming “more rational.”</a> “Rational pricing” is CFO-speak for “more predictably higher.” <a href=\"https://www.marketwatch.com/story/lyft-and-uber-are-giving-investors-what-they-want-which-is-bad-for-the-rest-of-us-2019-08-08\">Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, during his earnings call, said, “We and Lyft are big-time competitors here and have been for some period of time, but for now we’re seeing, generally, category positions that are stable. We are focused on improving profitability in this market.”</a>&nbsp; Which is CEO-speak for “we’re no longer going to slash prices to buy market share.”</li><li>We all knew this time would come -- at least the rational ones. Uber lost $5.2 billion in the second quarter while the smaller Lyft lost a mere $644 million last quarter. Investors are going to let you torch large piles of cash for only so long. Hence the topic question -- will we stay with Uber and Lyft even when they’re not a bargain anymore?</li><li>I’ve been talking about this with frequent travelers I know, or sit next to at bars, or bump into waiting for an Uber at O’Hare. One school of thought is that the Uber/Lyft experience is better than your typical cab, so even at the same price, you’d still order an Uber. You can order it on your phone rather than running into the street, trying to flag down a passing cab. Indeed, I’ve always said that, for me, Uber’s prime use case is getting a ride from midtown Manhattan to LGA at the end of the day a somewhat sane experience. Before Uber, I’d be practically dancing into 5th Ave, hiding my luggage behind a trash can because if a cabbie saw you wanted to go to LGA, they’d accelerate by you. I tried the cab company’s iPhone app last time I was in New York. It failed miserably.</li><li>Adding Uber and Lyft drivers to the transit mix means you can get a car ride from somewhere outside the usual downtown and tourist spots. I remember pre-Uber New Orleans, getting a cab anywhere other than between the airport and the French Quarter was near impossible. One night for dinner, we decided to go to a Mid-City restaurant, <a href=\"http://toupsmeatery.com/\">Toups Meatery</a>. Phenomenal place. The owner, Isaac Toups, later made it to the finals of the <em>Top Chef </em>cooking show. He didn’t win, but was voted “fan favorite”. And his food was our favorite too. The only problem -- getting a cab back to the Sheraton on Canal St from his Mid-City location. The hostess called 3 cab companies and we waited 20 minutes for a 15-minute ride. And that driver told us, “Yup, all most cab drivers want to do is make the easy money, driving between the airport and the hotels”</li><li>There’s also fare predictability -- you see the price to get from, say, downtown Chicago to O’Hare before committing to the ride. No more meter anxiety, watching the number run up in traffic. And the accompanying “Will I have enough cash to pay” or “Will this guy’s credit card machine work?” anxiety. With Uber and Lyft drivers following GPS apps, there’s no more “am I being taken the long way around to run up the meter” anxiety, or depending on your cab driver’s knowledge to take the fast way, or having them punt it to you with the “bridge or tunnel” question I often get from LGA cabs. The technology helps avoid a lot of the bad experiences we’ve had with taxi cab rides.</li><li>I used to say that Uber and Lyft cars are nicer, but their bar has slipped as they’re scrambling for drivers in a full-employment economy. An Uber I took last week was missing the door armrest; a Lyft that Irene took had the front right quarter-panel held on with duct tape. These are exceptions, though a bit more common that a couple of years ago. But they’re still a damn sight better than the beat-to-hell Baltimore cabs that would sit at the cab ranks in the Inner Harbor. I only did that once, because the cab rank was right outside the client’s building and I was late leaving for the airport. The back seat was full of old newspapers and other crap, and there was no air conditioning -- on a July afternoon. After that, I’d stand there, looking at the cabs, while waiting 5 minutes for an Uber to show up.</li><li>The place I most often take a cab rather than waiting for an Uber is the airport. And here, it’s not really about price, it’s convenience. The cab ranks are usually right at the terminal exit, while the rideshare pickup spot can be an Easter Egg hunt (Vegas), a 15-minute walk to the back 40 (Atlanta) or a confusing scrum of screaming traffic cops (Chicago Midway). Vegas and LGA especially -- catching a cab is so much easier than a rideshare. Here at CHO also -- it’s a flat rate into town that’s about the same as Uber and Lyft and the cabs are in decent shape, so if one’s there, there’s no reason to wait.</li><li>And I could be wrong, but it feels like the pricing discussion is mostly a US thing. <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/podcast-150-travel-interruptus/\">In Paris last Spring</a>, none of the Ubers were “rideshares”; they were all black car livery companies with professional drivers. Near as I could tell, Uber was just another dispatch system for them. In Lisbon a few years back, I couldn’t tell if they were true rideshares, but the pricing was the same as taxis, and there were more taxis so less wait. We took the path of least resistance and hailed cabs.</li><li>The rough consensus of my completely unrepresentative polling was - ride sharing got traction because it was cheaper, but now the technology gives such a better experience that I’d even pay a premium over a taxi -- but I wouldn’t want to tell Lyft or Uber that. But what they said on those earnings calls, I think they already know that.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #154</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_154.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<p><!--EndFragment--></p>','Podcast #154 — Will We Still Love Uber When The Prices Go Up?','','inherit','closed','closed','','2508-revision-v1','','','2019-08-16 12:16:01','2019-08-16 17:16:01','',2508,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/08/16/2508-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2527,1,'2019-09-20 14:00:32','2019-09-20 19:00:32','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\">\n<p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/IMG_1038.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2529 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/IMG_1038-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a></p>\n<figcaption>Polish health food</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p>Didn\'t have any problems with the 787\'s flying 4,800 miles to Krakow or back from Budapest, but the 560-mile regional jet flights between Chicago and Charlottesville, VA have been causing me no end of hassles. We talk about this, revisit our discussions about iPhone dual SIM capability and American Airlines\' MD-80 retirement. And then go deep on my very non-keto-friendly dive into Krakow and Budapest street food.  All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_155.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #155: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago on an off-travel week; taking a break this week after a couple of weeks of weather-induced hassles -- that in spite of completely avoiding Hurricane Dorian. Instead, it’s been a steady stream of morning thunderstorms hitting ORD and jacking it up for the rest of the day. That and flying regional jets, which we’ve said before, are often…. problematic. In the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/08/13/podcast-154-will-we-still-love-uber-when-the-prices-go-up/\">last episode</a>, I talked about having to shift my outbound evening flight from CHO to RIC because of morning thunderstorms at ORD. The last two weeks have been different variations on the theme. The Tuesday after Labor Day, I was on the bus to the L heading to ORD for an 8:30am flight (because the Uber and Lyft wait times were insane -- God, I miss my old Mongolian ex-taxi driver) when I got a text that my American Eagle flight was cancelled. Still on the bus, I called American’s Platinum line. They told me what I already knew -- no other American options until the end of the day. I told them that since I was coming home the next day (Weds), I needed to get to Charlottesville that morning. “What about the 9am United flight?” I asked her, “I’m already on my way to ORD.” “Let me call United to transfer the ticket,” she offered. I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised. Over the past few years, I’ve seen airlines more and more reluctant to lose \\ revenue by moving you to another carrier, but there was none of that coming from this American agent. Our call kept going as I got off the bus and walked down the stairs into the subway stop, but she got everything squared away. Now that United flight ended up being delayed an hour, but it eventually got me to Charlottesville.</li><li>Last Friday morning in Charlottesville, I woke up, and scrolling thru Twitter, saw <a href=\"https://twitter.com/NWSChicago\">NWS Chicago</a> -- Nat’l Weather Service -- tweeting about severe thunderstorms, so when I got the text from United at 9am delaying my 1pm flight 45 minutes, I wasn’t surprised. No big deal -- I’ll just get a second beer at the Radar Bar. But then, as these things tend to do it, it didn’t stop there. An hour later, another text from United -- the delay doubled to 90 minutes.  But then at noon, another text -- the delay is down to an hour -- shortly followed by another text -- it’s back up to 90 minutes. I pull up <a href=\"https://flightaware.com/\">FlightAware</a>; I’m not going to the airport until the inbound plane leaves the gate at ORD. Ten minutes later, I see it push back. OK, that should be the end of the delay cascade. I order an Uber and head to the airport. Halfway there, another text -- now my flight isn’t leaving until 3:30pm, 2½ hours late. Immediately followed by a text with a 3:57 departure time. I get out of the car and head to the gate agent. What’s going on? Has the plane left ORD yet? Unlike the American agent, the United agent -- or maybe she worked for Air Wisconsin, the United Express partner, is evasive -- don’t know what’s going on; no other options; everything else is oversold, even in Richmond. I back out of line and call United’s Premiere desk. Yes, there’s availability out of Richmond and DC. Richmond’s a little closer and has a helluva lot less of a rush hour, so I move over to the 5:30pm flight (the United agent said “I think you’re making the right decision”), book a one-way rental, and head out to the parking lot. There’s a mist starting to settle in over the airport. This can’t be good. It’s an uneventful 90-minute drive to Richmond. I sit at the Sam Adams Brewhouse bar and have a beer, and then another. This flight leaves on time -- it’s also a regional jet, but it’s been running up and down the East Coast, so today, it’s running on time -- getting me into ORD at 6:50pm, about 5 hours after my original flight was supposed to land. I fire up the United app and look up the status of that flight -- it still hasn’t left. It didn’t leave until 9pm and then only made it as far as Washington-Dulles -- 95 miles up the road.</li><li>Bridge Music —  &nbsp; I Will Writhe by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/26739 Ft: Soundprank </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>In contrast to my regional jet challenges, our trip at the end of August to Krakow and Budapest went much smoother. We flew LOT, the Polish airline, the whole way, including the last leg, BUD-ORD non-stop. I was kinda surprised by that leg -- a Transatlantic leg that didn’t go through Poland -- but there must be enough traffic on that route. A week before we left, American announced their own non-stop between ORD and BUD starting next year. Both airlines do/will use 787’s on the route. Perhaps it’s one of the “long, thin routes” that the 787 was designed to unlock. Anyways, all three flights on LOT -- 787’s on the long legs, and a Dash-8 prop job on the hop from Krakow to Budapest -- were reasonable. I thought the 787’s “morning wake-up” mode for breakfast -- where the cabin lights fade up while the darkened windows lighten -- was a pleasant change to usual “light on and PA announcement” approach. It was my first trip to Poland. Krakow Airport is nice -- new, compact, with train station into the city. It was a good trip.</li><li>I talked in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/08/13/podcast-154-will-we-still-love-uber-when-the-prices-go-up/\">last episode</a> about trying out my iPhone XS’s dual SIM capability in Hungary and Poland. I did the pre-work before I left -- working through a couple of chat sessions to move my US AT&amp;T number to the internal eSIM so I use the physical SIM slot for my UK EE pre-paid SIM. En route -- somewhere over the Faroe Islands I think -- I went into Settings and made my UK line the main voice and data line, leaving my US line open for phone calls and texts. It seemed to work as designed -- I replied to a couple of texts on my US line from my sister, but it looks like everything else went out over the UK line with the 3 GB for £10 plan. I’ll hold final judgement until I get this month’s bill from AT&amp;T, but from what I could see on their website, it looks like it worked. It was a nice change to only have one phone and not to have to remember to check my other phone every night. The new version of the iPhone operating system -- iOS 13 -- is supposed to have some improvements for dual SIM, but I was happy with it as it stands -- but check back with me after I get my AT&amp;T bill.</li><li>And, of course, I extend that 3 GB by hitting the WiFi in coffee shops and hotels, which is where we circle back to one of my top travel security tips -- use a VPN when on WiFi. I used to think that as long as I was hitting encrypted web sites I was OK -- it used to be that you’d see HTTPS in the address bar apparently Google and Apple think that’s too much for us to process; they’ve replaced it with a picture of a lock; Firefox still shows the full address, though. But it seems that more and more security breaches are taking advantage of obscure misconfigurations that get around basic security. And with major hotel chains regularly coughing up millions of credit card numbers, it seems a bit unreasonable to expect the staff at a small coffee shop or local hotel to be up-to-date on their router patching. So I have VPN clients on my iPhone, my Android tablet, and my MacBook Air. I usually forget to turn them on if I’m doing a quick check of Twitter or Google Maps while in line somewhere, but if I’m doing any sort of browsing session on public WiFi these days, I’ll fire it up.&nbsp;</li><li>Packing for this trip meant rummaging around for European plug adapters. Not voltage converters -- I don’t use them because all the electronics can handle 110 and 240 volt -- just the two blade-to-two round adapters. I’d rounded up my UK adapters for our June trip to Ireland and Scotland, but now I needed the European adapters -- the two round plug ones.&nbsp; I found the UK ones and a random South African one but I couldn’t find the European ones anywhere. Probably because I’d left them all behind in Brittany in March. So I got on Amazon (as one does when they need some random thing in a hurry) and ordered a box of 6. I only needed one, but given my history, 6 would keep me for a year or two. I ordered white adapters because that’s what popped up in Amazon. Which was OK in those hotels with black outlets, but not so great for white outlets. I took 2 and came home with 2, but only by sheer luck. At least twice, I was walking out of the room with my bag and only then noticed an adapter still plugged in, hiding in a recessed white outlet. I really need colored plug adapters. And not in tasteful colors; something gaudy, like a purple or pink or chartreuse. Maybe I’ll spray paint the ones I have before my next trip.&nbsp;</li><li>Leonard -- no last name -- commented on the last episode with a link to a Dallas TV station’s coverage of the last American Airlines MD-80 flight; appropriately flying from DFW to ORD, a route and a plane that contributed heavily to my Advantage Gold status -- when that was the highest level -- back in 1985. There’ve been a lot of stories covering the retirement; people waxing nostalgic -- though not too much since I haven’t heard of any big jump in Delta MD-80 bookings. They still fly almost 100 of them. I have seen a couple of quotes about not wanting to sit in the last rows because of the noise from the side-mounted engines. It’s true. Not even the Bose noise-cancelling headphones could handle all the engine and vibration noise. They were also bad seats because there were no windows; all you’d see would be the engine cowling and the window would make the noise even worse. And those times when I ended up in those seats -- usually last-minute bookings between ORD and DFW -- my mind would sometimes wander -- if the engine next to my head blows up, will the shrapnel blow out or blow into the cabin. I never heard of such a catastrophic failure on an MD-80 -- but that didn’t keep me from wondering.&nbsp;</li><li>Standing in the TSA PreCheck queue, watching the single screener who was checking boarding passes and IDs have to ping-pong between the regular and PreCheck lines, I wondered what was keeping US airports from installing the automated boarding pass-checking gates that I’ve passed thru at mid-sized European airports like Budapest and Krakow and Edinburgh. I got it -- they’re only checking for valid boarding passes; they’re not examining IDs -- but there’s got to be something there that can improve TSA efficiency <em>and</em> the traveler experience. Watching this poor woman, my mind fast-forwarded to October next year when the TSA starts enforcing the Real ID requirement, the time wasted arguing with people who travel maybe once a year and so didn’t go thru the additional hassle of getting a Real ID-compliant driver’s license. Note to self - don’t book any travel in October 2020. </li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com. </li><li>Bridge Music -- August (Reggae Rework) by el-B (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/elB/16075 Ft: Calendargirl </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Street Food in Poland and Hungary </strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Over-tourism is still a big topic in the tourism industry. Iceland seems to be cooling down after the Wow Air bankruptcy, but the photo from May of the queue to summit Mount Everest has become the new icon of the problem faced there and at places like Venice, Barcelona, and Machu Pichu. And it drives an interesting dichotomy -- travelers chasing the iconic Instagram picture -- sort of a virtual souvenir for this “pics or it didn’t happen” age -- while at the same time craving “authenticity” -- which is where, I think, the current glorification of street food is coming from. Wanting to experience something that you can only get in this place -- and, of course, post a picture of it.</li><li>Parking the cynicism for a sec -- if you’re queuing up (hopefully with some locals, not just tourists), doing the point-and-shoot ordering, and then eating it there on the street, it does create a very specific moment and memory. I vividly remember buying takoyaki, basically octopus croquettes, from a street vendor in Osaka; getting into the queue for a food stall in a Beijing hutong, the only non-Chinese guy, not knowing what for and getting this phenomenal crunchy scallion pancake; sending Andrew over to a vendor on a sidewalk in Hoi An, Vietnam for black sesame soup; folding up a slice of pizza in New York City in mid-bar crawl; and, as talked about a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/podcast-151-traveler-data-leaks-brittany-street-food/\">few episodes back</a>, slurping oysters on the Cancale sea wall on the Brittany coast.</li><li>So while we weren’t on a street food hunt in Poland and Hungary, our willingness, actually desire to eat pretty much whatever we came across without any filters -- no worries about keto or paleo or gluten-free diets -- led us to some good street food -- even though there were days I really felt the need to double down on the statins.</li><li>Probably the most memorable bit of street food came our first day in Krakow. We landed around 9am, took a taxi to the hotel, checked in, brushed our teeth, and walked up to the Old Square where I trawled through the vendor stalls. I came to a full stop at a small stand at the end of an aisle. An older couple had a huge pan over a wood fire. The pan had a metal divider down the middle; one half of the pan was frying onions; the other half, sliced kielbasa. I watched a couple people order and then stepped up. The man sliced a large, thick piece of bread off a round loaf, spread a thick smear of lard with cracklings, put down a layer of sliced kielbasa, finishing it off with fried onions. All for 13 złoty -- or about 3 and a half bucks. I don’t know what left more of an impression -- the size and heft of what he handed me or the staying power of the layer of pork fat it left on my lips. I’ll put a picture of it in the show notes.</li><li>We walked straight from there to a small square behind St Mary’s Basilica for the pierogi festival. There were 20-30 stands selling their selection of pierogis. Not sure if pierogis strictly qualify as a street food, but I queued up at the most popular ones and did point-&amp;-shoot ordering through most of their selection. I skipped the sweet pierogis -- the chocolate-banana and the blueberry ones just didn’t say “pierogi” to me -- but I still ended up with 5-6 from each stand -- from traditional onion and potato, to goose and duck and wild boar-filled ones. I tried to avoid pointing at one stand’s Mexican pierogi, but somehow it ended up on my plate. This was a pretty full-contact Day One. I needed a nap.</li><li>Chicago has a large Polish population -- somewhere in the range of 1-1.5 million Polish immigrants their descendants in the metro area, which, depending on who you read, is the largest Polish metropolitan area outside of Poland. So we get our share of Polish food and I wanted to try a few things I recognized. The first thing we hunted down was a pączki -- basically a Polish jelly doughnut. In Chicago, Pączki Day is Fat Tuesday and you see pączkis everywhere -- the grocery stores, bakeries. Asking around, Gorące Pączki -- “Hot Donuts” in English -- was the consensus recommendation in the Old Town. We rolled up there a couple of times and came away, I gotta say, disappointed. Even Chicago grocery store pączkis are better.</li><li>That weekend, we were staying with friends in the hills/mountains a couple of hours southwest of Krakow, down near the Czech and Slovakian borders. On Sunday, we went to a karczma for lunch, which as near as I could tell is a roadside pub/restaurant. But this one, the specialty was potato pancakes made in a wood-burning oven. One guy, the owner, was running the oven -- laying the pancake batter in the oven, shifting them around with a spatula, managing the fire, serving some pancakes flat while stuffing and folding others over like a potato pancake quesadilla. Watching this guy was like watching kitchen ballet. And the product -- like no potato pancake I’d ever had. Definitely beat out Chicago on this one.</li><li>We got into Budapest on St Stephen’s Day, Hungary’s biggest national holiday commemorating the founding of the Hungarian state; kinda like their version of the US Independence Day. After checking into our hotel, we walked over to the Buda side of the Danube where there was a huge food festival. The longest line was for the national cake. Apparently, they do a special cake each St Stephen’s Day. It was a really long line, but they were handing out free pieces of cake, so it was understandable. We skipped it though and went for the next longest line, for freshly fried lángos. Every culture seems to have some version of fried dough street food, and lángos is Hungary’s, though lángos is savory, not sweet. It was a hot day, but here was a booth full of women, hand stretching balls of dough into disks and dropping them into deep pans of hot oil for people waiting 15 minutes in the hot sun for them. The fully-dressed lángos was brushed with garlic and then topped with sour cream and shredded cheese. Still waddling from the weekend in Krakow, I went for the lite version -- just the garlic.&nbsp;</li><li>A couple of days later, Irene and I took a 40-minute train ride up along the Danube to Szentendre, a bit of an artist colony town. We hadn’t been up there in, I dunno, 20 years so we thought we’d check it out again. And top on our list of things to revisit was a little lángos shack tucked away halfway up a little stairway that goes from the town square up to the Catholic church on top of a hill. The last time we were in Szentendre, we tripped across this place walking up to the church - just a couple of people frying up lángos. It took us a bit to find the staircase this time -- it’s about a person-and-a-half wide archway next to a souvenir shop. The shack was still there, but it expanded, now with tables in a little courtyard, and it’s been found. We stood in a queue of tourists for 10-15 minutes watching 2 women crank out fried disks of dough. I cringed when I saw people putting ketchup on their lángos. We stayed pure with the garlic.</li><li>The <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/06/24/podcast-130-notes-from-hungary/\">last time</a> Irene and I were in Hungary, in 2017, we complained about not being able to find good, basic Hungarian food outside of the tourist traps. We saw lots of burger bars and pizza joint, especially in the Jewish Quarter, the party district where all the ruin bars are. But now, things seem to have diversified. Not far from Szimpla Kert, Ground Zero of the ruin bar circuit, there’s a place called Gettó Gulyás selling, well, gulyás and other Hungarian basics like chicken paprikas. And even better, it looks like there’s a bit of a chain called Langosh that’s open in the party district til 2 in the morning. Fried bread and beer -- not sure there’s any better definition of street food.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #155</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_155.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #155 — RJ Delays; Street Food in Poland and Hungary','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-155-rj-delays-street-food-in-poland-and-hungary','','','2021-10-01 11:48:35','2021-10-01 16:48:35','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=2527',0,'post','',0),
(2528,1,'2019-09-19 22:46:21','2019-09-20 03:46:21','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\">\n<p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/666C6507-4DEA-4808-9C1B-D3F828805BC8.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2521 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/666C6507-4DEA-4808-9C1B-D3F828805BC8-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a></p>\n<figcaption>The moment of truth</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p>Breaking out the mobile rig to record this episode in the Residence Inn in downtown Charlottesville, VA. Summer storms let me test Freebird\'s re-booking service, I wrestle with AT&amp;T so I can use my iPhone\'s dual SIM capability on my trip to Krakow and Budapest, booking more relaxed flight itineraries lets me call an audible when Uber and Lyft prices surge into the stratosphere, which gets me thinking -- will we still love those rideshare companies when they\'re no longer cheaper than taxis?  All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_155.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"300\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/666005807&color=%23ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true&visual=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #155: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago on an off-travel week; taking a break this week after a couple of weeks of weather-induced hassles -- that in spite of completely avoiding Hurricane Dorian. Instead, it’s been a steady stream of morning thunderstorms hitting ORD and jacking it up for the rest of the day. That and flying regional jets, which we’ve said before, are often…. problematic. In the last episode, I talked about having to shift my outbound evening flight from CHO to RIC because of morning thunderstorms at ORD. The last two weeks have been different variations on the theme. The Tuesday after Labor Day, I was on the bus to the L heading to ORD for an 8:30am flight (because the Uber and Lyft wait times were insane -- God, I miss my old Mongolian ex-taxi driver) when I got a text that my American Eagle flight was cancelled. Still on the bus, I called American’s Platinum line. They told me what I already knew -- no other American options until the end of the day. I told them that since I was coming home the next day (Weds), I needed to get to Charlottesville that morning. “What about the 9am United flight?” I asked her, “I’m already on my way to ORD.” “Let me call United to transfer the ticket,” she offered. I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised. Over the past few years, I’ve seen airlines more and more reluctant to lose \\ revenue by moving you to another carrier, but there was none of that coming from this American agent. Our call kept going as I got off the bus and walked down the stairs into the subway stop, but she got everything squared away. Now that United flight ended up being delayed an hour, but it eventually got me to Charlottesville.</li><li>Last Friday morning in Charlottesville, I woke up, and scrolling thru Twitter, saw <a href=\"https://twitter.com/NWSChicago\">NWS Chicago</a> -- Nat’l Weather Service -- tweeting about severe thunderstorms, so when I got the text from United at 9am delaying my 1pm flight 45 minutes, I wasn’t surprised. No big deal -- I’ll just get a second beer at the Radar Bar. But then, as these things tend to do it, it didn’t stop there. An hour later, another text from United -- the delay doubled to 90 minutes.  But then at noon, another text -- the delay is down to an hour -- shortly followed by another text -- it’s back up to 90 minutes. I pull up FlightAware; I’m not going to the airport until the inbound plane leaves the gate at ORD. Ten minutes later, I see it push back. OK, that should be the end of the delay cascade. I order an Uber and head to the airport. Halfway there, another text -- now my flight isn’t leaving until 3:30pm, 2½ hours late. Immediately followed by a text with a 3:57 departure time. I get out of the car and head to the gate agent. What’s going on? Has the plane left ORD yet? Unlike the American agent, the United agent -- or maybe she worked for Air Wisconsin, the United Express partner, is evasive -- don’t know what’s going on; no other options; everything else is oversold, even in Richmond. I back out of line and call United’s Premiere desk. Yes, there’s availability out of Richmond and DC. Richmond’s a little closer and has a helluva lot less of a rush hour, so I move over to the 5:30pm flight (the United agent said “I think you’re making the right decision”), book a one-way rental, and head out to the parking lot. There’s a mist starting to settle in over the airport. This can’t be good. It’s an uneventful 90-minute drive to Richmond. I sit at the Sam Adams Brewhouse bar and have a beer, and then another. This flight leaves on time -- it’s also a regional jet, but it’s been running up and down the East Coast, so today, it’s running on time -- getting me into ORD at 6:50pm, about 5 hours after my original flight was supposed to land. I fire up the United app and look up the status of that flight -- it still hasn’t left. It didn’t leave until 9pm and then only made it as far as Washington-Dulles -- 95 miles up the road.</li><li>Bridge Music -- One for Me by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/21492 Ft: Haskel  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>In contrast to my regional jet challenges, our trip at the end of August to Krakow and Budapest went much smoother. We flew LOT, the Polish airline, the whole way, including the last leg, BUD-ORD non-stop. I was kinda surprised by that leg -- a Transatlantic leg that didn’t go through Poland -- but there must be enough traffic on that route. A week before we left, American announced their own non-stop between ORD and BUD starting next year. Both airlines do/will use 787’s on the route. Perhaps it’s one of the “long, thin routes” that the 787 was designed to unlock. Anyways, all three flights on LOT -- 787’s on the long legs, and a Dash-8 prop job on the hop from Krakow to Budapest -- were reasonable. I thought the 787’s “morning wake-up” mode for breakfast -- where the cabin lights fade up while the darkened windows lighten -- was a pleasant change to usual “light on and PA announcement” approach. It was my first trip to Poland. Krakow Airport is nice -- new, compact, with train station into the city. It was a good trip.</li><li>I talked in the last episode about trying out my iPhone XS’s dual SIM capability in Hungary and Poland. I did the pre-work before I left -- working through a couple of chat sessions to move my US AT&amp;T number to the internal eSIM so I use the physical SIM slot for my UK EE pre-paid SIM. En route -- somewhere over the Faroe Islands I think -- I went into Settings and made my UK line the main voice and data line, leaving my US line open for phone calls and texts. It seemed to work as designed -- I replied to a couple of texts on my US line from my sister, but it looks like everything else went out over the UK line with the 3 GB for £10 plan. I’ll hold final judgement until I get this month’s bill from AT&amp;T, but from what I could see on their website, it looks like it worked. It was a nice change to only have one phone and not to have to remember to check my other phone every night. The new version of the iPhone operating system -- iOS 13 -- is supposed to have some improvements for dual SIM, but I was happy with it as it stands -- but check back with me after I get my AT&amp;T bill.</li><li>And, of course, I extend that 3 GB by hitting the WiFi in coffee shops and hotels, which is where we circle back to one of my top travel security tips -- use a VPN when on WiFi. I used to think that as long as I was hitting encrypted web sites I was OK -- it used to be that you’d see HTTPS in the address bar apparently Google and Apple think that’s too much for us to process; they’ve replaced it with a picture of a lock; Firefox still shows the full address, though. But it seems that more and more security breaches are taking advantage of obscure misconfigurations that get around basic security. And with major hotel chains regularly coughing up millions of credit card numbers, it seems a bit unreasonable to expect the staff at a small coffee shop or local hotel to be up-to-date on their router patching. So I have VPN clients on my iPhone, my Android tablet, and my MacBook Air. I usually forget to turn them on if I’m doing a quick check of Twitter or Google Maps while in line somewhere, but if I’m doing any sort of browsing session on public WiFi these days, I’ll fire it up. </li><li>Packing for this trip meant rummaging around for European plug adapters. Not voltage converters -- I don’t use them because all the electronics can handle 110 and 240 volt -- just the two blade-to-two round adapters. I’d rounded up my UK adapters for our June trip to Ireland and Scotland, but now I needed the European adapters -- the two round plug ones.  I found the UK ones and a random South African one but I couldn’t find the European ones anywhere. Probably because I’d left them all behind in Brittany in March. So I got on Amazon (as one does when they need some random thing in a hurry) and ordered a box of 6. I only needed one, but given my history, 6 would keep me for a year or two. I ordered white adapters because that’s what popped up in Amazon. Which was OK in those hotels with black outlets, but not so great for white outlets. I took 2 and came home with 2, but only by sheer luck. At least twice, I was walking out of the room with my bag and only then noticed an adapter still plugged in, hiding in a recessed white outlet. I really need colored plug adapters. And not in tasteful colors; something gaudy, like a purple or pink or chartreuse. Maybe I’ll spray paint the ones I have before my next trip. </li><li>Leonard -- no last name -- commented on the last episode with a link to a Dallas TV station’s coverage of the last American Airlines MD-80 flight; appropriately flying from DFW to ORD, a route and a plane that contributed heavily to my Advantage Gold status -- when that was the highest level -- back in 1985. There’ve been a lot of stories covering the retirement; people waxing nostalgic -- though not too much since I haven’t heard of any big jump in Delta MD-80 bookings. They still fly almost 100 of them. I have seen a couple of quotes about not wanting to sit in the last rows because of the noise from the side-mounted engines. It’s true. Not even the Bose noise-cancelling headphones could handle all the engine and vibration noise. They were also bad seats because there were no windows; all you’d see would be the engine cowling and the window would make the noise even worse. And those times when I ended up in those seats -- usually last-minute bookings between ORD and DFW -- my mind would sometimes wander -- if the engine next to my head blows up, will the shrapnel blow out or blow into the cabin. I never heard of such a catastrophic failure on an MD-80 -- but that didn’t keep me from wondering. </li><li>Standing in the TSA PreCheck queue, watching the single screener who was checking boarding passes and IDs have to ping-pong between the regular and PreCheck lines, I wondered what was keeping US airports from installing the automated boarding pass-checking gates that I’ve passed thru at mid-sized European airports like Budapest and Krakow and Edinburgh. I got it -- they’re only checking for valid boarding passes; they’re not examining IDs -- but there’s got to be something there that can improve TSA efficiency <em>and</em> the traveler experience. Watching this poor woman, my mind fast-forwarded to October next year when the TSA starts enforcing the Real ID requirement, the time wasted arguing with people who travel maybe once a year and so didn’t go thru the additional hassle of getting a Real ID-compliant driver’s license. Note to self - don’t book any travel in October 2020. </li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com. <br>Bridge Music —    Fall to pieces - Silence by mika (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mika/24945 Ft: Colab  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Street Food in Poland and Hungary </strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Over-tourism is still a big topic in the tourism industry. Iceland seems to be cooling down after the Wow Air bankruptcy, but the photo from May of the queue to summit Mount Everest has become the new icon of the problem faced there and at places like Venice, Barcelona, and Machu Pichu. And it drives an interesting dichotomy -- travelers chasing the iconic Instagram picture -- sort of a virtual souvenir for this “pics or it didn’t happen” age -- while at the same time craving “authenticity” -- which is where, I think, the current glorification of street food is coming from. Wanting to experience something that you can only get in this place -- and, of course, post a picture of it.</li><li>Parking the cynicism for a sec -- if you’re queuing up (hopefully with some locals, not just tourists), doing the point-and-shoot ordering, and then eating it there on the street, it does create a very specific moment and memory. I vividly remember buying takoyaki, basically octopus croquettes, from a street vendor in Osaka; getting into the queue for a food stall in a Beijing hutong, the only non-Chinese guy, not knowing what for and getting this phenomenal crunchy scallion pancake; sending Andrew over to a vendor on a sidewalk in Hoi An, Vietnam for black sesame soup; folding up a slice of pizza in New York City in mid-bar crawl; and, as talked about a few episodes back, slurping oysters on the Cancale sea wall on the Brittany coast.</li><li>So while we weren’t on a street food hunt in Poland and Hungary, our willingness, actually desire to eat pretty much whatever we came across without any filters -- no worries about keto or paleo or gluten-free diets -- led us to some good street food -- even though there were days I really felt the need to double down on the statins.</li><li>Probably the most memorable bit of street food came our first day in Krakow. We landed around 9am, took a taxi to the hotel, checked in, brushed our teeth, and walked up to the Old Square where I trawled through the vendor stalls. I came to a full stop at a small stand at the end of an aisle. An older couple had a huge pan over a wood fire. The pan had a metal divider down the middle; one half of the pan was frying onions; the other half, sliced kielbasa. I watched a couple people order and then stepped up. The man sliced a large, thick piece of bread off a round loaf, spread a thick smear of lard with cracklings, put down a layer of sliced kielbasa, finishing it off with fried onions. All for 13 złoty -- or about 3 and a half bucks. I don’t know what left more of an impression -- the size and heft of what he handed me or the staying power of the layer of pork fat it left on my lips. I’ll put a picture of it in the show notes.</li><li>We walked straight from there to a small square behind St Mary’s Basilica for the pierogi festival. There were 20-30 stands selling their selection of pierogis. Not sure if pierogis strictly qualify as a street food, but I queued up at the most popular ones and did point-&amp;-shoot ordering through most of their selection. I skipped the sweet pierogis -- the chocolate-banana and the blueberry ones just didn’t say “pierogi” to me -- but I still ended up with 5-6 from each stand -- from traditional onion and potato, to goose and duck and wild boar-filled ones. I tried to avoid pointing at one stand’s Mexican pierogi, but somehow it ended up on my plate. This was a pretty full-contact Day One. I needed a nap.</li><li>Chicago has a large Polish population -- somewhere in the range of 1-1.5 million Polish immigrants their descendants in the metro area, which, depending on who you read, is the largest Polish metropolitan area outside of Poland. So we get our share of Polish food and I wanted to try a few things I recognized. The first thing we hunted down was a pączki -- basically a Polish jelly doughnut. In Chicago, Pączki Day is Fat Tuesday and you see pączkis everywhere -- the grocery stores, bakeries. Asking around, Gorące Pączki -- “Hot Donuts” in English -- was the consensus recommendation in the Old Town. We rolled up there a couple of times and came away, I gotta say, disappointed. Even Chicago grocery store pączkis are better.</li><li>That weekend, we were staying with friends in the hills/mountains a couple of hours southwest of Krakow, down near the Czech and Slovakian borders. On Sunday, we went to a karczma for lunch, which as near as I could tell is a roadside pub/restaurant. But this one, the specialty was potato pancakes made in a wood-burning oven. One guy, the owner, was running the oven -- laying the pancake batter in the oven, shifting them around with a spatula, managing the fire, serving some pancakes flat while stuffing and folding others over like a potato pancake quesadilla. Watching this guy was like watching kitchen ballet. And the product -- like no potato pancake I’d ever had. Definitely beat out Chicago on this one.</li><li>We got into Budapest on St Stephen’s Day, Hungary’s biggest national holiday commemorating the founding of the Hungarian state; kinda like their version of the US Independence Day. After checking into our hotel, we walked over to the Buda side of the Danube where there was a huge food festival. The longest line was for the national cake. Apparently, they do a special cake each St Stephen’s Day. It was a really long line, but they were handing out free pieces of cake, so it was understandable. We skipped it though and went for the next longest line, for freshly fried lángos. Every culture seems to have some version of fried dough street food, and lángos is Hungary’s, though lángos is savory, not sweet. It was a hot day, but here was a booth full of women, hand stretching balls of dough into disks and dropping them into deep pans of hot oil for people waiting 15 minutes in the hot sun for them. The fully-dressed lángos was brushed with garlic and then topped with sour cream and shredded cheese. Still waddling from the weekend in Krakow, I went for the lite version -- just the garlic. </li><li>A couple of days later, Irene and I took a 40-minute train ride up along the Danube to Szentendre, a bit of an artist colony town. We hadn’t been up there in, I dunno, 20 years so we thought we’d check it out again. And top on our list of things to revisit was a little lángos shack tucked away halfway up a little stairway that goes from the town square up to the Catholic church on top of a hill. The last time we were in Szentendre, we tripped across this place walking up to the church - just a couple of people frying up lángos. It took us a bit to find the staircase this time -- it’s about a person-and-a-half wide archway next to a souvenir shop. The shack was still there, but it expanded, now with tables in a little courtyard, and it’s been found. We stood in a queue of tourists for 10-15 minutes watching 2 women crank out fried disks of dough. I cringed when I saw people putting ketchup on their lángos. We stayed pure with the garlic.</li><li>The last time Irene and I were in Hungary, in 2017, we complained about not being able to find good, basic Hungarian food outside of the tourist traps. We saw lots of burger bars and pizza joint, especially in the Jewish Quarter, the party district where all the ruin bars are. But now, things seem to have diversified. Not far from Szimpla Kert, Ground Zero of the ruin bar circuit, there’s a place called Gettó Gulyás selling, well, gulyás and other Hungarian basics like chicken paprikas. And even better, it looks like there’s a bit of a chain called Langosh that’s open in the party district til 2 in the morning. Fried bread and beer -- not sure there’s any better definition of street food.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #155</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_155.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #155 — RJ Delays; Street Food in Poland and Hungary','','inherit','closed','closed','','2527-revision-v1','','','2019-09-19 22:46:21','2019-09-20 03:46:21','',2527,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/09/19/2527-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2529,1,'2019-09-19 22:49:28','2019-09-20 03:49:28','','IMG_1038','','inherit','open','closed','','img_1038','','','2019-09-19 22:49:28','2019-09-20 03:49:28','',2527,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/IMG_1038.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(2530,1,'2019-09-19 22:53:37','2019-09-20 03:53:37','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\">\n<p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/IMG_1038.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2529 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/IMG_1038-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a></p>\n<figcaption>Polish health food</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p>Breaking out the mobile rig to record this episode in the Residence Inn in downtown Charlottesville, VA. Summer storms let me test Freebird\'s re-booking service, I wrestle with AT&amp;T so I can use my iPhone\'s dual SIM capability on my trip to Krakow and Budapest, booking more relaxed flight itineraries lets me call an audible when Uber and Lyft prices surge into the stratosphere, which gets me thinking -- will we still love those rideshare companies when they\'re no longer cheaper than taxis?  All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_155.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"300\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/666005807&color=%23ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true&visual=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #155: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago on an off-travel week; taking a break this week after a couple of weeks of weather-induced hassles -- that in spite of completely avoiding Hurricane Dorian. Instead, it’s been a steady stream of morning thunderstorms hitting ORD and jacking it up for the rest of the day. That and flying regional jets, which we’ve said before, are often…. problematic. In the last episode, I talked about having to shift my outbound evening flight from CHO to RIC because of morning thunderstorms at ORD. The last two weeks have been different variations on the theme. The Tuesday after Labor Day, I was on the bus to the L heading to ORD for an 8:30am flight (because the Uber and Lyft wait times were insane -- God, I miss my old Mongolian ex-taxi driver) when I got a text that my American Eagle flight was cancelled. Still on the bus, I called American’s Platinum line. They told me what I already knew -- no other American options until the end of the day. I told them that since I was coming home the next day (Weds), I needed to get to Charlottesville that morning. “What about the 9am United flight?” I asked her, “I’m already on my way to ORD.” “Let me call United to transfer the ticket,” she offered. I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised. Over the past few years, I’ve seen airlines more and more reluctant to lose \\ revenue by moving you to another carrier, but there was none of that coming from this American agent. Our call kept going as I got off the bus and walked down the stairs into the subway stop, but she got everything squared away. Now that United flight ended up being delayed an hour, but it eventually got me to Charlottesville.</li><li>Last Friday morning in Charlottesville, I woke up, and scrolling thru Twitter, saw <a href=\"https://twitter.com/NWSChicago\">NWS Chicago</a> -- Nat’l Weather Service -- tweeting about severe thunderstorms, so when I got the text from United at 9am delaying my 1pm flight 45 minutes, I wasn’t surprised. No big deal -- I’ll just get a second beer at the Radar Bar. But then, as these things tend to do it, it didn’t stop there. An hour later, another text from United -- the delay doubled to 90 minutes.  But then at noon, another text -- the delay is down to an hour -- shortly followed by another text -- it’s back up to 90 minutes. I pull up FlightAware; I’m not going to the airport until the inbound plane leaves the gate at ORD. Ten minutes later, I see it push back. OK, that should be the end of the delay cascade. I order an Uber and head to the airport. Halfway there, another text -- now my flight isn’t leaving until 3:30pm, 2½ hours late. Immediately followed by a text with a 3:57 departure time. I get out of the car and head to the gate agent. What’s going on? Has the plane left ORD yet? Unlike the American agent, the United agent -- or maybe she worked for Air Wisconsin, the United Express partner, is evasive -- don’t know what’s going on; no other options; everything else is oversold, even in Richmond. I back out of line and call United’s Premiere desk. Yes, there’s availability out of Richmond and DC. Richmond’s a little closer and has a helluva lot less of a rush hour, so I move over to the 5:30pm flight (the United agent said “I think you’re making the right decision”), book a one-way rental, and head out to the parking lot. There’s a mist starting to settle in over the airport. This can’t be good. It’s an uneventful 90-minute drive to Richmond. I sit at the Sam Adams Brewhouse bar and have a beer, and then another. This flight leaves on time -- it’s also a regional jet, but it’s been running up and down the East Coast, so today, it’s running on time -- getting me into ORD at 6:50pm, about 5 hours after my original flight was supposed to land. I fire up the United app and look up the status of that flight -- it still hasn’t left. It didn’t leave until 9pm and then only made it as far as Washington-Dulles -- 95 miles up the road.</li><li>Bridge Music -- One for Me by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/21492 Ft: Haskel  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>In contrast to my regional jet challenges, our trip at the end of August to Krakow and Budapest went much smoother. We flew LOT, the Polish airline, the whole way, including the last leg, BUD-ORD non-stop. I was kinda surprised by that leg -- a Transatlantic leg that didn’t go through Poland -- but there must be enough traffic on that route. A week before we left, American announced their own non-stop between ORD and BUD starting next year. Both airlines do/will use 787’s on the route. Perhaps it’s one of the “long, thin routes” that the 787 was designed to unlock. Anyways, all three flights on LOT -- 787’s on the long legs, and a Dash-8 prop job on the hop from Krakow to Budapest -- were reasonable. I thought the 787’s “morning wake-up” mode for breakfast -- where the cabin lights fade up while the darkened windows lighten -- was a pleasant change to usual “light on and PA announcement” approach. It was my first trip to Poland. Krakow Airport is nice -- new, compact, with train station into the city. It was a good trip.</li><li>I talked in the last episode about trying out my iPhone XS’s dual SIM capability in Hungary and Poland. I did the pre-work before I left -- working through a couple of chat sessions to move my US AT&amp;T number to the internal eSIM so I use the physical SIM slot for my UK EE pre-paid SIM. En route -- somewhere over the Faroe Islands I think -- I went into Settings and made my UK line the main voice and data line, leaving my US line open for phone calls and texts. It seemed to work as designed -- I replied to a couple of texts on my US line from my sister, but it looks like everything else went out over the UK line with the 3 GB for £10 plan. I’ll hold final judgement until I get this month’s bill from AT&amp;T, but from what I could see on their website, it looks like it worked. It was a nice change to only have one phone and not to have to remember to check my other phone every night. The new version of the iPhone operating system -- iOS 13 -- is supposed to have some improvements for dual SIM, but I was happy with it as it stands -- but check back with me after I get my AT&amp;T bill.</li><li>And, of course, I extend that 3 GB by hitting the WiFi in coffee shops and hotels, which is where we circle back to one of my top travel security tips -- use a VPN when on WiFi. I used to think that as long as I was hitting encrypted web sites I was OK -- it used to be that you’d see HTTPS in the address bar apparently Google and Apple think that’s too much for us to process; they’ve replaced it with a picture of a lock; Firefox still shows the full address, though. But it seems that more and more security breaches are taking advantage of obscure misconfigurations that get around basic security. And with major hotel chains regularly coughing up millions of credit card numbers, it seems a bit unreasonable to expect the staff at a small coffee shop or local hotel to be up-to-date on their router patching. So I have VPN clients on my iPhone, my Android tablet, and my MacBook Air. I usually forget to turn them on if I’m doing a quick check of Twitter or Google Maps while in line somewhere, but if I’m doing any sort of browsing session on public WiFi these days, I’ll fire it up. </li><li>Packing for this trip meant rummaging around for European plug adapters. Not voltage converters -- I don’t use them because all the electronics can handle 110 and 240 volt -- just the two blade-to-two round adapters. I’d rounded up my UK adapters for our June trip to Ireland and Scotland, but now I needed the European adapters -- the two round plug ones.  I found the UK ones and a random South African one but I couldn’t find the European ones anywhere. Probably because I’d left them all behind in Brittany in March. So I got on Amazon (as one does when they need some random thing in a hurry) and ordered a box of 6. I only needed one, but given my history, 6 would keep me for a year or two. I ordered white adapters because that’s what popped up in Amazon. Which was OK in those hotels with black outlets, but not so great for white outlets. I took 2 and came home with 2, but only by sheer luck. At least twice, I was walking out of the room with my bag and only then noticed an adapter still plugged in, hiding in a recessed white outlet. I really need colored plug adapters. And not in tasteful colors; something gaudy, like a purple or pink or chartreuse. Maybe I’ll spray paint the ones I have before my next trip. </li><li>Leonard -- no last name -- commented on the last episode with a link to a Dallas TV station’s coverage of the last American Airlines MD-80 flight; appropriately flying from DFW to ORD, a route and a plane that contributed heavily to my Advantage Gold status -- when that was the highest level -- back in 1985. There’ve been a lot of stories covering the retirement; people waxing nostalgic -- though not too much since I haven’t heard of any big jump in Delta MD-80 bookings. They still fly almost 100 of them. I have seen a couple of quotes about not wanting to sit in the last rows because of the noise from the side-mounted engines. It’s true. Not even the Bose noise-cancelling headphones could handle all the engine and vibration noise. They were also bad seats because there were no windows; all you’d see would be the engine cowling and the window would make the noise even worse. And those times when I ended up in those seats -- usually last-minute bookings between ORD and DFW -- my mind would sometimes wander -- if the engine next to my head blows up, will the shrapnel blow out or blow into the cabin. I never heard of such a catastrophic failure on an MD-80 -- but that didn’t keep me from wondering. </li><li>Standing in the TSA PreCheck queue, watching the single screener who was checking boarding passes and IDs have to ping-pong between the regular and PreCheck lines, I wondered what was keeping US airports from installing the automated boarding pass-checking gates that I’ve passed thru at mid-sized European airports like Budapest and Krakow and Edinburgh. I got it -- they’re only checking for valid boarding passes; they’re not examining IDs -- but there’s got to be something there that can improve TSA efficiency <em>and</em> the traveler experience. Watching this poor woman, my mind fast-forwarded to October next year when the TSA starts enforcing the Real ID requirement, the time wasted arguing with people who travel maybe once a year and so didn’t go thru the additional hassle of getting a Real ID-compliant driver’s license. Note to self - don’t book any travel in October 2020. </li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com. <br>Bridge Music —    Fall to pieces - Silence by mika (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mika/24945 Ft: Colab  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Street Food in Poland and Hungary </strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Over-tourism is still a big topic in the tourism industry. Iceland seems to be cooling down after the Wow Air bankruptcy, but the photo from May of the queue to summit Mount Everest has become the new icon of the problem faced there and at places like Venice, Barcelona, and Machu Pichu. And it drives an interesting dichotomy -- travelers chasing the iconic Instagram picture -- sort of a virtual souvenir for this “pics or it didn’t happen” age -- while at the same time craving “authenticity” -- which is where, I think, the current glorification of street food is coming from. Wanting to experience something that you can only get in this place -- and, of course, post a picture of it.</li><li>Parking the cynicism for a sec -- if you’re queuing up (hopefully with some locals, not just tourists), doing the point-and-shoot ordering, and then eating it there on the street, it does create a very specific moment and memory. I vividly remember buying takoyaki, basically octopus croquettes, from a street vendor in Osaka; getting into the queue for a food stall in a Beijing hutong, the only non-Chinese guy, not knowing what for and getting this phenomenal crunchy scallion pancake; sending Andrew over to a vendor on a sidewalk in Hoi An, Vietnam for black sesame soup; folding up a slice of pizza in New York City in mid-bar crawl; and, as talked about a few episodes back, slurping oysters on the Cancale sea wall on the Brittany coast.</li><li>So while we weren’t on a street food hunt in Poland and Hungary, our willingness, actually desire to eat pretty much whatever we came across without any filters -- no worries about keto or paleo or gluten-free diets -- led us to some good street food -- even though there were days I really felt the need to double down on the statins.</li><li>Probably the most memorable bit of street food came our first day in Krakow. We landed around 9am, took a taxi to the hotel, checked in, brushed our teeth, and walked up to the Old Square where I trawled through the vendor stalls. I came to a full stop at a small stand at the end of an aisle. An older couple had a huge pan over a wood fire. The pan had a metal divider down the middle; one half of the pan was frying onions; the other half, sliced kielbasa. I watched a couple people order and then stepped up. The man sliced a large, thick piece of bread off a round loaf, spread a thick smear of lard with cracklings, put down a layer of sliced kielbasa, finishing it off with fried onions. All for 13 złoty -- or about 3 and a half bucks. I don’t know what left more of an impression -- the size and heft of what he handed me or the staying power of the layer of pork fat it left on my lips. I’ll put a picture of it in the show notes.</li><li>We walked straight from there to a small square behind St Mary’s Basilica for the pierogi festival. There were 20-30 stands selling their selection of pierogis. Not sure if pierogis strictly qualify as a street food, but I queued up at the most popular ones and did point-&amp;-shoot ordering through most of their selection. I skipped the sweet pierogis -- the chocolate-banana and the blueberry ones just didn’t say “pierogi” to me -- but I still ended up with 5-6 from each stand -- from traditional onion and potato, to goose and duck and wild boar-filled ones. I tried to avoid pointing at one stand’s Mexican pierogi, but somehow it ended up on my plate. This was a pretty full-contact Day One. I needed a nap.</li><li>Chicago has a large Polish population -- somewhere in the range of 1-1.5 million Polish immigrants their descendants in the metro area, which, depending on who you read, is the largest Polish metropolitan area outside of Poland. So we get our share of Polish food and I wanted to try a few things I recognized. The first thing we hunted down was a pączki -- basically a Polish jelly doughnut. In Chicago, Pączki Day is Fat Tuesday and you see pączkis everywhere -- the grocery stores, bakeries. Asking around, Gorące Pączki -- “Hot Donuts” in English -- was the consensus recommendation in the Old Town. We rolled up there a couple of times and came away, I gotta say, disappointed. Even Chicago grocery store pączkis are better.</li><li>That weekend, we were staying with friends in the hills/mountains a couple of hours southwest of Krakow, down near the Czech and Slovakian borders. On Sunday, we went to a karczma for lunch, which as near as I could tell is a roadside pub/restaurant. But this one, the specialty was potato pancakes made in a wood-burning oven. One guy, the owner, was running the oven -- laying the pancake batter in the oven, shifting them around with a spatula, managing the fire, serving some pancakes flat while stuffing and folding others over like a potato pancake quesadilla. Watching this guy was like watching kitchen ballet. And the product -- like no potato pancake I’d ever had. Definitely beat out Chicago on this one.</li><li>We got into Budapest on St Stephen’s Day, Hungary’s biggest national holiday commemorating the founding of the Hungarian state; kinda like their version of the US Independence Day. After checking into our hotel, we walked over to the Buda side of the Danube where there was a huge food festival. The longest line was for the national cake. Apparently, they do a special cake each St Stephen’s Day. It was a really long line, but they were handing out free pieces of cake, so it was understandable. We skipped it though and went for the next longest line, for freshly fried lángos. Every culture seems to have some version of fried dough street food, and lángos is Hungary’s, though lángos is savory, not sweet. It was a hot day, but here was a booth full of women, hand stretching balls of dough into disks and dropping them into deep pans of hot oil for people waiting 15 minutes in the hot sun for them. The fully-dressed lángos was brushed with garlic and then topped with sour cream and shredded cheese. Still waddling from the weekend in Krakow, I went for the lite version -- just the garlic. </li><li>A couple of days later, Irene and I took a 40-minute train ride up along the Danube to Szentendre, a bit of an artist colony town. We hadn’t been up there in, I dunno, 20 years so we thought we’d check it out again. And top on our list of things to revisit was a little lángos shack tucked away halfway up a little stairway that goes from the town square up to the Catholic church on top of a hill. The last time we were in Szentendre, we tripped across this place walking up to the church - just a couple of people frying up lángos. It took us a bit to find the staircase this time -- it’s about a person-and-a-half wide archway next to a souvenir shop. The shack was still there, but it expanded, now with tables in a little courtyard, and it’s been found. We stood in a queue of tourists for 10-15 minutes watching 2 women crank out fried disks of dough. I cringed when I saw people putting ketchup on their lángos. We stayed pure with the garlic.</li><li>The last time Irene and I were in Hungary, in 2017, we complained about not being able to find good, basic Hungarian food outside of the tourist traps. We saw lots of burger bars and pizza joint, especially in the Jewish Quarter, the party district where all the ruin bars are. But now, things seem to have diversified. Not far from Szimpla Kert, Ground Zero of the ruin bar circuit, there’s a place called Gettó Gulyás selling, well, gulyás and other Hungarian basics like chicken paprikas. And even better, it looks like there’s a bit of a chain called Langosh that’s open in the party district til 2 in the morning. Fried bread and beer -- not sure there’s any better definition of street food.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #155</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_155.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #155 — RJ Delays; Street Food in Poland and Hungary','','inherit','closed','closed','','2527-revision-v1','','','2019-09-19 22:53:37','2019-09-20 03:53:37','',2527,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/09/19/2527-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2531,1,'2019-09-19 23:00:19','2019-09-20 04:00:19','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\">\n<p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/IMG_1038.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2529 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/IMG_1038-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a></p><figcaption>Polish health food</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>Breaking out the mobile rig to record this episode in the Residence Inn in downtown Charlottesville, VA. Summer storms let me test Freebird\'s re-booking service, I wrestle with AT&amp;T so I can use my iPhone\'s dual SIM capability on my trip to Krakow and Budapest, booking more relaxed flight itineraries lets me call an audible when Uber and Lyft prices surge into the stratosphere, which gets me thinking -- will we still love those rideshare companies when they\'re no longer cheaper than taxis?&nbsp; All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_155.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"300\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/666005807&color=%23ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true&visual=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #155: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago on an off-travel week; taking a break this week after a couple of weeks of weather-induced hassles -- that in spite of completely avoiding Hurricane Dorian. Instead, it’s been a steady stream of morning thunderstorms hitting ORD and jacking it up for the rest of the day. That and flying regional jets, which we’ve said before, are often…. problematic. In the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/08/13/podcast-154-will-we-still-love-uber-when-the-prices-go-up/\">last episode</a>, I talked about having to shift my outbound evening flight from CHO to RIC because of morning thunderstorms at ORD. The last two weeks have been different variations on the theme. The Tuesday after Labor Day, I was on the bus to the L heading to ORD for an 8:30am flight (because the Uber and Lyft wait times were insane -- God, I miss my old Mongolian ex-taxi driver) when I got a text that my American Eagle flight was cancelled. Still on the bus, I called American’s Platinum line. They told me what I already knew -- no other American options until the end of the day. I told them that since I was coming home the next day (Weds), I needed to get to Charlottesville that morning. “What about the 9am United flight?” I asked her, “I’m already on my way to ORD.” “Let me call United to transfer the ticket,” she offered. I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised. Over the past few years, I’ve seen airlines more and more reluctant to lose \\ revenue by moving you to another carrier, but there was none of that coming from this American agent. Our call kept going as I got off the bus and walked down the stairs into the subway stop, but she got everything squared away. Now that United flight ended up being delayed an hour, but it eventually got me to Charlottesville.</li><li>Last Friday morning in Charlottesville, I woke up, and scrolling thru Twitter, saw <a href=\"https://twitter.com/NWSChicago\">NWS Chicago</a> -- Nat’l Weather Service -- tweeting about severe thunderstorms, so when I got the text from United at 9am delaying my 1pm flight 45 minutes, I wasn’t surprised. No big deal -- I’ll just get a second beer at the Radar Bar. But then, as these things tend to do it, it didn’t stop there. An hour later, another text from United -- the delay doubled to 90 minutes.  But then at noon, another text -- the delay is down to an hour -- shortly followed by another text -- it’s back up to 90 minutes. I pull up <a href=\"https://flightaware.com/\">FlightAware</a>; I’m not going to the airport until the inbound plane leaves the gate at ORD. Ten minutes later, I see it push back. OK, that should be the end of the delay cascade. I order an Uber and head to the airport. Halfway there, another text -- now my flight isn’t leaving until 3:30pm, 2½ hours late. Immediately followed by a text with a 3:57 departure time. I get out of the car and head to the gate agent. What’s going on? Has the plane left ORD yet? Unlike the American agent, the United agent -- or maybe she worked for Air Wisconsin, the United Express partner, is evasive -- don’t know what’s going on; no other options; everything else is oversold, even in Richmond. I back out of line and call United’s Premiere desk. Yes, there’s availability out of Richmond and DC. Richmond’s a little closer and has a helluva lot less of a rush hour, so I move over to the 5:30pm flight (the United agent said “I think you’re making the right decision”), book a one-way rental, and head out to the parking lot. There’s a mist starting to settle in over the airport. This can’t be good. It’s an uneventful 90-minute drive to Richmond. I sit at the Sam Adams Brewhouse bar and have a beer, and then another. This flight leaves on time -- it’s also a regional jet, but it’s been running up and down the East Coast, so today, it’s running on time -- getting me into ORD at 6:50pm, about 5 hours after my original flight was supposed to land. I fire up the United app and look up the status of that flight -- it still hasn’t left. It didn’t leave until 9pm and then only made it as far as Washington-Dulles -- 95 miles up the road.</li><li>Bridge Music -- One for Me by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/21492 Ft: Haskel  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>In contrast to my regional jet challenges, our trip at the end of August to Krakow and Budapest went much smoother. We flew LOT, the Polish airline, the whole way, including the last leg, BUD-ORD non-stop. I was kinda surprised by that leg -- a Transatlantic leg that didn’t go through Poland -- but there must be enough traffic on that route. A week before we left, American announced their own non-stop between ORD and BUD starting next year. Both airlines do/will use 787’s on the route. Perhaps it’s one of the “long, thin routes” that the 787 was designed to unlock. Anyways, all three flights on LOT -- 787’s on the long legs, and a Dash-8 prop job on the hop from Krakow to Budapest -- were reasonable. I thought the 787’s “morning wake-up” mode for breakfast -- where the cabin lights fade up while the darkened windows lighten -- was a pleasant change to usual “light on and PA announcement” approach. It was my first trip to Poland. Krakow Airport is nice -- new, compact, with train station into the city. It was a good trip.</li><li>I talked in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/08/13/podcast-154-will-we-still-love-uber-when-the-prices-go-up/\">last episode</a> about trying out my iPhone XS’s dual SIM capability in Hungary and Poland. I did the pre-work before I left -- working through a couple of chat sessions to move my US AT&amp;T number to the internal eSIM so I use the physical SIM slot for my UK EE pre-paid SIM. En route -- somewhere over the Faroe Islands I think -- I went into Settings and made my UK line the main voice and data line, leaving my US line open for phone calls and texts. It seemed to work as designed -- I replied to a couple of texts on my US line from my sister, but it looks like everything else went out over the UK line with the 3 GB for £10 plan. I’ll hold final judgement until I get this month’s bill from AT&amp;T, but from what I could see on their website, it looks like it worked. It was a nice change to only have one phone and not to have to remember to check my other phone every night. The new version of the iPhone operating system -- iOS 13 -- is supposed to have some improvements for dual SIM, but I was happy with it as it stands -- but check back with me after I get my AT&amp;T bill.</li><li>And, of course, I extend that 3 GB by hitting the WiFi in coffee shops and hotels, which is where we circle back to one of my top travel security tips -- use a VPN when on WiFi. I used to think that as long as I was hitting encrypted web sites I was OK -- it used to be that you’d see HTTPS in the address bar apparently Google and Apple think that’s too much for us to process; they’ve replaced it with a picture of a lock; Firefox still shows the full address, though. But it seems that more and more security breaches are taking advantage of obscure misconfigurations that get around basic security. And with major hotel chains regularly coughing up millions of credit card numbers, it seems a bit unreasonable to expect the staff at a small coffee shop or local hotel to be up-to-date on their router patching. So I have VPN clients on my iPhone, my Android tablet, and my MacBook Air. I usually forget to turn them on if I’m doing a quick check of Twitter or Google Maps while in line somewhere, but if I’m doing any sort of browsing session on public WiFi these days, I’ll fire it up. </li><li>Packing for this trip meant rummaging around for European plug adapters. Not voltage converters -- I don’t use them because all the electronics can handle 110 and 240 volt -- just the two blade-to-two round adapters. I’d rounded up my UK adapters for our June trip to Ireland and Scotland, but now I needed the European adapters -- the two round plug ones.  I found the UK ones and a random South African one but I couldn’t find the European ones anywhere. Probably because I’d left them all behind in Brittany in March. So I got on Amazon (as one does when they need some random thing in a hurry) and ordered a box of 6. I only needed one, but given my history, 6 would keep me for a year or two. I ordered white adapters because that’s what popped up in Amazon. Which was OK in those hotels with black outlets, but not so great for white outlets. I took 2 and came home with 2, but only by sheer luck. At least twice, I was walking out of the room with my bag and only then noticed an adapter still plugged in, hiding in a recessed white outlet. I really need colored plug adapters. And not in tasteful colors; something gaudy, like a purple or pink or chartreuse. Maybe I’ll spray paint the ones I have before my next trip. </li><li>Leonard -- no last name -- commented on the last episode with a link to a Dallas TV station’s coverage of the last American Airlines MD-80 flight; appropriately flying from DFW to ORD, a route and a plane that contributed heavily to my Advantage Gold status -- when that was the highest level -- back in 1985. There’ve been a lot of stories covering the retirement; people waxing nostalgic -- though not too much since I haven’t heard of any big jump in Delta MD-80 bookings. They still fly almost 100 of them. I have seen a couple of quotes about not wanting to sit in the last rows because of the noise from the side-mounted engines. It’s true. Not even the Bose noise-cancelling headphones could handle all the engine and vibration noise. They were also bad seats because there were no windows; all you’d see would be the engine cowling and the window would make the noise even worse. And those times when I ended up in those seats -- usually last-minute bookings between ORD and DFW -- my mind would sometimes wander -- if the engine next to my head blows up, will the shrapnel blow out or blow into the cabin. I never heard of such a catastrophic failure on an MD-80 -- but that didn’t keep me from wondering. </li><li>Standing in the TSA PreCheck queue, watching the single screener who was checking boarding passes and IDs have to ping-pong between the regular and PreCheck lines, I wondered what was keeping US airports from installing the automated boarding pass-checking gates that I’ve passed thru at mid-sized European airports like Budapest and Krakow and Edinburgh. I got it -- they’re only checking for valid boarding passes; they’re not examining IDs -- but there’s got to be something there that can improve TSA efficiency <em>and</em> the traveler experience. Watching this poor woman, my mind fast-forwarded to October next year when the TSA starts enforcing the Real ID requirement, the time wasted arguing with people who travel maybe once a year and so didn’t go thru the additional hassle of getting a Real ID-compliant driver’s license. Note to self - don’t book any travel in October 2020. </li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com. <br>Bridge Music —    Fall to pieces - Silence by mika (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mika/24945 Ft: Colab  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Street Food in Poland and Hungary </strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Over-tourism is still a big topic in the tourism industry. Iceland seems to be cooling down after the Wow Air bankruptcy, but the photo from May of the queue to summit Mount Everest has become the new icon of the problem faced there and at places like Venice, Barcelona, and Machu Pichu. And it drives an interesting dichotomy -- travelers chasing the iconic Instagram picture -- sort of a virtual souvenir for this “pics or it didn’t happen” age -- while at the same time craving “authenticity” -- which is where, I think, the current glorification of street food is coming from. Wanting to experience something that you can only get in this place -- and, of course, post a picture of it.</li><li>Parking the cynicism for a sec -- if you’re queuing up (hopefully with some locals, not just tourists), doing the point-and-shoot ordering, and then eating it there on the street, it does create a very specific moment and memory. I vividly remember buying takoyaki, basically octopus croquettes, from a street vendor in Osaka; getting into the queue for a food stall in a Beijing hutong, the only non-Chinese guy, not knowing what for and getting this phenomenal crunchy scallion pancake; sending Andrew over to a vendor on a sidewalk in Hoi An, Vietnam for black sesame soup; folding up a slice of pizza in New York City in mid-bar crawl; and, as talked about a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/podcast-151-traveler-data-leaks-brittany-street-food/\">few episodes back</a>, slurping oysters on the Cancale sea wall on the Brittany coast.</li><li>So while we weren’t on a street food hunt in Poland and Hungary, our willingness, actually desire to eat pretty much whatever we came across without any filters -- no worries about keto or paleo or gluten-free diets -- led us to some good street food -- even though there were days I really felt the need to double down on the statins.</li><li>Probably the most memorable bit of street food came our first day in Krakow. We landed around 9am, took a taxi to the hotel, checked in, brushed our teeth, and walked up to the Old Square where I trawled through the vendor stalls. I came to a full stop at a small stand at the end of an aisle. An older couple had a huge pan over a wood fire. The pan had a metal divider down the middle; one half of the pan was frying onions; the other half, sliced kielbasa. I watched a couple people order and then stepped up. The man sliced a large, thick piece of bread off a round loaf, spread a thick smear of lard with cracklings, put down a layer of sliced kielbasa, finishing it off with fried onions. All for 13 złoty -- or about 3 and a half bucks. I don’t know what left more of an impression -- the size and heft of what he handed me or the staying power of the layer of pork fat it left on my lips. I’ll put a picture of it in the show notes.</li><li>We walked straight from there to a small square behind St Mary’s Basilica for the pierogi festival. There were 20-30 stands selling their selection of pierogis. Not sure if pierogis strictly qualify as a street food, but I queued up at the most popular ones and did point-&amp;-shoot ordering through most of their selection. I skipped the sweet pierogis -- the chocolate-banana and the blueberry ones just didn’t say “pierogi” to me -- but I still ended up with 5-6 from each stand -- from traditional onion and potato, to goose and duck and wild boar-filled ones. I tried to avoid pointing at one stand’s Mexican pierogi, but somehow it ended up on my plate. This was a pretty full-contact Day One. I needed a nap.</li><li>Chicago has a large Polish population -- somewhere in the range of 1-1.5 million Polish immigrants their descendants in the metro area, which, depending on who you read, is the largest Polish metropolitan area outside of Poland. So we get our share of Polish food and I wanted to try a few things I recognized. The first thing we hunted down was a pączki -- basically a Polish jelly doughnut. In Chicago, Pączki Day is Fat Tuesday and you see pączkis everywhere -- the grocery stores, bakeries. Asking around, Gorące Pączki -- “Hot Donuts” in English -- was the consensus recommendation in the Old Town. We rolled up there a couple of times and came away, I gotta say, disappointed. Even Chicago grocery store pączkis are better.</li><li>That weekend, we were staying with friends in the hills/mountains a couple of hours southwest of Krakow, down near the Czech and Slovakian borders. On Sunday, we went to a karczma for lunch, which as near as I could tell is a roadside pub/restaurant. But this one, the specialty was potato pancakes made in a wood-burning oven. One guy, the owner, was running the oven -- laying the pancake batter in the oven, shifting them around with a spatula, managing the fire, serving some pancakes flat while stuffing and folding others over like a potato pancake quesadilla. Watching this guy was like watching kitchen ballet. And the product -- like no potato pancake I’d ever had. Definitely beat out Chicago on this one.</li><li>We got into Budapest on St Stephen’s Day, Hungary’s biggest national holiday commemorating the founding of the Hungarian state; kinda like their version of the US Independence Day. After checking into our hotel, we walked over to the Buda side of the Danube where there was a huge food festival. The longest line was for the national cake. Apparently, they do a special cake each St Stephen’s Day. It was a really long line, but they were handing out free pieces of cake, so it was understandable. We skipped it though and went for the next longest line, for freshly fried lángos. Every culture seems to have some version of fried dough street food, and lángos is Hungary’s, though lángos is savory, not sweet. It was a hot day, but here was a booth full of women, hand stretching balls of dough into disks and dropping them into deep pans of hot oil for people waiting 15 minutes in the hot sun for them. The fully-dressed lángos was brushed with garlic and then topped with sour cream and shredded cheese. Still waddling from the weekend in Krakow, I went for the lite version -- just the garlic. </li><li>A couple of days later, Irene and I took a 40-minute train ride up along the Danube to Szentendre, a bit of an artist colony town. We hadn’t been up there in, I dunno, 20 years so we thought we’d check it out again. And top on our list of things to revisit was a little lángos shack tucked away halfway up a little stairway that goes from the town square up to the Catholic church on top of a hill. The last time we were in Szentendre, we tripped across this place walking up to the church - just a couple of people frying up lángos. It took us a bit to find the staircase this time -- it’s about a person-and-a-half wide archway next to a souvenir shop. The shack was still there, but it expanded, now with tables in a little courtyard, and it’s been found. We stood in a queue of tourists for 10-15 minutes watching 2 women crank out fried disks of dough. I cringed when I saw people putting ketchup on their lángos. We stayed pure with the garlic.</li><li>The <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/06/24/podcast-130-notes-from-hungary/\">last time</a> Irene and I were in Hungary, in 2017, we complained about not being able to find good, basic Hungarian food outside of the tourist traps. We saw lots of burger bars and pizza joint, especially in the Jewish Quarter, the party district where all the ruin bars are. But now, things seem to have diversified. Not far from Szimpla Kert, Ground Zero of the ruin bar circuit, there’s a place called Gettó Gulyás selling, well, gulyás and other Hungarian basics like chicken paprikas. And even better, it looks like there’s a bit of a chain called Langosh that’s open in the party district til 2 in the morning. Fried bread and beer -- not sure there’s any better definition of street food.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #155</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_155.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #155 — RJ Delays; Street Food in Poland and Hungary','','inherit','closed','closed','','2527-revision-v1','','','2019-09-19 23:00:19','2019-09-20 04:00:19','',2527,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/09/19/2527-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2532,1,'2019-09-19 23:05:43','2019-09-20 04:05:43','[caption id=\"attachment_789\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"250\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/3300827223_3bea6ba1ff1.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-789 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/3300827223_3bea6ba1ff1-250x300.jpg\" alt=\"Train Crash at Montparnasse 1895\" width=\"250\" height=\"300\" /></a> Train Crash at Montparnasse 1895[/caption]\n\nInto the summer travel rhythm with a mix of vacation and business travel. Using an Apple iPad 2 and Samsung\'s new Galaxy Tab 10.1 Android tablet during this mix gave me enough real world experience to make some recommendations. A couple of recent web links describe this podcast as \"not as upbeat as others\" which is true, but because it focuses on traveling, not destinations. Perhaps this non-chipper attitude is partially explained by a recent study placing 4 US airline companies in the top 8 most hated companies in America. And a listener suggests ways to reduce roaming voice and data costs. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_92.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_92.mp3\"]\n\n<!--more-->\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the transcript from TravelCommons podcast #92:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Travel since the last podcast has been pretty evenly split between personal and business travel.  First couple of weeks was summer vacation in the UK -- the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Lake District\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_District\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Lake District</a>, Scotland, and a couple of days in London.  Had phenomenal weather the whole time we were there -- one afternoon of rain, and the rest of the time was warm and sunny.  Almost too warm for the clothes we packed. And everyone was amazed.  All the bed &amp; breakfast owners were marveling at the weather. “It’s luvly,” said our landlady in Edinburgh, “Last week it was hailing”. Lucky us because we certainly didn’t pack for that.</li>\n 	<li>Just to make sure I didn\'t forget we were on vacation, we stayed at bed &amp; breakfasts the whole time -- until we hit London, when I made the reservations. Actually, when I think about it, it’s not <em>all</em> that different from the service I get in the concierge lounges at big hotels. Breakfast comes with the room -- though the full cooked breakfast, complete with black puddling in England and haggis in Scotland, was a bit heartier than the continental breakfasts I normally get in concierge lounges.  And there’s a bit of nice chit-chat when we walk in, though the B&amp;B owners are typically a bit older/more <em>seasoned</em> that the typical lounge staff.  The main differences -- most hotels I stay in don’t have dogs living there, and they prefer credit cards over cash.</li>\n 	<li>Of course, back in the US, the weather’s been sweltering.  I was in South Florida a couple weeks ago and it was <em>cooler</em> there than Chicago.  But that wasn’t good enough, so last week, I was down in Phoenix, where it was hitting 105-107 degrees during the day and wasn’t getting below 100 any time while I was awake.</li>\n 	<li>Tough weather to take advantage of the convertible red Mustang that Avis was nice enough to upgrade me to.</li>\n 	<li>Wednesday night after dinner, though, I decided I just <em>had</em> to drop the top.  The dashboard said the external temperature was 102 -- and it felt it when I dropped that top.  Soon, though, I found that the key to driving top-down in 102 degrees is the pretty much the same as driving top-down in 55 degree weather. Set the fan to High and remember to have the knob set to A/C.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em>Crazy Love-The Alex &amp; Lang mix</em> by <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/djlang59/10579\">J.Lang</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Let’s take a run through the comment bag.</li>\n 	<li>Sarah, who’s been a listener since 2006, posted a comment on the website on <a title=\"Podcast #85 — Importance of Hotel Bathrooms; Maximizing Miles\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2010/11/30/podcast-85-importance-of-hotel-bathrooms-maximizing-miles/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">episode #85</a> (!) -- she says “I was playing catch up after all my driving trips this past two months.” In that episode, I talked about how the hotel industry seems to be focused on spiffing up their lobbies and putting whizzy new technology in the rooms, and that they were making a mistake ignoring what I think is critical to the hotel experience -- the bathroom.  Sarah says “I say ‘heck yeah’ to the bathroom being one of the most important parts of a stay.  I ended in a bed and breakfast in the middle of nowhere, with no wifi.  And the bathroom made me want to tell everyone about it. It had a hot tub and a beautifully large bathroom. But even though I knew no one who was going to the area, I wanted to tell everyone about it. It\'s the <a href=\"http://www.innatnewberlin.com/\">Inn in New Berlin, PA</a> (in case you care).”</li>\n 	<li>Sarah, thanks for the note -- and thanks for the pointer to the Inn in New Berlin.  I do think we look for luxurious touches in hotels. And it doesn’t have to be anything big.  The first thing my wife looks for in a hotel room is to see if there are robes in the bathroom.  It’s a helluva lot cheaper than a tricked-out media panel, and it makes a much bigger impression.</li>\n 	<li>Sarah’s comment about wanting to tell everyone about her find reminded me of some stats I saw a few days ago.  It said on average 24% of a hotel guests first heard about it from a friend or family member; 16% from a review site like <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"TripAdvisor\" href=\"http://www.tripadvisor.com\" rel=\"homepage\">TripAdvisor</a>. I would guess that if anyone could calculate the cost of creating an enthusiastic recommender like Sarah -- it would turn out to be a lot cheaper to do it with a great bathroom than a posh new lobby.</li>\n 	<li>Fast forwarding to <a title=\"Podcast #90 — More Comfortable Traveling in India; Tipping Towards Android?\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/05/22/podcast-90-more-comfortable-traveling-in-india-tipping-towards-android/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">episode #90</a>, Andrew Gill left a comment on the TravelCommons Facebook wall\n<ul>\n 	<li>Thanks for podcast #90, it\'s great to hear how 170 degrees isn\'t as comfortable as fully flat when my company has a different approach to travel. UK to Australia in Economy has to be tried</li>\n 	<li>You talked about using large chunks of roaming data in a recent trip and I\'ve a couple of hints to share.</li>\n 	<li>Google Maps is great but try <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/offlinemaps\">City Maps 2Go</a>. I\'ve been using it for over a year having tried other off-line mapping products. It uses the built in compass so I don\'t have to walk a block either way to figure out if I\'m going in the right direction.</li>\n 	<li>I\'ve also become a real convert to local SIM cards. Now this may not be perfect for a business trip, but I had two weeks in Chile in January and my iPhone bill was $500, compare this to two weeks in Australia using the AU$2 a day plan from Optus and my bill was $22. In Australia I didn\'t worry about when I used my phone or finding the next hotspot, because I had unlimited calls, SMS and internet usage all for AU$2 a day.</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Thanks Andrew.  Sorry about the whinging on 10 degrees of seat recline. I paid for it on my flight over to Manchester last month -- 8 hrs of suffering in coach in a packed American Airlines 757. Even United gives you free beer in coach, but not American.</li>\n 	<li>Thanks for the tip on City Maps 2 Go.  I looked at it for our UK vacation and since we were spending most of our time in the hinterlands -- the Lake District, the Isle of Arran, around Loch Lomond, it wasn’t going to give us enough coverage.  I found, though, a great app from Phil Endecott called “UK Map”.  For $11 you get all the Ordnance Survey maps, 2D and 3D views, combined with OpenStreetMap.org info downloaded so you can use it off line.  It’s a universal app so I have it on my iPhone and iPad.  If you’re touring the UK, I highly recommend it.  I may end up back in Madrid in a couple of months.  If I do, I’ll be downloading its map from City Maps 2 Go.</li>\n 	<li>I did find an unexpected but valuable benefit from my Starbucks obsession. I have a couple of Starbucks gift cards that I’ve registered.  I kinda did it on a whim.  They send me a card for a free drink after every 15 coffees I buy.  I don’t use them -- it would be wasted on a tall coffee or cappuccino.  I give ‘em to my kids who use them for venti frappuccinos.  But anyways, while in London, I found that my US <a href=\"https://www.starbucks.com/card\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Starbucks Rewards</a> credentials gave me free WiFi in UK Starbucks. Since I was limiting my mobile data usage and there’s a Starbucks about every 200 ft in London, it was very handy.</li>\n 	<li>\n\n[caption id=\"attachment_1502\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"263\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/web0118-starbuckstrenta12.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1502\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/web0118-starbuckstrenta12-263x300.jpg\" alt=\"How big, exactly, is Starbucks’ new ‘Trenta’ size?\" width=\"263\" height=\"300\" /></a> How big, exactly, is Starbucks’ new ‘Trenta’ size?[/caption]\n\nSpeaking of Starbucks, when I was flying out of ORD last week, one of the Starbucks in Terminal 3 advertised “trenta is here” -- Starbucks’ new “BigGulp” serving size. I thought about this while waiting in line to order my tall bold coffee.  Should they really be selling the trenta in airports?  I mean, does it make sense to sell someone 31 fluid ounces of a beverage right before they will be strapped into a seat for the next 2-4 hours?  And odds are that the person ordering a trenta will be in the window seat.  Meaning that he/she’s rousting two people at least twice during the flight to drain that trenta.</li>\n 	<li>And then, reacting to my comments about Ryanair in the <a title=\"Podcast #91 — Can’t Patch Planes Forever; Saving Customers With A Personal Touch\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/06/18/podcast-91-cant-patch-planes-forever-saving-customers-with-a-personal-touch/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">last episode</a>, Leo Vegoda wrote\n<ul>\n 	<li>What you say about Ryanair reminds me of how Irish comedian Andrew Maxwell described them: ‘Ryanair is what flying would be like if it was illegal’. I think that says it all.”</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>That is perfect -- and I think perfectly describes Ryanair and Spirit and all that ilk.</li>\n 	<li>And it shouldn\'t be too surprising then that 4 of the top 8 most hated companies in America are airlines.  The latest <a href=\"http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/07/the-19-most-hated-companies-in-america/241344/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">American Customer Satisfaction Index</a> has American Airlines at #8, United at #7, US Airways at #6, Delta Airlines at #2(!), beat out by just 2 points for #1 by Potomac Electric utility.  Impressive results all around.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a question, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is <a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">comments@travelcommons.com</a> -- use the Voice Memo app on your iPhone or something like Virtual Recorder on your Android phone to record and send in an audio comment – or iMovie if you want to send in some video; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at travelcommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em>August (Reggae Rework)</em> by <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/elB/16075\">el-B</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>The Not-So-Upbeat Traveler</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>This podcast is a hobby, not a business, for me -- as if you couldn’t tell that from my haphazard posting schedule. So, I don’t obsess over podcast or website statistics, how many downloads, how many page views, all the stuff that real web business live and breathe and monitor on a real-time basis. I do, though, check in every couple of days to make sure everything’s running, clean the spam bin, and to look at site stats to see if anyone is coming by.</li>\n 	<li>I didn’t do any of this while on vacation, but when I got back and checked in, I saw that I’d gotten flooded with visits the first week in July.  Following the source links, I found most of the traffic came in from StumbleUpon, while another bit came from a recent post by Chris Christensen on his <em><a href=\"http://amateurtraveler.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Amateur Traveler</a></em> blog.</li>\n 	<li>The StumbleUpon pointer was from “sher1lock,” a “woman from Ontario”.  She recommended episode #88, where I reported from the floor of the Travel Goods show and talked about losing elite status. Her comment -- “A neat travel site. Not as upbeat as some.”</li>\n 	<li>Which actually lined up very nicely with Chris’ <a href=\"http://amateurtraveler.com/2011/06/30/where-is-the-darker-side-of-travel/\">post</a>.  Titled “Where is the Darker Side of Travel?”, Chris was responding to a listener’s letter that suggested his Amateur Traveler Podcast sugar-coats the travel experience a bit; the listener challenged Chris to “bring attention to the darker side of travel”. Chris gave a good, straight up response that boiled down to -- “Guilty as charged; I’m an optimistic guy” and “If you want a podcast about travel from the point of view of how bad can be, listen to Mark Peacock’s <em>Travel Commons</em>. Mark is a friend and fellow podcaster but I describe his show as the anti-Amateur Traveler.”</li>\n 	<li>OK, so I’m not always the cheeriest guy about travel, but I didn\'t think I was a complete “Debbie Downer”.  But, because I talk about more about the journey -- the act of transiting, travel as a verb -- rather than being a tourist -- what you are when you get to your destination, my travel stories are going to naturally follow what we all think is the dramatic decline in the travel experience -- airplanes as flying cattle cars, beat-up high-mileage rental cars, ....  Any podcast whose major characters are <a href=\"http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/07/the-19-most-hated-companies-in-america/241344/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">4 of the top 8 most hated companies in America</a> just isn\'t going to be “as upbeat as some.”</li>\n 	<li>I have varying degrees of success in being cheery about my travels.  It’s always easier to be chipper when there’s something new in the mix -- new destination, new air carrier, new plane,...  <a title=\"Podcast #90 — More Comfortable Traveling in India; Tipping Towards Android?\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/05/22/podcast-90-more-comfortable-traveling-in-india-tipping-towards-android/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">A couple podcasts ago</a>, when I talked about flying to Madrid on USAir -- the USAir service was definitely a 9-hour drag, but it couldn’t dull the excitement of a new destination. But this last trip to Phoenix? Going to the same place for the umpteenth time, on American, on old MD-80’s (one of which -- with a 1983 birth date -- treated me to yet another 2 hour delay), to temperatures in the 100’s every day.  I had to drag myself to the airport. The best thing about the trip -- a toss-up between  the convertible Mustang from Avis and the Tempe In-n-Out Burger where I killed some of that 2-hour delay.</li>\n 	<li>But then again, who really enjoys their commute to work?  Most of the times, that’s what my travel is -- a commute to work.  Some people drive 45 minutes to work; I fly 3 hours.  And just like you should avoid road rage, I try to avoid travel rage. Specifically, when my commute goes wrong, I try to limit the collateral damage.</li>\n 	<li>First off, I try not to call anybody. There’s just nothing to be gained from talking to family or colleagues live.\n<ul>\n 	<li>“I’m going to be late coming home/getting to the office.  American/United/Southwest/Joe’s Cattle Car decided to skip preventative maintenance this month in order to make payroll and so I’m waiting out a maintenance decision.  The delay’s going to be either 30 minutes or 3 hours -- depends on whether duct tape can fix the problem.”</li>\n 	<li>“Oh, that’s too bad.  I’m sorry to hear that”</li>\n 	<li>“Not half as sorry as I am to be living it”</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>See?  That’s just not a good exchange for anyone. I’m not feeling any better, and worse yet, I’ve passed along my frustration, my lousy day to a completely innocent bystander.  Best to rely on e-mail or text messages. Just make sure you immediately delete the inevitable frowny face emoticon from your significant other. Leaving it fester in your inbox will just lead to bad things.</li>\n 	<li>Same goes with airline gate agents and hotel clerks. They didn\'t overbook the hotel or break the plane.  On a good day, these folks are just barely breaking minimum wage.  They’re just trying to get on the other side of 8 hours.  Unless they’re pre-emptively snotty to me -- they take an attitude before I even open my mouth -- I give them a pass.</li>\n 	<li>So we\'ve identified a lot of people who <em>aren\'t</em> responsible for botching up my commute.  Who is, then? Who can I dump this rage on? Well, that’s the challenge.  When you’re driving down the freeway and a guy cuts you off, you see the culprit. You can yell, you glare, you can flip him off.  You vent and, if you’re a normal person, you move on.</li>\n 	<li>Airlines, hotels, car rentals -- you’ll never see the person that made your morning miserable. You can’t find them to flip them off; they don’t even know you exist. They’re sitting inside some operations center combining the output of some linear revenue optimization programs with the weather forecast and sending out e-mails that will complete jack up my day.  Nothing personal -- I’m just collateral damage.</li>\n 	<li>Without that outlet, though; that ability to vent directly to the culprit, the frustration festers. The undisciplined take it out on innocent workers. The introverts mutter to themselves under their breaths.  The majority of us, though, inhale, exhale and then make for closest repository of the three cure-alls for travel frustration -- fat, salt, and beer.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music --<em> I Will Writhe</em> by <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/26739\">SackJo22</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Tablet Wars: Apple iPad 2 vs. Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Regular listeners know that, over the past couple of years, I’ve migrated to an all Apple technology kit -- the 11-in MacBook Air, an iPhone 4, and an iPad 2. This isn’t a religious sort of fanboy thing -- the desktop unit that I create this podcast on is a custom-built dual monitor Windows 7 64-bit rig with 3 hard drives and a Blu-Ray DVD burner.</li>\n 	<li>Attending <a href=\"http://www.google.com/events/io/2011/index-live.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Google I/O</a> earlier this summer, I received a <a href=\"http://www.samsung.com/global/microsite/galaxytab/10.1/index.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1</a> with the <a href=\"http://www.engadget.com/2011/01/06/googles-android-3-0-honeycomb-for-tablets-a-guided-tour-of-the/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Honeycomb </a>tablet version of Android -- I think Honeycomb translates to version number 3.1 for non-Google-ites -- and a <a href=\"http://www.samsung.com/us/computer/chromebook\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Samsung Chromebook</a>. During the summer I’ve been traveling with both the Google and Apple kit -- a significant increase in carry-on weight, but the only way I know to truly compare equipment is live in the field.  I’ll compare the tablets this episode and talk about my Chromebook experiences next time.</li>\n 	<li>Not only did I carry both tablets for business over the past couple of months, I also took them both with me on vacation to the UK, leaving my laptop at home -- a real pressure test.</li>\n 	<li>To cut to the chase -- which do I like better? -- it’s a real toss-up.  Both tablets are nice pieces of hardware -- the screen sizes are a bit different (the Galaxy has a bit more of an HD aspect ratio while the iPad’s dimensions are more like a sheet of paper) and the Samsung is a few ounces lighter than the iPad, but in the real world -- it’s a push.  They feels the same, both screens are beautiful, and their response times are great.</li>\n 	<li>As you would expect, the iPad has a better selection of apps -- the Android tablet just launched this summer while the iPad has been out for over a year.  However, for apps that I use, the delta isn’t as huge as the raw number of apps -- iPad vs. Honeycomb -- would suggest.  Apps that I use regularly -- Evernote, Kindle, Pandora, Dropbox, Skype, Concur expense reporting, Angry Birds -- are all available for Android.  The Evernote app is the only tablet-specific one -- and it’s really nice -- but the others work fine.  The only MIA apps that have any real impact on me are WebEx and GoTo Meeting. I think the tablet form is the best way to watch an on-line presentation and so I do miss those apps.</li>\n 	<li>The operating system -- Apple’s iOS vs. Google’s Android and the accompanying apps -- the comparison seems to be less of a “better-worse” and more a difference in philosophies.  The Apple experience is pretty much locked down -- there’s only one place to get apps, the screen layout not very customizable, there’s no independent access to the file system. Now that’s not necessarily bad -- most people never change the default settings on their technology and there’s a lot to be said for not letting users screw things up beyond recovery. It’s Apple’s point of view. It’s a valid one, but it does have some impact.</li>\n 	<li>When we were in the UK with only the two tablets, I wanted to replace my Facebook profile picture with one taken that afternoon in the <a href=\"http://www.glengoyne.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Glengoyne Distillery</a> near Loch Lomond.  My daughter had taken the picture with my iPhone. Plunking around the Facebook app, I couldn’t find a way to change my profile. So I e-mailed the photo from my iPhone to my Gmail account.  Logging onto the Facebook site on the iPad Safari browser, I couldn’t save the picture from the Mail app to a place where the browser could access it -- for security reasons, all the apps seem to exist within their own sandboxes.  Opening up Gmail on the Samsung tablet, I could save the picture to the folder of my choice, and then upload the picture from that folder to the Facebook site through the Android browser.</li>\n 	<li>It’s a little thing, but it illustrates why I found working solely with the Android system -- being without my PC -- easier than the iPad. The Android design philosophy is to give the users much greater control over their experience.  Which means I can spelunk around the file system, tweak the technical operations, create truly horrid screen designs, and view Flash-based web sites to my heart’s content</li>\n 	<li>I also found it interesting that my daughter who’s starting high school this year, tends to pick up the Samsung tablet over the iPad. A lot of it probably has to do with the fact that she has an Android phone, but she seemed to prefer the Google experience.</li>\n 	<li>So as I said at the top, it’s a toss-up.  I think the iPad is a more polished experience.  It feels 1-2 releases ahead of the Android tablet -- which it is.  The Samsung tablet, though, keeps right up with Apple in hardware and fit-and-finish, and Android lets the advanced user customize it better to his/her specific needs.  Final recommendation -- at the same price, I’d recommend the casual/non-technical user go with the iPad, but if you like to pop the hood on your technology, you won’t go wrong with the Samsung.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids991762681117.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #92</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from the <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">ccMixter</a> site</li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_92.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #92 — Not-So-Upbeat Traveler; iPad 2 vs. Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1','','inherit','closed','closed','','785-revision-v1','','','2019-09-19 23:05:43','2019-09-20 04:05:43','',785,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/09/19/785-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2534,1,'2019-09-19 23:10:22','2019-09-20 04:10:22','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\">\n<p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/IMG_1038.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2529 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/IMG_1038-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a></p><figcaption>Polish health food</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>Breaking out the mobile rig to record this episode in the Residence Inn in downtown Charlottesville, VA. Summer storms let me test Freebird\'s re-booking service, I wrestle with AT&amp;T so I can use my iPhone\'s dual SIM capability on my trip to Krakow and Budapest, booking more relaxed flight itineraries lets me call an audible when Uber and Lyft prices surge into the stratosphere, which gets me thinking -- will we still love those rideshare companies when they\'re no longer cheaper than taxis?&nbsp; All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_155.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"300\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/666005807&color=%23ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true&visual=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #155: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago on an off-travel week; taking a break this week after a couple of weeks of weather-induced hassles -- that in spite of completely avoiding Hurricane Dorian. Instead, it’s been a steady stream of morning thunderstorms hitting ORD and jacking it up for the rest of the day. That and flying regional jets, which we’ve said before, are often…. problematic. In the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/08/13/podcast-154-will-we-still-love-uber-when-the-prices-go-up/\">last episode</a>, I talked about having to shift my outbound evening flight from CHO to RIC because of morning thunderstorms at ORD. The last two weeks have been different variations on the theme. The Tuesday after Labor Day, I was on the bus to the L heading to ORD for an 8:30am flight (because the Uber and Lyft wait times were insane -- God, I miss my old Mongolian ex-taxi driver) when I got a text that my American Eagle flight was cancelled. Still on the bus, I called American’s Platinum line. They told me what I already knew -- no other American options until the end of the day. I told them that since I was coming home the next day (Weds), I needed to get to Charlottesville that morning. “What about the 9am United flight?” I asked her, “I’m already on my way to ORD.” “Let me call United to transfer the ticket,” she offered. I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised. Over the past few years, I’ve seen airlines more and more reluctant to lose \\ revenue by moving you to another carrier, but there was none of that coming from this American agent. Our call kept going as I got off the bus and walked down the stairs into the subway stop, but she got everything squared away. Now that United flight ended up being delayed an hour, but it eventually got me to Charlottesville.</li><li>Last Friday morning in Charlottesville, I woke up, and scrolling thru Twitter, saw <a href=\"https://twitter.com/NWSChicago\">NWS Chicago</a> -- Nat’l Weather Service -- tweeting about severe thunderstorms, so when I got the text from United at 9am delaying my 1pm flight 45 minutes, I wasn’t surprised. No big deal -- I’ll just get a second beer at the Radar Bar. But then, as these things tend to do it, it didn’t stop there. An hour later, another text from United -- the delay doubled to 90 minutes.  But then at noon, another text -- the delay is down to an hour -- shortly followed by another text -- it’s back up to 90 minutes. I pull up <a href=\"https://flightaware.com/\">FlightAware</a>; I’m not going to the airport until the inbound plane leaves the gate at ORD. Ten minutes later, I see it push back. OK, that should be the end of the delay cascade. I order an Uber and head to the airport. Halfway there, another text -- now my flight isn’t leaving until 3:30pm, 2½ hours late. Immediately followed by a text with a 3:57 departure time. I get out of the car and head to the gate agent. What’s going on? Has the plane left ORD yet? Unlike the American agent, the United agent -- or maybe she worked for Air Wisconsin, the United Express partner, is evasive -- don’t know what’s going on; no other options; everything else is oversold, even in Richmond. I back out of line and call United’s Premiere desk. Yes, there’s availability out of Richmond and DC. Richmond’s a little closer and has a helluva lot less of a rush hour, so I move over to the 5:30pm flight (the United agent said “I think you’re making the right decision”), book a one-way rental, and head out to the parking lot. There’s a mist starting to settle in over the airport. This can’t be good. It’s an uneventful 90-minute drive to Richmond. I sit at the Sam Adams Brewhouse bar and have a beer, and then another. This flight leaves on time -- it’s also a regional jet, but it’s been running up and down the East Coast, so today, it’s running on time -- getting me into ORD at 6:50pm, about 5 hours after my original flight was supposed to land. I fire up the United app and look up the status of that flight -- it still hasn’t left. It didn’t leave until 9pm and then only made it as far as Washington-Dulles -- 95 miles up the road.</li><li>Bridge Music -- August (Reggae Rework) by el-B (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/elB/16075 Ft: Calendargirl  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>In contrast to my regional jet challenges, our trip at the end of August to Krakow and Budapest went much smoother. We flew LOT, the Polish airline, the whole way, including the last leg, BUD-ORD non-stop. I was kinda surprised by that leg -- a Transatlantic leg that didn’t go through Poland -- but there must be enough traffic on that route. A week before we left, American announced their own non-stop between ORD and BUD starting next year. Both airlines do/will use 787’s on the route. Perhaps it’s one of the “long, thin routes” that the 787 was designed to unlock. Anyways, all three flights on LOT -- 787’s on the long legs, and a Dash-8 prop job on the hop from Krakow to Budapest -- were reasonable. I thought the 787’s “morning wake-up” mode for breakfast -- where the cabin lights fade up while the darkened windows lighten -- was a pleasant change to usual “light on and PA announcement” approach. It was my first trip to Poland. Krakow Airport is nice -- new, compact, with train station into the city. It was a good trip.</li><li>I talked in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/08/13/podcast-154-will-we-still-love-uber-when-the-prices-go-up/\">last episode</a> about trying out my iPhone XS’s dual SIM capability in Hungary and Poland. I did the pre-work before I left -- working through a couple of chat sessions to move my US AT&amp;T number to the internal eSIM so I use the physical SIM slot for my UK EE pre-paid SIM. En route -- somewhere over the Faroe Islands I think -- I went into Settings and made my UK line the main voice and data line, leaving my US line open for phone calls and texts. It seemed to work as designed -- I replied to a couple of texts on my US line from my sister, but it looks like everything else went out over the UK line with the 3 GB for £10 plan. I’ll hold final judgement until I get this month’s bill from AT&amp;T, but from what I could see on their website, it looks like it worked. It was a nice change to only have one phone and not to have to remember to check my other phone every night. The new version of the iPhone operating system -- iOS 13 -- is supposed to have some improvements for dual SIM, but I was happy with it as it stands -- but check back with me after I get my AT&amp;T bill.</li><li>And, of course, I extend that 3 GB by hitting the WiFi in coffee shops and hotels, which is where we circle back to one of my top travel security tips -- use a VPN when on WiFi. I used to think that as long as I was hitting encrypted web sites I was OK -- it used to be that you’d see HTTPS in the address bar apparently Google and Apple think that’s too much for us to process; they’ve replaced it with a picture of a lock; Firefox still shows the full address, though. But it seems that more and more security breaches are taking advantage of obscure misconfigurations that get around basic security. And with major hotel chains regularly coughing up millions of credit card numbers, it seems a bit unreasonable to expect the staff at a small coffee shop or local hotel to be up-to-date on their router patching. So I have VPN clients on my iPhone, my Android tablet, and my MacBook Air. I usually forget to turn them on if I’m doing a quick check of Twitter or Google Maps while in line somewhere, but if I’m doing any sort of browsing session on public WiFi these days, I’ll fire it up. </li><li>Packing for this trip meant rummaging around for European plug adapters. Not voltage converters -- I don’t use them because all the electronics can handle 110 and 240 volt -- just the two blade-to-two round adapters. I’d rounded up my UK adapters for our June trip to Ireland and Scotland, but now I needed the European adapters -- the two round plug ones.  I found the UK ones and a random South African one but I couldn’t find the European ones anywhere. Probably because I’d left them all behind in Brittany in March. So I got on Amazon (as one does when they need some random thing in a hurry) and ordered a box of 6. I only needed one, but given my history, 6 would keep me for a year or two. I ordered white adapters because that’s what popped up in Amazon. Which was OK in those hotels with black outlets, but not so great for white outlets. I took 2 and came home with 2, but only by sheer luck. At least twice, I was walking out of the room with my bag and only then noticed an adapter still plugged in, hiding in a recessed white outlet. I really need colored plug adapters. And not in tasteful colors; something gaudy, like a purple or pink or chartreuse. Maybe I’ll spray paint the ones I have before my next trip. </li><li>Leonard -- no last name -- commented on the last episode with a link to a Dallas TV station’s coverage of the last American Airlines MD-80 flight; appropriately flying from DFW to ORD, a route and a plane that contributed heavily to my Advantage Gold status -- when that was the highest level -- back in 1985. There’ve been a lot of stories covering the retirement; people waxing nostalgic -- though not too much since I haven’t heard of any big jump in Delta MD-80 bookings. They still fly almost 100 of them. I have seen a couple of quotes about not wanting to sit in the last rows because of the noise from the side-mounted engines. It’s true. Not even the Bose noise-cancelling headphones could handle all the engine and vibration noise. They were also bad seats because there were no windows; all you’d see would be the engine cowling and the window would make the noise even worse. And those times when I ended up in those seats -- usually last-minute bookings between ORD and DFW -- my mind would sometimes wander -- if the engine next to my head blows up, will the shrapnel blow out or blow into the cabin. I never heard of such a catastrophic failure on an MD-80 -- but that didn’t keep me from wondering. </li><li>Standing in the TSA PreCheck queue, watching the single screener who was checking boarding passes and IDs have to ping-pong between the regular and PreCheck lines, I wondered what was keeping US airports from installing the automated boarding pass-checking gates that I’ve passed thru at mid-sized European airports like Budapest and Krakow and Edinburgh. I got it -- they’re only checking for valid boarding passes; they’re not examining IDs -- but there’s got to be something there that can improve TSA efficiency <em>and</em> the traveler experience. Watching this poor woman, my mind fast-forwarded to October next year when the TSA starts enforcing the Real ID requirement, the time wasted arguing with people who travel maybe once a year and so didn’t go thru the additional hassle of getting a Real ID-compliant driver’s license. Note to self - don’t book any travel in October 2020. </li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com. <br>Bridge Music —    I Will Writhe by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/26739 Ft: Soundprank  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Street Food in Poland and Hungary </strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Over-tourism is still a big topic in the tourism industry. Iceland seems to be cooling down after the Wow Air bankruptcy, but the photo from May of the queue to summit Mount Everest has become the new icon of the problem faced there and at places like Venice, Barcelona, and Machu Pichu. And it drives an interesting dichotomy -- travelers chasing the iconic Instagram picture -- sort of a virtual souvenir for this “pics or it didn’t happen” age -- while at the same time craving “authenticity” -- which is where, I think, the current glorification of street food is coming from. Wanting to experience something that you can only get in this place -- and, of course, post a picture of it.</li><li>Parking the cynicism for a sec -- if you’re queuing up (hopefully with some locals, not just tourists), doing the point-and-shoot ordering, and then eating it there on the street, it does create a very specific moment and memory. I vividly remember buying takoyaki, basically octopus croquettes, from a street vendor in Osaka; getting into the queue for a food stall in a Beijing hutong, the only non-Chinese guy, not knowing what for and getting this phenomenal crunchy scallion pancake; sending Andrew over to a vendor on a sidewalk in Hoi An, Vietnam for black sesame soup; folding up a slice of pizza in New York City in mid-bar crawl; and, as talked about a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/podcast-151-traveler-data-leaks-brittany-street-food/\">few episodes back</a>, slurping oysters on the Cancale sea wall on the Brittany coast.</li><li>So while we weren’t on a street food hunt in Poland and Hungary, our willingness, actually desire to eat pretty much whatever we came across without any filters -- no worries about keto or paleo or gluten-free diets -- led us to some good street food -- even though there were days I really felt the need to double down on the statins.</li><li>Probably the most memorable bit of street food came our first day in Krakow. We landed around 9am, took a taxi to the hotel, checked in, brushed our teeth, and walked up to the Old Square where I trawled through the vendor stalls. I came to a full stop at a small stand at the end of an aisle. An older couple had a huge pan over a wood fire. The pan had a metal divider down the middle; one half of the pan was frying onions; the other half, sliced kielbasa. I watched a couple people order and then stepped up. The man sliced a large, thick piece of bread off a round loaf, spread a thick smear of lard with cracklings, put down a layer of sliced kielbasa, finishing it off with fried onions. All for 13 złoty -- or about 3 and a half bucks. I don’t know what left more of an impression -- the size and heft of what he handed me or the staying power of the layer of pork fat it left on my lips. I’ll put a picture of it in the show notes.</li><li>We walked straight from there to a small square behind St Mary’s Basilica for the pierogi festival. There were 20-30 stands selling their selection of pierogis. Not sure if pierogis strictly qualify as a street food, but I queued up at the most popular ones and did point-&amp;-shoot ordering through most of their selection. I skipped the sweet pierogis -- the chocolate-banana and the blueberry ones just didn’t say “pierogi” to me -- but I still ended up with 5-6 from each stand -- from traditional onion and potato, to goose and duck and wild boar-filled ones. I tried to avoid pointing at one stand’s Mexican pierogi, but somehow it ended up on my plate. This was a pretty full-contact Day One. I needed a nap.</li><li>Chicago has a large Polish population -- somewhere in the range of 1-1.5 million Polish immigrants their descendants in the metro area, which, depending on who you read, is the largest Polish metropolitan area outside of Poland. So we get our share of Polish food and I wanted to try a few things I recognized. The first thing we hunted down was a pączki -- basically a Polish jelly doughnut. In Chicago, Pączki Day is Fat Tuesday and you see pączkis everywhere -- the grocery stores, bakeries. Asking around, Gorące Pączki -- “Hot Donuts” in English -- was the consensus recommendation in the Old Town. We rolled up there a couple of times and came away, I gotta say, disappointed. Even Chicago grocery store pączkis are better.</li><li>That weekend, we were staying with friends in the hills/mountains a couple of hours southwest of Krakow, down near the Czech and Slovakian borders. On Sunday, we went to a karczma for lunch, which as near as I could tell is a roadside pub/restaurant. But this one, the specialty was potato pancakes made in a wood-burning oven. One guy, the owner, was running the oven -- laying the pancake batter in the oven, shifting them around with a spatula, managing the fire, serving some pancakes flat while stuffing and folding others over like a potato pancake quesadilla. Watching this guy was like watching kitchen ballet. And the product -- like no potato pancake I’d ever had. Definitely beat out Chicago on this one.</li><li>We got into Budapest on St Stephen’s Day, Hungary’s biggest national holiday commemorating the founding of the Hungarian state; kinda like their version of the US Independence Day. After checking into our hotel, we walked over to the Buda side of the Danube where there was a huge food festival. The longest line was for the national cake. Apparently, they do a special cake each St Stephen’s Day. It was a really long line, but they were handing out free pieces of cake, so it was understandable. We skipped it though and went for the next longest line, for freshly fried lángos. Every culture seems to have some version of fried dough street food, and lángos is Hungary’s, though lángos is savory, not sweet. It was a hot day, but here was a booth full of women, hand stretching balls of dough into disks and dropping them into deep pans of hot oil for people waiting 15 minutes in the hot sun for them. The fully-dressed lángos was brushed with garlic and then topped with sour cream and shredded cheese. Still waddling from the weekend in Krakow, I went for the lite version -- just the garlic. </li><li>A couple of days later, Irene and I took a 40-minute train ride up along the Danube to Szentendre, a bit of an artist colony town. We hadn’t been up there in, I dunno, 20 years so we thought we’d check it out again. And top on our list of things to revisit was a little lángos shack tucked away halfway up a little stairway that goes from the town square up to the Catholic church on top of a hill. The last time we were in Szentendre, we tripped across this place walking up to the church - just a couple of people frying up lángos. It took us a bit to find the staircase this time -- it’s about a person-and-a-half wide archway next to a souvenir shop. The shack was still there, but it expanded, now with tables in a little courtyard, and it’s been found. We stood in a queue of tourists for 10-15 minutes watching 2 women crank out fried disks of dough. I cringed when I saw people putting ketchup on their lángos. We stayed pure with the garlic.</li><li>The <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/06/24/podcast-130-notes-from-hungary/\">last time</a> Irene and I were in Hungary, in 2017, we complained about not being able to find good, basic Hungarian food outside of the tourist traps. We saw lots of burger bars and pizza joint, especially in the Jewish Quarter, the party district where all the ruin bars are. But now, things seem to have diversified. Not far from Szimpla Kert, Ground Zero of the ruin bar circuit, there’s a place called Gettó Gulyás selling, well, gulyás and other Hungarian basics like chicken paprikas. And even better, it looks like there’s a bit of a chain called Langosh that’s open in the party district til 2 in the morning. Fried bread and beer -- not sure there’s any better definition of street food.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #155</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_155.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #155 — RJ Delays; Street Food in Poland and Hungary','','inherit','closed','closed','','2527-revision-v1','','','2019-09-19 23:10:22','2019-09-20 04:10:22','',2527,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/09/19/2527-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2535,1,'2019-09-20 15:37:42','2019-09-20 20:37:42','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\">\n<p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/IMG_1038.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2529 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/IMG_1038-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a></p>\n<figcaption>Polish health food</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p>Didn\'t have any problems with the 787\'s flying 4,800 miles to Krakow or back from Budapest, but the 560-mile regional jet flights between Chicago and Charlottesville, VA have been causing me no end of hassles. We talk about this, revisit our discussions about iPhone dual SIM capability and American Airlines\' MD-80 retirement. And then go deep on my very non-keto-friendly dive into Krakow and Budapest street food.  All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_155.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"300\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/666005807&color=%23ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true&visual=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #155: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago on an off-travel week; taking a break this week after a couple of weeks of weather-induced hassles -- that in spite of completely avoiding Hurricane Dorian. Instead, it’s been a steady stream of morning thunderstorms hitting ORD and jacking it up for the rest of the day. That and flying regional jets, which we’ve said before, are often…. problematic. In the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/08/13/podcast-154-will-we-still-love-uber-when-the-prices-go-up/\">last episode</a>, I talked about having to shift my outbound evening flight from CHO to RIC because of morning thunderstorms at ORD. The last two weeks have been different variations on the theme. The Tuesday after Labor Day, I was on the bus to the L heading to ORD for an 8:30am flight (because the Uber and Lyft wait times were insane -- God, I miss my old Mongolian ex-taxi driver) when I got a text that my American Eagle flight was cancelled. Still on the bus, I called American’s Platinum line. They told me what I already knew -- no other American options until the end of the day. I told them that since I was coming home the next day (Weds), I needed to get to Charlottesville that morning. “What about the 9am United flight?” I asked her, “I’m already on my way to ORD.” “Let me call United to transfer the ticket,” she offered. I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised. Over the past few years, I’ve seen airlines more and more reluctant to lose \\ revenue by moving you to another carrier, but there was none of that coming from this American agent. Our call kept going as I got off the bus and walked down the stairs into the subway stop, but she got everything squared away. Now that United flight ended up being delayed an hour, but it eventually got me to Charlottesville.</li><li>Last Friday morning in Charlottesville, I woke up, and scrolling thru Twitter, saw <a href=\"https://twitter.com/NWSChicago\">NWS Chicago</a> -- Nat’l Weather Service -- tweeting about severe thunderstorms, so when I got the text from United at 9am delaying my 1pm flight 45 minutes, I wasn’t surprised. No big deal -- I’ll just get a second beer at the Radar Bar. But then, as these things tend to do it, it didn’t stop there. An hour later, another text from United -- the delay doubled to 90 minutes.  But then at noon, another text -- the delay is down to an hour -- shortly followed by another text -- it’s back up to 90 minutes. I pull up <a href=\"https://flightaware.com/\">FlightAware</a>; I’m not going to the airport until the inbound plane leaves the gate at ORD. Ten minutes later, I see it push back. OK, that should be the end of the delay cascade. I order an Uber and head to the airport. Halfway there, another text -- now my flight isn’t leaving until 3:30pm, 2½ hours late. Immediately followed by a text with a 3:57 departure time. I get out of the car and head to the gate agent. What’s going on? Has the plane left ORD yet? Unlike the American agent, the United agent -- or maybe she worked for Air Wisconsin, the United Express partner, is evasive -- don’t know what’s going on; no other options; everything else is oversold, even in Richmond. I back out of line and call United’s Premiere desk. Yes, there’s availability out of Richmond and DC. Richmond’s a little closer and has a helluva lot less of a rush hour, so I move over to the 5:30pm flight (the United agent said “I think you’re making the right decision”), book a one-way rental, and head out to the parking lot. There’s a mist starting to settle in over the airport. This can’t be good. It’s an uneventful 90-minute drive to Richmond. I sit at the Sam Adams Brewhouse bar and have a beer, and then another. This flight leaves on time -- it’s also a regional jet, but it’s been running up and down the East Coast, so today, it’s running on time -- getting me into ORD at 6:50pm, about 5 hours after my original flight was supposed to land. I fire up the United app and look up the status of that flight -- it still hasn’t left. It didn’t leave until 9pm and then only made it as far as Washington-Dulles -- 95 miles up the road.</li><li>Bridge Music -- August (Reggae Rework) by el-B (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/elB/16075 Ft: Calendargirl  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>In contrast to my regional jet challenges, our trip at the end of August to Krakow and Budapest went much smoother. We flew LOT, the Polish airline, the whole way, including the last leg, BUD-ORD non-stop. I was kinda surprised by that leg -- a Transatlantic leg that didn’t go through Poland -- but there must be enough traffic on that route. A week before we left, American announced their own non-stop between ORD and BUD starting next year. Both airlines do/will use 787’s on the route. Perhaps it’s one of the “long, thin routes” that the 787 was designed to unlock. Anyways, all three flights on LOT -- 787’s on the long legs, and a Dash-8 prop job on the hop from Krakow to Budapest -- were reasonable. I thought the 787’s “morning wake-up” mode for breakfast -- where the cabin lights fade up while the darkened windows lighten -- was a pleasant change to usual “light on and PA announcement” approach. It was my first trip to Poland. Krakow Airport is nice -- new, compact, with train station into the city. It was a good trip.</li><li>I talked in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/08/13/podcast-154-will-we-still-love-uber-when-the-prices-go-up/\">last episode</a> about trying out my iPhone XS’s dual SIM capability in Hungary and Poland. I did the pre-work before I left -- working through a couple of chat sessions to move my US AT&amp;T number to the internal eSIM so I use the physical SIM slot for my UK EE pre-paid SIM. En route -- somewhere over the Faroe Islands I think -- I went into Settings and made my UK line the main voice and data line, leaving my US line open for phone calls and texts. It seemed to work as designed -- I replied to a couple of texts on my US line from my sister, but it looks like everything else went out over the UK line with the 3 GB for £10 plan. I’ll hold final judgement until I get this month’s bill from AT&amp;T, but from what I could see on their website, it looks like it worked. It was a nice change to only have one phone and not to have to remember to check my other phone every night. The new version of the iPhone operating system -- iOS 13 -- is supposed to have some improvements for dual SIM, but I was happy with it as it stands -- but check back with me after I get my AT&amp;T bill.</li><li>And, of course, I extend that 3 GB by hitting the WiFi in coffee shops and hotels, which is where we circle back to one of my top travel security tips -- use a VPN when on WiFi. I used to think that as long as I was hitting encrypted web sites I was OK -- it used to be that you’d see HTTPS in the address bar apparently Google and Apple think that’s too much for us to process; they’ve replaced it with a picture of a lock; Firefox still shows the full address, though. But it seems that more and more security breaches are taking advantage of obscure misconfigurations that get around basic security. And with major hotel chains regularly coughing up millions of credit card numbers, it seems a bit unreasonable to expect the staff at a small coffee shop or local hotel to be up-to-date on their router patching. So I have VPN clients on my iPhone, my Android tablet, and my MacBook Air. I usually forget to turn them on if I’m doing a quick check of Twitter or Google Maps while in line somewhere, but if I’m doing any sort of browsing session on public WiFi these days, I’ll fire it up.&nbsp;</li><li>Packing for this trip meant rummaging around for European plug adapters. Not voltage converters -- I don’t use them because all the electronics can handle 110 and 240 volt -- just the two blade-to-two round adapters. I’d rounded up my UK adapters for our June trip to Ireland and Scotland, but now I needed the European adapters -- the two round plug ones.&nbsp; I found the UK ones and a random South African one but I couldn’t find the European ones anywhere. Probably because I’d left them all behind in Brittany in March. So I got on Amazon (as one does when they need some random thing in a hurry) and ordered a box of 6. I only needed one, but given my history, 6 would keep me for a year or two. I ordered white adapters because that’s what popped up in Amazon. Which was OK in those hotels with black outlets, but not so great for white outlets. I took 2 and came home with 2, but only by sheer luck. At least twice, I was walking out of the room with my bag and only then noticed an adapter still plugged in, hiding in a recessed white outlet. I really need colored plug adapters. And not in tasteful colors; something gaudy, like a purple or pink or chartreuse. Maybe I’ll spray paint the ones I have before my next trip.&nbsp;</li><li>Leonard -- no last name -- commented on the last episode with a link to a Dallas TV station’s coverage of the last American Airlines MD-80 flight; appropriately flying from DFW to ORD, a route and a plane that contributed heavily to my Advantage Gold status -- when that was the highest level -- back in 1985. There’ve been a lot of stories covering the retirement; people waxing nostalgic -- though not too much since I haven’t heard of any big jump in Delta MD-80 bookings. They still fly almost 100 of them. I have seen a couple of quotes about not wanting to sit in the last rows because of the noise from the side-mounted engines. It’s true. Not even the Bose noise-cancelling headphones could handle all the engine and vibration noise. They were also bad seats because there were no windows; all you’d see would be the engine cowling and the window would make the noise even worse. And those times when I ended up in those seats -- usually last-minute bookings between ORD and DFW -- my mind would sometimes wander -- if the engine next to my head blows up, will the shrapnel blow out or blow into the cabin. I never heard of such a catastrophic failure on an MD-80 -- but that didn’t keep me from wondering.&nbsp;</li><li>Standing in the TSA PreCheck queue, watching the single screener who was checking boarding passes and IDs have to ping-pong between the regular and PreCheck lines, I wondered what was keeping US airports from installing the automated boarding pass-checking gates that I’ve passed thru at mid-sized European airports like Budapest and Krakow and Edinburgh. I got it -- they’re only checking for valid boarding passes; they’re not examining IDs -- but there’s got to be something there that can improve TSA efficiency <em>and</em> the traveler experience. Watching this poor woman, my mind fast-forwarded to October next year when the TSA starts enforcing the Real ID requirement, the time wasted arguing with people who travel maybe once a year and so didn’t go thru the additional hassle of getting a Real ID-compliant driver’s license. Note to self - don’t book any travel in October 2020. </li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com. <br>Bridge Music —  &nbsp; I Will Writhe by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/26739 Ft: Soundprank  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Street Food in Poland and Hungary </strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Over-tourism is still a big topic in the tourism industry. Iceland seems to be cooling down after the Wow Air bankruptcy, but the photo from May of the queue to summit Mount Everest has become the new icon of the problem faced there and at places like Venice, Barcelona, and Machu Pichu. And it drives an interesting dichotomy -- travelers chasing the iconic Instagram picture -- sort of a virtual souvenir for this “pics or it didn’t happen” age -- while at the same time craving “authenticity” -- which is where, I think, the current glorification of street food is coming from. Wanting to experience something that you can only get in this place -- and, of course, post a picture of it.</li><li>Parking the cynicism for a sec -- if you’re queuing up (hopefully with some locals, not just tourists), doing the point-and-shoot ordering, and then eating it there on the street, it does create a very specific moment and memory. I vividly remember buying takoyaki, basically octopus croquettes, from a street vendor in Osaka; getting into the queue for a food stall in a Beijing hutong, the only non-Chinese guy, not knowing what for and getting this phenomenal crunchy scallion pancake; sending Andrew over to a vendor on a sidewalk in Hoi An, Vietnam for black sesame soup; folding up a slice of pizza in New York City in mid-bar crawl; and, as talked about a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/podcast-151-traveler-data-leaks-brittany-street-food/\">few episodes back</a>, slurping oysters on the Cancale sea wall on the Brittany coast.</li><li>So while we weren’t on a street food hunt in Poland and Hungary, our willingness, actually desire to eat pretty much whatever we came across without any filters -- no worries about keto or paleo or gluten-free diets -- led us to some good street food -- even though there were days I really felt the need to double down on the statins.</li><li>Probably the most memorable bit of street food came our first day in Krakow. We landed around 9am, took a taxi to the hotel, checked in, brushed our teeth, and walked up to the Old Square where I trawled through the vendor stalls. I came to a full stop at a small stand at the end of an aisle. An older couple had a huge pan over a wood fire. The pan had a metal divider down the middle; one half of the pan was frying onions; the other half, sliced kielbasa. I watched a couple people order and then stepped up. The man sliced a large, thick piece of bread off a round loaf, spread a thick smear of lard with cracklings, put down a layer of sliced kielbasa, finishing it off with fried onions. All for 13 złoty -- or about 3 and a half bucks. I don’t know what left more of an impression -- the size and heft of what he handed me or the staying power of the layer of pork fat it left on my lips. I’ll put a picture of it in the show notes.</li><li>We walked straight from there to a small square behind St Mary’s Basilica for the pierogi festival. There were 20-30 stands selling their selection of pierogis. Not sure if pierogis strictly qualify as a street food, but I queued up at the most popular ones and did point-&amp;-shoot ordering through most of their selection. I skipped the sweet pierogis -- the chocolate-banana and the blueberry ones just didn’t say “pierogi” to me -- but I still ended up with 5-6 from each stand -- from traditional onion and potato, to goose and duck and wild boar-filled ones. I tried to avoid pointing at one stand’s Mexican pierogi, but somehow it ended up on my plate. This was a pretty full-contact Day One. I needed a nap.</li><li>Chicago has a large Polish population -- somewhere in the range of 1-1.5 million Polish immigrants their descendants in the metro area, which, depending on who you read, is the largest Polish metropolitan area outside of Poland. So we get our share of Polish food and I wanted to try a few things I recognized. The first thing we hunted down was a pączki -- basically a Polish jelly doughnut. In Chicago, Pączki Day is Fat Tuesday and you see pączkis everywhere -- the grocery stores, bakeries. Asking around, Gorące Pączki -- “Hot Donuts” in English -- was the consensus recommendation in the Old Town. We rolled up there a couple of times and came away, I gotta say, disappointed. Even Chicago grocery store pączkis are better.</li><li>That weekend, we were staying with friends in the hills/mountains a couple of hours southwest of Krakow, down near the Czech and Slovakian borders. On Sunday, we went to a karczma for lunch, which as near as I could tell is a roadside pub/restaurant. But this one, the specialty was potato pancakes made in a wood-burning oven. One guy, the owner, was running the oven -- laying the pancake batter in the oven, shifting them around with a spatula, managing the fire, serving some pancakes flat while stuffing and folding others over like a potato pancake quesadilla. Watching this guy was like watching kitchen ballet. And the product -- like no potato pancake I’d ever had. Definitely beat out Chicago on this one.</li><li>We got into Budapest on St Stephen’s Day, Hungary’s biggest national holiday commemorating the founding of the Hungarian state; kinda like their version of the US Independence Day. After checking into our hotel, we walked over to the Buda side of the Danube where there was a huge food festival. The longest line was for the national cake. Apparently, they do a special cake each St Stephen’s Day. It was a really long line, but they were handing out free pieces of cake, so it was understandable. We skipped it though and went for the next longest line, for freshly fried lángos. Every culture seems to have some version of fried dough street food, and lángos is Hungary’s, though lángos is savory, not sweet. It was a hot day, but here was a booth full of women, hand stretching balls of dough into disks and dropping them into deep pans of hot oil for people waiting 15 minutes in the hot sun for them. The fully-dressed lángos was brushed with garlic and then topped with sour cream and shredded cheese. Still waddling from the weekend in Krakow, I went for the lite version -- just the garlic.&nbsp;</li><li>A couple of days later, Irene and I took a 40-minute train ride up along the Danube to Szentendre, a bit of an artist colony town. We hadn’t been up there in, I dunno, 20 years so we thought we’d check it out again. And top on our list of things to revisit was a little lángos shack tucked away halfway up a little stairway that goes from the town square up to the Catholic church on top of a hill. The last time we were in Szentendre, we tripped across this place walking up to the church - just a couple of people frying up lángos. It took us a bit to find the staircase this time -- it’s about a person-and-a-half wide archway next to a souvenir shop. The shack was still there, but it expanded, now with tables in a little courtyard, and it’s been found. We stood in a queue of tourists for 10-15 minutes watching 2 women crank out fried disks of dough. I cringed when I saw people putting ketchup on their lángos. We stayed pure with the garlic.</li><li>The <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/06/24/podcast-130-notes-from-hungary/\">last time</a> Irene and I were in Hungary, in 2017, we complained about not being able to find good, basic Hungarian food outside of the tourist traps. We saw lots of burger bars and pizza joint, especially in the Jewish Quarter, the party district where all the ruin bars are. But now, things seem to have diversified. Not far from Szimpla Kert, Ground Zero of the ruin bar circuit, there’s a place called Gettó Gulyás selling, well, gulyás and other Hungarian basics like chicken paprikas. And even better, it looks like there’s a bit of a chain called Langosh that’s open in the party district til 2 in the morning. Fried bread and beer -- not sure there’s any better definition of street food.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #155</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_155.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #155 — RJ Delays; Street Food in Poland and Hungary','','inherit','closed','closed','','2527-revision-v1','','','2019-09-20 15:37:42','2019-09-20 20:37:42','',2527,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/09/20/2527-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2537,1,'2019-09-21 14:08:36','2019-09-21 19:08:36','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\">\n<p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/IMG_1038.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2529 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/IMG_1038-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a></p><figcaption>Polish health food</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>Didn\'t have any problems with the 787\'s flying 4,800 miles to Krakow or back from Budapest, but the 560-mile regional jet flights between Chicago and Charlottesville, VA have been causing me no end of hassles. We talk about this, revisit our discussions about iPhone dual SIM capability and American Airlines\' MD-80 retirement. And then go deep on my very non-keto-friendly dive into Krakow and Budapest street food.&nbsp; All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_155.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"300\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/666005807&color=%23ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true&visual=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #155: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago on an off-travel week; taking a break this week after a couple of weeks of weather-induced hassles -- that in spite of completely avoiding Hurricane Dorian. Instead, it’s been a steady stream of morning thunderstorms hitting ORD and jacking it up for the rest of the day. That and flying regional jets, which we’ve said before, are often…. problematic. In the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/08/13/podcast-154-will-we-still-love-uber-when-the-prices-go-up/\">last episode</a>, I talked about having to shift my outbound evening flight from CHO to RIC because of morning thunderstorms at ORD. The last two weeks have been different variations on the theme. The Tuesday after Labor Day, I was on the bus to the L heading to ORD for an 8:30am flight (because the Uber and Lyft wait times were insane -- God, I miss my old Mongolian ex-taxi driver) when I got a text that my American Eagle flight was cancelled. Still on the bus, I called American’s Platinum line. They told me what I already knew -- no other American options until the end of the day. I told them that since I was coming home the next day (Weds), I needed to get to Charlottesville that morning. “What about the 9am United flight?” I asked her, “I’m already on my way to ORD.” “Let me call United to transfer the ticket,” she offered. I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised. Over the past few years, I’ve seen airlines more and more reluctant to lose \\ revenue by moving you to another carrier, but there was none of that coming from this American agent. Our call kept going as I got off the bus and walked down the stairs into the subway stop, but she got everything squared away. Now that United flight ended up being delayed an hour, but it eventually got me to Charlottesville.</li><li>Last Friday morning in Charlottesville, I woke up, and scrolling thru Twitter, saw <a href=\"https://twitter.com/NWSChicago\">NWS Chicago</a> -- Nat’l Weather Service -- tweeting about severe thunderstorms, so when I got the text from United at 9am delaying my 1pm flight 45 minutes, I wasn’t surprised. No big deal -- I’ll just get a second beer at the Radar Bar. But then, as these things tend to do it, it didn’t stop there. An hour later, another text from United -- the delay doubled to 90 minutes.  But then at noon, another text -- the delay is down to an hour -- shortly followed by another text -- it’s back up to 90 minutes. I pull up <a href=\"https://flightaware.com/\">FlightAware</a>; I’m not going to the airport until the inbound plane leaves the gate at ORD. Ten minutes later, I see it push back. OK, that should be the end of the delay cascade. I order an Uber and head to the airport. Halfway there, another text -- now my flight isn’t leaving until 3:30pm, 2½ hours late. Immediately followed by a text with a 3:57 departure time. I get out of the car and head to the gate agent. What’s going on? Has the plane left ORD yet? Unlike the American agent, the United agent -- or maybe she worked for Air Wisconsin, the United Express partner, is evasive -- don’t know what’s going on; no other options; everything else is oversold, even in Richmond. I back out of line and call United’s Premiere desk. Yes, there’s availability out of Richmond and DC. Richmond’s a little closer and has a helluva lot less of a rush hour, so I move over to the 5:30pm flight (the United agent said “I think you’re making the right decision”), book a one-way rental, and head out to the parking lot. There’s a mist starting to settle in over the airport. This can’t be good. It’s an uneventful 90-minute drive to Richmond. I sit at the Sam Adams Brewhouse bar and have a beer, and then another. This flight leaves on time -- it’s also a regional jet, but it’s been running up and down the East Coast, so today, it’s running on time -- getting me into ORD at 6:50pm, about 5 hours after my original flight was supposed to land. I fire up the United app and look up the status of that flight -- it still hasn’t left. It didn’t leave until 9pm and then only made it as far as Washington-Dulles -- 95 miles up the road.</li><li>Bridge Music —    I Will Writhe by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/26739 Ft: Soundprank </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>In contrast to my regional jet challenges, our trip at the end of August to Krakow and Budapest went much smoother. We flew LOT, the Polish airline, the whole way, including the last leg, BUD-ORD non-stop. I was kinda surprised by that leg -- a Transatlantic leg that didn’t go through Poland -- but there must be enough traffic on that route. A week before we left, American announced their own non-stop between ORD and BUD starting next year. Both airlines do/will use 787’s on the route. Perhaps it’s one of the “long, thin routes” that the 787 was designed to unlock. Anyways, all three flights on LOT -- 787’s on the long legs, and a Dash-8 prop job on the hop from Krakow to Budapest -- were reasonable. I thought the 787’s “morning wake-up” mode for breakfast -- where the cabin lights fade up while the darkened windows lighten -- was a pleasant change to usual “light on and PA announcement” approach. It was my first trip to Poland. Krakow Airport is nice -- new, compact, with train station into the city. It was a good trip.</li><li>I talked in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/08/13/podcast-154-will-we-still-love-uber-when-the-prices-go-up/\">last episode</a> about trying out my iPhone XS’s dual SIM capability in Hungary and Poland. I did the pre-work before I left -- working through a couple of chat sessions to move my US AT&amp;T number to the internal eSIM so I use the physical SIM slot for my UK EE pre-paid SIM. En route -- somewhere over the Faroe Islands I think -- I went into Settings and made my UK line the main voice and data line, leaving my US line open for phone calls and texts. It seemed to work as designed -- I replied to a couple of texts on my US line from my sister, but it looks like everything else went out over the UK line with the 3 GB for £10 plan. I’ll hold final judgement until I get this month’s bill from AT&amp;T, but from what I could see on their website, it looks like it worked. It was a nice change to only have one phone and not to have to remember to check my other phone every night. The new version of the iPhone operating system -- iOS 13 -- is supposed to have some improvements for dual SIM, but I was happy with it as it stands -- but check back with me after I get my AT&amp;T bill.</li><li>And, of course, I extend that 3 GB by hitting the WiFi in coffee shops and hotels, which is where we circle back to one of my top travel security tips -- use a VPN when on WiFi. I used to think that as long as I was hitting encrypted web sites I was OK -- it used to be that you’d see HTTPS in the address bar apparently Google and Apple think that’s too much for us to process; they’ve replaced it with a picture of a lock; Firefox still shows the full address, though. But it seems that more and more security breaches are taking advantage of obscure misconfigurations that get around basic security. And with major hotel chains regularly coughing up millions of credit card numbers, it seems a bit unreasonable to expect the staff at a small coffee shop or local hotel to be up-to-date on their router patching. So I have VPN clients on my iPhone, my Android tablet, and my MacBook Air. I usually forget to turn them on if I’m doing a quick check of Twitter or Google Maps while in line somewhere, but if I’m doing any sort of browsing session on public WiFi these days, I’ll fire it up. </li><li>Packing for this trip meant rummaging around for European plug adapters. Not voltage converters -- I don’t use them because all the electronics can handle 110 and 240 volt -- just the two blade-to-two round adapters. I’d rounded up my UK adapters for our June trip to Ireland and Scotland, but now I needed the European adapters -- the two round plug ones.  I found the UK ones and a random South African one but I couldn’t find the European ones anywhere. Probably because I’d left them all behind in Brittany in March. So I got on Amazon (as one does when they need some random thing in a hurry) and ordered a box of 6. I only needed one, but given my history, 6 would keep me for a year or two. I ordered white adapters because that’s what popped up in Amazon. Which was OK in those hotels with black outlets, but not so great for white outlets. I took 2 and came home with 2, but only by sheer luck. At least twice, I was walking out of the room with my bag and only then noticed an adapter still plugged in, hiding in a recessed white outlet. I really need colored plug adapters. And not in tasteful colors; something gaudy, like a purple or pink or chartreuse. Maybe I’ll spray paint the ones I have before my next trip. </li><li>Leonard -- no last name -- commented on the last episode with a link to a Dallas TV station’s coverage of the last American Airlines MD-80 flight; appropriately flying from DFW to ORD, a route and a plane that contributed heavily to my Advantage Gold status -- when that was the highest level -- back in 1985. There’ve been a lot of stories covering the retirement; people waxing nostalgic -- though not too much since I haven’t heard of any big jump in Delta MD-80 bookings. They still fly almost 100 of them. I have seen a couple of quotes about not wanting to sit in the last rows because of the noise from the side-mounted engines. It’s true. Not even the Bose noise-cancelling headphones could handle all the engine and vibration noise. They were also bad seats because there were no windows; all you’d see would be the engine cowling and the window would make the noise even worse. And those times when I ended up in those seats -- usually last-minute bookings between ORD and DFW -- my mind would sometimes wander -- if the engine next to my head blows up, will the shrapnel blow out or blow into the cabin. I never heard of such a catastrophic failure on an MD-80 -- but that didn’t keep me from wondering. </li><li>Standing in the TSA PreCheck queue, watching the single screener who was checking boarding passes and IDs have to ping-pong between the regular and PreCheck lines, I wondered what was keeping US airports from installing the automated boarding pass-checking gates that I’ve passed thru at mid-sized European airports like Budapest and Krakow and Edinburgh. I got it -- they’re only checking for valid boarding passes; they’re not examining IDs -- but there’s got to be something there that can improve TSA efficiency <em>and</em> the traveler experience. Watching this poor woman, my mind fast-forwarded to October next year when the TSA starts enforcing the Real ID requirement, the time wasted arguing with people who travel maybe once a year and so didn’t go thru the additional hassle of getting a Real ID-compliant driver’s license. Note to self - don’t book any travel in October 2020. </li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com. </li><li>Bridge Music -- August (Reggae Rework) by el-B (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/elB/16075 Ft: Calendargirl </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Street Food in Poland and Hungary </strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Over-tourism is still a big topic in the tourism industry. Iceland seems to be cooling down after the Wow Air bankruptcy, but the photo from May of the queue to summit Mount Everest has become the new icon of the problem faced there and at places like Venice, Barcelona, and Machu Pichu. And it drives an interesting dichotomy -- travelers chasing the iconic Instagram picture -- sort of a virtual souvenir for this “pics or it didn’t happen” age -- while at the same time craving “authenticity” -- which is where, I think, the current glorification of street food is coming from. Wanting to experience something that you can only get in this place -- and, of course, post a picture of it.</li><li>Parking the cynicism for a sec -- if you’re queuing up (hopefully with some locals, not just tourists), doing the point-and-shoot ordering, and then eating it there on the street, it does create a very specific moment and memory. I vividly remember buying takoyaki, basically octopus croquettes, from a street vendor in Osaka; getting into the queue for a food stall in a Beijing hutong, the only non-Chinese guy, not knowing what for and getting this phenomenal crunchy scallion pancake; sending Andrew over to a vendor on a sidewalk in Hoi An, Vietnam for black sesame soup; folding up a slice of pizza in New York City in mid-bar crawl; and, as talked about a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/podcast-151-traveler-data-leaks-brittany-street-food/\">few episodes back</a>, slurping oysters on the Cancale sea wall on the Brittany coast.</li><li>So while we weren’t on a street food hunt in Poland and Hungary, our willingness, actually desire to eat pretty much whatever we came across without any filters -- no worries about keto or paleo or gluten-free diets -- led us to some good street food -- even though there were days I really felt the need to double down on the statins.</li><li>Probably the most memorable bit of street food came our first day in Krakow. We landed around 9am, took a taxi to the hotel, checked in, brushed our teeth, and walked up to the Old Square where I trawled through the vendor stalls. I came to a full stop at a small stand at the end of an aisle. An older couple had a huge pan over a wood fire. The pan had a metal divider down the middle; one half of the pan was frying onions; the other half, sliced kielbasa. I watched a couple people order and then stepped up. The man sliced a large, thick piece of bread off a round loaf, spread a thick smear of lard with cracklings, put down a layer of sliced kielbasa, finishing it off with fried onions. All for 13 złoty -- or about 3 and a half bucks. I don’t know what left more of an impression -- the size and heft of what he handed me or the staying power of the layer of pork fat it left on my lips. I’ll put a picture of it in the show notes.</li><li>We walked straight from there to a small square behind St Mary’s Basilica for the pierogi festival. There were 20-30 stands selling their selection of pierogis. Not sure if pierogis strictly qualify as a street food, but I queued up at the most popular ones and did point-&amp;-shoot ordering through most of their selection. I skipped the sweet pierogis -- the chocolate-banana and the blueberry ones just didn’t say “pierogi” to me -- but I still ended up with 5-6 from each stand -- from traditional onion and potato, to goose and duck and wild boar-filled ones. I tried to avoid pointing at one stand’s Mexican pierogi, but somehow it ended up on my plate. This was a pretty full-contact Day One. I needed a nap.</li><li>Chicago has a large Polish population -- somewhere in the range of 1-1.5 million Polish immigrants their descendants in the metro area, which, depending on who you read, is the largest Polish metropolitan area outside of Poland. So we get our share of Polish food and I wanted to try a few things I recognized. The first thing we hunted down was a pączki -- basically a Polish jelly doughnut. In Chicago, Pączki Day is Fat Tuesday and you see pączkis everywhere -- the grocery stores, bakeries. Asking around, Gorące Pączki -- “Hot Donuts” in English -- was the consensus recommendation in the Old Town. We rolled up there a couple of times and came away, I gotta say, disappointed. Even Chicago grocery store pączkis are better.</li><li>That weekend, we were staying with friends in the hills/mountains a couple of hours southwest of Krakow, down near the Czech and Slovakian borders. On Sunday, we went to a karczma for lunch, which as near as I could tell is a roadside pub/restaurant. But this one, the specialty was potato pancakes made in a wood-burning oven. One guy, the owner, was running the oven -- laying the pancake batter in the oven, shifting them around with a spatula, managing the fire, serving some pancakes flat while stuffing and folding others over like a potato pancake quesadilla. Watching this guy was like watching kitchen ballet. And the product -- like no potato pancake I’d ever had. Definitely beat out Chicago on this one.</li><li>We got into Budapest on St Stephen’s Day, Hungary’s biggest national holiday commemorating the founding of the Hungarian state; kinda like their version of the US Independence Day. After checking into our hotel, we walked over to the Buda side of the Danube where there was a huge food festival. The longest line was for the national cake. Apparently, they do a special cake each St Stephen’s Day. It was a really long line, but they were handing out free pieces of cake, so it was understandable. We skipped it though and went for the next longest line, for freshly fried lángos. Every culture seems to have some version of fried dough street food, and lángos is Hungary’s, though lángos is savory, not sweet. It was a hot day, but here was a booth full of women, hand stretching balls of dough into disks and dropping them into deep pans of hot oil for people waiting 15 minutes in the hot sun for them. The fully-dressed lángos was brushed with garlic and then topped with sour cream and shredded cheese. Still waddling from the weekend in Krakow, I went for the lite version -- just the garlic.&nbsp;</li><li>A couple of days later, Irene and I took a 40-minute train ride up along the Danube to Szentendre, a bit of an artist colony town. We hadn’t been up there in, I dunno, 20 years so we thought we’d check it out again. And top on our list of things to revisit was a little lángos shack tucked away halfway up a little stairway that goes from the town square up to the Catholic church on top of a hill. The last time we were in Szentendre, we tripped across this place walking up to the church - just a couple of people frying up lángos. It took us a bit to find the staircase this time -- it’s about a person-and-a-half wide archway next to a souvenir shop. The shack was still there, but it expanded, now with tables in a little courtyard, and it’s been found. We stood in a queue of tourists for 10-15 minutes watching 2 women crank out fried disks of dough. I cringed when I saw people putting ketchup on their lángos. We stayed pure with the garlic.</li><li>The <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/06/24/podcast-130-notes-from-hungary/\">last time</a> Irene and I were in Hungary, in 2017, we complained about not being able to find good, basic Hungarian food outside of the tourist traps. We saw lots of burger bars and pizza joint, especially in the Jewish Quarter, the party district where all the ruin bars are. But now, things seem to have diversified. Not far from Szimpla Kert, Ground Zero of the ruin bar circuit, there’s a place called Gettó Gulyás selling, well, gulyás and other Hungarian basics like chicken paprikas. And even better, it looks like there’s a bit of a chain called Langosh that’s open in the party district til 2 in the morning. Fried bread and beer -- not sure there’s any better definition of street food.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #155</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_155.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #155 — RJ Delays; Street Food in Poland and Hungary','','inherit','closed','closed','','2527-revision-v1','','','2019-09-21 14:08:36','2019-09-21 19:08:36','',2527,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/09/21/2527-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2538,1,'2019-09-22 10:09:18','2019-09-22 15:09:18','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\">\n<p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/IMG_1038.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2529 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/IMG_1038-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a></p><figcaption>Polish health food</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>Didn\'t have any problems with the 787\'s flying 4,800 miles to Krakow or back from Budapest, but the 560-mile regional jet flights between Chicago and Charlottesville, VA have been causing me no end of hassles. We talk about this, revisit our discussions about iPhone dual SIM capability and American Airlines\' MD-80 retirement. And then go deep on my very non-keto-friendly dive into Krakow and Budapest street food.&nbsp; All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_155.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/685058542&color=%23ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #155: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago on an off-travel week; taking a break this week after a couple of weeks of weather-induced hassles -- that in spite of completely avoiding Hurricane Dorian. Instead, it’s been a steady stream of morning thunderstorms hitting ORD and jacking it up for the rest of the day. That and flying regional jets, which we’ve said before, are often…. problematic. In the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/08/13/podcast-154-will-we-still-love-uber-when-the-prices-go-up/\">last episode</a>, I talked about having to shift my outbound evening flight from CHO to RIC because of morning thunderstorms at ORD. The last two weeks have been different variations on the theme. The Tuesday after Labor Day, I was on the bus to the L heading to ORD for an 8:30am flight (because the Uber and Lyft wait times were insane -- God, I miss my old Mongolian ex-taxi driver) when I got a text that my American Eagle flight was cancelled. Still on the bus, I called American’s Platinum line. They told me what I already knew -- no other American options until the end of the day. I told them that since I was coming home the next day (Weds), I needed to get to Charlottesville that morning. “What about the 9am United flight?” I asked her, “I’m already on my way to ORD.” “Let me call United to transfer the ticket,” she offered. I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised. Over the past few years, I’ve seen airlines more and more reluctant to lose \\ revenue by moving you to another carrier, but there was none of that coming from this American agent. Our call kept going as I got off the bus and walked down the stairs into the subway stop, but she got everything squared away. Now that United flight ended up being delayed an hour, but it eventually got me to Charlottesville.</li><li>Last Friday morning in Charlottesville, I woke up, and scrolling thru Twitter, saw <a href=\"https://twitter.com/NWSChicago\">NWS Chicago</a> -- Nat’l Weather Service -- tweeting about severe thunderstorms, so when I got the text from United at 9am delaying my 1pm flight 45 minutes, I wasn’t surprised. No big deal -- I’ll just get a second beer at the Radar Bar. But then, as these things tend to do it, it didn’t stop there. An hour later, another text from United -- the delay doubled to 90 minutes.  But then at noon, another text -- the delay is down to an hour -- shortly followed by another text -- it’s back up to 90 minutes. I pull up <a href=\"https://flightaware.com/\">FlightAware</a>; I’m not going to the airport until the inbound plane leaves the gate at ORD. Ten minutes later, I see it push back. OK, that should be the end of the delay cascade. I order an Uber and head to the airport. Halfway there, another text -- now my flight isn’t leaving until 3:30pm, 2½ hours late. Immediately followed by a text with a 3:57 departure time. I get out of the car and head to the gate agent. What’s going on? Has the plane left ORD yet? Unlike the American agent, the United agent -- or maybe she worked for Air Wisconsin, the United Express partner, is evasive -- don’t know what’s going on; no other options; everything else is oversold, even in Richmond. I back out of line and call United’s Premiere desk. Yes, there’s availability out of Richmond and DC. Richmond’s a little closer and has a helluva lot less of a rush hour, so I move over to the 5:30pm flight (the United agent said “I think you’re making the right decision”), book a one-way rental, and head out to the parking lot. There’s a mist starting to settle in over the airport. This can’t be good. It’s an uneventful 90-minute drive to Richmond. I sit at the Sam Adams Brewhouse bar and have a beer, and then another. This flight leaves on time -- it’s also a regional jet, but it’s been running up and down the East Coast, so today, it’s running on time -- getting me into ORD at 6:50pm, about 5 hours after my original flight was supposed to land. I fire up the United app and look up the status of that flight -- it still hasn’t left. It didn’t leave until 9pm and then only made it as far as Washington-Dulles -- 95 miles up the road.</li><li>Bridge Music —  &nbsp; I Will Writhe by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/26739 Ft: Soundprank </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>In contrast to my regional jet challenges, our trip at the end of August to Krakow and Budapest went much smoother. We flew LOT, the Polish airline, the whole way, including the last leg, BUD-ORD non-stop. I was kinda surprised by that leg -- a Transatlantic leg that didn’t go through Poland -- but there must be enough traffic on that route. A week before we left, American announced their own non-stop between ORD and BUD starting next year. Both airlines do/will use 787’s on the route. Perhaps it’s one of the “long, thin routes” that the 787 was designed to unlock. Anyways, all three flights on LOT -- 787’s on the long legs, and a Dash-8 prop job on the hop from Krakow to Budapest -- were reasonable. I thought the 787’s “morning wake-up” mode for breakfast -- where the cabin lights fade up while the darkened windows lighten -- was a pleasant change to usual “light on and PA announcement” approach. It was my first trip to Poland. Krakow Airport is nice -- new, compact, with train station into the city. It was a good trip.</li><li>I talked in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/08/13/podcast-154-will-we-still-love-uber-when-the-prices-go-up/\">last episode</a> about trying out my iPhone XS’s dual SIM capability in Hungary and Poland. I did the pre-work before I left -- working through a couple of chat sessions to move my US AT&amp;T number to the internal eSIM so I use the physical SIM slot for my UK EE pre-paid SIM. En route -- somewhere over the Faroe Islands I think -- I went into Settings and made my UK line the main voice and data line, leaving my US line open for phone calls and texts. It seemed to work as designed -- I replied to a couple of texts on my US line from my sister, but it looks like everything else went out over the UK line with the 3 GB for £10 plan. I’ll hold final judgement until I get this month’s bill from AT&amp;T, but from what I could see on their website, it looks like it worked. It was a nice change to only have one phone and not to have to remember to check my other phone every night. The new version of the iPhone operating system -- iOS 13 -- is supposed to have some improvements for dual SIM, but I was happy with it as it stands -- but check back with me after I get my AT&amp;T bill.</li><li>And, of course, I extend that 3 GB by hitting the WiFi in coffee shops and hotels, which is where we circle back to one of my top travel security tips -- use a VPN when on WiFi. I used to think that as long as I was hitting encrypted web sites I was OK -- it used to be that you’d see HTTPS in the address bar apparently Google and Apple think that’s too much for us to process; they’ve replaced it with a picture of a lock; Firefox still shows the full address, though. But it seems that more and more security breaches are taking advantage of obscure misconfigurations that get around basic security. And with major hotel chains regularly coughing up millions of credit card numbers, it seems a bit unreasonable to expect the staff at a small coffee shop or local hotel to be up-to-date on their router patching. So I have VPN clients on my iPhone, my Android tablet, and my MacBook Air. I usually forget to turn them on if I’m doing a quick check of Twitter or Google Maps while in line somewhere, but if I’m doing any sort of browsing session on public WiFi these days, I’ll fire it up.&nbsp;</li><li>Packing for this trip meant rummaging around for European plug adapters. Not voltage converters -- I don’t use them because all the electronics can handle 110 and 240 volt -- just the two blade-to-two round adapters. I’d rounded up my UK adapters for our June trip to Ireland and Scotland, but now I needed the European adapters -- the two round plug ones.&nbsp; I found the UK ones and a random South African one but I couldn’t find the European ones anywhere. Probably because I’d left them all behind in Brittany in March. So I got on Amazon (as one does when they need some random thing in a hurry) and ordered a box of 6. I only needed one, but given my history, 6 would keep me for a year or two. I ordered white adapters because that’s what popped up in Amazon. Which was OK in those hotels with black outlets, but not so great for white outlets. I took 2 and came home with 2, but only by sheer luck. At least twice, I was walking out of the room with my bag and only then noticed an adapter still plugged in, hiding in a recessed white outlet. I really need colored plug adapters. And not in tasteful colors; something gaudy, like a purple or pink or chartreuse. Maybe I’ll spray paint the ones I have before my next trip.&nbsp;</li><li>Leonard -- no last name -- commented on the last episode with a link to a Dallas TV station’s coverage of the last American Airlines MD-80 flight; appropriately flying from DFW to ORD, a route and a plane that contributed heavily to my Advantage Gold status -- when that was the highest level -- back in 1985. There’ve been a lot of stories covering the retirement; people waxing nostalgic -- though not too much since I haven’t heard of any big jump in Delta MD-80 bookings. They still fly almost 100 of them. I have seen a couple of quotes about not wanting to sit in the last rows because of the noise from the side-mounted engines. It’s true. Not even the Bose noise-cancelling headphones could handle all the engine and vibration noise. They were also bad seats because there were no windows; all you’d see would be the engine cowling and the window would make the noise even worse. And those times when I ended up in those seats -- usually last-minute bookings between ORD and DFW -- my mind would sometimes wander -- if the engine next to my head blows up, will the shrapnel blow out or blow into the cabin. I never heard of such a catastrophic failure on an MD-80 -- but that didn’t keep me from wondering.&nbsp;</li><li>Standing in the TSA PreCheck queue, watching the single screener who was checking boarding passes and IDs have to ping-pong between the regular and PreCheck lines, I wondered what was keeping US airports from installing the automated boarding pass-checking gates that I’ve passed thru at mid-sized European airports like Budapest and Krakow and Edinburgh. I got it -- they’re only checking for valid boarding passes; they’re not examining IDs -- but there’s got to be something there that can improve TSA efficiency <em>and</em> the traveler experience. Watching this poor woman, my mind fast-forwarded to October next year when the TSA starts enforcing the Real ID requirement, the time wasted arguing with people who travel maybe once a year and so didn’t go thru the additional hassle of getting a Real ID-compliant driver’s license. Note to self - don’t book any travel in October 2020. </li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com. </li><li>Bridge Music -- August (Reggae Rework) by el-B (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/elB/16075 Ft: Calendargirl </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Street Food in Poland and Hungary </strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Over-tourism is still a big topic in the tourism industry. Iceland seems to be cooling down after the Wow Air bankruptcy, but the photo from May of the queue to summit Mount Everest has become the new icon of the problem faced there and at places like Venice, Barcelona, and Machu Pichu. And it drives an interesting dichotomy -- travelers chasing the iconic Instagram picture -- sort of a virtual souvenir for this “pics or it didn’t happen” age -- while at the same time craving “authenticity” -- which is where, I think, the current glorification of street food is coming from. Wanting to experience something that you can only get in this place -- and, of course, post a picture of it.</li><li>Parking the cynicism for a sec -- if you’re queuing up (hopefully with some locals, not just tourists), doing the point-and-shoot ordering, and then eating it there on the street, it does create a very specific moment and memory. I vividly remember buying takoyaki, basically octopus croquettes, from a street vendor in Osaka; getting into the queue for a food stall in a Beijing hutong, the only non-Chinese guy, not knowing what for and getting this phenomenal crunchy scallion pancake; sending Andrew over to a vendor on a sidewalk in Hoi An, Vietnam for black sesame soup; folding up a slice of pizza in New York City in mid-bar crawl; and, as talked about a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/podcast-151-traveler-data-leaks-brittany-street-food/\">few episodes back</a>, slurping oysters on the Cancale sea wall on the Brittany coast.</li><li>So while we weren’t on a street food hunt in Poland and Hungary, our willingness, actually desire to eat pretty much whatever we came across without any filters -- no worries about keto or paleo or gluten-free diets -- led us to some good street food -- even though there were days I really felt the need to double down on the statins.</li><li>Probably the most memorable bit of street food came our first day in Krakow. We landed around 9am, took a taxi to the hotel, checked in, brushed our teeth, and walked up to the Old Square where I trawled through the vendor stalls. I came to a full stop at a small stand at the end of an aisle. An older couple had a huge pan over a wood fire. The pan had a metal divider down the middle; one half of the pan was frying onions; the other half, sliced kielbasa. I watched a couple people order and then stepped up. The man sliced a large, thick piece of bread off a round loaf, spread a thick smear of lard with cracklings, put down a layer of sliced kielbasa, finishing it off with fried onions. All for 13 złoty -- or about 3 and a half bucks. I don’t know what left more of an impression -- the size and heft of what he handed me or the staying power of the layer of pork fat it left on my lips. I’ll put a picture of it in the show notes.</li><li>We walked straight from there to a small square behind St Mary’s Basilica for the pierogi festival. There were 20-30 stands selling their selection of pierogis. Not sure if pierogis strictly qualify as a street food, but I queued up at the most popular ones and did point-&amp;-shoot ordering through most of their selection. I skipped the sweet pierogis -- the chocolate-banana and the blueberry ones just didn’t say “pierogi” to me -- but I still ended up with 5-6 from each stand -- from traditional onion and potato, to goose and duck and wild boar-filled ones. I tried to avoid pointing at one stand’s Mexican pierogi, but somehow it ended up on my plate. This was a pretty full-contact Day One. I needed a nap.</li><li>Chicago has a large Polish population -- somewhere in the range of 1-1.5 million Polish immigrants their descendants in the metro area, which, depending on who you read, is the largest Polish metropolitan area outside of Poland. So we get our share of Polish food and I wanted to try a few things I recognized. The first thing we hunted down was a pączki -- basically a Polish jelly doughnut. In Chicago, Pączki Day is Fat Tuesday and you see pączkis everywhere -- the grocery stores, bakeries. Asking around, Gorące Pączki -- “Hot Donuts” in English -- was the consensus recommendation in the Old Town. We rolled up there a couple of times and came away, I gotta say, disappointed. Even Chicago grocery store pączkis are better.</li><li>That weekend, we were staying with friends in the hills/mountains a couple of hours southwest of Krakow, down near the Czech and Slovakian borders. On Sunday, we went to a karczma for lunch, which as near as I could tell is a roadside pub/restaurant. But this one, the specialty was potato pancakes made in a wood-burning oven. One guy, the owner, was running the oven -- laying the pancake batter in the oven, shifting them around with a spatula, managing the fire, serving some pancakes flat while stuffing and folding others over like a potato pancake quesadilla. Watching this guy was like watching kitchen ballet. And the product -- like no potato pancake I’d ever had. Definitely beat out Chicago on this one.</li><li>We got into Budapest on St Stephen’s Day, Hungary’s biggest national holiday commemorating the founding of the Hungarian state; kinda like their version of the US Independence Day. After checking into our hotel, we walked over to the Buda side of the Danube where there was a huge food festival. The longest line was for the national cake. Apparently, they do a special cake each St Stephen’s Day. It was a really long line, but they were handing out free pieces of cake, so it was understandable. We skipped it though and went for the next longest line, for freshly fried lángos. Every culture seems to have some version of fried dough street food, and lángos is Hungary’s, though lángos is savory, not sweet. It was a hot day, but here was a booth full of women, hand stretching balls of dough into disks and dropping them into deep pans of hot oil for people waiting 15 minutes in the hot sun for them. The fully-dressed lángos was brushed with garlic and then topped with sour cream and shredded cheese. Still waddling from the weekend in Krakow, I went for the lite version -- just the garlic.&nbsp;</li><li>A couple of days later, Irene and I took a 40-minute train ride up along the Danube to Szentendre, a bit of an artist colony town. We hadn’t been up there in, I dunno, 20 years so we thought we’d check it out again. And top on our list of things to revisit was a little lángos shack tucked away halfway up a little stairway that goes from the town square up to the Catholic church on top of a hill. The last time we were in Szentendre, we tripped across this place walking up to the church - just a couple of people frying up lángos. It took us a bit to find the staircase this time -- it’s about a person-and-a-half wide archway next to a souvenir shop. The shack was still there, but it expanded, now with tables in a little courtyard, and it’s been found. We stood in a queue of tourists for 10-15 minutes watching 2 women crank out fried disks of dough. I cringed when I saw people putting ketchup on their lángos. We stayed pure with the garlic.</li><li>The <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/06/24/podcast-130-notes-from-hungary/\">last time</a> Irene and I were in Hungary, in 2017, we complained about not being able to find good, basic Hungarian food outside of the tourist traps. We saw lots of burger bars and pizza joint, especially in the Jewish Quarter, the party district where all the ruin bars are. But now, things seem to have diversified. Not far from Szimpla Kert, Ground Zero of the ruin bar circuit, there’s a place called Gettó Gulyás selling, well, gulyás and other Hungarian basics like chicken paprikas. And even better, it looks like there’s a bit of a chain called Langosh that’s open in the party district til 2 in the morning. Fried bread and beer -- not sure there’s any better definition of street food.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #155</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_155.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #155 — RJ Delays; Street Food in Poland and Hungary','','inherit','closed','closed','','2527-revision-v1','','','2019-09-22 10:09:18','2019-09-22 15:09:18','',2527,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/09/22/2527-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2539,1,'2019-09-22 10:11:21','2019-09-22 15:11:21','<!-- wp:image {\"id\":2382,\"align\":\"right\",\"width\":300,\"height\":300} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright is-resized\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/DSC_5715-1024x1024.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2382\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"/><figcaption>Not Looking Friendly for a Solo Diner</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I dusted off the mobile rig to record this episode in Happy Valley, the home of Penn State. And I am kinda happy with some travel to Phoenix and Florida to thaw me out after Chicago\'s run in with the polar vortex. In this episode, I talk about budget airlines, stepping down in Hertz status, why I bought physical guidebooks for a trip to France, the challenges of being a solo diner, and then dig into the archives for a classic travel story. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_149.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_149.mp3\"]\n<p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show Notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show Notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #149:</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the Hyatt Place in State College, PA, feeling a bit more positive about life after a couple of warm weather getaways -- an afternoon meeting in Phoenix that I happily turned into a 3-day stay by flying in early for a “prep” session and staying late “in case our session ran long”; and then a long weekend with friends on the Gulf side of Florida. It was a nice break to walk outside without layering up coats, and scarves, and hats, and without taking an Arctic blast in the face. Not that it was toasty in Phoenix, but I was walking around downtown in a blazer, passing people -- natives, I’d guess -- in puffy down jackets. Not that they were wrong; it’s just that my reference point was that -22 degree polar vortex day. </li><li>Reminds me of a time many years ago when I was doing a project in J’burg South Africa in July -- our summer, their winter. We’re going to a restaurant for dinner. The inside is full, but the outside tables are available. The owner apologizes, offers to bring us blankets. My colleague from Detroit is wearing a polo shirt; I’m in dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up. “Thanks, but we’re fine,” we tell him. Halfway through the meal, he comes out, offering to move us inside now that a table has freed up. He’s wearing a parka. “No, really, we’re OK,” we tell him. Different reference points on what’s cold.</li><li>Both trips -- out to Phoenix and down to Ft Myers airport, were full of young families, also getting away from the cold, maybe to stay with parents/ grandparents who’d retired in more reasonable climes. I flew Southwest to Phoenix and United to Ft Myers, and I came to appreciate what, before this, was, to me, an undiscovered benefit of Southwest’s open seating. Because I was in the B boarding group, those families with young children boarded before me. Walking down the aisle, I could spot the crying babies -- there, and there, and there -- and could just keep walking, until I was behind them all. Sure, I was in the back of the plane, and it took me a while to deplane, but that was a very small price I was willing to pay for 3 hours of relative peace. </li><li> Bridge Music —&nbsp;<em>Paint the Sky</em>&nbsp;by Hans Atom (c) 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/hansatom/50718 Ft: Miss Judged </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>In past episodes, we talked about the bare bones budget airlines -- Spirit and Frontier in the US; Ryanair and EasyJet in Europe, and Wow Air and Norwegian as the second coming of Laker Airways, doing TransAtlantic budget flight. Of those, I’ve flown Frontier, EasyJet, and Wow Air which, as a group, seems like the less severe set of the budgets. Ryanair and Spirit always seem to have a harder edge about the “budget-ness.” And then there’s their impact on the mainline carriers -- United, American, and Delta’s basic economy fares. Usually, when I look at a mainline carrier’s basic economy fare, the difference vs. their regular economy fare isn’t big enough to make up extra hassles. But booking our trip down to Florida, the difference on United was over $100 a ticket. Irene and I figured we could put up with a few hassles for over $200. But as dug a bit further, we didn’t find as many hassles as we thought. Because we’re both United Gold, there was no limitation on carry-on bags and we boarded in the usual Group 1. The only downgrade was that we had to pay to reserve seats and we couldn’t book them in Economy Plus -- the aisles with the extra legroom. Even after paying for reserved seats, we still saved enough to pay for a couple of nice dinners of grilled grouper. </li><li>Our friends who joined us from Milwaukee flew down on American through DFW without a hassle. Their flight back -- a direct to Milwaukee on Frontier -- not so much. Their flight was supposed to leave at 7:45pm. Around lunch, they received a note that their flight was delayed by 5 hours. What? We checked that again. We pulled up the FlightAware app, searched for their flight, and then started walked its planned flight legs back, hitting the “Where’s My Plane?” button until we found it -- still on the ground in Milwaukee 6 hours after its scheduled departure time. The weather wasn’t that bad, so it had to be a maintenance problem, which is a huge problem when flying budget and regional airlines because their model is to bounce a plane from place to place rather than flying it out of a hub where they could swap out a busted plane if need be. So that 6 hour delay was going to cascade through that day’s schedule. Our friends finally left Ft Myers at 2:45am. Which is something I’ve noticed about Frontier -- I’ve never seen them cancel a flight no matter how late they leave. A regional airline would’ve cancelled that flight way earlier, but not Frontier. I don’t know how their crews don’t time out, but I kinda admire them for getting you home no matter what time. Would be way better <em>not </em>&nbsp;to take a 7-hr delay, but at least they get you home.</li><li>This year, I got dropped a status level on Hertz, from President’s Circle down to Five Star. I didn’t do 20 rentals last year, and I missed an offer back in December to pay some points to keep my status. But, I can’t say that I notice the downgrade too much. When I was in Phoenix, I snagged a great Chrysler 300 with custom black rims. In Ft Myers, I got a brand new GMC Terrain SUV that held 4 adults very comfortable… Though I have to say that the Terrain through me for a loop when I got in. I’ve rented all sort of different cars. I get in, pair my phone to the Bluetooh, adjust the mirrors, put it in Drive, and pull out. With the Terrain, I was good with all of that right up until the “put it in Drive” step. I look down at the console -- no gear shift, no gear dial (the Chrysler experience talking). Then grab the stalk on the right side of the steering column and turn on the windshield wipers. I’m looking all over -- “WTF? Where is the damn gear shift?” From the back seat, Kristin points under the climate control “It’s right there”. And then I see, a line of buttons -- P, R, N, D. I push the D button and off we go. The last time I saw a push button gear selector was when I was a kid, riding in somebody’s old Plymouth. I mean, come on GMC, do we really need <em>another</em> type of gear selection? Searching the Internet later for the Terrain’s gear buttons yields a whole slew of “Worst Shifter Design” article featuring these buttons. I don’t know which was worse -- the actual buttons or me, the alpha road warrior, getting back seat instructions on how to put a rental car in gear.</li><li>Another new thing I learned at Hertz Ft Myers -- besides where to find gear buttons -- is that, for Hertz Gold customers, there’s no additional driver fee for your spouse. I’ve been in Hertz Gold since it started, but I never connected to this benefit. It’s saves real money -- additional driver fees can run $10/day -- and hassle. Another reason to like the Hertz Gold program.</li><li>TravelCommons made our little local newspaper in an installment of their “Ask The Expert” series with the sub-headline “How can travel be more relaxing and fun?” &nbsp;When Sandy, the reporter, emailed me to schedule the interview, she wanted to talk about advice for successful spring break travel. So I started off talking about how those spring break families should avoid traveling during road warrior rush hours -- Monday mornings and Thursday evenings. “Boarding a plane filled with busy professionals can quickly rob you of that pre-vacation high,” Sandy wrote, “Peacock advise leisure travelers to avoid sharing a plane with these potential buzzkills.” Such as me. The last thing a family heading for Disney wants to encounter is people like me powering down the concourse. I also recounted some of the tips that you’ve seen in my Top Holiday Travel Tips posts -- fly early in the day, avoid regional jets, and no one-and-done outfits so you can get everything you need into a carry-on. And I talked about turning long layovers into mini-vacations with our upcoming Stockholm layover as an example. Of course, I didn’t mention that a lot of these layovers turn into taproom crawls, like in last year’s video of the Midway layover taproom tour, and potentially this Stockholm stop thanks to TravelCommons’ listener Rob Cheshire’s custom Google map. No, I figured than might be a bit much for our nice local paper. Sandy turned our 45-minute conversation into a nice article. I posted a picture of the article on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">TravelCommons Facebook page</a> since they don’t seem to put their issues on-line. </li><li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/12/podcast-120-where-do-guidebooks-fit-in-i-hate-shopping-for-suitcases/\">episode #120</a>, back in March 2016, I asked the question -- Where do physical guidebooks fit in the world of apps, review websites, social media, and podcasts? Back then, I was planning Andrew’s and my visit to Iceland. Now, getting ready to head over to Brittany, France for 10 days, I bought two physical guidebooks to take with us. Irene wanted DK’s Eyewitness Travel; it was her favorite out of the stack of guidebooks she checked out of the library. While I did a throwback, picked up our go-to book from our PK (pre-kids) days of travel, Michelin’s Green Guide. The DK book is definitely more visually punchy, but I figured Michelin, a French company, should have Brittany covered pretty well, and they published this new edition just last month. Maybe I’m getting lazy in my old age, but I’m kinda glad to have everything in one spot -- a bit of local history, touring maps, city guides -- rather than having to rummage through multiple PDFs in an Evernote folder. However, I took a pass on Amazon’s recommended add-on of Michelin’s Brittany Road and Tourist Map No. 512. I’ve topped up my local SIM for 2.5 GB of mobile data; I’m sticking with Google Maps. I maybe old school, but I’m not going back to the Dark Ages.</li><li>And if you have any travel rants, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. &nbsp;The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or  Instagram  at travelcommons -- or  post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com. </li><li> Bridge Music —&nbsp;<em>Perfect Stranger</em>&nbsp;by stellarartwars (c) 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/stellarartwars/45510 Ft: TheDice </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Dining Single</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Our daughter Claire is heading down to London for her first week of Spring Break and will then meet us in Paris for our Brittany trip. &nbsp;Planning it, we got talking about eating alone on the road. Years ago, it used to be more awkward - escorted to the small table off in the corner, a server a bit ticked off at the small check and therefore small tip. You’d read the newspaper or a book between courses to keep yourself occupied, wrap it up pretty quickly and head back to the hotel.</li><li>For guy travelers, the sports bar was (and still is) the exception to that rule. Fine, sit me in a booth alone as long as I have a clear view of walls of TV screens showing all ESPN all the time – ESPN, ESPN-2, ESPN-3, ESPN-U, ESPN News… No need for a book, especially over the next few weeks watching the opening rounds of the NCAA tournaments when I can watch a couple of games at once. Rush out? Hell no, give me another large Coors Light, we haven’t even hit half time.</li><li>Most restaurants now serve a full menu at the bar, complete with a full set up -- placemats, maybe a bread basket. Might be a touch cramped at happy hour, but it’s usually nice to be in the main flow of things rather than off in the corner. The trend toward shared plates , while getting a bit tired when dining with a group (“OK, what can we all agree on?”) works great for the single diner. If I want a bit of variety without overeating, I now have choices beyond sushi or tapas bars. Not that those are bad choices. I have no doubt that Claire will find her way to the bar at Barrafina in Soho.</li><li>Sitting at the bar also gave you a chance for a little social interaction, some serendipity; with the bartender, maybe with the guy sitting next to you. Some years ago, on my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/08/14/food-and-drink-highlights-from-my-drive-south/\">2,100-mile circle tour through the South</a>, a guy next to me at a Louisville bar told me to check out a restaurant in the not-yet-hip Bywater neighborhood in New Orleans; turned out to be a great recommendation. But I get less and less of that as people eat and just interact with their smartphones. Maybe Claire wouldn’t be keen on random bar conversations, but I kinda miss it.</li><li>Nowadays, where I do find that interaction is microbrewery taprooms. Sure, people still have their phones out to check their tasting flight into Untappd, but there’s an acceptance, almost an expectation, that people will “nerd out” about hops and malt and yeast esters with each other and with folks behind the bar. During one of my Dallas trips, I found my way to Grapevine Craft Brewing on a rainy Weds night. The brewmaster was pulling the taps, passing out some barrel samples, and we all spinning our beer nerd propellers real hard.</li><li> Bridge Music —&nbsp;<em>Foolish Game</em>&nbsp;by copperhead (c) 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/copperhead/46390 Ft: Snowflake,Sackjo22 </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><b>From The Travel Story Archives -- Airlines Need To Tell Us More</b></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Prepping for that interview with the local paper had me spelunking deep into the TravelCommons archives, fixing some broken links and listening to some of those early shows for the first time in a long time. A couple of things struck me -- the really poor sound quality I got from the little iRiver MP3 recorder that I was using, and how good some of those early travel stories were.</li><li> So here’s one from<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/09/24/podcast-15-begging-for-business-needing-to-know-at-35000-ft/\"> episode #15</a>, very long-time TC listener Allan Marko talking about wanting to know just a little bit more about what an airline maintenance guy is doing.  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #149</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_149.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #149 — Dining Single; Airlines Need To Tell Us More','','inherit','closed','closed','','2373-revision-v1','','','2019-09-22 10:11:21','2019-09-22 15:11:21','',2373,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/09/22/2373-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2543,1,'2019-10-14 22:34:15','2019-10-15 03:34:15','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\">\n<p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/IMG_0159.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1402\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/IMG_0159-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"225\" height=\"300\" /></a></p><figcaption>This Won\'t Help Your Flier Sat Score</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>In this episode, we talk with Michael Taylor, author of <a href=\"https://www.jdpower.com/business/press-releases/2019-north-america-airport-satisfaction-study\">JD Power\'s 2019 Airport Satisfaction Survey</a>, about what keeps fliers happy. I also talk about what I like about eScooters, shopping for a smaller bag for upcoming flights on a Euro budget airline, and how Hertz\'s contract updates remind me to delete my Bluetooth pairings in rental cars. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_156.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #156: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago in the middle of what looks like a 6-week run of solid travel. Traveled to DC, Charlottesville, and Nashville, in that order, in the 3 weeks since the last episode. Heading back to Charlottesville this week, then a week hopscotching through the Baltics with my son Andrew -- Riga, Latvia; Talinn, Estonia; Helsinki, Finland -- and then back down to Charlottesville. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I flew Southwest on my non-Charlottesville flights -- into DC Reagan and Nashville -- and United again to Charlottesville. The Southwest flights went smoothly, except for trying to get to Chicago Midway for the DC flight. The Uber driver didn’t follow the app’s recommended route; instead, he pretended he was a cab driver and took the normal route down the Stevenson Expressway which was crawling due to an earlier accident. I wasn’t paying attention - first time I’ve had an Uber driver freelance on me - and didn’t notice he’d skipped the exit to the faster path until it was too late. We made our flight, but not without a bit of hustle through Midway. No tip, let alone a 5-star review for that guy.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Southwest flies into the old Terminal A at what I still call Washington National. I went to college in DC in the early ‘80’s, before it was named for President Reagan and when Terminal A was pretty much all that was there. I had forgotten what a long schlepp it is from that terminal to the Metro station. I remember way back then asking someone why they built the Metro station so far away. “Because they’re going to build new terminals right across from it.” Which they finally did, some 20 years after that Metro station was opened. Sometimes it seems that airport planning horizons are not in years, or even decades; feels more like they’re planning in lifetimes.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>In between the Southwest flights, my United flight continued the string of disruptions trying to get into or out of Charlottesville. I checked that my flight was on-time before calling an Uber -- no weather delays at either end, United and FlightAware apps say the inbound plane is on-time…. Then, halfway to ORD, I get the text from United; a 2½-hour delay for crew arrival. What!? The next text “Because of crew scheduling disruptions this evening in Chicago, we’ve assigned your flight a new crew…. We know this delay wasn’t in your plans today, so we appreciate your patience.” No shit a 2½-hour delay wasn’t in my plans, especially when it’s because United stole our original crew because they screwed up their scheduling. And really United, you can’t find another pilot in ORD, your largest hub, that’s a little closer? I tell you what else isn’t in my plans, flying United to Charlottesville this week. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/stefsax/7785\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Awel</a> </em>by stefsax (c) copyright 2006 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/stefsax/7785 </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>That’s the sound of my new <a href=\"https://www.marriott.com/loyalty/member-benefits/titanium.mi\">Marriott Bonvoy Lifetime Titanium Elite</a> card hitting the kitchen counter. The mailer package was appropriately upscale, but the sheer weight of the thing stunned me. I put a quick video of it on the TravelCommons Facebook page. Cate Rose commented “Hope it scans into your Stocard app so you don’t actually have to carry it in your luggage allowance”. My thought exactly.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I got a note that Chicago’s electric scooter pilot ends tomorrow, which made me realize that I’ve seen them in just about every city I’ve been to this summer -- Budapest, Krakow, Charlottesville, Nashville, Washington, DC. I think the only places I didn’t see them were in Scotland and Ireland. They’re handy; because they’re dockless, I’ve found they have a wider distribution than, say, a traditional docked bike share and you can take them directly to your planned destination. And they’re a good fill-in between walking and an Uber or a Lyft. And, they’re fun! When I was in DC a couple of weeks ago, I was in the <a href=\"https://washington.org/visit-dc/neighborhoods/brookland\">Brookland</a> neighborhood in the Northeast part of town, and wanted to try out a new taproom there, <a href=\"http://www.rightproperbrewing.com/what-we-do\">Right Proper Brewing</a>. Now Brookland is not the nicest part of DC. It’s much better than when I went to school there, but there are still iffy parts. I wasn’t completely comfortable walking down to Right Proper from the Brookland Metro stop, but it seemed too short for an Uber ride and there was no bus that went down there. But, there was a scooter a couple of blocks from the Metro station. Running down 9th St at 10 mph felt a bit better than speedwalking at 4. And could leave it right in front of the taproom. It was exactly what I wanted. Two problems I’ve seen -- first, too many people riding them on the sidewalk, especially in DC. Maybe because I bike a lot in Chicago, I’m comfortable in bike lanes and navigating around cars on the street and keeping an eye out for potholes. I actually wouldn’t be comfortable riding a scooter on the sidewalk; I’d be afraid of popping a pedestrian who suddenly walked in front of me. To me, cars are much more predictable than pedestrians. The second thing, the need to have half-a-dozen scooter apps on your phone. In Chicago, there are 8 scooter companies, in addition to Uber and Lyft’s scooters. And you need to download their app to find and rent their scooter. Which meant that when I wanted to find a scooter near the Brookland Metro stop, I’d have to cycle thru 5 or 6 apps. Except I didn’t because I found an app called <a href=\"https://scootermap.com/\">Scooter Map</a> that shows all the scooter brands on one map. I think it’s targeted at folks who are making money recharging scooters (not quite sure how that works) but it worked fine for me. I fired it up and saw all the different scooters that were near me. One caveat -- I’ve only ridden these scooters on sunny days. I’m not sure how enthusiastic I’d be riding one in the rain or snow. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>For the Baltics trip next week, we’re taking Finnair out and back from Chicago, an early morning ferry ride from Tallinn to Helsinki, and then AirBaltic for everything else. Which then got me thinking about luggage sizes, because I bought my current bag, the <a href=\"https://www.swissarmy.com/us/en&amp;eoq=!t/Products/Travel-Gear/Werks-Traveler-5-0/collection/trg-collection/travelgear_collection_TRA-C2955\">Victorinox Werks</a> 22-incher, to use every last inch of US carry-on allowance. It even catches some side-eye from American and United where I have status. So I didn’t figure it’d fit into any European budget carrier’s luggage sizer. Looking up <a href=\"https://www.airbaltic.com/en/cabin-baggage\">AirBaltic’s carry-on allowance</a>, my Victorinox is a couple of inches too tall and an inch too deep. But what really got me shopping for a new bag for this trip is the weight. AirBaltic has an 8 kg/17½ lbs weight limit. In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/05/30/podcast-121-tsa-lines-my-luggage-is-where/\">episode #121</a>, I talked about the baggage strip tease exercise with Wow Air to make their 7 kg/15 lbs carry-on weight limit. I’d take my bag off the scale, pull some clothes out, zip it back up, and put it back on the scale. Still too heavy. Repeat 3 more times until the agent takes pity — or just gets tired of me — and gives me the approval tag to put on my bag. After which I walk about 10 feet, open my bag and put my armful of clothes back in. My Victorinox is a bit over 7 lbs, so not only is it too tall, the bag itself uses over 40% of the weight allowance. And even though I’ve talked before about how much I hate shopping for luggage, I searched for a smaller, lighter bag that wouldn’t cost a fortune, since my Victorinox will stay my primary bag. I landed on the the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/32lIURe\">TravelPro Maxlite 5</a>. I, or rather my daughter has a good history with TravelPro. It fit the AirBaltic dimensions and is one of the lighter bags I saw at 5.4 lbs which is down to 30% of the 8 kg weight allowance. It also meets three of the key suitcase criteria I laid down in the “how to shop for a suitcase” topic in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/01/25/podcast-137-new-years-travel-status-tips-how-to-shop-for-a-suitcase/\">episode #137</a> -- it’s black, it’s a 2-wheeler so no lost space on extended spinner wheels, and the inside is, for the most part, a wide open box without clothes hangers or a bunch of zip compartments. I’m taking it to Charlottesville tomorrow for a shakedown cruise.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Three years ago, back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/11/22/podcast-125-uber-driver-stories-overseas-for-the-election/\">episode #125</a>, in a Travel Security tip, I talked about the need to delete your phone’s Bluetooth pairing when you return a rental car. Usually when I go to pair my phone, I’ll first go through and delete 3-5 pairings before pairing my own. And they all have personalized names like “Timmy’s iPhone”. And most phones by default will download your contacts to the car when paired, so leave all of their contacts and phone numbers in their rental. That is just bad in so many ways. And now Hertz has gotten around to noticing it. In their newest rental terms and conditions, they specifically carve out any liability from you leaving a Bluetooth pairing behind. It’s a pain to remember, especially if you’re running for a flight, but as you’re taking that last scan around the car for your sunglasses and iPhone, remember not to leave your identity behind either.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music -- Black Rainbow by Pitx (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Pitx/19513 Ft: ERH, acclivity</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Keeping Fliers Happy </strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>A couple of weeks ago, JD Power released their 2019 North American Airport Satisfaction Study.  The headline - “North American Airports Struggle to Keep Travelers Happy Amid Construction Delays and Surging Passenger Volumes” caught my eye, so I reached out to the study’s author, Michael Taylor, to dig into it a bit more. And so last Friday, we had a wide-ranging conversation. I was going to edit it down, but as I listened to it, I couldn’t think about what to cut. So here it is in its entirety…</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Interview with <a href=\"https://www.jdpower.com/business/content/michael-taylor\">Michael Taylor</a>, Travel Intelligence Lead at J.D. Power</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Thanks again to Michael for taking the time to talk to us. Here\'s the <a href=\"https://www.jdpower.com/business/press-releases/2019-north-america-airport-satisfaction-study\">link</a> to the study summary on the JD Power website.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #156</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li> And if you check out the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> page, you can click thru to highlights from my trips to Budapest and Ireland. And if you follow it, you can catch some pics from next week’s trip through the Baltics.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_156.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #156 — Airport Satisfaction; eScooters; Smaller Luggage','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-156-airport-satisfaction-escooters-smaller-luggage','','','2026-03-13 13:06:31','2026-03-13 19:06:31','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=2543',0,'post','',0),
(2544,1,'2019-10-15 07:49:40','2019-10-15 12:49:40','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\">\n<p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/IMG_1038.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2529 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/IMG_1038-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a></p><figcaption>Polish health food</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>Didn\'t have any problems with the 787\'s flying 4,800 miles to Krakow or back from Budapest, but the 560-mile regional jet flights between Chicago and Charlottesville, VA have been causing me no end of hassles. We talk about this, revisit our discussions about iPhone dual SIM capability and American Airlines\' MD-80 retirement. And then go deep on my very non-keto-friendly dive into Krakow and Budapest street food.&nbsp; All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_156.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/685058542&color=%23ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #156: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago in the middle of what looks like a 6-week run of solid travel. Traveled to DC, Charlottesville, and Nashville, in that order, in the 3 weeks since the last episode. Heading back to Charlottesville this week, then a week hopscotching through the Baltics with my son Andrew -- Riga, Latvia; Talinn, Estonia; Helsinki, Finland -- and then back down to Charlottesville. </li><li> I flew Southwest on my non-Charlottesville flights -- into DC Reagan and Nashville -- and United again to Charlottesville. The Southwest flights went smoothly, except for trying to get to Chicago Midway for the DC flight. The Uber driver didn’t follow the app’s recommended route; instead, he pretended he was a cab driver and took the normal route down the Stevenson Expressway which was crawling due to an earlier accident. I wasn’t paying attention - first time I’ve had an Uber driver freelance on me - and didn’t notice he’d skipped the exit to the faster path until it was too late. We made our flight, but not without a bit of hustle through Midway. No tip, let alone a 5-star review for that guy.</li><li> Southwest flies into the old Terminal A at what I still call Washington National. I went to college in DC in the early ‘80’s, before it was named for President Reagan and when Terminal A was pretty much all that was there. I had forgotten what a long schlepp it is from that terminal to the Metro station. I remember way back then asking someone why they built the Metro station so far away. “Because they’re going to build new terminals right across from it.” Which they finally did, some 20 years after that Metro station was opened. Sometimes it seems that airport planning horizons are not in years, or even decades; feels more like they’re planning in lifetimes.</li><li> In between the Southwest flights, my United flight continued the string of disruptions trying to get into or out of Charlottesville. I checked that my flight was on-time before calling an Uber -- no weather delays at either end, United and FlightAware apps say the inbound plane is on-time…. Then, halfway to ORD, I get the text from United; a 2½-hour delay for crew arrival. What!? The next text “Because of crew scheduling disruptions this evening in Chicago, we’ve assigned your flight a new crew…. We know this delay wasn’t in your plans today, so we appreciate your patience.” No shit a 2½-hour delay wasn’t in my plans, especially when it’s because United stole our original crew because they screwed up their scheduling. And really United, you can’t find another pilot in ORD, your largest hub, that’s a little closer? I tell you what else isn’t in my plans, flying United to Charlottesville this week. </li><li> Bridge Music -- <em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/stefsax/7785\" target=\"_blank\">Awel</a> </em>by stefsax (c) copyright 2006 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/stefsax/7785 </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>In contrast to my regional jet challenges, our trip at the end of August to Krakow and Budapest went much smoother. We flew LOT, the Polish airline, the whole way, including the last leg, BUD-ORD non-stop. I was kinda surprised by that leg -- a Transatlantic leg that didn’t go through Poland -- but there must be enough traffic on that route. A week before we left, American announced their own non-stop between ORD and BUD starting next year. Both airlines do/will use 787’s on the route. Perhaps it’s one of the “long, thin routes” that the 787 was designed to unlock. Anyways, all three flights on LOT -- 787’s on the long legs, and a Dash-8 prop job on the hop from Krakow to Budapest -- were reasonable. I thought the 787’s “morning wake-up” mode for breakfast -- where the cabin lights fade up while the darkened windows lighten -- was a pleasant change to usual “light on and PA announcement” approach. It was my first trip to Poland. Krakow Airport is nice -- new, compact, with train station into the city. It was a good trip.</li><li>I talked in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/08/13/podcast-154-will-we-still-love-uber-when-the-prices-go-up/\">last episode</a> about trying out my iPhone XS’s dual SIM capability in Hungary and Poland. I did the pre-work before I left -- working through a couple of chat sessions to move my US AT&amp;T number to the internal eSIM so I use the physical SIM slot for my UK EE pre-paid SIM. En route -- somewhere over the Faroe Islands I think -- I went into Settings and made my UK line the main voice and data line, leaving my US line open for phone calls and texts. It seemed to work as designed -- I replied to a couple of texts on my US line from my sister, but it looks like everything else went out over the UK line with the 3 GB for £10 plan. I’ll hold final judgement until I get this month’s bill from AT&amp;T, but from what I could see on their website, it looks like it worked. It was a nice change to only have one phone and not to have to remember to check my other phone every night. The new version of the iPhone operating system -- iOS 13 -- is supposed to have some improvements for dual SIM, but I was happy with it as it stands -- but check back with me after I get my AT&amp;T bill.</li><li>And, of course, I extend that 3 GB by hitting the WiFi in coffee shops and hotels, which is where we circle back to one of my top travel security tips -- use a VPN when on WiFi. I used to think that as long as I was hitting encrypted web sites I was OK -- it used to be that you’d see HTTPS in the address bar apparently Google and Apple think that’s too much for us to process; they’ve replaced it with a picture of a lock; Firefox still shows the full address, though. But it seems that more and more security breaches are taking advantage of obscure misconfigurations that get around basic security. And with major hotel chains regularly coughing up millions of credit card numbers, it seems a bit unreasonable to expect the staff at a small coffee shop or local hotel to be up-to-date on their router patching. So I have VPN clients on my iPhone, my Android tablet, and my MacBook Air. I usually forget to turn them on if I’m doing a quick check of Twitter or Google Maps while in line somewhere, but if I’m doing any sort of browsing session on public WiFi these days, I’ll fire it up.&nbsp;</li><li>Packing for this trip meant rummaging around for European plug adapters. Not voltage converters -- I don’t use them because all the electronics can handle 110 and 240 volt -- just the two blade-to-two round adapters. I’d rounded up my UK adapters for our June trip to Ireland and Scotland, but now I needed the European adapters -- the two round plug ones.&nbsp; I found the UK ones and a random South African one but I couldn’t find the European ones anywhere. Probably because I’d left them all behind in Brittany in March. So I got on Amazon (as one does when they need some random thing in a hurry) and ordered a box of 6. I only needed one, but given my history, 6 would keep me for a year or two. I ordered white adapters because that’s what popped up in Amazon. Which was OK in those hotels with black outlets, but not so great for white outlets. I took 2 and came home with 2, but only by sheer luck. At least twice, I was walking out of the room with my bag and only then noticed an adapter still plugged in, hiding in a recessed white outlet. I really need colored plug adapters. And not in tasteful colors; something gaudy, like a purple or pink or chartreuse. Maybe I’ll spray paint the ones I have before my next trip.&nbsp;</li><li>Leonard -- no last name -- commented on the last episode with a link to a Dallas TV station’s coverage of the last American Airlines MD-80 flight; appropriately flying from DFW to ORD, a route and a plane that contributed heavily to my Advantage Gold status -- when that was the highest level -- back in 1985. There’ve been a lot of stories covering the retirement; people waxing nostalgic -- though not too much since I haven’t heard of any big jump in Delta MD-80 bookings. They still fly almost 100 of them. I have seen a couple of quotes about not wanting to sit in the last rows because of the noise from the side-mounted engines. It’s true. Not even the Bose noise-cancelling headphones could handle all the engine and vibration noise. They were also bad seats because there were no windows; all you’d see would be the engine cowling and the window would make the noise even worse. And those times when I ended up in those seats -- usually last-minute bookings between ORD and DFW -- my mind would sometimes wander -- if the engine next to my head blows up, will the shrapnel blow out or blow into the cabin. I never heard of such a catastrophic failure on an MD-80 -- but that didn’t keep me from wondering.&nbsp;</li><li>Standing in the TSA PreCheck queue, watching the single screener who was checking boarding passes and IDs have to ping-pong between the regular and PreCheck lines, I wondered what was keeping US airports from installing the automated boarding pass-checking gates that I’ve passed thru at mid-sized European airports like Budapest and Krakow and Edinburgh. I got it -- they’re only checking for valid boarding passes; they’re not examining IDs -- but there’s got to be something there that can improve TSA efficiency <em>and</em> the traveler experience. Watching this poor woman, my mind fast-forwarded to October next year when the TSA starts enforcing the Real ID requirement, the time wasted arguing with people who travel maybe once a year and so didn’t go thru the additional hassle of getting a Real ID-compliant driver’s license. Note to self - don’t book any travel in October 2020. </li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com. </li><li>Bridge Music -- August (Reggae Rework) by el-B (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/elB/16075 Ft: Calendargirl </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Street Food in Poland and Hungary </strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Over-tourism is still a big topic in the tourism industry. Iceland seems to be cooling down after the Wow Air bankruptcy, but the photo from May of the queue to summit Mount Everest has become the new icon of the problem faced there and at places like Venice, Barcelona, and Machu Pichu. And it drives an interesting dichotomy -- travelers chasing the iconic Instagram picture -- sort of a virtual souvenir for this “pics or it didn’t happen” age -- while at the same time craving “authenticity” -- which is where, I think, the current glorification of street food is coming from. Wanting to experience something that you can only get in this place -- and, of course, post a picture of it.</li><li>Parking the cynicism for a sec -- if you’re queuing up (hopefully with some locals, not just tourists), doing the point-and-shoot ordering, and then eating it there on the street, it does create a very specific moment and memory. I vividly remember buying takoyaki, basically octopus croquettes, from a street vendor in Osaka; getting into the queue for a food stall in a Beijing hutong, the only non-Chinese guy, not knowing what for and getting this phenomenal crunchy scallion pancake; sending Andrew over to a vendor on a sidewalk in Hoi An, Vietnam for black sesame soup; folding up a slice of pizza in New York City in mid-bar crawl; and, as talked about a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/podcast-151-traveler-data-leaks-brittany-street-food/\">few episodes back</a>, slurping oysters on the Cancale sea wall on the Brittany coast.</li><li>So while we weren’t on a street food hunt in Poland and Hungary, our willingness, actually desire to eat pretty much whatever we came across without any filters -- no worries about keto or paleo or gluten-free diets -- led us to some good street food -- even though there were days I really felt the need to double down on the statins.</li><li>Probably the most memorable bit of street food came our first day in Krakow. We landed around 9am, took a taxi to the hotel, checked in, brushed our teeth, and walked up to the Old Square where I trawled through the vendor stalls. I came to a full stop at a small stand at the end of an aisle. An older couple had a huge pan over a wood fire. The pan had a metal divider down the middle; one half of the pan was frying onions; the other half, sliced kielbasa. I watched a couple people order and then stepped up. The man sliced a large, thick piece of bread off a round loaf, spread a thick smear of lard with cracklings, put down a layer of sliced kielbasa, finishing it off with fried onions. All for 13 złoty -- or about 3 and a half bucks. I don’t know what left more of an impression -- the size and heft of what he handed me or the staying power of the layer of pork fat it left on my lips. I’ll put a picture of it in the show notes.</li><li>We walked straight from there to a small square behind St Mary’s Basilica for the pierogi festival. There were 20-30 stands selling their selection of pierogis. Not sure if pierogis strictly qualify as a street food, but I queued up at the most popular ones and did point-&amp;-shoot ordering through most of their selection. I skipped the sweet pierogis -- the chocolate-banana and the blueberry ones just didn’t say “pierogi” to me -- but I still ended up with 5-6 from each stand -- from traditional onion and potato, to goose and duck and wild boar-filled ones. I tried to avoid pointing at one stand’s Mexican pierogi, but somehow it ended up on my plate. This was a pretty full-contact Day One. I needed a nap.</li><li>Chicago has a large Polish population -- somewhere in the range of 1-1.5 million Polish immigrants their descendants in the metro area, which, depending on who you read, is the largest Polish metropolitan area outside of Poland. So we get our share of Polish food and I wanted to try a few things I recognized. The first thing we hunted down was a pączki -- basically a Polish jelly doughnut. In Chicago, Pączki Day is Fat Tuesday and you see pączkis everywhere -- the grocery stores, bakeries. Asking around, Gorące Pączki -- “Hot Donuts” in English -- was the consensus recommendation in the Old Town. We rolled up there a couple of times and came away, I gotta say, disappointed. Even Chicago grocery store pączkis are better.</li><li>That weekend, we were staying with friends in the hills/mountains a couple of hours southwest of Krakow, down near the Czech and Slovakian borders. On Sunday, we went to a karczma for lunch, which as near as I could tell is a roadside pub/restaurant. But this one, the specialty was potato pancakes made in a wood-burning oven. One guy, the owner, was running the oven -- laying the pancake batter in the oven, shifting them around with a spatula, managing the fire, serving some pancakes flat while stuffing and folding others over like a potato pancake quesadilla. Watching this guy was like watching kitchen ballet. And the product -- like no potato pancake I’d ever had. Definitely beat out Chicago on this one.</li><li>We got into Budapest on St Stephen’s Day, Hungary’s biggest national holiday commemorating the founding of the Hungarian state; kinda like their version of the US Independence Day. After checking into our hotel, we walked over to the Buda side of the Danube where there was a huge food festival. The longest line was for the national cake. Apparently, they do a special cake each St Stephen’s Day. It was a really long line, but they were handing out free pieces of cake, so it was understandable. We skipped it though and went for the next longest line, for freshly fried lángos. Every culture seems to have some version of fried dough street food, and lángos is Hungary’s, though lángos is savory, not sweet. It was a hot day, but here was a booth full of women, hand stretching balls of dough into disks and dropping them into deep pans of hot oil for people waiting 15 minutes in the hot sun for them. The fully-dressed lángos was brushed with garlic and then topped with sour cream and shredded cheese. Still waddling from the weekend in Krakow, I went for the lite version -- just the garlic.&nbsp;</li><li>A couple of days later, Irene and I took a 40-minute train ride up along the Danube to Szentendre, a bit of an artist colony town. We hadn’t been up there in, I dunno, 20 years so we thought we’d check it out again. And top on our list of things to revisit was a little lángos shack tucked away halfway up a little stairway that goes from the town square up to the Catholic church on top of a hill. The last time we were in Szentendre, we tripped across this place walking up to the church - just a couple of people frying up lángos. It took us a bit to find the staircase this time -- it’s about a person-and-a-half wide archway next to a souvenir shop. The shack was still there, but it expanded, now with tables in a little courtyard, and it’s been found. We stood in a queue of tourists for 10-15 minutes watching 2 women crank out fried disks of dough. I cringed when I saw people putting ketchup on their lángos. We stayed pure with the garlic.</li><li>The <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/06/24/podcast-130-notes-from-hungary/\">last time</a> Irene and I were in Hungary, in 2017, we complained about not being able to find good, basic Hungarian food outside of the tourist traps. We saw lots of burger bars and pizza joint, especially in the Jewish Quarter, the party district where all the ruin bars are. But now, things seem to have diversified. Not far from Szimpla Kert, Ground Zero of the ruin bar circuit, there’s a place called Gettó Gulyás selling, well, gulyás and other Hungarian basics like chicken paprikas. And even better, it looks like there’s a bit of a chain called Langosh that’s open in the party district til 2 in the morning. Fried bread and beer -- not sure there’s any better definition of street food.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #155</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_155.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #156 — Airport Satisfaction;','','inherit','closed','closed','','2543-revision-v1','','','2019-10-15 07:49:40','2019-10-15 12:49:40','',2543,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/10/15/2543-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2545,1,'2019-10-15 07:51:09','2019-10-15 12:51:09','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\">\n<p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/IMG_1038.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2529 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/IMG_1038-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a></p><figcaption>Polish health food</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>Didn\'t have any problems with the 787\'s flying 4,800 miles to Krakow or back from Budapest, but the 560-mile regional jet flights between Chicago and Charlottesville, VA have been causing me no end of hassles. We talk about this, revisit our discussions about iPhone dual SIM capability and American Airlines\' MD-80 retirement. And then go deep on my very non-keto-friendly dive into Krakow and Budapest street food.&nbsp; All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_156.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/685058542&color=%23ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #156: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago in the middle of what looks like a 6-week run of solid travel. Traveled to DC, Charlottesville, and Nashville, in that order, in the 3 weeks since the last episode. Heading back to Charlottesville this week, then a week hopscotching through the Baltics with my son Andrew -- Riga, Latvia; Talinn, Estonia; Helsinki, Finland -- and then back down to Charlottesville. </li><li> I flew Southwest on my non-Charlottesville flights -- into DC Reagan and Nashville -- and United again to Charlottesville. The Southwest flights went smoothly, except for trying to get to Chicago Midway for the DC flight. The Uber driver didn’t follow the app’s recommended route; instead, he pretended he was a cab driver and took the normal route down the Stevenson Expressway which was crawling due to an earlier accident. I wasn’t paying attention - first time I’ve had an Uber driver freelance on me - and didn’t notice he’d skipped the exit to the faster path until it was too late. We made our flight, but not without a bit of hustle through Midway. No tip, let alone a 5-star review for that guy.</li><li> Southwest flies into the old Terminal A at what I still call Washington National. I went to college in DC in the early ‘80’s, before it was named for President Reagan and when Terminal A was pretty much all that was there. I had forgotten what a long schlepp it is from that terminal to the Metro station. I remember way back then asking someone why they built the Metro station so far away. “Because they’re going to build new terminals right across from it.” Which they finally did, some 20 years after that Metro station was opened. Sometimes it seems that airport planning horizons are not in years, or even decades; feels more like they’re planning in lifetimes.</li><li> In between the Southwest flights, my United flight continued the string of disruptions trying to get into or out of Charlottesville. I checked that my flight was on-time before calling an Uber -- no weather delays at either end, United and FlightAware apps say the inbound plane is on-time…. Then, halfway to ORD, I get the text from United; a 2½-hour delay for crew arrival. What!? The next text “Because of crew scheduling disruptions this evening in Chicago, we’ve assigned your flight a new crew…. We know this delay wasn’t in your plans today, so we appreciate your patience.” No shit a 2½-hour delay wasn’t in my plans, especially when it’s because United stole our original crew because they screwed up their scheduling. And really United, you can’t find another pilot in ORD, your largest hub, that’s a little closer? I tell you what else isn’t in my plans, flying United to Charlottesville this week. </li><li> Bridge Music -- <em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/stefsax/7785\" target=\"_blank\">Awel</a> </em>by stefsax (c) copyright 2006 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/stefsax/7785 </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>That’s the sound of my new Marriott Bonvoy Lifetime Titanium Elite card hitting the kitchen counter. The mailer package was appropriately upscale, but the sheer weight of the thing stunned me. I put a quick video of it on the TravelCommons Facebook page. Cate Rose commented “Hope it scans into your stocard app so you don’t actually have to carry it in your luggage allowance”. My thought exactly.</li><li> I got a note that Chicago’s electric scooter pilot ends tomorrow, which made me realize that I’ve seen them in just about every city I’ve been to this summer -- Budapest, Krakow, Charlottesville, Nashville, Washington, DC. I think the only places I didn’t see them were in Scotland and Ireland. They’re handy; because they’re dockless, I’ve found they have a wider distribution than, say, a traditional docked bike share and you can take them directly to your planned destination. And they’re a good fill-in between walking and an Uber or a Lyft. And, they’re fun! When I was in DC a couple of weeks ago, I was in the Brookland neighborhood in the Northeast part of town, and wanted to try out a new taproom there, Right Proper Brewing. Now Brookland is not the nicest part of DC. It’s much better than when I went to school there, but there are still iffy parts. I wasn’t completely comfortable walking down to Right Proper from the Brookland Metro stop, but it seemed too short for an Uber ride and there was no bus that went down there. But, there was a scooter a couple of blocks from the Metro station. Running down 9th St at 10 mph felt a bit better than speedwalking at 4. And could leave it right in front of the taproom. It was exactly what I wanted. Two problems I’ve seen -- first, too many people riding them on the sidewalk, especially in DC. Maybe because I bike a lot in Chicago, I’m comfortable in bike lanes and navigating around cars on the street and keeping an eye out for potholes. I actually wouldn’t be comfortable riding a scooter on the sidewalk; I’d be afraid of popping a pedestrian who suddenly walked in front of me. To me, cars are much more predictable than pedestrians. The second thing, the need to have half-a-dozen scooter apps on your phone. In Chicago, there are 8 scooter companies, in addition to Uber and Lyft’s scooters. And you need to download their app to find and rent their scooter. Which meant that when I wanted to find a scooter near the Brookland Metro stop, I’d have to cycle thru 5 or 6 apps. Except I didn’t because I found an app called Scooter Map that shows all the scooter brands on one map. I think it’s targeted at folks who are making money recharging scooters (not quite sure how that works) but it worked fine for me. I fired it up and saw all the different scooters that were near me. One caveat -- I’ve only ridden these scooters on sunny days. I’m not sure how enthusiastic I’d be riding one in the rain or snow. </li><li> For the Baltics trip next week, we’re taking Finnair out and back from Chicago, an early morning ferry ride from Talinn to Helsinki, and then AirBaltic for everything else. Which then got me thinking about luggage sizes, because I bought my current bag, the Victorinox Werks 22-incher, to use every last inch of US carry-on allowance. It even catches some side-eye from American and United where I have status. So I didn’t figure it’d fit into any European budget carrier’s luggage sizer. Looking up AirBaltic’s carry-on allowance, my Victorinox is a couple of inches too tall and an inch too deep. But what really got me shopping for a new bag for this trip is the weight. AirBaltic has an 8 kg/17½ lbs weight limit. In episode #121, I talked about the baggage strip tease exercise with Wow Air to make their 7 kg/15 lbs carry-on weight limit. I’d take my bag off the scale, pull some clothes out, zip it back up, and put it back on the scale. Still too heavy. Repeat 3 more times until the agent takes pity — or just gets tired of me — and gives me the approval tag to put on my bag. After which I walk about 10 feet, open my bag and put my armful of clothes back in. My Victorinox is a bit over 7 lbs, so not only is it too tall, the bag itself uses over 40% of the weight allowance. And even though I’ve talked before about how much I hate shopping for luggage, I searched for a smaller, lighter bag that wouldn’t cost a fortune, since my Victorinox will stay my primary bag. I landed on the the TravelPro Maxlite 5. I, or rather my daughter has a good history with TravelPro. It fit the AirBaltic dimensions and is one of the lighter bags I saw at 5.4 lbs which is down to 30% of the 8 kg weight allowance. It also meets three of the key suitcase criteria I laid down in the “how to shop for a suitcase” topic in episode #137 -- it’s black, it’s a 2-wheeler so no lost space on extended spinner wheels, and the inside is, for the most part, a wide open box without clothes hangers or a bunch of zip compartments. And it was only $112 on Amazon. I’m taking it to Charlottesville tomorrow for a shakedown cruise.</li><li> Three years ago, back in episode #125, in a Travel Security tip, I talked about the need to delete your phone’s Bluetooth pairing when you return a rental car. Usually when I go to pair my phone, I’ll first go through and delete 3-5 pairings before pairing my own. And they all have personalized names like “Timmy’s iPhone”. And most phones by default will download your contacts to the car when paired, so leave all of their contacts and phone numbers in their rental. That is just bad in so many ways. And now Hertz has gotten around to noticing it. In their newest rental terms and conditions, they specifically carve out any liability from you leaving a Bluetooth pairing behind. It’s a pain to remember, especially if you’re running for a flight, but as you’re taking that last scan around the car for your sunglasses and iPhone, remember not to leave your identity behind either.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li></li><li>In contrast to my regional jet challenges, our trip at the end of August to Krakow and Budapest went much smoother. We flew LOT, the Polish airline, the whole way, including the last leg, BUD-ORD non-stop. I was kinda surprised by that leg -- a Transatlantic leg that didn’t go through Poland -- but there must be enough traffic on that route. A week before we left, American announced their own non-stop between ORD and BUD starting next year. Both airlines do/will use 787’s on the route. Perhaps it’s one of the “long, thin routes” that the 787 was designed to unlock. Anyways, all three flights on LOT -- 787’s on the long legs, and a Dash-8 prop job on the hop from Krakow to Budapest -- were reasonable. I thought the 787’s “morning wake-up” mode for breakfast -- where the cabin lights fade up while the darkened windows lighten -- was a pleasant change to usual “light on and PA announcement” approach. It was my first trip to Poland. Krakow Airport is nice -- new, compact, with train station into the city. It was a good trip.</li><li>I talked in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/08/13/podcast-154-will-we-still-love-uber-when-the-prices-go-up/\">last episode</a> about trying out my iPhone XS’s dual SIM capability in Hungary and Poland. I did the pre-work before I left -- working through a couple of chat sessions to move my US AT&amp;T number to the internal eSIM so I use the physical SIM slot for my UK EE pre-paid SIM. En route -- somewhere over the Faroe Islands I think -- I went into Settings and made my UK line the main voice and data line, leaving my US line open for phone calls and texts. It seemed to work as designed -- I replied to a couple of texts on my US line from my sister, but it looks like everything else went out over the UK line with the 3 GB for £10 plan. I’ll hold final judgement until I get this month’s bill from AT&amp;T, but from what I could see on their website, it looks like it worked. It was a nice change to only have one phone and not to have to remember to check my other phone every night. The new version of the iPhone operating system -- iOS 13 -- is supposed to have some improvements for dual SIM, but I was happy with it as it stands -- but check back with me after I get my AT&amp;T bill.</li><li>And, of course, I extend that 3 GB by hitting the WiFi in coffee shops and hotels, which is where we circle back to one of my top travel security tips -- use a VPN when on WiFi. I used to think that as long as I was hitting encrypted web sites I was OK -- it used to be that you’d see HTTPS in the address bar apparently Google and Apple think that’s too much for us to process; they’ve replaced it with a picture of a lock; Firefox still shows the full address, though. But it seems that more and more security breaches are taking advantage of obscure misconfigurations that get around basic security. And with major hotel chains regularly coughing up millions of credit card numbers, it seems a bit unreasonable to expect the staff at a small coffee shop or local hotel to be up-to-date on their router patching. So I have VPN clients on my iPhone, my Android tablet, and my MacBook Air. I usually forget to turn them on if I’m doing a quick check of Twitter or Google Maps while in line somewhere, but if I’m doing any sort of browsing session on public WiFi these days, I’ll fire it up. </li><li>Packing for this trip meant rummaging around for European plug adapters. Not voltage converters -- I don’t use them because all the electronics can handle 110 and 240 volt -- just the two blade-to-two round adapters. I’d rounded up my UK adapters for our June trip to Ireland and Scotland, but now I needed the European adapters -- the two round plug ones.  I found the UK ones and a random South African one but I couldn’t find the European ones anywhere. Probably because I’d left them all behind in Brittany in March. So I got on Amazon (as one does when they need some random thing in a hurry) and ordered a box of 6. I only needed one, but given my history, 6 would keep me for a year or two. I ordered white adapters because that’s what popped up in Amazon. Which was OK in those hotels with black outlets, but not so great for white outlets. I took 2 and came home with 2, but only by sheer luck. At least twice, I was walking out of the room with my bag and only then noticed an adapter still plugged in, hiding in a recessed white outlet. I really need colored plug adapters. And not in tasteful colors; something gaudy, like a purple or pink or chartreuse. Maybe I’ll spray paint the ones I have before my next trip. </li><li>Leonard -- no last name -- commented on the last episode with a link to a Dallas TV station’s coverage of the last American Airlines MD-80 flight; appropriately flying from DFW to ORD, a route and a plane that contributed heavily to my Advantage Gold status -- when that was the highest level -- back in 1985. There’ve been a lot of stories covering the retirement; people waxing nostalgic -- though not too much since I haven’t heard of any big jump in Delta MD-80 bookings. They still fly almost 100 of them. I have seen a couple of quotes about not wanting to sit in the last rows because of the noise from the side-mounted engines. It’s true. Not even the Bose noise-cancelling headphones could handle all the engine and vibration noise. They were also bad seats because there were no windows; all you’d see would be the engine cowling and the window would make the noise even worse. And those times when I ended up in those seats -- usually last-minute bookings between ORD and DFW -- my mind would sometimes wander -- if the engine next to my head blows up, will the shrapnel blow out or blow into the cabin. I never heard of such a catastrophic failure on an MD-80 -- but that didn’t keep me from wondering. </li><li>Standing in the TSA PreCheck queue, watching the single screener who was checking boarding passes and IDs have to ping-pong between the regular and PreCheck lines, I wondered what was keeping US airports from installing the automated boarding pass-checking gates that I’ve passed thru at mid-sized European airports like Budapest and Krakow and Edinburgh. I got it -- they’re only checking for valid boarding passes; they’re not examining IDs -- but there’s got to be something there that can improve TSA efficiency <em>and</em> the traveler experience. Watching this poor woman, my mind fast-forwarded to October next year when the TSA starts enforcing the Real ID requirement, the time wasted arguing with people who travel maybe once a year and so didn’t go thru the additional hassle of getting a Real ID-compliant driver’s license. Note to self - don’t book any travel in October 2020. </li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com. </li><li>Bridge Music -- August (Reggae Rework) by el-B (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/elB/16075 Ft: Calendargirl </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Street Food in Poland and Hungary </strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Over-tourism is still a big topic in the tourism industry. Iceland seems to be cooling down after the Wow Air bankruptcy, but the photo from May of the queue to summit Mount Everest has become the new icon of the problem faced there and at places like Venice, Barcelona, and Machu Pichu. And it drives an interesting dichotomy -- travelers chasing the iconic Instagram picture -- sort of a virtual souvenir for this “pics or it didn’t happen” age -- while at the same time craving “authenticity” -- which is where, I think, the current glorification of street food is coming from. Wanting to experience something that you can only get in this place -- and, of course, post a picture of it.</li><li>Parking the cynicism for a sec -- if you’re queuing up (hopefully with some locals, not just tourists), doing the point-and-shoot ordering, and then eating it there on the street, it does create a very specific moment and memory. I vividly remember buying takoyaki, basically octopus croquettes, from a street vendor in Osaka; getting into the queue for a food stall in a Beijing hutong, the only non-Chinese guy, not knowing what for and getting this phenomenal crunchy scallion pancake; sending Andrew over to a vendor on a sidewalk in Hoi An, Vietnam for black sesame soup; folding up a slice of pizza in New York City in mid-bar crawl; and, as talked about a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/podcast-151-traveler-data-leaks-brittany-street-food/\">few episodes back</a>, slurping oysters on the Cancale sea wall on the Brittany coast.</li><li>So while we weren’t on a street food hunt in Poland and Hungary, our willingness, actually desire to eat pretty much whatever we came across without any filters -- no worries about keto or paleo or gluten-free diets -- led us to some good street food -- even though there were days I really felt the need to double down on the statins.</li><li>Probably the most memorable bit of street food came our first day in Krakow. We landed around 9am, took a taxi to the hotel, checked in, brushed our teeth, and walked up to the Old Square where I trawled through the vendor stalls. I came to a full stop at a small stand at the end of an aisle. An older couple had a huge pan over a wood fire. The pan had a metal divider down the middle; one half of the pan was frying onions; the other half, sliced kielbasa. I watched a couple people order and then stepped up. The man sliced a large, thick piece of bread off a round loaf, spread a thick smear of lard with cracklings, put down a layer of sliced kielbasa, finishing it off with fried onions. All for 13 złoty -- or about 3 and a half bucks. I don’t know what left more of an impression -- the size and heft of what he handed me or the staying power of the layer of pork fat it left on my lips. I’ll put a picture of it in the show notes.</li><li>We walked straight from there to a small square behind St Mary’s Basilica for the pierogi festival. There were 20-30 stands selling their selection of pierogis. Not sure if pierogis strictly qualify as a street food, but I queued up at the most popular ones and did point-&amp;-shoot ordering through most of their selection. I skipped the sweet pierogis -- the chocolate-banana and the blueberry ones just didn’t say “pierogi” to me -- but I still ended up with 5-6 from each stand -- from traditional onion and potato, to goose and duck and wild boar-filled ones. I tried to avoid pointing at one stand’s Mexican pierogi, but somehow it ended up on my plate. This was a pretty full-contact Day One. I needed a nap.</li><li>Chicago has a large Polish population -- somewhere in the range of 1-1.5 million Polish immigrants their descendants in the metro area, which, depending on who you read, is the largest Polish metropolitan area outside of Poland. So we get our share of Polish food and I wanted to try a few things I recognized. The first thing we hunted down was a pączki -- basically a Polish jelly doughnut. In Chicago, Pączki Day is Fat Tuesday and you see pączkis everywhere -- the grocery stores, bakeries. Asking around, Gorące Pączki -- “Hot Donuts” in English -- was the consensus recommendation in the Old Town. We rolled up there a couple of times and came away, I gotta say, disappointed. Even Chicago grocery store pączkis are better.</li><li>That weekend, we were staying with friends in the hills/mountains a couple of hours southwest of Krakow, down near the Czech and Slovakian borders. On Sunday, we went to a karczma for lunch, which as near as I could tell is a roadside pub/restaurant. But this one, the specialty was potato pancakes made in a wood-burning oven. One guy, the owner, was running the oven -- laying the pancake batter in the oven, shifting them around with a spatula, managing the fire, serving some pancakes flat while stuffing and folding others over like a potato pancake quesadilla. Watching this guy was like watching kitchen ballet. And the product -- like no potato pancake I’d ever had. Definitely beat out Chicago on this one.</li><li>We got into Budapest on St Stephen’s Day, Hungary’s biggest national holiday commemorating the founding of the Hungarian state; kinda like their version of the US Independence Day. After checking into our hotel, we walked over to the Buda side of the Danube where there was a huge food festival. The longest line was for the national cake. Apparently, they do a special cake each St Stephen’s Day. It was a really long line, but they were handing out free pieces of cake, so it was understandable. We skipped it though and went for the next longest line, for freshly fried lángos. Every culture seems to have some version of fried dough street food, and lángos is Hungary’s, though lángos is savory, not sweet. It was a hot day, but here was a booth full of women, hand stretching balls of dough into disks and dropping them into deep pans of hot oil for people waiting 15 minutes in the hot sun for them. The fully-dressed lángos was brushed with garlic and then topped with sour cream and shredded cheese. Still waddling from the weekend in Krakow, I went for the lite version -- just the garlic.&nbsp;</li><li>A couple of days later, Irene and I took a 40-minute train ride up along the Danube to Szentendre, a bit of an artist colony town. We hadn’t been up there in, I dunno, 20 years so we thought we’d check it out again. And top on our list of things to revisit was a little lángos shack tucked away halfway up a little stairway that goes from the town square up to the Catholic church on top of a hill. The last time we were in Szentendre, we tripped across this place walking up to the church - just a couple of people frying up lángos. It took us a bit to find the staircase this time -- it’s about a person-and-a-half wide archway next to a souvenir shop. The shack was still there, but it expanded, now with tables in a little courtyard, and it’s been found. We stood in a queue of tourists for 10-15 minutes watching 2 women crank out fried disks of dough. I cringed when I saw people putting ketchup on their lángos. We stayed pure with the garlic.</li><li>The <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/06/24/podcast-130-notes-from-hungary/\">last time</a> Irene and I were in Hungary, in 2017, we complained about not being able to find good, basic Hungarian food outside of the tourist traps. We saw lots of burger bars and pizza joint, especially in the Jewish Quarter, the party district where all the ruin bars are. But now, things seem to have diversified. Not far from Szimpla Kert, Ground Zero of the ruin bar circuit, there’s a place called Gettó Gulyás selling, well, gulyás and other Hungarian basics like chicken paprikas. And even better, it looks like there’s a bit of a chain called Langosh that’s open in the party district til 2 in the morning. Fried bread and beer -- not sure there’s any better definition of street food.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #155</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_155.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #156 — Airport Satisfaction;','','inherit','closed','closed','','2543-revision-v1','','','2019-10-15 07:51:09','2019-10-15 12:51:09','',2543,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/10/15/2543-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2546,1,'2019-10-15 08:02:14','2019-10-15 13:02:14','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\">\n<p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/IMG_1038.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2529 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/IMG_1038-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a></p><figcaption>Polish health food</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>Didn\'t have any problems with the 787\'s flying 4,800 miles to Krakow or back from Budapest, but the 560-mile regional jet flights between Chicago and Charlottesville, VA have been causing me no end of hassles. We talk about this, revisit our discussions about iPhone dual SIM capability and American Airlines\' MD-80 retirement. And then go deep on my very non-keto-friendly dive into Krakow and Budapest street food.&nbsp; All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_156.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/685058542&color=%23ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #156: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago in the middle of what looks like a 6-week run of solid travel. Traveled to DC, Charlottesville, and Nashville, in that order, in the 3 weeks since the last episode. Heading back to Charlottesville this week, then a week hopscotching through the Baltics with my son Andrew -- Riga, Latvia; Talinn, Estonia; Helsinki, Finland -- and then back down to Charlottesville. </li><li> I flew Southwest on my non-Charlottesville flights -- into DC Reagan and Nashville -- and United again to Charlottesville. The Southwest flights went smoothly, except for trying to get to Chicago Midway for the DC flight. The Uber driver didn’t follow the app’s recommended route; instead, he pretended he was a cab driver and took the normal route down the Stevenson Expressway which was crawling due to an earlier accident. I wasn’t paying attention - first time I’ve had an Uber driver freelance on me - and didn’t notice he’d skipped the exit to the faster path until it was too late. We made our flight, but not without a bit of hustle through Midway. No tip, let alone a 5-star review for that guy.</li><li> Southwest flies into the old Terminal A at what I still call Washington National. I went to college in DC in the early ‘80’s, before it was named for President Reagan and when Terminal A was pretty much all that was there. I had forgotten what a long schlepp it is from that terminal to the Metro station. I remember way back then asking someone why they built the Metro station so far away. “Because they’re going to build new terminals right across from it.” Which they finally did, some 20 years after that Metro station was opened. Sometimes it seems that airport planning horizons are not in years, or even decades; feels more like they’re planning in lifetimes.</li><li> In between the Southwest flights, my United flight continued the string of disruptions trying to get into or out of Charlottesville. I checked that my flight was on-time before calling an Uber -- no weather delays at either end, United and FlightAware apps say the inbound plane is on-time…. Then, halfway to ORD, I get the text from United; a 2½-hour delay for crew arrival. What!? The next text “Because of crew scheduling disruptions this evening in Chicago, we’ve assigned your flight a new crew…. We know this delay wasn’t in your plans today, so we appreciate your patience.” No shit a 2½-hour delay wasn’t in my plans, especially when it’s because United stole our original crew because they screwed up their scheduling. And really United, you can’t find another pilot in ORD, your largest hub, that’s a little closer? I tell you what else isn’t in my plans, flying United to Charlottesville this week. </li><li> Bridge Music -- <em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/stefsax/7785\" target=\"_blank\">Awel</a> </em>by stefsax (c) copyright 2006 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/stefsax/7785 </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>That’s the sound of my new <a href=\"https://www.marriott.com/loyalty/member-benefits/titanium.mi\">Marriott Bonvoy Lifetime Titanium Elite</a> card hitting the kitchen counter. The mailer package was appropriately upscale, but the sheer weight of the thing stunned me. I put a quick video of it on the TravelCommons Facebook page. Cate Rose commented “Hope it scans into your Stocard app so you don’t actually have to carry it in your luggage allowance”. My thought exactly.</li><li> I got a note that Chicago’s electric scooter pilot ends tomorrow, which made me realize that I’ve seen them in just about every city I’ve been to this summer -- Budapest, Krakow, Charlottesville, Nashville, Washington, DC. I think the only places I didn’t see them were in Scotland and Ireland. They’re handy; because they’re dockless, I’ve found they have a wider distribution than, say, a traditional docked bike share and you can take them directly to your planned destination. And they’re a good fill-in between walking and an Uber or a Lyft. And, they’re fun! When I was in DC a couple of weeks ago, I was in the <a href=\"https://washington.org/visit-dc/neighborhoods/brookland\">Brookland</a> neighborhood in the Northeast part of town, and wanted to try out a new taproom there, <a href=\"http://www.rightproperbrewing.com/what-we-do\">Right Proper Brewing</a>. Now Brookland is not the nicest part of DC. It’s much better than when I went to school there, but there are still iffy parts. I wasn’t completely comfortable walking down to Right Proper from the Brookland Metro stop, but it seemed too short for an Uber ride and there was no bus that went down there. But, there was a scooter a couple of blocks from the Metro station. Running down 9th St at 10 mph felt a bit better than speedwalking at 4. And could leave it right in front of the taproom. It was exactly what I wanted. Two problems I’ve seen -- first, too many people riding them on the sidewalk, especially in DC. Maybe because I bike a lot in Chicago, I’m comfortable in bike lanes and navigating around cars on the street and keeping an eye out for potholes. I actually wouldn’t be comfortable riding a scooter on the sidewalk; I’d be afraid of popping a pedestrian who suddenly walked in front of me. To me, cars are much more predictable than pedestrians. The second thing, the need to have half-a-dozen scooter apps on your phone. In Chicago, there are 8 scooter companies, in addition to Uber and Lyft’s scooters. And you need to download their app to find and rent their scooter. Which meant that when I wanted to find a scooter near the Brookland Metro stop, I’d have to cycle thru 5 or 6 apps. Except I didn’t because I found an app called <a href=\"https://scootermap.com/\">Scooter Map</a> that shows all the scooter brands on one map. I think it’s targeted at folks who are making money recharging scooters (not quite sure how that works) but it worked fine for me. I fired it up and saw all the different scooters that were near me. One caveat -- I’ve only ridden these scooters on sunny days. I’m not sure how enthusiastic I’d be riding one in the rain or snow. </li><li> For the Baltics trip next week, we’re taking Finnair out and back from Chicago, an early morning ferry ride from Talinn to Helsinki, and then AirBaltic for everything else. Which then got me thinking about luggage sizes, because I bought my current bag, the <a href=\"https://www.swissarmy.com/us/en&amp;eoq=!t/Products/Travel-Gear/Werks-Traveler-5-0/collection/trg-collection/travelgear_collection_TRA-C2955\">Victorinox Werks</a> 22-incher, to use every last inch of US carry-on allowance. It even catches some side-eye from American and United where I have status. So I didn’t figure it’d fit into any European budget carrier’s luggage sizer. Looking up <a href=\"https://www.airbaltic.com/en/cabin-baggage\">AirBaltic’s carry-on allowance</a>, my Victorinox is a couple of inches too tall and an inch too deep. But what really got me shopping for a new bag for this trip is the weight. AirBaltic has an 8 kg/17½ lbs weight limit. In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/05/30/podcast-121-tsa-lines-my-luggage-is-where/\">episode #121</a>, I talked about the baggage strip tease exercise with Wow Air to make their 7 kg/15 lbs carry-on weight limit. I’d take my bag off the scale, pull some clothes out, zip it back up, and put it back on the scale. Still too heavy. Repeat 3 more times until the agent takes pity — or just gets tired of me — and gives me the approval tag to put on my bag. After which I walk about 10 feet, open my bag and put my armful of clothes back in. My Victorinox is a bit over 7 lbs, so not only is it too tall, the bag itself uses over 40% of the weight allowance. And even though I’ve talked before about how much I hate shopping for luggage, I searched for a smaller, lighter bag that wouldn’t cost a fortune, since my Victorinox will stay my primary bag. I landed on the the <a href=\"https://travelpro.com/collections/rollaboard-luggage-1/products/maxlite%C2%AE-5-international-expandable-carry-on-rollaboard%C2%AE?variant=19641109479522\">TravelPro Maxlite 5</a>. I, or rather my daughter has a good history with TravelPro. It fit the AirBaltic dimensions and is one of the lighter bags I saw at 5.4 lbs which is down to 30% of the 8 kg weight allowance. It also meets three of the key suitcase criteria I laid down in the “how to shop for a suitcase” topic in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/01/25/podcast-137-new-years-travel-status-tips-how-to-shop-for-a-suitcase/\">episode #137</a> -- it’s black, it’s a 2-wheeler so no lost space on extended spinner wheels, and the inside is, for the most part, a wide open box without clothes hangers or a bunch of zip compartments. And it was o<a href=\"https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07BWJVTXD/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&amp;psc=1\">nly $112 on Amazon</a>. I’m taking it to Charlottesville tomorrow for a shakedown cruise.</li><li> Three years ago, back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/11/22/podcast-125-uber-driver-stories-overseas-for-the-election/\">episode #125</a>, in a Travel Security tip, I talked about the need to delete your phone’s Bluetooth pairing when you return a rental car. Usually when I go to pair my phone, I’ll first go through and delete 3-5 pairings before pairing my own. And they all have personalized names like “Timmy’s iPhone”. And most phones by default will download your contacts to the car when paired, so leave all of their contacts and phone numbers in their rental. That is just bad in so many ways. And now Hertz has gotten around to noticing it. In their newest rental terms and conditions, they specifically carve out any liability from you leaving a Bluetooth pairing behind. It’s a pain to remember, especially if you’re running for a flight, but as you’re taking that last scan around the car for your sunglasses and iPhone, remember not to leave your identity behind either.</li><li>Bridge Music -- Black Rainbow by Pitx (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Pitx/19513 Ft: ERH, acclivity</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Street Food in Poland and Hungary </strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Over-tourism is still a big topic in the tourism industry. Iceland seems to be cooling down after the Wow Air bankruptcy, but the photo from May of the queue to summit Mount Everest has become the new icon of the problem faced there and at places like Venice, Barcelona, and Machu Pichu. And it drives an interesting dichotomy -- travelers chasing the iconic Instagram picture -- sort of a virtual souvenir for this “pics or it didn’t happen” age -- while at the same time craving “authenticity” -- which is where, I think, the current glorification of street food is coming from. Wanting to experience something that you can only get in this place -- and, of course, post a picture of it.</li><li>Parking the cynicism for a sec -- if you’re queuing up (hopefully with some locals, not just tourists), doing the point-and-shoot ordering, and then eating it there on the street, it does create a very specific moment and memory. I vividly remember buying takoyaki, basically octopus croquettes, from a street vendor in Osaka; getting into the queue for a food stall in a Beijing hutong, the only non-Chinese guy, not knowing what for and getting this phenomenal crunchy scallion pancake; sending Andrew over to a vendor on a sidewalk in Hoi An, Vietnam for black sesame soup; folding up a slice of pizza in New York City in mid-bar crawl; and, as talked about a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/podcast-151-traveler-data-leaks-brittany-street-food/\">few episodes back</a>, slurping oysters on the Cancale sea wall on the Brittany coast.</li><li>So while we weren’t on a street food hunt in Poland and Hungary, our willingness, actually desire to eat pretty much whatever we came across without any filters -- no worries about keto or paleo or gluten-free diets -- led us to some good street food -- even though there were days I really felt the need to double down on the statins.</li><li>Probably the most memorable bit of street food came our first day in Krakow. We landed around 9am, took a taxi to the hotel, checked in, brushed our teeth, and walked up to the Old Square where I trawled through the vendor stalls. I came to a full stop at a small stand at the end of an aisle. An older couple had a huge pan over a wood fire. The pan had a metal divider down the middle; one half of the pan was frying onions; the other half, sliced kielbasa. I watched a couple people order and then stepped up. The man sliced a large, thick piece of bread off a round loaf, spread a thick smear of lard with cracklings, put down a layer of sliced kielbasa, finishing it off with fried onions. All for 13 złoty -- or about 3 and a half bucks. I don’t know what left more of an impression -- the size and heft of what he handed me or the staying power of the layer of pork fat it left on my lips. I’ll put a picture of it in the show notes.</li><li>We walked straight from there to a small square behind St Mary’s Basilica for the pierogi festival. There were 20-30 stands selling their selection of pierogis. Not sure if pierogis strictly qualify as a street food, but I queued up at the most popular ones and did point-&amp;-shoot ordering through most of their selection. I skipped the sweet pierogis -- the chocolate-banana and the blueberry ones just didn’t say “pierogi” to me -- but I still ended up with 5-6 from each stand -- from traditional onion and potato, to goose and duck and wild boar-filled ones. I tried to avoid pointing at one stand’s Mexican pierogi, but somehow it ended up on my plate. This was a pretty full-contact Day One. I needed a nap.</li><li>Chicago has a large Polish population -- somewhere in the range of 1-1.5 million Polish immigrants their descendants in the metro area, which, depending on who you read, is the largest Polish metropolitan area outside of Poland. So we get our share of Polish food and I wanted to try a few things I recognized. The first thing we hunted down was a pączki -- basically a Polish jelly doughnut. In Chicago, Pączki Day is Fat Tuesday and you see pączkis everywhere -- the grocery stores, bakeries. Asking around, Gorące Pączki -- “Hot Donuts” in English -- was the consensus recommendation in the Old Town. We rolled up there a couple of times and came away, I gotta say, disappointed. Even Chicago grocery store pączkis are better.</li><li>That weekend, we were staying with friends in the hills/mountains a couple of hours southwest of Krakow, down near the Czech and Slovakian borders. On Sunday, we went to a karczma for lunch, which as near as I could tell is a roadside pub/restaurant. But this one, the specialty was potato pancakes made in a wood-burning oven. One guy, the owner, was running the oven -- laying the pancake batter in the oven, shifting them around with a spatula, managing the fire, serving some pancakes flat while stuffing and folding others over like a potato pancake quesadilla. Watching this guy was like watching kitchen ballet. And the product -- like no potato pancake I’d ever had. Definitely beat out Chicago on this one.</li><li>We got into Budapest on St Stephen’s Day, Hungary’s biggest national holiday commemorating the founding of the Hungarian state; kinda like their version of the US Independence Day. After checking into our hotel, we walked over to the Buda side of the Danube where there was a huge food festival. The longest line was for the national cake. Apparently, they do a special cake each St Stephen’s Day. It was a really long line, but they were handing out free pieces of cake, so it was understandable. We skipped it though and went for the next longest line, for freshly fried lángos. Every culture seems to have some version of fried dough street food, and lángos is Hungary’s, though lángos is savory, not sweet. It was a hot day, but here was a booth full of women, hand stretching balls of dough into disks and dropping them into deep pans of hot oil for people waiting 15 minutes in the hot sun for them. The fully-dressed lángos was brushed with garlic and then topped with sour cream and shredded cheese. Still waddling from the weekend in Krakow, I went for the lite version -- just the garlic.&nbsp;</li><li>A couple of days later, Irene and I took a 40-minute train ride up along the Danube to Szentendre, a bit of an artist colony town. We hadn’t been up there in, I dunno, 20 years so we thought we’d check it out again. And top on our list of things to revisit was a little lángos shack tucked away halfway up a little stairway that goes from the town square up to the Catholic church on top of a hill. The last time we were in Szentendre, we tripped across this place walking up to the church - just a couple of people frying up lángos. It took us a bit to find the staircase this time -- it’s about a person-and-a-half wide archway next to a souvenir shop. The shack was still there, but it expanded, now with tables in a little courtyard, and it’s been found. We stood in a queue of tourists for 10-15 minutes watching 2 women crank out fried disks of dough. I cringed when I saw people putting ketchup on their lángos. We stayed pure with the garlic.</li><li>The <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/06/24/podcast-130-notes-from-hungary/\">last time</a> Irene and I were in Hungary, in 2017, we complained about not being able to find good, basic Hungarian food outside of the tourist traps. We saw lots of burger bars and pizza joint, especially in the Jewish Quarter, the party district where all the ruin bars are. But now, things seem to have diversified. Not far from Szimpla Kert, Ground Zero of the ruin bar circuit, there’s a place called Gettó Gulyás selling, well, gulyás and other Hungarian basics like chicken paprikas. And even better, it looks like there’s a bit of a chain called Langosh that’s open in the party district til 2 in the morning. Fried bread and beer -- not sure there’s any better definition of street food.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #155</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_155.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #156 — Airport Satisfaction;','','inherit','closed','closed','','2543-revision-v1','','','2019-10-15 08:02:14','2019-10-15 13:02:14','',2543,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/10/15/2543-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2547,1,'2019-10-15 08:09:30','2019-10-15 13:09:30','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\">\n<p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/IMG_1038.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2529 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/IMG_1038-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a></p><figcaption>Polish health food</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>Didn\'t have any problems with the 787\'s flying 4,800 miles to Krakow or back from Budapest, but the 560-mile regional jet flights between Chicago and Charlottesville, VA have been causing me no end of hassles. We talk about this, revisit our discussions about iPhone dual SIM capability and American Airlines\' MD-80 retirement. And then go deep on my very non-keto-friendly dive into Krakow and Budapest street food.&nbsp; All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_156.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/685058542&color=%23ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #156: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago in the middle of what looks like a 6-week run of solid travel. Traveled to DC, Charlottesville, and Nashville, in that order, in the 3 weeks since the last episode. Heading back to Charlottesville this week, then a week hopscotching through the Baltics with my son Andrew -- Riga, Latvia; Talinn, Estonia; Helsinki, Finland -- and then back down to Charlottesville. </li><li> I flew Southwest on my non-Charlottesville flights -- into DC Reagan and Nashville -- and United again to Charlottesville. The Southwest flights went smoothly, except for trying to get to Chicago Midway for the DC flight. The Uber driver didn’t follow the app’s recommended route; instead, he pretended he was a cab driver and took the normal route down the Stevenson Expressway which was crawling due to an earlier accident. I wasn’t paying attention - first time I’ve had an Uber driver freelance on me - and didn’t notice he’d skipped the exit to the faster path until it was too late. We made our flight, but not without a bit of hustle through Midway. No tip, let alone a 5-star review for that guy.</li><li> Southwest flies into the old Terminal A at what I still call Washington National. I went to college in DC in the early ‘80’s, before it was named for President Reagan and when Terminal A was pretty much all that was there. I had forgotten what a long schlepp it is from that terminal to the Metro station. I remember way back then asking someone why they built the Metro station so far away. “Because they’re going to build new terminals right across from it.” Which they finally did, some 20 years after that Metro station was opened. Sometimes it seems that airport planning horizons are not in years, or even decades; feels more like they’re planning in lifetimes.</li><li> In between the Southwest flights, my United flight continued the string of disruptions trying to get into or out of Charlottesville. I checked that my flight was on-time before calling an Uber -- no weather delays at either end, United and FlightAware apps say the inbound plane is on-time…. Then, halfway to ORD, I get the text from United; a 2½-hour delay for crew arrival. What!? The next text “Because of crew scheduling disruptions this evening in Chicago, we’ve assigned your flight a new crew…. We know this delay wasn’t in your plans today, so we appreciate your patience.” No shit a 2½-hour delay wasn’t in my plans, especially when it’s because United stole our original crew because they screwed up their scheduling. And really United, you can’t find another pilot in ORD, your largest hub, that’s a little closer? I tell you what else isn’t in my plans, flying United to Charlottesville this week. </li><li> Bridge Music -- <em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/stefsax/7785\" target=\"_blank\">Awel</a> </em>by stefsax (c) copyright 2006 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/stefsax/7785 </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>That’s the sound of my new <a href=\"https://www.marriott.com/loyalty/member-benefits/titanium.mi\">Marriott Bonvoy Lifetime Titanium Elite</a> card hitting the kitchen counter. The mailer package was appropriately upscale, but the sheer weight of the thing stunned me. I put a quick video of it on the TravelCommons Facebook page. Cate Rose commented “Hope it scans into your Stocard app so you don’t actually have to carry it in your luggage allowance”. My thought exactly.</li><li> I got a note that Chicago’s electric scooter pilot ends tomorrow, which made me realize that I’ve seen them in just about every city I’ve been to this summer -- Budapest, Krakow, Charlottesville, Nashville, Washington, DC. I think the only places I didn’t see them were in Scotland and Ireland. They’re handy; because they’re dockless, I’ve found they have a wider distribution than, say, a traditional docked bike share and you can take them directly to your planned destination. And they’re a good fill-in between walking and an Uber or a Lyft. And, they’re fun! When I was in DC a couple of weeks ago, I was in the <a href=\"https://washington.org/visit-dc/neighborhoods/brookland\">Brookland</a> neighborhood in the Northeast part of town, and wanted to try out a new taproom there, <a href=\"http://www.rightproperbrewing.com/what-we-do\">Right Proper Brewing</a>. Now Brookland is not the nicest part of DC. It’s much better than when I went to school there, but there are still iffy parts. I wasn’t completely comfortable walking down to Right Proper from the Brookland Metro stop, but it seemed too short for an Uber ride and there was no bus that went down there. But, there was a scooter a couple of blocks from the Metro station. Running down 9th St at 10 mph felt a bit better than speedwalking at 4. And could leave it right in front of the taproom. It was exactly what I wanted. Two problems I’ve seen -- first, too many people riding them on the sidewalk, especially in DC. Maybe because I bike a lot in Chicago, I’m comfortable in bike lanes and navigating around cars on the street and keeping an eye out for potholes. I actually wouldn’t be comfortable riding a scooter on the sidewalk; I’d be afraid of popping a pedestrian who suddenly walked in front of me. To me, cars are much more predictable than pedestrians. The second thing, the need to have half-a-dozen scooter apps on your phone. In Chicago, there are 8 scooter companies, in addition to Uber and Lyft’s scooters. And you need to download their app to find and rent their scooter. Which meant that when I wanted to find a scooter near the Brookland Metro stop, I’d have to cycle thru 5 or 6 apps. Except I didn’t because I found an app called <a href=\"https://scootermap.com/\">Scooter Map</a> that shows all the scooter brands on one map. I think it’s targeted at folks who are making money recharging scooters (not quite sure how that works) but it worked fine for me. I fired it up and saw all the different scooters that were near me. One caveat -- I’ve only ridden these scooters on sunny days. I’m not sure how enthusiastic I’d be riding one in the rain or snow. </li><li> For the Baltics trip next week, we’re taking Finnair out and back from Chicago, an early morning ferry ride from Talinn to Helsinki, and then AirBaltic for everything else. Which then got me thinking about luggage sizes, because I bought my current bag, the <a href=\"https://www.swissarmy.com/us/en&amp;eoq=!t/Products/Travel-Gear/Werks-Traveler-5-0/collection/trg-collection/travelgear_collection_TRA-C2955\">Victorinox Werks</a> 22-incher, to use every last inch of US carry-on allowance. It even catches some side-eye from American and United where I have status. So I didn’t figure it’d fit into any European budget carrier’s luggage sizer. Looking up <a href=\"https://www.airbaltic.com/en/cabin-baggage\">AirBaltic’s carry-on allowance</a>, my Victorinox is a couple of inches too tall and an inch too deep. But what really got me shopping for a new bag for this trip is the weight. AirBaltic has an 8 kg/17½ lbs weight limit. In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/05/30/podcast-121-tsa-lines-my-luggage-is-where/\">episode #121</a>, I talked about the baggage strip tease exercise with Wow Air to make their 7 kg/15 lbs carry-on weight limit. I’d take my bag off the scale, pull some clothes out, zip it back up, and put it back on the scale. Still too heavy. Repeat 3 more times until the agent takes pity — or just gets tired of me — and gives me the approval tag to put on my bag. After which I walk about 10 feet, open my bag and put my armful of clothes back in. My Victorinox is a bit over 7 lbs, so not only is it too tall, the bag itself uses over 40% of the weight allowance. And even though I’ve talked before about how much I hate shopping for luggage, I searched for a smaller, lighter bag that wouldn’t cost a fortune, since my Victorinox will stay my primary bag. I landed on the the <a href=\"https://travelpro.com/collections/rollaboard-luggage-1/products/maxlite%C2%AE-5-international-expandable-carry-on-rollaboard%C2%AE?variant=19641109479522\">TravelPro Maxlite 5</a>. I, or rather my daughter has a good history with TravelPro. It fit the AirBaltic dimensions and is one of the lighter bags I saw at 5.4 lbs which is down to 30% of the 8 kg weight allowance. It also meets three of the key suitcase criteria I laid down in the “how to shop for a suitcase” topic in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/01/25/podcast-137-new-years-travel-status-tips-how-to-shop-for-a-suitcase/\">episode #137</a> -- it’s black, it’s a 2-wheeler so no lost space on extended spinner wheels, and the inside is, for the most part, a wide open box without clothes hangers or a bunch of zip compartments. And it was o<a href=\"https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07BWJVTXD/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&amp;psc=1\">nly $112 on Amazon</a>. I’m taking it to Charlottesville tomorrow for a shakedown cruise.</li><li> Three years ago, back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/11/22/podcast-125-uber-driver-stories-overseas-for-the-election/\">episode #125</a>, in a Travel Security tip, I talked about the need to delete your phone’s Bluetooth pairing when you return a rental car. Usually when I go to pair my phone, I’ll first go through and delete 3-5 pairings before pairing my own. And they all have personalized names like “Timmy’s iPhone”. And most phones by default will download your contacts to the car when paired, so leave all of their contacts and phone numbers in their rental. That is just bad in so many ways. And now Hertz has gotten around to noticing it. In their newest rental terms and conditions, they specifically carve out any liability from you leaving a Bluetooth pairing behind. It’s a pain to remember, especially if you’re running for a flight, but as you’re taking that last scan around the car for your sunglasses and iPhone, remember not to leave your identity behind either.</li><li>Bridge Music -- Black Rainbow by Pitx (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Pitx/19513 Ft: ERH, acclivity</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Keeping Fliers Happy </strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A couple of weeks ago, JD Power released their 2019 North American Airport Satisfaction Study.  The headline - “North American Airports Struggle to Keep Travelers Happy Amid Construction Delays and Surging Passenger Volumes” caught my eye, so I reached out to the study’s author, Michael Taylor, to dig into it a bit more. And so last Friday, we had a wide-ranging conversation. I was going to edit it down, but as I listened to it, I couldn’t think about what to cut. So here it is in its entirety…</li><li>Interview with <a href=\"https://www.jdpower.com/business/content/michael-taylor\">Michael Taylor</a>, Travel Intelligence Lead at J.D. Power</li><li>Thanks again to Michael for taking the time to talk to us. Here\'s the <a href=\"https://www.jdpower.com/business/press-releases/2019-north-america-airport-satisfaction-study\">link</a> to the study summary on the JD Power website.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #156</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li> And if you check out the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> page, you can click thru to highlights from my trips to Budapest and Ireland. And if you follow it, you can catch some pics from next week’s trip through the Baltics.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_155.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #156 — Airport Satisfaction;','','inherit','closed','closed','','2543-revision-v1','','','2019-10-15 08:09:30','2019-10-15 13:09:30','',2543,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/10/15/2543-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2548,1,'2019-10-15 08:11:13','2019-10-15 13:11:13','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\">\n<p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/IMG_1038.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2529 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/IMG_1038-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a></p><figcaption>Polish health food</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>Didn\'t have any problems with the 787\'s flying 4,800 miles to Krakow or back from Budapest, but the 560-mile regional jet flights between Chicago and Charlottesville, VA have been causing me no end of hassles. We talk about this, revisit our discussions about iPhone dual SIM capability and American Airlines\' MD-80 retirement. And then go deep on my very non-keto-friendly dive into Krakow and Budapest street food.&nbsp; All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_156.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/685058542&color=%23ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #156: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago in the middle of what looks like a 6-week run of solid travel. Traveled to DC, Charlottesville, and Nashville, in that order, in the 3 weeks since the last episode. Heading back to Charlottesville this week, then a week hopscotching through the Baltics with my son Andrew -- Riga, Latvia; Talinn, Estonia; Helsinki, Finland -- and then back down to Charlottesville. </li><li> I flew Southwest on my non-Charlottesville flights -- into DC Reagan and Nashville -- and United again to Charlottesville. The Southwest flights went smoothly, except for trying to get to Chicago Midway for the DC flight. The Uber driver didn’t follow the app’s recommended route; instead, he pretended he was a cab driver and took the normal route down the Stevenson Expressway which was crawling due to an earlier accident. I wasn’t paying attention - first time I’ve had an Uber driver freelance on me - and didn’t notice he’d skipped the exit to the faster path until it was too late. We made our flight, but not without a bit of hustle through Midway. No tip, let alone a 5-star review for that guy.</li><li> Southwest flies into the old Terminal A at what I still call Washington National. I went to college in DC in the early ‘80’s, before it was named for President Reagan and when Terminal A was pretty much all that was there. I had forgotten what a long schlepp it is from that terminal to the Metro station. I remember way back then asking someone why they built the Metro station so far away. “Because they’re going to build new terminals right across from it.” Which they finally did, some 20 years after that Metro station was opened. Sometimes it seems that airport planning horizons are not in years, or even decades; feels more like they’re planning in lifetimes.</li><li> In between the Southwest flights, my United flight continued the string of disruptions trying to get into or out of Charlottesville. I checked that my flight was on-time before calling an Uber -- no weather delays at either end, United and FlightAware apps say the inbound plane is on-time…. Then, halfway to ORD, I get the text from United; a 2½-hour delay for crew arrival. What!? The next text “Because of crew scheduling disruptions this evening in Chicago, we’ve assigned your flight a new crew…. We know this delay wasn’t in your plans today, so we appreciate your patience.” No shit a 2½-hour delay wasn’t in my plans, especially when it’s because United stole our original crew because they screwed up their scheduling. And really United, you can’t find another pilot in ORD, your largest hub, that’s a little closer? I tell you what else isn’t in my plans, flying United to Charlottesville this week. </li><li> Bridge Music -- <em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/stefsax/7785\" target=\"_blank\">Awel</a> </em>by stefsax (c) copyright 2006 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/stefsax/7785 </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>That’s the sound of my new <a href=\"https://www.marriott.com/loyalty/member-benefits/titanium.mi\">Marriott Bonvoy Lifetime Titanium Elite</a> card hitting the kitchen counter. The mailer package was appropriately upscale, but the sheer weight of the thing stunned me. I put a quick video of it on the TravelCommons Facebook page. Cate Rose commented “Hope it scans into your Stocard app so you don’t actually have to carry it in your luggage allowance”. My thought exactly.</li><li> I got a note that Chicago’s electric scooter pilot ends tomorrow, which made me realize that I’ve seen them in just about every city I’ve been to this summer -- Budapest, Krakow, Charlottesville, Nashville, Washington, DC. I think the only places I didn’t see them were in Scotland and Ireland. They’re handy; because they’re dockless, I’ve found they have a wider distribution than, say, a traditional docked bike share and you can take them directly to your planned destination. And they’re a good fill-in between walking and an Uber or a Lyft. And, they’re fun! When I was in DC a couple of weeks ago, I was in the <a href=\"https://washington.org/visit-dc/neighborhoods/brookland\">Brookland</a> neighborhood in the Northeast part of town, and wanted to try out a new taproom there, <a href=\"http://www.rightproperbrewing.com/what-we-do\">Right Proper Brewing</a>. Now Brookland is not the nicest part of DC. It’s much better than when I went to school there, but there are still iffy parts. I wasn’t completely comfortable walking down to Right Proper from the Brookland Metro stop, but it seemed too short for an Uber ride and there was no bus that went down there. But, there was a scooter a couple of blocks from the Metro station. Running down 9th St at 10 mph felt a bit better than speedwalking at 4. And could leave it right in front of the taproom. It was exactly what I wanted. Two problems I’ve seen -- first, too many people riding them on the sidewalk, especially in DC. Maybe because I bike a lot in Chicago, I’m comfortable in bike lanes and navigating around cars on the street and keeping an eye out for potholes. I actually wouldn’t be comfortable riding a scooter on the sidewalk; I’d be afraid of popping a pedestrian who suddenly walked in front of me. To me, cars are much more predictable than pedestrians. The second thing, the need to have half-a-dozen scooter apps on your phone. In Chicago, there are 8 scooter companies, in addition to Uber and Lyft’s scooters. And you need to download their app to find and rent their scooter. Which meant that when I wanted to find a scooter near the Brookland Metro stop, I’d have to cycle thru 5 or 6 apps. Except I didn’t because I found an app called <a href=\"https://scootermap.com/\">Scooter Map</a> that shows all the scooter brands on one map. I think it’s targeted at folks who are making money recharging scooters (not quite sure how that works) but it worked fine for me. I fired it up and saw all the different scooters that were near me. One caveat -- I’ve only ridden these scooters on sunny days. I’m not sure how enthusiastic I’d be riding one in the rain or snow. </li><li> For the Baltics trip next week, we’re taking Finnair out and back from Chicago, an early morning ferry ride from Talinn to Helsinki, and then AirBaltic for everything else. Which then got me thinking about luggage sizes, because I bought my current bag, the <a href=\"https://www.swissarmy.com/us/en&amp;eoq=!t/Products/Travel-Gear/Werks-Traveler-5-0/collection/trg-collection/travelgear_collection_TRA-C2955\">Victorinox Werks</a> 22-incher, to use every last inch of US carry-on allowance. It even catches some side-eye from American and United where I have status. So I didn’t figure it’d fit into any European budget carrier’s luggage sizer. Looking up <a href=\"https://www.airbaltic.com/en/cabin-baggage\">AirBaltic’s carry-on allowance</a>, my Victorinox is a couple of inches too tall and an inch too deep. But what really got me shopping for a new bag for this trip is the weight. AirBaltic has an 8 kg/17½ lbs weight limit. In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/05/30/podcast-121-tsa-lines-my-luggage-is-where/\">episode #121</a>, I talked about the baggage strip tease exercise with Wow Air to make their 7 kg/15 lbs carry-on weight limit. I’d take my bag off the scale, pull some clothes out, zip it back up, and put it back on the scale. Still too heavy. Repeat 3 more times until the agent takes pity — or just gets tired of me — and gives me the approval tag to put on my bag. After which I walk about 10 feet, open my bag and put my armful of clothes back in. My Victorinox is a bit over 7 lbs, so not only is it too tall, the bag itself uses over 40% of the weight allowance. And even though I’ve talked before about how much I hate shopping for luggage, I searched for a smaller, lighter bag that wouldn’t cost a fortune, since my Victorinox will stay my primary bag. I landed on the the <a href=\"https://travelpro.com/collections/rollaboard-luggage-1/products/maxlite%C2%AE-5-international-expandable-carry-on-rollaboard%C2%AE?variant=19641109479522\">TravelPro Maxlite 5</a>. I, or rather my daughter has a good history with TravelPro. It fit the AirBaltic dimensions and is one of the lighter bags I saw at 5.4 lbs which is down to 30% of the 8 kg weight allowance. It also meets three of the key suitcase criteria I laid down in the “how to shop for a suitcase” topic in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/01/25/podcast-137-new-years-travel-status-tips-how-to-shop-for-a-suitcase/\">episode #137</a> -- it’s black, it’s a 2-wheeler so no lost space on extended spinner wheels, and the inside is, for the most part, a wide open box without clothes hangers or a bunch of zip compartments. And it was o<a href=\"https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07BWJVTXD/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&amp;psc=1\">nly $112 on Amazon</a>. I’m taking it to Charlottesville tomorrow for a shakedown cruise.</li><li> Three years ago, back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/11/22/podcast-125-uber-driver-stories-overseas-for-the-election/\">episode #125</a>, in a Travel Security tip, I talked about the need to delete your phone’s Bluetooth pairing when you return a rental car. Usually when I go to pair my phone, I’ll first go through and delete 3-5 pairings before pairing my own. And they all have personalized names like “Timmy’s iPhone”. And most phones by default will download your contacts to the car when paired, so leave all of their contacts and phone numbers in their rental. That is just bad in so many ways. And now Hertz has gotten around to noticing it. In their newest rental terms and conditions, they specifically carve out any liability from you leaving a Bluetooth pairing behind. It’s a pain to remember, especially if you’re running for a flight, but as you’re taking that last scan around the car for your sunglasses and iPhone, remember not to leave your identity behind either.</li><li>Bridge Music -- Black Rainbow by Pitx (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Pitx/19513 Ft: ERH, acclivity</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Keeping Fliers Happy </strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A couple of weeks ago, JD Power released their 2019 North American Airport Satisfaction Study.  The headline - “North American Airports Struggle to Keep Travelers Happy Amid Construction Delays and Surging Passenger Volumes” caught my eye, so I reached out to the study’s author, Michael Taylor, to dig into it a bit more. And so last Friday, we had a wide-ranging conversation. I was going to edit it down, but as I listened to it, I couldn’t think about what to cut. So here it is in its entirety…</li><li>Interview with <a href=\"https://www.jdpower.com/business/content/michael-taylor\">Michael Taylor</a>, Travel Intelligence Lead at J.D. Power</li><li>Thanks again to Michael for taking the time to talk to us. Here\'s the <a href=\"https://www.jdpower.com/business/press-releases/2019-north-america-airport-satisfaction-study\">link</a> to the study summary on the JD Power website.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #156</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li> And if you check out the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> page, you can click thru to highlights from my trips to Budapest and Ireland. And if you follow it, you can catch some pics from next week’s trip through the Baltics.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_155.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #156 — Airport Satisfaction; eScooters; Smaller Luggage','','inherit','closed','closed','','2543-revision-v1','','','2019-10-15 08:11:13','2019-10-15 13:11:13','',2543,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/10/15/2543-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2549,1,'2019-10-15 08:12:07','2019-10-15 13:12:07','<p>Didn\'t have any problems with the 787\'s flying 4,800 miles to Krakow or back from Budapest, but the 560-mile regional jet flights between Chicago and Charlottesville, VA have been causing me no end of hassles. We talk about this, revisit our discussions about iPhone dual SIM capability and American Airlines\' MD-80 retirement. And then go deep on my very non-keto-friendly dive into Krakow and Budapest street food.  All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_156.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/685058542&color=%23ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #156: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago in the middle of what looks like a 6-week run of solid travel. Traveled to DC, Charlottesville, and Nashville, in that order, in the 3 weeks since the last episode. Heading back to Charlottesville this week, then a week hopscotching through the Baltics with my son Andrew -- Riga, Latvia; Talinn, Estonia; Helsinki, Finland -- and then back down to Charlottesville. </li><li> I flew Southwest on my non-Charlottesville flights -- into DC Reagan and Nashville -- and United again to Charlottesville. The Southwest flights went smoothly, except for trying to get to Chicago Midway for the DC flight. The Uber driver didn’t follow the app’s recommended route; instead, he pretended he was a cab driver and took the normal route down the Stevenson Expressway which was crawling due to an earlier accident. I wasn’t paying attention - first time I’ve had an Uber driver freelance on me - and didn’t notice he’d skipped the exit to the faster path until it was too late. We made our flight, but not without a bit of hustle through Midway. No tip, let alone a 5-star review for that guy.</li><li> Southwest flies into the old Terminal A at what I still call Washington National. I went to college in DC in the early ‘80’s, before it was named for President Reagan and when Terminal A was pretty much all that was there. I had forgotten what a long schlepp it is from that terminal to the Metro station. I remember way back then asking someone why they built the Metro station so far away. “Because they’re going to build new terminals right across from it.” Which they finally did, some 20 years after that Metro station was opened. Sometimes it seems that airport planning horizons are not in years, or even decades; feels more like they’re planning in lifetimes.</li><li> In between the Southwest flights, my United flight continued the string of disruptions trying to get into or out of Charlottesville. I checked that my flight was on-time before calling an Uber -- no weather delays at either end, United and FlightAware apps say the inbound plane is on-time…. Then, halfway to ORD, I get the text from United; a 2½-hour delay for crew arrival. What!? The next text “Because of crew scheduling disruptions this evening in Chicago, we’ve assigned your flight a new crew…. We know this delay wasn’t in your plans today, so we appreciate your patience.” No shit a 2½-hour delay wasn’t in my plans, especially when it’s because United stole our original crew because they screwed up their scheduling. And really United, you can’t find another pilot in ORD, your largest hub, that’s a little closer? I tell you what else isn’t in my plans, flying United to Charlottesville this week. </li><li> Bridge Music -- <em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/stefsax/7785\" target=\"_blank\">Awel</a> </em>by stefsax (c) copyright 2006 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/stefsax/7785 </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>That’s the sound of my new <a href=\"https://www.marriott.com/loyalty/member-benefits/titanium.mi\">Marriott Bonvoy Lifetime Titanium Elite</a> card hitting the kitchen counter. The mailer package was appropriately upscale, but the sheer weight of the thing stunned me. I put a quick video of it on the TravelCommons Facebook page. Cate Rose commented “Hope it scans into your Stocard app so you don’t actually have to carry it in your luggage allowance”. My thought exactly.</li><li> I got a note that Chicago’s electric scooter pilot ends tomorrow, which made me realize that I’ve seen them in just about every city I’ve been to this summer -- Budapest, Krakow, Charlottesville, Nashville, Washington, DC. I think the only places I didn’t see them were in Scotland and Ireland. They’re handy; because they’re dockless, I’ve found they have a wider distribution than, say, a traditional docked bike share and you can take them directly to your planned destination. And they’re a good fill-in between walking and an Uber or a Lyft. And, they’re fun! When I was in DC a couple of weeks ago, I was in the <a href=\"https://washington.org/visit-dc/neighborhoods/brookland\">Brookland</a> neighborhood in the Northeast part of town, and wanted to try out a new taproom there, <a href=\"http://www.rightproperbrewing.com/what-we-do\">Right Proper Brewing</a>. Now Brookland is not the nicest part of DC. It’s much better than when I went to school there, but there are still iffy parts. I wasn’t completely comfortable walking down to Right Proper from the Brookland Metro stop, but it seemed too short for an Uber ride and there was no bus that went down there. But, there was a scooter a couple of blocks from the Metro station. Running down 9th St at 10 mph felt a bit better than speedwalking at 4. And could leave it right in front of the taproom. It was exactly what I wanted. Two problems I’ve seen -- first, too many people riding them on the sidewalk, especially in DC. Maybe because I bike a lot in Chicago, I’m comfortable in bike lanes and navigating around cars on the street and keeping an eye out for potholes. I actually wouldn’t be comfortable riding a scooter on the sidewalk; I’d be afraid of popping a pedestrian who suddenly walked in front of me. To me, cars are much more predictable than pedestrians. The second thing, the need to have half-a-dozen scooter apps on your phone. In Chicago, there are 8 scooter companies, in addition to Uber and Lyft’s scooters. And you need to download their app to find and rent their scooter. Which meant that when I wanted to find a scooter near the Brookland Metro stop, I’d have to cycle thru 5 or 6 apps. Except I didn’t because I found an app called <a href=\"https://scootermap.com/\">Scooter Map</a> that shows all the scooter brands on one map. I think it’s targeted at folks who are making money recharging scooters (not quite sure how that works) but it worked fine for me. I fired it up and saw all the different scooters that were near me. One caveat -- I’ve only ridden these scooters on sunny days. I’m not sure how enthusiastic I’d be riding one in the rain or snow. </li><li> For the Baltics trip next week, we’re taking Finnair out and back from Chicago, an early morning ferry ride from Talinn to Helsinki, and then AirBaltic for everything else. Which then got me thinking about luggage sizes, because I bought my current bag, the <a href=\"https://www.swissarmy.com/us/en&amp;eoq=!t/Products/Travel-Gear/Werks-Traveler-5-0/collection/trg-collection/travelgear_collection_TRA-C2955\">Victorinox Werks</a> 22-incher, to use every last inch of US carry-on allowance. It even catches some side-eye from American and United where I have status. So I didn’t figure it’d fit into any European budget carrier’s luggage sizer. Looking up <a href=\"https://www.airbaltic.com/en/cabin-baggage\">AirBaltic’s carry-on allowance</a>, my Victorinox is a couple of inches too tall and an inch too deep. But what really got me shopping for a new bag for this trip is the weight. AirBaltic has an 8 kg/17½ lbs weight limit. In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/05/30/podcast-121-tsa-lines-my-luggage-is-where/\">episode #121</a>, I talked about the baggage strip tease exercise with Wow Air to make their 7 kg/15 lbs carry-on weight limit. I’d take my bag off the scale, pull some clothes out, zip it back up, and put it back on the scale. Still too heavy. Repeat 3 more times until the agent takes pity — or just gets tired of me — and gives me the approval tag to put on my bag. After which I walk about 10 feet, open my bag and put my armful of clothes back in. My Victorinox is a bit over 7 lbs, so not only is it too tall, the bag itself uses over 40% of the weight allowance. And even though I’ve talked before about how much I hate shopping for luggage, I searched for a smaller, lighter bag that wouldn’t cost a fortune, since my Victorinox will stay my primary bag. I landed on the the <a href=\"https://travelpro.com/collections/rollaboard-luggage-1/products/maxlite%C2%AE-5-international-expandable-carry-on-rollaboard%C2%AE?variant=19641109479522\">TravelPro Maxlite 5</a>. I, or rather my daughter has a good history with TravelPro. It fit the AirBaltic dimensions and is one of the lighter bags I saw at 5.4 lbs which is down to 30% of the 8 kg weight allowance. It also meets three of the key suitcase criteria I laid down in the “how to shop for a suitcase” topic in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/01/25/podcast-137-new-years-travel-status-tips-how-to-shop-for-a-suitcase/\">episode #137</a> -- it’s black, it’s a 2-wheeler so no lost space on extended spinner wheels, and the inside is, for the most part, a wide open box without clothes hangers or a bunch of zip compartments. And it was o<a href=\"https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07BWJVTXD/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&amp;psc=1\">nly $112 on Amazon</a>. I’m taking it to Charlottesville tomorrow for a shakedown cruise.</li><li> Three years ago, back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/11/22/podcast-125-uber-driver-stories-overseas-for-the-election/\">episode #125</a>, in a Travel Security tip, I talked about the need to delete your phone’s Bluetooth pairing when you return a rental car. Usually when I go to pair my phone, I’ll first go through and delete 3-5 pairings before pairing my own. And they all have personalized names like “Timmy’s iPhone”. And most phones by default will download your contacts to the car when paired, so leave all of their contacts and phone numbers in their rental. That is just bad in so many ways. And now Hertz has gotten around to noticing it. In their newest rental terms and conditions, they specifically carve out any liability from you leaving a Bluetooth pairing behind. It’s a pain to remember, especially if you’re running for a flight, but as you’re taking that last scan around the car for your sunglasses and iPhone, remember not to leave your identity behind either.</li><li>Bridge Music -- Black Rainbow by Pitx (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Pitx/19513 Ft: ERH, acclivity</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Keeping Fliers Happy </strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A couple of weeks ago, JD Power released their 2019 North American Airport Satisfaction Study.&nbsp; The headline - “North American Airports Struggle to Keep Travelers Happy Amid Construction Delays and Surging Passenger Volumes” caught my eye, so I reached out to the study’s author, Michael Taylor, to dig into it a bit more. And so last Friday, we had a wide-ranging conversation. I was going to edit it down, but as I listened to it, I couldn’t think about what to cut. So here it is in its entirety…</li><li>Interview with <a href=\"https://www.jdpower.com/business/content/michael-taylor\">Michael Taylor</a>, Travel Intelligence Lead at J.D. Power</li><li>Thanks again to Michael for taking the time to talk to us. Here\'s the <a href=\"https://www.jdpower.com/business/press-releases/2019-north-america-airport-satisfaction-study\">link</a> to the study summary on the JD Power website.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #156</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li> And if you check out the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> page, you can click thru to highlights from my trips to Budapest and Ireland. And if you follow it, you can catch some pics from next week’s trip through the Baltics.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_155.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #156 — Airport Satisfaction; eScooters; Smaller Luggage','','inherit','closed','closed','','2543-revision-v1','','','2019-10-15 08:12:07','2019-10-15 13:12:07','',2543,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/10/15/2543-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2550,1,'2019-10-15 08:19:39','2019-10-15 13:19:39','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\">\n<p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/IMG_0159.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1402\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/IMG_0159-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"225\" height=\"300\"></a></p><figcaption>This Won\'t Help Your Flier Sat Score</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>Didn\'t have any problems with the 787\'s flying 4,800 miles to Krakow or back from Budapest, but the 560-mile regional jet flights between Chicago and Charlottesville, VA have been causing me no end of hassles. We talk about this, revisit our discussions about iPhone dual SIM capability and American Airlines\' MD-80 retirement. And then go deep on my very non-keto-friendly dive into Krakow and Budapest street food.&nbsp; All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_156.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/685058542&color=%23ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #156: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago in the middle of what looks like a 6-week run of solid travel. Traveled to DC, Charlottesville, and Nashville, in that order, in the 3 weeks since the last episode. Heading back to Charlottesville this week, then a week hopscotching through the Baltics with my son Andrew -- Riga, Latvia; Talinn, Estonia; Helsinki, Finland -- and then back down to Charlottesville. </li><li> I flew Southwest on my non-Charlottesville flights -- into DC Reagan and Nashville -- and United again to Charlottesville. The Southwest flights went smoothly, except for trying to get to Chicago Midway for the DC flight. The Uber driver didn’t follow the app’s recommended route; instead, he pretended he was a cab driver and took the normal route down the Stevenson Expressway which was crawling due to an earlier accident. I wasn’t paying attention - first time I’ve had an Uber driver freelance on me - and didn’t notice he’d skipped the exit to the faster path until it was too late. We made our flight, but not without a bit of hustle through Midway. No tip, let alone a 5-star review for that guy.</li><li> Southwest flies into the old Terminal A at what I still call Washington National. I went to college in DC in the early ‘80’s, before it was named for President Reagan and when Terminal A was pretty much all that was there. I had forgotten what a long schlepp it is from that terminal to the Metro station. I remember way back then asking someone why they built the Metro station so far away. “Because they’re going to build new terminals right across from it.” Which they finally did, some 20 years after that Metro station was opened. Sometimes it seems that airport planning horizons are not in years, or even decades; feels more like they’re planning in lifetimes.</li><li> In between the Southwest flights, my United flight continued the string of disruptions trying to get into or out of Charlottesville. I checked that my flight was on-time before calling an Uber -- no weather delays at either end, United and FlightAware apps say the inbound plane is on-time…. Then, halfway to ORD, I get the text from United; a 2½-hour delay for crew arrival. What!? The next text “Because of crew scheduling disruptions this evening in Chicago, we’ve assigned your flight a new crew…. We know this delay wasn’t in your plans today, so we appreciate your patience.” No shit a 2½-hour delay wasn’t in my plans, especially when it’s because United stole our original crew because they screwed up their scheduling. And really United, you can’t find another pilot in ORD, your largest hub, that’s a little closer? I tell you what else isn’t in my plans, flying United to Charlottesville this week. </li><li> Bridge Music -- <em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/stefsax/7785\" target=\"_blank\">Awel</a> </em>by stefsax (c) copyright 2006 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/stefsax/7785 </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>That’s the sound of my new <a href=\"https://www.marriott.com/loyalty/member-benefits/titanium.mi\">Marriott Bonvoy Lifetime Titanium Elite</a> card hitting the kitchen counter. The mailer package was appropriately upscale, but the sheer weight of the thing stunned me. I put a quick video of it on the TravelCommons Facebook page. Cate Rose commented “Hope it scans into your Stocard app so you don’t actually have to carry it in your luggage allowance”. My thought exactly.</li><li> I got a note that Chicago’s electric scooter pilot ends tomorrow, which made me realize that I’ve seen them in just about every city I’ve been to this summer -- Budapest, Krakow, Charlottesville, Nashville, Washington, DC. I think the only places I didn’t see them were in Scotland and Ireland. They’re handy; because they’re dockless, I’ve found they have a wider distribution than, say, a traditional docked bike share and you can take them directly to your planned destination. And they’re a good fill-in between walking and an Uber or a Lyft. And, they’re fun! When I was in DC a couple of weeks ago, I was in the <a href=\"https://washington.org/visit-dc/neighborhoods/brookland\">Brookland</a> neighborhood in the Northeast part of town, and wanted to try out a new taproom there, <a href=\"http://www.rightproperbrewing.com/what-we-do\">Right Proper Brewing</a>. Now Brookland is not the nicest part of DC. It’s much better than when I went to school there, but there are still iffy parts. I wasn’t completely comfortable walking down to Right Proper from the Brookland Metro stop, but it seemed too short for an Uber ride and there was no bus that went down there. But, there was a scooter a couple of blocks from the Metro station. Running down 9th St at 10 mph felt a bit better than speedwalking at 4. And could leave it right in front of the taproom. It was exactly what I wanted. Two problems I’ve seen -- first, too many people riding them on the sidewalk, especially in DC. Maybe because I bike a lot in Chicago, I’m comfortable in bike lanes and navigating around cars on the street and keeping an eye out for potholes. I actually wouldn’t be comfortable riding a scooter on the sidewalk; I’d be afraid of popping a pedestrian who suddenly walked in front of me. To me, cars are much more predictable than pedestrians. The second thing, the need to have half-a-dozen scooter apps on your phone. In Chicago, there are 8 scooter companies, in addition to Uber and Lyft’s scooters. And you need to download their app to find and rent their scooter. Which meant that when I wanted to find a scooter near the Brookland Metro stop, I’d have to cycle thru 5 or 6 apps. Except I didn’t because I found an app called <a href=\"https://scootermap.com/\">Scooter Map</a> that shows all the scooter brands on one map. I think it’s targeted at folks who are making money recharging scooters (not quite sure how that works) but it worked fine for me. I fired it up and saw all the different scooters that were near me. One caveat -- I’ve only ridden these scooters on sunny days. I’m not sure how enthusiastic I’d be riding one in the rain or snow. </li><li> For the Baltics trip next week, we’re taking Finnair out and back from Chicago, an early morning ferry ride from Talinn to Helsinki, and then AirBaltic for everything else. Which then got me thinking about luggage sizes, because I bought my current bag, the <a href=\"https://www.swissarmy.com/us/en&amp;eoq=!t/Products/Travel-Gear/Werks-Traveler-5-0/collection/trg-collection/travelgear_collection_TRA-C2955\">Victorinox Werks</a> 22-incher, to use every last inch of US carry-on allowance. It even catches some side-eye from American and United where I have status. So I didn’t figure it’d fit into any European budget carrier’s luggage sizer. Looking up <a href=\"https://www.airbaltic.com/en/cabin-baggage\">AirBaltic’s carry-on allowance</a>, my Victorinox is a couple of inches too tall and an inch too deep. But what really got me shopping for a new bag for this trip is the weight. AirBaltic has an 8 kg/17½ lbs weight limit. In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/05/30/podcast-121-tsa-lines-my-luggage-is-where/\">episode #121</a>, I talked about the baggage strip tease exercise with Wow Air to make their 7 kg/15 lbs carry-on weight limit. I’d take my bag off the scale, pull some clothes out, zip it back up, and put it back on the scale. Still too heavy. Repeat 3 more times until the agent takes pity — or just gets tired of me — and gives me the approval tag to put on my bag. After which I walk about 10 feet, open my bag and put my armful of clothes back in. My Victorinox is a bit over 7 lbs, so not only is it too tall, the bag itself uses over 40% of the weight allowance. And even though I’ve talked before about how much I hate shopping for luggage, I searched for a smaller, lighter bag that wouldn’t cost a fortune, since my Victorinox will stay my primary bag. I landed on the the <a href=\"https://travelpro.com/collections/rollaboard-luggage-1/products/maxlite%C2%AE-5-international-expandable-carry-on-rollaboard%C2%AE?variant=19641109479522\">TravelPro Maxlite 5</a>. I, or rather my daughter has a good history with TravelPro. It fit the AirBaltic dimensions and is one of the lighter bags I saw at 5.4 lbs which is down to 30% of the 8 kg weight allowance. It also meets three of the key suitcase criteria I laid down in the “how to shop for a suitcase” topic in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/01/25/podcast-137-new-years-travel-status-tips-how-to-shop-for-a-suitcase/\">episode #137</a> -- it’s black, it’s a 2-wheeler so no lost space on extended spinner wheels, and the inside is, for the most part, a wide open box without clothes hangers or a bunch of zip compartments. And it was o<a href=\"https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07BWJVTXD/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&amp;psc=1\">nly $112 on Amazon</a>. I’m taking it to Charlottesville tomorrow for a shakedown cruise.</li><li> Three years ago, back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/11/22/podcast-125-uber-driver-stories-overseas-for-the-election/\">episode #125</a>, in a Travel Security tip, I talked about the need to delete your phone’s Bluetooth pairing when you return a rental car. Usually when I go to pair my phone, I’ll first go through and delete 3-5 pairings before pairing my own. And they all have personalized names like “Timmy’s iPhone”. And most phones by default will download your contacts to the car when paired, so leave all of their contacts and phone numbers in their rental. That is just bad in so many ways. And now Hertz has gotten around to noticing it. In their newest rental terms and conditions, they specifically carve out any liability from you leaving a Bluetooth pairing behind. It’s a pain to remember, especially if you’re running for a flight, but as you’re taking that last scan around the car for your sunglasses and iPhone, remember not to leave your identity behind either.</li><li>Bridge Music -- Black Rainbow by Pitx (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Pitx/19513 Ft: ERH, acclivity</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Keeping Fliers Happy </strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A couple of weeks ago, JD Power released their 2019 North American Airport Satisfaction Study.&nbsp; The headline - “North American Airports Struggle to Keep Travelers Happy Amid Construction Delays and Surging Passenger Volumes” caught my eye, so I reached out to the study’s author, Michael Taylor, to dig into it a bit more. And so last Friday, we had a wide-ranging conversation. I was going to edit it down, but as I listened to it, I couldn’t think about what to cut. So here it is in its entirety…</li><li>Interview with <a href=\"https://www.jdpower.com/business/content/michael-taylor\">Michael Taylor</a>, Travel Intelligence Lead at J.D. Power</li><li>Thanks again to Michael for taking the time to talk to us. Here\'s the <a href=\"https://www.jdpower.com/business/press-releases/2019-north-america-airport-satisfaction-study\">link</a> to the study summary on the JD Power website.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #156</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li> And if you check out the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> page, you can click thru to highlights from my trips to Budapest and Ireland. And if you follow it, you can catch some pics from next week’s trip through the Baltics.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_155.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #156 — Airport Satisfaction; eScooters; Smaller Luggage','','inherit','closed','closed','','2543-revision-v1','','','2019-10-15 08:19:39','2019-10-15 13:19:39','',2543,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/10/15/2543-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2551,1,'2019-10-15 08:31:26','2019-10-15 13:31:26','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\">\n<p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/IMG_0159.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1402\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/IMG_0159-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"225\" height=\"300\" /></a></p>\n<figcaption>This Won\'t Help Your Flier Sat Score</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p>In this episode, we talk with Michael Taylor, author of <a href=\"https://www.jdpower.com/business/press-releases/2019-north-america-airport-satisfaction-study\">JD Power\'s 2019 Airport Satisfaction Survey</a>, about what keeps fliers happy. I also talk about what I like about eScooters, shopping for a smaller bag for upcoming flights on a Euro budget airline, and how Hertz\'s updated T&amp;Cs remind me to delete my Bluetooth pairings in rental cars. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_156.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/685058542&color=%23ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #156: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago in the middle of what looks like a 6-week run of solid travel. Traveled to DC, Charlottesville, and Nashville, in that order, in the 3 weeks since the last episode. Heading back to Charlottesville this week, then a week hopscotching through the Baltics with my son Andrew -- Riga, Latvia; Talinn, Estonia; Helsinki, Finland -- and then back down to Charlottesville. </li><li> I flew Southwest on my non-Charlottesville flights -- into DC Reagan and Nashville -- and United again to Charlottesville. The Southwest flights went smoothly, except for trying to get to Chicago Midway for the DC flight. The Uber driver didn’t follow the app’s recommended route; instead, he pretended he was a cab driver and took the normal route down the Stevenson Expressway which was crawling due to an earlier accident. I wasn’t paying attention - first time I’ve had an Uber driver freelance on me - and didn’t notice he’d skipped the exit to the faster path until it was too late. We made our flight, but not without a bit of hustle through Midway. No tip, let alone a 5-star review for that guy.</li><li> Southwest flies into the old Terminal A at what I still call Washington National. I went to college in DC in the early ‘80’s, before it was named for President Reagan and when Terminal A was pretty much all that was there. I had forgotten what a long schlepp it is from that terminal to the Metro station. I remember way back then asking someone why they built the Metro station so far away. “Because they’re going to build new terminals right across from it.” Which they finally did, some 20 years after that Metro station was opened. Sometimes it seems that airport planning horizons are not in years, or even decades; feels more like they’re planning in lifetimes.</li><li> In between the Southwest flights, my United flight continued the string of disruptions trying to get into or out of Charlottesville. I checked that my flight was on-time before calling an Uber -- no weather delays at either end, United and FlightAware apps say the inbound plane is on-time…. Then, halfway to ORD, I get the text from United; a 2½-hour delay for crew arrival. What!? The next text “Because of crew scheduling disruptions this evening in Chicago, we’ve assigned your flight a new crew…. We know this delay wasn’t in your plans today, so we appreciate your patience.” No shit a 2½-hour delay wasn’t in my plans, especially when it’s because United stole our original crew because they screwed up their scheduling. And really United, you can’t find another pilot in ORD, your largest hub, that’s a little closer? I tell you what else isn’t in my plans, flying United to Charlottesville this week. </li><li> Bridge Music -- <em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/stefsax/7785\" target=\"_blank\">Awel</a> </em>by stefsax (c) copyright 2006 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/stefsax/7785 </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>That’s the sound of my new <a href=\"https://www.marriott.com/loyalty/member-benefits/titanium.mi\">Marriott Bonvoy Lifetime Titanium Elite</a> card hitting the kitchen counter. The mailer package was appropriately upscale, but the sheer weight of the thing stunned me. I put a quick video of it on the TravelCommons Facebook page. Cate Rose commented “Hope it scans into your Stocard app so you don’t actually have to carry it in your luggage allowance”. My thought exactly.</li><li> I got a note that Chicago’s electric scooter pilot ends tomorrow, which made me realize that I’ve seen them in just about every city I’ve been to this summer -- Budapest, Krakow, Charlottesville, Nashville, Washington, DC. I think the only places I didn’t see them were in Scotland and Ireland. They’re handy; because they’re dockless, I’ve found they have a wider distribution than, say, a traditional docked bike share and you can take them directly to your planned destination. And they’re a good fill-in between walking and an Uber or a Lyft. And, they’re fun! When I was in DC a couple of weeks ago, I was in the <a href=\"https://washington.org/visit-dc/neighborhoods/brookland\">Brookland</a> neighborhood in the Northeast part of town, and wanted to try out a new taproom there, <a href=\"http://www.rightproperbrewing.com/what-we-do\">Right Proper Brewing</a>. Now Brookland is not the nicest part of DC. It’s much better than when I went to school there, but there are still iffy parts. I wasn’t completely comfortable walking down to Right Proper from the Brookland Metro stop, but it seemed too short for an Uber ride and there was no bus that went down there. But, there was a scooter a couple of blocks from the Metro station. Running down 9th St at 10 mph felt a bit better than speedwalking at 4. And could leave it right in front of the taproom. It was exactly what I wanted. Two problems I’ve seen -- first, too many people riding them on the sidewalk, especially in DC. Maybe because I bike a lot in Chicago, I’m comfortable in bike lanes and navigating around cars on the street and keeping an eye out for potholes. I actually wouldn’t be comfortable riding a scooter on the sidewalk; I’d be afraid of popping a pedestrian who suddenly walked in front of me. To me, cars are much more predictable than pedestrians. The second thing, the need to have half-a-dozen scooter apps on your phone. In Chicago, there are 8 scooter companies, in addition to Uber and Lyft’s scooters. And you need to download their app to find and rent their scooter. Which meant that when I wanted to find a scooter near the Brookland Metro stop, I’d have to cycle thru 5 or 6 apps. Except I didn’t because I found an app called <a href=\"https://scootermap.com/\">Scooter Map</a> that shows all the scooter brands on one map. I think it’s targeted at folks who are making money recharging scooters (not quite sure how that works) but it worked fine for me. I fired it up and saw all the different scooters that were near me. One caveat -- I’ve only ridden these scooters on sunny days. I’m not sure how enthusiastic I’d be riding one in the rain or snow. </li><li> For the Baltics trip next week, we’re taking Finnair out and back from Chicago, an early morning ferry ride from Talinn to Helsinki, and then AirBaltic for everything else. Which then got me thinking about luggage sizes, because I bought my current bag, the <a href=\"https://www.swissarmy.com/us/en&amp;eoq=!t/Products/Travel-Gear/Werks-Traveler-5-0/collection/trg-collection/travelgear_collection_TRA-C2955\">Victorinox Werks</a> 22-incher, to use every last inch of US carry-on allowance. It even catches some side-eye from American and United where I have status. So I didn’t figure it’d fit into any European budget carrier’s luggage sizer. Looking up <a href=\"https://www.airbaltic.com/en/cabin-baggage\">AirBaltic’s carry-on allowance</a>, my Victorinox is a couple of inches too tall and an inch too deep. But what really got me shopping for a new bag for this trip is the weight. AirBaltic has an 8 kg/17½ lbs weight limit. In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/05/30/podcast-121-tsa-lines-my-luggage-is-where/\">episode #121</a>, I talked about the baggage strip tease exercise with Wow Air to make their 7 kg/15 lbs carry-on weight limit. I’d take my bag off the scale, pull some clothes out, zip it back up, and put it back on the scale. Still too heavy. Repeat 3 more times until the agent takes pity — or just gets tired of me — and gives me the approval tag to put on my bag. After which I walk about 10 feet, open my bag and put my armful of clothes back in. My Victorinox is a bit over 7 lbs, so not only is it too tall, the bag itself uses over 40% of the weight allowance. And even though I’ve talked before about how much I hate shopping for luggage, I searched for a smaller, lighter bag that wouldn’t cost a fortune, since my Victorinox will stay my primary bag. I landed on the the <a href=\"https://travelpro.com/collections/rollaboard-luggage-1/products/maxlite%C2%AE-5-international-expandable-carry-on-rollaboard%C2%AE?variant=19641109479522\">TravelPro Maxlite 5</a>. I, or rather my daughter has a good history with TravelPro. It fit the AirBaltic dimensions and is one of the lighter bags I saw at 5.4 lbs which is down to 30% of the 8 kg weight allowance. It also meets three of the key suitcase criteria I laid down in the “how to shop for a suitcase” topic in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/01/25/podcast-137-new-years-travel-status-tips-how-to-shop-for-a-suitcase/\">episode #137</a> -- it’s black, it’s a 2-wheeler so no lost space on extended spinner wheels, and the inside is, for the most part, a wide open box without clothes hangers or a bunch of zip compartments. And it was o<a href=\"https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07BWJVTXD/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&amp;psc=1\">nly $112 on Amazon</a>. I’m taking it to Charlottesville tomorrow for a shakedown cruise.</li><li> Three years ago, back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/11/22/podcast-125-uber-driver-stories-overseas-for-the-election/\">episode #125</a>, in a Travel Security tip, I talked about the need to delete your phone’s Bluetooth pairing when you return a rental car. Usually when I go to pair my phone, I’ll first go through and delete 3-5 pairings before pairing my own. And they all have personalized names like “Timmy’s iPhone”. And most phones by default will download your contacts to the car when paired, so leave all of their contacts and phone numbers in their rental. That is just bad in so many ways. And now Hertz has gotten around to noticing it. In their newest rental terms and conditions, they specifically carve out any liability from you leaving a Bluetooth pairing behind. It’s a pain to remember, especially if you’re running for a flight, but as you’re taking that last scan around the car for your sunglasses and iPhone, remember not to leave your identity behind either.</li><li>Bridge Music -- Black Rainbow by Pitx (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Pitx/19513 Ft: ERH, acclivity</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Keeping Fliers Happy </strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A couple of weeks ago, JD Power released their 2019 North American Airport Satisfaction Study.&nbsp; The headline - “North American Airports Struggle to Keep Travelers Happy Amid Construction Delays and Surging Passenger Volumes” caught my eye, so I reached out to the study’s author, Michael Taylor, to dig into it a bit more. And so last Friday, we had a wide-ranging conversation. I was going to edit it down, but as I listened to it, I couldn’t think about what to cut. So here it is in its entirety…</li><li>Interview with <a href=\"https://www.jdpower.com/business/content/michael-taylor\">Michael Taylor</a>, Travel Intelligence Lead at J.D. Power</li><li>Thanks again to Michael for taking the time to talk to us. Here\'s the <a href=\"https://www.jdpower.com/business/press-releases/2019-north-america-airport-satisfaction-study\">link</a> to the study summary on the JD Power website.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #156</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li> And if you check out the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> page, you can click thru to highlights from my trips to Budapest and Ireland. And if you follow it, you can catch some pics from next week’s trip through the Baltics.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_155.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #156 — Airport Satisfaction;','','inherit','closed','closed','','2543-revision-v1','','','2019-10-15 08:31:26','2019-10-15 13:31:26','',2543,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/10/15/2543-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2552,1,'2019-10-15 08:34:10','2019-10-15 13:34:10','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\">\n<p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/IMG_0159.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1402\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/IMG_0159-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"225\" height=\"300\"></a></p><figcaption>This Won\'t Help Your Flier Sat Score</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>In this episode, we talk with Michael Taylor, author of <a href=\"https://www.jdpower.com/business/press-releases/2019-north-america-airport-satisfaction-study\">JD Power\'s 2019 Airport Satisfaction Survey</a>, about what keeps fliers happy. I also talk about what I like about eScooters, shopping for a smaller bag for upcoming flights on a Euro budget airline, and how Hertz\'s updated T&amp;Cs remind me to delete my Bluetooth pairings in rental cars. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_156.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/685058542&color=%23ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #156: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago in the middle of what looks like a 6-week run of solid travel. Traveled to DC, Charlottesville, and Nashville, in that order, in the 3 weeks since the last episode. Heading back to Charlottesville this week, then a week hopscotching through the Baltics with my son Andrew -- Riga, Latvia; Talinn, Estonia; Helsinki, Finland -- and then back down to Charlottesville. </li><li> I flew Southwest on my non-Charlottesville flights -- into DC Reagan and Nashville -- and United again to Charlottesville. The Southwest flights went smoothly, except for trying to get to Chicago Midway for the DC flight. The Uber driver didn’t follow the app’s recommended route; instead, he pretended he was a cab driver and took the normal route down the Stevenson Expressway which was crawling due to an earlier accident. I wasn’t paying attention - first time I’ve had an Uber driver freelance on me - and didn’t notice he’d skipped the exit to the faster path until it was too late. We made our flight, but not without a bit of hustle through Midway. No tip, let alone a 5-star review for that guy.</li><li> Southwest flies into the old Terminal A at what I still call Washington National. I went to college in DC in the early ‘80’s, before it was named for President Reagan and when Terminal A was pretty much all that was there. I had forgotten what a long schlepp it is from that terminal to the Metro station. I remember way back then asking someone why they built the Metro station so far away. “Because they’re going to build new terminals right across from it.” Which they finally did, some 20 years after that Metro station was opened. Sometimes it seems that airport planning horizons are not in years, or even decades; feels more like they’re planning in lifetimes.</li><li> In between the Southwest flights, my United flight continued the string of disruptions trying to get into or out of Charlottesville. I checked that my flight was on-time before calling an Uber -- no weather delays at either end, United and FlightAware apps say the inbound plane is on-time…. Then, halfway to ORD, I get the text from United; a 2½-hour delay for crew arrival. What!? The next text “Because of crew scheduling disruptions this evening in Chicago, we’ve assigned your flight a new crew…. We know this delay wasn’t in your plans today, so we appreciate your patience.” No shit a 2½-hour delay wasn’t in my plans, especially when it’s because United stole our original crew because they screwed up their scheduling. And really United, you can’t find another pilot in ORD, your largest hub, that’s a little closer? I tell you what else isn’t in my plans, flying United to Charlottesville this week. </li><li> Bridge Music -- <em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/stefsax/7785\" target=\"_blank\">Awel</a> </em>by stefsax (c) copyright 2006 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/stefsax/7785 </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>That’s the sound of my new <a href=\"https://www.marriott.com/loyalty/member-benefits/titanium.mi\">Marriott Bonvoy Lifetime Titanium Elite</a> card hitting the kitchen counter. The mailer package was appropriately upscale, but the sheer weight of the thing stunned me. I put a quick video of it on the TravelCommons Facebook page. Cate Rose commented “Hope it scans into your Stocard app so you don’t actually have to carry it in your luggage allowance”. My thought exactly.</li><li> I got a note that Chicago’s electric scooter pilot ends tomorrow, which made me realize that I’ve seen them in just about every city I’ve been to this summer -- Budapest, Krakow, Charlottesville, Nashville, Washington, DC. I think the only places I didn’t see them were in Scotland and Ireland. They’re handy; because they’re dockless, I’ve found they have a wider distribution than, say, a traditional docked bike share and you can take them directly to your planned destination. And they’re a good fill-in between walking and an Uber or a Lyft. And, they’re fun! When I was in DC a couple of weeks ago, I was in the <a href=\"https://washington.org/visit-dc/neighborhoods/brookland\">Brookland</a> neighborhood in the Northeast part of town, and wanted to try out a new taproom there, <a href=\"http://www.rightproperbrewing.com/what-we-do\">Right Proper Brewing</a>. Now Brookland is not the nicest part of DC. It’s much better than when I went to school there, but there are still iffy parts. I wasn’t completely comfortable walking down to Right Proper from the Brookland Metro stop, but it seemed too short for an Uber ride and there was no bus that went down there. But, there was a scooter a couple of blocks from the Metro station. Running down 9th St at 10 mph felt a bit better than speedwalking at 4. And could leave it right in front of the taproom. It was exactly what I wanted. Two problems I’ve seen -- first, too many people riding them on the sidewalk, especially in DC. Maybe because I bike a lot in Chicago, I’m comfortable in bike lanes and navigating around cars on the street and keeping an eye out for potholes. I actually wouldn’t be comfortable riding a scooter on the sidewalk; I’d be afraid of popping a pedestrian who suddenly walked in front of me. To me, cars are much more predictable than pedestrians. The second thing, the need to have half-a-dozen scooter apps on your phone. In Chicago, there are 8 scooter companies, in addition to Uber and Lyft’s scooters. And you need to download their app to find and rent their scooter. Which meant that when I wanted to find a scooter near the Brookland Metro stop, I’d have to cycle thru 5 or 6 apps. Except I didn’t because I found an app called <a href=\"https://scootermap.com/\">Scooter Map</a> that shows all the scooter brands on one map. I think it’s targeted at folks who are making money recharging scooters (not quite sure how that works) but it worked fine for me. I fired it up and saw all the different scooters that were near me. One caveat -- I’ve only ridden these scooters on sunny days. I’m not sure how enthusiastic I’d be riding one in the rain or snow. </li><li> For the Baltics trip next week, we’re taking Finnair out and back from Chicago, an early morning ferry ride from Talinn to Helsinki, and then AirBaltic for everything else. Which then got me thinking about luggage sizes, because I bought my current bag, the <a href=\"https://www.swissarmy.com/us/en&amp;eoq=!t/Products/Travel-Gear/Werks-Traveler-5-0/collection/trg-collection/travelgear_collection_TRA-C2955\">Victorinox Werks</a> 22-incher, to use every last inch of US carry-on allowance. It even catches some side-eye from American and United where I have status. So I didn’t figure it’d fit into any European budget carrier’s luggage sizer. Looking up <a href=\"https://www.airbaltic.com/en/cabin-baggage\">AirBaltic’s carry-on allowance</a>, my Victorinox is a couple of inches too tall and an inch too deep. But what really got me shopping for a new bag for this trip is the weight. AirBaltic has an 8 kg/17½ lbs weight limit. In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/05/30/podcast-121-tsa-lines-my-luggage-is-where/\">episode #121</a>, I talked about the baggage strip tease exercise with Wow Air to make their 7 kg/15 lbs carry-on weight limit. I’d take my bag off the scale, pull some clothes out, zip it back up, and put it back on the scale. Still too heavy. Repeat 3 more times until the agent takes pity — or just gets tired of me — and gives me the approval tag to put on my bag. After which I walk about 10 feet, open my bag and put my armful of clothes back in. My Victorinox is a bit over 7 lbs, so not only is it too tall, the bag itself uses over 40% of the weight allowance. And even though I’ve talked before about how much I hate shopping for luggage, I searched for a smaller, lighter bag that wouldn’t cost a fortune, since my Victorinox will stay my primary bag. I landed on the the <a href=\"https://travelpro.com/collections/rollaboard-luggage-1/products/maxlite%C2%AE-5-international-expandable-carry-on-rollaboard%C2%AE?variant=19641109479522\">TravelPro Maxlite 5</a>. I, or rather my daughter has a good history with TravelPro. It fit the AirBaltic dimensions and is one of the lighter bags I saw at 5.4 lbs which is down to 30% of the 8 kg weight allowance. It also meets three of the key suitcase criteria I laid down in the “how to shop for a suitcase” topic in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/01/25/podcast-137-new-years-travel-status-tips-how-to-shop-for-a-suitcase/\">episode #137</a> -- it’s black, it’s a 2-wheeler so no lost space on extended spinner wheels, and the inside is, for the most part, a wide open box without clothes hangers or a bunch of zip compartments. And it was o<a href=\"https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07BWJVTXD/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&amp;psc=1\">nly $112 on Amazon</a>. I’m taking it to Charlottesville tomorrow for a shakedown cruise.</li><li> Three years ago, back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/11/22/podcast-125-uber-driver-stories-overseas-for-the-election/\">episode #125</a>, in a Travel Security tip, I talked about the need to delete your phone’s Bluetooth pairing when you return a rental car. Usually when I go to pair my phone, I’ll first go through and delete 3-5 pairings before pairing my own. And they all have personalized names like “Timmy’s iPhone”. And most phones by default will download your contacts to the car when paired, so leave all of their contacts and phone numbers in their rental. That is just bad in so many ways. And now Hertz has gotten around to noticing it. In their newest rental terms and conditions, they specifically carve out any liability from you leaving a Bluetooth pairing behind. It’s a pain to remember, especially if you’re running for a flight, but as you’re taking that last scan around the car for your sunglasses and iPhone, remember not to leave your identity behind either.</li><li>Bridge Music -- Black Rainbow by Pitx (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Pitx/19513 Ft: ERH, acclivity</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Keeping Fliers Happy </strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A couple of weeks ago, JD Power released their 2019 North American Airport Satisfaction Study.&nbsp; The headline - “North American Airports Struggle to Keep Travelers Happy Amid Construction Delays and Surging Passenger Volumes” caught my eye, so I reached out to the study’s author, Michael Taylor, to dig into it a bit more. And so last Friday, we had a wide-ranging conversation. I was going to edit it down, but as I listened to it, I couldn’t think about what to cut. So here it is in its entirety…</li><li>Interview with <a href=\"https://www.jdpower.com/business/content/michael-taylor\">Michael Taylor</a>, Travel Intelligence Lead at J.D. Power</li><li>Thanks again to Michael for taking the time to talk to us. Here\'s the <a href=\"https://www.jdpower.com/business/press-releases/2019-north-america-airport-satisfaction-study\">link</a> to the study summary on the JD Power website.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #156</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li> And if you check out the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> page, you can click thru to highlights from my trips to Budapest and Ireland. And if you follow it, you can catch some pics from next week’s trip through the Baltics.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_155.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #156 — Airport Satisfaction; eScooters; Smaller Luggage','','inherit','closed','closed','','2543-revision-v1','','','2019-10-15 08:34:10','2019-10-15 13:34:10','',2543,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/10/15/2543-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2553,1,'2019-10-15 08:46:03','2019-10-15 13:46:03','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\">\n<p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/IMG_0159.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1402\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/IMG_0159-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"225\" height=\"300\"></a></p><figcaption>This Won\'t Help Your Flier Sat Score</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>In this episode, we talk with Michael Taylor, author of <a href=\"https://www.jdpower.com/business/press-releases/2019-north-america-airport-satisfaction-study\">JD Power\'s 2019 Airport Satisfaction Survey</a>, about what keeps fliers happy. I also talk about what I like about eScooters, shopping for a smaller bag for upcoming flights on a Euro budget airline, and how Hertz\'s updated T&amp;Cs remind me to delete my Bluetooth pairings in rental cars. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_156.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/696032101&color=%23ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #156: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago in the middle of what looks like a 6-week run of solid travel. Traveled to DC, Charlottesville, and Nashville, in that order, in the 3 weeks since the last episode. Heading back to Charlottesville this week, then a week hopscotching through the Baltics with my son Andrew -- Riga, Latvia; Talinn, Estonia; Helsinki, Finland -- and then back down to Charlottesville. </li><li> I flew Southwest on my non-Charlottesville flights -- into DC Reagan and Nashville -- and United again to Charlottesville. The Southwest flights went smoothly, except for trying to get to Chicago Midway for the DC flight. The Uber driver didn’t follow the app’s recommended route; instead, he pretended he was a cab driver and took the normal route down the Stevenson Expressway which was crawling due to an earlier accident. I wasn’t paying attention - first time I’ve had an Uber driver freelance on me - and didn’t notice he’d skipped the exit to the faster path until it was too late. We made our flight, but not without a bit of hustle through Midway. No tip, let alone a 5-star review for that guy.</li><li> Southwest flies into the old Terminal A at what I still call Washington National. I went to college in DC in the early ‘80’s, before it was named for President Reagan and when Terminal A was pretty much all that was there. I had forgotten what a long schlepp it is from that terminal to the Metro station. I remember way back then asking someone why they built the Metro station so far away. “Because they’re going to build new terminals right across from it.” Which they finally did, some 20 years after that Metro station was opened. Sometimes it seems that airport planning horizons are not in years, or even decades; feels more like they’re planning in lifetimes.</li><li> In between the Southwest flights, my United flight continued the string of disruptions trying to get into or out of Charlottesville. I checked that my flight was on-time before calling an Uber -- no weather delays at either end, United and FlightAware apps say the inbound plane is on-time…. Then, halfway to ORD, I get the text from United; a 2½-hour delay for crew arrival. What!? The next text “Because of crew scheduling disruptions this evening in Chicago, we’ve assigned your flight a new crew…. We know this delay wasn’t in your plans today, so we appreciate your patience.” No shit a 2½-hour delay wasn’t in my plans, especially when it’s because United stole our original crew because they screwed up their scheduling. And really United, you can’t find another pilot in ORD, your largest hub, that’s a little closer? I tell you what else isn’t in my plans, flying United to Charlottesville this week. </li><li> Bridge Music -- <em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/stefsax/7785\" target=\"_blank\">Awel</a> </em>by stefsax (c) copyright 2006 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/stefsax/7785 </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>That’s the sound of my new <a href=\"https://www.marriott.com/loyalty/member-benefits/titanium.mi\">Marriott Bonvoy Lifetime Titanium Elite</a> card hitting the kitchen counter. The mailer package was appropriately upscale, but the sheer weight of the thing stunned me. I put a quick video of it on the TravelCommons Facebook page. Cate Rose commented “Hope it scans into your Stocard app so you don’t actually have to carry it in your luggage allowance”. My thought exactly.</li><li> I got a note that Chicago’s electric scooter pilot ends tomorrow, which made me realize that I’ve seen them in just about every city I’ve been to this summer -- Budapest, Krakow, Charlottesville, Nashville, Washington, DC. I think the only places I didn’t see them were in Scotland and Ireland. They’re handy; because they’re dockless, I’ve found they have a wider distribution than, say, a traditional docked bike share and you can take them directly to your planned destination. And they’re a good fill-in between walking and an Uber or a Lyft. And, they’re fun! When I was in DC a couple of weeks ago, I was in the <a href=\"https://washington.org/visit-dc/neighborhoods/brookland\">Brookland</a> neighborhood in the Northeast part of town, and wanted to try out a new taproom there, <a href=\"http://www.rightproperbrewing.com/what-we-do\">Right Proper Brewing</a>. Now Brookland is not the nicest part of DC. It’s much better than when I went to school there, but there are still iffy parts. I wasn’t completely comfortable walking down to Right Proper from the Brookland Metro stop, but it seemed too short for an Uber ride and there was no bus that went down there. But, there was a scooter a couple of blocks from the Metro station. Running down 9th St at 10 mph felt a bit better than speedwalking at 4. And could leave it right in front of the taproom. It was exactly what I wanted. Two problems I’ve seen -- first, too many people riding them on the sidewalk, especially in DC. Maybe because I bike a lot in Chicago, I’m comfortable in bike lanes and navigating around cars on the street and keeping an eye out for potholes. I actually wouldn’t be comfortable riding a scooter on the sidewalk; I’d be afraid of popping a pedestrian who suddenly walked in front of me. To me, cars are much more predictable than pedestrians. The second thing, the need to have half-a-dozen scooter apps on your phone. In Chicago, there are 8 scooter companies, in addition to Uber and Lyft’s scooters. And you need to download their app to find and rent their scooter. Which meant that when I wanted to find a scooter near the Brookland Metro stop, I’d have to cycle thru 5 or 6 apps. Except I didn’t because I found an app called <a href=\"https://scootermap.com/\">Scooter Map</a> that shows all the scooter brands on one map. I think it’s targeted at folks who are making money recharging scooters (not quite sure how that works) but it worked fine for me. I fired it up and saw all the different scooters that were near me. One caveat -- I’ve only ridden these scooters on sunny days. I’m not sure how enthusiastic I’d be riding one in the rain or snow. </li><li> For the Baltics trip next week, we’re taking Finnair out and back from Chicago, an early morning ferry ride from Talinn to Helsinki, and then AirBaltic for everything else. Which then got me thinking about luggage sizes, because I bought my current bag, the <a href=\"https://www.swissarmy.com/us/en&amp;eoq=!t/Products/Travel-Gear/Werks-Traveler-5-0/collection/trg-collection/travelgear_collection_TRA-C2955\">Victorinox Werks</a> 22-incher, to use every last inch of US carry-on allowance. It even catches some side-eye from American and United where I have status. So I didn’t figure it’d fit into any European budget carrier’s luggage sizer. Looking up <a href=\"https://www.airbaltic.com/en/cabin-baggage\">AirBaltic’s carry-on allowance</a>, my Victorinox is a couple of inches too tall and an inch too deep. But what really got me shopping for a new bag for this trip is the weight. AirBaltic has an 8 kg/17½ lbs weight limit. In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/05/30/podcast-121-tsa-lines-my-luggage-is-where/\">episode #121</a>, I talked about the baggage strip tease exercise with Wow Air to make their 7 kg/15 lbs carry-on weight limit. I’d take my bag off the scale, pull some clothes out, zip it back up, and put it back on the scale. Still too heavy. Repeat 3 more times until the agent takes pity — or just gets tired of me — and gives me the approval tag to put on my bag. After which I walk about 10 feet, open my bag and put my armful of clothes back in. My Victorinox is a bit over 7 lbs, so not only is it too tall, the bag itself uses over 40% of the weight allowance. And even though I’ve talked before about how much I hate shopping for luggage, I searched for a smaller, lighter bag that wouldn’t cost a fortune, since my Victorinox will stay my primary bag. I landed on the the <a href=\"https://travelpro.com/collections/rollaboard-luggage-1/products/maxlite%C2%AE-5-international-expandable-carry-on-rollaboard%C2%AE?variant=19641109479522\">TravelPro Maxlite 5</a>. I, or rather my daughter has a good history with TravelPro. It fit the AirBaltic dimensions and is one of the lighter bags I saw at 5.4 lbs which is down to 30% of the 8 kg weight allowance. It also meets three of the key suitcase criteria I laid down in the “how to shop for a suitcase” topic in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/01/25/podcast-137-new-years-travel-status-tips-how-to-shop-for-a-suitcase/\">episode #137</a> -- it’s black, it’s a 2-wheeler so no lost space on extended spinner wheels, and the inside is, for the most part, a wide open box without clothes hangers or a bunch of zip compartments. And it was o<a href=\"https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07BWJVTXD/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&amp;psc=1\">nly $112 on Amazon</a>. I’m taking it to Charlottesville tomorrow for a shakedown cruise.</li><li> Three years ago, back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/11/22/podcast-125-uber-driver-stories-overseas-for-the-election/\">episode #125</a>, in a Travel Security tip, I talked about the need to delete your phone’s Bluetooth pairing when you return a rental car. Usually when I go to pair my phone, I’ll first go through and delete 3-5 pairings before pairing my own. And they all have personalized names like “Timmy’s iPhone”. And most phones by default will download your contacts to the car when paired, so leave all of their contacts and phone numbers in their rental. That is just bad in so many ways. And now Hertz has gotten around to noticing it. In their newest rental terms and conditions, they specifically carve out any liability from you leaving a Bluetooth pairing behind. It’s a pain to remember, especially if you’re running for a flight, but as you’re taking that last scan around the car for your sunglasses and iPhone, remember not to leave your identity behind either.</li><li>Bridge Music -- Black Rainbow by Pitx (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Pitx/19513 Ft: ERH, acclivity</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Keeping Fliers Happy </strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A couple of weeks ago, JD Power released their 2019 North American Airport Satisfaction Study.&nbsp; The headline - “North American Airports Struggle to Keep Travelers Happy Amid Construction Delays and Surging Passenger Volumes” caught my eye, so I reached out to the study’s author, Michael Taylor, to dig into it a bit more. And so last Friday, we had a wide-ranging conversation. I was going to edit it down, but as I listened to it, I couldn’t think about what to cut. So here it is in its entirety…</li><li>Interview with <a href=\"https://www.jdpower.com/business/content/michael-taylor\">Michael Taylor</a>, Travel Intelligence Lead at J.D. Power</li><li>Thanks again to Michael for taking the time to talk to us. Here\'s the <a href=\"https://www.jdpower.com/business/press-releases/2019-north-america-airport-satisfaction-study\">link</a> to the study summary on the JD Power website.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #156</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li> And if you check out the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> page, you can click thru to highlights from my trips to Budapest and Ireland. And if you follow it, you can catch some pics from next week’s trip through the Baltics.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_155.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #156 — Airport Satisfaction; eScooters; Smaller Luggage','','inherit','closed','closed','','2543-revision-v1','','','2019-10-15 08:46:03','2019-10-15 13:46:03','',2543,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/10/15/2543-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2555,1,'2019-10-15 08:48:18','2019-10-15 13:48:18','<!-- wp:image {\"id\":2404,\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/CoeazhcUMAAhyQN-300x251.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2404\"/><figcaption>This guy looks familiar...</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It\'s been a tough month for travel. Not quite to Book of Job-level torment, but two of this month\'s three trips spiraled into head-shaking metaphysical “What the hell is going on here” questioning of my decision to get out of bed that morning. I walk through the travel gods\' fun and games, as well as some new data on regional jet delays and buying a new travel bag.  All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_150.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_150.mp3\"]\n<p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To read the Detailed Show Notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To read the Detailed Show Notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #150: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, as the weather begins to stagger unsteadily toward Spring -- 74 degrees on Monday, 5.3 inches of snow (thundersnow!) on Sunday, then back up into the 70’s two days later. &nbsp;April 14 -- over 5 inches of snow, over 1,000 flights cancelled. A nasty surprise for folks who thought it would be safe to connect through ORD, but just validates a Chicago truism -- don’t put the snow gear away until after Tax Day. Yup, welcome to the Midwest.</li><li>Have done a <em>chunk</em> of travel -- there’s a unit of measure for you -- since the last episode. A 2-day trip that hit 4 airports in the first day -- Chicago-Midway, Las Vegas, Houston-Hobby, and Nashville. The next week, I squoze in a trip to a new airport - State College, PA -- before heading out on vacation to Brittany, France. The squeeze wasn’t too tight -- flew back from State College on Weds night and left on vacation Thursday night -- but I did scout out a couple of backups in case the United Express regional jet went AWOL; a hour or so drive down to Harrisburg, a couple hour drive over to Pittsburgh. Luckily, I didn’t need them. United Express was having a good day, and therefore, so did I.</li><li>The next day’s flight to Paris on SAS by way of Stockholm went fine. We got in on time, found the left luggage lockers, and then the express train into the city all without much hassle. Arlanda Airport is comfortably sized and has good signage. The only real problem was that we got into center city Stockholm too early -- around 8:30am -- and nothing was really open. So we coffee’d up at one place, had some cardamom pastries at another, and generally puttered around until things started opening up an hour or so later. It was a sunny, if brisk, day, so walking around the Gamla Stan and Sodermalm was nice. </li><li>I always chuckle a bit when going through De Gaulle Airport, passing through the tangle of flat escalator walkway tubes that bridge the levels and open center of Terminal 1. The walkways are a bit awkward with wheeled luggage -- going down and then up. An airport porter in front of us let a wheelchair go free on the downhill span -- took a moment for it to register that it was empty -- then it rolled back to him on the uphill. No knock against him; it was the end of the day.</li><li>The next day, we caught the train out to Brittany, to Saint Malo. We walked out of the train station and across the street to Europcar for what was one of the easiest rental car pick-ups I’ve ever had in Europe. No scare-tactic insurance upselling -- just a look at my driver’s license and a quick pointer to where I could find the car in the train station parking lot. Five minutes, max. And dropping off the car a week later at Rennes train station? Absolutely the easiest rental drop-off -- gave the guy the keys and a receipt showing I’d filled up the car and I was done. No waiting for him to go inspect the car, just a handshake and “Have a good day”. </li><li>The next day wasn’t near as carefree, but we’ll talk about that in a few minutes.</li><li> Bridge Music — <em>Countryside Summer Joyride</em> by Kara Square (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mindmapthat/56281 Ft: Javolenus</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I’ve been not-quite-hating on, but certainly have been down on regional jets for quite some time on this podcast. Given a choice, I recommend people avoid them -- not because of their size, but their schedule dependability. Because the regional airlines’ model is to bounce a plane from place to place rather than route through hubs, they never recover from weather or mechanical delays. Those delays just cascade through the rest of the day. Now there often aren’t alternatives. Hence my earlier comment about needing backup plans for my regional jet flight home from State College. My flight was at the end of the day, the most vulnerable time to delays. Given my personal experience, &nbsp;I wasn’t surprised to read that US Dept of Transportation data showed that regional flights were 2-4 times more likely to be cancelled than mainline flights. The Chicago Tribune dug into the DOT data and found flights operated by Delta’s regional partners were 4 times more likely to be canceled than flights operated by Delta, while American Eagle and United Express were 2-3 times more likely to cancel flights than their mainline partners. You can’t avoid regional jets when going to places like State College or Charlottesville, VA or Appleton, WI -- but you can when flying to LGA or DFW or MSY. And in those cases, unless those RJ flights have exactly the schedule I need, I’ll suffer a bit of inconvenience for a lot more dependability.</li><li>On our travels through Brittany earlier this month, I found that we were getting a large number of “card declined” messages when trying to use our Chase Sapphire Visa card -- at gas stations, stores, and in Paris when I tried to use my Uber app. Now this isn’t a new card -- we’ve had it for over 5 years -- and it’s not the first time we’ve used it on travels in Europe. But Chase fraud algorithm seems more sensitive, throwing more false positives, and no way to update things. On the way out of Brest, I pulled into a Total gas station to fill up on our way to the Crozon peninsula. We’d be there for a couple of days of hiking and I wasn’t sure many gas stations we’d see (turned out that I didn’t need to worry). I pull up to a pump, tap the Chase Visa, get a decline. Insert the card into the reader; get another decline. I do the same drill with my Citi MasterCard with the same result. However, I immediately get a fraud alert from Citi. I hit the big green “Yes” button on the e-mail -- as in, “Yes, I do recognize this charge” -- get an “all clear” response back, tap my Citi card again and fill up my tank. All this time, we get nothing from Chase. I open the Chase app on my phone; nothing there either. Same thing in Paris when I needed an Uber fast (more on that in a bit). Chase declined, but my Amex Platinum card went through. For me, it was just annoying; I always carry a full set of cards when traveling -- a Visa and a MasterCard from different banks, and an Amex -- because single points of failure when traveling are bad -- I don’t want to be left hanging if one bank or one card processor drops their network or loses a data center. Oh, and I also carry cash. But, as we’ve <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"talked (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/02/10/podcast-148-travel-potpourri-for-200-alex/\" target=\"_blank\">talked</a> <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"about (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/12/17/podcast-147-holiday-travel-tips-notes-from-santa-fe/\" target=\"_blank\">about</a> <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"before (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\" target=\"_blank\">before</a>, that’s ‘cause I’m old-school.</li><li>Brittany was a touring vacation, so we were moving every couple of days or so -- packing, unpacking, repacking. During one of those repacking sessions, maybe in Morgat on the Crozon peninsula -- I couldn’t find my Bose headphone case, which had my Bose headphones, in my backpack -- and I didn’t remember pulling out. Where the hell did they go, I asked myself. I pull everything out of my backpack and -- oh, there they are; they had slipped behind my camera bag in the bottom of my backpack. How did I lose my headphones in my backpack, you may ask -- and rightfully so because it really sounds stupid. Probably the same reason I lost a Google tablet in there a few years back -- too much black. The Bose case is black, the interior of Timbuk 2 backpack is black, my eyes aren’t as good as they used to be… I’d been toying around with getting a new bag, more of a messenger style -- that I could sling over one shoulder and with a bit better waterproofing. And, after this little panic drill, a non-black interior. I ended up getting a small Timbuk 2 Classic messenger bag from the Outlet section of REI.com for $50. It’s not too big -- holds my 11-inch MacBook Air, a couple of notebooks, an umbrella -- and has a bright yellow interior. I haven’t lost anything in it yet -- but I don’t trust myself. Maybe I need to get, like a white umbrella, and spray paint my Bose case red. I love black, but maybe I’ve taken that color palette a bit too far.</li><li>And if you have any travel rants, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. &nbsp;The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"mpeacock (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Facebook page (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Facebook page</a> or our Instagram account at <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\" (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Travelcommons</a> -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li> Bridge Music —  <em>Jester of the Golden Apocalypse</em> by Super_Sigil (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Super_Sigil/34750 </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Travel Interruptus</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A Greek tragedy in three acts where the travel gods toy with our anti-hero for fun and entertainment</li><li>OK, maybe not quite that bad, not quite Book of Job-level torment, but two out of the three trips I’ve taken in the past month spiraled into head-shaking metaphysical “What the hell is going on here” questioning of my decision to get out of bed that morning.</li><li><em>Act 1</em> - My Midway-Vegas-Nashville travel day. This trip didn’t start out to be stupid. It started as an easy day trip to downtown Nashville for a sales call. So many people are abandoning Chicago for Nashville, Southwest has non-stop flights every 90 minutes, so no problem with flight times. That works out fine -- until someone books a sales call the prior afternoon -- in Las Vegas. Hmmm, how do I get from Vegas after 4pm Pacific to Nashville in time for a meeting the next morning Central time? Southwest is about the only choice, connecting through either Denver or Houston. I go for the more direct routing through Denver -- my first mistake.</li><li>Because, as it turned out, the March “bomb cyclone” -- what the Weather Channel helpfully named “Winter Storm Ulmer” (who or what is an Ulmer?) -- was going to shut down DIA that day with 80 mph winds. I got an e-mail from Southwest the day before canceling my connection through Denver -- understandable -- but nothing else, no rebooking, just “We’re leaving you in Vegas” -- which I’ve found tends to be Southwest’s MO -- pleasantly unhelpful. Especially when the website errored out when I tried to find an alternate routing to Nashville, and the automated message answering their 800 number was estimating 80-some minute hold times. After about 45 minutes, between banging on the website, our corporate Concur app, and tweeting at their customer service, I managed to get re-routed through Houston, safely south of the bomb cyclone.</li><li>The next morning, I show up at the gate at Midway to find my 8am flight to Vegas delayed by 2 hours -- mechanical on the plane here meant they had to bring in a new plane and crew from somewhere else. Annoying, but not critical; I’d get into Vegas at noon for a 2pm meeting. I get another coffee, log into the Boingo hotspot and clear some emails. 9:40, we line up and board. And wait. Then the captain keys the mike, pauses (never a good sign) and then starts talking - he didn’t have time to do the walkaround before we boarded because they came in late. When they did, they noticed a problem with the front strut. Maintenance is looking at it, don’t know if they can fix it, but they need everyone off the plane. So we deplane for what is now my 2nd maintenance delay. We idle around the gate area. 10:30 and nothing. I start looking at my watch. If I’m don’t get into Vegas by 1pm, there won’t be enough time to get to my 2pm meeting, and so I shouldn’t get on the plane. Then they start to re-board us. What time will we get in? 12:20. OK, I’ll board. We all get back on -- and for the most part retaking the seats we had, in spite of Southwest’s open seating. We are creatures of habit. I’m surprised no one moo’d. We’re all on, and we wait. The mike keys. There’s a slight moan rather than a moo from the cabin. We’re waiting on the paperwork. It’s always paperwork. I’m looking at my watch. It’s past 11am Central and the door is still open. A 4-hour flight means we’re now coming up against that 1pm Pacific arrive time. Do I stay on the plane? A couple minutes more and my decision is made for me; they close the door. I lean back, put on my headphones and hope for no headwinds. We get to the gate at 1:02pm. Vegas is always a maze; there’s no straight walkways; they always want to vector you through a thicket of slot machines. I head to the cab rank -- shorter walk and no waiting -- and I get a guy with a heavy foot. I’m at the client 5 minutes before the meeting. That was a bit too close.</li><li>My return trip to the airport and the flight to Houston are uneventful, not even any turbulence as we skirt that bomb cyclone. We get into Hobby maybe even a bit early. I grab a beer and then head over to the gate. They call boarding - just half the A group -- 1-30 -- because that’s all there is on this late flight to Nashville. The gate agent scans the boarding passes, saying “You’re in Row 3, you’re in Row 4, you’re in Row 5….” &nbsp;We get all get in our separate rows, and then wait. The captain keys the mike, pauses, and then says “This plane had a bird strike on the nose on landing. There’s no damage, but Maintenance has to pull the nose cone off for a visual inspection. It’ll take about an hour, so you’re free to get off the plane.” But by now, everything in the airport was closed. “My 3rd maintenance delay of the day. Unbelievable!” I tweet out in frustrustration. Except that iPhone autocorrect turned “delay” into “deejay”. Hilary Baumann pointed it out with a nice emoji-laden tweet that gave me a good chuckle. I finally got to my Nashville hotel around 1:30 in the morning. I looked at the time, shook my head, and went to bed.</li><li> Bridge Music —  South Texas Cowboy Blues by texasradiofish (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/texasradiofish/52030 Ft: unreal_dm, ElRon XChile</li><li><em>Act 2</em> - A couple of weeks later, on Sunday in Rennes, France. We wheeled our luggage the 2 blocks from our AirBnB to Rennes train station for the TGV to CDG. We stood with everyone else, looking up at the departure board waiting for the track to be posted. Departure time came closer and still no track -- not a good sign. The crowd grew larger. There was an announcement in French and a scrolling message at the bottom of the departure screen. Irene banged it into Google Translate. The gist of it -- a bomb threat had been phoned into SCNF, the train company, and all the trains in and out of Paris were halted. Given France’s recent history with terrorism, it was a reasonable response, but still…. They finally start posting delay times -- 40 mins, then over an hour, but then it shrinks back. I pull up Google Maps. The drive to CDG is showing about the same time as the train, but we’d be in control of our own destiny. I walk down to the rental car offices. It’s Sunday morning; they’re all closed. They won’t open until the afternoon; too late for us to drive and make our flights. </li><li>Time continues to tick by, past the departure time for our flight. I call United -- any other options? I get a phenomenally helpful agent. I can hear the keystrokes. Nothing else today Sunday, nor tomorrow, Monday. I wasn’t surprised about nothing available today, but was about the next day -- until I got a text from Andrew. He was on this morning’s United flight to Chicago which just cancelled for a hydraulic problem and rebooked on tomorrow’s flight -- which explains the lack of seats for us. I took the Tuesday seats. Now would we get to CDG in time for Claire’s EasyJet flight to Edinburgh so she can make class the next day. The trains finally start moving. We head down and board our train. And then wait, and wait some &nbsp;more. And then the train starts moving. I look at my watch. I think Claire will be OK. </li><li>Until we come to a stop in the middle of a rail yard. I watch a couple of guys walk past our car -- maybe a visual inspection? After a bit, we start moving -- backwards. The conductor keys the mike, and makes an announcement in rapid French that we can’t pick up. I open Google Maps. I see we’re off to the east of Paris but can’t tell if we’re moving in the right direction. Until we pull into the next station -- it’s for EuroDisney. I find our train route on the SCNF website and see this is one of the stops en route to CDG, so we’re going in the right direction. We get to CDG by 3pm, which means Claire can make her flight. Andrew comes over from the Airport Hilton, where United is putting him up for the night, and we head down to Paris for another dinner together. There are, after all, worse cities to have to spend an extra day or two.</li><li> Bridge Music —  <em>Parisian </em>Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)<br> Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License<br> http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ </li><li><em>Act 3</em> - Tuesday morning, Paris. Our forced layover in Paris yesterday had been a beautiful day,&nbsp;sunny and warm. We walked through the Marais, south across Ile de la Cite, taking the obligatory selfie in front of Notre Dame that we pulled out at looked at two weeks later during the news coverage of the fire, and then rattled around the Latin Quarter looking for a place with outdoor seating and a nice rosé. This morning, though, not so beautiful. It was dumping rain. So rather than trundle our luggage 10 min to the Metro stop, I decide to order an Uber -- which takes a try or two when Chase declines my Visa again; and I switch over to Amex. A nice black Mercedes picks us up and heads for Les Halles -- or at least tries to. The traffic is a crawl at best. I watch our buffer time tick away and we’re not &nbsp;getting any closer. After sitting through a couple of traffic light cycles without clearing the intersection, we grab our bags and make for Les Halles on foot. We get there, a bit wet. We’re able to skip the ticket booth line; I have enough euros for the self-service machine, because it’s that or a chip-&amp;-pin card we don’t have. We get on the train. I look at my watch - we should have enough time to check our bags (bringing back some liquids), clear security, and get to the gate without too much more agita.</li><li>Until the train slows to a stop between stops. The conductor keys the mike, and makes an announcement in rapid French. I look at the other passengers. They don’t seem too agitated. I figure it’s some congestion on the track ahead. And, sure enough, we start moving after a couple of minutes. But at the next stop, the train doors stay open and a train employee come on, saying in French <em>and</em> English -- everyone has to get off, catch a bus outside the station to another station, then catch a different train to the airport. We head down the bus stop. There’s no one there to help; just a couple hundred people milling around.</li><li>Now I’m worried. We have no time to figure this out. The taxi stand is mobbed, I fire up Uber - 19-minute wait. Lyft? They’re not in Paris. I google to find taxi company but before I call, I try Uber one more time -- a 5-minute wait for a €60 fare. I hit the order button -- and then again after I swap over to Amex. €60 for a 15-minute ride to CDG is tough, but it’s cheaper than another night in a hotel. We get to the United desk 2 minutes before luggage check closes for our flight. The agent radioed down, checked in our bags, and then gave us the CDG version of Fast Track, so we could sidestep the long passport control and security lines. We board, sit down, but don’t really settle in until the plane leaves the ground. And when we’re finally at ORD, standing by the luggage carousel, our bags are the first ones to come out.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #150</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_150.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<p><!--EndFragment--></p>\n<p></p>','Podcast #150 — Travel Interruptus','','inherit','closed','closed','','2402-revision-v1','','','2019-10-15 08:48:18','2019-10-15 13:48:18','',2402,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/10/15/2402-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2556,1,'2019-10-15 09:07:31','2019-10-15 14:07:31','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\">\n<p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/IMG_0159.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1402\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/IMG_0159-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"225\" height=\"300\" /></a></p>\n<figcaption>This Won\'t Help Your Flier Sat Score</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p>In this episode, we talk with Michael Taylor, author of <a href=\"https://www.jdpower.com/business/press-releases/2019-north-america-airport-satisfaction-study\">JD Power\'s 2019 Airport Satisfaction Survey</a>, about what keeps fliers happy. I also talk about what I like about eScooters, shopping for a smaller bag for upcoming flights on a Euro budget airline, and how Hertz\'s contract updates remind me to delete my Bluetooth pairings in rental cars. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_156.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/696032101&color=%23ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #156: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago in the middle of what looks like a 6-week run of solid travel. Traveled to DC, Charlottesville, and Nashville, in that order, in the 3 weeks since the last episode. Heading back to Charlottesville this week, then a week hopscotching through the Baltics with my son Andrew -- Riga, Latvia; Talinn, Estonia; Helsinki, Finland -- and then back down to Charlottesville. </li><li> I flew Southwest on my non-Charlottesville flights -- into DC Reagan and Nashville -- and United again to Charlottesville. The Southwest flights went smoothly, except for trying to get to Chicago Midway for the DC flight. The Uber driver didn’t follow the app’s recommended route; instead, he pretended he was a cab driver and took the normal route down the Stevenson Expressway which was crawling due to an earlier accident. I wasn’t paying attention - first time I’ve had an Uber driver freelance on me - and didn’t notice he’d skipped the exit to the faster path until it was too late. We made our flight, but not without a bit of hustle through Midway. No tip, let alone a 5-star review for that guy.</li><li> Southwest flies into the old Terminal A at what I still call Washington National. I went to college in DC in the early ‘80’s, before it was named for President Reagan and when Terminal A was pretty much all that was there. I had forgotten what a long schlepp it is from that terminal to the Metro station. I remember way back then asking someone why they built the Metro station so far away. “Because they’re going to build new terminals right across from it.” Which they finally did, some 20 years after that Metro station was opened. Sometimes it seems that airport planning horizons are not in years, or even decades; feels more like they’re planning in lifetimes.</li><li> In between the Southwest flights, my United flight continued the string of disruptions trying to get into or out of Charlottesville. I checked that my flight was on-time before calling an Uber -- no weather delays at either end, United and FlightAware apps say the inbound plane is on-time…. Then, halfway to ORD, I get the text from United; a 2½-hour delay for crew arrival. What!? The next text “Because of crew scheduling disruptions this evening in Chicago, we’ve assigned your flight a new crew…. We know this delay wasn’t in your plans today, so we appreciate your patience.” No shit a 2½-hour delay wasn’t in my plans, especially when it’s because United stole our original crew because they screwed up their scheduling. And really United, you can’t find another pilot in ORD, your largest hub, that’s a little closer? I tell you what else isn’t in my plans, flying United to Charlottesville this week. </li><li> Bridge Music -- <em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/stefsax/7785\" target=\"_blank\">Awel</a> </em>by stefsax (c) copyright 2006 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/stefsax/7785 </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>That’s the sound of my new <a href=\"https://www.marriott.com/loyalty/member-benefits/titanium.mi\">Marriott Bonvoy Lifetime Titanium Elite</a> card hitting the kitchen counter. The mailer package was appropriately upscale, but the sheer weight of the thing stunned me. I put a quick video of it on the TravelCommons Facebook page. Cate Rose commented “Hope it scans into your Stocard app so you don’t actually have to carry it in your luggage allowance”. My thought exactly.</li><li> I got a note that Chicago’s electric scooter pilot ends tomorrow, which made me realize that I’ve seen them in just about every city I’ve been to this summer -- Budapest, Krakow, Charlottesville, Nashville, Washington, DC. I think the only places I didn’t see them were in Scotland and Ireland. They’re handy; because they’re dockless, I’ve found they have a wider distribution than, say, a traditional docked bike share and you can take them directly to your planned destination. And they’re a good fill-in between walking and an Uber or a Lyft. And, they’re fun! When I was in DC a couple of weeks ago, I was in the <a href=\"https://washington.org/visit-dc/neighborhoods/brookland\">Brookland</a> neighborhood in the Northeast part of town, and wanted to try out a new taproom there, <a href=\"http://www.rightproperbrewing.com/what-we-do\">Right Proper Brewing</a>. Now Brookland is not the nicest part of DC. It’s much better than when I went to school there, but there are still iffy parts. I wasn’t completely comfortable walking down to Right Proper from the Brookland Metro stop, but it seemed too short for an Uber ride and there was no bus that went down there. But, there was a scooter a couple of blocks from the Metro station. Running down 9th St at 10 mph felt a bit better than speedwalking at 4. And could leave it right in front of the taproom. It was exactly what I wanted. Two problems I’ve seen -- first, too many people riding them on the sidewalk, especially in DC. Maybe because I bike a lot in Chicago, I’m comfortable in bike lanes and navigating around cars on the street and keeping an eye out for potholes. I actually wouldn’t be comfortable riding a scooter on the sidewalk; I’d be afraid of popping a pedestrian who suddenly walked in front of me. To me, cars are much more predictable than pedestrians. The second thing, the need to have half-a-dozen scooter apps on your phone. In Chicago, there are 8 scooter companies, in addition to Uber and Lyft’s scooters. And you need to download their app to find and rent their scooter. Which meant that when I wanted to find a scooter near the Brookland Metro stop, I’d have to cycle thru 5 or 6 apps. Except I didn’t because I found an app called <a href=\"https://scootermap.com/\">Scooter Map</a> that shows all the scooter brands on one map. I think it’s targeted at folks who are making money recharging scooters (not quite sure how that works) but it worked fine for me. I fired it up and saw all the different scooters that were near me. One caveat -- I’ve only ridden these scooters on sunny days. I’m not sure how enthusiastic I’d be riding one in the rain or snow. </li><li> For the Baltics trip next week, we’re taking Finnair out and back from Chicago, an early morning ferry ride from Talinn to Helsinki, and then AirBaltic for everything else. Which then got me thinking about luggage sizes, because I bought my current bag, the <a href=\"https://www.swissarmy.com/us/en&amp;eoq=!t/Products/Travel-Gear/Werks-Traveler-5-0/collection/trg-collection/travelgear_collection_TRA-C2955\">Victorinox Werks</a> 22-incher, to use every last inch of US carry-on allowance. It even catches some side-eye from American and United where I have status. So I didn’t figure it’d fit into any European budget carrier’s luggage sizer. Looking up <a href=\"https://www.airbaltic.com/en/cabin-baggage\">AirBaltic’s carry-on allowance</a>, my Victorinox is a couple of inches too tall and an inch too deep. But what really got me shopping for a new bag for this trip is the weight. AirBaltic has an 8 kg/17½ lbs weight limit. In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/05/30/podcast-121-tsa-lines-my-luggage-is-where/\">episode #121</a>, I talked about the baggage strip tease exercise with Wow Air to make their 7 kg/15 lbs carry-on weight limit. I’d take my bag off the scale, pull some clothes out, zip it back up, and put it back on the scale. Still too heavy. Repeat 3 more times until the agent takes pity — or just gets tired of me — and gives me the approval tag to put on my bag. After which I walk about 10 feet, open my bag and put my armful of clothes back in. My Victorinox is a bit over 7 lbs, so not only is it too tall, the bag itself uses over 40% of the weight allowance. And even though I’ve talked before about how much I hate shopping for luggage, I searched for a smaller, lighter bag that wouldn’t cost a fortune, since my Victorinox will stay my primary bag. I landed on the the <a href=\"https://travelpro.com/collections/rollaboard-luggage-1/products/maxlite%C2%AE-5-international-expandable-carry-on-rollaboard%C2%AE?variant=19641109479522\">TravelPro Maxlite 5</a>. I, or rather my daughter has a good history with TravelPro. It fit the AirBaltic dimensions and is one of the lighter bags I saw at 5.4 lbs which is down to 30% of the 8 kg weight allowance. It also meets three of the key suitcase criteria I laid down in the “how to shop for a suitcase” topic in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/01/25/podcast-137-new-years-travel-status-tips-how-to-shop-for-a-suitcase/\">episode #137</a> -- it’s black, it’s a 2-wheeler so no lost space on extended spinner wheels, and the inside is, for the most part, a wide open box without clothes hangers or a bunch of zip compartments. And it was o<a href=\"https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07BWJVTXD/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&amp;psc=1\">nly $112 on Amazon</a>. I’m taking it to Charlottesville tomorrow for a shakedown cruise.</li><li> Three years ago, back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/11/22/podcast-125-uber-driver-stories-overseas-for-the-election/\">episode #125</a>, in a Travel Security tip, I talked about the need to delete your phone’s Bluetooth pairing when you return a rental car. Usually when I go to pair my phone, I’ll first go through and delete 3-5 pairings before pairing my own. And they all have personalized names like “Timmy’s iPhone”. And most phones by default will download your contacts to the car when paired, so leave all of their contacts and phone numbers in their rental. That is just bad in so many ways. And now Hertz has gotten around to noticing it. In their newest rental terms and conditions, they specifically carve out any liability from you leaving a Bluetooth pairing behind. It’s a pain to remember, especially if you’re running for a flight, but as you’re taking that last scan around the car for your sunglasses and iPhone, remember not to leave your identity behind either.</li><li>Bridge Music -- Black Rainbow by Pitx (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Pitx/19513 Ft: ERH, acclivity</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Keeping Fliers Happy </strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A couple of weeks ago, JD Power released their 2019 North American Airport Satisfaction Study.&nbsp; The headline - “North American Airports Struggle to Keep Travelers Happy Amid Construction Delays and Surging Passenger Volumes” caught my eye, so I reached out to the study’s author, Michael Taylor, to dig into it a bit more. And so last Friday, we had a wide-ranging conversation. I was going to edit it down, but as I listened to it, I couldn’t think about what to cut. So here it is in its entirety…</li><li>Interview with <a href=\"https://www.jdpower.com/business/content/michael-taylor\">Michael Taylor</a>, Travel Intelligence Lead at J.D. Power</li><li>Thanks again to Michael for taking the time to talk to us. Here\'s the <a href=\"https://www.jdpower.com/business/press-releases/2019-north-america-airport-satisfaction-study\">link</a> to the study summary on the JD Power website.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #156</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li> And if you check out the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> page, you can click thru to highlights from my trips to Budapest and Ireland. And if you follow it, you can catch some pics from next week’s trip through the Baltics.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_155.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #156 — Airport Satisfaction; eScooters; Smaller Luggage','','inherit','closed','closed','','2543-revision-v1','','','2019-10-15 09:07:31','2019-10-15 14:07:31','',2543,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/10/15/2543-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2559,1,'2019-11-05 15:51:48','2019-11-05 20:51:48','[caption id=\"attachment_1938\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/IMG_0091.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1938\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/IMG_0091-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> Rejected and Retired Suitcases[/caption]\n\nI\'ve been putting off shopping for a new bag for a long time, as in years. Up until a few months ago,&nbsp;I was using a vintage Swiss Army black roller that still sported the Vietnamese and Hong Kong customs stickers it picked up in 2008. A few years ago, I\'d retired it in favor of a grey Samsonite bag, but had to force the old vet back into service when the Samsonite’s rollers got wonky — the rubber wore off and the wheels splayed out after 2½ years of trundling across New Orleans sidewalks.\n\nBut then, right before Thanksgiving, the old Swiss guy resigned, rendering itself unusable when its retractable handle stuck in the extended position. I was still able to avoid luggage shopping, though. I&nbsp; pulled out the Bluesmart smart bag I\'d bought from their Indiegogo fundraising campaign. I recharged the battery, updated its iPhone app, and put it back into service -- only to read the next week that it was about to be banned by airlines because its lithium battery isn\'t removable.\n\nWith nothing left in the attic, I was finally forced to shop for a new suitcase. But what to buy? I started with a survey of fellow travelers. Actually, it was more like stalking; I eyeballed every piece of luggage that passed by me for two weeks. Then I wandered through the basement luggage departments of a couple of Macy\'s, opening bags and waving off clerks. After all that, I gave into my OCD and built this prioritized list of suitcase shopping evaluation criteria:\n<ol>\n 	<li><em>The bag has to be a carry-on</em>. Now that may seem a bit of a “duh”, but there is some ambiguity; the <a href=\"https://travel-made-simple.com/carry-on-size-chart/\">approved height</a>&nbsp;of a carry-on bag varies by airline between 19 and 22-inches. If I want to play it safe, I’d go for a 20-inch bag, but then I also want to maximize my carry-on space. Most US carriers accept a 22-inch bag and that’s mostly what I fly, and even when I’m on European carriers I usually have enough alliance status to glide past the baggage sizer. So I tilt the balance in favor of maximum packing volume and go for a 22-inch bag.</li>\n 	<li>I<em>t needs to be black</em>. As I said in my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/10/18/ruthless-packing-tips/\">Ruthless Packing Tips post</a>, black not only makes you look thinner, it makes your bag look thinner to gate agents scanning for bag-sizer bait. Black also doesn\'t show stains. My grey Samsonite bag, after 3-4 months of my travel schedule, started to look a lot less non-black. Smudges from grease on overhead bin hinges, muck from taxi trunks, muddy water from New Orleans gutters, spilled coffee…. It\'s why I can\'t have nice luggage.</li>\n 	<li><em>Two wheels, not four</em>. This is more of a personal preference. My Bluesmart is a 4-wheel spinner and my wife swears by hers, but because the 4 wheels have to extend from the bottom of the bag, spinners sacrifice packing space for agility. Also, I find 4-wheelers have a tendency to wander off -- rolling away down ramps or on uneven floors. I go for the 2-wheeler, and with the biggest wheels I can find to make it an easier, smoother pull. I was surprised how much this limited my selection. Spinners definitely rule.</li>\n 	<li><em>The inside of the suitcase has to be plain and empty</em>. No clever collection of zipped compartments, or built-in suit hangers, or ratcheting clothes dividers; just a wide open box that I\'m free to structure how I want for each trip. I was surprised how this also limited my selection. Indeed, in the end, I couldn’t find just a plain box, and settled for a bag where I could detach the suit hanger and clothes divider and stash that stuff up in Luggage Retirement Home next to the Bluesmart.</li>\n 	<li><em>Buy on-line</em>. A <a href=\"https://www.testfacts.com/luggage-prices-analyzed/\">recent study</a> of 32,672 luggage price showed&nbsp;that you can save an average of $110/39% buying on-line.&nbsp;Walmart and Target’s on-line stores had the highest discounts. And while&nbsp;Amazon was in 10th place for average discount (in the 40% range), it was tops with the greatest variety — over 12,000 luggage items.</li>\n</ol>','Tips for Buying A Suitcase','','inherit','closed','closed','','1937-revision-v1','','','2019-11-05 15:51:48','2019-11-05 20:51:48','',1937,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/11/05/1937-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2561,1,'2019-11-05 16:14:36','2019-11-05 21:14:36','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\">\n<p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/IMG_0159.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1402\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/IMG_0159-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"225\" height=\"300\"></a></p><figcaption>This Won\'t Help Your Flier Sat Score</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>In this episode, we talk with Michael Taylor, author of <a href=\"https://www.jdpower.com/business/press-releases/2019-north-america-airport-satisfaction-study\">JD Power\'s 2019 Airport Satisfaction Survey</a>, about what keeps fliers happy. I also talk about what I like about eScooters, shopping for a smaller bag for upcoming flights on a Euro budget airline, and how Hertz\'s contract updates remind me to delete my Bluetooth pairings in rental cars. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_156.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/696032101&color=%23ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #156: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago in the middle of what looks like a 6-week run of solid travel. Traveled to DC, Charlottesville, and Nashville, in that order, in the 3 weeks since the last episode. Heading back to Charlottesville this week, then a week hopscotching through the Baltics with my son Andrew -- Riga, Latvia; Talinn, Estonia; Helsinki, Finland -- and then back down to Charlottesville. </li><li> I flew Southwest on my non-Charlottesville flights -- into DC Reagan and Nashville -- and United again to Charlottesville. The Southwest flights went smoothly, except for trying to get to Chicago Midway for the DC flight. The Uber driver didn’t follow the app’s recommended route; instead, he pretended he was a cab driver and took the normal route down the Stevenson Expressway which was crawling due to an earlier accident. I wasn’t paying attention - first time I’ve had an Uber driver freelance on me - and didn’t notice he’d skipped the exit to the faster path until it was too late. We made our flight, but not without a bit of hustle through Midway. No tip, let alone a 5-star review for that guy.</li><li> Southwest flies into the old Terminal A at what I still call Washington National. I went to college in DC in the early ‘80’s, before it was named for President Reagan and when Terminal A was pretty much all that was there. I had forgotten what a long schlepp it is from that terminal to the Metro station. I remember way back then asking someone why they built the Metro station so far away. “Because they’re going to build new terminals right across from it.” Which they finally did, some 20 years after that Metro station was opened. Sometimes it seems that airport planning horizons are not in years, or even decades; feels more like they’re planning in lifetimes.</li><li> In between the Southwest flights, my United flight continued the string of disruptions trying to get into or out of Charlottesville. I checked that my flight was on-time before calling an Uber -- no weather delays at either end, United and FlightAware apps say the inbound plane is on-time…. Then, halfway to ORD, I get the text from United; a 2½-hour delay for crew arrival. What!? The next text “Because of crew scheduling disruptions this evening in Chicago, we’ve assigned your flight a new crew…. We know this delay wasn’t in your plans today, so we appreciate your patience.” No shit a 2½-hour delay wasn’t in my plans, especially when it’s because United stole our original crew because they screwed up their scheduling. And really United, you can’t find another pilot in ORD, your largest hub, that’s a little closer? I tell you what else isn’t in my plans, flying United to Charlottesville this week. </li><li> Bridge Music -- <em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/stefsax/7785\" target=\"_blank\">Awel</a> </em>by stefsax (c) copyright 2006 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/stefsax/7785 </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>That’s the sound of my new <a href=\"https://www.marriott.com/loyalty/member-benefits/titanium.mi\">Marriott Bonvoy Lifetime Titanium Elite</a> card hitting the kitchen counter. The mailer package was appropriately upscale, but the sheer weight of the thing stunned me. I put a quick video of it on the TravelCommons Facebook page. Cate Rose commented “Hope it scans into your Stocard app so you don’t actually have to carry it in your luggage allowance”. My thought exactly.</li><li> I got a note that Chicago’s electric scooter pilot ends tomorrow, which made me realize that I’ve seen them in just about every city I’ve been to this summer -- Budapest, Krakow, Charlottesville, Nashville, Washington, DC. I think the only places I didn’t see them were in Scotland and Ireland. They’re handy; because they’re dockless, I’ve found they have a wider distribution than, say, a traditional docked bike share and you can take them directly to your planned destination. And they’re a good fill-in between walking and an Uber or a Lyft. And, they’re fun! When I was in DC a couple of weeks ago, I was in the <a href=\"https://washington.org/visit-dc/neighborhoods/brookland\">Brookland</a> neighborhood in the Northeast part of town, and wanted to try out a new taproom there, <a href=\"http://www.rightproperbrewing.com/what-we-do\">Right Proper Brewing</a>. Now Brookland is not the nicest part of DC. It’s much better than when I went to school there, but there are still iffy parts. I wasn’t completely comfortable walking down to Right Proper from the Brookland Metro stop, but it seemed too short for an Uber ride and there was no bus that went down there. But, there was a scooter a couple of blocks from the Metro station. Running down 9th St at 10 mph felt a bit better than speedwalking at 4. And could leave it right in front of the taproom. It was exactly what I wanted. Two problems I’ve seen -- first, too many people riding them on the sidewalk, especially in DC. Maybe because I bike a lot in Chicago, I’m comfortable in bike lanes and navigating around cars on the street and keeping an eye out for potholes. I actually wouldn’t be comfortable riding a scooter on the sidewalk; I’d be afraid of popping a pedestrian who suddenly walked in front of me. To me, cars are much more predictable than pedestrians. The second thing, the need to have half-a-dozen scooter apps on your phone. In Chicago, there are 8 scooter companies, in addition to Uber and Lyft’s scooters. And you need to download their app to find and rent their scooter. Which meant that when I wanted to find a scooter near the Brookland Metro stop, I’d have to cycle thru 5 or 6 apps. Except I didn’t because I found an app called <a href=\"https://scootermap.com/\">Scooter Map</a> that shows all the scooter brands on one map. I think it’s targeted at folks who are making money recharging scooters (not quite sure how that works) but it worked fine for me. I fired it up and saw all the different scooters that were near me. One caveat -- I’ve only ridden these scooters on sunny days. I’m not sure how enthusiastic I’d be riding one in the rain or snow. </li><li> For the Baltics trip next week, we’re taking Finnair out and back from Chicago, an early morning ferry ride from Talinn to Helsinki, and then AirBaltic for everything else. Which then got me thinking about luggage sizes, because I bought my current bag, the <a href=\"https://www.swissarmy.com/us/en&amp;eoq=!t/Products/Travel-Gear/Werks-Traveler-5-0/collection/trg-collection/travelgear_collection_TRA-C2955\">Victorinox Werks</a> 22-incher, to use every last inch of US carry-on allowance. It even catches some side-eye from American and United where I have status. So I didn’t figure it’d fit into any European budget carrier’s luggage sizer. Looking up <a href=\"https://www.airbaltic.com/en/cabin-baggage\">AirBaltic’s carry-on allowance</a>, my Victorinox is a couple of inches too tall and an inch too deep. But what really got me shopping for a new bag for this trip is the weight. AirBaltic has an 8 kg/17½ lbs weight limit. In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/05/30/podcast-121-tsa-lines-my-luggage-is-where/\">episode #121</a>, I talked about the baggage strip tease exercise with Wow Air to make their 7 kg/15 lbs carry-on weight limit. I’d take my bag off the scale, pull some clothes out, zip it back up, and put it back on the scale. Still too heavy. Repeat 3 more times until the agent takes pity — or just gets tired of me — and gives me the approval tag to put on my bag. After which I walk about 10 feet, open my bag and put my armful of clothes back in. My Victorinox is a bit over 7 lbs, so not only is it too tall, the bag itself uses over 40% of the weight allowance. And even though I’ve talked before about how much I hate shopping for luggage, I searched for a smaller, lighter bag that wouldn’t cost a fortune, since my Victorinox will stay my primary bag. I landed on the the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/32lIURe\">TravelPro Maxlite 5</a>. I, or rather my daughter has a good history with TravelPro. It fit the AirBaltic dimensions and is one of the lighter bags I saw at 5.4 lbs which is down to 30% of the 8 kg weight allowance. It also meets three of the key suitcase criteria I laid down in the “how to shop for a suitcase” topic in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/01/25/podcast-137-new-years-travel-status-tips-how-to-shop-for-a-suitcase/\">episode #137</a> -- it’s black, it’s a 2-wheeler so no lost space on extended spinner wheels, and the inside is, for the most part, a wide open box without clothes hangers or a bunch of zip compartments. And it was o<a href=\"https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07BWJVTXD/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&amp;psc=1\">nly $112 on Amazon</a>. I’m taking it to Charlottesville tomorrow for a shakedown cruise.</li><li> Three years ago, back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/11/22/podcast-125-uber-driver-stories-overseas-for-the-election/\">episode #125</a>, in a Travel Security tip, I talked about the need to delete your phone’s Bluetooth pairing when you return a rental car. Usually when I go to pair my phone, I’ll first go through and delete 3-5 pairings before pairing my own. And they all have personalized names like “Timmy’s iPhone”. And most phones by default will download your contacts to the car when paired, so leave all of their contacts and phone numbers in their rental. That is just bad in so many ways. And now Hertz has gotten around to noticing it. In their newest rental terms and conditions, they specifically carve out any liability from you leaving a Bluetooth pairing behind. It’s a pain to remember, especially if you’re running for a flight, but as you’re taking that last scan around the car for your sunglasses and iPhone, remember not to leave your identity behind either.</li><li>Bridge Music -- Black Rainbow by Pitx (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Pitx/19513 Ft: ERH, acclivity</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Keeping Fliers Happy </strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A couple of weeks ago, JD Power released their 2019 North American Airport Satisfaction Study.&nbsp; The headline - “North American Airports Struggle to Keep Travelers Happy Amid Construction Delays and Surging Passenger Volumes” caught my eye, so I reached out to the study’s author, Michael Taylor, to dig into it a bit more. And so last Friday, we had a wide-ranging conversation. I was going to edit it down, but as I listened to it, I couldn’t think about what to cut. So here it is in its entirety…</li><li>Interview with <a href=\"https://www.jdpower.com/business/content/michael-taylor\">Michael Taylor</a>, Travel Intelligence Lead at J.D. Power</li><li>Thanks again to Michael for taking the time to talk to us. Here\'s the <a href=\"https://www.jdpower.com/business/press-releases/2019-north-america-airport-satisfaction-study\">link</a> to the study summary on the JD Power website.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #156</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li> And if you check out the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> page, you can click thru to highlights from my trips to Budapest and Ireland. And if you follow it, you can catch some pics from next week’s trip through the Baltics.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_155.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #156 — Airport Satisfaction; eScooters; Smaller Luggage','','inherit','closed','closed','','2543-revision-v1','','','2019-11-05 16:14:36','2019-11-05 21:14:36','',2543,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/11/05/2543-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2562,1,'2019-11-06 16:50:31','2019-11-06 21:50:31','<!-- wp:image {\"id\":1938,\"width\":261,\"height\":261,\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright is-resized\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/IMG_0091-1024x1024.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-1938\" style=\"width:261px;height:261px\"/><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Rejected and Retired Suitcases</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<p>I spend a lot of time with my luggage. I average 40-50 trips and 100,000 miles a year. I hate shopping for luggage, though. I\'d been putting off buying a new bag for a long time, as in years, until I was left with no working luggage when the handle died on my vintage Swiss Army black roller. Before that, the airlines forcibly grounded my Bluesmart smart bag for an unremovable lithium battery, and I had to retire my grey Samsonite bag after the wheels got wonky — the rubber wore off and the wheels splayed out after 2½ years of trundling it across New Orleans sidewalks.</p>\n<p>With my next trip looming, I was finally forced to shop for a new suitcase. But what to buy? I started with a survey of fellow travelers. Actually, it was more like stalking; I eyeballed every piece of luggage that passed by me for two weeks. Then I wandered through the basement luggage departments of a couple of Macy\'s, opening bags and waving off clerks. After all that, I gave into my OCD and built this prioritized carry-on luggage shopping evaluation criteria:</p>\n<ol>\n<li><em>It has to fit into my carrier\'s carry-on sizer</em>. Now that may seem a bit of a “duh”, but there is some ambiguity; the <a href=\"https://travel-made-simple.com/carry-on-size-chart/\">approved height</a> of a carry-on bag varies by airline between 19 and 22-inches. If I want to play it safe, I’d go for a 20-inch bag, but then I also want to maximize my carry-on space. Most US carriers accept a 22-inch bag and that’s mostly what I fly. So for my main bag, I go for maximum packing volume and choose a 22-inch bag.</li>\n<li><em>And my carrier\'s weight limit (if they have one)</em>. Many European carriers have a size <em>and</em> a weight limit. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/05/30/podcast-121-tsa-lines-my-luggage-is-where/\">episode #121</a>, I talked about the baggage strip tease I had to do at the Wow Air desk in Reykjavik to make their 7 kg/15 lbs carry-on weight limit. My 22-inch bag is 7 lbs, taking up almost half of the weight allowance. So last month, after booking some flights in and out of Riga, Latvia on AirBaltic, I bought a <a href=\"https://amzn.to/32lIURe\">much lighter 20-inch bag</a>. </li>\n<li>I<em>t needs to be black</em>. As I said in my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/10/18/ruthless-packing-tips/\">Ruthless Packing Tips post</a>, black not only makes you look thinner, it makes your bag look thinner to gate agents scanning for bag-sizer bait. Black also doesn\'t show stains. My grey Samsonite bag, after 3-4 months of my travel schedule, started to look a lot less non-black. Smudges from grease on overhead bin hinges, muck from taxi trunks, muddy water from New Orleans gutters, spilled coffee…. It\'s why I can\'t have nice luggage.</li>\n<li><em>Two wheels, not four</em>. This is more of a personal preference. My Bluesmart was a 4-wheel spinner and my wife swears by hers, but because the 4 wheels have to extend from the bottom of the bag, spinners sacrifice packing space for agility. Also, I find 4-wheelers have a tendency to wander off -- rolling away down ramps or on uneven floors. I go for the 2-wheeler, and with the biggest wheels I can find to make it an easier, smoother pull. I was surprised how much this limited my selection. Spinners definitely rule.</li>\n<li><em>The inside of the suitcase has to be plain and empty</em>. No clever collection of zipped compartments, or built-in suit hangers, or ratcheting clothes dividers; just a wide open box that I\'m free to structure how I want for each trip. I was surprised how this also limited my selection. Indeed, in the end, I couldn’t find just a plain box, and settled for a bag where I could detach the suit hanger and clothes divider and stash them in the back of a closet somewhere, never to be seen again.</li>\n<li><em>Buy on-line</em>. A <a href=\"https://www.testfacts.com/luggage-prices-analyzed/\">recent study</a> of 32,672 luggage price showed that you can save an average of $110/39% buying on-line. Walmart and Target’s on-line stores had the highest discounts. And while Amazon was in 10th place for average discount (in the 40% range), it was tops with the greatest variety — over 12,000 luggage items.</li>\n</ol>\n<p>So what did I buy? For my main bag, I bought a black <a href=\"https://www.swissarmy.com/us/en&amp;eoq=!t/Products/Travel-Gear/Werks-Traveler-5-0/collection/trg-collection/travelgear_collection_TRA-C2955\">Victorinox Werks Traveler 5.0</a> 22-inch 2-wheeler. Victorinox is what used to be Swiss Army; I figured if my last bag survived 10 years of hard mileage, that said something for durability. However, Victorinox has moved to a new model year, to Werks 6.0, which doesn\'t appear to have a 22-inch or a 2-wheel option. If you\'re OK with spinners, the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/33mYDkl\">Werks 5.0 22-inch spinner</a> is still available on Amazon. My 2-wheeler is a solid bag; highly recommended.</p>\n<p>For my European budget travel, and for 2-day trips where I don\'t need all the space of the Victorinox, I landed on the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/32lIURe\">TravelPro Maxlite 5</a>. It fit the AirBaltic dimensions, it\'s one of the lighter bags I saw at 5.4 lbs, and my daughter has had a good run with her TravelPro bag. Mine has worked well on two trips -- hopscotching through the Baltics and then a quick trip down to Charlottesville, VA. Another <a href=\"https://amzn.to/32lIURe\">solid bag</a> that\'s highly recommended.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:block {\"ref\":2601} /-->','How To Choose The Best Carry-On Luggage','','publish','closed','closed','','how-to-choose-the-best-carry-on-luggage','','','2026-03-13 13:01:33','2026-03-13 19:01:33','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=2562',0,'post','',0),
(2563,1,'2019-11-05 16:41:28','2019-11-05 21:41:28','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\">\n<p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/IMG_0159.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1402\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/IMG_0159-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"225\" height=\"300\"></a></p><figcaption>This Won\'t Help Your Flier Sat Score</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>In this episode, we talk with Michael Taylor, author of <a href=\"https://www.jdpower.com/business/press-releases/2019-north-america-airport-satisfaction-study\">JD Power\'s 2019 Airport Satisfaction Survey</a>, about what keeps fliers happy. I also talk about what I like about eScooters, shopping for a smaller bag for upcoming flights on a Euro budget airline, and how Hertz\'s contract updates remind me to delete my Bluetooth pairings in rental cars. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_156.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/696032101&color=%23ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #156: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago in the middle of what looks like a 6-week run of solid travel. Traveled to DC, Charlottesville, and Nashville, in that order, in the 3 weeks since the last episode. Heading back to Charlottesville this week, then a week hopscotching through the Baltics with my son Andrew -- Riga, Latvia; Talinn, Estonia; Helsinki, Finland -- and then back down to Charlottesville. </li><li> I flew Southwest on my non-Charlottesville flights -- into DC Reagan and Nashville -- and United again to Charlottesville. The Southwest flights went smoothly, except for trying to get to Chicago Midway for the DC flight. The Uber driver didn’t follow the app’s recommended route; instead, he pretended he was a cab driver and took the normal route down the Stevenson Expressway which was crawling due to an earlier accident. I wasn’t paying attention - first time I’ve had an Uber driver freelance on me - and didn’t notice he’d skipped the exit to the faster path until it was too late. We made our flight, but not without a bit of hustle through Midway. No tip, let alone a 5-star review for that guy.</li><li> Southwest flies into the old Terminal A at what I still call Washington National. I went to college in DC in the early ‘80’s, before it was named for President Reagan and when Terminal A was pretty much all that was there. I had forgotten what a long schlepp it is from that terminal to the Metro station. I remember way back then asking someone why they built the Metro station so far away. “Because they’re going to build new terminals right across from it.” Which they finally did, some 20 years after that Metro station was opened. Sometimes it seems that airport planning horizons are not in years, or even decades; feels more like they’re planning in lifetimes.</li><li> In between the Southwest flights, my United flight continued the string of disruptions trying to get into or out of Charlottesville. I checked that my flight was on-time before calling an Uber -- no weather delays at either end, United and FlightAware apps say the inbound plane is on-time…. Then, halfway to ORD, I get the text from United; a 2½-hour delay for crew arrival. What!? The next text “Because of crew scheduling disruptions this evening in Chicago, we’ve assigned your flight a new crew…. We know this delay wasn’t in your plans today, so we appreciate your patience.” No shit a 2½-hour delay wasn’t in my plans, especially when it’s because United stole our original crew because they screwed up their scheduling. And really United, you can’t find another pilot in ORD, your largest hub, that’s a little closer? I tell you what else isn’t in my plans, flying United to Charlottesville this week. </li><li> Bridge Music -- <em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/stefsax/7785\" target=\"_blank\">Awel</a> </em>by stefsax (c) copyright 2006 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/stefsax/7785 </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>That’s the sound of my new <a href=\"https://www.marriott.com/loyalty/member-benefits/titanium.mi\">Marriott Bonvoy Lifetime Titanium Elite</a> card hitting the kitchen counter. The mailer package was appropriately upscale, but the sheer weight of the thing stunned me. I put a quick video of it on the TravelCommons Facebook page. Cate Rose commented “Hope it scans into your Stocard app so you don’t actually have to carry it in your luggage allowance”. My thought exactly.</li><li> I got a note that Chicago’s electric scooter pilot ends tomorrow, which made me realize that I’ve seen them in just about every city I’ve been to this summer -- Budapest, Krakow, Charlottesville, Nashville, Washington, DC. I think the only places I didn’t see them were in Scotland and Ireland. They’re handy; because they’re dockless, I’ve found they have a wider distribution than, say, a traditional docked bike share and you can take them directly to your planned destination. And they’re a good fill-in between walking and an Uber or a Lyft. And, they’re fun! When I was in DC a couple of weeks ago, I was in the <a href=\"https://washington.org/visit-dc/neighborhoods/brookland\">Brookland</a> neighborhood in the Northeast part of town, and wanted to try out a new taproom there, <a href=\"http://www.rightproperbrewing.com/what-we-do\">Right Proper Brewing</a>. Now Brookland is not the nicest part of DC. It’s much better than when I went to school there, but there are still iffy parts. I wasn’t completely comfortable walking down to Right Proper from the Brookland Metro stop, but it seemed too short for an Uber ride and there was no bus that went down there. But, there was a scooter a couple of blocks from the Metro station. Running down 9th St at 10 mph felt a bit better than speedwalking at 4. And could leave it right in front of the taproom. It was exactly what I wanted. Two problems I’ve seen -- first, too many people riding them on the sidewalk, especially in DC. Maybe because I bike a lot in Chicago, I’m comfortable in bike lanes and navigating around cars on the street and keeping an eye out for potholes. I actually wouldn’t be comfortable riding a scooter on the sidewalk; I’d be afraid of popping a pedestrian who suddenly walked in front of me. To me, cars are much more predictable than pedestrians. The second thing, the need to have half-a-dozen scooter apps on your phone. In Chicago, there are 8 scooter companies, in addition to Uber and Lyft’s scooters. And you need to download their app to find and rent their scooter. Which meant that when I wanted to find a scooter near the Brookland Metro stop, I’d have to cycle thru 5 or 6 apps. Except I didn’t because I found an app called <a href=\"https://scootermap.com/\">Scooter Map</a> that shows all the scooter brands on one map. I think it’s targeted at folks who are making money recharging scooters (not quite sure how that works) but it worked fine for me. I fired it up and saw all the different scooters that were near me. One caveat -- I’ve only ridden these scooters on sunny days. I’m not sure how enthusiastic I’d be riding one in the rain or snow. </li><li> For the Baltics trip next week, we’re taking Finnair out and back from Chicago, an early morning ferry ride from Talinn to Helsinki, and then AirBaltic for everything else. Which then got me thinking about luggage sizes, because I bought my current bag, the <a href=\"https://www.swissarmy.com/us/en&amp;eoq=!t/Products/Travel-Gear/Werks-Traveler-5-0/collection/trg-collection/travelgear_collection_TRA-C2955\">Victorinox Werks</a> 22-incher, to use every last inch of US carry-on allowance. It even catches some side-eye from American and United where I have status. So I didn’t figure it’d fit into any European budget carrier’s luggage sizer. Looking up <a href=\"https://www.airbaltic.com/en/cabin-baggage\">AirBaltic’s carry-on allowance</a>, my Victorinox is a couple of inches too tall and an inch too deep. But what really got me shopping for a new bag for this trip is the weight. AirBaltic has an 8 kg/17½ lbs weight limit. In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/05/30/podcast-121-tsa-lines-my-luggage-is-where/\">episode #121</a>, I talked about the baggage strip tease exercise with Wow Air to make their 7 kg/15 lbs carry-on weight limit. I’d take my bag off the scale, pull some clothes out, zip it back up, and put it back on the scale. Still too heavy. Repeat 3 more times until the agent takes pity — or just gets tired of me — and gives me the approval tag to put on my bag. After which I walk about 10 feet, open my bag and put my armful of clothes back in. My Victorinox is a bit over 7 lbs, so not only is it too tall, the bag itself uses over 40% of the weight allowance. And even though I’ve talked before about how much I hate shopping for luggage, I searched for a smaller, lighter bag that wouldn’t cost a fortune, since my Victorinox will stay my primary bag. I landed on the the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/32lIURe\">TravelPro Maxlite 5</a>. I, or rather my daughter has a good history with TravelPro. It fit the AirBaltic dimensions and is one of the lighter bags I saw at 5.4 lbs which is down to 30% of the 8 kg weight allowance. It also meets three of the key suitcase criteria I laid down in the “how to shop for a suitcase” topic in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/01/25/podcast-137-new-years-travel-status-tips-how-to-shop-for-a-suitcase/\">episode #137</a> -- it’s black, it’s a 2-wheeler so no lost space on extended spinner wheels, and the inside is, for the most part, a wide open box without clothes hangers or a bunch of zip compartments. I’m taking it to Charlottesville tomorrow for a shakedown cruise.</li><li> Three years ago, back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/11/22/podcast-125-uber-driver-stories-overseas-for-the-election/\">episode #125</a>, in a Travel Security tip, I talked about the need to delete your phone’s Bluetooth pairing when you return a rental car. Usually when I go to pair my phone, I’ll first go through and delete 3-5 pairings before pairing my own. And they all have personalized names like “Timmy’s iPhone”. And most phones by default will download your contacts to the car when paired, so leave all of their contacts and phone numbers in their rental. That is just bad in so many ways. And now Hertz has gotten around to noticing it. In their newest rental terms and conditions, they specifically carve out any liability from you leaving a Bluetooth pairing behind. It’s a pain to remember, especially if you’re running for a flight, but as you’re taking that last scan around the car for your sunglasses and iPhone, remember not to leave your identity behind either.</li><li>Bridge Music -- Black Rainbow by Pitx (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Pitx/19513 Ft: ERH, acclivity</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Keeping Fliers Happy </strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A couple of weeks ago, JD Power released their 2019 North American Airport Satisfaction Study.&nbsp; The headline - “North American Airports Struggle to Keep Travelers Happy Amid Construction Delays and Surging Passenger Volumes” caught my eye, so I reached out to the study’s author, Michael Taylor, to dig into it a bit more. And so last Friday, we had a wide-ranging conversation. I was going to edit it down, but as I listened to it, I couldn’t think about what to cut. So here it is in its entirety…</li><li>Interview with <a href=\"https://www.jdpower.com/business/content/michael-taylor\">Michael Taylor</a>, Travel Intelligence Lead at J.D. Power</li><li>Thanks again to Michael for taking the time to talk to us. Here\'s the <a href=\"https://www.jdpower.com/business/press-releases/2019-north-america-airport-satisfaction-study\">link</a> to the study summary on the JD Power website.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #156</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li> And if you check out the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> page, you can click thru to highlights from my trips to Budapest and Ireland. And if you follow it, you can catch some pics from next week’s trip through the Baltics.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_155.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #156 — Airport Satisfaction; eScooters; Smaller Luggage','','inherit','closed','closed','','2543-revision-v1','','','2019-11-05 16:41:28','2019-11-05 21:41:28','',2543,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/11/05/2543-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2564,1,'2019-11-05 17:36:48','2019-11-05 22:36:48','I spend a lot of time with my luggage. Every year, I average 40-50 trips and 100,000 miles. I\'d putting off shopping for a new bag for a long time, as in years, until a year ago, I was left with no working luggage. The handle died on the vintage Swiss Army black roller that still sported Vietnamese and Hong Kong customs stickers from 2008. Before that, a grey Samsonite bag was retired after the rollers got wonky — the rubber wore off and the wheels splayed out after 2½ years of trundling it across New Orleans sidewalks.\n\nBut then, right before Thanksgiving, the old Swiss guy resigned, rendering itself unusable when its retractable handle stuck in the extended position. I was still able to avoid luggage shopping, though. I  pulled out the Bluesmart smart bag I\'d bought from their Indiegogo fundraising campaign. I recharged the battery, updated its iPhone app, and put it back into service -- only to read the next week that it was about to be banned by airlines because its lithium battery isn\'t removable.\n\nWith nothing left in the attic, I was finally forced to shop for a new suitcase. But what to buy? I started with a survey of fellow travelers. Actually, it was more like stalking; I eyeballed every piece of luggage that passed by me for two weeks. Then I wandered through the basement luggage departments of a couple of Macy\'s, opening bags and waving off clerks. After all that, I gave into my OCD and built this prioritized list of suitcase shopping evaluation criteria:\n<ol>\n 	<li><em>The bag has to be a carry-on</em>. Now that may seem a bit of a “duh”, but there is some ambiguity; the <a href=\"https://travel-made-simple.com/carry-on-size-chart/\">approved height</a> of a carry-on bag varies by airline between 19 and 22-inches. If I want to play it safe, I’d go for a 20-inch bag, but then I also want to maximize my carry-on space. Most US carriers accept a 22-inch bag and that’s mostly what I fly, and even when I’m on European carriers I usually have enough alliance status to glide past the baggage sizer. So I tilt the balance in favor of maximum packing volume and go for a 22-inch bag.</li>\n 	<li>I<em>t needs to be black</em>. As I said in my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/10/18/ruthless-packing-tips/\">Ruthless Packing Tips post</a>, black not only makes you look thinner, it makes your bag look thinner to gate agents scanning for bag-sizer bait. Black also doesn\'t show stains. My grey Samsonite bag, after 3-4 months of my travel schedule, started to look a lot less non-black. Smudges from grease on overhead bin hinges, muck from taxi trunks, muddy water from New Orleans gutters, spilled coffee…. It\'s why I can\'t have nice luggage.</li>\n 	<li><em>Two wheels, not four</em>. This is more of a personal preference. My Bluesmart is a 4-wheel spinner and my wife swears by hers, but because the 4 wheels have to extend from the bottom of the bag, spinners sacrifice packing space for agility. Also, I find 4-wheelers have a tendency to wander off -- rolling away down ramps or on uneven floors. I go for the 2-wheeler, and with the biggest wheels I can find to make it an easier, smoother pull. I was surprised how much this limited my selection. Spinners definitely rule.</li>\n 	<li><em>The inside of the suitcase has to be plain and empty</em>. No clever collection of zipped compartments, or built-in suit hangers, or ratcheting clothes dividers; just a wide open box that I\'m free to structure how I want for each trip. I was surprised how this also limited my selection. Indeed, in the end, I couldn’t find just a plain box, and settled for a bag where I could detach the suit hanger and clothes divider and stash that stuff up in Luggage Retirement Home next to the Bluesmart.</li>\n 	<li><em>Buy on-line</em>. A <a href=\"https://www.testfacts.com/luggage-prices-analyzed/\">recent study</a> of 32,672 luggage price showed that you can save an average of $110/39% buying on-line. Walmart and Target’s on-line stores had the highest discounts. And while Amazon was in 10th place for average discount (in the 40% range), it was tops with the greatest variety — over 12,000 luggage items.</li>\n</ol>','How To Choose The Best Carry-On Luggage','','inherit','closed','closed','','2562-revision-v1','','','2019-11-05 17:36:48','2019-11-05 22:36:48','',2562,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/11/05/2562-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2566,1,'2019-11-06 15:45:35','2019-11-06 20:45:35','I spend a lot of time with my luggage. Every year, I average 40-50 trips and 100,000 miles. I\'d putting off shopping for a new bag for a long time, as in years, until I was left with no working luggage when the handle died on my vintage Swiss Army black roller. Before that, the airlines forcibly grounded my Bluesmart smart bag because its lithium battery couldn\'t be removed, and I had to retire my grey Samsonite bag after the rollers got wonky — the rubber wore off and the wheels splayed out after 2½ years of trundling it across New Orleans sidewalks.\n\nWith my next trip looming, I was forced to shop for a new suitcase. But what to buy? I started with a survey of fellow travelers. Actually, it was more like stalking; I eyeballed every piece of luggage that passed by me for two weeks. Then I wandered through the basement luggage departments of a couple of Macy\'s, opening bags and waving off clerks. After all that, I gave into my OCD and built this prioritized list of carry-on luggage shopping evaluation criteria:\n<ol>\n 	<li><em>It has to fit into my carrier\'s carry-on sizer</em>. Now that may seem a bit of a “duh”, but there is some ambiguity; the <a href=\"https://travel-made-simple.com/carry-on-size-chart/\">approved height</a> of a carry-on bag varies by airline between 19 and 22-inches. If I want to play it safe, I’d go for a 20-inch bag, but then I also want to maximize my carry-on space. Most US carriers accept a 22-inch bag and that’s mostly what I fly. So for my main bag, I tilt the balance in favor of maximum packing volume and go for a 22-inch bag.</li>\n 	<li><em>And my carrier\'s weight limit (if they have one)</em>. Many European carriers have a size <em>and</em> a weight limit. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/05/30/podcast-121-tsa-lines-my-luggage-is-where/\">episode #121</a>, I talked about the baggage strip tease I had to do at the Wow Air desk in Reykjavik to make their 7 kg/15 lbs carry-on weight limit. My 22-inch bag is 7 lbs, taking up almost half of weight allowance. So last month, after booking some flights in and out of Riga, Latvia on AirBaltic, I bought a <a href=\"https://amzn.to/32lIURe\">much lighter 20-inch bag</a>.</li>\n 	<li>I<em>t needs to be black</em>. As I said in my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/10/18/ruthless-packing-tips/\">Ruthless Packing Tips post</a>, black not only makes you look thinner, it makes your bag look thinner to gate agents scanning for bag-sizer bait. Black also doesn\'t show stains. My grey Samsonite bag, after 3-4 months of my travel schedule, started to look a lot less non-black. Smudges from grease on overhead bin hinges, muck from taxi trunks, muddy water from New Orleans gutters, spilled coffee…. It\'s why I can\'t have nice luggage.</li>\n 	<li><em>Two wheels, not four</em>. This is more of a personal preference. My Bluesmart is a 4-wheel spinner and my wife swears by hers, but because the 4 wheels have to extend from the bottom of the bag, spinners sacrifice packing space for agility. Also, I find 4-wheelers have a tendency to wander off -- rolling away down ramps or on uneven floors. I go for the 2-wheeler, and with the biggest wheels I can find to make it an easier, smoother pull. I was surprised how much this limited my selection. Spinners definitely rule.</li>\n 	<li><em>The inside of the suitcase has to be plain and empty</em>. No clever collection of zipped compartments, or built-in suit hangers, or ratcheting clothes dividers; just a wide open box that I\'m free to structure how I want for each trip. I was surprised how this also limited my selection. Indeed, in the end, I couldn’t find just a plain box, and settled for a bag where I could detach the suit hanger and clothes divider and stash them in the back of a closet somewhere</li>\n 	<li><em>Buy on-line</em>. A <a href=\"https://www.testfacts.com/luggage-prices-analyzed/\">recent study</a> of 32,672 luggage price showed that you can save an average of $110/39% buying on-line. Walmart and Target’s on-line stores had the highest discounts. And while Amazon was in 10th place for average discount (in the 40% range), it was tops with the greatest variety — over 12,000 luggage items.</li>\n</ol>','How To Choose The Best Carry-On Luggage','','inherit','closed','closed','','2562-revision-v1','','','2019-11-06 15:45:35','2019-11-06 20:45:35','',2562,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/11/06/2562-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2567,1,'2019-11-06 16:33:57','2019-11-06 21:33:57','<p>I spend a lot of time with my luggage. I average 40-50 trips and 100,000 miles a year. I hate shopping for luggage, though. I\'d putting off buying a new bag for a long time, as in years, until I was left with no working luggage when the handle died on my vintage Swiss Army black roller. Before that, the airlines forcibly grounded my Bluesmart smart bag for an unremovable lithium battery, and I had to retire my grey Samsonite bag after the wheels got wonky — the rubber wore off and the wheels splayed out after 2½ years of trundling it across New Orleans sidewalks.</p>\n<p>With my next trip looming, I was finally forced to shop for a new suitcase. But what to buy? I started with a survey of fellow travelers. Actually, it was more like stalking; I eyeballed every piece of luggage that passed by me for two weeks. Then I wandered through the basement luggage departments of a couple of Macy\'s, opening bags and waving off clerks. After all that, I gave into my OCD and built this prioritized carry-on luggage shopping evaluation criteria:</p>\n<ol>\n<li><em>It has to fit into my carrier\'s carry-on sizer</em>. Now that may seem a bit of a “duh”, but there is some ambiguity; the <a href=\"https://travel-made-simple.com/carry-on-size-chart/\">approved height</a> of a carry-on bag varies by airline between 19 and 22-inches. If I want to play it safe, I’d go for a 20-inch bag, but then I also want to maximize my carry-on space. Most US carriers accept a 22-inch bag and that’s mostly what I fly. So for my main bag, I go for maximum packing volume and choose a 22-inch bag.</li>\n<li><em>And my carrier\'s weight limit (if they have one)</em>. Many European carriers have a size <em>and</em> a weight limit. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/05/30/podcast-121-tsa-lines-my-luggage-is-where/\">episode #121</a>, I talked about the baggage strip tease I had to do at the Wow Air desk in Reykjavik to make their 7 kg/15 lbs carry-on weight limit. My 22-inch bag is 7 lbs, taking up almost half of the weight allowance. So last month, after booking some flights in and out of Riga, Latvia on AirBaltic, I bought a <a href=\"https://amzn.to/32lIURe\">much lighter 20-inch bag</a>. </li>\n<li>I<em>t needs to be black</em>. As I said in my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/10/18/ruthless-packing-tips/\">Ruthless Packing Tips post</a>, black not only makes you look thinner, it makes your bag look thinner to gate agents scanning for bag-sizer bait. Black also doesn\'t show stains. My grey Samsonite bag, after 3-4 months of my travel schedule, started to look a lot less non-black. Smudges from grease on overhead bin hinges, muck from taxi trunks, muddy water from New Orleans gutters, spilled coffee…. It\'s why I can\'t have nice luggage.</li>\n<li><em>Two wheels, not four</em>. This is more of a personal preference. My Bluesmart was a 4-wheel spinner and my wife swears by hers, but because the 4 wheels have to extend from the bottom of the bag, spinners sacrifice packing space for agility. Also, I find 4-wheelers have a tendency to wander off -- rolling away down ramps or on uneven floors. I go for the 2-wheeler, and with the biggest wheels I can find to make it an easier, smoother pull. I was surprised how much this limited my selection. Spinners definitely rule.</li>\n<li><em>The inside of the suitcase has to be plain and empty</em>. No clever collection of zipped compartments, or built-in suit hangers, or ratcheting clothes dividers; just a wide open box that I\'m free to structure how I want for each trip. I was surprised how this also limited my selection. Indeed, in the end, I couldn’t find just a plain box, and settled for a bag where I could detach the suit hanger and clothes divider and stash them in the back of a closet somewhere, never to be seen again.</li>\n<li><em>Buy on-line</em>. A <a href=\"https://www.testfacts.com/luggage-prices-analyzed/\">recent study</a> of 32,672 luggage price showed that you can save an average of $110/39% buying on-line. Walmart and Target’s on-line stores had the highest discounts. And while Amazon was in 10th place for average discount (in the 40% range), it was tops with the greatest variety — over 12,000 luggage items.</li>\n</ol>\n<p>So what did I buy? For my main bag, I bought a black <a href=\"https://www.swissarmy.com/us/en&amp;eoq=!t/Products/Travel-Gear/Werks-Traveler-5-0/collection/trg-collection/travelgear_collection_TRA-C2955\">Victorinox Werks Traveler 5.0</a> 22-inch 2-wheeler. Victorinox is what used to be Swiss Army; I figured if my last bag survived 10 years of hard mileage, that said something for durability. However, Victorinox has moved to a new model year, to Werks 6.0, which doesn\'t appear to have a 22-inch or a 2-wheel option. If you\'re OK with spinners, the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/33mYDkl\">Werks 5.0 22-inch spinner</a> is still available on Amazon. My 2-wheeler is a solid bag; highly recommended.</p>\n<p>For my European budget travel, and for 2-day trips where I don\'t need all the space of the Victorinox, I landed on the the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/32lIURe\">TravelPro Maxlite 5</a>. It fit the AirBaltic dimensions, it\'s one of the lighter bags I saw at 5.4 lbs, and my daughter has had a good run with her TravelPro bag. Mine has worked well on two trips -- hopscotching through the Baltics and then a quick trip down to Charlottesville, VA. Another <a href=\"https://amzn.to/32lIURe\">solid bag</a> that\'s highly recommended.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Note: I purchased these bags with my own money. This is not a paid endorsement. This post contains links to Amazon where I can earn a small commission from qualifying purchases.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','How To Choose The Best Carry-On Luggage','','inherit','closed','closed','','2562-revision-v1','','','2019-11-06 16:33:57','2019-11-06 21:33:57','',2562,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/11/06/2562-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2568,1,'2019-11-06 16:46:12','2019-11-06 21:46:12','<!-- wp:image {\"id\":1938,\"align\":\"right\",\"width\":261,\"height\":261} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright is-resized\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/IMG_0091-1024x1024.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-1938\" width=\"261\" height=\"261\"/><figcaption>Rejected and Retired Suitcases</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<p>I spend a lot of time with my luggage. I average 40-50 trips and 100,000 miles a year. I hate shopping for luggage, though. I\'d putting off buying a new bag for a long time, as in years, until I was left with no working luggage when the handle died on my vintage Swiss Army black roller. Before that, the airlines forcibly grounded my Bluesmart smart bag for an unremovable lithium battery, and I had to retire my grey Samsonite bag after the wheels got wonky — the rubber wore off and the wheels splayed out after 2½ years of trundling it across New Orleans sidewalks.</p>\n<p>With my next trip looming, I was finally forced to shop for a new suitcase. But what to buy? I started with a survey of fellow travelers. Actually, it was more like stalking; I eyeballed every piece of luggage that passed by me for two weeks. Then I wandered through the basement luggage departments of a couple of Macy\'s, opening bags and waving off clerks. After all that, I gave into my OCD and built this prioritized carry-on luggage shopping evaluation criteria:</p>\n<ol>\n<li><em>It has to fit into my carrier\'s carry-on sizer</em>. Now that may seem a bit of a “duh”, but there is some ambiguity; the <a href=\"https://travel-made-simple.com/carry-on-size-chart/\">approved height</a> of a carry-on bag varies by airline between 19 and 22-inches. If I want to play it safe, I’d go for a 20-inch bag, but then I also want to maximize my carry-on space. Most US carriers accept a 22-inch bag and that’s mostly what I fly. So for my main bag, I go for maximum packing volume and choose a 22-inch bag.</li>\n<li><em>And my carrier\'s weight limit (if they have one)</em>. Many European carriers have a size <em>and</em> a weight limit. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/05/30/podcast-121-tsa-lines-my-luggage-is-where/\">episode #121</a>, I talked about the baggage strip tease I had to do at the Wow Air desk in Reykjavik to make their 7 kg/15 lbs carry-on weight limit. My 22-inch bag is 7 lbs, taking up almost half of the weight allowance. So last month, after booking some flights in and out of Riga, Latvia on AirBaltic, I bought a <a href=\"https://amzn.to/32lIURe\">much lighter 20-inch bag</a>. </li>\n<li>I<em>t needs to be black</em>. As I said in my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/10/18/ruthless-packing-tips/\">Ruthless Packing Tips post</a>, black not only makes you look thinner, it makes your bag look thinner to gate agents scanning for bag-sizer bait. Black also doesn\'t show stains. My grey Samsonite bag, after 3-4 months of my travel schedule, started to look a lot less non-black. Smudges from grease on overhead bin hinges, muck from taxi trunks, muddy water from New Orleans gutters, spilled coffee…. It\'s why I can\'t have nice luggage.</li>\n<li><em>Two wheels, not four</em>. This is more of a personal preference. My Bluesmart was a 4-wheel spinner and my wife swears by hers, but because the 4 wheels have to extend from the bottom of the bag, spinners sacrifice packing space for agility. Also, I find 4-wheelers have a tendency to wander off -- rolling away down ramps or on uneven floors. I go for the 2-wheeler, and with the biggest wheels I can find to make it an easier, smoother pull. I was surprised how much this limited my selection. Spinners definitely rule.</li>\n<li><em>The inside of the suitcase has to be plain and empty</em>. No clever collection of zipped compartments, or built-in suit hangers, or ratcheting clothes dividers; just a wide open box that I\'m free to structure how I want for each trip. I was surprised how this also limited my selection. Indeed, in the end, I couldn’t find just a plain box, and settled for a bag where I could detach the suit hanger and clothes divider and stash them in the back of a closet somewhere, never to be seen again.</li>\n<li><em>Buy on-line</em>. A <a href=\"https://www.testfacts.com/luggage-prices-analyzed/\">recent study</a> of 32,672 luggage price showed that you can save an average of $110/39% buying on-line. Walmart and Target’s on-line stores had the highest discounts. And while Amazon was in 10th place for average discount (in the 40% range), it was tops with the greatest variety — over 12,000 luggage items.</li>\n</ol>\n<p>So what did I buy? For my main bag, I bought a black <a href=\"https://www.swissarmy.com/us/en&amp;eoq=!t/Products/Travel-Gear/Werks-Traveler-5-0/collection/trg-collection/travelgear_collection_TRA-C2955\">Victorinox Werks Traveler 5.0</a> 22-inch 2-wheeler. Victorinox is what used to be Swiss Army; I figured if my last bag survived 10 years of hard mileage, that said something for durability. However, Victorinox has moved to a new model year, to Werks 6.0, which doesn\'t appear to have a 22-inch or a 2-wheel option. If you\'re OK with spinners, the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/33mYDkl\">Werks 5.0 22-inch spinner</a> is still available on Amazon. My 2-wheeler is a solid bag; highly recommended.</p>\n<p>For my European budget travel, and for 2-day trips where I don\'t need all the space of the Victorinox, I landed on the the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/32lIURe\">TravelPro Maxlite 5</a>. It fit the AirBaltic dimensions, it\'s one of the lighter bags I saw at 5.4 lbs, and my daughter has had a good run with her TravelPro bag. Mine has worked well on two trips -- hopscotching through the Baltics and then a quick trip down to Charlottesville, VA. Another <a href=\"https://amzn.to/32lIURe\">solid bag</a> that\'s highly recommended.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Note: I purchased these bags with my own money. This is not a paid endorsement. This post contains links to Amazon where I can earn a small commission from qualifying purchases.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','How To Choose The Best Carry-On Luggage','','inherit','closed','closed','','2562-revision-v1','','','2019-11-06 16:46:12','2019-11-06 21:46:12','',2562,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/11/06/2562-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2569,1,'2019-11-06 16:47:33','2019-11-06 21:47:33','<!-- wp:image {\"id\":1938,\"align\":\"right\",\"width\":261,\"height\":261} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright is-resized\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/IMG_0091-1024x1024.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-1938\" width=\"261\" height=\"261\"/><figcaption>Rejected and Retired Suitcases</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<p>I spend a lot of time with my luggage. I average 40-50 trips and 100,000 miles a year. I hate shopping for luggage, though. I\'d putting off buying a new bag for a long time, as in years, until I was left with no working luggage when the handle died on my vintage Swiss Army black roller. Before that, the airlines forcibly grounded my Bluesmart smart bag for an unremovable lithium battery, and I had to retire my grey Samsonite bag after the wheels got wonky — the rubber wore off and the wheels splayed out after 2½ years of trundling it across New Orleans sidewalks.</p>\n<p>With my next trip looming, I was finally forced to shop for a new suitcase. But what to buy? I started with a survey of fellow travelers. Actually, it was more like stalking; I eyeballed every piece of luggage that passed by me for two weeks. Then I wandered through the basement luggage departments of a couple of Macy\'s, opening bags and waving off clerks. After all that, I gave into my OCD and built this prioritized carry-on luggage shopping evaluation criteria:</p>\n<ol>\n<li><em>It has to fit into my carrier\'s carry-on sizer</em>. Now that may seem a bit of a “duh”, but there is some ambiguity; the <a href=\"https://travel-made-simple.com/carry-on-size-chart/\">approved height</a> of a carry-on bag varies by airline between 19 and 22-inches. If I want to play it safe, I’d go for a 20-inch bag, but then I also want to maximize my carry-on space. Most US carriers accept a 22-inch bag and that’s mostly what I fly. So for my main bag, I go for maximum packing volume and choose a 22-inch bag.</li>\n<li><em>And my carrier\'s weight limit (if they have one)</em>. Many European carriers have a size <em>and</em> a weight limit. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/05/30/podcast-121-tsa-lines-my-luggage-is-where/\">episode #121</a>, I talked about the baggage strip tease I had to do at the Wow Air desk in Reykjavik to make their 7 kg/15 lbs carry-on weight limit. My 22-inch bag is 7 lbs, taking up almost half of the weight allowance. So last month, after booking some flights in and out of Riga, Latvia on AirBaltic, I bought a <a href=\"https://amzn.to/32lIURe\">much lighter 20-inch bag</a>. </li>\n<li>I<em>t needs to be black</em>. As I said in my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/10/18/ruthless-packing-tips/\">Ruthless Packing Tips post</a>, black not only makes you look thinner, it makes your bag look thinner to gate agents scanning for bag-sizer bait. Black also doesn\'t show stains. My grey Samsonite bag, after 3-4 months of my travel schedule, started to look a lot less non-black. Smudges from grease on overhead bin hinges, muck from taxi trunks, muddy water from New Orleans gutters, spilled coffee…. It\'s why I can\'t have nice luggage.</li>\n<li><em>Two wheels, not four</em>. This is more of a personal preference. My Bluesmart was a 4-wheel spinner and my wife swears by hers, but because the 4 wheels have to extend from the bottom of the bag, spinners sacrifice packing space for agility. Also, I find 4-wheelers have a tendency to wander off -- rolling away down ramps or on uneven floors. I go for the 2-wheeler, and with the biggest wheels I can find to make it an easier, smoother pull. I was surprised how much this limited my selection. Spinners definitely rule.</li>\n<li><em>The inside of the suitcase has to be plain and empty</em>. No clever collection of zipped compartments, or built-in suit hangers, or ratcheting clothes dividers; just a wide open box that I\'m free to structure how I want for each trip. I was surprised how this also limited my selection. Indeed, in the end, I couldn’t find just a plain box, and settled for a bag where I could detach the suit hanger and clothes divider and stash them in the back of a closet somewhere, never to be seen again.</li>\n<li><em>Buy on-line</em>. A <a href=\"https://www.testfacts.com/luggage-prices-analyzed/\">recent study</a> of 32,672 luggage price showed that you can save an average of $110/39% buying on-line. Walmart and Target’s on-line stores had the highest discounts. And while Amazon was in 10th place for average discount (in the 40% range), it was tops with the greatest variety — over 12,000 luggage items.</li>\n</ol>\n<p>So what did I buy? For my main bag, I bought a black <a href=\"https://www.swissarmy.com/us/en&amp;eoq=!t/Products/Travel-Gear/Werks-Traveler-5-0/collection/trg-collection/travelgear_collection_TRA-C2955\">Victorinox Werks Traveler 5.0</a> 22-inch 2-wheeler. Victorinox is what used to be Swiss Army; I figured if my last bag survived 10 years of hard mileage, that said something for durability. However, Victorinox has moved to a new model year, to Werks 6.0, which doesn\'t appear to have a 22-inch or a 2-wheel option. If you\'re OK with spinners, the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/33mYDkl\">Werks 5.0 22-inch spinner</a> is still available on Amazon. My 2-wheeler is a solid bag; highly recommended.</p>\n<p>For my European budget travel, and for 2-day trips where I don\'t need all the space of the Victorinox, I landed on the the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/32lIURe\">TravelPro Maxlite 5</a>. It fit the AirBaltic dimensions, it\'s one of the lighter bags I saw at 5.4 lbs, and my daughter has had a good run with her TravelPro bag. Mine has worked well on two trips -- hopscotching through the Baltics and then a quick trip down to Charlottesville, VA. Another <a href=\"https://amzn.to/32lIURe\">solid bag</a> that\'s highly recommended.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph {\"align\":\"left\"} -->\n<p style=\"text-align:left\"><em>Note: I purchased these bags with my own money. This is not a paid endorsement. This post contains links to Amazon where I can earn a small commission from qualifying purchases.</em></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','How To Choose The Best Carry-On Luggage','','inherit','closed','closed','','2562-revision-v1','','','2019-11-06 16:47:33','2019-11-06 21:47:33','',2562,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/11/06/2562-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2570,1,'2019-11-06 16:50:31','2019-11-06 21:50:31','<!-- wp:image {\"id\":1938,\"align\":\"right\",\"width\":261,\"height\":261} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright is-resized\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/IMG_0091-1024x1024.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-1938\" width=\"261\" height=\"261\"/><figcaption>Rejected and Retired Suitcases</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<p>I spend a lot of time with my luggage. I average 40-50 trips and 100,000 miles a year. I hate shopping for luggage, though. I\'d putting off buying a new bag for a long time, as in years, until I was left with no working luggage when the handle died on my vintage Swiss Army black roller. Before that, the airlines forcibly grounded my Bluesmart smart bag for an unremovable lithium battery, and I had to retire my grey Samsonite bag after the wheels got wonky — the rubber wore off and the wheels splayed out after 2½ years of trundling it across New Orleans sidewalks.</p>\n<p>With my next trip looming, I was finally forced to shop for a new suitcase. But what to buy? I started with a survey of fellow travelers. Actually, it was more like stalking; I eyeballed every piece of luggage that passed by me for two weeks. Then I wandered through the basement luggage departments of a couple of Macy\'s, opening bags and waving off clerks. After all that, I gave into my OCD and built this prioritized carry-on luggage shopping evaluation criteria:</p>\n<ol>\n<li><em>It has to fit into my carrier\'s carry-on sizer</em>. Now that may seem a bit of a “duh”, but there is some ambiguity; the <a href=\"https://travel-made-simple.com/carry-on-size-chart/\">approved height</a> of a carry-on bag varies by airline between 19 and 22-inches. If I want to play it safe, I’d go for a 20-inch bag, but then I also want to maximize my carry-on space. Most US carriers accept a 22-inch bag and that’s mostly what I fly. So for my main bag, I go for maximum packing volume and choose a 22-inch bag.</li>\n<li><em>And my carrier\'s weight limit (if they have one)</em>. Many European carriers have a size <em>and</em> a weight limit. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/05/30/podcast-121-tsa-lines-my-luggage-is-where/\">episode #121</a>, I talked about the baggage strip tease I had to do at the Wow Air desk in Reykjavik to make their 7 kg/15 lbs carry-on weight limit. My 22-inch bag is 7 lbs, taking up almost half of the weight allowance. So last month, after booking some flights in and out of Riga, Latvia on AirBaltic, I bought a <a href=\"https://amzn.to/32lIURe\">much lighter 20-inch bag</a>. </li>\n<li>I<em>t needs to be black</em>. As I said in my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/10/18/ruthless-packing-tips/\">Ruthless Packing Tips post</a>, black not only makes you look thinner, it makes your bag look thinner to gate agents scanning for bag-sizer bait. Black also doesn\'t show stains. My grey Samsonite bag, after 3-4 months of my travel schedule, started to look a lot less non-black. Smudges from grease on overhead bin hinges, muck from taxi trunks, muddy water from New Orleans gutters, spilled coffee…. It\'s why I can\'t have nice luggage.</li>\n<li><em>Two wheels, not four</em>. This is more of a personal preference. My Bluesmart was a 4-wheel spinner and my wife swears by hers, but because the 4 wheels have to extend from the bottom of the bag, spinners sacrifice packing space for agility. Also, I find 4-wheelers have a tendency to wander off -- rolling away down ramps or on uneven floors. I go for the 2-wheeler, and with the biggest wheels I can find to make it an easier, smoother pull. I was surprised how much this limited my selection. Spinners definitely rule.</li>\n<li><em>The inside of the suitcase has to be plain and empty</em>. No clever collection of zipped compartments, or built-in suit hangers, or ratcheting clothes dividers; just a wide open box that I\'m free to structure how I want for each trip. I was surprised how this also limited my selection. Indeed, in the end, I couldn’t find just a plain box, and settled for a bag where I could detach the suit hanger and clothes divider and stash them in the back of a closet somewhere, never to be seen again.</li>\n<li><em>Buy on-line</em>. A <a href=\"https://www.testfacts.com/luggage-prices-analyzed/\">recent study</a> of 32,672 luggage price showed that you can save an average of $110/39% buying on-line. Walmart and Target’s on-line stores had the highest discounts. And while Amazon was in 10th place for average discount (in the 40% range), it was tops with the greatest variety — over 12,000 luggage items.</li>\n</ol>\n<p>So what did I buy? For my main bag, I bought a black <a href=\"https://www.swissarmy.com/us/en&amp;eoq=!t/Products/Travel-Gear/Werks-Traveler-5-0/collection/trg-collection/travelgear_collection_TRA-C2955\">Victorinox Werks Traveler 5.0</a> 22-inch 2-wheeler. Victorinox is what used to be Swiss Army; I figured if my last bag survived 10 years of hard mileage, that said something for durability. However, Victorinox has moved to a new model year, to Werks 6.0, which doesn\'t appear to have a 22-inch or a 2-wheel option. If you\'re OK with spinners, the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/33mYDkl\">Werks 5.0 22-inch spinner</a> is still available on Amazon. My 2-wheeler is a solid bag; highly recommended.</p>\n<p>For my European budget travel, and for 2-day trips where I don\'t need all the space of the Victorinox, I landed on the the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/32lIURe\">TravelPro Maxlite 5</a>. It fit the AirBaltic dimensions, it\'s one of the lighter bags I saw at 5.4 lbs, and my daughter has had a good run with her TravelPro bag. Mine has worked well on two trips -- hopscotching through the Baltics and then a quick trip down to Charlottesville, VA. Another <a href=\"https://amzn.to/32lIURe\">solid bag</a> that\'s highly recommended.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Note: I purchased these bags with my own money. This is not a paid endorsement. This post contains links to Amazon where I can earn a small commission from qualifying purchases.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','How To Choose The Best Carry-On Luggage','','inherit','closed','closed','','2562-revision-v1','','','2019-11-06 16:50:31','2019-11-06 21:50:31','',2562,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/11/06/2562-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2574,1,'2019-11-24 12:04:20','2019-11-24 17:04:20','<!-- wp:image {\"id\":1938,\"align\":\"right\",\"width\":261,\"height\":261} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright is-resized\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/IMG_0091-1024x1024.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-1938\" width=\"261\" height=\"261\"/><figcaption>Rejected and Retired Suitcases</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<p>I spend a lot of time with my luggage. I average 40-50 trips and 100,000 miles a year. I hate shopping for luggage, though. I\'d putting off buying a new bag for a long time, as in years, until I was left with no working luggage when the handle died on my vintage Swiss Army black roller. Before that, the airlines forcibly grounded my Bluesmart smart bag for an unremovable lithium battery, and I had to retire my grey Samsonite bag after the wheels got wonky — the rubber wore off and the wheels splayed out after 2½ years of trundling it across New Orleans sidewalks.</p>\n<p>With my next trip looming, I was finally forced to shop for a new suitcase. But what to buy? I started with a survey of fellow travelers. Actually, it was more like stalking; I eyeballed every piece of luggage that passed by me for two weeks. Then I wandered through the basement luggage departments of a couple of Macy\'s, opening bags and waving off clerks. After all that, I gave into my OCD and built this prioritized carry-on luggage shopping evaluation criteria:</p>\n<ol>\n<li><em>It has to fit into my carrier\'s carry-on sizer</em>. Now that may seem a bit of a “duh”, but there is some ambiguity; the <a href=\"https://travel-made-simple.com/carry-on-size-chart/\">approved height</a> of a carry-on bag varies by airline between 19 and 22-inches. If I want to play it safe, I’d go for a 20-inch bag, but then I also want to maximize my carry-on space. Most US carriers accept a 22-inch bag and that’s mostly what I fly. So for my main bag, I go for maximum packing volume and choose a 22-inch bag.</li>\n<li><em>And my carrier\'s weight limit (if they have one)</em>. Many European carriers have a size&nbsp;<em>and</em> a weight limit. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/05/30/podcast-121-tsa-lines-my-luggage-is-where/\">episode #121</a>, I talked about the baggage strip tease I had to do at the Wow Air desk in Reykjavik to make their 7 kg/15 lbs carry-on weight limit. My 22-inch bag is 7 lbs, taking up almost half of the weight allowance. So last month, after booking some flights in and out of Riga, Latvia on AirBaltic, I bought a <a href=\"https://amzn.to/32lIURe\">much lighter 20-inch bag</a>.&nbsp;</li>\n<li>I<em>t needs to be black</em>. As I said in my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/10/18/ruthless-packing-tips/\">Ruthless Packing Tips post</a>, black not only makes you look thinner, it makes your bag look thinner to gate agents scanning for bag-sizer bait. Black also doesn\'t show stains. My grey Samsonite bag, after 3-4 months of my travel schedule, started to look a lot less non-black. Smudges from grease on overhead bin hinges, muck from taxi trunks, muddy water from New Orleans gutters, spilled coffee…. It\'s why I can\'t have nice luggage.</li>\n<li><em>Two wheels, not four</em>. This is more of a personal preference. My Bluesmart was a 4-wheel spinner and my wife swears by hers, but because the 4 wheels have to extend from the bottom of the bag, spinners sacrifice packing space for agility. Also, I find 4-wheelers have a tendency to wander off -- rolling away down ramps or on uneven floors. I go for the 2-wheeler, and with the biggest wheels I can find to make it an easier, smoother pull. I was surprised how much this limited my selection. Spinners definitely rule.</li>\n<li><em>The inside of the suitcase has to be plain and empty</em>. No clever collection of zipped compartments, or built-in suit hangers, or ratcheting clothes dividers; just a wide open box that I\'m free to structure how I want for each trip. I was surprised how this also limited my selection. Indeed, in the end, I couldn’t find just a plain box, and settled for a bag where I could detach the suit hanger and clothes divider and stash them in the back of a closet somewhere, never to be seen again.</li>\n<li><em>Buy on-line</em>. A <a href=\"https://www.testfacts.com/luggage-prices-analyzed/\">recent study</a> of 32,672 luggage price showed&nbsp;that you can save an average of $110/39% buying on-line.&nbsp;Walmart and Target’s on-line stores had the highest discounts. And while&nbsp;Amazon was in 10th place for average discount (in the 40% range), it was tops with the greatest variety — over 12,000 luggage items.</li>\n</ol>\n<p>So what did I buy? For my main bag, I bought a black <a href=\"https://www.swissarmy.com/us/en&amp;eoq=!t/Products/Travel-Gear/Werks-Traveler-5-0/collection/trg-collection/travelgear_collection_TRA-C2955\">Victorinox Werks Traveler 5.0</a> 22-inch 2-wheeler. Victorinox is what used to be Swiss Army; I figured if my last bag survived 10 years of hard mileage, that said something for durability. However, Victorinox has moved to a new model year, to Werks 6.0, which doesn\'t appear to have a 22-inch or a 2-wheel option. If you\'re OK with spinners, the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/33mYDkl\">Werks 5.0 22-inch spinner</a> is still available on Amazon. My 2-wheeler is a solid bag; highly recommended.</p>\n<p>For my European budget travel, and for 2-day trips where I don\'t need all the space of the Victorinox, I landed on the the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/32lIURe\">TravelPro Maxlite 5</a>. It fit the AirBaltic dimensions, it\'s one of the lighter bags I saw at 5.4 lbs, and my daughter has had a good run with her TravelPro bag. Mine has worked well on two trips -- hopscotching through the Baltics and then a quick trip down to Charlottesville, VA. Another <a href=\"https://amzn.to/32lIURe\">solid bag</a> that\'s highly recommended.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><em>Note: I purchased these bags with my own money. This is not a paid endorsement. This post contains links to Amazon where I can earn a small commission from qualifying purchases.</em></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','How To Choose The Best Carry-On Luggage','','inherit','closed','closed','','2562-revision-v1','','','2019-11-24 12:04:20','2019-11-24 17:04:20','',2562,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/11/24/2562-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2575,1,'2019-11-30 15:25:13','2019-11-30 20:25:13','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\">\n<p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/2D576E07-6546-4D4B-9D64-0E593596FB0C.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2581 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/2D576E07-6546-4D4B-9D64-0E593596FB0C-268x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"268\" height=\"300\" /></a></p>\n<figcaption>Selfies with Friends in Tallinn</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p>Wrapping up my time in Charlottesville, VA with some \"bleisure\" travel, as well as some pure leisure travel with a quick trip in the Baltics. And a listener talks about the reason for his out-and-back day trip from Washington, DC to Hong Kong. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_157.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #157: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago just off the shores of Lake Michigan toward the end of what has been a record-breaking cold November. The first half of the month here was the coldest in 148 years with an average temperature of 31 degrees, which compares to an average high for November of 50 degrees, and a <em>low</em> of 39. But what’s been worse has been the early snow -- 3½ inches of snow on Halloween (another record) and again on Veterans Day. And by some incredible strokes of luck (as opposed to any foresight on my part), I dodged both snows -- by flying home from Charlottesville, VA the day before Halloween, and scheduling a week off the road the week of November 11. It’s <em>always</em> better to be lucky than good.</li><li>Last week was my last week in Charlottesville, finishing up an 18-week project that started in July. A year ago, when I wrapped up a long run in Charlottesville and didn’t know if/when I’d be back, I took an afternoon to hit Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s home that was only a 10-15 minute drive from the client. It was one of those things I wanted to do, but kept putting off -- I’ll get to it -- and here I was, the last day, and so squoze it in between meetings and calls.</li><li>With that in mind, I did just a touch more planning this year, and on my <em>second-to-last </em>trip, the week between the Halloween and Veterans Day snow storms, I flew in a day early on Monday, but to IAD rather than <a href=\"http://charlottesville-airport.com/\" class=\"aioseop-link\">CHO</a>, instead renting a car, and driving the length of the 105-mile <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Skyline Drive (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.nps.gov/shen/planyourvisit/driving-skyline-drive.htm\" target=\"_blank\">Skyline Drive</a> down to Charlottesville along the tops of the Blue Ridge Mountains through Shenandoah National Park. I was probably a week late for peak leaf peeping, but it was still pretty, especially when looking west over the Shenandoah Valley.&nbsp; I don’t think I would’ve made a special trip to drive Skyline Drive, but since I was in the neighborhood, why not? And it turned out to be just a great drive -- clear blue skies, still some good leaf color, and on a Monday, not a lot of people on that 2-lane road.&nbsp;</li><li>And then last Thursday, flying out of <a href=\"http://charlottesville-airport.com/\" class=\"aioseop-link\">CHO</a> for the last time until I don’t know when, I had to order one last beer at the <a href=\"http://www.gocho.com/concessions/\" class=\"aioseop-link\">Tailwind</a>, the airport bar. For an airport with only 5 gates, the Tailwind always has a great rotation of local craft beers. And there’s a mini-Cheers effect -- maybe not everyone knows my name, but Lyn the bartender recognizes me from my 4-year off-and-on presence in her bar. When I showed back up in July after a 9-month absence, she recognized me right away. So I had to get one last beer from her. I looked at the blackboard and ordered the stout from Blue Mountain Brewery, which was not far from when I ended my trip down Skyline Drive. I was getting over a bit of a cold; the IPA would’ve been a bit rough on the back of my throat. That <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Dark Hollow Stout (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/16352/39417/\" target=\"_blank\">Dark Hollow Stout</a> went down smoother, but what I didn’t quite pick up on is that it’s a 10% alcohol beer. Bit of an eye opener at 11:30am. Made for a good nap on the flight home.</li><li>Bridge Music -- Dive Deep (Loveshadow remix) by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/50488 Ft: Loveshadow</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Mark Skinner sent a note to comments@travelcommons.com a few days ago<ul><li>Hi Mark, Long time listener. So your tag line \"It\'s more about the journey than the destination” hit home to me with what has to be my oddest business trip yet. Tomorrow, I’m flying Washington to Hong Kong, via EWR, arriving Monday afternoon, and then returning on Tuesday morning! I’m basically there for dinner…</li><li>No meetings in Hong Kong, it’s all about taking a cosmic ray detector for NASA on an over-the-pole flight; which the UA flights 179/180 do quite well, EWR-HKG-EWR. They want to understand the amount of radiation from space inside the aircraft cabin. I’ll be in the air longer than on the ground. I’m planning to stay on and to sleep at “normal” east coast times, which means while I’ll have a hotel room by HKG, I’ll be awake then (night in HK, but daytime hours for me).&nbsp; Happily my upgrades to Polaris Business both ways have been confirmed! Otherwise the 16 hr flight would seem even longer…</li></ul></li><li>Oh, my! There’s a nice end-of-year mileage run! I told Mark that his itinerary reminds me of one I did 12 years ago when I flew to London for a lunch meeting to wrap up a project. I flew ORD-LHR, showered in the arrivals lounge, took a car out to Reading, gave the final readout over lunch, hopped back in the car to LHR, and caught the afternoon flight to DEN. I always say that ORD-LHR-DEN run was the epitome of \"stupid\" travel, but Mark has a good reason for his out-&amp;-back.&nbsp; Given the amount of time I’ve spent at 35,000 ft over the past 35 years, I’m not sure I want to know the results of Mark’s measurements.</li><li>United Airlines sent out a link promoting a jet lag app, <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Timeshifter (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.timeshifter.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Timeshifter</a>. Though Mark won’t need one because he’s staying on Eastern Time during his quick jaunt to Hong Kong, I decided to give it a try for my trip to Latvia, Estonia, and Finland. Going east, from the US to Europe, has always been easier for me. My usual routine - I skip the seat-back entertainment for 4-6 hrs of shut-eye (I wouldn’t call it true sleep) on the flight over, eat breakfast when I arrive even if I’m not hungry, get outside as much as possible, take a 30-minute nap after check-in, push through until 11:30pm that first night, and then set an alarm for, say, 7am the next morning. That usually resets my body clock and I’m pretty much good-to-go for the rest of the trip. Timeshifter added two things to my routine: starting to shift to destination time a few days before leaving, moving bedtime and wake-up time an hour earlier each day - going to bed at 10 instead of 11 and getting up at 5 instead of 6 the next morning. The second thing was taking melatonin before going to bed, which I tried by I’m not sure that it really does anything for me. It’s also a well-designed app that notifies you about things like when to seek out direct sunlight and when to start and stop with caffeinated drinks. I used the free first plan. Not sure I’ll pay the $9.99 for another plan, though.</li><li>And speaking of caffeinated drinks, last week, staying at the Omni Hotel in Charlottesville, they gave me two door hangers -- one for each night -- that I could exchange for a drink delivered to my door in the morning, or a beer at the bar in the evening. The first night, since I’d already had a margarita at dinner, I skipped the bar for something in the morning. Looking at the door hanger, my choices were coffee, tea, and Red Bull. Wow. Guess they’re catering to all kinds of morning afters. It wasn’t a big margarita, so I went for the cup of tea.</li><li>Following up on last episode’s carry-on discussion, about buying a new bag to meet Finnair and AirBaltic’s size and weight limits, My new <a href=\"https://amzn.to/32lIURe\">TravelPro Maxlite bag</a> worked like a charm. I packed a week of clothes and didn’t tagged by any gate agents. It even fit in the overheads of the ATR prop jobs that hopscotched us around between Riga, Tallinn, and Helsinki. On one of our passes through Helsinki, I saw an AirBaltic luggage sizer and scale by an empty customer service desk, so I decided to check the bag out. It was a bit of a force fit into the sizer and it weighed in at 8½ kilos, just a bit over the limit. Glad I didn’t catch a gate agent’s eye.</li><li>And since we’ve been talking about carry-on luggage over the past couple of episodes, so I pulled together all those threads into a new <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/11/06/how-to-choose-the-best-carry-on-luggage/\">“how to choose a new carry-on” blog post</a>. It went up at the beginning of the month, updating the one from last February, just in time for the Christmas shopping season. If you or a frequent traveling loved one needs a new carry-on, check it out, complete with Amazon Affiliate links if you want to toss a buck TravelCommons’ way.</li><li>And speaking of prop jobs, I definitely misfired on my Finnair seat choices between Helsinki and Riga. I was more focused on choosing seats for the long flights between Chicago and Helsinki, and didn’t pay much attention to the 45-minute flight to and from Riga. So just picked one off the seat map where there would be with no one next to me - 5C both ways - which, as it turned out, was empty for a reason, because it was right next to the propeller. I had forgotten how loud those propellers get on take-off. I popped on my Bose Noise Cancelling headphones (which, I noticed, are starting to show a good bit of wear; so I might be doing a bit of Black Friday/Cyber Monday shopping) on taxi, but when the pilot revved up the propellers, the noise cancellation started to cut in and out. The headphones were having to generate huge “anti-waves” to cancel the prop noise and the battery was too low to support the load. Luckily, I always carry extra triple-AAA batteries in the case. But while I was swapping the battery, the noise, the oscillation pressure was killer. I couldn’t get those headphones back over my ears fast enough. If you go to the <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">TravelCommons’ Instagram page</a>, you can see <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/p/B37C8LVnRkd/\">a bit of video</a> out the window of my HEL-RIX flight complete with a slow-motion propeller.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music - Drops of H2O ( The Filtered Water Treatment ) by J.Lang (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djlang59/37792 Ft: Airtone</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Notes from the Baltics: Riga, Latvia and Tallinn, Estonia</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>At the end of October, right after pushing out <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/10/14/podcast-156-airport-satisfaction-escooters-smaller-luggage/\">the last episode</a>, my son Andrew and I flew east for a week hopscotching through the Baltics -- Riga, Latvia; Tallinn, Estonia; and Helsinki, Finland. Why the Baltics? I’m not really sure. I’m sure we had a good rationale when we first thought of the trip a few years ago, but now, it wasn’t much more than “here are a few kinda outta-the-way countries that might be cool to wander around.”&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>Andrew booked our flights -- Finnair from ORD to Riga with a connection in Helsinki. The Finnair service was fine, a pretty standard Airbus A330 but with lots of polka-dot Marimekko patterns on everything. I’d forgotten they were a Finnish company. I skipped using my UK passport one last time for a quick pass down the EU passport lane, deciding not to strand Andrew in the “everyone else” passport path, which led to an unexpected grilling from the Finnish border control cop about the details of my itinerary. Then he spent a good bit of time paging back and forth through my passport stamps. Can’t think of what he found interesting -- the Chinese visa, the two Indian visas, maybe the Moroccan stamps from that day trip to Tangiers 3 years ago? Eventually, he decided to put his Helsinki stamp right next to August’s Krakow stamp and then open the gate so I could walk through.&nbsp;</li><li>I’m not quite sure what I expected from Riga, but it turned out to be a nice, mid-sized city. Maybe it shouldn’t have, but I was surprised at how well-preserved the city center is, especially the buildings with the over-the-top Art Nouveau edifices with huge faces over the doorways and carved figures holding up window sills. It took some money, though. Down by the river, I saw two buildings side-by-side, the one on the right recently refinished and repainted; the one on the left was still waiting its turn, but time is running out. The Art Nouveau look was there, but muted under the grime and soot and flaking plaster; with some relief decorations on the window balcony worn away.</li><li>I was surprised, though, at how empty Riga’s old town was in the middle of a Tuesday. The streets were empty. Where was everyone? Maybe across the river where it looks like they’ve built new modern office towers. I was glad I didn’t book our hotel down here.</li><li>The <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riga_Central_Market\">Central Market</a> down river from the Old Town was much more lively, and also where Riga stopped looking so Scandi and started looking a bit more post-Soviet. The busses and streetcars orbiting the market looked left over from the early ‘90’s. But I liked it. Most of the people here seemed to be doing their own grocery shopping -- unlike food markets in places like Paris and Barcelona that seem to have more people taking pictures of fish than buying them. But the place is so big that I don’t see that it could survive just on food porn tourism. They repurposed a set of World War I zeppelin hangars -- one for fishmongers, one of butchers, one for greengrocers, and then part of one with some restaurants where Andrew and I made lunch from a round loaf of Uzbeki bread and some tortellini-looking dumplings filled with lamb and venison. It was pretty good.</li><li>Then it was time to go search out some beer taprooms which had us walking sorta northeast, on a straight line away from the river, away from Old Town, across the canal and parks and past the embassies that sorta ring Old Town, and back into a less renovated landscape of storefronts and converted factories, some places run down, others with the hipster-signaling strands of naked edison bulbs over wood tables. Wandering into a courtyard off a busy street, we found&nbsp; <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Labietis (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.labietis.lv/en\" target=\"_blank\">Labietis</a> that had wide and interesting mix of beers -- herb beers and fruit beers, as well as the usual batch of IPAs. The names were interesting, also. <a href=\"https://www.labietis.lv/en/our-beers/fog\">Migla</a>, which they translated as “Fog” had hemp and peppermint in a light pale ale. Not sure it was my top pick, but I gotta give them props for trying something different.</li><li>It was a 45-minute prop job flight from Riga to Tallinn on AirBaltic. I did have a bit of a travel snob realization, though -- when everyone is getting on the same bus for a plane, boarding status is kinda meaningless. Anyhow, AirBaltic was fine service -- no hassles with carryon luggage, no annoying on-board upsells, though with only 45 minutes, there’s not too much damage they could do. Heading for the cab rank at Tallinn, I saw the same warning signs they had at Riga airport - there’s no regulated taxi fees so be careful which taxi you get into. At Riga, we used one of the airport-approved cabs with a meter. At Tallinn, we used <a href=\"https://bolt.eu/en/\">Bolt</a>, a ride-sharing app that looks a lot like Lyft. I used earlier in Krakow and had good luck with it, and it worked fine in Tallinn too - €4 from the airport to Old Town seemed a pretty good deal.</li><li>I can see why Tallinn is popular for long weekends. The Old Town is just that -- winding cobblestone streets, lots of churches and restored old buildings, and lots of shops in those old buildings. It’s up on a hill, so lots of scenic overlook Instagram moments. You could easily spend a couple of days wandering the streets, popping in and out of churches and museums… and shops and bars.</li><li>But after a half-day, I was ready to breach the Old Town’s walls to see what else there was to Tallinn. The first stop was a market by the train station - <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Balti Jaama Turg (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.visitestonia.com/en/baltic-station-market\" target=\"_blank\">Balti Jaama Turg</a>. Nowhere near the size of Riga’s Central Market, we strolled around until, after the 4th or 5th fruit stand and butcher stall, our minds wandered to lunch. We bought a couple different kinds of Uzbeki breads from one stand and a couple of beers from another. The breads were stuffed with some sliced meat cooked in a warming, floral spice, maybe cinnamon. It was very good, though I never got the story of why all the Uzbeki food up here.</li><li>We walked out and around the train station, and through a collection of restaurants in small square buildings, old cargo containers and a couple of railcars. As much as I liked the Uzbeki breads, I wish I’d seen these places first. On the other side was something called <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Telliskivi Creative City. (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://telliskivi.cc/en/\" target=\"_blank\">Telliskivi Creative City.</a> It looked like an old office or administrative building had been converted to a kinda “makers” mall, where people were doing small-scale clothing or leather work in the back of their space and selling it out of the front. We took a quick pass through it though didn’t see anything we wanted to haul back to the US.</li><li>We walked kinda north-northeast, through the<a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\" Kalamaja neighborhood (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.visittallinn.ee/eng/visitor/discover/articles-guides/kalamaja\" target=\"_blank\"> Kalamaja neighborhood</a> toward the harbor. Kalamaja was the exact opposite of the Old Town - wood buildings vs. stone; straight paved streets vs. windy cobblestones; groups of flats vs. castles and government buildings. A few blocks off the harbor we hit the <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Põhjala Brewery &amp; Tap Room (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://pohjalabeer.com/taproom\" target=\"_blank\">Põhjala Brewery &amp; Tap Room</a>. It was in what looked like a very recently renovated stone building; workers were in the midst of renovating the building next to it. Where Labietis felt very native -- funky space tucked away behind some kinda decaying buildings -- Põhjala could’ve been any new taproom in the US -- big U-shaped bar, open kitchen, BBQ on the menu. The beer was very good; the BBQ maybe less successful, but having lived in Memphis and Dallas, I’m a bit of a BBQ snob. The smoked trout dish, though -- that was great.&nbsp;</li><li>We walked back towards town on a path that ran along the harbor. There were lots of new apartment buildings across the road -- 3-4 stories with floor-to-ceiling windows and enclosed balconies facing the harbor. There wasn’t a lot there… yet. But you could see it coming.</li><li>We stopped at the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/ubajahumal/\">Uba Ja Humal</a> beer store before heading back through the Old Town walls. We walked through the front store to the taproom in the back, complete with a DJ who was set up between the back coolers. Locals would pull a can out of a cooler, pay for it at the bar, get a glass, and sit down at a table with their friends. Tallinn had that kind of easy-going vibe.</li><li>Both cities have done a good job renovating and preserving their Old Towns, and now seem to be expanding past that, repurposing older, maybe Soviet-era buildings to something a bit hipper, edgier (?), less traditional. I came away liking Tallinn a bit more than Riga, but maybe it’s because they’re a little bit further down that hipper, less traditional path.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #157</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li> And if you check out the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> page, you can click thru to highlights from Riga and Tallinn.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_157.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #157 — Notes from the Baltics: Riga, Latvia and Tallinn, Estonia','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-157-notes-from-the-baltics-riga-latvia-and-tallinn-estonia','','https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/11/06/how-to-choose-the-best-carry-on-luggage/\nhttp://www.gocho.com/concessions/','2021-10-01 16:57:09','2021-10-01 21:57:09','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=2575',0,'post','',2),
(2576,1,'2019-11-29 18:09:47','2019-11-29 23:09:47','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\">\n<p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/IMG_0159.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1402\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/IMG_0159-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"225\" height=\"300\"></a></p><figcaption>This Won\'t Help Your Flier Sat Score</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>In this episode, we talk with Michael Taylor, author of <a href=\"https://www.jdpower.com/business/press-releases/2019-north-america-airport-satisfaction-study\">JD Power\'s 2019 Airport Satisfaction Survey</a>, about what keeps fliers happy. I also talk about what I like about eScooters, shopping for a smaller bag for upcoming flights on a Euro budget airline, and how Hertz\'s contract updates remind me to delete my Bluetooth pairings in rental cars. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_156.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/696032101&color=%23ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #156: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago in the middle of what looks like a 6-week run of solid travel. Traveled to DC, Charlottesville, and Nashville, in that order, in the 3 weeks since the last episode. Heading back to Charlottesville this week, then a week hopscotching through the Baltics with my son Andrew -- Riga, Latvia; Talinn, Estonia; Helsinki, Finland -- and then back down to Charlottesville. </li><li> I flew Southwest on my non-Charlottesville flights -- into DC Reagan and Nashville -- and United again to Charlottesville. The Southwest flights went smoothly, except for trying to get to Chicago Midway for the DC flight. The Uber driver didn’t follow the app’s recommended route; instead, he pretended he was a cab driver and took the normal route down the Stevenson Expressway which was crawling due to an earlier accident. I wasn’t paying attention - first time I’ve had an Uber driver freelance on me - and didn’t notice he’d skipped the exit to the faster path until it was too late. We made our flight, but not without a bit of hustle through Midway. No tip, let alone a 5-star review for that guy.</li><li> Southwest flies into the old Terminal A at what I still call Washington National. I went to college in DC in the early ‘80’s, before it was named for President Reagan and when Terminal A was pretty much all that was there. I had forgotten what a long schlepp it is from that terminal to the Metro station. I remember way back then asking someone why they built the Metro station so far away. “Because they’re going to build new terminals right across from it.” Which they finally did, some 20 years after that Metro station was opened. Sometimes it seems that airport planning horizons are not in years, or even decades; feels more like they’re planning in lifetimes.</li><li> In between the Southwest flights, my United flight continued the string of disruptions trying to get into or out of Charlottesville. I checked that my flight was on-time before calling an Uber -- no weather delays at either end, United and FlightAware apps say the inbound plane is on-time…. Then, halfway to ORD, I get the text from United; a 2½-hour delay for crew arrival. What!? The next text “Because of crew scheduling disruptions this evening in Chicago, we’ve assigned your flight a new crew…. We know this delay wasn’t in your plans today, so we appreciate your patience.” No shit a 2½-hour delay wasn’t in my plans, especially when it’s because United stole our original crew because they screwed up their scheduling. And really United, you can’t find another pilot in ORD, your largest hub, that’s a little closer? I tell you what else isn’t in my plans, flying United to Charlottesville this week. </li><li> Bridge Music -- <em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/stefsax/7785\" target=\"_blank\">Awel</a> </em>by stefsax (c) copyright 2006 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/stefsax/7785 </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>That’s the sound of my new <a href=\"https://www.marriott.com/loyalty/member-benefits/titanium.mi\">Marriott Bonvoy Lifetime Titanium Elite</a> card hitting the kitchen counter. The mailer package was appropriately upscale, but the sheer weight of the thing stunned me. I put a quick video of it on the TravelCommons Facebook page. Cate Rose commented “Hope it scans into your Stocard app so you don’t actually have to carry it in your luggage allowance”. My thought exactly.</li><li> I got a note that Chicago’s electric scooter pilot ends tomorrow, which made me realize that I’ve seen them in just about every city I’ve been to this summer -- Budapest, Krakow, Charlottesville, Nashville, Washington, DC. I think the only places I didn’t see them were in Scotland and Ireland. They’re handy; because they’re dockless, I’ve found they have a wider distribution than, say, a traditional docked bike share and you can take them directly to your planned destination. And they’re a good fill-in between walking and an Uber or a Lyft. And, they’re fun! When I was in DC a couple of weeks ago, I was in the <a href=\"https://washington.org/visit-dc/neighborhoods/brookland\">Brookland</a> neighborhood in the Northeast part of town, and wanted to try out a new taproom there, <a href=\"http://www.rightproperbrewing.com/what-we-do\">Right Proper Brewing</a>. Now Brookland is not the nicest part of DC. It’s much better than when I went to school there, but there are still iffy parts. I wasn’t completely comfortable walking down to Right Proper from the Brookland Metro stop, but it seemed too short for an Uber ride and there was no bus that went down there. But, there was a scooter a couple of blocks from the Metro station. Running down 9th St at 10 mph felt a bit better than speedwalking at 4. And could leave it right in front of the taproom. It was exactly what I wanted. Two problems I’ve seen -- first, too many people riding them on the sidewalk, especially in DC. Maybe because I bike a lot in Chicago, I’m comfortable in bike lanes and navigating around cars on the street and keeping an eye out for potholes. I actually wouldn’t be comfortable riding a scooter on the sidewalk; I’d be afraid of popping a pedestrian who suddenly walked in front of me. To me, cars are much more predictable than pedestrians. The second thing, the need to have half-a-dozen scooter apps on your phone. In Chicago, there are 8 scooter companies, in addition to Uber and Lyft’s scooters. And you need to download their app to find and rent their scooter. Which meant that when I wanted to find a scooter near the Brookland Metro stop, I’d have to cycle thru 5 or 6 apps. Except I didn’t because I found an app called <a href=\"https://scootermap.com/\">Scooter Map</a> that shows all the scooter brands on one map. I think it’s targeted at folks who are making money recharging scooters (not quite sure how that works) but it worked fine for me. I fired it up and saw all the different scooters that were near me. One caveat -- I’ve only ridden these scooters on sunny days. I’m not sure how enthusiastic I’d be riding one in the rain or snow. </li><li> For the Baltics trip next week, we’re taking Finnair out and back from Chicago, an early morning ferry ride from Talinn to Helsinki, and then AirBaltic for everything else. Which then got me thinking about luggage sizes, because I bought my current bag, the <a href=\"https://www.swissarmy.com/us/en&amp;eoq=!t/Products/Travel-Gear/Werks-Traveler-5-0/collection/trg-collection/travelgear_collection_TRA-C2955\">Victorinox Werks</a> 22-incher, to use every last inch of US carry-on allowance. It even catches some side-eye from American and United where I have status. So I didn’t figure it’d fit into any European budget carrier’s luggage sizer. Looking up <a href=\"https://www.airbaltic.com/en/cabin-baggage\">AirBaltic’s carry-on allowance</a>, my Victorinox is a couple of inches too tall and an inch too deep. But what really got me shopping for a new bag for this trip is the weight. AirBaltic has an 8 kg/17½ lbs weight limit. In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/05/30/podcast-121-tsa-lines-my-luggage-is-where/\">episode #121</a>, I talked about the baggage strip tease exercise with Wow Air to make their 7 kg/15 lbs carry-on weight limit. I’d take my bag off the scale, pull some clothes out, zip it back up, and put it back on the scale. Still too heavy. Repeat 3 more times until the agent takes pity — or just gets tired of me — and gives me the approval tag to put on my bag. After which I walk about 10 feet, open my bag and put my armful of clothes back in. My Victorinox is a bit over 7 lbs, so not only is it too tall, the bag itself uses over 40% of the weight allowance. And even though I’ve talked before about how much I hate shopping for luggage, I searched for a smaller, lighter bag that wouldn’t cost a fortune, since my Victorinox will stay my primary bag. I landed on the the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/32lIURe\">TravelPro Maxlite 5</a>. I, or rather my daughter has a good history with TravelPro. It fit the AirBaltic dimensions and is one of the lighter bags I saw at 5.4 lbs which is down to 30% of the 8 kg weight allowance. It also meets three of the key suitcase criteria I laid down in the “how to shop for a suitcase” topic in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/01/25/podcast-137-new-years-travel-status-tips-how-to-shop-for-a-suitcase/\">episode #137</a> -- it’s black, it’s a 2-wheeler so no lost space on extended spinner wheels, and the inside is, for the most part, a wide open box without clothes hangers or a bunch of zip compartments. I’m taking it to Charlottesville tomorrow for a shakedown cruise.</li><li> Three years ago, back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/11/22/podcast-125-uber-driver-stories-overseas-for-the-election/\">episode #125</a>, in a Travel Security tip, I talked about the need to delete your phone’s Bluetooth pairing when you return a rental car. Usually when I go to pair my phone, I’ll first go through and delete 3-5 pairings before pairing my own. And they all have personalized names like “Timmy’s iPhone”. And most phones by default will download your contacts to the car when paired, so leave all of their contacts and phone numbers in their rental. That is just bad in so many ways. And now Hertz has gotten around to noticing it. In their newest rental terms and conditions, they specifically carve out any liability from you leaving a Bluetooth pairing behind. It’s a pain to remember, especially if you’re running for a flight, but as you’re taking that last scan around the car for your sunglasses and iPhone, remember not to leave your identity behind either.</li><li>Bridge Music -- Black Rainbow by Pitx (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Pitx/19513 Ft: ERH, acclivity</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Keeping Fliers Happy </strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A couple of weeks ago, JD Power released their 2019 North American Airport Satisfaction Study.&nbsp; The headline - “North American Airports Struggle to Keep Travelers Happy Amid Construction Delays and Surging Passenger Volumes” caught my eye, so I reached out to the study’s author, Michael Taylor, to dig into it a bit more. And so last Friday, we had a wide-ranging conversation. I was going to edit it down, but as I listened to it, I couldn’t think about what to cut. So here it is in its entirety…</li><li>Interview with <a href=\"https://www.jdpower.com/business/content/michael-taylor\">Michael Taylor</a>, Travel Intelligence Lead at J.D. Power</li><li>Thanks again to Michael for taking the time to talk to us. Here\'s the <a href=\"https://www.jdpower.com/business/press-releases/2019-north-america-airport-satisfaction-study\">link</a> to the study summary on the JD Power website.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #156</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li> And if you check out the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> page, you can click thru to highlights from my trips to Budapest and Ireland. And if you follow it, you can catch some pics from next week’s trip through the Baltics.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_155.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #156 — Airport Satisfaction; eScooters; Smaller Luggage','','inherit','closed','closed','','2543-revision-v1','','','2019-11-29 18:09:47','2019-11-29 23:09:47','',2543,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/11/29/2543-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0);
INSERT INTO `wp_posts` VALUES
(2577,1,'2019-11-29 18:27:14','2019-11-29 23:27:14','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\">\n<p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/IMG_0159.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1402\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/IMG_0159-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"225\" height=\"300\"></a></p><figcaption>This Won\'t Help Your Flier Sat Score</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>In this episode, we talk with Michael Taylor, author of <a href=\"https://www.jdpower.com/business/press-releases/2019-north-america-airport-satisfaction-study\">JD Power\'s 2019 Airport Satisfaction Survey</a>, about what keeps fliers happy. I also talk about what I like about eScooters, shopping for a smaller bag for upcoming flights on a Euro budget airline, and how Hertz\'s contract updates remind me to delete my Bluetooth pairings in rental cars. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_156.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/696032101&color=%23ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #157: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago just off the shores of Lake Michigan toward the end of what has been a record-breaking cold November. The first half of the month here was the coldest in 148 years with an average temperature of 31 degrees, which compares to an average high for November of 50 degrees, and a <em>low</em> of 39. But what’s been worse has been the early snow -- 3½ inches of snow on Halloween (another record) and again on Veterans Day. And by some incredible strokes of luck (as opposed to any foresight on my part), I dodged both snows -- by flying home from Charlottesville, VA the day before Halloween, and scheduling a week off the road the week of November 11. It’s <em>always</em> better to be lucky than good.</li><li>Last week was my last week in Charlottesville, finishing up an 18-week project that started in July. A year ago, when I wrapped up a long run in Charlottesville and didn’t know if/when I’d be back, I took an afternoon to hit Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s home that was only a 10-15 minute drive from the client. It was one of those things I wanted to do, but kept putting off -- I’ll get to it -- and here I was, the last day, and so squoze it in between meetings and calls.</li><li>With that in mind, I did just a touch more planning this year, and on my <em>second-to-last </em>trip, the week between the Halloween and Veterans Day snow storms, I flew in a day early on Monday, but to IAD rather than CHO, instead renting a car, and driving the length of the 105-mile <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Skyline Drive (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.nps.gov/shen/planyourvisit/driving-skyline-drive.htm\" target=\"_blank\">Skyline Drive</a> down to Charlottesville along the tops of the Blue Ridge Mountains through Shenandoah National Park. I was probably a week late for peak leaf peeping, but it was still pretty, especially when looking west over the Shenandoah Valley.  I don’t think I would’ve made a special trip to drive Skyline Drive, but since I was in the neighborhood, why not? And it turned out to be just a great drive -- clear blue skies, still some good leaf color, and on a Monday, not a lot of people on that 2-lane road. </li><li>And then last Thursday, flying out of CHO for the last time until I don’t know when, I had to order one last beer at the <a href=\"http://www.gocho.com/concessions/\">Tailwind</a>, the airport bar. For an airport with only 5 gates, the Tailwind always has a great rotation of local craft beers. And there’s a mini-Cheers effect -- maybe not everyone knows my name, but Lyn the bartender recognizes me from my 4-year off-and-on presence in her bar. When I showed back up in July after a 9-month absence, she recognized me right away. So I had to get one last beer from her. I looked at the blackboard and ordered the stout from Blue Mountain Brewery, which was not far from when I ended my trip down Skyline Drive. I was getting over a bit of a cold; the IPA would’ve been a bit rough on the back of my throat. That <a href=\"https://www.beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/16352/39417/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Dark Hollow Stout (opens in a new tab)\">Dark Hollow Stout</a> went down smoother, but what I didn’t quite pick up on is that it’s a 10% alcohol beer. Bit of an eye opener at 11:30am. Made for a good nap on the flight home.</li><li>Bridge Music</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Mark Skinner sent a note to comments@travelcommons.com a few days ago<ul><li>Hi Mark, Long time listener. So your tag line \"It\'s more about the journey than the destination” hit home to me with what has to be my oddest business trip yet. Tomorrow, I’m flying Washington to Hong Kong, via EWR, arriving Monday afternoon, and then returning on Tuesday morning! I’m basically there for dinner…</li><li>No meetings in Hong Kong, it’s all about taking a cosmic ray detector for NASA on an over-the-pole flight; which the UA flights 179/180 do quite well, EWR-HKG-EWR. They want to understand the amount of radiation from space inside the aircraft cabin. I’ll be in the air longer than on the ground. I’m planning to stay on and to sleep at “normal” east coast times, which means while I’ll have a hotel room by HKG, I’ll be awake then (night in HK, but daytime hours for me).  Happily my upgrades to Polaris Business both ways have been confirmed! Otherwise the 16 hr flight would seem even longer…</li></ul></li><li>Oh, my! There’s a nice end-of-year mileage run! I told Mark that his itinerary reminds me of one I did 12 years ago when I flew to London for a lunch meeting to wrap up a project. I flew ORD-LHR, showered in the arrivals lounge, took a car out to Reading, gave the final readout over lunch, hopped back in the car to LHR, and caught the afternoon flight to DEN. I always say that ORD-LHR-DEN run was the epitome of \"stupid\" travel, but Mark has a good reason for his out-&amp;-back.  Given the amount of time I’ve spent at 35,000 ft over the past 35 years, I’m not sure I want to know the results of Mark’s measurements.</li><li>United Airlines sent out a link promoting a jet lag app, <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Timeshifter (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.timeshifter.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Timeshifter</a>. Though Mark won’t need one because he’s staying on Eastern Time during his quick jaunt to Hong Kong, I decided to give it a try for my trip to Latvia, Estonia, and Finland. Going east, from the US to Europe, has always been easier for me. My usual routine - I skip the seat-back entertainment for 4-6 hrs of shut-eye (I wouldn’t call it true sleep) on the flight over, eat breakfast when I arrive even if I’m not hungry, get outside as much as possible, take a 30-minute nap after check-in, push through until 11:30pm that first night, and then set an alarm for, say, 7am the next morning. That usually resets my body clock and I’m pretty much good-to-go for the rest of the trip. Timeshifter added two things to my routine: starting to shift to destination time a few days before leaving, moving bedtime and wake-up time an hour earlier each day - going to bed at 10 instead of 11 and getting up at 5 instead of 6 the next morning. The second thing was taking melatonin before going to bed, which I tried by I’m not sure that it really does anything for me. It’s also a well-designed app that notifies you about things like when to seek out direct sunlight and when to start and stop with caffeinated drinks. I used the free first plan. Not sure I’ll pay the $9.99 for another plan, though.</li><li>And speaking of caffeinated drinks, last week, staying at the Omni Hotel in Charlottesville, they gave me two door hangers -- one for each night -- that I could exchange for a drink delivered to my door in the morning, or a beer at the bar in the evening. The first night, since I’d already had a margarita at dinner, I skipped the bar for something in the morning. Looking at the door hanger, my choices were coffee, tea, and Red Bull. Wow. Guess they’re catering to all kinds of morning afters. It wasn’t a big margarita, so I went for the cup of tea.</li><li>Following up on last episode’s carry-on discussion, about buying a new bag to meet Finnair and AirBaltic’s size and weight limits, My new <a href=\"https://amzn.to/32lIURe\">TravelPro Maxlite bag</a> worked like a charm. I packed a week of clothes and didn’t tagged by any gate agents. It even fit in the overheads of the ATR prop jobs that hopscotched us around between Riga, Tallinn, and Helsinki. On one of our passes through Helsinki, I saw an AirBaltic luggage sizer and scale by an empty customer service desk, so I decided to check the bag out. It was a bit of a force fit into the sizer and it weighed in at 8½ kilos, just a bit over the limit. Glad I didn’t catch a gate agent’s eye.</li><li>And since we’ve been talking about carry-on luggage over the past couple of episodes, so I pulled together all those threads into a new <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/11/06/how-to-choose-the-best-carry-on-luggage/\">“how to choose a new carry-on” blog post</a>. It went up at the beginning of the month, updating the one from last February, just in time for the Christmas shopping season. If you or a frequent traveling loved one needs a new carry-on, check it out, complete with Amazon Affiliate links if you want to toss a buck TravelCommons’ way.</li><li>And speaking of prop jobs, I definitely misfired on my Finnair seat choices between Helsinki and Riga. I was more focused on choosing seats for the long flights between Chicago and Helsinki, and didn’t pay much attention to the 45-minute flight to and from Riga. So just picked one off the seat map where there would be with no one next to me - 5C both ways - which, as it turned out, was empty for a reason, because it was right next to the propeller. I had forgotten how loud those propellers get on take-off. I popped on my Bose Noise Cancelling headphones (which, I noticed, are starting to show a good bit of wear; so I might be doing a bit of Black Friday/Cyber Monday shopping) on taxi, but when the pilot revved up the propellers, the noise cancellation started to cut in and out. The headphones were having to generate huge “anti-waves” to cancel the prop noise and the battery was too low to support the load. Luckily, I always carry extra triple-AAA batteries in the case. But while I was swapping the battery, the noise, the oscillation pressure was killer. I couldn’t get those headphones back over my ears fast enough. If you go to the <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">TravelCommons’ Instagram page</a>, you can see <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/p/B37C8LVnRkd/\">a bit of video</a> out the window of my HEL-RIX flight complete with a slow-motion propeller.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music -</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Notes from the Baltics: Riga, Latvia and Tallinn, Estonia</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>At the end of October, right after pushing out the last episode, my son Andrew and I flew east for a week hopscotching through the Baltics -- Riga, Latvia; Tallinn, Estonia; and Helsinki, Finland. Why the Baltics? I’m not really sure. I’m sure we had a good rationale when we first thought of the trip a few years ago, but now, it wasn’t much more than “here are a few kinda outta-the-way countries that might be cool to wander around.”  </li><li>Andrew booked our flights -- Finnair from ORD to Riga with a connection in Helsinki. The Finnair service was fine, a pretty standard Airbus A330 but with lots of polka-dot Marimekko patterns on everything. I’d forgotten they were a Finnish company. I skipped using my UK passport one last time for a quick pass down the EU passport lane, deciding not to strand Andrew in the “everyone else” passport path, which led to an unexpected grilling from the Finnish border control cop about the details of my itinerary. Then he spent a good bit of time paging back and forth through my passport stamps. Can’t think of what he found interesting -- the Chinese visa, the two Indian visas, maybe the Moroccan stamps from that day trip to Tangiers 3 years ago? Eventually, he decided to put his Helsinki stamp right next to August’s Krakow stamp and then open the gate so I could walk through. </li><li>I’m not quite sure what I expected from Riga, but it turned out to be a nice, mid-sized city. Maybe it shouldn’t have, but I was surprised at how well-preserved the city center is, especially the buildings with the over-the-top Art Nouveau edifices with huge faces over the doorways and carved figures holding up window sills. It took some money, though. Down by the river, I saw two buildings side-by-side, the one on the right recently refinished and repainted; the one on the left was still waiting its turn, but time is running out. The Art Nouveau look was there, but muted under the grime and soot and flaking plaster; with some relief decorations on the window balcony worn away.</li><li>I was surprised, though, at how empty Riga’s old town was in the middle of a Tuesday. The streets were empty. Where was everyone? Maybe across the river where it looks like they’ve built new modern office towers. I was glad I didn’t book our hotel down here.</li><li>The Central Market down river from the Old Town was much more lively, and also where Riga stopped looking so Scandi and started looking a bit more post-Soviet. The busses and streetcars orbiting the market looked left over from the early ‘90’s. But I liked it. Most of the people here seemed to be doing their own grocery shopping -- unlike food markets in places like Paris and Barcelona that seem to have more people taking pictures of fish than buying them. But the place is so big that I don’t see that it could survive just on food porn tourism. They repurposed a set of World War I zeppelin hangars -- one for fishmongers, one of butchers, one for greengrocers, and then part of one with some restaurants where Andrew and I made lunch from a round loaf of Uzbeki bread and some tortellini-looking dumplings filled with lamb and venison. It was pretty good.</li><li>Then it was time to go search out some beer taprooms which had us walking sorta northeast, on a straight line away from the river, away from Old Town, across the canal and parks and past the embassies that sorta ring Old Town, and back into a less renovated landscape of storefronts and converted factories, some places run down, others with the hipster-signaling strands of naked edison bulbs over wood tables. Wandering into a courtyard off a busy street, we found  Labietis that had wide and interesting mix of beers -- herb beers and fruit beers, as well as the usual batch of IPAs. The names were interesting, also. Migla, which they translated as “Fog” had hemp and peppermint in a light pale ale. Not sure it was my top pick, but I gotta give them props for trying something different.</li><li>It was a 45-minute prop job flight from Riga to Tallinn on AirBaltic. I did have a bit of a travel snob realization, though -- when everyone is getting on the same bus for a plane, boarding status is kinda meaningless. Anyhow, AirBaltic was fine service -- no hassles with carryon luggage, no annoying on-board upsells, though with only 45 minutes, there’s not too much damage they could do. Heading for the cab rank at Tallinn, I saw the same warning signs they had at Riga airport - there’s no regulated taxi fees so be careful which taxi you get into. At Riga, we used one of the airport-approved cabs with a meter. At Tallinn, we used Bolt, a ride-sharing app that looks a lot like Lyft. I used earlier in Krakow and had good luck with it, and it worked fine in Tallinn too - €4 from the airport to Old Town seemed a pretty good deal.</li><li>I can see why Tallinn is popular for long weekends. The Old Town is just that -- winding cobblestone streets, lots of churches and restored old buildings, and lots of shops in those old buildings. It’s up on a hill, so lots of scenic overlook Instagram moments. You could easily spend a couple of days wandering the streets, popping in and out of churches and museums… and shops and bars.</li><li>But after a half-day, I was ready to breach the Old Town’s walls to see what else there was to Tallinn. The first stop was a market by the train station - Balti Jaama Turg. Nowhere near the size of Riga’s Central Market, we strolled around until, after the 4th or 5th fruit stand and butcher stall, our minds wandered to lunch. We bought a couple different kinds of Uzbeki breads from one stand and a couple of beers from another. The breads were stuffed with some sliced meat cooked in a warming, floral spice, maybe cinnamon. It was very good, though I never got the story of why all the Uzbeki food up here.</li><li>We walked out and around the train station, and through a collection of restaurants in small square buildings, old cargo containers and a couple of railcars. As much as I liked the Uzbeki breads, I wish I’d seen these places first. On the other side was something called Telliskivi Creative City. It looked like an old office or administrative building had been converted to a kinda “makers” mall, where people were doing small-scale clothing or leather work in the back of their space and selling it out of the front. We took a quick pass through it though didn’t see anything we wanted to haul back to the US.</li><li>We walked kinda north-northeast, through the Kalamaja neighborhood toward the harbor. Kalamaja was the exact opposite of the Old Town - wood buildings vs. stone; straight paved streets vs. windy cobblestones; groups of flats vs. castles and government buildings. A few blocks off the harbor we hit the Põhjala Brewery &amp; Tap Room. It was in what looked like a very recently renovated stone building; workers were in the midst of renovating the building next to it. Where Labietis felt very native -- funky space tucked away behind some kinda decaying buildings -- Põhjala could’ve been any new taproom in the US -- big U-shaped bar, open kitchen, BBQ on the menu. The beer was very good; the BBQ maybe less successful, but having lived in Memphis and Dallas, I’m a bit of a BBQ snob. The smoked trout dish, though -- that was great. </li><li>We walked back towards town on a path that ran along the harbor. There were lots of new apartment buildings across the road -- 3-4 stories with floor-to-ceiling windows and enclosed balconies facing the harbor. There wasn’t a lot there… yet. But you could see it coming.</li><li>We stopped at the Uba Ja Humal beer store before heading back through the Old Town walls. We walked through the front store to the taproom in the back, complete with a DJ who was set up between the back coolers. Locals would pull a can out of a cooler, pay for it at the bar, get a glass, and sit down at a table with their friends. Tallinn had that kind of easy-going vibe.</li><li>Both cities have done a good job renovating and preserving their Old Towns, and now seem to be expanding past that, repurposing older, maybe Soviet-era buildings to something a bit hipper, edgier (?), less traditional. I came away liking Tallinn a bit more than Riga, but maybe it’s because they’re a little bit further down that hipper, less traditional path.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li></li><li>A couple of weeks ago, JD Power released their 2019 North American Airport Satisfaction Study.  The headline - “North American Airports Struggle to Keep Travelers Happy Amid Construction Delays and Surging Passenger Volumes” caught my eye, so I reached out to the study’s author, Michael Taylor, to dig into it a bit more. And so last Friday, we had a wide-ranging conversation. I was going to edit it down, but as I listened to it, I couldn’t think about what to cut. So here it is in its entirety…</li><li>Interview with <a href=\"https://www.jdpower.com/business/content/michael-taylor\">Michael Taylor</a>, Travel Intelligence Lead at J.D. Power</li><li>Thanks again to Michael for taking the time to talk to us. Here\'s the <a href=\"https://www.jdpower.com/business/press-releases/2019-north-america-airport-satisfaction-study\">link</a> to the study summary on the JD Power website.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #156</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li> And if you check out the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> page, you can click thru to highlights from my trips to Budapest and Ireland. And if you follow it, you can catch some pics from next week’s trip through the Baltics.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_155.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #157 — Notes from the Baltics: Riga, Latvia and Tallinn, Estonia','','inherit','closed','closed','','2575-revision-v1','','','2019-11-29 18:27:14','2019-11-29 23:27:14','',2575,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/11/29/2575-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2578,1,'2019-11-29 18:41:43','2019-11-29 23:41:43','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\">\n<p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/IMG_0159.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1402\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/IMG_0159-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"225\" height=\"300\" /></a></p>\n<figcaption>This Won\'t Help Your Flier Sat Score</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p>In this episode, we talk with Michael Taylor, author of <a href=\"https://www.jdpower.com/business/press-releases/2019-north-america-airport-satisfaction-study\">JD Power\'s 2019 Airport Satisfaction Survey</a>, about what keeps fliers happy. I also talk about what I like about eScooters, shopping for a smaller bag for upcoming flights on a Euro budget airline, and how Hertz\'s contract updates remind me to delete my Bluetooth pairings in rental cars. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_156.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/696032101&color=%23ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #156: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago in the middle of what looks like a 6-week run of solid travel. Traveled to DC, Charlottesville, and Nashville, in that order, in the 3 weeks since the last episode. Heading back to Charlottesville this week, then a week hopscotching through the Baltics with my son Andrew -- Riga, Latvia; Talinn, Estonia; Helsinki, Finland -- and then back down to Charlottesville. </li><li> I flew Southwest on my non-Charlottesville flights -- into DC Reagan and Nashville -- and United again to Charlottesville. The Southwest flights went smoothly, except for trying to get to Chicago Midway for the DC flight. The Uber driver didn’t follow the app’s recommended route; instead, he pretended he was a cab driver and took the normal route down the Stevenson Expressway which was crawling due to an earlier accident. I wasn’t paying attention - first time I’ve had an Uber driver freelance on me - and didn’t notice he’d skipped the exit to the faster path until it was too late. We made our flight, but not without a bit of hustle through Midway. No tip, let alone a 5-star review for that guy.</li><li> Southwest flies into the old Terminal A at what I still call Washington National. I went to college in DC in the early ‘80’s, before it was named for President Reagan and when Terminal A was pretty much all that was there. I had forgotten what a long schlepp it is from that terminal to the Metro station. I remember way back then asking someone why they built the Metro station so far away. “Because they’re going to build new terminals right across from it.” Which they finally did, some 20 years after that Metro station was opened. Sometimes it seems that airport planning horizons are not in years, or even decades; feels more like they’re planning in lifetimes.</li><li> In between the Southwest flights, my United flight continued the string of disruptions trying to get into or out of Charlottesville. I checked that my flight was on-time before calling an Uber -- no weather delays at either end, United and FlightAware apps say the inbound plane is on-time…. Then, halfway to ORD, I get the text from United; a 2½-hour delay for crew arrival. What!? The next text “Because of crew scheduling disruptions this evening in Chicago, we’ve assigned your flight a new crew…. We know this delay wasn’t in your plans today, so we appreciate your patience.” No shit a 2½-hour delay wasn’t in my plans, especially when it’s because United stole our original crew because they screwed up their scheduling. And really United, you can’t find another pilot in ORD, your largest hub, that’s a little closer? I tell you what else isn’t in my plans, flying United to Charlottesville this week. </li><li> Bridge Music -- <em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/stefsax/7785\" target=\"_blank\">Awel</a> </em>by stefsax (c) copyright 2006 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/stefsax/7785 </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>That’s the sound of my new <a href=\"https://www.marriott.com/loyalty/member-benefits/titanium.mi\">Marriott Bonvoy Lifetime Titanium Elite</a> card hitting the kitchen counter. The mailer package was appropriately upscale, but the sheer weight of the thing stunned me. I put a quick video of it on the TravelCommons Facebook page. Cate Rose commented “Hope it scans into your Stocard app so you don’t actually have to carry it in your luggage allowance”. My thought exactly.</li><li> I got a note that Chicago’s electric scooter pilot ends tomorrow, which made me realize that I’ve seen them in just about every city I’ve been to this summer -- Budapest, Krakow, Charlottesville, Nashville, Washington, DC. I think the only places I didn’t see them were in Scotland and Ireland. They’re handy; because they’re dockless, I’ve found they have a wider distribution than, say, a traditional docked bike share and you can take them directly to your planned destination. And they’re a good fill-in between walking and an Uber or a Lyft. And, they’re fun! When I was in DC a couple of weeks ago, I was in the <a href=\"https://washington.org/visit-dc/neighborhoods/brookland\">Brookland</a> neighborhood in the Northeast part of town, and wanted to try out a new taproom there, <a href=\"http://www.rightproperbrewing.com/what-we-do\">Right Proper Brewing</a>. Now Brookland is not the nicest part of DC. It’s much better than when I went to school there, but there are still iffy parts. I wasn’t completely comfortable walking down to Right Proper from the Brookland Metro stop, but it seemed too short for an Uber ride and there was no bus that went down there. But, there was a scooter a couple of blocks from the Metro station. Running down 9th St at 10 mph felt a bit better than speedwalking at 4. And could leave it right in front of the taproom. It was exactly what I wanted. Two problems I’ve seen -- first, too many people riding them on the sidewalk, especially in DC. Maybe because I bike a lot in Chicago, I’m comfortable in bike lanes and navigating around cars on the street and keeping an eye out for potholes. I actually wouldn’t be comfortable riding a scooter on the sidewalk; I’d be afraid of popping a pedestrian who suddenly walked in front of me. To me, cars are much more predictable than pedestrians. The second thing, the need to have half-a-dozen scooter apps on your phone. In Chicago, there are 8 scooter companies, in addition to Uber and Lyft’s scooters. And you need to download their app to find and rent their scooter. Which meant that when I wanted to find a scooter near the Brookland Metro stop, I’d have to cycle thru 5 or 6 apps. Except I didn’t because I found an app called <a href=\"https://scootermap.com/\">Scooter Map</a> that shows all the scooter brands on one map. I think it’s targeted at folks who are making money recharging scooters (not quite sure how that works) but it worked fine for me. I fired it up and saw all the different scooters that were near me. One caveat -- I’ve only ridden these scooters on sunny days. I’m not sure how enthusiastic I’d be riding one in the rain or snow. </li><li> For the Baltics trip next week, we’re taking Finnair out and back from Chicago, an early morning ferry ride from Talinn to Helsinki, and then AirBaltic for everything else. Which then got me thinking about luggage sizes, because I bought my current bag, the <a href=\"https://www.swissarmy.com/us/en&amp;eoq=!t/Products/Travel-Gear/Werks-Traveler-5-0/collection/trg-collection/travelgear_collection_TRA-C2955\">Victorinox Werks</a> 22-incher, to use every last inch of US carry-on allowance. It even catches some side-eye from American and United where I have status. So I didn’t figure it’d fit into any European budget carrier’s luggage sizer. Looking up <a href=\"https://www.airbaltic.com/en/cabin-baggage\">AirBaltic’s carry-on allowance</a>, my Victorinox is a couple of inches too tall and an inch too deep. But what really got me shopping for a new bag for this trip is the weight. AirBaltic has an 8 kg/17½ lbs weight limit. In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/05/30/podcast-121-tsa-lines-my-luggage-is-where/\">episode #121</a>, I talked about the baggage strip tease exercise with Wow Air to make their 7 kg/15 lbs carry-on weight limit. I’d take my bag off the scale, pull some clothes out, zip it back up, and put it back on the scale. Still too heavy. Repeat 3 more times until the agent takes pity — or just gets tired of me — and gives me the approval tag to put on my bag. After which I walk about 10 feet, open my bag and put my armful of clothes back in. My Victorinox is a bit over 7 lbs, so not only is it too tall, the bag itself uses over 40% of the weight allowance. And even though I’ve talked before about how much I hate shopping for luggage, I searched for a smaller, lighter bag that wouldn’t cost a fortune, since my Victorinox will stay my primary bag. I landed on the the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/32lIURe\">TravelPro Maxlite 5</a>. I, or rather my daughter has a good history with TravelPro. It fit the AirBaltic dimensions and is one of the lighter bags I saw at 5.4 lbs which is down to 30% of the 8 kg weight allowance. It also meets three of the key suitcase criteria I laid down in the “how to shop for a suitcase” topic in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/01/25/podcast-137-new-years-travel-status-tips-how-to-shop-for-a-suitcase/\">episode #137</a> -- it’s black, it’s a 2-wheeler so no lost space on extended spinner wheels, and the inside is, for the most part, a wide open box without clothes hangers or a bunch of zip compartments. I’m taking it to Charlottesville tomorrow for a shakedown cruise.</li><li> Three years ago, back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/11/22/podcast-125-uber-driver-stories-overseas-for-the-election/\">episode #125</a>, in a Travel Security tip, I talked about the need to delete your phone’s Bluetooth pairing when you return a rental car. Usually when I go to pair my phone, I’ll first go through and delete 3-5 pairings before pairing my own. And they all have personalized names like “Timmy’s iPhone”. And most phones by default will download your contacts to the car when paired, so leave all of their contacts and phone numbers in their rental. That is just bad in so many ways. And now Hertz has gotten around to noticing it. In their newest rental terms and conditions, they specifically carve out any liability from you leaving a Bluetooth pairing behind. It’s a pain to remember, especially if you’re running for a flight, but as you’re taking that last scan around the car for your sunglasses and iPhone, remember not to leave your identity behind either.</li><li>Bridge Music -- Black Rainbow by Pitx (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Pitx/19513 Ft: ERH, acclivity</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Keeping Fliers Happy </strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A couple of weeks ago, JD Power released their 2019 North American Airport Satisfaction Study.&nbsp; The headline - “North American Airports Struggle to Keep Travelers Happy Amid Construction Delays and Surging Passenger Volumes” caught my eye, so I reached out to the study’s author, Michael Taylor, to dig into it a bit more. And so last Friday, we had a wide-ranging conversation. I was going to edit it down, but as I listened to it, I couldn’t think about what to cut. So here it is in its entirety…</li><li>Interview with <a href=\"https://www.jdpower.com/business/content/michael-taylor\">Michael Taylor</a>, Travel Intelligence Lead at J.D. Power</li><li>Thanks again to Michael for taking the time to talk to us. Here\'s the <a href=\"https://www.jdpower.com/business/press-releases/2019-north-america-airport-satisfaction-study\">link</a> to the study summary on the JD Power website.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #156</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li> And if you check out the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> page, you can click thru to highlights from my trips to Budapest and Ireland. And if you follow it, you can catch some pics from next week’s trip through the Baltics.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_155.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #156 — Airport Satisfaction; eScooters; Smaller Luggage','','inherit','closed','closed','','2543-revision-v1','','','2019-11-29 18:41:43','2019-11-29 23:41:43','',2543,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/11/29/2543-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2579,1,'2019-11-29 18:42:02','2019-11-29 23:42:02','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\">\n<p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/IMG_0159.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1402\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/IMG_0159-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"225\" height=\"300\"></a></p><figcaption>This Won\'t Help Your Flier Sat Score</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>In this episode, we talk with Michael Taylor, author of <a href=\"https://www.jdpower.com/business/press-releases/2019-north-america-airport-satisfaction-study\">JD Power\'s 2019 Airport Satisfaction Survey</a>, about what keeps fliers happy. I also talk about what I like about eScooters, shopping for a smaller bag for upcoming flights on a Euro budget airline, and how Hertz\'s contract updates remind me to delete my Bluetooth pairings in rental cars. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_156.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/696032101&color=%23ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #157: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago just off the shores of Lake Michigan toward the end of what has been a record-breaking cold November. The first half of the month here was the coldest in 148 years with an average temperature of 31 degrees, which compares to an average high for November of 50 degrees, and a <em>low</em> of 39. But what’s been worse has been the early snow -- 3½ inches of snow on Halloween (another record) and again on Veterans Day. And by some incredible strokes of luck (as opposed to any foresight on my part), I dodged both snows -- by flying home from Charlottesville, VA the day before Halloween, and scheduling a week off the road the week of November 11. It’s <em>always</em> better to be lucky than good.</li><li>Last week was my last week in Charlottesville, finishing up an 18-week project that started in July. A year ago, when I wrapped up a long run in Charlottesville and didn’t know if/when I’d be back, I took an afternoon to hit Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s home that was only a 10-15 minute drive from the client. It was one of those things I wanted to do, but kept putting off -- I’ll get to it -- and here I was, the last day, and so squoze it in between meetings and calls.</li><li>With that in mind, I did just a touch more planning this year, and on my <em>second-to-last </em>trip, the week between the Halloween and Veterans Day snow storms, I flew in a day early on Monday, but to IAD rather than CHO, instead renting a car, and driving the length of the 105-mile <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Skyline Drive (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.nps.gov/shen/planyourvisit/driving-skyline-drive.htm\" target=\"_blank\">Skyline Drive</a> down to Charlottesville along the tops of the Blue Ridge Mountains through Shenandoah National Park. I was probably a week late for peak leaf peeping, but it was still pretty, especially when looking west over the Shenandoah Valley.  I don’t think I would’ve made a special trip to drive Skyline Drive, but since I was in the neighborhood, why not? And it turned out to be just a great drive -- clear blue skies, still some good leaf color, and on a Monday, not a lot of people on that 2-lane road. </li><li>And then last Thursday, flying out of CHO for the last time until I don’t know when, I had to order one last beer at the <a href=\"http://www.gocho.com/concessions/\">Tailwind</a>, the airport bar. For an airport with only 5 gates, the Tailwind always has a great rotation of local craft beers. And there’s a mini-Cheers effect -- maybe not everyone knows my name, but Lyn the bartender recognizes me from my 4-year off-and-on presence in her bar. When I showed back up in July after a 9-month absence, she recognized me right away. So I had to get one last beer from her. I looked at the blackboard and ordered the stout from Blue Mountain Brewery, which was not far from when I ended my trip down Skyline Drive. I was getting over a bit of a cold; the IPA would’ve been a bit rough on the back of my throat. That <a href=\"https://www.beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/16352/39417/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Dark Hollow Stout (opens in a new tab)\">Dark Hollow Stout</a> went down smoother, but what I didn’t quite pick up on is that it’s a 10% alcohol beer. Bit of an eye opener at 11:30am. Made for a good nap on the flight home.</li><li>Bridge Music</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Mark Skinner sent a note to comments@travelcommons.com a few days ago<ul><li>Hi Mark, Long time listener. So your tag line \"It\'s more about the journey than the destination” hit home to me with what has to be my oddest business trip yet. Tomorrow, I’m flying Washington to Hong Kong, via EWR, arriving Monday afternoon, and then returning on Tuesday morning! I’m basically there for dinner…</li><li>No meetings in Hong Kong, it’s all about taking a cosmic ray detector for NASA on an over-the-pole flight; which the UA flights 179/180 do quite well, EWR-HKG-EWR. They want to understand the amount of radiation from space inside the aircraft cabin. I’ll be in the air longer than on the ground. I’m planning to stay on and to sleep at “normal” east coast times, which means while I’ll have a hotel room by HKG, I’ll be awake then (night in HK, but daytime hours for me).  Happily my upgrades to Polaris Business both ways have been confirmed! Otherwise the 16 hr flight would seem even longer…</li></ul></li><li>Oh, my! There’s a nice end-of-year mileage run! I told Mark that his itinerary reminds me of one I did 12 years ago when I flew to London for a lunch meeting to wrap up a project. I flew ORD-LHR, showered in the arrivals lounge, took a car out to Reading, gave the final readout over lunch, hopped back in the car to LHR, and caught the afternoon flight to DEN. I always say that ORD-LHR-DEN run was the epitome of \"stupid\" travel, but Mark has a good reason for his out-&amp;-back.  Given the amount of time I’ve spent at 35,000 ft over the past 35 years, I’m not sure I want to know the results of Mark’s measurements.</li><li>United Airlines sent out a link promoting a jet lag app, <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Timeshifter (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.timeshifter.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Timeshifter</a>. Though Mark won’t need one because he’s staying on Eastern Time during his quick jaunt to Hong Kong, I decided to give it a try for my trip to Latvia, Estonia, and Finland. Going east, from the US to Europe, has always been easier for me. My usual routine - I skip the seat-back entertainment for 4-6 hrs of shut-eye (I wouldn’t call it true sleep) on the flight over, eat breakfast when I arrive even if I’m not hungry, get outside as much as possible, take a 30-minute nap after check-in, push through until 11:30pm that first night, and then set an alarm for, say, 7am the next morning. That usually resets my body clock and I’m pretty much good-to-go for the rest of the trip. Timeshifter added two things to my routine: starting to shift to destination time a few days before leaving, moving bedtime and wake-up time an hour earlier each day - going to bed at 10 instead of 11 and getting up at 5 instead of 6 the next morning. The second thing was taking melatonin before going to bed, which I tried by I’m not sure that it really does anything for me. It’s also a well-designed app that notifies you about things like when to seek out direct sunlight and when to start and stop with caffeinated drinks. I used the free first plan. Not sure I’ll pay the $9.99 for another plan, though.</li><li>And speaking of caffeinated drinks, last week, staying at the Omni Hotel in Charlottesville, they gave me two door hangers -- one for each night -- that I could exchange for a drink delivered to my door in the morning, or a beer at the bar in the evening. The first night, since I’d already had a margarita at dinner, I skipped the bar for something in the morning. Looking at the door hanger, my choices were coffee, tea, and Red Bull. Wow. Guess they’re catering to all kinds of morning afters. It wasn’t a big margarita, so I went for the cup of tea.</li><li>Following up on last episode’s carry-on discussion, about buying a new bag to meet Finnair and AirBaltic’s size and weight limits, My new <a href=\"https://amzn.to/32lIURe\">TravelPro Maxlite bag</a> worked like a charm. I packed a week of clothes and didn’t tagged by any gate agents. It even fit in the overheads of the ATR prop jobs that hopscotched us around between Riga, Tallinn, and Helsinki. On one of our passes through Helsinki, I saw an AirBaltic luggage sizer and scale by an empty customer service desk, so I decided to check the bag out. It was a bit of a force fit into the sizer and it weighed in at 8½ kilos, just a bit over the limit. Glad I didn’t catch a gate agent’s eye.</li><li>And since we’ve been talking about carry-on luggage over the past couple of episodes, so I pulled together all those threads into a new <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/11/06/how-to-choose-the-best-carry-on-luggage/\">“how to choose a new carry-on” blog post</a>. It went up at the beginning of the month, updating the one from last February, just in time for the Christmas shopping season. If you or a frequent traveling loved one needs a new carry-on, check it out, complete with Amazon Affiliate links if you want to toss a buck TravelCommons’ way.</li><li>And speaking of prop jobs, I definitely misfired on my Finnair seat choices between Helsinki and Riga. I was more focused on choosing seats for the long flights between Chicago and Helsinki, and didn’t pay much attention to the 45-minute flight to and from Riga. So just picked one off the seat map where there would be with no one next to me - 5C both ways - which, as it turned out, was empty for a reason, because it was right next to the propeller. I had forgotten how loud those propellers get on take-off. I popped on my Bose Noise Cancelling headphones (which, I noticed, are starting to show a good bit of wear; so I might be doing a bit of Black Friday/Cyber Monday shopping) on taxi, but when the pilot revved up the propellers, the noise cancellation started to cut in and out. The headphones were having to generate huge “anti-waves” to cancel the prop noise and the battery was too low to support the load. Luckily, I always carry extra triple-AAA batteries in the case. But while I was swapping the battery, the noise, the oscillation pressure was killer. I couldn’t get those headphones back over my ears fast enough. If you go to the <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">TravelCommons’ Instagram page</a>, you can see <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/p/B37C8LVnRkd/\">a bit of video</a> out the window of my HEL-RIX flight complete with a slow-motion propeller.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music -</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Notes from the Baltics: Riga, Latvia and Tallinn, Estonia</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>At the end of October, right after pushing out <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/10/14/podcast-156-airport-satisfaction-escooters-smaller-luggage/\">the last episode</a>, my son Andrew and I flew east for a week hopscotching through the Baltics -- Riga, Latvia; Tallinn, Estonia; and Helsinki, Finland. Why the Baltics? I’m not really sure. I’m sure we had a good rationale when we first thought of the trip a few years ago, but now, it wasn’t much more than “here are a few kinda outta-the-way countries that might be cool to wander around.”  </li><li>Andrew booked our flights -- Finnair from ORD to Riga with a connection in Helsinki. The Finnair service was fine, a pretty standard Airbus A330 but with lots of polka-dot Marimekko patterns on everything. I’d forgotten they were a Finnish company. I skipped using my UK passport one last time for a quick pass down the EU passport lane, deciding not to strand Andrew in the “everyone else” passport path, which led to an unexpected grilling from the Finnish border control cop about the details of my itinerary. Then he spent a good bit of time paging back and forth through my passport stamps. Can’t think of what he found interesting -- the Chinese visa, the two Indian visas, maybe the Moroccan stamps from that day trip to Tangiers 3 years ago? Eventually, he decided to put his Helsinki stamp right next to August’s Krakow stamp and then open the gate so I could walk through. </li><li>I’m not quite sure what I expected from Riga, but it turned out to be a nice, mid-sized city. Maybe it shouldn’t have, but I was surprised at how well-preserved the city center is, especially the buildings with the over-the-top Art Nouveau edifices with huge faces over the doorways and carved figures holding up window sills. It took some money, though. Down by the river, I saw two buildings side-by-side, the one on the right recently refinished and repainted; the one on the left was still waiting its turn, but time is running out. The Art Nouveau look was there, but muted under the grime and soot and flaking plaster; with some relief decorations on the window balcony worn away.</li><li>I was surprised, though, at how empty Riga’s old town was in the middle of a Tuesday. The streets were empty. Where was everyone? Maybe across the river where it looks like they’ve built new modern office towers. I was glad I didn’t book our hotel down here.</li><li>The <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riga_Central_Market\">Central Market</a> down river from the Old Town was much more lively, and also where Riga stopped looking so Scandi and started looking a bit more post-Soviet. The busses and streetcars orbiting the market looked left over from the early ‘90’s. But I liked it. Most of the people here seemed to be doing their own grocery shopping -- unlike food markets in places like Paris and Barcelona that seem to have more people taking pictures of fish than buying them. But the place is so big that I don’t see that it could survive just on food porn tourism. They repurposed a set of World War I zeppelin hangars -- one for fishmongers, one of butchers, one for greengrocers, and then part of one with some restaurants where Andrew and I made lunch from a round loaf of Uzbeki bread and some tortellini-looking dumplings filled with lamb and venison. It was pretty good.</li><li>Then it was time to go search out some beer taprooms which had us walking sorta northeast, on a straight line away from the river, away from Old Town, across the canal and parks and past the embassies that sorta ring Old Town, and back into a less renovated landscape of storefronts and converted factories, some places run down, others with the hipster-signaling strands of naked edison bulbs over wood tables. Wandering into a courtyard off a busy street, we found  <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Labietis (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.labietis.lv/en\" target=\"_blank\">Labietis</a> that had wide and interesting mix of beers -- herb beers and fruit beers, as well as the usual batch of IPAs. The names were interesting, also. <a href=\"https://www.labietis.lv/en/our-beers/fog\">Migla</a>, which they translated as “Fog” had hemp and peppermint in a light pale ale. Not sure it was my top pick, but I gotta give them props for trying something different.</li><li>It was a 45-minute prop job flight from Riga to Tallinn on AirBaltic. I did have a bit of a travel snob realization, though -- when everyone is getting on the same bus for a plane, boarding status is kinda meaningless. Anyhow, AirBaltic was fine service -- no hassles with carryon luggage, no annoying on-board upsells, though with only 45 minutes, there’s not too much damage they could do. Heading for the cab rank at Tallinn, I saw the same warning signs they had at Riga airport - there’s no regulated taxi fees so be careful which taxi you get into. At Riga, we used one of the airport-approved cabs with a meter. At Tallinn, we used <a href=\"https://bolt.eu/en/\">Bolt</a>, a ride-sharing app that looks a lot like Lyft. I used earlier in Krakow and had good luck with it, and it worked fine in Tallinn too - €4 from the airport to Old Town seemed a pretty good deal.</li><li>I can see why Tallinn is popular for long weekends. The Old Town is just that -- winding cobblestone streets, lots of churches and restored old buildings, and lots of shops in those old buildings. It’s up on a hill, so lots of scenic overlook Instagram moments. You could easily spend a couple of days wandering the streets, popping in and out of churches and museums… and shops and bars.</li><li>But after a half-day, I was ready to breach the Old Town’s walls to see what else there was to Tallinn. The first stop was a market by the train station - <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Balti Jaama Turg (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.visitestonia.com/en/baltic-station-market\" target=\"_blank\">Balti Jaama Turg</a>. Nowhere near the size of Riga’s Central Market, we strolled around until, after the 4th or 5th fruit stand and butcher stall, our minds wandered to lunch. We bought a couple different kinds of Uzbeki breads from one stand and a couple of beers from another. The breads were stuffed with some sliced meat cooked in a warming, floral spice, maybe cinnamon. It was very good, though I never got the story of why all the Uzbeki food up here.</li><li>We walked out and around the train station, and through a collection of restaurants in small square buildings, old cargo containers and a couple of railcars. As much as I liked the Uzbeki breads, I wish I’d seen these places first. On the other side was something called <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Telliskivi Creative City. (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://telliskivi.cc/en/\" target=\"_blank\">Telliskivi Creative City.</a> It looked like an old office or administrative building had been converted to a kinda “makers” mall, where people were doing small-scale clothing or leather work in the back of their space and selling it out of the front. We took a quick pass through it though didn’t see anything we wanted to haul back to the US.</li><li>We walked kinda north-northeast, through the<a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\" Kalamaja neighborhood (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.visittallinn.ee/eng/visitor/discover/articles-guides/kalamaja\" target=\"_blank\"> Kalamaja neighborhood</a> toward the harbor. Kalamaja was the exact opposite of the Old Town - wood buildings vs. stone; straight paved streets vs. windy cobblestones; groups of flats vs. castles and government buildings. A few blocks off the harbor we hit the <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Põhjala Brewery &amp; Tap Room (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://pohjalabeer.com/taproom\" target=\"_blank\">Põhjala Brewery &amp; Tap Room</a>. It was in what looked like a very recently renovated stone building; workers were in the midst of renovating the building next to it. Where Labietis felt very native -- funky space tucked away behind some kinda decaying buildings -- Põhjala could’ve been any new taproom in the US -- big U-shaped bar, open kitchen, BBQ on the menu. The beer was very good; the BBQ maybe less successful, but having lived in Memphis and Dallas, I’m a bit of a BBQ snob. The smoked trout dish, though -- that was great. </li><li>We walked back towards town on a path that ran along the harbor. There were lots of new apartment buildings across the road -- 3-4 stories with floor-to-ceiling windows and enclosed balconies facing the harbor. There wasn’t a lot there… yet. But you could see it coming.</li><li>We stopped at the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/ubajahumal/\">Uba Ja Humal</a> beer store before heading back through the Old Town walls. We walked through the front store to the taproom in the back, complete with a DJ who was set up between the back coolers. Locals would pull a can out of a cooler, pay for it at the bar, get a glass, and sit down at a table with their friends. Tallinn had that kind of easy-going vibe.</li><li>Both cities have done a good job renovating and preserving their Old Towns, and now seem to be expanding past that, repurposing older, maybe Soviet-era buildings to something a bit hipper, edgier (?), less traditional. I came away liking Tallinn a bit more than Riga, but maybe it’s because they’re a little bit further down that hipper, less traditional path.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #157</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li> And if you check out the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> page, you can click thru to highlights from Riga and Tallinn.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_155.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #157 — Notes from the Baltics - Riga, Latvia and Tallinn, Estonia','','inherit','closed','closed','','2575-revision-v1','','','2019-11-29 18:42:02','2019-11-29 23:42:02','',2575,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/11/29/2575-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2580,1,'2019-11-29 18:42:19','2019-11-29 23:42:19','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\">\n<p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/IMG_0159.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1402\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/IMG_0159-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"225\" height=\"300\"></a></p><figcaption>This Won\'t Help Your Flier Sat Score</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>In this episode, we talk with Michael Taylor, author of <a href=\"https://www.jdpower.com/business/press-releases/2019-north-america-airport-satisfaction-study\">JD Power\'s 2019 Airport Satisfaction Survey</a>, about what keeps fliers happy. I also talk about what I like about eScooters, shopping for a smaller bag for upcoming flights on a Euro budget airline, and how Hertz\'s contract updates remind me to delete my Bluetooth pairings in rental cars. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_156.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/696032101&color=%23ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #157: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago just off the shores of Lake Michigan toward the end of what has been a record-breaking cold November. The first half of the month here was the coldest in 148 years with an average temperature of 31 degrees, which compares to an average high for November of 50 degrees, and a <em>low</em> of 39. But what’s been worse has been the early snow -- 3½ inches of snow on Halloween (another record) and again on Veterans Day. And by some incredible strokes of luck (as opposed to any foresight on my part), I dodged both snows -- by flying home from Charlottesville, VA the day before Halloween, and scheduling a week off the road the week of November 11. It’s <em>always</em> better to be lucky than good.</li><li>Last week was my last week in Charlottesville, finishing up an 18-week project that started in July. A year ago, when I wrapped up a long run in Charlottesville and didn’t know if/when I’d be back, I took an afternoon to hit Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s home that was only a 10-15 minute drive from the client. It was one of those things I wanted to do, but kept putting off -- I’ll get to it -- and here I was, the last day, and so squoze it in between meetings and calls.</li><li>With that in mind, I did just a touch more planning this year, and on my <em>second-to-last </em>trip, the week between the Halloween and Veterans Day snow storms, I flew in a day early on Monday, but to IAD rather than CHO, instead renting a car, and driving the length of the 105-mile <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Skyline Drive (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.nps.gov/shen/planyourvisit/driving-skyline-drive.htm\" target=\"_blank\">Skyline Drive</a> down to Charlottesville along the tops of the Blue Ridge Mountains through Shenandoah National Park. I was probably a week late for peak leaf peeping, but it was still pretty, especially when looking west over the Shenandoah Valley.  I don’t think I would’ve made a special trip to drive Skyline Drive, but since I was in the neighborhood, why not? And it turned out to be just a great drive -- clear blue skies, still some good leaf color, and on a Monday, not a lot of people on that 2-lane road. </li><li>And then last Thursday, flying out of CHO for the last time until I don’t know when, I had to order one last beer at the <a href=\"http://www.gocho.com/concessions/\">Tailwind</a>, the airport bar. For an airport with only 5 gates, the Tailwind always has a great rotation of local craft beers. And there’s a mini-Cheers effect -- maybe not everyone knows my name, but Lyn the bartender recognizes me from my 4-year off-and-on presence in her bar. When I showed back up in July after a 9-month absence, she recognized me right away. So I had to get one last beer from her. I looked at the blackboard and ordered the stout from Blue Mountain Brewery, which was not far from when I ended my trip down Skyline Drive. I was getting over a bit of a cold; the IPA would’ve been a bit rough on the back of my throat. That <a href=\"https://www.beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/16352/39417/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Dark Hollow Stout (opens in a new tab)\">Dark Hollow Stout</a> went down smoother, but what I didn’t quite pick up on is that it’s a 10% alcohol beer. Bit of an eye opener at 11:30am. Made for a good nap on the flight home.</li><li>Bridge Music</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Mark Skinner sent a note to comments@travelcommons.com a few days ago<ul><li>Hi Mark, Long time listener. So your tag line \"It\'s more about the journey than the destination” hit home to me with what has to be my oddest business trip yet. Tomorrow, I’m flying Washington to Hong Kong, via EWR, arriving Monday afternoon, and then returning on Tuesday morning! I’m basically there for dinner…</li><li>No meetings in Hong Kong, it’s all about taking a cosmic ray detector for NASA on an over-the-pole flight; which the UA flights 179/180 do quite well, EWR-HKG-EWR. They want to understand the amount of radiation from space inside the aircraft cabin. I’ll be in the air longer than on the ground. I’m planning to stay on and to sleep at “normal” east coast times, which means while I’ll have a hotel room by HKG, I’ll be awake then (night in HK, but daytime hours for me).  Happily my upgrades to Polaris Business both ways have been confirmed! Otherwise the 16 hr flight would seem even longer…</li></ul></li><li>Oh, my! There’s a nice end-of-year mileage run! I told Mark that his itinerary reminds me of one I did 12 years ago when I flew to London for a lunch meeting to wrap up a project. I flew ORD-LHR, showered in the arrivals lounge, took a car out to Reading, gave the final readout over lunch, hopped back in the car to LHR, and caught the afternoon flight to DEN. I always say that ORD-LHR-DEN run was the epitome of \"stupid\" travel, but Mark has a good reason for his out-&amp;-back.  Given the amount of time I’ve spent at 35,000 ft over the past 35 years, I’m not sure I want to know the results of Mark’s measurements.</li><li>United Airlines sent out a link promoting a jet lag app, <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Timeshifter (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.timeshifter.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Timeshifter</a>. Though Mark won’t need one because he’s staying on Eastern Time during his quick jaunt to Hong Kong, I decided to give it a try for my trip to Latvia, Estonia, and Finland. Going east, from the US to Europe, has always been easier for me. My usual routine - I skip the seat-back entertainment for 4-6 hrs of shut-eye (I wouldn’t call it true sleep) on the flight over, eat breakfast when I arrive even if I’m not hungry, get outside as much as possible, take a 30-minute nap after check-in, push through until 11:30pm that first night, and then set an alarm for, say, 7am the next morning. That usually resets my body clock and I’m pretty much good-to-go for the rest of the trip. Timeshifter added two things to my routine: starting to shift to destination time a few days before leaving, moving bedtime and wake-up time an hour earlier each day - going to bed at 10 instead of 11 and getting up at 5 instead of 6 the next morning. The second thing was taking melatonin before going to bed, which I tried by I’m not sure that it really does anything for me. It’s also a well-designed app that notifies you about things like when to seek out direct sunlight and when to start and stop with caffeinated drinks. I used the free first plan. Not sure I’ll pay the $9.99 for another plan, though.</li><li>And speaking of caffeinated drinks, last week, staying at the Omni Hotel in Charlottesville, they gave me two door hangers -- one for each night -- that I could exchange for a drink delivered to my door in the morning, or a beer at the bar in the evening. The first night, since I’d already had a margarita at dinner, I skipped the bar for something in the morning. Looking at the door hanger, my choices were coffee, tea, and Red Bull. Wow. Guess they’re catering to all kinds of morning afters. It wasn’t a big margarita, so I went for the cup of tea.</li><li>Following up on last episode’s carry-on discussion, about buying a new bag to meet Finnair and AirBaltic’s size and weight limits, My new <a href=\"https://amzn.to/32lIURe\">TravelPro Maxlite bag</a> worked like a charm. I packed a week of clothes and didn’t tagged by any gate agents. It even fit in the overheads of the ATR prop jobs that hopscotched us around between Riga, Tallinn, and Helsinki. On one of our passes through Helsinki, I saw an AirBaltic luggage sizer and scale by an empty customer service desk, so I decided to check the bag out. It was a bit of a force fit into the sizer and it weighed in at 8½ kilos, just a bit over the limit. Glad I didn’t catch a gate agent’s eye.</li><li>And since we’ve been talking about carry-on luggage over the past couple of episodes, so I pulled together all those threads into a new <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/11/06/how-to-choose-the-best-carry-on-luggage/\">“how to choose a new carry-on” blog post</a>. It went up at the beginning of the month, updating the one from last February, just in time for the Christmas shopping season. If you or a frequent traveling loved one needs a new carry-on, check it out, complete with Amazon Affiliate links if you want to toss a buck TravelCommons’ way.</li><li>And speaking of prop jobs, I definitely misfired on my Finnair seat choices between Helsinki and Riga. I was more focused on choosing seats for the long flights between Chicago and Helsinki, and didn’t pay much attention to the 45-minute flight to and from Riga. So just picked one off the seat map where there would be with no one next to me - 5C both ways - which, as it turned out, was empty for a reason, because it was right next to the propeller. I had forgotten how loud those propellers get on take-off. I popped on my Bose Noise Cancelling headphones (which, I noticed, are starting to show a good bit of wear; so I might be doing a bit of Black Friday/Cyber Monday shopping) on taxi, but when the pilot revved up the propellers, the noise cancellation started to cut in and out. The headphones were having to generate huge “anti-waves” to cancel the prop noise and the battery was too low to support the load. Luckily, I always carry extra triple-AAA batteries in the case. But while I was swapping the battery, the noise, the oscillation pressure was killer. I couldn’t get those headphones back over my ears fast enough. If you go to the <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">TravelCommons’ Instagram page</a>, you can see <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/p/B37C8LVnRkd/\">a bit of video</a> out the window of my HEL-RIX flight complete with a slow-motion propeller.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music -</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Notes from the Baltics: Riga, Latvia and Tallinn, Estonia</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>At the end of October, right after pushing out <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/10/14/podcast-156-airport-satisfaction-escooters-smaller-luggage/\">the last episode</a>, my son Andrew and I flew east for a week hopscotching through the Baltics -- Riga, Latvia; Tallinn, Estonia; and Helsinki, Finland. Why the Baltics? I’m not really sure. I’m sure we had a good rationale when we first thought of the trip a few years ago, but now, it wasn’t much more than “here are a few kinda outta-the-way countries that might be cool to wander around.”  </li><li>Andrew booked our flights -- Finnair from ORD to Riga with a connection in Helsinki. The Finnair service was fine, a pretty standard Airbus A330 but with lots of polka-dot Marimekko patterns on everything. I’d forgotten they were a Finnish company. I skipped using my UK passport one last time for a quick pass down the EU passport lane, deciding not to strand Andrew in the “everyone else” passport path, which led to an unexpected grilling from the Finnish border control cop about the details of my itinerary. Then he spent a good bit of time paging back and forth through my passport stamps. Can’t think of what he found interesting -- the Chinese visa, the two Indian visas, maybe the Moroccan stamps from that day trip to Tangiers 3 years ago? Eventually, he decided to put his Helsinki stamp right next to August’s Krakow stamp and then open the gate so I could walk through. </li><li>I’m not quite sure what I expected from Riga, but it turned out to be a nice, mid-sized city. Maybe it shouldn’t have, but I was surprised at how well-preserved the city center is, especially the buildings with the over-the-top Art Nouveau edifices with huge faces over the doorways and carved figures holding up window sills. It took some money, though. Down by the river, I saw two buildings side-by-side, the one on the right recently refinished and repainted; the one on the left was still waiting its turn, but time is running out. The Art Nouveau look was there, but muted under the grime and soot and flaking plaster; with some relief decorations on the window balcony worn away.</li><li>I was surprised, though, at how empty Riga’s old town was in the middle of a Tuesday. The streets were empty. Where was everyone? Maybe across the river where it looks like they’ve built new modern office towers. I was glad I didn’t book our hotel down here.</li><li>The <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riga_Central_Market\">Central Market</a> down river from the Old Town was much more lively, and also where Riga stopped looking so Scandi and started looking a bit more post-Soviet. The busses and streetcars orbiting the market looked left over from the early ‘90’s. But I liked it. Most of the people here seemed to be doing their own grocery shopping -- unlike food markets in places like Paris and Barcelona that seem to have more people taking pictures of fish than buying them. But the place is so big that I don’t see that it could survive just on food porn tourism. They repurposed a set of World War I zeppelin hangars -- one for fishmongers, one of butchers, one for greengrocers, and then part of one with some restaurants where Andrew and I made lunch from a round loaf of Uzbeki bread and some tortellini-looking dumplings filled with lamb and venison. It was pretty good.</li><li>Then it was time to go search out some beer taprooms which had us walking sorta northeast, on a straight line away from the river, away from Old Town, across the canal and parks and past the embassies that sorta ring Old Town, and back into a less renovated landscape of storefronts and converted factories, some places run down, others with the hipster-signaling strands of naked edison bulbs over wood tables. Wandering into a courtyard off a busy street, we found  <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Labietis (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.labietis.lv/en\" target=\"_blank\">Labietis</a> that had wide and interesting mix of beers -- herb beers and fruit beers, as well as the usual batch of IPAs. The names were interesting, also. <a href=\"https://www.labietis.lv/en/our-beers/fog\">Migla</a>, which they translated as “Fog” had hemp and peppermint in a light pale ale. Not sure it was my top pick, but I gotta give them props for trying something different.</li><li>It was a 45-minute prop job flight from Riga to Tallinn on AirBaltic. I did have a bit of a travel snob realization, though -- when everyone is getting on the same bus for a plane, boarding status is kinda meaningless. Anyhow, AirBaltic was fine service -- no hassles with carryon luggage, no annoying on-board upsells, though with only 45 minutes, there’s not too much damage they could do. Heading for the cab rank at Tallinn, I saw the same warning signs they had at Riga airport - there’s no regulated taxi fees so be careful which taxi you get into. At Riga, we used one of the airport-approved cabs with a meter. At Tallinn, we used <a href=\"https://bolt.eu/en/\">Bolt</a>, a ride-sharing app that looks a lot like Lyft. I used earlier in Krakow and had good luck with it, and it worked fine in Tallinn too - €4 from the airport to Old Town seemed a pretty good deal.</li><li>I can see why Tallinn is popular for long weekends. The Old Town is just that -- winding cobblestone streets, lots of churches and restored old buildings, and lots of shops in those old buildings. It’s up on a hill, so lots of scenic overlook Instagram moments. You could easily spend a couple of days wandering the streets, popping in and out of churches and museums… and shops and bars.</li><li>But after a half-day, I was ready to breach the Old Town’s walls to see what else there was to Tallinn. The first stop was a market by the train station - <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Balti Jaama Turg (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.visitestonia.com/en/baltic-station-market\" target=\"_blank\">Balti Jaama Turg</a>. Nowhere near the size of Riga’s Central Market, we strolled around until, after the 4th or 5th fruit stand and butcher stall, our minds wandered to lunch. We bought a couple different kinds of Uzbeki breads from one stand and a couple of beers from another. The breads were stuffed with some sliced meat cooked in a warming, floral spice, maybe cinnamon. It was very good, though I never got the story of why all the Uzbeki food up here.</li><li>We walked out and around the train station, and through a collection of restaurants in small square buildings, old cargo containers and a couple of railcars. As much as I liked the Uzbeki breads, I wish I’d seen these places first. On the other side was something called <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Telliskivi Creative City. (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://telliskivi.cc/en/\" target=\"_blank\">Telliskivi Creative City.</a> It looked like an old office or administrative building had been converted to a kinda “makers” mall, where people were doing small-scale clothing or leather work in the back of their space and selling it out of the front. We took a quick pass through it though didn’t see anything we wanted to haul back to the US.</li><li>We walked kinda north-northeast, through the<a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\" Kalamaja neighborhood (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.visittallinn.ee/eng/visitor/discover/articles-guides/kalamaja\" target=\"_blank\"> Kalamaja neighborhood</a> toward the harbor. Kalamaja was the exact opposite of the Old Town - wood buildings vs. stone; straight paved streets vs. windy cobblestones; groups of flats vs. castles and government buildings. A few blocks off the harbor we hit the <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Põhjala Brewery &amp; Tap Room (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://pohjalabeer.com/taproom\" target=\"_blank\">Põhjala Brewery &amp; Tap Room</a>. It was in what looked like a very recently renovated stone building; workers were in the midst of renovating the building next to it. Where Labietis felt very native -- funky space tucked away behind some kinda decaying buildings -- Põhjala could’ve been any new taproom in the US -- big U-shaped bar, open kitchen, BBQ on the menu. The beer was very good; the BBQ maybe less successful, but having lived in Memphis and Dallas, I’m a bit of a BBQ snob. The smoked trout dish, though -- that was great. </li><li>We walked back towards town on a path that ran along the harbor. There were lots of new apartment buildings across the road -- 3-4 stories with floor-to-ceiling windows and enclosed balconies facing the harbor. There wasn’t a lot there… yet. But you could see it coming.</li><li>We stopped at the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/ubajahumal/\">Uba Ja Humal</a> beer store before heading back through the Old Town walls. We walked through the front store to the taproom in the back, complete with a DJ who was set up between the back coolers. Locals would pull a can out of a cooler, pay for it at the bar, get a glass, and sit down at a table with their friends. Tallinn had that kind of easy-going vibe.</li><li>Both cities have done a good job renovating and preserving their Old Towns, and now seem to be expanding past that, repurposing older, maybe Soviet-era buildings to something a bit hipper, edgier (?), less traditional. I came away liking Tallinn a bit more than Riga, but maybe it’s because they’re a little bit further down that hipper, less traditional path.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #157</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li> And if you check out the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> page, you can click thru to highlights from Riga and Tallinn.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_155.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #157 — Notes from the Baltics: Riga, Latvia and Tallinn, Estonia','','inherit','closed','closed','','2575-revision-v1','','','2019-11-29 18:42:19','2019-11-29 23:42:19','',2575,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/11/29/2575-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2581,1,'2019-11-29 18:50:41','2019-11-29 23:50:41','','2D576E07-6546-4D4B-9D64-0E593596FB0C','','inherit','open','closed','','2d576e07-6546-4d4b-9d64-0e593596fb0c','','','2019-11-29 18:50:41','2019-11-29 23:50:41','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/2D576E07-6546-4D4B-9D64-0E593596FB0C.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(2582,1,'2019-11-29 18:54:51','2019-11-29 23:54:51','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\">\n<p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/2D576E07-6546-4D4B-9D64-0E593596FB0C.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2581 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/2D576E07-6546-4D4B-9D64-0E593596FB0C-268x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"268\" height=\"300\" /></a></p>\n<figcaption>Selfies with Friends in Tallinn</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p>In this episode, we talk with Michael Taylor, author of <a href=\"https://www.jdpower.com/business/press-releases/2019-north-america-airport-satisfaction-study\">JD Power\'s 2019 Airport Satisfaction Survey</a>, about what keeps fliers happy. I also talk about what I like about eScooters, shopping for a smaller bag for upcoming flights on a Euro budget airline, and how Hertz\'s contract updates remind me to delete my Bluetooth pairings in rental cars. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_156.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/696032101&color=%23ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #157: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago just off the shores of Lake Michigan toward the end of what has been a record-breaking cold November. The first half of the month here was the coldest in 148 years with an average temperature of 31 degrees, which compares to an average high for November of 50 degrees, and a <em>low</em> of 39. But what’s been worse has been the early snow -- 3½ inches of snow on Halloween (another record) and again on Veterans Day. And by some incredible strokes of luck (as opposed to any foresight on my part), I dodged both snows -- by flying home from Charlottesville, VA the day before Halloween, and scheduling a week off the road the week of November 11. It’s <em>always</em> better to be lucky than good.</li><li>Last week was my last week in Charlottesville, finishing up an 18-week project that started in July. A year ago, when I wrapped up a long run in Charlottesville and didn’t know if/when I’d be back, I took an afternoon to hit Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s home that was only a 10-15 minute drive from the client. It was one of those things I wanted to do, but kept putting off -- I’ll get to it -- and here I was, the last day, and so squoze it in between meetings and calls.</li><li>With that in mind, I did just a touch more planning this year, and on my <em>second-to-last </em>trip, the week between the Halloween and Veterans Day snow storms, I flew in a day early on Monday, but to IAD rather than CHO, instead renting a car, and driving the length of the 105-mile <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Skyline Drive (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.nps.gov/shen/planyourvisit/driving-skyline-drive.htm\" target=\"_blank\">Skyline Drive</a> down to Charlottesville along the tops of the Blue Ridge Mountains through Shenandoah National Park. I was probably a week late for peak leaf peeping, but it was still pretty, especially when looking west over the Shenandoah Valley.&nbsp; I don’t think I would’ve made a special trip to drive Skyline Drive, but since I was in the neighborhood, why not? And it turned out to be just a great drive -- clear blue skies, still some good leaf color, and on a Monday, not a lot of people on that 2-lane road.&nbsp;</li><li>And then last Thursday, flying out of CHO for the last time until I don’t know when, I had to order one last beer at the <a href=\"http://www.gocho.com/concessions/\">Tailwind</a>, the airport bar. For an airport with only 5 gates, the Tailwind always has a great rotation of local craft beers. And there’s a mini-Cheers effect -- maybe not everyone knows my name, but Lyn the bartender recognizes me from my 4-year off-and-on presence in her bar. When I showed back up in July after a 9-month absence, she recognized me right away. So I had to get one last beer from her. I looked at the blackboard and ordered the stout from Blue Mountain Brewery, which was not far from when I ended my trip down Skyline Drive. I was getting over a bit of a cold; the IPA would’ve been a bit rough on the back of my throat. That <a href=\"https://www.beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/16352/39417/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Dark Hollow Stout (opens in a new tab)\">Dark Hollow Stout</a> went down smoother, but what I didn’t quite pick up on is that it’s a 10% alcohol beer. Bit of an eye opener at 11:30am. Made for a good nap on the flight home.</li><li>Bridge Music</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Mark Skinner sent a note to comments@travelcommons.com a few days ago<ul><li>Hi Mark, Long time listener. So your tag line \"It\'s more about the journey than the destination” hit home to me with what has to be my oddest business trip yet. Tomorrow, I’m flying Washington to Hong Kong, via EWR, arriving Monday afternoon, and then returning on Tuesday morning! I’m basically there for dinner…</li><li>No meetings in Hong Kong, it’s all about taking a cosmic ray detector for NASA on an over-the-pole flight; which the UA flights 179/180 do quite well, EWR-HKG-EWR. They want to understand the amount of radiation from space inside the aircraft cabin. I’ll be in the air longer than on the ground. I’m planning to stay on and to sleep at “normal” east coast times, which means while I’ll have a hotel room by HKG, I’ll be awake then (night in HK, but daytime hours for me).&nbsp; Happily my upgrades to Polaris Business both ways have been confirmed! Otherwise the 16 hr flight would seem even longer…</li></ul></li><li>Oh, my! There’s a nice end-of-year mileage run! I told Mark that his itinerary reminds me of one I did 12 years ago when I flew to London for a lunch meeting to wrap up a project. I flew ORD-LHR, showered in the arrivals lounge, took a car out to Reading, gave the final readout over lunch, hopped back in the car to LHR, and caught the afternoon flight to DEN. I always say that ORD-LHR-DEN run was the epitome of \"stupid\" travel, but Mark has a good reason for his out-&amp;-back.&nbsp; Given the amount of time I’ve spent at 35,000 ft over the past 35 years, I’m not sure I want to know the results of Mark’s measurements.</li><li>United Airlines sent out a link promoting a jet lag app, <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Timeshifter (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.timeshifter.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Timeshifter</a>. Though Mark won’t need one because he’s staying on Eastern Time during his quick jaunt to Hong Kong, I decided to give it a try for my trip to Latvia, Estonia, and Finland. Going east, from the US to Europe, has always been easier for me. My usual routine - I skip the seat-back entertainment for 4-6 hrs of shut-eye (I wouldn’t call it true sleep) on the flight over, eat breakfast when I arrive even if I’m not hungry, get outside as much as possible, take a 30-minute nap after check-in, push through until 11:30pm that first night, and then set an alarm for, say, 7am the next morning. That usually resets my body clock and I’m pretty much good-to-go for the rest of the trip. Timeshifter added two things to my routine: starting to shift to destination time a few days before leaving, moving bedtime and wake-up time an hour earlier each day - going to bed at 10 instead of 11 and getting up at 5 instead of 6 the next morning. The second thing was taking melatonin before going to bed, which I tried by I’m not sure that it really does anything for me. It’s also a well-designed app that notifies you about things like when to seek out direct sunlight and when to start and stop with caffeinated drinks. I used the free first plan. Not sure I’ll pay the $9.99 for another plan, though.</li><li>And speaking of caffeinated drinks, last week, staying at the Omni Hotel in Charlottesville, they gave me two door hangers -- one for each night -- that I could exchange for a drink delivered to my door in the morning, or a beer at the bar in the evening. The first night, since I’d already had a margarita at dinner, I skipped the bar for something in the morning. Looking at the door hanger, my choices were coffee, tea, and Red Bull. Wow. Guess they’re catering to all kinds of morning afters. It wasn’t a big margarita, so I went for the cup of tea.</li><li>Following up on last episode’s carry-on discussion, about buying a new bag to meet Finnair and AirBaltic’s size and weight limits, My new <a href=\"https://amzn.to/32lIURe\">TravelPro Maxlite bag</a> worked like a charm. I packed a week of clothes and didn’t tagged by any gate agents. It even fit in the overheads of the ATR prop jobs that hopscotched us around between Riga, Tallinn, and Helsinki. On one of our passes through Helsinki, I saw an AirBaltic luggage sizer and scale by an empty customer service desk, so I decided to check the bag out. It was a bit of a force fit into the sizer and it weighed in at 8½ kilos, just a bit over the limit. Glad I didn’t catch a gate agent’s eye.</li><li>And since we’ve been talking about carry-on luggage over the past couple of episodes, so I pulled together all those threads into a new <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/11/06/how-to-choose-the-best-carry-on-luggage/\">“how to choose a new carry-on” blog post</a>. It went up at the beginning of the month, updating the one from last February, just in time for the Christmas shopping season. If you or a frequent traveling loved one needs a new carry-on, check it out, complete with Amazon Affiliate links if you want to toss a buck TravelCommons’ way.</li><li>And speaking of prop jobs, I definitely misfired on my Finnair seat choices between Helsinki and Riga. I was more focused on choosing seats for the long flights between Chicago and Helsinki, and didn’t pay much attention to the 45-minute flight to and from Riga. So just picked one off the seat map where there would be with no one next to me - 5C both ways - which, as it turned out, was empty for a reason, because it was right next to the propeller. I had forgotten how loud those propellers get on take-off. I popped on my Bose Noise Cancelling headphones (which, I noticed, are starting to show a good bit of wear; so I might be doing a bit of Black Friday/Cyber Monday shopping) on taxi, but when the pilot revved up the propellers, the noise cancellation started to cut in and out. The headphones were having to generate huge “anti-waves” to cancel the prop noise and the battery was too low to support the load. Luckily, I always carry extra triple-AAA batteries in the case. But while I was swapping the battery, the noise, the oscillation pressure was killer. I couldn’t get those headphones back over my ears fast enough. If you go to the <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">TravelCommons’ Instagram page</a>, you can see <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/p/B37C8LVnRkd/\">a bit of video</a> out the window of my HEL-RIX flight complete with a slow-motion propeller.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music -</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Notes from the Baltics: Riga, Latvia and Tallinn, Estonia</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>At the end of October, right after pushing out <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/10/14/podcast-156-airport-satisfaction-escooters-smaller-luggage/\">the last episode</a>, my son Andrew and I flew east for a week hopscotching through the Baltics -- Riga, Latvia; Tallinn, Estonia; and Helsinki, Finland. Why the Baltics? I’m not really sure. I’m sure we had a good rationale when we first thought of the trip a few years ago, but now, it wasn’t much more than “here are a few kinda outta-the-way countries that might be cool to wander around.”&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>Andrew booked our flights -- Finnair from ORD to Riga with a connection in Helsinki. The Finnair service was fine, a pretty standard Airbus A330 but with lots of polka-dot Marimekko patterns on everything. I’d forgotten they were a Finnish company. I skipped using my UK passport one last time for a quick pass down the EU passport lane, deciding not to strand Andrew in the “everyone else” passport path, which led to an unexpected grilling from the Finnish border control cop about the details of my itinerary. Then he spent a good bit of time paging back and forth through my passport stamps. Can’t think of what he found interesting -- the Chinese visa, the two Indian visas, maybe the Moroccan stamps from that day trip to Tangiers 3 years ago? Eventually, he decided to put his Helsinki stamp right next to August’s Krakow stamp and then open the gate so I could walk through.&nbsp;</li><li>I’m not quite sure what I expected from Riga, but it turned out to be a nice, mid-sized city. Maybe it shouldn’t have, but I was surprised at how well-preserved the city center is, especially the buildings with the over-the-top Art Nouveau edifices with huge faces over the doorways and carved figures holding up window sills. It took some money, though. Down by the river, I saw two buildings side-by-side, the one on the right recently refinished and repainted; the one on the left was still waiting its turn, but time is running out. The Art Nouveau look was there, but muted under the grime and soot and flaking plaster; with some relief decorations on the window balcony worn away.</li><li>I was surprised, though, at how empty Riga’s old town was in the middle of a Tuesday. The streets were empty. Where was everyone? Maybe across the river where it looks like they’ve built new modern office towers. I was glad I didn’t book our hotel down here.</li><li>The <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riga_Central_Market\">Central Market</a> down river from the Old Town was much more lively, and also where Riga stopped looking so Scandi and started looking a bit more post-Soviet. The busses and streetcars orbiting the market looked left over from the early ‘90’s. But I liked it. Most of the people here seemed to be doing their own grocery shopping -- unlike food markets in places like Paris and Barcelona that seem to have more people taking pictures of fish than buying them. But the place is so big that I don’t see that it could survive just on food porn tourism. They repurposed a set of World War I zeppelin hangars -- one for fishmongers, one of butchers, one for greengrocers, and then part of one with some restaurants where Andrew and I made lunch from a round loaf of Uzbeki bread and some tortellini-looking dumplings filled with lamb and venison. It was pretty good.</li><li>Then it was time to go search out some beer taprooms which had us walking sorta northeast, on a straight line away from the river, away from Old Town, across the canal and parks and past the embassies that sorta ring Old Town, and back into a less renovated landscape of storefronts and converted factories, some places run down, others with the hipster-signaling strands of naked edison bulbs over wood tables. Wandering into a courtyard off a busy street, we found&nbsp; <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Labietis (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.labietis.lv/en\" target=\"_blank\">Labietis</a> that had wide and interesting mix of beers -- herb beers and fruit beers, as well as the usual batch of IPAs. The names were interesting, also. <a href=\"https://www.labietis.lv/en/our-beers/fog\">Migla</a>, which they translated as “Fog” had hemp and peppermint in a light pale ale. Not sure it was my top pick, but I gotta give them props for trying something different.</li><li>It was a 45-minute prop job flight from Riga to Tallinn on AirBaltic. I did have a bit of a travel snob realization, though -- when everyone is getting on the same bus for a plane, boarding status is kinda meaningless. Anyhow, AirBaltic was fine service -- no hassles with carryon luggage, no annoying on-board upsells, though with only 45 minutes, there’s not too much damage they could do. Heading for the cab rank at Tallinn, I saw the same warning signs they had at Riga airport - there’s no regulated taxi fees so be careful which taxi you get into. At Riga, we used one of the airport-approved cabs with a meter. At Tallinn, we used <a href=\"https://bolt.eu/en/\">Bolt</a>, a ride-sharing app that looks a lot like Lyft. I used earlier in Krakow and had good luck with it, and it worked fine in Tallinn too - €4 from the airport to Old Town seemed a pretty good deal.</li><li>I can see why Tallinn is popular for long weekends. The Old Town is just that -- winding cobblestone streets, lots of churches and restored old buildings, and lots of shops in those old buildings. It’s up on a hill, so lots of scenic overlook Instagram moments. You could easily spend a couple of days wandering the streets, popping in and out of churches and museums… and shops and bars.</li><li>But after a half-day, I was ready to breach the Old Town’s walls to see what else there was to Tallinn. The first stop was a market by the train station - <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Balti Jaama Turg (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.visitestonia.com/en/baltic-station-market\" target=\"_blank\">Balti Jaama Turg</a>. Nowhere near the size of Riga’s Central Market, we strolled around until, after the 4th or 5th fruit stand and butcher stall, our minds wandered to lunch. We bought a couple different kinds of Uzbeki breads from one stand and a couple of beers from another. The breads were stuffed with some sliced meat cooked in a warming, floral spice, maybe cinnamon. It was very good, though I never got the story of why all the Uzbeki food up here.</li><li>We walked out and around the train station, and through a collection of restaurants in small square buildings, old cargo containers and a couple of railcars. As much as I liked the Uzbeki breads, I wish I’d seen these places first. On the other side was something called <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Telliskivi Creative City. (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://telliskivi.cc/en/\" target=\"_blank\">Telliskivi Creative City.</a> It looked like an old office or administrative building had been converted to a kinda “makers” mall, where people were doing small-scale clothing or leather work in the back of their space and selling it out of the front. We took a quick pass through it though didn’t see anything we wanted to haul back to the US.</li><li>We walked kinda north-northeast, through the<a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\" Kalamaja neighborhood (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.visittallinn.ee/eng/visitor/discover/articles-guides/kalamaja\" target=\"_blank\"> Kalamaja neighborhood</a> toward the harbor. Kalamaja was the exact opposite of the Old Town - wood buildings vs. stone; straight paved streets vs. windy cobblestones; groups of flats vs. castles and government buildings. A few blocks off the harbor we hit the <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Põhjala Brewery &amp; Tap Room (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://pohjalabeer.com/taproom\" target=\"_blank\">Põhjala Brewery &amp; Tap Room</a>. It was in what looked like a very recently renovated stone building; workers were in the midst of renovating the building next to it. Where Labietis felt very native -- funky space tucked away behind some kinda decaying buildings -- Põhjala could’ve been any new taproom in the US -- big U-shaped bar, open kitchen, BBQ on the menu. The beer was very good; the BBQ maybe less successful, but having lived in Memphis and Dallas, I’m a bit of a BBQ snob. The smoked trout dish, though -- that was great.&nbsp;</li><li>We walked back towards town on a path that ran along the harbor. There were lots of new apartment buildings across the road -- 3-4 stories with floor-to-ceiling windows and enclosed balconies facing the harbor. There wasn’t a lot there… yet. But you could see it coming.</li><li>We stopped at the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/ubajahumal/\">Uba Ja Humal</a> beer store before heading back through the Old Town walls. We walked through the front store to the taproom in the back, complete with a DJ who was set up between the back coolers. Locals would pull a can out of a cooler, pay for it at the bar, get a glass, and sit down at a table with their friends. Tallinn had that kind of easy-going vibe.</li><li>Both cities have done a good job renovating and preserving their Old Towns, and now seem to be expanding past that, repurposing older, maybe Soviet-era buildings to something a bit hipper, edgier (?), less traditional. I came away liking Tallinn a bit more than Riga, but maybe it’s because they’re a little bit further down that hipper, less traditional path.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #157</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li> And if you check out the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> page, you can click thru to highlights from Riga and Tallinn.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_155.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #157 — Notes from the Baltics: Riga, Latvia and Tallinn, Estonia','','inherit','closed','closed','','2575-revision-v1','','','2019-11-29 18:54:51','2019-11-29 23:54:51','',2575,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/11/29/2575-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2583,1,'2019-11-30 12:45:53','2019-11-30 17:45:53','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\">\n<p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/2D576E07-6546-4D4B-9D64-0E593596FB0C.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2581 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/2D576E07-6546-4D4B-9D64-0E593596FB0C-268x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"268\" height=\"300\"></a></p><figcaption>Selfies with Friends in Tallinn</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>In this episode, we talk with Michael Taylor, author of <a href=\"https://www.jdpower.com/business/press-releases/2019-north-america-airport-satisfaction-study\">JD Power\'s 2019 Airport Satisfaction Survey</a>, about what keeps fliers happy. I also talk about what I like about eScooters, shopping for a smaller bag for upcoming flights on a Euro budget airline, and how Hertz\'s contract updates remind me to delete my Bluetooth pairings in rental cars. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_156.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/696032101&color=%23ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #157: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago just off the shores of Lake Michigan toward the end of what has been a record-breaking cold November. The first half of the month here was the coldest in 148 years with an average temperature of 31 degrees, which compares to an average high for November of 50 degrees, and a <em>low</em> of 39. But what’s been worse has been the early snow -- 3½ inches of snow on Halloween (another record) and again on Veterans Day. And by some incredible strokes of luck (as opposed to any foresight on my part), I dodged both snows -- by flying home from Charlottesville, VA the day before Halloween, and scheduling a week off the road the week of November 11. It’s <em>always</em> better to be lucky than good.</li><li>Last week was my last week in Charlottesville, finishing up an 18-week project that started in July. A year ago, when I wrapped up a long run in Charlottesville and didn’t know if/when I’d be back, I took an afternoon to hit Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s home that was only a 10-15 minute drive from the client. It was one of those things I wanted to do, but kept putting off -- I’ll get to it -- and here I was, the last day, and so squoze it in between meetings and calls.</li><li>With that in mind, I did just a touch more planning this year, and on my <em>second-to-last </em>trip, the week between the Halloween and Veterans Day snow storms, I flew in a day early on Monday, but to IAD rather than CHO, instead renting a car, and driving the length of the 105-mile <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Skyline Drive (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.nps.gov/shen/planyourvisit/driving-skyline-drive.htm\" target=\"_blank\">Skyline Drive</a> down to Charlottesville along the tops of the Blue Ridge Mountains through Shenandoah National Park. I was probably a week late for peak leaf peeping, but it was still pretty, especially when looking west over the Shenandoah Valley.  I don’t think I would’ve made a special trip to drive Skyline Drive, but since I was in the neighborhood, why not? And it turned out to be just a great drive -- clear blue skies, still some good leaf color, and on a Monday, not a lot of people on that 2-lane road. </li><li>And then last Thursday, flying out of CHO for the last time until I don’t know when, I had to order one last beer at the <a href=\"http://www.gocho.com/concessions/\">Tailwind</a>, the airport bar. For an airport with only 5 gates, the Tailwind always has a great rotation of local craft beers. And there’s a mini-Cheers effect -- maybe not everyone knows my name, but Lyn the bartender recognizes me from my 4-year off-and-on presence in her bar. When I showed back up in July after a 9-month absence, she recognized me right away. So I had to get one last beer from her. I looked at the blackboard and ordered the stout from Blue Mountain Brewery, which was not far from when I ended my trip down Skyline Drive. I was getting over a bit of a cold; the IPA would’ve been a bit rough on the back of my throat. That <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Dark Hollow Stout (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/16352/39417/\" target=\"_blank\">Dark Hollow Stout</a> went down smoother, but what I didn’t quite pick up on is that it’s a 10% alcohol beer. Bit of an eye opener at 11:30am. Made for a good nap on the flight home.</li><li>Bridge Music -- Dive Deep (Loveshadow remix) by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/50488 Ft: Loveshadow</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Mark Skinner sent a note to comments@travelcommons.com a few days ago<ul><li>Hi Mark, Long time listener. So your tag line \"It\'s more about the journey than the destination” hit home to me with what has to be my oddest business trip yet. Tomorrow, I’m flying Washington to Hong Kong, via EWR, arriving Monday afternoon, and then returning on Tuesday morning! I’m basically there for dinner…</li><li>No meetings in Hong Kong, it’s all about taking a cosmic ray detector for NASA on an over-the-pole flight; which the UA flights 179/180 do quite well, EWR-HKG-EWR. They want to understand the amount of radiation from space inside the aircraft cabin. I’ll be in the air longer than on the ground. I’m planning to stay on and to sleep at “normal” east coast times, which means while I’ll have a hotel room by HKG, I’ll be awake then (night in HK, but daytime hours for me).  Happily my upgrades to Polaris Business both ways have been confirmed! Otherwise the 16 hr flight would seem even longer…</li></ul></li><li>Oh, my! There’s a nice end-of-year mileage run! I told Mark that his itinerary reminds me of one I did 12 years ago when I flew to London for a lunch meeting to wrap up a project. I flew ORD-LHR, showered in the arrivals lounge, took a car out to Reading, gave the final readout over lunch, hopped back in the car to LHR, and caught the afternoon flight to DEN. I always say that ORD-LHR-DEN run was the epitome of \"stupid\" travel, but Mark has a good reason for his out-&amp;-back.  Given the amount of time I’ve spent at 35,000 ft over the past 35 years, I’m not sure I want to know the results of Mark’s measurements.</li><li>United Airlines sent out a link promoting a jet lag app, <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Timeshifter (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.timeshifter.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Timeshifter</a>. Though Mark won’t need one because he’s staying on Eastern Time during his quick jaunt to Hong Kong, I decided to give it a try for my trip to Latvia, Estonia, and Finland. Going east, from the US to Europe, has always been easier for me. My usual routine - I skip the seat-back entertainment for 4-6 hrs of shut-eye (I wouldn’t call it true sleep) on the flight over, eat breakfast when I arrive even if I’m not hungry, get outside as much as possible, take a 30-minute nap after check-in, push through until 11:30pm that first night, and then set an alarm for, say, 7am the next morning. That usually resets my body clock and I’m pretty much good-to-go for the rest of the trip. Timeshifter added two things to my routine: starting to shift to destination time a few days before leaving, moving bedtime and wake-up time an hour earlier each day - going to bed at 10 instead of 11 and getting up at 5 instead of 6 the next morning. The second thing was taking melatonin before going to bed, which I tried by I’m not sure that it really does anything for me. It’s also a well-designed app that notifies you about things like when to seek out direct sunlight and when to start and stop with caffeinated drinks. I used the free first plan. Not sure I’ll pay the $9.99 for another plan, though.</li><li>And speaking of caffeinated drinks, last week, staying at the Omni Hotel in Charlottesville, they gave me two door hangers -- one for each night -- that I could exchange for a drink delivered to my door in the morning, or a beer at the bar in the evening. The first night, since I’d already had a margarita at dinner, I skipped the bar for something in the morning. Looking at the door hanger, my choices were coffee, tea, and Red Bull. Wow. Guess they’re catering to all kinds of morning afters. It wasn’t a big margarita, so I went for the cup of tea.</li><li>Following up on last episode’s carry-on discussion, about buying a new bag to meet Finnair and AirBaltic’s size and weight limits, My new <a href=\"https://amzn.to/32lIURe\">TravelPro Maxlite bag</a> worked like a charm. I packed a week of clothes and didn’t tagged by any gate agents. It even fit in the overheads of the ATR prop jobs that hopscotched us around between Riga, Tallinn, and Helsinki. On one of our passes through Helsinki, I saw an AirBaltic luggage sizer and scale by an empty customer service desk, so I decided to check the bag out. It was a bit of a force fit into the sizer and it weighed in at 8½ kilos, just a bit over the limit. Glad I didn’t catch a gate agent’s eye.</li><li>And since we’ve been talking about carry-on luggage over the past couple of episodes, so I pulled together all those threads into a new <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/11/06/how-to-choose-the-best-carry-on-luggage/\">“how to choose a new carry-on” blog post</a>. It went up at the beginning of the month, updating the one from last February, just in time for the Christmas shopping season. If you or a frequent traveling loved one needs a new carry-on, check it out, complete with Amazon Affiliate links if you want to toss a buck TravelCommons’ way.</li><li>And speaking of prop jobs, I definitely misfired on my Finnair seat choices between Helsinki and Riga. I was more focused on choosing seats for the long flights between Chicago and Helsinki, and didn’t pay much attention to the 45-minute flight to and from Riga. So just picked one off the seat map where there would be with no one next to me - 5C both ways - which, as it turned out, was empty for a reason, because it was right next to the propeller. I had forgotten how loud those propellers get on take-off. I popped on my Bose Noise Cancelling headphones (which, I noticed, are starting to show a good bit of wear; so I might be doing a bit of Black Friday/Cyber Monday shopping) on taxi, but when the pilot revved up the propellers, the noise cancellation started to cut in and out. The headphones were having to generate huge “anti-waves” to cancel the prop noise and the battery was too low to support the load. Luckily, I always carry extra triple-AAA batteries in the case. But while I was swapping the battery, the noise, the oscillation pressure was killer. I couldn’t get those headphones back over my ears fast enough. If you go to the <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">TravelCommons’ Instagram page</a>, you can see <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/p/B37C8LVnRkd/\">a bit of video</a> out the window of my HEL-RIX flight complete with a slow-motion propeller.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music - Drops of H2O ( The Filtered Water Treatment ) by J.Lang (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djlang59/37792 Ft: Airtone</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Notes from the Baltics: Riga, Latvia and Tallinn, Estonia</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>At the end of October, right after pushing out <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/10/14/podcast-156-airport-satisfaction-escooters-smaller-luggage/\">the last episode</a>, my son Andrew and I flew east for a week hopscotching through the Baltics -- Riga, Latvia; Tallinn, Estonia; and Helsinki, Finland. Why the Baltics? I’m not really sure. I’m sure we had a good rationale when we first thought of the trip a few years ago, but now, it wasn’t much more than “here are a few kinda outta-the-way countries that might be cool to wander around.”&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>Andrew booked our flights -- Finnair from ORD to Riga with a connection in Helsinki. The Finnair service was fine, a pretty standard Airbus A330 but with lots of polka-dot Marimekko patterns on everything. I’d forgotten they were a Finnish company. I skipped using my UK passport one last time for a quick pass down the EU passport lane, deciding not to strand Andrew in the “everyone else” passport path, which led to an unexpected grilling from the Finnish border control cop about the details of my itinerary. Then he spent a good bit of time paging back and forth through my passport stamps. Can’t think of what he found interesting -- the Chinese visa, the two Indian visas, maybe the Moroccan stamps from that day trip to Tangiers 3 years ago? Eventually, he decided to put his Helsinki stamp right next to August’s Krakow stamp and then open the gate so I could walk through.&nbsp;</li><li>I’m not quite sure what I expected from Riga, but it turned out to be a nice, mid-sized city. Maybe it shouldn’t have, but I was surprised at how well-preserved the city center is, especially the buildings with the over-the-top Art Nouveau edifices with huge faces over the doorways and carved figures holding up window sills. It took some money, though. Down by the river, I saw two buildings side-by-side, the one on the right recently refinished and repainted; the one on the left was still waiting its turn, but time is running out. The Art Nouveau look was there, but muted under the grime and soot and flaking plaster; with some relief decorations on the window balcony worn away.</li><li>I was surprised, though, at how empty Riga’s old town was in the middle of a Tuesday. The streets were empty. Where was everyone? Maybe across the river where it looks like they’ve built new modern office towers. I was glad I didn’t book our hotel down here.</li><li>The <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riga_Central_Market\">Central Market</a> down river from the Old Town was much more lively, and also where Riga stopped looking so Scandi and started looking a bit more post-Soviet. The busses and streetcars orbiting the market looked left over from the early ‘90’s. But I liked it. Most of the people here seemed to be doing their own grocery shopping -- unlike food markets in places like Paris and Barcelona that seem to have more people taking pictures of fish than buying them. But the place is so big that I don’t see that it could survive just on food porn tourism. They repurposed a set of World War I zeppelin hangars -- one for fishmongers, one of butchers, one for greengrocers, and then part of one with some restaurants where Andrew and I made lunch from a round loaf of Uzbeki bread and some tortellini-looking dumplings filled with lamb and venison. It was pretty good.</li><li>Then it was time to go search out some beer taprooms which had us walking sorta northeast, on a straight line away from the river, away from Old Town, across the canal and parks and past the embassies that sorta ring Old Town, and back into a less renovated landscape of storefronts and converted factories, some places run down, others with the hipster-signaling strands of naked edison bulbs over wood tables. Wandering into a courtyard off a busy street, we found&nbsp; <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Labietis (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.labietis.lv/en\" target=\"_blank\">Labietis</a> that had wide and interesting mix of beers -- herb beers and fruit beers, as well as the usual batch of IPAs. The names were interesting, also. <a href=\"https://www.labietis.lv/en/our-beers/fog\">Migla</a>, which they translated as “Fog” had hemp and peppermint in a light pale ale. Not sure it was my top pick, but I gotta give them props for trying something different.</li><li>It was a 45-minute prop job flight from Riga to Tallinn on AirBaltic. I did have a bit of a travel snob realization, though -- when everyone is getting on the same bus for a plane, boarding status is kinda meaningless. Anyhow, AirBaltic was fine service -- no hassles with carryon luggage, no annoying on-board upsells, though with only 45 minutes, there’s not too much damage they could do. Heading for the cab rank at Tallinn, I saw the same warning signs they had at Riga airport - there’s no regulated taxi fees so be careful which taxi you get into. At Riga, we used one of the airport-approved cabs with a meter. At Tallinn, we used <a href=\"https://bolt.eu/en/\">Bolt</a>, a ride-sharing app that looks a lot like Lyft. I used earlier in Krakow and had good luck with it, and it worked fine in Tallinn too - €4 from the airport to Old Town seemed a pretty good deal.</li><li>I can see why Tallinn is popular for long weekends. The Old Town is just that -- winding cobblestone streets, lots of churches and restored old buildings, and lots of shops in those old buildings. It’s up on a hill, so lots of scenic overlook Instagram moments. You could easily spend a couple of days wandering the streets, popping in and out of churches and museums… and shops and bars.</li><li>But after a half-day, I was ready to breach the Old Town’s walls to see what else there was to Tallinn. The first stop was a market by the train station - <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Balti Jaama Turg (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.visitestonia.com/en/baltic-station-market\" target=\"_blank\">Balti Jaama Turg</a>. Nowhere near the size of Riga’s Central Market, we strolled around until, after the 4th or 5th fruit stand and butcher stall, our minds wandered to lunch. We bought a couple different kinds of Uzbeki breads from one stand and a couple of beers from another. The breads were stuffed with some sliced meat cooked in a warming, floral spice, maybe cinnamon. It was very good, though I never got the story of why all the Uzbeki food up here.</li><li>We walked out and around the train station, and through a collection of restaurants in small square buildings, old cargo containers and a couple of railcars. As much as I liked the Uzbeki breads, I wish I’d seen these places first. On the other side was something called <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Telliskivi Creative City. (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://telliskivi.cc/en/\" target=\"_blank\">Telliskivi Creative City.</a> It looked like an old office or administrative building had been converted to a kinda “makers” mall, where people were doing small-scale clothing or leather work in the back of their space and selling it out of the front. We took a quick pass through it though didn’t see anything we wanted to haul back to the US.</li><li>We walked kinda north-northeast, through the<a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\" Kalamaja neighborhood (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.visittallinn.ee/eng/visitor/discover/articles-guides/kalamaja\" target=\"_blank\"> Kalamaja neighborhood</a> toward the harbor. Kalamaja was the exact opposite of the Old Town - wood buildings vs. stone; straight paved streets vs. windy cobblestones; groups of flats vs. castles and government buildings. A few blocks off the harbor we hit the <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Põhjala Brewery &amp; Tap Room (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://pohjalabeer.com/taproom\" target=\"_blank\">Põhjala Brewery &amp; Tap Room</a>. It was in what looked like a very recently renovated stone building; workers were in the midst of renovating the building next to it. Where Labietis felt very native -- funky space tucked away behind some kinda decaying buildings -- Põhjala could’ve been any new taproom in the US -- big U-shaped bar, open kitchen, BBQ on the menu. The beer was very good; the BBQ maybe less successful, but having lived in Memphis and Dallas, I’m a bit of a BBQ snob. The smoked trout dish, though -- that was great.&nbsp;</li><li>We walked back towards town on a path that ran along the harbor. There were lots of new apartment buildings across the road -- 3-4 stories with floor-to-ceiling windows and enclosed balconies facing the harbor. There wasn’t a lot there… yet. But you could see it coming.</li><li>We stopped at the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/ubajahumal/\">Uba Ja Humal</a> beer store before heading back through the Old Town walls. We walked through the front store to the taproom in the back, complete with a DJ who was set up between the back coolers. Locals would pull a can out of a cooler, pay for it at the bar, get a glass, and sit down at a table with their friends. Tallinn had that kind of easy-going vibe.</li><li>Both cities have done a good job renovating and preserving their Old Towns, and now seem to be expanding past that, repurposing older, maybe Soviet-era buildings to something a bit hipper, edgier (?), less traditional. I came away liking Tallinn a bit more than Riga, but maybe it’s because they’re a little bit further down that hipper, less traditional path.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #157</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li> And if you check out the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> page, you can click thru to highlights from Riga and Tallinn.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_155.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #157 — Notes from the Baltics: Riga, Latvia and Tallinn, Estonia','','inherit','closed','closed','','2575-revision-v1','','','2019-11-30 12:45:53','2019-11-30 17:45:53','',2575,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/11/30/2575-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2584,1,'2019-11-30 12:58:18','2019-11-30 17:58:18','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\">\n<p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/2D576E07-6546-4D4B-9D64-0E593596FB0C.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2581 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/2D576E07-6546-4D4B-9D64-0E593596FB0C-268x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"268\" height=\"300\" /></a></p>\n<figcaption>Selfies with Friends in Tallinn</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p>Wrapping up my Charlottesville, VA travel this month, and between those last two trips, I fit in a quick tour of the Baltics. And a listener talks about the reason for his out-and-back day trip from Washington, DC to Hong Kong. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_156.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/696032101&color=%23ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #157: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago just off the shores of Lake Michigan toward the end of what has been a record-breaking cold November. The first half of the month here was the coldest in 148 years with an average temperature of 31 degrees, which compares to an average high for November of 50 degrees, and a <em>low</em> of 39. But what’s been worse has been the early snow -- 3½ inches of snow on Halloween (another record) and again on Veterans Day. And by some incredible strokes of luck (as opposed to any foresight on my part), I dodged both snows -- by flying home from Charlottesville, VA the day before Halloween, and scheduling a week off the road the week of November 11. It’s <em>always</em> better to be lucky than good.</li><li>Last week was my last week in Charlottesville, finishing up an 18-week project that started in July. A year ago, when I wrapped up a long run in Charlottesville and didn’t know if/when I’d be back, I took an afternoon to hit Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s home that was only a 10-15 minute drive from the client. It was one of those things I wanted to do, but kept putting off -- I’ll get to it -- and here I was, the last day, and so squoze it in between meetings and calls.</li><li>With that in mind, I did just a touch more planning this year, and on my <em>second-to-last </em>trip, the week between the Halloween and Veterans Day snow storms, I flew in a day early on Monday, but to IAD rather than CHO, instead renting a car, and driving the length of the 105-mile <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Skyline Drive (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.nps.gov/shen/planyourvisit/driving-skyline-drive.htm\" target=\"_blank\">Skyline Drive</a> down to Charlottesville along the tops of the Blue Ridge Mountains through Shenandoah National Park. I was probably a week late for peak leaf peeping, but it was still pretty, especially when looking west over the Shenandoah Valley.  I don’t think I would’ve made a special trip to drive Skyline Drive, but since I was in the neighborhood, why not? And it turned out to be just a great drive -- clear blue skies, still some good leaf color, and on a Monday, not a lot of people on that 2-lane road. </li><li>And then last Thursday, flying out of CHO for the last time until I don’t know when, I had to order one last beer at the <a href=\"http://www.gocho.com/concessions/\">Tailwind</a>, the airport bar. For an airport with only 5 gates, the Tailwind always has a great rotation of local craft beers. And there’s a mini-Cheers effect -- maybe not everyone knows my name, but Lyn the bartender recognizes me from my 4-year off-and-on presence in her bar. When I showed back up in July after a 9-month absence, she recognized me right away. So I had to get one last beer from her. I looked at the blackboard and ordered the stout from Blue Mountain Brewery, which was not far from when I ended my trip down Skyline Drive. I was getting over a bit of a cold; the IPA would’ve been a bit rough on the back of my throat. That <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Dark Hollow Stout (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/16352/39417/\" target=\"_blank\">Dark Hollow Stout</a> went down smoother, but what I didn’t quite pick up on is that it’s a 10% alcohol beer. Bit of an eye opener at 11:30am. Made for a good nap on the flight home.</li><li>Bridge Music -- Dive Deep (Loveshadow remix) by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/50488 Ft: Loveshadow</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Mark Skinner sent a note to comments@travelcommons.com a few days ago<ul><li>Hi Mark, Long time listener. So your tag line \"It\'s more about the journey than the destination” hit home to me with what has to be my oddest business trip yet. Tomorrow, I’m flying Washington to Hong Kong, via EWR, arriving Monday afternoon, and then returning on Tuesday morning! I’m basically there for dinner…</li><li>No meetings in Hong Kong, it’s all about taking a cosmic ray detector for NASA on an over-the-pole flight; which the UA flights 179/180 do quite well, EWR-HKG-EWR. They want to understand the amount of radiation from space inside the aircraft cabin. I’ll be in the air longer than on the ground. I’m planning to stay on and to sleep at “normal” east coast times, which means while I’ll have a hotel room by HKG, I’ll be awake then (night in HK, but daytime hours for me).  Happily my upgrades to Polaris Business both ways have been confirmed! Otherwise the 16 hr flight would seem even longer…</li></ul></li><li>Oh, my! There’s a nice end-of-year mileage run! I told Mark that his itinerary reminds me of one I did 12 years ago when I flew to London for a lunch meeting to wrap up a project. I flew ORD-LHR, showered in the arrivals lounge, took a car out to Reading, gave the final readout over lunch, hopped back in the car to LHR, and caught the afternoon flight to DEN. I always say that ORD-LHR-DEN run was the epitome of \"stupid\" travel, but Mark has a good reason for his out-&amp;-back.  Given the amount of time I’ve spent at 35,000 ft over the past 35 years, I’m not sure I want to know the results of Mark’s measurements.</li><li>United Airlines sent out a link promoting a jet lag app, <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Timeshifter (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.timeshifter.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Timeshifter</a>. Though Mark won’t need one because he’s staying on Eastern Time during his quick jaunt to Hong Kong, I decided to give it a try for my trip to Latvia, Estonia, and Finland. Going east, from the US to Europe, has always been easier for me. My usual routine - I skip the seat-back entertainment for 4-6 hrs of shut-eye (I wouldn’t call it true sleep) on the flight over, eat breakfast when I arrive even if I’m not hungry, get outside as much as possible, take a 30-minute nap after check-in, push through until 11:30pm that first night, and then set an alarm for, say, 7am the next morning. That usually resets my body clock and I’m pretty much good-to-go for the rest of the trip. Timeshifter added two things to my routine: starting to shift to destination time a few days before leaving, moving bedtime and wake-up time an hour earlier each day - going to bed at 10 instead of 11 and getting up at 5 instead of 6 the next morning. The second thing was taking melatonin before going to bed, which I tried by I’m not sure that it really does anything for me. It’s also a well-designed app that notifies you about things like when to seek out direct sunlight and when to start and stop with caffeinated drinks. I used the free first plan. Not sure I’ll pay the $9.99 for another plan, though.</li><li>And speaking of caffeinated drinks, last week, staying at the Omni Hotel in Charlottesville, they gave me two door hangers -- one for each night -- that I could exchange for a drink delivered to my door in the morning, or a beer at the bar in the evening. The first night, since I’d already had a margarita at dinner, I skipped the bar for something in the morning. Looking at the door hanger, my choices were coffee, tea, and Red Bull. Wow. Guess they’re catering to all kinds of morning afters. It wasn’t a big margarita, so I went for the cup of tea.</li><li>Following up on last episode’s carry-on discussion, about buying a new bag to meet Finnair and AirBaltic’s size and weight limits, My new <a href=\"https://amzn.to/32lIURe\">TravelPro Maxlite bag</a> worked like a charm. I packed a week of clothes and didn’t tagged by any gate agents. It even fit in the overheads of the ATR prop jobs that hopscotched us around between Riga, Tallinn, and Helsinki. On one of our passes through Helsinki, I saw an AirBaltic luggage sizer and scale by an empty customer service desk, so I decided to check the bag out. It was a bit of a force fit into the sizer and it weighed in at 8½ kilos, just a bit over the limit. Glad I didn’t catch a gate agent’s eye.</li><li>And since we’ve been talking about carry-on luggage over the past couple of episodes, so I pulled together all those threads into a new <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/11/06/how-to-choose-the-best-carry-on-luggage/\">“how to choose a new carry-on” blog post</a>. It went up at the beginning of the month, updating the one from last February, just in time for the Christmas shopping season. If you or a frequent traveling loved one needs a new carry-on, check it out, complete with Amazon Affiliate links if you want to toss a buck TravelCommons’ way.</li><li>And speaking of prop jobs, I definitely misfired on my Finnair seat choices between Helsinki and Riga. I was more focused on choosing seats for the long flights between Chicago and Helsinki, and didn’t pay much attention to the 45-minute flight to and from Riga. So just picked one off the seat map where there would be with no one next to me - 5C both ways - which, as it turned out, was empty for a reason, because it was right next to the propeller. I had forgotten how loud those propellers get on take-off. I popped on my Bose Noise Cancelling headphones (which, I noticed, are starting to show a good bit of wear; so I might be doing a bit of Black Friday/Cyber Monday shopping) on taxi, but when the pilot revved up the propellers, the noise cancellation started to cut in and out. The headphones were having to generate huge “anti-waves” to cancel the prop noise and the battery was too low to support the load. Luckily, I always carry extra triple-AAA batteries in the case. But while I was swapping the battery, the noise, the oscillation pressure was killer. I couldn’t get those headphones back over my ears fast enough. If you go to the <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">TravelCommons’ Instagram page</a>, you can see <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/p/B37C8LVnRkd/\">a bit of video</a> out the window of my HEL-RIX flight complete with a slow-motion propeller.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music - Drops of H2O ( The Filtered Water Treatment ) by J.Lang (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djlang59/37792 Ft: Airtone</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Notes from the Baltics: Riga, Latvia and Tallinn, Estonia</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>At the end of October, right after pushing out <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/10/14/podcast-156-airport-satisfaction-escooters-smaller-luggage/\">the last episode</a>, my son Andrew and I flew east for a week hopscotching through the Baltics -- Riga, Latvia; Tallinn, Estonia; and Helsinki, Finland. Why the Baltics? I’m not really sure. I’m sure we had a good rationale when we first thought of the trip a few years ago, but now, it wasn’t much more than “here are a few kinda outta-the-way countries that might be cool to wander around.”&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>Andrew booked our flights -- Finnair from ORD to Riga with a connection in Helsinki. The Finnair service was fine, a pretty standard Airbus A330 but with lots of polka-dot Marimekko patterns on everything. I’d forgotten they were a Finnish company. I skipped using my UK passport one last time for a quick pass down the EU passport lane, deciding not to strand Andrew in the “everyone else” passport path, which led to an unexpected grilling from the Finnish border control cop about the details of my itinerary. Then he spent a good bit of time paging back and forth through my passport stamps. Can’t think of what he found interesting -- the Chinese visa, the two Indian visas, maybe the Moroccan stamps from that day trip to Tangiers 3 years ago? Eventually, he decided to put his Helsinki stamp right next to August’s Krakow stamp and then open the gate so I could walk through.&nbsp;</li><li>I’m not quite sure what I expected from Riga, but it turned out to be a nice, mid-sized city. Maybe it shouldn’t have, but I was surprised at how well-preserved the city center is, especially the buildings with the over-the-top Art Nouveau edifices with huge faces over the doorways and carved figures holding up window sills. It took some money, though. Down by the river, I saw two buildings side-by-side, the one on the right recently refinished and repainted; the one on the left was still waiting its turn, but time is running out. The Art Nouveau look was there, but muted under the grime and soot and flaking plaster; with some relief decorations on the window balcony worn away.</li><li>I was surprised, though, at how empty Riga’s old town was in the middle of a Tuesday. The streets were empty. Where was everyone? Maybe across the river where it looks like they’ve built new modern office towers. I was glad I didn’t book our hotel down here.</li><li>The <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riga_Central_Market\">Central Market</a> down river from the Old Town was much more lively, and also where Riga stopped looking so Scandi and started looking a bit more post-Soviet. The busses and streetcars orbiting the market looked left over from the early ‘90’s. But I liked it. Most of the people here seemed to be doing their own grocery shopping -- unlike food markets in places like Paris and Barcelona that seem to have more people taking pictures of fish than buying them. But the place is so big that I don’t see that it could survive just on food porn tourism. They repurposed a set of World War I zeppelin hangars -- one for fishmongers, one of butchers, one for greengrocers, and then part of one with some restaurants where Andrew and I made lunch from a round loaf of Uzbeki bread and some tortellini-looking dumplings filled with lamb and venison. It was pretty good.</li><li>Then it was time to go search out some beer taprooms which had us walking sorta northeast, on a straight line away from the river, away from Old Town, across the canal and parks and past the embassies that sorta ring Old Town, and back into a less renovated landscape of storefronts and converted factories, some places run down, others with the hipster-signaling strands of naked edison bulbs over wood tables. Wandering into a courtyard off a busy street, we found&nbsp; <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Labietis (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.labietis.lv/en\" target=\"_blank\">Labietis</a> that had wide and interesting mix of beers -- herb beers and fruit beers, as well as the usual batch of IPAs. The names were interesting, also. <a href=\"https://www.labietis.lv/en/our-beers/fog\">Migla</a>, which they translated as “Fog” had hemp and peppermint in a light pale ale. Not sure it was my top pick, but I gotta give them props for trying something different.</li><li>It was a 45-minute prop job flight from Riga to Tallinn on AirBaltic. I did have a bit of a travel snob realization, though -- when everyone is getting on the same bus for a plane, boarding status is kinda meaningless. Anyhow, AirBaltic was fine service -- no hassles with carryon luggage, no annoying on-board upsells, though with only 45 minutes, there’s not too much damage they could do. Heading for the cab rank at Tallinn, I saw the same warning signs they had at Riga airport - there’s no regulated taxi fees so be careful which taxi you get into. At Riga, we used one of the airport-approved cabs with a meter. At Tallinn, we used <a href=\"https://bolt.eu/en/\">Bolt</a>, a ride-sharing app that looks a lot like Lyft. I used earlier in Krakow and had good luck with it, and it worked fine in Tallinn too - €4 from the airport to Old Town seemed a pretty good deal.</li><li>I can see why Tallinn is popular for long weekends. The Old Town is just that -- winding cobblestone streets, lots of churches and restored old buildings, and lots of shops in those old buildings. It’s up on a hill, so lots of scenic overlook Instagram moments. You could easily spend a couple of days wandering the streets, popping in and out of churches and museums… and shops and bars.</li><li>But after a half-day, I was ready to breach the Old Town’s walls to see what else there was to Tallinn. The first stop was a market by the train station - <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Balti Jaama Turg (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.visitestonia.com/en/baltic-station-market\" target=\"_blank\">Balti Jaama Turg</a>. Nowhere near the size of Riga’s Central Market, we strolled around until, after the 4th or 5th fruit stand and butcher stall, our minds wandered to lunch. We bought a couple different kinds of Uzbeki breads from one stand and a couple of beers from another. The breads were stuffed with some sliced meat cooked in a warming, floral spice, maybe cinnamon. It was very good, though I never got the story of why all the Uzbeki food up here.</li><li>We walked out and around the train station, and through a collection of restaurants in small square buildings, old cargo containers and a couple of railcars. As much as I liked the Uzbeki breads, I wish I’d seen these places first. On the other side was something called <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Telliskivi Creative City. (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://telliskivi.cc/en/\" target=\"_blank\">Telliskivi Creative City.</a> It looked like an old office or administrative building had been converted to a kinda “makers” mall, where people were doing small-scale clothing or leather work in the back of their space and selling it out of the front. We took a quick pass through it though didn’t see anything we wanted to haul back to the US.</li><li>We walked kinda north-northeast, through the<a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\" Kalamaja neighborhood (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.visittallinn.ee/eng/visitor/discover/articles-guides/kalamaja\" target=\"_blank\"> Kalamaja neighborhood</a> toward the harbor. Kalamaja was the exact opposite of the Old Town - wood buildings vs. stone; straight paved streets vs. windy cobblestones; groups of flats vs. castles and government buildings. A few blocks off the harbor we hit the <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Põhjala Brewery &amp; Tap Room (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://pohjalabeer.com/taproom\" target=\"_blank\">Põhjala Brewery &amp; Tap Room</a>. It was in what looked like a very recently renovated stone building; workers were in the midst of renovating the building next to it. Where Labietis felt very native -- funky space tucked away behind some kinda decaying buildings -- Põhjala could’ve been any new taproom in the US -- big U-shaped bar, open kitchen, BBQ on the menu. The beer was very good; the BBQ maybe less successful, but having lived in Memphis and Dallas, I’m a bit of a BBQ snob. The smoked trout dish, though -- that was great.&nbsp;</li><li>We walked back towards town on a path that ran along the harbor. There were lots of new apartment buildings across the road -- 3-4 stories with floor-to-ceiling windows and enclosed balconies facing the harbor. There wasn’t a lot there… yet. But you could see it coming.</li><li>We stopped at the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/ubajahumal/\">Uba Ja Humal</a> beer store before heading back through the Old Town walls. We walked through the front store to the taproom in the back, complete with a DJ who was set up between the back coolers. Locals would pull a can out of a cooler, pay for it at the bar, get a glass, and sit down at a table with their friends. Tallinn had that kind of easy-going vibe.</li><li>Both cities have done a good job renovating and preserving their Old Towns, and now seem to be expanding past that, repurposing older, maybe Soviet-era buildings to something a bit hipper, edgier (?), less traditional. I came away liking Tallinn a bit more than Riga, but maybe it’s because they’re a little bit further down that hipper, less traditional path.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #157</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li> And if you check out the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> page, you can click thru to highlights from Riga and Tallinn.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_155.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #157 — Notes from the Baltics: Riga, Latvia and Tallinn, Estonia','','inherit','closed','closed','','2575-revision-v1','','','2019-11-30 12:58:18','2019-11-30 17:58:18','',2575,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/11/30/2575-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2585,1,'2019-11-30 15:25:13','2019-11-30 20:25:13','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\">\n<p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/2D576E07-6546-4D4B-9D64-0E593596FB0C.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2581 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/2D576E07-6546-4D4B-9D64-0E593596FB0C-268x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"268\" height=\"300\" /></a></p>\n<figcaption>Selfies with Friends in Tallinn</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p>Wrapping up my time in Charlottesville, VA this month with some \"bleisure\" travel, as well as some pure leisure travel with a quick tour of the Baltics. And a listener talks about the reason for his out-and-back day trip from Washington, DC to Hong Kong. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_157.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/720859504&color=%23ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #157: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago just off the shores of Lake Michigan toward the end of what has been a record-breaking cold November. The first half of the month here was the coldest in 148 years with an average temperature of 31 degrees, which compares to an average high for November of 50 degrees, and a <em>low</em> of 39. But what’s been worse has been the early snow -- 3½ inches of snow on Halloween (another record) and again on Veterans Day. And by some incredible strokes of luck (as opposed to any foresight on my part), I dodged both snows -- by flying home from Charlottesville, VA the day before Halloween, and scheduling a week off the road the week of November 11. It’s <em>always</em> better to be lucky than good.</li><li>Last week was my last week in Charlottesville, finishing up an 18-week project that started in July. A year ago, when I wrapped up a long run in Charlottesville and didn’t know if/when I’d be back, I took an afternoon to hit Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s home that was only a 10-15 minute drive from the client. It was one of those things I wanted to do, but kept putting off -- I’ll get to it -- and here I was, the last day, and so squoze it in between meetings and calls.</li><li>With that in mind, I did just a touch more planning this year, and on my <em>second-to-last </em>trip, the week between the Halloween and Veterans Day snow storms, I flew in a day early on Monday, but to IAD rather than CHO, instead renting a car, and driving the length of the 105-mile <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Skyline Drive (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.nps.gov/shen/planyourvisit/driving-skyline-drive.htm\" target=\"_blank\">Skyline Drive</a> down to Charlottesville along the tops of the Blue Ridge Mountains through Shenandoah National Park. I was probably a week late for peak leaf peeping, but it was still pretty, especially when looking west over the Shenandoah Valley.&nbsp; I don’t think I would’ve made a special trip to drive Skyline Drive, but since I was in the neighborhood, why not? And it turned out to be just a great drive -- clear blue skies, still some good leaf color, and on a Monday, not a lot of people on that 2-lane road.&nbsp;</li><li>And then last Thursday, flying out of CHO for the last time until I don’t know when, I had to order one last beer at the <a href=\"http://www.gocho.com/concessions/\">Tailwind</a>, the airport bar. For an airport with only 5 gates, the Tailwind always has a great rotation of local craft beers. And there’s a mini-Cheers effect -- maybe not everyone knows my name, but Lyn the bartender recognizes me from my 4-year off-and-on presence in her bar. When I showed back up in July after a 9-month absence, she recognized me right away. So I had to get one last beer from her. I looked at the blackboard and ordered the stout from Blue Mountain Brewery, which was not far from when I ended my trip down Skyline Drive. I was getting over a bit of a cold; the IPA would’ve been a bit rough on the back of my throat. That <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Dark Hollow Stout (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/16352/39417/\" target=\"_blank\">Dark Hollow Stout</a> went down smoother, but what I didn’t quite pick up on is that it’s a 10% alcohol beer. Bit of an eye opener at 11:30am. Made for a good nap on the flight home.</li><li>Bridge Music -- Dive Deep (Loveshadow remix) by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/50488 Ft: Loveshadow</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Mark Skinner sent a note to comments@travelcommons.com a few days ago<ul><li>Hi Mark, Long time listener. So your tag line \"It\'s more about the journey than the destination” hit home to me with what has to be my oddest business trip yet. Tomorrow, I’m flying Washington to Hong Kong, via EWR, arriving Monday afternoon, and then returning on Tuesday morning! I’m basically there for dinner…</li><li>No meetings in Hong Kong, it’s all about taking a cosmic ray detector for NASA on an over-the-pole flight; which the UA flights 179/180 do quite well, EWR-HKG-EWR. They want to understand the amount of radiation from space inside the aircraft cabin. I’ll be in the air longer than on the ground. I’m planning to stay on and to sleep at “normal” east coast times, which means while I’ll have a hotel room by HKG, I’ll be awake then (night in HK, but daytime hours for me).&nbsp; Happily my upgrades to Polaris Business both ways have been confirmed! Otherwise the 16 hr flight would seem even longer…</li></ul></li><li>Oh, my! There’s a nice end-of-year mileage run! I told Mark that his itinerary reminds me of one I did 12 years ago when I flew to London for a lunch meeting to wrap up a project. I flew ORD-LHR, showered in the arrivals lounge, took a car out to Reading, gave the final readout over lunch, hopped back in the car to LHR, and caught the afternoon flight to DEN. I always say that ORD-LHR-DEN run was the epitome of \"stupid\" travel, but Mark has a good reason for his out-&amp;-back.&nbsp; Given the amount of time I’ve spent at 35,000 ft over the past 35 years, I’m not sure I want to know the results of Mark’s measurements.</li><li>United Airlines sent out a link promoting a jet lag app, <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Timeshifter (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.timeshifter.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Timeshifter</a>. Though Mark won’t need one because he’s staying on Eastern Time during his quick jaunt to Hong Kong, I decided to give it a try for my trip to Latvia, Estonia, and Finland. Going east, from the US to Europe, has always been easier for me. My usual routine - I skip the seat-back entertainment for 4-6 hrs of shut-eye (I wouldn’t call it true sleep) on the flight over, eat breakfast when I arrive even if I’m not hungry, get outside as much as possible, take a 30-minute nap after check-in, push through until 11:30pm that first night, and then set an alarm for, say, 7am the next morning. That usually resets my body clock and I’m pretty much good-to-go for the rest of the trip. Timeshifter added two things to my routine: starting to shift to destination time a few days before leaving, moving bedtime and wake-up time an hour earlier each day - going to bed at 10 instead of 11 and getting up at 5 instead of 6 the next morning. The second thing was taking melatonin before going to bed, which I tried by I’m not sure that it really does anything for me. It’s also a well-designed app that notifies you about things like when to seek out direct sunlight and when to start and stop with caffeinated drinks. I used the free first plan. Not sure I’ll pay the $9.99 for another plan, though.</li><li>And speaking of caffeinated drinks, last week, staying at the Omni Hotel in Charlottesville, they gave me two door hangers -- one for each night -- that I could exchange for a drink delivered to my door in the morning, or a beer at the bar in the evening. The first night, since I’d already had a margarita at dinner, I skipped the bar for something in the morning. Looking at the door hanger, my choices were coffee, tea, and Red Bull. Wow. Guess they’re catering to all kinds of morning afters. It wasn’t a big margarita, so I went for the cup of tea.</li><li>Following up on last episode’s carry-on discussion, about buying a new bag to meet Finnair and AirBaltic’s size and weight limits, My new <a href=\"https://amzn.to/32lIURe\">TravelPro Maxlite bag</a> worked like a charm. I packed a week of clothes and didn’t tagged by any gate agents. It even fit in the overheads of the ATR prop jobs that hopscotched us around between Riga, Tallinn, and Helsinki. On one of our passes through Helsinki, I saw an AirBaltic luggage sizer and scale by an empty customer service desk, so I decided to check the bag out. It was a bit of a force fit into the sizer and it weighed in at 8½ kilos, just a bit over the limit. Glad I didn’t catch a gate agent’s eye.</li><li>And since we’ve been talking about carry-on luggage over the past couple of episodes, so I pulled together all those threads into a new <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/11/06/how-to-choose-the-best-carry-on-luggage/\">“how to choose a new carry-on” blog post</a>. It went up at the beginning of the month, updating the one from last February, just in time for the Christmas shopping season. If you or a frequent traveling loved one needs a new carry-on, check it out, complete with Amazon Affiliate links if you want to toss a buck TravelCommons’ way.</li><li>And speaking of prop jobs, I definitely misfired on my Finnair seat choices between Helsinki and Riga. I was more focused on choosing seats for the long flights between Chicago and Helsinki, and didn’t pay much attention to the 45-minute flight to and from Riga. So just picked one off the seat map where there would be with no one next to me - 5C both ways - which, as it turned out, was empty for a reason, because it was right next to the propeller. I had forgotten how loud those propellers get on take-off. I popped on my Bose Noise Cancelling headphones (which, I noticed, are starting to show a good bit of wear; so I might be doing a bit of Black Friday/Cyber Monday shopping) on taxi, but when the pilot revved up the propellers, the noise cancellation started to cut in and out. The headphones were having to generate huge “anti-waves” to cancel the prop noise and the battery was too low to support the load. Luckily, I always carry extra triple-AAA batteries in the case. But while I was swapping the battery, the noise, the oscillation pressure was killer. I couldn’t get those headphones back over my ears fast enough. If you go to the <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">TravelCommons’ Instagram page</a>, you can see <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/p/B37C8LVnRkd/\">a bit of video</a> out the window of my HEL-RIX flight complete with a slow-motion propeller.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music - Drops of H2O ( The Filtered Water Treatment ) by J.Lang (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djlang59/37792 Ft: Airtone</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Notes from the Baltics: Riga, Latvia and Tallinn, Estonia</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>At the end of October, right after pushing out <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/10/14/podcast-156-airport-satisfaction-escooters-smaller-luggage/\">the last episode</a>, my son Andrew and I flew east for a week hopscotching through the Baltics -- Riga, Latvia; Tallinn, Estonia; and Helsinki, Finland. Why the Baltics? I’m not really sure. I’m sure we had a good rationale when we first thought of the trip a few years ago, but now, it wasn’t much more than “here are a few kinda outta-the-way countries that might be cool to wander around.”&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>Andrew booked our flights -- Finnair from ORD to Riga with a connection in Helsinki. The Finnair service was fine, a pretty standard Airbus A330 but with lots of polka-dot Marimekko patterns on everything. I’d forgotten they were a Finnish company. I skipped using my UK passport one last time for a quick pass down the EU passport lane, deciding not to strand Andrew in the “everyone else” passport path, which led to an unexpected grilling from the Finnish border control cop about the details of my itinerary. Then he spent a good bit of time paging back and forth through my passport stamps. Can’t think of what he found interesting -- the Chinese visa, the two Indian visas, maybe the Moroccan stamps from that day trip to Tangiers 3 years ago? Eventually, he decided to put his Helsinki stamp right next to August’s Krakow stamp and then open the gate so I could walk through.&nbsp;</li><li>I’m not quite sure what I expected from Riga, but it turned out to be a nice, mid-sized city. Maybe it shouldn’t have, but I was surprised at how well-preserved the city center is, especially the buildings with the over-the-top Art Nouveau edifices with huge faces over the doorways and carved figures holding up window sills. It took some money, though. Down by the river, I saw two buildings side-by-side, the one on the right recently refinished and repainted; the one on the left was still waiting its turn, but time is running out. The Art Nouveau look was there, but muted under the grime and soot and flaking plaster; with some relief decorations on the window balcony worn away.</li><li>I was surprised, though, at how empty Riga’s old town was in the middle of a Tuesday. The streets were empty. Where was everyone? Maybe across the river where it looks like they’ve built new modern office towers. I was glad I didn’t book our hotel down here.</li><li>The <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riga_Central_Market\">Central Market</a> down river from the Old Town was much more lively, and also where Riga stopped looking so Scandi and started looking a bit more post-Soviet. The busses and streetcars orbiting the market looked left over from the early ‘90’s. But I liked it. Most of the people here seemed to be doing their own grocery shopping -- unlike food markets in places like Paris and Barcelona that seem to have more people taking pictures of fish than buying them. But the place is so big that I don’t see that it could survive just on food porn tourism. They repurposed a set of World War I zeppelin hangars -- one for fishmongers, one of butchers, one for greengrocers, and then part of one with some restaurants where Andrew and I made lunch from a round loaf of Uzbeki bread and some tortellini-looking dumplings filled with lamb and venison. It was pretty good.</li><li>Then it was time to go search out some beer taprooms which had us walking sorta northeast, on a straight line away from the river, away from Old Town, across the canal and parks and past the embassies that sorta ring Old Town, and back into a less renovated landscape of storefronts and converted factories, some places run down, others with the hipster-signaling strands of naked edison bulbs over wood tables. Wandering into a courtyard off a busy street, we found&nbsp; <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Labietis (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.labietis.lv/en\" target=\"_blank\">Labietis</a> that had wide and interesting mix of beers -- herb beers and fruit beers, as well as the usual batch of IPAs. The names were interesting, also. <a href=\"https://www.labietis.lv/en/our-beers/fog\">Migla</a>, which they translated as “Fog” had hemp and peppermint in a light pale ale. Not sure it was my top pick, but I gotta give them props for trying something different.</li><li>It was a 45-minute prop job flight from Riga to Tallinn on AirBaltic. I did have a bit of a travel snob realization, though -- when everyone is getting on the same bus for a plane, boarding status is kinda meaningless. Anyhow, AirBaltic was fine service -- no hassles with carryon luggage, no annoying on-board upsells, though with only 45 minutes, there’s not too much damage they could do. Heading for the cab rank at Tallinn, I saw the same warning signs they had at Riga airport - there’s no regulated taxi fees so be careful which taxi you get into. At Riga, we used one of the airport-approved cabs with a meter. At Tallinn, we used <a href=\"https://bolt.eu/en/\">Bolt</a>, a ride-sharing app that looks a lot like Lyft. I used earlier in Krakow and had good luck with it, and it worked fine in Tallinn too - €4 from the airport to Old Town seemed a pretty good deal.</li><li>I can see why Tallinn is popular for long weekends. The Old Town is just that -- winding cobblestone streets, lots of churches and restored old buildings, and lots of shops in those old buildings. It’s up on a hill, so lots of scenic overlook Instagram moments. You could easily spend a couple of days wandering the streets, popping in and out of churches and museums… and shops and bars.</li><li>But after a half-day, I was ready to breach the Old Town’s walls to see what else there was to Tallinn. The first stop was a market by the train station - <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Balti Jaama Turg (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.visitestonia.com/en/baltic-station-market\" target=\"_blank\">Balti Jaama Turg</a>. Nowhere near the size of Riga’s Central Market, we strolled around until, after the 4th or 5th fruit stand and butcher stall, our minds wandered to lunch. We bought a couple different kinds of Uzbeki breads from one stand and a couple of beers from another. The breads were stuffed with some sliced meat cooked in a warming, floral spice, maybe cinnamon. It was very good, though I never got the story of why all the Uzbeki food up here.</li><li>We walked out and around the train station, and through a collection of restaurants in small square buildings, old cargo containers and a couple of railcars. As much as I liked the Uzbeki breads, I wish I’d seen these places first. On the other side was something called <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Telliskivi Creative City. (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://telliskivi.cc/en/\" target=\"_blank\">Telliskivi Creative City.</a> It looked like an old office or administrative building had been converted to a kinda “makers” mall, where people were doing small-scale clothing or leather work in the back of their space and selling it out of the front. We took a quick pass through it though didn’t see anything we wanted to haul back to the US.</li><li>We walked kinda north-northeast, through the<a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\" Kalamaja neighborhood (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.visittallinn.ee/eng/visitor/discover/articles-guides/kalamaja\" target=\"_blank\"> Kalamaja neighborhood</a> toward the harbor. Kalamaja was the exact opposite of the Old Town - wood buildings vs. stone; straight paved streets vs. windy cobblestones; groups of flats vs. castles and government buildings. A few blocks off the harbor we hit the <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Põhjala Brewery &amp; Tap Room (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://pohjalabeer.com/taproom\" target=\"_blank\">Põhjala Brewery &amp; Tap Room</a>. It was in what looked like a very recently renovated stone building; workers were in the midst of renovating the building next to it. Where Labietis felt very native -- funky space tucked away behind some kinda decaying buildings -- Põhjala could’ve been any new taproom in the US -- big U-shaped bar, open kitchen, BBQ on the menu. The beer was very good; the BBQ maybe less successful, but having lived in Memphis and Dallas, I’m a bit of a BBQ snob. The smoked trout dish, though -- that was great.&nbsp;</li><li>We walked back towards town on a path that ran along the harbor. There were lots of new apartment buildings across the road -- 3-4 stories with floor-to-ceiling windows and enclosed balconies facing the harbor. There wasn’t a lot there… yet. But you could see it coming.</li><li>We stopped at the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/ubajahumal/\">Uba Ja Humal</a> beer store before heading back through the Old Town walls. We walked through the front store to the taproom in the back, complete with a DJ who was set up between the back coolers. Locals would pull a can out of a cooler, pay for it at the bar, get a glass, and sit down at a table with their friends. Tallinn had that kind of easy-going vibe.</li><li>Both cities have done a good job renovating and preserving their Old Towns, and now seem to be expanding past that, repurposing older, maybe Soviet-era buildings to something a bit hipper, edgier (?), less traditional. I came away liking Tallinn a bit more than Riga, but maybe it’s because they’re a little bit further down that hipper, less traditional path.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #157</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li> And if you check out the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> page, you can click thru to highlights from Riga and Tallinn.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_157.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #157 — Notes from the Baltics: Riga, Latvia and Tallinn, Estonia','','inherit','closed','closed','','2575-revision-v1','','','2019-11-30 15:25:13','2019-11-30 20:25:13','',2575,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/11/30/2575-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2586,1,'2019-11-30 15:29:56','2019-11-30 20:29:56','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\">\n<p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/2D576E07-6546-4D4B-9D64-0E593596FB0C.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2581 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/2D576E07-6546-4D4B-9D64-0E593596FB0C-268x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"268\" height=\"300\" /></a></p>\n<figcaption>Selfies with Friends in Tallinn</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p>Wrapping up my time in Charlottesville, VA with some \"bleisure\" travel, as well as some pure leisure travel with a quick trip in the Baltics. And a listener talks about the reason for his out-and-back day trip from Washington, DC to Hong Kong. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_157.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/720859504&color=%23ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #157: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago just off the shores of Lake Michigan toward the end of what has been a record-breaking cold November. The first half of the month here was the coldest in 148 years with an average temperature of 31 degrees, which compares to an average high for November of 50 degrees, and a <em>low</em> of 39. But what’s been worse has been the early snow -- 3½ inches of snow on Halloween (another record) and again on Veterans Day. And by some incredible strokes of luck (as opposed to any foresight on my part), I dodged both snows -- by flying home from Charlottesville, VA the day before Halloween, and scheduling a week off the road the week of November 11. It’s <em>always</em> better to be lucky than good.</li><li>Last week was my last week in Charlottesville, finishing up an 18-week project that started in July. A year ago, when I wrapped up a long run in Charlottesville and didn’t know if/when I’d be back, I took an afternoon to hit Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s home that was only a 10-15 minute drive from the client. It was one of those things I wanted to do, but kept putting off -- I’ll get to it -- and here I was, the last day, and so squoze it in between meetings and calls.</li><li>With that in mind, I did just a touch more planning this year, and on my <em>second-to-last </em>trip, the week between the Halloween and Veterans Day snow storms, I flew in a day early on Monday, but to IAD rather than CHO, instead renting a car, and driving the length of the 105-mile <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Skyline Drive (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.nps.gov/shen/planyourvisit/driving-skyline-drive.htm\" target=\"_blank\">Skyline Drive</a> down to Charlottesville along the tops of the Blue Ridge Mountains through Shenandoah National Park. I was probably a week late for peak leaf peeping, but it was still pretty, especially when looking west over the Shenandoah Valley.&nbsp; I don’t think I would’ve made a special trip to drive Skyline Drive, but since I was in the neighborhood, why not? And it turned out to be just a great drive -- clear blue skies, still some good leaf color, and on a Monday, not a lot of people on that 2-lane road.&nbsp;</li><li>And then last Thursday, flying out of CHO for the last time until I don’t know when, I had to order one last beer at the <a href=\"http://www.gocho.com/concessions/\">Tailwind</a>, the airport bar. For an airport with only 5 gates, the Tailwind always has a great rotation of local craft beers. And there’s a mini-Cheers effect -- maybe not everyone knows my name, but Lyn the bartender recognizes me from my 4-year off-and-on presence in her bar. When I showed back up in July after a 9-month absence, she recognized me right away. So I had to get one last beer from her. I looked at the blackboard and ordered the stout from Blue Mountain Brewery, which was not far from when I ended my trip down Skyline Drive. I was getting over a bit of a cold; the IPA would’ve been a bit rough on the back of my throat. That <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Dark Hollow Stout (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/16352/39417/\" target=\"_blank\">Dark Hollow Stout</a> went down smoother, but what I didn’t quite pick up on is that it’s a 10% alcohol beer. Bit of an eye opener at 11:30am. Made for a good nap on the flight home.</li><li>Bridge Music -- Dive Deep (Loveshadow remix) by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/50488 Ft: Loveshadow</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Mark Skinner sent a note to comments@travelcommons.com a few days ago<ul><li>Hi Mark, Long time listener. So your tag line \"It\'s more about the journey than the destination” hit home to me with what has to be my oddest business trip yet. Tomorrow, I’m flying Washington to Hong Kong, via EWR, arriving Monday afternoon, and then returning on Tuesday morning! I’m basically there for dinner…</li><li>No meetings in Hong Kong, it’s all about taking a cosmic ray detector for NASA on an over-the-pole flight; which the UA flights 179/180 do quite well, EWR-HKG-EWR. They want to understand the amount of radiation from space inside the aircraft cabin. I’ll be in the air longer than on the ground. I’m planning to stay on and to sleep at “normal” east coast times, which means while I’ll have a hotel room by HKG, I’ll be awake then (night in HK, but daytime hours for me).&nbsp; Happily my upgrades to Polaris Business both ways have been confirmed! Otherwise the 16 hr flight would seem even longer…</li></ul></li><li>Oh, my! There’s a nice end-of-year mileage run! I told Mark that his itinerary reminds me of one I did 12 years ago when I flew to London for a lunch meeting to wrap up a project. I flew ORD-LHR, showered in the arrivals lounge, took a car out to Reading, gave the final readout over lunch, hopped back in the car to LHR, and caught the afternoon flight to DEN. I always say that ORD-LHR-DEN run was the epitome of \"stupid\" travel, but Mark has a good reason for his out-&amp;-back.&nbsp; Given the amount of time I’ve spent at 35,000 ft over the past 35 years, I’m not sure I want to know the results of Mark’s measurements.</li><li>United Airlines sent out a link promoting a jet lag app, <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Timeshifter (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.timeshifter.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Timeshifter</a>. Though Mark won’t need one because he’s staying on Eastern Time during his quick jaunt to Hong Kong, I decided to give it a try for my trip to Latvia, Estonia, and Finland. Going east, from the US to Europe, has always been easier for me. My usual routine - I skip the seat-back entertainment for 4-6 hrs of shut-eye (I wouldn’t call it true sleep) on the flight over, eat breakfast when I arrive even if I’m not hungry, get outside as much as possible, take a 30-minute nap after check-in, push through until 11:30pm that first night, and then set an alarm for, say, 7am the next morning. That usually resets my body clock and I’m pretty much good-to-go for the rest of the trip. Timeshifter added two things to my routine: starting to shift to destination time a few days before leaving, moving bedtime and wake-up time an hour earlier each day - going to bed at 10 instead of 11 and getting up at 5 instead of 6 the next morning. The second thing was taking melatonin before going to bed, which I tried by I’m not sure that it really does anything for me. It’s also a well-designed app that notifies you about things like when to seek out direct sunlight and when to start and stop with caffeinated drinks. I used the free first plan. Not sure I’ll pay the $9.99 for another plan, though.</li><li>And speaking of caffeinated drinks, last week, staying at the Omni Hotel in Charlottesville, they gave me two door hangers -- one for each night -- that I could exchange for a drink delivered to my door in the morning, or a beer at the bar in the evening. The first night, since I’d already had a margarita at dinner, I skipped the bar for something in the morning. Looking at the door hanger, my choices were coffee, tea, and Red Bull. Wow. Guess they’re catering to all kinds of morning afters. It wasn’t a big margarita, so I went for the cup of tea.</li><li>Following up on last episode’s carry-on discussion, about buying a new bag to meet Finnair and AirBaltic’s size and weight limits, My new <a href=\"https://amzn.to/32lIURe\">TravelPro Maxlite bag</a> worked like a charm. I packed a week of clothes and didn’t tagged by any gate agents. It even fit in the overheads of the ATR prop jobs that hopscotched us around between Riga, Tallinn, and Helsinki. On one of our passes through Helsinki, I saw an AirBaltic luggage sizer and scale by an empty customer service desk, so I decided to check the bag out. It was a bit of a force fit into the sizer and it weighed in at 8½ kilos, just a bit over the limit. Glad I didn’t catch a gate agent’s eye.</li><li>And since we’ve been talking about carry-on luggage over the past couple of episodes, so I pulled together all those threads into a new <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/11/06/how-to-choose-the-best-carry-on-luggage/\">“how to choose a new carry-on” blog post</a>. It went up at the beginning of the month, updating the one from last February, just in time for the Christmas shopping season. If you or a frequent traveling loved one needs a new carry-on, check it out, complete with Amazon Affiliate links if you want to toss a buck TravelCommons’ way.</li><li>And speaking of prop jobs, I definitely misfired on my Finnair seat choices between Helsinki and Riga. I was more focused on choosing seats for the long flights between Chicago and Helsinki, and didn’t pay much attention to the 45-minute flight to and from Riga. So just picked one off the seat map where there would be with no one next to me - 5C both ways - which, as it turned out, was empty for a reason, because it was right next to the propeller. I had forgotten how loud those propellers get on take-off. I popped on my Bose Noise Cancelling headphones (which, I noticed, are starting to show a good bit of wear; so I might be doing a bit of Black Friday/Cyber Monday shopping) on taxi, but when the pilot revved up the propellers, the noise cancellation started to cut in and out. The headphones were having to generate huge “anti-waves” to cancel the prop noise and the battery was too low to support the load. Luckily, I always carry extra triple-AAA batteries in the case. But while I was swapping the battery, the noise, the oscillation pressure was killer. I couldn’t get those headphones back over my ears fast enough. If you go to the <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">TravelCommons’ Instagram page</a>, you can see <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/p/B37C8LVnRkd/\">a bit of video</a> out the window of my HEL-RIX flight complete with a slow-motion propeller.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music - Drops of H2O ( The Filtered Water Treatment ) by J.Lang (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djlang59/37792 Ft: Airtone</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Notes from the Baltics: Riga, Latvia and Tallinn, Estonia</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>At the end of October, right after pushing out <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/10/14/podcast-156-airport-satisfaction-escooters-smaller-luggage/\">the last episode</a>, my son Andrew and I flew east for a week hopscotching through the Baltics -- Riga, Latvia; Tallinn, Estonia; and Helsinki, Finland. Why the Baltics? I’m not really sure. I’m sure we had a good rationale when we first thought of the trip a few years ago, but now, it wasn’t much more than “here are a few kinda outta-the-way countries that might be cool to wander around.”&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>Andrew booked our flights -- Finnair from ORD to Riga with a connection in Helsinki. The Finnair service was fine, a pretty standard Airbus A330 but with lots of polka-dot Marimekko patterns on everything. I’d forgotten they were a Finnish company. I skipped using my UK passport one last time for a quick pass down the EU passport lane, deciding not to strand Andrew in the “everyone else” passport path, which led to an unexpected grilling from the Finnish border control cop about the details of my itinerary. Then he spent a good bit of time paging back and forth through my passport stamps. Can’t think of what he found interesting -- the Chinese visa, the two Indian visas, maybe the Moroccan stamps from that day trip to Tangiers 3 years ago? Eventually, he decided to put his Helsinki stamp right next to August’s Krakow stamp and then open the gate so I could walk through.&nbsp;</li><li>I’m not quite sure what I expected from Riga, but it turned out to be a nice, mid-sized city. Maybe it shouldn’t have, but I was surprised at how well-preserved the city center is, especially the buildings with the over-the-top Art Nouveau edifices with huge faces over the doorways and carved figures holding up window sills. It took some money, though. Down by the river, I saw two buildings side-by-side, the one on the right recently refinished and repainted; the one on the left was still waiting its turn, but time is running out. The Art Nouveau look was there, but muted under the grime and soot and flaking plaster; with some relief decorations on the window balcony worn away.</li><li>I was surprised, though, at how empty Riga’s old town was in the middle of a Tuesday. The streets were empty. Where was everyone? Maybe across the river where it looks like they’ve built new modern office towers. I was glad I didn’t book our hotel down here.</li><li>The <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riga_Central_Market\">Central Market</a> down river from the Old Town was much more lively, and also where Riga stopped looking so Scandi and started looking a bit more post-Soviet. The busses and streetcars orbiting the market looked left over from the early ‘90’s. But I liked it. Most of the people here seemed to be doing their own grocery shopping -- unlike food markets in places like Paris and Barcelona that seem to have more people taking pictures of fish than buying them. But the place is so big that I don’t see that it could survive just on food porn tourism. They repurposed a set of World War I zeppelin hangars -- one for fishmongers, one of butchers, one for greengrocers, and then part of one with some restaurants where Andrew and I made lunch from a round loaf of Uzbeki bread and some tortellini-looking dumplings filled with lamb and venison. It was pretty good.</li><li>Then it was time to go search out some beer taprooms which had us walking sorta northeast, on a straight line away from the river, away from Old Town, across the canal and parks and past the embassies that sorta ring Old Town, and back into a less renovated landscape of storefronts and converted factories, some places run down, others with the hipster-signaling strands of naked edison bulbs over wood tables. Wandering into a courtyard off a busy street, we found&nbsp; <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Labietis (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.labietis.lv/en\" target=\"_blank\">Labietis</a> that had wide and interesting mix of beers -- herb beers and fruit beers, as well as the usual batch of IPAs. The names were interesting, also. <a href=\"https://www.labietis.lv/en/our-beers/fog\">Migla</a>, which they translated as “Fog” had hemp and peppermint in a light pale ale. Not sure it was my top pick, but I gotta give them props for trying something different.</li><li>It was a 45-minute prop job flight from Riga to Tallinn on AirBaltic. I did have a bit of a travel snob realization, though -- when everyone is getting on the same bus for a plane, boarding status is kinda meaningless. Anyhow, AirBaltic was fine service -- no hassles with carryon luggage, no annoying on-board upsells, though with only 45 minutes, there’s not too much damage they could do. Heading for the cab rank at Tallinn, I saw the same warning signs they had at Riga airport - there’s no regulated taxi fees so be careful which taxi you get into. At Riga, we used one of the airport-approved cabs with a meter. At Tallinn, we used <a href=\"https://bolt.eu/en/\">Bolt</a>, a ride-sharing app that looks a lot like Lyft. I used earlier in Krakow and had good luck with it, and it worked fine in Tallinn too - €4 from the airport to Old Town seemed a pretty good deal.</li><li>I can see why Tallinn is popular for long weekends. The Old Town is just that -- winding cobblestone streets, lots of churches and restored old buildings, and lots of shops in those old buildings. It’s up on a hill, so lots of scenic overlook Instagram moments. You could easily spend a couple of days wandering the streets, popping in and out of churches and museums… and shops and bars.</li><li>But after a half-day, I was ready to breach the Old Town’s walls to see what else there was to Tallinn. The first stop was a market by the train station - <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Balti Jaama Turg (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.visitestonia.com/en/baltic-station-market\" target=\"_blank\">Balti Jaama Turg</a>. Nowhere near the size of Riga’s Central Market, we strolled around until, after the 4th or 5th fruit stand and butcher stall, our minds wandered to lunch. We bought a couple different kinds of Uzbeki breads from one stand and a couple of beers from another. The breads were stuffed with some sliced meat cooked in a warming, floral spice, maybe cinnamon. It was very good, though I never got the story of why all the Uzbeki food up here.</li><li>We walked out and around the train station, and through a collection of restaurants in small square buildings, old cargo containers and a couple of railcars. As much as I liked the Uzbeki breads, I wish I’d seen these places first. On the other side was something called <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Telliskivi Creative City. (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://telliskivi.cc/en/\" target=\"_blank\">Telliskivi Creative City.</a> It looked like an old office or administrative building had been converted to a kinda “makers” mall, where people were doing small-scale clothing or leather work in the back of their space and selling it out of the front. We took a quick pass through it though didn’t see anything we wanted to haul back to the US.</li><li>We walked kinda north-northeast, through the<a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\" Kalamaja neighborhood (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.visittallinn.ee/eng/visitor/discover/articles-guides/kalamaja\" target=\"_blank\"> Kalamaja neighborhood</a> toward the harbor. Kalamaja was the exact opposite of the Old Town - wood buildings vs. stone; straight paved streets vs. windy cobblestones; groups of flats vs. castles and government buildings. A few blocks off the harbor we hit the <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Põhjala Brewery &amp; Tap Room (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://pohjalabeer.com/taproom\" target=\"_blank\">Põhjala Brewery &amp; Tap Room</a>. It was in what looked like a very recently renovated stone building; workers were in the midst of renovating the building next to it. Where Labietis felt very native -- funky space tucked away behind some kinda decaying buildings -- Põhjala could’ve been any new taproom in the US -- big U-shaped bar, open kitchen, BBQ on the menu. The beer was very good; the BBQ maybe less successful, but having lived in Memphis and Dallas, I’m a bit of a BBQ snob. The smoked trout dish, though -- that was great.&nbsp;</li><li>We walked back towards town on a path that ran along the harbor. There were lots of new apartment buildings across the road -- 3-4 stories with floor-to-ceiling windows and enclosed balconies facing the harbor. There wasn’t a lot there… yet. But you could see it coming.</li><li>We stopped at the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/ubajahumal/\">Uba Ja Humal</a> beer store before heading back through the Old Town walls. We walked through the front store to the taproom in the back, complete with a DJ who was set up between the back coolers. Locals would pull a can out of a cooler, pay for it at the bar, get a glass, and sit down at a table with their friends. Tallinn had that kind of easy-going vibe.</li><li>Both cities have done a good job renovating and preserving their Old Towns, and now seem to be expanding past that, repurposing older, maybe Soviet-era buildings to something a bit hipper, edgier (?), less traditional. I came away liking Tallinn a bit more than Riga, but maybe it’s because they’re a little bit further down that hipper, less traditional path.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #157</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li> And if you check out the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> page, you can click thru to highlights from Riga and Tallinn.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_157.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #157 — Notes from the Baltics: Riga, Latvia and Tallinn, Estonia','','inherit','closed','closed','','2575-revision-v1','','','2019-11-30 15:29:56','2019-11-30 20:29:56','',2575,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/11/30/2575-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2587,1,'2019-11-30 15:46:36','2019-11-30 20:46:36','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><img class=\"wp-image-2439\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/oysters_and_evian_bottles-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\"><figcaption>Cancale Oysters with a nice Evian Sancerre</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>Squeezing in another episode before moving the TravelCommons studios, we talk with <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mylaocoon\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Candid Wueest</span></a> of Symantec about websites that leak traveler data and what we can do to protect ourselves. I talk about yet more frustration with the <a href=\"http://avios.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Avios</a> frequent flyer program, while a listener writes in about his great experience with <a href=\"https://www.getfreebird.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Freebird</a>, a new flight rebooking service. I wrap up talking about great street food we had while touring Brittany, France last month. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_151.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_151.mp3\"]\n<p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #151: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, for the last time…. Not the last time for TravelCommons, just the last time for the studios “outside of Chicago”. We’re picking up stakes and moving about 20 miles east-northeast to Chicago’s Lakeview neighborhood. Hence the reason for the short-cycle on this episode. We’ll be breaking down and packing up the studio and production bay next week and probably won’t have everything reassembled until the end of the month. The recording isn’t really the issue -- I could always go back to my roots and find a spare bathroom to record in. It’s more about the production. I’m not sure I want to shrink my workflow down from a beefy dual 22-inch monitor Windows 10 mini-tower rig to my 2014 vintage 11-inch MacBook Air.</li><li>Being consumed by the move logistics vortex also means I haven’t done any real travel in the 2 weeks since the last episode -- but, given my most recent travel experiences, as laid out in last episode’s <em>Travel Interruptus</em> epic, I’ve appreciated the break. Especially when yet another yet another April snowstorm that blew up 700 flights last weekend. Instead, I’ve been wrestling once again with Avios -- the British Airways, Iberia, and now Aer Lingus frequent flyer program -- trying to book a Chicago-Dublin-Edinburgh Aer Lingus itinerary for my daughter’s graduation from University of St Andrews next month. I’ve been pretty <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/08/26/podcast-116-traveling-thru-japan-luggage-trends/\">vocal</a> about my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">challenges</a> with Avios over the years. In this go-around, the first wackiness was just trying to use the Avios website. To search for flights, you need to log in with your BA, Iberia, or Aer Lingus credentials. I try with all three; and fail with all three. Seems that the passwords given out by BA and Iberia don’t meet Avios’ security rules, so they fail. I assumed the username for my Aer Lingus account was my email address and the password seemed strong enough, but that kept failing too. Finally, after digging around my Aer Lingus profile, I found a separate username, which I’d never seen or used before, and <em>that</em> worked. Finally through the gate and onto the second wackiness -- the difference between the value of an Avios point on the Aer Lingus and Avios web sites. The award offers on both sites were points + cash. Taking the “market rate” for the ticket (pulled from Expedia), subtracting out the required cash payment, and dividing by the number of required Avios points gives the value of the Avios point for that award offer. My rule of thumb is -- get at least 2 cents/point or pay cash. The Aer Lingus site valued an Avios point at 0.7 cents while the Avios site hit my 2-cent minimum. I couldn’t quite understand that 65% difference, but I booked our tickets on the wonkier Avios site before it went away. If I remember anything from my University of Chicago business school courses, it’s that markets are efficient; 65% price differences don’t last forever. Though in this case, that difference may linger because the Avios website makes it so damn hard to find. </li><li>Bridge Music — <em>Lakeside Jam</em> by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/55998 </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Veteran TravelCommons listener Mika Pyyhkala sent in a note this week talking about his great experience with a flight rebooking service, <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Freebird (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"http://getfreebird.com\" target=\"_blank\">Freebird</a>. Mika writes:<ul><li>I was flying with a companion from (Wichita) ICT-STL and STL-DTW. &nbsp;Just as the plane was descending to DTW, I received text messages from WN and Freebird that STL-DTW on WN had been cancelled. &nbsp;Freebird then manually advised that the only flight for that day was a DL STL-DTW, and they were going to book it in case I wanted it; if they waited longer there might not be enough time to issue the new ticket on Delta through their travel agent. &nbsp;They just asked me to confirm that I in fact wanted the Delta ticket.  </li><li>I confirmed we wanted the 2 Delta tickets, and by the time the door opened in STL we had a confirmation number to check in for the Delta flight leaving in 47 minutes. We got seats together on the Delta flight that were assigned by the Freebird process, and they even gave us free drinks!</li><li>I think we actually arrived in DTW a few minutes earlier than we were scheduled on the original flight, and it made for a great travel story and adventure! &nbsp;This was my first time using Freebird as well!</li><li>It costs $19 to protect a one way trip per traveler. &nbsp;It’s simple to work with them: unlike insurance, there are no claim forms, long waits, or papers to sign</li></ul></li><li>Mika, thanks for this. I hadn’t heard of Freebird before Mika’s note. Hitting their website, they’re selling their service to companies, travel agencies, and to individual travelers. Clicking through to a TechCrunch article about them, it says they’re also talking to Amex and Citibank about including Freebird as a credit card benefit. The article quotes the CEO, Ethan Bernstein - “It’s funny what happens when people deal with uncertainty; uncertainty is the worst. As soon you give people information, human support and technology to help them solve their problems, they experience the event so much differently.” &nbsp;Which is exactly right. Certainty lets you plan; uncertainty just leaves you to stew… and drink at the airport bar… and eat bad airport food… and bitch Tweet. Yup, uncertainty leads to lots of bad things</li><li>One more-fun-than-necessarily-good thing on last month’s trip was getting to try out an alpha version of a new augmented reality feature for Google Maps. I used it first in Stockholm; we got off the Arlanda Express at the Central Train station and wanted make our way over to the <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Östermalms Saluhall (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.ostermalmshallen.se/en/\" target=\"_blank\">Östermalms Saluhall</a> for lunch. When I chose “Walking” as our transport mode, a “Start AR” button showed up next to the usual button to start the directions. With AR, I’d hold my phone up, the display would use the camera to show the streetscape in front of me with the &nbsp;directions -- street names, arrows -- overlaid on the real-time image. I thought it was a nice add; reduced any ambiguity about where the next turn was. One interesting feature -- when I started walking, the screen dimmed and a message popped up telling me to stop looking at the phone and look straight ahead. All in all, it’s kinda fun. At least I thought so; Andrew and Irene seemed much less impressed. It worked very well for what was billed as an alpha product. It’ll be interesting to see how it develops, and how fast Google rolls it out.</li><li>But even without a broader AR roll-out, Google Maps seems on track to become the next “<a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"super app (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://skift.com/2019/04/16/google-maps-is-ready-to-transform-the-world-of-superapps-a-skift-deep-dive/\" target=\"_blank\">super app</a>” -- sorta the Western counterpart to China’s WeChat -- the first “super app”, a Swiss Army Knife-kind of “it does everything” app. Now Google Maps isn’t to that level -- yet -- but it is growing. It started as a mapping app, then added driving directions, then ride share -- showing Uber and Lyft prices, then public transit directions with real-time arrival times, replacing the core use case for apps like Transit. Then the “Explore Nearby” became more prominent -- which, for me, has supplanted Yelp when looking for a restaurant because it’s so much more convenient, and with deep links to OpenTable for reservations; and for nearby hotels, direct booking links to Expedia and Booking.com. I wasn’t surprised when I saw a stat that those “Near Me” searches grew 150 percent the last year. I’m not quite sure what I think about this -- loving a free service that keeps becoming more valuable vs. becoming more enslaved to the Google overlords. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/08/27/podcast-132-travel-apps-on-my-phone/\">episode #132</a>, I listed all the travel apps on my smartphone, and Google Maps was the most important -- “Indeed, it’s the only travel app with its own screen real estate rather than sharing space in the Travel folder,” I said. And it only keeps getting more indispensable.</li><li>Thinking back to our last day in Paris when both Ubers that we ordered were nice black Mercedes, I couldn’t help thinking how the quality of US Uber and Lyft vehicles has slipped. I remember when I started using Uber in 4-5 years ago, the cars were pristine. I remember working in Baltimore one summer; I was more than happy to wait 5 minutes for an Uber rather than take one of the cabs waiting at the stand right outside the building I was in. Those cabs were so beat up, so full of trash, and most of the time, without working air conditioning. Today, cabs haven’t gotten much cleaner, but Uber and Lyft seem to be lowering their standards. I dunno if it’s because of falling unemployment rates or trying to keep up with growth or squeezing driver pay to improve their post-IPO margins -- or all of the above -- but I’m seeing a real drop in quality.</li><li>Long-time TravelCommons listeners will recall that I’ve spent a lot of time in New Orleans airport and other than serving beer in go cups French Quarter-style so you can walk around the terminal with it, there’s not much good to say about it. Especially with regards to food and restaurants. For such a great food town to have such mediocre airport concessions has always been beyond me. But then again, the original terminal was built in 1959, and then expanded in the mid-70’s and mid-90’s. The new $1 billion replacement terminal was originally scheduled to open last year during New Orleans’ tricentennial, but that then slipped to February of this year, then to May, and now to a “to be determined” date sometime in the fall. The restaurant selection is supposed to be much better but I hope they don’t change that beer policy though. One time, waiting out yet another thunderstorm delay, I’d bought a beer and was standing by the gate drinking it because the bar was full. American called boarding and I walked up to the gate. The agent stopped me -- “You can drink that beer anywhere in the airport -- except on the jetway.” I looked down; I’d forgotten that I was still carrying that beer. I stepped to the side, chugged it, and then got on the plane. Felt like a very New Orleans thing to do.</li><li>And if you have any travel rants, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. &nbsp;The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Facebook page</a> or our Instagram account at <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Travelcommons</a> -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music —  <em>A Thousand And None</em> by Speck (c) copyright 2018 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/speck/57256 Ft: Mr_Yesterday</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Traveler Data Leaks</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Interview with <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mylaocoon\">Candid Wueest</a>, Principal Threat Researcher at Symantec and author of a blog post titled <a href=\"https://www.symantec.com/blogs/threat-intelligence/hotel-websites-leak-guest-data\"><em>Two in Three Hotel Websites Leak Guest Booking Details and Allow Access to Personal Data</em></a></li><li>Bridge Music —  <em>dazed </em>by Jeris (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/VJ_Memes/39456 Ft: airtone</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Brittany Street Food</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I’ll write a proper “Road Trip” post about our Brittany trip later this spring, after we get settled in the new digs, but after streaming a few episodes of Netflix’s “Street Food” series, I started thinking about some of the Breton street food we enjoyed while touring last month. If you’ve seen any of the Netflix series, you know that it’s more about the vendors than the food. But my French trails off after “oui,” “non,” “merci,” and “S\'il vous plaît” so I wasn’t able to get much of the vendor’s life stories. So this will be all about the food.</li><li>The first place we stayed was <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancale\">Cancale</a>, and we went there for one reason - oysters. Like people have been doing for 300-some odd years. When the tide is out, you can see miles of oyster beds with big farm tractors moving through the rows, hauling out trailers of oysters. Lining the ramp where the tractors drive up out of the beds is a little oyster market -- 8 stalls selling oysters fresh from the beds for €5-6/dozen. After adding another couple of euros for shucking, a half lemon and the use of a plastic platter, we’d have our afternoon snack -- sitting on the sea wall by the market, slurping through a couple dozen very briny oysters while watching the tractors work, and then pitching the empty shells back onto the beach for the seagulls to pick through. Our first afternoon, we only had a couple of cans of beer in our jacket pocket. The next couple of afternoons, we’d pour a nice white wine into some empty Evian bottles (Claire and I preferred a Sancerre) and make sure we had a good supply of wet wipes. We didn’t miss an afternoon on that sea wall while in Cancale.</li><li>Buckwheat is a big thing in Brittany. It’s been grown in Brittany for half a millennium or more, and for almost that long, it seems, has been turned into a <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galette\">galette</a>. a buckwheat crêpe. But a crêpe in form and shape only. Instead of a soft white wheat flour crêpe filled with jam or Nutella, the galette is crisper/firmer and savory. Fine on its own smeared with Breton butter, or with egg and cheese and ham inside. We got into Concarneau, on the southwest coast of Brittany about an hour before the weekly Friday outdoor market closed. &nbsp;I counted a half-dozen galette trucks. We walked up to the closest one. The cook was finishing up what looked like a weekend’s worth of galettes for the person in front of us -- flipping them, then pulling them off two hot metal disks, buttering them, and adding them to the stack. It was Friday in Lent, so I went for the egg, onion, and cheese galette. The creaminess of the cheese played nicely against the nutty graininess of the buckwheat.</li><li>The next day we drove to Rennes, our last stop in Brittany. We dropped the rental car at the train station and took the subway to Place des Lices for the huge Saturday market. We walked down from the subway station, through the fruit and vegetable stands lining the street -- beautiful stuff, but we’re leaving the next day, so we’re not doing a lot of green grocery shopping. There, between the two market halls, is a collection of food trucks; about 70% of them selling what we were looking for -- <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galette-saucisse\">galette-saucisse</a> -- the classic Breton street food that is pretty much what the straight translation from French to English suggests -- a sausage in a galette. Kinda like a Breton hot dog, it’s a cooked pork sausage wrapped in a cool galette, maybe with some grilled onions and dijon mustard added. There were lines tailing back from all the trucks serving these. A local guy pointed one truck out to Irene -- “They’re the best”, he said. She and Claire stood in queue while Andrew and I searched for drinks. Around the corner, we found a local cider maker; a couple of tables surrounded by crates of cider bottles. Through a mangled bit of Franglais, we bought a bottle of dry cider that had stayed cool in the shade and four cups, and got back to the food truck line just in time to be handed my galette-saucisse. After finishing the sausage and cider, I swung past the cider stand to give him the empty bottle -- kinda in-person recycling. There wasn’t much time to catch up on his life story, but it was a sunny Saturday and he had a full line; looked like he was having a good day.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #151</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_151.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<p><!--EndFragment--></p>\n<p></p>','Podcast #151 — Traveler Data Leaks; Brittany Street Food','','inherit','closed','closed','','2436-revision-v1','','','2019-11-30 15:46:36','2019-11-30 20:46:36','',2436,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/11/30/2436-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2590,1,'2019-12-11 12:23:27','2019-12-11 17:23:27','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":2591,\"width\":316,\"height\":210} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright is-resized\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/DSC_2534-1024x683.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2591\" width=\"316\" height=\"210\"/></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Coming into the heart of the Christmas shopping season, when people are getting desperate for gift ideas, I thought I\'d offer up 10 suggestions for gifts that a new frequent traveler will actually use. While many gift lists are pushing Away luggage, Huzi infinity pillows, and Aesop travel kits (these companies must\'ve splashed a lot of samples around the blog-o-sphere), I built my list based on my own travel kit; the things I use every travel day in the 40-50 trips I take each year.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list {\"ordered\":true} -->\n<ol><li><strong>Black 20-inch carry-on suitcase</strong> <strong>—</strong> Black not only makes you look thinner, it makes your bag look thinner to gate agents hunting for bag-sizer bait. Black also doesn’t show stains. A 20-incher should get your traveler on-board for 90% of airlines without a hassle. I go for the 2-wheeler with the biggest wheels I can find to make it an easier, smoother pull. But that\'s my personal preference; a lot of travelers (including my wife) swear by their 4-wheel spinners. I bought the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/32lIURe\">TravelPro Maxlite 5</a> a few months ago and highly recommend it.</li><li><strong>TSA Global Entry or Pre-Check</strong> <strong>—</strong> Gift your new traveler with 5 years of time and hassle reduction. <a aria-label=\"$100 for both (opens in a new tab)\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.cbp.gov/travel/trusted-traveler-programs/global-entry\" target=\"_blank\">$100 for both</a>; $85 for just <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Pre-Check. (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/precheck\" target=\"_blank\">Pre-Check.</a> If you have a high-end card like an <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Amex Platinum (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.americanexpress.com/us/expedite-your-travel.html\" target=\"_blank\">Amex Platinum</a>, you might be able to put your card on their application and get the $100 fee back in a statement credit.</li><li><strong>Noise Canceling Headphones</strong> <strong>—</strong> I mentioned in <a aria-label=\"$100 for both (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/11/30/podcast-157-notes-from-the-baltics-riga-latvia-and-tallinn-estonia/\">the last podcast episode</a> how my trusty Bose QC-15s saved me from the propeller drone on my flights around the Baltics. The drone of jet or propeller engines disappear with the flick of a switch. But it\'s the drop in stress level and blood pressure that accompanies that flick of the switch — you don’t realize how much that drone affects you. Everything in my briefcase has to earn its space. I’ve been carrying Bose headphones for, I dunno, 10, 15 years. They’re nowhere near compact, but I’ve never thought of leaving them behind. The models you want to look for -- either the <a aria-label=\" (opens in a new tab)\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2RG7V80\" target=\"_blank\">Bose QC-35 II</a> or the <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Sony WH-1000XM3 (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2LGlVuK\" target=\"_blank\">Sony WH-1000XM3</a>. Your generous gift will be lovingly appreciated by your new traveler.</li><li><strong>VPN Subscription</strong> <strong>—</strong> Frequent travelers spend much of their time on public WiFi networks -- airports, hotels, bars, coffee shops, ....  Help them surf safe with a VPN subscription. I\'ve used <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"NordVPN (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"http://nordvpn.com\" target=\"_blank\">NordVPN</a> and <a aria-label=\" (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/\">PIA</a>.  They both protect laptops, and iOS and Android phones and tablets. VPN providers always have some promotion going on. A one-year subscription is usually in the $35-85 range.</li><li><strong>Portable Power Bank</strong> <strong>—</strong> Whatever the size or form factor -- slimline, lipstick, high-capacity brick -- having that second or third charge readily available is critical to get last-minute gate change notifications and when you’re using electronic boarding passes. It saves you from stalking cleaning crews to find a live power outlet on your layover, or negotiating with your seat mate for possession of outlet between you. It’s cheap peace of mind.  The <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Anker PowerCore+ Mini (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2E6HMri\" target=\"_blank\">Anker PowerCore+ Mini</a> is light enough (under 3 oz) to carry any time. I\'ve also started carrying a <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Zendure Power Bank Supermini (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/34fcbON\" target=\"_blank\">Zendure Power Bank Supermini</a> for faster iPhone 11 charging.</li><li><strong>Badger Hair Shaving Brush</strong> <strong>—</strong> I switched from an electric razor to blade to make it easier to pass through London-Heathrow during one of their security crack-downs and never went back. To do it right, though, you need to have a badger hair shaving brush. I use a not-too-expensive <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Edwin Jagger brush (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2Pcm1wy\" target=\"_blank\">Edwin Jagger brush</a> that makes my morning shave into a bit of a meditation. If you want to go all in, get your traveler the <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Alluvian Shave Soap 5-Piece Travel Size Sampler. (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://alluvian.co/shop/shave-soap-travel-size-sampler\" target=\"_blank\">Alluvian Shave Soap 5-Piece Travel Size Sampler.</a> They smell great and are the perfect travel size.</li><li><strong>Merino Wool Scarf</strong> <strong>—</strong>&nbsp;A man’s scarf is an incredibly undervalued piece of intermediate winter wear. In an airplane cabin or hotel room where a coat is too much (especially in a middle seat), but there’s a draft that chills you, a scarf around the neck is just enough without being too much. You may have to teach your new traveler how to wear it, but you can have fun with colors. I\'m a big fan of <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"merino wool scarves (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/35ckwUq\" target=\"_blank\">merino wool scarves</a> -- they\'re warm, soft, and dry out if you spill water on them.</li><li><strong>Compression Socks</strong> <strong>—</strong> Yes, I know that compression socks won\'t generate the most ooh\'s and aah\'s when their wrapping is torn off. But not having to stuff swollen feet back into shoes after an international or transcontinental flight has made me appreciate them. I wear <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"SB SOX Compression Socks (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/38kJGCi\" target=\"_blank\">SB SOX Compression Socks</a>, but any moderate compression sock should be fine.</li><li><strong>Short HDMI Cable and Dongle</strong> <strong>—</strong> It\'s a rare hotel room I walk into that doesn\'t have a big flat-screen TV mounted to the wall. Many of these will let you log into your Netflix or HBO Go account so you can watch your content on the big screen. But why go through all that (and trust their data and network security set-up) when you can just plug your laptop into one of their spare HDMI ports? I use a <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"basic 3-foot HDMI cable (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2PbFBZx\" target=\"_blank\">basic 3-foot HDMI cable</a>. Most of the common business laptops from Dell and Lenovo have HDMI ports but, because I have a MacBook Air, I also carry an <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Apple USB-C-to-HDMI adapter (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2E4HfpI\" target=\"_blank\">Apple USB-C-to-HDMI adapter</a>. </li><li><strong>Travel Notebook</strong> <strong>—</strong> And finally, a stocking stuffer idea — a travel notebook, something to jot down thoughts, ideas, observations, to do lists while waiting for the flight to board, the train to come, or the room to be made up. Nothing extravagant — no leather embossed cover — but it should be small enough to fit in a pocket, but substantial, something that can survive being knocked around in the bottom of a briefcase, and with paper quality that will hold onto those thoughts for a while. I used to use a <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Moleskine pocket notebook (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/36mN8dZ\" target=\"_blank\">Moleskine pocket notebook</a> but have switched over a similar-sized <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Clairefontaine A6 notebook (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2LMAOM9\" target=\"_blank\">Clairefontaine A6 notebook</a>. The soft cover fits better in a jeans back pocket, and the paper is more fountain-pen friendly. Or go a bit more whimsical and get <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"a pack of Field Notes (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/36pK68D\" target=\"_blank\">a pack of Field Notes</a>.</li></ol>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:block {\"ref\":2601} /-->','10 Best Gift Ideas for a New Traveler','','publish','closed','closed','','best-gift-ideas-for-a-new-traveler','','\nhttps://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/11/30/podcast-157-notes-from-the-baltics-riga-latvia-and-tallinn-estonia/','2021-11-02 13:12:05','2021-11-02 18:12:05','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=2590',0,'post','',0),
(2591,1,'2019-12-10 20:59:22','2019-12-11 01:59:22','','DSC_2534','','inherit','open','closed','','dsc_2534','','','2019-12-10 20:59:22','2019-12-11 01:59:22','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/DSC_2534.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(2592,1,'2019-12-10 21:01:19','2019-12-11 02:01:19','','Best Gift Ideas for a New Traveler','','inherit','closed','closed','','2590-revision-v1','','','2019-12-10 21:01:19','2019-12-11 02:01:19','',2590,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/12/10/2590-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2594,1,'2019-12-10 22:45:52','2019-12-11 03:45:52','[caption id=\"attachment_2186\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/IMG_0205.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2186\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/IMG_0205-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> I Think That\'s the Uber Pick-Up Spot[/caption]\n\nIt seems that the snow and cold temperatures settled into the northern part of the Northern Hemisphere a bit earlier than last year. With the crush of Christmas/New Years travel starting in a few weeks, here are the TravelCommons\' top holiday travel tips to get you started early on your travel prep...\n<ol>\n 	<li><strong>Fly Non-Stop —</strong> It\'s obvious because it\'s the cardinal rule of air travel. Holiday travel stacks up problems —  high passenger load factors combined with winter weather disruptions almost guarantees late arrivals and missed connections. Even if you’re connecting through Houston, an intermediate stop adds one more point of failure, one more opportunity for the airlines to screw up. Pay the extra $100 for a non-stop flight.</li>\n 	<li><strong>Sign Up for TSA PreCheck — </strong>Gift yourself and spend the $85 on 5 years of time and hassle reduction.</li>\n 	<li><strong>Skip the Tight Connection —  </strong>If you can’t fly non-stop, step away from any connection that’s less than 60 minutes.  Yes, we usually want to get to our destination in the shortest possible time, but accepting a connection of 1 hour or less…. Think about it – a 15-minute delay on your flight into a big hub like <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27hare_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Chicago</a> or <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denver_International_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Denver</a> or <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detroit_Metropolitan_Wayne_County_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Detroit</a> (as good as on-time in the winter for most airlines) and you’re sprinting across terminals and concourses just to beat the closing door.  A 1-hr connection is just asking for a stress attack and/or an overnight stay at the airport branch of the <a title=\"Bates Motel\" href=\"http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092622/\" rel=\"imdb\">Bates Motel</a>.</li>\n 	<li><strong>Catch the Early Flight </strong>— Delays stack up as the day wears on.  As your airplane goes from airport to airport, the probability of it getting stuck increases.  Overnight, airlines have a chance to recover – late planes finally get their destinations and operations groups can reassign planes.  So while the last flight out can be a crap shoot, I rarely hit a delay on the first flight out.</li>\n 	<li><strong>Use Twitter as a Concierge Service</strong> — Most airlines have social media teams monitoring Twitter. Before you leave, find and follow your airline’s Twitter customer service account. “At naming” them in a Tweet (e.g., “<a dir=\"ltr\" href=\"https://twitter.com/united\">@united</a> what’s happening with UA 4286 MSY-ORD that it’s 1:45 hr delayed?”) usually gets a response in a couple of minutes. Following them allows you to exchange personal information such as record locator numbers via direct message (DM). It’s usually faster than queuing up for a frazzled gate agent and the results can be better.</li>\n 	<li><strong>Use Multiple Flight Tracking Apps</strong> — Use your smartphone to keep track of gate changes and flight delays. Sign up for text notifications from your airline when you book your ticket. However,  I’ve often experienced long delays with the airlines’ services or notices that were never sent out. So I also use <a href=\"http://tripit.com/\">TripIt</a>, <a href=\"http://flightaware.com/\">FlightAware</a>, and <a href=\"http://flightstats.com\">FlightStats</a>. It means multiple notices, but it also means I don’t miss anything.</li>\n 	<li><strong>Bring a Battery Pack </strong>— Whatever the size or form factor -- slimline, lipstick, high-capacity brick -- having that second or third charge readily available is critical to get last-minute gate change notifications and when you’re using electronic boarding passes. It saves you from stalking cleaning crews to find a live power outlet on your layover, or negotiating with your seatmate for possession of outlet between you. It’s cheap peace of mind.</li>\n 	<li><strong>Carry On your Luggage</strong> -- Unless you\'re heading to the slopes for Christmas, everyone in your travel party should be able to fit into a carry-on sized bag. You can save $25/bag and increase the probability of having clean clothes at your destination. If you’re seating area 4 or higher, odds are there’s no overhead bin space for you. Let the agent gate-check the bag for you. You won’t have to pay a checked bag fee and it’s very unlikely that they’ll lose your bag – it’s only traveling a couple hundred feet from the jet bridge to the luggage hold.</li>\n 	<li><strong>Spread Clothes Across All Bags</strong> -- If you need to check your bags -- maybe you have to bring pre-wrapped gifts or a special bottle of wine for Christmas dinner --  split everyone\'s clothes across all the bags. It\'s rare for an airline to lose <em>all</em> of your checked bags.</li>\n 	<li><strong>Know Your Geography </strong>-- Knowing alternatives to your destination airport gives you more flexibility dealing with cancelled flights or missed connections. In New York, the LaGuardia to Newark pivot is easy, but others aren\'t so obvious.  Everyone knows that Chicago has two airports – O\'Hare and Midway.  But what about Milwaukee\'s Mitchell Field 80 miles north?  If PHL is in trouble, how many folks think about Harrisburg or Allentown?  Or Sacramento as an alternative to SFO?  I think about alternatives in two rings – within 60 miles – SNA and LGB for LAX; and then within 100-120 miles, which now picks up Palm Springs and San Diego for LAX.  Someone will drive a couple of hours to pick you up if it means getting you to Christmas dinner on time.</li>\n</ol>\nBut above all, be realistic. It’s gonna be a zoo. Steel yourself; get your inner karma tuned for it. Pack a snack and a book, and practice deep cleansing breaths.','Top 10 Holiday Travel Tips','','inherit','closed','closed','','2185-revision-v1','','','2019-12-10 22:45:52','2019-12-11 03:45:52','',2185,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/12/10/2185-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2595,1,'2019-12-10 22:46:27','2019-12-11 03:46:27','[caption id=\"attachment_2168\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2168\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> But I filled up the tank[/caption]\n\nGetting this posted just in time to give you something to listen to while jammed up in Thanksgiving traffic, be it on the road or in the airports. We talk about working the angles to maximize credit card benefits, which leads me to one more story from my fall trip to Europe -- a rental car scrape that my Chase Visa card just paid off. We also talk about the Wall Street Journal\'s new ranking of US airports and compare it to Skytrax\'s international rankings. And we wrap up with my Christmas gift suggestions for the frequent traveler on your list.  All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_146.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_146.mp3\"]\n\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show Notes -->\n\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #146:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, trying to give you something to keep you entertained? Or at least occupied as you thread through the Thanksgiving travel traffic -- be it airports, trains, or roadways -- the forecasts are for a 5% increase over last year.</li>\n 	<li>I’ve been trying to get this episode done for the past 2 weeks, but I just haven’t been able to make it happen. Since we last spoke, I’ve been in the midst of a weekly commute between Chicago and Dallas. It’s the standard consultant commute -- leaving ORD Monday at 7am, leaving DFW Thursday at 5pm -- the consulting rush hour. The lounges are packed, the Starbucks line tails way back; no matter what status, you’re in a middle seat if you don’t book 3 weeks ahead of time, and for a mere Advantage Platinum person, there’s no chance of an upgrade. I do click through American’s website to request an upgrade every week -- more for the entertainment value than any expectation of getting a seat. This week, I was #35 on the upgrade list.</li>\n 	<li>The traffic between these 2 American hubs is pretty amazing. The first week of this commute, taking the 6:30p flight back to Chicago, it was a fully-packed 787 Dreamliner. So I’m thinking -- hey, I gotta have a good shot at an upgrade on this flight, with all the first and business class seats. Nope, though I did get up to the teens on the upgrade list -- #15 to be exact. I counted myself lucky to get out of a center seat at the last minute.</li>\n 	<li>I’m not a huge fan of DFW Airport. It’s a massive, spread-out place with a $4 toll charge to just to drive out of the place. The semi-circular terminals are also spread out affairs, with 3 security checkpoints arrayed around each perimeter, only one of which has PreCheck and really not well-marked. I tweeted that out in frustration a few weeks back after trundling around from checkpoint to checkpoint. The DFW Airport Twitter account quickly came back with a <a href=\"https://www.dfwairport.com/security/\">link</a> to their website that has the location and hours of each checkpoint, with the PreCheck one bolded. Very useful. I have bookmarked on my iPhone now.</li>\n 	<li>The next day, back in Chicago, I was downtown, getting a afternoon espresso jolt at Intelligentsia Coffee, not a completely full-on hipster joint -- there no turntable playing vintage vinyl -- but they are a bit fussy about their coffee. You place your order, they ask your name, and then you mill around a bit waiting for them to “craft” your coffee. I’m scrolling through e-mail, the barista is calling out names in the background. He calls out \"Marco\". Completely on reflex, my inner child responds \"Polo\" and not quietly or under my breath. The guy sitting across from me looks up from his MacBook and starts laughing. The guy getting his coffee, Marco, apparently, turns around and gives me a slightly nasty look. Or maybe just puzzled. Or more likely a bit of both.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/indidginus-seismic/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Superstring</a></em> by Indidginus</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul class=\"\">\n 	<li>Allan Marko, a long-time listener, posted a travel story on the TravelCommons Facebook page -\n<ul>\n 	<li>I flew from SFO to MUC with a colleague last month on UAL Business Class (my first trip on a 787 - nice plane, and decent service from the UA team) We had an early morning arrival, and an hour to kill before our transportation arrived. My colleague’s 1K status couldn’t get us into the Lufthansa Arrivals Lounge for showers. I pulled up the Priority Pass app on my iPhone (membership came with my Chase Sapphire Reserve Card) and saw there was an Atlantic Lounge over in Terminal 1 that had shower facilities. We took the bus over to Terminal 1 which serves many European, Middle East, and other second-tier airlines. Pulling out my physical Priority Pass card (as opposed to the one in the app) I got both of us into the lounge and their two shower rooms. The lounge only offered the basics and needed of refresh, but we were happy to find it that morning (including the free beer!).</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Allan, thanks for that, and good on you for figuring that all out. There are so many nooks and crannies in the card benefits world. There’s real value there, but you have to think about it and dig in a bit. The last time I used my Priority Pass (which I got with my Amex Platinum card) was last summer when I was connecting through DUB on my way to London. That lounge was similar to Allan’s MUC experience -- pretty basic, a bit threadbare, but a reasonable place for a cup of tea and breakfast. My son Andrew used his Priority Pass card (also from his Chase card) to get a $28 credit at a restaurant in BOS which paid for a pre-flight meal and a couple of beers. “For the two of us, I think we were due $56 credit, but we wanted to be able to board the plane, so we cut ourselves off.” A colleague of mine told me that, in LGA, after Amex’s Centurion Lounge closed, his UA Gold status got him into the Air Canada lounge to wait out the rest of a long flight delay. “I only thought they let in Star Alliance Gold passengers for international flights, but let me in for my LGA-ORD flight.” And then there’s things like the 10 Gogo in-flight WiFi passes that I get every year with my Platinum card that I never burn through, or the $200 in annual statement credit that I think I get on UA and am always surprised when I see the charge for the in-flight tapas box reversed. And I’m reminded that I gotta pay more attention to this stuff because I hate leaving money on the table.</li>\n 	<li>I will say that there are 2 good things about doing trunk line, hub-to-hub commute vs., say, my last regular commute, between ORD and Charlottesville, VA: great flight frequency -- between AA and UA, there’s a flight at most every hour and that’s not even looking at SWA’s schedule out of Love Field; and, no RJs, no regional jets. I had forgotten how nice it is to be able to stand up straight in the aisle, let alone in the toilet. I take happiness in the small things.</li>\n 	<li>I was talking to a colleague about this -- flying AA, and UA, and SWA based on the most convenient times and price, and then maybe equipment (avoiding those RJs when I can). He said “I’m always amazed at how promiscuous you are in your airline choices.” It was an interesting word choice; one that kinda speaks to how invested people can get in their travel choices. Though it can also be a bit of Stockholm Syndrome for folks who have to fly out of fortress hubs, like this colleague who is in a very conflicted relationship with United out of Newark. “I think you’re more right than me,” he said. He’s 1K on United, their top tier. I’m mid-tier on United and American. Comparing notes, he hasn’t gotten any more upgrades than me, and though I board after 1Ks (or Exec Platinums on AA), I haven’t yet had a problem finding overhead space, even on packed flights to DFW. I’ve said it before -- I don’t think there’s all that much difference between mid- and top-tier loyalty ranks; certainly not enough to take less convenient flights to earn the extra miles needed to stay top-tier.</li>\n 	<li>A study of US airport growth hit the TravelCommons inbox on Halloween, saying that the two airports with the biggest drop in traffic are Memphis and Cincinnati. We talked about this back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/08/09/podcast-143-how-bad-is-business-travel-for-your-health-make-layovers-fun/\">August episode</a> when I was flying in and out of Cincinnati for 4 weeks straight. Nice airport, but I said back then it felt a bit overbuilt, and how both it and Memphis felt empty after after being “de-hubbed” by Delta. I wasn’t wrong. This new survey ground through 10 years of FAA traffic data and came to the same conclusion. Memphis lost the most traffic, down 62%. Cincinnati was second, losing 51% of its traffic.</li>\n 	<li>So you can guess that neither made the Wall Street Journal’s ranking of the 20 largest US airports. Denver, Orlando and Phoenix at the top 3 finishers while the three NYC airports -- LaGuardia, JFK, and Newark -- brought up the rear, numbers 18, 19, and 20. Surprises? I dunno -- maybe that LaGuardia wasn’t in last place given all the construction disruptions, that LAX was higher at #9 than Minneapolis-St Paul at #11, and that O’Hare is one spot higher than San Francisco, 15 vs. 16. That’s probably as much to do with their methodology as anything - how they weighed all the different score components, things like on-time arrivals, average TSA wait, cost of on-prem parking, average ticket cost. It’s interesting, though, to compare this ranking with Skytrax’s ranking of global airports. Denver, the top US airport on both lists; at #28 on Skytrax’s list. Cincinnati is the second US airport on the Skytrax list at #34, which makes sense when you look at the methodologies. Skytrax is focused on the in-airport experience -- terminal seating, cleanliness, queue times, friendliness of staff. With these criteria, I don’t doubt that Cincinnati should rank high -- it’s probably helped by now being a bit overbuilt -- lots of space and fewer people to clean up after. The Journal’s is a bit more wide-ranging, looking both inside and outside the terminal, including things like average fares, rental-car taxes and fees, number of nonstop destinations and dominance of the largest airline to its rankings. I’ll put links to both in the show notes for those interesting in a deeper dive.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our new Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/yoria-suerte/\"><em>Suerte Mijo</em></a> by Arthur Yoria</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Rental Demolition Derby</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>I’ve rented a lot of cars in my business travel and have never crashed one. I drive them off the lot, use them for 3-4 days, fill them back up with gas, return them to the lot, and walk away. So when I picked up a car from Hertz at Edinburgh airport back in September, I skipped all the insurance coverages, took the keys to a brand new Toyota hybrid cross-over, and drove off the lot. This was my fourth September in a row renting from the Hertz and had never had an incident -- even when driving a manual on the left side of the road while shifting with my left hand -- well, other than a Fiat that dropped its transmission, but that wasn’t my fault. So, no need to waste the collision damage waiver charges.</li>\n 	<li>You can see where this is going. The next day, I was driving a narrow road in St Andrews, heading south out of town to go knock around the fishing villages on the north bank of the Firth of Forth. Roads in Scotland can get narrow. Driving the one-lane roads in the Highlands are an acquired talent, but this road is in a residential neighborhood, and I’ve driven it many times. So I couldn’t believe it when I heard a big thump as I drove past a van. Damn, I thought, had I drifted over to the left and popped the van’s rear view mirror? I pulled over and hopped out of the car. No, it was worse. There was a huge crease along the left side of the car; just missed the front wheel, so still driveable but very ugly. I walked down to the van. It belonged to a nearby community center. In a hurry to pick up kids from school, the driver had pulled out into me as I drove past. I pulled out an accident report form that Hertz had helpfully put in the glove compartment. We filled it out, skipped calling the police since no one was hurt.</li>\n 	<li>So, again, not my fault, but I’m still, a few days later, I’m turning in a car with a full tank and some extra body work. I point out the damage to the Hertz guy. He pulls up a different tab on his Samsung tablet -- click, click, click -- damage, front left wing; damage, front left door; damage, rear left door -- took a couple of pictures, and because I’d skipped the CDW, out burped the bill -- £780 or about $1,000. They ran it through on my Chase Sapphire Visa card.</li>\n 	<li>Which I gave to Hertz because, as I was poking through the nooks and crannies of the Chase website before I left home, I confirmed that card would cover UK rental car damage for rentals charged to it. The next week, back home, I found where to file a claim. They didn’t make it easy, but Google eventually uncovered it. I created a claim, uploaded a scan of the accident report, the Hertz receipt, and a couple of iPhone pictures of the damage. And then waited. The website said they’d take 2 weeks to review and get back to me. Three weeks later, I called. A guy said they’d sent me an email asking for two more documents from Hertz. Hmmm, never saw that, but who knows what gets caught up in the Spam filtering. They wanted a copy of the original Hertz agreement, which I had left in the car, and Hertz’s repair cost breakdown. OK, that was reasonable. I called Hertz and a very helpful woman put in a request and said get it in a week. Within a couple of days, Hertz sent me what I needed. I uploaded them to my claim and waited another 2 weeks. On Day 2 Weeks + 1, I called. A woman looked at my file, said it was still being reviewed by management, but said she’s put me on hold and ring them for status. Two minutes later, she picked up and they’d approved my claim. 48 hours later, the $1,000 showed up in my bank account. It took me a bit over 2 months, but Chase paid my claim with a minimum amount of hassle.</li>\n 	<li>Now, while I’ve had a good rental car record in Scotland, my record in Hungary is not quite clean. Indeed, every time I’ve driven there, it’s been something. The last time I drove, we were a couple of blocks away from the rental return next to the Marriott on the Danube. Pulling into an intersection after stopping at a Stop sign, a motorcycle messenger plowed into the front of my car, flew across the hood, and landed in the street on the other side of the intersection. Luckily, he was in a full helmet and leathers and unhurt. The rental car, not so lucky. The entire front end was ripped off. The rental car guy showed up as the police were finishing their report. I pulled out suitcases out of the trunk and gave him the key. He looked at the front of his car in disbelief. We wheeled our bags down the sidewalk to the Marriott because this time, I had bought the collision damage waiver.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/artemis-gravity/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Inception</a></em> by Artemis</li>\n</ul>\n<b>Traveler Gift Guide</b>\n<ul>\n 	<li>As we come into the Christmas shopping season, I thought it would be useful to pull together some suggestions for the frequent traveler in your life. Or, if you are the frequent traveler, a list of hints you might want to drop on family members looking for ideas.</li>\n 	<li>Top of the list is a good battery charger. Whatever the size or form factor -- slimline, lipstick, high-capacity brick -- having that second or third charge readily available is critical to get notified of gate changes and when you’re using electronic boarding passes. It saves you from stalking cleaning crews to find a live power outlet on your layover, or negotiating with your seatmate for possession of outlet between you. I’m always looking to shed weight, so I retired the heavy no-name pack I picked up in the depths of Beijing’s Pearl Street Market for an Anker lipstick sized charger. I bought three and gave one to my wife and daughter. It’s cheap peace of mind.</li>\n 	<li>On my shopping list, trying to catch up to what’s already a cold winter, is one of those puffy coats -- but one of the thin ones, like the Patagonia Nano Puff, one that will smoosh down to nothing in the front pocket of my suitcase, or will fit in the crevices of a jammed full overhead bin. Right next that on the list, a man’s scarf is an incredibly undervalued piece of intermediate winter wear. In an airplane cabin or hotel room where a coat is too much (especially in a middle seat), but there’s a draft that chills you, a scarf around the neck is just enough without being too much. You may have to teach him how to wear it, but you can have fun with colors.</li>\n 	<li>For someone just embarking on the road warrior life, how ‘bout a black 20-inch hardsided carry-on. Black not only makes you look thinner, it makes your bag look thinner to gate agents hunting for bag-sizer bait. Black also doesn’t show stains. A 20-incher should get on-board for 90% of airlines, and the hard sides are the easiest to get in and out of a bag sizer if the not-yet-statused traveler gets waylaid by an over-zealous gate agent.</li>\n 	<li>If you’re going big for someone -- or for those December babies, combining Christmas and birthday gifts -- noise canceling headphones are a statement gift. The good ones -- the Bose or Sonys that make the drone of the jet engines disappear with the flick of a switch -- are a $300 number. But the drop in stress level and blood pressure that accompanies that flick of the switch -- you don’t realize how much that drone affects you until you turn on your Bose -- makes it worth the number. Everything in my briefcase has to earn its space. I’ve been carrying Bose headphones for, I dunno, 10, 15 years. They’re nowhere near compact, but I’ve never thought of leaving them behind.</li>\n 	<li>Another idea for the music -- or podcast lover, is a small portable Bluetooth speaker. I’ve started packing mine again for trips of a week or longer. For a couple of days, I’m fine with wearing headphones or using the phone speaker. But longer than that or if I’m with the family in, say, an Airbnb, I want something a bit more social. I’m still using my 6-year old Jambox speaker, the one that kinda created this category. The maker, Jawbone, went under last year, but the speaker still works. There are newer, better ones out there now, at all sorts of price points. The ones that can act as speaker phones are a nice to-have if they fit your budget.</li>\n 	<li>And finally, a stocking stuffer idea -- a travel notebook, something to jot down thoughts, ideas, observations, to do lists while waiting for the flight to board, the train to come, or the room to be made up. Nothing extravagant -- no leather embossed cover -- but it should be small enough to fit in a pocket, but substantial, something that can survive being knocked around in the bottom of a briefcase, and with paper quality that will hold onto those thoughts for a while. I used to use a Moleskine 3½x5½” notebook but have switched over a similar-sized A6 Clairefontaine. The soft cover fits better in a jeans back pocket, and the paper is more fountain-pen friendly. It’s $10 for a Moleskine, $7 for two Clairefontaines. Or go a bit more whimsical and get a 3-pack of Field Notes for $13. It’ll fit your budget and the stocking.</li>\n 	<li>So there you go, something to fit all sizes and budgets in time for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, or if you’re just killing time waiting for your Thanksgiving flight to leave.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #146</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and now on <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Magnatune</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_146.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #146 — Rental Demolition Derby; Traveler Gift Guide','','inherit','closed','closed','','2167-revision-v1','','','2019-12-10 22:46:27','2019-12-11 03:46:27','',2167,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/12/10/2167-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2596,1,'2019-12-10 23:10:34','2019-12-11 04:10:34','<!-- wp:image {\"id\":2591,\"align\":\"right\",\"width\":316,\"height\":210} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright is-resized\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/DSC_2534-1024x683.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2591\" width=\"316\" height=\"210\"/></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Coming into the heart of the Christmas shopping season, when people are getting desperate for gift ideas, I offer up suggestions that a new frequent traveler will actually use. While many gift lists are pushing Away luggage, Huzi infinity pillows, and Aesop travel kits (these companies must\'ve been splashing a lot of samples around), my list is more pragmatic, filled with the kind of things that I\'ve used in my 100,000 mile-a-year business travel career.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list {\"ordered\":true} -->\n<ol><li><strong>Black 20-inch carry-on suitcase</strong> <strong>—</strong> Black not only makes you look thinner, it makes your bag look thinner to gate agents hunting for bag-sizer bait. Black also doesn’t show stains. A 20-incher should get your traveler on-board for 90% of airlines without a hassle. I go for the 2-wheeler with the biggest wheels I can find to make it an easier, smoother pull. But that\'s my personal preference; a lot of travelers (including my wife) swear by their 4-wheel spinners. I bought the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/32lIURe\">TravelPro Maxlite 5</a> a few months ago and highly recommend it.</li><li><strong>TSA Global Entry or Pre-Check</strong> <strong>—</strong> Gift your new traveler with 5 years of time and hassle reduction. <a aria-label=\"$100 for both (opens in a new tab)\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.cbp.gov/travel/trusted-traveler-programs/global-entry\" target=\"_blank\">$100 for both</a>; $85 for just <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Pre-Check. (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/precheck\" target=\"_blank\">Pre-Check.</a> If you have a high-end card like an <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Amex Platinum (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.americanexpress.com/us/expedite-your-travel.html\" target=\"_blank\">Amex Platinum</a>, you might be able to put your card on their application and get the $100 fee back in a statement credit.</li><li><strong>Noise Canceling Headphones</strong> <strong>—</strong> I mentioned in <a aria-label=\"$100 for both (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/11/30/podcast-157-notes-from-the-baltics-riga-latvia-and-tallinn-estonia/\">the last podcast episode</a> how my trusty Bose QC-15s saved me from the propeller drone on my flights around the Baltics. The drone of jet or propeller engines disappear with the flick of a switch. But it\'s the drop in stress level and blood pressure that accompanies that flick of the switch — you don’t realize how much that drone affects you. Everything in my briefcase has to earn its space. I’ve been carrying Bose headphones for, I dunno, 10, 15 years. They’re nowhere near compact, but I’ve never thought of leaving them behind. The models you want to look for -- either the <a aria-label=\" (opens in a new tab)\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2RG7V80\" target=\"_blank\">Bose QC-35 II</a> or the <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Sony WH-1000XM3 (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2LGlVuK\" target=\"_blank\">Sony WH-1000XM3</a>. Your generous gift will be lovingly appreciated by your new traveler.</li><li><strong>VPN Subscription</strong> <strong>—</strong> Frequent travelers spend much of their time on public WiFi networks -- airports, hotels, bars, coffee shops, ....  Help them surf safe with a VPN subscription. I\'ve used <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"NordVPN (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"http://nordvpn.com\" target=\"_blank\">NordVPN</a> and <a aria-label=\" (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/\">PIA</a>.  They both protect laptops, and iOS and Android phones and tablets. VPN providers always have some promotion going on. A one-year subscription is usually in the $35-85 range.</li><li><strong>Portable Power Bank</strong> <strong>—</strong> Whatever the size or form factor -- slimline, lipstick, high-capacity brick -- having that second or third charge readily available is critical to get last-minute gate change notifications and when you’re using electronic boarding passes. It saves you from stalking cleaning crews to find a live power outlet on your layover, or negotiating with your seatmate for possession of outlet between you. It’s cheap peace of mind.  The <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Anker PowerCore+ Mini (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2E6HMri\" target=\"_blank\">Anker PowerCore+ Mini</a> is light enough (under 3 oz) to carry any time. I\'ve also started carrying a <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Zendure Power Bank Supermini (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/34fcbON\" target=\"_blank\">Zendure Power Bank Supermini</a> for faster iPhone 11 charging.</li><li><strong>Badger Hair Shaving Brush</strong> <strong>—</strong> </li></ol>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Best Gift Ideas for a New Traveler','','inherit','closed','closed','','2590-revision-v1','','','2019-12-10 23:10:34','2019-12-11 04:10:34','',2590,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/12/10/2590-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2597,1,'2019-12-10 23:20:14','2019-12-11 04:20:14','<!-- wp:image {\"id\":2591,\"align\":\"right\",\"width\":316,\"height\":210} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright is-resized\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/DSC_2534-1024x683.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2591\" width=\"316\" height=\"210\"/></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Coming into the heart of the Christmas shopping season, when people are getting desperate for gift ideas, I offer up suggestions that a new frequent traveler will actually use. While many gift lists are pushing Away luggage, Huzi infinity pillows, and Aesop travel kits (these companies must\'ve been splashing a lot of samples around), my list is more pragmatic, filled with the kind of things that I\'ve used in my 100,000 mile-a-year business travel career.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list {\"ordered\":true} -->\n<ol><li><strong>Black 20-inch carry-on suitcase</strong> <strong>—</strong> Black not only makes you look thinner, it makes your bag look thinner to gate agents hunting for bag-sizer bait. Black also doesn’t show stains. A 20-incher should get your traveler on-board for 90% of airlines without a hassle. I go for the 2-wheeler with the biggest wheels I can find to make it an easier, smoother pull. But that\'s my personal preference; a lot of travelers (including my wife) swear by their 4-wheel spinners. I bought the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/32lIURe\">TravelPro Maxlite 5</a> a few months ago and highly recommend it.</li><li><strong>TSA Global Entry or Pre-Check</strong> <strong>—</strong> Gift your new traveler with 5 years of time and hassle reduction. <a aria-label=\"$100 for both (opens in a new tab)\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.cbp.gov/travel/trusted-traveler-programs/global-entry\" target=\"_blank\">$100 for both</a>; $85 for just <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Pre-Check. (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/precheck\" target=\"_blank\">Pre-Check.</a> If you have a high-end card like an <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Amex Platinum (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.americanexpress.com/us/expedite-your-travel.html\" target=\"_blank\">Amex Platinum</a>, you might be able to put your card on their application and get the $100 fee back in a statement credit.</li><li><strong>Noise Canceling Headphones</strong> <strong>—</strong> I mentioned in <a aria-label=\"$100 for both (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/11/30/podcast-157-notes-from-the-baltics-riga-latvia-and-tallinn-estonia/\">the last podcast episode</a> how my trusty Bose QC-15s saved me from the propeller drone on my flights around the Baltics. The drone of jet or propeller engines disappear with the flick of a switch. But it\'s the drop in stress level and blood pressure that accompanies that flick of the switch — you don’t realize how much that drone affects you. Everything in my briefcase has to earn its space. I’ve been carrying Bose headphones for, I dunno, 10, 15 years. They’re nowhere near compact, but I’ve never thought of leaving them behind. The models you want to look for -- either the <a aria-label=\" (opens in a new tab)\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2RG7V80\" target=\"_blank\">Bose QC-35 II</a> or the <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Sony WH-1000XM3 (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2LGlVuK\" target=\"_blank\">Sony WH-1000XM3</a>. Your generous gift will be lovingly appreciated by your new traveler.</li><li><strong>VPN Subscription</strong> <strong>—</strong> Frequent travelers spend much of their time on public WiFi networks -- airports, hotels, bars, coffee shops, ....  Help them surf safe with a VPN subscription. I\'ve used <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"NordVPN (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"http://nordvpn.com\" target=\"_blank\">NordVPN</a> and <a aria-label=\" (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/\">PIA</a>.  They both protect laptops, and iOS and Android phones and tablets. VPN providers always have some promotion going on. A one-year subscription is usually in the $35-85 range.</li><li><strong>Portable Power Bank</strong> <strong>—</strong> Whatever the size or form factor -- slimline, lipstick, high-capacity brick -- having that second or third charge readily available is critical to get last-minute gate change notifications and when you’re using electronic boarding passes. It saves you from stalking cleaning crews to find a live power outlet on your layover, or negotiating with your seatmate for possession of outlet between you. It’s cheap peace of mind.  The <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Anker PowerCore+ Mini (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2E6HMri\" target=\"_blank\">Anker PowerCore+ Mini</a> is light enough (under 3 oz) to carry any time. I\'ve also started carrying a <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Zendure Power Bank Supermini (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/34fcbON\" target=\"_blank\">Zendure Power Bank Supermini</a> for faster iPhone 11 charging.</li><li><strong>Badger Hair Shaving Brush</strong> <strong>—</strong> I switched from an electric razor to blade to make it easier to pass through London-Heathrow during one of their security crack-downs and never went back. To do it right, though, you need to have a badger hair shaving brush. I use a not-too-expensive <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Edwin Jagger brush (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2Pcm1wy\" target=\"_blank\">Edwin Jagger brush</a> that makes my morning shave into a bit of a meditation. If you want to go all in, get your traveler the <a href=\"https://alluvian.co/shop/shave-soap-travel-size-sampler\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Alluvian Shave Soap 5-Piece Travel Size Sampler. (opens in a new tab)\">Alluvian Shave Soap 5-Piece Travel Size Sampler.</a> They smell great and are the perfect travel size.</li></ol>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Best Gift Ideas for a New Traveler','','inherit','closed','closed','','2590-revision-v1','','','2019-12-10 23:20:14','2019-12-11 04:20:14','',2590,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/12/10/2590-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2598,1,'2019-12-10 23:46:56','2019-12-11 04:46:56','<!-- wp:image {\"id\":2591,\"align\":\"right\",\"width\":316,\"height\":210} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright is-resized\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/DSC_2534-1024x683.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2591\" width=\"316\" height=\"210\"/></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Coming into the heart of the Christmas shopping season, when people are getting desperate for gift ideas, I offer up suggestions that a new frequent traveler will actually use. While many gift lists are pushing Away luggage, Huzi infinity pillows, and Aesop travel kits (these companies must\'ve been splashing a lot of samples around), my list is more pragmatic, filled with the kind of things that I\'ve used in my 100,000 mile-a-year business travel career.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list {\"ordered\":true} -->\n<ol><li><strong>Black 20-inch carry-on suitcase</strong> <strong>—</strong> Black not only makes you look thinner, it makes your bag look thinner to gate agents hunting for bag-sizer bait. Black also doesn’t show stains. A 20-incher should get your traveler on-board for 90% of airlines without a hassle. I go for the 2-wheeler with the biggest wheels I can find to make it an easier, smoother pull. But that\'s my personal preference; a lot of travelers (including my wife) swear by their 4-wheel spinners. I bought the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/32lIURe\">TravelPro Maxlite 5</a> a few months ago and highly recommend it.</li><li><strong>TSA Global Entry or Pre-Check</strong> <strong>—</strong> Gift your new traveler with 5 years of time and hassle reduction. <a aria-label=\"$100 for both (opens in a new tab)\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.cbp.gov/travel/trusted-traveler-programs/global-entry\" target=\"_blank\">$100 for both</a>; $85 for just <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Pre-Check. (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/precheck\" target=\"_blank\">Pre-Check.</a> If you have a high-end card like an <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Amex Platinum (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.americanexpress.com/us/expedite-your-travel.html\" target=\"_blank\">Amex Platinum</a>, you might be able to put your card on their application and get the $100 fee back in a statement credit.</li><li><strong>Noise Canceling Headphones</strong> <strong>—</strong> I mentioned in <a aria-label=\"$100 for both (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/11/30/podcast-157-notes-from-the-baltics-riga-latvia-and-tallinn-estonia/\">the last podcast episode</a> how my trusty Bose QC-15s saved me from the propeller drone on my flights around the Baltics. The drone of jet or propeller engines disappear with the flick of a switch. But it\'s the drop in stress level and blood pressure that accompanies that flick of the switch — you don’t realize how much that drone affects you. Everything in my briefcase has to earn its space. I’ve been carrying Bose headphones for, I dunno, 10, 15 years. They’re nowhere near compact, but I’ve never thought of leaving them behind. The models you want to look for -- either the <a aria-label=\" (opens in a new tab)\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2RG7V80\" target=\"_blank\">Bose QC-35 II</a> or the <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Sony WH-1000XM3 (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2LGlVuK\" target=\"_blank\">Sony WH-1000XM3</a>. Your generous gift will be lovingly appreciated by your new traveler.</li><li><strong>VPN Subscription</strong> <strong>—</strong> Frequent travelers spend much of their time on public WiFi networks -- airports, hotels, bars, coffee shops, ....  Help them surf safe with a VPN subscription. I\'ve used <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"NordVPN (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"http://nordvpn.com\" target=\"_blank\">NordVPN</a> and <a aria-label=\" (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/\">PIA</a>.  They both protect laptops, and iOS and Android phones and tablets. VPN providers always have some promotion going on. A one-year subscription is usually in the $35-85 range.</li><li><strong>Portable Power Bank</strong> <strong>—</strong> Whatever the size or form factor -- slimline, lipstick, high-capacity brick -- having that second or third charge readily available is critical to get last-minute gate change notifications and when you’re using electronic boarding passes. It saves you from stalking cleaning crews to find a live power outlet on your layover, or negotiating with your seatmate for possession of outlet between you. It’s cheap peace of mind.  The <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Anker PowerCore+ Mini (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2E6HMri\" target=\"_blank\">Anker PowerCore+ Mini</a> is light enough (under 3 oz) to carry any time. I\'ve also started carrying a <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Zendure Power Bank Supermini (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/34fcbON\" target=\"_blank\">Zendure Power Bank Supermini</a> for faster iPhone 11 charging.</li><li><strong>Badger Hair Shaving Brush</strong> <strong>—</strong> I switched from an electric razor to blade to make it easier to pass through London-Heathrow during one of their security crack-downs and never went back. To do it right, though, you need to have a badger hair shaving brush. I use a not-too-expensive <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Edwin Jagger brush (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2Pcm1wy\" target=\"_blank\">Edwin Jagger brush</a> that makes my morning shave into a bit of a meditation. If you want to go all in, get your traveler the <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Alluvian Shave Soap 5-Piece Travel Size Sampler. (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://alluvian.co/shop/shave-soap-travel-size-sampler\" target=\"_blank\">Alluvian Shave Soap 5-Piece Travel Size Sampler.</a> They smell great and are the perfect travel size.</li><li><strong>Merino Wool Scarf</strong> <strong>—</strong> A man’s scarf is an incredibly undervalued piece of intermediate winter wear. In an airplane cabin or hotel room where a coat is too much (especially in a middle seat), but there’s a draft that chills you, a scarf around the neck is just enough without being too much. You may have to teach your new traveler how to wear it, but you can have fun with colors. I\'m a big fan of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/35ckwUq\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"merino wool scarves (opens in a new tab)\">merino wool scarves</a> -- they\'re warm, soft, and dry out if you spill water on them.</li></ol>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Best Gift Ideas for a New Traveler','','inherit','closed','closed','','2590-revision-v1','','','2019-12-10 23:46:56','2019-12-11 04:46:56','',2590,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/12/10/2590-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2599,1,'2019-12-10 23:58:10','2019-12-11 04:58:10','<!-- wp:image {\"id\":2591,\"align\":\"right\",\"width\":316,\"height\":210} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright is-resized\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/DSC_2534-1024x683.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2591\" width=\"316\" height=\"210\"/></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Coming into the heart of the Christmas shopping season, when people are getting desperate for gift ideas, I offer up suggestions that a new frequent traveler will actually use. While many gift lists are pushing Away luggage, Huzi infinity pillows, and Aesop travel kits (these companies must\'ve been splashing a lot of samples around), my list is more pragmatic, filled with the kind of things that I\'ve used in my 100,000 mile-a-year business travel career.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list {\"ordered\":true} -->\n<ol><li><strong>Black 20-inch carry-on suitcase</strong> <strong>—</strong> Black not only makes you look thinner, it makes your bag look thinner to gate agents hunting for bag-sizer bait. Black also doesn’t show stains. A 20-incher should get your traveler on-board for 90% of airlines without a hassle. I go for the 2-wheeler with the biggest wheels I can find to make it an easier, smoother pull. But that\'s my personal preference; a lot of travelers (including my wife) swear by their 4-wheel spinners. I bought the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/32lIURe\">TravelPro Maxlite 5</a> a few months ago and highly recommend it.</li><li><strong>TSA Global Entry or Pre-Check</strong> <strong>—</strong> Gift your new traveler with 5 years of time and hassle reduction. <a aria-label=\"$100 for both (opens in a new tab)\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.cbp.gov/travel/trusted-traveler-programs/global-entry\" target=\"_blank\">$100 for both</a>; $85 for just <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Pre-Check. (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/precheck\" target=\"_blank\">Pre-Check.</a> If you have a high-end card like an <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Amex Platinum (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.americanexpress.com/us/expedite-your-travel.html\" target=\"_blank\">Amex Platinum</a>, you might be able to put your card on their application and get the $100 fee back in a statement credit.</li><li><strong>Noise Canceling Headphones</strong> <strong>—</strong> I mentioned in <a aria-label=\"$100 for both (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/11/30/podcast-157-notes-from-the-baltics-riga-latvia-and-tallinn-estonia/\">the last podcast episode</a> how my trusty Bose QC-15s saved me from the propeller drone on my flights around the Baltics. The drone of jet or propeller engines disappear with the flick of a switch. But it\'s the drop in stress level and blood pressure that accompanies that flick of the switch — you don’t realize how much that drone affects you. Everything in my briefcase has to earn its space. I’ve been carrying Bose headphones for, I dunno, 10, 15 years. They’re nowhere near compact, but I’ve never thought of leaving them behind. The models you want to look for -- either the <a aria-label=\" (opens in a new tab)\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2RG7V80\" target=\"_blank\">Bose QC-35 II</a> or the <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Sony WH-1000XM3 (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2LGlVuK\" target=\"_blank\">Sony WH-1000XM3</a>. Your generous gift will be lovingly appreciated by your new traveler.</li><li><strong>VPN Subscription</strong> <strong>—</strong> Frequent travelers spend much of their time on public WiFi networks -- airports, hotels, bars, coffee shops, ....  Help them surf safe with a VPN subscription. I\'ve used <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"NordVPN (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"http://nordvpn.com\" target=\"_blank\">NordVPN</a> and <a aria-label=\" (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/\">PIA</a>.  They both protect laptops, and iOS and Android phones and tablets. VPN providers always have some promotion going on. A one-year subscription is usually in the $35-85 range.</li><li><strong>Portable Power Bank</strong> <strong>—</strong> Whatever the size or form factor -- slimline, lipstick, high-capacity brick -- having that second or third charge readily available is critical to get last-minute gate change notifications and when you’re using electronic boarding passes. It saves you from stalking cleaning crews to find a live power outlet on your layover, or negotiating with your seatmate for possession of outlet between you. It’s cheap peace of mind.  The <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Anker PowerCore+ Mini (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2E6HMri\" target=\"_blank\">Anker PowerCore+ Mini</a> is light enough (under 3 oz) to carry any time. I\'ve also started carrying a <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Zendure Power Bank Supermini (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/34fcbON\" target=\"_blank\">Zendure Power Bank Supermini</a> for faster iPhone 11 charging.</li><li><strong>Badger Hair Shaving Brush</strong> <strong>—</strong> I switched from an electric razor to blade to make it easier to pass through London-Heathrow during one of their security crack-downs and never went back. To do it right, though, you need to have a badger hair shaving brush. I use a not-too-expensive <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Edwin Jagger brush (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2Pcm1wy\" target=\"_blank\">Edwin Jagger brush</a> that makes my morning shave into a bit of a meditation. If you want to go all in, get your traveler the <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Alluvian Shave Soap 5-Piece Travel Size Sampler. (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://alluvian.co/shop/shave-soap-travel-size-sampler\" target=\"_blank\">Alluvian Shave Soap 5-Piece Travel Size Sampler.</a> They smell great and are the perfect travel size.</li><li><strong>Merino Wool Scarf</strong> <strong>—</strong> A man’s scarf is an incredibly undervalued piece of intermediate winter wear. In an airplane cabin or hotel room where a coat is too much (especially in a middle seat), but there’s a draft that chills you, a scarf around the neck is just enough without being too much. You may have to teach your new traveler how to wear it, but you can have fun with colors. I\'m a big fan of <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"merino wool scarves (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/35ckwUq\" target=\"_blank\">merino wool scarves</a> -- they\'re warm, soft, and dry out if you spill water on them.</li><li><strong>Compression Socks</strong> <strong>—</strong> Yes, I know that compression socks won\'t generate the most ooh\'s and aah\'s when their wrapping is torn off. But not having to stuff swollen feet back into shoes after an international or transcontinental flight has made me appreciate them. I wear <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"SB SOX Compression Socks (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/38kJGCi\" target=\"_blank\">SB SOX Compression Socks</a>, but any moderate compression sock should be fine.</li></ol>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Best Gift Ideas for a New Traveler','','inherit','closed','closed','','2590-revision-v1','','','2019-12-10 23:58:10','2019-12-11 04:58:10','',2590,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/12/10/2590-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2600,1,'2019-12-11 11:35:37','2019-12-11 16:35:37','<!-- wp:image {\"id\":2591,\"align\":\"right\",\"width\":316,\"height\":210} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright is-resized\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/DSC_2534-1024x683.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2591\" width=\"316\" height=\"210\"/></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Coming into the heart of the Christmas shopping season, when people are getting desperate for gift ideas, I thought I\'d offer up 10 suggestions for gifts that a new frequent traveler will actually use. While many gift lists are pushing Away luggage, Huzi infinity pillows, and Aesop travel kits (these companies must\'ve splashed a lot of samples around the blog-o-sphere), I built my list based on my own travel kit; the things I use every travel day in the 40-50 trips I take each year.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list {\"ordered\":true} -->\n<ol><li><strong>Black 20-inch carry-on suitcase</strong> <strong>—</strong> Black not only makes you look thinner, it makes your bag look thinner to gate agents hunting for bag-sizer bait. Black also doesn’t show stains. A 20-incher should get your traveler on-board for 90% of airlines without a hassle. I go for the 2-wheeler with the biggest wheels I can find to make it an easier, smoother pull. But that\'s my personal preference; a lot of travelers (including my wife) swear by their 4-wheel spinners. I bought the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/32lIURe\">TravelPro Maxlite 5</a> a few months ago and highly recommend it.</li><li><strong>TSA Global Entry or Pre-Check</strong> <strong>—</strong> Gift your new traveler with 5 years of time and hassle reduction. <a aria-label=\"$100 for both (opens in a new tab)\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.cbp.gov/travel/trusted-traveler-programs/global-entry\" target=\"_blank\">$100 for both</a>; $85 for just <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Pre-Check. (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/precheck\" target=\"_blank\">Pre-Check.</a> If you have a high-end card like an <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Amex Platinum (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.americanexpress.com/us/expedite-your-travel.html\" target=\"_blank\">Amex Platinum</a>, you might be able to put your card on their application and get the $100 fee back in a statement credit.</li><li><strong>Noise Canceling Headphones</strong> <strong>—</strong> I mentioned in <a aria-label=\"$100 for both (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/11/30/podcast-157-notes-from-the-baltics-riga-latvia-and-tallinn-estonia/\">the last podcast episode</a> how my trusty Bose QC-15s saved me from the propeller drone on my flights around the Baltics. The drone of jet or propeller engines disappear with the flick of a switch. But it\'s the drop in stress level and blood pressure that accompanies that flick of the switch — you don’t realize how much that drone affects you. Everything in my briefcase has to earn its space. I’ve been carrying Bose headphones for, I dunno, 10, 15 years. They’re nowhere near compact, but I’ve never thought of leaving them behind. The models you want to look for -- either the <a aria-label=\" (opens in a new tab)\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2RG7V80\" target=\"_blank\">Bose QC-35 II</a> or the <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Sony WH-1000XM3 (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2LGlVuK\" target=\"_blank\">Sony WH-1000XM3</a>. Your generous gift will be lovingly appreciated by your new traveler.</li><li><strong>VPN Subscription</strong> <strong>—</strong> Frequent travelers spend much of their time on public WiFi networks -- airports, hotels, bars, coffee shops, ....  Help them surf safe with a VPN subscription. I\'ve used <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"NordVPN (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"http://nordvpn.com\" target=\"_blank\">NordVPN</a> and <a aria-label=\" (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/\">PIA</a>.  They both protect laptops, and iOS and Android phones and tablets. VPN providers always have some promotion going on. A one-year subscription is usually in the $35-85 range.</li><li><strong>Portable Power Bank</strong> <strong>—</strong> Whatever the size or form factor -- slimline, lipstick, high-capacity brick -- having that second or third charge readily available is critical to get last-minute gate change notifications and when you’re using electronic boarding passes. It saves you from stalking cleaning crews to find a live power outlet on your layover, or negotiating with your seat mate for possession of outlet between you. It’s cheap peace of mind.  The <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Anker PowerCore+ Mini (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2E6HMri\" target=\"_blank\">Anker PowerCore+ Mini</a> is light enough (under 3 oz) to carry any time. I\'ve also started carrying a <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Zendure Power Bank Supermini (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/34fcbON\" target=\"_blank\">Zendure Power Bank Supermini</a> for faster iPhone 11 charging.</li><li><strong>Badger Hair Shaving Brush</strong> <strong>—</strong> I switched from an electric razor to blade to make it easier to pass through London-Heathrow during one of their security crack-downs and never went back. To do it right, though, you need to have a badger hair shaving brush. I use a not-too-expensive <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Edwin Jagger brush (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2Pcm1wy\" target=\"_blank\">Edwin Jagger brush</a> that makes my morning shave into a bit of a meditation. If you want to go all in, get your traveler the <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Alluvian Shave Soap 5-Piece Travel Size Sampler. (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://alluvian.co/shop/shave-soap-travel-size-sampler\" target=\"_blank\">Alluvian Shave Soap 5-Piece Travel Size Sampler.</a> They smell great and are the perfect travel size.</li><li><strong>Merino Wool Scarf</strong> <strong>—</strong> A man’s scarf is an incredibly undervalued piece of intermediate winter wear. In an airplane cabin or hotel room where a coat is too much (especially in a middle seat), but there’s a draft that chills you, a scarf around the neck is just enough without being too much. You may have to teach your new traveler how to wear it, but you can have fun with colors. I\'m a big fan of <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"merino wool scarves (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/35ckwUq\" target=\"_blank\">merino wool scarves</a> -- they\'re warm, soft, and dry out if you spill water on them.</li><li><strong>Compression Socks</strong> <strong>—</strong> Yes, I know that compression socks won\'t generate the most ooh\'s and aah\'s when their wrapping is torn off. But not having to stuff swollen feet back into shoes after an international or transcontinental flight has made me appreciate them. I wear <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"SB SOX Compression Socks (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/38kJGCi\" target=\"_blank\">SB SOX Compression Socks</a>, but any moderate compression sock should be fine.</li></ol>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Best Gift Ideas for a New Traveler','','inherit','closed','closed','','2590-revision-v1','','','2019-12-11 11:35:37','2019-12-11 16:35:37','',2590,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/12/11/2590-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2602,1,'2019-12-11 12:11:02','2019-12-11 17:11:02','<!-- wp:image {\"id\":1938,\"align\":\"right\",\"width\":261,\"height\":261} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright is-resized\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/IMG_0091-1024x1024.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-1938\" width=\"261\" height=\"261\"/><figcaption>Rejected and Retired Suitcases</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<p>I spend a lot of time with my luggage. I average 40-50 trips and 100,000 miles a year. I hate shopping for luggage, though. I\'d putting off buying a new bag for a long time, as in years, until I was left with no working luggage when the handle died on my vintage Swiss Army black roller. Before that, the airlines forcibly grounded my Bluesmart smart bag for an unremovable lithium battery, and I had to retire my grey Samsonite bag after the wheels got wonky — the rubber wore off and the wheels splayed out after 2½ years of trundling it across New Orleans sidewalks.</p>\n<p>With my next trip looming, I was finally forced to shop for a new suitcase. But what to buy? I started with a survey of fellow travelers. Actually, it was more like stalking; I eyeballed every piece of luggage that passed by me for two weeks. Then I wandered through the basement luggage departments of a couple of Macy\'s, opening bags and waving off clerks. After all that, I gave into my OCD and built this prioritized carry-on luggage shopping evaluation criteria:</p>\n<ol>\n<li><em>It has to fit into my carrier\'s carry-on sizer</em>. Now that may seem a bit of a “duh”, but there is some ambiguity; the <a href=\"https://travel-made-simple.com/carry-on-size-chart/\">approved height</a> of a carry-on bag varies by airline between 19 and 22-inches. If I want to play it safe, I’d go for a 20-inch bag, but then I also want to maximize my carry-on space. Most US carriers accept a 22-inch bag and that’s mostly what I fly. So for my main bag, I go for maximum packing volume and choose a 22-inch bag.</li>\n<li><em>And my carrier\'s weight limit (if they have one)</em>. Many European carriers have a size <em>and</em> a weight limit. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/05/30/podcast-121-tsa-lines-my-luggage-is-where/\">episode #121</a>, I talked about the baggage strip tease I had to do at the Wow Air desk in Reykjavik to make their 7 kg/15 lbs carry-on weight limit. My 22-inch bag is 7 lbs, taking up almost half of the weight allowance. So last month, after booking some flights in and out of Riga, Latvia on AirBaltic, I bought a <a href=\"https://amzn.to/32lIURe\">much lighter 20-inch bag</a>. </li>\n<li>I<em>t needs to be black</em>. As I said in my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/10/18/ruthless-packing-tips/\">Ruthless Packing Tips post</a>, black not only makes you look thinner, it makes your bag look thinner to gate agents scanning for bag-sizer bait. Black also doesn\'t show stains. My grey Samsonite bag, after 3-4 months of my travel schedule, started to look a lot less non-black. Smudges from grease on overhead bin hinges, muck from taxi trunks, muddy water from New Orleans gutters, spilled coffee…. It\'s why I can\'t have nice luggage.</li>\n<li><em>Two wheels, not four</em>. This is more of a personal preference. My Bluesmart was a 4-wheel spinner and my wife swears by hers, but because the 4 wheels have to extend from the bottom of the bag, spinners sacrifice packing space for agility. Also, I find 4-wheelers have a tendency to wander off -- rolling away down ramps or on uneven floors. I go for the 2-wheeler, and with the biggest wheels I can find to make it an easier, smoother pull. I was surprised how much this limited my selection. Spinners definitely rule.</li>\n<li><em>The inside of the suitcase has to be plain and empty</em>. No clever collection of zipped compartments, or built-in suit hangers, or ratcheting clothes dividers; just a wide open box that I\'m free to structure how I want for each trip. I was surprised how this also limited my selection. Indeed, in the end, I couldn’t find just a plain box, and settled for a bag where I could detach the suit hanger and clothes divider and stash them in the back of a closet somewhere, never to be seen again.</li>\n<li><em>Buy on-line</em>. A <a href=\"https://www.testfacts.com/luggage-prices-analyzed/\">recent study</a> of 32,672 luggage price showed that you can save an average of $110/39% buying on-line. Walmart and Target’s on-line stores had the highest discounts. And while Amazon was in 10th place for average discount (in the 40% range), it was tops with the greatest variety — over 12,000 luggage items.</li>\n</ol>\n<p>So what did I buy? For my main bag, I bought a black <a href=\"https://www.swissarmy.com/us/en&amp;eoq=!t/Products/Travel-Gear/Werks-Traveler-5-0/collection/trg-collection/travelgear_collection_TRA-C2955\">Victorinox Werks Traveler 5.0</a> 22-inch 2-wheeler. Victorinox is what used to be Swiss Army; I figured if my last bag survived 10 years of hard mileage, that said something for durability. However, Victorinox has moved to a new model year, to Werks 6.0, which doesn\'t appear to have a 22-inch or a 2-wheel option. If you\'re OK with spinners, the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/33mYDkl\">Werks 5.0 22-inch spinner</a> is still available on Amazon. My 2-wheeler is a solid bag; highly recommended.</p>\n<p>For my European budget travel, and for 2-day trips where I don\'t need all the space of the Victorinox, I landed on the the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/32lIURe\">TravelPro Maxlite 5</a>. It fit the AirBaltic dimensions, it\'s one of the lighter bags I saw at 5.4 lbs, and my daughter has had a good run with her TravelPro bag. Mine has worked well on two trips -- hopscotching through the Baltics and then a quick trip down to Charlottesville, VA. Another <a href=\"https://amzn.to/32lIURe\">solid bag</a> that\'s highly recommended.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:block {\"ref\":2601} /-->','How To Choose The Best Carry-On Luggage','','inherit','closed','closed','','2562-revision-v1','','','2019-12-11 12:11:02','2019-12-11 17:11:02','',2562,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/12/11/2562-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2603,1,'2019-12-11 12:12:02','2019-12-11 17:12:02','<!-- wp:image {\"id\":2591,\"align\":\"right\",\"width\":316,\"height\":210} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright is-resized\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/DSC_2534-1024x683.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2591\" width=\"316\" height=\"210\"/></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Coming into the heart of the Christmas shopping season, when people are getting desperate for gift ideas, I thought I\'d offer up 10 suggestions for gifts that a new frequent traveler will actually use. While many gift lists are pushing Away luggage, Huzi infinity pillows, and Aesop travel kits (these companies must\'ve splashed a lot of samples around the blog-o-sphere), I built my list based on my own travel kit; the things I use every travel day in the 40-50 trips I take each year.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list {\"ordered\":true} -->\n<ol><li><strong>Black 20-inch carry-on suitcase</strong> <strong>—</strong> Black not only makes you look thinner, it makes your bag look thinner to gate agents hunting for bag-sizer bait. Black also doesn’t show stains. A 20-incher should get your traveler on-board for 90% of airlines without a hassle. I go for the 2-wheeler with the biggest wheels I can find to make it an easier, smoother pull. But that\'s my personal preference; a lot of travelers (including my wife) swear by their 4-wheel spinners. I bought the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/32lIURe\">TravelPro Maxlite 5</a> a few months ago and highly recommend it.</li><li><strong>TSA Global Entry or Pre-Check</strong> <strong>—</strong> Gift your new traveler with 5 years of time and hassle reduction. <a aria-label=\"$100 for both (opens in a new tab)\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.cbp.gov/travel/trusted-traveler-programs/global-entry\" target=\"_blank\">$100 for both</a>; $85 for just <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Pre-Check. (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/precheck\" target=\"_blank\">Pre-Check.</a> If you have a high-end card like an <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Amex Platinum (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.americanexpress.com/us/expedite-your-travel.html\" target=\"_blank\">Amex Platinum</a>, you might be able to put your card on their application and get the $100 fee back in a statement credit.</li><li><strong>Noise Canceling Headphones</strong> <strong>—</strong> I mentioned in <a aria-label=\"$100 for both (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/11/30/podcast-157-notes-from-the-baltics-riga-latvia-and-tallinn-estonia/\">the last podcast episode</a> how my trusty Bose QC-15s saved me from the propeller drone on my flights around the Baltics. The drone of jet or propeller engines disappear with the flick of a switch. But it\'s the drop in stress level and blood pressure that accompanies that flick of the switch — you don’t realize how much that drone affects you. Everything in my briefcase has to earn its space. I’ve been carrying Bose headphones for, I dunno, 10, 15 years. They’re nowhere near compact, but I’ve never thought of leaving them behind. The models you want to look for -- either the <a aria-label=\" (opens in a new tab)\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2RG7V80\" target=\"_blank\">Bose QC-35 II</a> or the <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Sony WH-1000XM3 (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2LGlVuK\" target=\"_blank\">Sony WH-1000XM3</a>. Your generous gift will be lovingly appreciated by your new traveler.</li><li><strong>VPN Subscription</strong> <strong>—</strong> Frequent travelers spend much of their time on public WiFi networks -- airports, hotels, bars, coffee shops, ....  Help them surf safe with a VPN subscription. I\'ve used <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"NordVPN (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"http://nordvpn.com\" target=\"_blank\">NordVPN</a> and <a aria-label=\" (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/\">PIA</a>.  They both protect laptops, and iOS and Android phones and tablets. VPN providers always have some promotion going on. A one-year subscription is usually in the $35-85 range.</li><li><strong>Portable Power Bank</strong> <strong>—</strong> Whatever the size or form factor -- slimline, lipstick, high-capacity brick -- having that second or third charge readily available is critical to get last-minute gate change notifications and when you’re using electronic boarding passes. It saves you from stalking cleaning crews to find a live power outlet on your layover, or negotiating with your seat mate for possession of outlet between you. It’s cheap peace of mind.  The <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Anker PowerCore+ Mini (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2E6HMri\" target=\"_blank\">Anker PowerCore+ Mini</a> is light enough (under 3 oz) to carry any time. I\'ve also started carrying a <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Zendure Power Bank Supermini (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/34fcbON\" target=\"_blank\">Zendure Power Bank Supermini</a> for faster iPhone 11 charging.</li><li><strong>Badger Hair Shaving Brush</strong> <strong>—</strong> I switched from an electric razor to blade to make it easier to pass through London-Heathrow during one of their security crack-downs and never went back. To do it right, though, you need to have a badger hair shaving brush. I use a not-too-expensive <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Edwin Jagger brush (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2Pcm1wy\" target=\"_blank\">Edwin Jagger brush</a> that makes my morning shave into a bit of a meditation. If you want to go all in, get your traveler the <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Alluvian Shave Soap 5-Piece Travel Size Sampler. (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://alluvian.co/shop/shave-soap-travel-size-sampler\" target=\"_blank\">Alluvian Shave Soap 5-Piece Travel Size Sampler.</a> They smell great and are the perfect travel size.</li><li><strong>Merino Wool Scarf</strong> <strong>—</strong> A man’s scarf is an incredibly undervalued piece of intermediate winter wear. In an airplane cabin or hotel room where a coat is too much (especially in a middle seat), but there’s a draft that chills you, a scarf around the neck is just enough without being too much. You may have to teach your new traveler how to wear it, but you can have fun with colors. I\'m a big fan of <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"merino wool scarves (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/35ckwUq\" target=\"_blank\">merino wool scarves</a> -- they\'re warm, soft, and dry out if you spill water on them.</li><li><strong>Compression Socks</strong> <strong>—</strong> Yes, I know that compression socks won\'t generate the most ooh\'s and aah\'s when their wrapping is torn off. But not having to stuff swollen feet back into shoes after an international or transcontinental flight has made me appreciate them. I wear <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"SB SOX Compression Socks (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/38kJGCi\" target=\"_blank\">SB SOX Compression Socks</a>, but any moderate compression sock should be fine.</li><li><strong>Short HDMI Cable and Dongle</strong> <strong>—</strong> It\'s a rare hotel room I walk into that doesn\'t have a big flat-screen TV mounted to the wall. Many of these will let you log into your Netflix or HBO Go account so you can watch your content on the big screen. But why go through all that (and trust their data and network security set-up) when you can just plug your laptop into one of their spare HDMI ports? I use a <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"basic 3-foot HDMI cable (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2PbFBZx\" target=\"_blank\">basic 3-foot HDMI cable</a>. Most of the common business laptops from Dell and Lenovo have HDMI ports but, because I have a MacBook Air, I also carry an <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Apple USB-C-to-HDMI adapter (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2E4HfpI\" target=\"_blank\">Apple USB-C-to-HDMI adapter</a>. </li><li><strong>Travel Notebook</strong> <strong>—</strong> And finally, a stocking stuffer idea — a travel notebook, something to jot down thoughts, ideas, observations, to do lists while waiting for the flight to board, the train to come, or the room to be made up. Nothing extravagant — no leather embossed cover — but it should be small enough to fit in a pocket, but substantial, something that can survive being knocked around in the bottom of a briefcase, and with paper quality that will hold onto those thoughts for a while. I used to use a <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Moleskine pocket notebook (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/36mN8dZ\" target=\"_blank\">Moleskine pocket notebook</a> but have switched over a similar-sized <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Clairefontaine A6 notebook (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2LMAOM9\" target=\"_blank\">Clairefontaine A6 notebook</a>. The soft cover fits better in a jeans back pocket, and the paper is more fountain-pen friendly. Or go a bit more whimsical and get <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"a pack of Field Notes (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/36pK68D\" target=\"_blank\">a pack of Field Notes</a>.</li></ol>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:block {\"ref\":2601} /-->','Best Gift Ideas for a New Traveler','','inherit','closed','closed','','2590-revision-v1','','','2019-12-11 12:12:02','2019-12-11 17:12:02','',2590,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/12/11/2590-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2607,1,'2019-12-31 14:28:36','2019-12-31 19:28:36','','189764_1571139330482_7074048_n','','inherit','open','closed','','189764_1571139330482_7074048_n','','','2019-12-31 14:32:53','2019-12-31 19:32:53','',2609,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/189764_1571139330482_7074048_n.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(2609,1,'2019-12-31 19:13:47','2020-01-01 00:13:47','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/189764_1571139330482_7074048_n.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-2607\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/189764_1571139330482_7074048_n-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\n<figcaption>Good End to 2019</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p>Skipping the Chicago winter with trips to Phoenix and Sedona, Arizona, and a Christmas morning flight to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. Talk about those trips, my good and bad Hertz experiences, and then gather up odds-‘n’-ends from my travel notebooks to see off 2019 in this New Year\'s Eve episode. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_158.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #158: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois, just back from a bone-thawing trip with the family to Cabo San Lucas, sorta the Land’s End of Mexico’s Baja California peninsula. We booked this trip back in May. Andrew has read on some budget traveler newsletter that Southwest was about to start service to Cabo. So the morning that the flights went on offer, we all went after Southwest’s website and snagged our flights for just over 30,000 points a person. We flew down early Christmas morning, connecting through HOU, and, thinking back to how empty ORD was last year at Thanksgiving, I was stunned that both of our flights were completely full. It seemed that half of our 6:45a flight out of MDW was also walking over to the Cabo gate. Guess that once the kids stop believing in Santa, Christmas morning travel is fair game.</li><li>Flying back out of Cabo last Sunday, I walk up to the gate and don’t see the usual Southwest boarding number pylons. It’s just a typical shared gate with the Southwest flight to Hobby at Gate 4A and a Delta flight to maybe Salt Lake at Gate 4B. And no plane, because there’s no jetway. It’s a bus. Southwest’s open seating works because everyone enters the plane in numerical order. Squeezing all the A group and half of the B group onto one bus… this’ll be interesting. It’s a 3-minute bus ride around the corner of the terminal. The doors open; we pour out. A ramp worker is trying to recreate the Southwest boarding process on the tarmac, asking everyone to line up in 3 lines -- pre-boards, A1-30, and A31-60. It kinda works, for the most part… until another ramp worker says “Hey, we’re boarding through the back door, too” just as the second bus opens its doors. Then it just devolves into a free-for-all. I imagine that first ramp worker looking like Kevin Bacon in “Animal House”, flattened by stampeding passengers. I was the first one through the rear door, so I was fine with it, but it does feel like Southwest needs to re-engineer how they board from shared gates.</li><li>I say “bone-thawing,” but it’s not like I was suffering too much from the Chicago December. I’ve been in Phoenix most of the month between Thanksgiving and Christmas, walking around in shirt sleeves in 65 degree weather, topping up my Vitamin D levels while kinda chuckling at the locals hurrying&nbsp; by in their puffy Patagonia parkas. I even extended my stay through one of the weekends -- doing some more of that “bleisure” travel, this time a hiking weekend in the <a href=\"https://www.fs.fed.us/wildflowers/regions/southwestern/RedRockCountry/index.shtml\">Red Rock Country</a> around Sedona, Arizona.&nbsp; An hour or so before picking up a car from Hertz for the weekend, I got an e-mail from the Hertz PHX station manager saying they’d upgraded me as an early birthday present. With equal parts anticipation and trepidation (I remember DFW Hertz “upgrading” me to a Ford F-150 pickup) Irene and I rolled up to spot 43 to find a Mercedes A220 sedan under a “Happy Birthday” sign. OK, now <em>this</em> is an exciting upgrade. Once we fought our way through the Phoenix traffic, the A220 made the 2-hour drive up I-17 a fun run, especially with a 75 mph speed limit. </li><li> Bridge Music -- Earth Soda by septahelix (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial Share-Alike  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/septahelix/34050  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I pushed a <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1206606966031675393/photo/1\">picture of the Hertz car under the Happy Birthday sign</a> to the TravelCommons Instagram Story roll. Steve Frick replied, saying that a friend of his had gotten a Hertz birthday upgrade too, to a Jag. Not to throw any shade, but I definitely think the PHX team did me a bit better with the Benz, but it’s nice of Hertz to give their customers a bit of a birthday surprise. With so many travel providers working hard to squeeze, to optimize, and then to charge for every little thing, getting a birthday present from one of them with a bit of luxury -- and in my case not an insignificant upgrade -- it’s a pleasant throwback to what travel was like when I started business travel coming on 35 years ago.&nbsp;</li><li>But all that love was blown away less than 2 weeks later when the Hertz team in Cabo put me through a 20-minute hard sell on insurance -- $85/day on a $50/day rental -- and then charged me $14/day for something called “Credit Card Care”, all for a beat-up VW Passat with 50,000 hard miles on it. Ugh.</li><li>Steve also hit the TravelCommons website to talk about mileage runs. In the last episode, I said that Mark Skinner’s DC-HKG up-and-back to carry a NASA cosmic ray detector on United’s over-the-pole route was one helluva mileage run. Steve said -<ul><li>I haven’t done a mileage run in years but came real close to losing my Southwest companion pass status for 2020. I had to change a few of my travel website profiles to use my Southwest card over my Hilton American Express card in order to hit it for 2020. It’s always a tough decision do I want 12 points per dollar at Hilton properties or free Southwest flights for my wife</li></ul></li><li>Thanks, Steve. I’ll tweak my travel credit cards now and then to hit some goals, but I hadn’t thought of it as an end-of-year mileage run. But it does make sense, especially with Southwest which counts credit card spend toward Companion Pass. I like that, a credit-card mileage run -- definitely more climate friendly.</li><li>I was talking about my flights to and from Phoenix a couple of weeks ago with one of the guys on the project team, a younger guy, and the look he gave me suggested that I’d hit peak travel nerdery -- at least in his eyes. I was telling him that I fly out to Phoenix on United from ORD because United has an 8am flight out, it’s easier to get a morning coffee at ORD than MDW, I get a free upgrade to Economy Plus which makes it easier to sleep, and because United uses PHX in Terminal 2, the older “slum” terminal that, because it’s separate from the main terminals, makes it easier to get an Uber or Lyft. But then I fly back to Chicago on Southwest because they have more flights back in the afternoon which gives me some flexibility with last-minute meetings, they don’t charge a change fee, they fly out of the newer Terminal 4 in PHX which gives me a much better selection of restaurants and bars than Terminal 2, and it puts me into Chicago-Midway where the wait for an Uber or Lyft is always shorter than at ORD. To me, it was a completely reasonable thought process -- optimizing each leg for the amenities I’d use. I turned to one of the other guys -- a guy who’s been traveling 20-some years -- “Yup, makes perfect sense to me,” he said. The younger guy was just shaking his head; probably muttering “OK Boomer” under his breath. But he’ll learn.</li><li>Back in November, during one of my semi-regular spelunks through Google Analytics, I noticed that <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/11/20/podcast-146-rental-demolition-derby-traveler-gift-guide/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #146 — Rental Demolition Derby; Traveler Gift Guide\">the November 2018 episode - #146: Rental Demolition Derby and Traveler Gift Guide</a> - was one of the top 5 pages on the TravelCommons website. I couldn’t figure how stories of rental car wrecks would get a lot of Google hits, so it must be the gift guide. Which suggested that maybe I should update it for 2019, but more as a blog post this time. I read through a half-dozen or so other gift guides, looking for some ideas I could steal, but they got pretty repetitious pretty quick -- pushing Away luggage, Huzi infinity pillows, and Aesop travel kits, which suggests to a cynical mind that these companies must’ve been splashing a lot of samples around the blog-o-sphere. And maybe didn’t age all that well after the Verge published an <a aria-label=\"exposé on Away’s toxic work culture (opens in a new tab)\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/5/20995453/away-luggage-ceo-steph-korey-toxic-work-environment-travel-inclusion\" target=\"_blank\">exposé on Away’s toxic work culture</a>. But anyway, I wanted something a bit different, and on one of my flights got thinking about a chat I’d had with a friend a while back. She was looking for gift ideas for her daughter who, a couple of years out of college, was starting a new job with a lot more business travel. Replaying that chat in my head, and thinking about the younger guy on my project team, I started going through my travel kit -- rummaging through my messenger bag and then cycling through my suitcase -- mentally, though; not enough space to physically pull it down from the overhead and open it up; and that would’ve looked a bit weird. I built <a aria-label=\"a list of the things I really use on my trips (opens in a new tab)\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/12/11/best-gift-ideas-for-a-new-traveler/\" target=\"_blank\">a list of the things I really use on my trips</a>, and that I miss when I forget to bring them along. Then I winnowed it down to 10 -- because “Top 10” is a key search term -- and there you have it. If you haven’t looked at it yet, give it a read and leave a comment with your suggestions.</li><li>Number 2 on <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/12/11/best-gift-ideas-for-a-new-traveler/\">my list of ideas</a>, after a 20-inch black roller bag, is picking up the application fee for TSA Global Entry for your new traveler. For $100, or for free with many airline and hotel reward credit cards, you can gift them with 5 years of hassle reduction with PreCheck for domestic travel and a fast path through Customs when they travel internationally. Coming back from Cabo, we connected again through Houston-Hobby and so had to clear Immigration and Customs there. It was my first time through Customs there, so it took me a minute to find the Global Entry kiosks. The interface was a bit different from the ORD ones. Instead of asking for my passport and prompting me for the fingerprint pad, it asked me to fit my face inside a red box before taking my picture. The camera didn’t look adjustable, so I squatted down ‘til my face was in the frame and then clicked the Take Photo button. A couple seconds later, the kiosk spit out my receipt and I was off to the exit -- no passport or fingerprint scans, no clicking through questions. Quick, but odd. Some Google searches when I got home told me that I’d hit the new generation of Global Entry kiosks -- Global Entry 2.0 -- that uses facial recognition to match the kiosk picture with my passport and Global Entry application pictures. Given how crappy the kiosk picture looked on the receipt -- and that I hadn’t taken my glasses off -- I’m either really impressed or really concerned about the accuracy of their facial recognition algorithm; I’m not quite sure which.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li> Bridge Music -- Absolutely Clear (ft Jeris &amp; Goldfish) by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/45578 Ft: Jeris, Goldfish  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong> Travel Potpourri for $400, Alex </strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Here it is, the last episode of the year that I’m trying to get out before cracking the Vueve and trying to stay awake until midnight. With the clock ticking, instead of a proper topic, all I can do is gather up some odds-‘n’-ends from my travel notebooks into a Jeopardy-like topic “Travel Potpourri”</li><li>And writing in my travel notebooks is something I like to do. I have a couple: a small one -- a 3½x5½-in or A6 size that fits in my back pocket -- to jot down notes, bullet points; and a larger one that I use as a proper travel journal. For that, I was using a B6 Muji notebook that I picked up in Lisbon 3 years ago. After I filled that one up, I switched to a taller, thinner Japanese traveler-sized notebook because… that’s what I had laying around. I’ve been writing in travel notebooks since I’ve started the podcast -- gotta feed the beast -- usually in public places -- in bars, a lotta bars, while drinking beers, or on planes, a lotta&nbsp; planes, though turbulence can be a problem. And for some reason, I’ve found that this act of writing in public generates a bit of interest, and a chunk of questions. Back in October, on the Finnair flight back from our Baltics tour, I was catching up, writing up my thoughts on our couple of days in Helsinki when the guy a few seats over started asking me what I was writing. He was a younger Finnish guy. He and his girlfriend and a group of 5 or 6 others were connecting through Chicago to Miami for a cruise, and they started their cruise party the minute the drink carts rolled. But he wanted to know what I was writing and why. The what was easy; he wanted to know what I thought of Helsinki; where I’d been, how I liked it. He was intrigued by our Baltic Riga-Tallinn-Helsinki itinerary, in kind of a “that’s weird, but interesting” way. The why I’m not sure made it through translation. It’s not a pure travelogue -- not a “we did this, and then did that”. It’s more about impressions; what I found unique; what caught my eye. Writing it down makes me think about it, and when I go back and read those pages, some 2 or 10 or 20 years later, it reminds me of that place, that time, those experiences.&nbsp;</li><li>And when I talk about travel with folks, when I tell them how often I travel, I’ll often get a story -- in a bar, on a plane, or… while getting my hair cut. The girl who does my hair told me about her trip to Peru with a yoga group. Not the whole trip (I don’t have that much hair), but on their flight back, out of Lima, the plane took off, rotating up, while the flight attendants were still in the aisle doing the final check. It was a bit of mayhem, she said. That had to be one quick taxi out and take-off, I thought, because you’d think those flight attendants would be sprinting to their seats once that plane started rolling down the runway. Which I have seen before, especially when the captain gets a quick release from a ground hold and wants to get airborne before the tower changes their mind. But I’ve never seen them leave the ground with anyone still in the aisle.</li><li>Maybe the pilot was distracted -- a message from the tower, an animal on the runway, a sudden thought crossed his mind. I thought about pilot distraction when walking the <a href=\"https://thehikehouse.com/trails/airport-mesa-trail\">Airport Mesa trail</a> in Sedona earlier this month. The trail name says it all -- it’s a 3½-mile loop around the mesa where Sedona’s general aviation airport is. The hikers aren’t the potential distraction, though. It’s one of Sedona’s famous energy vortexes that’s right next to the airport. The Airport Vortex is, according to<a href=\"https://sedonaverdevalley.natgeotourism.com/content/airport-mesa-vortex/svvc7d222a849df1d7d6\"> one website</a>, “an Upflow area (also called Electric or Masculine) that helps your spirit soar for a higher perspective and/or greater oneness and serenity.” Watching a couple of private jets take off while on our hike, I wondered what would happen if the pilot suddenly achieved greater oneness and serenity while rotating off the top of that mesa. For someone as unenlightened and non-serene as me, that would be one helluva distraction.</li><li>I think for many, maybe close to most frequent travelers, Uber and Lyft have replaced taxis, at least in the US, when not renting a car. So it got my attention when I hit a weird Uber app failure at ORD at the end of October. Coming back from Charlottesville, I light up both Uber and Lyft while getting off the plane to compare wait times and fares (you’d think their surge pricing would be consistent, but it rarely is for me). Uber is a bit better, so I go to book a ride. Except that the Uber app wouldn’t pick up at the domestic terminals, just the separate international terminal, Terminal 5. I check Lyft again; yup, they’ll pick me up at Terminal 2, so I book with them instead. But it’s weird, so I keep checking Uber. I walk out the door to the rideshare pick-up area. There’s nothing but cars with pink Lyft lights; not an Uber decal in sight. An older couple walks up to me -- “Where does Uber pick up?” Normally here, I tell them, but they seem to have deleted it from their app today. It was a good night to be a Lyft driver. I wondered how long it took Uber to notice that they weren’t getting any pick-ups from one of the country’s busiest airports.</li><li>Tonight, though -- New Year’s Eve night -- I’ll be skipping Uber and their after-midnight price surges. I’ll be happy to hang out at home, to skip any travel, and just pop a bottle... or two of Vueve and wish all you TravelCommons’ listeners a Happy New Year and fun and safe travels in 2020.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #158</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_158.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #158 — Travel Potpourri for $400, Alex','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-158-travel-potpourri-for-400-alex','','\nhttps://thehikehouse.com/trails/airport-mesa-trail','2021-10-01 16:59:19','2021-10-01 21:59:19','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=2609',0,'post','',0),
(2610,1,'2019-12-31 14:46:21','2019-12-31 19:46:21','<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/189764_1571139330482_7074048_n.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-2607\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/189764_1571139330482_7074048_n-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a></div>\n<p>Wrapping up my time in Charlottesville, VA with some \"bleisure\" travel, as well as some pure leisure travel with a quick trip in the Baltics. And a listener talks about the reason for his out-and-back day trip from Washington, DC to Hong Kong. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_158.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/720859504&color=%23ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #158: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois, just back from a bone-thawing trip with the family to Cabo San Lucas, sorta the Land’s End of Mexico’s Baja California peninsula. We booked this trip back in May. Andrew has read on some budget traveler newsletter that Southwest was about to start service to Cabo. So the morning that the flights went on offer, we all went after Southwest’s website and snagged our flights for just over 30,000 points a person. We flew down early Christmas morning, connecting through HOU, and, thinking back to how empty ORD was last year at Thanksgiving, I was stunned that both of our flights were completely full. It seemed that half of our 6:45a flight out of MDW was also walking over to the Cabo gate. Guess that once the kids stop believing in Santa, Christmas morning travel is fair game.</li><li>Flying back out of Cabo last Sunday, I walk up to the gate and don’t see the usual Southwest boarding number pylons. It’s just a typical shared gate with the Southwest flight to Hobby at Gate 4A and a Delta flight to maybe Salt Lake at Gate 4B. And no plane, because there’s no jetway. It’s a bus. Southwest’s open seating works because everyone enters the plane in numerical order. Squeezing all the A group and half of the B group onto one bus… this’ll be interesting. It’s a 3-minute bus ride around the corner of the terminal. The doors open; we pour out. A ramp worker is trying to recreate the Southwest boarding process on the tarmac, asking everyone to line up in 3 lines -- pre-boards, A1-30, and A31-60. It kinda works, for the most part… until another ramp worker says “Hey, we’re boarding through the back door, too” just as the second bus opens its doors. Then it just devolves into a free-for-all. I imagine that first ramp worker looking like Kevin Bacon in “Animal House”, flattened by stampeding passengers. I was the first one through the rear door, so I was fine with it, but it does feel like Southwest needs to re-engineer how they board from shared gates.</li><li>I say “bone-thawing,” but it’s not like I was suffering too much from the Chicago December. I’ve been in Phoenix most of the month between Thanksgiving and Christmas, walking around in shirt sleeves in 65 degree weather, topping up my Vitamin D levels while kinda chuckling at the locals hurrying  by in their puffy Patagonia parkas. I even extended my stay through one of the weekends -- doing some more of that “bleisure” travel, this time a hiking weekend in the <a href=\"https://www.fs.fed.us/wildflowers/regions/southwestern/RedRockCountry/index.shtml\">Red Rock Country</a> around Sedona, Arizona.  An hour or so before picking up a car from Hertz for the weekend, I got an e-mail from the Hertz PHX station manager saying they’d upgraded me as an early birthday present. With equal parts anticipation and trepidation (I remember DFW Hertz “upgrading” me to a Ford F-150 pickup) Irene and I rolled up to spot 43 to find a Mercedes A220 sedan under a “Happy Birthday” sign. OK, now <em>this</em> is an exciting upgrade. Once we fought our way through the Phoenix traffic, the A220 made the 2-hour drive up I-17 a fun run, especially with a 75 mph speed limit. </li><li> Bridge Music -- Dive Deep (Loveshadow remix) by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/50488 Ft: Loveshadow </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I pushed a <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1206606966031675393/photo/1\">picture of the Hertz car under the Happy Birthday sign</a> to the TravelCommons Instagram Story roll. Steve Frick replied, saying that a friend of his had gotten a Hertz birthday upgrade too, to a Jag. Not to throw any shade, but I definitely think the PHX team did me a bit better with the Benz, but it’s nice of Hertz to give their customers a bit of a birthday surprise. With so many travel providers working hard to squeeze, to optimize, and then to charge for every little thing, getting a birthday present from one of them with a bit of luxury -- and in my case not an insignificant upgrade -- it’s a pleasant throwback to what travel was like when I started business travel coming on 35 years ago. </li><li>But all that love was blown away less than 2 weeks later when the Hertz team in Cabo put me through a 20-minute hard sell on insurance -- $85/day on a $50/day rental -- and then charged me $14/day for something called “Credit Card Care”, all for a beat-up VW Passat with 50,000 hard miles on it. Ugh.</li><li>Steve also hit the TravelCommons website to talk about mileage runs. In the last episode, I said that Mark Skinner’s DC-HKG up-and-back to carry a NASA cosmic ray detector on United’s over-the-pole route was one helluva mileage run. Steve said -<ul><li>I haven’t done a mileage run in years but came real close to losing my Southwest companion pass status for 2020. I had to change a few of my travel website profiles to use my Southwest card over my Hilton American Express card in order to hit it for 2020. It’s always a tough decision do I want 12 points per dollar at Hilton properties or free Southwest flights for my wife</li></ul></li><li>Thanks, Steve. I’ll tweak my travel credit cards now and then to hit some goals, but I hadn’t thought of it as an end-of-year mileage run. But it does make sense, especially with Southwest which counts credit card spend toward Companion Pass. I like that, a credit-card mileage run -- definitely more climate friendly.</li><li>I was talking about my flights to and from Phoenix a couple of weeks ago with one of the guys on the project team, a younger guy, and the look he gave me suggested that I’d hit peak travel nerdery -- at least in his eyes. I was telling him that I fly out to Phoenix on United from ORD because United has an 8am flight out, it’s easier to get a morning coffee at ORD than MDW, I get a free upgrade to Economy Plus which makes it easier to sleep, and because United uses PHX in Terminal 2, the older “slum” terminal that, because it’s separate from the main terminals, makes it easier to get an Uber or Lyft. But then I fly back to Chicago on Southwest because they have more flights back in the afternoon which gives me some flexibility with last-minute meetings, they don’t charge a change fee, they fly out of the newer Terminal 4 in PHX which gives me a much better selection of restaurants and bars than Terminal 2, and it puts me into Chicago-Midway where the wait for an Uber or Lyft is always shorter than at ORD. To me, it was a completely reasonable thought process -- optimizing each leg for the amenities I’d use. I turned to one of the other guys -- a guy who’s been traveling 20-some years -- “Yup, makes perfect sense to me,” he said. The younger guy was just shaking his head; probably muttering “OK Boomer” under his breath. But he’ll learn.</li><li>Back in November, during one of my semi-regular spelunks through Google Analytics, I noticed that <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"the November 2018 episode - #146: Rental Demolition Derby and Traveler Gift Guide (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"http://146\" target=\"_blank\">the November 2018 episode - #146: Rental Demolition Derby and Traveler Gift Guide</a> - was one of the top 5 pages on the TravelCommons website. I couldn’t figure how stories of rental car wrecks would get a lot of Google hits, so it must be the gift guide. Which suggested that maybe I should update it for 2019, but more as a blog post this time. I read through a half-dozen or so other gift guides, looking for some ideas I could steal, but they got pretty repetitious pretty quick -- pushing Away luggage, Huzi infinity pillows, and Aesop travel kits, which suggests to a cynical mind that these companies must’ve been splashing a lot of samples around the blog-o-sphere. And maybe didn’t age all that well after the Verge published an <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"exposé on Away’s toxic work culture (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/5/20995453/away-luggage-ceo-steph-korey-toxic-work-environment-travel-inclusion\" target=\"_blank\">exposé on Away’s toxic work culture</a>. But anyway, I wanted something a bit different, and on one of my flights got thinking about a chat I’d had with a friend a while back. She was looking for gift ideas for her daughter who, a couple of years out of college, was starting a new job with a lot more business travel. Replaying that chat in my head, and thinking about the younger guy on my project team, I started going through my travel kit -- rummaging through my messenger bag and then cycling through my suitcase -- mentally, though; not enough space to physically pull it down from the overhead and open it up; and that would’ve looked a bit weird. I built <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"a list of the things I really use on my trips (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/12/11/best-gift-ideas-for-a-new-traveler/\" target=\"_blank\">a list of the things I really use on my trips</a>, and that I miss when I forget to bring them along. Then I winnowed it down to 10 -- because “Top 10” is a key search term -- and there you have it. If you haven’t looked at it yet, give it a read and leave a comment with your suggestions.</li><li>Number 2 on <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/12/11/best-gift-ideas-for-a-new-traveler/\">my list of ideas</a>, after a 20-inch black roller bag, is picking up the application fee for TSA Global Entry for your new traveler. For $100, or for free with many airline and hotel reward credit cards, you can gift them with 5 years of hassle reduction with PreCheck for domestic travel and a fast path through Customs when they travel internationally. Coming back from Cabo, we connected again through Houston-Hobby and so had to clear Immigration and Customs there. It was my first time through Customs there, so it took me a minute to find the Global Entry kiosks. The interface was a bit different from the ORD ones. Instead of asking for my passport and prompting me for the fingerprint pad, it asked me to fit my face inside a red box before taking my picture. The camera didn’t look adjustable, so I squatted down ‘til my face was in the frame and then clicked the Take Photo button. A couple seconds later, the kiosk spit out my receipt and I was off to the exit -- no passport or fingerprint scans, no clicking through questions. Quick, but odd. Some Google searches when I got home told me that I’d hit the new generation of Global Entry kiosks -- Global Entry 2.0 -- that uses facial recognition to match the kiosk picture with my passport and Global Entry application pictures. Given how crappy the kiosk picture looked on the receipt -- and that I hadn’t taken my glasses off -- I’m either really impressed or really concerned about the accuracy of their facial recognition algorithm; I’m not quite sure which.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li> Bridge Music - Drops of H2O ( The Filtered Water Treatment ) by J.Lang (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djlang59/37792 Ft: Airtone </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong> Travel Potpourri for $400, Alex </strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Here it is, the last episode of the year that I’m trying to get out before cracking the Vueve and trying to stay awake until midnight. With the clock ticking, instead of a proper topic, all I can do is gather up some odds-‘n’-ends from my travel notebooks into a Jeopardy-like topic “Travel Potpourri”</li><li>And writing in my travel notebooks is something I like to do. I have a couple: a small one -- a 3½x5½-in or A6 size that fits in my back pocket -- to jot down notes, bullet points; and a larger one that I use as a proper travel journal. For that, I was using a B6 Muji notebook that I picked up in Lisbon 3 years ago. After I filled that one up, I switched to a taller, thinner Japanese traveler-sized notebook because… that’s what I had laying around. I’ve been writing in travel notebooks since I’ve started the podcast -- gotta feed the beast -- usually in public places -- in bars, a lotta bars, while drinking beers, or on planes, a lotta  planes, though turbulence can be a problem. And for some reason, I’ve found that this act of writing in public generates a bit of interest, and a chunk of questions. Back in October, on the Finnair flight back from our Baltics tour, I was catching up, writing up my thoughts on our couple of days in Helsinki when the guy a few seats over started asking me what I was writing. He was a younger Finnish guy. He and his girlfriend and a group of 5 or 6 others were connecting through Chicago to Miami for a cruise, and they started their cruise party the minute the drink carts rolled. But he wanted to know what I was writing and why. The what was easy; he wanted to know what I thought of Helsinki; where I’d been, how I liked it. He was intrigued by our Baltic Riga-Tallinn-Helsinki itinerary, in kind of a “that’s weird, but interesting” way. The why I’m not sure made it through translation. It’s not a pure travelogue -- not a “we did this, and then did that”. It’s more about impressions; what I found unique; what caught my eye. Writing it down makes me think about it, and when I go back and read those pages, some 2 or 10 or 20 years later, it reminds me of that place, that time, those experiences. </li><li>And when I talk about travel with folks, when I tell them how often I travel, I’ll often get a story -- in a bar, on a plane, or… while getting my hair cut. The girl who does my hair told me about her trip to Peru with a yoga group. Not the whole trip (I don’t have that much hair), but on their flight back, out of Lima, the plane took off, rotating up, while the flight attendants were still in the aisle doing the final check. It was a bit of mayhem, she said. That had to be one quick taxi out and take-off, I thought, because you’d think those flight attendants would be sprinting to their seats once that plane started rolling down the runway. Which I have seen before, especially when the captain gets a quick release from a ground hold and wants to get airborne before the tower changes their mind. But I’ve never seen them leave the ground with anyone still in the aisle.</li><li>Maybe the pilot was distracted -- a message from the tower, an animal on the runway, a sudden thought crossed his mind. I thought about pilot distraction when walking the <a href=\"https://thehikehouse.com/trails/airport-mesa-trail\">Airport Mesa trail</a> in Sedona earlier this month. The trail name says it all -- it’s a 3½-mile loop around the mesa where Sedona’s general aviation airport is. The hikers aren’t the potential distraction, though. It’s one of Sedona’s famous energy vortexes that’s right next to the airport. The Airport Vortex is, according to<a href=\"https://sedonaverdevalley.natgeotourism.com/content/airport-mesa-vortex/svvc7d222a849df1d7d6\"> one website</a>, “an Upflow area (also called Electric or Masculine) that helps your spirit soar for a higher perspective and/or greater oneness and serenity.” Watching a couple of private jets take off while on our hike, I wondered what would happen if the pilot suddenly achieved greater oneness and serenity while rotating off the top of that mesa. For someone as unenlightened and non-serene as me, that would be one helluva distraction.</li><li>I think for many, maybe close to most frequent travelers, Uber and Lyft have replaced taxis, at least in the US, when not renting a car. So it got my attention when I hit a weird Uber app failure at ORD at the end of October. Coming back from Charlottesville, I light up both Uber and Lyft while getting off the plane to compare wait times and fares (you’d think their surge pricing would be consistent, but it rarely is for me). Uber is a bit better, so I go to book a ride. Except that the Uber app wouldn’t pick up at the domestic terminals, just the separate international terminal, Terminal 5. I check Lyft again; yup, they’ll pick me up at Terminal 2, so I book with them instead. But it’s weird, so I keep checking Uber. I walk out the door to the rideshare pick-up area. There’s nothing but cars with pink Lyft lights; not an Uber decal in sight. An older couple walks up to me -- “Where does Uber pick up?” Normally here, I tell them, but they seem to have deleted it from their app today. It was a good night to be a Lyft driver. I wondered how long it took Uber to notice that they weren’t getting any pick-ups from one of the country’s busiest airports.</li><li>Tonight, though -- New Year’s Eve night -- I’ll be skipping Uber and their after-midnight price surges. I’ll be happy to hang out at home, to skip any travel, and just pop a bottle... or two of Vueve and wish all you TravelCommons’ listeners a Happy New Year and fun and safe travels in 2020.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #158</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_157.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #158 — Travel Potpourri for $400, Alex','','inherit','closed','closed','','2609-revision-v1','','','2019-12-31 14:46:21','2019-12-31 19:46:21','',2609,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/12/31/2609-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2611,1,'2019-12-31 14:54:24','2019-12-31 19:54:24','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/189764_1571139330482_7074048_n.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-2607\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/189764_1571139330482_7074048_n-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a><figcaption>Good End to 2019</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>Wrapping up my time in Charlottesville, VA with some \"bleisure\" travel, as well as some pure leisure travel with a quick trip in the Baltics. And a listener talks about the reason for his out-and-back day trip from Washington, DC to Hong Kong. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_158.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/720859504&color=%23ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #158: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois, just back from a bone-thawing trip with the family to Cabo San Lucas, sorta the Land’s End of Mexico’s Baja California peninsula. We booked this trip back in May. Andrew has read on some budget traveler newsletter that Southwest was about to start service to Cabo. So the morning that the flights went on offer, we all went after Southwest’s website and snagged our flights for just over 30,000 points a person. We flew down early Christmas morning, connecting through HOU, and, thinking back to how empty ORD was last year at Thanksgiving, I was stunned that both of our flights were completely full. It seemed that half of our 6:45a flight out of MDW was also walking over to the Cabo gate. Guess that once the kids stop believing in Santa, Christmas morning travel is fair game.</li><li>Flying back out of Cabo last Sunday, I walk up to the gate and don’t see the usual Southwest boarding number pylons. It’s just a typical shared gate with the Southwest flight to Hobby at Gate 4A and a Delta flight to maybe Salt Lake at Gate 4B. And no plane, because there’s no jetway. It’s a bus. Southwest’s open seating works because everyone enters the plane in numerical order. Squeezing all the A group and half of the B group onto one bus… this’ll be interesting. It’s a 3-minute bus ride around the corner of the terminal. The doors open; we pour out. A ramp worker is trying to recreate the Southwest boarding process on the tarmac, asking everyone to line up in 3 lines -- pre-boards, A1-30, and A31-60. It kinda works, for the most part… until another ramp worker says “Hey, we’re boarding through the back door, too” just as the second bus opens its doors. Then it just devolves into a free-for-all. I imagine that first ramp worker looking like Kevin Bacon in “Animal House”, flattened by stampeding passengers. I was the first one through the rear door, so I was fine with it, but it does feel like Southwest needs to re-engineer how they board from shared gates.</li><li>I say “bone-thawing,” but it’s not like I was suffering too much from the Chicago December. I’ve been in Phoenix most of the month between Thanksgiving and Christmas, walking around in shirt sleeves in 65 degree weather, topping up my Vitamin D levels while kinda chuckling at the locals hurrying&nbsp; by in their puffy Patagonia parkas. I even extended my stay through one of the weekends -- doing some more of that “bleisure” travel, this time a hiking weekend in the <a href=\"https://www.fs.fed.us/wildflowers/regions/southwestern/RedRockCountry/index.shtml\">Red Rock Country</a> around Sedona, Arizona.&nbsp; An hour or so before picking up a car from Hertz for the weekend, I got an e-mail from the Hertz PHX station manager saying they’d upgraded me as an early birthday present. With equal parts anticipation and trepidation (I remember DFW Hertz “upgrading” me to a Ford F-150 pickup) Irene and I rolled up to spot 43 to find a Mercedes A220 sedan under a “Happy Birthday” sign. OK, now <em>this</em> is an exciting upgrade. Once we fought our way through the Phoenix traffic, the A220 made the 2-hour drive up I-17 a fun run, especially with a 75 mph speed limit. </li><li> Bridge Music -- Dive Deep (Loveshadow remix) by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/50488 Ft: Loveshadow </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I pushed a <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1206606966031675393/photo/1\">picture of the Hertz car under the Happy Birthday sign</a> to the TravelCommons Instagram Story roll. Steve Frick replied, saying that a friend of his had gotten a Hertz birthday upgrade too, to a Jag. Not to throw any shade, but I definitely think the PHX team did me a bit better with the Benz, but it’s nice of Hertz to give their customers a bit of a birthday surprise. With so many travel providers working hard to squeeze, to optimize, and then to charge for every little thing, getting a birthday present from one of them with a bit of luxury -- and in my case not an insignificant upgrade -- it’s a pleasant throwback to what travel was like when I started business travel coming on 35 years ago.&nbsp;</li><li>But all that love was blown away less than 2 weeks later when the Hertz team in Cabo put me through a 20-minute hard sell on insurance -- $85/day on a $50/day rental -- and then charged me $14/day for something called “Credit Card Care”, all for a beat-up VW Passat with 50,000 hard miles on it. Ugh.</li><li>Steve also hit the TravelCommons website to talk about mileage runs. In the last episode, I said that Mark Skinner’s DC-HKG up-and-back to carry a NASA cosmic ray detector on United’s over-the-pole route was one helluva mileage run. Steve said -<ul><li>I haven’t done a mileage run in years but came real close to losing my Southwest companion pass status for 2020. I had to change a few of my travel website profiles to use my Southwest card over my Hilton American Express card in order to hit it for 2020. It’s always a tough decision do I want 12 points per dollar at Hilton properties or free Southwest flights for my wife</li></ul></li><li>Thanks, Steve. I’ll tweak my travel credit cards now and then to hit some goals, but I hadn’t thought of it as an end-of-year mileage run. But it does make sense, especially with Southwest which counts credit card spend toward Companion Pass. I like that, a credit-card mileage run -- definitely more climate friendly.</li><li>I was talking about my flights to and from Phoenix a couple of weeks ago with one of the guys on the project team, a younger guy, and the look he gave me suggested that I’d hit peak travel nerdery -- at least in his eyes. I was telling him that I fly out to Phoenix on United from ORD because United has an 8am flight out, it’s easier to get a morning coffee at ORD than MDW, I get a free upgrade to Economy Plus which makes it easier to sleep, and because United uses PHX in Terminal 2, the older “slum” terminal that, because it’s separate from the main terminals, makes it easier to get an Uber or Lyft. But then I fly back to Chicago on Southwest because they have more flights back in the afternoon which gives me some flexibility with last-minute meetings, they don’t charge a change fee, they fly out of the newer Terminal 4 in PHX which gives me a much better selection of restaurants and bars than Terminal 2, and it puts me into Chicago-Midway where the wait for an Uber or Lyft is always shorter than at ORD. To me, it was a completely reasonable thought process -- optimizing each leg for the amenities I’d use. I turned to one of the other guys -- a guy who’s been traveling 20-some years -- “Yup, makes perfect sense to me,” he said. The younger guy was just shaking his head; probably muttering “OK Boomer” under his breath. But he’ll learn.</li><li>Back in November, during one of my semi-regular spelunks through Google Analytics, I noticed that <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"the November 2018 episode - #146: Rental Demolition Derby and Traveler Gift Guide (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"http://146\" target=\"_blank\">the November 2018 episode - #146: Rental Demolition Derby and Traveler Gift Guide</a> - was one of the top 5 pages on the TravelCommons website. I couldn’t figure how stories of rental car wrecks would get a lot of Google hits, so it must be the gift guide. Which suggested that maybe I should update it for 2019, but more as a blog post this time. I read through a half-dozen or so other gift guides, looking for some ideas I could steal, but they got pretty repetitious pretty quick -- pushing Away luggage, Huzi infinity pillows, and Aesop travel kits, which suggests to a cynical mind that these companies must’ve been splashing a lot of samples around the blog-o-sphere. And maybe didn’t age all that well after the Verge published an <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"exposé on Away’s toxic work culture (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/5/20995453/away-luggage-ceo-steph-korey-toxic-work-environment-travel-inclusion\" target=\"_blank\">exposé on Away’s toxic work culture</a>. But anyway, I wanted something a bit different, and on one of my flights got thinking about a chat I’d had with a friend a while back. She was looking for gift ideas for her daughter who, a couple of years out of college, was starting a new job with a lot more business travel. Replaying that chat in my head, and thinking about the younger guy on my project team, I started going through my travel kit -- rummaging through my messenger bag and then cycling through my suitcase -- mentally, though; not enough space to physically pull it down from the overhead and open it up; and that would’ve looked a bit weird. I built <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"a list of the things I really use on my trips (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/12/11/best-gift-ideas-for-a-new-traveler/\" target=\"_blank\">a list of the things I really use on my trips</a>, and that I miss when I forget to bring them along. Then I winnowed it down to 10 -- because “Top 10” is a key search term -- and there you have it. If you haven’t looked at it yet, give it a read and leave a comment with your suggestions.</li><li>Number 2 on <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/12/11/best-gift-ideas-for-a-new-traveler/\">my list of ideas</a>, after a 20-inch black roller bag, is picking up the application fee for TSA Global Entry for your new traveler. For $100, or for free with many airline and hotel reward credit cards, you can gift them with 5 years of hassle reduction with PreCheck for domestic travel and a fast path through Customs when they travel internationally. Coming back from Cabo, we connected again through Houston-Hobby and so had to clear Immigration and Customs there. It was my first time through Customs there, so it took me a minute to find the Global Entry kiosks. The interface was a bit different from the ORD ones. Instead of asking for my passport and prompting me for the fingerprint pad, it asked me to fit my face inside a red box before taking my picture. The camera didn’t look adjustable, so I squatted down ‘til my face was in the frame and then clicked the Take Photo button. A couple seconds later, the kiosk spit out my receipt and I was off to the exit -- no passport or fingerprint scans, no clicking through questions. Quick, but odd. Some Google searches when I got home told me that I’d hit the new generation of Global Entry kiosks -- Global Entry 2.0 -- that uses facial recognition to match the kiosk picture with my passport and Global Entry application pictures. Given how crappy the kiosk picture looked on the receipt -- and that I hadn’t taken my glasses off -- I’m either really impressed or really concerned about the accuracy of their facial recognition algorithm; I’m not quite sure which.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li> Bridge Music - Drops of H2O ( The Filtered Water Treatment ) by J.Lang (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djlang59/37792 Ft: Airtone </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong> Travel Potpourri for $400, Alex </strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Here it is, the last episode of the year that I’m trying to get out before cracking the Vueve and trying to stay awake until midnight. With the clock ticking, instead of a proper topic, all I can do is gather up some odds-‘n’-ends from my travel notebooks into a Jeopardy-like topic “Travel Potpourri”</li><li>And writing in my travel notebooks is something I like to do. I have a couple: a small one -- a 3½x5½-in or A6 size that fits in my back pocket -- to jot down notes, bullet points; and a larger one that I use as a proper travel journal. For that, I was using a B6 Muji notebook that I picked up in Lisbon 3 years ago. After I filled that one up, I switched to a taller, thinner Japanese traveler-sized notebook because… that’s what I had laying around. I’ve been writing in travel notebooks since I’ve started the podcast -- gotta feed the beast -- usually in public places -- in bars, a lotta bars, while drinking beers, or on planes, a lotta&nbsp; planes, though turbulence can be a problem. And for some reason, I’ve found that this act of writing in public generates a bit of interest, and a chunk of questions. Back in October, on the Finnair flight back from our Baltics tour, I was catching up, writing up my thoughts on our couple of days in Helsinki when the guy a few seats over started asking me what I was writing. He was a younger Finnish guy. He and his girlfriend and a group of 5 or 6 others were connecting through Chicago to Miami for a cruise, and they started their cruise party the minute the drink carts rolled. But he wanted to know what I was writing and why. The what was easy; he wanted to know what I thought of Helsinki; where I’d been, how I liked it. He was intrigued by our Baltic Riga-Tallinn-Helsinki itinerary, in kind of a “that’s weird, but interesting” way. The why I’m not sure made it through translation. It’s not a pure travelogue -- not a “we did this, and then did that”. It’s more about impressions; what I found unique; what caught my eye. Writing it down makes me think about it, and when I go back and read those pages, some 2 or 10 or 20 years later, it reminds me of that place, that time, those experiences.&nbsp;</li><li>And when I talk about travel with folks, when I tell them how often I travel, I’ll often get a story -- in a bar, on a plane, or… while getting my hair cut. The girl who does my hair told me about her trip to Peru with a yoga group. Not the whole trip (I don’t have that much hair), but on their flight back, out of Lima, the plane took off, rotating up, while the flight attendants were still in the aisle doing the final check. It was a bit of mayhem, she said. That had to be one quick taxi out and take-off, I thought, because you’d think those flight attendants would be sprinting to their seats once that plane started rolling down the runway. Which I have seen before, especially when the captain gets a quick release from a ground hold and wants to get airborne before the tower changes their mind. But I’ve never seen them leave the ground with anyone still in the aisle.</li><li>Maybe the pilot was distracted -- a message from the tower, an animal on the runway, a sudden thought crossed his mind. I thought about pilot distraction when walking the <a href=\"https://thehikehouse.com/trails/airport-mesa-trail\">Airport Mesa trail</a> in Sedona earlier this month. The trail name says it all -- it’s a 3½-mile loop around the mesa where Sedona’s general aviation airport is. The hikers aren’t the potential distraction, though. It’s one of Sedona’s famous energy vortexes that’s right next to the airport. The Airport Vortex is, according to<a href=\"https://sedonaverdevalley.natgeotourism.com/content/airport-mesa-vortex/svvc7d222a849df1d7d6\"> one website</a>, “an Upflow area (also called Electric or Masculine) that helps your spirit soar for a higher perspective and/or greater oneness and serenity.” Watching a couple of private jets take off while on our hike, I wondered what would happen if the pilot suddenly achieved greater oneness and serenity while rotating off the top of that mesa. For someone as unenlightened and non-serene as me, that would be one helluva distraction.</li><li>I think for many, maybe close to most frequent travelers, Uber and Lyft have replaced taxis, at least in the US, when not renting a car. So it got my attention when I hit a weird Uber app failure at ORD at the end of October. Coming back from Charlottesville, I light up both Uber and Lyft while getting off the plane to compare wait times and fares (you’d think their surge pricing would be consistent, but it rarely is for me). Uber is a bit better, so I go to book a ride. Except that the Uber app wouldn’t pick up at the domestic terminals, just the separate international terminal, Terminal 5. I check Lyft again; yup, they’ll pick me up at Terminal 2, so I book with them instead. But it’s weird, so I keep checking Uber. I walk out the door to the rideshare pick-up area. There’s nothing but cars with pink Lyft lights; not an Uber decal in sight. An older couple walks up to me -- “Where does Uber pick up?” Normally here, I tell them, but they seem to have deleted it from their app today. It was a good night to be a Lyft driver. I wondered how long it took Uber to notice that they weren’t getting any pick-ups from one of the country’s busiest airports.</li><li>Tonight, though -- New Year’s Eve night -- I’ll be skipping Uber and their after-midnight price surges. I’ll be happy to hang out at home, to skip any travel, and just pop a bottle... or two of Vueve and wish all you TravelCommons’ listeners a Happy New Year and fun and safe travels in 2020.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #158</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_157.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #158 — Travel Potpourri for $400, Alex','','inherit','closed','closed','','2609-revision-v1','','','2019-12-31 14:54:24','2019-12-31 19:54:24','',2609,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/12/31/2609-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2612,1,'2019-12-31 15:00:01','2019-12-31 20:00:01','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/189764_1571139330482_7074048_n.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-2607\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/189764_1571139330482_7074048_n-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\n<figcaption>Good End to 2019</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p>Skipping the Chicago winter with trips to Phoenix and Sedona, Arizona, and a Christmas morning flight to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. Talk about those trips, my good and bad Hertz experiences, and then gather up odds-‘n’-ends from my travel notebooks to see off 2019 in this New Year\'s Eve episode. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_158.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/720859504&color=%23ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #158: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois, just back from a bone-thawing trip with the family to Cabo San Lucas, sorta the Land’s End of Mexico’s Baja California peninsula. We booked this trip back in May. Andrew has read on some budget traveler newsletter that Southwest was about to start service to Cabo. So the morning that the flights went on offer, we all went after Southwest’s website and snagged our flights for just over 30,000 points a person. We flew down early Christmas morning, connecting through HOU, and, thinking back to how empty ORD was last year at Thanksgiving, I was stunned that both of our flights were completely full. It seemed that half of our 6:45a flight out of MDW was also walking over to the Cabo gate. Guess that once the kids stop believing in Santa, Christmas morning travel is fair game.</li><li>Flying back out of Cabo last Sunday, I walk up to the gate and don’t see the usual Southwest boarding number pylons. It’s just a typical shared gate with the Southwest flight to Hobby at Gate 4A and a Delta flight to maybe Salt Lake at Gate 4B. And no plane, because there’s no jetway. It’s a bus. Southwest’s open seating works because everyone enters the plane in numerical order. Squeezing all the A group and half of the B group onto one bus… this’ll be interesting. It’s a 3-minute bus ride around the corner of the terminal. The doors open; we pour out. A ramp worker is trying to recreate the Southwest boarding process on the tarmac, asking everyone to line up in 3 lines -- pre-boards, A1-30, and A31-60. It kinda works, for the most part… until another ramp worker says “Hey, we’re boarding through the back door, too” just as the second bus opens its doors. Then it just devolves into a free-for-all. I imagine that first ramp worker looking like Kevin Bacon in “Animal House”, flattened by stampeding passengers. I was the first one through the rear door, so I was fine with it, but it does feel like Southwest needs to re-engineer how they board from shared gates.</li><li>I say “bone-thawing,” but it’s not like I was suffering too much from the Chicago December. I’ve been in Phoenix most of the month between Thanksgiving and Christmas, walking around in shirt sleeves in 65 degree weather, topping up my Vitamin D levels while kinda chuckling at the locals hurrying&nbsp; by in their puffy Patagonia parkas. I even extended my stay through one of the weekends -- doing some more of that “bleisure” travel, this time a hiking weekend in the <a href=\"https://www.fs.fed.us/wildflowers/regions/southwestern/RedRockCountry/index.shtml\">Red Rock Country</a> around Sedona, Arizona.&nbsp; An hour or so before picking up a car from Hertz for the weekend, I got an e-mail from the Hertz PHX station manager saying they’d upgraded me as an early birthday present. With equal parts anticipation and trepidation (I remember DFW Hertz “upgrading” me to a Ford F-150 pickup) Irene and I rolled up to spot 43 to find a Mercedes A220 sedan under a “Happy Birthday” sign. OK, now <em>this</em> is an exciting upgrade. Once we fought our way through the Phoenix traffic, the A220 made the 2-hour drive up I-17 a fun run, especially with a 75 mph speed limit. </li><li> Bridge Music -- Dive Deep (Loveshadow remix) by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/50488 Ft: Loveshadow </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I pushed a <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1206606966031675393/photo/1\">picture of the Hertz car under the Happy Birthday sign</a> to the TravelCommons Instagram Story roll. Steve Frick replied, saying that a friend of his had gotten a Hertz birthday upgrade too, to a Jag. Not to throw any shade, but I definitely think the PHX team did me a bit better with the Benz, but it’s nice of Hertz to give their customers a bit of a birthday surprise. With so many travel providers working hard to squeeze, to optimize, and then to charge for every little thing, getting a birthday present from one of them with a bit of luxury -- and in my case not an insignificant upgrade -- it’s a pleasant throwback to what travel was like when I started business travel coming on 35 years ago.&nbsp;</li><li>But all that love was blown away less than 2 weeks later when the Hertz team in Cabo put me through a 20-minute hard sell on insurance -- $85/day on a $50/day rental -- and then charged me $14/day for something called “Credit Card Care”, all for a beat-up VW Passat with 50,000 hard miles on it. Ugh.</li><li>Steve also hit the TravelCommons website to talk about mileage runs. In the last episode, I said that Mark Skinner’s DC-HKG up-and-back to carry a NASA cosmic ray detector on United’s over-the-pole route was one helluva mileage run. Steve said -<ul><li>I haven’t done a mileage run in years but came real close to losing my Southwest companion pass status for 2020. I had to change a few of my travel website profiles to use my Southwest card over my Hilton American Express card in order to hit it for 2020. It’s always a tough decision do I want 12 points per dollar at Hilton properties or free Southwest flights for my wife</li></ul></li><li>Thanks, Steve. I’ll tweak my travel credit cards now and then to hit some goals, but I hadn’t thought of it as an end-of-year mileage run. But it does make sense, especially with Southwest which counts credit card spend toward Companion Pass. I like that, a credit-card mileage run -- definitely more climate friendly.</li><li>I was talking about my flights to and from Phoenix a couple of weeks ago with one of the guys on the project team, a younger guy, and the look he gave me suggested that I’d hit peak travel nerdery -- at least in his eyes. I was telling him that I fly out to Phoenix on United from ORD because United has an 8am flight out, it’s easier to get a morning coffee at ORD than MDW, I get a free upgrade to Economy Plus which makes it easier to sleep, and because United uses PHX in Terminal 2, the older “slum” terminal that, because it’s separate from the main terminals, makes it easier to get an Uber or Lyft. But then I fly back to Chicago on Southwest because they have more flights back in the afternoon which gives me some flexibility with last-minute meetings, they don’t charge a change fee, they fly out of the newer Terminal 4 in PHX which gives me a much better selection of restaurants and bars than Terminal 2, and it puts me into Chicago-Midway where the wait for an Uber or Lyft is always shorter than at ORD. To me, it was a completely reasonable thought process -- optimizing each leg for the amenities I’d use. I turned to one of the other guys -- a guy who’s been traveling 20-some years -- “Yup, makes perfect sense to me,” he said. The younger guy was just shaking his head; probably muttering “OK Boomer” under his breath. But he’ll learn.</li><li>Back in November, during one of my semi-regular spelunks through Google Analytics, I noticed that <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"the November 2018 episode - #146: Rental Demolition Derby and Traveler Gift Guide (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"http://146\" target=\"_blank\">the November 2018 episode - #146: Rental Demolition Derby and Traveler Gift Guide</a> - was one of the top 5 pages on the TravelCommons website. I couldn’t figure how stories of rental car wrecks would get a lot of Google hits, so it must be the gift guide. Which suggested that maybe I should update it for 2019, but more as a blog post this time. I read through a half-dozen or so other gift guides, looking for some ideas I could steal, but they got pretty repetitious pretty quick -- pushing Away luggage, Huzi infinity pillows, and Aesop travel kits, which suggests to a cynical mind that these companies must’ve been splashing a lot of samples around the blog-o-sphere. And maybe didn’t age all that well after the Verge published an <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"exposé on Away’s toxic work culture (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/5/20995453/away-luggage-ceo-steph-korey-toxic-work-environment-travel-inclusion\" target=\"_blank\">exposé on Away’s toxic work culture</a>. But anyway, I wanted something a bit different, and on one of my flights got thinking about a chat I’d had with a friend a while back. She was looking for gift ideas for her daughter who, a couple of years out of college, was starting a new job with a lot more business travel. Replaying that chat in my head, and thinking about the younger guy on my project team, I started going through my travel kit -- rummaging through my messenger bag and then cycling through my suitcase -- mentally, though; not enough space to physically pull it down from the overhead and open it up; and that would’ve looked a bit weird. I built <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"a list of the things I really use on my trips (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/12/11/best-gift-ideas-for-a-new-traveler/\" target=\"_blank\">a list of the things I really use on my trips</a>, and that I miss when I forget to bring them along. Then I winnowed it down to 10 -- because “Top 10” is a key search term -- and there you have it. If you haven’t looked at it yet, give it a read and leave a comment with your suggestions.</li><li>Number 2 on <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/12/11/best-gift-ideas-for-a-new-traveler/\">my list of ideas</a>, after a 20-inch black roller bag, is picking up the application fee for TSA Global Entry for your new traveler. For $100, or for free with many airline and hotel reward credit cards, you can gift them with 5 years of hassle reduction with PreCheck for domestic travel and a fast path through Customs when they travel internationally. Coming back from Cabo, we connected again through Houston-Hobby and so had to clear Immigration and Customs there. It was my first time through Customs there, so it took me a minute to find the Global Entry kiosks. The interface was a bit different from the ORD ones. Instead of asking for my passport and prompting me for the fingerprint pad, it asked me to fit my face inside a red box before taking my picture. The camera didn’t look adjustable, so I squatted down ‘til my face was in the frame and then clicked the Take Photo button. A couple seconds later, the kiosk spit out my receipt and I was off to the exit -- no passport or fingerprint scans, no clicking through questions. Quick, but odd. Some Google searches when I got home told me that I’d hit the new generation of Global Entry kiosks -- Global Entry 2.0 -- that uses facial recognition to match the kiosk picture with my passport and Global Entry application pictures. Given how crappy the kiosk picture looked on the receipt -- and that I hadn’t taken my glasses off -- I’m either really impressed or really concerned about the accuracy of their facial recognition algorithm; I’m not quite sure which.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li> Bridge Music - Drops of H2O ( The Filtered Water Treatment ) by J.Lang (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djlang59/37792 Ft: Airtone </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong> Travel Potpourri for $400, Alex </strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Here it is, the last episode of the year that I’m trying to get out before cracking the Vueve and trying to stay awake until midnight. With the clock ticking, instead of a proper topic, all I can do is gather up some odds-‘n’-ends from my travel notebooks into a Jeopardy-like topic “Travel Potpourri”</li><li>And writing in my travel notebooks is something I like to do. I have a couple: a small one -- a 3½x5½-in or A6 size that fits in my back pocket -- to jot down notes, bullet points; and a larger one that I use as a proper travel journal. For that, I was using a B6 Muji notebook that I picked up in Lisbon 3 years ago. After I filled that one up, I switched to a taller, thinner Japanese traveler-sized notebook because… that’s what I had laying around. I’ve been writing in travel notebooks since I’ve started the podcast -- gotta feed the beast -- usually in public places -- in bars, a lotta bars, while drinking beers, or on planes, a lotta&nbsp; planes, though turbulence can be a problem. And for some reason, I’ve found that this act of writing in public generates a bit of interest, and a chunk of questions. Back in October, on the Finnair flight back from our Baltics tour, I was catching up, writing up my thoughts on our couple of days in Helsinki when the guy a few seats over started asking me what I was writing. He was a younger Finnish guy. He and his girlfriend and a group of 5 or 6 others were connecting through Chicago to Miami for a cruise, and they started their cruise party the minute the drink carts rolled. But he wanted to know what I was writing and why. The what was easy; he wanted to know what I thought of Helsinki; where I’d been, how I liked it. He was intrigued by our Baltic Riga-Tallinn-Helsinki itinerary, in kind of a “that’s weird, but interesting” way. The why I’m not sure made it through translation. It’s not a pure travelogue -- not a “we did this, and then did that”. It’s more about impressions; what I found unique; what caught my eye. Writing it down makes me think about it, and when I go back and read those pages, some 2 or 10 or 20 years later, it reminds me of that place, that time, those experiences.&nbsp;</li><li>And when I talk about travel with folks, when I tell them how often I travel, I’ll often get a story -- in a bar, on a plane, or… while getting my hair cut. The girl who does my hair told me about her trip to Peru with a yoga group. Not the whole trip (I don’t have that much hair), but on their flight back, out of Lima, the plane took off, rotating up, while the flight attendants were still in the aisle doing the final check. It was a bit of mayhem, she said. That had to be one quick taxi out and take-off, I thought, because you’d think those flight attendants would be sprinting to their seats once that plane started rolling down the runway. Which I have seen before, especially when the captain gets a quick release from a ground hold and wants to get airborne before the tower changes their mind. But I’ve never seen them leave the ground with anyone still in the aisle.</li><li>Maybe the pilot was distracted -- a message from the tower, an animal on the runway, a sudden thought crossed his mind. I thought about pilot distraction when walking the <a href=\"https://thehikehouse.com/trails/airport-mesa-trail\">Airport Mesa trail</a> in Sedona earlier this month. The trail name says it all -- it’s a 3½-mile loop around the mesa where Sedona’s general aviation airport is. The hikers aren’t the potential distraction, though. It’s one of Sedona’s famous energy vortexes that’s right next to the airport. The Airport Vortex is, according to<a href=\"https://sedonaverdevalley.natgeotourism.com/content/airport-mesa-vortex/svvc7d222a849df1d7d6\"> one website</a>, “an Upflow area (also called Electric or Masculine) that helps your spirit soar for a higher perspective and/or greater oneness and serenity.” Watching a couple of private jets take off while on our hike, I wondered what would happen if the pilot suddenly achieved greater oneness and serenity while rotating off the top of that mesa. For someone as unenlightened and non-serene as me, that would be one helluva distraction.</li><li>I think for many, maybe close to most frequent travelers, Uber and Lyft have replaced taxis, at least in the US, when not renting a car. So it got my attention when I hit a weird Uber app failure at ORD at the end of October. Coming back from Charlottesville, I light up both Uber and Lyft while getting off the plane to compare wait times and fares (you’d think their surge pricing would be consistent, but it rarely is for me). Uber is a bit better, so I go to book a ride. Except that the Uber app wouldn’t pick up at the domestic terminals, just the separate international terminal, Terminal 5. I check Lyft again; yup, they’ll pick me up at Terminal 2, so I book with them instead. But it’s weird, so I keep checking Uber. I walk out the door to the rideshare pick-up area. There’s nothing but cars with pink Lyft lights; not an Uber decal in sight. An older couple walks up to me -- “Where does Uber pick up?” Normally here, I tell them, but they seem to have deleted it from their app today. It was a good night to be a Lyft driver. I wondered how long it took Uber to notice that they weren’t getting any pick-ups from one of the country’s busiest airports.</li><li>Tonight, though -- New Year’s Eve night -- I’ll be skipping Uber and their after-midnight price surges. I’ll be happy to hang out at home, to skip any travel, and just pop a bottle... or two of Vueve and wish all you TravelCommons’ listeners a Happy New Year and fun and safe travels in 2020.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #158</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_157.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #158 — Travel Potpourri for $400, Alex','','inherit','closed','closed','','2609-revision-v1','','','2019-12-31 15:00:01','2019-12-31 20:00:01','',2609,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/12/31/2609-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2613,1,'2019-12-31 15:02:45','2019-12-31 20:02:45','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":2591,\"width\":316,\"height\":210} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright is-resized\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/DSC_2534-1024x683.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2591\" width=\"316\" height=\"210\"/></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Coming into the heart of the Christmas shopping season, when people are getting desperate for gift ideas, I thought I\'d offer up 10 suggestions for gifts that a new frequent traveler will actually use. While many gift lists are pushing Away luggage, Huzi infinity pillows, and Aesop travel kits (these companies must\'ve splashed a lot of samples around the blog-o-sphere), I built my list based on my own travel kit; the things I use every travel day in the 40-50 trips I take each year.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list {\"ordered\":true} -->\n<ol><li><strong>Black 20-inch carry-on suitcase</strong> <strong>—</strong> Black not only makes you look thinner, it makes your bag look thinner to gate agents hunting for bag-sizer bait. Black also doesn’t show stains. A 20-incher should get your traveler on-board for 90% of airlines without a hassle. I go for the 2-wheeler with the biggest wheels I can find to make it an easier, smoother pull. But that\'s my personal preference; a lot of travelers (including my wife) swear by their 4-wheel spinners. I bought the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/32lIURe\">TravelPro Maxlite 5</a> a few months ago and highly recommend it.</li><li><strong>TSA Global Entry or Pre-Check</strong> <strong>—</strong> Gift your new traveler with 5 years of time and hassle reduction. <a aria-label=\"$100 for both (opens in a new tab)\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.cbp.gov/travel/trusted-traveler-programs/global-entry\" target=\"_blank\">$100 for both</a>; $85 for just <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Pre-Check. (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/precheck\" target=\"_blank\">Pre-Check.</a> If you have a high-end card like an <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Amex Platinum (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.americanexpress.com/us/expedite-your-travel.html\" target=\"_blank\">Amex Platinum</a>, you might be able to put your card on their application and get the $100 fee back in a statement credit.</li><li><strong>Noise Canceling Headphones</strong> <strong>—</strong> I mentioned in <a aria-label=\"$100 for both (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/11/30/podcast-157-notes-from-the-baltics-riga-latvia-and-tallinn-estonia/\">the last podcast episode</a> how my trusty Bose QC-15s saved me from the propeller drone on my flights around the Baltics. The drone of jet or propeller engines disappear with the flick of a switch. But it\'s the drop in stress level and blood pressure that accompanies that flick of the switch — you don’t realize how much that drone affects you. Everything in my briefcase has to earn its space. I’ve been carrying Bose headphones for, I dunno, 10, 15 years. They’re nowhere near compact, but I’ve never thought of leaving them behind. The models you want to look for -- either the <a aria-label=\" (opens in a new tab)\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2RG7V80\" target=\"_blank\">Bose QC-35 II</a> or the <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Sony WH-1000XM3 (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2LGlVuK\" target=\"_blank\">Sony WH-1000XM3</a>. Your generous gift will be lovingly appreciated by your new traveler.</li><li><strong>VPN Subscription</strong> <strong>—</strong> Frequent travelers spend much of their time on public WiFi networks -- airports, hotels, bars, coffee shops, ....  Help them surf safe with a VPN subscription. I\'ve used <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"NordVPN (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"http://nordvpn.com\" target=\"_blank\">NordVPN</a> and <a aria-label=\" (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/\">PIA</a>.  They both protect laptops, and iOS and Android phones and tablets. VPN providers always have some promotion going on. A one-year subscription is usually in the $35-85 range.</li><li><strong>Portable Power Bank</strong> <strong>—</strong> Whatever the size or form factor -- slimline, lipstick, high-capacity brick -- having that second or third charge readily available is critical to get last-minute gate change notifications and when you’re using electronic boarding passes. It saves you from stalking cleaning crews to find a live power outlet on your layover, or negotiating with your seat mate for possession of outlet between you. It’s cheap peace of mind.  The <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Anker PowerCore+ Mini (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2E6HMri\" target=\"_blank\">Anker PowerCore+ Mini</a> is light enough (under 3 oz) to carry any time. I\'ve also started carrying a <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Zendure Power Bank Supermini (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/34fcbON\" target=\"_blank\">Zendure Power Bank Supermini</a> for faster iPhone 11 charging.</li><li><strong>Badger Hair Shaving Brush</strong> <strong>—</strong> I switched from an electric razor to blade to make it easier to pass through London-Heathrow during one of their security crack-downs and never went back. To do it right, though, you need to have a badger hair shaving brush. I use a not-too-expensive <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Edwin Jagger brush (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2Pcm1wy\" target=\"_blank\">Edwin Jagger brush</a> that makes my morning shave into a bit of a meditation. If you want to go all in, get your traveler the <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Alluvian Shave Soap 5-Piece Travel Size Sampler. (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://alluvian.co/shop/shave-soap-travel-size-sampler\" target=\"_blank\">Alluvian Shave Soap 5-Piece Travel Size Sampler.</a> They smell great and are the perfect travel size.</li><li><strong>Merino Wool Scarf</strong> <strong>—</strong>&nbsp;A man’s scarf is an incredibly undervalued piece of intermediate winter wear. In an airplane cabin or hotel room where a coat is too much (especially in a middle seat), but there’s a draft that chills you, a scarf around the neck is just enough without being too much. You may have to teach your new traveler how to wear it, but you can have fun with colors. I\'m a big fan of <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"merino wool scarves (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/35ckwUq\" target=\"_blank\">merino wool scarves</a> -- they\'re warm, soft, and dry out if you spill water on them.</li><li><strong>Compression Socks</strong> <strong>—</strong> Yes, I know that compression socks won\'t generate the most ooh\'s and aah\'s when their wrapping is torn off. But not having to stuff swollen feet back into shoes after an international or transcontinental flight has made me appreciate them. I wear <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"SB SOX Compression Socks (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/38kJGCi\" target=\"_blank\">SB SOX Compression Socks</a>, but any moderate compression sock should be fine.</li><li><strong>Short HDMI Cable and Dongle</strong> <strong>—</strong> It\'s a rare hotel room I walk into that doesn\'t have a big flat-screen TV mounted to the wall. Many of these will let you log into your Netflix or HBO Go account so you can watch your content on the big screen. But why go through all that (and trust their data and network security set-up) when you can just plug your laptop into one of their spare HDMI ports? I use a <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"basic 3-foot HDMI cable (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2PbFBZx\" target=\"_blank\">basic 3-foot HDMI cable</a>. Most of the common business laptops from Dell and Lenovo have HDMI ports but, because I have a MacBook Air, I also carry an <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Apple USB-C-to-HDMI adapter (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2E4HfpI\" target=\"_blank\">Apple USB-C-to-HDMI adapter</a>. </li><li><strong>Travel Notebook</strong> <strong>—</strong> And finally, a stocking stuffer idea — a travel notebook, something to jot down thoughts, ideas, observations, to do lists while waiting for the flight to board, the train to come, or the room to be made up. Nothing extravagant — no leather embossed cover — but it should be small enough to fit in a pocket, but substantial, something that can survive being knocked around in the bottom of a briefcase, and with paper quality that will hold onto those thoughts for a while. I used to use a <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Moleskine pocket notebook (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/36mN8dZ\" target=\"_blank\">Moleskine pocket notebook</a> but have switched over a similar-sized <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Clairefontaine A6 notebook (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2LMAOM9\" target=\"_blank\">Clairefontaine A6 notebook</a>. The soft cover fits better in a jeans back pocket, and the paper is more fountain-pen friendly. Or go a bit more whimsical and get <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"a pack of Field Notes (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/36pK68D\" target=\"_blank\">a pack of Field Notes</a>.</li></ol>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:block {\"ref\":2601} /-->','Best Gift Ideas for a New Traveler','','inherit','closed','closed','','2590-revision-v1','','','2019-12-31 15:02:45','2019-12-31 20:02:45','',2590,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/12/31/2590-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2614,1,'2019-12-31 15:11:07','2019-12-31 20:11:07','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/189764_1571139330482_7074048_n.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-2607\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/189764_1571139330482_7074048_n-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\n<figcaption>Good End to 2019</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p>Skipping the Chicago winter with trips to Phoenix and Sedona, Arizona, and a Christmas morning flight to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. Talk about those trips, my good and bad Hertz experiences, and then gather up odds-‘n’-ends from my travel notebooks to see off 2019 in this New Year\'s Eve episode. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_158.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/720859504&color=%23ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #158: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois, just back from a bone-thawing trip with the family to Cabo San Lucas, sorta the Land’s End of Mexico’s Baja California peninsula. We booked this trip back in May. Andrew has read on some budget traveler newsletter that Southwest was about to start service to Cabo. So the morning that the flights went on offer, we all went after Southwest’s website and snagged our flights for just over 30,000 points a person. We flew down early Christmas morning, connecting through HOU, and, thinking back to how empty ORD was last year at Thanksgiving, I was stunned that both of our flights were completely full. It seemed that half of our 6:45a flight out of MDW was also walking over to the Cabo gate. Guess that once the kids stop believing in Santa, Christmas morning travel is fair game.</li><li>Flying back out of Cabo last Sunday, I walk up to the gate and don’t see the usual Southwest boarding number pylons. It’s just a typical shared gate with the Southwest flight to Hobby at Gate 4A and a Delta flight to maybe Salt Lake at Gate 4B. And no plane, because there’s no jetway. It’s a bus. Southwest’s open seating works because everyone enters the plane in numerical order. Squeezing all the A group and half of the B group onto one bus… this’ll be interesting. It’s a 3-minute bus ride around the corner of the terminal. The doors open; we pour out. A ramp worker is trying to recreate the Southwest boarding process on the tarmac, asking everyone to line up in 3 lines -- pre-boards, A1-30, and A31-60. It kinda works, for the most part… until another ramp worker says “Hey, we’re boarding through the back door, too” just as the second bus opens its doors. Then it just devolves into a free-for-all. I imagine that first ramp worker looking like Kevin Bacon in “Animal House”, flattened by stampeding passengers. I was the first one through the rear door, so I was fine with it, but it does feel like Southwest needs to re-engineer how they board from shared gates.</li><li>I say “bone-thawing,” but it’s not like I was suffering too much from the Chicago December. I’ve been in Phoenix most of the month between Thanksgiving and Christmas, walking around in shirt sleeves in 65 degree weather, topping up my Vitamin D levels while kinda chuckling at the locals hurrying  by in their puffy Patagonia parkas. I even extended my stay through one of the weekends -- doing some more of that “bleisure” travel, this time a hiking weekend in the <a href=\"https://www.fs.fed.us/wildflowers/regions/southwestern/RedRockCountry/index.shtml\">Red Rock Country</a> around Sedona, Arizona.  An hour or so before picking up a car from Hertz for the weekend, I got an e-mail from the Hertz PHX station manager saying they’d upgraded me as an early birthday present. With equal parts anticipation and trepidation (I remember DFW Hertz “upgrading” me to a Ford F-150 pickup) Irene and I rolled up to spot 43 to find a Mercedes A220 sedan under a “Happy Birthday” sign. OK, now <em>this</em> is an exciting upgrade. Once we fought our way through the Phoenix traffic, the A220 made the 2-hour drive up I-17 a fun run, especially with a 75 mph speed limit. </li><li> Bridge Music -- Earth Soda by septahelix (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial Share-Alike  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/septahelix/34050  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I pushed a <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1206606966031675393/photo/1\">picture of the Hertz car under the Happy Birthday sign</a> to the TravelCommons Instagram Story roll. Steve Frick replied, saying that a friend of his had gotten a Hertz birthday upgrade too, to a Jag. Not to throw any shade, but I definitely think the PHX team did me a bit better with the Benz, but it’s nice of Hertz to give their customers a bit of a birthday surprise. With so many travel providers working hard to squeeze, to optimize, and then to charge for every little thing, getting a birthday present from one of them with a bit of luxury -- and in my case not an insignificant upgrade -- it’s a pleasant throwback to what travel was like when I started business travel coming on 35 years ago. </li><li>But all that love was blown away less than 2 weeks later when the Hertz team in Cabo put me through a 20-minute hard sell on insurance -- $85/day on a $50/day rental -- and then charged me $14/day for something called “Credit Card Care”, all for a beat-up VW Passat with 50,000 hard miles on it. Ugh.</li><li>Steve also hit the TravelCommons website to talk about mileage runs. In the last episode, I said that Mark Skinner’s DC-HKG up-and-back to carry a NASA cosmic ray detector on United’s over-the-pole route was one helluva mileage run. Steve said -<ul><li>I haven’t done a mileage run in years but came real close to losing my Southwest companion pass status for 2020. I had to change a few of my travel website profiles to use my Southwest card over my Hilton American Express card in order to hit it for 2020. It’s always a tough decision do I want 12 points per dollar at Hilton properties or free Southwest flights for my wife</li></ul></li><li>Thanks, Steve. I’ll tweak my travel credit cards now and then to hit some goals, but I hadn’t thought of it as an end-of-year mileage run. But it does make sense, especially with Southwest which counts credit card spend toward Companion Pass. I like that, a credit-card mileage run -- definitely more climate friendly.</li><li>I was talking about my flights to and from Phoenix a couple of weeks ago with one of the guys on the project team, a younger guy, and the look he gave me suggested that I’d hit peak travel nerdery -- at least in his eyes. I was telling him that I fly out to Phoenix on United from ORD because United has an 8am flight out, it’s easier to get a morning coffee at ORD than MDW, I get a free upgrade to Economy Plus which makes it easier to sleep, and because United uses PHX in Terminal 2, the older “slum” terminal that, because it’s separate from the main terminals, makes it easier to get an Uber or Lyft. But then I fly back to Chicago on Southwest because they have more flights back in the afternoon which gives me some flexibility with last-minute meetings, they don’t charge a change fee, they fly out of the newer Terminal 4 in PHX which gives me a much better selection of restaurants and bars than Terminal 2, and it puts me into Chicago-Midway where the wait for an Uber or Lyft is always shorter than at ORD. To me, it was a completely reasonable thought process -- optimizing each leg for the amenities I’d use. I turned to one of the other guys -- a guy who’s been traveling 20-some years -- “Yup, makes perfect sense to me,” he said. The younger guy was just shaking his head; probably muttering “OK Boomer” under his breath. But he’ll learn.</li><li>Back in November, during one of my semi-regular spelunks through Google Analytics, I noticed that <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"the November 2018 episode - #146: Rental Demolition Derby and Traveler Gift Guide (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"http://146\" target=\"_blank\">the November 2018 episode - #146: Rental Demolition Derby and Traveler Gift Guide</a> - was one of the top 5 pages on the TravelCommons website. I couldn’t figure how stories of rental car wrecks would get a lot of Google hits, so it must be the gift guide. Which suggested that maybe I should update it for 2019, but more as a blog post this time. I read through a half-dozen or so other gift guides, looking for some ideas I could steal, but they got pretty repetitious pretty quick -- pushing Away luggage, Huzi infinity pillows, and Aesop travel kits, which suggests to a cynical mind that these companies must’ve been splashing a lot of samples around the blog-o-sphere. And maybe didn’t age all that well after the Verge published an <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"exposé on Away’s toxic work culture (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/5/20995453/away-luggage-ceo-steph-korey-toxic-work-environment-travel-inclusion\" target=\"_blank\">exposé on Away’s toxic work culture</a>. But anyway, I wanted something a bit different, and on one of my flights got thinking about a chat I’d had with a friend a while back. She was looking for gift ideas for her daughter who, a couple of years out of college, was starting a new job with a lot more business travel. Replaying that chat in my head, and thinking about the younger guy on my project team, I started going through my travel kit -- rummaging through my messenger bag and then cycling through my suitcase -- mentally, though; not enough space to physically pull it down from the overhead and open it up; and that would’ve looked a bit weird. I built <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"a list of the things I really use on my trips (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/12/11/best-gift-ideas-for-a-new-traveler/\" target=\"_blank\">a list of the things I really use on my trips</a>, and that I miss when I forget to bring them along. Then I winnowed it down to 10 -- because “Top 10” is a key search term -- and there you have it. If you haven’t looked at it yet, give it a read and leave a comment with your suggestions.</li><li>Number 2 on <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/12/11/best-gift-ideas-for-a-new-traveler/\">my list of ideas</a>, after a 20-inch black roller bag, is picking up the application fee for TSA Global Entry for your new traveler. For $100, or for free with many airline and hotel reward credit cards, you can gift them with 5 years of hassle reduction with PreCheck for domestic travel and a fast path through Customs when they travel internationally. Coming back from Cabo, we connected again through Houston-Hobby and so had to clear Immigration and Customs there. It was my first time through Customs there, so it took me a minute to find the Global Entry kiosks. The interface was a bit different from the ORD ones. Instead of asking for my passport and prompting me for the fingerprint pad, it asked me to fit my face inside a red box before taking my picture. The camera didn’t look adjustable, so I squatted down ‘til my face was in the frame and then clicked the Take Photo button. A couple seconds later, the kiosk spit out my receipt and I was off to the exit -- no passport or fingerprint scans, no clicking through questions. Quick, but odd. Some Google searches when I got home told me that I’d hit the new generation of Global Entry kiosks -- Global Entry 2.0 -- that uses facial recognition to match the kiosk picture with my passport and Global Entry application pictures. Given how crappy the kiosk picture looked on the receipt -- and that I hadn’t taken my glasses off -- I’m either really impressed or really concerned about the accuracy of their facial recognition algorithm; I’m not quite sure which.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li> Bridge Music -- Absolutely Clear (ft Jeris &amp; Goldfish) by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/45578 Ft: Jeris, Goldfish  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong> Travel Potpourri for $400, Alex </strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Here it is, the last episode of the year that I’m trying to get out before cracking the Vueve and trying to stay awake until midnight. With the clock ticking, instead of a proper topic, all I can do is gather up some odds-‘n’-ends from my travel notebooks into a Jeopardy-like topic “Travel Potpourri”</li><li>And writing in my travel notebooks is something I like to do. I have a couple: a small one -- a 3½x5½-in or A6 size that fits in my back pocket -- to jot down notes, bullet points; and a larger one that I use as a proper travel journal. For that, I was using a B6 Muji notebook that I picked up in Lisbon 3 years ago. After I filled that one up, I switched to a taller, thinner Japanese traveler-sized notebook because… that’s what I had laying around. I’ve been writing in travel notebooks since I’ve started the podcast -- gotta feed the beast -- usually in public places -- in bars, a lotta bars, while drinking beers, or on planes, a lotta&nbsp; planes, though turbulence can be a problem. And for some reason, I’ve found that this act of writing in public generates a bit of interest, and a chunk of questions. Back in October, on the Finnair flight back from our Baltics tour, I was catching up, writing up my thoughts on our couple of days in Helsinki when the guy a few seats over started asking me what I was writing. He was a younger Finnish guy. He and his girlfriend and a group of 5 or 6 others were connecting through Chicago to Miami for a cruise, and they started their cruise party the minute the drink carts rolled. But he wanted to know what I was writing and why. The what was easy; he wanted to know what I thought of Helsinki; where I’d been, how I liked it. He was intrigued by our Baltic Riga-Tallinn-Helsinki itinerary, in kind of a “that’s weird, but interesting” way. The why I’m not sure made it through translation. It’s not a pure travelogue -- not a “we did this, and then did that”. It’s more about impressions; what I found unique; what caught my eye. Writing it down makes me think about it, and when I go back and read those pages, some 2 or 10 or 20 years later, it reminds me of that place, that time, those experiences.&nbsp;</li><li>And when I talk about travel with folks, when I tell them how often I travel, I’ll often get a story -- in a bar, on a plane, or… while getting my hair cut. The girl who does my hair told me about her trip to Peru with a yoga group. Not the whole trip (I don’t have that much hair), but on their flight back, out of Lima, the plane took off, rotating up, while the flight attendants were still in the aisle doing the final check. It was a bit of mayhem, she said. That had to be one quick taxi out and take-off, I thought, because you’d think those flight attendants would be sprinting to their seats once that plane started rolling down the runway. Which I have seen before, especially when the captain gets a quick release from a ground hold and wants to get airborne before the tower changes their mind. But I’ve never seen them leave the ground with anyone still in the aisle.</li><li>Maybe the pilot was distracted -- a message from the tower, an animal on the runway, a sudden thought crossed his mind. I thought about pilot distraction when walking the <a href=\"https://thehikehouse.com/trails/airport-mesa-trail\">Airport Mesa trail</a> in Sedona earlier this month. The trail name says it all -- it’s a 3½-mile loop around the mesa where Sedona’s general aviation airport is. The hikers aren’t the potential distraction, though. It’s one of Sedona’s famous energy vortexes that’s right next to the airport. The Airport Vortex is, according to<a href=\"https://sedonaverdevalley.natgeotourism.com/content/airport-mesa-vortex/svvc7d222a849df1d7d6\"> one website</a>, “an Upflow area (also called Electric or Masculine) that helps your spirit soar for a higher perspective and/or greater oneness and serenity.” Watching a couple of private jets take off while on our hike, I wondered what would happen if the pilot suddenly achieved greater oneness and serenity while rotating off the top of that mesa. For someone as unenlightened and non-serene as me, that would be one helluva distraction.</li><li>I think for many, maybe close to most frequent travelers, Uber and Lyft have replaced taxis, at least in the US, when not renting a car. So it got my attention when I hit a weird Uber app failure at ORD at the end of October. Coming back from Charlottesville, I light up both Uber and Lyft while getting off the plane to compare wait times and fares (you’d think their surge pricing would be consistent, but it rarely is for me). Uber is a bit better, so I go to book a ride. Except that the Uber app wouldn’t pick up at the domestic terminals, just the separate international terminal, Terminal 5. I check Lyft again; yup, they’ll pick me up at Terminal 2, so I book with them instead. But it’s weird, so I keep checking Uber. I walk out the door to the rideshare pick-up area. There’s nothing but cars with pink Lyft lights; not an Uber decal in sight. An older couple walks up to me -- “Where does Uber pick up?” Normally here, I tell them, but they seem to have deleted it from their app today. It was a good night to be a Lyft driver. I wondered how long it took Uber to notice that they weren’t getting any pick-ups from one of the country’s busiest airports.</li><li>Tonight, though -- New Year’s Eve night -- I’ll be skipping Uber and their after-midnight price surges. I’ll be happy to hang out at home, to skip any travel, and just pop a bottle... or two of Vueve and wish all you TravelCommons’ listeners a Happy New Year and fun and safe travels in 2020.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #158</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_157.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #158 — Travel Potpourri for $400, Alex','','inherit','closed','closed','','2609-revision-v1','','','2019-12-31 15:11:07','2019-12-31 20:11:07','',2609,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/12/31/2609-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2615,1,'2019-12-31 19:13:17','2020-01-01 00:13:17','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/189764_1571139330482_7074048_n.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-2607\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/189764_1571139330482_7074048_n-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a><figcaption>Good End to 2019</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>Skipping the Chicago winter with trips to Phoenix and Sedona, Arizona, and a Christmas morning flight to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. Talk about those trips, my good and bad Hertz experiences, and then gather up odds-‘n’-ends from my travel notebooks to see off 2019 in this New Year\'s Eve episode. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_158.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/736532716&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #158: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois, just back from a bone-thawing trip with the family to Cabo San Lucas, sorta the Land’s End of Mexico’s Baja California peninsula. We booked this trip back in May. Andrew has read on some budget traveler newsletter that Southwest was about to start service to Cabo. So the morning that the flights went on offer, we all went after Southwest’s website and snagged our flights for just over 30,000 points a person. We flew down early Christmas morning, connecting through HOU, and, thinking back to how empty ORD was last year at Thanksgiving, I was stunned that both of our flights were completely full. It seemed that half of our 6:45a flight out of MDW was also walking over to the Cabo gate. Guess that once the kids stop believing in Santa, Christmas morning travel is fair game.</li><li>Flying back out of Cabo last Sunday, I walk up to the gate and don’t see the usual Southwest boarding number pylons. It’s just a typical shared gate with the Southwest flight to Hobby at Gate 4A and a Delta flight to maybe Salt Lake at Gate 4B. And no plane, because there’s no jetway. It’s a bus. Southwest’s open seating works because everyone enters the plane in numerical order. Squeezing all the A group and half of the B group onto one bus… this’ll be interesting. It’s a 3-minute bus ride around the corner of the terminal. The doors open; we pour out. A ramp worker is trying to recreate the Southwest boarding process on the tarmac, asking everyone to line up in 3 lines -- pre-boards, A1-30, and A31-60. It kinda works, for the most part… until another ramp worker says “Hey, we’re boarding through the back door, too” just as the second bus opens its doors. Then it just devolves into a free-for-all. I imagine that first ramp worker looking like Kevin Bacon in “Animal House”, flattened by stampeding passengers. I was the first one through the rear door, so I was fine with it, but it does feel like Southwest needs to re-engineer how they board from shared gates.</li><li>I say “bone-thawing,” but it’s not like I was suffering too much from the Chicago December. I’ve been in Phoenix most of the month between Thanksgiving and Christmas, walking around in shirt sleeves in 65 degree weather, topping up my Vitamin D levels while kinda chuckling at the locals hurrying&nbsp; by in their puffy Patagonia parkas. I even extended my stay through one of the weekends -- doing some more of that “bleisure” travel, this time a hiking weekend in the <a href=\"https://www.fs.fed.us/wildflowers/regions/southwestern/RedRockCountry/index.shtml\">Red Rock Country</a> around Sedona, Arizona.&nbsp; An hour or so before picking up a car from Hertz for the weekend, I got an e-mail from the Hertz PHX station manager saying they’d upgraded me as an early birthday present. With equal parts anticipation and trepidation (I remember DFW Hertz “upgrading” me to a Ford F-150 pickup) Irene and I rolled up to spot 43 to find a Mercedes A220 sedan under a “Happy Birthday” sign. OK, now <em>this</em> is an exciting upgrade. Once we fought our way through the Phoenix traffic, the A220 made the 2-hour drive up I-17 a fun run, especially with a 75 mph speed limit. </li><li> Bridge Music -- Earth Soda by septahelix (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial Share-Alike  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/septahelix/34050  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I pushed a <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1206606966031675393/photo/1\">picture of the Hertz car under the Happy Birthday sign</a> to the TravelCommons Instagram Story roll. Steve Frick replied, saying that a friend of his had gotten a Hertz birthday upgrade too, to a Jag. Not to throw any shade, but I definitely think the PHX team did me a bit better with the Benz, but it’s nice of Hertz to give their customers a bit of a birthday surprise. With so many travel providers working hard to squeeze, to optimize, and then to charge for every little thing, getting a birthday present from one of them with a bit of luxury -- and in my case not an insignificant upgrade -- it’s a pleasant throwback to what travel was like when I started business travel coming on 35 years ago.&nbsp;</li><li>But all that love was blown away less than 2 weeks later when the Hertz team in Cabo put me through a 20-minute hard sell on insurance -- $85/day on a $50/day rental -- and then charged me $14/day for something called “Credit Card Care”, all for a beat-up VW Passat with 50,000 hard miles on it. Ugh.</li><li>Steve also hit the TravelCommons website to talk about mileage runs. In the last episode, I said that Mark Skinner’s DC-HKG up-and-back to carry a NASA cosmic ray detector on United’s over-the-pole route was one helluva mileage run. Steve said -<ul><li>I haven’t done a mileage run in years but came real close to losing my Southwest companion pass status for 2020. I had to change a few of my travel website profiles to use my Southwest card over my Hilton American Express card in order to hit it for 2020. It’s always a tough decision do I want 12 points per dollar at Hilton properties or free Southwest flights for my wife</li></ul></li><li>Thanks, Steve. I’ll tweak my travel credit cards now and then to hit some goals, but I hadn’t thought of it as an end-of-year mileage run. But it does make sense, especially with Southwest which counts credit card spend toward Companion Pass. I like that, a credit-card mileage run -- definitely more climate friendly.</li><li>I was talking about my flights to and from Phoenix a couple of weeks ago with one of the guys on the project team, a younger guy, and the look he gave me suggested that I’d hit peak travel nerdery -- at least in his eyes. I was telling him that I fly out to Phoenix on United from ORD because United has an 8am flight out, it’s easier to get a morning coffee at ORD than MDW, I get a free upgrade to Economy Plus which makes it easier to sleep, and because United uses PHX in Terminal 2, the older “slum” terminal that, because it’s separate from the main terminals, makes it easier to get an Uber or Lyft. But then I fly back to Chicago on Southwest because they have more flights back in the afternoon which gives me some flexibility with last-minute meetings, they don’t charge a change fee, they fly out of the newer Terminal 4 in PHX which gives me a much better selection of restaurants and bars than Terminal 2, and it puts me into Chicago-Midway where the wait for an Uber or Lyft is always shorter than at ORD. To me, it was a completely reasonable thought process -- optimizing each leg for the amenities I’d use. I turned to one of the other guys -- a guy who’s been traveling 20-some years -- “Yup, makes perfect sense to me,” he said. The younger guy was just shaking his head; probably muttering “OK Boomer” under his breath. But he’ll learn.</li><li>Back in November, during one of my semi-regular spelunks through Google Analytics, I noticed that <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"the November 2018 episode - #146: Rental Demolition Derby and Traveler Gift Guide (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"http://146\" target=\"_blank\">the November 2018 episode - #146: Rental Demolition Derby and Traveler Gift Guide</a> - was one of the top 5 pages on the TravelCommons website. I couldn’t figure how stories of rental car wrecks would get a lot of Google hits, so it must be the gift guide. Which suggested that maybe I should update it for 2019, but more as a blog post this time. I read through a half-dozen or so other gift guides, looking for some ideas I could steal, but they got pretty repetitious pretty quick -- pushing Away luggage, Huzi infinity pillows, and Aesop travel kits, which suggests to a cynical mind that these companies must’ve been splashing a lot of samples around the blog-o-sphere. And maybe didn’t age all that well after the Verge published an <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"exposé on Away’s toxic work culture (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/5/20995453/away-luggage-ceo-steph-korey-toxic-work-environment-travel-inclusion\" target=\"_blank\">exposé on Away’s toxic work culture</a>. But anyway, I wanted something a bit different, and on one of my flights got thinking about a chat I’d had with a friend a while back. She was looking for gift ideas for her daughter who, a couple of years out of college, was starting a new job with a lot more business travel. Replaying that chat in my head, and thinking about the younger guy on my project team, I started going through my travel kit -- rummaging through my messenger bag and then cycling through my suitcase -- mentally, though; not enough space to physically pull it down from the overhead and open it up; and that would’ve looked a bit weird. I built <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"a list of the things I really use on my trips (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/12/11/best-gift-ideas-for-a-new-traveler/\" target=\"_blank\">a list of the things I really use on my trips</a>, and that I miss when I forget to bring them along. Then I winnowed it down to 10 -- because “Top 10” is a key search term -- and there you have it. If you haven’t looked at it yet, give it a read and leave a comment with your suggestions.</li><li>Number 2 on <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/12/11/best-gift-ideas-for-a-new-traveler/\">my list of ideas</a>, after a 20-inch black roller bag, is picking up the application fee for TSA Global Entry for your new traveler. For $100, or for free with many airline and hotel reward credit cards, you can gift them with 5 years of hassle reduction with PreCheck for domestic travel and a fast path through Customs when they travel internationally. Coming back from Cabo, we connected again through Houston-Hobby and so had to clear Immigration and Customs there. It was my first time through Customs there, so it took me a minute to find the Global Entry kiosks. The interface was a bit different from the ORD ones. Instead of asking for my passport and prompting me for the fingerprint pad, it asked me to fit my face inside a red box before taking my picture. The camera didn’t look adjustable, so I squatted down ‘til my face was in the frame and then clicked the Take Photo button. A couple seconds later, the kiosk spit out my receipt and I was off to the exit -- no passport or fingerprint scans, no clicking through questions. Quick, but odd. Some Google searches when I got home told me that I’d hit the new generation of Global Entry kiosks -- Global Entry 2.0 -- that uses facial recognition to match the kiosk picture with my passport and Global Entry application pictures. Given how crappy the kiosk picture looked on the receipt -- and that I hadn’t taken my glasses off -- I’m either really impressed or really concerned about the accuracy of their facial recognition algorithm; I’m not quite sure which.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li> Bridge Music -- Absolutely Clear (ft Jeris &amp; Goldfish) by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/45578 Ft: Jeris, Goldfish  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong> Travel Potpourri for $400, Alex </strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Here it is, the last episode of the year that I’m trying to get out before cracking the Vueve and trying to stay awake until midnight. With the clock ticking, instead of a proper topic, all I can do is gather up some odds-‘n’-ends from my travel notebooks into a Jeopardy-like topic “Travel Potpourri”</li><li>And writing in my travel notebooks is something I like to do. I have a couple: a small one -- a 3½x5½-in or A6 size that fits in my back pocket -- to jot down notes, bullet points; and a larger one that I use as a proper travel journal. For that, I was using a B6 Muji notebook that I picked up in Lisbon 3 years ago. After I filled that one up, I switched to a taller, thinner Japanese traveler-sized notebook because… that’s what I had laying around. I’ve been writing in travel notebooks since I’ve started the podcast -- gotta feed the beast -- usually in public places -- in bars, a lotta bars, while drinking beers, or on planes, a lotta&nbsp; planes, though turbulence can be a problem. And for some reason, I’ve found that this act of writing in public generates a bit of interest, and a chunk of questions. Back in October, on the Finnair flight back from our Baltics tour, I was catching up, writing up my thoughts on our couple of days in Helsinki when the guy a few seats over started asking me what I was writing. He was a younger Finnish guy. He and his girlfriend and a group of 5 or 6 others were connecting through Chicago to Miami for a cruise, and they started their cruise party the minute the drink carts rolled. But he wanted to know what I was writing and why. The what was easy; he wanted to know what I thought of Helsinki; where I’d been, how I liked it. He was intrigued by our Baltic Riga-Tallinn-Helsinki itinerary, in kind of a “that’s weird, but interesting” way. The why I’m not sure made it through translation. It’s not a pure travelogue -- not a “we did this, and then did that”. It’s more about impressions; what I found unique; what caught my eye. Writing it down makes me think about it, and when I go back and read those pages, some 2 or 10 or 20 years later, it reminds me of that place, that time, those experiences.&nbsp;</li><li>And when I talk about travel with folks, when I tell them how often I travel, I’ll often get a story -- in a bar, on a plane, or… while getting my hair cut. The girl who does my hair told me about her trip to Peru with a yoga group. Not the whole trip (I don’t have that much hair), but on their flight back, out of Lima, the plane took off, rotating up, while the flight attendants were still in the aisle doing the final check. It was a bit of mayhem, she said. That had to be one quick taxi out and take-off, I thought, because you’d think those flight attendants would be sprinting to their seats once that plane started rolling down the runway. Which I have seen before, especially when the captain gets a quick release from a ground hold and wants to get airborne before the tower changes their mind. But I’ve never seen them leave the ground with anyone still in the aisle.</li><li>Maybe the pilot was distracted -- a message from the tower, an animal on the runway, a sudden thought crossed his mind. I thought about pilot distraction when walking the <a href=\"https://thehikehouse.com/trails/airport-mesa-trail\">Airport Mesa trail</a> in Sedona earlier this month. The trail name says it all -- it’s a 3½-mile loop around the mesa where Sedona’s general aviation airport is. The hikers aren’t the potential distraction, though. It’s one of Sedona’s famous energy vortexes that’s right next to the airport. The Airport Vortex is, according to<a href=\"https://sedonaverdevalley.natgeotourism.com/content/airport-mesa-vortex/svvc7d222a849df1d7d6\"> one website</a>, “an Upflow area (also called Electric or Masculine) that helps your spirit soar for a higher perspective and/or greater oneness and serenity.” Watching a couple of private jets take off while on our hike, I wondered what would happen if the pilot suddenly achieved greater oneness and serenity while rotating off the top of that mesa. For someone as unenlightened and non-serene as me, that would be one helluva distraction.</li><li>I think for many, maybe close to most frequent travelers, Uber and Lyft have replaced taxis, at least in the US, when not renting a car. So it got my attention when I hit a weird Uber app failure at ORD at the end of October. Coming back from Charlottesville, I light up both Uber and Lyft while getting off the plane to compare wait times and fares (you’d think their surge pricing would be consistent, but it rarely is for me). Uber is a bit better, so I go to book a ride. Except that the Uber app wouldn’t pick up at the domestic terminals, just the separate international terminal, Terminal 5. I check Lyft again; yup, they’ll pick me up at Terminal 2, so I book with them instead. But it’s weird, so I keep checking Uber. I walk out the door to the rideshare pick-up area. There’s nothing but cars with pink Lyft lights; not an Uber decal in sight. An older couple walks up to me -- “Where does Uber pick up?” Normally here, I tell them, but they seem to have deleted it from their app today. It was a good night to be a Lyft driver. I wondered how long it took Uber to notice that they weren’t getting any pick-ups from one of the country’s busiest airports.</li><li>Tonight, though -- New Year’s Eve night -- I’ll be skipping Uber and their after-midnight price surges. I’ll be happy to hang out at home, to skip any travel, and just pop a bottle... or two of Vueve and wish all you TravelCommons’ listeners a Happy New Year and fun and safe travels in 2020.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #158</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_157.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #158 — Travel Potpourri for $400, Alex','','inherit','closed','closed','','2609-revision-v1','','','2019-12-31 19:13:17','2020-01-01 00:13:17','',2609,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/12/31/2609-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2616,1,'2019-12-31 19:27:32','2020-01-01 00:27:32','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/189764_1571139330482_7074048_n.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-2607\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/189764_1571139330482_7074048_n-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a><figcaption>Good End to 2019</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>Skipping the Chicago winter with trips to Phoenix and Sedona, Arizona, and a Christmas morning flight to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. Talk about those trips, my good and bad Hertz experiences, and then gather up odds-‘n’-ends from my travel notebooks to see off 2019 in this New Year\'s Eve episode. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_158.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/736532716&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #158: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois, just back from a bone-thawing trip with the family to Cabo San Lucas, sorta the Land’s End of Mexico’s Baja California peninsula. We booked this trip back in May. Andrew has read on some budget traveler newsletter that Southwest was about to start service to Cabo. So the morning that the flights went on offer, we all went after Southwest’s website and snagged our flights for just over 30,000 points a person. We flew down early Christmas morning, connecting through HOU, and, thinking back to how empty ORD was last year at Thanksgiving, I was stunned that both of our flights were completely full. It seemed that half of our 6:45a flight out of MDW was also walking over to the Cabo gate. Guess that once the kids stop believing in Santa, Christmas morning travel is fair game.</li><li>Flying back out of Cabo last Sunday, I walk up to the gate and don’t see the usual Southwest boarding number pylons. It’s just a typical shared gate with the Southwest flight to Hobby at Gate 4A and a Delta flight to maybe Salt Lake at Gate 4B. And no plane, because there’s no jetway. It’s a bus. Southwest’s open seating works because everyone enters the plane in numerical order. Squeezing all the A group and half of the B group onto one bus… this’ll be interesting. It’s a 3-minute bus ride around the corner of the terminal. The doors open; we pour out. A ramp worker is trying to recreate the Southwest boarding process on the tarmac, asking everyone to line up in 3 lines -- pre-boards, A1-30, and A31-60. It kinda works, for the most part… until another ramp worker says “Hey, we’re boarding through the back door, too” just as the second bus opens its doors. Then it just devolves into a free-for-all. I imagine that first ramp worker looking like Kevin Bacon in “Animal House”, flattened by stampeding passengers. I was the first one through the rear door, so I was fine with it, but it does feel like Southwest needs to re-engineer how they board from shared gates.</li><li>I say “bone-thawing,” but it’s not like I was suffering too much from the Chicago December. I’ve been in Phoenix most of the month between Thanksgiving and Christmas, walking around in shirt sleeves in 65 degree weather, topping up my Vitamin D levels while kinda chuckling at the locals hurrying&nbsp; by in their puffy Patagonia parkas. I even extended my stay through one of the weekends -- doing some more of that “bleisure” travel, this time a hiking weekend in the <a href=\"https://www.fs.fed.us/wildflowers/regions/southwestern/RedRockCountry/index.shtml\">Red Rock Country</a> around Sedona, Arizona.&nbsp; An hour or so before picking up a car from Hertz for the weekend, I got an e-mail from the Hertz PHX station manager saying they’d upgraded me as an early birthday present. With equal parts anticipation and trepidation (I remember DFW Hertz “upgrading” me to a Ford F-150 pickup) Irene and I rolled up to spot 43 to find a Mercedes A220 sedan under a “Happy Birthday” sign. OK, now <em>this</em> is an exciting upgrade. Once we fought our way through the Phoenix traffic, the A220 made the 2-hour drive up I-17 a fun run, especially with a 75 mph speed limit. </li><li> Bridge Music -- Earth Soda by septahelix (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial Share-Alike  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/septahelix/34050  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I pushed a <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1206606966031675393/photo/1\">picture of the Hertz car under the Happy Birthday sign</a> to the TravelCommons Instagram Story roll. Steve Frick replied, saying that a friend of his had gotten a Hertz birthday upgrade too, to a Jag. Not to throw any shade, but I definitely think the PHX team did me a bit better with the Benz, but it’s nice of Hertz to give their customers a bit of a birthday surprise. With so many travel providers working hard to squeeze, to optimize, and then to charge for every little thing, getting a birthday present from one of them with a bit of luxury -- and in my case not an insignificant upgrade -- it’s a pleasant throwback to what travel was like when I started business travel coming on 35 years ago.&nbsp;</li><li>But all that love was blown away less than 2 weeks later when the Hertz team in Cabo put me through a 20-minute hard sell on insurance -- $85/day on a $50/day rental -- and then charged me $14/day for something called “Credit Card Care”, all for a beat-up VW Passat with 50,000 hard miles on it. Ugh.</li><li>Steve also hit the TravelCommons website to talk about mileage runs. In the last episode, I said that Mark Skinner’s DC-HKG up-and-back to carry a NASA cosmic ray detector on United’s over-the-pole route was one helluva mileage run. Steve said -<ul><li>I haven’t done a mileage run in years but came real close to losing my Southwest companion pass status for 2020. I had to change a few of my travel website profiles to use my Southwest card over my Hilton American Express card in order to hit it for 2020. It’s always a tough decision do I want 12 points per dollar at Hilton properties or free Southwest flights for my wife</li></ul></li><li>Thanks, Steve. I’ll tweak my travel credit cards now and then to hit some goals, but I hadn’t thought of it as an end-of-year mileage run. But it does make sense, especially with Southwest which counts credit card spend toward Companion Pass. I like that, a credit-card mileage run -- definitely more climate friendly.</li><li>I was talking about my flights to and from Phoenix a couple of weeks ago with one of the guys on the project team, a younger guy, and the look he gave me suggested that I’d hit peak travel nerdery -- at least in his eyes. I was telling him that I fly out to Phoenix on United from ORD because United has an 8am flight out, it’s easier to get a morning coffee at ORD than MDW, I get a free upgrade to Economy Plus which makes it easier to sleep, and because United uses PHX in Terminal 2, the older “slum” terminal that, because it’s separate from the main terminals, makes it easier to get an Uber or Lyft. But then I fly back to Chicago on Southwest because they have more flights back in the afternoon which gives me some flexibility with last-minute meetings, they don’t charge a change fee, they fly out of the newer Terminal 4 in PHX which gives me a much better selection of restaurants and bars than Terminal 2, and it puts me into Chicago-Midway where the wait for an Uber or Lyft is always shorter than at ORD. To me, it was a completely reasonable thought process -- optimizing each leg for the amenities I’d use. I turned to one of the other guys -- a guy who’s been traveling 20-some years -- “Yup, makes perfect sense to me,” he said. The younger guy was just shaking his head; probably muttering “OK Boomer” under his breath. But he’ll learn.</li><li>Back in November, during one of my semi-regular spelunks through Google Analytics, I noticed that <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"the November 2018 episode - #146: Rental Demolition Derby and Traveler Gift Guide (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"http://146\" target=\"_blank\">the November 2018 episode - #146: Rental Demolition Derby and Traveler Gift Guide</a> - was one of the top 5 pages on the TravelCommons website. I couldn’t figure how stories of rental car wrecks would get a lot of Google hits, so it must be the gift guide. Which suggested that maybe I should update it for 2019, but more as a blog post this time. I read through a half-dozen or so other gift guides, looking for some ideas I could steal, but they got pretty repetitious pretty quick -- pushing Away luggage, Huzi infinity pillows, and Aesop travel kits, which suggests to a cynical mind that these companies must’ve been splashing a lot of samples around the blog-o-sphere. And maybe didn’t age all that well after the Verge published an <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"exposé on Away’s toxic work culture (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/5/20995453/away-luggage-ceo-steph-korey-toxic-work-environment-travel-inclusion\" target=\"_blank\">exposé on Away’s toxic work culture</a>. But anyway, I wanted something a bit different, and on one of my flights got thinking about a chat I’d had with a friend a while back. She was looking for gift ideas for her daughter who, a couple of years out of college, was starting a new job with a lot more business travel. Replaying that chat in my head, and thinking about the younger guy on my project team, I started going through my travel kit -- rummaging through my messenger bag and then cycling through my suitcase -- mentally, though; not enough space to physically pull it down from the overhead and open it up; and that would’ve looked a bit weird. I built <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"a list of the things I really use on my trips (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/12/11/best-gift-ideas-for-a-new-traveler/\" target=\"_blank\">a list of the things I really use on my trips</a>, and that I miss when I forget to bring them along. Then I winnowed it down to 10 -- because “Top 10” is a key search term -- and there you have it. If you haven’t looked at it yet, give it a read and leave a comment with your suggestions.</li><li>Number 2 on <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/12/11/best-gift-ideas-for-a-new-traveler/\">my list of ideas</a>, after a 20-inch black roller bag, is picking up the application fee for TSA Global Entry for your new traveler. For $100, or for free with many airline and hotel reward credit cards, you can gift them with 5 years of hassle reduction with PreCheck for domestic travel and a fast path through Customs when they travel internationally. Coming back from Cabo, we connected again through Houston-Hobby and so had to clear Immigration and Customs there. It was my first time through Customs there, so it took me a minute to find the Global Entry kiosks. The interface was a bit different from the ORD ones. Instead of asking for my passport and prompting me for the fingerprint pad, it asked me to fit my face inside a red box before taking my picture. The camera didn’t look adjustable, so I squatted down ‘til my face was in the frame and then clicked the Take Photo button. A couple seconds later, the kiosk spit out my receipt and I was off to the exit -- no passport or fingerprint scans, no clicking through questions. Quick, but odd. Some Google searches when I got home told me that I’d hit the new generation of Global Entry kiosks -- Global Entry 2.0 -- that uses facial recognition to match the kiosk picture with my passport and Global Entry application pictures. Given how crappy the kiosk picture looked on the receipt -- and that I hadn’t taken my glasses off -- I’m either really impressed or really concerned about the accuracy of their facial recognition algorithm; I’m not quite sure which.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li> Bridge Music -- Absolutely Clear (ft Jeris &amp; Goldfish) by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/45578 Ft: Jeris, Goldfish  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong> Travel Potpourri for $400, Alex </strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Here it is, the last episode of the year that I’m trying to get out before cracking the Vueve and trying to stay awake until midnight. With the clock ticking, instead of a proper topic, all I can do is gather up some odds-‘n’-ends from my travel notebooks into a Jeopardy-like topic “Travel Potpourri”</li><li>And writing in my travel notebooks is something I like to do. I have a couple: a small one -- a 3½x5½-in or A6 size that fits in my back pocket -- to jot down notes, bullet points; and a larger one that I use as a proper travel journal. For that, I was using a B6 Muji notebook that I picked up in Lisbon 3 years ago. After I filled that one up, I switched to a taller, thinner Japanese traveler-sized notebook because… that’s what I had laying around. I’ve been writing in travel notebooks since I’ve started the podcast -- gotta feed the beast -- usually in public places -- in bars, a lotta bars, while drinking beers, or on planes, a lotta&nbsp; planes, though turbulence can be a problem. And for some reason, I’ve found that this act of writing in public generates a bit of interest, and a chunk of questions. Back in October, on the Finnair flight back from our Baltics tour, I was catching up, writing up my thoughts on our couple of days in Helsinki when the guy a few seats over started asking me what I was writing. He was a younger Finnish guy. He and his girlfriend and a group of 5 or 6 others were connecting through Chicago to Miami for a cruise, and they started their cruise party the minute the drink carts rolled. But he wanted to know what I was writing and why. The what was easy; he wanted to know what I thought of Helsinki; where I’d been, how I liked it. He was intrigued by our Baltic Riga-Tallinn-Helsinki itinerary, in kind of a “that’s weird, but interesting” way. The why I’m not sure made it through translation. It’s not a pure travelogue -- not a “we did this, and then did that”. It’s more about impressions; what I found unique; what caught my eye. Writing it down makes me think about it, and when I go back and read those pages, some 2 or 10 or 20 years later, it reminds me of that place, that time, those experiences.&nbsp;</li><li>And when I talk about travel with folks, when I tell them how often I travel, I’ll often get a story -- in a bar, on a plane, or… while getting my hair cut. The girl who does my hair told me about her trip to Peru with a yoga group. Not the whole trip (I don’t have that much hair), but on their flight back, out of Lima, the plane took off, rotating up, while the flight attendants were still in the aisle doing the final check. It was a bit of mayhem, she said. That had to be one quick taxi out and take-off, I thought, because you’d think those flight attendants would be sprinting to their seats once that plane started rolling down the runway. Which I have seen before, especially when the captain gets a quick release from a ground hold and wants to get airborne before the tower changes their mind. But I’ve never seen them leave the ground with anyone still in the aisle.</li><li>Maybe the pilot was distracted -- a message from the tower, an animal on the runway, a sudden thought crossed his mind. I thought about pilot distraction when walking the <a href=\"https://thehikehouse.com/trails/airport-mesa-trail\">Airport Mesa trail</a> in Sedona earlier this month. The trail name says it all -- it’s a 3½-mile loop around the mesa where Sedona’s general aviation airport is. The hikers aren’t the potential distraction, though. It’s one of Sedona’s famous energy vortexes that’s right next to the airport. The Airport Vortex is, according to<a href=\"https://sedonaverdevalley.natgeotourism.com/content/airport-mesa-vortex/svvc7d222a849df1d7d6\"> one website</a>, “an Upflow area (also called Electric or Masculine) that helps your spirit soar for a higher perspective and/or greater oneness and serenity.” Watching a couple of private jets take off while on our hike, I wondered what would happen if the pilot suddenly achieved greater oneness and serenity while rotating off the top of that mesa. For someone as unenlightened and non-serene as me, that would be one helluva distraction.</li><li>I think for many, maybe close to most frequent travelers, Uber and Lyft have replaced taxis, at least in the US, when not renting a car. So it got my attention when I hit a weird Uber app failure at ORD at the end of October. Coming back from Charlottesville, I light up both Uber and Lyft while getting off the plane to compare wait times and fares (you’d think their surge pricing would be consistent, but it rarely is for me). Uber is a bit better, so I go to book a ride. Except that the Uber app wouldn’t pick up at the domestic terminals, just the separate international terminal, Terminal 5. I check Lyft again; yup, they’ll pick me up at Terminal 2, so I book with them instead. But it’s weird, so I keep checking Uber. I walk out the door to the rideshare pick-up area. There’s nothing but cars with pink Lyft lights; not an Uber decal in sight. An older couple walks up to me -- “Where does Uber pick up?” Normally here, I tell them, but they seem to have deleted it from their app today. It was a good night to be a Lyft driver. I wondered how long it took Uber to notice that they weren’t getting any pick-ups from one of the country’s busiest airports.</li><li>Tonight, though -- New Year’s Eve night -- I’ll be skipping Uber and their after-midnight price surges. I’ll be happy to hang out at home, to skip any travel, and just pop a bottle... or two of Vueve and wish all you TravelCommons’ listeners a Happy New Year and fun and safe travels in 2020.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #158</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_157.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #158 — Travel Potpourri for $400, Alex','','inherit','closed','closed','','2609-revision-v1','','','2019-12-31 19:27:32','2020-01-01 00:27:32','',2609,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/12/31/2609-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2617,1,'2019-12-31 19:28:44','2020-01-01 00:28:44','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\">\n<p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/IMG_0449.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2482 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/IMG_0449-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a></p><figcaption>Latest in Sustainable Food Delivery&nbsp;</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>Moving the TravelCommons studios kept me mostly off the road this month except for a quick trip to Nashville, but staying out of restaurants has helped me finally drop the last bit of Christmas weight. We talk about the \"earn and burn\" strategy for frequent travel awards; answer a listener\'s question on how to keep from being overwhelmed when arriving in a new city, and new restaurant trends from the floor of the National Restaurant Association\'s big show. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_152.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_152.mp3\"]\n<p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #152: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the new TravelCommons studios <em>in</em> Chicago, IL. The move went surprisingly smoothly -- nothing lost, nothing destroyed on the 20-mile trip in from the western suburbs. Have the production bay rebuilt and now trying out the new studio set-up, so we’ll see how this sounds. </li><li>Which also means I haven’t done much travel since the last episode; just a quick trip last week down to Nashville. But the move downtown meant I had to rethink some of my travel patterns -- not how to get to and from Nashville, but how to get to and from Chicago Midway airport. We’ve said before in many episodes, most (all?) frequent travelers are all about optimizing the standard parts of their journey -- what’s the most efficient way to get to the airport, when to leave -- optimizing the trade-off between sleep and getting to the gate when status pre-boarding is announced. In the old digs, I had a pretty predictable 25-30 minute drive to either O’Hare or Midway, and long-term relationship with a dependable driver. Which meant answering the “when do I need leave for the airport” question was a mindless exercise -- subtract 90 minutes from the departure time and send a text to my guy the night before. But now it’s a kinda predictable 60-minute public transit ride or a very unpredictable 35-60-minute Uber/Lyft ride with even more unpredictable wait times and surge pricing, especially when catching a morning flight. Actually, for this 3-day trip, I think it would’ve been cheaper to drive and park, even with the City of Chicago’s latest parking taxes.</li><li>The Southwest flights between Midway and Nashville were a bit odd because the pilots kept everyone in their seats for the entire flight due to “expected turbulence” - of which there was absolutely none. Though I thought it was interesting that the pilot on our return trip said “We may ask our flight attendants to remain seated so we can fly faster and pick up some time.” It’s an hour-and-20-minute flight, so not too long to stay seated as long as you didn’t drop a couple of beers at the bar right before boarding. But it also meant I didn’t get a chance to use some of the free drink coupons Southwest sent me last month. I should’ve followed the advice of a Nashville Airport billboard that was posted right above the Southwest gate -- “Before Wheels Up, Whiskey up.”</li><li>Bridge Music — &nbsp;<em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/content/Per/Per_-_DLDN_Instrumental.mp3\" target=\"_blank\">DLDN Instrumental</a></em>&nbsp;by St Paul</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Because the trip to Nashville was personal travel, I used award points where I could -- Hyatt for our hotel and Hertz for the rental car. The only reason I didn’t use Southwest points was because I was burning off a $100 customer satisfaction certificate Southwest sent me as comp for one of their 3 delayed flights I talked about in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/podcast-150-travel-interruptus/\">Travel Interruptus episode</a> a couple of months back. We’ve talked about how to use awards many times over the years. And while the tactics may change a bit, my overall strategy has been pretty consistent -- use them rather than save them, or “earn and burn” as some folks say. I know a lot of travelers who save them -- hoard them -- thinking of them as their travel savings account -- or perhaps a badge of honor -- “I have 2 million American Airline points” to which I think (and try not to say) “that are going to get you a lot less the longer you keep holding them”. Because &nbsp;rather than increasing in value by earning interest, they can suddenly decrease in value when United or BA or Marriott or, a couple of weeks ago, Hertz decide to redo their awards charts. And, for all the luvvy words in those announcements about “increasing the value” of their programs, I’ve never seen one of those changes <em>increase</em> the value of the points. At the end of May, Hertz published -- without any warning or announcement -- a new award chart that increased the point cost for daily and weekly rentals by 11-36 percent. Back in March, Marriott added a new top hotel category with a 42% higher per-night award cost -- 85,000 points a night for the properties that moved into the new Category 8 vs. 60,000 points when they were in 7. And most of the properties that got that 42% bump were resort properties -- the ones you’d most likely want to use your points on. In November, United will eliminate their award charts altogether, following Delta and Southwest in moving to dynamic pricing. Pick your slogan - “Earn and burn”; “Use ‘em or lose ‘em”. Though I think I like “you deserve a break today” better. Plan a vacation and burn your points before the companies do.</li><li>Even though &nbsp;I haven’t traveled much since <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/podcast-151-traveler-data-leaks-brittany-street-food/\">the last episode</a>, I’ve still been thinking a lot about travel - specifically, laying out our trip at the back half of this month -- a week in Ireland and then heading over to Scotland for Claire’s graduation from Univ of St Andrews. I talked in the last episode about wrestling with the Avios website to book our flights, but with that done, I got consumed by packing and moving and unpacking, and sorta lost track of the other reservations that we needed for our week in Ireland. That insight landed on me pretty hard the Tuesday after Memorial Day when I looked at my calendar and started seeing June dates. I got nothing -- no car, no places to sleep. And it’s not like the end of June is low season in Ireland. Back in March, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/19/podcast-149-dining-single-airlines-need-to-tell-us-more/\">episode 149</a>, I talked about how we dug deep when planning our spring break trip to Brittany -- buying guidebooks, scouring web sites, .... But we had never been there before. My planning for Ireland is a lot more impromptu because, back in the early ‘90’s, I spent a lot of time in Cork for business, and while the country has no doubt changed a lot in the past 20-some odd years, I had a sense of what I wanted to see and a bit of an itinerary in mind -- spend most of the week hubbing out of Galway, going south to County Clare and north to the Connemara, and then heading over to Dublin for the weekend before flying over to Edinburgh. I found myself spending most of my time spelunking through TripAdvisor. First, in the Ireland forum trying to figure out the right rental car strategy. My default strategy -- go with Hertz and leverage my US status if anything goes sideways -- wouldn’t work because Hertz has franchised its name in Ireland to another company. Also, rental car insurance seems to be a bit unique there; using your credit card to cover damages like on my last trip to St Andrews apparently requires a letter from your card issuer and is still a particular hassle at the counter. Then there was the sifting through the Manichean universe of TripAdvisor reviews -- a bipolar split between 5-star “everything is fantabulous” and 1-star “it’s a complete dump and I’m sure the maid spit in my water glass” write-ups. I tend to the more forgiving end of that spectrum. I don’t think you should slam a place for a problem if you didn’t tell them about it and give them a chance to fix it. I also try to have reasonable expectations; you’re not going to get psychic/transcendent levels of service for $100/night. It took me a solid day-and-a-half of screen time, but we now have a bed for each night and a set of wheels to get us there. </li><li>Being off the road for a month has helped me drop a nagging 7-8 lbs that I put on over Christmas and until now -- 5-6 months later -- haven’t been able to drop. We’ve talked in past episodes how easy it is to put weight on when traveling -- eating 3 meals a day in restaurants, or worse on the run in airports, makes portion control difficult, as well as eating more vegetables than fries. But even when you’ve chosen, say, the fish instead of the burger, you’re still someone else’s mercy for how it’s cooked. This light bulb lit for me while watching <em><a href=\"https://www.netflix.com/title/81028317\">The Chef Show</a></em><a href=\"https://www.netflix.com/title/81028317\"> on Netflix</a> over the weekend. It’s a great cooking show. It stars Jon Favreau, director of the Iron Man movies, and Roy Choi, who was one of the first gourmet food truck guys in LA; you’d track them down on Twitter for fantastic Korean-Mexican tacos. These guys worked together on Favreau’s <em>Chef </em>movie a few years back and then got back together for this Netflix series. In the second episode, they’re cooking in Atlanta with Ford Fry at his restaurant, The Optimist. They’re making a Shrimp Toast dish that easily uses over a stick of butter to cook and sauce 5 large shrimp. They joke about the amount of butter and salt restaurants use -- “When they say ‘no salt’...,” Favreau asks Choi, Choi responds “...we add twice as much”. And then they add another half-stick of butter to the shrimp pan. I’m sure it tastes great, but it was an “a-ha” moment -- how, even when you think you’re ordering healthy, the guys in the back are focused on taste, not counting calories for you.</li><li>After our move, I’ve cranked through most of the change of addresses, but haven’t yet done my drivers license. But that one will take a little more work because my current Illinois drivers license isn’t a Real ID license -- it doesn’t have the gold star in the upper right corner. It’s not a problem right now, but in 16 months from now, October 2020, when the TSA says it will fully enforce the 2005 Real ID act -- 15 years later, for real this time, no more extensions or waivers -- and so will no longer accept non-compliant IDs at airports. Getting a Real ID license requires more documentation -- proof of my Social Security Number and two documents with our new address -- like a utility bill or a bank statement, which could be a bit of a challenge now that we get most everything electronically. Now, I could just skip it and use my passport or Global Entry card (if I could find it) instead. But that would mean I’d have to remember to bring one more thing with me to the airport, which is never a best practice. Not critical -- I have 16 months to get around to it -- though probably not something to wait until the last minute on. The Illinois DMV isn’t the quickest, most nimble organization on its best days. I can only imagine what it’ll be like come, say August or September 2020, when it gets crushed with people without passports looking to swap their drivers licenses before the October 1 deadline.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com. </li><li>Bridge Music —  &nbsp;<em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/content/oldDog/oldDog_-_Goodbye_sooner_or_later.mp3\" target=\"_blank\">Goodbye Sooner or Later</a></em>&nbsp;by oldDog    </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Overwhelmed By Travel</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Cristine Danielson, a long-time friend and first time listener, asked me after listening to the last episode “I’d love to hear how you get acclimatized to a new city from the moment you leave the gate. I always feel overwhelmed” &nbsp;That pulled me up short. I had never really thought about it that way. I’ve been traveling heavily coming up on 35 years; I’ve been traveling longer than I haven’t. I started when I was too young and seemingly indestructible to know any better, and now, I have enough travel experience, routines, rhythms &nbsp;-- patterns I called them earlier -- and status that, even when gutting through <em><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/podcast-150-travel-interruptus/\">Travel Interruptus</a></em>, things seem more inconvenient than overwhelming.</li><li>One of the most important things for me is having enough money in my pocket to handle what could come my way. At the end of the last century -- the 1990’s to be exact -- I was doing a lot of bunny hop trips through Europe -- Sweden one day, Switzerland the next, then Germany, then the UK …. This was pre-ATMs, pre-Euro, pre-mobile phones, and for many places in Europe, pre-widespread acceptance of credit cards. Truly the travel dark ages. So, my routine would be to exit Customs, head straight to the Currency Exchange, and cash a $100 American Express travelers check so I would have enough local cash for, say a coffee and a cab. Having that cash in my pocket settled me a bit; maybe gave me a sense of some control, no matter how illusionary it might be. Today, I head straight for an ATM instead of the Currency Exchange and, as I said a few episodes back, make sure I have a “full house” of credit cards -- a Visa and MasterCard from different banks, and an Amex. And it’s not just when I’m out of the country. Even in the US, I’m a lot more comfortable traveling when I have 5 or 10 $20’s in my wallet.</li><li>After my wallet comes my phone. Modern travel is all about the smartphone app -- is my plane on time, where’s the hotel, what train line do I need? My whole <em><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/podcast-150-travel-interruptus/\">Travel Interruptus</a></em> tale would’ve been much worse than “inconvenient” without smartphone connectivity. I wouldn’t have been able to tweet at Southwest customer service, I wouldn’t have been able to find a decent hotel in Paris when the train delays made us miss our flight home, I wouldn’t have been able to book that God-awful expensive Uber that got us to CDG just in time to make our flight. Back in the last century, I would’ve searched for a pay phone, pulled out my phone card, and rung up the travel agency. Even today, if I’m ringing up a travel agency instead of doing it on my own, when was the last time you saw a working pay phone? </li><li>Those are the mechanics of travel, but what about fitting in to the place you’ve arrived? I talked about how business travelers especially tend to float above everything in a “<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2008/04/29/podcast-64-escaping-the-travel-bubble-marks-travel-tips/\">travel bubble</a>”. You walk out -- of the plane with enough status, otherwise baggage claim -- and find someone holding a sign with your name who’s job is to give you a bottle of water and whisk you past the things that might be disconcerting, overwhelming. When that bubble pops, unexpectedly, and drops you into the day-to-day reality of the place you are; that decompression can be overwhelming. </li><li>The closest I came to an overwhelming experience was not arriving in a place, but trying to leave. A colleague and I wrapped up our day in Pune, India and were flying home from Mumbai that night, but on different flights; his leaving a couple of hours earlier than mine. For some reason, the person arranging our trip had us taking cars from Pune to Mumbai instead of flying. Well, OK. It wasn’t a bad drive -- actually a bit scenic -- right until we hit Mumbai traffic. We get to the international terminal, we pull our bags from the trunk, and make our way thru the general chaos of people and push carts and food vendors to the entrance. &nbsp;We both have our itineraries out and ready for inspection. My colleague goes first -- the officer looks at it and waves him through. I hand over my itinerary and follow my colleague. Except I can’t. I can’t go into the terminal; I’m too early. I’m now back out in the chaos with nowhere to go -- our car is long gone, I have no idea where Mumbai Airport is in relation to anything -- is there a hotel nearby. I don’t have a working mobile phone to ring anyone. I’m just standing around, with hundreds of other people trying to get in, or saying good-bye to someone trying to get in, or waiting for someone to come out. I walked up and down the sidewalk in front of the terminal, looking for something -- a phone, a bench. I find a door. I look in -- it’s a lounge for people waiting for arriving passengers. There’s a big plexiglass wall separating baggage claim. But more importantly, it has seats, is air conditioned, and has a restroom. I walk in -- except I can’t. I need a ticket. Where do I get that? Back out and around the corner. I find the ticket window. It’s a couple hundred rupee -- $2-3. I reach into my pocket and pull out my last bit of cash -- a 500 rupee note. Things got a lot less overwhelming.</li><li>Bridge Music —   &nbsp;<em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/content/Zapac/Zapac_-_Test_Drive.mp3\" target=\"_blank\">Test Drive</a>&nbsp;</em>by Zapac </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>New and Old Restaurant Trends</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Last month, I hit the <a href=\"https://restaurant.org/Home\">National Restaurant Association</a>’s <a href=\"https://www.nationalrestaurantshow.com/\">annual show</a> in Chicago’s McCormick Place convention center. If you need reminding of how big the restaurant business is in the US, this show is <em>huge</em>. I was interested to see what’s new and what has stayed the same since the last time I went, 4 years ago. </li><li>What’s new - Walking the aisles, I was immediately struck by the number of booths showing delivery containers. They were everywhere. Talking to a couple of vendors, they said some hotels are seeing huge growth in Doordash and Grubhub deliveries eating into their restaurant and room service revenues (all puns intended). And since they’re seeing it being driven by the new generation of new travelers -- the Millennial and Gen-Z travelers -- they think it’s more of a trend than a blip, yet another revenue stream lost to traveler technology -- like when they lost long-distance phone calls to cell phones, and then pay TV revenue to PCs and iPads running Netflix and YouTube. So many hotels, especially the lower end ones, are dropping food service altogether. But this collides head on with sustainability concerns -- the growth in delivery means a growth in styrofoam containers and plastic bags. And so I’d walk past, say, two booths back-to-back -- the first selling traditional containers; the second pushing compostable paper and bioplastics. These new containers looked good; except when I tried to use a paper straw on a frozen margarita sample that someone pushed on me. That was a complete fail.</li><li>Also saw a number of established ethnic food companies trying to branch out into new/hotter ethnic spaces. Kronos, for example, is one of the main companies selling Greek gyros meat. In their booth, they were sampling gyros, but also new chicken al pastor and Korean barbeque products. Cultural appropriation or trying to stay in business by catering to those darn Millennials and Gen Z’ers. I dunno, but a Kronos guy told me that 90% of their business still comes from gyros. Which kinda rang true when I looked at which sample booths had the longest lines -- hot dogs from Vienna Beef and Nathan’s and grilled cheese sandwiches from Tillamook Cheddar. </li><li>That being said, there were a lot of vendors selling Asian products -- primarily Japanese and Korean -- continuing the trend I’ve seen at the show. Digital is still big, but the focus seemed to have shifted from smartphone apps to \\ interfacing with those delivery services -- updating menus and getting orders automatically into their point-of-sale systems -- and more efficiently managing social media. I saw a Yelp booth for the first time at the show. It was a good-sized booth -- nicely carpeted, with tables full of phones running their app. But it was pretty empty -- mostly populated by Yelp employees. Gave me a good idea of how the restaurateurs were rating Yelp’s booth.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #152</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_152.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<p><!--EndFragment--></p>','Podcast #152 — Overwhelming Travel; New & Old Restaurant Trends','','inherit','closed','closed','','2474-revision-v1','','','2019-12-31 19:28:44','2020-01-01 00:28:44','',2474,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/12/31/2474-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2619,1,'2019-12-31 19:34:43','2020-01-01 00:34:43','.wp-block-image figcaption {\n    text-align: center;\n}','travelcommons','','publish','closed','closed','','travelcommons','','','2019-12-31 19:34:43','2020-01-01 00:34:43','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/12/31/travelcommons/',0,'custom_css','',0),
(2620,1,'2019-12-31 19:34:43','2020-01-01 00:34:43','.wp-block-image figcaption {\n    text-align: center;\n}','travelcommons','','inherit','closed','closed','','2619-revision-v1','','','2019-12-31 19:34:43','2020-01-01 00:34:43','',2619,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/12/31/2619-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2622,1,'2019-12-31 19:36:18','2020-01-01 00:36:18','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\">\n<p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/666C6507-4DEA-4808-9C1B-D3F828805BC8.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2521 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/666C6507-4DEA-4808-9C1B-D3F828805BC8-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a></p><figcaption>The moment of truth</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>Breaking out the mobile rig to record this episode in the Residence Inn in downtown Charlottesville, VA. Summer storms let me test Freebird\'s re-booking service, I wrestle with AT&amp;T so I can use my iPhone\'s dual SIM capability on my trip to Krakow and Budapest, booking more relaxed flight itineraries lets me call an audible when Uber and Lyft prices surge into the stratosphere, which gets me thinking -- will we still love those rideshare companies when they\'re no longer cheaper than taxis?&nbsp; All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_154.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/666005807&color=%23ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #154: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the Residence Inn just off the Main St pedestrian mall in downtown Charlottesville, VA, leaving behind last episode’s multi-mic, big mixer board, sound-baffled podcast studio to go old-school, back to the TravelCommons roots with the mobile rig in a hotel room. I was thinking about going way back and recording it in the bathroom, but there’s a noisy exhaust fan that I can’t figure out how to turn off. There may be a bit of traffic noise in the background, and maybe even some thunder if the black clouds out my window live up to their potential. This episode will be one of the shorter ones. I’m trying to get it in before Irene and I head out to Krakow and Budapest Thursday night.</li><li>This is my fourth week back in Charlottesville in Chicago, IL. Not much has changed since my last commute back at the end of last year. American Eagle and United Express have a couple of direct regional jets a day from Chicago, and when weather knocks those flights out, Richmond is an hour-and-a-bit drive to the east, or Washington-Dulles is 2 hours north as a last resort. It’s still a 5-gate airport; the bar in the middle still has a surprisingly decent local craft beer selection. The bartender still recognizes me, though she still asks for my ID each time I sit at the bar. So not much has changed at CHO.&nbsp;</li><li>However, my approach to flying there has a bit. I’ve talked about this in prior episodes; I’ve always planned my travel to maximize my time at home, with my family. Given a choice between flying out the night before or taking a 7am flight out the day of, I’d take the latter. The trade-off, though, is travel plans that don’t deal well with travel delays -- a 2-hour flight delay the night before is annoying but won’t make me miss a meeting; that same delay the morning of my meeting may mean I won’t need to take that flight. And I’ve had all that happen with my flights to Charlottesville. So this time, with the kids graduated and moved out, and now that we’ve downsized from a house to a city apartment, my wife thinking I’m underfoot a bit too much, the need to maximize my time at home has… eased a bit. So I’m booking more... resilient itineraries -- flying out the night before, staying over an extra day so I can fly out after lunch, before the summer humidity spools up the afternoon thunderstorms…. Which was paid off last week when thunderstorms in <em>Chicago</em> had my evening flight to CHO posting a 3 hour delay by noon. I had more than enough time to swing my endpoint from CHO to RIC (all done pretty seamlessly thru the United app, which I found pretty impressive). My travel plans may not be as optimized as before… or maybe they are, but for different things, like cutting down on stress and my need to bitch tweet.</li><li> Bridge Music -- One for Me by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/21492 Ft: Haskel </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>We’ve had a thread over a couple of episodes about <a href=\"http://getfreebird.com/\">Freebird</a>, a flight rebooking service. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/podcast-151-traveler-data-leaks-brittany-street-food/\">episode 151</a>, TravelCommons listener Mika Pyyhkala sent in a note about his great experience with them, how they picked up a Southwest flight cancellation and rebooked him on Delta while he was still in the air on his first Southwest leg. Saved him a huge disruption; well worth, he said, the $19/leg fee. I mentioned in the last episode that Amex Travel has been offering free coverage for flights I book on their site with my Platinum card. So Freebird has been covering these last few trips to Charlottesville. I get a text the night before and the morning of my flights assuring me that Freebird is monitoring them. And when last week’s outbound 6pm flight started posting delays at noon, I got texts letting me know they were monitoring the delay, but it hadn’t yet tripped their 4-hour trigger.&nbsp; But knowing that there weren’t going to be many alternative flights to RIC or IAD later in the evening, I didn’t feel comfortable waiting for United to push over 4 hours -- and then cancel -- and so moved myself to their 6pm Richmond flight -- which was on-time -- getting me into my hotel around 10pm after an hour Uber ride. And then, indulging in a bit of travel schadenfreude, I kept tracking the ORD-CHO flight on <a href=\"https://flightaware.com/\">FlightAware</a>. It finally took off at 11pm Central – 5 hrs late -- arriving CHO at 2am Eastern. So it did eventually cross Freebird’s 4-hour threshold, but I’m not sure if it was in time to catch an alternative flight. So, I’m glad I switched it myself. I dunno, maybe tight connections rather than thinly traveled direct routes is the better use case for Freebird</li><li>Also back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/podcast-151-traveler-data-leaks-brittany-street-food/\">episode 151</a>, I talked about trying out the alpha version of augmented reality directions in Google Maps, where you hold up your phone and the display uses the camera to show the streetscape in front of you with the&nbsp; directions -- street names, arrows -- overlaid on the real-time image. I thought it was kinda cool; Irene and the kids were less than impressed. But you can judge for yourself because Google <a href=\"https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/08/google-launches-live-view-ar-walking-directions-for-google-maps/\">announced last week</a> that they’ve widened the feature to a public beta. Give it a try and let me know what you think</li><li>Fast forward one whole episode -- from <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/podcast-151-traveler-data-leaks-brittany-street-food/\">151</a> in May to <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/06/16/podcast-152-overwhelming-travel-new-old-restaurant-trends/\">152</a> in June -- which really was a big jump because, right after recording episode <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/podcast-151-traveler-data-leaks-brittany-street-food/\">151</a>, we moved from the big house in the suburbs to a 60% smaller high-rise apartment on the lakefront -- but in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/06/16/podcast-152-overwhelming-travel-new-old-restaurant-trends/\">episode 152</a>, I talked about having to recalibrate how I’d get to the airport. I had my guy who’d pick me up for a 30-minute ride to ORD or MDW… But no more. Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve started to get a feel for it -- 45-50 minutes to ORD, but figure an hour for weird traffic. And in the morning, figure a 10-minute wait for an Uber or Lyft, and a tab with tip around $40-$45. So this Monday at 5am, I fire up Lyft and Uber while drinking my morning cup of tea to see what’s going on -- $110 on Uber and $60 on Lyft. What the hell is going on? Well, maybe all the drivers are sleeping in, so I shower, get dressed, gather all my worldly belongings, and check again -- $120 on Uber; $57 on Lyft. I hit the Lyft button and wait -- and wait and wait. Then someone accepts the ride, and cancels. Guess he didn’t want to go to ORD. So I fire up <a href=\"https://transitapp.com/\">Transit</a>, my favorite mass transit app. It’s developed in Montreal and does mass transit routing in a huge number of cities in the US and Canada. And in Chicago, it also covers Divvy bike share and constructs Lyft-to-mass transit routing. I fired it up thinking that, if I couldn’t get a Lyft to ORD, then maybe I could get one to the nearest Blue Line L stop and take the subway the rest of the way. But even it couldn’t find a Lyft. But, it showed that, across the street from our flat, a bus will pick me up and, 18 stops later, drop me at the L stop. I got nothing else going -- actually, I did but it would involve waking Irene up at&nbsp; now 5:40am for a ride to ORD, truly a last resort. I wheel my luggage across the street. Four minutes later, the bus shows up. There’s me and another guy -- no problem putting my luggage on the seat next to me. And we make pretty good time -- not a lot of people waiting at bus stops at 6am, and the traffic is pretty clear too. All told, we stop maybe 6 times and have 8 people on the bus at its most crowded.  I had to wait another 5 minutes for the L and, at 6:40, it was more crowded; almost everyone had an ORD badge around their neck -- pilots, flight attendants, ground staff -- except for a few passenger-looking folk like me. All told, it took me about an hour -- maybe 10 minutes longer than Uber and Lyft were quoting. But at $2.50 vs. $60 or $120, it seemed like I made out on the deal.</li><li>Also in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/06/16/podcast-152-overwhelming-travel-new-old-restaurant-trends/\">episode 152</a>, I talked about “earning and burning” frequent traveler points rather than saving them because airlines and hotels keep playing with redemption levels and rules that reduce the value of the points. Jim McDonough tweeted me with a contra view -<ul><li>Regarding frequent flyer miles and how they don\'t appreciate over time - I still like to keep some around in case we need to travel for family emergency situations. The walk-up fare does not compete with the $25 charge to book a frequent flyer mile ticket last minute.</li></ul></li><li>Jim, that’s a good point, but I wonder if that strategy still works as more airlines move from fixed awards schedules to dynamic point pricing -- Southwest, Delta, and soon United -- where point price for a flight climes as remaining ticket prices do. Does it still make sense to pay with points?</li><li>As I said earlier, Irene and I are heading out Thursday night for a weekend in Krakow, Poland and then heading down to Budapest for a mix of touring and visits with Irene’s family. So, I thought this was as good a time as any to try out <a href=\"https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT209044\">my iPhone’s dual SIM capability.</a> Up to now, my usual procedure is to transfer my US AT&amp;T SIM to an old HTC One phone and then put my UK EE SIM in my iPhone Xs (usually sometime in flight in that panic drill between them clearing the breakfast tray and packing everything up for final descent) if I’m going to an EU country or when I pick one up after we land. I do this because local data is <em>hugely</em> cheaper than an AT&amp;T international plan - the EE pay-as-you-go plan I got is £10, or $12 with this week’s Brexit exchange rate discount, for 3 GB of data, 100 minutes of voice, and unlimited texts. But I still want my US number to ring thru in case someone back home needs to reach me and doesn’t know I’m out of the country. I don’t carry both phones with me, though. I have the iPhone with me during the day, using the local SIM to run Google Maps and the like. The HTC stays in the hotel room and I check it for messages when we get back at night.</li><li>But with its dual SIM capabilities, I should be able to do this with just my iPhone. However, the iPhone has only one physical SIM slot; the second is an internal eSIM, like the ones Apple uses in their cellular Apple Watch. So to make this work, I had to get AT&amp;T to transfer my US number from its physical SIM to the eSIM in the phone. My first stop was the local AT&amp;T store. I explained to the store guy what I wanted to do. He looked at me for a moment and said, “Uh, I’m new; I don’t know how to do that. But I can give you an eSIM card if you want.” OK, that’s a start. He riffled around his desk drawer. “I don’t have one here. I’ll have to go in the back. But I’m the only one here today, so you’ll have to go outside so I can lock up while I’m in the back.” Interesting. I walked down the street to grab a bite rather than idle outside the door. I came back. He handed me the card, “Here you go, but I don’t know if this will work…” I went home and hit the AT&amp;T web site. I spelunked around the site until I found the chat link and fired it up. The person on the other end knew what needed to be done. I gave her a few numbers off the card, then pointed the camera at the card’s QR code and it added to plan to my iPhone. Now, the chat agent said that they’ll have to do a bit of provisioning at the back end. She’d text me when it was done. Irene and I went out to dinner; no text and no activation. So the next morning, I hit chat again and this time stuck with the guy until the provisioning was complete. Then I pulled out the AT&amp;T SIM and put in the EE SIM, and immediately got a text from EE telling me their US roaming charges. I also got a whole new set of selections under the Cellular section under Settings. Which line did I want to use for voice, for data, for iMessage and FaceTime. I spent some time on Apple’s FAQ pages trying to figure out which scenario works for me. My guess is that it’ll take me a bit of trial and error -- and self-inflected AT&amp;T international charges -- to really figure this out.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com. </li><li>Bridge Music —  &nbsp; Fall to pieces - Silence by mika (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mika/24945 Ft: Colab      </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Will We Still Love Uber When The Prices Go Up?</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><a href=\"https://www.reuters.com/article/us-lyft-results/lyft-sees-ride-hailing-price-war-easing-sending-uber-and-lyft-shares-up-idUSKCN1UX2BQ\">Lyft’s chief financial officer Brian Roberts said, during last week’s earnings call, that pricing was becoming “more rational.”</a> “Rational pricing” is CFO-speak for “more predictably higher.” <a href=\"https://www.marketwatch.com/story/lyft-and-uber-are-giving-investors-what-they-want-which-is-bad-for-the-rest-of-us-2019-08-08\">Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, during his earnings call, said, “We and Lyft are big-time competitors here and have been for some period of time, but for now we’re seeing, generally, category positions that are stable. We are focused on improving profitability in this market.”</a>&nbsp; Which is CEO-speak for “we’re no longer going to slash prices to buy market share.”</li><li>We all knew this time would come -- at least the rational ones. Uber lost $5.2 billion in the second quarter while the smaller Lyft lost a mere $644 million last quarter. Investors are going to let you torch large piles of cash for only so long. Hence the topic question -- will we stay with Uber and Lyft even when they’re not a bargain anymore?</li><li>I’ve been talking about this with frequent travelers I know, or sit next to at bars, or bump into waiting for an Uber at O’Hare. One school of thought is that the Uber/Lyft experience is better than your typical cab, so even at the same price, you’d still order an Uber. You can order it on your phone rather than running into the street, trying to flag down a passing cab. Indeed, I’ve always said that, for me, Uber’s prime use case is getting a ride from midtown Manhattan to LGA at the end of the day a somewhat sane experience. Before Uber, I’d be practically dancing into 5th Ave, hiding my luggage behind a trash can because if a cabbie saw you wanted to go to LGA, they’d accelerate by you. I tried the cab company’s iPhone app last time I was in New York. It failed miserably.</li><li>Adding Uber and Lyft drivers to the transit mix means you can get a car ride from somewhere outside the usual downtown and tourist spots. I remember pre-Uber New Orleans, getting a cab anywhere other than between the airport and the French Quarter was near impossible. One night for dinner, we decided to go to a Mid-City restaurant, <a href=\"http://toupsmeatery.com/\">Toups Meatery</a>. Phenomenal place. The owner, Isaac Toups, later made it to the finals of the <em>Top Chef </em>cooking show. He didn’t win, but was voted “fan favorite”. And his food was our favorite too. The only problem -- getting a cab back to the Sheraton on Canal St from his Mid-City location. The hostess called 3 cab companies and we waited 20 minutes for a 15-minute ride. And that driver told us, “Yup, all most cab drivers want to do is make the easy money, driving between the airport and the hotels”</li><li>There’s also fare predictability -- you see the price to get from, say, downtown Chicago to O’Hare before committing to the ride. No more meter anxiety, watching the number run up in traffic. And the accompanying “Will I have enough cash to pay” or “Will this guy’s credit card machine work?” anxiety. With Uber and Lyft drivers following GPS apps, there’s no more “am I being taken the long way around to run up the meter” anxiety, or depending on your cab driver’s knowledge to take the fast way, or having them punt it to you with the “bridge or tunnel” question I often get from LGA cabs. The technology helps avoid a lot of the bad experiences we’ve had with taxi cab rides.</li><li>I used to say that Uber and Lyft cars are nicer, but their bar has slipped as they’re scrambling for drivers in a full-employment economy. An Uber I took last week was missing the door armrest; a Lyft that Irene took had the front right quarter-panel held on with duct tape. These are exceptions, though a bit more common that a couple of years ago. But they’re still a damn sight better than the beat-to-hell Baltimore cabs that would sit at the cab ranks in the Inner Harbor. I only did that once, because the cab rank was right outside the client’s building and I was late leaving for the airport. The back seat was full of old newspapers and other crap, and there was no air conditioning -- on a July afternoon. After that, I’d stand there, looking at the cabs, while waiting 5 minutes for an Uber to show up.</li><li>The place I most often take a cab rather than waiting for an Uber is the airport. And here, it’s not really about price, it’s convenience. The cab ranks are usually right at the terminal exit, while the rideshare pickup spot can be an Easter Egg hunt (Vegas), a 15-minute walk to the back 40 (Atlanta) or a confusing scrum of screaming traffic cops (Chicago Midway). Vegas and LGA especially -- catching a cab is so much easier than a rideshare. Here at CHO also -- it’s a flat rate into town that’s about the same as Uber and Lyft and the cabs are in decent shape, so if one’s there, there’s no reason to wait.</li><li>And I could be wrong, but it feels like the pricing discussion is mostly a US thing. <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/podcast-150-travel-interruptus/\">In Paris last Spring</a>, none of the Ubers were “rideshares”; they were all black car livery companies with professional drivers. Near as I could tell, Uber was just another dispatch system for them. In Lisbon a few years back, I couldn’t tell if they were true rideshares, but the pricing was the same as taxis, and there were more taxis so less wait. We took the path of least resistance and hailed cabs.</li><li>The rough consensus of my completely unrepresentative polling was - ride sharing got traction because it was cheaper, but now the technology gives such a better experience that I’d even pay a premium over a taxi -- but I wouldn’t want to tell Lyft or Uber that. But what they said on those earnings calls, I think they already know that.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #154</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_154.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<p><!--EndFragment--></p>','Podcast #154 — Will We Still Love Uber When The Prices Go Up?','','inherit','closed','closed','','2508-revision-v1','','','2019-12-31 19:36:18','2020-01-01 00:36:18','',2508,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/12/31/2508-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2624,1,'2020-01-23 15:32:06','2020-01-23 20:32:06','[caption id=\"attachment_1925\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/IMG_20141210_231414.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1925\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/IMG_20141210_231414-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> How many nights to Leopard Print status?[/caption]\n\nSo we\'re four weeks into the new year and 30-50% of us have already ditched our New Year\'s resolutions, but we still have time to get our 2018 travel status lined up. Over the holiday break, I bought a non-smart carry-on to replace my now-banned Bluesmart; I walk through my shopping criteria. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_137.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\nThanks to <a href=\"http://go.travelperk.com/travelcommons\">TravelPerk</a> for sponsoring this episode.\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_137.mp3\"]\n\n<!--more-->\n\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #137:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. This episode is sponsored by <a href=\"http://go.travelperk.com/travelcommons\">TravelPerk</a>, the #1 rated business travel tool on the Internet. It’s been a light travel month, just a drive down to Nashville, and a couple of trips over to Charlottesville, VA, which has been a nice break from what is otherwise turning out to be a brutally cold winter in Chicago. The day after New Years, I walked out of the house into a -10℉ morning -- not windchill, it was -10℉ ambient. Welcome to January. I had my team travel here last week for a 2018 kick-off meeting. No one accused us of boon-doggling. The guy from Phoenix did say he was filing an employee abuse claim though.</li>\n 	<li>I’ve found myself drinking less craft beer and much more Scotch whisky in this month; -10℉ is definitely brown liquor weather. Luckily, my daughter brought home a nice bottle of 18-year-old <a href=\"http://www.glenscotia.com/\">Glen Scotia</a> from Edinburgh for Christmas. I’ve made a sizable dent in it.</li>\n 	<li>On my first trip to Charlottesville, after being off the road for four weeks, it took me forever to gather up all the bits of my regular travel carry from around the house. Normally, my travel carry stays in my backpack and my suitcase; I buy duplicates of things like hair brushes and headphones just so I don’t need to pull them out of my bag. But for some reason, all discipline broke down over the holidays and my carefully curated travel carry was spread/spewed throughout the house. Luckily, my ride to ORD was 5 minutes late. I took my Bluesmart bag, squeezed in one last trip before American’s January 15th smart luggage ban took effect. I tweeted a picture of my Bluesmart before boarding. American replied “We\'re glad you\'re flying with us and appreciate your cooperation with our team.” My response -- “Not that I have much of a choice…” Especially with IATA recommending the ban to its 300 airline members. My new non-smart Victorinox bag arrived on my front porch before the ban clicked in, so once I shift everything from the Bluesmart to the Victorinox, I’ll power down the Bluesmart, delete its app from my iPhone, and consign it to the corner of the attic with all my other retired bags -- my own Land of Misfit Bags.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mactonite/29469\">Static</a> by Darkroom (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mactonite/29469 </span></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Starting off the New Year, I did a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/01/01/looking-back-at-2017-the-highs-and-the-lows/\">blog post</a> summarizing some of the high and low points that we talked about in 2017. The high points? Things like Uber and Lyft driver stories, yet more craft beer taprooms, and Hertz’s President Circle Aisle. Low points? Airlines dragging passengers from planes, everybody lobbying for 5-star reviews, and, no surprise, the smart luggage ban.</li>\n 	<li>Allan Marko, not just a long-time TravelCommon’s listener, but probably one of the original listeners showed his roots by posting on the original comment channel -- the TravelCommons website\n<ul>\n 	<li>Have had our Away luggage for only about six months prior to the battery ban. I really like the ‘smart’ charging feature. Luckily the Away battery is a nicely designed self-contained and easily removable unit (two screws; screwdriver included!) Now the battery lives in my backpack, and the luggage still usable.</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\"></li>\n 	<li>Allan’s psychic capabilities are showing. I think Away is the only major smart bag that meets the airlines’ requirement for a removable battery. But for me, charging wasn’t the major use case for me. I’m typically fine with my Anker lipstick charger. And if I forget to recharge that, my Verizon mobile WiFi hotspot also doubles as a charger. For me, the GPS tracking was the main use case -- for those times I had to check my bag, it was nice to know that it had also made it to my destination -- a use case that requires power. Pull out the battery and no more tracking. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted.</li>\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\"></li>\n 	<li>Jim McDonough replied to the Twitter announcement of the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">last episode</a> where I wondered if I was the last generation of cash payers. Jim wrote\n<ul>\n 	<li>I use cash a) at the local farmer’s market; b) pay for haircuts . . . having a hard time coming up with c)</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Jim, I dunno. Looking at your Twitter profile picture, you look like you could land in my generation. I apologize for using a card for anything under $20. Although I have to say that more and more microbrewery taprooms only take credit cards. I don’t apologize there; or at the self-service tills in Home Depot or Tesco’s -- mostly because there’s no one to apologize to even though they will take cash.</li>\n 	<li>Natalie on the British Airways social media team <a href=\"https://twitter.com/British_Airways/status/943550974102245376\">tweeted back</a> at me about the other topic on the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">last episode</a> -- about how hard it can be to cash in on loyalty points. You’ll remember that I talked about all the hassles I had in transferring Avios points from BA to Iberia, until I got a BA agent with solid northern accent. Natalie of BA said\n<ul>\n 	<li>Hey Mark! Thanks for tagging us in your article. I\'m glad to hear that one of our \'Geordie\' colleagues was able to help you redeem some of your Avios. It\'s a shame you didn\'t catch her name though.</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Absolutely it was a shame. She deserves huge props.</li>\n 	<li>In that same riff, I mentioned how my email to Iberia to clean up my name on my Iberia Plus account -- which might have been the root cause of my point transfer problem -- seemed to have fallen into a black hole. Well, apparently it didn’t. Soon after that episode, I got a letter from Iberia with a new card that had my correct name. That was nice. Would’ve been just a bit nicer if they’d hit the Reply button while handling the email and typed, I dunno, just 8 words -- “Got it fixed; new card in the mail” But it got done -- all of it, Avios points, non-stop ORD-MAD flight on points, and now, a card with my correct name.</li>\n 	<li>And that Iberia letter was probably one of the last surprises I got when I open the mailbox at home. Somehow, I’m not quite sure how, I signed up for a US Post Office service that sends me an email every morning with scanned images of letters I’m going to receive that day. When I got that first email, I was kinda “What the hell?”, but now I kinda like it, especially when I’m on the road. No more wondering what bills showed up, or during the holidays, who had sent us Christmas cards. It does kinda take the surprise out of opening the mailbox -- though not that there was much left since 90% of our physical mail is junk -- but it is kinda entertaining.</li>\n 	<li>Back in August, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/08/27/podcast-132-travel-apps-on-my-phone/\">episode #132</a> about the travel apps I have loaded on my phone, I talked about using the paid or “Pro” version of TripIt, and about how it was on the bubble for me because of how the airlines have improved the flight status notifications in their own apps. In 4 months since then, the airline apps have pretty consistently notified me of gate changes and delays faster than TripIt Pro. And so when my subscription ran out a few weeks ago, I ignored the renewal alerts. I’ll still use the free version -- I like the way TripIt consolidates separate plane, hotel, and rental car reservations into a single trip -- kinda replicating the itineraries your travel agent used to give you when they booked your entire trip. But paying $50 for what are now slower, redundant flight alerts? I’ll spend it on beer or brown liquor instead.</li>\n 	<li>I don’t know if it’s just me, but the cadence for boarding groups has gotten out of control. I think I was on a Delta flight where I was boarding group 1 or 2, but was the 4th or 5th group to board, after Delta One, and then Platinum Medallion, then Gold Medallion, Sky Team Elite -- it went on forever. American is a bit better -- only one non-numeric boarding group for the invite-only Concierge Key gang (remember George Clooney in Up In The Air) -- and then 1 through 9(!). I do love the announcement “If you don’t have a boarding group number, then board Group 7” which feels a bit random. Where it really becomes fun is on a regional jet, when the gate agent runs through this cadence for a plane with only 40-50 passengers and all the carry-on bags are gate… I mean valet checked. “Now boarding passengers in Group 1, Group 2, Group 3…” Four people board… “Groups 5, 6, 7, and the rest of you” followed by general scrum in front of the agent. I know the airlines have PhDs in psychology, sociology, and linear programming working on this stuff, but it continues to be a cluster</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>And thanks to this episode’s sponsor TravelPerk</li>\n 	<li>Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/11/20/podcast-135-airport-bingo-new-old-travel-pc/\">November episode</a>, I talked about American\'s last-minute cancellation of my night flight to Charlottesville and my ensuing scramble to find a replacement flight and to make sure the Hyatt Place didn\'t flush my reservation. But if I\'d booked with TravelPerk, they would\'ve done the scrambling for me.\n<ul>\n 	<li>This all-in-one business travel management tool includes a team of highly qualified agents ready to rescue disgruntled travelers from any scenario 24/7.</li>\n 	<li>It’s because of making magic happen in times like this that TravelPerk is now the #1 rated business travel tool on the internet.</li>\n 	<li>You\'ll love them because you can finally take control of your travel schedule, have freedom to book alternative accommodation like Airbnb, and have a built-in rescue team when stuff goes south. Remove some stress from the equation, go to <a href=\"http://go.travelperk.com/travelcommons\">go.travelperk.com/travelcommons</a> for a no-commitment test drive.</li>\n 	<li>It’s free forever if you to <a href=\"http://go.travelperk.com/travelcommons\">go.travelperk.com/travelcommons</a></li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Psykick/52938\">Another Way</a> by Psykick (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Psykick/52938</span></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Plan for 2018 Travel Perks</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>So here we are, 4 weeks into the new year and anywhere from a third to a half of us have already ditched our New Year\'s resolutions and are now in full anticipation of Super Bowl queso dip. But while your dry January may have been washed out early, you still have time to get your 2018 travel perks in place.</li>\n 	<li>Almost all travel perks come from status in loyalty programs and all those status earning counts reset on Jan 1, so the first step is to match up what you think your 2018 travel plans will be to your loyalty programs. Any gaps? If you think you’ll start flying to Seattle (maybe helping to shill your hometown for Amazon’s HQ2), you’ll probably want to sign up for Alaskan Airlines Mileage Plan, where before, it might not have been worth the extra junk mail.</li>\n 	<li>Or if you’re already a member, do a status match. When I took a new CIO job some years back, all the hotels near our offices were Hilton brands. I had a Hilton\'s Honors card but just in basic blue as opposed to my top-of-the-line sparkly platinum Marriott card. After I hit the “reset my password” link on the Hilton website, I went straight to their status match page. Right at the top, it says “For the next 90 days,... we’ll match your elite status with any other loyalty program.” If you complete 4 or 8 stays over those 90 days, the match is good for the year. So rather than having to grind my way to Hilton status, I started enjoying it on Day 1. I had a friend do that with American -- parlay his United 1K status to Executive Platinum when he moved from Denver to Dallas. Much better than slumming in Boarding Group 5 until you clear the first status bar.</li>\n 	<li>Doing this, you also need to keep in mind the different ecosystems; the partnerships that tie travel companies together. It used to be just the international alliances -- Star, SkyTeam, OneWorld. When I knew I’d be traveling down to South Africa, racking up some serious business class mileage, I had two real options -- SAA out of JFK and IAD, or DL out of ATL. Living in Chicago, I chose SAA because they’re part of Star Alliance with United, and I’d get a lot more use from United status out of Chicago than I would Delta. And it’s getting even more combinatorial now with United and Marriott are status matching each other.</li>\n 	<li>And then there’s the credit cards -- both affinity (United and Chase Visa, American and Citi MasterCard) and non (Amex Platinum, Chase Sapphire Reserve). You gotta do the math. For example, Amex’s Platinum card is $550/year. But with that, you get Membership Rewards points that transfer to airlines and hotels, access to Delta lounges and Amex’s Centurion Lounges, which if you travel frequently to DFW, LAS, MIA, LGA, and now JFK, is great. They’re much better than, say American’s Admirals Clubs. I wish they had one in Chicago. Amex also picks up the $100 Global Entry or $85 PreCheck fee, gives you 10 GoGo WiFi sessions, $200 in Uber credit, and some other benefits. If you’ll use these benefits, that $550 can be a better deal than, say, the $95 that the United Chase will cost you. However, that United Chase will get you baggage fee waiver, two United Club passes, and status boarding. If you don’t travel a huge amount and live in a United hub like Houston, the United card could be a better deal. But you gotta think about your travel, do the math, and sign up for it now so you have all year to maximize the status benefits.</li>\n 	<li>And while you’re in this planning zone, do yourself a big favor sign up and make an appointment for Global Entry if you do international travel, or PreCheck if you’re mostly a domestic flyer. If it makes sense for you to get an Amex Platinum or Chase Sapphire Reserve card, it’ll be free. To me, TSA and Customs lines are still the worst part of travel. While you’re figuring out how to bump your status up your status on airlines and hotels, do yourself a favor and step out of those TSA and Customs lines too.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/flatwound/14476\">The Long Goodbye</a> by John Pazdan (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/flatwound/14476</span></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>How to Shop For A Suitcase</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>OK, perhaps a bit presumptuous of a title; perhaps it’s “How I shopped for a suitcase.” But before we go there, let’s summarize the set up from past episodes -- my 10-year old black Swiss Army carry-on rendered itself unusable before Thanksgiving when the handle became stuck in the extended position (luckily as I was getting in a car coming home from ORD and not while trying to stow it in an overhead while boarding), I hate shopping for suitcases so I recharge my Bluesmart smart bag and put it back into service in December only to have it banned from air travel as of last week.</li>\n 	<li>So now I’m forced to shop for a suitcase. Like any good consultant, I, of course, construct a prioritized list of evaluation criteria. First, it has to be a carry-on. Now that may seem a bit of a “duh”, but there is some ambiguity; the <a href=\"https://travel-made-simple.com/carry-on-size-chart/\">approved height</a> varies by airline between 19 and 22-inches. If I wanted to play it safe, I’d go for a 20-inch bag, but I’m also want to maximize how much I can carry-on. I tilt toward choosing space. Most US carriers accept a 22-inch bag and that’s mostly what I fly, and even when I’m on European carriers I usually have enough alliance status (my American Platinum status carrying over to OneWorld) to glide past the baggage sizer.</li>\n 	<li>Which leads to the second criterion -- it needs to be black. As I said in my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/10/18/ruthless-packing-tips/\">Ruthless Packing Tips post</a> in October, black not only makes you look thinner, it makes your bag look thinner to gate agents scanning for bag-sizer bait.</li>\n 	<li>Third, 2 wheels, not 4. This is a bit more of a personal preference. My Bluesmart is a 4-wheel spinner and my wife swears by hers, but because the 4 wheels have to extend from the bottom of the bag, spinners sacrifice packing space for agility, while 2-wheelers can embed their wheels up in the backplane of the bag. Again trying to maximize packing space, I go for the 2-wheeler, and with the biggest wheels I can find to make it an easier, smoother pull. I was kinda surprised how this limited my selection. Spinners definitely rule.</li>\n 	<li>My fourth criterion -- I wanted the inside of the suitcase to be as plain and empty as possible. No bunch of zip compartments, or built-in suit hangers, or ratcheting down clothes dividers; just a wide open box that free to structure how I want for each trip. I was surprised how tough this was to find. Indeed, in the end, I couldn’t find it and settled for a bag where I could detach the suit hanger and clothes divider and stash that stuff up in the Land of Misfit Bags next to the Bluesmart.</li>\n 	<li>Whittling through all that, I ended up buying a black Victorinox Werks Traveler 5.0 2-wheeler. Victorinox is what used to be Swiss Army; I figured if my last bag survived 10 years of hard mileage, that said something for durability. It was also one of the few where I could detach all the internal storage stuff. And it has that additional zipper to expand the width by an inch -- kinda like when you drop a notch on your belt after Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner; for those times when I’m flying home and have bought a few too many bottles of wine or brown liquor.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #137</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>Thanks again to TravelPerk for sponsoring this episode. Remember to go to <a href=\"http://go.travelperk.com/travelcommons\">go.travelperk.com/travelcommons</a> for a test drive</li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_137.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #137 — New Year\'s Travel Status Tips; How to Shop for a Suitcase','','inherit','closed','closed','','1916-revision-v1','','','2020-01-23 15:32:06','2020-01-23 20:32:06','',1916,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/01/23/1916-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2625,1,'2020-01-23 15:33:40','2020-01-23 20:33:40','[caption id=\"attachment_2100\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/20121212_195127000_iOS.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2100\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/20121212_195127000_iOS-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> Duck squats are supposed to keep you healthy[/caption]\n\nNo long-distance travel this month. Instead, I\"m getting back into regional jets, and waiting out a long delay in Cincinnati has me wondering about American Eagle\'s flight scheduling algorithm. My flights into CVG cause me to think about the impact of losing hub status. CVG looks overbuilt, but MEM is spending money to shrink itself. A Harvard Business Review article about how frequent business travel leads to poor health choices emphasizes the need for \"mindfulness\" on the road. The Midway Layover Taproom video gets me thinking about the time needed for a fun layover tour. And I give a listener my Chicago restaurant and taproom recommendations. All this and more at the&nbsp;<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_143.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_143.mp3\"]\n\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show Notes -->\n\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #143:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you a spiffed up TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. The production bay has been somewhat reassembled -- less one piece of furniture in the name of decluttering -- with the walls now a real estate agent-approved shade of “greige” and the floors redone from cherry to a bit more of a walnut; bowing to the presumed tastes of the millennial buyer. It’s not bad, just different. Definitely lighter though.</li>\n 	<li>No spur-of-the-moment international trips in July; mostly just running around the Midwest, but re-vectoring from Wisconsin to Cincinnati; a bit too far to drive, so I’m losing the freedom to leave when I want and back to stooping through regional jet doorways.</li>\n 	<li>And back to having my schedule jacked up by weather events thousands of miles away from me. As we’ve talked about before, the regional jet operators, affiliates that don’t have spare jets available to step in and wipe out delays a plane may encounter along their daily bunny hop schedule. Last week, my AA flight from CVG to ORD was a textbook example of this. At 12:30, on the way back from lunch, I got my first delay notice -- for a 6pm flight. It was just 20 minutes, so I didn’t think much of it. It was a nice day in both Cincinnati and Chicago, so I just chalked it up to standard ORD traffic. But then the delay started to stretch -- to 30 minutes, to 40 minutes, to an hour. I fired up FlightAware and used the “Where’s My Plane Now?” functionality to try and figure out what was going on. The nice thing about the FlightAware screen is it shows you the flight path and the current weather. My plane was traveling from Norfolk, VA to Miami, and then up to Cincinnati -- and I could see heavy storms all along the Southeast coast. The plane was late leaving Norfolk, and then was having to vector down the Florida Gulf Coast to avoid the storms over the Atlantic Coast. This wasn’t looking good.</li>\n 	<li>FlightAware also shows a 10-day history for a flight’s departure/arrival times. This American flight had only arrived on-time once; had also canceled once, and arrived late the other 8 times. With a bit of time to kill, I fired up Excel and calculated that this flight averaged an hour and 20 minute delay -- counting the one on-time flight, but not counting the cancellation (figuring out how to average in infinity was a bit more work that I was willing to tackle). This wasn’t really a one-off weather delay; it was a bad flight route. So as I’m wont to do, I hit American on Twitter -- “this flt has been delayed/cancelled 8 of the past 9 days. Kinda think AA needs to rethink the scheduling for this one”. I looked at the history of the United flight also leaving at 6pm -- one late flight in the past 10 days. It flies back and forth between ORD and CVG. Maybe not a great plan for the winter, but better than flying through the humid South in July and August. I’m switching. Besides, the beer selection in CVG won’t keep me occupied through too many more hour-long delays.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/beyond7-revelations/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><em>Miss America</em></a>&nbsp;by Beyond 7</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul class=\"\">\n 	<li>Even in the midst of studio refurb, I managed to push out the long-promised Chicago Midway Layover Southside Taproom Tour video. These videos always take longer than I think, but it’s fun and I like the end result. One of the things I’ve liked about the craft beer explosion -- in addition, of course, to good beer -- is that searching out new microbreweries has taken me to parts of cities I never would’ve visited otherwise -- walking into a basement in Portland, Oregon wondering how in the hell they got these huge steel tanks down here; or coming out of the Paris Metro in the middle of a North African neighborhood. I hope this Midway video has some of that same feel -- skipping the parts of Chicago that make the tour guides or TV shows -- the baseball themepark of Wrigleyville, the lakefront, hipster enclaves of Wicker Park and Logan Square -- guiding folks to pass through Douglas Park, Pilsen, Bridgeport, and the Back of the Yards. If you haven’t seen it already, check it out. You can watch it on the TravelCommons Facebook page, or go to the TravelCommons web site and you can click through to it on YouTube. Robert Fenerty left a comment on YouTube -- “Might be an excellent way to help get my A List status renewed this year!” Which, I think, is an excellent idea…</li>\n 	<li>Rob Cheshire commented on the web site, talking about the Southside breweries I featured on the video --\n<ul>\n 	<li>Thanks Mark! I will definitely build a visit to Marz and Lo-rez into my schedule for my August trip to Chicago. I am undecided about Whiner, which might be a bit too “European” in terms of beer styles for my tastes.I am a bit conflicted about Lagunitas, being part of the evil-Heineken Empire! I have no doubt that they have some great beers, and that the tasting room is a very cool spot.</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Rob and I have trading thoughts on Chicago brewery in comments to TravelCommons web site posts and Untappd check ins for a couple of months leading up to his trip here. Little does he know that I’m going to hit him up the other way for suggestions for my quick visit to Copenhagen in September. Rob has started his own blog -- <a href=\"https://taproomadventure.blogspot.com/\">The Great Taproom Adventure</a> -- with his notes on the taprooms he visits.</li>\n 	<li>Keith Love -- “long-time listener, first-time caller” as he describes himself -- sent me a note. He and his son are hitting Chicago early this month -- maybe for Lollapalooza? You’d be surprised how many older folks go hard on that 4-day music festival. Keith asked me for some restaurant and taproom recommendations, which got me thinking that I should do a Chicago episode, but in lieu of that, here’s the list I built for Keith in case you’re passing through Chicago soon -\n<ul>\n 	<li>Restaurant suggestions with good food/beer selections\n<ul>\n 	<li>The Publican (Fulton Market)</li>\n 	<li>Cruz Blanca (Randolph St)</li>\n 	<li>The Fountainhead (North Center)</li>\n 	<li>Hopleaf (Andersonville)</li>\n 	<li>Purple Pig (Michigan Ave)</li>\n 	<li>Eataly (River North; beer bar on the top floor)</li>\n 	<li>Fat Rice (Logan Square -- a bit of a cheat; OK beer, but food you won\'t find anywhere else)</li>\n 	<li>Wiener Circle (Lakeview -- even more of a cheat; no beer but a great char-Polish)</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Favorite Chicago taprooms -- this is more Northside focused since Keith said he was staying in River North\n<ul>\n 	<li>Goose Island Taproom (on Fulton St, not the brewpub)</li>\n 	<li>Half Acre (on either Lincoln or the new, larger one further north on Balmoral)</li>\n 	<li>Revolution Brewery Taproom (on Kedzie, not the brewpub on Milwaukee)</li>\n 	<li>Ravenswood taproom crawl -- 4 taprooms on Ravenswood between Foster and Irving Park Rd</li>\n 	<li>DryHop (Lakeview - another cheat; more of a brewpub, but a fav of mine)</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Keith also asked if I have a favorite airport app to, as he said, “actually guide you through airports and their amenities/services.” I had to admit that I’m a bit more old-school and use the maps that are posted around, though I will use Untappd to find the airport bars that have the best beer selection, which is how I killed a bit of that CVG delay I talked about earlier. If anybody uses an airport app, please let me know and I’ll talk about it on the next episode.</li>\n 	<li>The stint in Cincinnati forces me to fly out of ORD first thing Monday morning, the worst part of the road warrior rush hour. I normally avoid Monday morning flights like the plague, but my schedule these past weeks has forced me into it. That first Monday, I gave myself an extra 30 minutes, figuring life is too short to hyperventilate in a TSA line. But even then, the line tailing out of the Terminal 3 PreCheck took my breath away -- half the way down the terminal and I couldn’t catch up to the end of it; it grew faster than I could walk. I finally was able to get in -- I may have cut someone off, I dunno, the end of the line was a bit nebulous, lot of people muddling around, eventually forming a coherent line. Kinda like the travelers version of post-Big Bang dust clouds eventually forming galaxies. Anyhow, I get into line and start walking back toward the PreCheck station, at a brisk pace, and I didn’t really stop until I stood at the little swinging gate, waiting for the next available agent to check my license. It was 5-7 minutes tops. It’s amazing how many passengers they can process with 9 agents checking ID and every screening machine running. And with a line that’s 90% experienced travelers. It was just this side of a precision drill squad. I was impressed.</li>\n 	<li>I haven’t spent much time in Cincinnati airport before. It’s a very nice airport, but feels a bit “overbuilt”, especially with Delta “de-hubbing” it after it merged with Northwest.There’s two terminals with a train running between them and to the main building. The train is fine, as airplane trains go -- no better or worse than Denver’s or Atlanta’s -- but it seems a lot shorter. Indeed, the walk between terminals is maybe 3 minutes. The train seems a bit superfluous, or that the Cincinnati airport is trying to punch above its weight. Though feeling a bit overbuilt, it’s doesn’t have the ghost town feeling that the Memphis airport had the last time I was there. There were concourses there where I didn’t see a soul. It too was a casualty of the Delta-Northwest merger, a Northwest hub that was shut down in favor of Delta’s superhub in Atlanta. Memphis has lost ⅔’s of its passenger traffic and is now spending millions to downsize, to shutdown and mothball those empty concourses. There’s a <a href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/23/us/memphis-airport.html\">good NY Times story</a> about this. I tweeted out a link while I was writing this, but will also put a link in the show notes.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> or our new <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a> at travelcommons -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/westexit-extra/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><em>On Condition of Anonymity</em></a>&nbsp;by the West Exit</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>How Bad is Business Travel For Your Health?</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>I stumbled across an article in Harvard Business Review -- <a href=\"https://hbr.org/2018/05/just-how-bad-is-business-travel-for-your-health-heres-the-data\">Just How Bad is Business Travel for Your Health? Here’s the Data</a> -- by Dr Andrew Rundle, a pr ofessor of epidemiology at Columbia University. His bio says “his research focuses on the risks for, and consequences of, sedentary lifestyles and obesity.”\nThe article summarizes his recent research which boils down to\n<ul>\n 	<li>Employees who spent 14 or more nights away from home per month had significantly higher body mass index scores and were significantly more likely to report clinical symptoms of anxiety, depression and alcohol dependence; no physical activity or exercise; smoking; and trouble sleeping. The odds of being obese were 92% higher for those who traveled 21 or more nights per month</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Yup, so tell me something I don’t know. It takes work, or “mindfulness” to be on-trend, to eat right, exercise, and go to bed at a reasonable time when the guardrails of your normal routine disappear. Rundle’s population is people who travel every week. In the US, many consultancies shoot for a “3-4-5” travel schedule for their full-time project staff -- 3 nights, 4 days on the road -- leaving Monday morning, returning Thursday night -- with the 5th day in the office or working from home. Depending on the number of weeks in the month, that’s 12 -15 nights/month.</li>\n 	<li>When I went into consulting and full-time travel, the change was immediate -- working late and then project team dinners rolled over my evening workout routine, eating out every meal blew up my regular diet, and waking up at 4am on Monday morning to catch the 6am flight to LaGuardia, so I could be at my midtown Manhattan client by 10am screwed up my sleep cycle for the next couple of days. I could see the effects on the guys in my “class” -- the guys who joined the firm the same fall that I did -- putting on weight, walking a bit slower through the airport, drinking a bit more at dinner, maybe missing an early morning meeting or call after staying out a bit too late.</li>\n 	<li>I made some adjustments -- moved to morning workouts, became more “mindful” about what I was eating -- ordering fish and vegetarian meals where I could (though there aren’t always great options for non-Big 3 proteins (non-beef, chicken, or pork) in places like Dover, OH, Ephrata, PA, or Huntsville, AL). Maybe this slowed the inevitable, but 10 years on, we were on a family vacation with my folks, a Caribbean cruise. One of the stops along the Yucatan, the Mayan Riviera as they were starting to call it, I walk out of the water to our chairs, my dad looks up at me and says “You’ve put a bit of weight on, haven’t you?” I would’ve blown him off, except that I knew it was true. My waist size was 2 inches bigger and I was carrying 20 lbs more than when I started. I was heading in the same direction as my colleagues, even though it was at a slower pace.</li>\n 	<li>I was able to reverse the trend, and I think one of the key reasons was by then, I was senior enough to have more control over my schedule. I was managing the projects rather than being managed. So I could relieve the expectations of nightly team dinners -- at least one night a week, everyone was on their own, and no pressure if you bagged out other nights. I’d turn in early on Monday nights when most of us had gotten up early to fly out. We’d pick hotels with good workout rooms and where we could walk to the client and to restaurants rather than drive. Where I could, I’d negotiate remote work weeks with the client -- save them expense money, and give our team a break from the airport. It took work to break out of the usual, the default behaviors -- that “mindfulness” thing again.</li>\n 	<li>Thinking back on it, I guess I’m surprised that the firms I was with expected me to figure this out on my own. There were always travel policies on spending limits, and using the corporate travel agency, and what receipts were needed, and when you could fly business class, but no real guidance/support on how to lead a somewhat healthy life on the road. Maybe because the people writing those policies weren’t traveling -- the accountants and HR managers were paying for their own meals and going home every night, maybe a bit jealous thinking we were living it up every night eating steak dinners and drinking bottles of wine. Which some of us were, because we weren’t mindful enough to think about another way.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/solace-medusa/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Subtle Vice</a>&nbsp;</em>by Solace</li>\n</ul>\n<b>Make Layovers Fun</b>\n<ul>\n 	<li>One of the most sacred frequent traveler rules is Fly Direct. Be it winter with snow or summer with thunderstorms, adding that intermediate stop adds one more point of failure, one more opportunity for the airlines to screw up. But, with a bit of planning and an “adventuring” frame of mind, you can actually manufacture something good -- a mini-tour -- out of a connection. That has been the inspiration behind two TravelCommons videos -- the new MDW Layover Taproom Tour and the ORD Layover Excursion that I did almost 6 years ago -- and that is still getting regular hits on YouTube.</li>\n 	<li>To do it right, though, does take a bit of planning… and time. You have to factor in all the delay points -- getting off the plane, stashing your luggage if you carried on, getting to and from where you’re going, and then getting back through security when you return. For most airports, I think it’s tough to do a good layover tour in less than 4 hours -- this is supposed to be a fun daybreak, not another travel stressor.</li>\n 	<li>United Airlines used to have a series in their Hemispheres magazine called One City, Five Hours that would outline a 5-hour layover tour in a different city -- Reno, Albuquerque, Copenhagen, …. One of the early TravelCommons videos is me following their <a href=\"http://old.hemimag.us/2010/03/01/one-city-five-hours-frankfurt/\">Frankfurt tour</a> on a 6-hr layover between Mumbai and Chicago. Those article are tough to find, even with Google, but managed to dredge up the <a href=\"http://old.hemimag.us/2011/01/01/one-city-five-hours-copenhagen/\">Copenhagen one</a> from the Hemispheres archives and am going to give it a go at the end of this month.</li>\n 	<li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/06/24/podcast-130-notes-from-hungary/\">Episode 130</a> last year, I talked about how my son and I passed up a 90-minute connection in Vienna for an 8-hr one and then spent a Saturday eating schnitzel and drinking beer in the old section of town with a buddy of mine who came down from Poland.</li>\n 	<li>And I think that 5-8 hour span is about right. There are some exceptions -- the quick shopping jaunt from MSP to Mall of the Americas -- but even if you’re hitting the nearby Blue Lagoon on your Wow Air layover in Reykjavik, I’d still allow 4 hours, especially given the Wow check-in lines I stood in the last time I took flew them.\nJim McDonough felt that squeeze a few months ago. Commenting on the MDW Layover Facebook posting, Jim said</li>\n 	<li>We had a four hour layover at O\'Hare back in May on our way to Ireland. American did a schedule change that made a planned two hour layover into four. But we did not leave the airport. Somehow on international it didn\'t make sense. Had some bad \'free\' beer at the Admiral\'s Club.</li>\n 	<li>Yes, that would’ve been snug. Jim and his wife maybe could’ve swung down to Logan Square or Wicker Park -- both stops on the ORD subway line -- for a bite and a bit of a walkaround, but they would’ve needed to have a solid plan for that, tough with that last-minute schedule change.</li>\n 	<li>But even unplanned layovers can work out. Several years ago, my parents flew from Denver to Paducah, KY to visit my aunt and grandmother. As you can imagine, no direct flights so they connected through ORD. And, as you might guess, on the way home, their commuter flight was late out of Paducah and they missed a tight connection. My dad called me from the airport. It was New Year’s Eve night and we were having 3 or 4 couples over. “Get your luggage and book the flight out tomorrow,” I told him, “you can help me cook dinner.” I picked them up, brought them home, threw an apron at my dad, opened an early bottle of champagne, and we had a great time.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #143</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a> and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music is from&nbsp;<a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Magnatune</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_143.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #143 — How Bad is Business Travel For Your Health; Make Layovers Fun','','inherit','closed','closed','','2093-revision-v1','','','2020-01-23 15:33:40','2020-01-23 20:33:40','',2093,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/01/23/2093-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2626,1,'2020-01-25 14:31:13','2020-01-25 19:31:13','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/DSC_7106-scaled.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2633\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/DSC_7106-300x293.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"293\"></a><figcaption>Just put my dragon\'s den on Airbnb</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>January is a big travel planning month; people thinking about about the places they want to visit, spending days on the Internet researching itineraries, and putting in their week\'s vacation requests. But what about a 9-week sabbatical you’ve worked 7 years for? In this episode, we talk about that kind of extreme travel planning. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_159.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #159: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois having finished 3 weeks of traveling down to Phoenix with one more to go. It’s been a mild winter -- for Chicago -- especially when compared to last winter, which means it’s been in the 20’s and 30’s as opposed to -23 as it was one morning last January. But even with a mild winter, I still appreciate the 70 degree days in Phoenix.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li> It’s a 4-hr flight between Chicago and Phoenix. I normally enjoy that amount of “unplugged” time to just read, listen to music, listen to podcasts. But a couple of weeks ago, I tweaked my back during a workout -- not a big thing, I’ve done it many times before. But this time, the pain didn’t go away, it’s hung around on my left side, moving from back to hip to thigh, making it very uncomfortable to sit for long periods of time -- like 4 hrs. Which has made me notice how long US carriers keep the “Fasten Seatbelt” sign on -- like, forever. By the time that seatbelt sign finally goes off, my back is screaming -- and the person next to me in the middle seat is pretty annoyed at my constant shifting. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/06/16/podcast-152-overwhelming-travel-new-old-restaurant-trends/\">episode #152</a>, I talked about Southwest flights between Chicago and Nashville keeping the seatbelt sign on the entire hour-and-20-minutes. It hasn’t been that bad, but it’s easily been 45 minutes. And it isn’t just Southwest; United is doing the same thing. Quite a difference from, say, when Andrew and I flew Air Baltic back in October. 10,000 ft and “bing” that seat belt sign would go off, and we’d still be climbing. It doesn’t need to turn off that fast, but there’s gotta be a happy medium there somewhere. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>With the mild winter and a little bit of luck, my flights to and from Phoenix have been pretty dependable -- except for this week. On Monday, I started getting delay notices for my United 7:40pm flight right after lunch. United was doing their typical rolling delay exercise -- it’s a 30 minutes; no, really an hour; no, we’re leaving at 9pm; just kidding, it’s really 9:40. I was OK with the 30 and 60-minute delays, but then when I get two more delays in a 40-minute span -- now, something’s up. I call United. I get the Premier desk, which the guy tells me is in Chicago. I tell him the story -- rolling delays have now gotten to 2 hrs; I don’t trust that this flight is going off, and I need to get to PHX tonight. The guy says, “Yup, I got it. Makes sense.” He tries to find me routings through LAX and SFO, but the connections don’t work. So he cancels and refunds my ticket -- no hassle, no questions, no change fee. I love this guy. I pivot to Southwest and American, which both have 8:40 flights. I look at American’s seat map -- nothing but middle seats. That’s just not going to work with my back, so it’s over to Southwest. I’m A-List, so I know with their open seating I’ll get an aisle seat. (Exhale) Haven’t done that dance in a while, so was a bit out of shape. But with one more trip to PHX left, I’m not looking to get back into that shape.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music --  <em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/hisboyelroy/430\" target=\"_blank\">Revolve</a> mix</em> by cinematrik (c) copyright 2005 Licensed under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hisboyelroy/430   </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Before writing a podcast, I go through all the interaction channels -- website comments, Facebook comments, Instagram comments, Twitter replies, e-mails, … and inevitably I miss something. Which I have done since October when Arnoud Heijnis and I traded Twitter direct messages about travel converters. In episode #155, I’d talked about having to rummage around for European plug adaptors before my Krakow and Budapest trip, and how I’m always leaving them behind. Arnoud wrote -<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Hi Mark, just caught up on your last two episodes. I also did the travel converter dance until someone recommended the Power Bagel. It\'s so small and comes in handy not only as a travel adapter but also in hotel rooms with not enough power plugs, conference tables with one outlet etc. Iit never leaves my bag so thought I\'d share.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>A very belated thanks, Arnoud! Clicking through the link that Arnoud sent, the Power Bagel is a compact circular power strip of universal plugs and a couple of USB ports. They say that the circular design keeps large power adapters, like a Macbook power supply, from blocking outlets like they do on straight power strips. And then in the center hole, they store a universal plug adapter so you can plug the Power Bagel in most international outlets. Cool design and Arnoud vouches for it. Clicking around the web site, the company MOGICS seems to be a 3-person design company based in Singapore. They got started a few years back on Kickstarter and are in the middle of a new campaign for an upgraded version of the Power Bagel, called, of course, the Super Bagel that upgrades the plug adapter and adds a on-trend USB-C port. Kickstarter says the campaign ends on Feb 25th. I’ll include a <a href=\"http://kck.st/354ozBx\">link</a> in the show notes for anyone interested.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Kickstarter seems to be the place for these things. I sent Arnoud a link to a travel adapter campaign that I joined. The Passport Go is a more traditional travel adapter -- a big cube that will plug into most international outlets and has 3 USB-A and 1 USB-C plugs and one universal plug receptacle. I used it on my Baltics trip. For personal travel, most of my power needs seem to now be driven by USB cords rather than plugs -- my iPhone did a rapid charge off the USB-C port, my tablet and headphones off the USB-A ports and since I don’t have enough hair to justify a blow dryer or curling iron, I never used the plug receptacle. Indeed, if I’d brought my Macbook Air, I could’ve powered that up off the USB-C port rather than bringing its power adapter. I’ll include a link to <a href=\"https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/zendure/passport-go-worlds-first-travel-adapter-w-gan-technology\"><em>their</em> Kickstarter page</a>.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/10/14/podcast-156-airport-satisfaction-escooters-smaller-luggage/\">episode #156,</a> I talked about how I really liked electric scooters, using them to run around in Chicago and Charlottesville and DC, and down here in Phoenix. Whereas Chicago wrapped up their e-scooter pilot in October -- which made sense; I don’t think those scooters would do well in the snow -- Phoenix seemed the perfect place with perfect weather -- no snow, not a lot of rain. And they seemed to have nailed one of the main problems with e-scooters -- people leaving them lying everywhere, especially in the middle of sidewalks. In downtown Phoenix, you have to park them in designated areas, typically near sidewalk corners, inside a painted box. So it surprised me when I started coming down here in December that I saw only 2 scooter companies -- Lime (which is partnered with Uber) and Spin (which is owned by the car company Ford). But then, a couple of weeks ago, Lime announced that they were pulling out -- that they couldn’t make money in Phoenix -- and a day or so later, all their scooters were gone. I don’t know what the right balance between scooter availability and public right-of-way is, but I hope Chicago and Phoenix and other cities can figure it out. This whole micro-mobility space -- bike shares, e-scooters -- is an important part of the urban transit mix. And, when the weather’s nice, they’re fun too!</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>In that <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/10/14/podcast-156-airport-satisfaction-escooters-smaller-luggage/\">same episode</a>, I talked about buying a smaller bag, a <a href=\"https://amzn.to/32lIURe\">TravelPro Maxlite 5 international carry-on size</a>, to meet the smaller carry-on size and weight requirements of AirBaltic, which Andrew and I would be using to hop between Riga, Tallinn, and Helsinki on our Baltics beer and sauna tour. I said back then that I didn’t want to spend a lot of money on it because I’d only be using it for this Baltics trip and maybe some short couple-of-day trips, that my big Victorinox 22-incher would remain my primary bag. But as it turns out, I’ve been using the smaller TravelPro for these 4-day/3-night trips to Phoenix. Now, with temperatures in 70’s, I’m not having to bring heavy, thick clothes with me, but still, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by what I can pack into that smaller TravelPro. But, I think I’ll be back to the Victorinox for next week’s trip -- I’m vectoring through Durango, CO for a ski weekend on the way home. Little colder, little more clothing; I think I’ll need all the space I can get. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music -- Velvet Green of Mystery (Instrumental) by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/48114 Ft: Kthugha, Jeris, Martijn de Boer  </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong> </strong> <strong>Planning the Trip of a Lifetime</strong> </h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>We’ve talked on past episodes about trip planning -- using guidebooks, social media, Google algorithms, shooting the gaps between bipolar TripAdvisor reviews, casting runes, consulting tarot cards,... And all that for a week’s vacation, maybe two. What about a 9-week vacation, a paid sabbatical that you’ve worked and waited 7 years for? Well, that’s the extreme travel planning that long-time TravelCommons listener and even longer time friend Allan Marko and his wife Chris Chufo faced last year. And with January being a big travel planning month, I asked Allan to talk to us about how he and Chris planned for a trip of a lifetime.<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Allan. Thanks for joining us. It’s interesting that we’re having this conversation and this is the January episode because a lot of folks in January start to think start to make plans.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Allan: Yeah, it was a year ago. We left two days after Christmas, so we were gone from December 27th to February 27th, 2019. I\'m getting daily reminders from Facebook.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: So give us a little bit of background on the trip. It was a sabbatical. How long was it? What were some of your thoughts on it?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Allan: Well, her company allows, after seven years of employment, you could take a chunk of time off. In the case of her company, you\'re allowed to take a number of weeks off. And if you take it at a certain time of year, the Christmas holidays, you could get an extra week and you can clamp on two weeks of vacation. So that would give us a total of nine weeks, which was a very attractive option to take that much time off in one chunk, never having done anything longer than a three-week vacation.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Nine weeks; trip of a lifetime. There’re two sides of that one is Wow, that\'s pretty exciting: The other side of that is – Wow, what am I going to do? And how do I start to wrap my head around it?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Allan: It\'s like it\'s exciting to think about it first. Then it\'s kind of daunting to think about. It\'s kind of like -- it\'s this huge thing to plan. It\'s a mountain to climb. It\'s just almost overwhelming. When you start thinking about all the details that you\'re gonna have to figure out.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: So, unpack that. How did you start to climb that mountain?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Allan: We decided that we really wanted to do one big chunk of time like you said. Trip of a lifetime is a really good way to put it, because that\'s how we were thinking about it. We\'re also thinking about let\'s go someplace we haven\'t been before. We wanted to do something that would be more difficult to do when we\'re older, when we\'re retired, and we like warm weather vacations. So, knowing we had to take it during the holiday time, to get the advantage of those extra weeks. We decided that it\'s kind of naturally pointing towards Southeast Asia for us.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: So at least that sort of narrowed it down to a quarter of the globe. Right?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Allan: Yeah, it\'s also like, where could we go for that much time? Right? And so you\'ve got a lace a few destinations together, and through our planning, it kind of even made more sense to go through adjacent countries in Southeast Asia.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: So now we\'ve got it. We\'ve gone from a complete blank slate to at least an area. So after you\'ve got it narrowed down to an area to Southeast Asia, what was your what was your next thought process? So how did you then begin to piece the details together?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Allan: We definitely had a hit list of countries who wanted to visit. We knew we wanted to go to Vietnam. We knew we wanted to spend some time on the beaches in Thailand and speaking with some good friends of ours who have traveled extensively and lived for many years at a time in that part of the world. We had a few meetings with them where we did some brainstorming. Also, in part of my research, I found itinerary. I mean, there\'s a ton of information available online. I kept coming back to reference to banana pancake route that a lot of Backpackers took. And it\'s kind of this classic route through Vietnam and Cambodia, Laos and Thailand.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: So how did like banana pancake route, is that just Is that just the shape of the route? Or it was there. Is there a pancake house somewhere that like?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Allan: I think I looked that up originally, and I can\'t remember why it has that name, but it\'s quite interesting. I basically took that and modified it to our further discussions with our friends and between Chris and I. Some things we weren\'t really interested in. We didn\'t have enough time to do the complete routing. There were certain things I didn\'t want to do, like spending several days getting from Siem Reap in Cambodia into northern Thailand. I didn’t want to take bus travel. It was pretty primitive routing. So, there are certain things we opted to fly rather take a bus. Things like that like; a normal backpacker would take it. We\'re gonna be adult backpackers. Wanted a little bit higher level of comfort.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: There is a difference between your twenties and your fifties from a travel standpoint.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Allan: Although we wanted to travel with everything on our backs. We actually carried 40-liter backpacks on our back and 20-liter backpacks carried on the front.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: How did that work for you guys?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Allan: It was great. It was hard to get used to at first, but it\'s very efficient when you\'re traveling. Part of that is you can carry everything on when we were taking flight. It just gives you a lot of freedom. And you\'re kind of in control of your own destiny. So, you don\'t have to deal with lost luggage kind of thing, which is a major concern when you\'re that far away from home, losing everything.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: I think if you\'re doing point-to-point travel, that also could be a challenge. Because even if you lose something, somebody finds it, getting it caught up to you can be a challenge.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Allan: Right. As we were packing, when we were leaving the US, I started thinking about the luggage tags. We had luggage tags on our bags, of course, but we also had them inside the bags, and I start thinking -- it\'s not gonna help to have my home address on that, and my home phone number, because if it gets lost somewhere in Southeast Asia, they\'re not gonna be able to get a hold of me. So, I printed out our first set of tags with our hotel address and the phone number of the hotel on their email address. and my email address. So, as we progressed along the way, we had kind of this ritual at breakfast the morning we were leaving. We would redo our luggage tags with the information of the destination we were going to that day, so if it got lost somehow in transit, it knew where to find out, right? They knew where to find us. Think about the old steamer trunks that were on ocean liners. They always had the destination, not the home address.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: That\'s interesting. That\'s a good insight. Two questions... Were there some things you packed that, in hindsight, you didn\'t need? And then the flip side of that, were there a couple of things that you said, “Wow, I really wish I had packed that.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Allan: When you\'re only bringing that much stuff, which isn\'t that much for eight weeks, you\'ve got to think through a few things. You\'ve got to justify everything that you put in that pack we knew in advance. We\'re gonna be going to a cold weather location in Hanoi that time of year. It could be in the 40’s-low 50’s and we ended up bringing some light down jackets and base layers that we typically used for skiing, things like that. Never having been to Hanoi before, once we got there, you can literally buy any of that stuff on the streets for $5. It would have been something where you just buy it there and leave it there. But we have spent considerably more money on that, or we brought some of our ski base layers with us that took up valuable space when we didn\'t need to do that.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Flip side of that. Was there something that you didn\'t have that you said, “Damn, I wish I had that” <em>and</em> that you couldn\'t buy anywhere.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Allan: Right. We can\'t buy your way out of the jam. We have never said that. I don\'t remember saying that during the trip, that we ever wished we had something that we didn\'t have. I got to tell you, there was a lot of thought put into the packing. Multiple use, whether it be pants or shirts, you\'ve got to make sure almost everything is compatible with everything else. So you kind of keep it to a limited color range. A lot of black, you know, that kind of thing.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: I\'m a big fan of black.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Allan: You know, it works.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Goes with everything and it doesn\'t show stains.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Allan: And a lot of wool clothing. The 72-hour wool T shirts. We were going to be in very, very hot, humid climates for most of the trip. And we brought a lot of things that we could wash in our hotel. But also, when you get to Southeast Asia, hotel laundry is very inexpensive. So there were a couple of times where we would just send out our entire backpack. It was literally like US$5 to get it all cleaned.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: I had that same experience when we went thio. We went to Vietnam. We went in July. It was just, like, hugely hot. We did exactly the same thing. It was like, you know, let\'s ship all this stuff out. We took it across the street. It was probably about US$3-5. Everything came back amazingly clean, but amazingly stiff. Like they had just beat the hell out of it.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Allan: Yes, we’d be in Thailand on island after we just sent our laundry and you\'re driving down the street. And there\'s some garage where you see three industrial washers and all these clothes hanging on a line. It\'s like, I wonder if that’s our stuff.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: You didn\'t recognize your underwear or anything hanging. I guess that\'s a good thing.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Allan: You\'re going away for eight weeks. You certainly can\'t bring that many pairs of underwear. You know you\'re gonna be doing laundry in the hotel room sink, and you\'ve got a plan accordingly.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: When you are planning this, you know where you\'re gonna want to go. You said, “OK, I\'ve got a set of things and places I want to see. I\'ve got some sort of structure, some sort of sequence that other folks have done, so it sort of makes sense.” So the next step, then, is how much travel did you book ahead of time versus how much was just sort of <em>ad hoc</em>; that you sorta let flow.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Allan: We thought about this a lot before we left. And deliberately, we decided we wanted to have our travel booked for our outbound and inbound flights. For the beginning and the end of the trip, I wanted to use miles for business class seats. But in between, we decided we just wanted to keep some flexibility to the trip and book as we went. And that, as being people that are really focused on details, it was an interesting challenge for us to let go like that. But it was in the end, it was very liberating to do it that way.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Did that ever catch you any anywhere along the way?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Allan: We talked that through before we left, and we decided that might be the price we pay to keep flexibility. You know, there were plenty of places to stay. There was one accommodation in Thailand where we actually booked the last room that was available. But it did work to our advantage a few times, not having booked in advance because as, an example, when we were on a cruise in Halong Bay in Vietnam, our next destination was gonna be the Central Coast. And some folks that we were traveling with on the same cruise, we were chatting them up, and they told us that they had just come from that area and there were just torrential rainstorms. And we looked at the weather. It was gonna be the same way for a week or so we decided to just avoid that part of the country. And we just flew directly to Ho Chin Minh City instead. So there were a couple of things like that, where our initial thoughts on itinerary, we decided to reroute.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: That makes sense.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Allan: And so then we had our routing loosely established. We would spend a night every few days doing our advanced booking. So I always try to stay two steps ahead, about a week in advance. Sometimes your first choice accommodation would open up. We were just very loose that way. We\'re covering a lot of ground, and one of the major things realized as we were going is, even though we had 8 weeks, it was still a limited time to see what we wanted to see. So I determined that we didn\'t want to spend more than half a day transiting, if at all possible, between destinations. So, like I was saying earlier, instead of taking a 2-day bus ride where we would be in the middle of nowhere, we would just fly that and gain some time given the fact that in Southeast Asia, flights are very inexpensive and there are lots of flights going everywhere.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Was there a certain airline that you tended to use there? Was there one or did you just tend to use the national carriers?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Allan: I would do reviews of the national carriers and their safety records and things like that. The beginning of the trip, I was trying to use Vietnam Airlines. They have a fairly decent record, and they covered the first couple of countries we were in. When we got into Thailand, Thai was easy enough to use and they are Star Alliance. I\'ve got a lot of United miles, so I’d stay on that wherever possible. And also the type of plane they were flying. I didn\'t want to take a lot of regional jets if we could avoid doing that.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: That probably makes it easier from a carry-on standpoint.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Allan: Yeah, exactly</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Any visa issues that you had hopping between countries or did you line those all up before you left?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Allan: I did a lot of research on visas, and we had to get our visa before we left for Vietnam. We did that here in San Francisco. They give you a lot of options. I also decided to do a 2-entry/exit visa for Vietnam. You know, you never know what\'s gonna happen when you\'re in these countries that far away from home. And I wanted to have a way out if we had to exit into another country for whatever reason, political unrest or who knows what -- typhoon storms, whatever. So I had the availability to go back into Vietnam, which I thought would be fairly easy to get back to the US from should we have to do something like that. It cost a little more, but I thought that was a good insurance policy to have. Most of the visas that we needed we could just obtain upon arrival. Again, I did a lot of research to make sure that was the case.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: How much time do you think you invested in planning?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Allan: We knew we had a deadline as far as we knew what year we had to take the trip. And I knew in advance that I wanted to book our airline reservations for the business class seats approximately a year ahead of time. We were researching this trip for about 18 months. There\'s a lot of research that goes into figuring out how long you spend in each place. And I found that had to be managed as we were going along. I thought about what we wanted to see. We’d talk about how long we wanted to spend in certain places. And there weren\'t a lot of times where we said, “I wish we had an extra day here” because we had done that kind of legwork in advance, and we did the homework. But that comes with the time in the planning.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Well, Allan Marko, thank you very much. Thanks for sharing those stories with us on the TravelCommons podcast. Appreciate it.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Allan: It was fun. Thanks for having me. It was great to take the opportunity, doing research for this podcast to go through my old notes. And again, it was a year ago, and it\'s just bringing back a lot of great memories.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #159</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2010/09/06/video-1-impressions-of-vietnam/\">Link to TravelCommons Vietnam video</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_159.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #159 — Planning the Trip of a Lifetime in Southeast Asia','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-159-planning-the-trip-of-a-lifetime-in-southeast-asia','','','2023-08-28 11:07:01','2023-08-28 16:07:01','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=2626',0,'post','',0),
(2627,1,'2020-01-26 13:34:54','2020-01-26 18:34:54','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/189764_1571139330482_7074048_n.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-2607\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/189764_1571139330482_7074048_n-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a><figcaption>Good End to 2019</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>Skipping the Chicago winter with trips to Phoenix and Sedona, Arizona, and a Christmas morning flight to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. Talk about those trips, my good and bad Hertz experiences, and then gather up odds-‘n’-ends from my travel notebooks to see off 2019 in this New Year\'s Eve episode. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_158.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/736532716&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #158: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois, just back from a bone-thawing trip with the family to Cabo San Lucas, sorta the Land’s End of Mexico’s Baja California peninsula. We booked this trip back in May. Andrew has read on some budget traveler newsletter that Southwest was about to start service to Cabo. So the morning that the flights went on offer, we all went after Southwest’s website and snagged our flights for just over 30,000 points a person. We flew down early Christmas morning, connecting through HOU, and, thinking back to how empty ORD was last year at Thanksgiving, I was stunned that both of our flights were completely full. It seemed that half of our 6:45a flight out of MDW was also walking over to the Cabo gate. Guess that once the kids stop believing in Santa, Christmas morning travel is fair game.</li><li>Flying back out of Cabo last Sunday, I walk up to the gate and don’t see the usual Southwest boarding number pylons. It’s just a typical shared gate with the Southwest flight to Hobby at Gate 4A and a Delta flight to maybe Salt Lake at Gate 4B. And no plane, because there’s no jetway. It’s a bus. Southwest’s open seating works because everyone enters the plane in numerical order. Squeezing all the A group and half of the B group onto one bus… this’ll be interesting. It’s a 3-minute bus ride around the corner of the terminal. The doors open; we pour out. A ramp worker is trying to recreate the Southwest boarding process on the tarmac, asking everyone to line up in 3 lines -- pre-boards, A1-30, and A31-60. It kinda works, for the most part… until another ramp worker says “Hey, we’re boarding through the back door, too” just as the second bus opens its doors. Then it just devolves into a free-for-all. I imagine that first ramp worker looking like Kevin Bacon in “Animal House”, flattened by stampeding passengers. I was the first one through the rear door, so I was fine with it, but it does feel like Southwest needs to re-engineer how they board from shared gates.</li><li>I say “bone-thawing,” but it’s not like I was suffering too much from the Chicago December. I’ve been in Phoenix most of the month between Thanksgiving and Christmas, walking around in shirt sleeves in 65 degree weather, topping up my Vitamin D levels while kinda chuckling at the locals hurrying&nbsp; by in their puffy Patagonia parkas. I even extended my stay through one of the weekends -- doing some more of that “bleisure” travel, this time a hiking weekend in the <a href=\"https://www.fs.fed.us/wildflowers/regions/southwestern/RedRockCountry/index.shtml\">Red Rock Country</a> around Sedona, Arizona.&nbsp; An hour or so before picking up a car from Hertz for the weekend, I got an e-mail from the Hertz PHX station manager saying they’d upgraded me as an early birthday present. With equal parts anticipation and trepidation (I remember DFW Hertz “upgrading” me to a Ford F-150 pickup) Irene and I rolled up to spot 43 to find a Mercedes A220 sedan under a “Happy Birthday” sign. OK, now <em>this</em> is an exciting upgrade. Once we fought our way through the Phoenix traffic, the A220 made the 2-hour drive up I-17 a fun run, especially with a 75 mph speed limit. </li><li> Bridge Music -- Earth Soda by septahelix (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial Share-Alike  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/septahelix/34050  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I pushed a <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1206606966031675393/photo/1\">picture of the Hertz car under the Happy Birthday sign</a> to the TravelCommons Instagram Story roll. Steve Frick replied, saying that a friend of his had gotten a Hertz birthday upgrade too, to a Jag. Not to throw any shade, but I definitely think the PHX team did me a bit better with the Benz, but it’s nice of Hertz to give their customers a bit of a birthday surprise. With so many travel providers working hard to squeeze, to optimize, and then to charge for every little thing, getting a birthday present from one of them with a bit of luxury -- and in my case not an insignificant upgrade -- it’s a pleasant throwback to what travel was like when I started business travel coming on 35 years ago.&nbsp;</li><li>But all that love was blown away less than 2 weeks later when the Hertz team in Cabo put me through a 20-minute hard sell on insurance -- $85/day on a $50/day rental -- and then charged me $14/day for something called “Credit Card Care”, all for a beat-up VW Passat with 50,000 hard miles on it. Ugh.</li><li>Steve also hit the TravelCommons website to talk about mileage runs. In the last episode, I said that Mark Skinner’s DC-HKG up-and-back to carry a NASA cosmic ray detector on United’s over-the-pole route was one helluva mileage run. Steve said -<ul><li>I haven’t done a mileage run in years but came real close to losing my Southwest companion pass status for 2020. I had to change a few of my travel website profiles to use my Southwest card over my Hilton American Express card in order to hit it for 2020. It’s always a tough decision do I want 12 points per dollar at Hilton properties or free Southwest flights for my wife</li></ul></li><li>Thanks, Steve. I’ll tweak my travel credit cards now and then to hit some goals, but I hadn’t thought of it as an end-of-year mileage run. But it does make sense, especially with Southwest which counts credit card spend toward Companion Pass. I like that, a credit-card mileage run -- definitely more climate friendly.</li><li>I was talking about my flights to and from Phoenix a couple of weeks ago with one of the guys on the project team, a younger guy, and the look he gave me suggested that I’d hit peak travel nerdery -- at least in his eyes. I was telling him that I fly out to Phoenix on United from ORD because United has an 8am flight out, it’s easier to get a morning coffee at ORD than MDW, I get a free upgrade to Economy Plus which makes it easier to sleep, and because United uses PHX in Terminal 2, the older “slum” terminal that, because it’s separate from the main terminals, makes it easier to get an Uber or Lyft. But then I fly back to Chicago on Southwest because they have more flights back in the afternoon which gives me some flexibility with last-minute meetings, they don’t charge a change fee, they fly out of the newer Terminal 4 in PHX which gives me a much better selection of restaurants and bars than Terminal 2, and it puts me into Chicago-Midway where the wait for an Uber or Lyft is always shorter than at ORD. To me, it was a completely reasonable thought process -- optimizing each leg for the amenities I’d use. I turned to one of the other guys -- a guy who’s been traveling 20-some years -- “Yup, makes perfect sense to me,” he said. The younger guy was just shaking his head; probably muttering “OK Boomer” under his breath. But he’ll learn.</li><li>Back in November, during one of my semi-regular spelunks through Google Analytics, I noticed that <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"the November 2018 episode - #146: Rental Demolition Derby and Traveler Gift Guide (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"http://146\" target=\"_blank\">the November 2018 episode - #146: Rental Demolition Derby and Traveler Gift Guide</a> - was one of the top 5 pages on the TravelCommons website. I couldn’t figure how stories of rental car wrecks would get a lot of Google hits, so it must be the gift guide. Which suggested that maybe I should update it for 2019, but more as a blog post this time. I read through a half-dozen or so other gift guides, looking for some ideas I could steal, but they got pretty repetitious pretty quick -- pushing Away luggage, Huzi infinity pillows, and Aesop travel kits, which suggests to a cynical mind that these companies must’ve been splashing a lot of samples around the blog-o-sphere. And maybe didn’t age all that well after the Verge published an <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"exposé on Away’s toxic work culture (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/5/20995453/away-luggage-ceo-steph-korey-toxic-work-environment-travel-inclusion\" target=\"_blank\">exposé on Away’s toxic work culture</a>. But anyway, I wanted something a bit different, and on one of my flights got thinking about a chat I’d had with a friend a while back. She was looking for gift ideas for her daughter who, a couple of years out of college, was starting a new job with a lot more business travel. Replaying that chat in my head, and thinking about the younger guy on my project team, I started going through my travel kit -- rummaging through my messenger bag and then cycling through my suitcase -- mentally, though; not enough space to physically pull it down from the overhead and open it up; and that would’ve looked a bit weird. I built <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"a list of the things I really use on my trips (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/12/11/best-gift-ideas-for-a-new-traveler/\" target=\"_blank\">a list of the things I really use on my trips</a>, and that I miss when I forget to bring them along. Then I winnowed it down to 10 -- because “Top 10” is a key search term -- and there you have it. If you haven’t looked at it yet, give it a read and leave a comment with your suggestions.</li><li>Number 2 on <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/12/11/best-gift-ideas-for-a-new-traveler/\">my list of ideas</a>, after a 20-inch black roller bag, is picking up the application fee for TSA Global Entry for your new traveler. For $100, or for free with many airline and hotel reward credit cards, you can gift them with 5 years of hassle reduction with PreCheck for domestic travel and a fast path through Customs when they travel internationally. Coming back from Cabo, we connected again through Houston-Hobby and so had to clear Immigration and Customs there. It was my first time through Customs there, so it took me a minute to find the Global Entry kiosks. The interface was a bit different from the ORD ones. Instead of asking for my passport and prompting me for the fingerprint pad, it asked me to fit my face inside a red box before taking my picture. The camera didn’t look adjustable, so I squatted down ‘til my face was in the frame and then clicked the Take Photo button. A couple seconds later, the kiosk spit out my receipt and I was off to the exit -- no passport or fingerprint scans, no clicking through questions. Quick, but odd. Some Google searches when I got home told me that I’d hit the new generation of Global Entry kiosks -- Global Entry 2.0 -- that uses facial recognition to match the kiosk picture with my passport and Global Entry application pictures. Given how crappy the kiosk picture looked on the receipt -- and that I hadn’t taken my glasses off -- I’m either really impressed or really concerned about the accuracy of their facial recognition algorithm; I’m not quite sure which.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li> Bridge Music -- Absolutely Clear (ft Jeris &amp; Goldfish) by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/45578 Ft: Jeris, Goldfish  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong> Travel Potpourri for $400, Alex </strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Here it is, the last episode of the year that I’m trying to get out before cracking the Vueve and trying to stay awake until midnight. With the clock ticking, instead of a proper topic, all I can do is gather up some odds-‘n’-ends from my travel notebooks into a Jeopardy-like topic “Travel Potpourri”</li><li>And writing in my travel notebooks is something I like to do. I have a couple: a small one -- a 3½x5½-in or A6 size that fits in my back pocket -- to jot down notes, bullet points; and a larger one that I use as a proper travel journal. For that, I was using a B6 Muji notebook that I picked up in Lisbon 3 years ago. After I filled that one up, I switched to a taller, thinner Japanese traveler-sized notebook because… that’s what I had laying around. I’ve been writing in travel notebooks since I’ve started the podcast -- gotta feed the beast -- usually in public places -- in bars, a lotta bars, while drinking beers, or on planes, a lotta&nbsp; planes, though turbulence can be a problem. And for some reason, I’ve found that this act of writing in public generates a bit of interest, and a chunk of questions. Back in October, on the Finnair flight back from our Baltics tour, I was catching up, writing up my thoughts on our couple of days in Helsinki when the guy a few seats over started asking me what I was writing. He was a younger Finnish guy. He and his girlfriend and a group of 5 or 6 others were connecting through Chicago to Miami for a cruise, and they started their cruise party the minute the drink carts rolled. But he wanted to know what I was writing and why. The what was easy; he wanted to know what I thought of Helsinki; where I’d been, how I liked it. He was intrigued by our Baltic Riga-Tallinn-Helsinki itinerary, in kind of a “that’s weird, but interesting” way. The why I’m not sure made it through translation. It’s not a pure travelogue -- not a “we did this, and then did that”. It’s more about impressions; what I found unique; what caught my eye. Writing it down makes me think about it, and when I go back and read those pages, some 2 or 10 or 20 years later, it reminds me of that place, that time, those experiences.&nbsp;</li><li>And when I talk about travel with folks, when I tell them how often I travel, I’ll often get a story -- in a bar, on a plane, or… while getting my hair cut. The girl who does my hair told me about her trip to Peru with a yoga group. Not the whole trip (I don’t have that much hair), but on their flight back, out of Lima, the plane took off, rotating up, while the flight attendants were still in the aisle doing the final check. It was a bit of mayhem, she said. That had to be one quick taxi out and take-off, I thought, because you’d think those flight attendants would be sprinting to their seats once that plane started rolling down the runway. Which I have seen before, especially when the captain gets a quick release from a ground hold and wants to get airborne before the tower changes their mind. But I’ve never seen them leave the ground with anyone still in the aisle.</li><li>Maybe the pilot was distracted -- a message from the tower, an animal on the runway, a sudden thought crossed his mind. I thought about pilot distraction when walking the <a href=\"https://thehikehouse.com/trails/airport-mesa-trail\">Airport Mesa trail</a> in Sedona earlier this month. The trail name says it all -- it’s a 3½-mile loop around the mesa where Sedona’s general aviation airport is. The hikers aren’t the potential distraction, though. It’s one of Sedona’s famous energy vortexes that’s right next to the airport. The Airport Vortex is, according to<a href=\"https://sedonaverdevalley.natgeotourism.com/content/airport-mesa-vortex/svvc7d222a849df1d7d6\"> one website</a>, “an Upflow area (also called Electric or Masculine) that helps your spirit soar for a higher perspective and/or greater oneness and serenity.” Watching a couple of private jets take off while on our hike, I wondered what would happen if the pilot suddenly achieved greater oneness and serenity while rotating off the top of that mesa. For someone as unenlightened and non-serene as me, that would be one helluva distraction.</li><li>I think for many, maybe close to most frequent travelers, Uber and Lyft have replaced taxis, at least in the US, when not renting a car. So it got my attention when I hit a weird Uber app failure at ORD at the end of October. Coming back from Charlottesville, I light up both Uber and Lyft while getting off the plane to compare wait times and fares (you’d think their surge pricing would be consistent, but it rarely is for me). Uber is a bit better, so I go to book a ride. Except that the Uber app wouldn’t pick up at the domestic terminals, just the separate international terminal, Terminal 5. I check Lyft again; yup, they’ll pick me up at Terminal 2, so I book with them instead. But it’s weird, so I keep checking Uber. I walk out the door to the rideshare pick-up area. There’s nothing but cars with pink Lyft lights; not an Uber decal in sight. An older couple walks up to me -- “Where does Uber pick up?” Normally here, I tell them, but they seem to have deleted it from their app today. It was a good night to be a Lyft driver. I wondered how long it took Uber to notice that they weren’t getting any pick-ups from one of the country’s busiest airports.</li><li>Tonight, though -- New Year’s Eve night -- I’ll be skipping Uber and their after-midnight price surges. I’ll be happy to hang out at home, to skip any travel, and just pop a bottle... or two of Vueve and wish all you TravelCommons’ listeners a Happy New Year and fun and safe travels in 2020.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #158</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_158.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #158 — Travel Potpourri for $400, Alex','','inherit','closed','closed','','2609-revision-v1','','','2020-01-26 13:34:54','2020-01-26 18:34:54','',2609,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/01/26/2609-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2628,1,'2020-01-26 13:35:09','2020-01-26 18:35:09','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/189764_1571139330482_7074048_n.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-2607\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/189764_1571139330482_7074048_n-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a><figcaption>Good End to 2019</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>Skipping the Chicago winter with trips to Phoenix and Sedona, Arizona, and a Christmas morning flight to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. Talk about those trips, my good and bad Hertz experiences, and then gather up odds-‘n’-ends from my travel notebooks to see off 2019 in this New Year\'s Eve episode. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_158.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/736532716&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #158: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois, just back from a bone-thawing trip with the family to Cabo San Lucas, sorta the Land’s End of Mexico’s Baja California peninsula. We booked this trip back in May. Andrew has read on some budget traveler newsletter that Southwest was about to start service to Cabo. So the morning that the flights went on offer, we all went after Southwest’s website and snagged our flights for just over 30,000 points a person. We flew down early Christmas morning, connecting through HOU, and, thinking back to how empty ORD was last year at Thanksgiving, I was stunned that both of our flights were completely full. It seemed that half of our 6:45a flight out of MDW was also walking over to the Cabo gate. Guess that once the kids stop believing in Santa, Christmas morning travel is fair game.</li><li>Flying back out of Cabo last Sunday, I walk up to the gate and don’t see the usual Southwest boarding number pylons. It’s just a typical shared gate with the Southwest flight to Hobby at Gate 4A and a Delta flight to maybe Salt Lake at Gate 4B. And no plane, because there’s no jetway. It’s a bus. Southwest’s open seating works because everyone enters the plane in numerical order. Squeezing all the A group and half of the B group onto one bus… this’ll be interesting. It’s a 3-minute bus ride around the corner of the terminal. The doors open; we pour out. A ramp worker is trying to recreate the Southwest boarding process on the tarmac, asking everyone to line up in 3 lines -- pre-boards, A1-30, and A31-60. It kinda works, for the most part… until another ramp worker says “Hey, we’re boarding through the back door, too” just as the second bus opens its doors. Then it just devolves into a free-for-all. I imagine that first ramp worker looking like Kevin Bacon in “Animal House”, flattened by stampeding passengers. I was the first one through the rear door, so I was fine with it, but it does feel like Southwest needs to re-engineer how they board from shared gates.</li><li>I say “bone-thawing,” but it’s not like I was suffering too much from the Chicago December. I’ve been in Phoenix most of the month between Thanksgiving and Christmas, walking around in shirt sleeves in 65 degree weather, topping up my Vitamin D levels while kinda chuckling at the locals hurrying&nbsp; by in their puffy Patagonia parkas. I even extended my stay through one of the weekends -- doing some more of that “bleisure” travel, this time a hiking weekend in the <a href=\"https://www.fs.fed.us/wildflowers/regions/southwestern/RedRockCountry/index.shtml\">Red Rock Country</a> around Sedona, Arizona.&nbsp; An hour or so before picking up a car from Hertz for the weekend, I got an e-mail from the Hertz PHX station manager saying they’d upgraded me as an early birthday present. With equal parts anticipation and trepidation (I remember DFW Hertz “upgrading” me to a Ford F-150 pickup) Irene and I rolled up to spot 43 to find a Mercedes A220 sedan under a “Happy Birthday” sign. OK, now <em>this</em> is an exciting upgrade. Once we fought our way through the Phoenix traffic, the A220 made the 2-hour drive up I-17 a fun run, especially with a 75 mph speed limit. </li><li> Bridge Music -- Earth Soda by septahelix (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial Share-Alike  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/septahelix/34050  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I pushed a <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1206606966031675393/photo/1\">picture of the Hertz car under the Happy Birthday sign</a> to the TravelCommons Instagram Story roll. Steve Frick replied, saying that a friend of his had gotten a Hertz birthday upgrade too, to a Jag. Not to throw any shade, but I definitely think the PHX team did me a bit better with the Benz, but it’s nice of Hertz to give their customers a bit of a birthday surprise. With so many travel providers working hard to squeeze, to optimize, and then to charge for every little thing, getting a birthday present from one of them with a bit of luxury -- and in my case not an insignificant upgrade -- it’s a pleasant throwback to what travel was like when I started business travel coming on 35 years ago.&nbsp;</li><li>But all that love was blown away less than 2 weeks later when the Hertz team in Cabo put me through a 20-minute hard sell on insurance -- $85/day on a $50/day rental -- and then charged me $14/day for something called “Credit Card Care”, all for a beat-up VW Passat with 50,000 hard miles on it. Ugh.</li><li>Steve also hit the TravelCommons website to talk about mileage runs. In the last episode, I said that Mark Skinner’s DC-HKG up-and-back to carry a NASA cosmic ray detector on United’s over-the-pole route was one helluva mileage run. Steve said -<ul><li>I haven’t done a mileage run in years but came real close to losing my Southwest companion pass status for 2020. I had to change a few of my travel website profiles to use my Southwest card over my Hilton American Express card in order to hit it for 2020. It’s always a tough decision do I want 12 points per dollar at Hilton properties or free Southwest flights for my wife</li></ul></li><li>Thanks, Steve. I’ll tweak my travel credit cards now and then to hit some goals, but I hadn’t thought of it as an end-of-year mileage run. But it does make sense, especially with Southwest which counts credit card spend toward Companion Pass. I like that, a credit-card mileage run -- definitely more climate friendly.</li><li>I was talking about my flights to and from Phoenix a couple of weeks ago with one of the guys on the project team, a younger guy, and the look he gave me suggested that I’d hit peak travel nerdery -- at least in his eyes. I was telling him that I fly out to Phoenix on United from ORD because United has an 8am flight out, it’s easier to get a morning coffee at ORD than MDW, I get a free upgrade to Economy Plus which makes it easier to sleep, and because United uses PHX in Terminal 2, the older “slum” terminal that, because it’s separate from the main terminals, makes it easier to get an Uber or Lyft. But then I fly back to Chicago on Southwest because they have more flights back in the afternoon which gives me some flexibility with last-minute meetings, they don’t charge a change fee, they fly out of the newer Terminal 4 in PHX which gives me a much better selection of restaurants and bars than Terminal 2, and it puts me into Chicago-Midway where the wait for an Uber or Lyft is always shorter than at ORD. To me, it was a completely reasonable thought process -- optimizing each leg for the amenities I’d use. I turned to one of the other guys -- a guy who’s been traveling 20-some years -- “Yup, makes perfect sense to me,” he said. The younger guy was just shaking his head; probably muttering “OK Boomer” under his breath. But he’ll learn.</li><li>Back in November, during one of my semi-regular spelunks through Google Analytics, I noticed that <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"the November 2018 episode - #146: Rental Demolition Derby and Traveler Gift Guide (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"http://146\" target=\"_blank\">the November 2018 episode - #146: Rental Demolition Derby and Traveler Gift Guide</a> - was one of the top 5 pages on the TravelCommons website. I couldn’t figure how stories of rental car wrecks would get a lot of Google hits, so it must be the gift guide. Which suggested that maybe I should update it for 2019, but more as a blog post this time. I read through a half-dozen or so other gift guides, looking for some ideas I could steal, but they got pretty repetitious pretty quick -- pushing Away luggage, Huzi infinity pillows, and Aesop travel kits, which suggests to a cynical mind that these companies must’ve been splashing a lot of samples around the blog-o-sphere. And maybe didn’t age all that well after the Verge published an <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"exposé on Away’s toxic work culture (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/5/20995453/away-luggage-ceo-steph-korey-toxic-work-environment-travel-inclusion\" target=\"_blank\">exposé on Away’s toxic work culture</a>. But anyway, I wanted something a bit different, and on one of my flights got thinking about a chat I’d had with a friend a while back. She was looking for gift ideas for her daughter who, a couple of years out of college, was starting a new job with a lot more business travel. Replaying that chat in my head, and thinking about the younger guy on my project team, I started going through my travel kit -- rummaging through my messenger bag and then cycling through my suitcase -- mentally, though; not enough space to physically pull it down from the overhead and open it up; and that would’ve looked a bit weird. I built <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"a list of the things I really use on my trips (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/12/11/best-gift-ideas-for-a-new-traveler/\" target=\"_blank\">a list of the things I really use on my trips</a>, and that I miss when I forget to bring them along. Then I winnowed it down to 10 -- because “Top 10” is a key search term -- and there you have it. If you haven’t looked at it yet, give it a read and leave a comment with your suggestions.</li><li>Number 2 on <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/12/11/best-gift-ideas-for-a-new-traveler/\">my list of ideas</a>, after a 20-inch black roller bag, is picking up the application fee for TSA Global Entry for your new traveler. For $100, or for free with many airline and hotel reward credit cards, you can gift them with 5 years of hassle reduction with PreCheck for domestic travel and a fast path through Customs when they travel internationally. Coming back from Cabo, we connected again through Houston-Hobby and so had to clear Immigration and Customs there. It was my first time through Customs there, so it took me a minute to find the Global Entry kiosks. The interface was a bit different from the ORD ones. Instead of asking for my passport and prompting me for the fingerprint pad, it asked me to fit my face inside a red box before taking my picture. The camera didn’t look adjustable, so I squatted down ‘til my face was in the frame and then clicked the Take Photo button. A couple seconds later, the kiosk spit out my receipt and I was off to the exit -- no passport or fingerprint scans, no clicking through questions. Quick, but odd. Some Google searches when I got home told me that I’d hit the new generation of Global Entry kiosks -- Global Entry 2.0 -- that uses facial recognition to match the kiosk picture with my passport and Global Entry application pictures. Given how crappy the kiosk picture looked on the receipt -- and that I hadn’t taken my glasses off -- I’m either really impressed or really concerned about the accuracy of their facial recognition algorithm; I’m not quite sure which.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li> Bridge Music -- Absolutely Clear (ft Jeris &amp; Goldfish) by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/45578 Ft: Jeris, Goldfish  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong> Travel Potpourri for $400, Alex </strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Here it is, the last episode of the year that I’m trying to get out before cracking the Vueve and trying to stay awake until midnight. With the clock ticking, instead of a proper topic, all I can do is gather up some odds-‘n’-ends from my travel notebooks into a Jeopardy-like topic “Travel Potpourri”</li><li>And writing in my travel notebooks is something I like to do. I have a couple: a small one -- a 3½x5½-in or A6 size that fits in my back pocket -- to jot down notes, bullet points; and a larger one that I use as a proper travel journal. For that, I was using a B6 Muji notebook that I picked up in Lisbon 3 years ago. After I filled that one up, I switched to a taller, thinner Japanese traveler-sized notebook because… that’s what I had laying around. I’ve been writing in travel notebooks since I’ve started the podcast -- gotta feed the beast -- usually in public places -- in bars, a lotta bars, while drinking beers, or on planes, a lotta&nbsp; planes, though turbulence can be a problem. And for some reason, I’ve found that this act of writing in public generates a bit of interest, and a chunk of questions. Back in October, on the Finnair flight back from our Baltics tour, I was catching up, writing up my thoughts on our couple of days in Helsinki when the guy a few seats over started asking me what I was writing. He was a younger Finnish guy. He and his girlfriend and a group of 5 or 6 others were connecting through Chicago to Miami for a cruise, and they started their cruise party the minute the drink carts rolled. But he wanted to know what I was writing and why. The what was easy; he wanted to know what I thought of Helsinki; where I’d been, how I liked it. He was intrigued by our Baltic Riga-Tallinn-Helsinki itinerary, in kind of a “that’s weird, but interesting” way. The why I’m not sure made it through translation. It’s not a pure travelogue -- not a “we did this, and then did that”. It’s more about impressions; what I found unique; what caught my eye. Writing it down makes me think about it, and when I go back and read those pages, some 2 or 10 or 20 years later, it reminds me of that place, that time, those experiences.&nbsp;</li><li>And when I talk about travel with folks, when I tell them how often I travel, I’ll often get a story -- in a bar, on a plane, or… while getting my hair cut. The girl who does my hair told me about her trip to Peru with a yoga group. Not the whole trip (I don’t have that much hair), but on their flight back, out of Lima, the plane took off, rotating up, while the flight attendants were still in the aisle doing the final check. It was a bit of mayhem, she said. That had to be one quick taxi out and take-off, I thought, because you’d think those flight attendants would be sprinting to their seats once that plane started rolling down the runway. Which I have seen before, especially when the captain gets a quick release from a ground hold and wants to get airborne before the tower changes their mind. But I’ve never seen them leave the ground with anyone still in the aisle.</li><li>Maybe the pilot was distracted -- a message from the tower, an animal on the runway, a sudden thought crossed his mind. I thought about pilot distraction when walking the <a href=\"https://thehikehouse.com/trails/airport-mesa-trail\">Airport Mesa trail</a> in Sedona earlier this month. The trail name says it all -- it’s a 3½-mile loop around the mesa where Sedona’s general aviation airport is. The hikers aren’t the potential distraction, though. It’s one of Sedona’s famous energy vortexes that’s right next to the airport. The Airport Vortex is, according to<a href=\"https://sedonaverdevalley.natgeotourism.com/content/airport-mesa-vortex/svvc7d222a849df1d7d6\"> one website</a>, “an Upflow area (also called Electric or Masculine) that helps your spirit soar for a higher perspective and/or greater oneness and serenity.” Watching a couple of private jets take off while on our hike, I wondered what would happen if the pilot suddenly achieved greater oneness and serenity while rotating off the top of that mesa. For someone as unenlightened and non-serene as me, that would be one helluva distraction.</li><li>I think for many, maybe close to most frequent travelers, Uber and Lyft have replaced taxis, at least in the US, when not renting a car. So it got my attention when I hit a weird Uber app failure at ORD at the end of October. Coming back from Charlottesville, I light up both Uber and Lyft while getting off the plane to compare wait times and fares (you’d think their surge pricing would be consistent, but it rarely is for me). Uber is a bit better, so I go to book a ride. Except that the Uber app wouldn’t pick up at the domestic terminals, just the separate international terminal, Terminal 5. I check Lyft again; yup, they’ll pick me up at Terminal 2, so I book with them instead. But it’s weird, so I keep checking Uber. I walk out the door to the rideshare pick-up area. There’s nothing but cars with pink Lyft lights; not an Uber decal in sight. An older couple walks up to me -- “Where does Uber pick up?” Normally here, I tell them, but they seem to have deleted it from their app today. It was a good night to be a Lyft driver. I wondered how long it took Uber to notice that they weren’t getting any pick-ups from one of the country’s busiest airports.</li><li>Tonight, though -- New Year’s Eve night -- I’ll be skipping Uber and their after-midnight price surges. I’ll be happy to hang out at home, to skip any travel, and just pop a bottle... or two of Vueve and wish all you TravelCommons’ listeners a Happy New Year and fun and safe travels in 2020.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #158</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_158.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #158 — Travel Potpourri for $400, Alex','','inherit','closed','closed','','2609-revision-v1','','','2020-01-26 13:35:09','2020-01-26 18:35:09','',2609,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/01/26/2609-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2629,1,'2020-01-26 13:42:52','2020-01-26 18:42:52','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/189764_1571139330482_7074048_n.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-2607\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/189764_1571139330482_7074048_n-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\n<figcaption>Good End to 2019</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p>Skipping the Chicago winter with trips to Phoenix and Sedona, Arizona, and a Christmas morning flight to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. Talk about those trips, my good and bad Hertz experiences, and then gather up odds-‘n’-ends from my travel notebooks to see off 2019 in this New Year\'s Eve episode. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_159.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/736532716&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #159: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois having finished 3 weeks of traveling down to Phoenix with one more to go. It’s been a mild winter -- for Chicago -- especially when compared to last winter, which means it’s been in the 20’s and 30’s as opposed to -23 as it was one morning last January. But even with a mild winter, I still appreciate the 70 degree days in Phoenix.</li><li> It’s a 4-hr flight between Chicago and Phoenix. I normally enjoy that amount of “unplugged” time to just read, listen to music, listen to podcasts. But a couple of weeks ago, I tweaked my back during a workout -- not a big thing, I’ve done it many times before. But this time, the pain didn’t go away, it’s hung around on my left side, moving from back to hip to thigh, making it very uncomfortable to sit for long periods of time -- like 4 hrs. Which has made me notice how long US carriers keep the “Fasten Seatbelt” sign on -- like, forever. By the time that seatbelt sign finally goes off, my back is screaming -- and the person next to me in the middle seat is pretty annoyed at my constant shifting. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/06/16/podcast-152-overwhelming-travel-new-old-restaurant-trends/\">episode #152</a>, I talked about Southwest flights between Chicago and Nashville keeping the seatbelt sign on the entire hour-and-20-minutes. It hasn’t been that bad, but it’s easily been 45 minutes. And it isn’t just Southwest; United is doing the same thing. Quite a difference from, say, when Andrew and I flew Air Baltic back in October. 10,000 ft and “bing” that seat belt sign would go off, and we’d still be climbing. It doesn’t need to turn off that fast, but there’s gotta be a happy medium there somewhere. </li><li>With the mild winter and a little bit of luck, my flights to and from Phoenix have been pretty dependable -- except for this week. On Monday, I started getting delay notices for my United 7:40pm flight right after lunch. United was doing their typical rolling delay exercise -- it’s a 30 minutes; no, really an hour; no, we’re leaving at 9pm; just kidding, it’s really 9:40. I was OK with the 30 and 60-minute delays, but then when I get two more delays in a 40-minute span -- now, something’s up. I call United. I get the Premier desk, which the guy tells me is in Chicago. I tell him the story -- rolling delays have now gotten to 2 hrs; I don’t trust that this flight is going off, and I need to get to PHX tonight. The guy says, “Yup, I got it. Makes sense.” He tries to find me routings through LAX and SFO, but the connections don’t work. So he cancels and refunds my ticket -- no hassle, no questions, no change fee. I love this guy. I pivot to Southwest and American, which both have 8:40 flights. I look at American’s seat map -- nothing but middle seats. That’s just not going to work with my back, so it’s over to Southwest. I’m A-List, so I know with their open seating I’ll get an aisle seat. (Exhale) Haven’t done that dance in a while, so was a bit out of shape. But with one more trip to PHX left, I’m not looking to get back into that shape.</li><li>Bridge Music --  <em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/hisboyelroy/430\" target=\"_blank\">Revolve</a> mix</em> by cinematrik (c) copyright 2005 Licensed under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hisboyelroy/430   </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I pushed a <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1206606966031675393/photo/1\">picture of the Hertz car under the Happy Birthday sign</a> to the TravelCommons Instagram Story roll. Steve Frick replied, saying that a friend of his had gotten a Hertz birthday upgrade too, to a Jag. Not to throw any shade, but I definitely think the PHX team did me a bit better with the Benz, but it’s nice of Hertz to give their customers a bit of a birthday surprise. With so many travel providers working hard to squeeze, to optimize, and then to charge for every little thing, getting a birthday present from one of them with a bit of luxury -- and in my case not an insignificant upgrade -- it’s a pleasant throwback to what travel was like when I started business travel coming on 35 years ago.&nbsp;</li><li>But all that love was blown away less than 2 weeks later when the Hertz team in Cabo put me through a 20-minute hard sell on insurance -- $85/day on a $50/day rental -- and then charged me $14/day for something called “Credit Card Care”, all for a beat-up VW Passat with 50,000 hard miles on it. Ugh.</li><li>Steve also hit the TravelCommons website to talk about mileage runs. In the last episode, I said that Mark Skinner’s DC-HKG up-and-back to carry a NASA cosmic ray detector on United’s over-the-pole route was one helluva mileage run. Steve said -<ul><li>I haven’t done a mileage run in years but came real close to losing my Southwest companion pass status for 2020. I had to change a few of my travel website profiles to use my Southwest card over my Hilton American Express card in order to hit it for 2020. It’s always a tough decision do I want 12 points per dollar at Hilton properties or free Southwest flights for my wife</li></ul></li><li>Thanks, Steve. I’ll tweak my travel credit cards now and then to hit some goals, but I hadn’t thought of it as an end-of-year mileage run. But it does make sense, especially with Southwest which counts credit card spend toward Companion Pass. I like that, a credit-card mileage run -- definitely more climate friendly.</li><li>I was talking about my flights to and from Phoenix a couple of weeks ago with one of the guys on the project team, a younger guy, and the look he gave me suggested that I’d hit peak travel nerdery -- at least in his eyes. I was telling him that I fly out to Phoenix on United from ORD because United has an 8am flight out, it’s easier to get a morning coffee at ORD than MDW, I get a free upgrade to Economy Plus which makes it easier to sleep, and because United uses PHX in Terminal 2, the older “slum” terminal that, because it’s separate from the main terminals, makes it easier to get an Uber or Lyft. But then I fly back to Chicago on Southwest because they have more flights back in the afternoon which gives me some flexibility with last-minute meetings, they don’t charge a change fee, they fly out of the newer Terminal 4 in PHX which gives me a much better selection of restaurants and bars than Terminal 2, and it puts me into Chicago-Midway where the wait for an Uber or Lyft is always shorter than at ORD. To me, it was a completely reasonable thought process -- optimizing each leg for the amenities I’d use. I turned to one of the other guys -- a guy who’s been traveling 20-some years -- “Yup, makes perfect sense to me,” he said. The younger guy was just shaking his head; probably muttering “OK Boomer” under his breath. But he’ll learn.</li><li>Back in November, during one of my semi-regular spelunks through Google Analytics, I noticed that <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"the November 2018 episode - #146: Rental Demolition Derby and Traveler Gift Guide (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"http://146\" target=\"_blank\">the November 2018 episode - #146: Rental Demolition Derby and Traveler Gift Guide</a> - was one of the top 5 pages on the TravelCommons website. I couldn’t figure how stories of rental car wrecks would get a lot of Google hits, so it must be the gift guide. Which suggested that maybe I should update it for 2019, but more as a blog post this time. I read through a half-dozen or so other gift guides, looking for some ideas I could steal, but they got pretty repetitious pretty quick -- pushing Away luggage, Huzi infinity pillows, and Aesop travel kits, which suggests to a cynical mind that these companies must’ve been splashing a lot of samples around the blog-o-sphere. And maybe didn’t age all that well after the Verge published an <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"exposé on Away’s toxic work culture (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/5/20995453/away-luggage-ceo-steph-korey-toxic-work-environment-travel-inclusion\" target=\"_blank\">exposé on Away’s toxic work culture</a>. But anyway, I wanted something a bit different, and on one of my flights got thinking about a chat I’d had with a friend a while back. She was looking for gift ideas for her daughter who, a couple of years out of college, was starting a new job with a lot more business travel. Replaying that chat in my head, and thinking about the younger guy on my project team, I started going through my travel kit -- rummaging through my messenger bag and then cycling through my suitcase -- mentally, though; not enough space to physically pull it down from the overhead and open it up; and that would’ve looked a bit weird. I built <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"a list of the things I really use on my trips (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/12/11/best-gift-ideas-for-a-new-traveler/\" target=\"_blank\">a list of the things I really use on my trips</a>, and that I miss when I forget to bring them along. Then I winnowed it down to 10 -- because “Top 10” is a key search term -- and there you have it. If you haven’t looked at it yet, give it a read and leave a comment with your suggestions.</li><li>Number 2 on <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/12/11/best-gift-ideas-for-a-new-traveler/\">my list of ideas</a>, after a 20-inch black roller bag, is picking up the application fee for TSA Global Entry for your new traveler. For $100, or for free with many airline and hotel reward credit cards, you can gift them with 5 years of hassle reduction with PreCheck for domestic travel and a fast path through Customs when they travel internationally. Coming back from Cabo, we connected again through Houston-Hobby and so had to clear Immigration and Customs there. It was my first time through Customs there, so it took me a minute to find the Global Entry kiosks. The interface was a bit different from the ORD ones. Instead of asking for my passport and prompting me for the fingerprint pad, it asked me to fit my face inside a red box before taking my picture. The camera didn’t look adjustable, so I squatted down ‘til my face was in the frame and then clicked the Take Photo button. A couple seconds later, the kiosk spit out my receipt and I was off to the exit -- no passport or fingerprint scans, no clicking through questions. Quick, but odd. Some Google searches when I got home told me that I’d hit the new generation of Global Entry kiosks -- Global Entry 2.0 -- that uses facial recognition to match the kiosk picture with my passport and Global Entry application pictures. Given how crappy the kiosk picture looked on the receipt -- and that I hadn’t taken my glasses off -- I’m either really impressed or really concerned about the accuracy of their facial recognition algorithm; I’m not quite sure which.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li> Bridge Music -- Absolutely Clear (ft Jeris &amp; Goldfish) by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/45578 Ft: Jeris, Goldfish  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong> Travel Potpourri for $400, Alex </strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Here it is, the last episode of the year that I’m trying to get out before cracking the Vueve and trying to stay awake until midnight. With the clock ticking, instead of a proper topic, all I can do is gather up some odds-‘n’-ends from my travel notebooks into a Jeopardy-like topic “Travel Potpourri”</li><li>And writing in my travel notebooks is something I like to do. I have a couple: a small one -- a 3½x5½-in or A6 size that fits in my back pocket -- to jot down notes, bullet points; and a larger one that I use as a proper travel journal. For that, I was using a B6 Muji notebook that I picked up in Lisbon 3 years ago. After I filled that one up, I switched to a taller, thinner Japanese traveler-sized notebook because… that’s what I had laying around. I’ve been writing in travel notebooks since I’ve started the podcast -- gotta feed the beast -- usually in public places -- in bars, a lotta bars, while drinking beers, or on planes, a lotta&nbsp; planes, though turbulence can be a problem. And for some reason, I’ve found that this act of writing in public generates a bit of interest, and a chunk of questions. Back in October, on the Finnair flight back from our Baltics tour, I was catching up, writing up my thoughts on our couple of days in Helsinki when the guy a few seats over started asking me what I was writing. He was a younger Finnish guy. He and his girlfriend and a group of 5 or 6 others were connecting through Chicago to Miami for a cruise, and they started their cruise party the minute the drink carts rolled. But he wanted to know what I was writing and why. The what was easy; he wanted to know what I thought of Helsinki; where I’d been, how I liked it. He was intrigued by our Baltic Riga-Tallinn-Helsinki itinerary, in kind of a “that’s weird, but interesting” way. The why I’m not sure made it through translation. It’s not a pure travelogue -- not a “we did this, and then did that”. It’s more about impressions; what I found unique; what caught my eye. Writing it down makes me think about it, and when I go back and read those pages, some 2 or 10 or 20 years later, it reminds me of that place, that time, those experiences.&nbsp;</li><li>And when I talk about travel with folks, when I tell them how often I travel, I’ll often get a story -- in a bar, on a plane, or… while getting my hair cut. The girl who does my hair told me about her trip to Peru with a yoga group. Not the whole trip (I don’t have that much hair), but on their flight back, out of Lima, the plane took off, rotating up, while the flight attendants were still in the aisle doing the final check. It was a bit of mayhem, she said. That had to be one quick taxi out and take-off, I thought, because you’d think those flight attendants would be sprinting to their seats once that plane started rolling down the runway. Which I have seen before, especially when the captain gets a quick release from a ground hold and wants to get airborne before the tower changes their mind. But I’ve never seen them leave the ground with anyone still in the aisle.</li><li>Maybe the pilot was distracted -- a message from the tower, an animal on the runway, a sudden thought crossed his mind. I thought about pilot distraction when walking the <a href=\"https://thehikehouse.com/trails/airport-mesa-trail\">Airport Mesa trail</a> in Sedona earlier this month. The trail name says it all -- it’s a 3½-mile loop around the mesa where Sedona’s general aviation airport is. The hikers aren’t the potential distraction, though. It’s one of Sedona’s famous energy vortexes that’s right next to the airport. The Airport Vortex is, according to<a href=\"https://sedonaverdevalley.natgeotourism.com/content/airport-mesa-vortex/svvc7d222a849df1d7d6\"> one website</a>, “an Upflow area (also called Electric or Masculine) that helps your spirit soar for a higher perspective and/or greater oneness and serenity.” Watching a couple of private jets take off while on our hike, I wondered what would happen if the pilot suddenly achieved greater oneness and serenity while rotating off the top of that mesa. For someone as unenlightened and non-serene as me, that would be one helluva distraction.</li><li>I think for many, maybe close to most frequent travelers, Uber and Lyft have replaced taxis, at least in the US, when not renting a car. So it got my attention when I hit a weird Uber app failure at ORD at the end of October. Coming back from Charlottesville, I light up both Uber and Lyft while getting off the plane to compare wait times and fares (you’d think their surge pricing would be consistent, but it rarely is for me). Uber is a bit better, so I go to book a ride. Except that the Uber app wouldn’t pick up at the domestic terminals, just the separate international terminal, Terminal 5. I check Lyft again; yup, they’ll pick me up at Terminal 2, so I book with them instead. But it’s weird, so I keep checking Uber. I walk out the door to the rideshare pick-up area. There’s nothing but cars with pink Lyft lights; not an Uber decal in sight. An older couple walks up to me -- “Where does Uber pick up?” Normally here, I tell them, but they seem to have deleted it from their app today. It was a good night to be a Lyft driver. I wondered how long it took Uber to notice that they weren’t getting any pick-ups from one of the country’s busiest airports.</li><li>Tonight, though -- New Year’s Eve night -- I’ll be skipping Uber and their after-midnight price surges. I’ll be happy to hang out at home, to skip any travel, and just pop a bottle... or two of Vueve and wish all you TravelCommons’ listeners a Happy New Year and fun and safe travels in 2020.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #159</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_159.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #159 — Planning the Trip of a Lifetime in Southeast Asia','','inherit','closed','closed','','2626-revision-v1','','','2020-01-26 13:42:52','2020-01-26 18:42:52','',2626,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/01/26/2626-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2630,1,'2020-01-26 13:45:54','2020-01-26 18:45:54','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/189764_1571139330482_7074048_n.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-2607\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/189764_1571139330482_7074048_n-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\n<figcaption>Good End to 2019</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p>Skipping the Chicago winter with trips to Phoenix and Sedona, Arizona, and a Christmas morning flight to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. Talk about those trips, my good and bad Hertz experiences, and then gather up odds-‘n’-ends from my travel notebooks to see off 2019 in this New Year\'s Eve episode. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_159.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/736532716&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #159: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois having finished 3 weeks of traveling down to Phoenix with one more to go. It’s been a mild winter -- for Chicago -- especially when compared to last winter, which means it’s been in the 20’s and 30’s as opposed to -23 as it was one morning last January. But even with a mild winter, I still appreciate the 70 degree days in Phoenix.</li><li> It’s a 4-hr flight between Chicago and Phoenix. I normally enjoy that amount of “unplugged” time to just read, listen to music, listen to podcasts. But a couple of weeks ago, I tweaked my back during a workout -- not a big thing, I’ve done it many times before. But this time, the pain didn’t go away, it’s hung around on my left side, moving from back to hip to thigh, making it very uncomfortable to sit for long periods of time -- like 4 hrs. Which has made me notice how long US carriers keep the “Fasten Seatbelt” sign on -- like, forever. By the time that seatbelt sign finally goes off, my back is screaming -- and the person next to me in the middle seat is pretty annoyed at my constant shifting. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/06/16/podcast-152-overwhelming-travel-new-old-restaurant-trends/\">episode #152</a>, I talked about Southwest flights between Chicago and Nashville keeping the seatbelt sign on the entire hour-and-20-minutes. It hasn’t been that bad, but it’s easily been 45 minutes. And it isn’t just Southwest; United is doing the same thing. Quite a difference from, say, when Andrew and I flew Air Baltic back in October. 10,000 ft and “bing” that seat belt sign would go off, and we’d still be climbing. It doesn’t need to turn off that fast, but there’s gotta be a happy medium there somewhere. </li><li>With the mild winter and a little bit of luck, my flights to and from Phoenix have been pretty dependable -- except for this week. On Monday, I started getting delay notices for my United 7:40pm flight right after lunch. United was doing their typical rolling delay exercise -- it’s a 30 minutes; no, really an hour; no, we’re leaving at 9pm; just kidding, it’s really 9:40. I was OK with the 30 and 60-minute delays, but then when I get two more delays in a 40-minute span -- now, something’s up. I call United. I get the Premier desk, which the guy tells me is in Chicago. I tell him the story -- rolling delays have now gotten to 2 hrs; I don’t trust that this flight is going off, and I need to get to PHX tonight. The guy says, “Yup, I got it. Makes sense.” He tries to find me routings through LAX and SFO, but the connections don’t work. So he cancels and refunds my ticket -- no hassle, no questions, no change fee. I love this guy. I pivot to Southwest and American, which both have 8:40 flights. I look at American’s seat map -- nothing but middle seats. That’s just not going to work with my back, so it’s over to Southwest. I’m A-List, so I know with their open seating I’ll get an aisle seat. (Exhale) Haven’t done that dance in a while, so was a bit out of shape. But with one more trip to PHX left, I’m not looking to get back into that shape.</li><li>Bridge Music --  <em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/hisboyelroy/430\" target=\"_blank\">Revolve</a> mix</em> by cinematrik (c) copyright 2005 Licensed under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hisboyelroy/430   </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Before writing a podcast, I go through all the interaction channels -- website comments, Facebook comments, Instagram comments, Twitter replies, e-mails, … and inevitably I miss something. Which I have done since October when Arnoud Heijnis and I traded Twitter direct messages about travel converters. In episode #155, I’d talked about having to rummage around for European plug adaptors before my Krakow and Budapest trip, and how I’m always leaving them behind. Arnoud wrote -<ul><li>Hi Mark, just caught up on your last two episodes. I also did the travel converter dance until someone recommended the Power Bagel. It\'s so small and comes in handy not only as a travel adapter but also in hotel rooms with not enough power plugs, conference tables with one outlet etc. Iit never leaves my bag so thought I\'d share.</li></ul></li><li>A very belated thanks, Arnoud! Clicking through the link that Arnoud sent, the Power Bagel is a compact circular power strip of universal plugs and a couple of USB ports. They say that the circular design keeps large power adapters, like a Macbook power supply, from blocking outlets like they do on straight power strips. And then in the center hole, they store a universal plug adapter so you can plug the Power Bagel in most international outlets. Cool design and Arnoud vouches for it. Clicking around the web site, the company MOGICS seems to be a 3-person design company based in Singapore. They got started a few years back on Kickstarter and are in the middle of a new campaign for an upgraded version of the Power Bagel, called, of course, the Super Bagel that upgrades the plug adapter and adds a on-trend USB-C port. Kickstarter says the campaign ends on Feb 25th. I’ll include a <a href=\"http://kck.st/354ozBx\">link</a> in the show notes for anyone interested.</li><li>Kickstarter seems to be the place for these things. I sent Arnoud a link to a travel adapter campaign that I joined. The Passport Go is a more traditional travel adapter -- a big cube that will plug into most international outlets and has 3 USB-A and 1 USB-C plugs and one universal plug receptacle. I used it on my Baltics trip. For personal travel, most of my power needs seem to now be driven by USB cords rather than plugs -- my iPhone did a rapid charge off the USB-C port, my tablet and headphones off the USB-A ports and since I don’t have enough hair to justify a blow dryer or curling iron, I never used the plug receptacle. Indeed, if I’d brought my Macbook Air, I could’ve powered that up off the USB-C port rather than bringing its power adapter. I’ll include a link to <a href=\"https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/zendure/passport-go-worlds-first-travel-adapter-w-gan-technology\"><em>their</em> Kickstarter page</a>.</li><li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/10/14/podcast-156-airport-satisfaction-escooters-smaller-luggage/\">episode #156,</a> I talked about how I really liked electric scooters, using them to run around in Chicago and Charlottesville and DC, and down here in Phoenix. Whereas Chicago wrapped up their e-scooter pilot in October -- which made sense; I don’t think those scooters would do well in the snow -- Phoenix seemed the perfect place with perfect weather -- no snow, not a lot of rain. And they seemed to have nailed one of the main problems with e-scooters -- people leaving them lying everywhere, especially in the middle of sidewalks. In downtown Phoenix, you have to park them in designated areas, typically near sidewalk corners, inside a painted box. So it surprised me when I started coming down here in December that I saw only 2 scooter companies -- Lime (which is partnered with Uber) and Spin (which is owned by the car company Ford). But then, a couple of weeks ago, Lime announced that they were pulling out -- that they couldn’t make money in Phoenix -- and a day or so later, all their scooters were gone. I don’t know what the right balance between scooter availability and public right-of-way is, but I hope Chicago and Phoenix and other cities can figure it out. This whole micro-mobility space -- bike shares, e-scooters -- is an important part of the urban transit mix. And, when the weather’s nice, they’re fun too!</li><li>In that <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/10/14/podcast-156-airport-satisfaction-escooters-smaller-luggage/\">same episode</a>, I talked about buying a smaller bag, a TravelPro Maxlite 5 international carry-on size, to meet the smaller carry-on size and weight requirements of AirBaltic, which Andrew and I would be using to hop between Riga, Tallinn, and Helsinki on our Baltics beer and sauna tour. I said back then that I didn’t want to spend a lot of money on it because I’d only be using it for this Baltics trip and maybe some short couple-of-day trips, that my big Victorinox 22-incher would remain my primary bag. But as it turns out, I’ve been using the smaller TravelPro for these 4-day/3-night trips to Phoenix. Now, with temperatures in 70’s, I’m not having to bring heavy, thick clothes with me, but still, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by what I can pack into that smaller TravelPro. But, I think I’ll be back to the Victorinox for next week’s trip -- I’m vectoring through Durango, CO for a ski weekend on the way home. Little colder, little more clothing; I think I’ll need all the space I can get. </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I pushed a <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1206606966031675393/photo/1\">picture of the Hertz car under the Happy Birthday sign</a> to the TravelCommons Instagram Story roll. Steve Frick replied, saying that a friend of his had gotten a Hertz birthday upgrade too, to a Jag. Not to throw any shade, but I definitely think the PHX team did me a bit better with the Benz, but it’s nice of Hertz to give their customers a bit of a birthday surprise. With so many travel providers working hard to squeeze, to optimize, and then to charge for every little thing, getting a birthday present from one of them with a bit of luxury -- and in my case not an insignificant upgrade -- it’s a pleasant throwback to what travel was like when I started business travel coming on 35 years ago. </li><li>But all that love was blown away less than 2 weeks later when the Hertz team in Cabo put me through a 20-minute hard sell on insurance -- $85/day on a $50/day rental -- and then charged me $14/day for something called “Credit Card Care”, all for a beat-up VW Passat with 50,000 hard miles on it. Ugh.</li><li>Steve also hit the TravelCommons website to talk about mileage runs. In the last episode, I said that Mark Skinner’s DC-HKG up-and-back to carry a NASA cosmic ray detector on United’s over-the-pole route was one helluva mileage run. Steve said -<ul><li>I haven’t done a mileage run in years but came real close to losing my Southwest companion pass status for 2020. I had to change a few of my travel website profiles to use my Southwest card over my Hilton American Express card in order to hit it for 2020. It’s always a tough decision do I want 12 points per dollar at Hilton properties or free Southwest flights for my wife</li></ul></li><li>Thanks, Steve. I’ll tweak my travel credit cards now and then to hit some goals, but I hadn’t thought of it as an end-of-year mileage run. But it does make sense, especially with Southwest which counts credit card spend toward Companion Pass. I like that, a credit-card mileage run -- definitely more climate friendly.</li><li>I was talking about my flights to and from Phoenix a couple of weeks ago with one of the guys on the project team, a younger guy, and the look he gave me suggested that I’d hit peak travel nerdery -- at least in his eyes. I was telling him that I fly out to Phoenix on United from ORD because United has an 8am flight out, it’s easier to get a morning coffee at ORD than MDW, I get a free upgrade to Economy Plus which makes it easier to sleep, and because United uses PHX in Terminal 2, the older “slum” terminal that, because it’s separate from the main terminals, makes it easier to get an Uber or Lyft. But then I fly back to Chicago on Southwest because they have more flights back in the afternoon which gives me some flexibility with last-minute meetings, they don’t charge a change fee, they fly out of the newer Terminal 4 in PHX which gives me a much better selection of restaurants and bars than Terminal 2, and it puts me into Chicago-Midway where the wait for an Uber or Lyft is always shorter than at ORD. To me, it was a completely reasonable thought process -- optimizing each leg for the amenities I’d use. I turned to one of the other guys -- a guy who’s been traveling 20-some years -- “Yup, makes perfect sense to me,” he said. The younger guy was just shaking his head; probably muttering “OK Boomer” under his breath. But he’ll learn.</li><li>Back in November, during one of my semi-regular spelunks through Google Analytics, I noticed that <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"the November 2018 episode - #146: Rental Demolition Derby and Traveler Gift Guide (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"http://146\" target=\"_blank\">the November 2018 episode - #146: Rental Demolition Derby and Traveler Gift Guide</a> - was one of the top 5 pages on the TravelCommons website. I couldn’t figure how stories of rental car wrecks would get a lot of Google hits, so it must be the gift guide. Which suggested that maybe I should update it for 2019, but more as a blog post this time. I read through a half-dozen or so other gift guides, looking for some ideas I could steal, but they got pretty repetitious pretty quick -- pushing Away luggage, Huzi infinity pillows, and Aesop travel kits, which suggests to a cynical mind that these companies must’ve been splashing a lot of samples around the blog-o-sphere. And maybe didn’t age all that well after the Verge published an <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"exposé on Away’s toxic work culture (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/5/20995453/away-luggage-ceo-steph-korey-toxic-work-environment-travel-inclusion\" target=\"_blank\">exposé on Away’s toxic work culture</a>. But anyway, I wanted something a bit different, and on one of my flights got thinking about a chat I’d had with a friend a while back. She was looking for gift ideas for her daughter who, a couple of years out of college, was starting a new job with a lot more business travel. Replaying that chat in my head, and thinking about the younger guy on my project team, I started going through my travel kit -- rummaging through my messenger bag and then cycling through my suitcase -- mentally, though; not enough space to physically pull it down from the overhead and open it up; and that would’ve looked a bit weird. I built <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"a list of the things I really use on my trips (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/12/11/best-gift-ideas-for-a-new-traveler/\" target=\"_blank\">a list of the things I really use on my trips</a>, and that I miss when I forget to bring them along. Then I winnowed it down to 10 -- because “Top 10” is a key search term -- and there you have it. If you haven’t looked at it yet, give it a read and leave a comment with your suggestions.</li><li>Number 2 on <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/12/11/best-gift-ideas-for-a-new-traveler/\">my list of ideas</a>, after a 20-inch black roller bag, is picking up the application fee for TSA Global Entry for your new traveler. For $100, or for free with many airline and hotel reward credit cards, you can gift them with 5 years of hassle reduction with PreCheck for domestic travel and a fast path through Customs when they travel internationally. Coming back from Cabo, we connected again through Houston-Hobby and so had to clear Immigration and Customs there. It was my first time through Customs there, so it took me a minute to find the Global Entry kiosks. The interface was a bit different from the ORD ones. Instead of asking for my passport and prompting me for the fingerprint pad, it asked me to fit my face inside a red box before taking my picture. The camera didn’t look adjustable, so I squatted down ‘til my face was in the frame and then clicked the Take Photo button. A couple seconds later, the kiosk spit out my receipt and I was off to the exit -- no passport or fingerprint scans, no clicking through questions. Quick, but odd. Some Google searches when I got home told me that I’d hit the new generation of Global Entry kiosks -- Global Entry 2.0 -- that uses facial recognition to match the kiosk picture with my passport and Global Entry application pictures. Given how crappy the kiosk picture looked on the receipt -- and that I hadn’t taken my glasses off -- I’m either really impressed or really concerned about the accuracy of their facial recognition algorithm; I’m not quite sure which.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li> Bridge Music -- Absolutely Clear (ft Jeris &amp; Goldfish) by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/45578 Ft: Jeris, Goldfish  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong> Travel Potpourri for $400, Alex </strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Here it is, the last episode of the year that I’m trying to get out before cracking the Vueve and trying to stay awake until midnight. With the clock ticking, instead of a proper topic, all I can do is gather up some odds-‘n’-ends from my travel notebooks into a Jeopardy-like topic “Travel Potpourri”</li><li>And writing in my travel notebooks is something I like to do. I have a couple: a small one -- a 3½x5½-in or A6 size that fits in my back pocket -- to jot down notes, bullet points; and a larger one that I use as a proper travel journal. For that, I was using a B6 Muji notebook that I picked up in Lisbon 3 years ago. After I filled that one up, I switched to a taller, thinner Japanese traveler-sized notebook because… that’s what I had laying around. I’ve been writing in travel notebooks since I’ve started the podcast -- gotta feed the beast -- usually in public places -- in bars, a lotta bars, while drinking beers, or on planes, a lotta&nbsp; planes, though turbulence can be a problem. And for some reason, I’ve found that this act of writing in public generates a bit of interest, and a chunk of questions. Back in October, on the Finnair flight back from our Baltics tour, I was catching up, writing up my thoughts on our couple of days in Helsinki when the guy a few seats over started asking me what I was writing. He was a younger Finnish guy. He and his girlfriend and a group of 5 or 6 others were connecting through Chicago to Miami for a cruise, and they started their cruise party the minute the drink carts rolled. But he wanted to know what I was writing and why. The what was easy; he wanted to know what I thought of Helsinki; where I’d been, how I liked it. He was intrigued by our Baltic Riga-Tallinn-Helsinki itinerary, in kind of a “that’s weird, but interesting” way. The why I’m not sure made it through translation. It’s not a pure travelogue -- not a “we did this, and then did that”. It’s more about impressions; what I found unique; what caught my eye. Writing it down makes me think about it, and when I go back and read those pages, some 2 or 10 or 20 years later, it reminds me of that place, that time, those experiences.&nbsp;</li><li>And when I talk about travel with folks, when I tell them how often I travel, I’ll often get a story -- in a bar, on a plane, or… while getting my hair cut. The girl who does my hair told me about her trip to Peru with a yoga group. Not the whole trip (I don’t have that much hair), but on their flight back, out of Lima, the plane took off, rotating up, while the flight attendants were still in the aisle doing the final check. It was a bit of mayhem, she said. That had to be one quick taxi out and take-off, I thought, because you’d think those flight attendants would be sprinting to their seats once that plane started rolling down the runway. Which I have seen before, especially when the captain gets a quick release from a ground hold and wants to get airborne before the tower changes their mind. But I’ve never seen them leave the ground with anyone still in the aisle.</li><li>Maybe the pilot was distracted -- a message from the tower, an animal on the runway, a sudden thought crossed his mind. I thought about pilot distraction when walking the <a href=\"https://thehikehouse.com/trails/airport-mesa-trail\">Airport Mesa trail</a> in Sedona earlier this month. The trail name says it all -- it’s a 3½-mile loop around the mesa where Sedona’s general aviation airport is. The hikers aren’t the potential distraction, though. It’s one of Sedona’s famous energy vortexes that’s right next to the airport. The Airport Vortex is, according to<a href=\"https://sedonaverdevalley.natgeotourism.com/content/airport-mesa-vortex/svvc7d222a849df1d7d6\"> one website</a>, “an Upflow area (also called Electric or Masculine) that helps your spirit soar for a higher perspective and/or greater oneness and serenity.” Watching a couple of private jets take off while on our hike, I wondered what would happen if the pilot suddenly achieved greater oneness and serenity while rotating off the top of that mesa. For someone as unenlightened and non-serene as me, that would be one helluva distraction.</li><li>I think for many, maybe close to most frequent travelers, Uber and Lyft have replaced taxis, at least in the US, when not renting a car. So it got my attention when I hit a weird Uber app failure at ORD at the end of October. Coming back from Charlottesville, I light up both Uber and Lyft while getting off the plane to compare wait times and fares (you’d think their surge pricing would be consistent, but it rarely is for me). Uber is a bit better, so I go to book a ride. Except that the Uber app wouldn’t pick up at the domestic terminals, just the separate international terminal, Terminal 5. I check Lyft again; yup, they’ll pick me up at Terminal 2, so I book with them instead. But it’s weird, so I keep checking Uber. I walk out the door to the rideshare pick-up area. There’s nothing but cars with pink Lyft lights; not an Uber decal in sight. An older couple walks up to me -- “Where does Uber pick up?” Normally here, I tell them, but they seem to have deleted it from their app today. It was a good night to be a Lyft driver. I wondered how long it took Uber to notice that they weren’t getting any pick-ups from one of the country’s busiest airports.</li><li>Tonight, though -- New Year’s Eve night -- I’ll be skipping Uber and their after-midnight price surges. I’ll be happy to hang out at home, to skip any travel, and just pop a bottle... or two of Vueve and wish all you TravelCommons’ listeners a Happy New Year and fun and safe travels in 2020.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #159</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_159.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #159 — Planning the Trip of a Lifetime in Southeast Asia','','inherit','closed','closed','','2626-revision-v1','','','2020-01-26 13:45:54','2020-01-26 18:45:54','',2626,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/01/26/2626-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2631,1,'2020-01-26 13:50:13','2020-01-26 18:50:13','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/189764_1571139330482_7074048_n.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-2607\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/189764_1571139330482_7074048_n-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\n<figcaption>Good End to 2019</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p>Skipping the Chicago winter with trips to Phoenix and Sedona, Arizona, and a Christmas morning flight to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. Talk about those trips, my good and bad Hertz experiences, and then gather up odds-‘n’-ends from my travel notebooks to see off 2019 in this New Year\'s Eve episode. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_159.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/736532716&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #159: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois having finished 3 weeks of traveling down to Phoenix with one more to go. It’s been a mild winter -- for Chicago -- especially when compared to last winter, which means it’s been in the 20’s and 30’s as opposed to -23 as it was one morning last January. But even with a mild winter, I still appreciate the 70 degree days in Phoenix.</li><li> It’s a 4-hr flight between Chicago and Phoenix. I normally enjoy that amount of “unplugged” time to just read, listen to music, listen to podcasts. But a couple of weeks ago, I tweaked my back during a workout -- not a big thing, I’ve done it many times before. But this time, the pain didn’t go away, it’s hung around on my left side, moving from back to hip to thigh, making it very uncomfortable to sit for long periods of time -- like 4 hrs. Which has made me notice how long US carriers keep the “Fasten Seatbelt” sign on -- like, forever. By the time that seatbelt sign finally goes off, my back is screaming -- and the person next to me in the middle seat is pretty annoyed at my constant shifting. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/06/16/podcast-152-overwhelming-travel-new-old-restaurant-trends/\">episode #152</a>, I talked about Southwest flights between Chicago and Nashville keeping the seatbelt sign on the entire hour-and-20-minutes. It hasn’t been that bad, but it’s easily been 45 minutes. And it isn’t just Southwest; United is doing the same thing. Quite a difference from, say, when Andrew and I flew Air Baltic back in October. 10,000 ft and “bing” that seat belt sign would go off, and we’d still be climbing. It doesn’t need to turn off that fast, but there’s gotta be a happy medium there somewhere. </li><li>With the mild winter and a little bit of luck, my flights to and from Phoenix have been pretty dependable -- except for this week. On Monday, I started getting delay notices for my United 7:40pm flight right after lunch. United was doing their typical rolling delay exercise -- it’s a 30 minutes; no, really an hour; no, we’re leaving at 9pm; just kidding, it’s really 9:40. I was OK with the 30 and 60-minute delays, but then when I get two more delays in a 40-minute span -- now, something’s up. I call United. I get the Premier desk, which the guy tells me is in Chicago. I tell him the story -- rolling delays have now gotten to 2 hrs; I don’t trust that this flight is going off, and I need to get to PHX tonight. The guy says, “Yup, I got it. Makes sense.” He tries to find me routings through LAX and SFO, but the connections don’t work. So he cancels and refunds my ticket -- no hassle, no questions, no change fee. I love this guy. I pivot to Southwest and American, which both have 8:40 flights. I look at American’s seat map -- nothing but middle seats. That’s just not going to work with my back, so it’s over to Southwest. I’m A-List, so I know with their open seating I’ll get an aisle seat. (Exhale) Haven’t done that dance in a while, so was a bit out of shape. But with one more trip to PHX left, I’m not looking to get back into that shape.</li><li>Bridge Music --  <em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/hisboyelroy/430\" target=\"_blank\">Revolve</a> mix</em> by cinematrik (c) copyright 2005 Licensed under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hisboyelroy/430   </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Before writing a podcast, I go through all the interaction channels -- website comments, Facebook comments, Instagram comments, Twitter replies, e-mails, … and inevitably I miss something. Which I have done since October when Arnoud Heijnis and I traded Twitter direct messages about travel converters. In episode #155, I’d talked about having to rummage around for European plug adaptors before my Krakow and Budapest trip, and how I’m always leaving them behind. Arnoud wrote -<ul><li>Hi Mark, just caught up on your last two episodes. I also did the travel converter dance until someone recommended the Power Bagel. It\'s so small and comes in handy not only as a travel adapter but also in hotel rooms with not enough power plugs, conference tables with one outlet etc. Iit never leaves my bag so thought I\'d share.</li></ul></li><li>A very belated thanks, Arnoud! Clicking through the link that Arnoud sent, the Power Bagel is a compact circular power strip of universal plugs and a couple of USB ports. They say that the circular design keeps large power adapters, like a Macbook power supply, from blocking outlets like they do on straight power strips. And then in the center hole, they store a universal plug adapter so you can plug the Power Bagel in most international outlets. Cool design and Arnoud vouches for it. Clicking around the web site, the company MOGICS seems to be a 3-person design company based in Singapore. They got started a few years back on Kickstarter and are in the middle of a new campaign for an upgraded version of the Power Bagel, called, of course, the Super Bagel that upgrades the plug adapter and adds a on-trend USB-C port. Kickstarter says the campaign ends on Feb 25th. I’ll include a <a href=\"http://kck.st/354ozBx\">link</a> in the show notes for anyone interested.</li><li>Kickstarter seems to be the place for these things. I sent Arnoud a link to a travel adapter campaign that I joined. The Passport Go is a more traditional travel adapter -- a big cube that will plug into most international outlets and has 3 USB-A and 1 USB-C plugs and one universal plug receptacle. I used it on my Baltics trip. For personal travel, most of my power needs seem to now be driven by USB cords rather than plugs -- my iPhone did a rapid charge off the USB-C port, my tablet and headphones off the USB-A ports and since I don’t have enough hair to justify a blow dryer or curling iron, I never used the plug receptacle. Indeed, if I’d brought my Macbook Air, I could’ve powered that up off the USB-C port rather than bringing its power adapter. I’ll include a link to <a href=\"https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/zendure/passport-go-worlds-first-travel-adapter-w-gan-technology\"><em>their</em> Kickstarter page</a>.</li><li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/10/14/podcast-156-airport-satisfaction-escooters-smaller-luggage/\">episode #156,</a> I talked about how I really liked electric scooters, using them to run around in Chicago and Charlottesville and DC, and down here in Phoenix. Whereas Chicago wrapped up their e-scooter pilot in October -- which made sense; I don’t think those scooters would do well in the snow -- Phoenix seemed the perfect place with perfect weather -- no snow, not a lot of rain. And they seemed to have nailed one of the main problems with e-scooters -- people leaving them lying everywhere, especially in the middle of sidewalks. In downtown Phoenix, you have to park them in designated areas, typically near sidewalk corners, inside a painted box. So it surprised me when I started coming down here in December that I saw only 2 scooter companies -- Lime (which is partnered with Uber) and Spin (which is owned by the car company Ford). But then, a couple of weeks ago, Lime announced that they were pulling out -- that they couldn’t make money in Phoenix -- and a day or so later, all their scooters were gone. I don’t know what the right balance between scooter availability and public right-of-way is, but I hope Chicago and Phoenix and other cities can figure it out. This whole micro-mobility space -- bike shares, e-scooters -- is an important part of the urban transit mix. And, when the weather’s nice, they’re fun too!</li><li>In that <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/10/14/podcast-156-airport-satisfaction-escooters-smaller-luggage/\">same episode</a>, I talked about buying a smaller bag, a <a href=\"https://amzn.to/32lIURe\">TravelPro Maxlite 5 international carry-on size</a>, to meet the smaller carry-on size and weight requirements of AirBaltic, which Andrew and I would be using to hop between Riga, Tallinn, and Helsinki on our Baltics beer and sauna tour. I said back then that I didn’t want to spend a lot of money on it because I’d only be using it for this Baltics trip and maybe some short couple-of-day trips, that my big Victorinox 22-incher would remain my primary bag. But as it turns out, I’ve been using the smaller TravelPro for these 4-day/3-night trips to Phoenix. Now, with temperatures in 70’s, I’m not having to bring heavy, thick clothes with me, but still, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by what I can pack into that smaller TravelPro. But, I think I’ll be back to the Victorinox for next week’s trip -- I’m vectoring through Durango, CO for a ski weekend on the way home. Little colder, little more clothing; I think I’ll need all the space I can get. </li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music -- Velvet Green of Mystery (Instrumental) by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/48114 Ft: Kthugha, Jeris, Martijn de Boer  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong> Travel Potpourri for $400, Alex </strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Here it is, the last episode of the year that I’m trying to get out before cracking the Vueve and trying to stay awake until midnight. With the clock ticking, instead of a proper topic, all I can do is gather up some odds-‘n’-ends from my travel notebooks into a Jeopardy-like topic “Travel Potpourri”</li><li>And writing in my travel notebooks is something I like to do. I have a couple: a small one -- a 3½x5½-in or A6 size that fits in my back pocket -- to jot down notes, bullet points; and a larger one that I use as a proper travel journal. For that, I was using a B6 Muji notebook that I picked up in Lisbon 3 years ago. After I filled that one up, I switched to a taller, thinner Japanese traveler-sized notebook because… that’s what I had laying around. I’ve been writing in travel notebooks since I’ve started the podcast -- gotta feed the beast -- usually in public places -- in bars, a lotta bars, while drinking beers, or on planes, a lotta&nbsp; planes, though turbulence can be a problem. And for some reason, I’ve found that this act of writing in public generates a bit of interest, and a chunk of questions. Back in October, on the Finnair flight back from our Baltics tour, I was catching up, writing up my thoughts on our couple of days in Helsinki when the guy a few seats over started asking me what I was writing. He was a younger Finnish guy. He and his girlfriend and a group of 5 or 6 others were connecting through Chicago to Miami for a cruise, and they started their cruise party the minute the drink carts rolled. But he wanted to know what I was writing and why. The what was easy; he wanted to know what I thought of Helsinki; where I’d been, how I liked it. He was intrigued by our Baltic Riga-Tallinn-Helsinki itinerary, in kind of a “that’s weird, but interesting” way. The why I’m not sure made it through translation. It’s not a pure travelogue -- not a “we did this, and then did that”. It’s more about impressions; what I found unique; what caught my eye. Writing it down makes me think about it, and when I go back and read those pages, some 2 or 10 or 20 years later, it reminds me of that place, that time, those experiences.&nbsp;</li><li>And when I talk about travel with folks, when I tell them how often I travel, I’ll often get a story -- in a bar, on a plane, or… while getting my hair cut. The girl who does my hair told me about her trip to Peru with a yoga group. Not the whole trip (I don’t have that much hair), but on their flight back, out of Lima, the plane took off, rotating up, while the flight attendants were still in the aisle doing the final check. It was a bit of mayhem, she said. That had to be one quick taxi out and take-off, I thought, because you’d think those flight attendants would be sprinting to their seats once that plane started rolling down the runway. Which I have seen before, especially when the captain gets a quick release from a ground hold and wants to get airborne before the tower changes their mind. But I’ve never seen them leave the ground with anyone still in the aisle.</li><li>Maybe the pilot was distracted -- a message from the tower, an animal on the runway, a sudden thought crossed his mind. I thought about pilot distraction when walking the <a href=\"https://thehikehouse.com/trails/airport-mesa-trail\">Airport Mesa trail</a> in Sedona earlier this month. The trail name says it all -- it’s a 3½-mile loop around the mesa where Sedona’s general aviation airport is. The hikers aren’t the potential distraction, though. It’s one of Sedona’s famous energy vortexes that’s right next to the airport. The Airport Vortex is, according to<a href=\"https://sedonaverdevalley.natgeotourism.com/content/airport-mesa-vortex/svvc7d222a849df1d7d6\"> one website</a>, “an Upflow area (also called Electric or Masculine) that helps your spirit soar for a higher perspective and/or greater oneness and serenity.” Watching a couple of private jets take off while on our hike, I wondered what would happen if the pilot suddenly achieved greater oneness and serenity while rotating off the top of that mesa. For someone as unenlightened and non-serene as me, that would be one helluva distraction.</li><li>I think for many, maybe close to most frequent travelers, Uber and Lyft have replaced taxis, at least in the US, when not renting a car. So it got my attention when I hit a weird Uber app failure at ORD at the end of October. Coming back from Charlottesville, I light up both Uber and Lyft while getting off the plane to compare wait times and fares (you’d think their surge pricing would be consistent, but it rarely is for me). Uber is a bit better, so I go to book a ride. Except that the Uber app wouldn’t pick up at the domestic terminals, just the separate international terminal, Terminal 5. I check Lyft again; yup, they’ll pick me up at Terminal 2, so I book with them instead. But it’s weird, so I keep checking Uber. I walk out the door to the rideshare pick-up area. There’s nothing but cars with pink Lyft lights; not an Uber decal in sight. An older couple walks up to me -- “Where does Uber pick up?” Normally here, I tell them, but they seem to have deleted it from their app today. It was a good night to be a Lyft driver. I wondered how long it took Uber to notice that they weren’t getting any pick-ups from one of the country’s busiest airports.</li><li>Tonight, though -- New Year’s Eve night -- I’ll be skipping Uber and their after-midnight price surges. I’ll be happy to hang out at home, to skip any travel, and just pop a bottle... or two of Vueve and wish all you TravelCommons’ listeners a Happy New Year and fun and safe travels in 2020.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #159</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_159.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #159 — Planning the Trip of a Lifetime in Southeast Asia','','inherit','closed','closed','','2626-revision-v1','','','2020-01-26 13:50:13','2020-01-26 18:50:13','',2626,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/01/26/2626-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2632,1,'2020-01-26 13:52:45','2020-01-26 18:52:45','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/189764_1571139330482_7074048_n.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-2607\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/189764_1571139330482_7074048_n-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\n<figcaption>Good End to 2019</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p>Skipping the Chicago winter with trips to Phoenix and Sedona, Arizona, and a Christmas morning flight to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. Talk about those trips, my good and bad Hertz experiences, and then gather up odds-‘n’-ends from my travel notebooks to see off 2019 in this New Year\'s Eve episode. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_159.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/736532716&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #159: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois having finished 3 weeks of traveling down to Phoenix with one more to go. It’s been a mild winter -- for Chicago -- especially when compared to last winter, which means it’s been in the 20’s and 30’s as opposed to -23 as it was one morning last January. But even with a mild winter, I still appreciate the 70 degree days in Phoenix.</li><li> It’s a 4-hr flight between Chicago and Phoenix. I normally enjoy that amount of “unplugged” time to just read, listen to music, listen to podcasts. But a couple of weeks ago, I tweaked my back during a workout -- not a big thing, I’ve done it many times before. But this time, the pain didn’t go away, it’s hung around on my left side, moving from back to hip to thigh, making it very uncomfortable to sit for long periods of time -- like 4 hrs. Which has made me notice how long US carriers keep the “Fasten Seatbelt” sign on -- like, forever. By the time that seatbelt sign finally goes off, my back is screaming -- and the person next to me in the middle seat is pretty annoyed at my constant shifting. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/06/16/podcast-152-overwhelming-travel-new-old-restaurant-trends/\">episode #152</a>, I talked about Southwest flights between Chicago and Nashville keeping the seatbelt sign on the entire hour-and-20-minutes. It hasn’t been that bad, but it’s easily been 45 minutes. And it isn’t just Southwest; United is doing the same thing. Quite a difference from, say, when Andrew and I flew Air Baltic back in October. 10,000 ft and “bing” that seat belt sign would go off, and we’d still be climbing. It doesn’t need to turn off that fast, but there’s gotta be a happy medium there somewhere. </li><li>With the mild winter and a little bit of luck, my flights to and from Phoenix have been pretty dependable -- except for this week. On Monday, I started getting delay notices for my United 7:40pm flight right after lunch. United was doing their typical rolling delay exercise -- it’s a 30 minutes; no, really an hour; no, we’re leaving at 9pm; just kidding, it’s really 9:40. I was OK with the 30 and 60-minute delays, but then when I get two more delays in a 40-minute span -- now, something’s up. I call United. I get the Premier desk, which the guy tells me is in Chicago. I tell him the story -- rolling delays have now gotten to 2 hrs; I don’t trust that this flight is going off, and I need to get to PHX tonight. The guy says, “Yup, I got it. Makes sense.” He tries to find me routings through LAX and SFO, but the connections don’t work. So he cancels and refunds my ticket -- no hassle, no questions, no change fee. I love this guy. I pivot to Southwest and American, which both have 8:40 flights. I look at American’s seat map -- nothing but middle seats. That’s just not going to work with my back, so it’s over to Southwest. I’m A-List, so I know with their open seating I’ll get an aisle seat. (Exhale) Haven’t done that dance in a while, so was a bit out of shape. But with one more trip to PHX left, I’m not looking to get back into that shape.</li><li>Bridge Music --  <em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/hisboyelroy/430\" target=\"_blank\">Revolve</a> mix</em> by cinematrik (c) copyright 2005 Licensed under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hisboyelroy/430   </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Before writing a podcast, I go through all the interaction channels -- website comments, Facebook comments, Instagram comments, Twitter replies, e-mails, … and inevitably I miss something. Which I have done since October when Arnoud Heijnis and I traded Twitter direct messages about travel converters. In episode #155, I’d talked about having to rummage around for European plug adaptors before my Krakow and Budapest trip, and how I’m always leaving them behind. Arnoud wrote -<ul><li>Hi Mark, just caught up on your last two episodes. I also did the travel converter dance until someone recommended the Power Bagel. It\'s so small and comes in handy not only as a travel adapter but also in hotel rooms with not enough power plugs, conference tables with one outlet etc. Iit never leaves my bag so thought I\'d share.</li></ul></li><li>A very belated thanks, Arnoud! Clicking through the link that Arnoud sent, the Power Bagel is a compact circular power strip of universal plugs and a couple of USB ports. They say that the circular design keeps large power adapters, like a Macbook power supply, from blocking outlets like they do on straight power strips. And then in the center hole, they store a universal plug adapter so you can plug the Power Bagel in most international outlets. Cool design and Arnoud vouches for it. Clicking around the web site, the company MOGICS seems to be a 3-person design company based in Singapore. They got started a few years back on Kickstarter and are in the middle of a new campaign for an upgraded version of the Power Bagel, called, of course, the Super Bagel that upgrades the plug adapter and adds a on-trend USB-C port. Kickstarter says the campaign ends on Feb 25th. I’ll include a <a href=\"http://kck.st/354ozBx\">link</a> in the show notes for anyone interested.</li><li>Kickstarter seems to be the place for these things. I sent Arnoud a link to a travel adapter campaign that I joined. The Passport Go is a more traditional travel adapter -- a big cube that will plug into most international outlets and has 3 USB-A and 1 USB-C plugs and one universal plug receptacle. I used it on my Baltics trip. For personal travel, most of my power needs seem to now be driven by USB cords rather than plugs -- my iPhone did a rapid charge off the USB-C port, my tablet and headphones off the USB-A ports and since I don’t have enough hair to justify a blow dryer or curling iron, I never used the plug receptacle. Indeed, if I’d brought my Macbook Air, I could’ve powered that up off the USB-C port rather than bringing its power adapter. I’ll include a link to <a href=\"https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/zendure/passport-go-worlds-first-travel-adapter-w-gan-technology\"><em>their</em> Kickstarter page</a>.</li><li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/10/14/podcast-156-airport-satisfaction-escooters-smaller-luggage/\">episode #156,</a> I talked about how I really liked electric scooters, using them to run around in Chicago and Charlottesville and DC, and down here in Phoenix. Whereas Chicago wrapped up their e-scooter pilot in October -- which made sense; I don’t think those scooters would do well in the snow -- Phoenix seemed the perfect place with perfect weather -- no snow, not a lot of rain. And they seemed to have nailed one of the main problems with e-scooters -- people leaving them lying everywhere, especially in the middle of sidewalks. In downtown Phoenix, you have to park them in designated areas, typically near sidewalk corners, inside a painted box. So it surprised me when I started coming down here in December that I saw only 2 scooter companies -- Lime (which is partnered with Uber) and Spin (which is owned by the car company Ford). But then, a couple of weeks ago, Lime announced that they were pulling out -- that they couldn’t make money in Phoenix -- and a day or so later, all their scooters were gone. I don’t know what the right balance between scooter availability and public right-of-way is, but I hope Chicago and Phoenix and other cities can figure it out. This whole micro-mobility space -- bike shares, e-scooters -- is an important part of the urban transit mix. And, when the weather’s nice, they’re fun too!</li><li>In that <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/10/14/podcast-156-airport-satisfaction-escooters-smaller-luggage/\">same episode</a>, I talked about buying a smaller bag, a <a href=\"https://amzn.to/32lIURe\">TravelPro Maxlite 5 international carry-on size</a>, to meet the smaller carry-on size and weight requirements of AirBaltic, which Andrew and I would be using to hop between Riga, Tallinn, and Helsinki on our Baltics beer and sauna tour. I said back then that I didn’t want to spend a lot of money on it because I’d only be using it for this Baltics trip and maybe some short couple-of-day trips, that my big Victorinox 22-incher would remain my primary bag. But as it turns out, I’ve been using the smaller TravelPro for these 4-day/3-night trips to Phoenix. Now, with temperatures in 70’s, I’m not having to bring heavy, thick clothes with me, but still, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by what I can pack into that smaller TravelPro. But, I think I’ll be back to the Victorinox for next week’s trip -- I’m vectoring through Durango, CO for a ski weekend on the way home. Little colder, little more clothing; I think I’ll need all the space I can get. </li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music -- Velvet Green of Mystery (Instrumental) by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/48114 Ft: Kthugha, Jeris, Martijn de Boer  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong> </strong> <strong>Planning the Trip of a Lifetime</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>We’ve talked on past episodes about trip planning -- using guidebooks, social media, Google algorithms, shooting the gaps between bipolar TripAdvisor reviews, casting runes, consulting tarot cards,... And all that for a week’s vacation, maybe two. What about a 9-week vacation, a paid sabbatical that you’ve worked and waited 7 years for? Well, that’s the extreme travel planning that long-time TravelCommons listener and even longer time friend Allan Marko and his wife Chris Chufo faced last year. And with January being a big travel planning month, I asked Allan to talk to us about how he and Chris planned for a trip of a lifetime.</li><li>Interview with Allan Marko</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #159</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2010/09/06/video-1-impressions-of-vietnam/\">Link to TravelCommons Vietnam video</a></li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_159.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #159 — Planning the Trip of a Lifetime in Southeast Asia','','inherit','closed','closed','','2626-revision-v1','','','2020-01-26 13:52:45','2020-01-26 18:52:45','',2626,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/01/26/2626-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2633,1,'2020-01-26 14:00:54','2020-01-26 19:00:54','','DSC_7106','Just put my dragon\'s den on Airbnb','inherit','open','closed','','dsc_7106','','','2020-01-26 14:03:58','2020-01-26 19:03:58','',2626,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/DSC_7106.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(2634,1,'2020-01-26 14:07:58','2020-01-26 19:07:58','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/DSC_7106-scaled.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2633\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/DSC_7106-300x293.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"293\"></a><figcaption>Just put my dragon\'s den on Airbnb</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>Skipping the Chicago winter with trips to Phoenix and Sedona, Arizona, and a Christmas morning flight to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. Talk about those trips, my good and bad Hertz experiences, and then gather up odds-‘n’-ends from my travel notebooks to see off 2019 in this New Year\'s Eve episode. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_159.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/736532716&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #159: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois having finished 3 weeks of traveling down to Phoenix with one more to go. It’s been a mild winter -- for Chicago -- especially when compared to last winter, which means it’s been in the 20’s and 30’s as opposed to -23 as it was one morning last January. But even with a mild winter, I still appreciate the 70 degree days in Phoenix.</li><li> It’s a 4-hr flight between Chicago and Phoenix. I normally enjoy that amount of “unplugged” time to just read, listen to music, listen to podcasts. But a couple of weeks ago, I tweaked my back during a workout -- not a big thing, I’ve done it many times before. But this time, the pain didn’t go away, it’s hung around on my left side, moving from back to hip to thigh, making it very uncomfortable to sit for long periods of time -- like 4 hrs. Which has made me notice how long US carriers keep the “Fasten Seatbelt” sign on -- like, forever. By the time that seatbelt sign finally goes off, my back is screaming -- and the person next to me in the middle seat is pretty annoyed at my constant shifting. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/06/16/podcast-152-overwhelming-travel-new-old-restaurant-trends/\">episode #152</a>, I talked about Southwest flights between Chicago and Nashville keeping the seatbelt sign on the entire hour-and-20-minutes. It hasn’t been that bad, but it’s easily been 45 minutes. And it isn’t just Southwest; United is doing the same thing. Quite a difference from, say, when Andrew and I flew Air Baltic back in October. 10,000 ft and “bing” that seat belt sign would go off, and we’d still be climbing. It doesn’t need to turn off that fast, but there’s gotta be a happy medium there somewhere. </li><li>With the mild winter and a little bit of luck, my flights to and from Phoenix have been pretty dependable -- except for this week. On Monday, I started getting delay notices for my United 7:40pm flight right after lunch. United was doing their typical rolling delay exercise -- it’s a 30 minutes; no, really an hour; no, we’re leaving at 9pm; just kidding, it’s really 9:40. I was OK with the 30 and 60-minute delays, but then when I get two more delays in a 40-minute span -- now, something’s up. I call United. I get the Premier desk, which the guy tells me is in Chicago. I tell him the story -- rolling delays have now gotten to 2 hrs; I don’t trust that this flight is going off, and I need to get to PHX tonight. The guy says, “Yup, I got it. Makes sense.” He tries to find me routings through LAX and SFO, but the connections don’t work. So he cancels and refunds my ticket -- no hassle, no questions, no change fee. I love this guy. I pivot to Southwest and American, which both have 8:40 flights. I look at American’s seat map -- nothing but middle seats. That’s just not going to work with my back, so it’s over to Southwest. I’m A-List, so I know with their open seating I’ll get an aisle seat. (Exhale) Haven’t done that dance in a while, so was a bit out of shape. But with one more trip to PHX left, I’m not looking to get back into that shape.</li><li>Bridge Music --  <em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/hisboyelroy/430\" target=\"_blank\">Revolve</a> mix</em> by cinematrik (c) copyright 2005 Licensed under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hisboyelroy/430   </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Before writing a podcast, I go through all the interaction channels -- website comments, Facebook comments, Instagram comments, Twitter replies, e-mails, … and inevitably I miss something. Which I have done since October when Arnoud Heijnis and I traded Twitter direct messages about travel converters. In episode #155, I’d talked about having to rummage around for European plug adaptors before my Krakow and Budapest trip, and how I’m always leaving them behind. Arnoud wrote -<ul><li>Hi Mark, just caught up on your last two episodes. I also did the travel converter dance until someone recommended the Power Bagel. It\'s so small and comes in handy not only as a travel adapter but also in hotel rooms with not enough power plugs, conference tables with one outlet etc. Iit never leaves my bag so thought I\'d share.</li></ul></li><li>A very belated thanks, Arnoud! Clicking through the link that Arnoud sent, the Power Bagel is a compact circular power strip of universal plugs and a couple of USB ports. They say that the circular design keeps large power adapters, like a Macbook power supply, from blocking outlets like they do on straight power strips. And then in the center hole, they store a universal plug adapter so you can plug the Power Bagel in most international outlets. Cool design and Arnoud vouches for it. Clicking around the web site, the company MOGICS seems to be a 3-person design company based in Singapore. They got started a few years back on Kickstarter and are in the middle of a new campaign for an upgraded version of the Power Bagel, called, of course, the Super Bagel that upgrades the plug adapter and adds a on-trend USB-C port. Kickstarter says the campaign ends on Feb 25th. I’ll include a <a href=\"http://kck.st/354ozBx\">link</a> in the show notes for anyone interested.</li><li>Kickstarter seems to be the place for these things. I sent Arnoud a link to a travel adapter campaign that I joined. The Passport Go is a more traditional travel adapter -- a big cube that will plug into most international outlets and has 3 USB-A and 1 USB-C plugs and one universal plug receptacle. I used it on my Baltics trip. For personal travel, most of my power needs seem to now be driven by USB cords rather than plugs -- my iPhone did a rapid charge off the USB-C port, my tablet and headphones off the USB-A ports and since I don’t have enough hair to justify a blow dryer or curling iron, I never used the plug receptacle. Indeed, if I’d brought my Macbook Air, I could’ve powered that up off the USB-C port rather than bringing its power adapter. I’ll include a link to <a href=\"https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/zendure/passport-go-worlds-first-travel-adapter-w-gan-technology\"><em>their</em> Kickstarter page</a>.</li><li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/10/14/podcast-156-airport-satisfaction-escooters-smaller-luggage/\">episode #156,</a> I talked about how I really liked electric scooters, using them to run around in Chicago and Charlottesville and DC, and down here in Phoenix. Whereas Chicago wrapped up their e-scooter pilot in October -- which made sense; I don’t think those scooters would do well in the snow -- Phoenix seemed the perfect place with perfect weather -- no snow, not a lot of rain. And they seemed to have nailed one of the main problems with e-scooters -- people leaving them lying everywhere, especially in the middle of sidewalks. In downtown Phoenix, you have to park them in designated areas, typically near sidewalk corners, inside a painted box. So it surprised me when I started coming down here in December that I saw only 2 scooter companies -- Lime (which is partnered with Uber) and Spin (which is owned by the car company Ford). But then, a couple of weeks ago, Lime announced that they were pulling out -- that they couldn’t make money in Phoenix -- and a day or so later, all their scooters were gone. I don’t know what the right balance between scooter availability and public right-of-way is, but I hope Chicago and Phoenix and other cities can figure it out. This whole micro-mobility space -- bike shares, e-scooters -- is an important part of the urban transit mix. And, when the weather’s nice, they’re fun too!</li><li>In that <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/10/14/podcast-156-airport-satisfaction-escooters-smaller-luggage/\">same episode</a>, I talked about buying a smaller bag, a <a href=\"https://amzn.to/32lIURe\">TravelPro Maxlite 5 international carry-on size</a>, to meet the smaller carry-on size and weight requirements of AirBaltic, which Andrew and I would be using to hop between Riga, Tallinn, and Helsinki on our Baltics beer and sauna tour. I said back then that I didn’t want to spend a lot of money on it because I’d only be using it for this Baltics trip and maybe some short couple-of-day trips, that my big Victorinox 22-incher would remain my primary bag. But as it turns out, I’ve been using the smaller TravelPro for these 4-day/3-night trips to Phoenix. Now, with temperatures in 70’s, I’m not having to bring heavy, thick clothes with me, but still, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by what I can pack into that smaller TravelPro. But, I think I’ll be back to the Victorinox for next week’s trip -- I’m vectoring through Durango, CO for a ski weekend on the way home. Little colder, little more clothing; I think I’ll need all the space I can get. </li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music -- Velvet Green of Mystery (Instrumental) by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/48114 Ft: Kthugha, Jeris, Martijn de Boer  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong> </strong> <strong>Planning the Trip of a Lifetime</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>We’ve talked on past episodes about trip planning -- using guidebooks, social media, Google algorithms, shooting the gaps between bipolar TripAdvisor reviews, casting runes, consulting tarot cards,... And all that for a week’s vacation, maybe two. What about a 9-week vacation, a paid sabbatical that you’ve worked and waited 7 years for? Well, that’s the extreme travel planning that long-time TravelCommons listener and even longer time friend Allan Marko and his wife Chris Chufo faced last year. And with January being a big travel planning month, I asked Allan to talk to us about how he and Chris planned for a trip of a lifetime.</li><li>Interview with Allan Marko</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #159</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2010/09/06/video-1-impressions-of-vietnam/\">Link to TravelCommons Vietnam video</a></li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_159.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #159 — Planning the Trip of a Lifetime in Southeast Asia','','inherit','closed','closed','','2626-revision-v1','','','2020-01-26 14:07:58','2020-01-26 19:07:58','',2626,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/01/26/2626-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2635,1,'2020-01-26 14:31:13','2020-01-26 19:31:13','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/DSC_7106-scaled.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2633\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/DSC_7106-300x293.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"293\" /></a>\n<figcaption>Just put my dragon\'s den on Airbnb</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p>January is a big travel planning month; people thinking about about the places they want to visit, spending days on the Internet researching itineraries, and putting in their week\'s vacation requests. But what about a 9-week sabbatical you’ve worked 7 years for? In this episode, we talk about that kind of extreme travel planning. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_159.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/749899837&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #159: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois having finished 3 weeks of traveling down to Phoenix with one more to go. It’s been a mild winter -- for Chicago -- especially when compared to last winter, which means it’s been in the 20’s and 30’s as opposed to -23 as it was one morning last January. But even with a mild winter, I still appreciate the 70 degree days in Phoenix.</li><li> It’s a 4-hr flight between Chicago and Phoenix. I normally enjoy that amount of “unplugged” time to just read, listen to music, listen to podcasts. But a couple of weeks ago, I tweaked my back during a workout -- not a big thing, I’ve done it many times before. But this time, the pain didn’t go away, it’s hung around on my left side, moving from back to hip to thigh, making it very uncomfortable to sit for long periods of time -- like 4 hrs. Which has made me notice how long US carriers keep the “Fasten Seatbelt” sign on -- like, forever. By the time that seatbelt sign finally goes off, my back is screaming -- and the person next to me in the middle seat is pretty annoyed at my constant shifting. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/06/16/podcast-152-overwhelming-travel-new-old-restaurant-trends/\">episode #152</a>, I talked about Southwest flights between Chicago and Nashville keeping the seatbelt sign on the entire hour-and-20-minutes. It hasn’t been that bad, but it’s easily been 45 minutes. And it isn’t just Southwest; United is doing the same thing. Quite a difference from, say, when Andrew and I flew Air Baltic back in October. 10,000 ft and “bing” that seat belt sign would go off, and we’d still be climbing. It doesn’t need to turn off that fast, but there’s gotta be a happy medium there somewhere. </li><li>With the mild winter and a little bit of luck, my flights to and from Phoenix have been pretty dependable -- except for this week. On Monday, I started getting delay notices for my United 7:40pm flight right after lunch. United was doing their typical rolling delay exercise -- it’s a 30 minutes; no, really an hour; no, we’re leaving at 9pm; just kidding, it’s really 9:40. I was OK with the 30 and 60-minute delays, but then when I get two more delays in a 40-minute span -- now, something’s up. I call United. I get the Premier desk, which the guy tells me is in Chicago. I tell him the story -- rolling delays have now gotten to 2 hrs; I don’t trust that this flight is going off, and I need to get to PHX tonight. The guy says, “Yup, I got it. Makes sense.” He tries to find me routings through LAX and SFO, but the connections don’t work. So he cancels and refunds my ticket -- no hassle, no questions, no change fee. I love this guy. I pivot to Southwest and American, which both have 8:40 flights. I look at American’s seat map -- nothing but middle seats. That’s just not going to work with my back, so it’s over to Southwest. I’m A-List, so I know with their open seating I’ll get an aisle seat. (Exhale) Haven’t done that dance in a while, so was a bit out of shape. But with one more trip to PHX left, I’m not looking to get back into that shape.</li><li>Bridge Music --  <em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/hisboyelroy/430\" target=\"_blank\">Revolve</a> mix</em> by cinematrik (c) copyright 2005 Licensed under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hisboyelroy/430   </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Before writing a podcast, I go through all the interaction channels -- website comments, Facebook comments, Instagram comments, Twitter replies, e-mails, … and inevitably I miss something. Which I have done since October when Arnoud Heijnis and I traded Twitter direct messages about travel converters. In episode #155, I’d talked about having to rummage around for European plug adaptors before my Krakow and Budapest trip, and how I’m always leaving them behind. Arnoud wrote -<ul><li>Hi Mark, just caught up on your last two episodes. I also did the travel converter dance until someone recommended the Power Bagel. It\'s so small and comes in handy not only as a travel adapter but also in hotel rooms with not enough power plugs, conference tables with one outlet etc. Iit never leaves my bag so thought I\'d share.</li></ul></li><li>A very belated thanks, Arnoud! Clicking through the link that Arnoud sent, the Power Bagel is a compact circular power strip of universal plugs and a couple of USB ports. They say that the circular design keeps large power adapters, like a Macbook power supply, from blocking outlets like they do on straight power strips. And then in the center hole, they store a universal plug adapter so you can plug the Power Bagel in most international outlets. Cool design and Arnoud vouches for it. Clicking around the web site, the company MOGICS seems to be a 3-person design company based in Singapore. They got started a few years back on Kickstarter and are in the middle of a new campaign for an upgraded version of the Power Bagel, called, of course, the Super Bagel that upgrades the plug adapter and adds a on-trend USB-C port. Kickstarter says the campaign ends on Feb 25th. I’ll include a <a href=\"http://kck.st/354ozBx\">link</a> in the show notes for anyone interested.</li><li>Kickstarter seems to be the place for these things. I sent Arnoud a link to a travel adapter campaign that I joined. The Passport Go is a more traditional travel adapter -- a big cube that will plug into most international outlets and has 3 USB-A and 1 USB-C plugs and one universal plug receptacle. I used it on my Baltics trip. For personal travel, most of my power needs seem to now be driven by USB cords rather than plugs -- my iPhone did a rapid charge off the USB-C port, my tablet and headphones off the USB-A ports and since I don’t have enough hair to justify a blow dryer or curling iron, I never used the plug receptacle. Indeed, if I’d brought my Macbook Air, I could’ve powered that up off the USB-C port rather than bringing its power adapter. I’ll include a link to <a href=\"https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/zendure/passport-go-worlds-first-travel-adapter-w-gan-technology\"><em>their</em> Kickstarter page</a>.</li><li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/10/14/podcast-156-airport-satisfaction-escooters-smaller-luggage/\">episode #156,</a> I talked about how I really liked electric scooters, using them to run around in Chicago and Charlottesville and DC, and down here in Phoenix. Whereas Chicago wrapped up their e-scooter pilot in October -- which made sense; I don’t think those scooters would do well in the snow -- Phoenix seemed the perfect place with perfect weather -- no snow, not a lot of rain. And they seemed to have nailed one of the main problems with e-scooters -- people leaving them lying everywhere, especially in the middle of sidewalks. In downtown Phoenix, you have to park them in designated areas, typically near sidewalk corners, inside a painted box. So it surprised me when I started coming down here in December that I saw only 2 scooter companies -- Lime (which is partnered with Uber) and Spin (which is owned by the car company Ford). But then, a couple of weeks ago, Lime announced that they were pulling out -- that they couldn’t make money in Phoenix -- and a day or so later, all their scooters were gone. I don’t know what the right balance between scooter availability and public right-of-way is, but I hope Chicago and Phoenix and other cities can figure it out. This whole micro-mobility space -- bike shares, e-scooters -- is an important part of the urban transit mix. And, when the weather’s nice, they’re fun too!</li><li>In that <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/10/14/podcast-156-airport-satisfaction-escooters-smaller-luggage/\">same episode</a>, I talked about buying a smaller bag, a <a href=\"https://amzn.to/32lIURe\">TravelPro Maxlite 5 international carry-on size</a>, to meet the smaller carry-on size and weight requirements of AirBaltic, which Andrew and I would be using to hop between Riga, Tallinn, and Helsinki on our Baltics beer and sauna tour. I said back then that I didn’t want to spend a lot of money on it because I’d only be using it for this Baltics trip and maybe some short couple-of-day trips, that my big Victorinox 22-incher would remain my primary bag. But as it turns out, I’ve been using the smaller TravelPro for these 4-day/3-night trips to Phoenix. Now, with temperatures in 70’s, I’m not having to bring heavy, thick clothes with me, but still, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by what I can pack into that smaller TravelPro. But, I think I’ll be back to the Victorinox for next week’s trip -- I’m vectoring through Durango, CO for a ski weekend on the way home. Little colder, little more clothing; I think I’ll need all the space I can get. </li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music -- Velvet Green of Mystery (Instrumental) by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/48114 Ft: Kthugha, Jeris, Martijn de Boer  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong> </strong> <strong>Planning the Trip of a Lifetime</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>We’ve talked on past episodes about trip planning -- using guidebooks, social media, Google algorithms, shooting the gaps between bipolar TripAdvisor reviews, casting runes, consulting tarot cards,... And all that for a week’s vacation, maybe two. What about a 9-week vacation, a paid sabbatical that you’ve worked and waited 7 years for? Well, that’s the extreme travel planning that long-time TravelCommons listener and even longer time friend Allan Marko and his wife Chris Chufo faced last year. And with January being a big travel planning month, I asked Allan to talk to us about how he and Chris planned for a trip of a lifetime.</li><li>Interview with Allan Marko</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #159</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2010/09/06/video-1-impressions-of-vietnam/\">Link to TravelCommons Vietnam video</a></li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_159.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #159 — Planning the Trip of a Lifetime in Southeast Asia','','inherit','closed','closed','','2626-revision-v1','','','2020-01-26 14:31:13','2020-01-26 19:31:13','',2626,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/01/26/2626-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2636,1,'2020-01-26 14:32:25','2020-01-26 19:32:25','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\">\n<p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Cracked-mirror-square.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2482 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Cracked-mirror-square-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a></p><figcaption>What\'s Behind Me Is Not Important</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>Going upscale, recording in the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/1871Chicago/photos/we-have-a-new-podcast-studio-big-thanks-to-1871-company-parkergale-capital-for-h/1116900888351884/\">podcast studio</a> at the <a href=\"https://1871.com/\">1871 tech incubator</a> in Chicago, I talk about my surprising smooth 2-week trip in Ireland and Scotland. We also note the retirement (finally!) of American Airlines\' MD-80 jet, a very interesting new social media app, talk about how algorithms are changing the way we travel, and the melancholy of leaving familiar places for the last time.&nbsp; All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_153.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_153.mp3\"]\n<p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #153: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the podcast studio in the 1871 tech incubator in Chicago, IL. I have to say that this is the most professional studio I’ve recorded in since my high-school radio days in Memphis. I mentor here once a month and so get to use this bang-up studio. This sound ought to be phenomenal. It’s a few weeks after our 2-week Celtic jaunt -- a week touring in Ireland and a week of graduation festivities at University of St Andrews in Scotland. I’ve talked a bit about the planning for this trip in the past couple of episodes -- wrestling through the Avios website to kludge together flights on Aer Lingus and burn off some of my Avios balance that’s been sitting around for, I dunno, 5-10 years; and trying to sift through the horror stories of Irish car rentals. There were a whole lot of places where this trip could’ve gone bad… but it didn’t. The flights on Aer Lingus were fine; nothing special, but they were serviceable. Our Budget Car rental experience was the same -- a basic Renault compact with 30,000 km on it, but no issues with the folks on either the pick-up or the drop-off in Dublin airport. All the places I booked in Ireland were fine -- the B&amp;Bs on the west coast were great; the hotel in Dublin was, again, serviceable. And, we didn’t really have any rain to speak of until our last day in Dublin.</li><li>The flights between Dublin and Edinburgh were on turboprop planes -- ATR-72-600s to be exact. I can’t remember the last time I was on a prop plane -- even the quick 30-min hops I’d do occasionally between IAD and CHO are on Embraer jets. But I remember way back in my early flying days, American Eagle used to fly a lot of these ATRs. Once those props started turning, I popped on my Bose noise-cancelling headphones. Those American Eagle ATRs were one of the main reasons I invested in my first pair of Bose.</li><li>But other than a bit of a rainy walk to and from that plane in DUB and EDI, they were fine flights. Indeed, if there was any hiccup, it was on arrival in DUB from ORD.&nbsp; We’d checked luggage, even though one of my regular top travel tips is to carry on. I knew the plane was full, and since Aer Lingus isn’t part of OneWorld or StarAlliance, neither my American nor my United status was going to get us pre-boarded. Rather than worrying about having to jockey for overhead space, we checked our bags - and anyways, it was free; it was included in the fare. So, low-hassle boarding. In DUB, I stood at the luggage carousel, watched it heave out a dozen or so bags, and then nothing. No worries; seen that before; the guys must be driving the tug back to the plane. And then the carousel stopped. Not too worried; seen that before too; just saving a little energy. And then the lights above us went out.&nbsp; OK, this is a new one. I have to say that I started to worry a bit -- until I saw our pilot also looking around for his luggage. After 20 minutes, the lights came on and the carousel started burping up bags again. And there was a simultaneous sigh of relief from all the chaperones accompanying the half-dozen student trips that had packed this flight.</li><li> Bridge Music -- <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/Loveshadow/26219\" target=\"_blank\"><em>SP*ANK Vox</em></a> by Loveshadow </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Biggest travel news -- at least to me -- since the last episode -- American announced the retirement (finally!) of the last of its MD-80s, the “Super 80s” or the “Mad Dog 80s” with the last revenue flight planned for Sept 4th from DFW to ORD. Which for me is very apropos because I spent a <em>lot</em> of time in the mid-80\'s flying MD-80\'s between those two AA hubs. I thought the 737 Max grounding might delay the final MD-80 flight, but it looks like American has scrounged up enough 737-800s to fill the gap. I posted American’s announcement on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page. Jim McDonough commented - “Flew the Mad Dog many, many times. My wife and I would select row 9 on the 2 seat side, flying, usually, DFW/SAN. She’s tiny, so I felt like I was in first class.” The left-hand 2-seat side was great for couples -- got a window and an aisle seat without having to guess if the center seat would be filled. But then you had to deal with the short overhead bins on that side where you could only fit your bag in sideways, and usually no power supply. The cigarette style power adapters were on the other side, the 3-seat side, but only in every <em>other</em> row. It was a unique plane...</li><li>Back in May, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/podcast-151-traveler-data-leaks-brittany-street-food/\">episode 151</a>, TravelCommons listener Mika Pyyhkala sent in a note about his great experience with a flight rebooking service, Freebird. This week, I was booking a trip to CHO on the Amex Travel site with my Platinum card. At the end of the booking, it offered me free Freebird coverage for the trip. I had to check a box to opt in, so I read the fine print closely to make sure it was really free, but it was. Seems Freebird and Amex are doing a free trial. Don’t know how long it lasts, but I’ll opt in -- with the hope that I don’t actually have to use it.</li><li>Some bits ‘n’ bobs observations from my Ireland-Scotland trip…</li><li>Like so many other folks, I’m carrying my own water bottle on flights. I started last fall. The big Amazon Web Services conference gave everyone a refillable water bottle, replacing barrels of iced single-use water bottles with refilling stations. Most airports now have refilling spigots next to regular water fountains. Irene has carried one forever. It came in handy when Aer Lingus wanted to charge her €3 for water on one of our flights. Now, I lost that original AWS water bottles a few months back -- matching my usual 6-month time-before-loss metric. No big deal; it was just a plastic bottle with a screw-on cap. But I wanted a new one. So for Fathers’ Day, Claire gave me a new souped-up 20 oz. water bottle with a push-button pop-up drinking spout and a carabiner loop -- very nice. I pulled it out during one of our Aer Lingus flights, skipping their €3 charge, hit the button for the spout and immediately get hit square between the eyes with a fat stream of water from my bottle-now-turned-water fountain. Apparently this new fancy water bottle seals airtight, meaning the water in the bottle stayed at ground pressure while our cabin was now lower, at something between 6 and 8,000 ft. I’m used to that with foil-sealed yogurts, but not my water bottle. A surprise not just for me, but also the Irish guy next to me who was napping before he caught some shrapnel from my portable water cannon.</li><li>One of the things I look forward to when staying at bed-&amp;-breakfasts in the UK and Ireland are… the breakfasts. And the breakfasts we had in Ireland were at least one order of magnitude better than the best concierge lounge fare at a Marriott -- which may be damning with faint praise, but I don’t mean to, we had great breakfasts. For most of our time on the west coast, we hubbed out of Galway, staying in the same place for 3 nights, or more importantly, 3 breakfasts. The first morning was easy; the full cooked breakfast -- eggs, bacon, sausage, black and white pudding, tomatoes, mushrooms, baked beans, and toast. We were doing a good bit of hiking that day and I wasn’t hungry until 3. Doing that two days in a row, though, felt like I was tempting fate -- or at least an arterial blockage. So the next morning, I went with the healthier choice -- oatmeal porridge. The presentation is pretty typical -- a big bowl of porridge with little cups of raisins, brown sugar, and cream. I mix in the raisins, a touch of the brown sugar, and a bit of the cream to loosen up the porridge. Except it doesn’t smell like cream. I taste it -- it’s Bailey\'s Irish Cream. I dump the rest of it in. I figure porridge with a Bailey’s topper is kinda the Irish version of a Bloody Mary.</li><li>One of the big differences for me between renting a car in the US and in Europe is the pre-car inspection. You get the keys, the rental agreement, and a form showing the condition of the car before you take if off the lot -- pre-existing dings and scratches. I always give this form to Irene -- she’s much pickier than I am. She walks around the car, making note of anything missing, while I figure out the rear-view mirrors and pairing my iPhone to the entertainment system. So I was kinda surprised to get an e-mail from Hertz before getting on our flight to EDI with a bunch of pictures of a Kia wagon. Here was our car; here was the documentation of its condition. We walked straight to the car, loaded up the luggage and drove off. No walkaround inspection. It makes sense. We had gotten to the point, on our last couple of rentals, where we were taking pictures of dings and scratches as well as marking them on the form. Now here, Hertz was doing it for us. Not sure if I got this because I have Hertz Gold, but it certainly was a big improvement in the rental experience -- though I still had to figure out how to pair my phone.</li><li>The timing on international connections in Europe always feels a little bit of a crap shoot because there doesn’t seem to be a consistent rule about having to pass thru security again. Amsterdam, no security. Frankfurt, no security for a European connection, but security if you’re flying to, say, India or the Middle East. London, security every time, maybe even a couple of additional passes just for kicks. Dublin, though, had a new twist. Go thru the usual drill -- pull out your electronics, take off your belt, push your bags thru the X-ray machine, but then -- where’s the metal detector? Just walk past the security guy and put my PC back in my bag. I looked back. There was a metal detector all the way at the end of the security hall, but only one. The rest of us were acting like we were walking thru a metal detector, except there wasn’t one. That was just odd.</li><li>We were in Scotland for Claire’s graduation from University of St Andrews. Hanging around, drinking beer with folks a couple of generations younger than you -- this group was right on the Millennial/Gen Z boundary -- is always an educational experience. But when the conversation turned to their new favorite app -- <a href=\"https://apps.apple.com/us/app/poop-map-pin-and-track/id1303269455\">Poop</a> <a href=\"https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.poopmap&amp;hl=en_US\">Map</a> -- I thought they were leading this old guy on. An app where you and your friends share the places you’ve pooped, complete with star ratings and comments, seemed too much like an Onion headline -- social media taken to the absurd extreme. Except is wasn’t satire; it was real. They all pulled out their phones, fired up the app, and showed me their check-ins. OK, then. But I think checking in beers on Untappd is as far as I want to go.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com. </li><li>Bridge Music —  &nbsp;<em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/trifonic/445\" target=\"_blank\">Bored on Your Backside</a></em> by Trifonic     </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Travel by Algorithm</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>On the rainy Monday we flew from DUB to EDI, I drove us downtown to meet some friends for the day. The rain was beginning to muck up traffic, so I was kinda glued to Google Maps to help route us around some of the traffic tie ups, which meant we weren’t on the usual route take in from the airport, which meant I was just about completely dependent on Google; completely trusting that algorithm. Which was kinda broken when I followed Google’s directions through a warning sign and onto a “Buses Only” road. Google directed me to keep driving down the road, but since I was only a single-decker Kia wagon, I didn’t think any attempt to masquerade as a bus was going to survive our first police encounter. So I took the first left (much easier when driving on the left side of the road) hoping the algorithm would produce a bit more legal routing.</li><li>Not overly shocking. There have been a steady stream of stories for years about GPSs leading people astray -- this was a topic way back in the early days of&nbsp; TravelCommons, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2006/05/04/podcast-38-the-accidental-vacation-trusting-travel-technology/\">episode #36</a> in 2006 to be exact, when they were called SatNavs, I told the story of making a dash to SFO after a sales meeting. I’m riding shotgun, tracking our progress on a one of those <em>paper</em> maps that Hertz used to put in every car. But we also had a Hertz NeverLost. It seemed about 10 seconds slow to me. I spotted our turn on I-580, but Hertz said nothing. “Turn,” I said. “No,” Brian said, “You need to trust the technology.” And so when Hertz said to turn 10 seconds later, he did -- right into a gas station. Not as bad as stories of people driving across closed bridges, into rivers, up unpaved mountain roads… But in the subsequent 13 years, with SatNav, now GPS, moving from our cars to our pockets, we’re lean on those algorithms more than ever. Now living in Chicago, I haven’t bothered to learn any of the public transit routes; I just use Google Maps or the Transit app to tell me what bus to catch when.</li><li>Sometimes I’ll use Hipmunk to look at flight options to a new city, or a place I haven’t been in a while. They promote their Agony sort, where their algorithm rates flight by a combination of price, duration, # of stops, and dependability. I’m heading back to CHO and since I haven’t been out there for 6 months, I hit Hipmunk to check out American’s and United’s current flight offerings, scrolled down from the non-stops thru the 1-stops. I thought it was interesting, though, that Hipmunk’s algorithm scored a 24-hr hour Amtrak ride with a 3-hr layover in DC’s Union Station as less agonizing than a 6-hr 2-stop trip on United Express with connections in Columbus and IAD. But given some of my United Express experiences, who am I to second-guess that algorithm?</li><li>One of the things I liked about the soon-to-be-turned-off Google Trips app, is how it would auto-magically generate itinerary recommendations for a city. It would pick out points of interest with high Google review scores, and then combine the hours each would be open from the business listing with the typical amount of time people would stay there, and location and traffic data from Google Maps to generate the best itinerary. This fascinated me. It sucked my into a click hole of academic papers presented at the International Conference on the Practice and Theory of Automated Timetabling and the International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining talking about how the “Tourist Trip Design Problem (TTDP) is a route-planning problem on multiple Points of Interest. TTDP can be considered as an extension of the classical problem of Team Orienteering Problem with Time Windows.” I want to use this to automatically generate microbrewery taproom crawls but the math made my eyes bleed.</li><li>But back to that rainy day in Edinburgh, Google Maps redeemed itself at the end of the day. There was so much rain that Monday, our usual path out of the city, the A90, was at a complete standstill because of flooded underpasses, and stalled cars that tried to make it thru the flooded underpasses. Google Maps guided us past a gridlocked traffic circle, winding us through some apartment complexes, bypassing the flooded parts, and putting us right onto the M90 so we could head out to St Andrews. Better travel through algorithms.</li><li>Bridge Music —   &nbsp; <em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/hepepe/21074\" target=\"_blank\">Bogi Beat Budapest</a> </em>by KarmaHacker  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Leaving Places Behind</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Driving out of St Andrews that last time was a bit melancholy. We’d spent the last 4 September there, saw things change -- restaurants open and close, Edinburgh airport get spiffier -- but also the familiar things stay the same -- <a href=\"http://keysbar.co.uk/\">The Keys</a>, my favorite dive whisky bar; <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"St Andrews Brewing Company (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.standrewsbrewingcompany.com/\" target=\"_blank\">St Andrews Brewing Company</a> or “Stabco” as my daughter would call it, always with a great beer selection from across the UK; and <a href=\"https://jahangirstandrews.co.uk/\">Jahangir</a>, an Indian restaurant we found our first year because they were the only place we could find a table that Friday night... and we kept going back because they had great food and we never couldn’t get a table</li><li>The melancholy was that we probably wouldn’t be back; at least not for a long time. It’s out-of-the-way -- which is part of its charm, but it’s why we probably won’t be back for a while.</li><li>I felt the same way when I finished a project in Portland, Oregon some years back. I was in Portland every week for 3-4 months and got to know it pretty well. I explored new places, but developed some favorite spots I’d hit every week -- <a href=\"https://www.clydecommon.com/\">Clyde Commons</a> for dinner at the bar, <a href=\"https://www.baileystaproom.com/\">Bailey’s Taproom</a> with a new beer selection every week. When that project ended, I knew I wouldn’t be back to Portland for a long time -- as opposed to New York or San Francisco. Wrapping up a project there, not really a big deal because there’s enough business to bring me back. New Orleans was kinda in the middle. I’d been there almost non-stop for 3-4 years, but while I didn’t think business would bring me down there again, it’s not out of the way, and I’d be down often for vacations or conventions -- which is how it’s turned out.</li><li>Some of that melancholy comes from regret -- from things you always meant to do but never made time for -- “I’ll do that next time,” you’d say to yourself, but never get to it. The last time I was in Charlottesville, VA, I was finishing up what had been another 3-4 year stream of work and wasn’t sure when I’d be back. For me, Charlottesville was a bit like St Andrews, an out-of-the-way college town (though only a 2-hr flight from Chicago rather than an 8-10 hour fly-and-drive) and wasn’t sure when -- if ever -- I’d get back. Over those years, I’d always plan to take a half-day and drive the 15 minutes from the client to <a href=\"https://www.monticello.org/\">Monticello</a>, Thomas Jefferson’s home, and take the tour. It’s always written up as a must-see, and I’m right here. But every time I was going to do it, something would come up, and I’d say “I’ll do that next time.” And so here I was, the last time -- I didn’t know when the next time would be. And I really didn’t have much time in my schedule, but after lunch one day, I walked out, taking calls all the way to the Monticello parking lot, and then turned off my phone and had a great tour. And flew out the next morning without that regret.&nbsp;</li><li>But now 6 months later, I’m heading back to Charlottesville. So maybe I’ll get back to St Andrews sooner than I thought. Maybe I should see if <a href=\"https://www.standrewsbrewingcompany.com/\">Stabco</a> needs an old-guy bartender.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #153</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_153.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<p><!--EndFragment--></p>','Podcast #153 — Travel By Algorithm; Leaving Places Behind','','inherit','closed','closed','','2494-revision-v1','','','2020-01-26 14:32:25','2020-01-26 19:32:25','',2494,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/01/26/2494-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2637,1,'2020-01-26 14:33:47','2020-01-26 19:33:47','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/DSC_7106-scaled.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2633\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/DSC_7106-300x293.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"293\"></a><figcaption>Just put my dragon\'s den on Airbnb</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>January is a big travel planning month; people thinking about about the places they want to visit, spending days on the Internet researching itineraries, and putting in their week\'s vacation requests. But what about a 9-week sabbatical you’ve worked 7 years for? In this episode, we talk about that kind of extreme travel planning. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_159.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/749899837&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #159: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois having finished 3 weeks of traveling down to Phoenix with one more to go. It’s been a mild winter -- for Chicago -- especially when compared to last winter, which means it’s been in the 20’s and 30’s as opposed to -23 as it was one morning last January. But even with a mild winter, I still appreciate the 70 degree days in Phoenix.</li><li> It’s a 4-hr flight between Chicago and Phoenix. I normally enjoy that amount of “unplugged” time to just read, listen to music, listen to podcasts. But a couple of weeks ago, I tweaked my back during a workout -- not a big thing, I’ve done it many times before. But this time, the pain didn’t go away, it’s hung around on my left side, moving from back to hip to thigh, making it very uncomfortable to sit for long periods of time -- like 4 hrs. Which has made me notice how long US carriers keep the “Fasten Seatbelt” sign on -- like, forever. By the time that seatbelt sign finally goes off, my back is screaming -- and the person next to me in the middle seat is pretty annoyed at my constant shifting. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/06/16/podcast-152-overwhelming-travel-new-old-restaurant-trends/\">episode #152</a>, I talked about Southwest flights between Chicago and Nashville keeping the seatbelt sign on the entire hour-and-20-minutes. It hasn’t been that bad, but it’s easily been 45 minutes. And it isn’t just Southwest; United is doing the same thing. Quite a difference from, say, when Andrew and I flew Air Baltic back in October. 10,000 ft and “bing” that seat belt sign would go off, and we’d still be climbing. It doesn’t need to turn off that fast, but there’s gotta be a happy medium there somewhere. </li><li>With the mild winter and a little bit of luck, my flights to and from Phoenix have been pretty dependable -- except for this week. On Monday, I started getting delay notices for my United 7:40pm flight right after lunch. United was doing their typical rolling delay exercise -- it’s a 30 minutes; no, really an hour; no, we’re leaving at 9pm; just kidding, it’s really 9:40. I was OK with the 30 and 60-minute delays, but then when I get two more delays in a 40-minute span -- now, something’s up. I call United. I get the Premier desk, which the guy tells me is in Chicago. I tell him the story -- rolling delays have now gotten to 2 hrs; I don’t trust that this flight is going off, and I need to get to PHX tonight. The guy says, “Yup, I got it. Makes sense.” He tries to find me routings through LAX and SFO, but the connections don’t work. So he cancels and refunds my ticket -- no hassle, no questions, no change fee. I love this guy. I pivot to Southwest and American, which both have 8:40 flights. I look at American’s seat map -- nothing but middle seats. That’s just not going to work with my back, so it’s over to Southwest. I’m A-List, so I know with their open seating I’ll get an aisle seat. (Exhale) Haven’t done that dance in a while, so was a bit out of shape. But with one more trip to PHX left, I’m not looking to get back into that shape.</li><li>Bridge Music --  <em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/hisboyelroy/430\" target=\"_blank\">Revolve</a> mix</em> by cinematrik (c) copyright 2005 Licensed under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hisboyelroy/430   </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Before writing a podcast, I go through all the interaction channels -- website comments, Facebook comments, Instagram comments, Twitter replies, e-mails, … and inevitably I miss something. Which I have done since October when Arnoud Heijnis and I traded Twitter direct messages about travel converters. In episode #155, I’d talked about having to rummage around for European plug adaptors before my Krakow and Budapest trip, and how I’m always leaving them behind. Arnoud wrote -<ul><li>Hi Mark, just caught up on your last two episodes. I also did the travel converter dance until someone recommended the Power Bagel. It\'s so small and comes in handy not only as a travel adapter but also in hotel rooms with not enough power plugs, conference tables with one outlet etc. Iit never leaves my bag so thought I\'d share.</li></ul></li><li>A very belated thanks, Arnoud! Clicking through the link that Arnoud sent, the Power Bagel is a compact circular power strip of universal plugs and a couple of USB ports. They say that the circular design keeps large power adapters, like a Macbook power supply, from blocking outlets like they do on straight power strips. And then in the center hole, they store a universal plug adapter so you can plug the Power Bagel in most international outlets. Cool design and Arnoud vouches for it. Clicking around the web site, the company MOGICS seems to be a 3-person design company based in Singapore. They got started a few years back on Kickstarter and are in the middle of a new campaign for an upgraded version of the Power Bagel, called, of course, the Super Bagel that upgrades the plug adapter and adds a on-trend USB-C port. Kickstarter says the campaign ends on Feb 25th. I’ll include a <a href=\"http://kck.st/354ozBx\">link</a> in the show notes for anyone interested.</li><li>Kickstarter seems to be the place for these things. I sent Arnoud a link to a travel adapter campaign that I joined. The Passport Go is a more traditional travel adapter -- a big cube that will plug into most international outlets and has 3 USB-A and 1 USB-C plugs and one universal plug receptacle. I used it on my Baltics trip. For personal travel, most of my power needs seem to now be driven by USB cords rather than plugs -- my iPhone did a rapid charge off the USB-C port, my tablet and headphones off the USB-A ports and since I don’t have enough hair to justify a blow dryer or curling iron, I never used the plug receptacle. Indeed, if I’d brought my Macbook Air, I could’ve powered that up off the USB-C port rather than bringing its power adapter. I’ll include a link to <a href=\"https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/zendure/passport-go-worlds-first-travel-adapter-w-gan-technology\"><em>their</em> Kickstarter page</a>.</li><li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/10/14/podcast-156-airport-satisfaction-escooters-smaller-luggage/\">episode #156,</a> I talked about how I really liked electric scooters, using them to run around in Chicago and Charlottesville and DC, and down here in Phoenix. Whereas Chicago wrapped up their e-scooter pilot in October -- which made sense; I don’t think those scooters would do well in the snow -- Phoenix seemed the perfect place with perfect weather -- no snow, not a lot of rain. And they seemed to have nailed one of the main problems with e-scooters -- people leaving them lying everywhere, especially in the middle of sidewalks. In downtown Phoenix, you have to park them in designated areas, typically near sidewalk corners, inside a painted box. So it surprised me when I started coming down here in December that I saw only 2 scooter companies -- Lime (which is partnered with Uber) and Spin (which is owned by the car company Ford). But then, a couple of weeks ago, Lime announced that they were pulling out -- that they couldn’t make money in Phoenix -- and a day or so later, all their scooters were gone. I don’t know what the right balance between scooter availability and public right-of-way is, but I hope Chicago and Phoenix and other cities can figure it out. This whole micro-mobility space -- bike shares, e-scooters -- is an important part of the urban transit mix. And, when the weather’s nice, they’re fun too!</li><li>In that <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/10/14/podcast-156-airport-satisfaction-escooters-smaller-luggage/\">same episode</a>, I talked about buying a smaller bag, a <a href=\"https://amzn.to/32lIURe\">TravelPro Maxlite 5 international carry-on size</a>, to meet the smaller carry-on size and weight requirements of AirBaltic, which Andrew and I would be using to hop between Riga, Tallinn, and Helsinki on our Baltics beer and sauna tour. I said back then that I didn’t want to spend a lot of money on it because I’d only be using it for this Baltics trip and maybe some short couple-of-day trips, that my big Victorinox 22-incher would remain my primary bag. But as it turns out, I’ve been using the smaller TravelPro for these 4-day/3-night trips to Phoenix. Now, with temperatures in 70’s, I’m not having to bring heavy, thick clothes with me, but still, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by what I can pack into that smaller TravelPro. But, I think I’ll be back to the Victorinox for next week’s trip -- I’m vectoring through Durango, CO for a ski weekend on the way home. Little colder, little more clothing; I think I’ll need all the space I can get. </li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music -- Velvet Green of Mystery (Instrumental) by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/48114 Ft: Kthugha, Jeris, Martijn de Boer  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong> </strong> <strong>Planning the Trip of a Lifetime</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>We’ve talked on past episodes about trip planning -- using guidebooks, social media, Google algorithms, shooting the gaps between bipolar TripAdvisor reviews, casting runes, consulting tarot cards,... And all that for a week’s vacation, maybe two. What about a 9-week vacation, a paid sabbatical that you’ve worked and waited 7 years for? Well, that’s the extreme travel planning that long-time TravelCommons listener and even longer time friend Allan Marko and his wife Chris Chufo faced last year. And with January being a big travel planning month, I asked Allan to talk to us about how he and Chris planned for a trip of a lifetime.</li><li>Interview with Allan Marko</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #159</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2010/09/06/video-1-impressions-of-vietnam/\">Link to TravelCommons Vietnam video</a></li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_159.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #159 — Planning the Trip of a Lifetime in Southeast Asia','','inherit','closed','closed','','2626-revision-v1','','','2020-01-26 14:33:47','2020-01-26 19:33:47','',2626,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/01/26/2626-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2640,1,'2020-02-07 12:13:23','2020-02-07 17:13:23','<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/new2-640x641-1.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2641\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/new2-640x641-1-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a>I just wrapped up two months in downtown Phoenix and want to pass along my favorite hangouts for food and beer. When I started traveling to Phoenix in the mid-\'90\'s, there wasn\'t much to downtown Phoenix other than the Hyatt Regency hotel. Today, stadiums for the Phoenix Suns and the Arizona Diamondbacks, and a downtown campus for Arizona State University support a solid selection of restaurants, coffee shops, and bars. Below are the places that I found myself going back to again and again during my 2-month stay.\n\n<a href=\"https://mariscosplayahermosa.com\"><strong>Mariscos Playa Hermosa</strong></a> While not technically within the DTPHX boundary, this place has the best Mexican seafood I\'ve ever had -- and that includes my dinners in San Jose del Cabo over last Christmas Break. The <em>Pulpo y Callo Parrillada</em> (grilled octopus leg and scallops) and <em>Camarones Fantasia</em> (shrimp stuffed into mild chile and then wrapped in bacon) are my favorites, but it\'s all good. Worth the short Uber/Lyft ride. (1605 E Garfield St)\n\n<a href=\"http://harumisushiaz.com\"><strong>Harumi Sushi</strong></a> Sushi in the desert doesn\'t immediately jump to the top of my list of food must-do\'s, but Harumi hits all my sushi hot buttons -- nice pieces of sashimi served with fresh wasabi and an interesting selection of rolls. It\'s a small place that gets crowded, so check out the wait time on Yelp before you walk over. (114 W Adams St though the door is north of Adams on 1st St)\n\n<strong><a href=\"http://www.pizzeriabianco.com/\">Pizzeria Bianco</a></strong> Always on the lists of the top pizza places in the US. While I\'m not sure if deserves all those accolades, it\'s very good thin crust pizza. And Bar Bianco next door is a very cool space for pre- or post-dinner cocktails. (623 E Adams St in Heritage Square near the AZ Science Center)\n\n<strong><a href=\"http://thearrogantbutcher.com\">Arrogant Butcher</a> </strong> The place I\'d go when I wanted to eat at the bar and watch a ball game. I like the Butcher\'s Meatballs for a smaller meal and the Beef Short Rib Stew when a bit hungrier. It\'s kitty-corner from Talking Stick Arena, so it can get crowded before a Suns game. (2 E Jefferson St at S 1st St)\n\n<a href=\"http://thewhiningpig.com\"><strong>The Whining Pig</strong></a> A block north of Talking Stick Arena, The Whining Pig is a classic low-key/no-attitude craft beer bar -- a great draft selection, a huge can/bottle menu, knowledgable bartenders, and a solid selection of bar and card games. My go-to beer bar in DTPHX. (201 E Washington St, though the door is south of Washington on 2nd St)\n\n<a href=\"http://thetheodore.beer\"><strong>The Theodore</strong></a> Great craft beer bar at the west end of the hip Roosevelt Row district. Nice <a href=\"https://untappd.com/v/the-theodore/9474701\">draft menu</a>, color coded by style, and a cooler full of interesting cans and bottles for drinking there or back at your hotel. Good-sized place -- comfy couches inside and patio seating out front and on the side. (110 E Roosevelt St at N 1st St)\n\n<strong><a href=\"https://azwbeer.com/dtphx-beer-garden/\">Arizona Wilderness DTPHX</a></strong> A block-and-a-half down from The Theodore is Arizona Wilderness\'s downtown beer garden. Sit outside around the fire pit (during the winter months) or inside (during the summer months). They have a wide-ranging <a href=\"https://untappd.com/v/arizona-wilderness-dtphx/8695423\">beer menu</a>, many of which feature Arizona-sourced ingredients like honey, lemons, prickly pear, carrots, and sweet potato. (201 E Roosevelt St) .','My food and beer hangouts in Downtown Phoenix (#DTPHX)','','private','closed','closed','','my-food-and-beer-hangouts-in-downtown-phoenix-dtphx','','','2024-06-01 18:01:36','2024-06-01 23:01:36','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=2640',0,'post','',0),
(2641,1,'2020-02-06 16:08:28','2020-02-06 21:08:28','','new2-640x641','','inherit','open','closed','','new2-640x641','','','2020-02-06 16:08:28','2020-02-06 21:08:28','',2640,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/new2-640x641-1.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(2642,1,'2020-02-06 16:24:17','2020-02-06 21:24:17','<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/new2-640x641-1.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright  wp-image-2641\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/new2-640x641-1-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"196\" height=\"196\"></a>I just wrapped up two months in downtown Phoenix (#DTPHX) and want to pass along my favorite hangouts for food and beer.\n<em>Food</em> –\n<ul>\n 	<li>jlfjls</li>\n 	<li>jlkjflsdf;</li>\n 	<li>jfdlk;jasl;df</li>\n</ul>','My hangouts in Downtown Phoenix','','inherit','closed','closed','','2640-revision-v1','','','2020-02-06 16:24:17','2020-02-06 21:24:17','',2640,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/02/06/2640-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2643,1,'2020-02-06 16:36:53','2020-02-06 21:36:53','<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/new2-640x641-1.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright  wp-image-2641\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/new2-640x641-1-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"196\" height=\"196\" /></a>I just wrapped up two months in downtown Phoenix (#DTPHX) and want to pass along my favorite hangouts for food and beer.\n\n<a href=\"https://mariscosplayahermosa.com\"><strong>Mariscos Playa Hermosa</strong></a>\n\nHarumi Sushi\n\nPizzeria Bianco\n\nArrogant Butcher','My hangouts in Downtown Phoenix','','inherit','closed','closed','','2640-revision-v1','','','2020-02-06 16:36:53','2020-02-06 21:36:53','',2640,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/02/06/2640-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2644,1,'2020-02-06 16:41:28','2020-02-06 21:41:28','<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/new2-640x641-1.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright  wp-image-2641\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/new2-640x641-1-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"196\" height=\"196\" /></a>I just wrapped up two months in downtown Phoenix (#DTPHX) and want to pass along my favorite hangouts for food and beer.\n\n<a href=\"https://mariscosplayahermosa.com\"><strong>Mariscos Playa Hermosa</strong></a> 1605 E Garfield St\n\n<a href=\"http://harumisushiaz.com\"><strong>Harumi Sushi</strong></a> 114 W Adams St (between Monroe &amp; W Adams Sts)\n\n<strong><a href=\"http://pizzeriabianco.com\">Pizzeria Bianco</a></strong> 623 E Adams St (near the AZ Science Center)\n\nArrogant Butcher','My hangouts in Downtown Phoenix','','inherit','closed','closed','','2640-revision-v1','','','2020-02-06 16:41:28','2020-02-06 21:41:28','',2640,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/02/06/2640-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2645,1,'2020-02-06 16:46:22','2020-02-06 21:46:22','<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/new2-640x641-1.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright  wp-image-2641\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/new2-640x641-1-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"196\" height=\"196\" /></a>I just wrapped up two months in downtown Phoenix (#DTPHX) and want to pass along my favorite hangouts for food and beer.\n\n<a href=\"https://mariscosplayahermosa.com\"><strong>Mariscos Playa Hermosa</strong></a> 1605 E Garfield St\n\n<a href=\"http://harumisushiaz.com\"><strong>Harumi Sushi</strong></a> 114 W Adams St (between Monroe &amp; W Adams Sts)\n\n<strong><a href=\"http://pizzeriabianco.com\">Pizzeria Bianco</a></strong> 623 E Adams St (near the AZ Science Center)\n\n<a href=\"http://thearrogantbutcher.com\">Arrogant Butcher</a> 2 E Jefferson St (at S 1st St)','My hangouts in Downtown Phoenix','','inherit','closed','closed','','2640-revision-v1','','','2020-02-06 16:46:22','2020-02-06 21:46:22','',2640,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/02/06/2640-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2646,1,'2020-02-06 16:57:17','2020-02-06 21:57:17','<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/new2-640x641-1.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright  wp-image-2641\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/new2-640x641-1-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"196\" height=\"196\"></a>I just wrapped up two months in downtown Phoenix and want to pass along my favorite hangouts for food and beer.\n\n<a href=\"https://mariscosplayahermosa.com\"><strong>Mariscos Playa Hermosa</strong></a> While not technically within the DTPHX boundary, this place has the best Mexican seafood I\'ve ever had -- and that includes my dinners in San Jose del Cabo during Christmas. The Pulpo y Callo Parrillada (grilled octopus leg and scallops) and\nCamarones Fantasia (shrimp stuffed into mild chile and then wrapped in bacon) are my favorites, but it\'s all good. Worth the short Uber/Lyft ride. (1605 E Garfield St)\n\n<a href=\"http://harumisushiaz.com\"><strong>Harumi Sushi</strong></a> 114 W Adams St (between Monroe &amp; W Adams Sts)\n\n<strong><a href=\"http://pizzeriabianco.com\">Pizzeria Bianco</a></strong> 623 E Adams St (near the AZ Science Center)\n\n<strong><a href=\"http://thearrogantbutcher.com\">Arrogant Butcher</a> </strong> 2 E Jefferson St (at S 1st St)','My hangouts in Downtown Phoenix (#DTPHX)','','inherit','closed','closed','','2640-revision-v1','','','2020-02-06 16:57:17','2020-02-06 21:57:17','',2640,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/02/06/2640-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2647,1,'2020-02-06 16:58:14','2020-02-06 21:58:14','<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/new2-640x641-1.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright  wp-image-2641\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/new2-640x641-1-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"196\" height=\"196\" /></a>I just wrapped up two months in downtown Phoenix and want to pass along my favorite hangouts for food and beer.\n\n<a href=\"https://mariscosplayahermosa.com\"><strong>Mariscos Playa Hermosa</strong></a> While not technically within the DTPHX boundary, this place has the best Mexican seafood I\'ve ever had -- and that includes my dinners in San Jose del Cabo over Christmas Break. The <em>Pulpo y Callo Parrillada</em> (grilled octopus leg and scallops) and <em>Camarones Fantasia</em> (shrimp stuffed into mild chile and then wrapped in bacon) are my favorites, but it\'s all good. Worth the short Uber/Lyft ride. (1605 E Garfield St)\n\n<a href=\"http://harumisushiaz.com\"><strong>Harumi Sushi</strong></a> 114 W Adams St (between Monroe &amp; W Adams Sts)\n\n<strong><a href=\"http://pizzeriabianco.com\">Pizzeria Bianco</a></strong> 623 E Adams St (near the AZ Science Center)\n\n<strong><a href=\"http://thearrogantbutcher.com\">Arrogant Butcher</a> </strong> 2 E Jefferson St (at S 1st St)','My hangouts in Downtown Phoenix (#DTPHX)','','inherit','closed','closed','','2640-revision-v1','','','2020-02-06 16:58:14','2020-02-06 21:58:14','',2640,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/02/06/2640-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2648,1,'2020-02-06 17:06:38','2020-02-06 22:06:38','<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/new2-640x641-1.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright  wp-image-2641\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/new2-640x641-1-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"196\" height=\"196\"></a>I just wrapped up two months in downtown Phoenix and want to pass along my favorite hangouts for food and beer.\n\n<a href=\"https://mariscosplayahermosa.com\"><strong>Mariscos Playa Hermosa</strong></a> While not technically within the DTPHX boundary, this place has the best Mexican seafood I\'ve ever had -- and that includes my dinners in San Jose del Cabo over Christmas Break. The <em>Pulpo y Callo Parrillada</em> (grilled octopus leg and scallops) and <em>Camarones Fantasia</em> (shrimp stuffed into mild chile and then wrapped in bacon) are my favorites, but it\'s all good. Worth the short Uber/Lyft ride. (1605 E Garfield St)\n\n<a href=\"http://harumisushiaz.com\"><strong>Harumi Sushi</strong></a> Sushi in the desert doesn\'t immediately jump to the top of my list of food must-do\'s, but Harumi hits all my sushi hot buttons -- nice pieces of sashimi served with fresh wasabi and interesting selection of rolls. It\'s a small place that gets crowded, so check out the wait time on Yelp before you walk over. (114 W Adams St (between Monroe &amp; W Adams Sts))\n\n<strong><a href=\"http://pizzeriabianco.com\">Pizzeria Bianco</a></strong> 623 E Adams St (near the AZ Science Center)\n\n<strong><a href=\"http://thearrogantbutcher.com\">Arrogant Butcher</a> </strong> 2 E Jefferson St (at S 1st St)','My hangouts in Downtown Phoenix (#DTPHX)','','inherit','closed','closed','','2640-revision-v1','','','2020-02-06 17:06:38','2020-02-06 22:06:38','',2640,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/02/06/2640-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2649,1,'2020-02-06 17:15:46','2020-02-06 22:15:46','<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/new2-640x641-1.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright  wp-image-2641\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/new2-640x641-1-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"196\" height=\"196\"></a>I just wrapped up two months in downtown Phoenix and want to pass along my favorite hangouts for food and beer.\n\n<a href=\"https://mariscosplayahermosa.com\"><strong>Mariscos Playa Hermosa</strong></a> While not technically within the DTPHX boundary, this place has the best Mexican seafood I\'ve ever had -- and that includes my dinners in San Jose del Cabo over Christmas Break. The <em>Pulpo y Callo Parrillada</em> (grilled octopus leg and scallops) and <em>Camarones Fantasia</em> (shrimp stuffed into mild chile and then wrapped in bacon) are my favorites, but it\'s all good. Worth the short Uber/Lyft ride. (1605 E Garfield St)\n\n<a href=\"http://harumisushiaz.com\"><strong>Harumi Sushi</strong></a> Sushi in the desert doesn\'t immediately jump to the top of my list of food must-do\'s, but Harumi hits all my sushi hot buttons -- nice pieces of sashimi served with fresh wasabi and interesting selection of rolls. It\'s a small place that gets crowded, so check out the wait time on Yelp before you walk over. (114 W Adams St (between Monroe &amp; W Adams Sts))\n\n<strong><a href=\"http://pizzeriabianco.com\">Pizzeria Bianco</a></strong> Always on lists of the top pizza places in the US. While not sure about the ranking, it\'s very good thin crust pizza. Check out Bar Bianco next door for cocktails. (623 E Adams St (in Heritage Square near the AZ Science Center))\n\n<strong><a href=\"http://thearrogantbutcher.com\">Arrogant Butcher</a> </strong> The place I\'d go when I wanted to eat at the bar and watch a ball game. I liked the Butcher\'s Meatballs for a smaller meal and the Beef Short Rib Stew when a bit hungrier. It\'s kitty-corner from Talking Stick Arena, so it can get crowded before a Suns game. 2 E Jefferson St (at S 1st St)','My hangouts in Downtown Phoenix (#DTPHX)','','inherit','closed','closed','','2640-revision-v1','','','2020-02-06 17:15:46','2020-02-06 22:15:46','',2640,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/02/06/2640-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2650,1,'2020-02-06 17:16:26','2020-02-06 22:16:26','<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/new2-640x641-1.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright  wp-image-2641\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/new2-640x641-1-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"196\" height=\"196\"></a>I just wrapped up two months in downtown Phoenix and want to pass along my favorite hangouts for food and beer.\n\n<a href=\"https://mariscosplayahermosa.com\"><strong>Mariscos Playa Hermosa</strong></a> While not technically within the DTPHX boundary, this place has the best Mexican seafood I\'ve ever had -- and that includes my dinners in San Jose del Cabo over Christmas Break. The <em>Pulpo y Callo Parrillada</em> (grilled octopus leg and scallops) and <em>Camarones Fantasia</em> (shrimp stuffed into mild chile and then wrapped in bacon) are my favorites, but it\'s all good. Worth the short Uber/Lyft ride. (1605 E Garfield St)\n\n<a href=\"http://harumisushiaz.com\"><strong>Harumi Sushi</strong></a> Sushi in the desert doesn\'t immediately jump to the top of my list of food must-do\'s, but Harumi hits all my sushi hot buttons -- nice pieces of sashimi served with fresh wasabi and interesting selection of rolls. It\'s a small place that gets crowded, so check out the wait time on Yelp before you walk over. (114 W Adams St (between Monroe &amp; W Adams Sts))\n\n<strong><a href=\"http://pizzeriabianco.com\">Pizzeria Bianco</a></strong> Always on lists of the top pizza places in the US. While not sure about the ranking, it\'s very good thin crust pizza. Check out Bar Bianco next door for cocktails. (623 E Adams St (in Heritage Square near the AZ Science Center))\n\n<strong><a href=\"http://thearrogantbutcher.com\">Arrogant Butcher</a> </strong> The place I\'d go when I wanted to eat at the bar and watch a ball game. I liked the Butcher\'s Meatballs for a smaller meal and the Beef Short Rib Stew when a bit hungrier. It\'s kitty-corner from Talking Stick Arena, so it can get crowded before a Suns game. (2 E Jefferson St (at S 1st St))','My hangouts in Downtown Phoenix (#DTPHX)','','inherit','closed','closed','','2640-revision-v1','','','2020-02-06 17:16:26','2020-02-06 22:16:26','',2640,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/02/06/2640-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2651,1,'2020-02-06 17:21:05','2020-02-06 22:21:05','<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/new2-640x641-1.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright  wp-image-2641\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/new2-640x641-1-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"196\" height=\"196\" /></a>I just wrapped up two months in downtown Phoenix and want to pass along my favorite hangouts for food and beer.\n\n<a href=\"https://mariscosplayahermosa.com\"><strong>Mariscos Playa Hermosa</strong></a> While not technically within the DTPHX boundary, this place has the best Mexican seafood I\'ve ever had -- and that includes my dinners in San Jose del Cabo over Christmas Break. The <em>Pulpo y Callo Parrillada</em> (grilled octopus leg and scallops) and <em>Camarones Fantasia</em> (shrimp stuffed into mild chile and then wrapped in bacon) are my favorites, but it\'s all good. Worth the short Uber/Lyft ride. (1605 E Garfield St)\n\n<a href=\"http://harumisushiaz.com\"><strong>Harumi Sushi</strong></a> Sushi in the desert doesn\'t immediately jump to the top of my list of food must-do\'s, but Harumi hits all my sushi hot buttons -- nice pieces of sashimi served with fresh wasabi and interesting selection of rolls. It\'s a small place that gets crowded, so check out the wait time on Yelp before you walk over. (114 W Adams St (between Monroe &amp; W Adams Sts))\n\n<strong><a href=\"http://pizzeriabianco.com\">Pizzeria Bianco</a></strong> Always on lists of the top pizza places in the US. While not sure about the ranking, it\'s very good thin crust pizza. Check out Bar Bianco next door for cocktails. (623 E Adams St (in Heritage Square near the AZ Science Center))\n\n<strong><a href=\"http://thearrogantbutcher.com\">Arrogant Butcher</a> </strong> The place I\'d go when I wanted to eat at the bar and watch a ball game. I liked the Butcher\'s Meatballs for a smaller meal and the Beef Short Rib Stew when a bit hungrier. It\'s kitty-corner from Talking Stick Arena, so it can get crowded before a Suns game. (2 E Jefferson St (at S 1st St))\n\n<a href=\"http://thewhiningpig.com\"><strong>The Whining Pig</strong></a>\n\n<a href=\"http://thetheodore.beer\"><strong>The Theodore</strong></a>\n\n<strong><a href=\"http://wrenhousebrewing.com\">Wren House Brewing Company</a></strong>','My hangouts in Downtown Phoenix (#DTPHX)','','inherit','closed','closed','','2640-revision-v1','','','2020-02-06 17:21:05','2020-02-06 22:21:05','',2640,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/02/06/2640-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2652,1,'2020-02-06 17:26:59','2020-02-06 22:26:59','<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/new2-640x641-1.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright  wp-image-2641\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/new2-640x641-1-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"196\" height=\"196\"></a>I just wrapped up two months in downtown Phoenix and want to pass along my favorite hangouts for food and beer.\n\n<a href=\"https://mariscosplayahermosa.com\"><strong>Mariscos Playa Hermosa</strong></a> While not technically within the DTPHX boundary, this place has the best Mexican seafood I\'ve ever had -- and that includes my dinners in San Jose del Cabo over Christmas Break. The <em>Pulpo y Callo Parrillada</em> (grilled octopus leg and scallops) and <em>Camarones Fantasia</em> (shrimp stuffed into mild chile and then wrapped in bacon) are my favorites, but it\'s all good. Worth the short Uber/Lyft ride. (1605 E Garfield St)\n\n<a href=\"http://harumisushiaz.com\"><strong>Harumi Sushi</strong></a> Sushi in the desert doesn\'t immediately jump to the top of my list of food must-do\'s, but Harumi hits all my sushi hot buttons -- nice pieces of sashimi served with fresh wasabi and interesting selection of rolls. It\'s a small place that gets crowded, so check out the wait time on Yelp before you walk over. (114 W Adams St (between Monroe &amp; W Adams Sts))\n\n<strong><a href=\"http://pizzeriabianco.com\">Pizzeria Bianco</a></strong> Always on lists of the top pizza places in the US. While not sure about the ranking, it\'s very good thin crust pizza. Check out Bar Bianco next door for cocktails. (623 E Adams St (in Heritage Square near the AZ Science Center))\n\n<strong><a href=\"http://thearrogantbutcher.com\">Arrogant Butcher</a> </strong> The place I\'d go when I wanted to eat at the bar and watch a ball game. I liked the Butcher\'s Meatballs for a smaller meal and the Beef Short Rib Stew when a bit hungrier. It\'s kitty-corner from Talking Stick Arena, so it can get crowded before a Suns game. (2 E Jefferson St (at S 1st St))\n\n<a href=\"http://thewhiningpig.com\"><strong>The Whining Pig</strong></a> A couple of blocks east of the Arrogant Butcher, The Whining Pig is a classic low-key/no attitude craft beer bar -- a great draft selection, a huge can/bottle menu, knowledgable bartenders, and a solid selection of bar and card games. My go-to beer bar in DTPHX. (201 E Washington St, though the door is actually south of Washington on 2nd St)\n\n<a href=\"http://thetheodore.beer\"><strong>The Theodore</strong></a>\n\n<strong><a href=\"http://wrenhousebrewing.com\">Wren House Brewing Company</a></strong>','My hangouts in Downtown Phoenix (#DTPHX)','','inherit','closed','closed','','2640-revision-v1','','','2020-02-06 17:26:59','2020-02-06 22:26:59','',2640,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/02/06/2640-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2653,1,'2020-02-06 17:30:26','2020-02-06 22:30:26','<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/new2-640x641-1.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright  wp-image-2641\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/new2-640x641-1-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"196\" height=\"196\"></a>I just wrapped up two months in downtown Phoenix and want to pass along my favorite hangouts for food and beer.\n\n<a href=\"https://mariscosplayahermosa.com\"><strong>Mariscos Playa Hermosa</strong></a> While not technically within the DTPHX boundary, this place has the best Mexican seafood I\'ve ever had -- and that includes my dinners in San Jose del Cabo over Christmas Break. The <em>Pulpo y Callo Parrillada</em> (grilled octopus leg and scallops) and <em>Camarones Fantasia</em> (shrimp stuffed into mild chile and then wrapped in bacon) are my favorites, but it\'s all good. Worth the short Uber/Lyft ride. (1605 E Garfield St)\n\n<a href=\"http://harumisushiaz.com\"><strong>Harumi Sushi</strong></a> Sushi in the desert doesn\'t immediately jump to the top of my list of food must-do\'s, but Harumi hits all my sushi hot buttons -- nice pieces of sashimi served with fresh wasabi and interesting selection of rolls. It\'s a small place that gets crowded, so check out the wait time on Yelp before you walk over. (114 W Adams St though the door is north of Adams on 1st St)\n\n<strong><a href=\"http://pizzeriabianco.com\">Pizzeria Bianco</a></strong> Always on lists of the top pizza places in the US. While not sure about the ranking, it\'s very good thin crust pizza. Check out Bar Bianco next door for cocktails. (623 E Adams St in Heritage Square near the AZ Science Center)\n\n<strong><a href=\"http://thearrogantbutcher.com\">Arrogant Butcher</a> </strong> The place I\'d go when I wanted to eat at the bar and watch a ball game. I liked the Butcher\'s Meatballs for a smaller meal and the Beef Short Rib Stew when a bit hungrier. It\'s kitty-corner from Talking Stick Arena, so it can get crowded before a Suns game. (2 E Jefferson St at S 1st St)\n\n<a href=\"http://thewhiningpig.com\"><strong>The Whining Pig</strong></a> A couple of blocks east of the Arrogant Butcher, The Whining Pig is a classic low-key/no attitude craft beer bar -- a great draft selection, a huge can/bottle menu, knowledgable bartenders, and a solid selection of bar and card games. My go-to beer bar in DTPHX. (201 E Washington St, though the door is south of Washington on 2nd St)\n\n<a href=\"http://thetheodore.beer\"><strong>The Theodore</strong></a> (110 E Roosevelt St at N 1st St)\n\n<strong><a href=\"http://wrenhousebrewing.com\">Wren House Brewing Company</a></strong>','My hangouts in Downtown Phoenix (#DTPHX)','','inherit','closed','closed','','2640-revision-v1','','','2020-02-06 17:30:26','2020-02-06 22:30:26','',2640,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/02/06/2640-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2654,1,'2020-02-06 17:36:04','2020-02-06 22:36:04','<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/new2-640x641-1.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright  wp-image-2641\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/new2-640x641-1-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"196\" height=\"196\"></a>I just wrapped up two months in downtown Phoenix and want to pass along my favorite hangouts for food and beer.\n\n<a href=\"https://mariscosplayahermosa.com\"><strong>Mariscos Playa Hermosa</strong></a> While not technically within the DTPHX boundary, this place has the best Mexican seafood I\'ve ever had -- and that includes my dinners in San Jose del Cabo over Christmas Break. The <em>Pulpo y Callo Parrillada</em> (grilled octopus leg and scallops) and <em>Camarones Fantasia</em> (shrimp stuffed into mild chile and then wrapped in bacon) are my favorites, but it\'s all good. Worth the short Uber/Lyft ride. (1605 E Garfield St)\n\n<a href=\"http://harumisushiaz.com\"><strong>Harumi Sushi</strong></a> Sushi in the desert doesn\'t immediately jump to the top of my list of food must-do\'s, but Harumi hits all my sushi hot buttons -- nice pieces of sashimi served with fresh wasabi and interesting selection of rolls. It\'s a small place that gets crowded, so check out the wait time on Yelp before you walk over. (114 W Adams St though the door is north of Adams on 1st St)\n\n<strong><a href=\"http://pizzeriabianco.com\">Pizzeria Bianco</a></strong> Always on lists of the top pizza places in the US. While not sure about the ranking, it\'s very good thin crust pizza. Check out Bar Bianco next door for cocktails. (623 E Adams St in Heritage Square near the AZ Science Center)\n\n<strong><a href=\"http://thearrogantbutcher.com\">Arrogant Butcher</a> </strong> The place I\'d go when I wanted to eat at the bar and watch a ball game. I liked the Butcher\'s Meatballs for a smaller meal and the Beef Short Rib Stew when a bit hungrier. It\'s kitty-corner from Talking Stick Arena, so it can get crowded before a Suns game. (2 E Jefferson St at S 1st St)\n\n<a href=\"http://thewhiningpig.com\"><strong>The Whining Pig</strong></a> A couple of blocks east of the Arrogant Butcher, The Whining Pig is a classic low-key/no attitude craft beer bar -- a great draft selection, a huge can/bottle menu, knowledgable bartenders, and a solid selection of bar and card games. My go-to beer bar in DTPHX. (201 E Washington St, though the door is south of Washington on 2nd St)\n\n<a href=\"http://thetheodore.beer\"><strong>The Theodore</strong></a> Great craft beer bar at the west end of the hip Roosevelt Row district. Nice draft menu, color coded by style, and a cooler full of interesting cans and bottles for drinking there or back at your hotel. Good-sized place -- comfy couches inside and patio seating out front and on the side. (110 E Roosevelt St at N 1st St)\n\n<strong><a href=\"http://wrenhousebrewing.com\">Wren House Brewing Company</a></strong>','My hangouts in Downtown Phoenix (#DTPHX)','','inherit','closed','closed','','2640-revision-v1','','','2020-02-06 17:36:04','2020-02-06 22:36:04','',2640,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/02/06/2640-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2655,1,'2020-02-07 11:30:58','2020-02-07 16:30:58','I just wrapped up two months in downtown Phoenix and want to pass along my favorite hangouts for food and beer. When I started traveling to Phoenix in the mid-\'90\'s, there wasn\'t much to downtown Phoenix other than the Hyatt Regency hotel. Today, stadiums for the Phoenix Suns and the Arizona Diamondbacks, and a downtown campus for Arizona State University support a solid selection of restaurants, coffee shops, and bars. Below are the places that I found myself going back to again and again during my 2-month stay.\n\n<a href=\"https://mariscosplayahermosa.com\"><strong>Mariscos Playa Hermosa</strong></a> While not technically within the DTPHX boundary, this place has the best Mexican seafood I\'ve ever had -- and that includes my dinners in San Jose del Cabo over Christmas Break. The <em>Pulpo y Callo Parrillada</em> (grilled octopus leg and scallops) and <em>Camarones Fantasia</em> (shrimp stuffed into mild chile and then wrapped in bacon) are my favorites, but it\'s all good. Worth the short Uber/Lyft ride. (1605 E Garfield St)\n\n<a href=\"http://harumisushiaz.com\"><strong>Harumi Sushi</strong></a> Sushi in the desert doesn\'t immediately jump to the top of my list of food must-do\'s, but Harumi hits all my sushi hot buttons -- nice pieces of sashimi served with fresh wasabi and interesting selection of rolls. It\'s a small place that gets crowded, so check out the wait time on Yelp before you walk over. (114 W Adams St though the door is north of Adams on 1st St)\n\n<strong><a href=\"http://pizzeriabianco.com\">Pizzeria Bianco</a></strong> Always on lists of the top pizza places in the US. While not sure about the ranking, it\'s very good thin crust pizza. Check out Bar Bianco next door for cocktails. (623 E Adams St in Heritage Square near the AZ Science Center)\n\n<strong><a href=\"http://thearrogantbutcher.com\">Arrogant Butcher</a> </strong> The place I\'d go when I wanted to eat at the bar and watch a ball game. I liked the Butcher\'s Meatballs for a smaller meal and the Beef Short Rib Stew when a bit hungrier. It\'s kitty-corner from Talking Stick Arena, so it can get crowded before a Suns game. (2 E Jefferson St at S 1st St)\n\n<a href=\"http://thewhiningpig.com\"><strong>The Whining Pig</strong></a> A couple of blocks east of the Arrogant Butcher, The Whining Pig is a classic low-key/no attitude craft beer bar -- a great draft selection, a huge can/bottle menu, knowledgable bartenders, and a solid selection of bar and card games. My go-to beer bar in DTPHX. (201 E Washington St, though the door is south of Washington on 2nd St)\n\n<a href=\"http://thetheodore.beer\"><strong>The Theodore</strong></a> Great craft beer bar at the west end of the hip Roosevelt Row district. Nice draft menu, color coded by style, and a cooler full of interesting cans and bottles for drinking there or back at your hotel. Good-sized place -- comfy couches inside and patio seating out front and on the side. (110 E Roosevelt St at N 1st St)\n\nArizona Wilderness DTPHX\n<strong><a href=\"http://wrenhousebrewing.com\">Wren House Brewing Company</a></strong>','My hangouts in Downtown Phoenix (#DTPHX)','','inherit','closed','closed','','2640-revision-v1','','','2020-02-07 11:30:58','2020-02-07 16:30:58','',2640,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/02/07/2640-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2656,1,'2020-02-07 11:43:54','2020-02-07 16:43:54','<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/new2-640x641-1.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2641\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/new2-640x641-1-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a>I just wrapped up two months in downtown Phoenix and want to pass along my favorite hangouts for food and beer. When I started traveling to Phoenix in the mid-\'90\'s, there wasn\'t much to downtown Phoenix other than the Hyatt Regency hotel. Today, stadiums for the Phoenix Suns and the Arizona Diamondbacks, and a downtown campus for Arizona State University support a solid selection of restaurants, coffee shops, and bars. Below are the places that I found myself going back to again and again during my 2-month stay.\n\n<a href=\"https://mariscosplayahermosa.com\"><strong>Mariscos Playa Hermosa</strong></a> While not technically within the DTPHX boundary, this place has the best Mexican seafood I\'ve ever had -- and that includes my dinners in San Jose del Cabo over Christmas Break. The <em>Pulpo y Callo Parrillada</em> (grilled octopus leg and scallops) and <em>Camarones Fantasia</em> (shrimp stuffed into mild chile and then wrapped in bacon) are my favorites, but it\'s all good. Worth the short Uber/Lyft ride. (1605 E Garfield St)\n\n<a href=\"http://harumisushiaz.com\"><strong>Harumi Sushi</strong></a> Sushi in the desert doesn\'t immediately jump to the top of my list of food must-do\'s, but Harumi hits all my sushi hot buttons -- nice pieces of sashimi served with fresh wasabi and interesting selection of rolls. It\'s a small place that gets crowded, so check out the wait time on Yelp before you walk over. (114 W Adams St though the door is north of Adams on 1st St)\n\n<strong><a href=\"http://pizzeriabianco.com\">Pizzeria Bianco</a></strong> Always on lists of the top pizza places in the US. While not sure about the ranking, it\'s very good thin crust pizza. Check out Bar Bianco next door for cocktails. (623 E Adams St in Heritage Square near the AZ Science Center)\n\n<strong><a href=\"http://thearrogantbutcher.com\">Arrogant Butcher</a> </strong> The place I\'d go when I wanted to eat at the bar and watch a ball game. I liked the Butcher\'s Meatballs for a smaller meal and the Beef Short Rib Stew when a bit hungrier. It\'s kitty-corner from Talking Stick Arena, so it can get crowded before a Suns game. (2 E Jefferson St at S 1st St)\n\n<a href=\"http://thewhiningpig.com\"><strong>The Whining Pig</strong></a> A block north of Talking Stick Arena, The Whining Pig is a classic low-key/no attitude craft beer bar -- a great draft selection, a huge can/bottle menu, knowledgable bartenders, and a solid selection of bar and card games. My go-to beer bar in DTPHX. (201 E Washington St, though the door is south of Washington on 2nd St)\n\n<a href=\"http://thetheodore.beer\"><strong>The Theodore</strong></a> Great craft beer bar at the west end of the hip Roosevelt Row district. Nice draft menu, color coded by style, and a cooler full of interesting cans and bottles for drinking there or back at your hotel. Good-sized place -- comfy couches inside and patio seating out front and on the side. (110 E Roosevelt St at N 1st St)\n\n<strong><a href=\"https://azwbeer.com/dtphx-beer-garden/\">Arizona Wilderness DTPHX</a></strong> A block-and-a-half down from The Theodore is Arizona Wilderness\'s downtown beer garden. Sit outside around the firepit (during the winter months) or inside (during the summer months),\n<a href=\"http://wrenhousebrewing.com\">Wren House Brewing Company</a>','My hangouts in Downtown Phoenix (#DTPHX)','','inherit','closed','closed','','2640-revision-v1','','','2020-02-07 11:43:54','2020-02-07 16:43:54','',2640,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/02/07/2640-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2657,1,'2020-02-07 11:59:12','2020-02-07 16:59:12','<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/new2-640x641-1.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2641\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/new2-640x641-1-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>I just wrapped up two months in downtown Phoenix and want to pass along my favorite hangouts for food and beer. When I started traveling to Phoenix in the mid-\'90\'s, there wasn\'t much to downtown Phoenix other than the Hyatt Regency hotel. Today, stadiums for the Phoenix Suns and the Arizona Diamondbacks, and a downtown campus for Arizona State University support a solid selection of restaurants, coffee shops, and bars. Below are the places that I found myself going back to again and again during my 2-month stay.\n\n<a href=\"https://mariscosplayahermosa.com\"><strong>Mariscos Playa Hermosa</strong></a> While not technically within the DTPHX boundary, this place has the best Mexican seafood I\'ve ever had -- and that includes my dinners in San Jose del Cabo over Christmas Break. The <em>Pulpo y Callo Parrillada</em> (grilled octopus leg and scallops) and <em>Camarones Fantasia</em> (shrimp stuffed into mild chile and then wrapped in bacon) are my favorites, but it\'s all good. Worth the short Uber/Lyft ride. (1605 E Garfield St)\n\n<a href=\"http://harumisushiaz.com\"><strong>Harumi Sushi</strong></a> Sushi in the desert doesn\'t immediately jump to the top of my list of food must-do\'s, but Harumi hits all my sushi hot buttons -- nice pieces of sashimi served with fresh wasabi and interesting selection of rolls. It\'s a small place that gets crowded, so check out the wait time on Yelp before you walk over. (114 W Adams St though the door is north of Adams on 1st St)\n\n<strong><a href=\"http://pizzeriabianco.com\">Pizzeria Bianco</a></strong> Always on lists of the top pizza places in the US. While not sure about the ranking, it\'s very good thin crust pizza. Check out Bar Bianco next door for cocktails. (623 E Adams St in Heritage Square near the AZ Science Center)\n\n<strong><a href=\"http://thearrogantbutcher.com\">Arrogant Butcher</a> </strong> The place I\'d go when I wanted to eat at the bar and watch a ball game. I liked the Butcher\'s Meatballs for a smaller meal and the Beef Short Rib Stew when a bit hungrier. It\'s kitty-corner from Talking Stick Arena, so it can get crowded before a Suns game. (2 E Jefferson St at S 1st St)\n\n<a href=\"http://thewhiningpig.com\"><strong>The Whining Pig</strong></a> A block north of Talking Stick Arena, The Whining Pig is a classic low-key/no attitude craft beer bar -- a great draft selection, a huge can/bottle menu, knowledgable bartenders, and a solid selection of bar and card games. My go-to beer bar in DTPHX. (201 E Washington St, though the door is south of Washington on 2nd St)\n\n<a href=\"http://thetheodore.beer\"><strong>The Theodore</strong></a> Great craft beer bar at the west end of the hip Roosevelt Row district. Nice <a href=\"https://untappd.com/v/the-theodore/9474701\">draft menu</a>, color coded by style, and a cooler full of interesting cans and bottles for drinking there or back at your hotel. Good-sized place -- comfy couches inside and patio seating out front and on the side. (110 E Roosevelt St at N 1st St)\n\n<strong><a href=\"https://azwbeer.com/dtphx-beer-garden/\">Arizona Wilderness DTPHX</a></strong> A block-and-a-half down from The Theodore is Arizona Wilderness\'s downtown beer garden. Sit outside around the firepit (during the winter months) or inside (during the summer months). They have a wide-ranging <a href=\"https://untappd.com/v/arizona-wilderness-dtphx/8695423\">beer menu</a>, many of which feature Arizona-sourced ingredients like honey, lemons, prickly pear, carrots, and sweet potato. (201 E Roosevelt St) .\n<a href=\"http://wrenhousebrewing.com\">Wren House Brewing Company</a>','My hangouts in Downtown Phoenix (#DTPHX)','','inherit','closed','closed','','2640-revision-v1','','','2020-02-07 11:59:12','2020-02-07 16:59:12','',2640,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/02/07/2640-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2658,1,'2020-02-07 12:06:05','2020-02-07 17:06:05','<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/new2-640x641-1.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2641\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/new2-640x641-1-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>I just wrapped up two months in downtown Phoenix and want to pass along my favorite hangouts for food and beer. When I started traveling to Phoenix in the mid-\'90\'s, there wasn\'t much to downtown Phoenix other than the Hyatt Regency hotel. Today, stadiums for the Phoenix Suns and the Arizona Diamondbacks, and a downtown campus for Arizona State University support a solid selection of restaurants, coffee shops, and bars. Below are the places that I found myself going back to again and again during my 2-month stay.\n\n<a href=\"https://mariscosplayahermosa.com\"><strong>Mariscos Playa Hermosa</strong></a> While not technically within the DTPHX boundary, this place has the best Mexican seafood I\'ve ever had -- and that includes my dinners in San Jose del Cabo over last Christmas Break. The <em>Pulpo y Callo Parrillada</em> (grilled octopus leg and scallops) and <em>Camarones Fantasia</em> (shrimp stuffed into mild chile and then wrapped in bacon) are my favorites, but it\'s all good. Worth the short Uber/Lyft ride. (1605 E Garfield St)\n\n<a href=\"http://harumisushiaz.com\"><strong>Harumi Sushi</strong></a> Sushi in the desert doesn\'t immediately jump to the top of my list of food must-do\'s, but Harumi hits all my sushi hot buttons -- nice pieces of sashimi served with fresh wasabi and an interesting selection of rolls. It\'s a small place that gets crowded, so check out the wait time on Yelp before you walk over. (114 W Adams St though the door is north of Adams on 1st St)\n\n<strong><a href=\"http://pizzeriabianco.com\">Pizzeria Bianco</a></strong> Always on the lists of the top pizza places in the US. While I\'m not sure if deserves all those accolades, it\'s very good thin crust pizza. And Bar Bianco next door is a very cool space for pre- or post-dinner cocktails. (623 E Adams St in Heritage Square near the AZ Science Center)\n\n<strong><a href=\"http://thearrogantbutcher.com\">Arrogant Butcher</a> </strong> The place I\'d go when I wanted to eat at the bar and watch a ball game. I like the Butcher\'s Meatballs for a smaller meal and the Beef Short Rib Stew when a bit hungrier. It\'s kitty-corner from Talking Stick Arena, so it can get crowded before a Suns game. (2 E Jefferson St at S 1st St)\n\n<a href=\"http://thewhiningpig.com\"><strong>The Whining Pig</strong></a> A block north of Talking Stick Arena, The Whining Pig is a classic low-key/no-attitude craft beer bar -- a great draft selection, a huge can/bottle menu, knowledgable bartenders, and a solid selection of bar and card games. My go-to beer bar in DTPHX. (201 E Washington St, though the door is south of Washington on 2nd St)\n\n<a href=\"http://thetheodore.beer\"><strong>The Theodore</strong></a> Great craft beer bar at the west end of the hip Roosevelt Row district. Nice <a href=\"https://untappd.com/v/the-theodore/9474701\">draft menu</a>, color coded by style, and a cooler full of interesting cans and bottles for drinking there or back at your hotel. Good-sized place -- comfy couches inside and patio seating out front and on the side. (110 E Roosevelt St at N 1st St)\n\n<strong><a href=\"https://azwbeer.com/dtphx-beer-garden/\">Arizona Wilderness DTPHX</a></strong> A block-and-a-half down from The Theodore is Arizona Wilderness\'s downtown beer garden. Sit outside around the fire pit (during the winter months) or inside (during the summer months). They have a wide-ranging <a href=\"https://untappd.com/v/arizona-wilderness-dtphx/8695423\">beer menu</a>, many of which feature Arizona-sourced ingredients like honey, lemons, prickly pear, carrots, and sweet potato. (201 E Roosevelt St) .','My hangouts in Downtown Phoenix (#DTPHX)','','inherit','closed','closed','','2640-revision-v1','','','2020-02-07 12:06:05','2020-02-07 17:06:05','',2640,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/02/07/2640-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2659,1,'2020-02-07 12:13:02','2020-02-07 17:13:02','<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/new2-640x641-1.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2641\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/new2-640x641-1-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>I just wrapped up two months in downtown Phoenix and want to pass along my favorite hangouts for food and beer. When I started traveling to Phoenix in the mid-\'90\'s, there wasn\'t much to downtown Phoenix other than the Hyatt Regency hotel. Today, stadiums for the Phoenix Suns and the Arizona Diamondbacks, and a downtown campus for Arizona State University support a solid selection of restaurants, coffee shops, and bars. Below are the places that I found myself going back to again and again during my 2-month stay.\n\n<a href=\"https://mariscosplayahermosa.com\"><strong>Mariscos Playa Hermosa</strong></a> While not technically within the DTPHX boundary, this place has the best Mexican seafood I\'ve ever had -- and that includes my dinners in San Jose del Cabo over last Christmas Break. The <em>Pulpo y Callo Parrillada</em> (grilled octopus leg and scallops) and <em>Camarones Fantasia</em> (shrimp stuffed into mild chile and then wrapped in bacon) are my favorites, but it\'s all good. Worth the short Uber/Lyft ride. (1605 E Garfield St)\n\n<a href=\"http://harumisushiaz.com\"><strong>Harumi Sushi</strong></a> Sushi in the desert doesn\'t immediately jump to the top of my list of food must-do\'s, but Harumi hits all my sushi hot buttons -- nice pieces of sashimi served with fresh wasabi and an interesting selection of rolls. It\'s a small place that gets crowded, so check out the wait time on Yelp before you walk over. (114 W Adams St though the door is north of Adams on 1st St)\n\n<strong><a href=\"http://pizzeriabianco.com\">Pizzeria Bianco</a></strong> Always on the lists of the top pizza places in the US. While I\'m not sure if deserves all those accolades, it\'s very good thin crust pizza. And Bar Bianco next door is a very cool space for pre- or post-dinner cocktails. (623 E Adams St in Heritage Square near the AZ Science Center)\n\n<strong><a href=\"http://thearrogantbutcher.com\">Arrogant Butcher</a> </strong> The place I\'d go when I wanted to eat at the bar and watch a ball game. I like the Butcher\'s Meatballs for a smaller meal and the Beef Short Rib Stew when a bit hungrier. It\'s kitty-corner from Talking Stick Arena, so it can get crowded before a Suns game. (2 E Jefferson St at S 1st St)\n\n<a href=\"http://thewhiningpig.com\"><strong>The Whining Pig</strong></a> A block north of Talking Stick Arena, The Whining Pig is a classic low-key/no-attitude craft beer bar -- a great draft selection, a huge can/bottle menu, knowledgable bartenders, and a solid selection of bar and card games. My go-to beer bar in DTPHX. (201 E Washington St, though the door is south of Washington on 2nd St)\n\n<a href=\"http://thetheodore.beer\"><strong>The Theodore</strong></a> Great craft beer bar at the west end of the hip Roosevelt Row district. Nice <a href=\"https://untappd.com/v/the-theodore/9474701\">draft menu</a>, color coded by style, and a cooler full of interesting cans and bottles for drinking there or back at your hotel. Good-sized place -- comfy couches inside and patio seating out front and on the side. (110 E Roosevelt St at N 1st St)\n\n<strong><a href=\"https://azwbeer.com/dtphx-beer-garden/\">Arizona Wilderness DTPHX</a></strong> A block-and-a-half down from The Theodore is Arizona Wilderness\'s downtown beer garden. Sit outside around the fire pit (during the winter months) or inside (during the summer months). They have a wide-ranging <a href=\"https://untappd.com/v/arizona-wilderness-dtphx/8695423\">beer menu</a>, many of which feature Arizona-sourced ingredients like honey, lemons, prickly pear, carrots, and sweet potato. (201 E Roosevelt St) .','My food and beer hangouts in Downtown Phoenix (#DTPHX)','','inherit','closed','closed','','2640-revision-v1','','','2020-02-07 12:13:02','2020-02-07 17:13:02','',2640,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/02/07/2640-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2661,1,'2020-02-29 23:12:48','2020-03-01 04:12:48','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/IMG_0368-scaled.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2664 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/IMG_0368-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a><figcaption>Is this the IMAX seatback screen?</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>Trying to watch the Super Bowl while flying from Durango, CO to Chicago via Denver got me thinking about the fading away of seatback entertainment. We also talk about the continuing evolution of ride sharing. Uber and Lyft are looking more and more like the taxi companies they fought to replace. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_160.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #160: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. I finished my Phoenix travels at the end of January and made the last trip a “bleisure” trip -- business in Phoenix Monday thru Thursday afternoon, and then leisure Thursday evening thru Sunday with a ski weekend in Durango, CO, the first time I’ve been on the slopes in 7 years. I first thought about heading up to Salt Lake for the weekend, but when I saw that the Sundance Film Festival was the same weekend, I thought “Nope” and started Googling for other ideas. The ski slopes around Flagstaff were too small and I didn’t want to fight the traffic on I-70 to hit the areas near Denver. Durango, in the San Juan mountains in the southwest corner of the state -- near Four Corners -- looked like a good spot. It’s a quick and fairly inexpensive hour hop from Phoenix; it’s an actual town, not just a ski resort, so there’d be other things to do when the lifts closed; the lift tickets at Purgatory and Wolf Creek were reasonable -- 40-50% of the price at, say, Vail or Park City; I was able to book a whole tiny house on AirBnB for the price of a generic Fairfield Inn room; and, I’d never been there before. And, as I found out from my AirBnB host, it was the weekend of Durango’s Snowdown Festival -- the 42nd annual, with a parade down Main Street and everything. The snow was just OK, but the skiing was great -- beautiful weather, damn few lift lines, nice people -- a weird but fun combination of families -- mostly from Texas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico -- and the Colorado hippy-dippy ski bum crew. It was a nice ending to my 2 months of Phoenix trips.</li><li>The only downside was… I had to check a bag. Even though I rented all my equipment -- skis, boots, poles -- I still needed that extra bag for all the other paraphernalia -- helmet, ski pants, gloves, parka, …. I love skiing but it requires a lot of stuff. Not that it cost me anything -- even flying Basic Economy on American from Phoenix to Durango, I got free bags with my Platinum status. Though American’s website wasn’t very clear about that when they tried to upsell me off of Basic Economy -- imagine that. And while I got free bags, I couldn’t select my seat in advance. But given it was a small regional jet with no middle seats, I figured I’d risk it.&nbsp; I will say, though, that I was pretty happy with the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/37R0sHX\">teal green luggage tags</a> I bought before the trip. Made it very easy to spot my bags amidst the sea of black suitcases on the luggage belt. Probably <a href=\"https://amzn.to/37R0sHX\">the best $5 I’ve spent on Amazon</a>.&nbsp;</li><li>One detail I missed when planning my ski weekend is that my Sunday night flights from Durango to Denver to Chicago would be right in the middle of the Super Bowl. Though I’m not sure I’d have changed anything if I’d remembered it. I didn’t really have a dog in that hunt -- I’m not a big San Francisco or Kansas City fan and so was kinda like everyone else who wasn’t in the Bay Area, I was rooting more for Andy Reid than KC. I did end up catching <em>most</em> of the game, but it was a little choppy. I watched the kick-off and 1st quarter in the bar at Durango Airport. Durango Airport isn’t big -- just 4 gates if I remember correctly -- and the bar kinda sticks out into the gate seating area. I sat at the bar, had a beer, and watched the game on the TV hanging on the wall near Gate 2 -- or maybe 3. But then United called boarding, so I caught bits of the second quarter on the Fox TV iPhone app while waiting to take off for Denver. And then tracked the start of the 3rd quarter after touchdown and a really long taxi in DEN. I caught the rest of the 3rd quarter on multiple screens -- bars, CNN gate TVs -- while walking down the B Concourse to make my ORD connection. I got lucky, though, and was able to catch all of Kansas City’s phenomenal come-back uninterrupted in a Mexican restaurant with about a dozen other fixated passengers and restaurant workers. After KC’s final interception, I walked down and caught the final plays on the CNN TV at the gate. Every other night, I consciously avoid those CNN TVs -- the volumes always up on people yelling at each other. But this night, I was happy for that volume -- the one night when they weren’t to CNN. </li><li>Bridge Music --  <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/48915\">Like Music (cdk Mix</a>) by Analog By Nature (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/48915 Ft: Phasenwandler  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>The week after that last Phoenix trip, I wrote <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/02/07/my-food-and-beer-hangouts-in-downtown-phoenix-dtphx/\">a post</a> on the TravelCommons website listing my favorite food and beer hangouts in downtown Phoenix. When I started traveling to Phoenix in the mid-’90’s, there wasn’t much to downtown Phoenix other than a big Hyatt Regency hotel. Everything was in Scottsdale and Tempe. I’d usually stay in Tempe because, with Arizona State University there, there were restaurants and bars I could walk to. Fast forward to today, downtown Phoenix has a lot more going on. Stadiums for the Phoenix Suns and the Arizona Diamondbacks, and a new downtown campus for ASU’s law school bring in enough people to support a solid selection of restaurants, coffee shops, and bars. The blog post doesn’t cover everything -- just the places I found myself going back to again and again during my 2-month stay.</li><li>Most of my flights from the mid-90’s on went into PHX Sky Harbor’s Terminal 2 -- on United and on American, until they moved to the much better Terminal 4 after merging with US Air which had merged with America West, the original hub airline for PHX. Terminal 2 was PHX’s slum terminal. Built in 1962 and originally planned to shut down in 2000, they finally shut it down on Feb 4, 2020, the week after I finished my latest Phoenix gig. The last two airlines using it -- United and Alaska Air -- have moved to Terminal 3 with the rest of the non-hub carriers. PHX’s two major carriers -- American and Southwest -- split Terminal 4. Some of the newspaper articles said business travelers liked it because it was compact, easy to navigate. I’m not one of them. I thought it was a cramped low-ceilinged place, with small restrooms and lousy food and beer options when I had to wait out delays back to ORD.&nbsp; I think you can tell that I won’t miss it. The plans are to demo the terminal this year and replace it with European-style bus gates -- using buses to take passengers out to remotely parked aircraft instead of boarding through jetways. I’m gonna bet those bus gates won’t be popular in August when PHX’s tarmac temperatures hit 120 degrees.&nbsp;</li><li>Waiting for my American Eagle PHX-Durango flight, I was half-paying attention to the PA announcements, but then noticed that the gate agent wasn’t doing the boarding announcements. Instead they were using recorded announcements. That wasn’t what caught my attention, though. I’ve heard recorded gate announcements hundreds of times. But usually, they’re recordings of humans reading the announcements. Here at gate B19, it was one of those robotic text-to-speech synthesized voices -- something like &lt;insert Boarding Groups 1, 2, and 3&gt;. I mean, why? How much savings do you get by using text-to-speech over some gate agent standing in a closet and recording it, say, on their iPhone? Maybe more that I think now that American has, what, 7, 10, 123 boarding groups? I asked this question “Why the robot” out loud -- to Twitter. American came back “We heard back and the PHX gate staff actually does record the voices used in the announcements. They are real humans.” Kudos for American’s Twitter staff for following up, but unless they have an android with a bad vox box working for them, I think the gang at gate B19 is using text2speech.org.</li><li>I posted an article on the TravelCommons Facebook page about a guy who wore a plastic tent on a plane to avoid the coronavirus. Now, as it turns out, it was really more of a publicity stunt for the guy’s company. He makes personal tents to protect people from bad weather when sitting on the sidelines of their kids’ soccer games. Might cut down on the colds I catch when flying, but from the picture, it looks like it would be quite a pain when the person in the window seat wants to get out to use the toilet.</li><li>On January 6th, the first Monday of the new year, I <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1214167465627979776\">posted a picture on Twitter</a> of the “cannabis amnesty box” that was on the other side of security at ORD’s Terminal 1. Pot became legal in Illinois the first of the year, and the Chicago Dept of Aviation put out these boxes “so travelers have the opportunity to ensure compliance with federal law, as well as the local laws at their destination” according to the police department. If you look at the picture I posted, the box looks like something the maintenance guys knocked together in the wood shop during their break. So no surprise that 3 weeks later, someone broke into a similar box at Midway airport and helped themselves to some surrendered weed. Actually, I think the only real surprise is that it took as long as 3 weeks for this to happen. </li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/spinmeister/53428\">Somewhere</a> by spinmeister (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/spinmeister/53428 Ft: DJ Vadim  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Seatback Screens Fading Away</strong> </h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>On my flight from Durango to Denver, half the guys on the plane were staring down at their phones during boarding and taxi, watching the second quarter until the plane rotated up off the runway. For folks flying United planes with DirectTV seatback screens -- the repainted Continental 737s -- no problems; just swipe your credit card and keep watching. But that’s a shrinking group. Seat back entertainment screens have been on the death watch list for 5 years now, but it seems to be on its way out -- at least on a lot of the domestic routes.&nbsp;</li><li>And I can’t really say that I miss them. The DirectTV controls on those United planes are in the armrest, so I’m always changing the channel or the volume or the screen brightness. On American 737s, screens bulging out of the seat backs into an already tight space thanks to American’s war against seat pitch; I have to recline my seat just to be able to get that screen in focus. And the power supplies for all these seat back units are under the seat, crowding out space for my backpack or my feet.&nbsp;</li><li>I’m happy with the BYOS -- bring your own screen -- approach. I watched the season finale of The Mandalorian Star Wars TV show on my 8-inch Samsung tablet. It wasn’t as good as watching it on the 65-inch LG 4K TV at home, but it was bigger than any domestic in-flight screen. On one of my Southwest flights home from PHX, I saw a guy hang his big iPhone Max from the tray on the seatback in front of him -- kind of a DIY seatback entertainment unit.&nbsp;</li><li>On long international flights, though, I can see the case for seatback screens. My wife and kids have perfected synchronized movie viewing. They’re sitting three abreast; they queue up the same movie and then count down -- 3, 2, 1, Press Play! The airplane version of watching a movie together in the living room. I’m not sure it would be the same if they were all looking down at their iPhones. This tends to work better on newer planes, like the 787, that have bigger screens. I remember Andrew trying to watch the movie Dunkirk - a big WW II action movie that was great on IMAX -- on a maybe 7-inch screen on a United 767. I don’t think he got the full experience of that movie.</li><li>Back in December, United <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1211759835181654018\">tweeted out the top 10 most watched in-flight movies in 2019</a> -- Bohemian Rhapsody, A Star is Born, and Crazy Rich Asians were 1, 2, and 3. Makes sense. In 9th place, though, was John Wick 3, the 3rd installment of the Keanu Reeves fists of fury action flick. Loved that movie, but I can’t see even the new 16-inch screens in United’s business class being big enough to handle that flick. </li><li> Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/scottaltham/20747\"> Hear Us Now (poptastic mix)</a> by Scott Altham (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/scottaltham/20747  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Any Difference Left Between Ride-Share and Taxis?</strong> </h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I got an e-mail survey the other day asking for my thoughts, impressions about Uber and Lyft. One of the questions was how long I’d used each of them -- less than 1 year; 1-2 years, 2-3 years, more than 3 years. Which got <em>me</em> kinda wondering, so I pulled out my iPhone and fired up each app. My first Uber ride was in December 2013, from midtown Manhattan to LGA at 4pm. I signed up because it’s such a pain to find a regular cab to take you to LGA at rush hour, and I’d forgotten to book a ride with the black car service I would normally use. Interesting that I didn’t use Uber again for another 6 months, in June 2014, when again, I’d didn’t have a black car book for a ride from PHL to a client out in the suburbs along the Blue Route. I signed up with Lyft in December 2015 when I was in Las Vegas for a project. I’d be using Uber more frequently in 2015, but back then, only Lyft had permission to drop-off at LAS. We had used Uber a couple of times, but they’d have to drop us off at the rental car center so we could take the bus to the terminal. I did that exactly one time and then pivoted to Lyft. So, according to this e-mail survey -- which, at the end, revealed itself to be sponsored by Uber -- I’m a grizzled ride-sharing veteran -- as I’m sure are many of you.</li><li>And ride-sharing was what it was -- an app-driven version of the old ride-sharing bulletin boards -- “I’m driving from Chicago to Rockford; looking for someone to split the gas and tolls” -- except locally. I remember, at the start, that caused a bit of an etiquette challenge -- do I sit in the front or the back? And you were careful because it was their car -- and usually a nice one. Certainly much nicer and way less beat-up than the typical cab.&nbsp; And there were usually good stories from the drivers -- all but a couple were doing it part-time, to make some additional cash. Way back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/11/22/podcast-125-uber-driver-stories-overseas-for-the-election/\">episode #125</a>, in November 2016, early on in my Uber/Lyft days, I told some of those stories.</li><li>A year later, a driver in Charlottesville, VA told me he was driving full-time and wanted to expand, so he’d bought 3 used Toyota Corollas (even back then the preferred ride-share car) and was renting them out to “Hispanics”, his words, who were driving Uber and Lyft a couple hours north in the Washington, DC area. Interesting idea. A bit like the standard taxi cab model -- leasing licensed cabs to drivers for a shift -- but without the need to drop money on a taxi license, or a medallion in places like New York and Chicago. Interesting enough that there are now 6-7 companies, including Hertz, offering daily and weekly rentals if you don’t want to share rides in your personal car.</li><li>Back in December, landing in Chicago Midway on a Southwest flight from PHX, I did my usual drill, opened up Uber and Lyft as I got off the plane and checked prices and wait times for a ride home. The prices were about the same, but the wait time… 10 min for Uber, 2 for Lyft. Lyft it is! I hit the Request Ride button, but instead of searching for a driver, I immediately get a 4-digit PIN. I head downstairs and get into a queue that looks a lot like the cab line a few doors over, except this one is run by women in pink Lyft safety vests. But they’re doing the same thing the cab rank workers do -- wave down cars and then point passengers to them. I wait, I dunno, maybe 5 minutes to get into a car, show the guy the PIN on my Lyft app, he enters it into his, and off we go. A bit less hectic than the typical airport rideshare scrum, but again, how is this different than a taxi -- except that I don’t have to ask the driver if his credit card machine works.</li><li>Indeed, on most of my trips over the past year, arriving in PHX or CHO, there typically wouldn’t be a line for a cab, so I’d skip the 5-10 minute wait for Uber or Lyft. Or, returning from Durango with my extra bag of ski paraphernalia, I skipped the schlep up to to the ride-share pick-up zone; I just walked out the door to a waiting cab. And the price difference is shrinking --&nbsp; as we talked about in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/08/13/podcast-154-will-we-still-love-uber-when-the-prices-go-up/\">episode #154</a>, Uber and Lyft have been nudging their rates up to stem their losses.&nbsp;</li><li>This is not to say there aren’t important differences; places where Uber and Lyft bring real value. I was working in New Orleans before Uber set up shop. It was impossible to get a cab anywhere other than between the airport and the French Quarter. Trying to get to and from a restaurant in, say, Mid-City or Uptown was painful -- until Uber showed up.</li><li>It kinda feels like, after all the hype, the battles with regulators, the IPOs, that Uber and Lyft used billions of venture capital dollars to break the medallion monopolies and build some phenomenal taxi dispatch systems. As a traveler, it’s been great for me. For the investors though? Well, I’m glad I skipped those IPOs</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #160</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_160.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #160 — Disappearing Seatback Screens; Shrinking Difference Between Ride-Share and Taxis','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-160-disappearing-seatback-screens-shrinking-difference-between-ride-share-and-taxis','','\nhttps://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/02/07/my-food-and-beer-hangouts-in-downtown-phoenix-dtphx/','2021-10-01 17:00:44','2021-10-01 22:00:44','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=2661',0,'post','',0),
(2662,1,'2020-02-29 11:50:43','2020-02-29 16:50:43','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/DSC_7106-scaled.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2633\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/DSC_7106-300x293.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"293\"></a><figcaption>Just put my dragon\'s den on Airbnb</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>January is a big travel planning month; people thinking about about the places they want to visit, spending days on the Internet researching itineraries, and putting in their week\'s vacation requests. But what about a 9-week sabbatical you’ve worked 7 years for? In this episode, we talk about that kind of extreme travel planning. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_159.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/749899837&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #159: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois having finished 3 weeks of traveling down to Phoenix with one more to go. It’s been a mild winter -- for Chicago -- especially when compared to last winter, which means it’s been in the 20’s and 30’s as opposed to -23 as it was one morning last January. But even with a mild winter, I still appreciate the 70 degree days in Phoenix.</li><li> It’s a 4-hr flight between Chicago and Phoenix. I normally enjoy that amount of “unplugged” time to just read, listen to music, listen to podcasts. But a couple of weeks ago, I tweaked my back during a workout -- not a big thing, I’ve done it many times before. But this time, the pain didn’t go away, it’s hung around on my left side, moving from back to hip to thigh, making it very uncomfortable to sit for long periods of time -- like 4 hrs. Which has made me notice how long US carriers keep the “Fasten Seatbelt” sign on -- like, forever. By the time that seatbelt sign finally goes off, my back is screaming -- and the person next to me in the middle seat is pretty annoyed at my constant shifting. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/06/16/podcast-152-overwhelming-travel-new-old-restaurant-trends/\">episode #152</a>, I talked about Southwest flights between Chicago and Nashville keeping the seatbelt sign on the entire hour-and-20-minutes. It hasn’t been that bad, but it’s easily been 45 minutes. And it isn’t just Southwest; United is doing the same thing. Quite a difference from, say, when Andrew and I flew Air Baltic back in October. 10,000 ft and “bing” that seat belt sign would go off, and we’d still be climbing. It doesn’t need to turn off that fast, but there’s gotta be a happy medium there somewhere. </li><li>With the mild winter and a little bit of luck, my flights to and from Phoenix have been pretty dependable -- except for this week. On Monday, I started getting delay notices for my United 7:40pm flight right after lunch. United was doing their typical rolling delay exercise -- it’s a 30 minutes; no, really an hour; no, we’re leaving at 9pm; just kidding, it’s really 9:40. I was OK with the 30 and 60-minute delays, but then when I get two more delays in a 40-minute span -- now, something’s up. I call United. I get the Premier desk, which the guy tells me is in Chicago. I tell him the story -- rolling delays have now gotten to 2 hrs; I don’t trust that this flight is going off, and I need to get to PHX tonight. The guy says, “Yup, I got it. Makes sense.” He tries to find me routings through LAX and SFO, but the connections don’t work. So he cancels and refunds my ticket -- no hassle, no questions, no change fee. I love this guy. I pivot to Southwest and American, which both have 8:40 flights. I look at American’s seat map -- nothing but middle seats. That’s just not going to work with my back, so it’s over to Southwest. I’m A-List, so I know with their open seating I’ll get an aisle seat. (Exhale) Haven’t done that dance in a while, so was a bit out of shape. But with one more trip to PHX left, I’m not looking to get back into that shape.</li><li>Bridge Music --  <em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/hisboyelroy/430\" target=\"_blank\">Revolve</a> mix</em> by cinematrik (c) copyright 2005 Licensed under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hisboyelroy/430   </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Before writing a podcast, I go through all the interaction channels -- website comments, Facebook comments, Instagram comments, Twitter replies, e-mails, … and inevitably I miss something. Which I have done since October when Arnoud Heijnis and I traded Twitter direct messages about travel converters. In episode #155, I’d talked about having to rummage around for European plug adaptors before my Krakow and Budapest trip, and how I’m always leaving them behind. Arnoud wrote -<ul><li>Hi Mark, just caught up on your last two episodes. I also did the travel converter dance until someone recommended the Power Bagel. It\'s so small and comes in handy not only as a travel adapter but also in hotel rooms with not enough power plugs, conference tables with one outlet etc. Iit never leaves my bag so thought I\'d share.</li></ul></li><li>A very belated thanks, Arnoud! Clicking through the link that Arnoud sent, the Power Bagel is a compact circular power strip of universal plugs and a couple of USB ports. They say that the circular design keeps large power adapters, like a Macbook power supply, from blocking outlets like they do on straight power strips. And then in the center hole, they store a universal plug adapter so you can plug the Power Bagel in most international outlets. Cool design and Arnoud vouches for it. Clicking around the web site, the company MOGICS seems to be a 3-person design company based in Singapore. They got started a few years back on Kickstarter and are in the middle of a new campaign for an upgraded version of the Power Bagel, called, of course, the Super Bagel that upgrades the plug adapter and adds a on-trend USB-C port. Kickstarter says the campaign ends on Feb 25th. I’ll include a <a href=\"http://kck.st/354ozBx\">link</a> in the show notes for anyone interested.</li><li>Kickstarter seems to be the place for these things. I sent Arnoud a link to a travel adapter campaign that I joined. The Passport Go is a more traditional travel adapter -- a big cube that will plug into most international outlets and has 3 USB-A and 1 USB-C plugs and one universal plug receptacle. I used it on my Baltics trip. For personal travel, most of my power needs seem to now be driven by USB cords rather than plugs -- my iPhone did a rapid charge off the USB-C port, my tablet and headphones off the USB-A ports and since I don’t have enough hair to justify a blow dryer or curling iron, I never used the plug receptacle. Indeed, if I’d brought my Macbook Air, I could’ve powered that up off the USB-C port rather than bringing its power adapter. I’ll include a link to <a href=\"https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/zendure/passport-go-worlds-first-travel-adapter-w-gan-technology\"><em>their</em> Kickstarter page</a>.</li><li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/10/14/podcast-156-airport-satisfaction-escooters-smaller-luggage/\">episode #156,</a> I talked about how I really liked electric scooters, using them to run around in Chicago and Charlottesville and DC, and down here in Phoenix. Whereas Chicago wrapped up their e-scooter pilot in October -- which made sense; I don’t think those scooters would do well in the snow -- Phoenix seemed the perfect place with perfect weather -- no snow, not a lot of rain. And they seemed to have nailed one of the main problems with e-scooters -- people leaving them lying everywhere, especially in the middle of sidewalks. In downtown Phoenix, you have to park them in designated areas, typically near sidewalk corners, inside a painted box. So it surprised me when I started coming down here in December that I saw only 2 scooter companies -- Lime (which is partnered with Uber) and Spin (which is owned by the car company Ford). But then, a couple of weeks ago, Lime announced that they were pulling out -- that they couldn’t make money in Phoenix -- and a day or so later, all their scooters were gone. I don’t know what the right balance between scooter availability and public right-of-way is, but I hope Chicago and Phoenix and other cities can figure it out. This whole micro-mobility space -- bike shares, e-scooters -- is an important part of the urban transit mix. And, when the weather’s nice, they’re fun too!</li><li>In that <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/10/14/podcast-156-airport-satisfaction-escooters-smaller-luggage/\">same episode</a>, I talked about buying a smaller bag, a <a href=\"https://amzn.to/32lIURe\">TravelPro Maxlite 5 international carry-on size</a>, to meet the smaller carry-on size and weight requirements of AirBaltic, which Andrew and I would be using to hop between Riga, Tallinn, and Helsinki on our Baltics beer and sauna tour. I said back then that I didn’t want to spend a lot of money on it because I’d only be using it for this Baltics trip and maybe some short couple-of-day trips, that my big Victorinox 22-incher would remain my primary bag. But as it turns out, I’ve been using the smaller TravelPro for these 4-day/3-night trips to Phoenix. Now, with temperatures in 70’s, I’m not having to bring heavy, thick clothes with me, but still, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by what I can pack into that smaller TravelPro. But, I think I’ll be back to the Victorinox for next week’s trip -- I’m vectoring through Durango, CO for a ski weekend on the way home. Little colder, little more clothing; I think I’ll need all the space I can get. </li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music -- Velvet Green of Mystery (Instrumental) by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/48114 Ft: Kthugha, Jeris, Martijn de Boer  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong> </strong> <strong>Planning the Trip of a Lifetime</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>We’ve talked on past episodes about trip planning -- using guidebooks, social media, Google algorithms, shooting the gaps between bipolar TripAdvisor reviews, casting runes, consulting tarot cards,... And all that for a week’s vacation, maybe two. What about a 9-week vacation, a paid sabbatical that you’ve worked and waited 7 years for? Well, that’s the extreme travel planning that long-time TravelCommons listener and even longer time friend Allan Marko and his wife Chris Chufo faced last year. And with January being a big travel planning month, I asked Allan to talk to us about how he and Chris planned for a trip of a lifetime.</li><li>Interview with Allan Marko</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #159</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2010/09/06/video-1-impressions-of-vietnam/\">Link to TravelCommons Vietnam video</a></li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_159.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #160 — Disappearing Seatback Screens; Shrinking Difference Between Ride-Share and Taxis','','inherit','closed','closed','','2661-revision-v1','','','2020-02-29 11:50:43','2020-02-29 16:50:43','',2661,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/02/29/2661-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2663,1,'2020-02-29 13:19:52','2020-02-29 18:19:52','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/DSC_7106-scaled.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2633\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/DSC_7106-300x293.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"293\"></a><figcaption>Just put my dragon\'s den on Airbnb</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>January is a big travel planning month; people thinking about about the places they want to visit, spending days on the Internet researching itineraries, and putting in their week\'s vacation requests. But what about a 9-week sabbatical you’ve worked 7 years for? In this episode, we talk about that kind of extreme travel planning. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_159.mp3\" data-wplink-edit=\"true\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/749899837&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #160: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. I finished my Phoenix travels at the end of January and made the last trip a “bleisure” trip -- business in Phoenix Monday thru Thursday afternoon, and then leisure Thursday evening thru Sunday with a ski weekend in Durango, CO, the first time I’ve been on the slopes in 7 years. I first thought about heading up to Salt Lake for the weekend, but when I saw that the Sundance Film Festival was the same weekend, I thought “Nope” and started Googling for other ideas. The ski slopes around Flagstaff were too small and I didn’t want to fight the traffic on I-70 to hit the areas near Denver. Durango, in the San Juan mountains in the southwest corner of the state -- near Four Corners -- looked like a good spot. It’s a quick and fairly inexpensive hour hop from Phoenix; it’s an actual town, not just a ski resort, so there’d be other things to do when the lifts closed; the lift tickets at Purgatory and Wolf Creek were reasonable -- 40-50% of the price at, say, Vail or Park City; I was able to book a whole tiny house on AirBnB for the price of a generic Fairfield Inn room; and, I’d never been there before. And, as I found out from my AirBnB host, it was the weekend of Durango’s Snowdown Festival -- the 42nd annual, with a parade down Main Street and everything. The snow was just OK, but the skiing was great -- beautiful weather, damn few lift lines, nice people -- a weird but fun combination of families -- mostly from Texas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico -- and the Colorado hippy-dippy ski bum crew. It was a nice ending to my 2 months of Phoenix trips.</li><li>The only downside was… I had to check a bag. Even though I rented all my equipment -- skis, boots, poles -- I still needed that extra bag for all the other paraphernalia -- helmet, ski pants, gloves, parka, …. I love skiing but it requires a lot of stuff. Not that it cost me anything -- even flying Basic Economy on American from Phoenix to Durango, I got free bags with my Platinum status. Though American’s website wasn’t very clear about that when they tried to upsell me off of Basic Economy -- imagine that. And while I got free bags, I couldn’t select my seat in advance. But given it was a small regional jet with no middle seats, I figured I’d risk it.&nbsp; I will say, though, that I was pretty happy with the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/37R0sHX\">teal green luggage tags</a> I bought before the trip. Made it very easy to spot my bags amidst the sea of black suitcases on the luggage belt. Probably <a href=\"https://amzn.to/37R0sHX\">the best $5 I’ve spent on Amazon</a>.&nbsp;</li><li>One detail I missed when planning my ski weekend is that my Sunday night flights from Durango to Denver to Chicago would be right in the middle of the Super Bowl. Though I’m not sure I’d have changed anything if I’d remembered it. I didn’t really have a dog in that hunt -- I’m not a big San Francisco or Kansas City fan and so was kinda like everyone else who wasn’t in the Bay Area, I was rooting more for Andy Reid than KC. I did end up catching <em>most</em> of the game, but it was a little choppy. I watched the kick-off and 1st quarter in the bar at Durango Airport. Durango Airport isn’t big -- just 4 gates if I remember correctly -- and the bar kinda sticks out into the gate seating area. I sat at the bar, had a beer, and watched the game on the TV hanging on the wall near Gate 2 -- or maybe 3. But then United called boarding, so I caught bits of the second quarter on the Fox TV iPhone app while waiting to take off for Denver. And then tracked the start of the 3rd quarter after touchdown and a really long taxi in DEN. I caught the rest of the 3rd quarter on multiple screens -- bars, CNN gate TVs -- while walking down the B Concourse to make my ORD connection. I got lucky, though, and was able to catch all of Kansas City’s phenomenal come-back uninterrupted in a Mexican restaurant with about a dozen other fixated passengers and restaurant workers. After KC’s final interception, I walked down and caught the final plays on the CNN TV at the gate. Every other night, I consciously avoid those CNN TVs -- the volumes always up on people yelling at each other. But this night, I was happy for that volume -- the one night when they weren’t to CNN. </li><li>Bridge Music --  <em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/hisboyelroy/430\" target=\"_blank\">Revolve</a> mix</em> by cinematrik (c) copyright 2005 Licensed under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hisboyelroy/430   </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>The week after that last Phoenix trip, I wrote <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/02/07/my-food-and-beer-hangouts-in-downtown-phoenix-dtphx/\">a post</a> on the TravelCommons website listing my favorite food and beer hangouts in downtown Phoenix. When I started traveling to Phoenix in the mid-’90’s, there wasn’t much to downtown Phoenix other than a big Hyatt Regency hotel. Everything was in Scottsdale and Tempe. I’d usually stay in Tempe because, with Arizona State University there, there were restaurants and bars I could walk to. Fast forward to today, downtown Phoenix has a lot more going on. Stadiums for the Phoenix Suns and the Arizona Diamondbacks, and a new downtown campus for ASU’s law school bring in enough people to support a solid selection of restaurants, coffee shops, and bars. The blog post doesn’t cover everything -- just the places I found myself going back to again and again during my 2-month stay.</li><li>Most of my flights from the mid-90’s on went into PHX Sky Harbor’s Terminal 2 -- on United and on American, until they moved to the much better Terminal 4 after merging with US Air which had merged with America West, the original hub airline for PHX. Terminal 2 was PHX’s slum terminal. Built in 1962 and originally planned to shut down in 2000, they finally shut it down on Feb 4, 2020, the week after I finished my latest Phoenix gig. The last two airlines using it -- United and Alaska Air -- have moved to Terminal 3 with the rest of the non-hub carriers. PHX’s two major carriers -- American and Southwest -- split Terminal 4. Some of the newspaper articles said business travelers liked it because it was compact, easy to navigate. I’m not one of them. I thought it was a cramped low-ceilinged place, with small restrooms and lousy food and beer options when I had to wait out delays back to ORD.&nbsp; I think you can tell that I won’t miss it. The plans are to demo the terminal this year and replace it with European-style bus gates -- using buses to take passengers out to remotely parked aircraft instead of boarding through jetways. I’m gonna bet those bus gates won’t be popular in August when PHX’s tarmac temperatures hit 120 degrees.&nbsp;</li><li>Waiting for my American Eagle PHX-Durango flight, I was half-paying attention to the PA announcements, but then noticed that the gate agent wasn’t doing the boarding announcements. Instead they were using recorded announcements. That wasn’t what caught my attention, though. I’ve heard recorded gate announcements hundreds of times. But usually, they’re recordings of humans reading the announcements. Here at gate B19, it was one of those robotic text-to-speech synthesized voices -- something like &lt;insert Boarding Groups 1, 2, and 3&gt;. I mean, why? How much savings do you get by using text-to-speech over some gate agent standing in a closet and recording it, say, on their iPhone? Maybe more that I think now that American has, what, 7, 10, 123 boarding groups? I asked this question “Why the robot” out loud -- to Twitter. American came back “We heard back and the PHX gate staff actually does record the voices used in the announcements. They are real humans.” Kudos for American’s Twitter staff for following up, but unless they have an android with a bad vox box working for them, I think the gang at gate B19 is using text2speech.org.</li><li>I posted an article on the TravelCommons Facebook page about a guy who wore a plastic tent on a plane to avoid the coronavirus. Now, as it turns out, it was really more of a publicity stunt for the guy’s company. He makes personal tents to protect people from bad weather when sitting on the sidelines of their kids’ soccer games. Might cut down on the colds I catch when flying, but from the picture, it looks like it would be quite a pain when the person in the window seat wants to get out to use the toilet.</li><li>On January 6th, the first Monday of the new year, I <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1214167465627979776\">posted a picture on Twitter</a> of the “cannabis amnesty box” that was on the other side of security at ORD’s Terminal 1. Pot became legal in Illinois the first of the year, and the Chicago Dept of Aviation put out these boxes “so travelers have the opportunity to ensure compliance with federal law, as well as the local laws at their destination” according to the police department. If you look at the picture I posted, the box looks like something the maintenance guys knocked together in the wood shop during their break. So no surprise that 3 weeks later, someone broke into a similar box at Midway airport and helped themselves to some surrendered weed. Actually, I think the only real surprise is that it took as long as 3 weeks for this to happen. </li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music -- Velvet Green of Mystery (Instrumental) by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/48114 Ft: Kthugha, Jeris, Martijn de Boer  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Seatback Screens Fading Away</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>On my flight from Durango to Denver, half the guys on the plane were staring down at their phones during boarding and taxi, watching the second quarter until the plane rotated up off the runway. For folks flying United planes with DirectTV seatback screens -- the repainted Continental 737s -- no problems; just swipe your credit card and keep watching. But that’s a shrinking group. Seat back entertainment screens have been on the death watch list for 5 years now, but it seems to be on its way out -- at least on a lot of the domestic routes.&nbsp;</li><li>And I can’t really say that I miss them. The DirectTV controls on those United planes are in the armrest, so I’m always changing the channel or the volume or the screen brightness. On American 737s, screens bulging out of the seat backs into an already tight space thanks to American’s war against seat pitch; I have to recline my seat just to be able to get that screen in focus. And the power supplies for all these seat back units are under the seat, crowding out space for my backpack or my feet.&nbsp;</li><li>I’m happy with the BYOS -- bring your own screen -- approach. I watched the season finale of The Mandalorian Star Wars TV show on my 8-inch Samsung tablet. It wasn’t as good as watching it on the 65-inch LG 4K TV at home, but it was bigger than any domestic in-flight screen. On one of my Southwest flights home from PHX, I saw a guy hang his big iPhone Max from the tray on the seatback in front of him -- kind of a DIY seatback entertainment unit.&nbsp;</li><li>On long international flights, though, I can see the case for seatback screens. My wife and kids have perfected synchronized movie viewing. They’re sitting three abreast; they queue up the same movie and then count down -- 3, 2, 1, Press Play! The airplane version of watching a movie together in the living room. I’m not sure it would be the same if they were all looking down at their iPhones. This tends to work better on newer planes, like the 787, that have bigger screens. I remember Andrew trying to watch the movie Dunkirk - a big WW II action movie that was great on IMAX -- on a maybe 7-inch screen on a United 767. I don’t think he got the full experience of that movie.</li><li>Back in December, United <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1211759835181654018\">tweeted out the top 10 most watched in-flight movies in 2019</a> -- Bohemian Rhapsody, A Star is Born, and Crazy Rich Asians were 1, 2, and 3. Makes sense. In 9th place, though, was John Wick 3, the 3rd installment of the Keanu Reeves fists of fury action flick. Loved that movie, but I can’t see even the new 16-inch screens in United’s business class being big enough to handle that flick. </li><li>Bridge Music -- Velvet Green of Mystery (Instrumental) by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/48114 Ft: Kthugha, Jeris, Martijn de Boer  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Any Difference Left Between Ride-Share and Taxis?</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I got an e-mail survey the other day asking for my thoughts, impressions about Uber and Lyft. One of the questions was how long I’d used each of them -- less than 1 year; 1-2 years, 2-3 years, more than 3 years. Which got <em>me</em> kinda wondering, so I pulled out my iPhone and fired up each app. My first Uber ride was in December 2013, from midtown Manhattan to LGA at 4pm. I signed up because it’s such a pain to find a regular cab to take you to LGA at rush hour, and I’d forgotten to book a ride with the black car service I would normally use. Interesting that I didn’t use Uber again for another 6 months, in June 2014, when again, I’d didn’t have a black car book for a ride from PHL to a client out in the suburbs along the Blue Route. I signed up with Lyft in December 2015 when I was in Las Vegas for a project. I’d be using Uber more frequently in 2015, but back then, only Lyft had permission to drop-off at LAS. We had used Uber a couple of times, but they’d have to drop us off at the rental car center so we could take the bus to the terminal. I did that exactly one time and then pivoted to Lyft. So, according to this e-mail survey -- which, at the end, revealed itself to be sponsored by Uber -- I’m a grizzled ride-sharing veteran -- as I’m sure are many of you.</li><li>And ride-sharing was what it was -- an app-driven version of the old ride-sharing bulletin boards -- “I’m driving from Chicago to Rockford; looking for someone to split the gas and tolls” -- except locally. I remember, at the start, that caused a bit of an etiquette challenge -- do I sit in the front or the back? And you were careful because it was their car -- and usually a nice one. Certainly much nicer and way less beat-up than the typical cab.  And there were usually good stories from the drivers -- all but a couple were doing it part-time, to make some additional cash. Way back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/11/22/podcast-125-uber-driver-stories-overseas-for-the-election/\">episode #125</a>, in November 2016, early on in my Uber/Lyft days, I told some of those stories.</li><li>A year later, a driver in Charlottesville, VA told me he was driving full-time and wanted to expand, so he’d bought 3 used Toyota Corollas (even back then the preferred ride-share car) and was renting them out to “Hispanics”, his words, who were driving Uber and Lyft a couple hours north in the Washington, DC area. Interesting idea. A bit like the standard taxi cab model -- leasing licensed cabs to drivers for a shift -- but without the need to drop money on a taxi license, or a medallion in places like New York and Chicago. Interesting enough that there are now 6-7 companies, including Hertz, offering daily and weekly rentals if you don’t want to share rides in your personal car.</li><li>Back in December, landing in Chicago Midway on a Southwest flight from PHX, I did my usual drill, opened up Uber and Lyft as I got off the plane and checked prices and wait times for a ride home. The prices were about the same, but the wait time… 10 min for Uber, 2 for Lyft. Lyft it is! I hit the Request Ride button, but instead of searching for a driver, I immediately get a 4-digit PIN. I head downstairs and get into a queue that looks a lot like the cab line a few doors over, except this one is run by women in pink Lyft safety vests. But they’re doing the same thing the cab rank workers do -- wave down cars and then point passengers to them. I wait, I dunno, maybe 5 minutes to get into a car, show the guy the PIN on my Lyft app, he enters it into his, and off we go. A bit less hectic than the typical airport rideshare scrum, but again, how is this different than a taxi -- except that I don’t have to ask the driver if his credit card machine works.</li><li>Indeed, on most of my trips over the past year, arriving in PHX or CHO, there typically wouldn’t be a line for a cab, so I’d skip the 5-10 minute wait for Uber or Lyft. Or, returning from Durango with my extra bag of ski paraphernalia, I skipped the schlep up to to the ride-share pick-up zone; I just walked out the door to a waiting cab. And the price difference is shrinking --  as we talked about in episode #154, Uber and Lyft have been nudging their rates up to stem their losses. </li><li>This is not to say there aren’t important differences; places where Uber and Lyft bring real value. I was working in New Orleans before Uber set up shop. It was impossible to get a cab anywhere other than between the airport and the French Quarter. Trying to get to and from a restaurant in, say, Mid-City or Uptown was painful -- until Uber showed up.</li><li>It kinda feels like, after all the hype, the battles with regulators, the IPOs, that Uber and Lyft used billions of venture capital dollars to break the medallion monopolies and build some phenomenal taxi dispatch systems. As a traveler, it’s been great for me. For the investors though? Well, I’m glad I skipped those IPOs</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #160</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_159.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #160 — Disappearing Seatback Screens; Shrinking Difference Between Ride-Share and Taxis','','inherit','closed','closed','','2661-revision-v1','','','2020-02-29 13:19:52','2020-02-29 18:19:52','',2661,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/02/29/2661-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2664,1,'2020-02-29 13:58:06','2020-02-29 18:58:06','','IMG_0368','','inherit','open','closed','','img_0368','','','2020-02-29 13:58:06','2020-02-29 18:58:06','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/IMG_0368.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(2665,1,'2020-02-29 14:01:41','2020-02-29 19:01:41','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/IMG_0368-scaled.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2664 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/IMG_0368-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\n<figcaption>Is this the IMAX seatback screen?</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p>January is a big travel planning month; people thinking about about the places they want to visit, spending days on the Internet researching itineraries, and putting in their week\'s vacation requests. But what about a 9-week sabbatical you’ve worked 7 years for? In this episode, we talk about that kind of extreme travel planning. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_159.mp3\" data-wplink-edit=\"true\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/749899837&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #160: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. I finished my Phoenix travels at the end of January and made the last trip a “bleisure” trip -- business in Phoenix Monday thru Thursday afternoon, and then leisure Thursday evening thru Sunday with a ski weekend in Durango, CO, the first time I’ve been on the slopes in 7 years. I first thought about heading up to Salt Lake for the weekend, but when I saw that the Sundance Film Festival was the same weekend, I thought “Nope” and started Googling for other ideas. The ski slopes around Flagstaff were too small and I didn’t want to fight the traffic on I-70 to hit the areas near Denver. Durango, in the San Juan mountains in the southwest corner of the state -- near Four Corners -- looked like a good spot. It’s a quick and fairly inexpensive hour hop from Phoenix; it’s an actual town, not just a ski resort, so there’d be other things to do when the lifts closed; the lift tickets at Purgatory and Wolf Creek were reasonable -- 40-50% of the price at, say, Vail or Park City; I was able to book a whole tiny house on AirBnB for the price of a generic Fairfield Inn room; and, I’d never been there before. And, as I found out from my AirBnB host, it was the weekend of Durango’s Snowdown Festival -- the 42nd annual, with a parade down Main Street and everything. The snow was just OK, but the skiing was great -- beautiful weather, damn few lift lines, nice people -- a weird but fun combination of families -- mostly from Texas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico -- and the Colorado hippy-dippy ski bum crew. It was a nice ending to my 2 months of Phoenix trips.</li><li>The only downside was… I had to check a bag. Even though I rented all my equipment -- skis, boots, poles -- I still needed that extra bag for all the other paraphernalia -- helmet, ski pants, gloves, parka, …. I love skiing but it requires a lot of stuff. Not that it cost me anything -- even flying Basic Economy on American from Phoenix to Durango, I got free bags with my Platinum status. Though American’s website wasn’t very clear about that when they tried to upsell me off of Basic Economy -- imagine that. And while I got free bags, I couldn’t select my seat in advance. But given it was a small regional jet with no middle seats, I figured I’d risk it.&nbsp; I will say, though, that I was pretty happy with the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/37R0sHX\">teal green luggage tags</a> I bought before the trip. Made it very easy to spot my bags amidst the sea of black suitcases on the luggage belt. Probably <a href=\"https://amzn.to/37R0sHX\">the best $5 I’ve spent on Amazon</a>.&nbsp;</li><li>One detail I missed when planning my ski weekend is that my Sunday night flights from Durango to Denver to Chicago would be right in the middle of the Super Bowl. Though I’m not sure I’d have changed anything if I’d remembered it. I didn’t really have a dog in that hunt -- I’m not a big San Francisco or Kansas City fan and so was kinda like everyone else who wasn’t in the Bay Area, I was rooting more for Andy Reid than KC. I did end up catching <em>most</em> of the game, but it was a little choppy. I watched the kick-off and 1st quarter in the bar at Durango Airport. Durango Airport isn’t big -- just 4 gates if I remember correctly -- and the bar kinda sticks out into the gate seating area. I sat at the bar, had a beer, and watched the game on the TV hanging on the wall near Gate 2 -- or maybe 3. But then United called boarding, so I caught bits of the second quarter on the Fox TV iPhone app while waiting to take off for Denver. And then tracked the start of the 3rd quarter after touchdown and a really long taxi in DEN. I caught the rest of the 3rd quarter on multiple screens -- bars, CNN gate TVs -- while walking down the B Concourse to make my ORD connection. I got lucky, though, and was able to catch all of Kansas City’s phenomenal come-back uninterrupted in a Mexican restaurant with about a dozen other fixated passengers and restaurant workers. After KC’s final interception, I walked down and caught the final plays on the CNN TV at the gate. Every other night, I consciously avoid those CNN TVs -- the volumes always up on people yelling at each other. But this night, I was happy for that volume -- the one night when they weren’t to CNN. </li><li>Bridge Music --  <em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/hisboyelroy/430\" target=\"_blank\">Revolve</a> mix</em> by cinematrik (c) copyright 2005 Licensed under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hisboyelroy/430   </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>The week after that last Phoenix trip, I wrote <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/02/07/my-food-and-beer-hangouts-in-downtown-phoenix-dtphx/\">a post</a> on the TravelCommons website listing my favorite food and beer hangouts in downtown Phoenix. When I started traveling to Phoenix in the mid-’90’s, there wasn’t much to downtown Phoenix other than a big Hyatt Regency hotel. Everything was in Scottsdale and Tempe. I’d usually stay in Tempe because, with Arizona State University there, there were restaurants and bars I could walk to. Fast forward to today, downtown Phoenix has a lot more going on. Stadiums for the Phoenix Suns and the Arizona Diamondbacks, and a new downtown campus for ASU’s law school bring in enough people to support a solid selection of restaurants, coffee shops, and bars. The blog post doesn’t cover everything -- just the places I found myself going back to again and again during my 2-month stay.</li><li>Most of my flights from the mid-90’s on went into PHX Sky Harbor’s Terminal 2 -- on United and on American, until they moved to the much better Terminal 4 after merging with US Air which had merged with America West, the original hub airline for PHX. Terminal 2 was PHX’s slum terminal. Built in 1962 and originally planned to shut down in 2000, they finally shut it down on Feb 4, 2020, the week after I finished my latest Phoenix gig. The last two airlines using it -- United and Alaska Air -- have moved to Terminal 3 with the rest of the non-hub carriers. PHX’s two major carriers -- American and Southwest -- split Terminal 4. Some of the newspaper articles said business travelers liked it because it was compact, easy to navigate. I’m not one of them. I thought it was a cramped low-ceilinged place, with small restrooms and lousy food and beer options when I had to wait out delays back to ORD.&nbsp; I think you can tell that I won’t miss it. The plans are to demo the terminal this year and replace it with European-style bus gates -- using buses to take passengers out to remotely parked aircraft instead of boarding through jetways. I’m gonna bet those bus gates won’t be popular in August when PHX’s tarmac temperatures hit 120 degrees.&nbsp;</li><li>Waiting for my American Eagle PHX-Durango flight, I was half-paying attention to the PA announcements, but then noticed that the gate agent wasn’t doing the boarding announcements. Instead they were using recorded announcements. That wasn’t what caught my attention, though. I’ve heard recorded gate announcements hundreds of times. But usually, they’re recordings of humans reading the announcements. Here at gate B19, it was one of those robotic text-to-speech synthesized voices -- something like &lt;insert Boarding Groups 1, 2, and 3&gt;. I mean, why? How much savings do you get by using text-to-speech over some gate agent standing in a closet and recording it, say, on their iPhone? Maybe more that I think now that American has, what, 7, 10, 123 boarding groups? I asked this question “Why the robot” out loud -- to Twitter. American came back “We heard back and the PHX gate staff actually does record the voices used in the announcements. They are real humans.” Kudos for American’s Twitter staff for following up, but unless they have an android with a bad vox box working for them, I think the gang at gate B19 is using text2speech.org.</li><li>I posted an article on the TravelCommons Facebook page about a guy who wore a plastic tent on a plane to avoid the coronavirus. Now, as it turns out, it was really more of a publicity stunt for the guy’s company. He makes personal tents to protect people from bad weather when sitting on the sidelines of their kids’ soccer games. Might cut down on the colds I catch when flying, but from the picture, it looks like it would be quite a pain when the person in the window seat wants to get out to use the toilet.</li><li>On January 6th, the first Monday of the new year, I <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1214167465627979776\">posted a picture on Twitter</a> of the “cannabis amnesty box” that was on the other side of security at ORD’s Terminal 1. Pot became legal in Illinois the first of the year, and the Chicago Dept of Aviation put out these boxes “so travelers have the opportunity to ensure compliance with federal law, as well as the local laws at their destination” according to the police department. If you look at the picture I posted, the box looks like something the maintenance guys knocked together in the wood shop during their break. So no surprise that 3 weeks later, someone broke into a similar box at Midway airport and helped themselves to some surrendered weed. Actually, I think the only real surprise is that it took as long as 3 weeks for this to happen. </li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music -- Velvet Green of Mystery (Instrumental) by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/48114 Ft: Kthugha, Jeris, Martijn de Boer  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Seatback Screens Fading Away</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>On my flight from Durango to Denver, half the guys on the plane were staring down at their phones during boarding and taxi, watching the second quarter until the plane rotated up off the runway. For folks flying United planes with DirectTV seatback screens -- the repainted Continental 737s -- no problems; just swipe your credit card and keep watching. But that’s a shrinking group. Seat back entertainment screens have been on the death watch list for 5 years now, but it seems to be on its way out -- at least on a lot of the domestic routes.&nbsp;</li><li>And I can’t really say that I miss them. The DirectTV controls on those United planes are in the armrest, so I’m always changing the channel or the volume or the screen brightness. On American 737s, screens bulging out of the seat backs into an already tight space thanks to American’s war against seat pitch; I have to recline my seat just to be able to get that screen in focus. And the power supplies for all these seat back units are under the seat, crowding out space for my backpack or my feet.&nbsp;</li><li>I’m happy with the BYOS -- bring your own screen -- approach. I watched the season finale of The Mandalorian Star Wars TV show on my 8-inch Samsung tablet. It wasn’t as good as watching it on the 65-inch LG 4K TV at home, but it was bigger than any domestic in-flight screen. On one of my Southwest flights home from PHX, I saw a guy hang his big iPhone Max from the tray on the seatback in front of him -- kind of a DIY seatback entertainment unit.&nbsp;</li><li>On long international flights, though, I can see the case for seatback screens. My wife and kids have perfected synchronized movie viewing. They’re sitting three abreast; they queue up the same movie and then count down -- 3, 2, 1, Press Play! The airplane version of watching a movie together in the living room. I’m not sure it would be the same if they were all looking down at their iPhones. This tends to work better on newer planes, like the 787, that have bigger screens. I remember Andrew trying to watch the movie Dunkirk - a big WW II action movie that was great on IMAX -- on a maybe 7-inch screen on a United 767. I don’t think he got the full experience of that movie.</li><li>Back in December, United <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1211759835181654018\">tweeted out the top 10 most watched in-flight movies in 2019</a> -- Bohemian Rhapsody, A Star is Born, and Crazy Rich Asians were 1, 2, and 3. Makes sense. In 9th place, though, was John Wick 3, the 3rd installment of the Keanu Reeves fists of fury action flick. Loved that movie, but I can’t see even the new 16-inch screens in United’s business class being big enough to handle that flick. </li><li>Bridge Music -- Velvet Green of Mystery (Instrumental) by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/48114 Ft: Kthugha, Jeris, Martijn de Boer  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Any Difference Left Between Ride-Share and Taxis?</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I got an e-mail survey the other day asking for my thoughts, impressions about Uber and Lyft. One of the questions was how long I’d used each of them -- less than 1 year; 1-2 years, 2-3 years, more than 3 years. Which got <em>me</em> kinda wondering, so I pulled out my iPhone and fired up each app. My first Uber ride was in December 2013, from midtown Manhattan to LGA at 4pm. I signed up because it’s such a pain to find a regular cab to take you to LGA at rush hour, and I’d forgotten to book a ride with the black car service I would normally use. Interesting that I didn’t use Uber again for another 6 months, in June 2014, when again, I’d didn’t have a black car book for a ride from PHL to a client out in the suburbs along the Blue Route. I signed up with Lyft in December 2015 when I was in Las Vegas for a project. I’d be using Uber more frequently in 2015, but back then, only Lyft had permission to drop-off at LAS. We had used Uber a couple of times, but they’d have to drop us off at the rental car center so we could take the bus to the terminal. I did that exactly one time and then pivoted to Lyft. So, according to this e-mail survey -- which, at the end, revealed itself to be sponsored by Uber -- I’m a grizzled ride-sharing veteran -- as I’m sure are many of you.</li><li>And ride-sharing was what it was -- an app-driven version of the old ride-sharing bulletin boards -- “I’m driving from Chicago to Rockford; looking for someone to split the gas and tolls” -- except locally. I remember, at the start, that caused a bit of an etiquette challenge -- do I sit in the front or the back? And you were careful because it was their car -- and usually a nice one. Certainly much nicer and way less beat-up than the typical cab.  And there were usually good stories from the drivers -- all but a couple were doing it part-time, to make some additional cash. Way back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/11/22/podcast-125-uber-driver-stories-overseas-for-the-election/\">episode #125</a>, in November 2016, early on in my Uber/Lyft days, I told some of those stories.</li><li>A year later, a driver in Charlottesville, VA told me he was driving full-time and wanted to expand, so he’d bought 3 used Toyota Corollas (even back then the preferred ride-share car) and was renting them out to “Hispanics”, his words, who were driving Uber and Lyft a couple hours north in the Washington, DC area. Interesting idea. A bit like the standard taxi cab model -- leasing licensed cabs to drivers for a shift -- but without the need to drop money on a taxi license, or a medallion in places like New York and Chicago. Interesting enough that there are now 6-7 companies, including Hertz, offering daily and weekly rentals if you don’t want to share rides in your personal car.</li><li>Back in December, landing in Chicago Midway on a Southwest flight from PHX, I did my usual drill, opened up Uber and Lyft as I got off the plane and checked prices and wait times for a ride home. The prices were about the same, but the wait time… 10 min for Uber, 2 for Lyft. Lyft it is! I hit the Request Ride button, but instead of searching for a driver, I immediately get a 4-digit PIN. I head downstairs and get into a queue that looks a lot like the cab line a few doors over, except this one is run by women in pink Lyft safety vests. But they’re doing the same thing the cab rank workers do -- wave down cars and then point passengers to them. I wait, I dunno, maybe 5 minutes to get into a car, show the guy the PIN on my Lyft app, he enters it into his, and off we go. A bit less hectic than the typical airport rideshare scrum, but again, how is this different than a taxi -- except that I don’t have to ask the driver if his credit card machine works.</li><li>Indeed, on most of my trips over the past year, arriving in PHX or CHO, there typically wouldn’t be a line for a cab, so I’d skip the 5-10 minute wait for Uber or Lyft. Or, returning from Durango with my extra bag of ski paraphernalia, I skipped the schlep up to to the ride-share pick-up zone; I just walked out the door to a waiting cab. And the price difference is shrinking --  as we talked about in episode #154, Uber and Lyft have been nudging their rates up to stem their losses. </li><li>This is not to say there aren’t important differences; places where Uber and Lyft bring real value. I was working in New Orleans before Uber set up shop. It was impossible to get a cab anywhere other than between the airport and the French Quarter. Trying to get to and from a restaurant in, say, Mid-City or Uptown was painful -- until Uber showed up.</li><li>It kinda feels like, after all the hype, the battles with regulators, the IPOs, that Uber and Lyft used billions of venture capital dollars to break the medallion monopolies and build some phenomenal taxi dispatch systems. As a traveler, it’s been great for me. For the investors though? Well, I’m glad I skipped those IPOs</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #160</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_159.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #160 — Disappearing Seatback Screens; Shrinking Difference Between Ride-Share and Taxis','','inherit','closed','closed','','2661-revision-v1','','','2020-02-29 14:01:41','2020-02-29 19:01:41','',2661,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/02/29/2661-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2666,1,'2020-02-29 14:19:09','2020-02-29 19:19:09','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/IMG_0368-scaled.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2664 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/IMG_0368-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a><figcaption>Is this the IMAX seatback screen?</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>January is a big travel planning month; people thinking about about the places they want to visit, spending days on the Internet researching itineraries, and putting in their week\'s vacation requests. But what about a 9-week sabbatical you’ve worked 7 years for? In this episode, we talk about that kind of extreme travel planning. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_159.mp3\" data-wplink-edit=\"true\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/749899837&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #160: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. I finished my Phoenix travels at the end of January and made the last trip a “bleisure” trip -- business in Phoenix Monday thru Thursday afternoon, and then leisure Thursday evening thru Sunday with a ski weekend in Durango, CO, the first time I’ve been on the slopes in 7 years. I first thought about heading up to Salt Lake for the weekend, but when I saw that the Sundance Film Festival was the same weekend, I thought “Nope” and started Googling for other ideas. The ski slopes around Flagstaff were too small and I didn’t want to fight the traffic on I-70 to hit the areas near Denver. Durango, in the San Juan mountains in the southwest corner of the state -- near Four Corners -- looked like a good spot. It’s a quick and fairly inexpensive hour hop from Phoenix; it’s an actual town, not just a ski resort, so there’d be other things to do when the lifts closed; the lift tickets at Purgatory and Wolf Creek were reasonable -- 40-50% of the price at, say, Vail or Park City; I was able to book a whole tiny house on AirBnB for the price of a generic Fairfield Inn room; and, I’d never been there before. And, as I found out from my AirBnB host, it was the weekend of Durango’s Snowdown Festival -- the 42nd annual, with a parade down Main Street and everything. The snow was just OK, but the skiing was great -- beautiful weather, damn few lift lines, nice people -- a weird but fun combination of families -- mostly from Texas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico -- and the Colorado hippy-dippy ski bum crew. It was a nice ending to my 2 months of Phoenix trips.</li><li>The only downside was… I had to check a bag. Even though I rented all my equipment -- skis, boots, poles -- I still needed that extra bag for all the other paraphernalia -- helmet, ski pants, gloves, parka, …. I love skiing but it requires a lot of stuff. Not that it cost me anything -- even flying Basic Economy on American from Phoenix to Durango, I got free bags with my Platinum status. Though American’s website wasn’t very clear about that when they tried to upsell me off of Basic Economy -- imagine that. And while I got free bags, I couldn’t select my seat in advance. But given it was a small regional jet with no middle seats, I figured I’d risk it.  I will say, though, that I was pretty happy with the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/37R0sHX\">teal green luggage tags</a> I bought before the trip. Made it very easy to spot my bags amidst the sea of black suitcases on the luggage belt. Probably <a href=\"https://amzn.to/37R0sHX\">the best $5 I’ve spent on Amazon</a>. </li><li>One detail I missed when planning my ski weekend is that my Sunday night flights from Durango to Denver to Chicago would be right in the middle of the Super Bowl. Though I’m not sure I’d have changed anything if I’d remembered it. I didn’t really have a dog in that hunt -- I’m not a big San Francisco or Kansas City fan and so was kinda like everyone else who wasn’t in the Bay Area, I was rooting more for Andy Reid than KC. I did end up catching <em>most</em> of the game, but it was a little choppy. I watched the kick-off and 1st quarter in the bar at Durango Airport. Durango Airport isn’t big -- just 4 gates if I remember correctly -- and the bar kinda sticks out into the gate seating area. I sat at the bar, had a beer, and watched the game on the TV hanging on the wall near Gate 2 -- or maybe 3. But then United called boarding, so I caught bits of the second quarter on the Fox TV iPhone app while waiting to take off for Denver. And then tracked the start of the 3rd quarter after touchdown and a really long taxi in DEN. I caught the rest of the 3rd quarter on multiple screens -- bars, CNN gate TVs -- while walking down the B Concourse to make my ORD connection. I got lucky, though, and was able to catch all of Kansas City’s phenomenal come-back uninterrupted in a Mexican restaurant with about a dozen other fixated passengers and restaurant workers. After KC’s final interception, I walked down and caught the final plays on the CNN TV at the gate. Every other night, I consciously avoid those CNN TVs -- the volumes always up on people yelling at each other. But this night, I was happy for that volume -- the one night when they weren’t to CNN. </li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/scottaltham/20747\"> Hear Us Now (poptastic mix)</a> by Scott Altham (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/scottaltham/20747    </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>The week after that last Phoenix trip, I wrote <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/02/07/my-food-and-beer-hangouts-in-downtown-phoenix-dtphx/\">a post</a> on the TravelCommons website listing my favorite food and beer hangouts in downtown Phoenix. When I started traveling to Phoenix in the mid-’90’s, there wasn’t much to downtown Phoenix other than a big Hyatt Regency hotel. Everything was in Scottsdale and Tempe. I’d usually stay in Tempe because, with Arizona State University there, there were restaurants and bars I could walk to. Fast forward to today, downtown Phoenix has a lot more going on. Stadiums for the Phoenix Suns and the Arizona Diamondbacks, and a new downtown campus for ASU’s law school bring in enough people to support a solid selection of restaurants, coffee shops, and bars. The blog post doesn’t cover everything -- just the places I found myself going back to again and again during my 2-month stay.</li><li>Most of my flights from the mid-90’s on went into PHX Sky Harbor’s Terminal 2 -- on United and on American, until they moved to the much better Terminal 4 after merging with US Air which had merged with America West, the original hub airline for PHX. Terminal 2 was PHX’s slum terminal. Built in 1962 and originally planned to shut down in 2000, they finally shut it down on Feb 4, 2020, the week after I finished my latest Phoenix gig. The last two airlines using it -- United and Alaska Air -- have moved to Terminal 3 with the rest of the non-hub carriers. PHX’s two major carriers -- American and Southwest -- split Terminal 4. Some of the newspaper articles said business travelers liked it because it was compact, easy to navigate. I’m not one of them. I thought it was a cramped low-ceilinged place, with small restrooms and lousy food and beer options when I had to wait out delays back to ORD.&nbsp; I think you can tell that I won’t miss it. The plans are to demo the terminal this year and replace it with European-style bus gates -- using buses to take passengers out to remotely parked aircraft instead of boarding through jetways. I’m gonna bet those bus gates won’t be popular in August when PHX’s tarmac temperatures hit 120 degrees.&nbsp;</li><li>Waiting for my American Eagle PHX-Durango flight, I was half-paying attention to the PA announcements, but then noticed that the gate agent wasn’t doing the boarding announcements. Instead they were using recorded announcements. That wasn’t what caught my attention, though. I’ve heard recorded gate announcements hundreds of times. But usually, they’re recordings of humans reading the announcements. Here at gate B19, it was one of those robotic text-to-speech synthesized voices -- something like &lt;insert Boarding Groups 1, 2, and 3&gt;. I mean, why? How much savings do you get by using text-to-speech over some gate agent standing in a closet and recording it, say, on their iPhone? Maybe more that I think now that American has, what, 7, 10, 123 boarding groups? I asked this question “Why the robot” out loud -- to Twitter. American came back “We heard back and the PHX gate staff actually does record the voices used in the announcements. They are real humans.” Kudos for American’s Twitter staff for following up, but unless they have an android with a bad vox box working for them, I think the gang at gate B19 is using text2speech.org.</li><li>I posted an article on the TravelCommons Facebook page about a guy who wore a plastic tent on a plane to avoid the coronavirus. Now, as it turns out, it was really more of a publicity stunt for the guy’s company. He makes personal tents to protect people from bad weather when sitting on the sidelines of their kids’ soccer games. Might cut down on the colds I catch when flying, but from the picture, it looks like it would be quite a pain when the person in the window seat wants to get out to use the toilet.</li><li>On January 6th, the first Monday of the new year, I <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1214167465627979776\">posted a picture on Twitter</a> of the “cannabis amnesty box” that was on the other side of security at ORD’s Terminal 1. Pot became legal in Illinois the first of the year, and the Chicago Dept of Aviation put out these boxes “so travelers have the opportunity to ensure compliance with federal law, as well as the local laws at their destination” according to the police department. If you look at the picture I posted, the box looks like something the maintenance guys knocked together in the wood shop during their break. So no surprise that 3 weeks later, someone broke into a similar box at Midway airport and helped themselves to some surrendered weed. Actually, I think the only real surprise is that it took as long as 3 weeks for this to happen. </li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music -- Velvet Green of Mystery (Instrumental) by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/48114 Ft: Kthugha, Jeris, Martijn de Boer  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Seatback Screens Fading Away</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>On my flight from Durango to Denver, half the guys on the plane were staring down at their phones during boarding and taxi, watching the second quarter until the plane rotated up off the runway. For folks flying United planes with DirectTV seatback screens -- the repainted Continental 737s -- no problems; just swipe your credit card and keep watching. But that’s a shrinking group. Seat back entertainment screens have been on the death watch list for 5 years now, but it seems to be on its way out -- at least on a lot of the domestic routes.&nbsp;</li><li>And I can’t really say that I miss them. The DirectTV controls on those United planes are in the armrest, so I’m always changing the channel or the volume or the screen brightness. On American 737s, screens bulging out of the seat backs into an already tight space thanks to American’s war against seat pitch; I have to recline my seat just to be able to get that screen in focus. And the power supplies for all these seat back units are under the seat, crowding out space for my backpack or my feet.&nbsp;</li><li>I’m happy with the BYOS -- bring your own screen -- approach. I watched the season finale of The Mandalorian Star Wars TV show on my 8-inch Samsung tablet. It wasn’t as good as watching it on the 65-inch LG 4K TV at home, but it was bigger than any domestic in-flight screen. On one of my Southwest flights home from PHX, I saw a guy hang his big iPhone Max from the tray on the seatback in front of him -- kind of a DIY seatback entertainment unit.&nbsp;</li><li>On long international flights, though, I can see the case for seatback screens. My wife and kids have perfected synchronized movie viewing. They’re sitting three abreast; they queue up the same movie and then count down -- 3, 2, 1, Press Play! The airplane version of watching a movie together in the living room. I’m not sure it would be the same if they were all looking down at their iPhones. This tends to work better on newer planes, like the 787, that have bigger screens. I remember Andrew trying to watch the movie Dunkirk - a big WW II action movie that was great on IMAX -- on a maybe 7-inch screen on a United 767. I don’t think he got the full experience of that movie.</li><li>Back in December, United <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1211759835181654018\">tweeted out the top 10 most watched in-flight movies in 2019</a> -- Bohemian Rhapsody, A Star is Born, and Crazy Rich Asians were 1, 2, and 3. Makes sense. In 9th place, though, was John Wick 3, the 3rd installment of the Keanu Reeves fists of fury action flick. Loved that movie, but I can’t see even the new 16-inch screens in United’s business class being big enough to handle that flick. </li><li>Bridge Music -- Velvet Green of Mystery (Instrumental) by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/48114 Ft: Kthugha, Jeris, Martijn de Boer  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Any Difference Left Between Ride-Share and Taxis?</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I got an e-mail survey the other day asking for my thoughts, impressions about Uber and Lyft. One of the questions was how long I’d used each of them -- less than 1 year; 1-2 years, 2-3 years, more than 3 years. Which got <em>me</em> kinda wondering, so I pulled out my iPhone and fired up each app. My first Uber ride was in December 2013, from midtown Manhattan to LGA at 4pm. I signed up because it’s such a pain to find a regular cab to take you to LGA at rush hour, and I’d forgotten to book a ride with the black car service I would normally use. Interesting that I didn’t use Uber again for another 6 months, in June 2014, when again, I’d didn’t have a black car book for a ride from PHL to a client out in the suburbs along the Blue Route. I signed up with Lyft in December 2015 when I was in Las Vegas for a project. I’d be using Uber more frequently in 2015, but back then, only Lyft had permission to drop-off at LAS. We had used Uber a couple of times, but they’d have to drop us off at the rental car center so we could take the bus to the terminal. I did that exactly one time and then pivoted to Lyft. So, according to this e-mail survey -- which, at the end, revealed itself to be sponsored by Uber -- I’m a grizzled ride-sharing veteran -- as I’m sure are many of you.</li><li>And ride-sharing was what it was -- an app-driven version of the old ride-sharing bulletin boards -- “I’m driving from Chicago to Rockford; looking for someone to split the gas and tolls” -- except locally. I remember, at the start, that caused a bit of an etiquette challenge -- do I sit in the front or the back? And you were careful because it was their car -- and usually a nice one. Certainly much nicer and way less beat-up than the typical cab.&nbsp; And there were usually good stories from the drivers -- all but a couple were doing it part-time, to make some additional cash. Way back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/11/22/podcast-125-uber-driver-stories-overseas-for-the-election/\">episode #125</a>, in November 2016, early on in my Uber/Lyft days, I told some of those stories.</li><li>A year later, a driver in Charlottesville, VA told me he was driving full-time and wanted to expand, so he’d bought 3 used Toyota Corollas (even back then the preferred ride-share car) and was renting them out to “Hispanics”, his words, who were driving Uber and Lyft a couple hours north in the Washington, DC area. Interesting idea. A bit like the standard taxi cab model -- leasing licensed cabs to drivers for a shift -- but without the need to drop money on a taxi license, or a medallion in places like New York and Chicago. Interesting enough that there are now 6-7 companies, including Hertz, offering daily and weekly rentals if you don’t want to share rides in your personal car.</li><li>Back in December, landing in Chicago Midway on a Southwest flight from PHX, I did my usual drill, opened up Uber and Lyft as I got off the plane and checked prices and wait times for a ride home. The prices were about the same, but the wait time… 10 min for Uber, 2 for Lyft. Lyft it is! I hit the Request Ride button, but instead of searching for a driver, I immediately get a 4-digit PIN. I head downstairs and get into a queue that looks a lot like the cab line a few doors over, except this one is run by women in pink Lyft safety vests. But they’re doing the same thing the cab rank workers do -- wave down cars and then point passengers to them. I wait, I dunno, maybe 5 minutes to get into a car, show the guy the PIN on my Lyft app, he enters it into his, and off we go. A bit less hectic than the typical airport rideshare scrum, but again, how is this different than a taxi -- except that I don’t have to ask the driver if his credit card machine works.</li><li>Indeed, on most of my trips over the past year, arriving in PHX or CHO, there typically wouldn’t be a line for a cab, so I’d skip the 5-10 minute wait for Uber or Lyft. Or, returning from Durango with my extra bag of ski paraphernalia, I skipped the schlep up to to the ride-share pick-up zone; I just walked out the door to a waiting cab. And the price difference is shrinking --&nbsp; as we talked about in episode #154, Uber and Lyft have been nudging their rates up to stem their losses.&nbsp;</li><li>This is not to say there aren’t important differences; places where Uber and Lyft bring real value. I was working in New Orleans before Uber set up shop. It was impossible to get a cab anywhere other than between the airport and the French Quarter. Trying to get to and from a restaurant in, say, Mid-City or Uptown was painful -- until Uber showed up.</li><li>It kinda feels like, after all the hype, the battles with regulators, the IPOs, that Uber and Lyft used billions of venture capital dollars to break the medallion monopolies and build some phenomenal taxi dispatch systems. As a traveler, it’s been great for me. For the investors though? Well, I’m glad I skipped those IPOs</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #160</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_159.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #160 — Disappearing Seatback Screens; Shrinking Difference Between Ride-Share and Taxis','','inherit','closed','closed','','2661-revision-v1','','','2020-02-29 14:19:09','2020-02-29 19:19:09','',2661,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/02/29/2661-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2668,1,'2020-02-29 19:16:31','2020-03-01 00:16:31','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/IMG_0368-scaled.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2664 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/IMG_0368-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a><figcaption>Is this the IMAX seatback screen?</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>January is a big travel planning month; people thinking about about the places they want to visit, spending days on the Internet researching itineraries, and putting in their week\'s vacation requests. But what about a 9-week sabbatical you’ve worked 7 years for? In this episode, we talk about that kind of extreme travel planning. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_159.mp3\" data-wplink-edit=\"true\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/749899837&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #160: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. I finished my Phoenix travels at the end of January and made the last trip a “bleisure” trip -- business in Phoenix Monday thru Thursday afternoon, and then leisure Thursday evening thru Sunday with a ski weekend in Durango, CO, the first time I’ve been on the slopes in 7 years. I first thought about heading up to Salt Lake for the weekend, but when I saw that the Sundance Film Festival was the same weekend, I thought “Nope” and started Googling for other ideas. The ski slopes around Flagstaff were too small and I didn’t want to fight the traffic on I-70 to hit the areas near Denver. Durango, in the San Juan mountains in the southwest corner of the state -- near Four Corners -- looked like a good spot. It’s a quick and fairly inexpensive hour hop from Phoenix; it’s an actual town, not just a ski resort, so there’d be other things to do when the lifts closed; the lift tickets at Purgatory and Wolf Creek were reasonable -- 40-50% of the price at, say, Vail or Park City; I was able to book a whole tiny house on AirBnB for the price of a generic Fairfield Inn room; and, I’d never been there before. And, as I found out from my AirBnB host, it was the weekend of Durango’s Snowdown Festival -- the 42nd annual, with a parade down Main Street and everything. The snow was just OK, but the skiing was great -- beautiful weather, damn few lift lines, nice people -- a weird but fun combination of families -- mostly from Texas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico -- and the Colorado hippy-dippy ski bum crew. It was a nice ending to my 2 months of Phoenix trips.</li><li>The only downside was… I had to check a bag. Even though I rented all my equipment -- skis, boots, poles -- I still needed that extra bag for all the other paraphernalia -- helmet, ski pants, gloves, parka, …. I love skiing but it requires a lot of stuff. Not that it cost me anything -- even flying Basic Economy on American from Phoenix to Durango, I got free bags with my Platinum status. Though American’s website wasn’t very clear about that when they tried to upsell me off of Basic Economy -- imagine that. And while I got free bags, I couldn’t select my seat in advance. But given it was a small regional jet with no middle seats, I figured I’d risk it.  I will say, though, that I was pretty happy with the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/37R0sHX\">teal green luggage tags</a> I bought before the trip. Made it very easy to spot my bags amidst the sea of black suitcases on the luggage belt. Probably <a href=\"https://amzn.to/37R0sHX\">the best $5 I’ve spent on Amazon</a>. </li><li>One detail I missed when planning my ski weekend is that my Sunday night flights from Durango to Denver to Chicago would be right in the middle of the Super Bowl. Though I’m not sure I’d have changed anything if I’d remembered it. I didn’t really have a dog in that hunt -- I’m not a big San Francisco or Kansas City fan and so was kinda like everyone else who wasn’t in the Bay Area, I was rooting more for Andy Reid than KC. I did end up catching <em>most</em> of the game, but it was a little choppy. I watched the kick-off and 1st quarter in the bar at Durango Airport. Durango Airport isn’t big -- just 4 gates if I remember correctly -- and the bar kinda sticks out into the gate seating area. I sat at the bar, had a beer, and watched the game on the TV hanging on the wall near Gate 2 -- or maybe 3. But then United called boarding, so I caught bits of the second quarter on the Fox TV iPhone app while waiting to take off for Denver. And then tracked the start of the 3rd quarter after touchdown and a really long taxi in DEN. I caught the rest of the 3rd quarter on multiple screens -- bars, CNN gate TVs -- while walking down the B Concourse to make my ORD connection. I got lucky, though, and was able to catch all of Kansas City’s phenomenal come-back uninterrupted in a Mexican restaurant with about a dozen other fixated passengers and restaurant workers. After KC’s final interception, I walked down and caught the final plays on the CNN TV at the gate. Every other night, I consciously avoid those CNN TVs -- the volumes always up on people yelling at each other. But this night, I was happy for that volume -- the one night when they weren’t to CNN. </li><li>Bridge Music --  <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/48915\">Like Music (cdk Mix</a>) by Analog By Nature (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/48915 Ft: Phasenwandler  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>The week after that last Phoenix trip, I wrote <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/02/07/my-food-and-beer-hangouts-in-downtown-phoenix-dtphx/\">a post</a> on the TravelCommons website listing my favorite food and beer hangouts in downtown Phoenix. When I started traveling to Phoenix in the mid-’90’s, there wasn’t much to downtown Phoenix other than a big Hyatt Regency hotel. Everything was in Scottsdale and Tempe. I’d usually stay in Tempe because, with Arizona State University there, there were restaurants and bars I could walk to. Fast forward to today, downtown Phoenix has a lot more going on. Stadiums for the Phoenix Suns and the Arizona Diamondbacks, and a new downtown campus for ASU’s law school bring in enough people to support a solid selection of restaurants, coffee shops, and bars. The blog post doesn’t cover everything -- just the places I found myself going back to again and again during my 2-month stay.</li><li>Most of my flights from the mid-90’s on went into PHX Sky Harbor’s Terminal 2 -- on United and on American, until they moved to the much better Terminal 4 after merging with US Air which had merged with America West, the original hub airline for PHX. Terminal 2 was PHX’s slum terminal. Built in 1962 and originally planned to shut down in 2000, they finally shut it down on Feb 4, 2020, the week after I finished my latest Phoenix gig. The last two airlines using it -- United and Alaska Air -- have moved to Terminal 3 with the rest of the non-hub carriers. PHX’s two major carriers -- American and Southwest -- split Terminal 4. Some of the newspaper articles said business travelers liked it because it was compact, easy to navigate. I’m not one of them. I thought it was a cramped low-ceilinged place, with small restrooms and lousy food and beer options when I had to wait out delays back to ORD.  I think you can tell that I won’t miss it. The plans are to demo the terminal this year and replace it with European-style bus gates -- using buses to take passengers out to remotely parked aircraft instead of boarding through jetways. I’m gonna bet those bus gates won’t be popular in August when PHX’s tarmac temperatures hit 120 degrees. </li><li>Waiting for my American Eagle PHX-Durango flight, I was half-paying attention to the PA announcements, but then noticed that the gate agent wasn’t doing the boarding announcements. Instead they were using recorded announcements. That wasn’t what caught my attention, though. I’ve heard recorded gate announcements hundreds of times. But usually, they’re recordings of humans reading the announcements. Here at gate B19, it was one of those robotic text-to-speech synthesized voices -- something like &lt;insert Boarding Groups 1, 2, and 3>. I mean, why? How much savings do you get by using text-to-speech over some gate agent standing in a closet and recording it, say, on their iPhone? Maybe more that I think now that American has, what, 7, 10, 123 boarding groups? I asked this question “Why the robot” out loud -- to Twitter. American came back “We heard back and the PHX gate staff actually does record the voices used in the announcements. They are real humans.” Kudos for American’s Twitter staff for following up, but unless they have an android with a bad vox box working for them, I think the gang at gate B19 is using text2speech.org.</li><li>I posted an article on the TravelCommons Facebook page about a guy who wore a plastic tent on a plane to avoid the coronavirus. Now, as it turns out, it was really more of a publicity stunt for the guy’s company. He makes personal tents to protect people from bad weather when sitting on the sidelines of their kids’ soccer games. Might cut down on the colds I catch when flying, but from the picture, it looks like it would be quite a pain when the person in the window seat wants to get out to use the toilet.</li><li>On January 6th, the first Monday of the new year, I <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1214167465627979776\">posted a picture on Twitter</a> of the “cannabis amnesty box” that was on the other side of security at ORD’s Terminal 1. Pot became legal in Illinois the first of the year, and the Chicago Dept of Aviation put out these boxes “so travelers have the opportunity to ensure compliance with federal law, as well as the local laws at their destination” according to the police department. If you look at the picture I posted, the box looks like something the maintenance guys knocked together in the wood shop during their break. So no surprise that 3 weeks later, someone broke into a similar box at Midway airport and helped themselves to some surrendered weed. Actually, I think the only real surprise is that it took as long as 3 weeks for this to happen. </li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/spinmeister/53428\">Somewhere</a> by spinmeister (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/spinmeister/53428 Ft: DJ Vadim  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Seatback Screens Fading Away</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>On my flight from Durango to Denver, half the guys on the plane were staring down at their phones during boarding and taxi, watching the second quarter until the plane rotated up off the runway. For folks flying United planes with DirectTV seatback screens -- the repainted Continental 737s -- no problems; just swipe your credit card and keep watching. But that’s a shrinking group. Seat back entertainment screens have been on the death watch list for 5 years now, but it seems to be on its way out -- at least on a lot of the domestic routes. </li><li>And I can’t really say that I miss them. The DirectTV controls on those United planes are in the armrest, so I’m always changing the channel or the volume or the screen brightness. On American 737s, screens bulging out of the seat backs into an already tight space thanks to American’s war against seat pitch; I have to recline my seat just to be able to get that screen in focus. And the power supplies for all these seat back units are under the seat, crowding out space for my backpack or my feet. </li><li>I’m happy with the BYOS -- bring your own screen -- approach. I watched the season finale of The Mandalorian Star Wars TV show on my 8-inch Samsung tablet. It wasn’t as good as watching it on the 65-inch LG 4K TV at home, but it was bigger than any domestic in-flight screen. On one of my Southwest flights home from PHX, I saw a guy hang his big iPhone Max from the tray on the seatback in front of him -- kind of a DIY seatback entertainment unit. </li><li>On long international flights, though, I can see the case for seatback screens. My wife and kids have perfected synchronized movie viewing. They’re sitting three abreast; they queue up the same movie and then count down -- 3, 2, 1, Press Play! The airplane version of watching a movie together in the living room. I’m not sure it would be the same if they were all looking down at their iPhones. This tends to work better on newer planes, like the 787, that have bigger screens. I remember Andrew trying to watch the movie Dunkirk - a big WW II action movie that was great on IMAX -- on a maybe 7-inch screen on a United 767. I don’t think he got the full experience of that movie.</li><li>Back in December, United <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1211759835181654018\">tweeted out the top 10 most watched in-flight movies in 2019</a> -- Bohemian Rhapsody, A Star is Born, and Crazy Rich Asians were 1, 2, and 3. Makes sense. In 9th place, though, was John Wick 3, the 3rd installment of the Keanu Reeves fists of fury action flick. Loved that movie, but I can’t see even the new 16-inch screens in United’s business class being big enough to handle that flick. </li><li> Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/scottaltham/20747\"> Hear Us Now (poptastic mix)</a> by Scott Altham (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/scottaltham/20747  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Any Difference Left Between Ride-Share and Taxis?</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I got an e-mail survey the other day asking for my thoughts, impressions about Uber and Lyft. One of the questions was how long I’d used each of them -- less than 1 year; 1-2 years, 2-3 years, more than 3 years. Which got <em>me</em> kinda wondering, so I pulled out my iPhone and fired up each app. My first Uber ride was in December 2013, from midtown Manhattan to LGA at 4pm. I signed up because it’s such a pain to find a regular cab to take you to LGA at rush hour, and I’d forgotten to book a ride with the black car service I would normally use. Interesting that I didn’t use Uber again for another 6 months, in June 2014, when again, I’d didn’t have a black car book for a ride from PHL to a client out in the suburbs along the Blue Route. I signed up with Lyft in December 2015 when I was in Las Vegas for a project. I’d be using Uber more frequently in 2015, but back then, only Lyft had permission to drop-off at LAS. We had used Uber a couple of times, but they’d have to drop us off at the rental car center so we could take the bus to the terminal. I did that exactly one time and then pivoted to Lyft. So, according to this e-mail survey -- which, at the end, revealed itself to be sponsored by Uber -- I’m a grizzled ride-sharing veteran -- as I’m sure are many of you.</li><li>And ride-sharing was what it was -- an app-driven version of the old ride-sharing bulletin boards -- “I’m driving from Chicago to Rockford; looking for someone to split the gas and tolls” -- except locally. I remember, at the start, that caused a bit of an etiquette challenge -- do I sit in the front or the back? And you were careful because it was their car -- and usually a nice one. Certainly much nicer and way less beat-up than the typical cab.&nbsp; And there were usually good stories from the drivers -- all but a couple were doing it part-time, to make some additional cash. Way back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/11/22/podcast-125-uber-driver-stories-overseas-for-the-election/\">episode #125</a>, in November 2016, early on in my Uber/Lyft days, I told some of those stories.</li><li>A year later, a driver in Charlottesville, VA told me he was driving full-time and wanted to expand, so he’d bought 3 used Toyota Corollas (even back then the preferred ride-share car) and was renting them out to “Hispanics”, his words, who were driving Uber and Lyft a couple hours north in the Washington, DC area. Interesting idea. A bit like the standard taxi cab model -- leasing licensed cabs to drivers for a shift -- but without the need to drop money on a taxi license, or a medallion in places like New York and Chicago. Interesting enough that there are now 6-7 companies, including Hertz, offering daily and weekly rentals if you don’t want to share rides in your personal car.</li><li>Back in December, landing in Chicago Midway on a Southwest flight from PHX, I did my usual drill, opened up Uber and Lyft as I got off the plane and checked prices and wait times for a ride home. The prices were about the same, but the wait time… 10 min for Uber, 2 for Lyft. Lyft it is! I hit the Request Ride button, but instead of searching for a driver, I immediately get a 4-digit PIN. I head downstairs and get into a queue that looks a lot like the cab line a few doors over, except this one is run by women in pink Lyft safety vests. But they’re doing the same thing the cab rank workers do -- wave down cars and then point passengers to them. I wait, I dunno, maybe 5 minutes to get into a car, show the guy the PIN on my Lyft app, he enters it into his, and off we go. A bit less hectic than the typical airport rideshare scrum, but again, how is this different than a taxi -- except that I don’t have to ask the driver if his credit card machine works.</li><li>Indeed, on most of my trips over the past year, arriving in PHX or CHO, there typically wouldn’t be a line for a cab, so I’d skip the 5-10 minute wait for Uber or Lyft. Or, returning from Durango with my extra bag of ski paraphernalia, I skipped the schlep up to to the ride-share pick-up zone; I just walked out the door to a waiting cab. And the price difference is shrinking --&nbsp; as we talked about in episode #154, Uber and Lyft have been nudging their rates up to stem their losses.&nbsp;</li><li>This is not to say there aren’t important differences; places where Uber and Lyft bring real value. I was working in New Orleans before Uber set up shop. It was impossible to get a cab anywhere other than between the airport and the French Quarter. Trying to get to and from a restaurant in, say, Mid-City or Uptown was painful -- until Uber showed up.</li><li>It kinda feels like, after all the hype, the battles with regulators, the IPOs, that Uber and Lyft used billions of venture capital dollars to break the medallion monopolies and build some phenomenal taxi dispatch systems. As a traveler, it’s been great for me. For the investors though? Well, I’m glad I skipped those IPOs</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #160</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_159.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #160 — Disappearing Seatback Screens; Shrinking Difference Between Ride-Share and Taxis','','inherit','closed','closed','','2661-revision-v1','','','2020-02-29 19:16:31','2020-03-01 00:16:31','',2661,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/02/29/2661-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2669,1,'2020-02-29 23:02:08','2020-03-01 04:02:08','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/IMG_0368-scaled.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2664 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/IMG_0368-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\n<figcaption>Is this the IMAX seatback screen?</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p>Trying to watch the Super Bowl while flying from Durango, CO to Chicago via Denver got me thinking about the fading away of seatback entertainment. We also talk about the continuing evolution of ride sharing. Uber and Lyft are looking more and more like the taxi companies they fought to replace. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_159.mp3\" data-wplink-edit=\"true\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/749899837&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #160: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. I finished my Phoenix travels at the end of January and made the last trip a “bleisure” trip -- business in Phoenix Monday thru Thursday afternoon, and then leisure Thursday evening thru Sunday with a ski weekend in Durango, CO, the first time I’ve been on the slopes in 7 years. I first thought about heading up to Salt Lake for the weekend, but when I saw that the Sundance Film Festival was the same weekend, I thought “Nope” and started Googling for other ideas. The ski slopes around Flagstaff were too small and I didn’t want to fight the traffic on I-70 to hit the areas near Denver. Durango, in the San Juan mountains in the southwest corner of the state -- near Four Corners -- looked like a good spot. It’s a quick and fairly inexpensive hour hop from Phoenix; it’s an actual town, not just a ski resort, so there’d be other things to do when the lifts closed; the lift tickets at Purgatory and Wolf Creek were reasonable -- 40-50% of the price at, say, Vail or Park City; I was able to book a whole tiny house on AirBnB for the price of a generic Fairfield Inn room; and, I’d never been there before. And, as I found out from my AirBnB host, it was the weekend of Durango’s Snowdown Festival -- the 42nd annual, with a parade down Main Street and everything. The snow was just OK, but the skiing was great -- beautiful weather, damn few lift lines, nice people -- a weird but fun combination of families -- mostly from Texas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico -- and the Colorado hippy-dippy ski bum crew. It was a nice ending to my 2 months of Phoenix trips.</li><li>The only downside was… I had to check a bag. Even though I rented all my equipment -- skis, boots, poles -- I still needed that extra bag for all the other paraphernalia -- helmet, ski pants, gloves, parka, …. I love skiing but it requires a lot of stuff. Not that it cost me anything -- even flying Basic Economy on American from Phoenix to Durango, I got free bags with my Platinum status. Though American’s website wasn’t very clear about that when they tried to upsell me off of Basic Economy -- imagine that. And while I got free bags, I couldn’t select my seat in advance. But given it was a small regional jet with no middle seats, I figured I’d risk it.&nbsp; I will say, though, that I was pretty happy with the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/37R0sHX\">teal green luggage tags</a> I bought before the trip. Made it very easy to spot my bags amidst the sea of black suitcases on the luggage belt. Probably <a href=\"https://amzn.to/37R0sHX\">the best $5 I’ve spent on Amazon</a>.&nbsp;</li><li>One detail I missed when planning my ski weekend is that my Sunday night flights from Durango to Denver to Chicago would be right in the middle of the Super Bowl. Though I’m not sure I’d have changed anything if I’d remembered it. I didn’t really have a dog in that hunt -- I’m not a big San Francisco or Kansas City fan and so was kinda like everyone else who wasn’t in the Bay Area, I was rooting more for Andy Reid than KC. I did end up catching <em>most</em> of the game, but it was a little choppy. I watched the kick-off and 1st quarter in the bar at Durango Airport. Durango Airport isn’t big -- just 4 gates if I remember correctly -- and the bar kinda sticks out into the gate seating area. I sat at the bar, had a beer, and watched the game on the TV hanging on the wall near Gate 2 -- or maybe 3. But then United called boarding, so I caught bits of the second quarter on the Fox TV iPhone app while waiting to take off for Denver. And then tracked the start of the 3rd quarter after touchdown and a really long taxi in DEN. I caught the rest of the 3rd quarter on multiple screens -- bars, CNN gate TVs -- while walking down the B Concourse to make my ORD connection. I got lucky, though, and was able to catch all of Kansas City’s phenomenal come-back uninterrupted in a Mexican restaurant with about a dozen other fixated passengers and restaurant workers. After KC’s final interception, I walked down and caught the final plays on the CNN TV at the gate. Every other night, I consciously avoid those CNN TVs -- the volumes always up on people yelling at each other. But this night, I was happy for that volume -- the one night when they weren’t to CNN. </li><li>Bridge Music --  <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/48915\">Like Music (cdk Mix</a>) by Analog By Nature (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/48915 Ft: Phasenwandler  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>The week after that last Phoenix trip, I wrote <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/02/07/my-food-and-beer-hangouts-in-downtown-phoenix-dtphx/\">a post</a> on the TravelCommons website listing my favorite food and beer hangouts in downtown Phoenix. When I started traveling to Phoenix in the mid-’90’s, there wasn’t much to downtown Phoenix other than a big Hyatt Regency hotel. Everything was in Scottsdale and Tempe. I’d usually stay in Tempe because, with Arizona State University there, there were restaurants and bars I could walk to. Fast forward to today, downtown Phoenix has a lot more going on. Stadiums for the Phoenix Suns and the Arizona Diamondbacks, and a new downtown campus for ASU’s law school bring in enough people to support a solid selection of restaurants, coffee shops, and bars. The blog post doesn’t cover everything -- just the places I found myself going back to again and again during my 2-month stay.</li><li>Most of my flights from the mid-90’s on went into PHX Sky Harbor’s Terminal 2 -- on United and on American, until they moved to the much better Terminal 4 after merging with US Air which had merged with America West, the original hub airline for PHX. Terminal 2 was PHX’s slum terminal. Built in 1962 and originally planned to shut down in 2000, they finally shut it down on Feb 4, 2020, the week after I finished my latest Phoenix gig. The last two airlines using it -- United and Alaska Air -- have moved to Terminal 3 with the rest of the non-hub carriers. PHX’s two major carriers -- American and Southwest -- split Terminal 4. Some of the newspaper articles said business travelers liked it because it was compact, easy to navigate. I’m not one of them. I thought it was a cramped low-ceilinged place, with small restrooms and lousy food and beer options when I had to wait out delays back to ORD.&nbsp; I think you can tell that I won’t miss it. The plans are to demo the terminal this year and replace it with European-style bus gates -- using buses to take passengers out to remotely parked aircraft instead of boarding through jetways. I’m gonna bet those bus gates won’t be popular in August when PHX’s tarmac temperatures hit 120 degrees.&nbsp;</li><li>Waiting for my American Eagle PHX-Durango flight, I was half-paying attention to the PA announcements, but then noticed that the gate agent wasn’t doing the boarding announcements. Instead they were using recorded announcements. That wasn’t what caught my attention, though. I’ve heard recorded gate announcements hundreds of times. But usually, they’re recordings of humans reading the announcements. Here at gate B19, it was one of those robotic text-to-speech synthesized voices -- something like &lt;insert Boarding Groups 1, 2, and 3&gt;. I mean, why? How much savings do you get by using text-to-speech over some gate agent standing in a closet and recording it, say, on their iPhone? Maybe more that I think now that American has, what, 7, 10, 123 boarding groups? I asked this question “Why the robot” out loud -- to Twitter. American came back “We heard back and the PHX gate staff actually does record the voices used in the announcements. They are real humans.” Kudos for American’s Twitter staff for following up, but unless they have an android with a bad vox box working for them, I think the gang at gate B19 is using text2speech.org.</li><li>I posted an article on the TravelCommons Facebook page about a guy who wore a plastic tent on a plane to avoid the coronavirus. Now, as it turns out, it was really more of a publicity stunt for the guy’s company. He makes personal tents to protect people from bad weather when sitting on the sidelines of their kids’ soccer games. Might cut down on the colds I catch when flying, but from the picture, it looks like it would be quite a pain when the person in the window seat wants to get out to use the toilet.</li><li>On January 6th, the first Monday of the new year, I <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1214167465627979776\">posted a picture on Twitter</a> of the “cannabis amnesty box” that was on the other side of security at ORD’s Terminal 1. Pot became legal in Illinois the first of the year, and the Chicago Dept of Aviation put out these boxes “so travelers have the opportunity to ensure compliance with federal law, as well as the local laws at their destination” according to the police department. If you look at the picture I posted, the box looks like something the maintenance guys knocked together in the wood shop during their break. So no surprise that 3 weeks later, someone broke into a similar box at Midway airport and helped themselves to some surrendered weed. Actually, I think the only real surprise is that it took as long as 3 weeks for this to happen. </li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/spinmeister/53428\">Somewhere</a> by spinmeister (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/spinmeister/53428 Ft: DJ Vadim  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Seatback Screens Fading Away</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>On my flight from Durango to Denver, half the guys on the plane were staring down at their phones during boarding and taxi, watching the second quarter until the plane rotated up off the runway. For folks flying United planes with DirectTV seatback screens -- the repainted Continental 737s -- no problems; just swipe your credit card and keep watching. But that’s a shrinking group. Seat back entertainment screens have been on the death watch list for 5 years now, but it seems to be on its way out -- at least on a lot of the domestic routes.&nbsp;</li><li>And I can’t really say that I miss them. The DirectTV controls on those United planes are in the armrest, so I’m always changing the channel or the volume or the screen brightness. On American 737s, screens bulging out of the seat backs into an already tight space thanks to American’s war against seat pitch; I have to recline my seat just to be able to get that screen in focus. And the power supplies for all these seat back units are under the seat, crowding out space for my backpack or my feet.&nbsp;</li><li>I’m happy with the BYOS -- bring your own screen -- approach. I watched the season finale of The Mandalorian Star Wars TV show on my 8-inch Samsung tablet. It wasn’t as good as watching it on the 65-inch LG 4K TV at home, but it was bigger than any domestic in-flight screen. On one of my Southwest flights home from PHX, I saw a guy hang his big iPhone Max from the tray on the seatback in front of him -- kind of a DIY seatback entertainment unit.&nbsp;</li><li>On long international flights, though, I can see the case for seatback screens. My wife and kids have perfected synchronized movie viewing. They’re sitting three abreast; they queue up the same movie and then count down -- 3, 2, 1, Press Play! The airplane version of watching a movie together in the living room. I’m not sure it would be the same if they were all looking down at their iPhones. This tends to work better on newer planes, like the 787, that have bigger screens. I remember Andrew trying to watch the movie Dunkirk - a big WW II action movie that was great on IMAX -- on a maybe 7-inch screen on a United 767. I don’t think he got the full experience of that movie.</li><li>Back in December, United <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1211759835181654018\">tweeted out the top 10 most watched in-flight movies in 2019</a> -- Bohemian Rhapsody, A Star is Born, and Crazy Rich Asians were 1, 2, and 3. Makes sense. In 9th place, though, was John Wick 3, the 3rd installment of the Keanu Reeves fists of fury action flick. Loved that movie, but I can’t see even the new 16-inch screens in United’s business class being big enough to handle that flick. </li><li> Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/scottaltham/20747\"> Hear Us Now (poptastic mix)</a> by Scott Altham (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/scottaltham/20747  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Any Difference Left Between Ride-Share and Taxis?</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I got an e-mail survey the other day asking for my thoughts, impressions about Uber and Lyft. One of the questions was how long I’d used each of them -- less than 1 year; 1-2 years, 2-3 years, more than 3 years. Which got <em>me</em> kinda wondering, so I pulled out my iPhone and fired up each app. My first Uber ride was in December 2013, from midtown Manhattan to LGA at 4pm. I signed up because it’s such a pain to find a regular cab to take you to LGA at rush hour, and I’d forgotten to book a ride with the black car service I would normally use. Interesting that I didn’t use Uber again for another 6 months, in June 2014, when again, I’d didn’t have a black car book for a ride from PHL to a client out in the suburbs along the Blue Route. I signed up with Lyft in December 2015 when I was in Las Vegas for a project. I’d be using Uber more frequently in 2015, but back then, only Lyft had permission to drop-off at LAS. We had used Uber a couple of times, but they’d have to drop us off at the rental car center so we could take the bus to the terminal. I did that exactly one time and then pivoted to Lyft. So, according to this e-mail survey -- which, at the end, revealed itself to be sponsored by Uber -- I’m a grizzled ride-sharing veteran -- as I’m sure are many of you.</li><li>And ride-sharing was what it was -- an app-driven version of the old ride-sharing bulletin boards -- “I’m driving from Chicago to Rockford; looking for someone to split the gas and tolls” -- except locally. I remember, at the start, that caused a bit of an etiquette challenge -- do I sit in the front or the back? And you were careful because it was their car -- and usually a nice one. Certainly much nicer and way less beat-up than the typical cab.&nbsp; And there were usually good stories from the drivers -- all but a couple were doing it part-time, to make some additional cash. Way back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/11/22/podcast-125-uber-driver-stories-overseas-for-the-election/\">episode #125</a>, in November 2016, early on in my Uber/Lyft days, I told some of those stories.</li><li>A year later, a driver in Charlottesville, VA told me he was driving full-time and wanted to expand, so he’d bought 3 used Toyota Corollas (even back then the preferred ride-share car) and was renting them out to “Hispanics”, his words, who were driving Uber and Lyft a couple hours north in the Washington, DC area. Interesting idea. A bit like the standard taxi cab model -- leasing licensed cabs to drivers for a shift -- but without the need to drop money on a taxi license, or a medallion in places like New York and Chicago. Interesting enough that there are now 6-7 companies, including Hertz, offering daily and weekly rentals if you don’t want to share rides in your personal car.</li><li>Back in December, landing in Chicago Midway on a Southwest flight from PHX, I did my usual drill, opened up Uber and Lyft as I got off the plane and checked prices and wait times for a ride home. The prices were about the same, but the wait time… 10 min for Uber, 2 for Lyft. Lyft it is! I hit the Request Ride button, but instead of searching for a driver, I immediately get a 4-digit PIN. I head downstairs and get into a queue that looks a lot like the cab line a few doors over, except this one is run by women in pink Lyft safety vests. But they’re doing the same thing the cab rank workers do -- wave down cars and then point passengers to them. I wait, I dunno, maybe 5 minutes to get into a car, show the guy the PIN on my Lyft app, he enters it into his, and off we go. A bit less hectic than the typical airport rideshare scrum, but again, how is this different than a taxi -- except that I don’t have to ask the driver if his credit card machine works.</li><li>Indeed, on most of my trips over the past year, arriving in PHX or CHO, there typically wouldn’t be a line for a cab, so I’d skip the 5-10 minute wait for Uber or Lyft. Or, returning from Durango with my extra bag of ski paraphernalia, I skipped the schlep up to to the ride-share pick-up zone; I just walked out the door to a waiting cab. And the price difference is shrinking --&nbsp; as we talked about in episode #154, Uber and Lyft have been nudging their rates up to stem their losses.&nbsp;</li><li>This is not to say there aren’t important differences; places where Uber and Lyft bring real value. I was working in New Orleans before Uber set up shop. It was impossible to get a cab anywhere other than between the airport and the French Quarter. Trying to get to and from a restaurant in, say, Mid-City or Uptown was painful -- until Uber showed up.</li><li>It kinda feels like, after all the hype, the battles with regulators, the IPOs, that Uber and Lyft used billions of venture capital dollars to break the medallion monopolies and build some phenomenal taxi dispatch systems. As a traveler, it’s been great for me. For the investors though? Well, I’m glad I skipped those IPOs</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #160</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_159.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #160 — Disappearing Seatback Screens; Shrinking Difference Between Ride-Share and Taxis','','inherit','closed','closed','','2661-revision-v1','','','2020-02-29 23:02:08','2020-03-01 04:02:08','',2661,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/02/29/2661-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0);
INSERT INTO `wp_posts` VALUES
(2670,1,'2020-02-29 23:12:33','2020-03-01 04:12:33','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/IMG_0368-scaled.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2664 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/IMG_0368-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a><figcaption>Is this the IMAX seatback screen?</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>Trying to watch the Super Bowl while flying from Durango, CO to Chicago via Denver got me thinking about the fading away of seatback entertainment. We also talk about the continuing evolution of ride sharing. Uber and Lyft are looking more and more like the taxi companies they fought to replace. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_159.mp3\" data-wplink-edit=\"true\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/768815872&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #160: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. I finished my Phoenix travels at the end of January and made the last trip a “bleisure” trip -- business in Phoenix Monday thru Thursday afternoon, and then leisure Thursday evening thru Sunday with a ski weekend in Durango, CO, the first time I’ve been on the slopes in 7 years. I first thought about heading up to Salt Lake for the weekend, but when I saw that the Sundance Film Festival was the same weekend, I thought “Nope” and started Googling for other ideas. The ski slopes around Flagstaff were too small and I didn’t want to fight the traffic on I-70 to hit the areas near Denver. Durango, in the San Juan mountains in the southwest corner of the state -- near Four Corners -- looked like a good spot. It’s a quick and fairly inexpensive hour hop from Phoenix; it’s an actual town, not just a ski resort, so there’d be other things to do when the lifts closed; the lift tickets at Purgatory and Wolf Creek were reasonable -- 40-50% of the price at, say, Vail or Park City; I was able to book a whole tiny house on AirBnB for the price of a generic Fairfield Inn room; and, I’d never been there before. And, as I found out from my AirBnB host, it was the weekend of Durango’s Snowdown Festival -- the 42nd annual, with a parade down Main Street and everything. The snow was just OK, but the skiing was great -- beautiful weather, damn few lift lines, nice people -- a weird but fun combination of families -- mostly from Texas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico -- and the Colorado hippy-dippy ski bum crew. It was a nice ending to my 2 months of Phoenix trips.</li><li>The only downside was… I had to check a bag. Even though I rented all my equipment -- skis, boots, poles -- I still needed that extra bag for all the other paraphernalia -- helmet, ski pants, gloves, parka, …. I love skiing but it requires a lot of stuff. Not that it cost me anything -- even flying Basic Economy on American from Phoenix to Durango, I got free bags with my Platinum status. Though American’s website wasn’t very clear about that when they tried to upsell me off of Basic Economy -- imagine that. And while I got free bags, I couldn’t select my seat in advance. But given it was a small regional jet with no middle seats, I figured I’d risk it.&nbsp; I will say, though, that I was pretty happy with the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/37R0sHX\">teal green luggage tags</a> I bought before the trip. Made it very easy to spot my bags amidst the sea of black suitcases on the luggage belt. Probably <a href=\"https://amzn.to/37R0sHX\">the best $5 I’ve spent on Amazon</a>.&nbsp;</li><li>One detail I missed when planning my ski weekend is that my Sunday night flights from Durango to Denver to Chicago would be right in the middle of the Super Bowl. Though I’m not sure I’d have changed anything if I’d remembered it. I didn’t really have a dog in that hunt -- I’m not a big San Francisco or Kansas City fan and so was kinda like everyone else who wasn’t in the Bay Area, I was rooting more for Andy Reid than KC. I did end up catching <em>most</em> of the game, but it was a little choppy. I watched the kick-off and 1st quarter in the bar at Durango Airport. Durango Airport isn’t big -- just 4 gates if I remember correctly -- and the bar kinda sticks out into the gate seating area. I sat at the bar, had a beer, and watched the game on the TV hanging on the wall near Gate 2 -- or maybe 3. But then United called boarding, so I caught bits of the second quarter on the Fox TV iPhone app while waiting to take off for Denver. And then tracked the start of the 3rd quarter after touchdown and a really long taxi in DEN. I caught the rest of the 3rd quarter on multiple screens -- bars, CNN gate TVs -- while walking down the B Concourse to make my ORD connection. I got lucky, though, and was able to catch all of Kansas City’s phenomenal come-back uninterrupted in a Mexican restaurant with about a dozen other fixated passengers and restaurant workers. After KC’s final interception, I walked down and caught the final plays on the CNN TV at the gate. Every other night, I consciously avoid those CNN TVs -- the volumes always up on people yelling at each other. But this night, I was happy for that volume -- the one night when they weren’t to CNN. </li><li>Bridge Music --  <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/48915\">Like Music (cdk Mix</a>) by Analog By Nature (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/48915 Ft: Phasenwandler  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>The week after that last Phoenix trip, I wrote <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/02/07/my-food-and-beer-hangouts-in-downtown-phoenix-dtphx/\">a post</a> on the TravelCommons website listing my favorite food and beer hangouts in downtown Phoenix. When I started traveling to Phoenix in the mid-’90’s, there wasn’t much to downtown Phoenix other than a big Hyatt Regency hotel. Everything was in Scottsdale and Tempe. I’d usually stay in Tempe because, with Arizona State University there, there were restaurants and bars I could walk to. Fast forward to today, downtown Phoenix has a lot more going on. Stadiums for the Phoenix Suns and the Arizona Diamondbacks, and a new downtown campus for ASU’s law school bring in enough people to support a solid selection of restaurants, coffee shops, and bars. The blog post doesn’t cover everything -- just the places I found myself going back to again and again during my 2-month stay.</li><li>Most of my flights from the mid-90’s on went into PHX Sky Harbor’s Terminal 2 -- on United and on American, until they moved to the much better Terminal 4 after merging with US Air which had merged with America West, the original hub airline for PHX. Terminal 2 was PHX’s slum terminal. Built in 1962 and originally planned to shut down in 2000, they finally shut it down on Feb 4, 2020, the week after I finished my latest Phoenix gig. The last two airlines using it -- United and Alaska Air -- have moved to Terminal 3 with the rest of the non-hub carriers. PHX’s two major carriers -- American and Southwest -- split Terminal 4. Some of the newspaper articles said business travelers liked it because it was compact, easy to navigate. I’m not one of them. I thought it was a cramped low-ceilinged place, with small restrooms and lousy food and beer options when I had to wait out delays back to ORD.&nbsp; I think you can tell that I won’t miss it. The plans are to demo the terminal this year and replace it with European-style bus gates -- using buses to take passengers out to remotely parked aircraft instead of boarding through jetways. I’m gonna bet those bus gates won’t be popular in August when PHX’s tarmac temperatures hit 120 degrees.&nbsp;</li><li>Waiting for my American Eagle PHX-Durango flight, I was half-paying attention to the PA announcements, but then noticed that the gate agent wasn’t doing the boarding announcements. Instead they were using recorded announcements. That wasn’t what caught my attention, though. I’ve heard recorded gate announcements hundreds of times. But usually, they’re recordings of humans reading the announcements. Here at gate B19, it was one of those robotic text-to-speech synthesized voices -- something like &lt;insert Boarding Groups 1, 2, and 3&gt;. I mean, why? How much savings do you get by using text-to-speech over some gate agent standing in a closet and recording it, say, on their iPhone? Maybe more that I think now that American has, what, 7, 10, 123 boarding groups? I asked this question “Why the robot” out loud -- to Twitter. American came back “We heard back and the PHX gate staff actually does record the voices used in the announcements. They are real humans.” Kudos for American’s Twitter staff for following up, but unless they have an android with a bad vox box working for them, I think the gang at gate B19 is using text2speech.org.</li><li>I posted an article on the TravelCommons Facebook page about a guy who wore a plastic tent on a plane to avoid the coronavirus. Now, as it turns out, it was really more of a publicity stunt for the guy’s company. He makes personal tents to protect people from bad weather when sitting on the sidelines of their kids’ soccer games. Might cut down on the colds I catch when flying, but from the picture, it looks like it would be quite a pain when the person in the window seat wants to get out to use the toilet.</li><li>On January 6th, the first Monday of the new year, I <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1214167465627979776\">posted a picture on Twitter</a> of the “cannabis amnesty box” that was on the other side of security at ORD’s Terminal 1. Pot became legal in Illinois the first of the year, and the Chicago Dept of Aviation put out these boxes “so travelers have the opportunity to ensure compliance with federal law, as well as the local laws at their destination” according to the police department. If you look at the picture I posted, the box looks like something the maintenance guys knocked together in the wood shop during their break. So no surprise that 3 weeks later, someone broke into a similar box at Midway airport and helped themselves to some surrendered weed. Actually, I think the only real surprise is that it took as long as 3 weeks for this to happen. </li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/spinmeister/53428\">Somewhere</a> by spinmeister (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/spinmeister/53428 Ft: DJ Vadim  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Seatback Screens Fading Away</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>On my flight from Durango to Denver, half the guys on the plane were staring down at their phones during boarding and taxi, watching the second quarter until the plane rotated up off the runway. For folks flying United planes with DirectTV seatback screens -- the repainted Continental 737s -- no problems; just swipe your credit card and keep watching. But that’s a shrinking group. Seat back entertainment screens have been on the death watch list for 5 years now, but it seems to be on its way out -- at least on a lot of the domestic routes.&nbsp;</li><li>And I can’t really say that I miss them. The DirectTV controls on those United planes are in the armrest, so I’m always changing the channel or the volume or the screen brightness. On American 737s, screens bulging out of the seat backs into an already tight space thanks to American’s war against seat pitch; I have to recline my seat just to be able to get that screen in focus. And the power supplies for all these seat back units are under the seat, crowding out space for my backpack or my feet.&nbsp;</li><li>I’m happy with the BYOS -- bring your own screen -- approach. I watched the season finale of The Mandalorian Star Wars TV show on my 8-inch Samsung tablet. It wasn’t as good as watching it on the 65-inch LG 4K TV at home, but it was bigger than any domestic in-flight screen. On one of my Southwest flights home from PHX, I saw a guy hang his big iPhone Max from the tray on the seatback in front of him -- kind of a DIY seatback entertainment unit.&nbsp;</li><li>On long international flights, though, I can see the case for seatback screens. My wife and kids have perfected synchronized movie viewing. They’re sitting three abreast; they queue up the same movie and then count down -- 3, 2, 1, Press Play! The airplane version of watching a movie together in the living room. I’m not sure it would be the same if they were all looking down at their iPhones. This tends to work better on newer planes, like the 787, that have bigger screens. I remember Andrew trying to watch the movie Dunkirk - a big WW II action movie that was great on IMAX -- on a maybe 7-inch screen on a United 767. I don’t think he got the full experience of that movie.</li><li>Back in December, United <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1211759835181654018\">tweeted out the top 10 most watched in-flight movies in 2019</a> -- Bohemian Rhapsody, A Star is Born, and Crazy Rich Asians were 1, 2, and 3. Makes sense. In 9th place, though, was John Wick 3, the 3rd installment of the Keanu Reeves fists of fury action flick. Loved that movie, but I can’t see even the new 16-inch screens in United’s business class being big enough to handle that flick. </li><li> Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/scottaltham/20747\"> Hear Us Now (poptastic mix)</a> by Scott Altham (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/scottaltham/20747  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Any Difference Left Between Ride-Share and Taxis?</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I got an e-mail survey the other day asking for my thoughts, impressions about Uber and Lyft. One of the questions was how long I’d used each of them -- less than 1 year; 1-2 years, 2-3 years, more than 3 years. Which got <em>me</em> kinda wondering, so I pulled out my iPhone and fired up each app. My first Uber ride was in December 2013, from midtown Manhattan to LGA at 4pm. I signed up because it’s such a pain to find a regular cab to take you to LGA at rush hour, and I’d forgotten to book a ride with the black car service I would normally use. Interesting that I didn’t use Uber again for another 6 months, in June 2014, when again, I’d didn’t have a black car book for a ride from PHL to a client out in the suburbs along the Blue Route. I signed up with Lyft in December 2015 when I was in Las Vegas for a project. I’d be using Uber more frequently in 2015, but back then, only Lyft had permission to drop-off at LAS. We had used Uber a couple of times, but they’d have to drop us off at the rental car center so we could take the bus to the terminal. I did that exactly one time and then pivoted to Lyft. So, according to this e-mail survey -- which, at the end, revealed itself to be sponsored by Uber -- I’m a grizzled ride-sharing veteran -- as I’m sure are many of you.</li><li>And ride-sharing was what it was -- an app-driven version of the old ride-sharing bulletin boards -- “I’m driving from Chicago to Rockford; looking for someone to split the gas and tolls” -- except locally. I remember, at the start, that caused a bit of an etiquette challenge -- do I sit in the front or the back? And you were careful because it was their car -- and usually a nice one. Certainly much nicer and way less beat-up than the typical cab.&nbsp; And there were usually good stories from the drivers -- all but a couple were doing it part-time, to make some additional cash. Way back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/11/22/podcast-125-uber-driver-stories-overseas-for-the-election/\">episode #125</a>, in November 2016, early on in my Uber/Lyft days, I told some of those stories.</li><li>A year later, a driver in Charlottesville, VA told me he was driving full-time and wanted to expand, so he’d bought 3 used Toyota Corollas (even back then the preferred ride-share car) and was renting them out to “Hispanics”, his words, who were driving Uber and Lyft a couple hours north in the Washington, DC area. Interesting idea. A bit like the standard taxi cab model -- leasing licensed cabs to drivers for a shift -- but without the need to drop money on a taxi license, or a medallion in places like New York and Chicago. Interesting enough that there are now 6-7 companies, including Hertz, offering daily and weekly rentals if you don’t want to share rides in your personal car.</li><li>Back in December, landing in Chicago Midway on a Southwest flight from PHX, I did my usual drill, opened up Uber and Lyft as I got off the plane and checked prices and wait times for a ride home. The prices were about the same, but the wait time… 10 min for Uber, 2 for Lyft. Lyft it is! I hit the Request Ride button, but instead of searching for a driver, I immediately get a 4-digit PIN. I head downstairs and get into a queue that looks a lot like the cab line a few doors over, except this one is run by women in pink Lyft safety vests. But they’re doing the same thing the cab rank workers do -- wave down cars and then point passengers to them. I wait, I dunno, maybe 5 minutes to get into a car, show the guy the PIN on my Lyft app, he enters it into his, and off we go. A bit less hectic than the typical airport rideshare scrum, but again, how is this different than a taxi -- except that I don’t have to ask the driver if his credit card machine works.</li><li>Indeed, on most of my trips over the past year, arriving in PHX or CHO, there typically wouldn’t be a line for a cab, so I’d skip the 5-10 minute wait for Uber or Lyft. Or, returning from Durango with my extra bag of ski paraphernalia, I skipped the schlep up to to the ride-share pick-up zone; I just walked out the door to a waiting cab. And the price difference is shrinking --&nbsp; as we talked about in episode #154, Uber and Lyft have been nudging their rates up to stem their losses.&nbsp;</li><li>This is not to say there aren’t important differences; places where Uber and Lyft bring real value. I was working in New Orleans before Uber set up shop. It was impossible to get a cab anywhere other than between the airport and the French Quarter. Trying to get to and from a restaurant in, say, Mid-City or Uptown was painful -- until Uber showed up.</li><li>It kinda feels like, after all the hype, the battles with regulators, the IPOs, that Uber and Lyft used billions of venture capital dollars to break the medallion monopolies and build some phenomenal taxi dispatch systems. As a traveler, it’s been great for me. For the investors though? Well, I’m glad I skipped those IPOs</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #160</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_159.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #160 — Disappearing Seatback Screens; Shrinking Difference Between Ride-Share and Taxis','','inherit','closed','closed','','2661-revision-v1','','','2020-02-29 23:12:33','2020-03-01 04:12:33','',2661,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/02/29/2661-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2671,1,'2020-02-29 23:19:53','2020-03-01 04:19:53','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/IMG_0368-scaled.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2664 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/IMG_0368-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\n<figcaption>Is this the IMAX seatback screen?</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p>Trying to watch the Super Bowl while flying from Durango, CO to Chicago via Denver got me thinking about the fading away of seatback entertainment. We also talk about the continuing evolution of ride sharing. Uber and Lyft are looking more and more like the taxi companies they fought to replace. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_159.mp3\" data-wplink-edit=\"true\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/768815872&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #160: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. I finished my Phoenix travels at the end of January and made the last trip a “bleisure” trip -- business in Phoenix Monday thru Thursday afternoon, and then leisure Thursday evening thru Sunday with a ski weekend in Durango, CO, the first time I’ve been on the slopes in 7 years. I first thought about heading up to Salt Lake for the weekend, but when I saw that the Sundance Film Festival was the same weekend, I thought “Nope” and started Googling for other ideas. The ski slopes around Flagstaff were too small and I didn’t want to fight the traffic on I-70 to hit the areas near Denver. Durango, in the San Juan mountains in the southwest corner of the state -- near Four Corners -- looked like a good spot. It’s a quick and fairly inexpensive hour hop from Phoenix; it’s an actual town, not just a ski resort, so there’d be other things to do when the lifts closed; the lift tickets at Purgatory and Wolf Creek were reasonable -- 40-50% of the price at, say, Vail or Park City; I was able to book a whole tiny house on AirBnB for the price of a generic Fairfield Inn room; and, I’d never been there before. And, as I found out from my AirBnB host, it was the weekend of Durango’s Snowdown Festival -- the 42nd annual, with a parade down Main Street and everything. The snow was just OK, but the skiing was great -- beautiful weather, damn few lift lines, nice people -- a weird but fun combination of families -- mostly from Texas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico -- and the Colorado hippy-dippy ski bum crew. It was a nice ending to my 2 months of Phoenix trips.</li><li>The only downside was… I had to check a bag. Even though I rented all my equipment -- skis, boots, poles -- I still needed that extra bag for all the other paraphernalia -- helmet, ski pants, gloves, parka, …. I love skiing but it requires a lot of stuff. Not that it cost me anything -- even flying Basic Economy on American from Phoenix to Durango, I got free bags with my Platinum status. Though American’s website wasn’t very clear about that when they tried to upsell me off of Basic Economy -- imagine that. And while I got free bags, I couldn’t select my seat in advance. But given it was a small regional jet with no middle seats, I figured I’d risk it.&nbsp; I will say, though, that I was pretty happy with the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/37R0sHX\">teal green luggage tags</a> I bought before the trip. Made it very easy to spot my bags amidst the sea of black suitcases on the luggage belt. Probably <a href=\"https://amzn.to/37R0sHX\">the best $5 I’ve spent on Amazon</a>.&nbsp;</li><li>One detail I missed when planning my ski weekend is that my Sunday night flights from Durango to Denver to Chicago would be right in the middle of the Super Bowl. Though I’m not sure I’d have changed anything if I’d remembered it. I didn’t really have a dog in that hunt -- I’m not a big San Francisco or Kansas City fan and so was kinda like everyone else who wasn’t in the Bay Area, I was rooting more for Andy Reid than KC. I did end up catching <em>most</em> of the game, but it was a little choppy. I watched the kick-off and 1st quarter in the bar at Durango Airport. Durango Airport isn’t big -- just 4 gates if I remember correctly -- and the bar kinda sticks out into the gate seating area. I sat at the bar, had a beer, and watched the game on the TV hanging on the wall near Gate 2 -- or maybe 3. But then United called boarding, so I caught bits of the second quarter on the Fox TV iPhone app while waiting to take off for Denver. And then tracked the start of the 3rd quarter after touchdown and a really long taxi in DEN. I caught the rest of the 3rd quarter on multiple screens -- bars, CNN gate TVs -- while walking down the B Concourse to make my ORD connection. I got lucky, though, and was able to catch all of Kansas City’s phenomenal come-back uninterrupted in a Mexican restaurant with about a dozen other fixated passengers and restaurant workers. After KC’s final interception, I walked down and caught the final plays on the CNN TV at the gate. Every other night, I consciously avoid those CNN TVs -- the volumes always up on people yelling at each other. But this night, I was happy for that volume -- the one night when they weren’t to CNN. </li><li>Bridge Music --  <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/48915\">Like Music (cdk Mix</a>) by Analog By Nature (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/48915 Ft: Phasenwandler  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>The week after that last Phoenix trip, I wrote <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/02/07/my-food-and-beer-hangouts-in-downtown-phoenix-dtphx/\">a post</a> on the TravelCommons website listing my favorite food and beer hangouts in downtown Phoenix. When I started traveling to Phoenix in the mid-’90’s, there wasn’t much to downtown Phoenix other than a big Hyatt Regency hotel. Everything was in Scottsdale and Tempe. I’d usually stay in Tempe because, with Arizona State University there, there were restaurants and bars I could walk to. Fast forward to today, downtown Phoenix has a lot more going on. Stadiums for the Phoenix Suns and the Arizona Diamondbacks, and a new downtown campus for ASU’s law school bring in enough people to support a solid selection of restaurants, coffee shops, and bars. The blog post doesn’t cover everything -- just the places I found myself going back to again and again during my 2-month stay.</li><li>Most of my flights from the mid-90’s on went into PHX Sky Harbor’s Terminal 2 -- on United and on American, until they moved to the much better Terminal 4 after merging with US Air which had merged with America West, the original hub airline for PHX. Terminal 2 was PHX’s slum terminal. Built in 1962 and originally planned to shut down in 2000, they finally shut it down on Feb 4, 2020, the week after I finished my latest Phoenix gig. The last two airlines using it -- United and Alaska Air -- have moved to Terminal 3 with the rest of the non-hub carriers. PHX’s two major carriers -- American and Southwest -- split Terminal 4. Some of the newspaper articles said business travelers liked it because it was compact, easy to navigate. I’m not one of them. I thought it was a cramped low-ceilinged place, with small restrooms and lousy food and beer options when I had to wait out delays back to ORD.&nbsp; I think you can tell that I won’t miss it. The plans are to demo the terminal this year and replace it with European-style bus gates -- using buses to take passengers out to remotely parked aircraft instead of boarding through jetways. I’m gonna bet those bus gates won’t be popular in August when PHX’s tarmac temperatures hit 120 degrees.&nbsp;</li><li>Waiting for my American Eagle PHX-Durango flight, I was half-paying attention to the PA announcements, but then noticed that the gate agent wasn’t doing the boarding announcements. Instead they were using recorded announcements. That wasn’t what caught my attention, though. I’ve heard recorded gate announcements hundreds of times. But usually, they’re recordings of humans reading the announcements. Here at gate B19, it was one of those robotic text-to-speech synthesized voices -- something like &lt;insert Boarding Groups 1, 2, and 3&gt;. I mean, why? How much savings do you get by using text-to-speech over some gate agent standing in a closet and recording it, say, on their iPhone? Maybe more that I think now that American has, what, 7, 10, 123 boarding groups? I asked this question “Why the robot” out loud -- to Twitter. American came back “We heard back and the PHX gate staff actually does record the voices used in the announcements. They are real humans.” Kudos for American’s Twitter staff for following up, but unless they have an android with a bad vox box working for them, I think the gang at gate B19 is using text2speech.org.</li><li>I posted an article on the TravelCommons Facebook page about a guy who wore a plastic tent on a plane to avoid the coronavirus. Now, as it turns out, it was really more of a publicity stunt for the guy’s company. He makes personal tents to protect people from bad weather when sitting on the sidelines of their kids’ soccer games. Might cut down on the colds I catch when flying, but from the picture, it looks like it would be quite a pain when the person in the window seat wants to get out to use the toilet.</li><li>On January 6th, the first Monday of the new year, I <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1214167465627979776\">posted a picture on Twitter</a> of the “cannabis amnesty box” that was on the other side of security at ORD’s Terminal 1. Pot became legal in Illinois the first of the year, and the Chicago Dept of Aviation put out these boxes “so travelers have the opportunity to ensure compliance with federal law, as well as the local laws at their destination” according to the police department. If you look at the picture I posted, the box looks like something the maintenance guys knocked together in the wood shop during their break. So no surprise that 3 weeks later, someone broke into a similar box at Midway airport and helped themselves to some surrendered weed. Actually, I think the only real surprise is that it took as long as 3 weeks for this to happen. </li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/spinmeister/53428\">Somewhere</a> by spinmeister (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/spinmeister/53428 Ft: DJ Vadim  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Seatback Screens Fading Away</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>On my flight from Durango to Denver, half the guys on the plane were staring down at their phones during boarding and taxi, watching the second quarter until the plane rotated up off the runway. For folks flying United planes with DirectTV seatback screens -- the repainted Continental 737s -- no problems; just swipe your credit card and keep watching. But that’s a shrinking group. Seat back entertainment screens have been on the death watch list for 5 years now, but it seems to be on its way out -- at least on a lot of the domestic routes.&nbsp;</li><li>And I can’t really say that I miss them. The DirectTV controls on those United planes are in the armrest, so I’m always changing the channel or the volume or the screen brightness. On American 737s, screens bulging out of the seat backs into an already tight space thanks to American’s war against seat pitch; I have to recline my seat just to be able to get that screen in focus. And the power supplies for all these seat back units are under the seat, crowding out space for my backpack or my feet.&nbsp;</li><li>I’m happy with the BYOS -- bring your own screen -- approach. I watched the season finale of The Mandalorian Star Wars TV show on my 8-inch Samsung tablet. It wasn’t as good as watching it on the 65-inch LG 4K TV at home, but it was bigger than any domestic in-flight screen. On one of my Southwest flights home from PHX, I saw a guy hang his big iPhone Max from the tray on the seatback in front of him -- kind of a DIY seatback entertainment unit.&nbsp;</li><li>On long international flights, though, I can see the case for seatback screens. My wife and kids have perfected synchronized movie viewing. They’re sitting three abreast; they queue up the same movie and then count down -- 3, 2, 1, Press Play! The airplane version of watching a movie together in the living room. I’m not sure it would be the same if they were all looking down at their iPhones. This tends to work better on newer planes, like the 787, that have bigger screens. I remember Andrew trying to watch the movie Dunkirk - a big WW II action movie that was great on IMAX -- on a maybe 7-inch screen on a United 767. I don’t think he got the full experience of that movie.</li><li>Back in December, United <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1211759835181654018\">tweeted out the top 10 most watched in-flight movies in 2019</a> -- Bohemian Rhapsody, A Star is Born, and Crazy Rich Asians were 1, 2, and 3. Makes sense. In 9th place, though, was John Wick 3, the 3rd installment of the Keanu Reeves fists of fury action flick. Loved that movie, but I can’t see even the new 16-inch screens in United’s business class being big enough to handle that flick. </li><li> Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/scottaltham/20747\"> Hear Us Now (poptastic mix)</a> by Scott Altham (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/scottaltham/20747  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Any Difference Left Between Ride-Share and Taxis?</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I got an e-mail survey the other day asking for my thoughts, impressions about Uber and Lyft. One of the questions was how long I’d used each of them -- less than 1 year; 1-2 years, 2-3 years, more than 3 years. Which got <em>me</em> kinda wondering, so I pulled out my iPhone and fired up each app. My first Uber ride was in December 2013, from midtown Manhattan to LGA at 4pm. I signed up because it’s such a pain to find a regular cab to take you to LGA at rush hour, and I’d forgotten to book a ride with the black car service I would normally use. Interesting that I didn’t use Uber again for another 6 months, in June 2014, when again, I’d didn’t have a black car book for a ride from PHL to a client out in the suburbs along the Blue Route. I signed up with Lyft in December 2015 when I was in Las Vegas for a project. I’d be using Uber more frequently in 2015, but back then, only Lyft had permission to drop-off at LAS. We had used Uber a couple of times, but they’d have to drop us off at the rental car center so we could take the bus to the terminal. I did that exactly one time and then pivoted to Lyft. So, according to this e-mail survey -- which, at the end, revealed itself to be sponsored by Uber -- I’m a grizzled ride-sharing veteran -- as I’m sure are many of you.</li><li>And ride-sharing was what it was -- an app-driven version of the old ride-sharing bulletin boards -- “I’m driving from Chicago to Rockford; looking for someone to split the gas and tolls” -- except locally. I remember, at the start, that caused a bit of an etiquette challenge -- do I sit in the front or the back? And you were careful because it was their car -- and usually a nice one. Certainly much nicer and way less beat-up than the typical cab.&nbsp; And there were usually good stories from the drivers -- all but a couple were doing it part-time, to make some additional cash. Way back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/11/22/podcast-125-uber-driver-stories-overseas-for-the-election/\">episode #125</a>, in November 2016, early on in my Uber/Lyft days, I told some of those stories.</li><li>A year later, a driver in Charlottesville, VA told me he was driving full-time and wanted to expand, so he’d bought 3 used Toyota Corollas (even back then the preferred ride-share car) and was renting them out to “Hispanics”, his words, who were driving Uber and Lyft a couple hours north in the Washington, DC area. Interesting idea. A bit like the standard taxi cab model -- leasing licensed cabs to drivers for a shift -- but without the need to drop money on a taxi license, or a medallion in places like New York and Chicago. Interesting enough that there are now 6-7 companies, including Hertz, offering daily and weekly rentals if you don’t want to share rides in your personal car.</li><li>Back in December, landing in Chicago Midway on a Southwest flight from PHX, I did my usual drill, opened up Uber and Lyft as I got off the plane and checked prices and wait times for a ride home. The prices were about the same, but the wait time… 10 min for Uber, 2 for Lyft. Lyft it is! I hit the Request Ride button, but instead of searching for a driver, I immediately get a 4-digit PIN. I head downstairs and get into a queue that looks a lot like the cab line a few doors over, except this one is run by women in pink Lyft safety vests. But they’re doing the same thing the cab rank workers do -- wave down cars and then point passengers to them. I wait, I dunno, maybe 5 minutes to get into a car, show the guy the PIN on my Lyft app, he enters it into his, and off we go. A bit less hectic than the typical airport rideshare scrum, but again, how is this different than a taxi -- except that I don’t have to ask the driver if his credit card machine works.</li><li>Indeed, on most of my trips over the past year, arriving in PHX or CHO, there typically wouldn’t be a line for a cab, so I’d skip the 5-10 minute wait for Uber or Lyft. Or, returning from Durango with my extra bag of ski paraphernalia, I skipped the schlep up to to the ride-share pick-up zone; I just walked out the door to a waiting cab. And the price difference is shrinking --&nbsp; as we talked about in episode #154, Uber and Lyft have been nudging their rates up to stem their losses.&nbsp;</li><li>This is not to say there aren’t important differences; places where Uber and Lyft bring real value. I was working in New Orleans before Uber set up shop. It was impossible to get a cab anywhere other than between the airport and the French Quarter. Trying to get to and from a restaurant in, say, Mid-City or Uptown was painful -- until Uber showed up.</li><li>It kinda feels like, after all the hype, the battles with regulators, the IPOs, that Uber and Lyft used billions of venture capital dollars to break the medallion monopolies and build some phenomenal taxi dispatch systems. As a traveler, it’s been great for me. For the investors though? Well, I’m glad I skipped those IPOs</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #160</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_159.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #160 — Disappearing Seatback Screens; Shrinking Difference Between Ride-Share and Taxis','','inherit','closed','closed','','2661-revision-v1','','','2020-02-29 23:19:53','2020-03-01 04:19:53','',2661,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/02/29/2661-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2672,1,'2020-02-29 23:22:23','2020-03-01 04:22:23','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/IMG_0368-scaled.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2664 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/IMG_0368-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a><figcaption>Is this the IMAX seatback screen?</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>Trying to watch the Super Bowl while flying from Durango, CO to Chicago via Denver got me thinking about the fading away of seatback entertainment. We also talk about the continuing evolution of ride sharing. Uber and Lyft are looking more and more like the taxi companies they fought to replace. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_159.mp3\" data-wplink-edit=\"true\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/768815872&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #160: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. I finished my Phoenix travels at the end of January and made the last trip a “bleisure” trip -- business in Phoenix Monday thru Thursday afternoon, and then leisure Thursday evening thru Sunday with a ski weekend in Durango, CO, the first time I’ve been on the slopes in 7 years. I first thought about heading up to Salt Lake for the weekend, but when I saw that the Sundance Film Festival was the same weekend, I thought “Nope” and started Googling for other ideas. The ski slopes around Flagstaff were too small and I didn’t want to fight the traffic on I-70 to hit the areas near Denver. Durango, in the San Juan mountains in the southwest corner of the state -- near Four Corners -- looked like a good spot. It’s a quick and fairly inexpensive hour hop from Phoenix; it’s an actual town, not just a ski resort, so there’d be other things to do when the lifts closed; the lift tickets at Purgatory and Wolf Creek were reasonable -- 40-50% of the price at, say, Vail or Park City; I was able to book a whole tiny house on AirBnB for the price of a generic Fairfield Inn room; and, I’d never been there before. And, as I found out from my AirBnB host, it was the weekend of Durango’s Snowdown Festival -- the 42nd annual, with a parade down Main Street and everything. The snow was just OK, but the skiing was great -- beautiful weather, damn few lift lines, nice people -- a weird but fun combination of families -- mostly from Texas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico -- and the Colorado hippy-dippy ski bum crew. It was a nice ending to my 2 months of Phoenix trips.</li><li>The only downside was… I had to check a bag. Even though I rented all my equipment -- skis, boots, poles -- I still needed that extra bag for all the other paraphernalia -- helmet, ski pants, gloves, parka, …. I love skiing but it requires a lot of stuff. Not that it cost me anything -- even flying Basic Economy on American from Phoenix to Durango, I got free bags with my Platinum status. Though American’s website wasn’t very clear about that when they tried to upsell me off of Basic Economy -- imagine that. And while I got free bags, I couldn’t select my seat in advance. But given it was a small regional jet with no middle seats, I figured I’d risk it.&nbsp; I will say, though, that I was pretty happy with the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/37R0sHX\">teal green luggage tags</a> I bought before the trip. Made it very easy to spot my bags amidst the sea of black suitcases on the luggage belt. Probably <a href=\"https://amzn.to/37R0sHX\">the best $5 I’ve spent on Amazon</a>.&nbsp;</li><li>One detail I missed when planning my ski weekend is that my Sunday night flights from Durango to Denver to Chicago would be right in the middle of the Super Bowl. Though I’m not sure I’d have changed anything if I’d remembered it. I didn’t really have a dog in that hunt -- I’m not a big San Francisco or Kansas City fan and so was kinda like everyone else who wasn’t in the Bay Area, I was rooting more for Andy Reid than KC. I did end up catching <em>most</em> of the game, but it was a little choppy. I watched the kick-off and 1st quarter in the bar at Durango Airport. Durango Airport isn’t big -- just 4 gates if I remember correctly -- and the bar kinda sticks out into the gate seating area. I sat at the bar, had a beer, and watched the game on the TV hanging on the wall near Gate 2 -- or maybe 3. But then United called boarding, so I caught bits of the second quarter on the Fox TV iPhone app while waiting to take off for Denver. And then tracked the start of the 3rd quarter after touchdown and a really long taxi in DEN. I caught the rest of the 3rd quarter on multiple screens -- bars, CNN gate TVs -- while walking down the B Concourse to make my ORD connection. I got lucky, though, and was able to catch all of Kansas City’s phenomenal come-back uninterrupted in a Mexican restaurant with about a dozen other fixated passengers and restaurant workers. After KC’s final interception, I walked down and caught the final plays on the CNN TV at the gate. Every other night, I consciously avoid those CNN TVs -- the volumes always up on people yelling at each other. But this night, I was happy for that volume -- the one night when they weren’t to CNN. </li><li>Bridge Music --  <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/48915\">Like Music (cdk Mix</a>) by Analog By Nature (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/48915 Ft: Phasenwandler  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>The week after that last Phoenix trip, I wrote <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/02/07/my-food-and-beer-hangouts-in-downtown-phoenix-dtphx/\">a post</a> on the TravelCommons website listing my favorite food and beer hangouts in downtown Phoenix. When I started traveling to Phoenix in the mid-’90’s, there wasn’t much to downtown Phoenix other than a big Hyatt Regency hotel. Everything was in Scottsdale and Tempe. I’d usually stay in Tempe because, with Arizona State University there, there were restaurants and bars I could walk to. Fast forward to today, downtown Phoenix has a lot more going on. Stadiums for the Phoenix Suns and the Arizona Diamondbacks, and a new downtown campus for ASU’s law school bring in enough people to support a solid selection of restaurants, coffee shops, and bars. The blog post doesn’t cover everything -- just the places I found myself going back to again and again during my 2-month stay.</li><li>Most of my flights from the mid-90’s on went into PHX Sky Harbor’s Terminal 2 -- on United and on American, until they moved to the much better Terminal 4 after merging with US Air which had merged with America West, the original hub airline for PHX. Terminal 2 was PHX’s slum terminal. Built in 1962 and originally planned to shut down in 2000, they finally shut it down on Feb 4, 2020, the week after I finished my latest Phoenix gig. The last two airlines using it -- United and Alaska Air -- have moved to Terminal 3 with the rest of the non-hub carriers. PHX’s two major carriers -- American and Southwest -- split Terminal 4. Some of the newspaper articles said business travelers liked it because it was compact, easy to navigate. I’m not one of them. I thought it was a cramped low-ceilinged place, with small restrooms and lousy food and beer options when I had to wait out delays back to ORD.&nbsp; I think you can tell that I won’t miss it. The plans are to demo the terminal this year and replace it with European-style bus gates -- using buses to take passengers out to remotely parked aircraft instead of boarding through jetways. I’m gonna bet those bus gates won’t be popular in August when PHX’s tarmac temperatures hit 120 degrees.&nbsp;</li><li>Waiting for my American Eagle PHX-Durango flight, I was half-paying attention to the PA announcements, but then noticed that the gate agent wasn’t doing the boarding announcements. Instead they were using recorded announcements. That wasn’t what caught my attention, though. I’ve heard recorded gate announcements hundreds of times. But usually, they’re recordings of humans reading the announcements. Here at gate B19, it was one of those robotic text-to-speech synthesized voices -- something like &lt;insert Boarding Groups 1, 2, and 3&gt;. I mean, why? How much savings do you get by using text-to-speech over some gate agent standing in a closet and recording it, say, on their iPhone? Maybe more that I think now that American has, what, 7, 10, 123 boarding groups? I asked this question “Why the robot” out loud -- to Twitter. American came back “We heard back and the PHX gate staff actually does record the voices used in the announcements. They are real humans.” Kudos for American’s Twitter staff for following up, but unless they have an android with a bad vox box working for them, I think the gang at gate B19 is using text2speech.org.</li><li>I posted an article on the TravelCommons Facebook page about a guy who wore a plastic tent on a plane to avoid the coronavirus. Now, as it turns out, it was really more of a publicity stunt for the guy’s company. He makes personal tents to protect people from bad weather when sitting on the sidelines of their kids’ soccer games. Might cut down on the colds I catch when flying, but from the picture, it looks like it would be quite a pain when the person in the window seat wants to get out to use the toilet.</li><li>On January 6th, the first Monday of the new year, I <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1214167465627979776\">posted a picture on Twitter</a> of the “cannabis amnesty box” that was on the other side of security at ORD’s Terminal 1. Pot became legal in Illinois the first of the year, and the Chicago Dept of Aviation put out these boxes “so travelers have the opportunity to ensure compliance with federal law, as well as the local laws at their destination” according to the police department. If you look at the picture I posted, the box looks like something the maintenance guys knocked together in the wood shop during their break. So no surprise that 3 weeks later, someone broke into a similar box at Midway airport and helped themselves to some surrendered weed. Actually, I think the only real surprise is that it took as long as 3 weeks for this to happen. </li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/spinmeister/53428\">Somewhere</a> by spinmeister (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/spinmeister/53428 Ft: DJ Vadim  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Seatback Screens Fading Away</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>On my flight from Durango to Denver, half the guys on the plane were staring down at their phones during boarding and taxi, watching the second quarter until the plane rotated up off the runway. For folks flying United planes with DirectTV seatback screens -- the repainted Continental 737s -- no problems; just swipe your credit card and keep watching. But that’s a shrinking group. Seat back entertainment screens have been on the death watch list for 5 years now, but it seems to be on its way out -- at least on a lot of the domestic routes.&nbsp;</li><li>And I can’t really say that I miss them. The DirectTV controls on those United planes are in the armrest, so I’m always changing the channel or the volume or the screen brightness. On American 737s, screens bulging out of the seat backs into an already tight space thanks to American’s war against seat pitch; I have to recline my seat just to be able to get that screen in focus. And the power supplies for all these seat back units are under the seat, crowding out space for my backpack or my feet.&nbsp;</li><li>I’m happy with the BYOS -- bring your own screen -- approach. I watched the season finale of The Mandalorian Star Wars TV show on my 8-inch Samsung tablet. It wasn’t as good as watching it on the 65-inch LG 4K TV at home, but it was bigger than any domestic in-flight screen. On one of my Southwest flights home from PHX, I saw a guy hang his big iPhone Max from the tray on the seatback in front of him -- kind of a DIY seatback entertainment unit.&nbsp;</li><li>On long international flights, though, I can see the case for seatback screens. My wife and kids have perfected synchronized movie viewing. They’re sitting three abreast; they queue up the same movie and then count down -- 3, 2, 1, Press Play! The airplane version of watching a movie together in the living room. I’m not sure it would be the same if they were all looking down at their iPhones. This tends to work better on newer planes, like the 787, that have bigger screens. I remember Andrew trying to watch the movie Dunkirk - a big WW II action movie that was great on IMAX -- on a maybe 7-inch screen on a United 767. I don’t think he got the full experience of that movie.</li><li>Back in December, United <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1211759835181654018\">tweeted out the top 10 most watched in-flight movies in 2019</a> -- Bohemian Rhapsody, A Star is Born, and Crazy Rich Asians were 1, 2, and 3. Makes sense. In 9th place, though, was John Wick 3, the 3rd installment of the Keanu Reeves fists of fury action flick. Loved that movie, but I can’t see even the new 16-inch screens in United’s business class being big enough to handle that flick. </li><li> Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/scottaltham/20747\"> Hear Us Now (poptastic mix)</a> by Scott Altham (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/scottaltham/20747  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Any Difference Left Between Ride-Share and Taxis?</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I got an e-mail survey the other day asking for my thoughts, impressions about Uber and Lyft. One of the questions was how long I’d used each of them -- less than 1 year; 1-2 years, 2-3 years, more than 3 years. Which got <em>me</em> kinda wondering, so I pulled out my iPhone and fired up each app. My first Uber ride was in December 2013, from midtown Manhattan to LGA at 4pm. I signed up because it’s such a pain to find a regular cab to take you to LGA at rush hour, and I’d forgotten to book a ride with the black car service I would normally use. Interesting that I didn’t use Uber again for another 6 months, in June 2014, when again, I’d didn’t have a black car book for a ride from PHL to a client out in the suburbs along the Blue Route. I signed up with Lyft in December 2015 when I was in Las Vegas for a project. I’d be using Uber more frequently in 2015, but back then, only Lyft had permission to drop-off at LAS. We had used Uber a couple of times, but they’d have to drop us off at the rental car center so we could take the bus to the terminal. I did that exactly one time and then pivoted to Lyft. So, according to this e-mail survey -- which, at the end, revealed itself to be sponsored by Uber -- I’m a grizzled ride-sharing veteran -- as I’m sure are many of you.</li><li>And ride-sharing was what it was -- an app-driven version of the old ride-sharing bulletin boards -- “I’m driving from Chicago to Rockford; looking for someone to split the gas and tolls” -- except locally. I remember, at the start, that caused a bit of an etiquette challenge -- do I sit in the front or the back? And you were careful because it was their car -- and usually a nice one. Certainly much nicer and way less beat-up than the typical cab.  And there were usually good stories from the drivers -- all but a couple were doing it part-time, to make some additional cash. Way back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/11/22/podcast-125-uber-driver-stories-overseas-for-the-election/\">episode #125</a>, in November 2016, early on in my Uber/Lyft days, I told some of those stories.</li><li>A year later, a driver in Charlottesville, VA told me he was driving full-time and wanted to expand, so he’d bought 3 used Toyota Corollas (even back then the preferred ride-share car) and was renting them out to “Hispanics”, his words, who were driving Uber and Lyft a couple hours north in the Washington, DC area. Interesting idea. A bit like the standard taxi cab model -- leasing licensed cabs to drivers for a shift -- but without the need to drop money on a taxi license, or a medallion in places like New York and Chicago. Interesting enough that there are now 6-7 companies, including Hertz, offering daily and weekly rentals if you don’t want to share rides in your personal car.</li><li>Back in December, landing in Chicago Midway on a Southwest flight from PHX, I did my usual drill, opened up Uber and Lyft as I got off the plane and checked prices and wait times for a ride home. The prices were about the same, but the wait time… 10 min for Uber, 2 for Lyft. Lyft it is! I hit the Request Ride button, but instead of searching for a driver, I immediately get a 4-digit PIN. I head downstairs and get into a queue that looks a lot like the cab line a few doors over, except this one is run by women in pink Lyft safety vests. But they’re doing the same thing the cab rank workers do -- wave down cars and then point passengers to them. I wait, I dunno, maybe 5 minutes to get into a car, show the guy the PIN on my Lyft app, he enters it into his, and off we go. A bit less hectic than the typical airport rideshare scrum, but again, how is this different than a taxi -- except that I don’t have to ask the driver if his credit card machine works.</li><li>Indeed, on most of my trips over the past year, arriving in PHX or CHO, there typically wouldn’t be a line for a cab, so I’d skip the 5-10 minute wait for Uber or Lyft. Or, returning from Durango with my extra bag of ski paraphernalia, I skipped the schlep up to to the ride-share pick-up zone; I just walked out the door to a waiting cab. And the price difference is shrinking --  as we talked about in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/08/13/podcast-154-will-we-still-love-uber-when-the-prices-go-up/\">episode #154</a>, Uber and Lyft have been nudging their rates up to stem their losses. </li><li>This is not to say there aren’t important differences; places where Uber and Lyft bring real value. I was working in New Orleans before Uber set up shop. It was impossible to get a cab anywhere other than between the airport and the French Quarter. Trying to get to and from a restaurant in, say, Mid-City or Uptown was painful -- until Uber showed up.</li><li>It kinda feels like, after all the hype, the battles with regulators, the IPOs, that Uber and Lyft used billions of venture capital dollars to break the medallion monopolies and build some phenomenal taxi dispatch systems. As a traveler, it’s been great for me. For the investors though? Well, I’m glad I skipped those IPOs</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #160</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_159.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #160 — Disappearing Seatback Screens; Shrinking Difference Between Ride-Share and Taxis','','inherit','closed','closed','','2661-revision-v1','','','2020-02-29 23:22:23','2020-03-01 04:22:23','',2661,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/02/29/2661-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2673,1,'2020-02-29 23:23:31','2020-03-01 04:23:31','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/IMG_0368-scaled.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2664 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/IMG_0368-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\n<figcaption>Is this the IMAX seatback screen?</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p>Trying to watch the Super Bowl while flying from Durango, CO to Chicago via Denver got me thinking about the fading away of seatback entertainment. We also talk about the continuing evolution of ride sharing. Uber and Lyft are looking more and more like the taxi companies they fought to replace. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_160.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/768815872&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #160: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. I finished my Phoenix travels at the end of January and made the last trip a “bleisure” trip -- business in Phoenix Monday thru Thursday afternoon, and then leisure Thursday evening thru Sunday with a ski weekend in Durango, CO, the first time I’ve been on the slopes in 7 years. I first thought about heading up to Salt Lake for the weekend, but when I saw that the Sundance Film Festival was the same weekend, I thought “Nope” and started Googling for other ideas. The ski slopes around Flagstaff were too small and I didn’t want to fight the traffic on I-70 to hit the areas near Denver. Durango, in the San Juan mountains in the southwest corner of the state -- near Four Corners -- looked like a good spot. It’s a quick and fairly inexpensive hour hop from Phoenix; it’s an actual town, not just a ski resort, so there’d be other things to do when the lifts closed; the lift tickets at Purgatory and Wolf Creek were reasonable -- 40-50% of the price at, say, Vail or Park City; I was able to book a whole tiny house on AirBnB for the price of a generic Fairfield Inn room; and, I’d never been there before. And, as I found out from my AirBnB host, it was the weekend of Durango’s Snowdown Festival -- the 42nd annual, with a parade down Main Street and everything. The snow was just OK, but the skiing was great -- beautiful weather, damn few lift lines, nice people -- a weird but fun combination of families -- mostly from Texas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico -- and the Colorado hippy-dippy ski bum crew. It was a nice ending to my 2 months of Phoenix trips.</li><li>The only downside was… I had to check a bag. Even though I rented all my equipment -- skis, boots, poles -- I still needed that extra bag for all the other paraphernalia -- helmet, ski pants, gloves, parka, …. I love skiing but it requires a lot of stuff. Not that it cost me anything -- even flying Basic Economy on American from Phoenix to Durango, I got free bags with my Platinum status. Though American’s website wasn’t very clear about that when they tried to upsell me off of Basic Economy -- imagine that. And while I got free bags, I couldn’t select my seat in advance. But given it was a small regional jet with no middle seats, I figured I’d risk it.&nbsp; I will say, though, that I was pretty happy with the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/37R0sHX\">teal green luggage tags</a> I bought before the trip. Made it very easy to spot my bags amidst the sea of black suitcases on the luggage belt. Probably <a href=\"https://amzn.to/37R0sHX\">the best $5 I’ve spent on Amazon</a>.&nbsp;</li><li>One detail I missed when planning my ski weekend is that my Sunday night flights from Durango to Denver to Chicago would be right in the middle of the Super Bowl. Though I’m not sure I’d have changed anything if I’d remembered it. I didn’t really have a dog in that hunt -- I’m not a big San Francisco or Kansas City fan and so was kinda like everyone else who wasn’t in the Bay Area, I was rooting more for Andy Reid than KC. I did end up catching <em>most</em> of the game, but it was a little choppy. I watched the kick-off and 1st quarter in the bar at Durango Airport. Durango Airport isn’t big -- just 4 gates if I remember correctly -- and the bar kinda sticks out into the gate seating area. I sat at the bar, had a beer, and watched the game on the TV hanging on the wall near Gate 2 -- or maybe 3. But then United called boarding, so I caught bits of the second quarter on the Fox TV iPhone app while waiting to take off for Denver. And then tracked the start of the 3rd quarter after touchdown and a really long taxi in DEN. I caught the rest of the 3rd quarter on multiple screens -- bars, CNN gate TVs -- while walking down the B Concourse to make my ORD connection. I got lucky, though, and was able to catch all of Kansas City’s phenomenal come-back uninterrupted in a Mexican restaurant with about a dozen other fixated passengers and restaurant workers. After KC’s final interception, I walked down and caught the final plays on the CNN TV at the gate. Every other night, I consciously avoid those CNN TVs -- the volumes always up on people yelling at each other. But this night, I was happy for that volume -- the one night when they weren’t to CNN. </li><li>Bridge Music --  <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/48915\">Like Music (cdk Mix</a>) by Analog By Nature (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/48915 Ft: Phasenwandler  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>The week after that last Phoenix trip, I wrote <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/02/07/my-food-and-beer-hangouts-in-downtown-phoenix-dtphx/\">a post</a> on the TravelCommons website listing my favorite food and beer hangouts in downtown Phoenix. When I started traveling to Phoenix in the mid-’90’s, there wasn’t much to downtown Phoenix other than a big Hyatt Regency hotel. Everything was in Scottsdale and Tempe. I’d usually stay in Tempe because, with Arizona State University there, there were restaurants and bars I could walk to. Fast forward to today, downtown Phoenix has a lot more going on. Stadiums for the Phoenix Suns and the Arizona Diamondbacks, and a new downtown campus for ASU’s law school bring in enough people to support a solid selection of restaurants, coffee shops, and bars. The blog post doesn’t cover everything -- just the places I found myself going back to again and again during my 2-month stay.</li><li>Most of my flights from the mid-90’s on went into PHX Sky Harbor’s Terminal 2 -- on United and on American, until they moved to the much better Terminal 4 after merging with US Air which had merged with America West, the original hub airline for PHX. Terminal 2 was PHX’s slum terminal. Built in 1962 and originally planned to shut down in 2000, they finally shut it down on Feb 4, 2020, the week after I finished my latest Phoenix gig. The last two airlines using it -- United and Alaska Air -- have moved to Terminal 3 with the rest of the non-hub carriers. PHX’s two major carriers -- American and Southwest -- split Terminal 4. Some of the newspaper articles said business travelers liked it because it was compact, easy to navigate. I’m not one of them. I thought it was a cramped low-ceilinged place, with small restrooms and lousy food and beer options when I had to wait out delays back to ORD.&nbsp; I think you can tell that I won’t miss it. The plans are to demo the terminal this year and replace it with European-style bus gates -- using buses to take passengers out to remotely parked aircraft instead of boarding through jetways. I’m gonna bet those bus gates won’t be popular in August when PHX’s tarmac temperatures hit 120 degrees.&nbsp;</li><li>Waiting for my American Eagle PHX-Durango flight, I was half-paying attention to the PA announcements, but then noticed that the gate agent wasn’t doing the boarding announcements. Instead they were using recorded announcements. That wasn’t what caught my attention, though. I’ve heard recorded gate announcements hundreds of times. But usually, they’re recordings of humans reading the announcements. Here at gate B19, it was one of those robotic text-to-speech synthesized voices -- something like &lt;insert Boarding Groups 1, 2, and 3&gt;. I mean, why? How much savings do you get by using text-to-speech over some gate agent standing in a closet and recording it, say, on their iPhone? Maybe more that I think now that American has, what, 7, 10, 123 boarding groups? I asked this question “Why the robot” out loud -- to Twitter. American came back “We heard back and the PHX gate staff actually does record the voices used in the announcements. They are real humans.” Kudos for American’s Twitter staff for following up, but unless they have an android with a bad vox box working for them, I think the gang at gate B19 is using text2speech.org.</li><li>I posted an article on the TravelCommons Facebook page about a guy who wore a plastic tent on a plane to avoid the coronavirus. Now, as it turns out, it was really more of a publicity stunt for the guy’s company. He makes personal tents to protect people from bad weather when sitting on the sidelines of their kids’ soccer games. Might cut down on the colds I catch when flying, but from the picture, it looks like it would be quite a pain when the person in the window seat wants to get out to use the toilet.</li><li>On January 6th, the first Monday of the new year, I <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1214167465627979776\">posted a picture on Twitter</a> of the “cannabis amnesty box” that was on the other side of security at ORD’s Terminal 1. Pot became legal in Illinois the first of the year, and the Chicago Dept of Aviation put out these boxes “so travelers have the opportunity to ensure compliance with federal law, as well as the local laws at their destination” according to the police department. If you look at the picture I posted, the box looks like something the maintenance guys knocked together in the wood shop during their break. So no surprise that 3 weeks later, someone broke into a similar box at Midway airport and helped themselves to some surrendered weed. Actually, I think the only real surprise is that it took as long as 3 weeks for this to happen. </li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/spinmeister/53428\">Somewhere</a> by spinmeister (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/spinmeister/53428 Ft: DJ Vadim  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Seatback Screens Fading Away</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>On my flight from Durango to Denver, half the guys on the plane were staring down at their phones during boarding and taxi, watching the second quarter until the plane rotated up off the runway. For folks flying United planes with DirectTV seatback screens -- the repainted Continental 737s -- no problems; just swipe your credit card and keep watching. But that’s a shrinking group. Seat back entertainment screens have been on the death watch list for 5 years now, but it seems to be on its way out -- at least on a lot of the domestic routes.&nbsp;</li><li>And I can’t really say that I miss them. The DirectTV controls on those United planes are in the armrest, so I’m always changing the channel or the volume or the screen brightness. On American 737s, screens bulging out of the seat backs into an already tight space thanks to American’s war against seat pitch; I have to recline my seat just to be able to get that screen in focus. And the power supplies for all these seat back units are under the seat, crowding out space for my backpack or my feet.&nbsp;</li><li>I’m happy with the BYOS -- bring your own screen -- approach. I watched the season finale of The Mandalorian Star Wars TV show on my 8-inch Samsung tablet. It wasn’t as good as watching it on the 65-inch LG 4K TV at home, but it was bigger than any domestic in-flight screen. On one of my Southwest flights home from PHX, I saw a guy hang his big iPhone Max from the tray on the seatback in front of him -- kind of a DIY seatback entertainment unit.&nbsp;</li><li>On long international flights, though, I can see the case for seatback screens. My wife and kids have perfected synchronized movie viewing. They’re sitting three abreast; they queue up the same movie and then count down -- 3, 2, 1, Press Play! The airplane version of watching a movie together in the living room. I’m not sure it would be the same if they were all looking down at their iPhones. This tends to work better on newer planes, like the 787, that have bigger screens. I remember Andrew trying to watch the movie Dunkirk - a big WW II action movie that was great on IMAX -- on a maybe 7-inch screen on a United 767. I don’t think he got the full experience of that movie.</li><li>Back in December, United <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1211759835181654018\">tweeted out the top 10 most watched in-flight movies in 2019</a> -- Bohemian Rhapsody, A Star is Born, and Crazy Rich Asians were 1, 2, and 3. Makes sense. In 9th place, though, was John Wick 3, the 3rd installment of the Keanu Reeves fists of fury action flick. Loved that movie, but I can’t see even the new 16-inch screens in United’s business class being big enough to handle that flick. </li><li> Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/scottaltham/20747\"> Hear Us Now (poptastic mix)</a> by Scott Altham (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/scottaltham/20747  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Any Difference Left Between Ride-Share and Taxis?</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I got an e-mail survey the other day asking for my thoughts, impressions about Uber and Lyft. One of the questions was how long I’d used each of them -- less than 1 year; 1-2 years, 2-3 years, more than 3 years. Which got <em>me</em> kinda wondering, so I pulled out my iPhone and fired up each app. My first Uber ride was in December 2013, from midtown Manhattan to LGA at 4pm. I signed up because it’s such a pain to find a regular cab to take you to LGA at rush hour, and I’d forgotten to book a ride with the black car service I would normally use. Interesting that I didn’t use Uber again for another 6 months, in June 2014, when again, I’d didn’t have a black car book for a ride from PHL to a client out in the suburbs along the Blue Route. I signed up with Lyft in December 2015 when I was in Las Vegas for a project. I’d be using Uber more frequently in 2015, but back then, only Lyft had permission to drop-off at LAS. We had used Uber a couple of times, but they’d have to drop us off at the rental car center so we could take the bus to the terminal. I did that exactly one time and then pivoted to Lyft. So, according to this e-mail survey -- which, at the end, revealed itself to be sponsored by Uber -- I’m a grizzled ride-sharing veteran -- as I’m sure are many of you.</li><li>And ride-sharing was what it was -- an app-driven version of the old ride-sharing bulletin boards -- “I’m driving from Chicago to Rockford; looking for someone to split the gas and tolls” -- except locally. I remember, at the start, that caused a bit of an etiquette challenge -- do I sit in the front or the back? And you were careful because it was their car -- and usually a nice one. Certainly much nicer and way less beat-up than the typical cab.&nbsp; And there were usually good stories from the drivers -- all but a couple were doing it part-time, to make some additional cash. Way back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/11/22/podcast-125-uber-driver-stories-overseas-for-the-election/\">episode #125</a>, in November 2016, early on in my Uber/Lyft days, I told some of those stories.</li><li>A year later, a driver in Charlottesville, VA told me he was driving full-time and wanted to expand, so he’d bought 3 used Toyota Corollas (even back then the preferred ride-share car) and was renting them out to “Hispanics”, his words, who were driving Uber and Lyft a couple hours north in the Washington, DC area. Interesting idea. A bit like the standard taxi cab model -- leasing licensed cabs to drivers for a shift -- but without the need to drop money on a taxi license, or a medallion in places like New York and Chicago. Interesting enough that there are now 6-7 companies, including Hertz, offering daily and weekly rentals if you don’t want to share rides in your personal car.</li><li>Back in December, landing in Chicago Midway on a Southwest flight from PHX, I did my usual drill, opened up Uber and Lyft as I got off the plane and checked prices and wait times for a ride home. The prices were about the same, but the wait time… 10 min for Uber, 2 for Lyft. Lyft it is! I hit the Request Ride button, but instead of searching for a driver, I immediately get a 4-digit PIN. I head downstairs and get into a queue that looks a lot like the cab line a few doors over, except this one is run by women in pink Lyft safety vests. But they’re doing the same thing the cab rank workers do -- wave down cars and then point passengers to them. I wait, I dunno, maybe 5 minutes to get into a car, show the guy the PIN on my Lyft app, he enters it into his, and off we go. A bit less hectic than the typical airport rideshare scrum, but again, how is this different than a taxi -- except that I don’t have to ask the driver if his credit card machine works.</li><li>Indeed, on most of my trips over the past year, arriving in PHX or CHO, there typically wouldn’t be a line for a cab, so I’d skip the 5-10 minute wait for Uber or Lyft. Or, returning from Durango with my extra bag of ski paraphernalia, I skipped the schlep up to to the ride-share pick-up zone; I just walked out the door to a waiting cab. And the price difference is shrinking --&nbsp; as we talked about in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/08/13/podcast-154-will-we-still-love-uber-when-the-prices-go-up/\">episode #154</a>, Uber and Lyft have been nudging their rates up to stem their losses.&nbsp;</li><li>This is not to say there aren’t important differences; places where Uber and Lyft bring real value. I was working in New Orleans before Uber set up shop. It was impossible to get a cab anywhere other than between the airport and the French Quarter. Trying to get to and from a restaurant in, say, Mid-City or Uptown was painful -- until Uber showed up.</li><li>It kinda feels like, after all the hype, the battles with regulators, the IPOs, that Uber and Lyft used billions of venture capital dollars to break the medallion monopolies and build some phenomenal taxi dispatch systems. As a traveler, it’s been great for me. For the investors though? Well, I’m glad I skipped those IPOs</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #160</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_160.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #160 — Disappearing Seatback Screens; Shrinking Difference Between Ride-Share and Taxis','','inherit','closed','closed','','2661-revision-v1','','','2020-02-29 23:23:31','2020-03-01 04:23:31','',2661,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/02/29/2661-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2675,1,'2020-02-29 23:39:29','2020-03-01 04:39:29','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\">\n<p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/666C6507-4DEA-4808-9C1B-D3F828805BC8.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2521 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/666C6507-4DEA-4808-9C1B-D3F828805BC8-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a></p><figcaption>The moment of truth</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>Breaking out the mobile rig to record this episode in the Residence Inn in downtown Charlottesville, VA. Summer storms let me test Freebird\'s re-booking service, I wrestle with AT&amp;T so I can use my iPhone\'s dual SIM capability on my trip to Krakow and Budapest, booking more relaxed flight itineraries lets me call an audible when Uber and Lyft prices surge into the stratosphere, which gets me thinking -- will we still love those rideshare companies when they\'re no longer cheaper than taxis?&nbsp; All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_154.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe style=\"border: solid 1px #dedede;\"  src=\"https://app.stitcher.com/splayer/f/18933/63228539\" width=\"220\" height=\"150\" frameborder=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #154: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the Residence Inn just off the Main St pedestrian mall in downtown Charlottesville, VA, leaving behind last episode’s multi-mic, big mixer board, sound-baffled podcast studio to go old-school, back to the TravelCommons roots with the mobile rig in a hotel room. I was thinking about going way back and recording it in the bathroom, but there’s a noisy exhaust fan that I can’t figure out how to turn off. There may be a bit of traffic noise in the background, and maybe even some thunder if the black clouds out my window live up to their potential. This episode will be one of the shorter ones. I’m trying to get it in before Irene and I head out to Krakow and Budapest Thursday night.</li><li>This is my fourth week back in Charlottesville in Chicago, IL. Not much has changed since my last commute back at the end of last year. American Eagle and United Express have a couple of direct regional jets a day from Chicago, and when weather knocks those flights out, Richmond is an hour-and-a-bit drive to the east, or Washington-Dulles is 2 hours north as a last resort. It’s still a 5-gate airport; the bar in the middle still has a surprisingly decent local craft beer selection. The bartender still recognizes me, though she still asks for my ID each time I sit at the bar. So not much has changed at CHO.&nbsp;</li><li>However, my approach to flying there has a bit. I’ve talked about this in prior episodes; I’ve always planned my travel to maximize my time at home, with my family. Given a choice between flying out the night before or taking a 7am flight out the day of, I’d take the latter. The trade-off, though, is travel plans that don’t deal well with travel delays -- a 2-hour flight delay the night before is annoying but won’t make me miss a meeting; that same delay the morning of my meeting may mean I won’t need to take that flight. And I’ve had all that happen with my flights to Charlottesville. So this time, with the kids graduated and moved out, and now that we’ve downsized from a house to a city apartment, my wife thinking I’m underfoot a bit too much, the need to maximize my time at home has… eased a bit. So I’m booking more... resilient itineraries -- flying out the night before, staying over an extra day so I can fly out after lunch, before the summer humidity spools up the afternoon thunderstorms…. Which was paid off last week when thunderstorms in <em>Chicago</em> had my evening flight to CHO posting a 3 hour delay by noon. I had more than enough time to swing my endpoint from CHO to RIC (all done pretty seamlessly thru the United app, which I found pretty impressive). My travel plans may not be as optimized as before… or maybe they are, but for different things, like cutting down on stress and my need to bitch tweet.</li><li> Bridge Music -- One for Me by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/21492 Ft: Haskel </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>We’ve had a thread over a couple of episodes about <a href=\"http://getfreebird.com/\">Freebird</a>, a flight rebooking service. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/podcast-151-traveler-data-leaks-brittany-street-food/\">episode 151</a>, TravelCommons listener Mika Pyyhkala sent in a note about his great experience with them, how they picked up a Southwest flight cancellation and rebooked him on Delta while he was still in the air on his first Southwest leg. Saved him a huge disruption; well worth, he said, the $19/leg fee. I mentioned in the last episode that Amex Travel has been offering free coverage for flights I book on their site with my Platinum card. So Freebird has been covering these last few trips to Charlottesville. I get a text the night before and the morning of my flights assuring me that Freebird is monitoring them. And when last week’s outbound 6pm flight started posting delays at noon, I got texts letting me know they were monitoring the delay, but it hadn’t yet tripped their 4-hour trigger.&nbsp; But knowing that there weren’t going to be many alternative flights to RIC or IAD later in the evening, I didn’t feel comfortable waiting for United to push over 4 hours -- and then cancel -- and so moved myself to their 6pm Richmond flight -- which was on-time -- getting me into my hotel around 10pm after an hour Uber ride. And then, indulging in a bit of travel schadenfreude, I kept tracking the ORD-CHO flight on <a href=\"https://flightaware.com/\">FlightAware</a>. It finally took off at 11pm Central – 5 hrs late -- arriving CHO at 2am Eastern. So it did eventually cross Freebird’s 4-hour threshold, but I’m not sure if it was in time to catch an alternative flight. So, I’m glad I switched it myself. I dunno, maybe tight connections rather than thinly traveled direct routes is the better use case for Freebird</li><li>Also back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/podcast-151-traveler-data-leaks-brittany-street-food/\">episode 151</a>, I talked about trying out the alpha version of augmented reality directions in Google Maps, where you hold up your phone and the display uses the camera to show the streetscape in front of you with the&nbsp; directions -- street names, arrows -- overlaid on the real-time image. I thought it was kinda cool; Irene and the kids were less than impressed. But you can judge for yourself because Google <a href=\"https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/08/google-launches-live-view-ar-walking-directions-for-google-maps/\">announced last week</a> that they’ve widened the feature to a public beta. Give it a try and let me know what you think</li><li>Fast forward one whole episode -- from <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/podcast-151-traveler-data-leaks-brittany-street-food/\">151</a> in May to <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/06/16/podcast-152-overwhelming-travel-new-old-restaurant-trends/\">152</a> in June -- which really was a big jump because, right after recording episode <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/podcast-151-traveler-data-leaks-brittany-street-food/\">151</a>, we moved from the big house in the suburbs to a 60% smaller high-rise apartment on the lakefront -- but in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/06/16/podcast-152-overwhelming-travel-new-old-restaurant-trends/\">episode 152</a>, I talked about having to recalibrate how I’d get to the airport. I had my guy who’d pick me up for a 30-minute ride to ORD or MDW… But no more. Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve started to get a feel for it -- 45-50 minutes to ORD, but figure an hour for weird traffic. And in the morning, figure a 10-minute wait for an Uber or Lyft, and a tab with tip around $40-$45. So this Monday at 5am, I fire up Lyft and Uber while drinking my morning cup of tea to see what’s going on -- $110 on Uber and $60 on Lyft. What the hell is going on? Well, maybe all the drivers are sleeping in, so I shower, get dressed, gather all my worldly belongings, and check again -- $120 on Uber; $57 on Lyft. I hit the Lyft button and wait -- and wait and wait. Then someone accepts the ride, and cancels. Guess he didn’t want to go to ORD. So I fire up <a href=\"https://transitapp.com/\">Transit</a>, my favorite mass transit app. It’s developed in Montreal and does mass transit routing in a huge number of cities in the US and Canada. And in Chicago, it also covers Divvy bike share and constructs Lyft-to-mass transit routing. I fired it up thinking that, if I couldn’t get a Lyft to ORD, then maybe I could get one to the nearest Blue Line L stop and take the subway the rest of the way. But even it couldn’t find a Lyft. But, it showed that, across the street from our flat, a bus will pick me up and, 18 stops later, drop me at the L stop. I got nothing else going -- actually, I did but it would involve waking Irene up at&nbsp; now 5:40am for a ride to ORD, truly a last resort. I wheel my luggage across the street. Four minutes later, the bus shows up. There’s me and another guy -- no problem putting my luggage on the seat next to me. And we make pretty good time -- not a lot of people waiting at bus stops at 6am, and the traffic is pretty clear too. All told, we stop maybe 6 times and have 8 people on the bus at its most crowded.  I had to wait another 5 minutes for the L and, at 6:40, it was more crowded; almost everyone had an ORD badge around their neck -- pilots, flight attendants, ground staff -- except for a few passenger-looking folk like me. All told, it took me about an hour -- maybe 10 minutes longer than Uber and Lyft were quoting. But at $2.50 vs. $60 or $120, it seemed like I made out on the deal.</li><li>Also in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/06/16/podcast-152-overwhelming-travel-new-old-restaurant-trends/\">episode 152</a>, I talked about “earning and burning” frequent traveler points rather than saving them because airlines and hotels keep playing with redemption levels and rules that reduce the value of the points. Jim McDonough tweeted me with a contra view -<ul><li>Regarding frequent flyer miles and how they don\'t appreciate over time - I still like to keep some around in case we need to travel for family emergency situations. The walk-up fare does not compete with the $25 charge to book a frequent flyer mile ticket last minute.</li></ul></li><li>Jim, that’s a good point, but I wonder if that strategy still works as more airlines move from fixed awards schedules to dynamic point pricing -- Southwest, Delta, and soon United -- where point price for a flight climes as remaining ticket prices do. Does it still make sense to pay with points?</li><li>As I said earlier, Irene and I are heading out Thursday night for a weekend in Krakow, Poland and then heading down to Budapest for a mix of touring and visits with Irene’s family. So, I thought this was as good a time as any to try out <a href=\"https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT209044\">my iPhone’s dual SIM capability.</a> Up to now, my usual procedure is to transfer my US AT&amp;T SIM to an old HTC One phone and then put my UK EE SIM in my iPhone Xs (usually sometime in flight in that panic drill between them clearing the breakfast tray and packing everything up for final descent) if I’m going to an EU country or when I pick one up after we land. I do this because local data is <em>hugely</em> cheaper than an AT&amp;T international plan - the EE pay-as-you-go plan I got is £10, or $12 with this week’s Brexit exchange rate discount, for 3 GB of data, 100 minutes of voice, and unlimited texts. But I still want my US number to ring thru in case someone back home needs to reach me and doesn’t know I’m out of the country. I don’t carry both phones with me, though. I have the iPhone with me during the day, using the local SIM to run Google Maps and the like. The HTC stays in the hotel room and I check it for messages when we get back at night.</li><li>But with its dual SIM capabilities, I should be able to do this with just my iPhone. However, the iPhone has only one physical SIM slot; the second is an internal eSIM, like the ones Apple uses in their cellular Apple Watch. So to make this work, I had to get AT&amp;T to transfer my US number from its physical SIM to the eSIM in the phone. My first stop was the local AT&amp;T store. I explained to the store guy what I wanted to do. He looked at me for a moment and said, “Uh, I’m new; I don’t know how to do that. But I can give you an eSIM card if you want.” OK, that’s a start. He riffled around his desk drawer. “I don’t have one here. I’ll have to go in the back. But I’m the only one here today, so you’ll have to go outside so I can lock up while I’m in the back.” Interesting. I walked down the street to grab a bite rather than idle outside the door. I came back. He handed me the card, “Here you go, but I don’t know if this will work…” I went home and hit the AT&amp;T web site. I spelunked around the site until I found the chat link and fired it up. The person on the other end knew what needed to be done. I gave her a few numbers off the card, then pointed the camera at the card’s QR code and it added to plan to my iPhone. Now, the chat agent said that they’ll have to do a bit of provisioning at the back end. She’d text me when it was done. Irene and I went out to dinner; no text and no activation. So the next morning, I hit chat again and this time stuck with the guy until the provisioning was complete. Then I pulled out the AT&amp;T SIM and put in the EE SIM, and immediately got a text from EE telling me their US roaming charges. I also got a whole new set of selections under the Cellular section under Settings. Which line did I want to use for voice, for data, for iMessage and FaceTime. I spent some time on Apple’s FAQ pages trying to figure out which scenario works for me. My guess is that it’ll take me a bit of trial and error -- and self-inflected AT&amp;T international charges -- to really figure this out.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com. </li><li>Bridge Music —  &nbsp; Fall to pieces - Silence by mika (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mika/24945 Ft: Colab      </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Will We Still Love Uber When The Prices Go Up?</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><a href=\"https://www.reuters.com/article/us-lyft-results/lyft-sees-ride-hailing-price-war-easing-sending-uber-and-lyft-shares-up-idUSKCN1UX2BQ\">Lyft’s chief financial officer Brian Roberts said, during last week’s earnings call, that pricing was becoming “more rational.”</a> “Rational pricing” is CFO-speak for “more predictably higher.” <a href=\"https://www.marketwatch.com/story/lyft-and-uber-are-giving-investors-what-they-want-which-is-bad-for-the-rest-of-us-2019-08-08\">Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, during his earnings call, said, “We and Lyft are big-time competitors here and have been for some period of time, but for now we’re seeing, generally, category positions that are stable. We are focused on improving profitability in this market.”</a>&nbsp; Which is CEO-speak for “we’re no longer going to slash prices to buy market share.”</li><li>We all knew this time would come -- at least the rational ones. Uber lost $5.2 billion in the second quarter while the smaller Lyft lost a mere $644 million last quarter. Investors are going to let you torch large piles of cash for only so long. Hence the topic question -- will we stay with Uber and Lyft even when they’re not a bargain anymore?</li><li>I’ve been talking about this with frequent travelers I know, or sit next to at bars, or bump into waiting for an Uber at O’Hare. One school of thought is that the Uber/Lyft experience is better than your typical cab, so even at the same price, you’d still order an Uber. You can order it on your phone rather than running into the street, trying to flag down a passing cab. Indeed, I’ve always said that, for me, Uber’s prime use case is getting a ride from midtown Manhattan to LGA at the end of the day a somewhat sane experience. Before Uber, I’d be practically dancing into 5th Ave, hiding my luggage behind a trash can because if a cabbie saw you wanted to go to LGA, they’d accelerate by you. I tried the cab company’s iPhone app last time I was in New York. It failed miserably.</li><li>Adding Uber and Lyft drivers to the transit mix means you can get a car ride from somewhere outside the usual downtown and tourist spots. I remember pre-Uber New Orleans, getting a cab anywhere other than between the airport and the French Quarter was near impossible. One night for dinner, we decided to go to a Mid-City restaurant, <a href=\"http://toupsmeatery.com/\">Toups Meatery</a>. Phenomenal place. The owner, Isaac Toups, later made it to the finals of the <em>Top Chef </em>cooking show. He didn’t win, but was voted “fan favorite”. And his food was our favorite too. The only problem -- getting a cab back to the Sheraton on Canal St from his Mid-City location. The hostess called 3 cab companies and we waited 20 minutes for a 15-minute ride. And that driver told us, “Yup, all most cab drivers want to do is make the easy money, driving between the airport and the hotels”</li><li>There’s also fare predictability -- you see the price to get from, say, downtown Chicago to O’Hare before committing to the ride. No more meter anxiety, watching the number run up in traffic. And the accompanying “Will I have enough cash to pay” or “Will this guy’s credit card machine work?” anxiety. With Uber and Lyft drivers following GPS apps, there’s no more “am I being taken the long way around to run up the meter” anxiety, or depending on your cab driver’s knowledge to take the fast way, or having them punt it to you with the “bridge or tunnel” question I often get from LGA cabs. The technology helps avoid a lot of the bad experiences we’ve had with taxi cab rides.</li><li>I used to say that Uber and Lyft cars are nicer, but their bar has slipped as they’re scrambling for drivers in a full-employment economy. An Uber I took last week was missing the door armrest; a Lyft that Irene took had the front right quarter-panel held on with duct tape. These are exceptions, though a bit more common that a couple of years ago. But they’re still a damn sight better than the beat-to-hell Baltimore cabs that would sit at the cab ranks in the Inner Harbor. I only did that once, because the cab rank was right outside the client’s building and I was late leaving for the airport. The back seat was full of old newspapers and other crap, and there was no air conditioning -- on a July afternoon. After that, I’d stand there, looking at the cabs, while waiting 5 minutes for an Uber to show up.</li><li>The place I most often take a cab rather than waiting for an Uber is the airport. And here, it’s not really about price, it’s convenience. The cab ranks are usually right at the terminal exit, while the rideshare pickup spot can be an Easter Egg hunt (Vegas), a 15-minute walk to the back 40 (Atlanta) or a confusing scrum of screaming traffic cops (Chicago Midway). Vegas and LGA especially -- catching a cab is so much easier than a rideshare. Here at CHO also -- it’s a flat rate into town that’s about the same as Uber and Lyft and the cabs are in decent shape, so if one’s there, there’s no reason to wait.</li><li>And I could be wrong, but it feels like the pricing discussion is mostly a US thing. <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/podcast-150-travel-interruptus/\">In Paris last Spring</a>, none of the Ubers were “rideshares”; they were all black car livery companies with professional drivers. Near as I could tell, Uber was just another dispatch system for them. In Lisbon a few years back, I couldn’t tell if they were true rideshares, but the pricing was the same as taxis, and there were more taxis so less wait. We took the path of least resistance and hailed cabs.</li><li>The rough consensus of my completely unrepresentative polling was - ride sharing got traction because it was cheaper, but now the technology gives such a better experience that I’d even pay a premium over a taxi -- but I wouldn’t want to tell Lyft or Uber that. But what they said on those earnings calls, I think they already know that.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #154</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_154.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<p><!--EndFragment--></p>','Podcast #154 — Will We Still Love Uber When The Prices Go Up?','','inherit','closed','closed','','2508-revision-v1','','','2020-02-29 23:39:29','2020-03-01 04:39:29','',2508,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/02/29/2508-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2676,1,'2020-02-29 23:44:14','2020-03-01 04:44:14','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\">\n<p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/666C6507-4DEA-4808-9C1B-D3F828805BC8.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2521 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/666C6507-4DEA-4808-9C1B-D3F828805BC8-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a></p><figcaption>The moment of truth</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>Breaking out the mobile rig to record this episode in the Residence Inn in downtown Charlottesville, VA. Summer storms let me test Freebird\'s re-booking service, I wrestle with AT&amp;T so I can use my iPhone\'s dual SIM capability on my trip to Krakow and Budapest, booking more relaxed flight itineraries lets me call an audible when Uber and Lyft prices surge into the stratosphere, which gets me thinking -- will we still love those rideshare companies when they\'re no longer cheaper than taxis?&nbsp; All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_154.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_154.mp3\"]\n<p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #154: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the Residence Inn just off the Main St pedestrian mall in downtown Charlottesville, VA, leaving behind last episode’s multi-mic, big mixer board, sound-baffled podcast studio to go old-school, back to the TravelCommons roots with the mobile rig in a hotel room. I was thinking about going way back and recording it in the bathroom, but there’s a noisy exhaust fan that I can’t figure out how to turn off. There may be a bit of traffic noise in the background, and maybe even some thunder if the black clouds out my window live up to their potential. This episode will be one of the shorter ones. I’m trying to get it in before Irene and I head out to Krakow and Budapest Thursday night.</li><li>This is my fourth week back in Charlottesville in Chicago, IL. Not much has changed since my last commute back at the end of last year. American Eagle and United Express have a couple of direct regional jets a day from Chicago, and when weather knocks those flights out, Richmond is an hour-and-a-bit drive to the east, or Washington-Dulles is 2 hours north as a last resort. It’s still a 5-gate airport; the bar in the middle still has a surprisingly decent local craft beer selection. The bartender still recognizes me, though she still asks for my ID each time I sit at the bar. So not much has changed at CHO.&nbsp;</li><li>However, my approach to flying there has a bit. I’ve talked about this in prior episodes; I’ve always planned my travel to maximize my time at home, with my family. Given a choice between flying out the night before or taking a 7am flight out the day of, I’d take the latter. The trade-off, though, is travel plans that don’t deal well with travel delays -- a 2-hour flight delay the night before is annoying but won’t make me miss a meeting; that same delay the morning of my meeting may mean I won’t need to take that flight. And I’ve had all that happen with my flights to Charlottesville. So this time, with the kids graduated and moved out, and now that we’ve downsized from a house to a city apartment, my wife thinking I’m underfoot a bit too much, the need to maximize my time at home has… eased a bit. So I’m booking more... resilient itineraries -- flying out the night before, staying over an extra day so I can fly out after lunch, before the summer humidity spools up the afternoon thunderstorms…. Which was paid off last week when thunderstorms in <em>Chicago</em> had my evening flight to CHO posting a 3 hour delay by noon. I had more than enough time to swing my endpoint from CHO to RIC (all done pretty seamlessly thru the United app, which I found pretty impressive). My travel plans may not be as optimized as before… or maybe they are, but for different things, like cutting down on stress and my need to bitch tweet.</li><li> Bridge Music -- One for Me by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/21492 Ft: Haskel </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>We’ve had a thread over a couple of episodes about <a href=\"http://getfreebird.com/\">Freebird</a>, a flight rebooking service. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/podcast-151-traveler-data-leaks-brittany-street-food/\">episode 151</a>, TravelCommons listener Mika Pyyhkala sent in a note about his great experience with them, how they picked up a Southwest flight cancellation and rebooked him on Delta while he was still in the air on his first Southwest leg. Saved him a huge disruption; well worth, he said, the $19/leg fee. I mentioned in the last episode that Amex Travel has been offering free coverage for flights I book on their site with my Platinum card. So Freebird has been covering these last few trips to Charlottesville. I get a text the night before and the morning of my flights assuring me that Freebird is monitoring them. And when last week’s outbound 6pm flight started posting delays at noon, I got texts letting me know they were monitoring the delay, but it hadn’t yet tripped their 4-hour trigger.&nbsp; But knowing that there weren’t going to be many alternative flights to RIC or IAD later in the evening, I didn’t feel comfortable waiting for United to push over 4 hours -- and then cancel -- and so moved myself to their 6pm Richmond flight -- which was on-time -- getting me into my hotel around 10pm after an hour Uber ride. And then, indulging in a bit of travel schadenfreude, I kept tracking the ORD-CHO flight on <a href=\"https://flightaware.com/\">FlightAware</a>. It finally took off at 11pm Central – 5 hrs late -- arriving CHO at 2am Eastern. So it did eventually cross Freebird’s 4-hour threshold, but I’m not sure if it was in time to catch an alternative flight. So, I’m glad I switched it myself. I dunno, maybe tight connections rather than thinly traveled direct routes is the better use case for Freebird</li><li>Also back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/podcast-151-traveler-data-leaks-brittany-street-food/\">episode 151</a>, I talked about trying out the alpha version of augmented reality directions in Google Maps, where you hold up your phone and the display uses the camera to show the streetscape in front of you with the&nbsp; directions -- street names, arrows -- overlaid on the real-time image. I thought it was kinda cool; Irene and the kids were less than impressed. But you can judge for yourself because Google <a href=\"https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/08/google-launches-live-view-ar-walking-directions-for-google-maps/\">announced last week</a> that they’ve widened the feature to a public beta. Give it a try and let me know what you think</li><li>Fast forward one whole episode -- from <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/podcast-151-traveler-data-leaks-brittany-street-food/\">151</a> in May to <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/06/16/podcast-152-overwhelming-travel-new-old-restaurant-trends/\">152</a> in June -- which really was a big jump because, right after recording episode <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/podcast-151-traveler-data-leaks-brittany-street-food/\">151</a>, we moved from the big house in the suburbs to a 60% smaller high-rise apartment on the lakefront -- but in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/06/16/podcast-152-overwhelming-travel-new-old-restaurant-trends/\">episode 152</a>, I talked about having to recalibrate how I’d get to the airport. I had my guy who’d pick me up for a 30-minute ride to ORD or MDW… But no more. Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve started to get a feel for it -- 45-50 minutes to ORD, but figure an hour for weird traffic. And in the morning, figure a 10-minute wait for an Uber or Lyft, and a tab with tip around $40-$45. So this Monday at 5am, I fire up Lyft and Uber while drinking my morning cup of tea to see what’s going on -- $110 on Uber and $60 on Lyft. What the hell is going on? Well, maybe all the drivers are sleeping in, so I shower, get dressed, gather all my worldly belongings, and check again -- $120 on Uber; $57 on Lyft. I hit the Lyft button and wait -- and wait and wait. Then someone accepts the ride, and cancels. Guess he didn’t want to go to ORD. So I fire up <a href=\"https://transitapp.com/\">Transit</a>, my favorite mass transit app. It’s developed in Montreal and does mass transit routing in a huge number of cities in the US and Canada. And in Chicago, it also covers Divvy bike share and constructs Lyft-to-mass transit routing. I fired it up thinking that, if I couldn’t get a Lyft to ORD, then maybe I could get one to the nearest Blue Line L stop and take the subway the rest of the way. But even it couldn’t find a Lyft. But, it showed that, across the street from our flat, a bus will pick me up and, 18 stops later, drop me at the L stop. I got nothing else going -- actually, I did but it would involve waking Irene up at&nbsp; now 5:40am for a ride to ORD, truly a last resort. I wheel my luggage across the street. Four minutes later, the bus shows up. There’s me and another guy -- no problem putting my luggage on the seat next to me. And we make pretty good time -- not a lot of people waiting at bus stops at 6am, and the traffic is pretty clear too. All told, we stop maybe 6 times and have 8 people on the bus at its most crowded.  I had to wait another 5 minutes for the L and, at 6:40, it was more crowded; almost everyone had an ORD badge around their neck -- pilots, flight attendants, ground staff -- except for a few passenger-looking folk like me. All told, it took me about an hour -- maybe 10 minutes longer than Uber and Lyft were quoting. But at $2.50 vs. $60 or $120, it seemed like I made out on the deal.</li><li>Also in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/06/16/podcast-152-overwhelming-travel-new-old-restaurant-trends/\">episode 152</a>, I talked about “earning and burning” frequent traveler points rather than saving them because airlines and hotels keep playing with redemption levels and rules that reduce the value of the points. Jim McDonough tweeted me with a contra view -<ul><li>Regarding frequent flyer miles and how they don\'t appreciate over time - I still like to keep some around in case we need to travel for family emergency situations. The walk-up fare does not compete with the $25 charge to book a frequent flyer mile ticket last minute.</li></ul></li><li>Jim, that’s a good point, but I wonder if that strategy still works as more airlines move from fixed awards schedules to dynamic point pricing -- Southwest, Delta, and soon United -- where point price for a flight climes as remaining ticket prices do. Does it still make sense to pay with points?</li><li>As I said earlier, Irene and I are heading out Thursday night for a weekend in Krakow, Poland and then heading down to Budapest for a mix of touring and visits with Irene’s family. So, I thought this was as good a time as any to try out <a href=\"https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT209044\">my iPhone’s dual SIM capability.</a> Up to now, my usual procedure is to transfer my US AT&amp;T SIM to an old HTC One phone and then put my UK EE SIM in my iPhone Xs (usually sometime in flight in that panic drill between them clearing the breakfast tray and packing everything up for final descent) if I’m going to an EU country or when I pick one up after we land. I do this because local data is <em>hugely</em> cheaper than an AT&amp;T international plan - the EE pay-as-you-go plan I got is £10, or $12 with this week’s Brexit exchange rate discount, for 3 GB of data, 100 minutes of voice, and unlimited texts. But I still want my US number to ring thru in case someone back home needs to reach me and doesn’t know I’m out of the country. I don’t carry both phones with me, though. I have the iPhone with me during the day, using the local SIM to run Google Maps and the like. The HTC stays in the hotel room and I check it for messages when we get back at night.</li><li>But with its dual SIM capabilities, I should be able to do this with just my iPhone. However, the iPhone has only one physical SIM slot; the second is an internal eSIM, like the ones Apple uses in their cellular Apple Watch. So to make this work, I had to get AT&amp;T to transfer my US number from its physical SIM to the eSIM in the phone. My first stop was the local AT&amp;T store. I explained to the store guy what I wanted to do. He looked at me for a moment and said, “Uh, I’m new; I don’t know how to do that. But I can give you an eSIM card if you want.” OK, that’s a start. He riffled around his desk drawer. “I don’t have one here. I’ll have to go in the back. But I’m the only one here today, so you’ll have to go outside so I can lock up while I’m in the back.” Interesting. I walked down the street to grab a bite rather than idle outside the door. I came back. He handed me the card, “Here you go, but I don’t know if this will work…” I went home and hit the AT&amp;T web site. I spelunked around the site until I found the chat link and fired it up. The person on the other end knew what needed to be done. I gave her a few numbers off the card, then pointed the camera at the card’s QR code and it added to plan to my iPhone. Now, the chat agent said that they’ll have to do a bit of provisioning at the back end. She’d text me when it was done. Irene and I went out to dinner; no text and no activation. So the next morning, I hit chat again and this time stuck with the guy until the provisioning was complete. Then I pulled out the AT&amp;T SIM and put in the EE SIM, and immediately got a text from EE telling me their US roaming charges. I also got a whole new set of selections under the Cellular section under Settings. Which line did I want to use for voice, for data, for iMessage and FaceTime. I spent some time on Apple’s FAQ pages trying to figure out which scenario works for me. My guess is that it’ll take me a bit of trial and error -- and self-inflected AT&amp;T international charges -- to really figure this out.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com. </li><li>Bridge Music —  &nbsp; Fall to pieces - Silence by mika (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mika/24945 Ft: Colab      </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Will We Still Love Uber When The Prices Go Up?</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><a href=\"https://www.reuters.com/article/us-lyft-results/lyft-sees-ride-hailing-price-war-easing-sending-uber-and-lyft-shares-up-idUSKCN1UX2BQ\">Lyft’s chief financial officer Brian Roberts said, during last week’s earnings call, that pricing was becoming “more rational.”</a> “Rational pricing” is CFO-speak for “more predictably higher.” <a href=\"https://www.marketwatch.com/story/lyft-and-uber-are-giving-investors-what-they-want-which-is-bad-for-the-rest-of-us-2019-08-08\">Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, during his earnings call, said, “We and Lyft are big-time competitors here and have been for some period of time, but for now we’re seeing, generally, category positions that are stable. We are focused on improving profitability in this market.”</a>&nbsp; Which is CEO-speak for “we’re no longer going to slash prices to buy market share.”</li><li>We all knew this time would come -- at least the rational ones. Uber lost $5.2 billion in the second quarter while the smaller Lyft lost a mere $644 million last quarter. Investors are going to let you torch large piles of cash for only so long. Hence the topic question -- will we stay with Uber and Lyft even when they’re not a bargain anymore?</li><li>I’ve been talking about this with frequent travelers I know, or sit next to at bars, or bump into waiting for an Uber at O’Hare. One school of thought is that the Uber/Lyft experience is better than your typical cab, so even at the same price, you’d still order an Uber. You can order it on your phone rather than running into the street, trying to flag down a passing cab. Indeed, I’ve always said that, for me, Uber’s prime use case is getting a ride from midtown Manhattan to LGA at the end of the day a somewhat sane experience. Before Uber, I’d be practically dancing into 5th Ave, hiding my luggage behind a trash can because if a cabbie saw you wanted to go to LGA, they’d accelerate by you. I tried the cab company’s iPhone app last time I was in New York. It failed miserably.</li><li>Adding Uber and Lyft drivers to the transit mix means you can get a car ride from somewhere outside the usual downtown and tourist spots. I remember pre-Uber New Orleans, getting a cab anywhere other than between the airport and the French Quarter was near impossible. One night for dinner, we decided to go to a Mid-City restaurant, <a href=\"http://toupsmeatery.com/\">Toups Meatery</a>. Phenomenal place. The owner, Isaac Toups, later made it to the finals of the <em>Top Chef </em>cooking show. He didn’t win, but was voted “fan favorite”. And his food was our favorite too. The only problem -- getting a cab back to the Sheraton on Canal St from his Mid-City location. The hostess called 3 cab companies and we waited 20 minutes for a 15-minute ride. And that driver told us, “Yup, all most cab drivers want to do is make the easy money, driving between the airport and the hotels”</li><li>There’s also fare predictability -- you see the price to get from, say, downtown Chicago to O’Hare before committing to the ride. No more meter anxiety, watching the number run up in traffic. And the accompanying “Will I have enough cash to pay” or “Will this guy’s credit card machine work?” anxiety. With Uber and Lyft drivers following GPS apps, there’s no more “am I being taken the long way around to run up the meter” anxiety, or depending on your cab driver’s knowledge to take the fast way, or having them punt it to you with the “bridge or tunnel” question I often get from LGA cabs. The technology helps avoid a lot of the bad experiences we’ve had with taxi cab rides.</li><li>I used to say that Uber and Lyft cars are nicer, but their bar has slipped as they’re scrambling for drivers in a full-employment economy. An Uber I took last week was missing the door armrest; a Lyft that Irene took had the front right quarter-panel held on with duct tape. These are exceptions, though a bit more common that a couple of years ago. But they’re still a damn sight better than the beat-to-hell Baltimore cabs that would sit at the cab ranks in the Inner Harbor. I only did that once, because the cab rank was right outside the client’s building and I was late leaving for the airport. The back seat was full of old newspapers and other crap, and there was no air conditioning -- on a July afternoon. After that, I’d stand there, looking at the cabs, while waiting 5 minutes for an Uber to show up.</li><li>The place I most often take a cab rather than waiting for an Uber is the airport. And here, it’s not really about price, it’s convenience. The cab ranks are usually right at the terminal exit, while the rideshare pickup spot can be an Easter Egg hunt (Vegas), a 15-minute walk to the back 40 (Atlanta) or a confusing scrum of screaming traffic cops (Chicago Midway). Vegas and LGA especially -- catching a cab is so much easier than a rideshare. Here at CHO also -- it’s a flat rate into town that’s about the same as Uber and Lyft and the cabs are in decent shape, so if one’s there, there’s no reason to wait.</li><li>And I could be wrong, but it feels like the pricing discussion is mostly a US thing. <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/podcast-150-travel-interruptus/\">In Paris last Spring</a>, none of the Ubers were “rideshares”; they were all black car livery companies with professional drivers. Near as I could tell, Uber was just another dispatch system for them. In Lisbon a few years back, I couldn’t tell if they were true rideshares, but the pricing was the same as taxis, and there were more taxis so less wait. We took the path of least resistance and hailed cabs.</li><li>The rough consensus of my completely unrepresentative polling was - ride sharing got traction because it was cheaper, but now the technology gives such a better experience that I’d even pay a premium over a taxi -- but I wouldn’t want to tell Lyft or Uber that. But what they said on those earnings calls, I think they already know that.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #154</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_154.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<p><!--EndFragment--></p>','Podcast #154 — Will We Still Love Uber When The Prices Go Up?','','inherit','closed','closed','','2508-revision-v1','','','2020-02-29 23:44:14','2020-03-01 04:44:14','',2508,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/02/29/2508-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2680,1,'2020-03-21 23:40:00','2020-03-22 04:40:00','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/738DE79A-D927-423E-A890-569A5F3A0AB1-scaled.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2682 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/738DE79A-D927-423E-A890-569A5F3A0AB1-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a><figcaption>You have reached your destination</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>Things started out well, skipping out on Chicago winter for a drive down to Key West. But then last week, coronavirus hit the US and everything unraveled. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_161.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #161: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you hunkered down in the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois, trying to figure out exactly what the governor’s “shelter-in-place” directive means. Not a lot of travel since the last episode, and that’s not just because of coronavirus. No business travel booked, so it was just one trip in the back half of February to visit some friends who are snowbirding in Key West, Florida. 80 degrees and sunny vs. 30 degrees and grey skies in Chicago -- tough duty. Our friends rented a nice house up a dead end street in the Historic District, just a couple of blocks off Duval Street. They had it for two months, Feb through the end of March, but left early, giving up their last 2 weeks of sunny weather to drive back to Chicago because they’re afraid hotels will be closing along their route home.&nbsp;</li><li>Hadn’t planned any travel in March, but watched our April plans dissolve as Covid-19 spread. First, a friend from Poland canceled his wedding in Sedona, AZ shortly after the US announced the 30-day travel ban for Europeans. While their wedding date was past the 30 days, they figured this was just the start -- which it was. Over the next 5 days, travel bans started popping up across Europe. We joked to ourselves, “Lucky timing -- first time in 4 years we’re not doing Spring Break in Europe”, opting instead for some wine tasting in Howell Mountain and Napa Valley. Until the next day when California locked everything down, closing everything including restaurants and wineries…</li><li>For some families, kids home from school and mom or dad off the road and working from home -- the forced family togetherness is adding to the stress. I was talking to a friend this week -- “I’m usually on the road 75% of the time, and the kids are in school or sports. After 2 days of this, my wife laid down the rules -- my son is in the basement, my wife and daughter are on the second floor, I’m on the third floor, and the first floor with the kitchen is neutral territory -- you can pass through, but you can’t claim table or counter space there.” Last time I checked in with him, everyone was still alive -- that is, they hadn’t killed each other yet.</li><li>But I’m nothing if not an optimist, so in the midst of this week’s unraveling, I found a deal on a direct American Air flight from ORD to Barcelona -- 8½ hr 787 flight -- so I booked it -- 2 weeks in Barcelona at the end of September. I don’t know what we’ll do yet or where we’ll stay, but I’m already looking forward to it.</li><li>Bridge Music --  <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/snowflake/46164\">A Foolish Game</a> by Snowflake (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/snowflake/46164 Ft: Admiral Bob  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Steve Frick, a longtime TravelCommons listener and Untappd buddy who also does a podcast, <a href=\"http://hypeamerica.com/back-and-gone-again\">Travel Stories from Back and Gone Again</a>, took some time to record and send in an audio comment on last month’s episode -<ul><li>Gotta love the text-to-speech robot voice. Steve, would’ve been great to see that selfie on your Twitter feed. Also, check out the show notes for a link to Steve’s podcast</li></ul></li><li>Darren Mak hit me up on Twitter<ul><li>“Hey Mark,&nbsp; just listened to Travel Commons <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/09/20/podcast-155-rj-delays-street-food-in-poland-and-hungary/\">episode 155</a> on my last flight... board my next one which is a Delta MD88. Look out the window and see this... thanks for putting that in my head buddy!”&nbsp;</li><li>From the picture on his tweet, you can see he’s sitting in the window seat of an MD-88 just in front of the engine cowl. In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/09/20/podcast-155-rj-delays-street-food-in-poland-and-hungary/\">episode 155</a>, we talked about American Airlines’ retirement of their MD-80’s. I mentioned that when I ended up in a seat like Darren’s, my mind would sometimes wander -- if the engine next to my head blows up, will the shrapnel blow out or blow into the cabin. I never heard of such a catastrophic failure on an MD-80 -- but that didn’t keep me from wondering. And now, Darren can’t keep from wondering. Sorry about that, Darren. You won’t be able to un-think that. I’m guessing, though, that those MD’s were the first planes Delta parked as air traffic cratered and will be the last to return -- if they ever do. Savor that pic...</li></ul></li><li>And for our UK subscribers, a shout out to another TravelCommons listener and Untappd friend Rob Cheshire who launched <a href=\"https://thisweekincraft.beer/\">This Week in Craft.Beer</a>, a weekly newsletter covering the UK craft beer scene. He’s four issues in and is on a good roll. We’re thinking about heading over to the UK for Thanksgiving and the taproom directory in Rob’s newsletter will be key to planning that trip. I also love that he’s using a .Beer domain name. Check out the show notes for a link.</li><li>I think I’ve mentioned in a past episode that I’ve switched my carryon from a Timbuk 2 backpack to a Timbuk 2 messenger bag. Digitizing means carrying less physical stuff; the backpack was feeling half empty, so I switched to the smaller messenger bag. I like it except for one thing -- it’ll only hold a short water bottle. The big 20oz’er my daughter gave me for Christmas? Fits great in the backpack side pocket, but is too tall for the messenger bag. I played around with a lot of water bottles, but the best one has turned out to be a 500 ml Evian bottle. Now I know that single use plastic is a bad thing, but I can get a week’s use out of one Evian bottle. Until I fill it up in the gym or the concierge lounge the morning before my flight home and forget about it -- until the TSA person pulls it out of my bag on the other side of security and asks me, a bit sarcastically, if I want to go back and check it in my luggage. Yeah, no -- just pitch it. Which is why I can’t have nice things -- like a $35 teakwood S’well bottle. Instead, I walk down the terminal and just spend $3.50 for another bottle of Evian.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>For my trip to Key West, I got back to an old habit of reading some non-guidebook books -- either fiction or non-fiction -- about my destination before going. Before driving down the Overseas Highway, I read <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2QzesjI\"><em>Last Train to Paradise</em></a> about the incredible effort that went into building a railroad line to Key West 100 years ago -- that was later repurposed for the first iteration of the highway, and then read Hemingway’s <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3a72oOv\"><em>To Have and Have Not</em></a> because, well,&nbsp; it’s Hemingway and it’s about Key West, and so you just have to. I used to do this a lot more. I started when I read Paul Theroux’s <a href=\"https://amzn.to/398SvhE\"><em>Kingdom by the Sea</em></a> before my first trip to the UK back in 1985. I read John Lukacs’ history <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2xNS9A7\"><em>Budapest 1900</em></a> before my first trip to Hungary in 1989, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3a7KDhX\"><em>Watermark</em></a> by Joseph Brodsky before a trip to Venice, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/394bji3\"><em>His Bloody Project</em></a> by Grahame Burnet before going to Scotland’s Western Highlands. As you’d guess, none of these were about what to do or see, but instead they gave some context about the place -- even the fiction books. Gives a bit of balance to the go-here/see-that stuff in guidebooks and web sites.&nbsp; Something new for this trip -- a Spotify playlist of Jimmy Buffet tunes from those 1970’s Key West albums -- <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2whAqRs\"><em>Living And Dying In ¾ Time</em></a>, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2vG6wG8\"><em>Havana Daydreamin\'</em></a> -- for some additional context for that 3 hour drive down through the Keys.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com. </li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/THE_CONCEPT_OF_ENERGY/55008\">ABANDONED BUTTERFLIES</a> by THE_CONCEPT_OF_ENERGY (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/THE_CONCEPT_OF_ENERGY/55008 Ft: Doxent Zsigmond, Snowflake</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>New Crisis, Old Question</strong> </h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I’m not gonna try to do any hot takes on what this whole coronavirus/Covid-19/ social distancing experience means because: a) I hate the whole “insta-punditry” that social media has spawned; and b) there are so many unknowns and things are changing so fast that any attempt at meaningful analysis right now won’t age very well. Indeed, I’ve had to re-write this episode 3 times now. I gotta get it recorded before things change and I have to re-do it again.</li><li>At first, it felt like the Black Monday crash of 1987 (which, I hate to admit, I’m old enough to have experienced) or Sept 11, 2001 were good comparison points -- significant, sharp, scary events that came out of nowhere with no warning, and when we were in it, felt like a free fall with no bottom in sight. But after a week or so, even though the stock market was still down or airports and airplanes were still empty, we could see a path to the other side -- maybe not turn-by-turn directions, but at least it felt like we could point ourselves in the general direction. But with this, we’re, what 2-3 weeks in?, and it still feels like we’re in that free fall; we don’t know where the bottom is, let alone the direction to get out.</li><li>I remember, after Sept 11th and the 2008 Great Recession, people saying “everything has changed” and wondering if travel would rebound, if people would get on planes again in the same numbers. And it did and then some -- though the growth has been driven more by leisure travelers than the road warriors. But the travel industry makes its money off the frequent business traveler, and that question pops up again -- will they come back? Because it’s a bit different this time. In 2001, remote work options were pretty much just AOL or Yahoo instant messaging. Video was limited to special rooms with ISDN lines; Skype didn’t launch for another 2 years. In 2008, things were a bit better, but we’re a few months after the second version of the iPhone is released (the iPhone 3G), WhatsApp doesn’t launch for another year, and Slack doesn’t show up for another 5. But now 12 years on, we have bandwidth, we have tools. Last fall, we had <em><a href=\"https://www.ft.com/content/5c635430-1dbc-11ea-97df-cc63de1d73f4\">flygskam</a></em>  -- flight shaming -- hit the mainstream, and now the Covid-19 pandemic that’s just about shut down international air travel. Were we ready to step back from business travel and the coronavirus is just the forcing function?</li><li>I’m coming up on the 35th anniversary of my first business flight, and in that time, I’ve known maybe a handful of guys (and they were all men) who went out of their way to do more business travel; when offered the choice between a conference call or a plane trip, they chose the plane trip. The vast majority got on the plane or the train or behind the wheel because that’s what they needed to do to get the job done -- to close a deal, to do a project, to work with an employee. As remote tools get better and get more ingrained in the culture, the ability to get tasks done remotely increases. But we are social animals. And for all the data and processes, most business is about relationships. And as long as that’s true, we’ll want to meet people face-to-face -- over a coffee or a beer or a meal -- once we finally touch bottom after this coronavirus free fall and can feel safe sitting next to each other again.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/49674\">H2O</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/49674  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Driving Down to Key West</strong> </h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Back to the pre-lock down days of February, it was the first time I’d been to Key West. We decided to drive down, run the whole <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overseas_Highway\">Overseas Highway</a>, the 113-mile stretch of US 1 from Homestead, south of Miami, to Key West. We flew into FLL because -- well, it’s a bit less of a zoo parade than MIA. We landed, walked straight out of the terminal, across the street and into the rental car center -- no shuttle bus ride to the back-40. RSW is the same on the Gulf side. There are damn few on-site rental sites left, and so I appreciate them when I can. Walking down the Hertz Five-Star aisle with Irene (I fell out of top-tier President’s Circle a few years back; too many in-city clients where Uber and Lyft were more convenient), I see a bunch of <a href=\"https://www.hyundaiusa.com/us/en/vehicles/kona/gallery\">Hyundai Konas</a> -- which is a new model for me, it’s a subcompact SUV -- a few Chevy Malibus and, as always, the requisite bunch of Nissan Altimas. I do my normal drill -- looking for non-beat up cars (so I don’t have to argue about damage when I return it) and low mileage (so it won’t break down during the rental). Irene, she’s looking for a cute color. Lucky for us, the car that was at the intersection of all those criteria was right in front of us -- a Surf Blue Hyundai Kona with 126 miles on the odometer. We threw our luggage in, dialed up Key West on Google Maps on Car Play, and pulled out -- into a 15-minute line to get out of the Hertz lot. Somehow that partnership with Clear doesn’t seem to be making much of a dent.</li><li>When we were planning this trip, everyone warned us off the drive -- “It’s slow”, “you’ll get caught behind a bunch of trucks”, “an accident will shut the whole road down” -- but I was as excited for the drive as I was the time in Key West. I think the Overseas Highway is one of the iconic drives in the US -- in my mind, it’s in the same league with Pacific Coast Highway between San Francisco and LA and Route 66 from Chicago to LA.&nbsp;</li><li>Even before we left the mainland, the drive was cool, with the Everglades on one side and the marinas and ocean inlets on the other. The drive through Key Largo was less interesting -- not much more than bait shops and boat parking. A bit further along, we crawled through Islamorada and Marathon in heavy traffic on a Monday afternoon.</li><li>Everyone talks about Seven Mile Bridge (we clocked it at 6.8 miles) and have seen it in movies, and it <em>is</em> very cool, but what was more interesting to me were the sections of the highway before that, that run across the low-lying keys along the route of the old Overseas Railroad which I read about in <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2QzesjI\"><em>Last Train to Paradise</em></a> -- time and again we’d be driving across what was nothing more than just a bit of a road bed and a 100 or so feet of beach and vegetation. After that, it’s ocean.&nbsp;</li><li>The warnings were right -- the highway is not a fast drive. It squeezes down from four lanes to two lanes for a bit, and Monroe County sheriff cars are parked where the speed limit dips when you pass through towns. But speed isn’t really the point. Just like you don’t run through Big Sur at 70 mph on PCH, you don’t blow past people surf fishing for snapper, snook, and grouper, or not slow down and try to spot Key Deer on Big Pine Key. If you just want to get to Key West as fast as possible, spend $100 or so for a flight from FLL or MIA. Otherwise, throttle back and remember -- on this drive, it’s as much about the journey as the destination.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #161</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_161.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #161 — New Crisis, Old Question; Driving Down to Key West','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-161-new-crisis-old-question-driving-down-to-key-west','','','2021-10-01 17:01:42','2021-10-01 22:01:42','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=2680',0,'post','',1),
(2681,1,'2020-03-21 19:16:52','2020-03-22 00:16:52','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/IMG_0368-scaled.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2664 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/IMG_0368-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\n<figcaption>Is this the IMAX seatback screen?</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p>Trying to watch the Super Bowl while flying from Durango, CO to Chicago via Denver got me thinking about the fading away of seatback entertainment. We also talk about the continuing evolution of ride sharing. Uber and Lyft are looking more and more like the taxi companies they fought to replace. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_161.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/768815872&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #161: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you hunkered down in the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois, trying to figure out exactly what the governor’s “shelter-in-place” directive means. Not a lot of travel since the last episode, and that’s not just because of coronavirus. No business travel booked, so it was just one trip in the back half of February to visit some friends who are snowbirding in Key West, Florida. 80 degrees and sunny vs. 30 degrees and grey skies in Chicago -- tough duty. Our friends rented a nice house up a dead end street in the Historic District, just a couple of blocks off Duval Street. They had it for two months, Feb through the end of March, but left early, giving up their last 2 weeks of sunny weather to drive back to Chicago because they’re afraid hotels will be closing along their route home. </li><li>Hadn’t planned any travel in March, but watched our April plans dissolve as Covid-19 spread. First, a friend from Poland canceled his wedding in Sedona, AZ shortly after the US announced the 30-day travel ban for Europeans. While their wedding date was past the 30 days, they figured this was just the start -- which it was. Over the next 5 days, travel bans started popping up across Europe. We joked to ourselves, “Lucky timing -- first time in 4 years we’re not doing Spring Break in Europe”, opting instead for some wine tasting in Howell Mountain and Napa Valley. Until the next day when California locked everything down, closing everything including restaurants and wineries…</li><li>For some families, kids home from school and mom or dad off the road and working from home -- the forced family togetherness is adding to the stress. I was talking to a friend this week -- “I’m usually on the road 75% of the time, and the kids are in school or sports. After 2 days of this, my wife laid down the rules -- my son is in the basement, my wife and daughter are on the second floor, I’m on the third floor, and the first floor with the kitchen is neutral territory -- you can pass through, but you can’t claim table or counter space there.” Last time I checked in with him, everyone was still alive -- that is, they hadn’t killed each other yet.</li><li>But I’m nothing if not an optimist, so in the midst of this week’s unraveling, I found a deal on a direct American Air flight from ORD to Barcelona -- 8½ hr 787 flight -- so I booked it -- 2 weeks in Barcelona at the end of September. I don’t know what we’ll do yet or where we’ll stay, but I’m already looking forward to it.</li><li>Bridge Music --  <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/48915\">Like Music (cdk Mix</a>) by Analog By Nature (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/48915 Ft: Phasenwandler  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Steve Frick, a longtime TravelCommons listener and Untappd buddy who also does a podcast, <a href=\"http://hypeamerica.com/back-and-gone-again\">Travel Stories from Back and Gone Again</a>, took some time to record and send in an audio comment on last month’s episode -<ul><li>Gotta love the text-to-speech robot voice. Steve, would’ve been great to see that selfie on your Twitter feed. Also, check out the show notes for a link to Steve’s podcast</li></ul></li><li>Darren Mak hit me up on Twitter<ul><li>“Hey Mark,  just listened to Travel Commons <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/09/20/podcast-155-rj-delays-street-food-in-poland-and-hungary/\">episode 155</a> on my last flight... board my next one which is a Delta MD88. Look out the window and see this... thanks for putting that in my head buddy!” </li><li>From the picture on his tweet, you can see he’s sitting in the window seat of an MD-88 just in front of the engine cowl. In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/09/20/podcast-155-rj-delays-street-food-in-poland-and-hungary/\">episode 155</a>, we talked about American Airlines’ retirement of their MD-80’s. I mentioned that when I ended up in a seat like Darren’s, my mind would sometimes wander -- if the engine next to my head blows up, will the shrapnel blow out or blow into the cabin. I never heard of such a catastrophic failure on an MD-80 -- but that didn’t keep me from wondering. And now, Darren can’t keep from wondering. Sorry about that, Darren. You won’t be able to un-think that. I’m guessing, though, that those MD’s were the first planes Delta parked as air traffic cratered and will be the last to return -- if they ever do. Savor that pic...</li></ul></li><li>And for our UK subscribers, a shout out to another TravelCommons listener and Untappd friend Rob Cheshire who launched <a href=\"https://thisweekincraft.beer/\">This Week in Craft.Beer</a>, a weekly newsletter covering the UK craft beer scene. He’s four issues in and is on a good roll. We’re thinking about heading over to the UK for Thanksgiving and the taproom directory in Rob’s newsletter will be key to planning that trip. I also love that he’s using a .Beer domain name. Check out the show notes for a link.</li><li>I think I’ve mentioned in a past episode that I’ve switched my carryon from a Timbuk 2 backpack to a Timbuk 2 messenger bag. Digitizing means carrying less physical stuff; the backpack was feeling half empty, so I switched to the smaller messenger bag. I like it except for one thing -- it’ll only hold a short water bottle. The big 20oz’er my daughter gave me for Christmas? Fits great in the backpack side pocket, but is too tall for the messenger bag. I played around with a lot of water bottles, but the best one has turned out to be a 500 ml Evian bottle. Now I know that single use plastic is a bad thing, but I can get a week’s use out of one Evian bottle. Until I fill it up in the gym or the concierge lounge the morning before my flight home and forget about it -- until the TSA person pulls it out of my bag on the other side of security and asks me, a bit sarcastically, if I want to go back and check it in my luggage. Yeah, no -- just pitch it. Which is why I can’t have nice things -- like a $35 teakwood S’well bottle. Instead, I walk down the terminal and just spend $3.50 for another bottle of Evian.  </li><li>For my trip to Key West, I got back to an old habit of reading some non-guidebook books -- either fiction or non-fiction -- about my destination before going. Before driving down the Overseas Highway, I read <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2QzesjI\"><em>Last Train to Paradise</em></a> about the incredible effort that went into building a railroad line to Key West 100 years ago -- that was later repurposed for the first iteration of the highway, and then read Hemingway’s <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3a72oOv\"><em>To Have and Have Not</em></a> because, well,  it’s Hemingway and it’s about Key West, and so you just have to. I used to do this a lot more. I started when I read Paul Theroux’s <a href=\"https://amzn.to/398SvhE\"><em>Kingdom by the Sea</em></a> before my first trip to the UK back in 1985. I read John Lukacs’ history <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2xNS9A7\"><em>Budapest 1900</em></a> before my first trip to Hungary in 1989, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3a7KDhX\"><em>Watermark</em></a> by Joseph Brodsky before a trip to Venice, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/394bji3\"><em>His Bloody Project</em></a> by Grahame Burnet before going to Scotland’s Western Highlands. As you’d guess, none of these were about what to do or see, but instead they gave some context about the place -- even the fiction books. Gives a bit of balance to the go-here/see-that stuff in guidebooks and web sites.  Something new for this trip -- a Spotify playlist of Jimmy Buffet tunes from those 1970’s Key West albums -- <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2whAqRs\"><em>Living And Dying In ¾ Time</em></a>, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2vG6wG8\"><em>Havana Daydreamin\'</em></a> -- for some additional context for that 3 hour drive down through the Keys.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com. </li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/spinmeister/53428\">Somewhere</a> by spinmeister (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/spinmeister/53428 Ft: DJ Vadim  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>New Crisis, Old Question</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I’m not gonna try to do any hot takes on what this whole coronavirus/Covid-19/ social distancing experience means because: a) I hate the whole “insta-punditry” that social media has spawned; and b) there are so many unknowns and things are changing so fast that any attempt at meaningful analysis right now won’t age very well. Indeed, I’ve had to re-write this episode 3 times now. I gotta get it recorded before things change and I have to re-do it again.</li><li>At first, it felt like the Black Monday crash of 1987 (which, I hate to admit, I’m old enough to have experienced) or Sept 11, 2001 were good comparison points -- significant, sharp, scary events that came out of nowhere with no warning, and when we were in it, felt like a free fall with no bottom in sight. But after a week or so, even though the stock market was still down or airports and airplanes were still empty, we could see a path to the other side -- maybe not turn-by-turn directions, but at least it felt like we could point ourselves in the general direction. But with this, we’re, what 2-3 weeks in?, and it still feels like we’re in that free fall; we don’t know where the bottom is, let alone the direction to get out.</li><li>I remember, after Sept 11th and the 2008 Great Recession, people saying “everything has changed” and wondering if travel would rebound, if people would get on planes again in the same numbers. And it did and then some -- though the growth has been driven more by leisure travelers than the road warriors. But the travel industry makes its money off the frequent business traveler, and that question pops up again -- will they come back? Because it’s a bit different this time. In 2001, remote work options were pretty much just AOL or Yahoo instant messaging. Video was limited to special rooms with ISDN lines; Skype didn’t launch for another 2 years. In 2008, things were a bit better, but we’re a few months after the second version of the iPhone is released (the iPhone 3G), WhatsApp doesn’t launch for another year, and Slack doesn’t show up for another 5. But now 12 years on, we have bandwidth, we have tools. Last fall, we had <em><a href=\"https://www.ft.com/content/5c635430-1dbc-11ea-97df-cc63de1d73f4\">flygskam</a></em>  -- flight shaming -- hit the mainstream, and now the Covid-19 pandemic that’s just about shut down international air travel. Were we ready to step back from business travel and the coronavirus is just the forcing function?</li><li>I’m coming up on the 35th anniversary of my first business flight, and in that time, I’ve known maybe a handful of guys (and they were all men) who went out of their way to do more business travel; when offered the choice between a conference call or a plane trip, they chose the plane trip. The vast majority got on the plane or the train or behind the wheel because that’s what they needed to do to get the job done -- to close a deal, to do a project, to work with an employee. As remote tools get better and get more ingrained in the culture, the ability to get tasks done remotely increases. But we are social animals. And for all the data and processes, most business is about relationships. And as long as that’s true, we’ll want to meet people face-to-face -- over a coffee or a beer or a meal -- once we finally touch bottom after this coronavirus free fall and can feel safe sitting next to each other again.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/scottaltham/20747\"> Hear Us Now (poptastic mix)</a> by Scott Altham (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/scottaltham/20747  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Driving Down to Key West</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Back to the pre-lock down days of February, it was the first time I’d been to Key West. We decided to drive down, run the whole <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overseas_Highway\">Overseas Highway</a>, the 113-mile stretch of US 1 from Homestead, south of Miami, to Key West. We flew into FLL because -- well, it’s a bit less of a zoo parade than MIA. We landed, walked straight out of the terminal, across the street and into the rental car center -- no shuttle bus ride to the back-40. RSW is the same on the Gulf side. There are damn few on-site rental sites left, and so I appreciate them when I can. Walking down the Hertz Five-Star aisle with Irene (I fell out of top-tier President’s Circle a few years back; too many in-city clients where Uber and Lyft were more convenient), I see a bunch of <a href=\"https://www.hyundaiusa.com/us/en/vehicles/kona/gallery\">Hyundai Konas</a> -- which is a new model for me, it’s a subcompact SUV -- a few Chevy Malibus and, as always, the requisite bunch of Nissan Altimas. I do my normal drill -- looking for non-beat up cars (so I don’t have to argue about damage when I return it) and low mileage (so it won’t break down during the rental). Irene, she’s looking for a cute color. Lucky for us, the car that was at the intersection of all those criteria was right in front of us -- a Surf Blue Hyundai Kona with 126 miles on the odometer. We threw our luggage in, dialed up Key West on Google Maps on Car Play, and pulled out -- into a 15-minute line to get out of the Hertz lot. Somehow that partnership with Clear doesn’t seem to be making much of a dent.</li><li>When we were planning this trip, everyone warned us off the drive -- “It’s slow”, “you’ll get caught behind a bunch of trucks”, “an accident will shut the whole road down” -- but I was as excited for the drive as I was the time in Key West. I think the Overseas Highway is one of the iconic drives in the US -- in my mind, it’s in the same league with Pacific Coast Highway between San Francisco and LA and Route 66 from Chicago to LA. </li><li>Even before we left the mainland, the drive was cool, with the Everglades on one side and the marinas and ocean inlets on the other. The drive through Key Largo was less interesting -- not much more than bait shops and boat parking. A bit further along, we crawled through Islamorada and Marathon in heavy traffic on a Monday afternoon.</li><li>Everyone talks about Seven Mile Bridge (we clocked it at 6.8 miles) and have seen it in movies, and it <em>is</em> very cool, but what was more interesting to me were the sections of the highway before that, that run across the low-lying keys along the route of the old Overseas Railroad which I read about in <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2QzesjI\"><em>Last Train to Paradise</em></a> -- time and again we’d be driving across what was nothing more than just a bit of a road bed and a 100 or so feet of beach and vegetation. After that, it’s ocean. </li><li>The warnings were right -- the highway is not a fast drive. It squeezes down from four lanes to two lanes for a bit, and Monroe County sheriff cars are parked where the speed limit dips when you pass through towns. But speed isn’t really the point. Just like you don’t run through Big Sur at 70 mph on PCH, you don’t blow past people surf fishing for snapper, snook, and grouper, or not slow down and try to spot Key Deer on Big Pine Key. If you just want to get to Key West as fast as possible, spend $100 or so for a flight from FLL or MIA. Otherwise, throttle back and remember -- on this drive, it’s as much about the journey as the destination.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #161</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_161.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #161 — New Crisis, Old Question; Driving Down to Key West','','inherit','closed','closed','','2680-revision-v1','','','2020-03-21 19:16:52','2020-03-22 00:16:52','',2680,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/03/21/2680-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2682,1,'2020-03-21 19:21:12','2020-03-22 00:21:12','','738DE79A-D927-423E-A890-569A5F3A0AB1','','inherit','open','closed','','738de79a-d927-423e-a890-569a5f3a0ab1','','','2020-03-21 19:21:12','2020-03-22 00:21:12','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/738DE79A-D927-423E-A890-569A5F3A0AB1.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(2683,1,'2020-03-21 19:22:36','2020-03-22 00:22:36','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/738DE79A-D927-423E-A890-569A5F3A0AB1-scaled.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2682 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/738DE79A-D927-423E-A890-569A5F3A0AB1-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\n<figcaption>You have reached your destination</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p>Trying to watch the Super Bowl while flying from Durango, CO to Chicago via Denver got me thinking about the fading away of seatback entertainment. We also talk about the continuing evolution of ride sharing. Uber and Lyft are looking more and more like the taxi companies they fought to replace. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_161.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/768815872&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #161: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you hunkered down in the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois, trying to figure out exactly what the governor’s “shelter-in-place” directive means. Not a lot of travel since the last episode, and that’s not just because of coronavirus. No business travel booked, so it was just one trip in the back half of February to visit some friends who are snowbirding in Key West, Florida. 80 degrees and sunny vs. 30 degrees and grey skies in Chicago -- tough duty. Our friends rented a nice house up a dead end street in the Historic District, just a couple of blocks off Duval Street. They had it for two months, Feb through the end of March, but left early, giving up their last 2 weeks of sunny weather to drive back to Chicago because they’re afraid hotels will be closing along their route home. </li><li>Hadn’t planned any travel in March, but watched our April plans dissolve as Covid-19 spread. First, a friend from Poland canceled his wedding in Sedona, AZ shortly after the US announced the 30-day travel ban for Europeans. While their wedding date was past the 30 days, they figured this was just the start -- which it was. Over the next 5 days, travel bans started popping up across Europe. We joked to ourselves, “Lucky timing -- first time in 4 years we’re not doing Spring Break in Europe”, opting instead for some wine tasting in Howell Mountain and Napa Valley. Until the next day when California locked everything down, closing everything including restaurants and wineries…</li><li>For some families, kids home from school and mom or dad off the road and working from home -- the forced family togetherness is adding to the stress. I was talking to a friend this week -- “I’m usually on the road 75% of the time, and the kids are in school or sports. After 2 days of this, my wife laid down the rules -- my son is in the basement, my wife and daughter are on the second floor, I’m on the third floor, and the first floor with the kitchen is neutral territory -- you can pass through, but you can’t claim table or counter space there.” Last time I checked in with him, everyone was still alive -- that is, they hadn’t killed each other yet.</li><li>But I’m nothing if not an optimist, so in the midst of this week’s unraveling, I found a deal on a direct American Air flight from ORD to Barcelona -- 8½ hr 787 flight -- so I booked it -- 2 weeks in Barcelona at the end of September. I don’t know what we’ll do yet or where we’ll stay, but I’m already looking forward to it.</li><li>Bridge Music --  <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/48915\">Like Music (cdk Mix</a>) by Analog By Nature (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/48915 Ft: Phasenwandler  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Steve Frick, a longtime TravelCommons listener and Untappd buddy who also does a podcast, <a href=\"http://hypeamerica.com/back-and-gone-again\">Travel Stories from Back and Gone Again</a>, took some time to record and send in an audio comment on last month’s episode -<ul><li>Gotta love the text-to-speech robot voice. Steve, would’ve been great to see that selfie on your Twitter feed. Also, check out the show notes for a link to Steve’s podcast</li></ul></li><li>Darren Mak hit me up on Twitter<ul><li>“Hey Mark,  just listened to Travel Commons <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/09/20/podcast-155-rj-delays-street-food-in-poland-and-hungary/\">episode 155</a> on my last flight... board my next one which is a Delta MD88. Look out the window and see this... thanks for putting that in my head buddy!” </li><li>From the picture on his tweet, you can see he’s sitting in the window seat of an MD-88 just in front of the engine cowl. In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/09/20/podcast-155-rj-delays-street-food-in-poland-and-hungary/\">episode 155</a>, we talked about American Airlines’ retirement of their MD-80’s. I mentioned that when I ended up in a seat like Darren’s, my mind would sometimes wander -- if the engine next to my head blows up, will the shrapnel blow out or blow into the cabin. I never heard of such a catastrophic failure on an MD-80 -- but that didn’t keep me from wondering. And now, Darren can’t keep from wondering. Sorry about that, Darren. You won’t be able to un-think that. I’m guessing, though, that those MD’s were the first planes Delta parked as air traffic cratered and will be the last to return -- if they ever do. Savor that pic...</li></ul></li><li>And for our UK subscribers, a shout out to another TravelCommons listener and Untappd friend Rob Cheshire who launched <a href=\"https://thisweekincraft.beer/\">This Week in Craft.Beer</a>, a weekly newsletter covering the UK craft beer scene. He’s four issues in and is on a good roll. We’re thinking about heading over to the UK for Thanksgiving and the taproom directory in Rob’s newsletter will be key to planning that trip. I also love that he’s using a .Beer domain name. Check out the show notes for a link.</li><li>I think I’ve mentioned in a past episode that I’ve switched my carryon from a Timbuk 2 backpack to a Timbuk 2 messenger bag. Digitizing means carrying less physical stuff; the backpack was feeling half empty, so I switched to the smaller messenger bag. I like it except for one thing -- it’ll only hold a short water bottle. The big 20oz’er my daughter gave me for Christmas? Fits great in the backpack side pocket, but is too tall for the messenger bag. I played around with a lot of water bottles, but the best one has turned out to be a 500 ml Evian bottle. Now I know that single use plastic is a bad thing, but I can get a week’s use out of one Evian bottle. Until I fill it up in the gym or the concierge lounge the morning before my flight home and forget about it -- until the TSA person pulls it out of my bag on the other side of security and asks me, a bit sarcastically, if I want to go back and check it in my luggage. Yeah, no -- just pitch it. Which is why I can’t have nice things -- like a $35 teakwood S’well bottle. Instead, I walk down the terminal and just spend $3.50 for another bottle of Evian.  </li><li>For my trip to Key West, I got back to an old habit of reading some non-guidebook books -- either fiction or non-fiction -- about my destination before going. Before driving down the Overseas Highway, I read <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2QzesjI\"><em>Last Train to Paradise</em></a> about the incredible effort that went into building a railroad line to Key West 100 years ago -- that was later repurposed for the first iteration of the highway, and then read Hemingway’s <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3a72oOv\"><em>To Have and Have Not</em></a> because, well,  it’s Hemingway and it’s about Key West, and so you just have to. I used to do this a lot more. I started when I read Paul Theroux’s <a href=\"https://amzn.to/398SvhE\"><em>Kingdom by the Sea</em></a> before my first trip to the UK back in 1985. I read John Lukacs’ history <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2xNS9A7\"><em>Budapest 1900</em></a> before my first trip to Hungary in 1989, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3a7KDhX\"><em>Watermark</em></a> by Joseph Brodsky before a trip to Venice, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/394bji3\"><em>His Bloody Project</em></a> by Grahame Burnet before going to Scotland’s Western Highlands. As you’d guess, none of these were about what to do or see, but instead they gave some context about the place -- even the fiction books. Gives a bit of balance to the go-here/see-that stuff in guidebooks and web sites.  Something new for this trip -- a Spotify playlist of Jimmy Buffet tunes from those 1970’s Key West albums -- <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2whAqRs\"><em>Living And Dying In ¾ Time</em></a>, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2vG6wG8\"><em>Havana Daydreamin\'</em></a> -- for some additional context for that 3 hour drive down through the Keys.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com. </li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/spinmeister/53428\">Somewhere</a> by spinmeister (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/spinmeister/53428 Ft: DJ Vadim  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>New Crisis, Old Question</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I’m not gonna try to do any hot takes on what this whole coronavirus/Covid-19/ social distancing experience means because: a) I hate the whole “insta-punditry” that social media has spawned; and b) there are so many unknowns and things are changing so fast that any attempt at meaningful analysis right now won’t age very well. Indeed, I’ve had to re-write this episode 3 times now. I gotta get it recorded before things change and I have to re-do it again.</li><li>At first, it felt like the Black Monday crash of 1987 (which, I hate to admit, I’m old enough to have experienced) or Sept 11, 2001 were good comparison points -- significant, sharp, scary events that came out of nowhere with no warning, and when we were in it, felt like a free fall with no bottom in sight. But after a week or so, even though the stock market was still down or airports and airplanes were still empty, we could see a path to the other side -- maybe not turn-by-turn directions, but at least it felt like we could point ourselves in the general direction. But with this, we’re, what 2-3 weeks in?, and it still feels like we’re in that free fall; we don’t know where the bottom is, let alone the direction to get out.</li><li>I remember, after Sept 11th and the 2008 Great Recession, people saying “everything has changed” and wondering if travel would rebound, if people would get on planes again in the same numbers. And it did and then some -- though the growth has been driven more by leisure travelers than the road warriors. But the travel industry makes its money off the frequent business traveler, and that question pops up again -- will they come back? Because it’s a bit different this time. In 2001, remote work options were pretty much just AOL or Yahoo instant messaging. Video was limited to special rooms with ISDN lines; Skype didn’t launch for another 2 years. In 2008, things were a bit better, but we’re a few months after the second version of the iPhone is released (the iPhone 3G), WhatsApp doesn’t launch for another year, and Slack doesn’t show up for another 5. But now 12 years on, we have bandwidth, we have tools. Last fall, we had <em><a href=\"https://www.ft.com/content/5c635430-1dbc-11ea-97df-cc63de1d73f4\">flygskam</a></em>  -- flight shaming -- hit the mainstream, and now the Covid-19 pandemic that’s just about shut down international air travel. Were we ready to step back from business travel and the coronavirus is just the forcing function?</li><li>I’m coming up on the 35th anniversary of my first business flight, and in that time, I’ve known maybe a handful of guys (and they were all men) who went out of their way to do more business travel; when offered the choice between a conference call or a plane trip, they chose the plane trip. The vast majority got on the plane or the train or behind the wheel because that’s what they needed to do to get the job done -- to close a deal, to do a project, to work with an employee. As remote tools get better and get more ingrained in the culture, the ability to get tasks done remotely increases. But we are social animals. And for all the data and processes, most business is about relationships. And as long as that’s true, we’ll want to meet people face-to-face -- over a coffee or a beer or a meal -- once we finally touch bottom after this coronavirus free fall and can feel safe sitting next to each other again.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/scottaltham/20747\"> Hear Us Now (poptastic mix)</a> by Scott Altham (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/scottaltham/20747  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Driving Down to Key West</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Back to the pre-lock down days of February, it was the first time I’d been to Key West. We decided to drive down, run the whole <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overseas_Highway\">Overseas Highway</a>, the 113-mile stretch of US 1 from Homestead, south of Miami, to Key West. We flew into FLL because -- well, it’s a bit less of a zoo parade than MIA. We landed, walked straight out of the terminal, across the street and into the rental car center -- no shuttle bus ride to the back-40. RSW is the same on the Gulf side. There are damn few on-site rental sites left, and so I appreciate them when I can. Walking down the Hertz Five-Star aisle with Irene (I fell out of top-tier President’s Circle a few years back; too many in-city clients where Uber and Lyft were more convenient), I see a bunch of <a href=\"https://www.hyundaiusa.com/us/en/vehicles/kona/gallery\">Hyundai Konas</a> -- which is a new model for me, it’s a subcompact SUV -- a few Chevy Malibus and, as always, the requisite bunch of Nissan Altimas. I do my normal drill -- looking for non-beat up cars (so I don’t have to argue about damage when I return it) and low mileage (so it won’t break down during the rental). Irene, she’s looking for a cute color. Lucky for us, the car that was at the intersection of all those criteria was right in front of us -- a Surf Blue Hyundai Kona with 126 miles on the odometer. We threw our luggage in, dialed up Key West on Google Maps on Car Play, and pulled out -- into a 15-minute line to get out of the Hertz lot. Somehow that partnership with Clear doesn’t seem to be making much of a dent.</li><li>When we were planning this trip, everyone warned us off the drive -- “It’s slow”, “you’ll get caught behind a bunch of trucks”, “an accident will shut the whole road down” -- but I was as excited for the drive as I was the time in Key West. I think the Overseas Highway is one of the iconic drives in the US -- in my mind, it’s in the same league with Pacific Coast Highway between San Francisco and LA and Route 66 from Chicago to LA. </li><li>Even before we left the mainland, the drive was cool, with the Everglades on one side and the marinas and ocean inlets on the other. The drive through Key Largo was less interesting -- not much more than bait shops and boat parking. A bit further along, we crawled through Islamorada and Marathon in heavy traffic on a Monday afternoon.</li><li>Everyone talks about Seven Mile Bridge (we clocked it at 6.8 miles) and have seen it in movies, and it <em>is</em> very cool, but what was more interesting to me were the sections of the highway before that, that run across the low-lying keys along the route of the old Overseas Railroad which I read about in <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2QzesjI\"><em>Last Train to Paradise</em></a> -- time and again we’d be driving across what was nothing more than just a bit of a road bed and a 100 or so feet of beach and vegetation. After that, it’s ocean. </li><li>The warnings were right -- the highway is not a fast drive. It squeezes down from four lanes to two lanes for a bit, and Monroe County sheriff cars are parked where the speed limit dips when you pass through towns. But speed isn’t really the point. Just like you don’t run through Big Sur at 70 mph on PCH, you don’t blow past people surf fishing for snapper, snook, and grouper, or not slow down and try to spot Key Deer on Big Pine Key. If you just want to get to Key West as fast as possible, spend $100 or so for a flight from FLL or MIA. Otherwise, throttle back and remember -- on this drive, it’s as much about the journey as the destination.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #161</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_161.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #161 — New Crisis, Old Question; Driving Down to Key West','','inherit','closed','closed','','2680-revision-v1','','','2020-03-21 19:22:36','2020-03-22 00:22:36','',2680,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/03/21/2680-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2684,1,'2020-03-21 21:27:14','2020-03-22 02:27:14','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/738DE79A-D927-423E-A890-569A5F3A0AB1-scaled.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2682 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/738DE79A-D927-423E-A890-569A5F3A0AB1-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\n<figcaption>You have reached your destination</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p>Things started out well, skipping out on Chicago winter for a drive down to Key West. But then last week, coronavirus hit the US and everything changed. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_161.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/768815872&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #161: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you hunkered down in the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois, trying to figure out exactly what the governor’s “shelter-in-place” directive means. Not a lot of travel since the last episode, and that’s not just because of coronavirus. No business travel booked, so it was just one trip in the back half of February to visit some friends who are snowbirding in Key West, Florida. 80 degrees and sunny vs. 30 degrees and grey skies in Chicago -- tough duty. Our friends rented a nice house up a dead end street in the Historic District, just a couple of blocks off Duval Street. They had it for two months, Feb through the end of March, but left early, giving up their last 2 weeks of sunny weather to drive back to Chicago because they’re afraid hotels will be closing along their route home. </li><li>Hadn’t planned any travel in March, but watched our April plans dissolve as Covid-19 spread. First, a friend from Poland canceled his wedding in Sedona, AZ shortly after the US announced the 30-day travel ban for Europeans. While their wedding date was past the 30 days, they figured this was just the start -- which it was. Over the next 5 days, travel bans started popping up across Europe. We joked to ourselves, “Lucky timing -- first time in 4 years we’re not doing Spring Break in Europe”, opting instead for some wine tasting in Howell Mountain and Napa Valley. Until the next day when California locked everything down, closing everything including restaurants and wineries…</li><li>For some families, kids home from school and mom or dad off the road and working from home -- the forced family togetherness is adding to the stress. I was talking to a friend this week -- “I’m usually on the road 75% of the time, and the kids are in school or sports. After 2 days of this, my wife laid down the rules -- my son is in the basement, my wife and daughter are on the second floor, I’m on the third floor, and the first floor with the kitchen is neutral territory -- you can pass through, but you can’t claim table or counter space there.” Last time I checked in with him, everyone was still alive -- that is, they hadn’t killed each other yet.</li><li>But I’m nothing if not an optimist, so in the midst of this week’s unraveling, I found a deal on a direct American Air flight from ORD to Barcelona -- 8½ hr 787 flight -- so I booked it -- 2 weeks in Barcelona at the end of September. I don’t know what we’ll do yet or where we’ll stay, but I’m already looking forward to it.</li><li>Bridge Music --  <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/48915\">Like Music (cdk Mix</a>) by Analog By Nature (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/48915 Ft: Phasenwandler  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Steve Frick, a longtime TravelCommons listener and Untappd buddy who also does a podcast, <a href=\"http://hypeamerica.com/back-and-gone-again\">Travel Stories from Back and Gone Again</a>, took some time to record and send in an audio comment on last month’s episode -<ul><li>Gotta love the text-to-speech robot voice. Steve, would’ve been great to see that selfie on your Twitter feed. Also, check out the show notes for a link to Steve’s podcast</li></ul></li><li>Darren Mak hit me up on Twitter<ul><li>“Hey Mark,  just listened to Travel Commons <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/09/20/podcast-155-rj-delays-street-food-in-poland-and-hungary/\">episode 155</a> on my last flight... board my next one which is a Delta MD88. Look out the window and see this... thanks for putting that in my head buddy!” </li><li>From the picture on his tweet, you can see he’s sitting in the window seat of an MD-88 just in front of the engine cowl. In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/09/20/podcast-155-rj-delays-street-food-in-poland-and-hungary/\">episode 155</a>, we talked about American Airlines’ retirement of their MD-80’s. I mentioned that when I ended up in a seat like Darren’s, my mind would sometimes wander -- if the engine next to my head blows up, will the shrapnel blow out or blow into the cabin. I never heard of such a catastrophic failure on an MD-80 -- but that didn’t keep me from wondering. And now, Darren can’t keep from wondering. Sorry about that, Darren. You won’t be able to un-think that. I’m guessing, though, that those MD’s were the first planes Delta parked as air traffic cratered and will be the last to return -- if they ever do. Savor that pic...</li></ul></li><li>And for our UK subscribers, a shout out to another TravelCommons listener and Untappd friend Rob Cheshire who launched <a href=\"https://thisweekincraft.beer/\">This Week in Craft.Beer</a>, a weekly newsletter covering the UK craft beer scene. He’s four issues in and is on a good roll. We’re thinking about heading over to the UK for Thanksgiving and the taproom directory in Rob’s newsletter will be key to planning that trip. I also love that he’s using a .Beer domain name. Check out the show notes for a link.</li><li>I think I’ve mentioned in a past episode that I’ve switched my carryon from a Timbuk 2 backpack to a Timbuk 2 messenger bag. Digitizing means carrying less physical stuff; the backpack was feeling half empty, so I switched to the smaller messenger bag. I like it except for one thing -- it’ll only hold a short water bottle. The big 20oz’er my daughter gave me for Christmas? Fits great in the backpack side pocket, but is too tall for the messenger bag. I played around with a lot of water bottles, but the best one has turned out to be a 500 ml Evian bottle. Now I know that single use plastic is a bad thing, but I can get a week’s use out of one Evian bottle. Until I fill it up in the gym or the concierge lounge the morning before my flight home and forget about it -- until the TSA person pulls it out of my bag on the other side of security and asks me, a bit sarcastically, if I want to go back and check it in my luggage. Yeah, no -- just pitch it. Which is why I can’t have nice things -- like a $35 teakwood S’well bottle. Instead, I walk down the terminal and just spend $3.50 for another bottle of Evian.  </li><li>For my trip to Key West, I got back to an old habit of reading some non-guidebook books -- either fiction or non-fiction -- about my destination before going. Before driving down the Overseas Highway, I read <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2QzesjI\"><em>Last Train to Paradise</em></a> about the incredible effort that went into building a railroad line to Key West 100 years ago -- that was later repurposed for the first iteration of the highway, and then read Hemingway’s <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3a72oOv\"><em>To Have and Have Not</em></a> because, well,  it’s Hemingway and it’s about Key West, and so you just have to. I used to do this a lot more. I started when I read Paul Theroux’s <a href=\"https://amzn.to/398SvhE\"><em>Kingdom by the Sea</em></a> before my first trip to the UK back in 1985. I read John Lukacs’ history <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2xNS9A7\"><em>Budapest 1900</em></a> before my first trip to Hungary in 1989, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3a7KDhX\"><em>Watermark</em></a> by Joseph Brodsky before a trip to Venice, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/394bji3\"><em>His Bloody Project</em></a> by Grahame Burnet before going to Scotland’s Western Highlands. As you’d guess, none of these were about what to do or see, but instead they gave some context about the place -- even the fiction books. Gives a bit of balance to the go-here/see-that stuff in guidebooks and web sites.  Something new for this trip -- a Spotify playlist of Jimmy Buffet tunes from those 1970’s Key West albums -- <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2whAqRs\"><em>Living And Dying In ¾ Time</em></a>, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2vG6wG8\"><em>Havana Daydreamin\'</em></a> -- for some additional context for that 3 hour drive down through the Keys.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com. </li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/spinmeister/53428\">Somewhere</a> by spinmeister (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/spinmeister/53428 Ft: DJ Vadim  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>New Crisis, Old Question</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I’m not gonna try to do any hot takes on what this whole coronavirus/Covid-19/ social distancing experience means because: a) I hate the whole “insta-punditry” that social media has spawned; and b) there are so many unknowns and things are changing so fast that any attempt at meaningful analysis right now won’t age very well. Indeed, I’ve had to re-write this episode 3 times now. I gotta get it recorded before things change and I have to re-do it again.</li><li>At first, it felt like the Black Monday crash of 1987 (which, I hate to admit, I’m old enough to have experienced) or Sept 11, 2001 were good comparison points -- significant, sharp, scary events that came out of nowhere with no warning, and when we were in it, felt like a free fall with no bottom in sight. But after a week or so, even though the stock market was still down or airports and airplanes were still empty, we could see a path to the other side -- maybe not turn-by-turn directions, but at least it felt like we could point ourselves in the general direction. But with this, we’re, what 2-3 weeks in?, and it still feels like we’re in that free fall; we don’t know where the bottom is, let alone the direction to get out.</li><li>I remember, after Sept 11th and the 2008 Great Recession, people saying “everything has changed” and wondering if travel would rebound, if people would get on planes again in the same numbers. And it did and then some -- though the growth has been driven more by leisure travelers than the road warriors. But the travel industry makes its money off the frequent business traveler, and that question pops up again -- will they come back? Because it’s a bit different this time. In 2001, remote work options were pretty much just AOL or Yahoo instant messaging. Video was limited to special rooms with ISDN lines; Skype didn’t launch for another 2 years. In 2008, things were a bit better, but we’re a few months after the second version of the iPhone is released (the iPhone 3G), WhatsApp doesn’t launch for another year, and Slack doesn’t show up for another 5. But now 12 years on, we have bandwidth, we have tools. Last fall, we had <em><a href=\"https://www.ft.com/content/5c635430-1dbc-11ea-97df-cc63de1d73f4\">flygskam</a></em>  -- flight shaming -- hit the mainstream, and now the Covid-19 pandemic that’s just about shut down international air travel. Were we ready to step back from business travel and the coronavirus is just the forcing function?</li><li>I’m coming up on the 35th anniversary of my first business flight, and in that time, I’ve known maybe a handful of guys (and they were all men) who went out of their way to do more business travel; when offered the choice between a conference call or a plane trip, they chose the plane trip. The vast majority got on the plane or the train or behind the wheel because that’s what they needed to do to get the job done -- to close a deal, to do a project, to work with an employee. As remote tools get better and get more ingrained in the culture, the ability to get tasks done remotely increases. But we are social animals. And for all the data and processes, most business is about relationships. And as long as that’s true, we’ll want to meet people face-to-face -- over a coffee or a beer or a meal -- once we finally touch bottom after this coronavirus free fall and can feel safe sitting next to each other again.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/scottaltham/20747\"> Hear Us Now (poptastic mix)</a> by Scott Altham (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/scottaltham/20747  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Driving Down to Key West</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Back to the pre-lock down days of February, it was the first time I’d been to Key West. We decided to drive down, run the whole <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overseas_Highway\">Overseas Highway</a>, the 113-mile stretch of US 1 from Homestead, south of Miami, to Key West. We flew into FLL because -- well, it’s a bit less of a zoo parade than MIA. We landed, walked straight out of the terminal, across the street and into the rental car center -- no shuttle bus ride to the back-40. RSW is the same on the Gulf side. There are damn few on-site rental sites left, and so I appreciate them when I can. Walking down the Hertz Five-Star aisle with Irene (I fell out of top-tier President’s Circle a few years back; too many in-city clients where Uber and Lyft were more convenient), I see a bunch of <a href=\"https://www.hyundaiusa.com/us/en/vehicles/kona/gallery\">Hyundai Konas</a> -- which is a new model for me, it’s a subcompact SUV -- a few Chevy Malibus and, as always, the requisite bunch of Nissan Altimas. I do my normal drill -- looking for non-beat up cars (so I don’t have to argue about damage when I return it) and low mileage (so it won’t break down during the rental). Irene, she’s looking for a cute color. Lucky for us, the car that was at the intersection of all those criteria was right in front of us -- a Surf Blue Hyundai Kona with 126 miles on the odometer. We threw our luggage in, dialed up Key West on Google Maps on Car Play, and pulled out -- into a 15-minute line to get out of the Hertz lot. Somehow that partnership with Clear doesn’t seem to be making much of a dent.</li><li>When we were planning this trip, everyone warned us off the drive -- “It’s slow”, “you’ll get caught behind a bunch of trucks”, “an accident will shut the whole road down” -- but I was as excited for the drive as I was the time in Key West. I think the Overseas Highway is one of the iconic drives in the US -- in my mind, it’s in the same league with Pacific Coast Highway between San Francisco and LA and Route 66 from Chicago to LA. </li><li>Even before we left the mainland, the drive was cool, with the Everglades on one side and the marinas and ocean inlets on the other. The drive through Key Largo was less interesting -- not much more than bait shops and boat parking. A bit further along, we crawled through Islamorada and Marathon in heavy traffic on a Monday afternoon.</li><li>Everyone talks about Seven Mile Bridge (we clocked it at 6.8 miles) and have seen it in movies, and it <em>is</em> very cool, but what was more interesting to me were the sections of the highway before that, that run across the low-lying keys along the route of the old Overseas Railroad which I read about in <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2QzesjI\"><em>Last Train to Paradise</em></a> -- time and again we’d be driving across what was nothing more than just a bit of a road bed and a 100 or so feet of beach and vegetation. After that, it’s ocean. </li><li>The warnings were right -- the highway is not a fast drive. It squeezes down from four lanes to two lanes for a bit, and Monroe County sheriff cars are parked where the speed limit dips when you pass through towns. But speed isn’t really the point. Just like you don’t run through Big Sur at 70 mph on PCH, you don’t blow past people surf fishing for snapper, snook, and grouper, or not slow down and try to spot Key Deer on Big Pine Key. If you just want to get to Key West as fast as possible, spend $100 or so for a flight from FLL or MIA. Otherwise, throttle back and remember -- on this drive, it’s as much about the journey as the destination.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #161</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_161.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #161 — New Crisis, Old Question; Driving Down to Key West','','inherit','closed','closed','','2680-revision-v1','','','2020-03-21 21:27:14','2020-03-22 02:27:14','',2680,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/03/21/2680-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2686,1,'2020-03-22 08:48:09','2020-03-22 13:48:09','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/738DE79A-D927-423E-A890-569A5F3A0AB1-scaled.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2682 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/738DE79A-D927-423E-A890-569A5F3A0AB1-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a><figcaption>You have reached your destination</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>Things started out well, skipping out on Chicago winter for a drive down to Key West. But then last week, coronavirus hit the US and everything changed. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_161.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/768815872&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #161: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you hunkered down in the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois, trying to figure out exactly what the governor’s “shelter-in-place” directive means. Not a lot of travel since the last episode, and that’s not just because of coronavirus. No business travel booked, so it was just one trip in the back half of February to visit some friends who are snowbirding in Key West, Florida. 80 degrees and sunny vs. 30 degrees and grey skies in Chicago -- tough duty. Our friends rented a nice house up a dead end street in the Historic District, just a couple of blocks off Duval Street. They had it for two months, Feb through the end of March, but left early, giving up their last 2 weeks of sunny weather to drive back to Chicago because they’re afraid hotels will be closing along their route home. </li><li>Hadn’t planned any travel in March, but watched our April plans dissolve as Covid-19 spread. First, a friend from Poland canceled his wedding in Sedona, AZ shortly after the US announced the 30-day travel ban for Europeans. While their wedding date was past the 30 days, they figured this was just the start -- which it was. Over the next 5 days, travel bans started popping up across Europe. We joked to ourselves, “Lucky timing -- first time in 4 years we’re not doing Spring Break in Europe”, opting instead for some wine tasting in Howell Mountain and Napa Valley. Until the next day when California locked everything down, closing everything including restaurants and wineries…</li><li>For some families, kids home from school and mom or dad off the road and working from home -- the forced family togetherness is adding to the stress. I was talking to a friend this week -- “I’m usually on the road 75% of the time, and the kids are in school or sports. After 2 days of this, my wife laid down the rules -- my son is in the basement, my wife and daughter are on the second floor, I’m on the third floor, and the first floor with the kitchen is neutral territory -- you can pass through, but you can’t claim table or counter space there.” Last time I checked in with him, everyone was still alive -- that is, they hadn’t killed each other yet.</li><li>But I’m nothing if not an optimist, so in the midst of this week’s unraveling, I found a deal on a direct American Air flight from ORD to Barcelona -- 8½ hr 787 flight -- so I booked it -- 2 weeks in Barcelona at the end of September. I don’t know what we’ll do yet or where we’ll stay, but I’m already looking forward to it.</li><li>Bridge Music --  <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/snowflake/46164\">A Foolish Game</a> by Snowflake (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/snowflake/46164 Ft: Admiral Bob  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Steve Frick, a longtime TravelCommons listener and Untappd buddy who also does a podcast, <a href=\"http://hypeamerica.com/back-and-gone-again\">Travel Stories from Back and Gone Again</a>, took some time to record and send in an audio comment on last month’s episode -<ul><li>Gotta love the text-to-speech robot voice. Steve, would’ve been great to see that selfie on your Twitter feed. Also, check out the show notes for a link to Steve’s podcast</li></ul></li><li>Darren Mak hit me up on Twitter<ul><li>“Hey Mark,  just listened to Travel Commons <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/09/20/podcast-155-rj-delays-street-food-in-poland-and-hungary/\">episode 155</a> on my last flight... board my next one which is a Delta MD88. Look out the window and see this... thanks for putting that in my head buddy!” </li><li>From the picture on his tweet, you can see he’s sitting in the window seat of an MD-88 just in front of the engine cowl. In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/09/20/podcast-155-rj-delays-street-food-in-poland-and-hungary/\">episode 155</a>, we talked about American Airlines’ retirement of their MD-80’s. I mentioned that when I ended up in a seat like Darren’s, my mind would sometimes wander -- if the engine next to my head blows up, will the shrapnel blow out or blow into the cabin. I never heard of such a catastrophic failure on an MD-80 -- but that didn’t keep me from wondering. And now, Darren can’t keep from wondering. Sorry about that, Darren. You won’t be able to un-think that. I’m guessing, though, that those MD’s were the first planes Delta parked as air traffic cratered and will be the last to return -- if they ever do. Savor that pic...</li></ul></li><li>And for our UK subscribers, a shout out to another TravelCommons listener and Untappd friend Rob Cheshire who launched <a href=\"https://thisweekincraft.beer/\">This Week in Craft.Beer</a>, a weekly newsletter covering the UK craft beer scene. He’s four issues in and is on a good roll. We’re thinking about heading over to the UK for Thanksgiving and the taproom directory in Rob’s newsletter will be key to planning that trip. I also love that he’s using a .Beer domain name. Check out the show notes for a link.</li><li>I think I’ve mentioned in a past episode that I’ve switched my carryon from a Timbuk 2 backpack to a Timbuk 2 messenger bag. Digitizing means carrying less physical stuff; the backpack was feeling half empty, so I switched to the smaller messenger bag. I like it except for one thing -- it’ll only hold a short water bottle. The big 20oz’er my daughter gave me for Christmas? Fits great in the backpack side pocket, but is too tall for the messenger bag. I played around with a lot of water bottles, but the best one has turned out to be a 500 ml Evian bottle. Now I know that single use plastic is a bad thing, but I can get a week’s use out of one Evian bottle. Until I fill it up in the gym or the concierge lounge the morning before my flight home and forget about it -- until the TSA person pulls it out of my bag on the other side of security and asks me, a bit sarcastically, if I want to go back and check it in my luggage. Yeah, no -- just pitch it. Which is why I can’t have nice things -- like a $35 teakwood S’well bottle. Instead, I walk down the terminal and just spend $3.50 for another bottle of Evian.  </li><li>For my trip to Key West, I got back to an old habit of reading some non-guidebook books -- either fiction or non-fiction -- about my destination before going. Before driving down the Overseas Highway, I read <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2QzesjI\"><em>Last Train to Paradise</em></a> about the incredible effort that went into building a railroad line to Key West 100 years ago -- that was later repurposed for the first iteration of the highway, and then read Hemingway’s <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3a72oOv\"><em>To Have and Have Not</em></a> because, well,  it’s Hemingway and it’s about Key West, and so you just have to. I used to do this a lot more. I started when I read Paul Theroux’s <a href=\"https://amzn.to/398SvhE\"><em>Kingdom by the Sea</em></a> before my first trip to the UK back in 1985. I read John Lukacs’ history <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2xNS9A7\"><em>Budapest 1900</em></a> before my first trip to Hungary in 1989, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3a7KDhX\"><em>Watermark</em></a> by Joseph Brodsky before a trip to Venice, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/394bji3\"><em>His Bloody Project</em></a> by Grahame Burnet before going to Scotland’s Western Highlands. As you’d guess, none of these were about what to do or see, but instead they gave some context about the place -- even the fiction books. Gives a bit of balance to the go-here/see-that stuff in guidebooks and web sites.  Something new for this trip -- a Spotify playlist of Jimmy Buffet tunes from those 1970’s Key West albums -- <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2whAqRs\"><em>Living And Dying In ¾ Time</em></a>, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2vG6wG8\"><em>Havana Daydreamin\'</em></a> -- for some additional context for that 3 hour drive down through the Keys.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com. </li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/THE_CONCEPT_OF_ENERGY/55008\">ABANDONED BUTTERFLIES</a> by THE_CONCEPT_OF_ENERGY (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/THE_CONCEPT_OF_ENERGY/55008 Ft: Doxent Zsigmond, Snowflake</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>New Crisis, Old Question</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I’m not gonna try to do any hot takes on what this whole coronavirus/Covid-19/ social distancing experience means because: a) I hate the whole “insta-punditry” that social media has spawned; and b) there are so many unknowns and things are changing so fast that any attempt at meaningful analysis right now won’t age very well. Indeed, I’ve had to re-write this episode 3 times now. I gotta get it recorded before things change and I have to re-do it again.</li><li>At first, it felt like the Black Monday crash of 1987 (which, I hate to admit, I’m old enough to have experienced) or Sept 11, 2001 were good comparison points -- significant, sharp, scary events that came out of nowhere with no warning, and when we were in it, felt like a free fall with no bottom in sight. But after a week or so, even though the stock market was still down or airports and airplanes were still empty, we could see a path to the other side -- maybe not turn-by-turn directions, but at least it felt like we could point ourselves in the general direction. But with this, we’re, what 2-3 weeks in?, and it still feels like we’re in that free fall; we don’t know where the bottom is, let alone the direction to get out.</li><li>I remember, after Sept 11th and the 2008 Great Recession, people saying “everything has changed” and wondering if travel would rebound, if people would get on planes again in the same numbers. And it did and then some -- though the growth has been driven more by leisure travelers than the road warriors. But the travel industry makes its money off the frequent business traveler, and that question pops up again -- will they come back? Because it’s a bit different this time. In 2001, remote work options were pretty much just AOL or Yahoo instant messaging. Video was limited to special rooms with ISDN lines; Skype didn’t launch for another 2 years. In 2008, things were a bit better, but we’re a few months after the second version of the iPhone is released (the iPhone 3G), WhatsApp doesn’t launch for another year, and Slack doesn’t show up for another 5. But now 12 years on, we have bandwidth, we have tools. Last fall, we had <em><a href=\"https://www.ft.com/content/5c635430-1dbc-11ea-97df-cc63de1d73f4\">flygskam</a></em>  -- flight shaming -- hit the mainstream, and now the Covid-19 pandemic that’s just about shut down international air travel. Were we ready to step back from business travel and the coronavirus is just the forcing function?</li><li>I’m coming up on the 35th anniversary of my first business flight, and in that time, I’ve known maybe a handful of guys (and they were all men) who went out of their way to do more business travel; when offered the choice between a conference call or a plane trip, they chose the plane trip. The vast majority got on the plane or the train or behind the wheel because that’s what they needed to do to get the job done -- to close a deal, to do a project, to work with an employee. As remote tools get better and get more ingrained in the culture, the ability to get tasks done remotely increases. But we are social animals. And for all the data and processes, most business is about relationships. And as long as that’s true, we’ll want to meet people face-to-face -- over a coffee or a beer or a meal -- once we finally touch bottom after this coronavirus free fall and can feel safe sitting next to each other again.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/49674\">H2O</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/49674  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Driving Down to Key West</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Back to the pre-lock down days of February, it was the first time I’d been to Key West. We decided to drive down, run the whole <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overseas_Highway\">Overseas Highway</a>, the 113-mile stretch of US 1 from Homestead, south of Miami, to Key West. We flew into FLL because -- well, it’s a bit less of a zoo parade than MIA. We landed, walked straight out of the terminal, across the street and into the rental car center -- no shuttle bus ride to the back-40. RSW is the same on the Gulf side. There are damn few on-site rental sites left, and so I appreciate them when I can. Walking down the Hertz Five-Star aisle with Irene (I fell out of top-tier President’s Circle a few years back; too many in-city clients where Uber and Lyft were more convenient), I see a bunch of <a href=\"https://www.hyundaiusa.com/us/en/vehicles/kona/gallery\">Hyundai Konas</a> -- which is a new model for me, it’s a subcompact SUV -- a few Chevy Malibus and, as always, the requisite bunch of Nissan Altimas. I do my normal drill -- looking for non-beat up cars (so I don’t have to argue about damage when I return it) and low mileage (so it won’t break down during the rental). Irene, she’s looking for a cute color. Lucky for us, the car that was at the intersection of all those criteria was right in front of us -- a Surf Blue Hyundai Kona with 126 miles on the odometer. We threw our luggage in, dialed up Key West on Google Maps on Car Play, and pulled out -- into a 15-minute line to get out of the Hertz lot. Somehow that partnership with Clear doesn’t seem to be making much of a dent.</li><li>When we were planning this trip, everyone warned us off the drive -- “It’s slow”, “you’ll get caught behind a bunch of trucks”, “an accident will shut the whole road down” -- but I was as excited for the drive as I was the time in Key West. I think the Overseas Highway is one of the iconic drives in the US -- in my mind, it’s in the same league with Pacific Coast Highway between San Francisco and LA and Route 66 from Chicago to LA.&nbsp;</li><li>Even before we left the mainland, the drive was cool, with the Everglades on one side and the marinas and ocean inlets on the other. The drive through Key Largo was less interesting -- not much more than bait shops and boat parking. A bit further along, we crawled through Islamorada and Marathon in heavy traffic on a Monday afternoon.</li><li>Everyone talks about Seven Mile Bridge (we clocked it at 6.8 miles) and have seen it in movies, and it <em>is</em> very cool, but what was more interesting to me were the sections of the highway before that, that run across the low-lying keys along the route of the old Overseas Railroad which I read about in <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2QzesjI\"><em>Last Train to Paradise</em></a> -- time and again we’d be driving across what was nothing more than just a bit of a road bed and a 100 or so feet of beach and vegetation. After that, it’s ocean.&nbsp;</li><li>The warnings were right -- the highway is not a fast drive. It squeezes down from four lanes to two lanes for a bit, and Monroe County sheriff cars are parked where the speed limit dips when you pass through towns. But speed isn’t really the point. Just like you don’t run through Big Sur at 70 mph on PCH, you don’t blow past people surf fishing for snapper, snook, and grouper, or not slow down and try to spot Key Deer on Big Pine Key. If you just want to get to Key West as fast as possible, spend $100 or so for a flight from FLL or MIA. Otherwise, throttle back and remember -- on this drive, it’s as much about the journey as the destination.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #161</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_161.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #161 — New Crisis, Old Question; Driving Down to Key West','','inherit','closed','closed','','2680-revision-v1','','','2020-03-22 08:48:09','2020-03-22 13:48:09','',2680,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/03/22/2680-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2687,1,'2020-03-22 08:48:51','2020-03-22 13:48:51','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/738DE79A-D927-423E-A890-569A5F3A0AB1-scaled.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2682 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/738DE79A-D927-423E-A890-569A5F3A0AB1-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\n<figcaption>You have reached your destination</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p>Things started out well, skipping out on Chicago winter for a drive down to Key West. But then last week, coronavirus hit the US and everything unraveled. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_161.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/768815872&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #161: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you hunkered down in the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois, trying to figure out exactly what the governor’s “shelter-in-place” directive means. Not a lot of travel since the last episode, and that’s not just because of coronavirus. No business travel booked, so it was just one trip in the back half of February to visit some friends who are snowbirding in Key West, Florida. 80 degrees and sunny vs. 30 degrees and grey skies in Chicago -- tough duty. Our friends rented a nice house up a dead end street in the Historic District, just a couple of blocks off Duval Street. They had it for two months, Feb through the end of March, but left early, giving up their last 2 weeks of sunny weather to drive back to Chicago because they’re afraid hotels will be closing along their route home. </li><li>Hadn’t planned any travel in March, but watched our April plans dissolve as Covid-19 spread. First, a friend from Poland canceled his wedding in Sedona, AZ shortly after the US announced the 30-day travel ban for Europeans. While their wedding date was past the 30 days, they figured this was just the start -- which it was. Over the next 5 days, travel bans started popping up across Europe. We joked to ourselves, “Lucky timing -- first time in 4 years we’re not doing Spring Break in Europe”, opting instead for some wine tasting in Howell Mountain and Napa Valley. Until the next day when California locked everything down, closing everything including restaurants and wineries…</li><li>For some families, kids home from school and mom or dad off the road and working from home -- the forced family togetherness is adding to the stress. I was talking to a friend this week -- “I’m usually on the road 75% of the time, and the kids are in school or sports. After 2 days of this, my wife laid down the rules -- my son is in the basement, my wife and daughter are on the second floor, I’m on the third floor, and the first floor with the kitchen is neutral territory -- you can pass through, but you can’t claim table or counter space there.” Last time I checked in with him, everyone was still alive -- that is, they hadn’t killed each other yet.</li><li>But I’m nothing if not an optimist, so in the midst of this week’s unraveling, I found a deal on a direct American Air flight from ORD to Barcelona -- 8½ hr 787 flight -- so I booked it -- 2 weeks in Barcelona at the end of September. I don’t know what we’ll do yet or where we’ll stay, but I’m already looking forward to it.</li><li>Bridge Music --  <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/snowflake/46164\">A Foolish Game</a> by Snowflake (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/snowflake/46164 Ft: Admiral Bob  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Steve Frick, a longtime TravelCommons listener and Untappd buddy who also does a podcast, <a href=\"http://hypeamerica.com/back-and-gone-again\">Travel Stories from Back and Gone Again</a>, took some time to record and send in an audio comment on last month’s episode -<ul><li>Gotta love the text-to-speech robot voice. Steve, would’ve been great to see that selfie on your Twitter feed. Also, check out the show notes for a link to Steve’s podcast</li></ul></li><li>Darren Mak hit me up on Twitter<ul><li>“Hey Mark,  just listened to Travel Commons <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/09/20/podcast-155-rj-delays-street-food-in-poland-and-hungary/\">episode 155</a> on my last flight... board my next one which is a Delta MD88. Look out the window and see this... thanks for putting that in my head buddy!” </li><li>From the picture on his tweet, you can see he’s sitting in the window seat of an MD-88 just in front of the engine cowl. In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/09/20/podcast-155-rj-delays-street-food-in-poland-and-hungary/\">episode 155</a>, we talked about American Airlines’ retirement of their MD-80’s. I mentioned that when I ended up in a seat like Darren’s, my mind would sometimes wander -- if the engine next to my head blows up, will the shrapnel blow out or blow into the cabin. I never heard of such a catastrophic failure on an MD-80 -- but that didn’t keep me from wondering. And now, Darren can’t keep from wondering. Sorry about that, Darren. You won’t be able to un-think that. I’m guessing, though, that those MD’s were the first planes Delta parked as air traffic cratered and will be the last to return -- if they ever do. Savor that pic...</li></ul></li><li>And for our UK subscribers, a shout out to another TravelCommons listener and Untappd friend Rob Cheshire who launched <a href=\"https://thisweekincraft.beer/\">This Week in Craft.Beer</a>, a weekly newsletter covering the UK craft beer scene. He’s four issues in and is on a good roll. We’re thinking about heading over to the UK for Thanksgiving and the taproom directory in Rob’s newsletter will be key to planning that trip. I also love that he’s using a .Beer domain name. Check out the show notes for a link.</li><li>I think I’ve mentioned in a past episode that I’ve switched my carryon from a Timbuk 2 backpack to a Timbuk 2 messenger bag. Digitizing means carrying less physical stuff; the backpack was feeling half empty, so I switched to the smaller messenger bag. I like it except for one thing -- it’ll only hold a short water bottle. The big 20oz’er my daughter gave me for Christmas? Fits great in the backpack side pocket, but is too tall for the messenger bag. I played around with a lot of water bottles, but the best one has turned out to be a 500 ml Evian bottle. Now I know that single use plastic is a bad thing, but I can get a week’s use out of one Evian bottle. Until I fill it up in the gym or the concierge lounge the morning before my flight home and forget about it -- until the TSA person pulls it out of my bag on the other side of security and asks me, a bit sarcastically, if I want to go back and check it in my luggage. Yeah, no -- just pitch it. Which is why I can’t have nice things -- like a $35 teakwood S’well bottle. Instead, I walk down the terminal and just spend $3.50 for another bottle of Evian.  </li><li>For my trip to Key West, I got back to an old habit of reading some non-guidebook books -- either fiction or non-fiction -- about my destination before going. Before driving down the Overseas Highway, I read <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2QzesjI\"><em>Last Train to Paradise</em></a> about the incredible effort that went into building a railroad line to Key West 100 years ago -- that was later repurposed for the first iteration of the highway, and then read Hemingway’s <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3a72oOv\"><em>To Have and Have Not</em></a> because, well,  it’s Hemingway and it’s about Key West, and so you just have to. I used to do this a lot more. I started when I read Paul Theroux’s <a href=\"https://amzn.to/398SvhE\"><em>Kingdom by the Sea</em></a> before my first trip to the UK back in 1985. I read John Lukacs’ history <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2xNS9A7\"><em>Budapest 1900</em></a> before my first trip to Hungary in 1989, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3a7KDhX\"><em>Watermark</em></a> by Joseph Brodsky before a trip to Venice, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/394bji3\"><em>His Bloody Project</em></a> by Grahame Burnet before going to Scotland’s Western Highlands. As you’d guess, none of these were about what to do or see, but instead they gave some context about the place -- even the fiction books. Gives a bit of balance to the go-here/see-that stuff in guidebooks and web sites.  Something new for this trip -- a Spotify playlist of Jimmy Buffet tunes from those 1970’s Key West albums -- <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2whAqRs\"><em>Living And Dying In ¾ Time</em></a>, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2vG6wG8\"><em>Havana Daydreamin\'</em></a> -- for some additional context for that 3 hour drive down through the Keys.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com. </li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/THE_CONCEPT_OF_ENERGY/55008\">ABANDONED BUTTERFLIES</a> by THE_CONCEPT_OF_ENERGY (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/THE_CONCEPT_OF_ENERGY/55008 Ft: Doxent Zsigmond, Snowflake</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>New Crisis, Old Question</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I’m not gonna try to do any hot takes on what this whole coronavirus/Covid-19/ social distancing experience means because: a) I hate the whole “insta-punditry” that social media has spawned; and b) there are so many unknowns and things are changing so fast that any attempt at meaningful analysis right now won’t age very well. Indeed, I’ve had to re-write this episode 3 times now. I gotta get it recorded before things change and I have to re-do it again.</li><li>At first, it felt like the Black Monday crash of 1987 (which, I hate to admit, I’m old enough to have experienced) or Sept 11, 2001 were good comparison points -- significant, sharp, scary events that came out of nowhere with no warning, and when we were in it, felt like a free fall with no bottom in sight. But after a week or so, even though the stock market was still down or airports and airplanes were still empty, we could see a path to the other side -- maybe not turn-by-turn directions, but at least it felt like we could point ourselves in the general direction. But with this, we’re, what 2-3 weeks in?, and it still feels like we’re in that free fall; we don’t know where the bottom is, let alone the direction to get out.</li><li>I remember, after Sept 11th and the 2008 Great Recession, people saying “everything has changed” and wondering if travel would rebound, if people would get on planes again in the same numbers. And it did and then some -- though the growth has been driven more by leisure travelers than the road warriors. But the travel industry makes its money off the frequent business traveler, and that question pops up again -- will they come back? Because it’s a bit different this time. In 2001, remote work options were pretty much just AOL or Yahoo instant messaging. Video was limited to special rooms with ISDN lines; Skype didn’t launch for another 2 years. In 2008, things were a bit better, but we’re a few months after the second version of the iPhone is released (the iPhone 3G), WhatsApp doesn’t launch for another year, and Slack doesn’t show up for another 5. But now 12 years on, we have bandwidth, we have tools. Last fall, we had <em><a href=\"https://www.ft.com/content/5c635430-1dbc-11ea-97df-cc63de1d73f4\">flygskam</a></em>  -- flight shaming -- hit the mainstream, and now the Covid-19 pandemic that’s just about shut down international air travel. Were we ready to step back from business travel and the coronavirus is just the forcing function?</li><li>I’m coming up on the 35th anniversary of my first business flight, and in that time, I’ve known maybe a handful of guys (and they were all men) who went out of their way to do more business travel; when offered the choice between a conference call or a plane trip, they chose the plane trip. The vast majority got on the plane or the train or behind the wheel because that’s what they needed to do to get the job done -- to close a deal, to do a project, to work with an employee. As remote tools get better and get more ingrained in the culture, the ability to get tasks done remotely increases. But we are social animals. And for all the data and processes, most business is about relationships. And as long as that’s true, we’ll want to meet people face-to-face -- over a coffee or a beer or a meal -- once we finally touch bottom after this coronavirus free fall and can feel safe sitting next to each other again.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/49674\">H2O</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/49674  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Driving Down to Key West</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Back to the pre-lock down days of February, it was the first time I’d been to Key West. We decided to drive down, run the whole <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overseas_Highway\">Overseas Highway</a>, the 113-mile stretch of US 1 from Homestead, south of Miami, to Key West. We flew into FLL because -- well, it’s a bit less of a zoo parade than MIA. We landed, walked straight out of the terminal, across the street and into the rental car center -- no shuttle bus ride to the back-40. RSW is the same on the Gulf side. There are damn few on-site rental sites left, and so I appreciate them when I can. Walking down the Hertz Five-Star aisle with Irene (I fell out of top-tier President’s Circle a few years back; too many in-city clients where Uber and Lyft were more convenient), I see a bunch of <a href=\"https://www.hyundaiusa.com/us/en/vehicles/kona/gallery\">Hyundai Konas</a> -- which is a new model for me, it’s a subcompact SUV -- a few Chevy Malibus and, as always, the requisite bunch of Nissan Altimas. I do my normal drill -- looking for non-beat up cars (so I don’t have to argue about damage when I return it) and low mileage (so it won’t break down during the rental). Irene, she’s looking for a cute color. Lucky for us, the car that was at the intersection of all those criteria was right in front of us -- a Surf Blue Hyundai Kona with 126 miles on the odometer. We threw our luggage in, dialed up Key West on Google Maps on Car Play, and pulled out -- into a 15-minute line to get out of the Hertz lot. Somehow that partnership with Clear doesn’t seem to be making much of a dent.</li><li>When we were planning this trip, everyone warned us off the drive -- “It’s slow”, “you’ll get caught behind a bunch of trucks”, “an accident will shut the whole road down” -- but I was as excited for the drive as I was the time in Key West. I think the Overseas Highway is one of the iconic drives in the US -- in my mind, it’s in the same league with Pacific Coast Highway between San Francisco and LA and Route 66 from Chicago to LA.&nbsp;</li><li>Even before we left the mainland, the drive was cool, with the Everglades on one side and the marinas and ocean inlets on the other. The drive through Key Largo was less interesting -- not much more than bait shops and boat parking. A bit further along, we crawled through Islamorada and Marathon in heavy traffic on a Monday afternoon.</li><li>Everyone talks about Seven Mile Bridge (we clocked it at 6.8 miles) and have seen it in movies, and it <em>is</em> very cool, but what was more interesting to me were the sections of the highway before that, that run across the low-lying keys along the route of the old Overseas Railroad which I read about in <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2QzesjI\"><em>Last Train to Paradise</em></a> -- time and again we’d be driving across what was nothing more than just a bit of a road bed and a 100 or so feet of beach and vegetation. After that, it’s ocean.&nbsp;</li><li>The warnings were right -- the highway is not a fast drive. It squeezes down from four lanes to two lanes for a bit, and Monroe County sheriff cars are parked where the speed limit dips when you pass through towns. But speed isn’t really the point. Just like you don’t run through Big Sur at 70 mph on PCH, you don’t blow past people surf fishing for snapper, snook, and grouper, or not slow down and try to spot Key Deer on Big Pine Key. If you just want to get to Key West as fast as possible, spend $100 or so for a flight from FLL or MIA. Otherwise, throttle back and remember -- on this drive, it’s as much about the journey as the destination.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #161</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_161.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #161 — New Crisis, Old Question; Driving Down to Key West','','inherit','closed','closed','','2680-revision-v1','','','2020-03-22 08:48:51','2020-03-22 13:48:51','',2680,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/03/22/2680-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2688,1,'2020-03-22 11:40:23','2020-03-22 16:40:23','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/738DE79A-D927-423E-A890-569A5F3A0AB1-scaled.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2682 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/738DE79A-D927-423E-A890-569A5F3A0AB1-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\n<figcaption>You have reached your destination</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p>Things started out well, skipping out on Chicago winter for a drive down to Key West. But then last week, coronavirus hit the US and everything unraveled. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_161.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/780966433&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #161: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you hunkered down in the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois, trying to figure out exactly what the governor’s “shelter-in-place” directive means. Not a lot of travel since the last episode, and that’s not just because of coronavirus. No business travel booked, so it was just one trip in the back half of February to visit some friends who are snowbirding in Key West, Florida. 80 degrees and sunny vs. 30 degrees and grey skies in Chicago -- tough duty. Our friends rented a nice house up a dead end street in the Historic District, just a couple of blocks off Duval Street. They had it for two months, Feb through the end of March, but left early, giving up their last 2 weeks of sunny weather to drive back to Chicago because they’re afraid hotels will be closing along their route home.&nbsp;</li><li>Hadn’t planned any travel in March, but watched our April plans dissolve as Covid-19 spread. First, a friend from Poland canceled his wedding in Sedona, AZ shortly after the US announced the 30-day travel ban for Europeans. While their wedding date was past the 30 days, they figured this was just the start -- which it was. Over the next 5 days, travel bans started popping up across Europe. We joked to ourselves, “Lucky timing -- first time in 4 years we’re not doing Spring Break in Europe”, opting instead for some wine tasting in Howell Mountain and Napa Valley. Until the next day when California locked everything down, closing everything including restaurants and wineries…</li><li>For some families, kids home from school and mom or dad off the road and working from home -- the forced family togetherness is adding to the stress. I was talking to a friend this week -- “I’m usually on the road 75% of the time, and the kids are in school or sports. After 2 days of this, my wife laid down the rules -- my son is in the basement, my wife and daughter are on the second floor, I’m on the third floor, and the first floor with the kitchen is neutral territory -- you can pass through, but you can’t claim table or counter space there.” Last time I checked in with him, everyone was still alive -- that is, they hadn’t killed each other yet.</li><li>But I’m nothing if not an optimist, so in the midst of this week’s unraveling, I found a deal on a direct American Air flight from ORD to Barcelona -- 8½ hr 787 flight -- so I booked it -- 2 weeks in Barcelona at the end of September. I don’t know what we’ll do yet or where we’ll stay, but I’m already looking forward to it.</li><li>Bridge Music --  <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/snowflake/46164\">A Foolish Game</a> by Snowflake (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/snowflake/46164 Ft: Admiral Bob  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Steve Frick, a longtime TravelCommons listener and Untappd buddy who also does a podcast, <a href=\"http://hypeamerica.com/back-and-gone-again\">Travel Stories from Back and Gone Again</a>, took some time to record and send in an audio comment on last month’s episode -<ul><li>Gotta love the text-to-speech robot voice. Steve, would’ve been great to see that selfie on your Twitter feed. Also, check out the show notes for a link to Steve’s podcast</li></ul></li><li>Darren Mak hit me up on Twitter<ul><li>“Hey Mark,&nbsp; just listened to Travel Commons <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/09/20/podcast-155-rj-delays-street-food-in-poland-and-hungary/\">episode 155</a> on my last flight... board my next one which is a Delta MD88. Look out the window and see this... thanks for putting that in my head buddy!”&nbsp;</li><li>From the picture on his tweet, you can see he’s sitting in the window seat of an MD-88 just in front of the engine cowl. In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/09/20/podcast-155-rj-delays-street-food-in-poland-and-hungary/\">episode 155</a>, we talked about American Airlines’ retirement of their MD-80’s. I mentioned that when I ended up in a seat like Darren’s, my mind would sometimes wander -- if the engine next to my head blows up, will the shrapnel blow out or blow into the cabin. I never heard of such a catastrophic failure on an MD-80 -- but that didn’t keep me from wondering. And now, Darren can’t keep from wondering. Sorry about that, Darren. You won’t be able to un-think that. I’m guessing, though, that those MD’s were the first planes Delta parked as air traffic cratered and will be the last to return -- if they ever do. Savor that pic...</li></ul></li><li>And for our UK subscribers, a shout out to another TravelCommons listener and Untappd friend Rob Cheshire who launched <a href=\"https://thisweekincraft.beer/\">This Week in Craft.Beer</a>, a weekly newsletter covering the UK craft beer scene. He’s four issues in and is on a good roll. We’re thinking about heading over to the UK for Thanksgiving and the taproom directory in Rob’s newsletter will be key to planning that trip. I also love that he’s using a .Beer domain name. Check out the show notes for a link.</li><li>I think I’ve mentioned in a past episode that I’ve switched my carryon from a Timbuk 2 backpack to a Timbuk 2 messenger bag. Digitizing means carrying less physical stuff; the backpack was feeling half empty, so I switched to the smaller messenger bag. I like it except for one thing -- it’ll only hold a short water bottle. The big 20oz’er my daughter gave me for Christmas? Fits great in the backpack side pocket, but is too tall for the messenger bag. I played around with a lot of water bottles, but the best one has turned out to be a 500 ml Evian bottle. Now I know that single use plastic is a bad thing, but I can get a week’s use out of one Evian bottle. Until I fill it up in the gym or the concierge lounge the morning before my flight home and forget about it -- until the TSA person pulls it out of my bag on the other side of security and asks me, a bit sarcastically, if I want to go back and check it in my luggage. Yeah, no -- just pitch it. Which is why I can’t have nice things -- like a $35 teakwood S’well bottle. Instead, I walk down the terminal and just spend $3.50 for another bottle of Evian.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>For my trip to Key West, I got back to an old habit of reading some non-guidebook books -- either fiction or non-fiction -- about my destination before going. Before driving down the Overseas Highway, I read <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2QzesjI\"><em>Last Train to Paradise</em></a> about the incredible effort that went into building a railroad line to Key West 100 years ago -- that was later repurposed for the first iteration of the highway, and then read Hemingway’s <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3a72oOv\"><em>To Have and Have Not</em></a> because, well,&nbsp; it’s Hemingway and it’s about Key West, and so you just have to. I used to do this a lot more. I started when I read Paul Theroux’s <a href=\"https://amzn.to/398SvhE\"><em>Kingdom by the Sea</em></a> before my first trip to the UK back in 1985. I read John Lukacs’ history <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2xNS9A7\"><em>Budapest 1900</em></a> before my first trip to Hungary in 1989, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3a7KDhX\"><em>Watermark</em></a> by Joseph Brodsky before a trip to Venice, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/394bji3\"><em>His Bloody Project</em></a> by Grahame Burnet before going to Scotland’s Western Highlands. As you’d guess, none of these were about what to do or see, but instead they gave some context about the place -- even the fiction books. Gives a bit of balance to the go-here/see-that stuff in guidebooks and web sites.&nbsp; Something new for this trip -- a Spotify playlist of Jimmy Buffet tunes from those 1970’s Key West albums -- <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2whAqRs\"><em>Living And Dying In ¾ Time</em></a>, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2vG6wG8\"><em>Havana Daydreamin\'</em></a> -- for some additional context for that 3 hour drive down through the Keys.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com. </li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/THE_CONCEPT_OF_ENERGY/55008\">ABANDONED BUTTERFLIES</a> by THE_CONCEPT_OF_ENERGY (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/THE_CONCEPT_OF_ENERGY/55008 Ft: Doxent Zsigmond, Snowflake</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>New Crisis, Old Question</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I’m not gonna try to do any hot takes on what this whole coronavirus/Covid-19/ social distancing experience means because: a) I hate the whole “insta-punditry” that social media has spawned; and b) there are so many unknowns and things are changing so fast that any attempt at meaningful analysis right now won’t age very well. Indeed, I’ve had to re-write this episode 3 times now. I gotta get it recorded before things change and I have to re-do it again.</li><li>At first, it felt like the Black Monday crash of 1987 (which, I hate to admit, I’m old enough to have experienced) or Sept 11, 2001 were good comparison points -- significant, sharp, scary events that came out of nowhere with no warning, and when we were in it, felt like a free fall with no bottom in sight. But after a week or so, even though the stock market was still down or airports and airplanes were still empty, we could see a path to the other side -- maybe not turn-by-turn directions, but at least it felt like we could point ourselves in the general direction. But with this, we’re, what 2-3 weeks in?, and it still feels like we’re in that free fall; we don’t know where the bottom is, let alone the direction to get out.</li><li>I remember, after Sept 11th and the 2008 Great Recession, people saying “everything has changed” and wondering if travel would rebound, if people would get on planes again in the same numbers. And it did and then some -- though the growth has been driven more by leisure travelers than the road warriors. But the travel industry makes its money off the frequent business traveler, and that question pops up again -- will they come back? Because it’s a bit different this time. In 2001, remote work options were pretty much just AOL or Yahoo instant messaging. Video was limited to special rooms with ISDN lines; Skype didn’t launch for another 2 years. In 2008, things were a bit better, but we’re a few months after the second version of the iPhone is released (the iPhone 3G), WhatsApp doesn’t launch for another year, and Slack doesn’t show up for another 5. But now 12 years on, we have bandwidth, we have tools. Last fall, we had <em><a href=\"https://www.ft.com/content/5c635430-1dbc-11ea-97df-cc63de1d73f4\">flygskam</a></em>  -- flight shaming -- hit the mainstream, and now the Covid-19 pandemic that’s just about shut down international air travel. Were we ready to step back from business travel and the coronavirus is just the forcing function?</li><li>I’m coming up on the 35th anniversary of my first business flight, and in that time, I’ve known maybe a handful of guys (and they were all men) who went out of their way to do more business travel; when offered the choice between a conference call or a plane trip, they chose the plane trip. The vast majority got on the plane or the train or behind the wheel because that’s what they needed to do to get the job done -- to close a deal, to do a project, to work with an employee. As remote tools get better and get more ingrained in the culture, the ability to get tasks done remotely increases. But we are social animals. And for all the data and processes, most business is about relationships. And as long as that’s true, we’ll want to meet people face-to-face -- over a coffee or a beer or a meal -- once we finally touch bottom after this coronavirus free fall and can feel safe sitting next to each other again.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/49674\">H2O</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/49674  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Driving Down to Key West</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Back to the pre-lock down days of February, it was the first time I’d been to Key West. We decided to drive down, run the whole <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overseas_Highway\">Overseas Highway</a>, the 113-mile stretch of US 1 from Homestead, south of Miami, to Key West. We flew into FLL because -- well, it’s a bit less of a zoo parade than MIA. We landed, walked straight out of the terminal, across the street and into the rental car center -- no shuttle bus ride to the back-40. RSW is the same on the Gulf side. There are damn few on-site rental sites left, and so I appreciate them when I can. Walking down the Hertz Five-Star aisle with Irene (I fell out of top-tier President’s Circle a few years back; too many in-city clients where Uber and Lyft were more convenient), I see a bunch of <a href=\"https://www.hyundaiusa.com/us/en/vehicles/kona/gallery\">Hyundai Konas</a> -- which is a new model for me, it’s a subcompact SUV -- a few Chevy Malibus and, as always, the requisite bunch of Nissan Altimas. I do my normal drill -- looking for non-beat up cars (so I don’t have to argue about damage when I return it) and low mileage (so it won’t break down during the rental). Irene, she’s looking for a cute color. Lucky for us, the car that was at the intersection of all those criteria was right in front of us -- a Surf Blue Hyundai Kona with 126 miles on the odometer. We threw our luggage in, dialed up Key West on Google Maps on Car Play, and pulled out -- into a 15-minute line to get out of the Hertz lot. Somehow that partnership with Clear doesn’t seem to be making much of a dent.</li><li>When we were planning this trip, everyone warned us off the drive -- “It’s slow”, “you’ll get caught behind a bunch of trucks”, “an accident will shut the whole road down” -- but I was as excited for the drive as I was the time in Key West. I think the Overseas Highway is one of the iconic drives in the US -- in my mind, it’s in the same league with Pacific Coast Highway between San Francisco and LA and Route 66 from Chicago to LA.&nbsp;</li><li>Even before we left the mainland, the drive was cool, with the Everglades on one side and the marinas and ocean inlets on the other. The drive through Key Largo was less interesting -- not much more than bait shops and boat parking. A bit further along, we crawled through Islamorada and Marathon in heavy traffic on a Monday afternoon.</li><li>Everyone talks about Seven Mile Bridge (we clocked it at 6.8 miles) and have seen it in movies, and it <em>is</em> very cool, but what was more interesting to me were the sections of the highway before that, that run across the low-lying keys along the route of the old Overseas Railroad which I read about in <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2QzesjI\"><em>Last Train to Paradise</em></a> -- time and again we’d be driving across what was nothing more than just a bit of a road bed and a 100 or so feet of beach and vegetation. After that, it’s ocean.&nbsp;</li><li>The warnings were right -- the highway is not a fast drive. It squeezes down from four lanes to two lanes for a bit, and Monroe County sheriff cars are parked where the speed limit dips when you pass through towns. But speed isn’t really the point. Just like you don’t run through Big Sur at 70 mph on PCH, you don’t blow past people surf fishing for snapper, snook, and grouper, or not slow down and try to spot Key Deer on Big Pine Key. If you just want to get to Key West as fast as possible, spend $100 or so for a flight from FLL or MIA. Otherwise, throttle back and remember -- on this drive, it’s as much about the journey as the destination.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #161</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_161.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #161 — New Crisis, Old Question; Driving Down to Key West','','inherit','closed','closed','','2680-revision-v1','','','2020-03-22 11:40:23','2020-03-22 16:40:23','',2680,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/03/22/2680-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2689,1,'2020-03-22 11:42:40','2020-03-22 16:42:40','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\">\n<p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/IMG_1038.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2529 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/IMG_1038-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a></p><figcaption>Polish health food</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>Didn\'t have any problems with the 787\'s flying 4,800 miles to Krakow or back from Budapest, but the 560-mile regional jet flights between Chicago and Charlottesville, VA have been causing me no end of hassles. We talk about this, revisit our discussions about iPhone dual SIM capability and American Airlines\' MD-80 retirement. And then go deep on my very non-keto-friendly dive into Krakow and Budapest street food.&nbsp; All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_155.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_155.mp3\"]\n<p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #155: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago on an off-travel week; taking a break this week after a couple of weeks of weather-induced hassles -- that in spite of completely avoiding Hurricane Dorian. Instead, it’s been a steady stream of morning thunderstorms hitting ORD and jacking it up for the rest of the day. That and flying regional jets, which we’ve said before, are often…. problematic. In the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/08/13/podcast-154-will-we-still-love-uber-when-the-prices-go-up/\">last episode</a>, I talked about having to shift my outbound evening flight from CHO to RIC because of morning thunderstorms at ORD. The last two weeks have been different variations on the theme. The Tuesday after Labor Day, I was on the bus to the L heading to ORD for an 8:30am flight (because the Uber and Lyft wait times were insane -- God, I miss my old Mongolian ex-taxi driver) when I got a text that my American Eagle flight was cancelled. Still on the bus, I called American’s Platinum line. They told me what I already knew -- no other American options until the end of the day. I told them that since I was coming home the next day (Weds), I needed to get to Charlottesville that morning. “What about the 9am United flight?” I asked her, “I’m already on my way to ORD.” “Let me call United to transfer the ticket,” she offered. I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised. Over the past few years, I’ve seen airlines more and more reluctant to lose \\ revenue by moving you to another carrier, but there was none of that coming from this American agent. Our call kept going as I got off the bus and walked down the stairs into the subway stop, but she got everything squared away. Now that United flight ended up being delayed an hour, but it eventually got me to Charlottesville.</li><li>Last Friday morning in Charlottesville, I woke up, and scrolling thru Twitter, saw <a href=\"https://twitter.com/NWSChicago\">NWS Chicago</a> -- Nat’l Weather Service -- tweeting about severe thunderstorms, so when I got the text from United at 9am delaying my 1pm flight 45 minutes, I wasn’t surprised. No big deal -- I’ll just get a second beer at the Radar Bar. But then, as these things tend to do it, it didn’t stop there. An hour later, another text from United -- the delay doubled to 90 minutes.  But then at noon, another text -- the delay is down to an hour -- shortly followed by another text -- it’s back up to 90 minutes. I pull up <a href=\"https://flightaware.com/\">FlightAware</a>; I’m not going to the airport until the inbound plane leaves the gate at ORD. Ten minutes later, I see it push back. OK, that should be the end of the delay cascade. I order an Uber and head to the airport. Halfway there, another text -- now my flight isn’t leaving until 3:30pm, 2½ hours late. Immediately followed by a text with a 3:57 departure time. I get out of the car and head to the gate agent. What’s going on? Has the plane left ORD yet? Unlike the American agent, the United agent -- or maybe she worked for Air Wisconsin, the United Express partner, is evasive -- don’t know what’s going on; no other options; everything else is oversold, even in Richmond. I back out of line and call United’s Premiere desk. Yes, there’s availability out of Richmond and DC. Richmond’s a little closer and has a helluva lot less of a rush hour, so I move over to the 5:30pm flight (the United agent said “I think you’re making the right decision”), book a one-way rental, and head out to the parking lot. There’s a mist starting to settle in over the airport. This can’t be good. It’s an uneventful 90-minute drive to Richmond. I sit at the Sam Adams Brewhouse bar and have a beer, and then another. This flight leaves on time -- it’s also a regional jet, but it’s been running up and down the East Coast, so today, it’s running on time -- getting me into ORD at 6:50pm, about 5 hours after my original flight was supposed to land. I fire up the United app and look up the status of that flight -- it still hasn’t left. It didn’t leave until 9pm and then only made it as far as Washington-Dulles -- 95 miles up the road.</li><li>Bridge Music —  &nbsp; I Will Writhe by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/26739 Ft: Soundprank </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>In contrast to my regional jet challenges, our trip at the end of August to Krakow and Budapest went much smoother. We flew LOT, the Polish airline, the whole way, including the last leg, BUD-ORD non-stop. I was kinda surprised by that leg -- a Transatlantic leg that didn’t go through Poland -- but there must be enough traffic on that route. A week before we left, American announced their own non-stop between ORD and BUD starting next year. Both airlines do/will use 787’s on the route. Perhaps it’s one of the “long, thin routes” that the 787 was designed to unlock. Anyways, all three flights on LOT -- 787’s on the long legs, and a Dash-8 prop job on the hop from Krakow to Budapest -- were reasonable. I thought the 787’s “morning wake-up” mode for breakfast -- where the cabin lights fade up while the darkened windows lighten -- was a pleasant change to usual “light on and PA announcement” approach. It was my first trip to Poland. Krakow Airport is nice -- new, compact, with train station into the city. It was a good trip.</li><li>I talked in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/08/13/podcast-154-will-we-still-love-uber-when-the-prices-go-up/\">last episode</a> about trying out my iPhone XS’s dual SIM capability in Hungary and Poland. I did the pre-work before I left -- working through a couple of chat sessions to move my US AT&amp;T number to the internal eSIM so I use the physical SIM slot for my UK EE pre-paid SIM. En route -- somewhere over the Faroe Islands I think -- I went into Settings and made my UK line the main voice and data line, leaving my US line open for phone calls and texts. It seemed to work as designed -- I replied to a couple of texts on my US line from my sister, but it looks like everything else went out over the UK line with the 3 GB for £10 plan. I’ll hold final judgement until I get this month’s bill from AT&amp;T, but from what I could see on their website, it looks like it worked. It was a nice change to only have one phone and not to have to remember to check my other phone every night. The new version of the iPhone operating system -- iOS 13 -- is supposed to have some improvements for dual SIM, but I was happy with it as it stands -- but check back with me after I get my AT&amp;T bill.</li><li>And, of course, I extend that 3 GB by hitting the WiFi in coffee shops and hotels, which is where we circle back to one of my top travel security tips -- use a VPN when on WiFi. I used to think that as long as I was hitting encrypted web sites I was OK -- it used to be that you’d see HTTPS in the address bar apparently Google and Apple think that’s too much for us to process; they’ve replaced it with a picture of a lock; Firefox still shows the full address, though. But it seems that more and more security breaches are taking advantage of obscure misconfigurations that get around basic security. And with major hotel chains regularly coughing up millions of credit card numbers, it seems a bit unreasonable to expect the staff at a small coffee shop or local hotel to be up-to-date on their router patching. So I have VPN clients on my iPhone, my Android tablet, and my MacBook Air. I usually forget to turn them on if I’m doing a quick check of Twitter or Google Maps while in line somewhere, but if I’m doing any sort of browsing session on public WiFi these days, I’ll fire it up.&nbsp;</li><li>Packing for this trip meant rummaging around for European plug adapters. Not voltage converters -- I don’t use them because all the electronics can handle 110 and 240 volt -- just the two blade-to-two round adapters. I’d rounded up my UK adapters for our June trip to Ireland and Scotland, but now I needed the European adapters -- the two round plug ones.&nbsp; I found the UK ones and a random South African one but I couldn’t find the European ones anywhere. Probably because I’d left them all behind in Brittany in March. So I got on Amazon (as one does when they need some random thing in a hurry) and ordered a box of 6. I only needed one, but given my history, 6 would keep me for a year or two. I ordered white adapters because that’s what popped up in Amazon. Which was OK in those hotels with black outlets, but not so great for white outlets. I took 2 and came home with 2, but only by sheer luck. At least twice, I was walking out of the room with my bag and only then noticed an adapter still plugged in, hiding in a recessed white outlet. I really need colored plug adapters. And not in tasteful colors; something gaudy, like a purple or pink or chartreuse. Maybe I’ll spray paint the ones I have before my next trip.&nbsp;</li><li>Leonard -- no last name -- commented on the last episode with a link to a Dallas TV station’s coverage of the last American Airlines MD-80 flight; appropriately flying from DFW to ORD, a route and a plane that contributed heavily to my Advantage Gold status -- when that was the highest level -- back in 1985. There’ve been a lot of stories covering the retirement; people waxing nostalgic -- though not too much since I haven’t heard of any big jump in Delta MD-80 bookings. They still fly almost 100 of them. I have seen a couple of quotes about not wanting to sit in the last rows because of the noise from the side-mounted engines. It’s true. Not even the Bose noise-cancelling headphones could handle all the engine and vibration noise. They were also bad seats because there were no windows; all you’d see would be the engine cowling and the window would make the noise even worse. And those times when I ended up in those seats -- usually last-minute bookings between ORD and DFW -- my mind would sometimes wander -- if the engine next to my head blows up, will the shrapnel blow out or blow into the cabin. I never heard of such a catastrophic failure on an MD-80 -- but that didn’t keep me from wondering.&nbsp;</li><li>Standing in the TSA PreCheck queue, watching the single screener who was checking boarding passes and IDs have to ping-pong between the regular and PreCheck lines, I wondered what was keeping US airports from installing the automated boarding pass-checking gates that I’ve passed thru at mid-sized European airports like Budapest and Krakow and Edinburgh. I got it -- they’re only checking for valid boarding passes; they’re not examining IDs -- but there’s got to be something there that can improve TSA efficiency <em>and</em> the traveler experience. Watching this poor woman, my mind fast-forwarded to October next year when the TSA starts enforcing the Real ID requirement, the time wasted arguing with people who travel maybe once a year and so didn’t go thru the additional hassle of getting a Real ID-compliant driver’s license. Note to self - don’t book any travel in October 2020. </li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com. </li><li>Bridge Music -- August (Reggae Rework) by el-B (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/elB/16075 Ft: Calendargirl </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Street Food in Poland and Hungary </strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Over-tourism is still a big topic in the tourism industry. Iceland seems to be cooling down after the Wow Air bankruptcy, but the photo from May of the queue to summit Mount Everest has become the new icon of the problem faced there and at places like Venice, Barcelona, and Machu Pichu. And it drives an interesting dichotomy -- travelers chasing the iconic Instagram picture -- sort of a virtual souvenir for this “pics or it didn’t happen” age -- while at the same time craving “authenticity” -- which is where, I think, the current glorification of street food is coming from. Wanting to experience something that you can only get in this place -- and, of course, post a picture of it.</li><li>Parking the cynicism for a sec -- if you’re queuing up (hopefully with some locals, not just tourists), doing the point-and-shoot ordering, and then eating it there on the street, it does create a very specific moment and memory. I vividly remember buying takoyaki, basically octopus croquettes, from a street vendor in Osaka; getting into the queue for a food stall in a Beijing hutong, the only non-Chinese guy, not knowing what for and getting this phenomenal crunchy scallion pancake; sending Andrew over to a vendor on a sidewalk in Hoi An, Vietnam for black sesame soup; folding up a slice of pizza in New York City in mid-bar crawl; and, as talked about a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/podcast-151-traveler-data-leaks-brittany-street-food/\">few episodes back</a>, slurping oysters on the Cancale sea wall on the Brittany coast.</li><li>So while we weren’t on a street food hunt in Poland and Hungary, our willingness, actually desire to eat pretty much whatever we came across without any filters -- no worries about keto or paleo or gluten-free diets -- led us to some good street food -- even though there were days I really felt the need to double down on the statins.</li><li>Probably the most memorable bit of street food came our first day in Krakow. We landed around 9am, took a taxi to the hotel, checked in, brushed our teeth, and walked up to the Old Square where I trawled through the vendor stalls. I came to a full stop at a small stand at the end of an aisle. An older couple had a huge pan over a wood fire. The pan had a metal divider down the middle; one half of the pan was frying onions; the other half, sliced kielbasa. I watched a couple people order and then stepped up. The man sliced a large, thick piece of bread off a round loaf, spread a thick smear of lard with cracklings, put down a layer of sliced kielbasa, finishing it off with fried onions. All for 13 złoty -- or about 3 and a half bucks. I don’t know what left more of an impression -- the size and heft of what he handed me or the staying power of the layer of pork fat it left on my lips. I’ll put a picture of it in the show notes.</li><li>We walked straight from there to a small square behind St Mary’s Basilica for the pierogi festival. There were 20-30 stands selling their selection of pierogis. Not sure if pierogis strictly qualify as a street food, but I queued up at the most popular ones and did point-&amp;-shoot ordering through most of their selection. I skipped the sweet pierogis -- the chocolate-banana and the blueberry ones just didn’t say “pierogi” to me -- but I still ended up with 5-6 from each stand -- from traditional onion and potato, to goose and duck and wild boar-filled ones. I tried to avoid pointing at one stand’s Mexican pierogi, but somehow it ended up on my plate. This was a pretty full-contact Day One. I needed a nap.</li><li>Chicago has a large Polish population -- somewhere in the range of 1-1.5 million Polish immigrants their descendants in the metro area, which, depending on who you read, is the largest Polish metropolitan area outside of Poland. So we get our share of Polish food and I wanted to try a few things I recognized. The first thing we hunted down was a pączki -- basically a Polish jelly doughnut. In Chicago, Pączki Day is Fat Tuesday and you see pączkis everywhere -- the grocery stores, bakeries. Asking around, Gorące Pączki -- “Hot Donuts” in English -- was the consensus recommendation in the Old Town. We rolled up there a couple of times and came away, I gotta say, disappointed. Even Chicago grocery store pączkis are better.</li><li>That weekend, we were staying with friends in the hills/mountains a couple of hours southwest of Krakow, down near the Czech and Slovakian borders. On Sunday, we went to a karczma for lunch, which as near as I could tell is a roadside pub/restaurant. But this one, the specialty was potato pancakes made in a wood-burning oven. One guy, the owner, was running the oven -- laying the pancake batter in the oven, shifting them around with a spatula, managing the fire, serving some pancakes flat while stuffing and folding others over like a potato pancake quesadilla. Watching this guy was like watching kitchen ballet. And the product -- like no potato pancake I’d ever had. Definitely beat out Chicago on this one.</li><li>We got into Budapest on St Stephen’s Day, Hungary’s biggest national holiday commemorating the founding of the Hungarian state; kinda like their version of the US Independence Day. After checking into our hotel, we walked over to the Buda side of the Danube where there was a huge food festival. The longest line was for the national cake. Apparently, they do a special cake each St Stephen’s Day. It was a really long line, but they were handing out free pieces of cake, so it was understandable. We skipped it though and went for the next longest line, for freshly fried lángos. Every culture seems to have some version of fried dough street food, and lángos is Hungary’s, though lángos is savory, not sweet. It was a hot day, but here was a booth full of women, hand stretching balls of dough into disks and dropping them into deep pans of hot oil for people waiting 15 minutes in the hot sun for them. The fully-dressed lángos was brushed with garlic and then topped with sour cream and shredded cheese. Still waddling from the weekend in Krakow, I went for the lite version -- just the garlic.&nbsp;</li><li>A couple of days later, Irene and I took a 40-minute train ride up along the Danube to Szentendre, a bit of an artist colony town. We hadn’t been up there in, I dunno, 20 years so we thought we’d check it out again. And top on our list of things to revisit was a little lángos shack tucked away halfway up a little stairway that goes from the town square up to the Catholic church on top of a hill. The last time we were in Szentendre, we tripped across this place walking up to the church - just a couple of people frying up lángos. It took us a bit to find the staircase this time -- it’s about a person-and-a-half wide archway next to a souvenir shop. The shack was still there, but it expanded, now with tables in a little courtyard, and it’s been found. We stood in a queue of tourists for 10-15 minutes watching 2 women crank out fried disks of dough. I cringed when I saw people putting ketchup on their lángos. We stayed pure with the garlic.</li><li>The <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/06/24/podcast-130-notes-from-hungary/\">last time</a> Irene and I were in Hungary, in 2017, we complained about not being able to find good, basic Hungarian food outside of the tourist traps. We saw lots of burger bars and pizza joint, especially in the Jewish Quarter, the party district where all the ruin bars are. But now, things seem to have diversified. Not far from Szimpla Kert, Ground Zero of the ruin bar circuit, there’s a place called Gettó Gulyás selling, well, gulyás and other Hungarian basics like chicken paprikas. And even better, it looks like there’s a bit of a chain called Langosh that’s open in the party district til 2 in the morning. Fried bread and beer -- not sure there’s any better definition of street food.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #155</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_155.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #155 — RJ Delays; Street Food in Poland and Hungary','','inherit','closed','closed','','2527-revision-v1','','','2020-03-22 11:42:40','2020-03-22 16:42:40','',2527,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/03/22/2527-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2690,1,'2020-03-22 11:52:18','2020-03-22 16:52:18','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/738DE79A-D927-423E-A890-569A5F3A0AB1-scaled.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2682 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/738DE79A-D927-423E-A890-569A5F3A0AB1-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a><figcaption>You have reached your destination</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>Things started out well, skipping out on Chicago winter for a drive down to Key West. But then last week, coronavirus hit the US and everything unraveled. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_161.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/780966433&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #161: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you hunkered down in the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois, trying to figure out exactly what the governor’s “shelter-in-place” directive means. Not a lot of travel since the last episode, and that’s not just because of coronavirus. No business travel booked, so it was just one trip in the back half of February to visit some friends who are snowbirding in Key West, Florida. 80 degrees and sunny vs. 30 degrees and grey skies in Chicago -- tough duty. Our friends rented a nice house up a dead end street in the Historic District, just a couple of blocks off Duval Street. They had it for two months, Feb through the end of March, but left early, giving up their last 2 weeks of sunny weather to drive back to Chicago because they’re afraid hotels will be closing along their route home.&nbsp;</li><li>Hadn’t planned any travel in March, but watched our April plans dissolve as Covid-19 spread. First, a friend from Poland canceled his wedding in Sedona, AZ shortly after the US announced the 30-day travel ban for Europeans. While their wedding date was past the 30 days, they figured this was just the start -- which it was. Over the next 5 days, travel bans started popping up across Europe. We joked to ourselves, “Lucky timing -- first time in 4 years we’re not doing Spring Break in Europe”, opting instead for some wine tasting in Howell Mountain and Napa Valley. Until the next day when California locked everything down, closing everything including restaurants and wineries…</li><li>For some families, kids home from school and mom or dad off the road and working from home -- the forced family togetherness is adding to the stress. I was talking to a friend this week -- “I’m usually on the road 75% of the time, and the kids are in school or sports. After 2 days of this, my wife laid down the rules -- my son is in the basement, my wife and daughter are on the second floor, I’m on the third floor, and the first floor with the kitchen is neutral territory -- you can pass through, but you can’t claim table or counter space there.” Last time I checked in with him, everyone was still alive -- that is, they hadn’t killed each other yet.</li><li>But I’m nothing if not an optimist, so in the midst of this week’s unraveling, I found a deal on a direct American Air flight from ORD to Barcelona -- 8½ hr 787 flight -- so I booked it -- 2 weeks in Barcelona at the end of September. I don’t know what we’ll do yet or where we’ll stay, but I’m already looking forward to it.</li><li>Bridge Music --  <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/snowflake/46164\">A Foolish Game</a> by Snowflake (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/snowflake/46164 Ft: Admiral Bob  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Steve Frick, a longtime TravelCommons listener and Untappd buddy who also does a podcast, <a href=\"http://hypeamerica.com/back-and-gone-again\">Travel Stories from Back and Gone Again</a>, took some time to record and send in an audio comment on last month’s episode -<ul><li>Gotta love the text-to-speech robot voice. Steve, would’ve been great to see that selfie on your Twitter feed. Also, check out the show notes for a link to Steve’s podcast</li></ul></li><li>Darren Mak hit me up on Twitter<ul><li>“Hey Mark,&nbsp; just listened to Travel Commons <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/09/20/podcast-155-rj-delays-street-food-in-poland-and-hungary/\">episode 155</a> on my last flight... board my next one which is a Delta MD88. Look out the window and see this... thanks for putting that in my head buddy!”&nbsp;</li><li>From the picture on his tweet, you can see he’s sitting in the window seat of an MD-88 just in front of the engine cowl. In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/09/20/podcast-155-rj-delays-street-food-in-poland-and-hungary/\">episode 155</a>, we talked about American Airlines’ retirement of their MD-80’s. I mentioned that when I ended up in a seat like Darren’s, my mind would sometimes wander -- if the engine next to my head blows up, will the shrapnel blow out or blow into the cabin. I never heard of such a catastrophic failure on an MD-80 -- but that didn’t keep me from wondering. And now, Darren can’t keep from wondering. Sorry about that, Darren. You won’t be able to un-think that. I’m guessing, though, that those MD’s were the first planes Delta parked as air traffic cratered and will be the last to return -- if they ever do. Savor that pic...</li></ul></li><li>And for our UK subscribers, a shout out to another TravelCommons listener and Untappd friend Rob Cheshire who launched <a href=\"https://thisweekincraft.beer/\">This Week in Craft.Beer</a>, a weekly newsletter covering the UK craft beer scene. He’s four issues in and is on a good roll. We’re thinking about heading over to the UK for Thanksgiving and the taproom directory in Rob’s newsletter will be key to planning that trip. I also love that he’s using a .Beer domain name. Check out the show notes for a link.</li><li>I think I’ve mentioned in a past episode that I’ve switched my carryon from a Timbuk 2 backpack to a Timbuk 2 messenger bag. Digitizing means carrying less physical stuff; the backpack was feeling half empty, so I switched to the smaller messenger bag. I like it except for one thing -- it’ll only hold a short water bottle. The big 20oz’er my daughter gave me for Christmas? Fits great in the backpack side pocket, but is too tall for the messenger bag. I played around with a lot of water bottles, but the best one has turned out to be a 500 ml Evian bottle. Now I know that single use plastic is a bad thing, but I can get a week’s use out of one Evian bottle. Until I fill it up in the gym or the concierge lounge the morning before my flight home and forget about it -- until the TSA person pulls it out of my bag on the other side of security and asks me, a bit sarcastically, if I want to go back and check it in my luggage. Yeah, no -- just pitch it. Which is why I can’t have nice things -- like a $35 teakwood S’well bottle. Instead, I walk down the terminal and just spend $3.50 for another bottle of Evian.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>For my trip to Key West, I got back to an old habit of reading some non-guidebook books -- either fiction or non-fiction -- about my destination before going. Before driving down the Overseas Highway, I read <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2QzesjI\"><em>Last Train to Paradise</em></a> about the incredible effort that went into building a railroad line to Key West 100 years ago -- that was later repurposed for the first iteration of the highway, and then read Hemingway’s <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3a72oOv\"><em>To Have and Have Not</em></a> because, well,&nbsp; it’s Hemingway and it’s about Key West, and so you just have to. I used to do this a lot more. I started when I read Paul Theroux’s <a href=\"https://amzn.to/398SvhE\"><em>Kingdom by the Sea</em></a> before my first trip to the UK back in 1985. I read John Lukacs’ history <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2xNS9A7\"><em>Budapest 1900</em></a> before my first trip to Hungary in 1989, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3a7KDhX\"><em>Watermark</em></a> by Joseph Brodsky before a trip to Venice, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/394bji3\"><em>His Bloody Project</em></a> by Grahame Burnet before going to Scotland’s Western Highlands. As you’d guess, none of these were about what to do or see, but instead they gave some context about the place -- even the fiction books. Gives a bit of balance to the go-here/see-that stuff in guidebooks and web sites.&nbsp; Something new for this trip -- a Spotify playlist of Jimmy Buffet tunes from those 1970’s Key West albums -- <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2whAqRs\"><em>Living And Dying In ¾ Time</em></a>, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2vG6wG8\"><em>Havana Daydreamin\'</em></a> -- for some additional context for that 3 hour drive down through the Keys.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com. </li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/THE_CONCEPT_OF_ENERGY/55008\">ABANDONED BUTTERFLIES</a> by THE_CONCEPT_OF_ENERGY (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/THE_CONCEPT_OF_ENERGY/55008 Ft: Doxent Zsigmond, Snowflake</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>New Crisis, Old Question</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I’m not gonna try to do any hot takes on what this whole coronavirus/Covid-19/ social distancing experience means because: a) I hate the whole “insta-punditry” that social media has spawned; and b) there are so many unknowns and things are changing so fast that any attempt at meaningful analysis right now won’t age very well. Indeed, I’ve had to re-write this episode 3 times now. I gotta get it recorded before things change and I have to re-do it again.</li><li>At first, it felt like the Black Monday crash of 1987 (which, I hate to admit, I’m old enough to have experienced) or Sept 11, 2001 were good comparison points -- significant, sharp, scary events that came out of nowhere with no warning, and when we were in it, felt like a free fall with no bottom in sight. But after a week or so, even though the stock market was still down or airports and airplanes were still empty, we could see a path to the other side -- maybe not turn-by-turn directions, but at least it felt like we could point ourselves in the general direction. But with this, we’re, what 2-3 weeks in?, and it still feels like we’re in that free fall; we don’t know where the bottom is, let alone the direction to get out.</li><li>I remember, after Sept 11th and the 2008 Great Recession, people saying “everything has changed” and wondering if travel would rebound, if people would get on planes again in the same numbers. And it did and then some -- though the growth has been driven more by leisure travelers than the road warriors. But the travel industry makes its money off the frequent business traveler, and that question pops up again -- will they come back? Because it’s a bit different this time. In 2001, remote work options were pretty much just AOL or Yahoo instant messaging. Video was limited to special rooms with ISDN lines; Skype didn’t launch for another 2 years. In 2008, things were a bit better, but we’re a few months after the second version of the iPhone is released (the iPhone 3G), WhatsApp doesn’t launch for another year, and Slack doesn’t show up for another 5. But now 12 years on, we have bandwidth, we have tools. Last fall, we had <em><a href=\"https://www.ft.com/content/5c635430-1dbc-11ea-97df-cc63de1d73f4\">flygskam</a></em>  -- flight shaming -- hit the mainstream, and now the Covid-19 pandemic that’s just about shut down international air travel. Were we ready to step back from business travel and the coronavirus is just the forcing function?</li><li>I’m coming up on the 35th anniversary of my first business flight, and in that time, I’ve known maybe a handful of guys (and they were all men) who went out of their way to do more business travel; when offered the choice between a conference call or a plane trip, they chose the plane trip. The vast majority got on the plane or the train or behind the wheel because that’s what they needed to do to get the job done -- to close a deal, to do a project, to work with an employee. As remote tools get better and get more ingrained in the culture, the ability to get tasks done remotely increases. But we are social animals. And for all the data and processes, most business is about relationships. And as long as that’s true, we’ll want to meet people face-to-face -- over a coffee or a beer or a meal -- once we finally touch bottom after this coronavirus free fall and can feel safe sitting next to each other again.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/49674\">H2O</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/49674  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Driving Down to Key West</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Back to the pre-lock down days of February, it was the first time I’d been to Key West. We decided to drive down, run the whole <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overseas_Highway\">Overseas Highway</a>, the 113-mile stretch of US 1 from Homestead, south of Miami, to Key West. We flew into FLL because -- well, it’s a bit less of a zoo parade than MIA. We landed, walked straight out of the terminal, across the street and into the rental car center -- no shuttle bus ride to the back-40. RSW is the same on the Gulf side. There are damn few on-site rental sites left, and so I appreciate them when I can. Walking down the Hertz Five-Star aisle with Irene (I fell out of top-tier President’s Circle a few years back; too many in-city clients where Uber and Lyft were more convenient), I see a bunch of <a href=\"https://www.hyundaiusa.com/us/en/vehicles/kona/gallery\">Hyundai Konas</a> -- which is a new model for me, it’s a subcompact SUV -- a few Chevy Malibus and, as always, the requisite bunch of Nissan Altimas. I do my normal drill -- looking for non-beat up cars (so I don’t have to argue about damage when I return it) and low mileage (so it won’t break down during the rental). Irene, she’s looking for a cute color. Lucky for us, the car that was at the intersection of all those criteria was right in front of us -- a Surf Blue Hyundai Kona with 126 miles on the odometer. We threw our luggage in, dialed up Key West on Google Maps on Car Play, and pulled out -- into a 15-minute line to get out of the Hertz lot. Somehow that partnership with Clear doesn’t seem to be making much of a dent.</li><li>When we were planning this trip, everyone warned us off the drive -- “It’s slow”, “you’ll get caught behind a bunch of trucks”, “an accident will shut the whole road down” -- but I was as excited for the drive as I was the time in Key West. I think the Overseas Highway is one of the iconic drives in the US -- in my mind, it’s in the same league with Pacific Coast Highway between San Francisco and LA and Route 66 from Chicago to LA.&nbsp;</li><li>Even before we left the mainland, the drive was cool, with the Everglades on one side and the marinas and ocean inlets on the other. The drive through Key Largo was less interesting -- not much more than bait shops and boat parking. A bit further along, we crawled through Islamorada and Marathon in heavy traffic on a Monday afternoon.</li><li>Everyone talks about Seven Mile Bridge (we clocked it at 6.8 miles) and have seen it in movies, and it <em>is</em> very cool, but what was more interesting to me were the sections of the highway before that, that run across the low-lying keys along the route of the old Overseas Railroad which I read about in <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2QzesjI\"><em>Last Train to Paradise</em></a> -- time and again we’d be driving across what was nothing more than just a bit of a road bed and a 100 or so feet of beach and vegetation. After that, it’s ocean.&nbsp;</li><li>The warnings were right -- the highway is not a fast drive. It squeezes down from four lanes to two lanes for a bit, and Monroe County sheriff cars are parked where the speed limit dips when you pass through towns. But speed isn’t really the point. Just like you don’t run through Big Sur at 70 mph on PCH, you don’t blow past people surf fishing for snapper, snook, and grouper, or not slow down and try to spot Key Deer on Big Pine Key. If you just want to get to Key West as fast as possible, spend $100 or so for a flight from FLL or MIA. Otherwise, throttle back and remember -- on this drive, it’s as much about the journey as the destination.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #161</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_161.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #161 — New Crisis, Old Question; Driving Down to Key West','','inherit','closed','closed','','2680-revision-v1','','','2020-03-22 11:52:18','2020-03-22 16:52:18','',2680,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/03/22/2680-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2725,1,'2020-04-11 23:45:00','2020-04-12 04:45:00','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/DSC00969.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2732 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/DSC00969-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\n<figcaption>Early attempts at travel journaling</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Kinda tough to do a podcast that’s more about the journey than the destination if I’m not “journeying,” but I give it a go. We talk about cyberattacks on frequent flyer accounts now that we don\'t have a reason to check them, planning for my first post-pandemic trips, and how re-reading my travel journals is pinch-hitting right now. </span>All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_162.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #162: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you, as you might expect, from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois, going into what is either the 3rd or 4th week of Lockdown, depending on how one scores the executive orders. I usually kick off each episode talking about my travel since the last episode -- which is going to be a very short conversation since I recorded the last episode at the end of Lockdown Week 1. Does make it kinda tough to do a podcast that’s more about the journey if I’m not “journeying”. Indeed, longtime TravelCommons listener Steve Frick pinged me on Twitter - “How are you holding up being off the road?” I told him I was taking some long walks to relieve the itching on the soles of my feet, but I’m not sure it’s working.&nbsp;</li><li>I thought I could keep myself occupied by working out more; drop the winter weight a little earlier than usual; be in better biking shape for when the Midwest weather breaks. But I had to call an audible on that when the city closed all the gyms, and then the running and biking path along Lake Michigan. Now I’m trying out a lot of new in-room/no-weight workouts. There’s a lot of them out there, even the Wall Street Journal published “Five Home Workouts to Do During the Coronavirus Outbreak”. I’ve never been a big HIIT guy, high-intensity interval training, so things like squat jumps, burpees, and mountain climbers haven’t been in my repertoire. But I’m kinda liking it and thinking that, when I’m back traveling, this could be a great in-room workout for those days when the hotel gym is jammed, especially those Marriott Courtyard gyms, when all four of the ellipticals and treadmills are taken, and there’s a queue for the handful of dumbells. Of course, I might have to warm up with some furniture jenga -- stacking the chairs and magazine table out of the way, maybe with one of the end tables -- but most US hotel rooms should have enough open space, except maybe in Manhattan.</li><li>However, my other new workout -- stair intervals, sprinting up the stairs in our 20-floor apartment building -- might not translate as well to hotels, especially those 4-story Courtyards.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Javolenus/41932\">Ianiscus</a> by Javolenus (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/\">Attribution (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Wired_Ant</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>The waves of Covid-19 e-mails from travel companies have been interesting.&nbsp; The first wave was at the beginning of March. I tweeted out a screenshot of what I received from United, but all the travel companies seem to be working off similar scripts -- “We care about you; let me tell you about the great job that HEPA air filters do; we’re cleaning the planes a bit more every night; we’ll get back to you later on your elite status.” Then the second wave as travel started to crater a couple of weeks later -- “We really care about you, so if you book a flight/room/car with us and give us money this month, we won’t charge you to change your dates if things are still mucked up… but we’ll keep your money; oh, and we cleaning the planes/rooms/cars real hard now”. This wave did get my attention. I mentioned in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/03/21/podcast-161-new-crisis-old-question-driving-down-to-key-west/\">last episode</a> how the combination of change fee waiver and a smokin’ deal on American’s direct ORD-BCN flight got me to open up my wallet for an end-of-September trip. Friends of ours are saying we’re crazy, but I’m an optimist. And now, starting last week, I’m starting to get the third wave of e-mails wherein the dam finally broke -- “Honest, we care a whole lot about you, so we’ve extended that change fee waiver for the next couple of months -- so long as you give us money now -- and, since we’re all sorta throwing in the towel on 2020, we’re giving you elites a push on your status -- whatever you have now, you keep through next year -- and extending your club memberships by 6 months; oh, and we’re still spraying disinfectant everywhere.” For me, hotel brands were the first -- Hilton and Hyatt, and Marriott notable in its absence. Then, this week,&nbsp; some of the airlines finally dropped -- Delta, United, and Alaska, with American and Southwest notable in <em>their</em> absence. And then, in mid-week, Marriott finally gave it. It’ll be interesting to see how long American and Southwest feel they can hold out. The longer the travel shutdown, the more the pressure will build. Internationally, the trend for airlines seems to be a bit more of a hedge -- not extending status, but reducing qualification levels by 25-30%. BA, KLM, Emirates all seem to be trying this. It’ll be interesting to see how long they can hold out.</li><li>As if this wasn’t enough, Marriott announced at the end of March yet <a href=\"https://hospitalitytech.com/52m-guests-affected-new-marriott-data-breach\">another security breach</a> -- <a href=\"https://www.wired.com/story/marriott-hacked-yes-again-2020/\" class=\"aioseop-link\">the second one in 16 months</a>. This one was in a PMS, a property management system, used at some of the properties managed by Marriott. They estimate that 5.2 million guests are affected. We’ve said many times before, it’s gotten to the point with all these hacks that you gotta assume that you’ve been compromised. But the coronavirus lockdown adds a bit of a twist. A security firm, PerimeterX, says that, in the past month, they’ve <a href=\"https://www.perimeterx.com/resources/blog/2020/covid-19-part-2-data-tells-the-story/\">seen account takeover attacks surge</a> to as high as 80% of all login attempts on travel sites. Kinda makes sense -- if we’re not traveling, we’re not hitting airline or hotel sites to book trips, or to check our account balances or figure out where we are on a status match. As we drop off, the remaining traffic -- from the bad guys -- becomes a higher percentage. And there is some money to be had there. I’ve said in past episodes that I tend to use 2¢/mile as the breakeven point between buying a flight or using miles, though that number might have drifted down to 1.5¢ with recent award chart changes. Crack and drain an account with 100,000 miles -- not a high balance for a frequent traveler who’s getting elite bonuses and uses the airline’s credit card -- and that’s $1,500. Would be nice if these companies used two-factor authentication, but I haven’t seen that with any of my accounts. So I make sure each account has a strong and unique password, and run the circuit -- logging into each of them, or at least the ones with big balances -- every month.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/48914\">In Peace (Somewhere Else Mix)</a> by cdk (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/\">Attribution (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Snowflake</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Post-Corona Trip Planning</strong> </h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I took a survey from Conde Nast Traveler magazine, asking about my post-coronavirus travel plans. Good timing because, as I mentioned earlier, I’ve been thinking about just that topic, because this will be the longest stretch I’ve stayed home in I don’t know how long. And you can imagine that topic is hot across the travel industry -- with airlines, hotels, trip planning apps -- hence, probably the reason for the Conde Nast survey. But before you can plan, you have to know when the lockdown will be released and how. Nobody in Chicago or anywhere else in the US seems to want to talk about that quite yet, but some European countries are -- Austria, Denmark, the Czech Republic, even Italy -- and as you’d guess, it’s looking like it’ll be more of a gradual release than a big bang; and happen first in places less impacted by Covid-19 -- rural before urban, then smaller cities; New York probably the last in line.&nbsp;</li><li>If that plays out, then I’m thinking that leisure travel will be the first to come back. A lot of business travel is between cities, and when those lockdowns finally release, companies will first be figuring out who they want to bring back to their offices. And they’ll be looking to cut expenses going into the expected recession. So the weekend warriors may be on the move before the road warriors.</li><li>Pulling on that thread a bit more, I think it means that, for many folks, their first post-lockdown trip is going to be a car ride. With a car, you have more control than a plane or a train -- more flexibility, no waiting for airlines to un-furlough their crews and spin up their route systems, and no worries about who you’re sitting next to. Maybe a drive requires a bit more planning -- probably want to make sure the lockdown is lifted in all the places you have to drive through. But when I add low gas prices to this flexibility, driving is probably the way I’ll go.</li><li>OK, but to where? Probably not too far initially -- not more than, say, a 6-8 hour drive, a day -- so no “let’s re-trace Route 66” out to LA or beeline for the Florida beaches. Also, given some of the blowback around some of those pre-lockdown Spring Break antics, I gotta think that party places like Florida beaches and Nashville’s Lower Broadway are gonna be some of the last spots released from lockdown, and even when they are, they’ll be different places. Not every bar and restaurant will survive this lockdown. With still maybe a month to go, I’m already seeing places in Chicago give up and shut down for good.</li><li>But that doesn’t really impact my planning. The first trip I want to do after the lockdown wasn’t some bachelor party long weekend blow out. I think I want to go see some family first, not least because there’s still uncertainty about if and when future waves of Covid-19 might prompt future lockdowns. So I’m thinking, right now, that first drive will be down to Spring Hill, TN to see my mother. It’s an 8-hr drive, so about as far as I can get in a day. I’ll throw my bike on the back of the car; take some solo rides on the roads that thread through horse country, hoping to hit an open barbeque joint, and a taproom or two.&nbsp;</li><li>Then some business travel comes back. People can only get so much done through Zoom and Microsoft Teams. Though we’ve pushed it off for 6-8 weeks, at some point people need to get together -- physically -- to close deals, do projects, work with employees. The ramp up will depend on how deep of a recession we find ourselves in. Maybe it’ll start up by cashing in some of those vouchers from cancelled March and April trips that airlines have been loath to refund.</li><li>Which, hopefully, works Irene, Claire and I up some trans-Atlantic trips in the late fall -- Barcelona in late September and perhaps London over Thanksgiving. They’ll probably still be sedate -- still some social distancing; not sure if we’ll be able to catch La Liga or Premier League matches. That’s OK, though. I’d be happy to walk again through the Gothic District, check out Cat Bar Cat, my craft beer hangout the last time I was in Barcelona, and to shop and eat through Mercado de La Boqueria. And then to walk through London streets for the Christmas lights.&nbsp;</li><li>But if I’m going to do any of this, I’ll probably need to get a hair cut first.</li><li>Bridge Music --<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/35724\">Blue Like Venus</a> by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/\">Attribution (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Admiral Bob</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Keeping a Travel Journal</strong> </h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>One of the questions on the Conde Nast Traveler survey was “How are you getting your travel fix during the lockdown?” My initial response was curt “I’m not”. But I paused for a minute and then backspaced over that and typed “I’m paging through my old travel journals”.</li><li>Travel journaling is kinda at the core of the TravelCommons podcast or at least its creation myth. I had been writing a weekly business column for an alternative newspaper in Philadelphia. An editorial change dropped my column right about the same time my career change to consulting put me on the road just about every week. I picked up a small Moleskine notebook in SFO while waiting out yet another Northwest Airlines flight delay, found an empty bar stool, ordered an Anchor Steam, and killed time writing down some of the goofier travel stories that had happened to me or that other guys had told me. When I had just about filled it up, I thought about starting a travel blog. But right about then, the first wave of podcasting hit the mainstream. I’d been in radio during high school in Memphis, so thought I’d give it a go. And here we are, coming on 15 years later.</li><li>If I go back even further -- before Moleskines became a thing -- I might say I started travel journaling by way of postcards. If I was in a new or interesting place -- think Tuscany or Lake Tahoe, not Dover, OH or Southfield, MI -- I’d write postcards to my folks, my girlfriend-later-wife, the kids, usually while sitting at the bar having an end-of-the-day beer or wine. Irene saved some of those postcards. Flipping through them and my travel journals, I didn’t find diaries of my travel days -- I did this, went there, ate at these dishes at that restaurant -- but rather little vignettes of things that caught my eye, things like “the favorite pastime in Bologna appears to be trying on sunglasses at the corner stand and then checking out ‘the look’ in the side mirrors of parked cars” or “I was told by law, a Swiss office worker has to be within 50 ft of a window. Explains why all the buildings I see in Basel are thin or doughnuts” or “Roadside billboards in Detroit are different from anywhere else I’ve been. Rather than pitching hotels or consumer products, the billboards on I-94 in from the airport are all selling auto parts, punctuated by that massive Uniroyal tire”</li><li>I’ve pretty much stuck to an end-of-the-day routine; maybe that beer or glass of wine helps me reflect back on the day and ID the things that stood out; the things that taught me something, and then write it down. I don’t have a goal, trying to write X number of pages; I just let each day dictate. Sometimes it’s a bit prosaic, and sometimes it feeds TravelCommons. The journal pages from our <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/01/24/road-trip-lowbrow-santa-fe/\" class=\"aioseop-link\">Thanksgiving getaway to Santa Fe a couple of years ago turned into a 2,000-word blog post</a>; and what poured out of my pen in frustration in France a year ago was at the core of the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/podcast-150-travel-interruptus/\" class=\"aioseop-link\">Travel Interruptus</a> episode, what I called “A Greek tragedy where the travel gods toy with our anti-hero for fun and entertainment”.</li><li>But more than anything, right now when the lockdown is aggravating my wanderlust, reading the pages that I wrote some 2 or 10 or 20 years ago, reminds me of those places, those times, those experiences, and gives me the travel fix that I need right now in this lockdown.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #162</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_162.mp3\" class=\"aioseop-link\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #162 — Post-Corona Trip Planning; Keeping a Travel Journal','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-162-post-corona-trip-planning-keeping-a-travel-journal','','','2021-10-01 17:02:36','2021-10-01 22:02:36','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=2725',0,'post','',1),
(2726,1,'2020-04-09 19:34:55','2020-04-10 00:34:55','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/738DE79A-D927-423E-A890-569A5F3A0AB1-scaled.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2682 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/738DE79A-D927-423E-A890-569A5F3A0AB1-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a><figcaption>You have reached your destination</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>Things started out well, skipping out on Chicago winter for a drive down to Key West. But then last week, coronavirus hit the US and everything unraveled. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_162.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/780966433&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #162: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you, as you might expect, from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois, going into what is either the 3rd or 4th week of Lockdown, depending on how one scores the executive orders. I usually kick off each episode talking about my travel since the last episode -- which is going to be a very short conversation since I recorded the last episode at the end of Lockdown Week 1. Does make it kinda tough to do a podcast that’s more about the journey if I’m not “journeying”. Indeed, longtime TravelCommons listener Steve Frick pinged me on Twitter - “How are you holding up being off the road?” I told him I was taking some long walks to relieve the itching on the soles of my feet, but I’m not sure it’s working. </li><li>I thought I could keep myself occupied by working out more; drop the winter weight a little earlier than usual; be in better biking shape for when the Midwest weather breaks. But I had to call an audible on that when the city closed all the gyms, and then the running and biking path along Lake Michigan. Now I’m trying out a lot of new in-room/no-weight workouts. There’s a lot of them out there, even the Wall Street Journal published “Five Home Workouts to Do During the Coronavirus Outbreak”. I’ve never been a big HIIT guy, high-intensity interval training, so things like squat jumps, burpees, and mountain climbers haven’t been in my repertoire. But I’m kinda liking it and thinking that, when I’m back traveling, this could be a great in-room workout for those days when the hotel gym is jammed, especially those Marriott Courtyard gyms, when all four of the ellipticals and treadmills are taken, and there’s a queue for the handful of dumbells. Of course, I might have to warm up with some furniture jenga -- stacking the chairs and magazine table out of the way, maybe with one of the end tables -- but most US hotel rooms should have enough open space, except maybe in Manhattan.</li><li>However, my other new workout -- stair intervals, sprinting up the stairs in our 20-floor apartment building -- might not translate as well to hotels, especially those 4-story Courtyards.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/snowflake/46164\">A Foolish Game</a> by Snowflake (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/snowflake/46164 Ft: Admiral Bob</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>The waves of Covid-19 e-mails from travel companies have been interesting.&nbsp; The first wave was at the beginning of March. I tweeted out a screenshot of what I received from United, but all the travel companies seem to be working off similar scripts -- “We care about you; let me tell you about the great job that HEPA air filters do; we’re cleaning the planes a bit more every night; we’ll get back to you later on your elite status.” Then the second wave as travel started to crater a couple of weeks later -- “We really care about you, so if you book a flight/room/car with us and give us money this month, we won’t charge you to change your dates if things are still mucked up… but we’ll keep your money; oh, and we cleaning the planes/rooms/cars real hard now”. This wave did get my attention. I mentioned in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/03/21/podcast-161-new-crisis-old-question-driving-down-to-key-west/\">last episode</a> how the combination of change fee waiver and a smokin’ deal on American’s direct ORD-BCN flight got me to open up my wallet for an end-of-September trip. Friends of ours are saying we’re crazy, but I’m an optimist. And now, starting last week, I’m starting to get the third wave of e-mails wherein the dam finally broke -- “Honest, we care a whole lot about you, so we’ve extended that change fee waiver for the next couple of months -- so long as you give us money now -- and, since we’re all sorta throwing in the towel on 2020, we’re giving you elites a push on your status -- whatever you have now, you keep through next year -- and extending your club memberships by 6 months; oh, and we’re still spraying disinfectant everywhere.” For me, hotel brands were the first -- Hilton and Hyatt, and Marriott notable in its absence. Then, this week,&nbsp; some of the airlines finally dropped -- Delta, United, and Alaska, with American and Southwest notable in <em>their</em> absence. And then, in mid-week, Marriott finally gave it. It’ll be interesting to see how long American and Southwest feel they can hold out. The longer the travel shutdown, the more the pressure will build. Internationally, the trend for airlines seems to be a bit more of a hedge -- not extending status, but reducing qualification levels by 25-30%. BA, KLM, Emirates all seem to be trying this. It’ll be interesting to see how long they can hold out.</li><li>As if this wasn’t enough, Marriott announced at the end of March yet <a href=\"https://hospitalitytech.com/52m-guests-affected-new-marriott-data-breach\">another security breach</a> -- <a href=\"https://www.wired.com/story/marriott-hacked-yes-again-2020/\">the second one in 16 months</a>. This one was in a PMS, a property management system, used at some of the properties managed by Marriott. They estimate that 5.2 million guests are affected. We’ve said many times before, it’s gotten to the point with all these hacks that you gotta assume that you’ve been compromised. But the coronavirus lockdown adds a bit of a twist. A security firm, PerimeterX, says that, in the past month, they’ve <a href=\"https://www.perimeterx.com/resources/blog/2020/covid-19-part-2-data-tells-the-story/\">seen account takeover attacks surge</a> to as high as 80% of all login attempts on travel sites. Kinda makes sense -- if we’re not traveling, we’re not hitting airline or hotel sites to book trips, or to check our account balances or figure out where we are on a status match. As we drop off, the remaining traffic -- from the bad guys -- becomes a higher percentage. And there is some money to be had there. I’ve said in past episodes that I tend to use 2¢/mile as the breakeven point between buying a flight or using miles, though that number might have drifted down to 1.5¢ with recent award chart changes. Crack and drain an account with 100,000 miles -- not a high balance for a frequent traveler who’s getting elite bonuses and uses the airline’s credit card -- and that’s $1,500. Would be nice if these companies used two-factor authentication, but I haven’t seen that with any of my accounts. So I make sure each account has a strong and unique password, and run the circuit -- logging into each of them, or at least the ones with big balances -- every month.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Post-Corona Trip Planning</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I took a survey from Conde Nast Traveler magazine, asking about my post-coronavirus travel plans. Good timing because, as I mentioned earlier, I’ve been thinking about just that topic, because this will be the longest stretch I’ve stayed home in I don’t know how long. And you can imagine that topic is hot across the travel industry -- with airlines, hotels, trip planning apps -- hence, probably the reason for the Conde Nast survey. But before you can plan, you have to know when the lockdown will be released and how. Nobody in Chicago or anywhere else in the US seems to want to talk about that quite yet, but some European countries are -- Austria, Denmark, the Czech Republic, even Italy -- and as you’d guess, it’s looking like it’ll be more of a gradual release than a big bang; and happen first in places less impacted by Covid-19 -- rural before urban, then smaller cities; New York probably the last in line.&nbsp;</li><li>If that plays out, then I’m thinking that leisure travel will be the first to come back. A lot of business travel is between cities, and when those lockdowns finally release, companies will first be figuring out who they want to bring back to their offices. And they’ll be looking to cut expenses going into the expected recession. So the weekend warriors may be on the move before the road warriors.</li><li>Pulling on that thread a bit more, I think it means that, for many folks, their first post-lockdown trip is going to be a car ride. With a car, you have more control than a plane or a train -- more flexibility, no waiting for airlines to un-furlough their crews and spin up their route systems, and no worries about who you’re sitting next to. Maybe a drive requires a bit more planning -- probably want to make sure the lockdown is lifted in all the places you have to drive through. But when I add low gas prices to this flexibility, driving is probably the way I’ll go.</li><li>OK, but to where? Probably not too far initially -- not more than, say, a 6-8 hour drive, a day -- so no “let’s re-trace Route 66” out to LA or beeline for the Florida beaches. Also, given some of the blowback around some of those pre-lockdown Spring Break antics, you gotta think that party places like Florida beaches and Nashville’s Lower Broadway are gonna be some of the last spots released from lockdown. But that’s OK, because I don’t think that’s the first trip I want to do after the lockdown -- some bachelor party long weekend blow out. I think I want to go see some family first, not least because there’s still uncertainty about if and when future waves of Covid-19 might prompt future lockdowns. So I’m thinking, right now, that first drive will be down to Spring Hill, TN to see my mother. It’s an 8-hr drive, so about as far as I can get in a day. I’ll throw my bike on the back of the car; take some solo rides on the roads that thread through horse country, hoping to hit an open barbeque joint, and revisit a taproom or two. But if I’m going to do that, I’ll probably need to get a hair cut first.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Driving Down to Key West</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Back to the pre-lock down days of February, it was the first time I’d been to Key West. We decided to drive down, run the whole <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overseas_Highway\">Overseas Highway</a>, the 113-mile stretch of US 1 from Homestead, south of Miami, to Key West. We flew into FLL because -- well, it’s a bit less of a zoo parade than MIA. We landed, walked straight out of the terminal, across the street and into the rental car center -- no shuttle bus ride to the back-40. RSW is the same on the Gulf side. There are damn few on-site rental sites left, and so I appreciate them when I can. Walking down the Hertz Five-Star aisle with Irene (I fell out of top-tier President’s Circle a few years back; too many in-city clients where Uber and Lyft were more convenient), I see a bunch of <a href=\"https://www.hyundaiusa.com/us/en/vehicles/kona/gallery\">Hyundai Konas</a> -- which is a new model for me, it’s a subcompact SUV -- a few Chevy Malibus and, as always, the requisite bunch of Nissan Altimas. I do my normal drill -- looking for non-beat up cars (so I don’t have to argue about damage when I return it) and low mileage (so it won’t break down during the rental). Irene, she’s looking for a cute color. Lucky for us, the car that was at the intersection of all those criteria was right in front of us -- a Surf Blue Hyundai Kona with 126 miles on the odometer. We threw our luggage in, dialed up Key West on Google Maps on Car Play, and pulled out -- into a 15-minute line to get out of the Hertz lot. Somehow that partnership with Clear doesn’t seem to be making much of a dent.</li><li>When we were planning this trip, everyone warned us off the drive -- “It’s slow”, “you’ll get caught behind a bunch of trucks”, “an accident will shut the whole road down” -- but I was as excited for the drive as I was the time in Key West. I think the Overseas Highway is one of the iconic drives in the US -- in my mind, it’s in the same league with Pacific Coast Highway between San Francisco and LA and Route 66 from Chicago to LA.&nbsp;</li><li>Even before we left the mainland, the drive was cool, with the Everglades on one side and the marinas and ocean inlets on the other. The drive through Key Largo was less interesting -- not much more than bait shops and boat parking. A bit further along, we crawled through Islamorada and Marathon in heavy traffic on a Monday afternoon.</li><li>Everyone talks about Seven Mile Bridge (we clocked it at 6.8 miles) and have seen it in movies, and it <em>is</em> very cool, but what was more interesting to me were the sections of the highway before that, that run across the low-lying keys along the route of the old Overseas Railroad which I read about in <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2QzesjI\"><em>Last Train to Paradise</em></a> -- time and again we’d be driving across what was nothing more than just a bit of a road bed and a 100 or so feet of beach and vegetation. After that, it’s ocean.&nbsp;</li><li>The warnings were right -- the highway is not a fast drive. It squeezes down from four lanes to two lanes for a bit, and Monroe County sheriff cars are parked where the speed limit dips when you pass through towns. But speed isn’t really the point. Just like you don’t run through Big Sur at 70 mph on PCH, you don’t blow past people surf fishing for snapper, snook, and grouper, or not slow down and try to spot Key Deer on Big Pine Key. If you just want to get to Key West as fast as possible, spend $100 or so for a flight from FLL or MIA. Otherwise, throttle back and remember -- on this drive, it’s as much about the journey as the destination.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #161</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_162.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #162 — Post-Corona Trip Planning; Keeping a Travel Journal','','inherit','closed','closed','','2725-revision-v1','','','2020-04-09 19:34:55','2020-04-10 00:34:55','',2725,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/04/09/2725-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2728,1,'2020-04-09 23:53:21','2020-04-10 04:53:21','Recorded in the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, back doing my thing to support the travel industry with lots of travel in January. We talk about some recent TSA observations, good and bad; my latest spin of the \"travel roulette\" wheel, trading the plane for a train in an East Coast snow storm; a look back at last year\'s travel courtesy of Dopplr\'s Personal Annual Report; and being saved by duct tape while flying the tatty skies of United. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_71.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_71.mp3\"]\n<!--more-->\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #71:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded at the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago</li>\n 	<li>Back doing my thing to support the travel industry, visiting Washington DC, Denver, Phoenix, San Francisco, Stamford, CT, and Jackson, MI</li>\n 	<li>Noticing a lot more passengers paying attention to the pre-flight safety demo since the US Air Hudson River splashdown</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Beneath the Skin</em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/birdy-alter/\">Jerry Berlongieri</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Belated shout-out to Tim Grubb of <a href=\"http://www.sizeoflife.com/blog/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">The Size of Life blog</a> -- \"lifestyle news and reviews for the big and tall man\"</li>\n 	<li>Tim is doing a series of articles on \"Flying the (Big &amp; Tall) Friendly Skies\". The <a href=\"http://seatguru.com\" target=\"_self\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">SeatGuru</a> map he uses as an illustration points out the best coach seat for a big &amp; tall man -- the window seat on the second exit row of a United Airbus 319</li>\n 	<li>The new security checkpoint for Philadelphia Airport\'s Terminal\'s D and E replace a near-medieval set-up with a much better experience</li>\n 	<li>Watched the TSA do a full body patdown on <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_George\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Cardinal Francis George</a>, the 72-yr-old Catholic Archbishop of Chicago.  Couldn\'t that screener\'s time been used more productively checking out someone who could <em>actually</em> be a threat?</li>\n 	<li>Lost a recent game of \"travel roulette\". Moved from the Shuttle to Amtrak\'s Acela Express to avoid delays from an East Coast snow storm. The train ended up 2½ hours late because of equipment problems caused by the snow.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Hurt Me So I Can Walk Away </em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/joy-float/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Michael Joy</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Looking Back at Last Year\'s Travel\n</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Dopplr sent me a 2008 Personal Annual Report on my travel last year</li>\n 	<li>Has some interesting factoids, such as my \"personal velocity\" in 2008 was the same as that of a squirrel</li>\n 	<li>And that my 2008 carbon footprint was equivalent to 2.3 Hummers</li>\n</ul>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><img class=\"aligncenter\" src=\"http://thepeacocks.net/hummer.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"194\" height=\"139\" /></p>\n\n<ul>\n 	<li>Of course, they could have used, say a Mercedes Benz S-600 sedan, which gets worse mileage than a Hummer H3, but I guess chest-pounding about big gas-guzzling American SUVs is easier self-awareness about big gas-guzzling Euro sedans – especially when your company is based in Helsinki.</li>\n 	<li>The factoid that grabbed my attention was this one – “In 2008, you spent 214 days at home; 152 days traveling”</li>\n</ul>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><img class=\"aligncenter\" src=\"http://thepeacocks.net/days_home.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"149\" height=\"65\" /></p>\n\n<ul>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Bulletproof</em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/musicinside-forces/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Music Inside</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Flying the Tatty Skies of United </strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>My ORD-PHX flight was almost scuttled by a broken luggage bin door.</li>\n 	<li>Those of us who spend a good bit of time flying United know that duct tape is not an uncommon sight. United is fraying around the edges.</li>\n 	<li>United is the only major US airline to not have any current orders placed with any aircraft manufacturer</li>\n 	<li>And the service has gotten a bit frayed around the edges. The 2008 American Customer Satisfaction Index has United ahead of only US Airways</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://crankyflier.com/2008/11/20/united-gets-beaten-down-over-phocuswright-presentation-on-customer-experience\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Brett Snyder</a> was at a travel industry conference last November where a United executive gave a talk titled <em>Customer Experience and Flying: Not an Oxymoron</em> and admitted that United would be \"overstretching\" if they tried to be as good as Singapore Air or Virgin Atlantic</li>\n 	<li>Was refused entry to United\'s London-Heathrow business class arrivals lounge because I was flying on an upgraded coach ticket, not a full-fare business class ticket</li>\n 	<li>United\'s employees continue to hold together their frayed company by reaching out to passengers</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img style=\"display: none !important;\" src=\"http://ad.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/show?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;bids=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Magnatune</a></li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments@travelcommons.com or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_71.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #71 - Winter Travel, Last Year\'s Travel, Tatty United','','inherit','closed','closed','','115-revision-v1','','','2020-04-09 23:53:21','2020-04-10 04:53:21','',115,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/04/09/115-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2729,1,'2020-04-09 23:54:43','2020-04-10 04:54:43','Recorded in the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, back doing my thing to support the travel industry with lots of travel in January. We talk about some recent TSA observations, good and bad; my latest spin of the \"travel roulette\" wheel, trading the plane for a train in an East Coast snow storm; a look back at last year\'s travel courtesy of Dopplr\'s Personal Annual Report; and being saved by duct tape while flying the tatty skies of United. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_71.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_71.mp3\"]\n<!--more-->\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #71:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded at the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago</li>\n 	<li>Back doing my thing to support the travel industry, visiting Washington DC, Denver, Phoenix, San Francisco, Stamford, CT, and Jackson, MI</li>\n 	<li>Noticing a lot more passengers paying attention to the pre-flight safety demo since the US Air Hudson River splashdown</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Beneath the Skin</em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/birdy-alter/\">Jerry Berlongieri</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Belated shout-out to Tim Grubb of <a href=\"http://www.sizeoflife.com/blog/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">The Size of Life blog</a> -- \"lifestyle news and reviews for the big and tall man\"</li>\n 	<li>Tim is doing a series of articles on \"Flying the (Big &amp; Tall) Friendly Skies\". The <a href=\"http://seatguru.com\" target=\"_self\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">SeatGuru</a> map he uses as an illustration points out the best coach seat for a big &amp; tall man -- the window seat on the second exit row of a United Airbus 319</li>\n 	<li>The new security checkpoint for <a href=\"https://phl-airport.com/\">Philadelphia Airport</a>\'s Terminal\'s D and E replace a near-medieval set-up with a much better experience</li>\n 	<li>Watched the TSA do a full body patdown on <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_George\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Cardinal Francis George</a>, the 72-yr-old Catholic Archbishop of Chicago.  Couldn\'t that screener\'s time been used more productively checking out someone who could <em>actually</em> be a threat?</li>\n 	<li>Lost a recent game of \"travel roulette\". Moved from the Shuttle to Amtrak\'s Acela Express to avoid delays from an East Coast snow storm. The train ended up 2½ hours late because of equipment problems caused by the snow.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Hurt Me So I Can Walk Away </em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/joy-float/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Michael Joy</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Looking Back at Last Year\'s Travel\n</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Dopplr sent me a 2008 Personal Annual Report on my travel last year</li>\n 	<li>Has some interesting factoids, such as my \"personal velocity\" in 2008 was the same as that of a squirrel</li>\n 	<li>And that my 2008 carbon footprint was equivalent to 2.3 Hummers</li>\n</ul>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><img class=\"aligncenter\" src=\"http://thepeacocks.net/hummer.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"194\" height=\"139\" /></p>\n\n<ul>\n 	<li>Of course, they could have used, say a Mercedes Benz S-600 sedan, which gets worse mileage than a Hummer H3, but I guess chest-pounding about big gas-guzzling American SUVs is easier self-awareness about big gas-guzzling Euro sedans – especially when your company is based in Helsinki.</li>\n 	<li>The factoid that grabbed my attention was this one – “In 2008, you spent 214 days at home; 152 days traveling”</li>\n</ul>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><img class=\"aligncenter\" src=\"http://thepeacocks.net/days_home.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"149\" height=\"65\" /></p>\n\n<ul>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Bulletproof</em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/musicinside-forces/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Music Inside</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Flying the Tatty Skies of United </strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>My ORD-PHX flight was almost scuttled by a broken luggage bin door.</li>\n 	<li>Those of us who spend a good bit of time flying United know that duct tape is not an uncommon sight. United is fraying around the edges.</li>\n 	<li>United is the only major US airline to not have any current orders placed with any aircraft manufacturer</li>\n 	<li>And the service has gotten a bit frayed around the edges. The 2008 American Customer Satisfaction Index has United ahead of only US Airways</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://crankyflier.com/2008/11/20/united-gets-beaten-down-over-phocuswright-presentation-on-customer-experience\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Brett Snyder</a> was at a travel industry conference last November where a United executive gave a talk titled <em>Customer Experience and Flying: Not an Oxymoron</em> and admitted that United would be \"overstretching\" if they tried to be as good as Singapore Air or Virgin Atlantic</li>\n 	<li>Was refused entry to United\'s London-Heathrow business class arrivals lounge because I was flying on an upgraded coach ticket, not a full-fare business class ticket</li>\n 	<li>United\'s employees continue to hold together their frayed company by reaching out to passengers</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img style=\"display: none !important;\" src=\"http://ad.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/show?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;bids=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Magnatune</a></li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments@travelcommons.com or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_71.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #71 - Winter Travel, Last Year\'s Travel, Tatty United','','inherit','closed','closed','','115-revision-v1','','','2020-04-09 23:54:43','2020-04-10 04:54:43','',115,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/04/09/115-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2731,1,'2020-04-12 12:21:37','2020-04-12 17:21:37','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/738DE79A-D927-423E-A890-569A5F3A0AB1-scaled.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2682 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/738DE79A-D927-423E-A890-569A5F3A0AB1-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a><figcaption>You have reached your destination</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>Things started out well, skipping out on Chicago winter for a drive down to Key West. But then last week, coronavirus hit the US and everything unraveled. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_162.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/780966433&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #162: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you, as you might expect, from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois, going into what is either the 3rd or 4th week of Lockdown, depending on how one scores the executive orders. I usually kick off each episode talking about my travel since the last episode -- which is going to be a very short conversation since I recorded the last episode at the end of Lockdown Week 1. Does make it kinda tough to do a podcast that’s more about the journey if I’m not “journeying”. Indeed, longtime TravelCommons listener Steve Frick pinged me on Twitter - “How are you holding up being off the road?” I told him I was taking some long walks to relieve the itching on the soles of my feet, but I’m not sure it’s working.&nbsp;</li><li>I thought I could keep myself occupied by working out more; drop the winter weight a little earlier than usual; be in better biking shape for when the Midwest weather breaks. But I had to call an audible on that when the city closed all the gyms, and then the running and biking path along Lake Michigan. Now I’m trying out a lot of new in-room/no-weight workouts. There’s a lot of them out there, even the Wall Street Journal published “Five Home Workouts to Do During the Coronavirus Outbreak”. I’ve never been a big HIIT guy, high-intensity interval training, so things like squat jumps, burpees, and mountain climbers haven’t been in my repertoire. But I’m kinda liking it and thinking that, when I’m back traveling, this could be a great in-room workout for those days when the hotel gym is jammed, especially those Marriott Courtyard gyms, when all four of the ellipticals and treadmills are taken, and there’s a queue for the handful of dumbells. Of course, I might have to warm up with some furniture jenga -- stacking the chairs and magazine table out of the way, maybe with one of the end tables -- but most US hotel rooms should have enough open space, except maybe in Manhattan.</li><li>However, my other new workout -- stair intervals, sprinting up the stairs in our 20-floor apartment building -- might not translate as well to hotels, especially those 4-story Courtyards.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/snowflake/46164\">A Foolish Game</a> by Snowflake (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/snowflake/46164 Ft: Admiral Bob</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>The waves of Covid-19 e-mails from travel companies have been interesting.&nbsp; The first wave was at the beginning of March. I tweeted out a screenshot of what I received from United, but all the travel companies seem to be working off similar scripts -- “We care about you; let me tell you about the great job that HEPA air filters do; we’re cleaning the planes a bit more every night; we’ll get back to you later on your elite status.” Then the second wave as travel started to crater a couple of weeks later -- “We really care about you, so if you book a flight/room/car with us and give us money this month, we won’t charge you to change your dates if things are still mucked up… but we’ll keep your money; oh, and we cleaning the planes/rooms/cars real hard now”. This wave did get my attention. I mentioned in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/03/21/podcast-161-new-crisis-old-question-driving-down-to-key-west/\">last episode</a> how the combination of change fee waiver and a smokin’ deal on American’s direct ORD-BCN flight got me to open up my wallet for an end-of-September trip. Friends of ours are saying we’re crazy, but I’m an optimist. And now, starting last week, I’m starting to get the third wave of e-mails wherein the dam finally broke -- “Honest, we care a whole lot about you, so we’ve extended that change fee waiver for the next couple of months -- so long as you give us money now -- and, since we’re all sorta throwing in the towel on 2020, we’re giving you elites a push on your status -- whatever you have now, you keep through next year -- and extending your club memberships by 6 months; oh, and we’re still spraying disinfectant everywhere.” For me, hotel brands were the first -- Hilton and Hyatt, and Marriott notable in its absence. Then, this week,&nbsp; some of the airlines finally dropped -- Delta, United, and Alaska, with American and Southwest notable in <em>their</em> absence. And then, in mid-week, Marriott finally gave it. It’ll be interesting to see how long American and Southwest feel they can hold out. The longer the travel shutdown, the more the pressure will build. Internationally, the trend for airlines seems to be a bit more of a hedge -- not extending status, but reducing qualification levels by 25-30%. BA, KLM, Emirates all seem to be trying this. It’ll be interesting to see how long they can hold out.</li><li>As if this wasn’t enough, Marriott announced at the end of March yet <a href=\"https://hospitalitytech.com/52m-guests-affected-new-marriott-data-breach\">another security breach</a> -- <a href=\"https://www.wired.com/story/marriott-hacked-yes-again-2020/\">the second one in 16 months</a>. This one was in a PMS, a property management system, used at some of the properties managed by Marriott. They estimate that 5.2 million guests are affected. We’ve said many times before, it’s gotten to the point with all these hacks that you gotta assume that you’ve been compromised. But the coronavirus lockdown adds a bit of a twist. A security firm, PerimeterX, says that, in the past month, they’ve <a href=\"https://www.perimeterx.com/resources/blog/2020/covid-19-part-2-data-tells-the-story/\">seen account takeover attacks surge</a> to as high as 80% of all login attempts on travel sites. Kinda makes sense -- if we’re not traveling, we’re not hitting airline or hotel sites to book trips, or to check our account balances or figure out where we are on a status match. As we drop off, the remaining traffic -- from the bad guys -- becomes a higher percentage. And there is some money to be had there. I’ve said in past episodes that I tend to use 2¢/mile as the breakeven point between buying a flight or using miles, though that number might have drifted down to 1.5¢ with recent award chart changes. Crack and drain an account with 100,000 miles -- not a high balance for a frequent traveler who’s getting elite bonuses and uses the airline’s credit card -- and that’s $1,500. Would be nice if these companies used two-factor authentication, but I haven’t seen that with any of my accounts. So I make sure each account has a strong and unique password, and run the circuit -- logging into each of them, or at least the ones with big balances -- every month.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Post-Corona Trip Planning</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I took a survey from Conde Nast Traveler magazine, asking about my post-coronavirus travel plans. Good timing because, as I mentioned earlier, I’ve been thinking about just that topic, because this will be the longest stretch I’ve stayed home in I don’t know how long. And you can imagine that topic is hot across the travel industry -- with airlines, hotels, trip planning apps -- hence, probably the reason for the Conde Nast survey. But before you can plan, you have to know when the lockdown will be released and how. Nobody in Chicago or anywhere else in the US seems to want to talk about that quite yet, but some European countries are -- Austria, Denmark, the Czech Republic, even Italy -- and as you’d guess, it’s looking like it’ll be more of a gradual release than a big bang; and happen first in places less impacted by Covid-19 -- rural before urban, then smaller cities; New York probably the last in line. </li><li>If that plays out, then I’m thinking that leisure travel will be the first to come back. A lot of business travel is between cities, and when those lockdowns finally release, companies will first be figuring out who they want to bring back to their offices. And they’ll be looking to cut expenses going into the expected recession. So the weekend warriors may be on the move before the road warriors.</li><li>Pulling on that thread a bit more, I think it means that, for many folks, their first post-lockdown trip is going to be a car ride. With a car, you have more control than a plane or a train -- more flexibility, no waiting for airlines to un-furlough their crews and spin up their route systems, and no worries about who you’re sitting next to. Maybe a drive requires a bit more planning -- probably want to make sure the lockdown is lifted in all the places you have to drive through. But when I add low gas prices to this flexibility, driving is probably the way I’ll go.</li><li>OK, but to where? Probably not too far initially -- not more than, say, a 6-8 hour drive, a day -- so no “let’s re-trace Route 66” out to LA or beeline for the Florida beaches. Also, given some of the blowback around some of those pre-lockdown Spring Break antics, I gotta think that party places like Florida beaches and Nashville’s Lower Broadway are gonna be some of the last spots released from lockdown, and even when they are, they’ll be different places. Not every bar and restaurant will survive this lockdown. With still maybe a month to go, I’m already seeing places in Chicago give up and shut down for good.</li><li>But that doesn’t really impact my planning. The first trip I want to do after the lockdown wasn’t some bachelor party long weekend blow out. I think I want to go see some family first, not least because there’s still uncertainty about if and when future waves of Covid-19 might prompt future lockdowns. So I’m thinking, right now, that first drive will be down to Spring Hill, TN to see my mother. It’s an 8-hr drive, so about as far as I can get in a day. I’ll throw my bike on the back of the car; take some solo rides on the roads that thread through horse country, hoping to hit an open barbeque joint, and a taproom or two. </li><li>Then some business travel comes back. People can only get so much done through Zoom and Microsoft Teams. Though we’ve pushed it off for 6-8 weeks, at some point people need to get together -- physically -- to close deals, do projects, work with employees. The ramp up will depend on how deep of a recession we find ourselves in. Maybe it’ll start up by cashing in some of those vouchers from cancelled March and April trips that airlines have been loath to refund.</li><li>Which, hopefully, works Irene, Claire and I up some trans-Atlantic trips in the late fall -- Barcelona in late September and perhaps London over Thanksgiving. They’ll probably still be sedate -- still some social distancing; not sure if we’ll be able to catch La Liga or Premier League matches. That’s OK, though. I’d be happy to walk again through the Gothic District, check out Cat Bar Cat, my craft beer hangout the last time I was in Barcelona, and to shop and eat through Mercado de La Boqueria. And then to walk through London streets for the Christmas lights. </li><li>But if I’m going to do any of this, I’ll probably need to get a hair cut first.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Keeping a Travel Journal</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>One of the questions on the Conde Nast Traveler survey was “How are you getting your travel fix during the lockdown?” My initial response was curt “I’m not”. But I paused for a minute and then backspaced over that and typed “I’m paging through my old travel journals”.</li><li>Travel journaling is kinda at the core of the TravelCommons podcast or at least its creation myth. I had been writing a weekly business column for an alternative newspaper in Philadelphia. An editorial change dropped my column right about the same time my career change to consulting put me on the road just about every week. I picked up a small Moleskine notebook in SFO while waiting out yet another Northwest Airlines flight delay, found an empty bar stool, ordered an Anchor Steam, and killed time writing down some of the goofier travel stories that had happened to me or that other guys had told me. When I had just about filled it up, I thought about starting a travel blog. But right about then, the first wave of podcasting hit the mainstream. I’d been in radio during high school in Memphis, so thought I’d give it a go. And here we are, coming on 15 years later.</li><li>If I go back even further -- before Moleskines became a thing -- I might say I started travel journaling by way of postcards. If I was in a new or interesting place -- think Tuscany or Lake Tahoe, not Dover, OH or Southfield, MI -- I’d write postcards to my folks, my girlfriend-later-wife, the kids, usually while sitting at the bar having an end-of-the-day beer or wine. Irene saved some of those postcards. Flipping through them and my travel journals, I didn’t find diaries of my travel days -- I did this, went there, ate at these dishes at that restaurant -- but rather little vignettes of things that caught my eye, things like “the favorite pastime in Bologna appears to be trying on sunglasses at the corner stand and then checking out ‘the look’ in the side mirrors of parked cars” or “I was told by law, a Swiss office worker has to be within 50 ft of a window. Explains why all the buildings I see in Basel are thin or doughnuts” or “Roadside billboards in Detroit are different from anywhere else I’ve been. Rather than pitching hotels or consumer products, the billboards on I-94 in from the airport are all selling auto parts, punctuated by that massive Uniroyal tire”</li><li>I’ve pretty much stuck to an end-of-the-day routine; maybe that beer or glass of wine helps me reflect back on the day and ID the things that stood out; the things that taught me something, and then write it down. I don’t have a goal, trying to write X number of pages; I just let each day dictate. Sometimes it’s a bit prosaic, and sometimes it feeds TravelCommons. The journal pages from our <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/01/24/road-trip-lowbrow-santa-fe/\" class=\"aioseop-link\">Thanksgiving getaway to Santa Fe a couple of years ago turned into a 2,000-word blog post</a>; and what poured out of my pen in frustration in France a year ago was at the core of the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/podcast-150-travel-interruptus/\" class=\"aioseop-link\">Travel Interruptus</a> episode, what I called “A Greek tragedy where the travel gods toy with our anti-hero for fun and entertainment”.</li><li>But more than anything, right now when the lockdown is aggravating my wanderlust, reading the pages that I wrote some 2 or 10 or 20 years ago, reminds me of those places, those times, those experiences, and gives me the travel fix that I need right now in this lockdown.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #162</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_162.mp3\" class=\"aioseop-link\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #162 — Post-Corona Trip Planning; Keeping a Travel Journal','','inherit','closed','closed','','2725-revision-v1','','','2020-04-12 12:21:37','2020-04-12 17:21:37','',2725,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/04/12/2725-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2732,1,'2020-04-12 12:22:00','2020-04-12 17:22:00','','DSC00969','','inherit','open','closed','','dsc00969','','','2020-04-12 12:22:00','2020-04-12 17:22:00','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/DSC00969.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(2734,1,'2020-04-12 12:26:19','2020-04-12 17:26:19','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/DSC00969.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2732 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/DSC00969-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\n<figcaption>Early attempts at travel journaling</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p>Things started out well, skipping out on Chicago winter for a drive down to Key West. But then last week, coronavirus hit the US and everything unraveled. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_162.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/780966433&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #162: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you, as you might expect, from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois, going into what is either the 3rd or 4th week of Lockdown, depending on how one scores the executive orders. I usually kick off each episode talking about my travel since the last episode -- which is going to be a very short conversation since I recorded the last episode at the end of Lockdown Week 1. Does make it kinda tough to do a podcast that’s more about the journey if I’m not “journeying”. Indeed, longtime TravelCommons listener Steve Frick pinged me on Twitter - “How are you holding up being off the road?” I told him I was taking some long walks to relieve the itching on the soles of my feet, but I’m not sure it’s working. </li><li>I thought I could keep myself occupied by working out more; drop the winter weight a little earlier than usual; be in better biking shape for when the Midwest weather breaks. But I had to call an audible on that when the city closed all the gyms, and then the running and biking path along Lake Michigan. Now I’m trying out a lot of new in-room/no-weight workouts. There’s a lot of them out there, even the Wall Street Journal published “Five Home Workouts to Do During the Coronavirus Outbreak”. I’ve never been a big HIIT guy, high-intensity interval training, so things like squat jumps, burpees, and mountain climbers haven’t been in my repertoire. But I’m kinda liking it and thinking that, when I’m back traveling, this could be a great in-room workout for those days when the hotel gym is jammed, especially those Marriott Courtyard gyms, when all four of the ellipticals and treadmills are taken, and there’s a queue for the handful of dumbells. Of course, I might have to warm up with some furniture jenga -- stacking the chairs and magazine table out of the way, maybe with one of the end tables -- but most US hotel rooms should have enough open space, except maybe in Manhattan.</li><li>However, my other new workout -- stair intervals, sprinting up the stairs in our 20-floor apartment building -- might not translate as well to hotels, especially those 4-story Courtyards.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Javolenus/41932\">Ianiscus</a> by Javolenus (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/\">Attribution (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Wired_Ant</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>The waves of Covid-19 e-mails from travel companies have been interesting.  The first wave was at the beginning of March. I tweeted out a screenshot of what I received from United, but all the travel companies seem to be working off similar scripts -- “We care about you; let me tell you about the great job that HEPA air filters do; we’re cleaning the planes a bit more every night; we’ll get back to you later on your elite status.” Then the second wave as travel started to crater a couple of weeks later -- “We really care about you, so if you book a flight/room/car with us and give us money this month, we won’t charge you to change your dates if things are still mucked up… but we’ll keep your money; oh, and we cleaning the planes/rooms/cars real hard now”. This wave did get my attention. I mentioned in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/03/21/podcast-161-new-crisis-old-question-driving-down-to-key-west/\">last episode</a> how the combination of change fee waiver and a smokin’ deal on American’s direct ORD-BCN flight got me to open up my wallet for an end-of-September trip. Friends of ours are saying we’re crazy, but I’m an optimist. And now, starting last week, I’m starting to get the third wave of e-mails wherein the dam finally broke -- “Honest, we care a whole lot about you, so we’ve extended that change fee waiver for the next couple of months -- so long as you give us money now -- and, since we’re all sorta throwing in the towel on 2020, we’re giving you elites a push on your status -- whatever you have now, you keep through next year -- and extending your club memberships by 6 months; oh, and we’re still spraying disinfectant everywhere.” For me, hotel brands were the first -- Hilton and Hyatt, and Marriott notable in its absence. Then, this week,  some of the airlines finally dropped -- Delta, United, and Alaska, with American and Southwest notable in <em>their</em> absence. And then, in mid-week, Marriott finally gave it. It’ll be interesting to see how long American and Southwest feel they can hold out. The longer the travel shutdown, the more the pressure will build. Internationally, the trend for airlines seems to be a bit more of a hedge -- not extending status, but reducing qualification levels by 25-30%. BA, KLM, Emirates all seem to be trying this. It’ll be interesting to see how long they can hold out.</li><li>As if this wasn’t enough, Marriott announced at the end of March yet <a href=\"https://hospitalitytech.com/52m-guests-affected-new-marriott-data-breach\">another security breach</a> -- <a href=\"https://www.wired.com/story/marriott-hacked-yes-again-2020/\" class=\"aioseop-link\">the second one in 16 months</a>. This one was in a PMS, a property management system, used at some of the properties managed by Marriott. They estimate that 5.2 million guests are affected. We’ve said many times before, it’s gotten to the point with all these hacks that you gotta assume that you’ve been compromised. But the coronavirus lockdown adds a bit of a twist. A security firm, PerimeterX, says that, in the past month, they’ve <a href=\"https://www.perimeterx.com/resources/blog/2020/covid-19-part-2-data-tells-the-story/\">seen account takeover attacks surge</a> to as high as 80% of all login attempts on travel sites. Kinda makes sense -- if we’re not traveling, we’re not hitting airline or hotel sites to book trips, or to check our account balances or figure out where we are on a status match. As we drop off, the remaining traffic -- from the bad guys -- becomes a higher percentage. And there is some money to be had there. I’ve said in past episodes that I tend to use 2¢/mile as the breakeven point between buying a flight or using miles, though that number might have drifted down to 1.5¢ with recent award chart changes. Crack and drain an account with 100,000 miles -- not a high balance for a frequent traveler who’s getting elite bonuses and uses the airline’s credit card -- and that’s $1,500. Would be nice if these companies used two-factor authentication, but I haven’t seen that with any of my accounts. So I make sure each account has a strong and unique password, and run the circuit -- logging into each of them, or at least the ones with big balances -- every month.  </li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/48914\">In Peace (Somewhere Else Mix)</a> by cdk (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/\">Attribution (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Snowflake</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Post-Corona Trip Planning</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I took a survey from Conde Nast Traveler magazine, asking about my post-coronavirus travel plans. Good timing because, as I mentioned earlier, I’ve been thinking about just that topic, because this will be the longest stretch I’ve stayed home in I don’t know how long. And you can imagine that topic is hot across the travel industry -- with airlines, hotels, trip planning apps -- hence, probably the reason for the Conde Nast survey. But before you can plan, you have to know when the lockdown will be released and how. Nobody in Chicago or anywhere else in the US seems to want to talk about that quite yet, but some European countries are -- Austria, Denmark, the Czech Republic, even Italy -- and as you’d guess, it’s looking like it’ll be more of a gradual release than a big bang; and happen first in places less impacted by Covid-19 -- rural before urban, then smaller cities; New York probably the last in line. </li><li>If that plays out, then I’m thinking that leisure travel will be the first to come back. A lot of business travel is between cities, and when those lockdowns finally release, companies will first be figuring out who they want to bring back to their offices. And they’ll be looking to cut expenses going into the expected recession. So the weekend warriors may be on the move before the road warriors.</li><li>Pulling on that thread a bit more, I think it means that, for many folks, their first post-lockdown trip is going to be a car ride. With a car, you have more control than a plane or a train -- more flexibility, no waiting for airlines to un-furlough their crews and spin up their route systems, and no worries about who you’re sitting next to. Maybe a drive requires a bit more planning -- probably want to make sure the lockdown is lifted in all the places you have to drive through. But when I add low gas prices to this flexibility, driving is probably the way I’ll go.</li><li>OK, but to where? Probably not too far initially -- not more than, say, a 6-8 hour drive, a day -- so no “let’s re-trace Route 66” out to LA or beeline for the Florida beaches. Also, given some of the blowback around some of those pre-lockdown Spring Break antics, I gotta think that party places like Florida beaches and Nashville’s Lower Broadway are gonna be some of the last spots released from lockdown, and even when they are, they’ll be different places. Not every bar and restaurant will survive this lockdown. With still maybe a month to go, I’m already seeing places in Chicago give up and shut down for good.</li><li>But that doesn’t really impact my planning. The first trip I want to do after the lockdown wasn’t some bachelor party long weekend blow out. I think I want to go see some family first, not least because there’s still uncertainty about if and when future waves of Covid-19 might prompt future lockdowns. So I’m thinking, right now, that first drive will be down to Spring Hill, TN to see my mother. It’s an 8-hr drive, so about as far as I can get in a day. I’ll throw my bike on the back of the car; take some solo rides on the roads that thread through horse country, hoping to hit an open barbeque joint, and a taproom or two. </li><li>Then some business travel comes back. People can only get so much done through Zoom and Microsoft Teams. Though we’ve pushed it off for 6-8 weeks, at some point people need to get together -- physically -- to close deals, do projects, work with employees. The ramp up will depend on how deep of a recession we find ourselves in. Maybe it’ll start up by cashing in some of those vouchers from cancelled March and April trips that airlines have been loath to refund.</li><li>Which, hopefully, works Irene, Claire and I up some trans-Atlantic trips in the late fall -- Barcelona in late September and perhaps London over Thanksgiving. They’ll probably still be sedate -- still some social distancing; not sure if we’ll be able to catch La Liga or Premier League matches. That’s OK, though. I’d be happy to walk again through the Gothic District, check out Cat Bar Cat, my craft beer hangout the last time I was in Barcelona, and to shop and eat through Mercado de La Boqueria. And then to walk through London streets for the Christmas lights. </li><li>But if I’m going to do any of this, I’ll probably need to get a hair cut first.</li><li>Bridge Music --<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/35724\">Blue Like Venus</a> by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/\">Attribution (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Admiral Bob</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Keeping a Travel Journal</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>One of the questions on the Conde Nast Traveler survey was “How are you getting your travel fix during the lockdown?” My initial response was curt “I’m not”. But I paused for a minute and then backspaced over that and typed “I’m paging through my old travel journals”.</li><li>Travel journaling is kinda at the core of the TravelCommons podcast or at least its creation myth. I had been writing a weekly business column for an alternative newspaper in Philadelphia. An editorial change dropped my column right about the same time my career change to consulting put me on the road just about every week. I picked up a small Moleskine notebook in SFO while waiting out yet another Northwest Airlines flight delay, found an empty bar stool, ordered an Anchor Steam, and killed time writing down some of the goofier travel stories that had happened to me or that other guys had told me. When I had just about filled it up, I thought about starting a travel blog. But right about then, the first wave of podcasting hit the mainstream. I’d been in radio during high school in Memphis, so thought I’d give it a go. And here we are, coming on 15 years later.</li><li>If I go back even further -- before Moleskines became a thing -- I might say I started travel journaling by way of postcards. If I was in a new or interesting place -- think Tuscany or Lake Tahoe, not Dover, OH or Southfield, MI -- I’d write postcards to my folks, my girlfriend-later-wife, the kids, usually while sitting at the bar having an end-of-the-day beer or wine. Irene saved some of those postcards. Flipping through them and my travel journals, I didn’t find diaries of my travel days -- I did this, went there, ate at these dishes at that restaurant -- but rather little vignettes of things that caught my eye, things like “the favorite pastime in Bologna appears to be trying on sunglasses at the corner stand and then checking out ‘the look’ in the side mirrors of parked cars” or “I was told by law, a Swiss office worker has to be within 50 ft of a window. Explains why all the buildings I see in Basel are thin or doughnuts” or “Roadside billboards in Detroit are different from anywhere else I’ve been. Rather than pitching hotels or consumer products, the billboards on I-94 in from the airport are all selling auto parts, punctuated by that massive Uniroyal tire”</li><li>I’ve pretty much stuck to an end-of-the-day routine; maybe that beer or glass of wine helps me reflect back on the day and ID the things that stood out; the things that taught me something, and then write it down. I don’t have a goal, trying to write X number of pages; I just let each day dictate. Sometimes it’s a bit prosaic, and sometimes it feeds TravelCommons. The journal pages from our <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/01/24/road-trip-lowbrow-santa-fe/\" class=\"aioseop-link\">Thanksgiving getaway to Santa Fe a couple of years ago turned into a 2,000-word blog post</a>; and what poured out of my pen in frustration in France a year ago was at the core of the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/podcast-150-travel-interruptus/\" class=\"aioseop-link\">Travel Interruptus</a> episode, what I called “A Greek tragedy where the travel gods toy with our anti-hero for fun and entertainment”.</li><li>But more than anything, right now when the lockdown is aggravating my wanderlust, reading the pages that I wrote some 2 or 10 or 20 years ago, reminds me of those places, those times, those experiences, and gives me the travel fix that I need right now in this lockdown.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #162</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_162.mp3\" class=\"aioseop-link\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #162 — Post-Corona Trip Planning; Keeping a Travel Journal','','inherit','closed','closed','','2725-revision-v1','','','2020-04-12 12:26:19','2020-04-12 17:26:19','',2725,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/04/12/2725-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2735,1,'2020-04-12 12:46:58','2020-04-12 17:46:58','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/DSC00969.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2732 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/DSC00969-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\n<figcaption>Early attempts at travel journaling</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Kinda tough to do a podcast that’s more about the journey than the destination if I’m not “journeying,” but I give it a go. We talk about cyberattacks on flyer accounts now that we don\'t have a reason to check them, planning for my first post-pandemic trips, and how re-reading my travel journals is pinch-hitting right now. </span>All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_162.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/780966433&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #162: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you, as you might expect, from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois, going into what is either the 3rd or 4th week of Lockdown, depending on how one scores the executive orders. I usually kick off each episode talking about my travel since the last episode -- which is going to be a very short conversation since I recorded the last episode at the end of Lockdown Week 1. Does make it kinda tough to do a podcast that’s more about the journey if I’m not “journeying”. Indeed, longtime TravelCommons listener Steve Frick pinged me on Twitter - “How are you holding up being off the road?” I told him I was taking some long walks to relieve the itching on the soles of my feet, but I’m not sure it’s working. </li><li>I thought I could keep myself occupied by working out more; drop the winter weight a little earlier than usual; be in better biking shape for when the Midwest weather breaks. But I had to call an audible on that when the city closed all the gyms, and then the running and biking path along Lake Michigan. Now I’m trying out a lot of new in-room/no-weight workouts. There’s a lot of them out there, even the Wall Street Journal published “Five Home Workouts to Do During the Coronavirus Outbreak”. I’ve never been a big HIIT guy, high-intensity interval training, so things like squat jumps, burpees, and mountain climbers haven’t been in my repertoire. But I’m kinda liking it and thinking that, when I’m back traveling, this could be a great in-room workout for those days when the hotel gym is jammed, especially those Marriott Courtyard gyms, when all four of the ellipticals and treadmills are taken, and there’s a queue for the handful of dumbells. Of course, I might have to warm up with some furniture jenga -- stacking the chairs and magazine table out of the way, maybe with one of the end tables -- but most US hotel rooms should have enough open space, except maybe in Manhattan.</li><li>However, my other new workout -- stair intervals, sprinting up the stairs in our 20-floor apartment building -- might not translate as well to hotels, especially those 4-story Courtyards.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Javolenus/41932\">Ianiscus</a> by Javolenus (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/\">Attribution (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Wired_Ant</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>The waves of Covid-19 e-mails from travel companies have been interesting.  The first wave was at the beginning of March. I tweeted out a screenshot of what I received from United, but all the travel companies seem to be working off similar scripts -- “We care about you; let me tell you about the great job that HEPA air filters do; we’re cleaning the planes a bit more every night; we’ll get back to you later on your elite status.” Then the second wave as travel started to crater a couple of weeks later -- “We really care about you, so if you book a flight/room/car with us and give us money this month, we won’t charge you to change your dates if things are still mucked up… but we’ll keep your money; oh, and we cleaning the planes/rooms/cars real hard now”. This wave did get my attention. I mentioned in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/03/21/podcast-161-new-crisis-old-question-driving-down-to-key-west/\">last episode</a> how the combination of change fee waiver and a smokin’ deal on American’s direct ORD-BCN flight got me to open up my wallet for an end-of-September trip. Friends of ours are saying we’re crazy, but I’m an optimist. And now, starting last week, I’m starting to get the third wave of e-mails wherein the dam finally broke -- “Honest, we care a whole lot about you, so we’ve extended that change fee waiver for the next couple of months -- so long as you give us money now -- and, since we’re all sorta throwing in the towel on 2020, we’re giving you elites a push on your status -- whatever you have now, you keep through next year -- and extending your club memberships by 6 months; oh, and we’re still spraying disinfectant everywhere.” For me, hotel brands were the first -- Hilton and Hyatt, and Marriott notable in its absence. Then, this week,  some of the airlines finally dropped -- Delta, United, and Alaska, with American and Southwest notable in <em>their</em> absence. And then, in mid-week, Marriott finally gave it. It’ll be interesting to see how long American and Southwest feel they can hold out. The longer the travel shutdown, the more the pressure will build. Internationally, the trend for airlines seems to be a bit more of a hedge -- not extending status, but reducing qualification levels by 25-30%. BA, KLM, Emirates all seem to be trying this. It’ll be interesting to see how long they can hold out.</li><li>As if this wasn’t enough, Marriott announced at the end of March yet <a href=\"https://hospitalitytech.com/52m-guests-affected-new-marriott-data-breach\">another security breach</a> -- <a href=\"https://www.wired.com/story/marriott-hacked-yes-again-2020/\" class=\"aioseop-link\">the second one in 16 months</a>. This one was in a PMS, a property management system, used at some of the properties managed by Marriott. They estimate that 5.2 million guests are affected. We’ve said many times before, it’s gotten to the point with all these hacks that you gotta assume that you’ve been compromised. But the coronavirus lockdown adds a bit of a twist. A security firm, PerimeterX, says that, in the past month, they’ve <a href=\"https://www.perimeterx.com/resources/blog/2020/covid-19-part-2-data-tells-the-story/\">seen account takeover attacks surge</a> to as high as 80% of all login attempts on travel sites. Kinda makes sense -- if we’re not traveling, we’re not hitting airline or hotel sites to book trips, or to check our account balances or figure out where we are on a status match. As we drop off, the remaining traffic -- from the bad guys -- becomes a higher percentage. And there is some money to be had there. I’ve said in past episodes that I tend to use 2¢/mile as the breakeven point between buying a flight or using miles, though that number might have drifted down to 1.5¢ with recent award chart changes. Crack and drain an account with 100,000 miles -- not a high balance for a frequent traveler who’s getting elite bonuses and uses the airline’s credit card -- and that’s $1,500. Would be nice if these companies used two-factor authentication, but I haven’t seen that with any of my accounts. So I make sure each account has a strong and unique password, and run the circuit -- logging into each of them, or at least the ones with big balances -- every month.  </li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/48914\">In Peace (Somewhere Else Mix)</a> by cdk (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/\">Attribution (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Snowflake</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Post-Corona Trip Planning</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I took a survey from Conde Nast Traveler magazine, asking about my post-coronavirus travel plans. Good timing because, as I mentioned earlier, I’ve been thinking about just that topic, because this will be the longest stretch I’ve stayed home in I don’t know how long. And you can imagine that topic is hot across the travel industry -- with airlines, hotels, trip planning apps -- hence, probably the reason for the Conde Nast survey. But before you can plan, you have to know when the lockdown will be released and how. Nobody in Chicago or anywhere else in the US seems to want to talk about that quite yet, but some European countries are -- Austria, Denmark, the Czech Republic, even Italy -- and as you’d guess, it’s looking like it’ll be more of a gradual release than a big bang; and happen first in places less impacted by Covid-19 -- rural before urban, then smaller cities; New York probably the last in line. </li><li>If that plays out, then I’m thinking that leisure travel will be the first to come back. A lot of business travel is between cities, and when those lockdowns finally release, companies will first be figuring out who they want to bring back to their offices. And they’ll be looking to cut expenses going into the expected recession. So the weekend warriors may be on the move before the road warriors.</li><li>Pulling on that thread a bit more, I think it means that, for many folks, their first post-lockdown trip is going to be a car ride. With a car, you have more control than a plane or a train -- more flexibility, no waiting for airlines to un-furlough their crews and spin up their route systems, and no worries about who you’re sitting next to. Maybe a drive requires a bit more planning -- probably want to make sure the lockdown is lifted in all the places you have to drive through. But when I add low gas prices to this flexibility, driving is probably the way I’ll go.</li><li>OK, but to where? Probably not too far initially -- not more than, say, a 6-8 hour drive, a day -- so no “let’s re-trace Route 66” out to LA or beeline for the Florida beaches. Also, given some of the blowback around some of those pre-lockdown Spring Break antics, I gotta think that party places like Florida beaches and Nashville’s Lower Broadway are gonna be some of the last spots released from lockdown, and even when they are, they’ll be different places. Not every bar and restaurant will survive this lockdown. With still maybe a month to go, I’m already seeing places in Chicago give up and shut down for good.</li><li>But that doesn’t really impact my planning. The first trip I want to do after the lockdown wasn’t some bachelor party long weekend blow out. I think I want to go see some family first, not least because there’s still uncertainty about if and when future waves of Covid-19 might prompt future lockdowns. So I’m thinking, right now, that first drive will be down to Spring Hill, TN to see my mother. It’s an 8-hr drive, so about as far as I can get in a day. I’ll throw my bike on the back of the car; take some solo rides on the roads that thread through horse country, hoping to hit an open barbeque joint, and a taproom or two. </li><li>Then some business travel comes back. People can only get so much done through Zoom and Microsoft Teams. Though we’ve pushed it off for 6-8 weeks, at some point people need to get together -- physically -- to close deals, do projects, work with employees. The ramp up will depend on how deep of a recession we find ourselves in. Maybe it’ll start up by cashing in some of those vouchers from cancelled March and April trips that airlines have been loath to refund.</li><li>Which, hopefully, works Irene, Claire and I up some trans-Atlantic trips in the late fall -- Barcelona in late September and perhaps London over Thanksgiving. They’ll probably still be sedate -- still some social distancing; not sure if we’ll be able to catch La Liga or Premier League matches. That’s OK, though. I’d be happy to walk again through the Gothic District, check out Cat Bar Cat, my craft beer hangout the last time I was in Barcelona, and to shop and eat through Mercado de La Boqueria. And then to walk through London streets for the Christmas lights. </li><li>But if I’m going to do any of this, I’ll probably need to get a hair cut first.</li><li>Bridge Music --<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/35724\">Blue Like Venus</a> by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/\">Attribution (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Admiral Bob</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Keeping a Travel Journal</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>One of the questions on the Conde Nast Traveler survey was “How are you getting your travel fix during the lockdown?” My initial response was curt “I’m not”. But I paused for a minute and then backspaced over that and typed “I’m paging through my old travel journals”.</li><li>Travel journaling is kinda at the core of the TravelCommons podcast or at least its creation myth. I had been writing a weekly business column for an alternative newspaper in Philadelphia. An editorial change dropped my column right about the same time my career change to consulting put me on the road just about every week. I picked up a small Moleskine notebook in SFO while waiting out yet another Northwest Airlines flight delay, found an empty bar stool, ordered an Anchor Steam, and killed time writing down some of the goofier travel stories that had happened to me or that other guys had told me. When I had just about filled it up, I thought about starting a travel blog. But right about then, the first wave of podcasting hit the mainstream. I’d been in radio during high school in Memphis, so thought I’d give it a go. And here we are, coming on 15 years later.</li><li>If I go back even further -- before Moleskines became a thing -- I might say I started travel journaling by way of postcards. If I was in a new or interesting place -- think Tuscany or Lake Tahoe, not Dover, OH or Southfield, MI -- I’d write postcards to my folks, my girlfriend-later-wife, the kids, usually while sitting at the bar having an end-of-the-day beer or wine. Irene saved some of those postcards. Flipping through them and my travel journals, I didn’t find diaries of my travel days -- I did this, went there, ate at these dishes at that restaurant -- but rather little vignettes of things that caught my eye, things like “the favorite pastime in Bologna appears to be trying on sunglasses at the corner stand and then checking out ‘the look’ in the side mirrors of parked cars” or “I was told by law, a Swiss office worker has to be within 50 ft of a window. Explains why all the buildings I see in Basel are thin or doughnuts” or “Roadside billboards in Detroit are different from anywhere else I’ve been. Rather than pitching hotels or consumer products, the billboards on I-94 in from the airport are all selling auto parts, punctuated by that massive Uniroyal tire”</li><li>I’ve pretty much stuck to an end-of-the-day routine; maybe that beer or glass of wine helps me reflect back on the day and ID the things that stood out; the things that taught me something, and then write it down. I don’t have a goal, trying to write X number of pages; I just let each day dictate. Sometimes it’s a bit prosaic, and sometimes it feeds TravelCommons. The journal pages from our <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/01/24/road-trip-lowbrow-santa-fe/\" class=\"aioseop-link\">Thanksgiving getaway to Santa Fe a couple of years ago turned into a 2,000-word blog post</a>; and what poured out of my pen in frustration in France a year ago was at the core of the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/podcast-150-travel-interruptus/\" class=\"aioseop-link\">Travel Interruptus</a> episode, what I called “A Greek tragedy where the travel gods toy with our anti-hero for fun and entertainment”.</li><li>But more than anything, right now when the lockdown is aggravating my wanderlust, reading the pages that I wrote some 2 or 10 or 20 years ago, reminds me of those places, those times, those experiences, and gives me the travel fix that I need right now in this lockdown.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #162</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_162.mp3\" class=\"aioseop-link\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #162 — Post-Corona Trip Planning; Keeping a Travel Journal','','inherit','closed','closed','','2725-revision-v1','','','2020-04-12 12:46:58','2020-04-12 17:46:58','',2725,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/04/12/2725-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2736,1,'2020-04-12 12:49:33','2020-04-12 17:49:33','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/DSC00969.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2732 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/DSC00969-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\n<figcaption>Early attempts at travel journaling</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Kinda tough to do a podcast that’s more about the journey than the destination if I’m not “journeying,” but I give it a go. We talk about cyberattacks on frequent flyer accounts now that we don\'t have a reason to check them, planning for my first post-pandemic trips, and how re-reading my travel journals is pinch-hitting right now. </span>All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_162.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/780966433&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #162: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you, as you might expect, from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois, going into what is either the 3rd or 4th week of Lockdown, depending on how one scores the executive orders. I usually kick off each episode talking about my travel since the last episode -- which is going to be a very short conversation since I recorded the last episode at the end of Lockdown Week 1. Does make it kinda tough to do a podcast that’s more about the journey if I’m not “journeying”. Indeed, longtime TravelCommons listener Steve Frick pinged me on Twitter - “How are you holding up being off the road?” I told him I was taking some long walks to relieve the itching on the soles of my feet, but I’m not sure it’s working. </li><li>I thought I could keep myself occupied by working out more; drop the winter weight a little earlier than usual; be in better biking shape for when the Midwest weather breaks. But I had to call an audible on that when the city closed all the gyms, and then the running and biking path along Lake Michigan. Now I’m trying out a lot of new in-room/no-weight workouts. There’s a lot of them out there, even the Wall Street Journal published “Five Home Workouts to Do During the Coronavirus Outbreak”. I’ve never been a big HIIT guy, high-intensity interval training, so things like squat jumps, burpees, and mountain climbers haven’t been in my repertoire. But I’m kinda liking it and thinking that, when I’m back traveling, this could be a great in-room workout for those days when the hotel gym is jammed, especially those Marriott Courtyard gyms, when all four of the ellipticals and treadmills are taken, and there’s a queue for the handful of dumbells. Of course, I might have to warm up with some furniture jenga -- stacking the chairs and magazine table out of the way, maybe with one of the end tables -- but most US hotel rooms should have enough open space, except maybe in Manhattan.</li><li>However, my other new workout -- stair intervals, sprinting up the stairs in our 20-floor apartment building -- might not translate as well to hotels, especially those 4-story Courtyards.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Javolenus/41932\">Ianiscus</a> by Javolenus (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/\">Attribution (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Wired_Ant</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>The waves of Covid-19 e-mails from travel companies have been interesting.  The first wave was at the beginning of March. I tweeted out a screenshot of what I received from United, but all the travel companies seem to be working off similar scripts -- “We care about you; let me tell you about the great job that HEPA air filters do; we’re cleaning the planes a bit more every night; we’ll get back to you later on your elite status.” Then the second wave as travel started to crater a couple of weeks later -- “We really care about you, so if you book a flight/room/car with us and give us money this month, we won’t charge you to change your dates if things are still mucked up… but we’ll keep your money; oh, and we cleaning the planes/rooms/cars real hard now”. This wave did get my attention. I mentioned in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/03/21/podcast-161-new-crisis-old-question-driving-down-to-key-west/\">last episode</a> how the combination of change fee waiver and a smokin’ deal on American’s direct ORD-BCN flight got me to open up my wallet for an end-of-September trip. Friends of ours are saying we’re crazy, but I’m an optimist. And now, starting last week, I’m starting to get the third wave of e-mails wherein the dam finally broke -- “Honest, we care a whole lot about you, so we’ve extended that change fee waiver for the next couple of months -- so long as you give us money now -- and, since we’re all sorta throwing in the towel on 2020, we’re giving you elites a push on your status -- whatever you have now, you keep through next year -- and extending your club memberships by 6 months; oh, and we’re still spraying disinfectant everywhere.” For me, hotel brands were the first -- Hilton and Hyatt, and Marriott notable in its absence. Then, this week,  some of the airlines finally dropped -- Delta, United, and Alaska, with American and Southwest notable in <em>their</em> absence. And then, in mid-week, Marriott finally gave it. It’ll be interesting to see how long American and Southwest feel they can hold out. The longer the travel shutdown, the more the pressure will build. Internationally, the trend for airlines seems to be a bit more of a hedge -- not extending status, but reducing qualification levels by 25-30%. BA, KLM, Emirates all seem to be trying this. It’ll be interesting to see how long they can hold out.</li><li>As if this wasn’t enough, Marriott announced at the end of March yet <a href=\"https://hospitalitytech.com/52m-guests-affected-new-marriott-data-breach\">another security breach</a> -- <a href=\"https://www.wired.com/story/marriott-hacked-yes-again-2020/\" class=\"aioseop-link\">the second one in 16 months</a>. This one was in a PMS, a property management system, used at some of the properties managed by Marriott. They estimate that 5.2 million guests are affected. We’ve said many times before, it’s gotten to the point with all these hacks that you gotta assume that you’ve been compromised. But the coronavirus lockdown adds a bit of a twist. A security firm, PerimeterX, says that, in the past month, they’ve <a href=\"https://www.perimeterx.com/resources/blog/2020/covid-19-part-2-data-tells-the-story/\">seen account takeover attacks surge</a> to as high as 80% of all login attempts on travel sites. Kinda makes sense -- if we’re not traveling, we’re not hitting airline or hotel sites to book trips, or to check our account balances or figure out where we are on a status match. As we drop off, the remaining traffic -- from the bad guys -- becomes a higher percentage. And there is some money to be had there. I’ve said in past episodes that I tend to use 2¢/mile as the breakeven point between buying a flight or using miles, though that number might have drifted down to 1.5¢ with recent award chart changes. Crack and drain an account with 100,000 miles -- not a high balance for a frequent traveler who’s getting elite bonuses and uses the airline’s credit card -- and that’s $1,500. Would be nice if these companies used two-factor authentication, but I haven’t seen that with any of my accounts. So I make sure each account has a strong and unique password, and run the circuit -- logging into each of them, or at least the ones with big balances -- every month.  </li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/48914\">In Peace (Somewhere Else Mix)</a> by cdk (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/\">Attribution (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Snowflake</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Post-Corona Trip Planning</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I took a survey from Conde Nast Traveler magazine, asking about my post-coronavirus travel plans. Good timing because, as I mentioned earlier, I’ve been thinking about just that topic, because this will be the longest stretch I’ve stayed home in I don’t know how long. And you can imagine that topic is hot across the travel industry -- with airlines, hotels, trip planning apps -- hence, probably the reason for the Conde Nast survey. But before you can plan, you have to know when the lockdown will be released and how. Nobody in Chicago or anywhere else in the US seems to want to talk about that quite yet, but some European countries are -- Austria, Denmark, the Czech Republic, even Italy -- and as you’d guess, it’s looking like it’ll be more of a gradual release than a big bang; and happen first in places less impacted by Covid-19 -- rural before urban, then smaller cities; New York probably the last in line. </li><li>If that plays out, then I’m thinking that leisure travel will be the first to come back. A lot of business travel is between cities, and when those lockdowns finally release, companies will first be figuring out who they want to bring back to their offices. And they’ll be looking to cut expenses going into the expected recession. So the weekend warriors may be on the move before the road warriors.</li><li>Pulling on that thread a bit more, I think it means that, for many folks, their first post-lockdown trip is going to be a car ride. With a car, you have more control than a plane or a train -- more flexibility, no waiting for airlines to un-furlough their crews and spin up their route systems, and no worries about who you’re sitting next to. Maybe a drive requires a bit more planning -- probably want to make sure the lockdown is lifted in all the places you have to drive through. But when I add low gas prices to this flexibility, driving is probably the way I’ll go.</li><li>OK, but to where? Probably not too far initially -- not more than, say, a 6-8 hour drive, a day -- so no “let’s re-trace Route 66” out to LA or beeline for the Florida beaches. Also, given some of the blowback around some of those pre-lockdown Spring Break antics, I gotta think that party places like Florida beaches and Nashville’s Lower Broadway are gonna be some of the last spots released from lockdown, and even when they are, they’ll be different places. Not every bar and restaurant will survive this lockdown. With still maybe a month to go, I’m already seeing places in Chicago give up and shut down for good.</li><li>But that doesn’t really impact my planning. The first trip I want to do after the lockdown wasn’t some bachelor party long weekend blow out. I think I want to go see some family first, not least because there’s still uncertainty about if and when future waves of Covid-19 might prompt future lockdowns. So I’m thinking, right now, that first drive will be down to Spring Hill, TN to see my mother. It’s an 8-hr drive, so about as far as I can get in a day. I’ll throw my bike on the back of the car; take some solo rides on the roads that thread through horse country, hoping to hit an open barbeque joint, and a taproom or two. </li><li>Then some business travel comes back. People can only get so much done through Zoom and Microsoft Teams. Though we’ve pushed it off for 6-8 weeks, at some point people need to get together -- physically -- to close deals, do projects, work with employees. The ramp up will depend on how deep of a recession we find ourselves in. Maybe it’ll start up by cashing in some of those vouchers from cancelled March and April trips that airlines have been loath to refund.</li><li>Which, hopefully, works Irene, Claire and I up some trans-Atlantic trips in the late fall -- Barcelona in late September and perhaps London over Thanksgiving. They’ll probably still be sedate -- still some social distancing; not sure if we’ll be able to catch La Liga or Premier League matches. That’s OK, though. I’d be happy to walk again through the Gothic District, check out Cat Bar Cat, my craft beer hangout the last time I was in Barcelona, and to shop and eat through Mercado de La Boqueria. And then to walk through London streets for the Christmas lights. </li><li>But if I’m going to do any of this, I’ll probably need to get a hair cut first.</li><li>Bridge Music --<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/35724\">Blue Like Venus</a> by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/\">Attribution (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Admiral Bob</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Keeping a Travel Journal</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>One of the questions on the Conde Nast Traveler survey was “How are you getting your travel fix during the lockdown?” My initial response was curt “I’m not”. But I paused for a minute and then backspaced over that and typed “I’m paging through my old travel journals”.</li><li>Travel journaling is kinda at the core of the TravelCommons podcast or at least its creation myth. I had been writing a weekly business column for an alternative newspaper in Philadelphia. An editorial change dropped my column right about the same time my career change to consulting put me on the road just about every week. I picked up a small Moleskine notebook in SFO while waiting out yet another Northwest Airlines flight delay, found an empty bar stool, ordered an Anchor Steam, and killed time writing down some of the goofier travel stories that had happened to me or that other guys had told me. When I had just about filled it up, I thought about starting a travel blog. But right about then, the first wave of podcasting hit the mainstream. I’d been in radio during high school in Memphis, so thought I’d give it a go. And here we are, coming on 15 years later.</li><li>If I go back even further -- before Moleskines became a thing -- I might say I started travel journaling by way of postcards. If I was in a new or interesting place -- think Tuscany or Lake Tahoe, not Dover, OH or Southfield, MI -- I’d write postcards to my folks, my girlfriend-later-wife, the kids, usually while sitting at the bar having an end-of-the-day beer or wine. Irene saved some of those postcards. Flipping through them and my travel journals, I didn’t find diaries of my travel days -- I did this, went there, ate at these dishes at that restaurant -- but rather little vignettes of things that caught my eye, things like “the favorite pastime in Bologna appears to be trying on sunglasses at the corner stand and then checking out ‘the look’ in the side mirrors of parked cars” or “I was told by law, a Swiss office worker has to be within 50 ft of a window. Explains why all the buildings I see in Basel are thin or doughnuts” or “Roadside billboards in Detroit are different from anywhere else I’ve been. Rather than pitching hotels or consumer products, the billboards on I-94 in from the airport are all selling auto parts, punctuated by that massive Uniroyal tire”</li><li>I’ve pretty much stuck to an end-of-the-day routine; maybe that beer or glass of wine helps me reflect back on the day and ID the things that stood out; the things that taught me something, and then write it down. I don’t have a goal, trying to write X number of pages; I just let each day dictate. Sometimes it’s a bit prosaic, and sometimes it feeds TravelCommons. The journal pages from our <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/01/24/road-trip-lowbrow-santa-fe/\" class=\"aioseop-link\">Thanksgiving getaway to Santa Fe a couple of years ago turned into a 2,000-word blog post</a>; and what poured out of my pen in frustration in France a year ago was at the core of the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/podcast-150-travel-interruptus/\" class=\"aioseop-link\">Travel Interruptus</a> episode, what I called “A Greek tragedy where the travel gods toy with our anti-hero for fun and entertainment”.</li><li>But more than anything, right now when the lockdown is aggravating my wanderlust, reading the pages that I wrote some 2 or 10 or 20 years ago, reminds me of those places, those times, those experiences, and gives me the travel fix that I need right now in this lockdown.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #162</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_162.mp3\" class=\"aioseop-link\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #162 — Post-Corona Trip Planning; Keeping a Travel Journal','','inherit','closed','closed','','2725-revision-v1','','','2020-04-12 12:49:33','2020-04-12 17:49:33','',2725,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/04/12/2725-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2737,1,'2020-04-13 11:46:12','2020-04-13 16:46:12','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/DSC00969.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2732 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/DSC00969-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a><figcaption>Early attempts at travel journaling</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Kinda tough to do a podcast that’s more about the journey than the destination if I’m not “journeying,” but I give it a go. We talk about cyberattacks on frequent flyer accounts now that we don\'t have a reason to check them, planning for my first post-pandemic trips, and how re-reading my travel journals is pinch-hitting right now. </span>All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_162.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/780966433&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #162: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you, as you might expect, from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois, going into what is either the 3rd or 4th week of Lockdown, depending on how one scores the executive orders. I usually kick off each episode talking about my travel since the last episode -- which is going to be a very short conversation since I recorded the last episode at the end of Lockdown Week 1. Does make it kinda tough to do a podcast that’s more about the journey if I’m not “journeying”. Indeed, longtime TravelCommons listener Steve Frick pinged me on Twitter - “How are you holding up being off the road?” I told him I was taking some long walks to relieve the itching on the soles of my feet, but I’m not sure it’s working.&nbsp;</li><li>I thought I could keep myself occupied by working out more; drop the winter weight a little earlier than usual; be in better biking shape for when the Midwest weather breaks. But I had to call an audible on that when the city closed all the gyms, and then the running and biking path along Lake Michigan. Now I’m trying out a lot of new in-room/no-weight workouts. There’s a lot of them out there, even the Wall Street Journal published “Five Home Workouts to Do During the Coronavirus Outbreak”. I’ve never been a big HIIT guy, high-intensity interval training, so things like squat jumps, burpees, and mountain climbers haven’t been in my repertoire. But I’m kinda liking it and thinking that, when I’m back traveling, this could be a great in-room workout for those days when the hotel gym is jammed, especially those Marriott Courtyard gyms, when all four of the ellipticals and treadmills are taken, and there’s a queue for the handful of dumbells. Of course, I might have to warm up with some furniture jenga -- stacking the chairs and magazine table out of the way, maybe with one of the end tables -- but most US hotel rooms should have enough open space, except maybe in Manhattan.</li><li>However, my other new workout -- stair intervals, sprinting up the stairs in our 20-floor apartment building -- might not translate as well to hotels, especially those 4-story Courtyards.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Javolenus/41932\">Ianiscus</a> by Javolenus (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/\">Attribution (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Wired_Ant</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>The waves of Covid-19 e-mails from travel companies have been interesting.&nbsp; The first wave was at the beginning of March. I tweeted out a screenshot of what I received from United, but all the travel companies seem to be working off similar scripts -- “We care about you; let me tell you about the great job that HEPA air filters do; we’re cleaning the planes a bit more every night; we’ll get back to you later on your elite status.” Then the second wave as travel started to crater a couple of weeks later -- “We really care about you, so if you book a flight/room/car with us and give us money this month, we won’t charge you to change your dates if things are still mucked up… but we’ll keep your money; oh, and we cleaning the planes/rooms/cars real hard now”. This wave did get my attention. I mentioned in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/03/21/podcast-161-new-crisis-old-question-driving-down-to-key-west/\">last episode</a> how the combination of change fee waiver and a smokin’ deal on American’s direct ORD-BCN flight got me to open up my wallet for an end-of-September trip. Friends of ours are saying we’re crazy, but I’m an optimist. And now, starting last week, I’m starting to get the third wave of e-mails wherein the dam finally broke -- “Honest, we care a whole lot about you, so we’ve extended that change fee waiver for the next couple of months -- so long as you give us money now -- and, since we’re all sorta throwing in the towel on 2020, we’re giving you elites a push on your status -- whatever you have now, you keep through next year -- and extending your club memberships by 6 months; oh, and we’re still spraying disinfectant everywhere.” For me, hotel brands were the first -- Hilton and Hyatt, and Marriott notable in its absence. Then, this week,&nbsp; some of the airlines finally dropped -- Delta, United, and Alaska, with American and Southwest notable in <em>their</em> absence. And then, in mid-week, Marriott finally gave it. It’ll be interesting to see how long American and Southwest feel they can hold out. The longer the travel shutdown, the more the pressure will build. Internationally, the trend for airlines seems to be a bit more of a hedge -- not extending status, but reducing qualification levels by 25-30%. BA, KLM, Emirates all seem to be trying this. It’ll be interesting to see how long they can hold out.</li><li>As if this wasn’t enough, Marriott announced at the end of March yet <a href=\"https://hospitalitytech.com/52m-guests-affected-new-marriott-data-breach\">another security breach</a> -- <a href=\"https://www.wired.com/story/marriott-hacked-yes-again-2020/\" class=\"aioseop-link\">the second one in 16 months</a>. This one was in a PMS, a property management system, used at some of the properties managed by Marriott. They estimate that 5.2 million guests are affected. We’ve said many times before, it’s gotten to the point with all these hacks that you gotta assume that you’ve been compromised. But the coronavirus lockdown adds a bit of a twist. A security firm, PerimeterX, says that, in the past month, they’ve <a href=\"https://www.perimeterx.com/resources/blog/2020/covid-19-part-2-data-tells-the-story/\">seen account takeover attacks surge</a> to as high as 80% of all login attempts on travel sites. Kinda makes sense -- if we’re not traveling, we’re not hitting airline or hotel sites to book trips, or to check our account balances or figure out where we are on a status match. As we drop off, the remaining traffic -- from the bad guys -- becomes a higher percentage. And there is some money to be had there. I’ve said in past episodes that I tend to use 2¢/mile as the breakeven point between buying a flight or using miles, though that number might have drifted down to 1.5¢ with recent award chart changes. Crack and drain an account with 100,000 miles -- not a high balance for a frequent traveler who’s getting elite bonuses and uses the airline’s credit card -- and that’s $1,500. Would be nice if these companies used two-factor authentication, but I haven’t seen that with any of my accounts. So I make sure each account has a strong and unique password, and run the circuit -- logging into each of them, or at least the ones with big balances -- every month.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/48914\">In Peace (Somewhere Else Mix)</a> by cdk (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/\">Attribution (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Snowflake</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Post-Corona Trip Planning</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I took a survey from Conde Nast Traveler magazine, asking about my post-coronavirus travel plans. Good timing because, as I mentioned earlier, I’ve been thinking about just that topic, because this will be the longest stretch I’ve stayed home in I don’t know how long. And you can imagine that topic is hot across the travel industry -- with airlines, hotels, trip planning apps -- hence, probably the reason for the Conde Nast survey. But before you can plan, you have to know when the lockdown will be released and how. Nobody in Chicago or anywhere else in the US seems to want to talk about that quite yet, but some European countries are -- Austria, Denmark, the Czech Republic, even Italy -- and as you’d guess, it’s looking like it’ll be more of a gradual release than a big bang; and happen first in places less impacted by Covid-19 -- rural before urban, then smaller cities; New York probably the last in line.&nbsp;</li><li>If that plays out, then I’m thinking that leisure travel will be the first to come back. A lot of business travel is between cities, and when those lockdowns finally release, companies will first be figuring out who they want to bring back to their offices. And they’ll be looking to cut expenses going into the expected recession. So the weekend warriors may be on the move before the road warriors.</li><li>Pulling on that thread a bit more, I think it means that, for many folks, their first post-lockdown trip is going to be a car ride. With a car, you have more control than a plane or a train -- more flexibility, no waiting for airlines to un-furlough their crews and spin up their route systems, and no worries about who you’re sitting next to. Maybe a drive requires a bit more planning -- probably want to make sure the lockdown is lifted in all the places you have to drive through. But when I add low gas prices to this flexibility, driving is probably the way I’ll go.</li><li>OK, but to where? Probably not too far initially -- not more than, say, a 6-8 hour drive, a day -- so no “let’s re-trace Route 66” out to LA or beeline for the Florida beaches. Also, given some of the blowback around some of those pre-lockdown Spring Break antics, I gotta think that party places like Florida beaches and Nashville’s Lower Broadway are gonna be some of the last spots released from lockdown, and even when they are, they’ll be different places. Not every bar and restaurant will survive this lockdown. With still maybe a month to go, I’m already seeing places in Chicago give up and shut down for good.</li><li>But that doesn’t really impact my planning. The first trip I want to do after the lockdown wasn’t some bachelor party long weekend blow out. I think I want to go see some family first, not least because there’s still uncertainty about if and when future waves of Covid-19 might prompt future lockdowns. So I’m thinking, right now, that first drive will be down to Spring Hill, TN to see my mother. It’s an 8-hr drive, so about as far as I can get in a day. I’ll throw my bike on the back of the car; take some solo rides on the roads that thread through horse country, hoping to hit an open barbeque joint, and a taproom or two.&nbsp;</li><li>Then some business travel comes back. People can only get so much done through Zoom and Microsoft Teams. Though we’ve pushed it off for 6-8 weeks, at some point people need to get together -- physically -- to close deals, do projects, work with employees. The ramp up will depend on how deep of a recession we find ourselves in. Maybe it’ll start up by cashing in some of those vouchers from cancelled March and April trips that airlines have been loath to refund.</li><li>Which, hopefully, works Irene, Claire and I up some trans-Atlantic trips in the late fall -- Barcelona in late September and perhaps London over Thanksgiving. They’ll probably still be sedate -- still some social distancing; not sure if we’ll be able to catch La Liga or Premier League matches. That’s OK, though. I’d be happy to walk again through the Gothic District, check out Cat Bar Cat, my craft beer hangout the last time I was in Barcelona, and to shop and eat through Mercado de La Boqueria. And then to walk through London streets for the Christmas lights.&nbsp;</li><li>But if I’m going to do any of this, I’ll probably need to get a hair cut first.</li><li>Bridge Music --<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/35724\">Blue Like Venus</a> by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/\">Attribution (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Admiral Bob</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Keeping a Travel Journal</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>One of the questions on the Conde Nast Traveler survey was “How are you getting your travel fix during the lockdown?” My initial response was curt “I’m not”. But I paused for a minute and then backspaced over that and typed “I’m paging through my old travel journals”.</li><li>Travel journaling is kinda at the core of the TravelCommons podcast or at least its creation myth. I had been writing a weekly business column for an alternative newspaper in Philadelphia. An editorial change dropped my column right about the same time my career change to consulting put me on the road just about every week. I picked up a small Moleskine notebook in SFO while waiting out yet another Northwest Airlines flight delay, found an empty bar stool, ordered an Anchor Steam, and killed time writing down some of the goofier travel stories that had happened to me or that other guys had told me. When I had just about filled it up, I thought about starting a travel blog. But right about then, the first wave of podcasting hit the mainstream. I’d been in radio during high school in Memphis, so thought I’d give it a go. And here we are, coming on 15 years later.</li><li>If I go back even further -- before Moleskines became a thing -- I might say I started travel journaling by way of postcards. If I was in a new or interesting place -- think Tuscany or Lake Tahoe, not Dover, OH or Southfield, MI -- I’d write postcards to my folks, my girlfriend-later-wife, the kids, usually while sitting at the bar having an end-of-the-day beer or wine. Irene saved some of those postcards. Flipping through them and my travel journals, I didn’t find diaries of my travel days -- I did this, went there, ate at these dishes at that restaurant -- but rather little vignettes of things that caught my eye, things like “the favorite pastime in Bologna appears to be trying on sunglasses at the corner stand and then checking out ‘the look’ in the side mirrors of parked cars” or “I was told by law, a Swiss office worker has to be within 50 ft of a window. Explains why all the buildings I see in Basel are thin or doughnuts” or “Roadside billboards in Detroit are different from anywhere else I’ve been. Rather than pitching hotels or consumer products, the billboards on I-94 in from the airport are all selling auto parts, punctuated by that massive Uniroyal tire”</li><li>I’ve pretty much stuck to an end-of-the-day routine; maybe that beer or glass of wine helps me reflect back on the day and ID the things that stood out; the things that taught me something, and then write it down. I don’t have a goal, trying to write X number of pages; I just let each day dictate. Sometimes it’s a bit prosaic, and sometimes it feeds TravelCommons. The journal pages from our <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/01/24/road-trip-lowbrow-santa-fe/\" class=\"aioseop-link\">Thanksgiving getaway to Santa Fe a couple of years ago turned into a 2,000-word blog post</a>; and what poured out of my pen in frustration in France a year ago was at the core of the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/podcast-150-travel-interruptus/\" class=\"aioseop-link\">Travel Interruptus</a> episode, what I called “A Greek tragedy where the travel gods toy with our anti-hero for fun and entertainment”.</li><li>But more than anything, right now when the lockdown is aggravating my wanderlust, reading the pages that I wrote some 2 or 10 or 20 years ago, reminds me of those places, those times, those experiences, and gives me the travel fix that I need right now in this lockdown.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #162</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_162.mp3\" class=\"aioseop-link\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #162 — Post-Corona Trip Planning; Keeping a Travel Journal','','inherit','closed','closed','','2725-revision-v1','','','2020-04-13 11:46:12','2020-04-13 16:46:12','',2725,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/04/13/2725-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2739,1,'2020-04-13 11:51:00','2020-04-13 16:51:00','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\">\n<p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/IMG_0159.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1402\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/IMG_0159-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"225\" height=\"300\"></a></p><figcaption>This Won\'t Help Your Flier Sat Score</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>In this episode, we talk with Michael Taylor, author of <a href=\"https://www.jdpower.com/business/press-releases/2019-north-america-airport-satisfaction-study\">JD Power\'s 2019 Airport Satisfaction Survey</a>, about what keeps fliers happy. I also talk about what I like about eScooters, shopping for a smaller bag for upcoming flights on a Euro budget airline, and how Hertz\'s contract updates remind me to delete my Bluetooth pairings in rental cars. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_156.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_155.mp3\"]\n<p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #156: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago in the middle of what looks like a 6-week run of solid travel. Traveled to DC, Charlottesville, and Nashville, in that order, in the 3 weeks since the last episode. Heading back to Charlottesville this week, then a week hopscotching through the Baltics with my son Andrew -- Riga, Latvia; Talinn, Estonia; Helsinki, Finland -- and then back down to Charlottesville. </li><li> I flew Southwest on my non-Charlottesville flights -- into DC Reagan and Nashville -- and United again to Charlottesville. The Southwest flights went smoothly, except for trying to get to Chicago Midway for the DC flight. The Uber driver didn’t follow the app’s recommended route; instead, he pretended he was a cab driver and took the normal route down the Stevenson Expressway which was crawling due to an earlier accident. I wasn’t paying attention - first time I’ve had an Uber driver freelance on me - and didn’t notice he’d skipped the exit to the faster path until it was too late. We made our flight, but not without a bit of hustle through Midway. No tip, let alone a 5-star review for that guy.</li><li> Southwest flies into the old Terminal A at what I still call Washington National. I went to college in DC in the early ‘80’s, before it was named for President Reagan and when Terminal A was pretty much all that was there. I had forgotten what a long schlepp it is from that terminal to the Metro station. I remember way back then asking someone why they built the Metro station so far away. “Because they’re going to build new terminals right across from it.” Which they finally did, some 20 years after that Metro station was opened. Sometimes it seems that airport planning horizons are not in years, or even decades; feels more like they’re planning in lifetimes.</li><li> In between the Southwest flights, my United flight continued the string of disruptions trying to get into or out of Charlottesville. I checked that my flight was on-time before calling an Uber -- no weather delays at either end, United and FlightAware apps say the inbound plane is on-time…. Then, halfway to ORD, I get the text from United; a 2½-hour delay for crew arrival. What!? The next text “Because of crew scheduling disruptions this evening in Chicago, we’ve assigned your flight a new crew…. We know this delay wasn’t in your plans today, so we appreciate your patience.” No shit a 2½-hour delay wasn’t in my plans, especially when it’s because United stole our original crew because they screwed up their scheduling. And really United, you can’t find another pilot in ORD, your largest hub, that’s a little closer? I tell you what else isn’t in my plans, flying United to Charlottesville this week. </li><li> Bridge Music -- <em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/stefsax/7785\" target=\"_blank\">Awel</a> </em>by stefsax (c) copyright 2006 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/stefsax/7785 </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>That’s the sound of my new <a href=\"https://www.marriott.com/loyalty/member-benefits/titanium.mi\">Marriott Bonvoy Lifetime Titanium Elite</a> card hitting the kitchen counter. The mailer package was appropriately upscale, but the sheer weight of the thing stunned me. I put a quick video of it on the TravelCommons Facebook page. Cate Rose commented “Hope it scans into your Stocard app so you don’t actually have to carry it in your luggage allowance”. My thought exactly.</li><li> I got a note that Chicago’s electric scooter pilot ends tomorrow, which made me realize that I’ve seen them in just about every city I’ve been to this summer -- Budapest, Krakow, Charlottesville, Nashville, Washington, DC. I think the only places I didn’t see them were in Scotland and Ireland. They’re handy; because they’re dockless, I’ve found they have a wider distribution than, say, a traditional docked bike share and you can take them directly to your planned destination. And they’re a good fill-in between walking and an Uber or a Lyft. And, they’re fun! When I was in DC a couple of weeks ago, I was in the <a href=\"https://washington.org/visit-dc/neighborhoods/brookland\">Brookland</a> neighborhood in the Northeast part of town, and wanted to try out a new taproom there, <a href=\"http://www.rightproperbrewing.com/what-we-do\">Right Proper Brewing</a>. Now Brookland is not the nicest part of DC. It’s much better than when I went to school there, but there are still iffy parts. I wasn’t completely comfortable walking down to Right Proper from the Brookland Metro stop, but it seemed too short for an Uber ride and there was no bus that went down there. But, there was a scooter a couple of blocks from the Metro station. Running down 9th St at 10 mph felt a bit better than speedwalking at 4. And could leave it right in front of the taproom. It was exactly what I wanted. Two problems I’ve seen -- first, too many people riding them on the sidewalk, especially in DC. Maybe because I bike a lot in Chicago, I’m comfortable in bike lanes and navigating around cars on the street and keeping an eye out for potholes. I actually wouldn’t be comfortable riding a scooter on the sidewalk; I’d be afraid of popping a pedestrian who suddenly walked in front of me. To me, cars are much more predictable than pedestrians. The second thing, the need to have half-a-dozen scooter apps on your phone. In Chicago, there are 8 scooter companies, in addition to Uber and Lyft’s scooters. And you need to download their app to find and rent their scooter. Which meant that when I wanted to find a scooter near the Brookland Metro stop, I’d have to cycle thru 5 or 6 apps. Except I didn’t because I found an app called <a href=\"https://scootermap.com/\">Scooter Map</a> that shows all the scooter brands on one map. I think it’s targeted at folks who are making money recharging scooters (not quite sure how that works) but it worked fine for me. I fired it up and saw all the different scooters that were near me. One caveat -- I’ve only ridden these scooters on sunny days. I’m not sure how enthusiastic I’d be riding one in the rain or snow. </li><li> For the Baltics trip next week, we’re taking Finnair out and back from Chicago, an early morning ferry ride from Talinn to Helsinki, and then AirBaltic for everything else. Which then got me thinking about luggage sizes, because I bought my current bag, the <a href=\"https://www.swissarmy.com/us/en&amp;eoq=!t/Products/Travel-Gear/Werks-Traveler-5-0/collection/trg-collection/travelgear_collection_TRA-C2955\">Victorinox Werks</a> 22-incher, to use every last inch of US carry-on allowance. It even catches some side-eye from American and United where I have status. So I didn’t figure it’d fit into any European budget carrier’s luggage sizer. Looking up <a href=\"https://www.airbaltic.com/en/cabin-baggage\">AirBaltic’s carry-on allowance</a>, my Victorinox is a couple of inches too tall and an inch too deep. But what really got me shopping for a new bag for this trip is the weight. AirBaltic has an 8 kg/17½ lbs weight limit. In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/05/30/podcast-121-tsa-lines-my-luggage-is-where/\">episode #121</a>, I talked about the baggage strip tease exercise with Wow Air to make their 7 kg/15 lbs carry-on weight limit. I’d take my bag off the scale, pull some clothes out, zip it back up, and put it back on the scale. Still too heavy. Repeat 3 more times until the agent takes pity — or just gets tired of me — and gives me the approval tag to put on my bag. After which I walk about 10 feet, open my bag and put my armful of clothes back in. My Victorinox is a bit over 7 lbs, so not only is it too tall, the bag itself uses over 40% of the weight allowance. And even though I’ve talked before about how much I hate shopping for luggage, I searched for a smaller, lighter bag that wouldn’t cost a fortune, since my Victorinox will stay my primary bag. I landed on the the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/32lIURe\">TravelPro Maxlite 5</a>. I, or rather my daughter has a good history with TravelPro. It fit the AirBaltic dimensions and is one of the lighter bags I saw at 5.4 lbs which is down to 30% of the 8 kg weight allowance. It also meets three of the key suitcase criteria I laid down in the “how to shop for a suitcase” topic in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/01/25/podcast-137-new-years-travel-status-tips-how-to-shop-for-a-suitcase/\">episode #137</a> -- it’s black, it’s a 2-wheeler so no lost space on extended spinner wheels, and the inside is, for the most part, a wide open box without clothes hangers or a bunch of zip compartments. I’m taking it to Charlottesville tomorrow for a shakedown cruise.</li><li> Three years ago, back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/11/22/podcast-125-uber-driver-stories-overseas-for-the-election/\">episode #125</a>, in a Travel Security tip, I talked about the need to delete your phone’s Bluetooth pairing when you return a rental car. Usually when I go to pair my phone, I’ll first go through and delete 3-5 pairings before pairing my own. And they all have personalized names like “Timmy’s iPhone”. And most phones by default will download your contacts to the car when paired, so leave all of their contacts and phone numbers in their rental. That is just bad in so many ways. And now Hertz has gotten around to noticing it. In their newest rental terms and conditions, they specifically carve out any liability from you leaving a Bluetooth pairing behind. It’s a pain to remember, especially if you’re running for a flight, but as you’re taking that last scan around the car for your sunglasses and iPhone, remember not to leave your identity behind either.</li><li>Bridge Music -- Black Rainbow by Pitx (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Pitx/19513 Ft: ERH, acclivity</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Keeping Fliers Happy </strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A couple of weeks ago, JD Power released their 2019 North American Airport Satisfaction Study.&nbsp; The headline - “North American Airports Struggle to Keep Travelers Happy Amid Construction Delays and Surging Passenger Volumes” caught my eye, so I reached out to the study’s author, Michael Taylor, to dig into it a bit more. And so last Friday, we had a wide-ranging conversation. I was going to edit it down, but as I listened to it, I couldn’t think about what to cut. So here it is in its entirety…</li><li>Interview with <a href=\"https://www.jdpower.com/business/content/michael-taylor\">Michael Taylor</a>, Travel Intelligence Lead at J.D. Power</li><li>Thanks again to Michael for taking the time to talk to us. Here\'s the <a href=\"https://www.jdpower.com/business/press-releases/2019-north-america-airport-satisfaction-study\">link</a> to the study summary on the JD Power website.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #156</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li> And if you check out the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> page, you can click thru to highlights from my trips to Budapest and Ireland. And if you follow it, you can catch some pics from next week’s trip through the Baltics.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_155.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #156 — Airport Satisfaction; eScooters; Smaller Luggage','','inherit','closed','closed','','2543-revision-v1','','','2020-04-13 11:51:00','2020-04-13 16:51:00','',2543,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/04/13/2543-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2740,1,'2020-04-13 12:00:06','2020-04-13 17:00:06','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/DSC00969.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2732 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/DSC00969-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a><figcaption>Early attempts at travel journaling</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Kinda tough to do a podcast that’s more about the journey than the destination if I’m not “journeying,” but I give it a go. We talk about cyberattacks on frequent flyer accounts now that we don\'t have a reason to check them, planning for my first post-pandemic trips, and how re-reading my travel journals is pinch-hitting right now. </span>All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_162.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/797628493&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #162: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you, as you might expect, from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois, going into what is either the 3rd or 4th week of Lockdown, depending on how one scores the executive orders. I usually kick off each episode talking about my travel since the last episode -- which is going to be a very short conversation since I recorded the last episode at the end of Lockdown Week 1. Does make it kinda tough to do a podcast that’s more about the journey if I’m not “journeying”. Indeed, longtime TravelCommons listener Steve Frick pinged me on Twitter - “How are you holding up being off the road?” I told him I was taking some long walks to relieve the itching on the soles of my feet, but I’m not sure it’s working.&nbsp;</li><li>I thought I could keep myself occupied by working out more; drop the winter weight a little earlier than usual; be in better biking shape for when the Midwest weather breaks. But I had to call an audible on that when the city closed all the gyms, and then the running and biking path along Lake Michigan. Now I’m trying out a lot of new in-room/no-weight workouts. There’s a lot of them out there, even the Wall Street Journal published “Five Home Workouts to Do During the Coronavirus Outbreak”. I’ve never been a big HIIT guy, high-intensity interval training, so things like squat jumps, burpees, and mountain climbers haven’t been in my repertoire. But I’m kinda liking it and thinking that, when I’m back traveling, this could be a great in-room workout for those days when the hotel gym is jammed, especially those Marriott Courtyard gyms, when all four of the ellipticals and treadmills are taken, and there’s a queue for the handful of dumbells. Of course, I might have to warm up with some furniture jenga -- stacking the chairs and magazine table out of the way, maybe with one of the end tables -- but most US hotel rooms should have enough open space, except maybe in Manhattan.</li><li>However, my other new workout -- stair intervals, sprinting up the stairs in our 20-floor apartment building -- might not translate as well to hotels, especially those 4-story Courtyards.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Javolenus/41932\">Ianiscus</a> by Javolenus (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/\">Attribution (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Wired_Ant</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>The waves of Covid-19 e-mails from travel companies have been interesting.&nbsp; The first wave was at the beginning of March. I tweeted out a screenshot of what I received from United, but all the travel companies seem to be working off similar scripts -- “We care about you; let me tell you about the great job that HEPA air filters do; we’re cleaning the planes a bit more every night; we’ll get back to you later on your elite status.” Then the second wave as travel started to crater a couple of weeks later -- “We really care about you, so if you book a flight/room/car with us and give us money this month, we won’t charge you to change your dates if things are still mucked up… but we’ll keep your money; oh, and we cleaning the planes/rooms/cars real hard now”. This wave did get my attention. I mentioned in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/03/21/podcast-161-new-crisis-old-question-driving-down-to-key-west/\">last episode</a> how the combination of change fee waiver and a smokin’ deal on American’s direct ORD-BCN flight got me to open up my wallet for an end-of-September trip. Friends of ours are saying we’re crazy, but I’m an optimist. And now, starting last week, I’m starting to get the third wave of e-mails wherein the dam finally broke -- “Honest, we care a whole lot about you, so we’ve extended that change fee waiver for the next couple of months -- so long as you give us money now -- and, since we’re all sorta throwing in the towel on 2020, we’re giving you elites a push on your status -- whatever you have now, you keep through next year -- and extending your club memberships by 6 months; oh, and we’re still spraying disinfectant everywhere.” For me, hotel brands were the first -- Hilton and Hyatt, and Marriott notable in its absence. Then, this week,&nbsp; some of the airlines finally dropped -- Delta, United, and Alaska, with American and Southwest notable in <em>their</em> absence. And then, in mid-week, Marriott finally gave it. It’ll be interesting to see how long American and Southwest feel they can hold out. The longer the travel shutdown, the more the pressure will build. Internationally, the trend for airlines seems to be a bit more of a hedge -- not extending status, but reducing qualification levels by 25-30%. BA, KLM, Emirates all seem to be trying this. It’ll be interesting to see how long they can hold out.</li><li>As if this wasn’t enough, Marriott announced at the end of March yet <a href=\"https://hospitalitytech.com/52m-guests-affected-new-marriott-data-breach\">another security breach</a> -- <a href=\"https://www.wired.com/story/marriott-hacked-yes-again-2020/\" class=\"aioseop-link\">the second one in 16 months</a>. This one was in a PMS, a property management system, used at some of the properties managed by Marriott. They estimate that 5.2 million guests are affected. We’ve said many times before, it’s gotten to the point with all these hacks that you gotta assume that you’ve been compromised. But the coronavirus lockdown adds a bit of a twist. A security firm, PerimeterX, says that, in the past month, they’ve <a href=\"https://www.perimeterx.com/resources/blog/2020/covid-19-part-2-data-tells-the-story/\">seen account takeover attacks surge</a> to as high as 80% of all login attempts on travel sites. Kinda makes sense -- if we’re not traveling, we’re not hitting airline or hotel sites to book trips, or to check our account balances or figure out where we are on a status match. As we drop off, the remaining traffic -- from the bad guys -- becomes a higher percentage. And there is some money to be had there. I’ve said in past episodes that I tend to use 2¢/mile as the breakeven point between buying a flight or using miles, though that number might have drifted down to 1.5¢ with recent award chart changes. Crack and drain an account with 100,000 miles -- not a high balance for a frequent traveler who’s getting elite bonuses and uses the airline’s credit card -- and that’s $1,500. Would be nice if these companies used two-factor authentication, but I haven’t seen that with any of my accounts. So I make sure each account has a strong and unique password, and run the circuit -- logging into each of them, or at least the ones with big balances -- every month.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/48914\">In Peace (Somewhere Else Mix)</a> by cdk (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/\">Attribution (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Snowflake</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Post-Corona Trip Planning</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I took a survey from Conde Nast Traveler magazine, asking about my post-coronavirus travel plans. Good timing because, as I mentioned earlier, I’ve been thinking about just that topic, because this will be the longest stretch I’ve stayed home in I don’t know how long. And you can imagine that topic is hot across the travel industry -- with airlines, hotels, trip planning apps -- hence, probably the reason for the Conde Nast survey. But before you can plan, you have to know when the lockdown will be released and how. Nobody in Chicago or anywhere else in the US seems to want to talk about that quite yet, but some European countries are -- Austria, Denmark, the Czech Republic, even Italy -- and as you’d guess, it’s looking like it’ll be more of a gradual release than a big bang; and happen first in places less impacted by Covid-19 -- rural before urban, then smaller cities; New York probably the last in line.&nbsp;</li><li>If that plays out, then I’m thinking that leisure travel will be the first to come back. A lot of business travel is between cities, and when those lockdowns finally release, companies will first be figuring out who they want to bring back to their offices. And they’ll be looking to cut expenses going into the expected recession. So the weekend warriors may be on the move before the road warriors.</li><li>Pulling on that thread a bit more, I think it means that, for many folks, their first post-lockdown trip is going to be a car ride. With a car, you have more control than a plane or a train -- more flexibility, no waiting for airlines to un-furlough their crews and spin up their route systems, and no worries about who you’re sitting next to. Maybe a drive requires a bit more planning -- probably want to make sure the lockdown is lifted in all the places you have to drive through. But when I add low gas prices to this flexibility, driving is probably the way I’ll go.</li><li>OK, but to where? Probably not too far initially -- not more than, say, a 6-8 hour drive, a day -- so no “let’s re-trace Route 66” out to LA or beeline for the Florida beaches. Also, given some of the blowback around some of those pre-lockdown Spring Break antics, I gotta think that party places like Florida beaches and Nashville’s Lower Broadway are gonna be some of the last spots released from lockdown, and even when they are, they’ll be different places. Not every bar and restaurant will survive this lockdown. With still maybe a month to go, I’m already seeing places in Chicago give up and shut down for good.</li><li>But that doesn’t really impact my planning. The first trip I want to do after the lockdown wasn’t some bachelor party long weekend blow out. I think I want to go see some family first, not least because there’s still uncertainty about if and when future waves of Covid-19 might prompt future lockdowns. So I’m thinking, right now, that first drive will be down to Spring Hill, TN to see my mother. It’s an 8-hr drive, so about as far as I can get in a day. I’ll throw my bike on the back of the car; take some solo rides on the roads that thread through horse country, hoping to hit an open barbeque joint, and a taproom or two.&nbsp;</li><li>Then some business travel comes back. People can only get so much done through Zoom and Microsoft Teams. Though we’ve pushed it off for 6-8 weeks, at some point people need to get together -- physically -- to close deals, do projects, work with employees. The ramp up will depend on how deep of a recession we find ourselves in. Maybe it’ll start up by cashing in some of those vouchers from cancelled March and April trips that airlines have been loath to refund.</li><li>Which, hopefully, works Irene, Claire and I up some trans-Atlantic trips in the late fall -- Barcelona in late September and perhaps London over Thanksgiving. They’ll probably still be sedate -- still some social distancing; not sure if we’ll be able to catch La Liga or Premier League matches. That’s OK, though. I’d be happy to walk again through the Gothic District, check out Cat Bar Cat, my craft beer hangout the last time I was in Barcelona, and to shop and eat through Mercado de La Boqueria. And then to walk through London streets for the Christmas lights.&nbsp;</li><li>But if I’m going to do any of this, I’ll probably need to get a hair cut first.</li><li>Bridge Music --<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/35724\">Blue Like Venus</a> by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/\">Attribution (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Admiral Bob</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Keeping a Travel Journal</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>One of the questions on the Conde Nast Traveler survey was “How are you getting your travel fix during the lockdown?” My initial response was curt “I’m not”. But I paused for a minute and then backspaced over that and typed “I’m paging through my old travel journals”.</li><li>Travel journaling is kinda at the core of the TravelCommons podcast or at least its creation myth. I had been writing a weekly business column for an alternative newspaper in Philadelphia. An editorial change dropped my column right about the same time my career change to consulting put me on the road just about every week. I picked up a small Moleskine notebook in SFO while waiting out yet another Northwest Airlines flight delay, found an empty bar stool, ordered an Anchor Steam, and killed time writing down some of the goofier travel stories that had happened to me or that other guys had told me. When I had just about filled it up, I thought about starting a travel blog. But right about then, the first wave of podcasting hit the mainstream. I’d been in radio during high school in Memphis, so thought I’d give it a go. And here we are, coming on 15 years later.</li><li>If I go back even further -- before Moleskines became a thing -- I might say I started travel journaling by way of postcards. If I was in a new or interesting place -- think Tuscany or Lake Tahoe, not Dover, OH or Southfield, MI -- I’d write postcards to my folks, my girlfriend-later-wife, the kids, usually while sitting at the bar having an end-of-the-day beer or wine. Irene saved some of those postcards. Flipping through them and my travel journals, I didn’t find diaries of my travel days -- I did this, went there, ate at these dishes at that restaurant -- but rather little vignettes of things that caught my eye, things like “the favorite pastime in Bologna appears to be trying on sunglasses at the corner stand and then checking out ‘the look’ in the side mirrors of parked cars” or “I was told by law, a Swiss office worker has to be within 50 ft of a window. Explains why all the buildings I see in Basel are thin or doughnuts” or “Roadside billboards in Detroit are different from anywhere else I’ve been. Rather than pitching hotels or consumer products, the billboards on I-94 in from the airport are all selling auto parts, punctuated by that massive Uniroyal tire”</li><li>I’ve pretty much stuck to an end-of-the-day routine; maybe that beer or glass of wine helps me reflect back on the day and ID the things that stood out; the things that taught me something, and then write it down. I don’t have a goal, trying to write X number of pages; I just let each day dictate. Sometimes it’s a bit prosaic, and sometimes it feeds TravelCommons. The journal pages from our <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/01/24/road-trip-lowbrow-santa-fe/\" class=\"aioseop-link\">Thanksgiving getaway to Santa Fe a couple of years ago turned into a 2,000-word blog post</a>; and what poured out of my pen in frustration in France a year ago was at the core of the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/podcast-150-travel-interruptus/\" class=\"aioseop-link\">Travel Interruptus</a> episode, what I called “A Greek tragedy where the travel gods toy with our anti-hero for fun and entertainment”.</li><li>But more than anything, right now when the lockdown is aggravating my wanderlust, reading the pages that I wrote some 2 or 10 or 20 years ago, reminds me of those places, those times, those experiences, and gives me the travel fix that I need right now in this lockdown.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #162</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_162.mp3\" class=\"aioseop-link\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #162 — Post-Corona Trip Planning; Keeping a Travel Journal','','inherit','closed','closed','','2725-revision-v1','','','2020-04-13 12:00:06','2020-04-13 17:00:06','',2725,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/04/13/2725-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2742,1,'2020-04-17 16:08:25','2020-04-17 21:08:25','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\">\n<p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/2D576E07-6546-4D4B-9D64-0E593596FB0C.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2581 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/2D576E07-6546-4D4B-9D64-0E593596FB0C-268x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"268\" height=\"300\"></a></p><figcaption>Selfies with Friends in Tallinn</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>Wrapping up my time in Charlottesville, VA with some \"bleisure\" travel, as well as some pure leisure travel with a quick trip in the Baltics. And a listener talks about the reason for his out-and-back day trip from Washington, DC to Hong Kong. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_157.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/720859504&color=%23ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #157: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago just off the shores of Lake Michigan toward the end of what has been a record-breaking cold November. The first half of the month here was the coldest in 148 years with an average temperature of 31 degrees, which compares to an average high for November of 50 degrees, and a <em>low</em> of 39. But what’s been worse has been the early snow -- 3½ inches of snow on Halloween (another record) and again on Veterans Day. And by some incredible strokes of luck (as opposed to any foresight on my part), I dodged both snows -- by flying home from Charlottesville, VA the day before Halloween, and scheduling a week off the road the week of November 11. It’s <em>always</em> better to be lucky than good.</li><li>Last week was my last week in Charlottesville, finishing up an 18-week project that started in July. A year ago, when I wrapped up a long run in Charlottesville and didn’t know if/when I’d be back, I took an afternoon to hit Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s home that was only a 10-15 minute drive from the client. It was one of those things I wanted to do, but kept putting off -- I’ll get to it -- and here I was, the last day, and so squoze it in between meetings and calls.</li><li>With that in mind, I did just a touch more planning this year, and on my <em>second-to-last </em>trip, the week between the Halloween and Veterans Day snow storms, I flew in a day early on Monday, but to IAD rather than CHO, instead renting a car, and driving the length of the 105-mile <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Skyline Drive (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.nps.gov/shen/planyourvisit/driving-skyline-drive.htm\" target=\"_blank\">Skyline Drive</a> down to Charlottesville along the tops of the Blue Ridge Mountains through Shenandoah National Park. I was probably a week late for peak leaf peeping, but it was still pretty, especially when looking west over the Shenandoah Valley.  I don’t think I would’ve made a special trip to drive Skyline Drive, but since I was in the neighborhood, why not? And it turned out to be just a great drive -- clear blue skies, still some good leaf color, and on a Monday, not a lot of people on that 2-lane road. </li><li>And then last Thursday, flying out of <a href=\"http://charlottesville-airport.com/\" class=\"aioseop-link\">CHO</a> for the last time until I don’t know when, I had to order one last beer at the <a href=\"http://www.gocho.com/concessions/\" class=\"aioseop-link\">Tailwind</a>, the airport bar. For an airport with only 5 gates, the Tailwind always has a great rotation of local craft beers. And there’s a mini-Cheers effect -- maybe not everyone knows my name, but Lyn the bartender recognizes me from my 4-year off-and-on presence in her bar. When I showed back up in July after a 9-month absence, she recognized me right away. So I had to get one last beer from her. I looked at the blackboard and ordered the stout from Blue Mountain Brewery, which was not far from when I ended my trip down Skyline Drive. I was getting over a bit of a cold; the IPA would’ve been a bit rough on the back of my throat. That <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Dark Hollow Stout (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/16352/39417/\" target=\"_blank\">Dark Hollow Stout</a> went down smoother, but what I didn’t quite pick up on is that it’s a 10% alcohol beer. Bit of an eye opener at 11:30am. Made for a good nap on the flight home.</li><li>Bridge Music -- Dive Deep (Loveshadow remix) by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/50488 Ft: Loveshadow</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Mark Skinner sent a note to comments@travelcommons.com a few days ago<ul><li>Hi Mark, Long time listener. So your tag line \"It\'s more about the journey than the destination” hit home to me with what has to be my oddest business trip yet. Tomorrow, I’m flying Washington to Hong Kong, via EWR, arriving Monday afternoon, and then returning on Tuesday morning! I’m basically there for dinner…</li><li>No meetings in Hong Kong, it’s all about taking a cosmic ray detector for NASA on an over-the-pole flight; which the UA flights 179/180 do quite well, EWR-HKG-EWR. They want to understand the amount of radiation from space inside the aircraft cabin. I’ll be in the air longer than on the ground. I’m planning to stay on and to sleep at “normal” east coast times, which means while I’ll have a hotel room by HKG, I’ll be awake then (night in HK, but daytime hours for me).&nbsp; Happily my upgrades to Polaris Business both ways have been confirmed! Otherwise the 16 hr flight would seem even longer…</li></ul></li><li>Oh, my! There’s a nice end-of-year mileage run! I told Mark that his itinerary reminds me of one I did 12 years ago when I flew to London for a lunch meeting to wrap up a project. I flew ORD-LHR, showered in the arrivals lounge, took a car out to Reading, gave the final readout over lunch, hopped back in the car to LHR, and caught the afternoon flight to DEN. I always say that ORD-LHR-DEN run was the epitome of \"stupid\" travel, but Mark has a good reason for his out-&amp;-back.&nbsp; Given the amount of time I’ve spent at 35,000 ft over the past 35 years, I’m not sure I want to know the results of Mark’s measurements.</li><li>United Airlines sent out a link promoting a jet lag app, <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Timeshifter (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.timeshifter.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Timeshifter</a>. Though Mark won’t need one because he’s staying on Eastern Time during his quick jaunt to Hong Kong, I decided to give it a try for my trip to Latvia, Estonia, and Finland. Going east, from the US to Europe, has always been easier for me. My usual routine - I skip the seat-back entertainment for 4-6 hrs of shut-eye (I wouldn’t call it true sleep) on the flight over, eat breakfast when I arrive even if I’m not hungry, get outside as much as possible, take a 30-minute nap after check-in, push through until 11:30pm that first night, and then set an alarm for, say, 7am the next morning. That usually resets my body clock and I’m pretty much good-to-go for the rest of the trip. Timeshifter added two things to my routine: starting to shift to destination time a few days before leaving, moving bedtime and wake-up time an hour earlier each day - going to bed at 10 instead of 11 and getting up at 5 instead of 6 the next morning. The second thing was taking melatonin before going to bed, which I tried by I’m not sure that it really does anything for me. It’s also a well-designed app that notifies you about things like when to seek out direct sunlight and when to start and stop with caffeinated drinks. I used the free first plan. Not sure I’ll pay the $9.99 for another plan, though.</li><li>And speaking of caffeinated drinks, last week, staying at the Omni Hotel in Charlottesville, they gave me two door hangers -- one for each night -- that I could exchange for a drink delivered to my door in the morning, or a beer at the bar in the evening. The first night, since I’d already had a margarita at dinner, I skipped the bar for something in the morning. Looking at the door hanger, my choices were coffee, tea, and Red Bull. Wow. Guess they’re catering to all kinds of morning afters. It wasn’t a big margarita, so I went for the cup of tea.</li><li>Following up on last episode’s carry-on discussion, about buying a new bag to meet Finnair and AirBaltic’s size and weight limits, My new <a href=\"https://amzn.to/32lIURe\">TravelPro Maxlite bag</a> worked like a charm. I packed a week of clothes and didn’t tagged by any gate agents. It even fit in the overheads of the ATR prop jobs that hopscotched us around between Riga, Tallinn, and Helsinki. On one of our passes through Helsinki, I saw an AirBaltic luggage sizer and scale by an empty customer service desk, so I decided to check the bag out. It was a bit of a force fit into the sizer and it weighed in at 8½ kilos, just a bit over the limit. Glad I didn’t catch a gate agent’s eye.</li><li>And since we’ve been talking about carry-on luggage over the past couple of episodes, so I pulled together all those threads into a new <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/11/06/how-to-choose-the-best-carry-on-luggage/\">“how to choose a new carry-on” blog post</a>. It went up at the beginning of the month, updating the one from last February, just in time for the Christmas shopping season. If you or a frequent traveling loved one needs a new carry-on, check it out, complete with Amazon Affiliate links if you want to toss a buck TravelCommons’ way.</li><li>And speaking of prop jobs, I definitely misfired on my Finnair seat choices between Helsinki and Riga. I was more focused on choosing seats for the long flights between Chicago and Helsinki, and didn’t pay much attention to the 45-minute flight to and from Riga. So just picked one off the seat map where there would be with no one next to me - 5C both ways - which, as it turned out, was empty for a reason, because it was right next to the propeller. I had forgotten how loud those propellers get on take-off. I popped on my Bose Noise Cancelling headphones (which, I noticed, are starting to show a good bit of wear; so I might be doing a bit of Black Friday/Cyber Monday shopping) on taxi, but when the pilot revved up the propellers, the noise cancellation started to cut in and out. The headphones were having to generate huge “anti-waves” to cancel the prop noise and the battery was too low to support the load. Luckily, I always carry extra triple-AAA batteries in the case. But while I was swapping the battery, the noise, the oscillation pressure was killer. I couldn’t get those headphones back over my ears fast enough. If you go to the <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">TravelCommons’ Instagram page</a>, you can see <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/p/B37C8LVnRkd/\">a bit of video</a> out the window of my HEL-RIX flight complete with a slow-motion propeller.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music - Drops of H2O ( The Filtered Water Treatment ) by J.Lang (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djlang59/37792 Ft: Airtone</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Notes from the Baltics: Riga, Latvia and Tallinn, Estonia</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>At the end of October, right after pushing out <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/10/14/podcast-156-airport-satisfaction-escooters-smaller-luggage/\">the last episode</a>, my son Andrew and I flew east for a week hopscotching through the Baltics -- Riga, Latvia; Tallinn, Estonia; and Helsinki, Finland. Why the Baltics? I’m not really sure. I’m sure we had a good rationale when we first thought of the trip a few years ago, but now, it wasn’t much more than “here are a few kinda outta-the-way countries that might be cool to wander around.”&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>Andrew booked our flights -- Finnair from ORD to Riga with a connection in Helsinki. The Finnair service was fine, a pretty standard Airbus A330 but with lots of polka-dot Marimekko patterns on everything. I’d forgotten they were a Finnish company. I skipped using my UK passport one last time for a quick pass down the EU passport lane, deciding not to strand Andrew in the “everyone else” passport path, which led to an unexpected grilling from the Finnish border control cop about the details of my itinerary. Then he spent a good bit of time paging back and forth through my passport stamps. Can’t think of what he found interesting -- the Chinese visa, the two Indian visas, maybe the Moroccan stamps from that day trip to Tangiers 3 years ago? Eventually, he decided to put his Helsinki stamp right next to August’s Krakow stamp and then open the gate so I could walk through.&nbsp;</li><li>I’m not quite sure what I expected from Riga, but it turned out to be a nice, mid-sized city. Maybe it shouldn’t have, but I was surprised at how well-preserved the city center is, especially the buildings with the over-the-top Art Nouveau edifices with huge faces over the doorways and carved figures holding up window sills. It took some money, though. Down by the river, I saw two buildings side-by-side, the one on the right recently refinished and repainted; the one on the left was still waiting its turn, but time is running out. The Art Nouveau look was there, but muted under the grime and soot and flaking plaster; with some relief decorations on the window balcony worn away.</li><li>I was surprised, though, at how empty Riga’s old town was in the middle of a Tuesday. The streets were empty. Where was everyone? Maybe across the river where it looks like they’ve built new modern office towers. I was glad I didn’t book our hotel down here.</li><li>The <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riga_Central_Market\">Central Market</a> down river from the Old Town was much more lively, and also where Riga stopped looking so Scandi and started looking a bit more post-Soviet. The busses and streetcars orbiting the market looked left over from the early ‘90’s. But I liked it. Most of the people here seemed to be doing their own grocery shopping -- unlike food markets in places like Paris and Barcelona that seem to have more people taking pictures of fish than buying them. But the place is so big that I don’t see that it could survive just on food porn tourism. They repurposed a set of World War I zeppelin hangars -- one for fishmongers, one of butchers, one for greengrocers, and then part of one with some restaurants where Andrew and I made lunch from a round loaf of Uzbeki bread and some tortellini-looking dumplings filled with lamb and venison. It was pretty good.</li><li>Then it was time to go search out some beer taprooms which had us walking sorta northeast, on a straight line away from the river, away from Old Town, across the canal and parks and past the embassies that sorta ring Old Town, and back into a less renovated landscape of storefronts and converted factories, some places run down, others with the hipster-signaling strands of naked edison bulbs over wood tables. Wandering into a courtyard off a busy street, we found&nbsp; <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Labietis (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.labietis.lv/en\" target=\"_blank\">Labietis</a> that had wide and interesting mix of beers -- herb beers and fruit beers, as well as the usual batch of IPAs. The names were interesting, also. <a href=\"https://www.labietis.lv/en/our-beers/fog\">Migla</a>, which they translated as “Fog” had hemp and peppermint in a light pale ale. Not sure it was my top pick, but I gotta give them props for trying something different.</li><li>It was a 45-minute prop job flight from Riga to Tallinn on AirBaltic. I did have a bit of a travel snob realization, though -- when everyone is getting on the same bus for a plane, boarding status is kinda meaningless. Anyhow, AirBaltic was fine service -- no hassles with carryon luggage, no annoying on-board upsells, though with only 45 minutes, there’s not too much damage they could do. Heading for the cab rank at Tallinn, I saw the same warning signs they had at Riga airport - there’s no regulated taxi fees so be careful which taxi you get into. At Riga, we used one of the airport-approved cabs with a meter. At Tallinn, we used <a href=\"https://bolt.eu/en/\">Bolt</a>, a ride-sharing app that looks a lot like Lyft. I used earlier in Krakow and had good luck with it, and it worked fine in Tallinn too - €4 from the airport to Old Town seemed a pretty good deal.</li><li>I can see why Tallinn is popular for long weekends. The Old Town is just that -- winding cobblestone streets, lots of churches and restored old buildings, and lots of shops in those old buildings. It’s up on a hill, so lots of scenic overlook Instagram moments. You could easily spend a couple of days wandering the streets, popping in and out of churches and museums… and shops and bars.</li><li>But after a half-day, I was ready to breach the Old Town’s walls to see what else there was to Tallinn. The first stop was a market by the train station - <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Balti Jaama Turg (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.visitestonia.com/en/baltic-station-market\" target=\"_blank\">Balti Jaama Turg</a>. Nowhere near the size of Riga’s Central Market, we strolled around until, after the 4th or 5th fruit stand and butcher stall, our minds wandered to lunch. We bought a couple different kinds of Uzbeki breads from one stand and a couple of beers from another. The breads were stuffed with some sliced meat cooked in a warming, floral spice, maybe cinnamon. It was very good, though I never got the story of why all the Uzbeki food up here.</li><li>We walked out and around the train station, and through a collection of restaurants in small square buildings, old cargo containers and a couple of railcars. As much as I liked the Uzbeki breads, I wish I’d seen these places first. On the other side was something called <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Telliskivi Creative City. (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://telliskivi.cc/en/\" target=\"_blank\">Telliskivi Creative City.</a> It looked like an old office or administrative building had been converted to a kinda “makers” mall, where people were doing small-scale clothing or leather work in the back of their space and selling it out of the front. We took a quick pass through it though didn’t see anything we wanted to haul back to the US.</li><li>We walked kinda north-northeast, through the<a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\" Kalamaja neighborhood (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.visittallinn.ee/eng/visitor/discover/articles-guides/kalamaja\" target=\"_blank\"> Kalamaja neighborhood</a> toward the harbor. Kalamaja was the exact opposite of the Old Town - wood buildings vs. stone; straight paved streets vs. windy cobblestones; groups of flats vs. castles and government buildings. A few blocks off the harbor we hit the <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Põhjala Brewery &amp; Tap Room (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://pohjalabeer.com/taproom\" target=\"_blank\">Põhjala Brewery &amp; Tap Room</a>. It was in what looked like a very recently renovated stone building; workers were in the midst of renovating the building next to it. Where Labietis felt very native -- funky space tucked away behind some kinda decaying buildings -- Põhjala could’ve been any new taproom in the US -- big U-shaped bar, open kitchen, BBQ on the menu. The beer was very good; the BBQ maybe less successful, but having lived in Memphis and Dallas, I’m a bit of a BBQ snob. The smoked trout dish, though -- that was great.&nbsp;</li><li>We walked back towards town on a path that ran along the harbor. There were lots of new apartment buildings across the road -- 3-4 stories with floor-to-ceiling windows and enclosed balconies facing the harbor. There wasn’t a lot there… yet. But you could see it coming.</li><li>We stopped at the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/ubajahumal/\">Uba Ja Humal</a> beer store before heading back through the Old Town walls. We walked through the front store to the taproom in the back, complete with a DJ who was set up between the back coolers. Locals would pull a can out of a cooler, pay for it at the bar, get a glass, and sit down at a table with their friends. Tallinn had that kind of easy-going vibe.</li><li>Both cities have done a good job renovating and preserving their Old Towns, and now seem to be expanding past that, repurposing older, maybe Soviet-era buildings to something a bit hipper, edgier (?), less traditional. I came away liking Tallinn a bit more than Riga, but maybe it’s because they’re a little bit further down that hipper, less traditional path.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #157</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li> And if you check out the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> page, you can click thru to highlights from Riga and Tallinn.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_157.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #157 — Notes from the Baltics: Riga, Latvia and Tallinn, Estonia','','inherit','closed','closed','','2575-revision-v1','','','2020-04-17 16:08:25','2020-04-17 21:08:25','',2575,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/04/17/2575-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2743,1,'2020-04-17 16:08:48','2020-04-17 21:08:48','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\">\n<p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/2D576E07-6546-4D4B-9D64-0E593596FB0C.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2581 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/2D576E07-6546-4D4B-9D64-0E593596FB0C-268x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"268\" height=\"300\"></a></p><figcaption>Selfies with Friends in Tallinn</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>Wrapping up my time in Charlottesville, VA with some \"bleisure\" travel, as well as some pure leisure travel with a quick trip in the Baltics. And a listener talks about the reason for his out-and-back day trip from Washington, DC to Hong Kong. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_157.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/720859504&color=%23ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #157: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago just off the shores of Lake Michigan toward the end of what has been a record-breaking cold November. The first half of the month here was the coldest in 148 years with an average temperature of 31 degrees, which compares to an average high for November of 50 degrees, and a <em>low</em> of 39. But what’s been worse has been the early snow -- 3½ inches of snow on Halloween (another record) and again on Veterans Day. And by some incredible strokes of luck (as opposed to any foresight on my part), I dodged both snows -- by flying home from Charlottesville, VA the day before Halloween, and scheduling a week off the road the week of November 11. It’s <em>always</em> better to be lucky than good.</li><li>Last week was my last week in Charlottesville, finishing up an 18-week project that started in July. A year ago, when I wrapped up a long run in Charlottesville and didn’t know if/when I’d be back, I took an afternoon to hit Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s home that was only a 10-15 minute drive from the client. It was one of those things I wanted to do, but kept putting off -- I’ll get to it -- and here I was, the last day, and so squoze it in between meetings and calls.</li><li>With that in mind, I did just a touch more planning this year, and on my <em>second-to-last </em>trip, the week between the Halloween and Veterans Day snow storms, I flew in a day early on Monday, but to IAD rather than <a href=\"http://charlottesville-airport.com/\" class=\"aioseop-link\">CHO</a>, instead renting a car, and driving the length of the 105-mile <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Skyline Drive (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.nps.gov/shen/planyourvisit/driving-skyline-drive.htm\" target=\"_blank\">Skyline Drive</a> down to Charlottesville along the tops of the Blue Ridge Mountains through Shenandoah National Park. I was probably a week late for peak leaf peeping, but it was still pretty, especially when looking west over the Shenandoah Valley.  I don’t think I would’ve made a special trip to drive Skyline Drive, but since I was in the neighborhood, why not? And it turned out to be just a great drive -- clear blue skies, still some good leaf color, and on a Monday, not a lot of people on that 2-lane road. </li><li>And then last Thursday, flying out of <a href=\"http://charlottesville-airport.com/\" class=\"aioseop-link\">CHO</a> for the last time until I don’t know when, I had to order one last beer at the <a href=\"http://www.gocho.com/concessions/\" class=\"aioseop-link\">Tailwind</a>, the airport bar. For an airport with only 5 gates, the Tailwind always has a great rotation of local craft beers. And there’s a mini-Cheers effect -- maybe not everyone knows my name, but Lyn the bartender recognizes me from my 4-year off-and-on presence in her bar. When I showed back up in July after a 9-month absence, she recognized me right away. So I had to get one last beer from her. I looked at the blackboard and ordered the stout from Blue Mountain Brewery, which was not far from when I ended my trip down Skyline Drive. I was getting over a bit of a cold; the IPA would’ve been a bit rough on the back of my throat. That <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Dark Hollow Stout (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/16352/39417/\" target=\"_blank\">Dark Hollow Stout</a> went down smoother, but what I didn’t quite pick up on is that it’s a 10% alcohol beer. Bit of an eye opener at 11:30am. Made for a good nap on the flight home.</li><li>Bridge Music -- Dive Deep (Loveshadow remix) by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/50488 Ft: Loveshadow</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Mark Skinner sent a note to comments@travelcommons.com a few days ago<ul><li>Hi Mark, Long time listener. So your tag line \"It\'s more about the journey than the destination” hit home to me with what has to be my oddest business trip yet. Tomorrow, I’m flying Washington to Hong Kong, via EWR, arriving Monday afternoon, and then returning on Tuesday morning! I’m basically there for dinner…</li><li>No meetings in Hong Kong, it’s all about taking a cosmic ray detector for NASA on an over-the-pole flight; which the UA flights 179/180 do quite well, EWR-HKG-EWR. They want to understand the amount of radiation from space inside the aircraft cabin. I’ll be in the air longer than on the ground. I’m planning to stay on and to sleep at “normal” east coast times, which means while I’ll have a hotel room by HKG, I’ll be awake then (night in HK, but daytime hours for me).&nbsp; Happily my upgrades to Polaris Business both ways have been confirmed! Otherwise the 16 hr flight would seem even longer…</li></ul></li><li>Oh, my! There’s a nice end-of-year mileage run! I told Mark that his itinerary reminds me of one I did 12 years ago when I flew to London for a lunch meeting to wrap up a project. I flew ORD-LHR, showered in the arrivals lounge, took a car out to Reading, gave the final readout over lunch, hopped back in the car to LHR, and caught the afternoon flight to DEN. I always say that ORD-LHR-DEN run was the epitome of \"stupid\" travel, but Mark has a good reason for his out-&amp;-back.&nbsp; Given the amount of time I’ve spent at 35,000 ft over the past 35 years, I’m not sure I want to know the results of Mark’s measurements.</li><li>United Airlines sent out a link promoting a jet lag app, <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Timeshifter (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.timeshifter.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Timeshifter</a>. Though Mark won’t need one because he’s staying on Eastern Time during his quick jaunt to Hong Kong, I decided to give it a try for my trip to Latvia, Estonia, and Finland. Going east, from the US to Europe, has always been easier for me. My usual routine - I skip the seat-back entertainment for 4-6 hrs of shut-eye (I wouldn’t call it true sleep) on the flight over, eat breakfast when I arrive even if I’m not hungry, get outside as much as possible, take a 30-minute nap after check-in, push through until 11:30pm that first night, and then set an alarm for, say, 7am the next morning. That usually resets my body clock and I’m pretty much good-to-go for the rest of the trip. Timeshifter added two things to my routine: starting to shift to destination time a few days before leaving, moving bedtime and wake-up time an hour earlier each day - going to bed at 10 instead of 11 and getting up at 5 instead of 6 the next morning. The second thing was taking melatonin before going to bed, which I tried by I’m not sure that it really does anything for me. It’s also a well-designed app that notifies you about things like when to seek out direct sunlight and when to start and stop with caffeinated drinks. I used the free first plan. Not sure I’ll pay the $9.99 for another plan, though.</li><li>And speaking of caffeinated drinks, last week, staying at the Omni Hotel in Charlottesville, they gave me two door hangers -- one for each night -- that I could exchange for a drink delivered to my door in the morning, or a beer at the bar in the evening. The first night, since I’d already had a margarita at dinner, I skipped the bar for something in the morning. Looking at the door hanger, my choices were coffee, tea, and Red Bull. Wow. Guess they’re catering to all kinds of morning afters. It wasn’t a big margarita, so I went for the cup of tea.</li><li>Following up on last episode’s carry-on discussion, about buying a new bag to meet Finnair and AirBaltic’s size and weight limits, My new <a href=\"https://amzn.to/32lIURe\">TravelPro Maxlite bag</a> worked like a charm. I packed a week of clothes and didn’t tagged by any gate agents. It even fit in the overheads of the ATR prop jobs that hopscotched us around between Riga, Tallinn, and Helsinki. On one of our passes through Helsinki, I saw an AirBaltic luggage sizer and scale by an empty customer service desk, so I decided to check the bag out. It was a bit of a force fit into the sizer and it weighed in at 8½ kilos, just a bit over the limit. Glad I didn’t catch a gate agent’s eye.</li><li>And since we’ve been talking about carry-on luggage over the past couple of episodes, so I pulled together all those threads into a new <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/11/06/how-to-choose-the-best-carry-on-luggage/\">“how to choose a new carry-on” blog post</a>. It went up at the beginning of the month, updating the one from last February, just in time for the Christmas shopping season. If you or a frequent traveling loved one needs a new carry-on, check it out, complete with Amazon Affiliate links if you want to toss a buck TravelCommons’ way.</li><li>And speaking of prop jobs, I definitely misfired on my Finnair seat choices between Helsinki and Riga. I was more focused on choosing seats for the long flights between Chicago and Helsinki, and didn’t pay much attention to the 45-minute flight to and from Riga. So just picked one off the seat map where there would be with no one next to me - 5C both ways - which, as it turned out, was empty for a reason, because it was right next to the propeller. I had forgotten how loud those propellers get on take-off. I popped on my Bose Noise Cancelling headphones (which, I noticed, are starting to show a good bit of wear; so I might be doing a bit of Black Friday/Cyber Monday shopping) on taxi, but when the pilot revved up the propellers, the noise cancellation started to cut in and out. The headphones were having to generate huge “anti-waves” to cancel the prop noise and the battery was too low to support the load. Luckily, I always carry extra triple-AAA batteries in the case. But while I was swapping the battery, the noise, the oscillation pressure was killer. I couldn’t get those headphones back over my ears fast enough. If you go to the <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">TravelCommons’ Instagram page</a>, you can see <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/p/B37C8LVnRkd/\">a bit of video</a> out the window of my HEL-RIX flight complete with a slow-motion propeller.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music - Drops of H2O ( The Filtered Water Treatment ) by J.Lang (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djlang59/37792 Ft: Airtone</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Notes from the Baltics: Riga, Latvia and Tallinn, Estonia</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>At the end of October, right after pushing out <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/10/14/podcast-156-airport-satisfaction-escooters-smaller-luggage/\">the last episode</a>, my son Andrew and I flew east for a week hopscotching through the Baltics -- Riga, Latvia; Tallinn, Estonia; and Helsinki, Finland. Why the Baltics? I’m not really sure. I’m sure we had a good rationale when we first thought of the trip a few years ago, but now, it wasn’t much more than “here are a few kinda outta-the-way countries that might be cool to wander around.”&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>Andrew booked our flights -- Finnair from ORD to Riga with a connection in Helsinki. The Finnair service was fine, a pretty standard Airbus A330 but with lots of polka-dot Marimekko patterns on everything. I’d forgotten they were a Finnish company. I skipped using my UK passport one last time for a quick pass down the EU passport lane, deciding not to strand Andrew in the “everyone else” passport path, which led to an unexpected grilling from the Finnish border control cop about the details of my itinerary. Then he spent a good bit of time paging back and forth through my passport stamps. Can’t think of what he found interesting -- the Chinese visa, the two Indian visas, maybe the Moroccan stamps from that day trip to Tangiers 3 years ago? Eventually, he decided to put his Helsinki stamp right next to August’s Krakow stamp and then open the gate so I could walk through.&nbsp;</li><li>I’m not quite sure what I expected from Riga, but it turned out to be a nice, mid-sized city. Maybe it shouldn’t have, but I was surprised at how well-preserved the city center is, especially the buildings with the over-the-top Art Nouveau edifices with huge faces over the doorways and carved figures holding up window sills. It took some money, though. Down by the river, I saw two buildings side-by-side, the one on the right recently refinished and repainted; the one on the left was still waiting its turn, but time is running out. The Art Nouveau look was there, but muted under the grime and soot and flaking plaster; with some relief decorations on the window balcony worn away.</li><li>I was surprised, though, at how empty Riga’s old town was in the middle of a Tuesday. The streets were empty. Where was everyone? Maybe across the river where it looks like they’ve built new modern office towers. I was glad I didn’t book our hotel down here.</li><li>The <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riga_Central_Market\">Central Market</a> down river from the Old Town was much more lively, and also where Riga stopped looking so Scandi and started looking a bit more post-Soviet. The busses and streetcars orbiting the market looked left over from the early ‘90’s. But I liked it. Most of the people here seemed to be doing their own grocery shopping -- unlike food markets in places like Paris and Barcelona that seem to have more people taking pictures of fish than buying them. But the place is so big that I don’t see that it could survive just on food porn tourism. They repurposed a set of World War I zeppelin hangars -- one for fishmongers, one of butchers, one for greengrocers, and then part of one with some restaurants where Andrew and I made lunch from a round loaf of Uzbeki bread and some tortellini-looking dumplings filled with lamb and venison. It was pretty good.</li><li>Then it was time to go search out some beer taprooms which had us walking sorta northeast, on a straight line away from the river, away from Old Town, across the canal and parks and past the embassies that sorta ring Old Town, and back into a less renovated landscape of storefronts and converted factories, some places run down, others with the hipster-signaling strands of naked edison bulbs over wood tables. Wandering into a courtyard off a busy street, we found&nbsp; <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Labietis (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.labietis.lv/en\" target=\"_blank\">Labietis</a> that had wide and interesting mix of beers -- herb beers and fruit beers, as well as the usual batch of IPAs. The names were interesting, also. <a href=\"https://www.labietis.lv/en/our-beers/fog\">Migla</a>, which they translated as “Fog” had hemp and peppermint in a light pale ale. Not sure it was my top pick, but I gotta give them props for trying something different.</li><li>It was a 45-minute prop job flight from Riga to Tallinn on AirBaltic. I did have a bit of a travel snob realization, though -- when everyone is getting on the same bus for a plane, boarding status is kinda meaningless. Anyhow, AirBaltic was fine service -- no hassles with carryon luggage, no annoying on-board upsells, though with only 45 minutes, there’s not too much damage they could do. Heading for the cab rank at Tallinn, I saw the same warning signs they had at Riga airport - there’s no regulated taxi fees so be careful which taxi you get into. At Riga, we used one of the airport-approved cabs with a meter. At Tallinn, we used <a href=\"https://bolt.eu/en/\">Bolt</a>, a ride-sharing app that looks a lot like Lyft. I used earlier in Krakow and had good luck with it, and it worked fine in Tallinn too - €4 from the airport to Old Town seemed a pretty good deal.</li><li>I can see why Tallinn is popular for long weekends. The Old Town is just that -- winding cobblestone streets, lots of churches and restored old buildings, and lots of shops in those old buildings. It’s up on a hill, so lots of scenic overlook Instagram moments. You could easily spend a couple of days wandering the streets, popping in and out of churches and museums… and shops and bars.</li><li>But after a half-day, I was ready to breach the Old Town’s walls to see what else there was to Tallinn. The first stop was a market by the train station - <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Balti Jaama Turg (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.visitestonia.com/en/baltic-station-market\" target=\"_blank\">Balti Jaama Turg</a>. Nowhere near the size of Riga’s Central Market, we strolled around until, after the 4th or 5th fruit stand and butcher stall, our minds wandered to lunch. We bought a couple different kinds of Uzbeki breads from one stand and a couple of beers from another. The breads were stuffed with some sliced meat cooked in a warming, floral spice, maybe cinnamon. It was very good, though I never got the story of why all the Uzbeki food up here.</li><li>We walked out and around the train station, and through a collection of restaurants in small square buildings, old cargo containers and a couple of railcars. As much as I liked the Uzbeki breads, I wish I’d seen these places first. On the other side was something called <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Telliskivi Creative City. (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://telliskivi.cc/en/\" target=\"_blank\">Telliskivi Creative City.</a> It looked like an old office or administrative building had been converted to a kinda “makers” mall, where people were doing small-scale clothing or leather work in the back of their space and selling it out of the front. We took a quick pass through it though didn’t see anything we wanted to haul back to the US.</li><li>We walked kinda north-northeast, through the<a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\" Kalamaja neighborhood (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.visittallinn.ee/eng/visitor/discover/articles-guides/kalamaja\" target=\"_blank\"> Kalamaja neighborhood</a> toward the harbor. Kalamaja was the exact opposite of the Old Town - wood buildings vs. stone; straight paved streets vs. windy cobblestones; groups of flats vs. castles and government buildings. A few blocks off the harbor we hit the <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Põhjala Brewery &amp; Tap Room (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://pohjalabeer.com/taproom\" target=\"_blank\">Põhjala Brewery &amp; Tap Room</a>. It was in what looked like a very recently renovated stone building; workers were in the midst of renovating the building next to it. Where Labietis felt very native -- funky space tucked away behind some kinda decaying buildings -- Põhjala could’ve been any new taproom in the US -- big U-shaped bar, open kitchen, BBQ on the menu. The beer was very good; the BBQ maybe less successful, but having lived in Memphis and Dallas, I’m a bit of a BBQ snob. The smoked trout dish, though -- that was great.&nbsp;</li><li>We walked back towards town on a path that ran along the harbor. There were lots of new apartment buildings across the road -- 3-4 stories with floor-to-ceiling windows and enclosed balconies facing the harbor. There wasn’t a lot there… yet. But you could see it coming.</li><li>We stopped at the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/ubajahumal/\">Uba Ja Humal</a> beer store before heading back through the Old Town walls. We walked through the front store to the taproom in the back, complete with a DJ who was set up between the back coolers. Locals would pull a can out of a cooler, pay for it at the bar, get a glass, and sit down at a table with their friends. Tallinn had that kind of easy-going vibe.</li><li>Both cities have done a good job renovating and preserving their Old Towns, and now seem to be expanding past that, repurposing older, maybe Soviet-era buildings to something a bit hipper, edgier (?), less traditional. I came away liking Tallinn a bit more than Riga, but maybe it’s because they’re a little bit further down that hipper, less traditional path.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #157</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li> And if you check out the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> page, you can click thru to highlights from Riga and Tallinn.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_157.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #157 — Notes from the Baltics: Riga, Latvia and Tallinn, Estonia','','inherit','closed','closed','','2575-revision-v1','','','2020-04-17 16:08:48','2020-04-17 21:08:48','',2575,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/04/17/2575-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2747,1,'2020-05-08 08:30:48','2020-05-08 13:30:48','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/IMG_1615-1.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2732 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/IMG_1615-1-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\n<figcaption>I think I put off finding a doc too long</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Though I\'m still locked down on the shores of Lake Michigan, data shows that people are starting to do short car trips. What will people need to feel comfortable to do more extensive travel -- spacing in aircraft, we talk with Erik Josowitz of <a href=\"https://insurancequotes.com\">insuranceQuotes.com</a> about trends in travel insurance, and a story about finding medical attention while traveling through Southeast Asia. </span>All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_163.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #163: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois, probably 10 lbs heavier, half of which is beer (my doing) and the other half baked goods courtesy of Irene. While the coronavirus restrictions are beginning to ease in some parts of the US and Europe, everything is still locked down here on the shores of Lake Michigan. So my travels since the last episode have mostly been between the kitchen and the couch, and occasionally out in search of carbohydrate comfort foods -- to grocery stores in an endless and fruitless search for King Arthur Bread Flour, and then running a circuit of Chicago microbreweries using curbside no-contact pick-up to collect 4-packs of whatever is new that week. A couple of breweries are even doing curbside sales of ⅙ barrel kegs -- tempting, but seems a bit of overkill for a 3-person flat, though Amazon claims they can get a kegerator to me next week. Must be on Amazon’s essential items list.&nbsp;</li><li>But with the lockdown easing in non-urban places like the exurbs of Nashville, I’m starting to prep for my first post-Corona trip that I talked about in the last episode, a drive down to Spring Hill, TN to see my mother. Got the oil and tires changed on the BMW to avoid any unplanned stops. Figure I’ll pack a lunch which’ll let me do the drive with just one gas stop. I also tuned up my Trek Madone road bike -- cleaned and lubed the gears, re-wrapped the handlebars -- to take that down with me. Haven’t been able to ride much after Chicago shut down the lake shore path, and so riding solo on small country roads would seem to be a pretty good match for “social distancing” criteria.</li><li>All this spare time has allowed me to be a bit more “planful” as one client used to say, one of those ugly adjective constructions meant to turn an activity “we need to do more planning” into a quality “we need to be more planful”. But anyhow, whether the lockdown allows me to be more planful about the podcast or to do a bit more planning, it has. Which, for this episode, means you’ll hear less of me, and more from informed people. First up is Erik Josowitz, an analyst at <a href=\"https://www.insurancequotes.com\" class=\"aioseop-link\">insuranceQuotes.com</a>. Erik and I did an old-school remote interview -- using Skype instead of Zoom -- talking about what travel insurance looks like in the post-Corona world. And then Allan Marko returns with his wife Chris, following up our conversation in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/01/25/podcast-159-planning-the-trip-of-a-lifetime-in-southeast-asia/\" class=\"aioseop-link\">January travel planning episode</a> with a story from their Southeast Asia sabbatical last year; how they tracked down a doctor in Thailand when his wife became ill; a topic that could weigh on us more when we venture out into the post-lockdown/ pre-corona vaccine world that we\'ll be in for the next 18-24 months.</li><li>But right now, for my Tennessee trip, I think I’m less concerned about finding a doctor, and a bit more concerned about reconnoitering open drive-thru Taco Bells along I-65.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/50485\">Sunset Boulevard</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Siobhan Dakay, unreal_dm</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Videoconferencing is having its moment during the pandemic. Maybe it’s because people are looking for more of a connection in their lockdown isolations, or because we know that everyone is sitting at home in front of a video-equipped laptop and has no excuse not to video, nothing like “Can only call in because I’ll be running through airport security then.” I haven’t done a straight conference call in forever. Doing interviews for this episode, I hit the videoconference trifecta&nbsp; - Skype with Erik, FaceTime with Allan and Chris,&nbsp;</li><li>and then Zoom to be on the other side of the microphone on Steve Frick’s <a href=\"https://anchor.fm/steve-frick/episodes/Travel-Commons---Stories-From-Home-Episode-83-edipo7\">Back &amp; Gone Again podcast</a>.&nbsp; This is the 15th year of TravelCommons; I started in May 2005, and here Steve and I talk about that first episode.</li><li>&nbsp;We had a lot of fun, telling travel stories and talking about our current life-off-the-road. Give it a listen. There’s a link in the show notes, on the TravelCommons Facebook page, and in the Twitter feed.</li><li>Cate Rose left a comment on the Facebook page on the April episode.<ul><li>“I don\'t travel nearly as much as you do Mark but I enjoy your podcasts. These are unprecedented times. We arrived home from a month long rail trip from Italy, up to Sweden at the end of January just as this whole thing was blowing up. And now people, including us, are locked down all over the world. Unbelievable. And here you are with plenty of time to write, but no place to go! We are on Week 4 of social isolation in Western Australia and the novelty is wearing off a little ;-) but it seems to be working so all for the greater good. Thanks for keeping up with the storytelling and letting a crack of life into home isolation! Stay safe.</li><li>Cate - thanks for that note. Sounds like you just got out of Italy in time. If I remember correctly, they started locking down Italy in mid-February. Glad you made it back home safely. And it sounds like Australia and New Zealand have done the best in crushing the Covid curve.</li></ul></li><li>In that same episode, when we talked about post-corona trip planning, I said I thought the first post-lockdown trip most people would take would be a car ride -- more flexibility; easier social distancing. Turns out I was right -- at least according to the company <a href=\"https://www.arrivalist.com/\">Arrivalist</a>, a “visitation intelligence company” that has started publishing a Daily Travel Index measuring consumer road trips of 50 miles or more using data drawn from GPS signals. Road trips on Friday, May 1 were almost back to the pre-pandemic levels of February, with the number of trips in the 100-250 mile range higher than February’s number for the first time since the lockdowns started. You can go to Arrivalist’s website and <a href=\"https://www.arrivalist.com/daily-travel-index/\">play with the data yourself</a> or read an <a href=\"https://www.phocuswire.com/arrivalist-road-trip-surge-data\">analysis by Phocuswright</a>, a travel research firm. Links are in the show notes and my Twitter feed.</li><li>I got yet another email survey, this time from United asking me what would make me comfortable to fly again, and to rank some of their plans. For me, it was pretty easy. I’m not excited about standing in a packed gate area, hearing the gate agent say “This is a completely full flight”, and then spend 2-3 hours shoulder-to-shoulder with a complete stranger, in effect letting that person into my family’s corona exposure space.</li><li>A couple of weeks later (not implying causation, only correlation), all the major US airlines announced that passengers and crew will have to wear masks, they’re moving to strict back-to-front boarding schemes to reduce the number of passengers passing one another, and that they’re blocking/not booking the middle seats, reducing capacity from what had been running over 80% at the beginning of the year down to the 60’s. It was then interesting to watch what happened after Frontier’s CEO did a round of TV interviews at the beginning of this week, saying that they too would block the middle seat -- if a passenger bought a More Room seat for at least $39. Today, after getting a blizzard of red challenge flags from Washington, Frontier reversed course. Just kidding - “It was never our intent” they said, “to profit… from safety”. “ We simply wanted to provide our customers with an option for more space.” Yup. Frontier continuing to position their brand as the Ryanair of the US.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Vidian/52190\">Memories (infiniti loop)</a> by Vidian (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license. Ft: TheDice</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>New World of Travel Insurance</strong> </h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Interview with Erik Josowitz, an analyst at <a class=\"aioseop-link\" href=\"http://www.insurancequotes.com/\">insuranceQuotes.com</a><ul><li>Mark: Eric, thanks for joining us on the TravelCommons Podcast. Could you just give us a little background on yourself?</li><li>Eric: My name is Eric Josowitz. I’m an insurance analyst at InsuranceQuotes. We publish in-depth studies, data and analysis related to auto, home, health, life, and small business insurance. And my role is to study the insurance industry and provide tips and advice and insights that are relevant to consumers and small business owners.</li><li>Mark: The reason I asked you to join us today is, in the past couple of episodes, we\'ve been talking about travel planning. If we continue this thread, what do travelers need to think about from an insurance standpoint in the upcoming post-lock down but pre-Coronavirus vaccine world, which depending on who you read, we\'re gonna be in for the next 18 to 24 months.</li><li>Eric: Travel insurance was kind of a nice to-have pre-pandemic, except in cases of very, very large and elaborate trips where the investment and potential loss was substantial. And I think coming out of this, travel insurance is much more important. There are really two things that travel insurance gets you. One is protection for cancelations that might occur before you actually take the trip, which with the level of uncertainty, that\'s pretty important. And the second thing, travel insurance provides benefits if things happen while you\'re on the trip, ranging from interruptions and delays to medical issues that may pop up while you\'re actually traveling.</li><li>Mark: When people are looking and thinking about travel insurance going forward, what are some of the key things that they need to look for and think about given in the past it was kind of a nice-to-have. It was a check box that showed up on the bottom of a website that three quarters of us ignored. And now we\'re gonna pay a lot more attention to that.</li><li>Eric: I think that\'s a great question. And I\'m glad you mentioned checking the box or not checking the box before. I think as this crisis started to build and spread from the rest of the world into the US, I talked to a lot of people that had travel insurance but didn\'t actually know what it covered because they had just checked the box. And so, I think one thing that that needs to happen moving forward is travelers need to actually look at the specific coverage and specific exclusions associated with travel insurance policy before they purchase it. And so those exclusions in many cases turned out to include communicable diseases; turned out to include cases where, for example, the US State Department has issued travel warnings or travel bans. Many people were also surprised to learn that if they decided to cancel a trip because they were afraid of traveling to an area that had higher risk, that their travel insurance didn\'t actually cover cancelation in cases of fear. And so, one thing I would encourage everyone to look into is what\'s called a cancel-for-any-reason rider or endorsement on their travel insurance policy. And what that in most cases will buy you is the ability to cancel for any reason, no questions asked. You know when you\'re traveling, what you wanna look at on the travel insurance policy is to make sure that any medical issues or interruptions or delays that could occur while you\'re traveling are covered, even though there\'s been a declaration that this is a pandemic by the World Health Organization, there have been these warnings by the US State Dept. Make sure that those things are not specifically excluded in terms of the coverage that you can receive</li><li>Mark: As people need to read the coverage more closely now, any tips on how they should click through or where they ought to look for guidance on those terms?</li><li>Eric: I\'ve had people say to me that they\'re not able to easily find the specific terms and conditions when they\'re using the click-thru form on, you know, a booking website. And so if they feel that they can\'t easily access those terms and conditions, I would encourage them to actually search separately for travel insurance policies. And there are major carriers that offer travel insurance coverage on a regular basis who have packages of policies available for different types of travel, and they do have good frequently asked questions pages on their websites. They do have clearly outlined terms and conditions</li><li>Mark: Searching using the control-F function on your browser for things like communicable diseases. Try saying that three times fast and cancelation for any reason, as you mentioned before is probably some good search terms. Are you seeing any trends in pricing and coverage and riders? Has the travel insurance market reacted to Covid-19 coronavirus yet or is that still a work in progress?</li><li>Eric: Well, many companies have stopped offering travel insurance temporarily. And so, one of the indications that it\'s perhaps safe to travel again is going to be the ability to actually purchase travel insurance coverage at that time. Now there are certain companies that are continuing to offer policies and many of those policies don\'t have exclusions in the case of communicable disease, but they are pretty explicit about what they do and don\'t cover right now. So that yes, the insurance companies are reacting to this crisis in near-real time.</li><li>Mark: Eric, thank you very much for joining us on the TravelCommons podcast. Great insights, good information, good suggestions. Again, thanks for joining us.</li><li>Eric: My pleasure, Mark. Have a great week.</li></ul></li><li>Bridge Music --<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/ramblinglibrarian/55007\">Dawn at the Top of the World ft. copperhead &amp; Robert Seikawitch</a> by Ivan Chew (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Getting Medical Help on the Road</strong> </h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Back in January, long-time TravelCommons listener Allan Marko talked about the planning he did for the 9-week SE Asia sabbatical he and his wife Chris took last year. Fast forward 4 months, and health care on the road will now become much more important when traveling in the post-lockdown/pre-vaccine world. So let’s continue our conversation with Allan, joined now by his wife Chris, to talk about how they thought about getting health care when they were half a world away from home.&nbsp; It started with the research before they left home…</li><li>Interview with Allan Marko and Chris Chufo</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #163</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_163.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #163 — New World of Travel Insurance; Getting Medical Help on the Road','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-163-new-world-of-travel-insurance-getting-medical-help-on-the-road','','','2021-10-01 17:03:23','2021-10-01 22:03:23','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=2747',0,'post','',0),
(2748,1,'2020-05-07 20:33:13','2020-05-08 01:33:13','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/DSC00969.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2732 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/DSC00969-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\n<figcaption>Early attempts at travel journaling</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Kinda tough to do a podcast that’s more about the journey than the destination if I’m not “journeying,” but I give it a go. We talk about cyberattacks on frequent flyer accounts now that we don\'t have a reason to check them, planning for my first post-pandemic trips, and how re-reading my travel journals is pinch-hitting right now. </span>All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_163.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/797628493&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #163: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you, as you might expect, from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois, going into what is either the 3rd or 4th week of Lockdown, depending on how one scores the executive orders. I usually kick off each episode talking about my travel since the last episode -- which is going to be a very short conversation since I recorded the last episode at the end of Lockdown Week 1. Does make it kinda tough to do a podcast that’s more about the journey if I’m not “journeying”. Indeed, longtime TravelCommons listener Steve Frick pinged me on Twitter - “How are you holding up being off the road?” I told him I was taking some long walks to relieve the itching on the soles of my feet, but I’m not sure it’s working.&nbsp;</li><li>I thought I could keep myself occupied by working out more; drop the winter weight a little earlier than usual; be in better biking shape for when the Midwest weather breaks. But I had to call an audible on that when the city closed all the gyms, and then the running and biking path along Lake Michigan. Now I’m trying out a lot of new in-room/no-weight workouts. There’s a lot of them out there, even the Wall Street Journal published “Five Home Workouts to Do During the Coronavirus Outbreak”. I’ve never been a big HIIT guy, high-intensity interval training, so things like squat jumps, burpees, and mountain climbers haven’t been in my repertoire. But I’m kinda liking it and thinking that, when I’m back traveling, this could be a great in-room workout for those days when the hotel gym is jammed, especially those Marriott Courtyard gyms, when all four of the ellipticals and treadmills are taken, and there’s a queue for the handful of dumbells. Of course, I might have to warm up with some furniture jenga -- stacking the chairs and magazine table out of the way, maybe with one of the end tables -- but most US hotel rooms should have enough open space, except maybe in Manhattan.</li><li>However, my other new workout -- stair intervals, sprinting up the stairs in our 20-floor apartment building -- might not translate as well to hotels, especially those 4-story Courtyards.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Javolenus/41932\">Ianiscus</a> by Javolenus (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/\">Attribution (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Wired_Ant</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>The waves of Covid-19 e-mails from travel companies have been interesting.&nbsp; The first wave was at the beginning of March. I tweeted out a screenshot of what I received from United, but all the travel companies seem to be working off similar scripts -- “We care about you; let me tell you about the great job that HEPA air filters do; we’re cleaning the planes a bit more every night; we’ll get back to you later on your elite status.” Then the second wave as travel started to crater a couple of weeks later -- “We really care about you, so if you book a flight/room/car with us and give us money this month, we won’t charge you to change your dates if things are still mucked up… but we’ll keep your money; oh, and we cleaning the planes/rooms/cars real hard now”. This wave did get my attention. I mentioned in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/03/21/podcast-161-new-crisis-old-question-driving-down-to-key-west/\">last episode</a> how the combination of change fee waiver and a smokin’ deal on American’s direct ORD-BCN flight got me to open up my wallet for an end-of-September trip. Friends of ours are saying we’re crazy, but I’m an optimist. And now, starting last week, I’m starting to get the third wave of e-mails wherein the dam finally broke -- “Honest, we care a whole lot about you, so we’ve extended that change fee waiver for the next couple of months -- so long as you give us money now -- and, since we’re all sorta throwing in the towel on 2020, we’re giving you elites a push on your status -- whatever you have now, you keep through next year -- and extending your club memberships by 6 months; oh, and we’re still spraying disinfectant everywhere.” For me, hotel brands were the first -- Hilton and Hyatt, and Marriott notable in its absence. Then, this week,&nbsp; some of the airlines finally dropped -- Delta, United, and Alaska, with American and Southwest notable in <em>their</em> absence. And then, in mid-week, Marriott finally gave it. It’ll be interesting to see how long American and Southwest feel they can hold out. The longer the travel shutdown, the more the pressure will build. Internationally, the trend for airlines seems to be a bit more of a hedge -- not extending status, but reducing qualification levels by 25-30%. BA, KLM, Emirates all seem to be trying this. It’ll be interesting to see how long they can hold out.</li><li>As if this wasn’t enough, Marriott announced at the end of March yet <a href=\"https://hospitalitytech.com/52m-guests-affected-new-marriott-data-breach\">another security breach</a> -- <a href=\"https://www.wired.com/story/marriott-hacked-yes-again-2020/\" class=\"aioseop-link\">the second one in 16 months</a>. This one was in a PMS, a property management system, used at some of the properties managed by Marriott. They estimate that 5.2 million guests are affected. We’ve said many times before, it’s gotten to the point with all these hacks that you gotta assume that you’ve been compromised. But the coronavirus lockdown adds a bit of a twist. A security firm, PerimeterX, says that, in the past month, they’ve <a href=\"https://www.perimeterx.com/resources/blog/2020/covid-19-part-2-data-tells-the-story/\">seen account takeover attacks surge</a> to as high as 80% of all login attempts on travel sites. Kinda makes sense -- if we’re not traveling, we’re not hitting airline or hotel sites to book trips, or to check our account balances or figure out where we are on a status match. As we drop off, the remaining traffic -- from the bad guys -- becomes a higher percentage. And there is some money to be had there. I’ve said in past episodes that I tend to use 2¢/mile as the breakeven point between buying a flight or using miles, though that number might have drifted down to 1.5¢ with recent award chart changes. Crack and drain an account with 100,000 miles -- not a high balance for a frequent traveler who’s getting elite bonuses and uses the airline’s credit card -- and that’s $1,500. Would be nice if these companies used two-factor authentication, but I haven’t seen that with any of my accounts. So I make sure each account has a strong and unique password, and run the circuit -- logging into each of them, or at least the ones with big balances -- every month.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/48914\">In Peace (Somewhere Else Mix)</a> by cdk (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/\">Attribution (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Snowflake</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Post-Corona Trip Planning</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I took a survey from Conde Nast Traveler magazine, asking about my post-coronavirus travel plans. Good timing because, as I mentioned earlier, I’ve been thinking about just that topic, because this will be the longest stretch I’ve stayed home in I don’t know how long. And you can imagine that topic is hot across the travel industry -- with airlines, hotels, trip planning apps -- hence, probably the reason for the Conde Nast survey. But before you can plan, you have to know when the lockdown will be released and how. Nobody in Chicago or anywhere else in the US seems to want to talk about that quite yet, but some European countries are -- Austria, Denmark, the Czech Republic, even Italy -- and as you’d guess, it’s looking like it’ll be more of a gradual release than a big bang; and happen first in places less impacted by Covid-19 -- rural before urban, then smaller cities; New York probably the last in line.&nbsp;</li><li>If that plays out, then I’m thinking that leisure travel will be the first to come back. A lot of business travel is between cities, and when those lockdowns finally release, companies will first be figuring out who they want to bring back to their offices. And they’ll be looking to cut expenses going into the expected recession. So the weekend warriors may be on the move before the road warriors.</li><li>Pulling on that thread a bit more, I think it means that, for many folks, their first post-lockdown trip is going to be a car ride. With a car, you have more control than a plane or a train -- more flexibility, no waiting for airlines to un-furlough their crews and spin up their route systems, and no worries about who you’re sitting next to. Maybe a drive requires a bit more planning -- probably want to make sure the lockdown is lifted in all the places you have to drive through. But when I add low gas prices to this flexibility, driving is probably the way I’ll go.</li><li>OK, but to where? Probably not too far initially -- not more than, say, a 6-8 hour drive, a day -- so no “let’s re-trace Route 66” out to LA or beeline for the Florida beaches. Also, given some of the blowback around some of those pre-lockdown Spring Break antics, I gotta think that party places like Florida beaches and Nashville’s Lower Broadway are gonna be some of the last spots released from lockdown, and even when they are, they’ll be different places. Not every bar and restaurant will survive this lockdown. With still maybe a month to go, I’m already seeing places in Chicago give up and shut down for good.</li><li>But that doesn’t really impact my planning. The first trip I want to do after the lockdown wasn’t some bachelor party long weekend blow out. I think I want to go see some family first, not least because there’s still uncertainty about if and when future waves of Covid-19 might prompt future lockdowns. So I’m thinking, right now, that first drive will be down to Spring Hill, TN to see my mother. It’s an 8-hr drive, so about as far as I can get in a day. I’ll throw my bike on the back of the car; take some solo rides on the roads that thread through horse country, hoping to hit an open barbeque joint, and a taproom or two.&nbsp;</li><li>Then some business travel comes back. People can only get so much done through Zoom and Microsoft Teams. Though we’ve pushed it off for 6-8 weeks, at some point people need to get together -- physically -- to close deals, do projects, work with employees. The ramp up will depend on how deep of a recession we find ourselves in. Maybe it’ll start up by cashing in some of those vouchers from cancelled March and April trips that airlines have been loath to refund.</li><li>Which, hopefully, works Irene, Claire and I up some trans-Atlantic trips in the late fall -- Barcelona in late September and perhaps London over Thanksgiving. They’ll probably still be sedate -- still some social distancing; not sure if we’ll be able to catch La Liga or Premier League matches. That’s OK, though. I’d be happy to walk again through the Gothic District, check out Cat Bar Cat, my craft beer hangout the last time I was in Barcelona, and to shop and eat through Mercado de La Boqueria. And then to walk through London streets for the Christmas lights.&nbsp;</li><li>But if I’m going to do any of this, I’ll probably need to get a hair cut first.</li><li>Bridge Music --<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/35724\">Blue Like Venus</a> by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/\">Attribution (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Admiral Bob</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Keeping a Travel Journal</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>One of the questions on the Conde Nast Traveler survey was “How are you getting your travel fix during the lockdown?” My initial response was curt “I’m not”. But I paused for a minute and then backspaced over that and typed “I’m paging through my old travel journals”.</li><li>Travel journaling is kinda at the core of the TravelCommons podcast or at least its creation myth. I had been writing a weekly business column for an alternative newspaper in Philadelphia. An editorial change dropped my column right about the same time my career change to consulting put me on the road just about every week. I picked up a small Moleskine notebook in SFO while waiting out yet another Northwest Airlines flight delay, found an empty bar stool, ordered an Anchor Steam, and killed time writing down some of the goofier travel stories that had happened to me or that other guys had told me. When I had just about filled it up, I thought about starting a travel blog. But right about then, the first wave of podcasting hit the mainstream. I’d been in radio during high school in Memphis, so thought I’d give it a go. And here we are, coming on 15 years later.</li><li>If I go back even further -- before Moleskines became a thing -- I might say I started travel journaling by way of postcards. If I was in a new or interesting place -- think Tuscany or Lake Tahoe, not Dover, OH or Southfield, MI -- I’d write postcards to my folks, my girlfriend-later-wife, the kids, usually while sitting at the bar having an end-of-the-day beer or wine. Irene saved some of those postcards. Flipping through them and my travel journals, I didn’t find diaries of my travel days -- I did this, went there, ate at these dishes at that restaurant -- but rather little vignettes of things that caught my eye, things like “the favorite pastime in Bologna appears to be trying on sunglasses at the corner stand and then checking out ‘the look’ in the side mirrors of parked cars” or “I was told by law, a Swiss office worker has to be within 50 ft of a window. Explains why all the buildings I see in Basel are thin or doughnuts” or “Roadside billboards in Detroit are different from anywhere else I’ve been. Rather than pitching hotels or consumer products, the billboards on I-94 in from the airport are all selling auto parts, punctuated by that massive Uniroyal tire”</li><li>I’ve pretty much stuck to an end-of-the-day routine; maybe that beer or glass of wine helps me reflect back on the day and ID the things that stood out; the things that taught me something, and then write it down. I don’t have a goal, trying to write X number of pages; I just let each day dictate. Sometimes it’s a bit prosaic, and sometimes it feeds TravelCommons. The journal pages from our <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/01/24/road-trip-lowbrow-santa-fe/\" class=\"aioseop-link\">Thanksgiving getaway to Santa Fe a couple of years ago turned into a 2,000-word blog post</a>; and what poured out of my pen in frustration in France a year ago was at the core of the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/podcast-150-travel-interruptus/\" class=\"aioseop-link\">Travel Interruptus</a> episode, what I called “A Greek tragedy where the travel gods toy with our anti-hero for fun and entertainment”.</li><li>But more than anything, right now when the lockdown is aggravating my wanderlust, reading the pages that I wrote some 2 or 10 or 20 years ago, reminds me of those places, those times, those experiences, and gives me the travel fix that I need right now in this lockdown.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #162</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_162.mp3\" class=\"aioseop-link\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #163 — New World of Travel Insurance; Getting Medical Help on the Road','','inherit','closed','closed','','2747-revision-v1','','','2020-05-07 20:33:13','2020-05-08 01:33:13','',2747,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/05/07/2747-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2750,1,'2020-05-07 20:45:39','2020-05-08 01:45:39','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/DSC00969.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2732 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/DSC00969-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\n<figcaption>Early attempts at travel journaling</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Kinda tough to do a podcast that’s more about the journey than the destination if I’m not “journeying,” but I give it a go. We talk about cyberattacks on frequent flyer accounts now that we don\'t have a reason to check them, planning for my first post-pandemic trips, and how re-reading my travel journals is pinch-hitting right now. </span>All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_163.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/797628493&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #163: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you, as you might expect, from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois, going into what is either the 3rd or 4th week of Lockdown, depending on how one scores the executive orders. I usually kick off each episode talking about my travel since the last episode -- which is going to be a very short conversation since I recorded the last episode at the end of Lockdown Week 1. Does make it kinda tough to do a podcast that’s more about the journey if I’m not “journeying”. Indeed, longtime TravelCommons listener Steve Frick pinged me on Twitter - “How are you holding up being off the road?” I told him I was taking some long walks to relieve the itching on the soles of my feet, but I’m not sure it’s working. </li><li>I thought I could keep myself occupied by working out more; drop the winter weight a little earlier than usual; be in better biking shape for when the Midwest weather breaks. But I had to call an audible on that when the city closed all the gyms, and then the running and biking path along Lake Michigan. Now I’m trying out a lot of new in-room/no-weight workouts. There’s a lot of them out there, even the Wall Street Journal published “Five Home Workouts to Do During the Coronavirus Outbreak”. I’ve never been a big HIIT guy, high-intensity interval training, so things like squat jumps, burpees, and mountain climbers haven’t been in my repertoire. But I’m kinda liking it and thinking that, when I’m back traveling, this could be a great in-room workout for those days when the hotel gym is jammed, especially those Marriott Courtyard gyms, when all four of the ellipticals and treadmills are taken, and there’s a queue for the handful of dumbells. Of course, I might have to warm up with some furniture jenga -- stacking the chairs and magazine table out of the way, maybe with one of the end tables -- but most US hotel rooms should have enough open space, except maybe in Manhattan.</li><li>However, my other new workout -- stair intervals, sprinting up the stairs in our 20-floor apartment building -- might not translate as well to hotels, especially those 4-story Courtyards.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/50485\">Sunset Boulevard</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Siobhan Dakay, unreal_dm</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>The waves of Covid-19 e-mails from travel companies have been interesting.  The first wave was at the beginning of March. I tweeted out a screenshot of what I received from United, but all the travel companies seem to be working off similar scripts -- “We care about you; let me tell you about the great job that HEPA air filters do; we’re cleaning the planes a bit more every night; we’ll get back to you later on your elite status.” Then the second wave as travel started to crater a couple of weeks later -- “We really care about you, so if you book a flight/room/car with us and give us money this month, we won’t charge you to change your dates if things are still mucked up… but we’ll keep your money; oh, and we cleaning the planes/rooms/cars real hard now”. This wave did get my attention. I mentioned in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/03/21/podcast-161-new-crisis-old-question-driving-down-to-key-west/\">last episode</a> how the combination of change fee waiver and a smokin’ deal on American’s direct ORD-BCN flight got me to open up my wallet for an end-of-September trip. Friends of ours are saying we’re crazy, but I’m an optimist. And now, starting last week, I’m starting to get the third wave of e-mails wherein the dam finally broke -- “Honest, we care a whole lot about you, so we’ve extended that change fee waiver for the next couple of months -- so long as you give us money now -- and, since we’re all sorta throwing in the towel on 2020, we’re giving you elites a push on your status -- whatever you have now, you keep through next year -- and extending your club memberships by 6 months; oh, and we’re still spraying disinfectant everywhere.” For me, hotel brands were the first -- Hilton and Hyatt, and Marriott notable in its absence. Then, this week,  some of the airlines finally dropped -- Delta, United, and Alaska, with American and Southwest notable in <em>their</em> absence. And then, in mid-week, Marriott finally gave it. It’ll be interesting to see how long American and Southwest feel they can hold out. The longer the travel shutdown, the more the pressure will build. Internationally, the trend for airlines seems to be a bit more of a hedge -- not extending status, but reducing qualification levels by 25-30%. BA, KLM, Emirates all seem to be trying this. It’ll be interesting to see how long they can hold out.</li><li>As if this wasn’t enough, Marriott announced at the end of March yet <a href=\"https://hospitalitytech.com/52m-guests-affected-new-marriott-data-breach\">another security breach</a> -- <a href=\"https://www.wired.com/story/marriott-hacked-yes-again-2020/\" class=\"aioseop-link\">the second one in 16 months</a>. This one was in a PMS, a property management system, used at some of the properties managed by Marriott. They estimate that 5.2 million guests are affected. We’ve said many times before, it’s gotten to the point with all these hacks that you gotta assume that you’ve been compromised. But the coronavirus lockdown adds a bit of a twist. A security firm, PerimeterX, says that, in the past month, they’ve <a href=\"https://www.perimeterx.com/resources/blog/2020/covid-19-part-2-data-tells-the-story/\">seen account takeover attacks surge</a> to as high as 80% of all login attempts on travel sites. Kinda makes sense -- if we’re not traveling, we’re not hitting airline or hotel sites to book trips, or to check our account balances or figure out where we are on a status match. As we drop off, the remaining traffic -- from the bad guys -- becomes a higher percentage. And there is some money to be had there. I’ve said in past episodes that I tend to use 2¢/mile as the breakeven point between buying a flight or using miles, though that number might have drifted down to 1.5¢ with recent award chart changes. Crack and drain an account with 100,000 miles -- not a high balance for a frequent traveler who’s getting elite bonuses and uses the airline’s credit card -- and that’s $1,500. Would be nice if these companies used two-factor authentication, but I haven’t seen that with any of my accounts. So I make sure each account has a strong and unique password, and run the circuit -- logging into each of them, or at least the ones with big balances -- every month.  </li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Vidian/52190\">Memories (infiniti loop)</a> by Vidian (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license. Ft: TheDice</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Post-Corona Trip Planning</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I took a survey from Conde Nast Traveler magazine, asking about my post-coronavirus travel plans. Good timing because, as I mentioned earlier, I’ve been thinking about just that topic, because this will be the longest stretch I’ve stayed home in I don’t know how long. And you can imagine that topic is hot across the travel industry -- with airlines, hotels, trip planning apps -- hence, probably the reason for the Conde Nast survey. But before you can plan, you have to know when the lockdown will be released and how. Nobody in Chicago or anywhere else in the US seems to want to talk about that quite yet, but some European countries are -- Austria, Denmark, the Czech Republic, even Italy -- and as you’d guess, it’s looking like it’ll be more of a gradual release than a big bang; and happen first in places less impacted by Covid-19 -- rural before urban, then smaller cities; New York probably the last in line. </li><li>If that plays out, then I’m thinking that leisure travel will be the first to come back. A lot of business travel is between cities, and when those lockdowns finally release, companies will first be figuring out who they want to bring back to their offices. And they’ll be looking to cut expenses going into the expected recession. So the weekend warriors may be on the move before the road warriors.</li><li>Pulling on that thread a bit more, I think it means that, for many folks, their first post-lockdown trip is going to be a car ride. With a car, you have more control than a plane or a train -- more flexibility, no waiting for airlines to un-furlough their crews and spin up their route systems, and no worries about who you’re sitting next to. Maybe a drive requires a bit more planning -- probably want to make sure the lockdown is lifted in all the places you have to drive through. But when I add low gas prices to this flexibility, driving is probably the way I’ll go.</li><li>OK, but to where? Probably not too far initially -- not more than, say, a 6-8 hour drive, a day -- so no “let’s re-trace Route 66” out to LA or beeline for the Florida beaches. Also, given some of the blowback around some of those pre-lockdown Spring Break antics, I gotta think that party places like Florida beaches and Nashville’s Lower Broadway are gonna be some of the last spots released from lockdown, and even when they are, they’ll be different places. Not every bar and restaurant will survive this lockdown. With still maybe a month to go, I’m already seeing places in Chicago give up and shut down for good.</li><li>But that doesn’t really impact my planning. The first trip I want to do after the lockdown wasn’t some bachelor party long weekend blow out. I think I want to go see some family first, not least because there’s still uncertainty about if and when future waves of Covid-19 might prompt future lockdowns. So I’m thinking, right now, that first drive will be down to Spring Hill, TN to see my mother. It’s an 8-hr drive, so about as far as I can get in a day. I’ll throw my bike on the back of the car; take some solo rides on the roads that thread through horse country, hoping to hit an open barbeque joint, and a taproom or two. </li><li>Then some business travel comes back. People can only get so much done through Zoom and Microsoft Teams. Though we’ve pushed it off for 6-8 weeks, at some point people need to get together -- physically -- to close deals, do projects, work with employees. The ramp up will depend on how deep of a recession we find ourselves in. Maybe it’ll start up by cashing in some of those vouchers from cancelled March and April trips that airlines have been loath to refund.</li><li>Which, hopefully, works Irene, Claire and I up some trans-Atlantic trips in the late fall -- Barcelona in late September and perhaps London over Thanksgiving. They’ll probably still be sedate -- still some social distancing; not sure if we’ll be able to catch La Liga or Premier League matches. That’s OK, though. I’d be happy to walk again through the Gothic District, check out Cat Bar Cat, my craft beer hangout the last time I was in Barcelona, and to shop and eat through Mercado de La Boqueria. And then to walk through London streets for the Christmas lights. </li><li>But if I’m going to do any of this, I’ll probably need to get a hair cut first.</li><li>Bridge Music --<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/ramblinglibrarian/55007\">Dawn at the Top of the World ft. copperhead &amp; Robert Seikawitch</a> by Ivan Chew (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Keeping a Travel Journal</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>One of the questions on the Conde Nast Traveler survey was “How are you getting your travel fix during the lockdown?” My initial response was curt “I’m not”. But I paused for a minute and then backspaced over that and typed “I’m paging through my old travel journals”.</li><li>Travel journaling is kinda at the core of the TravelCommons podcast or at least its creation myth. I had been writing a weekly business column for an alternative newspaper in Philadelphia. An editorial change dropped my column right about the same time my career change to consulting put me on the road just about every week. I picked up a small Moleskine notebook in SFO while waiting out yet another Northwest Airlines flight delay, found an empty bar stool, ordered an Anchor Steam, and killed time writing down some of the goofier travel stories that had happened to me or that other guys had told me. When I had just about filled it up, I thought about starting a travel blog. But right about then, the first wave of podcasting hit the mainstream. I’d been in radio during high school in Memphis, so thought I’d give it a go. And here we are, coming on 15 years later.</li><li>If I go back even further -- before Moleskines became a thing -- I might say I started travel journaling by way of postcards. If I was in a new or interesting place -- think Tuscany or Lake Tahoe, not Dover, OH or Southfield, MI -- I’d write postcards to my folks, my girlfriend-later-wife, the kids, usually while sitting at the bar having an end-of-the-day beer or wine. Irene saved some of those postcards. Flipping through them and my travel journals, I didn’t find diaries of my travel days -- I did this, went there, ate at these dishes at that restaurant -- but rather little vignettes of things that caught my eye, things like “the favorite pastime in Bologna appears to be trying on sunglasses at the corner stand and then checking out ‘the look’ in the side mirrors of parked cars” or “I was told by law, a Swiss office worker has to be within 50 ft of a window. Explains why all the buildings I see in Basel are thin or doughnuts” or “Roadside billboards in Detroit are different from anywhere else I’ve been. Rather than pitching hotels or consumer products, the billboards on I-94 in from the airport are all selling auto parts, punctuated by that massive Uniroyal tire”</li><li>I’ve pretty much stuck to an end-of-the-day routine; maybe that beer or glass of wine helps me reflect back on the day and ID the things that stood out; the things that taught me something, and then write it down. I don’t have a goal, trying to write X number of pages; I just let each day dictate. Sometimes it’s a bit prosaic, and sometimes it feeds TravelCommons. The journal pages from our <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/01/24/road-trip-lowbrow-santa-fe/\" class=\"aioseop-link\">Thanksgiving getaway to Santa Fe a couple of years ago turned into a 2,000-word blog post</a>; and what poured out of my pen in frustration in France a year ago was at the core of the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/podcast-150-travel-interruptus/\" class=\"aioseop-link\">Travel Interruptus</a> episode, what I called “A Greek tragedy where the travel gods toy with our anti-hero for fun and entertainment”.</li><li>But more than anything, right now when the lockdown is aggravating my wanderlust, reading the pages that I wrote some 2 or 10 or 20 years ago, reminds me of those places, those times, those experiences, and gives me the travel fix that I need right now in this lockdown.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #162</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_162.mp3\" class=\"aioseop-link\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #163 — New World of Travel Insurance; Getting Medical Help on the Road','','inherit','closed','closed','','2747-revision-v1','','','2020-05-07 20:45:39','2020-05-08 01:45:39','',2747,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/05/07/2747-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2751,1,'2020-05-07 20:48:23','2020-05-08 01:48:23','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/DSC00969.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2732 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/DSC00969-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\n<figcaption>Early attempts at travel journaling</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Kinda tough to do a podcast that’s more about the journey than the destination if I’m not “journeying,” but I give it a go. We talk about cyberattacks on frequent flyer accounts now that we don\'t have a reason to check them, planning for my first post-pandemic trips, and how re-reading my travel journals is pinch-hitting right now. </span>All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_163.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/797628493&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #163: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois, probably 10 lbs heavier, half of which is beer (my doing) and the other half baked goods courtesy of Irene. While the coronavirus restrictions are beginning to ease in some parts of the US and Europe, everything is still locked down here on the shores of Lake Michigan. So my travels since the last episode have mostly been between the kitchen and the couch, and occasionally out in search of carbohydrate comfort foods -- to grocery stores in an endless and fruitless search for King Arthur Bread Flour, and then running a circuit of Chicago microbreweries using curbside no-contact pick-up to collect 4-packs of whatever is new that week. A couple of breweries are even doing curbside sales of ⅙ barrel kegs -- tempting, but seems a bit of overkill for a 3-person flat, though Amazon claims they can get a kegerator to me next week. Must be on Amazon’s essential items list. </li><li>But with the lockdown easing in non-urban places like the exurbs of Nashville, I’m starting to prep for my first post-Corona trip that I talked about in the last episode, a drive down to Spring Hill, TN to see my mother. Got the oil and tires changed on the BMW to avoid any unplanned stops. Figure I’ll pack a lunch which’ll let me do the drive with just one gas stop. I also tuned up my Trek Madone road bike -- cleaned and lubed the gears, re-wrapped the handlebars -- to take that down with me. Haven’t been able to ride much after Chicago shut down the lakeshore path, and so riding solo on small country roads would seem to be a pretty good match for “social distancing” criteria.</li><li>All this spare time has allowed me to be a bit more “planful” as one client used to say, one of those ugly adjective constructions meant to turn an activity “we need to do more planning” into a quality “we need to be more planful”. But anyhow, whether the lockdown allows me to be more planful about the podcast or to do a bit more planning, it has. Which, for this episode, means you’ll hear less of me, and more from informed people. First up is Erik Josowitz, an analyst at <a href=\"https://www.insurancequotes.com\" class=\"aioseop-link\">insuranceQuotes.com</a>. Erik and I did an old-school remote interview -- using Skype instead of Zoom -- talking about what travel insurance looks like in the post-Corona world. And then Allan Marko returns with his wife Chris, following up our conversation in the January travel planning episode with a story from their Southeast Asia sabbatical last year; how they tracked down a doctor in Thailand when his wife became ill; a topic that could weigh on us more when we venture out into the post-lockdown/ pre-corona vaccine world that we\'ll be in for the next 18-24 months.</li><li>But right now, for my Tennessee trip, I think I’m less concerned about finding a doctor, and a bit more concerned about reconnoitering open drive-thru Taco Bells along I-65.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/50485\">Sunset Boulevard</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Siobhan Dakay, unreal_dm</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>The waves of Covid-19 e-mails from travel companies have been interesting.  The first wave was at the beginning of March. I tweeted out a screenshot of what I received from United, but all the travel companies seem to be working off similar scripts -- “We care about you; let me tell you about the great job that HEPA air filters do; we’re cleaning the planes a bit more every night; we’ll get back to you later on your elite status.” Then the second wave as travel started to crater a couple of weeks later -- “We really care about you, so if you book a flight/room/car with us and give us money this month, we won’t charge you to change your dates if things are still mucked up… but we’ll keep your money; oh, and we cleaning the planes/rooms/cars real hard now”. This wave did get my attention. I mentioned in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/03/21/podcast-161-new-crisis-old-question-driving-down-to-key-west/\">last episode</a> how the combination of change fee waiver and a smokin’ deal on American’s direct ORD-BCN flight got me to open up my wallet for an end-of-September trip. Friends of ours are saying we’re crazy, but I’m an optimist. And now, starting last week, I’m starting to get the third wave of e-mails wherein the dam finally broke -- “Honest, we care a whole lot about you, so we’ve extended that change fee waiver for the next couple of months -- so long as you give us money now -- and, since we’re all sorta throwing in the towel on 2020, we’re giving you elites a push on your status -- whatever you have now, you keep through next year -- and extending your club memberships by 6 months; oh, and we’re still spraying disinfectant everywhere.” For me, hotel brands were the first -- Hilton and Hyatt, and Marriott notable in its absence. Then, this week,  some of the airlines finally dropped -- Delta, United, and Alaska, with American and Southwest notable in <em>their</em> absence. And then, in mid-week, Marriott finally gave it. It’ll be interesting to see how long American and Southwest feel they can hold out. The longer the travel shutdown, the more the pressure will build. Internationally, the trend for airlines seems to be a bit more of a hedge -- not extending status, but reducing qualification levels by 25-30%. BA, KLM, Emirates all seem to be trying this. It’ll be interesting to see how long they can hold out.</li><li>As if this wasn’t enough, Marriott announced at the end of March yet <a href=\"https://hospitalitytech.com/52m-guests-affected-new-marriott-data-breach\">another security breach</a> -- <a href=\"https://www.wired.com/story/marriott-hacked-yes-again-2020/\" class=\"aioseop-link\">the second one in 16 months</a>. This one was in a PMS, a property management system, used at some of the properties managed by Marriott. They estimate that 5.2 million guests are affected. We’ve said many times before, it’s gotten to the point with all these hacks that you gotta assume that you’ve been compromised. But the coronavirus lockdown adds a bit of a twist. A security firm, PerimeterX, says that, in the past month, they’ve <a href=\"https://www.perimeterx.com/resources/blog/2020/covid-19-part-2-data-tells-the-story/\">seen account takeover attacks surge</a> to as high as 80% of all login attempts on travel sites. Kinda makes sense -- if we’re not traveling, we’re not hitting airline or hotel sites to book trips, or to check our account balances or figure out where we are on a status match. As we drop off, the remaining traffic -- from the bad guys -- becomes a higher percentage. And there is some money to be had there. I’ve said in past episodes that I tend to use 2¢/mile as the breakeven point between buying a flight or using miles, though that number might have drifted down to 1.5¢ with recent award chart changes. Crack and drain an account with 100,000 miles -- not a high balance for a frequent traveler who’s getting elite bonuses and uses the airline’s credit card -- and that’s $1,500. Would be nice if these companies used two-factor authentication, but I haven’t seen that with any of my accounts. So I make sure each account has a strong and unique password, and run the circuit -- logging into each of them, or at least the ones with big balances -- every month.  </li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Vidian/52190\">Memories (infiniti loop)</a> by Vidian (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license. Ft: TheDice</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Post-Corona Trip Planning</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I took a survey from Conde Nast Traveler magazine, asking about my post-coronavirus travel plans. Good timing because, as I mentioned earlier, I’ve been thinking about just that topic, because this will be the longest stretch I’ve stayed home in I don’t know how long. And you can imagine that topic is hot across the travel industry -- with airlines, hotels, trip planning apps -- hence, probably the reason for the Conde Nast survey. But before you can plan, you have to know when the lockdown will be released and how. Nobody in Chicago or anywhere else in the US seems to want to talk about that quite yet, but some European countries are -- Austria, Denmark, the Czech Republic, even Italy -- and as you’d guess, it’s looking like it’ll be more of a gradual release than a big bang; and happen first in places less impacted by Covid-19 -- rural before urban, then smaller cities; New York probably the last in line. </li><li>If that plays out, then I’m thinking that leisure travel will be the first to come back. A lot of business travel is between cities, and when those lockdowns finally release, companies will first be figuring out who they want to bring back to their offices. And they’ll be looking to cut expenses going into the expected recession. So the weekend warriors may be on the move before the road warriors.</li><li>Pulling on that thread a bit more, I think it means that, for many folks, their first post-lockdown trip is going to be a car ride. With a car, you have more control than a plane or a train -- more flexibility, no waiting for airlines to un-furlough their crews and spin up their route systems, and no worries about who you’re sitting next to. Maybe a drive requires a bit more planning -- probably want to make sure the lockdown is lifted in all the places you have to drive through. But when I add low gas prices to this flexibility, driving is probably the way I’ll go.</li><li>OK, but to where? Probably not too far initially -- not more than, say, a 6-8 hour drive, a day -- so no “let’s re-trace Route 66” out to LA or beeline for the Florida beaches. Also, given some of the blowback around some of those pre-lockdown Spring Break antics, I gotta think that party places like Florida beaches and Nashville’s Lower Broadway are gonna be some of the last spots released from lockdown, and even when they are, they’ll be different places. Not every bar and restaurant will survive this lockdown. With still maybe a month to go, I’m already seeing places in Chicago give up and shut down for good.</li><li>But that doesn’t really impact my planning. The first trip I want to do after the lockdown wasn’t some bachelor party long weekend blow out. I think I want to go see some family first, not least because there’s still uncertainty about if and when future waves of Covid-19 might prompt future lockdowns. So I’m thinking, right now, that first drive will be down to Spring Hill, TN to see my mother. It’s an 8-hr drive, so about as far as I can get in a day. I’ll throw my bike on the back of the car; take some solo rides on the roads that thread through horse country, hoping to hit an open barbeque joint, and a taproom or two. </li><li>Then some business travel comes back. People can only get so much done through Zoom and Microsoft Teams. Though we’ve pushed it off for 6-8 weeks, at some point people need to get together -- physically -- to close deals, do projects, work with employees. The ramp up will depend on how deep of a recession we find ourselves in. Maybe it’ll start up by cashing in some of those vouchers from cancelled March and April trips that airlines have been loath to refund.</li><li>Which, hopefully, works Irene, Claire and I up some trans-Atlantic trips in the late fall -- Barcelona in late September and perhaps London over Thanksgiving. They’ll probably still be sedate -- still some social distancing; not sure if we’ll be able to catch La Liga or Premier League matches. That’s OK, though. I’d be happy to walk again through the Gothic District, check out Cat Bar Cat, my craft beer hangout the last time I was in Barcelona, and to shop and eat through Mercado de La Boqueria. And then to walk through London streets for the Christmas lights. </li><li>But if I’m going to do any of this, I’ll probably need to get a hair cut first.</li><li>Bridge Music --<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/ramblinglibrarian/55007\">Dawn at the Top of the World ft. copperhead &amp; Robert Seikawitch</a> by Ivan Chew (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Keeping a Travel Journal</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>One of the questions on the Conde Nast Traveler survey was “How are you getting your travel fix during the lockdown?” My initial response was curt “I’m not”. But I paused for a minute and then backspaced over that and typed “I’m paging through my old travel journals”.</li><li>Travel journaling is kinda at the core of the TravelCommons podcast or at least its creation myth. I had been writing a weekly business column for an alternative newspaper in Philadelphia. An editorial change dropped my column right about the same time my career change to consulting put me on the road just about every week. I picked up a small Moleskine notebook in SFO while waiting out yet another Northwest Airlines flight delay, found an empty bar stool, ordered an Anchor Steam, and killed time writing down some of the goofier travel stories that had happened to me or that other guys had told me. When I had just about filled it up, I thought about starting a travel blog. But right about then, the first wave of podcasting hit the mainstream. I’d been in radio during high school in Memphis, so thought I’d give it a go. And here we are, coming on 15 years later.</li><li>If I go back even further -- before Moleskines became a thing -- I might say I started travel journaling by way of postcards. If I was in a new or interesting place -- think Tuscany or Lake Tahoe, not Dover, OH or Southfield, MI -- I’d write postcards to my folks, my girlfriend-later-wife, the kids, usually while sitting at the bar having an end-of-the-day beer or wine. Irene saved some of those postcards. Flipping through them and my travel journals, I didn’t find diaries of my travel days -- I did this, went there, ate at these dishes at that restaurant -- but rather little vignettes of things that caught my eye, things like “the favorite pastime in Bologna appears to be trying on sunglasses at the corner stand and then checking out ‘the look’ in the side mirrors of parked cars” or “I was told by law, a Swiss office worker has to be within 50 ft of a window. Explains why all the buildings I see in Basel are thin or doughnuts” or “Roadside billboards in Detroit are different from anywhere else I’ve been. Rather than pitching hotels or consumer products, the billboards on I-94 in from the airport are all selling auto parts, punctuated by that massive Uniroyal tire”</li><li>I’ve pretty much stuck to an end-of-the-day routine; maybe that beer or glass of wine helps me reflect back on the day and ID the things that stood out; the things that taught me something, and then write it down. I don’t have a goal, trying to write X number of pages; I just let each day dictate. Sometimes it’s a bit prosaic, and sometimes it feeds TravelCommons. The journal pages from our <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/01/24/road-trip-lowbrow-santa-fe/\" class=\"aioseop-link\">Thanksgiving getaway to Santa Fe a couple of years ago turned into a 2,000-word blog post</a>; and what poured out of my pen in frustration in France a year ago was at the core of the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/podcast-150-travel-interruptus/\" class=\"aioseop-link\">Travel Interruptus</a> episode, what I called “A Greek tragedy where the travel gods toy with our anti-hero for fun and entertainment”.</li><li>But more than anything, right now when the lockdown is aggravating my wanderlust, reading the pages that I wrote some 2 or 10 or 20 years ago, reminds me of those places, those times, those experiences, and gives me the travel fix that I need right now in this lockdown.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #162</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_162.mp3\" class=\"aioseop-link\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #163 — New World of Travel Insurance; Getting Medical Help on the Road','','inherit','closed','closed','','2747-revision-v1','','','2020-05-07 20:48:23','2020-05-08 01:48:23','',2747,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/05/07/2747-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2752,1,'2020-05-07 20:51:09','2020-05-08 01:51:09','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/DSC00969.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2732 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/DSC00969-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\n<figcaption>Early attempts at travel journaling</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Kinda tough to do a podcast that’s more about the journey than the destination if I’m not “journeying,” but I give it a go. We talk about cyberattacks on frequent flyer accounts now that we don\'t have a reason to check them, planning for my first post-pandemic trips, and how re-reading my travel journals is pinch-hitting right now. </span>All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_163.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/797628493&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #163: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois, probably 10 lbs heavier, half of which is beer (my doing) and the other half baked goods courtesy of Irene. While the coronavirus restrictions are beginning to ease in some parts of the US and Europe, everything is still locked down here on the shores of Lake Michigan. So my travels since the last episode have mostly been between the kitchen and the couch, and occasionally out in search of carbohydrate comfort foods -- to grocery stores in an endless and fruitless search for King Arthur Bread Flour, and then running a circuit of Chicago microbreweries using curbside no-contact pick-up to collect 4-packs of whatever is new that week. A couple of breweries are even doing curbside sales of ⅙ barrel kegs -- tempting, but seems a bit of overkill for a 3-person flat, though Amazon claims they can get a kegerator to me next week. Must be on Amazon’s essential items list. </li><li>But with the lockdown easing in non-urban places like the exurbs of Nashville, I’m starting to prep for my first post-Corona trip that I talked about in the last episode, a drive down to Spring Hill, TN to see my mother. Got the oil and tires changed on the BMW to avoid any unplanned stops. Figure I’ll pack a lunch which’ll let me do the drive with just one gas stop. I also tuned up my Trek Madone road bike -- cleaned and lubed the gears, re-wrapped the handlebars -- to take that down with me. Haven’t been able to ride much after Chicago shut down the lake shore path, and so riding solo on small country roads would seem to be a pretty good match for “social distancing” criteria.</li><li>All this spare time has allowed me to be a bit more “planful” as one client used to say, one of those ugly adjective constructions meant to turn an activity “we need to do more planning” into a quality “we need to be more planful”. But anyhow, whether the lockdown allows me to be more planful about the podcast or to do a bit more planning, it has. Which, for this episode, means you’ll hear less of me, and more from informed people. First up is Erik Josowitz, an analyst at <a href=\"https://www.insurancequotes.com\" class=\"aioseop-link\">insuranceQuotes.com</a>. Erik and I did an old-school remote interview -- using Skype instead of Zoom -- talking about what travel insurance looks like in the post-Corona world. And then Allan Marko returns with his wife Chris, following up our conversation in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/01/25/podcast-159-planning-the-trip-of-a-lifetime-in-southeast-asia/\" class=\"aioseop-link\">January travel planning episode</a> with a story from their Southeast Asia sabbatical last year; how they tracked down a doctor in Thailand when his wife became ill; a topic that could weigh on us more when we venture out into the post-lockdown/ pre-corona vaccine world that we\'ll be in for the next 18-24 months.</li><li>But right now, for my Tennessee trip, I think I’m less concerned about finding a doctor, and a bit more concerned about reconnoitering open drive-thru Taco Bells along I-65.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/50485\">Sunset Boulevard</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Siobhan Dakay, unreal_dm</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Videoconferencing is having its moment during the pandemic. Maybe it’s because people are looking for more of a connection in their lockdown isolations, or because we know that everyone is sitting at home in front of a video-equipped laptop and has no excuse not to video, nothing like “Can only call in because I’ll be running through airport security then.” I haven’t done a straight conference call in forever. Doing interviews for this episode, I hit the videoconference trifecta  - Skype with Erik, FaceTime with Allan and Chris, </li><li>and then Zoom to be on the other side of the microphone on Steve Frick’s <a href=\"https://anchor.fm/steve-frick/episodes/Travel-Commons---Stories-From-Home-Episode-83-edipo7\">Back &amp; Gone Again podcast</a>.  This is the 15th year of TravelCommons; I started in May 2005, and here Steve and I talk about that first episode.</li><li> We had a lot of fun, telling travel stories and talking about our current life-off-the-road. Give it a listen. There’s a link in the show notes, on the TravelCommons Facebook page, and in the Twitter feed.</li><li>Cate Rose left a comment on the Facebook page on the April episode.<ul><li>“I don\'t travel nearly as much as you do Mark but I enjoy your podcasts. These are unprecedented times. We arrived home from a month long rail trip from Italy, up to Sweden at the end of January just as this whole thing was blowing up. And now people, including us, are locked down all over the world. Unbelievable. And here you are with plenty of time to write, but no place to go! We are on Week 4 of social isolation in Western Australia and the novelty is wearing off a little ;-) but it seems to be working so all for the greater good. Thanks for keeping up with the storytelling and letting a crack of life into home isolation! Stay safe.</li><li>Cate - thanks for that note. Sounds like you just got out of Italy in time. If I remember correctly, they started locking down Italy in mid-February. Glad you made it back home safely. And it sounds like Australia and New Zealand have done the best in crushing the Covid curve.</li></ul></li><li>In that same episode, when we talked about post-corona trip planning, I said I thought the first post-lockdown trip most people would take would be a car ride -- more flexibility; easier social distancing. Turns out I was right -- at least according to the company <a href=\"https://www.arrivalist.com/\">Arrivalist</a>, a “visitation intelligence company” that has started publishing a Daily Travel Index measuring consumer road trips of 50 miles or more using data drawn from GPS signals. Road trips on Friday, May 1 were almost back to the pre-pandemic levels of February, with the number of trips in the 100-250 mile range higher than February’s number for the first time since the lockdowns started. You can go to Arrivalist’s website and <a href=\"https://www.arrivalist.com/daily-travel-index/\">play with the data yourself</a> or read an <a href=\"https://www.phocuswire.com/arrivalist-road-trip-surge-data\">analysis by Phocuswright</a>, a travel research firm. Links are in the show notes and my Twitter feed.</li><li>I got yet another email survey, this time from United asking me what would make me comfortable to fly again, and to rank some of their plans. For me, it was pretty easy. I’m not excited about standing in a packed gate area, hearing the gate agent say “This is a completely full flight”, and then spend 2-3 hours shoulder-to-shoulder with a complete stranger, in effect letting that person into my family’s corona exposure space.</li><li>A couple of weeks later (not implying causation, only correlation), all the major US airlines announced that passengers and crew will have to wear masks, they’re moving to strict back-to-front boarding schemes to reduce the number of passengers passing one another, and that they’re blocking/not booking the middle seats, reducing capacity from what had been running over 80% at the beginning of the year down to the 60’s. It was then interesting to watch what happened after Frontier’s CEO did a round of TV interviews at the beginning of this week, saying that they too would block the middle seat -- if a passenger bought a More Room seat for at least $39. Today, after getting a blizzard of red challenge flags from Washington, Frontier reversed course. Just kidding - “It was never our intent” they said, “to profit… from safety”. “ We simply wanted to provide our customers with an option for more space.” Yup. Frontier continuing to position their brand as the Ryanair of the US.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Vidian/52190\">Memories (infiniti loop)</a> by Vidian (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license. Ft: TheDice</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Post-Corona Trip Planning</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I took a survey from Conde Nast Traveler magazine, asking about my post-coronavirus travel plans. Good timing because, as I mentioned earlier, I’ve been thinking about just that topic, because this will be the longest stretch I’ve stayed home in I don’t know how long. And you can imagine that topic is hot across the travel industry -- with airlines, hotels, trip planning apps -- hence, probably the reason for the Conde Nast survey. But before you can plan, you have to know when the lockdown will be released and how. Nobody in Chicago or anywhere else in the US seems to want to talk about that quite yet, but some European countries are -- Austria, Denmark, the Czech Republic, even Italy -- and as you’d guess, it’s looking like it’ll be more of a gradual release than a big bang; and happen first in places less impacted by Covid-19 -- rural before urban, then smaller cities; New York probably the last in line. </li><li>If that plays out, then I’m thinking that leisure travel will be the first to come back. A lot of business travel is between cities, and when those lockdowns finally release, companies will first be figuring out who they want to bring back to their offices. And they’ll be looking to cut expenses going into the expected recession. So the weekend warriors may be on the move before the road warriors.</li><li>Pulling on that thread a bit more, I think it means that, for many folks, their first post-lockdown trip is going to be a car ride. With a car, you have more control than a plane or a train -- more flexibility, no waiting for airlines to un-furlough their crews and spin up their route systems, and no worries about who you’re sitting next to. Maybe a drive requires a bit more planning -- probably want to make sure the lockdown is lifted in all the places you have to drive through. But when I add low gas prices to this flexibility, driving is probably the way I’ll go.</li><li>OK, but to where? Probably not too far initially -- not more than, say, a 6-8 hour drive, a day -- so no “let’s re-trace Route 66” out to LA or beeline for the Florida beaches. Also, given some of the blowback around some of those pre-lockdown Spring Break antics, I gotta think that party places like Florida beaches and Nashville’s Lower Broadway are gonna be some of the last spots released from lockdown, and even when they are, they’ll be different places. Not every bar and restaurant will survive this lockdown. With still maybe a month to go, I’m already seeing places in Chicago give up and shut down for good.</li><li>But that doesn’t really impact my planning. The first trip I want to do after the lockdown wasn’t some bachelor party long weekend blow out. I think I want to go see some family first, not least because there’s still uncertainty about if and when future waves of Covid-19 might prompt future lockdowns. So I’m thinking, right now, that first drive will be down to Spring Hill, TN to see my mother. It’s an 8-hr drive, so about as far as I can get in a day. I’ll throw my bike on the back of the car; take some solo rides on the roads that thread through horse country, hoping to hit an open barbeque joint, and a taproom or two. </li><li>Then some business travel comes back. People can only get so much done through Zoom and Microsoft Teams. Though we’ve pushed it off for 6-8 weeks, at some point people need to get together -- physically -- to close deals, do projects, work with employees. The ramp up will depend on how deep of a recession we find ourselves in. Maybe it’ll start up by cashing in some of those vouchers from cancelled March and April trips that airlines have been loath to refund.</li><li>Which, hopefully, works Irene, Claire and I up some trans-Atlantic trips in the late fall -- Barcelona in late September and perhaps London over Thanksgiving. They’ll probably still be sedate -- still some social distancing; not sure if we’ll be able to catch La Liga or Premier League matches. That’s OK, though. I’d be happy to walk again through the Gothic District, check out Cat Bar Cat, my craft beer hangout the last time I was in Barcelona, and to shop and eat through Mercado de La Boqueria. And then to walk through London streets for the Christmas lights. </li><li>But if I’m going to do any of this, I’ll probably need to get a hair cut first.</li><li>Bridge Music --<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/ramblinglibrarian/55007\">Dawn at the Top of the World ft. copperhead &amp; Robert Seikawitch</a> by Ivan Chew (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Keeping a Travel Journal</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>One of the questions on the Conde Nast Traveler survey was “How are you getting your travel fix during the lockdown?” My initial response was curt “I’m not”. But I paused for a minute and then backspaced over that and typed “I’m paging through my old travel journals”.</li><li>Travel journaling is kinda at the core of the TravelCommons podcast or at least its creation myth. I had been writing a weekly business column for an alternative newspaper in Philadelphia. An editorial change dropped my column right about the same time my career change to consulting put me on the road just about every week. I picked up a small Moleskine notebook in SFO while waiting out yet another Northwest Airlines flight delay, found an empty bar stool, ordered an Anchor Steam, and killed time writing down some of the goofier travel stories that had happened to me or that other guys had told me. When I had just about filled it up, I thought about starting a travel blog. But right about then, the first wave of podcasting hit the mainstream. I’d been in radio during high school in Memphis, so thought I’d give it a go. And here we are, coming on 15 years later.</li><li>If I go back even further -- before Moleskines became a thing -- I might say I started travel journaling by way of postcards. If I was in a new or interesting place -- think Tuscany or Lake Tahoe, not Dover, OH or Southfield, MI -- I’d write postcards to my folks, my girlfriend-later-wife, the kids, usually while sitting at the bar having an end-of-the-day beer or wine. Irene saved some of those postcards. Flipping through them and my travel journals, I didn’t find diaries of my travel days -- I did this, went there, ate at these dishes at that restaurant -- but rather little vignettes of things that caught my eye, things like “the favorite pastime in Bologna appears to be trying on sunglasses at the corner stand and then checking out ‘the look’ in the side mirrors of parked cars” or “I was told by law, a Swiss office worker has to be within 50 ft of a window. Explains why all the buildings I see in Basel are thin or doughnuts” or “Roadside billboards in Detroit are different from anywhere else I’ve been. Rather than pitching hotels or consumer products, the billboards on I-94 in from the airport are all selling auto parts, punctuated by that massive Uniroyal tire”</li><li>I’ve pretty much stuck to an end-of-the-day routine; maybe that beer or glass of wine helps me reflect back on the day and ID the things that stood out; the things that taught me something, and then write it down. I don’t have a goal, trying to write X number of pages; I just let each day dictate. Sometimes it’s a bit prosaic, and sometimes it feeds TravelCommons. The journal pages from our <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/01/24/road-trip-lowbrow-santa-fe/\" class=\"aioseop-link\">Thanksgiving getaway to Santa Fe a couple of years ago turned into a 2,000-word blog post</a>; and what poured out of my pen in frustration in France a year ago was at the core of the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/podcast-150-travel-interruptus/\" class=\"aioseop-link\">Travel Interruptus</a> episode, what I called “A Greek tragedy where the travel gods toy with our anti-hero for fun and entertainment”.</li><li>But more than anything, right now when the lockdown is aggravating my wanderlust, reading the pages that I wrote some 2 or 10 or 20 years ago, reminds me of those places, those times, those experiences, and gives me the travel fix that I need right now in this lockdown.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #162</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_162.mp3\" class=\"aioseop-link\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #163 — New World of Travel Insurance; Getting Medical Help on the Road','','inherit','closed','closed','','2747-revision-v1','','','2020-05-07 20:51:09','2020-05-08 01:51:09','',2747,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/05/07/2747-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2753,1,'2020-05-07 20:52:49','2020-05-08 01:52:49','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/DSC00969.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2732 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/DSC00969-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\n<figcaption>Early attempts at travel journaling</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Kinda tough to do a podcast that’s more about the journey than the destination if I’m not “journeying,” but I give it a go. We talk about cyberattacks on frequent flyer accounts now that we don\'t have a reason to check them, planning for my first post-pandemic trips, and how re-reading my travel journals is pinch-hitting right now. </span>All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_163.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/797628493&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #163: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois, probably 10 lbs heavier, half of which is beer (my doing) and the other half baked goods courtesy of Irene. While the coronavirus restrictions are beginning to ease in some parts of the US and Europe, everything is still locked down here on the shores of Lake Michigan. So my travels since the last episode have mostly been between the kitchen and the couch, and occasionally out in search of carbohydrate comfort foods -- to grocery stores in an endless and fruitless search for King Arthur Bread Flour, and then running a circuit of Chicago microbreweries using curbside no-contact pick-up to collect 4-packs of whatever is new that week. A couple of breweries are even doing curbside sales of ⅙ barrel kegs -- tempting, but seems a bit of overkill for a 3-person flat, though Amazon claims they can get a kegerator to me next week. Must be on Amazon’s essential items list. </li><li>But with the lockdown easing in non-urban places like the exurbs of Nashville, I’m starting to prep for my first post-Corona trip that I talked about in the last episode, a drive down to Spring Hill, TN to see my mother. Got the oil and tires changed on the BMW to avoid any unplanned stops. Figure I’ll pack a lunch which’ll let me do the drive with just one gas stop. I also tuned up my Trek Madone road bike -- cleaned and lubed the gears, re-wrapped the handlebars -- to take that down with me. Haven’t been able to ride much after Chicago shut down the lake shore path, and so riding solo on small country roads would seem to be a pretty good match for “social distancing” criteria.</li><li>All this spare time has allowed me to be a bit more “planful” as one client used to say, one of those ugly adjective constructions meant to turn an activity “we need to do more planning” into a quality “we need to be more planful”. But anyhow, whether the lockdown allows me to be more planful about the podcast or to do a bit more planning, it has. Which, for this episode, means you’ll hear less of me, and more from informed people. First up is Erik Josowitz, an analyst at <a href=\"https://www.insurancequotes.com\" class=\"aioseop-link\">insuranceQuotes.com</a>. Erik and I did an old-school remote interview -- using Skype instead of Zoom -- talking about what travel insurance looks like in the post-Corona world. And then Allan Marko returns with his wife Chris, following up our conversation in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/01/25/podcast-159-planning-the-trip-of-a-lifetime-in-southeast-asia/\" class=\"aioseop-link\">January travel planning episode</a> with a story from their Southeast Asia sabbatical last year; how they tracked down a doctor in Thailand when his wife became ill; a topic that could weigh on us more when we venture out into the post-lockdown/ pre-corona vaccine world that we\'ll be in for the next 18-24 months.</li><li>But right now, for my Tennessee trip, I think I’m less concerned about finding a doctor, and a bit more concerned about reconnoitering open drive-thru Taco Bells along I-65.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/50485\">Sunset Boulevard</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Siobhan Dakay, unreal_dm</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Videoconferencing is having its moment during the pandemic. Maybe it’s because people are looking for more of a connection in their lockdown isolations, or because we know that everyone is sitting at home in front of a video-equipped laptop and has no excuse not to video, nothing like “Can only call in because I’ll be running through airport security then.” I haven’t done a straight conference call in forever. Doing interviews for this episode, I hit the videoconference trifecta  - Skype with Erik, FaceTime with Allan and Chris, </li><li>and then Zoom to be on the other side of the microphone on Steve Frick’s <a href=\"https://anchor.fm/steve-frick/episodes/Travel-Commons---Stories-From-Home-Episode-83-edipo7\">Back &amp; Gone Again podcast</a>.  This is the 15th year of TravelCommons; I started in May 2005, and here Steve and I talk about that first episode.</li><li> We had a lot of fun, telling travel stories and talking about our current life-off-the-road. Give it a listen. There’s a link in the show notes, on the TravelCommons Facebook page, and in the Twitter feed.</li><li>Cate Rose left a comment on the Facebook page on the April episode.<ul><li>“I don\'t travel nearly as much as you do Mark but I enjoy your podcasts. These are unprecedented times. We arrived home from a month long rail trip from Italy, up to Sweden at the end of January just as this whole thing was blowing up. And now people, including us, are locked down all over the world. Unbelievable. And here you are with plenty of time to write, but no place to go! We are on Week 4 of social isolation in Western Australia and the novelty is wearing off a little ;-) but it seems to be working so all for the greater good. Thanks for keeping up with the storytelling and letting a crack of life into home isolation! Stay safe.</li><li>Cate - thanks for that note. Sounds like you just got out of Italy in time. If I remember correctly, they started locking down Italy in mid-February. Glad you made it back home safely. And it sounds like Australia and New Zealand have done the best in crushing the Covid curve.</li></ul></li><li>In that same episode, when we talked about post-corona trip planning, I said I thought the first post-lockdown trip most people would take would be a car ride -- more flexibility; easier social distancing. Turns out I was right -- at least according to the company <a href=\"https://www.arrivalist.com/\">Arrivalist</a>, a “visitation intelligence company” that has started publishing a Daily Travel Index measuring consumer road trips of 50 miles or more using data drawn from GPS signals. Road trips on Friday, May 1 were almost back to the pre-pandemic levels of February, with the number of trips in the 100-250 mile range higher than February’s number for the first time since the lockdowns started. You can go to Arrivalist’s website and <a href=\"https://www.arrivalist.com/daily-travel-index/\">play with the data yourself</a> or read an <a href=\"https://www.phocuswire.com/arrivalist-road-trip-surge-data\">analysis by Phocuswright</a>, a travel research firm. Links are in the show notes and my Twitter feed.</li><li>I got yet another email survey, this time from United asking me what would make me comfortable to fly again, and to rank some of their plans. For me, it was pretty easy. I’m not excited about standing in a packed gate area, hearing the gate agent say “This is a completely full flight”, and then spend 2-3 hours shoulder-to-shoulder with a complete stranger, in effect letting that person into my family’s corona exposure space.</li><li>A couple of weeks later (not implying causation, only correlation), all the major US airlines announced that passengers and crew will have to wear masks, they’re moving to strict back-to-front boarding schemes to reduce the number of passengers passing one another, and that they’re blocking/not booking the middle seats, reducing capacity from what had been running over 80% at the beginning of the year down to the 60’s. It was then interesting to watch what happened after Frontier’s CEO did a round of TV interviews at the beginning of this week, saying that they too would block the middle seat -- if a passenger bought a More Room seat for at least $39. Today, after getting a blizzard of red challenge flags from Washington, Frontier reversed course. Just kidding - “It was never our intent” they said, “to profit… from safety”. “ We simply wanted to provide our customers with an option for more space.” Yup. Frontier continuing to position their brand as the Ryanair of the US.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Vidian/52190\">Memories (infiniti loop)</a> by Vidian (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license. Ft: TheDice</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>New World of Travel Insurance</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Interview with Erik Josowitz, an analyst at <a href=\"http://www.insurancequotes.com/\" class=\"aioseop-link\">insuranceQuotes.com</a></li><li>Bridge Music --<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/ramblinglibrarian/55007\">Dawn at the Top of the World ft. copperhead &amp; Robert Seikawitch</a> by Ivan Chew (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Keeping a Travel Journal</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>One of the questions on the Conde Nast Traveler survey was “How are you getting your travel fix during the lockdown?” My initial response was curt “I’m not”. But I paused for a minute and then backspaced over that and typed “I’m paging through my old travel journals”.</li><li>Travel journaling is kinda at the core of the TravelCommons podcast or at least its creation myth. I had been writing a weekly business column for an alternative newspaper in Philadelphia. An editorial change dropped my column right about the same time my career change to consulting put me on the road just about every week. I picked up a small Moleskine notebook in SFO while waiting out yet another Northwest Airlines flight delay, found an empty bar stool, ordered an Anchor Steam, and killed time writing down some of the goofier travel stories that had happened to me or that other guys had told me. When I had just about filled it up, I thought about starting a travel blog. But right about then, the first wave of podcasting hit the mainstream. I’d been in radio during high school in Memphis, so thought I’d give it a go. And here we are, coming on 15 years later.</li><li>If I go back even further -- before Moleskines became a thing -- I might say I started travel journaling by way of postcards. If I was in a new or interesting place -- think Tuscany or Lake Tahoe, not Dover, OH or Southfield, MI -- I’d write postcards to my folks, my girlfriend-later-wife, the kids, usually while sitting at the bar having an end-of-the-day beer or wine. Irene saved some of those postcards. Flipping through them and my travel journals, I didn’t find diaries of my travel days -- I did this, went there, ate at these dishes at that restaurant -- but rather little vignettes of things that caught my eye, things like “the favorite pastime in Bologna appears to be trying on sunglasses at the corner stand and then checking out ‘the look’ in the side mirrors of parked cars” or “I was told by law, a Swiss office worker has to be within 50 ft of a window. Explains why all the buildings I see in Basel are thin or doughnuts” or “Roadside billboards in Detroit are different from anywhere else I’ve been. Rather than pitching hotels or consumer products, the billboards on I-94 in from the airport are all selling auto parts, punctuated by that massive Uniroyal tire”</li><li>I’ve pretty much stuck to an end-of-the-day routine; maybe that beer or glass of wine helps me reflect back on the day and ID the things that stood out; the things that taught me something, and then write it down. I don’t have a goal, trying to write X number of pages; I just let each day dictate. Sometimes it’s a bit prosaic, and sometimes it feeds TravelCommons. The journal pages from our <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/01/24/road-trip-lowbrow-santa-fe/\" class=\"aioseop-link\">Thanksgiving getaway to Santa Fe a couple of years ago turned into a 2,000-word blog post</a>; and what poured out of my pen in frustration in France a year ago was at the core of the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/podcast-150-travel-interruptus/\" class=\"aioseop-link\">Travel Interruptus</a> episode, what I called “A Greek tragedy where the travel gods toy with our anti-hero for fun and entertainment”.</li><li>But more than anything, right now when the lockdown is aggravating my wanderlust, reading the pages that I wrote some 2 or 10 or 20 years ago, reminds me of those places, those times, those experiences, and gives me the travel fix that I need right now in this lockdown.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #162</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_162.mp3\" class=\"aioseop-link\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #163 — New World of Travel Insurance; Getting Medical Help on the Road','','inherit','closed','closed','','2747-revision-v1','','','2020-05-07 20:52:49','2020-05-08 01:52:49','',2747,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/05/07/2747-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2754,1,'2020-05-07 20:53:59','2020-05-08 01:53:59','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/DSC00969.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2732 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/DSC00969-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\n<figcaption>Early attempts at travel journaling</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Kinda tough to do a podcast that’s more about the journey than the destination if I’m not “journeying,” but I give it a go. We talk about cyberattacks on frequent flyer accounts now that we don\'t have a reason to check them, planning for my first post-pandemic trips, and how re-reading my travel journals is pinch-hitting right now. </span>All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_163.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/797628493&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #163: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois, probably 10 lbs heavier, half of which is beer (my doing) and the other half baked goods courtesy of Irene. While the coronavirus restrictions are beginning to ease in some parts of the US and Europe, everything is still locked down here on the shores of Lake Michigan. So my travels since the last episode have mostly been between the kitchen and the couch, and occasionally out in search of carbohydrate comfort foods -- to grocery stores in an endless and fruitless search for King Arthur Bread Flour, and then running a circuit of Chicago microbreweries using curbside no-contact pick-up to collect 4-packs of whatever is new that week. A couple of breweries are even doing curbside sales of ⅙ barrel kegs -- tempting, but seems a bit of overkill for a 3-person flat, though Amazon claims they can get a kegerator to me next week. Must be on Amazon’s essential items list. </li><li>But with the lockdown easing in non-urban places like the exurbs of Nashville, I’m starting to prep for my first post-Corona trip that I talked about in the last episode, a drive down to Spring Hill, TN to see my mother. Got the oil and tires changed on the BMW to avoid any unplanned stops. Figure I’ll pack a lunch which’ll let me do the drive with just one gas stop. I also tuned up my Trek Madone road bike -- cleaned and lubed the gears, re-wrapped the handlebars -- to take that down with me. Haven’t been able to ride much after Chicago shut down the lake shore path, and so riding solo on small country roads would seem to be a pretty good match for “social distancing” criteria.</li><li>All this spare time has allowed me to be a bit more “planful” as one client used to say, one of those ugly adjective constructions meant to turn an activity “we need to do more planning” into a quality “we need to be more planful”. But anyhow, whether the lockdown allows me to be more planful about the podcast or to do a bit more planning, it has. Which, for this episode, means you’ll hear less of me, and more from informed people. First up is Erik Josowitz, an analyst at <a href=\"https://www.insurancequotes.com\" class=\"aioseop-link\">insuranceQuotes.com</a>. Erik and I did an old-school remote interview -- using Skype instead of Zoom -- talking about what travel insurance looks like in the post-Corona world. And then Allan Marko returns with his wife Chris, following up our conversation in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/01/25/podcast-159-planning-the-trip-of-a-lifetime-in-southeast-asia/\" class=\"aioseop-link\">January travel planning episode</a> with a story from their Southeast Asia sabbatical last year; how they tracked down a doctor in Thailand when his wife became ill; a topic that could weigh on us more when we venture out into the post-lockdown/ pre-corona vaccine world that we\'ll be in for the next 18-24 months.</li><li>But right now, for my Tennessee trip, I think I’m less concerned about finding a doctor, and a bit more concerned about reconnoitering open drive-thru Taco Bells along I-65.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/50485\">Sunset Boulevard</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Siobhan Dakay, unreal_dm</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Videoconferencing is having its moment during the pandemic. Maybe it’s because people are looking for more of a connection in their lockdown isolations, or because we know that everyone is sitting at home in front of a video-equipped laptop and has no excuse not to video, nothing like “Can only call in because I’ll be running through airport security then.” I haven’t done a straight conference call in forever. Doing interviews for this episode, I hit the videoconference trifecta  - Skype with Erik, FaceTime with Allan and Chris, </li><li>and then Zoom to be on the other side of the microphone on Steve Frick’s <a href=\"https://anchor.fm/steve-frick/episodes/Travel-Commons---Stories-From-Home-Episode-83-edipo7\">Back &amp; Gone Again podcast</a>.  This is the 15th year of TravelCommons; I started in May 2005, and here Steve and I talk about that first episode.</li><li> We had a lot of fun, telling travel stories and talking about our current life-off-the-road. Give it a listen. There’s a link in the show notes, on the TravelCommons Facebook page, and in the Twitter feed.</li><li>Cate Rose left a comment on the Facebook page on the April episode.<ul><li>“I don\'t travel nearly as much as you do Mark but I enjoy your podcasts. These are unprecedented times. We arrived home from a month long rail trip from Italy, up to Sweden at the end of January just as this whole thing was blowing up. And now people, including us, are locked down all over the world. Unbelievable. And here you are with plenty of time to write, but no place to go! We are on Week 4 of social isolation in Western Australia and the novelty is wearing off a little ;-) but it seems to be working so all for the greater good. Thanks for keeping up with the storytelling and letting a crack of life into home isolation! Stay safe.</li><li>Cate - thanks for that note. Sounds like you just got out of Italy in time. If I remember correctly, they started locking down Italy in mid-February. Glad you made it back home safely. And it sounds like Australia and New Zealand have done the best in crushing the Covid curve.</li></ul></li><li>In that same episode, when we talked about post-corona trip planning, I said I thought the first post-lockdown trip most people would take would be a car ride -- more flexibility; easier social distancing. Turns out I was right -- at least according to the company <a href=\"https://www.arrivalist.com/\">Arrivalist</a>, a “visitation intelligence company” that has started publishing a Daily Travel Index measuring consumer road trips of 50 miles or more using data drawn from GPS signals. Road trips on Friday, May 1 were almost back to the pre-pandemic levels of February, with the number of trips in the 100-250 mile range higher than February’s number for the first time since the lockdowns started. You can go to Arrivalist’s website and <a href=\"https://www.arrivalist.com/daily-travel-index/\">play with the data yourself</a> or read an <a href=\"https://www.phocuswire.com/arrivalist-road-trip-surge-data\">analysis by Phocuswright</a>, a travel research firm. Links are in the show notes and my Twitter feed.</li><li>I got yet another email survey, this time from United asking me what would make me comfortable to fly again, and to rank some of their plans. For me, it was pretty easy. I’m not excited about standing in a packed gate area, hearing the gate agent say “This is a completely full flight”, and then spend 2-3 hours shoulder-to-shoulder with a complete stranger, in effect letting that person into my family’s corona exposure space.</li><li>A couple of weeks later (not implying causation, only correlation), all the major US airlines announced that passengers and crew will have to wear masks, they’re moving to strict back-to-front boarding schemes to reduce the number of passengers passing one another, and that they’re blocking/not booking the middle seats, reducing capacity from what had been running over 80% at the beginning of the year down to the 60’s. It was then interesting to watch what happened after Frontier’s CEO did a round of TV interviews at the beginning of this week, saying that they too would block the middle seat -- if a passenger bought a More Room seat for at least $39. Today, after getting a blizzard of red challenge flags from Washington, Frontier reversed course. Just kidding - “It was never our intent” they said, “to profit… from safety”. “ We simply wanted to provide our customers with an option for more space.” Yup. Frontier continuing to position their brand as the Ryanair of the US.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Vidian/52190\">Memories (infiniti loop)</a> by Vidian (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license. Ft: TheDice</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>New World of Travel Insurance</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Interview with Erik Josowitz, an analyst at <a href=\"http://www.insurancequotes.com/\" class=\"aioseop-link\">insuranceQuotes.com</a></li><li>Bridge Music --<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/ramblinglibrarian/55007\">Dawn at the Top of the World ft. copperhead &amp; Robert Seikawitch</a> by Ivan Chew (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Getting Medical Help on the Road</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Back in January, long-time TravelCommons listener Allan Marko talked about the planning he did for the 9-week SE Asia sabbatical he and his wife Chris took last year. Fast forward 4 months, and health care on the road will now become much more important when traveling in the post-lockdown/pre-vaccine world. So let’s continue our conversation with Allan, joined now by his wife Chris, to talk about how they thought about getting health care when they were half a world away from home.  It started with the research before they left home…</li><li>Interview with Allan Marko and Chris Chufo</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #163</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_162.mp3\" class=\"aioseop-link\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #163 — New World of Travel Insurance; Getting Medical Help on the Road','','inherit','closed','closed','','2747-revision-v1','','','2020-05-07 20:53:59','2020-05-08 01:53:59','',2747,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/05/07/2747-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2757,1,'2020-05-07 21:06:03','2020-05-08 02:06:03','','IMG_1615 (1)','','inherit','open','closed','','img_1615-1','','','2020-05-07 21:06:03','2020-05-08 02:06:03','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/IMG_1615-1.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(2758,1,'2020-05-07 21:10:34','2020-05-08 02:10:34','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/DSC00969.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2732 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/DSC00969-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\n<figcaption>Early attempts at travel journaling</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Kinda tough to do a podcast that’s more about the journey than the destination if I’m not “journeying,” but I give it a go. We talk about cyberattacks on frequent flyer accounts now that we don\'t have a reason to check them, planning for my first post-pandemic trips, and how re-reading my travel journals is pinch-hitting right now. </span>All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_162.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/797628493&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #163: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois, probably 10 lbs heavier, half of which is beer (my doing) and the other half baked goods courtesy of Irene. While the coronavirus restrictions are beginning to ease in some parts of the US and Europe, everything is still locked down here on the shores of Lake Michigan. So my travels since the last episode have mostly been between the kitchen and the couch, and occasionally out in search of carbohydrate comfort foods -- to grocery stores in an endless and fruitless search for King Arthur Bread Flour, and then running a circuit of Chicago microbreweries using curbside no-contact pick-up to collect 4-packs of whatever is new that week. A couple of breweries are even doing curbside sales of ⅙ barrel kegs -- tempting, but seems a bit of overkill for a 3-person flat, though Amazon claims they can get a kegerator to me next week. Must be on Amazon’s essential items list. </li><li>But with the lockdown easing in non-urban places like the exurbs of Nashville, I’m starting to prep for my first post-Corona trip that I talked about in the last episode, a drive down to Spring Hill, TN to see my mother. Got the oil and tires changed on the BMW to avoid any unplanned stops. Figure I’ll pack a lunch which’ll let me do the drive with just one gas stop. I also tuned up my Trek Madone road bike -- cleaned and lubed the gears, re-wrapped the handlebars -- to take that down with me. Haven’t been able to ride much after Chicago shut down the lake shore path, and so riding solo on small country roads would seem to be a pretty good match for “social distancing” criteria.</li><li>All this spare time has allowed me to be a bit more “planful” as one client used to say, one of those ugly adjective constructions meant to turn an activity “we need to do more planning” into a quality “we need to be more planful”. But anyhow, whether the lockdown allows me to be more planful about the podcast or to do a bit more planning, it has. Which, for this episode, means you’ll hear less of me, and more from informed people. First up is Erik Josowitz, an analyst at <a href=\"https://www.insurancequotes.com\" class=\"aioseop-link\">insuranceQuotes.com</a>. Erik and I did an old-school remote interview -- using Skype instead of Zoom -- talking about what travel insurance looks like in the post-Corona world. And then Allan Marko returns with his wife Chris, following up our conversation in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/01/25/podcast-159-planning-the-trip-of-a-lifetime-in-southeast-asia/\" class=\"aioseop-link\">January travel planning episode</a> with a story from their Southeast Asia sabbatical last year; how they tracked down a doctor in Thailand when his wife became ill; a topic that could weigh on us more when we venture out into the post-lockdown/ pre-corona vaccine world that we\'ll be in for the next 18-24 months.</li><li>But right now, for my Tennessee trip, I think I’m less concerned about finding a doctor, and a bit more concerned about reconnoitering open drive-thru Taco Bells along I-65.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/50485\">Sunset Boulevard</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Siobhan Dakay, unreal_dm</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Videoconferencing is having its moment during the pandemic. Maybe it’s because people are looking for more of a connection in their lockdown isolations, or because we know that everyone is sitting at home in front of a video-equipped laptop and has no excuse not to video, nothing like “Can only call in because I’ll be running through airport security then.” I haven’t done a straight conference call in forever. Doing interviews for this episode, I hit the videoconference trifecta&nbsp; - Skype with Erik, FaceTime with Allan and Chris,&nbsp;</li><li>and then Zoom to be on the other side of the microphone on Steve Frick’s <a href=\"https://anchor.fm/steve-frick/episodes/Travel-Commons---Stories-From-Home-Episode-83-edipo7\">Back &amp; Gone Again podcast</a>.&nbsp; This is the 15th year of TravelCommons; I started in May 2005, and here Steve and I talk about that first episode.</li><li>&nbsp;We had a lot of fun, telling travel stories and talking about our current life-off-the-road. Give it a listen. There’s a link in the show notes, on the TravelCommons Facebook page, and in the Twitter feed.</li><li>Cate Rose left a comment on the Facebook page on the April episode.<ul><li>“I don\'t travel nearly as much as you do Mark but I enjoy your podcasts. These are unprecedented times. We arrived home from a month long rail trip from Italy, up to Sweden at the end of January just as this whole thing was blowing up. And now people, including us, are locked down all over the world. Unbelievable. And here you are with plenty of time to write, but no place to go! We are on Week 4 of social isolation in Western Australia and the novelty is wearing off a little ;-) but it seems to be working so all for the greater good. Thanks for keeping up with the storytelling and letting a crack of life into home isolation! Stay safe.</li><li>Cate - thanks for that note. Sounds like you just got out of Italy in time. If I remember correctly, they started locking down Italy in mid-February. Glad you made it back home safely. And it sounds like Australia and New Zealand have done the best in crushing the Covid curve.</li></ul></li><li>In that same episode, when we talked about post-corona trip planning, I said I thought the first post-lockdown trip most people would take would be a car ride -- more flexibility; easier social distancing. Turns out I was right -- at least according to the company <a href=\"https://www.arrivalist.com/\">Arrivalist</a>, a “visitation intelligence company” that has started publishing a Daily Travel Index measuring consumer road trips of 50 miles or more using data drawn from GPS signals. Road trips on Friday, May 1 were almost back to the pre-pandemic levels of February, with the number of trips in the 100-250 mile range higher than February’s number for the first time since the lockdowns started. You can go to Arrivalist’s website and <a href=\"https://www.arrivalist.com/daily-travel-index/\">play with the data yourself</a> or read an <a href=\"https://www.phocuswire.com/arrivalist-road-trip-surge-data\">analysis by Phocuswright</a>, a travel research firm. Links are in the show notes and my Twitter feed.</li><li>I got yet another email survey, this time from United asking me what would make me comfortable to fly again, and to rank some of their plans. For me, it was pretty easy. I’m not excited about standing in a packed gate area, hearing the gate agent say “This is a completely full flight”, and then spend 2-3 hours shoulder-to-shoulder with a complete stranger, in effect letting that person into my family’s corona exposure space.</li><li>A couple of weeks later (not implying causation, only correlation), all the major US airlines announced that passengers and crew will have to wear masks, they’re moving to strict back-to-front boarding schemes to reduce the number of passengers passing one another, and that they’re blocking/not booking the middle seats, reducing capacity from what had been running over 80% at the beginning of the year down to the 60’s. It was then interesting to watch what happened after Frontier’s CEO did a round of TV interviews at the beginning of this week, saying that they too would block the middle seat -- if a passenger bought a More Room seat for at least $39. Today, after getting a blizzard of red challenge flags from Washington, Frontier reversed course. Just kidding - “It was never our intent” they said, “to profit… from safety”. “ We simply wanted to provide our customers with an option for more space.” Yup. Frontier continuing to position their brand as the Ryanair of the US.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Vidian/52190\">Memories (infiniti loop)</a> by Vidian (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license. Ft: TheDice</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>New World of Travel Insurance</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Interview with Erik Josowitz, an analyst at <a href=\"http://www.insurancequotes.com/\" class=\"aioseop-link\">insuranceQuotes.com</a></li><li>Bridge Music --<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/ramblinglibrarian/55007\">Dawn at the Top of the World ft. copperhead &amp; Robert Seikawitch</a> by Ivan Chew (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Getting Medical Help on the Road</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Back in January, long-time TravelCommons listener Allan Marko talked about the planning he did for the 9-week SE Asia sabbatical he and his wife Chris took last year. Fast forward 4 months, and health care on the road will now become much more important when traveling in the post-lockdown/pre-vaccine world. So let’s continue our conversation with Allan, joined now by his wife Chris, to talk about how they thought about getting health care when they were half a world away from home.&nbsp; It started with the research before they left home…</li><li>Interview with Allan Marko and Chris Chufo</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #163</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_162.mp3\" class=\"aioseop-link\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #163 — New World of Travel Insurance; Getting Medical Help on the Road','','inherit','closed','closed','','2747-revision-v1','','','2020-05-07 21:10:34','2020-05-08 02:10:34','',2747,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/05/07/2747-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2759,1,'2020-05-07 21:16:01','2020-05-08 02:16:01','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/IMG_1615-1.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2732 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/IMG_1615-1-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\n<figcaption>I think I need to find a doc now</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Kinda tough to do a podcast that’s more about the journey than the destination if I’m not “journeying,” but I give it a go. We talk about cyberattacks on frequent flyer accounts now that we don\'t have a reason to check them, planning for my first post-pandemic trips, and how re-reading my travel journals is pinch-hitting right now. </span>All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_162.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/797628493&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #163: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois, probably 10 lbs heavier, half of which is beer (my doing) and the other half baked goods courtesy of Irene. While the coronavirus restrictions are beginning to ease in some parts of the US and Europe, everything is still locked down here on the shores of Lake Michigan. So my travels since the last episode have mostly been between the kitchen and the couch, and occasionally out in search of carbohydrate comfort foods -- to grocery stores in an endless and fruitless search for King Arthur Bread Flour, and then running a circuit of Chicago microbreweries using curbside no-contact pick-up to collect 4-packs of whatever is new that week. A couple of breweries are even doing curbside sales of ⅙ barrel kegs -- tempting, but seems a bit of overkill for a 3-person flat, though Amazon claims they can get a kegerator to me next week. Must be on Amazon’s essential items list.&nbsp;</li><li>But with the lockdown easing in non-urban places like the exurbs of Nashville, I’m starting to prep for my first post-Corona trip that I talked about in the last episode, a drive down to Spring Hill, TN to see my mother. Got the oil and tires changed on the BMW to avoid any unplanned stops. Figure I’ll pack a lunch which’ll let me do the drive with just one gas stop. I also tuned up my Trek Madone road bike -- cleaned and lubed the gears, re-wrapped the handlebars -- to take that down with me. Haven’t been able to ride much after Chicago shut down the lake shore path, and so riding solo on small country roads would seem to be a pretty good match for “social distancing” criteria.</li><li>All this spare time has allowed me to be a bit more “planful” as one client used to say, one of those ugly adjective constructions meant to turn an activity “we need to do more planning” into a quality “we need to be more planful”. But anyhow, whether the lockdown allows me to be more planful about the podcast or to do a bit more planning, it has. Which, for this episode, means you’ll hear less of me, and more from informed people. First up is Erik Josowitz, an analyst at <a href=\"https://www.insurancequotes.com\" class=\"aioseop-link\">insuranceQuotes.com</a>. Erik and I did an old-school remote interview -- using Skype instead of Zoom -- talking about what travel insurance looks like in the post-Corona world. And then Allan Marko returns with his wife Chris, following up our conversation in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/01/25/podcast-159-planning-the-trip-of-a-lifetime-in-southeast-asia/\" class=\"aioseop-link\">January travel planning episode</a> with a story from their Southeast Asia sabbatical last year; how they tracked down a doctor in Thailand when his wife became ill; a topic that could weigh on us more when we venture out into the post-lockdown/ pre-corona vaccine world that we\'ll be in for the next 18-24 months.</li><li>But right now, for my Tennessee trip, I think I’m less concerned about finding a doctor, and a bit more concerned about reconnoitering open drive-thru Taco Bells along I-65.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/50485\">Sunset Boulevard</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Siobhan Dakay, unreal_dm</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Videoconferencing is having its moment during the pandemic. Maybe it’s because people are looking for more of a connection in their lockdown isolations, or because we know that everyone is sitting at home in front of a video-equipped laptop and has no excuse not to video, nothing like “Can only call in because I’ll be running through airport security then.” I haven’t done a straight conference call in forever. Doing interviews for this episode, I hit the videoconference trifecta&nbsp; - Skype with Erik, FaceTime with Allan and Chris,&nbsp;</li><li>and then Zoom to be on the other side of the microphone on Steve Frick’s <a href=\"https://anchor.fm/steve-frick/episodes/Travel-Commons---Stories-From-Home-Episode-83-edipo7\">Back &amp; Gone Again podcast</a>.&nbsp; This is the 15th year of TravelCommons; I started in May 2005, and here Steve and I talk about that first episode.</li><li>&nbsp;We had a lot of fun, telling travel stories and talking about our current life-off-the-road. Give it a listen. There’s a link in the show notes, on the TravelCommons Facebook page, and in the Twitter feed.</li><li>Cate Rose left a comment on the Facebook page on the April episode.<ul><li>“I don\'t travel nearly as much as you do Mark but I enjoy your podcasts. These are unprecedented times. We arrived home from a month long rail trip from Italy, up to Sweden at the end of January just as this whole thing was blowing up. And now people, including us, are locked down all over the world. Unbelievable. And here you are with plenty of time to write, but no place to go! We are on Week 4 of social isolation in Western Australia and the novelty is wearing off a little ;-) but it seems to be working so all for the greater good. Thanks for keeping up with the storytelling and letting a crack of life into home isolation! Stay safe.</li><li>Cate - thanks for that note. Sounds like you just got out of Italy in time. If I remember correctly, they started locking down Italy in mid-February. Glad you made it back home safely. And it sounds like Australia and New Zealand have done the best in crushing the Covid curve.</li></ul></li><li>In that same episode, when we talked about post-corona trip planning, I said I thought the first post-lockdown trip most people would take would be a car ride -- more flexibility; easier social distancing. Turns out I was right -- at least according to the company <a href=\"https://www.arrivalist.com/\">Arrivalist</a>, a “visitation intelligence company” that has started publishing a Daily Travel Index measuring consumer road trips of 50 miles or more using data drawn from GPS signals. Road trips on Friday, May 1 were almost back to the pre-pandemic levels of February, with the number of trips in the 100-250 mile range higher than February’s number for the first time since the lockdowns started. You can go to Arrivalist’s website and <a href=\"https://www.arrivalist.com/daily-travel-index/\">play with the data yourself</a> or read an <a href=\"https://www.phocuswire.com/arrivalist-road-trip-surge-data\">analysis by Phocuswright</a>, a travel research firm. Links are in the show notes and my Twitter feed.</li><li>I got yet another email survey, this time from United asking me what would make me comfortable to fly again, and to rank some of their plans. For me, it was pretty easy. I’m not excited about standing in a packed gate area, hearing the gate agent say “This is a completely full flight”, and then spend 2-3 hours shoulder-to-shoulder with a complete stranger, in effect letting that person into my family’s corona exposure space.</li><li>A couple of weeks later (not implying causation, only correlation), all the major US airlines announced that passengers and crew will have to wear masks, they’re moving to strict back-to-front boarding schemes to reduce the number of passengers passing one another, and that they’re blocking/not booking the middle seats, reducing capacity from what had been running over 80% at the beginning of the year down to the 60’s. It was then interesting to watch what happened after Frontier’s CEO did a round of TV interviews at the beginning of this week, saying that they too would block the middle seat -- if a passenger bought a More Room seat for at least $39. Today, after getting a blizzard of red challenge flags from Washington, Frontier reversed course. Just kidding - “It was never our intent” they said, “to profit… from safety”. “ We simply wanted to provide our customers with an option for more space.” Yup. Frontier continuing to position their brand as the Ryanair of the US.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Vidian/52190\">Memories (infiniti loop)</a> by Vidian (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license. Ft: TheDice</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>New World of Travel Insurance</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Interview with Erik Josowitz, an analyst at <a href=\"http://www.insurancequotes.com/\" class=\"aioseop-link\">insuranceQuotes.com</a></li><li>Bridge Music --<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/ramblinglibrarian/55007\">Dawn at the Top of the World ft. copperhead &amp; Robert Seikawitch</a> by Ivan Chew (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Getting Medical Help on the Road</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Back in January, long-time TravelCommons listener Allan Marko talked about the planning he did for the 9-week SE Asia sabbatical he and his wife Chris took last year. Fast forward 4 months, and health care on the road will now become much more important when traveling in the post-lockdown/pre-vaccine world. So let’s continue our conversation with Allan, joined now by his wife Chris, to talk about how they thought about getting health care when they were half a world away from home.&nbsp; It started with the research before they left home…</li><li>Interview with Allan Marko and Chris Chufo</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #163</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_162.mp3\" class=\"aioseop-link\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #163 — New World of Travel Insurance; Getting Medical Help on the Road','','inherit','closed','closed','','2747-revision-v1','','','2020-05-07 21:16:01','2020-05-08 02:16:01','',2747,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/05/07/2747-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2760,1,'2020-05-07 21:17:38','2020-05-08 02:17:38','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/IMG_1615-1.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2732 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/IMG_1615-1-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a><figcaption>I think I need to find a doc now</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Kinda tough to do a podcast that’s more about the journey than the destination if I’m not “journeying,” but I give it a go. We talk about cyberattacks on frequent flyer accounts now that we don\'t have a reason to check them, planning for my first post-pandemic trips, and how re-reading my travel journals is pinch-hitting right now. </span>All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_162.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/815941426&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #163: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois, probably 10 lbs heavier, half of which is beer (my doing) and the other half baked goods courtesy of Irene. While the coronavirus restrictions are beginning to ease in some parts of the US and Europe, everything is still locked down here on the shores of Lake Michigan. So my travels since the last episode have mostly been between the kitchen and the couch, and occasionally out in search of carbohydrate comfort foods -- to grocery stores in an endless and fruitless search for King Arthur Bread Flour, and then running a circuit of Chicago microbreweries using curbside no-contact pick-up to collect 4-packs of whatever is new that week. A couple of breweries are even doing curbside sales of ⅙ barrel kegs -- tempting, but seems a bit of overkill for a 3-person flat, though Amazon claims they can get a kegerator to me next week. Must be on Amazon’s essential items list.&nbsp;</li><li>But with the lockdown easing in non-urban places like the exurbs of Nashville, I’m starting to prep for my first post-Corona trip that I talked about in the last episode, a drive down to Spring Hill, TN to see my mother. Got the oil and tires changed on the BMW to avoid any unplanned stops. Figure I’ll pack a lunch which’ll let me do the drive with just one gas stop. I also tuned up my Trek Madone road bike -- cleaned and lubed the gears, re-wrapped the handlebars -- to take that down with me. Haven’t been able to ride much after Chicago shut down the lake shore path, and so riding solo on small country roads would seem to be a pretty good match for “social distancing” criteria.</li><li>All this spare time has allowed me to be a bit more “planful” as one client used to say, one of those ugly adjective constructions meant to turn an activity “we need to do more planning” into a quality “we need to be more planful”. But anyhow, whether the lockdown allows me to be more planful about the podcast or to do a bit more planning, it has. Which, for this episode, means you’ll hear less of me, and more from informed people. First up is Erik Josowitz, an analyst at <a href=\"https://www.insurancequotes.com\" class=\"aioseop-link\">insuranceQuotes.com</a>. Erik and I did an old-school remote interview -- using Skype instead of Zoom -- talking about what travel insurance looks like in the post-Corona world. And then Allan Marko returns with his wife Chris, following up our conversation in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/01/25/podcast-159-planning-the-trip-of-a-lifetime-in-southeast-asia/\" class=\"aioseop-link\">January travel planning episode</a> with a story from their Southeast Asia sabbatical last year; how they tracked down a doctor in Thailand when his wife became ill; a topic that could weigh on us more when we venture out into the post-lockdown/ pre-corona vaccine world that we\'ll be in for the next 18-24 months.</li><li>But right now, for my Tennessee trip, I think I’m less concerned about finding a doctor, and a bit more concerned about reconnoitering open drive-thru Taco Bells along I-65.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/50485\">Sunset Boulevard</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Siobhan Dakay, unreal_dm</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Videoconferencing is having its moment during the pandemic. Maybe it’s because people are looking for more of a connection in their lockdown isolations, or because we know that everyone is sitting at home in front of a video-equipped laptop and has no excuse not to video, nothing like “Can only call in because I’ll be running through airport security then.” I haven’t done a straight conference call in forever. Doing interviews for this episode, I hit the videoconference trifecta&nbsp; - Skype with Erik, FaceTime with Allan and Chris,&nbsp;</li><li>and then Zoom to be on the other side of the microphone on Steve Frick’s <a href=\"https://anchor.fm/steve-frick/episodes/Travel-Commons---Stories-From-Home-Episode-83-edipo7\">Back &amp; Gone Again podcast</a>.&nbsp; This is the 15th year of TravelCommons; I started in May 2005, and here Steve and I talk about that first episode.</li><li>&nbsp;We had a lot of fun, telling travel stories and talking about our current life-off-the-road. Give it a listen. There’s a link in the show notes, on the TravelCommons Facebook page, and in the Twitter feed.</li><li>Cate Rose left a comment on the Facebook page on the April episode.<ul><li>“I don\'t travel nearly as much as you do Mark but I enjoy your podcasts. These are unprecedented times. We arrived home from a month long rail trip from Italy, up to Sweden at the end of January just as this whole thing was blowing up. And now people, including us, are locked down all over the world. Unbelievable. And here you are with plenty of time to write, but no place to go! We are on Week 4 of social isolation in Western Australia and the novelty is wearing off a little ;-) but it seems to be working so all for the greater good. Thanks for keeping up with the storytelling and letting a crack of life into home isolation! Stay safe.</li><li>Cate - thanks for that note. Sounds like you just got out of Italy in time. If I remember correctly, they started locking down Italy in mid-February. Glad you made it back home safely. And it sounds like Australia and New Zealand have done the best in crushing the Covid curve.</li></ul></li><li>In that same episode, when we talked about post-corona trip planning, I said I thought the first post-lockdown trip most people would take would be a car ride -- more flexibility; easier social distancing. Turns out I was right -- at least according to the company <a href=\"https://www.arrivalist.com/\">Arrivalist</a>, a “visitation intelligence company” that has started publishing a Daily Travel Index measuring consumer road trips of 50 miles or more using data drawn from GPS signals. Road trips on Friday, May 1 were almost back to the pre-pandemic levels of February, with the number of trips in the 100-250 mile range higher than February’s number for the first time since the lockdowns started. You can go to Arrivalist’s website and <a href=\"https://www.arrivalist.com/daily-travel-index/\">play with the data yourself</a> or read an <a href=\"https://www.phocuswire.com/arrivalist-road-trip-surge-data\">analysis by Phocuswright</a>, a travel research firm. Links are in the show notes and my Twitter feed.</li><li>I got yet another email survey, this time from United asking me what would make me comfortable to fly again, and to rank some of their plans. For me, it was pretty easy. I’m not excited about standing in a packed gate area, hearing the gate agent say “This is a completely full flight”, and then spend 2-3 hours shoulder-to-shoulder with a complete stranger, in effect letting that person into my family’s corona exposure space.</li><li>A couple of weeks later (not implying causation, only correlation), all the major US airlines announced that passengers and crew will have to wear masks, they’re moving to strict back-to-front boarding schemes to reduce the number of passengers passing one another, and that they’re blocking/not booking the middle seats, reducing capacity from what had been running over 80% at the beginning of the year down to the 60’s. It was then interesting to watch what happened after Frontier’s CEO did a round of TV interviews at the beginning of this week, saying that they too would block the middle seat -- if a passenger bought a More Room seat for at least $39. Today, after getting a blizzard of red challenge flags from Washington, Frontier reversed course. Just kidding - “It was never our intent” they said, “to profit… from safety”. “ We simply wanted to provide our customers with an option for more space.” Yup. Frontier continuing to position their brand as the Ryanair of the US.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Vidian/52190\">Memories (infiniti loop)</a> by Vidian (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license. Ft: TheDice</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>New World of Travel Insurance</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Interview with Erik Josowitz, an analyst at <a href=\"http://www.insurancequotes.com/\" class=\"aioseop-link\">insuranceQuotes.com</a></li><li>Bridge Music --<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/ramblinglibrarian/55007\">Dawn at the Top of the World ft. copperhead &amp; Robert Seikawitch</a> by Ivan Chew (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Getting Medical Help on the Road</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Back in January, long-time TravelCommons listener Allan Marko talked about the planning he did for the 9-week SE Asia sabbatical he and his wife Chris took last year. Fast forward 4 months, and health care on the road will now become much more important when traveling in the post-lockdown/pre-vaccine world. So let’s continue our conversation with Allan, joined now by his wife Chris, to talk about how they thought about getting health care when they were half a world away from home.&nbsp; It started with the research before they left home…</li><li>Interview with Allan Marko and Chris Chufo</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #163</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_162.mp3\" class=\"aioseop-link\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #163 — New World of Travel Insurance; Getting Medical Help on the Road','','inherit','closed','closed','','2747-revision-v1','','','2020-05-07 21:17:38','2020-05-08 02:17:38','',2747,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/05/07/2747-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2761,1,'2020-05-07 21:43:44','2020-05-08 02:43:44','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/IMG_1615-1.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2732 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/IMG_1615-1-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\n<figcaption>I think I need to find a doc now</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Though I\'m still locked down on the shores of Lake Michigan, data shows that people are starting to do short car trips. We talk about what people will need to feel comfortable to do more extensive travel -- spacing in aircraft, and putting a higher priority on travel insurance and finding medical attention. </span>All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_162.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/815941426&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #163: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois, probably 10 lbs heavier, half of which is beer (my doing) and the other half baked goods courtesy of Irene. While the coronavirus restrictions are beginning to ease in some parts of the US and Europe, everything is still locked down here on the shores of Lake Michigan. So my travels since the last episode have mostly been between the kitchen and the couch, and occasionally out in search of carbohydrate comfort foods -- to grocery stores in an endless and fruitless search for King Arthur Bread Flour, and then running a circuit of Chicago microbreweries using curbside no-contact pick-up to collect 4-packs of whatever is new that week. A couple of breweries are even doing curbside sales of ⅙ barrel kegs -- tempting, but seems a bit of overkill for a 3-person flat, though Amazon claims they can get a kegerator to me next week. Must be on Amazon’s essential items list.&nbsp;</li><li>But with the lockdown easing in non-urban places like the exurbs of Nashville, I’m starting to prep for my first post-Corona trip that I talked about in the last episode, a drive down to Spring Hill, TN to see my mother. Got the oil and tires changed on the BMW to avoid any unplanned stops. Figure I’ll pack a lunch which’ll let me do the drive with just one gas stop. I also tuned up my Trek Madone road bike -- cleaned and lubed the gears, re-wrapped the handlebars -- to take that down with me. Haven’t been able to ride much after Chicago shut down the lake shore path, and so riding solo on small country roads would seem to be a pretty good match for “social distancing” criteria.</li><li>All this spare time has allowed me to be a bit more “planful” as one client used to say, one of those ugly adjective constructions meant to turn an activity “we need to do more planning” into a quality “we need to be more planful”. But anyhow, whether the lockdown allows me to be more planful about the podcast or to do a bit more planning, it has. Which, for this episode, means you’ll hear less of me, and more from informed people. First up is Erik Josowitz, an analyst at <a href=\"https://www.insurancequotes.com\" class=\"aioseop-link\">insuranceQuotes.com</a>. Erik and I did an old-school remote interview -- using Skype instead of Zoom -- talking about what travel insurance looks like in the post-Corona world. And then Allan Marko returns with his wife Chris, following up our conversation in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/01/25/podcast-159-planning-the-trip-of-a-lifetime-in-southeast-asia/\" class=\"aioseop-link\">January travel planning episode</a> with a story from their Southeast Asia sabbatical last year; how they tracked down a doctor in Thailand when his wife became ill; a topic that could weigh on us more when we venture out into the post-lockdown/ pre-corona vaccine world that we\'ll be in for the next 18-24 months.</li><li>But right now, for my Tennessee trip, I think I’m less concerned about finding a doctor, and a bit more concerned about reconnoitering open drive-thru Taco Bells along I-65.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/50485\">Sunset Boulevard</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Siobhan Dakay, unreal_dm</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Videoconferencing is having its moment during the pandemic. Maybe it’s because people are looking for more of a connection in their lockdown isolations, or because we know that everyone is sitting at home in front of a video-equipped laptop and has no excuse not to video, nothing like “Can only call in because I’ll be running through airport security then.” I haven’t done a straight conference call in forever. Doing interviews for this episode, I hit the videoconference trifecta&nbsp; - Skype with Erik, FaceTime with Allan and Chris,&nbsp;</li><li>and then Zoom to be on the other side of the microphone on Steve Frick’s <a href=\"https://anchor.fm/steve-frick/episodes/Travel-Commons---Stories-From-Home-Episode-83-edipo7\">Back &amp; Gone Again podcast</a>.&nbsp; This is the 15th year of TravelCommons; I started in May 2005, and here Steve and I talk about that first episode.</li><li>&nbsp;We had a lot of fun, telling travel stories and talking about our current life-off-the-road. Give it a listen. There’s a link in the show notes, on the TravelCommons Facebook page, and in the Twitter feed.</li><li>Cate Rose left a comment on the Facebook page on the April episode.<ul><li>“I don\'t travel nearly as much as you do Mark but I enjoy your podcasts. These are unprecedented times. We arrived home from a month long rail trip from Italy, up to Sweden at the end of January just as this whole thing was blowing up. And now people, including us, are locked down all over the world. Unbelievable. And here you are with plenty of time to write, but no place to go! We are on Week 4 of social isolation in Western Australia and the novelty is wearing off a little ;-) but it seems to be working so all for the greater good. Thanks for keeping up with the storytelling and letting a crack of life into home isolation! Stay safe.</li><li>Cate - thanks for that note. Sounds like you just got out of Italy in time. If I remember correctly, they started locking down Italy in mid-February. Glad you made it back home safely. And it sounds like Australia and New Zealand have done the best in crushing the Covid curve.</li></ul></li><li>In that same episode, when we talked about post-corona trip planning, I said I thought the first post-lockdown trip most people would take would be a car ride -- more flexibility; easier social distancing. Turns out I was right -- at least according to the company <a href=\"https://www.arrivalist.com/\">Arrivalist</a>, a “visitation intelligence company” that has started publishing a Daily Travel Index measuring consumer road trips of 50 miles or more using data drawn from GPS signals. Road trips on Friday, May 1 were almost back to the pre-pandemic levels of February, with the number of trips in the 100-250 mile range higher than February’s number for the first time since the lockdowns started. You can go to Arrivalist’s website and <a href=\"https://www.arrivalist.com/daily-travel-index/\">play with the data yourself</a> or read an <a href=\"https://www.phocuswire.com/arrivalist-road-trip-surge-data\">analysis by Phocuswright</a>, a travel research firm. Links are in the show notes and my Twitter feed.</li><li>I got yet another email survey, this time from United asking me what would make me comfortable to fly again, and to rank some of their plans. For me, it was pretty easy. I’m not excited about standing in a packed gate area, hearing the gate agent say “This is a completely full flight”, and then spend 2-3 hours shoulder-to-shoulder with a complete stranger, in effect letting that person into my family’s corona exposure space.</li><li>A couple of weeks later (not implying causation, only correlation), all the major US airlines announced that passengers and crew will have to wear masks, they’re moving to strict back-to-front boarding schemes to reduce the number of passengers passing one another, and that they’re blocking/not booking the middle seats, reducing capacity from what had been running over 80% at the beginning of the year down to the 60’s. It was then interesting to watch what happened after Frontier’s CEO did a round of TV interviews at the beginning of this week, saying that they too would block the middle seat -- if a passenger bought a More Room seat for at least $39. Today, after getting a blizzard of red challenge flags from Washington, Frontier reversed course. Just kidding - “It was never our intent” they said, “to profit… from safety”. “ We simply wanted to provide our customers with an option for more space.” Yup. Frontier continuing to position their brand as the Ryanair of the US.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Vidian/52190\">Memories (infiniti loop)</a> by Vidian (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license. Ft: TheDice</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>New World of Travel Insurance</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Interview with Erik Josowitz, an analyst at <a href=\"http://www.insurancequotes.com/\" class=\"aioseop-link\">insuranceQuotes.com</a></li><li>Bridge Music --<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/ramblinglibrarian/55007\">Dawn at the Top of the World ft. copperhead &amp; Robert Seikawitch</a> by Ivan Chew (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Getting Medical Help on the Road</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Back in January, long-time TravelCommons listener Allan Marko talked about the planning he did for the 9-week SE Asia sabbatical he and his wife Chris took last year. Fast forward 4 months, and health care on the road will now become much more important when traveling in the post-lockdown/pre-vaccine world. So let’s continue our conversation with Allan, joined now by his wife Chris, to talk about how they thought about getting health care when they were half a world away from home.&nbsp; It started with the research before they left home…</li><li>Interview with Allan Marko and Chris Chufo</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #163</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_162.mp3\" class=\"aioseop-link\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #163 — New World of Travel Insurance; Getting Medical Help on the Road','','inherit','closed','closed','','2747-revision-v1','','','2020-05-07 21:43:44','2020-05-08 02:43:44','',2747,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/05/07/2747-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2763,1,'2020-05-07 21:55:12','2020-05-08 02:55:12','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/IMG_1615-1.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2732 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/IMG_1615-1-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\n<figcaption>I think I put off finding a doc too long</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Though I\'m still locked down on the shores of Lake Michigan, data shows that people are starting to do short car trips. What will people need to feel comfortable to do more extensive travel -- spacing in aircraft, we talk with Erik Josowitz of <a href=\"https://insurancequotes.com\">insuranceQuotes.com</a> about trends in travel insurance, and a story about finding medical attention while traveling through Southeast Asia. </span>All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_162.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/815941426&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #163: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois, probably 10 lbs heavier, half of which is beer (my doing) and the other half baked goods courtesy of Irene. While the coronavirus restrictions are beginning to ease in some parts of the US and Europe, everything is still locked down here on the shores of Lake Michigan. So my travels since the last episode have mostly been between the kitchen and the couch, and occasionally out in search of carbohydrate comfort foods -- to grocery stores in an endless and fruitless search for King Arthur Bread Flour, and then running a circuit of Chicago microbreweries using curbside no-contact pick-up to collect 4-packs of whatever is new that week. A couple of breweries are even doing curbside sales of ⅙ barrel kegs -- tempting, but seems a bit of overkill for a 3-person flat, though Amazon claims they can get a kegerator to me next week. Must be on Amazon’s essential items list.&nbsp;</li><li>But with the lockdown easing in non-urban places like the exurbs of Nashville, I’m starting to prep for my first post-Corona trip that I talked about in the last episode, a drive down to Spring Hill, TN to see my mother. Got the oil and tires changed on the BMW to avoid any unplanned stops. Figure I’ll pack a lunch which’ll let me do the drive with just one gas stop. I also tuned up my Trek Madone road bike -- cleaned and lubed the gears, re-wrapped the handlebars -- to take that down with me. Haven’t been able to ride much after Chicago shut down the lake shore path, and so riding solo on small country roads would seem to be a pretty good match for “social distancing” criteria.</li><li>All this spare time has allowed me to be a bit more “planful” as one client used to say, one of those ugly adjective constructions meant to turn an activity “we need to do more planning” into a quality “we need to be more planful”. But anyhow, whether the lockdown allows me to be more planful about the podcast or to do a bit more planning, it has. Which, for this episode, means you’ll hear less of me, and more from informed people. First up is Erik Josowitz, an analyst at <a href=\"https://www.insurancequotes.com\" class=\"aioseop-link\">insuranceQuotes.com</a>. Erik and I did an old-school remote interview -- using Skype instead of Zoom -- talking about what travel insurance looks like in the post-Corona world. And then Allan Marko returns with his wife Chris, following up our conversation in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/01/25/podcast-159-planning-the-trip-of-a-lifetime-in-southeast-asia/\" class=\"aioseop-link\">January travel planning episode</a> with a story from their Southeast Asia sabbatical last year; how they tracked down a doctor in Thailand when his wife became ill; a topic that could weigh on us more when we venture out into the post-lockdown/ pre-corona vaccine world that we\'ll be in for the next 18-24 months.</li><li>But right now, for my Tennessee trip, I think I’m less concerned about finding a doctor, and a bit more concerned about reconnoitering open drive-thru Taco Bells along I-65.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/50485\">Sunset Boulevard</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Siobhan Dakay, unreal_dm</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Videoconferencing is having its moment during the pandemic. Maybe it’s because people are looking for more of a connection in their lockdown isolations, or because we know that everyone is sitting at home in front of a video-equipped laptop and has no excuse not to video, nothing like “Can only call in because I’ll be running through airport security then.” I haven’t done a straight conference call in forever. Doing interviews for this episode, I hit the videoconference trifecta&nbsp; - Skype with Erik, FaceTime with Allan and Chris,&nbsp;</li><li>and then Zoom to be on the other side of the microphone on Steve Frick’s <a href=\"https://anchor.fm/steve-frick/episodes/Travel-Commons---Stories-From-Home-Episode-83-edipo7\">Back &amp; Gone Again podcast</a>.&nbsp; This is the 15th year of TravelCommons; I started in May 2005, and here Steve and I talk about that first episode.</li><li>&nbsp;We had a lot of fun, telling travel stories and talking about our current life-off-the-road. Give it a listen. There’s a link in the show notes, on the TravelCommons Facebook page, and in the Twitter feed.</li><li>Cate Rose left a comment on the Facebook page on the April episode.<ul><li>“I don\'t travel nearly as much as you do Mark but I enjoy your podcasts. These are unprecedented times. We arrived home from a month long rail trip from Italy, up to Sweden at the end of January just as this whole thing was blowing up. And now people, including us, are locked down all over the world. Unbelievable. And here you are with plenty of time to write, but no place to go! We are on Week 4 of social isolation in Western Australia and the novelty is wearing off a little ;-) but it seems to be working so all for the greater good. Thanks for keeping up with the storytelling and letting a crack of life into home isolation! Stay safe.</li><li>Cate - thanks for that note. Sounds like you just got out of Italy in time. If I remember correctly, they started locking down Italy in mid-February. Glad you made it back home safely. And it sounds like Australia and New Zealand have done the best in crushing the Covid curve.</li></ul></li><li>In that same episode, when we talked about post-corona trip planning, I said I thought the first post-lockdown trip most people would take would be a car ride -- more flexibility; easier social distancing. Turns out I was right -- at least according to the company <a href=\"https://www.arrivalist.com/\">Arrivalist</a>, a “visitation intelligence company” that has started publishing a Daily Travel Index measuring consumer road trips of 50 miles or more using data drawn from GPS signals. Road trips on Friday, May 1 were almost back to the pre-pandemic levels of February, with the number of trips in the 100-250 mile range higher than February’s number for the first time since the lockdowns started. You can go to Arrivalist’s website and <a href=\"https://www.arrivalist.com/daily-travel-index/\">play with the data yourself</a> or read an <a href=\"https://www.phocuswire.com/arrivalist-road-trip-surge-data\">analysis by Phocuswright</a>, a travel research firm. Links are in the show notes and my Twitter feed.</li><li>I got yet another email survey, this time from United asking me what would make me comfortable to fly again, and to rank some of their plans. For me, it was pretty easy. I’m not excited about standing in a packed gate area, hearing the gate agent say “This is a completely full flight”, and then spend 2-3 hours shoulder-to-shoulder with a complete stranger, in effect letting that person into my family’s corona exposure space.</li><li>A couple of weeks later (not implying causation, only correlation), all the major US airlines announced that passengers and crew will have to wear masks, they’re moving to strict back-to-front boarding schemes to reduce the number of passengers passing one another, and that they’re blocking/not booking the middle seats, reducing capacity from what had been running over 80% at the beginning of the year down to the 60’s. It was then interesting to watch what happened after Frontier’s CEO did a round of TV interviews at the beginning of this week, saying that they too would block the middle seat -- if a passenger bought a More Room seat for at least $39. Today, after getting a blizzard of red challenge flags from Washington, Frontier reversed course. Just kidding - “It was never our intent” they said, “to profit… from safety”. “ We simply wanted to provide our customers with an option for more space.” Yup. Frontier continuing to position their brand as the Ryanair of the US.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Vidian/52190\">Memories (infiniti loop)</a> by Vidian (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license. Ft: TheDice</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>New World of Travel Insurance</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Interview with Erik Josowitz, an analyst at <a href=\"http://www.insurancequotes.com/\" class=\"aioseop-link\">insuranceQuotes.com</a></li><li>Bridge Music --<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/ramblinglibrarian/55007\">Dawn at the Top of the World ft. copperhead &amp; Robert Seikawitch</a> by Ivan Chew (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Getting Medical Help on the Road</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Back in January, long-time TravelCommons listener Allan Marko talked about the planning he did for the 9-week SE Asia sabbatical he and his wife Chris took last year. Fast forward 4 months, and health care on the road will now become much more important when traveling in the post-lockdown/pre-vaccine world. So let’s continue our conversation with Allan, joined now by his wife Chris, to talk about how they thought about getting health care when they were half a world away from home.&nbsp; It started with the research before they left home…</li><li>Interview with Allan Marko and Chris Chufo</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #163</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_162.mp3\" class=\"aioseop-link\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #163 — New World of Travel Insurance; Getting Medical Help on the Road','','inherit','closed','closed','','2747-revision-v1','','','2020-05-07 21:55:12','2020-05-08 02:55:12','',2747,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/05/07/2747-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2764,1,'2020-05-07 22:01:12','2020-05-08 03:01:12','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/IMG_1615-1.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2732 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/IMG_1615-1-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a><figcaption>I think I put off finding a doc too long</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Though I\'m still locked down on the shores of Lake Michigan, data shows that people are starting to do short car trips. What will people need to feel comfortable to do more extensive travel -- spacing in aircraft, we talk with Erik Josowitz of <a href=\"https://insurancequotes.com\">insuranceQuotes.com</a> about trends in travel insurance, and a story about finding medical attention while traveling through Southeast Asia. </span>All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_162.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/815941426&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #163: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois, probably 10 lbs heavier, half of which is beer (my doing) and the other half baked goods courtesy of Irene. While the coronavirus restrictions are beginning to ease in some parts of the US and Europe, everything is still locked down here on the shores of Lake Michigan. So my travels since the last episode have mostly been between the kitchen and the couch, and occasionally out in search of carbohydrate comfort foods -- to grocery stores in an endless and fruitless search for King Arthur Bread Flour, and then running a circuit of Chicago microbreweries using curbside no-contact pick-up to collect 4-packs of whatever is new that week. A couple of breweries are even doing curbside sales of ⅙ barrel kegs -- tempting, but seems a bit of overkill for a 3-person flat, though Amazon claims they can get a kegerator to me next week. Must be on Amazon’s essential items list.&nbsp;</li><li>But with the lockdown easing in non-urban places like the exurbs of Nashville, I’m starting to prep for my first post-Corona trip that I talked about in the last episode, a drive down to Spring Hill, TN to see my mother. Got the oil and tires changed on the BMW to avoid any unplanned stops. Figure I’ll pack a lunch which’ll let me do the drive with just one gas stop. I also tuned up my Trek Madone road bike -- cleaned and lubed the gears, re-wrapped the handlebars -- to take that down with me. Haven’t been able to ride much after Chicago shut down the lake shore path, and so riding solo on small country roads would seem to be a pretty good match for “social distancing” criteria.</li><li>All this spare time has allowed me to be a bit more “planful” as one client used to say, one of those ugly adjective constructions meant to turn an activity “we need to do more planning” into a quality “we need to be more planful”. But anyhow, whether the lockdown allows me to be more planful about the podcast or to do a bit more planning, it has. Which, for this episode, means you’ll hear less of me, and more from informed people. First up is Erik Josowitz, an analyst at <a href=\"https://www.insurancequotes.com\" class=\"aioseop-link\">insuranceQuotes.com</a>. Erik and I did an old-school remote interview -- using Skype instead of Zoom -- talking about what travel insurance looks like in the post-Corona world. And then Allan Marko returns with his wife Chris, following up our conversation in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/01/25/podcast-159-planning-the-trip-of-a-lifetime-in-southeast-asia/\" class=\"aioseop-link\">January travel planning episode</a> with a story from their Southeast Asia sabbatical last year; how they tracked down a doctor in Thailand when his wife became ill; a topic that could weigh on us more when we venture out into the post-lockdown/ pre-corona vaccine world that we\'ll be in for the next 18-24 months.</li><li>But right now, for my Tennessee trip, I think I’m less concerned about finding a doctor, and a bit more concerned about reconnoitering open drive-thru Taco Bells along I-65.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/50485\">Sunset Boulevard</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Siobhan Dakay, unreal_dm</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Videoconferencing is having its moment during the pandemic. Maybe it’s because people are looking for more of a connection in their lockdown isolations, or because we know that everyone is sitting at home in front of a video-equipped laptop and has no excuse not to video, nothing like “Can only call in because I’ll be running through airport security then.” I haven’t done a straight conference call in forever. Doing interviews for this episode, I hit the videoconference trifecta&nbsp; - Skype with Erik, FaceTime with Allan and Chris,&nbsp;</li><li>and then Zoom to be on the other side of the microphone on Steve Frick’s <a href=\"https://anchor.fm/steve-frick/episodes/Travel-Commons---Stories-From-Home-Episode-83-edipo7\">Back &amp; Gone Again podcast</a>.&nbsp; This is the 15th year of TravelCommons; I started in May 2005, and here Steve and I talk about that first episode.</li><li>&nbsp;We had a lot of fun, telling travel stories and talking about our current life-off-the-road. Give it a listen. There’s a link in the show notes, on the TravelCommons Facebook page, and in the Twitter feed.</li><li>Cate Rose left a comment on the Facebook page on the April episode.<ul><li>“I don\'t travel nearly as much as you do Mark but I enjoy your podcasts. These are unprecedented times. We arrived home from a month long rail trip from Italy, up to Sweden at the end of January just as this whole thing was blowing up. And now people, including us, are locked down all over the world. Unbelievable. And here you are with plenty of time to write, but no place to go! We are on Week 4 of social isolation in Western Australia and the novelty is wearing off a little ;-) but it seems to be working so all for the greater good. Thanks for keeping up with the storytelling and letting a crack of life into home isolation! Stay safe.</li><li>Cate - thanks for that note. Sounds like you just got out of Italy in time. If I remember correctly, they started locking down Italy in mid-February. Glad you made it back home safely. And it sounds like Australia and New Zealand have done the best in crushing the Covid curve.</li></ul></li><li>In that same episode, when we talked about post-corona trip planning, I said I thought the first post-lockdown trip most people would take would be a car ride -- more flexibility; easier social distancing. Turns out I was right -- at least according to the company <a href=\"https://www.arrivalist.com/\">Arrivalist</a>, a “visitation intelligence company” that has started publishing a Daily Travel Index measuring consumer road trips of 50 miles or more using data drawn from GPS signals. Road trips on Friday, May 1 were almost back to the pre-pandemic levels of February, with the number of trips in the 100-250 mile range higher than February’s number for the first time since the lockdowns started. You can go to Arrivalist’s website and <a href=\"https://www.arrivalist.com/daily-travel-index/\">play with the data yourself</a> or read an <a href=\"https://www.phocuswire.com/arrivalist-road-trip-surge-data\">analysis by Phocuswright</a>, a travel research firm. Links are in the show notes and my Twitter feed.</li><li>I got yet another email survey, this time from United asking me what would make me comfortable to fly again, and to rank some of their plans. For me, it was pretty easy. I’m not excited about standing in a packed gate area, hearing the gate agent say “This is a completely full flight”, and then spend 2-3 hours shoulder-to-shoulder with a complete stranger, in effect letting that person into my family’s corona exposure space.</li><li>A couple of weeks later (not implying causation, only correlation), all the major US airlines announced that passengers and crew will have to wear masks, they’re moving to strict back-to-front boarding schemes to reduce the number of passengers passing one another, and that they’re blocking/not booking the middle seats, reducing capacity from what had been running over 80% at the beginning of the year down to the 60’s. It was then interesting to watch what happened after Frontier’s CEO did a round of TV interviews at the beginning of this week, saying that they too would block the middle seat -- if a passenger bought a More Room seat for at least $39. Today, after getting a blizzard of red challenge flags from Washington, Frontier reversed course. Just kidding - “It was never our intent” they said, “to profit… from safety”. “ We simply wanted to provide our customers with an option for more space.” Yup. Frontier continuing to position their brand as the Ryanair of the US.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Vidian/52190\">Memories (infiniti loop)</a> by Vidian (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license. Ft: TheDice</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>New World of Travel Insurance</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Interview with Erik Josowitz, an analyst at <a href=\"http://www.insurancequotes.com/\" class=\"aioseop-link\">insuranceQuotes.com</a></li><li>Bridge Music --<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/ramblinglibrarian/55007\">Dawn at the Top of the World ft. copperhead &amp; Robert Seikawitch</a> by Ivan Chew (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Getting Medical Help on the Road</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Back in January, long-time TravelCommons listener Allan Marko talked about the planning he did for the 9-week SE Asia sabbatical he and his wife Chris took last year. Fast forward 4 months, and health care on the road will now become much more important when traveling in the post-lockdown/pre-vaccine world. So let’s continue our conversation with Allan, joined now by his wife Chris, to talk about how they thought about getting health care when they were half a world away from home.&nbsp; It started with the research before they left home…</li><li>Interview with Allan Marko and Chris Chufo</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #163</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_162.mp3\" class=\"aioseop-link\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #163 — New World of Travel Insurance; Getting Medical Help on the Road','','inherit','closed','closed','','2747-revision-v1','','','2020-05-07 22:01:12','2020-05-08 03:01:12','',2747,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/05/07/2747-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2765,1,'2020-05-07 22:11:08','2020-05-08 03:11:08','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\">\n<p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/IMG_0159.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1402\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/IMG_0159-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"225\" height=\"300\"></a></p><figcaption>This Won\'t Help Your Flier Sat Score</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>In this episode, we talk with Michael Taylor, author of <a href=\"https://www.jdpower.com/business/press-releases/2019-north-america-airport-satisfaction-study\">JD Power\'s 2019 Airport Satisfaction Survey</a>, about what keeps fliers happy. I also talk about what I like about eScooters, shopping for a smaller bag for upcoming flights on a Euro budget airline, and how Hertz\'s contract updates remind me to delete my Bluetooth pairings in rental cars. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_156.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_156.mp3\"]\n<p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #156: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago in the middle of what looks like a 6-week run of solid travel. Traveled to DC, Charlottesville, and Nashville, in that order, in the 3 weeks since the last episode. Heading back to Charlottesville this week, then a week hopscotching through the Baltics with my son Andrew -- Riga, Latvia; Talinn, Estonia; Helsinki, Finland -- and then back down to Charlottesville. </li><li> I flew Southwest on my non-Charlottesville flights -- into DC Reagan and Nashville -- and United again to Charlottesville. The Southwest flights went smoothly, except for trying to get to Chicago Midway for the DC flight. The Uber driver didn’t follow the app’s recommended route; instead, he pretended he was a cab driver and took the normal route down the Stevenson Expressway which was crawling due to an earlier accident. I wasn’t paying attention - first time I’ve had an Uber driver freelance on me - and didn’t notice he’d skipped the exit to the faster path until it was too late. We made our flight, but not without a bit of hustle through Midway. No tip, let alone a 5-star review for that guy.</li><li> Southwest flies into the old Terminal A at what I still call Washington National. I went to college in DC in the early ‘80’s, before it was named for President Reagan and when Terminal A was pretty much all that was there. I had forgotten what a long schlepp it is from that terminal to the Metro station. I remember way back then asking someone why they built the Metro station so far away. “Because they’re going to build new terminals right across from it.” Which they finally did, some 20 years after that Metro station was opened. Sometimes it seems that airport planning horizons are not in years, or even decades; feels more like they’re planning in lifetimes.</li><li> In between the Southwest flights, my United flight continued the string of disruptions trying to get into or out of Charlottesville. I checked that my flight was on-time before calling an Uber -- no weather delays at either end, United and FlightAware apps say the inbound plane is on-time…. Then, halfway to ORD, I get the text from United; a 2½-hour delay for crew arrival. What!? The next text “Because of crew scheduling disruptions this evening in Chicago, we’ve assigned your flight a new crew…. We know this delay wasn’t in your plans today, so we appreciate your patience.” No shit a 2½-hour delay wasn’t in my plans, especially when it’s because United stole our original crew because they screwed up their scheduling. And really United, you can’t find another pilot in ORD, your largest hub, that’s a little closer? I tell you what else isn’t in my plans, flying United to Charlottesville this week. </li><li> Bridge Music -- <em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/stefsax/7785\" target=\"_blank\">Awel</a> </em>by stefsax (c) copyright 2006 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/stefsax/7785 </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>That’s the sound of my new <a href=\"https://www.marriott.com/loyalty/member-benefits/titanium.mi\">Marriott Bonvoy Lifetime Titanium Elite</a> card hitting the kitchen counter. The mailer package was appropriately upscale, but the sheer weight of the thing stunned me. I put a quick video of it on the TravelCommons Facebook page. Cate Rose commented “Hope it scans into your Stocard app so you don’t actually have to carry it in your luggage allowance”. My thought exactly.</li><li> I got a note that Chicago’s electric scooter pilot ends tomorrow, which made me realize that I’ve seen them in just about every city I’ve been to this summer -- Budapest, Krakow, Charlottesville, Nashville, Washington, DC. I think the only places I didn’t see them were in Scotland and Ireland. They’re handy; because they’re dockless, I’ve found they have a wider distribution than, say, a traditional docked bike share and you can take them directly to your planned destination. And they’re a good fill-in between walking and an Uber or a Lyft. And, they’re fun! When I was in DC a couple of weeks ago, I was in the <a href=\"https://washington.org/visit-dc/neighborhoods/brookland\">Brookland</a> neighborhood in the Northeast part of town, and wanted to try out a new taproom there, <a href=\"http://www.rightproperbrewing.com/what-we-do\">Right Proper Brewing</a>. Now Brookland is not the nicest part of DC. It’s much better than when I went to school there, but there are still iffy parts. I wasn’t completely comfortable walking down to Right Proper from the Brookland Metro stop, but it seemed too short for an Uber ride and there was no bus that went down there. But, there was a scooter a couple of blocks from the Metro station. Running down 9th St at 10 mph felt a bit better than speedwalking at 4. And could leave it right in front of the taproom. It was exactly what I wanted. Two problems I’ve seen -- first, too many people riding them on the sidewalk, especially in DC. Maybe because I bike a lot in Chicago, I’m comfortable in bike lanes and navigating around cars on the street and keeping an eye out for potholes. I actually wouldn’t be comfortable riding a scooter on the sidewalk; I’d be afraid of popping a pedestrian who suddenly walked in front of me. To me, cars are much more predictable than pedestrians. The second thing, the need to have half-a-dozen scooter apps on your phone. In Chicago, there are 8 scooter companies, in addition to Uber and Lyft’s scooters. And you need to download their app to find and rent their scooter. Which meant that when I wanted to find a scooter near the Brookland Metro stop, I’d have to cycle thru 5 or 6 apps. Except I didn’t because I found an app called <a href=\"https://scootermap.com/\">Scooter Map</a> that shows all the scooter brands on one map. I think it’s targeted at folks who are making money recharging scooters (not quite sure how that works) but it worked fine for me. I fired it up and saw all the different scooters that were near me. One caveat -- I’ve only ridden these scooters on sunny days. I’m not sure how enthusiastic I’d be riding one in the rain or snow. </li><li> For the Baltics trip next week, we’re taking Finnair out and back from Chicago, an early morning ferry ride from Talinn to Helsinki, and then AirBaltic for everything else. Which then got me thinking about luggage sizes, because I bought my current bag, the <a href=\"https://www.swissarmy.com/us/en&amp;eoq=!t/Products/Travel-Gear/Werks-Traveler-5-0/collection/trg-collection/travelgear_collection_TRA-C2955\">Victorinox Werks</a> 22-incher, to use every last inch of US carry-on allowance. It even catches some side-eye from American and United where I have status. So I didn’t figure it’d fit into any European budget carrier’s luggage sizer. Looking up <a href=\"https://www.airbaltic.com/en/cabin-baggage\">AirBaltic’s carry-on allowance</a>, my Victorinox is a couple of inches too tall and an inch too deep. But what really got me shopping for a new bag for this trip is the weight. AirBaltic has an 8 kg/17½ lbs weight limit. In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/05/30/podcast-121-tsa-lines-my-luggage-is-where/\">episode #121</a>, I talked about the baggage strip tease exercise with Wow Air to make their 7 kg/15 lbs carry-on weight limit. I’d take my bag off the scale, pull some clothes out, zip it back up, and put it back on the scale. Still too heavy. Repeat 3 more times until the agent takes pity — or just gets tired of me — and gives me the approval tag to put on my bag. After which I walk about 10 feet, open my bag and put my armful of clothes back in. My Victorinox is a bit over 7 lbs, so not only is it too tall, the bag itself uses over 40% of the weight allowance. And even though I’ve talked before about how much I hate shopping for luggage, I searched for a smaller, lighter bag that wouldn’t cost a fortune, since my Victorinox will stay my primary bag. I landed on the the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/32lIURe\">TravelPro Maxlite 5</a>. I, or rather my daughter has a good history with TravelPro. It fit the AirBaltic dimensions and is one of the lighter bags I saw at 5.4 lbs which is down to 30% of the 8 kg weight allowance. It also meets three of the key suitcase criteria I laid down in the “how to shop for a suitcase” topic in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/01/25/podcast-137-new-years-travel-status-tips-how-to-shop-for-a-suitcase/\">episode #137</a> -- it’s black, it’s a 2-wheeler so no lost space on extended spinner wheels, and the inside is, for the most part, a wide open box without clothes hangers or a bunch of zip compartments. I’m taking it to Charlottesville tomorrow for a shakedown cruise.</li><li> Three years ago, back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/11/22/podcast-125-uber-driver-stories-overseas-for-the-election/\">episode #125</a>, in a Travel Security tip, I talked about the need to delete your phone’s Bluetooth pairing when you return a rental car. Usually when I go to pair my phone, I’ll first go through and delete 3-5 pairings before pairing my own. And they all have personalized names like “Timmy’s iPhone”. And most phones by default will download your contacts to the car when paired, so leave all of their contacts and phone numbers in their rental. That is just bad in so many ways. And now Hertz has gotten around to noticing it. In their newest rental terms and conditions, they specifically carve out any liability from you leaving a Bluetooth pairing behind. It’s a pain to remember, especially if you’re running for a flight, but as you’re taking that last scan around the car for your sunglasses and iPhone, remember not to leave your identity behind either.</li><li>Bridge Music -- Black Rainbow by Pitx (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Pitx/19513 Ft: ERH, acclivity</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Keeping Fliers Happy </strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A couple of weeks ago, JD Power released their 2019 North American Airport Satisfaction Study.&nbsp; The headline - “North American Airports Struggle to Keep Travelers Happy Amid Construction Delays and Surging Passenger Volumes” caught my eye, so I reached out to the study’s author, Michael Taylor, to dig into it a bit more. And so last Friday, we had a wide-ranging conversation. I was going to edit it down, but as I listened to it, I couldn’t think about what to cut. So here it is in its entirety…</li><li>Interview with <a href=\"https://www.jdpower.com/business/content/michael-taylor\">Michael Taylor</a>, Travel Intelligence Lead at J.D. Power</li><li>Thanks again to Michael for taking the time to talk to us. Here\'s the <a href=\"https://www.jdpower.com/business/press-releases/2019-north-america-airport-satisfaction-study\">link</a> to the study summary on the JD Power website.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #156</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li> And if you check out the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> page, you can click thru to highlights from my trips to Budapest and Ireland. And if you follow it, you can catch some pics from next week’s trip through the Baltics.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_156.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #156 — Airport Satisfaction; eScooters; Smaller Luggage','','inherit','closed','closed','','2543-revision-v1','','','2020-05-07 22:11:08','2020-05-08 03:11:08','',2543,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/05/07/2543-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2766,1,'2020-05-07 22:11:29','2020-05-08 03:11:29','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\">\n<p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/2D576E07-6546-4D4B-9D64-0E593596FB0C.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2581 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/2D576E07-6546-4D4B-9D64-0E593596FB0C-268x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"268\" height=\"300\"></a></p><figcaption>Selfies with Friends in Tallinn</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>Wrapping up my time in Charlottesville, VA with some \"bleisure\" travel, as well as some pure leisure travel with a quick trip in the Baltics. And a listener talks about the reason for his out-and-back day trip from Washington, DC to Hong Kong. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_157.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_157.mp3\"]\n<p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #157: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago just off the shores of Lake Michigan toward the end of what has been a record-breaking cold November. The first half of the month here was the coldest in 148 years with an average temperature of 31 degrees, which compares to an average high for November of 50 degrees, and a <em>low</em> of 39. But what’s been worse has been the early snow -- 3½ inches of snow on Halloween (another record) and again on Veterans Day. And by some incredible strokes of luck (as opposed to any foresight on my part), I dodged both snows -- by flying home from Charlottesville, VA the day before Halloween, and scheduling a week off the road the week of November 11. It’s <em>always</em> better to be lucky than good.</li><li>Last week was my last week in Charlottesville, finishing up an 18-week project that started in July. A year ago, when I wrapped up a long run in Charlottesville and didn’t know if/when I’d be back, I took an afternoon to hit Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s home that was only a 10-15 minute drive from the client. It was one of those things I wanted to do, but kept putting off -- I’ll get to it -- and here I was, the last day, and so squoze it in between meetings and calls.</li><li>With that in mind, I did just a touch more planning this year, and on my <em>second-to-last </em>trip, the week between the Halloween and Veterans Day snow storms, I flew in a day early on Monday, but to IAD rather than <a href=\"http://charlottesville-airport.com/\" class=\"aioseop-link\">CHO</a>, instead renting a car, and driving the length of the 105-mile <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Skyline Drive (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.nps.gov/shen/planyourvisit/driving-skyline-drive.htm\" target=\"_blank\">Skyline Drive</a> down to Charlottesville along the tops of the Blue Ridge Mountains through Shenandoah National Park. I was probably a week late for peak leaf peeping, but it was still pretty, especially when looking west over the Shenandoah Valley.&nbsp; I don’t think I would’ve made a special trip to drive Skyline Drive, but since I was in the neighborhood, why not? And it turned out to be just a great drive -- clear blue skies, still some good leaf color, and on a Monday, not a lot of people on that 2-lane road.&nbsp;</li><li>And then last Thursday, flying out of <a href=\"http://charlottesville-airport.com/\" class=\"aioseop-link\">CHO</a> for the last time until I don’t know when, I had to order one last beer at the <a href=\"http://www.gocho.com/concessions/\" class=\"aioseop-link\">Tailwind</a>, the airport bar. For an airport with only 5 gates, the Tailwind always has a great rotation of local craft beers. And there’s a mini-Cheers effect -- maybe not everyone knows my name, but Lyn the bartender recognizes me from my 4-year off-and-on presence in her bar. When I showed back up in July after a 9-month absence, she recognized me right away. So I had to get one last beer from her. I looked at the blackboard and ordered the stout from Blue Mountain Brewery, which was not far from when I ended my trip down Skyline Drive. I was getting over a bit of a cold; the IPA would’ve been a bit rough on the back of my throat. That <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Dark Hollow Stout (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/16352/39417/\" target=\"_blank\">Dark Hollow Stout</a> went down smoother, but what I didn’t quite pick up on is that it’s a 10% alcohol beer. Bit of an eye opener at 11:30am. Made for a good nap on the flight home.</li><li>Bridge Music -- Dive Deep (Loveshadow remix) by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/50488 Ft: Loveshadow</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Mark Skinner sent a note to comments@travelcommons.com a few days ago<ul><li>Hi Mark, Long time listener. So your tag line \"It\'s more about the journey than the destination” hit home to me with what has to be my oddest business trip yet. Tomorrow, I’m flying Washington to Hong Kong, via EWR, arriving Monday afternoon, and then returning on Tuesday morning! I’m basically there for dinner…</li><li>No meetings in Hong Kong, it’s all about taking a cosmic ray detector for NASA on an over-the-pole flight; which the UA flights 179/180 do quite well, EWR-HKG-EWR. They want to understand the amount of radiation from space inside the aircraft cabin. I’ll be in the air longer than on the ground. I’m planning to stay on and to sleep at “normal” east coast times, which means while I’ll have a hotel room by HKG, I’ll be awake then (night in HK, but daytime hours for me).&nbsp; Happily my upgrades to Polaris Business both ways have been confirmed! Otherwise the 16 hr flight would seem even longer…</li></ul></li><li>Oh, my! There’s a nice end-of-year mileage run! I told Mark that his itinerary reminds me of one I did 12 years ago when I flew to London for a lunch meeting to wrap up a project. I flew ORD-LHR, showered in the arrivals lounge, took a car out to Reading, gave the final readout over lunch, hopped back in the car to LHR, and caught the afternoon flight to DEN. I always say that ORD-LHR-DEN run was the epitome of \"stupid\" travel, but Mark has a good reason for his out-&amp;-back.&nbsp; Given the amount of time I’ve spent at 35,000 ft over the past 35 years, I’m not sure I want to know the results of Mark’s measurements.</li><li>United Airlines sent out a link promoting a jet lag app, <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Timeshifter (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.timeshifter.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Timeshifter</a>. Though Mark won’t need one because he’s staying on Eastern Time during his quick jaunt to Hong Kong, I decided to give it a try for my trip to Latvia, Estonia, and Finland. Going east, from the US to Europe, has always been easier for me. My usual routine - I skip the seat-back entertainment for 4-6 hrs of shut-eye (I wouldn’t call it true sleep) on the flight over, eat breakfast when I arrive even if I’m not hungry, get outside as much as possible, take a 30-minute nap after check-in, push through until 11:30pm that first night, and then set an alarm for, say, 7am the next morning. That usually resets my body clock and I’m pretty much good-to-go for the rest of the trip. Timeshifter added two things to my routine: starting to shift to destination time a few days before leaving, moving bedtime and wake-up time an hour earlier each day - going to bed at 10 instead of 11 and getting up at 5 instead of 6 the next morning. The second thing was taking melatonin before going to bed, which I tried by I’m not sure that it really does anything for me. It’s also a well-designed app that notifies you about things like when to seek out direct sunlight and when to start and stop with caffeinated drinks. I used the free first plan. Not sure I’ll pay the $9.99 for another plan, though.</li><li>And speaking of caffeinated drinks, last week, staying at the Omni Hotel in Charlottesville, they gave me two door hangers -- one for each night -- that I could exchange for a drink delivered to my door in the morning, or a beer at the bar in the evening. The first night, since I’d already had a margarita at dinner, I skipped the bar for something in the morning. Looking at the door hanger, my choices were coffee, tea, and Red Bull. Wow. Guess they’re catering to all kinds of morning afters. It wasn’t a big margarita, so I went for the cup of tea.</li><li>Following up on last episode’s carry-on discussion, about buying a new bag to meet Finnair and AirBaltic’s size and weight limits, My new <a href=\"https://amzn.to/32lIURe\">TravelPro Maxlite bag</a> worked like a charm. I packed a week of clothes and didn’t tagged by any gate agents. It even fit in the overheads of the ATR prop jobs that hopscotched us around between Riga, Tallinn, and Helsinki. On one of our passes through Helsinki, I saw an AirBaltic luggage sizer and scale by an empty customer service desk, so I decided to check the bag out. It was a bit of a force fit into the sizer and it weighed in at 8½ kilos, just a bit over the limit. Glad I didn’t catch a gate agent’s eye.</li><li>And since we’ve been talking about carry-on luggage over the past couple of episodes, so I pulled together all those threads into a new <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/11/06/how-to-choose-the-best-carry-on-luggage/\">“how to choose a new carry-on” blog post</a>. It went up at the beginning of the month, updating the one from last February, just in time for the Christmas shopping season. If you or a frequent traveling loved one needs a new carry-on, check it out, complete with Amazon Affiliate links if you want to toss a buck TravelCommons’ way.</li><li>And speaking of prop jobs, I definitely misfired on my Finnair seat choices between Helsinki and Riga. I was more focused on choosing seats for the long flights between Chicago and Helsinki, and didn’t pay much attention to the 45-minute flight to and from Riga. So just picked one off the seat map where there would be with no one next to me - 5C both ways - which, as it turned out, was empty for a reason, because it was right next to the propeller. I had forgotten how loud those propellers get on take-off. I popped on my Bose Noise Cancelling headphones (which, I noticed, are starting to show a good bit of wear; so I might be doing a bit of Black Friday/Cyber Monday shopping) on taxi, but when the pilot revved up the propellers, the noise cancellation started to cut in and out. The headphones were having to generate huge “anti-waves” to cancel the prop noise and the battery was too low to support the load. Luckily, I always carry extra triple-AAA batteries in the case. But while I was swapping the battery, the noise, the oscillation pressure was killer. I couldn’t get those headphones back over my ears fast enough. If you go to the <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">TravelCommons’ Instagram page</a>, you can see <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/p/B37C8LVnRkd/\">a bit of video</a> out the window of my HEL-RIX flight complete with a slow-motion propeller.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music - Drops of H2O ( The Filtered Water Treatment ) by J.Lang (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djlang59/37792 Ft: Airtone</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Notes from the Baltics: Riga, Latvia and Tallinn, Estonia</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>At the end of October, right after pushing out <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/10/14/podcast-156-airport-satisfaction-escooters-smaller-luggage/\">the last episode</a>, my son Andrew and I flew east for a week hopscotching through the Baltics -- Riga, Latvia; Tallinn, Estonia; and Helsinki, Finland. Why the Baltics? I’m not really sure. I’m sure we had a good rationale when we first thought of the trip a few years ago, but now, it wasn’t much more than “here are a few kinda outta-the-way countries that might be cool to wander around.”&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>Andrew booked our flights -- Finnair from ORD to Riga with a connection in Helsinki. The Finnair service was fine, a pretty standard Airbus A330 but with lots of polka-dot Marimekko patterns on everything. I’d forgotten they were a Finnish company. I skipped using my UK passport one last time for a quick pass down the EU passport lane, deciding not to strand Andrew in the “everyone else” passport path, which led to an unexpected grilling from the Finnish border control cop about the details of my itinerary. Then he spent a good bit of time paging back and forth through my passport stamps. Can’t think of what he found interesting -- the Chinese visa, the two Indian visas, maybe the Moroccan stamps from that day trip to Tangiers 3 years ago? Eventually, he decided to put his Helsinki stamp right next to August’s Krakow stamp and then open the gate so I could walk through.&nbsp;</li><li>I’m not quite sure what I expected from Riga, but it turned out to be a nice, mid-sized city. Maybe it shouldn’t have, but I was surprised at how well-preserved the city center is, especially the buildings with the over-the-top Art Nouveau edifices with huge faces over the doorways and carved figures holding up window sills. It took some money, though. Down by the river, I saw two buildings side-by-side, the one on the right recently refinished and repainted; the one on the left was still waiting its turn, but time is running out. The Art Nouveau look was there, but muted under the grime and soot and flaking plaster; with some relief decorations on the window balcony worn away.</li><li>I was surprised, though, at how empty Riga’s old town was in the middle of a Tuesday. The streets were empty. Where was everyone? Maybe across the river where it looks like they’ve built new modern office towers. I was glad I didn’t book our hotel down here.</li><li>The <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riga_Central_Market\">Central Market</a> down river from the Old Town was much more lively, and also where Riga stopped looking so Scandi and started looking a bit more post-Soviet. The busses and streetcars orbiting the market looked left over from the early ‘90’s. But I liked it. Most of the people here seemed to be doing their own grocery shopping -- unlike food markets in places like Paris and Barcelona that seem to have more people taking pictures of fish than buying them. But the place is so big that I don’t see that it could survive just on food porn tourism. They repurposed a set of World War I zeppelin hangars -- one for fishmongers, one of butchers, one for greengrocers, and then part of one with some restaurants where Andrew and I made lunch from a round loaf of Uzbeki bread and some tortellini-looking dumplings filled with lamb and venison. It was pretty good.</li><li>Then it was time to go search out some beer taprooms which had us walking sorta northeast, on a straight line away from the river, away from Old Town, across the canal and parks and past the embassies that sorta ring Old Town, and back into a less renovated landscape of storefronts and converted factories, some places run down, others with the hipster-signaling strands of naked edison bulbs over wood tables. Wandering into a courtyard off a busy street, we found&nbsp; <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Labietis (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.labietis.lv/en\" target=\"_blank\">Labietis</a> that had wide and interesting mix of beers -- herb beers and fruit beers, as well as the usual batch of IPAs. The names were interesting, also. <a href=\"https://www.labietis.lv/en/our-beers/fog\">Migla</a>, which they translated as “Fog” had hemp and peppermint in a light pale ale. Not sure it was my top pick, but I gotta give them props for trying something different.</li><li>It was a 45-minute prop job flight from Riga to Tallinn on AirBaltic. I did have a bit of a travel snob realization, though -- when everyone is getting on the same bus for a plane, boarding status is kinda meaningless. Anyhow, AirBaltic was fine service -- no hassles with carryon luggage, no annoying on-board upsells, though with only 45 minutes, there’s not too much damage they could do. Heading for the cab rank at Tallinn, I saw the same warning signs they had at Riga airport - there’s no regulated taxi fees so be careful which taxi you get into. At Riga, we used one of the airport-approved cabs with a meter. At Tallinn, we used <a href=\"https://bolt.eu/en/\">Bolt</a>, a ride-sharing app that looks a lot like Lyft. I used earlier in Krakow and had good luck with it, and it worked fine in Tallinn too - €4 from the airport to Old Town seemed a pretty good deal.</li><li>I can see why Tallinn is popular for long weekends. The Old Town is just that -- winding cobblestone streets, lots of churches and restored old buildings, and lots of shops in those old buildings. It’s up on a hill, so lots of scenic overlook Instagram moments. You could easily spend a couple of days wandering the streets, popping in and out of churches and museums… and shops and bars.</li><li>But after a half-day, I was ready to breach the Old Town’s walls to see what else there was to Tallinn. The first stop was a market by the train station - <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Balti Jaama Turg (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.visitestonia.com/en/baltic-station-market\" target=\"_blank\">Balti Jaama Turg</a>. Nowhere near the size of Riga’s Central Market, we strolled around until, after the 4th or 5th fruit stand and butcher stall, our minds wandered to lunch. We bought a couple different kinds of Uzbeki breads from one stand and a couple of beers from another. The breads were stuffed with some sliced meat cooked in a warming, floral spice, maybe cinnamon. It was very good, though I never got the story of why all the Uzbeki food up here.</li><li>We walked out and around the train station, and through a collection of restaurants in small square buildings, old cargo containers and a couple of railcars. As much as I liked the Uzbeki breads, I wish I’d seen these places first. On the other side was something called <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Telliskivi Creative City. (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://telliskivi.cc/en/\" target=\"_blank\">Telliskivi Creative City.</a> It looked like an old office or administrative building had been converted to a kinda “makers” mall, where people were doing small-scale clothing or leather work in the back of their space and selling it out of the front. We took a quick pass through it though didn’t see anything we wanted to haul back to the US.</li><li>We walked kinda north-northeast, through the<a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\" Kalamaja neighborhood (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.visittallinn.ee/eng/visitor/discover/articles-guides/kalamaja\" target=\"_blank\"> Kalamaja neighborhood</a> toward the harbor. Kalamaja was the exact opposite of the Old Town - wood buildings vs. stone; straight paved streets vs. windy cobblestones; groups of flats vs. castles and government buildings. A few blocks off the harbor we hit the <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Põhjala Brewery &amp; Tap Room (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://pohjalabeer.com/taproom\" target=\"_blank\">Põhjala Brewery &amp; Tap Room</a>. It was in what looked like a very recently renovated stone building; workers were in the midst of renovating the building next to it. Where Labietis felt very native -- funky space tucked away behind some kinda decaying buildings -- Põhjala could’ve been any new taproom in the US -- big U-shaped bar, open kitchen, BBQ on the menu. The beer was very good; the BBQ maybe less successful, but having lived in Memphis and Dallas, I’m a bit of a BBQ snob. The smoked trout dish, though -- that was great.&nbsp;</li><li>We walked back towards town on a path that ran along the harbor. There were lots of new apartment buildings across the road -- 3-4 stories with floor-to-ceiling windows and enclosed balconies facing the harbor. There wasn’t a lot there… yet. But you could see it coming.</li><li>We stopped at the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/ubajahumal/\">Uba Ja Humal</a> beer store before heading back through the Old Town walls. We walked through the front store to the taproom in the back, complete with a DJ who was set up between the back coolers. Locals would pull a can out of a cooler, pay for it at the bar, get a glass, and sit down at a table with their friends. Tallinn had that kind of easy-going vibe.</li><li>Both cities have done a good job renovating and preserving their Old Towns, and now seem to be expanding past that, repurposing older, maybe Soviet-era buildings to something a bit hipper, edgier (?), less traditional. I came away liking Tallinn a bit more than Riga, but maybe it’s because they’re a little bit further down that hipper, less traditional path.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #157</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li> And if you check out the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> page, you can click thru to highlights from Riga and Tallinn.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_157.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #157 — Notes from the Baltics: Riga, Latvia and Tallinn, Estonia','','inherit','closed','closed','','2575-revision-v1','','','2020-05-07 22:11:29','2020-05-08 03:11:29','',2575,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/05/07/2575-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2770,1,'2020-06-09 09:53:09','2020-06-09 14:53:09','','DSC_6306-edit','','inherit','open','closed','','dsc_6306-edit','','','2020-06-09 09:53:09','2020-06-09 14:53:09','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/DSC_6306-edit.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(2771,1,'2020-06-09 17:40:16','2020-06-09 22:40:16','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/DSC_6306-edit.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2770 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/DSC_6306-edit-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a><figcaption>Can I leave my house now?</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>I broke Chicago\'s containment for my first post-lockdown trip, a fast drive down I-65. We talk about hotels swapping hospitality for sanitation, Hertz\'s bankruptcy, and tips for travel credit card usage from Brett Holzhauer, the travel card expert at <a title=\"valuepenguin.com\" href=\"http://valuepenguin.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">ValuePenguin.com.</a>&nbsp;All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_164.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #164: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois, as the lockdown here is starting to lift. What’s open and what’s not is still a bit spotty, though I’ve managed to hit a couple of microbreweries with outdoor patios. The opening in Chicago is not dissimilar to what I experienced down in Tennessee last month. I was down in Spring Hill, south of Nashville, two weeks after the non-urban lockdown lifted -- for every place other than the cities of Nashville, Memphis, Knoxville, and Chattanooga. It seemed that everyone was still trying to figure out what to do -- the bar/pizza joint next to my hotel was fully open, but the local bar-be-que joints and the Starbucks were still only doing take-away. Which makes sense; it’s not like there’s a standard playbook on how to re-open an economy. And throughout my consulting career, I’ve learned it’s always easier to shut things down than to start them up.</li><li>The drive south on I-65 from Chicago is one that, I’m not gonna say I can do with my eyes closed, but I’ve been doing it for almost 40 years, starting when I was in business school at the University of Chicago and my family was living in Louisville, KY. I mean, there’s a clump of trees in the median between West Lafayette and Crown Point that’s a milestone for me; I know I’m an hour from home. Which just goes to show you how boring the drive through northern Indiana is when trees in the median are a notable feature.</li><li>The drive between Chicago and Nashville, while not the most exciting, especially through Indiana, it does usually require a bit of timing to thread through Chicago, Indianapolis, Louisville, and Nashville to avoid rush hour in each. On this trip, not so much. I left Chicago after breakfast and was driving 80 mph most of the way, maybe dropping down to 70 through the cities. And I was still getting passed by guys going aggressively faster. And the only time I saw police or state troopers was in front of big road construction sites, cars running with all their lights flashing in front of big barriers, more as a warning to speeders than an attempt to get them. It was, hands down, the easiest drive down I-65 I’ve ever done.</li><li>That wide-open drive may be one of the few things I’ll actually appreciate about this lockdown. Well, that and the $2/gallon gas along the way...</li><li>Bridge Music — Brilliant Day by Hans Atom (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hansatom/47919 Ft: Lisa DeBenedictis</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>First up, thanks to the TravelCommons listener who goes by the handle Abe Froman, Ferris Bueller’s sausage king of Chicago, for dropping a 5-star review on <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">our iTunes page</a>. Abe writes:<ul><li>“I have been a fan of this podcast for many years. If you are a road warrior or a mileage runner, you will love the tips to make your travel easier.”</li><li>Abe, thanks a lot for this.&nbsp; I’m glad you’ve enjoyed the podcast</li></ul></li><li>Last year in episodes <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/07/26/podcast-153-travel-by-algorithm-leaving-places-behind/\" title=\"Podcast #153 — Travel By Algorithm; Leaving Places Behind\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">153</a> and <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/09/20/podcast-155-rj-delays-street-food-in-poland-and-hungary/\" title=\"Podcast #155 — RJ Delays; Street Food in Poland and Hungary\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">155</a>, we talked about American Airlines’ retirement of their MD-80’s, the “Mad Dog 80”, the plane on which I earned my first Advantage status -- Gold, and there wasn’t anything higher back then. Last week, <a href=\"https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/delta-air-lines-md-80-last-flight/index.html\">Delta finally retired their last Mad Dogs</a> -- MD-88’s and -90’s. They were supposed to run through the end of the year, but with late ‘80’s technology and fuel efficiency, they were among the first planes in the fleet to be grounded when the lockdown hit. Delta said that “at their peak, the planes accounted for 50% of Delta’s arrivals and departures from” their Atlanta hub.&nbsp; Which will be a relief to longtime TravelCommons listener Darren Mak, who tweeted at me back at the beginning of March, a picture out the window seat of a Delta MD-88 just in front of the engine cowl, thanking me for mentioning, in episode <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/09/20/podcast-155-rj-delays-street-food-in-poland-and-hungary/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #155 — RJ Delays; Street Food in Poland and Hungary\">155</a>, that whenever I would end up in that same seat, I would wonder — if that engine blows up, will the shrapnel blow out or blow into the cabin. Well Darren, no more worries. We both survived the Mad Dog’s back seat.</li><li>We’ve talked in the past couple of episodes about the first post-lockdown trips would be by car -- more schedule flexibility; no worries of a stranger in the middle seat exhaling 18 inches away from you.&nbsp; CNBC ran <a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/31/five-charts-that-track-the-us-economy-as-states-reopen.html\">a story</a> last week analyzing the change in the number of requests for directions on Apple Maps in 2020. Using January 13th as the baseline for their comparison, requests for driving and walking directions dropped by 50% in the first month of the lockdowns, but had recovered by May 29th -- the last day of the data series. Transit direction requests had dropped by 75% and were still more than 50% down by the end of May. Now, using January 13th as the baseline probably exaggerates the recovery -- you’d think the number of walking and driving direction requests on a normal Memorial Day weekend would be hugely higher than for the second Monday of January when it was in or below the 30’s for about ⅔’s of the country -- but I don’t want to kill a green shoot with too much skepticism.</li><li>American talked about their own green shoots last week, saying they would be operating 55% of last year’s schedule in July, up from 20% in April and May. Driven mostly by demand from states opening up -- Texas, Florida, and Arizona -- rather than cities like New York, Chicago, and San Francisco that are still under stricter lockdown orders. If I keep pulling on this trend line, I’m thinking by September all those voluntary capacity limits and empty middle seat promises will have faded away.</li><li>The absence of update emails from airline and hotel CEOs this week I think is another green shoot. If things are starting to look up, no need to send me an email extending a bonus award offer or cancellation fee waivers. This has cut into a new hobby of mine, though -- comparing the use of \"in these uncertain times,\" \"in these challenging times,\" and “in these unprecedented times” in these emails. I have a stroke count going. Right now, “unprecedented” is the runaway leader, with “challenging” second, and “uncertain” third.</li><li>I’ve been a Hertz customer on and off over my 35-year travel career -- mostly on. I started my business traveling when I was at IBM, and in the mid-80’s, they had negotiated a smoking rate with Hertz. In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/09/15/podcast-144-outside-airports-hospitality-mentality\">episode 144</a>, I talked about getting to know the woman working in the little Hertz hut at SJC back then, when SJC was still an outdoor airport; and before Hertz Gold, that’s all I needed to get an upgrade. And more recently, I’ve, on balance, had good experiences with Hertz. So I was bummed for a moment when I saw they filed for bankruptcy last month. It wasn’t surprising, though. Hertz was still carrying a big debt load courtesy of a 2005 PE leveraged buyout, and we’ve talked in past episodes about how Uber and Lyft have been eating away at its core airport rental market. So, when travel stopped in March and used car auction prices cratered in April, Hertz tipped over. By now though, we’re kinda used to big travel companies cleaning their debt problems in bankruptcy -- United and American Airlines the most recent examples. So I’m not too worried about losing the rest of my Gold points. In the short term, though, I will be paying more attention to the mileage on the Hertz cars in the Five Star aisle. That’s where I usually see signs of financial distress -- a lot less 500-mile cars and a lot more 25,000-mile cars. And while 25,000 miles on a car doesn’t seem like a lot, remember that rental car miles are kinda like dog years -- you gotta multiply them by, like, 7 to get to regular car miles.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook page</a> or our Instagram account at <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">travelcommons</a> -- or you can post comments on the web site at <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">TravelCommons.com</a>.</li><li>Bridge Music — &nbsp;<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Suenjo/11162\">Natchoongi (New Hope Remix)</a>&nbsp;by Suenjo (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>First Post-Lockdown Trips</strong> </h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>As we talked about a few minutes ago, travel is starting to pick up as the lockdowns ease and people want to see something other than the 4 walls that have surrounded them since mid-March.&nbsp;</li><li>TravelCommons listener Mark Skinner dropped me a line towards the end of May about his first lockdown trip. You may remember Mark from <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/11/30/podcast-157-notes-from-the-baltics-riga-latvia-and-tallinn-estonia/\" title=\"Podcast #157 — Notes from the Baltics: Riga, Latvia and Tallinn, Estonia\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">episode 157</a> back in November when he wrote in to tell us about his day trip from Washington, DC to Hong Kong -- flying out Monday afternoon, returning Tuesday morning -- to take a NASA cosmic ray detector on an over-the-pole flight.&nbsp; This time, Mark writes -<ul><li>So I had my first trip this past week, since the “before times”. On the way back, I was listening to your recent podcast. Yes, my first trip was via automobile, down to the outer banks of North Carolina. Dare County had recently opened up (the day before!) to allow visitors into the county.&nbsp;</li><li>Stayed at the Hilton Garden Inn. No servicing of the room, and after a few days at this hotel on the beach, things were looking a little dingy. Tropical Storm Arthur squashed any hopes of long walks on the beach. Departed a day early because the storm wasn’t letting up. I thought this was a good use of Hilton points… Take-out only that week, and hotel not helping out by lending any china, glass or utensils. Ending up getting a couple of sets at a dollar store… I contrast this to my last trip in the before time, to Maui, just as things were buttoning up. The Grand Wailea was happy to provide all sorts of stuff to enjoy one’s take-out on the lanai! That trip got cut short as well, due to flights evaporating.&nbsp;</li><li>A highlight of the trip was stopping for lunch in Virginia Beach, which had recently opened out-door seating at restaurants, and enjoyed lunch at a seafood restaurant at an outside table, by the ocean, and greatly enjoyed ordering food and having it brought to the table! The previous “normal” meal had been first evening on Maui, before they went take-out only.&nbsp;</li><li>Next trip that is getting kicked around is Hilton Head in June…. that would involve flying. Crossing fingers about a trip to Austria in August…</li></ul></li><li>Mark, thanks for sending that along. Your experience on the Outer Banks was similar to mine down in Spring Hill, TN. I went back and forth about staying in a hotel vs. an Airbnb. Airbnb -- not as many people passing through the property and some time buffer (24 hours, 72 hours) between guests in the same rooms, but a major hotel chain should have the corporate resources to build out and maybe test a more thorough cleaning program for its properties; maybe with access to stronger, more industrial cleaners. Procrastination ended up making my decision -- while I was going back and forth, the Airbnb property in Spring Hill I was looking at got booked for the front of that week, so I ended up in the Spring Hill Hampton Inn -- another Hilton brand.</li><li>That Monday morning, right before I left Chicago, I checked in on the Hilton app. It even let me pick out my room. This may be old news to Hilton Diamond listeners, but I haven’t stayed in a Hilton for at least a year, and so haven’t been tracking their app improvements. When I arrived at 5:30pm, the front doors were locked, but opening up the app showed me a digital key that opened the front door and my room door. I didn\'t have to physically check in at the front desk which only struck me odd later that night. Whenever I’ve checked in on a hotel’s app before, I’ve still had to go to the front desk so they could see my ID, which was why I’ve never paid much attention to app check-ins. But at this Hampton Inn with full check-in and digital keys, it worked the way I’d always thought it should.</li><li>My in-room experience was the same as Mark’s -- nobody servicing the room, though a guy did stop by the room every now and again asking if I needed extra towels; no morning coffee or breakfast buffet, and eating mostly take-out in the room with some cans of local craft beer bought from the liquor store a couple of doors down. I was pretty rigorous about dumping the food trash right after eating. Waking up to the smell of 8-hour-old bar-be-que rib and cole slaw remnants is never a good start to the day. Hotels are saying it’s all about cleaning and sanitation, but I can’t say that I saw any out-of-the-ordinary efforts while I was there. Maybe what I was experiencing was the cost reductions to fund that behind-the-scenes deep cleaning.</li><li>While Mark’s highlight was his lunch in Virginia Beach, mine was being able to walk into a little family-owned craft beer joint in a strip mall on Spring Hill\'s Main St, order a beer, and then sit down and drink it at the bar. I go into this place every time I\'m there to visit my mother. Seeing them open was a nice little bit of normality -- especially since Chicago didn’t start opening up until last week.</li><li>Don\'t know my next trip yet, but I\'m keeping my eye on Spain, hoping there\'s no second wave before our trip to Barcelona at the end of September.</li><li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/53277\">Fistful of Dub</a>&nbsp;(Feat. Snowflake and DJ Vadim) by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. &nbsp;Ft: snowflake and DJ Vadim</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Travel Credit Cards</strong> </h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>As we start traveling again, we’ll start pulling out those travel cards -- Hilton or Delta Amex, United or Southwest or Marriott Visas, American MasterCards -- and so I invited Brett Holzhauer, the travel card expert at <a href=\"http://ValuePenguin.com\" title=\"ValuePenguin.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">ValuePenguin.com</a>, a site that goes deep into these cards, to give us some of his advice as we “un-lockdown” ourselves. First up, he reads out the results of a recent survey on travel planning, and then talks about travel cards<ul><li>Mark: Brett, thanks for joining us on the TravelCommons podcast.</li><li>Brett: Thank you so much for having me. I\'m excited</li><li>Mark: Brett, I wanted to talk to you about a recent survey that ValuePenguin.com has done on travel planning. And we\'ve had sort of an arc through the past couple of episodes of the TravelCommons podcast around travel planning. As we think about post-lock-down/pre-vaccine where people are still concerned about coronavirus and Covid, but they gotta move on with their lives. So, in the survey that ValuePenguin did, where are people going?</li><li>Brett: One of the biggest notes was the amount of people going to Florida, and it\'s a couple of reasons: 1) good weather; 2) it\'s affordable; 3) there\'s a lot of the older generation that lives in Florida, so maybe people are itching to see their parents or grandparents or just older relatives. So, it\'s a mixture of all of those things leading to people wanting to travel to the beaches and get outside.</li><li>Mark: I think that kind of ties into some things we\'re seeing, which is more of a focus on outdoors with the theory that coronavirus transmission is less efficient outdoors than indoors. As a travel card expert, as people begin to travel again, what are some of the strategies as far as being able to maximize the value of the travel credit cards? Because really most frequent travelers already have got them in their wallets, at least one if not multiple award cards, but they\'ll tend to focus on maximizing award points.</li><li>Brett: So one of the biggest things that\'s gonna eventually happen is huge bonuses. These companies like Chase and American Express. They\'re gonna really incentivize people to get back on the road. So if you’re brand new into the Points and Miles game, this is a very good opportunity to start understanding how this whole thing works. So that way, when these big bonuses start coming out, you can find some really great bonuses to start your travels once again, maybe late 2020 or early 2021. So that\'s one thing, Number two, obviously, the uptick in in travel insurance. People can get travel insurance through credit cards.</li><li>Mark: Typically, what are the travel insurance capabilities?</li><li>Brett: A lot of credit cards beyond the big sign-up bonuses have travel insurance, and a lot of consumers either don\'t know that they have it, they forget, or they just don\'t really pay too much attention to it. I\'m going to use a personal example. My wife and I both have the American Express Platinum Card. It\'s a $550 annual fee, and your first thought is -- that\'s a lot of money to invest in a credit card. Is that really worth it? And beyond all of the perks and the sign-up bonuses, the travel insurance through that specific credit card is comprehensive. You get trip cancelation, trip interruption. Also, you get rental car insurance, and so it\'s it\'s important to know the difference between primary and secondary. If you do have a credit card that has primary car insurance, that will go first so your personal car insurance will not be affected.</li><li>Mark: I\'ve talked in a previous TravelCommons episode about my own personal experience with using the Chase Sapphire Visa that ended up covering an accident and St Andrews, Scotland. When I got back home, I filed with Chase. Took me a little bit, but I got full coverage on it.</li><li>Brett: There\'s also baggage insurance. Those are kind of the big ones. There\'s also emergency medical assistant. It\'s important to know that consumers have these protections. I just feel that a lot of times we have these cards in our wallets. We\'re overlooking the value proposition of what these cards can really do.</li><li>Mark: Let me pivot to your set up as a digital nomad. What are what are you up to?</li><li>Brett: My wife and I, we met in 2015. I knew on the first date that I was gonna marry her by some way, somehow and sure enough ended up happening.</li><li>Mark: Did she have that same sense, or was there some selling involved there?</li><li>Brett: No, we definitely sold each other. And we walked away from that first date knowing that what she sold me on was traveling. I had a traveler’s itch. She had the traveling bug. So really sold me on the idea of doing this full time travel. In July of 2019, we officially sold everything. We drove back to her parents house in Los Angeles. Then in August of 2019, we took a one way flight from LAX to Fiji. We bounced between 10 countries in 3.5 months. We returned home in December for the holidays from Japan back to Los Angeles. And we had the plan of leaving again in February, and everything unfortunately started to melt. So now we\'re stuck in Los Angeles just itching to get back on the road. But yeah, we love taking advantage of rewards. If it wasn\'t for credit card points of miles, we wouldn\'t be able to afford these types of travels.</li><li>Mark: So, when do you think you and your wife will head out next?</li><li>Brett: Yeah, so our plan was to go to Europe. Obviously, that\'s been immensely hit by Covid-19. So for us, luckily, so I\'m 26 years old, she\'s 24. We’re both very healthy, we’re of the mindset that life is a little bit risky, and you have to take those risks to get those rewards. So, we approach travel with that mentality that it is a risk. Everything in life is a risk -- walking across the street, driving your car So, there\'s always a risk to it. I think if I had to guess, probably August. But again, God forbid there\'s a second wind of coronavirus. We might be here for extended period of time, But, you know, we are very blessed and very privilege that we have parents that will take us in. And we have a free place to stay, which is nice to save up more money for travel and pay down on my student loan.</li><li>Mark: Brett Holzhauer, travel awards expert from ValuePenguin.com Thanks very much for taking the time to join us on the TravelCommons Podcast.</li><li>Brett: Thank you so much</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #164</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_164.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #164 — First-Post Lockdown Trips; Travel Credit Cards','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-164-first-post-lockdown-trips-travel-credit-cards','','','2021-10-01 17:04:24','2021-10-01 22:04:24','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=2771',0,'post','',0),
(2773,1,'2020-06-09 09:58:44','2020-06-09 14:58:44','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/IMG_1615-1.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2732 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/IMG_1615-1-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a><figcaption>I think I put off finding a doc too long</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Though I\'m still locked down on the shores of Lake Michigan, data shows that people are starting to do short car trips. What will people need to feel comfortable to do more extensive travel -- spacing in aircraft, we talk with Erik Josowitz of <a href=\"https://insurancequotes.com\">insuranceQuotes.com</a> about trends in travel insurance, and a story about finding medical attention while traveling through Southeast Asia. </span>All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_163.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/815941426&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #163: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois, probably 10 lbs heavier, half of which is beer (my doing) and the other half baked goods courtesy of Irene. While the coronavirus restrictions are beginning to ease in some parts of the US and Europe, everything is still locked down here on the shores of Lake Michigan. So my travels since the last episode have mostly been between the kitchen and the couch, and occasionally out in search of carbohydrate comfort foods -- to grocery stores in an endless and fruitless search for King Arthur Bread Flour, and then running a circuit of Chicago microbreweries using curbside no-contact pick-up to collect 4-packs of whatever is new that week. A couple of breweries are even doing curbside sales of ⅙ barrel kegs -- tempting, but seems a bit of overkill for a 3-person flat, though Amazon claims they can get a kegerator to me next week. Must be on Amazon’s essential items list.&nbsp;</li><li>But with the lockdown easing in non-urban places like the exurbs of Nashville, I’m starting to prep for my first post-Corona trip that I talked about in the last episode, a drive down to Spring Hill, TN to see my mother. Got the oil and tires changed on the BMW to avoid any unplanned stops. Figure I’ll pack a lunch which’ll let me do the drive with just one gas stop. I also tuned up my Trek Madone road bike -- cleaned and lubed the gears, re-wrapped the handlebars -- to take that down with me. Haven’t been able to ride much after Chicago shut down the lake shore path, and so riding solo on small country roads would seem to be a pretty good match for “social distancing” criteria.</li><li>All this spare time has allowed me to be a bit more “planful” as one client used to say, one of those ugly adjective constructions meant to turn an activity “we need to do more planning” into a quality “we need to be more planful”. But anyhow, whether the lockdown allows me to be more planful about the podcast or to do a bit more planning, it has. Which, for this episode, means you’ll hear less of me, and more from informed people. First up is Erik Josowitz, an analyst at <a href=\"https://www.insurancequotes.com\" class=\"aioseop-link\">insuranceQuotes.com</a>. Erik and I did an old-school remote interview -- using Skype instead of Zoom -- talking about what travel insurance looks like in the post-Corona world. And then Allan Marko returns with his wife Chris, following up our conversation in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/01/25/podcast-159-planning-the-trip-of-a-lifetime-in-southeast-asia/\" class=\"aioseop-link\">January travel planning episode</a> with a story from their Southeast Asia sabbatical last year; how they tracked down a doctor in Thailand when his wife became ill; a topic that could weigh on us more when we venture out into the post-lockdown/ pre-corona vaccine world that we\'ll be in for the next 18-24 months.</li><li>But right now, for my Tennessee trip, I think I’m less concerned about finding a doctor, and a bit more concerned about reconnoitering open drive-thru Taco Bells along I-65.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/50485\">Sunset Boulevard</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Siobhan Dakay, unreal_dm</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Videoconferencing is having its moment during the pandemic. Maybe it’s because people are looking for more of a connection in their lockdown isolations, or because we know that everyone is sitting at home in front of a video-equipped laptop and has no excuse not to video, nothing like “Can only call in because I’ll be running through airport security then.” I haven’t done a straight conference call in forever. Doing interviews for this episode, I hit the videoconference trifecta&nbsp; - Skype with Erik, FaceTime with Allan and Chris,&nbsp;</li><li>and then Zoom to be on the other side of the microphone on Steve Frick’s <a href=\"https://anchor.fm/steve-frick/episodes/Travel-Commons---Stories-From-Home-Episode-83-edipo7\">Back &amp; Gone Again podcast</a>.&nbsp; This is the 15th year of TravelCommons; I started in May 2005, and here Steve and I talk about that first episode.</li><li>&nbsp;We had a lot of fun, telling travel stories and talking about our current life-off-the-road. Give it a listen. There’s a link in the show notes, on the TravelCommons Facebook page, and in the Twitter feed.</li><li>Cate Rose left a comment on the Facebook page on the April episode.<ul><li>“I don\'t travel nearly as much as you do Mark but I enjoy your podcasts. These are unprecedented times. We arrived home from a month long rail trip from Italy, up to Sweden at the end of January just as this whole thing was blowing up. And now people, including us, are locked down all over the world. Unbelievable. And here you are with plenty of time to write, but no place to go! We are on Week 4 of social isolation in Western Australia and the novelty is wearing off a little ;-) but it seems to be working so all for the greater good. Thanks for keeping up with the storytelling and letting a crack of life into home isolation! Stay safe.</li><li>Cate - thanks for that note. Sounds like you just got out of Italy in time. If I remember correctly, they started locking down Italy in mid-February. Glad you made it back home safely. And it sounds like Australia and New Zealand have done the best in crushing the Covid curve.</li></ul></li><li>In that same episode, when we talked about post-corona trip planning, I said I thought the first post-lockdown trip most people would take would be a car ride -- more flexibility; easier social distancing. Turns out I was right -- at least according to the company <a href=\"https://www.arrivalist.com/\">Arrivalist</a>, a “visitation intelligence company” that has started publishing a Daily Travel Index measuring consumer road trips of 50 miles or more using data drawn from GPS signals. Road trips on Friday, May 1 were almost back to the pre-pandemic levels of February, with the number of trips in the 100-250 mile range higher than February’s number for the first time since the lockdowns started. You can go to Arrivalist’s website and <a href=\"https://www.arrivalist.com/daily-travel-index/\">play with the data yourself</a> or read an <a href=\"https://www.phocuswire.com/arrivalist-road-trip-surge-data\">analysis by Phocuswright</a>, a travel research firm. Links are in the show notes and my Twitter feed.</li><li>I got yet another email survey, this time from United asking me what would make me comfortable to fly again, and to rank some of their plans. For me, it was pretty easy. I’m not excited about standing in a packed gate area, hearing the gate agent say “This is a completely full flight”, and then spend 2-3 hours shoulder-to-shoulder with a complete stranger, in effect letting that person into my family’s corona exposure space.</li><li>A couple of weeks later (not implying causation, only correlation), all the major US airlines announced that passengers and crew will have to wear masks, they’re moving to strict back-to-front boarding schemes to reduce the number of passengers passing one another, and that they’re blocking/not booking the middle seats, reducing capacity from what had been running over 80% at the beginning of the year down to the 60’s. It was then interesting to watch what happened after Frontier’s CEO did a round of TV interviews at the beginning of this week, saying that they too would block the middle seat -- if a passenger bought a More Room seat for at least $39. Today, after getting a blizzard of red challenge flags from Washington, Frontier reversed course. Just kidding - “It was never our intent” they said, “to profit… from safety”. “ We simply wanted to provide our customers with an option for more space.” Yup. Frontier continuing to position their brand as the Ryanair of the US.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Vidian/52190\">Memories (infiniti loop)</a> by Vidian (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license. Ft: TheDice</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>New World of Travel Insurance</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Interview with Erik Josowitz, an analyst at <a href=\"http://www.insurancequotes.com/\" class=\"aioseop-link\">insuranceQuotes.com</a></li><li>Bridge Music --<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/ramblinglibrarian/55007\">Dawn at the Top of the World ft. copperhead &amp; Robert Seikawitch</a> by Ivan Chew (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Getting Medical Help on the Road</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Back in January, long-time TravelCommons listener Allan Marko talked about the planning he did for the 9-week SE Asia sabbatical he and his wife Chris took last year. Fast forward 4 months, and health care on the road will now become much more important when traveling in the post-lockdown/pre-vaccine world. So let’s continue our conversation with Allan, joined now by his wife Chris, to talk about how they thought about getting health care when they were half a world away from home.&nbsp; It started with the research before they left home…</li><li>Interview with Allan Marko and Chris Chufo</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #163</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_163.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #163 — New World of Travel Insurance; Getting Medical Help on the Road','','inherit','closed','closed','','2747-revision-v1','','','2020-06-09 09:58:44','2020-06-09 14:58:44','',2747,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/06/09/2747-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2775,1,'2020-06-09 10:11:58','2020-06-09 15:11:58','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/DSC_6306-edit.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2770 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/DSC_6306-edit-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\n<figcaption>Can I leave my house now?</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p>Though I\'m still locked down on the shores of Lake Michigan, data shows that people are starting to do short car trips. What will people need to feel comfortable to do more extensive travel -- spacing in aircraft, we talk with Erik Josowitz of <a href=\"https://insurancequotes.com\">insuranceQuotes.com</a> about trends in travel insurance, and a story about finding medical attention while traveling through Southeast Asia. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_164.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/815941426&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #164: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois, as the lockdown here is starting to lift. What’s open and what’s not is still a bit spotty, though I’ve managed to hit a couple of microbreweries with outdoor patios. The opening in Chicago is not dissimilar to what I experienced down in Tennessee last month. I was down in Spring Hill, south of Nashville, two weeks after the non-urban lockdown lifted -- for every place other than the cities of Nashville, Memphis, Knoxville, and Chattanooga. It seemed that everyone was still trying to figure out what to do -- the bar/pizza joint next to my hotel was fully open, but the local bar-be-que joints and the Starbucks were still only doing take-away. Which makes sense; it’s not like there’s a standard playbook on how to re-open an economy. And throughout my consulting career, I’ve learned it’s always easier to shut things down than to start them up.</li><li>The drive south on I-65 from Chicago is one that, I’m not gonna say I can do with my eyes closed, but I’ve been doing it for almost 40 years, starting when I was in business school at the University of Chicago and my family was living in Louisville, KY. I mean, there’s a clump of trees in the median between West Lafayette and Crown Point that’s a milestone for me; I know I’m an hour from home. Which just goes to show you how boring the drive through northern Indiana is when trees in the median are a notable feature.</li><li>The drive between Chicago and Nashville, while not the most exciting, especially through Indiana, it does usually require a bit of timing to thread through Chicago, Indianapolis, Louisville, and Nashville to avoid rush hour in each. On this trip, not so much. I left Chicago after breakfast and was driving 80 mph most of the way, maybe dropping down to 70 through the cities. And I was still getting passed by guys going aggressively faster. And the only time I saw police or state troopers was in front of big road construction sites, cars running with all their lights flashing in front of big barriers, more as a warning to speeders than an attempt to get them. It was, hands down, the easiest drive down I-65 I’ve ever done.</li><li>That wide-open drive may be one of the few things I’ll actually appreciate about this lockdown. Well, that and the $2/gallon gas along the way...</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/50485\">Sunset Boulevard</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Siobhan Dakay, unreal_dm</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>First up, thanks to the TravelCommons listener who goes by the handle Abe Froman, Ferris Bueller’s sausage king of Chicago, for dropping a 5-star review on <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">our iTunes page</a>. Abe writes:<ul><li>“I have been a fan of this podcast for many years. If you are a road warrior or a mileage runner, you will love the tips to make your travel easier.”</li><li>Abe, thanks a lot for this.  I’m glad you’ve enjoyed the podcast</li></ul></li><li>Last year in episodes <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/07/26/podcast-153-travel-by-algorithm-leaving-places-behind/\" title=\"Podcast #153 — Travel By Algorithm; Leaving Places Behind\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">153</a> and <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/09/20/podcast-155-rj-delays-street-food-in-poland-and-hungary/\" title=\"Podcast #155 — RJ Delays; Street Food in Poland and Hungary\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">155</a>, we talked about American Airlines’ retirement of their MD-80’s, the “Mad Dog 80”, the plane on which I earned my first Advantage status -- Gold, and there wasn’t anything higher back then. Last week, <a href=\"https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/delta-air-lines-md-80-last-flight/index.html\">Delta finally retired their last Mad Dogs</a> -- MD-88’s and -90’s. They were supposed to run through the end of the year, but with late ‘80’s technology and fuel efficiency, they were among the first planes in the fleet to be grounded when the lockdown hit. Delta said that “at their peak, the planes accounted for 50% of Delta’s arrivals and departures from” their Atlanta hub.  Which will be a relief to longtime TravelCommons listener Darren Mak, who tweeted at me back at the beginning of March, a picture out the window seat of a Delta MD-88 just in front of the engine cowl, thanking me for mentioning, in episode <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/09/20/podcast-155-rj-delays-street-food-in-poland-and-hungary/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #155 — RJ Delays; Street Food in Poland and Hungary\">155</a>, that whenever I would end up in that same seat, I would wonder — if that engine blows up, will the shrapnel blow out or blow into the cabin. Well Darren, no more worries. We both survived the Mad Dog’s back seat.</li><li>We’ve talked in the past couple of episodes about the first post-lockdown trips would be by car -- more schedule flexibility; no worries of a stranger in the middle seat exhaling 18 inches away from you.  CNBC ran <a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/31/five-charts-that-track-the-us-economy-as-states-reopen.html\">a story</a> last week analyzing the change in the number of requests for directions on Apple Maps in 2020. Using January 13th as the baseline for their comparison, requests for driving and walking directions dropped by 50% in the first month of the lockdowns, but had recovered by May 29th -- the last day of the data series. Transit direction requests had dropped by 75% and were still more than 50% down by the end of May. Now, using January 13th as the baseline probably exaggerates the recovery -- you’d think the number of walking and driving direction requests on a normal Memorial Day weekend would be hugely higher than for the second Monday of January when it was in or below the 30’s for about ⅔’s of the country -- but I don’t want to kill a green shoot with too much skepticism.</li><li>American talked about their own green shoots last week, saying they would be operating 55% of last year’s schedule in July, up from 20% in April and May. Driven mostly by demand from states opening up -- Texas, Florida, and Arizona -- rather than cities like New York, Chicago, and San Francisco that are still under stricter lockdown orders. If I keep pulling on this trend line, I’m thinking by September all those voluntary capacity limits and empty middle seat promises will have faded away.</li><li>The absence of update emails from airline and hotel CEOs this week I think is another green shoot. If things are starting to look up, no need to send me an email extending a bonus award offer or cancellation fee waivers. This has cut into a new hobby of mine, though -- comparing the use of \"in these uncertain times,\" \"in these challenging times,\" and “in these unprecedented times” in these emails. I have a stroke count going. Right now, “unprecedented” is the runaway leader, with “challenging” second, and “uncertain” third.</li><li>I’ve been a Hertz customer on and off over my 35-year travel career -- mostly on. I started my business traveling when I was at IBM, and in the mid-80’s, they had negotiated a smoking rate with Hertz. In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/09/15/podcast-144-outside-airports-hospitality-mentality\">episode 144</a>, I talked about getting to know the woman working in the little Hertz hut at SJC back then, when SJC was still an outdoor airport; and before Hertz Gold, that’s all I needed to get an upgrade. And more recently, I’ve, on balance, had good experiences with Hertz. So I was bummed for a moment when I saw they filed for bankruptcy last month. It wasn’t surprising, though. Hertz was still carrying a big debt load courtesy of a 2005 PE leveraged buyout, and we’ve talked in past episodes about how Uber and Lyft have been eating away at its core airport rental market. So, when travel stopped in March and used car auction prices cratered in April, Hertz tipped over. By now though, we’re kinda used to big travel companies cleaning their debt problems in bankruptcy -- United and American Airlines the most recent examples. So I’m not too worried about losing the rest of my Gold points. In the short term, though, I will be paying more attention to the mileage on the Hertz cars in the Five Star aisle. That’s where I usually see signs of financial distress -- a lot less 500-mile cars and a lot more 25,000-mile cars. And while 25,000 miles on a car doesn’t seem like a lot, remember that rental car miles are kinda like dog years -- you gotta multiply them by, like, 7 to get to regular car miles.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook page</a> or our Instagram account at <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">travelcommons</a> -- or you can post comments on the web site at <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">TravelCommons.com</a>.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Vidian/52190\">Memories (infiniti loop)</a> by Vidian (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license. Ft: TheDice</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>First Post-Lockdown Trips</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>As we talked about a few minutes ago, travel is starting to pick up as the lockdowns ease and people want to see something other than the 4 walls that have surrounded them since mid-March. </li><li>TravelCommons listener Mark Skinner dropped me a line towards the end of May about his first lockdown trip. You may remember Mark from <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/11/30/podcast-157-notes-from-the-baltics-riga-latvia-and-tallinn-estonia/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #157 — Notes from the Baltics: Riga, Latvia and Tallinn, Estonia\">episode 157</a> back in November when he wrote in to tell us about his day trip from Washington, DC to Hong Kong -- flying out Monday afternoon, returning Tuesday morning -- to take a NASA cosmic ray detector on an over-the-pole flight.  This time, Mark writes -<ul><li>So I had my first trip this past week, since the “before times”. On the way back, I was listening to your recent podcast. Yes, my first trip was via automobile, down to the outer banks of North Carolina. Dare County had recently opened up (the day before!) to allow visitors into the county. </li><li>Stayed at the Hilton Garden Inn. No servicing of the room, and after a few days at this hotel on the beach, things were looking a little dingy. Tropical Storm Arthur squashed any hopes of long walks on the beach. Departed a day early because the storm wasn’t letting up. I thought this was a good use of Hilton points… Take-out only that week, and hotel not helping out by lending any china, glass or utensils. Ending up getting a couple of sets at a dollar store… I contrast this to my last trip in the before time, to Maui, just as things were buttoning up. The Grand Wailea was happy to provide all sorts of stuff to enjoy one’s take-out on the lanai! That trip got cut short as well, due to flights evaporating. </li><li>A highlight of the trip was stopping for lunch in Virginia Beach, which had recently opened out-door seating at restaurants, and enjoyed lunch at a seafood restaurant at an outside table, by the ocean, and greatly enjoyed ordering food and having it brought to the table! The previous “normal” meal had been first evening on Maui, before they went take-out only. </li><li>Next trip that is getting kicked around is Hilton Head in June…. that would involve flying. Crossing fingers about a trip to Austria in August…</li></ul></li><li>Mark, thanks for sending that along. Your experience on the Outer Banks was similar to mine down in Spring Hill, TN. I went back and forth about staying in a hotel vs. an Airbnb. Airbnb -- not as many people passing through the property and some time buffer (24 hours, 72 hours) between guests in the same rooms, but a major hotel chain should have the corporate resources to build out and maybe test a more thorough cleaning program for its properties; maybe with access to stronger, more industrial cleaners. Procrastination ended up making my decision -- while I was going back and forth, the Airbnb property in Spring Hill I was looking at got booked for the front of that week, so I ended up in the Spring Hill Hampton Inn -- another Hilton brand.</li><li>That Monday morning, right before I left Chicago, I checked in on the Hilton app. It even let me pick out my room. This may be old news to Hilton Diamond listeners, but I haven’t stayed in a Hilton for at least a year, and so haven’t been tracking their app improvements. When I arrived at 5:30pm, the front doors were locked, but opening up the app showed me a digital key that opened the front door and my room door. I didn\'t have to physically check in at the front desk which only struck me odd later that night. Whenever I’ve checked in on a hotel’s app before, I’ve still had to go to the front desk so they could see my ID, which was why I’ve never paid much attention to app check-ins. But at this Hampton Inn with full check-in and digital keys, it worked the way I’d always thought it should.</li><li>My in-room experience was the same as Mark’s -- nobody servicing the room, though a guy did stop by the room every now and again asking if I needed extra towels; no morning coffee or breakfast buffet, and eating mostly take-out in the room with some cans of local craft beer bought from the liquor store a couple of doors down. I was pretty rigorous about dumping the food trash right after eating. Waking up to the smell of 8-hour-old bar-be-que rib and cole slaw remnants is never a good start to the day.</li><li>While Mark’s highlight was his lunch in Virginia Beach, mine was being able to walk into a little family-owned craft beer joint in a strip mall on Spring Hill\'s Main St, order a beer, and then sit down and drink it at the bar. I go into this place every time I\'m there to visit my mother. Seeing them open was a nice little bit of normality -- especially since Chicago didn’t start opening up until last week.</li><li>Don\'t know my next trip yet, but I\'m keeping my eye on Spain, hoping there\'s no second wave before our trip to Barcelona at the end of September.</li><li>Bridge Music --<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/ramblinglibrarian/55007\">Dawn at the Top of the World ft. copperhead &amp; Robert Seikawitch</a> by Ivan Chew (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Travel Credit Cards</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Back in January, long-time TravelCommons listener Allan Marko talked about the planning he did for the 9-week SE Asia sabbatical he and his wife Chris took last year. Fast forward 4 months, and health care on the road will now become much more important when traveling in the post-lockdown/pre-vaccine world. So let’s continue our conversation with Allan, joined now by his wife Chris, to talk about how they thought about getting health care when they were half a world away from home.&nbsp; It started with the research before they left home…</li><li>Interview with Allan Marko and Chris Chufo</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #163</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_164.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #164 — First Post Lockdown Trips; Travel Credit Cards','','inherit','closed','closed','','2771-revision-v1','','','2020-06-09 10:11:58','2020-06-09 15:11:58','',2771,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/06/09/2771-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2776,1,'2020-06-09 10:17:00','2020-06-09 15:17:00','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/DSC_6306-edit.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2770 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/DSC_6306-edit-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\n<figcaption>Can I leave my house now?</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p>Though I\'m still locked down on the shores of Lake Michigan, data shows that people are starting to do short car trips. What will people need to feel comfortable to do more extensive travel -- spacing in aircraft, we talk with Erik Josowitz of <a href=\"https://insurancequotes.com\">insuranceQuotes.com</a> about trends in travel insurance, and a story about finding medical attention while traveling through Southeast Asia. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_164.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/815941426&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #164: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois, as the lockdown here is starting to lift. What’s open and what’s not is still a bit spotty, though I’ve managed to hit a couple of microbreweries with outdoor patios. The opening in Chicago is not dissimilar to what I experienced down in Tennessee last month. I was down in Spring Hill, south of Nashville, two weeks after the non-urban lockdown lifted -- for every place other than the cities of Nashville, Memphis, Knoxville, and Chattanooga. It seemed that everyone was still trying to figure out what to do -- the bar/pizza joint next to my hotel was fully open, but the local bar-be-que joints and the Starbucks were still only doing take-away. Which makes sense; it’s not like there’s a standard playbook on how to re-open an economy. And throughout my consulting career, I’ve learned it’s always easier to shut things down than to start them up.</li><li>The drive south on I-65 from Chicago is one that, I’m not gonna say I can do with my eyes closed, but I’ve been doing it for almost 40 years, starting when I was in business school at the University of Chicago and my family was living in Louisville, KY. I mean, there’s a clump of trees in the median between West Lafayette and Crown Point that’s a milestone for me; I know I’m an hour from home. Which just goes to show you how boring the drive through northern Indiana is when trees in the median are a notable feature.</li><li>The drive between Chicago and Nashville, while not the most exciting, especially through Indiana, it does usually require a bit of timing to thread through Chicago, Indianapolis, Louisville, and Nashville to avoid rush hour in each. On this trip, not so much. I left Chicago after breakfast and was driving 80 mph most of the way, maybe dropping down to 70 through the cities. And I was still getting passed by guys going aggressively faster. And the only time I saw police or state troopers was in front of big road construction sites, cars running with all their lights flashing in front of big barriers, more as a warning to speeders than an attempt to get them. It was, hands down, the easiest drive down I-65 I’ve ever done.</li><li>That wide-open drive may be one of the few things I’ll actually appreciate about this lockdown. Well, that and the $2/gallon gas along the way...</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/50485\">Sunset Boulevard</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Siobhan Dakay, unreal_dm</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>First up, thanks to the TravelCommons listener who goes by the handle Abe Froman, Ferris Bueller’s sausage king of Chicago, for dropping a 5-star review on <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">our iTunes page</a>. Abe writes:<ul><li>“I have been a fan of this podcast for many years. If you are a road warrior or a mileage runner, you will love the tips to make your travel easier.”</li><li>Abe, thanks a lot for this.  I’m glad you’ve enjoyed the podcast</li></ul></li><li>Last year in episodes <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/07/26/podcast-153-travel-by-algorithm-leaving-places-behind/\" title=\"Podcast #153 — Travel By Algorithm; Leaving Places Behind\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">153</a> and <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/09/20/podcast-155-rj-delays-street-food-in-poland-and-hungary/\" title=\"Podcast #155 — RJ Delays; Street Food in Poland and Hungary\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">155</a>, we talked about American Airlines’ retirement of their MD-80’s, the “Mad Dog 80”, the plane on which I earned my first Advantage status -- Gold, and there wasn’t anything higher back then. Last week, <a href=\"https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/delta-air-lines-md-80-last-flight/index.html\">Delta finally retired their last Mad Dogs</a> -- MD-88’s and -90’s. They were supposed to run through the end of the year, but with late ‘80’s technology and fuel efficiency, they were among the first planes in the fleet to be grounded when the lockdown hit. Delta said that “at their peak, the planes accounted for 50% of Delta’s arrivals and departures from” their Atlanta hub.  Which will be a relief to longtime TravelCommons listener Darren Mak, who tweeted at me back at the beginning of March, a picture out the window seat of a Delta MD-88 just in front of the engine cowl, thanking me for mentioning, in episode <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/09/20/podcast-155-rj-delays-street-food-in-poland-and-hungary/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #155 — RJ Delays; Street Food in Poland and Hungary\">155</a>, that whenever I would end up in that same seat, I would wonder — if that engine blows up, will the shrapnel blow out or blow into the cabin. Well Darren, no more worries. We both survived the Mad Dog’s back seat.</li><li>We’ve talked in the past couple of episodes about the first post-lockdown trips would be by car -- more schedule flexibility; no worries of a stranger in the middle seat exhaling 18 inches away from you.  CNBC ran <a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/31/five-charts-that-track-the-us-economy-as-states-reopen.html\">a story</a> last week analyzing the change in the number of requests for directions on Apple Maps in 2020. Using January 13th as the baseline for their comparison, requests for driving and walking directions dropped by 50% in the first month of the lockdowns, but had recovered by May 29th -- the last day of the data series. Transit direction requests had dropped by 75% and were still more than 50% down by the end of May. Now, using January 13th as the baseline probably exaggerates the recovery -- you’d think the number of walking and driving direction requests on a normal Memorial Day weekend would be hugely higher than for the second Monday of January when it was in or below the 30’s for about ⅔’s of the country -- but I don’t want to kill a green shoot with too much skepticism.</li><li>American talked about their own green shoots last week, saying they would be operating 55% of last year’s schedule in July, up from 20% in April and May. Driven mostly by demand from states opening up -- Texas, Florida, and Arizona -- rather than cities like New York, Chicago, and San Francisco that are still under stricter lockdown orders. If I keep pulling on this trend line, I’m thinking by September all those voluntary capacity limits and empty middle seat promises will have faded away.</li><li>The absence of update emails from airline and hotel CEOs this week I think is another green shoot. If things are starting to look up, no need to send me an email extending a bonus award offer or cancellation fee waivers. This has cut into a new hobby of mine, though -- comparing the use of \"in these uncertain times,\" \"in these challenging times,\" and “in these unprecedented times” in these emails. I have a stroke count going. Right now, “unprecedented” is the runaway leader, with “challenging” second, and “uncertain” third.</li><li>I’ve been a Hertz customer on and off over my 35-year travel career -- mostly on. I started my business traveling when I was at IBM, and in the mid-80’s, they had negotiated a smoking rate with Hertz. In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/09/15/podcast-144-outside-airports-hospitality-mentality\">episode 144</a>, I talked about getting to know the woman working in the little Hertz hut at SJC back then, when SJC was still an outdoor airport; and before Hertz Gold, that’s all I needed to get an upgrade. And more recently, I’ve, on balance, had good experiences with Hertz. So I was bummed for a moment when I saw they filed for bankruptcy last month. It wasn’t surprising, though. Hertz was still carrying a big debt load courtesy of a 2005 PE leveraged buyout, and we’ve talked in past episodes about how Uber and Lyft have been eating away at its core airport rental market. So, when travel stopped in March and used car auction prices cratered in April, Hertz tipped over. By now though, we’re kinda used to big travel companies cleaning their debt problems in bankruptcy -- United and American Airlines the most recent examples. So I’m not too worried about losing the rest of my Gold points. In the short term, though, I will be paying more attention to the mileage on the Hertz cars in the Five Star aisle. That’s where I usually see signs of financial distress -- a lot less 500-mile cars and a lot more 25,000-mile cars. And while 25,000 miles on a car doesn’t seem like a lot, remember that rental car miles are kinda like dog years -- you gotta multiply them by, like, 7 to get to regular car miles.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook page</a> or our Instagram account at <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">travelcommons</a> -- or you can post comments on the web site at <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">TravelCommons.com</a>.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Vidian/52190\">Memories (infiniti loop)</a> by Vidian (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license. Ft: TheDice</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>First Post-Lockdown Trips</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>As we talked about a few minutes ago, travel is starting to pick up as the lockdowns ease and people want to see something other than the 4 walls that have surrounded them since mid-March. </li><li>TravelCommons listener Mark Skinner dropped me a line towards the end of May about his first lockdown trip. You may remember Mark from <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/11/30/podcast-157-notes-from-the-baltics-riga-latvia-and-tallinn-estonia/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #157 — Notes from the Baltics: Riga, Latvia and Tallinn, Estonia\">episode 157</a> back in November when he wrote in to tell us about his day trip from Washington, DC to Hong Kong -- flying out Monday afternoon, returning Tuesday morning -- to take a NASA cosmic ray detector on an over-the-pole flight.  This time, Mark writes -<ul><li>So I had my first trip this past week, since the “before times”. On the way back, I was listening to your recent podcast. Yes, my first trip was via automobile, down to the outer banks of North Carolina. Dare County had recently opened up (the day before!) to allow visitors into the county. </li><li>Stayed at the Hilton Garden Inn. No servicing of the room, and after a few days at this hotel on the beach, things were looking a little dingy. Tropical Storm Arthur squashed any hopes of long walks on the beach. Departed a day early because the storm wasn’t letting up. I thought this was a good use of Hilton points… Take-out only that week, and hotel not helping out by lending any china, glass or utensils. Ending up getting a couple of sets at a dollar store… I contrast this to my last trip in the before time, to Maui, just as things were buttoning up. The Grand Wailea was happy to provide all sorts of stuff to enjoy one’s take-out on the lanai! That trip got cut short as well, due to flights evaporating. </li><li>A highlight of the trip was stopping for lunch in Virginia Beach, which had recently opened out-door seating at restaurants, and enjoyed lunch at a seafood restaurant at an outside table, by the ocean, and greatly enjoyed ordering food and having it brought to the table! The previous “normal” meal had been first evening on Maui, before they went take-out only. </li><li>Next trip that is getting kicked around is Hilton Head in June…. that would involve flying. Crossing fingers about a trip to Austria in August…</li></ul></li><li>Mark, thanks for sending that along. Your experience on the Outer Banks was similar to mine down in Spring Hill, TN. I went back and forth about staying in a hotel vs. an Airbnb. Airbnb -- not as many people passing through the property and some time buffer (24 hours, 72 hours) between guests in the same rooms, but a major hotel chain should have the corporate resources to build out and maybe test a more thorough cleaning program for its properties; maybe with access to stronger, more industrial cleaners. Procrastination ended up making my decision -- while I was going back and forth, the Airbnb property in Spring Hill I was looking at got booked for the front of that week, so I ended up in the Spring Hill Hampton Inn -- another Hilton brand.</li><li>That Monday morning, right before I left Chicago, I checked in on the Hilton app. It even let me pick out my room. This may be old news to Hilton Diamond listeners, but I haven’t stayed in a Hilton for at least a year, and so haven’t been tracking their app improvements. When I arrived at 5:30pm, the front doors were locked, but opening up the app showed me a digital key that opened the front door and my room door. I didn\'t have to physically check in at the front desk which only struck me odd later that night. Whenever I’ve checked in on a hotel’s app before, I’ve still had to go to the front desk so they could see my ID, which was why I’ve never paid much attention to app check-ins. But at this Hampton Inn with full check-in and digital keys, it worked the way I’d always thought it should.</li><li>My in-room experience was the same as Mark’s -- nobody servicing the room, though a guy did stop by the room every now and again asking if I needed extra towels; no morning coffee or breakfast buffet, and eating mostly take-out in the room with some cans of local craft beer bought from the liquor store a couple of doors down. I was pretty rigorous about dumping the food trash right after eating. Waking up to the smell of 8-hour-old bar-be-que rib and cole slaw remnants is never a good start to the day.</li><li>While Mark’s highlight was his lunch in Virginia Beach, mine was being able to walk into a little family-owned craft beer joint in a strip mall on Spring Hill\'s Main St, order a beer, and then sit down and drink it at the bar. I go into this place every time I\'m there to visit my mother. Seeing them open was a nice little bit of normality -- especially since Chicago didn’t start opening up until last week.</li><li>Don\'t know my next trip yet, but I\'m keeping my eye on Spain, hoping there\'s no second wave before our trip to Barcelona at the end of September.</li><li>Bridge Music --<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/ramblinglibrarian/55007\">Dawn at the Top of the World ft. copperhead &amp; Robert Seikawitch</a> by Ivan Chew (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Travel Credit Cards</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>As we start traveling again, we’ll start pulling out those travel cards -- Hilton or Delta Amex, United or Southwest or Marriott Visas, American MasterCards -- and so I invited Brett Holzhauer, the travel card expert at ValuePenguin.com, a site that goes deep into these cards, to give us some of his advice as we “un-lockdown” ourselves...</li><li>Interview with Brett Holzhauer, the travel card expert at <a href=\"http://valuepenguin.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"valuepenguin.com\">ValuePenguin.com</a></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #164</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_164.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #164 — First Post Lockdown Trips; Travel Credit Cards','','inherit','closed','closed','','2771-revision-v1','','','2020-06-09 10:17:00','2020-06-09 15:17:00','',2771,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/06/09/2771-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2777,1,'2020-06-09 10:19:43','2020-06-09 15:19:43','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/IMG_1615-1.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2732 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/IMG_1615-1-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\n<figcaption>I think I put off finding a doc too long</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Though I\'m still locked down on the shores of Lake Michigan, data shows that people are starting to do short car trips. What will people need to feel comfortable to do more extensive travel -- spacing in aircraft, we talk with Erik Josowitz of <a href=\"https://insurancequotes.com\">insuranceQuotes.com</a> about trends in travel insurance, and a story about finding medical attention while traveling through Southeast Asia. </span>All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_163.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/815941426&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #163: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois, probably 10 lbs heavier, half of which is beer (my doing) and the other half baked goods courtesy of Irene. While the coronavirus restrictions are beginning to ease in some parts of the US and Europe, everything is still locked down here on the shores of Lake Michigan. So my travels since the last episode have mostly been between the kitchen and the couch, and occasionally out in search of carbohydrate comfort foods -- to grocery stores in an endless and fruitless search for King Arthur Bread Flour, and then running a circuit of Chicago microbreweries using curbside no-contact pick-up to collect 4-packs of whatever is new that week. A couple of breweries are even doing curbside sales of ⅙ barrel kegs -- tempting, but seems a bit of overkill for a 3-person flat, though Amazon claims they can get a kegerator to me next week. Must be on Amazon’s essential items list.&nbsp;</li><li>But with the lockdown easing in non-urban places like the exurbs of Nashville, I’m starting to prep for my first post-Corona trip that I talked about in the last episode, a drive down to Spring Hill, TN to see my mother. Got the oil and tires changed on the BMW to avoid any unplanned stops. Figure I’ll pack a lunch which’ll let me do the drive with just one gas stop. I also tuned up my Trek Madone road bike -- cleaned and lubed the gears, re-wrapped the handlebars -- to take that down with me. Haven’t been able to ride much after Chicago shut down the lake shore path, and so riding solo on small country roads would seem to be a pretty good match for “social distancing” criteria.</li><li>All this spare time has allowed me to be a bit more “planful” as one client used to say, one of those ugly adjective constructions meant to turn an activity “we need to do more planning” into a quality “we need to be more planful”. But anyhow, whether the lockdown allows me to be more planful about the podcast or to do a bit more planning, it has. Which, for this episode, means you’ll hear less of me, and more from informed people. First up is Erik Josowitz, an analyst at <a href=\"https://www.insurancequotes.com\" class=\"aioseop-link\">insuranceQuotes.com</a>. Erik and I did an old-school remote interview -- using Skype instead of Zoom -- talking about what travel insurance looks like in the post-Corona world. And then Allan Marko returns with his wife Chris, following up our conversation in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/01/25/podcast-159-planning-the-trip-of-a-lifetime-in-southeast-asia/\" class=\"aioseop-link\">January travel planning episode</a> with a story from their Southeast Asia sabbatical last year; how they tracked down a doctor in Thailand when his wife became ill; a topic that could weigh on us more when we venture out into the post-lockdown/ pre-corona vaccine world that we\'ll be in for the next 18-24 months.</li><li>But right now, for my Tennessee trip, I think I’m less concerned about finding a doctor, and a bit more concerned about reconnoitering open drive-thru Taco Bells along I-65.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/50485\">Sunset Boulevard</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Siobhan Dakay, unreal_dm</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Videoconferencing is having its moment during the pandemic. Maybe it’s because people are looking for more of a connection in their lockdown isolations, or because we know that everyone is sitting at home in front of a video-equipped laptop and has no excuse not to video, nothing like “Can only call in because I’ll be running through airport security then.” I haven’t done a straight conference call in forever. Doing interviews for this episode, I hit the videoconference trifecta&nbsp; - Skype with Erik, FaceTime with Allan and Chris,&nbsp;</li><li>and then Zoom to be on the other side of the microphone on Steve Frick’s <a href=\"https://anchor.fm/steve-frick/episodes/Travel-Commons---Stories-From-Home-Episode-83-edipo7\">Back &amp; Gone Again podcast</a>.&nbsp; This is the 15th year of TravelCommons; I started in May 2005, and here Steve and I talk about that first episode.</li><li>&nbsp;We had a lot of fun, telling travel stories and talking about our current life-off-the-road. Give it a listen. There’s a link in the show notes, on the TravelCommons Facebook page, and in the Twitter feed.</li><li>Cate Rose left a comment on the Facebook page on the April episode.<ul><li>“I don\'t travel nearly as much as you do Mark but I enjoy your podcasts. These are unprecedented times. We arrived home from a month long rail trip from Italy, up to Sweden at the end of January just as this whole thing was blowing up. And now people, including us, are locked down all over the world. Unbelievable. And here you are with plenty of time to write, but no place to go! We are on Week 4 of social isolation in Western Australia and the novelty is wearing off a little ;-) but it seems to be working so all for the greater good. Thanks for keeping up with the storytelling and letting a crack of life into home isolation! Stay safe.</li><li>Cate - thanks for that note. Sounds like you just got out of Italy in time. If I remember correctly, they started locking down Italy in mid-February. Glad you made it back home safely. And it sounds like Australia and New Zealand have done the best in crushing the Covid curve.</li></ul></li><li>In that same episode, when we talked about post-corona trip planning, I said I thought the first post-lockdown trip most people would take would be a car ride -- more flexibility; easier social distancing. Turns out I was right -- at least according to the company <a href=\"https://www.arrivalist.com/\">Arrivalist</a>, a “visitation intelligence company” that has started publishing a Daily Travel Index measuring consumer road trips of 50 miles or more using data drawn from GPS signals. Road trips on Friday, May 1 were almost back to the pre-pandemic levels of February, with the number of trips in the 100-250 mile range higher than February’s number for the first time since the lockdowns started. You can go to Arrivalist’s website and <a href=\"https://www.arrivalist.com/daily-travel-index/\">play with the data yourself</a> or read an <a href=\"https://www.phocuswire.com/arrivalist-road-trip-surge-data\">analysis by Phocuswright</a>, a travel research firm. Links are in the show notes and my Twitter feed.</li><li>I got yet another email survey, this time from United asking me what would make me comfortable to fly again, and to rank some of their plans. For me, it was pretty easy. I’m not excited about standing in a packed gate area, hearing the gate agent say “This is a completely full flight”, and then spend 2-3 hours shoulder-to-shoulder with a complete stranger, in effect letting that person into my family’s corona exposure space.</li><li>A couple of weeks later (not implying causation, only correlation), all the major US airlines announced that passengers and crew will have to wear masks, they’re moving to strict back-to-front boarding schemes to reduce the number of passengers passing one another, and that they’re blocking/not booking the middle seats, reducing capacity from what had been running over 80% at the beginning of the year down to the 60’s. It was then interesting to watch what happened after Frontier’s CEO did a round of TV interviews at the beginning of this week, saying that they too would block the middle seat -- if a passenger bought a More Room seat for at least $39. Today, after getting a blizzard of red challenge flags from Washington, Frontier reversed course. Just kidding - “It was never our intent” they said, “to profit… from safety”. “ We simply wanted to provide our customers with an option for more space.” Yup. Frontier continuing to position their brand as the Ryanair of the US.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Vidian/52190\">Memories (infiniti loop)</a> by Vidian (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license. Ft: TheDice</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>New World of Travel Insurance</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Interview with Erik Josowitz, an analyst at <a href=\"http://www.insurancequotes.com/\" class=\"aioseop-link\">insuranceQuotes.com</a></li><li>Bridge Music --<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/ramblinglibrarian/55007\">Dawn at the Top of the World ft. copperhead &amp; Robert Seikawitch</a> by Ivan Chew (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Getting Medical Help on the Road</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Back in January, long-time TravelCommons listener Allan Marko talked about the planning he did for the 9-week SE Asia sabbatical he and his wife Chris took last year. Fast forward 4 months, and health care on the road will now become much more important when traveling in the post-lockdown/pre-vaccine world. So let’s continue our conversation with Allan, joined now by his wife Chris, to talk about how they thought about getting health care when they were half a world away from home.&nbsp; It started with the research before they left home…</li><li>Interview with Allan Marko and Chris Chufo</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #163</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_163.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #163 — New World of Travel Insurance; Getting Medical Help on the Road','','inherit','closed','closed','','2747-revision-v1','','','2020-06-09 10:19:43','2020-06-09 15:19:43','',2747,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/06/09/2747-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2778,1,'2020-06-09 11:39:16','2020-06-09 16:39:16','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/DSC_6306-edit.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2770 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/DSC_6306-edit-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\n<figcaption>Can I leave my house now?</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p>I broke Chicago\'s containment for my first post-lockdown trip, a fast drive down I-65. We talk about hotels swapping hospitality for sanitation, Hertz\'s bankruptcy, and tips for travel credit card usage from Brett Holzhauer, the travel card expert at <a title=\"valuepenguin.com\" href=\"http://valuepenguin.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">ValuePenguin.com.</a> All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_164.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/815941426&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #164: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois, as the lockdown here is starting to lift. What’s open and what’s not is still a bit spotty, though I’ve managed to hit a couple of microbreweries with outdoor patios. The opening in Chicago is not dissimilar to what I experienced down in Tennessee last month. I was down in Spring Hill, south of Nashville, two weeks after the non-urban lockdown lifted -- for every place other than the cities of Nashville, Memphis, Knoxville, and Chattanooga. It seemed that everyone was still trying to figure out what to do -- the bar/pizza joint next to my hotel was fully open, but the local bar-be-que joints and the Starbucks were still only doing take-away. Which makes sense; it’s not like there’s a standard playbook on how to re-open an economy. And throughout my consulting career, I’ve learned it’s always easier to shut things down than to start them up.</li><li>The drive south on I-65 from Chicago is one that, I’m not gonna say I can do with my eyes closed, but I’ve been doing it for almost 40 years, starting when I was in business school at the University of Chicago and my family was living in Louisville, KY. I mean, there’s a clump of trees in the median between West Lafayette and Crown Point that’s a milestone for me; I know I’m an hour from home. Which just goes to show you how boring the drive through northern Indiana is when trees in the median are a notable feature.</li><li>The drive between Chicago and Nashville, while not the most exciting, especially through Indiana, it does usually require a bit of timing to thread through Chicago, Indianapolis, Louisville, and Nashville to avoid rush hour in each. On this trip, not so much. I left Chicago after breakfast and was driving 80 mph most of the way, maybe dropping down to 70 through the cities. And I was still getting passed by guys going aggressively faster. And the only time I saw police or state troopers was in front of big road construction sites, cars running with all their lights flashing in front of big barriers, more as a warning to speeders than an attempt to get them. It was, hands down, the easiest drive down I-65 I’ve ever done.</li><li>That wide-open drive may be one of the few things I’ll actually appreciate about this lockdown. Well, that and the $2/gallon gas along the way...</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/50485\">Sunset Boulevard</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Siobhan Dakay, unreal_dm</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>First up, thanks to the TravelCommons listener who goes by the handle Abe Froman, Ferris Bueller’s sausage king of Chicago, for dropping a 5-star review on <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">our iTunes page</a>. Abe writes:<ul><li>“I have been a fan of this podcast for many years. If you are a road warrior or a mileage runner, you will love the tips to make your travel easier.”</li><li>Abe, thanks a lot for this.  I’m glad you’ve enjoyed the podcast</li></ul></li><li>Last year in episodes <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/07/26/podcast-153-travel-by-algorithm-leaving-places-behind/\" title=\"Podcast #153 — Travel By Algorithm; Leaving Places Behind\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">153</a> and <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/09/20/podcast-155-rj-delays-street-food-in-poland-and-hungary/\" title=\"Podcast #155 — RJ Delays; Street Food in Poland and Hungary\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">155</a>, we talked about American Airlines’ retirement of their MD-80’s, the “Mad Dog 80”, the plane on which I earned my first Advantage status -- Gold, and there wasn’t anything higher back then. Last week, <a href=\"https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/delta-air-lines-md-80-last-flight/index.html\">Delta finally retired their last Mad Dogs</a> -- MD-88’s and -90’s. They were supposed to run through the end of the year, but with late ‘80’s technology and fuel efficiency, they were among the first planes in the fleet to be grounded when the lockdown hit. Delta said that “at their peak, the planes accounted for 50% of Delta’s arrivals and departures from” their Atlanta hub.  Which will be a relief to longtime TravelCommons listener Darren Mak, who tweeted at me back at the beginning of March, a picture out the window seat of a Delta MD-88 just in front of the engine cowl, thanking me for mentioning, in episode <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/09/20/podcast-155-rj-delays-street-food-in-poland-and-hungary/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #155 — RJ Delays; Street Food in Poland and Hungary\">155</a>, that whenever I would end up in that same seat, I would wonder — if that engine blows up, will the shrapnel blow out or blow into the cabin. Well Darren, no more worries. We both survived the Mad Dog’s back seat.</li><li>We’ve talked in the past couple of episodes about the first post-lockdown trips would be by car -- more schedule flexibility; no worries of a stranger in the middle seat exhaling 18 inches away from you.  CNBC ran <a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/31/five-charts-that-track-the-us-economy-as-states-reopen.html\">a story</a> last week analyzing the change in the number of requests for directions on Apple Maps in 2020. Using January 13th as the baseline for their comparison, requests for driving and walking directions dropped by 50% in the first month of the lockdowns, but had recovered by May 29th -- the last day of the data series. Transit direction requests had dropped by 75% and were still more than 50% down by the end of May. Now, using January 13th as the baseline probably exaggerates the recovery -- you’d think the number of walking and driving direction requests on a normal Memorial Day weekend would be hugely higher than for the second Monday of January when it was in or below the 30’s for about ⅔’s of the country -- but I don’t want to kill a green shoot with too much skepticism.</li><li>American talked about their own green shoots last week, saying they would be operating 55% of last year’s schedule in July, up from 20% in April and May. Driven mostly by demand from states opening up -- Texas, Florida, and Arizona -- rather than cities like New York, Chicago, and San Francisco that are still under stricter lockdown orders. If I keep pulling on this trend line, I’m thinking by September all those voluntary capacity limits and empty middle seat promises will have faded away.</li><li>The absence of update emails from airline and hotel CEOs this week I think is another green shoot. If things are starting to look up, no need to send me an email extending a bonus award offer or cancellation fee waivers. This has cut into a new hobby of mine, though -- comparing the use of \"in these uncertain times,\" \"in these challenging times,\" and “in these unprecedented times” in these emails. I have a stroke count going. Right now, “unprecedented” is the runaway leader, with “challenging” second, and “uncertain” third.</li><li>I’ve been a Hertz customer on and off over my 35-year travel career -- mostly on. I started my business traveling when I was at IBM, and in the mid-80’s, they had negotiated a smoking rate with Hertz. In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/09/15/podcast-144-outside-airports-hospitality-mentality\">episode 144</a>, I talked about getting to know the woman working in the little Hertz hut at SJC back then, when SJC was still an outdoor airport; and before Hertz Gold, that’s all I needed to get an upgrade. And more recently, I’ve, on balance, had good experiences with Hertz. So I was bummed for a moment when I saw they filed for bankruptcy last month. It wasn’t surprising, though. Hertz was still carrying a big debt load courtesy of a 2005 PE leveraged buyout, and we’ve talked in past episodes about how Uber and Lyft have been eating away at its core airport rental market. So, when travel stopped in March and used car auction prices cratered in April, Hertz tipped over. By now though, we’re kinda used to big travel companies cleaning their debt problems in bankruptcy -- United and American Airlines the most recent examples. So I’m not too worried about losing the rest of my Gold points. In the short term, though, I will be paying more attention to the mileage on the Hertz cars in the Five Star aisle. That’s where I usually see signs of financial distress -- a lot less 500-mile cars and a lot more 25,000-mile cars. And while 25,000 miles on a car doesn’t seem like a lot, remember that rental car miles are kinda like dog years -- you gotta multiply them by, like, 7 to get to regular car miles.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook page</a> or our Instagram account at <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">travelcommons</a> -- or you can post comments on the web site at <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">TravelCommons.com</a>.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Vidian/52190\">Memories (infiniti loop)</a> by Vidian (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license. Ft: TheDice</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>First Post-Lockdown Trips</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>As we talked about a few minutes ago, travel is starting to pick up as the lockdowns ease and people want to see something other than the 4 walls that have surrounded them since mid-March. </li><li>TravelCommons listener Mark Skinner dropped me a line towards the end of May about his first lockdown trip. You may remember Mark from <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/11/30/podcast-157-notes-from-the-baltics-riga-latvia-and-tallinn-estonia/\" title=\"Podcast #157 — Notes from the Baltics: Riga, Latvia and Tallinn, Estonia\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">episode 157</a> back in November when he wrote in to tell us about his day trip from Washington, DC to Hong Kong -- flying out Monday afternoon, returning Tuesday morning -- to take a NASA cosmic ray detector on an over-the-pole flight.  This time, Mark writes -<ul><li>So I had my first trip this past week, since the “before times”. On the way back, I was listening to your recent podcast. Yes, my first trip was via automobile, down to the outer banks of North Carolina. Dare County had recently opened up (the day before!) to allow visitors into the county. </li><li>Stayed at the Hilton Garden Inn. No servicing of the room, and after a few days at this hotel on the beach, things were looking a little dingy. Tropical Storm Arthur squashed any hopes of long walks on the beach. Departed a day early because the storm wasn’t letting up. I thought this was a good use of Hilton points… Take-out only that week, and hotel not helping out by lending any china, glass or utensils. Ending up getting a couple of sets at a dollar store… I contrast this to my last trip in the before time, to Maui, just as things were buttoning up. The Grand Wailea was happy to provide all sorts of stuff to enjoy one’s take-out on the lanai! That trip got cut short as well, due to flights evaporating. </li><li>A highlight of the trip was stopping for lunch in Virginia Beach, which had recently opened out-door seating at restaurants, and enjoyed lunch at a seafood restaurant at an outside table, by the ocean, and greatly enjoyed ordering food and having it brought to the table! The previous “normal” meal had been first evening on Maui, before they went take-out only. </li><li>Next trip that is getting kicked around is Hilton Head in June…. that would involve flying. Crossing fingers about a trip to Austria in August…</li></ul></li><li>Mark, thanks for sending that along. Your experience on the Outer Banks was similar to mine down in Spring Hill, TN. I went back and forth about staying in a hotel vs. an Airbnb. Airbnb -- not as many people passing through the property and some time buffer (24 hours, 72 hours) between guests in the same rooms, but a major hotel chain should have the corporate resources to build out and maybe test a more thorough cleaning program for its properties; maybe with access to stronger, more industrial cleaners. Procrastination ended up making my decision -- while I was going back and forth, the Airbnb property in Spring Hill I was looking at got booked for the front of that week, so I ended up in the Spring Hill Hampton Inn -- another Hilton brand.</li><li>That Monday morning, right before I left Chicago, I checked in on the Hilton app. It even let me pick out my room. This may be old news to Hilton Diamond listeners, but I haven’t stayed in a Hilton for at least a year, and so haven’t been tracking their app improvements. When I arrived at 5:30pm, the front doors were locked, but opening up the app showed me a digital key that opened the front door and my room door. I didn\'t have to physically check in at the front desk which only struck me odd later that night. Whenever I’ve checked in on a hotel’s app before, I’ve still had to go to the front desk so they could see my ID, which was why I’ve never paid much attention to app check-ins. But at this Hampton Inn with full check-in and digital keys, it worked the way I’d always thought it should.</li><li>My in-room experience was the same as Mark’s -- nobody servicing the room, though a guy did stop by the room every now and again asking if I needed extra towels; no morning coffee or breakfast buffet, and eating mostly take-out in the room with some cans of local craft beer bought from the liquor store a couple of doors down. I was pretty rigorous about dumping the food trash right after eating. Waking up to the smell of 8-hour-old bar-be-que rib and cole slaw remnants is never a good start to the day. Hotels are saying it’s all about cleaning and sanitation, but I can’t say that I saw any out-of-the-ordinary efforts while I was there. Maybe what I was experiencing was the cost reductions to fund that behind-the-scenes deep cleaning.</li><li>While Mark’s highlight was his lunch in Virginia Beach, mine was being able to walk into a little family-owned craft beer joint in a strip mall on Spring Hill\'s Main St, order a beer, and then sit down and drink it at the bar. I go into this place every time I\'m there to visit my mother. Seeing them open was a nice little bit of normality -- especially since Chicago didn’t start opening up until last week.</li><li>Don\'t know my next trip yet, but I\'m keeping my eye on Spain, hoping there\'s no second wave before our trip to Barcelona at the end of September.</li><li>Bridge Music --<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/ramblinglibrarian/55007\">Dawn at the Top of the World ft. copperhead &amp; Robert Seikawitch</a> by Ivan Chew (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Travel Credit Cards</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>As we start traveling again, we’ll start pulling out those travel cards -- Hilton or Delta Amex, United or Southwest or Marriott Visas, American MasterCards -- and so I invited Brett Holzhauer, the travel card expert at ValuePenguin.com, a site that goes deep into these cards, to give us some of his advice as we “un-lockdown” ourselves...</li><li>Interview with Brett Holzhauer, the travel card expert at <a href=\"http://valuepenguin.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"valuepenguin.com\">ValuePenguin.com</a></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #164</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_164.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #164 — First Post Lockdown Trips; Travel Credit Cards','','inherit','closed','closed','','2771-revision-v1','','','2020-06-09 11:39:16','2020-06-09 16:39:16','',2771,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/06/09/2771-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2779,1,'2020-06-09 17:13:15','2020-06-09 22:13:15','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/DSC_6306-edit.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2770 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/DSC_6306-edit-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a><figcaption>Can I leave my house now?</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>I broke Chicago\'s containment for my first post-lockdown trip, a fast drive down I-65. We talk about hotels swapping hospitality for sanitation, Hertz\'s bankruptcy, and tips for travel credit card usage from Brett Holzhauer, the travel card expert at <a title=\"valuepenguin.com\" href=\"http://valuepenguin.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">ValuePenguin.com.</a>&nbsp;All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_164.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/837229303&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #164: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois, as the lockdown here is starting to lift. What’s open and what’s not is still a bit spotty, though I’ve managed to hit a couple of microbreweries with outdoor patios. The opening in Chicago is not dissimilar to what I experienced down in Tennessee last month. I was down in Spring Hill, south of Nashville, two weeks after the non-urban lockdown lifted -- for every place other than the cities of Nashville, Memphis, Knoxville, and Chattanooga. It seemed that everyone was still trying to figure out what to do -- the bar/pizza joint next to my hotel was fully open, but the local bar-be-que joints and the Starbucks were still only doing take-away. Which makes sense; it’s not like there’s a standard playbook on how to re-open an economy. And throughout my consulting career, I’ve learned it’s always easier to shut things down than to start them up.</li><li>The drive south on I-65 from Chicago is one that, I’m not gonna say I can do with my eyes closed, but I’ve been doing it for almost 40 years, starting when I was in business school at the University of Chicago and my family was living in Louisville, KY. I mean, there’s a clump of trees in the median between West Lafayette and Crown Point that’s a milestone for me; I know I’m an hour from home. Which just goes to show you how boring the drive through northern Indiana is when trees in the median are a notable feature.</li><li>The drive between Chicago and Nashville, while not the most exciting, especially through Indiana, it does usually require a bit of timing to thread through Chicago, Indianapolis, Louisville, and Nashville to avoid rush hour in each. On this trip, not so much. I left Chicago after breakfast and was driving 80 mph most of the way, maybe dropping down to 70 through the cities. And I was still getting passed by guys going aggressively faster. And the only time I saw police or state troopers was in front of big road construction sites, cars running with all their lights flashing in front of big barriers, more as a warning to speeders than an attempt to get them. It was, hands down, the easiest drive down I-65 I’ve ever done.</li><li>That wide-open drive may be one of the few things I’ll actually appreciate about this lockdown. Well, that and the $2/gallon gas along the way...</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/50485\">Sunset Boulevard</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Siobhan Dakay, unreal_dm</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>First up, thanks to the TravelCommons listener who goes by the handle Abe Froman, Ferris Bueller’s sausage king of Chicago, for dropping a 5-star review on <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">our iTunes page</a>. Abe writes:<ul><li>“I have been a fan of this podcast for many years. If you are a road warrior or a mileage runner, you will love the tips to make your travel easier.”</li><li>Abe, thanks a lot for this.&nbsp; I’m glad you’ve enjoyed the podcast</li></ul></li><li>Last year in episodes <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/07/26/podcast-153-travel-by-algorithm-leaving-places-behind/\" title=\"Podcast #153 — Travel By Algorithm; Leaving Places Behind\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">153</a> and <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/09/20/podcast-155-rj-delays-street-food-in-poland-and-hungary/\" title=\"Podcast #155 — RJ Delays; Street Food in Poland and Hungary\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">155</a>, we talked about American Airlines’ retirement of their MD-80’s, the “Mad Dog 80”, the plane on which I earned my first Advantage status -- Gold, and there wasn’t anything higher back then. Last week, <a href=\"https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/delta-air-lines-md-80-last-flight/index.html\">Delta finally retired their last Mad Dogs</a> -- MD-88’s and -90’s. They were supposed to run through the end of the year, but with late ‘80’s technology and fuel efficiency, they were among the first planes in the fleet to be grounded when the lockdown hit. Delta said that “at their peak, the planes accounted for 50% of Delta’s arrivals and departures from” their Atlanta hub.&nbsp; Which will be a relief to longtime TravelCommons listener Darren Mak, who tweeted at me back at the beginning of March, a picture out the window seat of a Delta MD-88 just in front of the engine cowl, thanking me for mentioning, in episode <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/09/20/podcast-155-rj-delays-street-food-in-poland-and-hungary/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #155 — RJ Delays; Street Food in Poland and Hungary\">155</a>, that whenever I would end up in that same seat, I would wonder — if that engine blows up, will the shrapnel blow out or blow into the cabin. Well Darren, no more worries. We both survived the Mad Dog’s back seat.</li><li>We’ve talked in the past couple of episodes about the first post-lockdown trips would be by car -- more schedule flexibility; no worries of a stranger in the middle seat exhaling 18 inches away from you.&nbsp; CNBC ran <a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/31/five-charts-that-track-the-us-economy-as-states-reopen.html\">a story</a> last week analyzing the change in the number of requests for directions on Apple Maps in 2020. Using January 13th as the baseline for their comparison, requests for driving and walking directions dropped by 50% in the first month of the lockdowns, but had recovered by May 29th -- the last day of the data series. Transit direction requests had dropped by 75% and were still more than 50% down by the end of May. Now, using January 13th as the baseline probably exaggerates the recovery -- you’d think the number of walking and driving direction requests on a normal Memorial Day weekend would be hugely higher than for the second Monday of January when it was in or below the 30’s for about ⅔’s of the country -- but I don’t want to kill a green shoot with too much skepticism.</li><li>American talked about their own green shoots last week, saying they would be operating 55% of last year’s schedule in July, up from 20% in April and May. Driven mostly by demand from states opening up -- Texas, Florida, and Arizona -- rather than cities like New York, Chicago, and San Francisco that are still under stricter lockdown orders. If I keep pulling on this trend line, I’m thinking by September all those voluntary capacity limits and empty middle seat promises will have faded away.</li><li>The absence of update emails from airline and hotel CEOs this week I think is another green shoot. If things are starting to look up, no need to send me an email extending a bonus award offer or cancellation fee waivers. This has cut into a new hobby of mine, though -- comparing the use of \"in these uncertain times,\" \"in these challenging times,\" and “in these unprecedented times” in these emails. I have a stroke count going. Right now, “unprecedented” is the runaway leader, with “challenging” second, and “uncertain” third.</li><li>I’ve been a Hertz customer on and off over my 35-year travel career -- mostly on. I started my business traveling when I was at IBM, and in the mid-80’s, they had negotiated a smoking rate with Hertz. In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/09/15/podcast-144-outside-airports-hospitality-mentality\">episode 144</a>, I talked about getting to know the woman working in the little Hertz hut at SJC back then, when SJC was still an outdoor airport; and before Hertz Gold, that’s all I needed to get an upgrade. And more recently, I’ve, on balance, had good experiences with Hertz. So I was bummed for a moment when I saw they filed for bankruptcy last month. It wasn’t surprising, though. Hertz was still carrying a big debt load courtesy of a 2005 PE leveraged buyout, and we’ve talked in past episodes about how Uber and Lyft have been eating away at its core airport rental market. So, when travel stopped in March and used car auction prices cratered in April, Hertz tipped over. By now though, we’re kinda used to big travel companies cleaning their debt problems in bankruptcy -- United and American Airlines the most recent examples. So I’m not too worried about losing the rest of my Gold points. In the short term, though, I will be paying more attention to the mileage on the Hertz cars in the Five Star aisle. That’s where I usually see signs of financial distress -- a lot less 500-mile cars and a lot more 25,000-mile cars. And while 25,000 miles on a car doesn’t seem like a lot, remember that rental car miles are kinda like dog years -- you gotta multiply them by, like, 7 to get to regular car miles.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook page</a> or our Instagram account at <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">travelcommons</a> -- or you can post comments on the web site at <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">TravelCommons.com</a>.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Vidian/52190\">Memories (infiniti loop)</a> by Vidian (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license. Ft: TheDice</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>First Post-Lockdown Trips</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>As we talked about a few minutes ago, travel is starting to pick up as the lockdowns ease and people want to see something other than the 4 walls that have surrounded them since mid-March.&nbsp;</li><li>TravelCommons listener Mark Skinner dropped me a line towards the end of May about his first lockdown trip. You may remember Mark from <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/11/30/podcast-157-notes-from-the-baltics-riga-latvia-and-tallinn-estonia/\" title=\"Podcast #157 — Notes from the Baltics: Riga, Latvia and Tallinn, Estonia\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">episode 157</a> back in November when he wrote in to tell us about his day trip from Washington, DC to Hong Kong -- flying out Monday afternoon, returning Tuesday morning -- to take a NASA cosmic ray detector on an over-the-pole flight.&nbsp; This time, Mark writes -<ul><li>So I had my first trip this past week, since the “before times”. On the way back, I was listening to your recent podcast. Yes, my first trip was via automobile, down to the outer banks of North Carolina. Dare County had recently opened up (the day before!) to allow visitors into the county.&nbsp;</li><li>Stayed at the Hilton Garden Inn. No servicing of the room, and after a few days at this hotel on the beach, things were looking a little dingy. Tropical Storm Arthur squashed any hopes of long walks on the beach. Departed a day early because the storm wasn’t letting up. I thought this was a good use of Hilton points… Take-out only that week, and hotel not helping out by lending any china, glass or utensils. Ending up getting a couple of sets at a dollar store… I contrast this to my last trip in the before time, to Maui, just as things were buttoning up. The Grand Wailea was happy to provide all sorts of stuff to enjoy one’s take-out on the lanai! That trip got cut short as well, due to flights evaporating.&nbsp;</li><li>A highlight of the trip was stopping for lunch in Virginia Beach, which had recently opened out-door seating at restaurants, and enjoyed lunch at a seafood restaurant at an outside table, by the ocean, and greatly enjoyed ordering food and having it brought to the table! The previous “normal” meal had been first evening on Maui, before they went take-out only.&nbsp;</li><li>Next trip that is getting kicked around is Hilton Head in June…. that would involve flying. Crossing fingers about a trip to Austria in August…</li></ul></li><li>Mark, thanks for sending that along. Your experience on the Outer Banks was similar to mine down in Spring Hill, TN. I went back and forth about staying in a hotel vs. an Airbnb. Airbnb -- not as many people passing through the property and some time buffer (24 hours, 72 hours) between guests in the same rooms, but a major hotel chain should have the corporate resources to build out and maybe test a more thorough cleaning program for its properties; maybe with access to stronger, more industrial cleaners. Procrastination ended up making my decision -- while I was going back and forth, the Airbnb property in Spring Hill I was looking at got booked for the front of that week, so I ended up in the Spring Hill Hampton Inn -- another Hilton brand.</li><li>That Monday morning, right before I left Chicago, I checked in on the Hilton app. It even let me pick out my room. This may be old news to Hilton Diamond listeners, but I haven’t stayed in a Hilton for at least a year, and so haven’t been tracking their app improvements. When I arrived at 5:30pm, the front doors were locked, but opening up the app showed me a digital key that opened the front door and my room door. I didn\'t have to physically check in at the front desk which only struck me odd later that night. Whenever I’ve checked in on a hotel’s app before, I’ve still had to go to the front desk so they could see my ID, which was why I’ve never paid much attention to app check-ins. But at this Hampton Inn with full check-in and digital keys, it worked the way I’d always thought it should.</li><li>My in-room experience was the same as Mark’s -- nobody servicing the room, though a guy did stop by the room every now and again asking if I needed extra towels; no morning coffee or breakfast buffet, and eating mostly take-out in the room with some cans of local craft beer bought from the liquor store a couple of doors down. I was pretty rigorous about dumping the food trash right after eating. Waking up to the smell of 8-hour-old bar-be-que rib and cole slaw remnants is never a good start to the day. Hotels are saying it’s all about cleaning and sanitation, but I can’t say that I saw any out-of-the-ordinary efforts while I was there. Maybe what I was experiencing was the cost reductions to fund that behind-the-scenes deep cleaning.</li><li>While Mark’s highlight was his lunch in Virginia Beach, mine was being able to walk into a little family-owned craft beer joint in a strip mall on Spring Hill\'s Main St, order a beer, and then sit down and drink it at the bar. I go into this place every time I\'m there to visit my mother. Seeing them open was a nice little bit of normality -- especially since Chicago didn’t start opening up until last week.</li><li>Don\'t know my next trip yet, but I\'m keeping my eye on Spain, hoping there\'s no second wave before our trip to Barcelona at the end of September.</li><li>Bridge Music --<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/ramblinglibrarian/55007\">Dawn at the Top of the World ft. copperhead &amp; Robert Seikawitch</a> by Ivan Chew (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Travel Credit Cards</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>As we start traveling again, we’ll start pulling out those travel cards -- Hilton or Delta Amex, United or Southwest or Marriott Visas, American MasterCards -- and so I invited Brett Holzhauer, the travel card expert at ValuePenguin.com, a site that goes deep into these cards, to give us some of his advice as we “un-lockdown” ourselves...</li><li>Interview with Brett Holzhauer, the travel card expert at <a href=\"http://valuepenguin.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"valuepenguin.com\">ValuePenguin.com</a></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #164</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_164.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #164 — First Post Lockdown Trips; Travel Credit Cards','','inherit','closed','closed','','2771-revision-v1','','','2020-06-09 17:13:15','2020-06-09 22:13:15','',2771,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/06/09/2771-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2780,1,'2020-06-09 17:36:00','2020-06-09 22:36:00','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/DSC_6306-edit.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2770 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/DSC_6306-edit-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a><figcaption>Can I leave my house now?</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>I broke Chicago\'s containment for my first post-lockdown trip, a fast drive down I-65. We talk about hotels swapping hospitality for sanitation, Hertz\'s bankruptcy, and tips for travel credit card usage from Brett Holzhauer, the travel card expert at <a title=\"valuepenguin.com\" href=\"http://valuepenguin.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">ValuePenguin.com.</a>&nbsp;All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_164.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/837229303&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #164: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois, as the lockdown here is starting to lift. What’s open and what’s not is still a bit spotty, though I’ve managed to hit a couple of microbreweries with outdoor patios. The opening in Chicago is not dissimilar to what I experienced down in Tennessee last month. I was down in Spring Hill, south of Nashville, two weeks after the non-urban lockdown lifted -- for every place other than the cities of Nashville, Memphis, Knoxville, and Chattanooga. It seemed that everyone was still trying to figure out what to do -- the bar/pizza joint next to my hotel was fully open, but the local bar-be-que joints and the Starbucks were still only doing take-away. Which makes sense; it’s not like there’s a standard playbook on how to re-open an economy. And throughout my consulting career, I’ve learned it’s always easier to shut things down than to start them up.</li><li>The drive south on I-65 from Chicago is one that, I’m not gonna say I can do with my eyes closed, but I’ve been doing it for almost 40 years, starting when I was in business school at the University of Chicago and my family was living in Louisville, KY. I mean, there’s a clump of trees in the median between West Lafayette and Crown Point that’s a milestone for me; I know I’m an hour from home. Which just goes to show you how boring the drive through northern Indiana is when trees in the median are a notable feature.</li><li>The drive between Chicago and Nashville, while not the most exciting, especially through Indiana, it does usually require a bit of timing to thread through Chicago, Indianapolis, Louisville, and Nashville to avoid rush hour in each. On this trip, not so much. I left Chicago after breakfast and was driving 80 mph most of the way, maybe dropping down to 70 through the cities. And I was still getting passed by guys going aggressively faster. And the only time I saw police or state troopers was in front of big road construction sites, cars running with all their lights flashing in front of big barriers, more as a warning to speeders than an attempt to get them. It was, hands down, the easiest drive down I-65 I’ve ever done.</li><li>That wide-open drive may be one of the few things I’ll actually appreciate about this lockdown. Well, that and the $2/gallon gas along the way...</li><li>Bridge Music — Brilliant Day by Hans Atom (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hansatom/47919 Ft: Lisa DeBenedictis</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>First up, thanks to the TravelCommons listener who goes by the handle Abe Froman, Ferris Bueller’s sausage king of Chicago, for dropping a 5-star review on <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">our iTunes page</a>. Abe writes:<ul><li>“I have been a fan of this podcast for many years. If you are a road warrior or a mileage runner, you will love the tips to make your travel easier.”</li><li>Abe, thanks a lot for this.&nbsp; I’m glad you’ve enjoyed the podcast</li></ul></li><li>Last year in episodes <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/07/26/podcast-153-travel-by-algorithm-leaving-places-behind/\" title=\"Podcast #153 — Travel By Algorithm; Leaving Places Behind\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">153</a> and <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/09/20/podcast-155-rj-delays-street-food-in-poland-and-hungary/\" title=\"Podcast #155 — RJ Delays; Street Food in Poland and Hungary\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">155</a>, we talked about American Airlines’ retirement of their MD-80’s, the “Mad Dog 80”, the plane on which I earned my first Advantage status -- Gold, and there wasn’t anything higher back then. Last week, <a href=\"https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/delta-air-lines-md-80-last-flight/index.html\">Delta finally retired their last Mad Dogs</a> -- MD-88’s and -90’s. They were supposed to run through the end of the year, but with late ‘80’s technology and fuel efficiency, they were among the first planes in the fleet to be grounded when the lockdown hit. Delta said that “at their peak, the planes accounted for 50% of Delta’s arrivals and departures from” their Atlanta hub.&nbsp; Which will be a relief to longtime TravelCommons listener Darren Mak, who tweeted at me back at the beginning of March, a picture out the window seat of a Delta MD-88 just in front of the engine cowl, thanking me for mentioning, in episode <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/09/20/podcast-155-rj-delays-street-food-in-poland-and-hungary/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #155 — RJ Delays; Street Food in Poland and Hungary\">155</a>, that whenever I would end up in that same seat, I would wonder — if that engine blows up, will the shrapnel blow out or blow into the cabin. Well Darren, no more worries. We both survived the Mad Dog’s back seat.</li><li>We’ve talked in the past couple of episodes about the first post-lockdown trips would be by car -- more schedule flexibility; no worries of a stranger in the middle seat exhaling 18 inches away from you.&nbsp; CNBC ran <a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/31/five-charts-that-track-the-us-economy-as-states-reopen.html\">a story</a> last week analyzing the change in the number of requests for directions on Apple Maps in 2020. Using January 13th as the baseline for their comparison, requests for driving and walking directions dropped by 50% in the first month of the lockdowns, but had recovered by May 29th -- the last day of the data series. Transit direction requests had dropped by 75% and were still more than 50% down by the end of May. Now, using January 13th as the baseline probably exaggerates the recovery -- you’d think the number of walking and driving direction requests on a normal Memorial Day weekend would be hugely higher than for the second Monday of January when it was in or below the 30’s for about ⅔’s of the country -- but I don’t want to kill a green shoot with too much skepticism.</li><li>American talked about their own green shoots last week, saying they would be operating 55% of last year’s schedule in July, up from 20% in April and May. Driven mostly by demand from states opening up -- Texas, Florida, and Arizona -- rather than cities like New York, Chicago, and San Francisco that are still under stricter lockdown orders. If I keep pulling on this trend line, I’m thinking by September all those voluntary capacity limits and empty middle seat promises will have faded away.</li><li>The absence of update emails from airline and hotel CEOs this week I think is another green shoot. If things are starting to look up, no need to send me an email extending a bonus award offer or cancellation fee waivers. This has cut into a new hobby of mine, though -- comparing the use of \"in these uncertain times,\" \"in these challenging times,\" and “in these unprecedented times” in these emails. I have a stroke count going. Right now, “unprecedented” is the runaway leader, with “challenging” second, and “uncertain” third.</li><li>I’ve been a Hertz customer on and off over my 35-year travel career -- mostly on. I started my business traveling when I was at IBM, and in the mid-80’s, they had negotiated a smoking rate with Hertz. In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/09/15/podcast-144-outside-airports-hospitality-mentality\">episode 144</a>, I talked about getting to know the woman working in the little Hertz hut at SJC back then, when SJC was still an outdoor airport; and before Hertz Gold, that’s all I needed to get an upgrade. And more recently, I’ve, on balance, had good experiences with Hertz. So I was bummed for a moment when I saw they filed for bankruptcy last month. It wasn’t surprising, though. Hertz was still carrying a big debt load courtesy of a 2005 PE leveraged buyout, and we’ve talked in past episodes about how Uber and Lyft have been eating away at its core airport rental market. So, when travel stopped in March and used car auction prices cratered in April, Hertz tipped over. By now though, we’re kinda used to big travel companies cleaning their debt problems in bankruptcy -- United and American Airlines the most recent examples. So I’m not too worried about losing the rest of my Gold points. In the short term, though, I will be paying more attention to the mileage on the Hertz cars in the Five Star aisle. That’s where I usually see signs of financial distress -- a lot less 500-mile cars and a lot more 25,000-mile cars. And while 25,000 miles on a car doesn’t seem like a lot, remember that rental car miles are kinda like dog years -- you gotta multiply them by, like, 7 to get to regular car miles.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook page</a> or our Instagram account at <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">travelcommons</a> -- or you can post comments on the web site at <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">TravelCommons.com</a>.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Vidian/52190\">Memories (infiniti loop)</a> by Vidian (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license. Ft: TheDice</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>First Post-Lockdown Trips</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>As we talked about a few minutes ago, travel is starting to pick up as the lockdowns ease and people want to see something other than the 4 walls that have surrounded them since mid-March.&nbsp;</li><li>TravelCommons listener Mark Skinner dropped me a line towards the end of May about his first lockdown trip. You may remember Mark from <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/11/30/podcast-157-notes-from-the-baltics-riga-latvia-and-tallinn-estonia/\" title=\"Podcast #157 — Notes from the Baltics: Riga, Latvia and Tallinn, Estonia\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">episode 157</a> back in November when he wrote in to tell us about his day trip from Washington, DC to Hong Kong -- flying out Monday afternoon, returning Tuesday morning -- to take a NASA cosmic ray detector on an over-the-pole flight.&nbsp; This time, Mark writes -<ul><li>So I had my first trip this past week, since the “before times”. On the way back, I was listening to your recent podcast. Yes, my first trip was via automobile, down to the outer banks of North Carolina. Dare County had recently opened up (the day before!) to allow visitors into the county.&nbsp;</li><li>Stayed at the Hilton Garden Inn. No servicing of the room, and after a few days at this hotel on the beach, things were looking a little dingy. Tropical Storm Arthur squashed any hopes of long walks on the beach. Departed a day early because the storm wasn’t letting up. I thought this was a good use of Hilton points… Take-out only that week, and hotel not helping out by lending any china, glass or utensils. Ending up getting a couple of sets at a dollar store… I contrast this to my last trip in the before time, to Maui, just as things were buttoning up. The Grand Wailea was happy to provide all sorts of stuff to enjoy one’s take-out on the lanai! That trip got cut short as well, due to flights evaporating.&nbsp;</li><li>A highlight of the trip was stopping for lunch in Virginia Beach, which had recently opened out-door seating at restaurants, and enjoyed lunch at a seafood restaurant at an outside table, by the ocean, and greatly enjoyed ordering food and having it brought to the table! The previous “normal” meal had been first evening on Maui, before they went take-out only.&nbsp;</li><li>Next trip that is getting kicked around is Hilton Head in June…. that would involve flying. Crossing fingers about a trip to Austria in August…</li></ul></li><li>Mark, thanks for sending that along. Your experience on the Outer Banks was similar to mine down in Spring Hill, TN. I went back and forth about staying in a hotel vs. an Airbnb. Airbnb -- not as many people passing through the property and some time buffer (24 hours, 72 hours) between guests in the same rooms, but a major hotel chain should have the corporate resources to build out and maybe test a more thorough cleaning program for its properties; maybe with access to stronger, more industrial cleaners. Procrastination ended up making my decision -- while I was going back and forth, the Airbnb property in Spring Hill I was looking at got booked for the front of that week, so I ended up in the Spring Hill Hampton Inn -- another Hilton brand.</li><li>That Monday morning, right before I left Chicago, I checked in on the Hilton app. It even let me pick out my room. This may be old news to Hilton Diamond listeners, but I haven’t stayed in a Hilton for at least a year, and so haven’t been tracking their app improvements. When I arrived at 5:30pm, the front doors were locked, but opening up the app showed me a digital key that opened the front door and my room door. I didn\'t have to physically check in at the front desk which only struck me odd later that night. Whenever I’ve checked in on a hotel’s app before, I’ve still had to go to the front desk so they could see my ID, which was why I’ve never paid much attention to app check-ins. But at this Hampton Inn with full check-in and digital keys, it worked the way I’d always thought it should.</li><li>My in-room experience was the same as Mark’s -- nobody servicing the room, though a guy did stop by the room every now and again asking if I needed extra towels; no morning coffee or breakfast buffet, and eating mostly take-out in the room with some cans of local craft beer bought from the liquor store a couple of doors down. I was pretty rigorous about dumping the food trash right after eating. Waking up to the smell of 8-hour-old bar-be-que rib and cole slaw remnants is never a good start to the day. Hotels are saying it’s all about cleaning and sanitation, but I can’t say that I saw any out-of-the-ordinary efforts while I was there. Maybe what I was experiencing was the cost reductions to fund that behind-the-scenes deep cleaning.</li><li>While Mark’s highlight was his lunch in Virginia Beach, mine was being able to walk into a little family-owned craft beer joint in a strip mall on Spring Hill\'s Main St, order a beer, and then sit down and drink it at the bar. I go into this place every time I\'m there to visit my mother. Seeing them open was a nice little bit of normality -- especially since Chicago didn’t start opening up until last week.</li><li>Don\'t know my next trip yet, but I\'m keeping my eye on Spain, hoping there\'s no second wave before our trip to Barcelona at the end of September.</li><li>Bridge Music --<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/ramblinglibrarian/55007\">Dawn at the Top of the World ft. copperhead &amp; Robert Seikawitch</a> by Ivan Chew (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Travel Credit Cards</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>As we start traveling again, we’ll start pulling out those travel cards -- Hilton or Delta Amex, United or Southwest or Marriott Visas, American MasterCards -- and so I invited Brett Holzhauer, the travel card expert at ValuePenguin.com, a site that goes deep into these cards, to give us some of his advice as we “un-lockdown” ourselves...</li><li>Interview with Brett Holzhauer, the travel card expert at <a href=\"http://valuepenguin.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"valuepenguin.com\">ValuePenguin.com</a></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #164</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_164.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #164 — First Post Lockdown Trips; Travel Credit Cards','','inherit','closed','closed','','2771-revision-v1','','','2020-06-09 17:36:00','2020-06-09 22:36:00','',2771,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/06/09/2771-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2781,1,'2020-06-09 17:38:58','2020-06-09 22:38:58','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/DSC_6306-edit.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2770 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/DSC_6306-edit-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a><figcaption>Can I leave my house now?</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>I broke Chicago\'s containment for my first post-lockdown trip, a fast drive down I-65. We talk about hotels swapping hospitality for sanitation, Hertz\'s bankruptcy, and tips for travel credit card usage from Brett Holzhauer, the travel card expert at <a title=\"valuepenguin.com\" href=\"http://valuepenguin.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">ValuePenguin.com.</a>&nbsp;All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_164.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/837229303&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #164: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois, as the lockdown here is starting to lift. What’s open and what’s not is still a bit spotty, though I’ve managed to hit a couple of microbreweries with outdoor patios. The opening in Chicago is not dissimilar to what I experienced down in Tennessee last month. I was down in Spring Hill, south of Nashville, two weeks after the non-urban lockdown lifted -- for every place other than the cities of Nashville, Memphis, Knoxville, and Chattanooga. It seemed that everyone was still trying to figure out what to do -- the bar/pizza joint next to my hotel was fully open, but the local bar-be-que joints and the Starbucks were still only doing take-away. Which makes sense; it’s not like there’s a standard playbook on how to re-open an economy. And throughout my consulting career, I’ve learned it’s always easier to shut things down than to start them up.</li><li>The drive south on I-65 from Chicago is one that, I’m not gonna say I can do with my eyes closed, but I’ve been doing it for almost 40 years, starting when I was in business school at the University of Chicago and my family was living in Louisville, KY. I mean, there’s a clump of trees in the median between West Lafayette and Crown Point that’s a milestone for me; I know I’m an hour from home. Which just goes to show you how boring the drive through northern Indiana is when trees in the median are a notable feature.</li><li>The drive between Chicago and Nashville, while not the most exciting, especially through Indiana, it does usually require a bit of timing to thread through Chicago, Indianapolis, Louisville, and Nashville to avoid rush hour in each. On this trip, not so much. I left Chicago after breakfast and was driving 80 mph most of the way, maybe dropping down to 70 through the cities. And I was still getting passed by guys going aggressively faster. And the only time I saw police or state troopers was in front of big road construction sites, cars running with all their lights flashing in front of big barriers, more as a warning to speeders than an attempt to get them. It was, hands down, the easiest drive down I-65 I’ve ever done.</li><li>That wide-open drive may be one of the few things I’ll actually appreciate about this lockdown. Well, that and the $2/gallon gas along the way...</li><li>Bridge Music — Brilliant Day by Hans Atom (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hansatom/47919 Ft: Lisa DeBenedictis</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>First up, thanks to the TravelCommons listener who goes by the handle Abe Froman, Ferris Bueller’s sausage king of Chicago, for dropping a 5-star review on <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">our iTunes page</a>. Abe writes:<ul><li>“I have been a fan of this podcast for many years. If you are a road warrior or a mileage runner, you will love the tips to make your travel easier.”</li><li>Abe, thanks a lot for this.  I’m glad you’ve enjoyed the podcast</li></ul></li><li>Last year in episodes <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/07/26/podcast-153-travel-by-algorithm-leaving-places-behind/\" title=\"Podcast #153 — Travel By Algorithm; Leaving Places Behind\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">153</a> and <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/09/20/podcast-155-rj-delays-street-food-in-poland-and-hungary/\" title=\"Podcast #155 — RJ Delays; Street Food in Poland and Hungary\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">155</a>, we talked about American Airlines’ retirement of their MD-80’s, the “Mad Dog 80”, the plane on which I earned my first Advantage status -- Gold, and there wasn’t anything higher back then. Last week, <a href=\"https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/delta-air-lines-md-80-last-flight/index.html\">Delta finally retired their last Mad Dogs</a> -- MD-88’s and -90’s. They were supposed to run through the end of the year, but with late ‘80’s technology and fuel efficiency, they were among the first planes in the fleet to be grounded when the lockdown hit. Delta said that “at their peak, the planes accounted for 50% of Delta’s arrivals and departures from” their Atlanta hub.  Which will be a relief to longtime TravelCommons listener Darren Mak, who tweeted at me back at the beginning of March, a picture out the window seat of a Delta MD-88 just in front of the engine cowl, thanking me for mentioning, in episode <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/09/20/podcast-155-rj-delays-street-food-in-poland-and-hungary/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #155 — RJ Delays; Street Food in Poland and Hungary\">155</a>, that whenever I would end up in that same seat, I would wonder — if that engine blows up, will the shrapnel blow out or blow into the cabin. Well Darren, no more worries. We both survived the Mad Dog’s back seat.</li><li>We’ve talked in the past couple of episodes about the first post-lockdown trips would be by car -- more schedule flexibility; no worries of a stranger in the middle seat exhaling 18 inches away from you.  CNBC ran <a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/31/five-charts-that-track-the-us-economy-as-states-reopen.html\">a story</a> last week analyzing the change in the number of requests for directions on Apple Maps in 2020. Using January 13th as the baseline for their comparison, requests for driving and walking directions dropped by 50% in the first month of the lockdowns, but had recovered by May 29th -- the last day of the data series. Transit direction requests had dropped by 75% and were still more than 50% down by the end of May. Now, using January 13th as the baseline probably exaggerates the recovery -- you’d think the number of walking and driving direction requests on a normal Memorial Day weekend would be hugely higher than for the second Monday of January when it was in or below the 30’s for about ⅔’s of the country -- but I don’t want to kill a green shoot with too much skepticism.</li><li>American talked about their own green shoots last week, saying they would be operating 55% of last year’s schedule in July, up from 20% in April and May. Driven mostly by demand from states opening up -- Texas, Florida, and Arizona -- rather than cities like New York, Chicago, and San Francisco that are still under stricter lockdown orders. If I keep pulling on this trend line, I’m thinking by September all those voluntary capacity limits and empty middle seat promises will have faded away.</li><li>The absence of update emails from airline and hotel CEOs this week I think is another green shoot. If things are starting to look up, no need to send me an email extending a bonus award offer or cancellation fee waivers. This has cut into a new hobby of mine, though -- comparing the use of \"in these uncertain times,\" \"in these challenging times,\" and “in these unprecedented times” in these emails. I have a stroke count going. Right now, “unprecedented” is the runaway leader, with “challenging” second, and “uncertain” third.</li><li>I’ve been a Hertz customer on and off over my 35-year travel career -- mostly on. I started my business traveling when I was at IBM, and in the mid-80’s, they had negotiated a smoking rate with Hertz. In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/09/15/podcast-144-outside-airports-hospitality-mentality\">episode 144</a>, I talked about getting to know the woman working in the little Hertz hut at SJC back then, when SJC was still an outdoor airport; and before Hertz Gold, that’s all I needed to get an upgrade. And more recently, I’ve, on balance, had good experiences with Hertz. So I was bummed for a moment when I saw they filed for bankruptcy last month. It wasn’t surprising, though. Hertz was still carrying a big debt load courtesy of a 2005 PE leveraged buyout, and we’ve talked in past episodes about how Uber and Lyft have been eating away at its core airport rental market. So, when travel stopped in March and used car auction prices cratered in April, Hertz tipped over. By now though, we’re kinda used to big travel companies cleaning their debt problems in bankruptcy -- United and American Airlines the most recent examples. So I’m not too worried about losing the rest of my Gold points. In the short term, though, I will be paying more attention to the mileage on the Hertz cars in the Five Star aisle. That’s where I usually see signs of financial distress -- a lot less 500-mile cars and a lot more 25,000-mile cars. And while 25,000 miles on a car doesn’t seem like a lot, remember that rental car miles are kinda like dog years -- you gotta multiply them by, like, 7 to get to regular car miles.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook page</a> or our Instagram account at <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">travelcommons</a> -- or you can post comments on the web site at <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">TravelCommons.com</a>.</li><li>Bridge Music —  <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Suenjo/11162\">Natchoongi (New Hope Remix)</a> by Suenjo (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>First Post-Lockdown Trips</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>As we talked about a few minutes ago, travel is starting to pick up as the lockdowns ease and people want to see something other than the 4 walls that have surrounded them since mid-March. </li><li>TravelCommons listener Mark Skinner dropped me a line towards the end of May about his first lockdown trip. You may remember Mark from <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/11/30/podcast-157-notes-from-the-baltics-riga-latvia-and-tallinn-estonia/\" title=\"Podcast #157 — Notes from the Baltics: Riga, Latvia and Tallinn, Estonia\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">episode 157</a> back in November when he wrote in to tell us about his day trip from Washington, DC to Hong Kong -- flying out Monday afternoon, returning Tuesday morning -- to take a NASA cosmic ray detector on an over-the-pole flight.  This time, Mark writes -<ul><li>So I had my first trip this past week, since the “before times”. On the way back, I was listening to your recent podcast. Yes, my first trip was via automobile, down to the outer banks of North Carolina. Dare County had recently opened up (the day before!) to allow visitors into the county. </li><li>Stayed at the Hilton Garden Inn. No servicing of the room, and after a few days at this hotel on the beach, things were looking a little dingy. Tropical Storm Arthur squashed any hopes of long walks on the beach. Departed a day early because the storm wasn’t letting up. I thought this was a good use of Hilton points… Take-out only that week, and hotel not helping out by lending any china, glass or utensils. Ending up getting a couple of sets at a dollar store… I contrast this to my last trip in the before time, to Maui, just as things were buttoning up. The Grand Wailea was happy to provide all sorts of stuff to enjoy one’s take-out on the lanai! That trip got cut short as well, due to flights evaporating. </li><li>A highlight of the trip was stopping for lunch in Virginia Beach, which had recently opened out-door seating at restaurants, and enjoyed lunch at a seafood restaurant at an outside table, by the ocean, and greatly enjoyed ordering food and having it brought to the table! The previous “normal” meal had been first evening on Maui, before they went take-out only. </li><li>Next trip that is getting kicked around is Hilton Head in June…. that would involve flying. Crossing fingers about a trip to Austria in August…</li></ul></li><li>Mark, thanks for sending that along. Your experience on the Outer Banks was similar to mine down in Spring Hill, TN. I went back and forth about staying in a hotel vs. an Airbnb. Airbnb -- not as many people passing through the property and some time buffer (24 hours, 72 hours) between guests in the same rooms, but a major hotel chain should have the corporate resources to build out and maybe test a more thorough cleaning program for its properties; maybe with access to stronger, more industrial cleaners. Procrastination ended up making my decision -- while I was going back and forth, the Airbnb property in Spring Hill I was looking at got booked for the front of that week, so I ended up in the Spring Hill Hampton Inn -- another Hilton brand.</li><li>That Monday morning, right before I left Chicago, I checked in on the Hilton app. It even let me pick out my room. This may be old news to Hilton Diamond listeners, but I haven’t stayed in a Hilton for at least a year, and so haven’t been tracking their app improvements. When I arrived at 5:30pm, the front doors were locked, but opening up the app showed me a digital key that opened the front door and my room door. I didn\'t have to physically check in at the front desk which only struck me odd later that night. Whenever I’ve checked in on a hotel’s app before, I’ve still had to go to the front desk so they could see my ID, which was why I’ve never paid much attention to app check-ins. But at this Hampton Inn with full check-in and digital keys, it worked the way I’d always thought it should.</li><li>My in-room experience was the same as Mark’s -- nobody servicing the room, though a guy did stop by the room every now and again asking if I needed extra towels; no morning coffee or breakfast buffet, and eating mostly take-out in the room with some cans of local craft beer bought from the liquor store a couple of doors down. I was pretty rigorous about dumping the food trash right after eating. Waking up to the smell of 8-hour-old bar-be-que rib and cole slaw remnants is never a good start to the day. Hotels are saying it’s all about cleaning and sanitation, but I can’t say that I saw any out-of-the-ordinary efforts while I was there. Maybe what I was experiencing was the cost reductions to fund that behind-the-scenes deep cleaning.</li><li>While Mark’s highlight was his lunch in Virginia Beach, mine was being able to walk into a little family-owned craft beer joint in a strip mall on Spring Hill\'s Main St, order a beer, and then sit down and drink it at the bar. I go into this place every time I\'m there to visit my mother. Seeing them open was a nice little bit of normality -- especially since Chicago didn’t start opening up until last week.</li><li>Don\'t know my next trip yet, but I\'m keeping my eye on Spain, hoping there\'s no second wave before our trip to Barcelona at the end of September.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/53277\">Fistful of Dub</a> (Feat. Snowflake and DJ Vadim) by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: snowflake and DJ Vadim</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Travel Credit Cards</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>As we start traveling again, we’ll start pulling out those travel cards -- Hilton or Delta Amex, United or Southwest or Marriott Visas, American MasterCards -- and so I invited Brett Holzhauer, the travel card expert at ValuePenguin.com, a site that goes deep into these cards, to give us some of his advice as we “un-lockdown” ourselves...</li><li>Interview with Brett Holzhauer, the travel card expert at <a href=\"http://valuepenguin.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"valuepenguin.com\">ValuePenguin.com</a></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #164</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_164.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #164 — First Post Lockdown Trips; Travel Credit Cards','','inherit','closed','closed','','2771-revision-v1','','','2020-06-09 17:38:58','2020-06-09 22:38:58','',2771,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/06/09/2771-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0);
INSERT INTO `wp_posts` VALUES
(2782,1,'2020-06-09 17:39:40','2020-06-09 22:39:40','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/DSC_6306-edit.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2770 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/DSC_6306-edit-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\n<figcaption>Can I leave my house now?</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p>I broke Chicago\'s containment for my first post-lockdown trip, a fast drive down I-65. We talk about hotels swapping hospitality for sanitation, Hertz\'s bankruptcy, and tips for travel credit card usage from Brett Holzhauer, the travel card expert at <a title=\"valuepenguin.com\" href=\"http://valuepenguin.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">ValuePenguin.com.</a> All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_164.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/837229303&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #164: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois, as the lockdown here is starting to lift. What’s open and what’s not is still a bit spotty, though I’ve managed to hit a couple of microbreweries with outdoor patios. The opening in Chicago is not dissimilar to what I experienced down in Tennessee last month. I was down in Spring Hill, south of Nashville, two weeks after the non-urban lockdown lifted -- for every place other than the cities of Nashville, Memphis, Knoxville, and Chattanooga. It seemed that everyone was still trying to figure out what to do -- the bar/pizza joint next to my hotel was fully open, but the local bar-be-que joints and the Starbucks were still only doing take-away. Which makes sense; it’s not like there’s a standard playbook on how to re-open an economy. And throughout my consulting career, I’ve learned it’s always easier to shut things down than to start them up.</li><li>The drive south on I-65 from Chicago is one that, I’m not gonna say I can do with my eyes closed, but I’ve been doing it for almost 40 years, starting when I was in business school at the University of Chicago and my family was living in Louisville, KY. I mean, there’s a clump of trees in the median between West Lafayette and Crown Point that’s a milestone for me; I know I’m an hour from home. Which just goes to show you how boring the drive through northern Indiana is when trees in the median are a notable feature.</li><li>The drive between Chicago and Nashville, while not the most exciting, especially through Indiana, it does usually require a bit of timing to thread through Chicago, Indianapolis, Louisville, and Nashville to avoid rush hour in each. On this trip, not so much. I left Chicago after breakfast and was driving 80 mph most of the way, maybe dropping down to 70 through the cities. And I was still getting passed by guys going aggressively faster. And the only time I saw police or state troopers was in front of big road construction sites, cars running with all their lights flashing in front of big barriers, more as a warning to speeders than an attempt to get them. It was, hands down, the easiest drive down I-65 I’ve ever done.</li><li>That wide-open drive may be one of the few things I’ll actually appreciate about this lockdown. Well, that and the $2/gallon gas along the way...</li><li>Bridge Music — Brilliant Day by Hans Atom (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hansatom/47919 Ft: Lisa DeBenedictis</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>First up, thanks to the TravelCommons listener who goes by the handle Abe Froman, Ferris Bueller’s sausage king of Chicago, for dropping a 5-star review on <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">our iTunes page</a>. Abe writes:<ul><li>“I have been a fan of this podcast for many years. If you are a road warrior or a mileage runner, you will love the tips to make your travel easier.”</li><li>Abe, thanks a lot for this.  I’m glad you’ve enjoyed the podcast</li></ul></li><li>Last year in episodes <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/07/26/podcast-153-travel-by-algorithm-leaving-places-behind/\" title=\"Podcast #153 — Travel By Algorithm; Leaving Places Behind\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">153</a> and <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/09/20/podcast-155-rj-delays-street-food-in-poland-and-hungary/\" title=\"Podcast #155 — RJ Delays; Street Food in Poland and Hungary\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">155</a>, we talked about American Airlines’ retirement of their MD-80’s, the “Mad Dog 80”, the plane on which I earned my first Advantage status -- Gold, and there wasn’t anything higher back then. Last week, <a href=\"https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/delta-air-lines-md-80-last-flight/index.html\">Delta finally retired their last Mad Dogs</a> -- MD-88’s and -90’s. They were supposed to run through the end of the year, but with late ‘80’s technology and fuel efficiency, they were among the first planes in the fleet to be grounded when the lockdown hit. Delta said that “at their peak, the planes accounted for 50% of Delta’s arrivals and departures from” their Atlanta hub.  Which will be a relief to longtime TravelCommons listener Darren Mak, who tweeted at me back at the beginning of March, a picture out the window seat of a Delta MD-88 just in front of the engine cowl, thanking me for mentioning, in episode <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/09/20/podcast-155-rj-delays-street-food-in-poland-and-hungary/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #155 — RJ Delays; Street Food in Poland and Hungary\">155</a>, that whenever I would end up in that same seat, I would wonder — if that engine blows up, will the shrapnel blow out or blow into the cabin. Well Darren, no more worries. We both survived the Mad Dog’s back seat.</li><li>We’ve talked in the past couple of episodes about the first post-lockdown trips would be by car -- more schedule flexibility; no worries of a stranger in the middle seat exhaling 18 inches away from you.  CNBC ran <a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/31/five-charts-that-track-the-us-economy-as-states-reopen.html\">a story</a> last week analyzing the change in the number of requests for directions on Apple Maps in 2020. Using January 13th as the baseline for their comparison, requests for driving and walking directions dropped by 50% in the first month of the lockdowns, but had recovered by May 29th -- the last day of the data series. Transit direction requests had dropped by 75% and were still more than 50% down by the end of May. Now, using January 13th as the baseline probably exaggerates the recovery -- you’d think the number of walking and driving direction requests on a normal Memorial Day weekend would be hugely higher than for the second Monday of January when it was in or below the 30’s for about ⅔’s of the country -- but I don’t want to kill a green shoot with too much skepticism.</li><li>American talked about their own green shoots last week, saying they would be operating 55% of last year’s schedule in July, up from 20% in April and May. Driven mostly by demand from states opening up -- Texas, Florida, and Arizona -- rather than cities like New York, Chicago, and San Francisco that are still under stricter lockdown orders. If I keep pulling on this trend line, I’m thinking by September all those voluntary capacity limits and empty middle seat promises will have faded away.</li><li>The absence of update emails from airline and hotel CEOs this week I think is another green shoot. If things are starting to look up, no need to send me an email extending a bonus award offer or cancellation fee waivers. This has cut into a new hobby of mine, though -- comparing the use of \"in these uncertain times,\" \"in these challenging times,\" and “in these unprecedented times” in these emails. I have a stroke count going. Right now, “unprecedented” is the runaway leader, with “challenging” second, and “uncertain” third.</li><li>I’ve been a Hertz customer on and off over my 35-year travel career -- mostly on. I started my business traveling when I was at IBM, and in the mid-80’s, they had negotiated a smoking rate with Hertz. In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/09/15/podcast-144-outside-airports-hospitality-mentality\">episode 144</a>, I talked about getting to know the woman working in the little Hertz hut at SJC back then, when SJC was still an outdoor airport; and before Hertz Gold, that’s all I needed to get an upgrade. And more recently, I’ve, on balance, had good experiences with Hertz. So I was bummed for a moment when I saw they filed for bankruptcy last month. It wasn’t surprising, though. Hertz was still carrying a big debt load courtesy of a 2005 PE leveraged buyout, and we’ve talked in past episodes about how Uber and Lyft have been eating away at its core airport rental market. So, when travel stopped in March and used car auction prices cratered in April, Hertz tipped over. By now though, we’re kinda used to big travel companies cleaning their debt problems in bankruptcy -- United and American Airlines the most recent examples. So I’m not too worried about losing the rest of my Gold points. In the short term, though, I will be paying more attention to the mileage on the Hertz cars in the Five Star aisle. That’s where I usually see signs of financial distress -- a lot less 500-mile cars and a lot more 25,000-mile cars. And while 25,000 miles on a car doesn’t seem like a lot, remember that rental car miles are kinda like dog years -- you gotta multiply them by, like, 7 to get to regular car miles.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook page</a> or our Instagram account at <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">travelcommons</a> -- or you can post comments on the web site at <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">TravelCommons.com</a>.</li><li>Bridge Music —  <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Suenjo/11162\">Natchoongi (New Hope Remix)</a> by Suenjo (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>First Post-Lockdown Trips</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>As we talked about a few minutes ago, travel is starting to pick up as the lockdowns ease and people want to see something other than the 4 walls that have surrounded them since mid-March. </li><li>TravelCommons listener Mark Skinner dropped me a line towards the end of May about his first lockdown trip. You may remember Mark from <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/11/30/podcast-157-notes-from-the-baltics-riga-latvia-and-tallinn-estonia/\" title=\"Podcast #157 — Notes from the Baltics: Riga, Latvia and Tallinn, Estonia\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">episode 157</a> back in November when he wrote in to tell us about his day trip from Washington, DC to Hong Kong -- flying out Monday afternoon, returning Tuesday morning -- to take a NASA cosmic ray detector on an over-the-pole flight.  This time, Mark writes -<ul><li>So I had my first trip this past week, since the “before times”. On the way back, I was listening to your recent podcast. Yes, my first trip was via automobile, down to the outer banks of North Carolina. Dare County had recently opened up (the day before!) to allow visitors into the county. </li><li>Stayed at the Hilton Garden Inn. No servicing of the room, and after a few days at this hotel on the beach, things were looking a little dingy. Tropical Storm Arthur squashed any hopes of long walks on the beach. Departed a day early because the storm wasn’t letting up. I thought this was a good use of Hilton points… Take-out only that week, and hotel not helping out by lending any china, glass or utensils. Ending up getting a couple of sets at a dollar store… I contrast this to my last trip in the before time, to Maui, just as things were buttoning up. The Grand Wailea was happy to provide all sorts of stuff to enjoy one’s take-out on the lanai! That trip got cut short as well, due to flights evaporating. </li><li>A highlight of the trip was stopping for lunch in Virginia Beach, which had recently opened out-door seating at restaurants, and enjoyed lunch at a seafood restaurant at an outside table, by the ocean, and greatly enjoyed ordering food and having it brought to the table! The previous “normal” meal had been first evening on Maui, before they went take-out only. </li><li>Next trip that is getting kicked around is Hilton Head in June…. that would involve flying. Crossing fingers about a trip to Austria in August…</li></ul></li><li>Mark, thanks for sending that along. Your experience on the Outer Banks was similar to mine down in Spring Hill, TN. I went back and forth about staying in a hotel vs. an Airbnb. Airbnb -- not as many people passing through the property and some time buffer (24 hours, 72 hours) between guests in the same rooms, but a major hotel chain should have the corporate resources to build out and maybe test a more thorough cleaning program for its properties; maybe with access to stronger, more industrial cleaners. Procrastination ended up making my decision -- while I was going back and forth, the Airbnb property in Spring Hill I was looking at got booked for the front of that week, so I ended up in the Spring Hill Hampton Inn -- another Hilton brand.</li><li>That Monday morning, right before I left Chicago, I checked in on the Hilton app. It even let me pick out my room. This may be old news to Hilton Diamond listeners, but I haven’t stayed in a Hilton for at least a year, and so haven’t been tracking their app improvements. When I arrived at 5:30pm, the front doors were locked, but opening up the app showed me a digital key that opened the front door and my room door. I didn\'t have to physically check in at the front desk which only struck me odd later that night. Whenever I’ve checked in on a hotel’s app before, I’ve still had to go to the front desk so they could see my ID, which was why I’ve never paid much attention to app check-ins. But at this Hampton Inn with full check-in and digital keys, it worked the way I’d always thought it should.</li><li>My in-room experience was the same as Mark’s -- nobody servicing the room, though a guy did stop by the room every now and again asking if I needed extra towels; no morning coffee or breakfast buffet, and eating mostly take-out in the room with some cans of local craft beer bought from the liquor store a couple of doors down. I was pretty rigorous about dumping the food trash right after eating. Waking up to the smell of 8-hour-old bar-be-que rib and cole slaw remnants is never a good start to the day. Hotels are saying it’s all about cleaning and sanitation, but I can’t say that I saw any out-of-the-ordinary efforts while I was there. Maybe what I was experiencing was the cost reductions to fund that behind-the-scenes deep cleaning.</li><li>While Mark’s highlight was his lunch in Virginia Beach, mine was being able to walk into a little family-owned craft beer joint in a strip mall on Spring Hill\'s Main St, order a beer, and then sit down and drink it at the bar. I go into this place every time I\'m there to visit my mother. Seeing them open was a nice little bit of normality -- especially since Chicago didn’t start opening up until last week.</li><li>Don\'t know my next trip yet, but I\'m keeping my eye on Spain, hoping there\'s no second wave before our trip to Barcelona at the end of September.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/53277\">Fistful of Dub</a> (Feat. Snowflake and DJ Vadim) by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: snowflake and DJ Vadim</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Travel Credit Cards</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>As we start traveling again, we’ll start pulling out those travel cards -- Hilton or Delta Amex, United or Southwest or Marriott Visas, American MasterCards -- and so I invited Brett Holzhauer, the travel card expert at ValuePenguin.com, a site that goes deep into these cards, to give us some of his advice as we “un-lockdown” ourselves...</li><li>Interview with Brett Holzhauer, the travel card expert at <a href=\"http://valuepenguin.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"valuepenguin.com\">ValuePenguin.com</a></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #164</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_164.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #164 — First Post Lockdown Trips; Travel Credit Cards','','inherit','closed','closed','','2771-revision-v1','','','2020-06-09 17:39:40','2020-06-09 22:39:40','',2771,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/06/09/2771-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2783,1,'2020-06-09 17:48:58','2020-06-09 22:48:58','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/DSC_6306-edit.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2770 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/DSC_6306-edit-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\n<figcaption>Can I leave my house now?</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p>I broke Chicago\'s containment for my first post-lockdown trip, a fast drive down I-65. We talk about hotels swapping hospitality for sanitation, Hertz\'s bankruptcy, and tips for travel credit card usage from Brett Holzhauer, the travel card expert at <a title=\"valuepenguin.com\" href=\"http://valuepenguin.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">ValuePenguin.com.</a> All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_164.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/837229303&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #164: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois, as the lockdown here is starting to lift. What’s open and what’s not is still a bit spotty, though I’ve managed to hit a couple of microbreweries with outdoor patios. The opening in Chicago is not dissimilar to what I experienced down in Tennessee last month. I was down in Spring Hill, south of Nashville, two weeks after the non-urban lockdown lifted -- for every place other than the cities of Nashville, Memphis, Knoxville, and Chattanooga. It seemed that everyone was still trying to figure out what to do -- the bar/pizza joint next to my hotel was fully open, but the local bar-be-que joints and the Starbucks were still only doing take-away. Which makes sense; it’s not like there’s a standard playbook on how to re-open an economy. And throughout my consulting career, I’ve learned it’s always easier to shut things down than to start them up.</li><li>The drive south on I-65 from Chicago is one that, I’m not gonna say I can do with my eyes closed, but I’ve been doing it for almost 40 years, starting when I was in business school at the University of Chicago and my family was living in Louisville, KY. I mean, there’s a clump of trees in the median between West Lafayette and Crown Point that’s a milestone for me; I know I’m an hour from home. Which just goes to show you how boring the drive through northern Indiana is when trees in the median are a notable feature.</li><li>The drive between Chicago and Nashville, while not the most exciting, especially through Indiana, it does usually require a bit of timing to thread through Chicago, Indianapolis, Louisville, and Nashville to avoid rush hour in each. On this trip, not so much. I left Chicago after breakfast and was driving 80 mph most of the way, maybe dropping down to 70 through the cities. And I was still getting passed by guys going aggressively faster. And the only time I saw police or state troopers was in front of big road construction sites, cars running with all their lights flashing in front of big barriers, more as a warning to speeders than an attempt to get them. It was, hands down, the easiest drive down I-65 I’ve ever done.</li><li>That wide-open drive may be one of the few things I’ll actually appreciate about this lockdown. Well, that and the $2/gallon gas along the way...</li><li>Bridge Music — Brilliant Day by Hans Atom (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hansatom/47919 Ft: Lisa DeBenedictis</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>First up, thanks to the TravelCommons listener who goes by the handle Abe Froman, Ferris Bueller’s sausage king of Chicago, for dropping a 5-star review on <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">our iTunes page</a>. Abe writes:<ul><li>“I have been a fan of this podcast for many years. If you are a road warrior or a mileage runner, you will love the tips to make your travel easier.”</li><li>Abe, thanks a lot for this.  I’m glad you’ve enjoyed the podcast</li></ul></li><li>Last year in episodes <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/07/26/podcast-153-travel-by-algorithm-leaving-places-behind/\" title=\"Podcast #153 — Travel By Algorithm; Leaving Places Behind\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">153</a> and <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/09/20/podcast-155-rj-delays-street-food-in-poland-and-hungary/\" title=\"Podcast #155 — RJ Delays; Street Food in Poland and Hungary\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">155</a>, we talked about American Airlines’ retirement of their MD-80’s, the “Mad Dog 80”, the plane on which I earned my first Advantage status -- Gold, and there wasn’t anything higher back then. Last week, <a href=\"https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/delta-air-lines-md-80-last-flight/index.html\">Delta finally retired their last Mad Dogs</a> -- MD-88’s and -90’s. They were supposed to run through the end of the year, but with late ‘80’s technology and fuel efficiency, they were among the first planes in the fleet to be grounded when the lockdown hit. Delta said that “at their peak, the planes accounted for 50% of Delta’s arrivals and departures from” their Atlanta hub.  Which will be a relief to longtime TravelCommons listener Darren Mak, who tweeted at me back at the beginning of March, a picture out the window seat of a Delta MD-88 just in front of the engine cowl, thanking me for mentioning, in episode <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/09/20/podcast-155-rj-delays-street-food-in-poland-and-hungary/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #155 — RJ Delays; Street Food in Poland and Hungary\">155</a>, that whenever I would end up in that same seat, I would wonder — if that engine blows up, will the shrapnel blow out or blow into the cabin. Well Darren, no more worries. We both survived the Mad Dog’s back seat.</li><li>We’ve talked in the past couple of episodes about the first post-lockdown trips would be by car -- more schedule flexibility; no worries of a stranger in the middle seat exhaling 18 inches away from you.  CNBC ran <a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/31/five-charts-that-track-the-us-economy-as-states-reopen.html\">a story</a> last week analyzing the change in the number of requests for directions on Apple Maps in 2020. Using January 13th as the baseline for their comparison, requests for driving and walking directions dropped by 50% in the first month of the lockdowns, but had recovered by May 29th -- the last day of the data series. Transit direction requests had dropped by 75% and were still more than 50% down by the end of May. Now, using January 13th as the baseline probably exaggerates the recovery -- you’d think the number of walking and driving direction requests on a normal Memorial Day weekend would be hugely higher than for the second Monday of January when it was in or below the 30’s for about ⅔’s of the country -- but I don’t want to kill a green shoot with too much skepticism.</li><li>American talked about their own green shoots last week, saying they would be operating 55% of last year’s schedule in July, up from 20% in April and May. Driven mostly by demand from states opening up -- Texas, Florida, and Arizona -- rather than cities like New York, Chicago, and San Francisco that are still under stricter lockdown orders. If I keep pulling on this trend line, I’m thinking by September all those voluntary capacity limits and empty middle seat promises will have faded away.</li><li>The absence of update emails from airline and hotel CEOs this week I think is another green shoot. If things are starting to look up, no need to send me an email extending a bonus award offer or cancellation fee waivers. This has cut into a new hobby of mine, though -- comparing the use of \"in these uncertain times,\" \"in these challenging times,\" and “in these unprecedented times” in these emails. I have a stroke count going. Right now, “unprecedented” is the runaway leader, with “challenging” second, and “uncertain” third.</li><li>I’ve been a Hertz customer on and off over my 35-year travel career -- mostly on. I started my business traveling when I was at IBM, and in the mid-80’s, they had negotiated a smoking rate with Hertz. In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/09/15/podcast-144-outside-airports-hospitality-mentality\">episode 144</a>, I talked about getting to know the woman working in the little Hertz hut at SJC back then, when SJC was still an outdoor airport; and before Hertz Gold, that’s all I needed to get an upgrade. And more recently, I’ve, on balance, had good experiences with Hertz. So I was bummed for a moment when I saw they filed for bankruptcy last month. It wasn’t surprising, though. Hertz was still carrying a big debt load courtesy of a 2005 PE leveraged buyout, and we’ve talked in past episodes about how Uber and Lyft have been eating away at its core airport rental market. So, when travel stopped in March and used car auction prices cratered in April, Hertz tipped over. By now though, we’re kinda used to big travel companies cleaning their debt problems in bankruptcy -- United and American Airlines the most recent examples. So I’m not too worried about losing the rest of my Gold points. In the short term, though, I will be paying more attention to the mileage on the Hertz cars in the Five Star aisle. That’s where I usually see signs of financial distress -- a lot less 500-mile cars and a lot more 25,000-mile cars. And while 25,000 miles on a car doesn’t seem like a lot, remember that rental car miles are kinda like dog years -- you gotta multiply them by, like, 7 to get to regular car miles.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook page</a> or our Instagram account at <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">travelcommons</a> -- or you can post comments on the web site at <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">TravelCommons.com</a>.</li><li>Bridge Music —  <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Suenjo/11162\">Natchoongi (New Hope Remix)</a> by Suenjo (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>First Post-Lockdown Trips</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>As we talked about a few minutes ago, travel is starting to pick up as the lockdowns ease and people want to see something other than the 4 walls that have surrounded them since mid-March. </li><li>TravelCommons listener Mark Skinner dropped me a line towards the end of May about his first lockdown trip. You may remember Mark from <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/11/30/podcast-157-notes-from-the-baltics-riga-latvia-and-tallinn-estonia/\" title=\"Podcast #157 — Notes from the Baltics: Riga, Latvia and Tallinn, Estonia\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">episode 157</a> back in November when he wrote in to tell us about his day trip from Washington, DC to Hong Kong -- flying out Monday afternoon, returning Tuesday morning -- to take a NASA cosmic ray detector on an over-the-pole flight.  This time, Mark writes -<ul><li>So I had my first trip this past week, since the “before times”. On the way back, I was listening to your recent podcast. Yes, my first trip was via automobile, down to the outer banks of North Carolina. Dare County had recently opened up (the day before!) to allow visitors into the county. </li><li>Stayed at the Hilton Garden Inn. No servicing of the room, and after a few days at this hotel on the beach, things were looking a little dingy. Tropical Storm Arthur squashed any hopes of long walks on the beach. Departed a day early because the storm wasn’t letting up. I thought this was a good use of Hilton points… Take-out only that week, and hotel not helping out by lending any china, glass or utensils. Ending up getting a couple of sets at a dollar store… I contrast this to my last trip in the before time, to Maui, just as things were buttoning up. The Grand Wailea was happy to provide all sorts of stuff to enjoy one’s take-out on the lanai! That trip got cut short as well, due to flights evaporating. </li><li>A highlight of the trip was stopping for lunch in Virginia Beach, which had recently opened out-door seating at restaurants, and enjoyed lunch at a seafood restaurant at an outside table, by the ocean, and greatly enjoyed ordering food and having it brought to the table! The previous “normal” meal had been first evening on Maui, before they went take-out only. </li><li>Next trip that is getting kicked around is Hilton Head in June…. that would involve flying. Crossing fingers about a trip to Austria in August…</li></ul></li><li>Mark, thanks for sending that along. Your experience on the Outer Banks was similar to mine down in Spring Hill, TN. I went back and forth about staying in a hotel vs. an Airbnb. Airbnb -- not as many people passing through the property and some time buffer (24 hours, 72 hours) between guests in the same rooms, but a major hotel chain should have the corporate resources to build out and maybe test a more thorough cleaning program for its properties; maybe with access to stronger, more industrial cleaners. Procrastination ended up making my decision -- while I was going back and forth, the Airbnb property in Spring Hill I was looking at got booked for the front of that week, so I ended up in the Spring Hill Hampton Inn -- another Hilton brand.</li><li>That Monday morning, right before I left Chicago, I checked in on the Hilton app. It even let me pick out my room. This may be old news to Hilton Diamond listeners, but I haven’t stayed in a Hilton for at least a year, and so haven’t been tracking their app improvements. When I arrived at 5:30pm, the front doors were locked, but opening up the app showed me a digital key that opened the front door and my room door. I didn\'t have to physically check in at the front desk which only struck me odd later that night. Whenever I’ve checked in on a hotel’s app before, I’ve still had to go to the front desk so they could see my ID, which was why I’ve never paid much attention to app check-ins. But at this Hampton Inn with full check-in and digital keys, it worked the way I’d always thought it should.</li><li>My in-room experience was the same as Mark’s -- nobody servicing the room, though a guy did stop by the room every now and again asking if I needed extra towels; no morning coffee or breakfast buffet, and eating mostly take-out in the room with some cans of local craft beer bought from the liquor store a couple of doors down. I was pretty rigorous about dumping the food trash right after eating. Waking up to the smell of 8-hour-old bar-be-que rib and cole slaw remnants is never a good start to the day. Hotels are saying it’s all about cleaning and sanitation, but I can’t say that I saw any out-of-the-ordinary efforts while I was there. Maybe what I was experiencing was the cost reductions to fund that behind-the-scenes deep cleaning.</li><li>While Mark’s highlight was his lunch in Virginia Beach, mine was being able to walk into a little family-owned craft beer joint in a strip mall on Spring Hill\'s Main St, order a beer, and then sit down and drink it at the bar. I go into this place every time I\'m there to visit my mother. Seeing them open was a nice little bit of normality -- especially since Chicago didn’t start opening up until last week.</li><li>Don\'t know my next trip yet, but I\'m keeping my eye on Spain, hoping there\'s no second wave before our trip to Barcelona at the end of September.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/53277\">Fistful of Dub</a> (Feat. Snowflake and DJ Vadim) by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: snowflake and DJ Vadim</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Travel Credit Cards</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>As we start traveling again, we’ll start pulling out those travel cards -- Hilton or Delta Amex, United or Southwest or Marriott Visas, American MasterCards -- and so I invited Brett Holzhauer, the travel card expert at ValuePenguin.com, a site that goes deep into these cards, to give us some of his advice as we “un-lockdown” ourselves...</li><li>Interview with Brett Holzhauer, the travel card expert at <a href=\"http://valuepenguin.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"valuepenguin.com\">ValuePenguin.com</a></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #164</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_164.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #164 — First-Post Lockdown Trips; Travel Credit Cards','','inherit','closed','closed','','2771-revision-v1','','','2020-06-09 17:48:58','2020-06-09 22:48:58','',2771,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/06/09/2771-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2788,1,'2020-07-17 20:56:37','2020-07-18 01:56:37','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/IMG_2073.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2789 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/IMG_2073-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\n<figcaption>The hop taste isn\'t coming through</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p>My first post-lockdown flight was a 90-minute Southwest non-stop from Chicago to Nashville. It wasn\'t bad, but not as casually easy as my last pre-coronavirus flight in February. We talk about that experience as well as Hertz\'s new cleaning program, my latest pair of Bose noise-cancelling headphones, and then wonder when business travel will return. All this and more at the<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_165.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"> <strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #165: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after a couple of runs back down to Nashville for family stuff -- one in the air and the other on the ground. And with COVID cases spiking in vacation spots like California and south Florida, it seems like that’s the market segment -- folks traveling to see friends and family -- that the airline and hotel companies are banking on. And that’s most of what I saw when flying back from Nashville a few Thursdays ago -- lots of families with kids, groups of people meeting up on the other side of security for maybe some 4 day-weekend trips? The tip-off for me on the business vs. leisure traveler mix was the TSA lines -- solid lines for regular TSA, while I pretty much walked straight through PreCheck. Another tip-off used to be mid-day lines at the bars, but with most of the airport restaurants closed up, that’s not a valid indicator right now.</li><li>Traveling right now requires a bit of nimbleness. On my first post-lockdown trip in May, the workout room at the Spring Hill Hampton Inn was open and I used it every day. Back down in June, there was a piece of paper taped to the door -- “Closed by order of the Health Department”. The front desk agent told me it was a couple of days old -- which explained all the banging in the room above me; somebody must’ve been doing their HIIT workout in their room. I didn’t know if I should be annoyed or impressed at how long they went at it. So for this last trip, I called the hotel the night before I left, before I packed my gym clothes vs. a yoga mat. They told me that they’d just reopened the workout room the day before, so the yoga mat went back in the closet.&nbsp;</li><li>It’s kinda the same very fluid situation right now with bars and restaurants. A few days before we got to Nashville, the mayor closed down any establishment with less than 50% of their sales in food, so pretty much all the bars and taprooms. Makes sense, not arguing it; just forced us to quickly pivot some of our plans. It also forced us to go a bit “old school”, back to making actual phone calls, asking “are you open; dine-in or just take-away?” since places seem to be having trouble updating their websites and their Facebook/Yelp/Google/OpenTable listings fast enough to keep up with the changes.</li><li>It proved out our decision to book the Residence Inn rather than the mainline Marriott a few blocks away. The full-size fridge held a lot more beer, and that kitchenette came in handy when we found out that<a href=\"https://www.princeshotchicken.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"https://www.princeshotchicken.com/\"> Prince’s Hot Chicken</a> was only doing take-away -- I can’t imagine trying to eat an extra-hot half-chicken perched on a king-size bed.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/JeffSpeed68/54450\">Hula Hoop Party</a> by Stefan Kartenberg (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. &nbsp;Ft: Martijn de Boer, Blue Wave Theory</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Lots has been written about how the COVID pandemic has massively accelerated changes toward contactless transactions. Microsoft’s CEO famously said back in April “We’ve seen two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months”.&nbsp; Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #136 — Is Cash A Waning King; Don’t Make It Hard to Cash in on Loyalty\">episode #136</a>, I said I felt like the last generation of cash payers, that my younger colleagues rarely carried cash; they paid for everything with a card. Looking into my wallet, I had the same $200 worth of 20’s in June that I’d taken out of an ATM in March. Nobody wants to handle cash; they don’t even want to handle my card (Most extreme experience - A bartender at Asgard Brewing’s taproom in Columbia, TN sprayed my Visa card with diluted chlorine bleach before swiping it to pay my bill. Made my wallet smell like a swimming pool). As much as possible, places want us to pre-order and pre-pay, so we just pick up our purchases in a socially distant way and then head home. It’s also switched up some opinions on using facial recognition for flight check ins. Pre-coronavirus, the push was from governments as a better way to do security screenings and to improve immigration compliance, and this was getting big pushback on privacy concerns. Now, it’s pivoted. The push is from travel companies using facial recognition as a way of providing the touchless check-in experience that most travelers now want.&nbsp;</li><li>But facial recognition is stymied by face masks which we wear when we’re checking in at airports and hotel lobbies. As is Face ID when trying to unlock my iPhone to get to my boarding pass or digital room key. Until I can downgrade to an iPhone SE with that old-school Touch ID that unlocks using my thumb print, I think I’m going to have to shorten the PIN code on my iPhone 11 Pro. I lengthened it for better security but am banging it in more and more often. And I’ve noticed the iPhone is really slow about recognizing my number presses -- or it misses some when I go too fast (like when I’m trying to pull up a boarding pass in line) and errors out.&nbsp;</li><li>Walking down the Hertz Five Star aisle at Nashville Airport, I saw their version of paper rings that hotels used to put around toilet seats to “certify” they’d been cleaned. In Hertz’s case, they put a “<a href=\"http://ir.hertz.com/2020-05-15-Hertz-Introduces-Hertz-Gold-Standard-Clean-Sealed-and-Certified-Vehicles\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Hertz Gold Standard Clean</a>” sticker across the driver-side center pillar (the B pillar for all my gearhead listeners) so that you break it when you open the driver door to get it. Nice gesture, though it kept me from doing my usual walk down the aisle, opening the door of a bunch of cars to check their mileage. Seemed rude to break all those stickers, though I did notice more than a few broken ones when choosing my car. Way back in the old days of TravelCommons, we used to talk about the TSA doing “security theater” in the screening lines. This feels a bit like “sanitation theater”.&nbsp;</li><li>I finally broke down and bought a new set of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2BbOqyA\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bose noise cancelling headphones -- the new 700’s</a>. This is my third set of Bose cans. Bought my first pair in 2009. I was flying a lot of short flights at the time, and in those days before regional jets, I was on a lot of prop planes. And they’re noisy -- not just on take-off, but the entire flight. After a while, I started to notice fatigue when getting off those planes. Talking to a few folks, they said the noise heightens stress. A friend told me how much he liked his Bose cans, and so I burnt some Amex Membership Rewards points on Amazon for a pair of Quiet Comfort 2’s. It was a revelation; flick the switch and, whoosh, quiet. I took them on every flight, until 3 years later, I left them in a seatback pocket when rushing off a plane to make a tight connection. I immediately lit up some more Membership Rewards points for a new pair - <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3eF2iPk\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">QC-15’s</a>. Four years later, I replaced a worn out set of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2OwiIPF\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">ear cushions</a>. And though the non-replaceable headband cushion is looking pretty ratty, the now 8-year-old headphones still work great. What got me to replace them was the wire. I’d be sitting in my usual aisle seat, plugged into my iPhone (using one of those dongles that Apple no longer gives you with a new phone). At some point in the flight, the folks in the middle and window seats would want to get up and use the toilet and inevitably, I’d snag the wire on the arm of the seat, pull the headphones off my head, and/or launch my phone a row forward.&nbsp; I could’ve gotten a pair of the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3eFWLYJ\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">QC-35’s</a> -- same form factor without the wire -- but decided to go all next-generation with the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2BbOqyA\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">700’s</a>, which has meant some adjustment pains. Like there are buttons in places where they never were before. So when I grab the ear cups to slip the headphones off, I manage to hit a button that changes the noise reduction level or summons Siri. Also new is using the touch surface on the right ear cup to control things. You tap or swipe the right ear cup to accept or drop a call, pause a song, raise or lower the volume, or skip 30 seconds to fast-forward past a podcast ad. I’m learning to be a bit more precise in my motions; I’ve already dropped a couple of calls when I was just trying to turn down the call volume.&nbsp; One thing I really like -- more for working-at-home than in-flight usage -- is that the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2BbOqyA\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">700’s</a> can pair with two Bluetooth devices at the same time. So, for me, I have them paired with my MacBook Air and my iPhone and they switch seamlessly between the two. Nice when I’ve got Zoom calls on my Mac and then a phone call on my iPhone. And, call me shallow, but they look a bit cooler than my old <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3eF2iPk\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">QC-15’s</a>. I’ve had the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2BbOqyA\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">700’s</a> for about a month now and really like them. I guess you could say they’re “TravelCommons Approved.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/bridges/15563\">i knew</a> by bridges (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp;Ft: shannonsongs</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>First Post-Lockdown Flight</strong> </h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Way back at the beginning of the lockdown, the first Saturday of April, I was on a Zoom beer drinking call with Rob Cheshire, a long-time TravelCommons listener and now a podcaster -- he interviews UK craft brewers on his <em><a href=\"https://thisweekincraft.beer/podcast/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">This Week in Craft Beer</a></em>. It was a Saturday afternoon call, for Rob and the other guys in London; just past noon for me in Chicago, but hey…. And somewhere around our second or third beer, Rob asked me “When will you be comfortable getting on a plane again?” I really didn\'t have a good answer. It was early days; I wasn’t sure.</li><li>Fast forward to the back half of June. I needed to get down to Nashville again and didn’t have the time to burn 8 hrs for the drive down and another 8 on the way back. I had some travel funds sitting in my Southwest account from a couple of April trip cancellations, and Southwest flies 6 non-stop 737s between Chicago and Nashville while American and United only do smaller regional jets, and Southwest isn’t packing them full -- booking those bigger planes at ⅔’s capacity -- while American and United say they’ll let you know if your flight books solid. All told, a pretty easy decision to fly Southwest. One of the benefits of living in Chicago, a rare 3-hub town.</li><li>The day before my flight, when getting my boarding pass on the Southwest app (my usual process; I was contactless before it was a thing), I had to click through a certification that I wasn’t running a temperature and that I hadn’t been exposed to or tested positive for COVID-19. OK, click. Then I get a screen telling me that face masks are required to board. Makes sense, click. And now I get my boarding pass.</li><li>Monday morning, Irene drops me off at a pretty sedate departures curb at Midway. I mask up and walk in. It’s not empty, but it’s definitely not the normal Monday morning bustle. It feels more like a Wednesday early afternoon. There’s a bit of a line at regular security, but no line at PreCheck. The TSA agent asks me to drop my mask for a moment to check my ID and then waves me through. I noticed that TSA still has their October 2020 Real ID deadline warning signs on the podium. Hmm… I remember reading at the end of March that the TSA has <a href=\"https://www.dhs.gov/real-id\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">pushed the deadline a year to October 2021</a>. Guess they haven’t had a chance to issue updated signs. You’d think they’d just take the old ones down.</li><li>Most of the restaurants and stores were closed; a pretty common situation. Kev Monteith, a TravelCommons listener and <a href=\"https://travelswithkev.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amtrak travel blogger</a>, replied to one of my Twitter posts saying “I flew Southwest a few weeks ago. Layovers are rough because most places in the airports are closed. I was at STL and only found beer at Burger King and Dunkin Doughnuts.” I would’ve been happy for just a coffee. Down in the main Southwest concourse, some gates were closed off with curtains which I assume was to keep people from sitting there so they don’t have to clean it.</li><li>Looking around the terminal, it felt like mask usage was about 80%. Just about everyone was wearing them when walking around. I’d see some people not wearing them while sitting at the gate, though those folks were distancing themselves from everyone else. I’d see kids ripping their masks off as soon as they got off the jetway. I did notice, though, a sizable minority of mask wearers were just covering their mouths, leaving their noses uncovered -- pilots, cleaning crew, passengers, wheelchair people. Now I’m no epidemiologist, but that seems to defeat the purpose.</li><li>When the agent called boarding, she said “There’s 40 of you on a plane with 175 seats. So everyone gets their own row, and please, don’t everyone sit up front. We need a bit of weight distribution.” It was a quick boarding; we pushed back and took off early. These truly are unprecedented times.</li><li>Nashville was more crowded on Thursday morning when I headed back home. Mostly families as I said at the top of the show. The end of the concourse where the&nbsp; Southwest gates are was as crowded as usual. There were signs around saying that 3 seats between people equals 6 ft, but there were too many people waiting to make it practical; at least everyone is masked up. I walked back up the terminal to find a bit more space and there, tucked away behind some construction sheeting, I found an empty gate. I’m all alone, mega social distanced, so I take off my mask, log into the WiFi and do some work until the Southwest app on my phone bings, telling me that boarding has begun.&nbsp;</li><li>There were a lot more than 40 people on this flight. I found an empty row and slid all the way over to the window seat since it’s only a 90-minute flight. About 3 minutes later, a guy sat down in the aisle seat. Nobody in the middle seat. Everyone wearing masks and nobody’s head right next to mine, I was good to go. Maybe helped just a bit by the fact that, in those 3 minutes, I pointed all three air jets toward the empty middle seat and turned them on full blast, creating an air curtain between me and the aisle seat -- just in case.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/3lb3r3th/44072\">Misunderstood</a> by 3lb3r3th (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. &nbsp;Ft: Alchemistry</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>When Does Business Travel Come Back?</strong> </h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>My son Andrew and his girlfriend took the 6am flight to LGA earlier this week. I asked him “How full was the flight?” “Maybe 20 people; mostly families,” he said. Didn’t surprise me that a Thursday 6am LGA flight was only at 11% capacity. That’s normally a business travel run; people getting up at 0 dark 30 in Chicago to make 10am meetings in Manhattan. But there’s not many business travelers now.&nbsp; While business travelers only make up about 10% of passengers on major airlines, they provide between 55 and 75% of the profits. You might could think they’re subsidizing the budget fares those families are using.</li><li>Over the past month, I’ve been talking with Sales VPs at companies that deliver complex IT services. If anybody would be feeling the bite of not traveling, I thought it would be these guys. I’ve done a number of these deals, and they always involved locking all the right decision makers in a conference room to hash out all the contract details and ride herd over the transition. But I was completely wrong. They all said that work hasn’t slowed down during the lockdown. They’ve been able to do all that conference room work over Zoom. Indeed, they said being virtual has made it easier for them. Pre-lockdown, one of their biggest challenges was calendar wrangling -- being able to get all their execs and the client execs into that conference room at the same time. Now, they just click some buttons and everyone shows up in Zoom gallery mode -- no travel planning, no scrambling after cancelled or delayed flights. They all said they love the ease of virtual meetings and, at the end of the day, closing the lid on their laptops and having dinner with the family every night.</li><li>Kinda supports the narrative that business travel will never rebound; back to the Microsoft CEO’s quote: in 2 months, we’ve advanced 2 years in virtual work culture. But when I probed a bit, I found that Zoom hasn’t completely replaced an airplane ticket. While these guys have been able to virtually close deals they had in their sales funnel, virtual meetings don’t seem to be replacing these deals; getting new prospects into the top of the sales funnel. So while things are looking good now, they’re beginning to worry about 4-6 months from now.</li><li>This was the exact opposite of what I’d expected. I thought the give and take of negotiations, the sidebar conversations, the emotional content, wouldn’t translate into video calls. But it looks like I was wrong; that once a deal has some momentum and a structure to guide everyone, the in-person hammering out turns out to be a nice-to-have. And the reason new opportunities aren’t coming in is that they need more exploratory, abstract, wide-ranging conversations that lack that guiding structure and selling a team as much as a product -- at least for complex services -- and that’s tough to do over a pane of glass.</li><li>And so they all said that they’d probably start traveling again -- reluctantly -- by the end of this month. But I do think this, call it a 4-month exercise in figuring out virtual work methods and cultures will move the set point, everybody’s default decision toward virtual meetings. And so maybe a bit less focused on high-profit road warriors and more dependent on those cost-conscious families. Does this mean repointing the 6am LGA flights to Cancun? They’re going to have to seriously reengineer those drink carts.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #165</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_165.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #165 — First Post Lockdown Flight; When Do We Travel For Business Again?','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-165-first-post-lockdown-flight-when-does-business-travel-come-back','','','2021-10-01 17:05:10','2021-10-01 22:05:10','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=2788',0,'post','',0),
(2789,1,'2020-07-16 19:16:10','2020-07-17 00:16:10','','IMG_2073','','inherit','open','closed','','img_2073','','','2020-07-16 19:16:10','2020-07-17 00:16:10','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/IMG_2073.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(2790,1,'2020-07-16 19:36:38','2020-07-17 00:36:38','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/IMG_2073.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2789 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/IMG_2073-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\n<figcaption>The hop taste isn\'t coming through</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p>I broke Chicago\'s containment for my first post-lockdown trip, a fast drive down I-65. We talk about hotels swapping hospitality for sanitation, Hertz\'s bankruptcy, and tips for travel credit card usage from Brett Holzhauer, the travel card expert at <a title=\"valuepenguin.com\" href=\"http://valuepenguin.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">ValuePenguin.com.</a> All this and more at the<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_165.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"> <strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/837229303&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #165: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after a couple of runs back down to Nashville for family stuff -- one in the air and the other on the ground. And with COVID cases spiking in vacation spots like California and south Florida, it seems like that’s the market segment -- folks traveling to see friends and family -- that the airline and hotel companies are banking on. And that’s most of what I saw when flying back from Nashville a few Thursdays ago -- lots of families with kids, groups of people meeting up on the other side of security for maybe some 4 day-weekend trips? The tip-off for me on the business vs. leisure traveler mix was the TSA lines -- solid lines for regular TSA, while I pretty much walked straight through PreCheck. Another tip-off used to be mid-day lines at the bars, but with most of the airport restaurants closed up, that’s not a valid indicator right now.</li><li>Traveling right now requires a bit of nimbleness. On my first post-lockdown trip in May, the workout room at the Spring Hill Hampton Inn was open and I used it every day. Back down in June, there was a piece of paper taped to the door -- “Closed by order of the Health Department”. The front desk agent told me it was a couple of days old -- which explained all the banging in the room above me; somebody must’ve been doing their HIIT workout in their room. I didn’t know if I should be annoyed or impressed at how long they went at it. So for this last trip, I called the hotel the night before I left, before I packed my gym clothes vs. a yoga mat. They told me that they’d just reopened the workout room the day before, so the yoga mat went back in the closet. </li><li>It’s kinda the same very fluid situation right now with bars and restaurants. A few days before we got to Nashville, the mayor closed down any establishment with less than 50% of their sales in food, so pretty much all the bars and taprooms. Makes sense, not arguing it; just forced us to quickly pivot some of our plans. It also forced us to go a bit “old school”, back to making actual phone calls, asking “are you open; dine-in or just take-away?” since places seem to be having trouble updating their websites and their Facebook/Yelp/Google/OpenTable listings fast enough to keep up with the changes.</li><li>It proved out our decision to book the Residence Inn rather than the mainline Marriott a few blocks away. The full-size fridge held a lot more beer, and that kitchenette came in handy when we found out that<a href=\"https://www.princeshotchicken.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"https://www.princeshotchicken.com/\"> Prince’s Hot Chicken</a> was only doing take-away -- I can’t imagine trying to eat an extra-hot half-chicken perched on a king-size bed.</li><li>Bridge Music — Brilliant Day by Hans Atom (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hansatom/47919 Ft: Lisa DeBenedictis</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Lots has been written about how the COVID pandemic has massively accelerated changes toward contactless transactions. Microsoft’s CEO famously said back in April “We’ve seen two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months”.  Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #136 — Is Cash A Waning King; Don’t Make It Hard to Cash in on Loyalty\">episode #136</a>, I said I felt like the last generation of cash payers, that my younger colleagues rarely carried cash; they paid for everything with a card. Looking into my wallet, I had the same $200 worth of 20’s in June that I’d taken out of an ATM in March. Nobody wants to handle cash; they don’t even want to handle my card (Most extreme experience - A bartender at Asgard Brewing’s taproom in Columbia, TN sprayed my Visa card with diluted chlorine bleach before swiping it to pay my bill. Made my wallet smell like a swimming pool). As much as possible, places want us to pre-order and pre-pay, so we just pick up our purchases in a socially distant way and then head home. It’s also switched up some opinions on using facial recognition for flight check ins. Pre-coronavirus, the push was from governments as a better way to do security screenings and to improve immigration compliance, and this was getting big pushback on privacy concerns. Now, it’s pivoted. The push is from travel companies using facial recognition as a way of providing the touchless check-in experience that most travelers now want. </li><li>But facial recognition is stymied by face masks which we wear when we’re checking in at airports and hotel lobbies. As is Face ID when trying to unlock my iPhone to get to my boarding pass or digital room key. Until I can downgrade to an iPhone SE with that old-school Touch ID that unlocks using my thumb print, I think I’m going to have to shorten the PIN code on my iPhone 11 Pro. I lengthened it for better security but am banging it in more and more often. And I’ve noticed the iPhone is really slow about recognizing my number presses -- or it misses some when I go too fast (like when I’m trying to pull up a boarding pass in line) and errors out. </li><li>Walking down the Hertz Five Star aisle at Nashville Airport, I saw their version of paper rings that hotels used to put around toilet seats to “certify” they’d been cleaned. In Hertz’s case, they put a “<a href=\"http://ir.hertz.com/2020-05-15-Hertz-Introduces-Hertz-Gold-Standard-Clean-Sealed-and-Certified-Vehicles\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Hertz Gold Standard Clean</a>” sticker across the driver-side center pillar (the B pillar for all my gearhead listeners) so that you break it when you open the driver door to get it. Nice gesture, though it kept me from doing my usual walk down the aisle, opening the door of a bunch of cars to check their mileage. Seemed rude to break all those stickers, though I did notice more than a few broken ones when choosing my car. Way back in the old days of TravelCommons, we used to talk about the TSA doing “security theater” in the screening lines. This feels a bit like “sanitation theater”. </li><li>I finally broke down and bought a new set of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2BbOqyA\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bose noise cancelling headphones -- the new 700’s</a>. This is my third set of Bose cans. Bought my first pair in 2009. I was flying a lot of short flights at the time, and in those days before regional jets, I was on a lot of prop planes. And they’re noisy -- not just on take-off, but the entire flight. After a while, I started to notice fatigue when getting off those planes. Talking to a few folks, they said the noise heightens stress. A friend told me how much he liked his Bose cans, and so I burnt some Amex Membership Rewards points on Amazon for a pair of Quiet Comfort 2’s. It was a revelation; flick the switch and, whoosh, quiet. I took them on every flight, until 3 years later, I left them in a seatback pocket when rushing off a plane to make a tight connection. I immediately lit up some more Membership Rewards points for a new pair - <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3eF2iPk\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">QC-15’s</a>. Four years later, I replaced a worn out set of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2OwiIPF\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">ear cushions</a>. And though the non-replaceable headband cushion is looking pretty ratty, the now 8-year-old headphones still work great. What got me to replace them was the wire. I’d be sitting in my usual aisle seat, plugged into my iPhone (using one of those dongles that Apple no longer gives you with a new phone). At some point in the flight, the folks in the middle and window seats would want to get up and use the toilet and inevitably, I’d snag the wire on the arm of the seat, pull the headphones off my head, and/or launch my phone a row forward.  I could’ve gotten a pair of the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3eFWLYJ\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">QC-35’s</a> -- same form factor without the wire -- but decided to go all next-generation with the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2BbOqyA\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">700’s</a>, which has meant some adjustment pains. Like there are buttons in places where they never were before. So when I grab the ear cups to slip the headphones off, I manage to hit a button that changes the noise reduction level or summons Siri. Also new is using the touch surface on the right ear cup to control things. You tap or swipe the right ear cup to accept or drop a call, pause a song, raise or lower the volume, or skip 30 seconds to fast-forward past a podcast ad. I’m learning to be a bit more precise in my motions; I’ve already dropped a couple of calls when I was just trying to turn down the call volume.  One thing I really like -- more for working-at-home than in-flight usage -- is that the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2BbOqyA\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">700’s</a> can pair with two Bluetooth devices at the same time. So, for me, I have them paired with my MacBook Air and my iPhone and they switch seamlessly between the two. Nice when I’ve got Zoom calls on my Mac and then a phone call on my iPhone. And, call me shallow, but they look a bit cooler than my old <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3eF2iPk\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">QC-15’s</a>. I’ve had the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2BbOqyA\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">700’s</a> for about a month now and really like them. I guess you could say they’re “TravelCommons Approved.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music —  <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Suenjo/11162\">Natchoongi (New Hope Remix)</a> by Suenjo (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>First Post-Lockdown Flight</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Way back at the beginning of the lockdown, the first Saturday of April, I was on a Zoom beer drinking call with Rob Cheshire, a long-time TravelCommons listener and now a podcaster -- he interviews UK craft brewers on his <em><a href=\"https://thisweekincraft.beer/podcast/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">This Week in Craft Beer</a></em>. It was a Saturday afternoon call, for Rob and the other guys in London; just past noon for me in Chicago, but hey…. And somewhere around our second or third beer, Rob asked me “When will you be comfortable getting on a plane again?” I really didn\'t have a good answer. It was early days; I wasn’t sure.</li><li>Fast forward to the back half of June. I needed to get down to Nashville again and didn’t have the time to burn 8 hrs for the drive down and another 8 on the way back. I had some travel funds sitting in my Southwest account from a couple of April trip cancellations, and Southwest flies 6 non-stop 737s between Chicago and Nashville while American and United only do smaller regional jets, and Southwest isn’t packing them full -- booking those bigger planes at ⅔’s capacity -- while American and United say they’ll let you know if your flight books solid. All told, a pretty easy decision to fly Southwest. One of the benefits of living in Chicago, a rare 3-hub town.</li><li>The day before my flight, when getting my boarding pass on the Southwest app (my usual process; I was contactless before it was a thing), I had to click through a certification that I wasn’t running a temperature and that I hadn’t been exposed to or tested positive for COVID-19. OK, click. Then I get a screen telling me that face masks are required to board. Makes sense, click. And now I get my boarding pass.</li><li>Monday morning, Irene drops me off at a pretty sedate departures curb at Midway. I mask up and walk in. It’s not empty, but it’s definitely not the normal Monday morning bustle. It feels more like a Wednesday early afternoon. There’s a bit of a line at regular security, but no line at PreCheck. The TSA agent asks me to drop my mask for a moment to check my ID and then waves me through. I noticed that TSA still has their October 2020 Real ID deadline warning signs on the podium. Hmm… I remember reading at the end of March that the TSA has <a href=\"https://www.dhs.gov/real-id\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">pushed the deadline a year to October 2021</a>. Guess they haven’t had a chance to issue updated signs. You’d think they’d just take the old ones down.</li><li>Most of the restaurants and stores were closed; a pretty common situation. Kev Monteith, a TravelCommons listener and <a href=\"https://travelswithkev.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amtrak travel blogger</a>, replied to one of my Twitter posts saying “I flew Southwest a few weeks ago. Layovers are rough because most places in the airports are closed. I was at STL and only found beer at Burger King and Dunkin Doughnuts.” I would’ve been happy for just a coffee. Down in the main Southwest concourse, some gates were closed off with curtains which I assume was to keep people from sitting there so they don’t have to clean it.</li><li>Looking around the terminal, it felt like mask usage was about 80%. Just about everyone was wearing them when walking around. I’d see some people not wearing them while sitting at the gate, though those folks were distancing themselves from everyone else. I’d see kids ripping their masks off as soon as they got off the jetway. I did notice, though, a sizable minority of mask wearers were just covering their mouths, leaving their noses uncovered -- pilots, cleaning crew, passengers, wheelchair people. Now I’m no epidemiologist, but that seems to defeat the purpose.</li><li>When the agent called boarding, she said “There’s 40 of you on a plane with 175 seats. So everyone gets their own row, and please, don’t everyone sit up front. We need a bit of weight distribution.” It was a quick boarding; we pushed back and took off early. These truly are unprecedented times.</li><li>Nashville was more crowded on Thursday morning when I headed back home. Mostly families as I said at the top of the show. The end of the concourse where the  Southwest gates are was as crowded as usual. There were signs around saying that 3 seats between people equals 6 ft, but there were too many people waiting to make it practical; at least everyone is masked up. I walked back up the terminal to find a bit more space and there, tucked away behind some construction sheeting, I found an empty gate. I’m all alone, mega social distanced, so I take off my mask, log into the WiFi and do some work until the Southwest app on my phone bings, telling me that boarding has begun. </li><li>There were a lot more than 40 people on this flight. I found an empty row and slid all the way over to the window seat since it’s only a 90-minute flight. About 3 minutes later, a guy sat down in the aisle seat. Nobody in the middle seat. Everyone wearing masks and nobody’s head right next to mine, I was good to go. Maybe helped just a bit by the fact that, in those 3 minutes, I pointed all three air jets toward the empty middle seat and turned them on full blast, creating an air curtain between me and the aisle seat -- just in case.</li><li>Bridge Music —  <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Suenjo/11162\">Natchoongi (New Hope Remix)</a> by Suenjo (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Travel Credit Cards</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>As we start traveling again, we’ll start pulling out those travel cards -- Hilton or Delta Amex, United or Southwest or Marriott Visas, American MasterCards -- and so I invited Brett Holzhauer, the travel card expert at ValuePenguin.com, a site that goes deep into these cards, to give us some of his advice as we “un-lockdown” ourselves...</li><li>Interview with Brett Holzhauer, the travel card expert at <a href=\"http://valuepenguin.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"valuepenguin.com\">ValuePenguin.com</a></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #165</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_165.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #165 — First-Post Lockdown Flight; When Does Business Travel Come Back?','','inherit','closed','closed','','2788-revision-v1','','','2020-07-16 19:36:38','2020-07-17 00:36:38','',2788,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/07/16/2788-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2791,1,'2020-07-16 19:37:21','2020-07-17 00:37:21','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/IMG_2073.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2789 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/IMG_2073-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\n<figcaption>The hop taste isn\'t coming through</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p>I broke Chicago\'s containment for my first post-lockdown trip, a fast drive down I-65. We talk about hotels swapping hospitality for sanitation, Hertz\'s bankruptcy, and tips for travel credit card usage from Brett Holzhauer, the travel card expert at <a title=\"valuepenguin.com\" href=\"http://valuepenguin.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">ValuePenguin.com.</a> All this and more at the<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_165.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"> <strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/837229303&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #165: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after a couple of runs back down to Nashville for family stuff -- one in the air and the other on the ground. And with COVID cases spiking in vacation spots like California and south Florida, it seems like that’s the market segment -- folks traveling to see friends and family -- that the airline and hotel companies are banking on. And that’s most of what I saw when flying back from Nashville a few Thursdays ago -- lots of families with kids, groups of people meeting up on the other side of security for maybe some 4 day-weekend trips? The tip-off for me on the business vs. leisure traveler mix was the TSA lines -- solid lines for regular TSA, while I pretty much walked straight through PreCheck. Another tip-off used to be mid-day lines at the bars, but with most of the airport restaurants closed up, that’s not a valid indicator right now.</li><li>Traveling right now requires a bit of nimbleness. On my first post-lockdown trip in May, the workout room at the Spring Hill Hampton Inn was open and I used it every day. Back down in June, there was a piece of paper taped to the door -- “Closed by order of the Health Department”. The front desk agent told me it was a couple of days old -- which explained all the banging in the room above me; somebody must’ve been doing their HIIT workout in their room. I didn’t know if I should be annoyed or impressed at how long they went at it. So for this last trip, I called the hotel the night before I left, before I packed my gym clothes vs. a yoga mat. They told me that they’d just reopened the workout room the day before, so the yoga mat went back in the closet. </li><li>It’s kinda the same very fluid situation right now with bars and restaurants. A few days before we got to Nashville, the mayor closed down any establishment with less than 50% of their sales in food, so pretty much all the bars and taprooms. Makes sense, not arguing it; just forced us to quickly pivot some of our plans. It also forced us to go a bit “old school”, back to making actual phone calls, asking “are you open; dine-in or just take-away?” since places seem to be having trouble updating their websites and their Facebook/Yelp/Google/OpenTable listings fast enough to keep up with the changes.</li><li>It proved out our decision to book the Residence Inn rather than the mainline Marriott a few blocks away. The full-size fridge held a lot more beer, and that kitchenette came in handy when we found out that<a href=\"https://www.princeshotchicken.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"https://www.princeshotchicken.com/\"> Prince’s Hot Chicken</a> was only doing take-away -- I can’t imagine trying to eat an extra-hot half-chicken perched on a king-size bed.</li><li>Bridge Music — Brilliant Day by Hans Atom (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hansatom/47919 Ft: Lisa DeBenedictis</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Lots has been written about how the COVID pandemic has massively accelerated changes toward contactless transactions. Microsoft’s CEO famously said back in April “We’ve seen two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months”.  Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #136 — Is Cash A Waning King; Don’t Make It Hard to Cash in on Loyalty\">episode #136</a>, I said I felt like the last generation of cash payers, that my younger colleagues rarely carried cash; they paid for everything with a card. Looking into my wallet, I had the same $200 worth of 20’s in June that I’d taken out of an ATM in March. Nobody wants to handle cash; they don’t even want to handle my card (Most extreme experience - A bartender at Asgard Brewing’s taproom in Columbia, TN sprayed my Visa card with diluted chlorine bleach before swiping it to pay my bill. Made my wallet smell like a swimming pool). As much as possible, places want us to pre-order and pre-pay, so we just pick up our purchases in a socially distant way and then head home. It’s also switched up some opinions on using facial recognition for flight check ins. Pre-coronavirus, the push was from governments as a better way to do security screenings and to improve immigration compliance, and this was getting big pushback on privacy concerns. Now, it’s pivoted. The push is from travel companies using facial recognition as a way of providing the touchless check-in experience that most travelers now want. </li><li>But facial recognition is stymied by face masks which we wear when we’re checking in at airports and hotel lobbies. As is Face ID when trying to unlock my iPhone to get to my boarding pass or digital room key. Until I can downgrade to an iPhone SE with that old-school Touch ID that unlocks using my thumb print, I think I’m going to have to shorten the PIN code on my iPhone 11 Pro. I lengthened it for better security but am banging it in more and more often. And I’ve noticed the iPhone is really slow about recognizing my number presses -- or it misses some when I go too fast (like when I’m trying to pull up a boarding pass in line) and errors out. </li><li>Walking down the Hertz Five Star aisle at Nashville Airport, I saw their version of paper rings that hotels used to put around toilet seats to “certify” they’d been cleaned. In Hertz’s case, they put a “<a href=\"http://ir.hertz.com/2020-05-15-Hertz-Introduces-Hertz-Gold-Standard-Clean-Sealed-and-Certified-Vehicles\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Hertz Gold Standard Clean</a>” sticker across the driver-side center pillar (the B pillar for all my gearhead listeners) so that you break it when you open the driver door to get it. Nice gesture, though it kept me from doing my usual walk down the aisle, opening the door of a bunch of cars to check their mileage. Seemed rude to break all those stickers, though I did notice more than a few broken ones when choosing my car. Way back in the old days of TravelCommons, we used to talk about the TSA doing “security theater” in the screening lines. This feels a bit like “sanitation theater”. </li><li>I finally broke down and bought a new set of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2BbOqyA\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bose noise cancelling headphones -- the new 700’s</a>. This is my third set of Bose cans. Bought my first pair in 2009. I was flying a lot of short flights at the time, and in those days before regional jets, I was on a lot of prop planes. And they’re noisy -- not just on take-off, but the entire flight. After a while, I started to notice fatigue when getting off those planes. Talking to a few folks, they said the noise heightens stress. A friend told me how much he liked his Bose cans, and so I burnt some Amex Membership Rewards points on Amazon for a pair of Quiet Comfort 2’s. It was a revelation; flick the switch and, whoosh, quiet. I took them on every flight, until 3 years later, I left them in a seatback pocket when rushing off a plane to make a tight connection. I immediately lit up some more Membership Rewards points for a new pair - <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3eF2iPk\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">QC-15’s</a>. Four years later, I replaced a worn out set of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2OwiIPF\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">ear cushions</a>. And though the non-replaceable headband cushion is looking pretty ratty, the now 8-year-old headphones still work great. What got me to replace them was the wire. I’d be sitting in my usual aisle seat, plugged into my iPhone (using one of those dongles that Apple no longer gives you with a new phone). At some point in the flight, the folks in the middle and window seats would want to get up and use the toilet and inevitably, I’d snag the wire on the arm of the seat, pull the headphones off my head, and/or launch my phone a row forward.  I could’ve gotten a pair of the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3eFWLYJ\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">QC-35’s</a> -- same form factor without the wire -- but decided to go all next-generation with the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2BbOqyA\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">700’s</a>, which has meant some adjustment pains. Like there are buttons in places where they never were before. So when I grab the ear cups to slip the headphones off, I manage to hit a button that changes the noise reduction level or summons Siri. Also new is using the touch surface on the right ear cup to control things. You tap or swipe the right ear cup to accept or drop a call, pause a song, raise or lower the volume, or skip 30 seconds to fast-forward past a podcast ad. I’m learning to be a bit more precise in my motions; I’ve already dropped a couple of calls when I was just trying to turn down the call volume.  One thing I really like -- more for working-at-home than in-flight usage -- is that the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2BbOqyA\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">700’s</a> can pair with two Bluetooth devices at the same time. So, for me, I have them paired with my MacBook Air and my iPhone and they switch seamlessly between the two. Nice when I’ve got Zoom calls on my Mac and then a phone call on my iPhone. And, call me shallow, but they look a bit cooler than my old <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3eF2iPk\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">QC-15’s</a>. I’ve had the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2BbOqyA\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">700’s</a> for about a month now and really like them. I guess you could say they’re “TravelCommons Approved.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music —  <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Suenjo/11162\">Natchoongi (New Hope Remix)</a> by Suenjo (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>First Post-Lockdown Flight</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Way back at the beginning of the lockdown, the first Saturday of April, I was on a Zoom beer drinking call with Rob Cheshire, a long-time TravelCommons listener and now a podcaster -- he interviews UK craft brewers on his <em><a href=\"https://thisweekincraft.beer/podcast/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">This Week in Craft Beer</a></em>. It was a Saturday afternoon call, for Rob and the other guys in London; just past noon for me in Chicago, but hey…. And somewhere around our second or third beer, Rob asked me “When will you be comfortable getting on a plane again?” I really didn\'t have a good answer. It was early days; I wasn’t sure.</li><li>Fast forward to the back half of June. I needed to get down to Nashville again and didn’t have the time to burn 8 hrs for the drive down and another 8 on the way back. I had some travel funds sitting in my Southwest account from a couple of April trip cancellations, and Southwest flies 6 non-stop 737s between Chicago and Nashville while American and United only do smaller regional jets, and Southwest isn’t packing them full -- booking those bigger planes at ⅔’s capacity -- while American and United say they’ll let you know if your flight books solid. All told, a pretty easy decision to fly Southwest. One of the benefits of living in Chicago, a rare 3-hub town.</li><li>The day before my flight, when getting my boarding pass on the Southwest app (my usual process; I was contactless before it was a thing), I had to click through a certification that I wasn’t running a temperature and that I hadn’t been exposed to or tested positive for COVID-19. OK, click. Then I get a screen telling me that face masks are required to board. Makes sense, click. And now I get my boarding pass.</li><li>Monday morning, Irene drops me off at a pretty sedate departures curb at Midway. I mask up and walk in. It’s not empty, but it’s definitely not the normal Monday morning bustle. It feels more like a Wednesday early afternoon. There’s a bit of a line at regular security, but no line at PreCheck. The TSA agent asks me to drop my mask for a moment to check my ID and then waves me through. I noticed that TSA still has their October 2020 Real ID deadline warning signs on the podium. Hmm… I remember reading at the end of March that the TSA has <a href=\"https://www.dhs.gov/real-id\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">pushed the deadline a year to October 2021</a>. Guess they haven’t had a chance to issue updated signs. You’d think they’d just take the old ones down.</li><li>Most of the restaurants and stores were closed; a pretty common situation. Kev Monteith, a TravelCommons listener and <a href=\"https://travelswithkev.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amtrak travel blogger</a>, replied to one of my Twitter posts saying “I flew Southwest a few weeks ago. Layovers are rough because most places in the airports are closed. I was at STL and only found beer at Burger King and Dunkin Doughnuts.” I would’ve been happy for just a coffee. Down in the main Southwest concourse, some gates were closed off with curtains which I assume was to keep people from sitting there so they don’t have to clean it.</li><li>Looking around the terminal, it felt like mask usage was about 80%. Just about everyone was wearing them when walking around. I’d see some people not wearing them while sitting at the gate, though those folks were distancing themselves from everyone else. I’d see kids ripping their masks off as soon as they got off the jetway. I did notice, though, a sizable minority of mask wearers were just covering their mouths, leaving their noses uncovered -- pilots, cleaning crew, passengers, wheelchair people. Now I’m no epidemiologist, but that seems to defeat the purpose.</li><li>When the agent called boarding, she said “There’s 40 of you on a plane with 175 seats. So everyone gets their own row, and please, don’t everyone sit up front. We need a bit of weight distribution.” It was a quick boarding; we pushed back and took off early. These truly are unprecedented times.</li><li>Nashville was more crowded on Thursday morning when I headed back home. Mostly families as I said at the top of the show. The end of the concourse where the  Southwest gates are was as crowded as usual. There were signs around saying that 3 seats between people equals 6 ft, but there were too many people waiting to make it practical; at least everyone is masked up. I walked back up the terminal to find a bit more space and there, tucked away behind some construction sheeting, I found an empty gate. I’m all alone, mega social distanced, so I take off my mask, log into the WiFi and do some work until the Southwest app on my phone bings, telling me that boarding has begun. </li><li>There were a lot more than 40 people on this flight. I found an empty row and slid all the way over to the window seat since it’s only a 90-minute flight. About 3 minutes later, a guy sat down in the aisle seat. Nobody in the middle seat. Everyone wearing masks and nobody’s head right next to mine, I was good to go. Maybe helped just a bit by the fact that, in those 3 minutes, I pointed all three air jets toward the empty middle seat and turned them on full blast, creating an air curtain between me and the aisle seat -- just in case.</li><li>Bridge Music —  <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Suenjo/11162\">Natchoongi (New Hope Remix)</a> by Suenjo (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>When Does Business Travel Come Back?</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>As we start traveling again, we’ll start pulling out those travel cards -- Hilton or Delta Amex, United or Southwest or Marriott Visas, American MasterCards -- and so I invited Brett Holzhauer, the travel card expert at ValuePenguin.com, a site that goes deep into these cards, to give us some of his advice as we “un-lockdown” ourselves...</li><li>Interview with Brett Holzhauer, the travel card expert at <a href=\"http://valuepenguin.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"valuepenguin.com\">ValuePenguin.com</a></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #165</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_165.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #165 — First-Post Lockdown Flight; When Does Business Travel Come Back?','','inherit','closed','closed','','2788-revision-v1','','','2020-07-16 19:37:21','2020-07-17 00:37:21','',2788,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/07/16/2788-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2792,1,'2020-07-17 19:48:05','2020-07-18 00:48:05','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/IMG_2073.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2789 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/IMG_2073-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a><figcaption>The hop taste isn\'t coming through</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>I broke Chicago\'s containment for my first post-lockdown trip, a fast drive down I-65. We talk about hotels swapping hospitality for sanitation, Hertz\'s bankruptcy, and tips for travel credit card usage from Brett Holzhauer, the travel card expert at <a title=\"valuepenguin.com\" href=\"http://valuepenguin.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">ValuePenguin.com.</a>&nbsp;All this and more at the<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_165.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"> <strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/837229303&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #165: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after a couple of runs back down to Nashville for family stuff -- one in the air and the other on the ground. And with COVID cases spiking in vacation spots like California and south Florida, it seems like that’s the market segment -- folks traveling to see friends and family -- that the airline and hotel companies are banking on. And that’s most of what I saw when flying back from Nashville a few Thursdays ago -- lots of families with kids, groups of people meeting up on the other side of security for maybe some 4 day-weekend trips? The tip-off for me on the business vs. leisure traveler mix was the TSA lines -- solid lines for regular TSA, while I pretty much walked straight through PreCheck. Another tip-off used to be mid-day lines at the bars, but with most of the airport restaurants closed up, that’s not a valid indicator right now.</li><li>Traveling right now requires a bit of nimbleness. On my first post-lockdown trip in May, the workout room at the Spring Hill Hampton Inn was open and I used it every day. Back down in June, there was a piece of paper taped to the door -- “Closed by order of the Health Department”. The front desk agent told me it was a couple of days old -- which explained all the banging in the room above me; somebody must’ve been doing their HIIT workout in their room. I didn’t know if I should be annoyed or impressed at how long they went at it. So for this last trip, I called the hotel the night before I left, before I packed my gym clothes vs. a yoga mat. They told me that they’d just reopened the workout room the day before, so the yoga mat went back in the closet. </li><li>It’s kinda the same very fluid situation right now with bars and restaurants. A few days before we got to Nashville, the mayor closed down any establishment with less than 50% of their sales in food, so pretty much all the bars and taprooms. Makes sense, not arguing it; just forced us to quickly pivot some of our plans. It also forced us to go a bit “old school”, back to making actual phone calls, asking “are you open; dine-in or just take-away?” since places seem to be having trouble updating their websites and their Facebook/Yelp/Google/OpenTable listings fast enough to keep up with the changes.</li><li>It proved out our decision to book the Residence Inn rather than the mainline Marriott a few blocks away. The full-size fridge held a lot more beer, and that kitchenette came in handy when we found out that<a href=\"https://www.princeshotchicken.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"https://www.princeshotchicken.com/\"> Prince’s Hot Chicken</a> was only doing take-away -- I can’t imagine trying to eat an extra-hot half-chicken perched on a king-size bed.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/JeffSpeed68/54450\">Hula Hoop Party</a> by Stefan Kartenberg (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: Martijn de Boer, Blue Wave Theory</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Lots has been written about how the COVID pandemic has massively accelerated changes toward contactless transactions. Microsoft’s CEO famously said back in April “We’ve seen two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months”.  Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #136 — Is Cash A Waning King; Don’t Make It Hard to Cash in on Loyalty\">episode #136</a>, I said I felt like the last generation of cash payers, that my younger colleagues rarely carried cash; they paid for everything with a card. Looking into my wallet, I had the same $200 worth of 20’s in June that I’d taken out of an ATM in March. Nobody wants to handle cash; they don’t even want to handle my card (Most extreme experience - A bartender at Asgard Brewing’s taproom in Columbia, TN sprayed my Visa card with diluted chlorine bleach before swiping it to pay my bill. Made my wallet smell like a swimming pool). As much as possible, places want us to pre-order and pre-pay, so we just pick up our purchases in a socially distant way and then head home. It’s also switched up some opinions on using facial recognition for flight check ins. Pre-coronavirus, the push was from governments as a better way to do security screenings and to improve immigration compliance, and this was getting big pushback on privacy concerns. Now, it’s pivoted. The push is from travel companies using facial recognition as a way of providing the touchless check-in experience that most travelers now want. </li><li>But facial recognition is stymied by face masks which we wear when we’re checking in at airports and hotel lobbies. As is Face ID when trying to unlock my iPhone to get to my boarding pass or digital room key. Until I can downgrade to an iPhone SE with that old-school Touch ID that unlocks using my thumb print, I think I’m going to have to shorten the PIN code on my iPhone 11 Pro. I lengthened it for better security but am banging it in more and more often. And I’ve noticed the iPhone is really slow about recognizing my number presses -- or it misses some when I go too fast (like when I’m trying to pull up a boarding pass in line) and errors out. </li><li>Walking down the Hertz Five Star aisle at Nashville Airport, I saw their version of paper rings that hotels used to put around toilet seats to “certify” they’d been cleaned. In Hertz’s case, they put a “<a href=\"http://ir.hertz.com/2020-05-15-Hertz-Introduces-Hertz-Gold-Standard-Clean-Sealed-and-Certified-Vehicles\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Hertz Gold Standard Clean</a>” sticker across the driver-side center pillar (the B pillar for all my gearhead listeners) so that you break it when you open the driver door to get it. Nice gesture, though it kept me from doing my usual walk down the aisle, opening the door of a bunch of cars to check their mileage. Seemed rude to break all those stickers, though I did notice more than a few broken ones when choosing my car. Way back in the old days of TravelCommons, we used to talk about the TSA doing “security theater” in the screening lines. This feels a bit like “sanitation theater”. </li><li>I finally broke down and bought a new set of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2BbOqyA\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bose noise cancelling headphones -- the new 700’s</a>. This is my third set of Bose cans. Bought my first pair in 2009. I was flying a lot of short flights at the time, and in those days before regional jets, I was on a lot of prop planes. And they’re noisy -- not just on take-off, but the entire flight. After a while, I started to notice fatigue when getting off those planes. Talking to a few folks, they said the noise heightens stress. A friend told me how much he liked his Bose cans, and so I burnt some Amex Membership Rewards points on Amazon for a pair of Quiet Comfort 2’s. It was a revelation; flick the switch and, whoosh, quiet. I took them on every flight, until 3 years later, I left them in a seatback pocket when rushing off a plane to make a tight connection. I immediately lit up some more Membership Rewards points for a new pair - <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3eF2iPk\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">QC-15’s</a>. Four years later, I replaced a worn out set of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2OwiIPF\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">ear cushions</a>. And though the non-replaceable headband cushion is looking pretty ratty, the now 8-year-old headphones still work great. What got me to replace them was the wire. I’d be sitting in my usual aisle seat, plugged into my iPhone (using one of those dongles that Apple no longer gives you with a new phone). At some point in the flight, the folks in the middle and window seats would want to get up and use the toilet and inevitably, I’d snag the wire on the arm of the seat, pull the headphones off my head, and/or launch my phone a row forward.  I could’ve gotten a pair of the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3eFWLYJ\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">QC-35’s</a> -- same form factor without the wire -- but decided to go all next-generation with the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2BbOqyA\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">700’s</a>, which has meant some adjustment pains. Like there are buttons in places where they never were before. So when I grab the ear cups to slip the headphones off, I manage to hit a button that changes the noise reduction level or summons Siri. Also new is using the touch surface on the right ear cup to control things. You tap or swipe the right ear cup to accept or drop a call, pause a song, raise or lower the volume, or skip 30 seconds to fast-forward past a podcast ad. I’m learning to be a bit more precise in my motions; I’ve already dropped a couple of calls when I was just trying to turn down the call volume.  One thing I really like -- more for working-at-home than in-flight usage -- is that the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2BbOqyA\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">700’s</a> can pair with two Bluetooth devices at the same time. So, for me, I have them paired with my MacBook Air and my iPhone and they switch seamlessly between the two. Nice when I’ve got Zoom calls on my Mac and then a phone call on my iPhone. And, call me shallow, but they look a bit cooler than my old <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3eF2iPk\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">QC-15’s</a>. I’ve had the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2BbOqyA\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">700’s</a> for about a month now and really like them. I guess you could say they’re “TravelCommons Approved.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/bridges/15563\">i knew</a> by bridges (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. Ft: shannonsongs</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>First Post-Lockdown Flight</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Way back at the beginning of the lockdown, the first Saturday of April, I was on a Zoom beer drinking call with Rob Cheshire, a long-time TravelCommons listener and now a podcaster -- he interviews UK craft brewers on his <em><a href=\"https://thisweekincraft.beer/podcast/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">This Week in Craft Beer</a></em>. It was a Saturday afternoon call, for Rob and the other guys in London; just past noon for me in Chicago, but hey…. And somewhere around our second or third beer, Rob asked me “When will you be comfortable getting on a plane again?” I really didn\'t have a good answer. It was early days; I wasn’t sure.</li><li>Fast forward to the back half of June. I needed to get down to Nashville again and didn’t have the time to burn 8 hrs for the drive down and another 8 on the way back. I had some travel funds sitting in my Southwest account from a couple of April trip cancellations, and Southwest flies 6 non-stop 737s between Chicago and Nashville while American and United only do smaller regional jets, and Southwest isn’t packing them full -- booking those bigger planes at ⅔’s capacity -- while American and United say they’ll let you know if your flight books solid. All told, a pretty easy decision to fly Southwest. One of the benefits of living in Chicago, a rare 3-hub town.</li><li>The day before my flight, when getting my boarding pass on the Southwest app (my usual process; I was contactless before it was a thing), I had to click through a certification that I wasn’t running a temperature and that I hadn’t been exposed to or tested positive for COVID-19. OK, click. Then I get a screen telling me that face masks are required to board. Makes sense, click. And now I get my boarding pass.</li><li>Monday morning, Irene drops me off at a pretty sedate departures curb at Midway. I mask up and walk in. It’s not empty, but it’s definitely not the normal Monday morning bustle. It feels more like a Wednesday early afternoon. There’s a bit of a line at regular security, but no line at PreCheck. The TSA agent asks me to drop my mask for a moment to check my ID and then waves me through. I noticed that TSA still has their October 2020 Real ID deadline warning signs on the podium. Hmm… I remember reading at the end of March that the TSA has <a href=\"https://www.dhs.gov/real-id\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">pushed the deadline a year to October 2021</a>. Guess they haven’t had a chance to issue updated signs. You’d think they’d just take the old ones down.</li><li>Most of the restaurants and stores were closed; a pretty common situation. Kev Monteith, a TravelCommons listener and <a href=\"https://travelswithkev.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amtrak travel blogger</a>, replied to one of my Twitter posts saying “I flew Southwest a few weeks ago. Layovers are rough because most places in the airports are closed. I was at STL and only found beer at Burger King and Dunkin Doughnuts.” I would’ve been happy for just a coffee. Down in the main Southwest concourse, some gates were closed off with curtains which I assume was to keep people from sitting there so they don’t have to clean it.</li><li>Looking around the terminal, it felt like mask usage was about 80%. Just about everyone was wearing them when walking around. I’d see some people not wearing them while sitting at the gate, though those folks were distancing themselves from everyone else. I’d see kids ripping their masks off as soon as they got off the jetway. I did notice, though, a sizable minority of mask wearers were just covering their mouths, leaving their noses uncovered -- pilots, cleaning crew, passengers, wheelchair people. Now I’m no epidemiologist, but that seems to defeat the purpose.</li><li>When the agent called boarding, she said “There’s 40 of you on a plane with 175 seats. So everyone gets their own row, and please, don’t everyone sit up front. We need a bit of weight distribution.” It was a quick boarding; we pushed back and took off early. These truly are unprecedented times.</li><li>Nashville was more crowded on Thursday morning when I headed back home. Mostly families as I said at the top of the show. The end of the concourse where the  Southwest gates are was as crowded as usual. There were signs around saying that 3 seats between people equals 6 ft, but there were too many people waiting to make it practical; at least everyone is masked up. I walked back up the terminal to find a bit more space and there, tucked away behind some construction sheeting, I found an empty gate. I’m all alone, mega social distanced, so I take off my mask, log into the WiFi and do some work until the Southwest app on my phone bings, telling me that boarding has begun. </li><li>There were a lot more than 40 people on this flight. I found an empty row and slid all the way over to the window seat since it’s only a 90-minute flight. About 3 minutes later, a guy sat down in the aisle seat. Nobody in the middle seat. Everyone wearing masks and nobody’s head right next to mine, I was good to go. Maybe helped just a bit by the fact that, in those 3 minutes, I pointed all three air jets toward the empty middle seat and turned them on full blast, creating an air curtain between me and the aisle seat -- just in case.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/3lb3r3th/44072\">Misunderstood</a> by 3lb3r3th (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: Alchemistry</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>When Does Business Travel Come Back?</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>As we start traveling again, we’ll start pulling out those travel cards -- Hilton or Delta Amex, United or Southwest or Marriott Visas, American MasterCards -- and so I invited Brett Holzhauer, the travel card expert at ValuePenguin.com, a site that goes deep into these cards, to give us some of his advice as we “un-lockdown” ourselves...</li><li>Interview with Brett Holzhauer, the travel card expert at <a href=\"http://valuepenguin.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"valuepenguin.com\">ValuePenguin.com</a></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #165</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_165.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #165 — First-Post Lockdown Flight; When Does Business Travel Come Back?','','inherit','closed','closed','','2788-revision-v1','','','2020-07-17 19:48:05','2020-07-18 00:48:05','',2788,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/07/17/2788-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2793,1,'2020-07-17 19:48:50','2020-07-18 00:48:50','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/IMG_2073.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2789 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/IMG_2073-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a><figcaption>The hop taste isn\'t coming through</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>I broke Chicago\'s containment for my first post-lockdown trip, a fast drive down I-65. We talk about hotels swapping hospitality for sanitation, Hertz\'s bankruptcy, and tips for travel credit card usage from Brett Holzhauer, the travel card expert at <a title=\"valuepenguin.com\" href=\"http://valuepenguin.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">ValuePenguin.com.</a>&nbsp;All this and more at the<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_165.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"> <strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/837229303&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #165: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after a couple of runs back down to Nashville for family stuff -- one in the air and the other on the ground. And with COVID cases spiking in vacation spots like California and south Florida, it seems like that’s the market segment -- folks traveling to see friends and family -- that the airline and hotel companies are banking on. And that’s most of what I saw when flying back from Nashville a few Thursdays ago -- lots of families with kids, groups of people meeting up on the other side of security for maybe some 4 day-weekend trips? The tip-off for me on the business vs. leisure traveler mix was the TSA lines -- solid lines for regular TSA, while I pretty much walked straight through PreCheck. Another tip-off used to be mid-day lines at the bars, but with most of the airport restaurants closed up, that’s not a valid indicator right now.</li><li>Traveling right now requires a bit of nimbleness. On my first post-lockdown trip in May, the workout room at the Spring Hill Hampton Inn was open and I used it every day. Back down in June, there was a piece of paper taped to the door -- “Closed by order of the Health Department”. The front desk agent told me it was a couple of days old -- which explained all the banging in the room above me; somebody must’ve been doing their HIIT workout in their room. I didn’t know if I should be annoyed or impressed at how long they went at it. So for this last trip, I called the hotel the night before I left, before I packed my gym clothes vs. a yoga mat. They told me that they’d just reopened the workout room the day before, so the yoga mat went back in the closet. </li><li>It’s kinda the same very fluid situation right now with bars and restaurants. A few days before we got to Nashville, the mayor closed down any establishment with less than 50% of their sales in food, so pretty much all the bars and taprooms. Makes sense, not arguing it; just forced us to quickly pivot some of our plans. It also forced us to go a bit “old school”, back to making actual phone calls, asking “are you open; dine-in or just take-away?” since places seem to be having trouble updating their websites and their Facebook/Yelp/Google/OpenTable listings fast enough to keep up with the changes.</li><li>It proved out our decision to book the Residence Inn rather than the mainline Marriott a few blocks away. The full-size fridge held a lot more beer, and that kitchenette came in handy when we found out that<a href=\"https://www.princeshotchicken.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"https://www.princeshotchicken.com/\"> Prince’s Hot Chicken</a> was only doing take-away -- I can’t imagine trying to eat an extra-hot half-chicken perched on a king-size bed.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/JeffSpeed68/54450\">Hula Hoop Party</a> by Stefan Kartenberg (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: Martijn de Boer, Blue Wave Theory</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Lots has been written about how the COVID pandemic has massively accelerated changes toward contactless transactions. Microsoft’s CEO famously said back in April “We’ve seen two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months”.  Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #136 — Is Cash A Waning King; Don’t Make It Hard to Cash in on Loyalty\">episode #136</a>, I said I felt like the last generation of cash payers, that my younger colleagues rarely carried cash; they paid for everything with a card. Looking into my wallet, I had the same $200 worth of 20’s in June that I’d taken out of an ATM in March. Nobody wants to handle cash; they don’t even want to handle my card (Most extreme experience - A bartender at Asgard Brewing’s taproom in Columbia, TN sprayed my Visa card with diluted chlorine bleach before swiping it to pay my bill. Made my wallet smell like a swimming pool). As much as possible, places want us to pre-order and pre-pay, so we just pick up our purchases in a socially distant way and then head home. It’s also switched up some opinions on using facial recognition for flight check ins. Pre-coronavirus, the push was from governments as a better way to do security screenings and to improve immigration compliance, and this was getting big pushback on privacy concerns. Now, it’s pivoted. The push is from travel companies using facial recognition as a way of providing the touchless check-in experience that most travelers now want. </li><li>But facial recognition is stymied by face masks which we wear when we’re checking in at airports and hotel lobbies. As is Face ID when trying to unlock my iPhone to get to my boarding pass or digital room key. Until I can downgrade to an iPhone SE with that old-school Touch ID that unlocks using my thumb print, I think I’m going to have to shorten the PIN code on my iPhone 11 Pro. I lengthened it for better security but am banging it in more and more often. And I’ve noticed the iPhone is really slow about recognizing my number presses -- or it misses some when I go too fast (like when I’m trying to pull up a boarding pass in line) and errors out. </li><li>Walking down the Hertz Five Star aisle at Nashville Airport, I saw their version of paper rings that hotels used to put around toilet seats to “certify” they’d been cleaned. In Hertz’s case, they put a “<a href=\"http://ir.hertz.com/2020-05-15-Hertz-Introduces-Hertz-Gold-Standard-Clean-Sealed-and-Certified-Vehicles\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Hertz Gold Standard Clean</a>” sticker across the driver-side center pillar (the B pillar for all my gearhead listeners) so that you break it when you open the driver door to get it. Nice gesture, though it kept me from doing my usual walk down the aisle, opening the door of a bunch of cars to check their mileage. Seemed rude to break all those stickers, though I did notice more than a few broken ones when choosing my car. Way back in the old days of TravelCommons, we used to talk about the TSA doing “security theater” in the screening lines. This feels a bit like “sanitation theater”. </li><li>I finally broke down and bought a new set of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2BbOqyA\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bose noise cancelling headphones -- the new 700’s</a>. This is my third set of Bose cans. Bought my first pair in 2009. I was flying a lot of short flights at the time, and in those days before regional jets, I was on a lot of prop planes. And they’re noisy -- not just on take-off, but the entire flight. After a while, I started to notice fatigue when getting off those planes. Talking to a few folks, they said the noise heightens stress. A friend told me how much he liked his Bose cans, and so I burnt some Amex Membership Rewards points on Amazon for a pair of Quiet Comfort 2’s. It was a revelation; flick the switch and, whoosh, quiet. I took them on every flight, until 3 years later, I left them in a seatback pocket when rushing off a plane to make a tight connection. I immediately lit up some more Membership Rewards points for a new pair - <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3eF2iPk\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">QC-15’s</a>. Four years later, I replaced a worn out set of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2OwiIPF\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">ear cushions</a>. And though the non-replaceable headband cushion is looking pretty ratty, the now 8-year-old headphones still work great. What got me to replace them was the wire. I’d be sitting in my usual aisle seat, plugged into my iPhone (using one of those dongles that Apple no longer gives you with a new phone). At some point in the flight, the folks in the middle and window seats would want to get up and use the toilet and inevitably, I’d snag the wire on the arm of the seat, pull the headphones off my head, and/or launch my phone a row forward.  I could’ve gotten a pair of the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3eFWLYJ\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">QC-35’s</a> -- same form factor without the wire -- but decided to go all next-generation with the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2BbOqyA\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">700’s</a>, which has meant some adjustment pains. Like there are buttons in places where they never were before. So when I grab the ear cups to slip the headphones off, I manage to hit a button that changes the noise reduction level or summons Siri. Also new is using the touch surface on the right ear cup to control things. You tap or swipe the right ear cup to accept or drop a call, pause a song, raise or lower the volume, or skip 30 seconds to fast-forward past a podcast ad. I’m learning to be a bit more precise in my motions; I’ve already dropped a couple of calls when I was just trying to turn down the call volume.  One thing I really like -- more for working-at-home than in-flight usage -- is that the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2BbOqyA\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">700’s</a> can pair with two Bluetooth devices at the same time. So, for me, I have them paired with my MacBook Air and my iPhone and they switch seamlessly between the two. Nice when I’ve got Zoom calls on my Mac and then a phone call on my iPhone. And, call me shallow, but they look a bit cooler than my old <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3eF2iPk\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">QC-15’s</a>. I’ve had the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2BbOqyA\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">700’s</a> for about a month now and really like them. I guess you could say they’re “TravelCommons Approved.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/bridges/15563\">i knew</a> by bridges (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. Ft: shannonsongs</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>First Post-Lockdown Flight</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Way back at the beginning of the lockdown, the first Saturday of April, I was on a Zoom beer drinking call with Rob Cheshire, a long-time TravelCommons listener and now a podcaster -- he interviews UK craft brewers on his <em><a href=\"https://thisweekincraft.beer/podcast/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">This Week in Craft Beer</a></em>. It was a Saturday afternoon call, for Rob and the other guys in London; just past noon for me in Chicago, but hey…. And somewhere around our second or third beer, Rob asked me “When will you be comfortable getting on a plane again?” I really didn\'t have a good answer. It was early days; I wasn’t sure.</li><li>Fast forward to the back half of June. I needed to get down to Nashville again and didn’t have the time to burn 8 hrs for the drive down and another 8 on the way back. I had some travel funds sitting in my Southwest account from a couple of April trip cancellations, and Southwest flies 6 non-stop 737s between Chicago and Nashville while American and United only do smaller regional jets, and Southwest isn’t packing them full -- booking those bigger planes at ⅔’s capacity -- while American and United say they’ll let you know if your flight books solid. All told, a pretty easy decision to fly Southwest. One of the benefits of living in Chicago, a rare 3-hub town.</li><li>The day before my flight, when getting my boarding pass on the Southwest app (my usual process; I was contactless before it was a thing), I had to click through a certification that I wasn’t running a temperature and that I hadn’t been exposed to or tested positive for COVID-19. OK, click. Then I get a screen telling me that face masks are required to board. Makes sense, click. And now I get my boarding pass.</li><li>Monday morning, Irene drops me off at a pretty sedate departures curb at Midway. I mask up and walk in. It’s not empty, but it’s definitely not the normal Monday morning bustle. It feels more like a Wednesday early afternoon. There’s a bit of a line at regular security, but no line at PreCheck. The TSA agent asks me to drop my mask for a moment to check my ID and then waves me through. I noticed that TSA still has their October 2020 Real ID deadline warning signs on the podium. Hmm… I remember reading at the end of March that the TSA has <a href=\"https://www.dhs.gov/real-id\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">pushed the deadline a year to October 2021</a>. Guess they haven’t had a chance to issue updated signs. You’d think they’d just take the old ones down.</li><li>Most of the restaurants and stores were closed; a pretty common situation. Kev Monteith, a TravelCommons listener and <a href=\"https://travelswithkev.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amtrak travel blogger</a>, replied to one of my Twitter posts saying “I flew Southwest a few weeks ago. Layovers are rough because most places in the airports are closed. I was at STL and only found beer at Burger King and Dunkin Doughnuts.” I would’ve been happy for just a coffee. Down in the main Southwest concourse, some gates were closed off with curtains which I assume was to keep people from sitting there so they don’t have to clean it.</li><li>Looking around the terminal, it felt like mask usage was about 80%. Just about everyone was wearing them when walking around. I’d see some people not wearing them while sitting at the gate, though those folks were distancing themselves from everyone else. I’d see kids ripping their masks off as soon as they got off the jetway. I did notice, though, a sizable minority of mask wearers were just covering their mouths, leaving their noses uncovered -- pilots, cleaning crew, passengers, wheelchair people. Now I’m no epidemiologist, but that seems to defeat the purpose.</li><li>When the agent called boarding, she said “There’s 40 of you on a plane with 175 seats. So everyone gets their own row, and please, don’t everyone sit up front. We need a bit of weight distribution.” It was a quick boarding; we pushed back and took off early. These truly are unprecedented times.</li><li>Nashville was more crowded on Thursday morning when I headed back home. Mostly families as I said at the top of the show. The end of the concourse where the  Southwest gates are was as crowded as usual. There were signs around saying that 3 seats between people equals 6 ft, but there were too many people waiting to make it practical; at least everyone is masked up. I walked back up the terminal to find a bit more space and there, tucked away behind some construction sheeting, I found an empty gate. I’m all alone, mega social distanced, so I take off my mask, log into the WiFi and do some work until the Southwest app on my phone bings, telling me that boarding has begun. </li><li>There were a lot more than 40 people on this flight. I found an empty row and slid all the way over to the window seat since it’s only a 90-minute flight. About 3 minutes later, a guy sat down in the aisle seat. Nobody in the middle seat. Everyone wearing masks and nobody’s head right next to mine, I was good to go. Maybe helped just a bit by the fact that, in those 3 minutes, I pointed all three air jets toward the empty middle seat and turned them on full blast, creating an air curtain between me and the aisle seat -- just in case.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/3lb3r3th/44072\">Misunderstood</a> by 3lb3r3th (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: Alchemistry</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>When Does Business Travel Come Back?</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>My son Andrew and his girlfriend took the 6am flight to LGA earlier this week. I asked him “How full was the flight?” “Maybe 20 people; mostly families,” he said. Didn’t surprise me that a Thursday 6am LGA flight was only at 11% capacity. That’s normally a business travel run; people getting up at 0 dark 30 in Chicago to make 10am meetings in Manhattan. But there’s not many business travelers now.&nbsp; While business travelers only make up about 10% of passengers on major airlines, they provide between 55 and 75% of the profits. You might could think they’re subsidizing the budget fares those families are using.</li><li>Over the past month, I’ve been talking with Sales VPs at companies that deliver complex IT services. If anybody would be feeling the bite of not traveling, I thought it would be these guys. I’ve done a number of these deals, and they always involved locking all the right decision makers in a conference room to hash out all the contract details and ride herd over the transition. But I was completely wrong. They all said that work hasn’t slowed down during the lockdown. They’ve been able to do all that conference room work over Zoom. Indeed, they said being virtual has made it easier for them. Pre-lockdown, one of their biggest challenges was calendar wrangling -- being able to get all their execs and the client execs into that conference room at the same time. Now, they just click some buttons and everyone shows up in Zoom gallery mode -- no travel planning, no scrambling after cancelled or delayed flights. They all said they love the ease of virtual meetings and, at the end of the day, closing the lid on their laptops and having dinner with the family every night.</li><li>Kinda supports the narrative that business travel will never rebound; back to the Microsoft CEO’s quote: in 2 months, we’ve advanced 2 years in virtual work culture. But when I probed a bit, I found that Zoom hasn’t completely replaced an airplane ticket. While these guys have been able to virtually close deals they had in their sales funnel, virtual meetings don’t seem to be replacing these deals; getting new prospects into the top of the sales funnel. So while things are looking good now, they’re beginning to worry about 4-6 months from now.</li><li>This was the exact opposite of what I’d expected. I thought the give and take of negotiations, the sidebar conversations, the emotional content, wouldn’t translate into video calls. But it looks like I was wrong; that once a deal has some momentum and a structure to guide everyone, the in-person hammering out turns out to be a nice-to-have. And the reason new opportunities aren’t coming in is that they need more exploratory, abstract, wide-ranging conversations that lack that guiding structure and selling a team as much as a product -- at least for complex services -- and that’s tough to do over a pane of glass.</li><li>And so they all said that they’d probably start traveling again -- reluctantly -- by the end of this month. But I do think this, call it a 4-month exercise in figuring out virtual work methods and cultures will move the set point, everybody’s default decision toward virtual meetings. And so maybe a bit less focused on high-profit road warriors and more dependent on those cost-conscious families. Does this mean repointing the 6am LGA flights to Cancun? They’re going to have to seriously reengineer those drink carts.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #165</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_165.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #165 — First-Post Lockdown Flight; When Does Business Travel Come Back?','','inherit','closed','closed','','2788-revision-v1','','','2020-07-17 19:48:50','2020-07-18 00:48:50','',2788,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/07/17/2788-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2794,1,'2020-07-17 20:49:20','2020-07-18 01:49:20','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/IMG_2073.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2789 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/IMG_2073-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\n<figcaption>The hop taste isn\'t coming through</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p>My first post-lockdown flight was a 90-minute Southwest non-stop from Chicago to Nashville. It wasn\'t bad, but not as casually easy as my last pre-coronavirus flight in February. We talk about that experience as well as Hertz\'s new cleaning program, my latest pair of Bose noise-cancelling headphones, and then wonder when business travel will return. All this and more at the<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_165.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"> <strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/837229303&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #165: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after a couple of runs back down to Nashville for family stuff -- one in the air and the other on the ground. And with COVID cases spiking in vacation spots like California and south Florida, it seems like that’s the market segment -- folks traveling to see friends and family -- that the airline and hotel companies are banking on. And that’s most of what I saw when flying back from Nashville a few Thursdays ago -- lots of families with kids, groups of people meeting up on the other side of security for maybe some 4 day-weekend trips? The tip-off for me on the business vs. leisure traveler mix was the TSA lines -- solid lines for regular TSA, while I pretty much walked straight through PreCheck. Another tip-off used to be mid-day lines at the bars, but with most of the airport restaurants closed up, that’s not a valid indicator right now.</li><li>Traveling right now requires a bit of nimbleness. On my first post-lockdown trip in May, the workout room at the Spring Hill Hampton Inn was open and I used it every day. Back down in June, there was a piece of paper taped to the door -- “Closed by order of the Health Department”. The front desk agent told me it was a couple of days old -- which explained all the banging in the room above me; somebody must’ve been doing their HIIT workout in their room. I didn’t know if I should be annoyed or impressed at how long they went at it. So for this last trip, I called the hotel the night before I left, before I packed my gym clothes vs. a yoga mat. They told me that they’d just reopened the workout room the day before, so the yoga mat went back in the closet. </li><li>It’s kinda the same very fluid situation right now with bars and restaurants. A few days before we got to Nashville, the mayor closed down any establishment with less than 50% of their sales in food, so pretty much all the bars and taprooms. Makes sense, not arguing it; just forced us to quickly pivot some of our plans. It also forced us to go a bit “old school”, back to making actual phone calls, asking “are you open; dine-in or just take-away?” since places seem to be having trouble updating their websites and their Facebook/Yelp/Google/OpenTable listings fast enough to keep up with the changes.</li><li>It proved out our decision to book the Residence Inn rather than the mainline Marriott a few blocks away. The full-size fridge held a lot more beer, and that kitchenette came in handy when we found out that<a href=\"https://www.princeshotchicken.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"https://www.princeshotchicken.com/\"> Prince’s Hot Chicken</a> was only doing take-away -- I can’t imagine trying to eat an extra-hot half-chicken perched on a king-size bed.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/JeffSpeed68/54450\">Hula Hoop Party</a> by Stefan Kartenberg (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: Martijn de Boer, Blue Wave Theory</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Lots has been written about how the COVID pandemic has massively accelerated changes toward contactless transactions. Microsoft’s CEO famously said back in April “We’ve seen two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months”.  Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #136 — Is Cash A Waning King; Don’t Make It Hard to Cash in on Loyalty\">episode #136</a>, I said I felt like the last generation of cash payers, that my younger colleagues rarely carried cash; they paid for everything with a card. Looking into my wallet, I had the same $200 worth of 20’s in June that I’d taken out of an ATM in March. Nobody wants to handle cash; they don’t even want to handle my card (Most extreme experience - A bartender at Asgard Brewing’s taproom in Columbia, TN sprayed my Visa card with diluted chlorine bleach before swiping it to pay my bill. Made my wallet smell like a swimming pool). As much as possible, places want us to pre-order and pre-pay, so we just pick up our purchases in a socially distant way and then head home. It’s also switched up some opinions on using facial recognition for flight check ins. Pre-coronavirus, the push was from governments as a better way to do security screenings and to improve immigration compliance, and this was getting big pushback on privacy concerns. Now, it’s pivoted. The push is from travel companies using facial recognition as a way of providing the touchless check-in experience that most travelers now want. </li><li>But facial recognition is stymied by face masks which we wear when we’re checking in at airports and hotel lobbies. As is Face ID when trying to unlock my iPhone to get to my boarding pass or digital room key. Until I can downgrade to an iPhone SE with that old-school Touch ID that unlocks using my thumb print, I think I’m going to have to shorten the PIN code on my iPhone 11 Pro. I lengthened it for better security but am banging it in more and more often. And I’ve noticed the iPhone is really slow about recognizing my number presses -- or it misses some when I go too fast (like when I’m trying to pull up a boarding pass in line) and errors out. </li><li>Walking down the Hertz Five Star aisle at Nashville Airport, I saw their version of paper rings that hotels used to put around toilet seats to “certify” they’d been cleaned. In Hertz’s case, they put a “<a href=\"http://ir.hertz.com/2020-05-15-Hertz-Introduces-Hertz-Gold-Standard-Clean-Sealed-and-Certified-Vehicles\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Hertz Gold Standard Clean</a>” sticker across the driver-side center pillar (the B pillar for all my gearhead listeners) so that you break it when you open the driver door to get it. Nice gesture, though it kept me from doing my usual walk down the aisle, opening the door of a bunch of cars to check their mileage. Seemed rude to break all those stickers, though I did notice more than a few broken ones when choosing my car. Way back in the old days of TravelCommons, we used to talk about the TSA doing “security theater” in the screening lines. This feels a bit like “sanitation theater”. </li><li>I finally broke down and bought a new set of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2BbOqyA\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bose noise cancelling headphones -- the new 700’s</a>. This is my third set of Bose cans. Bought my first pair in 2009. I was flying a lot of short flights at the time, and in those days before regional jets, I was on a lot of prop planes. And they’re noisy -- not just on take-off, but the entire flight. After a while, I started to notice fatigue when getting off those planes. Talking to a few folks, they said the noise heightens stress. A friend told me how much he liked his Bose cans, and so I burnt some Amex Membership Rewards points on Amazon for a pair of Quiet Comfort 2’s. It was a revelation; flick the switch and, whoosh, quiet. I took them on every flight, until 3 years later, I left them in a seatback pocket when rushing off a plane to make a tight connection. I immediately lit up some more Membership Rewards points for a new pair - <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3eF2iPk\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">QC-15’s</a>. Four years later, I replaced a worn out set of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2OwiIPF\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">ear cushions</a>. And though the non-replaceable headband cushion is looking pretty ratty, the now 8-year-old headphones still work great. What got me to replace them was the wire. I’d be sitting in my usual aisle seat, plugged into my iPhone (using one of those dongles that Apple no longer gives you with a new phone). At some point in the flight, the folks in the middle and window seats would want to get up and use the toilet and inevitably, I’d snag the wire on the arm of the seat, pull the headphones off my head, and/or launch my phone a row forward.  I could’ve gotten a pair of the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3eFWLYJ\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">QC-35’s</a> -- same form factor without the wire -- but decided to go all next-generation with the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2BbOqyA\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">700’s</a>, which has meant some adjustment pains. Like there are buttons in places where they never were before. So when I grab the ear cups to slip the headphones off, I manage to hit a button that changes the noise reduction level or summons Siri. Also new is using the touch surface on the right ear cup to control things. You tap or swipe the right ear cup to accept or drop a call, pause a song, raise or lower the volume, or skip 30 seconds to fast-forward past a podcast ad. I’m learning to be a bit more precise in my motions; I’ve already dropped a couple of calls when I was just trying to turn down the call volume.  One thing I really like -- more for working-at-home than in-flight usage -- is that the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2BbOqyA\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">700’s</a> can pair with two Bluetooth devices at the same time. So, for me, I have them paired with my MacBook Air and my iPhone and they switch seamlessly between the two. Nice when I’ve got Zoom calls on my Mac and then a phone call on my iPhone. And, call me shallow, but they look a bit cooler than my old <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3eF2iPk\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">QC-15’s</a>. I’ve had the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2BbOqyA\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">700’s</a> for about a month now and really like them. I guess you could say they’re “TravelCommons Approved.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/bridges/15563\">i knew</a> by bridges (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. Ft: shannonsongs</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>First Post-Lockdown Flight</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Way back at the beginning of the lockdown, the first Saturday of April, I was on a Zoom beer drinking call with Rob Cheshire, a long-time TravelCommons listener and now a podcaster -- he interviews UK craft brewers on his <em><a href=\"https://thisweekincraft.beer/podcast/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">This Week in Craft Beer</a></em>. It was a Saturday afternoon call, for Rob and the other guys in London; just past noon for me in Chicago, but hey…. And somewhere around our second or third beer, Rob asked me “When will you be comfortable getting on a plane again?” I really didn\'t have a good answer. It was early days; I wasn’t sure.</li><li>Fast forward to the back half of June. I needed to get down to Nashville again and didn’t have the time to burn 8 hrs for the drive down and another 8 on the way back. I had some travel funds sitting in my Southwest account from a couple of April trip cancellations, and Southwest flies 6 non-stop 737s between Chicago and Nashville while American and United only do smaller regional jets, and Southwest isn’t packing them full -- booking those bigger planes at ⅔’s capacity -- while American and United say they’ll let you know if your flight books solid. All told, a pretty easy decision to fly Southwest. One of the benefits of living in Chicago, a rare 3-hub town.</li><li>The day before my flight, when getting my boarding pass on the Southwest app (my usual process; I was contactless before it was a thing), I had to click through a certification that I wasn’t running a temperature and that I hadn’t been exposed to or tested positive for COVID-19. OK, click. Then I get a screen telling me that face masks are required to board. Makes sense, click. And now I get my boarding pass.</li><li>Monday morning, Irene drops me off at a pretty sedate departures curb at Midway. I mask up and walk in. It’s not empty, but it’s definitely not the normal Monday morning bustle. It feels more like a Wednesday early afternoon. There’s a bit of a line at regular security, but no line at PreCheck. The TSA agent asks me to drop my mask for a moment to check my ID and then waves me through. I noticed that TSA still has their October 2020 Real ID deadline warning signs on the podium. Hmm… I remember reading at the end of March that the TSA has <a href=\"https://www.dhs.gov/real-id\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">pushed the deadline a year to October 2021</a>. Guess they haven’t had a chance to issue updated signs. You’d think they’d just take the old ones down.</li><li>Most of the restaurants and stores were closed; a pretty common situation. Kev Monteith, a TravelCommons listener and <a href=\"https://travelswithkev.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amtrak travel blogger</a>, replied to one of my Twitter posts saying “I flew Southwest a few weeks ago. Layovers are rough because most places in the airports are closed. I was at STL and only found beer at Burger King and Dunkin Doughnuts.” I would’ve been happy for just a coffee. Down in the main Southwest concourse, some gates were closed off with curtains which I assume was to keep people from sitting there so they don’t have to clean it.</li><li>Looking around the terminal, it felt like mask usage was about 80%. Just about everyone was wearing them when walking around. I’d see some people not wearing them while sitting at the gate, though those folks were distancing themselves from everyone else. I’d see kids ripping their masks off as soon as they got off the jetway. I did notice, though, a sizable minority of mask wearers were just covering their mouths, leaving their noses uncovered -- pilots, cleaning crew, passengers, wheelchair people. Now I’m no epidemiologist, but that seems to defeat the purpose.</li><li>When the agent called boarding, she said “There’s 40 of you on a plane with 175 seats. So everyone gets their own row, and please, don’t everyone sit up front. We need a bit of weight distribution.” It was a quick boarding; we pushed back and took off early. These truly are unprecedented times.</li><li>Nashville was more crowded on Thursday morning when I headed back home. Mostly families as I said at the top of the show. The end of the concourse where the  Southwest gates are was as crowded as usual. There were signs around saying that 3 seats between people equals 6 ft, but there were too many people waiting to make it practical; at least everyone is masked up. I walked back up the terminal to find a bit more space and there, tucked away behind some construction sheeting, I found an empty gate. I’m all alone, mega social distanced, so I take off my mask, log into the WiFi and do some work until the Southwest app on my phone bings, telling me that boarding has begun. </li><li>There were a lot more than 40 people on this flight. I found an empty row and slid all the way over to the window seat since it’s only a 90-minute flight. About 3 minutes later, a guy sat down in the aisle seat. Nobody in the middle seat. Everyone wearing masks and nobody’s head right next to mine, I was good to go. Maybe helped just a bit by the fact that, in those 3 minutes, I pointed all three air jets toward the empty middle seat and turned them on full blast, creating an air curtain between me and the aisle seat -- just in case.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/3lb3r3th/44072\">Misunderstood</a> by 3lb3r3th (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: Alchemistry</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>When Does Business Travel Come Back?</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>My son Andrew and his girlfriend took the 6am flight to LGA earlier this week. I asked him “How full was the flight?” “Maybe 20 people; mostly families,” he said. Didn’t surprise me that a Thursday 6am LGA flight was only at 11% capacity. That’s normally a business travel run; people getting up at 0 dark 30 in Chicago to make 10am meetings in Manhattan. But there’s not many business travelers now.&nbsp; While business travelers only make up about 10% of passengers on major airlines, they provide between 55 and 75% of the profits. You might could think they’re subsidizing the budget fares those families are using.</li><li>Over the past month, I’ve been talking with Sales VPs at companies that deliver complex IT services. If anybody would be feeling the bite of not traveling, I thought it would be these guys. I’ve done a number of these deals, and they always involved locking all the right decision makers in a conference room to hash out all the contract details and ride herd over the transition. But I was completely wrong. They all said that work hasn’t slowed down during the lockdown. They’ve been able to do all that conference room work over Zoom. Indeed, they said being virtual has made it easier for them. Pre-lockdown, one of their biggest challenges was calendar wrangling -- being able to get all their execs and the client execs into that conference room at the same time. Now, they just click some buttons and everyone shows up in Zoom gallery mode -- no travel planning, no scrambling after cancelled or delayed flights. They all said they love the ease of virtual meetings and, at the end of the day, closing the lid on their laptops and having dinner with the family every night.</li><li>Kinda supports the narrative that business travel will never rebound; back to the Microsoft CEO’s quote: in 2 months, we’ve advanced 2 years in virtual work culture. But when I probed a bit, I found that Zoom hasn’t completely replaced an airplane ticket. While these guys have been able to virtually close deals they had in their sales funnel, virtual meetings don’t seem to be replacing these deals; getting new prospects into the top of the sales funnel. So while things are looking good now, they’re beginning to worry about 4-6 months from now.</li><li>This was the exact opposite of what I’d expected. I thought the give and take of negotiations, the sidebar conversations, the emotional content, wouldn’t translate into video calls. But it looks like I was wrong; that once a deal has some momentum and a structure to guide everyone, the in-person hammering out turns out to be a nice-to-have. And the reason new opportunities aren’t coming in is that they need more exploratory, abstract, wide-ranging conversations that lack that guiding structure and selling a team as much as a product -- at least for complex services -- and that’s tough to do over a pane of glass.</li><li>And so they all said that they’d probably start traveling again -- reluctantly -- by the end of this month. But I do think this, call it a 4-month exercise in figuring out virtual work methods and cultures will move the set point, everybody’s default decision toward virtual meetings. And so maybe a bit less focused on high-profit road warriors and more dependent on those cost-conscious families. Does this mean repointing the 6am LGA flights to Cancun? They’re going to have to seriously reengineer those drink carts.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #165</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_165.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #165 — First Post- Lockdown Flight; When Does Business Travel Come Back?','','inherit','closed','closed','','2788-revision-v1','','','2020-07-17 20:49:20','2020-07-18 01:49:20','',2788,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/07/17/2788-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2795,1,'2020-07-17 20:53:10','2020-07-18 01:53:10','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/IMG_2073.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2789 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/IMG_2073-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a><figcaption>The hop taste isn\'t coming through</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>My first post-lockdown flight was a 90-minute Southwest non-stop from Chicago to Nashville. It wasn\'t bad, but not as casually easy as my last pre-coronavirus flight in February. We talk about that experience as well as Hertz\'s new cleaning program, my latest pair of Bose noise-cancelling headphones, and then wonder when business travel will return. All this and more at the<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_165.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"> <strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/8600727073&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #165: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after a couple of runs back down to Nashville for family stuff -- one in the air and the other on the ground. And with COVID cases spiking in vacation spots like California and south Florida, it seems like that’s the market segment -- folks traveling to see friends and family -- that the airline and hotel companies are banking on. And that’s most of what I saw when flying back from Nashville a few Thursdays ago -- lots of families with kids, groups of people meeting up on the other side of security for maybe some 4 day-weekend trips? The tip-off for me on the business vs. leisure traveler mix was the TSA lines -- solid lines for regular TSA, while I pretty much walked straight through PreCheck. Another tip-off used to be mid-day lines at the bars, but with most of the airport restaurants closed up, that’s not a valid indicator right now.</li><li>Traveling right now requires a bit of nimbleness. On my first post-lockdown trip in May, the workout room at the Spring Hill Hampton Inn was open and I used it every day. Back down in June, there was a piece of paper taped to the door -- “Closed by order of the Health Department”. The front desk agent told me it was a couple of days old -- which explained all the banging in the room above me; somebody must’ve been doing their HIIT workout in their room. I didn’t know if I should be annoyed or impressed at how long they went at it. So for this last trip, I called the hotel the night before I left, before I packed my gym clothes vs. a yoga mat. They told me that they’d just reopened the workout room the day before, so the yoga mat went back in the closet.&nbsp;</li><li>It’s kinda the same very fluid situation right now with bars and restaurants. A few days before we got to Nashville, the mayor closed down any establishment with less than 50% of their sales in food, so pretty much all the bars and taprooms. Makes sense, not arguing it; just forced us to quickly pivot some of our plans. It also forced us to go a bit “old school”, back to making actual phone calls, asking “are you open; dine-in or just take-away?” since places seem to be having trouble updating their websites and their Facebook/Yelp/Google/OpenTable listings fast enough to keep up with the changes.</li><li>It proved out our decision to book the Residence Inn rather than the mainline Marriott a few blocks away. The full-size fridge held a lot more beer, and that kitchenette came in handy when we found out that<a href=\"https://www.princeshotchicken.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"https://www.princeshotchicken.com/\"> Prince’s Hot Chicken</a> was only doing take-away -- I can’t imagine trying to eat an extra-hot half-chicken perched on a king-size bed.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/JeffSpeed68/54450\">Hula Hoop Party</a> by Stefan Kartenberg (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. &nbsp;Ft: Martijn de Boer, Blue Wave Theory</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Lots has been written about how the COVID pandemic has massively accelerated changes toward contactless transactions. Microsoft’s CEO famously said back in April “We’ve seen two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months”.&nbsp; Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #136 — Is Cash A Waning King; Don’t Make It Hard to Cash in on Loyalty\">episode #136</a>, I said I felt like the last generation of cash payers, that my younger colleagues rarely carried cash; they paid for everything with a card. Looking into my wallet, I had the same $200 worth of 20’s in June that I’d taken out of an ATM in March. Nobody wants to handle cash; they don’t even want to handle my card (Most extreme experience - A bartender at Asgard Brewing’s taproom in Columbia, TN sprayed my Visa card with diluted chlorine bleach before swiping it to pay my bill. Made my wallet smell like a swimming pool). As much as possible, places want us to pre-order and pre-pay, so we just pick up our purchases in a socially distant way and then head home. It’s also switched up some opinions on using facial recognition for flight check ins. Pre-coronavirus, the push was from governments as a better way to do security screenings and to improve immigration compliance, and this was getting big pushback on privacy concerns. Now, it’s pivoted. The push is from travel companies using facial recognition as a way of providing the touchless check-in experience that most travelers now want.&nbsp;</li><li>But facial recognition is stymied by face masks which we wear when we’re checking in at airports and hotel lobbies. As is Face ID when trying to unlock my iPhone to get to my boarding pass or digital room key. Until I can downgrade to an iPhone SE with that old-school Touch ID that unlocks using my thumb print, I think I’m going to have to shorten the PIN code on my iPhone 11 Pro. I lengthened it for better security but am banging it in more and more often. And I’ve noticed the iPhone is really slow about recognizing my number presses -- or it misses some when I go too fast (like when I’m trying to pull up a boarding pass in line) and errors out.&nbsp;</li><li>Walking down the Hertz Five Star aisle at Nashville Airport, I saw their version of paper rings that hotels used to put around toilet seats to “certify” they’d been cleaned. In Hertz’s case, they put a “<a href=\"http://ir.hertz.com/2020-05-15-Hertz-Introduces-Hertz-Gold-Standard-Clean-Sealed-and-Certified-Vehicles\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Hertz Gold Standard Clean</a>” sticker across the driver-side center pillar (the B pillar for all my gearhead listeners) so that you break it when you open the driver door to get it. Nice gesture, though it kept me from doing my usual walk down the aisle, opening the door of a bunch of cars to check their mileage. Seemed rude to break all those stickers, though I did notice more than a few broken ones when choosing my car. Way back in the old days of TravelCommons, we used to talk about the TSA doing “security theater” in the screening lines. This feels a bit like “sanitation theater”.&nbsp;</li><li>I finally broke down and bought a new set of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2BbOqyA\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bose noise cancelling headphones -- the new 700’s</a>. This is my third set of Bose cans. Bought my first pair in 2009. I was flying a lot of short flights at the time, and in those days before regional jets, I was on a lot of prop planes. And they’re noisy -- not just on take-off, but the entire flight. After a while, I started to notice fatigue when getting off those planes. Talking to a few folks, they said the noise heightens stress. A friend told me how much he liked his Bose cans, and so I burnt some Amex Membership Rewards points on Amazon for a pair of Quiet Comfort 2’s. It was a revelation; flick the switch and, whoosh, quiet. I took them on every flight, until 3 years later, I left them in a seatback pocket when rushing off a plane to make a tight connection. I immediately lit up some more Membership Rewards points for a new pair - <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3eF2iPk\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">QC-15’s</a>. Four years later, I replaced a worn out set of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2OwiIPF\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">ear cushions</a>. And though the non-replaceable headband cushion is looking pretty ratty, the now 8-year-old headphones still work great. What got me to replace them was the wire. I’d be sitting in my usual aisle seat, plugged into my iPhone (using one of those dongles that Apple no longer gives you with a new phone). At some point in the flight, the folks in the middle and window seats would want to get up and use the toilet and inevitably, I’d snag the wire on the arm of the seat, pull the headphones off my head, and/or launch my phone a row forward.&nbsp; I could’ve gotten a pair of the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3eFWLYJ\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">QC-35’s</a> -- same form factor without the wire -- but decided to go all next-generation with the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2BbOqyA\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">700’s</a>, which has meant some adjustment pains. Like there are buttons in places where they never were before. So when I grab the ear cups to slip the headphones off, I manage to hit a button that changes the noise reduction level or summons Siri. Also new is using the touch surface on the right ear cup to control things. You tap or swipe the right ear cup to accept or drop a call, pause a song, raise or lower the volume, or skip 30 seconds to fast-forward past a podcast ad. I’m learning to be a bit more precise in my motions; I’ve already dropped a couple of calls when I was just trying to turn down the call volume.&nbsp; One thing I really like -- more for working-at-home than in-flight usage -- is that the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2BbOqyA\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">700’s</a> can pair with two Bluetooth devices at the same time. So, for me, I have them paired with my MacBook Air and my iPhone and they switch seamlessly between the two. Nice when I’ve got Zoom calls on my Mac and then a phone call on my iPhone. And, call me shallow, but they look a bit cooler than my old <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3eF2iPk\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">QC-15’s</a>. I’ve had the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2BbOqyA\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">700’s</a> for about a month now and really like them. I guess you could say they’re “TravelCommons Approved.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/bridges/15563\">i knew</a> by bridges (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp;Ft: shannonsongs</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>First Post-Lockdown Flight</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Way back at the beginning of the lockdown, the first Saturday of April, I was on a Zoom beer drinking call with Rob Cheshire, a long-time TravelCommons listener and now a podcaster -- he interviews UK craft brewers on his <em><a href=\"https://thisweekincraft.beer/podcast/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">This Week in Craft Beer</a></em>. It was a Saturday afternoon call, for Rob and the other guys in London; just past noon for me in Chicago, but hey…. And somewhere around our second or third beer, Rob asked me “When will you be comfortable getting on a plane again?” I really didn\'t have a good answer. It was early days; I wasn’t sure.</li><li>Fast forward to the back half of June. I needed to get down to Nashville again and didn’t have the time to burn 8 hrs for the drive down and another 8 on the way back. I had some travel funds sitting in my Southwest account from a couple of April trip cancellations, and Southwest flies 6 non-stop 737s between Chicago and Nashville while American and United only do smaller regional jets, and Southwest isn’t packing them full -- booking those bigger planes at ⅔’s capacity -- while American and United say they’ll let you know if your flight books solid. All told, a pretty easy decision to fly Southwest. One of the benefits of living in Chicago, a rare 3-hub town.</li><li>The day before my flight, when getting my boarding pass on the Southwest app (my usual process; I was contactless before it was a thing), I had to click through a certification that I wasn’t running a temperature and that I hadn’t been exposed to or tested positive for COVID-19. OK, click. Then I get a screen telling me that face masks are required to board. Makes sense, click. And now I get my boarding pass.</li><li>Monday morning, Irene drops me off at a pretty sedate departures curb at Midway. I mask up and walk in. It’s not empty, but it’s definitely not the normal Monday morning bustle. It feels more like a Wednesday early afternoon. There’s a bit of a line at regular security, but no line at PreCheck. The TSA agent asks me to drop my mask for a moment to check my ID and then waves me through. I noticed that TSA still has their October 2020 Real ID deadline warning signs on the podium. Hmm… I remember reading at the end of March that the TSA has <a href=\"https://www.dhs.gov/real-id\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">pushed the deadline a year to October 2021</a>. Guess they haven’t had a chance to issue updated signs. You’d think they’d just take the old ones down.</li><li>Most of the restaurants and stores were closed; a pretty common situation. Kev Monteith, a TravelCommons listener and <a href=\"https://travelswithkev.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amtrak travel blogger</a>, replied to one of my Twitter posts saying “I flew Southwest a few weeks ago. Layovers are rough because most places in the airports are closed. I was at STL and only found beer at Burger King and Dunkin Doughnuts.” I would’ve been happy for just a coffee. Down in the main Southwest concourse, some gates were closed off with curtains which I assume was to keep people from sitting there so they don’t have to clean it.</li><li>Looking around the terminal, it felt like mask usage was about 80%. Just about everyone was wearing them when walking around. I’d see some people not wearing them while sitting at the gate, though those folks were distancing themselves from everyone else. I’d see kids ripping their masks off as soon as they got off the jetway. I did notice, though, a sizable minority of mask wearers were just covering their mouths, leaving their noses uncovered -- pilots, cleaning crew, passengers, wheelchair people. Now I’m no epidemiologist, but that seems to defeat the purpose.</li><li>When the agent called boarding, she said “There’s 40 of you on a plane with 175 seats. So everyone gets their own row, and please, don’t everyone sit up front. We need a bit of weight distribution.” It was a quick boarding; we pushed back and took off early. These truly are unprecedented times.</li><li>Nashville was more crowded on Thursday morning when I headed back home. Mostly families as I said at the top of the show. The end of the concourse where the&nbsp; Southwest gates are was as crowded as usual. There were signs around saying that 3 seats between people equals 6 ft, but there were too many people waiting to make it practical; at least everyone is masked up. I walked back up the terminal to find a bit more space and there, tucked away behind some construction sheeting, I found an empty gate. I’m all alone, mega social distanced, so I take off my mask, log into the WiFi and do some work until the Southwest app on my phone bings, telling me that boarding has begun.&nbsp;</li><li>There were a lot more than 40 people on this flight. I found an empty row and slid all the way over to the window seat since it’s only a 90-minute flight. About 3 minutes later, a guy sat down in the aisle seat. Nobody in the middle seat. Everyone wearing masks and nobody’s head right next to mine, I was good to go. Maybe helped just a bit by the fact that, in those 3 minutes, I pointed all three air jets toward the empty middle seat and turned them on full blast, creating an air curtain between me and the aisle seat -- just in case.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/3lb3r3th/44072\">Misunderstood</a> by 3lb3r3th (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. &nbsp;Ft: Alchemistry</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>When Does Business Travel Come Back?</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>My son Andrew and his girlfriend took the 6am flight to LGA earlier this week. I asked him “How full was the flight?” “Maybe 20 people; mostly families,” he said. Didn’t surprise me that a Thursday 6am LGA flight was only at 11% capacity. That’s normally a business travel run; people getting up at 0 dark 30 in Chicago to make 10am meetings in Manhattan. But there’s not many business travelers now.&nbsp; While business travelers only make up about 10% of passengers on major airlines, they provide between 55 and 75% of the profits. You might could think they’re subsidizing the budget fares those families are using.</li><li>Over the past month, I’ve been talking with Sales VPs at companies that deliver complex IT services. If anybody would be feeling the bite of not traveling, I thought it would be these guys. I’ve done a number of these deals, and they always involved locking all the right decision makers in a conference room to hash out all the contract details and ride herd over the transition. But I was completely wrong. They all said that work hasn’t slowed down during the lockdown. They’ve been able to do all that conference room work over Zoom. Indeed, they said being virtual has made it easier for them. Pre-lockdown, one of their biggest challenges was calendar wrangling -- being able to get all their execs and the client execs into that conference room at the same time. Now, they just click some buttons and everyone shows up in Zoom gallery mode -- no travel planning, no scrambling after cancelled or delayed flights. They all said they love the ease of virtual meetings and, at the end of the day, closing the lid on their laptops and having dinner with the family every night.</li><li>Kinda supports the narrative that business travel will never rebound; back to the Microsoft CEO’s quote: in 2 months, we’ve advanced 2 years in virtual work culture. But when I probed a bit, I found that Zoom hasn’t completely replaced an airplane ticket. While these guys have been able to virtually close deals they had in their sales funnel, virtual meetings don’t seem to be replacing these deals; getting new prospects into the top of the sales funnel. So while things are looking good now, they’re beginning to worry about 4-6 months from now.</li><li>This was the exact opposite of what I’d expected. I thought the give and take of negotiations, the sidebar conversations, the emotional content, wouldn’t translate into video calls. But it looks like I was wrong; that once a deal has some momentum and a structure to guide everyone, the in-person hammering out turns out to be a nice-to-have. And the reason new opportunities aren’t coming in is that they need more exploratory, abstract, wide-ranging conversations that lack that guiding structure and selling a team as much as a product -- at least for complex services -- and that’s tough to do over a pane of glass.</li><li>And so they all said that they’d probably start traveling again -- reluctantly -- by the end of this month. But I do think this, call it a 4-month exercise in figuring out virtual work methods and cultures will move the set point, everybody’s default decision toward virtual meetings. And so maybe a bit less focused on high-profit road warriors and more dependent on those cost-conscious families. Does this mean repointing the 6am LGA flights to Cancun? They’re going to have to seriously reengineer those drink carts.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #165</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_165.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #165 — First Post- Lockdown Flight; When Does Business Travel Come Back?','','inherit','closed','closed','','2788-revision-v1','','','2020-07-17 20:53:10','2020-07-18 01:53:10','',2788,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/07/17/2788-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2796,1,'2020-07-17 20:54:09','2020-07-18 01:54:09','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/IMG_2073.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2789 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/IMG_2073-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a><figcaption>The hop taste isn\'t coming through</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>My first post-lockdown flight was a 90-minute Southwest non-stop from Chicago to Nashville. It wasn\'t bad, but not as casually easy as my last pre-coronavirus flight in February. We talk about that experience as well as Hertz\'s new cleaning program, my latest pair of Bose noise-cancelling headphones, and then wonder when business travel will return. All this and more at the<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_165.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"> <strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/860072707&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><div style=\"font-size: 10px; color: #cccccc;line-break: anywhere;word-break: normal;overflow: hidden;white-space: nowrap;text-overflow: ellipsis; font-family: Interstate,Lucida Grande,Lucida Sans Unicode,Lucida Sans,Garuda,Verdana,Tahoma,sans-serif;font-weight: 100;\"><a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" title=\"travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" style=\"color: #cccccc; text-decoration: none;\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">travelcommons</a> · <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons/podcast-165-first-post-lockdown-flight-when-does-business-travel-come-back\" title=\"Podcast #165 — First Post-Lockdown Flight; When Does Business Travel Come Back?\" target=\"_blank\" style=\"color: #cccccc; text-decoration: none;\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Podcast #165 — First Post-Lockdown Flight; When Does Business Travel Come Back?</a></div>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #165: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after a couple of runs back down to Nashville for family stuff -- one in the air and the other on the ground. And with COVID cases spiking in vacation spots like California and south Florida, it seems like that’s the market segment -- folks traveling to see friends and family -- that the airline and hotel companies are banking on. And that’s most of what I saw when flying back from Nashville a few Thursdays ago -- lots of families with kids, groups of people meeting up on the other side of security for maybe some 4 day-weekend trips? The tip-off for me on the business vs. leisure traveler mix was the TSA lines -- solid lines for regular TSA, while I pretty much walked straight through PreCheck. Another tip-off used to be mid-day lines at the bars, but with most of the airport restaurants closed up, that’s not a valid indicator right now.</li><li>Traveling right now requires a bit of nimbleness. On my first post-lockdown trip in May, the workout room at the Spring Hill Hampton Inn was open and I used it every day. Back down in June, there was a piece of paper taped to the door -- “Closed by order of the Health Department”. The front desk agent told me it was a couple of days old -- which explained all the banging in the room above me; somebody must’ve been doing their HIIT workout in their room. I didn’t know if I should be annoyed or impressed at how long they went at it. So for this last trip, I called the hotel the night before I left, before I packed my gym clothes vs. a yoga mat. They told me that they’d just reopened the workout room the day before, so the yoga mat went back in the closet.&nbsp;</li><li>It’s kinda the same very fluid situation right now with bars and restaurants. A few days before we got to Nashville, the mayor closed down any establishment with less than 50% of their sales in food, so pretty much all the bars and taprooms. Makes sense, not arguing it; just forced us to quickly pivot some of our plans. It also forced us to go a bit “old school”, back to making actual phone calls, asking “are you open; dine-in or just take-away?” since places seem to be having trouble updating their websites and their Facebook/Yelp/Google/OpenTable listings fast enough to keep up with the changes.</li><li>It proved out our decision to book the Residence Inn rather than the mainline Marriott a few blocks away. The full-size fridge held a lot more beer, and that kitchenette came in handy when we found out that<a href=\"https://www.princeshotchicken.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"https://www.princeshotchicken.com/\"> Prince’s Hot Chicken</a> was only doing take-away -- I can’t imagine trying to eat an extra-hot half-chicken perched on a king-size bed.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/JeffSpeed68/54450\">Hula Hoop Party</a> by Stefan Kartenberg (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. &nbsp;Ft: Martijn de Boer, Blue Wave Theory</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Lots has been written about how the COVID pandemic has massively accelerated changes toward contactless transactions. Microsoft’s CEO famously said back in April “We’ve seen two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months”.&nbsp; Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #136 — Is Cash A Waning King; Don’t Make It Hard to Cash in on Loyalty\">episode #136</a>, I said I felt like the last generation of cash payers, that my younger colleagues rarely carried cash; they paid for everything with a card. Looking into my wallet, I had the same $200 worth of 20’s in June that I’d taken out of an ATM in March. Nobody wants to handle cash; they don’t even want to handle my card (Most extreme experience - A bartender at Asgard Brewing’s taproom in Columbia, TN sprayed my Visa card with diluted chlorine bleach before swiping it to pay my bill. Made my wallet smell like a swimming pool). As much as possible, places want us to pre-order and pre-pay, so we just pick up our purchases in a socially distant way and then head home. It’s also switched up some opinions on using facial recognition for flight check ins. Pre-coronavirus, the push was from governments as a better way to do security screenings and to improve immigration compliance, and this was getting big pushback on privacy concerns. Now, it’s pivoted. The push is from travel companies using facial recognition as a way of providing the touchless check-in experience that most travelers now want.&nbsp;</li><li>But facial recognition is stymied by face masks which we wear when we’re checking in at airports and hotel lobbies. As is Face ID when trying to unlock my iPhone to get to my boarding pass or digital room key. Until I can downgrade to an iPhone SE with that old-school Touch ID that unlocks using my thumb print, I think I’m going to have to shorten the PIN code on my iPhone 11 Pro. I lengthened it for better security but am banging it in more and more often. And I’ve noticed the iPhone is really slow about recognizing my number presses -- or it misses some when I go too fast (like when I’m trying to pull up a boarding pass in line) and errors out.&nbsp;</li><li>Walking down the Hertz Five Star aisle at Nashville Airport, I saw their version of paper rings that hotels used to put around toilet seats to “certify” they’d been cleaned. In Hertz’s case, they put a “<a href=\"http://ir.hertz.com/2020-05-15-Hertz-Introduces-Hertz-Gold-Standard-Clean-Sealed-and-Certified-Vehicles\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Hertz Gold Standard Clean</a>” sticker across the driver-side center pillar (the B pillar for all my gearhead listeners) so that you break it when you open the driver door to get it. Nice gesture, though it kept me from doing my usual walk down the aisle, opening the door of a bunch of cars to check their mileage. Seemed rude to break all those stickers, though I did notice more than a few broken ones when choosing my car. Way back in the old days of TravelCommons, we used to talk about the TSA doing “security theater” in the screening lines. This feels a bit like “sanitation theater”.&nbsp;</li><li>I finally broke down and bought a new set of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2BbOqyA\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bose noise cancelling headphones -- the new 700’s</a>. This is my third set of Bose cans. Bought my first pair in 2009. I was flying a lot of short flights at the time, and in those days before regional jets, I was on a lot of prop planes. And they’re noisy -- not just on take-off, but the entire flight. After a while, I started to notice fatigue when getting off those planes. Talking to a few folks, they said the noise heightens stress. A friend told me how much he liked his Bose cans, and so I burnt some Amex Membership Rewards points on Amazon for a pair of Quiet Comfort 2’s. It was a revelation; flick the switch and, whoosh, quiet. I took them on every flight, until 3 years later, I left them in a seatback pocket when rushing off a plane to make a tight connection. I immediately lit up some more Membership Rewards points for a new pair - <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3eF2iPk\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">QC-15’s</a>. Four years later, I replaced a worn out set of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2OwiIPF\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">ear cushions</a>. And though the non-replaceable headband cushion is looking pretty ratty, the now 8-year-old headphones still work great. What got me to replace them was the wire. I’d be sitting in my usual aisle seat, plugged into my iPhone (using one of those dongles that Apple no longer gives you with a new phone). At some point in the flight, the folks in the middle and window seats would want to get up and use the toilet and inevitably, I’d snag the wire on the arm of the seat, pull the headphones off my head, and/or launch my phone a row forward.&nbsp; I could’ve gotten a pair of the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3eFWLYJ\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">QC-35’s</a> -- same form factor without the wire -- but decided to go all next-generation with the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2BbOqyA\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">700’s</a>, which has meant some adjustment pains. Like there are buttons in places where they never were before. So when I grab the ear cups to slip the headphones off, I manage to hit a button that changes the noise reduction level or summons Siri. Also new is using the touch surface on the right ear cup to control things. You tap or swipe the right ear cup to accept or drop a call, pause a song, raise or lower the volume, or skip 30 seconds to fast-forward past a podcast ad. I’m learning to be a bit more precise in my motions; I’ve already dropped a couple of calls when I was just trying to turn down the call volume.&nbsp; One thing I really like -- more for working-at-home than in-flight usage -- is that the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2BbOqyA\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">700’s</a> can pair with two Bluetooth devices at the same time. So, for me, I have them paired with my MacBook Air and my iPhone and they switch seamlessly between the two. Nice when I’ve got Zoom calls on my Mac and then a phone call on my iPhone. And, call me shallow, but they look a bit cooler than my old <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3eF2iPk\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">QC-15’s</a>. I’ve had the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2BbOqyA\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">700’s</a> for about a month now and really like them. I guess you could say they’re “TravelCommons Approved.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/bridges/15563\">i knew</a> by bridges (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp;Ft: shannonsongs</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>First Post-Lockdown Flight</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Way back at the beginning of the lockdown, the first Saturday of April, I was on a Zoom beer drinking call with Rob Cheshire, a long-time TravelCommons listener and now a podcaster -- he interviews UK craft brewers on his <em><a href=\"https://thisweekincraft.beer/podcast/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">This Week in Craft Beer</a></em>. It was a Saturday afternoon call, for Rob and the other guys in London; just past noon for me in Chicago, but hey…. And somewhere around our second or third beer, Rob asked me “When will you be comfortable getting on a plane again?” I really didn\'t have a good answer. It was early days; I wasn’t sure.</li><li>Fast forward to the back half of June. I needed to get down to Nashville again and didn’t have the time to burn 8 hrs for the drive down and another 8 on the way back. I had some travel funds sitting in my Southwest account from a couple of April trip cancellations, and Southwest flies 6 non-stop 737s between Chicago and Nashville while American and United only do smaller regional jets, and Southwest isn’t packing them full -- booking those bigger planes at ⅔’s capacity -- while American and United say they’ll let you know if your flight books solid. All told, a pretty easy decision to fly Southwest. One of the benefits of living in Chicago, a rare 3-hub town.</li><li>The day before my flight, when getting my boarding pass on the Southwest app (my usual process; I was contactless before it was a thing), I had to click through a certification that I wasn’t running a temperature and that I hadn’t been exposed to or tested positive for COVID-19. OK, click. Then I get a screen telling me that face masks are required to board. Makes sense, click. And now I get my boarding pass.</li><li>Monday morning, Irene drops me off at a pretty sedate departures curb at Midway. I mask up and walk in. It’s not empty, but it’s definitely not the normal Monday morning bustle. It feels more like a Wednesday early afternoon. There’s a bit of a line at regular security, but no line at PreCheck. The TSA agent asks me to drop my mask for a moment to check my ID and then waves me through. I noticed that TSA still has their October 2020 Real ID deadline warning signs on the podium. Hmm… I remember reading at the end of March that the TSA has <a href=\"https://www.dhs.gov/real-id\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">pushed the deadline a year to October 2021</a>. Guess they haven’t had a chance to issue updated signs. You’d think they’d just take the old ones down.</li><li>Most of the restaurants and stores were closed; a pretty common situation. Kev Monteith, a TravelCommons listener and <a href=\"https://travelswithkev.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amtrak travel blogger</a>, replied to one of my Twitter posts saying “I flew Southwest a few weeks ago. Layovers are rough because most places in the airports are closed. I was at STL and only found beer at Burger King and Dunkin Doughnuts.” I would’ve been happy for just a coffee. Down in the main Southwest concourse, some gates were closed off with curtains which I assume was to keep people from sitting there so they don’t have to clean it.</li><li>Looking around the terminal, it felt like mask usage was about 80%. Just about everyone was wearing them when walking around. I’d see some people not wearing them while sitting at the gate, though those folks were distancing themselves from everyone else. I’d see kids ripping their masks off as soon as they got off the jetway. I did notice, though, a sizable minority of mask wearers were just covering their mouths, leaving their noses uncovered -- pilots, cleaning crew, passengers, wheelchair people. Now I’m no epidemiologist, but that seems to defeat the purpose.</li><li>When the agent called boarding, she said “There’s 40 of you on a plane with 175 seats. So everyone gets their own row, and please, don’t everyone sit up front. We need a bit of weight distribution.” It was a quick boarding; we pushed back and took off early. These truly are unprecedented times.</li><li>Nashville was more crowded on Thursday morning when I headed back home. Mostly families as I said at the top of the show. The end of the concourse where the&nbsp; Southwest gates are was as crowded as usual. There were signs around saying that 3 seats between people equals 6 ft, but there were too many people waiting to make it practical; at least everyone is masked up. I walked back up the terminal to find a bit more space and there, tucked away behind some construction sheeting, I found an empty gate. I’m all alone, mega social distanced, so I take off my mask, log into the WiFi and do some work until the Southwest app on my phone bings, telling me that boarding has begun.&nbsp;</li><li>There were a lot more than 40 people on this flight. I found an empty row and slid all the way over to the window seat since it’s only a 90-minute flight. About 3 minutes later, a guy sat down in the aisle seat. Nobody in the middle seat. Everyone wearing masks and nobody’s head right next to mine, I was good to go. Maybe helped just a bit by the fact that, in those 3 minutes, I pointed all three air jets toward the empty middle seat and turned them on full blast, creating an air curtain between me and the aisle seat -- just in case.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/3lb3r3th/44072\">Misunderstood</a> by 3lb3r3th (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. &nbsp;Ft: Alchemistry</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>When Does Business Travel Come Back?</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>My son Andrew and his girlfriend took the 6am flight to LGA earlier this week. I asked him “How full was the flight?” “Maybe 20 people; mostly families,” he said. Didn’t surprise me that a Thursday 6am LGA flight was only at 11% capacity. That’s normally a business travel run; people getting up at 0 dark 30 in Chicago to make 10am meetings in Manhattan. But there’s not many business travelers now.&nbsp; While business travelers only make up about 10% of passengers on major airlines, they provide between 55 and 75% of the profits. You might could think they’re subsidizing the budget fares those families are using.</li><li>Over the past month, I’ve been talking with Sales VPs at companies that deliver complex IT services. If anybody would be feeling the bite of not traveling, I thought it would be these guys. I’ve done a number of these deals, and they always involved locking all the right decision makers in a conference room to hash out all the contract details and ride herd over the transition. But I was completely wrong. They all said that work hasn’t slowed down during the lockdown. They’ve been able to do all that conference room work over Zoom. Indeed, they said being virtual has made it easier for them. Pre-lockdown, one of their biggest challenges was calendar wrangling -- being able to get all their execs and the client execs into that conference room at the same time. Now, they just click some buttons and everyone shows up in Zoom gallery mode -- no travel planning, no scrambling after cancelled or delayed flights. They all said they love the ease of virtual meetings and, at the end of the day, closing the lid on their laptops and having dinner with the family every night.</li><li>Kinda supports the narrative that business travel will never rebound; back to the Microsoft CEO’s quote: in 2 months, we’ve advanced 2 years in virtual work culture. But when I probed a bit, I found that Zoom hasn’t completely replaced an airplane ticket. While these guys have been able to virtually close deals they had in their sales funnel, virtual meetings don’t seem to be replacing these deals; getting new prospects into the top of the sales funnel. So while things are looking good now, they’re beginning to worry about 4-6 months from now.</li><li>This was the exact opposite of what I’d expected. I thought the give and take of negotiations, the sidebar conversations, the emotional content, wouldn’t translate into video calls. But it looks like I was wrong; that once a deal has some momentum and a structure to guide everyone, the in-person hammering out turns out to be a nice-to-have. And the reason new opportunities aren’t coming in is that they need more exploratory, abstract, wide-ranging conversations that lack that guiding structure and selling a team as much as a product -- at least for complex services -- and that’s tough to do over a pane of glass.</li><li>And so they all said that they’d probably start traveling again -- reluctantly -- by the end of this month. But I do think this, call it a 4-month exercise in figuring out virtual work methods and cultures will move the set point, everybody’s default decision toward virtual meetings. And so maybe a bit less focused on high-profit road warriors and more dependent on those cost-conscious families. Does this mean repointing the 6am LGA flights to Cancun? They’re going to have to seriously reengineer those drink carts.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #165</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_165.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #165 — First Post- Lockdown Flight; When Does Business Travel Come Back?','','inherit','closed','closed','','2788-revision-v1','','','2020-07-17 20:54:09','2020-07-18 01:54:09','',2788,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/07/17/2788-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2797,1,'2020-07-17 20:55:20','2020-07-18 01:55:20','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/IMG_2073.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2789 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/IMG_2073-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a><figcaption>The hop taste isn\'t coming through</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>My first post-lockdown flight was a 90-minute Southwest non-stop from Chicago to Nashville. It wasn\'t bad, but not as casually easy as my last pre-coronavirus flight in February. We talk about that experience as well as Hertz\'s new cleaning program, my latest pair of Bose noise-cancelling headphones, and then wonder when business travel will return. All this and more at the<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_165.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"> <strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/860072707&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #165: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after a couple of runs back down to Nashville for family stuff -- one in the air and the other on the ground. And with COVID cases spiking in vacation spots like California and south Florida, it seems like that’s the market segment -- folks traveling to see friends and family -- that the airline and hotel companies are banking on. And that’s most of what I saw when flying back from Nashville a few Thursdays ago -- lots of families with kids, groups of people meeting up on the other side of security for maybe some 4 day-weekend trips? The tip-off for me on the business vs. leisure traveler mix was the TSA lines -- solid lines for regular TSA, while I pretty much walked straight through PreCheck. Another tip-off used to be mid-day lines at the bars, but with most of the airport restaurants closed up, that’s not a valid indicator right now.</li><li>Traveling right now requires a bit of nimbleness. On my first post-lockdown trip in May, the workout room at the Spring Hill Hampton Inn was open and I used it every day. Back down in June, there was a piece of paper taped to the door -- “Closed by order of the Health Department”. The front desk agent told me it was a couple of days old -- which explained all the banging in the room above me; somebody must’ve been doing their HIIT workout in their room. I didn’t know if I should be annoyed or impressed at how long they went at it. So for this last trip, I called the hotel the night before I left, before I packed my gym clothes vs. a yoga mat. They told me that they’d just reopened the workout room the day before, so the yoga mat went back in the closet.&nbsp;</li><li>It’s kinda the same very fluid situation right now with bars and restaurants. A few days before we got to Nashville, the mayor closed down any establishment with less than 50% of their sales in food, so pretty much all the bars and taprooms. Makes sense, not arguing it; just forced us to quickly pivot some of our plans. It also forced us to go a bit “old school”, back to making actual phone calls, asking “are you open; dine-in or just take-away?” since places seem to be having trouble updating their websites and their Facebook/Yelp/Google/OpenTable listings fast enough to keep up with the changes.</li><li>It proved out our decision to book the Residence Inn rather than the mainline Marriott a few blocks away. The full-size fridge held a lot more beer, and that kitchenette came in handy when we found out that<a href=\"https://www.princeshotchicken.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"https://www.princeshotchicken.com/\"> Prince’s Hot Chicken</a> was only doing take-away -- I can’t imagine trying to eat an extra-hot half-chicken perched on a king-size bed.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/JeffSpeed68/54450\">Hula Hoop Party</a> by Stefan Kartenberg (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. &nbsp;Ft: Martijn de Boer, Blue Wave Theory</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Lots has been written about how the COVID pandemic has massively accelerated changes toward contactless transactions. Microsoft’s CEO famously said back in April “We’ve seen two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months”.&nbsp; Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #136 — Is Cash A Waning King; Don’t Make It Hard to Cash in on Loyalty\">episode #136</a>, I said I felt like the last generation of cash payers, that my younger colleagues rarely carried cash; they paid for everything with a card. Looking into my wallet, I had the same $200 worth of 20’s in June that I’d taken out of an ATM in March. Nobody wants to handle cash; they don’t even want to handle my card (Most extreme experience - A bartender at Asgard Brewing’s taproom in Columbia, TN sprayed my Visa card with diluted chlorine bleach before swiping it to pay my bill. Made my wallet smell like a swimming pool). As much as possible, places want us to pre-order and pre-pay, so we just pick up our purchases in a socially distant way and then head home. It’s also switched up some opinions on using facial recognition for flight check ins. Pre-coronavirus, the push was from governments as a better way to do security screenings and to improve immigration compliance, and this was getting big pushback on privacy concerns. Now, it’s pivoted. The push is from travel companies using facial recognition as a way of providing the touchless check-in experience that most travelers now want.&nbsp;</li><li>But facial recognition is stymied by face masks which we wear when we’re checking in at airports and hotel lobbies. As is Face ID when trying to unlock my iPhone to get to my boarding pass or digital room key. Until I can downgrade to an iPhone SE with that old-school Touch ID that unlocks using my thumb print, I think I’m going to have to shorten the PIN code on my iPhone 11 Pro. I lengthened it for better security but am banging it in more and more often. And I’ve noticed the iPhone is really slow about recognizing my number presses -- or it misses some when I go too fast (like when I’m trying to pull up a boarding pass in line) and errors out.&nbsp;</li><li>Walking down the Hertz Five Star aisle at Nashville Airport, I saw their version of paper rings that hotels used to put around toilet seats to “certify” they’d been cleaned. In Hertz’s case, they put a “<a href=\"http://ir.hertz.com/2020-05-15-Hertz-Introduces-Hertz-Gold-Standard-Clean-Sealed-and-Certified-Vehicles\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Hertz Gold Standard Clean</a>” sticker across the driver-side center pillar (the B pillar for all my gearhead listeners) so that you break it when you open the driver door to get it. Nice gesture, though it kept me from doing my usual walk down the aisle, opening the door of a bunch of cars to check their mileage. Seemed rude to break all those stickers, though I did notice more than a few broken ones when choosing my car. Way back in the old days of TravelCommons, we used to talk about the TSA doing “security theater” in the screening lines. This feels a bit like “sanitation theater”.&nbsp;</li><li>I finally broke down and bought a new set of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2BbOqyA\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bose noise cancelling headphones -- the new 700’s</a>. This is my third set of Bose cans. Bought my first pair in 2009. I was flying a lot of short flights at the time, and in those days before regional jets, I was on a lot of prop planes. And they’re noisy -- not just on take-off, but the entire flight. After a while, I started to notice fatigue when getting off those planes. Talking to a few folks, they said the noise heightens stress. A friend told me how much he liked his Bose cans, and so I burnt some Amex Membership Rewards points on Amazon for a pair of Quiet Comfort 2’s. It was a revelation; flick the switch and, whoosh, quiet. I took them on every flight, until 3 years later, I left them in a seatback pocket when rushing off a plane to make a tight connection. I immediately lit up some more Membership Rewards points for a new pair - <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3eF2iPk\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">QC-15’s</a>. Four years later, I replaced a worn out set of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2OwiIPF\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">ear cushions</a>. And though the non-replaceable headband cushion is looking pretty ratty, the now 8-year-old headphones still work great. What got me to replace them was the wire. I’d be sitting in my usual aisle seat, plugged into my iPhone (using one of those dongles that Apple no longer gives you with a new phone). At some point in the flight, the folks in the middle and window seats would want to get up and use the toilet and inevitably, I’d snag the wire on the arm of the seat, pull the headphones off my head, and/or launch my phone a row forward.&nbsp; I could’ve gotten a pair of the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3eFWLYJ\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">QC-35’s</a> -- same form factor without the wire -- but decided to go all next-generation with the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2BbOqyA\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">700’s</a>, which has meant some adjustment pains. Like there are buttons in places where they never were before. So when I grab the ear cups to slip the headphones off, I manage to hit a button that changes the noise reduction level or summons Siri. Also new is using the touch surface on the right ear cup to control things. You tap or swipe the right ear cup to accept or drop a call, pause a song, raise or lower the volume, or skip 30 seconds to fast-forward past a podcast ad. I’m learning to be a bit more precise in my motions; I’ve already dropped a couple of calls when I was just trying to turn down the call volume.&nbsp; One thing I really like -- more for working-at-home than in-flight usage -- is that the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2BbOqyA\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">700’s</a> can pair with two Bluetooth devices at the same time. So, for me, I have them paired with my MacBook Air and my iPhone and they switch seamlessly between the two. Nice when I’ve got Zoom calls on my Mac and then a phone call on my iPhone. And, call me shallow, but they look a bit cooler than my old <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3eF2iPk\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">QC-15’s</a>. I’ve had the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2BbOqyA\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">700’s</a> for about a month now and really like them. I guess you could say they’re “TravelCommons Approved.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/bridges/15563\">i knew</a> by bridges (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp;Ft: shannonsongs</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>First Post-Lockdown Flight</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Way back at the beginning of the lockdown, the first Saturday of April, I was on a Zoom beer drinking call with Rob Cheshire, a long-time TravelCommons listener and now a podcaster -- he interviews UK craft brewers on his <em><a href=\"https://thisweekincraft.beer/podcast/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">This Week in Craft Beer</a></em>. It was a Saturday afternoon call, for Rob and the other guys in London; just past noon for me in Chicago, but hey…. And somewhere around our second or third beer, Rob asked me “When will you be comfortable getting on a plane again?” I really didn\'t have a good answer. It was early days; I wasn’t sure.</li><li>Fast forward to the back half of June. I needed to get down to Nashville again and didn’t have the time to burn 8 hrs for the drive down and another 8 on the way back. I had some travel funds sitting in my Southwest account from a couple of April trip cancellations, and Southwest flies 6 non-stop 737s between Chicago and Nashville while American and United only do smaller regional jets, and Southwest isn’t packing them full -- booking those bigger planes at ⅔’s capacity -- while American and United say they’ll let you know if your flight books solid. All told, a pretty easy decision to fly Southwest. One of the benefits of living in Chicago, a rare 3-hub town.</li><li>The day before my flight, when getting my boarding pass on the Southwest app (my usual process; I was contactless before it was a thing), I had to click through a certification that I wasn’t running a temperature and that I hadn’t been exposed to or tested positive for COVID-19. OK, click. Then I get a screen telling me that face masks are required to board. Makes sense, click. And now I get my boarding pass.</li><li>Monday morning, Irene drops me off at a pretty sedate departures curb at Midway. I mask up and walk in. It’s not empty, but it’s definitely not the normal Monday morning bustle. It feels more like a Wednesday early afternoon. There’s a bit of a line at regular security, but no line at PreCheck. The TSA agent asks me to drop my mask for a moment to check my ID and then waves me through. I noticed that TSA still has their October 2020 Real ID deadline warning signs on the podium. Hmm… I remember reading at the end of March that the TSA has <a href=\"https://www.dhs.gov/real-id\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">pushed the deadline a year to October 2021</a>. Guess they haven’t had a chance to issue updated signs. You’d think they’d just take the old ones down.</li><li>Most of the restaurants and stores were closed; a pretty common situation. Kev Monteith, a TravelCommons listener and <a href=\"https://travelswithkev.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amtrak travel blogger</a>, replied to one of my Twitter posts saying “I flew Southwest a few weeks ago. Layovers are rough because most places in the airports are closed. I was at STL and only found beer at Burger King and Dunkin Doughnuts.” I would’ve been happy for just a coffee. Down in the main Southwest concourse, some gates were closed off with curtains which I assume was to keep people from sitting there so they don’t have to clean it.</li><li>Looking around the terminal, it felt like mask usage was about 80%. Just about everyone was wearing them when walking around. I’d see some people not wearing them while sitting at the gate, though those folks were distancing themselves from everyone else. I’d see kids ripping their masks off as soon as they got off the jetway. I did notice, though, a sizable minority of mask wearers were just covering their mouths, leaving their noses uncovered -- pilots, cleaning crew, passengers, wheelchair people. Now I’m no epidemiologist, but that seems to defeat the purpose.</li><li>When the agent called boarding, she said “There’s 40 of you on a plane with 175 seats. So everyone gets their own row, and please, don’t everyone sit up front. We need a bit of weight distribution.” It was a quick boarding; we pushed back and took off early. These truly are unprecedented times.</li><li>Nashville was more crowded on Thursday morning when I headed back home. Mostly families as I said at the top of the show. The end of the concourse where the&nbsp; Southwest gates are was as crowded as usual. There were signs around saying that 3 seats between people equals 6 ft, but there were too many people waiting to make it practical; at least everyone is masked up. I walked back up the terminal to find a bit more space and there, tucked away behind some construction sheeting, I found an empty gate. I’m all alone, mega social distanced, so I take off my mask, log into the WiFi and do some work until the Southwest app on my phone bings, telling me that boarding has begun.&nbsp;</li><li>There were a lot more than 40 people on this flight. I found an empty row and slid all the way over to the window seat since it’s only a 90-minute flight. About 3 minutes later, a guy sat down in the aisle seat. Nobody in the middle seat. Everyone wearing masks and nobody’s head right next to mine, I was good to go. Maybe helped just a bit by the fact that, in those 3 minutes, I pointed all three air jets toward the empty middle seat and turned them on full blast, creating an air curtain between me and the aisle seat -- just in case.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/3lb3r3th/44072\">Misunderstood</a> by 3lb3r3th (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. &nbsp;Ft: Alchemistry</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>When Does Business Travel Come Back?</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>My son Andrew and his girlfriend took the 6am flight to LGA earlier this week. I asked him “How full was the flight?” “Maybe 20 people; mostly families,” he said. Didn’t surprise me that a Thursday 6am LGA flight was only at 11% capacity. That’s normally a business travel run; people getting up at 0 dark 30 in Chicago to make 10am meetings in Manhattan. But there’s not many business travelers now.&nbsp; While business travelers only make up about 10% of passengers on major airlines, they provide between 55 and 75% of the profits. You might could think they’re subsidizing the budget fares those families are using.</li><li>Over the past month, I’ve been talking with Sales VPs at companies that deliver complex IT services. If anybody would be feeling the bite of not traveling, I thought it would be these guys. I’ve done a number of these deals, and they always involved locking all the right decision makers in a conference room to hash out all the contract details and ride herd over the transition. But I was completely wrong. They all said that work hasn’t slowed down during the lockdown. They’ve been able to do all that conference room work over Zoom. Indeed, they said being virtual has made it easier for them. Pre-lockdown, one of their biggest challenges was calendar wrangling -- being able to get all their execs and the client execs into that conference room at the same time. Now, they just click some buttons and everyone shows up in Zoom gallery mode -- no travel planning, no scrambling after cancelled or delayed flights. They all said they love the ease of virtual meetings and, at the end of the day, closing the lid on their laptops and having dinner with the family every night.</li><li>Kinda supports the narrative that business travel will never rebound; back to the Microsoft CEO’s quote: in 2 months, we’ve advanced 2 years in virtual work culture. But when I probed a bit, I found that Zoom hasn’t completely replaced an airplane ticket. While these guys have been able to virtually close deals they had in their sales funnel, virtual meetings don’t seem to be replacing these deals; getting new prospects into the top of the sales funnel. So while things are looking good now, they’re beginning to worry about 4-6 months from now.</li><li>This was the exact opposite of what I’d expected. I thought the give and take of negotiations, the sidebar conversations, the emotional content, wouldn’t translate into video calls. But it looks like I was wrong; that once a deal has some momentum and a structure to guide everyone, the in-person hammering out turns out to be a nice-to-have. And the reason new opportunities aren’t coming in is that they need more exploratory, abstract, wide-ranging conversations that lack that guiding structure and selling a team as much as a product -- at least for complex services -- and that’s tough to do over a pane of glass.</li><li>And so they all said that they’d probably start traveling again -- reluctantly -- by the end of this month. But I do think this, call it a 4-month exercise in figuring out virtual work methods and cultures will move the set point, everybody’s default decision toward virtual meetings. And so maybe a bit less focused on high-profit road warriors and more dependent on those cost-conscious families. Does this mean repointing the 6am LGA flights to Cancun? They’re going to have to seriously reengineer those drink carts.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #165</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_165.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #165 — First Post- Lockdown Flight; When Does Business Travel Come Back?','','inherit','closed','closed','','2788-revision-v1','','','2020-07-17 20:55:20','2020-07-18 01:55:20','',2788,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/07/17/2788-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2798,1,'2020-07-17 20:55:42','2020-07-18 01:55:42','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/IMG_2073.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2789 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/IMG_2073-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a><figcaption>The hop taste isn\'t coming through</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>My first post-lockdown flight was a 90-minute Southwest non-stop from Chicago to Nashville. It wasn\'t bad, but not as casually easy as my last pre-coronavirus flight in February. We talk about that experience as well as Hertz\'s new cleaning program, my latest pair of Bose noise-cancelling headphones, and then wonder when business travel will return. All this and more at the<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_165.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"> <strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/860072707&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #165: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after a couple of runs back down to Nashville for family stuff -- one in the air and the other on the ground. And with COVID cases spiking in vacation spots like California and south Florida, it seems like that’s the market segment -- folks traveling to see friends and family -- that the airline and hotel companies are banking on. And that’s most of what I saw when flying back from Nashville a few Thursdays ago -- lots of families with kids, groups of people meeting up on the other side of security for maybe some 4 day-weekend trips? The tip-off for me on the business vs. leisure traveler mix was the TSA lines -- solid lines for regular TSA, while I pretty much walked straight through PreCheck. Another tip-off used to be mid-day lines at the bars, but with most of the airport restaurants closed up, that’s not a valid indicator right now.</li><li>Traveling right now requires a bit of nimbleness. On my first post-lockdown trip in May, the workout room at the Spring Hill Hampton Inn was open and I used it every day. Back down in June, there was a piece of paper taped to the door -- “Closed by order of the Health Department”. The front desk agent told me it was a couple of days old -- which explained all the banging in the room above me; somebody must’ve been doing their HIIT workout in their room. I didn’t know if I should be annoyed or impressed at how long they went at it. So for this last trip, I called the hotel the night before I left, before I packed my gym clothes vs. a yoga mat. They told me that they’d just reopened the workout room the day before, so the yoga mat went back in the closet.&nbsp;</li><li>It’s kinda the same very fluid situation right now with bars and restaurants. A few days before we got to Nashville, the mayor closed down any establishment with less than 50% of their sales in food, so pretty much all the bars and taprooms. Makes sense, not arguing it; just forced us to quickly pivot some of our plans. It also forced us to go a bit “old school”, back to making actual phone calls, asking “are you open; dine-in or just take-away?” since places seem to be having trouble updating their websites and their Facebook/Yelp/Google/OpenTable listings fast enough to keep up with the changes.</li><li>It proved out our decision to book the Residence Inn rather than the mainline Marriott a few blocks away. The full-size fridge held a lot more beer, and that kitchenette came in handy when we found out that<a href=\"https://www.princeshotchicken.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"https://www.princeshotchicken.com/\"> Prince’s Hot Chicken</a> was only doing take-away -- I can’t imagine trying to eat an extra-hot half-chicken perched on a king-size bed.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/JeffSpeed68/54450\">Hula Hoop Party</a> by Stefan Kartenberg (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. &nbsp;Ft: Martijn de Boer, Blue Wave Theory</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Lots has been written about how the COVID pandemic has massively accelerated changes toward contactless transactions. Microsoft’s CEO famously said back in April “We’ve seen two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months”.&nbsp; Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #136 — Is Cash A Waning King; Don’t Make It Hard to Cash in on Loyalty\">episode #136</a>, I said I felt like the last generation of cash payers, that my younger colleagues rarely carried cash; they paid for everything with a card. Looking into my wallet, I had the same $200 worth of 20’s in June that I’d taken out of an ATM in March. Nobody wants to handle cash; they don’t even want to handle my card (Most extreme experience - A bartender at Asgard Brewing’s taproom in Columbia, TN sprayed my Visa card with diluted chlorine bleach before swiping it to pay my bill. Made my wallet smell like a swimming pool). As much as possible, places want us to pre-order and pre-pay, so we just pick up our purchases in a socially distant way and then head home. It’s also switched up some opinions on using facial recognition for flight check ins. Pre-coronavirus, the push was from governments as a better way to do security screenings and to improve immigration compliance, and this was getting big pushback on privacy concerns. Now, it’s pivoted. The push is from travel companies using facial recognition as a way of providing the touchless check-in experience that most travelers now want.&nbsp;</li><li>But facial recognition is stymied by face masks which we wear when we’re checking in at airports and hotel lobbies. As is Face ID when trying to unlock my iPhone to get to my boarding pass or digital room key. Until I can downgrade to an iPhone SE with that old-school Touch ID that unlocks using my thumb print, I think I’m going to have to shorten the PIN code on my iPhone 11 Pro. I lengthened it for better security but am banging it in more and more often. And I’ve noticed the iPhone is really slow about recognizing my number presses -- or it misses some when I go too fast (like when I’m trying to pull up a boarding pass in line) and errors out.&nbsp;</li><li>Walking down the Hertz Five Star aisle at Nashville Airport, I saw their version of paper rings that hotels used to put around toilet seats to “certify” they’d been cleaned. In Hertz’s case, they put a “<a href=\"http://ir.hertz.com/2020-05-15-Hertz-Introduces-Hertz-Gold-Standard-Clean-Sealed-and-Certified-Vehicles\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Hertz Gold Standard Clean</a>” sticker across the driver-side center pillar (the B pillar for all my gearhead listeners) so that you break it when you open the driver door to get it. Nice gesture, though it kept me from doing my usual walk down the aisle, opening the door of a bunch of cars to check their mileage. Seemed rude to break all those stickers, though I did notice more than a few broken ones when choosing my car. Way back in the old days of TravelCommons, we used to talk about the TSA doing “security theater” in the screening lines. This feels a bit like “sanitation theater”.&nbsp;</li><li>I finally broke down and bought a new set of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2BbOqyA\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bose noise cancelling headphones -- the new 700’s</a>. This is my third set of Bose cans. Bought my first pair in 2009. I was flying a lot of short flights at the time, and in those days before regional jets, I was on a lot of prop planes. And they’re noisy -- not just on take-off, but the entire flight. After a while, I started to notice fatigue when getting off those planes. Talking to a few folks, they said the noise heightens stress. A friend told me how much he liked his Bose cans, and so I burnt some Amex Membership Rewards points on Amazon for a pair of Quiet Comfort 2’s. It was a revelation; flick the switch and, whoosh, quiet. I took them on every flight, until 3 years later, I left them in a seatback pocket when rushing off a plane to make a tight connection. I immediately lit up some more Membership Rewards points for a new pair - <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3eF2iPk\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">QC-15’s</a>. Four years later, I replaced a worn out set of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2OwiIPF\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">ear cushions</a>. And though the non-replaceable headband cushion is looking pretty ratty, the now 8-year-old headphones still work great. What got me to replace them was the wire. I’d be sitting in my usual aisle seat, plugged into my iPhone (using one of those dongles that Apple no longer gives you with a new phone). At some point in the flight, the folks in the middle and window seats would want to get up and use the toilet and inevitably, I’d snag the wire on the arm of the seat, pull the headphones off my head, and/or launch my phone a row forward.&nbsp; I could’ve gotten a pair of the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3eFWLYJ\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">QC-35’s</a> -- same form factor without the wire -- but decided to go all next-generation with the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2BbOqyA\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">700’s</a>, which has meant some adjustment pains. Like there are buttons in places where they never were before. So when I grab the ear cups to slip the headphones off, I manage to hit a button that changes the noise reduction level or summons Siri. Also new is using the touch surface on the right ear cup to control things. You tap or swipe the right ear cup to accept or drop a call, pause a song, raise or lower the volume, or skip 30 seconds to fast-forward past a podcast ad. I’m learning to be a bit more precise in my motions; I’ve already dropped a couple of calls when I was just trying to turn down the call volume.&nbsp; One thing I really like -- more for working-at-home than in-flight usage -- is that the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2BbOqyA\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">700’s</a> can pair with two Bluetooth devices at the same time. So, for me, I have them paired with my MacBook Air and my iPhone and they switch seamlessly between the two. Nice when I’ve got Zoom calls on my Mac and then a phone call on my iPhone. And, call me shallow, but they look a bit cooler than my old <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3eF2iPk\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">QC-15’s</a>. I’ve had the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2BbOqyA\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">700’s</a> for about a month now and really like them. I guess you could say they’re “TravelCommons Approved.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/bridges/15563\">i knew</a> by bridges (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp;Ft: shannonsongs</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>First Post-Lockdown Flight</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Way back at the beginning of the lockdown, the first Saturday of April, I was on a Zoom beer drinking call with Rob Cheshire, a long-time TravelCommons listener and now a podcaster -- he interviews UK craft brewers on his <em><a href=\"https://thisweekincraft.beer/podcast/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">This Week in Craft Beer</a></em>. It was a Saturday afternoon call, for Rob and the other guys in London; just past noon for me in Chicago, but hey…. And somewhere around our second or third beer, Rob asked me “When will you be comfortable getting on a plane again?” I really didn\'t have a good answer. It was early days; I wasn’t sure.</li><li>Fast forward to the back half of June. I needed to get down to Nashville again and didn’t have the time to burn 8 hrs for the drive down and another 8 on the way back. I had some travel funds sitting in my Southwest account from a couple of April trip cancellations, and Southwest flies 6 non-stop 737s between Chicago and Nashville while American and United only do smaller regional jets, and Southwest isn’t packing them full -- booking those bigger planes at ⅔’s capacity -- while American and United say they’ll let you know if your flight books solid. All told, a pretty easy decision to fly Southwest. One of the benefits of living in Chicago, a rare 3-hub town.</li><li>The day before my flight, when getting my boarding pass on the Southwest app (my usual process; I was contactless before it was a thing), I had to click through a certification that I wasn’t running a temperature and that I hadn’t been exposed to or tested positive for COVID-19. OK, click. Then I get a screen telling me that face masks are required to board. Makes sense, click. And now I get my boarding pass.</li><li>Monday morning, Irene drops me off at a pretty sedate departures curb at Midway. I mask up and walk in. It’s not empty, but it’s definitely not the normal Monday morning bustle. It feels more like a Wednesday early afternoon. There’s a bit of a line at regular security, but no line at PreCheck. The TSA agent asks me to drop my mask for a moment to check my ID and then waves me through. I noticed that TSA still has their October 2020 Real ID deadline warning signs on the podium. Hmm… I remember reading at the end of March that the TSA has <a href=\"https://www.dhs.gov/real-id\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">pushed the deadline a year to October 2021</a>. Guess they haven’t had a chance to issue updated signs. You’d think they’d just take the old ones down.</li><li>Most of the restaurants and stores were closed; a pretty common situation. Kev Monteith, a TravelCommons listener and <a href=\"https://travelswithkev.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amtrak travel blogger</a>, replied to one of my Twitter posts saying “I flew Southwest a few weeks ago. Layovers are rough because most places in the airports are closed. I was at STL and only found beer at Burger King and Dunkin Doughnuts.” I would’ve been happy for just a coffee. Down in the main Southwest concourse, some gates were closed off with curtains which I assume was to keep people from sitting there so they don’t have to clean it.</li><li>Looking around the terminal, it felt like mask usage was about 80%. Just about everyone was wearing them when walking around. I’d see some people not wearing them while sitting at the gate, though those folks were distancing themselves from everyone else. I’d see kids ripping their masks off as soon as they got off the jetway. I did notice, though, a sizable minority of mask wearers were just covering their mouths, leaving their noses uncovered -- pilots, cleaning crew, passengers, wheelchair people. Now I’m no epidemiologist, but that seems to defeat the purpose.</li><li>When the agent called boarding, she said “There’s 40 of you on a plane with 175 seats. So everyone gets their own row, and please, don’t everyone sit up front. We need a bit of weight distribution.” It was a quick boarding; we pushed back and took off early. These truly are unprecedented times.</li><li>Nashville was more crowded on Thursday morning when I headed back home. Mostly families as I said at the top of the show. The end of the concourse where the&nbsp; Southwest gates are was as crowded as usual. There were signs around saying that 3 seats between people equals 6 ft, but there were too many people waiting to make it practical; at least everyone is masked up. I walked back up the terminal to find a bit more space and there, tucked away behind some construction sheeting, I found an empty gate. I’m all alone, mega social distanced, so I take off my mask, log into the WiFi and do some work until the Southwest app on my phone bings, telling me that boarding has begun.&nbsp;</li><li>There were a lot more than 40 people on this flight. I found an empty row and slid all the way over to the window seat since it’s only a 90-minute flight. About 3 minutes later, a guy sat down in the aisle seat. Nobody in the middle seat. Everyone wearing masks and nobody’s head right next to mine, I was good to go. Maybe helped just a bit by the fact that, in those 3 minutes, I pointed all three air jets toward the empty middle seat and turned them on full blast, creating an air curtain between me and the aisle seat -- just in case.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/3lb3r3th/44072\">Misunderstood</a> by 3lb3r3th (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. &nbsp;Ft: Alchemistry</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>When Does Business Travel Come Back?</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>My son Andrew and his girlfriend took the 6am flight to LGA earlier this week. I asked him “How full was the flight?” “Maybe 20 people; mostly families,” he said. Didn’t surprise me that a Thursday 6am LGA flight was only at 11% capacity. That’s normally a business travel run; people getting up at 0 dark 30 in Chicago to make 10am meetings in Manhattan. But there’s not many business travelers now.&nbsp; While business travelers only make up about 10% of passengers on major airlines, they provide between 55 and 75% of the profits. You might could think they’re subsidizing the budget fares those families are using.</li><li>Over the past month, I’ve been talking with Sales VPs at companies that deliver complex IT services. If anybody would be feeling the bite of not traveling, I thought it would be these guys. I’ve done a number of these deals, and they always involved locking all the right decision makers in a conference room to hash out all the contract details and ride herd over the transition. But I was completely wrong. They all said that work hasn’t slowed down during the lockdown. They’ve been able to do all that conference room work over Zoom. Indeed, they said being virtual has made it easier for them. Pre-lockdown, one of their biggest challenges was calendar wrangling -- being able to get all their execs and the client execs into that conference room at the same time. Now, they just click some buttons and everyone shows up in Zoom gallery mode -- no travel planning, no scrambling after cancelled or delayed flights. They all said they love the ease of virtual meetings and, at the end of the day, closing the lid on their laptops and having dinner with the family every night.</li><li>Kinda supports the narrative that business travel will never rebound; back to the Microsoft CEO’s quote: in 2 months, we’ve advanced 2 years in virtual work culture. But when I probed a bit, I found that Zoom hasn’t completely replaced an airplane ticket. While these guys have been able to virtually close deals they had in their sales funnel, virtual meetings don’t seem to be replacing these deals; getting new prospects into the top of the sales funnel. So while things are looking good now, they’re beginning to worry about 4-6 months from now.</li><li>This was the exact opposite of what I’d expected. I thought the give and take of negotiations, the sidebar conversations, the emotional content, wouldn’t translate into video calls. But it looks like I was wrong; that once a deal has some momentum and a structure to guide everyone, the in-person hammering out turns out to be a nice-to-have. And the reason new opportunities aren’t coming in is that they need more exploratory, abstract, wide-ranging conversations that lack that guiding structure and selling a team as much as a product -- at least for complex services -- and that’s tough to do over a pane of glass.</li><li>And so they all said that they’d probably start traveling again -- reluctantly -- by the end of this month. But I do think this, call it a 4-month exercise in figuring out virtual work methods and cultures will move the set point, everybody’s default decision toward virtual meetings. And so maybe a bit less focused on high-profit road warriors and more dependent on those cost-conscious families. Does this mean repointing the 6am LGA flights to Cancun? They’re going to have to seriously reengineer those drink carts.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #165</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_165.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #165 — First Post- Lockdown Flight; When Does Business Travel Come Back?','','inherit','closed','closed','','2788-revision-v1','','','2020-07-17 20:55:42','2020-07-18 01:55:42','',2788,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/07/17/2788-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2800,1,'2020-07-17 21:00:19','2020-07-18 02:00:19','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/IMG_2073.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2789 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/IMG_2073-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\n<figcaption>The hop taste isn\'t coming through</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p>My first post-lockdown flight was a 90-minute Southwest non-stop from Chicago to Nashville. It wasn\'t bad, but not as casually easy as my last pre-coronavirus flight in February. We talk about that experience as well as Hertz\'s new cleaning program, my latest pair of Bose noise-cancelling headphones, and then wonder when business travel will return. All this and more at the<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_165.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"> <strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/860072707&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #165: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after a couple of runs back down to Nashville for family stuff -- one in the air and the other on the ground. And with COVID cases spiking in vacation spots like California and south Florida, it seems like that’s the market segment -- folks traveling to see friends and family -- that the airline and hotel companies are banking on. And that’s most of what I saw when flying back from Nashville a few Thursdays ago -- lots of families with kids, groups of people meeting up on the other side of security for maybe some 4 day-weekend trips? The tip-off for me on the business vs. leisure traveler mix was the TSA lines -- solid lines for regular TSA, while I pretty much walked straight through PreCheck. Another tip-off used to be mid-day lines at the bars, but with most of the airport restaurants closed up, that’s not a valid indicator right now.</li><li>Traveling right now requires a bit of nimbleness. On my first post-lockdown trip in May, the workout room at the Spring Hill Hampton Inn was open and I used it every day. Back down in June, there was a piece of paper taped to the door -- “Closed by order of the Health Department”. The front desk agent told me it was a couple of days old -- which explained all the banging in the room above me; somebody must’ve been doing their HIIT workout in their room. I didn’t know if I should be annoyed or impressed at how long they went at it. So for this last trip, I called the hotel the night before I left, before I packed my gym clothes vs. a yoga mat. They told me that they’d just reopened the workout room the day before, so the yoga mat went back in the closet.&nbsp;</li><li>It’s kinda the same very fluid situation right now with bars and restaurants. A few days before we got to Nashville, the mayor closed down any establishment with less than 50% of their sales in food, so pretty much all the bars and taprooms. Makes sense, not arguing it; just forced us to quickly pivot some of our plans. It also forced us to go a bit “old school”, back to making actual phone calls, asking “are you open; dine-in or just take-away?” since places seem to be having trouble updating their websites and their Facebook/Yelp/Google/OpenTable listings fast enough to keep up with the changes.</li><li>It proved out our decision to book the Residence Inn rather than the mainline Marriott a few blocks away. The full-size fridge held a lot more beer, and that kitchenette came in handy when we found out that<a href=\"https://www.princeshotchicken.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"https://www.princeshotchicken.com/\"> Prince’s Hot Chicken</a> was only doing take-away -- I can’t imagine trying to eat an extra-hot half-chicken perched on a king-size bed.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/JeffSpeed68/54450\">Hula Hoop Party</a> by Stefan Kartenberg (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. &nbsp;Ft: Martijn de Boer, Blue Wave Theory</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Lots has been written about how the COVID pandemic has massively accelerated changes toward contactless transactions. Microsoft’s CEO famously said back in April “We’ve seen two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months”.&nbsp; Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #136 — Is Cash A Waning King; Don’t Make It Hard to Cash in on Loyalty\">episode #136</a>, I said I felt like the last generation of cash payers, that my younger colleagues rarely carried cash; they paid for everything with a card. Looking into my wallet, I had the same $200 worth of 20’s in June that I’d taken out of an ATM in March. Nobody wants to handle cash; they don’t even want to handle my card (Most extreme experience - A bartender at Asgard Brewing’s taproom in Columbia, TN sprayed my Visa card with diluted chlorine bleach before swiping it to pay my bill. Made my wallet smell like a swimming pool). As much as possible, places want us to pre-order and pre-pay, so we just pick up our purchases in a socially distant way and then head home. It’s also switched up some opinions on using facial recognition for flight check ins. Pre-coronavirus, the push was from governments as a better way to do security screenings and to improve immigration compliance, and this was getting big pushback on privacy concerns. Now, it’s pivoted. The push is from travel companies using facial recognition as a way of providing the touchless check-in experience that most travelers now want.&nbsp;</li><li>But facial recognition is stymied by face masks which we wear when we’re checking in at airports and hotel lobbies. As is Face ID when trying to unlock my iPhone to get to my boarding pass or digital room key. Until I can downgrade to an iPhone SE with that old-school Touch ID that unlocks using my thumb print, I think I’m going to have to shorten the PIN code on my iPhone 11 Pro. I lengthened it for better security but am banging it in more and more often. And I’ve noticed the iPhone is really slow about recognizing my number presses -- or it misses some when I go too fast (like when I’m trying to pull up a boarding pass in line) and errors out.&nbsp;</li><li>Walking down the Hertz Five Star aisle at Nashville Airport, I saw their version of paper rings that hotels used to put around toilet seats to “certify” they’d been cleaned. In Hertz’s case, they put a “<a href=\"http://ir.hertz.com/2020-05-15-Hertz-Introduces-Hertz-Gold-Standard-Clean-Sealed-and-Certified-Vehicles\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Hertz Gold Standard Clean</a>” sticker across the driver-side center pillar (the B pillar for all my gearhead listeners) so that you break it when you open the driver door to get it. Nice gesture, though it kept me from doing my usual walk down the aisle, opening the door of a bunch of cars to check their mileage. Seemed rude to break all those stickers, though I did notice more than a few broken ones when choosing my car. Way back in the old days of TravelCommons, we used to talk about the TSA doing “security theater” in the screening lines. This feels a bit like “sanitation theater”.&nbsp;</li><li>I finally broke down and bought a new set of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2BbOqyA\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bose noise cancelling headphones -- the new 700’s</a>. This is my third set of Bose cans. Bought my first pair in 2009. I was flying a lot of short flights at the time, and in those days before regional jets, I was on a lot of prop planes. And they’re noisy -- not just on take-off, but the entire flight. After a while, I started to notice fatigue when getting off those planes. Talking to a few folks, they said the noise heightens stress. A friend told me how much he liked his Bose cans, and so I burnt some Amex Membership Rewards points on Amazon for a pair of Quiet Comfort 2’s. It was a revelation; flick the switch and, whoosh, quiet. I took them on every flight, until 3 years later, I left them in a seatback pocket when rushing off a plane to make a tight connection. I immediately lit up some more Membership Rewards points for a new pair - <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3eF2iPk\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">QC-15’s</a>. Four years later, I replaced a worn out set of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2OwiIPF\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">ear cushions</a>. And though the non-replaceable headband cushion is looking pretty ratty, the now 8-year-old headphones still work great. What got me to replace them was the wire. I’d be sitting in my usual aisle seat, plugged into my iPhone (using one of those dongles that Apple no longer gives you with a new phone). At some point in the flight, the folks in the middle and window seats would want to get up and use the toilet and inevitably, I’d snag the wire on the arm of the seat, pull the headphones off my head, and/or launch my phone a row forward.&nbsp; I could’ve gotten a pair of the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3eFWLYJ\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">QC-35’s</a> -- same form factor without the wire -- but decided to go all next-generation with the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2BbOqyA\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">700’s</a>, which has meant some adjustment pains. Like there are buttons in places where they never were before. So when I grab the ear cups to slip the headphones off, I manage to hit a button that changes the noise reduction level or summons Siri. Also new is using the touch surface on the right ear cup to control things. You tap or swipe the right ear cup to accept or drop a call, pause a song, raise or lower the volume, or skip 30 seconds to fast-forward past a podcast ad. I’m learning to be a bit more precise in my motions; I’ve already dropped a couple of calls when I was just trying to turn down the call volume.&nbsp; One thing I really like -- more for working-at-home than in-flight usage -- is that the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2BbOqyA\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">700’s</a> can pair with two Bluetooth devices at the same time. So, for me, I have them paired with my MacBook Air and my iPhone and they switch seamlessly between the two. Nice when I’ve got Zoom calls on my Mac and then a phone call on my iPhone. And, call me shallow, but they look a bit cooler than my old <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3eF2iPk\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">QC-15’s</a>. I’ve had the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2BbOqyA\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">700’s</a> for about a month now and really like them. I guess you could say they’re “TravelCommons Approved.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/bridges/15563\">i knew</a> by bridges (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp;Ft: shannonsongs</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>First Post-Lockdown Flight</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Way back at the beginning of the lockdown, the first Saturday of April, I was on a Zoom beer drinking call with Rob Cheshire, a long-time TravelCommons listener and now a podcaster -- he interviews UK craft brewers on his <em><a href=\"https://thisweekincraft.beer/podcast/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">This Week in Craft Beer</a></em>. It was a Saturday afternoon call, for Rob and the other guys in London; just past noon for me in Chicago, but hey…. And somewhere around our second or third beer, Rob asked me “When will you be comfortable getting on a plane again?” I really didn\'t have a good answer. It was early days; I wasn’t sure.</li><li>Fast forward to the back half of June. I needed to get down to Nashville again and didn’t have the time to burn 8 hrs for the drive down and another 8 on the way back. I had some travel funds sitting in my Southwest account from a couple of April trip cancellations, and Southwest flies 6 non-stop 737s between Chicago and Nashville while American and United only do smaller regional jets, and Southwest isn’t packing them full -- booking those bigger planes at ⅔’s capacity -- while American and United say they’ll let you know if your flight books solid. All told, a pretty easy decision to fly Southwest. One of the benefits of living in Chicago, a rare 3-hub town.</li><li>The day before my flight, when getting my boarding pass on the Southwest app (my usual process; I was contactless before it was a thing), I had to click through a certification that I wasn’t running a temperature and that I hadn’t been exposed to or tested positive for COVID-19. OK, click. Then I get a screen telling me that face masks are required to board. Makes sense, click. And now I get my boarding pass.</li><li>Monday morning, Irene drops me off at a pretty sedate departures curb at Midway. I mask up and walk in. It’s not empty, but it’s definitely not the normal Monday morning bustle. It feels more like a Wednesday early afternoon. There’s a bit of a line at regular security, but no line at PreCheck. The TSA agent asks me to drop my mask for a moment to check my ID and then waves me through. I noticed that TSA still has their October 2020 Real ID deadline warning signs on the podium. Hmm… I remember reading at the end of March that the TSA has <a href=\"https://www.dhs.gov/real-id\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">pushed the deadline a year to October 2021</a>. Guess they haven’t had a chance to issue updated signs. You’d think they’d just take the old ones down.</li><li>Most of the restaurants and stores were closed; a pretty common situation. Kev Monteith, a TravelCommons listener and <a href=\"https://travelswithkev.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amtrak travel blogger</a>, replied to one of my Twitter posts saying “I flew Southwest a few weeks ago. Layovers are rough because most places in the airports are closed. I was at STL and only found beer at Burger King and Dunkin Doughnuts.” I would’ve been happy for just a coffee. Down in the main Southwest concourse, some gates were closed off with curtains which I assume was to keep people from sitting there so they don’t have to clean it.</li><li>Looking around the terminal, it felt like mask usage was about 80%. Just about everyone was wearing them when walking around. I’d see some people not wearing them while sitting at the gate, though those folks were distancing themselves from everyone else. I’d see kids ripping their masks off as soon as they got off the jetway. I did notice, though, a sizable minority of mask wearers were just covering their mouths, leaving their noses uncovered -- pilots, cleaning crew, passengers, wheelchair people. Now I’m no epidemiologist, but that seems to defeat the purpose.</li><li>When the agent called boarding, she said “There’s 40 of you on a plane with 175 seats. So everyone gets their own row, and please, don’t everyone sit up front. We need a bit of weight distribution.” It was a quick boarding; we pushed back and took off early. These truly are unprecedented times.</li><li>Nashville was more crowded on Thursday morning when I headed back home. Mostly families as I said at the top of the show. The end of the concourse where the&nbsp; Southwest gates are was as crowded as usual. There were signs around saying that 3 seats between people equals 6 ft, but there were too many people waiting to make it practical; at least everyone is masked up. I walked back up the terminal to find a bit more space and there, tucked away behind some construction sheeting, I found an empty gate. I’m all alone, mega social distanced, so I take off my mask, log into the WiFi and do some work until the Southwest app on my phone bings, telling me that boarding has begun.&nbsp;</li><li>There were a lot more than 40 people on this flight. I found an empty row and slid all the way over to the window seat since it’s only a 90-minute flight. About 3 minutes later, a guy sat down in the aisle seat. Nobody in the middle seat. Everyone wearing masks and nobody’s head right next to mine, I was good to go. Maybe helped just a bit by the fact that, in those 3 minutes, I pointed all three air jets toward the empty middle seat and turned them on full blast, creating an air curtain between me and the aisle seat -- just in case.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/3lb3r3th/44072\">Misunderstood</a> by 3lb3r3th (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. &nbsp;Ft: Alchemistry</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>When Does Business Travel Come Back?</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>My son Andrew and his girlfriend took the 6am flight to LGA earlier this week. I asked him “How full was the flight?” “Maybe 20 people; mostly families,” he said. Didn’t surprise me that a Thursday 6am LGA flight was only at 11% capacity. That’s normally a business travel run; people getting up at 0 dark 30 in Chicago to make 10am meetings in Manhattan. But there’s not many business travelers now.&nbsp; While business travelers only make up about 10% of passengers on major airlines, they provide between 55 and 75% of the profits. You might could think they’re subsidizing the budget fares those families are using.</li><li>Over the past month, I’ve been talking with Sales VPs at companies that deliver complex IT services. If anybody would be feeling the bite of not traveling, I thought it would be these guys. I’ve done a number of these deals, and they always involved locking all the right decision makers in a conference room to hash out all the contract details and ride herd over the transition. But I was completely wrong. They all said that work hasn’t slowed down during the lockdown. They’ve been able to do all that conference room work over Zoom. Indeed, they said being virtual has made it easier for them. Pre-lockdown, one of their biggest challenges was calendar wrangling -- being able to get all their execs and the client execs into that conference room at the same time. Now, they just click some buttons and everyone shows up in Zoom gallery mode -- no travel planning, no scrambling after cancelled or delayed flights. They all said they love the ease of virtual meetings and, at the end of the day, closing the lid on their laptops and having dinner with the family every night.</li><li>Kinda supports the narrative that business travel will never rebound; back to the Microsoft CEO’s quote: in 2 months, we’ve advanced 2 years in virtual work culture. But when I probed a bit, I found that Zoom hasn’t completely replaced an airplane ticket. While these guys have been able to virtually close deals they had in their sales funnel, virtual meetings don’t seem to be replacing these deals; getting new prospects into the top of the sales funnel. So while things are looking good now, they’re beginning to worry about 4-6 months from now.</li><li>This was the exact opposite of what I’d expected. I thought the give and take of negotiations, the sidebar conversations, the emotional content, wouldn’t translate into video calls. But it looks like I was wrong; that once a deal has some momentum and a structure to guide everyone, the in-person hammering out turns out to be a nice-to-have. And the reason new opportunities aren’t coming in is that they need more exploratory, abstract, wide-ranging conversations that lack that guiding structure and selling a team as much as a product -- at least for complex services -- and that’s tough to do over a pane of glass.</li><li>And so they all said that they’d probably start traveling again -- reluctantly -- by the end of this month. But I do think this, call it a 4-month exercise in figuring out virtual work methods and cultures will move the set point, everybody’s default decision toward virtual meetings. And so maybe a bit less focused on high-profit road warriors and more dependent on those cost-conscious families. Does this mean repointing the 6am LGA flights to Cancun? They’re going to have to seriously reengineer those drink carts.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #165</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_165.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #165 — First Post- Lockdown Flight; When Does Business Travel Come Back?','','inherit','closed','closed','','2788-revision-v1','','','2020-07-17 21:00:19','2020-07-18 02:00:19','',2788,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/07/17/2788-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2801,1,'2020-07-17 21:08:43','2020-07-18 02:08:43','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/IMG_2073.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2789 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/IMG_2073-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a><figcaption>The hop taste isn\'t coming through</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>My first post-lockdown flight was a 90-minute Southwest non-stop from Chicago to Nashville. It wasn\'t bad, but not as casually easy as my last pre-coronavirus flight in February. We talk about that experience as well as Hertz\'s new cleaning program, my latest pair of Bose noise-cancelling headphones, and then wonder when business travel will return. All this and more at the<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_165.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"> <strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/860072707&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #165: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after a couple of runs back down to Nashville for family stuff -- one in the air and the other on the ground. And with COVID cases spiking in vacation spots like California and south Florida, it seems like that’s the market segment -- folks traveling to see friends and family -- that the airline and hotel companies are banking on. And that’s most of what I saw when flying back from Nashville a few Thursdays ago -- lots of families with kids, groups of people meeting up on the other side of security for maybe some 4 day-weekend trips? The tip-off for me on the business vs. leisure traveler mix was the TSA lines -- solid lines for regular TSA, while I pretty much walked straight through PreCheck. Another tip-off used to be mid-day lines at the bars, but with most of the airport restaurants closed up, that’s not a valid indicator right now.</li><li>Traveling right now requires a bit of nimbleness. On my first post-lockdown trip in May, the workout room at the Spring Hill Hampton Inn was open and I used it every day. Back down in June, there was a piece of paper taped to the door -- “Closed by order of the Health Department”. The front desk agent told me it was a couple of days old -- which explained all the banging in the room above me; somebody must’ve been doing their HIIT workout in their room. I didn’t know if I should be annoyed or impressed at how long they went at it. So for this last trip, I called the hotel the night before I left, before I packed my gym clothes vs. a yoga mat. They told me that they’d just reopened the workout room the day before, so the yoga mat went back in the closet.&nbsp;</li><li>It’s kinda the same very fluid situation right now with bars and restaurants. A few days before we got to Nashville, the mayor closed down any establishment with less than 50% of their sales in food, so pretty much all the bars and taprooms. Makes sense, not arguing it; just forced us to quickly pivot some of our plans. It also forced us to go a bit “old school”, back to making actual phone calls, asking “are you open; dine-in or just take-away?” since places seem to be having trouble updating their websites and their Facebook/Yelp/Google/OpenTable listings fast enough to keep up with the changes.</li><li>It proved out our decision to book the Residence Inn rather than the mainline Marriott a few blocks away. The full-size fridge held a lot more beer, and that kitchenette came in handy when we found out that<a href=\"https://www.princeshotchicken.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"https://www.princeshotchicken.com/\"> Prince’s Hot Chicken</a> was only doing take-away -- I can’t imagine trying to eat an extra-hot half-chicken perched on a king-size bed.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/JeffSpeed68/54450\">Hula Hoop Party</a> by Stefan Kartenberg (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. &nbsp;Ft: Martijn de Boer, Blue Wave Theory</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Lots has been written about how the COVID pandemic has massively accelerated changes toward contactless transactions. Microsoft’s CEO famously said back in April “We’ve seen two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months”.&nbsp; Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #136 — Is Cash A Waning King; Don’t Make It Hard to Cash in on Loyalty\">episode #136</a>, I said I felt like the last generation of cash payers, that my younger colleagues rarely carried cash; they paid for everything with a card. Looking into my wallet, I had the same $200 worth of 20’s in June that I’d taken out of an ATM in March. Nobody wants to handle cash; they don’t even want to handle my card (Most extreme experience - A bartender at Asgard Brewing’s taproom in Columbia, TN sprayed my Visa card with diluted chlorine bleach before swiping it to pay my bill. Made my wallet smell like a swimming pool). As much as possible, places want us to pre-order and pre-pay, so we just pick up our purchases in a socially distant way and then head home. It’s also switched up some opinions on using facial recognition for flight check ins. Pre-coronavirus, the push was from governments as a better way to do security screenings and to improve immigration compliance, and this was getting big pushback on privacy concerns. Now, it’s pivoted. The push is from travel companies using facial recognition as a way of providing the touchless check-in experience that most travelers now want.&nbsp;</li><li>But facial recognition is stymied by face masks which we wear when we’re checking in at airports and hotel lobbies. As is Face ID when trying to unlock my iPhone to get to my boarding pass or digital room key. Until I can downgrade to an iPhone SE with that old-school Touch ID that unlocks using my thumb print, I think I’m going to have to shorten the PIN code on my iPhone 11 Pro. I lengthened it for better security but am banging it in more and more often. And I’ve noticed the iPhone is really slow about recognizing my number presses -- or it misses some when I go too fast (like when I’m trying to pull up a boarding pass in line) and errors out.&nbsp;</li><li>Walking down the Hertz Five Star aisle at Nashville Airport, I saw their version of paper rings that hotels used to put around toilet seats to “certify” they’d been cleaned. In Hertz’s case, they put a “<a href=\"http://ir.hertz.com/2020-05-15-Hertz-Introduces-Hertz-Gold-Standard-Clean-Sealed-and-Certified-Vehicles\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Hertz Gold Standard Clean</a>” sticker across the driver-side center pillar (the B pillar for all my gearhead listeners) so that you break it when you open the driver door to get it. Nice gesture, though it kept me from doing my usual walk down the aisle, opening the door of a bunch of cars to check their mileage. Seemed rude to break all those stickers, though I did notice more than a few broken ones when choosing my car. Way back in the old days of TravelCommons, we used to talk about the TSA doing “security theater” in the screening lines. This feels a bit like “sanitation theater”.&nbsp;</li><li>I finally broke down and bought a new set of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2BbOqyA\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bose noise cancelling headphones -- the new 700’s</a>. This is my third set of Bose cans. Bought my first pair in 2009. I was flying a lot of short flights at the time, and in those days before regional jets, I was on a lot of prop planes. And they’re noisy -- not just on take-off, but the entire flight. After a while, I started to notice fatigue when getting off those planes. Talking to a few folks, they said the noise heightens stress. A friend told me how much he liked his Bose cans, and so I burnt some Amex Membership Rewards points on Amazon for a pair of Quiet Comfort 2’s. It was a revelation; flick the switch and, whoosh, quiet. I took them on every flight, until 3 years later, I left them in a seatback pocket when rushing off a plane to make a tight connection. I immediately lit up some more Membership Rewards points for a new pair - <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3eF2iPk\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">QC-15’s</a>. Four years later, I replaced a worn out set of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2OwiIPF\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">ear cushions</a>. And though the non-replaceable headband cushion is looking pretty ratty, the now 8-year-old headphones still work great. What got me to replace them was the wire. I’d be sitting in my usual aisle seat, plugged into my iPhone (using one of those dongles that Apple no longer gives you with a new phone). At some point in the flight, the folks in the middle and window seats would want to get up and use the toilet and inevitably, I’d snag the wire on the arm of the seat, pull the headphones off my head, and/or launch my phone a row forward.&nbsp; I could’ve gotten a pair of the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3eFWLYJ\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">QC-35’s</a> -- same form factor without the wire -- but decided to go all next-generation with the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2BbOqyA\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">700’s</a>, which has meant some adjustment pains. Like there are buttons in places where they never were before. So when I grab the ear cups to slip the headphones off, I manage to hit a button that changes the noise reduction level or summons Siri. Also new is using the touch surface on the right ear cup to control things. You tap or swipe the right ear cup to accept or drop a call, pause a song, raise or lower the volume, or skip 30 seconds to fast-forward past a podcast ad. I’m learning to be a bit more precise in my motions; I’ve already dropped a couple of calls when I was just trying to turn down the call volume.&nbsp; One thing I really like -- more for working-at-home than in-flight usage -- is that the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2BbOqyA\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">700’s</a> can pair with two Bluetooth devices at the same time. So, for me, I have them paired with my MacBook Air and my iPhone and they switch seamlessly between the two. Nice when I’ve got Zoom calls on my Mac and then a phone call on my iPhone. And, call me shallow, but they look a bit cooler than my old <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3eF2iPk\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">QC-15’s</a>. I’ve had the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2BbOqyA\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">700’s</a> for about a month now and really like them. I guess you could say they’re “TravelCommons Approved.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/bridges/15563\">i knew</a> by bridges (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp;Ft: shannonsongs</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>First Post-Lockdown Flight</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Way back at the beginning of the lockdown, the first Saturday of April, I was on a Zoom beer drinking call with Rob Cheshire, a long-time TravelCommons listener and now a podcaster -- he interviews UK craft brewers on his <em><a href=\"https://thisweekincraft.beer/podcast/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">This Week in Craft Beer</a></em>. It was a Saturday afternoon call, for Rob and the other guys in London; just past noon for me in Chicago, but hey…. And somewhere around our second or third beer, Rob asked me “When will you be comfortable getting on a plane again?” I really didn\'t have a good answer. It was early days; I wasn’t sure.</li><li>Fast forward to the back half of June. I needed to get down to Nashville again and didn’t have the time to burn 8 hrs for the drive down and another 8 on the way back. I had some travel funds sitting in my Southwest account from a couple of April trip cancellations, and Southwest flies 6 non-stop 737s between Chicago and Nashville while American and United only do smaller regional jets, and Southwest isn’t packing them full -- booking those bigger planes at ⅔’s capacity -- while American and United say they’ll let you know if your flight books solid. All told, a pretty easy decision to fly Southwest. One of the benefits of living in Chicago, a rare 3-hub town.</li><li>The day before my flight, when getting my boarding pass on the Southwest app (my usual process; I was contactless before it was a thing), I had to click through a certification that I wasn’t running a temperature and that I hadn’t been exposed to or tested positive for COVID-19. OK, click. Then I get a screen telling me that face masks are required to board. Makes sense, click. And now I get my boarding pass.</li><li>Monday morning, Irene drops me off at a pretty sedate departures curb at Midway. I mask up and walk in. It’s not empty, but it’s definitely not the normal Monday morning bustle. It feels more like a Wednesday early afternoon. There’s a bit of a line at regular security, but no line at PreCheck. The TSA agent asks me to drop my mask for a moment to check my ID and then waves me through. I noticed that TSA still has their October 2020 Real ID deadline warning signs on the podium. Hmm… I remember reading at the end of March that the TSA has <a href=\"https://www.dhs.gov/real-id\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">pushed the deadline a year to October 2021</a>. Guess they haven’t had a chance to issue updated signs. You’d think they’d just take the old ones down.</li><li>Most of the restaurants and stores were closed; a pretty common situation. Kev Monteith, a TravelCommons listener and <a href=\"https://travelswithkev.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amtrak travel blogger</a>, replied to one of my Twitter posts saying “I flew Southwest a few weeks ago. Layovers are rough because most places in the airports are closed. I was at STL and only found beer at Burger King and Dunkin Doughnuts.” I would’ve been happy for just a coffee. Down in the main Southwest concourse, some gates were closed off with curtains which I assume was to keep people from sitting there so they don’t have to clean it.</li><li>Looking around the terminal, it felt like mask usage was about 80%. Just about everyone was wearing them when walking around. I’d see some people not wearing them while sitting at the gate, though those folks were distancing themselves from everyone else. I’d see kids ripping their masks off as soon as they got off the jetway. I did notice, though, a sizable minority of mask wearers were just covering their mouths, leaving their noses uncovered -- pilots, cleaning crew, passengers, wheelchair people. Now I’m no epidemiologist, but that seems to defeat the purpose.</li><li>When the agent called boarding, she said “There’s 40 of you on a plane with 175 seats. So everyone gets their own row, and please, don’t everyone sit up front. We need a bit of weight distribution.” It was a quick boarding; we pushed back and took off early. These truly are unprecedented times.</li><li>Nashville was more crowded on Thursday morning when I headed back home. Mostly families as I said at the top of the show. The end of the concourse where the&nbsp; Southwest gates are was as crowded as usual. There were signs around saying that 3 seats between people equals 6 ft, but there were too many people waiting to make it practical; at least everyone is masked up. I walked back up the terminal to find a bit more space and there, tucked away behind some construction sheeting, I found an empty gate. I’m all alone, mega social distanced, so I take off my mask, log into the WiFi and do some work until the Southwest app on my phone bings, telling me that boarding has begun.&nbsp;</li><li>There were a lot more than 40 people on this flight. I found an empty row and slid all the way over to the window seat since it’s only a 90-minute flight. About 3 minutes later, a guy sat down in the aisle seat. Nobody in the middle seat. Everyone wearing masks and nobody’s head right next to mine, I was good to go. Maybe helped just a bit by the fact that, in those 3 minutes, I pointed all three air jets toward the empty middle seat and turned them on full blast, creating an air curtain between me and the aisle seat -- just in case.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/3lb3r3th/44072\">Misunderstood</a> by 3lb3r3th (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. &nbsp;Ft: Alchemistry</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>When Does Business Travel Come Back?</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>My son Andrew and his girlfriend took the 6am flight to LGA earlier this week. I asked him “How full was the flight?” “Maybe 20 people; mostly families,” he said. Didn’t surprise me that a Thursday 6am LGA flight was only at 11% capacity. That’s normally a business travel run; people getting up at 0 dark 30 in Chicago to make 10am meetings in Manhattan. But there’s not many business travelers now.&nbsp; While business travelers only make up about 10% of passengers on major airlines, they provide between 55 and 75% of the profits. You might could think they’re subsidizing the budget fares those families are using.</li><li>Over the past month, I’ve been talking with Sales VPs at companies that deliver complex IT services. If anybody would be feeling the bite of not traveling, I thought it would be these guys. I’ve done a number of these deals, and they always involved locking all the right decision makers in a conference room to hash out all the contract details and ride herd over the transition. But I was completely wrong. They all said that work hasn’t slowed down during the lockdown. They’ve been able to do all that conference room work over Zoom. Indeed, they said being virtual has made it easier for them. Pre-lockdown, one of their biggest challenges was calendar wrangling -- being able to get all their execs and the client execs into that conference room at the same time. Now, they just click some buttons and everyone shows up in Zoom gallery mode -- no travel planning, no scrambling after cancelled or delayed flights. They all said they love the ease of virtual meetings and, at the end of the day, closing the lid on their laptops and having dinner with the family every night.</li><li>Kinda supports the narrative that business travel will never rebound; back to the Microsoft CEO’s quote: in 2 months, we’ve advanced 2 years in virtual work culture. But when I probed a bit, I found that Zoom hasn’t completely replaced an airplane ticket. While these guys have been able to virtually close deals they had in their sales funnel, virtual meetings don’t seem to be replacing these deals; getting new prospects into the top of the sales funnel. So while things are looking good now, they’re beginning to worry about 4-6 months from now.</li><li>This was the exact opposite of what I’d expected. I thought the give and take of negotiations, the sidebar conversations, the emotional content, wouldn’t translate into video calls. But it looks like I was wrong; that once a deal has some momentum and a structure to guide everyone, the in-person hammering out turns out to be a nice-to-have. And the reason new opportunities aren’t coming in is that they need more exploratory, abstract, wide-ranging conversations that lack that guiding structure and selling a team as much as a product -- at least for complex services -- and that’s tough to do over a pane of glass.</li><li>And so they all said that they’d probably start traveling again -- reluctantly -- by the end of this month. But I do think this, call it a 4-month exercise in figuring out virtual work methods and cultures will move the set point, everybody’s default decision toward virtual meetings. And so maybe a bit less focused on high-profit road warriors and more dependent on those cost-conscious families. Does this mean repointing the 6am LGA flights to Cancun? They’re going to have to seriously reengineer those drink carts.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #165</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_165.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #165 — First Post- Lockdown Flight; When Does Business Travel Come Back?','','inherit','closed','closed','','2788-revision-v1','','','2020-07-17 21:08:43','2020-07-18 02:08:43','',2788,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/07/17/2788-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2802,1,'2020-07-17 21:09:28','2020-07-18 02:09:28','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/IMG_2073.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2789 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/IMG_2073-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a><figcaption>The hop taste isn\'t coming through</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>My first post-lockdown flight was a 90-minute Southwest non-stop from Chicago to Nashville. It wasn\'t bad, but not as casually easy as my last pre-coronavirus flight in February. We talk about that experience as well as Hertz\'s new cleaning program, my latest pair of Bose noise-cancelling headphones, and then wonder when business travel will return. All this and more at the<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_165.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"> <strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/860072707&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #165: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after a couple of runs back down to Nashville for family stuff -- one in the air and the other on the ground. And with COVID cases spiking in vacation spots like California and south Florida, it seems like that’s the market segment -- folks traveling to see friends and family -- that the airline and hotel companies are banking on. And that’s most of what I saw when flying back from Nashville a few Thursdays ago -- lots of families with kids, groups of people meeting up on the other side of security for maybe some 4 day-weekend trips? The tip-off for me on the business vs. leisure traveler mix was the TSA lines -- solid lines for regular TSA, while I pretty much walked straight through PreCheck. Another tip-off used to be mid-day lines at the bars, but with most of the airport restaurants closed up, that’s not a valid indicator right now.</li><li>Traveling right now requires a bit of nimbleness. On my first post-lockdown trip in May, the workout room at the Spring Hill Hampton Inn was open and I used it every day. Back down in June, there was a piece of paper taped to the door -- “Closed by order of the Health Department”. The front desk agent told me it was a couple of days old -- which explained all the banging in the room above me; somebody must’ve been doing their HIIT workout in their room. I didn’t know if I should be annoyed or impressed at how long they went at it. So for this last trip, I called the hotel the night before I left, before I packed my gym clothes vs. a yoga mat. They told me that they’d just reopened the workout room the day before, so the yoga mat went back in the closet.&nbsp;</li><li>It’s kinda the same very fluid situation right now with bars and restaurants. A few days before we got to Nashville, the mayor closed down any establishment with less than 50% of their sales in food, so pretty much all the bars and taprooms. Makes sense, not arguing it; just forced us to quickly pivot some of our plans. It also forced us to go a bit “old school”, back to making actual phone calls, asking “are you open; dine-in or just take-away?” since places seem to be having trouble updating their websites and their Facebook/Yelp/Google/OpenTable listings fast enough to keep up with the changes.</li><li>It proved out our decision to book the Residence Inn rather than the mainline Marriott a few blocks away. The full-size fridge held a lot more beer, and that kitchenette came in handy when we found out that<a href=\"https://www.princeshotchicken.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"https://www.princeshotchicken.com/\"> Prince’s Hot Chicken</a> was only doing take-away -- I can’t imagine trying to eat an extra-hot half-chicken perched on a king-size bed.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/JeffSpeed68/54450\">Hula Hoop Party</a> by Stefan Kartenberg (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. &nbsp;Ft: Martijn de Boer, Blue Wave Theory</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Lots has been written about how the COVID pandemic has massively accelerated changes toward contactless transactions. Microsoft’s CEO famously said back in April “We’ve seen two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months”.&nbsp; Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #136 — Is Cash A Waning King; Don’t Make It Hard to Cash in on Loyalty\">episode #136</a>, I said I felt like the last generation of cash payers, that my younger colleagues rarely carried cash; they paid for everything with a card. Looking into my wallet, I had the same $200 worth of 20’s in June that I’d taken out of an ATM in March. Nobody wants to handle cash; they don’t even want to handle my card (Most extreme experience - A bartender at Asgard Brewing’s taproom in Columbia, TN sprayed my Visa card with diluted chlorine bleach before swiping it to pay my bill. Made my wallet smell like a swimming pool). As much as possible, places want us to pre-order and pre-pay, so we just pick up our purchases in a socially distant way and then head home. It’s also switched up some opinions on using facial recognition for flight check ins. Pre-coronavirus, the push was from governments as a better way to do security screenings and to improve immigration compliance, and this was getting big pushback on privacy concerns. Now, it’s pivoted. The push is from travel companies using facial recognition as a way of providing the touchless check-in experience that most travelers now want.&nbsp;</li><li>But facial recognition is stymied by face masks which we wear when we’re checking in at airports and hotel lobbies. As is Face ID when trying to unlock my iPhone to get to my boarding pass or digital room key. Until I can downgrade to an iPhone SE with that old-school Touch ID that unlocks using my thumb print, I think I’m going to have to shorten the PIN code on my iPhone 11 Pro. I lengthened it for better security but am banging it in more and more often. And I’ve noticed the iPhone is really slow about recognizing my number presses -- or it misses some when I go too fast (like when I’m trying to pull up a boarding pass in line) and errors out.&nbsp;</li><li>Walking down the Hertz Five Star aisle at Nashville Airport, I saw their version of paper rings that hotels used to put around toilet seats to “certify” they’d been cleaned. In Hertz’s case, they put a “<a href=\"http://ir.hertz.com/2020-05-15-Hertz-Introduces-Hertz-Gold-Standard-Clean-Sealed-and-Certified-Vehicles\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Hertz Gold Standard Clean</a>” sticker across the driver-side center pillar (the B pillar for all my gearhead listeners) so that you break it when you open the driver door to get it. Nice gesture, though it kept me from doing my usual walk down the aisle, opening the door of a bunch of cars to check their mileage. Seemed rude to break all those stickers, though I did notice more than a few broken ones when choosing my car. Way back in the old days of TravelCommons, we used to talk about the TSA doing “security theater” in the screening lines. This feels a bit like “sanitation theater”.&nbsp;</li><li>I finally broke down and bought a new set of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2BbOqyA\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bose noise cancelling headphones -- the new 700’s</a>. This is my third set of Bose cans. Bought my first pair in 2009. I was flying a lot of short flights at the time, and in those days before regional jets, I was on a lot of prop planes. And they’re noisy -- not just on take-off, but the entire flight. After a while, I started to notice fatigue when getting off those planes. Talking to a few folks, they said the noise heightens stress. A friend told me how much he liked his Bose cans, and so I burnt some Amex Membership Rewards points on Amazon for a pair of Quiet Comfort 2’s. It was a revelation; flick the switch and, whoosh, quiet. I took them on every flight, until 3 years later, I left them in a seatback pocket when rushing off a plane to make a tight connection. I immediately lit up some more Membership Rewards points for a new pair - <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3eF2iPk\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">QC-15’s</a>. Four years later, I replaced a worn out set of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2OwiIPF\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">ear cushions</a>. And though the non-replaceable headband cushion is looking pretty ratty, the now 8-year-old headphones still work great. What got me to replace them was the wire. I’d be sitting in my usual aisle seat, plugged into my iPhone (using one of those dongles that Apple no longer gives you with a new phone). At some point in the flight, the folks in the middle and window seats would want to get up and use the toilet and inevitably, I’d snag the wire on the arm of the seat, pull the headphones off my head, and/or launch my phone a row forward.&nbsp; I could’ve gotten a pair of the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3eFWLYJ\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">QC-35’s</a> -- same form factor without the wire -- but decided to go all next-generation with the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2BbOqyA\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">700’s</a>, which has meant some adjustment pains. Like there are buttons in places where they never were before. So when I grab the ear cups to slip the headphones off, I manage to hit a button that changes the noise reduction level or summons Siri. Also new is using the touch surface on the right ear cup to control things. You tap or swipe the right ear cup to accept or drop a call, pause a song, raise or lower the volume, or skip 30 seconds to fast-forward past a podcast ad. I’m learning to be a bit more precise in my motions; I’ve already dropped a couple of calls when I was just trying to turn down the call volume.&nbsp; One thing I really like -- more for working-at-home than in-flight usage -- is that the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2BbOqyA\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">700’s</a> can pair with two Bluetooth devices at the same time. So, for me, I have them paired with my MacBook Air and my iPhone and they switch seamlessly between the two. Nice when I’ve got Zoom calls on my Mac and then a phone call on my iPhone. And, call me shallow, but they look a bit cooler than my old <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3eF2iPk\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">QC-15’s</a>. I’ve had the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2BbOqyA\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">700’s</a> for about a month now and really like them. I guess you could say they’re “TravelCommons Approved.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/bridges/15563\">i knew</a> by bridges (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp;Ft: shannonsongs</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>First Post-Lockdown Flight</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Way back at the beginning of the lockdown, the first Saturday of April, I was on a Zoom beer drinking call with Rob Cheshire, a long-time TravelCommons listener and now a podcaster -- he interviews UK craft brewers on his <em><a href=\"https://thisweekincraft.beer/podcast/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">This Week in Craft Beer</a></em>. It was a Saturday afternoon call, for Rob and the other guys in London; just past noon for me in Chicago, but hey…. And somewhere around our second or third beer, Rob asked me “When will you be comfortable getting on a plane again?” I really didn\'t have a good answer. It was early days; I wasn’t sure.</li><li>Fast forward to the back half of June. I needed to get down to Nashville again and didn’t have the time to burn 8 hrs for the drive down and another 8 on the way back. I had some travel funds sitting in my Southwest account from a couple of April trip cancellations, and Southwest flies 6 non-stop 737s between Chicago and Nashville while American and United only do smaller regional jets, and Southwest isn’t packing them full -- booking those bigger planes at ⅔’s capacity -- while American and United say they’ll let you know if your flight books solid. All told, a pretty easy decision to fly Southwest. One of the benefits of living in Chicago, a rare 3-hub town.</li><li>The day before my flight, when getting my boarding pass on the Southwest app (my usual process; I was contactless before it was a thing), I had to click through a certification that I wasn’t running a temperature and that I hadn’t been exposed to or tested positive for COVID-19. OK, click. Then I get a screen telling me that face masks are required to board. Makes sense, click. And now I get my boarding pass.</li><li>Monday morning, Irene drops me off at a pretty sedate departures curb at Midway. I mask up and walk in. It’s not empty, but it’s definitely not the normal Monday morning bustle. It feels more like a Wednesday early afternoon. There’s a bit of a line at regular security, but no line at PreCheck. The TSA agent asks me to drop my mask for a moment to check my ID and then waves me through. I noticed that TSA still has their October 2020 Real ID deadline warning signs on the podium. Hmm… I remember reading at the end of March that the TSA has <a href=\"https://www.dhs.gov/real-id\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">pushed the deadline a year to October 2021</a>. Guess they haven’t had a chance to issue updated signs. You’d think they’d just take the old ones down.</li><li>Most of the restaurants and stores were closed; a pretty common situation. Kev Monteith, a TravelCommons listener and <a href=\"https://travelswithkev.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amtrak travel blogger</a>, replied to one of my Twitter posts saying “I flew Southwest a few weeks ago. Layovers are rough because most places in the airports are closed. I was at STL and only found beer at Burger King and Dunkin Doughnuts.” I would’ve been happy for just a coffee. Down in the main Southwest concourse, some gates were closed off with curtains which I assume was to keep people from sitting there so they don’t have to clean it.</li><li>Looking around the terminal, it felt like mask usage was about 80%. Just about everyone was wearing them when walking around. I’d see some people not wearing them while sitting at the gate, though those folks were distancing themselves from everyone else. I’d see kids ripping their masks off as soon as they got off the jetway. I did notice, though, a sizable minority of mask wearers were just covering their mouths, leaving their noses uncovered -- pilots, cleaning crew, passengers, wheelchair people. Now I’m no epidemiologist, but that seems to defeat the purpose.</li><li>When the agent called boarding, she said “There’s 40 of you on a plane with 175 seats. So everyone gets their own row, and please, don’t everyone sit up front. We need a bit of weight distribution.” It was a quick boarding; we pushed back and took off early. These truly are unprecedented times.</li><li>Nashville was more crowded on Thursday morning when I headed back home. Mostly families as I said at the top of the show. The end of the concourse where the&nbsp; Southwest gates are was as crowded as usual. There were signs around saying that 3 seats between people equals 6 ft, but there were too many people waiting to make it practical; at least everyone is masked up. I walked back up the terminal to find a bit more space and there, tucked away behind some construction sheeting, I found an empty gate. I’m all alone, mega social distanced, so I take off my mask, log into the WiFi and do some work until the Southwest app on my phone bings, telling me that boarding has begun.&nbsp;</li><li>There were a lot more than 40 people on this flight. I found an empty row and slid all the way over to the window seat since it’s only a 90-minute flight. About 3 minutes later, a guy sat down in the aisle seat. Nobody in the middle seat. Everyone wearing masks and nobody’s head right next to mine, I was good to go. Maybe helped just a bit by the fact that, in those 3 minutes, I pointed all three air jets toward the empty middle seat and turned them on full blast, creating an air curtain between me and the aisle seat -- just in case.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/3lb3r3th/44072\">Misunderstood</a> by 3lb3r3th (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. &nbsp;Ft: Alchemistry</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>When Does Business Travel Come Back?</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>My son Andrew and his girlfriend took the 6am flight to LGA earlier this week. I asked him “How full was the flight?” “Maybe 20 people; mostly families,” he said. Didn’t surprise me that a Thursday 6am LGA flight was only at 11% capacity. That’s normally a business travel run; people getting up at 0 dark 30 in Chicago to make 10am meetings in Manhattan. But there’s not many business travelers now.&nbsp; While business travelers only make up about 10% of passengers on major airlines, they provide between 55 and 75% of the profits. You might could think they’re subsidizing the budget fares those families are using.</li><li>Over the past month, I’ve been talking with Sales VPs at companies that deliver complex IT services. If anybody would be feeling the bite of not traveling, I thought it would be these guys. I’ve done a number of these deals, and they always involved locking all the right decision makers in a conference room to hash out all the contract details and ride herd over the transition. But I was completely wrong. They all said that work hasn’t slowed down during the lockdown. They’ve been able to do all that conference room work over Zoom. Indeed, they said being virtual has made it easier for them. Pre-lockdown, one of their biggest challenges was calendar wrangling -- being able to get all their execs and the client execs into that conference room at the same time. Now, they just click some buttons and everyone shows up in Zoom gallery mode -- no travel planning, no scrambling after cancelled or delayed flights. They all said they love the ease of virtual meetings and, at the end of the day, closing the lid on their laptops and having dinner with the family every night.</li><li>Kinda supports the narrative that business travel will never rebound; back to the Microsoft CEO’s quote: in 2 months, we’ve advanced 2 years in virtual work culture. But when I probed a bit, I found that Zoom hasn’t completely replaced an airplane ticket. While these guys have been able to virtually close deals they had in their sales funnel, virtual meetings don’t seem to be replacing these deals; getting new prospects into the top of the sales funnel. So while things are looking good now, they’re beginning to worry about 4-6 months from now.</li><li>This was the exact opposite of what I’d expected. I thought the give and take of negotiations, the sidebar conversations, the emotional content, wouldn’t translate into video calls. But it looks like I was wrong; that once a deal has some momentum and a structure to guide everyone, the in-person hammering out turns out to be a nice-to-have. And the reason new opportunities aren’t coming in is that they need more exploratory, abstract, wide-ranging conversations that lack that guiding structure and selling a team as much as a product -- at least for complex services -- and that’s tough to do over a pane of glass.</li><li>And so they all said that they’d probably start traveling again -- reluctantly -- by the end of this month. But I do think this, call it a 4-month exercise in figuring out virtual work methods and cultures will move the set point, everybody’s default decision toward virtual meetings. And so maybe a bit less focused on high-profit road warriors and more dependent on those cost-conscious families. Does this mean repointing the 6am LGA flights to Cancun? They’re going to have to seriously reengineer those drink carts.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #165</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_165.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #165 — First Post Lockdown Flight; When Does Business Travel Come Back?','','inherit','closed','closed','','2788-revision-v1','','','2020-07-17 21:09:28','2020-07-18 02:09:28','',2788,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/07/17/2788-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2804,1,'2020-07-17 21:14:41','2020-07-18 02:14:41','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/IMG_2073.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2789 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/IMG_2073-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\n<figcaption>The hop taste isn\'t coming through</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p>My first post-lockdown flight was a 90-minute Southwest non-stop from Chicago to Nashville. It wasn\'t bad, but not as casually easy as my last pre-coronavirus flight in February. We talk about that experience as well as Hertz\'s new cleaning program, my latest pair of Bose noise-cancelling headphones, and then wonder when business travel will return. All this and more at the<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_165.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"> <strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/860072707&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #165: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after a couple of runs back down to Nashville for family stuff -- one in the air and the other on the ground. And with COVID cases spiking in vacation spots like California and south Florida, it seems like that’s the market segment -- folks traveling to see friends and family -- that the airline and hotel companies are banking on. And that’s most of what I saw when flying back from Nashville a few Thursdays ago -- lots of families with kids, groups of people meeting up on the other side of security for maybe some 4 day-weekend trips? The tip-off for me on the business vs. leisure traveler mix was the TSA lines -- solid lines for regular TSA, while I pretty much walked straight through PreCheck. Another tip-off used to be mid-day lines at the bars, but with most of the airport restaurants closed up, that’s not a valid indicator right now.</li><li>Traveling right now requires a bit of nimbleness. On my first post-lockdown trip in May, the workout room at the Spring Hill Hampton Inn was open and I used it every day. Back down in June, there was a piece of paper taped to the door -- “Closed by order of the Health Department”. The front desk agent told me it was a couple of days old -- which explained all the banging in the room above me; somebody must’ve been doing their HIIT workout in their room. I didn’t know if I should be annoyed or impressed at how long they went at it. So for this last trip, I called the hotel the night before I left, before I packed my gym clothes vs. a yoga mat. They told me that they’d just reopened the workout room the day before, so the yoga mat went back in the closet.&nbsp;</li><li>It’s kinda the same very fluid situation right now with bars and restaurants. A few days before we got to Nashville, the mayor closed down any establishment with less than 50% of their sales in food, so pretty much all the bars and taprooms. Makes sense, not arguing it; just forced us to quickly pivot some of our plans. It also forced us to go a bit “old school”, back to making actual phone calls, asking “are you open; dine-in or just take-away?” since places seem to be having trouble updating their websites and their Facebook/Yelp/Google/OpenTable listings fast enough to keep up with the changes.</li><li>It proved out our decision to book the Residence Inn rather than the mainline Marriott a few blocks away. The full-size fridge held a lot more beer, and that kitchenette came in handy when we found out that<a href=\"https://www.princeshotchicken.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"https://www.princeshotchicken.com/\"> Prince’s Hot Chicken</a> was only doing take-away -- I can’t imagine trying to eat an extra-hot half-chicken perched on a king-size bed.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/JeffSpeed68/54450\">Hula Hoop Party</a> by Stefan Kartenberg (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. &nbsp;Ft: Martijn de Boer, Blue Wave Theory</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Lots has been written about how the COVID pandemic has massively accelerated changes toward contactless transactions. Microsoft’s CEO famously said back in April “We’ve seen two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months”.&nbsp; Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #136 — Is Cash A Waning King; Don’t Make It Hard to Cash in on Loyalty\">episode #136</a>, I said I felt like the last generation of cash payers, that my younger colleagues rarely carried cash; they paid for everything with a card. Looking into my wallet, I had the same $200 worth of 20’s in June that I’d taken out of an ATM in March. Nobody wants to handle cash; they don’t even want to handle my card (Most extreme experience - A bartender at Asgard Brewing’s taproom in Columbia, TN sprayed my Visa card with diluted chlorine bleach before swiping it to pay my bill. Made my wallet smell like a swimming pool). As much as possible, places want us to pre-order and pre-pay, so we just pick up our purchases in a socially distant way and then head home. It’s also switched up some opinions on using facial recognition for flight check ins. Pre-coronavirus, the push was from governments as a better way to do security screenings and to improve immigration compliance, and this was getting big pushback on privacy concerns. Now, it’s pivoted. The push is from travel companies using facial recognition as a way of providing the touchless check-in experience that most travelers now want.&nbsp;</li><li>But facial recognition is stymied by face masks which we wear when we’re checking in at airports and hotel lobbies. As is Face ID when trying to unlock my iPhone to get to my boarding pass or digital room key. Until I can downgrade to an iPhone SE with that old-school Touch ID that unlocks using my thumb print, I think I’m going to have to shorten the PIN code on my iPhone 11 Pro. I lengthened it for better security but am banging it in more and more often. And I’ve noticed the iPhone is really slow about recognizing my number presses -- or it misses some when I go too fast (like when I’m trying to pull up a boarding pass in line) and errors out.&nbsp;</li><li>Walking down the Hertz Five Star aisle at Nashville Airport, I saw their version of paper rings that hotels used to put around toilet seats to “certify” they’d been cleaned. In Hertz’s case, they put a “<a href=\"http://ir.hertz.com/2020-05-15-Hertz-Introduces-Hertz-Gold-Standard-Clean-Sealed-and-Certified-Vehicles\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Hertz Gold Standard Clean</a>” sticker across the driver-side center pillar (the B pillar for all my gearhead listeners) so that you break it when you open the driver door to get it. Nice gesture, though it kept me from doing my usual walk down the aisle, opening the door of a bunch of cars to check their mileage. Seemed rude to break all those stickers, though I did notice more than a few broken ones when choosing my car. Way back in the old days of TravelCommons, we used to talk about the TSA doing “security theater” in the screening lines. This feels a bit like “sanitation theater”.&nbsp;</li><li>I finally broke down and bought a new set of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2BbOqyA\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bose noise cancelling headphones -- the new 700’s</a>. This is my third set of Bose cans. Bought my first pair in 2009. I was flying a lot of short flights at the time, and in those days before regional jets, I was on a lot of prop planes. And they’re noisy -- not just on take-off, but the entire flight. After a while, I started to notice fatigue when getting off those planes. Talking to a few folks, they said the noise heightens stress. A friend told me how much he liked his Bose cans, and so I burnt some Amex Membership Rewards points on Amazon for a pair of Quiet Comfort 2’s. It was a revelation; flick the switch and, whoosh, quiet. I took them on every flight, until 3 years later, I left them in a seatback pocket when rushing off a plane to make a tight connection. I immediately lit up some more Membership Rewards points for a new pair - <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3eF2iPk\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">QC-15’s</a>. Four years later, I replaced a worn out set of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2OwiIPF\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">ear cushions</a>. And though the non-replaceable headband cushion is looking pretty ratty, the now 8-year-old headphones still work great. What got me to replace them was the wire. I’d be sitting in my usual aisle seat, plugged into my iPhone (using one of those dongles that Apple no longer gives you with a new phone). At some point in the flight, the folks in the middle and window seats would want to get up and use the toilet and inevitably, I’d snag the wire on the arm of the seat, pull the headphones off my head, and/or launch my phone a row forward.&nbsp; I could’ve gotten a pair of the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3eFWLYJ\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">QC-35’s</a> -- same form factor without the wire -- but decided to go all next-generation with the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2BbOqyA\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">700’s</a>, which has meant some adjustment pains. Like there are buttons in places where they never were before. So when I grab the ear cups to slip the headphones off, I manage to hit a button that changes the noise reduction level or summons Siri. Also new is using the touch surface on the right ear cup to control things. You tap or swipe the right ear cup to accept or drop a call, pause a song, raise or lower the volume, or skip 30 seconds to fast-forward past a podcast ad. I’m learning to be a bit more precise in my motions; I’ve already dropped a couple of calls when I was just trying to turn down the call volume.&nbsp; One thing I really like -- more for working-at-home than in-flight usage -- is that the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2BbOqyA\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">700’s</a> can pair with two Bluetooth devices at the same time. So, for me, I have them paired with my MacBook Air and my iPhone and they switch seamlessly between the two. Nice when I’ve got Zoom calls on my Mac and then a phone call on my iPhone. And, call me shallow, but they look a bit cooler than my old <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3eF2iPk\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">QC-15’s</a>. I’ve had the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2BbOqyA\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">700’s</a> for about a month now and really like them. I guess you could say they’re “TravelCommons Approved.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/bridges/15563\">i knew</a> by bridges (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp;Ft: shannonsongs</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>First Post-Lockdown Flight</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Way back at the beginning of the lockdown, the first Saturday of April, I was on a Zoom beer drinking call with Rob Cheshire, a long-time TravelCommons listener and now a podcaster -- he interviews UK craft brewers on his <em><a href=\"https://thisweekincraft.beer/podcast/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">This Week in Craft Beer</a></em>. It was a Saturday afternoon call, for Rob and the other guys in London; just past noon for me in Chicago, but hey…. And somewhere around our second or third beer, Rob asked me “When will you be comfortable getting on a plane again?” I really didn\'t have a good answer. It was early days; I wasn’t sure.</li><li>Fast forward to the back half of June. I needed to get down to Nashville again and didn’t have the time to burn 8 hrs for the drive down and another 8 on the way back. I had some travel funds sitting in my Southwest account from a couple of April trip cancellations, and Southwest flies 6 non-stop 737s between Chicago and Nashville while American and United only do smaller regional jets, and Southwest isn’t packing them full -- booking those bigger planes at ⅔’s capacity -- while American and United say they’ll let you know if your flight books solid. All told, a pretty easy decision to fly Southwest. One of the benefits of living in Chicago, a rare 3-hub town.</li><li>The day before my flight, when getting my boarding pass on the Southwest app (my usual process; I was contactless before it was a thing), I had to click through a certification that I wasn’t running a temperature and that I hadn’t been exposed to or tested positive for COVID-19. OK, click. Then I get a screen telling me that face masks are required to board. Makes sense, click. And now I get my boarding pass.</li><li>Monday morning, Irene drops me off at a pretty sedate departures curb at Midway. I mask up and walk in. It’s not empty, but it’s definitely not the normal Monday morning bustle. It feels more like a Wednesday early afternoon. There’s a bit of a line at regular security, but no line at PreCheck. The TSA agent asks me to drop my mask for a moment to check my ID and then waves me through. I noticed that TSA still has their October 2020 Real ID deadline warning signs on the podium. Hmm… I remember reading at the end of March that the TSA has <a href=\"https://www.dhs.gov/real-id\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">pushed the deadline a year to October 2021</a>. Guess they haven’t had a chance to issue updated signs. You’d think they’d just take the old ones down.</li><li>Most of the restaurants and stores were closed; a pretty common situation. Kev Monteith, a TravelCommons listener and <a href=\"https://travelswithkev.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amtrak travel blogger</a>, replied to one of my Twitter posts saying “I flew Southwest a few weeks ago. Layovers are rough because most places in the airports are closed. I was at STL and only found beer at Burger King and Dunkin Doughnuts.” I would’ve been happy for just a coffee. Down in the main Southwest concourse, some gates were closed off with curtains which I assume was to keep people from sitting there so they don’t have to clean it.</li><li>Looking around the terminal, it felt like mask usage was about 80%. Just about everyone was wearing them when walking around. I’d see some people not wearing them while sitting at the gate, though those folks were distancing themselves from everyone else. I’d see kids ripping their masks off as soon as they got off the jetway. I did notice, though, a sizable minority of mask wearers were just covering their mouths, leaving their noses uncovered -- pilots, cleaning crew, passengers, wheelchair people. Now I’m no epidemiologist, but that seems to defeat the purpose.</li><li>When the agent called boarding, she said “There’s 40 of you on a plane with 175 seats. So everyone gets their own row, and please, don’t everyone sit up front. We need a bit of weight distribution.” It was a quick boarding; we pushed back and took off early. These truly are unprecedented times.</li><li>Nashville was more crowded on Thursday morning when I headed back home. Mostly families as I said at the top of the show. The end of the concourse where the&nbsp; Southwest gates are was as crowded as usual. There were signs around saying that 3 seats between people equals 6 ft, but there were too many people waiting to make it practical; at least everyone is masked up. I walked back up the terminal to find a bit more space and there, tucked away behind some construction sheeting, I found an empty gate. I’m all alone, mega social distanced, so I take off my mask, log into the WiFi and do some work until the Southwest app on my phone bings, telling me that boarding has begun.&nbsp;</li><li>There were a lot more than 40 people on this flight. I found an empty row and slid all the way over to the window seat since it’s only a 90-minute flight. About 3 minutes later, a guy sat down in the aisle seat. Nobody in the middle seat. Everyone wearing masks and nobody’s head right next to mine, I was good to go. Maybe helped just a bit by the fact that, in those 3 minutes, I pointed all three air jets toward the empty middle seat and turned them on full blast, creating an air curtain between me and the aisle seat -- just in case.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/3lb3r3th/44072\">Misunderstood</a> by 3lb3r3th (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. &nbsp;Ft: Alchemistry</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>When Does Business Travel Come Back?</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>My son Andrew and his girlfriend took the 6am flight to LGA earlier this week. I asked him “How full was the flight?” “Maybe 20 people; mostly families,” he said. Didn’t surprise me that a Thursday 6am LGA flight was only at 11% capacity. That’s normally a business travel run; people getting up at 0 dark 30 in Chicago to make 10am meetings in Manhattan. But there’s not many business travelers now.&nbsp; While business travelers only make up about 10% of passengers on major airlines, they provide between 55 and 75% of the profits. You might could think they’re subsidizing the budget fares those families are using.</li><li>Over the past month, I’ve been talking with Sales VPs at companies that deliver complex IT services. If anybody would be feeling the bite of not traveling, I thought it would be these guys. I’ve done a number of these deals, and they always involved locking all the right decision makers in a conference room to hash out all the contract details and ride herd over the transition. But I was completely wrong. They all said that work hasn’t slowed down during the lockdown. They’ve been able to do all that conference room work over Zoom. Indeed, they said being virtual has made it easier for them. Pre-lockdown, one of their biggest challenges was calendar wrangling -- being able to get all their execs and the client execs into that conference room at the same time. Now, they just click some buttons and everyone shows up in Zoom gallery mode -- no travel planning, no scrambling after cancelled or delayed flights. They all said they love the ease of virtual meetings and, at the end of the day, closing the lid on their laptops and having dinner with the family every night.</li><li>Kinda supports the narrative that business travel will never rebound; back to the Microsoft CEO’s quote: in 2 months, we’ve advanced 2 years in virtual work culture. But when I probed a bit, I found that Zoom hasn’t completely replaced an airplane ticket. While these guys have been able to virtually close deals they had in their sales funnel, virtual meetings don’t seem to be replacing these deals; getting new prospects into the top of the sales funnel. So while things are looking good now, they’re beginning to worry about 4-6 months from now.</li><li>This was the exact opposite of what I’d expected. I thought the give and take of negotiations, the sidebar conversations, the emotional content, wouldn’t translate into video calls. But it looks like I was wrong; that once a deal has some momentum and a structure to guide everyone, the in-person hammering out turns out to be a nice-to-have. And the reason new opportunities aren’t coming in is that they need more exploratory, abstract, wide-ranging conversations that lack that guiding structure and selling a team as much as a product -- at least for complex services -- and that’s tough to do over a pane of glass.</li><li>And so they all said that they’d probably start traveling again -- reluctantly -- by the end of this month. But I do think this, call it a 4-month exercise in figuring out virtual work methods and cultures will move the set point, everybody’s default decision toward virtual meetings. And so maybe a bit less focused on high-profit road warriors and more dependent on those cost-conscious families. Does this mean repointing the 6am LGA flights to Cancun? They’re going to have to seriously reengineer those drink carts.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #165</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_165.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #165 — First Post Lockdown Flight; When Does Business Travel Come Back?','','inherit','closed','closed','','2788-revision-v1','','','2020-07-17 21:14:41','2020-07-18 02:14:41','',2788,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/07/17/2788-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2807,1,'2020-08-13 11:05:02','2020-08-13 16:05:02','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/IMG_0822-scaled.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2810 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/IMG_0822-300x278.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"278\" /></a>\n<figcaption>Reindeer are ruining my cabin porn</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p>Trying to plan an August trip amidst dueling state quarantine lists and rapid lockdown changes while writing off my September plans for Barcelona. What\'s worse - hotels cutting back on housekeeping or breakfasts? And talking with <a href=\"https://emilythomaswrites.co.uk/about/\">Emily Thomas</a> about her new book <i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"https://amzn.to/2DO07fV\">The Meaning of Travel: Philosophers Abroad</a>. </span></i>All this and more, or listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below or by following this<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_166.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"> <strong>direct link</strong></a> to download the podcast file .</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #166: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after managing to front-run the city’s quarantine order on Wisconsin. Went up to Milwaukee to meet up with some friends and do a bit of biking a couple of weekends before the Chicago Health Department added Wisconsin to their list of 22 states where you’re required to self-quarantine for 14 days after returning from a trip. Mind you, they’re not setting up roadblock checkpoints like New York City is -- at least not as of the time of this recording. Reasonable people can differ on this -- New York’s governor claimed similar efforts back in March by Rhode Island and Florida aimed at New Yorkers were “unconstitutional” but seems OK with it when it’s pointed the other way -- but it does make travel planning for law abiding citizens a bit more of a challenge. And making me wonder about our downsizing move into Chicago last year -- was missing the yard, the extra rooms, and the basement gym in the suburbs during the lockdown earlier in the year; now after Chicago’s quarantine rules, am missing freedom of travel.</li><li>All this adds a couple orders of magnitude of complexity to our efforts to plan a week out of the city in a couple of weeks. Not only do we need to check Chicago’s quarantine list, but also the quarantine plans of any potential destinations. While New York isn’t on Chicago’s quarantine list, Illinois is on New York’s. Mapping it all out, we take the “clean destination” intersection of that quarantine Venn diagram and then look at what restrictions are in those places; if nothing’s open, it’s not worth traveling there. I’ve eaten more meals in my hotel rooms over the past 3 months than I have in the last couple of years.&nbsp;</li><li>But things are changing so fast, that even after you figure out what’s open now, we then start following local papers on Twitter to get any early warnings on new restrictions. Which also means paying a lot more attention to hotel cancellation policies than I ever did. And then overloading our itinerary with outdoor activities like hiking and biking so last-minute closures or restrictions don’t leave us with nothing to do. Which means spending more time trolling the AccuWeather and Weather Channel web sites because an outside-heavy itinerary is more vulnerable to big storm fronts and hurricanes. And to think I used to bitch about having to navigate TripAdvisor ratings.</li><li>Bridge Music — funkyGarden by Jeris (c) copyright 2020 Licensed under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/VJ_Memes/61356 Ft: airtone, SackJo22, Analog By Nature</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>First, a couple of shout-outs to folks who are helping me spread the word about the podcast</li><li>Thanks to GHLGB, an apparently long-time TravelCommons listener, who gave us a 5-star iTunes review the day after the last month’s episode dropped, writing:<ul><li>“Mark does a great job of relating the world of the road warrior with a bit of branching out to those of us who are miles and points nutty. Always a calm and reasonable voice one that’s been in my ears for four years”</li><li>Thanks for that. I appreciate the words, and the effort of wading through the iTunes interface to leave them</li></ul></li><li>Also, in last month’s episode, I mentioned Kev Monteith, a TravelCommons listener and Amtrak travel blogger, but didn’t thank him for calling us out in his <a href=\"https://travelswithkev.com/kevs-favorite-podcasts/\"><em>2020 Favorite Podcast</em> list</a> on his <a href=\"https://travelswithkev.com/\"><em>Travels With Kev</em> website</a>. So, I’m fixing that right now. Thanks, Kev! Check out the show notes for links to his site.</li><li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/06/09/podcast-164-first-post-lockdown-trips-travel-credit-cards/\">episode #164</a>, we talked about how hotels are pulling back on housekeeping during stays -- the Hampton Inn in Spring Hill, TN said they’d be 3 days between room visits while the Residence Inn up the road in Franklin said 7 days, which seems a bit excessive; more like a COVID-washing a cost-cutting move. Replacing the breakfast buffet with a “grab-&amp;-go” breakfast bag makes all the sense in the world, but here again, hotels are grabbing the opportunity to trim costs. Most of what I’ve seen is a brown lunch bag with a bottle of water, a NutriGrain breakfast bar, and an apple -- a banana if I’m lucky. But the Residence Inn in Wauwatosa, WI, just outside of Milwaukee, was having none of that a couple of weeks back. You had 4 options for the main breakfast course in your bag -- a turkey and waffle sandwich, a peanut and strawberry sandwich, an egg and cheese quiche, or one of 13 kinds of cereal boxes, accompanied by your choice of chocolate milk, or orange or apple juice. I’m not passing judgement on the food choices, but I was awfully impressed by their ambition -- yeah, we can’t lay out a breakfast buffet spread, but we’re gonna try our damndest to give you a decent alternative. I just had to give the turkey &amp; waffle sandwich a go. I had visions of a <a href=\"https://twitter.com/trev4president/status/857776562615308288\">Fyre Festival-like trainwreck of a sandwich</a> -- a deli slice of turkey breast between two Eggo waffles. But it was a little more reasonable -- a small wrapped sandwich of turkey sausage between two small waffles, meant to be heated in the microwave. I grabbed it on the way out for a bike ride, so missed the microwave step, which, I think, was critical. But like I said, I give that RI team huge props for the effort.</li><li>But outside the Wauwatosa gang, if this stripped down hotel service stays the norm for the next 12-18 months, it’s probably going to drive some big changes in the year-end traveler gift guides -- shifting from Away luggage and Aesop travel kits, last year’s big recommendations, to sets of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3izWHMJ\">wine tumblers</a>, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2PIgihg\">collapsible bowls</a>, and <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3an6BhJ\">camping mess kits</a>. And, of course, all sorts of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/30NAqF2\">upscale sporks</a>.</li><li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/03/21/podcast-161-new-crisis-old-question-driving-down-to-key-west/\">episode #161</a>, at the end of March, still in a bit of shock from the COVID lockdown and trying to figure out how long it was going to last, I said “I’m nothing if not an optimist. In the midst of this week’s unraveling, I found a deal on a direct American Air flight from ORD to Barcelona — 8½ hr 787 flight — so I booked it — 2 weeks in Barcelona at the end of September.”&nbsp; But here we are five months later and as we all know, things haven’t “re-raveled”. At the beginning of July, American announced that <a href=\"https://liveandletsfly.com/american-airlines-international-reset/\">direct 787 ORD-BCN flight won’t restart until next summer.</a> I checked our reservation on the AA iPhone app after I read this. It still showed us on that direct flight -- until I clicked through, which then, I guess, forced the app to pull the latest information from Dallas, and now showed us flight BA through Heathrow. Not that it really matters. The EU isn’t letting Americans in any time in the near future, and, last time I checked, Barcelona is in a voluntary lockdown because of a new spike in COVID cases. News articles are showing <a href=\"https://time.com/5876132/europe-coronavirus-second-wave/\">shuttered-up stalls at the La Boqueria market</a>; like I said earlier, if nothing’s open, why go? It was a gamble, and really, not even a big one. There’s no change fee, so it’s a push. We won’t lose any money -- unless American goes belly-up, but that’d never happen -- would it?!</li><li>Last year, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/podcast-150-travel-interruptus/\">episode #150</a>, (these show notes are gonna be chock full of backlinks), I talked about switching my carryon bag -- from a Timbuk2 backpack to a <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3izS991\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Timbuk2 messenger bag</a>. I gave two reasons for the switch: I wanted to carry something a little smaller that would stand up under a plane seat; and I wanted a non-black interior, I kept losing things in my backpack -- <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3iDWIiu\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">my tablet</a>, my Bose headphone case. But also because the backpack was breaking down a bit - the seam on one of the side pockets had blown out and one of the strap clips had broken. I was going to pitch it during our last downsizing binge before moving into the city and a friend said “You know, <a href=\"https://www.timbuk2.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Timbuk2</a> bags have <a href=\"https://www.timbuk2.com/pages/warranty-repairs\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">lifetime warranties</a>.” Huh. So I hung onto it because I still like the bag. And about 14 months later, I finally got around to sending it back to them in San Francisco. I wasn’t sure if they’d re-opened their factory, so I was ready for it to take awhile for them to process the bag and repair it. Tracking the package, I could see they received it on a Friday. I got a note from them the following Monday saying they’d inspected it and yes, it was covered by the warranty, and had the bag back in my hands that Saturday. I have to tell you that I am pretty damned impressed. I won’t be switching back from my messenger bag, but I have found that the backpack can carry 4 four-packs of 16-oz cans, perfect when I’m biking a circuit of Chicago microbreweries using curbside no-contact pick-up to grab whatever’s their newest thing. Timbuk2 is definitely “TravelCommons Approved.”</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — Xena\'s Kiss / Medea\'s Kiss by mwic (c) copyright 2018 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mwic/58883</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>The Meaning of Travel</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>This seems to be <em>the</em> existential question for a lot of travelers -- why do we travel? -- now that can’t, or at least can’t as easily and, well thoughtlessly is too strong a word, but when we could travel without having to plan as much. It’s been a whipsaw -- from overtourism to <a href=\"https://skift.com/2020/06/05/travel-sector-remains-thorn-in-a-falling-u-s-unemployment-rate-defying-expectations/\">36% unemployment in the travel and hospitality sector in the the US</a> -- so a bit soul-searching/navel-gazing is to be expected, if not encouraged. So when I saw the new book, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2DO07fV\"><em>The Meaning of Travel: Philosophers Abroad</em></a> by <a href=\"https://www.dur.ac.uk/research/directory/staff/?id=15319\">Dr. Emily</a> <a href=\"https://emilythomaswrites.co.uk/\">Thomas</a>, associate professor in philosophy at Durham University in the UK, immediately bought it and read it -- and then thought that I needed to have her on the podcast. Lucky for me, she’s a very nice person and agreed to spend a bit of time talking about “the meaning of travel”. It was a fun conversation; I hope you enjoy it.<ul><li>Mark: I\'ve got to admit that, as an engineer and an IT guy, my philosophy knowledge pretty much starts and ends with buying a T shirt that said “I Drink Therefore I Am.” It was a fundraiser for the Philosophy club for my undergrad. Emily, the first chapter “Why Do Philosophers Care About Travel” got me because you get straight into a topic we\'ve discussed often on the TravelCommons podcast about how travelers build travel bubbles around themselves. They isolate themselves from the places that they traveled to. Oftentimes they do it in the name of efficiency, maybe to keep themselves safe from experiencing what you call the “otherness of travel.” What do philosophers say about that difference between everyday journeys and traveling?</li><li>Emily: So, I think the difference between these kinds of everyday journeys, like popping to the grocery store, visiting your grandmother and what we think of as travel lies in how much unfamiliarity or otherness we experience along the way. And it seems to me that when I popped to the grocery store, everything is super familiar. I know how things work; I know the roads; I know the products I\'m going to buy. If I were to go grocery shopping in an unfamiliar country, that experience is going to be really different. I don\'t know how the roads work anymore; I don\'t necessarily recognize the writing on the signs of the products; I may not understand the languages that I\'m overhearing. And so, an everyday experience becomes much more unfamiliar. And then seems to be much more about travel in the deeper sense. And several philosophers, including folks like <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9_Descartes\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">René Descartes</a> and <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_de_Montaigne\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Michel de Montagne</a>, have talked about how the benefits of travel lie in experiencing otherness, that this broadens your mind, that it forces you to think past the familiar everyday world of your experience and think about how things might be otherwise, how they could be in other places and they think that\'s a really good thing.Frequent travelers often build travel bubbles around themselves that isolates them from the places they travel to; doing it in the name of efficiency,  but also perhaps to keep themselves safe from experiencing what philosophers call “the otherness” of travel</li><li>Mark: I was thinking about this -- is there a spectrum of otherness? I\'ve got the complete travel bubble at one end; in the middle, curated sidebar experiences -- you find a local restaurant, or hunting down a microbrewery or a taproom in a not-great section of town that you would not normally go; and then at the other end, full immersion – I live here, I’ve got a flat.</li><li>Emily: I definitely think there\'s a spectrum. And you can imagine, in your bubble, it might not be the full-blown experience of taking all the same clothes with you and you using all familiar airports. But even if you have your laptop and your mobile phone with you, part of the way that you\'ll be connecting with the world is through these really familiar mediums. Maybe you\'re going there, and you\'re still using Trip Advisor to look for recommendations like you would back home or you\'re still using Google maps to navigate your way around the streets. And again, I think that\'s going to provide you with this kind of buffer between you and the unfamiliar.</li><li>Mark: Later on in the book, you riff on <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_David_Thoreau\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Henry David Thoreau</a> and<em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/33SYvw3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"> Walden</a></em> and <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3kEGjw6\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Cabin Porn</a> and Solitude. When the lock down started, I just decided I was going to dig into some early American literature that I had been threatened with in high school and college but never really got into. And so I kind of flipped a coin between Thoreau and Whitman\'s <em>Leaves of Grass</em> and, heads so it was Thoreau. I will admit I did this in the beginning of April, and I still have not finished <em>Walden</em> yet, and here we are in August. So it has been a bit of a slog, but I\'m still working it. But before I get into that, I gotta ask – “cabin porn.” That\'s a new one on me – the term, not so much the porn. But the term <em>cabin porn</em>, what is that?</li><li>Emily: And so despite what you might think (laughter), Cabin Porn refers to photography of beautiful, isolated cabins. So, picture wood-built cabins nestled in the woods with smoke curling from the chimney. Or maybe they are stone cottages perched on the edge of a cliff, looking out over a crevasse. And there’s this whole industry dedicated to people taking photographs of these gorgeous cabins. The idea is that they\'re kind of aspirational. If you stick these into Google images, you will find some of the most astounding dwellings; places that you can rent and live for a little. <em>Walden</em> seemingly kicked this whole thing off. So, Thoreau describes building a cabin in the woods by Walden Pond and while the book can be a little bit of a slog in places, there are beautiful bits of the book. When he\'s describing living in nature in this really kind of rustic way, lots of people credit their cabin aspirations to <em>Walden</em>.</li><li>Mark: What is the strain about solitude and travel and in the balance with “otherness”?</li><li>Emily: Solitude is often held up is one of the things we can get through travel that\'s hard to get home. Although it seems like you can go out into a crowded cafe or a bar and be alone there, it seems like it\'s much easier to do that by venturing out into wilderness, that you\'re not going to meet other human beings and you have objects in front of you – trees, plants, creatures – that you can connect with. So the idea is that you\'re not being solitary in the sense of just introspection, but you\'re also connecting with some part of the world around you. It might in turn cause you to reflect on that world, and then your own part in that wider network. And that\'s very much what Thoreau is all about. He thinks that being alone in wilderness allows you to better understand wilderness and your own part in the wider universe.</li><li>Mark: I often find when I\'m traveling, it is kinda easy to hold yourself at a distance, especially if, where you are, you don\'t speak that language. It\'s almost like white noise.</li><li>Emily: Yes, when you spend large chunks of time without hearing words that you understand is a strange experience. I think it allows you to focus on other things. I think then you end up paying more attention, maybe to like the sights and the smells, the things that you can understand. I quite enjoy it, actually, the experience of being somewhere and not understanding anything that\'s going on.</li><li>Mark: (laughter) The only challenge, though, is because you\'re so used to people saying things and you don\'t understand it that you just don\'t listen. And then when you actually come back to the UK or the US and people are talking to you and you\'re just so used to tuning them out, just like “Oh, wait, you said something to me?” There was another piece in the book that you talked about global homogenization. And I\'ve felt this, I would say over the past 10-15 years. I started traveling a lot in the mid-80’s, back in the Dark Ages. In that chapter you talk about that it\'s an old complaint. You talk about Rousseau bitching about it, and John Stuart Mills…. Are we just repeating the same thing?</li><li>Emily: So, people like Mills and Rousseau are writing a couple of hundred years ago, and they are bitching about how Paris and Rome “seemed to me to be the same city” and reading this now, it just seems so implausible! I am sure that a large part of this feeling has to do with context. I would imagine that these men are moving in intellectual circles and then they\'re going to be around people who speak the same kind of languages, and value the same kind of things that you would like to hope that if they had broken free of those circles that they might have found things that were more unfamiliar. I do suspect that the world has been becoming more the same now than it was before, and simply because of the rise of global companies – that was just not around before. And the idea that you can go into a city and find the same shops and restaurants that you do back home is really strange. I mean, that would not have been there back in the 17th and 18th centuries. That said, I do think what we were talking about before – using technology to find your way around – I think that\'s going to give you the impression that things are all the same because you\'re looking at them through the same medium. That is an illusion. The real world is not all the same. New York is very different than Paris. Something in the US that I personally am really fond of is investigating small towns that are not listed in guidebooks, in search of what Bill Bryson once described as Anywhere, USA. I really enjoy that. Seeing how these small towns do differ from each other, but also what they have in common. For me, there\'s a reall attraction in that, especially in the US.</li><li>Mark: Are there any that are top of the list for you?</li><li>Emily: Yes, <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silverton,_Colorado\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Silverton, Colorado</a>. I enjoyed that enormously. As a British tourist, so much of it is totally unfamiliar, even though I got the impression that, to the people who lived there and are from Colorado, this is all just par for the course. It’s regular looking houses, it’s regular looking shops that, as is a non-American trying the local bars, seeing the local kind of pancake breakfast, all of this was completely new and really stunningly beautiful.</li><li>Mark: Just to wrap up, if you look forward and you think about philosophy and travel, what are some of the new things that philosophers are thinking about on travel?</li><li>Emily: I think the big thing right now it is the ethics of climate change and how best to travel responsibly. I think that issue is going to dwarf everything else in the philosophy of travel for several decades to come. Whether or not we are partaking in carbon off-setting schemes is enough, whether or not we should be looking to educate ourselves more about the places that we travel, possibly even traveling less but aiming for higher quality experiences. I think that stuff is really going to dominate. However, there is other stuff going on too. Looking at the issues posed by space travel and space tourism, which I don\'t think is that far away, actually. I mean in the immediate decades, it\'s going to be the province of the super wealthy, but I think past that it will become more and more accessible and that\'s also going to pose some ethical issues like the cost of fuel to get people up out of the atmosphere is gonna be enormous. But also, that will prompt us to think about our place in the world. I obviously have not been up into space, but were I to go, I imagine it would cause me to reflect on how little the planet Earth is in the grand scheme of things. And I wonder whether that will lead us to reconsider our place in the world and how we\'re treating the planet that we live on. I think space travel is going to be really rife with opportunities for philosophical reflection.</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #166</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_166.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #166 — What Is The Meaning of Travel?','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel','','\nhttps://liveandletsfly.com/american-airlines-international-reset/','2021-10-01 17:05:53','2021-10-01 22:05:53','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=2807',0,'post','',0),
(2808,1,'2020-08-12 20:11:02','2020-08-13 01:11:02','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/IMG_2073.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2789 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/IMG_2073-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\n<figcaption>The hop taste isn\'t coming through</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p>My first post-lockdown flight was a 90-minute Southwest non-stop from Chicago to Nashville. It wasn\'t bad, but not as casually easy as my last pre-coronavirus flight in February. We talk about that experience as well as Hertz\'s new cleaning program, my latest pair of Bose noise-cancelling headphones, and then wonder when business travel will return. All this and more at the<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_166.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"> <strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/860072707&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #166: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after managing to front-run the city’s quarantine order on Wisconsin. Went up to Milwaukee to meet up with some friends and do a bit of biking a couple of weekends before the Chicago Health Department added Wisconsin to their list of 22 states where you’re required to self-quarantine for 14 days after returning from a trip. Mind you, they’re not setting up roadblock checkpoints like New York City is -- at least not as of the time of this recording. Reasonable people can differ on this -- New York’s governor claimed similar efforts back in March by Rhode Island and Florida aimed at New Yorkers were “unconstitutional” but seems OK with it when it’s pointed the other way -- but it does make travel planning for law abiding citizens a bit more of a challenge. And making me wonder about our downsizing move into Chicago last year -- was missing the yard, the extra rooms, and the basement gym in the suburbs during the lockdown earlier in the year; now after Chicago’s quarantine rules, am missing freedom of travel.</li><li>All this adds a couple orders of magnitude of complexity to our efforts to plan a week out of the city in a couple of weeks. Not only do we need to check Chicago’s quarantine list, but also the quarantine plans of any potential destinations. While New York isn’t on Chicago’s quarantine list, Illinois is on New York’s. Mapping it all out, we take the “clean destination” intersection of that quarantine Venn diagram and then look at what restrictions are in those places; if nothing’s open, it’s not worth traveling there. I’ve eaten more meals in my hotel rooms over the past 3 months than I have in the last couple of years. </li><li>But things are changing so fast, that even after you figure out what’s open now, we then start following local papers on Twitter to get any early warnings on new restrictions. Which also means paying a lot more attention to hotel cancellation policies than I ever did. And then overloading our itinerary with outdoor activities like hiking and biking so last-minute closures or restrictions don’t leave us with nothing to do. Which means spending more time trolling the AccuWeather and Weather Channel web sites because an outside-heavy itinerary is more vulnerable to big storm fronts and hurricanes. And to think I used to bitch about having to navigate TripAdvisor ratings.</li><li>Bridge Music —</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>First, a couple of shout-outs to folks who are helping me spread the word about the podcast</li><li>Thanks to GHLGB, an apparently long-time TravelCommons listener, who gave us a 5-star iTunes review the day after the last month’s episode dropped, writing:<ul><li>“Mark does a great job of relating the world of the road warrior with a bit of branching out to those of us who are miles and points nutty. Always a calm and reasonable voice one that’s been in my ears for four years”</li><li>Thanks for that. I appreciate the words, and the effort of wading through the iTunes interface to leave them</li></ul></li><li>Also, in last month’s episode, I mentioned Kev Monteith, a TravelCommons listener and Amtrak travel blogger, but didn’t thank him for calling us out in his <a href=\"https://travelswithkev.com/kevs-favorite-podcasts/\"><em>2020 Favorite Podcast</em> list</a> on his <a href=\"https://travelswithkev.com/\"><em>Travels With Kev</em> website</a>. So, I’m fixing that right now. Thanks, Kev! Check out the show notes for links to his site.</li><li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/06/09/podcast-164-first-post-lockdown-trips-travel-credit-cards/\">episode #164</a>, we talked about how hotels are pulling back on housekeeping during stays -- the Hampton Inn in Spring Hill, TN said they’d be 3 days between room visits while the Residence Inn up the road in Franklin said 7 days, which seems a bit excessive; more like a COVID-washing a cost-cutting move. Replacing the breakfast buffet with a “grab-&amp;-go” breakfast bag makes all the sense in the world, but here again, hotels are grabbing the opportunity to trim costs. Most of what I’ve seen is a brown lunch bag with a bottle of water, a NutriGrain breakfast bar, and an apple -- a banana if I’m lucky. But the Residence Inn in Wauwatosa, WI, just outside of Milwaukee, was having none of that a couple of weeks back. You had 4 options for the main breakfast course in your bag -- a turkey and waffle sandwich, a peanut and strawberry sandwich, an egg and cheese quiche, or one of 13 kinds of cereal boxes, accompanied by your choice of chocolate milk, or orange or apple juice. I’m not passing judgement on the food choices, but I was awfully impressed by their ambition -- yeah, we can’t lay out a breakfast buffet spread, but we’re gonna try our damndest to give you a decent alternative. I just had to give the turkey &amp; waffle sandwich a go. I had visions of a <a href=\"https://twitter.com/trev4president/status/857776562615308288\">Fyre Festival-like trainwreck of a sandwich</a> -- a deli slice of turkey breast between two Eggo waffles. But it was a little more reasonable -- a small wrapped sandwich of turkey sausage between two small waffles, meant to be heated in the microwave. I grabbed it on the way out for a bike ride, so missed the microwave step, which, I think, was critical. But like I said, I give that RI team huge props for the effort.</li><li>But outside the Wauwatosa gang, if this stripped down hotel service stays the norm for the next 12-18 months, it’s probably going to drive some big changes in the year-end traveler gift guides -- shifting from Away luggage and Aesop travel kits, last year’s big recommendations, to sets of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3izWHMJ\">wine tumblers</a>, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2PIgihg\">collapsible bowls</a>, and <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3an6BhJ\">camping mess kits</a>. And, of course, all sorts of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/30NAqF2\">upscale sporks</a>.</li><li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/03/21/podcast-161-new-crisis-old-question-driving-down-to-key-west/\">episode #161</a>, at the end of March, still in a bit of shock from the COVID lockdown and trying to figure out how long it was going to last, I said “I’m nothing if not an optimist. In the midst of this week’s unraveling, I found a deal on a direct American Air flight from ORD to Barcelona — 8½ hr 787 flight — so I booked it — 2 weeks in Barcelona at the end of September.”  But here we are five months later and as we all know, things haven’t “re-raveled”. At the beginning of July, American announced that <a href=\"https://liveandletsfly.com/american-airlines-international-reset/\">direct 787 ORD-BCN flight won’t restart until next summer.</a> I checked our reservation on the AA iPhone app after I read this. It still showed us on that direct flight -- until I clicked through, which then, I guess, forced the app to pull the latest information from Dallas, and now showed us flight BA through Heathrow. Not that it really matters. The EU isn’t letting Americans in any time in the near future, and, last time I checked, Barcelona is in a voluntary lockdown because of a new spike in COVID cases. News articles are showing <a href=\"https://time.com/5876132/europe-coronavirus-second-wave/\">shuttered-up stalls at the La Boqueria market</a>; like I said earlier, if nothing’s open, why go? It was a gamble, and really, not even a big one. There’s no change fee, so it’s a push. We won’t lose any money -- unless American goes belly-up, but that’d never happen -- would it?!</li><li>Last year, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/podcast-150-travel-interruptus/\">episode #150</a>, (these show notes are gonna be chock full of backlinks), I talked about switching my carryon bag -- from a Timbuk2 backpack to a <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3izS991\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Timbuk2 messenger bag</a>. I gave two reasons for the switch: I wanted to carry something a little smaller that would stand up under a plane seat; and I wanted a non-black interior, I kept losing things in my backpack -- <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3iDWIiu\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">my tablet</a>, my Bose headphone case. But also because the backpack was breaking down a bit - the seam on one of the side pockets had blown out and one of the strap clips had broken. I was going to pitch it during our last downsizing binge before moving into the city and a friend said “You know, <a href=\"https://www.timbuk2.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Timbuk2</a> bags have <a href=\"https://www.timbuk2.com/pages/warranty-repairs\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">lifetime warranties</a>.” Huh. So I hung onto it because I still like the bag. And about 14 months later, I finally got around to sending it back to them in San Francisco. I wasn’t sure if they’d re-opened their factory, so I was ready for it to take awhile for them to process the bag and repair it. Tracking the package, I could see they received it on a Friday. I got a note from them the following Monday saying they’d inspected it and yes, it was covered by the warranty, and had the bag back in my hands that Saturday. I have to tell you that I am pretty damned impressed. I won’t be switching back from my messenger bag, but I have found that the backpack can carry 4 four-packs of 16-oz cans, perfect when I’m biking a circuit of Chicago microbreweries using curbside no-contact pick-up to grab whatever’s their newest thing. Timbuk2 is definitely “TravelCommons Approved.”</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music —</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>The Meaning of Travel</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Way back at the beginning of the lockdown, the first Saturday of April, I was on a Zoom beer drinking call with Rob Cheshire, a long-time TravelCommons listener and now a podcaster -- he interviews UK craft brewers on his <em><a href=\"https://thisweekincraft.beer/podcast/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">This Week in Craft Beer</a></em>. It was a Saturday afternoon call, for Rob and the other guys in London; just past noon for me in Chicago, but hey…. And somewhere around our second or third beer, Rob asked me “When will you be comfortable getting on a plane again?” I really didn\'t have a good answer. It was early days; I wasn’t sure.</li><li>Fast forward to the back half of June. I needed to get down to Nashville again and didn’t have the time to burn 8 hrs for the drive down and another 8 on the way back. I had some travel funds sitting in my Southwest account from a couple of April trip cancellations, and Southwest flies 6 non-stop 737s between Chicago and Nashville while American and United only do smaller regional jets, and Southwest isn’t packing them full -- booking those bigger planes at ⅔’s capacity -- while American and United say they’ll let you know if your flight books solid. All told, a pretty easy decision to fly Southwest. One of the benefits of living in Chicago, a rare 3-hub town.</li><li>The day before my flight, when getting my boarding pass on the Southwest app (my usual process; I was contactless before it was a thing), I had to click through a certification that I wasn’t running a temperature and that I hadn’t been exposed to or tested positive for COVID-19. OK, click. Then I get a screen telling me that face masks are required to board. Makes sense, click. And now I get my boarding pass.</li><li>Monday morning, Irene drops me off at a pretty sedate departures curb at Midway. I mask up and walk in. It’s not empty, but it’s definitely not the normal Monday morning bustle. It feels more like a Wednesday early afternoon. There’s a bit of a line at regular security, but no line at PreCheck. The TSA agent asks me to drop my mask for a moment to check my ID and then waves me through. I noticed that TSA still has their October 2020 Real ID deadline warning signs on the podium. Hmm… I remember reading at the end of March that the TSA has <a href=\"https://www.dhs.gov/real-id\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">pushed the deadline a year to October 2021</a>. Guess they haven’t had a chance to issue updated signs. You’d think they’d just take the old ones down.</li><li>Most of the restaurants and stores were closed; a pretty common situation. Kev Monteith, a TravelCommons listener and <a href=\"https://travelswithkev.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amtrak travel blogger</a>, replied to one of my Twitter posts saying “I flew Southwest a few weeks ago. Layovers are rough because most places in the airports are closed. I was at STL and only found beer at Burger King and Dunkin Doughnuts.” I would’ve been happy for just a coffee. Down in the main Southwest concourse, some gates were closed off with curtains which I assume was to keep people from sitting there so they don’t have to clean it.</li><li>Looking around the terminal, it felt like mask usage was about 80%. Just about everyone was wearing them when walking around. I’d see some people not wearing them while sitting at the gate, though those folks were distancing themselves from everyone else. I’d see kids ripping their masks off as soon as they got off the jetway. I did notice, though, a sizable minority of mask wearers were just covering their mouths, leaving their noses uncovered -- pilots, cleaning crew, passengers, wheelchair people. Now I’m no epidemiologist, but that seems to defeat the purpose.</li><li>When the agent called boarding, she said “There’s 40 of you on a plane with 175 seats. So everyone gets their own row, and please, don’t everyone sit up front. We need a bit of weight distribution.” It was a quick boarding; we pushed back and took off early. These truly are unprecedented times.</li><li>Nashville was more crowded on Thursday morning when I headed back home. Mostly families as I said at the top of the show. The end of the concourse where the&nbsp; Southwest gates are was as crowded as usual. There were signs around saying that 3 seats between people equals 6 ft, but there were too many people waiting to make it practical; at least everyone is masked up. I walked back up the terminal to find a bit more space and there, tucked away behind some construction sheeting, I found an empty gate. I’m all alone, mega social distanced, so I take off my mask, log into the WiFi and do some work until the Southwest app on my phone bings, telling me that boarding has begun.&nbsp;</li><li>There were a lot more than 40 people on this flight. I found an empty row and slid all the way over to the window seat since it’s only a 90-minute flight. About 3 minutes later, a guy sat down in the aisle seat. Nobody in the middle seat. Everyone wearing masks and nobody’s head right next to mine, I was good to go. Maybe helped just a bit by the fact that, in those 3 minutes, I pointed all three air jets toward the empty middle seat and turned them on full blast, creating an air curtain between me and the aisle seat -- just in case.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/3lb3r3th/44072\">Misunderstood</a> by 3lb3r3th (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. &nbsp;Ft: Alchemistry</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>When Does Business Travel Come Back?</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>My son Andrew and his girlfriend took the 6am flight to LGA earlier this week. I asked him “How full was the flight?” “Maybe 20 people; mostly families,” he said. Didn’t surprise me that a Thursday 6am LGA flight was only at 11% capacity. That’s normally a business travel run; people getting up at 0 dark 30 in Chicago to make 10am meetings in Manhattan. But there’s not many business travelers now.&nbsp; While business travelers only make up about 10% of passengers on major airlines, they provide between 55 and 75% of the profits. You might could think they’re subsidizing the budget fares those families are using.</li><li>Over the past month, I’ve been talking with Sales VPs at companies that deliver complex IT services. If anybody would be feeling the bite of not traveling, I thought it would be these guys. I’ve done a number of these deals, and they always involved locking all the right decision makers in a conference room to hash out all the contract details and ride herd over the transition. But I was completely wrong. They all said that work hasn’t slowed down during the lockdown. They’ve been able to do all that conference room work over Zoom. Indeed, they said being virtual has made it easier for them. Pre-lockdown, one of their biggest challenges was calendar wrangling -- being able to get all their execs and the client execs into that conference room at the same time. Now, they just click some buttons and everyone shows up in Zoom gallery mode -- no travel planning, no scrambling after cancelled or delayed flights. They all said they love the ease of virtual meetings and, at the end of the day, closing the lid on their laptops and having dinner with the family every night.</li><li>Kinda supports the narrative that business travel will never rebound; back to the Microsoft CEO’s quote: in 2 months, we’ve advanced 2 years in virtual work culture. But when I probed a bit, I found that Zoom hasn’t completely replaced an airplane ticket. While these guys have been able to virtually close deals they had in their sales funnel, virtual meetings don’t seem to be replacing these deals; getting new prospects into the top of the sales funnel. So while things are looking good now, they’re beginning to worry about 4-6 months from now.</li><li>This was the exact opposite of what I’d expected. I thought the give and take of negotiations, the sidebar conversations, the emotional content, wouldn’t translate into video calls. But it looks like I was wrong; that once a deal has some momentum and a structure to guide everyone, the in-person hammering out turns out to be a nice-to-have. And the reason new opportunities aren’t coming in is that they need more exploratory, abstract, wide-ranging conversations that lack that guiding structure and selling a team as much as a product -- at least for complex services -- and that’s tough to do over a pane of glass.</li><li>And so they all said that they’d probably start traveling again -- reluctantly -- by the end of this month. But I do think this, call it a 4-month exercise in figuring out virtual work methods and cultures will move the set point, everybody’s default decision toward virtual meetings. And so maybe a bit less focused on high-profit road warriors and more dependent on those cost-conscious families. Does this mean repointing the 6am LGA flights to Cancun? They’re going to have to seriously reengineer those drink carts.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #165</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_166.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #166 — How Do We Think About Travel?','','inherit','closed','closed','','2807-revision-v1','','','2020-08-12 20:11:02','2020-08-13 01:11:02','',2807,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/12/2807-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2809,1,'2020-08-12 20:13:24','2020-08-13 01:13:24','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/IMG_2073.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2789 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/IMG_2073-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\n<figcaption>The hop taste isn\'t coming through</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p>My first post-lockdown flight was a 90-minute Southwest non-stop from Chicago to Nashville. It wasn\'t bad, but not as casually easy as my last pre-coronavirus flight in February. We talk about that experience as well as Hertz\'s new cleaning program, my latest pair of Bose noise-cancelling headphones, and then wonder when business travel will return. All this and more at the<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_166.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"> <strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/860072707&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #166: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after managing to front-run the city’s quarantine order on Wisconsin. Went up to Milwaukee to meet up with some friends and do a bit of biking a couple of weekends before the Chicago Health Department added Wisconsin to their list of 22 states where you’re required to self-quarantine for 14 days after returning from a trip. Mind you, they’re not setting up roadblock checkpoints like New York City is -- at least not as of the time of this recording. Reasonable people can differ on this -- New York’s governor claimed similar efforts back in March by Rhode Island and Florida aimed at New Yorkers were “unconstitutional” but seems OK with it when it’s pointed the other way -- but it does make travel planning for law abiding citizens a bit more of a challenge. And making me wonder about our downsizing move into Chicago last year -- was missing the yard, the extra rooms, and the basement gym in the suburbs during the lockdown earlier in the year; now after Chicago’s quarantine rules, am missing freedom of travel.</li><li>All this adds a couple orders of magnitude of complexity to our efforts to plan a week out of the city in a couple of weeks. Not only do we need to check Chicago’s quarantine list, but also the quarantine plans of any potential destinations. While New York isn’t on Chicago’s quarantine list, Illinois is on New York’s. Mapping it all out, we take the “clean destination” intersection of that quarantine Venn diagram and then look at what restrictions are in those places; if nothing’s open, it’s not worth traveling there. I’ve eaten more meals in my hotel rooms over the past 3 months than I have in the last couple of years. </li><li>But things are changing so fast, that even after you figure out what’s open now, we then start following local papers on Twitter to get any early warnings on new restrictions. Which also means paying a lot more attention to hotel cancellation policies than I ever did. And then overloading our itinerary with outdoor activities like hiking and biking so last-minute closures or restrictions don’t leave us with nothing to do. Which means spending more time trolling the AccuWeather and Weather Channel web sites because an outside-heavy itinerary is more vulnerable to big storm fronts and hurricanes. And to think I used to bitch about having to navigate TripAdvisor ratings.</li><li>Bridge Music —</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>First, a couple of shout-outs to folks who are helping me spread the word about the podcast</li><li>Thanks to GHLGB, an apparently long-time TravelCommons listener, who gave us a 5-star iTunes review the day after the last month’s episode dropped, writing:<ul><li>“Mark does a great job of relating the world of the road warrior with a bit of branching out to those of us who are miles and points nutty. Always a calm and reasonable voice one that’s been in my ears for four years”</li><li>Thanks for that. I appreciate the words, and the effort of wading through the iTunes interface to leave them</li></ul></li><li>Also, in last month’s episode, I mentioned Kev Monteith, a TravelCommons listener and Amtrak travel blogger, but didn’t thank him for calling us out in his <a href=\"https://travelswithkev.com/kevs-favorite-podcasts/\"><em>2020 Favorite Podcast</em> list</a> on his <a href=\"https://travelswithkev.com/\"><em>Travels With Kev</em> website</a>. So, I’m fixing that right now. Thanks, Kev! Check out the show notes for links to his site.</li><li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/06/09/podcast-164-first-post-lockdown-trips-travel-credit-cards/\">episode #164</a>, we talked about how hotels are pulling back on housekeeping during stays -- the Hampton Inn in Spring Hill, TN said they’d be 3 days between room visits while the Residence Inn up the road in Franklin said 7 days, which seems a bit excessive; more like a COVID-washing a cost-cutting move. Replacing the breakfast buffet with a “grab-&amp;-go” breakfast bag makes all the sense in the world, but here again, hotels are grabbing the opportunity to trim costs. Most of what I’ve seen is a brown lunch bag with a bottle of water, a NutriGrain breakfast bar, and an apple -- a banana if I’m lucky. But the Residence Inn in Wauwatosa, WI, just outside of Milwaukee, was having none of that a couple of weeks back. You had 4 options for the main breakfast course in your bag -- a turkey and waffle sandwich, a peanut and strawberry sandwich, an egg and cheese quiche, or one of 13 kinds of cereal boxes, accompanied by your choice of chocolate milk, or orange or apple juice. I’m not passing judgement on the food choices, but I was awfully impressed by their ambition -- yeah, we can’t lay out a breakfast buffet spread, but we’re gonna try our damndest to give you a decent alternative. I just had to give the turkey &amp; waffle sandwich a go. I had visions of a <a href=\"https://twitter.com/trev4president/status/857776562615308288\">Fyre Festival-like trainwreck of a sandwich</a> -- a deli slice of turkey breast between two Eggo waffles. But it was a little more reasonable -- a small wrapped sandwich of turkey sausage between two small waffles, meant to be heated in the microwave. I grabbed it on the way out for a bike ride, so missed the microwave step, which, I think, was critical. But like I said, I give that RI team huge props for the effort.</li><li>But outside the Wauwatosa gang, if this stripped down hotel service stays the norm for the next 12-18 months, it’s probably going to drive some big changes in the year-end traveler gift guides -- shifting from Away luggage and Aesop travel kits, last year’s big recommendations, to sets of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3izWHMJ\">wine tumblers</a>, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2PIgihg\">collapsible bowls</a>, and <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3an6BhJ\">camping mess kits</a>. And, of course, all sorts of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/30NAqF2\">upscale sporks</a>.</li><li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/03/21/podcast-161-new-crisis-old-question-driving-down-to-key-west/\">episode #161</a>, at the end of March, still in a bit of shock from the COVID lockdown and trying to figure out how long it was going to last, I said “I’m nothing if not an optimist. In the midst of this week’s unraveling, I found a deal on a direct American Air flight from ORD to Barcelona — 8½ hr 787 flight — so I booked it — 2 weeks in Barcelona at the end of September.”  But here we are five months later and as we all know, things haven’t “re-raveled”. At the beginning of July, American announced that <a href=\"https://liveandletsfly.com/american-airlines-international-reset/\">direct 787 ORD-BCN flight won’t restart until next summer.</a> I checked our reservation on the AA iPhone app after I read this. It still showed us on that direct flight -- until I clicked through, which then, I guess, forced the app to pull the latest information from Dallas, and now showed us flight BA through Heathrow. Not that it really matters. The EU isn’t letting Americans in any time in the near future, and, last time I checked, Barcelona is in a voluntary lockdown because of a new spike in COVID cases. News articles are showing <a href=\"https://time.com/5876132/europe-coronavirus-second-wave/\">shuttered-up stalls at the La Boqueria market</a>; like I said earlier, if nothing’s open, why go? It was a gamble, and really, not even a big one. There’s no change fee, so it’s a push. We won’t lose any money -- unless American goes belly-up, but that’d never happen -- would it?!</li><li>Last year, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/podcast-150-travel-interruptus/\">episode #150</a>, (these show notes are gonna be chock full of backlinks), I talked about switching my carryon bag -- from a Timbuk2 backpack to a <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3izS991\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Timbuk2 messenger bag</a>. I gave two reasons for the switch: I wanted to carry something a little smaller that would stand up under a plane seat; and I wanted a non-black interior, I kept losing things in my backpack -- <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3iDWIiu\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">my tablet</a>, my Bose headphone case. But also because the backpack was breaking down a bit - the seam on one of the side pockets had blown out and one of the strap clips had broken. I was going to pitch it during our last downsizing binge before moving into the city and a friend said “You know, <a href=\"https://www.timbuk2.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Timbuk2</a> bags have <a href=\"https://www.timbuk2.com/pages/warranty-repairs\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">lifetime warranties</a>.” Huh. So I hung onto it because I still like the bag. And about 14 months later, I finally got around to sending it back to them in San Francisco. I wasn’t sure if they’d re-opened their factory, so I was ready for it to take awhile for them to process the bag and repair it. Tracking the package, I could see they received it on a Friday. I got a note from them the following Monday saying they’d inspected it and yes, it was covered by the warranty, and had the bag back in my hands that Saturday. I have to tell you that I am pretty damned impressed. I won’t be switching back from my messenger bag, but I have found that the backpack can carry 4 four-packs of 16-oz cans, perfect when I’m biking a circuit of Chicago microbreweries using curbside no-contact pick-up to grab whatever’s their newest thing. Timbuk2 is definitely “TravelCommons Approved.”</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music —</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>The Meaning of Travel</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>This seems to be <em>the</em> existential question for a lot of travelers -- why do we travel? -- now that can’t, or at least can’t as easily and, well thoughtlessly is too strong a word, but when we could travel without having to plan as much. It’s been a whipsaw -- from overtourism to <a href=\"https://skift.com/2020/06/05/travel-sector-remains-thorn-in-a-falling-u-s-unemployment-rate-defying-expectations/\">36% unemployment in the travel and hospitality sector in the the US</a> -- so a bit soul-searching/navel-gazing is to be expected, if not encouraged. So when I saw the new book, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2DO07fV\"><em>The Meaning of Travel: Philosophers Abroad</em></a> by <a href=\"https://www.dur.ac.uk/research/directory/staff/?id=15319\">Emily</a> <a href=\"https://emilythomaswrites.co.uk/\">Thomas</a>, I immediately bought it and read it -- and then thought that I needed to have her on the podcast. Lucky for me, she’s a very nice person and agreed to spend a bit of time talking about “the meaning of travel”. It was a fun conversation; I hope you enjoy it.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #166</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_166.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #166 — How Do We Think About Travel?','','inherit','closed','closed','','2807-revision-v1','','','2020-08-12 20:13:24','2020-08-13 01:13:24','',2807,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/12/2807-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2810,1,'2020-08-12 20:37:29','2020-08-13 01:37:29','','IMG_0822','','inherit','open','closed','','img_0822','','','2020-08-12 20:37:29','2020-08-13 01:37:29','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/IMG_0822.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(2811,1,'2020-08-12 20:38:38','2020-08-13 01:38:38','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/IMG_0822-scaled.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2810 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/IMG_0822-300x278.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"278\" /></a>\n<figcaption>Reindeer are ruining my cabin porn</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p>My first post-lockdown flight was a 90-minute Southwest non-stop from Chicago to Nashville. It wasn\'t bad, but not as casually easy as my last pre-coronavirus flight in February. We talk about that experience as well as Hertz\'s new cleaning program, my latest pair of Bose noise-cancelling headphones, and then wonder when business travel will return. All this and more at the<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_166.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"> <strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/860072707&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #166: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after managing to front-run the city’s quarantine order on Wisconsin. Went up to Milwaukee to meet up with some friends and do a bit of biking a couple of weekends before the Chicago Health Department added Wisconsin to their list of 22 states where you’re required to self-quarantine for 14 days after returning from a trip. Mind you, they’re not setting up roadblock checkpoints like New York City is -- at least not as of the time of this recording. Reasonable people can differ on this -- New York’s governor claimed similar efforts back in March by Rhode Island and Florida aimed at New Yorkers were “unconstitutional” but seems OK with it when it’s pointed the other way -- but it does make travel planning for law abiding citizens a bit more of a challenge. And making me wonder about our downsizing move into Chicago last year -- was missing the yard, the extra rooms, and the basement gym in the suburbs during the lockdown earlier in the year; now after Chicago’s quarantine rules, am missing freedom of travel.</li><li>All this adds a couple orders of magnitude of complexity to our efforts to plan a week out of the city in a couple of weeks. Not only do we need to check Chicago’s quarantine list, but also the quarantine plans of any potential destinations. While New York isn’t on Chicago’s quarantine list, Illinois is on New York’s. Mapping it all out, we take the “clean destination” intersection of that quarantine Venn diagram and then look at what restrictions are in those places; if nothing’s open, it’s not worth traveling there. I’ve eaten more meals in my hotel rooms over the past 3 months than I have in the last couple of years. </li><li>But things are changing so fast, that even after you figure out what’s open now, we then start following local papers on Twitter to get any early warnings on new restrictions. Which also means paying a lot more attention to hotel cancellation policies than I ever did. And then overloading our itinerary with outdoor activities like hiking and biking so last-minute closures or restrictions don’t leave us with nothing to do. Which means spending more time trolling the AccuWeather and Weather Channel web sites because an outside-heavy itinerary is more vulnerable to big storm fronts and hurricanes. And to think I used to bitch about having to navigate TripAdvisor ratings.</li><li>Bridge Music —</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>First, a couple of shout-outs to folks who are helping me spread the word about the podcast</li><li>Thanks to GHLGB, an apparently long-time TravelCommons listener, who gave us a 5-star iTunes review the day after the last month’s episode dropped, writing:<ul><li>“Mark does a great job of relating the world of the road warrior with a bit of branching out to those of us who are miles and points nutty. Always a calm and reasonable voice one that’s been in my ears for four years”</li><li>Thanks for that. I appreciate the words, and the effort of wading through the iTunes interface to leave them</li></ul></li><li>Also, in last month’s episode, I mentioned Kev Monteith, a TravelCommons listener and Amtrak travel blogger, but didn’t thank him for calling us out in his <a href=\"https://travelswithkev.com/kevs-favorite-podcasts/\"><em>2020 Favorite Podcast</em> list</a> on his <a href=\"https://travelswithkev.com/\"><em>Travels With Kev</em> website</a>. So, I’m fixing that right now. Thanks, Kev! Check out the show notes for links to his site.</li><li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/06/09/podcast-164-first-post-lockdown-trips-travel-credit-cards/\">episode #164</a>, we talked about how hotels are pulling back on housekeeping during stays -- the Hampton Inn in Spring Hill, TN said they’d be 3 days between room visits while the Residence Inn up the road in Franklin said 7 days, which seems a bit excessive; more like a COVID-washing a cost-cutting move. Replacing the breakfast buffet with a “grab-&amp;-go” breakfast bag makes all the sense in the world, but here again, hotels are grabbing the opportunity to trim costs. Most of what I’ve seen is a brown lunch bag with a bottle of water, a NutriGrain breakfast bar, and an apple -- a banana if I’m lucky. But the Residence Inn in Wauwatosa, WI, just outside of Milwaukee, was having none of that a couple of weeks back. You had 4 options for the main breakfast course in your bag -- a turkey and waffle sandwich, a peanut and strawberry sandwich, an egg and cheese quiche, or one of 13 kinds of cereal boxes, accompanied by your choice of chocolate milk, or orange or apple juice. I’m not passing judgement on the food choices, but I was awfully impressed by their ambition -- yeah, we can’t lay out a breakfast buffet spread, but we’re gonna try our damndest to give you a decent alternative. I just had to give the turkey &amp; waffle sandwich a go. I had visions of a <a href=\"https://twitter.com/trev4president/status/857776562615308288\">Fyre Festival-like trainwreck of a sandwich</a> -- a deli slice of turkey breast between two Eggo waffles. But it was a little more reasonable -- a small wrapped sandwich of turkey sausage between two small waffles, meant to be heated in the microwave. I grabbed it on the way out for a bike ride, so missed the microwave step, which, I think, was critical. But like I said, I give that RI team huge props for the effort.</li><li>But outside the Wauwatosa gang, if this stripped down hotel service stays the norm for the next 12-18 months, it’s probably going to drive some big changes in the year-end traveler gift guides -- shifting from Away luggage and Aesop travel kits, last year’s big recommendations, to sets of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3izWHMJ\">wine tumblers</a>, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2PIgihg\">collapsible bowls</a>, and <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3an6BhJ\">camping mess kits</a>. And, of course, all sorts of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/30NAqF2\">upscale sporks</a>.</li><li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/03/21/podcast-161-new-crisis-old-question-driving-down-to-key-west/\">episode #161</a>, at the end of March, still in a bit of shock from the COVID lockdown and trying to figure out how long it was going to last, I said “I’m nothing if not an optimist. In the midst of this week’s unraveling, I found a deal on a direct American Air flight from ORD to Barcelona — 8½ hr 787 flight — so I booked it — 2 weeks in Barcelona at the end of September.”  But here we are five months later and as we all know, things haven’t “re-raveled”. At the beginning of July, American announced that <a href=\"https://liveandletsfly.com/american-airlines-international-reset/\">direct 787 ORD-BCN flight won’t restart until next summer.</a> I checked our reservation on the AA iPhone app after I read this. It still showed us on that direct flight -- until I clicked through, which then, I guess, forced the app to pull the latest information from Dallas, and now showed us flight BA through Heathrow. Not that it really matters. The EU isn’t letting Americans in any time in the near future, and, last time I checked, Barcelona is in a voluntary lockdown because of a new spike in COVID cases. News articles are showing <a href=\"https://time.com/5876132/europe-coronavirus-second-wave/\">shuttered-up stalls at the La Boqueria market</a>; like I said earlier, if nothing’s open, why go? It was a gamble, and really, not even a big one. There’s no change fee, so it’s a push. We won’t lose any money -- unless American goes belly-up, but that’d never happen -- would it?!</li><li>Last year, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/podcast-150-travel-interruptus/\">episode #150</a>, (these show notes are gonna be chock full of backlinks), I talked about switching my carryon bag -- from a Timbuk2 backpack to a <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3izS991\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Timbuk2 messenger bag</a>. I gave two reasons for the switch: I wanted to carry something a little smaller that would stand up under a plane seat; and I wanted a non-black interior, I kept losing things in my backpack -- <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3iDWIiu\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">my tablet</a>, my Bose headphone case. But also because the backpack was breaking down a bit - the seam on one of the side pockets had blown out and one of the strap clips had broken. I was going to pitch it during our last downsizing binge before moving into the city and a friend said “You know, <a href=\"https://www.timbuk2.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Timbuk2</a> bags have <a href=\"https://www.timbuk2.com/pages/warranty-repairs\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">lifetime warranties</a>.” Huh. So I hung onto it because I still like the bag. And about 14 months later, I finally got around to sending it back to them in San Francisco. I wasn’t sure if they’d re-opened their factory, so I was ready for it to take awhile for them to process the bag and repair it. Tracking the package, I could see they received it on a Friday. I got a note from them the following Monday saying they’d inspected it and yes, it was covered by the warranty, and had the bag back in my hands that Saturday. I have to tell you that I am pretty damned impressed. I won’t be switching back from my messenger bag, but I have found that the backpack can carry 4 four-packs of 16-oz cans, perfect when I’m biking a circuit of Chicago microbreweries using curbside no-contact pick-up to grab whatever’s their newest thing. Timbuk2 is definitely “TravelCommons Approved.”</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music —</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>The Meaning of Travel</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>This seems to be <em>the</em> existential question for a lot of travelers -- why do we travel? -- now that can’t, or at least can’t as easily and, well thoughtlessly is too strong a word, but when we could travel without having to plan as much. It’s been a whipsaw -- from overtourism to <a href=\"https://skift.com/2020/06/05/travel-sector-remains-thorn-in-a-falling-u-s-unemployment-rate-defying-expectations/\">36% unemployment in the travel and hospitality sector in the the US</a> -- so a bit soul-searching/navel-gazing is to be expected, if not encouraged. So when I saw the new book, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2DO07fV\"><em>The Meaning of Travel: Philosophers Abroad</em></a> by <a href=\"https://www.dur.ac.uk/research/directory/staff/?id=15319\">Emily</a> <a href=\"https://emilythomaswrites.co.uk/\">Thomas</a>, I immediately bought it and read it -- and then thought that I needed to have her on the podcast. Lucky for me, she’s a very nice person and agreed to spend a bit of time talking about “the meaning of travel”. It was a fun conversation; I hope you enjoy it.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #166</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_166.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #166 — How Do We Think About Travel?','','inherit','closed','closed','','2807-revision-v1','','','2020-08-12 20:38:38','2020-08-13 01:38:38','',2807,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/12/2807-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2812,1,'2020-08-12 20:40:07','2020-08-13 01:40:07','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/IMG_0822-scaled.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2810 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/IMG_0822-300x278.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"278\"></a><figcaption>Reindeer are ruining my cabin porn</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>My first post-lockdown flight was a 90-minute Southwest non-stop from Chicago to Nashville. It wasn\'t bad, but not as casually easy as my last pre-coronavirus flight in February. We talk about that experience as well as Hertz\'s new cleaning program, my latest pair of Bose noise-cancelling headphones, and then wonder when business travel will return. All this and more at the<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_166.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"> <strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/860072707&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #166: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after managing to front-run the city’s quarantine order on Wisconsin. Went up to Milwaukee to meet up with some friends and do a bit of biking a couple of weekends before the Chicago Health Department added Wisconsin to their list of 22 states where you’re required to self-quarantine for 14 days after returning from a trip. Mind you, they’re not setting up roadblock checkpoints like New York City is -- at least not as of the time of this recording. Reasonable people can differ on this -- New York’s governor claimed similar efforts back in March by Rhode Island and Florida aimed at New Yorkers were “unconstitutional” but seems OK with it when it’s pointed the other way -- but it does make travel planning for law abiding citizens a bit more of a challenge. And making me wonder about our downsizing move into Chicago last year -- was missing the yard, the extra rooms, and the basement gym in the suburbs during the lockdown earlier in the year; now after Chicago’s quarantine rules, am missing freedom of travel.</li><li>All this adds a couple orders of magnitude of complexity to our efforts to plan a week out of the city in a couple of weeks. Not only do we need to check Chicago’s quarantine list, but also the quarantine plans of any potential destinations. While New York isn’t on Chicago’s quarantine list, Illinois is on New York’s. Mapping it all out, we take the “clean destination” intersection of that quarantine Venn diagram and then look at what restrictions are in those places; if nothing’s open, it’s not worth traveling there. I’ve eaten more meals in my hotel rooms over the past 3 months than I have in the last couple of years.&nbsp;</li><li>But things are changing so fast, that even after you figure out what’s open now, we then start following local papers on Twitter to get any early warnings on new restrictions. Which also means paying a lot more attention to hotel cancellation policies than I ever did. And then overloading our itinerary with outdoor activities like hiking and biking so last-minute closures or restrictions don’t leave us with nothing to do. Which means spending more time trolling the AccuWeather and Weather Channel web sites because an outside-heavy itinerary is more vulnerable to big storm fronts and hurricanes. And to think I used to bitch about having to navigate TripAdvisor ratings.</li><li>Bridge Music —</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>First, a couple of shout-outs to folks who are helping me spread the word about the podcast</li><li>Thanks to GHLGB, an apparently long-time TravelCommons listener, who gave us a 5-star iTunes review the day after the last month’s episode dropped, writing:<ul><li>“Mark does a great job of relating the world of the road warrior with a bit of branching out to those of us who are miles and points nutty. Always a calm and reasonable voice one that’s been in my ears for four years”</li><li>Thanks for that. I appreciate the words, and the effort of wading through the iTunes interface to leave them</li></ul></li><li>Also, in last month’s episode, I mentioned Kev Monteith, a TravelCommons listener and Amtrak travel blogger, but didn’t thank him for calling us out in his <a href=\"https://travelswithkev.com/kevs-favorite-podcasts/\"><em>2020 Favorite Podcast</em> list</a> on his <a href=\"https://travelswithkev.com/\"><em>Travels With Kev</em> website</a>. So, I’m fixing that right now. Thanks, Kev! Check out the show notes for links to his site.</li><li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/06/09/podcast-164-first-post-lockdown-trips-travel-credit-cards/\">episode #164</a>, we talked about how hotels are pulling back on housekeeping during stays -- the Hampton Inn in Spring Hill, TN said they’d be 3 days between room visits while the Residence Inn up the road in Franklin said 7 days, which seems a bit excessive; more like a COVID-washing a cost-cutting move. Replacing the breakfast buffet with a “grab-&amp;-go” breakfast bag makes all the sense in the world, but here again, hotels are grabbing the opportunity to trim costs. Most of what I’ve seen is a brown lunch bag with a bottle of water, a NutriGrain breakfast bar, and an apple -- a banana if I’m lucky. But the Residence Inn in Wauwatosa, WI, just outside of Milwaukee, was having none of that a couple of weeks back. You had 4 options for the main breakfast course in your bag -- a turkey and waffle sandwich, a peanut and strawberry sandwich, an egg and cheese quiche, or one of 13 kinds of cereal boxes, accompanied by your choice of chocolate milk, or orange or apple juice. I’m not passing judgement on the food choices, but I was awfully impressed by their ambition -- yeah, we can’t lay out a breakfast buffet spread, but we’re gonna try our damndest to give you a decent alternative. I just had to give the turkey &amp; waffle sandwich a go. I had visions of a <a href=\"https://twitter.com/trev4president/status/857776562615308288\">Fyre Festival-like trainwreck of a sandwich</a> -- a deli slice of turkey breast between two Eggo waffles. But it was a little more reasonable -- a small wrapped sandwich of turkey sausage between two small waffles, meant to be heated in the microwave. I grabbed it on the way out for a bike ride, so missed the microwave step, which, I think, was critical. But like I said, I give that RI team huge props for the effort.</li><li>But outside the Wauwatosa gang, if this stripped down hotel service stays the norm for the next 12-18 months, it’s probably going to drive some big changes in the year-end traveler gift guides -- shifting from Away luggage and Aesop travel kits, last year’s big recommendations, to sets of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3izWHMJ\">wine tumblers</a>, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2PIgihg\">collapsible bowls</a>, and <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3an6BhJ\">camping mess kits</a>. And, of course, all sorts of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/30NAqF2\">upscale sporks</a>.</li><li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/03/21/podcast-161-new-crisis-old-question-driving-down-to-key-west/\">episode #161</a>, at the end of March, still in a bit of shock from the COVID lockdown and trying to figure out how long it was going to last, I said “I’m nothing if not an optimist. In the midst of this week’s unraveling, I found a deal on a direct American Air flight from ORD to Barcelona — 8½ hr 787 flight — so I booked it — 2 weeks in Barcelona at the end of September.”&nbsp; But here we are five months later and as we all know, things haven’t “re-raveled”. At the beginning of July, American announced that <a href=\"https://liveandletsfly.com/american-airlines-international-reset/\">direct 787 ORD-BCN flight won’t restart until next summer.</a> I checked our reservation on the AA iPhone app after I read this. It still showed us on that direct flight -- until I clicked through, which then, I guess, forced the app to pull the latest information from Dallas, and now showed us flight BA through Heathrow. Not that it really matters. The EU isn’t letting Americans in any time in the near future, and, last time I checked, Barcelona is in a voluntary lockdown because of a new spike in COVID cases. News articles are showing <a href=\"https://time.com/5876132/europe-coronavirus-second-wave/\">shuttered-up stalls at the La Boqueria market</a>; like I said earlier, if nothing’s open, why go? It was a gamble, and really, not even a big one. There’s no change fee, so it’s a push. We won’t lose any money -- unless American goes belly-up, but that’d never happen -- would it?!</li><li>Last year, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/podcast-150-travel-interruptus/\">episode #150</a>, (these show notes are gonna be chock full of backlinks), I talked about switching my carryon bag -- from a Timbuk2 backpack to a <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3izS991\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Timbuk2 messenger bag</a>. I gave two reasons for the switch: I wanted to carry something a little smaller that would stand up under a plane seat; and I wanted a non-black interior, I kept losing things in my backpack -- <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3iDWIiu\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">my tablet</a>, my Bose headphone case. But also because the backpack was breaking down a bit - the seam on one of the side pockets had blown out and one of the strap clips had broken. I was going to pitch it during our last downsizing binge before moving into the city and a friend said “You know, <a href=\"https://www.timbuk2.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Timbuk2</a> bags have <a href=\"https://www.timbuk2.com/pages/warranty-repairs\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">lifetime warranties</a>.” Huh. So I hung onto it because I still like the bag. And about 14 months later, I finally got around to sending it back to them in San Francisco. I wasn’t sure if they’d re-opened their factory, so I was ready for it to take awhile for them to process the bag and repair it. Tracking the package, I could see they received it on a Friday. I got a note from them the following Monday saying they’d inspected it and yes, it was covered by the warranty, and had the bag back in my hands that Saturday. I have to tell you that I am pretty damned impressed. I won’t be switching back from my messenger bag, but I have found that the backpack can carry 4 four-packs of 16-oz cans, perfect when I’m biking a circuit of Chicago microbreweries using curbside no-contact pick-up to grab whatever’s their newest thing. Timbuk2 is definitely “TravelCommons Approved.”</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music —</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>The Meaning of Travel</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>This seems to be <em>the</em> existential question for a lot of travelers -- why do we travel? -- now that can’t, or at least can’t as easily and, well thoughtlessly is too strong a word, but when we could travel without having to plan as much. It’s been a whipsaw -- from overtourism to <a href=\"https://skift.com/2020/06/05/travel-sector-remains-thorn-in-a-falling-u-s-unemployment-rate-defying-expectations/\">36% unemployment in the travel and hospitality sector in the the US</a> -- so a bit soul-searching/navel-gazing is to be expected, if not encouraged. So when I saw the new book, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2DO07fV\"><em>The Meaning of Travel: Philosophers Abroad</em></a> by <a href=\"https://www.dur.ac.uk/research/directory/staff/?id=15319\">Emily</a> <a href=\"https://emilythomaswrites.co.uk/\">Thomas</a>, I immediately bought it and read it -- and then thought that I needed to have her on the podcast. Lucky for me, she’s a very nice person and agreed to spend a bit of time talking about “the meaning of travel”. It was a fun conversation; I hope you enjoy it.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #166</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_166.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #166 — How Do We Think About Travel?','','inherit','closed','closed','','2807-revision-v1','','','2020-08-12 20:40:07','2020-08-13 01:40:07','',2807,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/12/2807-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2813,1,'2020-08-12 20:59:16','2020-08-13 01:59:16','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/IMG_0822-scaled.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2810 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/IMG_0822-300x278.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"278\" /></a>\n<figcaption>Reindeer are ruining my cabin porn</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p>Trying to plan an August trip amidst dueling state quarantine lists and rapid lockdown changes while writing off my September plans for Barcelona. What\'s worse - hotels cutting back on housekeeping or breakfasts? And talking with Emily Thomas about her new book <i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"https://amzn.to/2DO07fV\">The Meaning of Travel: Philosophers Abroad</a>. </span></i>All this and more, or listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below or by following this<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_166.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"> <strong>direct link</strong></a> to download the podcast file .</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/860072707&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #166: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after managing to front-run the city’s quarantine order on Wisconsin. Went up to Milwaukee to meet up with some friends and do a bit of biking a couple of weekends before the Chicago Health Department added Wisconsin to their list of 22 states where you’re required to self-quarantine for 14 days after returning from a trip. Mind you, they’re not setting up roadblock checkpoints like New York City is -- at least not as of the time of this recording. Reasonable people can differ on this -- New York’s governor claimed similar efforts back in March by Rhode Island and Florida aimed at New Yorkers were “unconstitutional” but seems OK with it when it’s pointed the other way -- but it does make travel planning for law abiding citizens a bit more of a challenge. And making me wonder about our downsizing move into Chicago last year -- was missing the yard, the extra rooms, and the basement gym in the suburbs during the lockdown earlier in the year; now after Chicago’s quarantine rules, am missing freedom of travel.</li><li>All this adds a couple orders of magnitude of complexity to our efforts to plan a week out of the city in a couple of weeks. Not only do we need to check Chicago’s quarantine list, but also the quarantine plans of any potential destinations. While New York isn’t on Chicago’s quarantine list, Illinois is on New York’s. Mapping it all out, we take the “clean destination” intersection of that quarantine Venn diagram and then look at what restrictions are in those places; if nothing’s open, it’s not worth traveling there. I’ve eaten more meals in my hotel rooms over the past 3 months than I have in the last couple of years.&nbsp;</li><li>But things are changing so fast, that even after you figure out what’s open now, we then start following local papers on Twitter to get any early warnings on new restrictions. Which also means paying a lot more attention to hotel cancellation policies than I ever did. And then overloading our itinerary with outdoor activities like hiking and biking so last-minute closures or restrictions don’t leave us with nothing to do. Which means spending more time trolling the AccuWeather and Weather Channel web sites because an outside-heavy itinerary is more vulnerable to big storm fronts and hurricanes. And to think I used to bitch about having to navigate TripAdvisor ratings.</li><li>Bridge Music —</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>First, a couple of shout-outs to folks who are helping me spread the word about the podcast</li><li>Thanks to GHLGB, an apparently long-time TravelCommons listener, who gave us a 5-star iTunes review the day after the last month’s episode dropped, writing:<ul><li>“Mark does a great job of relating the world of the road warrior with a bit of branching out to those of us who are miles and points nutty. Always a calm and reasonable voice one that’s been in my ears for four years”</li><li>Thanks for that. I appreciate the words, and the effort of wading through the iTunes interface to leave them</li></ul></li><li>Also, in last month’s episode, I mentioned Kev Monteith, a TravelCommons listener and Amtrak travel blogger, but didn’t thank him for calling us out in his <a href=\"https://travelswithkev.com/kevs-favorite-podcasts/\"><em>2020 Favorite Podcast</em> list</a> on his <a href=\"https://travelswithkev.com/\"><em>Travels With Kev</em> website</a>. So, I’m fixing that right now. Thanks, Kev! Check out the show notes for links to his site.</li><li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/06/09/podcast-164-first-post-lockdown-trips-travel-credit-cards/\">episode #164</a>, we talked about how hotels are pulling back on housekeeping during stays -- the Hampton Inn in Spring Hill, TN said they’d be 3 days between room visits while the Residence Inn up the road in Franklin said 7 days, which seems a bit excessive; more like a COVID-washing a cost-cutting move. Replacing the breakfast buffet with a “grab-&amp;-go” breakfast bag makes all the sense in the world, but here again, hotels are grabbing the opportunity to trim costs. Most of what I’ve seen is a brown lunch bag with a bottle of water, a NutriGrain breakfast bar, and an apple -- a banana if I’m lucky. But the Residence Inn in Wauwatosa, WI, just outside of Milwaukee, was having none of that a couple of weeks back. You had 4 options for the main breakfast course in your bag -- a turkey and waffle sandwich, a peanut and strawberry sandwich, an egg and cheese quiche, or one of 13 kinds of cereal boxes, accompanied by your choice of chocolate milk, or orange or apple juice. I’m not passing judgement on the food choices, but I was awfully impressed by their ambition -- yeah, we can’t lay out a breakfast buffet spread, but we’re gonna try our damndest to give you a decent alternative. I just had to give the turkey &amp; waffle sandwich a go. I had visions of a <a href=\"https://twitter.com/trev4president/status/857776562615308288\">Fyre Festival-like trainwreck of a sandwich</a> -- a deli slice of turkey breast between two Eggo waffles. But it was a little more reasonable -- a small wrapped sandwich of turkey sausage between two small waffles, meant to be heated in the microwave. I grabbed it on the way out for a bike ride, so missed the microwave step, which, I think, was critical. But like I said, I give that RI team huge props for the effort.</li><li>But outside the Wauwatosa gang, if this stripped down hotel service stays the norm for the next 12-18 months, it’s probably going to drive some big changes in the year-end traveler gift guides -- shifting from Away luggage and Aesop travel kits, last year’s big recommendations, to sets of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3izWHMJ\">wine tumblers</a>, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2PIgihg\">collapsible bowls</a>, and <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3an6BhJ\">camping mess kits</a>. And, of course, all sorts of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/30NAqF2\">upscale sporks</a>.</li><li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/03/21/podcast-161-new-crisis-old-question-driving-down-to-key-west/\">episode #161</a>, at the end of March, still in a bit of shock from the COVID lockdown and trying to figure out how long it was going to last, I said “I’m nothing if not an optimist. In the midst of this week’s unraveling, I found a deal on a direct American Air flight from ORD to Barcelona — 8½ hr 787 flight — so I booked it — 2 weeks in Barcelona at the end of September.”&nbsp; But here we are five months later and as we all know, things haven’t “re-raveled”. At the beginning of July, American announced that <a href=\"https://liveandletsfly.com/american-airlines-international-reset/\">direct 787 ORD-BCN flight won’t restart until next summer.</a> I checked our reservation on the AA iPhone app after I read this. It still showed us on that direct flight -- until I clicked through, which then, I guess, forced the app to pull the latest information from Dallas, and now showed us flight BA through Heathrow. Not that it really matters. The EU isn’t letting Americans in any time in the near future, and, last time I checked, Barcelona is in a voluntary lockdown because of a new spike in COVID cases. News articles are showing <a href=\"https://time.com/5876132/europe-coronavirus-second-wave/\">shuttered-up stalls at the La Boqueria market</a>; like I said earlier, if nothing’s open, why go? It was a gamble, and really, not even a big one. There’s no change fee, so it’s a push. We won’t lose any money -- unless American goes belly-up, but that’d never happen -- would it?!</li><li>Last year, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/podcast-150-travel-interruptus/\">episode #150</a>, (these show notes are gonna be chock full of backlinks), I talked about switching my carryon bag -- from a Timbuk2 backpack to a <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3izS991\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Timbuk2 messenger bag</a>. I gave two reasons for the switch: I wanted to carry something a little smaller that would stand up under a plane seat; and I wanted a non-black interior, I kept losing things in my backpack -- <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3iDWIiu\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">my tablet</a>, my Bose headphone case. But also because the backpack was breaking down a bit - the seam on one of the side pockets had blown out and one of the strap clips had broken. I was going to pitch it during our last downsizing binge before moving into the city and a friend said “You know, <a href=\"https://www.timbuk2.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Timbuk2</a> bags have <a href=\"https://www.timbuk2.com/pages/warranty-repairs\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">lifetime warranties</a>.” Huh. So I hung onto it because I still like the bag. And about 14 months later, I finally got around to sending it back to them in San Francisco. I wasn’t sure if they’d re-opened their factory, so I was ready for it to take awhile for them to process the bag and repair it. Tracking the package, I could see they received it on a Friday. I got a note from them the following Monday saying they’d inspected it and yes, it was covered by the warranty, and had the bag back in my hands that Saturday. I have to tell you that I am pretty damned impressed. I won’t be switching back from my messenger bag, but I have found that the backpack can carry 4 four-packs of 16-oz cans, perfect when I’m biking a circuit of Chicago microbreweries using curbside no-contact pick-up to grab whatever’s their newest thing. Timbuk2 is definitely “TravelCommons Approved.”</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music —</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>The Meaning of Travel</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>This seems to be <em>the</em> existential question for a lot of travelers -- why do we travel? -- now that can’t, or at least can’t as easily and, well thoughtlessly is too strong a word, but when we could travel without having to plan as much. It’s been a whipsaw -- from overtourism to <a href=\"https://skift.com/2020/06/05/travel-sector-remains-thorn-in-a-falling-u-s-unemployment-rate-defying-expectations/\">36% unemployment in the travel and hospitality sector in the the US</a> -- so a bit soul-searching/navel-gazing is to be expected, if not encouraged. So when I saw the new book, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2DO07fV\"><em>The Meaning of Travel: Philosophers Abroad</em></a> by <a href=\"https://www.dur.ac.uk/research/directory/staff/?id=15319\">Emily</a> <a href=\"https://emilythomaswrites.co.uk/\">Thomas</a>, I immediately bought it and read it -- and then thought that I needed to have her on the podcast. Lucky for me, she’s a very nice person and agreed to spend a bit of time talking about “the meaning of travel”. It was a fun conversation; I hope you enjoy it.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #166</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_166.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #166 — How Do We Think About Travel?','','inherit','closed','closed','','2807-revision-v1','','','2020-08-12 20:59:16','2020-08-13 01:59:16','',2807,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/12/2807-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2814,1,'2020-08-12 21:15:39','2020-08-13 02:15:39','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/IMG_0822-scaled.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2810 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/IMG_0822-300x278.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"278\" /></a>\n<figcaption>Reindeer are ruining my cabin porn</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p>Trying to plan an August trip amidst dueling state quarantine lists and rapid lockdown changes while writing off my September plans for Barcelona. What\'s worse - hotels cutting back on housekeeping or breakfasts? And talking with Emily Thomas about her new book <i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"https://amzn.to/2DO07fV\">The Meaning of Travel: Philosophers Abroad</a>. </span></i>All this and more, or listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below or by following this<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_166.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"> <strong>direct link</strong></a> to download the podcast file .</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/860072707&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #166: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after managing to front-run the city’s quarantine order on Wisconsin. Went up to Milwaukee to meet up with some friends and do a bit of biking a couple of weekends before the Chicago Health Department added Wisconsin to their list of 22 states where you’re required to self-quarantine for 14 days after returning from a trip. Mind you, they’re not setting up roadblock checkpoints like New York City is -- at least not as of the time of this recording. Reasonable people can differ on this -- New York’s governor claimed similar efforts back in March by Rhode Island and Florida aimed at New Yorkers were “unconstitutional” but seems OK with it when it’s pointed the other way -- but it does make travel planning for law abiding citizens a bit more of a challenge. And making me wonder about our downsizing move into Chicago last year -- was missing the yard, the extra rooms, and the basement gym in the suburbs during the lockdown earlier in the year; now after Chicago’s quarantine rules, am missing freedom of travel.</li><li>All this adds a couple orders of magnitude of complexity to our efforts to plan a week out of the city in a couple of weeks. Not only do we need to check Chicago’s quarantine list, but also the quarantine plans of any potential destinations. While New York isn’t on Chicago’s quarantine list, Illinois is on New York’s. Mapping it all out, we take the “clean destination” intersection of that quarantine Venn diagram and then look at what restrictions are in those places; if nothing’s open, it’s not worth traveling there. I’ve eaten more meals in my hotel rooms over the past 3 months than I have in the last couple of years.&nbsp;</li><li>But things are changing so fast, that even after you figure out what’s open now, we then start following local papers on Twitter to get any early warnings on new restrictions. Which also means paying a lot more attention to hotel cancellation policies than I ever did. And then overloading our itinerary with outdoor activities like hiking and biking so last-minute closures or restrictions don’t leave us with nothing to do. Which means spending more time trolling the AccuWeather and Weather Channel web sites because an outside-heavy itinerary is more vulnerable to big storm fronts and hurricanes. And to think I used to bitch about having to navigate TripAdvisor ratings.</li><li>Bridge Music —</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>First, a couple of shout-outs to folks who are helping me spread the word about the podcast</li><li>Thanks to GHLGB, an apparently long-time TravelCommons listener, who gave us a 5-star iTunes review the day after the last month’s episode dropped, writing:<ul><li>“Mark does a great job of relating the world of the road warrior with a bit of branching out to those of us who are miles and points nutty. Always a calm and reasonable voice one that’s been in my ears for four years”</li><li>Thanks for that. I appreciate the words, and the effort of wading through the iTunes interface to leave them</li></ul></li><li>Also, in last month’s episode, I mentioned Kev Monteith, a TravelCommons listener and Amtrak travel blogger, but didn’t thank him for calling us out in his <a href=\"https://travelswithkev.com/kevs-favorite-podcasts/\"><em>2020 Favorite Podcast</em> list</a> on his <a href=\"https://travelswithkev.com/\"><em>Travels With Kev</em> website</a>. So, I’m fixing that right now. Thanks, Kev! Check out the show notes for links to his site.</li><li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/06/09/podcast-164-first-post-lockdown-trips-travel-credit-cards/\">episode #164</a>, we talked about how hotels are pulling back on housekeeping during stays -- the Hampton Inn in Spring Hill, TN said they’d be 3 days between room visits while the Residence Inn up the road in Franklin said 7 days, which seems a bit excessive; more like a COVID-washing a cost-cutting move. Replacing the breakfast buffet with a “grab-&amp;-go” breakfast bag makes all the sense in the world, but here again, hotels are grabbing the opportunity to trim costs. Most of what I’ve seen is a brown lunch bag with a bottle of water, a NutriGrain breakfast bar, and an apple -- a banana if I’m lucky. But the Residence Inn in Wauwatosa, WI, just outside of Milwaukee, was having none of that a couple of weeks back. You had 4 options for the main breakfast course in your bag -- a turkey and waffle sandwich, a peanut and strawberry sandwich, an egg and cheese quiche, or one of 13 kinds of cereal boxes, accompanied by your choice of chocolate milk, or orange or apple juice. I’m not passing judgement on the food choices, but I was awfully impressed by their ambition -- yeah, we can’t lay out a breakfast buffet spread, but we’re gonna try our damndest to give you a decent alternative. I just had to give the turkey &amp; waffle sandwich a go. I had visions of a <a href=\"https://twitter.com/trev4president/status/857776562615308288\">Fyre Festival-like trainwreck of a sandwich</a> -- a deli slice of turkey breast between two Eggo waffles. But it was a little more reasonable -- a small wrapped sandwich of turkey sausage between two small waffles, meant to be heated in the microwave. I grabbed it on the way out for a bike ride, so missed the microwave step, which, I think, was critical. But like I said, I give that RI team huge props for the effort.</li><li>But outside the Wauwatosa gang, if this stripped down hotel service stays the norm for the next 12-18 months, it’s probably going to drive some big changes in the year-end traveler gift guides -- shifting from Away luggage and Aesop travel kits, last year’s big recommendations, to sets of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3izWHMJ\">wine tumblers</a>, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2PIgihg\">collapsible bowls</a>, and <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3an6BhJ\">camping mess kits</a>. And, of course, all sorts of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/30NAqF2\">upscale sporks</a>.</li><li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/03/21/podcast-161-new-crisis-old-question-driving-down-to-key-west/\">episode #161</a>, at the end of March, still in a bit of shock from the COVID lockdown and trying to figure out how long it was going to last, I said “I’m nothing if not an optimist. In the midst of this week’s unraveling, I found a deal on a direct American Air flight from ORD to Barcelona — 8½ hr 787 flight — so I booked it — 2 weeks in Barcelona at the end of September.”&nbsp; But here we are five months later and as we all know, things haven’t “re-raveled”. At the beginning of July, American announced that <a href=\"https://liveandletsfly.com/american-airlines-international-reset/\">direct 787 ORD-BCN flight won’t restart until next summer.</a> I checked our reservation on the AA iPhone app after I read this. It still showed us on that direct flight -- until I clicked through, which then, I guess, forced the app to pull the latest information from Dallas, and now showed us flight BA through Heathrow. Not that it really matters. The EU isn’t letting Americans in any time in the near future, and, last time I checked, Barcelona is in a voluntary lockdown because of a new spike in COVID cases. News articles are showing <a href=\"https://time.com/5876132/europe-coronavirus-second-wave/\">shuttered-up stalls at the La Boqueria market</a>; like I said earlier, if nothing’s open, why go? It was a gamble, and really, not even a big one. There’s no change fee, so it’s a push. We won’t lose any money -- unless American goes belly-up, but that’d never happen -- would it?!</li><li>Last year, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/podcast-150-travel-interruptus/\">episode #150</a>, (these show notes are gonna be chock full of backlinks), I talked about switching my carryon bag -- from a Timbuk2 backpack to a <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3izS991\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Timbuk2 messenger bag</a>. I gave two reasons for the switch: I wanted to carry something a little smaller that would stand up under a plane seat; and I wanted a non-black interior, I kept losing things in my backpack -- <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3iDWIiu\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">my tablet</a>, my Bose headphone case. But also because the backpack was breaking down a bit - the seam on one of the side pockets had blown out and one of the strap clips had broken. I was going to pitch it during our last downsizing binge before moving into the city and a friend said “You know, <a href=\"https://www.timbuk2.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Timbuk2</a> bags have <a href=\"https://www.timbuk2.com/pages/warranty-repairs\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">lifetime warranties</a>.” Huh. So I hung onto it because I still like the bag. And about 14 months later, I finally got around to sending it back to them in San Francisco. I wasn’t sure if they’d re-opened their factory, so I was ready for it to take awhile for them to process the bag and repair it. Tracking the package, I could see they received it on a Friday. I got a note from them the following Monday saying they’d inspected it and yes, it was covered by the warranty, and had the bag back in my hands that Saturday. I have to tell you that I am pretty damned impressed. I won’t be switching back from my messenger bag, but I have found that the backpack can carry 4 four-packs of 16-oz cans, perfect when I’m biking a circuit of Chicago microbreweries using curbside no-contact pick-up to grab whatever’s their newest thing. Timbuk2 is definitely “TravelCommons Approved.”</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music —</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>The Meaning of Travel</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>This seems to be <em>the</em> existential question for a lot of travelers -- why do we travel? -- now that can’t, or at least can’t as easily and, well thoughtlessly is too strong a word, but when we could travel without having to plan as much. It’s been a whipsaw -- from overtourism to <a href=\"https://skift.com/2020/06/05/travel-sector-remains-thorn-in-a-falling-u-s-unemployment-rate-defying-expectations/\">36% unemployment in the travel and hospitality sector in the the US</a> -- so a bit soul-searching/navel-gazing is to be expected, if not encouraged. So when I saw the new book, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2DO07fV\"><em>The Meaning of Travel: Philosophers Abroad</em></a> by <a href=\"https://www.dur.ac.uk/research/directory/staff/?id=15319\">Emily</a> <a href=\"https://emilythomaswrites.co.uk/\">Thomas</a>, I immediately bought it and read it -- and then thought that I needed to have her on the podcast. Lucky for me, she’s a very nice person and agreed to spend a bit of time talking about “the meaning of travel”. It was a fun conversation; I hope you enjoy it.</li><li>Discussion topics<ul><li>Frequent travelers often build travel bubbles around themselves that isolates them from the places they travel to; doing it in the name of efficiency,  but also perhaps to keep themselves safe from experiencing what philosophers call “the otherness” of travel</li><li><a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_David_Thoreau\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Henry David Thoreau</a>, <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/33SYvw3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Walden</a></em>, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3kEGjw6\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Cabin Porn</a>, and Solitude</li><li>Global homogenization - every place seems like the other, but is this an old complaint?</li><li>Future topics on the philosophy of travel -- ethics of climate change, and impact of space tourism on our view of the Earth</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #166</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_166.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #166 — How Do We Think About Travel?','','inherit','closed','closed','','2807-revision-v1','','','2020-08-12 21:15:39','2020-08-13 02:15:39','',2807,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/12/2807-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2815,1,'2020-08-12 21:45:04','2020-08-13 02:45:04','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/IMG_0822-scaled.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2810 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/IMG_0822-300x278.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"278\"></a><figcaption>Reindeer are ruining my cabin porn</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>Trying to plan an August trip amidst dueling state quarantine lists and rapid lockdown changes while writing off my September plans for Barcelona. What\'s worse - hotels cutting back on housekeeping or breakfasts? And talking with Emily Thomas about her new book <i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"https://amzn.to/2DO07fV\">The Meaning of Travel: Philosophers Abroad</a>. </span></i>All this and more, or listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below or by following this<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_166.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"> <strong>direct link</strong></a> to download the podcast file .</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/860072707&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #166: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after managing to front-run the city’s quarantine order on Wisconsin. Went up to Milwaukee to meet up with some friends and do a bit of biking a couple of weekends before the Chicago Health Department added Wisconsin to their list of 22 states where you’re required to self-quarantine for 14 days after returning from a trip. Mind you, they’re not setting up roadblock checkpoints like New York City is -- at least not as of the time of this recording. Reasonable people can differ on this -- New York’s governor claimed similar efforts back in March by Rhode Island and Florida aimed at New Yorkers were “unconstitutional” but seems OK with it when it’s pointed the other way -- but it does make travel planning for law abiding citizens a bit more of a challenge. And making me wonder about our downsizing move into Chicago last year -- was missing the yard, the extra rooms, and the basement gym in the suburbs during the lockdown earlier in the year; now after Chicago’s quarantine rules, am missing freedom of travel.</li><li>All this adds a couple orders of magnitude of complexity to our efforts to plan a week out of the city in a couple of weeks. Not only do we need to check Chicago’s quarantine list, but also the quarantine plans of any potential destinations. While New York isn’t on Chicago’s quarantine list, Illinois is on New York’s. Mapping it all out, we take the “clean destination” intersection of that quarantine Venn diagram and then look at what restrictions are in those places; if nothing’s open, it’s not worth traveling there. I’ve eaten more meals in my hotel rooms over the past 3 months than I have in the last couple of years. </li><li>But things are changing so fast, that even after you figure out what’s open now, we then start following local papers on Twitter to get any early warnings on new restrictions. Which also means paying a lot more attention to hotel cancellation policies than I ever did. And then overloading our itinerary with outdoor activities like hiking and biking so last-minute closures or restrictions don’t leave us with nothing to do. Which means spending more time trolling the AccuWeather and Weather Channel web sites because an outside-heavy itinerary is more vulnerable to big storm fronts and hurricanes. And to think I used to bitch about having to navigate TripAdvisor ratings.</li><li>Bridge Music — funkyGarden by Jeris (c) copyright 2020 Licensed under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/VJ_Memes/61356 Ft: airtone, SackJo22, Analog By Nature</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>First, a couple of shout-outs to folks who are helping me spread the word about the podcast</li><li>Thanks to GHLGB, an apparently long-time TravelCommons listener, who gave us a 5-star iTunes review the day after the last month’s episode dropped, writing:<ul><li>“Mark does a great job of relating the world of the road warrior with a bit of branching out to those of us who are miles and points nutty. Always a calm and reasonable voice one that’s been in my ears for four years”</li><li>Thanks for that. I appreciate the words, and the effort of wading through the iTunes interface to leave them</li></ul></li><li>Also, in last month’s episode, I mentioned Kev Monteith, a TravelCommons listener and Amtrak travel blogger, but didn’t thank him for calling us out in his <a href=\"https://travelswithkev.com/kevs-favorite-podcasts/\"><em>2020 Favorite Podcast</em> list</a> on his <a href=\"https://travelswithkev.com/\"><em>Travels With Kev</em> website</a>. So, I’m fixing that right now. Thanks, Kev! Check out the show notes for links to his site.</li><li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/06/09/podcast-164-first-post-lockdown-trips-travel-credit-cards/\">episode #164</a>, we talked about how hotels are pulling back on housekeeping during stays -- the Hampton Inn in Spring Hill, TN said they’d be 3 days between room visits while the Residence Inn up the road in Franklin said 7 days, which seems a bit excessive; more like a COVID-washing a cost-cutting move. Replacing the breakfast buffet with a “grab-&amp;-go” breakfast bag makes all the sense in the world, but here again, hotels are grabbing the opportunity to trim costs. Most of what I’ve seen is a brown lunch bag with a bottle of water, a NutriGrain breakfast bar, and an apple -- a banana if I’m lucky. But the Residence Inn in Wauwatosa, WI, just outside of Milwaukee, was having none of that a couple of weeks back. You had 4 options for the main breakfast course in your bag -- a turkey and waffle sandwich, a peanut and strawberry sandwich, an egg and cheese quiche, or one of 13 kinds of cereal boxes, accompanied by your choice of chocolate milk, or orange or apple juice. I’m not passing judgement on the food choices, but I was awfully impressed by their ambition -- yeah, we can’t lay out a breakfast buffet spread, but we’re gonna try our damndest to give you a decent alternative. I just had to give the turkey &amp; waffle sandwich a go. I had visions of a <a href=\"https://twitter.com/trev4president/status/857776562615308288\">Fyre Festival-like trainwreck of a sandwich</a> -- a deli slice of turkey breast between two Eggo waffles. But it was a little more reasonable -- a small wrapped sandwich of turkey sausage between two small waffles, meant to be heated in the microwave. I grabbed it on the way out for a bike ride, so missed the microwave step, which, I think, was critical. But like I said, I give that RI team huge props for the effort.</li><li>But outside the Wauwatosa gang, if this stripped down hotel service stays the norm for the next 12-18 months, it’s probably going to drive some big changes in the year-end traveler gift guides -- shifting from Away luggage and Aesop travel kits, last year’s big recommendations, to sets of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3izWHMJ\">wine tumblers</a>, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2PIgihg\">collapsible bowls</a>, and <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3an6BhJ\">camping mess kits</a>. And, of course, all sorts of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/30NAqF2\">upscale sporks</a>.</li><li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/03/21/podcast-161-new-crisis-old-question-driving-down-to-key-west/\">episode #161</a>, at the end of March, still in a bit of shock from the COVID lockdown and trying to figure out how long it was going to last, I said “I’m nothing if not an optimist. In the midst of this week’s unraveling, I found a deal on a direct American Air flight from ORD to Barcelona — 8½ hr 787 flight — so I booked it — 2 weeks in Barcelona at the end of September.”  But here we are five months later and as we all know, things haven’t “re-raveled”. At the beginning of July, American announced that <a href=\"https://liveandletsfly.com/american-airlines-international-reset/\">direct 787 ORD-BCN flight won’t restart until next summer.</a> I checked our reservation on the AA iPhone app after I read this. It still showed us on that direct flight -- until I clicked through, which then, I guess, forced the app to pull the latest information from Dallas, and now showed us flight BA through Heathrow. Not that it really matters. The EU isn’t letting Americans in any time in the near future, and, last time I checked, Barcelona is in a voluntary lockdown because of a new spike in COVID cases. News articles are showing <a href=\"https://time.com/5876132/europe-coronavirus-second-wave/\">shuttered-up stalls at the La Boqueria market</a>; like I said earlier, if nothing’s open, why go? It was a gamble, and really, not even a big one. There’s no change fee, so it’s a push. We won’t lose any money -- unless American goes belly-up, but that’d never happen -- would it?!</li><li>Last year, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/podcast-150-travel-interruptus/\">episode #150</a>, (these show notes are gonna be chock full of backlinks), I talked about switching my carryon bag -- from a Timbuk2 backpack to a <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3izS991\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Timbuk2 messenger bag</a>. I gave two reasons for the switch: I wanted to carry something a little smaller that would stand up under a plane seat; and I wanted a non-black interior, I kept losing things in my backpack -- <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3iDWIiu\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">my tablet</a>, my Bose headphone case. But also because the backpack was breaking down a bit - the seam on one of the side pockets had blown out and one of the strap clips had broken. I was going to pitch it during our last downsizing binge before moving into the city and a friend said “You know, <a href=\"https://www.timbuk2.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Timbuk2</a> bags have <a href=\"https://www.timbuk2.com/pages/warranty-repairs\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">lifetime warranties</a>.” Huh. So I hung onto it because I still like the bag. And about 14 months later, I finally got around to sending it back to them in San Francisco. I wasn’t sure if they’d re-opened their factory, so I was ready for it to take awhile for them to process the bag and repair it. Tracking the package, I could see they received it on a Friday. I got a note from them the following Monday saying they’d inspected it and yes, it was covered by the warranty, and had the bag back in my hands that Saturday. I have to tell you that I am pretty damned impressed. I won’t be switching back from my messenger bag, but I have found that the backpack can carry 4 four-packs of 16-oz cans, perfect when I’m biking a circuit of Chicago microbreweries using curbside no-contact pick-up to grab whatever’s their newest thing. Timbuk2 is definitely “TravelCommons Approved.”</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — Xena\'s Kiss / Medea\'s Kiss by mwic (c) copyright 2018 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mwic/58883</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>The Meaning of Travel</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>This seems to be <em>the</em> existential question for a lot of travelers -- why do we travel? -- now that can’t, or at least can’t as easily and, well thoughtlessly is too strong a word, but when we could travel without having to plan as much. It’s been a whipsaw -- from overtourism to <a href=\"https://skift.com/2020/06/05/travel-sector-remains-thorn-in-a-falling-u-s-unemployment-rate-defying-expectations/\">36% unemployment in the travel and hospitality sector in the the US</a> -- so a bit soul-searching/navel-gazing is to be expected, if not encouraged. So when I saw the new book, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2DO07fV\"><em>The Meaning of Travel: Philosophers Abroad</em></a> by <a href=\"https://www.dur.ac.uk/research/directory/staff/?id=15319\">Emily</a> <a href=\"https://emilythomaswrites.co.uk/\">Thomas</a>, I immediately bought it and read it -- and then thought that I needed to have her on the podcast. Lucky for me, she’s a very nice person and agreed to spend a bit of time talking about “the meaning of travel”. It was a fun conversation; I hope you enjoy it.</li><li>Discussion topics<ul><li>Frequent travelers often build travel bubbles around themselves that isolates them from the places they travel to; doing it in the name of efficiency,  but also perhaps to keep themselves safe from experiencing what philosophers call “the otherness” of travel</li><li><a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_David_Thoreau\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Henry David Thoreau</a>, <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/33SYvw3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Walden</a></em>, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3kEGjw6\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Cabin Porn</a>, and Solitude</li><li>Global homogenization - every place seems like the other, but is this an old complaint?</li><li>Future topics on the philosophy of travel -- ethics of climate change, and impact of space tourism on our view of the Earth</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #166</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_166.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #166 — How Do We Think About Travel?','','inherit','closed','closed','','2807-revision-v1','','','2020-08-12 21:45:04','2020-08-13 02:45:04','',2807,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/12/2807-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2816,1,'2020-08-13 10:53:44','2020-08-13 15:53:44','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/IMG_0822-scaled.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2810 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/IMG_0822-300x278.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"278\"></a><figcaption>Reindeer are ruining my cabin porn</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>Trying to plan an August trip amidst dueling state quarantine lists and rapid lockdown changes while writing off my September plans for Barcelona. What\'s worse - hotels cutting back on housekeeping or breakfasts? And talking with Emily Thomas about her new book <i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"https://amzn.to/2DO07fV\">The Meaning of Travel: Philosophers Abroad</a>. </span></i>All this and more, or listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below or by following this<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_166.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"> <strong>direct link</strong></a> to download the podcast file .</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/875150551&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #166: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after managing to front-run the city’s quarantine order on Wisconsin. Went up to Milwaukee to meet up with some friends and do a bit of biking a couple of weekends before the Chicago Health Department added Wisconsin to their list of 22 states where you’re required to self-quarantine for 14 days after returning from a trip. Mind you, they’re not setting up roadblock checkpoints like New York City is -- at least not as of the time of this recording. Reasonable people can differ on this -- New York’s governor claimed similar efforts back in March by Rhode Island and Florida aimed at New Yorkers were “unconstitutional” but seems OK with it when it’s pointed the other way -- but it does make travel planning for law abiding citizens a bit more of a challenge. And making me wonder about our downsizing move into Chicago last year -- was missing the yard, the extra rooms, and the basement gym in the suburbs during the lockdown earlier in the year; now after Chicago’s quarantine rules, am missing freedom of travel.</li><li>All this adds a couple orders of magnitude of complexity to our efforts to plan a week out of the city in a couple of weeks. Not only do we need to check Chicago’s quarantine list, but also the quarantine plans of any potential destinations. While New York isn’t on Chicago’s quarantine list, Illinois is on New York’s. Mapping it all out, we take the “clean destination” intersection of that quarantine Venn diagram and then look at what restrictions are in those places; if nothing’s open, it’s not worth traveling there. I’ve eaten more meals in my hotel rooms over the past 3 months than I have in the last couple of years.&nbsp;</li><li>But things are changing so fast, that even after you figure out what’s open now, we then start following local papers on Twitter to get any early warnings on new restrictions. Which also means paying a lot more attention to hotel cancellation policies than I ever did. And then overloading our itinerary with outdoor activities like hiking and biking so last-minute closures or restrictions don’t leave us with nothing to do. Which means spending more time trolling the AccuWeather and Weather Channel web sites because an outside-heavy itinerary is more vulnerable to big storm fronts and hurricanes. And to think I used to bitch about having to navigate TripAdvisor ratings.</li><li>Bridge Music — funkyGarden by Jeris (c) copyright 2020 Licensed under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/VJ_Memes/61356 Ft: airtone, SackJo22, Analog By Nature</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>First, a couple of shout-outs to folks who are helping me spread the word about the podcast</li><li>Thanks to GHLGB, an apparently long-time TravelCommons listener, who gave us a 5-star iTunes review the day after the last month’s episode dropped, writing:<ul><li>“Mark does a great job of relating the world of the road warrior with a bit of branching out to those of us who are miles and points nutty. Always a calm and reasonable voice one that’s been in my ears for four years”</li><li>Thanks for that. I appreciate the words, and the effort of wading through the iTunes interface to leave them</li></ul></li><li>Also, in last month’s episode, I mentioned Kev Monteith, a TravelCommons listener and Amtrak travel blogger, but didn’t thank him for calling us out in his <a href=\"https://travelswithkev.com/kevs-favorite-podcasts/\"><em>2020 Favorite Podcast</em> list</a> on his <a href=\"https://travelswithkev.com/\"><em>Travels With Kev</em> website</a>. So, I’m fixing that right now. Thanks, Kev! Check out the show notes for links to his site.</li><li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/06/09/podcast-164-first-post-lockdown-trips-travel-credit-cards/\">episode #164</a>, we talked about how hotels are pulling back on housekeeping during stays -- the Hampton Inn in Spring Hill, TN said they’d be 3 days between room visits while the Residence Inn up the road in Franklin said 7 days, which seems a bit excessive; more like a COVID-washing a cost-cutting move. Replacing the breakfast buffet with a “grab-&amp;-go” breakfast bag makes all the sense in the world, but here again, hotels are grabbing the opportunity to trim costs. Most of what I’ve seen is a brown lunch bag with a bottle of water, a NutriGrain breakfast bar, and an apple -- a banana if I’m lucky. But the Residence Inn in Wauwatosa, WI, just outside of Milwaukee, was having none of that a couple of weeks back. You had 4 options for the main breakfast course in your bag -- a turkey and waffle sandwich, a peanut and strawberry sandwich, an egg and cheese quiche, or one of 13 kinds of cereal boxes, accompanied by your choice of chocolate milk, or orange or apple juice. I’m not passing judgement on the food choices, but I was awfully impressed by their ambition -- yeah, we can’t lay out a breakfast buffet spread, but we’re gonna try our damndest to give you a decent alternative. I just had to give the turkey &amp; waffle sandwich a go. I had visions of a <a href=\"https://twitter.com/trev4president/status/857776562615308288\">Fyre Festival-like trainwreck of a sandwich</a> -- a deli slice of turkey breast between two Eggo waffles. But it was a little more reasonable -- a small wrapped sandwich of turkey sausage between two small waffles, meant to be heated in the microwave. I grabbed it on the way out for a bike ride, so missed the microwave step, which, I think, was critical. But like I said, I give that RI team huge props for the effort.</li><li>But outside the Wauwatosa gang, if this stripped down hotel service stays the norm for the next 12-18 months, it’s probably going to drive some big changes in the year-end traveler gift guides -- shifting from Away luggage and Aesop travel kits, last year’s big recommendations, to sets of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3izWHMJ\">wine tumblers</a>, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2PIgihg\">collapsible bowls</a>, and <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3an6BhJ\">camping mess kits</a>. And, of course, all sorts of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/30NAqF2\">upscale sporks</a>.</li><li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/03/21/podcast-161-new-crisis-old-question-driving-down-to-key-west/\">episode #161</a>, at the end of March, still in a bit of shock from the COVID lockdown and trying to figure out how long it was going to last, I said “I’m nothing if not an optimist. In the midst of this week’s unraveling, I found a deal on a direct American Air flight from ORD to Barcelona — 8½ hr 787 flight — so I booked it — 2 weeks in Barcelona at the end of September.”&nbsp; But here we are five months later and as we all know, things haven’t “re-raveled”. At the beginning of July, American announced that <a href=\"https://liveandletsfly.com/american-airlines-international-reset/\">direct 787 ORD-BCN flight won’t restart until next summer.</a> I checked our reservation on the AA iPhone app after I read this. It still showed us on that direct flight -- until I clicked through, which then, I guess, forced the app to pull the latest information from Dallas, and now showed us flight BA through Heathrow. Not that it really matters. The EU isn’t letting Americans in any time in the near future, and, last time I checked, Barcelona is in a voluntary lockdown because of a new spike in COVID cases. News articles are showing <a href=\"https://time.com/5876132/europe-coronavirus-second-wave/\">shuttered-up stalls at the La Boqueria market</a>; like I said earlier, if nothing’s open, why go? It was a gamble, and really, not even a big one. There’s no change fee, so it’s a push. We won’t lose any money -- unless American goes belly-up, but that’d never happen -- would it?!</li><li>Last year, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/podcast-150-travel-interruptus/\">episode #150</a>, (these show notes are gonna be chock full of backlinks), I talked about switching my carryon bag -- from a Timbuk2 backpack to a <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3izS991\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Timbuk2 messenger bag</a>. I gave two reasons for the switch: I wanted to carry something a little smaller that would stand up under a plane seat; and I wanted a non-black interior, I kept losing things in my backpack -- <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3iDWIiu\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">my tablet</a>, my Bose headphone case. But also because the backpack was breaking down a bit - the seam on one of the side pockets had blown out and one of the strap clips had broken. I was going to pitch it during our last downsizing binge before moving into the city and a friend said “You know, <a href=\"https://www.timbuk2.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Timbuk2</a> bags have <a href=\"https://www.timbuk2.com/pages/warranty-repairs\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">lifetime warranties</a>.” Huh. So I hung onto it because I still like the bag. And about 14 months later, I finally got around to sending it back to them in San Francisco. I wasn’t sure if they’d re-opened their factory, so I was ready for it to take awhile for them to process the bag and repair it. Tracking the package, I could see they received it on a Friday. I got a note from them the following Monday saying they’d inspected it and yes, it was covered by the warranty, and had the bag back in my hands that Saturday. I have to tell you that I am pretty damned impressed. I won’t be switching back from my messenger bag, but I have found that the backpack can carry 4 four-packs of 16-oz cans, perfect when I’m biking a circuit of Chicago microbreweries using curbside no-contact pick-up to grab whatever’s their newest thing. Timbuk2 is definitely “TravelCommons Approved.”</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — Xena\'s Kiss / Medea\'s Kiss by mwic (c) copyright 2018 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mwic/58883</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>The Meaning of Travel</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>This seems to be <em>the</em> existential question for a lot of travelers -- why do we travel? -- now that can’t, or at least can’t as easily and, well thoughtlessly is too strong a word, but when we could travel without having to plan as much. It’s been a whipsaw -- from overtourism to <a href=\"https://skift.com/2020/06/05/travel-sector-remains-thorn-in-a-falling-u-s-unemployment-rate-defying-expectations/\">36% unemployment in the travel and hospitality sector in the the US</a> -- so a bit soul-searching/navel-gazing is to be expected, if not encouraged. So when I saw the new book, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2DO07fV\"><em>The Meaning of Travel: Philosophers Abroad</em></a> by <a href=\"https://www.dur.ac.uk/research/directory/staff/?id=15319\">Emily</a> <a href=\"https://emilythomaswrites.co.uk/\">Thomas</a>, I immediately bought it and read it -- and then thought that I needed to have her on the podcast. Lucky for me, she’s a very nice person and agreed to spend a bit of time talking about “the meaning of travel”. It was a fun conversation; I hope you enjoy it.</li><li>Discussion topics<ul><li>Frequent travelers often build travel bubbles around themselves that isolates them from the places they travel to; doing it in the name of efficiency,  but also perhaps to keep themselves safe from experiencing what philosophers call “the otherness” of travel</li><li><a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_David_Thoreau\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Henry David Thoreau</a>, <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/33SYvw3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Walden</a></em>, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3kEGjw6\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Cabin Porn</a>, and Solitude</li><li>Global homogenization - every place seems like the other, but is this an old complaint?</li><li>Future topics on the philosophy of travel -- ethics of climate change, and impact of space tourism on our view of the Earth</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #166</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_166.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #166 — What Is The Meaning of Travel?','','inherit','closed','closed','','2807-revision-v1','','','2020-08-13 10:53:44','2020-08-13 15:53:44','',2807,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/2807-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2817,1,'2020-08-13 10:56:21','2020-08-13 15:56:21','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/IMG_0822-scaled.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2810 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/IMG_0822-300x278.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"278\" /></a>\n<figcaption>Reindeer are ruining my cabin porn</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p>Trying to plan an August trip amidst dueling state quarantine lists and rapid lockdown changes while writing off my September plans for Barcelona. What\'s worse - hotels cutting back on housekeeping or breakfasts? And talking with <a href=\"https://emilythomaswrites.co.uk/about/\">Emily Thomas</a> about her new book <i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"https://amzn.to/2DO07fV\">The Meaning of Travel: Philosophers Abroad</a>. </span></i>All this and more, or listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below or by following this<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_166.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"> <strong>direct link</strong></a> to download the podcast file .</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/875150551&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #166: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after managing to front-run the city’s quarantine order on Wisconsin. Went up to Milwaukee to meet up with some friends and do a bit of biking a couple of weekends before the Chicago Health Department added Wisconsin to their list of 22 states where you’re required to self-quarantine for 14 days after returning from a trip. Mind you, they’re not setting up roadblock checkpoints like New York City is -- at least not as of the time of this recording. Reasonable people can differ on this -- New York’s governor claimed similar efforts back in March by Rhode Island and Florida aimed at New Yorkers were “unconstitutional” but seems OK with it when it’s pointed the other way -- but it does make travel planning for law abiding citizens a bit more of a challenge. And making me wonder about our downsizing move into Chicago last year -- was missing the yard, the extra rooms, and the basement gym in the suburbs during the lockdown earlier in the year; now after Chicago’s quarantine rules, am missing freedom of travel.</li><li>All this adds a couple orders of magnitude of complexity to our efforts to plan a week out of the city in a couple of weeks. Not only do we need to check Chicago’s quarantine list, but also the quarantine plans of any potential destinations. While New York isn’t on Chicago’s quarantine list, Illinois is on New York’s. Mapping it all out, we take the “clean destination” intersection of that quarantine Venn diagram and then look at what restrictions are in those places; if nothing’s open, it’s not worth traveling there. I’ve eaten more meals in my hotel rooms over the past 3 months than I have in the last couple of years.&nbsp;</li><li>But things are changing so fast, that even after you figure out what’s open now, we then start following local papers on Twitter to get any early warnings on new restrictions. Which also means paying a lot more attention to hotel cancellation policies than I ever did. And then overloading our itinerary with outdoor activities like hiking and biking so last-minute closures or restrictions don’t leave us with nothing to do. Which means spending more time trolling the AccuWeather and Weather Channel web sites because an outside-heavy itinerary is more vulnerable to big storm fronts and hurricanes. And to think I used to bitch about having to navigate TripAdvisor ratings.</li><li>Bridge Music — funkyGarden by Jeris (c) copyright 2020 Licensed under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/VJ_Memes/61356 Ft: airtone, SackJo22, Analog By Nature</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>First, a couple of shout-outs to folks who are helping me spread the word about the podcast</li><li>Thanks to GHLGB, an apparently long-time TravelCommons listener, who gave us a 5-star iTunes review the day after the last month’s episode dropped, writing:<ul><li>“Mark does a great job of relating the world of the road warrior with a bit of branching out to those of us who are miles and points nutty. Always a calm and reasonable voice one that’s been in my ears for four years”</li><li>Thanks for that. I appreciate the words, and the effort of wading through the iTunes interface to leave them</li></ul></li><li>Also, in last month’s episode, I mentioned Kev Monteith, a TravelCommons listener and Amtrak travel blogger, but didn’t thank him for calling us out in his <a href=\"https://travelswithkev.com/kevs-favorite-podcasts/\"><em>2020 Favorite Podcast</em> list</a> on his <a href=\"https://travelswithkev.com/\"><em>Travels With Kev</em> website</a>. So, I’m fixing that right now. Thanks, Kev! Check out the show notes for links to his site.</li><li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/06/09/podcast-164-first-post-lockdown-trips-travel-credit-cards/\">episode #164</a>, we talked about how hotels are pulling back on housekeeping during stays -- the Hampton Inn in Spring Hill, TN said they’d be 3 days between room visits while the Residence Inn up the road in Franklin said 7 days, which seems a bit excessive; more like a COVID-washing a cost-cutting move. Replacing the breakfast buffet with a “grab-&amp;-go” breakfast bag makes all the sense in the world, but here again, hotels are grabbing the opportunity to trim costs. Most of what I’ve seen is a brown lunch bag with a bottle of water, a NutriGrain breakfast bar, and an apple -- a banana if I’m lucky. But the Residence Inn in Wauwatosa, WI, just outside of Milwaukee, was having none of that a couple of weeks back. You had 4 options for the main breakfast course in your bag -- a turkey and waffle sandwich, a peanut and strawberry sandwich, an egg and cheese quiche, or one of 13 kinds of cereal boxes, accompanied by your choice of chocolate milk, or orange or apple juice. I’m not passing judgement on the food choices, but I was awfully impressed by their ambition -- yeah, we can’t lay out a breakfast buffet spread, but we’re gonna try our damndest to give you a decent alternative. I just had to give the turkey &amp; waffle sandwich a go. I had visions of a <a href=\"https://twitter.com/trev4president/status/857776562615308288\">Fyre Festival-like trainwreck of a sandwich</a> -- a deli slice of turkey breast between two Eggo waffles. But it was a little more reasonable -- a small wrapped sandwich of turkey sausage between two small waffles, meant to be heated in the microwave. I grabbed it on the way out for a bike ride, so missed the microwave step, which, I think, was critical. But like I said, I give that RI team huge props for the effort.</li><li>But outside the Wauwatosa gang, if this stripped down hotel service stays the norm for the next 12-18 months, it’s probably going to drive some big changes in the year-end traveler gift guides -- shifting from Away luggage and Aesop travel kits, last year’s big recommendations, to sets of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3izWHMJ\">wine tumblers</a>, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2PIgihg\">collapsible bowls</a>, and <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3an6BhJ\">camping mess kits</a>. And, of course, all sorts of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/30NAqF2\">upscale sporks</a>.</li><li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/03/21/podcast-161-new-crisis-old-question-driving-down-to-key-west/\">episode #161</a>, at the end of March, still in a bit of shock from the COVID lockdown and trying to figure out how long it was going to last, I said “I’m nothing if not an optimist. In the midst of this week’s unraveling, I found a deal on a direct American Air flight from ORD to Barcelona — 8½ hr 787 flight — so I booked it — 2 weeks in Barcelona at the end of September.”&nbsp; But here we are five months later and as we all know, things haven’t “re-raveled”. At the beginning of July, American announced that <a href=\"https://liveandletsfly.com/american-airlines-international-reset/\">direct 787 ORD-BCN flight won’t restart until next summer.</a> I checked our reservation on the AA iPhone app after I read this. It still showed us on that direct flight -- until I clicked through, which then, I guess, forced the app to pull the latest information from Dallas, and now showed us flight BA through Heathrow. Not that it really matters. The EU isn’t letting Americans in any time in the near future, and, last time I checked, Barcelona is in a voluntary lockdown because of a new spike in COVID cases. News articles are showing <a href=\"https://time.com/5876132/europe-coronavirus-second-wave/\">shuttered-up stalls at the La Boqueria market</a>; like I said earlier, if nothing’s open, why go? It was a gamble, and really, not even a big one. There’s no change fee, so it’s a push. We won’t lose any money -- unless American goes belly-up, but that’d never happen -- would it?!</li><li>Last year, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/podcast-150-travel-interruptus/\">episode #150</a>, (these show notes are gonna be chock full of backlinks), I talked about switching my carryon bag -- from a Timbuk2 backpack to a <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3izS991\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Timbuk2 messenger bag</a>. I gave two reasons for the switch: I wanted to carry something a little smaller that would stand up under a plane seat; and I wanted a non-black interior, I kept losing things in my backpack -- <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3iDWIiu\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">my tablet</a>, my Bose headphone case. But also because the backpack was breaking down a bit - the seam on one of the side pockets had blown out and one of the strap clips had broken. I was going to pitch it during our last downsizing binge before moving into the city and a friend said “You know, <a href=\"https://www.timbuk2.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Timbuk2</a> bags have <a href=\"https://www.timbuk2.com/pages/warranty-repairs\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">lifetime warranties</a>.” Huh. So I hung onto it because I still like the bag. And about 14 months later, I finally got around to sending it back to them in San Francisco. I wasn’t sure if they’d re-opened their factory, so I was ready for it to take awhile for them to process the bag and repair it. Tracking the package, I could see they received it on a Friday. I got a note from them the following Monday saying they’d inspected it and yes, it was covered by the warranty, and had the bag back in my hands that Saturday. I have to tell you that I am pretty damned impressed. I won’t be switching back from my messenger bag, but I have found that the backpack can carry 4 four-packs of 16-oz cans, perfect when I’m biking a circuit of Chicago microbreweries using curbside no-contact pick-up to grab whatever’s their newest thing. Timbuk2 is definitely “TravelCommons Approved.”</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — Xena\'s Kiss / Medea\'s Kiss by mwic (c) copyright 2018 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mwic/58883</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>The Meaning of Travel</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>This seems to be <em>the</em> existential question for a lot of travelers -- why do we travel? -- now that can’t, or at least can’t as easily and, well thoughtlessly is too strong a word, but when we could travel without having to plan as much. It’s been a whipsaw -- from overtourism to <a href=\"https://skift.com/2020/06/05/travel-sector-remains-thorn-in-a-falling-u-s-unemployment-rate-defying-expectations/\">36% unemployment in the travel and hospitality sector in the the US</a> -- so a bit soul-searching/navel-gazing is to be expected, if not encouraged. So when I saw the new book, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2DO07fV\"><em>The Meaning of Travel: Philosophers Abroad</em></a> by <a href=\"https://www.dur.ac.uk/research/directory/staff/?id=15319\">Emily</a> <a href=\"https://emilythomaswrites.co.uk/\">Thomas</a>, I immediately bought it and read it -- and then thought that I needed to have her on the podcast. Lucky for me, she’s a very nice person and agreed to spend a bit of time talking about “the meaning of travel”. It was a fun conversation; I hope you enjoy it.</li><li>Discussion topics<ul><li>Frequent travelers often build travel bubbles around themselves that isolates them from the places they travel to; doing it in the name of efficiency,  but also perhaps to keep themselves safe from experiencing what philosophers call “the otherness” of travel</li><li><a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_David_Thoreau\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Henry David Thoreau</a>, <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/33SYvw3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Walden</a></em>, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3kEGjw6\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Cabin Porn</a>, and Solitude</li><li>Global homogenization - every place seems like the other, but is this an old complaint?</li><li>Future topics on the philosophy of travel -- ethics of climate change, and impact of space tourism on our view of the Earth</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #166</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_166.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #166 — What Is The Meaning of Travel?','','inherit','closed','closed','','2807-revision-v1','','','2020-08-13 10:56:21','2020-08-13 15:56:21','',2807,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/2807-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2819,1,'2020-08-13 11:28:32','2020-08-13 16:28:32','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/IMG_0822-scaled.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2810 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/IMG_0822-300x278.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"278\"></a><figcaption>Reindeer are ruining my cabin porn</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>Trying to plan an August trip amidst dueling state quarantine lists and rapid lockdown changes while writing off my September plans for Barcelona. What\'s worse - hotels cutting back on housekeeping or breakfasts? And talking with <a href=\"https://emilythomaswrites.co.uk/about/\">Emily Thomas</a> about her new book <i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"https://amzn.to/2DO07fV\">The Meaning of Travel: Philosophers Abroad</a>. </span></i>All this and more, or listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below or by following this<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_166.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"> <strong>direct link</strong></a> to download the podcast file .</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/875150551&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #166: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after managing to front-run the city’s quarantine order on Wisconsin. Went up to Milwaukee to meet up with some friends and do a bit of biking a couple of weekends before the Chicago Health Department added Wisconsin to their list of 22 states where you’re required to self-quarantine for 14 days after returning from a trip. Mind you, they’re not setting up roadblock checkpoints like New York City is -- at least not as of the time of this recording. Reasonable people can differ on this -- New York’s governor claimed similar efforts back in March by Rhode Island and Florida aimed at New Yorkers were “unconstitutional” but seems OK with it when it’s pointed the other way -- but it does make travel planning for law abiding citizens a bit more of a challenge. And making me wonder about our downsizing move into Chicago last year -- was missing the yard, the extra rooms, and the basement gym in the suburbs during the lockdown earlier in the year; now after Chicago’s quarantine rules, am missing freedom of travel.</li><li>All this adds a couple orders of magnitude of complexity to our efforts to plan a week out of the city in a couple of weeks. Not only do we need to check Chicago’s quarantine list, but also the quarantine plans of any potential destinations. While New York isn’t on Chicago’s quarantine list, Illinois is on New York’s. Mapping it all out, we take the “clean destination” intersection of that quarantine Venn diagram and then look at what restrictions are in those places; if nothing’s open, it’s not worth traveling there. I’ve eaten more meals in my hotel rooms over the past 3 months than I have in the last couple of years.&nbsp;</li><li>But things are changing so fast, that even after you figure out what’s open now, we then start following local papers on Twitter to get any early warnings on new restrictions. Which also means paying a lot more attention to hotel cancellation policies than I ever did. And then overloading our itinerary with outdoor activities like hiking and biking so last-minute closures or restrictions don’t leave us with nothing to do. Which means spending more time trolling the AccuWeather and Weather Channel web sites because an outside-heavy itinerary is more vulnerable to big storm fronts and hurricanes. And to think I used to bitch about having to navigate TripAdvisor ratings.</li><li>Bridge Music — funkyGarden by Jeris (c) copyright 2020 Licensed under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/VJ_Memes/61356 Ft: airtone, SackJo22, Analog By Nature</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>First, a couple of shout-outs to folks who are helping me spread the word about the podcast</li><li>Thanks to GHLGB, an apparently long-time TravelCommons listener, who gave us a 5-star iTunes review the day after the last month’s episode dropped, writing:<ul><li>“Mark does a great job of relating the world of the road warrior with a bit of branching out to those of us who are miles and points nutty. Always a calm and reasonable voice one that’s been in my ears for four years”</li><li>Thanks for that. I appreciate the words, and the effort of wading through the iTunes interface to leave them</li></ul></li><li>Also, in last month’s episode, I mentioned Kev Monteith, a TravelCommons listener and Amtrak travel blogger, but didn’t thank him for calling us out in his <a href=\"https://travelswithkev.com/kevs-favorite-podcasts/\"><em>2020 Favorite Podcast</em> list</a> on his <a href=\"https://travelswithkev.com/\"><em>Travels With Kev</em> website</a>. So, I’m fixing that right now. Thanks, Kev! Check out the show notes for links to his site.</li><li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/06/09/podcast-164-first-post-lockdown-trips-travel-credit-cards/\">episode #164</a>, we talked about how hotels are pulling back on housekeeping during stays -- the Hampton Inn in Spring Hill, TN said they’d be 3 days between room visits while the Residence Inn up the road in Franklin said 7 days, which seems a bit excessive; more like a COVID-washing a cost-cutting move. Replacing the breakfast buffet with a “grab-&amp;-go” breakfast bag makes all the sense in the world, but here again, hotels are grabbing the opportunity to trim costs. Most of what I’ve seen is a brown lunch bag with a bottle of water, a NutriGrain breakfast bar, and an apple -- a banana if I’m lucky. But the Residence Inn in Wauwatosa, WI, just outside of Milwaukee, was having none of that a couple of weeks back. You had 4 options for the main breakfast course in your bag -- a turkey and waffle sandwich, a peanut and strawberry sandwich, an egg and cheese quiche, or one of 13 kinds of cereal boxes, accompanied by your choice of chocolate milk, or orange or apple juice. I’m not passing judgement on the food choices, but I was awfully impressed by their ambition -- yeah, we can’t lay out a breakfast buffet spread, but we’re gonna try our damndest to give you a decent alternative. I just had to give the turkey &amp; waffle sandwich a go. I had visions of a <a href=\"https://twitter.com/trev4president/status/857776562615308288\">Fyre Festival-like trainwreck of a sandwich</a> -- a deli slice of turkey breast between two Eggo waffles. But it was a little more reasonable -- a small wrapped sandwich of turkey sausage between two small waffles, meant to be heated in the microwave. I grabbed it on the way out for a bike ride, so missed the microwave step, which, I think, was critical. But like I said, I give that RI team huge props for the effort.</li><li>But outside the Wauwatosa gang, if this stripped down hotel service stays the norm for the next 12-18 months, it’s probably going to drive some big changes in the year-end traveler gift guides -- shifting from Away luggage and Aesop travel kits, last year’s big recommendations, to sets of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3izWHMJ\">wine tumblers</a>, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2PIgihg\">collapsible bowls</a>, and <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3an6BhJ\">camping mess kits</a>. And, of course, all sorts of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/30NAqF2\">upscale sporks</a>.</li><li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/03/21/podcast-161-new-crisis-old-question-driving-down-to-key-west/\">episode #161</a>, at the end of March, still in a bit of shock from the COVID lockdown and trying to figure out how long it was going to last, I said “I’m nothing if not an optimist. In the midst of this week’s unraveling, I found a deal on a direct American Air flight from ORD to Barcelona — 8½ hr 787 flight — so I booked it — 2 weeks in Barcelona at the end of September.”&nbsp; But here we are five months later and as we all know, things haven’t “re-raveled”. At the beginning of July, American announced that <a href=\"https://liveandletsfly.com/american-airlines-international-reset/\">direct 787 ORD-BCN flight won’t restart until next summer.</a> I checked our reservation on the AA iPhone app after I read this. It still showed us on that direct flight -- until I clicked through, which then, I guess, forced the app to pull the latest information from Dallas, and now showed us flight BA through Heathrow. Not that it really matters. The EU isn’t letting Americans in any time in the near future, and, last time I checked, Barcelona is in a voluntary lockdown because of a new spike in COVID cases. News articles are showing <a href=\"https://time.com/5876132/europe-coronavirus-second-wave/\">shuttered-up stalls at the La Boqueria market</a>; like I said earlier, if nothing’s open, why go? It was a gamble, and really, not even a big one. There’s no change fee, so it’s a push. We won’t lose any money -- unless American goes belly-up, but that’d never happen -- would it?!</li><li>Last year, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/podcast-150-travel-interruptus/\">episode #150</a>, (these show notes are gonna be chock full of backlinks), I talked about switching my carryon bag -- from a Timbuk2 backpack to a <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3izS991\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Timbuk2 messenger bag</a>. I gave two reasons for the switch: I wanted to carry something a little smaller that would stand up under a plane seat; and I wanted a non-black interior, I kept losing things in my backpack -- <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3iDWIiu\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">my tablet</a>, my Bose headphone case. But also because the backpack was breaking down a bit - the seam on one of the side pockets had blown out and one of the strap clips had broken. I was going to pitch it during our last downsizing binge before moving into the city and a friend said “You know, <a href=\"https://www.timbuk2.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Timbuk2</a> bags have <a href=\"https://www.timbuk2.com/pages/warranty-repairs\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">lifetime warranties</a>.” Huh. So I hung onto it because I still like the bag. And about 14 months later, I finally got around to sending it back to them in San Francisco. I wasn’t sure if they’d re-opened their factory, so I was ready for it to take awhile for them to process the bag and repair it. Tracking the package, I could see they received it on a Friday. I got a note from them the following Monday saying they’d inspected it and yes, it was covered by the warranty, and had the bag back in my hands that Saturday. I have to tell you that I am pretty damned impressed. I won’t be switching back from my messenger bag, but I have found that the backpack can carry 4 four-packs of 16-oz cans, perfect when I’m biking a circuit of Chicago microbreweries using curbside no-contact pick-up to grab whatever’s their newest thing. Timbuk2 is definitely “TravelCommons Approved.”</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — Xena\'s Kiss / Medea\'s Kiss by mwic (c) copyright 2018 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mwic/58883</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>The Meaning of Travel</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>This seems to be <em>the</em> existential question for a lot of travelers -- why do we travel? -- now that can’t, or at least can’t as easily and, well thoughtlessly is too strong a word, but when we could travel without having to plan as much. It’s been a whipsaw -- from overtourism to <a href=\"https://skift.com/2020/06/05/travel-sector-remains-thorn-in-a-falling-u-s-unemployment-rate-defying-expectations/\">36% unemployment in the travel and hospitality sector in the the US</a> -- so a bit soul-searching/navel-gazing is to be expected, if not encouraged. So when I saw the new book, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2DO07fV\"><em>The Meaning of Travel: Philosophers Abroad</em></a> by <a href=\"https://www.dur.ac.uk/research/directory/staff/?id=15319\">Emily</a> <a href=\"https://emilythomaswrites.co.uk/\">Thomas</a>, I immediately bought it and read it -- and then thought that I needed to have her on the podcast. Lucky for me, she’s a very nice person and agreed to spend a bit of time talking about “the meaning of travel”. It was a fun conversation; I hope you enjoy it.</li><li>Discussion topics<ul><li>Frequent travelers often build travel bubbles around themselves that isolates them from the places they travel to; doing it in the name of efficiency,  but also perhaps to keep themselves safe from experiencing what philosophers call “the otherness” of travel</li><li><a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_David_Thoreau\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Henry David Thoreau</a>, <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/33SYvw3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Walden</a></em>, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3kEGjw6\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Cabin Porn</a>, and Solitude</li><li>Global homogenization - every place seems like the other, but is this an old complaint?</li><li>Future topics on the philosophy of travel -- ethics of climate change, and impact of space tourism on our view of the Earth</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #166</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_166.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #166 — What Is The Meaning of Travel?','','inherit','closed','closed','','2807-revision-v1','','','2020-08-13 11:28:32','2020-08-13 16:28:32','',2807,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/2807-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2854,1,'2020-09-18 14:37:37','2020-09-18 19:37:37','','Amazon Music','','publish','closed','closed','','amazon-music','','','2020-09-18 14:37:37','2020-09-18 19:37:37','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?post_type=simple_link&#038;p=2854',0,'simple_link','',0),
(2855,1,'2020-09-18 14:37:37','2020-09-18 19:37:37','','Amazon Music','','inherit','closed','closed','','2854-revision-v1','','','2020-09-18 14:37:37','2020-09-18 19:37:37','',2854,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/09/18/2854-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2856,1,'2020-09-19 16:01:47','2020-09-19 21:01:47','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":2857,\"width\":300,\"height\":300,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large is-resized\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/F3E28DAE-0026-4E8A-957E-D6CE914F717C.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2857\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"/><figcaption>I seem to have put on a Quarantine 15</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Spent a week in <a href=\"https://www.uptravel.com/\">Michigan\'s Upper Peninsula</a> hiking, biking, kayaking, and running into a lot of other people getting away to do the same, which got me looking back six months to the start of the pandemic. I talk about a surprisingly good flight cancellation experience with American Airlines, and figuring out how to download 12 years of <a href=\"https://www.tripit.com/\">TripIt</a> data. We wrap up talking to <a href=\"https://www.lendingtree.com/writer/matt-schulz/\">Matt Schulz</a> of <a href=\"https://www.lendingtree.com/\">LendingTree</a>, asking him what are we doing with travel credit cards that are generating frequent traveler points we can’t use? All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_167.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>download</strong></a> the podcast file, subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #167: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after a week’s tour of the UP -- Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Did a counter-clockwise circle route around Lake Michigan. Headed out east on Friday morning; stopped at a brewery in Grand Rapids for lunch; drove the 5 miles across the Mackinac Bridge just before dusk; and had my first UP pasty (the first of many) and a local beer for dinner that night in Sault Ste Marie. Spent a couple of days in Soo; watched 700-ft lake freighters make their way through the locks that connect Lake Superior to Lake Huron; I’m still enough of an engineer to geek out on that kind of stuff. We then drove west to Marquette for 3 days and again west to Houghton for 2 days before heading home through Wisconsin down the west side of Lake Michigan. It was all outdoors stuff -- hiking, biking, kayaking; the things that last-minute COVID closures or restrictions won’t muck up.&nbsp; The UP has always been on my list of places to visit, but it’s always on sorta the B-list, and so plans to go someplace else -- Spain, Napa, Ireland -- would always push it down the list. But now, with most places blocked off with travel restrictions and quarantines, the UP -- drivable with lots of outdoor activities -- bubbled to the top of the list.</li><li>And I wasn’t the only one thinking that way. The guy renting rowboats at <a href=\"https://www2.dnr.state.mi.us/ParksandTrails/Details.aspx?id=428&amp;type=SPRK\">Tahquamenon Falls State Park</a> looked at our release forms and said “We’ve had a lot of people up here from Chicago. It’s been crazy busy. We can’t get enough people to handle it.” And biking around <a href=\"https://www.travelmarquette.com/things-to-do/attractions/presque-isle-park/\">Presque Isle Park</a> in Marquette, we got talking, in a socially distant way, to a biking couple up from St Louis. It was also their first time up. A bunch of their friends and family had been up earlier; they’d seen nothing but UP pictures in their Facebook feed for the past month.</li><li>The husband said that he had an underlying medical condition and so they were looking for places away from people; they’d rented a cabin in the little town of Au Train. Which got me thinking about the place we stayed in Soo -- the <a href=\"https://www.plazamotormotel.com/\">Plaza Motor Motel</a>. No lobby, no elevators, no hallways; no places to run into other guests; no need to have to remember to mask up when you leave your room. Just open your room door and there’s your car. Most frequent travelers would never think of voluntarily staying in a motor inn, a <em>mo</em>-tel. But with so many things changing in these unprecedented times, maybe COVID will have folks give motels another chance.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/11510\">Funkist</a> - cdk dub mix by cdk (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: teru</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>First, a big shout out to the folks in Hanoi, Vietnam listening to TravelCommons on Soundcloud. One of the fun things about the podcast is looking at where people are listening from. For the most part, the stats make sense -- most of the listeners are from the US, and then English-speaking countries -- the UK, Canada, Australia. But every once in a while, there’s a spike that I just can’t figure out. I’ll see it, go look at the episode notes to see if I’ve mentioned that country, but I usually can’t make sense of it. Last fall, it was Argentina., but over the past couple of months, it’s been folks from Hanoi, primarily listening to <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/04/11/podcast-162-post-corona-trip-planning-keeping-a-travel-journal/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #162 — Post-Corona Trip Planning; Keeping a Travel Journal\">April episode, #162</a>, about post-lockdown trip planning and keeping a travel journal. Not sure why, but if you’re in Hanoi and you’ve made it to this episode - Hi! And thanks for listening!</li><li>Dan Grabon sent me a note at the beginning of the month about my lockdown reading that I mentioned during <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #166 — What Is The Meaning of Travel?\">last month’s interview</a> with Dr Emily Thomas<ul><li>“Mark,&nbsp; I feel your pain. I started re-reading Walden back in April, and I just passed the halfway mark at the end of August. This was part of an overly ambitious effort to read one great book a month from a literary calendar that I bought. The Brothers Karamazov took up January through March, and even though COVID should have meant more time to read, it just hasn’t turned out that way.</li><li>“Writing this from a long overdue vacation near Lake George, where I saw the book Cabin Porn in a gift shop. Good timing.</li><li>“Thanks for keeping the podcast going— helps keep me going in this time of not going much of anywhere!”</li></ul></li><li>Dan, Thanks for the note. <em>The Brothers Karamazov</em> -- you are a better man than I.&nbsp; I swore off of Russian fiction after suffering through <em>Crime and Punishment</em> in high school. That and Charles Dickens, just can’t do ‘em. And I am still working my way through <em>Walden</em>. Just got through his half-dozen pages on hoeing his bean field. I find if I try to read more than a dozen pages in a sitting, I just start skimming -- or sleeping. Glad you were able to get away to the wilderness of Lake George. Feel like the perfect place to find that Cabin Porn book.</li><li>Jim McDonough hit the TravelCommons Facebook page, following up on my comment in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\" title=\"Podcast #166 — What Is The Meaning of Travel?\">last month’s episode</a> about my disappearing American flight from ORD to BCN. Jim writes...<ul><li>“We were going to Barcelona and Madrid with Rick Steves Europe in October, but of course Rick has canceled every tour for the rest of the year. Interestingly, AA says we are still booked on a BA 747 from SAN to LHR as part of this trip. BA has no more 747\'s and doesn\'t serve SAN any more.”</li></ul></li><li>I sometimes think any of the airline’s schedules more than one month out are more like aspirational projections than reflections of reality. Especially given how fast they’re shifting schedules to capture any sort of bump in passenger volume. Like United having <a href=\"https://airlineweekly.com/airlines-feeling-a-lift-from-rocky-mountain-hubs\">some transcontinental flights stop in DEN to pick up a bump in volume from people visiting national parks</a> -- there’s that outdoor activity trend again.</li><li>But back to that BCN trip, I should be getting things here in Chicago sorted before heading off for 2 weeks in Catalonia, but you’ve probably already guessed, that trip isn’t happening. Not a surprise. The EU still isn’t letting US travelers in and the case count in Spain’s second COVID wave has gotten worse in the last month. So at the beginning of the month, I gritted my teeth, called American and cancelled the flights. Actually, American had called me the prior week while we were in the UP, but I let it go to voicemail. We were in a taproom in Marquette and I didn’t feel ready to have that conversation. I wanted to have all our booking info in front of me and be clear minded (tough during a taproom session) and mentally girded for battle. So when I returned their call the next week, I was sitting in front of my laptop with all my itinerary documents up and was ready to go. It was a quick trip through the automated phone tree to a very nice woman in Dallas. No hassles with canceling. I was asking her about the logistics of the travel credit - how long will it be good for - when she said, “Since your flight was canceled and you were re-booked, you can get a refund if you like.” Wow. “Uh, yes,” I quickly said, not wanting her offer to disappear, “I think I’ll take the refund instead.” That was not what I expected from all the stories about American trying to keep as much cash as possible. It took her a couple of minutes to process the refunds during which we compared the weather between Chicago and Dallas. The refunds hit my credit card the following week, so full kudos to American on handling this. I’m hoping I don’t need to repeat in November for my Thanksgiving trip to London.</li><li>A couple of weeks back I was trading notes with TravelCommons contributor Allan Marko about <a href=\"https://www.sfgate.com/travel/article/United-bangalore-SFO-15551358.php\">United’s new SFO-Bangalore non-stop</a>. It’ll be their longest flight at 17½ hours. My immediate reaction was, of course, “that’s a helluva long time to wear a mask.” United is using a 787-9 with a special engine enhancement that makes the flight possible. Which got me thinking about what planes I’d flown into BLR. I’ve been using <a href=\"https://www.tripit.com/\">TripIt</a> since 2008 when it first broke out of the Silicon Valley venture cap bubble, so I logged in, clicked over to Past Trips and started clicking back through the pages -- and clicking and clicking because the last time I was in Bangalore was April 2014. I kept looking around the screen - there’s gotta be a way to export all my trip data; but I couldn’t find anything. So I sent a note to <a href=\"mailto:support@tripit.com\">support@tripit.com</a>. And, to my huge surprise, Andy from the Tripit Help Center replied in <em>15 minutes</em> saying “We currently do not offer customer driven travel data export capability. We have passed your suggestion on to the appropriate team for review.” Having run a software product team, I knew what that meant -- never. But, in the next paragraph, Andy offered a solution -- “You can check out a third party app Openflights. They have an API with TripIt that will allow you to import trips from your TripIt account to their site. From there you can create a list of all of your flights and download them to a csv file. Their basic account is free to use.” Sweet. I thanked Andy for his quick reply and hit <a href=\"https://openflights.org/\">Openflights</a>. I set up an account, hit the “Import” button and connected to my TripIt account. The import was a touch kludgy -- I had to go page by page, review each trip, and mark it to import. After 88 pages, I had imported 1006 flight segments, which they displayed on a world map. I clicked on BLR and a little card popped up. I clicked on the first option and it listed the 8 flights I’d taken to and from BLR. Turns out I’d mostly flown Airbus A320s, though I did once fly a 747-400 in from FRA. It has a couple of analysis buttons -- like my longest flight -- Joburg to IAD at 17:40 (ha! 10 minutes longer than the SFO-BLR flight); and my shortest -- IAD again, but this time a 44-minute flight to CHO. And of course, I was able to download all my trips into Excel so I can noodle around to my heart’s content. Openflights is free, but I’m going to <a href=\"https://openflights.org/donate\">donate</a> to help keep them going. <a href=\"https://openflights.org/\">Openflights.org</a> -- definitely recommended. I’ll put a link in the show notes.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/48705\">Jolanta Blues</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: Admiral Bob, Martijn de Boer</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>6 Months of Pandemic</strong> </h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Finally giving into reality and canceling my Barcelona flight 6 months after booking it got me thinking back on these -- you know what’s coming -- <em>unprecedented</em> times. Airlines canceled flights to China at the end of January, then to South Korea, Iran, and Italy in February, until, by the beginning of March, airline traffic joined the stock market in a free fall. But back then, we thought it was a one-off event, kinda like Sept 11th; a sharp, scary event that came out of nowhere with no warning but that would soon pass. So taking advantage of one of the many March fare sales to book a flight at the end of September didn’t seem that risky.</li><li>I was talking to one of my consulting friends a couple of weeks ago. His travel schedule was similar to mine - a week without seeing an airport was a rare exception. He hasn’t been on a plane since March and doesn’t know when he’ll get on one next. He just started a project with a manufacturer in Cincinnati. Most of the project will be virtual, but he’s pretty sure he ought to at least put eyes on their plant. He lives outside Detroit. In the past, he’d be flying down every week. Now, he fires up Google Maps -- it’s a 4½ drive down I-75. He’ll drive down once, stay a couple of days, and then head back home.&nbsp;</li><li>I can’t say that anyone I’ve talked to misses the act of business travel -- getting up at 0 dark 30 Monday morning to get to the airport, shuffle through the PreCheck line for 15-20 minutes, and then shoehorn into a full flight for an hour or 3.&nbsp; But we did it because that was part of the job. But now that it’s not, at least for now and what seems like (for now) through the end of the year, everybody is taking full advantage of sleeping in -- in their own beds.</li><li>Which explains why, of all the US airlines, Spirit Airlines, with its complete focus on low-cost leisure travelers, is the only one sounding even somewhat non-negative.&nbsp; And hotel chains like Choice, focused on what they call “drive-to” locations and extended stay properties getting occupancy rates over 50% while center city hotels like Chicago’s Hilton Palmer House are missing rent payments and slouching towards bankruptcy.</li><li>Irene and I were sitting outside at a microbrewery a couple of days ago, enjoying a sunny afternoon full in the knowledge that we have maybe 4 weeks of outdoor eating and drinking left in Chicago. We talked about what kind of travel we would do over the next 12 months, figuring travel restrictions and periodic lockdowns are going to be the norm for at least that long. No big plans; nothing that COVID could blow up but seeing some new places -- some skiing, maybe trying out Montana; some hiking, maybe checking out the Texas Hill Country. But next month, we’re trading Barcelona for Philadelphia; now that they’ve opened up the restaurants again, check out our old neighborhood and visit with some friends. It’ll be Irene’s first flight since February. It took a bit of talking, but I really think the threat of a total of 22 hrs in a car with me -- alone -- tipped her over.&nbsp;</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djiz/10514\">Nube - Djiz Rmx</a> by Kwame (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: SylviaO</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Do We Keep Travel Credit Cards?</strong> </h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Last week, <a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/14/delta-launches-6point5-billion-debt-deal-backed-by-its-frequent-flyer-program.html\">Delta used their SkyMiles program to back $6.5 billion in debt</a>, running the same play that United and American did in June. What caught my eye was some of the stats that came out with the debt filing -- that <a href=\"https://skift.com/2020/09/15/how-delta-looks-to-leverage-rewards-from-its-own-frequent-flyer-program/\">SkyMiles had about $6.1 billion in revenue in 2019, about two-thirds from American Express</a> which issues a co-branded Delta card, and that <a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/14/delta-launches-6point5-billion-debt-deal-backed-by-its-frequent-flyer-program.html\">total miles redeemed fell by 78% in the first half of this year.</a> The big carriers are leaning on their loyalty programs for cash, their biggest customers are credit card issuers, but those card users - us - are generating points that we’ve stopped using.&nbsp;</li><li>It’s against this background that I called up Matt Schulz, chief credit analyst at LendingTree, and to ask him -- do we want to keep travel credit cards?<ul><li>Mark: Matt, a lot of folks carry at least one travel credit card and I don’t think I’m going too far out on a limb guessing that damn close to every TravelCommons listeners carry them. We’re 6 months on from the COVID lockdowns and the resulting cratering of the travel industry. But with travel not recovering -- airline demand is still just a third of pre-pandemic levels and United Airlines’ CEO said last week it could be 3-4 years before it’s back to 2019 levels -- what are card holders doing with these cards generating frequent traveler points that they can’t or don’t want to use?</li><li>Matt: An awful lot of people are closing them simply because they may need to use those points that they had been planning to go on a trip to Paris or to Hawaii. But they need to use that money or those points to keep food on the table. Our survey that we just did found that about 30% of respondents with travel rewards card said that they had closed one and that number is even higher for Millennials. And that\'s got to be something that that scares the banks to death. It\'s not terribly surprising for all the reasons that you that you ticked off a minute ago, and I don\'t think that\'s going to slow down anytime soon either.</li><li>Mark: So, people are closing them out, so they\'re not taking those annual fees.</li><li>Matt: Our survey found that about half of those who had been laid off or furloughed had cashed out some of their points or miles. And again, it stands to reason because when you\'re trying to keep the lights on and keep food on the table, there are things more important than travel rewards. And I think that\'s a lot of what this comes down to -- if you are somebody who feels pretty stable in your job, has a decent emergency fund and generally feels kinda OK about things despite all of economic chaos, you\'re probably going to try and hold on to those miles</li><li>Mark: Back in March and April, it seemed the strategy for the big travel card issuers -- Chase, Citi, Amex -- seemed to be to sacrifice revenue to hold share -- statement credits for annual fees if you called them to cancel, new bonuses for stay-at-home purchases to keep wallet share -- seemed like 5x bonuses for grocery and gas was the most popular. Made sense when everyone was talking about 2-week shutdowns and a V-shaped recovery. But, as we said before, travel is gonna stay depressed for a while -- between state and country quarantines and many people not wanting to get in a plane -- how are travel card companies going to handle the next round of renewals? When I call Chase and Amex again, do I get more statement credits -- do they continue to fight for share? And if they don’t, what do I do with the balance of Ultimate or Membership Rewards points that I’ll lose if I don’t re-up and pay the fee?</li><li>Matt: I think what\'s gonna happen is that issuers are going to continue to tinker around the edges to see what people like and what is impactful. And the truth is that issuers desperately want to keep the customers on cards like Chase Sapphire Reserve, Amex Platinum -- all the high end and the next-step-down cards because those customers are so valuable from a lifetime value perspective. You may get a travel card when you\'re 25 and the bank will do what they can to keep you around to try and upsell you to other products that they might have. The issuers are going to try and do what they can to figure out how to make you stay. And right now, that may not look like giving a ton of travel rewards points.</li><li>Mark: Any recommendations for travel card holders as we\'re going forward to the end of the year and into the beginning of next year?</li><li>Matt: You really have to know your situation and understand it, and you also have to not feel guilty if you have to cash in your points that you had been saving up for that dream trip in order to help you extend your budget. Nobody gets a high-end travel card with a high annual fee hoping to eventually cash that in for groceries at Walmart, but sometimes these things have to happen. If you have the financial wherewithal and you can hold on to those points, I think it\'s worth doing because we are going to travel again. Nobody knows when. But we are going to travel again and assuming that your whole financial situation is generally OK, I think there is value in holding on to those points as something to look forward to in the future.</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #167</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and now, <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_167.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #167 — 6 Months On; Why Keep Travel Cards?','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-167-6-months-on-why-keep-travel-cards','','','2021-10-01 17:06:27','2021-10-01 22:06:27','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=2856',0,'post','',0),
(2857,1,'2020-09-18 20:59:41','2020-09-19 01:59:41','','F3E28DAE-0026-4E8A-957E-D6CE914F717C','','inherit','open','closed','','f3e28dae-0026-4e8a-957e-d6ce914f717c','','','2020-09-18 20:59:41','2020-09-19 01:59:41','',2856,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/F3E28DAE-0026-4E8A-957E-D6CE914F717C.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(2858,1,'2020-09-18 21:07:01','2020-09-19 02:07:01','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/F3E28DAE-0026-4E8A-957E-D6CE914F717C.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2857 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/F3E28DAE-0026-4E8A-957E-D6CE914F717C-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\n<figcaption>I\'ve put on the Quarantine 15</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p>My first post-lockdown flight was a 90-minute Southwest non-stop from Chicago to Nashville. It wasn\'t bad, but not as casually easy as my last pre-coronavirus flight in February. We talk about that experience as well as Hertz\'s new cleaning program, my latest pair of Bose noise-cancelling headphones, and then wonder when business travel will return. All this and more at the<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_167.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"> <strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/860072707&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #167: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after a week’s tour of the UP -- Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Did a counter-clockwise  circle route around Lake Michigan. Headed out east on Friday morning; stopped at a brewery in Grand Rapids for lunch; drove the 5 miles across the Mackinac Bridge just before dusk; and had my first UP pasty (the first of many) and a local beer for dinner that night in Sault Ste Marie. Spent a couple of days in Soo; watched 700-ft lake freighters make their way through the locks that connect Lake Superior to Lake Huron; I’m still enough of an engineer to geek out on that kind of stuff. We then drove west to Marquette for 3 days and again west to Houghton for 2 days before heading home through Wisconsin down the west side of Lake Michigan. It was all outdoors stuff -- hiking, biking, kayaking; the things that last-minute COVID closures or restrictions won’t muck up.  The UP has always been on my list of places to visit, but it’s always on sorta the B-list, and so plans to go someplace else -- Spain, Napa, Ireland -- would always push it down the list. But now, with most places blocked off with travel restrictions and quarantines, the UP -- drivable with lots of outdoor activities -- bubbled to the top of the list.</li><li>And I wasn’t the only one thinking that way. The guy renting rowboats at <a href=\"https://www2.dnr.state.mi.us/ParksandTrails/Details.aspx?id=428&amp;type=SPRK\">Tahquamenon Falls State Park</a> looked at our release forms and said “We’ve had a lot of people up here from Chicago. It’s been crazy busy. We can’t get enough people to handle it.” And biking around <a href=\"https://www.travelmarquette.com/things-to-do/attractions/presque-isle-park/\">Presque Isle Park</a> in Marquette, we got talking, in a socially distant way, to a biking couple up from St Louis. It was also their first time up. A bunch of their friends and family had been up earlier; they’d seen nothing but UP pictures in their Facebook feed for the past month.</li><li>The husband said that he had an underlying medical condition and so they were looking for places away from people; they’d rented a cabin in the little town of Au Train. Which got me thinking about the place we stayed in Soo -- the <a href=\"https://www.plazamotormotel.com/\">Plaza Motor Motel</a>. No lobby, no elevators, no hallways; no places to run into other guests; no need to have to remember to mask up when you leave your room. Just open your room door and there’s your car. Most frequent travelers would never think of voluntarily staying in a motor inn, a <em>mo</em>-tel. But with so many things changing in these unprecedented times, maybe COVID will have folks give motels another chance.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/bridges/15563\">i knew</a> by bridges (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. Ft: shannonsongs</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>First, a big shout out to the folks in Hanoi, Vietnam listening to TravelCommons on Soundcloud. One of the fun things about the podcast is looking at where people are listening from. For the most part, the stats make sense -- most of the listeners are from the US, and then English-speaking countries -- the UK, Canada, Australia. But every once in a while, there’s a spike that I just can’t figure out. I’ll see it, go look at the episode notes to see if I’ve mentioned that country, but I usually can’t make sense of it. Last fall, it was Argentina., but over the past couple of months, it’s been folks from Hanoi, primarily listening to April episode, #162, about post-lockdown trip planning and keeping a travel journal. Not sure why, but if you’re in Hanoi and you’ve made it to this episode - Hi! And thanks for listening!</li><li>Dan Grabon sent me a note at the beginning of the month about my lockdown reading that I mentioned during last month’s interview with Dr Emily Thomas<ul><li>“Mark,  I feel your pain. I started re-reading Walden back in April, and I just passed the halfway mark at the end of August. This was part of an overly ambitious effort to read one great book a month from a literary calendar that I bought. The Brothers Karamazov took up January through March, and even though COVID should have meant more time to read, it just hasn’t turned out that way.</li><li>“Writing this from a long overdue vacation near Lake George, where I saw the book Cabin Porn in a gift shop. Good timing.</li><li>“Thanks for keeping the podcast going— helps keep me going in this time of not going much of anywhere!”</li></ul></li><li>Dan, Thanks for the note. <em>The Brothers Karamazov</em> -- you are a better man than I.  I swore off of Russian fiction after suffering through <em>Crime and Punishment</em> in high school. That and Charles Dickens, just can’t do ‘em. And I am still working my way through <em>Walden</em>. Just got through his half-dozen pages on hoeing his bean field. I find if I try to read more than a dozen pages in a sitting, I just start skimming -- or sleeping. Glad you were able to get away to the wilderness of Lake George. Feel like the perfect place to find that Cabin Porn book.</li><li>Jim McDonough hit the TravelCommons Facebook page, following up on my comment in last month’s episode about my disappearing American flight from ORD to BCN. Jim writes...<ul><li>“We were going to Barcelona and Madrid with Rick Steves Europe in October, but of course Rick has canceled every tour for the rest of the year. Interestingly, AA says we are still booked on a BA 747 from SAN to LHR as part of this trip. BA has no more 747\'s and doesn\'t serve SAN any more.”</li></ul></li><li>I sometimes think any of the airline’s schedules more than one month out are more like aspirational projections than reflections of reality. Especially given how fast they’re shifting schedules to capture any sort of bump in passenger volume. Like United having <a href=\"https://airlineweekly.com/airlines-feeling-a-lift-from-rocky-mountain-hubs\">some transcontinental flights stop in DEN to pick up a bump in volume from people visiting national parks</a> -- there’s that outdoor activity trend again.</li><li>But back to that BCN trip, I should be getting things here in Chicago sorted before heading off for 2 weeks in Catalonia, but you’ve probably already guessed, that trip isn’t happening. Not a surprise. The EU still isn’t letting US travelers in and the case count in Spain’s second COVID wave has gotten worse in the last month. So at the beginning of the month, I gritted my teeth, called American and cancelled the flights. Actually, American had called me the prior week while we were in the UP, but I let it go to voicemail. We were in a taproom in Marquette and I didn’t feel ready to have that conversation. I wanted to have all our booking info in front of me and be clear minded (tough during a taproom session) and mentally girded for battle. So when I returned their call the next week, I was sitting in front of my laptop with all my itinerary documents up and was ready to go. It was a quick trip through the automated phone tree to a very nice woman in Dallas. No hassles with canceling. I was asking her about the logistics of the travel credit - how long will it be good for - when she said, “Since your flight was canceled and you were re-booked, you can get a refund if you like.” Wow. “Uh, yes,” I quickly said, not wanting her offer to disappear, “I think I’ll take the refund instead.” That was not what I expected from all the stories about American trying to keep as much cash as possible. It took her a couple of minutes to process the refunds during which we compared the weather between Chicago and Dallas. The refunds hit my credit card the following week, so full kudos to American on handling this. I’m hoping I don’t need to repeat in November for my Thanksgiving trip to London.</li><li>A couple of weeks back I was trading notes with TravelCommons contributor Allan Marko about <a href=\"https://www.sfgate.com/travel/article/United-bangalore-SFO-15551358.php\">United’s new SFO-Bangalore non-stop</a>. It’ll be their longest flight at 17½ hours. My immediate reaction was, of course, “that’s a helluva long time to wear a mask.” United is using a 787-9 with a special engine enhancement that makes the flight possible. Which got me thinking about what planes I’d flown into BLR. I’ve been using <a href=\"https://www.tripit.com/\">TripIt</a> since 2008 when it first broke out of the Silicon Valley venture cap bubble, so I logged in, clicked over to Past Trips and started clicking back through the pages -- and clicking and clicking because the last time I was in Bangalore was April 2014. I kept looking around the screen - there’s gotta be a way to export all my trip data; but I couldn’t find anything. So I sent a note to <a href=\"mailto:support@tripit.com\">support@tripit.com</a>. And, to my huge surprise, Andy from the Tripit Help Center replied in <em>15 minutes</em> saying “We currently do not offer customer driven travel data export capability. We have passed your suggestion on to the appropriate team for review.” Having run a software product team, I knew what that meant -- never. But, in the next paragraph, Andy offered a solution -- “You can check out a third party app Openflights. They have an API with TripIt that will allow you to import trips from your TripIt account to their site. From there you can create a list of all of your flights and download them to a csv file. Their basic account is free to use.” Sweet. I thanked Andy for his quick reply and hit <a href=\"https://openflights.org/\">Openflights</a>. I set up an account, hit the “Import” button and connected to my TripIt account. The import was a touch kludgy -- I had to go page by page, review each trip, and mark it to import. After 88 pages, I had imported 1006 flight segments, which they displayed on a world map. I clicked on BLR and a little card popped up. I clicked on the first option and it listed the 8 flights I’d taken to and from BLR. Turns out I’d mostly flown Airbus A320s, though I did once fly a 747-400 in from FRA. It has a couple of analysis buttons -- like my longest flight -- Joburg to IAD at 17:40 (ha! 10 minutes longer than the SFO-BLR flight); and my shortest -- IAD again, but this time a 44-minute flight to CHO. And of course, I was able to download all my trips into Excel so I can noodle around to my heart’s content. Openflights is free, but I’m going to <a href=\"https://openflights.org/donate\">donate</a> to help keep them going. <a href=\"https://openflights.org/\">Openflights.org</a> -- definitely recommended. I’ll put a link in the show notes.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/bridges/15563\">i knew</a> by bridges (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. Ft: shannonsongs</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>6 Months of Pandemic</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Finally giving into reality and canceling my Barcelona flight 6 months after booking it got me thinking back on these -- you know what’s coming -- <em>unprecedented</em> times. Airlines canceled flights to China at the end of January, then to South Korea, Iran, and Italy in February, until, by the beginning of March, airline traffic joined the stock market in a free fall. But back then, we thought it was a one-off event, kinda like Sept 11th; a sharp, scary event that came out of nowhere with no warning but that would soon pass. So taking advantage of one of the many March fare sales to book a flight at the end of September didn’t seem that risky.</li><li>I was talking to one of my consulting friends a couple of weeks ago. His travel schedule was similar to mine - a week without seeing an airport was a rare exception. He hasn’t been on a plane since March and doesn’t know when he’ll get on one next. He just started a project with a manufacturer in Cincinnati. Most of the project will be virtual, but he’s pretty sure he ought to at least put eyes on their plant. He lives outside Detroit. In the past, he’d be flying down every week. Now, he fires up Google Maps -- it’s a 4½ drive down I-75. He’ll drive down once, stay a couple of days, and then head back home. </li><li>I can’t say that anyone I’ve talked to misses the act of business travel -- getting up at 0 dark 30 Monday morning to get to the airport, shuffle through the PreCheck line for 15-20 minutes, and then shoehorn into a full flight for an hour or 3.  But we did it because that was part of the job. But now that it’s not, at least for now and what seems like (for now) through the end of the year, everybody is taking full advantage of sleeping in -- in their own beds.</li><li>Which explains why, of all the US airlines, Spirit Airlines, with its complete focus on low-cost leisure travelers, is the only one sounding even somewhat non-negative.  And hotel chains like Choice, focused on what they call “drive-to” locations and extended stay properties getting occupancy rates over 50% while center city hotels like Chicago’s Hilton Palmer House are missing rent payments and slouching towards bankruptcy.</li><li>Irene and I were sitting outside at a microbrewery a couple of days ago, enjoying a sunny afternoon full in the knowledge that we have maybe 4 weeks of outdoor eating and drinking left in Chicago. We talked about what kind of travel we would do over the next 12 months, figuring travel restrictions and periodic lockdowns are going to be the norm for at least that long. No big plans; nothing that COVID could blow up but seeing some new places -- some skiing, maybe trying out Montana; some hiking, maybe checking out the Texas Hill Country. But next month, we’re trading Barcelona for Philadelphia; now that they’ve opened up the restaurants again, check out our old neighborhood and visit with some friends. It’ll be Irene’s first flight since February. It took a bit of talking, but I really think the threat of a total of 22 hrs in a car with me -- alone -- tipped her over. </li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/3lb3r3th/44072\">Misunderstood</a> by 3lb3r3th (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: Alchemistry</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Do We Keep Travel Credit Cards?</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Last week, <a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/14/delta-launches-6point5-billion-debt-deal-backed-by-its-frequent-flyer-program.html\">Delta used their SkyMiles program to back $6.5 billion in debt</a>, running the same play that United and American did in June. What caught my eye was some of the stats that came out with the debt filing -- that <a href=\"https://skift.com/2020/09/15/how-delta-looks-to-leverage-rewards-from-its-own-frequent-flyer-program/\">SkyMiles had about $6.1 billion in revenue in 2019, about two-thirds from American Express</a> which issues a co-branded Delta card, and that <a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/14/delta-launches-6point5-billion-debt-deal-backed-by-its-frequent-flyer-program.html\">total miles redeemed fell by 78% in the first half of this year.</a> The big carriers are leaning on their loyalty programs for cash, their biggest customers are credit card issuers, but those card users - us - are generating points that we’ve stopped using. </li><li>It’s against this background that I called up Matt Schulz, chief credit analyst at LendingTree, and to ask him -- do we want to keep travel credit cards?<ul><li>Matt, a lot of folks carry at least one travel credit card and I don’t think I’m going too far out on a limb guessing that damn close to every TravelCommons listeners carry them. We’re 6 months on from the COVID lockdowns and the resulting cratering of the travel industry. But with travel not recovering -- airline demand is still just a third of pre-pandemic levels and United Airlines’ CEO said last week it could be 3-4 years before it’s back to 2019 levels -- what are card holders doing with these cards generating frequent traveler points that they can’t or don’t want to use?</li><li>Back in March and April, it seemed the strategy for the big travel card issuers -- Chase, Citi, Amex -- seemed to be to sacrifice revenue to hold share -- statement credits for annual fees if you called them to cancel, new bonuses for stay-at-home purchases to keep wallet share -- seemed like 5x bonuses for grocery and gas was the most popular. Made sense when everyone was talking about 2-week shutdowns and a V-shaped recovery. But, as we said before, travel is gonna stay depressed for a while -- between state and country quarantines and many people not wanting to get in a plane -- how are travel card companies going to handle the next round of renewals? When I call Chase and Amex again, do I get more statement credits -- do they continue to fight for share? And if they don’t, what do I do with the balance of Ultimate or Membership Rewards points that I’ll lose if I don’t re-up and pay the fee?</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #167</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and now, <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_167.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #167 — 6 Months of Pandemic; Why Keep Travel Cards?','','inherit','closed','closed','','2856-revision-v1','','','2020-09-18 21:07:01','2020-09-19 02:07:01','',2856,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/09/18/2856-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2859,1,'2020-09-18 21:35:00','2020-09-19 02:35:00','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_1820\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/IMG_0548.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1820\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/IMG_0548-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> One Way to Reduce Packing Needs by 50%[/caption]</p>\n<p>Fitting 10 days of clothes for rain, hiking, and Michelin restaurants into a 22-inch carry-on forced me to pack ruthlessly, and to distill my packing thoughts into 5 packing pro tips. Flying to Hungary right after a cycling accident reminded me of the hassles of traveling on the injured reserve list. All this and listener comments on EU mobile regulations, travel apps on smartphones, and the need for Atlanta baggage X-ray ninja skills at the&nbsp;<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_133.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_133.mp3\"]<br><!--more--><br>Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #133:</p>\n<ul>\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL after what has been a light month of travel, just 10 days in Scotland on vacation, and then a quick overnight to Atlanta a couple of days after I returned. Other than that, I’ve been in Chicago trying to get back my body clock back to local time. Conventional wisdom says that your body will adjust at the rate of 1-2 time zones a day. So, for the 6 hours between Chicago and the UK, it should take me 3-5 days to adjust. I dunno, it’s felt longer than that. The older I get, the longer it seems to get.</li>\n<li>It’s also harder for me coming west than going east. When I go to Europe, I can set an alarm to wake up at the right time and will myself out of bed and into the shower. Back in the US, I can’t quite “will” myself back to sleep when I wake up at 2 or 3 in the morning. I did find, though, on this trip that I needed to be careful how long I stayed up the first couple of nights. My usual routine is to take a 30-minute nap the first afternoon I’m there -- say around 4:30 -- which then lets me push through to, say 10 or 11 that night. I’m then tired enough to get to sleep at what my body might still think is 5 or 6pm. This trip, I found that if I stayed up past midnight -- maybe because I got to reading something after getting back from dinner -- my body sorta tipped over that inflection point, caught a second, or is it a third wind, and would be happy to push through to 2 or 3 in the morning, which would make the morning’s alarm much tougher to handle.</li>\n<li>The United flight to and from Edinburgh was direct -- always nice -- but on an old 757 that had definitely seen better days, and many of them. Eight hours on any narrow body is tough, but on a 757 -- the narrowest of the narrow bodies -- it’s a bit tougher. And it was completely full -- nothing out-of-the-ordinary nowadays. Our flight from ORD landed shortly after the United direct from EWR landed, and so there was quite a queue for the non-EU passport line. Indeed, as we were coming off the jet bridge, an airport worker turned off the escalator and blocked it off. The end of the passport queue was beginning to block it on the floor below. So I reached into my backpack and pulled out my UK passport and was waved over to a set of four unmanned automated gates with no lines. I put my passport in, took my glasses off for the camera, and walked through when the gates opened up. It was pretty slick.</li>\n<li>I still had to wait for my wife and kids to work their way through the non-EU line, but I made some good use of the time -- I helped a mother and daughter from the EWR flight wrestle some amazing large bags onto a luggage cart, and had collected all of our luggage. If they had a Starbucks there in baggage claim like they do at ORD, it would’ve been damn close to a perfect morning.</li>\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/bridges/15563\">i knew</a> by bridges (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp;Ft: shannonsongs</li>\n</ul>\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<ul>\n<li>Received some good comments on the last episode</li>\n<li>Nick -- no last name on the e-mail -- helped answer the question I had about arbitraging different European phone SIMs now that the EU had banned roaming charges. Nick writes -\n<ul>\n<li>You mentioned having 3 EU SIMs to choose from in Dublin, and working out the best value of the three.<br>I live in the UK and have a UK SIM. If I go to Spain, and call a UK number (even if that number belongs to the person next to me) then I just pay a local rate call - or nothing if I have an unlimited calls account. However, if I call a Spanish number, then it counts as an overseas call, as if I were in the UK - even though I\'m in Spain. So which is the best SIM to use will to an extent depend on the actual call rates, but also which country it is registered in, and which country you are calling, independently of where you are.<br>I hope that makes sense, and it\'s useful</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n<li>Nick, thanks for that. It makes a lot of sense when I recall that the EU wanted to eliminate roaming charges, so a mobile call from the UK is the same as one from Spain. For us, though, we’re rarely making a phone call. Indeed, I’m usually the only one making phone calls and that’s typically into a conference bridge. During our 10 days in Scotland, I used 11 of the 300 minutes in my 30 day plan. My wife’s 7 day plan ran out and she never noticed, because her 1 GB of data didn’t. And I think that’s where the arbitrage still could work, on using the cheapest data plan. That will, though, take a good bit of wading through really bad websites with confusing plan descriptions that are only partially in English. I think I’ll probably default to using my UK SIM just out of sheer laziness.</li>\n<li>Steve Frick left a comment on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page about the new parallel loading baggage X-ray machines I’ve encountered in the ATL PreCheck line. Steve writes -\n<ul>\n<li>I agree with you that people are hesitant to jump the queue in front of others..... and you do need mad ninja skills if you\'re in the first slot trying to grab one of those oversized bins</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n<li>Steve linked to his blog post where he has video and a more detailed description of the situation. Check out the show notes for a <a href=\"http://www.hypeorlando.com/back-and-gone-again/2017/05/01/atlanta-hartsfield-has-automated-the-tsa-process/\">link to his blog</a></li>\n<li>I have to give the ATL TSA crew props for noticing the problem with breaking into the stream of bins if you’re in one of the front loading stations. When I was going through ATL a few weeks back, there was a TSA person at the parallel loading line choreographing each bin push, having everyone hold up until all the previous bins had cleared, and then having everyone push their bins onto the conveyor at once. I haven’t seen this problem with parallel loaders in, say, Edinburgh or Heathrow or Madrid. I wonder what’s different that requires this manual intervention.</li>\n<li>And there were a couple of comments on the travel apps people use on their smartphones. Dan Brener left this Facebook\n<ul>\n<li>Great episode! Here\'s the apps I use the most: Air Canada and United, TripIt (although it\'s not as good as it could/should be), I used to use FlightTrack and really miss it, FlightAware since the AC app doesn\'t tell me where planes are coming from, Uber and Lyft, Packing (it\'s a list app to make sure I don\'t forget something obvious!), SPG, Yelp, Google Maps and Waze. There\'s a few others, but those are the main ones.</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n<li>Dan, thanks for that list. I had forgotten to mention Yelp in the last episode. I have some colleagues who are heavy Yelp users; they’ll build lists of restaurants and bars before starting a project in a new city. I tend to use Yelp and the “Explore food &amp; drinks near you” feature in Google Maps for restaurant suggestions interchangeably when I’m in a new place. I’m always surprised at how different the recommendations often are.</li>\n<li>Gary Learned sent in on Twitter -\n<ul>\n<li>What I love about Lyft over Uber is their ability to produce a consolidated receipt of all my rides on a trip</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n<li>Thanks Gary. I’ve noticed that functionality in the Lyft app, but it’s not hugely useful for me since we use Concur for our T&amp;E reporting, and it picks up the individual Amex charges rather than a feed from Lyft. Would be handy if Concur would pull a single consolidated charge from Lyft.</li>\n<li>And finally, a couple of weeks later on Twitter, Eddie Antar, who is always a chuckle, said\n<ul>\n<li>Binge listening to TC bc I had to let an AA voucher expire.? OTOH I\'m not being groped or dragged down the aisle screaming, so.</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n<li>I dunno, listening to my is better than being groped or dragged down the plane aisle. Feels a bit like being damned with very faint praise...</li>\n<li>And one last Tweet, this one from the Craig and Linda Martin of the Indie Travel Podcast…\n<ul>\n<li>Highlight of the week? meeting fellow travel podcaster @mpeacock for lunch &amp; craft beer in Edinburgh. 10 or so years of podcast friendship</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n<li>Honestly, I think Linda and I had been trading e-mails for most of this year, seeing if we could physically meet up after so many years of knowing each other in the travel podcast universe. One of us would hear the other mention travel plans in a podcast that might overlap with the other’s. It finally came together at the end of our Scotland vacation and the beginning of theirs. They flew into EDI Sunday night; we were leaving from EDI Tuesday morning, so Monday lunch was the call. I drove over from St Andrews to a new neighborhood for me; kinda hip. Linda picked a nice pub with a great beer list that we all enjoyed. It is one of the great things about travel -- getting to meet up with friends; and in this case, for the first time.</li>\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/11510\">Funkist</a> - cdk dub mix by cdk (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: teru.</li>\n</ul>\n<p><strong>Packing Pro Tips</strong></p>\n<ul>\n<li>Getting everything I needed for our 10 days in Scotland into a carry-on bag pushed my packing skills just a bit. The trip was mostly hiking and hill walks with a couple of 1-star Michelin restaurants thrown into the mix. And the forecast was for rain just about every day. We were on a direct flight to EDI and my daughter had to check a bag with stuff she was taking back to university, so the carry-on limitation wasn’t because of lost luggage or being able to power past the baggage carousel -- a non-starter given the long non-EU immigration line at EDI. It was more about trunk space in the rental car. As it was, I was doing luggage jenga just about every morning trying to puzzle everything into the back of our Nissan X-Terra.</li>\n<li>I easily spent an hour -- 2-3 times longer than usual -- trying to figure out how to get hiking shoes, rain gear, dress shirts, and everything else into that 22-inch bag. It made me pack ruthlessly -- everything had to earn its space in the bag. And though I’ve casually mentioned some of these ideas in prior episodes, this latest packing experience really crystallized this pro tip list.</li>\n<li>First and foremost, pick a single color family for your clothes, and make it black. Three main reasons -- Black makes everyone look thinner, it spans casual to smart dress codes, and black doesn’t show stains. OK, the thinner thing is a nice-to-have, but hiding stains is key. I packed two pair of slacks and wore a third on the plane. I couldn’t be one-and-done because I took incoming from a fork-handling mishap.</li>\n<li>Second, no one-and-done outfits. Every piece of clothes has to serve multiple purposes so it can be worn multiple times -- every shirt has to work under multiple sweaters and has to go with more than one pair of pants. Versatility is key. And yet another reason to pack black.</li>\n<li>Third, think \"additively\"; pack layers. This was key in my last packing challenge too -- last year’s Spring Break trip to Iceland and Southern Spain that I talked about in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/05/30/podcast-121-tsa-lines-my-luggage-is-where/\">episode #121</a>. Pack multiple thin layers that you can pile on when it’s cold and wear separately when it’s not. Black sweaters and a black fleece vest are my layering go-to’s.</li>\n<li>Fourth, wear your bulkiest clothes on the flight. I packed the hiking rain shell and flew in the blazer I needed for the 1-stars because the shell is infinitely more crushable. My only caveat to this is shoes. I packed the hiking shoes, even though they were bulkier than the dressily casual walking shoes I was also bringing, because I didn’t want to set off the metal detector in the Pre-Check line or get pulled out because the soles are too thick. If you’re not doing Pre-Check, you’re already taking your shoes off, so wear your biggest ones.</li>\n<li>And my fifth and final pro tip, use a non-descript black rolling bag. Black not only makes you look thinner, it makes your bag look thinner to gate agents scanning for bag-sizer bait. My daughter had a baby blue roller bag for the longest time. She loved that color, and it was easy to spot on the luggage carousel, which is a good thing; it ended up there a lot because gate agents were always pulling my daughter out of line to gate check that bag. Her current bag is a dark eggplant purple. It’s not black, but it’s close. If you’re flying a budget airline that’s a stickler on size, use a hard-shell bag. It’ll keep its dimensions better when overstuffed, and the polycarbonate shell will slide past the metal bars of the sizer easier than the ballistic nylon of a soft-sided bag.</li>\n<li>There you go, my five packing pro tips. If you’ve got some of your own to share, send them along through the usual channels and we’ll have them on the next episode.</li>\n<li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/48705\">Jolanta Blues</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: Admiral Bob, Martijn de Boer</li>\n</ul>\n<p><strong>Traveling Injured</strong></p>\n<ul>\n<li>In a couple of <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/02/06/podcast-87-sick-on-the-road-whats-in-my-briefcase/\">past</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/03/13/podcast-88-new-travel-goodies-losing-status/\">episodes</a>, we’ve talked about how miserable it is to be sick on the road.&nbsp;Traveling injured is a bit similar, but not quite the same. While you’re not, say, shivering under hotel blankets after you’ve cranked the thermostat as high as it’ll go, you’re not powering through your day at 100%.</li>\n<li>The most recent stint on travel injured reserve was our May trip to Hungary. My wife had left the week before to visit her aunt and cousins, leaving me alone with the cat. I was working from home one nice day and decided to take a break for a bike ride. Figured I should take every opportunity to burn some calories now since Hungarian food isn’t known as spa cuisine. I did my normal 17-mile circuit for the 50th or 60th time. Coming towards the last mile, I’m looking ahead to line up a turn and boom -- I hit some huge divot in the pavement that I’ve never seen before. My hands fly off the handle bar, I see the front wheel turned 90 degrees, and down I go, skidding across the asphalt. I come to a stop just short of the curb, pick myself up, rinse the visible road rash with the last bits of water in my bottle, and limp my bike and myself home.</li>\n<li>I immediately hit the shower, scrubbed out the road rash (with, as you might imagine, a bit of loud vocal commentary), and surveyed the damage. Good sized abrasions on my right elbow and forearm, my right butt cheek, both knees, and a line on my left chest where I must’ve popped the handle bar. I lost a bunch of skin, but felt lucky I didn’t break a collarbone or something worse.</li>\n<li>The Friday night flight to Vienna was not a comfortable one. No knock on Austrian Airlines; as I mentioned in an <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/06/24/podcast-130-notes-from-hungary/\">earlier podcast</a>, I was happy with their service. It was primarily the seat -- a standard coach seat, so not overly spacious -- pressing up against that large bit of road rash on my right, uhh, hip. Indeed, that abrasion was still -- I think “weeping” is the technical term. And so halfway through the flight, I was in the toilet with my tube of neosporin, my gauze pads and my surgical tape re-dressing it. It was either that or change pants. And following my packing pro tips, I couldn’t do a one-and-done on these pants. Luckily, I was in that quiet time between the after-dinner and the just-before-landing toilet rushes, so no banging on the door to hurry up.</li>\n<li>Every day was like that -- 30 minutes of removing and reapplying dressings, at first 3 times a day, then 2, and then when things finally scabbed up a bit, just in the morning, and really by then as much for cosmetic purposes -- so that people wouldn’t ask me about it -- as much as anything. I had to skip the family trip to a Budapest thermal bath -- I didn’t want some bath guard calling me out of the pool in front of a couple of thousand Hungarians, and I honestly wasn’t sure how aggressively they were chlorinating that water.</li>\n<li>That wasn’t my most awkward stint on the travel injured reserve list. Last year, I squeezed in a dermatologist appt for a mole scan before a flight out that afternoon. The doc said “This one looks a bit suspect”, putting his finger on a mole right in the middle of my back. He numbed it up, shaved it off, sent it off to the lab and bandaged me up. “Change that dressing every day,” he said as I raced out to head to ORD. The next morning, in a hotel bathroom, by myself, looking in the mirror at the gauze dressing between my shoulder blades that I couldn’t reach, I wondered how I could change that dressing -- call the front desk, ask a colleague? That seemed way too much to ask. And, it wasn’t that big of a mole. That dressing could wait ‘til Friday.</li>\n</ul>\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<ul>\n<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #133</li>\n<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\n<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_133.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #133 — Packing Pro Tips; Traveling Injured','','inherit','closed','closed','','1819-revision-v1','','','2020-09-18 21:35:00','2020-09-19 02:35:00','',1819,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/09/18/1819-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2861,1,'2020-09-18 21:44:20','2020-09-19 02:44:20','[caption id=\"attachment_1843\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/2D9A5999-E233-4434-BFCE-4A45D285BEA6.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1843\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/2D9A5999-E233-4434-BFCE-4A45D285BEA6-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Status Recognition in Vietnam[/caption]\n<p>Finding a Jag in the Hertz Presidents Club aisle has me thinking about the differing value of loyalty from hotel, airlines, and car rental companies while 5-star rating schemes are pushing grade inflation. All this and comments on luggage discounts, traveling while injured, and #metoo while flying at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_134.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_134.mp3\"]<br /><!--more--><br />Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #134:</p>\n<ul>\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. No exciting or exotic travel since the last episode; just a quick down-and-back to Atlanta, a day in Washington, DC, and a few trips to Charlottesville, VA.</li>\n<li>The first trip to Charlottesville, about 3 weeks ago, was the first time I’d been back in 5 months after spending more than a year there. Other than the flights being poorly timed -- there are non-stops from ORD, but they arrive at either 2:45 in the afternoon or quarter past midnight -- it’s been a great town to visit. So I was surprised as anyone by the white supremacist march there in August.</li>\n<li>I was on the late night flight and when I walked out of the terminal, the one cab at the curb had already been claimed. But it was only a 4 min wait for a Lyft driver, so not a problem. Indeed, it turned out to be a great ride. The Lyft driver, an older black guy, told me, unprompted, the whole back story of the protests; how it started as a local political battle that then blew up big. He wanted me to know that Charlottesville wasn’t like that. He told me “I’ve lived here for 40 years and have never seen that statue, until one day, I drove past a park, looked to my right and there it was!”</li>\n<li>Since the white supremacists had shown back up the Saturday before we came back, I said to the project team, “We need to find out where that statue is so we can avoid it.” One is from India, the other born in the US of Indian parents. I didn’t want us stumbling into a line of tiki torch-bearing protesters.<br />But as we got working that day, we forgot about it. Driving to dinner, we missed a turn -- actually we missed going straight; instead followed the road as it turned -- and as we wandered through some side streets to get back on track, I look to my right, and there’s the Robert E Lee statue covered in black tarp, with a couple of people camped out in front of it, and another group of people walking toward it. I suggested that we didn’t need to come to a complete stop at intersection. And, well, we know where that statue is now.</li>\n<li>For all of my complaints and bitch tweeting about delayed flights, I have to say that my American flight home from Reagan National Saturday morning was great. Exit row seat; no one in the middle. Everyone boarded quickly; they closed the door and left 10 minutes early and with no traffic on the taxiway and a beautiful sunny day, we were up and over the Potomac in 5 minutes. Typically, though, nothing like this goes unpunished at ORD, but we landed, didn’t have to wait for a gate, and taxied immediately in, arriving a half-hour early. Damn if this doesn’t make me look forward to my next trip.</li>\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/52154\">release.JOY.release</a> by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: essesq, Haskel (hej31)</li>\n</ul>\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<ul>\n<li>On my most recent trip through the ATL PreCheck line, there was no X-Ray machine choreography this time. If you remember in the last episode, I talked about the TSA agent at the parallel loading X-Ray machine coordinating each bin push, having everyone hold up until all the previous bins had cleared, and then having everyone push their bins onto the conveyor at once. Not this time, though I did get a bit of a stink eye from a couple when I walked around them to one of the further up loading stations. They’re obviously not old PC heads, otherwise they’d instantly understand the difference between serial and parallel paths.</li>\n<li>Following up on the packing pro tips topics from the last episode, which I also repurposed/recycled into the Ruthless Packing Tips blog post, Dan Bennett, the CEO of Test Facts, sent me a link to study where they tested and compared 32,672 luggage prices. I’ll put a <a href=\"https://www.testfacts.com/luggage-prices-analyzed/\"><strong>link</strong> </a>to the study in the show notes, but a couple of interesting factoids from their introductory infographic\n<ul>\n<li>You can save an average of $110/39% buying on-line</li>\n<li>Walmart and Target’s on-line stores tend to have the highest discounts; Kohl’s and Macy’s the lowest</li>\n<li>Amazon is in 10th place for average discount (in the 40% range), but is tops by a long way in greatest variety -- over 12,000 luggage items vs. 7,500 for Jet which was #2</li>\n<li>Luggage sets have a 23% higher discount than single pieces</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n<li>Check it out -- it’s an interesting piece of analysis</li>\n<li>Jim McDonough posted a “traveled while injured” story on Facebook that put my biking injury whining in its place\n<ul>\n<li>My wife and I were in County Kerry on the West Coast of Ireland. We were killing time before dinner, at an ancient stone circle on the edge of town. I was taking some photos, and it started raining. While walking down a slope, I was putting my camera back in my bag to keep it dry, when my left foot slipped on the wet grass. My right knee hyper-flexed, causing a complete tear of my quadriceps tendon. There was a loud crack, but no pain.</li>\n<li>It turns out you can\'t walk without a quadriceps tendon. We didn\'t know what the problem was. My wife ran off and found some people and got them to come and get me, and they took me to the doctor\'s house. The doctor (more like a physician\'s assistant, the regular doctor was away) poked around but couldn\'t diagnose anything. We went back to our B&amp;B but did not go out to dinner that night!</li>\n<li>Flying home, Dublin/Gatwick/DFW, I needed assistance for the connections. British Airways took such good care of me in Gatwick that I fly them whenever I can. While on the plane I was OK - I used seat backs to get to/from the head. American was supposed to provide a wheelchair at DFW but they failed to until the lead flight attendant got on the horn and got me one. I had surgery a couple of days later, and my rehab took a few months.</li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">This is the same injury that Bill Clinton had at Greg Norman\'s house. He had a better medical plan than I did</span></li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n<li>Just “ouch”, Jim. Reminds me of years ago when I broke my right foot getting out of my car in Philadelphia. I stepped on some broken concrete and heard a loud “snap”! After a long wait in an ER in downtown Philly -- where they rightly were triaging gunshot victims over me -- they plastered me up to my thigh and told me not to put any weight on my foot. The next day, I’m hobbling through 30th Street Station and down the stairs to the train platform on crutches with a carry-on bag across my back, swinging with every step. No one from Amtrak took any sort of care of me.</li>\n<li>Mika Pyyhkala tweeted me a great video of what I assume is a new service that guides blind travelers through airports. I’ll put a <a href=\"https://youtu.be/rXtv-M4WpMU\"><strong>link</strong> </a>in the show notes. It’s a great demo, show how a person in the contact center is viewing a real-time video stream through what I assume is a camera mounted on the head of the traveler, and then providing audio guidance. And watching the video made me realize what a mine field an airport is for blind or low-sight travelers. I guess I should’ve realized this; it’s typically a mine field for those with 20/20 vision. Thanks Mika for the pointer. Very cool video.</li>\n<li>The #metoo Twitter campaign on sexual harassment that started up a couple of weeks ago reminded me of a couple of stories women have told me about seat assignments. One from a woman CIO; she’s sitting in her aisle seat, pre-boarded with the top status group and is downloading some last-minute e-mails during regular boarding. She looks up, there’s a guy standing there who says “Why don’t you just slide over, honey”, pointing to the center seat. She closed her PC, stood up and pointed the guy to his center seat, and then leaned out into the aisle for the rest of the flight. Another story was from a friend, a woman air marshal, who was sitting in her assigned aisle First Class seat -- armed and incognito to everyone except the flight crew. During boarding, a well-known male TV host on MSNBC asks her to switch seats. She can’t; the regulations say that air marshals need to be in their assigned seats; but she can’t tell him that and stay undercover, so she politely tells him “No”. To which he becomes very irate, obnoxiously berating her -- “Do you know who I am” and all that. As much as she’d love to tell him why she can’t move, she can’t. So she has to sit there and take it, until finally a flight attendant comes over and intervenes. Followed by, again, an uncomfortable 2-hr flight in close quarters with a troglodyte. Sexual harassment is bad -- full stop. Having to fend someone off, and then be in the same tight metal tube with him unable to leave, even worse.</li>\n<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/snowflake/56508\">Rise Up (Like the Sun)</a> by Snowflake (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: Bluemillenium, Sackjo22, Martin Luther King, Kara Square</li>\n</ul>\n<p><strong>What’s the Current Value of Loyalty?</strong></p>\n<ul>\n<li>I continue to love Hertz’s new Presidents Club pick-your-own car aisle. Yes, National has been doing it for years. But on my last trip to Atlanta, I’m walking down the aisle looking at the cars -- Altima, Altima, Hyundai, Altima, Jag, Altima -- wait, what? I very quickly back up. It’s a new Jaguar Model XF. I look up -- nope, I haven’t slipped into the Upgrade aisle. I throw my bag in the back and take off for one of my nicer drives up I-85 through the city. Another time, I’m walking down the aisle and a Hertz guy pulls a new Dodge Charger into the space next to me. He hops out, hands me the keys saying “We want to make sure you guys have a nice selection of cars to choose from.” And so now as the year is winding down, I’m looking -- how many more rentals to keep Presidents Club status?</li>\n<li>I felt the flip side of this last week at the Charlottesville Courtyard where as I’m filling up a couple of water glasses in the workout room cooler, I tweet “I kinda hate Courtyard Hotels. They offer the worst experience for the money to Marriott Platinum members…” Scott Drake tweeted back “I’ll be the contrarian: at the price point is it not valuable? Are you expecting the JW experience at a Courtyard?” while Michael Kline asked “Detailed explanation? Maybe on the podcast?” Mine was a tweet that come from a comparison between my stay at an Atlanta Marriott the prior week and this Courtyard. For about the same rate, the Atlanta Marriott gave me a bit of a welcome gift, free breakfast every morning, and restocked my room with bottled water. The Courtyard -- I could either pick a bottle of something from their little market next to the front desk or have one free coffee during my stay. I took the bottle of water, which I then filled up every morning in the workout room until the maid threw it out. Not knocking the maid -- she’s just doing her job. But as I’m carrying the now filled water glasses back to my room, I’m thinking -- why am I staying here? And again, it’s not that I couldn’t go buy a bottle of water and expense it, it was more the disconnect of the thing -- how much better the Marriott treated me for the same price.</li>\n<li>On my last trip to ATL, I flew DL where I have absolutely no status. I was trying to thread my flights between already-booked conference calls, and DL, with way more flights than AA or UA, was the only way to string everything together. On the way down, I couldn’t get a seat assignment until I was at the gate -- 32B, second-to-the-last row on an old Boeing 717 -- the last of the DC-9/MD-80 series that I think Delta got from the old AirTrans. At the gate I thought I lucked into an aisle seat, but those 717’s have a 3-2 seat configuration, opposite of AA and the old NW, so B is a middle seat. The flight was fine; the service reasonable, and it was a short flight, so it wasn’t a big deal. But it was definitely a less enjoyable experience that my Saturday flight on American, with an exit row aisle seat and an empty middle seat.</li>\n<li>There was a study a few months ago that showed American was the most stingy carrier with award seats. And there are other ways that they’ve eroded the value of loyalty. I’ve flown American since July 1985 when I started my first full-time job in Dallas and I’ve noticed that chipping way over what’s now 37 years -- that’s a frightening number to say out loud. But when my objective is to get from Point A to Point B with the least amount of hassle, there is still some value to loyalty.</li>\n<li>Which is kinda the muddling middle ground I’ve carved out nowadays; invest enough time/effort to hit the loyalty level that fits the value I will get. I’ll go out of my way to re-up my Hertz status because it’s given me great rental car choices. I won’t push for anything more than mid-level airline status because, with the high load factors and the push to sell 1st-class seats, there not much more to get than free front-of-the-plane seating and a reasonable shot at overhead bin space. Going out of my way to make American’s Exec Platinum or United’s 1K again doesn’t appear to be worth it. And with Courtyards, there’s not much value in a $2 bottle of water.</li>\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djiz/10514\">Nube - Djiz Rmx</a> by Kwame (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: SylviaO</li>\n</ul>\n<p><strong>Need Those 5 Stars</strong></p>\n<ul>\n<li>A few months ago, after an overnight stay at a Residence Inn in Baltimore, I wrote up a TripAdvisor review. I titled it “Pretty standard Residence Inn experience” and gave the place 3 whatever TripAdvisor calls them -- stars, circles -- whatever they are, I gave them 3. Seemed in line with the review, where I said “Standard Residence Inn set up; friendly service. Shuttle driver provided good service driving us to/from nearby businesses”. Nothing controversial. So I was a little surprised when I got a note the next day from the general manager\n<ul>\n<li>“Thank you very much for going on TripAdvisor.com to review our hotel. We greatly appreciate it. One request I have, if you would be willing, is if you might consider changing your rating from a 3 star review to a 4 star review. Marriott hotels views a 3 star review or lower as a “0”. Meaning the hotel takes a hit/mark against it for providing what Marriott considers is a “bad” stay which is 3 or under in their view. It looks like your comments indicate that you had a good stay. In that regard, I wonder if you would be willing to change your score up to a 4? We would really appreciate it if you would.”</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n<li>I didn’t change the rating. Maybe I should’ve, but honestly, I don’t know. And even if I did, I really didn’t want to. I thought it was a 3-star experience. I’m sorry that Marriott doesn’t give you credit for that, but I kinda feel like that’s not my problem</li>\n<li>Now, I’m nothing if not inconsistent, because I’ll give every Uber and Lyft driver 5 stars if they get me to my destination in a reasonably clean car. Indeed, I was right with my son when he jumped all over my wife for giving a Lyft driver 3 stars for what she thought was an “OK, nothing special” ride. “You gonna get him kicked off!” he said. And he wasn’t wrong. Internal Uber documents leaked a few years back said that drivers with ratings less than 4.6 would be considered for deactivation. So this is a little different than TripAdvisor. Here, Uber, the owner of the platform, is saying that a reasonable, acceptable ride should be 5 stars, since anything less will slide the driver down toward the deactivation zone.</li>\n<li>It’s the Internet version of the Lake Wobegon effect -- everybody is above average. The latest stats I saw on Yelp said that the average rating is 3.8 and 46% of their reviews had 5 stars. Which explains why that 4-star diner you drove to try out was just “OK”.</li>\n<li>Call me cranky, but the two apps that I regularly rate on -- TripAdvisor and Untappd -- I rate “average” as a 3; kinda like King Canute trying to hold back the waves of grade inflation. On Untappd, anything below a 3, I wouldn’t order again. a 3 is OK, 4 is a great beer, 5 outstanding. I just downloaded my stats into Excel and after a little remedial pivot table training, I can see that I’m a bit skewed -- 13% of my ratings are below 3; 60% are between 3 and 3.75; 26% between 4 and 4.75; and 1% at 5 with a median rating of 3.5. Not as bad as Yelp, but maybe it’s because I really like beer.</li>\n</ul>\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<ul>\n<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #134</li>\n<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\n<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_134.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #134 — Value of Loyalty; Need Those 5 Stars','','inherit','closed','closed','','1842-revision-v1','','','2020-09-18 21:44:20','2020-09-19 02:44:20','',1842,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/09/18/1842-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2862,1,'2020-09-18 21:45:15','2020-09-19 02:45:15','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/F3E28DAE-0026-4E8A-957E-D6CE914F717C.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2857 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/F3E28DAE-0026-4E8A-957E-D6CE914F717C-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\n<figcaption>I\'ve put on the Quarantine 15</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p>My first post-lockdown flight was a 90-minute Southwest non-stop from Chicago to Nashville. It wasn\'t bad, but not as casually easy as my last pre-coronavirus flight in February. We talk about that experience as well as Hertz\'s new cleaning program, my latest pair of Bose noise-cancelling headphones, and then wonder when business travel will return. All this and more at the<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_167.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"> <strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/860072707&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #167: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after a week’s tour of the UP -- Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Did a counter-clockwise  circle route around Lake Michigan. Headed out east on Friday morning; stopped at a brewery in Grand Rapids for lunch; drove the 5 miles across the Mackinac Bridge just before dusk; and had my first UP pasty (the first of many) and a local beer for dinner that night in Sault Ste Marie. Spent a couple of days in Soo; watched 700-ft lake freighters make their way through the locks that connect Lake Superior to Lake Huron; I’m still enough of an engineer to geek out on that kind of stuff. We then drove west to Marquette for 3 days and again west to Houghton for 2 days before heading home through Wisconsin down the west side of Lake Michigan. It was all outdoors stuff -- hiking, biking, kayaking; the things that last-minute COVID closures or restrictions won’t muck up.  The UP has always been on my list of places to visit, but it’s always on sorta the B-list, and so plans to go someplace else -- Spain, Napa, Ireland -- would always push it down the list. But now, with most places blocked off with travel restrictions and quarantines, the UP -- drivable with lots of outdoor activities -- bubbled to the top of the list.</li><li>And I wasn’t the only one thinking that way. The guy renting rowboats at <a href=\"https://www2.dnr.state.mi.us/ParksandTrails/Details.aspx?id=428&amp;type=SPRK\">Tahquamenon Falls State Park</a> looked at our release forms and said “We’ve had a lot of people up here from Chicago. It’s been crazy busy. We can’t get enough people to handle it.” And biking around <a href=\"https://www.travelmarquette.com/things-to-do/attractions/presque-isle-park/\">Presque Isle Park</a> in Marquette, we got talking, in a socially distant way, to a biking couple up from St Louis. It was also their first time up. A bunch of their friends and family had been up earlier; they’d seen nothing but UP pictures in their Facebook feed for the past month.</li><li>The husband said that he had an underlying medical condition and so they were looking for places away from people; they’d rented a cabin in the little town of Au Train. Which got me thinking about the place we stayed in Soo -- the <a href=\"https://www.plazamotormotel.com/\">Plaza Motor Motel</a>. No lobby, no elevators, no hallways; no places to run into other guests; no need to have to remember to mask up when you leave your room. Just open your room door and there’s your car. Most frequent travelers would never think of voluntarily staying in a motor inn, a <em>mo</em>-tel. But with so many things changing in these unprecedented times, maybe COVID will have folks give motels another chance.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/11510\">Funkist</a> - cdk dub mix by cdk (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: teru</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>First, a big shout out to the folks in Hanoi, Vietnam listening to TravelCommons on Soundcloud. One of the fun things about the podcast is looking at where people are listening from. For the most part, the stats make sense -- most of the listeners are from the US, and then English-speaking countries -- the UK, Canada, Australia. But every once in a while, there’s a spike that I just can’t figure out. I’ll see it, go look at the episode notes to see if I’ve mentioned that country, but I usually can’t make sense of it. Last fall, it was Argentina., but over the past couple of months, it’s been folks from Hanoi, primarily listening to April episode, #162, about post-lockdown trip planning and keeping a travel journal. Not sure why, but if you’re in Hanoi and you’ve made it to this episode - Hi! And thanks for listening!</li><li>Dan Grabon sent me a note at the beginning of the month about my lockdown reading that I mentioned during last month’s interview with Dr Emily Thomas<ul><li>“Mark,  I feel your pain. I started re-reading Walden back in April, and I just passed the halfway mark at the end of August. This was part of an overly ambitious effort to read one great book a month from a literary calendar that I bought. The Brothers Karamazov took up January through March, and even though COVID should have meant more time to read, it just hasn’t turned out that way.</li><li>“Writing this from a long overdue vacation near Lake George, where I saw the book Cabin Porn in a gift shop. Good timing.</li><li>“Thanks for keeping the podcast going— helps keep me going in this time of not going much of anywhere!”</li></ul></li><li>Dan, Thanks for the note. <em>The Brothers Karamazov</em> -- you are a better man than I.  I swore off of Russian fiction after suffering through <em>Crime and Punishment</em> in high school. That and Charles Dickens, just can’t do ‘em. And I am still working my way through <em>Walden</em>. Just got through his half-dozen pages on hoeing his bean field. I find if I try to read more than a dozen pages in a sitting, I just start skimming -- or sleeping. Glad you were able to get away to the wilderness of Lake George. Feel like the perfect place to find that Cabin Porn book.</li><li>Jim McDonough hit the TravelCommons Facebook page, following up on my comment in last month’s episode about my disappearing American flight from ORD to BCN. Jim writes...<ul><li>“We were going to Barcelona and Madrid with Rick Steves Europe in October, but of course Rick has canceled every tour for the rest of the year. Interestingly, AA says we are still booked on a BA 747 from SAN to LHR as part of this trip. BA has no more 747\'s and doesn\'t serve SAN any more.”</li></ul></li><li>I sometimes think any of the airline’s schedules more than one month out are more like aspirational projections than reflections of reality. Especially given how fast they’re shifting schedules to capture any sort of bump in passenger volume. Like United having <a href=\"https://airlineweekly.com/airlines-feeling-a-lift-from-rocky-mountain-hubs\">some transcontinental flights stop in DEN to pick up a bump in volume from people visiting national parks</a> -- there’s that outdoor activity trend again.</li><li>But back to that BCN trip, I should be getting things here in Chicago sorted before heading off for 2 weeks in Catalonia, but you’ve probably already guessed, that trip isn’t happening. Not a surprise. The EU still isn’t letting US travelers in and the case count in Spain’s second COVID wave has gotten worse in the last month. So at the beginning of the month, I gritted my teeth, called American and cancelled the flights. Actually, American had called me the prior week while we were in the UP, but I let it go to voicemail. We were in a taproom in Marquette and I didn’t feel ready to have that conversation. I wanted to have all our booking info in front of me and be clear minded (tough during a taproom session) and mentally girded for battle. So when I returned their call the next week, I was sitting in front of my laptop with all my itinerary documents up and was ready to go. It was a quick trip through the automated phone tree to a very nice woman in Dallas. No hassles with canceling. I was asking her about the logistics of the travel credit - how long will it be good for - when she said, “Since your flight was canceled and you were re-booked, you can get a refund if you like.” Wow. “Uh, yes,” I quickly said, not wanting her offer to disappear, “I think I’ll take the refund instead.” That was not what I expected from all the stories about American trying to keep as much cash as possible. It took her a couple of minutes to process the refunds during which we compared the weather between Chicago and Dallas. The refunds hit my credit card the following week, so full kudos to American on handling this. I’m hoping I don’t need to repeat in November for my Thanksgiving trip to London.</li><li>A couple of weeks back I was trading notes with TravelCommons contributor Allan Marko about <a href=\"https://www.sfgate.com/travel/article/United-bangalore-SFO-15551358.php\">United’s new SFO-Bangalore non-stop</a>. It’ll be their longest flight at 17½ hours. My immediate reaction was, of course, “that’s a helluva long time to wear a mask.” United is using a 787-9 with a special engine enhancement that makes the flight possible. Which got me thinking about what planes I’d flown into BLR. I’ve been using <a href=\"https://www.tripit.com/\">TripIt</a> since 2008 when it first broke out of the Silicon Valley venture cap bubble, so I logged in, clicked over to Past Trips and started clicking back through the pages -- and clicking and clicking because the last time I was in Bangalore was April 2014. I kept looking around the screen - there’s gotta be a way to export all my trip data; but I couldn’t find anything. So I sent a note to <a href=\"mailto:support@tripit.com\">support@tripit.com</a>. And, to my huge surprise, Andy from the Tripit Help Center replied in <em>15 minutes</em> saying “We currently do not offer customer driven travel data export capability. We have passed your suggestion on to the appropriate team for review.” Having run a software product team, I knew what that meant -- never. But, in the next paragraph, Andy offered a solution -- “You can check out a third party app Openflights. They have an API with TripIt that will allow you to import trips from your TripIt account to their site. From there you can create a list of all of your flights and download them to a csv file. Their basic account is free to use.” Sweet. I thanked Andy for his quick reply and hit <a href=\"https://openflights.org/\">Openflights</a>. I set up an account, hit the “Import” button and connected to my TripIt account. The import was a touch kludgy -- I had to go page by page, review each trip, and mark it to import. After 88 pages, I had imported 1006 flight segments, which they displayed on a world map. I clicked on BLR and a little card popped up. I clicked on the first option and it listed the 8 flights I’d taken to and from BLR. Turns out I’d mostly flown Airbus A320s, though I did once fly a 747-400 in from FRA. It has a couple of analysis buttons -- like my longest flight -- Joburg to IAD at 17:40 (ha! 10 minutes longer than the SFO-BLR flight); and my shortest -- IAD again, but this time a 44-minute flight to CHO. And of course, I was able to download all my trips into Excel so I can noodle around to my heart’s content. Openflights is free, but I’m going to <a href=\"https://openflights.org/donate\">donate</a> to help keep them going. <a href=\"https://openflights.org/\">Openflights.org</a> -- definitely recommended. I’ll put a link in the show notes.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djiz/10514\">Nube - Djiz Rmx</a> by Kwame (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: SylviaO</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>6 Months of Pandemic</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Finally giving into reality and canceling my Barcelona flight 6 months after booking it got me thinking back on these -- you know what’s coming -- <em>unprecedented</em> times. Airlines canceled flights to China at the end of January, then to South Korea, Iran, and Italy in February, until, by the beginning of March, airline traffic joined the stock market in a free fall. But back then, we thought it was a one-off event, kinda like Sept 11th; a sharp, scary event that came out of nowhere with no warning but that would soon pass. So taking advantage of one of the many March fare sales to book a flight at the end of September didn’t seem that risky.</li><li>I was talking to one of my consulting friends a couple of weeks ago. His travel schedule was similar to mine - a week without seeing an airport was a rare exception. He hasn’t been on a plane since March and doesn’t know when he’ll get on one next. He just started a project with a manufacturer in Cincinnati. Most of the project will be virtual, but he’s pretty sure he ought to at least put eyes on their plant. He lives outside Detroit. In the past, he’d be flying down every week. Now, he fires up Google Maps -- it’s a 4½ drive down I-75. He’ll drive down once, stay a couple of days, and then head back home. </li><li>I can’t say that anyone I’ve talked to misses the act of business travel -- getting up at 0 dark 30 Monday morning to get to the airport, shuffle through the PreCheck line for 15-20 minutes, and then shoehorn into a full flight for an hour or 3.  But we did it because that was part of the job. But now that it’s not, at least for now and what seems like (for now) through the end of the year, everybody is taking full advantage of sleeping in -- in their own beds.</li><li>Which explains why, of all the US airlines, Spirit Airlines, with its complete focus on low-cost leisure travelers, is the only one sounding even somewhat non-negative.  And hotel chains like Choice, focused on what they call “drive-to” locations and extended stay properties getting occupancy rates over 50% while center city hotels like Chicago’s Hilton Palmer House are missing rent payments and slouching towards bankruptcy.</li><li>Irene and I were sitting outside at a microbrewery a couple of days ago, enjoying a sunny afternoon full in the knowledge that we have maybe 4 weeks of outdoor eating and drinking left in Chicago. We talked about what kind of travel we would do over the next 12 months, figuring travel restrictions and periodic lockdowns are going to be the norm for at least that long. No big plans; nothing that COVID could blow up but seeing some new places -- some skiing, maybe trying out Montana; some hiking, maybe checking out the Texas Hill Country. But next month, we’re trading Barcelona for Philadelphia; now that they’ve opened up the restaurants again, check out our old neighborhood and visit with some friends. It’ll be Irene’s first flight since February. It took a bit of talking, but I really think the threat of a total of 22 hrs in a car with me -- alone -- tipped her over. </li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/3lb3r3th/44072\">Misunderstood</a> by 3lb3r3th (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: Alchemistry</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Do We Keep Travel Credit Cards?</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Last week, <a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/14/delta-launches-6point5-billion-debt-deal-backed-by-its-frequent-flyer-program.html\">Delta used their SkyMiles program to back $6.5 billion in debt</a>, running the same play that United and American did in June. What caught my eye was some of the stats that came out with the debt filing -- that <a href=\"https://skift.com/2020/09/15/how-delta-looks-to-leverage-rewards-from-its-own-frequent-flyer-program/\">SkyMiles had about $6.1 billion in revenue in 2019, about two-thirds from American Express</a> which issues a co-branded Delta card, and that <a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/14/delta-launches-6point5-billion-debt-deal-backed-by-its-frequent-flyer-program.html\">total miles redeemed fell by 78% in the first half of this year.</a> The big carriers are leaning on their loyalty programs for cash, their biggest customers are credit card issuers, but those card users - us - are generating points that we’ve stopped using. </li><li>It’s against this background that I called up Matt Schulz, chief credit analyst at LendingTree, and to ask him -- do we want to keep travel credit cards?<ul><li>Matt, a lot of folks carry at least one travel credit card and I don’t think I’m going too far out on a limb guessing that damn close to every TravelCommons listeners carry them. We’re 6 months on from the COVID lockdowns and the resulting cratering of the travel industry. But with travel not recovering -- airline demand is still just a third of pre-pandemic levels and United Airlines’ CEO said last week it could be 3-4 years before it’s back to 2019 levels -- what are card holders doing with these cards generating frequent traveler points that they can’t or don’t want to use?</li><li>Back in March and April, it seemed the strategy for the big travel card issuers -- Chase, Citi, Amex -- seemed to be to sacrifice revenue to hold share -- statement credits for annual fees if you called them to cancel, new bonuses for stay-at-home purchases to keep wallet share -- seemed like 5x bonuses for grocery and gas was the most popular. Made sense when everyone was talking about 2-week shutdowns and a V-shaped recovery. But, as we said before, travel is gonna stay depressed for a while -- between state and country quarantines and many people not wanting to get in a plane -- how are travel card companies going to handle the next round of renewals? When I call Chase and Amex again, do I get more statement credits -- do they continue to fight for share? And if they don’t, what do I do with the balance of Ultimate or Membership Rewards points that I’ll lose if I don’t re-up and pay the fee?</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #167</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and now, <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_167.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #167 — 6 Months of Pandemic; Why Keep Travel Cards?','','inherit','closed','closed','','2856-revision-v1','','','2020-09-18 21:45:15','2020-09-19 02:45:15','',2856,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/09/18/2856-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2863,1,'2020-09-18 21:46:28','2020-09-19 02:46:28','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/IMG_2073.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2789 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/IMG_2073-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a><figcaption>The hop taste isn\'t coming through</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>My first post-lockdown flight was a 90-minute Southwest non-stop from Chicago to Nashville. It wasn\'t bad, but not as casually easy as my last pre-coronavirus flight in February. We talk about that experience as well as Hertz\'s new cleaning program, my latest pair of Bose noise-cancelling headphones, and then wonder when business travel will return. All this and more at the<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_165.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"> <strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/860072707&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #165: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after a couple of runs back down to Nashville for family stuff -- one in the air and the other on the ground. And with COVID cases spiking in vacation spots like California and south Florida, it seems like that’s the market segment -- folks traveling to see friends and family -- that the airline and hotel companies are banking on. And that’s most of what I saw when flying back from Nashville a few Thursdays ago -- lots of families with kids, groups of people meeting up on the other side of security for maybe some 4 day-weekend trips? The tip-off for me on the business vs. leisure traveler mix was the TSA lines -- solid lines for regular TSA, while I pretty much walked straight through PreCheck. Another tip-off used to be mid-day lines at the bars, but with most of the airport restaurants closed up, that’s not a valid indicator right now.</li><li>Traveling right now requires a bit of nimbleness. On my first post-lockdown trip in May, the workout room at the Spring Hill Hampton Inn was open and I used it every day. Back down in June, there was a piece of paper taped to the door -- “Closed by order of the Health Department”. The front desk agent told me it was a couple of days old -- which explained all the banging in the room above me; somebody must’ve been doing their HIIT workout in their room. I didn’t know if I should be annoyed or impressed at how long they went at it. So for this last trip, I called the hotel the night before I left, before I packed my gym clothes vs. a yoga mat. They told me that they’d just reopened the workout room the day before, so the yoga mat went back in the closet.&nbsp;</li><li>It’s kinda the same very fluid situation right now with bars and restaurants. A few days before we got to Nashville, the mayor closed down any establishment with less than 50% of their sales in food, so pretty much all the bars and taprooms. Makes sense, not arguing it; just forced us to quickly pivot some of our plans. It also forced us to go a bit “old school”, back to making actual phone calls, asking “are you open; dine-in or just take-away?” since places seem to be having trouble updating their websites and their Facebook/Yelp/Google/OpenTable listings fast enough to keep up with the changes.</li><li>It proved out our decision to book the Residence Inn rather than the mainline Marriott a few blocks away. The full-size fridge held a lot more beer, and that kitchenette came in handy when we found out that<a href=\"https://www.princeshotchicken.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"https://www.princeshotchicken.com/\"> Prince’s Hot Chicken</a> was only doing take-away -- I can’t imagine trying to eat an extra-hot half-chicken perched on a king-size bed.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/JeffSpeed68/54450\">Hula Hoop Party</a> by Stefan Kartenberg (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. &nbsp;Ft: Martijn de Boer, Blue Wave Theory</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Lots has been written about how the COVID pandemic has massively accelerated changes toward contactless transactions. Microsoft’s CEO famously said back in April “We’ve seen two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months”.&nbsp; Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #136 — Is Cash A Waning King; Don’t Make It Hard to Cash in on Loyalty\">episode #136</a>, I said I felt like the last generation of cash payers, that my younger colleagues rarely carried cash; they paid for everything with a card. Looking into my wallet, I had the same $200 worth of 20’s in June that I’d taken out of an ATM in March. Nobody wants to handle cash; they don’t even want to handle my card (Most extreme experience - A bartender at Asgard Brewing’s taproom in Columbia, TN sprayed my Visa card with diluted chlorine bleach before swiping it to pay my bill. Made my wallet smell like a swimming pool). As much as possible, places want us to pre-order and pre-pay, so we just pick up our purchases in a socially distant way and then head home. It’s also switched up some opinions on using facial recognition for flight check ins. Pre-coronavirus, the push was from governments as a better way to do security screenings and to improve immigration compliance, and this was getting big pushback on privacy concerns. Now, it’s pivoted. The push is from travel companies using facial recognition as a way of providing the touchless check-in experience that most travelers now want.&nbsp;</li><li>But facial recognition is stymied by face masks which we wear when we’re checking in at airports and hotel lobbies. As is Face ID when trying to unlock my iPhone to get to my boarding pass or digital room key. Until I can downgrade to an iPhone SE with that old-school Touch ID that unlocks using my thumb print, I think I’m going to have to shorten the PIN code on my iPhone 11 Pro. I lengthened it for better security but am banging it in more and more often. And I’ve noticed the iPhone is really slow about recognizing my number presses -- or it misses some when I go too fast (like when I’m trying to pull up a boarding pass in line) and errors out.&nbsp;</li><li>Walking down the Hertz Five Star aisle at Nashville Airport, I saw their version of paper rings that hotels used to put around toilet seats to “certify” they’d been cleaned. In Hertz’s case, they put a “<a href=\"http://ir.hertz.com/2020-05-15-Hertz-Introduces-Hertz-Gold-Standard-Clean-Sealed-and-Certified-Vehicles\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Hertz Gold Standard Clean</a>” sticker across the driver-side center pillar (the B pillar for all my gearhead listeners) so that you break it when you open the driver door to get it. Nice gesture, though it kept me from doing my usual walk down the aisle, opening the door of a bunch of cars to check their mileage. Seemed rude to break all those stickers, though I did notice more than a few broken ones when choosing my car. Way back in the old days of TravelCommons, we used to talk about the TSA doing “security theater” in the screening lines. This feels a bit like “sanitation theater”.&nbsp;</li><li>I finally broke down and bought a new set of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2BbOqyA\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bose noise cancelling headphones -- the new 700’s</a>. This is my third set of Bose cans. Bought my first pair in 2009. I was flying a lot of short flights at the time, and in those days before regional jets, I was on a lot of prop planes. And they’re noisy -- not just on take-off, but the entire flight. After a while, I started to notice fatigue when getting off those planes. Talking to a few folks, they said the noise heightens stress. A friend told me how much he liked his Bose cans, and so I burnt some Amex Membership Rewards points on Amazon for a pair of Quiet Comfort 2’s. It was a revelation; flick the switch and, whoosh, quiet. I took them on every flight, until 3 years later, I left them in a seatback pocket when rushing off a plane to make a tight connection. I immediately lit up some more Membership Rewards points for a new pair - <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3eF2iPk\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">QC-15’s</a>. Four years later, I replaced a worn out set of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2OwiIPF\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">ear cushions</a>. And though the non-replaceable headband cushion is looking pretty ratty, the now 8-year-old headphones still work great. What got me to replace them was the wire. I’d be sitting in my usual aisle seat, plugged into my iPhone (using one of those dongles that Apple no longer gives you with a new phone). At some point in the flight, the folks in the middle and window seats would want to get up and use the toilet and inevitably, I’d snag the wire on the arm of the seat, pull the headphones off my head, and/or launch my phone a row forward.&nbsp; I could’ve gotten a pair of the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3eFWLYJ\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">QC-35’s</a> -- same form factor without the wire -- but decided to go all next-generation with the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2BbOqyA\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">700’s</a>, which has meant some adjustment pains. Like there are buttons in places where they never were before. So when I grab the ear cups to slip the headphones off, I manage to hit a button that changes the noise reduction level or summons Siri. Also new is using the touch surface on the right ear cup to control things. You tap or swipe the right ear cup to accept or drop a call, pause a song, raise or lower the volume, or skip 30 seconds to fast-forward past a podcast ad. I’m learning to be a bit more precise in my motions; I’ve already dropped a couple of calls when I was just trying to turn down the call volume.&nbsp; One thing I really like -- more for working-at-home than in-flight usage -- is that the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2BbOqyA\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">700’s</a> can pair with two Bluetooth devices at the same time. So, for me, I have them paired with my MacBook Air and my iPhone and they switch seamlessly between the two. Nice when I’ve got Zoom calls on my Mac and then a phone call on my iPhone. And, call me shallow, but they look a bit cooler than my old <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3eF2iPk\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">QC-15’s</a>. I’ve had the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2BbOqyA\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">700’s</a> for about a month now and really like them. I guess you could say they’re “TravelCommons Approved.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/bridges/15563\">i knew</a> by bridges (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp;Ft: shannonsongs</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>First Post-Lockdown Flight</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Way back at the beginning of the lockdown, the first Saturday of April, I was on a Zoom beer drinking call with Rob Cheshire, a long-time TravelCommons listener and now a podcaster -- he interviews UK craft brewers on his <em><a href=\"https://thisweekincraft.beer/podcast/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">This Week in Craft Beer</a></em>. It was a Saturday afternoon call, for Rob and the other guys in London; just past noon for me in Chicago, but hey…. And somewhere around our second or third beer, Rob asked me “When will you be comfortable getting on a plane again?” I really didn\'t have a good answer. It was early days; I wasn’t sure.</li><li>Fast forward to the back half of June. I needed to get down to Nashville again and didn’t have the time to burn 8 hrs for the drive down and another 8 on the way back. I had some travel funds sitting in my Southwest account from a couple of April trip cancellations, and Southwest flies 6 non-stop 737s between Chicago and Nashville while American and United only do smaller regional jets, and Southwest isn’t packing them full -- booking those bigger planes at ⅔’s capacity -- while American and United say they’ll let you know if your flight books solid. All told, a pretty easy decision to fly Southwest. One of the benefits of living in Chicago, a rare 3-hub town.</li><li>The day before my flight, when getting my boarding pass on the Southwest app (my usual process; I was contactless before it was a thing), I had to click through a certification that I wasn’t running a temperature and that I hadn’t been exposed to or tested positive for COVID-19. OK, click. Then I get a screen telling me that face masks are required to board. Makes sense, click. And now I get my boarding pass.</li><li>Monday morning, Irene drops me off at a pretty sedate departures curb at Midway. I mask up and walk in. It’s not empty, but it’s definitely not the normal Monday morning bustle. It feels more like a Wednesday early afternoon. There’s a bit of a line at regular security, but no line at PreCheck. The TSA agent asks me to drop my mask for a moment to check my ID and then waves me through. I noticed that TSA still has their October 2020 Real ID deadline warning signs on the podium. Hmm… I remember reading at the end of March that the TSA has <a href=\"https://www.dhs.gov/real-id\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">pushed the deadline a year to October 2021</a>. Guess they haven’t had a chance to issue updated signs. You’d think they’d just take the old ones down.</li><li>Most of the restaurants and stores were closed; a pretty common situation. Kev Monteith, a TravelCommons listener and <a href=\"https://travelswithkev.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amtrak travel blogger</a>, replied to one of my Twitter posts saying “I flew Southwest a few weeks ago. Layovers are rough because most places in the airports are closed. I was at STL and only found beer at Burger King and Dunkin Doughnuts.” I would’ve been happy for just a coffee. Down in the main Southwest concourse, some gates were closed off with curtains which I assume was to keep people from sitting there so they don’t have to clean it.</li><li>Looking around the terminal, it felt like mask usage was about 80%. Just about everyone was wearing them when walking around. I’d see some people not wearing them while sitting at the gate, though those folks were distancing themselves from everyone else. I’d see kids ripping their masks off as soon as they got off the jetway. I did notice, though, a sizable minority of mask wearers were just covering their mouths, leaving their noses uncovered -- pilots, cleaning crew, passengers, wheelchair people. Now I’m no epidemiologist, but that seems to defeat the purpose.</li><li>When the agent called boarding, she said “There’s 40 of you on a plane with 175 seats. So everyone gets their own row, and please, don’t everyone sit up front. We need a bit of weight distribution.” It was a quick boarding; we pushed back and took off early. These truly are unprecedented times.</li><li>Nashville was more crowded on Thursday morning when I headed back home. Mostly families as I said at the top of the show. The end of the concourse where the&nbsp; Southwest gates are was as crowded as usual. There were signs around saying that 3 seats between people equals 6 ft, but there were too many people waiting to make it practical; at least everyone is masked up. I walked back up the terminal to find a bit more space and there, tucked away behind some construction sheeting, I found an empty gate. I’m all alone, mega social distanced, so I take off my mask, log into the WiFi and do some work until the Southwest app on my phone bings, telling me that boarding has begun.&nbsp;</li><li>There were a lot more than 40 people on this flight. I found an empty row and slid all the way over to the window seat since it’s only a 90-minute flight. About 3 minutes later, a guy sat down in the aisle seat. Nobody in the middle seat. Everyone wearing masks and nobody’s head right next to mine, I was good to go. Maybe helped just a bit by the fact that, in those 3 minutes, I pointed all three air jets toward the empty middle seat and turned them on full blast, creating an air curtain between me and the aisle seat -- just in case.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/3lb3r3th/44072\">Misunderstood</a> by 3lb3r3th (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. &nbsp;Ft: Alchemistry</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>When Does Business Travel Come Back?</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>My son Andrew and his girlfriend took the 6am flight to LGA earlier this week. I asked him “How full was the flight?” “Maybe 20 people; mostly families,” he said. Didn’t surprise me that a Thursday 6am LGA flight was only at 11% capacity. That’s normally a business travel run; people getting up at 0 dark 30 in Chicago to make 10am meetings in Manhattan. But there’s not many business travelers now.&nbsp; While business travelers only make up about 10% of passengers on major airlines, they provide between 55 and 75% of the profits. You might could think they’re subsidizing the budget fares those families are using.</li><li>Over the past month, I’ve been talking with Sales VPs at companies that deliver complex IT services. If anybody would be feeling the bite of not traveling, I thought it would be these guys. I’ve done a number of these deals, and they always involved locking all the right decision makers in a conference room to hash out all the contract details and ride herd over the transition. But I was completely wrong. They all said that work hasn’t slowed down during the lockdown. They’ve been able to do all that conference room work over Zoom. Indeed, they said being virtual has made it easier for them. Pre-lockdown, one of their biggest challenges was calendar wrangling -- being able to get all their execs and the client execs into that conference room at the same time. Now, they just click some buttons and everyone shows up in Zoom gallery mode -- no travel planning, no scrambling after cancelled or delayed flights. They all said they love the ease of virtual meetings and, at the end of the day, closing the lid on their laptops and having dinner with the family every night.</li><li>Kinda supports the narrative that business travel will never rebound; back to the Microsoft CEO’s quote: in 2 months, we’ve advanced 2 years in virtual work culture. But when I probed a bit, I found that Zoom hasn’t completely replaced an airplane ticket. While these guys have been able to virtually close deals they had in their sales funnel, virtual meetings don’t seem to be replacing these deals; getting new prospects into the top of the sales funnel. So while things are looking good now, they’re beginning to worry about 4-6 months from now.</li><li>This was the exact opposite of what I’d expected. I thought the give and take of negotiations, the sidebar conversations, the emotional content, wouldn’t translate into video calls. But it looks like I was wrong; that once a deal has some momentum and a structure to guide everyone, the in-person hammering out turns out to be a nice-to-have. And the reason new opportunities aren’t coming in is that they need more exploratory, abstract, wide-ranging conversations that lack that guiding structure and selling a team as much as a product -- at least for complex services -- and that’s tough to do over a pane of glass.</li><li>And so they all said that they’d probably start traveling again -- reluctantly -- by the end of this month. But I do think this, call it a 4-month exercise in figuring out virtual work methods and cultures will move the set point, everybody’s default decision toward virtual meetings. And so maybe a bit less focused on high-profit road warriors and more dependent on those cost-conscious families. Does this mean repointing the 6am LGA flights to Cancun? They’re going to have to seriously reengineer those drink carts.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #165</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_165.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #165 — First Post Lockdown Flight; When Do We For Business Again?','','inherit','closed','closed','','2788-revision-v1','','','2020-09-18 21:46:28','2020-09-19 02:46:28','',2788,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/09/18/2788-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2864,1,'2020-09-18 21:54:07','2020-09-19 02:54:07','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/F3E28DAE-0026-4E8A-957E-D6CE914F717C.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2857 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/F3E28DAE-0026-4E8A-957E-D6CE914F717C-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\n<figcaption>I\'ve put on the Quarantine 15</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p>My first post-lockdown flight was a 90-minute Southwest non-stop from Chicago to Nashville. It wasn\'t bad, but not as casually easy as my last pre-coronavirus flight in February. We talk about that experience as well as Hertz\'s new cleaning program, my latest pair of Bose noise-cancelling headphones, and then wonder when business travel will return. All this and more at the<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_167.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"> <strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/860072707&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #167: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after a week’s tour of the UP -- Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Did a counter-clockwise  circle route around Lake Michigan. Headed out east on Friday morning; stopped at a brewery in Grand Rapids for lunch; drove the 5 miles across the Mackinac Bridge just before dusk; and had my first UP pasty (the first of many) and a local beer for dinner that night in Sault Ste Marie. Spent a couple of days in Soo; watched 700-ft lake freighters make their way through the locks that connect Lake Superior to Lake Huron; I’m still enough of an engineer to geek out on that kind of stuff. We then drove west to Marquette for 3 days and again west to Houghton for 2 days before heading home through Wisconsin down the west side of Lake Michigan. It was all outdoors stuff -- hiking, biking, kayaking; the things that last-minute COVID closures or restrictions won’t muck up.  The UP has always been on my list of places to visit, but it’s always on sorta the B-list, and so plans to go someplace else -- Spain, Napa, Ireland -- would always push it down the list. But now, with most places blocked off with travel restrictions and quarantines, the UP -- drivable with lots of outdoor activities -- bubbled to the top of the list.</li><li>And I wasn’t the only one thinking that way. The guy renting rowboats at <a href=\"https://www2.dnr.state.mi.us/ParksandTrails/Details.aspx?id=428&amp;type=SPRK\">Tahquamenon Falls State Park</a> looked at our release forms and said “We’ve had a lot of people up here from Chicago. It’s been crazy busy. We can’t get enough people to handle it.” And biking around <a href=\"https://www.travelmarquette.com/things-to-do/attractions/presque-isle-park/\">Presque Isle Park</a> in Marquette, we got talking, in a socially distant way, to a biking couple up from St Louis. It was also their first time up. A bunch of their friends and family had been up earlier; they’d seen nothing but UP pictures in their Facebook feed for the past month.</li><li>The husband said that he had an underlying medical condition and so they were looking for places away from people; they’d rented a cabin in the little town of Au Train. Which got me thinking about the place we stayed in Soo -- the <a href=\"https://www.plazamotormotel.com/\">Plaza Motor Motel</a>. No lobby, no elevators, no hallways; no places to run into other guests; no need to have to remember to mask up when you leave your room. Just open your room door and there’s your car. Most frequent travelers would never think of voluntarily staying in a motor inn, a <em>mo</em>-tel. But with so many things changing in these unprecedented times, maybe COVID will have folks give motels another chance.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/11510\">Funkist</a> - cdk dub mix by cdk (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: teru</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>First, a big shout out to the folks in Hanoi, Vietnam listening to TravelCommons on Soundcloud. One of the fun things about the podcast is looking at where people are listening from. For the most part, the stats make sense -- most of the listeners are from the US, and then English-speaking countries -- the UK, Canada, Australia. But every once in a while, there’s a spike that I just can’t figure out. I’ll see it, go look at the episode notes to see if I’ve mentioned that country, but I usually can’t make sense of it. Last fall, it was Argentina., but over the past couple of months, it’s been folks from Hanoi, primarily listening to April episode, #162, about post-lockdown trip planning and keeping a travel journal. Not sure why, but if you’re in Hanoi and you’ve made it to this episode - Hi! And thanks for listening!</li><li>Dan Grabon sent me a note at the beginning of the month about my lockdown reading that I mentioned during last month’s interview with Dr Emily Thomas<ul><li>“Mark,  I feel your pain. I started re-reading Walden back in April, and I just passed the halfway mark at the end of August. This was part of an overly ambitious effort to read one great book a month from a literary calendar that I bought. The Brothers Karamazov took up January through March, and even though COVID should have meant more time to read, it just hasn’t turned out that way.</li><li>“Writing this from a long overdue vacation near Lake George, where I saw the book Cabin Porn in a gift shop. Good timing.</li><li>“Thanks for keeping the podcast going— helps keep me going in this time of not going much of anywhere!”</li></ul></li><li>Dan, Thanks for the note. <em>The Brothers Karamazov</em> -- you are a better man than I.  I swore off of Russian fiction after suffering through <em>Crime and Punishment</em> in high school. That and Charles Dickens, just can’t do ‘em. And I am still working my way through <em>Walden</em>. Just got through his half-dozen pages on hoeing his bean field. I find if I try to read more than a dozen pages in a sitting, I just start skimming -- or sleeping. Glad you were able to get away to the wilderness of Lake George. Feel like the perfect place to find that Cabin Porn book.</li><li>Jim McDonough hit the TravelCommons Facebook page, following up on my comment in last month’s episode about my disappearing American flight from ORD to BCN. Jim writes...<ul><li>“We were going to Barcelona and Madrid with Rick Steves Europe in October, but of course Rick has canceled every tour for the rest of the year. Interestingly, AA says we are still booked on a BA 747 from SAN to LHR as part of this trip. BA has no more 747\'s and doesn\'t serve SAN any more.”</li></ul></li><li>I sometimes think any of the airline’s schedules more than one month out are more like aspirational projections than reflections of reality. Especially given how fast they’re shifting schedules to capture any sort of bump in passenger volume. Like United having <a href=\"https://airlineweekly.com/airlines-feeling-a-lift-from-rocky-mountain-hubs\">some transcontinental flights stop in DEN to pick up a bump in volume from people visiting national parks</a> -- there’s that outdoor activity trend again.</li><li>But back to that BCN trip, I should be getting things here in Chicago sorted before heading off for 2 weeks in Catalonia, but you’ve probably already guessed, that trip isn’t happening. Not a surprise. The EU still isn’t letting US travelers in and the case count in Spain’s second COVID wave has gotten worse in the last month. So at the beginning of the month, I gritted my teeth, called American and cancelled the flights. Actually, American had called me the prior week while we were in the UP, but I let it go to voicemail. We were in a taproom in Marquette and I didn’t feel ready to have that conversation. I wanted to have all our booking info in front of me and be clear minded (tough during a taproom session) and mentally girded for battle. So when I returned their call the next week, I was sitting in front of my laptop with all my itinerary documents up and was ready to go. It was a quick trip through the automated phone tree to a very nice woman in Dallas. No hassles with canceling. I was asking her about the logistics of the travel credit - how long will it be good for - when she said, “Since your flight was canceled and you were re-booked, you can get a refund if you like.” Wow. “Uh, yes,” I quickly said, not wanting her offer to disappear, “I think I’ll take the refund instead.” That was not what I expected from all the stories about American trying to keep as much cash as possible. It took her a couple of minutes to process the refunds during which we compared the weather between Chicago and Dallas. The refunds hit my credit card the following week, so full kudos to American on handling this. I’m hoping I don’t need to repeat in November for my Thanksgiving trip to London.</li><li>A couple of weeks back I was trading notes with TravelCommons contributor Allan Marko about <a href=\"https://www.sfgate.com/travel/article/United-bangalore-SFO-15551358.php\">United’s new SFO-Bangalore non-stop</a>. It’ll be their longest flight at 17½ hours. My immediate reaction was, of course, “that’s a helluva long time to wear a mask.” United is using a 787-9 with a special engine enhancement that makes the flight possible. Which got me thinking about what planes I’d flown into BLR. I’ve been using <a href=\"https://www.tripit.com/\">TripIt</a> since 2008 when it first broke out of the Silicon Valley venture cap bubble, so I logged in, clicked over to Past Trips and started clicking back through the pages -- and clicking and clicking because the last time I was in Bangalore was April 2014. I kept looking around the screen - there’s gotta be a way to export all my trip data; but I couldn’t find anything. So I sent a note to <a href=\"mailto:support@tripit.com\">support@tripit.com</a>. And, to my huge surprise, Andy from the Tripit Help Center replied in <em>15 minutes</em> saying “We currently do not offer customer driven travel data export capability. We have passed your suggestion on to the appropriate team for review.” Having run a software product team, I knew what that meant -- never. But, in the next paragraph, Andy offered a solution -- “You can check out a third party app Openflights. They have an API with TripIt that will allow you to import trips from your TripIt account to their site. From there you can create a list of all of your flights and download them to a csv file. Their basic account is free to use.” Sweet. I thanked Andy for his quick reply and hit <a href=\"https://openflights.org/\">Openflights</a>. I set up an account, hit the “Import” button and connected to my TripIt account. The import was a touch kludgy -- I had to go page by page, review each trip, and mark it to import. After 88 pages, I had imported 1006 flight segments, which they displayed on a world map. I clicked on BLR and a little card popped up. I clicked on the first option and it listed the 8 flights I’d taken to and from BLR. Turns out I’d mostly flown Airbus A320s, though I did once fly a 747-400 in from FRA. It has a couple of analysis buttons -- like my longest flight -- Joburg to IAD at 17:40 (ha! 10 minutes longer than the SFO-BLR flight); and my shortest -- IAD again, but this time a 44-minute flight to CHO. And of course, I was able to download all my trips into Excel so I can noodle around to my heart’s content. Openflights is free, but I’m going to <a href=\"https://openflights.org/donate\">donate</a> to help keep them going. <a href=\"https://openflights.org/\">Openflights.org</a> -- definitely recommended. I’ll put a link in the show notes.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djiz/10514\">Nube - Djiz Rmx</a> by Kwame (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: SylviaO</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>6 Months of Pandemic</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Finally giving into reality and canceling my Barcelona flight 6 months after booking it got me thinking back on these -- you know what’s coming -- <em>unprecedented</em> times. Airlines canceled flights to China at the end of January, then to South Korea, Iran, and Italy in February, until, by the beginning of March, airline traffic joined the stock market in a free fall. But back then, we thought it was a one-off event, kinda like Sept 11th; a sharp, scary event that came out of nowhere with no warning but that would soon pass. So taking advantage of one of the many March fare sales to book a flight at the end of September didn’t seem that risky.</li><li>I was talking to one of my consulting friends a couple of weeks ago. His travel schedule was similar to mine - a week without seeing an airport was a rare exception. He hasn’t been on a plane since March and doesn’t know when he’ll get on one next. He just started a project with a manufacturer in Cincinnati. Most of the project will be virtual, but he’s pretty sure he ought to at least put eyes on their plant. He lives outside Detroit. In the past, he’d be flying down every week. Now, he fires up Google Maps -- it’s a 4½ drive down I-75. He’ll drive down once, stay a couple of days, and then head back home. </li><li>I can’t say that anyone I’ve talked to misses the act of business travel -- getting up at 0 dark 30 Monday morning to get to the airport, shuffle through the PreCheck line for 15-20 minutes, and then shoehorn into a full flight for an hour or 3.  But we did it because that was part of the job. But now that it’s not, at least for now and what seems like (for now) through the end of the year, everybody is taking full advantage of sleeping in -- in their own beds.</li><li>Which explains why, of all the US airlines, Spirit Airlines, with its complete focus on low-cost leisure travelers, is the only one sounding even somewhat non-negative.  And hotel chains like Choice, focused on what they call “drive-to” locations and extended stay properties getting occupancy rates over 50% while center city hotels like Chicago’s Hilton Palmer House are missing rent payments and slouching towards bankruptcy.</li><li>Irene and I were sitting outside at a microbrewery a couple of days ago, enjoying a sunny afternoon full in the knowledge that we have maybe 4 weeks of outdoor eating and drinking left in Chicago. We talked about what kind of travel we would do over the next 12 months, figuring travel restrictions and periodic lockdowns are going to be the norm for at least that long. No big plans; nothing that COVID could blow up but seeing some new places -- some skiing, maybe trying out Montana; some hiking, maybe checking out the Texas Hill Country. But next month, we’re trading Barcelona for Philadelphia; now that they’ve opened up the restaurants again, check out our old neighborhood and visit with some friends. It’ll be Irene’s first flight since February. It took a bit of talking, but I really think the threat of a total of 22 hrs in a car with me -- alone -- tipped her over. </li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/3lb3r3th/44072\">Misunderstood</a> by 3lb3r3th (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: Alchemistry</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Do We Keep Travel Credit Cards?</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Last week, <a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/14/delta-launches-6point5-billion-debt-deal-backed-by-its-frequent-flyer-program.html\">Delta used their SkyMiles program to back $6.5 billion in debt</a>, running the same play that United and American did in June. What caught my eye was some of the stats that came out with the debt filing -- that <a href=\"https://skift.com/2020/09/15/how-delta-looks-to-leverage-rewards-from-its-own-frequent-flyer-program/\">SkyMiles had about $6.1 billion in revenue in 2019, about two-thirds from American Express</a> which issues a co-branded Delta card, and that <a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/14/delta-launches-6point5-billion-debt-deal-backed-by-its-frequent-flyer-program.html\">total miles redeemed fell by 78% in the first half of this year.</a> The big carriers are leaning on their loyalty programs for cash, their biggest customers are credit card issuers, but those card users - us - are generating points that we’ve stopped using. </li><li>It’s against this background that I called up Matt Schulz, chief credit analyst at LendingTree, and to ask him -- do we want to keep travel credit cards?<ul><li>Matt, a lot of folks carry at least one travel credit card and I don’t think I’m going too far out on a limb guessing that damn close to every TravelCommons listeners carry them. We’re 6 months on from the COVID lockdowns and the resulting cratering of the travel industry. But with travel not recovering -- airline demand is still just a third of pre-pandemic levels and United Airlines’ CEO said last week it could be 3-4 years before it’s back to 2019 levels -- what are card holders doing with these cards generating frequent traveler points that they can’t or don’t want to use?</li><li>Back in March and April, it seemed the strategy for the big travel card issuers -- Chase, Citi, Amex -- seemed to be to sacrifice revenue to hold share -- statement credits for annual fees if you called them to cancel, new bonuses for stay-at-home purchases to keep wallet share -- seemed like 5x bonuses for grocery and gas was the most popular. Made sense when everyone was talking about 2-week shutdowns and a V-shaped recovery. But, as we said before, travel is gonna stay depressed for a while -- between state and country quarantines and many people not wanting to get in a plane -- how are travel card companies going to handle the next round of renewals? When I call Chase and Amex again, do I get more statement credits -- do they continue to fight for share? And if they don’t, what do I do with the balance of Ultimate or Membership Rewards points that I’ll lose if I don’t re-up and pay the fee?</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #167</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and now, <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_167.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #167 — 6 Months On; Why Keep Travel Cards?','','inherit','closed','closed','','2856-revision-v1','','','2020-09-18 21:54:07','2020-09-19 02:54:07','',2856,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/09/18/2856-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2866,1,'2020-09-19 09:42:08','2020-09-19 14:42:08','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/F3E28DAE-0026-4E8A-957E-D6CE914F717C.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2857 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/F3E28DAE-0026-4E8A-957E-D6CE914F717C-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\n<figcaption>I seem to have put on a Quarantine 15</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p>Spent a week in <a href=\"https://www.uptravel.com/\">Michigan\'s Upper Peninsula</a> hiking, biking, kayaking, and running into a lot of other people getting away to do the same, which got me looking back six months to the start of the pandemic . I talk about a surprisingly good flight cancelation experience with American Airlines, and figuring out how to download 12 years of <a href=\"https://www.tripit.com/\">TripIt</a> data. And then I talk to Matt Schulz of LendingTree, asking him what are we doing with travel credit cards that are generating frequent traveler points we can’t use? All this and more at the<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_167.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"> <strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/860072707&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #167: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after a week’s tour of the UP -- Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Did a counter-clockwise&nbsp; circle route around Lake Michigan. Headed out east on Friday morning; stopped at a brewery in Grand Rapids for lunch; drove the 5 miles across the Mackinac Bridge just before dusk; and had my first UP pasty (the first of many) and a local beer for dinner that night in Sault Ste Marie. Spent a couple of days in Soo; watched 700-ft lake freighters make their way through the locks that connect Lake Superior to Lake Huron; I’m still enough of an engineer to geek out on that kind of stuff. We then drove west to Marquette for 3 days and again west to Houghton for 2 days before heading home through Wisconsin down the west side of Lake Michigan. It was all outdoors stuff -- hiking, biking, kayaking; the things that last-minute COVID closures or restrictions won’t muck up.&nbsp; The UP has always been on my list of places to visit, but it’s always on sorta the B-list, and so plans to go someplace else -- Spain, Napa, Ireland -- would always push it down the list. But now, with most places blocked off with travel restrictions and quarantines, the UP -- drivable with lots of outdoor activities -- bubbled to the top of the list.</li><li>And I wasn’t the only one thinking that way. The guy renting rowboats at <a href=\"https://www2.dnr.state.mi.us/ParksandTrails/Details.aspx?id=428&amp;type=SPRK\">Tahquamenon Falls State Park</a> looked at our release forms and said “We’ve had a lot of people up here from Chicago. It’s been crazy busy. We can’t get enough people to handle it.” And biking around <a href=\"https://www.travelmarquette.com/things-to-do/attractions/presque-isle-park/\">Presque Isle Park</a> in Marquette, we got talking, in a socially distant way, to a biking couple up from St Louis. It was also their first time up. A bunch of their friends and family had been up earlier; they’d seen nothing but UP pictures in their Facebook feed for the past month.</li><li>The husband said that he had an underlying medical condition and so they were looking for places away from people; they’d rented a cabin in the little town of Au Train. Which got me thinking about the place we stayed in Soo -- the <a href=\"https://www.plazamotormotel.com/\">Plaza Motor Motel</a>. No lobby, no elevators, no hallways; no places to run into other guests; no need to have to remember to mask up when you leave your room. Just open your room door and there’s your car. Most frequent travelers would never think of voluntarily staying in a motor inn, a <em>mo</em>-tel. But with so many things changing in these unprecedented times, maybe COVID will have folks give motels another chance.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/11510\">Funkist</a> - cdk dub mix by cdk (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: teru</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>First, a big shout out to the folks in Hanoi, Vietnam listening to TravelCommons on Soundcloud. One of the fun things about the podcast is looking at where people are listening from. For the most part, the stats make sense -- most of the listeners are from the US, and then English-speaking countries -- the UK, Canada, Australia. But every once in a while, there’s a spike that I just can’t figure out. I’ll see it, go look at the episode notes to see if I’ve mentioned that country, but I usually can’t make sense of it. Last fall, it was Argentina., but over the past couple of months, it’s been folks from Hanoi, primarily listening to April episode, #162, about post-lockdown trip planning and keeping a travel journal. Not sure why, but if you’re in Hanoi and you’ve made it to this episode - Hi! And thanks for listening!</li><li>Dan Grabon sent me a note at the beginning of the month about my lockdown reading that I mentioned during last month’s interview with Dr Emily Thomas<ul><li>“Mark,&nbsp; I feel your pain. I started re-reading Walden back in April, and I just passed the halfway mark at the end of August. This was part of an overly ambitious effort to read one great book a month from a literary calendar that I bought. The Brothers Karamazov took up January through March, and even though COVID should have meant more time to read, it just hasn’t turned out that way.</li><li>“Writing this from a long overdue vacation near Lake George, where I saw the book Cabin Porn in a gift shop. Good timing.</li><li>“Thanks for keeping the podcast going— helps keep me going in this time of not going much of anywhere!”</li></ul></li><li>Dan, Thanks for the note. <em>The Brothers Karamazov</em> -- you are a better man than I.&nbsp; I swore off of Russian fiction after suffering through <em>Crime and Punishment</em> in high school. That and Charles Dickens, just can’t do ‘em. And I am still working my way through <em>Walden</em>. Just got through his half-dozen pages on hoeing his bean field. I find if I try to read more than a dozen pages in a sitting, I just start skimming -- or sleeping. Glad you were able to get away to the wilderness of Lake George. Feel like the perfect place to find that Cabin Porn book.</li><li>Jim McDonough hit the TravelCommons Facebook page, following up on my comment in last month’s episode about my disappearing American flight from ORD to BCN. Jim writes...<ul><li>“We were going to Barcelona and Madrid with Rick Steves Europe in October, but of course Rick has canceled every tour for the rest of the year. Interestingly, AA says we are still booked on a BA 747 from SAN to LHR as part of this trip. BA has no more 747\'s and doesn\'t serve SAN any more.”</li></ul></li><li>I sometimes think any of the airline’s schedules more than one month out are more like aspirational projections than reflections of reality. Especially given how fast they’re shifting schedules to capture any sort of bump in passenger volume. Like United having <a href=\"https://airlineweekly.com/airlines-feeling-a-lift-from-rocky-mountain-hubs\">some transcontinental flights stop in DEN to pick up a bump in volume from people visiting national parks</a> -- there’s that outdoor activity trend again.</li><li>But back to that BCN trip, I should be getting things here in Chicago sorted before heading off for 2 weeks in Catalonia, but you’ve probably already guessed, that trip isn’t happening. Not a surprise. The EU still isn’t letting US travelers in and the case count in Spain’s second COVID wave has gotten worse in the last month. So at the beginning of the month, I gritted my teeth, called American and cancelled the flights. Actually, American had called me the prior week while we were in the UP, but I let it go to voicemail. We were in a taproom in Marquette and I didn’t feel ready to have that conversation. I wanted to have all our booking info in front of me and be clear minded (tough during a taproom session) and mentally girded for battle. So when I returned their call the next week, I was sitting in front of my laptop with all my itinerary documents up and was ready to go. It was a quick trip through the automated phone tree to a very nice woman in Dallas. No hassles with canceling. I was asking her about the logistics of the travel credit - how long will it be good for - when she said, “Since your flight was canceled and you were re-booked, you can get a refund if you like.” Wow. “Uh, yes,” I quickly said, not wanting her offer to disappear, “I think I’ll take the refund instead.” That was not what I expected from all the stories about American trying to keep as much cash as possible. It took her a couple of minutes to process the refunds during which we compared the weather between Chicago and Dallas. The refunds hit my credit card the following week, so full kudos to American on handling this. I’m hoping I don’t need to repeat in November for my Thanksgiving trip to London.</li><li>A couple of weeks back I was trading notes with TravelCommons contributor Allan Marko about <a href=\"https://www.sfgate.com/travel/article/United-bangalore-SFO-15551358.php\">United’s new SFO-Bangalore non-stop</a>. It’ll be their longest flight at 17½ hours. My immediate reaction was, of course, “that’s a helluva long time to wear a mask.” United is using a 787-9 with a special engine enhancement that makes the flight possible. Which got me thinking about what planes I’d flown into BLR. I’ve been using <a href=\"https://www.tripit.com/\">TripIt</a> since 2008 when it first broke out of the Silicon Valley venture cap bubble, so I logged in, clicked over to Past Trips and started clicking back through the pages -- and clicking and clicking because the last time I was in Bangalore was April 2014. I kept looking around the screen - there’s gotta be a way to export all my trip data; but I couldn’t find anything. So I sent a note to <a href=\"mailto:support@tripit.com\">support@tripit.com</a>. And, to my huge surprise, Andy from the Tripit Help Center replied in <em>15 minutes</em> saying “We currently do not offer customer driven travel data export capability. We have passed your suggestion on to the appropriate team for review.” Having run a software product team, I knew what that meant -- never. But, in the next paragraph, Andy offered a solution -- “You can check out a third party app Openflights. They have an API with TripIt that will allow you to import trips from your TripIt account to their site. From there you can create a list of all of your flights and download them to a csv file. Their basic account is free to use.” Sweet. I thanked Andy for his quick reply and hit <a href=\"https://openflights.org/\">Openflights</a>. I set up an account, hit the “Import” button and connected to my TripIt account. The import was a touch kludgy -- I had to go page by page, review each trip, and mark it to import. After 88 pages, I had imported 1006 flight segments, which they displayed on a world map. I clicked on BLR and a little card popped up. I clicked on the first option and it listed the 8 flights I’d taken to and from BLR. Turns out I’d mostly flown Airbus A320s, though I did once fly a 747-400 in from FRA. It has a couple of analysis buttons -- like my longest flight -- Joburg to IAD at 17:40 (ha! 10 minutes longer than the SFO-BLR flight); and my shortest -- IAD again, but this time a 44-minute flight to CHO. And of course, I was able to download all my trips into Excel so I can noodle around to my heart’s content. Openflights is free, but I’m going to <a href=\"https://openflights.org/donate\">donate</a> to help keep them going. <a href=\"https://openflights.org/\">Openflights.org</a> -- definitely recommended. I’ll put a link in the show notes.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djiz/10514\">Nube - Djiz Rmx</a> by Kwame (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: SylviaO</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>6 Months of Pandemic</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Finally giving into reality and canceling my Barcelona flight 6 months after booking it got me thinking back on these -- you know what’s coming -- <em>unprecedented</em> times. Airlines canceled flights to China at the end of January, then to South Korea, Iran, and Italy in February, until, by the beginning of March, airline traffic joined the stock market in a free fall. But back then, we thought it was a one-off event, kinda like Sept 11th; a sharp, scary event that came out of nowhere with no warning but that would soon pass. So taking advantage of one of the many March fare sales to book a flight at the end of September didn’t seem that risky.</li><li>I was talking to one of my consulting friends a couple of weeks ago. His travel schedule was similar to mine - a week without seeing an airport was a rare exception. He hasn’t been on a plane since March and doesn’t know when he’ll get on one next. He just started a project with a manufacturer in Cincinnati. Most of the project will be virtual, but he’s pretty sure he ought to at least put eyes on their plant. He lives outside Detroit. In the past, he’d be flying down every week. Now, he fires up Google Maps -- it’s a 4½ drive down I-75. He’ll drive down once, stay a couple of days, and then head back home.&nbsp;</li><li>I can’t say that anyone I’ve talked to misses the act of business travel -- getting up at 0 dark 30 Monday morning to get to the airport, shuffle through the PreCheck line for 15-20 minutes, and then shoehorn into a full flight for an hour or 3.&nbsp; But we did it because that was part of the job. But now that it’s not, at least for now and what seems like (for now) through the end of the year, everybody is taking full advantage of sleeping in -- in their own beds.</li><li>Which explains why, of all the US airlines, Spirit Airlines, with its complete focus on low-cost leisure travelers, is the only one sounding even somewhat non-negative.&nbsp; And hotel chains like Choice, focused on what they call “drive-to” locations and extended stay properties getting occupancy rates over 50% while center city hotels like Chicago’s Hilton Palmer House are missing rent payments and slouching towards bankruptcy.</li><li>Irene and I were sitting outside at a microbrewery a couple of days ago, enjoying a sunny afternoon full in the knowledge that we have maybe 4 weeks of outdoor eating and drinking left in Chicago. We talked about what kind of travel we would do over the next 12 months, figuring travel restrictions and periodic lockdowns are going to be the norm for at least that long. No big plans; nothing that COVID could blow up but seeing some new places -- some skiing, maybe trying out Montana; some hiking, maybe checking out the Texas Hill Country. But next month, we’re trading Barcelona for Philadelphia; now that they’ve opened up the restaurants again, check out our old neighborhood and visit with some friends. It’ll be Irene’s first flight since February. It took a bit of talking, but I really think the threat of a total of 22 hrs in a car with me -- alone -- tipped her over.&nbsp;</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/3lb3r3th/44072\">Misunderstood</a> by 3lb3r3th (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. &nbsp;Ft: Alchemistry</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Do We Keep Travel Credit Cards?</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Last week, <a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/14/delta-launches-6point5-billion-debt-deal-backed-by-its-frequent-flyer-program.html\">Delta used their SkyMiles program to back $6.5 billion in debt</a>, running the same play that United and American did in June. What caught my eye was some of the stats that came out with the debt filing -- that <a href=\"https://skift.com/2020/09/15/how-delta-looks-to-leverage-rewards-from-its-own-frequent-flyer-program/\">SkyMiles had about $6.1 billion in revenue in 2019, about two-thirds from American Express</a> which issues a co-branded Delta card, and that <a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/14/delta-launches-6point5-billion-debt-deal-backed-by-its-frequent-flyer-program.html\">total miles redeemed fell by 78% in the first half of this year.</a> The big carriers are leaning on their loyalty programs for cash, their biggest customers are credit card issuers, but those card users - us - are generating points that we’ve stopped using.&nbsp;</li><li>It’s against this background that I called up Matt Schulz, chief credit analyst at LendingTree, and to ask him -- do we want to keep travel credit cards?<ul><li>Matt, a lot of folks carry at least one travel credit card and I don’t think I’m going too far out on a limb guessing that damn close to every TravelCommons listeners carry them. We’re 6 months on from the COVID lockdowns and the resulting cratering of the travel industry. But with travel not recovering -- airline demand is still just a third of pre-pandemic levels and United Airlines’ CEO said last week it could be 3-4 years before it’s back to 2019 levels -- what are card holders doing with these cards generating frequent traveler points that they can’t or don’t want to use?</li><li>Back in March and April, it seemed the strategy for the big travel card issuers -- Chase, Citi, Amex -- seemed to be to sacrifice revenue to hold share -- statement credits for annual fees if you called them to cancel, new bonuses for stay-at-home purchases to keep wallet share -- seemed like 5x bonuses for grocery and gas was the most popular. Made sense when everyone was talking about 2-week shutdowns and a V-shaped recovery. But, as we said before, travel is gonna stay depressed for a while -- between state and country quarantines and many people not wanting to get in a plane -- how are travel card companies going to handle the next round of renewals? When I call Chase and Amex again, do I get more statement credits -- do they continue to fight for share? And if they don’t, what do I do with the balance of Ultimate or Membership Rewards points that I’ll lose if I don’t re-up and pay the fee?</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #167</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and now, <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_167.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #167 — 6 Months On; Why Keep Travel Cards?','','inherit','closed','closed','','2856-revision-v1','','','2020-09-19 09:42:08','2020-09-19 14:42:08','',2856,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/09/19/2856-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2867,1,'2020-09-19 09:43:20','2020-09-19 14:43:20','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/F3E28DAE-0026-4E8A-957E-D6CE914F717C.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2857 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/F3E28DAE-0026-4E8A-957E-D6CE914F717C-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\n<figcaption>I seem to have put on a Quarantine 15</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p>Spent a week in <a href=\"https://www.uptravel.com/\">Michigan\'s Upper Peninsula</a> hiking, biking, kayaking, and running into a lot of other people getting away to do the same, which got me looking back six months to the start of the pandemic . I talk about a surprisingly good flight cancelation experience with American Airlines, and figuring out how to download 12 years of <a href=\"https://www.tripit.com/\">TripIt</a> data. And then I talk to <a href=\"https://www.lendingtree.com/writer/matt-schulz/\">Matt Schulz</a> of <a href=\"https://www.lendingtree.com/\">LendingTree</a>, asking him what are we doing with travel credit cards that are generating frequent traveler points we can’t use? All this and more at the<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_167.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"> <strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/860072707&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #167: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after a week’s tour of the UP -- Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Did a counter-clockwise&nbsp; circle route around Lake Michigan. Headed out east on Friday morning; stopped at a brewery in Grand Rapids for lunch; drove the 5 miles across the Mackinac Bridge just before dusk; and had my first UP pasty (the first of many) and a local beer for dinner that night in Sault Ste Marie. Spent a couple of days in Soo; watched 700-ft lake freighters make their way through the locks that connect Lake Superior to Lake Huron; I’m still enough of an engineer to geek out on that kind of stuff. We then drove west to Marquette for 3 days and again west to Houghton for 2 days before heading home through Wisconsin down the west side of Lake Michigan. It was all outdoors stuff -- hiking, biking, kayaking; the things that last-minute COVID closures or restrictions won’t muck up.&nbsp; The UP has always been on my list of places to visit, but it’s always on sorta the B-list, and so plans to go someplace else -- Spain, Napa, Ireland -- would always push it down the list. But now, with most places blocked off with travel restrictions and quarantines, the UP -- drivable with lots of outdoor activities -- bubbled to the top of the list.</li><li>And I wasn’t the only one thinking that way. The guy renting rowboats at <a href=\"https://www2.dnr.state.mi.us/ParksandTrails/Details.aspx?id=428&amp;type=SPRK\">Tahquamenon Falls State Park</a> looked at our release forms and said “We’ve had a lot of people up here from Chicago. It’s been crazy busy. We can’t get enough people to handle it.” And biking around <a href=\"https://www.travelmarquette.com/things-to-do/attractions/presque-isle-park/\">Presque Isle Park</a> in Marquette, we got talking, in a socially distant way, to a biking couple up from St Louis. It was also their first time up. A bunch of their friends and family had been up earlier; they’d seen nothing but UP pictures in their Facebook feed for the past month.</li><li>The husband said that he had an underlying medical condition and so they were looking for places away from people; they’d rented a cabin in the little town of Au Train. Which got me thinking about the place we stayed in Soo -- the <a href=\"https://www.plazamotormotel.com/\">Plaza Motor Motel</a>. No lobby, no elevators, no hallways; no places to run into other guests; no need to have to remember to mask up when you leave your room. Just open your room door and there’s your car. Most frequent travelers would never think of voluntarily staying in a motor inn, a <em>mo</em>-tel. But with so many things changing in these unprecedented times, maybe COVID will have folks give motels another chance.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/11510\">Funkist</a> - cdk dub mix by cdk (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: teru</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>First, a big shout out to the folks in Hanoi, Vietnam listening to TravelCommons on Soundcloud. One of the fun things about the podcast is looking at where people are listening from. For the most part, the stats make sense -- most of the listeners are from the US, and then English-speaking countries -- the UK, Canada, Australia. But every once in a while, there’s a spike that I just can’t figure out. I’ll see it, go look at the episode notes to see if I’ve mentioned that country, but I usually can’t make sense of it. Last fall, it was Argentina., but over the past couple of months, it’s been folks from Hanoi, primarily listening to April episode, #162, about post-lockdown trip planning and keeping a travel journal. Not sure why, but if you’re in Hanoi and you’ve made it to this episode - Hi! And thanks for listening!</li><li>Dan Grabon sent me a note at the beginning of the month about my lockdown reading that I mentioned during last month’s interview with Dr Emily Thomas<ul><li>“Mark,&nbsp; I feel your pain. I started re-reading Walden back in April, and I just passed the halfway mark at the end of August. This was part of an overly ambitious effort to read one great book a month from a literary calendar that I bought. The Brothers Karamazov took up January through March, and even though COVID should have meant more time to read, it just hasn’t turned out that way.</li><li>“Writing this from a long overdue vacation near Lake George, where I saw the book Cabin Porn in a gift shop. Good timing.</li><li>“Thanks for keeping the podcast going— helps keep me going in this time of not going much of anywhere!”</li></ul></li><li>Dan, Thanks for the note. <em>The Brothers Karamazov</em> -- you are a better man than I.&nbsp; I swore off of Russian fiction after suffering through <em>Crime and Punishment</em> in high school. That and Charles Dickens, just can’t do ‘em. And I am still working my way through <em>Walden</em>. Just got through his half-dozen pages on hoeing his bean field. I find if I try to read more than a dozen pages in a sitting, I just start skimming -- or sleeping. Glad you were able to get away to the wilderness of Lake George. Feel like the perfect place to find that Cabin Porn book.</li><li>Jim McDonough hit the TravelCommons Facebook page, following up on my comment in last month’s episode about my disappearing American flight from ORD to BCN. Jim writes...<ul><li>“We were going to Barcelona and Madrid with Rick Steves Europe in October, but of course Rick has canceled every tour for the rest of the year. Interestingly, AA says we are still booked on a BA 747 from SAN to LHR as part of this trip. BA has no more 747\'s and doesn\'t serve SAN any more.”</li></ul></li><li>I sometimes think any of the airline’s schedules more than one month out are more like aspirational projections than reflections of reality. Especially given how fast they’re shifting schedules to capture any sort of bump in passenger volume. Like United having <a href=\"https://airlineweekly.com/airlines-feeling-a-lift-from-rocky-mountain-hubs\">some transcontinental flights stop in DEN to pick up a bump in volume from people visiting national parks</a> -- there’s that outdoor activity trend again.</li><li>But back to that BCN trip, I should be getting things here in Chicago sorted before heading off for 2 weeks in Catalonia, but you’ve probably already guessed, that trip isn’t happening. Not a surprise. The EU still isn’t letting US travelers in and the case count in Spain’s second COVID wave has gotten worse in the last month. So at the beginning of the month, I gritted my teeth, called American and cancelled the flights. Actually, American had called me the prior week while we were in the UP, but I let it go to voicemail. We were in a taproom in Marquette and I didn’t feel ready to have that conversation. I wanted to have all our booking info in front of me and be clear minded (tough during a taproom session) and mentally girded for battle. So when I returned their call the next week, I was sitting in front of my laptop with all my itinerary documents up and was ready to go. It was a quick trip through the automated phone tree to a very nice woman in Dallas. No hassles with canceling. I was asking her about the logistics of the travel credit - how long will it be good for - when she said, “Since your flight was canceled and you were re-booked, you can get a refund if you like.” Wow. “Uh, yes,” I quickly said, not wanting her offer to disappear, “I think I’ll take the refund instead.” That was not what I expected from all the stories about American trying to keep as much cash as possible. It took her a couple of minutes to process the refunds during which we compared the weather between Chicago and Dallas. The refunds hit my credit card the following week, so full kudos to American on handling this. I’m hoping I don’t need to repeat in November for my Thanksgiving trip to London.</li><li>A couple of weeks back I was trading notes with TravelCommons contributor Allan Marko about <a href=\"https://www.sfgate.com/travel/article/United-bangalore-SFO-15551358.php\">United’s new SFO-Bangalore non-stop</a>. It’ll be their longest flight at 17½ hours. My immediate reaction was, of course, “that’s a helluva long time to wear a mask.” United is using a 787-9 with a special engine enhancement that makes the flight possible. Which got me thinking about what planes I’d flown into BLR. I’ve been using <a href=\"https://www.tripit.com/\">TripIt</a> since 2008 when it first broke out of the Silicon Valley venture cap bubble, so I logged in, clicked over to Past Trips and started clicking back through the pages -- and clicking and clicking because the last time I was in Bangalore was April 2014. I kept looking around the screen - there’s gotta be a way to export all my trip data; but I couldn’t find anything. So I sent a note to <a href=\"mailto:support@tripit.com\">support@tripit.com</a>. And, to my huge surprise, Andy from the Tripit Help Center replied in <em>15 minutes</em> saying “We currently do not offer customer driven travel data export capability. We have passed your suggestion on to the appropriate team for review.” Having run a software product team, I knew what that meant -- never. But, in the next paragraph, Andy offered a solution -- “You can check out a third party app Openflights. They have an API with TripIt that will allow you to import trips from your TripIt account to their site. From there you can create a list of all of your flights and download them to a csv file. Their basic account is free to use.” Sweet. I thanked Andy for his quick reply and hit <a href=\"https://openflights.org/\">Openflights</a>. I set up an account, hit the “Import” button and connected to my TripIt account. The import was a touch kludgy -- I had to go page by page, review each trip, and mark it to import. After 88 pages, I had imported 1006 flight segments, which they displayed on a world map. I clicked on BLR and a little card popped up. I clicked on the first option and it listed the 8 flights I’d taken to and from BLR. Turns out I’d mostly flown Airbus A320s, though I did once fly a 747-400 in from FRA. It has a couple of analysis buttons -- like my longest flight -- Joburg to IAD at 17:40 (ha! 10 minutes longer than the SFO-BLR flight); and my shortest -- IAD again, but this time a 44-minute flight to CHO. And of course, I was able to download all my trips into Excel so I can noodle around to my heart’s content. Openflights is free, but I’m going to <a href=\"https://openflights.org/donate\">donate</a> to help keep them going. <a href=\"https://openflights.org/\">Openflights.org</a> -- definitely recommended. I’ll put a link in the show notes.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djiz/10514\">Nube - Djiz Rmx</a> by Kwame (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: SylviaO</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>6 Months of Pandemic</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Finally giving into reality and canceling my Barcelona flight 6 months after booking it got me thinking back on these -- you know what’s coming -- <em>unprecedented</em> times. Airlines canceled flights to China at the end of January, then to South Korea, Iran, and Italy in February, until, by the beginning of March, airline traffic joined the stock market in a free fall. But back then, we thought it was a one-off event, kinda like Sept 11th; a sharp, scary event that came out of nowhere with no warning but that would soon pass. So taking advantage of one of the many March fare sales to book a flight at the end of September didn’t seem that risky.</li><li>I was talking to one of my consulting friends a couple of weeks ago. His travel schedule was similar to mine - a week without seeing an airport was a rare exception. He hasn’t been on a plane since March and doesn’t know when he’ll get on one next. He just started a project with a manufacturer in Cincinnati. Most of the project will be virtual, but he’s pretty sure he ought to at least put eyes on their plant. He lives outside Detroit. In the past, he’d be flying down every week. Now, he fires up Google Maps -- it’s a 4½ drive down I-75. He’ll drive down once, stay a couple of days, and then head back home.&nbsp;</li><li>I can’t say that anyone I’ve talked to misses the act of business travel -- getting up at 0 dark 30 Monday morning to get to the airport, shuffle through the PreCheck line for 15-20 minutes, and then shoehorn into a full flight for an hour or 3.&nbsp; But we did it because that was part of the job. But now that it’s not, at least for now and what seems like (for now) through the end of the year, everybody is taking full advantage of sleeping in -- in their own beds.</li><li>Which explains why, of all the US airlines, Spirit Airlines, with its complete focus on low-cost leisure travelers, is the only one sounding even somewhat non-negative.&nbsp; And hotel chains like Choice, focused on what they call “drive-to” locations and extended stay properties getting occupancy rates over 50% while center city hotels like Chicago’s Hilton Palmer House are missing rent payments and slouching towards bankruptcy.</li><li>Irene and I were sitting outside at a microbrewery a couple of days ago, enjoying a sunny afternoon full in the knowledge that we have maybe 4 weeks of outdoor eating and drinking left in Chicago. We talked about what kind of travel we would do over the next 12 months, figuring travel restrictions and periodic lockdowns are going to be the norm for at least that long. No big plans; nothing that COVID could blow up but seeing some new places -- some skiing, maybe trying out Montana; some hiking, maybe checking out the Texas Hill Country. But next month, we’re trading Barcelona for Philadelphia; now that they’ve opened up the restaurants again, check out our old neighborhood and visit with some friends. It’ll be Irene’s first flight since February. It took a bit of talking, but I really think the threat of a total of 22 hrs in a car with me -- alone -- tipped her over.&nbsp;</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/3lb3r3th/44072\">Misunderstood</a> by 3lb3r3th (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. &nbsp;Ft: Alchemistry</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Do We Keep Travel Credit Cards?</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Last week, <a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/14/delta-launches-6point5-billion-debt-deal-backed-by-its-frequent-flyer-program.html\">Delta used their SkyMiles program to back $6.5 billion in debt</a>, running the same play that United and American did in June. What caught my eye was some of the stats that came out with the debt filing -- that <a href=\"https://skift.com/2020/09/15/how-delta-looks-to-leverage-rewards-from-its-own-frequent-flyer-program/\">SkyMiles had about $6.1 billion in revenue in 2019, about two-thirds from American Express</a> which issues a co-branded Delta card, and that <a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/14/delta-launches-6point5-billion-debt-deal-backed-by-its-frequent-flyer-program.html\">total miles redeemed fell by 78% in the first half of this year.</a> The big carriers are leaning on their loyalty programs for cash, their biggest customers are credit card issuers, but those card users - us - are generating points that we’ve stopped using.&nbsp;</li><li>It’s against this background that I called up Matt Schulz, chief credit analyst at LendingTree, and to ask him -- do we want to keep travel credit cards?<ul><li>Matt, a lot of folks carry at least one travel credit card and I don’t think I’m going too far out on a limb guessing that damn close to every TravelCommons listeners carry them. We’re 6 months on from the COVID lockdowns and the resulting cratering of the travel industry. But with travel not recovering -- airline demand is still just a third of pre-pandemic levels and United Airlines’ CEO said last week it could be 3-4 years before it’s back to 2019 levels -- what are card holders doing with these cards generating frequent traveler points that they can’t or don’t want to use?</li><li>Back in March and April, it seemed the strategy for the big travel card issuers -- Chase, Citi, Amex -- seemed to be to sacrifice revenue to hold share -- statement credits for annual fees if you called them to cancel, new bonuses for stay-at-home purchases to keep wallet share -- seemed like 5x bonuses for grocery and gas was the most popular. Made sense when everyone was talking about 2-week shutdowns and a V-shaped recovery. But, as we said before, travel is gonna stay depressed for a while -- between state and country quarantines and many people not wanting to get in a plane -- how are travel card companies going to handle the next round of renewals? When I call Chase and Amex again, do I get more statement credits -- do they continue to fight for share? And if they don’t, what do I do with the balance of Ultimate or Membership Rewards points that I’ll lose if I don’t re-up and pay the fee?</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #167</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and now, <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_167.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #167 — 6 Months On; Why Keep Travel Cards?','','inherit','closed','closed','','2856-revision-v1','','','2020-09-19 09:43:20','2020-09-19 14:43:20','',2856,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/09/19/2856-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2868,1,'2020-09-19 09:44:42','2020-09-19 14:44:42','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/F3E28DAE-0026-4E8A-957E-D6CE914F717C.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2857 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/F3E28DAE-0026-4E8A-957E-D6CE914F717C-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\n<figcaption>I seem to have put on a Quarantine 15</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p>Spent a week in <a href=\"https://www.uptravel.com/\">Michigan\'s Upper Peninsula</a> hiking, biking, kayaking, and running into a lot of other people getting away to do the same, which got me looking back six months to the start of the pandemic . I talk about a surprisingly good flight cancelation experience with American Airlines, and figuring out how to download 12 years of <a href=\"https://www.tripit.com/\">TripIt</a> data. We wrap up talking to <a href=\"https://www.lendingtree.com/writer/matt-schulz/\">Matt Schulz</a> of <a href=\"https://www.lendingtree.com/\">LendingTree</a>, asking him what are we doing with travel credit cards that are generating frequent traveler points we can’t use? All this and more at the<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_167.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"> <strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/860072707&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #167: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after a week’s tour of the UP -- Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Did a counter-clockwise circle route around Lake Michigan. Headed out east on Friday morning; stopped at a brewery in Grand Rapids for lunch; drove the 5 miles across the Mackinac Bridge just before dusk; and had my first UP pasty (the first of many) and a local beer for dinner that night in Sault Ste Marie. Spent a couple of days in Soo; watched 700-ft lake freighters make their way through the locks that connect Lake Superior to Lake Huron; I’m still enough of an engineer to geek out on that kind of stuff. We then drove west to Marquette for 3 days and again west to Houghton for 2 days before heading home through Wisconsin down the west side of Lake Michigan. It was all outdoors stuff -- hiking, biking, kayaking; the things that last-minute COVID closures or restrictions won’t muck up.  The UP has always been on my list of places to visit, but it’s always on sorta the B-list, and so plans to go someplace else -- Spain, Napa, Ireland -- would always push it down the list. But now, with most places blocked off with travel restrictions and quarantines, the UP -- drivable with lots of outdoor activities -- bubbled to the top of the list.</li><li>And I wasn’t the only one thinking that way. The guy renting rowboats at <a href=\"https://www2.dnr.state.mi.us/ParksandTrails/Details.aspx?id=428&amp;type=SPRK\">Tahquamenon Falls State Park</a> looked at our release forms and said “We’ve had a lot of people up here from Chicago. It’s been crazy busy. We can’t get enough people to handle it.” And biking around <a href=\"https://www.travelmarquette.com/things-to-do/attractions/presque-isle-park/\">Presque Isle Park</a> in Marquette, we got talking, in a socially distant way, to a biking couple up from St Louis. It was also their first time up. A bunch of their friends and family had been up earlier; they’d seen nothing but UP pictures in their Facebook feed for the past month.</li><li>The husband said that he had an underlying medical condition and so they were looking for places away from people; they’d rented a cabin in the little town of Au Train. Which got me thinking about the place we stayed in Soo -- the <a href=\"https://www.plazamotormotel.com/\">Plaza Motor Motel</a>. No lobby, no elevators, no hallways; no places to run into other guests; no need to have to remember to mask up when you leave your room. Just open your room door and there’s your car. Most frequent travelers would never think of voluntarily staying in a motor inn, a <em>mo</em>-tel. But with so many things changing in these unprecedented times, maybe COVID will have folks give motels another chance.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/11510\">Funkist</a> - cdk dub mix by cdk (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: teru</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>First, a big shout out to the folks in Hanoi, Vietnam listening to TravelCommons on Soundcloud. One of the fun things about the podcast is looking at where people are listening from. For the most part, the stats make sense -- most of the listeners are from the US, and then English-speaking countries -- the UK, Canada, Australia. But every once in a while, there’s a spike that I just can’t figure out. I’ll see it, go look at the episode notes to see if I’ve mentioned that country, but I usually can’t make sense of it. Last fall, it was Argentina., but over the past couple of months, it’s been folks from Hanoi, primarily listening to April episode, #162, about post-lockdown trip planning and keeping a travel journal. Not sure why, but if you’re in Hanoi and you’ve made it to this episode - Hi! And thanks for listening!</li><li>Dan Grabon sent me a note at the beginning of the month about my lockdown reading that I mentioned during last month’s interview with Dr Emily Thomas<ul><li>“Mark,&nbsp; I feel your pain. I started re-reading Walden back in April, and I just passed the halfway mark at the end of August. This was part of an overly ambitious effort to read one great book a month from a literary calendar that I bought. The Brothers Karamazov took up January through March, and even though COVID should have meant more time to read, it just hasn’t turned out that way.</li><li>“Writing this from a long overdue vacation near Lake George, where I saw the book Cabin Porn in a gift shop. Good timing.</li><li>“Thanks for keeping the podcast going— helps keep me going in this time of not going much of anywhere!”</li></ul></li><li>Dan, Thanks for the note. <em>The Brothers Karamazov</em> -- you are a better man than I.&nbsp; I swore off of Russian fiction after suffering through <em>Crime and Punishment</em> in high school. That and Charles Dickens, just can’t do ‘em. And I am still working my way through <em>Walden</em>. Just got through his half-dozen pages on hoeing his bean field. I find if I try to read more than a dozen pages in a sitting, I just start skimming -- or sleeping. Glad you were able to get away to the wilderness of Lake George. Feel like the perfect place to find that Cabin Porn book.</li><li>Jim McDonough hit the TravelCommons Facebook page, following up on my comment in last month’s episode about my disappearing American flight from ORD to BCN. Jim writes...<ul><li>“We were going to Barcelona and Madrid with Rick Steves Europe in October, but of course Rick has canceled every tour for the rest of the year. Interestingly, AA says we are still booked on a BA 747 from SAN to LHR as part of this trip. BA has no more 747\'s and doesn\'t serve SAN any more.”</li></ul></li><li>I sometimes think any of the airline’s schedules more than one month out are more like aspirational projections than reflections of reality. Especially given how fast they’re shifting schedules to capture any sort of bump in passenger volume. Like United having <a href=\"https://airlineweekly.com/airlines-feeling-a-lift-from-rocky-mountain-hubs\">some transcontinental flights stop in DEN to pick up a bump in volume from people visiting national parks</a> -- there’s that outdoor activity trend again.</li><li>But back to that BCN trip, I should be getting things here in Chicago sorted before heading off for 2 weeks in Catalonia, but you’ve probably already guessed, that trip isn’t happening. Not a surprise. The EU still isn’t letting US travelers in and the case count in Spain’s second COVID wave has gotten worse in the last month. So at the beginning of the month, I gritted my teeth, called American and cancelled the flights. Actually, American had called me the prior week while we were in the UP, but I let it go to voicemail. We were in a taproom in Marquette and I didn’t feel ready to have that conversation. I wanted to have all our booking info in front of me and be clear minded (tough during a taproom session) and mentally girded for battle. So when I returned their call the next week, I was sitting in front of my laptop with all my itinerary documents up and was ready to go. It was a quick trip through the automated phone tree to a very nice woman in Dallas. No hassles with canceling. I was asking her about the logistics of the travel credit - how long will it be good for - when she said, “Since your flight was canceled and you were re-booked, you can get a refund if you like.” Wow. “Uh, yes,” I quickly said, not wanting her offer to disappear, “I think I’ll take the refund instead.” That was not what I expected from all the stories about American trying to keep as much cash as possible. It took her a couple of minutes to process the refunds during which we compared the weather between Chicago and Dallas. The refunds hit my credit card the following week, so full kudos to American on handling this. I’m hoping I don’t need to repeat in November for my Thanksgiving trip to London.</li><li>A couple of weeks back I was trading notes with TravelCommons contributor Allan Marko about <a href=\"https://www.sfgate.com/travel/article/United-bangalore-SFO-15551358.php\">United’s new SFO-Bangalore non-stop</a>. It’ll be their longest flight at 17½ hours. My immediate reaction was, of course, “that’s a helluva long time to wear a mask.” United is using a 787-9 with a special engine enhancement that makes the flight possible. Which got me thinking about what planes I’d flown into BLR. I’ve been using <a href=\"https://www.tripit.com/\">TripIt</a> since 2008 when it first broke out of the Silicon Valley venture cap bubble, so I logged in, clicked over to Past Trips and started clicking back through the pages -- and clicking and clicking because the last time I was in Bangalore was April 2014. I kept looking around the screen - there’s gotta be a way to export all my trip data; but I couldn’t find anything. So I sent a note to <a href=\"mailto:support@tripit.com\">support@tripit.com</a>. And, to my huge surprise, Andy from the Tripit Help Center replied in <em>15 minutes</em> saying “We currently do not offer customer driven travel data export capability. We have passed your suggestion on to the appropriate team for review.” Having run a software product team, I knew what that meant -- never. But, in the next paragraph, Andy offered a solution -- “You can check out a third party app Openflights. They have an API with TripIt that will allow you to import trips from your TripIt account to their site. From there you can create a list of all of your flights and download them to a csv file. Their basic account is free to use.” Sweet. I thanked Andy for his quick reply and hit <a href=\"https://openflights.org/\">Openflights</a>. I set up an account, hit the “Import” button and connected to my TripIt account. The import was a touch kludgy -- I had to go page by page, review each trip, and mark it to import. After 88 pages, I had imported 1006 flight segments, which they displayed on a world map. I clicked on BLR and a little card popped up. I clicked on the first option and it listed the 8 flights I’d taken to and from BLR. Turns out I’d mostly flown Airbus A320s, though I did once fly a 747-400 in from FRA. It has a couple of analysis buttons -- like my longest flight -- Joburg to IAD at 17:40 (ha! 10 minutes longer than the SFO-BLR flight); and my shortest -- IAD again, but this time a 44-minute flight to CHO. And of course, I was able to download all my trips into Excel so I can noodle around to my heart’s content. Openflights is free, but I’m going to <a href=\"https://openflights.org/donate\">donate</a> to help keep them going. <a href=\"https://openflights.org/\">Openflights.org</a> -- definitely recommended. I’ll put a link in the show notes.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djiz/10514\">Nube - Djiz Rmx</a> by Kwame (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: SylviaO</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>6 Months of Pandemic</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Finally giving into reality and canceling my Barcelona flight 6 months after booking it got me thinking back on these -- you know what’s coming -- <em>unprecedented</em> times. Airlines canceled flights to China at the end of January, then to South Korea, Iran, and Italy in February, until, by the beginning of March, airline traffic joined the stock market in a free fall. But back then, we thought it was a one-off event, kinda like Sept 11th; a sharp, scary event that came out of nowhere with no warning but that would soon pass. So taking advantage of one of the many March fare sales to book a flight at the end of September didn’t seem that risky.</li><li>I was talking to one of my consulting friends a couple of weeks ago. His travel schedule was similar to mine - a week without seeing an airport was a rare exception. He hasn’t been on a plane since March and doesn’t know when he’ll get on one next. He just started a project with a manufacturer in Cincinnati. Most of the project will be virtual, but he’s pretty sure he ought to at least put eyes on their plant. He lives outside Detroit. In the past, he’d be flying down every week. Now, he fires up Google Maps -- it’s a 4½ drive down I-75. He’ll drive down once, stay a couple of days, and then head back home.&nbsp;</li><li>I can’t say that anyone I’ve talked to misses the act of business travel -- getting up at 0 dark 30 Monday morning to get to the airport, shuffle through the PreCheck line for 15-20 minutes, and then shoehorn into a full flight for an hour or 3.&nbsp; But we did it because that was part of the job. But now that it’s not, at least for now and what seems like (for now) through the end of the year, everybody is taking full advantage of sleeping in -- in their own beds.</li><li>Which explains why, of all the US airlines, Spirit Airlines, with its complete focus on low-cost leisure travelers, is the only one sounding even somewhat non-negative.&nbsp; And hotel chains like Choice, focused on what they call “drive-to” locations and extended stay properties getting occupancy rates over 50% while center city hotels like Chicago’s Hilton Palmer House are missing rent payments and slouching towards bankruptcy.</li><li>Irene and I were sitting outside at a microbrewery a couple of days ago, enjoying a sunny afternoon full in the knowledge that we have maybe 4 weeks of outdoor eating and drinking left in Chicago. We talked about what kind of travel we would do over the next 12 months, figuring travel restrictions and periodic lockdowns are going to be the norm for at least that long. No big plans; nothing that COVID could blow up but seeing some new places -- some skiing, maybe trying out Montana; some hiking, maybe checking out the Texas Hill Country. But next month, we’re trading Barcelona for Philadelphia; now that they’ve opened up the restaurants again, check out our old neighborhood and visit with some friends. It’ll be Irene’s first flight since February. It took a bit of talking, but I really think the threat of a total of 22 hrs in a car with me -- alone -- tipped her over.&nbsp;</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/3lb3r3th/44072\">Misunderstood</a> by 3lb3r3th (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. &nbsp;Ft: Alchemistry</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Do We Keep Travel Credit Cards?</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Last week, <a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/14/delta-launches-6point5-billion-debt-deal-backed-by-its-frequent-flyer-program.html\">Delta used their SkyMiles program to back $6.5 billion in debt</a>, running the same play that United and American did in June. What caught my eye was some of the stats that came out with the debt filing -- that <a href=\"https://skift.com/2020/09/15/how-delta-looks-to-leverage-rewards-from-its-own-frequent-flyer-program/\">SkyMiles had about $6.1 billion in revenue in 2019, about two-thirds from American Express</a> which issues a co-branded Delta card, and that <a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/14/delta-launches-6point5-billion-debt-deal-backed-by-its-frequent-flyer-program.html\">total miles redeemed fell by 78% in the first half of this year.</a> The big carriers are leaning on their loyalty programs for cash, their biggest customers are credit card issuers, but those card users - us - are generating points that we’ve stopped using.&nbsp;</li><li>It’s against this background that I called up Matt Schulz, chief credit analyst at LendingTree, and to ask him -- do we want to keep travel credit cards?<ul><li>Matt, a lot of folks carry at least one travel credit card and I don’t think I’m going too far out on a limb guessing that damn close to every TravelCommons listeners carry them. We’re 6 months on from the COVID lockdowns and the resulting cratering of the travel industry. But with travel not recovering -- airline demand is still just a third of pre-pandemic levels and United Airlines’ CEO said last week it could be 3-4 years before it’s back to 2019 levels -- what are card holders doing with these cards generating frequent traveler points that they can’t or don’t want to use?</li><li>Back in March and April, it seemed the strategy for the big travel card issuers -- Chase, Citi, Amex -- seemed to be to sacrifice revenue to hold share -- statement credits for annual fees if you called them to cancel, new bonuses for stay-at-home purchases to keep wallet share -- seemed like 5x bonuses for grocery and gas was the most popular. Made sense when everyone was talking about 2-week shutdowns and a V-shaped recovery. But, as we said before, travel is gonna stay depressed for a while -- between state and country quarantines and many people not wanting to get in a plane -- how are travel card companies going to handle the next round of renewals? When I call Chase and Amex again, do I get more statement credits -- do they continue to fight for share? And if they don’t, what do I do with the balance of Ultimate or Membership Rewards points that I’ll lose if I don’t re-up and pay the fee?</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #167</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and now, <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_167.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #167 — 6 Months On; Why Keep Travel Cards?','','inherit','closed','closed','','2856-revision-v1','','','2020-09-19 09:44:42','2020-09-19 14:44:42','',2856,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/09/19/2856-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2869,1,'2020-09-19 09:47:48','2020-09-19 14:47:48','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/F3E28DAE-0026-4E8A-957E-D6CE914F717C.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2857 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/F3E28DAE-0026-4E8A-957E-D6CE914F717C-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\n<figcaption>I seem to have put on a Quarantine 15</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p>Spent a week in <a href=\"https://www.uptravel.com/\">Michigan\'s Upper Peninsula</a> hiking, biking, kayaking, and running into a lot of other people getting away to do the same, which got me looking back six months to the start of the pandemic. I talk about a surprisingly good flight cancelation experience with American Airlines, and figuring out how to download 12 years of <a href=\"https://www.tripit.com/\">TripIt</a> data. We wrap up talking to <a href=\"https://www.lendingtree.com/writer/matt-schulz/\">Matt Schulz</a> of <a href=\"https://www.lendingtree.com/\">LendingTree</a>, asking him what are we doing with travel credit cards that are generating frequent traveler points we can’t use? All this and more at the<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_167.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"> <strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/860072707&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #167: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after a week’s tour of the UP -- Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Did a counter-clockwise circle route around Lake Michigan. Headed out east on Friday morning; stopped at a brewery in Grand Rapids for lunch; drove the 5 miles across the Mackinac Bridge just before dusk; and had my first UP pasty (the first of many) and a local beer for dinner that night in Sault Ste Marie. Spent a couple of days in Soo; watched 700-ft lake freighters make their way through the locks that connect Lake Superior to Lake Huron; I’m still enough of an engineer to geek out on that kind of stuff. We then drove west to Marquette for 3 days and again west to Houghton for 2 days before heading home through Wisconsin down the west side of Lake Michigan. It was all outdoors stuff -- hiking, biking, kayaking; the things that last-minute COVID closures or restrictions won’t muck up.  The UP has always been on my list of places to visit, but it’s always on sorta the B-list, and so plans to go someplace else -- Spain, Napa, Ireland -- would always push it down the list. But now, with most places blocked off with travel restrictions and quarantines, the UP -- drivable with lots of outdoor activities -- bubbled to the top of the list.</li><li>And I wasn’t the only one thinking that way. The guy renting rowboats at <a href=\"https://www2.dnr.state.mi.us/ParksandTrails/Details.aspx?id=428&amp;type=SPRK\">Tahquamenon Falls State Park</a> looked at our release forms and said “We’ve had a lot of people up here from Chicago. It’s been crazy busy. We can’t get enough people to handle it.” And biking around <a href=\"https://www.travelmarquette.com/things-to-do/attractions/presque-isle-park/\">Presque Isle Park</a> in Marquette, we got talking, in a socially distant way, to a biking couple up from St Louis. It was also their first time up. A bunch of their friends and family had been up earlier; they’d seen nothing but UP pictures in their Facebook feed for the past month.</li><li>The husband said that he had an underlying medical condition and so they were looking for places away from people; they’d rented a cabin in the little town of Au Train. Which got me thinking about the place we stayed in Soo -- the <a href=\"https://www.plazamotormotel.com/\">Plaza Motor Motel</a>. No lobby, no elevators, no hallways; no places to run into other guests; no need to have to remember to mask up when you leave your room. Just open your room door and there’s your car. Most frequent travelers would never think of voluntarily staying in a motor inn, a <em>mo</em>-tel. But with so many things changing in these unprecedented times, maybe COVID will have folks give motels another chance.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/11510\">Funkist</a> - cdk dub mix by cdk (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: teru</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>First, a big shout out to the folks in Hanoi, Vietnam listening to TravelCommons on Soundcloud. One of the fun things about the podcast is looking at where people are listening from. For the most part, the stats make sense -- most of the listeners are from the US, and then English-speaking countries -- the UK, Canada, Australia. But every once in a while, there’s a spike that I just can’t figure out. I’ll see it, go look at the episode notes to see if I’ve mentioned that country, but I usually can’t make sense of it. Last fall, it was Argentina., but over the past couple of months, it’s been folks from Hanoi, primarily listening to April episode, #162, about post-lockdown trip planning and keeping a travel journal. Not sure why, but if you’re in Hanoi and you’ve made it to this episode - Hi! And thanks for listening!</li><li>Dan Grabon sent me a note at the beginning of the month about my lockdown reading that I mentioned during last month’s interview with Dr Emily Thomas<ul><li>“Mark,&nbsp; I feel your pain. I started re-reading Walden back in April, and I just passed the halfway mark at the end of August. This was part of an overly ambitious effort to read one great book a month from a literary calendar that I bought. The Brothers Karamazov took up January through March, and even though COVID should have meant more time to read, it just hasn’t turned out that way.</li><li>“Writing this from a long overdue vacation near Lake George, where I saw the book Cabin Porn in a gift shop. Good timing.</li><li>“Thanks for keeping the podcast going— helps keep me going in this time of not going much of anywhere!”</li></ul></li><li>Dan, Thanks for the note. <em>The Brothers Karamazov</em> -- you are a better man than I.&nbsp; I swore off of Russian fiction after suffering through <em>Crime and Punishment</em> in high school. That and Charles Dickens, just can’t do ‘em. And I am still working my way through <em>Walden</em>. Just got through his half-dozen pages on hoeing his bean field. I find if I try to read more than a dozen pages in a sitting, I just start skimming -- or sleeping. Glad you were able to get away to the wilderness of Lake George. Feel like the perfect place to find that Cabin Porn book.</li><li>Jim McDonough hit the TravelCommons Facebook page, following up on my comment in last month’s episode about my disappearing American flight from ORD to BCN. Jim writes...<ul><li>“We were going to Barcelona and Madrid with Rick Steves Europe in October, but of course Rick has canceled every tour for the rest of the year. Interestingly, AA says we are still booked on a BA 747 from SAN to LHR as part of this trip. BA has no more 747\'s and doesn\'t serve SAN any more.”</li></ul></li><li>I sometimes think any of the airline’s schedules more than one month out are more like aspirational projections than reflections of reality. Especially given how fast they’re shifting schedules to capture any sort of bump in passenger volume. Like United having <a href=\"https://airlineweekly.com/airlines-feeling-a-lift-from-rocky-mountain-hubs\">some transcontinental flights stop in DEN to pick up a bump in volume from people visiting national parks</a> -- there’s that outdoor activity trend again.</li><li>But back to that BCN trip, I should be getting things here in Chicago sorted before heading off for 2 weeks in Catalonia, but you’ve probably already guessed, that trip isn’t happening. Not a surprise. The EU still isn’t letting US travelers in and the case count in Spain’s second COVID wave has gotten worse in the last month. So at the beginning of the month, I gritted my teeth, called American and cancelled the flights. Actually, American had called me the prior week while we were in the UP, but I let it go to voicemail. We were in a taproom in Marquette and I didn’t feel ready to have that conversation. I wanted to have all our booking info in front of me and be clear minded (tough during a taproom session) and mentally girded for battle. So when I returned their call the next week, I was sitting in front of my laptop with all my itinerary documents up and was ready to go. It was a quick trip through the automated phone tree to a very nice woman in Dallas. No hassles with canceling. I was asking her about the logistics of the travel credit - how long will it be good for - when she said, “Since your flight was canceled and you were re-booked, you can get a refund if you like.” Wow. “Uh, yes,” I quickly said, not wanting her offer to disappear, “I think I’ll take the refund instead.” That was not what I expected from all the stories about American trying to keep as much cash as possible. It took her a couple of minutes to process the refunds during which we compared the weather between Chicago and Dallas. The refunds hit my credit card the following week, so full kudos to American on handling this. I’m hoping I don’t need to repeat in November for my Thanksgiving trip to London.</li><li>A couple of weeks back I was trading notes with TravelCommons contributor Allan Marko about <a href=\"https://www.sfgate.com/travel/article/United-bangalore-SFO-15551358.php\">United’s new SFO-Bangalore non-stop</a>. It’ll be their longest flight at 17½ hours. My immediate reaction was, of course, “that’s a helluva long time to wear a mask.” United is using a 787-9 with a special engine enhancement that makes the flight possible. Which got me thinking about what planes I’d flown into BLR. I’ve been using <a href=\"https://www.tripit.com/\">TripIt</a> since 2008 when it first broke out of the Silicon Valley venture cap bubble, so I logged in, clicked over to Past Trips and started clicking back through the pages -- and clicking and clicking because the last time I was in Bangalore was April 2014. I kept looking around the screen - there’s gotta be a way to export all my trip data; but I couldn’t find anything. So I sent a note to <a href=\"mailto:support@tripit.com\">support@tripit.com</a>. And, to my huge surprise, Andy from the Tripit Help Center replied in <em>15 minutes</em> saying “We currently do not offer customer driven travel data export capability. We have passed your suggestion on to the appropriate team for review.” Having run a software product team, I knew what that meant -- never. But, in the next paragraph, Andy offered a solution -- “You can check out a third party app Openflights. They have an API with TripIt that will allow you to import trips from your TripIt account to their site. From there you can create a list of all of your flights and download them to a csv file. Their basic account is free to use.” Sweet. I thanked Andy for his quick reply and hit <a href=\"https://openflights.org/\">Openflights</a>. I set up an account, hit the “Import” button and connected to my TripIt account. The import was a touch kludgy -- I had to go page by page, review each trip, and mark it to import. After 88 pages, I had imported 1006 flight segments, which they displayed on a world map. I clicked on BLR and a little card popped up. I clicked on the first option and it listed the 8 flights I’d taken to and from BLR. Turns out I’d mostly flown Airbus A320s, though I did once fly a 747-400 in from FRA. It has a couple of analysis buttons -- like my longest flight -- Joburg to IAD at 17:40 (ha! 10 minutes longer than the SFO-BLR flight); and my shortest -- IAD again, but this time a 44-minute flight to CHO. And of course, I was able to download all my trips into Excel so I can noodle around to my heart’s content. Openflights is free, but I’m going to <a href=\"https://openflights.org/donate\">donate</a> to help keep them going. <a href=\"https://openflights.org/\">Openflights.org</a> -- definitely recommended. I’ll put a link in the show notes.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djiz/10514\">Nube - Djiz Rmx</a> by Kwame (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: SylviaO</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>6 Months of Pandemic</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Finally giving into reality and canceling my Barcelona flight 6 months after booking it got me thinking back on these -- you know what’s coming -- <em>unprecedented</em> times. Airlines canceled flights to China at the end of January, then to South Korea, Iran, and Italy in February, until, by the beginning of March, airline traffic joined the stock market in a free fall. But back then, we thought it was a one-off event, kinda like Sept 11th; a sharp, scary event that came out of nowhere with no warning but that would soon pass. So taking advantage of one of the many March fare sales to book a flight at the end of September didn’t seem that risky.</li><li>I was talking to one of my consulting friends a couple of weeks ago. His travel schedule was similar to mine - a week without seeing an airport was a rare exception. He hasn’t been on a plane since March and doesn’t know when he’ll get on one next. He just started a project with a manufacturer in Cincinnati. Most of the project will be virtual, but he’s pretty sure he ought to at least put eyes on their plant. He lives outside Detroit. In the past, he’d be flying down every week. Now, he fires up Google Maps -- it’s a 4½ drive down I-75. He’ll drive down once, stay a couple of days, and then head back home.&nbsp;</li><li>I can’t say that anyone I’ve talked to misses the act of business travel -- getting up at 0 dark 30 Monday morning to get to the airport, shuffle through the PreCheck line for 15-20 minutes, and then shoehorn into a full flight for an hour or 3.&nbsp; But we did it because that was part of the job. But now that it’s not, at least for now and what seems like (for now) through the end of the year, everybody is taking full advantage of sleeping in -- in their own beds.</li><li>Which explains why, of all the US airlines, Spirit Airlines, with its complete focus on low-cost leisure travelers, is the only one sounding even somewhat non-negative.&nbsp; And hotel chains like Choice, focused on what they call “drive-to” locations and extended stay properties getting occupancy rates over 50% while center city hotels like Chicago’s Hilton Palmer House are missing rent payments and slouching towards bankruptcy.</li><li>Irene and I were sitting outside at a microbrewery a couple of days ago, enjoying a sunny afternoon full in the knowledge that we have maybe 4 weeks of outdoor eating and drinking left in Chicago. We talked about what kind of travel we would do over the next 12 months, figuring travel restrictions and periodic lockdowns are going to be the norm for at least that long. No big plans; nothing that COVID could blow up but seeing some new places -- some skiing, maybe trying out Montana; some hiking, maybe checking out the Texas Hill Country. But next month, we’re trading Barcelona for Philadelphia; now that they’ve opened up the restaurants again, check out our old neighborhood and visit with some friends. It’ll be Irene’s first flight since February. It took a bit of talking, but I really think the threat of a total of 22 hrs in a car with me -- alone -- tipped her over.&nbsp;</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/3lb3r3th/44072\">Misunderstood</a> by 3lb3r3th (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. &nbsp;Ft: Alchemistry</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Do We Keep Travel Credit Cards?</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Last week, <a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/14/delta-launches-6point5-billion-debt-deal-backed-by-its-frequent-flyer-program.html\">Delta used their SkyMiles program to back $6.5 billion in debt</a>, running the same play that United and American did in June. What caught my eye was some of the stats that came out with the debt filing -- that <a href=\"https://skift.com/2020/09/15/how-delta-looks-to-leverage-rewards-from-its-own-frequent-flyer-program/\">SkyMiles had about $6.1 billion in revenue in 2019, about two-thirds from American Express</a> which issues a co-branded Delta card, and that <a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/14/delta-launches-6point5-billion-debt-deal-backed-by-its-frequent-flyer-program.html\">total miles redeemed fell by 78% in the first half of this year.</a> The big carriers are leaning on their loyalty programs for cash, their biggest customers are credit card issuers, but those card users - us - are generating points that we’ve stopped using.&nbsp;</li><li>It’s against this background that I called up Matt Schulz, chief credit analyst at LendingTree, and to ask him -- do we want to keep travel credit cards?<ul><li>Matt, a lot of folks carry at least one travel credit card and I don’t think I’m going too far out on a limb guessing that damn close to every TravelCommons listeners carry them. We’re 6 months on from the COVID lockdowns and the resulting cratering of the travel industry. But with travel not recovering -- airline demand is still just a third of pre-pandemic levels and United Airlines’ CEO said last week it could be 3-4 years before it’s back to 2019 levels -- what are card holders doing with these cards generating frequent traveler points that they can’t or don’t want to use?</li><li>Back in March and April, it seemed the strategy for the big travel card issuers -- Chase, Citi, Amex -- seemed to be to sacrifice revenue to hold share -- statement credits for annual fees if you called them to cancel, new bonuses for stay-at-home purchases to keep wallet share -- seemed like 5x bonuses for grocery and gas was the most popular. Made sense when everyone was talking about 2-week shutdowns and a V-shaped recovery. But, as we said before, travel is gonna stay depressed for a while -- between state and country quarantines and many people not wanting to get in a plane -- how are travel card companies going to handle the next round of renewals? When I call Chase and Amex again, do I get more statement credits -- do they continue to fight for share? And if they don’t, what do I do with the balance of Ultimate or Membership Rewards points that I’ll lose if I don’t re-up and pay the fee?</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #167</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and now, <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_167.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #167 — 6 Months On; Why Keep Travel Cards?','','inherit','closed','closed','','2856-revision-v1','','','2020-09-19 09:47:48','2020-09-19 14:47:48','',2856,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/09/19/2856-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2870,1,'2020-09-19 09:52:19','2020-09-19 14:52:19','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/F3E28DAE-0026-4E8A-957E-D6CE914F717C.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2857 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/F3E28DAE-0026-4E8A-957E-D6CE914F717C-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\n<figcaption>I seem to have put on a Quarantine 15</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p>Spent a week in <a href=\"https://www.uptravel.com/\">Michigan\'s Upper Peninsula</a> hiking, biking, kayaking, and running into a lot of other people getting away to do the same, which got me looking back six months to the start of the pandemic. I talk about a surprisingly good flight cancellation experience with American Airlines, and figuring out how to download 12 years of <a href=\"https://www.tripit.com/\">TripIt</a> data. We wrap up talking to <a href=\"https://www.lendingtree.com/writer/matt-schulz/\">Matt Schulz</a> of <a href=\"https://www.lendingtree.com/\">LendingTree</a>, asking him what are we doing with travel credit cards that are generating frequent traveler points we can’t use? All this and more at the<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_167.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"> <strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/860072707&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #167: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after a week’s tour of the UP -- Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Did a counter-clockwise circle route around Lake Michigan. Headed out east on Friday morning; stopped at a brewery in Grand Rapids for lunch; drove the 5 miles across the Mackinac Bridge just before dusk; and had my first UP pasty (the first of many) and a local beer for dinner that night in Sault Ste Marie. Spent a couple of days in Soo; watched 700-ft lake freighters make their way through the locks that connect Lake Superior to Lake Huron; I’m still enough of an engineer to geek out on that kind of stuff. We then drove west to Marquette for 3 days and again west to Houghton for 2 days before heading home through Wisconsin down the west side of Lake Michigan. It was all outdoors stuff -- hiking, biking, kayaking; the things that last-minute COVID closures or restrictions won’t muck up.  The UP has always been on my list of places to visit, but it’s always on sorta the B-list, and so plans to go someplace else -- Spain, Napa, Ireland -- would always push it down the list. But now, with most places blocked off with travel restrictions and quarantines, the UP -- drivable with lots of outdoor activities -- bubbled to the top of the list.</li><li>And I wasn’t the only one thinking that way. The guy renting rowboats at <a href=\"https://www2.dnr.state.mi.us/ParksandTrails/Details.aspx?id=428&amp;type=SPRK\">Tahquamenon Falls State Park</a> looked at our release forms and said “We’ve had a lot of people up here from Chicago. It’s been crazy busy. We can’t get enough people to handle it.” And biking around <a href=\"https://www.travelmarquette.com/things-to-do/attractions/presque-isle-park/\">Presque Isle Park</a> in Marquette, we got talking, in a socially distant way, to a biking couple up from St Louis. It was also their first time up. A bunch of their friends and family had been up earlier; they’d seen nothing but UP pictures in their Facebook feed for the past month.</li><li>The husband said that he had an underlying medical condition and so they were looking for places away from people; they’d rented a cabin in the little town of Au Train. Which got me thinking about the place we stayed in Soo -- the <a href=\"https://www.plazamotormotel.com/\">Plaza Motor Motel</a>. No lobby, no elevators, no hallways; no places to run into other guests; no need to have to remember to mask up when you leave your room. Just open your room door and there’s your car. Most frequent travelers would never think of voluntarily staying in a motor inn, a <em>mo</em>-tel. But with so many things changing in these unprecedented times, maybe COVID will have folks give motels another chance.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/11510\">Funkist</a> - cdk dub mix by cdk (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: teru</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>First, a big shout out to the folks in Hanoi, Vietnam listening to TravelCommons on Soundcloud. One of the fun things about the podcast is looking at where people are listening from. For the most part, the stats make sense -- most of the listeners are from the US, and then English-speaking countries -- the UK, Canada, Australia. But every once in a while, there’s a spike that I just can’t figure out. I’ll see it, go look at the episode notes to see if I’ve mentioned that country, but I usually can’t make sense of it. Last fall, it was Argentina., but over the past couple of months, it’s been folks from Hanoi, primarily listening to April episode, #162, about post-lockdown trip planning and keeping a travel journal. Not sure why, but if you’re in Hanoi and you’ve made it to this episode - Hi! And thanks for listening!</li><li>Dan Grabon sent me a note at the beginning of the month about my lockdown reading that I mentioned during last month’s interview with Dr Emily Thomas<ul><li>“Mark,&nbsp; I feel your pain. I started re-reading Walden back in April, and I just passed the halfway mark at the end of August. This was part of an overly ambitious effort to read one great book a month from a literary calendar that I bought. The Brothers Karamazov took up January through March, and even though COVID should have meant more time to read, it just hasn’t turned out that way.</li><li>“Writing this from a long overdue vacation near Lake George, where I saw the book Cabin Porn in a gift shop. Good timing.</li><li>“Thanks for keeping the podcast going— helps keep me going in this time of not going much of anywhere!”</li></ul></li><li>Dan, Thanks for the note. <em>The Brothers Karamazov</em> -- you are a better man than I.&nbsp; I swore off of Russian fiction after suffering through <em>Crime and Punishment</em> in high school. That and Charles Dickens, just can’t do ‘em. And I am still working my way through <em>Walden</em>. Just got through his half-dozen pages on hoeing his bean field. I find if I try to read more than a dozen pages in a sitting, I just start skimming -- or sleeping. Glad you were able to get away to the wilderness of Lake George. Feel like the perfect place to find that Cabin Porn book.</li><li>Jim McDonough hit the TravelCommons Facebook page, following up on my comment in last month’s episode about my disappearing American flight from ORD to BCN. Jim writes...<ul><li>“We were going to Barcelona and Madrid with Rick Steves Europe in October, but of course Rick has canceled every tour for the rest of the year. Interestingly, AA says we are still booked on a BA 747 from SAN to LHR as part of this trip. BA has no more 747\'s and doesn\'t serve SAN any more.”</li></ul></li><li>I sometimes think any of the airline’s schedules more than one month out are more like aspirational projections than reflections of reality. Especially given how fast they’re shifting schedules to capture any sort of bump in passenger volume. Like United having <a href=\"https://airlineweekly.com/airlines-feeling-a-lift-from-rocky-mountain-hubs\">some transcontinental flights stop in DEN to pick up a bump in volume from people visiting national parks</a> -- there’s that outdoor activity trend again.</li><li>But back to that BCN trip, I should be getting things here in Chicago sorted before heading off for 2 weeks in Catalonia, but you’ve probably already guessed, that trip isn’t happening. Not a surprise. The EU still isn’t letting US travelers in and the case count in Spain’s second COVID wave has gotten worse in the last month. So at the beginning of the month, I gritted my teeth, called American and cancelled the flights. Actually, American had called me the prior week while we were in the UP, but I let it go to voicemail. We were in a taproom in Marquette and I didn’t feel ready to have that conversation. I wanted to have all our booking info in front of me and be clear minded (tough during a taproom session) and mentally girded for battle. So when I returned their call the next week, I was sitting in front of my laptop with all my itinerary documents up and was ready to go. It was a quick trip through the automated phone tree to a very nice woman in Dallas. No hassles with canceling. I was asking her about the logistics of the travel credit - how long will it be good for - when she said, “Since your flight was canceled and you were re-booked, you can get a refund if you like.” Wow. “Uh, yes,” I quickly said, not wanting her offer to disappear, “I think I’ll take the refund instead.” That was not what I expected from all the stories about American trying to keep as much cash as possible. It took her a couple of minutes to process the refunds during which we compared the weather between Chicago and Dallas. The refunds hit my credit card the following week, so full kudos to American on handling this. I’m hoping I don’t need to repeat in November for my Thanksgiving trip to London.</li><li>A couple of weeks back I was trading notes with TravelCommons contributor Allan Marko about <a href=\"https://www.sfgate.com/travel/article/United-bangalore-SFO-15551358.php\">United’s new SFO-Bangalore non-stop</a>. It’ll be their longest flight at 17½ hours. My immediate reaction was, of course, “that’s a helluva long time to wear a mask.” United is using a 787-9 with a special engine enhancement that makes the flight possible. Which got me thinking about what planes I’d flown into BLR. I’ve been using <a href=\"https://www.tripit.com/\">TripIt</a> since 2008 when it first broke out of the Silicon Valley venture cap bubble, so I logged in, clicked over to Past Trips and started clicking back through the pages -- and clicking and clicking because the last time I was in Bangalore was April 2014. I kept looking around the screen - there’s gotta be a way to export all my trip data; but I couldn’t find anything. So I sent a note to <a href=\"mailto:support@tripit.com\">support@tripit.com</a>. And, to my huge surprise, Andy from the Tripit Help Center replied in <em>15 minutes</em> saying “We currently do not offer customer driven travel data export capability. We have passed your suggestion on to the appropriate team for review.” Having run a software product team, I knew what that meant -- never. But, in the next paragraph, Andy offered a solution -- “You can check out a third party app Openflights. They have an API with TripIt that will allow you to import trips from your TripIt account to their site. From there you can create a list of all of your flights and download them to a csv file. Their basic account is free to use.” Sweet. I thanked Andy for his quick reply and hit <a href=\"https://openflights.org/\">Openflights</a>. I set up an account, hit the “Import” button and connected to my TripIt account. The import was a touch kludgy -- I had to go page by page, review each trip, and mark it to import. After 88 pages, I had imported 1006 flight segments, which they displayed on a world map. I clicked on BLR and a little card popped up. I clicked on the first option and it listed the 8 flights I’d taken to and from BLR. Turns out I’d mostly flown Airbus A320s, though I did once fly a 747-400 in from FRA. It has a couple of analysis buttons -- like my longest flight -- Joburg to IAD at 17:40 (ha! 10 minutes longer than the SFO-BLR flight); and my shortest -- IAD again, but this time a 44-minute flight to CHO. And of course, I was able to download all my trips into Excel so I can noodle around to my heart’s content. Openflights is free, but I’m going to <a href=\"https://openflights.org/donate\">donate</a> to help keep them going. <a href=\"https://openflights.org/\">Openflights.org</a> -- definitely recommended. I’ll put a link in the show notes.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djiz/10514\">Nube - Djiz Rmx</a> by Kwame (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: SylviaO</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>6 Months of Pandemic</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Finally giving into reality and canceling my Barcelona flight 6 months after booking it got me thinking back on these -- you know what’s coming -- <em>unprecedented</em> times. Airlines canceled flights to China at the end of January, then to South Korea, Iran, and Italy in February, until, by the beginning of March, airline traffic joined the stock market in a free fall. But back then, we thought it was a one-off event, kinda like Sept 11th; a sharp, scary event that came out of nowhere with no warning but that would soon pass. So taking advantage of one of the many March fare sales to book a flight at the end of September didn’t seem that risky.</li><li>I was talking to one of my consulting friends a couple of weeks ago. His travel schedule was similar to mine - a week without seeing an airport was a rare exception. He hasn’t been on a plane since March and doesn’t know when he’ll get on one next. He just started a project with a manufacturer in Cincinnati. Most of the project will be virtual, but he’s pretty sure he ought to at least put eyes on their plant. He lives outside Detroit. In the past, he’d be flying down every week. Now, he fires up Google Maps -- it’s a 4½ drive down I-75. He’ll drive down once, stay a couple of days, and then head back home.&nbsp;</li><li>I can’t say that anyone I’ve talked to misses the act of business travel -- getting up at 0 dark 30 Monday morning to get to the airport, shuffle through the PreCheck line for 15-20 minutes, and then shoehorn into a full flight for an hour or 3.&nbsp; But we did it because that was part of the job. But now that it’s not, at least for now and what seems like (for now) through the end of the year, everybody is taking full advantage of sleeping in -- in their own beds.</li><li>Which explains why, of all the US airlines, Spirit Airlines, with its complete focus on low-cost leisure travelers, is the only one sounding even somewhat non-negative.&nbsp; And hotel chains like Choice, focused on what they call “drive-to” locations and extended stay properties getting occupancy rates over 50% while center city hotels like Chicago’s Hilton Palmer House are missing rent payments and slouching towards bankruptcy.</li><li>Irene and I were sitting outside at a microbrewery a couple of days ago, enjoying a sunny afternoon full in the knowledge that we have maybe 4 weeks of outdoor eating and drinking left in Chicago. We talked about what kind of travel we would do over the next 12 months, figuring travel restrictions and periodic lockdowns are going to be the norm for at least that long. No big plans; nothing that COVID could blow up but seeing some new places -- some skiing, maybe trying out Montana; some hiking, maybe checking out the Texas Hill Country. But next month, we’re trading Barcelona for Philadelphia; now that they’ve opened up the restaurants again, check out our old neighborhood and visit with some friends. It’ll be Irene’s first flight since February. It took a bit of talking, but I really think the threat of a total of 22 hrs in a car with me -- alone -- tipped her over.&nbsp;</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/3lb3r3th/44072\">Misunderstood</a> by 3lb3r3th (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. &nbsp;Ft: Alchemistry</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Do We Keep Travel Credit Cards?</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Last week, <a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/14/delta-launches-6point5-billion-debt-deal-backed-by-its-frequent-flyer-program.html\">Delta used their SkyMiles program to back $6.5 billion in debt</a>, running the same play that United and American did in June. What caught my eye was some of the stats that came out with the debt filing -- that <a href=\"https://skift.com/2020/09/15/how-delta-looks-to-leverage-rewards-from-its-own-frequent-flyer-program/\">SkyMiles had about $6.1 billion in revenue in 2019, about two-thirds from American Express</a> which issues a co-branded Delta card, and that <a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/14/delta-launches-6point5-billion-debt-deal-backed-by-its-frequent-flyer-program.html\">total miles redeemed fell by 78% in the first half of this year.</a> The big carriers are leaning on their loyalty programs for cash, their biggest customers are credit card issuers, but those card users - us - are generating points that we’ve stopped using.&nbsp;</li><li>It’s against this background that I called up Matt Schulz, chief credit analyst at LendingTree, and to ask him -- do we want to keep travel credit cards?<ul><li>Matt, a lot of folks carry at least one travel credit card and I don’t think I’m going too far out on a limb guessing that damn close to every TravelCommons listeners carry them. We’re 6 months on from the COVID lockdowns and the resulting cratering of the travel industry. But with travel not recovering -- airline demand is still just a third of pre-pandemic levels and United Airlines’ CEO said last week it could be 3-4 years before it’s back to 2019 levels -- what are card holders doing with these cards generating frequent traveler points that they can’t or don’t want to use?</li><li>Back in March and April, it seemed the strategy for the big travel card issuers -- Chase, Citi, Amex -- seemed to be to sacrifice revenue to hold share -- statement credits for annual fees if you called them to cancel, new bonuses for stay-at-home purchases to keep wallet share -- seemed like 5x bonuses for grocery and gas was the most popular. Made sense when everyone was talking about 2-week shutdowns and a V-shaped recovery. But, as we said before, travel is gonna stay depressed for a while -- between state and country quarantines and many people not wanting to get in a plane -- how are travel card companies going to handle the next round of renewals? When I call Chase and Amex again, do I get more statement credits -- do they continue to fight for share? And if they don’t, what do I do with the balance of Ultimate or Membership Rewards points that I’ll lose if I don’t re-up and pay the fee?</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #167</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and now, <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_167.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #167 — 6 Months On; Why Keep Travel Cards?','','inherit','closed','closed','','2856-revision-v1','','','2020-09-19 09:52:19','2020-09-19 14:52:19','',2856,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/09/19/2856-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2871,1,'2020-09-19 14:55:14','2020-09-19 19:55:14','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/F3E28DAE-0026-4E8A-957E-D6CE914F717C.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2857 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/F3E28DAE-0026-4E8A-957E-D6CE914F717C-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a><figcaption>I seem to have put on a Quarantine 15</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>Spent a week in <a href=\"https://www.uptravel.com/\">Michigan\'s Upper Peninsula</a> hiking, biking, kayaking, and running into a lot of other people getting away to do the same, which got me looking back six months to the start of the pandemic. I talk about a surprisingly good flight cancellation experience with American Airlines, and figuring out how to download 12 years of <a href=\"https://www.tripit.com/\">TripIt</a> data. We wrap up talking to <a href=\"https://www.lendingtree.com/writer/matt-schulz/\">Matt Schulz</a> of <a href=\"https://www.lendingtree.com/\">LendingTree</a>, asking him what are we doing with travel credit cards that are generating frequent traveler points we can’t use? All this and more at the<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_167.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"> <strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/860072707&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #167: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after a week’s tour of the UP -- Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Did a counter-clockwise circle route around Lake Michigan. Headed out east on Friday morning; stopped at a brewery in Grand Rapids for lunch; drove the 5 miles across the Mackinac Bridge just before dusk; and had my first UP pasty (the first of many) and a local beer for dinner that night in Sault Ste Marie. Spent a couple of days in Soo; watched 700-ft lake freighters make their way through the locks that connect Lake Superior to Lake Huron; I’m still enough of an engineer to geek out on that kind of stuff. We then drove west to Marquette for 3 days and again west to Houghton for 2 days before heading home through Wisconsin down the west side of Lake Michigan. It was all outdoors stuff -- hiking, biking, kayaking; the things that last-minute COVID closures or restrictions won’t muck up.&nbsp; The UP has always been on my list of places to visit, but it’s always on sorta the B-list, and so plans to go someplace else -- Spain, Napa, Ireland -- would always push it down the list. But now, with most places blocked off with travel restrictions and quarantines, the UP -- drivable with lots of outdoor activities -- bubbled to the top of the list.</li><li>And I wasn’t the only one thinking that way. The guy renting rowboats at <a href=\"https://www2.dnr.state.mi.us/ParksandTrails/Details.aspx?id=428&amp;type=SPRK\">Tahquamenon Falls State Park</a> looked at our release forms and said “We’ve had a lot of people up here from Chicago. It’s been crazy busy. We can’t get enough people to handle it.” And biking around <a href=\"https://www.travelmarquette.com/things-to-do/attractions/presque-isle-park/\">Presque Isle Park</a> in Marquette, we got talking, in a socially distant way, to a biking couple up from St Louis. It was also their first time up. A bunch of their friends and family had been up earlier; they’d seen nothing but UP pictures in their Facebook feed for the past month.</li><li>The husband said that he had an underlying medical condition and so they were looking for places away from people; they’d rented a cabin in the little town of Au Train. Which got me thinking about the place we stayed in Soo -- the <a href=\"https://www.plazamotormotel.com/\">Plaza Motor Motel</a>. No lobby, no elevators, no hallways; no places to run into other guests; no need to have to remember to mask up when you leave your room. Just open your room door and there’s your car. Most frequent travelers would never think of voluntarily staying in a motor inn, a <em>mo</em>-tel. But with so many things changing in these unprecedented times, maybe COVID will have folks give motels another chance.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/11510\">Funkist</a> - cdk dub mix by cdk (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: teru</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>First, a big shout out to the folks in Hanoi, Vietnam listening to TravelCommons on Soundcloud. One of the fun things about the podcast is looking at where people are listening from. For the most part, the stats make sense -- most of the listeners are from the US, and then English-speaking countries -- the UK, Canada, Australia. But every once in a while, there’s a spike that I just can’t figure out. I’ll see it, go look at the episode notes to see if I’ve mentioned that country, but I usually can’t make sense of it. Last fall, it was Argentina., but over the past couple of months, it’s been folks from Hanoi, primarily listening to April episode, #162, about post-lockdown trip planning and keeping a travel journal. Not sure why, but if you’re in Hanoi and you’ve made it to this episode - Hi! And thanks for listening!</li><li>Dan Grabon sent me a note at the beginning of the month about my lockdown reading that I mentioned during last month’s interview with Dr Emily Thomas<ul><li>“Mark,  I feel your pain. I started re-reading Walden back in April, and I just passed the halfway mark at the end of August. This was part of an overly ambitious effort to read one great book a month from a literary calendar that I bought. The Brothers Karamazov took up January through March, and even though COVID should have meant more time to read, it just hasn’t turned out that way.</li><li>“Writing this from a long overdue vacation near Lake George, where I saw the book Cabin Porn in a gift shop. Good timing.</li><li>“Thanks for keeping the podcast going— helps keep me going in this time of not going much of anywhere!”</li></ul></li><li>Dan, Thanks for the note. <em>The Brothers Karamazov</em> -- you are a better man than I.  I swore off of Russian fiction after suffering through <em>Crime and Punishment</em> in high school. That and Charles Dickens, just can’t do ‘em. And I am still working my way through <em>Walden</em>. Just got through his half-dozen pages on hoeing his bean field. I find if I try to read more than a dozen pages in a sitting, I just start skimming -- or sleeping. Glad you were able to get away to the wilderness of Lake George. Feel like the perfect place to find that Cabin Porn book.</li><li>Jim McDonough hit the TravelCommons Facebook page, following up on my comment in last month’s episode about my disappearing American flight from ORD to BCN. Jim writes...<ul><li>“We were going to Barcelona and Madrid with Rick Steves Europe in October, but of course Rick has canceled every tour for the rest of the year. Interestingly, AA says we are still booked on a BA 747 from SAN to LHR as part of this trip. BA has no more 747\'s and doesn\'t serve SAN any more.”</li></ul></li><li>I sometimes think any of the airline’s schedules more than one month out are more like aspirational projections than reflections of reality. Especially given how fast they’re shifting schedules to capture any sort of bump in passenger volume. Like United having <a href=\"https://airlineweekly.com/airlines-feeling-a-lift-from-rocky-mountain-hubs\">some transcontinental flights stop in DEN to pick up a bump in volume from people visiting national parks</a> -- there’s that outdoor activity trend again.</li><li>But back to that BCN trip, I should be getting things here in Chicago sorted before heading off for 2 weeks in Catalonia, but you’ve probably already guessed, that trip isn’t happening. Not a surprise. The EU still isn’t letting US travelers in and the case count in Spain’s second COVID wave has gotten worse in the last month. So at the beginning of the month, I gritted my teeth, called American and cancelled the flights. Actually, American had called me the prior week while we were in the UP, but I let it go to voicemail. We were in a taproom in Marquette and I didn’t feel ready to have that conversation. I wanted to have all our booking info in front of me and be clear minded (tough during a taproom session) and mentally girded for battle. So when I returned their call the next week, I was sitting in front of my laptop with all my itinerary documents up and was ready to go. It was a quick trip through the automated phone tree to a very nice woman in Dallas. No hassles with canceling. I was asking her about the logistics of the travel credit - how long will it be good for - when she said, “Since your flight was canceled and you were re-booked, you can get a refund if you like.” Wow. “Uh, yes,” I quickly said, not wanting her offer to disappear, “I think I’ll take the refund instead.” That was not what I expected from all the stories about American trying to keep as much cash as possible. It took her a couple of minutes to process the refunds during which we compared the weather between Chicago and Dallas. The refunds hit my credit card the following week, so full kudos to American on handling this. I’m hoping I don’t need to repeat in November for my Thanksgiving trip to London.</li><li>A couple of weeks back I was trading notes with TravelCommons contributor Allan Marko about <a href=\"https://www.sfgate.com/travel/article/United-bangalore-SFO-15551358.php\">United’s new SFO-Bangalore non-stop</a>. It’ll be their longest flight at 17½ hours. My immediate reaction was, of course, “that’s a helluva long time to wear a mask.” United is using a 787-9 with a special engine enhancement that makes the flight possible. Which got me thinking about what planes I’d flown into BLR. I’ve been using <a href=\"https://www.tripit.com/\">TripIt</a> since 2008 when it first broke out of the Silicon Valley venture cap bubble, so I logged in, clicked over to Past Trips and started clicking back through the pages -- and clicking and clicking because the last time I was in Bangalore was April 2014. I kept looking around the screen - there’s gotta be a way to export all my trip data; but I couldn’t find anything. So I sent a note to <a href=\"mailto:support@tripit.com\">support@tripit.com</a>. And, to my huge surprise, Andy from the Tripit Help Center replied in <em>15 minutes</em> saying “We currently do not offer customer driven travel data export capability. We have passed your suggestion on to the appropriate team for review.” Having run a software product team, I knew what that meant -- never. But, in the next paragraph, Andy offered a solution -- “You can check out a third party app Openflights. They have an API with TripIt that will allow you to import trips from your TripIt account to their site. From there you can create a list of all of your flights and download them to a csv file. Their basic account is free to use.” Sweet. I thanked Andy for his quick reply and hit <a href=\"https://openflights.org/\">Openflights</a>. I set up an account, hit the “Import” button and connected to my TripIt account. The import was a touch kludgy -- I had to go page by page, review each trip, and mark it to import. After 88 pages, I had imported 1006 flight segments, which they displayed on a world map. I clicked on BLR and a little card popped up. I clicked on the first option and it listed the 8 flights I’d taken to and from BLR. Turns out I’d mostly flown Airbus A320s, though I did once fly a 747-400 in from FRA. It has a couple of analysis buttons -- like my longest flight -- Joburg to IAD at 17:40 (ha! 10 minutes longer than the SFO-BLR flight); and my shortest -- IAD again, but this time a 44-minute flight to CHO. And of course, I was able to download all my trips into Excel so I can noodle around to my heart’s content. Openflights is free, but I’m going to <a href=\"https://openflights.org/donate\">donate</a> to help keep them going. <a href=\"https://openflights.org/\">Openflights.org</a> -- definitely recommended. I’ll put a link in the show notes.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/48705\">Jolanta Blues</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license.  Ft: Admiral Bob, Martijn de Boer</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>6 Months of Pandemic</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Finally giving into reality and canceling my Barcelona flight 6 months after booking it got me thinking back on these -- you know what’s coming -- <em>unprecedented</em> times. Airlines canceled flights to China at the end of January, then to South Korea, Iran, and Italy in February, until, by the beginning of March, airline traffic joined the stock market in a free fall. But back then, we thought it was a one-off event, kinda like Sept 11th; a sharp, scary event that came out of nowhere with no warning but that would soon pass. So taking advantage of one of the many March fare sales to book a flight at the end of September didn’t seem that risky.</li><li>I was talking to one of my consulting friends a couple of weeks ago. His travel schedule was similar to mine - a week without seeing an airport was a rare exception. He hasn’t been on a plane since March and doesn’t know when he’ll get on one next. He just started a project with a manufacturer in Cincinnati. Most of the project will be virtual, but he’s pretty sure he ought to at least put eyes on their plant. He lives outside Detroit. In the past, he’d be flying down every week. Now, he fires up Google Maps -- it’s a 4½ drive down I-75. He’ll drive down once, stay a couple of days, and then head back home. </li><li>I can’t say that anyone I’ve talked to misses the act of business travel -- getting up at 0 dark 30 Monday morning to get to the airport, shuffle through the PreCheck line for 15-20 minutes, and then shoehorn into a full flight for an hour or 3.  But we did it because that was part of the job. But now that it’s not, at least for now and what seems like (for now) through the end of the year, everybody is taking full advantage of sleeping in -- in their own beds.</li><li>Which explains why, of all the US airlines, Spirit Airlines, with its complete focus on low-cost leisure travelers, is the only one sounding even somewhat non-negative.  And hotel chains like Choice, focused on what they call “drive-to” locations and extended stay properties getting occupancy rates over 50% while center city hotels like Chicago’s Hilton Palmer House are missing rent payments and slouching towards bankruptcy.</li><li>Irene and I were sitting outside at a microbrewery a couple of days ago, enjoying a sunny afternoon full in the knowledge that we have maybe 4 weeks of outdoor eating and drinking left in Chicago. We talked about what kind of travel we would do over the next 12 months, figuring travel restrictions and periodic lockdowns are going to be the norm for at least that long. No big plans; nothing that COVID could blow up but seeing some new places -- some skiing, maybe trying out Montana; some hiking, maybe checking out the Texas Hill Country. But next month, we’re trading Barcelona for Philadelphia; now that they’ve opened up the restaurants again, check out our old neighborhood and visit with some friends. It’ll be Irene’s first flight since February. It took a bit of talking, but I really think the threat of a total of 22 hrs in a car with me -- alone -- tipped her over. </li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djiz/10514\">Nube - Djiz Rmx</a> by Kwame (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: SylviaO</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Do We Keep Travel Credit Cards?</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Last week, <a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/14/delta-launches-6point5-billion-debt-deal-backed-by-its-frequent-flyer-program.html\">Delta used their SkyMiles program to back $6.5 billion in debt</a>, running the same play that United and American did in June. What caught my eye was some of the stats that came out with the debt filing -- that <a href=\"https://skift.com/2020/09/15/how-delta-looks-to-leverage-rewards-from-its-own-frequent-flyer-program/\">SkyMiles had about $6.1 billion in revenue in 2019, about two-thirds from American Express</a> which issues a co-branded Delta card, and that <a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/14/delta-launches-6point5-billion-debt-deal-backed-by-its-frequent-flyer-program.html\">total miles redeemed fell by 78% in the first half of this year.</a> The big carriers are leaning on their loyalty programs for cash, their biggest customers are credit card issuers, but those card users - us - are generating points that we’ve stopped using.&nbsp;</li><li>It’s against this background that I called up Matt Schulz, chief credit analyst at LendingTree, and to ask him -- do we want to keep travel credit cards?<ul><li>Matt, a lot of folks carry at least one travel credit card and I don’t think I’m going too far out on a limb guessing that damn close to every TravelCommons listeners carry them. We’re 6 months on from the COVID lockdowns and the resulting cratering of the travel industry. But with travel not recovering -- airline demand is still just a third of pre-pandemic levels and United Airlines’ CEO said last week it could be 3-4 years before it’s back to 2019 levels -- what are card holders doing with these cards generating frequent traveler points that they can’t or don’t want to use?</li><li>Back in March and April, it seemed the strategy for the big travel card issuers -- Chase, Citi, Amex -- seemed to be to sacrifice revenue to hold share -- statement credits for annual fees if you called them to cancel, new bonuses for stay-at-home purchases to keep wallet share -- seemed like 5x bonuses for grocery and gas was the most popular. Made sense when everyone was talking about 2-week shutdowns and a V-shaped recovery. But, as we said before, travel is gonna stay depressed for a while -- between state and country quarantines and many people not wanting to get in a plane -- how are travel card companies going to handle the next round of renewals? When I call Chase and Amex again, do I get more statement credits -- do they continue to fight for share? And if they don’t, what do I do with the balance of Ultimate or Membership Rewards points that I’ll lose if I don’t re-up and pay the fee?</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #167</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and now, <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_167.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #167 — 6 Months On; Why Keep Travel Cards?','','inherit','closed','closed','','2856-revision-v1','','','2020-09-19 14:55:14','2020-09-19 19:55:14','',2856,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/09/19/2856-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2872,1,'2020-09-19 16:01:05','2020-09-19 21:01:05','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/F3E28DAE-0026-4E8A-957E-D6CE914F717C.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2857 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/F3E28DAE-0026-4E8A-957E-D6CE914F717C-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a><figcaption>I seem to have put on a Quarantine 15</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>Spent a week in <a href=\"https://www.uptravel.com/\">Michigan\'s Upper Peninsula</a> hiking, biking, kayaking, and running into a lot of other people getting away to do the same, which got me looking back six months to the start of the pandemic. I talk about a surprisingly good flight cancellation experience with American Airlines, and figuring out how to download 12 years of <a href=\"https://www.tripit.com/\">TripIt</a> data. We wrap up talking to <a href=\"https://www.lendingtree.com/writer/matt-schulz/\">Matt Schulz</a> of <a href=\"https://www.lendingtree.com/\">LendingTree</a>, asking him what are we doing with travel credit cards that are generating frequent traveler points we can’t use? All this and more at the<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_167.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"> <strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/896151355&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #167: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after a week’s tour of the UP -- Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Did a counter-clockwise circle route around Lake Michigan. Headed out east on Friday morning; stopped at a brewery in Grand Rapids for lunch; drove the 5 miles across the Mackinac Bridge just before dusk; and had my first UP pasty (the first of many) and a local beer for dinner that night in Sault Ste Marie. Spent a couple of days in Soo; watched 700-ft lake freighters make their way through the locks that connect Lake Superior to Lake Huron; I’m still enough of an engineer to geek out on that kind of stuff. We then drove west to Marquette for 3 days and again west to Houghton for 2 days before heading home through Wisconsin down the west side of Lake Michigan. It was all outdoors stuff -- hiking, biking, kayaking; the things that last-minute COVID closures or restrictions won’t muck up.&nbsp; The UP has always been on my list of places to visit, but it’s always on sorta the B-list, and so plans to go someplace else -- Spain, Napa, Ireland -- would always push it down the list. But now, with most places blocked off with travel restrictions and quarantines, the UP -- drivable with lots of outdoor activities -- bubbled to the top of the list.</li><li>And I wasn’t the only one thinking that way. The guy renting rowboats at <a href=\"https://www2.dnr.state.mi.us/ParksandTrails/Details.aspx?id=428&amp;type=SPRK\">Tahquamenon Falls State Park</a> looked at our release forms and said “We’ve had a lot of people up here from Chicago. It’s been crazy busy. We can’t get enough people to handle it.” And biking around <a href=\"https://www.travelmarquette.com/things-to-do/attractions/presque-isle-park/\">Presque Isle Park</a> in Marquette, we got talking, in a socially distant way, to a biking couple up from St Louis. It was also their first time up. A bunch of their friends and family had been up earlier; they’d seen nothing but UP pictures in their Facebook feed for the past month.</li><li>The husband said that he had an underlying medical condition and so they were looking for places away from people; they’d rented a cabin in the little town of Au Train. Which got me thinking about the place we stayed in Soo -- the <a href=\"https://www.plazamotormotel.com/\">Plaza Motor Motel</a>. No lobby, no elevators, no hallways; no places to run into other guests; no need to have to remember to mask up when you leave your room. Just open your room door and there’s your car. Most frequent travelers would never think of voluntarily staying in a motor inn, a <em>mo</em>-tel. But with so many things changing in these unprecedented times, maybe COVID will have folks give motels another chance.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/11510\">Funkist</a> - cdk dub mix by cdk (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: teru</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>First, a big shout out to the folks in Hanoi, Vietnam listening to TravelCommons on Soundcloud. One of the fun things about the podcast is looking at where people are listening from. For the most part, the stats make sense -- most of the listeners are from the US, and then English-speaking countries -- the UK, Canada, Australia. But every once in a while, there’s a spike that I just can’t figure out. I’ll see it, go look at the episode notes to see if I’ve mentioned that country, but I usually can’t make sense of it. Last fall, it was Argentina., but over the past couple of months, it’s been folks from Hanoi, primarily listening to April episode, #162, about post-lockdown trip planning and keeping a travel journal. Not sure why, but if you’re in Hanoi and you’ve made it to this episode - Hi! And thanks for listening!</li><li>Dan Grabon sent me a note at the beginning of the month about my lockdown reading that I mentioned during last month’s interview with Dr Emily Thomas<ul><li>“Mark,&nbsp; I feel your pain. I started re-reading Walden back in April, and I just passed the halfway mark at the end of August. This was part of an overly ambitious effort to read one great book a month from a literary calendar that I bought. The Brothers Karamazov took up January through March, and even though COVID should have meant more time to read, it just hasn’t turned out that way.</li><li>“Writing this from a long overdue vacation near Lake George, where I saw the book Cabin Porn in a gift shop. Good timing.</li><li>“Thanks for keeping the podcast going— helps keep me going in this time of not going much of anywhere!”</li></ul></li><li>Dan, Thanks for the note. <em>The Brothers Karamazov</em> -- you are a better man than I.&nbsp; I swore off of Russian fiction after suffering through <em>Crime and Punishment</em> in high school. That and Charles Dickens, just can’t do ‘em. And I am still working my way through <em>Walden</em>. Just got through his half-dozen pages on hoeing his bean field. I find if I try to read more than a dozen pages in a sitting, I just start skimming -- or sleeping. Glad you were able to get away to the wilderness of Lake George. Feel like the perfect place to find that Cabin Porn book.</li><li>Jim McDonough hit the TravelCommons Facebook page, following up on my comment in last month’s episode about my disappearing American flight from ORD to BCN. Jim writes...<ul><li>“We were going to Barcelona and Madrid with Rick Steves Europe in October, but of course Rick has canceled every tour for the rest of the year. Interestingly, AA says we are still booked on a BA 747 from SAN to LHR as part of this trip. BA has no more 747\'s and doesn\'t serve SAN any more.”</li></ul></li><li>I sometimes think any of the airline’s schedules more than one month out are more like aspirational projections than reflections of reality. Especially given how fast they’re shifting schedules to capture any sort of bump in passenger volume. Like United having <a href=\"https://airlineweekly.com/airlines-feeling-a-lift-from-rocky-mountain-hubs\">some transcontinental flights stop in DEN to pick up a bump in volume from people visiting national parks</a> -- there’s that outdoor activity trend again.</li><li>But back to that BCN trip, I should be getting things here in Chicago sorted before heading off for 2 weeks in Catalonia, but you’ve probably already guessed, that trip isn’t happening. Not a surprise. The EU still isn’t letting US travelers in and the case count in Spain’s second COVID wave has gotten worse in the last month. So at the beginning of the month, I gritted my teeth, called American and cancelled the flights. Actually, American had called me the prior week while we were in the UP, but I let it go to voicemail. We were in a taproom in Marquette and I didn’t feel ready to have that conversation. I wanted to have all our booking info in front of me and be clear minded (tough during a taproom session) and mentally girded for battle. So when I returned their call the next week, I was sitting in front of my laptop with all my itinerary documents up and was ready to go. It was a quick trip through the automated phone tree to a very nice woman in Dallas. No hassles with canceling. I was asking her about the logistics of the travel credit - how long will it be good for - when she said, “Since your flight was canceled and you were re-booked, you can get a refund if you like.” Wow. “Uh, yes,” I quickly said, not wanting her offer to disappear, “I think I’ll take the refund instead.” That was not what I expected from all the stories about American trying to keep as much cash as possible. It took her a couple of minutes to process the refunds during which we compared the weather between Chicago and Dallas. The refunds hit my credit card the following week, so full kudos to American on handling this. I’m hoping I don’t need to repeat in November for my Thanksgiving trip to London.</li><li>A couple of weeks back I was trading notes with TravelCommons contributor Allan Marko about <a href=\"https://www.sfgate.com/travel/article/United-bangalore-SFO-15551358.php\">United’s new SFO-Bangalore non-stop</a>. It’ll be their longest flight at 17½ hours. My immediate reaction was, of course, “that’s a helluva long time to wear a mask.” United is using a 787-9 with a special engine enhancement that makes the flight possible. Which got me thinking about what planes I’d flown into BLR. I’ve been using <a href=\"https://www.tripit.com/\">TripIt</a> since 2008 when it first broke out of the Silicon Valley venture cap bubble, so I logged in, clicked over to Past Trips and started clicking back through the pages -- and clicking and clicking because the last time I was in Bangalore was April 2014. I kept looking around the screen - there’s gotta be a way to export all my trip data; but I couldn’t find anything. So I sent a note to <a href=\"mailto:support@tripit.com\">support@tripit.com</a>. And, to my huge surprise, Andy from the Tripit Help Center replied in <em>15 minutes</em> saying “We currently do not offer customer driven travel data export capability. We have passed your suggestion on to the appropriate team for review.” Having run a software product team, I knew what that meant -- never. But, in the next paragraph, Andy offered a solution -- “You can check out a third party app Openflights. They have an API with TripIt that will allow you to import trips from your TripIt account to their site. From there you can create a list of all of your flights and download them to a csv file. Their basic account is free to use.” Sweet. I thanked Andy for his quick reply and hit <a href=\"https://openflights.org/\">Openflights</a>. I set up an account, hit the “Import” button and connected to my TripIt account. The import was a touch kludgy -- I had to go page by page, review each trip, and mark it to import. After 88 pages, I had imported 1006 flight segments, which they displayed on a world map. I clicked on BLR and a little card popped up. I clicked on the first option and it listed the 8 flights I’d taken to and from BLR. Turns out I’d mostly flown Airbus A320s, though I did once fly a 747-400 in from FRA. It has a couple of analysis buttons -- like my longest flight -- Joburg to IAD at 17:40 (ha! 10 minutes longer than the SFO-BLR flight); and my shortest -- IAD again, but this time a 44-minute flight to CHO. And of course, I was able to download all my trips into Excel so I can noodle around to my heart’s content. Openflights is free, but I’m going to <a href=\"https://openflights.org/donate\">donate</a> to help keep them going. <a href=\"https://openflights.org/\">Openflights.org</a> -- definitely recommended. I’ll put a link in the show notes.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/48705\">Jolanta Blues</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: Admiral Bob, Martijn de Boer</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>6 Months of Pandemic</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Finally giving into reality and canceling my Barcelona flight 6 months after booking it got me thinking back on these -- you know what’s coming -- <em>unprecedented</em> times. Airlines canceled flights to China at the end of January, then to South Korea, Iran, and Italy in February, until, by the beginning of March, airline traffic joined the stock market in a free fall. But back then, we thought it was a one-off event, kinda like Sept 11th; a sharp, scary event that came out of nowhere with no warning but that would soon pass. So taking advantage of one of the many March fare sales to book a flight at the end of September didn’t seem that risky.</li><li>I was talking to one of my consulting friends a couple of weeks ago. His travel schedule was similar to mine - a week without seeing an airport was a rare exception. He hasn’t been on a plane since March and doesn’t know when he’ll get on one next. He just started a project with a manufacturer in Cincinnati. Most of the project will be virtual, but he’s pretty sure he ought to at least put eyes on their plant. He lives outside Detroit. In the past, he’d be flying down every week. Now, he fires up Google Maps -- it’s a 4½ drive down I-75. He’ll drive down once, stay a couple of days, and then head back home.&nbsp;</li><li>I can’t say that anyone I’ve talked to misses the act of business travel -- getting up at 0 dark 30 Monday morning to get to the airport, shuffle through the PreCheck line for 15-20 minutes, and then shoehorn into a full flight for an hour or 3.&nbsp; But we did it because that was part of the job. But now that it’s not, at least for now and what seems like (for now) through the end of the year, everybody is taking full advantage of sleeping in -- in their own beds.</li><li>Which explains why, of all the US airlines, Spirit Airlines, with its complete focus on low-cost leisure travelers, is the only one sounding even somewhat non-negative.&nbsp; And hotel chains like Choice, focused on what they call “drive-to” locations and extended stay properties getting occupancy rates over 50% while center city hotels like Chicago’s Hilton Palmer House are missing rent payments and slouching towards bankruptcy.</li><li>Irene and I were sitting outside at a microbrewery a couple of days ago, enjoying a sunny afternoon full in the knowledge that we have maybe 4 weeks of outdoor eating and drinking left in Chicago. We talked about what kind of travel we would do over the next 12 months, figuring travel restrictions and periodic lockdowns are going to be the norm for at least that long. No big plans; nothing that COVID could blow up but seeing some new places -- some skiing, maybe trying out Montana; some hiking, maybe checking out the Texas Hill Country. But next month, we’re trading Barcelona for Philadelphia; now that they’ve opened up the restaurants again, check out our old neighborhood and visit with some friends. It’ll be Irene’s first flight since February. It took a bit of talking, but I really think the threat of a total of 22 hrs in a car with me -- alone -- tipped her over.&nbsp;</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djiz/10514\">Nube - Djiz Rmx</a> by Kwame (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: SylviaO</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Do We Keep Travel Credit Cards?</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Last week, <a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/14/delta-launches-6point5-billion-debt-deal-backed-by-its-frequent-flyer-program.html\">Delta used their SkyMiles program to back $6.5 billion in debt</a>, running the same play that United and American did in June. What caught my eye was some of the stats that came out with the debt filing -- that <a href=\"https://skift.com/2020/09/15/how-delta-looks-to-leverage-rewards-from-its-own-frequent-flyer-program/\">SkyMiles had about $6.1 billion in revenue in 2019, about two-thirds from American Express</a> which issues a co-branded Delta card, and that <a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/14/delta-launches-6point5-billion-debt-deal-backed-by-its-frequent-flyer-program.html\">total miles redeemed fell by 78% in the first half of this year.</a> The big carriers are leaning on their loyalty programs for cash, their biggest customers are credit card issuers, but those card users - us - are generating points that we’ve stopped using.&nbsp;</li><li>It’s against this background that I called up Matt Schulz, chief credit analyst at LendingTree, and to ask him -- do we want to keep travel credit cards?<ul><li>Matt, a lot of folks carry at least one travel credit card and I don’t think I’m going too far out on a limb guessing that damn close to every TravelCommons listeners carry them. We’re 6 months on from the COVID lockdowns and the resulting cratering of the travel industry. But with travel not recovering -- airline demand is still just a third of pre-pandemic levels and United Airlines’ CEO said last week it could be 3-4 years before it’s back to 2019 levels -- what are card holders doing with these cards generating frequent traveler points that they can’t or don’t want to use?</li><li>Back in March and April, it seemed the strategy for the big travel card issuers -- Chase, Citi, Amex -- seemed to be to sacrifice revenue to hold share -- statement credits for annual fees if you called them to cancel, new bonuses for stay-at-home purchases to keep wallet share -- seemed like 5x bonuses for grocery and gas was the most popular. Made sense when everyone was talking about 2-week shutdowns and a V-shaped recovery. But, as we said before, travel is gonna stay depressed for a while -- between state and country quarantines and many people not wanting to get in a plane -- how are travel card companies going to handle the next round of renewals? When I call Chase and Amex again, do I get more statement credits -- do they continue to fight for share? And if they don’t, what do I do with the balance of Ultimate or Membership Rewards points that I’ll lose if I don’t re-up and pay the fee?</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #167</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and now, <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_167.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #167 — 6 Months On; Why Keep Travel Cards?','','inherit','closed','closed','','2856-revision-v1','','','2020-09-19 16:01:05','2020-09-19 21:01:05','',2856,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/09/19/2856-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2874,1,'2020-09-19 16:11:59','2020-09-19 21:11:59','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/189764_1571139330482_7074048_n.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-2607\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/189764_1571139330482_7074048_n-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a><figcaption>Good End to 2019</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>Skipping the Chicago winter with trips to Phoenix and Sedona, Arizona, and a Christmas morning flight to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. Talk about those trips, my good and bad Hertz experiences, and then gather up odds-‘n’-ends from my travel notebooks to see off 2019 in this New Year\'s Eve episode. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_158.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html /-->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #158: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois, just back from a bone-thawing trip with the family to Cabo San Lucas, sorta the Land’s End of Mexico’s Baja California peninsula. We booked this trip back in May. Andrew has read on some budget traveler newsletter that Southwest was about to start service to Cabo. So the morning that the flights went on offer, we all went after Southwest’s website and snagged our flights for just over 30,000 points a person. We flew down early Christmas morning, connecting through HOU, and, thinking back to how empty ORD was last year at Thanksgiving, I was stunned that both of our flights were completely full. It seemed that half of our 6:45a flight out of MDW was also walking over to the Cabo gate. Guess that once the kids stop believing in Santa, Christmas morning travel is fair game.</li><li>Flying back out of Cabo last Sunday, I walk up to the gate and don’t see the usual Southwest boarding number pylons. It’s just a typical shared gate with the Southwest flight to Hobby at Gate 4A and a Delta flight to maybe Salt Lake at Gate 4B. And no plane, because there’s no jetway. It’s a bus. Southwest’s open seating works because everyone enters the plane in numerical order. Squeezing all the A group and half of the B group onto one bus… this’ll be interesting. It’s a 3-minute bus ride around the corner of the terminal. The doors open; we pour out. A ramp worker is trying to recreate the Southwest boarding process on the tarmac, asking everyone to line up in 3 lines -- pre-boards, A1-30, and A31-60. It kinda works, for the most part… until another ramp worker says “Hey, we’re boarding through the back door, too” just as the second bus opens its doors. Then it just devolves into a free-for-all. I imagine that first ramp worker looking like Kevin Bacon in “Animal House”, flattened by stampeding passengers. I was the first one through the rear door, so I was fine with it, but it does feel like Southwest needs to re-engineer how they board from shared gates.</li><li>I say “bone-thawing,” but it’s not like I was suffering too much from the Chicago December. I’ve been in Phoenix most of the month between Thanksgiving and Christmas, walking around in shirt sleeves in 65 degree weather, topping up my Vitamin D levels while kinda chuckling at the locals hurrying&nbsp; by in their puffy Patagonia parkas. I even extended my stay through one of the weekends -- doing some more of that “bleisure” travel, this time a hiking weekend in the <a href=\"https://www.fs.fed.us/wildflowers/regions/southwestern/RedRockCountry/index.shtml\">Red Rock Country</a> around Sedona, Arizona.&nbsp; An hour or so before picking up a car from Hertz for the weekend, I got an e-mail from the Hertz PHX station manager saying they’d upgraded me as an early birthday present. With equal parts anticipation and trepidation (I remember DFW Hertz “upgrading” me to a Ford F-150 pickup) Irene and I rolled up to spot 43 to find a Mercedes A220 sedan under a “Happy Birthday” sign. OK, now <em>this</em> is an exciting upgrade. Once we fought our way through the Phoenix traffic, the A220 made the 2-hour drive up I-17 a fun run, especially with a 75 mph speed limit. </li><li> Bridge Music -- Earth Soda by septahelix (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial Share-Alike  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/septahelix/34050  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I pushed a <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1206606966031675393/photo/1\">picture of the Hertz car under the Happy Birthday sign</a> to the TravelCommons Instagram Story roll. Steve Frick replied, saying that a friend of his had gotten a Hertz birthday upgrade too, to a Jag. Not to throw any shade, but I definitely think the PHX team did me a bit better with the Benz, but it’s nice of Hertz to give their customers a bit of a birthday surprise. With so many travel providers working hard to squeeze, to optimize, and then to charge for every little thing, getting a birthday present from one of them with a bit of luxury -- and in my case not an insignificant upgrade -- it’s a pleasant throwback to what travel was like when I started business travel coming on 35 years ago.&nbsp;</li><li>But all that love was blown away less than 2 weeks later when the Hertz team in Cabo put me through a 20-minute hard sell on insurance -- $85/day on a $50/day rental -- and then charged me $14/day for something called “Credit Card Care”, all for a beat-up VW Passat with 50,000 hard miles on it. Ugh.</li><li>Steve also hit the TravelCommons website to talk about mileage runs. In the last episode, I said that Mark Skinner’s DC-HKG up-and-back to carry a NASA cosmic ray detector on United’s over-the-pole route was one helluva mileage run. Steve said -<ul><li>I haven’t done a mileage run in years but came real close to losing my Southwest companion pass status for 2020. I had to change a few of my travel website profiles to use my Southwest card over my Hilton American Express card in order to hit it for 2020. It’s always a tough decision do I want 12 points per dollar at Hilton properties or free Southwest flights for my wife</li></ul></li><li>Thanks, Steve. I’ll tweak my travel credit cards now and then to hit some goals, but I hadn’t thought of it as an end-of-year mileage run. But it does make sense, especially with Southwest which counts credit card spend toward Companion Pass. I like that, a credit-card mileage run -- definitely more climate friendly.</li><li>I was talking about my flights to and from Phoenix a couple of weeks ago with one of the guys on the project team, a younger guy, and the look he gave me suggested that I’d hit peak travel nerdery -- at least in his eyes. I was telling him that I fly out to Phoenix on United from ORD because United has an 8am flight out, it’s easier to get a morning coffee at ORD than MDW, I get a free upgrade to Economy Plus which makes it easier to sleep, and because United uses PHX in Terminal 2, the older “slum” terminal that, because it’s separate from the main terminals, makes it easier to get an Uber or Lyft. But then I fly back to Chicago on Southwest because they have more flights back in the afternoon which gives me some flexibility with last-minute meetings, they don’t charge a change fee, they fly out of the newer Terminal 4 in PHX which gives me a much better selection of restaurants and bars than Terminal 2, and it puts me into Chicago-Midway where the wait for an Uber or Lyft is always shorter than at ORD. To me, it was a completely reasonable thought process -- optimizing each leg for the amenities I’d use. I turned to one of the other guys -- a guy who’s been traveling 20-some years -- “Yup, makes perfect sense to me,” he said. The younger guy was just shaking his head; probably muttering “OK Boomer” under his breath. But he’ll learn.</li><li>Back in November, during one of my semi-regular spelunks through Google Analytics, I noticed that <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"the November 2018 episode - #146: Rental Demolition Derby and Traveler Gift Guide (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"http://146\" target=\"_blank\">the November 2018 episode - #146: Rental Demolition Derby and Traveler Gift Guide</a> - was one of the top 5 pages on the TravelCommons website. I couldn’t figure how stories of rental car wrecks would get a lot of Google hits, so it must be the gift guide. Which suggested that maybe I should update it for 2019, but more as a blog post this time. I read through a half-dozen or so other gift guides, looking for some ideas I could steal, but they got pretty repetitious pretty quick -- pushing Away luggage, Huzi infinity pillows, and Aesop travel kits, which suggests to a cynical mind that these companies must’ve been splashing a lot of samples around the blog-o-sphere. And maybe didn’t age all that well after the Verge published an <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"exposé on Away’s toxic work culture (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/5/20995453/away-luggage-ceo-steph-korey-toxic-work-environment-travel-inclusion\" target=\"_blank\">exposé on Away’s toxic work culture</a>. But anyway, I wanted something a bit different, and on one of my flights got thinking about a chat I’d had with a friend a while back. She was looking for gift ideas for her daughter who, a couple of years out of college, was starting a new job with a lot more business travel. Replaying that chat in my head, and thinking about the younger guy on my project team, I started going through my travel kit -- rummaging through my messenger bag and then cycling through my suitcase -- mentally, though; not enough space to physically pull it down from the overhead and open it up; and that would’ve looked a bit weird. I built <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"a list of the things I really use on my trips (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/12/11/best-gift-ideas-for-a-new-traveler/\" target=\"_blank\">a list of the things I really use on my trips</a>, and that I miss when I forget to bring them along. Then I winnowed it down to 10 -- because “Top 10” is a key search term -- and there you have it. If you haven’t looked at it yet, give it a read and leave a comment with your suggestions.</li><li>Number 2 on <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/12/11/best-gift-ideas-for-a-new-traveler/\">my list of ideas</a>, after a 20-inch black roller bag, is picking up the application fee for TSA Global Entry for your new traveler. For $100, or for free with many airline and hotel reward credit cards, you can gift them with 5 years of hassle reduction with PreCheck for domestic travel and a fast path through Customs when they travel internationally. Coming back from Cabo, we connected again through Houston-Hobby and so had to clear Immigration and Customs there. It was my first time through Customs there, so it took me a minute to find the Global Entry kiosks. The interface was a bit different from the ORD ones. Instead of asking for my passport and prompting me for the fingerprint pad, it asked me to fit my face inside a red box before taking my picture. The camera didn’t look adjustable, so I squatted down ‘til my face was in the frame and then clicked the Take Photo button. A couple seconds later, the kiosk spit out my receipt and I was off to the exit -- no passport or fingerprint scans, no clicking through questions. Quick, but odd. Some Google searches when I got home told me that I’d hit the new generation of Global Entry kiosks -- Global Entry 2.0 -- that uses facial recognition to match the kiosk picture with my passport and Global Entry application pictures. Given how crappy the kiosk picture looked on the receipt -- and that I hadn’t taken my glasses off -- I’m either really impressed or really concerned about the accuracy of their facial recognition algorithm; I’m not quite sure which.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li> Bridge Music -- Absolutely Clear (ft Jeris &amp; Goldfish) by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/45578 Ft: Jeris, Goldfish  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong> Travel Potpourri for $400, Alex </strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Here it is, the last episode of the year that I’m trying to get out before cracking the Vueve and trying to stay awake until midnight. With the clock ticking, instead of a proper topic, all I can do is gather up some odds-‘n’-ends from my travel notebooks into a Jeopardy-like topic “Travel Potpourri”</li><li>And writing in my travel notebooks is something I like to do. I have a couple: a small one -- a 3½x5½-in or A6 size that fits in my back pocket -- to jot down notes, bullet points; and a larger one that I use as a proper travel journal. For that, I was using a B6 Muji notebook that I picked up in Lisbon 3 years ago. After I filled that one up, I switched to a taller, thinner Japanese traveler-sized notebook because… that’s what I had laying around. I’ve been writing in travel notebooks since I’ve started the podcast -- gotta feed the beast -- usually in public places -- in bars, a lotta bars, while drinking beers, or on planes, a lotta&nbsp; planes, though turbulence can be a problem. And for some reason, I’ve found that this act of writing in public generates a bit of interest, and a chunk of questions. Back in October, on the Finnair flight back from our Baltics tour, I was catching up, writing up my thoughts on our couple of days in Helsinki when the guy a few seats over started asking me what I was writing. He was a younger Finnish guy. He and his girlfriend and a group of 5 or 6 others were connecting through Chicago to Miami for a cruise, and they started their cruise party the minute the drink carts rolled. But he wanted to know what I was writing and why. The what was easy; he wanted to know what I thought of Helsinki; where I’d been, how I liked it. He was intrigued by our Baltic Riga-Tallinn-Helsinki itinerary, in kind of a “that’s weird, but interesting” way. The why I’m not sure made it through translation. It’s not a pure travelogue -- not a “we did this, and then did that”. It’s more about impressions; what I found unique; what caught my eye. Writing it down makes me think about it, and when I go back and read those pages, some 2 or 10 or 20 years later, it reminds me of that place, that time, those experiences.&nbsp;</li><li>And when I talk about travel with folks, when I tell them how often I travel, I’ll often get a story -- in a bar, on a plane, or… while getting my hair cut. The girl who does my hair told me about her trip to Peru with a yoga group. Not the whole trip (I don’t have that much hair), but on their flight back, out of Lima, the plane took off, rotating up, while the flight attendants were still in the aisle doing the final check. It was a bit of mayhem, she said. That had to be one quick taxi out and take-off, I thought, because you’d think those flight attendants would be sprinting to their seats once that plane started rolling down the runway. Which I have seen before, especially when the captain gets a quick release from a ground hold and wants to get airborne before the tower changes their mind. But I’ve never seen them leave the ground with anyone still in the aisle.</li><li>Maybe the pilot was distracted -- a message from the tower, an animal on the runway, a sudden thought crossed his mind. I thought about pilot distraction when walking the <a href=\"https://thehikehouse.com/trails/airport-mesa-trail\">Airport Mesa trail</a> in Sedona earlier this month. The trail name says it all -- it’s a 3½-mile loop around the mesa where Sedona’s general aviation airport is. The hikers aren’t the potential distraction, though. It’s one of Sedona’s famous energy vortexes that’s right next to the airport. The Airport Vortex is, according to<a href=\"https://sedonaverdevalley.natgeotourism.com/content/airport-mesa-vortex/svvc7d222a849df1d7d6\"> one website</a>, “an Upflow area (also called Electric or Masculine) that helps your spirit soar for a higher perspective and/or greater oneness and serenity.” Watching a couple of private jets take off while on our hike, I wondered what would happen if the pilot suddenly achieved greater oneness and serenity while rotating off the top of that mesa. For someone as unenlightened and non-serene as me, that would be one helluva distraction.</li><li>I think for many, maybe close to most frequent travelers, Uber and Lyft have replaced taxis, at least in the US, when not renting a car. So it got my attention when I hit a weird Uber app failure at ORD at the end of October. Coming back from Charlottesville, I light up both Uber and Lyft while getting off the plane to compare wait times and fares (you’d think their surge pricing would be consistent, but it rarely is for me). Uber is a bit better, so I go to book a ride. Except that the Uber app wouldn’t pick up at the domestic terminals, just the separate international terminal, Terminal 5. I check Lyft again; yup, they’ll pick me up at Terminal 2, so I book with them instead. But it’s weird, so I keep checking Uber. I walk out the door to the rideshare pick-up area. There’s nothing but cars with pink Lyft lights; not an Uber decal in sight. An older couple walks up to me -- “Where does Uber pick up?” Normally here, I tell them, but they seem to have deleted it from their app today. It was a good night to be a Lyft driver. I wondered how long it took Uber to notice that they weren’t getting any pick-ups from one of the country’s busiest airports.</li><li>Tonight, though -- New Year’s Eve night -- I’ll be skipping Uber and their after-midnight price surges. I’ll be happy to hang out at home, to skip any travel, and just pop a bottle... or two of Vueve and wish all you TravelCommons’ listeners a Happy New Year and fun and safe travels in 2020.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #158</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_158.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #158 — Travel Potpourri for $400, Alex','','inherit','closed','closed','','2609-revision-v1','','','2020-09-19 16:11:59','2020-09-19 21:11:59','',2609,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/09/19/2609-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2875,1,'2020-09-19 16:13:31','2020-09-19 21:13:31','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/189764_1571139330482_7074048_n.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-2607\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/189764_1571139330482_7074048_n-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a><figcaption>Good End to 2019</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>Skipping the Chicago winter with trips to Phoenix and Sedona, Arizona, and a Christmas morning flight to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. Talk about those trips, my good and bad Hertz experiences, and then gather up odds-‘n’-ends from my travel notebooks to see off 2019 in this New Year\'s Eve episode. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_158.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html /-->\n\n<p>[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_157.mp3\"]</p>\n<p></p>\n\n<!-- wp:html /-->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #158: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois, just back from a bone-thawing trip with the family to Cabo San Lucas, sorta the Land’s End of Mexico’s Baja California peninsula. We booked this trip back in May. Andrew has read on some budget traveler newsletter that Southwest was about to start service to Cabo. So the morning that the flights went on offer, we all went after Southwest’s website and snagged our flights for just over 30,000 points a person. We flew down early Christmas morning, connecting through HOU, and, thinking back to how empty ORD was last year at Thanksgiving, I was stunned that both of our flights were completely full. It seemed that half of our 6:45a flight out of MDW was also walking over to the Cabo gate. Guess that once the kids stop believing in Santa, Christmas morning travel is fair game.</li><li>Flying back out of Cabo last Sunday, I walk up to the gate and don’t see the usual Southwest boarding number pylons. It’s just a typical shared gate with the Southwest flight to Hobby at Gate 4A and a Delta flight to maybe Salt Lake at Gate 4B. And no plane, because there’s no jetway. It’s a bus. Southwest’s open seating works because everyone enters the plane in numerical order. Squeezing all the A group and half of the B group onto one bus… this’ll be interesting. It’s a 3-minute bus ride around the corner of the terminal. The doors open; we pour out. A ramp worker is trying to recreate the Southwest boarding process on the tarmac, asking everyone to line up in 3 lines -- pre-boards, A1-30, and A31-60. It kinda works, for the most part… until another ramp worker says “Hey, we’re boarding through the back door, too” just as the second bus opens its doors. Then it just devolves into a free-for-all. I imagine that first ramp worker looking like Kevin Bacon in “Animal House”, flattened by stampeding passengers. I was the first one through the rear door, so I was fine with it, but it does feel like Southwest needs to re-engineer how they board from shared gates.</li><li>I say “bone-thawing,” but it’s not like I was suffering too much from the Chicago December. I’ve been in Phoenix most of the month between Thanksgiving and Christmas, walking around in shirt sleeves in 65 degree weather, topping up my Vitamin D levels while kinda chuckling at the locals hurrying&nbsp; by in their puffy Patagonia parkas. I even extended my stay through one of the weekends -- doing some more of that “bleisure” travel, this time a hiking weekend in the <a href=\"https://www.fs.fed.us/wildflowers/regions/southwestern/RedRockCountry/index.shtml\">Red Rock Country</a> around Sedona, Arizona.&nbsp; An hour or so before picking up a car from Hertz for the weekend, I got an e-mail from the Hertz PHX station manager saying they’d upgraded me as an early birthday present. With equal parts anticipation and trepidation (I remember DFW Hertz “upgrading” me to a Ford F-150 pickup) Irene and I rolled up to spot 43 to find a Mercedes A220 sedan under a “Happy Birthday” sign. OK, now <em>this</em> is an exciting upgrade. Once we fought our way through the Phoenix traffic, the A220 made the 2-hour drive up I-17 a fun run, especially with a 75 mph speed limit. </li><li> Bridge Music -- Earth Soda by septahelix (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial Share-Alike  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/septahelix/34050  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I pushed a <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1206606966031675393/photo/1\">picture of the Hertz car under the Happy Birthday sign</a> to the TravelCommons Instagram Story roll. Steve Frick replied, saying that a friend of his had gotten a Hertz birthday upgrade too, to a Jag. Not to throw any shade, but I definitely think the PHX team did me a bit better with the Benz, but it’s nice of Hertz to give their customers a bit of a birthday surprise. With so many travel providers working hard to squeeze, to optimize, and then to charge for every little thing, getting a birthday present from one of them with a bit of luxury -- and in my case not an insignificant upgrade -- it’s a pleasant throwback to what travel was like when I started business travel coming on 35 years ago.&nbsp;</li><li>But all that love was blown away less than 2 weeks later when the Hertz team in Cabo put me through a 20-minute hard sell on insurance -- $85/day on a $50/day rental -- and then charged me $14/day for something called “Credit Card Care”, all for a beat-up VW Passat with 50,000 hard miles on it. Ugh.</li><li>Steve also hit the TravelCommons website to talk about mileage runs. In the last episode, I said that Mark Skinner’s DC-HKG up-and-back to carry a NASA cosmic ray detector on United’s over-the-pole route was one helluva mileage run. Steve said -<ul><li>I haven’t done a mileage run in years but came real close to losing my Southwest companion pass status for 2020. I had to change a few of my travel website profiles to use my Southwest card over my Hilton American Express card in order to hit it for 2020. It’s always a tough decision do I want 12 points per dollar at Hilton properties or free Southwest flights for my wife</li></ul></li><li>Thanks, Steve. I’ll tweak my travel credit cards now and then to hit some goals, but I hadn’t thought of it as an end-of-year mileage run. But it does make sense, especially with Southwest which counts credit card spend toward Companion Pass. I like that, a credit-card mileage run -- definitely more climate friendly.</li><li>I was talking about my flights to and from Phoenix a couple of weeks ago with one of the guys on the project team, a younger guy, and the look he gave me suggested that I’d hit peak travel nerdery -- at least in his eyes. I was telling him that I fly out to Phoenix on United from ORD because United has an 8am flight out, it’s easier to get a morning coffee at ORD than MDW, I get a free upgrade to Economy Plus which makes it easier to sleep, and because United uses PHX in Terminal 2, the older “slum” terminal that, because it’s separate from the main terminals, makes it easier to get an Uber or Lyft. But then I fly back to Chicago on Southwest because they have more flights back in the afternoon which gives me some flexibility with last-minute meetings, they don’t charge a change fee, they fly out of the newer Terminal 4 in PHX which gives me a much better selection of restaurants and bars than Terminal 2, and it puts me into Chicago-Midway where the wait for an Uber or Lyft is always shorter than at ORD. To me, it was a completely reasonable thought process -- optimizing each leg for the amenities I’d use. I turned to one of the other guys -- a guy who’s been traveling 20-some years -- “Yup, makes perfect sense to me,” he said. The younger guy was just shaking his head; probably muttering “OK Boomer” under his breath. But he’ll learn.</li><li>Back in November, during one of my semi-regular spelunks through Google Analytics, I noticed that <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"the November 2018 episode - #146: Rental Demolition Derby and Traveler Gift Guide (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"http://146\" target=\"_blank\">the November 2018 episode - #146: Rental Demolition Derby and Traveler Gift Guide</a> - was one of the top 5 pages on the TravelCommons website. I couldn’t figure how stories of rental car wrecks would get a lot of Google hits, so it must be the gift guide. Which suggested that maybe I should update it for 2019, but more as a blog post this time. I read through a half-dozen or so other gift guides, looking for some ideas I could steal, but they got pretty repetitious pretty quick -- pushing Away luggage, Huzi infinity pillows, and Aesop travel kits, which suggests to a cynical mind that these companies must’ve been splashing a lot of samples around the blog-o-sphere. And maybe didn’t age all that well after the Verge published an <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"exposé on Away’s toxic work culture (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/5/20995453/away-luggage-ceo-steph-korey-toxic-work-environment-travel-inclusion\" target=\"_blank\">exposé on Away’s toxic work culture</a>. But anyway, I wanted something a bit different, and on one of my flights got thinking about a chat I’d had with a friend a while back. She was looking for gift ideas for her daughter who, a couple of years out of college, was starting a new job with a lot more business travel. Replaying that chat in my head, and thinking about the younger guy on my project team, I started going through my travel kit -- rummaging through my messenger bag and then cycling through my suitcase -- mentally, though; not enough space to physically pull it down from the overhead and open it up; and that would’ve looked a bit weird. I built <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"a list of the things I really use on my trips (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/12/11/best-gift-ideas-for-a-new-traveler/\" target=\"_blank\">a list of the things I really use on my trips</a>, and that I miss when I forget to bring them along. Then I winnowed it down to 10 -- because “Top 10” is a key search term -- and there you have it. If you haven’t looked at it yet, give it a read and leave a comment with your suggestions.</li><li>Number 2 on <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/12/11/best-gift-ideas-for-a-new-traveler/\">my list of ideas</a>, after a 20-inch black roller bag, is picking up the application fee for TSA Global Entry for your new traveler. For $100, or for free with many airline and hotel reward credit cards, you can gift them with 5 years of hassle reduction with PreCheck for domestic travel and a fast path through Customs when they travel internationally. Coming back from Cabo, we connected again through Houston-Hobby and so had to clear Immigration and Customs there. It was my first time through Customs there, so it took me a minute to find the Global Entry kiosks. The interface was a bit different from the ORD ones. Instead of asking for my passport and prompting me for the fingerprint pad, it asked me to fit my face inside a red box before taking my picture. The camera didn’t look adjustable, so I squatted down ‘til my face was in the frame and then clicked the Take Photo button. A couple seconds later, the kiosk spit out my receipt and I was off to the exit -- no passport or fingerprint scans, no clicking through questions. Quick, but odd. Some Google searches when I got home told me that I’d hit the new generation of Global Entry kiosks -- Global Entry 2.0 -- that uses facial recognition to match the kiosk picture with my passport and Global Entry application pictures. Given how crappy the kiosk picture looked on the receipt -- and that I hadn’t taken my glasses off -- I’m either really impressed or really concerned about the accuracy of their facial recognition algorithm; I’m not quite sure which.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li> Bridge Music -- Absolutely Clear (ft Jeris &amp; Goldfish) by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/45578 Ft: Jeris, Goldfish  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong> Travel Potpourri for $400, Alex </strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Here it is, the last episode of the year that I’m trying to get out before cracking the Vueve and trying to stay awake until midnight. With the clock ticking, instead of a proper topic, all I can do is gather up some odds-‘n’-ends from my travel notebooks into a Jeopardy-like topic “Travel Potpourri”</li><li>And writing in my travel notebooks is something I like to do. I have a couple: a small one -- a 3½x5½-in or A6 size that fits in my back pocket -- to jot down notes, bullet points; and a larger one that I use as a proper travel journal. For that, I was using a B6 Muji notebook that I picked up in Lisbon 3 years ago. After I filled that one up, I switched to a taller, thinner Japanese traveler-sized notebook because… that’s what I had laying around. I’ve been writing in travel notebooks since I’ve started the podcast -- gotta feed the beast -- usually in public places -- in bars, a lotta bars, while drinking beers, or on planes, a lotta&nbsp; planes, though turbulence can be a problem. And for some reason, I’ve found that this act of writing in public generates a bit of interest, and a chunk of questions. Back in October, on the Finnair flight back from our Baltics tour, I was catching up, writing up my thoughts on our couple of days in Helsinki when the guy a few seats over started asking me what I was writing. He was a younger Finnish guy. He and his girlfriend and a group of 5 or 6 others were connecting through Chicago to Miami for a cruise, and they started their cruise party the minute the drink carts rolled. But he wanted to know what I was writing and why. The what was easy; he wanted to know what I thought of Helsinki; where I’d been, how I liked it. He was intrigued by our Baltic Riga-Tallinn-Helsinki itinerary, in kind of a “that’s weird, but interesting” way. The why I’m not sure made it through translation. It’s not a pure travelogue -- not a “we did this, and then did that”. It’s more about impressions; what I found unique; what caught my eye. Writing it down makes me think about it, and when I go back and read those pages, some 2 or 10 or 20 years later, it reminds me of that place, that time, those experiences.&nbsp;</li><li>And when I talk about travel with folks, when I tell them how often I travel, I’ll often get a story -- in a bar, on a plane, or… while getting my hair cut. The girl who does my hair told me about her trip to Peru with a yoga group. Not the whole trip (I don’t have that much hair), but on their flight back, out of Lima, the plane took off, rotating up, while the flight attendants were still in the aisle doing the final check. It was a bit of mayhem, she said. That had to be one quick taxi out and take-off, I thought, because you’d think those flight attendants would be sprinting to their seats once that plane started rolling down the runway. Which I have seen before, especially when the captain gets a quick release from a ground hold and wants to get airborne before the tower changes their mind. But I’ve never seen them leave the ground with anyone still in the aisle.</li><li>Maybe the pilot was distracted -- a message from the tower, an animal on the runway, a sudden thought crossed his mind. I thought about pilot distraction when walking the <a href=\"https://thehikehouse.com/trails/airport-mesa-trail\">Airport Mesa trail</a> in Sedona earlier this month. The trail name says it all -- it’s a 3½-mile loop around the mesa where Sedona’s general aviation airport is. The hikers aren’t the potential distraction, though. It’s one of Sedona’s famous energy vortexes that’s right next to the airport. The Airport Vortex is, according to<a href=\"https://sedonaverdevalley.natgeotourism.com/content/airport-mesa-vortex/svvc7d222a849df1d7d6\"> one website</a>, “an Upflow area (also called Electric or Masculine) that helps your spirit soar for a higher perspective and/or greater oneness and serenity.” Watching a couple of private jets take off while on our hike, I wondered what would happen if the pilot suddenly achieved greater oneness and serenity while rotating off the top of that mesa. For someone as unenlightened and non-serene as me, that would be one helluva distraction.</li><li>I think for many, maybe close to most frequent travelers, Uber and Lyft have replaced taxis, at least in the US, when not renting a car. So it got my attention when I hit a weird Uber app failure at ORD at the end of October. Coming back from Charlottesville, I light up both Uber and Lyft while getting off the plane to compare wait times and fares (you’d think their surge pricing would be consistent, but it rarely is for me). Uber is a bit better, so I go to book a ride. Except that the Uber app wouldn’t pick up at the domestic terminals, just the separate international terminal, Terminal 5. I check Lyft again; yup, they’ll pick me up at Terminal 2, so I book with them instead. But it’s weird, so I keep checking Uber. I walk out the door to the rideshare pick-up area. There’s nothing but cars with pink Lyft lights; not an Uber decal in sight. An older couple walks up to me -- “Where does Uber pick up?” Normally here, I tell them, but they seem to have deleted it from their app today. It was a good night to be a Lyft driver. I wondered how long it took Uber to notice that they weren’t getting any pick-ups from one of the country’s busiest airports.</li><li>Tonight, though -- New Year’s Eve night -- I’ll be skipping Uber and their after-midnight price surges. I’ll be happy to hang out at home, to skip any travel, and just pop a bottle... or two of Vueve and wish all you TravelCommons’ listeners a Happy New Year and fun and safe travels in 2020.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #158</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_158.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #158 — Travel Potpourri for $400, Alex','','inherit','closed','closed','','2609-revision-v1','','','2020-09-19 16:13:31','2020-09-19 21:13:31','',2609,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/09/19/2609-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2876,1,'2020-09-19 16:14:05','2020-09-19 21:14:05','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/189764_1571139330482_7074048_n.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-2607\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/189764_1571139330482_7074048_n-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a><figcaption>Good End to 2019</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>Skipping the Chicago winter with trips to Phoenix and Sedona, Arizona, and a Christmas morning flight to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. Talk about those trips, my good and bad Hertz experiences, and then gather up odds-‘n’-ends from my travel notebooks to see off 2019 in this New Year\'s Eve episode. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_158.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html /-->\n\n<p>[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_158.mp3\"]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html /-->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #158: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois, just back from a bone-thawing trip with the family to Cabo San Lucas, sorta the Land’s End of Mexico’s Baja California peninsula. We booked this trip back in May. Andrew has read on some budget traveler newsletter that Southwest was about to start service to Cabo. So the morning that the flights went on offer, we all went after Southwest’s website and snagged our flights for just over 30,000 points a person. We flew down early Christmas morning, connecting through HOU, and, thinking back to how empty ORD was last year at Thanksgiving, I was stunned that both of our flights were completely full. It seemed that half of our 6:45a flight out of MDW was also walking over to the Cabo gate. Guess that once the kids stop believing in Santa, Christmas morning travel is fair game.</li><li>Flying back out of Cabo last Sunday, I walk up to the gate and don’t see the usual Southwest boarding number pylons. It’s just a typical shared gate with the Southwest flight to Hobby at Gate 4A and a Delta flight to maybe Salt Lake at Gate 4B. And no plane, because there’s no jetway. It’s a bus. Southwest’s open seating works because everyone enters the plane in numerical order. Squeezing all the A group and half of the B group onto one bus… this’ll be interesting. It’s a 3-minute bus ride around the corner of the terminal. The doors open; we pour out. A ramp worker is trying to recreate the Southwest boarding process on the tarmac, asking everyone to line up in 3 lines -- pre-boards, A1-30, and A31-60. It kinda works, for the most part… until another ramp worker says “Hey, we’re boarding through the back door, too” just as the second bus opens its doors. Then it just devolves into a free-for-all. I imagine that first ramp worker looking like Kevin Bacon in “Animal House”, flattened by stampeding passengers. I was the first one through the rear door, so I was fine with it, but it does feel like Southwest needs to re-engineer how they board from shared gates.</li><li>I say “bone-thawing,” but it’s not like I was suffering too much from the Chicago December. I’ve been in Phoenix most of the month between Thanksgiving and Christmas, walking around in shirt sleeves in 65 degree weather, topping up my Vitamin D levels while kinda chuckling at the locals hurrying&nbsp; by in their puffy Patagonia parkas. I even extended my stay through one of the weekends -- doing some more of that “bleisure” travel, this time a hiking weekend in the <a href=\"https://www.fs.fed.us/wildflowers/regions/southwestern/RedRockCountry/index.shtml\">Red Rock Country</a> around Sedona, Arizona.&nbsp; An hour or so before picking up a car from Hertz for the weekend, I got an e-mail from the Hertz PHX station manager saying they’d upgraded me as an early birthday present. With equal parts anticipation and trepidation (I remember DFW Hertz “upgrading” me to a Ford F-150 pickup) Irene and I rolled up to spot 43 to find a Mercedes A220 sedan under a “Happy Birthday” sign. OK, now <em>this</em> is an exciting upgrade. Once we fought our way through the Phoenix traffic, the A220 made the 2-hour drive up I-17 a fun run, especially with a 75 mph speed limit. </li><li> Bridge Music -- Earth Soda by septahelix (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial Share-Alike  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/septahelix/34050  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I pushed a <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1206606966031675393/photo/1\">picture of the Hertz car under the Happy Birthday sign</a> to the TravelCommons Instagram Story roll. Steve Frick replied, saying that a friend of his had gotten a Hertz birthday upgrade too, to a Jag. Not to throw any shade, but I definitely think the PHX team did me a bit better with the Benz, but it’s nice of Hertz to give their customers a bit of a birthday surprise. With so many travel providers working hard to squeeze, to optimize, and then to charge for every little thing, getting a birthday present from one of them with a bit of luxury -- and in my case not an insignificant upgrade -- it’s a pleasant throwback to what travel was like when I started business travel coming on 35 years ago.&nbsp;</li><li>But all that love was blown away less than 2 weeks later when the Hertz team in Cabo put me through a 20-minute hard sell on insurance -- $85/day on a $50/day rental -- and then charged me $14/day for something called “Credit Card Care”, all for a beat-up VW Passat with 50,000 hard miles on it. Ugh.</li><li>Steve also hit the TravelCommons website to talk about mileage runs. In the last episode, I said that Mark Skinner’s DC-HKG up-and-back to carry a NASA cosmic ray detector on United’s over-the-pole route was one helluva mileage run. Steve said -<ul><li>I haven’t done a mileage run in years but came real close to losing my Southwest companion pass status for 2020. I had to change a few of my travel website profiles to use my Southwest card over my Hilton American Express card in order to hit it for 2020. It’s always a tough decision do I want 12 points per dollar at Hilton properties or free Southwest flights for my wife</li></ul></li><li>Thanks, Steve. I’ll tweak my travel credit cards now and then to hit some goals, but I hadn’t thought of it as an end-of-year mileage run. But it does make sense, especially with Southwest which counts credit card spend toward Companion Pass. I like that, a credit-card mileage run -- definitely more climate friendly.</li><li>I was talking about my flights to and from Phoenix a couple of weeks ago with one of the guys on the project team, a younger guy, and the look he gave me suggested that I’d hit peak travel nerdery -- at least in his eyes. I was telling him that I fly out to Phoenix on United from ORD because United has an 8am flight out, it’s easier to get a morning coffee at ORD than MDW, I get a free upgrade to Economy Plus which makes it easier to sleep, and because United uses PHX in Terminal 2, the older “slum” terminal that, because it’s separate from the main terminals, makes it easier to get an Uber or Lyft. But then I fly back to Chicago on Southwest because they have more flights back in the afternoon which gives me some flexibility with last-minute meetings, they don’t charge a change fee, they fly out of the newer Terminal 4 in PHX which gives me a much better selection of restaurants and bars than Terminal 2, and it puts me into Chicago-Midway where the wait for an Uber or Lyft is always shorter than at ORD. To me, it was a completely reasonable thought process -- optimizing each leg for the amenities I’d use. I turned to one of the other guys -- a guy who’s been traveling 20-some years -- “Yup, makes perfect sense to me,” he said. The younger guy was just shaking his head; probably muttering “OK Boomer” under his breath. But he’ll learn.</li><li>Back in November, during one of my semi-regular spelunks through Google Analytics, I noticed that <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"the November 2018 episode - #146: Rental Demolition Derby and Traveler Gift Guide (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"http://146\" target=\"_blank\">the November 2018 episode - #146: Rental Demolition Derby and Traveler Gift Guide</a> - was one of the top 5 pages on the TravelCommons website. I couldn’t figure how stories of rental car wrecks would get a lot of Google hits, so it must be the gift guide. Which suggested that maybe I should update it for 2019, but more as a blog post this time. I read through a half-dozen or so other gift guides, looking for some ideas I could steal, but they got pretty repetitious pretty quick -- pushing Away luggage, Huzi infinity pillows, and Aesop travel kits, which suggests to a cynical mind that these companies must’ve been splashing a lot of samples around the blog-o-sphere. And maybe didn’t age all that well after the Verge published an <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"exposé on Away’s toxic work culture (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/5/20995453/away-luggage-ceo-steph-korey-toxic-work-environment-travel-inclusion\" target=\"_blank\">exposé on Away’s toxic work culture</a>. But anyway, I wanted something a bit different, and on one of my flights got thinking about a chat I’d had with a friend a while back. She was looking for gift ideas for her daughter who, a couple of years out of college, was starting a new job with a lot more business travel. Replaying that chat in my head, and thinking about the younger guy on my project team, I started going through my travel kit -- rummaging through my messenger bag and then cycling through my suitcase -- mentally, though; not enough space to physically pull it down from the overhead and open it up; and that would’ve looked a bit weird. I built <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"a list of the things I really use on my trips (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/12/11/best-gift-ideas-for-a-new-traveler/\" target=\"_blank\">a list of the things I really use on my trips</a>, and that I miss when I forget to bring them along. Then I winnowed it down to 10 -- because “Top 10” is a key search term -- and there you have it. If you haven’t looked at it yet, give it a read and leave a comment with your suggestions.</li><li>Number 2 on <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/12/11/best-gift-ideas-for-a-new-traveler/\">my list of ideas</a>, after a 20-inch black roller bag, is picking up the application fee for TSA Global Entry for your new traveler. For $100, or for free with many airline and hotel reward credit cards, you can gift them with 5 years of hassle reduction with PreCheck for domestic travel and a fast path through Customs when they travel internationally. Coming back from Cabo, we connected again through Houston-Hobby and so had to clear Immigration and Customs there. It was my first time through Customs there, so it took me a minute to find the Global Entry kiosks. The interface was a bit different from the ORD ones. Instead of asking for my passport and prompting me for the fingerprint pad, it asked me to fit my face inside a red box before taking my picture. The camera didn’t look adjustable, so I squatted down ‘til my face was in the frame and then clicked the Take Photo button. A couple seconds later, the kiosk spit out my receipt and I was off to the exit -- no passport or fingerprint scans, no clicking through questions. Quick, but odd. Some Google searches when I got home told me that I’d hit the new generation of Global Entry kiosks -- Global Entry 2.0 -- that uses facial recognition to match the kiosk picture with my passport and Global Entry application pictures. Given how crappy the kiosk picture looked on the receipt -- and that I hadn’t taken my glasses off -- I’m either really impressed or really concerned about the accuracy of their facial recognition algorithm; I’m not quite sure which.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li> Bridge Music -- Absolutely Clear (ft Jeris &amp; Goldfish) by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/45578 Ft: Jeris, Goldfish  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong> Travel Potpourri for $400, Alex </strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Here it is, the last episode of the year that I’m trying to get out before cracking the Vueve and trying to stay awake until midnight. With the clock ticking, instead of a proper topic, all I can do is gather up some odds-‘n’-ends from my travel notebooks into a Jeopardy-like topic “Travel Potpourri”</li><li>And writing in my travel notebooks is something I like to do. I have a couple: a small one -- a 3½x5½-in or A6 size that fits in my back pocket -- to jot down notes, bullet points; and a larger one that I use as a proper travel journal. For that, I was using a B6 Muji notebook that I picked up in Lisbon 3 years ago. After I filled that one up, I switched to a taller, thinner Japanese traveler-sized notebook because… that’s what I had laying around. I’ve been writing in travel notebooks since I’ve started the podcast -- gotta feed the beast -- usually in public places -- in bars, a lotta bars, while drinking beers, or on planes, a lotta&nbsp; planes, though turbulence can be a problem. And for some reason, I’ve found that this act of writing in public generates a bit of interest, and a chunk of questions. Back in October, on the Finnair flight back from our Baltics tour, I was catching up, writing up my thoughts on our couple of days in Helsinki when the guy a few seats over started asking me what I was writing. He was a younger Finnish guy. He and his girlfriend and a group of 5 or 6 others were connecting through Chicago to Miami for a cruise, and they started their cruise party the minute the drink carts rolled. But he wanted to know what I was writing and why. The what was easy; he wanted to know what I thought of Helsinki; where I’d been, how I liked it. He was intrigued by our Baltic Riga-Tallinn-Helsinki itinerary, in kind of a “that’s weird, but interesting” way. The why I’m not sure made it through translation. It’s not a pure travelogue -- not a “we did this, and then did that”. It’s more about impressions; what I found unique; what caught my eye. Writing it down makes me think about it, and when I go back and read those pages, some 2 or 10 or 20 years later, it reminds me of that place, that time, those experiences.&nbsp;</li><li>And when I talk about travel with folks, when I tell them how often I travel, I’ll often get a story -- in a bar, on a plane, or… while getting my hair cut. The girl who does my hair told me about her trip to Peru with a yoga group. Not the whole trip (I don’t have that much hair), but on their flight back, out of Lima, the plane took off, rotating up, while the flight attendants were still in the aisle doing the final check. It was a bit of mayhem, she said. That had to be one quick taxi out and take-off, I thought, because you’d think those flight attendants would be sprinting to their seats once that plane started rolling down the runway. Which I have seen before, especially when the captain gets a quick release from a ground hold and wants to get airborne before the tower changes their mind. But I’ve never seen them leave the ground with anyone still in the aisle.</li><li>Maybe the pilot was distracted -- a message from the tower, an animal on the runway, a sudden thought crossed his mind. I thought about pilot distraction when walking the <a href=\"https://thehikehouse.com/trails/airport-mesa-trail\">Airport Mesa trail</a> in Sedona earlier this month. The trail name says it all -- it’s a 3½-mile loop around the mesa where Sedona’s general aviation airport is. The hikers aren’t the potential distraction, though. It’s one of Sedona’s famous energy vortexes that’s right next to the airport. The Airport Vortex is, according to<a href=\"https://sedonaverdevalley.natgeotourism.com/content/airport-mesa-vortex/svvc7d222a849df1d7d6\"> one website</a>, “an Upflow area (also called Electric or Masculine) that helps your spirit soar for a higher perspective and/or greater oneness and serenity.” Watching a couple of private jets take off while on our hike, I wondered what would happen if the pilot suddenly achieved greater oneness and serenity while rotating off the top of that mesa. For someone as unenlightened and non-serene as me, that would be one helluva distraction.</li><li>I think for many, maybe close to most frequent travelers, Uber and Lyft have replaced taxis, at least in the US, when not renting a car. So it got my attention when I hit a weird Uber app failure at ORD at the end of October. Coming back from Charlottesville, I light up both Uber and Lyft while getting off the plane to compare wait times and fares (you’d think their surge pricing would be consistent, but it rarely is for me). Uber is a bit better, so I go to book a ride. Except that the Uber app wouldn’t pick up at the domestic terminals, just the separate international terminal, Terminal 5. I check Lyft again; yup, they’ll pick me up at Terminal 2, so I book with them instead. But it’s weird, so I keep checking Uber. I walk out the door to the rideshare pick-up area. There’s nothing but cars with pink Lyft lights; not an Uber decal in sight. An older couple walks up to me -- “Where does Uber pick up?” Normally here, I tell them, but they seem to have deleted it from their app today. It was a good night to be a Lyft driver. I wondered how long it took Uber to notice that they weren’t getting any pick-ups from one of the country’s busiest airports.</li><li>Tonight, though -- New Year’s Eve night -- I’ll be skipping Uber and their after-midnight price surges. I’ll be happy to hang out at home, to skip any travel, and just pop a bottle... or two of Vueve and wish all you TravelCommons’ listeners a Happy New Year and fun and safe travels in 2020.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #158</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_158.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #158 — Travel Potpourri for $400, Alex','','inherit','closed','closed','','2609-revision-v1','','','2020-09-19 16:14:05','2020-09-19 21:14:05','',2609,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/09/19/2609-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2877,1,'2020-09-19 16:15:00','2020-09-19 21:15:00','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/189764_1571139330482_7074048_n.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-2607\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/189764_1571139330482_7074048_n-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a><figcaption>Good End to 2019</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>Skipping the Chicago winter with trips to Phoenix and Sedona, Arizona, and a Christmas morning flight to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. Talk about those trips, my good and bad Hertz experiences, and then gather up odds-‘n’-ends from my travel notebooks to see off 2019 in this New Year\'s Eve episode. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_158.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html /-->\n\n<p>[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_158.mp3\"]</p>\n<p></p>\n\n<!-- wp:html /-->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #158: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois, just back from a bone-thawing trip with the family to Cabo San Lucas, sorta the Land’s End of Mexico’s Baja California peninsula. We booked this trip back in May. Andrew has read on some budget traveler newsletter that Southwest was about to start service to Cabo. So the morning that the flights went on offer, we all went after Southwest’s website and snagged our flights for just over 30,000 points a person. We flew down early Christmas morning, connecting through HOU, and, thinking back to how empty ORD was last year at Thanksgiving, I was stunned that both of our flights were completely full. It seemed that half of our 6:45a flight out of MDW was also walking over to the Cabo gate. Guess that once the kids stop believing in Santa, Christmas morning travel is fair game.</li><li>Flying back out of Cabo last Sunday, I walk up to the gate and don’t see the usual Southwest boarding number pylons. It’s just a typical shared gate with the Southwest flight to Hobby at Gate 4A and a Delta flight to maybe Salt Lake at Gate 4B. And no plane, because there’s no jetway. It’s a bus. Southwest’s open seating works because everyone enters the plane in numerical order. Squeezing all the A group and half of the B group onto one bus… this’ll be interesting. It’s a 3-minute bus ride around the corner of the terminal. The doors open; we pour out. A ramp worker is trying to recreate the Southwest boarding process on the tarmac, asking everyone to line up in 3 lines -- pre-boards, A1-30, and A31-60. It kinda works, for the most part… until another ramp worker says “Hey, we’re boarding through the back door, too” just as the second bus opens its doors. Then it just devolves into a free-for-all. I imagine that first ramp worker looking like Kevin Bacon in “Animal House”, flattened by stampeding passengers. I was the first one through the rear door, so I was fine with it, but it does feel like Southwest needs to re-engineer how they board from shared gates.</li><li>I say “bone-thawing,” but it’s not like I was suffering too much from the Chicago December. I’ve been in Phoenix most of the month between Thanksgiving and Christmas, walking around in shirt sleeves in 65 degree weather, topping up my Vitamin D levels while kinda chuckling at the locals hurrying&nbsp; by in their puffy Patagonia parkas. I even extended my stay through one of the weekends -- doing some more of that “bleisure” travel, this time a hiking weekend in the <a href=\"https://www.fs.fed.us/wildflowers/regions/southwestern/RedRockCountry/index.shtml\">Red Rock Country</a> around Sedona, Arizona.&nbsp; An hour or so before picking up a car from Hertz for the weekend, I got an e-mail from the Hertz PHX station manager saying they’d upgraded me as an early birthday present. With equal parts anticipation and trepidation (I remember DFW Hertz “upgrading” me to a Ford F-150 pickup) Irene and I rolled up to spot 43 to find a Mercedes A220 sedan under a “Happy Birthday” sign. OK, now <em>this</em> is an exciting upgrade. Once we fought our way through the Phoenix traffic, the A220 made the 2-hour drive up I-17 a fun run, especially with a 75 mph speed limit. </li><li> Bridge Music -- Earth Soda by septahelix (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial Share-Alike  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/septahelix/34050  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I pushed a <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1206606966031675393/photo/1\">picture of the Hertz car under the Happy Birthday sign</a> to the TravelCommons Instagram Story roll. Steve Frick replied, saying that a friend of his had gotten a Hertz birthday upgrade too, to a Jag. Not to throw any shade, but I definitely think the PHX team did me a bit better with the Benz, but it’s nice of Hertz to give their customers a bit of a birthday surprise. With so many travel providers working hard to squeeze, to optimize, and then to charge for every little thing, getting a birthday present from one of them with a bit of luxury -- and in my case not an insignificant upgrade -- it’s a pleasant throwback to what travel was like when I started business travel coming on 35 years ago.&nbsp;</li><li>But all that love was blown away less than 2 weeks later when the Hertz team in Cabo put me through a 20-minute hard sell on insurance -- $85/day on a $50/day rental -- and then charged me $14/day for something called “Credit Card Care”, all for a beat-up VW Passat with 50,000 hard miles on it. Ugh.</li><li>Steve also hit the TravelCommons website to talk about mileage runs. In the last episode, I said that Mark Skinner’s DC-HKG up-and-back to carry a NASA cosmic ray detector on United’s over-the-pole route was one helluva mileage run. Steve said -<ul><li>I haven’t done a mileage run in years but came real close to losing my Southwest companion pass status for 2020. I had to change a few of my travel website profiles to use my Southwest card over my Hilton American Express card in order to hit it for 2020. It’s always a tough decision do I want 12 points per dollar at Hilton properties or free Southwest flights for my wife</li></ul></li><li>Thanks, Steve. I’ll tweak my travel credit cards now and then to hit some goals, but I hadn’t thought of it as an end-of-year mileage run. But it does make sense, especially with Southwest which counts credit card spend toward Companion Pass. I like that, a credit-card mileage run -- definitely more climate friendly.</li><li>I was talking about my flights to and from Phoenix a couple of weeks ago with one of the guys on the project team, a younger guy, and the look he gave me suggested that I’d hit peak travel nerdery -- at least in his eyes. I was telling him that I fly out to Phoenix on United from ORD because United has an 8am flight out, it’s easier to get a morning coffee at ORD than MDW, I get a free upgrade to Economy Plus which makes it easier to sleep, and because United uses PHX in Terminal 2, the older “slum” terminal that, because it’s separate from the main terminals, makes it easier to get an Uber or Lyft. But then I fly back to Chicago on Southwest because they have more flights back in the afternoon which gives me some flexibility with last-minute meetings, they don’t charge a change fee, they fly out of the newer Terminal 4 in PHX which gives me a much better selection of restaurants and bars than Terminal 2, and it puts me into Chicago-Midway where the wait for an Uber or Lyft is always shorter than at ORD. To me, it was a completely reasonable thought process -- optimizing each leg for the amenities I’d use. I turned to one of the other guys -- a guy who’s been traveling 20-some years -- “Yup, makes perfect sense to me,” he said. The younger guy was just shaking his head; probably muttering “OK Boomer” under his breath. But he’ll learn.</li><li>Back in November, during one of my semi-regular spelunks through Google Analytics, I noticed that <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"the November 2018 episode - #146: Rental Demolition Derby and Traveler Gift Guide (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"http://146\" target=\"_blank\">the November 2018 episode - #146: Rental Demolition Derby and Traveler Gift Guide</a> - was one of the top 5 pages on the TravelCommons website. I couldn’t figure how stories of rental car wrecks would get a lot of Google hits, so it must be the gift guide. Which suggested that maybe I should update it for 2019, but more as a blog post this time. I read through a half-dozen or so other gift guides, looking for some ideas I could steal, but they got pretty repetitious pretty quick -- pushing Away luggage, Huzi infinity pillows, and Aesop travel kits, which suggests to a cynical mind that these companies must’ve been splashing a lot of samples around the blog-o-sphere. And maybe didn’t age all that well after the Verge published an <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"exposé on Away’s toxic work culture (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/5/20995453/away-luggage-ceo-steph-korey-toxic-work-environment-travel-inclusion\" target=\"_blank\">exposé on Away’s toxic work culture</a>. But anyway, I wanted something a bit different, and on one of my flights got thinking about a chat I’d had with a friend a while back. She was looking for gift ideas for her daughter who, a couple of years out of college, was starting a new job with a lot more business travel. Replaying that chat in my head, and thinking about the younger guy on my project team, I started going through my travel kit -- rummaging through my messenger bag and then cycling through my suitcase -- mentally, though; not enough space to physically pull it down from the overhead and open it up; and that would’ve looked a bit weird. I built <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"a list of the things I really use on my trips (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/12/11/best-gift-ideas-for-a-new-traveler/\" target=\"_blank\">a list of the things I really use on my trips</a>, and that I miss when I forget to bring them along. Then I winnowed it down to 10 -- because “Top 10” is a key search term -- and there you have it. If you haven’t looked at it yet, give it a read and leave a comment with your suggestions.</li><li>Number 2 on <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/12/11/best-gift-ideas-for-a-new-traveler/\">my list of ideas</a>, after a 20-inch black roller bag, is picking up the application fee for TSA Global Entry for your new traveler. For $100, or for free with many airline and hotel reward credit cards, you can gift them with 5 years of hassle reduction with PreCheck for domestic travel and a fast path through Customs when they travel internationally. Coming back from Cabo, we connected again through Houston-Hobby and so had to clear Immigration and Customs there. It was my first time through Customs there, so it took me a minute to find the Global Entry kiosks. The interface was a bit different from the ORD ones. Instead of asking for my passport and prompting me for the fingerprint pad, it asked me to fit my face inside a red box before taking my picture. The camera didn’t look adjustable, so I squatted down ‘til my face was in the frame and then clicked the Take Photo button. A couple seconds later, the kiosk spit out my receipt and I was off to the exit -- no passport or fingerprint scans, no clicking through questions. Quick, but odd. Some Google searches when I got home told me that I’d hit the new generation of Global Entry kiosks -- Global Entry 2.0 -- that uses facial recognition to match the kiosk picture with my passport and Global Entry application pictures. Given how crappy the kiosk picture looked on the receipt -- and that I hadn’t taken my glasses off -- I’m either really impressed or really concerned about the accuracy of their facial recognition algorithm; I’m not quite sure which.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li> Bridge Music -- Absolutely Clear (ft Jeris &amp; Goldfish) by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/45578 Ft: Jeris, Goldfish  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong> Travel Potpourri for $400, Alex </strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Here it is, the last episode of the year that I’m trying to get out before cracking the Vueve and trying to stay awake until midnight. With the clock ticking, instead of a proper topic, all I can do is gather up some odds-‘n’-ends from my travel notebooks into a Jeopardy-like topic “Travel Potpourri”</li><li>And writing in my travel notebooks is something I like to do. I have a couple: a small one -- a 3½x5½-in or A6 size that fits in my back pocket -- to jot down notes, bullet points; and a larger one that I use as a proper travel journal. For that, I was using a B6 Muji notebook that I picked up in Lisbon 3 years ago. After I filled that one up, I switched to a taller, thinner Japanese traveler-sized notebook because… that’s what I had laying around. I’ve been writing in travel notebooks since I’ve started the podcast -- gotta feed the beast -- usually in public places -- in bars, a lotta bars, while drinking beers, or on planes, a lotta&nbsp; planes, though turbulence can be a problem. And for some reason, I’ve found that this act of writing in public generates a bit of interest, and a chunk of questions. Back in October, on the Finnair flight back from our Baltics tour, I was catching up, writing up my thoughts on our couple of days in Helsinki when the guy a few seats over started asking me what I was writing. He was a younger Finnish guy. He and his girlfriend and a group of 5 or 6 others were connecting through Chicago to Miami for a cruise, and they started their cruise party the minute the drink carts rolled. But he wanted to know what I was writing and why. The what was easy; he wanted to know what I thought of Helsinki; where I’d been, how I liked it. He was intrigued by our Baltic Riga-Tallinn-Helsinki itinerary, in kind of a “that’s weird, but interesting” way. The why I’m not sure made it through translation. It’s not a pure travelogue -- not a “we did this, and then did that”. It’s more about impressions; what I found unique; what caught my eye. Writing it down makes me think about it, and when I go back and read those pages, some 2 or 10 or 20 years later, it reminds me of that place, that time, those experiences.&nbsp;</li><li>And when I talk about travel with folks, when I tell them how often I travel, I’ll often get a story -- in a bar, on a plane, or… while getting my hair cut. The girl who does my hair told me about her trip to Peru with a yoga group. Not the whole trip (I don’t have that much hair), but on their flight back, out of Lima, the plane took off, rotating up, while the flight attendants were still in the aisle doing the final check. It was a bit of mayhem, she said. That had to be one quick taxi out and take-off, I thought, because you’d think those flight attendants would be sprinting to their seats once that plane started rolling down the runway. Which I have seen before, especially when the captain gets a quick release from a ground hold and wants to get airborne before the tower changes their mind. But I’ve never seen them leave the ground with anyone still in the aisle.</li><li>Maybe the pilot was distracted -- a message from the tower, an animal on the runway, a sudden thought crossed his mind. I thought about pilot distraction when walking the <a href=\"https://thehikehouse.com/trails/airport-mesa-trail\">Airport Mesa trail</a> in Sedona earlier this month. The trail name says it all -- it’s a 3½-mile loop around the mesa where Sedona’s general aviation airport is. The hikers aren’t the potential distraction, though. It’s one of Sedona’s famous energy vortexes that’s right next to the airport. The Airport Vortex is, according to<a href=\"https://sedonaverdevalley.natgeotourism.com/content/airport-mesa-vortex/svvc7d222a849df1d7d6\"> one website</a>, “an Upflow area (also called Electric or Masculine) that helps your spirit soar for a higher perspective and/or greater oneness and serenity.” Watching a couple of private jets take off while on our hike, I wondered what would happen if the pilot suddenly achieved greater oneness and serenity while rotating off the top of that mesa. For someone as unenlightened and non-serene as me, that would be one helluva distraction.</li><li>I think for many, maybe close to most frequent travelers, Uber and Lyft have replaced taxis, at least in the US, when not renting a car. So it got my attention when I hit a weird Uber app failure at ORD at the end of October. Coming back from Charlottesville, I light up both Uber and Lyft while getting off the plane to compare wait times and fares (you’d think their surge pricing would be consistent, but it rarely is for me). Uber is a bit better, so I go to book a ride. Except that the Uber app wouldn’t pick up at the domestic terminals, just the separate international terminal, Terminal 5. I check Lyft again; yup, they’ll pick me up at Terminal 2, so I book with them instead. But it’s weird, so I keep checking Uber. I walk out the door to the rideshare pick-up area. There’s nothing but cars with pink Lyft lights; not an Uber decal in sight. An older couple walks up to me -- “Where does Uber pick up?” Normally here, I tell them, but they seem to have deleted it from their app today. It was a good night to be a Lyft driver. I wondered how long it took Uber to notice that they weren’t getting any pick-ups from one of the country’s busiest airports.</li><li>Tonight, though -- New Year’s Eve night -- I’ll be skipping Uber and their after-midnight price surges. I’ll be happy to hang out at home, to skip any travel, and just pop a bottle... or two of Vueve and wish all you TravelCommons’ listeners a Happy New Year and fun and safe travels in 2020.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #158</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_158.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #158 — Travel Potpourri for $400, Alex','','inherit','closed','closed','','2609-revision-v1','','','2020-09-19 16:15:00','2020-09-19 21:15:00','',2609,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/09/19/2609-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2878,1,'2020-09-19 16:15:43','2020-09-19 21:15:43','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/DSC_7106-scaled.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2633\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/DSC_7106-300x293.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"293\"></a><figcaption>Just put my dragon\'s den on Airbnb</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>January is a big travel planning month; people thinking about about the places they want to visit, spending days on the Internet researching itineraries, and putting in their week\'s vacation requests. But what about a 9-week sabbatical you’ve worked 7 years for? In this episode, we talk about that kind of extreme travel planning. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_159.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_159.mp3\"]\n<p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #159: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois having finished 3 weeks of traveling down to Phoenix with one more to go. It’s been a mild winter -- for Chicago -- especially when compared to last winter, which means it’s been in the 20’s and 30’s as opposed to -23 as it was one morning last January. But even with a mild winter, I still appreciate the 70 degree days in Phoenix.</li><li> It’s a 4-hr flight between Chicago and Phoenix. I normally enjoy that amount of “unplugged” time to just read, listen to music, listen to podcasts. But a couple of weeks ago, I tweaked my back during a workout -- not a big thing, I’ve done it many times before. But this time, the pain didn’t go away, it’s hung around on my left side, moving from back to hip to thigh, making it very uncomfortable to sit for long periods of time -- like 4 hrs. Which has made me notice how long US carriers keep the “Fasten Seatbelt” sign on -- like, forever. By the time that seatbelt sign finally goes off, my back is screaming -- and the person next to me in the middle seat is pretty annoyed at my constant shifting. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/06/16/podcast-152-overwhelming-travel-new-old-restaurant-trends/\">episode #152</a>, I talked about Southwest flights between Chicago and Nashville keeping the seatbelt sign on the entire hour-and-20-minutes. It hasn’t been that bad, but it’s easily been 45 minutes. And it isn’t just Southwest; United is doing the same thing. Quite a difference from, say, when Andrew and I flew Air Baltic back in October. 10,000 ft and “bing” that seat belt sign would go off, and we’d still be climbing. It doesn’t need to turn off that fast, but there’s gotta be a happy medium there somewhere. </li><li>With the mild winter and a little bit of luck, my flights to and from Phoenix have been pretty dependable -- except for this week. On Monday, I started getting delay notices for my United 7:40pm flight right after lunch. United was doing their typical rolling delay exercise -- it’s a 30 minutes; no, really an hour; no, we’re leaving at 9pm; just kidding, it’s really 9:40. I was OK with the 30 and 60-minute delays, but then when I get two more delays in a 40-minute span -- now, something’s up. I call United. I get the Premier desk, which the guy tells me is in Chicago. I tell him the story -- rolling delays have now gotten to 2 hrs; I don’t trust that this flight is going off, and I need to get to PHX tonight. The guy says, “Yup, I got it. Makes sense.” He tries to find me routings through LAX and SFO, but the connections don’t work. So he cancels and refunds my ticket -- no hassle, no questions, no change fee. I love this guy. I pivot to Southwest and American, which both have 8:40 flights. I look at American’s seat map -- nothing but middle seats. That’s just not going to work with my back, so it’s over to Southwest. I’m A-List, so I know with their open seating I’ll get an aisle seat. (Exhale) Haven’t done that dance in a while, so was a bit out of shape. But with one more trip to PHX left, I’m not looking to get back into that shape.</li><li>Bridge Music --  <em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/hisboyelroy/430\" target=\"_blank\">Revolve</a> mix</em> by cinematrik (c) copyright 2005 Licensed under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hisboyelroy/430   </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Before writing a podcast, I go through all the interaction channels -- website comments, Facebook comments, Instagram comments, Twitter replies, e-mails, … and inevitably I miss something. Which I have done since October when Arnoud Heijnis and I traded Twitter direct messages about travel converters. In episode #155, I’d talked about having to rummage around for European plug adaptors before my Krakow and Budapest trip, and how I’m always leaving them behind. Arnoud wrote -<ul><li>Hi Mark, just caught up on your last two episodes. I also did the travel converter dance until someone recommended the Power Bagel. It\'s so small and comes in handy not only as a travel adapter but also in hotel rooms with not enough power plugs, conference tables with one outlet etc. Iit never leaves my bag so thought I\'d share.</li></ul></li><li>A very belated thanks, Arnoud! Clicking through the link that Arnoud sent, the Power Bagel is a compact circular power strip of universal plugs and a couple of USB ports. They say that the circular design keeps large power adapters, like a Macbook power supply, from blocking outlets like they do on straight power strips. And then in the center hole, they store a universal plug adapter so you can plug the Power Bagel in most international outlets. Cool design and Arnoud vouches for it. Clicking around the web site, the company MOGICS seems to be a 3-person design company based in Singapore. They got started a few years back on Kickstarter and are in the middle of a new campaign for an upgraded version of the Power Bagel, called, of course, the Super Bagel that upgrades the plug adapter and adds a on-trend USB-C port. Kickstarter says the campaign ends on Feb 25th. I’ll include a <a href=\"http://kck.st/354ozBx\">link</a> in the show notes for anyone interested.</li><li>Kickstarter seems to be the place for these things. I sent Arnoud a link to a travel adapter campaign that I joined. The Passport Go is a more traditional travel adapter -- a big cube that will plug into most international outlets and has 3 USB-A and 1 USB-C plugs and one universal plug receptacle. I used it on my Baltics trip. For personal travel, most of my power needs seem to now be driven by USB cords rather than plugs -- my iPhone did a rapid charge off the USB-C port, my tablet and headphones off the USB-A ports and since I don’t have enough hair to justify a blow dryer or curling iron, I never used the plug receptacle. Indeed, if I’d brought my Macbook Air, I could’ve powered that up off the USB-C port rather than bringing its power adapter. I’ll include a link to <a href=\"https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/zendure/passport-go-worlds-first-travel-adapter-w-gan-technology\"><em>their</em> Kickstarter page</a>.</li><li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/10/14/podcast-156-airport-satisfaction-escooters-smaller-luggage/\">episode #156,</a> I talked about how I really liked electric scooters, using them to run around in Chicago and Charlottesville and DC, and down here in Phoenix. Whereas Chicago wrapped up their e-scooter pilot in October -- which made sense; I don’t think those scooters would do well in the snow -- Phoenix seemed the perfect place with perfect weather -- no snow, not a lot of rain. And they seemed to have nailed one of the main problems with e-scooters -- people leaving them lying everywhere, especially in the middle of sidewalks. In downtown Phoenix, you have to park them in designated areas, typically near sidewalk corners, inside a painted box. So it surprised me when I started coming down here in December that I saw only 2 scooter companies -- Lime (which is partnered with Uber) and Spin (which is owned by the car company Ford). But then, a couple of weeks ago, Lime announced that they were pulling out -- that they couldn’t make money in Phoenix -- and a day or so later, all their scooters were gone. I don’t know what the right balance between scooter availability and public right-of-way is, but I hope Chicago and Phoenix and other cities can figure it out. This whole micro-mobility space -- bike shares, e-scooters -- is an important part of the urban transit mix. And, when the weather’s nice, they’re fun too!</li><li>In that <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/10/14/podcast-156-airport-satisfaction-escooters-smaller-luggage/\">same episode</a>, I talked about buying a smaller bag, a <a href=\"https://amzn.to/32lIURe\">TravelPro Maxlite 5 international carry-on size</a>, to meet the smaller carry-on size and weight requirements of AirBaltic, which Andrew and I would be using to hop between Riga, Tallinn, and Helsinki on our Baltics beer and sauna tour. I said back then that I didn’t want to spend a lot of money on it because I’d only be using it for this Baltics trip and maybe some short couple-of-day trips, that my big Victorinox 22-incher would remain my primary bag. But as it turns out, I’ve been using the smaller TravelPro for these 4-day/3-night trips to Phoenix. Now, with temperatures in 70’s, I’m not having to bring heavy, thick clothes with me, but still, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by what I can pack into that smaller TravelPro. But, I think I’ll be back to the Victorinox for next week’s trip -- I’m vectoring through Durango, CO for a ski weekend on the way home. Little colder, little more clothing; I think I’ll need all the space I can get. </li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music -- Velvet Green of Mystery (Instrumental) by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/48114 Ft: Kthugha, Jeris, Martijn de Boer  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong> </strong> <strong>Planning the Trip of a Lifetime</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>We’ve talked on past episodes about trip planning -- using guidebooks, social media, Google algorithms, shooting the gaps between bipolar TripAdvisor reviews, casting runes, consulting tarot cards,... And all that for a week’s vacation, maybe two. What about a 9-week vacation, a paid sabbatical that you’ve worked and waited 7 years for? Well, that’s the extreme travel planning that long-time TravelCommons listener and even longer time friend Allan Marko and his wife Chris Chufo faced last year. And with January being a big travel planning month, I asked Allan to talk to us about how he and Chris planned for a trip of a lifetime.</li><li>Interview with Allan Marko</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #159</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2010/09/06/video-1-impressions-of-vietnam/\">Link to TravelCommons Vietnam video</a></li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_159.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #159 — Planning the Trip of a Lifetime in Southeast Asia','','inherit','closed','closed','','2626-revision-v1','','','2020-09-19 16:15:43','2020-09-19 21:15:43','',2626,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/09/19/2626-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2879,1,'2020-09-19 16:16:19','2020-09-19 21:16:19','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/IMG_0368-scaled.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2664 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/IMG_0368-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a><figcaption>Is this the IMAX seatback screen?</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>Trying to watch the Super Bowl while flying from Durango, CO to Chicago via Denver got me thinking about the fading away of seatback entertainment. We also talk about the continuing evolution of ride sharing. Uber and Lyft are looking more and more like the taxi companies they fought to replace. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_160.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_160.mp3\"]\n<p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #160: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. I finished my Phoenix travels at the end of January and made the last trip a “bleisure” trip -- business in Phoenix Monday thru Thursday afternoon, and then leisure Thursday evening thru Sunday with a ski weekend in Durango, CO, the first time I’ve been on the slopes in 7 years. I first thought about heading up to Salt Lake for the weekend, but when I saw that the Sundance Film Festival was the same weekend, I thought “Nope” and started Googling for other ideas. The ski slopes around Flagstaff were too small and I didn’t want to fight the traffic on I-70 to hit the areas near Denver. Durango, in the San Juan mountains in the southwest corner of the state -- near Four Corners -- looked like a good spot. It’s a quick and fairly inexpensive hour hop from Phoenix; it’s an actual town, not just a ski resort, so there’d be other things to do when the lifts closed; the lift tickets at Purgatory and Wolf Creek were reasonable -- 40-50% of the price at, say, Vail or Park City; I was able to book a whole tiny house on AirBnB for the price of a generic Fairfield Inn room; and, I’d never been there before. And, as I found out from my AirBnB host, it was the weekend of Durango’s Snowdown Festival -- the 42nd annual, with a parade down Main Street and everything. The snow was just OK, but the skiing was great -- beautiful weather, damn few lift lines, nice people -- a weird but fun combination of families -- mostly from Texas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico -- and the Colorado hippy-dippy ski bum crew. It was a nice ending to my 2 months of Phoenix trips.</li><li>The only downside was… I had to check a bag. Even though I rented all my equipment -- skis, boots, poles -- I still needed that extra bag for all the other paraphernalia -- helmet, ski pants, gloves, parka, …. I love skiing but it requires a lot of stuff. Not that it cost me anything -- even flying Basic Economy on American from Phoenix to Durango, I got free bags with my Platinum status. Though American’s website wasn’t very clear about that when they tried to upsell me off of Basic Economy -- imagine that. And while I got free bags, I couldn’t select my seat in advance. But given it was a small regional jet with no middle seats, I figured I’d risk it.&nbsp; I will say, though, that I was pretty happy with the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/37R0sHX\">teal green luggage tags</a> I bought before the trip. Made it very easy to spot my bags amidst the sea of black suitcases on the luggage belt. Probably <a href=\"https://amzn.to/37R0sHX\">the best $5 I’ve spent on Amazon</a>.&nbsp;</li><li>One detail I missed when planning my ski weekend is that my Sunday night flights from Durango to Denver to Chicago would be right in the middle of the Super Bowl. Though I’m not sure I’d have changed anything if I’d remembered it. I didn’t really have a dog in that hunt -- I’m not a big San Francisco or Kansas City fan and so was kinda like everyone else who wasn’t in the Bay Area, I was rooting more for Andy Reid than KC. I did end up catching <em>most</em> of the game, but it was a little choppy. I watched the kick-off and 1st quarter in the bar at Durango Airport. Durango Airport isn’t big -- just 4 gates if I remember correctly -- and the bar kinda sticks out into the gate seating area. I sat at the bar, had a beer, and watched the game on the TV hanging on the wall near Gate 2 -- or maybe 3. But then United called boarding, so I caught bits of the second quarter on the Fox TV iPhone app while waiting to take off for Denver. And then tracked the start of the 3rd quarter after touchdown and a really long taxi in DEN. I caught the rest of the 3rd quarter on multiple screens -- bars, CNN gate TVs -- while walking down the B Concourse to make my ORD connection. I got lucky, though, and was able to catch all of Kansas City’s phenomenal come-back uninterrupted in a Mexican restaurant with about a dozen other fixated passengers and restaurant workers. After KC’s final interception, I walked down and caught the final plays on the CNN TV at the gate. Every other night, I consciously avoid those CNN TVs -- the volumes always up on people yelling at each other. But this night, I was happy for that volume -- the one night when they weren’t to CNN. </li><li>Bridge Music --  <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/48915\">Like Music (cdk Mix</a>) by Analog By Nature (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/48915 Ft: Phasenwandler  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>The week after that last Phoenix trip, I wrote <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/02/07/my-food-and-beer-hangouts-in-downtown-phoenix-dtphx/\">a post</a> on the TravelCommons website listing my favorite food and beer hangouts in downtown Phoenix. When I started traveling to Phoenix in the mid-’90’s, there wasn’t much to downtown Phoenix other than a big Hyatt Regency hotel. Everything was in Scottsdale and Tempe. I’d usually stay in Tempe because, with Arizona State University there, there were restaurants and bars I could walk to. Fast forward to today, downtown Phoenix has a lot more going on. Stadiums for the Phoenix Suns and the Arizona Diamondbacks, and a new downtown campus for ASU’s law school bring in enough people to support a solid selection of restaurants, coffee shops, and bars. The blog post doesn’t cover everything -- just the places I found myself going back to again and again during my 2-month stay.</li><li>Most of my flights from the mid-90’s on went into PHX Sky Harbor’s Terminal 2 -- on United and on American, until they moved to the much better Terminal 4 after merging with US Air which had merged with America West, the original hub airline for PHX. Terminal 2 was PHX’s slum terminal. Built in 1962 and originally planned to shut down in 2000, they finally shut it down on Feb 4, 2020, the week after I finished my latest Phoenix gig. The last two airlines using it -- United and Alaska Air -- have moved to Terminal 3 with the rest of the non-hub carriers. PHX’s two major carriers -- American and Southwest -- split Terminal 4. Some of the newspaper articles said business travelers liked it because it was compact, easy to navigate. I’m not one of them. I thought it was a cramped low-ceilinged place, with small restrooms and lousy food and beer options when I had to wait out delays back to ORD.&nbsp; I think you can tell that I won’t miss it. The plans are to demo the terminal this year and replace it with European-style bus gates -- using buses to take passengers out to remotely parked aircraft instead of boarding through jetways. I’m gonna bet those bus gates won’t be popular in August when PHX’s tarmac temperatures hit 120 degrees.&nbsp;</li><li>Waiting for my American Eagle PHX-Durango flight, I was half-paying attention to the PA announcements, but then noticed that the gate agent wasn’t doing the boarding announcements. Instead they were using recorded announcements. That wasn’t what caught my attention, though. I’ve heard recorded gate announcements hundreds of times. But usually, they’re recordings of humans reading the announcements. Here at gate B19, it was one of those robotic text-to-speech synthesized voices -- something like &lt;insert Boarding Groups 1, 2, and 3&gt;. I mean, why? How much savings do you get by using text-to-speech over some gate agent standing in a closet and recording it, say, on their iPhone? Maybe more that I think now that American has, what, 7, 10, 123 boarding groups? I asked this question “Why the robot” out loud -- to Twitter. American came back “We heard back and the PHX gate staff actually does record the voices used in the announcements. They are real humans.” Kudos for American’s Twitter staff for following up, but unless they have an android with a bad vox box working for them, I think the gang at gate B19 is using text2speech.org.</li><li>I posted an article on the TravelCommons Facebook page about a guy who wore a plastic tent on a plane to avoid the coronavirus. Now, as it turns out, it was really more of a publicity stunt for the guy’s company. He makes personal tents to protect people from bad weather when sitting on the sidelines of their kids’ soccer games. Might cut down on the colds I catch when flying, but from the picture, it looks like it would be quite a pain when the person in the window seat wants to get out to use the toilet.</li><li>On January 6th, the first Monday of the new year, I <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1214167465627979776\">posted a picture on Twitter</a> of the “cannabis amnesty box” that was on the other side of security at ORD’s Terminal 1. Pot became legal in Illinois the first of the year, and the Chicago Dept of Aviation put out these boxes “so travelers have the opportunity to ensure compliance with federal law, as well as the local laws at their destination” according to the police department. If you look at the picture I posted, the box looks like something the maintenance guys knocked together in the wood shop during their break. So no surprise that 3 weeks later, someone broke into a similar box at Midway airport and helped themselves to some surrendered weed. Actually, I think the only real surprise is that it took as long as 3 weeks for this to happen. </li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/spinmeister/53428\">Somewhere</a> by spinmeister (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/spinmeister/53428 Ft: DJ Vadim  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Seatback Screens Fading Away</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>On my flight from Durango to Denver, half the guys on the plane were staring down at their phones during boarding and taxi, watching the second quarter until the plane rotated up off the runway. For folks flying United planes with DirectTV seatback screens -- the repainted Continental 737s -- no problems; just swipe your credit card and keep watching. But that’s a shrinking group. Seat back entertainment screens have been on the death watch list for 5 years now, but it seems to be on its way out -- at least on a lot of the domestic routes.&nbsp;</li><li>And I can’t really say that I miss them. The DirectTV controls on those United planes are in the armrest, so I’m always changing the channel or the volume or the screen brightness. On American 737s, screens bulging out of the seat backs into an already tight space thanks to American’s war against seat pitch; I have to recline my seat just to be able to get that screen in focus. And the power supplies for all these seat back units are under the seat, crowding out space for my backpack or my feet.&nbsp;</li><li>I’m happy with the BYOS -- bring your own screen -- approach. I watched the season finale of The Mandalorian Star Wars TV show on my 8-inch Samsung tablet. It wasn’t as good as watching it on the 65-inch LG 4K TV at home, but it was bigger than any domestic in-flight screen. On one of my Southwest flights home from PHX, I saw a guy hang his big iPhone Max from the tray on the seatback in front of him -- kind of a DIY seatback entertainment unit.&nbsp;</li><li>On long international flights, though, I can see the case for seatback screens. My wife and kids have perfected synchronized movie viewing. They’re sitting three abreast; they queue up the same movie and then count down -- 3, 2, 1, Press Play! The airplane version of watching a movie together in the living room. I’m not sure it would be the same if they were all looking down at their iPhones. This tends to work better on newer planes, like the 787, that have bigger screens. I remember Andrew trying to watch the movie Dunkirk - a big WW II action movie that was great on IMAX -- on a maybe 7-inch screen on a United 767. I don’t think he got the full experience of that movie.</li><li>Back in December, United <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1211759835181654018\">tweeted out the top 10 most watched in-flight movies in 2019</a> -- Bohemian Rhapsody, A Star is Born, and Crazy Rich Asians were 1, 2, and 3. Makes sense. In 9th place, though, was John Wick 3, the 3rd installment of the Keanu Reeves fists of fury action flick. Loved that movie, but I can’t see even the new 16-inch screens in United’s business class being big enough to handle that flick. </li><li> Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/scottaltham/20747\"> Hear Us Now (poptastic mix)</a> by Scott Altham (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/scottaltham/20747  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Any Difference Left Between Ride-Share and Taxis?</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I got an e-mail survey the other day asking for my thoughts, impressions about Uber and Lyft. One of the questions was how long I’d used each of them -- less than 1 year; 1-2 years, 2-3 years, more than 3 years. Which got <em>me</em> kinda wondering, so I pulled out my iPhone and fired up each app. My first Uber ride was in December 2013, from midtown Manhattan to LGA at 4pm. I signed up because it’s such a pain to find a regular cab to take you to LGA at rush hour, and I’d forgotten to book a ride with the black car service I would normally use. Interesting that I didn’t use Uber again for another 6 months, in June 2014, when again, I’d didn’t have a black car book for a ride from PHL to a client out in the suburbs along the Blue Route. I signed up with Lyft in December 2015 when I was in Las Vegas for a project. I’d be using Uber more frequently in 2015, but back then, only Lyft had permission to drop-off at LAS. We had used Uber a couple of times, but they’d have to drop us off at the rental car center so we could take the bus to the terminal. I did that exactly one time and then pivoted to Lyft. So, according to this e-mail survey -- which, at the end, revealed itself to be sponsored by Uber -- I’m a grizzled ride-sharing veteran -- as I’m sure are many of you.</li><li>And ride-sharing was what it was -- an app-driven version of the old ride-sharing bulletin boards -- “I’m driving from Chicago to Rockford; looking for someone to split the gas and tolls” -- except locally. I remember, at the start, that caused a bit of an etiquette challenge -- do I sit in the front or the back? And you were careful because it was their car -- and usually a nice one. Certainly much nicer and way less beat-up than the typical cab.&nbsp; And there were usually good stories from the drivers -- all but a couple were doing it part-time, to make some additional cash. Way back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/11/22/podcast-125-uber-driver-stories-overseas-for-the-election/\">episode #125</a>, in November 2016, early on in my Uber/Lyft days, I told some of those stories.</li><li>A year later, a driver in Charlottesville, VA told me he was driving full-time and wanted to expand, so he’d bought 3 used Toyota Corollas (even back then the preferred ride-share car) and was renting them out to “Hispanics”, his words, who were driving Uber and Lyft a couple hours north in the Washington, DC area. Interesting idea. A bit like the standard taxi cab model -- leasing licensed cabs to drivers for a shift -- but without the need to drop money on a taxi license, or a medallion in places like New York and Chicago. Interesting enough that there are now 6-7 companies, including Hertz, offering daily and weekly rentals if you don’t want to share rides in your personal car.</li><li>Back in December, landing in Chicago Midway on a Southwest flight from PHX, I did my usual drill, opened up Uber and Lyft as I got off the plane and checked prices and wait times for a ride home. The prices were about the same, but the wait time… 10 min for Uber, 2 for Lyft. Lyft it is! I hit the Request Ride button, but instead of searching for a driver, I immediately get a 4-digit PIN. I head downstairs and get into a queue that looks a lot like the cab line a few doors over, except this one is run by women in pink Lyft safety vests. But they’re doing the same thing the cab rank workers do -- wave down cars and then point passengers to them. I wait, I dunno, maybe 5 minutes to get into a car, show the guy the PIN on my Lyft app, he enters it into his, and off we go. A bit less hectic than the typical airport rideshare scrum, but again, how is this different than a taxi -- except that I don’t have to ask the driver if his credit card machine works.</li><li>Indeed, on most of my trips over the past year, arriving in PHX or CHO, there typically wouldn’t be a line for a cab, so I’d skip the 5-10 minute wait for Uber or Lyft. Or, returning from Durango with my extra bag of ski paraphernalia, I skipped the schlep up to to the ride-share pick-up zone; I just walked out the door to a waiting cab. And the price difference is shrinking --&nbsp; as we talked about in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/08/13/podcast-154-will-we-still-love-uber-when-the-prices-go-up/\">episode #154</a>, Uber and Lyft have been nudging their rates up to stem their losses.&nbsp;</li><li>This is not to say there aren’t important differences; places where Uber and Lyft bring real value. I was working in New Orleans before Uber set up shop. It was impossible to get a cab anywhere other than between the airport and the French Quarter. Trying to get to and from a restaurant in, say, Mid-City or Uptown was painful -- until Uber showed up.</li><li>It kinda feels like, after all the hype, the battles with regulators, the IPOs, that Uber and Lyft used billions of venture capital dollars to break the medallion monopolies and build some phenomenal taxi dispatch systems. As a traveler, it’s been great for me. For the investors though? Well, I’m glad I skipped those IPOs</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #160</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_160.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #160 — Disappearing Seatback Screens; Shrinking Difference Between Ride-Share and Taxis','','inherit','closed','closed','','2661-revision-v1','','','2020-09-19 16:16:19','2020-09-19 21:16:19','',2661,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/09/19/2661-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0);
INSERT INTO `wp_posts` VALUES
(2880,1,'2020-09-19 16:19:45','2020-09-19 21:19:45','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/F3E28DAE-0026-4E8A-957E-D6CE914F717C.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2857 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/F3E28DAE-0026-4E8A-957E-D6CE914F717C-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a><figcaption>I seem to have put on a Quarantine 15</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>Spent a week in <a href=\"https://www.uptravel.com/\">Michigan\'s Upper Peninsula</a> hiking, biking, kayaking, and running into a lot of other people getting away to do the same, which got me looking back six months to the start of the pandemic. I talk about a surprisingly good flight cancellation experience with American Airlines, and figuring out how to download 12 years of <a href=\"https://www.tripit.com/\">TripIt</a> data. We wrap up talking to <a href=\"https://www.lendingtree.com/writer/matt-schulz/\">Matt Schulz</a> of <a href=\"https://www.lendingtree.com/\">LendingTree</a>, asking him what are we doing with travel credit cards that are generating frequent traveler points we can’t use? All this and more at the<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_167.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"> <strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/896151355&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #167: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after a week’s tour of the UP -- Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Did a counter-clockwise circle route around Lake Michigan. Headed out east on Friday morning; stopped at a brewery in Grand Rapids for lunch; drove the 5 miles across the Mackinac Bridge just before dusk; and had my first UP pasty (the first of many) and a local beer for dinner that night in Sault Ste Marie. Spent a couple of days in Soo; watched 700-ft lake freighters make their way through the locks that connect Lake Superior to Lake Huron; I’m still enough of an engineer to geek out on that kind of stuff. We then drove west to Marquette for 3 days and again west to Houghton for 2 days before heading home through Wisconsin down the west side of Lake Michigan. It was all outdoors stuff -- hiking, biking, kayaking; the things that last-minute COVID closures or restrictions won’t muck up.&nbsp; The UP has always been on my list of places to visit, but it’s always on sorta the B-list, and so plans to go someplace else -- Spain, Napa, Ireland -- would always push it down the list. But now, with most places blocked off with travel restrictions and quarantines, the UP -- drivable with lots of outdoor activities -- bubbled to the top of the list.</li><li>And I wasn’t the only one thinking that way. The guy renting rowboats at <a href=\"https://www2.dnr.state.mi.us/ParksandTrails/Details.aspx?id=428&amp;type=SPRK\">Tahquamenon Falls State Park</a> looked at our release forms and said “We’ve had a lot of people up here from Chicago. It’s been crazy busy. We can’t get enough people to handle it.” And biking around <a href=\"https://www.travelmarquette.com/things-to-do/attractions/presque-isle-park/\">Presque Isle Park</a> in Marquette, we got talking, in a socially distant way, to a biking couple up from St Louis. It was also their first time up. A bunch of their friends and family had been up earlier; they’d seen nothing but UP pictures in their Facebook feed for the past month.</li><li>The husband said that he had an underlying medical condition and so they were looking for places away from people; they’d rented a cabin in the little town of Au Train. Which got me thinking about the place we stayed in Soo -- the <a href=\"https://www.plazamotormotel.com/\">Plaza Motor Motel</a>. No lobby, no elevators, no hallways; no places to run into other guests; no need to have to remember to mask up when you leave your room. Just open your room door and there’s your car. Most frequent travelers would never think of voluntarily staying in a motor inn, a <em>mo</em>-tel. But with so many things changing in these unprecedented times, maybe COVID will have folks give motels another chance.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/11510\">Funkist</a> - cdk dub mix by cdk (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: teru</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>First, a big shout out to the folks in Hanoi, Vietnam listening to TravelCommons on Soundcloud. One of the fun things about the podcast is looking at where people are listening from. For the most part, the stats make sense -- most of the listeners are from the US, and then English-speaking countries -- the UK, Canada, Australia. But every once in a while, there’s a spike that I just can’t figure out. I’ll see it, go look at the episode notes to see if I’ve mentioned that country, but I usually can’t make sense of it. Last fall, it was Argentina., but over the past couple of months, it’s been folks from Hanoi, primarily listening to <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/04/11/podcast-162-post-corona-trip-planning-keeping-a-travel-journal/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #162 — Post-Corona Trip Planning; Keeping a Travel Journal\">April episode, #162</a>, about post-lockdown trip planning and keeping a travel journal. Not sure why, but if you’re in Hanoi and you’ve made it to this episode - Hi! And thanks for listening!</li><li>Dan Grabon sent me a note at the beginning of the month about my lockdown reading that I mentioned during <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #166 — What Is The Meaning of Travel?\">last month’s interview</a> with Dr Emily Thomas<ul><li>“Mark,  I feel your pain. I started re-reading Walden back in April, and I just passed the halfway mark at the end of August. This was part of an overly ambitious effort to read one great book a month from a literary calendar that I bought. The Brothers Karamazov took up January through March, and even though COVID should have meant more time to read, it just hasn’t turned out that way.</li><li>“Writing this from a long overdue vacation near Lake George, where I saw the book Cabin Porn in a gift shop. Good timing.</li><li>“Thanks for keeping the podcast going— helps keep me going in this time of not going much of anywhere!”</li></ul></li><li>Dan, Thanks for the note. <em>The Brothers Karamazov</em> -- you are a better man than I.  I swore off of Russian fiction after suffering through <em>Crime and Punishment</em> in high school. That and Charles Dickens, just can’t do ‘em. And I am still working my way through <em>Walden</em>. Just got through his half-dozen pages on hoeing his bean field. I find if I try to read more than a dozen pages in a sitting, I just start skimming -- or sleeping. Glad you were able to get away to the wilderness of Lake George. Feel like the perfect place to find that Cabin Porn book.</li><li>Jim McDonough hit the TravelCommons Facebook page, following up on my comment in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\" title=\"Podcast #166 — What Is The Meaning of Travel?\">last month’s episode</a> about my disappearing American flight from ORD to BCN. Jim writes...<ul><li>“We were going to Barcelona and Madrid with Rick Steves Europe in October, but of course Rick has canceled every tour for the rest of the year. Interestingly, AA says we are still booked on a BA 747 from SAN to LHR as part of this trip. BA has no more 747\'s and doesn\'t serve SAN any more.”</li></ul></li><li>I sometimes think any of the airline’s schedules more than one month out are more like aspirational projections than reflections of reality. Especially given how fast they’re shifting schedules to capture any sort of bump in passenger volume. Like United having <a href=\"https://airlineweekly.com/airlines-feeling-a-lift-from-rocky-mountain-hubs\">some transcontinental flights stop in DEN to pick up a bump in volume from people visiting national parks</a> -- there’s that outdoor activity trend again.</li><li>But back to that BCN trip, I should be getting things here in Chicago sorted before heading off for 2 weeks in Catalonia, but you’ve probably already guessed, that trip isn’t happening. Not a surprise. The EU still isn’t letting US travelers in and the case count in Spain’s second COVID wave has gotten worse in the last month. So at the beginning of the month, I gritted my teeth, called American and cancelled the flights. Actually, American had called me the prior week while we were in the UP, but I let it go to voicemail. We were in a taproom in Marquette and I didn’t feel ready to have that conversation. I wanted to have all our booking info in front of me and be clear minded (tough during a taproom session) and mentally girded for battle. So when I returned their call the next week, I was sitting in front of my laptop with all my itinerary documents up and was ready to go. It was a quick trip through the automated phone tree to a very nice woman in Dallas. No hassles with canceling. I was asking her about the logistics of the travel credit - how long will it be good for - when she said, “Since your flight was canceled and you were re-booked, you can get a refund if you like.” Wow. “Uh, yes,” I quickly said, not wanting her offer to disappear, “I think I’ll take the refund instead.” That was not what I expected from all the stories about American trying to keep as much cash as possible. It took her a couple of minutes to process the refunds during which we compared the weather between Chicago and Dallas. The refunds hit my credit card the following week, so full kudos to American on handling this. I’m hoping I don’t need to repeat in November for my Thanksgiving trip to London.</li><li>A couple of weeks back I was trading notes with TravelCommons contributor Allan Marko about <a href=\"https://www.sfgate.com/travel/article/United-bangalore-SFO-15551358.php\">United’s new SFO-Bangalore non-stop</a>. It’ll be their longest flight at 17½ hours. My immediate reaction was, of course, “that’s a helluva long time to wear a mask.” United is using a 787-9 with a special engine enhancement that makes the flight possible. Which got me thinking about what planes I’d flown into BLR. I’ve been using <a href=\"https://www.tripit.com/\">TripIt</a> since 2008 when it first broke out of the Silicon Valley venture cap bubble, so I logged in, clicked over to Past Trips and started clicking back through the pages -- and clicking and clicking because the last time I was in Bangalore was April 2014. I kept looking around the screen - there’s gotta be a way to export all my trip data; but I couldn’t find anything. So I sent a note to <a href=\"mailto:support@tripit.com\">support@tripit.com</a>. And, to my huge surprise, Andy from the Tripit Help Center replied in <em>15 minutes</em> saying “We currently do not offer customer driven travel data export capability. We have passed your suggestion on to the appropriate team for review.” Having run a software product team, I knew what that meant -- never. But, in the next paragraph, Andy offered a solution -- “You can check out a third party app Openflights. They have an API with TripIt that will allow you to import trips from your TripIt account to their site. From there you can create a list of all of your flights and download them to a csv file. Their basic account is free to use.” Sweet. I thanked Andy for his quick reply and hit <a href=\"https://openflights.org/\">Openflights</a>. I set up an account, hit the “Import” button and connected to my TripIt account. The import was a touch kludgy -- I had to go page by page, review each trip, and mark it to import. After 88 pages, I had imported 1006 flight segments, which they displayed on a world map. I clicked on BLR and a little card popped up. I clicked on the first option and it listed the 8 flights I’d taken to and from BLR. Turns out I’d mostly flown Airbus A320s, though I did once fly a 747-400 in from FRA. It has a couple of analysis buttons -- like my longest flight -- Joburg to IAD at 17:40 (ha! 10 minutes longer than the SFO-BLR flight); and my shortest -- IAD again, but this time a 44-minute flight to CHO. And of course, I was able to download all my trips into Excel so I can noodle around to my heart’s content. Openflights is free, but I’m going to <a href=\"https://openflights.org/donate\">donate</a> to help keep them going. <a href=\"https://openflights.org/\">Openflights.org</a> -- definitely recommended. I’ll put a link in the show notes.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/48705\">Jolanta Blues</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license.  Ft: Admiral Bob, Martijn de Boer</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>6 Months of Pandemic</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Finally giving into reality and canceling my Barcelona flight 6 months after booking it got me thinking back on these -- you know what’s coming -- <em>unprecedented</em> times. Airlines canceled flights to China at the end of January, then to South Korea, Iran, and Italy in February, until, by the beginning of March, airline traffic joined the stock market in a free fall. But back then, we thought it was a one-off event, kinda like Sept 11th; a sharp, scary event that came out of nowhere with no warning but that would soon pass. So taking advantage of one of the many March fare sales to book a flight at the end of September didn’t seem that risky.</li><li>I was talking to one of my consulting friends a couple of weeks ago. His travel schedule was similar to mine - a week without seeing an airport was a rare exception. He hasn’t been on a plane since March and doesn’t know when he’ll get on one next. He just started a project with a manufacturer in Cincinnati. Most of the project will be virtual, but he’s pretty sure he ought to at least put eyes on their plant. He lives outside Detroit. In the past, he’d be flying down every week. Now, he fires up Google Maps -- it’s a 4½ drive down I-75. He’ll drive down once, stay a couple of days, and then head back home.&nbsp;</li><li>I can’t say that anyone I’ve talked to misses the act of business travel -- getting up at 0 dark 30 Monday morning to get to the airport, shuffle through the PreCheck line for 15-20 minutes, and then shoehorn into a full flight for an hour or 3.&nbsp; But we did it because that was part of the job. But now that it’s not, at least for now and what seems like (for now) through the end of the year, everybody is taking full advantage of sleeping in -- in their own beds.</li><li>Which explains why, of all the US airlines, Spirit Airlines, with its complete focus on low-cost leisure travelers, is the only one sounding even somewhat non-negative.&nbsp; And hotel chains like Choice, focused on what they call “drive-to” locations and extended stay properties getting occupancy rates over 50% while center city hotels like Chicago’s Hilton Palmer House are missing rent payments and slouching towards bankruptcy.</li><li>Irene and I were sitting outside at a microbrewery a couple of days ago, enjoying a sunny afternoon full in the knowledge that we have maybe 4 weeks of outdoor eating and drinking left in Chicago. We talked about what kind of travel we would do over the next 12 months, figuring travel restrictions and periodic lockdowns are going to be the norm for at least that long. No big plans; nothing that COVID could blow up but seeing some new places -- some skiing, maybe trying out Montana; some hiking, maybe checking out the Texas Hill Country. But next month, we’re trading Barcelona for Philadelphia; now that they’ve opened up the restaurants again, check out our old neighborhood and visit with some friends. It’ll be Irene’s first flight since February. It took a bit of talking, but I really think the threat of a total of 22 hrs in a car with me -- alone -- tipped her over.&nbsp;</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djiz/10514\">Nube - Djiz Rmx</a> by Kwame (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: SylviaO</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Do We Keep Travel Credit Cards?</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Last week, <a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/14/delta-launches-6point5-billion-debt-deal-backed-by-its-frequent-flyer-program.html\">Delta used their SkyMiles program to back $6.5 billion in debt</a>, running the same play that United and American did in June. What caught my eye was some of the stats that came out with the debt filing -- that <a href=\"https://skift.com/2020/09/15/how-delta-looks-to-leverage-rewards-from-its-own-frequent-flyer-program/\">SkyMiles had about $6.1 billion in revenue in 2019, about two-thirds from American Express</a> which issues a co-branded Delta card, and that <a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/14/delta-launches-6point5-billion-debt-deal-backed-by-its-frequent-flyer-program.html\">total miles redeemed fell by 78% in the first half of this year.</a> The big carriers are leaning on their loyalty programs for cash, their biggest customers are credit card issuers, but those card users - us - are generating points that we’ve stopped using.&nbsp;</li><li>It’s against this background that I called up Matt Schulz, chief credit analyst at LendingTree, and to ask him -- do we want to keep travel credit cards?<ul><li>Matt, a lot of folks carry at least one travel credit card and I don’t think I’m going too far out on a limb guessing that damn close to every TravelCommons listeners carry them. We’re 6 months on from the COVID lockdowns and the resulting cratering of the travel industry. But with travel not recovering -- airline demand is still just a third of pre-pandemic levels and United Airlines’ CEO said last week it could be 3-4 years before it’s back to 2019 levels -- what are card holders doing with these cards generating frequent traveler points that they can’t or don’t want to use?</li><li>Back in March and April, it seemed the strategy for the big travel card issuers -- Chase, Citi, Amex -- seemed to be to sacrifice revenue to hold share -- statement credits for annual fees if you called them to cancel, new bonuses for stay-at-home purchases to keep wallet share -- seemed like 5x bonuses for grocery and gas was the most popular. Made sense when everyone was talking about 2-week shutdowns and a V-shaped recovery. But, as we said before, travel is gonna stay depressed for a while -- between state and country quarantines and many people not wanting to get in a plane -- how are travel card companies going to handle the next round of renewals? When I call Chase and Amex again, do I get more statement credits -- do they continue to fight for share? And if they don’t, what do I do with the balance of Ultimate or Membership Rewards points that I’ll lose if I don’t re-up and pay the fee?</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #167</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and now, <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_167.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #167 — 6 Months On; Why Keep Travel Cards?','','inherit','closed','closed','','2856-revision-v1','','','2020-09-19 16:19:45','2020-09-19 21:19:45','',2856,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/09/19/2856-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2885,1,'2021-03-04 13:43:11','2021-03-04 18:43:11','','Subscribe to the TravelCommons Podcast','','private','closed','closed','','subscribe-to-the-travelcommons-podcast','','','2021-03-04 13:43:11','2021-03-04 18:43:11','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?page_id=2885',0,'page','',0),
(2886,1,'2020-09-28 17:55:49','2020-09-28 22:55:49','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":1938,\"width\":261,\"height\":261} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright is-resized\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/IMG_0091-1024x1024.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-1938\" width=\"261\" height=\"261\"/><figcaption>Rejected and Retired Suitcases</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<p>I spend a lot of time with my luggage. I average 40-50 trips and 100,000 miles a year. I hate shopping for luggage, though. I\'d putting off buying a new bag for a long time, as in years, until I was left with no working luggage when the handle died on my vintage Swiss Army black roller. Before that, the airlines forcibly grounded my Bluesmart smart bag for an unremovable lithium battery, and I had to retire my grey Samsonite bag after the wheels got wonky — the rubber wore off and the wheels splayed out after 2½ years of trundling it across New Orleans sidewalks.</p>\n<p>With my next trip looming, I was finally forced to shop for a new suitcase. But what to buy? I started with a survey of fellow travelers. Actually, it was more like stalking; I eyeballed every piece of luggage that passed by me for two weeks. Then I wandered through the basement luggage departments of a couple of Macy\'s, opening bags and waving off clerks. After all that, I gave into my OCD and built this prioritized carry-on luggage shopping evaluation criteria:</p>\n<ol>\n<li><em>It has to fit into my carrier\'s carry-on sizer</em>. Now that may seem a bit of a “duh”, but there is some ambiguity; the <a href=\"https://travel-made-simple.com/carry-on-size-chart/\">approved height</a> of a carry-on bag varies by airline between 19 and 22-inches. If I want to play it safe, I’d go for a 20-inch bag, but then I also want to maximize my carry-on space. Most US carriers accept a 22-inch bag and that’s mostly what I fly. So for my main bag, I go for maximum packing volume and choose a 22-inch bag.</li>\n<li><em>And my carrier\'s weight limit (if they have one)</em>. Many European carriers have a size&nbsp;<em>and</em> a weight limit. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/05/30/podcast-121-tsa-lines-my-luggage-is-where/\">episode #121</a>, I talked about the baggage strip tease I had to do at the Wow Air desk in Reykjavik to make their 7 kg/15 lbs carry-on weight limit. My 22-inch bag is 7 lbs, taking up almost half of the weight allowance. So last month, after booking some flights in and out of Riga, Latvia on AirBaltic, I bought a <a href=\"https://amzn.to/32lIURe\">much lighter 20-inch bag</a>.&nbsp;</li>\n<li>I<em>t needs to be black</em>. As I said in my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/10/18/ruthless-packing-tips/\">Ruthless Packing Tips post</a>, black not only makes you look thinner, it makes your bag look thinner to gate agents scanning for bag-sizer bait. Black also doesn\'t show stains. My grey Samsonite bag, after 3-4 months of my travel schedule, started to look a lot less non-black. Smudges from grease on overhead bin hinges, muck from taxi trunks, muddy water from New Orleans gutters, spilled coffee…. It\'s why I can\'t have nice luggage.</li>\n<li><em>Two wheels, not four</em>. This is more of a personal preference. My Bluesmart was a 4-wheel spinner and my wife swears by hers, but because the 4 wheels have to extend from the bottom of the bag, spinners sacrifice packing space for agility. Also, I find 4-wheelers have a tendency to wander off -- rolling away down ramps or on uneven floors. I go for the 2-wheeler, and with the biggest wheels I can find to make it an easier, smoother pull. I was surprised how much this limited my selection. Spinners definitely rule.</li>\n<li><em>The inside of the suitcase has to be plain and empty</em>. No clever collection of zipped compartments, or built-in suit hangers, or ratcheting clothes dividers; just a wide open box that I\'m free to structure how I want for each trip. I was surprised how this also limited my selection. Indeed, in the end, I couldn’t find just a plain box, and settled for a bag where I could detach the suit hanger and clothes divider and stash them in the back of a closet somewhere, never to be seen again.</li>\n<li><em>Buy on-line</em>. A <a href=\"https://www.testfacts.com/luggage-prices-analyzed/\">recent study</a> of 32,672 luggage price showed&nbsp;that you can save an average of $110/39% buying on-line.&nbsp;Walmart and Target’s on-line stores had the highest discounts. And while&nbsp;Amazon was in 10th place for average discount (in the 40% range), it was tops with the greatest variety — over 12,000 luggage items.</li>\n</ol>\n<p>So what did I buy? For my main bag, I bought a black <a href=\"https://www.swissarmy.com/us/en&amp;eoq=!t/Products/Travel-Gear/Werks-Traveler-5-0/collection/trg-collection/travelgear_collection_TRA-C2955\">Victorinox Werks Traveler 5.0</a> 22-inch 2-wheeler. Victorinox is what used to be Swiss Army; I figured if my last bag survived 10 years of hard mileage, that said something for durability. However, Victorinox has moved to a new model year, to Werks 6.0, which doesn\'t appear to have a 22-inch or a 2-wheel option. If you\'re OK with spinners, the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/33mYDkl\">Werks 5.0 22-inch spinner</a> is still available on Amazon. My 2-wheeler is a solid bag; highly recommended.</p>\n<p>For my European budget travel, and for 2-day trips where I don\'t need all the space of the Victorinox, I landed on the the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/32lIURe\">TravelPro Maxlite 5</a>. It fit the AirBaltic dimensions, it\'s one of the lighter bags I saw at 5.4 lbs, and my daughter has had a good run with her TravelPro bag. Mine has worked well on two trips -- hopscotching through the Baltics and then a quick trip down to Charlottesville, VA. Another <a href=\"https://amzn.to/32lIURe\">solid bag</a> that\'s highly recommended.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:block {\"ref\":2601} /-->','How To Choose The Best Carry-On Luggage','','inherit','closed','closed','','2562-revision-v1','','','2020-09-28 17:55:49','2020-09-28 22:55:49','',2562,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/09/28/2562-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2887,1,'2020-09-28 18:19:42','2020-09-28 23:19:42','','Pop Up','','publish','closed','closed','','2887','','','2024-04-17 17:44:20','2024-04-17 22:44:20','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?post_type=secondline_psb_post&#038;p=2887',0,'secondline_psb_post','',0),
(2888,1,'2020-09-28 18:11:27','2020-09-28 23:11:27','','Subscribe to the TravelCommons Podcast','','inherit','closed','closed','','2885-revision-v1','','','2020-09-28 18:11:27','2020-09-28 23:11:27','',2885,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/09/28/2885-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2890,1,'2020-09-28 18:46:13','2020-09-28 23:46:13','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":2857,\"width\":300,\"height\":300,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large is-resized\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/F3E28DAE-0026-4E8A-957E-D6CE914F717C.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2857\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"/><figcaption>I seem to have put on a Quarantine 15</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph {\"align\":null} -->\n<p>Spent a week in <a href=\"https://www.uptravel.com/\">Michigan\'s Upper Peninsula</a> hiking, biking, kayaking, and running into a lot of other people getting away to do the same, which got me looking back six months to the start of the pandemic. I talk do the same, which got me looking back six months to the start of the pandemic. I talk about a surprisingly good flight cancellation experience with American Airlines, and figuring out how to download 12 years of <a href=\"https://www.tripit.com/\">TripIt</a> data. We wrap up talking to <a href=\"https://www.lendingtree.com/writer/matt-schulz/\">Matt Schulz</a> of <a href=\"https://www.lendingtree.com/\">LendingTree</a>, asking him what are we doing with travel credit cards that are generating frequent traveler points we can’t use? All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_167.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>download</strong></a> the podcast file, subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/896151355&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #167: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after a week’s tour of the UP -- Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Did a counter-clockwise circle route around Lake Michigan. Headed out east on Friday morning; stopped at a brewery in Grand Rapids for lunch; drove the 5 miles across the Mackinac Bridge just before dusk; and had my first UP pasty (the first of many) and a local beer for dinner that night in Sault Ste Marie. Spent a couple of days in Soo; watched 700-ft lake freighters make their way through the locks that connect Lake Superior to Lake Huron; I’m still enough of an engineer to geek out on that kind of stuff. We then drove west to Marquette for 3 days and again west to Houghton for 2 days before heading home through Wisconsin down the west side of Lake Michigan. It was all outdoors stuff -- hiking, biking, kayaking; the things that last-minute COVID closures or restrictions won’t muck up.&nbsp; The UP has always been on my list of places to visit, but it’s always on sorta the B-list, and so plans to go someplace else -- Spain, Napa, Ireland -- would always push it down the list. But now, with most places blocked off with travel restrictions and quarantines, the UP -- drivable with lots of outdoor activities -- bubbled to the top of the list.</li><li>And I wasn’t the only one thinking that way. The guy renting rowboats at <a href=\"https://www2.dnr.state.mi.us/ParksandTrails/Details.aspx?id=428&amp;type=SPRK\">Tahquamenon Falls State Park</a> looked at our release forms and said “We’ve had a lot of people up here from Chicago. It’s been crazy busy. We can’t get enough people to handle it.” And biking around <a href=\"https://www.travelmarquette.com/things-to-do/attractions/presque-isle-park/\">Presque Isle Park</a> in Marquette, we got talking, in a socially distant way, to a biking couple up from St Louis. It was also their first time up. A bunch of their friends and family had been up earlier; they’d seen nothing but UP pictures in their Facebook feed for the past month.</li><li>The husband said that he had an underlying medical condition and so they were looking for places away from people; they’d rented a cabin in the little town of Au Train. Which got me thinking about the place we stayed in Soo -- the <a href=\"https://www.plazamotormotel.com/\">Plaza Motor Motel</a>. No lobby, no elevators, no hallways; no places to run into other guests; no need to have to remember to mask up when you leave your room. Just open your room door and there’s your car. Most frequent travelers would never think of voluntarily staying in a motor inn, a <em>mo</em>-tel. But with so many things changing in these unprecedented times, maybe COVID will have folks give motels another chance.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/11510\">Funkist</a> - cdk dub mix by cdk (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: teru</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>First, a big shout out to the folks in Hanoi, Vietnam listening to TravelCommons on Soundcloud. One of the fun things about the podcast is looking at where people are listening from. For the most part, the stats make sense -- most of the listeners are from the US, and then English-speaking countries -- the UK, Canada, Australia. But every once in a while, there’s a spike that I just can’t figure out. I’ll see it, go look at the episode notes to see if I’ve mentioned that country, but I usually can’t make sense of it. Last fall, it was Argentina., but over the past couple of months, it’s been folks from Hanoi, primarily listening to <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/04/11/podcast-162-post-corona-trip-planning-keeping-a-travel-journal/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #162 — Post-Corona Trip Planning; Keeping a Travel Journal\">April episode, #162</a>, about post-lockdown trip planning and keeping a travel journal. Not sure why, but if you’re in Hanoi and you’ve made it to this episode - Hi! And thanks for listening!</li><li>Dan Grabon sent me a note at the beginning of the month about my lockdown reading that I mentioned during <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #166 — What Is The Meaning of Travel?\">last month’s interview</a> with Dr Emily Thomas<ul><li>“Mark,&nbsp; I feel your pain. I started re-reading Walden back in April, and I just passed the halfway mark at the end of August. This was part of an overly ambitious effort to read one great book a month from a literary calendar that I bought. The Brothers Karamazov took up January through March, and even though COVID should have meant more time to read, it just hasn’t turned out that way.</li><li>“Writing this from a long overdue vacation near Lake George, where I saw the book Cabin Porn in a gift shop. Good timing.</li><li>“Thanks for keeping the podcast going— helps keep me going in this time of not going much of anywhere!”</li></ul></li><li>Dan, Thanks for the note. <em>The Brothers Karamazov</em> -- you are a better man than I.&nbsp; I swore off of Russian fiction after suffering through <em>Crime and Punishment</em> in high school. That and Charles Dickens, just can’t do ‘em. And I am still working my way through <em>Walden</em>. Just got through his half-dozen pages on hoeing his bean field. I find if I try to read more than a dozen pages in a sitting, I just start skimming -- or sleeping. Glad you were able to get away to the wilderness of Lake George. Feel like the perfect place to find that Cabin Porn book.</li><li>Jim McDonough hit the TravelCommons Facebook page, following up on my comment in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\" title=\"Podcast #166 — What Is The Meaning of Travel?\">last month’s episode</a> about my disappearing American flight from ORD to BCN. Jim writes...<ul><li>“We were going to Barcelona and Madrid with Rick Steves Europe in October, but of course Rick has canceled every tour for the rest of the year. Interestingly, AA says we are still booked on a BA 747 from SAN to LHR as part of this trip. BA has no more 747\'s and doesn\'t serve SAN any more.”</li></ul></li><li>I sometimes think any of the airline’s schedules more than one month out are more like aspirational projections than reflections of reality. Especially given how fast they’re shifting schedules to capture any sort of bump in passenger volume. Like United having <a href=\"https://airlineweekly.com/airlines-feeling-a-lift-from-rocky-mountain-hubs\">some transcontinental flights stop in DEN to pick up a bump in volume from people visiting national parks</a> -- there’s that outdoor activity trend again.</li><li>But back to that BCN trip, I should be getting things here in Chicago sorted before heading off for 2 weeks in Catalonia, but you’ve probably already guessed, that trip isn’t happening. Not a surprise. The EU still isn’t letting US travelers in and the case count in Spain’s second COVID wave has gotten worse in the last month. So at the beginning of the month, I gritted my teeth, called American and cancelled the flights. Actually, American had called me the prior week while we were in the UP, but I let it go to voicemail. We were in a taproom in Marquette and I didn’t feel ready to have that conversation. I wanted to have all our booking info in front of me and be clear minded (tough during a taproom session) and mentally girded for battle. So when I returned their call the next week, I was sitting in front of my laptop with all my itinerary documents up and was ready to go. It was a quick trip through the automated phone tree to a very nice woman in Dallas. No hassles with canceling. I was asking her about the logistics of the travel credit - how long will it be good for - when she said, “Since your flight was canceled and you were re-booked, you can get a refund if you like.” Wow. “Uh, yes,” I quickly said, not wanting her offer to disappear, “I think I’ll take the refund instead.” That was not what I expected from all the stories about American trying to keep as much cash as possible. It took her a couple of minutes to process the refunds during which we compared the weather between Chicago and Dallas. The refunds hit my credit card the following week, so full kudos to American on handling this. I’m hoping I don’t need to repeat in November for my Thanksgiving trip to London.</li><li>A couple of weeks back I was trading notes with TravelCommons contributor Allan Marko about <a href=\"https://www.sfgate.com/travel/article/United-bangalore-SFO-15551358.php\">United’s new SFO-Bangalore non-stop</a>. It’ll be their longest flight at 17½ hours. My immediate reaction was, of course, “that’s a helluva long time to wear a mask.” United is using a 787-9 with a special engine enhancement that makes the flight possible. Which got me thinking about what planes I’d flown into BLR. I’ve been using <a href=\"https://www.tripit.com/\">TripIt</a> since 2008 when it first broke out of the Silicon Valley venture cap bubble, so I logged in, clicked over to Past Trips and started clicking back through the pages -- and clicking and clicking because the last time I was in Bangalore was April 2014. I kept looking around the screen - there’s gotta be a way to export all my trip data; but I couldn’t find anything. So I sent a note to <a href=\"mailto:support@tripit.com\">support@tripit.com</a>. And, to my huge surprise, Andy from the Tripit Help Center replied in <em>15 minutes</em> saying “We currently do not offer customer driven travel data export capability. We have passed your suggestion on to the appropriate team for review.” Having run a software product team, I knew what that meant -- never. But, in the next paragraph, Andy offered a solution -- “You can check out a third party app Openflights. They have an API with TripIt that will allow you to import trips from your TripIt account to their site. From there you can create a list of all of your flights and download them to a csv file. Their basic account is free to use.” Sweet. I thanked Andy for his quick reply and hit <a href=\"https://openflights.org/\">Openflights</a>. I set up an account, hit the “Import” button and connected to my TripIt account. The import was a touch kludgy -- I had to go page by page, review each trip, and mark it to import. After 88 pages, I had imported 1006 flight segments, which they displayed on a world map. I clicked on BLR and a little card popped up. I clicked on the first option and it listed the 8 flights I’d taken to and from BLR. Turns out I’d mostly flown Airbus A320s, though I did once fly a 747-400 in from FRA. It has a couple of analysis buttons -- like my longest flight -- Joburg to IAD at 17:40 (ha! 10 minutes longer than the SFO-BLR flight); and my shortest -- IAD again, but this time a 44-minute flight to CHO. And of course, I was able to download all my trips into Excel so I can noodle around to my heart’s content. Openflights is free, but I’m going to <a href=\"https://openflights.org/donate\">donate</a> to help keep them going. <a href=\"https://openflights.org/\">Openflights.org</a> -- definitely recommended. I’ll put a link in the show notes.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/48705\">Jolanta Blues</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: Admiral Bob, Martijn de Boer</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>6 Months of Pandemic</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Finally giving into reality and canceling my Barcelona flight 6 months after booking it got me thinking back on these -- you know what’s coming -- <em>unprecedented</em> times. Airlines canceled flights to China at the end of January, then to South Korea, Iran, and Italy in February, until, by the beginning of March, airline traffic joined the stock market in a free fall. But back then, we thought it was a one-off event, kinda like Sept 11th; a sharp, scary event that came out of nowhere with no warning but that would soon pass. So taking advantage of one of the many March fare sales to book a flight at the end of September didn’t seem that risky.</li><li>I was talking to one of my consulting friends a couple of weeks ago. His travel schedule was similar to mine - a week without seeing an airport was a rare exception. He hasn’t been on a plane since March and doesn’t know when he’ll get on one next. He just started a project with a manufacturer in Cincinnati. Most of the project will be virtual, but he’s pretty sure he ought to at least put eyes on their plant. He lives outside Detroit. In the past, he’d be flying down every week. Now, he fires up Google Maps -- it’s a 4½ drive down I-75. He’ll drive down once, stay a couple of days, and then head back home.&nbsp;</li><li>I can’t say that anyone I’ve talked to misses the act of business travel -- getting up at 0 dark 30 Monday morning to get to the airport, shuffle through the PreCheck line for 15-20 minutes, and then shoehorn into a full flight for an hour or 3.&nbsp; But we did it because that was part of the job. But now that it’s not, at least for now and what seems like (for now) through the end of the year, everybody is taking full advantage of sleeping in -- in their own beds.</li><li>Which explains why, of all the US airlines, Spirit Airlines, with its complete focus on low-cost leisure travelers, is the only one sounding even somewhat non-negative.&nbsp; And hotel chains like Choice, focused on what they call “drive-to” locations and extended stay properties getting occupancy rates over 50% while center city hotels like Chicago’s Hilton Palmer House are missing rent payments and slouching towards bankruptcy.</li><li>Irene and I were sitting outside at a microbrewery a couple of days ago, enjoying a sunny afternoon full in the knowledge that we have maybe 4 weeks of outdoor eating and drinking left in Chicago. We talked about what kind of travel we would do over the next 12 months, figuring travel restrictions and periodic lockdowns are going to be the norm for at least that long. No big plans; nothing that COVID could blow up but seeing some new places -- some skiing, maybe trying out Montana; some hiking, maybe checking out the Texas Hill Country. But next month, we’re trading Barcelona for Philadelphia; now that they’ve opened up the restaurants again, check out our old neighborhood and visit with some friends. It’ll be Irene’s first flight since February. It took a bit of talking, but I really think the threat of a total of 22 hrs in a car with me -- alone -- tipped her over.&nbsp;</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djiz/10514\">Nube - Djiz Rmx</a> by Kwame (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: SylviaO</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Do We Keep Travel Credit Cards?</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Last week, <a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/14/delta-launches-6point5-billion-debt-deal-backed-by-its-frequent-flyer-program.html\">Delta used their SkyMiles program to back $6.5 billion in debt</a>, running the same play that United and American did in June. What caught my eye was some of the stats that came out with the debt filing -- that <a href=\"https://skift.com/2020/09/15/how-delta-looks-to-leverage-rewards-from-its-own-frequent-flyer-program/\">SkyMiles had about $6.1 billion in revenue in 2019, about two-thirds from American Express</a> which issues a co-branded Delta card, and that <a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/14/delta-launches-6point5-billion-debt-deal-backed-by-its-frequent-flyer-program.html\">total miles redeemed fell by 78% in the first half of this year.</a> The big carriers are leaning on their loyalty programs for cash, their biggest customers are credit card issuers, but those card users - us - are generating points that we’ve stopped using.&nbsp;</li><li>It’s against this background that I called up Matt Schulz, chief credit analyst at LendingTree, and to ask him -- do we want to keep travel credit cards?<ul><li>Matt, a lot of folks carry at least one travel credit card and I don’t think I’m going too far out on a limb guessing that damn close to every TravelCommons listeners carry them. We’re 6 months on from the COVID lockdowns and the resulting cratering of the travel industry. But with travel not recovering -- airline demand is still just a third of pre-pandemic levels and United Airlines’ CEO said last week it could be 3-4 years before it’s back to 2019 levels -- what are card holders doing with these cards generating frequent traveler points that they can’t or don’t want to use?</li><li>Back in March and April, it seemed the strategy for the big travel card issuers -- Chase, Citi, Amex -- seemed to be to sacrifice revenue to hold share -- statement credits for annual fees if you called them to cancel, new bonuses for stay-at-home purchases to keep wallet share -- seemed like 5x bonuses for grocery and gas was the most popular. Made sense when everyone was talking about 2-week shutdowns and a V-shaped recovery. But, as we said before, travel is gonna stay depressed for a while -- between state and country quarantines and many people not wanting to get in a plane -- how are travel card companies going to handle the next round of renewals? When I call Chase and Amex again, do I get more statement credits -- do they continue to fight for share? And if they don’t, what do I do with the balance of Ultimate or Membership Rewards points that I’ll lose if I don’t re-up and pay the fee?</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #167</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and now, <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_167.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #167 — 6 Months On; Why Keep Travel Cards?','','inherit','closed','closed','','2856-revision-v1','','','2020-09-28 18:46:13','2020-09-28 23:46:13','',2856,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/09/28/2856-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
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(2896,1,'2020-10-16 19:18:16','2020-10-17 00:18:16','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":2899,\"width\":300,\"height\":300,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large is-resized\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-1024x1024.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2899\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"/><figcaption>My mission is clear</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Trying to recover from a long weekend of eating and drinking through the neighborhoods of South Philly. Our movable feast reminded me that food may be the one experience of a place left that can’t be easily exported and bought on-line. We talk about the FBI\'s cybersecurity warning to work-from-home types using hotels for getaway offices, and are a bit amazed at how fast last year\'s \"flight shaming\" gave way to \"flights to nowhere.\" And we think about \"quarantine theater\" -- how cities and states are focusing on activities to signal they are serious about COVID, but that most folks know aren’t really effective. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_168.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>download</strong></a> the podcast file, go over to the <em>Subscribe</em> section on the right to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #168: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after a long weekend of eating and drinking and eating some more with friends in Philadelphia, a family we’ve traveled with before - South Africa, Singapore, Spain… and now, with COVID lockdowns, Philly. And while we’ll do a cultural thing or two, what we really like to do together is eat. It is the kind of group where comments like: “OK, we need to stop eating at 1:30 because we have 5:30 reservations” and “We’re only going to order the half-kilo of barbacoa because we’re eating again in 4 hours” are met with “Yeah, that’s a good point,” and “makes sense” rather than “I think we have a problem here.”&nbsp;</li><li>And Pennsylvania’s reopening regulation about needing to buy food when getting a beer didn’t help. After sneaking in a cheesesteak right before that 1:30 cutoff, we had to order some food with our afternoon beers -- the beer, of course, not subject to that 1:30 deadline because it’s liquid, so it’s not really food, so it doesn’t count. But we had to order some real, solid food with our beers. So we look at the menu -- ah, brussels sprouts, it’s a vegetable, that’s kinda healthy. Five minutes later, our beers arrive with a wire basket full of deep-fried brussels sprouts doused in a sweet chili sauce. So much for healthy.</li><li>But some of the bars, the smaller ones, the neighborhood ones, gamed it -- as these places are wont to do -- by putting a $1 food item on the menu -- 2 hard boiled eggs at one bar, a PB&amp;J at another. The best, though, was the Pop Tart we had with our last beer at Ray’s Happy Birthday Bar in South Philly. That one won the prize.</li><li>Which we found because we skipped the usual downtown/Center City/Society Hill hotels and grabbed an Airbnb in South Philly - kinda sandwiched between the older Italian neighborhoods and the newer Little Saigon area. We spent a lot of time outdoors, walking the neighborhoods -- and walking off our food -- and stopping in at neighborhood joints. One day, we’re picking up salamis and cheese from the Italian Market; another day, we’re buying banh mi’s from a Vietnamese bakery. I’ll write up a list of our favorite places for the TravelCommons website in a couple of weeks -- after my cholesterol level gets back to some semblance of normal.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/duckett/2333\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Another Girl (instrumental)</a> by duckett (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/duckett/23334 Ft: fourstones, miafas</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>First, a big “Thank You” to Gary Learned who goes by Denrael on social media for his review in Apple Podcasts. Gary is a long-time TravelCommons listener. Indeed, he’s pointed me to some great restaurants in places like Seattle and Memphis. Gary wrote a couple of weeks ago:<ul><li>“When people ask where I live, I usually just say airports and hilton. As someone who lives the life of the road warrior, I find this podcast strikes an all-to-familiar chord with my own experiences. A definite must-listen to understand the life of the traveller.</li><li>“I wrote the above a number of years ago and it is as true now as it was then, I look forward to Mark’s take on travel, it’s more about the journey, and cannot count the number of times when I’ve shook my head, laughed and said “yep, been there.”</li></ul></li><li>Gary, thanks for that. And thanks for staying with me this long.</li><li>The FBI pushed out a consumer alert last week to remind folks about the risks when using hotel wi-fi. We’ve talked about this many times and I think most frequent travelers know the drill when accessing any shared wi-fi, whether it be in a hotel or an airport or a bar or a Starbucks. Nothing new there, so why the FBI alert? Because the “FBI has observed a trend where individuals who were previously teleworking from home are beginning to telework from hotels. US hotels, predominantly in major cities, have begun to advertise daytime room reservations for guests seeking a quiet, distraction-free work environment.” So people who used to work in offices and have been working from home since March, are looking for a change of scenery, but either can’t or aren’t keen to go back to the group office setting. Enter downtown hotels, many of whom, we mentioned last month, are slouching towards bankruptcy because of low occupancy. Don’t want a bed for the night? How ‘bout a desk for the day? I just got an email from Omni Hotels pitching just that -- “Trade up your classroom for everything you need for a productive day of work plus downtown Los Angeles views.” I guess the FBI thinks these displaced office workers, used to working on secure corporate or home networks, might not be as careful. But even for frequent travelers, the alert is a good read:&nbsp; talking about the dangers of an “evil twin” attack, logging onto what looks like a hotel wi-fi but is actually a hacker’s network; logging into the actual hotel wi-fi which has been compromised through exploits in out-of-date or unpatched network hardware. The FBI’s top recommendations are ones we’ve <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/09/20/podcast-155-rj-delays-street-food-in-poland-and-hungary/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #155 — RJ Delays; Street Food in Poland and Hungary\">repeated</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/02/20/podcast-127-critiquing-my-top-10-travel-tips-reviewing-vpns/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #127 — Critiquing My Top 10 Travel Tips; Reviewing VPNs\">numerous</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/12/20/podcast-119-digital-security-on-the-road-us-airports-getting-better/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #119 — Digital Security On The Road; US Airports Getting Better?\">times</a> - use a VPN when you connect to public wi-fi, or avoid them altogether with a mobile hotspot. Even when I’ve had a corporate VPN, I’ve always used one of the top paid VPN providers - NordVPN, PIA or ExpressVPN - because their software is so much better. I’m using NordVPN now, and whenever I’m not on a private network, I fire up the Nord client and it handles everything -- connects to the best server, reconnects automatically when I open the lid to wake up my Mac again. I don’t have to think about it. Indeed, half the time I forget to shut it off at home, until I’m wondering why I can’t move a file to another PC. Also, only access secure websites; I used to say “look for https://” but I guess that was too geeky, so you need to look for lock icons instead. And, of course, enable 2-factor authentication whenever you can. Nothing new, but a good reminder nonetheless. I’ll put a <a href=\"https://www.ic3.gov/media/2020/201006.aspx\">link to the alert</a> in the show notes, but you can also find links on the TravelCommons Facebook page and Twitter account.</li><li>OK, I gotta ask “what happened to Greta Thunberg\'s ‘flygskam’ or ‘flight shaming’ -- the 2019 existential travel threat? Because the whole Asian thing of “flights to nowhere” -- EVA Air from Taiwan filling up its “Hello Kitty” plane, All Nippon doing a fake flight to Hawaii, and then Qantas selling out a 787 for a lap around Australia. Singapore Air scrapped their “flight to nowhere” at the last minute, instead turning one of their A380s into a pop-up restaurant. I have to tell you that, honestly, I just don’t get this. For me, the flight is a means to an end -- something I’ve got to bear to get where I want to go. Getting on that American 737 in ORD last week didn’t fill me with joy; it was just simple math -- 2 hrs in a plane vs. 11 hrs in a car. And all that I just said… goes double for the idea of voluntarily buying airplane meals to eat at home. Words fail me.</li><li>At the end of September, the CDC did an early release of an article slated for the November issue of their peer-reviewed journal <em>Emerging Infectious Diseases</em> (and I thought <em>Walden Pond</em> was a cure for insomnia). The article analyzed the in-flight transmission of coronavirus from one business class passenger to 14 other passengers and a crew member on a 10-hour Vietnam Air flight from London to Hanoi. Most of the reactions in the press and on Twitter were “Yikes! Single passenger infects 15 people!”. While noting the CDC’s disclaimer “Early release articles are not considered as final versions” (which I didn’t see mentioned in any of the press articles), I came away with a less-than- “Yikes” after reading the whole paper. The flight was on March 2nd, so while the world was still trying to figure this novel coronavirus thing out and way before mandatory in-flight masks. And the passenger was symptomatic with a cough and a sore throat. Of the 14 passengers infected, 12 were in the same business class cabin and of those, all but one were within a 2-seat radius. And the authors aren’t sure if the 2 economy class infections were from the business class index case or from a different source. My takeaways: 1) Don’t let symptomatic people on planes - even if temperature checks aren’t perfect, it might catch some folks and will certainly make people think about their condition before flying; 2) Because this appears to validate the risk of being kept in close proximity to an infected person over a prolonged period; 3) Which, to me, justifies the airlines’ no-excuses mask requirements; but 4) In spite of a symptomatic un-masked passenger coughing away in the front of the plane, no non-adjacent passengers got infected -- so maybe the airline execs’ confidence in HEPA filters kinda justified. I’ll put <a href=\"https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/11/20-3299_article\">a link to the CDC paper</a> in the show notes. It’s not that long. It’s interesting to read the source document rather than just a headline or a short USAToday blurb.</li><li>Having said all that, I’m in no way, shape, or form justifying the “hygiene theater” that the travel industry seems to be trying to use to bring folks back. I talked back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/07/17/podcast-165-first-post-lockdown-flight-when-does-business-travel-come-back/\">the July episode</a> about the “Hertz Gold Standard Clean” sticker Hertz is slapping across driver-side doors. And there are some hotels now scheduling cleaning during the day rather than overnight so guests can see it. And then, on my American flights between Chicago and Philly last week, the banner across the top of the American Way magazine cover in the seatback pocket - “This magazine has been treated with an antimicrobial process” -- which I guess means “Please, feel safe to open it up and look at the advertisements.” I dunno, it feels a bit like the “security theater” we all went through after 9/11 - it was less about actually making things safer and more about making us “feel” safer -- and so, more willing to get on a plane. But maybe if I’m an airline or hotel exec facing down the pain of laying off thousands or tens of thousands of people if travelers don’t come back, that distinction is meaningless; I’m just trying to survive.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/snowflake/56508\">Rise Up (Like the Sun)</a> by Snowflake (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: Bluemillenium, Sackjo22, Martin Luther King, Kara Square</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Quarantine Theater</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>While some folks in the hospitality industry are talking about “hygiene theater”, what about “quarantine theater”? Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #166 — What Is The Meaning of Travel?\">August episode</a>, I talked about the complexity local and state travel bans and quarantine measures are causing for people trying to plan some sort of travel.&nbsp;</li><li>My son Andrew and his significant other headed out to Portland, ME last month for work. The week before they left, the Marriott emailed him a form - “Please certify one of the following is true - I have received a negative COVID test performed no later than 72 hours prior to my arrival, or will quarantine for 14 days upon my arrival in Maine.” Since they were only going to be in Portland for 4 days, they trundled down to the nearest testing site for the quick test 2 days before they left -- where they got chewed out by one of the testers. “We’re running out of the quick tests. You should’ve planned better.” OK, how long to get results from the other test? “5 days” But that won’t meet Maine’s 3-day requirement. Tester just walks away. But they got their negative test results and got on their plane to Portland -- where no one in the airport or the hotel asked to see it.&nbsp; OK, not harm done other than the discomfort of a Q-tip probing their sinuses and a random bit of yelling, but waste scarce testing resources?</li><li>Chicago’s quarantine is also a bit of kabuki. Once a week the city’s health commission gets in front of the press to scold another state or two -- this week was Indiana and Wisconsin. There’s now 25 states and Puerto Rico that if you’re traveling from there to Chicago, you’re supposed to self-quarantine for 14 days or face fines up to $7,000. More interesting is that Chicago’s threshold for getting on the list is 15 new daily cases per 100,000 residents. On this week’s <a href=\"https://www.chicago.gov/city/en/sites/covid-19/home/emergency-travel-order.html\">tally,</a> Indiana is running in the 20-30 range, but so is the state of Illinois. You could call it hypocritical or pragmatic or keeping its powder dry for when the city needs another bucket of money from the state, but Chicago hasn’t put the rest of Illinois on its quarantine list.</li><li>Now, I’ve yet to hear of anyone who has actually self-quarantined and as of last week, <a href=\"https://chicago.cbslocal.com/2020/10/02/three-months-into-chicagos-emergency-travel-order-no-fines-issued-enforcement-focus-remains-on-education/\">no one has been rung up for not doing so</a>. But last month, a friend told me about how Chicago’s quarantine theater hit her last month. She finally got ‘round to taking some vacation at the end of the summer. She lives in Chicago, but is a big outdoors person; looking at airfares and tossing some darts at a map, she decided to go hit Bryce Canyon and Zion National Parks in Southern Utah. So she’s down there for a couple of days when her boss calls her. “They just announced that Utah is going on the city’s quarantine list. It’s not official until Friday, so I guess if you get out of there by Thursday, you won’t have to quarantine for 2 weeks before coming back to work.” And, it didn’t need to be said, those 2 weeks of self-quarantine wouldn’t be paid. My friend is unique in that she works for maybe the one company in Chicago that takes the city’s quarantine order seriously. So my friend fought through lousy cell coverage to see what she could salvage of the back half of her vacation. Luckily, she has friends in Oregon, which isn’t on the city’s list. So Thursday, she cut her hiking short, schlepped the 4½ hours back up to SLC and caught the last flight out to Portland -- which let her come back to work and make some money the next week.</li><li>Theater isn’t a new thing. If you’re, say, a <em>mature</em> traveler, you got to play a bit part in the security theater that premiered after 9/11 and the underwear bomber. While not a perfect analogy (and really, nothing ever is), we can see some similar theatrics -- government agencies (TSA then, health departments now) investing in activities that signal they are serious, but that most folks know aren’t really effective. For me and I think for most frequent travelers, the security theater ended with TSA PreCheck -- it seemed, again to most of us, as a reasonable balance between risk and getting on with our traveling lives. I don’t know what that looks like for quarantine theater, but I sure hope it doesn’t take the 10 years it took to figure out PreCheck.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/52154\">release.JOY.release</a> by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: essesq, Haskel (hej31)</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Traveling For Food</strong> </h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I talked at the start of the episode about eating my way through Philadelphia a couple of weeks back, and it was just that. We landed Thursday around 11:30a and were hitting our favs at Reading Terminal Market by 1:30p. I went straight for Tommy Dinic’s for the roast pork sandwich with sharp provolone and broccoli rabe while Irene and Claire made for the Mennonite pretzel place and Termini Brothers for fresh-filled cannolis. And then as we were leaving, I swung past one of the PA Dutch stands to buy a 1-lb block of <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrapple\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">scrapple</a> for breakfast the rest of the stay.</li><li>Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #166 — What Is The Meaning of Travel?\">August episode</a> in the interview with Emily Thomas about her book <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2IpLXnd\"><em>The Meaning of Travel</em></a><em>, </em>we talked about a chapter on global homogenization. One of the bits that I edited out was the observation that, back 10-20 year ago, it was fun to go shopping and bring something unique back home. But now, with globalized e-commerce, there’s not much that you can’t find easier (and often cheaper) on Amazon or Taobao or Rakuten. And so, for me, food is the one experience of a place that can’t be easily exported and bought on-line.</li><li>On our trip to the UP -- Michigan’s Upper Peninsula -- along with the biking, hiking, and kayaking, we were also on a bit of a <a href=\"https://thepastyguy.com/portfolio/the-pasty-trail-best-pasties-in-up/\">pasty tasting tour</a>. The UP is pretty well known -- in the Midwest at least -- for their <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pasty\">pasties</a>, brought over by Cornish miners working the copper mines. We had traditional pasties filled with steak, potatoes, onions, and rutabagas, and breakfast pasties. We worked our ways through the finer points of pasty critique -- picking out the pasties made from lard-based doughs, and fillings that held together so you could eat the pasty with your hand but weren’t just complete mush.</li><li>It’s funny how these comparison dishes can crop up on a vacation. On a trip to Phuket, Thailand, Andrew ordered pad thai everywhere we ate. On a trip to Hungary, Irene searched every menu for <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisherman\'s_soup\">halászlé</a> - a spicy fish soup - after having a great bowl of it at lunch with her cousin in some little town on the shores of <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Balaton\">Lake Balaton</a>. And again Irene, in Spain now, searched every city we visited for <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salmorejo\">salmorejo</a>, not quite soup, more of a tomato and bread and olive oil and garlic purée. These sorta horizontal tasting, some would be planned -- like our pasty tour -- and some would just come up, like Irene’s halászlé hunt. But it’d be fun, getting a feel for what the base of the dish is, what everyone agrees on, and what people put their own spin on, because usually for these core dishes -- dishes that everyone around has eaten all their lives -- everyone has an opinion about them. And that’s part of what makes the broad/horizontal tasting fun.</li><li>And also, these dishes don’t seem to be “industrialized.” While I’ve had mass produced pasties in the UK, grabbing something out from the West Cornish Pasty hut in Waterloo Station while running for a train, the pasties in the UP were much more -- not “artisanal” because I don’t think anyone making pasties in the UP would use that word, but “family made”. At Miners Pasties in Munising, which came out top in our pasty ranks, the woman helping us at the counter said the lard pastry recipe came from the owner’s grandmother and only 3 people know it -- the granddaughters and their niece. And only those three make the pastry each day.&nbsp; We sat back and enjoyed those pasties because we knew we wouldn’t be eating them again unless and until we found our way back to this bench again some day.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #168</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_168.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food','','','2021-10-01 17:07:05','2021-10-01 22:07:05','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=2896',0,'post','',0),
(2897,1,'2020-10-15 21:25:22','2020-10-16 02:25:22','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":2857,\"width\":300,\"height\":300,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large is-resized\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/F3E28DAE-0026-4E8A-957E-D6CE914F717C.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2857\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"/><figcaption>I seem to have put on a Quarantine 15</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Spent a week in <a href=\"https://www.uptravel.com/\">Michigan\'s Upper Peninsula</a> hiking, biking, kayaking, and running into a lot of other people getting away to do the same, which got me looking back six months to the start of the pandemic. I talk do the same, which got me looking back six months to the start of the pandemic. I talk about a surprisingly good flight cancellation experience with American Airlines, and figuring out how to download 12 years of <a href=\"https://www.tripit.com/\">TripIt</a> data. We wrap up talking to <a href=\"https://www.lendingtree.com/writer/matt-schulz/\">Matt Schulz</a> of <a href=\"https://www.lendingtree.com/\">LendingTree</a>, asking him what are we doing with travel credit cards that are generating frequent traveler points we can’t use? All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_168.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>download</strong></a> the podcast file, subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/896151355&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #168: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after a long weekend of eating and drinking and eating some more with friends in Philadelphia, a family we’ve traveled with before - South Africa, Singapore, Spain… and now, with COVID lockdowns, Philly. And while we’ll do a cultural thing or two, what we really like to do together is eat. It is the kind of group where comments like: “OK, we need to stop eating at 1:30 because we have 5:30 reservations” and “We’re only going to order the half-kilo of barbacoa because we’re eating again in 4 hours” are met with “Yeah, that’s a good point,” and “makes sense” rather than “I think we have a problem here.” </li><li>And Pennsylvania’s reopening regulation about needing to buy food when getting a beer didn’t help. After sneaking in a cheesesteak right before that 1:30 cutoff, we had to order some food with our afternoon beers -- the beer, of course, not subject to that 1:30 deadline because it’s liquid, so it’s not really food, so it doesn’t count. But we had to order some real, solid food with our beers. So we look at the menu -- ah, brussels sprouts, it’s a vegetable, that’s kinda healthy. Five minutes later, our beers arrive with a wire basket full of deep-fried brussels sprouts doused in a sweet chili sauce. So much for healthy.</li><li>But some of the bars, the smaller ones, the neighborhood ones, gamed it -- as these places are wont to do -- by putting a $1 food item on the menu -- 2 hard boiled eggs at one bar, a PB&amp;J at another. The best, though, was the Pop Tart we had with our last beer at Ray’ Happy Birthday Bar in South Philly. That one won the prize.</li><li>Which we found because we skipped the usual downtown/Center City/Society Hill hotels and grabbed an Airbnb in South Philly - kinda sandwiched between the older Italian neighborhoods and the newer Little Saigon area. We spent a lot of time outdoors, walking the neighborhoods -- and walking off our food -- and stopping in at neighborhood joints. One day, we’re picking up salamis and cheese from the Italian Market; another day, we’re buying banh mi’s from a Vietnamese bakery. I’ll write up a list of our favorite places for the TravelCommons website in a couple of weeks -- after my cholesterol level gets back to some semblance of normal.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/11510\">Funkist</a> - cdk dub mix by cdk (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: teru</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>First, a big “Thank You” to Gary Learned who goes by Denrael on social media for his review in Apple Podcasts. Gary is a long-time TravelCommons listener. Indeed, he’s pointed me to some great restaurants in places like Seattle and Memphis. Gary wrote a couple of weeks ago:<ul><li>“When people ask where I live, I usually just say airports and hilton. As someone who lives the life of the road warrior, I find this podcast strikes an all-to-familiar chord with my own experiences. A definite must-listen to understand the life of the traveller.</li><li>“I wrote the above a number of years ago and it is as true now as it was then, I look forward to Mark’s take on travel, it’s more about the journey, and cannot count the number of times when I’ve shook my head, laughed and said “yep, been there.”</li></ul></li><li>Gary, thanks for that. And thanks for staying with me this long.</li><li>The FBI pushed out a consumer alert last week to remind folks about the risks when using hotel wi-fi. We’ve talked about this many times and I think most frequent travelers know the drill when accessing any shared wi-fi, whether it be in a hotel or an airport or a bar or a Starbucks. Nothing new there, so why the FBI alert? Because the “FBI has observed a trend where individuals who were previously teleworking from home are beginning to telework from hotels. US hotels, predominantly in major cities, have begun to advertise daytime room reservations for guests seeking a quiet, distraction-free work environment.” So people who used to work in offices and have been working from home since March, are looking for a change of scenery, but either can’t or aren’t keen to go back to the group office setting. Enter downtown hotels, many of whom, we mentioned last month, are slouching towards bankruptcy because of low occupancy. Don’t want a bed for the night? How ‘bout a desk for the day? I just got an email from Omni Hotels pitching just that -- “Trade up your classroom for everything you need for a productive day of work plus downtown Los Angeles views.” I guess the FBI thinks these displaced office workers, used to working on secure corporate or home networks, might not be as careful. But even for frequent travelers, the alert is a good read:  talking about the dangers of an “evil twin” attack, logging onto what looks like a hotel wi-fi but is actually a hacker’s network; logging into the actual hotel wi-fi which has been compromised through exploits in out-of-date or unpatched network hardware. The FBI’s top recommendations are ones we’ve repeated numerous times - use a VPN when you connect to public wi-fi, or avoid them altogether with a mobile hotspot. Even when I’ve had a corporate VPN, I’ve always used one of the top paid VPN providers - NordVPN, PIA or ExpressVPN - because their software is so much better. I’m using NordVPN now, and whenever I’m not on a private network, I fire up the Nord client and it handles everything -- connects to the best server, reconnects automatically when I open the lid to wake up my Mac again. I don’t have to think about it. Indeed, half the time I forget to shut it off at home, until I’m wondering why I can’t move a file to another PC. Also, only access secure websites; I used to say “look for https://” but I guess that was too geeky, so you need to look for lock icons instead. And, of course, enable 2-factor authentication whenever you can. Nothing new, but a good reminder nonetheless. I’ll put a <a href=\"https://www.ic3.gov/media/2020/201006.aspx\">link to the alert</a> in the show notes, but you can also find links on the TravelCommons Facebook page and Twitter account.</li><li>OK, I gotta ask “what happened to Greta Thunberg\'s ‘flygskam’ or ‘flight shaming’ -- the 2019 existential travel threat? Because the whole Asian thing of “flights to nowhere” -- EVA Air from Taiwan filling up its “Hello Kitty” plane, All Nippon doing a fake flight to Hawaii, and then Qantas selling out a 787 for a lap around Australia. Singapore Air scrapped their “flight to nowhere” at the last minute, instead turning one of their A380s into a pop-up restaurant. I have to tell you that, honestly, I just don’t get this. For me, the flight is a means to an end -- something I’ve got to bear to get where I want to go. Getting on that American 737 in ORD last week didn’t fill me with joy; it was just simple math -- 2 hrs in a plane vs. 11 hrs in a car. And all that I just said… goes double for the idea of voluntarily buying airplane meals to eat at home. Words fail me.</li><li>At the end of September, the CDC did an early release of an article slated for the November issue of their peer-reviewed journal <em>Emerging Infectious Diseases</em> (and I thought <em>Walden Pond</em> was a cure for insomnia). The article analyzed the in-flight transmission of coronavirus from one business class passenger to 14 other passengers and a crew member on a 10-hour Vietnam Air flight from London to Hanoi. Most of the reactions in the press and on Twitter were “Yikes! Single passenger infects 15 people!”. While noting the CDC’s disclaimer “Early release articles are not considered as final versions” (which I didn’t see mentioned in any of the press articles), I came away with a less-than- “Yikes” after reading the whole paper. The flight was on March 2nd, so while the world was still trying to figure this novel coronavirus thing out and way before mandatory in-flight masks. And the passenger was symptomatic with a cough and a sore throat. Of the 14 passengers infected, 12 were in the same business class cabin and of those, all but one were within a 2-seat radius. And the authors aren’t sure if the 2 economy class infections were from the business class index case or from a different source. My takeaways: 1) Don’t let symptomatic people on planes - even if temperature checks aren’t perfect, it might catch some folks and will certainly make people think about their condition before flying; 2) Because this appears to validate the risk of being kept in close proximity to an infected person over a prolonged period; 3) Which, to me, justifies the airlines’ no-excuses mask requirements; but 4) In spite of a symptomatic un-masked passenger coughing away in the front of the plane, no non-adjacent passengers got infected -- so maybe the airline execs’ confidence in HEPA filters kinda justified. I’ll put <a href=\"https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/11/20-3299_article\">a link to the CDC paper</a> in the show notes. It’s not that long. It’s interesting to read the source document rather than just a headline or a short USAToday blurb.</li><li>Having said all that, I’m in no way, shape, or form justifying the “hygiene theater” that the travel industry seems to be trying to use to bring folks back. I talked back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/07/17/podcast-165-first-post-lockdown-flight-when-does-business-travel-come-back/\">the July episode</a> about the “Hertz Gold Standard Clean” sticker Hertz is slapping across driver-side doors. And there are some hotels now scheduling cleaning during the day rather than overnight so guests can see it. And then, on my American flights between Chicago and Philly last week, the banner across the top of the American Way magazine cover in the seatback pocket - “This magazine has been treated with an antimicrobial process” -- which I guess means “Please, feel safe to open it up and look at the advertisements.” I dunno, it feels a bit like the “security theater” we all went through after 9/11 - it was less about actually making things safer and more about making us “feel” safer -- and so, more willing to get on a plane. But maybe if I’m an airline or hotel exec facing down the pain of laying off thousands or tens of thousands of people if travelers don’t come back, that distinction is meaningless; I’m just trying to survive.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/48705\">Jolanta Blues</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license.  Ft: Admiral Bob, Martijn de Boer</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Quarantine Theater</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Finally giving into reality and canceling my Barcelona flight 6 months after booking it got me thinking back on these -- you know what’s coming -- <em>unprecedented</em> times. Airlines canceled flights to China at the end of January, then to South Korea, Iran, and Italy in February, until, by the beginning of March, airline traffic joined the stock market in a free fall. But back then, we thought it was a one-off event, kinda like Sept 11th; a sharp, scary event that came out of nowhere with no warning but that would soon pass. So taking advantage of one of the many March fare sales to book a flight at the end of September didn’t seem that risky.</li><li>I was talking to one of my consulting friends a couple of weeks ago. His travel schedule was similar to mine - a week without seeing an airport was a rare exception. He hasn’t been on a plane since March and doesn’t know when he’ll get on one next. He just started a project with a manufacturer in Cincinnati. Most of the project will be virtual, but he’s pretty sure he ought to at least put eyes on their plant. He lives outside Detroit. In the past, he’d be flying down every week. Now, he fires up Google Maps -- it’s a 4½ drive down I-75. He’ll drive down once, stay a couple of days, and then head back home.&nbsp;</li><li>I can’t say that anyone I’ve talked to misses the act of business travel -- getting up at 0 dark 30 Monday morning to get to the airport, shuffle through the PreCheck line for 15-20 minutes, and then shoehorn into a full flight for an hour or 3.&nbsp; But we did it because that was part of the job. But now that it’s not, at least for now and what seems like (for now) through the end of the year, everybody is taking full advantage of sleeping in -- in their own beds.</li><li>Which explains why, of all the US airlines, Spirit Airlines, with its complete focus on low-cost leisure travelers, is the only one sounding even somewhat non-negative.&nbsp; And hotel chains like Choice, focused on what they call “drive-to” locations and extended stay properties getting occupancy rates over 50% while center city hotels like Chicago’s Hilton Palmer House are missing rent payments and slouching towards bankruptcy.</li><li>Irene and I were sitting outside at a microbrewery a couple of days ago, enjoying a sunny afternoon full in the knowledge that we have maybe 4 weeks of outdoor eating and drinking left in Chicago. We talked about what kind of travel we would do over the next 12 months, figuring travel restrictions and periodic lockdowns are going to be the norm for at least that long. No big plans; nothing that COVID could blow up but seeing some new places -- some skiing, maybe trying out Montana; some hiking, maybe checking out the Texas Hill Country. But next month, we’re trading Barcelona for Philadelphia; now that they’ve opened up the restaurants again, check out our old neighborhood and visit with some friends. It’ll be Irene’s first flight since February. It took a bit of talking, but I really think the threat of a total of 22 hrs in a car with me -- alone -- tipped her over.&nbsp;</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djiz/10514\">Nube - Djiz Rmx</a> by Kwame (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: SylviaO</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Do We Keep Travel Credit Cards?</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Last week, <a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/14/delta-launches-6point5-billion-debt-deal-backed-by-its-frequent-flyer-program.html\">Delta used their SkyMiles program to back $6.5 billion in debt</a>, running the same play that United and American did in June. What caught my eye was some of the stats that came out with the debt filing -- that <a href=\"https://skift.com/2020/09/15/how-delta-looks-to-leverage-rewards-from-its-own-frequent-flyer-program/\">SkyMiles had about $6.1 billion in revenue in 2019, about two-thirds from American Express</a> which issues a co-branded Delta card, and that <a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/14/delta-launches-6point5-billion-debt-deal-backed-by-its-frequent-flyer-program.html\">total miles redeemed fell by 78% in the first half of this year.</a> The big carriers are leaning on their loyalty programs for cash, their biggest customers are credit card issuers, but those card users - us - are generating points that we’ve stopped using.&nbsp;</li><li>It’s against this background that I called up Matt Schulz, chief credit analyst at LendingTree, and to ask him -- do we want to keep travel credit cards?<ul><li>Matt, a lot of folks carry at least one travel credit card and I don’t think I’m going too far out on a limb guessing that damn close to every TravelCommons listeners carry them. We’re 6 months on from the COVID lockdowns and the resulting cratering of the travel industry. But with travel not recovering -- airline demand is still just a third of pre-pandemic levels and United Airlines’ CEO said last week it could be 3-4 years before it’s back to 2019 levels -- what are card holders doing with these cards generating frequent traveler points that they can’t or don’t want to use?</li><li>Back in March and April, it seemed the strategy for the big travel card issuers -- Chase, Citi, Amex -- seemed to be to sacrifice revenue to hold share -- statement credits for annual fees if you called them to cancel, new bonuses for stay-at-home purchases to keep wallet share -- seemed like 5x bonuses for grocery and gas was the most popular. Made sense when everyone was talking about 2-week shutdowns and a V-shaped recovery. But, as we said before, travel is gonna stay depressed for a while -- between state and country quarantines and many people not wanting to get in a plane -- how are travel card companies going to handle the next round of renewals? When I call Chase and Amex again, do I get more statement credits -- do they continue to fight for share? And if they don’t, what do I do with the balance of Ultimate or Membership Rewards points that I’ll lose if I don’t re-up and pay the fee?</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #167</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and now, <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_168.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food','','inherit','closed','closed','','2896-revision-v1','','','2020-10-15 21:25:22','2020-10-16 02:25:22','',2896,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/15/2896-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2898,1,'2020-10-15 21:39:05','2020-10-16 02:39:05','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":2857,\"width\":300,\"height\":300,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large is-resized\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/F3E28DAE-0026-4E8A-957E-D6CE914F717C.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2857\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"/><figcaption>I seem to have put on a Quarantine 15</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Spent a week in <a href=\"https://www.uptravel.com/\">Michigan\'s Upper Peninsula</a> hiking, biking, kayaking, and running into a lot of other people getting away to do the same, which got me looking back six months to the start of the pandemic. I talk do the same, which got me looking back six months to the start of the pandemic. I talk about a surprisingly good flight cancellation experience with American Airlines, and figuring out how to download 12 years of <a href=\"https://www.tripit.com/\">TripIt</a> data. We wrap up talking to <a href=\"https://www.lendingtree.com/writer/matt-schulz/\">Matt Schulz</a> of <a href=\"https://www.lendingtree.com/\">LendingTree</a>, asking him what are we doing with travel credit cards that are generating frequent traveler points we can’t use? All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_168.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>download</strong></a> the podcast file, subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/896151355&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #168: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after a long weekend of eating and drinking and eating some more with friends in Philadelphia, a family we’ve traveled with before - South Africa, Singapore, Spain… and now, with COVID lockdowns, Philly. And while we’ll do a cultural thing or two, what we really like to do together is eat. It is the kind of group where comments like: “OK, we need to stop eating at 1:30 because we have 5:30 reservations” and “We’re only going to order the half-kilo of barbacoa because we’re eating again in 4 hours” are met with “Yeah, that’s a good point,” and “makes sense” rather than “I think we have a problem here.” </li><li>And Pennsylvania’s reopening regulation about needing to buy food when getting a beer didn’t help. After sneaking in a cheesesteak right before that 1:30 cutoff, we had to order some food with our afternoon beers -- the beer, of course, not subject to that 1:30 deadline because it’s liquid, so it’s not really food, so it doesn’t count. But we had to order some real, solid food with our beers. So we look at the menu -- ah, brussels sprouts, it’s a vegetable, that’s kinda healthy. Five minutes later, our beers arrive with a wire basket full of deep-fried brussels sprouts doused in a sweet chili sauce. So much for healthy.</li><li>But some of the bars, the smaller ones, the neighborhood ones, gamed it -- as these places are wont to do -- by putting a $1 food item on the menu -- 2 hard boiled eggs at one bar, a PB&amp;J at another. The best, though, was the Pop Tart we had with our last beer at Ray’ Happy Birthday Bar in South Philly. That one won the prize.</li><li>Which we found because we skipped the usual downtown/Center City/Society Hill hotels and grabbed an Airbnb in South Philly - kinda sandwiched between the older Italian neighborhoods and the newer Little Saigon area. We spent a lot of time outdoors, walking the neighborhoods -- and walking off our food -- and stopping in at neighborhood joints. One day, we’re picking up salamis and cheese from the Italian Market; another day, we’re buying banh mi’s from a Vietnamese bakery. I’ll write up a list of our favorite places for the TravelCommons website in a couple of weeks -- after my cholesterol level gets back to some semblance of normal.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/11510\">Funkist</a> - cdk dub mix by cdk (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: teru</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>First, a big “Thank You” to Gary Learned who goes by Denrael on social media for his review in Apple Podcasts. Gary is a long-time TravelCommons listener. Indeed, he’s pointed me to some great restaurants in places like Seattle and Memphis. Gary wrote a couple of weeks ago:<ul><li>“When people ask where I live, I usually just say airports and hilton. As someone who lives the life of the road warrior, I find this podcast strikes an all-to-familiar chord with my own experiences. A definite must-listen to understand the life of the traveller.</li><li>“I wrote the above a number of years ago and it is as true now as it was then, I look forward to Mark’s take on travel, it’s more about the journey, and cannot count the number of times when I’ve shook my head, laughed and said “yep, been there.”</li></ul></li><li>Gary, thanks for that. And thanks for staying with me this long.</li><li>The FBI pushed out a consumer alert last week to remind folks about the risks when using hotel wi-fi. We’ve talked about this many times and I think most frequent travelers know the drill when accessing any shared wi-fi, whether it be in a hotel or an airport or a bar or a Starbucks. Nothing new there, so why the FBI alert? Because the “FBI has observed a trend where individuals who were previously teleworking from home are beginning to telework from hotels. US hotels, predominantly in major cities, have begun to advertise daytime room reservations for guests seeking a quiet, distraction-free work environment.” So people who used to work in offices and have been working from home since March, are looking for a change of scenery, but either can’t or aren’t keen to go back to the group office setting. Enter downtown hotels, many of whom, we mentioned last month, are slouching towards bankruptcy because of low occupancy. Don’t want a bed for the night? How ‘bout a desk for the day? I just got an email from Omni Hotels pitching just that -- “Trade up your classroom for everything you need for a productive day of work plus downtown Los Angeles views.” I guess the FBI thinks these displaced office workers, used to working on secure corporate or home networks, might not be as careful. But even for frequent travelers, the alert is a good read:  talking about the dangers of an “evil twin” attack, logging onto what looks like a hotel wi-fi but is actually a hacker’s network; logging into the actual hotel wi-fi which has been compromised through exploits in out-of-date or unpatched network hardware. The FBI’s top recommendations are ones we’ve repeated numerous times - use a VPN when you connect to public wi-fi, or avoid them altogether with a mobile hotspot. Even when I’ve had a corporate VPN, I’ve always used one of the top paid VPN providers - NordVPN, PIA or ExpressVPN - because their software is so much better. I’m using NordVPN now, and whenever I’m not on a private network, I fire up the Nord client and it handles everything -- connects to the best server, reconnects automatically when I open the lid to wake up my Mac again. I don’t have to think about it. Indeed, half the time I forget to shut it off at home, until I’m wondering why I can’t move a file to another PC. Also, only access secure websites; I used to say “look for https://” but I guess that was too geeky, so you need to look for lock icons instead. And, of course, enable 2-factor authentication whenever you can. Nothing new, but a good reminder nonetheless. I’ll put a <a href=\"https://www.ic3.gov/media/2020/201006.aspx\">link to the alert</a> in the show notes, but you can also find links on the TravelCommons Facebook page and Twitter account.</li><li>OK, I gotta ask “what happened to Greta Thunberg\'s ‘flygskam’ or ‘flight shaming’ -- the 2019 existential travel threat? Because the whole Asian thing of “flights to nowhere” -- EVA Air from Taiwan filling up its “Hello Kitty” plane, All Nippon doing a fake flight to Hawaii, and then Qantas selling out a 787 for a lap around Australia. Singapore Air scrapped their “flight to nowhere” at the last minute, instead turning one of their A380s into a pop-up restaurant. I have to tell you that, honestly, I just don’t get this. For me, the flight is a means to an end -- something I’ve got to bear to get where I want to go. Getting on that American 737 in ORD last week didn’t fill me with joy; it was just simple math -- 2 hrs in a plane vs. 11 hrs in a car. And all that I just said… goes double for the idea of voluntarily buying airplane meals to eat at home. Words fail me.</li><li>At the end of September, the CDC did an early release of an article slated for the November issue of their peer-reviewed journal <em>Emerging Infectious Diseases</em> (and I thought <em>Walden Pond</em> was a cure for insomnia). The article analyzed the in-flight transmission of coronavirus from one business class passenger to 14 other passengers and a crew member on a 10-hour Vietnam Air flight from London to Hanoi. Most of the reactions in the press and on Twitter were “Yikes! Single passenger infects 15 people!”. While noting the CDC’s disclaimer “Early release articles are not considered as final versions” (which I didn’t see mentioned in any of the press articles), I came away with a less-than- “Yikes” after reading the whole paper. The flight was on March 2nd, so while the world was still trying to figure this novel coronavirus thing out and way before mandatory in-flight masks. And the passenger was symptomatic with a cough and a sore throat. Of the 14 passengers infected, 12 were in the same business class cabin and of those, all but one were within a 2-seat radius. And the authors aren’t sure if the 2 economy class infections were from the business class index case or from a different source. My takeaways: 1) Don’t let symptomatic people on planes - even if temperature checks aren’t perfect, it might catch some folks and will certainly make people think about their condition before flying; 2) Because this appears to validate the risk of being kept in close proximity to an infected person over a prolonged period; 3) Which, to me, justifies the airlines’ no-excuses mask requirements; but 4) In spite of a symptomatic un-masked passenger coughing away in the front of the plane, no non-adjacent passengers got infected -- so maybe the airline execs’ confidence in HEPA filters kinda justified. I’ll put <a href=\"https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/11/20-3299_article\">a link to the CDC paper</a> in the show notes. It’s not that long. It’s interesting to read the source document rather than just a headline or a short USAToday blurb.</li><li>Having said all that, I’m in no way, shape, or form justifying the “hygiene theater” that the travel industry seems to be trying to use to bring folks back. I talked back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/07/17/podcast-165-first-post-lockdown-flight-when-does-business-travel-come-back/\">the July episode</a> about the “Hertz Gold Standard Clean” sticker Hertz is slapping across driver-side doors. And there are some hotels now scheduling cleaning during the day rather than overnight so guests can see it. And then, on my American flights between Chicago and Philly last week, the banner across the top of the American Way magazine cover in the seatback pocket - “This magazine has been treated with an antimicrobial process” -- which I guess means “Please, feel safe to open it up and look at the advertisements.” I dunno, it feels a bit like the “security theater” we all went through after 9/11 - it was less about actually making things safer and more about making us “feel” safer -- and so, more willing to get on a plane. But maybe if I’m an airline or hotel exec facing down the pain of laying off thousands or tens of thousands of people if travelers don’t come back, that distinction is meaningless; I’m just trying to survive.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/48705\">Jolanta Blues</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license.  Ft: Admiral Bob, Martijn de Boer</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Quarantine Theater</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>While some folks in the hospitality industry are talking about “hygiene theater”, what about “quarantine theater”? Back in the August episode, I talked about the complexity local and state travel bans and quarantine measures are causing for people trying to plan some sort of travel. </li><li>My son Andrew and his significant other headed out to Portland, ME last month for work. The week before they left, the Marriott emailed him a form - “Please certify one of the following is true - I have received a negative COVID test performed no later than 72 hours prior to my arrival, or will quarantine for 14 days upon my arrival in Maine.” Since they were only going to be in Portland for 4 days, they trundled down to the nearest testing site for the quick test 2 days before they left -- where they got chewed out by one of the testers. “We’re running out of the quick tests. You should’ve planned better.” OK, how long to get results from the other test? “5 days” But that won’t meet Maine’s 3-day requirement. Tester just walks away. But they got their negative test results and got on their plane to Portland -- where no one in the airport or the hotel asked to see it.  OK, not harm done other than the discomfort of a Q-tip probing their sinuses and a random bit of yelling, but waste scarce testing resources?</li><li>Chicago’s quarantine is also a bit of kabuki. Once a week the city’s health commission gets in front of the press to scold another state or two -- this week was Indiana and Wisconsin. There’s now 25 states and Puerto Rico that if you’re traveling from there to Chicago, you’re supposed to self-quarantine for 14 days or face fines up to $7,000. More interesting is that Chicago’s threshold for getting on the list is 15 new daily cases per 100,000 residents. On this week’s <a href=\"https://www.chicago.gov/city/en/sites/covid-19/home/emergency-travel-order.html\">tally,</a> Indiana is running in the 20-30 range, but so is the state of Illinois. You could call it hypocritical or pragmatic or keeping its powder dry for when the city needs another bucket of money from the state, but Chicago hasn’t put the rest of Illinois on its quarantine list.</li><li>Now, I’ve yet to hear of anyone who has actually self-quarantined and as of last week, <a href=\"https://chicago.cbslocal.com/2020/10/02/three-months-into-chicagos-emergency-travel-order-no-fines-issued-enforcement-focus-remains-on-education/\">no one has been rung up for not doing so</a>. But last month, a friend told me about how Chicago’s quarantine theater hit her last month. She finally got ‘round to taking some vacation at the end of the summer. She lives in Chicago, but is a big outdoors person; looking at airfares and tossing some darts at a map, she decided to go hit Bryce Canyon and Zion National Parks in Southern Utah. So she’s down there for a couple of days when her boss calls her. “They just announced that Utah is going on the city’s quarantine list. It’s not official until Friday, so I guess if you get out of there by Thursday, you won’t have to quarantine for 2 weeks before coming back to work.” And, it didn’t need to be said, those 2 weeks of self-quarantine wouldn’t be paid. My friend is unique in that she works for maybe the one company in Chicago that takes the city’s quarantine order seriously. So my friend fought through lousy cell coverage to see what she could salvage of the back half of her vacation. Luckily, she has friends in Oregon, which isn’t on the city’s list. So Thursday, she cut her hiking short, schlepped the 4½ hours back up to SLC and caught the last flight out to Portland -- which let her come back to work and make some money the next week.</li><li>Theater isn’t a new thing. If you’re, say, a <em>mature</em> traveler, you got to play a bit part in the security theater that premiered after 9/11 and the underwear bomber. While not a perfect analogy (and really, nothing ever is), we can see some similar theatrics -- government agencies (TSA then, health departments now) investing in activities that signal they are serious, but that most folks know aren’t really effective. For me and I think for most frequent travelers, the security theater ended with TSA PreCheck -- it seemed, again to most of us, as a reasonable balance between risk and getting on with our traveling lives. I don’t know what that looks like for quarantine theater, but I sure hope it doesn’t take the 10 years it took to figure out PreCheck.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djiz/10514\">Nube - Djiz Rmx</a> by Kwame (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: SylviaO</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Traveling For Food</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I talked at the start of the episode about eating my way through Philadelphia a couple of weeks back, and it was just that. We landed Thursday around 11:30a and were hitting our favs at Reading Terminal Market by 1:30p. I went straight for Tommy Dinic’s for the roast pork sandwich with sharp provolone and broccoli rabe while Irene and Claire made for the Mennonite pretzel place and Termini Brothers for fresh-filled cannolis. And then as we were leaving, I swung past one of the PA Dutch stands to buy a 1-lb block of scrapple for breakfast the rest of the stay.</li><li>Back in the August episode in the interview with Emily Thomas about her book <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2IpLXnd\"><em>The Meaning of Travel</em></a><em>, </em>we talked about a chapter on global homogenization. One of the bits that I edited out was the observation that, back 10-20 year ago, it was fun to go shopping and bring something unique back home. But now, with globalized e-commerce, there’s not much that you can’t find easier (and often cheaper) on Amazon or Taobao or Rakuten. And so, for me, food is the one experience of a place that can’t be easily exported and bought on-line.</li><li>On our trip to the UP -- Michigan’s Upper Peninsula -- along with the biking, hiking, and kayaking, we were also on a bit of a <a href=\"https://thepastyguy.com/portfolio/the-pasty-trail-best-pasties-in-up/\">pasty tasting tour</a>. The UP is pretty well known -- in the Midwest at least -- for their <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pasty\">pasties</a>, brought over by Cornish miners working the copper mines. We had traditional pasties filled with steak, potatoes, onions, and rutabagas, and breakfast pasties. We worked our ways through the finer points of pasty critique -- picking out the pasties made from lard-based doughs, and fillings that held together so you could eat the pasty with your hand but weren’t just complete mush.</li><li>It’s funny how these comparison dishes can crop up on a vacation. On a trip to Phuket, Thailand, Andrew ordered pad thai everywhere we ate. On a trip to Hungary, Irene searched every menu for <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisherman\'s_soup\">halászlé</a> - a spicy fish soup - after having a great bowl of it at lunch with her cousin in some little town on the shores of <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Balaton\">Lake Balaton</a>. And again Irene, in Spain now, searched every city we visited for <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salmorejo\">salmorejo</a>, not quite soup, more of a tomato and bread and olive oil and garlic purée. These sorta horizontal tasting, some would be planned -- like our pasty tour -- and some would just come up, like Irene’s halászlé hunt. But it’d be fun, getting a feel for what the base of the dish is, what everyone agrees on, and what people put their own spin on, because usually for these core dishes -- dishes that everyone around has eaten all their lives -- everyone has an opinion about them. And that’s part of what makes the broad/horizontal tasting fun.</li><li>And also, these dishes don’t seem to be “industrialized.” While I’ve had mass produced pasties in the UK, grabbing something out from the West Cornish Pasty hut in Waterloo Station while running for a train, the pasties in the UP were much more -- not “artisanal” because I don’t think anyone making pasties in the UP would use that word, but “family made”. At Miners Pasties in Munising, which came out top in our pasty ranks, the woman helping us at the counter said the lard pastry recipe came from the owner’s grandmother and only 3 people know it -- the granddaughters and their niece. And only those three make the pastry each day.&nbsp; We sat back and enjoyed those pasties because we knew we wouldn’t be eating them again unless and until we found our way back to this bench again some day.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #168</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and now, <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_168.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food','','inherit','closed','closed','','2896-revision-v1','','','2020-10-15 21:39:05','2020-10-16 02:39:05','',2896,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/15/2896-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2899,1,'2020-10-15 21:46:21','2020-10-16 02:46:21','','IMG_2240','','inherit','open','closed','','img_2240','','','2020-10-15 21:46:21','2020-10-16 02:46:21','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(2900,1,'2020-10-15 21:50:02','2020-10-16 02:50:02','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":2899,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-1024x1024.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2899\"/><figcaption>My mission is clear</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Spent a week in <a href=\"https://www.uptravel.com/\">Michigan\'s Upper Peninsula</a> hiking, biking, kayaking, and running into a lot of other people getting away to do the same, which got me looking back six months to the start of the pandemic. I talk do the same, which got me looking back six months to the start of the pandemic. I talk about a surprisingly good flight cancellation experience with American Airlines, and figuring out how to download 12 years of <a href=\"https://www.tripit.com/\">TripIt</a> data. We wrap up talking to <a href=\"https://www.lendingtree.com/writer/matt-schulz/\">Matt Schulz</a> of <a href=\"https://www.lendingtree.com/\">LendingTree</a>, asking him what are we doing with travel credit cards that are generating frequent traveler points we can’t use? All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_168.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>download</strong></a> the podcast file, subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/896151355&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #168: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after a long weekend of eating and drinking and eating some more with friends in Philadelphia, a family we’ve traveled with before - South Africa, Singapore, Spain… and now, with COVID lockdowns, Philly. And while we’ll do a cultural thing or two, what we really like to do together is eat. It is the kind of group where comments like: “OK, we need to stop eating at 1:30 because we have 5:30 reservations” and “We’re only going to order the half-kilo of barbacoa because we’re eating again in 4 hours” are met with “Yeah, that’s a good point,” and “makes sense” rather than “I think we have a problem here.”&nbsp;</li><li>And Pennsylvania’s reopening regulation about needing to buy food when getting a beer didn’t help. After sneaking in a cheesesteak right before that 1:30 cutoff, we had to order some food with our afternoon beers -- the beer, of course, not subject to that 1:30 deadline because it’s liquid, so it’s not really food, so it doesn’t count. But we had to order some real, solid food with our beers. So we look at the menu -- ah, brussels sprouts, it’s a vegetable, that’s kinda healthy. Five minutes later, our beers arrive with a wire basket full of deep-fried brussels sprouts doused in a sweet chili sauce. So much for healthy.</li><li>But some of the bars, the smaller ones, the neighborhood ones, gamed it -- as these places are wont to do -- by putting a $1 food item on the menu -- 2 hard boiled eggs at one bar, a PB&amp;J at another. The best, though, was the Pop Tart we had with our last beer at Ray’ Happy Birthday Bar in South Philly. That one won the prize.</li><li>Which we found because we skipped the usual downtown/Center City/Society Hill hotels and grabbed an Airbnb in South Philly - kinda sandwiched between the older Italian neighborhoods and the newer Little Saigon area. We spent a lot of time outdoors, walking the neighborhoods -- and walking off our food -- and stopping in at neighborhood joints. One day, we’re picking up salamis and cheese from the Italian Market; another day, we’re buying banh mi’s from a Vietnamese bakery. I’ll write up a list of our favorite places for the TravelCommons website in a couple of weeks -- after my cholesterol level gets back to some semblance of normal.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/11510\">Funkist</a> - cdk dub mix by cdk (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: teru</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>First, a big “Thank You” to Gary Learned who goes by Denrael on social media for his review in Apple Podcasts. Gary is a long-time TravelCommons listener. Indeed, he’s pointed me to some great restaurants in places like Seattle and Memphis. Gary wrote a couple of weeks ago:<ul><li>“When people ask where I live, I usually just say airports and hilton. As someone who lives the life of the road warrior, I find this podcast strikes an all-to-familiar chord with my own experiences. A definite must-listen to understand the life of the traveller.</li><li>“I wrote the above a number of years ago and it is as true now as it was then, I look forward to Mark’s take on travel, it’s more about the journey, and cannot count the number of times when I’ve shook my head, laughed and said “yep, been there.”</li></ul></li><li>Gary, thanks for that. And thanks for staying with me this long.</li><li>The FBI pushed out a consumer alert last week to remind folks about the risks when using hotel wi-fi. We’ve talked about this many times and I think most frequent travelers know the drill when accessing any shared wi-fi, whether it be in a hotel or an airport or a bar or a Starbucks. Nothing new there, so why the FBI alert? Because the “FBI has observed a trend where individuals who were previously teleworking from home are beginning to telework from hotels. US hotels, predominantly in major cities, have begun to advertise daytime room reservations for guests seeking a quiet, distraction-free work environment.” So people who used to work in offices and have been working from home since March, are looking for a change of scenery, but either can’t or aren’t keen to go back to the group office setting. Enter downtown hotels, many of whom, we mentioned last month, are slouching towards bankruptcy because of low occupancy. Don’t want a bed for the night? How ‘bout a desk for the day? I just got an email from Omni Hotels pitching just that -- “Trade up your classroom for everything you need for a productive day of work plus downtown Los Angeles views.” I guess the FBI thinks these displaced office workers, used to working on secure corporate or home networks, might not be as careful. But even for frequent travelers, the alert is a good read:&nbsp; talking about the dangers of an “evil twin” attack, logging onto what looks like a hotel wi-fi but is actually a hacker’s network; logging into the actual hotel wi-fi which has been compromised through exploits in out-of-date or unpatched network hardware. The FBI’s top recommendations are ones we’ve repeated numerous times - use a VPN when you connect to public wi-fi, or avoid them altogether with a mobile hotspot. Even when I’ve had a corporate VPN, I’ve always used one of the top paid VPN providers - NordVPN, PIA or ExpressVPN - because their software is so much better. I’m using NordVPN now, and whenever I’m not on a private network, I fire up the Nord client and it handles everything -- connects to the best server, reconnects automatically when I open the lid to wake up my Mac again. I don’t have to think about it. Indeed, half the time I forget to shut it off at home, until I’m wondering why I can’t move a file to another PC. Also, only access secure websites; I used to say “look for https://” but I guess that was too geeky, so you need to look for lock icons instead. And, of course, enable 2-factor authentication whenever you can. Nothing new, but a good reminder nonetheless. I’ll put a <a href=\"https://www.ic3.gov/media/2020/201006.aspx\">link to the alert</a> in the show notes, but you can also find links on the TravelCommons Facebook page and Twitter account.</li><li>OK, I gotta ask “what happened to Greta Thunberg\'s ‘flygskam’ or ‘flight shaming’ -- the 2019 existential travel threat? Because the whole Asian thing of “flights to nowhere” -- EVA Air from Taiwan filling up its “Hello Kitty” plane, All Nippon doing a fake flight to Hawaii, and then Qantas selling out a 787 for a lap around Australia. Singapore Air scrapped their “flight to nowhere” at the last minute, instead turning one of their A380s into a pop-up restaurant. I have to tell you that, honestly, I just don’t get this. For me, the flight is a means to an end -- something I’ve got to bear to get where I want to go. Getting on that American 737 in ORD last week didn’t fill me with joy; it was just simple math -- 2 hrs in a plane vs. 11 hrs in a car. And all that I just said… goes double for the idea of voluntarily buying airplane meals to eat at home. Words fail me.</li><li>At the end of September, the CDC did an early release of an article slated for the November issue of their peer-reviewed journal <em>Emerging Infectious Diseases</em> (and I thought <em>Walden Pond</em> was a cure for insomnia). The article analyzed the in-flight transmission of coronavirus from one business class passenger to 14 other passengers and a crew member on a 10-hour Vietnam Air flight from London to Hanoi. Most of the reactions in the press and on Twitter were “Yikes! Single passenger infects 15 people!”. While noting the CDC’s disclaimer “Early release articles are not considered as final versions” (which I didn’t see mentioned in any of the press articles), I came away with a less-than- “Yikes” after reading the whole paper. The flight was on March 2nd, so while the world was still trying to figure this novel coronavirus thing out and way before mandatory in-flight masks. And the passenger was symptomatic with a cough and a sore throat. Of the 14 passengers infected, 12 were in the same business class cabin and of those, all but one were within a 2-seat radius. And the authors aren’t sure if the 2 economy class infections were from the business class index case or from a different source. My takeaways: 1) Don’t let symptomatic people on planes - even if temperature checks aren’t perfect, it might catch some folks and will certainly make people think about their condition before flying; 2) Because this appears to validate the risk of being kept in close proximity to an infected person over a prolonged period; 3) Which, to me, justifies the airlines’ no-excuses mask requirements; but 4) In spite of a symptomatic un-masked passenger coughing away in the front of the plane, no non-adjacent passengers got infected -- so maybe the airline execs’ confidence in HEPA filters kinda justified. I’ll put <a href=\"https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/11/20-3299_article\">a link to the CDC paper</a> in the show notes. It’s not that long. It’s interesting to read the source document rather than just a headline or a short USAToday blurb.</li><li>Having said all that, I’m in no way, shape, or form justifying the “hygiene theater” that the travel industry seems to be trying to use to bring folks back. I talked back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/07/17/podcast-165-first-post-lockdown-flight-when-does-business-travel-come-back/\">the July episode</a> about the “Hertz Gold Standard Clean” sticker Hertz is slapping across driver-side doors. And there are some hotels now scheduling cleaning during the day rather than overnight so guests can see it. And then, on my American flights between Chicago and Philly last week, the banner across the top of the American Way magazine cover in the seatback pocket - “This magazine has been treated with an antimicrobial process” -- which I guess means “Please, feel safe to open it up and look at the advertisements.” I dunno, it feels a bit like the “security theater” we all went through after 9/11 - it was less about actually making things safer and more about making us “feel” safer -- and so, more willing to get on a plane. But maybe if I’m an airline or hotel exec facing down the pain of laying off thousands or tens of thousands of people if travelers don’t come back, that distinction is meaningless; I’m just trying to survive.</li><li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/48705\">Jolanta Blues</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: Admiral Bob, Martijn de Boer</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Quarantine Theater</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>While some folks in the hospitality industry are talking about “hygiene theater”, what about “quarantine theater”? Back in the August episode, I talked about the complexity local and state travel bans and quarantine measures are causing for people trying to plan some sort of travel.&nbsp;</li><li>My son Andrew and his significant other headed out to Portland, ME last month for work. The week before they left, the Marriott emailed him a form - “Please certify one of the following is true - I have received a negative COVID test performed no later than 72 hours prior to my arrival, or will quarantine for 14 days upon my arrival in Maine.” Since they were only going to be in Portland for 4 days, they trundled down to the nearest testing site for the quick test 2 days before they left -- where they got chewed out by one of the testers. “We’re running out of the quick tests. You should’ve planned better.” OK, how long to get results from the other test? “5 days” But that won’t meet Maine’s 3-day requirement. Tester just walks away. But they got their negative test results and got on their plane to Portland -- where no one in the airport or the hotel asked to see it.&nbsp; OK, not harm done other than the discomfort of a Q-tip probing their sinuses and a random bit of yelling, but waste scarce testing resources?</li><li>Chicago’s quarantine is also a bit of kabuki. Once a week the city’s health commission gets in front of the press to scold another state or two -- this week was Indiana and Wisconsin. There’s now 25 states and Puerto Rico that if you’re traveling from there to Chicago, you’re supposed to self-quarantine for 14 days or face fines up to $7,000. More interesting is that Chicago’s threshold for getting on the list is 15 new daily cases per 100,000 residents. On this week’s <a href=\"https://www.chicago.gov/city/en/sites/covid-19/home/emergency-travel-order.html\">tally,</a> Indiana is running in the 20-30 range, but so is the state of Illinois. You could call it hypocritical or pragmatic or keeping its powder dry for when the city needs another bucket of money from the state, but Chicago hasn’t put the rest of Illinois on its quarantine list.</li><li>Now, I’ve yet to hear of anyone who has actually self-quarantined and as of last week, <a href=\"https://chicago.cbslocal.com/2020/10/02/three-months-into-chicagos-emergency-travel-order-no-fines-issued-enforcement-focus-remains-on-education/\">no one has been rung up for not doing so</a>. But last month, a friend told me about how Chicago’s quarantine theater hit her last month. She finally got ‘round to taking some vacation at the end of the summer. She lives in Chicago, but is a big outdoors person; looking at airfares and tossing some darts at a map, she decided to go hit Bryce Canyon and Zion National Parks in Southern Utah. So she’s down there for a couple of days when her boss calls her. “They just announced that Utah is going on the city’s quarantine list. It’s not official until Friday, so I guess if you get out of there by Thursday, you won’t have to quarantine for 2 weeks before coming back to work.” And, it didn’t need to be said, those 2 weeks of self-quarantine wouldn’t be paid. My friend is unique in that she works for maybe the one company in Chicago that takes the city’s quarantine order seriously. So my friend fought through lousy cell coverage to see what she could salvage of the back half of her vacation. Luckily, she has friends in Oregon, which isn’t on the city’s list. So Thursday, she cut her hiking short, schlepped the 4½ hours back up to SLC and caught the last flight out to Portland -- which let her come back to work and make some money the next week.</li><li>Theater isn’t a new thing. If you’re, say, a <em>mature</em> traveler, you got to play a bit part in the security theater that premiered after 9/11 and the underwear bomber. While not a perfect analogy (and really, nothing ever is), we can see some similar theatrics -- government agencies (TSA then, health departments now) investing in activities that signal they are serious, but that most folks know aren’t really effective. For me and I think for most frequent travelers, the security theater ended with TSA PreCheck -- it seemed, again to most of us, as a reasonable balance between risk and getting on with our traveling lives. I don’t know what that looks like for quarantine theater, but I sure hope it doesn’t take the 10 years it took to figure out PreCheck.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djiz/10514\">Nube - Djiz Rmx</a> by Kwame (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: SylviaO</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Traveling For Food</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I talked at the start of the episode about eating my way through Philadelphia a couple of weeks back, and it was just that. We landed Thursday around 11:30a and were hitting our favs at Reading Terminal Market by 1:30p. I went straight for Tommy Dinic’s for the roast pork sandwich with sharp provolone and broccoli rabe while Irene and Claire made for the Mennonite pretzel place and Termini Brothers for fresh-filled cannolis. And then as we were leaving, I swung past one of the PA Dutch stands to buy a 1-lb block of scrapple for breakfast the rest of the stay.</li><li>Back in the August episode in the interview with Emily Thomas about her book <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2IpLXnd\"><em>The Meaning of Travel</em></a><em>, </em>we talked about a chapter on global homogenization. One of the bits that I edited out was the observation that, back 10-20 year ago, it was fun to go shopping and bring something unique back home. But now, with globalized e-commerce, there’s not much that you can’t find easier (and often cheaper) on Amazon or Taobao or Rakuten. And so, for me, food is the one experience of a place that can’t be easily exported and bought on-line.</li><li>On our trip to the UP -- Michigan’s Upper Peninsula -- along with the biking, hiking, and kayaking, we were also on a bit of a <a href=\"https://thepastyguy.com/portfolio/the-pasty-trail-best-pasties-in-up/\">pasty tasting tour</a>. The UP is pretty well known -- in the Midwest at least -- for their <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pasty\">pasties</a>, brought over by Cornish miners working the copper mines. We had traditional pasties filled with steak, potatoes, onions, and rutabagas, and breakfast pasties. We worked our ways through the finer points of pasty critique -- picking out the pasties made from lard-based doughs, and fillings that held together so you could eat the pasty with your hand but weren’t just complete mush.</li><li>It’s funny how these comparison dishes can crop up on a vacation. On a trip to Phuket, Thailand, Andrew ordered pad thai everywhere we ate. On a trip to Hungary, Irene searched every menu for <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisherman\'s_soup\">halászlé</a> - a spicy fish soup - after having a great bowl of it at lunch with her cousin in some little town on the shores of <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Balaton\">Lake Balaton</a>. And again Irene, in Spain now, searched every city we visited for <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salmorejo\">salmorejo</a>, not quite soup, more of a tomato and bread and olive oil and garlic purée. These sorta horizontal tasting, some would be planned -- like our pasty tour -- and some would just come up, like Irene’s halászlé hunt. But it’d be fun, getting a feel for what the base of the dish is, what everyone agrees on, and what people put their own spin on, because usually for these core dishes -- dishes that everyone around has eaten all their lives -- everyone has an opinion about them. And that’s part of what makes the broad/horizontal tasting fun.</li><li>And also, these dishes don’t seem to be “industrialized.” While I’ve had mass produced pasties in the UK, grabbing something out from the West Cornish Pasty hut in Waterloo Station while running for a train, the pasties in the UP were much more -- not “artisanal” because I don’t think anyone making pasties in the UP would use that word, but “family made”. At Miners Pasties in Munising, which came out top in our pasty ranks, the woman helping us at the counter said the lard pastry recipe came from the owner’s grandmother and only 3 people know it -- the granddaughters and their niece. And only those three make the pastry each day.&nbsp; We sat back and enjoyed those pasties because we knew we wouldn’t be eating them again unless and until we found our way back to this bench again some day.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #168</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and now, <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_168.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food','','inherit','closed','closed','','2896-revision-v1','','','2020-10-15 21:50:02','2020-10-16 02:50:02','',2896,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/15/2896-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2901,1,'2020-10-16 18:05:20','2020-10-16 23:05:20','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":2899,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-1024x1024.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2899\"/><figcaption>My mission is clear</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Spent a week in <a href=\"https://www.uptravel.com/\">Michigan\'s Upper Peninsula</a> hiking, biking, kayaking, and running into a lot of other people getting away to do the same, which got me looking back six months to the start of the pandemic. I talk do the same, which got me looking back six months to the start of the pandemic. I talk about a surprisingly good flight cancellation experience with American Airlines, and figuring out how to download 12 years of <a href=\"https://www.tripit.com/\">TripIt</a> data. We wrap up talking to <a href=\"https://www.lendingtree.com/writer/matt-schulz/\">Matt Schulz</a> of <a href=\"https://www.lendingtree.com/\">LendingTree</a>, asking him what are we doing with travel credit cards that are generating frequent traveler points we can’t use? All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_168.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>download</strong></a> the podcast file, subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/896151355&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #168: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after a long weekend of eating and drinking and eating some more with friends in Philadelphia, a family we’ve traveled with before - South Africa, Singapore, Spain… and now, with COVID lockdowns, Philly. And while we’ll do a cultural thing or two, what we really like to do together is eat. It is the kind of group where comments like: “OK, we need to stop eating at 1:30 because we have 5:30 reservations” and “We’re only going to order the half-kilo of barbacoa because we’re eating again in 4 hours” are met with “Yeah, that’s a good point,” and “makes sense” rather than “I think we have a problem here.” </li><li>And Pennsylvania’s reopening regulation about needing to buy food when getting a beer didn’t help. After sneaking in a cheesesteak right before that 1:30 cutoff, we had to order some food with our afternoon beers -- the beer, of course, not subject to that 1:30 deadline because it’s liquid, so it’s not really food, so it doesn’t count. But we had to order some real, solid food with our beers. So we look at the menu -- ah, brussels sprouts, it’s a vegetable, that’s kinda healthy. Five minutes later, our beers arrive with a wire basket full of deep-fried brussels sprouts doused in a sweet chili sauce. So much for healthy.</li><li>But some of the bars, the smaller ones, the neighborhood ones, gamed it -- as these places are wont to do -- by putting a $1 food item on the menu -- 2 hard boiled eggs at one bar, a PB&amp;J at another. The best, though, was the Pop Tart we had with our last beer at Ray’s Happy Birthday Bar in South Philly. That one won the prize.</li><li>Which we found because we skipped the usual downtown/Center City/Society Hill hotels and grabbed an Airbnb in South Philly - kinda sandwiched between the older Italian neighborhoods and the newer Little Saigon area. We spent a lot of time outdoors, walking the neighborhoods -- and walking off our food -- and stopping in at neighborhood joints. One day, we’re picking up salamis and cheese from the Italian Market; another day, we’re buying banh mi’s from a Vietnamese bakery. I’ll write up a list of our favorite places for the TravelCommons website in a couple of weeks -- after my cholesterol level gets back to some semblance of normal.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/duckett/2333\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Another Girl (instrumental)</a> by duckett (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/duckett/23334 Ft: fourstones, miafas</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>First, a big “Thank You” to Gary Learned who goes by Denrael on social media for his review in Apple Podcasts. Gary is a long-time TravelCommons listener. Indeed, he’s pointed me to some great restaurants in places like Seattle and Memphis. Gary wrote a couple of weeks ago:<ul><li>“When people ask where I live, I usually just say airports and hilton. As someone who lives the life of the road warrior, I find this podcast strikes an all-to-familiar chord with my own experiences. A definite must-listen to understand the life of the traveller.</li><li>“I wrote the above a number of years ago and it is as true now as it was then, I look forward to Mark’s take on travel, it’s more about the journey, and cannot count the number of times when I’ve shook my head, laughed and said “yep, been there.”</li></ul></li><li>Gary, thanks for that. And thanks for staying with me this long.</li><li>The FBI pushed out a consumer alert last week to remind folks about the risks when using hotel wi-fi. We’ve talked about this many times and I think most frequent travelers know the drill when accessing any shared wi-fi, whether it be in a hotel or an airport or a bar or a Starbucks. Nothing new there, so why the FBI alert? Because the “FBI has observed a trend where individuals who were previously teleworking from home are beginning to telework from hotels. US hotels, predominantly in major cities, have begun to advertise daytime room reservations for guests seeking a quiet, distraction-free work environment.” So people who used to work in offices and have been working from home since March, are looking for a change of scenery, but either can’t or aren’t keen to go back to the group office setting. Enter downtown hotels, many of whom, we mentioned last month, are slouching towards bankruptcy because of low occupancy. Don’t want a bed for the night? How ‘bout a desk for the day? I just got an email from Omni Hotels pitching just that -- “Trade up your classroom for everything you need for a productive day of work plus downtown Los Angeles views.” I guess the FBI thinks these displaced office workers, used to working on secure corporate or home networks, might not be as careful. But even for frequent travelers, the alert is a good read:&nbsp; talking about the dangers of an “evil twin” attack, logging onto what looks like a hotel wi-fi but is actually a hacker’s network; logging into the actual hotel wi-fi which has been compromised through exploits in out-of-date or unpatched network hardware. The FBI’s top recommendations are ones we’ve repeated numerous times - use a VPN when you connect to public wi-fi, or avoid them altogether with a mobile hotspot. Even when I’ve had a corporate VPN, I’ve always used one of the top paid VPN providers - NordVPN, PIA or ExpressVPN - because their software is so much better. I’m using NordVPN now, and whenever I’m not on a private network, I fire up the Nord client and it handles everything -- connects to the best server, reconnects automatically when I open the lid to wake up my Mac again. I don’t have to think about it. Indeed, half the time I forget to shut it off at home, until I’m wondering why I can’t move a file to another PC. Also, only access secure websites; I used to say “look for https://” but I guess that was too geeky, so you need to look for lock icons instead. And, of course, enable 2-factor authentication whenever you can. Nothing new, but a good reminder nonetheless. I’ll put a <a href=\"https://www.ic3.gov/media/2020/201006.aspx\">link to the alert</a> in the show notes, but you can also find links on the TravelCommons Facebook page and Twitter account.</li><li>OK, I gotta ask “what happened to Greta Thunberg\'s ‘flygskam’ or ‘flight shaming’ -- the 2019 existential travel threat? Because the whole Asian thing of “flights to nowhere” -- EVA Air from Taiwan filling up its “Hello Kitty” plane, All Nippon doing a fake flight to Hawaii, and then Qantas selling out a 787 for a lap around Australia. Singapore Air scrapped their “flight to nowhere” at the last minute, instead turning one of their A380s into a pop-up restaurant. I have to tell you that, honestly, I just don’t get this. For me, the flight is a means to an end -- something I’ve got to bear to get where I want to go. Getting on that American 737 in ORD last week didn’t fill me with joy; it was just simple math -- 2 hrs in a plane vs. 11 hrs in a car. And all that I just said… goes double for the idea of voluntarily buying airplane meals to eat at home. Words fail me.</li><li>At the end of September, the CDC did an early release of an article slated for the November issue of their peer-reviewed journal <em>Emerging Infectious Diseases</em> (and I thought <em>Walden Pond</em> was a cure for insomnia). The article analyzed the in-flight transmission of coronavirus from one business class passenger to 14 other passengers and a crew member on a 10-hour Vietnam Air flight from London to Hanoi. Most of the reactions in the press and on Twitter were “Yikes! Single passenger infects 15 people!”. While noting the CDC’s disclaimer “Early release articles are not considered as final versions” (which I didn’t see mentioned in any of the press articles), I came away with a less-than- “Yikes” after reading the whole paper. The flight was on March 2nd, so while the world was still trying to figure this novel coronavirus thing out and way before mandatory in-flight masks. And the passenger was symptomatic with a cough and a sore throat. Of the 14 passengers infected, 12 were in the same business class cabin and of those, all but one were within a 2-seat radius. And the authors aren’t sure if the 2 economy class infections were from the business class index case or from a different source. My takeaways: 1) Don’t let symptomatic people on planes - even if temperature checks aren’t perfect, it might catch some folks and will certainly make people think about their condition before flying; 2) Because this appears to validate the risk of being kept in close proximity to an infected person over a prolonged period; 3) Which, to me, justifies the airlines’ no-excuses mask requirements; but 4) In spite of a symptomatic un-masked passenger coughing away in the front of the plane, no non-adjacent passengers got infected -- so maybe the airline execs’ confidence in HEPA filters kinda justified. I’ll put <a href=\"https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/11/20-3299_article\">a link to the CDC paper</a> in the show notes. It’s not that long. It’s interesting to read the source document rather than just a headline or a short USAToday blurb.</li><li>Having said all that, I’m in no way, shape, or form justifying the “hygiene theater” that the travel industry seems to be trying to use to bring folks back. I talked back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/07/17/podcast-165-first-post-lockdown-flight-when-does-business-travel-come-back/\">the July episode</a> about the “Hertz Gold Standard Clean” sticker Hertz is slapping across driver-side doors. And there are some hotels now scheduling cleaning during the day rather than overnight so guests can see it. And then, on my American flights between Chicago and Philly last week, the banner across the top of the American Way magazine cover in the seatback pocket - “This magazine has been treated with an antimicrobial process” -- which I guess means “Please, feel safe to open it up and look at the advertisements.” I dunno, it feels a bit like the “security theater” we all went through after 9/11 - it was less about actually making things safer and more about making us “feel” safer -- and so, more willing to get on a plane. But maybe if I’m an airline or hotel exec facing down the pain of laying off thousands or tens of thousands of people if travelers don’t come back, that distinction is meaningless; I’m just trying to survive.</li><li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/48705\">Jolanta Blues</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: Admiral Bob, Martijn de Boer</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Quarantine Theater</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>While some folks in the hospitality industry are talking about “hygiene theater”, what about “quarantine theater”? Back in the August episode, I talked about the complexity local and state travel bans and quarantine measures are causing for people trying to plan some sort of travel.&nbsp;</li><li>My son Andrew and his significant other headed out to Portland, ME last month for work. The week before they left, the Marriott emailed him a form - “Please certify one of the following is true - I have received a negative COVID test performed no later than 72 hours prior to my arrival, or will quarantine for 14 days upon my arrival in Maine.” Since they were only going to be in Portland for 4 days, they trundled down to the nearest testing site for the quick test 2 days before they left -- where they got chewed out by one of the testers. “We’re running out of the quick tests. You should’ve planned better.” OK, how long to get results from the other test? “5 days” But that won’t meet Maine’s 3-day requirement. Tester just walks away. But they got their negative test results and got on their plane to Portland -- where no one in the airport or the hotel asked to see it.&nbsp; OK, not harm done other than the discomfort of a Q-tip probing their sinuses and a random bit of yelling, but waste scarce testing resources?</li><li>Chicago’s quarantine is also a bit of kabuki. Once a week the city’s health commission gets in front of the press to scold another state or two -- this week was Indiana and Wisconsin. There’s now 25 states and Puerto Rico that if you’re traveling from there to Chicago, you’re supposed to self-quarantine for 14 days or face fines up to $7,000. More interesting is that Chicago’s threshold for getting on the list is 15 new daily cases per 100,000 residents. On this week’s <a href=\"https://www.chicago.gov/city/en/sites/covid-19/home/emergency-travel-order.html\">tally,</a> Indiana is running in the 20-30 range, but so is the state of Illinois. You could call it hypocritical or pragmatic or keeping its powder dry for when the city needs another bucket of money from the state, but Chicago hasn’t put the rest of Illinois on its quarantine list.</li><li>Now, I’ve yet to hear of anyone who has actually self-quarantined and as of last week, <a href=\"https://chicago.cbslocal.com/2020/10/02/three-months-into-chicagos-emergency-travel-order-no-fines-issued-enforcement-focus-remains-on-education/\">no one has been rung up for not doing so</a>. But last month, a friend told me about how Chicago’s quarantine theater hit her last month. She finally got ‘round to taking some vacation at the end of the summer. She lives in Chicago, but is a big outdoors person; looking at airfares and tossing some darts at a map, she decided to go hit Bryce Canyon and Zion National Parks in Southern Utah. So she’s down there for a couple of days when her boss calls her. “They just announced that Utah is going on the city’s quarantine list. It’s not official until Friday, so I guess if you get out of there by Thursday, you won’t have to quarantine for 2 weeks before coming back to work.” And, it didn’t need to be said, those 2 weeks of self-quarantine wouldn’t be paid. My friend is unique in that she works for maybe the one company in Chicago that takes the city’s quarantine order seriously. So my friend fought through lousy cell coverage to see what she could salvage of the back half of her vacation. Luckily, she has friends in Oregon, which isn’t on the city’s list. So Thursday, she cut her hiking short, schlepped the 4½ hours back up to SLC and caught the last flight out to Portland -- which let her come back to work and make some money the next week.</li><li>Theater isn’t a new thing. If you’re, say, a <em>mature</em> traveler, you got to play a bit part in the security theater that premiered after 9/11 and the underwear bomber. While not a perfect analogy (and really, nothing ever is), we can see some similar theatrics -- government agencies (TSA then, health departments now) investing in activities that signal they are serious, but that most folks know aren’t really effective. For me and I think for most frequent travelers, the security theater ended with TSA PreCheck -- it seemed, again to most of us, as a reasonable balance between risk and getting on with our traveling lives. I don’t know what that looks like for quarantine theater, but I sure hope it doesn’t take the 10 years it took to figure out PreCheck.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djiz/10514\">Nube - Djiz Rmx</a> by Kwame (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: SylviaO</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Traveling For Food</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I talked at the start of the episode about eating my way through Philadelphia a couple of weeks back, and it was just that. We landed Thursday around 11:30a and were hitting our favs at Reading Terminal Market by 1:30p. I went straight for Tommy Dinic’s for the roast pork sandwich with sharp provolone and broccoli rabe while Irene and Claire made for the Mennonite pretzel place and Termini Brothers for fresh-filled cannolis. And then as we were leaving, I swung past one of the PA Dutch stands to buy a 1-lb block of scrapple for breakfast the rest of the stay.</li><li>Back in the August episode in the interview with Emily Thomas about her book <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2IpLXnd\"><em>The Meaning of Travel</em></a><em>, </em>we talked about a chapter on global homogenization. One of the bits that I edited out was the observation that, back 10-20 year ago, it was fun to go shopping and bring something unique back home. But now, with globalized e-commerce, there’s not much that you can’t find easier (and often cheaper) on Amazon or Taobao or Rakuten. And so, for me, food is the one experience of a place that can’t be easily exported and bought on-line.</li><li>On our trip to the UP -- Michigan’s Upper Peninsula -- along with the biking, hiking, and kayaking, we were also on a bit of a <a href=\"https://thepastyguy.com/portfolio/the-pasty-trail-best-pasties-in-up/\">pasty tasting tour</a>. The UP is pretty well known -- in the Midwest at least -- for their <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pasty\">pasties</a>, brought over by Cornish miners working the copper mines. We had traditional pasties filled with steak, potatoes, onions, and rutabagas, and breakfast pasties. We worked our ways through the finer points of pasty critique -- picking out the pasties made from lard-based doughs, and fillings that held together so you could eat the pasty with your hand but weren’t just complete mush.</li><li>It’s funny how these comparison dishes can crop up on a vacation. On a trip to Phuket, Thailand, Andrew ordered pad thai everywhere we ate. On a trip to Hungary, Irene searched every menu for <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisherman\'s_soup\">halászlé</a> - a spicy fish soup - after having a great bowl of it at lunch with her cousin in some little town on the shores of <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Balaton\">Lake Balaton</a>. And again Irene, in Spain now, searched every city we visited for <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salmorejo\">salmorejo</a>, not quite soup, more of a tomato and bread and olive oil and garlic purée. These sorta horizontal tasting, some would be planned -- like our pasty tour -- and some would just come up, like Irene’s halászlé hunt. But it’d be fun, getting a feel for what the base of the dish is, what everyone agrees on, and what people put their own spin on, because usually for these core dishes -- dishes that everyone around has eaten all their lives -- everyone has an opinion about them. And that’s part of what makes the broad/horizontal tasting fun.</li><li>And also, these dishes don’t seem to be “industrialized.” While I’ve had mass produced pasties in the UK, grabbing something out from the West Cornish Pasty hut in Waterloo Station while running for a train, the pasties in the UP were much more -- not “artisanal” because I don’t think anyone making pasties in the UP would use that word, but “family made”. At Miners Pasties in Munising, which came out top in our pasty ranks, the woman helping us at the counter said the lard pastry recipe came from the owner’s grandmother and only 3 people know it -- the granddaughters and their niece. And only those three make the pastry each day.&nbsp; We sat back and enjoyed those pasties because we knew we wouldn’t be eating them again unless and until we found our way back to this bench again some day.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #168</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and now, <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_168.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food','','inherit','closed','closed','','2896-revision-v1','','','2020-10-16 18:05:20','2020-10-16 23:05:20','',2896,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/2896-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2902,1,'2020-10-16 18:10:22','2020-10-16 23:10:22','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":2899,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-1024x1024.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2899\"/><figcaption>My mission is clear</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Spent a week in <a href=\"https://www.uptravel.com/\">Michigan\'s Upper Peninsula</a> hiking, biking, kayaking, and running into a lot of other people getting away to do the same, which got me looking back six months to the start of the pandemic. I talk do the same, which got me looking back six months to the start of the pandemic. I talk about a surprisingly good flight cancellation experience with American Airlines, and figuring out how to download 12 years of <a href=\"https://www.tripit.com/\">TripIt</a> data. We wrap up talking to <a href=\"https://www.lendingtree.com/writer/matt-schulz/\">Matt Schulz</a> of <a href=\"https://www.lendingtree.com/\">LendingTree</a>, asking him what are we doing with travel credit cards that are generating frequent traveler points we can’t use? All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_168.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>download</strong></a> the podcast file, subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/896151355&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #168: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after a long weekend of eating and drinking and eating some more with friends in Philadelphia, a family we’ve traveled with before - South Africa, Singapore, Spain… and now, with COVID lockdowns, Philly. And while we’ll do a cultural thing or two, what we really like to do together is eat. It is the kind of group where comments like: “OK, we need to stop eating at 1:30 because we have 5:30 reservations” and “We’re only going to order the half-kilo of barbacoa because we’re eating again in 4 hours” are met with “Yeah, that’s a good point,” and “makes sense” rather than “I think we have a problem here.” </li><li>And Pennsylvania’s reopening regulation about needing to buy food when getting a beer didn’t help. After sneaking in a cheesesteak right before that 1:30 cutoff, we had to order some food with our afternoon beers -- the beer, of course, not subject to that 1:30 deadline because it’s liquid, so it’s not really food, so it doesn’t count. But we had to order some real, solid food with our beers. So we look at the menu -- ah, brussels sprouts, it’s a vegetable, that’s kinda healthy. Five minutes later, our beers arrive with a wire basket full of deep-fried brussels sprouts doused in a sweet chili sauce. So much for healthy.</li><li>But some of the bars, the smaller ones, the neighborhood ones, gamed it -- as these places are wont to do -- by putting a $1 food item on the menu -- 2 hard boiled eggs at one bar, a PB&amp;J at another. The best, though, was the Pop Tart we had with our last beer at Ray’s Happy Birthday Bar in South Philly. That one won the prize.</li><li>Which we found because we skipped the usual downtown/Center City/Society Hill hotels and grabbed an Airbnb in South Philly - kinda sandwiched between the older Italian neighborhoods and the newer Little Saigon area. We spent a lot of time outdoors, walking the neighborhoods -- and walking off our food -- and stopping in at neighborhood joints. One day, we’re picking up salamis and cheese from the Italian Market; another day, we’re buying banh mi’s from a Vietnamese bakery. I’ll write up a list of our favorite places for the TravelCommons website in a couple of weeks -- after my cholesterol level gets back to some semblance of normal.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/duckett/2333\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Another Girl (instrumental)</a> by duckett (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/duckett/23334 Ft: fourstones, miafas</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>First, a big “Thank You” to Gary Learned who goes by Denrael on social media for his review in Apple Podcasts. Gary is a long-time TravelCommons listener. Indeed, he’s pointed me to some great restaurants in places like Seattle and Memphis. Gary wrote a couple of weeks ago:<ul><li>“When people ask where I live, I usually just say airports and hilton. As someone who lives the life of the road warrior, I find this podcast strikes an all-to-familiar chord with my own experiences. A definite must-listen to understand the life of the traveller.</li><li>“I wrote the above a number of years ago and it is as true now as it was then, I look forward to Mark’s take on travel, it’s more about the journey, and cannot count the number of times when I’ve shook my head, laughed and said “yep, been there.”</li></ul></li><li>Gary, thanks for that. And thanks for staying with me this long.</li><li>The FBI pushed out a consumer alert last week to remind folks about the risks when using hotel wi-fi. We’ve talked about this many times and I think most frequent travelers know the drill when accessing any shared wi-fi, whether it be in a hotel or an airport or a bar or a Starbucks. Nothing new there, so why the FBI alert? Because the “FBI has observed a trend where individuals who were previously teleworking from home are beginning to telework from hotels. US hotels, predominantly in major cities, have begun to advertise daytime room reservations for guests seeking a quiet, distraction-free work environment.” So people who used to work in offices and have been working from home since March, are looking for a change of scenery, but either can’t or aren’t keen to go back to the group office setting. Enter downtown hotels, many of whom, we mentioned last month, are slouching towards bankruptcy because of low occupancy. Don’t want a bed for the night? How ‘bout a desk for the day? I just got an email from Omni Hotels pitching just that -- “Trade up your classroom for everything you need for a productive day of work plus downtown Los Angeles views.” I guess the FBI thinks these displaced office workers, used to working on secure corporate or home networks, might not be as careful. But even for frequent travelers, the alert is a good read:  talking about the dangers of an “evil twin” attack, logging onto what looks like a hotel wi-fi but is actually a hacker’s network; logging into the actual hotel wi-fi which has been compromised through exploits in out-of-date or unpatched network hardware. The FBI’s top recommendations are ones we’ve <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/09/20/podcast-155-rj-delays-street-food-in-poland-and-hungary/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #155 — RJ Delays; Street Food in Poland and Hungary\">repeated</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/02/20/podcast-127-critiquing-my-top-10-travel-tips-reviewing-vpns/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #127 — Critiquing My Top 10 Travel Tips; Reviewing VPNs\">numerous</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/12/20/podcast-119-digital-security-on-the-road-us-airports-getting-better/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #119 — Digital Security On The Road; US Airports Getting Better?\">times</a> - use a VPN when you connect to public wi-fi, or avoid them altogether with a mobile hotspot. Even when I’ve had a corporate VPN, I’ve always used one of the top paid VPN providers - NordVPN, PIA or ExpressVPN - because their software is so much better. I’m using NordVPN now, and whenever I’m not on a private network, I fire up the Nord client and it handles everything -- connects to the best server, reconnects automatically when I open the lid to wake up my Mac again. I don’t have to think about it. Indeed, half the time I forget to shut it off at home, until I’m wondering why I can’t move a file to another PC. Also, only access secure websites; I used to say “look for https://” but I guess that was too geeky, so you need to look for lock icons instead. And, of course, enable 2-factor authentication whenever you can. Nothing new, but a good reminder nonetheless. I’ll put a <a href=\"https://www.ic3.gov/media/2020/201006.aspx\">link to the alert</a> in the show notes, but you can also find links on the TravelCommons Facebook page and Twitter account.</li><li>OK, I gotta ask “what happened to Greta Thunberg\'s ‘flygskam’ or ‘flight shaming’ -- the 2019 existential travel threat? Because the whole Asian thing of “flights to nowhere” -- EVA Air from Taiwan filling up its “Hello Kitty” plane, All Nippon doing a fake flight to Hawaii, and then Qantas selling out a 787 for a lap around Australia. Singapore Air scrapped their “flight to nowhere” at the last minute, instead turning one of their A380s into a pop-up restaurant. I have to tell you that, honestly, I just don’t get this. For me, the flight is a means to an end -- something I’ve got to bear to get where I want to go. Getting on that American 737 in ORD last week didn’t fill me with joy; it was just simple math -- 2 hrs in a plane vs. 11 hrs in a car. And all that I just said… goes double for the idea of voluntarily buying airplane meals to eat at home. Words fail me.</li><li>At the end of September, the CDC did an early release of an article slated for the November issue of their peer-reviewed journal <em>Emerging Infectious Diseases</em> (and I thought <em>Walden Pond</em> was a cure for insomnia). The article analyzed the in-flight transmission of coronavirus from one business class passenger to 14 other passengers and a crew member on a 10-hour Vietnam Air flight from London to Hanoi. Most of the reactions in the press and on Twitter were “Yikes! Single passenger infects 15 people!”. While noting the CDC’s disclaimer “Early release articles are not considered as final versions” (which I didn’t see mentioned in any of the press articles), I came away with a less-than- “Yikes” after reading the whole paper. The flight was on March 2nd, so while the world was still trying to figure this novel coronavirus thing out and way before mandatory in-flight masks. And the passenger was symptomatic with a cough and a sore throat. Of the 14 passengers infected, 12 were in the same business class cabin and of those, all but one were within a 2-seat radius. And the authors aren’t sure if the 2 economy class infections were from the business class index case or from a different source. My takeaways: 1) Don’t let symptomatic people on planes - even if temperature checks aren’t perfect, it might catch some folks and will certainly make people think about their condition before flying; 2) Because this appears to validate the risk of being kept in close proximity to an infected person over a prolonged period; 3) Which, to me, justifies the airlines’ no-excuses mask requirements; but 4) In spite of a symptomatic un-masked passenger coughing away in the front of the plane, no non-adjacent passengers got infected -- so maybe the airline execs’ confidence in HEPA filters kinda justified. I’ll put <a href=\"https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/11/20-3299_article\">a link to the CDC paper</a> in the show notes. It’s not that long. It’s interesting to read the source document rather than just a headline or a short USAToday blurb.</li><li>Having said all that, I’m in no way, shape, or form justifying the “hygiene theater” that the travel industry seems to be trying to use to bring folks back. I talked back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/07/17/podcast-165-first-post-lockdown-flight-when-does-business-travel-come-back/\">the July episode</a> about the “Hertz Gold Standard Clean” sticker Hertz is slapping across driver-side doors. And there are some hotels now scheduling cleaning during the day rather than overnight so guests can see it. And then, on my American flights between Chicago and Philly last week, the banner across the top of the American Way magazine cover in the seatback pocket - “This magazine has been treated with an antimicrobial process” -- which I guess means “Please, feel safe to open it up and look at the advertisements.” I dunno, it feels a bit like the “security theater” we all went through after 9/11 - it was less about actually making things safer and more about making us “feel” safer -- and so, more willing to get on a plane. But maybe if I’m an airline or hotel exec facing down the pain of laying off thousands or tens of thousands of people if travelers don’t come back, that distinction is meaningless; I’m just trying to survive.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/48705\">Jolanta Blues</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license.  Ft: Admiral Bob, Martijn de Boer</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Quarantine Theater</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>While some folks in the hospitality industry are talking about “hygiene theater”, what about “quarantine theater”? Back in the August episode, I talked about the complexity local and state travel bans and quarantine measures are causing for people trying to plan some sort of travel.&nbsp;</li><li>My son Andrew and his significant other headed out to Portland, ME last month for work. The week before they left, the Marriott emailed him a form - “Please certify one of the following is true - I have received a negative COVID test performed no later than 72 hours prior to my arrival, or will quarantine for 14 days upon my arrival in Maine.” Since they were only going to be in Portland for 4 days, they trundled down to the nearest testing site for the quick test 2 days before they left -- where they got chewed out by one of the testers. “We’re running out of the quick tests. You should’ve planned better.” OK, how long to get results from the other test? “5 days” But that won’t meet Maine’s 3-day requirement. Tester just walks away. But they got their negative test results and got on their plane to Portland -- where no one in the airport or the hotel asked to see it.&nbsp; OK, not harm done other than the discomfort of a Q-tip probing their sinuses and a random bit of yelling, but waste scarce testing resources?</li><li>Chicago’s quarantine is also a bit of kabuki. Once a week the city’s health commission gets in front of the press to scold another state or two -- this week was Indiana and Wisconsin. There’s now 25 states and Puerto Rico that if you’re traveling from there to Chicago, you’re supposed to self-quarantine for 14 days or face fines up to $7,000. More interesting is that Chicago’s threshold for getting on the list is 15 new daily cases per 100,000 residents. On this week’s <a href=\"https://www.chicago.gov/city/en/sites/covid-19/home/emergency-travel-order.html\">tally,</a> Indiana is running in the 20-30 range, but so is the state of Illinois. You could call it hypocritical or pragmatic or keeping its powder dry for when the city needs another bucket of money from the state, but Chicago hasn’t put the rest of Illinois on its quarantine list.</li><li>Now, I’ve yet to hear of anyone who has actually self-quarantined and as of last week, <a href=\"https://chicago.cbslocal.com/2020/10/02/three-months-into-chicagos-emergency-travel-order-no-fines-issued-enforcement-focus-remains-on-education/\">no one has been rung up for not doing so</a>. But last month, a friend told me about how Chicago’s quarantine theater hit her last month. She finally got ‘round to taking some vacation at the end of the summer. She lives in Chicago, but is a big outdoors person; looking at airfares and tossing some darts at a map, she decided to go hit Bryce Canyon and Zion National Parks in Southern Utah. So she’s down there for a couple of days when her boss calls her. “They just announced that Utah is going on the city’s quarantine list. It’s not official until Friday, so I guess if you get out of there by Thursday, you won’t have to quarantine for 2 weeks before coming back to work.” And, it didn’t need to be said, those 2 weeks of self-quarantine wouldn’t be paid. My friend is unique in that she works for maybe the one company in Chicago that takes the city’s quarantine order seriously. So my friend fought through lousy cell coverage to see what she could salvage of the back half of her vacation. Luckily, she has friends in Oregon, which isn’t on the city’s list. So Thursday, she cut her hiking short, schlepped the 4½ hours back up to SLC and caught the last flight out to Portland -- which let her come back to work and make some money the next week.</li><li>Theater isn’t a new thing. If you’re, say, a <em>mature</em> traveler, you got to play a bit part in the security theater that premiered after 9/11 and the underwear bomber. While not a perfect analogy (and really, nothing ever is), we can see some similar theatrics -- government agencies (TSA then, health departments now) investing in activities that signal they are serious, but that most folks know aren’t really effective. For me and I think for most frequent travelers, the security theater ended with TSA PreCheck -- it seemed, again to most of us, as a reasonable balance between risk and getting on with our traveling lives. I don’t know what that looks like for quarantine theater, but I sure hope it doesn’t take the 10 years it took to figure out PreCheck.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djiz/10514\">Nube - Djiz Rmx</a> by Kwame (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: SylviaO</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Traveling For Food</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I talked at the start of the episode about eating my way through Philadelphia a couple of weeks back, and it was just that. We landed Thursday around 11:30a and were hitting our favs at Reading Terminal Market by 1:30p. I went straight for Tommy Dinic’s for the roast pork sandwich with sharp provolone and broccoli rabe while Irene and Claire made for the Mennonite pretzel place and Termini Brothers for fresh-filled cannolis. And then as we were leaving, I swung past one of the PA Dutch stands to buy a 1-lb block of scrapple for breakfast the rest of the stay.</li><li>Back in the August episode in the interview with Emily Thomas about her book <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2IpLXnd\"><em>The Meaning of Travel</em></a><em>, </em>we talked about a chapter on global homogenization. One of the bits that I edited out was the observation that, back 10-20 year ago, it was fun to go shopping and bring something unique back home. But now, with globalized e-commerce, there’s not much that you can’t find easier (and often cheaper) on Amazon or Taobao or Rakuten. And so, for me, food is the one experience of a place that can’t be easily exported and bought on-line.</li><li>On our trip to the UP -- Michigan’s Upper Peninsula -- along with the biking, hiking, and kayaking, we were also on a bit of a <a href=\"https://thepastyguy.com/portfolio/the-pasty-trail-best-pasties-in-up/\">pasty tasting tour</a>. The UP is pretty well known -- in the Midwest at least -- for their <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pasty\">pasties</a>, brought over by Cornish miners working the copper mines. We had traditional pasties filled with steak, potatoes, onions, and rutabagas, and breakfast pasties. We worked our ways through the finer points of pasty critique -- picking out the pasties made from lard-based doughs, and fillings that held together so you could eat the pasty with your hand but weren’t just complete mush.</li><li>It’s funny how these comparison dishes can crop up on a vacation. On a trip to Phuket, Thailand, Andrew ordered pad thai everywhere we ate. On a trip to Hungary, Irene searched every menu for <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisherman\'s_soup\">halászlé</a> - a spicy fish soup - after having a great bowl of it at lunch with her cousin in some little town on the shores of <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Balaton\">Lake Balaton</a>. And again Irene, in Spain now, searched every city we visited for <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salmorejo\">salmorejo</a>, not quite soup, more of a tomato and bread and olive oil and garlic purée. These sorta horizontal tasting, some would be planned -- like our pasty tour -- and some would just come up, like Irene’s halászlé hunt. But it’d be fun, getting a feel for what the base of the dish is, what everyone agrees on, and what people put their own spin on, because usually for these core dishes -- dishes that everyone around has eaten all their lives -- everyone has an opinion about them. And that’s part of what makes the broad/horizontal tasting fun.</li><li>And also, these dishes don’t seem to be “industrialized.” While I’ve had mass produced pasties in the UK, grabbing something out from the West Cornish Pasty hut in Waterloo Station while running for a train, the pasties in the UP were much more -- not “artisanal” because I don’t think anyone making pasties in the UP would use that word, but “family made”. At Miners Pasties in Munising, which came out top in our pasty ranks, the woman helping us at the counter said the lard pastry recipe came from the owner’s grandmother and only 3 people know it -- the granddaughters and their niece. And only those three make the pastry each day.&nbsp; We sat back and enjoyed those pasties because we knew we wouldn’t be eating them again unless and until we found our way back to this bench again some day.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #168</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and now, <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_168.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food','','inherit','closed','closed','','2896-revision-v1','','','2020-10-16 18:10:22','2020-10-16 23:10:22','',2896,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/2896-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2903,1,'2020-10-16 18:11:48','2020-10-16 23:11:48','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":2899,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-1024x1024.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2899\"/><figcaption>My mission is clear</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Spent a week in <a href=\"https://www.uptravel.com/\">Michigan\'s Upper Peninsula</a> hiking, biking, kayaking, and running into a lot of other people getting away to do the same, which got me looking back six months to the start of the pandemic. I talk do the same, which got me looking back six months to the start of the pandemic. I talk about a surprisingly good flight cancellation experience with American Airlines, and figuring out how to download 12 years of <a href=\"https://www.tripit.com/\">TripIt</a> data. We wrap up talking to <a href=\"https://www.lendingtree.com/writer/matt-schulz/\">Matt Schulz</a> of <a href=\"https://www.lendingtree.com/\">LendingTree</a>, asking him what are we doing with travel credit cards that are generating frequent traveler points we can’t use? All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_168.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>download</strong></a> the podcast file, subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/896151355&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #168: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after a long weekend of eating and drinking and eating some more with friends in Philadelphia, a family we’ve traveled with before - South Africa, Singapore, Spain… and now, with COVID lockdowns, Philly. And while we’ll do a cultural thing or two, what we really like to do together is eat. It is the kind of group where comments like: “OK, we need to stop eating at 1:30 because we have 5:30 reservations” and “We’re only going to order the half-kilo of barbacoa because we’re eating again in 4 hours” are met with “Yeah, that’s a good point,” and “makes sense” rather than “I think we have a problem here.” </li><li>And Pennsylvania’s reopening regulation about needing to buy food when getting a beer didn’t help. After sneaking in a cheesesteak right before that 1:30 cutoff, we had to order some food with our afternoon beers -- the beer, of course, not subject to that 1:30 deadline because it’s liquid, so it’s not really food, so it doesn’t count. But we had to order some real, solid food with our beers. So we look at the menu -- ah, brussels sprouts, it’s a vegetable, that’s kinda healthy. Five minutes later, our beers arrive with a wire basket full of deep-fried brussels sprouts doused in a sweet chili sauce. So much for healthy.</li><li>But some of the bars, the smaller ones, the neighborhood ones, gamed it -- as these places are wont to do -- by putting a $1 food item on the menu -- 2 hard boiled eggs at one bar, a PB&amp;J at another. The best, though, was the Pop Tart we had with our last beer at Ray’s Happy Birthday Bar in South Philly. That one won the prize.</li><li>Which we found because we skipped the usual downtown/Center City/Society Hill hotels and grabbed an Airbnb in South Philly - kinda sandwiched between the older Italian neighborhoods and the newer Little Saigon area. We spent a lot of time outdoors, walking the neighborhoods -- and walking off our food -- and stopping in at neighborhood joints. One day, we’re picking up salamis and cheese from the Italian Market; another day, we’re buying banh mi’s from a Vietnamese bakery. I’ll write up a list of our favorite places for the TravelCommons website in a couple of weeks -- after my cholesterol level gets back to some semblance of normal.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/duckett/2333\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Another Girl (instrumental)</a> by duckett (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/duckett/23334 Ft: fourstones, miafas</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>First, a big “Thank You” to Gary Learned who goes by Denrael on social media for his review in Apple Podcasts. Gary is a long-time TravelCommons listener. Indeed, he’s pointed me to some great restaurants in places like Seattle and Memphis. Gary wrote a couple of weeks ago:<ul><li>“When people ask where I live, I usually just say airports and hilton. As someone who lives the life of the road warrior, I find this podcast strikes an all-to-familiar chord with my own experiences. A definite must-listen to understand the life of the traveller.</li><li>“I wrote the above a number of years ago and it is as true now as it was then, I look forward to Mark’s take on travel, it’s more about the journey, and cannot count the number of times when I’ve shook my head, laughed and said “yep, been there.”</li></ul></li><li>Gary, thanks for that. And thanks for staying with me this long.</li><li>The FBI pushed out a consumer alert last week to remind folks about the risks when using hotel wi-fi. We’ve talked about this many times and I think most frequent travelers know the drill when accessing any shared wi-fi, whether it be in a hotel or an airport or a bar or a Starbucks. Nothing new there, so why the FBI alert? Because the “FBI has observed a trend where individuals who were previously teleworking from home are beginning to telework from hotels. US hotels, predominantly in major cities, have begun to advertise daytime room reservations for guests seeking a quiet, distraction-free work environment.” So people who used to work in offices and have been working from home since March, are looking for a change of scenery, but either can’t or aren’t keen to go back to the group office setting. Enter downtown hotels, many of whom, we mentioned last month, are slouching towards bankruptcy because of low occupancy. Don’t want a bed for the night? How ‘bout a desk for the day? I just got an email from Omni Hotels pitching just that -- “Trade up your classroom for everything you need for a productive day of work plus downtown Los Angeles views.” I guess the FBI thinks these displaced office workers, used to working on secure corporate or home networks, might not be as careful. But even for frequent travelers, the alert is a good read:  talking about the dangers of an “evil twin” attack, logging onto what looks like a hotel wi-fi but is actually a hacker’s network; logging into the actual hotel wi-fi which has been compromised through exploits in out-of-date or unpatched network hardware. The FBI’s top recommendations are ones we’ve <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/09/20/podcast-155-rj-delays-street-food-in-poland-and-hungary/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #155 — RJ Delays; Street Food in Poland and Hungary\">repeated</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/02/20/podcast-127-critiquing-my-top-10-travel-tips-reviewing-vpns/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #127 — Critiquing My Top 10 Travel Tips; Reviewing VPNs\">numerous</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/12/20/podcast-119-digital-security-on-the-road-us-airports-getting-better/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #119 — Digital Security On The Road; US Airports Getting Better?\">times</a> - use a VPN when you connect to public wi-fi, or avoid them altogether with a mobile hotspot. Even when I’ve had a corporate VPN, I’ve always used one of the top paid VPN providers - NordVPN, PIA or ExpressVPN - because their software is so much better. I’m using NordVPN now, and whenever I’m not on a private network, I fire up the Nord client and it handles everything -- connects to the best server, reconnects automatically when I open the lid to wake up my Mac again. I don’t have to think about it. Indeed, half the time I forget to shut it off at home, until I’m wondering why I can’t move a file to another PC. Also, only access secure websites; I used to say “look for https://” but I guess that was too geeky, so you need to look for lock icons instead. And, of course, enable 2-factor authentication whenever you can. Nothing new, but a good reminder nonetheless. I’ll put a <a href=\"https://www.ic3.gov/media/2020/201006.aspx\">link to the alert</a> in the show notes, but you can also find links on the TravelCommons Facebook page and Twitter account.</li><li>OK, I gotta ask “what happened to Greta Thunberg\'s ‘flygskam’ or ‘flight shaming’ -- the 2019 existential travel threat? Because the whole Asian thing of “flights to nowhere” -- EVA Air from Taiwan filling up its “Hello Kitty” plane, All Nippon doing a fake flight to Hawaii, and then Qantas selling out a 787 for a lap around Australia. Singapore Air scrapped their “flight to nowhere” at the last minute, instead turning one of their A380s into a pop-up restaurant. I have to tell you that, honestly, I just don’t get this. For me, the flight is a means to an end -- something I’ve got to bear to get where I want to go. Getting on that American 737 in ORD last week didn’t fill me with joy; it was just simple math -- 2 hrs in a plane vs. 11 hrs in a car. And all that I just said… goes double for the idea of voluntarily buying airplane meals to eat at home. Words fail me.</li><li>At the end of September, the CDC did an early release of an article slated for the November issue of their peer-reviewed journal <em>Emerging Infectious Diseases</em> (and I thought <em>Walden Pond</em> was a cure for insomnia). The article analyzed the in-flight transmission of coronavirus from one business class passenger to 14 other passengers and a crew member on a 10-hour Vietnam Air flight from London to Hanoi. Most of the reactions in the press and on Twitter were “Yikes! Single passenger infects 15 people!”. While noting the CDC’s disclaimer “Early release articles are not considered as final versions” (which I didn’t see mentioned in any of the press articles), I came away with a less-than- “Yikes” after reading the whole paper. The flight was on March 2nd, so while the world was still trying to figure this novel coronavirus thing out and way before mandatory in-flight masks. And the passenger was symptomatic with a cough and a sore throat. Of the 14 passengers infected, 12 were in the same business class cabin and of those, all but one were within a 2-seat radius. And the authors aren’t sure if the 2 economy class infections were from the business class index case or from a different source. My takeaways: 1) Don’t let symptomatic people on planes - even if temperature checks aren’t perfect, it might catch some folks and will certainly make people think about their condition before flying; 2) Because this appears to validate the risk of being kept in close proximity to an infected person over a prolonged period; 3) Which, to me, justifies the airlines’ no-excuses mask requirements; but 4) In spite of a symptomatic un-masked passenger coughing away in the front of the plane, no non-adjacent passengers got infected -- so maybe the airline execs’ confidence in HEPA filters kinda justified. I’ll put <a href=\"https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/11/20-3299_article\">a link to the CDC paper</a> in the show notes. It’s not that long. It’s interesting to read the source document rather than just a headline or a short USAToday blurb.</li><li>Having said all that, I’m in no way, shape, or form justifying the “hygiene theater” that the travel industry seems to be trying to use to bring folks back. I talked back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/07/17/podcast-165-first-post-lockdown-flight-when-does-business-travel-come-back/\">the July episode</a> about the “Hertz Gold Standard Clean” sticker Hertz is slapping across driver-side doors. And there are some hotels now scheduling cleaning during the day rather than overnight so guests can see it. And then, on my American flights between Chicago and Philly last week, the banner across the top of the American Way magazine cover in the seatback pocket - “This magazine has been treated with an antimicrobial process” -- which I guess means “Please, feel safe to open it up and look at the advertisements.” I dunno, it feels a bit like the “security theater” we all went through after 9/11 - it was less about actually making things safer and more about making us “feel” safer -- and so, more willing to get on a plane. But maybe if I’m an airline or hotel exec facing down the pain of laying off thousands or tens of thousands of people if travelers don’t come back, that distinction is meaningless; I’m just trying to survive.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/48705\">Jolanta Blues</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license.  Ft: Admiral Bob, Martijn de Boer</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Quarantine Theater</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>While some folks in the hospitality industry are talking about “hygiene theater”, what about “quarantine theater”? Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #166 — What Is The Meaning of Travel?\">August episode</a>, I talked about the complexity local and state travel bans and quarantine measures are causing for people trying to plan some sort of travel. </li><li>My son Andrew and his significant other headed out to Portland, ME last month for work. The week before they left, the Marriott emailed him a form - “Please certify one of the following is true - I have received a negative COVID test performed no later than 72 hours prior to my arrival, or will quarantine for 14 days upon my arrival in Maine.” Since they were only going to be in Portland for 4 days, they trundled down to the nearest testing site for the quick test 2 days before they left -- where they got chewed out by one of the testers. “We’re running out of the quick tests. You should’ve planned better.” OK, how long to get results from the other test? “5 days” But that won’t meet Maine’s 3-day requirement. Tester just walks away. But they got their negative test results and got on their plane to Portland -- where no one in the airport or the hotel asked to see it.  OK, not harm done other than the discomfort of a Q-tip probing their sinuses and a random bit of yelling, but waste scarce testing resources?</li><li>Chicago’s quarantine is also a bit of kabuki. Once a week the city’s health commission gets in front of the press to scold another state or two -- this week was Indiana and Wisconsin. There’s now 25 states and Puerto Rico that if you’re traveling from there to Chicago, you’re supposed to self-quarantine for 14 days or face fines up to $7,000. More interesting is that Chicago’s threshold for getting on the list is 15 new daily cases per 100,000 residents. On this week’s <a href=\"https://www.chicago.gov/city/en/sites/covid-19/home/emergency-travel-order.html\">tally,</a> Indiana is running in the 20-30 range, but so is the state of Illinois. You could call it hypocritical or pragmatic or keeping its powder dry for when the city needs another bucket of money from the state, but Chicago hasn’t put the rest of Illinois on its quarantine list.</li><li>Now, I’ve yet to hear of anyone who has actually self-quarantined and as of last week, <a href=\"https://chicago.cbslocal.com/2020/10/02/three-months-into-chicagos-emergency-travel-order-no-fines-issued-enforcement-focus-remains-on-education/\">no one has been rung up for not doing so</a>. But last month, a friend told me about how Chicago’s quarantine theater hit her last month. She finally got ‘round to taking some vacation at the end of the summer. She lives in Chicago, but is a big outdoors person; looking at airfares and tossing some darts at a map, she decided to go hit Bryce Canyon and Zion National Parks in Southern Utah. So she’s down there for a couple of days when her boss calls her. “They just announced that Utah is going on the city’s quarantine list. It’s not official until Friday, so I guess if you get out of there by Thursday, you won’t have to quarantine for 2 weeks before coming back to work.” And, it didn’t need to be said, those 2 weeks of self-quarantine wouldn’t be paid. My friend is unique in that she works for maybe the one company in Chicago that takes the city’s quarantine order seriously. So my friend fought through lousy cell coverage to see what she could salvage of the back half of her vacation. Luckily, she has friends in Oregon, which isn’t on the city’s list. So Thursday, she cut her hiking short, schlepped the 4½ hours back up to SLC and caught the last flight out to Portland -- which let her come back to work and make some money the next week.</li><li>Theater isn’t a new thing. If you’re, say, a <em>mature</em> traveler, you got to play a bit part in the security theater that premiered after 9/11 and the underwear bomber. While not a perfect analogy (and really, nothing ever is), we can see some similar theatrics -- government agencies (TSA then, health departments now) investing in activities that signal they are serious, but that most folks know aren’t really effective. For me and I think for most frequent travelers, the security theater ended with TSA PreCheck -- it seemed, again to most of us, as a reasonable balance between risk and getting on with our traveling lives. I don’t know what that looks like for quarantine theater, but I sure hope it doesn’t take the 10 years it took to figure out PreCheck.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djiz/10514\">Nube - Djiz Rmx</a> by Kwame (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: SylviaO</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Traveling For Food</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I talked at the start of the episode about eating my way through Philadelphia a couple of weeks back, and it was just that. We landed Thursday around 11:30a and were hitting our favs at Reading Terminal Market by 1:30p. I went straight for Tommy Dinic’s for the roast pork sandwich with sharp provolone and broccoli rabe while Irene and Claire made for the Mennonite pretzel place and Termini Brothers for fresh-filled cannolis. And then as we were leaving, I swung past one of the PA Dutch stands to buy a 1-lb block of scrapple for breakfast the rest of the stay.</li><li>Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #166 — What Is The Meaning of Travel?\">August episode</a> in the interview with Emily Thomas about her book <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2IpLXnd\"><em>The Meaning of Travel</em></a><em>, </em>we talked about a chapter on global homogenization. One of the bits that I edited out was the observation that, back 10-20 year ago, it was fun to go shopping and bring something unique back home. But now, with globalized e-commerce, there’s not much that you can’t find easier (and often cheaper) on Amazon or Taobao or Rakuten. And so, for me, food is the one experience of a place that can’t be easily exported and bought on-line.</li><li>On our trip to the UP -- Michigan’s Upper Peninsula -- along with the biking, hiking, and kayaking, we were also on a bit of a <a href=\"https://thepastyguy.com/portfolio/the-pasty-trail-best-pasties-in-up/\">pasty tasting tour</a>. The UP is pretty well known -- in the Midwest at least -- for their <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pasty\">pasties</a>, brought over by Cornish miners working the copper mines. We had traditional pasties filled with steak, potatoes, onions, and rutabagas, and breakfast pasties. We worked our ways through the finer points of pasty critique -- picking out the pasties made from lard-based doughs, and fillings that held together so you could eat the pasty with your hand but weren’t just complete mush.</li><li>It’s funny how these comparison dishes can crop up on a vacation. On a trip to Phuket, Thailand, Andrew ordered pad thai everywhere we ate. On a trip to Hungary, Irene searched every menu for <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisherman\'s_soup\">halászlé</a> - a spicy fish soup - after having a great bowl of it at lunch with her cousin in some little town on the shores of <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Balaton\">Lake Balaton</a>. And again Irene, in Spain now, searched every city we visited for <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salmorejo\">salmorejo</a>, not quite soup, more of a tomato and bread and olive oil and garlic purée. These sorta horizontal tasting, some would be planned -- like our pasty tour -- and some would just come up, like Irene’s halászlé hunt. But it’d be fun, getting a feel for what the base of the dish is, what everyone agrees on, and what people put their own spin on, because usually for these core dishes -- dishes that everyone around has eaten all their lives -- everyone has an opinion about them. And that’s part of what makes the broad/horizontal tasting fun.</li><li>And also, these dishes don’t seem to be “industrialized.” While I’ve had mass produced pasties in the UK, grabbing something out from the West Cornish Pasty hut in Waterloo Station while running for a train, the pasties in the UP were much more -- not “artisanal” because I don’t think anyone making pasties in the UP would use that word, but “family made”. At Miners Pasties in Munising, which came out top in our pasty ranks, the woman helping us at the counter said the lard pastry recipe came from the owner’s grandmother and only 3 people know it -- the granddaughters and their niece. And only those three make the pastry each day.  We sat back and enjoyed those pasties because we knew we wouldn’t be eating them again unless and until we found our way back to this bench again some day.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #168</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_168.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food','','inherit','closed','closed','','2896-revision-v1','','','2020-10-16 18:11:48','2020-10-16 23:11:48','',2896,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/2896-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2904,1,'2020-10-16 18:17:56','2020-10-16 23:17:56','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":2899,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-1024x1024.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2899\"/><figcaption>My mission is clear</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Spent a week in <a href=\"https://www.uptravel.com/\">Michigan\'s Upper Peninsula</a> hiking, biking, kayaking, and running into a lot of other people getting away to do the same, which got me looking back six months to the start of the pandemic. I talk do the same, which got me looking back six months to the start of the pandemic. I talk about a surprisingly good flight cancellation experience with American Airlines, and figuring out how to download 12 years of <a href=\"https://www.tripit.com/\">TripIt</a> data. We wrap up talking to <a href=\"https://www.lendingtree.com/writer/matt-schulz/\">Matt Schulz</a> of <a href=\"https://www.lendingtree.com/\">LendingTree</a>, asking him what are we doing with travel credit cards that are generating frequent traveler points we can’t use? All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_168.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>download</strong></a> the podcast file, subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/896151355&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #168: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after a long weekend of eating and drinking and eating some more with friends in Philadelphia, a family we’ve traveled with before - South Africa, Singapore, Spain… and now, with COVID lockdowns, Philly. And while we’ll do a cultural thing or two, what we really like to do together is eat. It is the kind of group where comments like: “OK, we need to stop eating at 1:30 because we have 5:30 reservations” and “We’re only going to order the half-kilo of barbacoa because we’re eating again in 4 hours” are met with “Yeah, that’s a good point,” and “makes sense” rather than “I think we have a problem here.” </li><li>And Pennsylvania’s reopening regulation about needing to buy food when getting a beer didn’t help. After sneaking in a cheesesteak right before that 1:30 cutoff, we had to order some food with our afternoon beers -- the beer, of course, not subject to that 1:30 deadline because it’s liquid, so it’s not really food, so it doesn’t count. But we had to order some real, solid food with our beers. So we look at the menu -- ah, brussels sprouts, it’s a vegetable, that’s kinda healthy. Five minutes later, our beers arrive with a wire basket full of deep-fried brussels sprouts doused in a sweet chili sauce. So much for healthy.</li><li>But some of the bars, the smaller ones, the neighborhood ones, gamed it -- as these places are wont to do -- by putting a $1 food item on the menu -- 2 hard boiled eggs at one bar, a PB&amp;J at another. The best, though, was the Pop Tart we had with our last beer at Ray’s Happy Birthday Bar in South Philly. That one won the prize.</li><li>Which we found because we skipped the usual downtown/Center City/Society Hill hotels and grabbed an Airbnb in South Philly - kinda sandwiched between the older Italian neighborhoods and the newer Little Saigon area. We spent a lot of time outdoors, walking the neighborhoods -- and walking off our food -- and stopping in at neighborhood joints. One day, we’re picking up salamis and cheese from the Italian Market; another day, we’re buying banh mi’s from a Vietnamese bakery. I’ll write up a list of our favorite places for the TravelCommons website in a couple of weeks -- after my cholesterol level gets back to some semblance of normal.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/duckett/2333\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Another Girl (instrumental)</a> by duckett (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/duckett/23334 Ft: fourstones, miafas</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>First, a big “Thank You” to Gary Learned who goes by Denrael on social media for his review in Apple Podcasts. Gary is a long-time TravelCommons listener. Indeed, he’s pointed me to some great restaurants in places like Seattle and Memphis. Gary wrote a couple of weeks ago:<ul><li>“When people ask where I live, I usually just say airports and hilton. As someone who lives the life of the road warrior, I find this podcast strikes an all-to-familiar chord with my own experiences. A definite must-listen to understand the life of the traveller.</li><li>“I wrote the above a number of years ago and it is as true now as it was then, I look forward to Mark’s take on travel, it’s more about the journey, and cannot count the number of times when I’ve shook my head, laughed and said “yep, been there.”</li></ul></li><li>Gary, thanks for that. And thanks for staying with me this long.</li><li>The FBI pushed out a consumer alert last week to remind folks about the risks when using hotel wi-fi. We’ve talked about this many times and I think most frequent travelers know the drill when accessing any shared wi-fi, whether it be in a hotel or an airport or a bar or a Starbucks. Nothing new there, so why the FBI alert? Because the “FBI has observed a trend where individuals who were previously teleworking from home are beginning to telework from hotels. US hotels, predominantly in major cities, have begun to advertise daytime room reservations for guests seeking a quiet, distraction-free work environment.” So people who used to work in offices and have been working from home since March, are looking for a change of scenery, but either can’t or aren’t keen to go back to the group office setting. Enter downtown hotels, many of whom, we mentioned last month, are slouching towards bankruptcy because of low occupancy. Don’t want a bed for the night? How ‘bout a desk for the day? I just got an email from Omni Hotels pitching just that -- “Trade up your classroom for everything you need for a productive day of work plus downtown Los Angeles views.” I guess the FBI thinks these displaced office workers, used to working on secure corporate or home networks, might not be as careful. But even for frequent travelers, the alert is a good read:  talking about the dangers of an “evil twin” attack, logging onto what looks like a hotel wi-fi but is actually a hacker’s network; logging into the actual hotel wi-fi which has been compromised through exploits in out-of-date or unpatched network hardware. The FBI’s top recommendations are ones we’ve <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/09/20/podcast-155-rj-delays-street-food-in-poland-and-hungary/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #155 — RJ Delays; Street Food in Poland and Hungary\">repeated</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/02/20/podcast-127-critiquing-my-top-10-travel-tips-reviewing-vpns/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #127 — Critiquing My Top 10 Travel Tips; Reviewing VPNs\">numerous</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/12/20/podcast-119-digital-security-on-the-road-us-airports-getting-better/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #119 — Digital Security On The Road; US Airports Getting Better?\">times</a> - use a VPN when you connect to public wi-fi, or avoid them altogether with a mobile hotspot. Even when I’ve had a corporate VPN, I’ve always used one of the top paid VPN providers - NordVPN, PIA or ExpressVPN - because their software is so much better. I’m using NordVPN now, and whenever I’m not on a private network, I fire up the Nord client and it handles everything -- connects to the best server, reconnects automatically when I open the lid to wake up my Mac again. I don’t have to think about it. Indeed, half the time I forget to shut it off at home, until I’m wondering why I can’t move a file to another PC. Also, only access secure websites; I used to say “look for https://” but I guess that was too geeky, so you need to look for lock icons instead. And, of course, enable 2-factor authentication whenever you can. Nothing new, but a good reminder nonetheless. I’ll put a <a href=\"https://www.ic3.gov/media/2020/201006.aspx\">link to the alert</a> in the show notes, but you can also find links on the TravelCommons Facebook page and Twitter account.</li><li>OK, I gotta ask “what happened to Greta Thunberg\'s ‘flygskam’ or ‘flight shaming’ -- the 2019 existential travel threat? Because the whole Asian thing of “flights to nowhere” -- EVA Air from Taiwan filling up its “Hello Kitty” plane, All Nippon doing a fake flight to Hawaii, and then Qantas selling out a 787 for a lap around Australia. Singapore Air scrapped their “flight to nowhere” at the last minute, instead turning one of their A380s into a pop-up restaurant. I have to tell you that, honestly, I just don’t get this. For me, the flight is a means to an end -- something I’ve got to bear to get where I want to go. Getting on that American 737 in ORD last week didn’t fill me with joy; it was just simple math -- 2 hrs in a plane vs. 11 hrs in a car. And all that I just said… goes double for the idea of voluntarily buying airplane meals to eat at home. Words fail me.</li><li>At the end of September, the CDC did an early release of an article slated for the November issue of their peer-reviewed journal <em>Emerging Infectious Diseases</em> (and I thought <em>Walden Pond</em> was a cure for insomnia). The article analyzed the in-flight transmission of coronavirus from one business class passenger to 14 other passengers and a crew member on a 10-hour Vietnam Air flight from London to Hanoi. Most of the reactions in the press and on Twitter were “Yikes! Single passenger infects 15 people!”. While noting the CDC’s disclaimer “Early release articles are not considered as final versions” (which I didn’t see mentioned in any of the press articles), I came away with a less-than- “Yikes” after reading the whole paper. The flight was on March 2nd, so while the world was still trying to figure this novel coronavirus thing out and way before mandatory in-flight masks. And the passenger was symptomatic with a cough and a sore throat. Of the 14 passengers infected, 12 were in the same business class cabin and of those, all but one were within a 2-seat radius. And the authors aren’t sure if the 2 economy class infections were from the business class index case or from a different source. My takeaways: 1) Don’t let symptomatic people on planes - even if temperature checks aren’t perfect, it might catch some folks and will certainly make people think about their condition before flying; 2) Because this appears to validate the risk of being kept in close proximity to an infected person over a prolonged period; 3) Which, to me, justifies the airlines’ no-excuses mask requirements; but 4) In spite of a symptomatic un-masked passenger coughing away in the front of the plane, no non-adjacent passengers got infected -- so maybe the airline execs’ confidence in HEPA filters kinda justified. I’ll put <a href=\"https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/11/20-3299_article\">a link to the CDC paper</a> in the show notes. It’s not that long. It’s interesting to read the source document rather than just a headline or a short USAToday blurb.</li><li>Having said all that, I’m in no way, shape, or form justifying the “hygiene theater” that the travel industry seems to be trying to use to bring folks back. I talked back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/07/17/podcast-165-first-post-lockdown-flight-when-does-business-travel-come-back/\">the July episode</a> about the “Hertz Gold Standard Clean” sticker Hertz is slapping across driver-side doors. And there are some hotels now scheduling cleaning during the day rather than overnight so guests can see it. And then, on my American flights between Chicago and Philly last week, the banner across the top of the American Way magazine cover in the seatback pocket - “This magazine has been treated with an antimicrobial process” -- which I guess means “Please, feel safe to open it up and look at the advertisements.” I dunno, it feels a bit like the “security theater” we all went through after 9/11 - it was less about actually making things safer and more about making us “feel” safer -- and so, more willing to get on a plane. But maybe if I’m an airline or hotel exec facing down the pain of laying off thousands or tens of thousands of people if travelers don’t come back, that distinction is meaningless; I’m just trying to survive.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/snowflake/56508\">Rise Up (Like the Sun)</a> by Snowflake (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: Bluemillenium, Sackjo22, Martin Luther King, Kara Square</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Quarantine Theater</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>While some folks in the hospitality industry are talking about “hygiene theater”, what about “quarantine theater”? Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #166 — What Is The Meaning of Travel?\">August episode</a>, I talked about the complexity local and state travel bans and quarantine measures are causing for people trying to plan some sort of travel. </li><li>My son Andrew and his significant other headed out to Portland, ME last month for work. The week before they left, the Marriott emailed him a form - “Please certify one of the following is true - I have received a negative COVID test performed no later than 72 hours prior to my arrival, or will quarantine for 14 days upon my arrival in Maine.” Since they were only going to be in Portland for 4 days, they trundled down to the nearest testing site for the quick test 2 days before they left -- where they got chewed out by one of the testers. “We’re running out of the quick tests. You should’ve planned better.” OK, how long to get results from the other test? “5 days” But that won’t meet Maine’s 3-day requirement. Tester just walks away. But they got their negative test results and got on their plane to Portland -- where no one in the airport or the hotel asked to see it.  OK, not harm done other than the discomfort of a Q-tip probing their sinuses and a random bit of yelling, but waste scarce testing resources?</li><li>Chicago’s quarantine is also a bit of kabuki. Once a week the city’s health commission gets in front of the press to scold another state or two -- this week was Indiana and Wisconsin. There’s now 25 states and Puerto Rico that if you’re traveling from there to Chicago, you’re supposed to self-quarantine for 14 days or face fines up to $7,000. More interesting is that Chicago’s threshold for getting on the list is 15 new daily cases per 100,000 residents. On this week’s <a href=\"https://www.chicago.gov/city/en/sites/covid-19/home/emergency-travel-order.html\">tally,</a> Indiana is running in the 20-30 range, but so is the state of Illinois. You could call it hypocritical or pragmatic or keeping its powder dry for when the city needs another bucket of money from the state, but Chicago hasn’t put the rest of Illinois on its quarantine list.</li><li>Now, I’ve yet to hear of anyone who has actually self-quarantined and as of last week, <a href=\"https://chicago.cbslocal.com/2020/10/02/three-months-into-chicagos-emergency-travel-order-no-fines-issued-enforcement-focus-remains-on-education/\">no one has been rung up for not doing so</a>. But last month, a friend told me about how Chicago’s quarantine theater hit her last month. She finally got ‘round to taking some vacation at the end of the summer. She lives in Chicago, but is a big outdoors person; looking at airfares and tossing some darts at a map, she decided to go hit Bryce Canyon and Zion National Parks in Southern Utah. So she’s down there for a couple of days when her boss calls her. “They just announced that Utah is going on the city’s quarantine list. It’s not official until Friday, so I guess if you get out of there by Thursday, you won’t have to quarantine for 2 weeks before coming back to work.” And, it didn’t need to be said, those 2 weeks of self-quarantine wouldn’t be paid. My friend is unique in that she works for maybe the one company in Chicago that takes the city’s quarantine order seriously. So my friend fought through lousy cell coverage to see what she could salvage of the back half of her vacation. Luckily, she has friends in Oregon, which isn’t on the city’s list. So Thursday, she cut her hiking short, schlepped the 4½ hours back up to SLC and caught the last flight out to Portland -- which let her come back to work and make some money the next week.</li><li>Theater isn’t a new thing. If you’re, say, a <em>mature</em> traveler, you got to play a bit part in the security theater that premiered after 9/11 and the underwear bomber. While not a perfect analogy (and really, nothing ever is), we can see some similar theatrics -- government agencies (TSA then, health departments now) investing in activities that signal they are serious, but that most folks know aren’t really effective. For me and I think for most frequent travelers, the security theater ended with TSA PreCheck -- it seemed, again to most of us, as a reasonable balance between risk and getting on with our traveling lives. I don’t know what that looks like for quarantine theater, but I sure hope it doesn’t take the 10 years it took to figure out PreCheck.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djiz/10514\">Nube - Djiz Rmx</a> by Kwame (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: SylviaO</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Traveling For Food</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I talked at the start of the episode about eating my way through Philadelphia a couple of weeks back, and it was just that. We landed Thursday around 11:30a and were hitting our favs at Reading Terminal Market by 1:30p. I went straight for Tommy Dinic’s for the roast pork sandwich with sharp provolone and broccoli rabe while Irene and Claire made for the Mennonite pretzel place and Termini Brothers for fresh-filled cannolis. And then as we were leaving, I swung past one of the PA Dutch stands to buy a 1-lb block of scrapple for breakfast the rest of the stay.</li><li>Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #166 — What Is The Meaning of Travel?\">August episode</a> in the interview with Emily Thomas about her book <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2IpLXnd\"><em>The Meaning of Travel</em></a><em>, </em>we talked about a chapter on global homogenization. One of the bits that I edited out was the observation that, back 10-20 year ago, it was fun to go shopping and bring something unique back home. But now, with globalized e-commerce, there’s not much that you can’t find easier (and often cheaper) on Amazon or Taobao or Rakuten. And so, for me, food is the one experience of a place that can’t be easily exported and bought on-line.</li><li>On our trip to the UP -- Michigan’s Upper Peninsula -- along with the biking, hiking, and kayaking, we were also on a bit of a <a href=\"https://thepastyguy.com/portfolio/the-pasty-trail-best-pasties-in-up/\">pasty tasting tour</a>. The UP is pretty well known -- in the Midwest at least -- for their <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pasty\">pasties</a>, brought over by Cornish miners working the copper mines. We had traditional pasties filled with steak, potatoes, onions, and rutabagas, and breakfast pasties. We worked our ways through the finer points of pasty critique -- picking out the pasties made from lard-based doughs, and fillings that held together so you could eat the pasty with your hand but weren’t just complete mush.</li><li>It’s funny how these comparison dishes can crop up on a vacation. On a trip to Phuket, Thailand, Andrew ordered pad thai everywhere we ate. On a trip to Hungary, Irene searched every menu for <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisherman\'s_soup\">halászlé</a> - a spicy fish soup - after having a great bowl of it at lunch with her cousin in some little town on the shores of <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Balaton\">Lake Balaton</a>. And again Irene, in Spain now, searched every city we visited for <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salmorejo\">salmorejo</a>, not quite soup, more of a tomato and bread and olive oil and garlic purée. These sorta horizontal tasting, some would be planned -- like our pasty tour -- and some would just come up, like Irene’s halászlé hunt. But it’d be fun, getting a feel for what the base of the dish is, what everyone agrees on, and what people put their own spin on, because usually for these core dishes -- dishes that everyone around has eaten all their lives -- everyone has an opinion about them. And that’s part of what makes the broad/horizontal tasting fun.</li><li>And also, these dishes don’t seem to be “industrialized.” While I’ve had mass produced pasties in the UK, grabbing something out from the West Cornish Pasty hut in Waterloo Station while running for a train, the pasties in the UP were much more -- not “artisanal” because I don’t think anyone making pasties in the UP would use that word, but “family made”. At Miners Pasties in Munising, which came out top in our pasty ranks, the woman helping us at the counter said the lard pastry recipe came from the owner’s grandmother and only 3 people know it -- the granddaughters and their niece. And only those three make the pastry each day.  We sat back and enjoyed those pasties because we knew we wouldn’t be eating them again unless and until we found our way back to this bench again some day.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #168</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_168.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food','','inherit','closed','closed','','2896-revision-v1','','','2020-10-16 18:17:56','2020-10-16 23:17:56','',2896,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/2896-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2905,1,'2020-10-16 18:24:00','2020-10-16 23:24:00','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":2899,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-1024x1024.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2899\"/><figcaption>My mission is clear</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Spent a week in <a href=\"https://www.uptravel.com/\">Michigan\'s Upper Peninsula</a> hiking, biking, kayaking, and running into a lot of other people getting away to do the same, which got me looking back six months to the start of the pandemic. I talk do the same, which got me looking back six months to the start of the pandemic. I talk about a surprisingly good flight cancellation experience with American Airlines, and figuring out how to download 12 years of <a href=\"https://www.tripit.com/\">TripIt</a> data. We wrap up talking to <a href=\"https://www.lendingtree.com/writer/matt-schulz/\">Matt Schulz</a> of <a href=\"https://www.lendingtree.com/\">LendingTree</a>, asking him what are we doing with travel credit cards that are generating frequent traveler points we can’t use? All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_168.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>download</strong></a> the podcast file, subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/896151355&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #168: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after a long weekend of eating and drinking and eating some more with friends in Philadelphia, a family we’ve traveled with before - South Africa, Singapore, Spain… and now, with COVID lockdowns, Philly. And while we’ll do a cultural thing or two, what we really like to do together is eat. It is the kind of group where comments like: “OK, we need to stop eating at 1:30 because we have 5:30 reservations” and “We’re only going to order the half-kilo of barbacoa because we’re eating again in 4 hours” are met with “Yeah, that’s a good point,” and “makes sense” rather than “I think we have a problem here.” </li><li>And Pennsylvania’s reopening regulation about needing to buy food when getting a beer didn’t help. After sneaking in a cheesesteak right before that 1:30 cutoff, we had to order some food with our afternoon beers -- the beer, of course, not subject to that 1:30 deadline because it’s liquid, so it’s not really food, so it doesn’t count. But we had to order some real, solid food with our beers. So we look at the menu -- ah, brussels sprouts, it’s a vegetable, that’s kinda healthy. Five minutes later, our beers arrive with a wire basket full of deep-fried brussels sprouts doused in a sweet chili sauce. So much for healthy.</li><li>But some of the bars, the smaller ones, the neighborhood ones, gamed it -- as these places are wont to do -- by putting a $1 food item on the menu -- 2 hard boiled eggs at one bar, a PB&amp;J at another. The best, though, was the Pop Tart we had with our last beer at Ray’s Happy Birthday Bar in South Philly. That one won the prize.</li><li>Which we found because we skipped the usual downtown/Center City/Society Hill hotels and grabbed an Airbnb in South Philly - kinda sandwiched between the older Italian neighborhoods and the newer Little Saigon area. We spent a lot of time outdoors, walking the neighborhoods -- and walking off our food -- and stopping in at neighborhood joints. One day, we’re picking up salamis and cheese from the Italian Market; another day, we’re buying banh mi’s from a Vietnamese bakery. I’ll write up a list of our favorite places for the TravelCommons website in a couple of weeks -- after my cholesterol level gets back to some semblance of normal.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/duckett/2333\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Another Girl (instrumental)</a> by duckett (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/duckett/23334 Ft: fourstones, miafas</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>First, a big “Thank You” to Gary Learned who goes by Denrael on social media for his review in Apple Podcasts. Gary is a long-time TravelCommons listener. Indeed, he’s pointed me to some great restaurants in places like Seattle and Memphis. Gary wrote a couple of weeks ago:<ul><li>“When people ask where I live, I usually just say airports and hilton. As someone who lives the life of the road warrior, I find this podcast strikes an all-to-familiar chord with my own experiences. A definite must-listen to understand the life of the traveller.</li><li>“I wrote the above a number of years ago and it is as true now as it was then, I look forward to Mark’s take on travel, it’s more about the journey, and cannot count the number of times when I’ve shook my head, laughed and said “yep, been there.”</li></ul></li><li>Gary, thanks for that. And thanks for staying with me this long.</li><li>The FBI pushed out a consumer alert last week to remind folks about the risks when using hotel wi-fi. We’ve talked about this many times and I think most frequent travelers know the drill when accessing any shared wi-fi, whether it be in a hotel or an airport or a bar or a Starbucks. Nothing new there, so why the FBI alert? Because the “FBI has observed a trend where individuals who were previously teleworking from home are beginning to telework from hotels. US hotels, predominantly in major cities, have begun to advertise daytime room reservations for guests seeking a quiet, distraction-free work environment.” So people who used to work in offices and have been working from home since March, are looking for a change of scenery, but either can’t or aren’t keen to go back to the group office setting. Enter downtown hotels, many of whom, we mentioned last month, are slouching towards bankruptcy because of low occupancy. Don’t want a bed for the night? How ‘bout a desk for the day? I just got an email from Omni Hotels pitching just that -- “Trade up your classroom for everything you need for a productive day of work plus downtown Los Angeles views.” I guess the FBI thinks these displaced office workers, used to working on secure corporate or home networks, might not be as careful. But even for frequent travelers, the alert is a good read:  talking about the dangers of an “evil twin” attack, logging onto what looks like a hotel wi-fi but is actually a hacker’s network; logging into the actual hotel wi-fi which has been compromised through exploits in out-of-date or unpatched network hardware. The FBI’s top recommendations are ones we’ve <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/09/20/podcast-155-rj-delays-street-food-in-poland-and-hungary/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #155 — RJ Delays; Street Food in Poland and Hungary\">repeated</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/02/20/podcast-127-critiquing-my-top-10-travel-tips-reviewing-vpns/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #127 — Critiquing My Top 10 Travel Tips; Reviewing VPNs\">numerous</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/12/20/podcast-119-digital-security-on-the-road-us-airports-getting-better/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #119 — Digital Security On The Road; US Airports Getting Better?\">times</a> - use a VPN when you connect to public wi-fi, or avoid them altogether with a mobile hotspot. Even when I’ve had a corporate VPN, I’ve always used one of the top paid VPN providers - NordVPN, PIA or ExpressVPN - because their software is so much better. I’m using NordVPN now, and whenever I’m not on a private network, I fire up the Nord client and it handles everything -- connects to the best server, reconnects automatically when I open the lid to wake up my Mac again. I don’t have to think about it. Indeed, half the time I forget to shut it off at home, until I’m wondering why I can’t move a file to another PC. Also, only access secure websites; I used to say “look for https://” but I guess that was too geeky, so you need to look for lock icons instead. And, of course, enable 2-factor authentication whenever you can. Nothing new, but a good reminder nonetheless. I’ll put a <a href=\"https://www.ic3.gov/media/2020/201006.aspx\">link to the alert</a> in the show notes, but you can also find links on the TravelCommons Facebook page and Twitter account.</li><li>OK, I gotta ask “what happened to Greta Thunberg\'s ‘flygskam’ or ‘flight shaming’ -- the 2019 existential travel threat? Because the whole Asian thing of “flights to nowhere” -- EVA Air from Taiwan filling up its “Hello Kitty” plane, All Nippon doing a fake flight to Hawaii, and then Qantas selling out a 787 for a lap around Australia. Singapore Air scrapped their “flight to nowhere” at the last minute, instead turning one of their A380s into a pop-up restaurant. I have to tell you that, honestly, I just don’t get this. For me, the flight is a means to an end -- something I’ve got to bear to get where I want to go. Getting on that American 737 in ORD last week didn’t fill me with joy; it was just simple math -- 2 hrs in a plane vs. 11 hrs in a car. And all that I just said… goes double for the idea of voluntarily buying airplane meals to eat at home. Words fail me.</li><li>At the end of September, the CDC did an early release of an article slated for the November issue of their peer-reviewed journal <em>Emerging Infectious Diseases</em> (and I thought <em>Walden Pond</em> was a cure for insomnia). The article analyzed the in-flight transmission of coronavirus from one business class passenger to 14 other passengers and a crew member on a 10-hour Vietnam Air flight from London to Hanoi. Most of the reactions in the press and on Twitter were “Yikes! Single passenger infects 15 people!”. While noting the CDC’s disclaimer “Early release articles are not considered as final versions” (which I didn’t see mentioned in any of the press articles), I came away with a less-than- “Yikes” after reading the whole paper. The flight was on March 2nd, so while the world was still trying to figure this novel coronavirus thing out and way before mandatory in-flight masks. And the passenger was symptomatic with a cough and a sore throat. Of the 14 passengers infected, 12 were in the same business class cabin and of those, all but one were within a 2-seat radius. And the authors aren’t sure if the 2 economy class infections were from the business class index case or from a different source. My takeaways: 1) Don’t let symptomatic people on planes - even if temperature checks aren’t perfect, it might catch some folks and will certainly make people think about their condition before flying; 2) Because this appears to validate the risk of being kept in close proximity to an infected person over a prolonged period; 3) Which, to me, justifies the airlines’ no-excuses mask requirements; but 4) In spite of a symptomatic un-masked passenger coughing away in the front of the plane, no non-adjacent passengers got infected -- so maybe the airline execs’ confidence in HEPA filters kinda justified. I’ll put <a href=\"https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/11/20-3299_article\">a link to the CDC paper</a> in the show notes. It’s not that long. It’s interesting to read the source document rather than just a headline or a short USAToday blurb.</li><li>Having said all that, I’m in no way, shape, or form justifying the “hygiene theater” that the travel industry seems to be trying to use to bring folks back. I talked back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/07/17/podcast-165-first-post-lockdown-flight-when-does-business-travel-come-back/\">the July episode</a> about the “Hertz Gold Standard Clean” sticker Hertz is slapping across driver-side doors. And there are some hotels now scheduling cleaning during the day rather than overnight so guests can see it. And then, on my American flights between Chicago and Philly last week, the banner across the top of the American Way magazine cover in the seatback pocket - “This magazine has been treated with an antimicrobial process” -- which I guess means “Please, feel safe to open it up and look at the advertisements.” I dunno, it feels a bit like the “security theater” we all went through after 9/11 - it was less about actually making things safer and more about making us “feel” safer -- and so, more willing to get on a plane. But maybe if I’m an airline or hotel exec facing down the pain of laying off thousands or tens of thousands of people if travelers don’t come back, that distinction is meaningless; I’m just trying to survive.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/snowflake/56508\">Rise Up (Like the Sun)</a> by Snowflake (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: Bluemillenium, Sackjo22, Martin Luther King, Kara Square</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Quarantine Theater</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>While some folks in the hospitality industry are talking about “hygiene theater”, what about “quarantine theater”? Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #166 — What Is The Meaning of Travel?\">August episode</a>, I talked about the complexity local and state travel bans and quarantine measures are causing for people trying to plan some sort of travel. </li><li>My son Andrew and his significant other headed out to Portland, ME last month for work. The week before they left, the Marriott emailed him a form - “Please certify one of the following is true - I have received a negative COVID test performed no later than 72 hours prior to my arrival, or will quarantine for 14 days upon my arrival in Maine.” Since they were only going to be in Portland for 4 days, they trundled down to the nearest testing site for the quick test 2 days before they left -- where they got chewed out by one of the testers. “We’re running out of the quick tests. You should’ve planned better.” OK, how long to get results from the other test? “5 days” But that won’t meet Maine’s 3-day requirement. Tester just walks away. But they got their negative test results and got on their plane to Portland -- where no one in the airport or the hotel asked to see it.  OK, not harm done other than the discomfort of a Q-tip probing their sinuses and a random bit of yelling, but waste scarce testing resources?</li><li>Chicago’s quarantine is also a bit of kabuki. Once a week the city’s health commission gets in front of the press to scold another state or two -- this week was Indiana and Wisconsin. There’s now 25 states and Puerto Rico that if you’re traveling from there to Chicago, you’re supposed to self-quarantine for 14 days or face fines up to $7,000. More interesting is that Chicago’s threshold for getting on the list is 15 new daily cases per 100,000 residents. On this week’s <a href=\"https://www.chicago.gov/city/en/sites/covid-19/home/emergency-travel-order.html\">tally,</a> Indiana is running in the 20-30 range, but so is the state of Illinois. You could call it hypocritical or pragmatic or keeping its powder dry for when the city needs another bucket of money from the state, but Chicago hasn’t put the rest of Illinois on its quarantine list.</li><li>Now, I’ve yet to hear of anyone who has actually self-quarantined and as of last week, <a href=\"https://chicago.cbslocal.com/2020/10/02/three-months-into-chicagos-emergency-travel-order-no-fines-issued-enforcement-focus-remains-on-education/\">no one has been rung up for not doing so</a>. But last month, a friend told me about how Chicago’s quarantine theater hit her last month. She finally got ‘round to taking some vacation at the end of the summer. She lives in Chicago, but is a big outdoors person; looking at airfares and tossing some darts at a map, she decided to go hit Bryce Canyon and Zion National Parks in Southern Utah. So she’s down there for a couple of days when her boss calls her. “They just announced that Utah is going on the city’s quarantine list. It’s not official until Friday, so I guess if you get out of there by Thursday, you won’t have to quarantine for 2 weeks before coming back to work.” And, it didn’t need to be said, those 2 weeks of self-quarantine wouldn’t be paid. My friend is unique in that she works for maybe the one company in Chicago that takes the city’s quarantine order seriously. So my friend fought through lousy cell coverage to see what she could salvage of the back half of her vacation. Luckily, she has friends in Oregon, which isn’t on the city’s list. So Thursday, she cut her hiking short, schlepped the 4½ hours back up to SLC and caught the last flight out to Portland -- which let her come back to work and make some money the next week.</li><li>Theater isn’t a new thing. If you’re, say, a <em>mature</em> traveler, you got to play a bit part in the security theater that premiered after 9/11 and the underwear bomber. While not a perfect analogy (and really, nothing ever is), we can see some similar theatrics -- government agencies (TSA then, health departments now) investing in activities that signal they are serious, but that most folks know aren’t really effective. For me and I think for most frequent travelers, the security theater ended with TSA PreCheck -- it seemed, again to most of us, as a reasonable balance between risk and getting on with our traveling lives. I don’t know what that looks like for quarantine theater, but I sure hope it doesn’t take the 10 years it took to figure out PreCheck.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/52154\">release.JOY.release</a> by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: essesq, Haskel (hej31)</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Traveling For Food</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I talked at the start of the episode about eating my way through Philadelphia a couple of weeks back, and it was just that. We landed Thursday around 11:30a and were hitting our favs at Reading Terminal Market by 1:30p. I went straight for Tommy Dinic’s for the roast pork sandwich with sharp provolone and broccoli rabe while Irene and Claire made for the Mennonite pretzel place and Termini Brothers for fresh-filled cannolis. And then as we were leaving, I swung past one of the PA Dutch stands to buy a 1-lb block of scrapple for breakfast the rest of the stay.</li><li>Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #166 — What Is The Meaning of Travel?\">August episode</a> in the interview with Emily Thomas about her book <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2IpLXnd\"><em>The Meaning of Travel</em></a><em>, </em>we talked about a chapter on global homogenization. One of the bits that I edited out was the observation that, back 10-20 year ago, it was fun to go shopping and bring something unique back home. But now, with globalized e-commerce, there’s not much that you can’t find easier (and often cheaper) on Amazon or Taobao or Rakuten. And so, for me, food is the one experience of a place that can’t be easily exported and bought on-line.</li><li>On our trip to the UP -- Michigan’s Upper Peninsula -- along with the biking, hiking, and kayaking, we were also on a bit of a <a href=\"https://thepastyguy.com/portfolio/the-pasty-trail-best-pasties-in-up/\">pasty tasting tour</a>. The UP is pretty well known -- in the Midwest at least -- for their <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pasty\">pasties</a>, brought over by Cornish miners working the copper mines. We had traditional pasties filled with steak, potatoes, onions, and rutabagas, and breakfast pasties. We worked our ways through the finer points of pasty critique -- picking out the pasties made from lard-based doughs, and fillings that held together so you could eat the pasty with your hand but weren’t just complete mush.</li><li>It’s funny how these comparison dishes can crop up on a vacation. On a trip to Phuket, Thailand, Andrew ordered pad thai everywhere we ate. On a trip to Hungary, Irene searched every menu for <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisherman\'s_soup\">halászlé</a> - a spicy fish soup - after having a great bowl of it at lunch with her cousin in some little town on the shores of <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Balaton\">Lake Balaton</a>. And again Irene, in Spain now, searched every city we visited for <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salmorejo\">salmorejo</a>, not quite soup, more of a tomato and bread and olive oil and garlic purée. These sorta horizontal tasting, some would be planned -- like our pasty tour -- and some would just come up, like Irene’s halászlé hunt. But it’d be fun, getting a feel for what the base of the dish is, what everyone agrees on, and what people put their own spin on, because usually for these core dishes -- dishes that everyone around has eaten all their lives -- everyone has an opinion about them. And that’s part of what makes the broad/horizontal tasting fun.</li><li>And also, these dishes don’t seem to be “industrialized.” While I’ve had mass produced pasties in the UK, grabbing something out from the West Cornish Pasty hut in Waterloo Station while running for a train, the pasties in the UP were much more -- not “artisanal” because I don’t think anyone making pasties in the UP would use that word, but “family made”. At Miners Pasties in Munising, which came out top in our pasty ranks, the woman helping us at the counter said the lard pastry recipe came from the owner’s grandmother and only 3 people know it -- the granddaughters and their niece. And only those three make the pastry each day.  We sat back and enjoyed those pasties because we knew we wouldn’t be eating them again unless and until we found our way back to this bench again some day.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #168</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_168.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food','','inherit','closed','closed','','2896-revision-v1','','','2020-10-16 18:24:00','2020-10-16 23:24:00','',2896,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/2896-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2906,1,'2020-10-16 18:49:31','2020-10-16 23:49:31','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":2899,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-1024x1024.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2899\"/><figcaption>My mission is clear</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Spent a week in <a href=\"https://www.uptravel.com/\">Michigan\'s Upper Peninsula</a> hiking, biking, kayaking, and running into a lot of other people getting away to do the same, which got me looking back six months to the start of the pandemic. I talk do the same, which got me looking back six months to the start of the pandemic. I talk about a surprisingly good flight cancellation experience with American Airlines, and figuring out how to download 12 years of <a href=\"https://www.tripit.com/\">TripIt</a> data. We wrap up talking to <a href=\"https://www.lendingtree.com/writer/matt-schulz/\">Matt Schulz</a> of <a href=\"https://www.lendingtree.com/\">LendingTree</a>, asking him what are we doing with travel credit cards that are generating frequent traveler points we can’t use? All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_168.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>download</strong></a> the podcast file, subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/896151355&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #168: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after a long weekend of eating and drinking and eating some more with friends in Philadelphia, a family we’ve traveled with before - South Africa, Singapore, Spain… and now, with COVID lockdowns, Philly. And while we’ll do a cultural thing or two, what we really like to do together is eat. It is the kind of group where comments like: “OK, we need to stop eating at 1:30 because we have 5:30 reservations” and “We’re only going to order the half-kilo of barbacoa because we’re eating again in 4 hours” are met with “Yeah, that’s a good point,” and “makes sense” rather than “I think we have a problem here.”&nbsp;</li><li>And Pennsylvania’s reopening regulation about needing to buy food when getting a beer didn’t help. After sneaking in a cheesesteak right before that 1:30 cutoff, we had to order some food with our afternoon beers -- the beer, of course, not subject to that 1:30 deadline because it’s liquid, so it’s not really food, so it doesn’t count. But we had to order some real, solid food with our beers. So we look at the menu -- ah, brussels sprouts, it’s a vegetable, that’s kinda healthy. Five minutes later, our beers arrive with a wire basket full of deep-fried brussels sprouts doused in a sweet chili sauce. So much for healthy.</li><li>But some of the bars, the smaller ones, the neighborhood ones, gamed it -- as these places are wont to do -- by putting a $1 food item on the menu -- 2 hard boiled eggs at one bar, a PB&amp;J at another. The best, though, was the Pop Tart we had with our last beer at Ray’s Happy Birthday Bar in South Philly. That one won the prize.</li><li>Which we found because we skipped the usual downtown/Center City/Society Hill hotels and grabbed an Airbnb in South Philly - kinda sandwiched between the older Italian neighborhoods and the newer Little Saigon area. We spent a lot of time outdoors, walking the neighborhoods -- and walking off our food -- and stopping in at neighborhood joints. One day, we’re picking up salamis and cheese from the Italian Market; another day, we’re buying banh mi’s from a Vietnamese bakery. I’ll write up a list of our favorite places for the TravelCommons website in a couple of weeks -- after my cholesterol level gets back to some semblance of normal.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/duckett/2333\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Another Girl (instrumental)</a> by duckett (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/duckett/23334 Ft: fourstones, miafas</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>First, a big “Thank You” to Gary Learned who goes by Denrael on social media for his review in Apple Podcasts. Gary is a long-time TravelCommons listener. Indeed, he’s pointed me to some great restaurants in places like Seattle and Memphis. Gary wrote a couple of weeks ago:<ul><li>“When people ask where I live, I usually just say airports and hilton. As someone who lives the life of the road warrior, I find this podcast strikes an all-to-familiar chord with my own experiences. A definite must-listen to understand the life of the traveller.</li><li>“I wrote the above a number of years ago and it is as true now as it was then, I look forward to Mark’s take on travel, it’s more about the journey, and cannot count the number of times when I’ve shook my head, laughed and said “yep, been there.”</li></ul></li><li>Gary, thanks for that. And thanks for staying with me this long.</li><li>The FBI pushed out a consumer alert last week to remind folks about the risks when using hotel wi-fi. We’ve talked about this many times and I think most frequent travelers know the drill when accessing any shared wi-fi, whether it be in a hotel or an airport or a bar or a Starbucks. Nothing new there, so why the FBI alert? Because the “FBI has observed a trend where individuals who were previously teleworking from home are beginning to telework from hotels. US hotels, predominantly in major cities, have begun to advertise daytime room reservations for guests seeking a quiet, distraction-free work environment.” So people who used to work in offices and have been working from home since March, are looking for a change of scenery, but either can’t or aren’t keen to go back to the group office setting. Enter downtown hotels, many of whom, we mentioned last month, are slouching towards bankruptcy because of low occupancy. Don’t want a bed for the night? How ‘bout a desk for the day? I just got an email from Omni Hotels pitching just that -- “Trade up your classroom for everything you need for a productive day of work plus downtown Los Angeles views.” I guess the FBI thinks these displaced office workers, used to working on secure corporate or home networks, might not be as careful. But even for frequent travelers, the alert is a good read:&nbsp; talking about the dangers of an “evil twin” attack, logging onto what looks like a hotel wi-fi but is actually a hacker’s network; logging into the actual hotel wi-fi which has been compromised through exploits in out-of-date or unpatched network hardware. The FBI’s top recommendations are ones we’ve <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/09/20/podcast-155-rj-delays-street-food-in-poland-and-hungary/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #155 — RJ Delays; Street Food in Poland and Hungary\">repeated</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/02/20/podcast-127-critiquing-my-top-10-travel-tips-reviewing-vpns/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #127 — Critiquing My Top 10 Travel Tips; Reviewing VPNs\">numerous</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/12/20/podcast-119-digital-security-on-the-road-us-airports-getting-better/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #119 — Digital Security On The Road; US Airports Getting Better?\">times</a> - use a VPN when you connect to public wi-fi, or avoid them altogether with a mobile hotspot. Even when I’ve had a corporate VPN, I’ve always used one of the top paid VPN providers - NordVPN, PIA or ExpressVPN - because their software is so much better. I’m using NordVPN now, and whenever I’m not on a private network, I fire up the Nord client and it handles everything -- connects to the best server, reconnects automatically when I open the lid to wake up my Mac again. I don’t have to think about it. Indeed, half the time I forget to shut it off at home, until I’m wondering why I can’t move a file to another PC. Also, only access secure websites; I used to say “look for https://” but I guess that was too geeky, so you need to look for lock icons instead. And, of course, enable 2-factor authentication whenever you can. Nothing new, but a good reminder nonetheless. I’ll put a <a href=\"https://www.ic3.gov/media/2020/201006.aspx\">link to the alert</a> in the show notes, but you can also find links on the TravelCommons Facebook page and Twitter account.</li><li>OK, I gotta ask “what happened to Greta Thunberg\'s ‘flygskam’ or ‘flight shaming’ -- the 2019 existential travel threat? Because the whole Asian thing of “flights to nowhere” -- EVA Air from Taiwan filling up its “Hello Kitty” plane, All Nippon doing a fake flight to Hawaii, and then Qantas selling out a 787 for a lap around Australia. Singapore Air scrapped their “flight to nowhere” at the last minute, instead turning one of their A380s into a pop-up restaurant. I have to tell you that, honestly, I just don’t get this. For me, the flight is a means to an end -- something I’ve got to bear to get where I want to go. Getting on that American 737 in ORD last week didn’t fill me with joy; it was just simple math -- 2 hrs in a plane vs. 11 hrs in a car. And all that I just said… goes double for the idea of voluntarily buying airplane meals to eat at home. Words fail me.</li><li>At the end of September, the CDC did an early release of an article slated for the November issue of their peer-reviewed journal <em>Emerging Infectious Diseases</em> (and I thought <em>Walden Pond</em> was a cure for insomnia). The article analyzed the in-flight transmission of coronavirus from one business class passenger to 14 other passengers and a crew member on a 10-hour Vietnam Air flight from London to Hanoi. Most of the reactions in the press and on Twitter were “Yikes! Single passenger infects 15 people!”. While noting the CDC’s disclaimer “Early release articles are not considered as final versions” (which I didn’t see mentioned in any of the press articles), I came away with a less-than- “Yikes” after reading the whole paper. The flight was on March 2nd, so while the world was still trying to figure this novel coronavirus thing out and way before mandatory in-flight masks. And the passenger was symptomatic with a cough and a sore throat. Of the 14 passengers infected, 12 were in the same business class cabin and of those, all but one were within a 2-seat radius. And the authors aren’t sure if the 2 economy class infections were from the business class index case or from a different source. My takeaways: 1) Don’t let symptomatic people on planes - even if temperature checks aren’t perfect, it might catch some folks and will certainly make people think about their condition before flying; 2) Because this appears to validate the risk of being kept in close proximity to an infected person over a prolonged period; 3) Which, to me, justifies the airlines’ no-excuses mask requirements; but 4) In spite of a symptomatic un-masked passenger coughing away in the front of the plane, no non-adjacent passengers got infected -- so maybe the airline execs’ confidence in HEPA filters kinda justified. I’ll put <a href=\"https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/11/20-3299_article\">a link to the CDC paper</a> in the show notes. It’s not that long. It’s interesting to read the source document rather than just a headline or a short USAToday blurb.</li><li>Having said all that, I’m in no way, shape, or form justifying the “hygiene theater” that the travel industry seems to be trying to use to bring folks back. I talked back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/07/17/podcast-165-first-post-lockdown-flight-when-does-business-travel-come-back/\">the July episode</a> about the “Hertz Gold Standard Clean” sticker Hertz is slapping across driver-side doors. And there are some hotels now scheduling cleaning during the day rather than overnight so guests can see it. And then, on my American flights between Chicago and Philly last week, the banner across the top of the American Way magazine cover in the seatback pocket - “This magazine has been treated with an antimicrobial process” -- which I guess means “Please, feel safe to open it up and look at the advertisements.” I dunno, it feels a bit like the “security theater” we all went through after 9/11 - it was less about actually making things safer and more about making us “feel” safer -- and so, more willing to get on a plane. But maybe if I’m an airline or hotel exec facing down the pain of laying off thousands or tens of thousands of people if travelers don’t come back, that distinction is meaningless; I’m just trying to survive.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/snowflake/56508\">Rise Up (Like the Sun)</a> by Snowflake (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: Bluemillenium, Sackjo22, Martin Luther King, Kara Square</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Quarantine Theater</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>While some folks in the hospitality industry are talking about “hygiene theater”, what about “quarantine theater”? Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #166 — What Is The Meaning of Travel?\">August episode</a>, I talked about the complexity local and state travel bans and quarantine measures are causing for people trying to plan some sort of travel.&nbsp;</li><li>My son Andrew and his significant other headed out to Portland, ME last month for work. The week before they left, the Marriott emailed him a form - “Please certify one of the following is true - I have received a negative COVID test performed no later than 72 hours prior to my arrival, or will quarantine for 14 days upon my arrival in Maine.” Since they were only going to be in Portland for 4 days, they trundled down to the nearest testing site for the quick test 2 days before they left -- where they got chewed out by one of the testers. “We’re running out of the quick tests. You should’ve planned better.” OK, how long to get results from the other test? “5 days” But that won’t meet Maine’s 3-day requirement. Tester just walks away. But they got their negative test results and got on their plane to Portland -- where no one in the airport or the hotel asked to see it.&nbsp; OK, not harm done other than the discomfort of a Q-tip probing their sinuses and a random bit of yelling, but waste scarce testing resources?</li><li>Chicago’s quarantine is also a bit of kabuki. Once a week the city’s health commission gets in front of the press to scold another state or two -- this week was Indiana and Wisconsin. There’s now 25 states and Puerto Rico that if you’re traveling from there to Chicago, you’re supposed to self-quarantine for 14 days or face fines up to $7,000. More interesting is that Chicago’s threshold for getting on the list is 15 new daily cases per 100,000 residents. On this week’s <a href=\"https://www.chicago.gov/city/en/sites/covid-19/home/emergency-travel-order.html\">tally,</a> Indiana is running in the 20-30 range, but so is the state of Illinois. You could call it hypocritical or pragmatic or keeping its powder dry for when the city needs another bucket of money from the state, but Chicago hasn’t put the rest of Illinois on its quarantine list.</li><li>Now, I’ve yet to hear of anyone who has actually self-quarantined and as of last week, <a href=\"https://chicago.cbslocal.com/2020/10/02/three-months-into-chicagos-emergency-travel-order-no-fines-issued-enforcement-focus-remains-on-education/\">no one has been rung up for not doing so</a>. But last month, a friend told me about how Chicago’s quarantine theater hit her last month. She finally got ‘round to taking some vacation at the end of the summer. She lives in Chicago, but is a big outdoors person; looking at airfares and tossing some darts at a map, she decided to go hit Bryce Canyon and Zion National Parks in Southern Utah. So she’s down there for a couple of days when her boss calls her. “They just announced that Utah is going on the city’s quarantine list. It’s not official until Friday, so I guess if you get out of there by Thursday, you won’t have to quarantine for 2 weeks before coming back to work.” And, it didn’t need to be said, those 2 weeks of self-quarantine wouldn’t be paid. My friend is unique in that she works for maybe the one company in Chicago that takes the city’s quarantine order seriously. So my friend fought through lousy cell coverage to see what she could salvage of the back half of her vacation. Luckily, she has friends in Oregon, which isn’t on the city’s list. So Thursday, she cut her hiking short, schlepped the 4½ hours back up to SLC and caught the last flight out to Portland -- which let her come back to work and make some money the next week.</li><li>Theater isn’t a new thing. If you’re, say, a <em>mature</em> traveler, you got to play a bit part in the security theater that premiered after 9/11 and the underwear bomber. While not a perfect analogy (and really, nothing ever is), we can see some similar theatrics -- government agencies (TSA then, health departments now) investing in activities that signal they are serious, but that most folks know aren’t really effective. For me and I think for most frequent travelers, the security theater ended with TSA PreCheck -- it seemed, again to most of us, as a reasonable balance between risk and getting on with our traveling lives. I don’t know what that looks like for quarantine theater, but I sure hope it doesn’t take the 10 years it took to figure out PreCheck.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/52154\">release.JOY.release</a> by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: essesq, Haskel (hej31)</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Traveling For Food</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I talked at the start of the episode about eating my way through Philadelphia a couple of weeks back, and it was just that. We landed Thursday around 11:30a and were hitting our favs at Reading Terminal Market by 1:30p. I went straight for Tommy Dinic’s for the roast pork sandwich with sharp provolone and broccoli rabe while Irene and Claire made for the Mennonite pretzel place and Termini Brothers for fresh-filled cannolis. And then as we were leaving, I swung past one of the PA Dutch stands to buy a 1-lb block of scrapple for breakfast the rest of the stay.</li><li>Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #166 — What Is The Meaning of Travel?\">August episode</a> in the interview with Emily Thomas about her book <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2IpLXnd\"><em>The Meaning of Travel</em></a><em>, </em>we talked about a chapter on global homogenization. One of the bits that I edited out was the observation that, back 10-20 year ago, it was fun to go shopping and bring something unique back home. But now, with globalized e-commerce, there’s not much that you can’t find easier (and often cheaper) on Amazon or Taobao or Rakuten. And so, for me, food is the one experience of a place that can’t be easily exported and bought on-line.</li><li>On our trip to the UP -- Michigan’s Upper Peninsula -- along with the biking, hiking, and kayaking, we were also on a bit of a <a href=\"https://thepastyguy.com/portfolio/the-pasty-trail-best-pasties-in-up/\">pasty tasting tour</a>. The UP is pretty well known -- in the Midwest at least -- for their <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pasty\">pasties</a>, brought over by Cornish miners working the copper mines. We had traditional pasties filled with steak, potatoes, onions, and rutabagas, and breakfast pasties. We worked our ways through the finer points of pasty critique -- picking out the pasties made from lard-based doughs, and fillings that held together so you could eat the pasty with your hand but weren’t just complete mush.</li><li>It’s funny how these comparison dishes can crop up on a vacation. On a trip to Phuket, Thailand, Andrew ordered pad thai everywhere we ate. On a trip to Hungary, Irene searched every menu for <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisherman\'s_soup\">halászlé</a> - a spicy fish soup - after having a great bowl of it at lunch with her cousin in some little town on the shores of <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Balaton\">Lake Balaton</a>. And again Irene, in Spain now, searched every city we visited for <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salmorejo\">salmorejo</a>, not quite soup, more of a tomato and bread and olive oil and garlic purée. These sorta horizontal tasting, some would be planned -- like our pasty tour -- and some would just come up, like Irene’s halászlé hunt. But it’d be fun, getting a feel for what the base of the dish is, what everyone agrees on, and what people put their own spin on, because usually for these core dishes -- dishes that everyone around has eaten all their lives -- everyone has an opinion about them. And that’s part of what makes the broad/horizontal tasting fun.</li><li>And also, these dishes don’t seem to be “industrialized.” While I’ve had mass produced pasties in the UK, grabbing something out from the West Cornish Pasty hut in Waterloo Station while running for a train, the pasties in the UP were much more -- not “artisanal” because I don’t think anyone making pasties in the UP would use that word, but “family made”. At Miners Pasties in Munising, which came out top in our pasty ranks, the woman helping us at the counter said the lard pastry recipe came from the owner’s grandmother and only 3 people know it -- the granddaughters and their niece. And only those three make the pastry each day.&nbsp; We sat back and enjoyed those pasties because we knew we wouldn’t be eating them again unless and until we found our way back to this bench again some day.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #168</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_168.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food','','inherit','closed','closed','','2896-revision-v1','','','2020-10-16 18:49:31','2020-10-16 23:49:31','',2896,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/2896-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2907,1,'2020-10-16 19:03:34','2020-10-17 00:03:34','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":2899,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-1024x1024.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2899\"/><figcaption>My mission is clear</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Trying to recover from a long weekend of eating and drinking through the neighborhoods of South Philly. Our movable feast reminded me that food may be the one experience of a place left that can’t be easily exported and bought on-line. We talk about the FBI\'s cybersecurity warning to work-from-home types using hotels for getaway offices, and are a bit amazed at how fast last year\'s \"flight shaming\" gave way to \"flights to nowhere.\" And we think about \"quarantine theater\" -- how cities and states are focusing on activities to signal they are serious about COVID, but that most folks know aren’t really effective. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_168.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>download</strong></a> the podcast file, go over to the <em>Subscribe</em> section on the right to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/896151355&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #168: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after a long weekend of eating and drinking and eating some more with friends in Philadelphia, a family we’ve traveled with before - South Africa, Singapore, Spain… and now, with COVID lockdowns, Philly. And while we’ll do a cultural thing or two, what we really like to do together is eat. It is the kind of group where comments like: “OK, we need to stop eating at 1:30 because we have 5:30 reservations” and “We’re only going to order the half-kilo of barbacoa because we’re eating again in 4 hours” are met with “Yeah, that’s a good point,” and “makes sense” rather than “I think we have a problem here.”&nbsp;</li><li>And Pennsylvania’s reopening regulation about needing to buy food when getting a beer didn’t help. After sneaking in a cheesesteak right before that 1:30 cutoff, we had to order some food with our afternoon beers -- the beer, of course, not subject to that 1:30 deadline because it’s liquid, so it’s not really food, so it doesn’t count. But we had to order some real, solid food with our beers. So we look at the menu -- ah, brussels sprouts, it’s a vegetable, that’s kinda healthy. Five minutes later, our beers arrive with a wire basket full of deep-fried brussels sprouts doused in a sweet chili sauce. So much for healthy.</li><li>But some of the bars, the smaller ones, the neighborhood ones, gamed it -- as these places are wont to do -- by putting a $1 food item on the menu -- 2 hard boiled eggs at one bar, a PB&amp;J at another. The best, though, was the Pop Tart we had with our last beer at Ray’s Happy Birthday Bar in South Philly. That one won the prize.</li><li>Which we found because we skipped the usual downtown/Center City/Society Hill hotels and grabbed an Airbnb in South Philly - kinda sandwiched between the older Italian neighborhoods and the newer Little Saigon area. We spent a lot of time outdoors, walking the neighborhoods -- and walking off our food -- and stopping in at neighborhood joints. One day, we’re picking up salamis and cheese from the Italian Market; another day, we’re buying banh mi’s from a Vietnamese bakery. I’ll write up a list of our favorite places for the TravelCommons website in a couple of weeks -- after my cholesterol level gets back to some semblance of normal.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/duckett/2333\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Another Girl (instrumental)</a> by duckett (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/duckett/23334 Ft: fourstones, miafas</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>First, a big “Thank You” to Gary Learned who goes by Denrael on social media for his review in Apple Podcasts. Gary is a long-time TravelCommons listener. Indeed, he’s pointed me to some great restaurants in places like Seattle and Memphis. Gary wrote a couple of weeks ago:<ul><li>“When people ask where I live, I usually just say airports and hilton. As someone who lives the life of the road warrior, I find this podcast strikes an all-to-familiar chord with my own experiences. A definite must-listen to understand the life of the traveller.</li><li>“I wrote the above a number of years ago and it is as true now as it was then, I look forward to Mark’s take on travel, it’s more about the journey, and cannot count the number of times when I’ve shook my head, laughed and said “yep, been there.”</li></ul></li><li>Gary, thanks for that. And thanks for staying with me this long.</li><li>The FBI pushed out a consumer alert last week to remind folks about the risks when using hotel wi-fi. We’ve talked about this many times and I think most frequent travelers know the drill when accessing any shared wi-fi, whether it be in a hotel or an airport or a bar or a Starbucks. Nothing new there, so why the FBI alert? Because the “FBI has observed a trend where individuals who were previously teleworking from home are beginning to telework from hotels. US hotels, predominantly in major cities, have begun to advertise daytime room reservations for guests seeking a quiet, distraction-free work environment.” So people who used to work in offices and have been working from home since March, are looking for a change of scenery, but either can’t or aren’t keen to go back to the group office setting. Enter downtown hotels, many of whom, we mentioned last month, are slouching towards bankruptcy because of low occupancy. Don’t want a bed for the night? How ‘bout a desk for the day? I just got an email from Omni Hotels pitching just that -- “Trade up your classroom for everything you need for a productive day of work plus downtown Los Angeles views.” I guess the FBI thinks these displaced office workers, used to working on secure corporate or home networks, might not be as careful. But even for frequent travelers, the alert is a good read:&nbsp; talking about the dangers of an “evil twin” attack, logging onto what looks like a hotel wi-fi but is actually a hacker’s network; logging into the actual hotel wi-fi which has been compromised through exploits in out-of-date or unpatched network hardware. The FBI’s top recommendations are ones we’ve <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/09/20/podcast-155-rj-delays-street-food-in-poland-and-hungary/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #155 — RJ Delays; Street Food in Poland and Hungary\">repeated</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/02/20/podcast-127-critiquing-my-top-10-travel-tips-reviewing-vpns/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #127 — Critiquing My Top 10 Travel Tips; Reviewing VPNs\">numerous</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/12/20/podcast-119-digital-security-on-the-road-us-airports-getting-better/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #119 — Digital Security On The Road; US Airports Getting Better?\">times</a> - use a VPN when you connect to public wi-fi, or avoid them altogether with a mobile hotspot. Even when I’ve had a corporate VPN, I’ve always used one of the top paid VPN providers - NordVPN, PIA or ExpressVPN - because their software is so much better. I’m using NordVPN now, and whenever I’m not on a private network, I fire up the Nord client and it handles everything -- connects to the best server, reconnects automatically when I open the lid to wake up my Mac again. I don’t have to think about it. Indeed, half the time I forget to shut it off at home, until I’m wondering why I can’t move a file to another PC. Also, only access secure websites; I used to say “look for https://” but I guess that was too geeky, so you need to look for lock icons instead. And, of course, enable 2-factor authentication whenever you can. Nothing new, but a good reminder nonetheless. I’ll put a <a href=\"https://www.ic3.gov/media/2020/201006.aspx\">link to the alert</a> in the show notes, but you can also find links on the TravelCommons Facebook page and Twitter account.</li><li>OK, I gotta ask “what happened to Greta Thunberg\'s ‘flygskam’ or ‘flight shaming’ -- the 2019 existential travel threat? Because the whole Asian thing of “flights to nowhere” -- EVA Air from Taiwan filling up its “Hello Kitty” plane, All Nippon doing a fake flight to Hawaii, and then Qantas selling out a 787 for a lap around Australia. Singapore Air scrapped their “flight to nowhere” at the last minute, instead turning one of their A380s into a pop-up restaurant. I have to tell you that, honestly, I just don’t get this. For me, the flight is a means to an end -- something I’ve got to bear to get where I want to go. Getting on that American 737 in ORD last week didn’t fill me with joy; it was just simple math -- 2 hrs in a plane vs. 11 hrs in a car. And all that I just said… goes double for the idea of voluntarily buying airplane meals to eat at home. Words fail me.</li><li>At the end of September, the CDC did an early release of an article slated for the November issue of their peer-reviewed journal <em>Emerging Infectious Diseases</em> (and I thought <em>Walden Pond</em> was a cure for insomnia). The article analyzed the in-flight transmission of coronavirus from one business class passenger to 14 other passengers and a crew member on a 10-hour Vietnam Air flight from London to Hanoi. Most of the reactions in the press and on Twitter were “Yikes! Single passenger infects 15 people!”. While noting the CDC’s disclaimer “Early release articles are not considered as final versions” (which I didn’t see mentioned in any of the press articles), I came away with a less-than- “Yikes” after reading the whole paper. The flight was on March 2nd, so while the world was still trying to figure this novel coronavirus thing out and way before mandatory in-flight masks. And the passenger was symptomatic with a cough and a sore throat. Of the 14 passengers infected, 12 were in the same business class cabin and of those, all but one were within a 2-seat radius. And the authors aren’t sure if the 2 economy class infections were from the business class index case or from a different source. My takeaways: 1) Don’t let symptomatic people on planes - even if temperature checks aren’t perfect, it might catch some folks and will certainly make people think about their condition before flying; 2) Because this appears to validate the risk of being kept in close proximity to an infected person over a prolonged period; 3) Which, to me, justifies the airlines’ no-excuses mask requirements; but 4) In spite of a symptomatic un-masked passenger coughing away in the front of the plane, no non-adjacent passengers got infected -- so maybe the airline execs’ confidence in HEPA filters kinda justified. I’ll put <a href=\"https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/11/20-3299_article\">a link to the CDC paper</a> in the show notes. It’s not that long. It’s interesting to read the source document rather than just a headline or a short USAToday blurb.</li><li>Having said all that, I’m in no way, shape, or form justifying the “hygiene theater” that the travel industry seems to be trying to use to bring folks back. I talked back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/07/17/podcast-165-first-post-lockdown-flight-when-does-business-travel-come-back/\">the July episode</a> about the “Hertz Gold Standard Clean” sticker Hertz is slapping across driver-side doors. And there are some hotels now scheduling cleaning during the day rather than overnight so guests can see it. And then, on my American flights between Chicago and Philly last week, the banner across the top of the American Way magazine cover in the seatback pocket - “This magazine has been treated with an antimicrobial process” -- which I guess means “Please, feel safe to open it up and look at the advertisements.” I dunno, it feels a bit like the “security theater” we all went through after 9/11 - it was less about actually making things safer and more about making us “feel” safer -- and so, more willing to get on a plane. But maybe if I’m an airline or hotel exec facing down the pain of laying off thousands or tens of thousands of people if travelers don’t come back, that distinction is meaningless; I’m just trying to survive.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/snowflake/56508\">Rise Up (Like the Sun)</a> by Snowflake (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: Bluemillenium, Sackjo22, Martin Luther King, Kara Square</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Quarantine Theater</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>While some folks in the hospitality industry are talking about “hygiene theater”, what about “quarantine theater”? Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #166 — What Is The Meaning of Travel?\">August episode</a>, I talked about the complexity local and state travel bans and quarantine measures are causing for people trying to plan some sort of travel.&nbsp;</li><li>My son Andrew and his significant other headed out to Portland, ME last month for work. The week before they left, the Marriott emailed him a form - “Please certify one of the following is true - I have received a negative COVID test performed no later than 72 hours prior to my arrival, or will quarantine for 14 days upon my arrival in Maine.” Since they were only going to be in Portland for 4 days, they trundled down to the nearest testing site for the quick test 2 days before they left -- where they got chewed out by one of the testers. “We’re running out of the quick tests. You should’ve planned better.” OK, how long to get results from the other test? “5 days” But that won’t meet Maine’s 3-day requirement. Tester just walks away. But they got their negative test results and got on their plane to Portland -- where no one in the airport or the hotel asked to see it.&nbsp; OK, not harm done other than the discomfort of a Q-tip probing their sinuses and a random bit of yelling, but waste scarce testing resources?</li><li>Chicago’s quarantine is also a bit of kabuki. Once a week the city’s health commission gets in front of the press to scold another state or two -- this week was Indiana and Wisconsin. There’s now 25 states and Puerto Rico that if you’re traveling from there to Chicago, you’re supposed to self-quarantine for 14 days or face fines up to $7,000. More interesting is that Chicago’s threshold for getting on the list is 15 new daily cases per 100,000 residents. On this week’s <a href=\"https://www.chicago.gov/city/en/sites/covid-19/home/emergency-travel-order.html\">tally,</a> Indiana is running in the 20-30 range, but so is the state of Illinois. You could call it hypocritical or pragmatic or keeping its powder dry for when the city needs another bucket of money from the state, but Chicago hasn’t put the rest of Illinois on its quarantine list.</li><li>Now, I’ve yet to hear of anyone who has actually self-quarantined and as of last week, <a href=\"https://chicago.cbslocal.com/2020/10/02/three-months-into-chicagos-emergency-travel-order-no-fines-issued-enforcement-focus-remains-on-education/\">no one has been rung up for not doing so</a>. But last month, a friend told me about how Chicago’s quarantine theater hit her last month. She finally got ‘round to taking some vacation at the end of the summer. She lives in Chicago, but is a big outdoors person; looking at airfares and tossing some darts at a map, she decided to go hit Bryce Canyon and Zion National Parks in Southern Utah. So she’s down there for a couple of days when her boss calls her. “They just announced that Utah is going on the city’s quarantine list. It’s not official until Friday, so I guess if you get out of there by Thursday, you won’t have to quarantine for 2 weeks before coming back to work.” And, it didn’t need to be said, those 2 weeks of self-quarantine wouldn’t be paid. My friend is unique in that she works for maybe the one company in Chicago that takes the city’s quarantine order seriously. So my friend fought through lousy cell coverage to see what she could salvage of the back half of her vacation. Luckily, she has friends in Oregon, which isn’t on the city’s list. So Thursday, she cut her hiking short, schlepped the 4½ hours back up to SLC and caught the last flight out to Portland -- which let her come back to work and make some money the next week.</li><li>Theater isn’t a new thing. If you’re, say, a <em>mature</em> traveler, you got to play a bit part in the security theater that premiered after 9/11 and the underwear bomber. While not a perfect analogy (and really, nothing ever is), we can see some similar theatrics -- government agencies (TSA then, health departments now) investing in activities that signal they are serious, but that most folks know aren’t really effective. For me and I think for most frequent travelers, the security theater ended with TSA PreCheck -- it seemed, again to most of us, as a reasonable balance between risk and getting on with our traveling lives. I don’t know what that looks like for quarantine theater, but I sure hope it doesn’t take the 10 years it took to figure out PreCheck.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/52154\">release.JOY.release</a> by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: essesq, Haskel (hej31)</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Traveling For Food</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I talked at the start of the episode about eating my way through Philadelphia a couple of weeks back, and it was just that. We landed Thursday around 11:30a and were hitting our favs at Reading Terminal Market by 1:30p. I went straight for Tommy Dinic’s for the roast pork sandwich with sharp provolone and broccoli rabe while Irene and Claire made for the Mennonite pretzel place and Termini Brothers for fresh-filled cannolis. And then as we were leaving, I swung past one of the PA Dutch stands to buy a 1-lb block of <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrapple\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">scrapple</a> for breakfast the rest of the stay.</li><li>Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #166 — What Is The Meaning of Travel?\">August episode</a> in the interview with Emily Thomas about her book <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2IpLXnd\"><em>The Meaning of Travel</em></a><em>, </em>we talked about a chapter on global homogenization. One of the bits that I edited out was the observation that, back 10-20 year ago, it was fun to go shopping and bring something unique back home. But now, with globalized e-commerce, there’s not much that you can’t find easier (and often cheaper) on Amazon or Taobao or Rakuten. And so, for me, food is the one experience of a place that can’t be easily exported and bought on-line.</li><li>On our trip to the UP -- Michigan’s Upper Peninsula -- along with the biking, hiking, and kayaking, we were also on a bit of a <a href=\"https://thepastyguy.com/portfolio/the-pasty-trail-best-pasties-in-up/\">pasty tasting tour</a>. The UP is pretty well known -- in the Midwest at least -- for their <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pasty\">pasties</a>, brought over by Cornish miners working the copper mines. We had traditional pasties filled with steak, potatoes, onions, and rutabagas, and breakfast pasties. We worked our ways through the finer points of pasty critique -- picking out the pasties made from lard-based doughs, and fillings that held together so you could eat the pasty with your hand but weren’t just complete mush.</li><li>It’s funny how these comparison dishes can crop up on a vacation. On a trip to Phuket, Thailand, Andrew ordered pad thai everywhere we ate. On a trip to Hungary, Irene searched every menu for <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisherman\'s_soup\">halászlé</a> - a spicy fish soup - after having a great bowl of it at lunch with her cousin in some little town on the shores of <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Balaton\">Lake Balaton</a>. And again Irene, in Spain now, searched every city we visited for <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salmorejo\">salmorejo</a>, not quite soup, more of a tomato and bread and olive oil and garlic purée. These sorta horizontal tasting, some would be planned -- like our pasty tour -- and some would just come up, like Irene’s halászlé hunt. But it’d be fun, getting a feel for what the base of the dish is, what everyone agrees on, and what people put their own spin on, because usually for these core dishes -- dishes that everyone around has eaten all their lives -- everyone has an opinion about them. And that’s part of what makes the broad/horizontal tasting fun.</li><li>And also, these dishes don’t seem to be “industrialized.” While I’ve had mass produced pasties in the UK, grabbing something out from the West Cornish Pasty hut in Waterloo Station while running for a train, the pasties in the UP were much more -- not “artisanal” because I don’t think anyone making pasties in the UP would use that word, but “family made”. At Miners Pasties in Munising, which came out top in our pasty ranks, the woman helping us at the counter said the lard pastry recipe came from the owner’s grandmother and only 3 people know it -- the granddaughters and their niece. And only those three make the pastry each day.  We sat back and enjoyed those pasties because we knew we wouldn’t be eating them again unless and until we found our way back to this bench again some day.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #168</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_168.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food','','inherit','closed','closed','','2896-revision-v1','','','2020-10-16 19:03:34','2020-10-17 00:03:34','',2896,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/2896-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2908,1,'2020-10-16 19:05:57','2020-10-17 00:05:57','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":2899,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-1024x1024.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2899\"/><figcaption>My mission is clear</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Trying to recover from a long weekend of eating and drinking through the neighborhoods of South Philly. Our movable feast reminded me that food may be the one experience of a place left that can’t be easily exported and bought on-line. We talk about the FBI\'s cybersecurity warning to work-from-home types using hotels for getaway offices, and are a bit amazed at how fast last year\'s \"flight shaming\" gave way to \"flights to nowhere.\" And we think about \"quarantine theater\" -- how cities and states are focusing on activities to signal they are serious about COVID, but that most folks know aren’t really effective. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_168.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>download</strong></a> the podcast file, go over to the <em>Subscribe</em> section on the right to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/911959576&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #168: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after a long weekend of eating and drinking and eating some more with friends in Philadelphia, a family we’ve traveled with before - South Africa, Singapore, Spain… and now, with COVID lockdowns, Philly. And while we’ll do a cultural thing or two, what we really like to do together is eat. It is the kind of group where comments like: “OK, we need to stop eating at 1:30 because we have 5:30 reservations” and “We’re only going to order the half-kilo of barbacoa because we’re eating again in 4 hours” are met with “Yeah, that’s a good point,” and “makes sense” rather than “I think we have a problem here.”&nbsp;</li><li>And Pennsylvania’s reopening regulation about needing to buy food when getting a beer didn’t help. After sneaking in a cheesesteak right before that 1:30 cutoff, we had to order some food with our afternoon beers -- the beer, of course, not subject to that 1:30 deadline because it’s liquid, so it’s not really food, so it doesn’t count. But we had to order some real, solid food with our beers. So we look at the menu -- ah, brussels sprouts, it’s a vegetable, that’s kinda healthy. Five minutes later, our beers arrive with a wire basket full of deep-fried brussels sprouts doused in a sweet chili sauce. So much for healthy.</li><li>But some of the bars, the smaller ones, the neighborhood ones, gamed it -- as these places are wont to do -- by putting a $1 food item on the menu -- 2 hard boiled eggs at one bar, a PB&amp;J at another. The best, though, was the Pop Tart we had with our last beer at Ray’s Happy Birthday Bar in South Philly. That one won the prize.</li><li>Which we found because we skipped the usual downtown/Center City/Society Hill hotels and grabbed an Airbnb in South Philly - kinda sandwiched between the older Italian neighborhoods and the newer Little Saigon area. We spent a lot of time outdoors, walking the neighborhoods -- and walking off our food -- and stopping in at neighborhood joints. One day, we’re picking up salamis and cheese from the Italian Market; another day, we’re buying banh mi’s from a Vietnamese bakery. I’ll write up a list of our favorite places for the TravelCommons website in a couple of weeks -- after my cholesterol level gets back to some semblance of normal.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/duckett/2333\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Another Girl (instrumental)</a> by duckett (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/duckett/23334 Ft: fourstones, miafas</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>First, a big “Thank You” to Gary Learned who goes by Denrael on social media for his review in Apple Podcasts. Gary is a long-time TravelCommons listener. Indeed, he’s pointed me to some great restaurants in places like Seattle and Memphis. Gary wrote a couple of weeks ago:<ul><li>“When people ask where I live, I usually just say airports and hilton. As someone who lives the life of the road warrior, I find this podcast strikes an all-to-familiar chord with my own experiences. A definite must-listen to understand the life of the traveller.</li><li>“I wrote the above a number of years ago and it is as true now as it was then, I look forward to Mark’s take on travel, it’s more about the journey, and cannot count the number of times when I’ve shook my head, laughed and said “yep, been there.”</li></ul></li><li>Gary, thanks for that. And thanks for staying with me this long.</li><li>The FBI pushed out a consumer alert last week to remind folks about the risks when using hotel wi-fi. We’ve talked about this many times and I think most frequent travelers know the drill when accessing any shared wi-fi, whether it be in a hotel or an airport or a bar or a Starbucks. Nothing new there, so why the FBI alert? Because the “FBI has observed a trend where individuals who were previously teleworking from home are beginning to telework from hotels. US hotels, predominantly in major cities, have begun to advertise daytime room reservations for guests seeking a quiet, distraction-free work environment.” So people who used to work in offices and have been working from home since March, are looking for a change of scenery, but either can’t or aren’t keen to go back to the group office setting. Enter downtown hotels, many of whom, we mentioned last month, are slouching towards bankruptcy because of low occupancy. Don’t want a bed for the night? How ‘bout a desk for the day? I just got an email from Omni Hotels pitching just that -- “Trade up your classroom for everything you need for a productive day of work plus downtown Los Angeles views.” I guess the FBI thinks these displaced office workers, used to working on secure corporate or home networks, might not be as careful. But even for frequent travelers, the alert is a good read:&nbsp; talking about the dangers of an “evil twin” attack, logging onto what looks like a hotel wi-fi but is actually a hacker’s network; logging into the actual hotel wi-fi which has been compromised through exploits in out-of-date or unpatched network hardware. The FBI’s top recommendations are ones we’ve <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/09/20/podcast-155-rj-delays-street-food-in-poland-and-hungary/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #155 — RJ Delays; Street Food in Poland and Hungary\">repeated</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/02/20/podcast-127-critiquing-my-top-10-travel-tips-reviewing-vpns/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #127 — Critiquing My Top 10 Travel Tips; Reviewing VPNs\">numerous</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/12/20/podcast-119-digital-security-on-the-road-us-airports-getting-better/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #119 — Digital Security On The Road; US Airports Getting Better?\">times</a> - use a VPN when you connect to public wi-fi, or avoid them altogether with a mobile hotspot. Even when I’ve had a corporate VPN, I’ve always used one of the top paid VPN providers - NordVPN, PIA or ExpressVPN - because their software is so much better. I’m using NordVPN now, and whenever I’m not on a private network, I fire up the Nord client and it handles everything -- connects to the best server, reconnects automatically when I open the lid to wake up my Mac again. I don’t have to think about it. Indeed, half the time I forget to shut it off at home, until I’m wondering why I can’t move a file to another PC. Also, only access secure websites; I used to say “look for https://” but I guess that was too geeky, so you need to look for lock icons instead. And, of course, enable 2-factor authentication whenever you can. Nothing new, but a good reminder nonetheless. I’ll put a <a href=\"https://www.ic3.gov/media/2020/201006.aspx\">link to the alert</a> in the show notes, but you can also find links on the TravelCommons Facebook page and Twitter account.</li><li>OK, I gotta ask “what happened to Greta Thunberg\'s ‘flygskam’ or ‘flight shaming’ -- the 2019 existential travel threat? Because the whole Asian thing of “flights to nowhere” -- EVA Air from Taiwan filling up its “Hello Kitty” plane, All Nippon doing a fake flight to Hawaii, and then Qantas selling out a 787 for a lap around Australia. Singapore Air scrapped their “flight to nowhere” at the last minute, instead turning one of their A380s into a pop-up restaurant. I have to tell you that, honestly, I just don’t get this. For me, the flight is a means to an end -- something I’ve got to bear to get where I want to go. Getting on that American 737 in ORD last week didn’t fill me with joy; it was just simple math -- 2 hrs in a plane vs. 11 hrs in a car. And all that I just said… goes double for the idea of voluntarily buying airplane meals to eat at home. Words fail me.</li><li>At the end of September, the CDC did an early release of an article slated for the November issue of their peer-reviewed journal <em>Emerging Infectious Diseases</em> (and I thought <em>Walden Pond</em> was a cure for insomnia). The article analyzed the in-flight transmission of coronavirus from one business class passenger to 14 other passengers and a crew member on a 10-hour Vietnam Air flight from London to Hanoi. Most of the reactions in the press and on Twitter were “Yikes! Single passenger infects 15 people!”. While noting the CDC’s disclaimer “Early release articles are not considered as final versions” (which I didn’t see mentioned in any of the press articles), I came away with a less-than- “Yikes” after reading the whole paper. The flight was on March 2nd, so while the world was still trying to figure this novel coronavirus thing out and way before mandatory in-flight masks. And the passenger was symptomatic with a cough and a sore throat. Of the 14 passengers infected, 12 were in the same business class cabin and of those, all but one were within a 2-seat radius. And the authors aren’t sure if the 2 economy class infections were from the business class index case or from a different source. My takeaways: 1) Don’t let symptomatic people on planes - even if temperature checks aren’t perfect, it might catch some folks and will certainly make people think about their condition before flying; 2) Because this appears to validate the risk of being kept in close proximity to an infected person over a prolonged period; 3) Which, to me, justifies the airlines’ no-excuses mask requirements; but 4) In spite of a symptomatic un-masked passenger coughing away in the front of the plane, no non-adjacent passengers got infected -- so maybe the airline execs’ confidence in HEPA filters kinda justified. I’ll put <a href=\"https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/11/20-3299_article\">a link to the CDC paper</a> in the show notes. It’s not that long. It’s interesting to read the source document rather than just a headline or a short USAToday blurb.</li><li>Having said all that, I’m in no way, shape, or form justifying the “hygiene theater” that the travel industry seems to be trying to use to bring folks back. I talked back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/07/17/podcast-165-first-post-lockdown-flight-when-does-business-travel-come-back/\">the July episode</a> about the “Hertz Gold Standard Clean” sticker Hertz is slapping across driver-side doors. And there are some hotels now scheduling cleaning during the day rather than overnight so guests can see it. And then, on my American flights between Chicago and Philly last week, the banner across the top of the American Way magazine cover in the seatback pocket - “This magazine has been treated with an antimicrobial process” -- which I guess means “Please, feel safe to open it up and look at the advertisements.” I dunno, it feels a bit like the “security theater” we all went through after 9/11 - it was less about actually making things safer and more about making us “feel” safer -- and so, more willing to get on a plane. But maybe if I’m an airline or hotel exec facing down the pain of laying off thousands or tens of thousands of people if travelers don’t come back, that distinction is meaningless; I’m just trying to survive.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/snowflake/56508\">Rise Up (Like the Sun)</a> by Snowflake (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: Bluemillenium, Sackjo22, Martin Luther King, Kara Square</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Quarantine Theater</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>While some folks in the hospitality industry are talking about “hygiene theater”, what about “quarantine theater”? Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #166 — What Is The Meaning of Travel?\">August episode</a>, I talked about the complexity local and state travel bans and quarantine measures are causing for people trying to plan some sort of travel.&nbsp;</li><li>My son Andrew and his significant other headed out to Portland, ME last month for work. The week before they left, the Marriott emailed him a form - “Please certify one of the following is true - I have received a negative COVID test performed no later than 72 hours prior to my arrival, or will quarantine for 14 days upon my arrival in Maine.” Since they were only going to be in Portland for 4 days, they trundled down to the nearest testing site for the quick test 2 days before they left -- where they got chewed out by one of the testers. “We’re running out of the quick tests. You should’ve planned better.” OK, how long to get results from the other test? “5 days” But that won’t meet Maine’s 3-day requirement. Tester just walks away. But they got their negative test results and got on their plane to Portland -- where no one in the airport or the hotel asked to see it.&nbsp; OK, not harm done other than the discomfort of a Q-tip probing their sinuses and a random bit of yelling, but waste scarce testing resources?</li><li>Chicago’s quarantine is also a bit of kabuki. Once a week the city’s health commission gets in front of the press to scold another state or two -- this week was Indiana and Wisconsin. There’s now 25 states and Puerto Rico that if you’re traveling from there to Chicago, you’re supposed to self-quarantine for 14 days or face fines up to $7,000. More interesting is that Chicago’s threshold for getting on the list is 15 new daily cases per 100,000 residents. On this week’s <a href=\"https://www.chicago.gov/city/en/sites/covid-19/home/emergency-travel-order.html\">tally,</a> Indiana is running in the 20-30 range, but so is the state of Illinois. You could call it hypocritical or pragmatic or keeping its powder dry for when the city needs another bucket of money from the state, but Chicago hasn’t put the rest of Illinois on its quarantine list.</li><li>Now, I’ve yet to hear of anyone who has actually self-quarantined and as of last week, <a href=\"https://chicago.cbslocal.com/2020/10/02/three-months-into-chicagos-emergency-travel-order-no-fines-issued-enforcement-focus-remains-on-education/\">no one has been rung up for not doing so</a>. But last month, a friend told me about how Chicago’s quarantine theater hit her last month. She finally got ‘round to taking some vacation at the end of the summer. She lives in Chicago, but is a big outdoors person; looking at airfares and tossing some darts at a map, she decided to go hit Bryce Canyon and Zion National Parks in Southern Utah. So she’s down there for a couple of days when her boss calls her. “They just announced that Utah is going on the city’s quarantine list. It’s not official until Friday, so I guess if you get out of there by Thursday, you won’t have to quarantine for 2 weeks before coming back to work.” And, it didn’t need to be said, those 2 weeks of self-quarantine wouldn’t be paid. My friend is unique in that she works for maybe the one company in Chicago that takes the city’s quarantine order seriously. So my friend fought through lousy cell coverage to see what she could salvage of the back half of her vacation. Luckily, she has friends in Oregon, which isn’t on the city’s list. So Thursday, she cut her hiking short, schlepped the 4½ hours back up to SLC and caught the last flight out to Portland -- which let her come back to work and make some money the next week.</li><li>Theater isn’t a new thing. If you’re, say, a <em>mature</em> traveler, you got to play a bit part in the security theater that premiered after 9/11 and the underwear bomber. While not a perfect analogy (and really, nothing ever is), we can see some similar theatrics -- government agencies (TSA then, health departments now) investing in activities that signal they are serious, but that most folks know aren’t really effective. For me and I think for most frequent travelers, the security theater ended with TSA PreCheck -- it seemed, again to most of us, as a reasonable balance between risk and getting on with our traveling lives. I don’t know what that looks like for quarantine theater, but I sure hope it doesn’t take the 10 years it took to figure out PreCheck.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/52154\">release.JOY.release</a> by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: essesq, Haskel (hej31)</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Traveling For Food</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I talked at the start of the episode about eating my way through Philadelphia a couple of weeks back, and it was just that. We landed Thursday around 11:30a and were hitting our favs at Reading Terminal Market by 1:30p. I went straight for Tommy Dinic’s for the roast pork sandwich with sharp provolone and broccoli rabe while Irene and Claire made for the Mennonite pretzel place and Termini Brothers for fresh-filled cannolis. And then as we were leaving, I swung past one of the PA Dutch stands to buy a 1-lb block of <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrapple\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">scrapple</a> for breakfast the rest of the stay.</li><li>Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #166 — What Is The Meaning of Travel?\">August episode</a> in the interview with Emily Thomas about her book <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2IpLXnd\"><em>The Meaning of Travel</em></a><em>, </em>we talked about a chapter on global homogenization. One of the bits that I edited out was the observation that, back 10-20 year ago, it was fun to go shopping and bring something unique back home. But now, with globalized e-commerce, there’s not much that you can’t find easier (and often cheaper) on Amazon or Taobao or Rakuten. And so, for me, food is the one experience of a place that can’t be easily exported and bought on-line.</li><li>On our trip to the UP -- Michigan’s Upper Peninsula -- along with the biking, hiking, and kayaking, we were also on a bit of a <a href=\"https://thepastyguy.com/portfolio/the-pasty-trail-best-pasties-in-up/\">pasty tasting tour</a>. The UP is pretty well known -- in the Midwest at least -- for their <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pasty\">pasties</a>, brought over by Cornish miners working the copper mines. We had traditional pasties filled with steak, potatoes, onions, and rutabagas, and breakfast pasties. We worked our ways through the finer points of pasty critique -- picking out the pasties made from lard-based doughs, and fillings that held together so you could eat the pasty with your hand but weren’t just complete mush.</li><li>It’s funny how these comparison dishes can crop up on a vacation. On a trip to Phuket, Thailand, Andrew ordered pad thai everywhere we ate. On a trip to Hungary, Irene searched every menu for <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisherman\'s_soup\">halászlé</a> - a spicy fish soup - after having a great bowl of it at lunch with her cousin in some little town on the shores of <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Balaton\">Lake Balaton</a>. And again Irene, in Spain now, searched every city we visited for <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salmorejo\">salmorejo</a>, not quite soup, more of a tomato and bread and olive oil and garlic purée. These sorta horizontal tasting, some would be planned -- like our pasty tour -- and some would just come up, like Irene’s halászlé hunt. But it’d be fun, getting a feel for what the base of the dish is, what everyone agrees on, and what people put their own spin on, because usually for these core dishes -- dishes that everyone around has eaten all their lives -- everyone has an opinion about them. And that’s part of what makes the broad/horizontal tasting fun.</li><li>And also, these dishes don’t seem to be “industrialized.” While I’ve had mass produced pasties in the UK, grabbing something out from the West Cornish Pasty hut in Waterloo Station while running for a train, the pasties in the UP were much more -- not “artisanal” because I don’t think anyone making pasties in the UP would use that word, but “family made”. At Miners Pasties in Munising, which came out top in our pasty ranks, the woman helping us at the counter said the lard pastry recipe came from the owner’s grandmother and only 3 people know it -- the granddaughters and their niece. And only those three make the pastry each day.&nbsp; We sat back and enjoyed those pasties because we knew we wouldn’t be eating them again unless and until we found our way back to this bench again some day.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #168</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_168.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food','','inherit','closed','closed','','2896-revision-v1','','','2020-10-16 19:05:57','2020-10-17 00:05:57','',2896,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/2896-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2909,1,'2020-10-16 19:17:21','2020-10-17 00:17:21','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":2899,\"width\":300,\"height\":300,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large is-resized\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-1024x1024.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2899\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"/><figcaption>300My mission is clear</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Trying to recover from a long weekend of eating and drinking through the neighborhoods of South Philly. Our movable feast reminded me that food may be the one experience of a place left that can’t be easily exported and bought on-line. We talk about the FBI\'s cybersecurity warning to work-from-home types using hotels for getaway offices, and are a bit amazed at how fast last year\'s \"flight shaming\" gave way to \"flights to nowhere.\" And we think about \"quarantine theater\" -- how cities and states are focusing on activities to signal they are serious about COVID, but that most folks know aren’t really effective. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_168.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>download</strong></a> the podcast file, go over to the <em>Subscribe</em> section on the right to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/911959576&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #168: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after a long weekend of eating and drinking and eating some more with friends in Philadelphia, a family we’ve traveled with before - South Africa, Singapore, Spain… and now, with COVID lockdowns, Philly. And while we’ll do a cultural thing or two, what we really like to do together is eat. It is the kind of group where comments like: “OK, we need to stop eating at 1:30 because we have 5:30 reservations” and “We’re only going to order the half-kilo of barbacoa because we’re eating again in 4 hours” are met with “Yeah, that’s a good point,” and “makes sense” rather than “I think we have a problem here.”&nbsp;</li><li>And Pennsylvania’s reopening regulation about needing to buy food when getting a beer didn’t help. After sneaking in a cheesesteak right before that 1:30 cutoff, we had to order some food with our afternoon beers -- the beer, of course, not subject to that 1:30 deadline because it’s liquid, so it’s not really food, so it doesn’t count. But we had to order some real, solid food with our beers. So we look at the menu -- ah, brussels sprouts, it’s a vegetable, that’s kinda healthy. Five minutes later, our beers arrive with a wire basket full of deep-fried brussels sprouts doused in a sweet chili sauce. So much for healthy.</li><li>But some of the bars, the smaller ones, the neighborhood ones, gamed it -- as these places are wont to do -- by putting a $1 food item on the menu -- 2 hard boiled eggs at one bar, a PB&amp;J at another. The best, though, was the Pop Tart we had with our last beer at Ray’s Happy Birthday Bar in South Philly. That one won the prize.</li><li>Which we found because we skipped the usual downtown/Center City/Society Hill hotels and grabbed an Airbnb in South Philly - kinda sandwiched between the older Italian neighborhoods and the newer Little Saigon area. We spent a lot of time outdoors, walking the neighborhoods -- and walking off our food -- and stopping in at neighborhood joints. One day, we’re picking up salamis and cheese from the Italian Market; another day, we’re buying banh mi’s from a Vietnamese bakery. I’ll write up a list of our favorite places for the TravelCommons website in a couple of weeks -- after my cholesterol level gets back to some semblance of normal.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/duckett/2333\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Another Girl (instrumental)</a> by duckett (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/duckett/23334 Ft: fourstones, miafas</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>First, a big “Thank You” to Gary Learned who goes by Denrael on social media for his review in Apple Podcasts. Gary is a long-time TravelCommons listener. Indeed, he’s pointed me to some great restaurants in places like Seattle and Memphis. Gary wrote a couple of weeks ago:<ul><li>“When people ask where I live, I usually just say airports and hilton. As someone who lives the life of the road warrior, I find this podcast strikes an all-to-familiar chord with my own experiences. A definite must-listen to understand the life of the traveller.</li><li>“I wrote the above a number of years ago and it is as true now as it was then, I look forward to Mark’s take on travel, it’s more about the journey, and cannot count the number of times when I’ve shook my head, laughed and said “yep, been there.”</li></ul></li><li>Gary, thanks for that. And thanks for staying with me this long.</li><li>The FBI pushed out a consumer alert last week to remind folks about the risks when using hotel wi-fi. We’ve talked about this many times and I think most frequent travelers know the drill when accessing any shared wi-fi, whether it be in a hotel or an airport or a bar or a Starbucks. Nothing new there, so why the FBI alert? Because the “FBI has observed a trend where individuals who were previously teleworking from home are beginning to telework from hotels. US hotels, predominantly in major cities, have begun to advertise daytime room reservations for guests seeking a quiet, distraction-free work environment.” So people who used to work in offices and have been working from home since March, are looking for a change of scenery, but either can’t or aren’t keen to go back to the group office setting. Enter downtown hotels, many of whom, we mentioned last month, are slouching towards bankruptcy because of low occupancy. Don’t want a bed for the night? How ‘bout a desk for the day? I just got an email from Omni Hotels pitching just that -- “Trade up your classroom for everything you need for a productive day of work plus downtown Los Angeles views.” I guess the FBI thinks these displaced office workers, used to working on secure corporate or home networks, might not be as careful. But even for frequent travelers, the alert is a good read:&nbsp; talking about the dangers of an “evil twin” attack, logging onto what looks like a hotel wi-fi but is actually a hacker’s network; logging into the actual hotel wi-fi which has been compromised through exploits in out-of-date or unpatched network hardware. The FBI’s top recommendations are ones we’ve <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/09/20/podcast-155-rj-delays-street-food-in-poland-and-hungary/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #155 — RJ Delays; Street Food in Poland and Hungary\">repeated</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/02/20/podcast-127-critiquing-my-top-10-travel-tips-reviewing-vpns/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #127 — Critiquing My Top 10 Travel Tips; Reviewing VPNs\">numerous</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/12/20/podcast-119-digital-security-on-the-road-us-airports-getting-better/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #119 — Digital Security On The Road; US Airports Getting Better?\">times</a> - use a VPN when you connect to public wi-fi, or avoid them altogether with a mobile hotspot. Even when I’ve had a corporate VPN, I’ve always used one of the top paid VPN providers - NordVPN, PIA or ExpressVPN - because their software is so much better. I’m using NordVPN now, and whenever I’m not on a private network, I fire up the Nord client and it handles everything -- connects to the best server, reconnects automatically when I open the lid to wake up my Mac again. I don’t have to think about it. Indeed, half the time I forget to shut it off at home, until I’m wondering why I can’t move a file to another PC. Also, only access secure websites; I used to say “look for https://” but I guess that was too geeky, so you need to look for lock icons instead. And, of course, enable 2-factor authentication whenever you can. Nothing new, but a good reminder nonetheless. I’ll put a <a href=\"https://www.ic3.gov/media/2020/201006.aspx\">link to the alert</a> in the show notes, but you can also find links on the TravelCommons Facebook page and Twitter account.</li><li>OK, I gotta ask “what happened to Greta Thunberg\'s ‘flygskam’ or ‘flight shaming’ -- the 2019 existential travel threat? Because the whole Asian thing of “flights to nowhere” -- EVA Air from Taiwan filling up its “Hello Kitty” plane, All Nippon doing a fake flight to Hawaii, and then Qantas selling out a 787 for a lap around Australia. Singapore Air scrapped their “flight to nowhere” at the last minute, instead turning one of their A380s into a pop-up restaurant. I have to tell you that, honestly, I just don’t get this. For me, the flight is a means to an end -- something I’ve got to bear to get where I want to go. Getting on that American 737 in ORD last week didn’t fill me with joy; it was just simple math -- 2 hrs in a plane vs. 11 hrs in a car. And all that I just said… goes double for the idea of voluntarily buying airplane meals to eat at home. Words fail me.</li><li>At the end of September, the CDC did an early release of an article slated for the November issue of their peer-reviewed journal <em>Emerging Infectious Diseases</em> (and I thought <em>Walden Pond</em> was a cure for insomnia). The article analyzed the in-flight transmission of coronavirus from one business class passenger to 14 other passengers and a crew member on a 10-hour Vietnam Air flight from London to Hanoi. Most of the reactions in the press and on Twitter were “Yikes! Single passenger infects 15 people!”. While noting the CDC’s disclaimer “Early release articles are not considered as final versions” (which I didn’t see mentioned in any of the press articles), I came away with a less-than- “Yikes” after reading the whole paper. The flight was on March 2nd, so while the world was still trying to figure this novel coronavirus thing out and way before mandatory in-flight masks. And the passenger was symptomatic with a cough and a sore throat. Of the 14 passengers infected, 12 were in the same business class cabin and of those, all but one were within a 2-seat radius. And the authors aren’t sure if the 2 economy class infections were from the business class index case or from a different source. My takeaways: 1) Don’t let symptomatic people on planes - even if temperature checks aren’t perfect, it might catch some folks and will certainly make people think about their condition before flying; 2) Because this appears to validate the risk of being kept in close proximity to an infected person over a prolonged period; 3) Which, to me, justifies the airlines’ no-excuses mask requirements; but 4) In spite of a symptomatic un-masked passenger coughing away in the front of the plane, no non-adjacent passengers got infected -- so maybe the airline execs’ confidence in HEPA filters kinda justified. I’ll put <a href=\"https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/11/20-3299_article\">a link to the CDC paper</a> in the show notes. It’s not that long. It’s interesting to read the source document rather than just a headline or a short USAToday blurb.</li><li>Having said all that, I’m in no way, shape, or form justifying the “hygiene theater” that the travel industry seems to be trying to use to bring folks back. I talked back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/07/17/podcast-165-first-post-lockdown-flight-when-does-business-travel-come-back/\">the July episode</a> about the “Hertz Gold Standard Clean” sticker Hertz is slapping across driver-side doors. And there are some hotels now scheduling cleaning during the day rather than overnight so guests can see it. And then, on my American flights between Chicago and Philly last week, the banner across the top of the American Way magazine cover in the seatback pocket - “This magazine has been treated with an antimicrobial process” -- which I guess means “Please, feel safe to open it up and look at the advertisements.” I dunno, it feels a bit like the “security theater” we all went through after 9/11 - it was less about actually making things safer and more about making us “feel” safer -- and so, more willing to get on a plane. But maybe if I’m an airline or hotel exec facing down the pain of laying off thousands or tens of thousands of people if travelers don’t come back, that distinction is meaningless; I’m just trying to survive.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/snowflake/56508\">Rise Up (Like the Sun)</a> by Snowflake (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: Bluemillenium, Sackjo22, Martin Luther King, Kara Square</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Quarantine Theater</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>While some folks in the hospitality industry are talking about “hygiene theater”, what about “quarantine theater”? Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #166 — What Is The Meaning of Travel?\">August episode</a>, I talked about the complexity local and state travel bans and quarantine measures are causing for people trying to plan some sort of travel.&nbsp;</li><li>My son Andrew and his significant other headed out to Portland, ME last month for work. The week before they left, the Marriott emailed him a form - “Please certify one of the following is true - I have received a negative COVID test performed no later than 72 hours prior to my arrival, or will quarantine for 14 days upon my arrival in Maine.” Since they were only going to be in Portland for 4 days, they trundled down to the nearest testing site for the quick test 2 days before they left -- where they got chewed out by one of the testers. “We’re running out of the quick tests. You should’ve planned better.” OK, how long to get results from the other test? “5 days” But that won’t meet Maine’s 3-day requirement. Tester just walks away. But they got their negative test results and got on their plane to Portland -- where no one in the airport or the hotel asked to see it.&nbsp; OK, not harm done other than the discomfort of a Q-tip probing their sinuses and a random bit of yelling, but waste scarce testing resources?</li><li>Chicago’s quarantine is also a bit of kabuki. Once a week the city’s health commission gets in front of the press to scold another state or two -- this week was Indiana and Wisconsin. There’s now 25 states and Puerto Rico that if you’re traveling from there to Chicago, you’re supposed to self-quarantine for 14 days or face fines up to $7,000. More interesting is that Chicago’s threshold for getting on the list is 15 new daily cases per 100,000 residents. On this week’s <a href=\"https://www.chicago.gov/city/en/sites/covid-19/home/emergency-travel-order.html\">tally,</a> Indiana is running in the 20-30 range, but so is the state of Illinois. You could call it hypocritical or pragmatic or keeping its powder dry for when the city needs another bucket of money from the state, but Chicago hasn’t put the rest of Illinois on its quarantine list.</li><li>Now, I’ve yet to hear of anyone who has actually self-quarantined and as of last week, <a href=\"https://chicago.cbslocal.com/2020/10/02/three-months-into-chicagos-emergency-travel-order-no-fines-issued-enforcement-focus-remains-on-education/\">no one has been rung up for not doing so</a>. But last month, a friend told me about how Chicago’s quarantine theater hit her last month. She finally got ‘round to taking some vacation at the end of the summer. She lives in Chicago, but is a big outdoors person; looking at airfares and tossing some darts at a map, she decided to go hit Bryce Canyon and Zion National Parks in Southern Utah. So she’s down there for a couple of days when her boss calls her. “They just announced that Utah is going on the city’s quarantine list. It’s not official until Friday, so I guess if you get out of there by Thursday, you won’t have to quarantine for 2 weeks before coming back to work.” And, it didn’t need to be said, those 2 weeks of self-quarantine wouldn’t be paid. My friend is unique in that she works for maybe the one company in Chicago that takes the city’s quarantine order seriously. So my friend fought through lousy cell coverage to see what she could salvage of the back half of her vacation. Luckily, she has friends in Oregon, which isn’t on the city’s list. So Thursday, she cut her hiking short, schlepped the 4½ hours back up to SLC and caught the last flight out to Portland -- which let her come back to work and make some money the next week.</li><li>Theater isn’t a new thing. If you’re, say, a <em>mature</em> traveler, you got to play a bit part in the security theater that premiered after 9/11 and the underwear bomber. While not a perfect analogy (and really, nothing ever is), we can see some similar theatrics -- government agencies (TSA then, health departments now) investing in activities that signal they are serious, but that most folks know aren’t really effective. For me and I think for most frequent travelers, the security theater ended with TSA PreCheck -- it seemed, again to most of us, as a reasonable balance between risk and getting on with our traveling lives. I don’t know what that looks like for quarantine theater, but I sure hope it doesn’t take the 10 years it took to figure out PreCheck.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/52154\">release.JOY.release</a> by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: essesq, Haskel (hej31)</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Traveling For Food</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I talked at the start of the episode about eating my way through Philadelphia a couple of weeks back, and it was just that. We landed Thursday around 11:30a and were hitting our favs at Reading Terminal Market by 1:30p. I went straight for Tommy Dinic’s for the roast pork sandwich with sharp provolone and broccoli rabe while Irene and Claire made for the Mennonite pretzel place and Termini Brothers for fresh-filled cannolis. And then as we were leaving, I swung past one of the PA Dutch stands to buy a 1-lb block of <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrapple\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">scrapple</a> for breakfast the rest of the stay.</li><li>Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #166 — What Is The Meaning of Travel?\">August episode</a> in the interview with Emily Thomas about her book <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2IpLXnd\"><em>The Meaning of Travel</em></a><em>, </em>we talked about a chapter on global homogenization. One of the bits that I edited out was the observation that, back 10-20 year ago, it was fun to go shopping and bring something unique back home. But now, with globalized e-commerce, there’s not much that you can’t find easier (and often cheaper) on Amazon or Taobao or Rakuten. And so, for me, food is the one experience of a place that can’t be easily exported and bought on-line.</li><li>On our trip to the UP -- Michigan’s Upper Peninsula -- along with the biking, hiking, and kayaking, we were also on a bit of a <a href=\"https://thepastyguy.com/portfolio/the-pasty-trail-best-pasties-in-up/\">pasty tasting tour</a>. The UP is pretty well known -- in the Midwest at least -- for their <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pasty\">pasties</a>, brought over by Cornish miners working the copper mines. We had traditional pasties filled with steak, potatoes, onions, and rutabagas, and breakfast pasties. We worked our ways through the finer points of pasty critique -- picking out the pasties made from lard-based doughs, and fillings that held together so you could eat the pasty with your hand but weren’t just complete mush.</li><li>It’s funny how these comparison dishes can crop up on a vacation. On a trip to Phuket, Thailand, Andrew ordered pad thai everywhere we ate. On a trip to Hungary, Irene searched every menu for <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisherman\'s_soup\">halászlé</a> - a spicy fish soup - after having a great bowl of it at lunch with her cousin in some little town on the shores of <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Balaton\">Lake Balaton</a>. And again Irene, in Spain now, searched every city we visited for <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salmorejo\">salmorejo</a>, not quite soup, more of a tomato and bread and olive oil and garlic purée. These sorta horizontal tasting, some would be planned -- like our pasty tour -- and some would just come up, like Irene’s halászlé hunt. But it’d be fun, getting a feel for what the base of the dish is, what everyone agrees on, and what people put their own spin on, because usually for these core dishes -- dishes that everyone around has eaten all their lives -- everyone has an opinion about them. And that’s part of what makes the broad/horizontal tasting fun.</li><li>And also, these dishes don’t seem to be “industrialized.” While I’ve had mass produced pasties in the UK, grabbing something out from the West Cornish Pasty hut in Waterloo Station while running for a train, the pasties in the UP were much more -- not “artisanal” because I don’t think anyone making pasties in the UP would use that word, but “family made”. At Miners Pasties in Munising, which came out top in our pasty ranks, the woman helping us at the counter said the lard pastry recipe came from the owner’s grandmother and only 3 people know it -- the granddaughters and their niece. And only those three make the pastry each day.&nbsp; We sat back and enjoyed those pasties because we knew we wouldn’t be eating them again unless and until we found our way back to this bench again some day.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #168</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_168.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food','','inherit','closed','closed','','2896-revision-v1','','','2020-10-16 19:17:21','2020-10-17 00:17:21','',2896,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/2896-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2911,1,'2020-10-16 19:20:53','2020-10-17 00:20:53','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/738DE79A-D927-423E-A890-569A5F3A0AB1-scaled.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2682 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/738DE79A-D927-423E-A890-569A5F3A0AB1-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a><figcaption>You have reached your destination</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>Things started out well, skipping out on Chicago winter for a drive down to Key West. But then last week, coronavirus hit the US and everything unraveled. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_161.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_161.mp3\"]\n<p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #161: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you hunkered down in the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois, trying to figure out exactly what the governor’s “shelter-in-place” directive means. Not a lot of travel since the last episode, and that’s not just because of coronavirus. No business travel booked, so it was just one trip in the back half of February to visit some friends who are snowbirding in Key West, Florida. 80 degrees and sunny vs. 30 degrees and grey skies in Chicago -- tough duty. Our friends rented a nice house up a dead end street in the Historic District, just a couple of blocks off Duval Street. They had it for two months, Feb through the end of March, but left early, giving up their last 2 weeks of sunny weather to drive back to Chicago because they’re afraid hotels will be closing along their route home.&nbsp;</li><li>Hadn’t planned any travel in March, but watched our April plans dissolve as Covid-19 spread. First, a friend from Poland canceled his wedding in Sedona, AZ shortly after the US announced the 30-day travel ban for Europeans. While their wedding date was past the 30 days, they figured this was just the start -- which it was. Over the next 5 days, travel bans started popping up across Europe. We joked to ourselves, “Lucky timing -- first time in 4 years we’re not doing Spring Break in Europe”, opting instead for some wine tasting in Howell Mountain and Napa Valley. Until the next day when California locked everything down, closing everything including restaurants and wineries…</li><li>For some families, kids home from school and mom or dad off the road and working from home -- the forced family togetherness is adding to the stress. I was talking to a friend this week -- “I’m usually on the road 75% of the time, and the kids are in school or sports. After 2 days of this, my wife laid down the rules -- my son is in the basement, my wife and daughter are on the second floor, I’m on the third floor, and the first floor with the kitchen is neutral territory -- you can pass through, but you can’t claim table or counter space there.” Last time I checked in with him, everyone was still alive -- that is, they hadn’t killed each other yet.</li><li>But I’m nothing if not an optimist, so in the midst of this week’s unraveling, I found a deal on a direct American Air flight from ORD to Barcelona -- 8½ hr 787 flight -- so I booked it -- 2 weeks in Barcelona at the end of September. I don’t know what we’ll do yet or where we’ll stay, but I’m already looking forward to it.</li><li>Bridge Music --  <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/snowflake/46164\">A Foolish Game</a> by Snowflake (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/snowflake/46164 Ft: Admiral Bob  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Steve Frick, a longtime TravelCommons listener and Untappd buddy who also does a podcast, <a href=\"http://hypeamerica.com/back-and-gone-again\">Travel Stories from Back and Gone Again</a>, took some time to record and send in an audio comment on last month’s episode -<ul><li>Gotta love the text-to-speech robot voice. Steve, would’ve been great to see that selfie on your Twitter feed. Also, check out the show notes for a link to Steve’s podcast</li></ul></li><li>Darren Mak hit me up on Twitter<ul><li>“Hey Mark,&nbsp; just listened to Travel Commons <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/09/20/podcast-155-rj-delays-street-food-in-poland-and-hungary/\">episode 155</a> on my last flight... board my next one which is a Delta MD88. Look out the window and see this... thanks for putting that in my head buddy!”&nbsp;</li><li>From the picture on his tweet, you can see he’s sitting in the window seat of an MD-88 just in front of the engine cowl. In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/09/20/podcast-155-rj-delays-street-food-in-poland-and-hungary/\">episode 155</a>, we talked about American Airlines’ retirement of their MD-80’s. I mentioned that when I ended up in a seat like Darren’s, my mind would sometimes wander -- if the engine next to my head blows up, will the shrapnel blow out or blow into the cabin. I never heard of such a catastrophic failure on an MD-80 -- but that didn’t keep me from wondering. And now, Darren can’t keep from wondering. Sorry about that, Darren. You won’t be able to un-think that. I’m guessing, though, that those MD’s were the first planes Delta parked as air traffic cratered and will be the last to return -- if they ever do. Savor that pic...</li></ul></li><li>And for our UK subscribers, a shout out to another TravelCommons listener and Untappd friend Rob Cheshire who launched <a href=\"https://thisweekincraft.beer/\">This Week in Craft.Beer</a>, a weekly newsletter covering the UK craft beer scene. He’s four issues in and is on a good roll. We’re thinking about heading over to the UK for Thanksgiving and the taproom directory in Rob’s newsletter will be key to planning that trip. I also love that he’s using a .Beer domain name. Check out the show notes for a link.</li><li>I think I’ve mentioned in a past episode that I’ve switched my carryon from a Timbuk 2 backpack to a Timbuk 2 messenger bag. Digitizing means carrying less physical stuff; the backpack was feeling half empty, so I switched to the smaller messenger bag. I like it except for one thing -- it’ll only hold a short water bottle. The big 20oz’er my daughter gave me for Christmas? Fits great in the backpack side pocket, but is too tall for the messenger bag. I played around with a lot of water bottles, but the best one has turned out to be a 500 ml Evian bottle. Now I know that single use plastic is a bad thing, but I can get a week’s use out of one Evian bottle. Until I fill it up in the gym or the concierge lounge the morning before my flight home and forget about it -- until the TSA person pulls it out of my bag on the other side of security and asks me, a bit sarcastically, if I want to go back and check it in my luggage. Yeah, no -- just pitch it. Which is why I can’t have nice things -- like a $35 teakwood S’well bottle. Instead, I walk down the terminal and just spend $3.50 for another bottle of Evian.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>For my trip to Key West, I got back to an old habit of reading some non-guidebook books -- either fiction or non-fiction -- about my destination before going. Before driving down the Overseas Highway, I read <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2QzesjI\"><em>Last Train to Paradise</em></a> about the incredible effort that went into building a railroad line to Key West 100 years ago -- that was later repurposed for the first iteration of the highway, and then read Hemingway’s <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3a72oOv\"><em>To Have and Have Not</em></a> because, well,&nbsp; it’s Hemingway and it’s about Key West, and so you just have to. I used to do this a lot more. I started when I read Paul Theroux’s <a href=\"https://amzn.to/398SvhE\"><em>Kingdom by the Sea</em></a> before my first trip to the UK back in 1985. I read John Lukacs’ history <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2xNS9A7\"><em>Budapest 1900</em></a> before my first trip to Hungary in 1989, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3a7KDhX\"><em>Watermark</em></a> by Joseph Brodsky before a trip to Venice, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/394bji3\"><em>His Bloody Project</em></a> by Grahame Burnet before going to Scotland’s Western Highlands. As you’d guess, none of these were about what to do or see, but instead they gave some context about the place -- even the fiction books. Gives a bit of balance to the go-here/see-that stuff in guidebooks and web sites.&nbsp; Something new for this trip -- a Spotify playlist of Jimmy Buffet tunes from those 1970’s Key West albums -- <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2whAqRs\"><em>Living And Dying In ¾ Time</em></a>, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2vG6wG8\"><em>Havana Daydreamin\'</em></a> -- for some additional context for that 3 hour drive down through the Keys.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com. </li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/THE_CONCEPT_OF_ENERGY/55008\">ABANDONED BUTTERFLIES</a> by THE_CONCEPT_OF_ENERGY (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/THE_CONCEPT_OF_ENERGY/55008 Ft: Doxent Zsigmond, Snowflake</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>New Crisis, Old Question</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I’m not gonna try to do any hot takes on what this whole coronavirus/Covid-19/ social distancing experience means because: a) I hate the whole “insta-punditry” that social media has spawned; and b) there are so many unknowns and things are changing so fast that any attempt at meaningful analysis right now won’t age very well. Indeed, I’ve had to re-write this episode 3 times now. I gotta get it recorded before things change and I have to re-do it again.</li><li>At first, it felt like the Black Monday crash of 1987 (which, I hate to admit, I’m old enough to have experienced) or Sept 11, 2001 were good comparison points -- significant, sharp, scary events that came out of nowhere with no warning, and when we were in it, felt like a free fall with no bottom in sight. But after a week or so, even though the stock market was still down or airports and airplanes were still empty, we could see a path to the other side -- maybe not turn-by-turn directions, but at least it felt like we could point ourselves in the general direction. But with this, we’re, what 2-3 weeks in?, and it still feels like we’re in that free fall; we don’t know where the bottom is, let alone the direction to get out.</li><li>I remember, after Sept 11th and the 2008 Great Recession, people saying “everything has changed” and wondering if travel would rebound, if people would get on planes again in the same numbers. And it did and then some -- though the growth has been driven more by leisure travelers than the road warriors. But the travel industry makes its money off the frequent business traveler, and that question pops up again -- will they come back? Because it’s a bit different this time. In 2001, remote work options were pretty much just AOL or Yahoo instant messaging. Video was limited to special rooms with ISDN lines; Skype didn’t launch for another 2 years. In 2008, things were a bit better, but we’re a few months after the second version of the iPhone is released (the iPhone 3G), WhatsApp doesn’t launch for another year, and Slack doesn’t show up for another 5. But now 12 years on, we have bandwidth, we have tools. Last fall, we had <em><a href=\"https://www.ft.com/content/5c635430-1dbc-11ea-97df-cc63de1d73f4\">flygskam</a></em>  -- flight shaming -- hit the mainstream, and now the Covid-19 pandemic that’s just about shut down international air travel. Were we ready to step back from business travel and the coronavirus is just the forcing function?</li><li>I’m coming up on the 35th anniversary of my first business flight, and in that time, I’ve known maybe a handful of guys (and they were all men) who went out of their way to do more business travel; when offered the choice between a conference call or a plane trip, they chose the plane trip. The vast majority got on the plane or the train or behind the wheel because that’s what they needed to do to get the job done -- to close a deal, to do a project, to work with an employee. As remote tools get better and get more ingrained in the culture, the ability to get tasks done remotely increases. But we are social animals. And for all the data and processes, most business is about relationships. And as long as that’s true, we’ll want to meet people face-to-face -- over a coffee or a beer or a meal -- once we finally touch bottom after this coronavirus free fall and can feel safe sitting next to each other again.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/49674\">H2O</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/49674  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Driving Down to Key West</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Back to the pre-lock down days of February, it was the first time I’d been to Key West. We decided to drive down, run the whole <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overseas_Highway\">Overseas Highway</a>, the 113-mile stretch of US 1 from Homestead, south of Miami, to Key West. We flew into FLL because -- well, it’s a bit less of a zoo parade than MIA. We landed, walked straight out of the terminal, across the street and into the rental car center -- no shuttle bus ride to the back-40. RSW is the same on the Gulf side. There are damn few on-site rental sites left, and so I appreciate them when I can. Walking down the Hertz Five-Star aisle with Irene (I fell out of top-tier President’s Circle a few years back; too many in-city clients where Uber and Lyft were more convenient), I see a bunch of <a href=\"https://www.hyundaiusa.com/us/en/vehicles/kona/gallery\">Hyundai Konas</a> -- which is a new model for me, it’s a subcompact SUV -- a few Chevy Malibus and, as always, the requisite bunch of Nissan Altimas. I do my normal drill -- looking for non-beat up cars (so I don’t have to argue about damage when I return it) and low mileage (so it won’t break down during the rental). Irene, she’s looking for a cute color. Lucky for us, the car that was at the intersection of all those criteria was right in front of us -- a Surf Blue Hyundai Kona with 126 miles on the odometer. We threw our luggage in, dialed up Key West on Google Maps on Car Play, and pulled out -- into a 15-minute line to get out of the Hertz lot. Somehow that partnership with Clear doesn’t seem to be making much of a dent.</li><li>When we were planning this trip, everyone warned us off the drive -- “It’s slow”, “you’ll get caught behind a bunch of trucks”, “an accident will shut the whole road down” -- but I was as excited for the drive as I was the time in Key West. I think the Overseas Highway is one of the iconic drives in the US -- in my mind, it’s in the same league with Pacific Coast Highway between San Francisco and LA and Route 66 from Chicago to LA.&nbsp;</li><li>Even before we left the mainland, the drive was cool, with the Everglades on one side and the marinas and ocean inlets on the other. The drive through Key Largo was less interesting -- not much more than bait shops and boat parking. A bit further along, we crawled through Islamorada and Marathon in heavy traffic on a Monday afternoon.</li><li>Everyone talks about Seven Mile Bridge (we clocked it at 6.8 miles) and have seen it in movies, and it <em>is</em> very cool, but what was more interesting to me were the sections of the highway before that, that run across the low-lying keys along the route of the old Overseas Railroad which I read about in <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2QzesjI\"><em>Last Train to Paradise</em></a> -- time and again we’d be driving across what was nothing more than just a bit of a road bed and a 100 or so feet of beach and vegetation. After that, it’s ocean.&nbsp;</li><li>The warnings were right -- the highway is not a fast drive. It squeezes down from four lanes to two lanes for a bit, and Monroe County sheriff cars are parked where the speed limit dips when you pass through towns. But speed isn’t really the point. Just like you don’t run through Big Sur at 70 mph on PCH, you don’t blow past people surf fishing for snapper, snook, and grouper, or not slow down and try to spot Key Deer on Big Pine Key. If you just want to get to Key West as fast as possible, spend $100 or so for a flight from FLL or MIA. Otherwise, throttle back and remember -- on this drive, it’s as much about the journey as the destination.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #161</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_161.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #161 — New Crisis, Old Question; Driving Down to Key West','','inherit','closed','closed','','2680-revision-v1','','','2020-10-16 19:20:53','2020-10-17 00:20:53','',2680,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/2680-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2912,1,'2020-10-16 19:22:27','2020-10-17 00:22:27','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":2899,\"width\":300,\"height\":300,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large is-resized\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-1024x1024.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2899\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"/><figcaption>My mission is clear</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Trying to recover from a long weekend of eating and drinking through the neighborhoods of South Philly. Our movable feast reminded me that food may be the one experience of a place left that can’t be easily exported and bought on-line. We talk about the FBI\'s cybersecurity warning to work-from-home types using hotels for getaway offices, and are a bit amazed at how fast last year\'s \"flight shaming\" gave way to \"flights to nowhere.\" And we think about \"quarantine theater\" -- how cities and states are focusing on activities to signal they are serious about COVID, but that most folks know aren’t really effective. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_168.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>download</strong></a> the podcast file, go over to the <em>Subscribe</em> section on the right to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/911959576&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #168: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after a long weekend of eating and drinking and eating some more with friends in Philadelphia, a family we’ve traveled with before - South Africa, Singapore, Spain… and now, with COVID lockdowns, Philly. And while we’ll do a cultural thing or two, what we really like to do together is eat. It is the kind of group where comments like: “OK, we need to stop eating at 1:30 because we have 5:30 reservations” and “We’re only going to order the half-kilo of barbacoa because we’re eating again in 4 hours” are met with “Yeah, that’s a good point,” and “makes sense” rather than “I think we have a problem here.”&nbsp;</li><li>And Pennsylvania’s reopening regulation about needing to buy food when getting a beer didn’t help. After sneaking in a cheesesteak right before that 1:30 cutoff, we had to order some food with our afternoon beers -- the beer, of course, not subject to that 1:30 deadline because it’s liquid, so it’s not really food, so it doesn’t count. But we had to order some real, solid food with our beers. So we look at the menu -- ah, brussels sprouts, it’s a vegetable, that’s kinda healthy. Five minutes later, our beers arrive with a wire basket full of deep-fried brussels sprouts doused in a sweet chili sauce. So much for healthy.</li><li>But some of the bars, the smaller ones, the neighborhood ones, gamed it -- as these places are wont to do -- by putting a $1 food item on the menu -- 2 hard boiled eggs at one bar, a PB&amp;J at another. The best, though, was the Pop Tart we had with our last beer at Ray’s Happy Birthday Bar in South Philly. That one won the prize.</li><li>Which we found because we skipped the usual downtown/Center City/Society Hill hotels and grabbed an Airbnb in South Philly - kinda sandwiched between the older Italian neighborhoods and the newer Little Saigon area. We spent a lot of time outdoors, walking the neighborhoods -- and walking off our food -- and stopping in at neighborhood joints. One day, we’re picking up salamis and cheese from the Italian Market; another day, we’re buying banh mi’s from a Vietnamese bakery. I’ll write up a list of our favorite places for the TravelCommons website in a couple of weeks -- after my cholesterol level gets back to some semblance of normal.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/duckett/2333\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Another Girl (instrumental)</a> by duckett (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/duckett/23334 Ft: fourstones, miafas</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>First, a big “Thank You” to Gary Learned who goes by Denrael on social media for his review in Apple Podcasts. Gary is a long-time TravelCommons listener. Indeed, he’s pointed me to some great restaurants in places like Seattle and Memphis. Gary wrote a couple of weeks ago:<ul><li>“When people ask where I live, I usually just say airports and hilton. As someone who lives the life of the road warrior, I find this podcast strikes an all-to-familiar chord with my own experiences. A definite must-listen to understand the life of the traveller.</li><li>“I wrote the above a number of years ago and it is as true now as it was then, I look forward to Mark’s take on travel, it’s more about the journey, and cannot count the number of times when I’ve shook my head, laughed and said “yep, been there.”</li></ul></li><li>Gary, thanks for that. And thanks for staying with me this long.</li><li>The FBI pushed out a consumer alert last week to remind folks about the risks when using hotel wi-fi. We’ve talked about this many times and I think most frequent travelers know the drill when accessing any shared wi-fi, whether it be in a hotel or an airport or a bar or a Starbucks. Nothing new there, so why the FBI alert? Because the “FBI has observed a trend where individuals who were previously teleworking from home are beginning to telework from hotels. US hotels, predominantly in major cities, have begun to advertise daytime room reservations for guests seeking a quiet, distraction-free work environment.” So people who used to work in offices and have been working from home since March, are looking for a change of scenery, but either can’t or aren’t keen to go back to the group office setting. Enter downtown hotels, many of whom, we mentioned last month, are slouching towards bankruptcy because of low occupancy. Don’t want a bed for the night? How ‘bout a desk for the day? I just got an email from Omni Hotels pitching just that -- “Trade up your classroom for everything you need for a productive day of work plus downtown Los Angeles views.” I guess the FBI thinks these displaced office workers, used to working on secure corporate or home networks, might not be as careful. But even for frequent travelers, the alert is a good read:&nbsp; talking about the dangers of an “evil twin” attack, logging onto what looks like a hotel wi-fi but is actually a hacker’s network; logging into the actual hotel wi-fi which has been compromised through exploits in out-of-date or unpatched network hardware. The FBI’s top recommendations are ones we’ve <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/09/20/podcast-155-rj-delays-street-food-in-poland-and-hungary/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #155 — RJ Delays; Street Food in Poland and Hungary\">repeated</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/02/20/podcast-127-critiquing-my-top-10-travel-tips-reviewing-vpns/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #127 — Critiquing My Top 10 Travel Tips; Reviewing VPNs\">numerous</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/12/20/podcast-119-digital-security-on-the-road-us-airports-getting-better/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #119 — Digital Security On The Road; US Airports Getting Better?\">times</a> - use a VPN when you connect to public wi-fi, or avoid them altogether with a mobile hotspot. Even when I’ve had a corporate VPN, I’ve always used one of the top paid VPN providers - NordVPN, PIA or ExpressVPN - because their software is so much better. I’m using NordVPN now, and whenever I’m not on a private network, I fire up the Nord client and it handles everything -- connects to the best server, reconnects automatically when I open the lid to wake up my Mac again. I don’t have to think about it. Indeed, half the time I forget to shut it off at home, until I’m wondering why I can’t move a file to another PC. Also, only access secure websites; I used to say “look for https://” but I guess that was too geeky, so you need to look for lock icons instead. And, of course, enable 2-factor authentication whenever you can. Nothing new, but a good reminder nonetheless. I’ll put a <a href=\"https://www.ic3.gov/media/2020/201006.aspx\">link to the alert</a> in the show notes, but you can also find links on the TravelCommons Facebook page and Twitter account.</li><li>OK, I gotta ask “what happened to Greta Thunberg\'s ‘flygskam’ or ‘flight shaming’ -- the 2019 existential travel threat? Because the whole Asian thing of “flights to nowhere” -- EVA Air from Taiwan filling up its “Hello Kitty” plane, All Nippon doing a fake flight to Hawaii, and then Qantas selling out a 787 for a lap around Australia. Singapore Air scrapped their “flight to nowhere” at the last minute, instead turning one of their A380s into a pop-up restaurant. I have to tell you that, honestly, I just don’t get this. For me, the flight is a means to an end -- something I’ve got to bear to get where I want to go. Getting on that American 737 in ORD last week didn’t fill me with joy; it was just simple math -- 2 hrs in a plane vs. 11 hrs in a car. And all that I just said… goes double for the idea of voluntarily buying airplane meals to eat at home. Words fail me.</li><li>At the end of September, the CDC did an early release of an article slated for the November issue of their peer-reviewed journal <em>Emerging Infectious Diseases</em> (and I thought <em>Walden Pond</em> was a cure for insomnia). The article analyzed the in-flight transmission of coronavirus from one business class passenger to 14 other passengers and a crew member on a 10-hour Vietnam Air flight from London to Hanoi. Most of the reactions in the press and on Twitter were “Yikes! Single passenger infects 15 people!”. While noting the CDC’s disclaimer “Early release articles are not considered as final versions” (which I didn’t see mentioned in any of the press articles), I came away with a less-than- “Yikes” after reading the whole paper. The flight was on March 2nd, so while the world was still trying to figure this novel coronavirus thing out and way before mandatory in-flight masks. And the passenger was symptomatic with a cough and a sore throat. Of the 14 passengers infected, 12 were in the same business class cabin and of those, all but one were within a 2-seat radius. And the authors aren’t sure if the 2 economy class infections were from the business class index case or from a different source. My takeaways: 1) Don’t let symptomatic people on planes - even if temperature checks aren’t perfect, it might catch some folks and will certainly make people think about their condition before flying; 2) Because this appears to validate the risk of being kept in close proximity to an infected person over a prolonged period; 3) Which, to me, justifies the airlines’ no-excuses mask requirements; but 4) In spite of a symptomatic un-masked passenger coughing away in the front of the plane, no non-adjacent passengers got infected -- so maybe the airline execs’ confidence in HEPA filters kinda justified. I’ll put <a href=\"https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/11/20-3299_article\">a link to the CDC paper</a> in the show notes. It’s not that long. It’s interesting to read the source document rather than just a headline or a short USAToday blurb.</li><li>Having said all that, I’m in no way, shape, or form justifying the “hygiene theater” that the travel industry seems to be trying to use to bring folks back. I talked back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/07/17/podcast-165-first-post-lockdown-flight-when-does-business-travel-come-back/\">the July episode</a> about the “Hertz Gold Standard Clean” sticker Hertz is slapping across driver-side doors. And there are some hotels now scheduling cleaning during the day rather than overnight so guests can see it. And then, on my American flights between Chicago and Philly last week, the banner across the top of the American Way magazine cover in the seatback pocket - “This magazine has been treated with an antimicrobial process” -- which I guess means “Please, feel safe to open it up and look at the advertisements.” I dunno, it feels a bit like the “security theater” we all went through after 9/11 - it was less about actually making things safer and more about making us “feel” safer -- and so, more willing to get on a plane. But maybe if I’m an airline or hotel exec facing down the pain of laying off thousands or tens of thousands of people if travelers don’t come back, that distinction is meaningless; I’m just trying to survive.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/snowflake/56508\">Rise Up (Like the Sun)</a> by Snowflake (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: Bluemillenium, Sackjo22, Martin Luther King, Kara Square</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Quarantine Theater</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>While some folks in the hospitality industry are talking about “hygiene theater”, what about “quarantine theater”? Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #166 — What Is The Meaning of Travel?\">August episode</a>, I talked about the complexity local and state travel bans and quarantine measures are causing for people trying to plan some sort of travel.&nbsp;</li><li>My son Andrew and his significant other headed out to Portland, ME last month for work. The week before they left, the Marriott emailed him a form - “Please certify one of the following is true - I have received a negative COVID test performed no later than 72 hours prior to my arrival, or will quarantine for 14 days upon my arrival in Maine.” Since they were only going to be in Portland for 4 days, they trundled down to the nearest testing site for the quick test 2 days before they left -- where they got chewed out by one of the testers. “We’re running out of the quick tests. You should’ve planned better.” OK, how long to get results from the other test? “5 days” But that won’t meet Maine’s 3-day requirement. Tester just walks away. But they got their negative test results and got on their plane to Portland -- where no one in the airport or the hotel asked to see it.&nbsp; OK, not harm done other than the discomfort of a Q-tip probing their sinuses and a random bit of yelling, but waste scarce testing resources?</li><li>Chicago’s quarantine is also a bit of kabuki. Once a week the city’s health commission gets in front of the press to scold another state or two -- this week was Indiana and Wisconsin. There’s now 25 states and Puerto Rico that if you’re traveling from there to Chicago, you’re supposed to self-quarantine for 14 days or face fines up to $7,000. More interesting is that Chicago’s threshold for getting on the list is 15 new daily cases per 100,000 residents. On this week’s <a href=\"https://www.chicago.gov/city/en/sites/covid-19/home/emergency-travel-order.html\">tally,</a> Indiana is running in the 20-30 range, but so is the state of Illinois. You could call it hypocritical or pragmatic or keeping its powder dry for when the city needs another bucket of money from the state, but Chicago hasn’t put the rest of Illinois on its quarantine list.</li><li>Now, I’ve yet to hear of anyone who has actually self-quarantined and as of last week, <a href=\"https://chicago.cbslocal.com/2020/10/02/three-months-into-chicagos-emergency-travel-order-no-fines-issued-enforcement-focus-remains-on-education/\">no one has been rung up for not doing so</a>. But last month, a friend told me about how Chicago’s quarantine theater hit her last month. She finally got ‘round to taking some vacation at the end of the summer. She lives in Chicago, but is a big outdoors person; looking at airfares and tossing some darts at a map, she decided to go hit Bryce Canyon and Zion National Parks in Southern Utah. So she’s down there for a couple of days when her boss calls her. “They just announced that Utah is going on the city’s quarantine list. It’s not official until Friday, so I guess if you get out of there by Thursday, you won’t have to quarantine for 2 weeks before coming back to work.” And, it didn’t need to be said, those 2 weeks of self-quarantine wouldn’t be paid. My friend is unique in that she works for maybe the one company in Chicago that takes the city’s quarantine order seriously. So my friend fought through lousy cell coverage to see what she could salvage of the back half of her vacation. Luckily, she has friends in Oregon, which isn’t on the city’s list. So Thursday, she cut her hiking short, schlepped the 4½ hours back up to SLC and caught the last flight out to Portland -- which let her come back to work and make some money the next week.</li><li>Theater isn’t a new thing. If you’re, say, a <em>mature</em> traveler, you got to play a bit part in the security theater that premiered after 9/11 and the underwear bomber. While not a perfect analogy (and really, nothing ever is), we can see some similar theatrics -- government agencies (TSA then, health departments now) investing in activities that signal they are serious, but that most folks know aren’t really effective. For me and I think for most frequent travelers, the security theater ended with TSA PreCheck -- it seemed, again to most of us, as a reasonable balance between risk and getting on with our traveling lives. I don’t know what that looks like for quarantine theater, but I sure hope it doesn’t take the 10 years it took to figure out PreCheck.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/52154\">release.JOY.release</a> by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: essesq, Haskel (hej31)</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Traveling For Food</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I talked at the start of the episode about eating my way through Philadelphia a couple of weeks back, and it was just that. We landed Thursday around 11:30a and were hitting our favs at Reading Terminal Market by 1:30p. I went straight for Tommy Dinic’s for the roast pork sandwich with sharp provolone and broccoli rabe while Irene and Claire made for the Mennonite pretzel place and Termini Brothers for fresh-filled cannolis. And then as we were leaving, I swung past one of the PA Dutch stands to buy a 1-lb block of <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrapple\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">scrapple</a> for breakfast the rest of the stay.</li><li>Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #166 — What Is The Meaning of Travel?\">August episode</a> in the interview with Emily Thomas about her book <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2IpLXnd\"><em>The Meaning of Travel</em></a><em>, </em>we talked about a chapter on global homogenization. One of the bits that I edited out was the observation that, back 10-20 year ago, it was fun to go shopping and bring something unique back home. But now, with globalized e-commerce, there’s not much that you can’t find easier (and often cheaper) on Amazon or Taobao or Rakuten. And so, for me, food is the one experience of a place that can’t be easily exported and bought on-line.</li><li>On our trip to the UP -- Michigan’s Upper Peninsula -- along with the biking, hiking, and kayaking, we were also on a bit of a <a href=\"https://thepastyguy.com/portfolio/the-pasty-trail-best-pasties-in-up/\">pasty tasting tour</a>. The UP is pretty well known -- in the Midwest at least -- for their <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pasty\">pasties</a>, brought over by Cornish miners working the copper mines. We had traditional pasties filled with steak, potatoes, onions, and rutabagas, and breakfast pasties. We worked our ways through the finer points of pasty critique -- picking out the pasties made from lard-based doughs, and fillings that held together so you could eat the pasty with your hand but weren’t just complete mush.</li><li>It’s funny how these comparison dishes can crop up on a vacation. On a trip to Phuket, Thailand, Andrew ordered pad thai everywhere we ate. On a trip to Hungary, Irene searched every menu for <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisherman\'s_soup\">halászlé</a> - a spicy fish soup - after having a great bowl of it at lunch with her cousin in some little town on the shores of <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Balaton\">Lake Balaton</a>. And again Irene, in Spain now, searched every city we visited for <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salmorejo\">salmorejo</a>, not quite soup, more of a tomato and bread and olive oil and garlic purée. These sorta horizontal tasting, some would be planned -- like our pasty tour -- and some would just come up, like Irene’s halászlé hunt. But it’d be fun, getting a feel for what the base of the dish is, what everyone agrees on, and what people put their own spin on, because usually for these core dishes -- dishes that everyone around has eaten all their lives -- everyone has an opinion about them. And that’s part of what makes the broad/horizontal tasting fun.</li><li>And also, these dishes don’t seem to be “industrialized.” While I’ve had mass produced pasties in the UK, grabbing something out from the West Cornish Pasty hut in Waterloo Station while running for a train, the pasties in the UP were much more -- not “artisanal” because I don’t think anyone making pasties in the UP would use that word, but “family made”. At Miners Pasties in Munising, which came out top in our pasty ranks, the woman helping us at the counter said the lard pastry recipe came from the owner’s grandmother and only 3 people know it -- the granddaughters and their niece. And only those three make the pastry each day.&nbsp; We sat back and enjoyed those pasties because we knew we wouldn’t be eating them again unless and until we found our way back to this bench again some day.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #168</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_168.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food','','inherit','closed','closed','','2896-revision-v1','','','2020-10-16 19:22:27','2020-10-17 00:22:27','',2896,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/2896-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2916,1,'2020-11-03 16:27:52','2020-11-03 21:27:52','[caption id=\"attachment_2168\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2168\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> But I filled up the tank[/caption]\n\nGetting this posted just in time to give you something to listen to while jammed up in Thanksgiving traffic, be it on the road or in the airports. We talk about working the angles to maximize credit card benefits, which leads me to one more story from my fall trip to Europe -- a rental car scrape that my Chase Visa card just paid off. We also talk about the Wall Street Journal\'s new ranking of US airports and compare it to Skytrax\'s international rankings. And we wrap up with my Christmas gift suggestions for the frequent traveler on your list.  All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_146.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_146.mp3\"]\n\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show Notes -->\n\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #146:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, trying to give you something to keep you entertained? Or at least occupied as you thread through the Thanksgiving travel traffic -- be it airports, trains, or roadways -- the forecasts are for a 5% increase over last year.</li>\n 	<li>I’ve been trying to get this episode done for the past 2 weeks, but I just haven’t been able to make it happen. Since we last spoke, I’ve been in the midst of a weekly commute between Chicago and Dallas. It’s the standard consultant commute -- leaving ORD Monday at 7am, leaving DFW Thursday at 5pm -- the consulting rush hour. The lounges are packed, the Starbucks line tails way back; no matter what status, you’re in a middle seat if you don’t book 3 weeks ahead of time, and for a mere Advantage Platinum person, there’s no chance of an upgrade. I do click through American’s website to request an upgrade every week -- more for the entertainment value than any expectation of getting a seat. This week, I was #35 on the upgrade list.</li>\n 	<li>The traffic between these 2 American hubs is pretty amazing. The first week of this commute, taking the 6:30p flight back to Chicago, it was a fully-packed 787 Dreamliner. So I’m thinking -- hey, I gotta have a good shot at an upgrade on this flight, with all the first and business class seats. Nope, though I did get up to the teens on the upgrade list -- #15 to be exact. I counted myself lucky to get out of a center seat at the last minute.</li>\n 	<li>I’m not a huge fan of DFW Airport. It’s a massive, spread-out place with a $4 toll charge to just to drive out of the place. The semi-circular terminals are also spread out affairs, with 3 security checkpoints arrayed around each perimeter, only one of which has PreCheck and really not well-marked. I tweeted that out in frustration a few weeks back after trundling around from checkpoint to checkpoint. The DFW Airport Twitter account quickly came back with a <a href=\"https://www.dfwairport.com/security/\">link</a> to their website that has the location and hours of each checkpoint, with the PreCheck one bolded. Very useful. I have bookmarked on my iPhone now.</li>\n 	<li>The next day, back in Chicago, I was downtown, getting a afternoon espresso jolt at Intelligentsia Coffee, not a completely full-on hipster joint -- there no turntable playing vintage vinyl -- but they are a bit fussy about their coffee. You place your order, they ask your name, and then you mill around a bit waiting for them to “craft” your coffee. I’m scrolling through e-mail, the barista is calling out names in the background. He calls out \"Marco\". Completely on reflex, my inner child responds \"Polo\" and not quietly or under my breath. The guy sitting across from me looks up from his MacBook and starts laughing. The guy getting his coffee, Marco, apparently, turns around and gives me a slightly nasty look. Or maybe just puzzled. Or more likely a bit of both.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/indidginus-seismic/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Superstring</a></em> by Indidginus</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul class=\"\">\n 	<li>Allan Marko, a long-time listener, posted a travel story on the TravelCommons Facebook page -\n<ul>\n 	<li>I flew from SFO to MUC with a colleague last month on UAL Business Class (my first trip on a 787 - nice plane, and decent service from the UA team) We had an early morning arrival, and an hour to kill before our transportation arrived. My colleague’s 1K status couldn’t get us into the Lufthansa Arrivals Lounge for showers. I pulled up the Priority Pass app on my iPhone (membership came with my Chase Sapphire Reserve Card) and saw there was an Atlantic Lounge over in Terminal 1 that had shower facilities. We took the bus over to Terminal 1 which serves many European, Middle East, and other second-tier airlines. Pulling out my physical Priority Pass card (as opposed to the one in the app) I got both of us into the lounge and their two shower rooms. The lounge only offered the basics and needed of refresh, but we were happy to find it that morning (including the free beer!).</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Allan, thanks for that, and good on you for figuring that all out. There are so many nooks and crannies in the card benefits world. There’s real value there, but you have to think about it and dig in a bit. The last time I used my Priority Pass (which I got with my Amex Platinum card) was last summer when I was connecting through DUB on my way to London. That lounge was similar to Allan’s MUC experience -- pretty basic, a bit threadbare, but a reasonable place for a cup of tea and breakfast. My son Andrew used his Priority Pass card (also from his Chase card) to get a $28 credit at a restaurant in BOS which paid for a pre-flight meal and a couple of beers. “For the two of us, I think we were due $56 credit, but we wanted to be able to board the plane, so we cut ourselves off.” A colleague of mine told me that, in LGA, after Amex’s Centurion Lounge closed, his UA Gold status got him into the Air Canada lounge to wait out the rest of a long flight delay. “I only thought they let in Star Alliance Gold passengers for international flights, but let me in for my LGA-ORD flight.” And then there’s things like the 10 Gogo in-flight WiFi passes that I get every year with my Platinum card that I never burn through, or the $200 in annual statement credit that I think I get on UA and am always surprised when I see the charge for the in-flight tapas box reversed. And I’m reminded that I gotta pay more attention to this stuff because I hate leaving money on the table.</li>\n 	<li>I will say that there are 2 good things about doing trunk line, hub-to-hub commute vs., say, my last regular commute, between ORD and Charlottesville, VA: great flight frequency -- between AA and UA, there’s a flight at most every hour and that’s not even looking at SWA’s schedule out of Love Field; and, no RJs, no regional jets. I had forgotten how nice it is to be able to stand up straight in the aisle, let alone in the toilet. I take happiness in the small things.</li>\n 	<li>I was talking to a colleague about this -- flying AA, and UA, and SWA based on the most convenient times and price, and then maybe equipment (avoiding those RJs when I can). He said “I’m always amazed at how promiscuous you are in your airline choices.” It was an interesting word choice; one that kinda speaks to how invested people can get in their travel choices. Though it can also be a bit of Stockholm Syndrome for folks who have to fly out of fortress hubs, like this colleague who is in a very conflicted relationship with United out of Newark. “I think you’re more right than me,” he said. He’s 1K on United, their top tier. I’m mid-tier on United and American. Comparing notes, he hasn’t gotten any more upgrades than me, and though I board after 1Ks (or Exec Platinums on AA), I haven’t yet had a problem finding overhead space, even on packed flights to DFW. I’ve said it before -- I don’t think there’s all that much difference between mid- and top-tier loyalty ranks; certainly not enough to take less convenient flights to earn the extra miles needed to stay top-tier.</li>\n 	<li>A study of US airport growth hit the TravelCommons inbox on Halloween, saying that the two airports with the biggest drop in traffic are Memphis and Cincinnati. We talked about this back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/08/09/podcast-143-how-bad-is-business-travel-for-your-health-make-layovers-fun/\">August episode</a> when I was flying in and out of Cincinnati for 4 weeks straight. Nice airport, but I said back then it felt a bit overbuilt, and how both it and Memphis felt empty after after being “de-hubbed” by Delta. I wasn’t wrong. This new survey ground through 10 years of FAA traffic data and came to the same conclusion. Memphis lost the most traffic, down 62%. Cincinnati was second, losing 51% of its traffic.</li>\n 	<li>So you can guess that neither made the Wall Street Journal’s ranking of the 20 largest US airports. Denver, Orlando and Phoenix at the top 3 finishers while the three NYC airports -- LaGuardia, JFK, and Newark -- brought up the rear, numbers 18, 19, and 20. Surprises? I dunno -- maybe that LaGuardia wasn’t in last place given all the construction disruptions, that LAX was higher at #9 than Minneapolis-St Paul at #11, and that O’Hare is one spot higher than San Francisco, 15 vs. 16. That’s probably as much to do with their methodology as anything - how they weighed all the different score components, things like on-time arrivals, average TSA wait, cost of on-prem parking, average ticket cost. It’s interesting, though, to compare this ranking with Skytrax’s ranking of global airports. Denver, the top US airport on both lists; at #28 on Skytrax’s list. Cincinnati is the second US airport on the Skytrax list at #34, which makes sense when you look at the methodologies. Skytrax is focused on the in-airport experience -- terminal seating, cleanliness, queue times, friendliness of staff. With these criteria, I don’t doubt that Cincinnati should rank high -- it’s probably helped by now being a bit overbuilt -- lots of space and fewer people to clean up after. The Journal’s is a bit more wide-ranging, looking both inside and outside the terminal, including things like average fares, rental-car taxes and fees, number of nonstop destinations and dominance of the largest airline to its rankings. I’ll put links to both in the show notes for those interesting in a deeper dive.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our new Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/yoria-suerte/\"><em>Suerte Mijo</em></a> by Arthur Yoria</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Rental Demolition Derby</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>I’ve rented a lot of cars in my business travel and have never crashed one. I drive them off the lot, use them for 3-4 days, fill them back up with gas, return them to the lot, and walk away. So when I picked up a car from Hertz at Edinburgh airport back in September, I skipped all the insurance coverages, took the keys to a brand new Toyota hybrid cross-over, and drove off the lot. This was my fourth September in a row renting from the Hertz and had never had an incident -- even when driving a manual on the left side of the road while shifting with my left hand -- well, other than a Fiat that dropped its transmission, but that wasn’t my fault. So, no need to waste the collision damage waiver charges.</li>\n 	<li>You can see where this is going. The next day, I was driving a narrow road in St Andrews, heading south out of town to go knock around the fishing villages on the north bank of the Firth of Forth. Roads in Scotland can get narrow. Driving the one-lane roads in the Highlands are an acquired talent, but this road is in a residential neighborhood, and I’ve driven it many times. So I couldn’t believe it when I heard a big thump as I drove past a van. Damn, I thought, had I drifted over to the left and popped the van’s rear view mirror? I pulled over and hopped out of the car. No, it was worse. There was a huge crease along the left side of the car; just missed the front wheel, so still driveable but very ugly. I walked down to the van. It belonged to a nearby community center. In a hurry to pick up kids from school, the driver had pulled out into me as I drove past. I pulled out an accident report form that Hertz had helpfully put in the glove compartment. We filled it out, skipped calling the police since no one was hurt.</li>\n 	<li>So, again, not my fault, but I’m still, a few days later, I’m turning in a car with a full tank and some extra body work. I point out the damage to the Hertz guy. He pulls up a different tab on his Samsung tablet -- click, click, click -- damage, front left wing; damage, front left door; damage, rear left door -- took a couple of pictures, and because I’d skipped the CDW, out burped the bill -- £780 or about $1,000. They ran it through on my Chase Sapphire Visa card.</li>\n 	<li>Which I gave to Hertz because, as I was poking through the nooks and crannies of the Chase website before I left home, I confirmed that card would cover UK rental car damage for rentals charged to it. The next week, back home, I found where to file a claim. They didn’t make it easy, but Google eventually uncovered it. I created a claim, uploaded a scan of the accident report, the Hertz receipt, and a couple of iPhone pictures of the damage. And then waited. The website said they’d take 2 weeks to review and get back to me. Three weeks later, I called. A guy said they’d sent me an email asking for two more documents from Hertz. Hmmm, never saw that, but who knows what gets caught up in the Spam filtering. They wanted a copy of the original Hertz agreement, which I had left in the car, and Hertz’s repair cost breakdown. OK, that was reasonable. I called Hertz and a very helpful woman put in a request and said get it in a week. Within a couple of days, Hertz sent me what I needed. I uploaded them to my claim and waited another 2 weeks. On Day 2 Weeks + 1, I called. A woman looked at my file, said it was still being reviewed by management, but said she’s put me on hold and ring them for status. Two minutes later, she picked up and they’d approved my claim. 48 hours later, the $1,000 showed up in my bank account. It took me a bit over 2 months, but Chase paid my claim with a minimum amount of hassle.</li>\n 	<li>Now, while I’ve had a good rental car record in Scotland, my record in Hungary is not quite clean. Indeed, every time I’ve driven there, it’s been something. The last time I drove, we were a couple of blocks away from the rental return next to the Marriott on the Danube. Pulling into an intersection after stopping at a Stop sign, a motorcycle messenger plowed into the front of my car, flew across the hood, and landed in the street on the other side of the intersection. Luckily, he was in a full helmet and leathers and unhurt. The rental car, not so lucky. The entire front end was ripped off. The rental car guy showed up as the police were finishing their report. I pulled out suitcases out of the trunk and gave him the key. He looked at the front of his car in disbelief. We wheeled our bags down the sidewalk to the Marriott because this time, I had bought the collision damage waiver.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/artemis-gravity/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Inception</a></em> by Artemis</li>\n</ul>\n<b>Traveler Gift Guide</b>\n<ul>\n 	<li>As we come into the Christmas shopping season, I thought it would be useful to pull together some suggestions for the frequent traveler in your life. Or, if you are the frequent traveler, a list of hints you might want to drop on family members looking for ideas.</li>\n 	<li>Top of the list is a good battery charger. Whatever the size or form factor -- slimline, lipstick, high-capacity brick -- having that second or third charge readily available is critical to get notified of gate changes and when you’re using electronic boarding passes. It saves you from stalking cleaning crews to find a live power outlet on your layover, or negotiating with your seatmate for possession of outlet between you. I’m always looking to shed weight, so I retired the heavy no-name pack I picked up in the depths of Beijing’s Pearl Street Market for an <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2Jrt83y\">Anker lipstick sized charger</a>. I bought three and gave one to my wife and daughter. It’s cheap peace of mind.</li>\n 	<li>On my shopping list, trying to catch up to what’s already a cold winter, is one of those puffy coats -- but one of the thin ones, like the <a href=\"https://www.patagonia.com/shop/nano-puff\">Patagonia Nano Puff</a>, one that will smoosh down to nothing in the front pocket of my suitcase, or will fit in the crevices of a jammed full overhead bin. Right next that on the list, a man’s scarf is an incredibly undervalued piece of intermediate winter wear. In an airplane cabin or hotel room where a coat is too much (especially in a middle seat), but there’s a draft that chills you, a scarf around the neck is just enough without being too much. You may have to teach him how to wear it, but you can have fun with colors.</li>\n 	<li>For someone just embarking on the road warrior life, how ‘bout a <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3k1E3Og\">black 20-inch hardsided carry-on</a>. Black not only makes you look thinner, it makes your bag look thinner to gate agents hunting for bag-sizer bait. Black also doesn’t show stains. A 20-incher should get on-board for 90% of airlines, and the hard sides are the easiest to get in and out of a bag sizer if the not-yet-statused traveler gets waylaid by an over-zealous gate agent.</li>\n 	<li>If you’re going big for someone -- or for those December babies, combining Christmas and birthday gifts -- noise canceling headphones are a statement gift. The good ones -- the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3mOrRC3\">Bose</a> or <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3kUfRyx\">Sonys</a> that make the drone of the jet engines disappear with the flick of a switch -- are a $300 number. But the drop in stress level and blood pressure that accompanies that flick of the switch -- you don’t realize how much that drone affects you until you turn on your Bose -- makes it worth the number. Everything in my briefcase has to earn its space. I’ve been carrying Bose headphones for, I dunno, 10, 15 years. They’re nowhere near compact, but I’ve never thought of leaving them behind.</li>\n 	<li>Another idea for the music -- or podcast lover, is a <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3oWPpXa\">small portable Bluetooth speaker</a>. I’ve started packing mine again for trips of a week or longer. For a couple of days, I’m fine with wearing headphones or using the phone speaker. But longer than that or if I’m with the family in, say, an Airbnb, I want something a bit more social. I’m still using my 6-year old Jambox speaker, the one that kinda created this category. The maker, Jawbone, went under last year, but the speaker still works. There are newer, better ones out there now, at all sorts of price points. The ones that can act as speaker phones are a nice to-have if they fit your budget.</li>\n 	<li>And finally, a stocking stuffer idea -- a travel notebook, something to jot down thoughts, ideas, observations, to do lists while waiting for the flight to board, the train to come, or the room to be made up. Nothing extravagant -- no leather embossed cover -- but it should be small enough to fit in a pocket, but substantial, something that can survive being knocked around in the bottom of a briefcase, and with paper quality that will hold onto those thoughts for a while. I used to use a <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3jOs3zq\">Moleskine 3½x5½” notebook</a> but have switched over a similar-sized A6 Clairefontaine. The soft cover fits better in a jeans back pocket, and the paper is more fountain-pen friendly. It’s $10 for a Moleskine, $7 for two Clairefontaines. Or go a bit more whimsical and get a 3-pack of Field Notes for $13. It’ll fit your budget and the stocking.</li>\n 	<li>So there you go, something to fit all sizes and budgets in time for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, or if you’re just killing time waiting for your Thanksgiving flight to leave.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #146</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and now on <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Magnatune</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_146.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #146 — Rental Demolition Derby; Traveler Gift Guide','','inherit','closed','closed','','2167-revision-v1','','','2020-11-03 16:27:52','2020-11-03 21:27:52','',2167,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/03/2167-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2917,1,'2020-11-04 22:14:59','2020-11-05 03:14:59','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":2931,\"width\":300,\"height\":300,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large is-resized\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-1024x1024.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2931\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"/><figcaption>Social distancing the reindeer will be tough</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>With public health officials saying things like <a href=\"https://www.smh.com.au/national/vaccine-is-imminent-but-virus-fight-has-long-way-to-go-fauci-20201028-p569h2.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">\"it will be easily by the end of 2021 and perhaps into the next year before we start having some semblance of normality,\"</a> I figured this year\'s travel gift guide would need to be a bit different. Here are my top shopping ideas for your pandemic traveler.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list {\"ordered\":true} -->\n<ol><li><strong>Comfortable Masks —</strong> If your traveler is a bandana/buff wearer, they\'re going to need a more conventional mask to get on an airplane. And since they\'ll be wearing it for 2 or 3 or 4 hours straight, they\'ll want something a bit more breathable than the bargain-basement masks the gate agent give away for free. I\'m a big fan of the <a href=\"https://evolvetogether.com/collections/adult-masks/products/black-milan-coordinates-30-face-masks\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">evolvetogether masks in basic black</a>. They\'re breathable, they come with a pocket carrier for spares, and at $1.20/mask, they hit the right cost/quality balance point.</li><li><strong>Battery Packs</strong> <strong>—</strong> With more things going contactless -- electronic boarding passes, digital hotel door locks, order-ahead food and beer -- a dead phone is more than just a bit of an inconvenience, and having that second or third charge immediately available is a lot more important. I carry a mix of sizes. The <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2E6HMri\" target=\"_blank\">Anker PowerCore+ Mini</a> lipstick charger is light enough (under 3 oz) for my pocket while the heavier/higher-capacity <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://amzn.to/34fcbON\" target=\"_blank\">Zendure Power Bank Supermini</a> waits for me in my computer bag.</li><li><strong>TSA Pre-Check or Global Entry —</strong> A perennial on the gift guide, but even more important when we want to limit time spent in security lines because no one is really staying 6 feet away from each other. It\'s $85 for 5 years of <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/precheck\" target=\"_blank\">Pre-Check</a> or, if you\'re feeling optimistic about international travel opening soon, <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.cbp.gov/travel/trusted-traveler-programs/global-entry\" target=\"_blank\">$100 for both Global Entry and Pre-Check.</a> You might be able to use a high-end travel card like an <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.americanexpress.com/us/expedite-your-travel.html\" target=\"_blank\">Amex Platinum</a> to pay for your traveler\'s application and get the TSA fee back as a statement credit.</li><li><strong>Car Phone Mount —</strong> If your traveler isn\'t buying <a href=\"https://youtu.be/4ZvIoVfqbw0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the airlines\' \"HEPA filters are great!\" pitch</a>, they\'ll be doing more road trips -- and so could probably could use a phone mount upgrade. I like the simplicity and low profile of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/34VrMX4\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">air vent mounts</a>. If your traveler just upgraded to a new iPhone 12, you could go all-in for a matching <a href=\"https://www.belkin.com/us/p/P-WIC002/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">MagSafe vent mount</a>.</li><li><strong>VPN Subscription</strong> <strong>—</strong> Another suggestion that\'s on every one of my gift guides. When you travel away from home or the office, you spend most of your time on public WiFi networks. In the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">last podcast episode</a>, we talked about an <a href=\"https://www.ic3.gov/Media/Y2020/PSA201006\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" target=\"_blank\">FBI consumer alert</a> reminding folks about the risks of these networks. Help your traveler surf safe with a VPN subscription. I’ve always used one of the top paid VPN providers:  <a href=\"http://nordvpn.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">NordVPN</a>, ExpressVPN, or <a href=\"https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/\">PIA</a>. A single subscription, usually in the $35-$85 range, will cover their laptop, phone, and tablet. VPN providers always have some promotion going on so it pays to shop around.</li><li><strong>Bring-Your-Own Dining Sets —</strong> Trying to navigate all the restaurant lockdowns and indoor dining limits, I\'ve eaten more take-away meals in my hotel room in the past 6 month than I have in the prior 6 years.  Rather than struggling with plastic knives on styrofoam plates, upgrade your traveler\'s dining experience with their own non-breakable <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3izWHMJ\">wine tumblers</a>, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/364UTXc\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">IPA glasses</a>, and <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3an6BhJ\">camping mess kit</a>. And don\'t forget the non-plastic <a href=\"https://amzn.to/30NAqF2\">upscale sporks</a>.</li><li><strong>In-Room Coffee Brewing Kit —</strong> In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/03/29/podcast-139-brewing-best-hotel-room-coffee-notes-from-spain/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #139 — Brewing Best Hotel Room Coffee; Notes from Spain\">episode #139</a>, I interviewed Coleman Collins about <a href=\"https://roadwarrior.blog/hotel-room-coffee/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">brewing the best hotel room coffee</a>.  Back then, it was only a thing for coffee geeks (snobs?) because just about every hotel lobby offered free coffee. But now, those coffee pots are locked up with the rest of the free breakfast gear, and most hotels aren\'t restocking the in-room coffee makers. So keep your traveler caffeinated with their own coffee brewing kit. I like keeping things simple with a <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3864wYy\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">plastic Hario V60 cone</a> over a coffee mug, but you could go all-barista with an <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2I7RsqR\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Aeropress Go travel press</a> and <a href=\"https://amzn.to/362FQ0u\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Hario mini-mill coffee grinder</a>.</li><li><strong>Portable Bluetooth Speaker —</strong> Last-minute restrictions and closures could have your traveler spending more time than planned in their hotel room or Airbnb, and needing a way to keep themselves entertained. Wearing headphones is OK for a day or two if you\'re by yourself, but when I’m with the family, I want something a bit more social. I\'m a Bose fan, so I like their <a href=\"https://amzn.to/328yhUP\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundLink Micro</a>, but there\'s a broad selection of makers, form factors, and price points to choose from.</li><li><strong>Smartphone Tripod —</strong> It\'s tough to get everyone into an arms-length selfie <em>and</em> maintain social distance. A tabletop tripod with a smartphone clamp like the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/34Vk5QS\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Manfrotto PIXI</a> can help your traveler get those group shots as well as taking some night shots and maybe a cool timelapse video.</li><li><strong>Travel Notebook</strong> <strong>—</strong> Nothing fancy, no leather embossed cover, just something to jot down thoughts, ideas, observations, or to do lists while traveling in this time of COVID. My first travel notebooks were <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://amzn.to/36mN8dZ\" target=\"_blank\">Moleskine pocket notebooks</a> but I\'ve switched over similar-sized <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2LMAOM9\" target=\"_blank\">Clairefontaine A6 notebooks</a>. Their soft cover fits better in the back pocket of my Levis and the paper is more fountain-pen friendly. Or you could go a bit more whimsical and get <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://amzn.to/36pK68D\" target=\"_blank\">a pack of Field Notes</a>.</li></ol>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:block {\"ref\":2601} /-->','10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times','','publish','closed','closed','','10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times','','\nhttps://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/','2021-08-17 20:14:54','2021-08-18 01:14:54','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=2917',0,'post','',0),
(2918,1,'2020-11-03 19:03:07','2020-11-04 00:03:07','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>After reading interviews with top public health officials saying things like <a href=\"https://www.smh.com.au/national/vaccine-is-imminent-but-virus-fight-has-long-way-to-go-fauci-20201028-p569h2.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">\"it will be easily by the end of 2021 and perhaps into the next year before we start having some semblance of normality,\"</a> I looked back over my trips this year to put together this holiday gift guide for the pandemic traveler.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list {\"ordered\":true} -->\n<ol><li><strong>Comfortable Masks —</strong> If you\'re a bandana/buff wearer, you\'re going to need a more conventional mask to get on an airplane. And since you\'ll be wearing if for 2 or 3 or 4 hours straight, you\'ll want something a bit more breathable than the bargain-priced masks the gate agent will give you for free. I like the <a href=\"https://evolvetogether.com/collections/adult-masks/products/black-milan-coordinates-30-face-masks\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">evolvetogether masks in basic black</a>. They\'re breathable, they come with a pocket carrier for spares, and at $1.20/mask, they hit the right cost/quality balance point.</li><li><strong>Battery Packs</strong> <strong>—</strong> With more things going contactless -- electronic boarding passes, digital hotel door locks, order-ahead food and beer -- a dead phone is now more than just a bit of an inconvenience, and having that second or third charge immediately available has become a lot more important. I carry a mix of sizes. The <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2E6HMri\" target=\"_blank\">Anker PowerCore+ Mini</a> lipstick charger is light enough (under 3 oz) for my pocket while the heavier/higher-capacity <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://amzn.to/34fcbON\" target=\"_blank\">Zendure Power Bank Supermini</a> is in my computer bag.</li><li><strong>TSA Pre-Check or Global Entry —</strong> A perennial gift guide entry, but even more important when we want to limit time spent in security lines where no one is really staying 6 feet away from each other. It\'s $85 for 5 years of <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/precheck\" target=\"_blank\">Pre-Check</a> or, if you\'re feeling optimistic about international travel opening soon, <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.cbp.gov/travel/trusted-traveler-programs/global-entry\" target=\"_blank\">$100 for both Global Entry and Pre-Check.</a> If you have a high-end card like an <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.americanexpress.com/us/expedite-your-travel.html\" target=\"_blank\">Amex Platinum</a>, you might be able to use your card to pay for their application and get the TSA fee back in as a statement credit.</li><li><strong>VPN Subscription</strong> <strong>—</strong> Another suggestion that\'s on every one of my gift guides. When you travel away from home or the office, you spend most of your time on public WiFi networks. In the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">last podcast episode</a>, we talked about an FBI consumer alert reminding folks about the potential risks of these networks. Help your traveler surf safe with a VPN subscription. I’ve always used one of the top paid VPN providers:  <a href=\"http://nordvpn.com/\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" target=\"_blank\">NordVPN</a>, <a href=\"http://expressvpn.com\" title=\"expressvpn.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">ExpressVPN</a>, or <a href=\"https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/\">PIA</a>. A single subscription, usually in the $35-85 range, will cover laptops, phones, and tablets. VPN providers always have some promotion going on so it pays to shop around.</li></ol>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times','','inherit','closed','closed','','2917-revision-v1','','','2020-11-03 19:03:07','2020-11-04 00:03:07','',2917,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/03/2917-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2919,1,'2020-11-03 21:18:48','2020-11-04 02:18:48','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>After reading interviews with top public health officials saying things like <a href=\"https://www.smh.com.au/national/vaccine-is-imminent-but-virus-fight-has-long-way-to-go-fauci-20201028-p569h2.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">\"it will be easily by the end of 2021 and perhaps into the next year before we start having some semblance of normality,\"</a> I looked back over my trips this year to put together this holiday gift guide for the pandemic traveler.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list {\"ordered\":true} -->\n<ol><li><strong>Comfortable Masks —</strong> If you\'re a bandana/buff wearer, you\'re going to need a more conventional mask to get on an airplane. And since you\'ll be wearing if for 2 or 3 or 4 hours straight, you\'ll want something a bit more breathable than the bargain-priced masks the gate agent will give you for free. I like the <a href=\"https://evolvetogether.com/collections/adult-masks/products/black-milan-coordinates-30-face-masks\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">evolvetogether masks in basic black</a>. They\'re breathable, they come with a pocket carrier for spares, and at $1.20/mask, they hit the right cost/quality balance point.</li><li><strong>Battery Packs</strong> <strong>—</strong> With more things going contactless -- electronic boarding passes, digital hotel door locks, order-ahead food and beer -- a dead phone is now more than just a bit of an inconvenience, and having that second or third charge immediately available has become a lot more important. I carry a mix of sizes. The <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2E6HMri\" target=\"_blank\">Anker PowerCore+ Mini</a> lipstick charger is light enough (under 3 oz) for my pocket while the heavier/higher-capacity <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://amzn.to/34fcbON\" target=\"_blank\">Zendure Power Bank Supermini</a> is in my computer bag.</li><li><strong>TSA Pre-Check or Global Entry —</strong> A perennial gift guide entry, but even more important when we want to limit time spent in security lines where no one is really staying 6 feet away from each other. It\'s $85 for 5 years of <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/precheck\" target=\"_blank\">Pre-Check</a> or, if you\'re feeling optimistic about international travel opening soon, <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.cbp.gov/travel/trusted-traveler-programs/global-entry\" target=\"_blank\">$100 for both Global Entry and Pre-Check.</a> If you have a high-end card like an <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.americanexpress.com/us/expedite-your-travel.html\" target=\"_blank\">Amex Platinum</a>, you might be able to use your card to pay for their application and get the TSA fee back in as a statement credit.</li><li><strong>VPN Subscription</strong> <strong>—</strong> Another suggestion that\'s on every one of my gift guides. When you travel away from home or the office, you spend most of your time on public WiFi networks. In the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">last podcast episode</a>, we talked about an FBI consumer alert reminding folks about the potential risks of these networks. Help your traveler surf safe with a VPN subscription. I’ve always used one of the top paid VPN providers:  <a href=\"http://nordvpn.com/\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" target=\"_blank\">NordVPN</a>, <a href=\"http://expressvpn.com\" title=\"expressvpn.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">ExpressVPN</a>, or <a href=\"https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/\">PIA</a>. A single subscription, usually in the $35-85 range, will cover laptops, phones, and tablets. VPN providers always have some promotion going on so it pays to shop around.</li><li><strong>Bring-Your-Own Dining Sets —</strong> Trying to navigate indoor dining lockdowns and seating caps, I\'ve eaten more take-away meals in my hotel room in the past 6 month than I have in the prior 6 years. With stripped down hotel service </li></ol>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times','','inherit','closed','closed','','2917-revision-v1','','','2020-11-03 21:18:48','2020-11-04 02:18:48','',2917,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/03/2917-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2920,1,'2020-11-03 21:35:25','2020-11-04 02:35:25','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>After reading interviews with top public health officials saying things like <a href=\"https://www.smh.com.au/national/vaccine-is-imminent-but-virus-fight-has-long-way-to-go-fauci-20201028-p569h2.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">\"it will be easily by the end of 2021 and perhaps into the next year before we start having some semblance of normality,\"</a> I looked back over my trips this year to put together this holiday gift guide for the pandemic traveler.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list {\"ordered\":true} -->\n<ol><li><strong>Comfortable Masks —</strong> If you\'re a bandana/buff wearer, you\'re going to need a more conventional mask to get on an airplane. And since you\'ll be wearing if for 2 or 3 or 4 hours straight, you\'ll want something a bit more breathable than the bargain-priced masks the gate agent will give you for free. I like the <a href=\"https://evolvetogether.com/collections/adult-masks/products/black-milan-coordinates-30-face-masks\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">evolvetogether masks in basic black</a>. They\'re breathable, they come with a pocket carrier for spares, and at $1.20/mask, they hit the right cost/quality balance point.</li><li><strong>Battery Packs</strong> <strong>—</strong> With more things going contactless -- electronic boarding passes, digital hotel door locks, order-ahead food and beer -- a dead phone is now more than just a bit of an inconvenience, and having that second or third charge immediately available has become a lot more important. I carry a mix of sizes. The <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2E6HMri\" target=\"_blank\">Anker PowerCore+ Mini</a> lipstick charger is light enough (under 3 oz) for my pocket while the heavier/higher-capacity <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://amzn.to/34fcbON\" target=\"_blank\">Zendure Power Bank Supermini</a> is in my computer bag.</li><li><strong>TSA Pre-Check or Global Entry —</strong> A perennial gift guide entry, but even more important when we want to limit time spent in security lines where no one is really staying 6 feet away from each other. It\'s $85 for 5 years of <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/precheck\" target=\"_blank\">Pre-Check</a> or, if you\'re feeling optimistic about international travel opening soon, <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.cbp.gov/travel/trusted-traveler-programs/global-entry\" target=\"_blank\">$100 for both Global Entry and Pre-Check.</a> If you have a high-end card like an <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.americanexpress.com/us/expedite-your-travel.html\" target=\"_blank\">Amex Platinum</a>, you might be able to use your card to pay for their application and get the TSA fee back in as a statement credit.</li><li><strong>VPN Subscription</strong> <strong>—</strong> Another suggestion that\'s on every one of my gift guides. When you travel away from home or the office, you spend most of your time on public WiFi networks. In the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">last podcast episode</a>, we talked about an FBI consumer alert reminding folks about the potential risks of these networks. Help your traveler surf safe with a VPN subscription. I’ve always used one of the top paid VPN providers:  <a href=\"http://nordvpn.com/\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" target=\"_blank\">NordVPN</a>, <a href=\"http://expressvpn.com\" title=\"expressvpn.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">ExpressVPN</a>, or <a href=\"https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/\">PIA</a>. A single subscription, usually in the $35-85 range, will cover laptops, phones, and tablets. VPN providers always have some promotion going on so it pays to shop around.</li><li><strong>Bring-Your-Own Dining Sets —</strong> Trying to navigate all the restaurant lockdowns and indoor dining limits, I\'ve eaten more take-away meals in my hotel room in the past 6 month than I have in the prior 6 years.  Rather than struggling with plastics knives on styrofoam plates, upgrade your traveler\'s dining experience with their own plastic <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3izWHMJ\">wine tumblers</a>, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/364UTXc\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">IPA glasses</a>, and <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3an6BhJ\">camping mess kits</a>. And, of course, all sorts of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/30NAqF2\">upscale sporks</a>.</li><li>In-Room Coffee Kit</li></ol>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times','','inherit','closed','closed','','2917-revision-v1','','','2020-11-03 21:35:25','2020-11-04 02:35:25','',2917,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/03/2917-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2921,1,'2020-11-04 11:12:54','2020-11-04 16:12:54','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>After reading interviews with top public health officials saying things like <a href=\"https://www.smh.com.au/national/vaccine-is-imminent-but-virus-fight-has-long-way-to-go-fauci-20201028-p569h2.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">\"it will be easily by the end of 2021 and perhaps into the next year before we start having some semblance of normality,\"</a> I looked back over my trips this year to put together this holiday gift guide for the pandemic traveler.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list {\"ordered\":true} -->\n<ol><li><strong>Comfortable Masks —</strong> If you\'re a bandana/buff wearer, you\'re going to need a more conventional mask to get on an airplane. And since you\'ll be wearing it for 2 or 3 or 4 hours straight, you\'ll want something a bit more breathable than the bargain-basement masks the gate agent will give you for free. I\'m a fan of the <a href=\"https://evolvetogether.com/collections/adult-masks/products/black-milan-coordinates-30-face-masks\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">evolvetogether masks in basic black</a>. They\'re breathable, they come with a pocket carrier for spares, and at $1.20/mask, they hit the right cost/quality balance point.</li><li><strong>Battery Packs</strong> <strong>—</strong> With more things going contactless -- electronic boarding passes, digital hotel door locks, order-ahead food and beer -- a dead phone is now more than just a bit of an inconvenience, and having that second or third charge immediately available has become a lot more important. I carry a mix of sizes. The <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2E6HMri\" target=\"_blank\">Anker PowerCore+ Mini</a> lipstick charger is light enough (under 3 oz) for my pocket while the heavier/higher-capacity <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://amzn.to/34fcbON\" target=\"_blank\">Zendure Power Bank Supermini</a> is in my computer bag.</li><li><strong>TSA Pre-Check or Global Entry —</strong> A perennial gift guide entry, but even more important when we want to limit time spent in security lines where no one is really staying 6 feet away from each other. It\'s $85 for 5 years of <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/precheck\" target=\"_blank\">Pre-Check</a> or, if you\'re feeling optimistic about international travel opening soon, <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.cbp.gov/travel/trusted-traveler-programs/global-entry\" target=\"_blank\">$100 for both Global Entry and Pre-Check.</a> If you have a high-end card like an <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.americanexpress.com/us/expedite-your-travel.html\" target=\"_blank\">Amex Platinum</a>, you might be able to use your card to pay for their application and get the TSA fee back in as a statement credit.</li><li><strong>VPN Subscription</strong> <strong>—</strong> Another suggestion that\'s on every one of my gift guides. When you travel away from home or the office, you spend most of your time on public WiFi networks. In the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">last podcast episode</a>, we talked about an <a href=\"https://www.ic3.gov/Media/Y2020/PSA201006\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" target=\"_blank\">FBI consumer alert</a> reminding folks about the potential risks of these networks. Help your traveler surf safe with a VPN subscription. I’ve always used one of the top paid VPN providers:  <a href=\"http://nordvpn.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">NordVPN</a>, <a href=\"http://expressvpn.com\" title=\"expressvpn.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">ExpressVPN</a>, or <a href=\"https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/\">PIA</a>. A single subscription, usually in the $35-85 range, will cover laptops, phones, and tablets. VPN providers always have some promotion going on so it pays to shop around.</li><li><strong>Bring-Your-Own Dining Sets —</strong> Trying to navigate all the restaurant lockdowns and indoor dining limits, I\'ve eaten more take-away meals in my hotel room in the past 6 month than I have in the prior 6 years.  Rather than struggling with plastics knives on styrofoam plates, upgrade your traveler\'s dining experience with their own plastic <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3izWHMJ\">wine tumblers</a>, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/364UTXc\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">IPA glasses</a>, and <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3an6BhJ\">camping mess kits</a>. And, of course, all sorts of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/30NAqF2\">upscale sporks</a>.</li><li><strong>In-Room Coffee Brewing Kit —</strong> Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/03/29/podcast-139-brewing-best-hotel-room-coffee-notes-from-spain/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #139 — Brewing Best Hotel Room Coffee; Notes from Spain\">episode #139</a>, I interviewed Coleman Collins about <a href=\"https://roadwarrior.blog/hotel-room-coffee/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">brewing the best hotel room coffee</a>.  Back then, it was a </li></ol>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times','','inherit','closed','closed','','2917-revision-v1','','','2020-11-04 11:12:54','2020-11-04 16:12:54','',2917,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/2917-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2922,1,'2020-11-04 11:46:24','2020-11-04 16:46:24','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>After reading interviews with top public health officials saying things like <a href=\"https://www.smh.com.au/national/vaccine-is-imminent-but-virus-fight-has-long-way-to-go-fauci-20201028-p569h2.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">\"it will be easily by the end of 2021 and perhaps into the next year before we start having some semblance of normality,\"</a> I looked back over my trips this year to put together this holiday gift guide for the pandemic traveler.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list {\"ordered\":true} -->\n<ol><li><strong>Comfortable Masks —</strong> If your traveler is a bandana/buff wearer, they\'re going to need a more conventional mask to get on an airplane. And since they\'ll be wearing it for 2 or 3 or 4 hours straight, they\'ll want something a bit more breathable than the bargain-basement masks the gate agent give away for free. I\'m a fan of the <a href=\"https://evolvetogether.com/collections/adult-masks/products/black-milan-coordinates-30-face-masks\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">evolvetogether masks in basic black</a>. They\'re breathable, they come with a pocket carrier for spares, and at $1.20/mask, they hit the right cost/quality balance point.</li><li><strong>Battery Packs</strong> <strong>—</strong> With more things going contactless -- electronic boarding passes, digital hotel door locks, order-ahead food and beer -- a dead phone is now more than just a bit of an inconvenience, and having that second or third charge immediately available has become a lot more important. I carry a mix of sizes. The <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2E6HMri\" target=\"_blank\">Anker PowerCore+ Mini</a> lipstick charger is light enough (under 3 oz) for my pocket while the heavier/higher-capacity <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://amzn.to/34fcbON\" target=\"_blank\">Zendure Power Bank Supermini</a> is in my computer bag.</li><li><strong>TSA Pre-Check or Global Entry —</strong> A perennial gift guide entry, but even more important when we want to limit time spent in security lines where no one is really staying 6 feet away from each other. It\'s $85 for 5 years of <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/precheck\" target=\"_blank\">Pre-Check</a> or, if you\'re feeling optimistic about international travel opening soon, <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.cbp.gov/travel/trusted-traveler-programs/global-entry\" target=\"_blank\">$100 for both Global Entry and Pre-Check.</a> If you have a high-end card like an <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.americanexpress.com/us/expedite-your-travel.html\" target=\"_blank\">Amex Platinum</a>, you might be able to use your card to pay for their application and get the TSA fee back in as a statement credit.</li><li><strong>VPN Subscription</strong> <strong>—</strong> Another suggestion that\'s on every one of my gift guides. When you travel away from home or the office, you spend most of your time on public WiFi networks. In the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">last podcast episode</a>, we talked about an <a href=\"https://www.ic3.gov/Media/Y2020/PSA201006\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" target=\"_blank\">FBI consumer alert</a> reminding folks about the potential risks of these networks. Help your traveler surf safe with a VPN subscription. I’ve always used one of the top paid VPN providers:  <a href=\"http://nordvpn.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">NordVPN</a>, <a href=\"http://expressvpn.com\" title=\"expressvpn.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">ExpressVPN</a>, or <a href=\"https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/\">PIA</a>. A single subscription, usually in the $35-85 range, will cover laptops, phones, and tablets. VPN providers always have some promotion going on so it pays to shop around.</li><li><strong>Bring-Your-Own Dining Sets —</strong> Trying to navigate all the restaurant lockdowns and indoor dining limits, I\'ve eaten more take-away meals in my hotel room in the past 6 month than I have in the prior 6 years.  Rather than struggling with plastics knives on styrofoam plates, upgrade your traveler\'s dining experience with their own plastic <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3izWHMJ\">wine tumblers</a>, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/364UTXc\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">IPA glasses</a>, and <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3an6BhJ\">camping mess kits</a>. And, of course, all sorts of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/30NAqF2\">upscale sporks</a>.</li><li><strong>In-Room Coffee Brewing Kit —</strong> In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/03/29/podcast-139-brewing-best-hotel-room-coffee-notes-from-spain/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #139 — Brewing Best Hotel Room Coffee; Notes from Spain\">episode #139</a>, I interviewed Coleman Collins about <a href=\"https://roadwarrior.blog/hotel-room-coffee/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">brewing the best hotel room coffee</a>.  Back then, it was only a thing for coffee geeks (snobs?) because just about every hotel lobby offered free coffee. But now, those coffee pots are locked up with the rest of the free breakfast gear and most hotels aren\'t restocking the in-room coffee maker. So keep your traveler caffeinated with their own coffee brewing kit. I like keeping it simple with <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3864wYy\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">plastic Hario V60 cone</a> over a coffee mug, or go all-in with an <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2I7RsqR\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Aeropress Go travel press</a> and <a href=\"https://amzn.to/362FQ0u\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Hario mini-mill coffee grinder</a>.</li><li></li></ol>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times','','inherit','closed','closed','','2917-revision-v1','','','2020-11-04 11:46:24','2020-11-04 16:46:24','',2917,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/2917-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2923,1,'2020-11-04 12:18:44','2020-11-04 17:18:44','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>After reading interviews with top public health officials saying things like <a href=\"https://www.smh.com.au/national/vaccine-is-imminent-but-virus-fight-has-long-way-to-go-fauci-20201028-p569h2.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">\"it will be easily by the end of 2021 and perhaps into the next year before we start having some semblance of normality,\"</a> I looked back over my trips this year to put together this holiday gift guide for the pandemic traveler.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list {\"ordered\":true} -->\n<ol><li><strong>Comfortable Masks —</strong> If your traveler is a bandana/buff wearer, they\'re going to need a more conventional mask to get on an airplane. And since they\'ll be wearing it for 2 or 3 or 4 hours straight, they\'ll want something a bit more breathable than the bargain-basement masks the gate agent give away for free. I\'m a fan of the <a href=\"https://evolvetogether.com/collections/adult-masks/products/black-milan-coordinates-30-face-masks\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">evolvetogether masks in basic black</a>. They\'re breathable, they come with a pocket carrier for spares, and at $1.20/mask, they hit the right cost/quality balance point.</li><li><strong>Battery Packs</strong> <strong>—</strong> With more things going contactless -- electronic boarding passes, digital hotel door locks, order-ahead food and beer -- a dead phone is now more than just a bit of an inconvenience, and having that second or third charge immediately available has become a lot more important. I carry a mix of sizes. The <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2E6HMri\" target=\"_blank\">Anker PowerCore+ Mini</a> lipstick charger is light enough (under 3 oz) for my pocket while the heavier/higher-capacity <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://amzn.to/34fcbON\" target=\"_blank\">Zendure Power Bank Supermini</a> is in my computer bag.</li><li><strong>TSA Pre-Check or Global Entry —</strong> A perennial gift guide entry, but even more important when we want to limit time spent in security lines where no one is really staying 6 feet away from each other. It\'s $85 for 5 years of <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/precheck\" target=\"_blank\">Pre-Check</a> or, if you\'re feeling optimistic about international travel opening soon, <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.cbp.gov/travel/trusted-traveler-programs/global-entry\" target=\"_blank\">$100 for both Global Entry and Pre-Check.</a> If you have a high-end card like an <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.americanexpress.com/us/expedite-your-travel.html\" target=\"_blank\">Amex Platinum</a>, you might be able to use your card to pay for their application and get the TSA fee back in as a statement credit.</li><li><strong>VPN Subscription</strong> <strong>—</strong> Another suggestion that\'s on every one of my gift guides. When you travel away from home or the office, you spend most of your time on public WiFi networks. In the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">last podcast episode</a>, we talked about an <a href=\"https://www.ic3.gov/Media/Y2020/PSA201006\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" target=\"_blank\">FBI consumer alert</a> reminding folks about the potential risks of these networks. Help your traveler surf safe with a VPN subscription. I’ve always used one of the top paid VPN providers:  <a href=\"http://nordvpn.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">NordVPN</a>, <a href=\"http://expressvpn.com\" title=\"expressvpn.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">ExpressVPN</a>, or <a href=\"https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/\">PIA</a>. A single subscription, usually in the $35-85 range, will cover laptops, phones, and tablets. VPN providers always have some promotion going on so it pays to shop around.</li><li><strong>Bring-Your-Own Dining Sets —</strong> Trying to navigate all the restaurant lockdowns and indoor dining limits, I\'ve eaten more take-away meals in my hotel room in the past 6 month than I have in the prior 6 years.  Rather than struggling with plastics knives on styrofoam plates, upgrade your traveler\'s dining experience with their own plastic <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3izWHMJ\">wine tumblers</a>, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/364UTXc\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">IPA glasses</a>, and <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3an6BhJ\">camping mess kits</a>. And, of course, all sorts of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/30NAqF2\">upscale sporks</a>.</li><li><strong>In-Room Coffee Brewing Kit —</strong> In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/03/29/podcast-139-brewing-best-hotel-room-coffee-notes-from-spain/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #139 — Brewing Best Hotel Room Coffee; Notes from Spain\">episode #139</a>, I interviewed Coleman Collins about <a href=\"https://roadwarrior.blog/hotel-room-coffee/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">brewing the best hotel room coffee</a>.  Back then, it was only a thing for coffee geeks (snobs?) because just about every hotel lobby offered free coffee. But now, those coffee pots are locked up with the rest of the free breakfast gear and most hotels aren\'t restocking the in-room coffee maker. So keep your traveler caffeinated with their own coffee brewing kit. I like keeping it simple with <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3864wYy\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">plastic Hario V60 cone</a> over a coffee mug, or go all-in with an <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2I7RsqR\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Aeropress Go travel press</a> and <a href=\"https://amzn.to/362FQ0u\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Hario mini-mill coffee grinder</a>.</li><li><strong>Portable Bluetooth Speaker —</strong> Last-minute restrictions and closures could have your traveler spending more time than planned in their hotel room or Airbnb, needing a way to keep themselves entertained. Wearing headphones is OK for a day or two if you\'re by yourself, but if I’m with the family, I want something a bit more social. I\'m a Bose fan, so I like their <a href=\"https://amzn.to/328yhUP\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundLink Micro</a>, but there\'s a broad selection of makers and price points to choose from.</li><li></li></ol>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times','','inherit','closed','closed','','2917-revision-v1','','','2020-11-04 12:18:44','2020-11-04 17:18:44','',2917,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/2917-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2924,1,'2020-11-04 12:43:07','2020-11-04 17:43:07','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>After reading interviews with top public health officials saying things like <a href=\"https://www.smh.com.au/national/vaccine-is-imminent-but-virus-fight-has-long-way-to-go-fauci-20201028-p569h2.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">\"it will be easily by the end of 2021 and perhaps into the next year before we start having some semblance of normality,\"</a> I looked back over my trips this year to put together this holiday gift guide for the pandemic traveler.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list {\"ordered\":true} -->\n<ol><li><strong>Comfortable Masks —</strong> If your traveler is a bandana/buff wearer, they\'re going to need a more conventional mask to get on an airplane. And since they\'ll be wearing it for 2 or 3 or 4 hours straight, they\'ll want something a bit more breathable than the bargain-basement masks the gate agent give away for free. I\'m a fan of the <a href=\"https://evolvetogether.com/collections/adult-masks/products/black-milan-coordinates-30-face-masks\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">evolvetogether masks in basic black</a>. They\'re breathable, they come with a pocket carrier for spares, and at $1.20/mask, they hit the right cost/quality balance point.</li><li><strong>Battery Packs</strong> <strong>—</strong> With more things going contactless -- electronic boarding passes, digital hotel door locks, order-ahead food and beer -- a dead phone is now more than just a bit of an inconvenience, and having that second or third charge immediately available has become a lot more important. I carry a mix of sizes. The <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2E6HMri\" target=\"_blank\">Anker PowerCore+ Mini</a> lipstick charger is light enough (under 3 oz) for my pocket while the heavier/higher-capacity <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://amzn.to/34fcbON\" target=\"_blank\">Zendure Power Bank Supermini</a> is in my computer bag.</li><li><strong>TSA Pre-Check or Global Entry —</strong> A perennial gift guide entry, but even more important when we want to limit time spent in security lines where no one is really staying 6 feet away from each other. It\'s $85 for 5 years of <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/precheck\" target=\"_blank\">Pre-Check</a> or, if you\'re feeling optimistic about international travel opening soon, <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.cbp.gov/travel/trusted-traveler-programs/global-entry\" target=\"_blank\">$100 for both Global Entry and Pre-Check.</a> If you have a high-end card like an <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.americanexpress.com/us/expedite-your-travel.html\" target=\"_blank\">Amex Platinum</a>, you might be able to use your card to pay for their application and get the TSA fee back in as a statement credit.</li><li><strong>VPN Subscription</strong> <strong>—</strong> Another suggestion that\'s on every one of my gift guides. When you travel away from home or the office, you spend most of your time on public WiFi networks. In the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">last podcast episode</a>, we talked about an <a href=\"https://www.ic3.gov/Media/Y2020/PSA201006\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" target=\"_blank\">FBI consumer alert</a> reminding folks about the potential risks of these networks. Help your traveler surf safe with a VPN subscription. I’ve always used one of the top paid VPN providers:  <a href=\"http://nordvpn.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">NordVPN</a>, <a href=\"http://expressvpn.com\" title=\"expressvpn.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">ExpressVPN</a>, or <a href=\"https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/\">PIA</a>. A single subscription, usually in the $35-85 range, will cover laptops, phones, and tablets. VPN providers always have some promotion going on so it pays to shop around.</li><li>Car Phone Mount</li><li><strong>Bring-Your-Own Dining Sets —</strong> Trying to navigate all the restaurant lockdowns and indoor dining limits, I\'ve eaten more take-away meals in my hotel room in the past 6 month than I have in the prior 6 years.  Rather than struggling with plastics knives on styrofoam plates, upgrade your traveler\'s dining experience with their own plastic <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3izWHMJ\">wine tumblers</a>, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/364UTXc\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">IPA glasses</a>, and <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3an6BhJ\">camping mess kits</a>. And, of course, all sorts of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/30NAqF2\">upscale sporks</a>.</li><li><strong>In-Room Coffee Brewing Kit —</strong> In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/03/29/podcast-139-brewing-best-hotel-room-coffee-notes-from-spain/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #139 — Brewing Best Hotel Room Coffee; Notes from Spain\">episode #139</a>, I interviewed Coleman Collins about <a href=\"https://roadwarrior.blog/hotel-room-coffee/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">brewing the best hotel room coffee</a>.  Back then, it was only a thing for coffee geeks (snobs?) because just about every hotel lobby offered free coffee. But now, those coffee pots are locked up with the rest of the free breakfast gear and most hotels aren\'t restocking the in-room coffee maker. So keep your traveler caffeinated with their own coffee brewing kit. I like keeping it simple with <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3864wYy\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">plastic Hario V60 cone</a> over a coffee mug, or go all-in with an <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2I7RsqR\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Aeropress Go travel press</a> and <a href=\"https://amzn.to/362FQ0u\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Hario mini-mill coffee grinder</a>.</li><li><strong>Portable Bluetooth Speaker —</strong> Last-minute restrictions and closures could have your traveler spending more time than planned in their hotel room or Airbnb, needing a way to keep themselves entertained. Wearing headphones is OK for a day or two if you\'re by yourself, but if I’m with the family, I want something a bit more social. I\'m a Bose fan, so I like their <a href=\"https://amzn.to/328yhUP\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundLink Micro</a>, but there\'s a broad selection of makers and price points to choose from.</li><li>TV Dongle</li><li>Travel Notebook</li></ol>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times','','inherit','closed','closed','','2917-revision-v1','','','2020-11-04 12:43:07','2020-11-04 17:43:07','',2917,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/2917-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2925,1,'2020-11-04 12:44:30','2020-11-04 17:44:30','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>After reading interviews with top public health officials saying things like <a href=\"https://www.smh.com.au/national/vaccine-is-imminent-but-virus-fight-has-long-way-to-go-fauci-20201028-p569h2.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">\"it will be easily by the end of 2021 and perhaps into the next year before we start having some semblance of normality,\"</a> I looked back over my trips this year to put together this holiday gift guide for the pandemic traveler.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list {\"ordered\":true} -->\n<ol><li><strong>Comfortable Masks —</strong> If your traveler is a bandana/buff wearer, they\'re going to need a more conventional mask to get on an airplane. And since they\'ll be wearing it for 2 or 3 or 4 hours straight, they\'ll want something a bit more breathable than the bargain-basement masks the gate agent give away for free. I\'m a fan of the <a href=\"https://evolvetogether.com/collections/adult-masks/products/black-milan-coordinates-30-face-masks\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">evolvetogether masks in basic black</a>. They\'re breathable, they come with a pocket carrier for spares, and at $1.20/mask, they hit the right cost/quality balance point.</li><li><strong>Battery Packs</strong> <strong>—</strong> With more things going contactless -- electronic boarding passes, digital hotel door locks, order-ahead food and beer -- a dead phone is now more than just a bit of an inconvenience, and having that second or third charge immediately available has become a lot more important. I carry a mix of sizes. The <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2E6HMri\" target=\"_blank\">Anker PowerCore+ Mini</a> lipstick charger is light enough (under 3 oz) for my pocket while the heavier/higher-capacity <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://amzn.to/34fcbON\" target=\"_blank\">Zendure Power Bank Supermini</a> is in my computer bag.</li><li><strong>TSA Pre-Check or Global Entry —</strong> A perennial gift guide entry, but even more important when we want to limit time spent in security lines where no one is really staying 6 feet away from each other. It\'s $85 for 5 years of <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/precheck\" target=\"_blank\">Pre-Check</a> or, if you\'re feeling optimistic about international travel opening soon, <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.cbp.gov/travel/trusted-traveler-programs/global-entry\" target=\"_blank\">$100 for both Global Entry and Pre-Check.</a> If you have a high-end card like an <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.americanexpress.com/us/expedite-your-travel.html\" target=\"_blank\">Amex Platinum</a>, you might be able to use your card to pay for their application and get the TSA fee back in as a statement credit.</li><li>Car Phone Mount</li><li><strong>VPN Subscription</strong> <strong>—</strong> Another suggestion that\'s on every one of my gift guides. When you travel away from home or the office, you spend most of your time on public WiFi networks. In the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">last podcast episode</a>, we talked about an <a href=\"https://www.ic3.gov/Media/Y2020/PSA201006\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" target=\"_blank\">FBI consumer alert</a> reminding folks about the potential risks of these networks. Help your traveler surf safe with a VPN subscription. I’ve always used one of the top paid VPN providers:  <a href=\"http://nordvpn.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">NordVPN</a>, <a href=\"http://expressvpn.com\" title=\"expressvpn.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">ExpressVPN</a>, or <a href=\"https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/\">PIA</a>. A single subscription, usually in the $35-$85 range, will cover laptops, phones, and tablets. VPN providers always have some promotion going on so it pays to shop around.</li><li><strong>Bring-Your-Own Dining Sets —</strong> Trying to navigate all the restaurant lockdowns and indoor dining limits, I\'ve eaten more take-away meals in my hotel room in the past 6 month than I have in the prior 6 years.  Rather than struggling with plastics knives on styrofoam plates, upgrade your traveler\'s dining experience with their own plastic <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3izWHMJ\">wine tumblers</a>, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/364UTXc\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">IPA glasses</a>, and <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3an6BhJ\">camping mess kits</a>. And, of course, all sorts of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/30NAqF2\">upscale sporks</a>.</li><li><strong>In-Room Coffee Brewing Kit —</strong> In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/03/29/podcast-139-brewing-best-hotel-room-coffee-notes-from-spain/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #139 — Brewing Best Hotel Room Coffee; Notes from Spain\">episode #139</a>, I interviewed Coleman Collins about <a href=\"https://roadwarrior.blog/hotel-room-coffee/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">brewing the best hotel room coffee</a>.  Back then, it was only a thing for coffee geeks (snobs?) because just about every hotel lobby offered free coffee. But now, those coffee pots are locked up with the rest of the free breakfast gear and most hotels aren\'t restocking the in-room coffee maker. So keep your traveler caffeinated with their own coffee brewing kit. I like keeping it simple with <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3864wYy\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">plastic Hario V60 cone</a> over a coffee mug, or go all-in with an <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2I7RsqR\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Aeropress Go travel press</a> and <a href=\"https://amzn.to/362FQ0u\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Hario mini-mill coffee grinder</a>.</li><li><strong>Portable Bluetooth Speaker —</strong> Last-minute restrictions and closures could have your traveler spending more time than planned in their hotel room or Airbnb, needing a way to keep themselves entertained. Wearing headphones is OK for a day or two if you\'re by yourself, but if I’m with the family, I want something a bit more social. I\'m a Bose fan, so I like their <a href=\"https://amzn.to/328yhUP\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundLink Micro</a>, but there\'s a broad selection of makers and price points to choose from.</li><li>TV Dongle</li><li><strong>Travel Notebook</strong> <strong>—</strong> And finally, a stocking stuffer idea — a travel notebook, something to jot down thoughts, ideas, observations, to do lists while waiting for the flight to board, the train to come, or the room to be made up. Nothing extravagant — no leather embossed cover — but it should be small enough to fit in a pocket, but substantial, something that can survive being knocked around in the bottom of a briefcase, and with paper quality that will hold onto those thoughts for a while. I used to use a <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://amzn.to/36mN8dZ\" target=\"_blank\">Moleskine pocket notebook</a> but have switched over a similar-sized <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2LMAOM9\" target=\"_blank\">Clairefontaine A6 notebook</a>. The soft cover fits better in a jeans back pocket, and the paper is more fountain-pen friendly. Or go a bit more whimsical and get <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://amzn.to/36pK68D\" target=\"_blank\">a pack of Field Notes</a>.</li></ol>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times','','inherit','closed','closed','','2917-revision-v1','','','2020-11-04 12:44:30','2020-11-04 17:44:30','',2917,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/2917-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2926,1,'2020-11-04 17:38:56','2020-11-04 22:38:56','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>After reading interviews with top public health officials saying things like <a href=\"https://www.smh.com.au/national/vaccine-is-imminent-but-virus-fight-has-long-way-to-go-fauci-20201028-p569h2.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">\"it will be easily by the end of 2021 and perhaps into the next year before we start having some semblance of normality,\"</a> I looked back over my trips this year to put together this holiday gift guide for the pandemic traveler.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list {\"ordered\":true} -->\n<ol><li><strong>Comfortable Masks —</strong> If your traveler is a bandana/buff wearer, they\'re going to need a more conventional mask to get on an airplane. And since they\'ll be wearing it for 2 or 3 or 4 hours straight, they\'ll want something a bit more breathable than the bargain-basement masks the gate agent give away for free. I\'m a fan of the <a href=\"https://evolvetogether.com/collections/adult-masks/products/black-milan-coordinates-30-face-masks\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">evolvetogether masks in basic black</a>. They\'re breathable, they come with a pocket carrier for spares, and at $1.20/mask, they hit the right cost/quality balance point.</li><li><strong>Battery Packs</strong> <strong>—</strong> With more things going contactless -- electronic boarding passes, digital hotel door locks, order-ahead food and beer -- a dead phone is now more than just a bit of an inconvenience, and having that second or third charge immediately available has become a lot more important. I carry a mix of sizes. The <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2E6HMri\" target=\"_blank\">Anker PowerCore+ Mini</a> lipstick charger is light enough (under 3 oz) for my pocket while the heavier/higher-capacity <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://amzn.to/34fcbON\" target=\"_blank\">Zendure Power Bank Supermini</a> is in my computer bag.</li><li><strong>TSA Pre-Check or Global Entry —</strong> A perennial gift guide entry, but even more important when we want to limit time spent in security lines where no one is really staying 6 feet away from each other. It\'s $85 for 5 years of <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/precheck\" target=\"_blank\">Pre-Check</a> or, if you\'re feeling optimistic about international travel opening soon, <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.cbp.gov/travel/trusted-traveler-programs/global-entry\" target=\"_blank\">$100 for both Global Entry and Pre-Check.</a> If you have a high-end card like an <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.americanexpress.com/us/expedite-your-travel.html\" target=\"_blank\">Amex Platinum</a>, you might be able to use your card to pay for their application and get the TSA fee back in as a statement credit.</li><li><strong>Car Phone Mount —</strong> If your traveler isn\'t buying <a href=\"https://youtu.be/4ZvIoVfqbw0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the airlines\' \"HEPA filters are great!\" pitch</a>, they\'re doing more road trips -- and so could probably could use a phone mount upgrade. I like the simplicity and low profile of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/34VrMX4\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">air vent mounts</a>. If your traveler just upgraded to a new iPhone 12, you could go all-in for a matching <a href=\"https://www.belkin.com/us/p/P-WIC002/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">MagSafe vent mount</a>.</li><li><strong>VPN Subscription</strong> <strong>—</strong> Another suggestion that\'s on every one of my gift guides. When you travel away from home or the office, you spend most of your time on public WiFi networks. In the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">last podcast episode</a>, we talked about an <a href=\"https://www.ic3.gov/Media/Y2020/PSA201006\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" target=\"_blank\">FBI consumer alert</a> reminding folks about the potential risks of these networks. Help your traveler surf safe with a VPN subscription. I’ve always used one of the top paid VPN providers:  <a href=\"http://nordvpn.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">NordVPN</a>, <a href=\"http://expressvpn.com\" title=\"expressvpn.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">ExpressVPN</a>, or <a href=\"https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/\">PIA</a>. A single subscription, usually in the $35-$85 range, will cover laptops, phones, and tablets. VPN providers always have some promotion going on so it pays to shop around.</li><li><strong>Bring-Your-Own Dining Sets —</strong> Trying to navigate all the restaurant lockdowns and indoor dining limits, I\'ve eaten more take-away meals in my hotel room in the past 6 month than I have in the prior 6 years.  Rather than struggling with plastics knives on styrofoam plates, upgrade your traveler\'s dining experience with their own plastic <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3izWHMJ\">wine tumblers</a>, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/364UTXc\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">IPA glasses</a>, and <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3an6BhJ\">camping mess kits</a>. And, of course, all sorts of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/30NAqF2\">upscale sporks</a>.</li><li><strong>In-Room Coffee Brewing Kit —</strong> In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/03/29/podcast-139-brewing-best-hotel-room-coffee-notes-from-spain/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #139 — Brewing Best Hotel Room Coffee; Notes from Spain\">episode #139</a>, I interviewed Coleman Collins about <a href=\"https://roadwarrior.blog/hotel-room-coffee/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">brewing the best hotel room coffee</a>.  Back then, it was only a thing for coffee geeks (snobs?) because just about every hotel lobby offered free coffee. But now, those coffee pots are locked up with the rest of the free breakfast gear and most hotels aren\'t restocking the in-room coffee maker. So keep your traveler caffeinated with their own coffee brewing kit. I like keeping it simple with <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3864wYy\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">plastic Hario V60 cone</a> over a coffee mug, or go all-in with an <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2I7RsqR\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Aeropress Go travel press</a> and <a href=\"https://amzn.to/362FQ0u\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Hario mini-mill coffee grinder</a>.</li><li><strong>Portable Bluetooth Speaker —</strong> Last-minute restrictions and closures could have your traveler spending more time than planned in their hotel room or Airbnb, needing a way to keep themselves entertained. Wearing headphones is OK for a day or two if you\'re by yourself, but if I’m with the family, I want something a bit more social. I\'m a Bose fan, so I like their <a href=\"https://amzn.to/328yhUP\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundLink Micro</a>, but there\'s a broad selection of makers and price points to choose from.</li><li>Smartphone Tripod</li><li><strong>Travel Notebook</strong> <strong>—</strong> And finally, a stocking stuffer idea — a travel notebook, something to jot down thoughts, ideas, observations, to do lists while waiting for the flight to board, the train to come, or the room to be made up. Nothing extravagant — no leather embossed cover — but it should be small enough to fit in a pocket, but substantial, something that can survive being knocked around in the bottom of a briefcase, and with paper quality that will hold onto those thoughts for a while. I used to use a <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://amzn.to/36mN8dZ\" target=\"_blank\">Moleskine pocket notebook</a> but have switched over a similar-sized <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2LMAOM9\" target=\"_blank\">Clairefontaine A6 notebook</a>. The soft cover fits better in a jeans back pocket, and the paper is more fountain-pen friendly. Or go a bit more whimsical and get <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://amzn.to/36pK68D\" target=\"_blank\">a pack of Field Notes</a>.</li></ol>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times','','inherit','closed','closed','','2917-revision-v1','','','2020-11-04 17:38:56','2020-11-04 22:38:56','',2917,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/2917-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2927,1,'2020-11-04 18:03:09','2020-11-04 23:03:09','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>After reading interviews with top public health officials saying things like <a href=\"https://www.smh.com.au/national/vaccine-is-imminent-but-virus-fight-has-long-way-to-go-fauci-20201028-p569h2.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">\"it will be easily by the end of 2021 and perhaps into the next year before we start having some semblance of normality,\"</a> I looked back over my trips this year to put together this holiday gift guide for the pandemic traveler.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list {\"ordered\":true} -->\n<ol><li><strong>Comfortable Masks —</strong> If your traveler is a bandana/buff wearer, they\'re going to need a more conventional mask to get on an airplane. And since they\'ll be wearing it for 2 or 3 or 4 hours straight, they\'ll want something a bit more breathable than the bargain-basement masks the gate agent give away for free. I\'m a fan of the <a href=\"https://evolvetogether.com/collections/adult-masks/products/black-milan-coordinates-30-face-masks\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">evolvetogether masks in basic black</a>. They\'re breathable, they come with a pocket carrier for spares, and at $1.20/mask, they hit the right cost/quality balance point.</li><li><strong>Battery Packs</strong> <strong>—</strong> With more things going contactless -- electronic boarding passes, digital hotel door locks, order-ahead food and beer -- a dead phone is now more than just a bit of an inconvenience, and having that second or third charge immediately available has become a lot more important. I carry a mix of sizes. The <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2E6HMri\" target=\"_blank\">Anker PowerCore+ Mini</a> lipstick charger is light enough (under 3 oz) for my pocket while the heavier/higher-capacity <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://amzn.to/34fcbON\" target=\"_blank\">Zendure Power Bank Supermini</a> is in my computer bag.</li><li><strong>TSA Pre-Check or Global Entry —</strong> A perennial gift guide entry, but even more important when we want to limit time spent in security lines where no one is really staying 6 feet away from each other. It\'s $85 for 5 years of <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/precheck\" target=\"_blank\">Pre-Check</a> or, if you\'re feeling optimistic about international travel opening soon, <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.cbp.gov/travel/trusted-traveler-programs/global-entry\" target=\"_blank\">$100 for both Global Entry and Pre-Check.</a> If you have a high-end card like an <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.americanexpress.com/us/expedite-your-travel.html\" target=\"_blank\">Amex Platinum</a>, you might be able to use your card to pay for their application and get the TSA fee back in as a statement credit.</li><li><strong>Car Phone Mount —</strong> If your traveler isn\'t buying <a href=\"https://youtu.be/4ZvIoVfqbw0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the airlines\' \"HEPA filters are great!\" pitch</a>, they\'re doing more road trips -- and so could probably could use a phone mount upgrade. I like the simplicity and low profile of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/34VrMX4\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">air vent mounts</a>. If your traveler just upgraded to a new iPhone 12, you could go all-in for a matching <a href=\"https://www.belkin.com/us/p/P-WIC002/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">MagSafe vent mount</a>.</li><li><strong>VPN Subscription</strong> <strong>—</strong> Another suggestion that\'s on every one of my gift guides. When you travel away from home or the office, you spend most of your time on public WiFi networks. In the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">last podcast episode</a>, we talked about an <a href=\"https://www.ic3.gov/Media/Y2020/PSA201006\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" target=\"_blank\">FBI consumer alert</a> reminding folks about the potential risks of these networks. Help your traveler surf safe with a VPN subscription. I’ve always used one of the top paid VPN providers:  <a href=\"http://nordvpn.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">NordVPN</a>, <a href=\"http://expressvpn.com\" title=\"expressvpn.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">ExpressVPN</a>, or <a href=\"https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/\">PIA</a>. A single subscription, usually in the $35-$85 range, will cover laptops, phones, and tablets. VPN providers always have some promotion going on so it pays to shop around.</li><li><strong>Bring-Your-Own Dining Sets —</strong> Trying to navigate all the restaurant lockdowns and indoor dining limits, I\'ve eaten more take-away meals in my hotel room in the past 6 month than I have in the prior 6 years.  Rather than struggling with plastics knives on styrofoam plates, upgrade your traveler\'s dining experience with their own plastic <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3izWHMJ\">wine tumblers</a>, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/364UTXc\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">IPA glasses</a>, and <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3an6BhJ\">camping mess kits</a>. And, of course, all sorts of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/30NAqF2\">upscale sporks</a>.</li><li><strong>In-Room Coffee Brewing Kit —</strong> In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/03/29/podcast-139-brewing-best-hotel-room-coffee-notes-from-spain/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #139 — Brewing Best Hotel Room Coffee; Notes from Spain\">episode #139</a>, I interviewed Coleman Collins about <a href=\"https://roadwarrior.blog/hotel-room-coffee/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">brewing the best hotel room coffee</a>.  Back then, it was only a thing for coffee geeks (snobs?) because just about every hotel lobby offered free coffee. But now, those coffee pots are locked up with the rest of the free breakfast gear and most hotels aren\'t restocking the in-room coffee maker. So keep your traveler caffeinated with their own coffee brewing kit. I like keeping it simple with <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3864wYy\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">plastic Hario V60 cone</a> over a coffee mug, or go all-in with an <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2I7RsqR\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Aeropress Go travel press</a> and <a href=\"https://amzn.to/362FQ0u\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Hario mini-mill coffee grinder</a>.</li><li><strong>Portable Bluetooth Speaker —</strong> Last-minute restrictions and closures could have your traveler spending more time than planned in their hotel room or Airbnb, needing a way to keep themselves entertained. Wearing headphones is OK for a day or two if you\'re by yourself, but if I’m with the family, I want something a bit more social. I\'m a Bose fan, so I like their <a href=\"https://amzn.to/328yhUP\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundLink Micro</a>, but there\'s a broad selection of makers and price points to choose from.</li><li><strong>Smartphone Tripod —</strong> </li><li><strong>Travel Notebook</strong> <strong>—</strong> And finally, a stocking stuffer idea — a travel notebook, something to jot down thoughts, ideas, observations, to do lists while waiting for the flight to board, the train to come, or the room to be made up. Nothing extravagant — no leather embossed cover — but it should be small enough to fit in a pocket, but substantial, something that can survive being knocked around in the bottom of a briefcase, and with paper quality that will hold onto those thoughts for a while. I used to use a <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://amzn.to/36mN8dZ\" target=\"_blank\">Moleskine pocket notebook</a> but have switched over a similar-sized <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2LMAOM9\" target=\"_blank\">Clairefontaine A6 notebook</a>. The soft cover fits better in a jeans back pocket, and the paper is more fountain-pen friendly. Or go a bit more whimsical and get <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://amzn.to/36pK68D\" target=\"_blank\">a pack of Field Notes</a>.</li></ol>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times','','inherit','closed','closed','','2917-revision-v1','','','2020-11-04 18:03:09','2020-11-04 23:03:09','',2917,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/2917-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2928,1,'2020-11-04 18:16:11','2020-11-04 23:16:11','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>After reading interviews with top public health officials saying things like <a href=\"https://www.smh.com.au/national/vaccine-is-imminent-but-virus-fight-has-long-way-to-go-fauci-20201028-p569h2.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">\"it will be easily by the end of 2021 and perhaps into the next year before we start having some semblance of normality,\"</a> I looked back over my trips this year to put together this holiday gift guide for the pandemic traveler.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list {\"ordered\":true} -->\n<ol><li><strong>Comfortable Masks —</strong> If your traveler is a bandana/buff wearer, they\'re going to need a more conventional mask to get on an airplane. And since they\'ll be wearing it for 2 or 3 or 4 hours straight, they\'ll want something a bit more breathable than the bargain-basement masks the gate agent give away for free. I\'m a fan of the <a href=\"https://evolvetogether.com/collections/adult-masks/products/black-milan-coordinates-30-face-masks\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">evolvetogether masks in basic black</a>. They\'re breathable, they come with a pocket carrier for spares, and at $1.20/mask, they hit the right cost/quality balance point.</li><li><strong>Battery Packs</strong> <strong>—</strong> With more things going contactless -- electronic boarding passes, digital hotel door locks, order-ahead food and beer -- a dead phone is now more than just a bit of an inconvenience, and having that second or third charge immediately available has become a lot more important. I carry a mix of sizes. The <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2E6HMri\" target=\"_blank\">Anker PowerCore+ Mini</a> lipstick charger is light enough (under 3 oz) for my pocket while the heavier/higher-capacity <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://amzn.to/34fcbON\" target=\"_blank\">Zendure Power Bank Supermini</a> is in my computer bag.</li><li><strong>TSA Pre-Check or Global Entry —</strong> A perennial gift guide entry, but even more important when we want to limit time spent in security lines where no one is really staying 6 feet away from each other. It\'s $85 for 5 years of <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/precheck\" target=\"_blank\">Pre-Check</a> or, if you\'re feeling optimistic about international travel opening soon, <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.cbp.gov/travel/trusted-traveler-programs/global-entry\" target=\"_blank\">$100 for both Global Entry and Pre-Check.</a> If you have a high-end card like an <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.americanexpress.com/us/expedite-your-travel.html\" target=\"_blank\">Amex Platinum</a>, you might be able to use your card to pay for their application and get the TSA fee back in as a statement credit.</li><li><strong>Car Phone Mount —</strong> If your traveler isn\'t buying <a href=\"https://youtu.be/4ZvIoVfqbw0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the airlines\' \"HEPA filters are great!\" pitch</a>, they\'re doing more road trips -- and so could probably could use a phone mount upgrade. I like the simplicity and low profile of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/34VrMX4\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">air vent mounts</a>. If your traveler just upgraded to a new iPhone 12, you could go all-in for a matching <a href=\"https://www.belkin.com/us/p/P-WIC002/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">MagSafe vent mount</a>.</li><li><strong>VPN Subscription</strong> <strong>—</strong> Another suggestion that\'s on every one of my gift guides. When you travel away from home or the office, you spend most of your time on public WiFi networks. In the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">last podcast episode</a>, we talked about an <a href=\"https://www.ic3.gov/Media/Y2020/PSA201006\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" target=\"_blank\">FBI consumer alert</a> reminding folks about the potential risks of these networks. Help your traveler surf safe with a VPN subscription. I’ve always used one of the top paid VPN providers:  <a href=\"http://nordvpn.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">NordVPN</a>, <a href=\"http://expressvpn.com\" title=\"expressvpn.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">ExpressVPN</a>, or <a href=\"https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/\">PIA</a>. A single subscription, usually in the $35-$85 range, will cover laptops, phones, and tablets. VPN providers always have some promotion going on so it pays to shop around.</li><li><strong>Bring-Your-Own Dining Sets —</strong> Trying to navigate all the restaurant lockdowns and indoor dining limits, I\'ve eaten more take-away meals in my hotel room in the past 6 month than I have in the prior 6 years.  Rather than struggling with plastics knives on styrofoam plates, upgrade your traveler\'s dining experience with their own plastic <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3izWHMJ\">wine tumblers</a>, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/364UTXc\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">IPA glasses</a>, and <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3an6BhJ\">camping mess kits</a>. And, of course, all sorts of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/30NAqF2\">upscale sporks</a>.</li><li><strong>In-Room Coffee Brewing Kit —</strong> In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/03/29/podcast-139-brewing-best-hotel-room-coffee-notes-from-spain/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #139 — Brewing Best Hotel Room Coffee; Notes from Spain\">episode #139</a>, I interviewed Coleman Collins about <a href=\"https://roadwarrior.blog/hotel-room-coffee/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">brewing the best hotel room coffee</a>.  Back then, it was only a thing for coffee geeks (snobs?) because just about every hotel lobby offered free coffee. But now, those coffee pots are locked up with the rest of the free breakfast gear and most hotels aren\'t restocking the in-room coffee maker. So keep your traveler caffeinated with their own coffee brewing kit. I like keeping it simple with <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3864wYy\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">plastic Hario V60 cone</a> over a coffee mug, or go all-in with an <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2I7RsqR\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Aeropress Go travel press</a> and <a href=\"https://amzn.to/362FQ0u\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Hario mini-mill coffee grinder</a>.</li><li><strong>Portable Bluetooth Speaker —</strong> Last-minute restrictions and closures could have your traveler spending more time than planned in their hotel room or Airbnb, needing a way to keep themselves entertained. Wearing headphones is OK for a day or two if you\'re by yourself, but if I’m with the family, I want something a bit more social. I\'m a Bose fan, so I like their <a href=\"https://amzn.to/328yhUP\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundLink Micro</a>, but there\'s a broad selection of makers and price points to choose from.</li><li><strong>Smartphone Tripod —</strong> Tough to get everyone into an arms-length selfie <em>and</em> maintain social distance. A tabletop tripod topped with a smartphone clamp like the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/34Vk5QS\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Manfrotto PIXI</a> can help your traveler get those group shots as well as some night shots and maybe some cool timelapse video.</li><li><strong>Travel Notebook</strong> <strong>—</strong> Nothing fancy — no leather embossed cover — just something to jot down thoughts, ideas, observations, or to do lists while traveling in this time of COVID. My first travel notebooks were <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://amzn.to/36mN8dZ\" target=\"_blank\">Moleskine pocket notebooks</a> but I\'ve switched over similar-sized <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2LMAOM9\" target=\"_blank\">Clairefontaine A6 notebooks</a>. Their soft cover fits better in the back pocket of my Levis and the paper is more fountain-pen friendly. Or go a bit more whimsical and get <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://amzn.to/36pK68D\" target=\"_blank\">a pack of Field Notes</a>.</li></ol>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times','','inherit','closed','closed','','2917-revision-v1','','','2020-11-04 18:16:11','2020-11-04 23:16:11','',2917,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/2917-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2929,1,'2020-11-04 18:20:33','2020-11-04 23:20:33','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>After reading interviews with top public health officials saying things like <a href=\"https://www.smh.com.au/national/vaccine-is-imminent-but-virus-fight-has-long-way-to-go-fauci-20201028-p569h2.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">\"it will be easily by the end of 2021 and perhaps into the next year before we start having some semblance of normality,\"</a> I looked back over my trips this year to put together this holiday gift guide for the pandemic traveler.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list {\"ordered\":true} -->\n<ol><li><strong>Comfortable Masks —</strong> If your traveler is a bandana/buff wearer, they\'re going to need a more conventional mask to get on an airplane. And since they\'ll be wearing it for 2 or 3 or 4 hours straight, they\'ll want something a bit more breathable than the bargain-basement masks the gate agent give away for free. I\'m a fan of the <a href=\"https://evolvetogether.com/collections/adult-masks/products/black-milan-coordinates-30-face-masks\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">evolvetogether masks in basic black</a>. They\'re breathable, they come with a pocket carrier for spares, and at $1.20/mask, they hit the right cost/quality balance point.</li><li><strong>Battery Packs</strong> <strong>—</strong> With more things going contactless -- electronic boarding passes, digital hotel door locks, order-ahead food and beer -- a dead phone is now more than just a bit of an inconvenience, and having that second or third charge immediately available has become a lot more important. I carry a mix of sizes. The <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2E6HMri\" target=\"_blank\">Anker PowerCore+ Mini</a> lipstick charger is light enough (under 3 oz) for my pocket while the heavier/higher-capacity <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://amzn.to/34fcbON\" target=\"_blank\">Zendure Power Bank Supermini</a> is in my computer bag.</li><li><strong>TSA Pre-Check or Global Entry —</strong> A perennial gift guide entry, but even more important when we want to limit time spent in security lines where no one is really staying 6 feet away from each other. It\'s $85 for 5 years of <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/precheck\" target=\"_blank\">Pre-Check</a> or, if you\'re feeling optimistic about international travel opening soon, <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.cbp.gov/travel/trusted-traveler-programs/global-entry\" target=\"_blank\">$100 for both Global Entry and Pre-Check.</a> If you have a high-end card like an <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.americanexpress.com/us/expedite-your-travel.html\" target=\"_blank\">Amex Platinum</a>, you might be able to use your card to pay for their application and get the TSA fee back in as a statement credit.</li><li><strong>Car Phone Mount —</strong> If your traveler isn\'t buying <a href=\"https://youtu.be/4ZvIoVfqbw0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the airlines\' \"HEPA filters are great!\" pitch</a>, they\'re doing more road trips -- and so could probably could use a phone mount upgrade. I like the simplicity and low profile of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/34VrMX4\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">air vent mounts</a>. If your traveler just upgraded to a new iPhone 12, you could go all-in for a matching <a href=\"https://www.belkin.com/us/p/P-WIC002/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">MagSafe vent mount</a>.</li><li><strong>VPN Subscription</strong> <strong>—</strong> Another suggestion that\'s on every one of my gift guides. When you travel away from home or the office, you spend most of your time on public WiFi networks. In the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">last podcast episode</a>, we talked about an <a href=\"https://www.ic3.gov/Media/Y2020/PSA201006\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" target=\"_blank\">FBI consumer alert</a> reminding folks about the potential risks of these networks. Help your traveler surf safe with a VPN subscription. I’ve always used one of the top paid VPN providers:  <a href=\"http://nordvpn.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">NordVPN</a>, <a href=\"http://expressvpn.com\" title=\"expressvpn.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">ExpressVPN</a>, or <a href=\"https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/\">PIA</a>. A single subscription, usually in the $35-$85 range, will cover laptops, phones, and tablets. VPN providers always have some promotion going on so it pays to shop around.</li><li><strong>Bring-Your-Own Dining Sets —</strong> Trying to navigate all the restaurant lockdowns and indoor dining limits, I\'ve eaten more take-away meals in my hotel room in the past 6 month than I have in the prior 6 years.  Rather than struggling with plastics knives on styrofoam plates, upgrade your traveler\'s dining experience with their own plastic <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3izWHMJ\">wine tumblers</a>, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/364UTXc\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">IPA glasses</a>, and <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3an6BhJ\">camping mess kits</a>. And, of course, all sorts of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/30NAqF2\">upscale sporks</a>.</li><li><strong>In-Room Coffee Brewing Kit —</strong> In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/03/29/podcast-139-brewing-best-hotel-room-coffee-notes-from-spain/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #139 — Brewing Best Hotel Room Coffee; Notes from Spain\">episode #139</a>, I interviewed Coleman Collins about <a href=\"https://roadwarrior.blog/hotel-room-coffee/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">brewing the best hotel room coffee</a>.  Back then, it was only a thing for coffee geeks (snobs?) because just about every hotel lobby offered free coffee. But now, those coffee pots are locked up with the rest of the free breakfast gear and most hotels aren\'t restocking the in-room coffee maker. So keep your traveler caffeinated with their own coffee brewing kit. I like keeping it simple with <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3864wYy\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">plastic Hario V60 cone</a> over a coffee mug, or go all-in with an <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2I7RsqR\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Aeropress Go travel press</a> and <a href=\"https://amzn.to/362FQ0u\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Hario mini-mill coffee grinder</a>.</li><li><strong>Portable Bluetooth Speaker —</strong> Last-minute restrictions and closures could have your traveler spending more time than planned in their hotel room or Airbnb, needing a way to keep themselves entertained. Wearing headphones is OK for a day or two if you\'re by yourself, but if I’m with the family, I want something a bit more social. I\'m a Bose fan, so I like their <a href=\"https://amzn.to/328yhUP\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundLink Micro</a>, but there\'s a broad selection of makers and price points to choose from.</li><li><strong>Smartphone Tripod —</strong> Tough to get everyone into an arms-length selfie <em>and</em> maintain social distance. A tabletop tripod topped with a smartphone clamp like the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/34Vk5QS\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Manfrotto PIXI</a> can help your traveler get those group shots as well as some night shots and maybe some cool timelapse video.</li><li><strong>Travel Notebook</strong> <strong>—</strong> Nothing fancy — no leather embossed cover — just something to jot down thoughts, ideas, observations, or to do lists while traveling in this time of COVID. My first travel notebooks were <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://amzn.to/36mN8dZ\" target=\"_blank\">Moleskine pocket notebooks</a> but I\'ve switched over similar-sized <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2LMAOM9\" target=\"_blank\">Clairefontaine A6 notebooks</a>. Their soft cover fits better in the back pocket of my Levis and the paper is more fountain-pen friendly. Or go a bit more whimsical and get <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://amzn.to/36pK68D\" target=\"_blank\">a pack of Field Notes</a>.</li></ol>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:block {\"ref\":2601} /-->','10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times','','inherit','closed','closed','','2917-revision-v1','','','2020-11-04 18:20:33','2020-11-04 23:20:33','',2917,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/2917-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2930,1,'2020-11-04 21:18:38','2020-11-05 02:18:38','','40319_1_6299b8a4-2013-446b-8296-25aee9a328b4_387x','','inherit','open','closed','','40319_1_6299b8a4-2013-446b-8296-25aee9a328b4_387x','','','2020-11-04 21:18:38','2020-11-05 02:18:38','',2917,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/40319_1_6299b8a4-2013-446b-8296-25aee9a328b4_387x.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(2931,1,'2020-11-04 21:46:33','2020-11-05 02:46:33','','IMG_2530','','inherit','open','closed','','img_2530','','','2020-11-04 21:46:33','2020-11-05 02:46:33','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(2932,1,'2020-11-04 22:03:23','2020-11-05 03:03:23','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":2931,\"width\":300,\"height\":300,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large is-resized\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-1024x1024.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2931\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"/><figcaption>Social distancing the reindeer will be tough</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>With public health officials saying things like <a href=\"https://www.smh.com.au/national/vaccine-is-imminent-but-virus-fight-has-long-way-to-go-fauci-20201028-p569h2.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">\"it will be easily by the end of 2021 and perhaps into the next year before we start having some semblance of normality,\"</a> I figured this year\'s travel gift guide would need to be a bit different. Here are my top shopping ideas for your pandemic traveler.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list {\"ordered\":true} -->\n<ol><li><strong>Comfortable Masks —</strong> If your traveler is a bandana/buff wearer, they\'re going to need a more conventional mask to get on an airplane. And since they\'ll be wearing it for 2 or 3 or 4 hours straight, they\'ll want something a bit more breathable than the bargain-basement masks the gate agent give away for free. I\'m a big fan of the <a href=\"https://evolvetogether.com/collections/adult-masks/products/black-milan-coordinates-30-face-masks\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">evolvetogether masks in basic black</a>. They\'re breathable, they come with a pocket carrier for spares, and at $1.20/mask, they hit the right cost/quality balance point.</li><li><strong>Battery Packs</strong> <strong>—</strong> With more things going contactless -- electronic boarding passes, digital hotel door locks, order-ahead food and beer -- a dead phone is more than just a bit of an inconvenience, and having that second or third charge immediately available is a lot more important. I carry a mix of sizes. The <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2E6HMri\" target=\"_blank\">Anker PowerCore+ Mini</a> lipstick charger is light enough (under 3 oz) for my pocket while the heavier/higher-capacity <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://amzn.to/34fcbON\" target=\"_blank\">Zendure Power Bank Supermini</a> waits for me in my computer bag.</li><li><strong>TSA Pre-Check or Global Entry —</strong> A perennial on the gift guide, but even more important when we want to limit time spent in security lines because no one is really staying 6 feet away from each other. It\'s $85 for 5 years of <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/precheck\" target=\"_blank\">Pre-Check</a> or, if you\'re feeling optimistic about international travel opening soon, <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.cbp.gov/travel/trusted-traveler-programs/global-entry\" target=\"_blank\">$100 for both Global Entry and Pre-Check.</a> You might be able to use a high-end travel card like an <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.americanexpress.com/us/expedite-your-travel.html\" target=\"_blank\">Amex Platinum</a> to pay for your traveler\'s application and get the TSA fee back as a statement credit.</li><li><strong>Car Phone Mount —</strong> If your traveler isn\'t buying <a href=\"https://youtu.be/4ZvIoVfqbw0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the airlines\' \"HEPA filters are great!\" pitch</a>, they\'ll be doing more road trips -- and so could probably could use a phone mount upgrade. I like the simplicity and low profile of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/34VrMX4\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">air vent mounts</a>. If your traveler just upgraded to a new iPhone 12, you could go all-in for a matching <a href=\"https://www.belkin.com/us/p/P-WIC002/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">MagSafe vent mount</a>.</li><li><strong>VPN Subscription</strong> <strong>—</strong> Another suggestion that\'s on every one of my gift guides. When you travel away from home or the office, you spend most of your time on public WiFi networks. In the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">last podcast episode</a>, we talked about an <a href=\"https://www.ic3.gov/Media/Y2020/PSA201006\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" target=\"_blank\">FBI consumer alert</a> reminding folks about the risks of these networks. Help your traveler surf safe with a VPN subscription. I’ve always used one of the top paid VPN providers:  <a href=\"http://nordvpn.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">NordVPN</a>, <a href=\"http://expressvpn.com\" title=\"expressvpn.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">ExpressVPN</a>, or <a href=\"https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/\">PIA</a>. A single subscription, usually in the $35-$85 range, will cover their laptop, phone, and tablet. VPN providers always have some promotion going on so it pays to shop around.</li><li><strong>Bring-Your-Own Dining Sets —</strong> Trying to navigate all the restaurant lockdowns and indoor dining limits, I\'ve eaten more take-away meals in my hotel room in the past 6 month than I have in the prior 6 years.  Rather than struggling with plastics knives on styrofoam plates, upgrade your traveler\'s dining experience with their own non-breakable <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3izWHMJ\">wine tumblers</a>, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/364UTXc\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">IPA glasses</a>, and <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3an6BhJ\">camping mess kit</a>. And don\'t forget the non-plastic <a href=\"https://amzn.to/30NAqF2\">upscale sporks</a>.</li><li><strong>In-Room Coffee Brewing Kit —</strong> In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/03/29/podcast-139-brewing-best-hotel-room-coffee-notes-from-spain/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #139 — Brewing Best Hotel Room Coffee; Notes from Spain\">episode #139</a>, I interviewed Coleman Collins about <a href=\"https://roadwarrior.blog/hotel-room-coffee/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">brewing the best hotel room coffee</a>.  Back then, it was only a thing for coffee geeks (snobs?) because just about every hotel lobby offered free coffee. But now, those coffee pots are locked up with the rest of the free breakfast gear, and most hotels aren\'t restocking the in-room coffee makers. So keep your traveler caffeinated with their own coffee brewing kit. I like keeping things simple with a <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3864wYy\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">plastic Hario V60 cone</a> over a coffee mug, but you could go all-barista with an <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2I7RsqR\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Aeropress Go travel press</a> and <a href=\"https://amzn.to/362FQ0u\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Hario mini-mill coffee grinder</a>.</li><li><strong>Portable Bluetooth Speaker —</strong> Last-minute restrictions and closures could have your traveler spending more time than planned in their hotel room or Airbnb, and needing a way to keep themselves entertained. Wearing headphones is OK for a day or two if you\'re by yourself, but when I’m with the family, I want something a bit more social. I\'m a Bose fan, so I like their <a href=\"https://amzn.to/328yhUP\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundLink Micro</a>, but there\'s a broad selection of makers, form factors, and price points to choose from.</li><li><strong>Smartphone Tripod —</strong> It\'s tough to get everyone into an arms-length selfie <em>and</em> maintain social distance. A tabletop tripod with a smartphone clamp like the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/34Vk5QS\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Manfrotto PIXI</a> can help your traveler get those group shots as well as taking some night shots and maybe a cool timelapse video.</li><li><strong>Travel Notebook</strong> <strong>—</strong> Nothing fancy, no leather embossed cover, just something to jot down thoughts, ideas, observations, or to do lists while traveling in this time of COVID. My first travel notebooks were <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://amzn.to/36mN8dZ\" target=\"_blank\">Moleskine pocket notebooks</a> but I\'ve switched over similar-sized <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2LMAOM9\" target=\"_blank\">Clairefontaine A6 notebooks</a>. Their soft cover fits better in the back pocket of my Levis and the paper is more fountain-pen friendly. Or you could go a bit more whimsical and get <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://amzn.to/36pK68D\" target=\"_blank\">a pack of Field Notes</a>.</li></ol>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:block {\"ref\":2601} /-->','10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times','','inherit','closed','closed','','2917-revision-v1','','','2020-11-04 22:03:23','2020-11-05 03:03:23','',2917,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/2917-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2934,1,'2020-11-11 21:53:51','2020-11-12 02:53:51','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":2931,\"width\":300,\"height\":300,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large is-resized\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-1024x1024.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2931\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"/><figcaption>Social distancing the reindeer will be tough</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>With public health officials saying things like <a href=\"https://www.smh.com.au/national/vaccine-is-imminent-but-virus-fight-has-long-way-to-go-fauci-20201028-p569h2.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">\"it will be easily by the end of 2021 and perhaps into the next year before we start having some semblance of normality,\"</a> I figured this year\'s travel gift guide would need to be a bit different. Here are my top shopping ideas for your pandemic traveler.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list {\"ordered\":true} -->\n<ol><li><strong>Comfortable Masks —</strong> If your traveler is a bandana/buff wearer, they\'re going to need a more conventional mask to get on an airplane. And since they\'ll be wearing it for 2 or 3 or 4 hours straight, they\'ll want something a bit more breathable than the bargain-basement masks the gate agent give away for free. I\'m a big fan of the <a href=\"https://evolvetogether.com/collections/adult-masks/products/black-milan-coordinates-30-face-masks\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">evolvetogether masks in basic black</a>. They\'re breathable, they come with a pocket carrier for spares, and at $1.20/mask, they hit the right cost/quality balance point.</li><li><strong>Battery Packs</strong> <strong>—</strong> With more things going contactless -- electronic boarding passes, digital hotel door locks, order-ahead food and beer -- a dead phone is more than just a bit of an inconvenience, and having that second or third charge immediately available is a lot more important. I carry a mix of sizes. The <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2E6HMri\" target=\"_blank\">Anker PowerCore+ Mini</a> lipstick charger is light enough (under 3 oz) for my pocket while the heavier/higher-capacity <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://amzn.to/34fcbON\" target=\"_blank\">Zendure Power Bank Supermini</a> waits for me in my computer bag.</li><li><strong>TSA Pre-Check or Global Entry —</strong> A perennial on the gift guide, but even more important when we want to limit time spent in security lines because no one is really staying 6 feet away from each other. It\'s $85 for 5 years of <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/precheck\" target=\"_blank\">Pre-Check</a> or, if you\'re feeling optimistic about international travel opening soon, <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.cbp.gov/travel/trusted-traveler-programs/global-entry\" target=\"_blank\">$100 for both Global Entry and Pre-Check.</a> You might be able to use a high-end travel card like an <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.americanexpress.com/us/expedite-your-travel.html\" target=\"_blank\">Amex Platinum</a> to pay for your traveler\'s application and get the TSA fee back as a statement credit.</li><li><strong>Car Phone Mount —</strong> If your traveler isn\'t buying <a href=\"https://youtu.be/4ZvIoVfqbw0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the airlines\' \"HEPA filters are great!\" pitch</a>, they\'ll be doing more road trips -- and so could probably could use a phone mount upgrade. I like the simplicity and low profile of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/34VrMX4\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">air vent mounts</a>. If your traveler just upgraded to a new iPhone 12, you could go all-in for a matching <a href=\"https://www.belkin.com/us/p/P-WIC002/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">MagSafe vent mount</a>.</li><li><strong>VPN Subscription</strong> <strong>—</strong> Another suggestion that\'s on every one of my gift guides. When you travel away from home or the office, you spend most of your time on public WiFi networks. In the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">last podcast episode</a>, we talked about an <a href=\"https://www.ic3.gov/Media/Y2020/PSA201006\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" target=\"_blank\">FBI consumer alert</a> reminding folks about the risks of these networks. Help your traveler surf safe with a VPN subscription. I’ve always used one of the top paid VPN providers:  <a href=\"http://nordvpn.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">NordVPN</a>, <a href=\"http://expressvpn.com\" title=\"expressvpn.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">ExpressVPN</a>, or <a href=\"https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/\">PIA</a>. A single subscription, usually in the $35-$85 range, will cover their laptop, phone, and tablet. VPN providers always have some promotion going on so it pays to shop around.</li><li><strong>Bring-Your-Own Dining Sets —</strong> Trying to navigate all the restaurant lockdowns and indoor dining limits, I\'ve eaten more take-away meals in my hotel room in the past 6 month than I have in the prior 6 years.  Rather than struggling with plastic knives on styrofoam plates, upgrade your traveler\'s dining experience with their own non-breakable <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3izWHMJ\">wine tumblers</a>, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/364UTXc\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">IPA glasses</a>, and <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3an6BhJ\">camping mess kit</a>. And don\'t forget the non-plastic <a href=\"https://amzn.to/30NAqF2\">upscale sporks</a>.</li><li><strong>In-Room Coffee Brewing Kit —</strong> In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/03/29/podcast-139-brewing-best-hotel-room-coffee-notes-from-spain/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #139 — Brewing Best Hotel Room Coffee; Notes from Spain\">episode #139</a>, I interviewed Coleman Collins about <a href=\"https://roadwarrior.blog/hotel-room-coffee/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">brewing the best hotel room coffee</a>.  Back then, it was only a thing for coffee geeks (snobs?) because just about every hotel lobby offered free coffee. But now, those coffee pots are locked up with the rest of the free breakfast gear, and most hotels aren\'t restocking the in-room coffee makers. So keep your traveler caffeinated with their own coffee brewing kit. I like keeping things simple with a <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3864wYy\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">plastic Hario V60 cone</a> over a coffee mug, but you could go all-barista with an <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2I7RsqR\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Aeropress Go travel press</a> and <a href=\"https://amzn.to/362FQ0u\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Hario mini-mill coffee grinder</a>.</li><li><strong>Portable Bluetooth Speaker —</strong> Last-minute restrictions and closures could have your traveler spending more time than planned in their hotel room or Airbnb, and needing a way to keep themselves entertained. Wearing headphones is OK for a day or two if you\'re by yourself, but when I’m with the family, I want something a bit more social. I\'m a Bose fan, so I like their <a href=\"https://amzn.to/328yhUP\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundLink Micro</a>, but there\'s a broad selection of makers, form factors, and price points to choose from.</li><li><strong>Smartphone Tripod —</strong> It\'s tough to get everyone into an arms-length selfie <em>and</em> maintain social distance. A tabletop tripod with a smartphone clamp like the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/34Vk5QS\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Manfrotto PIXI</a> can help your traveler get those group shots as well as taking some night shots and maybe a cool timelapse video.</li><li><strong>Travel Notebook</strong> <strong>—</strong> Nothing fancy, no leather embossed cover, just something to jot down thoughts, ideas, observations, or to do lists while traveling in this time of COVID. My first travel notebooks were <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://amzn.to/36mN8dZ\" target=\"_blank\">Moleskine pocket notebooks</a> but I\'ve switched over similar-sized <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2LMAOM9\" target=\"_blank\">Clairefontaine A6 notebooks</a>. Their soft cover fits better in the back pocket of my Levis and the paper is more fountain-pen friendly. Or you could go a bit more whimsical and get <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://amzn.to/36pK68D\" target=\"_blank\">a pack of Field Notes</a>.</li></ol>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:block {\"ref\":2601} /-->','10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times','','inherit','closed','closed','','2917-revision-v1','','','2020-11-11 21:53:51','2020-11-12 02:53:51','',2917,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/11/2917-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2935,1,'2020-11-12 23:48:05','2020-11-13 04:48:05','','Red christmas ball and Quarantine biohazard danger. yellow and black stripes. Coronavirus Covid-19 and christmas or new year canceled concept. Vector illustration','','inherit','open','closed','','red-christmas-ball-and-quarantine-biohazard-danger-yellow-and-black-stripes-coronavirus-covid-19-and-christmas-or-new-year-canceled-concept-vector-illustration','','','2020-11-12 23:48:05','2020-11-13 04:48:05','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581.jpeg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(2936,1,'2020-11-12 20:00:54','2020-11-13 01:00:54','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":2935,\"width\":300,\"height\":300,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large is-resized\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714-1024x1024.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2935\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"/><figcaption>Locking Down The Christmas Tree</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>No travel since the last episode, so I had some time to think back through my post-lockdown travel and come up with my top 10 <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">gift ideas</a> for your pandemic travelers.  We look at the start of the year-end efforts by airlines, hotels, and credit card companies to keep their grounded travelers, unpack the work-from-hotel offerings from Marriott, Hilton, and Hyatt, and dissect the latest hotel reservation system data breach. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_169.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go over to the <em>Subscribe</em> section on the right to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #169: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. No travel, but a November week with temps in the 70’s felt like I was someplace other than Chicago. But the weather reverted to the mean yesterday, which chased me back indoors to finish this podcast.</li><li>Last week was a boon to Chicago’s bars and restaurants. The week before, the governor banned indoor service again as COVID cases began to rise. The bonus week of warm sunny weather gifted them with some needed outdoor dining revenue. Last Friday, a friend and I met for lunch at a neighborhood place that had been able to expand their outdoor seating by putting tables on the sidewalk in front of the shuttered retailer next door to them. We showed up at 11:30; the tables were full by 12.</li><li>One of the things we talked about was travel; how, over the past 8 months, we’d more or less adjusted to all of the COVID restrictions, the masks, the social distance, all of it -- except for travel. Yes, we’ve done the car trips and long weekends, but we miss the big trips -- I’d just cancelled our Thanksgiving trip to London and he’s trying to think through their annual Christmas trip to December. Now, I know this is definitely a “First World problem” for folks who’ve had families, friends, and even themselves hit with COVID, so I’m not trying to overplay this. But as the end of the year approaches, and I start hearing more public health experts reset expectation -- for the worse, saying <a href=\"https://www.smh.com.au/national/vaccine-is-imminent-but-virus-fight-has-long-way-to-go-fauci-20201028-p569h2.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">“Well, it’s probably more like the end of 2021 or maybe into the beginning of 2022 before things start feeling normal”</a> -- I dunno, for people who love travel, I don’t think they want to put it on hold for another year or two. You start hearing about people looking for openings -- Mexico, Costa Rica -- as they figure out their own personal risk profiles. Maybe <a href=\"https://hub.united.com/2020-10-29-united-airlines-launches-worlds-first-free-transatlantic-covid-19-testing-pilot-2648544789.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">United Airlines’ testing program</a> that they’re trialing on flights to Hawaii and London is part of the answer; certainly <a href=\"https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/11/heres-everything-to-know-about-pfizers-positive-vaccine-news/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pfizer’s release of preliminary vaccine results</a> on Monday got everybody hopeful again. I don’t think anyone expects -- or really wants -- an immediate snap-back to 2019. But the ability to stretch things a bit more would be greatly appreciated.</li><li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mactonite/29469\">Static</a>&nbsp;by Darkroom (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mactonite/29469</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>First, a quick program note. As I tweak things with the underlying TravelCommons infrastructure -- the audio file, the RSS feed, the website -- I’ll talk about the changes at the end of the podcast, so I don’t muck up the content that you come to listen to with the “inside baseball” sorta podcast stuff. If you’re not interested, you can skip to the end without missing anything. I will say, though, that I was pleasantly surprised when I looked at the Apple Podcast stats showing about 80% of you stay through the end of an episode. I’d fully expected to see at least 50% of folks hitting the “skip to next podcast” button when they heard the “Pictures of You” song clip. Thanks to everybody for sticking all the way through.</li><li>And congrats to Emily Thomas, our guest on the August episode, for winning the <a href=\"https://www.leverhulme.ac.uk/philip-leverhulme-prizes\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Leverhulme prize</a> last month. The prize recognizes the achievement of outstanding researchers across a broad range of disciplines whose work has already attracted international recognition and whose future career is exceptionally promising. I interviewed Emily about her book <em>The Meaning of Travel: Philosophers Abroad</em> and had a great time talking to her. A well-deserved award. I just may go back and listen to that interview again.</li><li>I got an email from Marriott last week announcing their work-from-hotel offerings. We\'ve talked about this trend in the past couple of episodes -- first as a way for downtown hotels to do something/anything about their low occupancy rates, and then in the last episode with the FBI\'s cyber security advisory to people moving from work-at-home to work-at-hotels. The Day Pass gives you a room from 6am to 6pm, wi-fi, bottled water, and lounge access if you’re a high-status Marriott Bonvoy member. They’re piloting it in Atlanta, Dallas, New York, and Phoenix. Scanning the pricing, the range looked to be in the $60-$90 range, though the Phoenician in Scottsdale did price out at $260. If you looked hard, you could probably get a day pass at a co-working place for cheaper, but if you can expense it, the Marriott offer is probably not a bad deal -- especially for those days that you have a big sales presentation or maybe a webinar, where you need that guaranteed alone time to focus on preparation and then delivery, and a video backdrop that’s not your closet door or a semi-made bed or random people walking past. Hilton and Hyatt are also offering work-from hotel plans, but with different spins. Hilton’s WorkSpaces will give you 10,000 Honors points for your first booking and, unlike Marriott, is across all of their properties, but it doesn’t feel as put together as Marriott’s. You have to ring up the property directly; looks like Hilton can’t figure out a way to shoehorn this day rate concept into their reservation system. Work from Hyatt, on the other hand, isn’t so much a WeWork replacement as a digital nomad trial package with its 7-night minimum stay requirement and a focus on resort locations like the Grand Hyatts in Kauai or Vail, CO. Kinda the complete opposite of spending 12 hours in a room at the Marriott by DFW. They all feel a bit “toe in the water”, a bit opportunistic in their own way.&nbsp;</li><li>At the beginning of this week, Candid Wueest, a cyber security researcher who joined us last year in episode #151 to talk about hotel websites that leaked traveler data, tweeted out a link to yet <a href=\"https://www.websiteplanet.com/blog/prestige-soft-breach-report/\">another hotel data breach</a>. This time it was channel management software, something that hotels use to automate the task of updating room availability and rates across all the on-line booking sites like Expedia and Booking.com and Hotels.com and on and on. Turns out this channel manager, Prestige Software, stored 24 GB of names and emails and credit card data and reservation records -- 10 million log files going back to 2013 -- in a misconfigured AWS S3 bucket -- storage space on Amazon’s cloud. The pandemic has massively accelerated companies moving from their own data centers to cloud services like Amazon and Microsoft. But sometimes it feels like the speed of that migration has overrun the skills of the teams supporting it.&nbsp; What can you do about it? In this case, not much. You would’ve booked your room on Expedia or Trivago and not known anything about something called a channel manager piping your data down to the hotel. We’ve talked about these breaches in so many past episodes. What I said then still stands: you need to be realistic -- it’s not <em>if</em> your personal data will get breached, it’s <em>when</em>. If you can, put your on-line purchases on a separate card and watch those transactions on the bank’s website or mobile app so you can quickly shut it down if you see something that doesn’t look right. I remember one time, years ago, seeing a Northwest Air flight from Tokyo to Beijing show up on my card. Struck me as odd because I was in Chicago with no plans to be in Asia. Immediately called the bank, disputed the charge, and they closed down the card. Interesting thing is that the crook had booked an economy class ticket. You’d think if you’re going to risk it, go big -- book the front of the plane -- business class if not first.&nbsp;</li><li>The quarantine theater we talked about in the last episode just keeps keeping on. Chicago now has 43 states on its list, 31 of which have <em>lower</em> COVID rates than Chicago. And, I guess in admission that no one’s paying attention, they’re moving from weekly updates to every other week. I guess ‘cause there’s not that many more states they can add. New York gave up on its quarantine list when COVID rates in neighboring Connecticut and New Jersey qualified them for the list. \"There will be no quarantine list, there will be no metrics,\" Governor Cuomo says. Everyone needs to test negative, except for people coming in from Connecticut, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania because, at some point, you just gotta be realistic. Especially in the face of this, what is it, a third wave? I’ve lost count.</li><li>And just to show how deeply all of this -- the quarantine, the lack of travel has gotten me, here’s a fun game I now play with my Google Mini.&nbsp;I dug around in the Google Home app and found where I can change the voice. I’ll switch to the British Racing Green voice to check the weather in London and then click over on Sydney Harbour Blue to check the weather there. Then I flip back to the default voice to get the weather at the Googleplex. And, of course, I ask it to play TravelCommons.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter message</a> to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> or our <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a> account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge music —&nbsp;<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Psykick/52938\">Another Way</a>&nbsp;by Psykick (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Psykick/52938</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Holiday Gift Guide for the Pandemic Traveler</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Like I mentioned at the top of the show, hearing public health officials saying things like “it will be easily by the end of 2021 and perhaps into the next year before we start having some semblance of normality” got my attention; got me thinking that this year’s travel gift guide needs to be a bit different. So I flipped through my 2020 travel journal, thought back through all of my post-lockdown travel to come up with my top shopping ideas for your pandemic travelers.</li><li>Check out this year\'s pandemic gift guide on the front page of the TravelCommons\' website or <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times\">here </a>at https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/2879\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Slinky Blues</a> by Admiral Bob (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/28792 Ft: unreal_dm</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>End of Year “Don’t Leave Me” Offers</strong> </h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Back in September, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/09/19/podcast-167-6-months-on-why-keep-travel-cards/\" title=\"Podcast #167 — 6 Months On; Why Keep Travel Cards?\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">episode #167</a>, we talked with <a href=\"https://www.lendingtree.com/writer/matt-schulz/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Matt Schulz, chief credit analyst at LendingTree</a>, about travel credit cards. Matt told us that their late summer surveys showed trends toward people canceling travel cards and cashing out points. But then earlier this week, <a href=\"https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-11-10/amex-says-its-cardholders-are-stockpiling-their-points-and-miles\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">American Express’ CFO said that their card customers <em>weren’t</em> cashing out points, and instead stocking them up to travel</a>.&nbsp; The two comments aren’t necessarily at odds. If you’re laid off, you can use those miles to buy groceries or clothes via gift cards or on Amazon. But if you don’t have to, the best value you’ll get for those points will be on travel. You’ll get less than a penny a point when cashing out Amex points on Amazon, but you can double that when you use them to book flights on, say, Singapore Air or KLM.&nbsp; So the hoarding makes sense -- if you can.</li><li>One of Matt’s points in our interview was that card companies will continue to tweak their rewards to keep people holding and using their cards because travelers are a valuable customer segment because, well, they typically spend chunks of money to travel. So as we come up on the end of the year, it’ll be interesting to see what those tweaks will be. Chase keeps extending the 5x grocery and gas bonus on their Southwest card while <a href=\"https://thepointsguy.com/news/amex-platinum-current-offer/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amex just announced a <em>10x</em> grocery and gas bonus as well as a 75K sign-up bonus for their Platinum card</a>.</li><li>Airlines and hotels are also rolling out their year-end offers. Back in the spring, all the majors gave existing status holders a push, extending elite expiration dates to Jan 2022 to keep them in the fold. So that settled everyone down for 2020. But now, with 2021 coming up and travel still in the hole, we’re starting to see new offers.<a href=\"http://news.aa.com/news/news-details/2020/Rewarding-AAdvantage-Members-With-More-Benefits-and-Flexibility-in-2021-AADV-10/default.aspx\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"> American opened the bidding last month</a>, knocking 20% off of 2021 status qualifying mileage clip levels (e.g., 40,000 instead of 50,000 to qualify for AAdvantage Platinum) and trying to get whatever they can for this year by counting October (last month), November, and December flights&nbsp; towards earning status in 2021, which is then good through Jan 2023. This afternoon, I got an email from <a href=\"https://hub.united.com/2020-11-12-united-airlines-makes-it-easier-to-earn-mileageplus-premier-status-for-2022-2648871852.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">United announcing their deal</a>. United’s status qualification methodology has gotten ridiculously complex over the past couple of years, but by at least one of their metrics, it looks like they’re dropping their status qualifying point (PQP -- don’t ask) clip levels by at least 30% <em>and</em> offering double points for flights taken in Q1 -- January, February, March -- next year. <a href=\"https://newsroom.hilton.com/hilton-honors/news/hilton-honors-adds-flexibility-value-for-members\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Hilton, though, made the simplest and deepest offer</a> -- knocking 50% off of all status qualifying measures -- stays, nights, points -- boom, mike drop.</li><li>It makes sense. Most statused travelers are business travelers and depending on which CEO is talking, business travel is down 85% (Delta), 90% (Southwest), and will be 3-4 years before it’s back to pre-pandemic levels (United). And those business travelers are the airlines’ and hotels’ most profitable customers. So expect to see Delta and Southwest and Marriott announcements soon, and maybe again this time next year if that “Well, it’s probably more like the end of 2021 or maybe into the beginning of 2022 before things start feeling normal” forecast turns out to be true.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #169</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li>As I mentioned at the end of the last episode, I restructured the RSS feed a bit so that I shouldn’t accidently trigger any more episode re-downloads. And I moved the episode number from the title to its own XML tag just to clean up how everything looks in your podcast app. Also, a few months ago, I tweaked the production workflow to add chapter markers in each episode. So, if your app supports them (Apple Podcasts and Overcast do), you can skip forward to the next section or, if you wanted to go back and listen to, say, the interview with Emily Thomas, you can go straight to it.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>, as well as asking Alexa and Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_169.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers','','','2021-10-01 17:08:38','2021-10-01 22:08:38','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=2936',0,'post','',3),
(2937,1,'2020-11-13 00:03:23','2020-11-13 05:03:23','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":2935,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714-1024x1024.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2935\"/><figcaption>My mission is clear</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Trying to recover from a long weekend of eating and drinking through the neighborhoods of South Philly. Our movable feast reminded me that food may be the one experience of a place left that can’t be easily exported and bought on-line. We talk about the FBI\'s cybersecurity warning to work-from-home types using hotels for getaway offices, and are a bit amazed at how fast last year\'s \"flight shaming\" gave way to \"flights to nowhere.\" And we think about \"quarantine theater\" -- how cities and states are focusing on activities to signal they are serious about COVID, but that most folks know aren’t really effective. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_168.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>download</strong></a> the podcast file, go over to the <em>Subscribe</em> section on the right to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/911959576&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #168: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after a long weekend of eating and drinking and eating some more with friends in Philadelphia, a family we’ve traveled with before - South Africa, Singapore, Spain… and now, with COVID lockdowns, Philly. And while we’ll do a cultural thing or two, what we really like to do together is eat. It is the kind of group where comments like: “OK, we need to stop eating at 1:30 because we have 5:30 reservations” and “We’re only going to order the half-kilo of barbacoa because we’re eating again in 4 hours” are met with “Yeah, that’s a good point,” and “makes sense” rather than “I think we have a problem here.”&nbsp;</li><li>And Pennsylvania’s reopening regulation about needing to buy food when getting a beer didn’t help. After sneaking in a cheesesteak right before that 1:30 cutoff, we had to order some food with our afternoon beers -- the beer, of course, not subject to that 1:30 deadline because it’s liquid, so it’s not really food, so it doesn’t count. But we had to order some real, solid food with our beers. So we look at the menu -- ah, brussels sprouts, it’s a vegetable, that’s kinda healthy. Five minutes later, our beers arrive with a wire basket full of deep-fried brussels sprouts doused in a sweet chili sauce. So much for healthy.</li><li>But some of the bars, the smaller ones, the neighborhood ones, gamed it -- as these places are wont to do -- by putting a $1 food item on the menu -- 2 hard boiled eggs at one bar, a PB&amp;J at another. The best, though, was the Pop Tart we had with our last beer at Ray’s Happy Birthday Bar in South Philly. That one won the prize.</li><li>Which we found because we skipped the usual downtown/Center City/Society Hill hotels and grabbed an Airbnb in South Philly - kinda sandwiched between the older Italian neighborhoods and the newer Little Saigon area. We spent a lot of time outdoors, walking the neighborhoods -- and walking off our food -- and stopping in at neighborhood joints. One day, we’re picking up salamis and cheese from the Italian Market; another day, we’re buying banh mi’s from a Vietnamese bakery. I’ll write up a list of our favorite places for the TravelCommons website in a couple of weeks -- after my cholesterol level gets back to some semblance of normal.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/duckett/2333\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Another Girl (instrumental)</a> by duckett (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/duckett/23334 Ft: fourstones, miafas</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>First, a big “Thank You” to Gary Learned who goes by Denrael on social media for his review in Apple Podcasts. Gary is a long-time TravelCommons listener. Indeed, he’s pointed me to some great restaurants in places like Seattle and Memphis. Gary wrote a couple of weeks ago:<ul><li>“When people ask where I live, I usually just say airports and hilton. As someone who lives the life of the road warrior, I find this podcast strikes an all-to-familiar chord with my own experiences. A definite must-listen to understand the life of the traveller.</li><li>“I wrote the above a number of years ago and it is as true now as it was then, I look forward to Mark’s take on travel, it’s more about the journey, and cannot count the number of times when I’ve shook my head, laughed and said “yep, been there.”</li></ul></li><li>Gary, thanks for that. And thanks for staying with me this long.</li><li>The FBI pushed out a consumer alert last week to remind folks about the risks when using hotel wi-fi. We’ve talked about this many times and I think most frequent travelers know the drill when accessing any shared wi-fi, whether it be in a hotel or an airport or a bar or a Starbucks. Nothing new there, so why the FBI alert? Because the “FBI has observed a trend where individuals who were previously teleworking from home are beginning to telework from hotels. US hotels, predominantly in major cities, have begun to advertise daytime room reservations for guests seeking a quiet, distraction-free work environment.” So people who used to work in offices and have been working from home since March, are looking for a change of scenery, but either can’t or aren’t keen to go back to the group office setting. Enter downtown hotels, many of whom, we mentioned last month, are slouching towards bankruptcy because of low occupancy. Don’t want a bed for the night? How ‘bout a desk for the day? I just got an email from Omni Hotels pitching just that -- “Trade up your classroom for everything you need for a productive day of work plus downtown Los Angeles views.” I guess the FBI thinks these displaced office workers, used to working on secure corporate or home networks, might not be as careful. But even for frequent travelers, the alert is a good read:&nbsp; talking about the dangers of an “evil twin” attack, logging onto what looks like a hotel wi-fi but is actually a hacker’s network; logging into the actual hotel wi-fi which has been compromised through exploits in out-of-date or unpatched network hardware. The FBI’s top recommendations are ones we’ve <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/09/20/podcast-155-rj-delays-street-food-in-poland-and-hungary/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #155 — RJ Delays; Street Food in Poland and Hungary\">repeated</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/02/20/podcast-127-critiquing-my-top-10-travel-tips-reviewing-vpns/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #127 — Critiquing My Top 10 Travel Tips; Reviewing VPNs\">numerous</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/12/20/podcast-119-digital-security-on-the-road-us-airports-getting-better/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #119 — Digital Security On The Road; US Airports Getting Better?\">times</a> - use a VPN when you connect to public wi-fi, or avoid them altogether with a mobile hotspot. Even when I’ve had a corporate VPN, I’ve always used one of the top paid VPN providers - NordVPN, PIA or ExpressVPN - because their software is so much better. I’m using NordVPN now, and whenever I’m not on a private network, I fire up the Nord client and it handles everything -- connects to the best server, reconnects automatically when I open the lid to wake up my Mac again. I don’t have to think about it. Indeed, half the time I forget to shut it off at home, until I’m wondering why I can’t move a file to another PC. Also, only access secure websites; I used to say “look for https://” but I guess that was too geeky, so you need to look for lock icons instead. And, of course, enable 2-factor authentication whenever you can. Nothing new, but a good reminder nonetheless. I’ll put a <a href=\"https://www.ic3.gov/media/2020/201006.aspx\">link to the alert</a> in the show notes, but you can also find links on the TravelCommons Facebook page and Twitter account.</li><li>OK, I gotta ask “what happened to Greta Thunberg\'s ‘flygskam’ or ‘flight shaming’ -- the 2019 existential travel threat? Because the whole Asian thing of “flights to nowhere” -- EVA Air from Taiwan filling up its “Hello Kitty” plane, All Nippon doing a fake flight to Hawaii, and then Qantas selling out a 787 for a lap around Australia. Singapore Air scrapped their “flight to nowhere” at the last minute, instead turning one of their A380s into a pop-up restaurant. I have to tell you that, honestly, I just don’t get this. For me, the flight is a means to an end -- something I’ve got to bear to get where I want to go. Getting on that American 737 in ORD last week didn’t fill me with joy; it was just simple math -- 2 hrs in a plane vs. 11 hrs in a car. And all that I just said… goes double for the idea of voluntarily buying airplane meals to eat at home. Words fail me.</li><li>At the end of September, the CDC did an early release of an article slated for the November issue of their peer-reviewed journal <em>Emerging Infectious Diseases</em> (and I thought <em>Walden Pond</em> was a cure for insomnia). The article analyzed the in-flight transmission of coronavirus from one business class passenger to 14 other passengers and a crew member on a 10-hour Vietnam Air flight from London to Hanoi. Most of the reactions in the press and on Twitter were “Yikes! Single passenger infects 15 people!”. While noting the CDC’s disclaimer “Early release articles are not considered as final versions” (which I didn’t see mentioned in any of the press articles), I came away with a less-than- “Yikes” after reading the whole paper. The flight was on March 2nd, so while the world was still trying to figure this novel coronavirus thing out and way before mandatory in-flight masks. And the passenger was symptomatic with a cough and a sore throat. Of the 14 passengers infected, 12 were in the same business class cabin and of those, all but one were within a 2-seat radius. And the authors aren’t sure if the 2 economy class infections were from the business class index case or from a different source. My takeaways: 1) Don’t let symptomatic people on planes - even if temperature checks aren’t perfect, it might catch some folks and will certainly make people think about their condition before flying; 2) Because this appears to validate the risk of being kept in close proximity to an infected person over a prolonged period; 3) Which, to me, justifies the airlines’ no-excuses mask requirements; but 4) In spite of a symptomatic un-masked passenger coughing away in the front of the plane, no non-adjacent passengers got infected -- so maybe the airline execs’ confidence in HEPA filters kinda justified. I’ll put <a href=\"https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/11/20-3299_article\">a link to the CDC paper</a> in the show notes. It’s not that long. It’s interesting to read the source document rather than just a headline or a short USAToday blurb.</li><li>Having said all that, I’m in no way, shape, or form justifying the “hygiene theater” that the travel industry seems to be trying to use to bring folks back. I talked back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/07/17/podcast-165-first-post-lockdown-flight-when-does-business-travel-come-back/\">the July episode</a> about the “Hertz Gold Standard Clean” sticker Hertz is slapping across driver-side doors. And there are some hotels now scheduling cleaning during the day rather than overnight so guests can see it. And then, on my American flights between Chicago and Philly last week, the banner across the top of the American Way magazine cover in the seatback pocket - “This magazine has been treated with an antimicrobial process” -- which I guess means “Please, feel safe to open it up and look at the advertisements.” I dunno, it feels a bit like the “security theater” we all went through after 9/11 - it was less about actually making things safer and more about making us “feel” safer -- and so, more willing to get on a plane. But maybe if I’m an airline or hotel exec facing down the pain of laying off thousands or tens of thousands of people if travelers don’t come back, that distinction is meaningless; I’m just trying to survive.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/snowflake/56508\">Rise Up (Like the Sun)</a> by Snowflake (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: Bluemillenium, Sackjo22, Martin Luther King, Kara Square</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Quarantine Theater</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>While some folks in the hospitality industry are talking about “hygiene theater”, what about “quarantine theater”? Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #166 — What Is The Meaning of Travel?\">August episode</a>, I talked about the complexity local and state travel bans and quarantine measures are causing for people trying to plan some sort of travel.&nbsp;</li><li>My son Andrew and his significant other headed out to Portland, ME last month for work. The week before they left, the Marriott emailed him a form - “Please certify one of the following is true - I have received a negative COVID test performed no later than 72 hours prior to my arrival, or will quarantine for 14 days upon my arrival in Maine.” Since they were only going to be in Portland for 4 days, they trundled down to the nearest testing site for the quick test 2 days before they left -- where they got chewed out by one of the testers. “We’re running out of the quick tests. You should’ve planned better.” OK, how long to get results from the other test? “5 days” But that won’t meet Maine’s 3-day requirement. Tester just walks away. But they got their negative test results and got on their plane to Portland -- where no one in the airport or the hotel asked to see it.&nbsp; OK, not harm done other than the discomfort of a Q-tip probing their sinuses and a random bit of yelling, but waste scarce testing resources?</li><li>Chicago’s quarantine is also a bit of kabuki. Once a week the city’s health commission gets in front of the press to scold another state or two -- this week was Indiana and Wisconsin. There’s now 25 states and Puerto Rico that if you’re traveling from there to Chicago, you’re supposed to self-quarantine for 14 days or face fines up to $7,000. More interesting is that Chicago’s threshold for getting on the list is 15 new daily cases per 100,000 residents. On this week’s <a href=\"https://www.chicago.gov/city/en/sites/covid-19/home/emergency-travel-order.html\">tally,</a> Indiana is running in the 20-30 range, but so is the state of Illinois. You could call it hypocritical or pragmatic or keeping its powder dry for when the city needs another bucket of money from the state, but Chicago hasn’t put the rest of Illinois on its quarantine list.</li><li>Now, I’ve yet to hear of anyone who has actually self-quarantined and as of last week, <a href=\"https://chicago.cbslocal.com/2020/10/02/three-months-into-chicagos-emergency-travel-order-no-fines-issued-enforcement-focus-remains-on-education/\">no one has been rung up for not doing so</a>. But last month, a friend told me about how Chicago’s quarantine theater hit her last month. She finally got ‘round to taking some vacation at the end of the summer. She lives in Chicago, but is a big outdoors person; looking at airfares and tossing some darts at a map, she decided to go hit Bryce Canyon and Zion National Parks in Southern Utah. So she’s down there for a couple of days when her boss calls her. “They just announced that Utah is going on the city’s quarantine list. It’s not official until Friday, so I guess if you get out of there by Thursday, you won’t have to quarantine for 2 weeks before coming back to work.” And, it didn’t need to be said, those 2 weeks of self-quarantine wouldn’t be paid. My friend is unique in that she works for maybe the one company in Chicago that takes the city’s quarantine order seriously. So my friend fought through lousy cell coverage to see what she could salvage of the back half of her vacation. Luckily, she has friends in Oregon, which isn’t on the city’s list. So Thursday, she cut her hiking short, schlepped the 4½ hours back up to SLC and caught the last flight out to Portland -- which let her come back to work and make some money the next week.</li><li>Theater isn’t a new thing. If you’re, say, a <em>mature</em> traveler, you got to play a bit part in the security theater that premiered after 9/11 and the underwear bomber. While not a perfect analogy (and really, nothing ever is), we can see some similar theatrics -- government agencies (TSA then, health departments now) investing in activities that signal they are serious, but that most folks know aren’t really effective. For me and I think for most frequent travelers, the security theater ended with TSA PreCheck -- it seemed, again to most of us, as a reasonable balance between risk and getting on with our traveling lives. I don’t know what that looks like for quarantine theater, but I sure hope it doesn’t take the 10 years it took to figure out PreCheck.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/52154\">release.JOY.release</a> by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: essesq, Haskel (hej31)</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Traveling For Food</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I talked at the start of the episode about eating my way through Philadelphia a couple of weeks back, and it was just that. We landed Thursday around 11:30a and were hitting our favs at Reading Terminal Market by 1:30p. I went straight for Tommy Dinic’s for the roast pork sandwich with sharp provolone and broccoli rabe while Irene and Claire made for the Mennonite pretzel place and Termini Brothers for fresh-filled cannolis. And then as we were leaving, I swung past one of the PA Dutch stands to buy a 1-lb block of <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrapple\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">scrapple</a> for breakfast the rest of the stay.</li><li>Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #166 — What Is The Meaning of Travel?\">August episode</a> in the interview with Emily Thomas about her book <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2IpLXnd\"><em>The Meaning of Travel</em></a><em>, </em>we talked about a chapter on global homogenization. One of the bits that I edited out was the observation that, back 10-20 year ago, it was fun to go shopping and bring something unique back home. But now, with globalized e-commerce, there’s not much that you can’t find easier (and often cheaper) on Amazon or Taobao or Rakuten. And so, for me, food is the one experience of a place that can’t be easily exported and bought on-line.</li><li>On our trip to the UP -- Michigan’s Upper Peninsula -- along with the biking, hiking, and kayaking, we were also on a bit of a <a href=\"https://thepastyguy.com/portfolio/the-pasty-trail-best-pasties-in-up/\">pasty tasting tour</a>. The UP is pretty well known -- in the Midwest at least -- for their <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pasty\">pasties</a>, brought over by Cornish miners working the copper mines. We had traditional pasties filled with steak, potatoes, onions, and rutabagas, and breakfast pasties. We worked our ways through the finer points of pasty critique -- picking out the pasties made from lard-based doughs, and fillings that held together so you could eat the pasty with your hand but weren’t just complete mush.</li><li>It’s funny how these comparison dishes can crop up on a vacation. On a trip to Phuket, Thailand, Andrew ordered pad thai everywhere we ate. On a trip to Hungary, Irene searched every menu for <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisherman\'s_soup\">halászlé</a> - a spicy fish soup - after having a great bowl of it at lunch with her cousin in some little town on the shores of <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Balaton\">Lake Balaton</a>. And again Irene, in Spain now, searched every city we visited for <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salmorejo\">salmorejo</a>, not quite soup, more of a tomato and bread and olive oil and garlic purée. These sorta horizontal tasting, some would be planned -- like our pasty tour -- and some would just come up, like Irene’s halászlé hunt. But it’d be fun, getting a feel for what the base of the dish is, what everyone agrees on, and what people put their own spin on, because usually for these core dishes -- dishes that everyone around has eaten all their lives -- everyone has an opinion about them. And that’s part of what makes the broad/horizontal tasting fun.</li><li>And also, these dishes don’t seem to be “industrialized.” While I’ve had mass produced pasties in the UK, grabbing something out from the West Cornish Pasty hut in Waterloo Station while running for a train, the pasties in the UP were much more -- not “artisanal” because I don’t think anyone making pasties in the UP would use that word, but “family made”. At Miners Pasties in Munising, which came out top in our pasty ranks, the woman helping us at the counter said the lard pastry recipe came from the owner’s grandmother and only 3 people know it -- the granddaughters and their niece. And only those three make the pastry each day.&nbsp; We sat back and enjoyed those pasties because we knew we wouldn’t be eating them again unless and until we found our way back to this bench again some day.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #168</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_168.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers','','inherit','closed','closed','','2936-revision-v1','','','2020-11-13 00:03:23','2020-11-13 05:03:23','',2936,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/13/2936-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2938,1,'2020-11-13 10:04:46','2020-11-13 15:04:46','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":2935,\"width\":300,\"height\":300,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large is-resized\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714-1024x1024.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2935\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"/><figcaption>My mission is clear</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Trying to recover from a long weekend of eating and drinking through the neighborhoods of South Philly. Our movable feast reminded me that food may be the one experience of a place left that can’t be easily exported and bought on-line. We talk about the FBI\'s cybersecurity warning to work-from-home types using hotels for getaway offices, and are a bit amazed at how fast last year\'s \"flight shaming\" gave way to \"flights to nowhere.\" And we think about \"quarantine theater\" -- how cities and states are focusing on activities to signal they are serious about COVID, but that most folks know aren’t really effective. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_168.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>download</strong></a> the podcast file, go over to the <em>Subscribe</em> section on the right to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/911959576&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #169: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. No travel, but a November week with temps in the 70’s felt like I was someplace other than Chicago. But the weather reverted to the mean yesterday, which chased me back indoors to finish this podcast.</li><li>Last week was a boon to Chicago’s bars and restaurants. The week before, the governor banned indoor service again as COVID cases began to rise. The bonus week of warm sunny weather gifted them with some needed outdoor dining revenue. Last Friday, a friend and I met for lunch at a neighborhood place that had been able to expand their outdoor seating by putting tables on the sidewalk in front of the shuttered retailer next door to them. We showed up at 11:30; the tables were full by 12.</li><li>One of the things we talked about was travel; how, over the past 8 months, we’d more or less adjusted to all of the COVID restrictions, the masks, the social distance, all of it -- except for travel. Yes, we’ve done the car trips and long weekends, but we miss the big trips -- I’d just cancelled our Thanksgiving trip to London and he’s trying to think through their annual Christmas trip to December. Now, I know this is definitely a “First World problem” for folks who’ve had families, friends, and even themselves hit with COVID, so I’m not trying to overplay this. But as the end of the year approaches, and I start hearing more public health experts reset expectation -- for the worse, saying <a href=\"https://www.smh.com.au/national/vaccine-is-imminent-but-virus-fight-has-long-way-to-go-fauci-20201028-p569h2.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">“Well, it’s probably more like the end of 2021 or maybe into the beginning of 2022 before things start feeling normal”</a> -- I dunno, for people who love travel, I don’t think they want to put it on hold for another year or two. You start hearing about people looking for openings -- Mexico, Costa Rica -- as they figure out their own personal risk profiles. Maybe <a href=\"https://hub.united.com/2020-10-29-united-airlines-launches-worlds-first-free-transatlantic-covid-19-testing-pilot-2648544789.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">United Airlines’ testing program</a> that they’re trialing on flights to Hawaii and London is part of the answer; certainly <a href=\"https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/11/heres-everything-to-know-about-pfizers-positive-vaccine-news/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pfizer’s release of preliminary vaccine results</a> on Monday got everybody hopeful again. I don’t think anyone expects -- or really wants -- an immediate snap-back to 2019. But the ability to stretch things a bit more would be greatly appreciated.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/duckett/2333\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Another Girl (instrumental)</a> by duckett (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/duckett/23334 Ft: fourstones, miafas</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>First, a quick program note. As I tweak things with the underlying TravelCommons infrastructure -- the audio file, the RSS feed, the website -- I’ll talk about the changes at the end of the podcast, so I don’t muck up the content that you come to listen to with the “inside baseball” sorta podcast stuff. If you’re not interested, you can skip to the end without missing anything. I will say, though, that I was pleasantly surprised when I looked at the Apple Podcast stats showing about 80% of you stay through the end of an episode. I’d fully expected to see at least 50% of folks hitting the “skip to next podcast” button when they heard the “Pictures of You” song clip. Thanks to everybody for sticking all the way through.</li><li>And congrats to Emily Thomas, our guest on the August episode, for winning the Leverhulme prize last month. The prize recognizes the achievement of outstanding researchers across a broad range of disciplines whose work has already attracted international recognition and whose future career is exceptionally promising. I interviewed Emily about her book <em>The Meaning of Travel: Philosophers Abroad</em> and had a great time talking to her. A well-deserved award. I just may go back and listen to that interview again.</li><li>I got an email from Marriott last week announcing their work-from-hotel offerings. We\'ve talked about this trend in the past couple of episodes -- first as a way for downtown hotels to do something/anything about their low occupancy rates, and then in the last episode with the FBI\'s cyber security advisory to people moving from work-at-home to work-at-hotels. The Day Pass gives you a room from 6am to 6pm, wi-fi, bottled water, and lounge access if you’re a high-status Marriott Bonvoy member. They’re piloting it in Atlanta, Dallas, New York, and Phoenix. Scanning the pricing, the range looked to be in the $60-$90 range, though the Phoenician in Scottsdale did price out at $260. If you looked hard, you could probably get a day pass at a co-working place for cheaper, but if you can expense it, the Marriott offer is probably not a bad deal -- especially for those days that you have a big sales presentation or maybe a webinar, where you need that guaranteed alone time to focus on preparation and then delivery, and a video backdrop that’s not your closet door or a semi-made bed or random people walking past. Hilton and Hyatt are also offering work-from hotel plans, but with different spins. Hilton’s WorkSpaces will give you 10,000 Honors points for your first booking and, unlike Marriott, is across all of their properties, but it doesn’t feel as put together as Marriott’s. You have to ring up the property directly; looks like Hilton can’t figure out a way to shoehorn this day rate concept into their reservation system. Work from Hyatt, on the other hand, isn’t so much a WeWork replacement as a digital nomad trial package with its 7-night minimum stay requirement and a focus on resort locations like the Grand Hyatts in Kauai or Vail, CO. Kinda the complete opposite of spending 12 hours in a room at the Marriott by DFW. They all feel a bit “toe in the water”, a bit opportunistic in their own way. </li><li>At the beginning of this week, Candid Wueest, a cyber security researcher who joined us last year in episode #151 to talk about hotel websites that leaked traveler data, tweeted out a link to yet <a href=\"https://www.websiteplanet.com/blog/prestige-soft-breach-report/\">another hotel data breach</a>. This time it was channel management software, something that hotels use to automate the task of updating room availability and rates across all the on-line booking sites like Expedia and Booking.com and Hotels.com and on and on. Turns out this channel manager, Prestige Software, stored 24 GB of names and emails and credit card data and reservation records -- 10 million log files going back to 2013 -- in a misconfigured AWS S3 bucket -- storage space on Amazon’s cloud. The pandemic has massively accelerated companies moving from their own data centers to cloud services like Amazon and Microsoft. But sometimes it feels like the speed of that migration has overrun the skills of the teams supporting it.  What can you do about it? In this case, not much. You would’ve booked your room on Expedia or Trivago and not known anything about something called a channel manager piping your data down to the hotel. We’ve talked about these breaches in so many past episodes. What I said then still stands: you need to be realistic -- it’s not <em>if</em> your personal data will get breached, it’s <em>when</em>. If you can, put your on-line purchases on a separate card and watch those transactions on the bank’s website or mobile app so you can quickly shut it down if you see something that doesn’t look right. I remember one time, years ago, seeing a Northwest Air flight from Tokyo to Beijing show up on my card. Struck me as odd because I was in Chicago with no plans to be in Asia. Immediately called the bank, disputed the charge, and they closed down the card. Interesting thing is that the crook had booked an economy class ticket. You’d think if you’re going to risk it, go big -- book the front of the plane -- business class if not first. </li><li>The quarantine theater we talked about in the last episode just keeps keeping on. Chicago now has 43 states on its list, 31 of which have <em>lower</em> COVID rates than Chicago. And, I guess in admission that no one’s paying attention, they’re moving from weekly updates to every other week. I guess ‘cause there’s not that many more states they can add. New York gave up on its quarantine list when COVID rates in neighboring Connecticut and New Jersey qualified them for the list. \"There will be no quarantine list, there will be no metrics,\" Governor Cuomo says. Everyone needs to test negative, except for people coming in from Connecticut, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania because, at some point, you just gotta be realistic. Especially in the face of this, what is it, a third wave? I’ve lost count.</li><li>And just to show how deeply all of this -- the quarantine, the lack of travel has gotten me, here’s a fun game I now play with my Google Mini. <ul><li>&lt;London weather></li><li>I dug around in the Google Home app and found where I can change the voice. I’ll switch to the British Racing Green voice to check the weather in London and then click over on Sydney Harbour Blue…</li><li>&lt;Sydney weather></li><li>To check the weather there. Then I flip back to the default to get the weather at the Googleplex</li><li>&lt;Mountain View weather></li><li>And, of course...</li></ul></li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter message</a> to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> or our <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a> account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Quarantine Theater</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>While some folks in the hospitality industry are talking about “hygiene theater”, what about “quarantine theater”? Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #166 — What Is The Meaning of Travel?\">August episode</a>, I talked about the complexity local and state travel bans and quarantine measures are causing for people trying to plan some sort of travel.&nbsp;</li><li>My son Andrew and his significant other headed out to Portland, ME last month for work. The week before they left, the Marriott emailed him a form - “Please certify one of the following is true - I have received a negative COVID test performed no later than 72 hours prior to my arrival, or will quarantine for 14 days upon my arrival in Maine.” Since they were only going to be in Portland for 4 days, they trundled down to the nearest testing site for the quick test 2 days before they left -- where they got chewed out by one of the testers. “We’re running out of the quick tests. You should’ve planned better.” OK, how long to get results from the other test? “5 days” But that won’t meet Maine’s 3-day requirement. Tester just walks away. But they got their negative test results and got on their plane to Portland -- where no one in the airport or the hotel asked to see it.&nbsp; OK, not harm done other than the discomfort of a Q-tip probing their sinuses and a random bit of yelling, but waste scarce testing resources?</li><li>Chicago’s quarantine is also a bit of kabuki. Once a week the city’s health commission gets in front of the press to scold another state or two -- this week was Indiana and Wisconsin. There’s now 25 states and Puerto Rico that if you’re traveling from there to Chicago, you’re supposed to self-quarantine for 14 days or face fines up to $7,000. More interesting is that Chicago’s threshold for getting on the list is 15 new daily cases per 100,000 residents. On this week’s <a href=\"https://www.chicago.gov/city/en/sites/covid-19/home/emergency-travel-order.html\">tally,</a> Indiana is running in the 20-30 range, but so is the state of Illinois. You could call it hypocritical or pragmatic or keeping its powder dry for when the city needs another bucket of money from the state, but Chicago hasn’t put the rest of Illinois on its quarantine list.</li><li>Now, I’ve yet to hear of anyone who has actually self-quarantined and as of last week, <a href=\"https://chicago.cbslocal.com/2020/10/02/three-months-into-chicagos-emergency-travel-order-no-fines-issued-enforcement-focus-remains-on-education/\">no one has been rung up for not doing so</a>. But last month, a friend told me about how Chicago’s quarantine theater hit her last month. She finally got ‘round to taking some vacation at the end of the summer. She lives in Chicago, but is a big outdoors person; looking at airfares and tossing some darts at a map, she decided to go hit Bryce Canyon and Zion National Parks in Southern Utah. So she’s down there for a couple of days when her boss calls her. “They just announced that Utah is going on the city’s quarantine list. It’s not official until Friday, so I guess if you get out of there by Thursday, you won’t have to quarantine for 2 weeks before coming back to work.” And, it didn’t need to be said, those 2 weeks of self-quarantine wouldn’t be paid. My friend is unique in that she works for maybe the one company in Chicago that takes the city’s quarantine order seriously. So my friend fought through lousy cell coverage to see what she could salvage of the back half of her vacation. Luckily, she has friends in Oregon, which isn’t on the city’s list. So Thursday, she cut her hiking short, schlepped the 4½ hours back up to SLC and caught the last flight out to Portland -- which let her come back to work and make some money the next week.</li><li>Theater isn’t a new thing. If you’re, say, a <em>mature</em> traveler, you got to play a bit part in the security theater that premiered after 9/11 and the underwear bomber. While not a perfect analogy (and really, nothing ever is), we can see some similar theatrics -- government agencies (TSA then, health departments now) investing in activities that signal they are serious, but that most folks know aren’t really effective. For me and I think for most frequent travelers, the security theater ended with TSA PreCheck -- it seemed, again to most of us, as a reasonable balance between risk and getting on with our traveling lives. I don’t know what that looks like for quarantine theater, but I sure hope it doesn’t take the 10 years it took to figure out PreCheck.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/52154\">release.JOY.release</a> by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: essesq, Haskel (hej31)</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Traveling For Food</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I talked at the start of the episode about eating my way through Philadelphia a couple of weeks back, and it was just that. We landed Thursday around 11:30a and were hitting our favs at Reading Terminal Market by 1:30p. I went straight for Tommy Dinic’s for the roast pork sandwich with sharp provolone and broccoli rabe while Irene and Claire made for the Mennonite pretzel place and Termini Brothers for fresh-filled cannolis. And then as we were leaving, I swung past one of the PA Dutch stands to buy a 1-lb block of <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrapple\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">scrapple</a> for breakfast the rest of the stay.</li><li>Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #166 — What Is The Meaning of Travel?\">August episode</a> in the interview with Emily Thomas about her book <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2IpLXnd\"><em>The Meaning of Travel</em></a><em>, </em>we talked about a chapter on global homogenization. One of the bits that I edited out was the observation that, back 10-20 year ago, it was fun to go shopping and bring something unique back home. But now, with globalized e-commerce, there’s not much that you can’t find easier (and often cheaper) on Amazon or Taobao or Rakuten. And so, for me, food is the one experience of a place that can’t be easily exported and bought on-line.</li><li>On our trip to the UP -- Michigan’s Upper Peninsula -- along with the biking, hiking, and kayaking, we were also on a bit of a <a href=\"https://thepastyguy.com/portfolio/the-pasty-trail-best-pasties-in-up/\">pasty tasting tour</a>. The UP is pretty well known -- in the Midwest at least -- for their <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pasty\">pasties</a>, brought over by Cornish miners working the copper mines. We had traditional pasties filled with steak, potatoes, onions, and rutabagas, and breakfast pasties. We worked our ways through the finer points of pasty critique -- picking out the pasties made from lard-based doughs, and fillings that held together so you could eat the pasty with your hand but weren’t just complete mush.</li><li>It’s funny how these comparison dishes can crop up on a vacation. On a trip to Phuket, Thailand, Andrew ordered pad thai everywhere we ate. On a trip to Hungary, Irene searched every menu for <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisherman\'s_soup\">halászlé</a> - a spicy fish soup - after having a great bowl of it at lunch with her cousin in some little town on the shores of <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Balaton\">Lake Balaton</a>. And again Irene, in Spain now, searched every city we visited for <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salmorejo\">salmorejo</a>, not quite soup, more of a tomato and bread and olive oil and garlic purée. These sorta horizontal tasting, some would be planned -- like our pasty tour -- and some would just come up, like Irene’s halászlé hunt. But it’d be fun, getting a feel for what the base of the dish is, what everyone agrees on, and what people put their own spin on, because usually for these core dishes -- dishes that everyone around has eaten all their lives -- everyone has an opinion about them. And that’s part of what makes the broad/horizontal tasting fun.</li><li>And also, these dishes don’t seem to be “industrialized.” While I’ve had mass produced pasties in the UK, grabbing something out from the West Cornish Pasty hut in Waterloo Station while running for a train, the pasties in the UP were much more -- not “artisanal” because I don’t think anyone making pasties in the UP would use that word, but “family made”. At Miners Pasties in Munising, which came out top in our pasty ranks, the woman helping us at the counter said the lard pastry recipe came from the owner’s grandmother and only 3 people know it -- the granddaughters and their niece. And only those three make the pastry each day.&nbsp; We sat back and enjoyed those pasties because we knew we wouldn’t be eating them again unless and until we found our way back to this bench again some day.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #168</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_168.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers','','inherit','closed','closed','','2936-revision-v1','','','2020-11-13 10:04:46','2020-11-13 15:04:46','',2936,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/13/2936-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2939,1,'2020-11-13 10:19:49','2020-11-13 15:19:49','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":2935,\"width\":300,\"height\":300,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large is-resized\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714-1024x1024.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2935\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"/><figcaption>My mission is clear</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Trying to recover from a long weekend of eating and drinking through the neighborhoods of South Philly. Our movable feast reminded me that food may be the one experience of a place left that can’t be easily exported and bought on-line. We talk about the FBI\'s cybersecurity warning to work-from-home types using hotels for getaway offices, and are a bit amazed at how fast last year\'s \"flight shaming\" gave way to \"flights to nowhere.\" And we think about \"quarantine theater\" -- how cities and states are focusing on activities to signal they are serious about COVID, but that most folks know aren’t really effective. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_169.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go over to the <em>Subscribe</em> section on the right to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/911959576&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #169: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. No travel, but a November week with temps in the 70’s felt like I was someplace other than Chicago. But the weather reverted to the mean yesterday, which chased me back indoors to finish this podcast.</li><li>Last week was a boon to Chicago’s bars and restaurants. The week before, the governor banned indoor service again as COVID cases began to rise. The bonus week of warm sunny weather gifted them with some needed outdoor dining revenue. Last Friday, a friend and I met for lunch at a neighborhood place that had been able to expand their outdoor seating by putting tables on the sidewalk in front of the shuttered retailer next door to them. We showed up at 11:30; the tables were full by 12.</li><li>One of the things we talked about was travel; how, over the past 8 months, we’d more or less adjusted to all of the COVID restrictions, the masks, the social distance, all of it -- except for travel. Yes, we’ve done the car trips and long weekends, but we miss the big trips -- I’d just cancelled our Thanksgiving trip to London and he’s trying to think through their annual Christmas trip to December. Now, I know this is definitely a “First World problem” for folks who’ve had families, friends, and even themselves hit with COVID, so I’m not trying to overplay this. But as the end of the year approaches, and I start hearing more public health experts reset expectation -- for the worse, saying <a href=\"https://www.smh.com.au/national/vaccine-is-imminent-but-virus-fight-has-long-way-to-go-fauci-20201028-p569h2.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">“Well, it’s probably more like the end of 2021 or maybe into the beginning of 2022 before things start feeling normal”</a> -- I dunno, for people who love travel, I don’t think they want to put it on hold for another year or two. You start hearing about people looking for openings -- Mexico, Costa Rica -- as they figure out their own personal risk profiles. Maybe <a href=\"https://hub.united.com/2020-10-29-united-airlines-launches-worlds-first-free-transatlantic-covid-19-testing-pilot-2648544789.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">United Airlines’ testing program</a> that they’re trialing on flights to Hawaii and London is part of the answer; certainly <a href=\"https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/11/heres-everything-to-know-about-pfizers-positive-vaccine-news/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pfizer’s release of preliminary vaccine results</a> on Monday got everybody hopeful again. I don’t think anyone expects -- or really wants -- an immediate snap-back to 2019. But the ability to stretch things a bit more would be greatly appreciated.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/duckett/2333\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Another Girl (instrumental)</a> by duckett (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/duckett/23334 Ft: fourstones, miafas</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>First, a quick program note. As I tweak things with the underlying TravelCommons infrastructure -- the audio file, the RSS feed, the website -- I’ll talk about the changes at the end of the podcast, so I don’t muck up the content that you come to listen to with the “inside baseball” sorta podcast stuff. If you’re not interested, you can skip to the end without missing anything. I will say, though, that I was pleasantly surprised when I looked at the Apple Podcast stats showing about 80% of you stay through the end of an episode. I’d fully expected to see at least 50% of folks hitting the “skip to next podcast” button when they heard the “Pictures of You” song clip. Thanks to everybody for sticking all the way through.</li><li>And congrats to Emily Thomas, our guest on the August episode, for winning the Leverhulme prize last month. The prize recognizes the achievement of outstanding researchers across a broad range of disciplines whose work has already attracted international recognition and whose future career is exceptionally promising. I interviewed Emily about her book <em>The Meaning of Travel: Philosophers Abroad</em> and had a great time talking to her. A well-deserved award. I just may go back and listen to that interview again.</li><li>I got an email from Marriott last week announcing their work-from-hotel offerings. We\'ve talked about this trend in the past couple of episodes -- first as a way for downtown hotels to do something/anything about their low occupancy rates, and then in the last episode with the FBI\'s cyber security advisory to people moving from work-at-home to work-at-hotels. The Day Pass gives you a room from 6am to 6pm, wi-fi, bottled water, and lounge access if you’re a high-status Marriott Bonvoy member. They’re piloting it in Atlanta, Dallas, New York, and Phoenix. Scanning the pricing, the range looked to be in the $60-$90 range, though the Phoenician in Scottsdale did price out at $260. If you looked hard, you could probably get a day pass at a co-working place for cheaper, but if you can expense it, the Marriott offer is probably not a bad deal -- especially for those days that you have a big sales presentation or maybe a webinar, where you need that guaranteed alone time to focus on preparation and then delivery, and a video backdrop that’s not your closet door or a semi-made bed or random people walking past. Hilton and Hyatt are also offering work-from hotel plans, but with different spins. Hilton’s WorkSpaces will give you 10,000 Honors points for your first booking and, unlike Marriott, is across all of their properties, but it doesn’t feel as put together as Marriott’s. You have to ring up the property directly; looks like Hilton can’t figure out a way to shoehorn this day rate concept into their reservation system. Work from Hyatt, on the other hand, isn’t so much a WeWork replacement as a digital nomad trial package with its 7-night minimum stay requirement and a focus on resort locations like the Grand Hyatts in Kauai or Vail, CO. Kinda the complete opposite of spending 12 hours in a room at the Marriott by DFW. They all feel a bit “toe in the water”, a bit opportunistic in their own way. </li><li>At the beginning of this week, Candid Wueest, a cyber security researcher who joined us last year in episode #151 to talk about hotel websites that leaked traveler data, tweeted out a link to yet <a href=\"https://www.websiteplanet.com/blog/prestige-soft-breach-report/\">another hotel data breach</a>. This time it was channel management software, something that hotels use to automate the task of updating room availability and rates across all the on-line booking sites like Expedia and Booking.com and Hotels.com and on and on. Turns out this channel manager, Prestige Software, stored 24 GB of names and emails and credit card data and reservation records -- 10 million log files going back to 2013 -- in a misconfigured AWS S3 bucket -- storage space on Amazon’s cloud. The pandemic has massively accelerated companies moving from their own data centers to cloud services like Amazon and Microsoft. But sometimes it feels like the speed of that migration has overrun the skills of the teams supporting it.  What can you do about it? In this case, not much. You would’ve booked your room on Expedia or Trivago and not known anything about something called a channel manager piping your data down to the hotel. We’ve talked about these breaches in so many past episodes. What I said then still stands: you need to be realistic -- it’s not <em>if</em> your personal data will get breached, it’s <em>when</em>. If you can, put your on-line purchases on a separate card and watch those transactions on the bank’s website or mobile app so you can quickly shut it down if you see something that doesn’t look right. I remember one time, years ago, seeing a Northwest Air flight from Tokyo to Beijing show up on my card. Struck me as odd because I was in Chicago with no plans to be in Asia. Immediately called the bank, disputed the charge, and they closed down the card. Interesting thing is that the crook had booked an economy class ticket. You’d think if you’re going to risk it, go big -- book the front of the plane -- business class if not first. </li><li>The quarantine theater we talked about in the last episode just keeps keeping on. Chicago now has 43 states on its list, 31 of which have <em>lower</em> COVID rates than Chicago. And, I guess in admission that no one’s paying attention, they’re moving from weekly updates to every other week. I guess ‘cause there’s not that many more states they can add. New York gave up on its quarantine list when COVID rates in neighboring Connecticut and New Jersey qualified them for the list. \"There will be no quarantine list, there will be no metrics,\" Governor Cuomo says. Everyone needs to test negative, except for people coming in from Connecticut, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania because, at some point, you just gotta be realistic. Especially in the face of this, what is it, a third wave? I’ve lost count.</li><li>And just to show how deeply all of this -- the quarantine, the lack of travel has gotten me, here’s a fun game I now play with my Google Mini. <ul><li>&lt;London weather></li><li>I dug around in the Google Home app and found where I can change the voice. I’ll switch to the British Racing Green voice to check the weather in London and then click over on Sydney Harbour Blue…</li><li>&lt;Sydney weather></li><li>To check the weather there. Then I flip back to the default to get the weather at the Googleplex</li><li>&lt;Mountain View weather></li><li>And, of course...</li></ul></li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter message</a> to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> or our <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a> account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Holiday Gift Guide for the Pandemic Traveler</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Like I mentioned at the top of the show, hearing public health officials saying things like “it will be easily by the end of 2021 and perhaps into the next year before we start having some semblance of normality” got my attention; got me thinking that this year’s travel gift guide needs to be a bit different. So I flipped through my 2020 travel journal, thought back through all of my post-lockdown travel to come up with my top shopping ideas for your pandemic travelers.</li><li>Check out this year\'s pandemic gift guide on the front page of the TravelCommons\' website or at https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/52154\">release.JOY.release</a> by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: essesq, Haskel (hej31)</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>End of Year “Don’t Leave Me” Offers</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Back in September, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/09/19/podcast-167-6-months-on-why-keep-travel-cards/\" title=\"Podcast #167 — 6 Months On; Why Keep Travel Cards?\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">episode #167</a>, we talked with <a href=\"https://www.lendingtree.com/writer/matt-schulz/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Matt Schulz, chief credit analyst at LendingTree</a>, about travel credit cards. Matt told us that their late summer surveys showed trends toward people canceling travel cards and cashing out points. But then earlier this week, <a href=\"https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-11-10/amex-says-its-cardholders-are-stockpiling-their-points-and-miles\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">American Express’ CFO said that their card customers <em>weren’t</em> cashing out points, and instead stocking them up to travel</a>.  The two comments aren’t necessarily at odds. If you’re laid off, you can use those miles to buy groceries or clothes via gift cards or on Amazon. But if you don’t have to, the best value you’ll get for those points will be on travel. You’ll get less than a penny a point when cashing out Amex points on Amazon, but you can double that when you use them to book flights on, say, Singapore Air or KLM.  So the hoarding makes sense -- if you can.</li><li>One of Matt’s points in our interview was that card companies will continue to tweak their rewards to keep people holding and using their cards because travelers are a valuable customer segment because, well, they typically spend chunks of money to travel. So as we come up on the end of the year, it’ll be interesting to see what those tweaks will be. Chase keeps extending the 5x grocery and gas bonus on their Southwest card while <a href=\"https://thepointsguy.com/news/amex-platinum-current-offer/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amex just announced a <em>10x</em> grocery and gas bonus as well as a 75K sign-up bonus for their Platinum card</a>.</li><li>Airlines and hotels are also rolling out their year-end offers. Back in the spring, all the majors gave existing status holders a push, extending elite expiration dates to Jan 2022 to keep them in the fold. So that settled everyone down for 2020. But now, with 2021 coming up and travel still in the hole, we’re starting to see new offers.<a href=\"http://news.aa.com/news/news-details/2020/Rewarding-AAdvantage-Members-With-More-Benefits-and-Flexibility-in-2021-AADV-10/default.aspx\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"> American opened the bidding last month</a>, knocking 20% off of 2021 status qualifying mileage clip levels (e.g., 40,000 instead of 50,000 to qualify for AAdvantage Platinum) and trying to get whatever they can for this year by counting October (last month), November, and December flights  towards earning status in 2021, which is then good through Jan 2023. This afternoon, I got an email from <a href=\"https://hub.united.com/2020-11-12-united-airlines-makes-it-easier-to-earn-mileageplus-premier-status-for-2022-2648871852.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">United announcing their deal</a>. United’s status qualification methodology has gotten ridiculously complex over the past couple of years, but by at least one of their metrics, it looks like they’re dropping their status qualifying point (PQP -- don’t ask) clip levels by at least 30% <em>and</em> offering double points for flights taken in Q1 -- January, February, March -- next year. <a href=\"https://newsroom.hilton.com/hilton-honors/news/hilton-honors-adds-flexibility-value-for-members\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Hilton, though, made the simplest and deepest offer</a> -- knocking 50% off of all status qualifying measures -- stays, nights, points -- boom, mike drop.</li><li>It makes sense. Most statused travelers are business travelers and depending on which CEO is talking, business travel is down 85% (Delta), 90% (Southwest), and will be 3-4 years before it’s back to pre-pandemic levels (United). And those business travelers are the airlines’ and hotels’ most profitable customers. So expect to see Delta and Southwest and Marriott announcements soon, and maybe again this time next year if that “Well, it’s probably more like the end of 2021 or maybe into the beginning of 2022 before things start feeling normal” forecast turns out to be true.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #169</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li>As I mentioned at the end of the last episode, I restructured the RSS feed a bit so that I shouldn’t accidently trigger any more episode re-downloads. And I moved the episode number from the title to its own XML tag just to clean up how everything looks in your podcast app. Also, a few months ago, I tweaked the production workflow to add chapter markers in each episode. So, if your app supports them (Apple Podcasts and Overcast do), you can skip forward to the next section or, if you wanted to go back and listen to, say, the interview with Emily Thomas, you can go straight to it.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>, as well as asking Alexa and Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_169.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers','','inherit','closed','closed','','2936-revision-v1','','','2020-11-13 10:19:49','2020-11-13 15:19:49','',2936,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/13/2936-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2940,1,'2020-11-13 10:52:06','2020-11-13 15:52:06','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":2935,\"width\":300,\"height\":300,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large is-resized\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714-1024x1024.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2935\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"/><figcaption>My mission is clear</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>No travel since the last episode, so I had some time to think back through my post-lockdown travel and come up with <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">gift ideas</a> for your pandemic travelers  All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_169.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go over to the <em>Subscribe</em> section on the right to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/911959576&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #169: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. No travel, but a November week with temps in the 70’s felt like I was someplace other than Chicago. But the weather reverted to the mean yesterday, which chased me back indoors to finish this podcast.</li><li>Last week was a boon to Chicago’s bars and restaurants. The week before, the governor banned indoor service again as COVID cases began to rise. The bonus week of warm sunny weather gifted them with some needed outdoor dining revenue. Last Friday, a friend and I met for lunch at a neighborhood place that had been able to expand their outdoor seating by putting tables on the sidewalk in front of the shuttered retailer next door to them. We showed up at 11:30; the tables were full by 12.</li><li>One of the things we talked about was travel; how, over the past 8 months, we’d more or less adjusted to all of the COVID restrictions, the masks, the social distance, all of it -- except for travel. Yes, we’ve done the car trips and long weekends, but we miss the big trips -- I’d just cancelled our Thanksgiving trip to London and he’s trying to think through their annual Christmas trip to December. Now, I know this is definitely a “First World problem” for folks who’ve had families, friends, and even themselves hit with COVID, so I’m not trying to overplay this. But as the end of the year approaches, and I start hearing more public health experts reset expectation -- for the worse, saying <a href=\"https://www.smh.com.au/national/vaccine-is-imminent-but-virus-fight-has-long-way-to-go-fauci-20201028-p569h2.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">“Well, it’s probably more like the end of 2021 or maybe into the beginning of 2022 before things start feeling normal”</a> -- I dunno, for people who love travel, I don’t think they want to put it on hold for another year or two. You start hearing about people looking for openings -- Mexico, Costa Rica -- as they figure out their own personal risk profiles. Maybe <a href=\"https://hub.united.com/2020-10-29-united-airlines-launches-worlds-first-free-transatlantic-covid-19-testing-pilot-2648544789.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">United Airlines’ testing program</a> that they’re trialing on flights to Hawaii and London is part of the answer; certainly <a href=\"https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/11/heres-everything-to-know-about-pfizers-positive-vaccine-news/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pfizer’s release of preliminary vaccine results</a> on Monday got everybody hopeful again. I don’t think anyone expects -- or really wants -- an immediate snap-back to 2019. But the ability to stretch things a bit more would be greatly appreciated.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/duckett/2333\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Another Girl (instrumental)</a> by duckett (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/duckett/23334 Ft: fourstones, miafas</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>First, a quick program note. As I tweak things with the underlying TravelCommons infrastructure -- the audio file, the RSS feed, the website -- I’ll talk about the changes at the end of the podcast, so I don’t muck up the content that you come to listen to with the “inside baseball” sorta podcast stuff. If you’re not interested, you can skip to the end without missing anything. I will say, though, that I was pleasantly surprised when I looked at the Apple Podcast stats showing about 80% of you stay through the end of an episode. I’d fully expected to see at least 50% of folks hitting the “skip to next podcast” button when they heard the “Pictures of You” song clip. Thanks to everybody for sticking all the way through.</li><li>And congrats to Emily Thomas, our guest on the August episode, for winning the Leverhulme prize last month. The prize recognizes the achievement of outstanding researchers across a broad range of disciplines whose work has already attracted international recognition and whose future career is exceptionally promising. I interviewed Emily about her book <em>The Meaning of Travel: Philosophers Abroad</em> and had a great time talking to her. A well-deserved award. I just may go back and listen to that interview again.</li><li>I got an email from Marriott last week announcing their work-from-hotel offerings. We\'ve talked about this trend in the past couple of episodes -- first as a way for downtown hotels to do something/anything about their low occupancy rates, and then in the last episode with the FBI\'s cyber security advisory to people moving from work-at-home to work-at-hotels. The Day Pass gives you a room from 6am to 6pm, wi-fi, bottled water, and lounge access if you’re a high-status Marriott Bonvoy member. They’re piloting it in Atlanta, Dallas, New York, and Phoenix. Scanning the pricing, the range looked to be in the $60-$90 range, though the Phoenician in Scottsdale did price out at $260. If you looked hard, you could probably get a day pass at a co-working place for cheaper, but if you can expense it, the Marriott offer is probably not a bad deal -- especially for those days that you have a big sales presentation or maybe a webinar, where you need that guaranteed alone time to focus on preparation and then delivery, and a video backdrop that’s not your closet door or a semi-made bed or random people walking past. Hilton and Hyatt are also offering work-from hotel plans, but with different spins. Hilton’s WorkSpaces will give you 10,000 Honors points for your first booking and, unlike Marriott, is across all of their properties, but it doesn’t feel as put together as Marriott’s. You have to ring up the property directly; looks like Hilton can’t figure out a way to shoehorn this day rate concept into their reservation system. Work from Hyatt, on the other hand, isn’t so much a WeWork replacement as a digital nomad trial package with its 7-night minimum stay requirement and a focus on resort locations like the Grand Hyatts in Kauai or Vail, CO. Kinda the complete opposite of spending 12 hours in a room at the Marriott by DFW. They all feel a bit “toe in the water”, a bit opportunistic in their own way. </li><li>At the beginning of this week, Candid Wueest, a cyber security researcher who joined us last year in episode #151 to talk about hotel websites that leaked traveler data, tweeted out a link to yet <a href=\"https://www.websiteplanet.com/blog/prestige-soft-breach-report/\">another hotel data breach</a>. This time it was channel management software, something that hotels use to automate the task of updating room availability and rates across all the on-line booking sites like Expedia and Booking.com and Hotels.com and on and on. Turns out this channel manager, Prestige Software, stored 24 GB of names and emails and credit card data and reservation records -- 10 million log files going back to 2013 -- in a misconfigured AWS S3 bucket -- storage space on Amazon’s cloud. The pandemic has massively accelerated companies moving from their own data centers to cloud services like Amazon and Microsoft. But sometimes it feels like the speed of that migration has overrun the skills of the teams supporting it.  What can you do about it? In this case, not much. You would’ve booked your room on Expedia or Trivago and not known anything about something called a channel manager piping your data down to the hotel. We’ve talked about these breaches in so many past episodes. What I said then still stands: you need to be realistic -- it’s not <em>if</em> your personal data will get breached, it’s <em>when</em>. If you can, put your on-line purchases on a separate card and watch those transactions on the bank’s website or mobile app so you can quickly shut it down if you see something that doesn’t look right. I remember one time, years ago, seeing a Northwest Air flight from Tokyo to Beijing show up on my card. Struck me as odd because I was in Chicago with no plans to be in Asia. Immediately called the bank, disputed the charge, and they closed down the card. Interesting thing is that the crook had booked an economy class ticket. You’d think if you’re going to risk it, go big -- book the front of the plane -- business class if not first. </li><li>The quarantine theater we talked about in the last episode just keeps keeping on. Chicago now has 43 states on its list, 31 of which have <em>lower</em> COVID rates than Chicago. And, I guess in admission that no one’s paying attention, they’re moving from weekly updates to every other week. I guess ‘cause there’s not that many more states they can add. New York gave up on its quarantine list when COVID rates in neighboring Connecticut and New Jersey qualified them for the list. \"There will be no quarantine list, there will be no metrics,\" Governor Cuomo says. Everyone needs to test negative, except for people coming in from Connecticut, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania because, at some point, you just gotta be realistic. Especially in the face of this, what is it, a third wave? I’ve lost count.</li><li>And just to show how deeply all of this -- the quarantine, the lack of travel has gotten me, here’s a fun game I now play with my Google Mini. I dug around in the Google Home app and found where I can change the voice. I’ll switch to the British Racing Green voice to check the weather in London and then click over on Sydney Harbour Blue to check the weather there. Then I flip back to the default voice to get the weather at the Googleplex. And, of course, I ask it to play TravelCommons.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter message</a> to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> or our <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a> account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Holiday Gift Guide for the Pandemic Traveler</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Like I mentioned at the top of the show, hearing public health officials saying things like “it will be easily by the end of 2021 and perhaps into the next year before we start having some semblance of normality” got my attention; got me thinking that this year’s travel gift guide needs to be a bit different. So I flipped through my 2020 travel journal, thought back through all of my post-lockdown travel to come up with my top shopping ideas for your pandemic travelers.</li><li>Check out this year\'s pandemic gift guide on the front page of the TravelCommons\' website or at https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/52154\">release.JOY.release</a> by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: essesq, Haskel (hej31)</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>End of Year “Don’t Leave Me” Offers</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Back in September, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/09/19/podcast-167-6-months-on-why-keep-travel-cards/\" title=\"Podcast #167 — 6 Months On; Why Keep Travel Cards?\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">episode #167</a>, we talked with <a href=\"https://www.lendingtree.com/writer/matt-schulz/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Matt Schulz, chief credit analyst at LendingTree</a>, about travel credit cards. Matt told us that their late summer surveys showed trends toward people canceling travel cards and cashing out points. But then earlier this week, <a href=\"https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-11-10/amex-says-its-cardholders-are-stockpiling-their-points-and-miles\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">American Express’ CFO said that their card customers <em>weren’t</em> cashing out points, and instead stocking them up to travel</a>.  The two comments aren’t necessarily at odds. If you’re laid off, you can use those miles to buy groceries or clothes via gift cards or on Amazon. But if you don’t have to, the best value you’ll get for those points will be on travel. You’ll get less than a penny a point when cashing out Amex points on Amazon, but you can double that when you use them to book flights on, say, Singapore Air or KLM.  So the hoarding makes sense -- if you can.</li><li>One of Matt’s points in our interview was that card companies will continue to tweak their rewards to keep people holding and using their cards because travelers are a valuable customer segment because, well, they typically spend chunks of money to travel. So as we come up on the end of the year, it’ll be interesting to see what those tweaks will be. Chase keeps extending the 5x grocery and gas bonus on their Southwest card while <a href=\"https://thepointsguy.com/news/amex-platinum-current-offer/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amex just announced a <em>10x</em> grocery and gas bonus as well as a 75K sign-up bonus for their Platinum card</a>.</li><li>Airlines and hotels are also rolling out their year-end offers. Back in the spring, all the majors gave existing status holders a push, extending elite expiration dates to Jan 2022 to keep them in the fold. So that settled everyone down for 2020. But now, with 2021 coming up and travel still in the hole, we’re starting to see new offers.<a href=\"http://news.aa.com/news/news-details/2020/Rewarding-AAdvantage-Members-With-More-Benefits-and-Flexibility-in-2021-AADV-10/default.aspx\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"> American opened the bidding last month</a>, knocking 20% off of 2021 status qualifying mileage clip levels (e.g., 40,000 instead of 50,000 to qualify for AAdvantage Platinum) and trying to get whatever they can for this year by counting October (last month), November, and December flights  towards earning status in 2021, which is then good through Jan 2023. This afternoon, I got an email from <a href=\"https://hub.united.com/2020-11-12-united-airlines-makes-it-easier-to-earn-mileageplus-premier-status-for-2022-2648871852.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">United announcing their deal</a>. United’s status qualification methodology has gotten ridiculously complex over the past couple of years, but by at least one of their metrics, it looks like they’re dropping their status qualifying point (PQP -- don’t ask) clip levels by at least 30% <em>and</em> offering double points for flights taken in Q1 -- January, February, March -- next year. <a href=\"https://newsroom.hilton.com/hilton-honors/news/hilton-honors-adds-flexibility-value-for-members\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Hilton, though, made the simplest and deepest offer</a> -- knocking 50% off of all status qualifying measures -- stays, nights, points -- boom, mike drop.</li><li>It makes sense. Most statused travelers are business travelers and depending on which CEO is talking, business travel is down 85% (Delta), 90% (Southwest), and will be 3-4 years before it’s back to pre-pandemic levels (United). And those business travelers are the airlines’ and hotels’ most profitable customers. So expect to see Delta and Southwest and Marriott announcements soon, and maybe again this time next year if that “Well, it’s probably more like the end of 2021 or maybe into the beginning of 2022 before things start feeling normal” forecast turns out to be true.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #169</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li>As I mentioned at the end of the last episode, I restructured the RSS feed a bit so that I shouldn’t accidently trigger any more episode re-downloads. And I moved the episode number from the title to its own XML tag just to clean up how everything looks in your podcast app. Also, a few months ago, I tweaked the production workflow to add chapter markers in each episode. So, if your app supports them (Apple Podcasts and Overcast do), you can skip forward to the next section or, if you wanted to go back and listen to, say, the interview with Emily Thomas, you can go straight to it.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>, as well as asking Alexa and Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_169.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers','','inherit','closed','closed','','2936-revision-v1','','','2020-11-13 10:52:06','2020-11-13 15:52:06','',2936,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/13/2936-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2941,1,'2020-11-13 11:09:25','2020-11-13 16:09:25','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":2935,\"width\":300,\"height\":300,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large is-resized\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714-1024x1024.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2935\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"/><figcaption>My mission is clear</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>No travel since the last episode, so I had some time to think back through my post-lockdown travel and come up with my top 10 <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">gift ideas</a> for your pandemic travelers.  We look at the start of the year-end efforts by airlines, hotels, and credit card companies to keep their grounded travelers, unpack the work-from-hotel offerings from Marriott, Hilton, and Hyatt, and dissect the latest hotel reservation system data breach. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_169.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go over to the <em>Subscribe</em> section on the right to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/911959576&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #169: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. No travel, but a November week with temps in the 70’s felt like I was someplace other than Chicago. But the weather reverted to the mean yesterday, which chased me back indoors to finish this podcast.</li><li>Last week was a boon to Chicago’s bars and restaurants. The week before, the governor banned indoor service again as COVID cases began to rise. The bonus week of warm sunny weather gifted them with some needed outdoor dining revenue. Last Friday, a friend and I met for lunch at a neighborhood place that had been able to expand their outdoor seating by putting tables on the sidewalk in front of the shuttered retailer next door to them. We showed up at 11:30; the tables were full by 12.</li><li>One of the things we talked about was travel; how, over the past 8 months, we’d more or less adjusted to all of the COVID restrictions, the masks, the social distance, all of it -- except for travel. Yes, we’ve done the car trips and long weekends, but we miss the big trips -- I’d just cancelled our Thanksgiving trip to London and he’s trying to think through their annual Christmas trip to December. Now, I know this is definitely a “First World problem” for folks who’ve had families, friends, and even themselves hit with COVID, so I’m not trying to overplay this. But as the end of the year approaches, and I start hearing more public health experts reset expectation -- for the worse, saying <a href=\"https://www.smh.com.au/national/vaccine-is-imminent-but-virus-fight-has-long-way-to-go-fauci-20201028-p569h2.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">“Well, it’s probably more like the end of 2021 or maybe into the beginning of 2022 before things start feeling normal”</a> -- I dunno, for people who love travel, I don’t think they want to put it on hold for another year or two. You start hearing about people looking for openings -- Mexico, Costa Rica -- as they figure out their own personal risk profiles. Maybe <a href=\"https://hub.united.com/2020-10-29-united-airlines-launches-worlds-first-free-transatlantic-covid-19-testing-pilot-2648544789.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">United Airlines’ testing program</a> that they’re trialing on flights to Hawaii and London is part of the answer; certainly <a href=\"https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/11/heres-everything-to-know-about-pfizers-positive-vaccine-news/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pfizer’s release of preliminary vaccine results</a> on Monday got everybody hopeful again. I don’t think anyone expects -- or really wants -- an immediate snap-back to 2019. But the ability to stretch things a bit more would be greatly appreciated.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/duckett/2333\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Another Girl (instrumental)</a> by duckett (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/duckett/23334 Ft: fourstones, miafas</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>First, a quick program note. As I tweak things with the underlying TravelCommons infrastructure -- the audio file, the RSS feed, the website -- I’ll talk about the changes at the end of the podcast, so I don’t muck up the content that you come to listen to with the “inside baseball” sorta podcast stuff. If you’re not interested, you can skip to the end without missing anything. I will say, though, that I was pleasantly surprised when I looked at the Apple Podcast stats showing about 80% of you stay through the end of an episode. I’d fully expected to see at least 50% of folks hitting the “skip to next podcast” button when they heard the “Pictures of You” song clip. Thanks to everybody for sticking all the way through.</li><li>And congrats to Emily Thomas, our guest on the August episode, for winning the Leverhulme prize last month. The prize recognizes the achievement of outstanding researchers across a broad range of disciplines whose work has already attracted international recognition and whose future career is exceptionally promising. I interviewed Emily about her book <em>The Meaning of Travel: Philosophers Abroad</em> and had a great time talking to her. A well-deserved award. I just may go back and listen to that interview again.</li><li>I got an email from Marriott last week announcing their work-from-hotel offerings. We\'ve talked about this trend in the past couple of episodes -- first as a way for downtown hotels to do something/anything about their low occupancy rates, and then in the last episode with the FBI\'s cyber security advisory to people moving from work-at-home to work-at-hotels. The Day Pass gives you a room from 6am to 6pm, wi-fi, bottled water, and lounge access if you’re a high-status Marriott Bonvoy member. They’re piloting it in Atlanta, Dallas, New York, and Phoenix. Scanning the pricing, the range looked to be in the $60-$90 range, though the Phoenician in Scottsdale did price out at $260. If you looked hard, you could probably get a day pass at a co-working place for cheaper, but if you can expense it, the Marriott offer is probably not a bad deal -- especially for those days that you have a big sales presentation or maybe a webinar, where you need that guaranteed alone time to focus on preparation and then delivery, and a video backdrop that’s not your closet door or a semi-made bed or random people walking past. Hilton and Hyatt are also offering work-from hotel plans, but with different spins. Hilton’s WorkSpaces will give you 10,000 Honors points for your first booking and, unlike Marriott, is across all of their properties, but it doesn’t feel as put together as Marriott’s. You have to ring up the property directly; looks like Hilton can’t figure out a way to shoehorn this day rate concept into their reservation system. Work from Hyatt, on the other hand, isn’t so much a WeWork replacement as a digital nomad trial package with its 7-night minimum stay requirement and a focus on resort locations like the Grand Hyatts in Kauai or Vail, CO. Kinda the complete opposite of spending 12 hours in a room at the Marriott by DFW. They all feel a bit “toe in the water”, a bit opportunistic in their own way. </li><li>At the beginning of this week, Candid Wueest, a cyber security researcher who joined us last year in episode #151 to talk about hotel websites that leaked traveler data, tweeted out a link to yet <a href=\"https://www.websiteplanet.com/blog/prestige-soft-breach-report/\">another hotel data breach</a>. This time it was channel management software, something that hotels use to automate the task of updating room availability and rates across all the on-line booking sites like Expedia and Booking.com and Hotels.com and on and on. Turns out this channel manager, Prestige Software, stored 24 GB of names and emails and credit card data and reservation records -- 10 million log files going back to 2013 -- in a misconfigured AWS S3 bucket -- storage space on Amazon’s cloud. The pandemic has massively accelerated companies moving from their own data centers to cloud services like Amazon and Microsoft. But sometimes it feels like the speed of that migration has overrun the skills of the teams supporting it.  What can you do about it? In this case, not much. You would’ve booked your room on Expedia or Trivago and not known anything about something called a channel manager piping your data down to the hotel. We’ve talked about these breaches in so many past episodes. What I said then still stands: you need to be realistic -- it’s not <em>if</em> your personal data will get breached, it’s <em>when</em>. If you can, put your on-line purchases on a separate card and watch those transactions on the bank’s website or mobile app so you can quickly shut it down if you see something that doesn’t look right. I remember one time, years ago, seeing a Northwest Air flight from Tokyo to Beijing show up on my card. Struck me as odd because I was in Chicago with no plans to be in Asia. Immediately called the bank, disputed the charge, and they closed down the card. Interesting thing is that the crook had booked an economy class ticket. You’d think if you’re going to risk it, go big -- book the front of the plane -- business class if not first. </li><li>The quarantine theater we talked about in the last episode just keeps keeping on. Chicago now has 43 states on its list, 31 of which have <em>lower</em> COVID rates than Chicago. And, I guess in admission that no one’s paying attention, they’re moving from weekly updates to every other week. I guess ‘cause there’s not that many more states they can add. New York gave up on its quarantine list when COVID rates in neighboring Connecticut and New Jersey qualified them for the list. \"There will be no quarantine list, there will be no metrics,\" Governor Cuomo says. Everyone needs to test negative, except for people coming in from Connecticut, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania because, at some point, you just gotta be realistic. Especially in the face of this, what is it, a third wave? I’ve lost count.</li><li>And just to show how deeply all of this -- the quarantine, the lack of travel has gotten me, here’s a fun game I now play with my Google Mini. I dug around in the Google Home app and found where I can change the voice. I’ll switch to the British Racing Green voice to check the weather in London and then click over on Sydney Harbour Blue to check the weather there. Then I flip back to the default voice to get the weather at the Googleplex. And, of course, I ask it to play TravelCommons.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter message</a> to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> or our <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a> account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Holiday Gift Guide for the Pandemic Traveler</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Like I mentioned at the top of the show, hearing public health officials saying things like “it will be easily by the end of 2021 and perhaps into the next year before we start having some semblance of normality” got my attention; got me thinking that this year’s travel gift guide needs to be a bit different. So I flipped through my 2020 travel journal, thought back through all of my post-lockdown travel to come up with my top shopping ideas for your pandemic travelers.</li><li>Check out this year\'s pandemic gift guide on the front page of the TravelCommons\' website or at https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/52154\">release.JOY.release</a> by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: essesq, Haskel (hej31)</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>End of Year “Don’t Leave Me” Offers</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Back in September, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/09/19/podcast-167-6-months-on-why-keep-travel-cards/\" title=\"Podcast #167 — 6 Months On; Why Keep Travel Cards?\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">episode #167</a>, we talked with <a href=\"https://www.lendingtree.com/writer/matt-schulz/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Matt Schulz, chief credit analyst at LendingTree</a>, about travel credit cards. Matt told us that their late summer surveys showed trends toward people canceling travel cards and cashing out points. But then earlier this week, <a href=\"https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-11-10/amex-says-its-cardholders-are-stockpiling-their-points-and-miles\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">American Express’ CFO said that their card customers <em>weren’t</em> cashing out points, and instead stocking them up to travel</a>.  The two comments aren’t necessarily at odds. If you’re laid off, you can use those miles to buy groceries or clothes via gift cards or on Amazon. But if you don’t have to, the best value you’ll get for those points will be on travel. You’ll get less than a penny a point when cashing out Amex points on Amazon, but you can double that when you use them to book flights on, say, Singapore Air or KLM.  So the hoarding makes sense -- if you can.</li><li>One of Matt’s points in our interview was that card companies will continue to tweak their rewards to keep people holding and using their cards because travelers are a valuable customer segment because, well, they typically spend chunks of money to travel. So as we come up on the end of the year, it’ll be interesting to see what those tweaks will be. Chase keeps extending the 5x grocery and gas bonus on their Southwest card while <a href=\"https://thepointsguy.com/news/amex-platinum-current-offer/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amex just announced a <em>10x</em> grocery and gas bonus as well as a 75K sign-up bonus for their Platinum card</a>.</li><li>Airlines and hotels are also rolling out their year-end offers. Back in the spring, all the majors gave existing status holders a push, extending elite expiration dates to Jan 2022 to keep them in the fold. So that settled everyone down for 2020. But now, with 2021 coming up and travel still in the hole, we’re starting to see new offers.<a href=\"http://news.aa.com/news/news-details/2020/Rewarding-AAdvantage-Members-With-More-Benefits-and-Flexibility-in-2021-AADV-10/default.aspx\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"> American opened the bidding last month</a>, knocking 20% off of 2021 status qualifying mileage clip levels (e.g., 40,000 instead of 50,000 to qualify for AAdvantage Platinum) and trying to get whatever they can for this year by counting October (last month), November, and December flights  towards earning status in 2021, which is then good through Jan 2023. This afternoon, I got an email from <a href=\"https://hub.united.com/2020-11-12-united-airlines-makes-it-easier-to-earn-mileageplus-premier-status-for-2022-2648871852.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">United announcing their deal</a>. United’s status qualification methodology has gotten ridiculously complex over the past couple of years, but by at least one of their metrics, it looks like they’re dropping their status qualifying point (PQP -- don’t ask) clip levels by at least 30% <em>and</em> offering double points for flights taken in Q1 -- January, February, March -- next year. <a href=\"https://newsroom.hilton.com/hilton-honors/news/hilton-honors-adds-flexibility-value-for-members\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Hilton, though, made the simplest and deepest offer</a> -- knocking 50% off of all status qualifying measures -- stays, nights, points -- boom, mike drop.</li><li>It makes sense. Most statused travelers are business travelers and depending on which CEO is talking, business travel is down 85% (Delta), 90% (Southwest), and will be 3-4 years before it’s back to pre-pandemic levels (United). And those business travelers are the airlines’ and hotels’ most profitable customers. So expect to see Delta and Southwest and Marriott announcements soon, and maybe again this time next year if that “Well, it’s probably more like the end of 2021 or maybe into the beginning of 2022 before things start feeling normal” forecast turns out to be true.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #169</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li>As I mentioned at the end of the last episode, I restructured the RSS feed a bit so that I shouldn’t accidently trigger any more episode re-downloads. And I moved the episode number from the title to its own XML tag just to clean up how everything looks in your podcast app. Also, a few months ago, I tweaked the production workflow to add chapter markers in each episode. So, if your app supports them (Apple Podcasts and Overcast do), you can skip forward to the next section or, if you wanted to go back and listen to, say, the interview with Emily Thomas, you can go straight to it.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>, as well as asking Alexa and Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_169.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers','','inherit','closed','closed','','2936-revision-v1','','','2020-11-13 11:09:25','2020-11-13 16:09:25','',2936,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/13/2936-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2942,1,'2020-11-13 11:23:08','2020-11-13 16:23:08','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":2935,\"width\":300,\"height\":300,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large is-resized\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714-1024x1024.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2935\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"/><figcaption>Locking Down The Christmas Tree</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>No travel since the last episode, so I had some time to think back through my post-lockdown travel and come up with my top 10 <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">gift ideas</a> for your pandemic travelers.  We look at the start of the year-end efforts by airlines, hotels, and credit card companies to keep their grounded travelers, unpack the work-from-hotel offerings from Marriott, Hilton, and Hyatt, and dissect the latest hotel reservation system data breach. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_169.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go over to the <em>Subscribe</em> section on the right to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/911959576&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #169: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. No travel, but a November week with temps in the 70’s felt like I was someplace other than Chicago. But the weather reverted to the mean yesterday, which chased me back indoors to finish this podcast.</li><li>Last week was a boon to Chicago’s bars and restaurants. The week before, the governor banned indoor service again as COVID cases began to rise. The bonus week of warm sunny weather gifted them with some needed outdoor dining revenue. Last Friday, a friend and I met for lunch at a neighborhood place that had been able to expand their outdoor seating by putting tables on the sidewalk in front of the shuttered retailer next door to them. We showed up at 11:30; the tables were full by 12.</li><li>One of the things we talked about was travel; how, over the past 8 months, we’d more or less adjusted to all of the COVID restrictions, the masks, the social distance, all of it -- except for travel. Yes, we’ve done the car trips and long weekends, but we miss the big trips -- I’d just cancelled our Thanksgiving trip to London and he’s trying to think through their annual Christmas trip to December. Now, I know this is definitely a “First World problem” for folks who’ve had families, friends, and even themselves hit with COVID, so I’m not trying to overplay this. But as the end of the year approaches, and I start hearing more public health experts reset expectation -- for the worse, saying <a href=\"https://www.smh.com.au/national/vaccine-is-imminent-but-virus-fight-has-long-way-to-go-fauci-20201028-p569h2.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">“Well, it’s probably more like the end of 2021 or maybe into the beginning of 2022 before things start feeling normal”</a> -- I dunno, for people who love travel, I don’t think they want to put it on hold for another year or two. You start hearing about people looking for openings -- Mexico, Costa Rica -- as they figure out their own personal risk profiles. Maybe <a href=\"https://hub.united.com/2020-10-29-united-airlines-launches-worlds-first-free-transatlantic-covid-19-testing-pilot-2648544789.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">United Airlines’ testing program</a> that they’re trialing on flights to Hawaii and London is part of the answer; certainly <a href=\"https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/11/heres-everything-to-know-about-pfizers-positive-vaccine-news/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pfizer’s release of preliminary vaccine results</a> on Monday got everybody hopeful again. I don’t think anyone expects -- or really wants -- an immediate snap-back to 2019. But the ability to stretch things a bit more would be greatly appreciated.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/duckett/2333\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Another Girl (instrumental)</a> by duckett (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/duckett/23334 Ft: fourstones, miafas</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>First, a quick program note. As I tweak things with the underlying TravelCommons infrastructure -- the audio file, the RSS feed, the website -- I’ll talk about the changes at the end of the podcast, so I don’t muck up the content that you come to listen to with the “inside baseball” sorta podcast stuff. If you’re not interested, you can skip to the end without missing anything. I will say, though, that I was pleasantly surprised when I looked at the Apple Podcast stats showing about 80% of you stay through the end of an episode. I’d fully expected to see at least 50% of folks hitting the “skip to next podcast” button when they heard the “Pictures of You” song clip. Thanks to everybody for sticking all the way through.</li><li>And congrats to Emily Thomas, our guest on the August episode, for winning the Leverhulme prize last month. The prize recognizes the achievement of outstanding researchers across a broad range of disciplines whose work has already attracted international recognition and whose future career is exceptionally promising. I interviewed Emily about her book <em>The Meaning of Travel: Philosophers Abroad</em> and had a great time talking to her. A well-deserved award. I just may go back and listen to that interview again.</li><li>I got an email from Marriott last week announcing their work-from-hotel offerings. We\'ve talked about this trend in the past couple of episodes -- first as a way for downtown hotels to do something/anything about their low occupancy rates, and then in the last episode with the FBI\'s cyber security advisory to people moving from work-at-home to work-at-hotels. The Day Pass gives you a room from 6am to 6pm, wi-fi, bottled water, and lounge access if you’re a high-status Marriott Bonvoy member. They’re piloting it in Atlanta, Dallas, New York, and Phoenix. Scanning the pricing, the range looked to be in the $60-$90 range, though the Phoenician in Scottsdale did price out at $260. If you looked hard, you could probably get a day pass at a co-working place for cheaper, but if you can expense it, the Marriott offer is probably not a bad deal -- especially for those days that you have a big sales presentation or maybe a webinar, where you need that guaranteed alone time to focus on preparation and then delivery, and a video backdrop that’s not your closet door or a semi-made bed or random people walking past. Hilton and Hyatt are also offering work-from hotel plans, but with different spins. Hilton’s WorkSpaces will give you 10,000 Honors points for your first booking and, unlike Marriott, is across all of their properties, but it doesn’t feel as put together as Marriott’s. You have to ring up the property directly; looks like Hilton can’t figure out a way to shoehorn this day rate concept into their reservation system. Work from Hyatt, on the other hand, isn’t so much a WeWork replacement as a digital nomad trial package with its 7-night minimum stay requirement and a focus on resort locations like the Grand Hyatts in Kauai or Vail, CO. Kinda the complete opposite of spending 12 hours in a room at the Marriott by DFW. They all feel a bit “toe in the water”, a bit opportunistic in their own way. </li><li>At the beginning of this week, Candid Wueest, a cyber security researcher who joined us last year in episode #151 to talk about hotel websites that leaked traveler data, tweeted out a link to yet <a href=\"https://www.websiteplanet.com/blog/prestige-soft-breach-report/\">another hotel data breach</a>. This time it was channel management software, something that hotels use to automate the task of updating room availability and rates across all the on-line booking sites like Expedia and Booking.com and Hotels.com and on and on. Turns out this channel manager, Prestige Software, stored 24 GB of names and emails and credit card data and reservation records -- 10 million log files going back to 2013 -- in a misconfigured AWS S3 bucket -- storage space on Amazon’s cloud. The pandemic has massively accelerated companies moving from their own data centers to cloud services like Amazon and Microsoft. But sometimes it feels like the speed of that migration has overrun the skills of the teams supporting it.  What can you do about it? In this case, not much. You would’ve booked your room on Expedia or Trivago and not known anything about something called a channel manager piping your data down to the hotel. We’ve talked about these breaches in so many past episodes. What I said then still stands: you need to be realistic -- it’s not <em>if</em> your personal data will get breached, it’s <em>when</em>. If you can, put your on-line purchases on a separate card and watch those transactions on the bank’s website or mobile app so you can quickly shut it down if you see something that doesn’t look right. I remember one time, years ago, seeing a Northwest Air flight from Tokyo to Beijing show up on my card. Struck me as odd because I was in Chicago with no plans to be in Asia. Immediately called the bank, disputed the charge, and they closed down the card. Interesting thing is that the crook had booked an economy class ticket. You’d think if you’re going to risk it, go big -- book the front of the plane -- business class if not first. </li><li>The quarantine theater we talked about in the last episode just keeps keeping on. Chicago now has 43 states on its list, 31 of which have <em>lower</em> COVID rates than Chicago. And, I guess in admission that no one’s paying attention, they’re moving from weekly updates to every other week. I guess ‘cause there’s not that many more states they can add. New York gave up on its quarantine list when COVID rates in neighboring Connecticut and New Jersey qualified them for the list. \"There will be no quarantine list, there will be no metrics,\" Governor Cuomo says. Everyone needs to test negative, except for people coming in from Connecticut, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania because, at some point, you just gotta be realistic. Especially in the face of this, what is it, a third wave? I’ve lost count.</li><li>And just to show how deeply all of this -- the quarantine, the lack of travel has gotten me, here’s a fun game I now play with my Google Mini. I dug around in the Google Home app and found where I can change the voice. I’ll switch to the British Racing Green voice to check the weather in London and then click over on Sydney Harbour Blue to check the weather there. Then I flip back to the default voice to get the weather at the Googleplex. And, of course, I ask it to play TravelCommons.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter message</a> to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> or our <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a> account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Holiday Gift Guide for the Pandemic Traveler</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Like I mentioned at the top of the show, hearing public health officials saying things like “it will be easily by the end of 2021 and perhaps into the next year before we start having some semblance of normality” got my attention; got me thinking that this year’s travel gift guide needs to be a bit different. So I flipped through my 2020 travel journal, thought back through all of my post-lockdown travel to come up with my top shopping ideas for your pandemic travelers.</li><li>Check out this year\'s pandemic gift guide on the front page of the TravelCommons\' website or at https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/52154\">release.JOY.release</a> by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: essesq, Haskel (hej31)</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>End of Year “Don’t Leave Me” Offers</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Back in September, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/09/19/podcast-167-6-months-on-why-keep-travel-cards/\" title=\"Podcast #167 — 6 Months On; Why Keep Travel Cards?\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">episode #167</a>, we talked with <a href=\"https://www.lendingtree.com/writer/matt-schulz/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Matt Schulz, chief credit analyst at LendingTree</a>, about travel credit cards. Matt told us that their late summer surveys showed trends toward people canceling travel cards and cashing out points. But then earlier this week, <a href=\"https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-11-10/amex-says-its-cardholders-are-stockpiling-their-points-and-miles\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">American Express’ CFO said that their card customers <em>weren’t</em> cashing out points, and instead stocking them up to travel</a>.  The two comments aren’t necessarily at odds. If you’re laid off, you can use those miles to buy groceries or clothes via gift cards or on Amazon. But if you don’t have to, the best value you’ll get for those points will be on travel. You’ll get less than a penny a point when cashing out Amex points on Amazon, but you can double that when you use them to book flights on, say, Singapore Air or KLM.  So the hoarding makes sense -- if you can.</li><li>One of Matt’s points in our interview was that card companies will continue to tweak their rewards to keep people holding and using their cards because travelers are a valuable customer segment because, well, they typically spend chunks of money to travel. So as we come up on the end of the year, it’ll be interesting to see what those tweaks will be. Chase keeps extending the 5x grocery and gas bonus on their Southwest card while <a href=\"https://thepointsguy.com/news/amex-platinum-current-offer/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amex just announced a <em>10x</em> grocery and gas bonus as well as a 75K sign-up bonus for their Platinum card</a>.</li><li>Airlines and hotels are also rolling out their year-end offers. Back in the spring, all the majors gave existing status holders a push, extending elite expiration dates to Jan 2022 to keep them in the fold. So that settled everyone down for 2020. But now, with 2021 coming up and travel still in the hole, we’re starting to see new offers.<a href=\"http://news.aa.com/news/news-details/2020/Rewarding-AAdvantage-Members-With-More-Benefits-and-Flexibility-in-2021-AADV-10/default.aspx\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"> American opened the bidding last month</a>, knocking 20% off of 2021 status qualifying mileage clip levels (e.g., 40,000 instead of 50,000 to qualify for AAdvantage Platinum) and trying to get whatever they can for this year by counting October (last month), November, and December flights  towards earning status in 2021, which is then good through Jan 2023. This afternoon, I got an email from <a href=\"https://hub.united.com/2020-11-12-united-airlines-makes-it-easier-to-earn-mileageplus-premier-status-for-2022-2648871852.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">United announcing their deal</a>. United’s status qualification methodology has gotten ridiculously complex over the past couple of years, but by at least one of their metrics, it looks like they’re dropping their status qualifying point (PQP -- don’t ask) clip levels by at least 30% <em>and</em> offering double points for flights taken in Q1 -- January, February, March -- next year. <a href=\"https://newsroom.hilton.com/hilton-honors/news/hilton-honors-adds-flexibility-value-for-members\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Hilton, though, made the simplest and deepest offer</a> -- knocking 50% off of all status qualifying measures -- stays, nights, points -- boom, mike drop.</li><li>It makes sense. Most statused travelers are business travelers and depending on which CEO is talking, business travel is down 85% (Delta), 90% (Southwest), and will be 3-4 years before it’s back to pre-pandemic levels (United). And those business travelers are the airlines’ and hotels’ most profitable customers. So expect to see Delta and Southwest and Marriott announcements soon, and maybe again this time next year if that “Well, it’s probably more like the end of 2021 or maybe into the beginning of 2022 before things start feeling normal” forecast turns out to be true.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #169</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li>As I mentioned at the end of the last episode, I restructured the RSS feed a bit so that I shouldn’t accidently trigger any more episode re-downloads. And I moved the episode number from the title to its own XML tag just to clean up how everything looks in your podcast app. Also, a few months ago, I tweaked the production workflow to add chapter markers in each episode. So, if your app supports them (Apple Podcasts and Overcast do), you can skip forward to the next section or, if you wanted to go back and listen to, say, the interview with Emily Thomas, you can go straight to it.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>, as well as asking Alexa and Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_169.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers','','inherit','closed','closed','','2936-revision-v1','','','2020-11-13 11:23:08','2020-11-13 16:23:08','',2936,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/13/2936-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2943,1,'2020-11-13 11:47:31','2020-11-13 16:47:31','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":2935,\"width\":300,\"height\":300,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large is-resized\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714-1024x1024.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2935\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"/><figcaption>Locking Down The Christmas Tree</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>No travel since the last episode, so I had some time to think back through my post-lockdown travel and come up with my top 10 <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">gift ideas</a> for your pandemic travelers.  We look at the start of the year-end efforts by airlines, hotels, and credit card companies to keep their grounded travelers, unpack the work-from-hotel offerings from Marriott, Hilton, and Hyatt, and dissect the latest hotel reservation system data breach. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_169.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go over to the <em>Subscribe</em> section on the right to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/911959576&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #169: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. No travel, but a November week with temps in the 70’s felt like I was someplace other than Chicago. But the weather reverted to the mean yesterday, which chased me back indoors to finish this podcast.</li><li>Last week was a boon to Chicago’s bars and restaurants. The week before, the governor banned indoor service again as COVID cases began to rise. The bonus week of warm sunny weather gifted them with some needed outdoor dining revenue. Last Friday, a friend and I met for lunch at a neighborhood place that had been able to expand their outdoor seating by putting tables on the sidewalk in front of the shuttered retailer next door to them. We showed up at 11:30; the tables were full by 12.</li><li>One of the things we talked about was travel; how, over the past 8 months, we’d more or less adjusted to all of the COVID restrictions, the masks, the social distance, all of it -- except for travel. Yes, we’ve done the car trips and long weekends, but we miss the big trips -- I’d just cancelled our Thanksgiving trip to London and he’s trying to think through their annual Christmas trip to December. Now, I know this is definitely a “First World problem” for folks who’ve had families, friends, and even themselves hit with COVID, so I’m not trying to overplay this. But as the end of the year approaches, and I start hearing more public health experts reset expectation -- for the worse, saying <a href=\"https://www.smh.com.au/national/vaccine-is-imminent-but-virus-fight-has-long-way-to-go-fauci-20201028-p569h2.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">“Well, it’s probably more like the end of 2021 or maybe into the beginning of 2022 before things start feeling normal”</a> -- I dunno, for people who love travel, I don’t think they want to put it on hold for another year or two. You start hearing about people looking for openings -- Mexico, Costa Rica -- as they figure out their own personal risk profiles. Maybe <a href=\"https://hub.united.com/2020-10-29-united-airlines-launches-worlds-first-free-transatlantic-covid-19-testing-pilot-2648544789.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">United Airlines’ testing program</a> that they’re trialing on flights to Hawaii and London is part of the answer; certainly <a href=\"https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/11/heres-everything-to-know-about-pfizers-positive-vaccine-news/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pfizer’s release of preliminary vaccine results</a> on Monday got everybody hopeful again. I don’t think anyone expects -- or really wants -- an immediate snap-back to 2019. But the ability to stretch things a bit more would be greatly appreciated.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mactonite/29469\">Static</a> by Darkroom (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mactonite/29469</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>First, a quick program note. As I tweak things with the underlying TravelCommons infrastructure -- the audio file, the RSS feed, the website -- I’ll talk about the changes at the end of the podcast, so I don’t muck up the content that you come to listen to with the “inside baseball” sorta podcast stuff. If you’re not interested, you can skip to the end without missing anything. I will say, though, that I was pleasantly surprised when I looked at the Apple Podcast stats showing about 80% of you stay through the end of an episode. I’d fully expected to see at least 50% of folks hitting the “skip to next podcast” button when they heard the “Pictures of You” song clip. Thanks to everybody for sticking all the way through.</li><li>And congrats to Emily Thomas, our guest on the August episode, for winning the Leverhulme prize last month. The prize recognizes the achievement of outstanding researchers across a broad range of disciplines whose work has already attracted international recognition and whose future career is exceptionally promising. I interviewed Emily about her book <em>The Meaning of Travel: Philosophers Abroad</em> and had a great time talking to her. A well-deserved award. I just may go back and listen to that interview again.</li><li>I got an email from Marriott last week announcing their work-from-hotel offerings. We\'ve talked about this trend in the past couple of episodes -- first as a way for downtown hotels to do something/anything about their low occupancy rates, and then in the last episode with the FBI\'s cyber security advisory to people moving from work-at-home to work-at-hotels. The Day Pass gives you a room from 6am to 6pm, wi-fi, bottled water, and lounge access if you’re a high-status Marriott Bonvoy member. They’re piloting it in Atlanta, Dallas, New York, and Phoenix. Scanning the pricing, the range looked to be in the $60-$90 range, though the Phoenician in Scottsdale did price out at $260. If you looked hard, you could probably get a day pass at a co-working place for cheaper, but if you can expense it, the Marriott offer is probably not a bad deal -- especially for those days that you have a big sales presentation or maybe a webinar, where you need that guaranteed alone time to focus on preparation and then delivery, and a video backdrop that’s not your closet door or a semi-made bed or random people walking past. Hilton and Hyatt are also offering work-from hotel plans, but with different spins. Hilton’s WorkSpaces will give you 10,000 Honors points for your first booking and, unlike Marriott, is across all of their properties, but it doesn’t feel as put together as Marriott’s. You have to ring up the property directly; looks like Hilton can’t figure out a way to shoehorn this day rate concept into their reservation system. Work from Hyatt, on the other hand, isn’t so much a WeWork replacement as a digital nomad trial package with its 7-night minimum stay requirement and a focus on resort locations like the Grand Hyatts in Kauai or Vail, CO. Kinda the complete opposite of spending 12 hours in a room at the Marriott by DFW. They all feel a bit “toe in the water”, a bit opportunistic in their own way. </li><li>At the beginning of this week, Candid Wueest, a cyber security researcher who joined us last year in episode #151 to talk about hotel websites that leaked traveler data, tweeted out a link to yet <a href=\"https://www.websiteplanet.com/blog/prestige-soft-breach-report/\">another hotel data breach</a>. This time it was channel management software, something that hotels use to automate the task of updating room availability and rates across all the on-line booking sites like Expedia and Booking.com and Hotels.com and on and on. Turns out this channel manager, Prestige Software, stored 24 GB of names and emails and credit card data and reservation records -- 10 million log files going back to 2013 -- in a misconfigured AWS S3 bucket -- storage space on Amazon’s cloud. The pandemic has massively accelerated companies moving from their own data centers to cloud services like Amazon and Microsoft. But sometimes it feels like the speed of that migration has overrun the skills of the teams supporting it.  What can you do about it? In this case, not much. You would’ve booked your room on Expedia or Trivago and not known anything about something called a channel manager piping your data down to the hotel. We’ve talked about these breaches in so many past episodes. What I said then still stands: you need to be realistic -- it’s not <em>if</em> your personal data will get breached, it’s <em>when</em>. If you can, put your on-line purchases on a separate card and watch those transactions on the bank’s website or mobile app so you can quickly shut it down if you see something that doesn’t look right. I remember one time, years ago, seeing a Northwest Air flight from Tokyo to Beijing show up on my card. Struck me as odd because I was in Chicago with no plans to be in Asia. Immediately called the bank, disputed the charge, and they closed down the card. Interesting thing is that the crook had booked an economy class ticket. You’d think if you’re going to risk it, go big -- book the front of the plane -- business class if not first. </li><li>The quarantine theater we talked about in the last episode just keeps keeping on. Chicago now has 43 states on its list, 31 of which have <em>lower</em> COVID rates than Chicago. And, I guess in admission that no one’s paying attention, they’re moving from weekly updates to every other week. I guess ‘cause there’s not that many more states they can add. New York gave up on its quarantine list when COVID rates in neighboring Connecticut and New Jersey qualified them for the list. \"There will be no quarantine list, there will be no metrics,\" Governor Cuomo says. Everyone needs to test negative, except for people coming in from Connecticut, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania because, at some point, you just gotta be realistic. Especially in the face of this, what is it, a third wave? I’ve lost count.</li><li>And just to show how deeply all of this -- the quarantine, the lack of travel has gotten me, here’s a fun game I now play with my Google Mini. I dug around in the Google Home app and found where I can change the voice. I’ll switch to the British Racing Green voice to check the weather in London and then click over on Sydney Harbour Blue to check the weather there. Then I flip back to the default voice to get the weather at the Googleplex. And, of course, I ask it to play TravelCommons.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter message</a> to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> or our <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a> account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Psykick/52938\">Another Way</a> by Psykick (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Psykick/52938</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Holiday Gift Guide for the Pandemic Traveler</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Like I mentioned at the top of the show, hearing public health officials saying things like “it will be easily by the end of 2021 and perhaps into the next year before we start having some semblance of normality” got my attention; got me thinking that this year’s travel gift guide needs to be a bit different. So I flipped through my 2020 travel journal, thought back through all of my post-lockdown travel to come up with my top shopping ideas for your pandemic travelers.</li><li>Check out this year\'s pandemic gift guide on the front page of the TravelCommons\' website or at https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/2879\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Slinky Blues</a> by Admiral Bob (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/28792 Ft: unreal_dm</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>End of Year “Don’t Leave Me” Offers</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Back in September, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/09/19/podcast-167-6-months-on-why-keep-travel-cards/\" title=\"Podcast #167 — 6 Months On; Why Keep Travel Cards?\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">episode #167</a>, we talked with <a href=\"https://www.lendingtree.com/writer/matt-schulz/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Matt Schulz, chief credit analyst at LendingTree</a>, about travel credit cards. Matt told us that their late summer surveys showed trends toward people canceling travel cards and cashing out points. But then earlier this week, <a href=\"https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-11-10/amex-says-its-cardholders-are-stockpiling-their-points-and-miles\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">American Express’ CFO said that their card customers <em>weren’t</em> cashing out points, and instead stocking them up to travel</a>.  The two comments aren’t necessarily at odds. If you’re laid off, you can use those miles to buy groceries or clothes via gift cards or on Amazon. But if you don’t have to, the best value you’ll get for those points will be on travel. You’ll get less than a penny a point when cashing out Amex points on Amazon, but you can double that when you use them to book flights on, say, Singapore Air or KLM.  So the hoarding makes sense -- if you can.</li><li>One of Matt’s points in our interview was that card companies will continue to tweak their rewards to keep people holding and using their cards because travelers are a valuable customer segment because, well, they typically spend chunks of money to travel. So as we come up on the end of the year, it’ll be interesting to see what those tweaks will be. Chase keeps extending the 5x grocery and gas bonus on their Southwest card while <a href=\"https://thepointsguy.com/news/amex-platinum-current-offer/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amex just announced a <em>10x</em> grocery and gas bonus as well as a 75K sign-up bonus for their Platinum card</a>.</li><li>Airlines and hotels are also rolling out their year-end offers. Back in the spring, all the majors gave existing status holders a push, extending elite expiration dates to Jan 2022 to keep them in the fold. So that settled everyone down for 2020. But now, with 2021 coming up and travel still in the hole, we’re starting to see new offers.<a href=\"http://news.aa.com/news/news-details/2020/Rewarding-AAdvantage-Members-With-More-Benefits-and-Flexibility-in-2021-AADV-10/default.aspx\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"> American opened the bidding last month</a>, knocking 20% off of 2021 status qualifying mileage clip levels (e.g., 40,000 instead of 50,000 to qualify for AAdvantage Platinum) and trying to get whatever they can for this year by counting October (last month), November, and December flights  towards earning status in 2021, which is then good through Jan 2023. This afternoon, I got an email from <a href=\"https://hub.united.com/2020-11-12-united-airlines-makes-it-easier-to-earn-mileageplus-premier-status-for-2022-2648871852.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">United announcing their deal</a>. United’s status qualification methodology has gotten ridiculously complex over the past couple of years, but by at least one of their metrics, it looks like they’re dropping their status qualifying point (PQP -- don’t ask) clip levels by at least 30% <em>and</em> offering double points for flights taken in Q1 -- January, February, March -- next year. <a href=\"https://newsroom.hilton.com/hilton-honors/news/hilton-honors-adds-flexibility-value-for-members\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Hilton, though, made the simplest and deepest offer</a> -- knocking 50% off of all status qualifying measures -- stays, nights, points -- boom, mike drop.</li><li>It makes sense. Most statused travelers are business travelers and depending on which CEO is talking, business travel is down 85% (Delta), 90% (Southwest), and will be 3-4 years before it’s back to pre-pandemic levels (United). And those business travelers are the airlines’ and hotels’ most profitable customers. So expect to see Delta and Southwest and Marriott announcements soon, and maybe again this time next year if that “Well, it’s probably more like the end of 2021 or maybe into the beginning of 2022 before things start feeling normal” forecast turns out to be true.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #169</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li>As I mentioned at the end of the last episode, I restructured the RSS feed a bit so that I shouldn’t accidently trigger any more episode re-downloads. And I moved the episode number from the title to its own XML tag just to clean up how everything looks in your podcast app. Also, a few months ago, I tweaked the production workflow to add chapter markers in each episode. So, if your app supports them (Apple Podcasts and Overcast do), you can skip forward to the next section or, if you wanted to go back and listen to, say, the interview with Emily Thomas, you can go straight to it.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>, as well as asking Alexa and Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_169.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers','','inherit','closed','closed','','2936-revision-v1','','','2020-11-13 11:47:31','2020-11-13 16:47:31','',2936,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/13/2936-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2944,1,'2020-11-13 16:41:42','2020-11-13 21:41:42','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":2935,\"width\":300,\"height\":300,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large is-resized\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714-1024x1024.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2935\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"/><figcaption>Locking Down The Christmas Tree</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>No travel since the last episode, so I had some time to think back through my post-lockdown travel and come up with my top 10 <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">gift ideas</a> for your pandemic travelers.  We look at the start of the year-end efforts by airlines, hotels, and credit card companies to keep their grounded travelers, unpack the work-from-hotel offerings from Marriott, Hilton, and Hyatt, and dissect the latest hotel reservation system data breach. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_169.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go over to the <em>Subscribe</em> section on the right to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/928852471&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #169: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. No travel, but a November week with temps in the 70’s felt like I was someplace other than Chicago. But the weather reverted to the mean yesterday, which chased me back indoors to finish this podcast.</li><li>Last week was a boon to Chicago’s bars and restaurants. The week before, the governor banned indoor service again as COVID cases began to rise. The bonus week of warm sunny weather gifted them with some needed outdoor dining revenue. Last Friday, a friend and I met for lunch at a neighborhood place that had been able to expand their outdoor seating by putting tables on the sidewalk in front of the shuttered retailer next door to them. We showed up at 11:30; the tables were full by 12.</li><li>One of the things we talked about was travel; how, over the past 8 months, we’d more or less adjusted to all of the COVID restrictions, the masks, the social distance, all of it -- except for travel. Yes, we’ve done the car trips and long weekends, but we miss the big trips -- I’d just cancelled our Thanksgiving trip to London and he’s trying to think through their annual Christmas trip to December. Now, I know this is definitely a “First World problem” for folks who’ve had families, friends, and even themselves hit with COVID, so I’m not trying to overplay this. But as the end of the year approaches, and I start hearing more public health experts reset expectation -- for the worse, saying <a href=\"https://www.smh.com.au/national/vaccine-is-imminent-but-virus-fight-has-long-way-to-go-fauci-20201028-p569h2.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">“Well, it’s probably more like the end of 2021 or maybe into the beginning of 2022 before things start feeling normal”</a> -- I dunno, for people who love travel, I don’t think they want to put it on hold for another year or two. You start hearing about people looking for openings -- Mexico, Costa Rica -- as they figure out their own personal risk profiles. Maybe <a href=\"https://hub.united.com/2020-10-29-united-airlines-launches-worlds-first-free-transatlantic-covid-19-testing-pilot-2648544789.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">United Airlines’ testing program</a> that they’re trialing on flights to Hawaii and London is part of the answer; certainly <a href=\"https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/11/heres-everything-to-know-about-pfizers-positive-vaccine-news/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pfizer’s release of preliminary vaccine results</a> on Monday got everybody hopeful again. I don’t think anyone expects -- or really wants -- an immediate snap-back to 2019. But the ability to stretch things a bit more would be greatly appreciated.</li><li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mactonite/29469\">Static</a>&nbsp;by Darkroom (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mactonite/29469</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>First, a quick program note. As I tweak things with the underlying TravelCommons infrastructure -- the audio file, the RSS feed, the website -- I’ll talk about the changes at the end of the podcast, so I don’t muck up the content that you come to listen to with the “inside baseball” sorta podcast stuff. If you’re not interested, you can skip to the end without missing anything. I will say, though, that I was pleasantly surprised when I looked at the Apple Podcast stats showing about 80% of you stay through the end of an episode. I’d fully expected to see at least 50% of folks hitting the “skip to next podcast” button when they heard the “Pictures of You” song clip. Thanks to everybody for sticking all the way through.</li><li>And congrats to Emily Thomas, our guest on the August episode, for winning the Leverhulme prize last month. The prize recognizes the achievement of outstanding researchers across a broad range of disciplines whose work has already attracted international recognition and whose future career is exceptionally promising. I interviewed Emily about her book <em>The Meaning of Travel: Philosophers Abroad</em> and had a great time talking to her. A well-deserved award. I just may go back and listen to that interview again.</li><li>I got an email from Marriott last week announcing their work-from-hotel offerings. We\'ve talked about this trend in the past couple of episodes -- first as a way for downtown hotels to do something/anything about their low occupancy rates, and then in the last episode with the FBI\'s cyber security advisory to people moving from work-at-home to work-at-hotels. The Day Pass gives you a room from 6am to 6pm, wi-fi, bottled water, and lounge access if you’re a high-status Marriott Bonvoy member. They’re piloting it in Atlanta, Dallas, New York, and Phoenix. Scanning the pricing, the range looked to be in the $60-$90 range, though the Phoenician in Scottsdale did price out at $260. If you looked hard, you could probably get a day pass at a co-working place for cheaper, but if you can expense it, the Marriott offer is probably not a bad deal -- especially for those days that you have a big sales presentation or maybe a webinar, where you need that guaranteed alone time to focus on preparation and then delivery, and a video backdrop that’s not your closet door or a semi-made bed or random people walking past. Hilton and Hyatt are also offering work-from hotel plans, but with different spins. Hilton’s WorkSpaces will give you 10,000 Honors points for your first booking and, unlike Marriott, is across all of their properties, but it doesn’t feel as put together as Marriott’s. You have to ring up the property directly; looks like Hilton can’t figure out a way to shoehorn this day rate concept into their reservation system. Work from Hyatt, on the other hand, isn’t so much a WeWork replacement as a digital nomad trial package with its 7-night minimum stay requirement and a focus on resort locations like the Grand Hyatts in Kauai or Vail, CO. Kinda the complete opposite of spending 12 hours in a room at the Marriott by DFW. They all feel a bit “toe in the water”, a bit opportunistic in their own way.&nbsp;</li><li>At the beginning of this week, Candid Wueest, a cyber security researcher who joined us last year in episode #151 to talk about hotel websites that leaked traveler data, tweeted out a link to yet <a href=\"https://www.websiteplanet.com/blog/prestige-soft-breach-report/\">another hotel data breach</a>. This time it was channel management software, something that hotels use to automate the task of updating room availability and rates across all the on-line booking sites like Expedia and Booking.com and Hotels.com and on and on. Turns out this channel manager, Prestige Software, stored 24 GB of names and emails and credit card data and reservation records -- 10 million log files going back to 2013 -- in a misconfigured AWS S3 bucket -- storage space on Amazon’s cloud. The pandemic has massively accelerated companies moving from their own data centers to cloud services like Amazon and Microsoft. But sometimes it feels like the speed of that migration has overrun the skills of the teams supporting it.&nbsp; What can you do about it? In this case, not much. You would’ve booked your room on Expedia or Trivago and not known anything about something called a channel manager piping your data down to the hotel. We’ve talked about these breaches in so many past episodes. What I said then still stands: you need to be realistic -- it’s not <em>if</em> your personal data will get breached, it’s <em>when</em>. If you can, put your on-line purchases on a separate card and watch those transactions on the bank’s website or mobile app so you can quickly shut it down if you see something that doesn’t look right. I remember one time, years ago, seeing a Northwest Air flight from Tokyo to Beijing show up on my card. Struck me as odd because I was in Chicago with no plans to be in Asia. Immediately called the bank, disputed the charge, and they closed down the card. Interesting thing is that the crook had booked an economy class ticket. You’d think if you’re going to risk it, go big -- book the front of the plane -- business class if not first.&nbsp;</li><li>The quarantine theater we talked about in the last episode just keeps keeping on. Chicago now has 43 states on its list, 31 of which have <em>lower</em> COVID rates than Chicago. And, I guess in admission that no one’s paying attention, they’re moving from weekly updates to every other week. I guess ‘cause there’s not that many more states they can add. New York gave up on its quarantine list when COVID rates in neighboring Connecticut and New Jersey qualified them for the list. \"There will be no quarantine list, there will be no metrics,\" Governor Cuomo says. Everyone needs to test negative, except for people coming in from Connecticut, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania because, at some point, you just gotta be realistic. Especially in the face of this, what is it, a third wave? I’ve lost count.</li><li>And just to show how deeply all of this -- the quarantine, the lack of travel has gotten me, here’s a fun game I now play with my Google Mini.&nbsp;I dug around in the Google Home app and found where I can change the voice. I’ll switch to the British Racing Green voice to check the weather in London and then click over on Sydney Harbour Blue to check the weather there. Then I flip back to the default voice to get the weather at the Googleplex. And, of course, I ask it to play TravelCommons.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter message</a> to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> or our <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a> account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge music —&nbsp;<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Psykick/52938\">Another Way</a>&nbsp;by Psykick (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Psykick/52938</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Holiday Gift Guide for the Pandemic Traveler</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Like I mentioned at the top of the show, hearing public health officials saying things like “it will be easily by the end of 2021 and perhaps into the next year before we start having some semblance of normality” got my attention; got me thinking that this year’s travel gift guide needs to be a bit different. So I flipped through my 2020 travel journal, thought back through all of my post-lockdown travel to come up with my top shopping ideas for your pandemic travelers.</li><li>Check out this year\'s pandemic gift guide on the front page of the TravelCommons\' website or at https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/2879\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Slinky Blues</a> by Admiral Bob (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/28792 Ft: unreal_dm</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>End of Year “Don’t Leave Me” Offers</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Back in September, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/09/19/podcast-167-6-months-on-why-keep-travel-cards/\" title=\"Podcast #167 — 6 Months On; Why Keep Travel Cards?\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">episode #167</a>, we talked with <a href=\"https://www.lendingtree.com/writer/matt-schulz/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Matt Schulz, chief credit analyst at LendingTree</a>, about travel credit cards. Matt told us that their late summer surveys showed trends toward people canceling travel cards and cashing out points. But then earlier this week, <a href=\"https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-11-10/amex-says-its-cardholders-are-stockpiling-their-points-and-miles\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">American Express’ CFO said that their card customers <em>weren’t</em> cashing out points, and instead stocking them up to travel</a>.&nbsp; The two comments aren’t necessarily at odds. If you’re laid off, you can use those miles to buy groceries or clothes via gift cards or on Amazon. But if you don’t have to, the best value you’ll get for those points will be on travel. You’ll get less than a penny a point when cashing out Amex points on Amazon, but you can double that when you use them to book flights on, say, Singapore Air or KLM.&nbsp; So the hoarding makes sense -- if you can.</li><li>One of Matt’s points in our interview was that card companies will continue to tweak their rewards to keep people holding and using their cards because travelers are a valuable customer segment because, well, they typically spend chunks of money to travel. So as we come up on the end of the year, it’ll be interesting to see what those tweaks will be. Chase keeps extending the 5x grocery and gas bonus on their Southwest card while <a href=\"https://thepointsguy.com/news/amex-platinum-current-offer/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amex just announced a <em>10x</em> grocery and gas bonus as well as a 75K sign-up bonus for their Platinum card</a>.</li><li>Airlines and hotels are also rolling out their year-end offers. Back in the spring, all the majors gave existing status holders a push, extending elite expiration dates to Jan 2022 to keep them in the fold. So that settled everyone down for 2020. But now, with 2021 coming up and travel still in the hole, we’re starting to see new offers.<a href=\"http://news.aa.com/news/news-details/2020/Rewarding-AAdvantage-Members-With-More-Benefits-and-Flexibility-in-2021-AADV-10/default.aspx\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"> American opened the bidding last month</a>, knocking 20% off of 2021 status qualifying mileage clip levels (e.g., 40,000 instead of 50,000 to qualify for AAdvantage Platinum) and trying to get whatever they can for this year by counting October (last month), November, and December flights&nbsp; towards earning status in 2021, which is then good through Jan 2023. This afternoon, I got an email from <a href=\"https://hub.united.com/2020-11-12-united-airlines-makes-it-easier-to-earn-mileageplus-premier-status-for-2022-2648871852.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">United announcing their deal</a>. United’s status qualification methodology has gotten ridiculously complex over the past couple of years, but by at least one of their metrics, it looks like they’re dropping their status qualifying point (PQP -- don’t ask) clip levels by at least 30% <em>and</em> offering double points for flights taken in Q1 -- January, February, March -- next year. <a href=\"https://newsroom.hilton.com/hilton-honors/news/hilton-honors-adds-flexibility-value-for-members\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Hilton, though, made the simplest and deepest offer</a> -- knocking 50% off of all status qualifying measures -- stays, nights, points -- boom, mike drop.</li><li>It makes sense. Most statused travelers are business travelers and depending on which CEO is talking, business travel is down 85% (Delta), 90% (Southwest), and will be 3-4 years before it’s back to pre-pandemic levels (United). And those business travelers are the airlines’ and hotels’ most profitable customers. So expect to see Delta and Southwest and Marriott announcements soon, and maybe again this time next year if that “Well, it’s probably more like the end of 2021 or maybe into the beginning of 2022 before things start feeling normal” forecast turns out to be true.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #169</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li>As I mentioned at the end of the last episode, I restructured the RSS feed a bit so that I shouldn’t accidently trigger any more episode re-downloads. And I moved the episode number from the title to its own XML tag just to clean up how everything looks in your podcast app. Also, a few months ago, I tweaked the production workflow to add chapter markers in each episode. So, if your app supports them (Apple Podcasts and Overcast do), you can skip forward to the next section or, if you wanted to go back and listen to, say, the interview with Emily Thomas, you can go straight to it.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>, as well as asking Alexa and Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_169.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers','','inherit','closed','closed','','2936-revision-v1','','','2020-11-13 16:41:42','2020-11-13 21:41:42','',2936,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/13/2936-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2945,1,'2020-11-13 16:43:59','2020-11-13 21:43:59','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":2935,\"width\":300,\"height\":300,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large is-resized\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714-1024x1024.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2935\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"/><figcaption>Locking Down The Christmas Tree</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>No travel since the last episode, so I had some time to think back through my post-lockdown travel and come up with my top 10 <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">gift ideas</a> for your pandemic travelers.  We look at the start of the year-end efforts by airlines, hotels, and credit card companies to keep their grounded travelers, unpack the work-from-hotel offerings from Marriott, Hilton, and Hyatt, and dissect the latest hotel reservation system data breach. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_169.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go over to the <em>Subscribe</em> section on the right to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/928852471&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #169: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. No travel, but a November week with temps in the 70’s felt like I was someplace other than Chicago. But the weather reverted to the mean yesterday, which chased me back indoors to finish this podcast.</li><li>Last week was a boon to Chicago’s bars and restaurants. The week before, the governor banned indoor service again as COVID cases began to rise. The bonus week of warm sunny weather gifted them with some needed outdoor dining revenue. Last Friday, a friend and I met for lunch at a neighborhood place that had been able to expand their outdoor seating by putting tables on the sidewalk in front of the shuttered retailer next door to them. We showed up at 11:30; the tables were full by 12.</li><li>One of the things we talked about was travel; how, over the past 8 months, we’d more or less adjusted to all of the COVID restrictions, the masks, the social distance, all of it -- except for travel. Yes, we’ve done the car trips and long weekends, but we miss the big trips -- I’d just cancelled our Thanksgiving trip to London and he’s trying to think through their annual Christmas trip to December. Now, I know this is definitely a “First World problem” for folks who’ve had families, friends, and even themselves hit with COVID, so I’m not trying to overplay this. But as the end of the year approaches, and I start hearing more public health experts reset expectation -- for the worse, saying <a href=\"https://www.smh.com.au/national/vaccine-is-imminent-but-virus-fight-has-long-way-to-go-fauci-20201028-p569h2.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">“Well, it’s probably more like the end of 2021 or maybe into the beginning of 2022 before things start feeling normal”</a> -- I dunno, for people who love travel, I don’t think they want to put it on hold for another year or two. You start hearing about people looking for openings -- Mexico, Costa Rica -- as they figure out their own personal risk profiles. Maybe <a href=\"https://hub.united.com/2020-10-29-united-airlines-launches-worlds-first-free-transatlantic-covid-19-testing-pilot-2648544789.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">United Airlines’ testing program</a> that they’re trialing on flights to Hawaii and London is part of the answer; certainly <a href=\"https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/11/heres-everything-to-know-about-pfizers-positive-vaccine-news/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pfizer’s release of preliminary vaccine results</a> on Monday got everybody hopeful again. I don’t think anyone expects -- or really wants -- an immediate snap-back to 2019. But the ability to stretch things a bit more would be greatly appreciated.</li><li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mactonite/29469\">Static</a>&nbsp;by Darkroom (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mactonite/29469</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>First, a quick program note. As I tweak things with the underlying TravelCommons infrastructure -- the audio file, the RSS feed, the website -- I’ll talk about the changes at the end of the podcast, so I don’t muck up the content that you come to listen to with the “inside baseball” sorta podcast stuff. If you’re not interested, you can skip to the end without missing anything. I will say, though, that I was pleasantly surprised when I looked at the Apple Podcast stats showing about 80% of you stay through the end of an episode. I’d fully expected to see at least 50% of folks hitting the “skip to next podcast” button when they heard the “Pictures of You” song clip. Thanks to everybody for sticking all the way through.</li><li>And congrats to Emily Thomas, our guest on the August episode, for winning the <a href=\"https://www.leverhulme.ac.uk/philip-leverhulme-prizes\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Leverhulme prize</a> last month. The prize recognizes the achievement of outstanding researchers across a broad range of disciplines whose work has already attracted international recognition and whose future career is exceptionally promising. I interviewed Emily about her book <em>The Meaning of Travel: Philosophers Abroad</em> and had a great time talking to her. A well-deserved award. I just may go back and listen to that interview again.</li><li>I got an email from Marriott last week announcing their work-from-hotel offerings. We\'ve talked about this trend in the past couple of episodes -- first as a way for downtown hotels to do something/anything about their low occupancy rates, and then in the last episode with the FBI\'s cyber security advisory to people moving from work-at-home to work-at-hotels. The Day Pass gives you a room from 6am to 6pm, wi-fi, bottled water, and lounge access if you’re a high-status Marriott Bonvoy member. They’re piloting it in Atlanta, Dallas, New York, and Phoenix. Scanning the pricing, the range looked to be in the $60-$90 range, though the Phoenician in Scottsdale did price out at $260. If you looked hard, you could probably get a day pass at a co-working place for cheaper, but if you can expense it, the Marriott offer is probably not a bad deal -- especially for those days that you have a big sales presentation or maybe a webinar, where you need that guaranteed alone time to focus on preparation and then delivery, and a video backdrop that’s not your closet door or a semi-made bed or random people walking past. Hilton and Hyatt are also offering work-from hotel plans, but with different spins. Hilton’s WorkSpaces will give you 10,000 Honors points for your first booking and, unlike Marriott, is across all of their properties, but it doesn’t feel as put together as Marriott’s. You have to ring up the property directly; looks like Hilton can’t figure out a way to shoehorn this day rate concept into their reservation system. Work from Hyatt, on the other hand, isn’t so much a WeWork replacement as a digital nomad trial package with its 7-night minimum stay requirement and a focus on resort locations like the Grand Hyatts in Kauai or Vail, CO. Kinda the complete opposite of spending 12 hours in a room at the Marriott by DFW. They all feel a bit “toe in the water”, a bit opportunistic in their own way. </li><li>At the beginning of this week, Candid Wueest, a cyber security researcher who joined us last year in episode #151 to talk about hotel websites that leaked traveler data, tweeted out a link to yet <a href=\"https://www.websiteplanet.com/blog/prestige-soft-breach-report/\">another hotel data breach</a>. This time it was channel management software, something that hotels use to automate the task of updating room availability and rates across all the on-line booking sites like Expedia and Booking.com and Hotels.com and on and on. Turns out this channel manager, Prestige Software, stored 24 GB of names and emails and credit card data and reservation records -- 10 million log files going back to 2013 -- in a misconfigured AWS S3 bucket -- storage space on Amazon’s cloud. The pandemic has massively accelerated companies moving from their own data centers to cloud services like Amazon and Microsoft. But sometimes it feels like the speed of that migration has overrun the skills of the teams supporting it.  What can you do about it? In this case, not much. You would’ve booked your room on Expedia or Trivago and not known anything about something called a channel manager piping your data down to the hotel. We’ve talked about these breaches in so many past episodes. What I said then still stands: you need to be realistic -- it’s not <em>if</em> your personal data will get breached, it’s <em>when</em>. If you can, put your on-line purchases on a separate card and watch those transactions on the bank’s website or mobile app so you can quickly shut it down if you see something that doesn’t look right. I remember one time, years ago, seeing a Northwest Air flight from Tokyo to Beijing show up on my card. Struck me as odd because I was in Chicago with no plans to be in Asia. Immediately called the bank, disputed the charge, and they closed down the card. Interesting thing is that the crook had booked an economy class ticket. You’d think if you’re going to risk it, go big -- book the front of the plane -- business class if not first. </li><li>The quarantine theater we talked about in the last episode just keeps keeping on. Chicago now has 43 states on its list, 31 of which have <em>lower</em> COVID rates than Chicago. And, I guess in admission that no one’s paying attention, they’re moving from weekly updates to every other week. I guess ‘cause there’s not that many more states they can add. New York gave up on its quarantine list when COVID rates in neighboring Connecticut and New Jersey qualified them for the list. \"There will be no quarantine list, there will be no metrics,\" Governor Cuomo says. Everyone needs to test negative, except for people coming in from Connecticut, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania because, at some point, you just gotta be realistic. Especially in the face of this, what is it, a third wave? I’ve lost count.</li><li>And just to show how deeply all of this -- the quarantine, the lack of travel has gotten me, here’s a fun game I now play with my Google Mini. I dug around in the Google Home app and found where I can change the voice. I’ll switch to the British Racing Green voice to check the weather in London and then click over on Sydney Harbour Blue to check the weather there. Then I flip back to the default voice to get the weather at the Googleplex. And, of course, I ask it to play TravelCommons.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter message</a> to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> or our <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a> account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Psykick/52938\">Another Way</a> by Psykick (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Psykick/52938</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Holiday Gift Guide for the Pandemic Traveler</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Like I mentioned at the top of the show, hearing public health officials saying things like “it will be easily by the end of 2021 and perhaps into the next year before we start having some semblance of normality” got my attention; got me thinking that this year’s travel gift guide needs to be a bit different. So I flipped through my 2020 travel journal, thought back through all of my post-lockdown travel to come up with my top shopping ideas for your pandemic travelers.</li><li>Check out this year\'s pandemic gift guide on the front page of the TravelCommons\' website or <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times\">here </a>at https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/2879\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Slinky Blues</a> by Admiral Bob (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/28792 Ft: unreal_dm</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>End of Year “Don’t Leave Me” Offers</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Back in September, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/09/19/podcast-167-6-months-on-why-keep-travel-cards/\" title=\"Podcast #167 — 6 Months On; Why Keep Travel Cards?\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">episode #167</a>, we talked with <a href=\"https://www.lendingtree.com/writer/matt-schulz/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Matt Schulz, chief credit analyst at LendingTree</a>, about travel credit cards. Matt told us that their late summer surveys showed trends toward people canceling travel cards and cashing out points. But then earlier this week, <a href=\"https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-11-10/amex-says-its-cardholders-are-stockpiling-their-points-and-miles\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">American Express’ CFO said that their card customers <em>weren’t</em> cashing out points, and instead stocking them up to travel</a>.&nbsp; The two comments aren’t necessarily at odds. If you’re laid off, you can use those miles to buy groceries or clothes via gift cards or on Amazon. But if you don’t have to, the best value you’ll get for those points will be on travel. You’ll get less than a penny a point when cashing out Amex points on Amazon, but you can double that when you use them to book flights on, say, Singapore Air or KLM.&nbsp; So the hoarding makes sense -- if you can.</li><li>One of Matt’s points in our interview was that card companies will continue to tweak their rewards to keep people holding and using their cards because travelers are a valuable customer segment because, well, they typically spend chunks of money to travel. So as we come up on the end of the year, it’ll be interesting to see what those tweaks will be. Chase keeps extending the 5x grocery and gas bonus on their Southwest card while <a href=\"https://thepointsguy.com/news/amex-platinum-current-offer/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amex just announced a <em>10x</em> grocery and gas bonus as well as a 75K sign-up bonus for their Platinum card</a>.</li><li>Airlines and hotels are also rolling out their year-end offers. Back in the spring, all the majors gave existing status holders a push, extending elite expiration dates to Jan 2022 to keep them in the fold. So that settled everyone down for 2020. But now, with 2021 coming up and travel still in the hole, we’re starting to see new offers.<a href=\"http://news.aa.com/news/news-details/2020/Rewarding-AAdvantage-Members-With-More-Benefits-and-Flexibility-in-2021-AADV-10/default.aspx\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"> American opened the bidding last month</a>, knocking 20% off of 2021 status qualifying mileage clip levels (e.g., 40,000 instead of 50,000 to qualify for AAdvantage Platinum) and trying to get whatever they can for this year by counting October (last month), November, and December flights&nbsp; towards earning status in 2021, which is then good through Jan 2023. This afternoon, I got an email from <a href=\"https://hub.united.com/2020-11-12-united-airlines-makes-it-easier-to-earn-mileageplus-premier-status-for-2022-2648871852.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">United announcing their deal</a>. United’s status qualification methodology has gotten ridiculously complex over the past couple of years, but by at least one of their metrics, it looks like they’re dropping their status qualifying point (PQP -- don’t ask) clip levels by at least 30% <em>and</em> offering double points for flights taken in Q1 -- January, February, March -- next year. <a href=\"https://newsroom.hilton.com/hilton-honors/news/hilton-honors-adds-flexibility-value-for-members\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Hilton, though, made the simplest and deepest offer</a> -- knocking 50% off of all status qualifying measures -- stays, nights, points -- boom, mike drop.</li><li>It makes sense. Most statused travelers are business travelers and depending on which CEO is talking, business travel is down 85% (Delta), 90% (Southwest), and will be 3-4 years before it’s back to pre-pandemic levels (United). And those business travelers are the airlines’ and hotels’ most profitable customers. So expect to see Delta and Southwest and Marriott announcements soon, and maybe again this time next year if that “Well, it’s probably more like the end of 2021 or maybe into the beginning of 2022 before things start feeling normal” forecast turns out to be true.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #169</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li>As I mentioned at the end of the last episode, I restructured the RSS feed a bit so that I shouldn’t accidently trigger any more episode re-downloads. And I moved the episode number from the title to its own XML tag just to clean up how everything looks in your podcast app. Also, a few months ago, I tweaked the production workflow to add chapter markers in each episode. So, if your app supports them (Apple Podcasts and Overcast do), you can skip forward to the next section or, if you wanted to go back and listen to, say, the interview with Emily Thomas, you can go straight to it.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>, as well as asking Alexa and Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_169.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers','','inherit','closed','closed','','2936-revision-v1','','','2020-11-13 16:43:59','2020-11-13 21:43:59','',2936,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/13/2936-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2946,1,'2020-11-13 16:50:19','2020-11-13 21:50:19','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/IMG_1615-1.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2732 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/IMG_1615-1-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a><figcaption>I think I put off finding a doc too long</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Though I\'m still locked down on the shores of Lake Michigan, data shows that people are starting to do short car trips. What will people need to feel comfortable to do more extensive travel -- spacing in aircraft, we talk with Erik Josowitz of <a href=\"https://insurancequotes.com\">insuranceQuotes.com</a> about trends in travel insurance, and a story about finding medical attention while traveling through Southeast Asia. </span>All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_163.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_163.mp3\"]\n<p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #163: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois, probably 10 lbs heavier, half of which is beer (my doing) and the other half baked goods courtesy of Irene. While the coronavirus restrictions are beginning to ease in some parts of the US and Europe, everything is still locked down here on the shores of Lake Michigan. So my travels since the last episode have mostly been between the kitchen and the couch, and occasionally out in search of carbohydrate comfort foods -- to grocery stores in an endless and fruitless search for King Arthur Bread Flour, and then running a circuit of Chicago microbreweries using curbside no-contact pick-up to collect 4-packs of whatever is new that week. A couple of breweries are even doing curbside sales of ⅙ barrel kegs -- tempting, but seems a bit of overkill for a 3-person flat, though Amazon claims they can get a kegerator to me next week. Must be on Amazon’s essential items list.&nbsp;</li><li>But with the lockdown easing in non-urban places like the exurbs of Nashville, I’m starting to prep for my first post-Corona trip that I talked about in the last episode, a drive down to Spring Hill, TN to see my mother. Got the oil and tires changed on the BMW to avoid any unplanned stops. Figure I’ll pack a lunch which’ll let me do the drive with just one gas stop. I also tuned up my Trek Madone road bike -- cleaned and lubed the gears, re-wrapped the handlebars -- to take that down with me. Haven’t been able to ride much after Chicago shut down the lake shore path, and so riding solo on small country roads would seem to be a pretty good match for “social distancing” criteria.</li><li>All this spare time has allowed me to be a bit more “planful” as one client used to say, one of those ugly adjective constructions meant to turn an activity “we need to do more planning” into a quality “we need to be more planful”. But anyhow, whether the lockdown allows me to be more planful about the podcast or to do a bit more planning, it has. Which, for this episode, means you’ll hear less of me, and more from informed people. First up is Erik Josowitz, an analyst at <a href=\"https://www.insurancequotes.com\" class=\"aioseop-link\">insuranceQuotes.com</a>. Erik and I did an old-school remote interview -- using Skype instead of Zoom -- talking about what travel insurance looks like in the post-Corona world. And then Allan Marko returns with his wife Chris, following up our conversation in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/01/25/podcast-159-planning-the-trip-of-a-lifetime-in-southeast-asia/\" class=\"aioseop-link\">January travel planning episode</a> with a story from their Southeast Asia sabbatical last year; how they tracked down a doctor in Thailand when his wife became ill; a topic that could weigh on us more when we venture out into the post-lockdown/ pre-corona vaccine world that we\'ll be in for the next 18-24 months.</li><li>But right now, for my Tennessee trip, I think I’m less concerned about finding a doctor, and a bit more concerned about reconnoitering open drive-thru Taco Bells along I-65.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/50485\">Sunset Boulevard</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Siobhan Dakay, unreal_dm</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Videoconferencing is having its moment during the pandemic. Maybe it’s because people are looking for more of a connection in their lockdown isolations, or because we know that everyone is sitting at home in front of a video-equipped laptop and has no excuse not to video, nothing like “Can only call in because I’ll be running through airport security then.” I haven’t done a straight conference call in forever. Doing interviews for this episode, I hit the videoconference trifecta&nbsp; - Skype with Erik, FaceTime with Allan and Chris,&nbsp;</li><li>and then Zoom to be on the other side of the microphone on Steve Frick’s <a href=\"https://anchor.fm/steve-frick/episodes/Travel-Commons---Stories-From-Home-Episode-83-edipo7\">Back &amp; Gone Again podcast</a>.&nbsp; This is the 15th year of TravelCommons; I started in May 2005, and here Steve and I talk about that first episode.</li><li>&nbsp;We had a lot of fun, telling travel stories and talking about our current life-off-the-road. Give it a listen. There’s a link in the show notes, on the TravelCommons Facebook page, and in the Twitter feed.</li><li>Cate Rose left a comment on the Facebook page on the April episode.<ul><li>“I don\'t travel nearly as much as you do Mark but I enjoy your podcasts. These are unprecedented times. We arrived home from a month long rail trip from Italy, up to Sweden at the end of January just as this whole thing was blowing up. And now people, including us, are locked down all over the world. Unbelievable. And here you are with plenty of time to write, but no place to go! We are on Week 4 of social isolation in Western Australia and the novelty is wearing off a little ;-) but it seems to be working so all for the greater good. Thanks for keeping up with the storytelling and letting a crack of life into home isolation! Stay safe.</li><li>Cate - thanks for that note. Sounds like you just got out of Italy in time. If I remember correctly, they started locking down Italy in mid-February. Glad you made it back home safely. And it sounds like Australia and New Zealand have done the best in crushing the Covid curve.</li></ul></li><li>In that same episode, when we talked about post-corona trip planning, I said I thought the first post-lockdown trip most people would take would be a car ride -- more flexibility; easier social distancing. Turns out I was right -- at least according to the company <a href=\"https://www.arrivalist.com/\">Arrivalist</a>, a “visitation intelligence company” that has started publishing a Daily Travel Index measuring consumer road trips of 50 miles or more using data drawn from GPS signals. Road trips on Friday, May 1 were almost back to the pre-pandemic levels of February, with the number of trips in the 100-250 mile range higher than February’s number for the first time since the lockdowns started. You can go to Arrivalist’s website and <a href=\"https://www.arrivalist.com/daily-travel-index/\">play with the data yourself</a> or read an <a href=\"https://www.phocuswire.com/arrivalist-road-trip-surge-data\">analysis by Phocuswright</a>, a travel research firm. Links are in the show notes and my Twitter feed.</li><li>I got yet another email survey, this time from United asking me what would make me comfortable to fly again, and to rank some of their plans. For me, it was pretty easy. I’m not excited about standing in a packed gate area, hearing the gate agent say “This is a completely full flight”, and then spend 2-3 hours shoulder-to-shoulder with a complete stranger, in effect letting that person into my family’s corona exposure space.</li><li>A couple of weeks later (not implying causation, only correlation), all the major US airlines announced that passengers and crew will have to wear masks, they’re moving to strict back-to-front boarding schemes to reduce the number of passengers passing one another, and that they’re blocking/not booking the middle seats, reducing capacity from what had been running over 80% at the beginning of the year down to the 60’s. It was then interesting to watch what happened after Frontier’s CEO did a round of TV interviews at the beginning of this week, saying that they too would block the middle seat -- if a passenger bought a More Room seat for at least $39. Today, after getting a blizzard of red challenge flags from Washington, Frontier reversed course. Just kidding - “It was never our intent” they said, “to profit… from safety”. “ We simply wanted to provide our customers with an option for more space.” Yup. Frontier continuing to position their brand as the Ryanair of the US.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Vidian/52190\">Memories (infiniti loop)</a> by Vidian (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license. Ft: TheDice</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>New World of Travel Insurance</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Interview with Erik Josowitz, an analyst at <a href=\"http://www.insurancequotes.com/\" class=\"aioseop-link\">insuranceQuotes.com</a></li><li>Bridge Music --<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/ramblinglibrarian/55007\">Dawn at the Top of the World ft. copperhead &amp; Robert Seikawitch</a> by Ivan Chew (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Getting Medical Help on the Road</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Back in January, long-time TravelCommons listener Allan Marko talked about the planning he did for the 9-week SE Asia sabbatical he and his wife Chris took last year. Fast forward 4 months, and health care on the road will now become much more important when traveling in the post-lockdown/pre-vaccine world. So let’s continue our conversation with Allan, joined now by his wife Chris, to talk about how they thought about getting health care when they were half a world away from home.&nbsp; It started with the research before they left home…</li><li>Interview with Allan Marko and Chris Chufo</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #163</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_163.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #163 — New World of Travel Insurance; Getting Medical Help on the Road','','inherit','closed','closed','','2747-revision-v1','','','2020-11-13 16:50:19','2020-11-13 21:50:19','',2747,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/13/2747-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2948,1,'2020-11-18 13:39:49','2020-11-18 18:39:49','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":2935,\"width\":300,\"height\":300,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large is-resized\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714-1024x1024.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2935\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"/><figcaption>Locking Down The Christmas Tree</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>No travel since the last episode, so I had some time to think back through my post-lockdown travel and come up with my top 10 <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">gift ideas</a> for your pandemic travelers.  We look at the start of the year-end efforts by airlines, hotels, and credit card companies to keep their grounded travelers, unpack the work-from-hotel offerings from Marriott, Hilton, and Hyatt, and dissect the latest hotel reservation system data breach. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_169.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go over to the <em>Subscribe</em> section on the right to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/928852471&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #169: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. No travel, but a November week with temps in the 70’s felt like I was someplace other than Chicago. But the weather reverted to the mean yesterday, which chased me back indoors to finish this podcast.</li><li>Last week was a boon to Chicago’s bars and restaurants. The week before, the governor banned indoor service again as COVID cases began to rise. The bonus week of warm sunny weather gifted them with some needed outdoor dining revenue. Last Friday, a friend and I met for lunch at a neighborhood place that had been able to expand their outdoor seating by putting tables on the sidewalk in front of the shuttered retailer next door to them. We showed up at 11:30; the tables were full by 12.</li><li>One of the things we talked about was travel; how, over the past 8 months, we’d more or less adjusted to all of the COVID restrictions, the masks, the social distance, all of it -- except for travel. Yes, we’ve done the car trips and long weekends, but we miss the big trips -- I’d just cancelled our Thanksgiving trip to London and he’s trying to think through their annual Christmas trip to December. Now, I know this is definitely a “First World problem” for folks who’ve had families, friends, and even themselves hit with COVID, so I’m not trying to overplay this. But as the end of the year approaches, and I start hearing more public health experts reset expectation -- for the worse, saying <a href=\"https://www.smh.com.au/national/vaccine-is-imminent-but-virus-fight-has-long-way-to-go-fauci-20201028-p569h2.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">“Well, it’s probably more like the end of 2021 or maybe into the beginning of 2022 before things start feeling normal”</a> -- I dunno, for people who love travel, I don’t think they want to put it on hold for another year or two. You start hearing about people looking for openings -- Mexico, Costa Rica -- as they figure out their own personal risk profiles. Maybe <a href=\"https://hub.united.com/2020-10-29-united-airlines-launches-worlds-first-free-transatlantic-covid-19-testing-pilot-2648544789.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">United Airlines’ testing program</a> that they’re trialing on flights to Hawaii and London is part of the answer; certainly <a href=\"https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/11/heres-everything-to-know-about-pfizers-positive-vaccine-news/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pfizer’s release of preliminary vaccine results</a> on Monday got everybody hopeful again. I don’t think anyone expects -- or really wants -- an immediate snap-back to 2019. But the ability to stretch things a bit more would be greatly appreciated.</li><li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mactonite/29469\">Static</a>&nbsp;by Darkroom (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mactonite/29469</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>First, a quick program note. As I tweak things with the underlying TravelCommons infrastructure -- the audio file, the RSS feed, the website -- I’ll talk about the changes at the end of the podcast, so I don’t muck up the content that you come to listen to with the “inside baseball” sorta podcast stuff. If you’re not interested, you can skip to the end without missing anything. I will say, though, that I was pleasantly surprised when I looked at the Apple Podcast stats showing about 80% of you stay through the end of an episode. I’d fully expected to see at least 50% of folks hitting the “skip to next podcast” button when they heard the “Pictures of You” song clip. Thanks to everybody for sticking all the way through.</li><li>And congrats to Emily Thomas, our guest on the August episode, for winning the <a href=\"https://www.leverhulme.ac.uk/philip-leverhulme-prizes\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Leverhulme prize</a> last month. The prize recognizes the achievement of outstanding researchers across a broad range of disciplines whose work has already attracted international recognition and whose future career is exceptionally promising. I interviewed Emily about her book <em>The Meaning of Travel: Philosophers Abroad</em> and had a great time talking to her. A well-deserved award. I just may go back and listen to that interview again.</li><li>I got an email from Marriott last week announcing their work-from-hotel offerings. We\'ve talked about this trend in the past couple of episodes -- first as a way for downtown hotels to do something/anything about their low occupancy rates, and then in the last episode with the FBI\'s cyber security advisory to people moving from work-at-home to work-at-hotels. The Day Pass gives you a room from 6am to 6pm, wi-fi, bottled water, and lounge access if you’re a high-status Marriott Bonvoy member. They’re piloting it in Atlanta, Dallas, New York, and Phoenix. Scanning the pricing, the range looked to be in the $60-$90 range, though the Phoenician in Scottsdale did price out at $260. If you looked hard, you could probably get a day pass at a co-working place for cheaper, but if you can expense it, the Marriott offer is probably not a bad deal -- especially for those days that you have a big sales presentation or maybe a webinar, where you need that guaranteed alone time to focus on preparation and then delivery, and a video backdrop that’s not your closet door or a semi-made bed or random people walking past. Hilton and Hyatt are also offering work-from hotel plans, but with different spins. Hilton’s WorkSpaces will give you 10,000 Honors points for your first booking and, unlike Marriott, is across all of their properties, but it doesn’t feel as put together as Marriott’s. You have to ring up the property directly; looks like Hilton can’t figure out a way to shoehorn this day rate concept into their reservation system. Work from Hyatt, on the other hand, isn’t so much a WeWork replacement as a digital nomad trial package with its 7-night minimum stay requirement and a focus on resort locations like the Grand Hyatts in Kauai or Vail, CO. Kinda the complete opposite of spending 12 hours in a room at the Marriott by DFW. They all feel a bit “toe in the water”, a bit opportunistic in their own way.&nbsp;</li><li>At the beginning of this week, Candid Wueest, a cyber security researcher who joined us last year in episode #151 to talk about hotel websites that leaked traveler data, tweeted out a link to yet <a href=\"https://www.websiteplanet.com/blog/prestige-soft-breach-report/\">another hotel data breach</a>. This time it was channel management software, something that hotels use to automate the task of updating room availability and rates across all the on-line booking sites like Expedia and Booking.com and Hotels.com and on and on. Turns out this channel manager, Prestige Software, stored 24 GB of names and emails and credit card data and reservation records -- 10 million log files going back to 2013 -- in a misconfigured AWS S3 bucket -- storage space on Amazon’s cloud. The pandemic has massively accelerated companies moving from their own data centers to cloud services like Amazon and Microsoft. But sometimes it feels like the speed of that migration has overrun the skills of the teams supporting it.&nbsp; What can you do about it? In this case, not much. You would’ve booked your room on Expedia or Trivago and not known anything about something called a channel manager piping your data down to the hotel. We’ve talked about these breaches in so many past episodes. What I said then still stands: you need to be realistic -- it’s not <em>if</em> your personal data will get breached, it’s <em>when</em>. If you can, put your on-line purchases on a separate card and watch those transactions on the bank’s website or mobile app so you can quickly shut it down if you see something that doesn’t look right. I remember one time, years ago, seeing a Northwest Air flight from Tokyo to Beijing show up on my card. Struck me as odd because I was in Chicago with no plans to be in Asia. Immediately called the bank, disputed the charge, and they closed down the card. Interesting thing is that the crook had booked an economy class ticket. You’d think if you’re going to risk it, go big -- book the front of the plane -- business class if not first.&nbsp;</li><li>The quarantine theater we talked about in the last episode just keeps keeping on. Chicago now has 43 states on its list, 31 of which have <em>lower</em> COVID rates than Chicago. And, I guess in admission that no one’s paying attention, they’re moving from weekly updates to every other week. I guess ‘cause there’s not that many more states they can add. New York gave up on its quarantine list when COVID rates in neighboring Connecticut and New Jersey qualified them for the list. \"There will be no quarantine list, there will be no metrics,\" Governor Cuomo says. Everyone needs to test negative, except for people coming in from Connecticut, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania because, at some point, you just gotta be realistic. Especially in the face of this, what is it, a third wave? I’ve lost count.</li><li>And just to show how deeply all of this -- the quarantine, the lack of travel has gotten me, here’s a fun game I now play with my Google Mini.&nbsp;I dug around in the Google Home app and found where I can change the voice. I’ll switch to the British Racing Green voice to check the weather in London and then click over on Sydney Harbour Blue to check the weather there. Then I flip back to the default voice to get the weather at the Googleplex. And, of course, I ask it to play TravelCommons.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter message</a> to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> or our <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a> account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge music —&nbsp;<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Psykick/52938\">Another Way</a>&nbsp;by Psykick (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Psykick/52938</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Holiday Gift Guide for the Pandemic Traveler</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Like I mentioned at the top of the show, hearing public health officials saying things like “it will be easily by the end of 2021 and perhaps into the next year before we start having some semblance of normality” got my attention; got me thinking that this year’s travel gift guide needs to be a bit different. So I flipped through my 2020 travel journal, thought back through all of my post-lockdown travel to come up with my top shopping ideas for your pandemic travelers.</li><li>Check out this year\'s pandemic gift guide on the front page of the TravelCommons\' website or <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times\">here </a>at https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/2879\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Slinky Blues</a> by Admiral Bob (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/28792 Ft: unreal_dm</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>End of Year “Don’t Leave Me” Offers</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Back in September, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/09/19/podcast-167-6-months-on-why-keep-travel-cards/\" title=\"Podcast #167 — 6 Months On; Why Keep Travel Cards?\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">episode #167</a>, we talked with <a href=\"https://www.lendingtree.com/writer/matt-schulz/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Matt Schulz, chief credit analyst at LendingTree</a>, about travel credit cards. Matt told us that their late summer surveys showed trends toward people canceling travel cards and cashing out points. But then earlier this week, <a href=\"https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-11-10/amex-says-its-cardholders-are-stockpiling-their-points-and-miles\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">American Express’ CFO said that their card customers <em>weren’t</em> cashing out points, and instead stocking them up to travel</a>.&nbsp; The two comments aren’t necessarily at odds. If you’re laid off, you can use those miles to buy groceries or clothes via gift cards or on Amazon. But if you don’t have to, the best value you’ll get for those points will be on travel. You’ll get less than a penny a point when cashing out Amex points on Amazon, but you can double that when you use them to book flights on, say, Singapore Air or KLM.&nbsp; So the hoarding makes sense -- if you can.</li><li>One of Matt’s points in our interview was that card companies will continue to tweak their rewards to keep people holding and using their cards because travelers are a valuable customer segment because, well, they typically spend chunks of money to travel. So as we come up on the end of the year, it’ll be interesting to see what those tweaks will be. Chase keeps extending the 5x grocery and gas bonus on their Southwest card while <a href=\"https://thepointsguy.com/news/amex-platinum-current-offer/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amex just announced a <em>10x</em> grocery and gas bonus as well as a 75K sign-up bonus for their Platinum card</a>.</li><li>Airlines and hotels are also rolling out their year-end offers. Back in the spring, all the majors gave existing status holders a push, extending elite expiration dates to Jan 2022 to keep them in the fold. So that settled everyone down for 2020. But now, with 2021 coming up and travel still in the hole, we’re starting to see new offers.<a href=\"http://news.aa.com/news/news-details/2020/Rewarding-AAdvantage-Members-With-More-Benefits-and-Flexibility-in-2021-AADV-10/default.aspx\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"> American opened the bidding last month</a>, knocking 20% off of 2021 status qualifying mileage clip levels (e.g., 40,000 instead of 50,000 to qualify for AAdvantage Platinum) and trying to get whatever they can for this year by counting October (last month), November, and December flights&nbsp; towards earning status in 2021, which is then good through Jan 2023. This afternoon, I got an email from <a href=\"https://hub.united.com/2020-11-12-united-airlines-makes-it-easier-to-earn-mileageplus-premier-status-for-2022-2648871852.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">United announcing their deal</a>. United’s status qualification methodology has gotten ridiculously complex over the past couple of years, but by at least one of their metrics, it looks like they’re dropping their status qualifying point (PQP -- don’t ask) clip levels by at least 30% <em>and</em> offering double points for flights taken in Q1 -- January, February, March -- next year. <a href=\"https://newsroom.hilton.com/hilton-honors/news/hilton-honors-adds-flexibility-value-for-members\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Hilton, though, made the simplest and deepest offer</a> -- knocking 50% off of all status qualifying measures -- stays, nights, points -- boom, mike drop.</li><li>It makes sense. Most statused travelers are business travelers and depending on which CEO is talking, business travel is down 85% (Delta), 90% (Southwest), and will be 3-4 years before it’s back to pre-pandemic levels (United). And those business travelers are the airlines’ and hotels’ most profitable customers. So expect to see Delta and Southwest and Marriott announcements soon, and maybe again this time next year if that “Well, it’s probably more like the end of 2021 or maybe into the beginning of 2022 before things start feeling normal” forecast turns out to be true.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #169</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li>As I mentioned at the end of the last episode, I restructured the RSS feed a bit so that I shouldn’t accidently trigger any more episode re-downloads. And I moved the episode number from the title to its own XML tag just to clean up how everything looks in your podcast app. Also, a few months ago, I tweaked the production workflow to add chapter markers in each episode. So, if your app supports them (Apple Podcasts and Overcast do), you can skip forward to the next section or, if you wanted to go back and listen to, say, the interview with Emily Thomas, you can go straight to it.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>, as well as asking Alexa and Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_169.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers','','inherit','closed','closed','','2936-revision-v1','','','2020-11-18 13:39:49','2020-11-18 18:39:49','',2936,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/18/2936-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
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(2950,1,'2020-11-18 15:31:15','2020-11-18 20:31:15','','YouTube Channel','','inherit','closed','closed','','2949-revision-v1','','','2020-11-18 15:31:15','2020-11-18 20:31:15','',2949,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/18/2949-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2952,1,'2020-11-30 17:41:42','2020-11-30 22:41:42','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/IMG_2073.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2789 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/IMG_2073-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a><figcaption>The hop taste isn\'t coming through</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>My first post-lockdown flight was a 90-minute Southwest non-stop from Chicago to Nashville. It wasn\'t bad, but not as casually easy as my last pre-coronavirus flight in February. We talk about that experience as well as Hertz\'s new cleaning program, my latest pair of Bose noise-cancelling headphones, and then wonder when business travel will return. All this and more at the<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_165.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"> <strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/860072707&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #165: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after a couple of runs back down to Nashville for family stuff -- one in the air and the other on the ground. And with COVID cases spiking in vacation spots like California and south Florida, it seems like that’s the market segment -- folks traveling to see friends and family -- that the airline and hotel companies are banking on. And that’s most of what I saw when flying back from Nashville a few Thursdays ago -- lots of families with kids, groups of people meeting up on the other side of security for maybe some 4 day-weekend trips? The tip-off for me on the business vs. leisure traveler mix was the TSA lines -- solid lines for regular TSA, while I pretty much walked straight through PreCheck. Another tip-off used to be mid-day lines at the bars, but with most of the airport restaurants closed up, that’s not a valid indicator right now.</li><li>Traveling right now requires a bit of nimbleness. On my first post-lockdown trip in May, the workout room at the Spring Hill Hampton Inn was open and I used it every day. Back down in June, there was a piece of paper taped to the door -- “Closed by order of the Health Department”. The front desk agent told me it was a couple of days old -- which explained all the banging in the room above me; somebody must’ve been doing their HIIT workout in their room. I didn’t know if I should be annoyed or impressed at how long they went at it. So for this last trip, I called the hotel the night before I left, before I packed my gym clothes vs. a yoga mat. They told me that they’d just reopened the workout room the day before, so the yoga mat went back in the closet.&nbsp;</li><li>It’s kinda the same very fluid situation right now with bars and restaurants. A few days before we got to Nashville, the mayor closed down any establishment with less than 50% of their sales in food, so pretty much all the bars and taprooms. Makes sense, not arguing it; just forced us to quickly pivot some of our plans. It also forced us to go a bit “old school”, back to making actual phone calls, asking “are you open; dine-in or just take-away?” since places seem to be having trouble updating their websites and their Facebook/Yelp/Google/OpenTable listings fast enough to keep up with the changes.</li><li>It proved out our decision to book the Residence Inn rather than the mainline Marriott a few blocks away. The full-size fridge held a lot more beer, and that kitchenette came in handy when we found out that<a href=\"https://www.princeshotchicken.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"https://www.princeshotchicken.com/\"> Prince’s Hot Chicken</a> was only doing take-away -- I can’t imagine trying to eat an extra-hot half-chicken perched on a king-size bed.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/JeffSpeed68/54450\">Hula Hoop Party</a> by Stefan Kartenberg (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. &nbsp;Ft: Martijn de Boer, Blue Wave Theory</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Lots has been written about how the COVID pandemic has massively accelerated changes toward contactless transactions. Microsoft’s CEO famously said back in April “We’ve seen two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months”.&nbsp; Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #136 — Is Cash A Waning King; Don’t Make It Hard to Cash in on Loyalty\">episode #136</a>, I said I felt like the last generation of cash payers, that my younger colleagues rarely carried cash; they paid for everything with a card. Looking into my wallet, I had the same $200 worth of 20’s in June that I’d taken out of an ATM in March. Nobody wants to handle cash; they don’t even want to handle my card (Most extreme experience - A bartender at Asgard Brewing’s taproom in Columbia, TN sprayed my Visa card with diluted chlorine bleach before swiping it to pay my bill. Made my wallet smell like a swimming pool). As much as possible, places want us to pre-order and pre-pay, so we just pick up our purchases in a socially distant way and then head home. It’s also switched up some opinions on using facial recognition for flight check ins. Pre-coronavirus, the push was from governments as a better way to do security screenings and to improve immigration compliance, and this was getting big pushback on privacy concerns. Now, it’s pivoted. The push is from travel companies using facial recognition as a way of providing the touchless check-in experience that most travelers now want.&nbsp;</li><li>But facial recognition is stymied by face masks which we wear when we’re checking in at airports and hotel lobbies. As is Face ID when trying to unlock my iPhone to get to my boarding pass or digital room key. Until I can downgrade to an iPhone SE with that old-school Touch ID that unlocks using my thumb print, I think I’m going to have to shorten the PIN code on my iPhone 11 Pro. I lengthened it for better security but am banging it in more and more often. And I’ve noticed the iPhone is really slow about recognizing my number presses -- or it misses some when I go too fast (like when I’m trying to pull up a boarding pass in line) and errors out.&nbsp;</li><li>Walking down the Hertz Five Star aisle at Nashville Airport, I saw their version of paper rings that hotels used to put around toilet seats to “certify” they’d been cleaned. In Hertz’s case, they put a “<a href=\"http://ir.hertz.com/2020-05-15-Hertz-Introduces-Hertz-Gold-Standard-Clean-Sealed-and-Certified-Vehicles\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Hertz Gold Standard Clean</a>” sticker across the driver-side center pillar (the B pillar for all my gearhead listeners) so that you break it when you open the driver door to get it. Nice gesture, though it kept me from doing my usual walk down the aisle, opening the door of a bunch of cars to check their mileage. Seemed rude to break all those stickers, though I did notice more than a few broken ones when choosing my car. Way back in the old days of TravelCommons, we used to talk about the TSA doing “security theater” in the screening lines. This feels a bit like “sanitation theater”.&nbsp;</li><li>I finally broke down and bought a new set of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2BbOqyA\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bose noise cancelling headphones -- the new 700’s</a>. This is my third set of Bose cans. Bought my first pair in 2009. I was flying a lot of short flights at the time, and in those days before regional jets, I was on a lot of prop planes. And they’re noisy -- not just on take-off, but the entire flight. After a while, I started to notice fatigue when getting off those planes. Talking to a few folks, they said the noise heightens stress. A friend told me how much he liked his Bose cans, and so I burnt some Amex Membership Rewards points on Amazon for a pair of Quiet Comfort 2’s. It was a revelation; flick the switch and, whoosh, quiet. I took them on every flight, until 3 years later, I left them in a seatback pocket when rushing off a plane to make a tight connection. I immediately lit up some more Membership Rewards points for a new pair - <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3eF2iPk\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">QC-15’s</a>. Four years later, I replaced a worn out set of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2OwiIPF\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">ear cushions</a>. And though the non-replaceable headband cushion is looking pretty ratty, the now 8-year-old headphones still work great. What got me to replace them was the wire. I’d be sitting in my usual aisle seat, plugged into my iPhone (using one of those dongles that Apple no longer gives you with a new phone). At some point in the flight, the folks in the middle and window seats would want to get up and use the toilet and inevitably, I’d snag the wire on the arm of the seat, pull the headphones off my head, and/or launch my phone a row forward.&nbsp; I could’ve gotten a pair of the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3eFWLYJ\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">QC-35’s</a> -- same form factor without the wire -- but decided to go all next-generation with the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2BbOqyA\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">700’s</a>, which has meant some adjustment pains. Like there are buttons in places where they never were before. So when I grab the ear cups to slip the headphones off, I manage to hit a button that changes the noise reduction level or summons Siri. Also new is using the touch surface on the right ear cup to control things. You tap or swipe the right ear cup to accept or drop a call, pause a song, raise or lower the volume, or skip 30 seconds to fast-forward past a podcast ad. I’m learning to be a bit more precise in my motions; I’ve already dropped a couple of calls when I was just trying to turn down the call volume.&nbsp; One thing I really like -- more for working-at-home than in-flight usage -- is that the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2BbOqyA\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">700’s</a> can pair with two Bluetooth devices at the same time. So, for me, I have them paired with my MacBook Air and my iPhone and they switch seamlessly between the two. Nice when I’ve got Zoom calls on my Mac and then a phone call on my iPhone. And, call me shallow, but they look a bit cooler than my old <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3eF2iPk\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">QC-15’s</a>. I’ve had the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2BbOqyA\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">700’s</a> for about a month now and really like them. I guess you could say they’re “TravelCommons Approved.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/bridges/15563\">i knew</a> by bridges (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp;Ft: shannonsongs</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>First Post-Lockdown Flight</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Way back at the beginning of the lockdown, the first Saturday of April, I was on a Zoom beer drinking call with Rob Cheshire, a long-time TravelCommons listener and now a podcaster -- he interviews UK craft brewers on his <em><a href=\"https://thisweekincraft.beer/podcast/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">This Week in Craft Beer</a></em>. It was a Saturday afternoon call, for Rob and the other guys in London; just past noon for me in Chicago, but hey…. And somewhere around our second or third beer, Rob asked me “When will you be comfortable getting on a plane again?” I really didn\'t have a good answer. It was early days; I wasn’t sure.</li><li>Fast forward to the back half of June. I needed to get down to Nashville again and didn’t have the time to burn 8 hrs for the drive down and another 8 on the way back. I had some travel funds sitting in my Southwest account from a couple of April trip cancellations, and Southwest flies 6 non-stop 737s between Chicago and Nashville while American and United only do smaller regional jets, and Southwest isn’t packing them full -- booking those bigger planes at ⅔’s capacity -- while American and United say they’ll let you know if your flight books solid. All told, a pretty easy decision to fly Southwest. One of the benefits of living in Chicago, a rare 3-hub town.</li><li>The day before my flight, when getting my boarding pass on the Southwest app (my usual process; I was contactless before it was a thing), I had to click through a certification that I wasn’t running a temperature and that I hadn’t been exposed to or tested positive for COVID-19. OK, click. Then I get a screen telling me that face masks are required to board. Makes sense, click. And now I get my boarding pass.</li><li>Monday morning, Irene drops me off at a pretty sedate departures curb at Midway. I mask up and walk in. It’s not empty, but it’s definitely not the normal Monday morning bustle. It feels more like a Wednesday early afternoon. There’s a bit of a line at regular security, but no line at PreCheck. The TSA agent asks me to drop my mask for a moment to check my ID and then waves me through. I noticed that TSA still has their October 2020 Real ID deadline warning signs on the podium. Hmm… I remember reading at the end of March that the TSA has <a href=\"https://www.dhs.gov/real-id\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">pushed the deadline a year to October 2021</a>. Guess they haven’t had a chance to issue updated signs. You’d think they’d just take the old ones down.</li><li>Most of the restaurants and stores were closed; a pretty common situation. Kev Monteith, a TravelCommons listener and <a href=\"https://travelswithkev.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amtrak travel blogger</a>, replied to one of my Twitter posts saying “I flew Southwest a few weeks ago. Layovers are rough because most places in the airports are closed. I was at STL and only found beer at Burger King and Dunkin Doughnuts.” I would’ve been happy for just a coffee. Down in the main Southwest concourse, some gates were closed off with curtains which I assume was to keep people from sitting there so they don’t have to clean it.</li><li>Looking around the terminal, it felt like mask usage was about 80%. Just about everyone was wearing them when walking around. I’d see some people not wearing them while sitting at the gate, though those folks were distancing themselves from everyone else. I’d see kids ripping their masks off as soon as they got off the jetway. I did notice, though, a sizable minority of mask wearers were just covering their mouths, leaving their noses uncovered -- pilots, cleaning crew, passengers, wheelchair people. Now I’m no epidemiologist, but that seems to defeat the purpose.</li><li>When the agent called boarding, she said “There’s 40 of you on a plane with 175 seats. So everyone gets their own row, and please, don’t everyone sit up front. We need a bit of weight distribution.” It was a quick boarding; we pushed back and took off early. These truly are unprecedented times.</li><li>Nashville was more crowded on Thursday morning when I headed back home. Mostly families as I said at the top of the show. The end of the concourse where the&nbsp; Southwest gates are was as crowded as usual. There were signs around saying that 3 seats between people equals 6 ft, but there were too many people waiting to make it practical; at least everyone is masked up. I walked back up the terminal to find a bit more space and there, tucked away behind some construction sheeting, I found an empty gate. I’m all alone, mega social distanced, so I take off my mask, log into the WiFi and do some work until the Southwest app on my phone bings, telling me that boarding has begun.&nbsp;</li><li>There were a lot more than 40 people on this flight. I found an empty row and slid all the way over to the window seat since it’s only a 90-minute flight. About 3 minutes later, a guy sat down in the aisle seat. Nobody in the middle seat. Everyone wearing masks and nobody’s head right next to mine, I was good to go. Maybe helped just a bit by the fact that, in those 3 minutes, I pointed all three air jets toward the empty middle seat and turned them on full blast, creating an air curtain between me and the aisle seat -- just in case.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/3lb3r3th/44072\">Misunderstood</a> by 3lb3r3th (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. &nbsp;Ft: Alchemistry</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>When Does Business Travel Come Back?</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>My son Andrew and his girlfriend took the 6am flight to LGA earlier this week. I asked him “How full was the flight?” “Maybe 20 people; mostly families,” he said. Didn’t surprise me that a Thursday 6am LGA flight was only at 11% capacity. That’s normally a business travel run; people getting up at 0 dark 30 in Chicago to make 10am meetings in Manhattan. But there’s not many business travelers now.&nbsp; While business travelers only make up about 10% of passengers on major airlines, they provide between 55 and 75% of the profits. You might could think they’re subsidizing the budget fares those families are using.</li><li>Over the past month, I’ve been talking with Sales VPs at companies that deliver complex IT services. If anybody would be feeling the bite of not traveling, I thought it would be these guys. I’ve done a number of these deals, and they always involved locking all the right decision makers in a conference room to hash out all the contract details and ride herd over the transition. But I was completely wrong. They all said that work hasn’t slowed down during the lockdown. They’ve been able to do all that conference room work over Zoom. Indeed, they said being virtual has made it easier for them. Pre-lockdown, one of their biggest challenges was calendar wrangling -- being able to get all their execs and the client execs into that conference room at the same time. Now, they just click some buttons and everyone shows up in Zoom gallery mode -- no travel planning, no scrambling after cancelled or delayed flights. They all said they love the ease of virtual meetings and, at the end of the day, closing the lid on their laptops and having dinner with the family every night.</li><li>Kinda supports the narrative that business travel will never rebound; back to the Microsoft CEO’s quote: in 2 months, we’ve advanced 2 years in virtual work culture. But when I probed a bit, I found that Zoom hasn’t completely replaced an airplane ticket. While these guys have been able to virtually close deals they had in their sales funnel, virtual meetings don’t seem to be replacing these deals; getting new prospects into the top of the sales funnel. So while things are looking good now, they’re beginning to worry about 4-6 months from now.</li><li>This was the exact opposite of what I’d expected. I thought the give and take of negotiations, the sidebar conversations, the emotional content, wouldn’t translate into video calls. But it looks like I was wrong; that once a deal has some momentum and a structure to guide everyone, the in-person hammering out turns out to be a nice-to-have. And the reason new opportunities aren’t coming in is that they need more exploratory, abstract, wide-ranging conversations that lack that guiding structure and selling a team as much as a product -- at least for complex services -- and that’s tough to do over a pane of glass.</li><li>And so they all said that they’d probably start traveling again -- reluctantly -- by the end of this month. But I do think this, call it a 4-month exercise in figuring out virtual work methods and cultures will move the set point, everybody’s default decision toward virtual meetings. And so maybe a bit less focused on high-profit road warriors and more dependent on those cost-conscious families. Does this mean repointing the 6am LGA flights to Cancun? They’re going to have to seriously reengineer those drink carts.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #165</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_165.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #165 — First Post Lockdown Flight; When Do We Travel For Business Again?','','inherit','closed','closed','','2788-revision-v1','','','2020-11-30 17:41:42','2020-11-30 22:41:42','',2788,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/30/2788-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2954,1,'2020-12-10 15:33:14','2020-12-10 20:33:14','<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/new2-640x641-1.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2641\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/new2-640x641-1-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>I just wrapped up two months in downtown Phoenix and want to pass along my favorite hangouts for food and beer. When I started traveling to Phoenix in the mid-\'90\'s, there wasn\'t much to downtown Phoenix other than the Hyatt Regency hotel. Today, stadiums for the Phoenix Suns and the Arizona Diamondbacks, and a downtown campus for Arizona State University support a solid selection of restaurants, coffee shops, and bars. Below are the places that I found myself going back to again and again during my 2-month stay.\n\n<a href=\"https://mariscosplayahermosa.com\"><strong>Mariscos Playa Hermosa</strong></a> While not technically within the DTPHX boundary, this place has the best Mexican seafood I\'ve ever had -- and that includes my dinners in San Jose del Cabo over last Christmas Break. The <em>Pulpo y Callo Parrillada</em> (grilled octopus leg and scallops) and <em>Camarones Fantasia</em> (shrimp stuffed into mild chile and then wrapped in bacon) are my favorites, but it\'s all good. Worth the short Uber/Lyft ride. (1605 E Garfield St)\n\n<a href=\"http://harumisushiaz.com\"><strong>Harumi Sushi</strong></a> Sushi in the desert doesn\'t immediately jump to the top of my list of food must-do\'s, but Harumi hits all my sushi hot buttons -- nice pieces of sashimi served with fresh wasabi and an interesting selection of rolls. It\'s a small place that gets crowded, so check out the wait time on Yelp before you walk over. (114 W Adams St though the door is north of Adams on 1st St)\n\n<strong><a href=\"http://www.pizzeriabianco.com/\">Pizzeria Bianco</a></strong> Always on the lists of the top pizza places in the US. While I\'m not sure if deserves all those accolades, it\'s very good thin crust pizza. And Bar Bianco next door is a very cool space for pre- or post-dinner cocktails. (623 E Adams St in Heritage Square near the AZ Science Center)\n\n<strong><a href=\"http://thearrogantbutcher.com\">Arrogant Butcher</a> </strong> The place I\'d go when I wanted to eat at the bar and watch a ball game. I like the Butcher\'s Meatballs for a smaller meal and the Beef Short Rib Stew when a bit hungrier. It\'s kitty-corner from Talking Stick Arena, so it can get crowded before a Suns game. (2 E Jefferson St at S 1st St)\n\n<a href=\"http://thewhiningpig.com\"><strong>The Whining Pig</strong></a> A block north of Talking Stick Arena, The Whining Pig is a classic low-key/no-attitude craft beer bar -- a great draft selection, a huge can/bottle menu, knowledgable bartenders, and a solid selection of bar and card games. My go-to beer bar in DTPHX. (201 E Washington St, though the door is south of Washington on 2nd St)\n\n<a href=\"http://thetheodore.beer\"><strong>The Theodore</strong></a> Great craft beer bar at the west end of the hip Roosevelt Row district. Nice <a href=\"https://untappd.com/v/the-theodore/9474701\">draft menu</a>, color coded by style, and a cooler full of interesting cans and bottles for drinking there or back at your hotel. Good-sized place -- comfy couches inside and patio seating out front and on the side. (110 E Roosevelt St at N 1st St)\n\n<strong><a href=\"https://azwbeer.com/dtphx-beer-garden/\">Arizona Wilderness DTPHX</a></strong> A block-and-a-half down from The Theodore is Arizona Wilderness\'s downtown beer garden. Sit outside around the fire pit (during the winter months) or inside (during the summer months). They have a wide-ranging <a href=\"https://untappd.com/v/arizona-wilderness-dtphx/8695423\">beer menu</a>, many of which feature Arizona-sourced ingredients like honey, lemons, prickly pear, carrots, and sweet potato. (201 E Roosevelt St) .','My food and beer hangouts in Downtown Phoenix (#DTPHX)','','inherit','closed','closed','','2640-revision-v1','','','2020-12-10 15:33:14','2020-12-10 20:33:14','',2640,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/10/2640-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2955,1,'2020-12-10 15:59:07','2020-12-10 20:59:07','In past TravelCommons episodes, we\'ve talked about how important it is for a frequent traveler to find good restaurants that welcome a single diner.  In spite of a former colleague\'s advice to \"<a href=\"http://www.keithferrazzi.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">never eat alone</a>\", I often find myself with nothing but the <a href=\"http://www.usatoday.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">USA Today </a>as a dining partner.  Sure, I could dine in the hotel bar, but I can only eat just so many <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobb_salad\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Cobb salads</a> and watch just so many re-runs of <a href=\"http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/sportscenter/index\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">ESPN SportsCenter</a>.  Here are 4 recommendations to eating alone in your hotel room.\n<ul>\n 	<li><strong><a href=\"http://www.avecrestaurant.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Avec</a></strong> - <a href=\"http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&amp;hl=en&amp;geocode=&amp;q=615+w+randolph,+chicago&amp;sll=41.80855,-87.922509&amp;sspn=0.007469,0.013819&amp;g=615+w+randolph,+chicago&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;ll=41.885234,-87.643218&amp;spn=0.00746,0.013819&amp;z=16&amp;iwloc=addr\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">615 W Randolph, Chicago</a> - No, I don\'t eat alone in my home town.  But if I had to, I\'d be a regular at this West Loop restaurant.  They have a good selection of Portuguese wines -- not always an easy find -- and \"small plates\" menu focused on Mediterranean flavors.  I like to sit about 2/3rd\'s down the bar in front of the wood burning oven and watch the chefs do their thing -- much more interesting than any ESPN-blaring plasma screen.  I get a <em>large</em> order of the <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salumi\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">salumi</a> plate, a selection of 5 sausages cured in the fridge behind the bar, and then a vegetable dish to assuage my guilt.</li>\n 	<li><strong><a href=\"http://www.sushisams.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Sushi Sam\'s</a></strong> - <a href=\"http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&amp;hl=en&amp;geocode=&amp;q=218+e+3rd+ave,+san+mateo,+ca&amp;sll=37.566521,-122.3227&amp;sspn=0.007943,0.013819&amp;g=218+e+3rd+ave,+san+mateo,+ca&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;ll=37.566521,-122.3227&amp;spn=0.007943,0.013819&amp;z=16&amp;iwloc=addr\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">281 E 3rd Ave, San Mateo, CA</a> - Sushi restaurants seem to be second only to hotel sports bars as the default hangout for many travelers -- trading high cholesterol for <a href=\"http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/thedishrag/2008/12/jeremy-pivens-m.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">mercury poisoning</a>.  However, when I\'m in the Bay Area running up and down the 101, I always end up at the sushi bar ordering up the <a href=\"http://sushifaq.com/sushiotaku/2006/10/07/omakase-sushi/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">omakase</a> sashimi -- the chef\'s choice.  It\'s not cheap, but Sam serves up a selection of fish and preparations I rarely see at other sushi joints.</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://www.clydecommon.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><strong>Clyde Common</strong></a> - <a href=\"http://maps.google.com/maps?ie=UTF8&amp;oe=utf-8&amp;client=firefox-a&amp;q=clyde+commons+portland&amp;fb=1&amp;cid=0,0,9204446187365665864&amp;ll=45.523924,-122.681386&amp;spn=0.007021,0.013819&amp;z=16&amp;iwloc=A\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">SW 10th and Stark, Portland</a> -This recommendation may violate my rules -- Clyde Common <em>seems </em>to be the restaurant for the <a href=\"http://www.acehotel.com/portland\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Ace Hotel</a> -- but the great food and communal table seating wins it a recommendation for a dining-alone traveler.  The menu is probably the most adventurous of my four recommendations, but a good choice if you\'re willing to color outside the lines a bit -- grilled rabbit,  salt cod, ravioli with beef heart.</li>\n</ul>','Good Restaurants for One','','inherit','closed','closed','','114-revision-v1','','','2020-12-10 15:59:07','2020-12-10 20:59:07','',114,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/10/114-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2957,1,'2020-12-16 22:32:05','2020-12-17 03:32:05','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":2960,\"width\":300,\"height\":300,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large is-resized\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2960\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"/><figcaption>How Do I Insert This Into My iPhone<br>(DoD photo by EJ Hersom)</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>No Thanksgiving travel, but looking at the travel volume for this, the busiest travel week of the year, shows just how far things have fallen. The Qantas CEO said \"No vax, no fly\", so we dig into the emerging world of digital vaccine passports. And then I trace my travel genealogy, wondering if road warrior-ism is hereditary. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_170.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go over to the <em>Subscribe</em> section on the right to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #170: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. And again, no travel since the last episode. Not too surprising given the way things are going right now. Back in April, I’d jumped on one of those smokin’ American Airlines’ promotions to book flights to London for Thanksgiving. Which then -- not surprisingly -- got cancelled at the beginning of September.&nbsp; So I was back to what has been my typical Thanksgiving travel pattern for the past 10-15 years -- staying at home to avoid the crowds on what is always the busiest travel week of the year. PK -- pre-kids -- Irene and I would always travel over the holidays, splitting Thanksgiving and Christmas between my family in Southern California and hers in Chicago. But post-kids -- which is also PK, so I guess it should be AK -- after kids -- we started staying at home. And I’d figure out how to “ground” myself from business travel also. I found that the challenge of holiday travel wasn’t necessarily the crowds; it’s the make-up of the crowds; what some road warriors might call “clueless” travelers. I think “amateur” is certainly a more charitable and probably more accurate term. Even more so this year with so many road warriors out of practice after being off the road since March. Lots of those folks definitely in danger of losing their “professional” traveler status.</li><li>I saw an interesting graph the other day comparing last year’s and this year’s day-by-day airport travel volumes over the Thanksgiving weekend. No surprises comparing the Wednesday travel volumes, what is traditionally the busiest travel day of the year. Last year’s Wednesday saw 2.6 million passengers, almost 2½ times busier than this year. I expected that. But what really caught my eye was that this year’s peak day -- <a href=\"https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/thanksgiving-travel-volume-2020-pandemic/index.html\">Sunday at about 1.2 million </a>-- was still a lot less than last year’s slowest day, Thanksgiving, at about 1.6 million. I didn’t travel last year at Thanksgiving, but did in 2018.&nbsp; Irene and I broke our no-travel rule and flew down to Santa Fe, NM on Thanksgiving Day. Back in episode <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/12/17/podcast-147-holiday-travel-tips-notes-from-santa-fe/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">#147</a>, I said that Thanksgiving Day flight was one of the least stressful travel experiences I’d ever had — no traffic on the drive to ORD, no lines. The TSA agents were hanging around just looking for people to screen. And that day, there were around 25% more people in airports than this year’s <em>busiest</em> day. I shouldn’t be surprised, but all the pictures I saw in the news coverage made it look like airports were a lot more crowded.&nbsp;</li><li>Our apartment is just south of one of the northern approaches to ORD. Flights from the east come in over the lake -- seats A, B, and C get a great view of the city skyline while seats D, E, and F get to look down into Wrigley Field -- then&nbsp; over the northwest side of the city, landing on one of the runways north of the terminal. I’ve always been impressed by the choreography of ORD. On a clear Friday afternoon, driving up the tollway that runs east of the airport, I’d see planes on parallel approaches landing simultaneously -- one to the north of the terminal and one to the south -- and looking up, see the lights of planes on approach behind them -- 2, 3, 4.... Back in April, during Chicago’s lockdown, I’d sit out on the rooftop deck -- because what else was I going to do? -- and maybe see one plane coming in over the lake on that approach. But now I’m seeing more planes -- sometimes 3, 4 in a row. Don’t know that they’re all carrying passengers -- some could be temporary cargo carriers taking some of that e-commerce money, with boxes instead of seats under the overhead bins. But I can feel travel starting to pick up. It could be a tough winter, but I’m trying to look out over the horizon a bit; trying to look forward to spring.</li><li>Bridge Music -- Leviathan by Kirkoid (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Kirkoid/31109</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>TravelCommons contributor Allan Marko commented on my little lockdown game with my Google Mini -- changing the voice to, say, an English accent and then asking about the weather in London.&nbsp; Allan wrote:<ul><li>I often change the Siri voice for a bit of variety. Currently “Australian Female” is providing my CarPlay directions. you can also ask Siri to “Play TravelCommons”…</li></ul></li><li>Which immediately got me digging into Siri’s settings, looking for the Voice options. I found I had a choice of American, Australian, British, Indian, Irish, and South African. Since I’d already used the first three with my Google Mini, it was between the last three. I chose Irish for now, but will probably switch to South African before the end of the month. Actually, Waze, the nav app, always impressed me with the number of voice and language options. Every once in a while, I switch Irene’s Waze over to Hungarian before she’s heading out somewhere. For some reason, I get more of a laugh out of it than she does.</li><li>TravelCommons listener Dan Grabon and I have been trading notes as we’ve each slogged through Thoreau’s <em>Walden</em>. We both started it back in April, in the height of the lockdown. Everybody was deciding that, with nothing much else to do, it was a good time to pick up that classic you’ve always been meaning to get to. Dan started out with <em>The Brothers Karamazov</em>, which I thought was damned impressive. I first reached for Whitman’s <em>Leaves of Grass</em>, but then thought I needed something a bit more down-to-earth, something that wouldn’t need quite that level of interpretation and abstract thinking. And <em>Walden</em>, about Thoreau’s self-isolation in the woods outside of Concord, MA, seemed a better fit with the lockdown. Dan finished last month, at the beginning of November. I was 50 pages behind, so I didn’t finish ‘til Thanksgiving -- it was tough cutting through the tryptophan fog, but I gutted it through. Dan said he was staying with Thoreau, moving onto <em>Civil Disobedience</em> before shelving the book. I pivoted to non-fiction, <em>Why We Sleep</em>, where a neuroscientist and sleep expert spends some 300+ pages saying “If you don’t sleep 8 hours, you’re killing yourself” which got me doing some mental math. Between jet lag from all the&nbsp; international flights and waking up at 4am to make 6am flights to LGA, I’ve probably dropped 5 years off my life. Though, given some dementia running through my family history, I might not have remembered those years anyways.</li><li>And I show up on the other side of the mic talking travel pro tips with Matt Wilson on his <a href=\"https://www.under30experiences.com/blog/travel-like-a-pro-with-mark-peacock-of-travelcommons\">Millennial Travel Podcast</a>.&nbsp; I’m trying to remember when we recorded this -- had to be pre-April 2019 because I was still in the suburban TravelCommons studio and Matt was hanging out down in Costa Rica. The connection fuzzes out now and again, but it was a fun conversation. I’ll put a link in the episode in the show notes but fair warning -- it’s mostly me rattling on for an hour. Listening back to it, I’m kinda embarrassed that I don’t give Matt much of a chance to get a word in edgewise.</li><li>In the last episode, I talked about the work-from-hotel offerings from Marriott, Hilton, and Hyatt. They all had their own twists, but Hyatt’s was the most unique in that their “Work from Hyatt” offer was resort-focused and had a 7-night minimum. I said it wasn’t so much a WeWork replacement as a digital nomad trial. Well, I’m guessing that they didn’t get much uptake on it because I just got another email from Hyatt with a new offering -- “Office for the Day” -- that pretty much matches Marriott’s Day Pass. Like I said last month, these offerings all feel a bit “toe in the water”, a bit opportunistic. And now that we’re starting to get better visibility into post-vaccine timelines, I wonder how long they’ll last -- will people still want to pay to work in a hotel room after all the Starbucks stores have reopened.</li><li>I’ve talked in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/12/podcast-120-where-do-guidebooks-fit-in-i-hate-shopping-for-suitcases\">past</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/09/28/podcast-124-craft-beer-hunting-i-hate-rick-steves\">episodes</a> about how I’m a bit of a knuckle-dragger regarding printed travel guides. I still find a physical book useful when traveling. But I’ve been wondering how quickly these physical guides will be able to push out post-COVID editions to reflect the closures of bars, restaurants, and independent shops they’ve recommended. I was running through my own Chicago recommendation list from 2019. A bunch of my favorite places have closed; it’s about an even split between “Closed forever, good-bye, we’ve taken down our sign” and “Closed until Spring… we hope.” The final proofs of the 2021 editions have to already be baked if not already at the printers. I dunno, maybe they’ll all post errata pages that you can download, print off, and then stick in your books.</li><li>In a massive intersection of all things social media, I posted a <a href=\"https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/tiktok-hotel-room-chef/index.html\">CNN article</a> on the TravelCommons Facebook page that a friend, a hotel company CIO, sent me on LinkedIn that showed TikTok videos of people cooking meals in hotel rooms using an iron for a griddle, a hot water kettle for a steamer, a pants presser as an oven, and the one that really wowed me -- a coffee maker as a sous vide water bath. I don’t know if I should be impressed by the ingenuity or looking to set up as a ghost kitchen/delivery service wherever they are because I’ve never seen anyone go to that extent to cook their own meal in a hotel room. Even guys I knew trying to squeeze the last pennies out of their per diems wouldn’t do much more than boil water for their Cup O’Noodles or work hard not to burn their microwave popcorn. I’ll also put a link in the show notes to the TikTok account of one of the guys, Jago Randles. His TikTok series,<a href=\"https://www.tiktok.com/@jagoscrandles\"> Isolation Kitchen</a>, has about 150,000 followers. He does some impressive stuff. But I will make sure, going forward, that I rinse out the coffee maker and wipe down the iron before using them.</li><li>For many frequent travelers, a key early milestone of the pandemic was when airlines and hotels gave them a year’s push on their status -- moving the expiration date from Jan 2021 to Jan 2022. Big sigh of relief. Then for Southwest fliers, another milestone -- drink coupon expiration dates all got pushed to the end of this year. Whew! All’s right in the traveling world. But a couple of days ago, I was rummaging around in my messenger bag and out tumbled 5 Southwest drink coupons -- one with a Sept expiration date; the rest, December 31. Look Southwest, I don’t want to seem greedy. I did get a year’s push on A-List and 6 months on Companion Pass. But I’d love you even more if you gave me another 6 months on those drink coupons. Nope, don’t say anything now; just think about it.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge music -- Ethereal (nop mix) by @nop (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Lancefield/34818</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Prove My Vax So I Can Fly</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Last month, I saw that quote from the Qantas CEO -- \"We will ask people to have a vaccination before they can get on the aircraft\'\' -- and thought, well it’s kinda the next logical step from Delta’s ATL-Rome and United’s EWR-LHR flights were you have to take COVID test and prove you’re negative before you can board.&nbsp;</li><li>I remember going to a travel clinic before my first flight to India; getting shot up with MMR, DTP, Hepatitis, and Typhoid vaccines and being given my <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carte_Jaune\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Yellow Card</a> -- officially my International Certificate of Vaccination or Prophylaxis -- listing all my shots. They told me to carry that with me to India, which I did and to Vietnam and Thailand and Singapore and China. No one ever asked to see it, not in an airport, an immigration line, a hotel,....&nbsp; It looks like the plans are that we’ll get a vaccination card from the CDC after receiving the first dose of COVID-19 vaccine. But that card isn’t meant as a validated proof of vaccination; it’s more of a reminder to go back in a couple of weeks for the second shot.&nbsp;</li><li>That handwritten piece of paper probably won’t pass muster at the Qantas boarding gate, and so that’s why we’re starting to see a bit of a vaccine passport app land grab going on. United has been testing the <a href=\"https://thecommonsproject.org/commonpass\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">CommonPass app</a> on their COVID-free EWR-LHR flight. You get your COVID test at the United Club near gate C93 and the results are uploaded into the app which then will display a QR code to the gate agent. CommonPass is being spun up with support from the World Economic Forum. Cathay Pacific, Lufthansa, SwissAir, and JetBlue also have plans to use it. Delta and Alitalia are trialing the <a href=\"https://www.aokpass.com/en/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">AOKPass </a>developed by the Int’l Chamber of Commerce on their COVID-free ATL-Rome flight. It uses blockchain for medical certificate storage, so bonus points to them in technology buzzword bingo. IATA, the Int’l Air Transport Association, an airline trade group, says they’re finishing up their app, <a href=\"https://www.iata.org/en/programs/passenger/travel-pass/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Travel Pass</a>, and will be piloting it with IAG, the parent of British Airways, Iberia, and Aer Lingus, in early 2021. And the World Health Organization says they’re looking at Estonia’s e-vaccination certificates as <a href=\"https://www.who.int/news-room/feature-stories/detail/estonia-and-who-to-jointly-develop-digital-vaccine-certificate-to-strengthen-covax#:~:text=WHO%20and%20Estonia%20recently%20agreed,access%20to%20COVID%2D19%20vaccines.\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the basis of a sort of “smart” Yellow Card app</a>.</li><li>I’m sure I’m missing a whole lot more; I just got tired of reading the same rehashed press release verbiage about secure and verifiable storage of health certifications. Going through this, it starts to feel like the health equivalent of those scooter apps, where I need half-a-dozen of them on my phone so I can rent the closest scooter to me. Unless someone blinks, it seems like I’ll need 3 or 4 of these vaccine passports to cover all my travel bases. But after reading through all the press releases and the infographics and the FAQs, none of these apps were real clear on how I get my physical CDC vaccine card into their digital storage vault. And I’m guessing that doctors and clinics are going to be more focused on taking care of patients and keeping their COVID vaccines cold, and not all that interested in entering my vaccination information into all those apps. Maybe Australia is further ahead with electronic health records, but I’m thinking, at least for the next year or so, that my CDC card is gonna be the best that Qantas and the gang are going to get.</li><li>Bridge music -- My Flaming Heart by Wired Ant (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial &nbsp;(3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Wired_Ant/36862 Ft: Javolenus</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Hereditary Road Warriors</strong> </h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I was reading some research, as one does during a lockdown advisory when one gets caught up running down a clickhole, about <a href=\"https://research.fb.com/blog/2016/03/do-jobs-run-in-families/\">jobs running in the family</a>. Some of the stats -- a son with a military father is 5 times more likely to enlist himself while if his mother is a lawyer, he’s 6.6 times more likely to follow her to the bar; a daughter with a scientist father is almost 4 times more likely to be a scientist. Indeed, when I was deciding my college major, I was leaning toward&nbsp; chemistry but chose chemical engineering mostly because my grandfather and father were both engineers.</li><li>Which got me thinking -- does traveling -- careers that require frequent traveling -- run in the family? Again, looking back on my family, my grandfather traveled a lot when he worked for Sears, checking out vendors for hard goods -- tools, small machinery -- and working with them on new products. My dad designed farm machinery -- things like hay balers and cotton pickers -- for International Harvester. He’d often be on the road for weeks at a time, testing prototypes at farms around the country, looking for different crop and field conditions, and then at plants helping to set up the manufacturing lines for the finished machine. And so I grew up seeing that rhythm of travel -- Dad at home, Dad packing, saying good-bye, and then getting on with our lives until he came back. This was back in the late ‘60’s and into the 70’s, so no cheap long-distance let alone messaging or email or video calls. He was gone, with the exception of a postcard or two, until he came back.</li><li>And then when I joined the workforce, the first day of my first real job out of school, I got on a plane and made the first of what’s been hundreds of flights between ORD and DFW.&nbsp; So many that, pretty soon, I got to know the women working the front desk at the DFW Admirals Club. One morning, one of them asks me if I’d maybe like to meet her daughter. Awkward. I asked her, “Would you want your daughter dating someone who’s out of town as much as I am?” She paused for a moment and then said, “No, not really”.&nbsp;</li><li>Also around this time, my dad had gotten promoted past the level of going out to the field and so was traveling a lot less. But my mother took a purchasing executive role and with that, the need for a lot of travel to vendors. So while travel was generational/ “hereditary” from my father to me, my mother and I started road warrior-ing at the same time, so we were more like travel “siblings” -- comparing hotel notes, competing on frequent flier status and perks.&nbsp;</li><li>Will traveling for a living continue to a 4th generation? Tough to tell right now; both kids measure their commute in feet rather than miles during the lockdown, and friends running consulting operations tell me the current state is great for staff productivity -- an hour sales call takes an hour, rather than a day’s worth of travel for that hour, and working remotely with clients saves the client money and consultants don’t get burnt out trying to balance work and home needs. As I said back in the March and July episodes, I don’t buy that 100% remote is the “new normal”, but I also don’t believe it will snap back to 2019 levels, not after what will have been a year’s-plus time working out the mechanics of virtual working. But will there be another generation of road warriors in my family? It’ll probably take a couple of years to figure that out.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #170</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li>I’ve made another little tweak to the RSS feed -- the file that all the podcast apps use to pull new episodes for your subscribed podcasts. This tweak affects the episode descriptions in the top podcast apps. For those apps that support it, there are now clickable links in the episode notes or descriptions. In last month’s episode, there were clickable links to the gift ideas blog post on the TravelCommons website as well as the episode show notes page. Going forward, there will always be a link to the episode’s show notes page. I’ve tested that this works on Apple Podcasts, Overcast (which is what I use), Stitcher, Pocket Casts, Podcast Addict, and Google Podcasts -- all of which make up 70-80% (depending on who’s doing the counting) of the TravelCommons downloads. So, if you get a chance, flip over to the episode description right now and check it out.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>, as well as asking Alexa, Siri, and Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_170.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors','','\nhttps://research.fb.com/blog/2016/03/do-jobs-run-in-families/','2021-10-01 17:09:12','2021-10-01 22:09:12','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=2957',0,'post','',0),
(2958,1,'2020-12-16 21:47:52','2020-12-17 02:47:52','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":2935,\"width\":300,\"height\":300,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large is-resized\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714-1024x1024.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2935\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"/><figcaption>Locking Down The Christmas Tree</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>No travel since the last episode, so I had some time to think back through my post-lockdown travel and come up with my top 10 <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">gift ideas</a> for your pandemic travelers.  We look at the start of the year-end efforts by airlines, hotels, and credit card companies to keep their grounded travelers, unpack the work-from-hotel offerings from Marriott, Hilton, and Hyatt, and dissect the latest hotel reservation system data breach. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_169.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go over to the <em>Subscribe</em> section on the right to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/928852471&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #169: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. No travel, but a November week with temps in the 70’s felt like I was someplace other than Chicago. But the weather reverted to the mean yesterday, which chased me back indoors to finish this podcast.</li><li>Last week was a boon to Chicago’s bars and restaurants. The week before, the governor banned indoor service again as COVID cases began to rise. The bonus week of warm sunny weather gifted them with some needed outdoor dining revenue. Last Friday, a friend and I met for lunch at a neighborhood place that had been able to expand their outdoor seating by putting tables on the sidewalk in front of the shuttered retailer next door to them. We showed up at 11:30; the tables were full by 12.</li><li>One of the things we talked about was travel; how, over the past 8 months, we’d more or less adjusted to all of the COVID restrictions, the masks, the social distance, all of it -- except for travel. Yes, we’ve done the car trips and long weekends, but we miss the big trips -- I’d just cancelled our Thanksgiving trip to London and he’s trying to think through their annual Christmas trip to December. Now, I know this is definitely a “First World problem” for folks who’ve had families, friends, and even themselves hit with COVID, so I’m not trying to overplay this. But as the end of the year approaches, and I start hearing more public health experts reset expectation -- for the worse, saying <a href=\"https://www.smh.com.au/national/vaccine-is-imminent-but-virus-fight-has-long-way-to-go-fauci-20201028-p569h2.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">“Well, it’s probably more like the end of 2021 or maybe into the beginning of 2022 before things start feeling normal”</a> -- I dunno, for people who love travel, I don’t think they want to put it on hold for another year or two. You start hearing about people looking for openings -- Mexico, Costa Rica -- as they figure out their own personal risk profiles. Maybe <a href=\"https://hub.united.com/2020-10-29-united-airlines-launches-worlds-first-free-transatlantic-covid-19-testing-pilot-2648544789.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">United Airlines’ testing program</a> that they’re trialing on flights to Hawaii and London is part of the answer; certainly <a href=\"https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/11/heres-everything-to-know-about-pfizers-positive-vaccine-news/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pfizer’s release of preliminary vaccine results</a> on Monday got everybody hopeful again. I don’t think anyone expects -- or really wants -- an immediate snap-back to 2019. But the ability to stretch things a bit more would be greatly appreciated.</li><li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mactonite/29469\">Static</a>&nbsp;by Darkroom (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mactonite/29469</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>First, a quick program note. As I tweak things with the underlying TravelCommons infrastructure -- the audio file, the RSS feed, the website -- I’ll talk about the changes at the end of the podcast, so I don’t muck up the content that you come to listen to with the “inside baseball” sorta podcast stuff. If you’re not interested, you can skip to the end without missing anything. I will say, though, that I was pleasantly surprised when I looked at the Apple Podcast stats showing about 80% of you stay through the end of an episode. I’d fully expected to see at least 50% of folks hitting the “skip to next podcast” button when they heard the “Pictures of You” song clip. Thanks to everybody for sticking all the way through.</li><li>And congrats to Emily Thomas, our guest on the August episode, for winning the <a href=\"https://www.leverhulme.ac.uk/philip-leverhulme-prizes\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Leverhulme prize</a> last month. The prize recognizes the achievement of outstanding researchers across a broad range of disciplines whose work has already attracted international recognition and whose future career is exceptionally promising. I interviewed Emily about her book <em>The Meaning of Travel: Philosophers Abroad</em> and had a great time talking to her. A well-deserved award. I just may go back and listen to that interview again.</li><li>I got an email from Marriott last week announcing their work-from-hotel offerings. We\'ve talked about this trend in the past couple of episodes -- first as a way for downtown hotels to do something/anything about their low occupancy rates, and then in the last episode with the FBI\'s cyber security advisory to people moving from work-at-home to work-at-hotels. The Day Pass gives you a room from 6am to 6pm, wi-fi, bottled water, and lounge access if you’re a high-status Marriott Bonvoy member. They’re piloting it in Atlanta, Dallas, New York, and Phoenix. Scanning the pricing, the range looked to be in the $60-$90 range, though the Phoenician in Scottsdale did price out at $260. If you looked hard, you could probably get a day pass at a co-working place for cheaper, but if you can expense it, the Marriott offer is probably not a bad deal -- especially for those days that you have a big sales presentation or maybe a webinar, where you need that guaranteed alone time to focus on preparation and then delivery, and a video backdrop that’s not your closet door or a semi-made bed or random people walking past. Hilton and Hyatt are also offering work-from hotel plans, but with different spins. Hilton’s WorkSpaces will give you 10,000 Honors points for your first booking and, unlike Marriott, is across all of their properties, but it doesn’t feel as put together as Marriott’s. You have to ring up the property directly; looks like Hilton can’t figure out a way to shoehorn this day rate concept into their reservation system. Work from Hyatt, on the other hand, isn’t so much a WeWork replacement as a digital nomad trial package with its 7-night minimum stay requirement and a focus on resort locations like the Grand Hyatts in Kauai or Vail, CO. Kinda the complete opposite of spending 12 hours in a room at the Marriott by DFW. They all feel a bit “toe in the water”, a bit opportunistic in their own way.&nbsp;</li><li>At the beginning of this week, Candid Wueest, a cyber security researcher who joined us last year in episode #151 to talk about hotel websites that leaked traveler data, tweeted out a link to yet <a href=\"https://www.websiteplanet.com/blog/prestige-soft-breach-report/\">another hotel data breach</a>. This time it was channel management software, something that hotels use to automate the task of updating room availability and rates across all the on-line booking sites like Expedia and Booking.com and Hotels.com and on and on. Turns out this channel manager, Prestige Software, stored 24 GB of names and emails and credit card data and reservation records -- 10 million log files going back to 2013 -- in a misconfigured AWS S3 bucket -- storage space on Amazon’s cloud. The pandemic has massively accelerated companies moving from their own data centers to cloud services like Amazon and Microsoft. But sometimes it feels like the speed of that migration has overrun the skills of the teams supporting it.&nbsp; What can you do about it? In this case, not much. You would’ve booked your room on Expedia or Trivago and not known anything about something called a channel manager piping your data down to the hotel. We’ve talked about these breaches in so many past episodes. What I said then still stands: you need to be realistic -- it’s not <em>if</em> your personal data will get breached, it’s <em>when</em>. If you can, put your on-line purchases on a separate card and watch those transactions on the bank’s website or mobile app so you can quickly shut it down if you see something that doesn’t look right. I remember one time, years ago, seeing a Northwest Air flight from Tokyo to Beijing show up on my card. Struck me as odd because I was in Chicago with no plans to be in Asia. Immediately called the bank, disputed the charge, and they closed down the card. Interesting thing is that the crook had booked an economy class ticket. You’d think if you’re going to risk it, go big -- book the front of the plane -- business class if not first.&nbsp;</li><li>The quarantine theater we talked about in the last episode just keeps keeping on. Chicago now has 43 states on its list, 31 of which have <em>lower</em> COVID rates than Chicago. And, I guess in admission that no one’s paying attention, they’re moving from weekly updates to every other week. I guess ‘cause there’s not that many more states they can add. New York gave up on its quarantine list when COVID rates in neighboring Connecticut and New Jersey qualified them for the list. \"There will be no quarantine list, there will be no metrics,\" Governor Cuomo says. Everyone needs to test negative, except for people coming in from Connecticut, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania because, at some point, you just gotta be realistic. Especially in the face of this, what is it, a third wave? I’ve lost count.</li><li>And just to show how deeply all of this -- the quarantine, the lack of travel has gotten me, here’s a fun game I now play with my Google Mini.&nbsp;I dug around in the Google Home app and found where I can change the voice. I’ll switch to the British Racing Green voice to check the weather in London and then click over on Sydney Harbour Blue to check the weather there. Then I flip back to the default voice to get the weather at the Googleplex. And, of course, I ask it to play TravelCommons.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter message</a> to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> or our <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a> account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge music —&nbsp;<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Psykick/52938\">Another Way</a>&nbsp;by Psykick (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Psykick/52938</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Holiday Gift Guide for the Pandemic Traveler</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Like I mentioned at the top of the show, hearing public health officials saying things like “it will be easily by the end of 2021 and perhaps into the next year before we start having some semblance of normality” got my attention; got me thinking that this year’s travel gift guide needs to be a bit different. So I flipped through my 2020 travel journal, thought back through all of my post-lockdown travel to come up with my top shopping ideas for your pandemic travelers.</li><li>Check out this year\'s pandemic gift guide on the front page of the TravelCommons\' website or <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times\">here </a>at https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/2879\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Slinky Blues</a> by Admiral Bob (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/28792 Ft: unreal_dm</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>End of Year “Don’t Leave Me” Offers</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Back in September, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/09/19/podcast-167-6-months-on-why-keep-travel-cards/\" title=\"Podcast #167 — 6 Months On; Why Keep Travel Cards?\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">episode #167</a>, we talked with <a href=\"https://www.lendingtree.com/writer/matt-schulz/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Matt Schulz, chief credit analyst at LendingTree</a>, about travel credit cards. Matt told us that their late summer surveys showed trends toward people canceling travel cards and cashing out points. But then earlier this week, <a href=\"https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-11-10/amex-says-its-cardholders-are-stockpiling-their-points-and-miles\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">American Express’ CFO said that their card customers <em>weren’t</em> cashing out points, and instead stocking them up to travel</a>.&nbsp; The two comments aren’t necessarily at odds. If you’re laid off, you can use those miles to buy groceries or clothes via gift cards or on Amazon. But if you don’t have to, the best value you’ll get for those points will be on travel. You’ll get less than a penny a point when cashing out Amex points on Amazon, but you can double that when you use them to book flights on, say, Singapore Air or KLM.&nbsp; So the hoarding makes sense -- if you can.</li><li>One of Matt’s points in our interview was that card companies will continue to tweak their rewards to keep people holding and using their cards because travelers are a valuable customer segment because, well, they typically spend chunks of money to travel. So as we come up on the end of the year, it’ll be interesting to see what those tweaks will be. Chase keeps extending the 5x grocery and gas bonus on their Southwest card while <a href=\"https://thepointsguy.com/news/amex-platinum-current-offer/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amex just announced a <em>10x</em> grocery and gas bonus as well as a 75K sign-up bonus for their Platinum card</a>.</li><li>Airlines and hotels are also rolling out their year-end offers. Back in the spring, all the majors gave existing status holders a push, extending elite expiration dates to Jan 2022 to keep them in the fold. So that settled everyone down for 2020. But now, with 2021 coming up and travel still in the hole, we’re starting to see new offers.<a href=\"http://news.aa.com/news/news-details/2020/Rewarding-AAdvantage-Members-With-More-Benefits-and-Flexibility-in-2021-AADV-10/default.aspx\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"> American opened the bidding last month</a>, knocking 20% off of 2021 status qualifying mileage clip levels (e.g., 40,000 instead of 50,000 to qualify for AAdvantage Platinum) and trying to get whatever they can for this year by counting October (last month), November, and December flights&nbsp; towards earning status in 2021, which is then good through Jan 2023. This afternoon, I got an email from <a href=\"https://hub.united.com/2020-11-12-united-airlines-makes-it-easier-to-earn-mileageplus-premier-status-for-2022-2648871852.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">United announcing their deal</a>. United’s status qualification methodology has gotten ridiculously complex over the past couple of years, but by at least one of their metrics, it looks like they’re dropping their status qualifying point (PQP -- don’t ask) clip levels by at least 30% <em>and</em> offering double points for flights taken in Q1 -- January, February, March -- next year. <a href=\"https://newsroom.hilton.com/hilton-honors/news/hilton-honors-adds-flexibility-value-for-members\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Hilton, though, made the simplest and deepest offer</a> -- knocking 50% off of all status qualifying measures -- stays, nights, points -- boom, mike drop.</li><li>It makes sense. Most statused travelers are business travelers and depending on which CEO is talking, business travel is down 85% (Delta), 90% (Southwest), and will be 3-4 years before it’s back to pre-pandemic levels (United). And those business travelers are the airlines’ and hotels’ most profitable customers. So expect to see Delta and Southwest and Marriott announcements soon, and maybe again this time next year if that “Well, it’s probably more like the end of 2021 or maybe into the beginning of 2022 before things start feeling normal” forecast turns out to be true.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #169</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li>As I mentioned at the end of the last episode, I restructured the RSS feed a bit so that I shouldn’t accidently trigger any more episode re-downloads. And I moved the episode number from the title to its own XML tag just to clean up how everything looks in your podcast app. Also, a few months ago, I tweaked the production workflow to add chapter markers in each episode. So, if your app supports them (Apple Podcasts and Overcast do), you can skip forward to the next section or, if you wanted to go back and listen to, say, the interview with Emily Thomas, you can go straight to it.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>, as well as asking Alexa and Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_169.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers','','inherit','closed','closed','','2936-revision-v1','','','2020-12-16 21:47:52','2020-12-17 02:47:52','',2936,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/2936-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2959,1,'2020-12-16 22:07:35','2020-12-17 03:07:35','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":2935,\"width\":300,\"height\":300,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large is-resized\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714-1024x1024.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2935\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"/><figcaption>Locking Down The Christmas Tree</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>No travel since the last episode, so I had some time to think back through my post-lockdown travel and come up with my top 10 <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">gift ideas</a> for your pandemic travelers.  We look at the start of the year-end efforts by airlines, hotels, and credit card companies to keep their grounded travelers, unpack the work-from-hotel offerings from Marriott, Hilton, and Hyatt, and dissect the latest hotel reservation system data breach. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_170.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go over to the <em>Subscribe</em> section on the right to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/928852471&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #170: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. And again, no travel since the last episode. Not too surprising given the way things are going right now. Back in April, I’d jumped on one of those smokin’ American Airlines’ promotions to book flights to London for Thanksgiving. Which then -- not surprisingly -- got cancelled at the beginning of September.  So I was back to what has been my typical Thanksgiving travel pattern for the past 10-15 years -- staying at home to avoid the crowds on what is always the busiest travel week of the year. PK -- pre-kids -- Irene and I would always travel over the holidays, splitting Thanksgiving and Christmas between my family in Southern California and hers in Chicago. But post-kids -- which is also PK, so I guess it should be AK -- after kids -- we started staying at home. And I’d figure out how to “ground” myself from business travel also. I found that the challenge of holiday travel wasn’t necessarily the crowds; it’s the make-up of the crowds; what some road warriors might call “clueless” travelers. I think “amateur” is certainly a more charitable and probably more accurate term. Even more so this year with so many road warriors out of practice after being off the road since March. Lots of those folks definitely in danger of losing their “professional” traveler status.</li><li>I saw an interesting graph the other day comparing last year’s and this year’s day-by-day airport travel volumes over the Thanksgiving weekend. No surprises comparing the Wednesday travel volumes, what is traditionally the busiest travel day of the year. Last year’s Wednesday saw 2.6 million passengers, almost 2½ times busier than this year. I expected that. But what really caught my eye was that this year’s peak day -- <a href=\"https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/thanksgiving-travel-volume-2020-pandemic/index.html\">Sunday at about 1.2 million </a>-- was still a lot less than last year’s slowest day, Thanksgiving, at about 1.6 million. I didn’t travel last year at Thanksgiving, but did in 2018.  Irene and I broke our no-travel rule and flew down to Santa Fe, NM on Thanksgiving Day. Back in episode <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/12/17/podcast-147-holiday-travel-tips-notes-from-santa-fe/\">#147</a>, I said that Thanksgiving Day flight was one of the least stressful travel experiences I’d ever had — no traffic on the drive to ORD, no lines. The TSA agents were hanging around just looking for people to screen. And that day, there were around 25% more people in airports than this year’s <em>busiest</em> day. I shouldn’t be surprised, but all the pictures I saw in the news coverage made it look like airports were a lot more crowded. </li><li>Our apartment is just south of one of the northern approaches to ORD. Flights from the east come in over the lake -- seats A, B, and C get a great view of the city skyline while seats D, E, and F get to look down into Wrigley Field -- then  over the northwest side of the city, landing on one of the runways north of the terminal. I’ve always been impressed by the choreography of ORD. On a clear Friday afternoon, driving up the tollway that runs east of the airport, I’d see planes on parallel approaches landing simultaneously -- one to the north of the terminal and one to the south -- and looking up, see the lights of planes on approach behind them -- 2, 3, 4.... Back in April, during Chicago’s lockdown, I’d sit out on the rooftop deck -- because what else was I going to do? -- and maybe see one plane coming in over the lake on that approach. But now I’m seeing more planes -- sometimes 3, 4 in a row. Don’t know that they’re all carrying passengers -- some could be temporary cargo carriers taking some of that e-commerce money, with boxes instead of seats under the overhead bins. But I can feel travel starting to pick up. It could be a tough winter, but I’m trying to look out over the horizon a bit; trying to look forward to spring.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mactonite/29469\">Static</a> by Darkroom (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mactonite/29469</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>TravelCommons contributor Allan Marko commented on my little lockdown game with my Google Mini -- changing the voice to, say, an English accent and then asking about the weather in London.  Allan wrote:<ul><li>I often change the Siri voice for a bit of variety. Currently “Australian Female” is providing my CarPlay directions. you can also ask Siri to “Play TravelCommons”…</li></ul></li><li>Which immediately got me digging into Siri’s settings, looking for the Voice options. I found I had a choice of American, Australian, British, Indian, Irish, and South African. Since I’d already used the first three with my Google Mini, it was between the last three. I chose Irish for now, but will probably switch to South African before the end of the month. Actually, Waze, the nav app, always impressed me with the number of voice and language options. Every once in a while, I switch Irene’s Waze over to Hungarian before she’s heading out somewhere. For some reason, I get more of a laugh out of it than she does.</li><li>TravelCommons listener Dan Grabon and I have been trading notes as we’ve each slogged through Thoreau’s <em>Walden</em>. We both started it back in April, in the height of the lockdown. Everybody was deciding that, with nothing much else to do, it was a good time to pick up that classic you’ve always been meaning to get to. Dan started out with <em>The Brothers Karamazov</em>, which I thought was damned impressive. I first reached for Whitman’s <em>Leaves of Grass</em>, but then thought I needed something a bit more down-to-earth, something that wouldn’t need quite that level of interpretation and abstract thinking. And <em>Walden</em>, about Thoreau’s self-isolation in the woods outside of Concord, MA, seemed a better fit with the lockdown. Dan finished last month, at the beginning of November. I was 50 pages behind, so I didn’t finish ‘til Thanksgiving -- it was tough cutting through the tryptophan fog, but I gutted it through. Dan said he was staying with Thoreau, moving onto <em>Civil Disobedience</em> before shelving the book. I pivoted to non-fiction, <em>Why We Sleep</em>, where a neuroscientist and sleep expert spends some 300+ pages saying “If you don’t sleep 8 hours, you’re killing yourself” which got me doing some mental math. Between jet lag from all the  international flights and waking up at 4am to make 6am flights to LGA, I’ve probably dropped 5 years off my life. Though, given some dementia running through my family history, I might not have remembered those years anyways.</li><li>And I show up on the other side of the mic talking travel pro tips with Matt Wilson on his <a href=\"https://www.under30experiences.com/blog/travel-like-a-pro-with-mark-peacock-of-travelcommons\">Millennial Travel Podcast</a>.  I’m trying to remember when we recorded this -- had to be pre-April 2019 because I was still in the suburban TravelCommons studio and Matt was hanging out down in Costa Rica. The connection fuzzes out now and again, but it was a fun conversation. I’ll put a link in the episode in the show notes but fair warning -- it’s mostly me rattling on for an hour. Listening back to it, I’m kinda embarrassed that I don’t give Matt much of a chance to get a word in edgewise.</li><li>In the last episode, I talked about the work-from-hotel offerings from Marriott, Hilton, and Hyatt. They all had their own twists, but Hyatt’s was the most unique in that their “Work from Hyatt” offer was resort-focused and had a 7-night minimum. I said it wasn’t so much a WeWork replacement as a digital nomad trial. Well, I’m guessing that they didn’t get much uptake on it because I just got another email from Hyatt with a new offering -- “Office for the Day” -- that pretty much matches Marriott’s Day Pass. Like I said last month, these offerings all feel a bit “toe in the water”, a bit opportunistic. And now that we’re starting to get better visibility into post-vaccine timelines, I wonder how long they’ll last -- will people still want to pay to work in a hotel room after all the Starbucks stores have reopened.</li><li>I’ve talked in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/12/podcast-120-where-do-guidebooks-fit-in-i-hate-shopping-for-suitcases\">past</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/09/28/podcast-124-craft-beer-hunting-i-hate-rick-steves\">episodes</a> about how I’m a bit of a knuckle-dragger regarding printed travel guides. I still find a physical book useful when traveling. But I’ve been wondering how quickly these physical guides will be able to push out post-COVID editions to reflect the closures of bars, restaurants, and independent shops they’ve recommended. I was running through my own Chicago recommendation list from 2019. A bunch of my favorite places have closed; it’s about an even split between “Closed forever, good-bye, we’ve taken down our sign” and “Closed until Spring… we hope.” The final proofs of the 2021 editions have to already be baked if not already at the printers. I dunno, maybe they’ll all post errata pages that you can download, print off, and then stick in your books.</li><li>In a massive intersection of all things social media, I posted a <a href=\"https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/tiktok-hotel-room-chef/index.html\">CNN article</a> on the TravelCommons Facebook page that a friend, a hotel company CIO, sent me on LinkedIn that showed TikTok videos of people cooking meals in hotel rooms using an iron for a griddle, a hot water kettle for a steamer, a pants presser as an oven, and the one that really wowed me -- a coffee maker as a sous vide water bath. I don’t know if I should be impressed by the ingenuity or looking to set up as a ghost kitchen/delivery service wherever they are because I’ve never seen anyone go to that extent to cook their own meal in a hotel room. Even guys I knew trying to squeeze the last pennies out of their per diems wouldn’t do much more than boil water for their Cup O’Noodles or work hard not to burn their microwave popcorn. I’ll also put a link in the show notes to the TikTok account of one of the guys, Jago Randles. His TikTok series,<a href=\"https://www.tiktok.com/@jagoscrandles\"> Isolation Kitchen</a>, has about 150,000 followers. He does some impressive stuff. But I will make sure, going forward, that I rinse out the coffee maker and wipe down the iron before using them.</li><li>For many frequent travelers, a key early milestone of the pandemic was when airlines and hotels gave them a year’s push on their status -- moving the expiration date from Jan 2021 to Jan 2022. Big sigh of relief. Then for Southwest fliers, another milestone -- drink coupon expiration dates all got pushed to the end of this year. Whew! All’s right in the traveling world. But a couple of days ago, I was rummaging around in my messenger bag and out tumbled 5 Southwest drink coupons -- one with a Sept expiration date; the rest, December 31. Look Southwest, I don’t want to seem greedy. I did get a year’s push on A-List and 6 months on Companion Pass. But I’d love you even more if you gave me another 6 months on those drink coupons. Nope, don’t say anything now; just think about it.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Psykick/52938\">Another Way</a> by Psykick (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Psykick/52938</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Prove My Vax So I Can Fly</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Last month, I saw that quote from the Qantas CEO -- \"We will ask people to have a vaccination before they can get on the aircraft\'\' -- and thought, well it’s kinda the next logical step from Delta’s ATL-Rome and United’s EWR-LHR flights were you have to take COVID test and prove you’re negative before you can board. </li><li>I remember going to a travel clinic before my first flight to India; getting shot up with MMR, DTP, Hepatitis, and Typhoid vaccines and being given my <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carte_Jaune\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Yellow Card</a> -- officially my International Certificate of Vaccination or Prophylaxis -- listing all my shots. They told me to carry that with me to India, which I did and to Vietnam and Thailand and Singapore and China. No one ever asked to see it, not in an airport, an immigration line, a hotel,....  It looks like the plans are that we’ll get a vaccination card from the CDC after receiving the first dose of COVID-19 vaccine. But that card isn’t meant as a validated proof of vaccination; it’s more of a reminder to go back in a couple of weeks for the second shot. </li><li>That handwritten piece of paper probably won’t pass muster at the Qantas boarding gate, and so that’s why we’re starting to see a bit of a vaccine passport app land grab going on. United has been testing the <a href=\"https://thecommonsproject.org/commonpass\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">CommonPass app</a> on their COVID-free EWR-LHR flight. You get your COVID test at the United Club near gate C93 and the results are uploaded into the app which then will display a QR code to the gate agent. CommonPass is being spun up with support from the World Economic Forum. Cathay Pacific, Lufthansa, SwissAir, and JetBlue also have plans to use it. Delta and Alitalia are trialing the <a href=\"https://www.aokpass.com/en/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">AOKPass </a>developed by the Int’l Chamber of Commerce on their COVID-free ATL-Rome flight. It uses blockchain for medical certificate storage, so bonus points to them in technology buzzword bingo. IATA, the Int’l Air Transport Association, an airline trade group, says they’re finishing up their app, <a href=\"https://www.iata.org/en/programs/passenger/travel-pass/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Travel Pass</a>, and will be piloting it with IAG, the parent of British Airways, Iberia, and Aer Lingus, in early 2021. And the World Health Organization says they’re looking at Estonia’s e-vaccination certificates as <a href=\"https://www.who.int/news-room/feature-stories/detail/estonia-and-who-to-jointly-develop-digital-vaccine-certificate-to-strengthen-covax#:~:text=WHO%20and%20Estonia%20recently%20agreed,access%20to%20COVID%2D19%20vaccines.\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the basis of a sort of “smart” Yellow Card app</a>.</li><li>I’m sure I’m missing a whole lot more; I just got tired of reading the same rehashed press release verbiage about secure and verifiable storage of health certifications. Going through this, it starts to feel like the health equivalent of those scooter apps, where I need half-a-dozen of them on my phone so I can rent the closest scooter to me. Unless someone blinks, it seems like I’ll need 3 or 4 of these vaccine passports to cover all my travel bases. But after reading through all the press releases and the infographics and the FAQs, none of these apps were real clear on how I get my physical CDC vaccine card into their digital storage vault. And I’m guessing that doctors and clinics are going to be more focused on taking care of patients and keeping their COVID vaccines cold, and not all that interested in entering my vaccination information into all those apps. Maybe Australia is further ahead with electronic health records, but I’m thinking, at least for the next year or so, that my CDC card is gonna be the best that Qantas and the gang are going to get.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/2879\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Slinky Blues</a> by Admiral Bob (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/28792 Ft: unreal_dm</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Hereditary Road Warriors</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I was reading some research, as one does during a lockdown advisory when one gets caught up running down a clickhole, about <a href=\"https://research.fb.com/blog/2016/03/do-jobs-run-in-families/\">jobs running in the family</a>. Some of the stats -- a son with a military father is 5 times more likely to enlist himself while if his mother is a lawyer, he’s 6.6 times more likely to follow her to the bar; a daughter with a scientist father is almost 4 times more likely to be a scientist. Indeed, when I was deciding my college major, I was leaning toward&nbsp; chemistry but chose chemical engineering mostly because my grandfather and father were both engineers.</li><li>Which got me thinking -- does traveling -- careers that require frequent traveling -- run in the family? Again, looking back on my family, my grandfather traveled a lot when he worked for Sears, checking out vendors for hard goods -- tools, small machinery -- and working with them on new products. My dad designed farm machinery -- things like hay balers and cotton pickers -- for International Harvester. He’d often be on the road for weeks at a time, testing prototypes at farms around the country, looking for different crop and field conditions, and then at plants helping to set up the manufacturing lines for the finished machine. And so I grew up seeing that rhythm of travel -- Dad at home, Dad packing, saying good-bye, and then getting on with our lives until he came back. This was back in the late ‘60’s and into the 70’s, so no cheap long-distance let alone messaging or email or video calls. He was gone, with the exception of a postcard or two, until he came back.</li><li>And then when I joined the workforce, the first day of my first real job out of school, I got on a plane and made the first of what’s been hundreds of flights between ORD and DFW.&nbsp; So many that, pretty soon, I got to know the women working the front desk at the DFW Admirals Club. One morning, one of them asks me if I’d maybe like to meet her daughter. Awkward. I asked her, “Would you want your daughter dating someone who’s out of town as much as I am?” She paused for a moment and then said, “No, not really”.&nbsp;</li><li>Also around this time, my dad had gotten promoted past the level of going out to the field and so was traveling a lot less. But my mother took a purchasing executive role and with that, the need for a lot of travel to vendors. So while travel was generational/ “hereditary” from my father to me, my mother and I started road warrior-ing at the same time, so we were more like travel “siblings” -- comparing hotel notes, competing on frequent flier status and perks.&nbsp;</li><li>Will traveling for a living continue to a 4th generation? Tough to tell right now; both kids measure their commute in feet rather than miles during the lockdown, and friends running consulting operations tell me the current state is great for staff productivity -- an hour sales call takes an hour, rather than a day’s worth of travel for that hour, and working remotely with clients saves the client money and consultants don’t get burnt out trying to balance work and home needs. As I said back in the March and July episodes, I don’t buy that 100% remote is the “new normal”, but I also don’t believe it will snap back to 2019 levels, not after what will have been a year’s-plus time working out the mechanics of virtual working. But will there be another generation of road warriors in my family? It’ll probably take a couple of years to figure that out.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #170</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li>I’ve made another little tweak to the RSS feed -- the file that all the podcast apps use to pull new episodes for your subscribed podcasts. This tweak affects the episode descriptions in the top podcast apps. For those apps that support it, there are now clickable links in the episode notes or descriptions. In last month’s episode, there were clickable links to the gift ideas blog post on the TravelCommons website as well as the episode show notes page. Going forward, there will always be a link to the episode’s show notes page. I’ve tested that this works on Apple Podcasts, Overcast (which is what I use), Stitcher, Pocket Casts, Podcast Addict, and Google Podcasts -- all of which make up 70-80% (depending on who’s doing the counting) of the TravelCommons downloads. So, if you get a chance, flip over to the episode description right now and check it out.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>, as well as asking Alexa, Siri, and Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_170.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors','','inherit','closed','closed','','2957-revision-v1','','','2020-12-16 22:07:35','2020-12-17 03:07:35','',2957,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/2957-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2960,1,'2020-12-16 22:15:42','2020-12-17 03:15:42','A Department of Health and Human Services employee holds a COVID-19 vaccine record card Nov. 13, 2020, in Washington D.C.  The cards will be sent out as part of vaccination kits from Operation Warp Speed, which is an effort by several U.S. government components and public partnerships to facilitate the development, manufacturing and distribution of COVID-19 vaccines, therapeutics and diagnostics. (DoD photo by EJ Hersom)','201113-D-DB155-011','(DoD photo by EJ Hersom)','inherit','open','closed','','201113-d-db155-011','','','2020-12-16 22:16:26','2020-12-17 03:16:26','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(2961,1,'2020-12-16 22:17:52','2020-12-17 03:17:52','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":2960,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2960\"/><figcaption>How Do I Insert This Into My iPhone<br>(DoD photo by EJ Hersom)</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>No travel since the last episode, so I had some time to think back through my post-lockdown travel and come up with my top 10 <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">gift ideas</a> for your pandemic travelers.  We look at the start of the year-end efforts by airlines, hotels, and credit card companies to keep their grounded travelers, unpack the work-from-hotel offerings from Marriott, Hilton, and Hyatt, and dissect the latest hotel reservation system data breach. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_170.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go over to the <em>Subscribe</em> section on the right to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/928852471&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #170: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. And again, no travel since the last episode. Not too surprising given the way things are going right now. Back in April, I’d jumped on one of those smokin’ American Airlines’ promotions to book flights to London for Thanksgiving. Which then -- not surprisingly -- got cancelled at the beginning of September.  So I was back to what has been my typical Thanksgiving travel pattern for the past 10-15 years -- staying at home to avoid the crowds on what is always the busiest travel week of the year. PK -- pre-kids -- Irene and I would always travel over the holidays, splitting Thanksgiving and Christmas between my family in Southern California and hers in Chicago. But post-kids -- which is also PK, so I guess it should be AK -- after kids -- we started staying at home. And I’d figure out how to “ground” myself from business travel also. I found that the challenge of holiday travel wasn’t necessarily the crowds; it’s the make-up of the crowds; what some road warriors might call “clueless” travelers. I think “amateur” is certainly a more charitable and probably more accurate term. Even more so this year with so many road warriors out of practice after being off the road since March. Lots of those folks definitely in danger of losing their “professional” traveler status.</li><li>I saw an interesting graph the other day comparing last year’s and this year’s day-by-day airport travel volumes over the Thanksgiving weekend. No surprises comparing the Wednesday travel volumes, what is traditionally the busiest travel day of the year. Last year’s Wednesday saw 2.6 million passengers, almost 2½ times busier than this year. I expected that. But what really caught my eye was that this year’s peak day -- <a href=\"https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/thanksgiving-travel-volume-2020-pandemic/index.html\">Sunday at about 1.2 million </a>-- was still a lot less than last year’s slowest day, Thanksgiving, at about 1.6 million. I didn’t travel last year at Thanksgiving, but did in 2018.  Irene and I broke our no-travel rule and flew down to Santa Fe, NM on Thanksgiving Day. Back in episode <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/12/17/podcast-147-holiday-travel-tips-notes-from-santa-fe/\">#147</a>, I said that Thanksgiving Day flight was one of the least stressful travel experiences I’d ever had — no traffic on the drive to ORD, no lines. The TSA agents were hanging around just looking for people to screen. And that day, there were around 25% more people in airports than this year’s <em>busiest</em> day. I shouldn’t be surprised, but all the pictures I saw in the news coverage made it look like airports were a lot more crowded. </li><li>Our apartment is just south of one of the northern approaches to ORD. Flights from the east come in over the lake -- seats A, B, and C get a great view of the city skyline while seats D, E, and F get to look down into Wrigley Field -- then  over the northwest side of the city, landing on one of the runways north of the terminal. I’ve always been impressed by the choreography of ORD. On a clear Friday afternoon, driving up the tollway that runs east of the airport, I’d see planes on parallel approaches landing simultaneously -- one to the north of the terminal and one to the south -- and looking up, see the lights of planes on approach behind them -- 2, 3, 4.... Back in April, during Chicago’s lockdown, I’d sit out on the rooftop deck -- because what else was I going to do? -- and maybe see one plane coming in over the lake on that approach. But now I’m seeing more planes -- sometimes 3, 4 in a row. Don’t know that they’re all carrying passengers -- some could be temporary cargo carriers taking some of that e-commerce money, with boxes instead of seats under the overhead bins. But I can feel travel starting to pick up. It could be a tough winter, but I’m trying to look out over the horizon a bit; trying to look forward to spring.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mactonite/29469\">Static</a> by Darkroom (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mactonite/29469</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>TravelCommons contributor Allan Marko commented on my little lockdown game with my Google Mini -- changing the voice to, say, an English accent and then asking about the weather in London.  Allan wrote:<ul><li>I often change the Siri voice for a bit of variety. Currently “Australian Female” is providing my CarPlay directions. you can also ask Siri to “Play TravelCommons”…</li></ul></li><li>Which immediately got me digging into Siri’s settings, looking for the Voice options. I found I had a choice of American, Australian, British, Indian, Irish, and South African. Since I’d already used the first three with my Google Mini, it was between the last three. I chose Irish for now, but will probably switch to South African before the end of the month. Actually, Waze, the nav app, always impressed me with the number of voice and language options. Every once in a while, I switch Irene’s Waze over to Hungarian before she’s heading out somewhere. For some reason, I get more of a laugh out of it than she does.</li><li>TravelCommons listener Dan Grabon and I have been trading notes as we’ve each slogged through Thoreau’s <em>Walden</em>. We both started it back in April, in the height of the lockdown. Everybody was deciding that, with nothing much else to do, it was a good time to pick up that classic you’ve always been meaning to get to. Dan started out with <em>The Brothers Karamazov</em>, which I thought was damned impressive. I first reached for Whitman’s <em>Leaves of Grass</em>, but then thought I needed something a bit more down-to-earth, something that wouldn’t need quite that level of interpretation and abstract thinking. And <em>Walden</em>, about Thoreau’s self-isolation in the woods outside of Concord, MA, seemed a better fit with the lockdown. Dan finished last month, at the beginning of November. I was 50 pages behind, so I didn’t finish ‘til Thanksgiving -- it was tough cutting through the tryptophan fog, but I gutted it through. Dan said he was staying with Thoreau, moving onto <em>Civil Disobedience</em> before shelving the book. I pivoted to non-fiction, <em>Why We Sleep</em>, where a neuroscientist and sleep expert spends some 300+ pages saying “If you don’t sleep 8 hours, you’re killing yourself” which got me doing some mental math. Between jet lag from all the  international flights and waking up at 4am to make 6am flights to LGA, I’ve probably dropped 5 years off my life. Though, given some dementia running through my family history, I might not have remembered those years anyways.</li><li>And I show up on the other side of the mic talking travel pro tips with Matt Wilson on his <a href=\"https://www.under30experiences.com/blog/travel-like-a-pro-with-mark-peacock-of-travelcommons\">Millennial Travel Podcast</a>.  I’m trying to remember when we recorded this -- had to be pre-April 2019 because I was still in the suburban TravelCommons studio and Matt was hanging out down in Costa Rica. The connection fuzzes out now and again, but it was a fun conversation. I’ll put a link in the episode in the show notes but fair warning -- it’s mostly me rattling on for an hour. Listening back to it, I’m kinda embarrassed that I don’t give Matt much of a chance to get a word in edgewise.</li><li>In the last episode, I talked about the work-from-hotel offerings from Marriott, Hilton, and Hyatt. They all had their own twists, but Hyatt’s was the most unique in that their “Work from Hyatt” offer was resort-focused and had a 7-night minimum. I said it wasn’t so much a WeWork replacement as a digital nomad trial. Well, I’m guessing that they didn’t get much uptake on it because I just got another email from Hyatt with a new offering -- “Office for the Day” -- that pretty much matches Marriott’s Day Pass. Like I said last month, these offerings all feel a bit “toe in the water”, a bit opportunistic. And now that we’re starting to get better visibility into post-vaccine timelines, I wonder how long they’ll last -- will people still want to pay to work in a hotel room after all the Starbucks stores have reopened.</li><li>I’ve talked in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/12/podcast-120-where-do-guidebooks-fit-in-i-hate-shopping-for-suitcases\">past</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/09/28/podcast-124-craft-beer-hunting-i-hate-rick-steves\">episodes</a> about how I’m a bit of a knuckle-dragger regarding printed travel guides. I still find a physical book useful when traveling. But I’ve been wondering how quickly these physical guides will be able to push out post-COVID editions to reflect the closures of bars, restaurants, and independent shops they’ve recommended. I was running through my own Chicago recommendation list from 2019. A bunch of my favorite places have closed; it’s about an even split between “Closed forever, good-bye, we’ve taken down our sign” and “Closed until Spring… we hope.” The final proofs of the 2021 editions have to already be baked if not already at the printers. I dunno, maybe they’ll all post errata pages that you can download, print off, and then stick in your books.</li><li>In a massive intersection of all things social media, I posted a <a href=\"https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/tiktok-hotel-room-chef/index.html\">CNN article</a> on the TravelCommons Facebook page that a friend, a hotel company CIO, sent me on LinkedIn that showed TikTok videos of people cooking meals in hotel rooms using an iron for a griddle, a hot water kettle for a steamer, a pants presser as an oven, and the one that really wowed me -- a coffee maker as a sous vide water bath. I don’t know if I should be impressed by the ingenuity or looking to set up as a ghost kitchen/delivery service wherever they are because I’ve never seen anyone go to that extent to cook their own meal in a hotel room. Even guys I knew trying to squeeze the last pennies out of their per diems wouldn’t do much more than boil water for their Cup O’Noodles or work hard not to burn their microwave popcorn. I’ll also put a link in the show notes to the TikTok account of one of the guys, Jago Randles. His TikTok series,<a href=\"https://www.tiktok.com/@jagoscrandles\"> Isolation Kitchen</a>, has about 150,000 followers. He does some impressive stuff. But I will make sure, going forward, that I rinse out the coffee maker and wipe down the iron before using them.</li><li>For many frequent travelers, a key early milestone of the pandemic was when airlines and hotels gave them a year’s push on their status -- moving the expiration date from Jan 2021 to Jan 2022. Big sigh of relief. Then for Southwest fliers, another milestone -- drink coupon expiration dates all got pushed to the end of this year. Whew! All’s right in the traveling world. But a couple of days ago, I was rummaging around in my messenger bag and out tumbled 5 Southwest drink coupons -- one with a Sept expiration date; the rest, December 31. Look Southwest, I don’t want to seem greedy. I did get a year’s push on A-List and 6 months on Companion Pass. But I’d love you even more if you gave me another 6 months on those drink coupons. Nope, don’t say anything now; just think about it.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Psykick/52938\">Another Way</a> by Psykick (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Psykick/52938</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Prove My Vax So I Can Fly</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Last month, I saw that quote from the Qantas CEO -- \"We will ask people to have a vaccination before they can get on the aircraft\'\' -- and thought, well it’s kinda the next logical step from Delta’s ATL-Rome and United’s EWR-LHR flights were you have to take COVID test and prove you’re negative before you can board. </li><li>I remember going to a travel clinic before my first flight to India; getting shot up with MMR, DTP, Hepatitis, and Typhoid vaccines and being given my <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carte_Jaune\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Yellow Card</a> -- officially my International Certificate of Vaccination or Prophylaxis -- listing all my shots. They told me to carry that with me to India, which I did and to Vietnam and Thailand and Singapore and China. No one ever asked to see it, not in an airport, an immigration line, a hotel,....  It looks like the plans are that we’ll get a vaccination card from the CDC after receiving the first dose of COVID-19 vaccine. But that card isn’t meant as a validated proof of vaccination; it’s more of a reminder to go back in a couple of weeks for the second shot. </li><li>That handwritten piece of paper probably won’t pass muster at the Qantas boarding gate, and so that’s why we’re starting to see a bit of a vaccine passport app land grab going on. United has been testing the <a href=\"https://thecommonsproject.org/commonpass\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">CommonPass app</a> on their COVID-free EWR-LHR flight. You get your COVID test at the United Club near gate C93 and the results are uploaded into the app which then will display a QR code to the gate agent. CommonPass is being spun up with support from the World Economic Forum. Cathay Pacific, Lufthansa, SwissAir, and JetBlue also have plans to use it. Delta and Alitalia are trialing the <a href=\"https://www.aokpass.com/en/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">AOKPass </a>developed by the Int’l Chamber of Commerce on their COVID-free ATL-Rome flight. It uses blockchain for medical certificate storage, so bonus points to them in technology buzzword bingo. IATA, the Int’l Air Transport Association, an airline trade group, says they’re finishing up their app, <a href=\"https://www.iata.org/en/programs/passenger/travel-pass/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Travel Pass</a>, and will be piloting it with IAG, the parent of British Airways, Iberia, and Aer Lingus, in early 2021. And the World Health Organization says they’re looking at Estonia’s e-vaccination certificates as <a href=\"https://www.who.int/news-room/feature-stories/detail/estonia-and-who-to-jointly-develop-digital-vaccine-certificate-to-strengthen-covax#:~:text=WHO%20and%20Estonia%20recently%20agreed,access%20to%20COVID%2D19%20vaccines.\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the basis of a sort of “smart” Yellow Card app</a>.</li><li>I’m sure I’m missing a whole lot more; I just got tired of reading the same rehashed press release verbiage about secure and verifiable storage of health certifications. Going through this, it starts to feel like the health equivalent of those scooter apps, where I need half-a-dozen of them on my phone so I can rent the closest scooter to me. Unless someone blinks, it seems like I’ll need 3 or 4 of these vaccine passports to cover all my travel bases. But after reading through all the press releases and the infographics and the FAQs, none of these apps were real clear on how I get my physical CDC vaccine card into their digital storage vault. And I’m guessing that doctors and clinics are going to be more focused on taking care of patients and keeping their COVID vaccines cold, and not all that interested in entering my vaccination information into all those apps. Maybe Australia is further ahead with electronic health records, but I’m thinking, at least for the next year or so, that my CDC card is gonna be the best that Qantas and the gang are going to get.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/2879\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Slinky Blues</a> by Admiral Bob (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/28792 Ft: unreal_dm</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Hereditary Road Warriors</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I was reading some research, as one does during a lockdown advisory when one gets caught up running down a clickhole, about <a href=\"https://research.fb.com/blog/2016/03/do-jobs-run-in-families/\">jobs running in the family</a>. Some of the stats -- a son with a military father is 5 times more likely to enlist himself while if his mother is a lawyer, he’s 6.6 times more likely to follow her to the bar; a daughter with a scientist father is almost 4 times more likely to be a scientist. Indeed, when I was deciding my college major, I was leaning toward&nbsp; chemistry but chose chemical engineering mostly because my grandfather and father were both engineers.</li><li>Which got me thinking -- does traveling -- careers that require frequent traveling -- run in the family? Again, looking back on my family, my grandfather traveled a lot when he worked for Sears, checking out vendors for hard goods -- tools, small machinery -- and working with them on new products. My dad designed farm machinery -- things like hay balers and cotton pickers -- for International Harvester. He’d often be on the road for weeks at a time, testing prototypes at farms around the country, looking for different crop and field conditions, and then at plants helping to set up the manufacturing lines for the finished machine. And so I grew up seeing that rhythm of travel -- Dad at home, Dad packing, saying good-bye, and then getting on with our lives until he came back. This was back in the late ‘60’s and into the 70’s, so no cheap long-distance let alone messaging or email or video calls. He was gone, with the exception of a postcard or two, until he came back.</li><li>And then when I joined the workforce, the first day of my first real job out of school, I got on a plane and made the first of what’s been hundreds of flights between ORD and DFW.&nbsp; So many that, pretty soon, I got to know the women working the front desk at the DFW Admirals Club. One morning, one of them asks me if I’d maybe like to meet her daughter. Awkward. I asked her, “Would you want your daughter dating someone who’s out of town as much as I am?” She paused for a moment and then said, “No, not really”.&nbsp;</li><li>Also around this time, my dad had gotten promoted past the level of going out to the field and so was traveling a lot less. But my mother took a purchasing executive role and with that, the need for a lot of travel to vendors. So while travel was generational/ “hereditary” from my father to me, my mother and I started road warrior-ing at the same time, so we were more like travel “siblings” -- comparing hotel notes, competing on frequent flier status and perks.&nbsp;</li><li>Will traveling for a living continue to a 4th generation? Tough to tell right now; both kids measure their commute in feet rather than miles during the lockdown, and friends running consulting operations tell me the current state is great for staff productivity -- an hour sales call takes an hour, rather than a day’s worth of travel for that hour, and working remotely with clients saves the client money and consultants don’t get burnt out trying to balance work and home needs. As I said back in the March and July episodes, I don’t buy that 100% remote is the “new normal”, but I also don’t believe it will snap back to 2019 levels, not after what will have been a year’s-plus time working out the mechanics of virtual working. But will there be another generation of road warriors in my family? It’ll probably take a couple of years to figure that out.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #170</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li>I’ve made another little tweak to the RSS feed -- the file that all the podcast apps use to pull new episodes for your subscribed podcasts. This tweak affects the episode descriptions in the top podcast apps. For those apps that support it, there are now clickable links in the episode notes or descriptions. In last month’s episode, there were clickable links to the gift ideas blog post on the TravelCommons website as well as the episode show notes page. Going forward, there will always be a link to the episode’s show notes page. I’ve tested that this works on Apple Podcasts, Overcast (which is what I use), Stitcher, Pocket Casts, Podcast Addict, and Google Podcasts -- all of which make up 70-80% (depending on who’s doing the counting) of the TravelCommons downloads. So, if you get a chance, flip over to the episode description right now and check it out.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>, as well as asking Alexa, Siri, and Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_170.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors','','inherit','closed','closed','','2957-revision-v1','','','2020-12-16 22:17:52','2020-12-17 03:17:52','',2957,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/2957-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2962,1,'2020-12-16 23:01:08','2020-12-17 04:01:08','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":2960,\"width\":300,\"height\":300,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large is-resized\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2960\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"/><figcaption>300How Do I Insert This Into My iPhone<br>(DoD photo by EJ Hersom)</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>No travel since the last episode, so I had some time to think back through my post-lockdown travel and come up with my top 10 <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">gift ideas</a> for your pandemic travelers.  We look at the start of the year-end efforts by airlines, hotels, and credit card companies to keep their grounded travelers, unpack the work-from-hotel offerings from Marriott, Hilton, and Hyatt, and dissect the latest hotel reservation system data breach. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_170.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go over to the <em>Subscribe</em> section on the right to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/928852471&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #170: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. And again, no travel since the last episode. Not too surprising given the way things are going right now. Back in April, I’d jumped on one of those smokin’ American Airlines’ promotions to book flights to London for Thanksgiving. Which then -- not surprisingly -- got cancelled at the beginning of September.&nbsp; So I was back to what has been my typical Thanksgiving travel pattern for the past 10-15 years -- staying at home to avoid the crowds on what is always the busiest travel week of the year. PK -- pre-kids -- Irene and I would always travel over the holidays, splitting Thanksgiving and Christmas between my family in Southern California and hers in Chicago. But post-kids -- which is also PK, so I guess it should be AK -- after kids -- we started staying at home. And I’d figure out how to “ground” myself from business travel also. I found that the challenge of holiday travel wasn’t necessarily the crowds; it’s the make-up of the crowds; what some road warriors might call “clueless” travelers. I think “amateur” is certainly a more charitable and probably more accurate term. Even more so this year with so many road warriors out of practice after being off the road since March. Lots of those folks definitely in danger of losing their “professional” traveler status.</li><li>I saw an interesting graph the other day comparing last year’s and this year’s day-by-day airport travel volumes over the Thanksgiving weekend. No surprises comparing the Wednesday travel volumes, what is traditionally the busiest travel day of the year. Last year’s Wednesday saw 2.6 million passengers, almost 2½ times busier than this year. I expected that. But what really caught my eye was that this year’s peak day -- <a href=\"https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/thanksgiving-travel-volume-2020-pandemic/index.html\">Sunday at about 1.2 million </a>-- was still a lot less than last year’s slowest day, Thanksgiving, at about 1.6 million. I didn’t travel last year at Thanksgiving, but did in 2018.&nbsp; Irene and I broke our no-travel rule and flew down to Santa Fe, NM on Thanksgiving Day. Back in episode <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/12/17/podcast-147-holiday-travel-tips-notes-from-santa-fe/\">#147</a>, I said that Thanksgiving Day flight was one of the least stressful travel experiences I’d ever had — no traffic on the drive to ORD, no lines. The TSA agents were hanging around just looking for people to screen. And that day, there were around 25% more people in airports than this year’s <em>busiest</em> day. I shouldn’t be surprised, but all the pictures I saw in the news coverage made it look like airports were a lot more crowded.&nbsp;</li><li>Our apartment is just south of one of the northern approaches to ORD. Flights from the east come in over the lake -- seats A, B, and C get a great view of the city skyline while seats D, E, and F get to look down into Wrigley Field -- then&nbsp; over the northwest side of the city, landing on one of the runways north of the terminal. I’ve always been impressed by the choreography of ORD. On a clear Friday afternoon, driving up the tollway that runs east of the airport, I’d see planes on parallel approaches landing simultaneously -- one to the north of the terminal and one to the south -- and looking up, see the lights of planes on approach behind them -- 2, 3, 4.... Back in April, during Chicago’s lockdown, I’d sit out on the rooftop deck -- because what else was I going to do? -- and maybe see one plane coming in over the lake on that approach. But now I’m seeing more planes -- sometimes 3, 4 in a row. Don’t know that they’re all carrying passengers -- some could be temporary cargo carriers taking some of that e-commerce money, with boxes instead of seats under the overhead bins. But I can feel travel starting to pick up. It could be a tough winter, but I’m trying to look out over the horizon a bit; trying to look forward to spring.</li><li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mactonite/29469\">Static</a>&nbsp;by Darkroom (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mactonite/29469</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>TravelCommons contributor Allan Marko commented on my little lockdown game with my Google Mini -- changing the voice to, say, an English accent and then asking about the weather in London.&nbsp; Allan wrote:<ul><li>I often change the Siri voice for a bit of variety. Currently “Australian Female” is providing my CarPlay directions. you can also ask Siri to “Play TravelCommons”…</li></ul></li><li>Which immediately got me digging into Siri’s settings, looking for the Voice options. I found I had a choice of American, Australian, British, Indian, Irish, and South African. Since I’d already used the first three with my Google Mini, it was between the last three. I chose Irish for now, but will probably switch to South African before the end of the month. Actually, Waze, the nav app, always impressed me with the number of voice and language options. Every once in a while, I switch Irene’s Waze over to Hungarian before she’s heading out somewhere. For some reason, I get more of a laugh out of it than she does.</li><li>TravelCommons listener Dan Grabon and I have been trading notes as we’ve each slogged through Thoreau’s <em>Walden</em>. We both started it back in April, in the height of the lockdown. Everybody was deciding that, with nothing much else to do, it was a good time to pick up that classic you’ve always been meaning to get to. Dan started out with <em>The Brothers Karamazov</em>, which I thought was damned impressive. I first reached for Whitman’s <em>Leaves of Grass</em>, but then thought I needed something a bit more down-to-earth, something that wouldn’t need quite that level of interpretation and abstract thinking. And <em>Walden</em>, about Thoreau’s self-isolation in the woods outside of Concord, MA, seemed a better fit with the lockdown. Dan finished last month, at the beginning of November. I was 50 pages behind, so I didn’t finish ‘til Thanksgiving -- it was tough cutting through the tryptophan fog, but I gutted it through. Dan said he was staying with Thoreau, moving onto <em>Civil Disobedience</em> before shelving the book. I pivoted to non-fiction, <em>Why We Sleep</em>, where a neuroscientist and sleep expert spends some 300+ pages saying “If you don’t sleep 8 hours, you’re killing yourself” which got me doing some mental math. Between jet lag from all the&nbsp; international flights and waking up at 4am to make 6am flights to LGA, I’ve probably dropped 5 years off my life. Though, given some dementia running through my family history, I might not have remembered those years anyways.</li><li>And I show up on the other side of the mic talking travel pro tips with Matt Wilson on his <a href=\"https://www.under30experiences.com/blog/travel-like-a-pro-with-mark-peacock-of-travelcommons\">Millennial Travel Podcast</a>.&nbsp; I’m trying to remember when we recorded this -- had to be pre-April 2019 because I was still in the suburban TravelCommons studio and Matt was hanging out down in Costa Rica. The connection fuzzes out now and again, but it was a fun conversation. I’ll put a link in the episode in the show notes but fair warning -- it’s mostly me rattling on for an hour. Listening back to it, I’m kinda embarrassed that I don’t give Matt much of a chance to get a word in edgewise.</li><li>In the last episode, I talked about the work-from-hotel offerings from Marriott, Hilton, and Hyatt. They all had their own twists, but Hyatt’s was the most unique in that their “Work from Hyatt” offer was resort-focused and had a 7-night minimum. I said it wasn’t so much a WeWork replacement as a digital nomad trial. Well, I’m guessing that they didn’t get much uptake on it because I just got another email from Hyatt with a new offering -- “Office for the Day” -- that pretty much matches Marriott’s Day Pass. Like I said last month, these offerings all feel a bit “toe in the water”, a bit opportunistic. And now that we’re starting to get better visibility into post-vaccine timelines, I wonder how long they’ll last -- will people still want to pay to work in a hotel room after all the Starbucks stores have reopened.</li><li>I’ve talked in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/12/podcast-120-where-do-guidebooks-fit-in-i-hate-shopping-for-suitcases\">past</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/09/28/podcast-124-craft-beer-hunting-i-hate-rick-steves\">episodes</a> about how I’m a bit of a knuckle-dragger regarding printed travel guides. I still find a physical book useful when traveling. But I’ve been wondering how quickly these physical guides will be able to push out post-COVID editions to reflect the closures of bars, restaurants, and independent shops they’ve recommended. I was running through my own Chicago recommendation list from 2019. A bunch of my favorite places have closed; it’s about an even split between “Closed forever, good-bye, we’ve taken down our sign” and “Closed until Spring… we hope.” The final proofs of the 2021 editions have to already be baked if not already at the printers. I dunno, maybe they’ll all post errata pages that you can download, print off, and then stick in your books.</li><li>In a massive intersection of all things social media, I posted a <a href=\"https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/tiktok-hotel-room-chef/index.html\">CNN article</a> on the TravelCommons Facebook page that a friend, a hotel company CIO, sent me on LinkedIn that showed TikTok videos of people cooking meals in hotel rooms using an iron for a griddle, a hot water kettle for a steamer, a pants presser as an oven, and the one that really wowed me -- a coffee maker as a sous vide water bath. I don’t know if I should be impressed by the ingenuity or looking to set up as a ghost kitchen/delivery service wherever they are because I’ve never seen anyone go to that extent to cook their own meal in a hotel room. Even guys I knew trying to squeeze the last pennies out of their per diems wouldn’t do much more than boil water for their Cup O’Noodles or work hard not to burn their microwave popcorn. I’ll also put a link in the show notes to the TikTok account of one of the guys, Jago Randles. His TikTok series,<a href=\"https://www.tiktok.com/@jagoscrandles\"> Isolation Kitchen</a>, has about 150,000 followers. He does some impressive stuff. But I will make sure, going forward, that I rinse out the coffee maker and wipe down the iron before using them.</li><li>For many frequent travelers, a key early milestone of the pandemic was when airlines and hotels gave them a year’s push on their status -- moving the expiration date from Jan 2021 to Jan 2022. Big sigh of relief. Then for Southwest fliers, another milestone -- drink coupon expiration dates all got pushed to the end of this year. Whew! All’s right in the traveling world. But a couple of days ago, I was rummaging around in my messenger bag and out tumbled 5 Southwest drink coupons -- one with a Sept expiration date; the rest, December 31. Look Southwest, I don’t want to seem greedy. I did get a year’s push on A-List and 6 months on Companion Pass. But I’d love you even more if you gave me another 6 months on those drink coupons. Nope, don’t say anything now; just think about it.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge music —&nbsp;<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Psykick/52938\">Another Way</a>&nbsp;by Psykick (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Psykick/52938</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Prove My Vax So I Can Fly</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Last month, I saw that quote from the Qantas CEO -- \"We will ask people to have a vaccination before they can get on the aircraft\'\' -- and thought, well it’s kinda the next logical step from Delta’s ATL-Rome and United’s EWR-LHR flights were you have to take COVID test and prove you’re negative before you can board.&nbsp;</li><li>I remember going to a travel clinic before my first flight to India; getting shot up with MMR, DTP, Hepatitis, and Typhoid vaccines and being given my <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carte_Jaune\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Yellow Card</a> -- officially my International Certificate of Vaccination or Prophylaxis -- listing all my shots. They told me to carry that with me to India, which I did and to Vietnam and Thailand and Singapore and China. No one ever asked to see it, not in an airport, an immigration line, a hotel,....&nbsp; It looks like the plans are that we’ll get a vaccination card from the CDC after receiving the first dose of COVID-19 vaccine. But that card isn’t meant as a validated proof of vaccination; it’s more of a reminder to go back in a couple of weeks for the second shot.&nbsp;</li><li>That handwritten piece of paper probably won’t pass muster at the Qantas boarding gate, and so that’s why we’re starting to see a bit of a vaccine passport app land grab going on. United has been testing the <a href=\"https://thecommonsproject.org/commonpass\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">CommonPass app</a> on their COVID-free EWR-LHR flight. You get your COVID test at the United Club near gate C93 and the results are uploaded into the app which then will display a QR code to the gate agent. CommonPass is being spun up with support from the World Economic Forum. Cathay Pacific, Lufthansa, SwissAir, and JetBlue also have plans to use it. Delta and Alitalia are trialing the <a href=\"https://www.aokpass.com/en/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">AOKPass </a>developed by the Int’l Chamber of Commerce on their COVID-free ATL-Rome flight. It uses blockchain for medical certificate storage, so bonus points to them in technology buzzword bingo. IATA, the Int’l Air Transport Association, an airline trade group, says they’re finishing up their app, <a href=\"https://www.iata.org/en/programs/passenger/travel-pass/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Travel Pass</a>, and will be piloting it with IAG, the parent of British Airways, Iberia, and Aer Lingus, in early 2021. And the World Health Organization says they’re looking at Estonia’s e-vaccination certificates as <a href=\"https://www.who.int/news-room/feature-stories/detail/estonia-and-who-to-jointly-develop-digital-vaccine-certificate-to-strengthen-covax#:~:text=WHO%20and%20Estonia%20recently%20agreed,access%20to%20COVID%2D19%20vaccines.\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the basis of a sort of “smart” Yellow Card app</a>.</li><li>I’m sure I’m missing a whole lot more; I just got tired of reading the same rehashed press release verbiage about secure and verifiable storage of health certifications. Going through this, it starts to feel like the health equivalent of those scooter apps, where I need half-a-dozen of them on my phone so I can rent the closest scooter to me. Unless someone blinks, it seems like I’ll need 3 or 4 of these vaccine passports to cover all my travel bases. But after reading through all the press releases and the infographics and the FAQs, none of these apps were real clear on how I get my physical CDC vaccine card into their digital storage vault. And I’m guessing that doctors and clinics are going to be more focused on taking care of patients and keeping their COVID vaccines cold, and not all that interested in entering my vaccination information into all those apps. Maybe Australia is further ahead with electronic health records, but I’m thinking, at least for the next year or so, that my CDC card is gonna be the best that Qantas and the gang are going to get.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/2879\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Slinky Blues</a> by Admiral Bob (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/28792 Ft: unreal_dm</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Hereditary Road Warriors</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I was reading some research, as one does during a lockdown advisory when one gets caught up running down a clickhole, about <a href=\"https://research.fb.com/blog/2016/03/do-jobs-run-in-families/\">jobs running in the family</a>. Some of the stats -- a son with a military father is 5 times more likely to enlist himself while if his mother is a lawyer, he’s 6.6 times more likely to follow her to the bar; a daughter with a scientist father is almost 4 times more likely to be a scientist. Indeed, when I was deciding my college major, I was leaning toward&nbsp; chemistry but chose chemical engineering mostly because my grandfather and father were both engineers.</li><li>Which got me thinking -- does traveling -- careers that require frequent traveling -- run in the family? Again, looking back on my family, my grandfather traveled a lot when he worked for Sears, checking out vendors for hard goods -- tools, small machinery -- and working with them on new products. My dad designed farm machinery -- things like hay balers and cotton pickers -- for International Harvester. He’d often be on the road for weeks at a time, testing prototypes at farms around the country, looking for different crop and field conditions, and then at plants helping to set up the manufacturing lines for the finished machine. And so I grew up seeing that rhythm of travel -- Dad at home, Dad packing, saying good-bye, and then getting on with our lives until he came back. This was back in the late ‘60’s and into the 70’s, so no cheap long-distance let alone messaging or email or video calls. He was gone, with the exception of a postcard or two, until he came back.</li><li>And then when I joined the workforce, the first day of my first real job out of school, I got on a plane and made the first of what’s been hundreds of flights between ORD and DFW.&nbsp; So many that, pretty soon, I got to know the women working the front desk at the DFW Admirals Club. One morning, one of them asks me if I’d maybe like to meet her daughter. Awkward. I asked her, “Would you want your daughter dating someone who’s out of town as much as I am?” She paused for a moment and then said, “No, not really”.&nbsp;</li><li>Also around this time, my dad had gotten promoted past the level of going out to the field and so was traveling a lot less. But my mother took a purchasing executive role and with that, the need for a lot of travel to vendors. So while travel was generational/ “hereditary” from my father to me, my mother and I started road warrior-ing at the same time, so we were more like travel “siblings” -- comparing hotel notes, competing on frequent flier status and perks.&nbsp;</li><li>Will traveling for a living continue to a 4th generation? Tough to tell right now; both kids measure their commute in feet rather than miles during the lockdown, and friends running consulting operations tell me the current state is great for staff productivity -- an hour sales call takes an hour, rather than a day’s worth of travel for that hour, and working remotely with clients saves the client money and consultants don’t get burnt out trying to balance work and home needs. As I said back in the March and July episodes, I don’t buy that 100% remote is the “new normal”, but I also don’t believe it will snap back to 2019 levels, not after what will have been a year’s-plus time working out the mechanics of virtual working. But will there be another generation of road warriors in my family? It’ll probably take a couple of years to figure that out.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #170</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li>I’ve made another little tweak to the RSS feed -- the file that all the podcast apps use to pull new episodes for your subscribed podcasts. This tweak affects the episode descriptions in the top podcast apps. For those apps that support it, there are now clickable links in the episode notes or descriptions. In last month’s episode, there were clickable links to the gift ideas blog post on the TravelCommons website as well as the episode show notes page. Going forward, there will always be a link to the episode’s show notes page. I’ve tested that this works on Apple Podcasts, Overcast (which is what I use), Stitcher, Pocket Casts, Podcast Addict, and Google Podcasts -- all of which make up 70-80% (depending on who’s doing the counting) of the TravelCommons downloads. So, if you get a chance, flip over to the episode description right now and check it out.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>, as well as asking Alexa, Siri, and Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_170.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors','','inherit','closed','closed','','2957-revision-v1','','','2020-12-16 23:01:08','2020-12-17 04:01:08','',2957,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/2957-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2963,1,'2020-12-16 23:07:44','2020-12-17 04:07:44','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":2857,\"width\":300,\"height\":300,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large is-resized\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/F3E28DAE-0026-4E8A-957E-D6CE914F717C.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2857\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"/><figcaption>I seem to have put on a Quarantine 15</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Spent a week in <a href=\"https://www.uptravel.com/\">Michigan\'s Upper Peninsula</a> hiking, biking, kayaking, and running into a lot of other people getting away to do the same, which got me looking back six months to the start of the pandemic. I talk about a surprisingly good flight cancellation experience with American Airlines, and figuring out how to download 12 years of <a href=\"https://www.tripit.com/\">TripIt</a> data. We wrap up talking to <a href=\"https://www.lendingtree.com/writer/matt-schulz/\">Matt Schulz</a> of <a href=\"https://www.lendingtree.com/\">LendingTree</a>, asking him what are we doing with travel credit cards that are generating frequent traveler points we can’t use? All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_167.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>download</strong></a> the podcast file, subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/896151355&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #167: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after a week’s tour of the UP -- Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Did a counter-clockwise circle route around Lake Michigan. Headed out east on Friday morning; stopped at a brewery in Grand Rapids for lunch; drove the 5 miles across the Mackinac Bridge just before dusk; and had my first UP pasty (the first of many) and a local beer for dinner that night in Sault Ste Marie. Spent a couple of days in Soo; watched 700-ft lake freighters make their way through the locks that connect Lake Superior to Lake Huron; I’m still enough of an engineer to geek out on that kind of stuff. We then drove west to Marquette for 3 days and again west to Houghton for 2 days before heading home through Wisconsin down the west side of Lake Michigan. It was all outdoors stuff -- hiking, biking, kayaking; the things that last-minute COVID closures or restrictions won’t muck up.&nbsp; The UP has always been on my list of places to visit, but it’s always on sorta the B-list, and so plans to go someplace else -- Spain, Napa, Ireland -- would always push it down the list. But now, with most places blocked off with travel restrictions and quarantines, the UP -- drivable with lots of outdoor activities -- bubbled to the top of the list.</li><li>And I wasn’t the only one thinking that way. The guy renting rowboats at <a href=\"https://www2.dnr.state.mi.us/ParksandTrails/Details.aspx?id=428&amp;type=SPRK\">Tahquamenon Falls State Park</a> looked at our release forms and said “We’ve had a lot of people up here from Chicago. It’s been crazy busy. We can’t get enough people to handle it.” And biking around <a href=\"https://www.travelmarquette.com/things-to-do/attractions/presque-isle-park/\">Presque Isle Park</a> in Marquette, we got talking, in a socially distant way, to a biking couple up from St Louis. It was also their first time up. A bunch of their friends and family had been up earlier; they’d seen nothing but UP pictures in their Facebook feed for the past month.</li><li>The husband said that he had an underlying medical condition and so they were looking for places away from people; they’d rented a cabin in the little town of Au Train. Which got me thinking about the place we stayed in Soo -- the <a href=\"https://www.plazamotormotel.com/\">Plaza Motor Motel</a>. No lobby, no elevators, no hallways; no places to run into other guests; no need to have to remember to mask up when you leave your room. Just open your room door and there’s your car. Most frequent travelers would never think of voluntarily staying in a motor inn, a <em>mo</em>-tel. But with so many things changing in these unprecedented times, maybe COVID will have folks give motels another chance.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/11510\">Funkist</a> - cdk dub mix by cdk (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: teru</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>First, a big shout out to the folks in Hanoi, Vietnam listening to TravelCommons on Soundcloud. One of the fun things about the podcast is looking at where people are listening from. For the most part, the stats make sense -- most of the listeners are from the US, and then English-speaking countries -- the UK, Canada, Australia. But every once in a while, there’s a spike that I just can’t figure out. I’ll see it, go look at the episode notes to see if I’ve mentioned that country, but I usually can’t make sense of it. Last fall, it was Argentina., but over the past couple of months, it’s been folks from Hanoi, primarily listening to <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/04/11/podcast-162-post-corona-trip-planning-keeping-a-travel-journal/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #162 — Post-Corona Trip Planning; Keeping a Travel Journal\">April episode, #162</a>, about post-lockdown trip planning and keeping a travel journal. Not sure why, but if you’re in Hanoi and you’ve made it to this episode - Hi! And thanks for listening!</li><li>Dan Grabon sent me a note at the beginning of the month about my lockdown reading that I mentioned during <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #166 — What Is The Meaning of Travel?\">last month’s interview</a> with Dr Emily Thomas<ul><li>“Mark,&nbsp; I feel your pain. I started re-reading Walden back in April, and I just passed the halfway mark at the end of August. This was part of an overly ambitious effort to read one great book a month from a literary calendar that I bought. The Brothers Karamazov took up January through March, and even though COVID should have meant more time to read, it just hasn’t turned out that way.</li><li>“Writing this from a long overdue vacation near Lake George, where I saw the book Cabin Porn in a gift shop. Good timing.</li><li>“Thanks for keeping the podcast going— helps keep me going in this time of not going much of anywhere!”</li></ul></li><li>Dan, Thanks for the note. <em>The Brothers Karamazov</em> -- you are a better man than I.&nbsp; I swore off of Russian fiction after suffering through <em>Crime and Punishment</em> in high school. That and Charles Dickens, just can’t do ‘em. And I am still working my way through <em>Walden</em>. Just got through his half-dozen pages on hoeing his bean field. I find if I try to read more than a dozen pages in a sitting, I just start skimming -- or sleeping. Glad you were able to get away to the wilderness of Lake George. Feel like the perfect place to find that Cabin Porn book.</li><li>Jim McDonough hit the TravelCommons Facebook page, following up on my comment in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\" title=\"Podcast #166 — What Is The Meaning of Travel?\">last month’s episode</a> about my disappearing American flight from ORD to BCN. Jim writes...<ul><li>“We were going to Barcelona and Madrid with Rick Steves Europe in October, but of course Rick has canceled every tour for the rest of the year. Interestingly, AA says we are still booked on a BA 747 from SAN to LHR as part of this trip. BA has no more 747\'s and doesn\'t serve SAN any more.”</li></ul></li><li>I sometimes think any of the airline’s schedules more than one month out are more like aspirational projections than reflections of reality. Especially given how fast they’re shifting schedules to capture any sort of bump in passenger volume. Like United having <a href=\"https://airlineweekly.com/airlines-feeling-a-lift-from-rocky-mountain-hubs\">some transcontinental flights stop in DEN to pick up a bump in volume from people visiting national parks</a> -- there’s that outdoor activity trend again.</li><li>But back to that BCN trip, I should be getting things here in Chicago sorted before heading off for 2 weeks in Catalonia, but you’ve probably already guessed, that trip isn’t happening. Not a surprise. The EU still isn’t letting US travelers in and the case count in Spain’s second COVID wave has gotten worse in the last month. So at the beginning of the month, I gritted my teeth, called American and cancelled the flights. Actually, American had called me the prior week while we were in the UP, but I let it go to voicemail. We were in a taproom in Marquette and I didn’t feel ready to have that conversation. I wanted to have all our booking info in front of me and be clear minded (tough during a taproom session) and mentally girded for battle. So when I returned their call the next week, I was sitting in front of my laptop with all my itinerary documents up and was ready to go. It was a quick trip through the automated phone tree to a very nice woman in Dallas. No hassles with canceling. I was asking her about the logistics of the travel credit - how long will it be good for - when she said, “Since your flight was canceled and you were re-booked, you can get a refund if you like.” Wow. “Uh, yes,” I quickly said, not wanting her offer to disappear, “I think I’ll take the refund instead.” That was not what I expected from all the stories about American trying to keep as much cash as possible. It took her a couple of minutes to process the refunds during which we compared the weather between Chicago and Dallas. The refunds hit my credit card the following week, so full kudos to American on handling this. I’m hoping I don’t need to repeat in November for my Thanksgiving trip to London.</li><li>A couple of weeks back I was trading notes with TravelCommons contributor Allan Marko about <a href=\"https://www.sfgate.com/travel/article/United-bangalore-SFO-15551358.php\">United’s new SFO-Bangalore non-stop</a>. It’ll be their longest flight at 17½ hours. My immediate reaction was, of course, “that’s a helluva long time to wear a mask.” United is using a 787-9 with a special engine enhancement that makes the flight possible. Which got me thinking about what planes I’d flown into BLR. I’ve been using <a href=\"https://www.tripit.com/\">TripIt</a> since 2008 when it first broke out of the Silicon Valley venture cap bubble, so I logged in, clicked over to Past Trips and started clicking back through the pages -- and clicking and clicking because the last time I was in Bangalore was April 2014. I kept looking around the screen - there’s gotta be a way to export all my trip data; but I couldn’t find anything. So I sent a note to <a href=\"mailto:support@tripit.com\">support@tripit.com</a>. And, to my huge surprise, Andy from the Tripit Help Center replied in <em>15 minutes</em> saying “We currently do not offer customer driven travel data export capability. We have passed your suggestion on to the appropriate team for review.” Having run a software product team, I knew what that meant -- never. But, in the next paragraph, Andy offered a solution -- “You can check out a third party app Openflights. They have an API with TripIt that will allow you to import trips from your TripIt account to their site. From there you can create a list of all of your flights and download them to a csv file. Their basic account is free to use.” Sweet. I thanked Andy for his quick reply and hit <a href=\"https://openflights.org/\">Openflights</a>. I set up an account, hit the “Import” button and connected to my TripIt account. The import was a touch kludgy -- I had to go page by page, review each trip, and mark it to import. After 88 pages, I had imported 1006 flight segments, which they displayed on a world map. I clicked on BLR and a little card popped up. I clicked on the first option and it listed the 8 flights I’d taken to and from BLR. Turns out I’d mostly flown Airbus A320s, though I did once fly a 747-400 in from FRA. It has a couple of analysis buttons -- like my longest flight -- Joburg to IAD at 17:40 (ha! 10 minutes longer than the SFO-BLR flight); and my shortest -- IAD again, but this time a 44-minute flight to CHO. And of course, I was able to download all my trips into Excel so I can noodle around to my heart’s content. Openflights is free, but I’m going to <a href=\"https://openflights.org/donate\">donate</a> to help keep them going. <a href=\"https://openflights.org/\">Openflights.org</a> -- definitely recommended. I’ll put a link in the show notes.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/48705\">Jolanta Blues</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: Admiral Bob, Martijn de Boer</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>6 Months of Pandemic</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Finally giving into reality and canceling my Barcelona flight 6 months after booking it got me thinking back on these -- you know what’s coming -- <em>unprecedented</em> times. Airlines canceled flights to China at the end of January, then to South Korea, Iran, and Italy in February, until, by the beginning of March, airline traffic joined the stock market in a free fall. But back then, we thought it was a one-off event, kinda like Sept 11th; a sharp, scary event that came out of nowhere with no warning but that would soon pass. So taking advantage of one of the many March fare sales to book a flight at the end of September didn’t seem that risky.</li><li>I was talking to one of my consulting friends a couple of weeks ago. His travel schedule was similar to mine - a week without seeing an airport was a rare exception. He hasn’t been on a plane since March and doesn’t know when he’ll get on one next. He just started a project with a manufacturer in Cincinnati. Most of the project will be virtual, but he’s pretty sure he ought to at least put eyes on their plant. He lives outside Detroit. In the past, he’d be flying down every week. Now, he fires up Google Maps -- it’s a 4½ drive down I-75. He’ll drive down once, stay a couple of days, and then head back home.&nbsp;</li><li>I can’t say that anyone I’ve talked to misses the act of business travel -- getting up at 0 dark 30 Monday morning to get to the airport, shuffle through the PreCheck line for 15-20 minutes, and then shoehorn into a full flight for an hour or 3.&nbsp; But we did it because that was part of the job. But now that it’s not, at least for now and what seems like (for now) through the end of the year, everybody is taking full advantage of sleeping in -- in their own beds.</li><li>Which explains why, of all the US airlines, Spirit Airlines, with its complete focus on low-cost leisure travelers, is the only one sounding even somewhat non-negative.&nbsp; And hotel chains like Choice, focused on what they call “drive-to” locations and extended stay properties getting occupancy rates over 50% while center city hotels like Chicago’s Hilton Palmer House are missing rent payments and slouching towards bankruptcy.</li><li>Irene and I were sitting outside at a microbrewery a couple of days ago, enjoying a sunny afternoon full in the knowledge that we have maybe 4 weeks of outdoor eating and drinking left in Chicago. We talked about what kind of travel we would do over the next 12 months, figuring travel restrictions and periodic lockdowns are going to be the norm for at least that long. No big plans; nothing that COVID could blow up but seeing some new places -- some skiing, maybe trying out Montana; some hiking, maybe checking out the Texas Hill Country. But next month, we’re trading Barcelona for Philadelphia; now that they’ve opened up the restaurants again, check out our old neighborhood and visit with some friends. It’ll be Irene’s first flight since February. It took a bit of talking, but I really think the threat of a total of 22 hrs in a car with me -- alone -- tipped her over.&nbsp;</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djiz/10514\">Nube - Djiz Rmx</a> by Kwame (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: SylviaO</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Do We Keep Travel Credit Cards?</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Last week, <a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/14/delta-launches-6point5-billion-debt-deal-backed-by-its-frequent-flyer-program.html\">Delta used their SkyMiles program to back $6.5 billion in debt</a>, running the same play that United and American did in June. What caught my eye was some of the stats that came out with the debt filing -- that <a href=\"https://skift.com/2020/09/15/how-delta-looks-to-leverage-rewards-from-its-own-frequent-flyer-program/\">SkyMiles had about $6.1 billion in revenue in 2019, about two-thirds from American Express</a> which issues a co-branded Delta card, and that <a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/14/delta-launches-6point5-billion-debt-deal-backed-by-its-frequent-flyer-program.html\">total miles redeemed fell by 78% in the first half of this year.</a> The big carriers are leaning on their loyalty programs for cash, their biggest customers are credit card issuers, but those card users - us - are generating points that we’ve stopped using.&nbsp;</li><li>It’s against this background that I called up Matt Schulz, chief credit analyst at LendingTree, and to ask him -- do we want to keep travel credit cards?<ul><li>Matt, a lot of folks carry at least one travel credit card and I don’t think I’m going too far out on a limb guessing that damn close to every TravelCommons listeners carry them. We’re 6 months on from the COVID lockdowns and the resulting cratering of the travel industry. But with travel not recovering -- airline demand is still just a third of pre-pandemic levels and United Airlines’ CEO said last week it could be 3-4 years before it’s back to 2019 levels -- what are card holders doing with these cards generating frequent traveler points that they can’t or don’t want to use?</li><li>Back in March and April, it seemed the strategy for the big travel card issuers -- Chase, Citi, Amex -- seemed to be to sacrifice revenue to hold share -- statement credits for annual fees if you called them to cancel, new bonuses for stay-at-home purchases to keep wallet share -- seemed like 5x bonuses for grocery and gas was the most popular. Made sense when everyone was talking about 2-week shutdowns and a V-shaped recovery. But, as we said before, travel is gonna stay depressed for a while -- between state and country quarantines and many people not wanting to get in a plane -- how are travel card companies going to handle the next round of renewals? When I call Chase and Amex again, do I get more statement credits -- do they continue to fight for share? And if they don’t, what do I do with the balance of Ultimate or Membership Rewards points that I’ll lose if I don’t re-up and pay the fee?</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #167</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and now, <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_167.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #167 — 6 Months On; Why Keep Travel Cards?','','inherit','closed','closed','','2856-revision-v1','','','2020-12-16 23:07:44','2020-12-17 04:07:44','',2856,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/2856-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0);
INSERT INTO `wp_posts` VALUES
(2964,1,'2020-12-16 23:20:22','2020-12-17 04:20:22','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":2960,\"width\":300,\"height\":300,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large is-resized\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2960\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"/><figcaption>How Do I Insert This Into My iPhone<br>(DoD photo by EJ Hersom)</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>No Thanksgiving travel, but looking at the travel volume for this, the busiest travel week of the year, shows just how far things have fallen. The Qantas CEO said \"No vax, no fly\", so we dig into the emerging world of digital vaccine passports. And then I trace my travel genealogy, wondering if road warrior-ism is hereditary. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_170.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go over to the <em>Subscribe</em> section on the right to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/928852471&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #170: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. And again, no travel since the last episode. Not too surprising given the way things are going right now. Back in April, I’d jumped on one of those smokin’ American Airlines’ promotions to book flights to London for Thanksgiving. Which then -- not surprisingly -- got cancelled at the beginning of September.&nbsp; So I was back to what has been my typical Thanksgiving travel pattern for the past 10-15 years -- staying at home to avoid the crowds on what is always the busiest travel week of the year. PK -- pre-kids -- Irene and I would always travel over the holidays, splitting Thanksgiving and Christmas between my family in Southern California and hers in Chicago. But post-kids -- which is also PK, so I guess it should be AK -- after kids -- we started staying at home. And I’d figure out how to “ground” myself from business travel also. I found that the challenge of holiday travel wasn’t necessarily the crowds; it’s the make-up of the crowds; what some road warriors might call “clueless” travelers. I think “amateur” is certainly a more charitable and probably more accurate term. Even more so this year with so many road warriors out of practice after being off the road since March. Lots of those folks definitely in danger of losing their “professional” traveler status.</li><li>I saw an interesting graph the other day comparing last year’s and this year’s day-by-day airport travel volumes over the Thanksgiving weekend. No surprises comparing the Wednesday travel volumes, what is traditionally the busiest travel day of the year. Last year’s Wednesday saw 2.6 million passengers, almost 2½ times busier than this year. I expected that. But what really caught my eye was that this year’s peak day -- <a href=\"https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/thanksgiving-travel-volume-2020-pandemic/index.html\">Sunday at about 1.2 million </a>-- was still a lot less than last year’s slowest day, Thanksgiving, at about 1.6 million. I didn’t travel last year at Thanksgiving, but did in 2018.&nbsp; Irene and I broke our no-travel rule and flew down to Santa Fe, NM on Thanksgiving Day. Back in episode <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/12/17/podcast-147-holiday-travel-tips-notes-from-santa-fe/\">#147</a>, I said that Thanksgiving Day flight was one of the least stressful travel experiences I’d ever had — no traffic on the drive to ORD, no lines. The TSA agents were hanging around just looking for people to screen. And that day, there were around 25% more people in airports than this year’s <em>busiest</em> day. I shouldn’t be surprised, but all the pictures I saw in the news coverage made it look like airports were a lot more crowded.&nbsp;</li><li>Our apartment is just south of one of the northern approaches to ORD. Flights from the east come in over the lake -- seats A, B, and C get a great view of the city skyline while seats D, E, and F get to look down into Wrigley Field -- then&nbsp; over the northwest side of the city, landing on one of the runways north of the terminal. I’ve always been impressed by the choreography of ORD. On a clear Friday afternoon, driving up the tollway that runs east of the airport, I’d see planes on parallel approaches landing simultaneously -- one to the north of the terminal and one to the south -- and looking up, see the lights of planes on approach behind them -- 2, 3, 4.... Back in April, during Chicago’s lockdown, I’d sit out on the rooftop deck -- because what else was I going to do? -- and maybe see one plane coming in over the lake on that approach. But now I’m seeing more planes -- sometimes 3, 4 in a row. Don’t know that they’re all carrying passengers -- some could be temporary cargo carriers taking some of that e-commerce money, with boxes instead of seats under the overhead bins. But I can feel travel starting to pick up. It could be a tough winter, but I’m trying to look out over the horizon a bit; trying to look forward to spring.</li><li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mactonite/29469\">Static</a>&nbsp;by Darkroom (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mactonite/29469</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>TravelCommons contributor Allan Marko commented on my little lockdown game with my Google Mini -- changing the voice to, say, an English accent and then asking about the weather in London.&nbsp; Allan wrote:<ul><li>I often change the Siri voice for a bit of variety. Currently “Australian Female” is providing my CarPlay directions. you can also ask Siri to “Play TravelCommons”…</li></ul></li><li>Which immediately got me digging into Siri’s settings, looking for the Voice options. I found I had a choice of American, Australian, British, Indian, Irish, and South African. Since I’d already used the first three with my Google Mini, it was between the last three. I chose Irish for now, but will probably switch to South African before the end of the month. Actually, Waze, the nav app, always impressed me with the number of voice and language options. Every once in a while, I switch Irene’s Waze over to Hungarian before she’s heading out somewhere. For some reason, I get more of a laugh out of it than she does.</li><li>TravelCommons listener Dan Grabon and I have been trading notes as we’ve each slogged through Thoreau’s <em>Walden</em>. We both started it back in April, in the height of the lockdown. Everybody was deciding that, with nothing much else to do, it was a good time to pick up that classic you’ve always been meaning to get to. Dan started out with <em>The Brothers Karamazov</em>, which I thought was damned impressive. I first reached for Whitman’s <em>Leaves of Grass</em>, but then thought I needed something a bit more down-to-earth, something that wouldn’t need quite that level of interpretation and abstract thinking. And <em>Walden</em>, about Thoreau’s self-isolation in the woods outside of Concord, MA, seemed a better fit with the lockdown. Dan finished last month, at the beginning of November. I was 50 pages behind, so I didn’t finish ‘til Thanksgiving -- it was tough cutting through the tryptophan fog, but I gutted it through. Dan said he was staying with Thoreau, moving onto <em>Civil Disobedience</em> before shelving the book. I pivoted to non-fiction, <em>Why We Sleep</em>, where a neuroscientist and sleep expert spends some 300+ pages saying “If you don’t sleep 8 hours, you’re killing yourself” which got me doing some mental math. Between jet lag from all the&nbsp; international flights and waking up at 4am to make 6am flights to LGA, I’ve probably dropped 5 years off my life. Though, given some dementia running through my family history, I might not have remembered those years anyways.</li><li>And I show up on the other side of the mic talking travel pro tips with Matt Wilson on his <a href=\"https://www.under30experiences.com/blog/travel-like-a-pro-with-mark-peacock-of-travelcommons\">Millennial Travel Podcast</a>.&nbsp; I’m trying to remember when we recorded this -- had to be pre-April 2019 because I was still in the suburban TravelCommons studio and Matt was hanging out down in Costa Rica. The connection fuzzes out now and again, but it was a fun conversation. I’ll put a link in the episode in the show notes but fair warning -- it’s mostly me rattling on for an hour. Listening back to it, I’m kinda embarrassed that I don’t give Matt much of a chance to get a word in edgewise.</li><li>In the last episode, I talked about the work-from-hotel offerings from Marriott, Hilton, and Hyatt. They all had their own twists, but Hyatt’s was the most unique in that their “Work from Hyatt” offer was resort-focused and had a 7-night minimum. I said it wasn’t so much a WeWork replacement as a digital nomad trial. Well, I’m guessing that they didn’t get much uptake on it because I just got another email from Hyatt with a new offering -- “Office for the Day” -- that pretty much matches Marriott’s Day Pass. Like I said last month, these offerings all feel a bit “toe in the water”, a bit opportunistic. And now that we’re starting to get better visibility into post-vaccine timelines, I wonder how long they’ll last -- will people still want to pay to work in a hotel room after all the Starbucks stores have reopened.</li><li>I’ve talked in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/12/podcast-120-where-do-guidebooks-fit-in-i-hate-shopping-for-suitcases\">past</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/09/28/podcast-124-craft-beer-hunting-i-hate-rick-steves\">episodes</a> about how I’m a bit of a knuckle-dragger regarding printed travel guides. I still find a physical book useful when traveling. But I’ve been wondering how quickly these physical guides will be able to push out post-COVID editions to reflect the closures of bars, restaurants, and independent shops they’ve recommended. I was running through my own Chicago recommendation list from 2019. A bunch of my favorite places have closed; it’s about an even split between “Closed forever, good-bye, we’ve taken down our sign” and “Closed until Spring… we hope.” The final proofs of the 2021 editions have to already be baked if not already at the printers. I dunno, maybe they’ll all post errata pages that you can download, print off, and then stick in your books.</li><li>In a massive intersection of all things social media, I posted a <a href=\"https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/tiktok-hotel-room-chef/index.html\">CNN article</a> on the TravelCommons Facebook page that a friend, a hotel company CIO, sent me on LinkedIn that showed TikTok videos of people cooking meals in hotel rooms using an iron for a griddle, a hot water kettle for a steamer, a pants presser as an oven, and the one that really wowed me -- a coffee maker as a sous vide water bath. I don’t know if I should be impressed by the ingenuity or looking to set up as a ghost kitchen/delivery service wherever they are because I’ve never seen anyone go to that extent to cook their own meal in a hotel room. Even guys I knew trying to squeeze the last pennies out of their per diems wouldn’t do much more than boil water for their Cup O’Noodles or work hard not to burn their microwave popcorn. I’ll also put a link in the show notes to the TikTok account of one of the guys, Jago Randles. His TikTok series,<a href=\"https://www.tiktok.com/@jagoscrandles\"> Isolation Kitchen</a>, has about 150,000 followers. He does some impressive stuff. But I will make sure, going forward, that I rinse out the coffee maker and wipe down the iron before using them.</li><li>For many frequent travelers, a key early milestone of the pandemic was when airlines and hotels gave them a year’s push on their status -- moving the expiration date from Jan 2021 to Jan 2022. Big sigh of relief. Then for Southwest fliers, another milestone -- drink coupon expiration dates all got pushed to the end of this year. Whew! All’s right in the traveling world. But a couple of days ago, I was rummaging around in my messenger bag and out tumbled 5 Southwest drink coupons -- one with a Sept expiration date; the rest, December 31. Look Southwest, I don’t want to seem greedy. I did get a year’s push on A-List and 6 months on Companion Pass. But I’d love you even more if you gave me another 6 months on those drink coupons. Nope, don’t say anything now; just think about it.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge music —&nbsp;<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Psykick/52938\">Another Way</a>&nbsp;by Psykick (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Psykick/52938</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Prove My Vax So I Can Fly</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Last month, I saw that quote from the Qantas CEO -- \"We will ask people to have a vaccination before they can get on the aircraft\'\' -- and thought, well it’s kinda the next logical step from Delta’s ATL-Rome and United’s EWR-LHR flights were you have to take COVID test and prove you’re negative before you can board.&nbsp;</li><li>I remember going to a travel clinic before my first flight to India; getting shot up with MMR, DTP, Hepatitis, and Typhoid vaccines and being given my <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carte_Jaune\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Yellow Card</a> -- officially my International Certificate of Vaccination or Prophylaxis -- listing all my shots. They told me to carry that with me to India, which I did and to Vietnam and Thailand and Singapore and China. No one ever asked to see it, not in an airport, an immigration line, a hotel,....&nbsp; It looks like the plans are that we’ll get a vaccination card from the CDC after receiving the first dose of COVID-19 vaccine. But that card isn’t meant as a validated proof of vaccination; it’s more of a reminder to go back in a couple of weeks for the second shot.&nbsp;</li><li>That handwritten piece of paper probably won’t pass muster at the Qantas boarding gate, and so that’s why we’re starting to see a bit of a vaccine passport app land grab going on. United has been testing the <a href=\"https://thecommonsproject.org/commonpass\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">CommonPass app</a> on their COVID-free EWR-LHR flight. You get your COVID test at the United Club near gate C93 and the results are uploaded into the app which then will display a QR code to the gate agent. CommonPass is being spun up with support from the World Economic Forum. Cathay Pacific, Lufthansa, SwissAir, and JetBlue also have plans to use it. Delta and Alitalia are trialing the <a href=\"https://www.aokpass.com/en/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">AOKPass </a>developed by the Int’l Chamber of Commerce on their COVID-free ATL-Rome flight. It uses blockchain for medical certificate storage, so bonus points to them in technology buzzword bingo. IATA, the Int’l Air Transport Association, an airline trade group, says they’re finishing up their app, <a href=\"https://www.iata.org/en/programs/passenger/travel-pass/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Travel Pass</a>, and will be piloting it with IAG, the parent of British Airways, Iberia, and Aer Lingus, in early 2021. And the World Health Organization says they’re looking at Estonia’s e-vaccination certificates as <a href=\"https://www.who.int/news-room/feature-stories/detail/estonia-and-who-to-jointly-develop-digital-vaccine-certificate-to-strengthen-covax#:~:text=WHO%20and%20Estonia%20recently%20agreed,access%20to%20COVID%2D19%20vaccines.\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the basis of a sort of “smart” Yellow Card app</a>.</li><li>I’m sure I’m missing a whole lot more; I just got tired of reading the same rehashed press release verbiage about secure and verifiable storage of health certifications. Going through this, it starts to feel like the health equivalent of those scooter apps, where I need half-a-dozen of them on my phone so I can rent the closest scooter to me. Unless someone blinks, it seems like I’ll need 3 or 4 of these vaccine passports to cover all my travel bases. But after reading through all the press releases and the infographics and the FAQs, none of these apps were real clear on how I get my physical CDC vaccine card into their digital storage vault. And I’m guessing that doctors and clinics are going to be more focused on taking care of patients and keeping their COVID vaccines cold, and not all that interested in entering my vaccination information into all those apps. Maybe Australia is further ahead with electronic health records, but I’m thinking, at least for the next year or so, that my CDC card is gonna be the best that Qantas and the gang are going to get.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/2879\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Slinky Blues</a> by Admiral Bob (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/28792 Ft: unreal_dm</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Hereditary Road Warriors</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I was reading some research, as one does during a lockdown advisory when one gets caught up running down a clickhole, about <a href=\"https://research.fb.com/blog/2016/03/do-jobs-run-in-families/\">jobs running in the family</a>. Some of the stats -- a son with a military father is 5 times more likely to enlist himself while if his mother is a lawyer, he’s 6.6 times more likely to follow her to the bar; a daughter with a scientist father is almost 4 times more likely to be a scientist. Indeed, when I was deciding my college major, I was leaning toward&nbsp; chemistry but chose chemical engineering mostly because my grandfather and father were both engineers.</li><li>Which got me thinking -- does traveling -- careers that require frequent traveling -- run in the family? Again, looking back on my family, my grandfather traveled a lot when he worked for Sears, checking out vendors for hard goods -- tools, small machinery -- and working with them on new products. My dad designed farm machinery -- things like hay balers and cotton pickers -- for International Harvester. He’d often be on the road for weeks at a time, testing prototypes at farms around the country, looking for different crop and field conditions, and then at plants helping to set up the manufacturing lines for the finished machine. And so I grew up seeing that rhythm of travel -- Dad at home, Dad packing, saying good-bye, and then getting on with our lives until he came back. This was back in the late ‘60’s and into the 70’s, so no cheap long-distance let alone messaging or email or video calls. He was gone, with the exception of a postcard or two, until he came back.</li><li>And then when I joined the workforce, the first day of my first real job out of school, I got on a plane and made the first of what’s been hundreds of flights between ORD and DFW.&nbsp; So many that, pretty soon, I got to know the women working the front desk at the DFW Admirals Club. One morning, one of them asks me if I’d maybe like to meet her daughter. Awkward. I asked her, “Would you want your daughter dating someone who’s out of town as much as I am?” She paused for a moment and then said, “No, not really”.&nbsp;</li><li>Also around this time, my dad had gotten promoted past the level of going out to the field and so was traveling a lot less. But my mother took a purchasing executive role and with that, the need for a lot of travel to vendors. So while travel was generational/ “hereditary” from my father to me, my mother and I started road warrior-ing at the same time, so we were more like travel “siblings” -- comparing hotel notes, competing on frequent flier status and perks.&nbsp;</li><li>Will traveling for a living continue to a 4th generation? Tough to tell right now; both kids measure their commute in feet rather than miles during the lockdown, and friends running consulting operations tell me the current state is great for staff productivity -- an hour sales call takes an hour, rather than a day’s worth of travel for that hour, and working remotely with clients saves the client money and consultants don’t get burnt out trying to balance work and home needs. As I said back in the March and July episodes, I don’t buy that 100% remote is the “new normal”, but I also don’t believe it will snap back to 2019 levels, not after what will have been a year’s-plus time working out the mechanics of virtual working. But will there be another generation of road warriors in my family? It’ll probably take a couple of years to figure that out.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #170</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li>I’ve made another little tweak to the RSS feed -- the file that all the podcast apps use to pull new episodes for your subscribed podcasts. This tweak affects the episode descriptions in the top podcast apps. For those apps that support it, there are now clickable links in the episode notes or descriptions. In last month’s episode, there were clickable links to the gift ideas blog post on the TravelCommons website as well as the episode show notes page. Going forward, there will always be a link to the episode’s show notes page. I’ve tested that this works on Apple Podcasts, Overcast (which is what I use), Stitcher, Pocket Casts, Podcast Addict, and Google Podcasts -- all of which make up 70-80% (depending on who’s doing the counting) of the TravelCommons downloads. So, if you get a chance, flip over to the episode description right now and check it out.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>, as well as asking Alexa, Siri, and Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_170.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors','','inherit','closed','closed','','2957-revision-v1','','','2020-12-16 23:20:22','2020-12-17 04:20:22','',2957,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/2957-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2965,1,'2020-12-17 16:29:41','2020-12-17 21:29:41','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":2960,\"width\":300,\"height\":300,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large is-resized\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2960\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"/><figcaption>How Do I Insert This Into My iPhone<br>(DoD photo by EJ Hersom)</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>No Thanksgiving travel, but looking at the travel volume for this, the busiest travel week of the year, shows just how far things have fallen. The Qantas CEO said \"No vax, no fly\", so we dig into the emerging world of digital vaccine passports. And then I trace my travel genealogy, wondering if road warrior-ism is hereditary. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_170.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go over to the <em>Subscribe</em> section on the right to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/928852471&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #170: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. And again, no travel since the last episode. Not too surprising given the way things are going right now. Back in April, I’d jumped on one of those smokin’ American Airlines’ promotions to book flights to London for Thanksgiving. Which then -- not surprisingly -- got cancelled at the beginning of September.  So I was back to what has been my typical Thanksgiving travel pattern for the past 10-15 years -- staying at home to avoid the crowds on what is always the busiest travel week of the year. PK -- pre-kids -- Irene and I would always travel over the holidays, splitting Thanksgiving and Christmas between my family in Southern California and hers in Chicago. But post-kids -- which is also PK, so I guess it should be AK -- after kids -- we started staying at home. And I’d figure out how to “ground” myself from business travel also. I found that the challenge of holiday travel wasn’t necessarily the crowds; it’s the make-up of the crowds; what some road warriors might call “clueless” travelers. I think “amateur” is certainly a more charitable and probably more accurate term. Even more so this year with so many road warriors out of practice after being off the road since March. Lots of those folks definitely in danger of losing their “professional” traveler status.</li><li>I saw an interesting graph the other day comparing last year’s and this year’s day-by-day airport travel volumes over the Thanksgiving weekend. No surprises comparing the Wednesday travel volumes, what is traditionally the busiest travel day of the year. Last year’s Wednesday saw 2.6 million passengers, almost 2½ times busier than this year. I expected that. But what really caught my eye was that this year’s peak day -- <a href=\"https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/thanksgiving-travel-volume-2020-pandemic/index.html\">Sunday at about 1.2 million </a>-- was still a lot less than last year’s slowest day, Thanksgiving, at about 1.6 million. I didn’t travel last year at Thanksgiving, but did in 2018.  Irene and I broke our no-travel rule and flew down to Santa Fe, NM on Thanksgiving Day. Back in episode <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/12/17/podcast-147-holiday-travel-tips-notes-from-santa-fe/\">#147</a>, I said that Thanksgiving Day flight was one of the least stressful travel experiences I’d ever had — no traffic on the drive to ORD, no lines. The TSA agents were hanging around just looking for people to screen. And that day, there were around 25% more people in airports than this year’s <em>busiest</em> day. I shouldn’t be surprised, but all the pictures I saw in the news coverage made it look like airports were a lot more crowded. </li><li>Our apartment is just south of one of the northern approaches to ORD. Flights from the east come in over the lake -- seats A, B, and C get a great view of the city skyline while seats D, E, and F get to look down into Wrigley Field -- then  over the northwest side of the city, landing on one of the runways north of the terminal. I’ve always been impressed by the choreography of ORD. On a clear Friday afternoon, driving up the tollway that runs east of the airport, I’d see planes on parallel approaches landing simultaneously -- one to the north of the terminal and one to the south -- and looking up, see the lights of planes on approach behind them -- 2, 3, 4.... Back in April, during Chicago’s lockdown, I’d sit out on the rooftop deck -- because what else was I going to do? -- and maybe see one plane coming in over the lake on that approach. But now I’m seeing more planes -- sometimes 3, 4 in a row. Don’t know that they’re all carrying passengers -- some could be temporary cargo carriers taking some of that e-commerce money, with boxes instead of seats under the overhead bins. But I can feel travel starting to pick up. It could be a tough winter, but I’m trying to look out over the horizon a bit; trying to look forward to spring.</li><li>Bridge Music -- Leviathan by Kirkoid (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Kirkoid/31109</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>TravelCommons contributor Allan Marko commented on my little lockdown game with my Google Mini -- changing the voice to, say, an English accent and then asking about the weather in London.  Allan wrote:<ul><li>I often change the Siri voice for a bit of variety. Currently “Australian Female” is providing my CarPlay directions. you can also ask Siri to “Play TravelCommons”…</li></ul></li><li>Which immediately got me digging into Siri’s settings, looking for the Voice options. I found I had a choice of American, Australian, British, Indian, Irish, and South African. Since I’d already used the first three with my Google Mini, it was between the last three. I chose Irish for now, but will probably switch to South African before the end of the month. Actually, Waze, the nav app, always impressed me with the number of voice and language options. Every once in a while, I switch Irene’s Waze over to Hungarian before she’s heading out somewhere. For some reason, I get more of a laugh out of it than she does.</li><li>TravelCommons listener Dan Grabon and I have been trading notes as we’ve each slogged through Thoreau’s <em>Walden</em>. We both started it back in April, in the height of the lockdown. Everybody was deciding that, with nothing much else to do, it was a good time to pick up that classic you’ve always been meaning to get to. Dan started out with <em>The Brothers Karamazov</em>, which I thought was damned impressive. I first reached for Whitman’s <em>Leaves of Grass</em>, but then thought I needed something a bit more down-to-earth, something that wouldn’t need quite that level of interpretation and abstract thinking. And <em>Walden</em>, about Thoreau’s self-isolation in the woods outside of Concord, MA, seemed a better fit with the lockdown. Dan finished last month, at the beginning of November. I was 50 pages behind, so I didn’t finish ‘til Thanksgiving -- it was tough cutting through the tryptophan fog, but I gutted it through. Dan said he was staying with Thoreau, moving onto <em>Civil Disobedience</em> before shelving the book. I pivoted to non-fiction, <em>Why We Sleep</em>, where a neuroscientist and sleep expert spends some 300+ pages saying “If you don’t sleep 8 hours, you’re killing yourself” which got me doing some mental math. Between jet lag from all the  international flights and waking up at 4am to make 6am flights to LGA, I’ve probably dropped 5 years off my life. Though, given some dementia running through my family history, I might not have remembered those years anyways.</li><li>And I show up on the other side of the mic talking travel pro tips with Matt Wilson on his <a href=\"https://www.under30experiences.com/blog/travel-like-a-pro-with-mark-peacock-of-travelcommons\">Millennial Travel Podcast</a>.  I’m trying to remember when we recorded this -- had to be pre-April 2019 because I was still in the suburban TravelCommons studio and Matt was hanging out down in Costa Rica. The connection fuzzes out now and again, but it was a fun conversation. I’ll put a link in the episode in the show notes but fair warning -- it’s mostly me rattling on for an hour. Listening back to it, I’m kinda embarrassed that I don’t give Matt much of a chance to get a word in edgewise.</li><li>In the last episode, I talked about the work-from-hotel offerings from Marriott, Hilton, and Hyatt. They all had their own twists, but Hyatt’s was the most unique in that their “Work from Hyatt” offer was resort-focused and had a 7-night minimum. I said it wasn’t so much a WeWork replacement as a digital nomad trial. Well, I’m guessing that they didn’t get much uptake on it because I just got another email from Hyatt with a new offering -- “Office for the Day” -- that pretty much matches Marriott’s Day Pass. Like I said last month, these offerings all feel a bit “toe in the water”, a bit opportunistic. And now that we’re starting to get better visibility into post-vaccine timelines, I wonder how long they’ll last -- will people still want to pay to work in a hotel room after all the Starbucks stores have reopened.</li><li>I’ve talked in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/12/podcast-120-where-do-guidebooks-fit-in-i-hate-shopping-for-suitcases\">past</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/09/28/podcast-124-craft-beer-hunting-i-hate-rick-steves\">episodes</a> about how I’m a bit of a knuckle-dragger regarding printed travel guides. I still find a physical book useful when traveling. But I’ve been wondering how quickly these physical guides will be able to push out post-COVID editions to reflect the closures of bars, restaurants, and independent shops they’ve recommended. I was running through my own Chicago recommendation list from 2019. A bunch of my favorite places have closed; it’s about an even split between “Closed forever, good-bye, we’ve taken down our sign” and “Closed until Spring… we hope.” The final proofs of the 2021 editions have to already be baked if not already at the printers. I dunno, maybe they’ll all post errata pages that you can download, print off, and then stick in your books.</li><li>In a massive intersection of all things social media, I posted a <a href=\"https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/tiktok-hotel-room-chef/index.html\">CNN article</a> on the TravelCommons Facebook page that a friend, a hotel company CIO, sent me on LinkedIn that showed TikTok videos of people cooking meals in hotel rooms using an iron for a griddle, a hot water kettle for a steamer, a pants presser as an oven, and the one that really wowed me -- a coffee maker as a sous vide water bath. I don’t know if I should be impressed by the ingenuity or looking to set up as a ghost kitchen/delivery service wherever they are because I’ve never seen anyone go to that extent to cook their own meal in a hotel room. Even guys I knew trying to squeeze the last pennies out of their per diems wouldn’t do much more than boil water for their Cup O’Noodles or work hard not to burn their microwave popcorn. I’ll also put a link in the show notes to the TikTok account of one of the guys, Jago Randles. His TikTok series,<a href=\"https://www.tiktok.com/@jagoscrandles\"> Isolation Kitchen</a>, has about 150,000 followers. He does some impressive stuff. But I will make sure, going forward, that I rinse out the coffee maker and wipe down the iron before using them.</li><li>For many frequent travelers, a key early milestone of the pandemic was when airlines and hotels gave them a year’s push on their status -- moving the expiration date from Jan 2021 to Jan 2022. Big sigh of relief. Then for Southwest fliers, another milestone -- drink coupon expiration dates all got pushed to the end of this year. Whew! All’s right in the traveling world. But a couple of days ago, I was rummaging around in my messenger bag and out tumbled 5 Southwest drink coupons -- one with a Sept expiration date; the rest, December 31. Look Southwest, I don’t want to seem greedy. I did get a year’s push on A-List and 6 months on Companion Pass. But I’d love you even more if you gave me another 6 months on those drink coupons. Nope, don’t say anything now; just think about it.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge music -- Ethereal (nop mix) by @nop (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Lancefield/34818</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Prove My Vax So I Can Fly</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Last month, I saw that quote from the Qantas CEO -- \"We will ask people to have a vaccination before they can get on the aircraft\'\' -- and thought, well it’s kinda the next logical step from Delta’s ATL-Rome and United’s EWR-LHR flights were you have to take COVID test and prove you’re negative before you can board. </li><li>I remember going to a travel clinic before my first flight to India; getting shot up with MMR, DTP, Hepatitis, and Typhoid vaccines and being given my <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carte_Jaune\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Yellow Card</a> -- officially my International Certificate of Vaccination or Prophylaxis -- listing all my shots. They told me to carry that with me to India, which I did and to Vietnam and Thailand and Singapore and China. No one ever asked to see it, not in an airport, an immigration line, a hotel,....  It looks like the plans are that we’ll get a vaccination card from the CDC after receiving the first dose of COVID-19 vaccine. But that card isn’t meant as a validated proof of vaccination; it’s more of a reminder to go back in a couple of weeks for the second shot. </li><li>That handwritten piece of paper probably won’t pass muster at the Qantas boarding gate, and so that’s why we’re starting to see a bit of a vaccine passport app land grab going on. United has been testing the <a href=\"https://thecommonsproject.org/commonpass\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">CommonPass app</a> on their COVID-free EWR-LHR flight. You get your COVID test at the United Club near gate C93 and the results are uploaded into the app which then will display a QR code to the gate agent. CommonPass is being spun up with support from the World Economic Forum. Cathay Pacific, Lufthansa, SwissAir, and JetBlue also have plans to use it. Delta and Alitalia are trialing the <a href=\"https://www.aokpass.com/en/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">AOKPass </a>developed by the Int’l Chamber of Commerce on their COVID-free ATL-Rome flight. It uses blockchain for medical certificate storage, so bonus points to them in technology buzzword bingo. IATA, the Int’l Air Transport Association, an airline trade group, says they’re finishing up their app, <a href=\"https://www.iata.org/en/programs/passenger/travel-pass/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Travel Pass</a>, and will be piloting it with IAG, the parent of British Airways, Iberia, and Aer Lingus, in early 2021. And the World Health Organization says they’re looking at Estonia’s e-vaccination certificates as <a href=\"https://www.who.int/news-room/feature-stories/detail/estonia-and-who-to-jointly-develop-digital-vaccine-certificate-to-strengthen-covax#:~:text=WHO%20and%20Estonia%20recently%20agreed,access%20to%20COVID%2D19%20vaccines.\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the basis of a sort of “smart” Yellow Card app</a>.</li><li>I’m sure I’m missing a whole lot more; I just got tired of reading the same rehashed press release verbiage about secure and verifiable storage of health certifications. Going through this, it starts to feel like the health equivalent of those scooter apps, where I need half-a-dozen of them on my phone so I can rent the closest scooter to me. Unless someone blinks, it seems like I’ll need 3 or 4 of these vaccine passports to cover all my travel bases. But after reading through all the press releases and the infographics and the FAQs, none of these apps were real clear on how I get my physical CDC vaccine card into their digital storage vault. And I’m guessing that doctors and clinics are going to be more focused on taking care of patients and keeping their COVID vaccines cold, and not all that interested in entering my vaccination information into all those apps. Maybe Australia is further ahead with electronic health records, but I’m thinking, at least for the next year or so, that my CDC card is gonna be the best that Qantas and the gang are going to get.</li><li>Bridge music -- My Flaming Heart by Wired Ant (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Wired_Ant/36862 Ft: Javolenus</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Hereditary Road Warriors</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I was reading some research, as one does during a lockdown advisory when one gets caught up running down a clickhole, about <a href=\"https://research.fb.com/blog/2016/03/do-jobs-run-in-families/\">jobs running in the family</a>. Some of the stats -- a son with a military father is 5 times more likely to enlist himself while if his mother is a lawyer, he’s 6.6 times more likely to follow her to the bar; a daughter with a scientist father is almost 4 times more likely to be a scientist. Indeed, when I was deciding my college major, I was leaning toward&nbsp; chemistry but chose chemical engineering mostly because my grandfather and father were both engineers.</li><li>Which got me thinking -- does traveling -- careers that require frequent traveling -- run in the family? Again, looking back on my family, my grandfather traveled a lot when he worked for Sears, checking out vendors for hard goods -- tools, small machinery -- and working with them on new products. My dad designed farm machinery -- things like hay balers and cotton pickers -- for International Harvester. He’d often be on the road for weeks at a time, testing prototypes at farms around the country, looking for different crop and field conditions, and then at plants helping to set up the manufacturing lines for the finished machine. And so I grew up seeing that rhythm of travel -- Dad at home, Dad packing, saying good-bye, and then getting on with our lives until he came back. This was back in the late ‘60’s and into the 70’s, so no cheap long-distance let alone messaging or email or video calls. He was gone, with the exception of a postcard or two, until he came back.</li><li>And then when I joined the workforce, the first day of my first real job out of school, I got on a plane and made the first of what’s been hundreds of flights between ORD and DFW.&nbsp; So many that, pretty soon, I got to know the women working the front desk at the DFW Admirals Club. One morning, one of them asks me if I’d maybe like to meet her daughter. Awkward. I asked her, “Would you want your daughter dating someone who’s out of town as much as I am?” She paused for a moment and then said, “No, not really”.&nbsp;</li><li>Also around this time, my dad had gotten promoted past the level of going out to the field and so was traveling a lot less. But my mother took a purchasing executive role and with that, the need for a lot of travel to vendors. So while travel was generational/ “hereditary” from my father to me, my mother and I started road warrior-ing at the same time, so we were more like travel “siblings” -- comparing hotel notes, competing on frequent flier status and perks.&nbsp;</li><li>Will traveling for a living continue to a 4th generation? Tough to tell right now; both kids measure their commute in feet rather than miles during the lockdown, and friends running consulting operations tell me the current state is great for staff productivity -- an hour sales call takes an hour, rather than a day’s worth of travel for that hour, and working remotely with clients saves the client money and consultants don’t get burnt out trying to balance work and home needs. As I said back in the March and July episodes, I don’t buy that 100% remote is the “new normal”, but I also don’t believe it will snap back to 2019 levels, not after what will have been a year’s-plus time working out the mechanics of virtual working. But will there be another generation of road warriors in my family? It’ll probably take a couple of years to figure that out.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #170</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li>I’ve made another little tweak to the RSS feed -- the file that all the podcast apps use to pull new episodes for your subscribed podcasts. This tweak affects the episode descriptions in the top podcast apps. For those apps that support it, there are now clickable links in the episode notes or descriptions. In last month’s episode, there were clickable links to the gift ideas blog post on the TravelCommons website as well as the episode show notes page. Going forward, there will always be a link to the episode’s show notes page. I’ve tested that this works on Apple Podcasts, Overcast (which is what I use), Stitcher, Pocket Casts, Podcast Addict, and Google Podcasts -- all of which make up 70-80% (depending on who’s doing the counting) of the TravelCommons downloads. So, if you get a chance, flip over to the episode description right now and check it out.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>, as well as asking Alexa, Siri, and Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_170.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors','','inherit','closed','closed','','2957-revision-v1','','','2020-12-17 16:29:41','2020-12-17 21:29:41','',2957,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/17/2957-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2966,1,'2020-12-17 17:01:05','2020-12-17 22:01:05','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":2960,\"width\":300,\"height\":300,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large is-resized\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2960\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"/><figcaption>How Do I Insert This Into My iPhone<br>(DoD photo by EJ Hersom)</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>No Thanksgiving travel, but looking at the travel volume for this, the busiest travel week of the year, shows just how far things have fallen. The Qantas CEO said \"No vax, no fly\", so we dig into the emerging world of digital vaccine passports. And then I trace my travel genealogy, wondering if road warrior-ism is hereditary. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_170.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go over to the <em>Subscribe</em> section on the right to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/949687216&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #170: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. And again, no travel since the last episode. Not too surprising given the way things are going right now. Back in April, I’d jumped on one of those smokin’ American Airlines’ promotions to book flights to London for Thanksgiving. Which then -- not surprisingly -- got cancelled at the beginning of September.&nbsp; So I was back to what has been my typical Thanksgiving travel pattern for the past 10-15 years -- staying at home to avoid the crowds on what is always the busiest travel week of the year. PK -- pre-kids -- Irene and I would always travel over the holidays, splitting Thanksgiving and Christmas between my family in Southern California and hers in Chicago. But post-kids -- which is also PK, so I guess it should be AK -- after kids -- we started staying at home. And I’d figure out how to “ground” myself from business travel also. I found that the challenge of holiday travel wasn’t necessarily the crowds; it’s the make-up of the crowds; what some road warriors might call “clueless” travelers. I think “amateur” is certainly a more charitable and probably more accurate term. Even more so this year with so many road warriors out of practice after being off the road since March. Lots of those folks definitely in danger of losing their “professional” traveler status.</li><li>I saw an interesting graph the other day comparing last year’s and this year’s day-by-day airport travel volumes over the Thanksgiving weekend. No surprises comparing the Wednesday travel volumes, what is traditionally the busiest travel day of the year. Last year’s Wednesday saw 2.6 million passengers, almost 2½ times busier than this year. I expected that. But what really caught my eye was that this year’s peak day -- <a href=\"https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/thanksgiving-travel-volume-2020-pandemic/index.html\">Sunday at about 1.2 million </a>-- was still a lot less than last year’s slowest day, Thanksgiving, at about 1.6 million. I didn’t travel last year at Thanksgiving, but did in 2018.&nbsp; Irene and I broke our no-travel rule and flew down to Santa Fe, NM on Thanksgiving Day. Back in episode <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/12/17/podcast-147-holiday-travel-tips-notes-from-santa-fe/\">#147</a>, I said that Thanksgiving Day flight was one of the least stressful travel experiences I’d ever had — no traffic on the drive to ORD, no lines. The TSA agents were hanging around just looking for people to screen. And that day, there were around 25% more people in airports than this year’s <em>busiest</em> day. I shouldn’t be surprised, but all the pictures I saw in the news coverage made it look like airports were a lot more crowded.&nbsp;</li><li>Our apartment is just south of one of the northern approaches to ORD. Flights from the east come in over the lake -- seats A, B, and C get a great view of the city skyline while seats D, E, and F get to look down into Wrigley Field -- then&nbsp; over the northwest side of the city, landing on one of the runways north of the terminal. I’ve always been impressed by the choreography of ORD. On a clear Friday afternoon, driving up the tollway that runs east of the airport, I’d see planes on parallel approaches landing simultaneously -- one to the north of the terminal and one to the south -- and looking up, see the lights of planes on approach behind them -- 2, 3, 4.... Back in April, during Chicago’s lockdown, I’d sit out on the rooftop deck -- because what else was I going to do? -- and maybe see one plane coming in over the lake on that approach. But now I’m seeing more planes -- sometimes 3, 4 in a row. Don’t know that they’re all carrying passengers -- some could be temporary cargo carriers taking some of that e-commerce money, with boxes instead of seats under the overhead bins. But I can feel travel starting to pick up. It could be a tough winter, but I’m trying to look out over the horizon a bit; trying to look forward to spring.</li><li>Bridge Music -- Leviathan by Kirkoid (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Kirkoid/31109</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>TravelCommons contributor Allan Marko commented on my little lockdown game with my Google Mini -- changing the voice to, say, an English accent and then asking about the weather in London.&nbsp; Allan wrote:<ul><li>I often change the Siri voice for a bit of variety. Currently “Australian Female” is providing my CarPlay directions. you can also ask Siri to “Play TravelCommons”…</li></ul></li><li>Which immediately got me digging into Siri’s settings, looking for the Voice options. I found I had a choice of American, Australian, British, Indian, Irish, and South African. Since I’d already used the first three with my Google Mini, it was between the last three. I chose Irish for now, but will probably switch to South African before the end of the month. Actually, Waze, the nav app, always impressed me with the number of voice and language options. Every once in a while, I switch Irene’s Waze over to Hungarian before she’s heading out somewhere. For some reason, I get more of a laugh out of it than she does.</li><li>TravelCommons listener Dan Grabon and I have been trading notes as we’ve each slogged through Thoreau’s <em>Walden</em>. We both started it back in April, in the height of the lockdown. Everybody was deciding that, with nothing much else to do, it was a good time to pick up that classic you’ve always been meaning to get to. Dan started out with <em>The Brothers Karamazov</em>, which I thought was damned impressive. I first reached for Whitman’s <em>Leaves of Grass</em>, but then thought I needed something a bit more down-to-earth, something that wouldn’t need quite that level of interpretation and abstract thinking. And <em>Walden</em>, about Thoreau’s self-isolation in the woods outside of Concord, MA, seemed a better fit with the lockdown. Dan finished last month, at the beginning of November. I was 50 pages behind, so I didn’t finish ‘til Thanksgiving -- it was tough cutting through the tryptophan fog, but I gutted it through. Dan said he was staying with Thoreau, moving onto <em>Civil Disobedience</em> before shelving the book. I pivoted to non-fiction, <em>Why We Sleep</em>, where a neuroscientist and sleep expert spends some 300+ pages saying “If you don’t sleep 8 hours, you’re killing yourself” which got me doing some mental math. Between jet lag from all the&nbsp; international flights and waking up at 4am to make 6am flights to LGA, I’ve probably dropped 5 years off my life. Though, given some dementia running through my family history, I might not have remembered those years anyways.</li><li>And I show up on the other side of the mic talking travel pro tips with Matt Wilson on his <a href=\"https://www.under30experiences.com/blog/travel-like-a-pro-with-mark-peacock-of-travelcommons\">Millennial Travel Podcast</a>.&nbsp; I’m trying to remember when we recorded this -- had to be pre-April 2019 because I was still in the suburban TravelCommons studio and Matt was hanging out down in Costa Rica. The connection fuzzes out now and again, but it was a fun conversation. I’ll put a link in the episode in the show notes but fair warning -- it’s mostly me rattling on for an hour. Listening back to it, I’m kinda embarrassed that I don’t give Matt much of a chance to get a word in edgewise.</li><li>In the last episode, I talked about the work-from-hotel offerings from Marriott, Hilton, and Hyatt. They all had their own twists, but Hyatt’s was the most unique in that their “Work from Hyatt” offer was resort-focused and had a 7-night minimum. I said it wasn’t so much a WeWork replacement as a digital nomad trial. Well, I’m guessing that they didn’t get much uptake on it because I just got another email from Hyatt with a new offering -- “Office for the Day” -- that pretty much matches Marriott’s Day Pass. Like I said last month, these offerings all feel a bit “toe in the water”, a bit opportunistic. And now that we’re starting to get better visibility into post-vaccine timelines, I wonder how long they’ll last -- will people still want to pay to work in a hotel room after all the Starbucks stores have reopened.</li><li>I’ve talked in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/12/podcast-120-where-do-guidebooks-fit-in-i-hate-shopping-for-suitcases\">past</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/09/28/podcast-124-craft-beer-hunting-i-hate-rick-steves\">episodes</a> about how I’m a bit of a knuckle-dragger regarding printed travel guides. I still find a physical book useful when traveling. But I’ve been wondering how quickly these physical guides will be able to push out post-COVID editions to reflect the closures of bars, restaurants, and independent shops they’ve recommended. I was running through my own Chicago recommendation list from 2019. A bunch of my favorite places have closed; it’s about an even split between “Closed forever, good-bye, we’ve taken down our sign” and “Closed until Spring… we hope.” The final proofs of the 2021 editions have to already be baked if not already at the printers. I dunno, maybe they’ll all post errata pages that you can download, print off, and then stick in your books.</li><li>In a massive intersection of all things social media, I posted a <a href=\"https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/tiktok-hotel-room-chef/index.html\">CNN article</a> on the TravelCommons Facebook page that a friend, a hotel company CIO, sent me on LinkedIn that showed TikTok videos of people cooking meals in hotel rooms using an iron for a griddle, a hot water kettle for a steamer, a pants presser as an oven, and the one that really wowed me -- a coffee maker as a sous vide water bath. I don’t know if I should be impressed by the ingenuity or looking to set up as a ghost kitchen/delivery service wherever they are because I’ve never seen anyone go to that extent to cook their own meal in a hotel room. Even guys I knew trying to squeeze the last pennies out of their per diems wouldn’t do much more than boil water for their Cup O’Noodles or work hard not to burn their microwave popcorn. I’ll also put a link in the show notes to the TikTok account of one of the guys, Jago Randles. His TikTok series,<a href=\"https://www.tiktok.com/@jagoscrandles\"> Isolation Kitchen</a>, has about 150,000 followers. He does some impressive stuff. But I will make sure, going forward, that I rinse out the coffee maker and wipe down the iron before using them.</li><li>For many frequent travelers, a key early milestone of the pandemic was when airlines and hotels gave them a year’s push on their status -- moving the expiration date from Jan 2021 to Jan 2022. Big sigh of relief. Then for Southwest fliers, another milestone -- drink coupon expiration dates all got pushed to the end of this year. Whew! All’s right in the traveling world. But a couple of days ago, I was rummaging around in my messenger bag and out tumbled 5 Southwest drink coupons -- one with a Sept expiration date; the rest, December 31. Look Southwest, I don’t want to seem greedy. I did get a year’s push on A-List and 6 months on Companion Pass. But I’d love you even more if you gave me another 6 months on those drink coupons. Nope, don’t say anything now; just think about it.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge music -- Ethereal (nop mix) by @nop (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Lancefield/34818</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Prove My Vax So I Can Fly</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Last month, I saw that quote from the Qantas CEO -- \"We will ask people to have a vaccination before they can get on the aircraft\'\' -- and thought, well it’s kinda the next logical step from Delta’s ATL-Rome and United’s EWR-LHR flights were you have to take COVID test and prove you’re negative before you can board.&nbsp;</li><li>I remember going to a travel clinic before my first flight to India; getting shot up with MMR, DTP, Hepatitis, and Typhoid vaccines and being given my <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carte_Jaune\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Yellow Card</a> -- officially my International Certificate of Vaccination or Prophylaxis -- listing all my shots. They told me to carry that with me to India, which I did and to Vietnam and Thailand and Singapore and China. No one ever asked to see it, not in an airport, an immigration line, a hotel,....&nbsp; It looks like the plans are that we’ll get a vaccination card from the CDC after receiving the first dose of COVID-19 vaccine. But that card isn’t meant as a validated proof of vaccination; it’s more of a reminder to go back in a couple of weeks for the second shot.&nbsp;</li><li>That handwritten piece of paper probably won’t pass muster at the Qantas boarding gate, and so that’s why we’re starting to see a bit of a vaccine passport app land grab going on. United has been testing the <a href=\"https://thecommonsproject.org/commonpass\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">CommonPass app</a> on their COVID-free EWR-LHR flight. You get your COVID test at the United Club near gate C93 and the results are uploaded into the app which then will display a QR code to the gate agent. CommonPass is being spun up with support from the World Economic Forum. Cathay Pacific, Lufthansa, SwissAir, and JetBlue also have plans to use it. Delta and Alitalia are trialing the <a href=\"https://www.aokpass.com/en/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">AOKPass </a>developed by the Int’l Chamber of Commerce on their COVID-free ATL-Rome flight. It uses blockchain for medical certificate storage, so bonus points to them in technology buzzword bingo. IATA, the Int’l Air Transport Association, an airline trade group, says they’re finishing up their app, <a href=\"https://www.iata.org/en/programs/passenger/travel-pass/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Travel Pass</a>, and will be piloting it with IAG, the parent of British Airways, Iberia, and Aer Lingus, in early 2021. And the World Health Organization says they’re looking at Estonia’s e-vaccination certificates as <a href=\"https://www.who.int/news-room/feature-stories/detail/estonia-and-who-to-jointly-develop-digital-vaccine-certificate-to-strengthen-covax#:~:text=WHO%20and%20Estonia%20recently%20agreed,access%20to%20COVID%2D19%20vaccines.\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the basis of a sort of “smart” Yellow Card app</a>.</li><li>I’m sure I’m missing a whole lot more; I just got tired of reading the same rehashed press release verbiage about secure and verifiable storage of health certifications. Going through this, it starts to feel like the health equivalent of those scooter apps, where I need half-a-dozen of them on my phone so I can rent the closest scooter to me. Unless someone blinks, it seems like I’ll need 3 or 4 of these vaccine passports to cover all my travel bases. But after reading through all the press releases and the infographics and the FAQs, none of these apps were real clear on how I get my physical CDC vaccine card into their digital storage vault. And I’m guessing that doctors and clinics are going to be more focused on taking care of patients and keeping their COVID vaccines cold, and not all that interested in entering my vaccination information into all those apps. Maybe Australia is further ahead with electronic health records, but I’m thinking, at least for the next year or so, that my CDC card is gonna be the best that Qantas and the gang are going to get.</li><li>Bridge music -- My Flaming Heart by Wired Ant (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial &nbsp;(3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Wired_Ant/36862 Ft: Javolenus</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Hereditary Road Warriors</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I was reading some research, as one does during a lockdown advisory when one gets caught up running down a clickhole, about <a href=\"https://research.fb.com/blog/2016/03/do-jobs-run-in-families/\">jobs running in the family</a>. Some of the stats -- a son with a military father is 5 times more likely to enlist himself while if his mother is a lawyer, he’s 6.6 times more likely to follow her to the bar; a daughter with a scientist father is almost 4 times more likely to be a scientist. Indeed, when I was deciding my college major, I was leaning toward&nbsp; chemistry but chose chemical engineering mostly because my grandfather and father were both engineers.</li><li>Which got me thinking -- does traveling -- careers that require frequent traveling -- run in the family? Again, looking back on my family, my grandfather traveled a lot when he worked for Sears, checking out vendors for hard goods -- tools, small machinery -- and working with them on new products. My dad designed farm machinery -- things like hay balers and cotton pickers -- for International Harvester. He’d often be on the road for weeks at a time, testing prototypes at farms around the country, looking for different crop and field conditions, and then at plants helping to set up the manufacturing lines for the finished machine. And so I grew up seeing that rhythm of travel -- Dad at home, Dad packing, saying good-bye, and then getting on with our lives until he came back. This was back in the late ‘60’s and into the 70’s, so no cheap long-distance let alone messaging or email or video calls. He was gone, with the exception of a postcard or two, until he came back.</li><li>And then when I joined the workforce, the first day of my first real job out of school, I got on a plane and made the first of what’s been hundreds of flights between ORD and DFW.&nbsp; So many that, pretty soon, I got to know the women working the front desk at the DFW Admirals Club. One morning, one of them asks me if I’d maybe like to meet her daughter. Awkward. I asked her, “Would you want your daughter dating someone who’s out of town as much as I am?” She paused for a moment and then said, “No, not really”.&nbsp;</li><li>Also around this time, my dad had gotten promoted past the level of going out to the field and so was traveling a lot less. But my mother took a purchasing executive role and with that, the need for a lot of travel to vendors. So while travel was generational/ “hereditary” from my father to me, my mother and I started road warrior-ing at the same time, so we were more like travel “siblings” -- comparing hotel notes, competing on frequent flier status and perks.&nbsp;</li><li>Will traveling for a living continue to a 4th generation? Tough to tell right now; both kids measure their commute in feet rather than miles during the lockdown, and friends running consulting operations tell me the current state is great for staff productivity -- an hour sales call takes an hour, rather than a day’s worth of travel for that hour, and working remotely with clients saves the client money and consultants don’t get burnt out trying to balance work and home needs. As I said back in the March and July episodes, I don’t buy that 100% remote is the “new normal”, but I also don’t believe it will snap back to 2019 levels, not after what will have been a year’s-plus time working out the mechanics of virtual working. But will there be another generation of road warriors in my family? It’ll probably take a couple of years to figure that out.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #170</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li>I’ve made another little tweak to the RSS feed -- the file that all the podcast apps use to pull new episodes for your subscribed podcasts. This tweak affects the episode descriptions in the top podcast apps. For those apps that support it, there are now clickable links in the episode notes or descriptions. In last month’s episode, there were clickable links to the gift ideas blog post on the TravelCommons website as well as the episode show notes page. Going forward, there will always be a link to the episode’s show notes page. I’ve tested that this works on Apple Podcasts, Overcast (which is what I use), Stitcher, Pocket Casts, Podcast Addict, and Google Podcasts -- all of which make up 70-80% (depending on who’s doing the counting) of the TravelCommons downloads. So, if you get a chance, flip over to the episode description right now and check it out.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>, as well as asking Alexa, Siri, and Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_170.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors','','inherit','closed','closed','','2957-revision-v1','','','2020-12-17 17:01:05','2020-12-17 22:01:05','',2957,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/17/2957-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2967,1,'2020-12-17 17:14:13','2020-12-17 22:14:13','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/DSC_6306-edit.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2770 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/DSC_6306-edit-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a><figcaption>Can I leave my house now?</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>I broke Chicago\'s containment for my first post-lockdown trip, a fast drive down I-65. We talk about hotels swapping hospitality for sanitation, Hertz\'s bankruptcy, and tips for travel credit card usage from Brett Holzhauer, the travel card expert at <a title=\"valuepenguin.com\" href=\"http://valuepenguin.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">ValuePenguin.com.</a>&nbsp;All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_164.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_164.mp3\"]\n<p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #164: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois, as the lockdown here is starting to lift. What’s open and what’s not is still a bit spotty, though I’ve managed to hit a couple of microbreweries with outdoor patios. The opening in Chicago is not dissimilar to what I experienced down in Tennessee last month. I was down in Spring Hill, south of Nashville, two weeks after the non-urban lockdown lifted -- for every place other than the cities of Nashville, Memphis, Knoxville, and Chattanooga. It seemed that everyone was still trying to figure out what to do -- the bar/pizza joint next to my hotel was fully open, but the local bar-be-que joints and the Starbucks were still only doing take-away. Which makes sense; it’s not like there’s a standard playbook on how to re-open an economy. And throughout my consulting career, I’ve learned it’s always easier to shut things down than to start them up.</li><li>The drive south on I-65 from Chicago is one that, I’m not gonna say I can do with my eyes closed, but I’ve been doing it for almost 40 years, starting when I was in business school at the University of Chicago and my family was living in Louisville, KY. I mean, there’s a clump of trees in the median between West Lafayette and Crown Point that’s a milestone for me; I know I’m an hour from home. Which just goes to show you how boring the drive through northern Indiana is when trees in the median are a notable feature.</li><li>The drive between Chicago and Nashville, while not the most exciting, especially through Indiana, it does usually require a bit of timing to thread through Chicago, Indianapolis, Louisville, and Nashville to avoid rush hour in each. On this trip, not so much. I left Chicago after breakfast and was driving 80 mph most of the way, maybe dropping down to 70 through the cities. And I was still getting passed by guys going aggressively faster. And the only time I saw police or state troopers was in front of big road construction sites, cars running with all their lights flashing in front of big barriers, more as a warning to speeders than an attempt to get them. It was, hands down, the easiest drive down I-65 I’ve ever done.</li><li>That wide-open drive may be one of the few things I’ll actually appreciate about this lockdown. Well, that and the $2/gallon gas along the way...</li><li>Bridge Music — Brilliant Day by Hans Atom (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hansatom/47919 Ft: Lisa DeBenedictis</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>First up, thanks to the TravelCommons listener who goes by the handle Abe Froman, Ferris Bueller’s sausage king of Chicago, for dropping a 5-star review on <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">our iTunes page</a>. Abe writes:<ul><li>“I have been a fan of this podcast for many years. If you are a road warrior or a mileage runner, you will love the tips to make your travel easier.”</li><li>Abe, thanks a lot for this.&nbsp; I’m glad you’ve enjoyed the podcast</li></ul></li><li>Last year in episodes <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/07/26/podcast-153-travel-by-algorithm-leaving-places-behind/\" title=\"Podcast #153 — Travel By Algorithm; Leaving Places Behind\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">153</a> and <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/09/20/podcast-155-rj-delays-street-food-in-poland-and-hungary/\" title=\"Podcast #155 — RJ Delays; Street Food in Poland and Hungary\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">155</a>, we talked about American Airlines’ retirement of their MD-80’s, the “Mad Dog 80”, the plane on which I earned my first Advantage status -- Gold, and there wasn’t anything higher back then. Last week, <a href=\"https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/delta-air-lines-md-80-last-flight/index.html\">Delta finally retired their last Mad Dogs</a> -- MD-88’s and -90’s. They were supposed to run through the end of the year, but with late ‘80’s technology and fuel efficiency, they were among the first planes in the fleet to be grounded when the lockdown hit. Delta said that “at their peak, the planes accounted for 50% of Delta’s arrivals and departures from” their Atlanta hub.&nbsp; Which will be a relief to longtime TravelCommons listener Darren Mak, who tweeted at me back at the beginning of March, a picture out the window seat of a Delta MD-88 just in front of the engine cowl, thanking me for mentioning, in episode <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/09/20/podcast-155-rj-delays-street-food-in-poland-and-hungary/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #155 — RJ Delays; Street Food in Poland and Hungary\">155</a>, that whenever I would end up in that same seat, I would wonder — if that engine blows up, will the shrapnel blow out or blow into the cabin. Well Darren, no more worries. We both survived the Mad Dog’s back seat.</li><li>We’ve talked in the past couple of episodes about the first post-lockdown trips would be by car -- more schedule flexibility; no worries of a stranger in the middle seat exhaling 18 inches away from you.&nbsp; CNBC ran <a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/31/five-charts-that-track-the-us-economy-as-states-reopen.html\">a story</a> last week analyzing the change in the number of requests for directions on Apple Maps in 2020. Using January 13th as the baseline for their comparison, requests for driving and walking directions dropped by 50% in the first month of the lockdowns, but had recovered by May 29th -- the last day of the data series. Transit direction requests had dropped by 75% and were still more than 50% down by the end of May. Now, using January 13th as the baseline probably exaggerates the recovery -- you’d think the number of walking and driving direction requests on a normal Memorial Day weekend would be hugely higher than for the second Monday of January when it was in or below the 30’s for about ⅔’s of the country -- but I don’t want to kill a green shoot with too much skepticism.</li><li>American talked about their own green shoots last week, saying they would be operating 55% of last year’s schedule in July, up from 20% in April and May. Driven mostly by demand from states opening up -- Texas, Florida, and Arizona -- rather than cities like New York, Chicago, and San Francisco that are still under stricter lockdown orders. If I keep pulling on this trend line, I’m thinking by September all those voluntary capacity limits and empty middle seat promises will have faded away.</li><li>The absence of update emails from airline and hotel CEOs this week I think is another green shoot. If things are starting to look up, no need to send me an email extending a bonus award offer or cancellation fee waivers. This has cut into a new hobby of mine, though -- comparing the use of \"in these uncertain times,\" \"in these challenging times,\" and “in these unprecedented times” in these emails. I have a stroke count going. Right now, “unprecedented” is the runaway leader, with “challenging” second, and “uncertain” third.</li><li>I’ve been a Hertz customer on and off over my 35-year travel career -- mostly on. I started my business traveling when I was at IBM, and in the mid-80’s, they had negotiated a smoking rate with Hertz. In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/09/15/podcast-144-outside-airports-hospitality-mentality\">episode 144</a>, I talked about getting to know the woman working in the little Hertz hut at SJC back then, when SJC was still an outdoor airport; and before Hertz Gold, that’s all I needed to get an upgrade. And more recently, I’ve, on balance, had good experiences with Hertz. So I was bummed for a moment when I saw they filed for bankruptcy last month. It wasn’t surprising, though. Hertz was still carrying a big debt load courtesy of a 2005 PE leveraged buyout, and we’ve talked in past episodes about how Uber and Lyft have been eating away at its core airport rental market. So, when travel stopped in March and used car auction prices cratered in April, Hertz tipped over. By now though, we’re kinda used to big travel companies cleaning their debt problems in bankruptcy -- United and American Airlines the most recent examples. So I’m not too worried about losing the rest of my Gold points. In the short term, though, I will be paying more attention to the mileage on the Hertz cars in the Five Star aisle. That’s where I usually see signs of financial distress -- a lot less 500-mile cars and a lot more 25,000-mile cars. And while 25,000 miles on a car doesn’t seem like a lot, remember that rental car miles are kinda like dog years -- you gotta multiply them by, like, 7 to get to regular car miles.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook page</a> or our Instagram account at <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">travelcommons</a> -- or you can post comments on the web site at <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">TravelCommons.com</a>.</li><li>Bridge Music — &nbsp;<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Suenjo/11162\">Natchoongi (New Hope Remix)</a>&nbsp;by Suenjo (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>First Post-Lockdown Trips</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>As we talked about a few minutes ago, travel is starting to pick up as the lockdowns ease and people want to see something other than the 4 walls that have surrounded them since mid-March.&nbsp;</li><li>TravelCommons listener Mark Skinner dropped me a line towards the end of May about his first lockdown trip. You may remember Mark from <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/11/30/podcast-157-notes-from-the-baltics-riga-latvia-and-tallinn-estonia/\" title=\"Podcast #157 — Notes from the Baltics: Riga, Latvia and Tallinn, Estonia\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">episode 157</a> back in November when he wrote in to tell us about his day trip from Washington, DC to Hong Kong -- flying out Monday afternoon, returning Tuesday morning -- to take a NASA cosmic ray detector on an over-the-pole flight.&nbsp; This time, Mark writes -<ul><li>So I had my first trip this past week, since the “before times”. On the way back, I was listening to your recent podcast. Yes, my first trip was via automobile, down to the outer banks of North Carolina. Dare County had recently opened up (the day before!) to allow visitors into the county.&nbsp;</li><li>Stayed at the Hilton Garden Inn. No servicing of the room, and after a few days at this hotel on the beach, things were looking a little dingy. Tropical Storm Arthur squashed any hopes of long walks on the beach. Departed a day early because the storm wasn’t letting up. I thought this was a good use of Hilton points… Take-out only that week, and hotel not helping out by lending any china, glass or utensils. Ending up getting a couple of sets at a dollar store… I contrast this to my last trip in the before time, to Maui, just as things were buttoning up. The Grand Wailea was happy to provide all sorts of stuff to enjoy one’s take-out on the lanai! That trip got cut short as well, due to flights evaporating.&nbsp;</li><li>A highlight of the trip was stopping for lunch in Virginia Beach, which had recently opened out-door seating at restaurants, and enjoyed lunch at a seafood restaurant at an outside table, by the ocean, and greatly enjoyed ordering food and having it brought to the table! The previous “normal” meal had been first evening on Maui, before they went take-out only.&nbsp;</li><li>Next trip that is getting kicked around is Hilton Head in June…. that would involve flying. Crossing fingers about a trip to Austria in August…</li></ul></li><li>Mark, thanks for sending that along. Your experience on the Outer Banks was similar to mine down in Spring Hill, TN. I went back and forth about staying in a hotel vs. an Airbnb. Airbnb -- not as many people passing through the property and some time buffer (24 hours, 72 hours) between guests in the same rooms, but a major hotel chain should have the corporate resources to build out and maybe test a more thorough cleaning program for its properties; maybe with access to stronger, more industrial cleaners. Procrastination ended up making my decision -- while I was going back and forth, the Airbnb property in Spring Hill I was looking at got booked for the front of that week, so I ended up in the Spring Hill Hampton Inn -- another Hilton brand.</li><li>That Monday morning, right before I left Chicago, I checked in on the Hilton app. It even let me pick out my room. This may be old news to Hilton Diamond listeners, but I haven’t stayed in a Hilton for at least a year, and so haven’t been tracking their app improvements. When I arrived at 5:30pm, the front doors were locked, but opening up the app showed me a digital key that opened the front door and my room door. I didn\'t have to physically check in at the front desk which only struck me odd later that night. Whenever I’ve checked in on a hotel’s app before, I’ve still had to go to the front desk so they could see my ID, which was why I’ve never paid much attention to app check-ins. But at this Hampton Inn with full check-in and digital keys, it worked the way I’d always thought it should.</li><li>My in-room experience was the same as Mark’s -- nobody servicing the room, though a guy did stop by the room every now and again asking if I needed extra towels; no morning coffee or breakfast buffet, and eating mostly take-out in the room with some cans of local craft beer bought from the liquor store a couple of doors down. I was pretty rigorous about dumping the food trash right after eating. Waking up to the smell of 8-hour-old bar-be-que rib and cole slaw remnants is never a good start to the day. Hotels are saying it’s all about cleaning and sanitation, but I can’t say that I saw any out-of-the-ordinary efforts while I was there. Maybe what I was experiencing was the cost reductions to fund that behind-the-scenes deep cleaning.</li><li>While Mark’s highlight was his lunch in Virginia Beach, mine was being able to walk into a little family-owned craft beer joint in a strip mall on Spring Hill\'s Main St, order a beer, and then sit down and drink it at the bar. I go into this place every time I\'m there to visit my mother. Seeing them open was a nice little bit of normality -- especially since Chicago didn’t start opening up until last week.</li><li>Don\'t know my next trip yet, but I\'m keeping my eye on Spain, hoping there\'s no second wave before our trip to Barcelona at the end of September.</li><li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/53277\">Fistful of Dub</a>&nbsp;(Feat. Snowflake and DJ Vadim) by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. &nbsp;Ft: snowflake and DJ Vadim</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Travel Credit Cards</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>As we start traveling again, we’ll start pulling out those travel cards -- Hilton or Delta Amex, United or Southwest or Marriott Visas, American MasterCards -- and so I invited Brett Holzhauer, the travel card expert at ValuePenguin.com, a site that goes deep into these cards, to give us some of his advice as we “un-lockdown” ourselves...</li><li>Interview with Brett Holzhauer, the travel card expert at <a href=\"http://valuepenguin.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"valuepenguin.com\">ValuePenguin.com</a></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #164</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_164.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #164 — First-Post Lockdown Trips; Travel Credit Cards','','inherit','closed','closed','','2771-revision-v1','','','2020-12-17 17:14:13','2020-12-17 22:14:13','',2771,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/17/2771-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2971,1,'2021-01-03 11:42:52','2021-01-03 16:42:52','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":2857,\"width\":300,\"height\":300,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large is-resized\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/F3E28DAE-0026-4E8A-957E-D6CE914F717C.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2857\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"/><figcaption>I seem to have put on a Quarantine 15</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Spent a week in <a href=\"https://www.uptravel.com/\">Michigan\'s Upper Peninsula</a> hiking, biking, kayaking, and running into a lot of other people getting away to do the same, which got me looking back six months to the start of the pandemic. I talk about a surprisingly good flight cancellation experience with American Airlines, and figuring out how to download 12 years of <a href=\"https://www.tripit.com/\">TripIt</a> data. We wrap up talking to <a href=\"https://www.lendingtree.com/writer/matt-schulz/\">Matt Schulz</a> of <a href=\"https://www.lendingtree.com/\">LendingTree</a>, asking him what are we doing with travel credit cards that are generating frequent traveler points we can’t use? All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_167.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>download</strong></a> the podcast file, subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/896151355&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #167: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after a week’s tour of the UP -- Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Did a counter-clockwise circle route around Lake Michigan. Headed out east on Friday morning; stopped at a brewery in Grand Rapids for lunch; drove the 5 miles across the Mackinac Bridge just before dusk; and had my first UP pasty (the first of many) and a local beer for dinner that night in Sault Ste Marie. Spent a couple of days in Soo; watched 700-ft lake freighters make their way through the locks that connect Lake Superior to Lake Huron; I’m still enough of an engineer to geek out on that kind of stuff. We then drove west to Marquette for 3 days and again west to Houghton for 2 days before heading home through Wisconsin down the west side of Lake Michigan. It was all outdoors stuff -- hiking, biking, kayaking; the things that last-minute COVID closures or restrictions won’t muck up.&nbsp; The UP has always been on my list of places to visit, but it’s always on sorta the B-list, and so plans to go someplace else -- Spain, Napa, Ireland -- would always push it down the list. But now, with most places blocked off with travel restrictions and quarantines, the UP -- drivable with lots of outdoor activities -- bubbled to the top of the list.</li><li>And I wasn’t the only one thinking that way. The guy renting rowboats at <a href=\"https://www2.dnr.state.mi.us/ParksandTrails/Details.aspx?id=428&amp;type=SPRK\">Tahquamenon Falls State Park</a> looked at our release forms and said “We’ve had a lot of people up here from Chicago. It’s been crazy busy. We can’t get enough people to handle it.” And biking around <a href=\"https://www.travelmarquette.com/things-to-do/attractions/presque-isle-park/\">Presque Isle Park</a> in Marquette, we got talking, in a socially distant way, to a biking couple up from St Louis. It was also their first time up. A bunch of their friends and family had been up earlier; they’d seen nothing but UP pictures in their Facebook feed for the past month.</li><li>The husband said that he had an underlying medical condition and so they were looking for places away from people; they’d rented a cabin in the little town of Au Train. Which got me thinking about the place we stayed in Soo -- the <a href=\"https://www.plazamotormotel.com/\">Plaza Motor Motel</a>. No lobby, no elevators, no hallways; no places to run into other guests; no need to have to remember to mask up when you leave your room. Just open your room door and there’s your car. Most frequent travelers would never think of voluntarily staying in a motor inn, a <em>mo</em>-tel. But with so many things changing in these unprecedented times, maybe COVID will have folks give motels another chance.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/11510\">Funkist</a> - cdk dub mix by cdk (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: teru</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>First, a big shout out to the folks in Hanoi, Vietnam listening to TravelCommons on Soundcloud. One of the fun things about the podcast is looking at where people are listening from. For the most part, the stats make sense -- most of the listeners are from the US, and then English-speaking countries -- the UK, Canada, Australia. But every once in a while, there’s a spike that I just can’t figure out. I’ll see it, go look at the episode notes to see if I’ve mentioned that country, but I usually can’t make sense of it. Last fall, it was Argentina., but over the past couple of months, it’s been folks from Hanoi, primarily listening to <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/04/11/podcast-162-post-corona-trip-planning-keeping-a-travel-journal/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #162 — Post-Corona Trip Planning; Keeping a Travel Journal\">April episode, #162</a>, about post-lockdown trip planning and keeping a travel journal. Not sure why, but if you’re in Hanoi and you’ve made it to this episode - Hi! And thanks for listening!</li><li>Dan Grabon sent me a note at the beginning of the month about my lockdown reading that I mentioned during <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #166 — What Is The Meaning of Travel?\">last month’s interview</a> with Dr Emily Thomas<ul><li>“Mark,&nbsp; I feel your pain. I started re-reading Walden back in April, and I just passed the halfway mark at the end of August. This was part of an overly ambitious effort to read one great book a month from a literary calendar that I bought. The Brothers Karamazov took up January through March, and even though COVID should have meant more time to read, it just hasn’t turned out that way.</li><li>“Writing this from a long overdue vacation near Lake George, where I saw the book Cabin Porn in a gift shop. Good timing.</li><li>“Thanks for keeping the podcast going— helps keep me going in this time of not going much of anywhere!”</li></ul></li><li>Dan, Thanks for the note. <em>The Brothers Karamazov</em> -- you are a better man than I.&nbsp; I swore off of Russian fiction after suffering through <em>Crime and Punishment</em> in high school. That and Charles Dickens, just can’t do ‘em. And I am still working my way through <em>Walden</em>. Just got through his half-dozen pages on hoeing his bean field. I find if I try to read more than a dozen pages in a sitting, I just start skimming -- or sleeping. Glad you were able to get away to the wilderness of Lake George. Feel like the perfect place to find that Cabin Porn book.</li><li>Jim McDonough hit the TravelCommons Facebook page, following up on my comment in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\" title=\"Podcast #166 — What Is The Meaning of Travel?\">last month’s episode</a> about my disappearing American flight from ORD to BCN. Jim writes...<ul><li>“We were going to Barcelona and Madrid with Rick Steves Europe in October, but of course Rick has canceled every tour for the rest of the year. Interestingly, AA says we are still booked on a BA 747 from SAN to LHR as part of this trip. BA has no more 747\'s and doesn\'t serve SAN any more.”</li></ul></li><li>I sometimes think any of the airline’s schedules more than one month out are more like aspirational projections than reflections of reality. Especially given how fast they’re shifting schedules to capture any sort of bump in passenger volume. Like United having <a href=\"https://airlineweekly.com/airlines-feeling-a-lift-from-rocky-mountain-hubs\">some transcontinental flights stop in DEN to pick up a bump in volume from people visiting national parks</a> -- there’s that outdoor activity trend again.</li><li>But back to that BCN trip, I should be getting things here in Chicago sorted before heading off for 2 weeks in Catalonia, but you’ve probably already guessed, that trip isn’t happening. Not a surprise. The EU still isn’t letting US travelers in and the case count in Spain’s second COVID wave has gotten worse in the last month. So at the beginning of the month, I gritted my teeth, called American and cancelled the flights. Actually, American had called me the prior week while we were in the UP, but I let it go to voicemail. We were in a taproom in Marquette and I didn’t feel ready to have that conversation. I wanted to have all our booking info in front of me and be clear minded (tough during a taproom session) and mentally girded for battle. So when I returned their call the next week, I was sitting in front of my laptop with all my itinerary documents up and was ready to go. It was a quick trip through the automated phone tree to a very nice woman in Dallas. No hassles with canceling. I was asking her about the logistics of the travel credit - how long will it be good for - when she said, “Since your flight was canceled and you were re-booked, you can get a refund if you like.” Wow. “Uh, yes,” I quickly said, not wanting her offer to disappear, “I think I’ll take the refund instead.” That was not what I expected from all the stories about American trying to keep as much cash as possible. It took her a couple of minutes to process the refunds during which we compared the weather between Chicago and Dallas. The refunds hit my credit card the following week, so full kudos to American on handling this. I’m hoping I don’t need to repeat in November for my Thanksgiving trip to London.</li><li>A couple of weeks back I was trading notes with TravelCommons contributor Allan Marko about <a href=\"https://www.sfgate.com/travel/article/United-bangalore-SFO-15551358.php\">United’s new SFO-Bangalore non-stop</a>. It’ll be their longest flight at 17½ hours. My immediate reaction was, of course, “that’s a helluva long time to wear a mask.” United is using a 787-9 with a special engine enhancement that makes the flight possible. Which got me thinking about what planes I’d flown into BLR. I’ve been using <a href=\"https://www.tripit.com/\">TripIt</a> since 2008 when it first broke out of the Silicon Valley venture cap bubble, so I logged in, clicked over to Past Trips and started clicking back through the pages -- and clicking and clicking because the last time I was in Bangalore was April 2014. I kept looking around the screen - there’s gotta be a way to export all my trip data; but I couldn’t find anything. So I sent a note to <a href=\"mailto:support@tripit.com\">support@tripit.com</a>. And, to my huge surprise, Andy from the Tripit Help Center replied in <em>15 minutes</em> saying “We currently do not offer customer driven travel data export capability. We have passed your suggestion on to the appropriate team for review.” Having run a software product team, I knew what that meant -- never. But, in the next paragraph, Andy offered a solution -- “You can check out a third party app Openflights. They have an API with TripIt that will allow you to import trips from your TripIt account to their site. From there you can create a list of all of your flights and download them to a csv file. Their basic account is free to use.” Sweet. I thanked Andy for his quick reply and hit <a href=\"https://openflights.org/\">Openflights</a>. I set up an account, hit the “Import” button and connected to my TripIt account. The import was a touch kludgy -- I had to go page by page, review each trip, and mark it to import. After 88 pages, I had imported 1006 flight segments, which they displayed on a world map. I clicked on BLR and a little card popped up. I clicked on the first option and it listed the 8 flights I’d taken to and from BLR. Turns out I’d mostly flown Airbus A320s, though I did once fly a 747-400 in from FRA. It has a couple of analysis buttons -- like my longest flight -- Joburg to IAD at 17:40 (ha! 10 minutes longer than the SFO-BLR flight); and my shortest -- IAD again, but this time a 44-minute flight to CHO. And of course, I was able to download all my trips into Excel so I can noodle around to my heart’s content. Openflights is free, but I’m going to <a href=\"https://openflights.org/donate\">donate</a> to help keep them going. <a href=\"https://openflights.org/\">Openflights.org</a> -- definitely recommended. I’ll put a link in the show notes.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/48705\">Jolanta Blues</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: Admiral Bob, Martijn de Boer</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>6 Months of Pandemic</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Finally giving into reality and canceling my Barcelona flight 6 months after booking it got me thinking back on these -- you know what’s coming -- <em>unprecedented</em> times. Airlines canceled flights to China at the end of January, then to South Korea, Iran, and Italy in February, until, by the beginning of March, airline traffic joined the stock market in a free fall. But back then, we thought it was a one-off event, kinda like Sept 11th; a sharp, scary event that came out of nowhere with no warning but that would soon pass. So taking advantage of one of the many March fare sales to book a flight at the end of September didn’t seem that risky.</li><li>I was talking to one of my consulting friends a couple of weeks ago. His travel schedule was similar to mine - a week without seeing an airport was a rare exception. He hasn’t been on a plane since March and doesn’t know when he’ll get on one next. He just started a project with a manufacturer in Cincinnati. Most of the project will be virtual, but he’s pretty sure he ought to at least put eyes on their plant. He lives outside Detroit. In the past, he’d be flying down every week. Now, he fires up Google Maps -- it’s a 4½ drive down I-75. He’ll drive down once, stay a couple of days, and then head back home.&nbsp;</li><li>I can’t say that anyone I’ve talked to misses the act of business travel -- getting up at 0 dark 30 Monday morning to get to the airport, shuffle through the PreCheck line for 15-20 minutes, and then shoehorn into a full flight for an hour or 3.&nbsp; But we did it because that was part of the job. But now that it’s not, at least for now and what seems like (for now) through the end of the year, everybody is taking full advantage of sleeping in -- in their own beds.</li><li>Which explains why, of all the US airlines, Spirit Airlines, with its complete focus on low-cost leisure travelers, is the only one sounding even somewhat non-negative.&nbsp; And hotel chains like Choice, focused on what they call “drive-to” locations and extended stay properties getting occupancy rates over 50% while center city hotels like Chicago’s Hilton Palmer House are missing rent payments and slouching towards bankruptcy.</li><li>Irene and I were sitting outside at a microbrewery a couple of days ago, enjoying a sunny afternoon full in the knowledge that we have maybe 4 weeks of outdoor eating and drinking left in Chicago. We talked about what kind of travel we would do over the next 12 months, figuring travel restrictions and periodic lockdowns are going to be the norm for at least that long. No big plans; nothing that COVID could blow up but seeing some new places -- some skiing, maybe trying out Montana; some hiking, maybe checking out the Texas Hill Country. But next month, we’re trading Barcelona for Philadelphia; now that they’ve opened up the restaurants again, check out our old neighborhood and visit with some friends. It’ll be Irene’s first flight since February. It took a bit of talking, but I really think the threat of a total of 22 hrs in a car with me -- alone -- tipped her over.&nbsp;</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djiz/10514\">Nube - Djiz Rmx</a> by Kwame (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: SylviaO</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Do We Keep Travel Credit Cards?</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Last week, <a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/14/delta-launches-6point5-billion-debt-deal-backed-by-its-frequent-flyer-program.html\">Delta used their SkyMiles program to back $6.5 billion in debt</a>, running the same play that United and American did in June. What caught my eye was some of the stats that came out with the debt filing -- that <a href=\"https://skift.com/2020/09/15/how-delta-looks-to-leverage-rewards-from-its-own-frequent-flyer-program/\">SkyMiles had about $6.1 billion in revenue in 2019, about two-thirds from American Express</a> which issues a co-branded Delta card, and that <a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/14/delta-launches-6point5-billion-debt-deal-backed-by-its-frequent-flyer-program.html\">total miles redeemed fell by 78% in the first half of this year.</a> The big carriers are leaning on their loyalty programs for cash, their biggest customers are credit card issuers, but those card users - us - are generating points that we’ve stopped using. </li><li>It’s against this background that I called up Matt Schulz, chief credit analyst at LendingTree, and to ask him -- do we want to keep travel credit cards?<ul><li>Mark: Matt, a lot of folks carry at least one travel credit card and I don’t think I’m going too far out on a limb guessing that damn close to every TravelCommons listeners carry them. We’re 6 months on from the COVID lockdowns and the resulting cratering of the travel industry. But with travel not recovering -- airline demand is still just a third of pre-pandemic levels and United Airlines’ CEO said last week it could be 3-4 years before it’s back to 2019 levels -- what are card holders doing with these cards generating frequent traveler points that they can’t or don’t want to use?</li><li>Matt: An awful lot of people are closing them simply because they may need to use those points that they had been planning to go on a trip to Paris or to Hawaii. But they need to use that money or those points to keep food on the table. Our survey that we just did found that about 30% of respondents with travel rewards card said that they had closed one and that number is even higher for Millennials. And that\'s got to be something that that scares the banks to death. It\'s not terribly surprising for all the reasons that you that you ticked off a minute ago, and I don\'t think that\'s going to slow down anytime soon either.</li><li>Mark: So, people are closing them out, so they\'re not taking those annual fees.</li><li>Matt: Our survey found that about half of those who had been laid off or furloughed had cashed out some of their points or miles. And again, it stands to reason because when you\'re trying to keep the lights on and keep food on the table, there are things more important than travel rewards. And I think that\'s a lot of what this comes down to -- if you are somebody who feels pretty stable in your job, has a decent emergency fund and generally feels kinda OK about things despite all of economic chaos, you\'re probably going to try and hold on to those miles</li><li>Back in March and April, it seemed the strategy for the big travel card issuers -- Chase, Citi, Amex -- seemed to be to sacrifice revenue to hold share -- statement credits for annual fees if you called them to cancel, new bonuses for stay-at-home purchases to keep wallet share -- seemed like 5x bonuses for grocery and gas was the most popular. Made sense when everyone was talking about 2-week shutdowns and a V-shaped recovery. But, as we said before, travel is gonna stay depressed for a while -- between state and country quarantines and many people not wanting to get in a plane -- how are travel card companies going to handle the next round of renewals? When I call Chase and Amex again, do I get more statement credits -- do they continue to fight for share? And if they don’t, what do I do with the balance of Ultimate or Membership Rewards points that I’ll lose if I don’t re-up and pay the fee?</li><li>Matt: I think what\'s gonna happen is that issuers are going to continue to tinker around the edges to see what people like and what is impactful. And the truth is that issuers desperately want to keep the customers on cards like Chase Sapphire Reserve, Amex Platinum -- all the high end and the next-step-down cards because those customers are so valuable from a lifetime value perspective. You may get a travel card when you\'re 25 and the bank will do what they can to keep you around to try and upsell you to other products that they might have. The issuers are going to try and do what they can to figure out how to make you stay. And right now, that may not look like giving a ton of travel rewards points.</li><li></li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #167</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and now, <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_167.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #167 — 6 Months On; Why Keep Travel Cards?','','inherit','closed','closed','','2856-revision-v1','','','2021-01-03 11:42:52','2021-01-03 16:42:52','',2856,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/03/2856-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2973,1,'2021-01-03 11:45:37','2021-01-03 16:45:37','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":2857,\"width\":300,\"height\":300,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large is-resized\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/F3E28DAE-0026-4E8A-957E-D6CE914F717C.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2857\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"/><figcaption>I seem to have put on a Quarantine 15</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Spent a week in <a href=\"https://www.uptravel.com/\">Michigan\'s Upper Peninsula</a> hiking, biking, kayaking, and running into a lot of other people getting away to do the same, which got me looking back six months to the start of the pandemic. I talk about a surprisingly good flight cancellation experience with American Airlines, and figuring out how to download 12 years of <a href=\"https://www.tripit.com/\">TripIt</a> data. We wrap up talking to <a href=\"https://www.lendingtree.com/writer/matt-schulz/\">Matt Schulz</a> of <a href=\"https://www.lendingtree.com/\">LendingTree</a>, asking him what are we doing with travel credit cards that are generating frequent traveler points we can’t use? All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_167.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>download</strong></a> the podcast file, subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/896151355&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #167: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after a week’s tour of the UP -- Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Did a counter-clockwise circle route around Lake Michigan. Headed out east on Friday morning; stopped at a brewery in Grand Rapids for lunch; drove the 5 miles across the Mackinac Bridge just before dusk; and had my first UP pasty (the first of many) and a local beer for dinner that night in Sault Ste Marie. Spent a couple of days in Soo; watched 700-ft lake freighters make their way through the locks that connect Lake Superior to Lake Huron; I’m still enough of an engineer to geek out on that kind of stuff. We then drove west to Marquette for 3 days and again west to Houghton for 2 days before heading home through Wisconsin down the west side of Lake Michigan. It was all outdoors stuff -- hiking, biking, kayaking; the things that last-minute COVID closures or restrictions won’t muck up.&nbsp; The UP has always been on my list of places to visit, but it’s always on sorta the B-list, and so plans to go someplace else -- Spain, Napa, Ireland -- would always push it down the list. But now, with most places blocked off with travel restrictions and quarantines, the UP -- drivable with lots of outdoor activities -- bubbled to the top of the list.</li><li>And I wasn’t the only one thinking that way. The guy renting rowboats at <a href=\"https://www2.dnr.state.mi.us/ParksandTrails/Details.aspx?id=428&amp;type=SPRK\">Tahquamenon Falls State Park</a> looked at our release forms and said “We’ve had a lot of people up here from Chicago. It’s been crazy busy. We can’t get enough people to handle it.” And biking around <a href=\"https://www.travelmarquette.com/things-to-do/attractions/presque-isle-park/\">Presque Isle Park</a> in Marquette, we got talking, in a socially distant way, to a biking couple up from St Louis. It was also their first time up. A bunch of their friends and family had been up earlier; they’d seen nothing but UP pictures in their Facebook feed for the past month.</li><li>The husband said that he had an underlying medical condition and so they were looking for places away from people; they’d rented a cabin in the little town of Au Train. Which got me thinking about the place we stayed in Soo -- the <a href=\"https://www.plazamotormotel.com/\">Plaza Motor Motel</a>. No lobby, no elevators, no hallways; no places to run into other guests; no need to have to remember to mask up when you leave your room. Just open your room door and there’s your car. Most frequent travelers would never think of voluntarily staying in a motor inn, a <em>mo</em>-tel. But with so many things changing in these unprecedented times, maybe COVID will have folks give motels another chance.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/11510\">Funkist</a> - cdk dub mix by cdk (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: teru</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>First, a big shout out to the folks in Hanoi, Vietnam listening to TravelCommons on Soundcloud. One of the fun things about the podcast is looking at where people are listening from. For the most part, the stats make sense -- most of the listeners are from the US, and then English-speaking countries -- the UK, Canada, Australia. But every once in a while, there’s a spike that I just can’t figure out. I’ll see it, go look at the episode notes to see if I’ve mentioned that country, but I usually can’t make sense of it. Last fall, it was Argentina., but over the past couple of months, it’s been folks from Hanoi, primarily listening to <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/04/11/podcast-162-post-corona-trip-planning-keeping-a-travel-journal/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #162 — Post-Corona Trip Planning; Keeping a Travel Journal\">April episode, #162</a>, about post-lockdown trip planning and keeping a travel journal. Not sure why, but if you’re in Hanoi and you’ve made it to this episode - Hi! And thanks for listening!</li><li>Dan Grabon sent me a note at the beginning of the month about my lockdown reading that I mentioned during <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #166 — What Is The Meaning of Travel?\">last month’s interview</a> with Dr Emily Thomas<ul><li>“Mark,&nbsp; I feel your pain. I started re-reading Walden back in April, and I just passed the halfway mark at the end of August. This was part of an overly ambitious effort to read one great book a month from a literary calendar that I bought. The Brothers Karamazov took up January through March, and even though COVID should have meant more time to read, it just hasn’t turned out that way.</li><li>“Writing this from a long overdue vacation near Lake George, where I saw the book Cabin Porn in a gift shop. Good timing.</li><li>“Thanks for keeping the podcast going— helps keep me going in this time of not going much of anywhere!”</li></ul></li><li>Dan, Thanks for the note. <em>The Brothers Karamazov</em> -- you are a better man than I.&nbsp; I swore off of Russian fiction after suffering through <em>Crime and Punishment</em> in high school. That and Charles Dickens, just can’t do ‘em. And I am still working my way through <em>Walden</em>. Just got through his half-dozen pages on hoeing his bean field. I find if I try to read more than a dozen pages in a sitting, I just start skimming -- or sleeping. Glad you were able to get away to the wilderness of Lake George. Feel like the perfect place to find that Cabin Porn book.</li><li>Jim McDonough hit the TravelCommons Facebook page, following up on my comment in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\" title=\"Podcast #166 — What Is The Meaning of Travel?\">last month’s episode</a> about my disappearing American flight from ORD to BCN. Jim writes...<ul><li>“We were going to Barcelona and Madrid with Rick Steves Europe in October, but of course Rick has canceled every tour for the rest of the year. Interestingly, AA says we are still booked on a BA 747 from SAN to LHR as part of this trip. BA has no more 747\'s and doesn\'t serve SAN any more.”</li></ul></li><li>I sometimes think any of the airline’s schedules more than one month out are more like aspirational projections than reflections of reality. Especially given how fast they’re shifting schedules to capture any sort of bump in passenger volume. Like United having <a href=\"https://airlineweekly.com/airlines-feeling-a-lift-from-rocky-mountain-hubs\">some transcontinental flights stop in DEN to pick up a bump in volume from people visiting national parks</a> -- there’s that outdoor activity trend again.</li><li>But back to that BCN trip, I should be getting things here in Chicago sorted before heading off for 2 weeks in Catalonia, but you’ve probably already guessed, that trip isn’t happening. Not a surprise. The EU still isn’t letting US travelers in and the case count in Spain’s second COVID wave has gotten worse in the last month. So at the beginning of the month, I gritted my teeth, called American and cancelled the flights. Actually, American had called me the prior week while we were in the UP, but I let it go to voicemail. We were in a taproom in Marquette and I didn’t feel ready to have that conversation. I wanted to have all our booking info in front of me and be clear minded (tough during a taproom session) and mentally girded for battle. So when I returned their call the next week, I was sitting in front of my laptop with all my itinerary documents up and was ready to go. It was a quick trip through the automated phone tree to a very nice woman in Dallas. No hassles with canceling. I was asking her about the logistics of the travel credit - how long will it be good for - when she said, “Since your flight was canceled and you were re-booked, you can get a refund if you like.” Wow. “Uh, yes,” I quickly said, not wanting her offer to disappear, “I think I’ll take the refund instead.” That was not what I expected from all the stories about American trying to keep as much cash as possible. It took her a couple of minutes to process the refunds during which we compared the weather between Chicago and Dallas. The refunds hit my credit card the following week, so full kudos to American on handling this. I’m hoping I don’t need to repeat in November for my Thanksgiving trip to London.</li><li>A couple of weeks back I was trading notes with TravelCommons contributor Allan Marko about <a href=\"https://www.sfgate.com/travel/article/United-bangalore-SFO-15551358.php\">United’s new SFO-Bangalore non-stop</a>. It’ll be their longest flight at 17½ hours. My immediate reaction was, of course, “that’s a helluva long time to wear a mask.” United is using a 787-9 with a special engine enhancement that makes the flight possible. Which got me thinking about what planes I’d flown into BLR. I’ve been using <a href=\"https://www.tripit.com/\">TripIt</a> since 2008 when it first broke out of the Silicon Valley venture cap bubble, so I logged in, clicked over to Past Trips and started clicking back through the pages -- and clicking and clicking because the last time I was in Bangalore was April 2014. I kept looking around the screen - there’s gotta be a way to export all my trip data; but I couldn’t find anything. So I sent a note to <a href=\"mailto:support@tripit.com\">support@tripit.com</a>. And, to my huge surprise, Andy from the Tripit Help Center replied in <em>15 minutes</em> saying “We currently do not offer customer driven travel data export capability. We have passed your suggestion on to the appropriate team for review.” Having run a software product team, I knew what that meant -- never. But, in the next paragraph, Andy offered a solution -- “You can check out a third party app Openflights. They have an API with TripIt that will allow you to import trips from your TripIt account to their site. From there you can create a list of all of your flights and download them to a csv file. Their basic account is free to use.” Sweet. I thanked Andy for his quick reply and hit <a href=\"https://openflights.org/\">Openflights</a>. I set up an account, hit the “Import” button and connected to my TripIt account. The import was a touch kludgy -- I had to go page by page, review each trip, and mark it to import. After 88 pages, I had imported 1006 flight segments, which they displayed on a world map. I clicked on BLR and a little card popped up. I clicked on the first option and it listed the 8 flights I’d taken to and from BLR. Turns out I’d mostly flown Airbus A320s, though I did once fly a 747-400 in from FRA. It has a couple of analysis buttons -- like my longest flight -- Joburg to IAD at 17:40 (ha! 10 minutes longer than the SFO-BLR flight); and my shortest -- IAD again, but this time a 44-minute flight to CHO. And of course, I was able to download all my trips into Excel so I can noodle around to my heart’s content. Openflights is free, but I’m going to <a href=\"https://openflights.org/donate\">donate</a> to help keep them going. <a href=\"https://openflights.org/\">Openflights.org</a> -- definitely recommended. I’ll put a link in the show notes.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/48705\">Jolanta Blues</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: Admiral Bob, Martijn de Boer</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>6 Months of Pandemic</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Finally giving into reality and canceling my Barcelona flight 6 months after booking it got me thinking back on these -- you know what’s coming -- <em>unprecedented</em> times. Airlines canceled flights to China at the end of January, then to South Korea, Iran, and Italy in February, until, by the beginning of March, airline traffic joined the stock market in a free fall. But back then, we thought it was a one-off event, kinda like Sept 11th; a sharp, scary event that came out of nowhere with no warning but that would soon pass. So taking advantage of one of the many March fare sales to book a flight at the end of September didn’t seem that risky.</li><li>I was talking to one of my consulting friends a couple of weeks ago. His travel schedule was similar to mine - a week without seeing an airport was a rare exception. He hasn’t been on a plane since March and doesn’t know when he’ll get on one next. He just started a project with a manufacturer in Cincinnati. Most of the project will be virtual, but he’s pretty sure he ought to at least put eyes on their plant. He lives outside Detroit. In the past, he’d be flying down every week. Now, he fires up Google Maps -- it’s a 4½ drive down I-75. He’ll drive down once, stay a couple of days, and then head back home.&nbsp;</li><li>I can’t say that anyone I’ve talked to misses the act of business travel -- getting up at 0 dark 30 Monday morning to get to the airport, shuffle through the PreCheck line for 15-20 minutes, and then shoehorn into a full flight for an hour or 3.&nbsp; But we did it because that was part of the job. But now that it’s not, at least for now and what seems like (for now) through the end of the year, everybody is taking full advantage of sleeping in -- in their own beds.</li><li>Which explains why, of all the US airlines, Spirit Airlines, with its complete focus on low-cost leisure travelers, is the only one sounding even somewhat non-negative.&nbsp; And hotel chains like Choice, focused on what they call “drive-to” locations and extended stay properties getting occupancy rates over 50% while center city hotels like Chicago’s Hilton Palmer House are missing rent payments and slouching towards bankruptcy.</li><li>Irene and I were sitting outside at a microbrewery a couple of days ago, enjoying a sunny afternoon full in the knowledge that we have maybe 4 weeks of outdoor eating and drinking left in Chicago. We talked about what kind of travel we would do over the next 12 months, figuring travel restrictions and periodic lockdowns are going to be the norm for at least that long. No big plans; nothing that COVID could blow up but seeing some new places -- some skiing, maybe trying out Montana; some hiking, maybe checking out the Texas Hill Country. But next month, we’re trading Barcelona for Philadelphia; now that they’ve opened up the restaurants again, check out our old neighborhood and visit with some friends. It’ll be Irene’s first flight since February. It took a bit of talking, but I really think the threat of a total of 22 hrs in a car with me -- alone -- tipped her over.&nbsp;</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djiz/10514\">Nube - Djiz Rmx</a> by Kwame (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: SylviaO</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Do We Keep Travel Credit Cards?</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Last week, <a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/14/delta-launches-6point5-billion-debt-deal-backed-by-its-frequent-flyer-program.html\">Delta used their SkyMiles program to back $6.5 billion in debt</a>, running the same play that United and American did in June. What caught my eye was some of the stats that came out with the debt filing -- that <a href=\"https://skift.com/2020/09/15/how-delta-looks-to-leverage-rewards-from-its-own-frequent-flyer-program/\">SkyMiles had about $6.1 billion in revenue in 2019, about two-thirds from American Express</a> which issues a co-branded Delta card, and that <a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/14/delta-launches-6point5-billion-debt-deal-backed-by-its-frequent-flyer-program.html\">total miles redeemed fell by 78% in the first half of this year.</a> The big carriers are leaning on their loyalty programs for cash, their biggest customers are credit card issuers, but those card users - us - are generating points that we’ve stopped using. </li><li>It’s against this background that I called up Matt Schulz, chief credit analyst at LendingTree, and to ask him -- do we want to keep travel credit cards?<ul><li>Mark: Matt, a lot of folks carry at least one travel credit card and I don’t think I’m going too far out on a limb guessing that damn close to every TravelCommons listeners carry them. We’re 6 months on from the COVID lockdowns and the resulting cratering of the travel industry. But with travel not recovering -- airline demand is still just a third of pre-pandemic levels and United Airlines’ CEO said last week it could be 3-4 years before it’s back to 2019 levels -- what are card holders doing with these cards generating frequent traveler points that they can’t or don’t want to use?</li><li>Matt: An awful lot of people are closing them simply because they may need to use those points that they had been planning to go on a trip to Paris or to Hawaii. But they need to use that money or those points to keep food on the table. Our survey that we just did found that about 30% of respondents with travel rewards card said that they had closed one and that number is even higher for Millennials. And that\'s got to be something that that scares the banks to death. It\'s not terribly surprising for all the reasons that you that you ticked off a minute ago, and I don\'t think that\'s going to slow down anytime soon either.</li><li>Mark: So, people are closing them out, so they\'re not taking those annual fees.</li><li>Matt: Our survey found that about half of those who had been laid off or furloughed had cashed out some of their points or miles. And again, it stands to reason because when you\'re trying to keep the lights on and keep food on the table, there are things more important than travel rewards. And I think that\'s a lot of what this comes down to -- if you are somebody who feels pretty stable in your job, has a decent emergency fund and generally feels kinda OK about things despite all of economic chaos, you\'re probably going to try and hold on to those miles</li><li>Back in March and April, it seemed the strategy for the big travel card issuers -- Chase, Citi, Amex -- seemed to be to sacrifice revenue to hold share -- statement credits for annual fees if you called them to cancel, new bonuses for stay-at-home purchases to keep wallet share -- seemed like 5x bonuses for grocery and gas was the most popular. Made sense when everyone was talking about 2-week shutdowns and a V-shaped recovery. But, as we said before, travel is gonna stay depressed for a while -- between state and country quarantines and many people not wanting to get in a plane -- how are travel card companies going to handle the next round of renewals? When I call Chase and Amex again, do I get more statement credits -- do they continue to fight for share? And if they don’t, what do I do with the balance of Ultimate or Membership Rewards points that I’ll lose if I don’t re-up and pay the fee?</li><li>Matt: I think what\'s gonna happen is that issuers are going to continue to tinker around the edges to see what people like and what is impactful. And the truth is that issuers desperately want to keep the customers on cards like Chase Sapphire Reserve, Amex Platinum -- all the high end and the next-step-down cards because those customers are so valuable from a lifetime value perspective. You may get a travel card when you\'re 25 and the bank will do what they can to keep you around to try and upsell you to other products that they might have. The issuers are going to try and do what they can to figure out how to make you stay. And right now, that may not look like giving a ton of travel rewards points.</li><li>Mark: Any recommendations for travel card holders as we\'re going forward to the end of the year and into the beginning of next year?</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #167</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and now, <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_167.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #167 — 6 Months On; Why Keep Travel Cards?','','inherit','closed','closed','','2856-revision-v1','','','2021-01-03 11:45:37','2021-01-03 16:45:37','',2856,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/03/2856-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2974,1,'2021-01-03 11:55:53','2021-01-03 16:55:53','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":2857,\"width\":300,\"height\":300,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large is-resized\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/F3E28DAE-0026-4E8A-957E-D6CE914F717C.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2857\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"/><figcaption>I seem to have put on a Quarantine 15</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Spent a week in <a href=\"https://www.uptravel.com/\">Michigan\'s Upper Peninsula</a> hiking, biking, kayaking, and running into a lot of other people getting away to do the same, which got me looking back six months to the start of the pandemic. I talk about a surprisingly good flight cancellation experience with American Airlines, and figuring out how to download 12 years of <a href=\"https://www.tripit.com/\">TripIt</a> data. We wrap up talking to <a href=\"https://www.lendingtree.com/writer/matt-schulz/\">Matt Schulz</a> of <a href=\"https://www.lendingtree.com/\">LendingTree</a>, asking him what are we doing with travel credit cards that are generating frequent traveler points we can’t use? All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_167.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>download</strong></a> the podcast file, subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/896151355&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #167: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after a week’s tour of the UP -- Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Did a counter-clockwise circle route around Lake Michigan. Headed out east on Friday morning; stopped at a brewery in Grand Rapids for lunch; drove the 5 miles across the Mackinac Bridge just before dusk; and had my first UP pasty (the first of many) and a local beer for dinner that night in Sault Ste Marie. Spent a couple of days in Soo; watched 700-ft lake freighters make their way through the locks that connect Lake Superior to Lake Huron; I’m still enough of an engineer to geek out on that kind of stuff. We then drove west to Marquette for 3 days and again west to Houghton for 2 days before heading home through Wisconsin down the west side of Lake Michigan. It was all outdoors stuff -- hiking, biking, kayaking; the things that last-minute COVID closures or restrictions won’t muck up.&nbsp; The UP has always been on my list of places to visit, but it’s always on sorta the B-list, and so plans to go someplace else -- Spain, Napa, Ireland -- would always push it down the list. But now, with most places blocked off with travel restrictions and quarantines, the UP -- drivable with lots of outdoor activities -- bubbled to the top of the list.</li><li>And I wasn’t the only one thinking that way. The guy renting rowboats at <a href=\"https://www2.dnr.state.mi.us/ParksandTrails/Details.aspx?id=428&amp;type=SPRK\">Tahquamenon Falls State Park</a> looked at our release forms and said “We’ve had a lot of people up here from Chicago. It’s been crazy busy. We can’t get enough people to handle it.” And biking around <a href=\"https://www.travelmarquette.com/things-to-do/attractions/presque-isle-park/\">Presque Isle Park</a> in Marquette, we got talking, in a socially distant way, to a biking couple up from St Louis. It was also their first time up. A bunch of their friends and family had been up earlier; they’d seen nothing but UP pictures in their Facebook feed for the past month.</li><li>The husband said that he had an underlying medical condition and so they were looking for places away from people; they’d rented a cabin in the little town of Au Train. Which got me thinking about the place we stayed in Soo -- the <a href=\"https://www.plazamotormotel.com/\">Plaza Motor Motel</a>. No lobby, no elevators, no hallways; no places to run into other guests; no need to have to remember to mask up when you leave your room. Just open your room door and there’s your car. Most frequent travelers would never think of voluntarily staying in a motor inn, a <em>mo</em>-tel. But with so many things changing in these unprecedented times, maybe COVID will have folks give motels another chance.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/11510\">Funkist</a> - cdk dub mix by cdk (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: teru</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>First, a big shout out to the folks in Hanoi, Vietnam listening to TravelCommons on Soundcloud. One of the fun things about the podcast is looking at where people are listening from. For the most part, the stats make sense -- most of the listeners are from the US, and then English-speaking countries -- the UK, Canada, Australia. But every once in a while, there’s a spike that I just can’t figure out. I’ll see it, go look at the episode notes to see if I’ve mentioned that country, but I usually can’t make sense of it. Last fall, it was Argentina., but over the past couple of months, it’s been folks from Hanoi, primarily listening to <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/04/11/podcast-162-post-corona-trip-planning-keeping-a-travel-journal/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #162 — Post-Corona Trip Planning; Keeping a Travel Journal\">April episode, #162</a>, about post-lockdown trip planning and keeping a travel journal. Not sure why, but if you’re in Hanoi and you’ve made it to this episode - Hi! And thanks for listening!</li><li>Dan Grabon sent me a note at the beginning of the month about my lockdown reading that I mentioned during <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #166 — What Is The Meaning of Travel?\">last month’s interview</a> with Dr Emily Thomas<ul><li>“Mark,&nbsp; I feel your pain. I started re-reading Walden back in April, and I just passed the halfway mark at the end of August. This was part of an overly ambitious effort to read one great book a month from a literary calendar that I bought. The Brothers Karamazov took up January through March, and even though COVID should have meant more time to read, it just hasn’t turned out that way.</li><li>“Writing this from a long overdue vacation near Lake George, where I saw the book Cabin Porn in a gift shop. Good timing.</li><li>“Thanks for keeping the podcast going— helps keep me going in this time of not going much of anywhere!”</li></ul></li><li>Dan, Thanks for the note. <em>The Brothers Karamazov</em> -- you are a better man than I.&nbsp; I swore off of Russian fiction after suffering through <em>Crime and Punishment</em> in high school. That and Charles Dickens, just can’t do ‘em. And I am still working my way through <em>Walden</em>. Just got through his half-dozen pages on hoeing his bean field. I find if I try to read more than a dozen pages in a sitting, I just start skimming -- or sleeping. Glad you were able to get away to the wilderness of Lake George. Feel like the perfect place to find that Cabin Porn book.</li><li>Jim McDonough hit the TravelCommons Facebook page, following up on my comment in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\" title=\"Podcast #166 — What Is The Meaning of Travel?\">last month’s episode</a> about my disappearing American flight from ORD to BCN. Jim writes...<ul><li>“We were going to Barcelona and Madrid with Rick Steves Europe in October, but of course Rick has canceled every tour for the rest of the year. Interestingly, AA says we are still booked on a BA 747 from SAN to LHR as part of this trip. BA has no more 747\'s and doesn\'t serve SAN any more.”</li></ul></li><li>I sometimes think any of the airline’s schedules more than one month out are more like aspirational projections than reflections of reality. Especially given how fast they’re shifting schedules to capture any sort of bump in passenger volume. Like United having <a href=\"https://airlineweekly.com/airlines-feeling-a-lift-from-rocky-mountain-hubs\">some transcontinental flights stop in DEN to pick up a bump in volume from people visiting national parks</a> -- there’s that outdoor activity trend again.</li><li>But back to that BCN trip, I should be getting things here in Chicago sorted before heading off for 2 weeks in Catalonia, but you’ve probably already guessed, that trip isn’t happening. Not a surprise. The EU still isn’t letting US travelers in and the case count in Spain’s second COVID wave has gotten worse in the last month. So at the beginning of the month, I gritted my teeth, called American and cancelled the flights. Actually, American had called me the prior week while we were in the UP, but I let it go to voicemail. We were in a taproom in Marquette and I didn’t feel ready to have that conversation. I wanted to have all our booking info in front of me and be clear minded (tough during a taproom session) and mentally girded for battle. So when I returned their call the next week, I was sitting in front of my laptop with all my itinerary documents up and was ready to go. It was a quick trip through the automated phone tree to a very nice woman in Dallas. No hassles with canceling. I was asking her about the logistics of the travel credit - how long will it be good for - when she said, “Since your flight was canceled and you were re-booked, you can get a refund if you like.” Wow. “Uh, yes,” I quickly said, not wanting her offer to disappear, “I think I’ll take the refund instead.” That was not what I expected from all the stories about American trying to keep as much cash as possible. It took her a couple of minutes to process the refunds during which we compared the weather between Chicago and Dallas. The refunds hit my credit card the following week, so full kudos to American on handling this. I’m hoping I don’t need to repeat in November for my Thanksgiving trip to London.</li><li>A couple of weeks back I was trading notes with TravelCommons contributor Allan Marko about <a href=\"https://www.sfgate.com/travel/article/United-bangalore-SFO-15551358.php\">United’s new SFO-Bangalore non-stop</a>. It’ll be their longest flight at 17½ hours. My immediate reaction was, of course, “that’s a helluva long time to wear a mask.” United is using a 787-9 with a special engine enhancement that makes the flight possible. Which got me thinking about what planes I’d flown into BLR. I’ve been using <a href=\"https://www.tripit.com/\">TripIt</a> since 2008 when it first broke out of the Silicon Valley venture cap bubble, so I logged in, clicked over to Past Trips and started clicking back through the pages -- and clicking and clicking because the last time I was in Bangalore was April 2014. I kept looking around the screen - there’s gotta be a way to export all my trip data; but I couldn’t find anything. So I sent a note to <a href=\"mailto:support@tripit.com\">support@tripit.com</a>. And, to my huge surprise, Andy from the Tripit Help Center replied in <em>15 minutes</em> saying “We currently do not offer customer driven travel data export capability. We have passed your suggestion on to the appropriate team for review.” Having run a software product team, I knew what that meant -- never. But, in the next paragraph, Andy offered a solution -- “You can check out a third party app Openflights. They have an API with TripIt that will allow you to import trips from your TripIt account to their site. From there you can create a list of all of your flights and download them to a csv file. Their basic account is free to use.” Sweet. I thanked Andy for his quick reply and hit <a href=\"https://openflights.org/\">Openflights</a>. I set up an account, hit the “Import” button and connected to my TripIt account. The import was a touch kludgy -- I had to go page by page, review each trip, and mark it to import. After 88 pages, I had imported 1006 flight segments, which they displayed on a world map. I clicked on BLR and a little card popped up. I clicked on the first option and it listed the 8 flights I’d taken to and from BLR. Turns out I’d mostly flown Airbus A320s, though I did once fly a 747-400 in from FRA. It has a couple of analysis buttons -- like my longest flight -- Joburg to IAD at 17:40 (ha! 10 minutes longer than the SFO-BLR flight); and my shortest -- IAD again, but this time a 44-minute flight to CHO. And of course, I was able to download all my trips into Excel so I can noodle around to my heart’s content. Openflights is free, but I’m going to <a href=\"https://openflights.org/donate\">donate</a> to help keep them going. <a href=\"https://openflights.org/\">Openflights.org</a> -- definitely recommended. I’ll put a link in the show notes.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/48705\">Jolanta Blues</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: Admiral Bob, Martijn de Boer</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>6 Months of Pandemic</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Finally giving into reality and canceling my Barcelona flight 6 months after booking it got me thinking back on these -- you know what’s coming -- <em>unprecedented</em> times. Airlines canceled flights to China at the end of January, then to South Korea, Iran, and Italy in February, until, by the beginning of March, airline traffic joined the stock market in a free fall. But back then, we thought it was a one-off event, kinda like Sept 11th; a sharp, scary event that came out of nowhere with no warning but that would soon pass. So taking advantage of one of the many March fare sales to book a flight at the end of September didn’t seem that risky.</li><li>I was talking to one of my consulting friends a couple of weeks ago. His travel schedule was similar to mine - a week without seeing an airport was a rare exception. He hasn’t been on a plane since March and doesn’t know when he’ll get on one next. He just started a project with a manufacturer in Cincinnati. Most of the project will be virtual, but he’s pretty sure he ought to at least put eyes on their plant. He lives outside Detroit. In the past, he’d be flying down every week. Now, he fires up Google Maps -- it’s a 4½ drive down I-75. He’ll drive down once, stay a couple of days, and then head back home.&nbsp;</li><li>I can’t say that anyone I’ve talked to misses the act of business travel -- getting up at 0 dark 30 Monday morning to get to the airport, shuffle through the PreCheck line for 15-20 minutes, and then shoehorn into a full flight for an hour or 3.&nbsp; But we did it because that was part of the job. But now that it’s not, at least for now and what seems like (for now) through the end of the year, everybody is taking full advantage of sleeping in -- in their own beds.</li><li>Which explains why, of all the US airlines, Spirit Airlines, with its complete focus on low-cost leisure travelers, is the only one sounding even somewhat non-negative.&nbsp; And hotel chains like Choice, focused on what they call “drive-to” locations and extended stay properties getting occupancy rates over 50% while center city hotels like Chicago’s Hilton Palmer House are missing rent payments and slouching towards bankruptcy.</li><li>Irene and I were sitting outside at a microbrewery a couple of days ago, enjoying a sunny afternoon full in the knowledge that we have maybe 4 weeks of outdoor eating and drinking left in Chicago. We talked about what kind of travel we would do over the next 12 months, figuring travel restrictions and periodic lockdowns are going to be the norm for at least that long. No big plans; nothing that COVID could blow up but seeing some new places -- some skiing, maybe trying out Montana; some hiking, maybe checking out the Texas Hill Country. But next month, we’re trading Barcelona for Philadelphia; now that they’ve opened up the restaurants again, check out our old neighborhood and visit with some friends. It’ll be Irene’s first flight since February. It took a bit of talking, but I really think the threat of a total of 22 hrs in a car with me -- alone -- tipped her over.&nbsp;</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djiz/10514\">Nube - Djiz Rmx</a> by Kwame (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: SylviaO</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Do We Keep Travel Credit Cards?</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Last week, <a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/14/delta-launches-6point5-billion-debt-deal-backed-by-its-frequent-flyer-program.html\">Delta used their SkyMiles program to back $6.5 billion in debt</a>, running the same play that United and American did in June. What caught my eye was some of the stats that came out with the debt filing -- that <a href=\"https://skift.com/2020/09/15/how-delta-looks-to-leverage-rewards-from-its-own-frequent-flyer-program/\">SkyMiles had about $6.1 billion in revenue in 2019, about two-thirds from American Express</a> which issues a co-branded Delta card, and that <a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/14/delta-launches-6point5-billion-debt-deal-backed-by-its-frequent-flyer-program.html\">total miles redeemed fell by 78% in the first half of this year.</a> The big carriers are leaning on their loyalty programs for cash, their biggest customers are credit card issuers, but those card users - us - are generating points that we’ve stopped using. </li><li>It’s against this background that I called up Matt Schulz, chief credit analyst at LendingTree, and to ask him -- do we want to keep travel credit cards?<ul><li>Mark: Matt, a lot of folks carry at least one travel credit card and I don’t think I’m going too far out on a limb guessing that damn close to every TravelCommons listeners carry them. We’re 6 months on from the COVID lockdowns and the resulting cratering of the travel industry. But with travel not recovering -- airline demand is still just a third of pre-pandemic levels and United Airlines’ CEO said last week it could be 3-4 years before it’s back to 2019 levels -- what are card holders doing with these cards generating frequent traveler points that they can’t or don’t want to use?</li><li>Matt: An awful lot of people are closing them simply because they may need to use those points that they had been planning to go on a trip to Paris or to Hawaii. But they need to use that money or those points to keep food on the table. Our survey that we just did found that about 30% of respondents with travel rewards card said that they had closed one and that number is even higher for Millennials. And that\'s got to be something that that scares the banks to death. It\'s not terribly surprising for all the reasons that you that you ticked off a minute ago, and I don\'t think that\'s going to slow down anytime soon either.</li><li>Mark: So, people are closing them out, so they\'re not taking those annual fees.</li><li>Matt: Our survey found that about half of those who had been laid off or furloughed had cashed out some of their points or miles. And again, it stands to reason because when you\'re trying to keep the lights on and keep food on the table, there are things more important than travel rewards. And I think that\'s a lot of what this comes down to -- if you are somebody who feels pretty stable in your job, has a decent emergency fund and generally feels kinda OK about things despite all of economic chaos, you\'re probably going to try and hold on to those miles</li><li>Back in March and April, it seemed the strategy for the big travel card issuers -- Chase, Citi, Amex -- seemed to be to sacrifice revenue to hold share -- statement credits for annual fees if you called them to cancel, new bonuses for stay-at-home purchases to keep wallet share -- seemed like 5x bonuses for grocery and gas was the most popular. Made sense when everyone was talking about 2-week shutdowns and a V-shaped recovery. But, as we said before, travel is gonna stay depressed for a while -- between state and country quarantines and many people not wanting to get in a plane -- how are travel card companies going to handle the next round of renewals? When I call Chase and Amex again, do I get more statement credits -- do they continue to fight for share? And if they don’t, what do I do with the balance of Ultimate or Membership Rewards points that I’ll lose if I don’t re-up and pay the fee?</li><li>Matt: I think what\'s gonna happen is that issuers are going to continue to tinker around the edges to see what people like and what is impactful. And the truth is that issuers desperately want to keep the customers on cards like Chase Sapphire Reserve, Amex Platinum -- all the high end and the next-step-down cards because those customers are so valuable from a lifetime value perspective. You may get a travel card when you\'re 25 and the bank will do what they can to keep you around to try and upsell you to other products that they might have. The issuers are going to try and do what they can to figure out how to make you stay. And right now, that may not look like giving a ton of travel rewards points.</li><li>Mark: Any recommendations for travel card holders as we\'re going forward to the end of the year and into the beginning of next year?</li><li>Matt: You really have to know your situation and understand it, and you also have to not feel guilty if you have to cash in your points that you had been saving up for that dream trip in order to help you extend your budget. Nobody gets a high-end travel card with a high annual fee hoping to eventually cash that in for groceries at Walmart, but sometimes these things have to happen. If you have the financial wherewithal and you can hold on to those points, I think it\'s worth doing because we are going to travel again. Nobody knows when. But we are going to travel again and assuming that your whole financial situation is generally OK, I think there is value in holding on to those points as something to look forward to in the future.</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #167</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and now, <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_167.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #167 — 6 Months On; Why Keep Travel Cards?','','inherit','closed','closed','','2856-revision-v1','','','2021-01-03 11:55:53','2021-01-03 16:55:53','',2856,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/03/2856-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2975,1,'2021-01-03 13:27:44','2021-01-03 18:27:44','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":2857,\"width\":300,\"height\":300,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large is-resized\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/F3E28DAE-0026-4E8A-957E-D6CE914F717C.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2857\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"/><figcaption>I seem to have put on a Quarantine 15</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Spent a week in <a href=\"https://www.uptravel.com/\">Michigan\'s Upper Peninsula</a> hiking, biking, kayaking, and running into a lot of other people getting away to do the same, which got me looking back six months to the start of the pandemic. I talk about a surprisingly good flight cancellation experience with American Airlines, and figuring out how to download 12 years of <a href=\"https://www.tripit.com/\">TripIt</a> data. We wrap up talking to <a href=\"https://www.lendingtree.com/writer/matt-schulz/\">Matt Schulz</a> of <a href=\"https://www.lendingtree.com/\">LendingTree</a>, asking him what are we doing with travel credit cards that are generating frequent traveler points we can’t use? All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_167.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>download</strong></a> the podcast file, subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/896151355&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #167: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after a week’s tour of the UP -- Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Did a counter-clockwise circle route around Lake Michigan. Headed out east on Friday morning; stopped at a brewery in Grand Rapids for lunch; drove the 5 miles across the Mackinac Bridge just before dusk; and had my first UP pasty (the first of many) and a local beer for dinner that night in Sault Ste Marie. Spent a couple of days in Soo; watched 700-ft lake freighters make their way through the locks that connect Lake Superior to Lake Huron; I’m still enough of an engineer to geek out on that kind of stuff. We then drove west to Marquette for 3 days and again west to Houghton for 2 days before heading home through Wisconsin down the west side of Lake Michigan. It was all outdoors stuff -- hiking, biking, kayaking; the things that last-minute COVID closures or restrictions won’t muck up.&nbsp; The UP has always been on my list of places to visit, but it’s always on sorta the B-list, and so plans to go someplace else -- Spain, Napa, Ireland -- would always push it down the list. But now, with most places blocked off with travel restrictions and quarantines, the UP -- drivable with lots of outdoor activities -- bubbled to the top of the list.</li><li>And I wasn’t the only one thinking that way. The guy renting rowboats at <a href=\"https://www2.dnr.state.mi.us/ParksandTrails/Details.aspx?id=428&amp;type=SPRK\">Tahquamenon Falls State Park</a> looked at our release forms and said “We’ve had a lot of people up here from Chicago. It’s been crazy busy. We can’t get enough people to handle it.” And biking around <a href=\"https://www.travelmarquette.com/things-to-do/attractions/presque-isle-park/\">Presque Isle Park</a> in Marquette, we got talking, in a socially distant way, to a biking couple up from St Louis. It was also their first time up. A bunch of their friends and family had been up earlier; they’d seen nothing but UP pictures in their Facebook feed for the past month.</li><li>The husband said that he had an underlying medical condition and so they were looking for places away from people; they’d rented a cabin in the little town of Au Train. Which got me thinking about the place we stayed in Soo -- the <a href=\"https://www.plazamotormotel.com/\">Plaza Motor Motel</a>. No lobby, no elevators, no hallways; no places to run into other guests; no need to have to remember to mask up when you leave your room. Just open your room door and there’s your car. Most frequent travelers would never think of voluntarily staying in a motor inn, a <em>mo</em>-tel. But with so many things changing in these unprecedented times, maybe COVID will have folks give motels another chance.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/11510\">Funkist</a> - cdk dub mix by cdk (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: teru</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>First, a big shout out to the folks in Hanoi, Vietnam listening to TravelCommons on Soundcloud. One of the fun things about the podcast is looking at where people are listening from. For the most part, the stats make sense -- most of the listeners are from the US, and then English-speaking countries -- the UK, Canada, Australia. But every once in a while, there’s a spike that I just can’t figure out. I’ll see it, go look at the episode notes to see if I’ve mentioned that country, but I usually can’t make sense of it. Last fall, it was Argentina., but over the past couple of months, it’s been folks from Hanoi, primarily listening to <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/04/11/podcast-162-post-corona-trip-planning-keeping-a-travel-journal/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #162 — Post-Corona Trip Planning; Keeping a Travel Journal\">April episode, #162</a>, about post-lockdown trip planning and keeping a travel journal. Not sure why, but if you’re in Hanoi and you’ve made it to this episode - Hi! And thanks for listening!</li><li>Dan Grabon sent me a note at the beginning of the month about my lockdown reading that I mentioned during <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #166 — What Is The Meaning of Travel?\">last month’s interview</a> with Dr Emily Thomas<ul><li>“Mark,&nbsp; I feel your pain. I started re-reading Walden back in April, and I just passed the halfway mark at the end of August. This was part of an overly ambitious effort to read one great book a month from a literary calendar that I bought. The Brothers Karamazov took up January through March, and even though COVID should have meant more time to read, it just hasn’t turned out that way.</li><li>“Writing this from a long overdue vacation near Lake George, where I saw the book Cabin Porn in a gift shop. Good timing.</li><li>“Thanks for keeping the podcast going— helps keep me going in this time of not going much of anywhere!”</li></ul></li><li>Dan, Thanks for the note. <em>The Brothers Karamazov</em> -- you are a better man than I.&nbsp; I swore off of Russian fiction after suffering through <em>Crime and Punishment</em> in high school. That and Charles Dickens, just can’t do ‘em. And I am still working my way through <em>Walden</em>. Just got through his half-dozen pages on hoeing his bean field. I find if I try to read more than a dozen pages in a sitting, I just start skimming -- or sleeping. Glad you were able to get away to the wilderness of Lake George. Feel like the perfect place to find that Cabin Porn book.</li><li>Jim McDonough hit the TravelCommons Facebook page, following up on my comment in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\" title=\"Podcast #166 — What Is The Meaning of Travel?\">last month’s episode</a> about my disappearing American flight from ORD to BCN. Jim writes...<ul><li>“We were going to Barcelona and Madrid with Rick Steves Europe in October, but of course Rick has canceled every tour for the rest of the year. Interestingly, AA says we are still booked on a BA 747 from SAN to LHR as part of this trip. BA has no more 747\'s and doesn\'t serve SAN any more.”</li></ul></li><li>I sometimes think any of the airline’s schedules more than one month out are more like aspirational projections than reflections of reality. Especially given how fast they’re shifting schedules to capture any sort of bump in passenger volume. Like United having <a href=\"https://airlineweekly.com/airlines-feeling-a-lift-from-rocky-mountain-hubs\">some transcontinental flights stop in DEN to pick up a bump in volume from people visiting national parks</a> -- there’s that outdoor activity trend again.</li><li>But back to that BCN trip, I should be getting things here in Chicago sorted before heading off for 2 weeks in Catalonia, but you’ve probably already guessed, that trip isn’t happening. Not a surprise. The EU still isn’t letting US travelers in and the case count in Spain’s second COVID wave has gotten worse in the last month. So at the beginning of the month, I gritted my teeth, called American and cancelled the flights. Actually, American had called me the prior week while we were in the UP, but I let it go to voicemail. We were in a taproom in Marquette and I didn’t feel ready to have that conversation. I wanted to have all our booking info in front of me and be clear minded (tough during a taproom session) and mentally girded for battle. So when I returned their call the next week, I was sitting in front of my laptop with all my itinerary documents up and was ready to go. It was a quick trip through the automated phone tree to a very nice woman in Dallas. No hassles with canceling. I was asking her about the logistics of the travel credit - how long will it be good for - when she said, “Since your flight was canceled and you were re-booked, you can get a refund if you like.” Wow. “Uh, yes,” I quickly said, not wanting her offer to disappear, “I think I’ll take the refund instead.” That was not what I expected from all the stories about American trying to keep as much cash as possible. It took her a couple of minutes to process the refunds during which we compared the weather between Chicago and Dallas. The refunds hit my credit card the following week, so full kudos to American on handling this. I’m hoping I don’t need to repeat in November for my Thanksgiving trip to London.</li><li>A couple of weeks back I was trading notes with TravelCommons contributor Allan Marko about <a href=\"https://www.sfgate.com/travel/article/United-bangalore-SFO-15551358.php\">United’s new SFO-Bangalore non-stop</a>. It’ll be their longest flight at 17½ hours. My immediate reaction was, of course, “that’s a helluva long time to wear a mask.” United is using a 787-9 with a special engine enhancement that makes the flight possible. Which got me thinking about what planes I’d flown into BLR. I’ve been using <a href=\"https://www.tripit.com/\">TripIt</a> since 2008 when it first broke out of the Silicon Valley venture cap bubble, so I logged in, clicked over to Past Trips and started clicking back through the pages -- and clicking and clicking because the last time I was in Bangalore was April 2014. I kept looking around the screen - there’s gotta be a way to export all my trip data; but I couldn’t find anything. So I sent a note to <a href=\"mailto:support@tripit.com\">support@tripit.com</a>. And, to my huge surprise, Andy from the Tripit Help Center replied in <em>15 minutes</em> saying “We currently do not offer customer driven travel data export capability. We have passed your suggestion on to the appropriate team for review.” Having run a software product team, I knew what that meant -- never. But, in the next paragraph, Andy offered a solution -- “You can check out a third party app Openflights. They have an API with TripIt that will allow you to import trips from your TripIt account to their site. From there you can create a list of all of your flights and download them to a csv file. Their basic account is free to use.” Sweet. I thanked Andy for his quick reply and hit <a href=\"https://openflights.org/\">Openflights</a>. I set up an account, hit the “Import” button and connected to my TripIt account. The import was a touch kludgy -- I had to go page by page, review each trip, and mark it to import. After 88 pages, I had imported 1006 flight segments, which they displayed on a world map. I clicked on BLR and a little card popped up. I clicked on the first option and it listed the 8 flights I’d taken to and from BLR. Turns out I’d mostly flown Airbus A320s, though I did once fly a 747-400 in from FRA. It has a couple of analysis buttons -- like my longest flight -- Joburg to IAD at 17:40 (ha! 10 minutes longer than the SFO-BLR flight); and my shortest -- IAD again, but this time a 44-minute flight to CHO. And of course, I was able to download all my trips into Excel so I can noodle around to my heart’s content. Openflights is free, but I’m going to <a href=\"https://openflights.org/donate\">donate</a> to help keep them going. <a href=\"https://openflights.org/\">Openflights.org</a> -- definitely recommended. I’ll put a link in the show notes.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/48705\">Jolanta Blues</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: Admiral Bob, Martijn de Boer</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>6 Months of Pandemic</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Finally giving into reality and canceling my Barcelona flight 6 months after booking it got me thinking back on these -- you know what’s coming -- <em>unprecedented</em> times. Airlines canceled flights to China at the end of January, then to South Korea, Iran, and Italy in February, until, by the beginning of March, airline traffic joined the stock market in a free fall. But back then, we thought it was a one-off event, kinda like Sept 11th; a sharp, scary event that came out of nowhere with no warning but that would soon pass. So taking advantage of one of the many March fare sales to book a flight at the end of September didn’t seem that risky.</li><li>I was talking to one of my consulting friends a couple of weeks ago. His travel schedule was similar to mine - a week without seeing an airport was a rare exception. He hasn’t been on a plane since March and doesn’t know when he’ll get on one next. He just started a project with a manufacturer in Cincinnati. Most of the project will be virtual, but he’s pretty sure he ought to at least put eyes on their plant. He lives outside Detroit. In the past, he’d be flying down every week. Now, he fires up Google Maps -- it’s a 4½ drive down I-75. He’ll drive down once, stay a couple of days, and then head back home.&nbsp;</li><li>I can’t say that anyone I’ve talked to misses the act of business travel -- getting up at 0 dark 30 Monday morning to get to the airport, shuffle through the PreCheck line for 15-20 minutes, and then shoehorn into a full flight for an hour or 3.&nbsp; But we did it because that was part of the job. But now that it’s not, at least for now and what seems like (for now) through the end of the year, everybody is taking full advantage of sleeping in -- in their own beds.</li><li>Which explains why, of all the US airlines, Spirit Airlines, with its complete focus on low-cost leisure travelers, is the only one sounding even somewhat non-negative.&nbsp; And hotel chains like Choice, focused on what they call “drive-to” locations and extended stay properties getting occupancy rates over 50% while center city hotels like Chicago’s Hilton Palmer House are missing rent payments and slouching towards bankruptcy.</li><li>Irene and I were sitting outside at a microbrewery a couple of days ago, enjoying a sunny afternoon full in the knowledge that we have maybe 4 weeks of outdoor eating and drinking left in Chicago. We talked about what kind of travel we would do over the next 12 months, figuring travel restrictions and periodic lockdowns are going to be the norm for at least that long. No big plans; nothing that COVID could blow up but seeing some new places -- some skiing, maybe trying out Montana; some hiking, maybe checking out the Texas Hill Country. But next month, we’re trading Barcelona for Philadelphia; now that they’ve opened up the restaurants again, check out our old neighborhood and visit with some friends. It’ll be Irene’s first flight since February. It took a bit of talking, but I really think the threat of a total of 22 hrs in a car with me -- alone -- tipped her over.&nbsp;</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djiz/10514\">Nube - Djiz Rmx</a> by Kwame (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: SylviaO</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Do We Keep Travel Credit Cards?</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Last week, <a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/14/delta-launches-6point5-billion-debt-deal-backed-by-its-frequent-flyer-program.html\">Delta used their SkyMiles program to back $6.5 billion in debt</a>, running the same play that United and American did in June. What caught my eye was some of the stats that came out with the debt filing -- that <a href=\"https://skift.com/2020/09/15/how-delta-looks-to-leverage-rewards-from-its-own-frequent-flyer-program/\">SkyMiles had about $6.1 billion in revenue in 2019, about two-thirds from American Express</a> which issues a co-branded Delta card, and that <a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/14/delta-launches-6point5-billion-debt-deal-backed-by-its-frequent-flyer-program.html\">total miles redeemed fell by 78% in the first half of this year.</a> The big carriers are leaning on their loyalty programs for cash, their biggest customers are credit card issuers, but those card users - us - are generating points that we’ve stopped using. </li><li>It’s against this background that I called up Matt Schulz, chief credit analyst at LendingTree, and to ask him -- do we want to keep travel credit cards?<ul><li>Mark: Matt, a lot of folks carry at least one travel credit card and I don’t think I’m going too far out on a limb guessing that damn close to every TravelCommons listeners carry them. We’re 6 months on from the COVID lockdowns and the resulting cratering of the travel industry. But with travel not recovering -- airline demand is still just a third of pre-pandemic levels and United Airlines’ CEO said last week it could be 3-4 years before it’s back to 2019 levels -- what are card holders doing with these cards generating frequent traveler points that they can’t or don’t want to use?</li><li>Matt: An awful lot of people are closing them simply because they may need to use those points that they had been planning to go on a trip to Paris or to Hawaii. But they need to use that money or those points to keep food on the table. Our survey that we just did found that about 30% of respondents with travel rewards card said that they had closed one and that number is even higher for Millennials. And that\'s got to be something that that scares the banks to death. It\'s not terribly surprising for all the reasons that you that you ticked off a minute ago, and I don\'t think that\'s going to slow down anytime soon either.</li><li>Mark: So, people are closing them out, so they\'re not taking those annual fees.</li><li>Matt: Our survey found that about half of those who had been laid off or furloughed had cashed out some of their points or miles. And again, it stands to reason because when you\'re trying to keep the lights on and keep food on the table, there are things more important than travel rewards. And I think that\'s a lot of what this comes down to -- if you are somebody who feels pretty stable in your job, has a decent emergency fund and generally feels kinda OK about things despite all of economic chaos, you\'re probably going to try and hold on to those miles</li><li>Mark: Back in March and April, it seemed the strategy for the big travel card issuers -- Chase, Citi, Amex -- seemed to be to sacrifice revenue to hold share -- statement credits for annual fees if you called them to cancel, new bonuses for stay-at-home purchases to keep wallet share -- seemed like 5x bonuses for grocery and gas was the most popular. Made sense when everyone was talking about 2-week shutdowns and a V-shaped recovery. But, as we said before, travel is gonna stay depressed for a while -- between state and country quarantines and many people not wanting to get in a plane -- how are travel card companies going to handle the next round of renewals? When I call Chase and Amex again, do I get more statement credits -- do they continue to fight for share? And if they don’t, what do I do with the balance of Ultimate or Membership Rewards points that I’ll lose if I don’t re-up and pay the fee?</li><li>Matt: I think what\'s gonna happen is that issuers are going to continue to tinker around the edges to see what people like and what is impactful. And the truth is that issuers desperately want to keep the customers on cards like Chase Sapphire Reserve, Amex Platinum -- all the high end and the next-step-down cards because those customers are so valuable from a lifetime value perspective. You may get a travel card when you\'re 25 and the bank will do what they can to keep you around to try and upsell you to other products that they might have. The issuers are going to try and do what they can to figure out how to make you stay. And right now, that may not look like giving a ton of travel rewards points.</li><li>Mark: Any recommendations for travel card holders as we\'re going forward to the end of the year and into the beginning of next year?</li><li>Matt: You really have to know your situation and understand it, and you also have to not feel guilty if you have to cash in your points that you had been saving up for that dream trip in order to help you extend your budget. Nobody gets a high-end travel card with a high annual fee hoping to eventually cash that in for groceries at Walmart, but sometimes these things have to happen. If you have the financial wherewithal and you can hold on to those points, I think it\'s worth doing because we are going to travel again. Nobody knows when. But we are going to travel again and assuming that your whole financial situation is generally OK, I think there is value in holding on to those points as something to look forward to in the future.</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #167</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and now, <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_167.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #167 — 6 Months On; Why Keep Travel Cards?','','inherit','closed','closed','','2856-revision-v1','','','2021-01-03 13:27:44','2021-01-03 18:27:44','',2856,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/03/2856-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2977,1,'2021-01-03 15:54:37','2021-01-03 20:54:37','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/IMG_0822-scaled.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2810 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/IMG_0822-300x278.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"278\"></a><figcaption>Reindeer are ruining my cabin porn</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>Trying to plan an August trip amidst dueling state quarantine lists and rapid lockdown changes while writing off my September plans for Barcelona. What\'s worse - hotels cutting back on housekeeping or breakfasts? And talking with <a href=\"https://emilythomaswrites.co.uk/about/\">Emily Thomas</a> about her new book <i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"https://amzn.to/2DO07fV\">The Meaning of Travel: Philosophers Abroad</a>. </span></i>All this and more, or listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below or by following this<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_166.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"> <strong>direct link</strong></a> to download the podcast file .</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/875150551&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #166: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after managing to front-run the city’s quarantine order on Wisconsin. Went up to Milwaukee to meet up with some friends and do a bit of biking a couple of weekends before the Chicago Health Department added Wisconsin to their list of 22 states where you’re required to self-quarantine for 14 days after returning from a trip. Mind you, they’re not setting up roadblock checkpoints like New York City is -- at least not as of the time of this recording. Reasonable people can differ on this -- New York’s governor claimed similar efforts back in March by Rhode Island and Florida aimed at New Yorkers were “unconstitutional” but seems OK with it when it’s pointed the other way -- but it does make travel planning for law abiding citizens a bit more of a challenge. And making me wonder about our downsizing move into Chicago last year -- was missing the yard, the extra rooms, and the basement gym in the suburbs during the lockdown earlier in the year; now after Chicago’s quarantine rules, am missing freedom of travel.</li><li>All this adds a couple orders of magnitude of complexity to our efforts to plan a week out of the city in a couple of weeks. Not only do we need to check Chicago’s quarantine list, but also the quarantine plans of any potential destinations. While New York isn’t on Chicago’s quarantine list, Illinois is on New York’s. Mapping it all out, we take the “clean destination” intersection of that quarantine Venn diagram and then look at what restrictions are in those places; if nothing’s open, it’s not worth traveling there. I’ve eaten more meals in my hotel rooms over the past 3 months than I have in the last couple of years.&nbsp;</li><li>But things are changing so fast, that even after you figure out what’s open now, we then start following local papers on Twitter to get any early warnings on new restrictions. Which also means paying a lot more attention to hotel cancellation policies than I ever did. And then overloading our itinerary with outdoor activities like hiking and biking so last-minute closures or restrictions don’t leave us with nothing to do. Which means spending more time trolling the AccuWeather and Weather Channel web sites because an outside-heavy itinerary is more vulnerable to big storm fronts and hurricanes. And to think I used to bitch about having to navigate TripAdvisor ratings.</li><li>Bridge Music — funkyGarden by Jeris (c) copyright 2020 Licensed under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/VJ_Memes/61356 Ft: airtone, SackJo22, Analog By Nature</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>First, a couple of shout-outs to folks who are helping me spread the word about the podcast</li><li>Thanks to GHLGB, an apparently long-time TravelCommons listener, who gave us a 5-star iTunes review the day after the last month’s episode dropped, writing:<ul><li>“Mark does a great job of relating the world of the road warrior with a bit of branching out to those of us who are miles and points nutty. Always a calm and reasonable voice one that’s been in my ears for four years”</li><li>Thanks for that. I appreciate the words, and the effort of wading through the iTunes interface to leave them</li></ul></li><li>Also, in last month’s episode, I mentioned Kev Monteith, a TravelCommons listener and Amtrak travel blogger, but didn’t thank him for calling us out in his <a href=\"https://travelswithkev.com/kevs-favorite-podcasts/\"><em>2020 Favorite Podcast</em> list</a> on his <a href=\"https://travelswithkev.com/\"><em>Travels With Kev</em> website</a>. So, I’m fixing that right now. Thanks, Kev! Check out the show notes for links to his site.</li><li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/06/09/podcast-164-first-post-lockdown-trips-travel-credit-cards/\">episode #164</a>, we talked about how hotels are pulling back on housekeeping during stays -- the Hampton Inn in Spring Hill, TN said they’d be 3 days between room visits while the Residence Inn up the road in Franklin said 7 days, which seems a bit excessive; more like a COVID-washing a cost-cutting move. Replacing the breakfast buffet with a “grab-&amp;-go” breakfast bag makes all the sense in the world, but here again, hotels are grabbing the opportunity to trim costs. Most of what I’ve seen is a brown lunch bag with a bottle of water, a NutriGrain breakfast bar, and an apple -- a banana if I’m lucky. But the Residence Inn in Wauwatosa, WI, just outside of Milwaukee, was having none of that a couple of weeks back. You had 4 options for the main breakfast course in your bag -- a turkey and waffle sandwich, a peanut and strawberry sandwich, an egg and cheese quiche, or one of 13 kinds of cereal boxes, accompanied by your choice of chocolate milk, or orange or apple juice. I’m not passing judgement on the food choices, but I was awfully impressed by their ambition -- yeah, we can’t lay out a breakfast buffet spread, but we’re gonna try our damndest to give you a decent alternative. I just had to give the turkey &amp; waffle sandwich a go. I had visions of a <a href=\"https://twitter.com/trev4president/status/857776562615308288\">Fyre Festival-like trainwreck of a sandwich</a> -- a deli slice of turkey breast between two Eggo waffles. But it was a little more reasonable -- a small wrapped sandwich of turkey sausage between two small waffles, meant to be heated in the microwave. I grabbed it on the way out for a bike ride, so missed the microwave step, which, I think, was critical. But like I said, I give that RI team huge props for the effort.</li><li>But outside the Wauwatosa gang, if this stripped down hotel service stays the norm for the next 12-18 months, it’s probably going to drive some big changes in the year-end traveler gift guides -- shifting from Away luggage and Aesop travel kits, last year’s big recommendations, to sets of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3izWHMJ\">wine tumblers</a>, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2PIgihg\">collapsible bowls</a>, and <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3an6BhJ\">camping mess kits</a>. And, of course, all sorts of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/30NAqF2\">upscale sporks</a>.</li><li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/03/21/podcast-161-new-crisis-old-question-driving-down-to-key-west/\">episode #161</a>, at the end of March, still in a bit of shock from the COVID lockdown and trying to figure out how long it was going to last, I said “I’m nothing if not an optimist. In the midst of this week’s unraveling, I found a deal on a direct American Air flight from ORD to Barcelona — 8½ hr 787 flight — so I booked it — 2 weeks in Barcelona at the end of September.”&nbsp; But here we are five months later and as we all know, things haven’t “re-raveled”. At the beginning of July, American announced that <a href=\"https://liveandletsfly.com/american-airlines-international-reset/\">direct 787 ORD-BCN flight won’t restart until next summer.</a> I checked our reservation on the AA iPhone app after I read this. It still showed us on that direct flight -- until I clicked through, which then, I guess, forced the app to pull the latest information from Dallas, and now showed us flight BA through Heathrow. Not that it really matters. The EU isn’t letting Americans in any time in the near future, and, last time I checked, Barcelona is in a voluntary lockdown because of a new spike in COVID cases. News articles are showing <a href=\"https://time.com/5876132/europe-coronavirus-second-wave/\">shuttered-up stalls at the La Boqueria market</a>; like I said earlier, if nothing’s open, why go? It was a gamble, and really, not even a big one. There’s no change fee, so it’s a push. We won’t lose any money -- unless American goes belly-up, but that’d never happen -- would it?!</li><li>Last year, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/podcast-150-travel-interruptus/\">episode #150</a>, (these show notes are gonna be chock full of backlinks), I talked about switching my carryon bag -- from a Timbuk2 backpack to a <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3izS991\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Timbuk2 messenger bag</a>. I gave two reasons for the switch: I wanted to carry something a little smaller that would stand up under a plane seat; and I wanted a non-black interior, I kept losing things in my backpack -- <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3iDWIiu\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">my tablet</a>, my Bose headphone case. But also because the backpack was breaking down a bit - the seam on one of the side pockets had blown out and one of the strap clips had broken. I was going to pitch it during our last downsizing binge before moving into the city and a friend said “You know, <a href=\"https://www.timbuk2.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Timbuk2</a> bags have <a href=\"https://www.timbuk2.com/pages/warranty-repairs\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">lifetime warranties</a>.” Huh. So I hung onto it because I still like the bag. And about 14 months later, I finally got around to sending it back to them in San Francisco. I wasn’t sure if they’d re-opened their factory, so I was ready for it to take awhile for them to process the bag and repair it. Tracking the package, I could see they received it on a Friday. I got a note from them the following Monday saying they’d inspected it and yes, it was covered by the warranty, and had the bag back in my hands that Saturday. I have to tell you that I am pretty damned impressed. I won’t be switching back from my messenger bag, but I have found that the backpack can carry 4 four-packs of 16-oz cans, perfect when I’m biking a circuit of Chicago microbreweries using curbside no-contact pick-up to grab whatever’s their newest thing. Timbuk2 is definitely “TravelCommons Approved.”</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — Xena\'s Kiss / Medea\'s Kiss by mwic (c) copyright 2018 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mwic/58883</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>The Meaning of Travel</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>This seems to be <em>the</em> existential question for a lot of travelers -- why do we travel? -- now that can’t, or at least can’t as easily and, well thoughtlessly is too strong a word, but when we could travel without having to plan as much. It’s been a whipsaw -- from overtourism to <a href=\"https://skift.com/2020/06/05/travel-sector-remains-thorn-in-a-falling-u-s-unemployment-rate-defying-expectations/\">36% unemployment in the travel and hospitality sector in the the US</a> -- so a bit soul-searching/navel-gazing is to be expected, if not encouraged. So when I saw the new book, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2DO07fV\"><em>The Meaning of Travel: Philosophers Abroad</em></a> by <a href=\"https://www.dur.ac.uk/research/directory/staff/?id=15319\">Dr. Emily</a> <a href=\"https://emilythomaswrites.co.uk/\">Thomas</a>, associate professor in philosophy at Durham University in the UK, immediately bought it and read it -- and then thought that I needed to have her on the podcast. Lucky for me, she’s a very nice person and agreed to spend a bit of time talking about “the meaning of travel”. It was a fun conversation; I hope you enjoy it.<ul><li>Mark: I\'ve got to admit that is as an engineer and an IT guy, my philosophy knowledge pretty much starts and ends with buying a T shirt that said “I Drink Therefore I Am.” It was a fundraiser for the Philosophy club for my undergrad. Emily, the first chapter “Why Do Philosophers Care About Travel” got me because you get straight into a topic we\'ve discussed often on the TravelCommons podcast about how travelers build travel bubbles around themselves. They isolate themselves from the places that they traveled to. Often times they do it in the name of efficiency, maybe to keep themselves safe from experiencing what you call the “otherness of travel.” What do philosophers say about that difference between everyday journeys and traveling?</li><li>Emily: So, I think the difference between these kinds of everyday journeys, like popping to the grocery store, visiting your grandmother and what we think of as travel lies in how much unfamiliarity or otherness we experience along the way. And it seems to me that when I popped to the grocery store, everything is super familiar. I know how things work; I know the roads; I know the products I\'m going to buy. If I were to go grocery shopping in an unfamiliar country, that experience is going to be really different. I don\'t know how the roads work anymore; I don\'t necessarily recognize the writing on the signs of the products; I may not understand the languages that I\'m overhearing. And so, an everyday experience becomes much more unfamiliar. And then seems to be much more about travel in the deeper sense. And several philosophers, including folks like <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9_Descartes\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">René Descartes</a> and <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_de_Montaigne\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Michel de Montagne</a>, have talked about how the benefits of travel lie in experiencing otherness, that this broadens your mind, that it forces you to think past the familiar everyday world of your experience and think about how things might be otherwise, how they could be in other places and they think that\'s a really good thing.Frequent travelers often build travel bubbles around themselves that isolates them from the places they travel to; doing it in the name of efficiency,  but also perhaps to keep themselves safe from experiencing what philosophers call “the otherness” of travel</li></ul><ul><li><a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_David_Thoreau\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Henry David Thoreau</a>, <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/33SYvw3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Walden</a></em>, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3kEGjw6\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Cabin Porn</a>, and Solitude</li><li>Global homogenization - every place seems like the other, but is this an old complaint?</li><li>Future topics on the philosophy of travel -- ethics of climate change, and impact of space tourism on our view of the Earth</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #166</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_166.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #166 — What Is The Meaning of Travel?','','inherit','closed','closed','','2807-revision-v1','','','2021-01-03 15:54:37','2021-01-03 20:54:37','',2807,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/03/2807-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2978,1,'2021-01-03 15:59:58','2021-01-03 20:59:58','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/IMG_0822-scaled.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2810 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/IMG_0822-300x278.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"278\"></a><figcaption>Reindeer are ruining my cabin porn</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>Trying to plan an August trip amidst dueling state quarantine lists and rapid lockdown changes while writing off my September plans for Barcelona. What\'s worse - hotels cutting back on housekeeping or breakfasts? And talking with <a href=\"https://emilythomaswrites.co.uk/about/\">Emily Thomas</a> about her new book <i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"https://amzn.to/2DO07fV\">The Meaning of Travel: Philosophers Abroad</a>. </span></i>All this and more, or listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below or by following this<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_166.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"> <strong>direct link</strong></a> to download the podcast file .</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/875150551&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #166: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after managing to front-run the city’s quarantine order on Wisconsin. Went up to Milwaukee to meet up with some friends and do a bit of biking a couple of weekends before the Chicago Health Department added Wisconsin to their list of 22 states where you’re required to self-quarantine for 14 days after returning from a trip. Mind you, they’re not setting up roadblock checkpoints like New York City is -- at least not as of the time of this recording. Reasonable people can differ on this -- New York’s governor claimed similar efforts back in March by Rhode Island and Florida aimed at New Yorkers were “unconstitutional” but seems OK with it when it’s pointed the other way -- but it does make travel planning for law abiding citizens a bit more of a challenge. And making me wonder about our downsizing move into Chicago last year -- was missing the yard, the extra rooms, and the basement gym in the suburbs during the lockdown earlier in the year; now after Chicago’s quarantine rules, am missing freedom of travel.</li><li>All this adds a couple orders of magnitude of complexity to our efforts to plan a week out of the city in a couple of weeks. Not only do we need to check Chicago’s quarantine list, but also the quarantine plans of any potential destinations. While New York isn’t on Chicago’s quarantine list, Illinois is on New York’s. Mapping it all out, we take the “clean destination” intersection of that quarantine Venn diagram and then look at what restrictions are in those places; if nothing’s open, it’s not worth traveling there. I’ve eaten more meals in my hotel rooms over the past 3 months than I have in the last couple of years.&nbsp;</li><li>But things are changing so fast, that even after you figure out what’s open now, we then start following local papers on Twitter to get any early warnings on new restrictions. Which also means paying a lot more attention to hotel cancellation policies than I ever did. And then overloading our itinerary with outdoor activities like hiking and biking so last-minute closures or restrictions don’t leave us with nothing to do. Which means spending more time trolling the AccuWeather and Weather Channel web sites because an outside-heavy itinerary is more vulnerable to big storm fronts and hurricanes. And to think I used to bitch about having to navigate TripAdvisor ratings.</li><li>Bridge Music — funkyGarden by Jeris (c) copyright 2020 Licensed under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/VJ_Memes/61356 Ft: airtone, SackJo22, Analog By Nature</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>First, a couple of shout-outs to folks who are helping me spread the word about the podcast</li><li>Thanks to GHLGB, an apparently long-time TravelCommons listener, who gave us a 5-star iTunes review the day after the last month’s episode dropped, writing:<ul><li>“Mark does a great job of relating the world of the road warrior with a bit of branching out to those of us who are miles and points nutty. Always a calm and reasonable voice one that’s been in my ears for four years”</li><li>Thanks for that. I appreciate the words, and the effort of wading through the iTunes interface to leave them</li></ul></li><li>Also, in last month’s episode, I mentioned Kev Monteith, a TravelCommons listener and Amtrak travel blogger, but didn’t thank him for calling us out in his <a href=\"https://travelswithkev.com/kevs-favorite-podcasts/\"><em>2020 Favorite Podcast</em> list</a> on his <a href=\"https://travelswithkev.com/\"><em>Travels With Kev</em> website</a>. So, I’m fixing that right now. Thanks, Kev! Check out the show notes for links to his site.</li><li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/06/09/podcast-164-first-post-lockdown-trips-travel-credit-cards/\">episode #164</a>, we talked about how hotels are pulling back on housekeeping during stays -- the Hampton Inn in Spring Hill, TN said they’d be 3 days between room visits while the Residence Inn up the road in Franklin said 7 days, which seems a bit excessive; more like a COVID-washing a cost-cutting move. Replacing the breakfast buffet with a “grab-&amp;-go” breakfast bag makes all the sense in the world, but here again, hotels are grabbing the opportunity to trim costs. Most of what I’ve seen is a brown lunch bag with a bottle of water, a NutriGrain breakfast bar, and an apple -- a banana if I’m lucky. But the Residence Inn in Wauwatosa, WI, just outside of Milwaukee, was having none of that a couple of weeks back. You had 4 options for the main breakfast course in your bag -- a turkey and waffle sandwich, a peanut and strawberry sandwich, an egg and cheese quiche, or one of 13 kinds of cereal boxes, accompanied by your choice of chocolate milk, or orange or apple juice. I’m not passing judgement on the food choices, but I was awfully impressed by their ambition -- yeah, we can’t lay out a breakfast buffet spread, but we’re gonna try our damndest to give you a decent alternative. I just had to give the turkey &amp; waffle sandwich a go. I had visions of a <a href=\"https://twitter.com/trev4president/status/857776562615308288\">Fyre Festival-like trainwreck of a sandwich</a> -- a deli slice of turkey breast between two Eggo waffles. But it was a little more reasonable -- a small wrapped sandwich of turkey sausage between two small waffles, meant to be heated in the microwave. I grabbed it on the way out for a bike ride, so missed the microwave step, which, I think, was critical. But like I said, I give that RI team huge props for the effort.</li><li>But outside the Wauwatosa gang, if this stripped down hotel service stays the norm for the next 12-18 months, it’s probably going to drive some big changes in the year-end traveler gift guides -- shifting from Away luggage and Aesop travel kits, last year’s big recommendations, to sets of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3izWHMJ\">wine tumblers</a>, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2PIgihg\">collapsible bowls</a>, and <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3an6BhJ\">camping mess kits</a>. And, of course, all sorts of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/30NAqF2\">upscale sporks</a>.</li><li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/03/21/podcast-161-new-crisis-old-question-driving-down-to-key-west/\">episode #161</a>, at the end of March, still in a bit of shock from the COVID lockdown and trying to figure out how long it was going to last, I said “I’m nothing if not an optimist. In the midst of this week’s unraveling, I found a deal on a direct American Air flight from ORD to Barcelona — 8½ hr 787 flight — so I booked it — 2 weeks in Barcelona at the end of September.”&nbsp; But here we are five months later and as we all know, things haven’t “re-raveled”. At the beginning of July, American announced that <a href=\"https://liveandletsfly.com/american-airlines-international-reset/\">direct 787 ORD-BCN flight won’t restart until next summer.</a> I checked our reservation on the AA iPhone app after I read this. It still showed us on that direct flight -- until I clicked through, which then, I guess, forced the app to pull the latest information from Dallas, and now showed us flight BA through Heathrow. Not that it really matters. The EU isn’t letting Americans in any time in the near future, and, last time I checked, Barcelona is in a voluntary lockdown because of a new spike in COVID cases. News articles are showing <a href=\"https://time.com/5876132/europe-coronavirus-second-wave/\">shuttered-up stalls at the La Boqueria market</a>; like I said earlier, if nothing’s open, why go? It was a gamble, and really, not even a big one. There’s no change fee, so it’s a push. We won’t lose any money -- unless American goes belly-up, but that’d never happen -- would it?!</li><li>Last year, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/podcast-150-travel-interruptus/\">episode #150</a>, (these show notes are gonna be chock full of backlinks), I talked about switching my carryon bag -- from a Timbuk2 backpack to a <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3izS991\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Timbuk2 messenger bag</a>. I gave two reasons for the switch: I wanted to carry something a little smaller that would stand up under a plane seat; and I wanted a non-black interior, I kept losing things in my backpack -- <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3iDWIiu\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">my tablet</a>, my Bose headphone case. But also because the backpack was breaking down a bit - the seam on one of the side pockets had blown out and one of the strap clips had broken. I was going to pitch it during our last downsizing binge before moving into the city and a friend said “You know, <a href=\"https://www.timbuk2.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Timbuk2</a> bags have <a href=\"https://www.timbuk2.com/pages/warranty-repairs\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">lifetime warranties</a>.” Huh. So I hung onto it because I still like the bag. And about 14 months later, I finally got around to sending it back to them in San Francisco. I wasn’t sure if they’d re-opened their factory, so I was ready for it to take awhile for them to process the bag and repair it. Tracking the package, I could see they received it on a Friday. I got a note from them the following Monday saying they’d inspected it and yes, it was covered by the warranty, and had the bag back in my hands that Saturday. I have to tell you that I am pretty damned impressed. I won’t be switching back from my messenger bag, but I have found that the backpack can carry 4 four-packs of 16-oz cans, perfect when I’m biking a circuit of Chicago microbreweries using curbside no-contact pick-up to grab whatever’s their newest thing. Timbuk2 is definitely “TravelCommons Approved.”</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — Xena\'s Kiss / Medea\'s Kiss by mwic (c) copyright 2018 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mwic/58883</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>The Meaning of Travel</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>This seems to be <em>the</em> existential question for a lot of travelers -- why do we travel? -- now that can’t, or at least can’t as easily and, well thoughtlessly is too strong a word, but when we could travel without having to plan as much. It’s been a whipsaw -- from overtourism to <a href=\"https://skift.com/2020/06/05/travel-sector-remains-thorn-in-a-falling-u-s-unemployment-rate-defying-expectations/\">36% unemployment in the travel and hospitality sector in the the US</a> -- so a bit soul-searching/navel-gazing is to be expected, if not encouraged. So when I saw the new book, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2DO07fV\"><em>The Meaning of Travel: Philosophers Abroad</em></a> by <a href=\"https://www.dur.ac.uk/research/directory/staff/?id=15319\">Dr. Emily</a> <a href=\"https://emilythomaswrites.co.uk/\">Thomas</a>, associate professor in philosophy at Durham University in the UK, immediately bought it and read it -- and then thought that I needed to have her on the podcast. Lucky for me, she’s a very nice person and agreed to spend a bit of time talking about “the meaning of travel”. It was a fun conversation; I hope you enjoy it.<ul><li>Mark: I\'ve got to admit that is as an engineer and an IT guy, my philosophy knowledge pretty much starts and ends with buying a T shirt that said “I Drink Therefore I Am.” It was a fundraiser for the Philosophy club for my undergrad. Emily, the first chapter “Why Do Philosophers Care About Travel” got me because you get straight into a topic we\'ve discussed often on the TravelCommons podcast about how travelers build travel bubbles around themselves. They isolate themselves from the places that they traveled to. Often times they do it in the name of efficiency, maybe to keep themselves safe from experiencing what you call the “otherness of travel.” What do philosophers say about that difference between everyday journeys and traveling?</li><li>Emily: So, I think the difference between these kinds of everyday journeys, like popping to the grocery store, visiting your grandmother and what we think of as travel lies in how much unfamiliarity or otherness we experience along the way. And it seems to me that when I popped to the grocery store, everything is super familiar. I know how things work; I know the roads; I know the products I\'m going to buy. If I were to go grocery shopping in an unfamiliar country, that experience is going to be really different. I don\'t know how the roads work anymore; I don\'t necessarily recognize the writing on the signs of the products; I may not understand the languages that I\'m overhearing. And so, an everyday experience becomes much more unfamiliar. And then seems to be much more about travel in the deeper sense. And several philosophers, including folks like <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9_Descartes\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">René Descartes</a> and <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_de_Montaigne\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Michel de Montagne</a>, have talked about how the benefits of travel lie in experiencing otherness, that this broadens your mind, that it forces you to think past the familiar everyday world of your experience and think about how things might be otherwise, how they could be in other places and they think that\'s a really good thing.Frequent travelers often build travel bubbles around themselves that isolates them from the places they travel to; doing it in the name of efficiency,  but also perhaps to keep themselves safe from experiencing what philosophers call “the otherness” of travel</li><li>Mark: I was thinking about this -- is there a spectrum of otherness? I\'ve got the complete travel bubble at one end; in the middle, curated sidebar experiences -- you find a local restaurant, or hunting down a microbrewery or a taproom in a not-great section of town that you would not normally go; and then at the other end, full immersion – I live here, I’ve got a flat.</li><li><a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_David_Thoreau\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Henry David Thoreau</a>, <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/33SYvw3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Walden</a></em>, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3kEGjw6\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Cabin Porn</a>, and Solitude</li></ul><ul><li>Global homogenization - every place seems like the other, but is this an old complaint?</li><li>Future topics on the philosophy of travel -- ethics of climate change, and impact of space tourism on our view of the Earth</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #166</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_166.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #166 — What Is The Meaning of Travel?','','inherit','closed','closed','','2807-revision-v1','','','2021-01-03 15:59:58','2021-01-03 20:59:58','',2807,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/03/2807-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2980,1,'2021-01-03 16:13:26','2021-01-03 21:13:26','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/IMG_0822-scaled.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2810 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/IMG_0822-300x278.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"278\"></a><figcaption>Reindeer are ruining my cabin porn</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>Trying to plan an August trip amidst dueling state quarantine lists and rapid lockdown changes while writing off my September plans for Barcelona. What\'s worse - hotels cutting back on housekeeping or breakfasts? And talking with <a href=\"https://emilythomaswrites.co.uk/about/\">Emily Thomas</a> about her new book <i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"https://amzn.to/2DO07fV\">The Meaning of Travel: Philosophers Abroad</a>. </span></i>All this and more, or listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below or by following this<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_166.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"> <strong>direct link</strong></a> to download the podcast file .</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/875150551&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #166: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after managing to front-run the city’s quarantine order on Wisconsin. Went up to Milwaukee to meet up with some friends and do a bit of biking a couple of weekends before the Chicago Health Department added Wisconsin to their list of 22 states where you’re required to self-quarantine for 14 days after returning from a trip. Mind you, they’re not setting up roadblock checkpoints like New York City is -- at least not as of the time of this recording. Reasonable people can differ on this -- New York’s governor claimed similar efforts back in March by Rhode Island and Florida aimed at New Yorkers were “unconstitutional” but seems OK with it when it’s pointed the other way -- but it does make travel planning for law abiding citizens a bit more of a challenge. And making me wonder about our downsizing move into Chicago last year -- was missing the yard, the extra rooms, and the basement gym in the suburbs during the lockdown earlier in the year; now after Chicago’s quarantine rules, am missing freedom of travel.</li><li>All this adds a couple orders of magnitude of complexity to our efforts to plan a week out of the city in a couple of weeks. Not only do we need to check Chicago’s quarantine list, but also the quarantine plans of any potential destinations. While New York isn’t on Chicago’s quarantine list, Illinois is on New York’s. Mapping it all out, we take the “clean destination” intersection of that quarantine Venn diagram and then look at what restrictions are in those places; if nothing’s open, it’s not worth traveling there. I’ve eaten more meals in my hotel rooms over the past 3 months than I have in the last couple of years.&nbsp;</li><li>But things are changing so fast, that even after you figure out what’s open now, we then start following local papers on Twitter to get any early warnings on new restrictions. Which also means paying a lot more attention to hotel cancellation policies than I ever did. And then overloading our itinerary with outdoor activities like hiking and biking so last-minute closures or restrictions don’t leave us with nothing to do. Which means spending more time trolling the AccuWeather and Weather Channel web sites because an outside-heavy itinerary is more vulnerable to big storm fronts and hurricanes. And to think I used to bitch about having to navigate TripAdvisor ratings.</li><li>Bridge Music — funkyGarden by Jeris (c) copyright 2020 Licensed under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/VJ_Memes/61356 Ft: airtone, SackJo22, Analog By Nature</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>First, a couple of shout-outs to folks who are helping me spread the word about the podcast</li><li>Thanks to GHLGB, an apparently long-time TravelCommons listener, who gave us a 5-star iTunes review the day after the last month’s episode dropped, writing:<ul><li>“Mark does a great job of relating the world of the road warrior with a bit of branching out to those of us who are miles and points nutty. Always a calm and reasonable voice one that’s been in my ears for four years”</li><li>Thanks for that. I appreciate the words, and the effort of wading through the iTunes interface to leave them</li></ul></li><li>Also, in last month’s episode, I mentioned Kev Monteith, a TravelCommons listener and Amtrak travel blogger, but didn’t thank him for calling us out in his <a href=\"https://travelswithkev.com/kevs-favorite-podcasts/\"><em>2020 Favorite Podcast</em> list</a> on his <a href=\"https://travelswithkev.com/\"><em>Travels With Kev</em> website</a>. So, I’m fixing that right now. Thanks, Kev! Check out the show notes for links to his site.</li><li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/06/09/podcast-164-first-post-lockdown-trips-travel-credit-cards/\">episode #164</a>, we talked about how hotels are pulling back on housekeeping during stays -- the Hampton Inn in Spring Hill, TN said they’d be 3 days between room visits while the Residence Inn up the road in Franklin said 7 days, which seems a bit excessive; more like a COVID-washing a cost-cutting move. Replacing the breakfast buffet with a “grab-&amp;-go” breakfast bag makes all the sense in the world, but here again, hotels are grabbing the opportunity to trim costs. Most of what I’ve seen is a brown lunch bag with a bottle of water, a NutriGrain breakfast bar, and an apple -- a banana if I’m lucky. But the Residence Inn in Wauwatosa, WI, just outside of Milwaukee, was having none of that a couple of weeks back. You had 4 options for the main breakfast course in your bag -- a turkey and waffle sandwich, a peanut and strawberry sandwich, an egg and cheese quiche, or one of 13 kinds of cereal boxes, accompanied by your choice of chocolate milk, or orange or apple juice. I’m not passing judgement on the food choices, but I was awfully impressed by their ambition -- yeah, we can’t lay out a breakfast buffet spread, but we’re gonna try our damndest to give you a decent alternative. I just had to give the turkey &amp; waffle sandwich a go. I had visions of a <a href=\"https://twitter.com/trev4president/status/857776562615308288\">Fyre Festival-like trainwreck of a sandwich</a> -- a deli slice of turkey breast between two Eggo waffles. But it was a little more reasonable -- a small wrapped sandwich of turkey sausage between two small waffles, meant to be heated in the microwave. I grabbed it on the way out for a bike ride, so missed the microwave step, which, I think, was critical. But like I said, I give that RI team huge props for the effort.</li><li>But outside the Wauwatosa gang, if this stripped down hotel service stays the norm for the next 12-18 months, it’s probably going to drive some big changes in the year-end traveler gift guides -- shifting from Away luggage and Aesop travel kits, last year’s big recommendations, to sets of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3izWHMJ\">wine tumblers</a>, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2PIgihg\">collapsible bowls</a>, and <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3an6BhJ\">camping mess kits</a>. And, of course, all sorts of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/30NAqF2\">upscale sporks</a>.</li><li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/03/21/podcast-161-new-crisis-old-question-driving-down-to-key-west/\">episode #161</a>, at the end of March, still in a bit of shock from the COVID lockdown and trying to figure out how long it was going to last, I said “I’m nothing if not an optimist. In the midst of this week’s unraveling, I found a deal on a direct American Air flight from ORD to Barcelona — 8½ hr 787 flight — so I booked it — 2 weeks in Barcelona at the end of September.”&nbsp; But here we are five months later and as we all know, things haven’t “re-raveled”. At the beginning of July, American announced that <a href=\"https://liveandletsfly.com/american-airlines-international-reset/\">direct 787 ORD-BCN flight won’t restart until next summer.</a> I checked our reservation on the AA iPhone app after I read this. It still showed us on that direct flight -- until I clicked through, which then, I guess, forced the app to pull the latest information from Dallas, and now showed us flight BA through Heathrow. Not that it really matters. The EU isn’t letting Americans in any time in the near future, and, last time I checked, Barcelona is in a voluntary lockdown because of a new spike in COVID cases. News articles are showing <a href=\"https://time.com/5876132/europe-coronavirus-second-wave/\">shuttered-up stalls at the La Boqueria market</a>; like I said earlier, if nothing’s open, why go? It was a gamble, and really, not even a big one. There’s no change fee, so it’s a push. We won’t lose any money -- unless American goes belly-up, but that’d never happen -- would it?!</li><li>Last year, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/podcast-150-travel-interruptus/\">episode #150</a>, (these show notes are gonna be chock full of backlinks), I talked about switching my carryon bag -- from a Timbuk2 backpack to a <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3izS991\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Timbuk2 messenger bag</a>. I gave two reasons for the switch: I wanted to carry something a little smaller that would stand up under a plane seat; and I wanted a non-black interior, I kept losing things in my backpack -- <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3iDWIiu\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">my tablet</a>, my Bose headphone case. But also because the backpack was breaking down a bit - the seam on one of the side pockets had blown out and one of the strap clips had broken. I was going to pitch it during our last downsizing binge before moving into the city and a friend said “You know, <a href=\"https://www.timbuk2.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Timbuk2</a> bags have <a href=\"https://www.timbuk2.com/pages/warranty-repairs\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">lifetime warranties</a>.” Huh. So I hung onto it because I still like the bag. And about 14 months later, I finally got around to sending it back to them in San Francisco. I wasn’t sure if they’d re-opened their factory, so I was ready for it to take awhile for them to process the bag and repair it. Tracking the package, I could see they received it on a Friday. I got a note from them the following Monday saying they’d inspected it and yes, it was covered by the warranty, and had the bag back in my hands that Saturday. I have to tell you that I am pretty damned impressed. I won’t be switching back from my messenger bag, but I have found that the backpack can carry 4 four-packs of 16-oz cans, perfect when I’m biking a circuit of Chicago microbreweries using curbside no-contact pick-up to grab whatever’s their newest thing. Timbuk2 is definitely “TravelCommons Approved.”</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — Xena\'s Kiss / Medea\'s Kiss by mwic (c) copyright 2018 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mwic/58883</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>The Meaning of Travel</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>This seems to be <em>the</em> existential question for a lot of travelers -- why do we travel? -- now that can’t, or at least can’t as easily and, well thoughtlessly is too strong a word, but when we could travel without having to plan as much. It’s been a whipsaw -- from overtourism to <a href=\"https://skift.com/2020/06/05/travel-sector-remains-thorn-in-a-falling-u-s-unemployment-rate-defying-expectations/\">36% unemployment in the travel and hospitality sector in the the US</a> -- so a bit soul-searching/navel-gazing is to be expected, if not encouraged. So when I saw the new book, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2DO07fV\"><em>The Meaning of Travel: Philosophers Abroad</em></a> by <a href=\"https://www.dur.ac.uk/research/directory/staff/?id=15319\">Dr. Emily</a> <a href=\"https://emilythomaswrites.co.uk/\">Thomas</a>, associate professor in philosophy at Durham University in the UK, immediately bought it and read it -- and then thought that I needed to have her on the podcast. Lucky for me, she’s a very nice person and agreed to spend a bit of time talking about “the meaning of travel”. It was a fun conversation; I hope you enjoy it.<ul><li>Mark: I\'ve got to admit that is as an engineer and an IT guy, my philosophy knowledge pretty much starts and ends with buying a T shirt that said “I Drink Therefore I Am.” It was a fundraiser for the Philosophy club for my undergrad. Emily, the first chapter “Why Do Philosophers Care About Travel” got me because you get straight into a topic we\'ve discussed often on the TravelCommons podcast about how travelers build travel bubbles around themselves. They isolate themselves from the places that they traveled to. Often times they do it in the name of efficiency, maybe to keep themselves safe from experiencing what you call the “otherness of travel.” What do philosophers say about that difference between everyday journeys and traveling?</li><li>Emily: So, I think the difference between these kinds of everyday journeys, like popping to the grocery store, visiting your grandmother and what we think of as travel lies in how much unfamiliarity or otherness we experience along the way. And it seems to me that when I popped to the grocery store, everything is super familiar. I know how things work; I know the roads; I know the products I\'m going to buy. If I were to go grocery shopping in an unfamiliar country, that experience is going to be really different. I don\'t know how the roads work anymore; I don\'t necessarily recognize the writing on the signs of the products; I may not understand the languages that I\'m overhearing. And so, an everyday experience becomes much more unfamiliar. And then seems to be much more about travel in the deeper sense. And several philosophers, including folks like <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9_Descartes\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">René Descartes</a> and <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_de_Montaigne\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Michel de Montagne</a>, have talked about how the benefits of travel lie in experiencing otherness, that this broadens your mind, that it forces you to think past the familiar everyday world of your experience and think about how things might be otherwise, how they could be in other places and they think that\'s a really good thing.Frequent travelers often build travel bubbles around themselves that isolates them from the places they travel to; doing it in the name of efficiency,  but also perhaps to keep themselves safe from experiencing what philosophers call “the otherness” of travel</li><li>Mark: I was thinking about this -- is there a spectrum of otherness? I\'ve got the complete travel bubble at one end; in the middle, curated sidebar experiences -- you find a local restaurant, or hunting down a microbrewery or a taproom in a not-great section of town that you would not normally go; and then at the other end, full immersion – I live here, I’ve got a flat.</li><li>Emily: I definitely think there\'s a spectrum. And you can imagine, in your bubble, it might not be the full-blown experience of taking all the same clothes with you and you using all familiar airports. But even if you have your laptop and your mobile phone with you, part of the way that you\'ll be connecting with the world is through these really familiar mediums. Maybe you\'re going there, and you\'re still using Trip Advisor to look for recommendations like you would back home or you\'re still using Google maps to navigate your way around the streets. And again, I think that\'s going to provide you with this kind of buffer between you and the unfamiliar.</li><li>Mark: Later on in the book, you riff on <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_David_Thoreau\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Henry David Thoreau</a> and<em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/33SYvw3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"> Walden</a></em> and <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3kEGjw6\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Cabin Porn</a> and Solitude. When the lock down started, I just decided I was going to dig into some early American literature that I had been threatened with in high school and college but never really got into. And so I kind of flipped a coin between Thoreau and Whitman\'s <em>Leaves of Grass</em> and, heads so it was Thoreau. I will admit I did this in the beginning of April, and I still have not finished <em>Walden</em> yet, and here we are in August. So it has been a bit of a slog, but I\'m still working it. But before get into that, I gotta ask – “cabin porn.” That\'s a new one on me. The term not so much the porn. But the term “cabin porn,” what is that?</li></ul><ul><li>Global homogenization - every place seems like the other, but is this an old complaint?</li><li>Future topics on the philosophy of travel -- ethics of climate change, and impact of space tourism on our view of the Earth</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #166</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_166.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #166 — What Is The Meaning of Travel?','','inherit','closed','closed','','2807-revision-v1','','','2021-01-03 16:13:26','2021-01-03 21:13:26','',2807,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/03/2807-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2982,1,'2021-01-03 16:26:58','2021-01-03 21:26:58','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/IMG_0822-scaled.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2810 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/IMG_0822-300x278.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"278\"></a><figcaption>Reindeer are ruining my cabin porn</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>Trying to plan an August trip amidst dueling state quarantine lists and rapid lockdown changes while writing off my September plans for Barcelona. What\'s worse - hotels cutting back on housekeeping or breakfasts? And talking with <a href=\"https://emilythomaswrites.co.uk/about/\">Emily Thomas</a> about her new book <i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"https://amzn.to/2DO07fV\">The Meaning of Travel: Philosophers Abroad</a>. </span></i>All this and more, or listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below or by following this<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_166.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"> <strong>direct link</strong></a> to download the podcast file .</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/875150551&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #166: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after managing to front-run the city’s quarantine order on Wisconsin. Went up to Milwaukee to meet up with some friends and do a bit of biking a couple of weekends before the Chicago Health Department added Wisconsin to their list of 22 states where you’re required to self-quarantine for 14 days after returning from a trip. Mind you, they’re not setting up roadblock checkpoints like New York City is -- at least not as of the time of this recording. Reasonable people can differ on this -- New York’s governor claimed similar efforts back in March by Rhode Island and Florida aimed at New Yorkers were “unconstitutional” but seems OK with it when it’s pointed the other way -- but it does make travel planning for law abiding citizens a bit more of a challenge. And making me wonder about our downsizing move into Chicago last year -- was missing the yard, the extra rooms, and the basement gym in the suburbs during the lockdown earlier in the year; now after Chicago’s quarantine rules, am missing freedom of travel.</li><li>All this adds a couple orders of magnitude of complexity to our efforts to plan a week out of the city in a couple of weeks. Not only do we need to check Chicago’s quarantine list, but also the quarantine plans of any potential destinations. While New York isn’t on Chicago’s quarantine list, Illinois is on New York’s. Mapping it all out, we take the “clean destination” intersection of that quarantine Venn diagram and then look at what restrictions are in those places; if nothing’s open, it’s not worth traveling there. I’ve eaten more meals in my hotel rooms over the past 3 months than I have in the last couple of years.&nbsp;</li><li>But things are changing so fast, that even after you figure out what’s open now, we then start following local papers on Twitter to get any early warnings on new restrictions. Which also means paying a lot more attention to hotel cancellation policies than I ever did. And then overloading our itinerary with outdoor activities like hiking and biking so last-minute closures or restrictions don’t leave us with nothing to do. Which means spending more time trolling the AccuWeather and Weather Channel web sites because an outside-heavy itinerary is more vulnerable to big storm fronts and hurricanes. And to think I used to bitch about having to navigate TripAdvisor ratings.</li><li>Bridge Music — funkyGarden by Jeris (c) copyright 2020 Licensed under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/VJ_Memes/61356 Ft: airtone, SackJo22, Analog By Nature</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>First, a couple of shout-outs to folks who are helping me spread the word about the podcast</li><li>Thanks to GHLGB, an apparently long-time TravelCommons listener, who gave us a 5-star iTunes review the day after the last month’s episode dropped, writing:<ul><li>“Mark does a great job of relating the world of the road warrior with a bit of branching out to those of us who are miles and points nutty. Always a calm and reasonable voice one that’s been in my ears for four years”</li><li>Thanks for that. I appreciate the words, and the effort of wading through the iTunes interface to leave them</li></ul></li><li>Also, in last month’s episode, I mentioned Kev Monteith, a TravelCommons listener and Amtrak travel blogger, but didn’t thank him for calling us out in his <a href=\"https://travelswithkev.com/kevs-favorite-podcasts/\"><em>2020 Favorite Podcast</em> list</a> on his <a href=\"https://travelswithkev.com/\"><em>Travels With Kev</em> website</a>. So, I’m fixing that right now. Thanks, Kev! Check out the show notes for links to his site.</li><li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/06/09/podcast-164-first-post-lockdown-trips-travel-credit-cards/\">episode #164</a>, we talked about how hotels are pulling back on housekeeping during stays -- the Hampton Inn in Spring Hill, TN said they’d be 3 days between room visits while the Residence Inn up the road in Franklin said 7 days, which seems a bit excessive; more like a COVID-washing a cost-cutting move. Replacing the breakfast buffet with a “grab-&amp;-go” breakfast bag makes all the sense in the world, but here again, hotels are grabbing the opportunity to trim costs. Most of what I’ve seen is a brown lunch bag with a bottle of water, a NutriGrain breakfast bar, and an apple -- a banana if I’m lucky. But the Residence Inn in Wauwatosa, WI, just outside of Milwaukee, was having none of that a couple of weeks back. You had 4 options for the main breakfast course in your bag -- a turkey and waffle sandwich, a peanut and strawberry sandwich, an egg and cheese quiche, or one of 13 kinds of cereal boxes, accompanied by your choice of chocolate milk, or orange or apple juice. I’m not passing judgement on the food choices, but I was awfully impressed by their ambition -- yeah, we can’t lay out a breakfast buffet spread, but we’re gonna try our damndest to give you a decent alternative. I just had to give the turkey &amp; waffle sandwich a go. I had visions of a <a href=\"https://twitter.com/trev4president/status/857776562615308288\">Fyre Festival-like trainwreck of a sandwich</a> -- a deli slice of turkey breast between two Eggo waffles. But it was a little more reasonable -- a small wrapped sandwich of turkey sausage between two small waffles, meant to be heated in the microwave. I grabbed it on the way out for a bike ride, so missed the microwave step, which, I think, was critical. But like I said, I give that RI team huge props for the effort.</li><li>But outside the Wauwatosa gang, if this stripped down hotel service stays the norm for the next 12-18 months, it’s probably going to drive some big changes in the year-end traveler gift guides -- shifting from Away luggage and Aesop travel kits, last year’s big recommendations, to sets of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3izWHMJ\">wine tumblers</a>, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2PIgihg\">collapsible bowls</a>, and <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3an6BhJ\">camping mess kits</a>. And, of course, all sorts of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/30NAqF2\">upscale sporks</a>.</li><li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/03/21/podcast-161-new-crisis-old-question-driving-down-to-key-west/\">episode #161</a>, at the end of March, still in a bit of shock from the COVID lockdown and trying to figure out how long it was going to last, I said “I’m nothing if not an optimist. In the midst of this week’s unraveling, I found a deal on a direct American Air flight from ORD to Barcelona — 8½ hr 787 flight — so I booked it — 2 weeks in Barcelona at the end of September.”&nbsp; But here we are five months later and as we all know, things haven’t “re-raveled”. At the beginning of July, American announced that <a href=\"https://liveandletsfly.com/american-airlines-international-reset/\">direct 787 ORD-BCN flight won’t restart until next summer.</a> I checked our reservation on the AA iPhone app after I read this. It still showed us on that direct flight -- until I clicked through, which then, I guess, forced the app to pull the latest information from Dallas, and now showed us flight BA through Heathrow. Not that it really matters. The EU isn’t letting Americans in any time in the near future, and, last time I checked, Barcelona is in a voluntary lockdown because of a new spike in COVID cases. News articles are showing <a href=\"https://time.com/5876132/europe-coronavirus-second-wave/\">shuttered-up stalls at the La Boqueria market</a>; like I said earlier, if nothing’s open, why go? It was a gamble, and really, not even a big one. There’s no change fee, so it’s a push. We won’t lose any money -- unless American goes belly-up, but that’d never happen -- would it?!</li><li>Last year, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/podcast-150-travel-interruptus/\">episode #150</a>, (these show notes are gonna be chock full of backlinks), I talked about switching my carryon bag -- from a Timbuk2 backpack to a <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3izS991\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Timbuk2 messenger bag</a>. I gave two reasons for the switch: I wanted to carry something a little smaller that would stand up under a plane seat; and I wanted a non-black interior, I kept losing things in my backpack -- <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3iDWIiu\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">my tablet</a>, my Bose headphone case. But also because the backpack was breaking down a bit - the seam on one of the side pockets had blown out and one of the strap clips had broken. I was going to pitch it during our last downsizing binge before moving into the city and a friend said “You know, <a href=\"https://www.timbuk2.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Timbuk2</a> bags have <a href=\"https://www.timbuk2.com/pages/warranty-repairs\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">lifetime warranties</a>.” Huh. So I hung onto it because I still like the bag. And about 14 months later, I finally got around to sending it back to them in San Francisco. I wasn’t sure if they’d re-opened their factory, so I was ready for it to take awhile for them to process the bag and repair it. Tracking the package, I could see they received it on a Friday. I got a note from them the following Monday saying they’d inspected it and yes, it was covered by the warranty, and had the bag back in my hands that Saturday. I have to tell you that I am pretty damned impressed. I won’t be switching back from my messenger bag, but I have found that the backpack can carry 4 four-packs of 16-oz cans, perfect when I’m biking a circuit of Chicago microbreweries using curbside no-contact pick-up to grab whatever’s their newest thing. Timbuk2 is definitely “TravelCommons Approved.”</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — Xena\'s Kiss / Medea\'s Kiss by mwic (c) copyright 2018 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mwic/58883</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>The Meaning of Travel</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>This seems to be <em>the</em> existential question for a lot of travelers -- why do we travel? -- now that can’t, or at least can’t as easily and, well thoughtlessly is too strong a word, but when we could travel without having to plan as much. It’s been a whipsaw -- from overtourism to <a href=\"https://skift.com/2020/06/05/travel-sector-remains-thorn-in-a-falling-u-s-unemployment-rate-defying-expectations/\">36% unemployment in the travel and hospitality sector in the the US</a> -- so a bit soul-searching/navel-gazing is to be expected, if not encouraged. So when I saw the new book, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2DO07fV\"><em>The Meaning of Travel: Philosophers Abroad</em></a> by <a href=\"https://www.dur.ac.uk/research/directory/staff/?id=15319\">Dr. Emily</a> <a href=\"https://emilythomaswrites.co.uk/\">Thomas</a>, associate professor in philosophy at Durham University in the UK, immediately bought it and read it -- and then thought that I needed to have her on the podcast. Lucky for me, she’s a very nice person and agreed to spend a bit of time talking about “the meaning of travel”. It was a fun conversation; I hope you enjoy it.<ul><li>Mark: I\'ve got to admit that is as an engineer and an IT guy, my philosophy knowledge pretty much starts and ends with buying a T shirt that said “I Drink Therefore I Am.” It was a fundraiser for the Philosophy club for my undergrad. Emily, the first chapter “Why Do Philosophers Care About Travel” got me because you get straight into a topic we\'ve discussed often on the TravelCommons podcast about how travelers build travel bubbles around themselves. They isolate themselves from the places that they traveled to. Often times they do it in the name of efficiency, maybe to keep themselves safe from experiencing what you call the “otherness of travel.” What do philosophers say about that difference between everyday journeys and traveling?</li><li>Emily: So, I think the difference between these kinds of everyday journeys, like popping to the grocery store, visiting your grandmother and what we think of as travel lies in how much unfamiliarity or otherness we experience along the way. And it seems to me that when I popped to the grocery store, everything is super familiar. I know how things work; I know the roads; I know the products I\'m going to buy. If I were to go grocery shopping in an unfamiliar country, that experience is going to be really different. I don\'t know how the roads work anymore; I don\'t necessarily recognize the writing on the signs of the products; I may not understand the languages that I\'m overhearing. And so, an everyday experience becomes much more unfamiliar. And then seems to be much more about travel in the deeper sense. And several philosophers, including folks like <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9_Descartes\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">René Descartes</a> and <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_de_Montaigne\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Michel de Montagne</a>, have talked about how the benefits of travel lie in experiencing otherness, that this broadens your mind, that it forces you to think past the familiar everyday world of your experience and think about how things might be otherwise, how they could be in other places and they think that\'s a really good thing.Frequent travelers often build travel bubbles around themselves that isolates them from the places they travel to; doing it in the name of efficiency,  but also perhaps to keep themselves safe from experiencing what philosophers call “the otherness” of travel</li><li>Mark: I was thinking about this -- is there a spectrum of otherness? I\'ve got the complete travel bubble at one end; in the middle, curated sidebar experiences -- you find a local restaurant, or hunting down a microbrewery or a taproom in a not-great section of town that you would not normally go; and then at the other end, full immersion – I live here, I’ve got a flat.</li><li>Emily: I definitely think there\'s a spectrum. And you can imagine, in your bubble, it might not be the full-blown experience of taking all the same clothes with you and you using all familiar airports. But even if you have your laptop and your mobile phone with you, part of the way that you\'ll be connecting with the world is through these really familiar mediums. Maybe you\'re going there, and you\'re still using Trip Advisor to look for recommendations like you would back home or you\'re still using Google maps to navigate your way around the streets. And again, I think that\'s going to provide you with this kind of buffer between you and the unfamiliar.</li><li>Mark: Later on in the book, you riff on <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_David_Thoreau\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Henry David Thoreau</a> and<em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/33SYvw3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"> Walden</a></em> and <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3kEGjw6\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Cabin Porn</a> and Solitude. When the lock down started, I just decided I was going to dig into some early American literature that I had been threatened with in high school and college but never really got into. And so I kind of flipped a coin between Thoreau and Whitman\'s <em>Leaves of Grass</em> and, heads so it was Thoreau. I will admit I did this in the beginning of April, and I still have not finished <em>Walden</em> yet, and here we are in August. So it has been a bit of a slog, but I\'m still working it. But before get into that, I gotta ask – “cabin porn.” That\'s a new one on me. The term not so much the porn. But the term <em>cabin porn</em>, what is that?</li><li>Emily: And so despite what you might think (laughter), Cabin Porn refers to photography of beautiful, isolated cabins. So, picture wood-built cabins nestled in the woods with smoke curling from the chimney. Or maybe they are stone cottages perched on the edge of a cliff, looking out over a crevasse. And there’s this whole industry dedicated to people taking photographs of these gorgeous cabins. The idea is that they\'re kind of aspirational. If you stick these into Google images, you will find some of the most astounding dwellings; places that you can rent and live for a little. <em>Walden</em> seemingly kicked this whole thing off. So, Thoreau describes building a cabin in the woods by Walden Pond and while the book can be a little bit of a slog in places, there are beautiful bits of the book. When he\'s describing living in nature in this really kind of rustic way, lots of people credit their cabin aspirations to <em>Walden</em>.</li><li>Global homogenization - every place seems like the other, but is this an old complaint?</li></ul><ul><li>Future topics on the philosophy of travel -- ethics of climate change, and impact of space tourism on our view of the Earth</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #166</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_166.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #166 — What Is The Meaning of Travel?','','inherit','closed','closed','','2807-revision-v1','','','2021-01-03 16:26:58','2021-01-03 21:26:58','',2807,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/03/2807-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2984,1,'2021-01-03 16:36:25','2021-01-03 21:36:25','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/IMG_0822-scaled.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2810 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/IMG_0822-300x278.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"278\"></a><figcaption>Reindeer are ruining my cabin porn</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>Trying to plan an August trip amidst dueling state quarantine lists and rapid lockdown changes while writing off my September plans for Barcelona. What\'s worse - hotels cutting back on housekeeping or breakfasts? And talking with <a href=\"https://emilythomaswrites.co.uk/about/\">Emily Thomas</a> about her new book <i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"https://amzn.to/2DO07fV\">The Meaning of Travel: Philosophers Abroad</a>. </span></i>All this and more, or listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below or by following this<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_166.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"> <strong>direct link</strong></a> to download the podcast file .</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/875150551&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #166: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after managing to front-run the city’s quarantine order on Wisconsin. Went up to Milwaukee to meet up with some friends and do a bit of biking a couple of weekends before the Chicago Health Department added Wisconsin to their list of 22 states where you’re required to self-quarantine for 14 days after returning from a trip. Mind you, they’re not setting up roadblock checkpoints like New York City is -- at least not as of the time of this recording. Reasonable people can differ on this -- New York’s governor claimed similar efforts back in March by Rhode Island and Florida aimed at New Yorkers were “unconstitutional” but seems OK with it when it’s pointed the other way -- but it does make travel planning for law abiding citizens a bit more of a challenge. And making me wonder about our downsizing move into Chicago last year -- was missing the yard, the extra rooms, and the basement gym in the suburbs during the lockdown earlier in the year; now after Chicago’s quarantine rules, am missing freedom of travel.</li><li>All this adds a couple orders of magnitude of complexity to our efforts to plan a week out of the city in a couple of weeks. Not only do we need to check Chicago’s quarantine list, but also the quarantine plans of any potential destinations. While New York isn’t on Chicago’s quarantine list, Illinois is on New York’s. Mapping it all out, we take the “clean destination” intersection of that quarantine Venn diagram and then look at what restrictions are in those places; if nothing’s open, it’s not worth traveling there. I’ve eaten more meals in my hotel rooms over the past 3 months than I have in the last couple of years.&nbsp;</li><li>But things are changing so fast, that even after you figure out what’s open now, we then start following local papers on Twitter to get any early warnings on new restrictions. Which also means paying a lot more attention to hotel cancellation policies than I ever did. And then overloading our itinerary with outdoor activities like hiking and biking so last-minute closures or restrictions don’t leave us with nothing to do. Which means spending more time trolling the AccuWeather and Weather Channel web sites because an outside-heavy itinerary is more vulnerable to big storm fronts and hurricanes. And to think I used to bitch about having to navigate TripAdvisor ratings.</li><li>Bridge Music — funkyGarden by Jeris (c) copyright 2020 Licensed under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/VJ_Memes/61356 Ft: airtone, SackJo22, Analog By Nature</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>First, a couple of shout-outs to folks who are helping me spread the word about the podcast</li><li>Thanks to GHLGB, an apparently long-time TravelCommons listener, who gave us a 5-star iTunes review the day after the last month’s episode dropped, writing:<ul><li>“Mark does a great job of relating the world of the road warrior with a bit of branching out to those of us who are miles and points nutty. Always a calm and reasonable voice one that’s been in my ears for four years”</li><li>Thanks for that. I appreciate the words, and the effort of wading through the iTunes interface to leave them</li></ul></li><li>Also, in last month’s episode, I mentioned Kev Monteith, a TravelCommons listener and Amtrak travel blogger, but didn’t thank him for calling us out in his <a href=\"https://travelswithkev.com/kevs-favorite-podcasts/\"><em>2020 Favorite Podcast</em> list</a> on his <a href=\"https://travelswithkev.com/\"><em>Travels With Kev</em> website</a>. So, I’m fixing that right now. Thanks, Kev! Check out the show notes for links to his site.</li><li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/06/09/podcast-164-first-post-lockdown-trips-travel-credit-cards/\">episode #164</a>, we talked about how hotels are pulling back on housekeeping during stays -- the Hampton Inn in Spring Hill, TN said they’d be 3 days between room visits while the Residence Inn up the road in Franklin said 7 days, which seems a bit excessive; more like a COVID-washing a cost-cutting move. Replacing the breakfast buffet with a “grab-&amp;-go” breakfast bag makes all the sense in the world, but here again, hotels are grabbing the opportunity to trim costs. Most of what I’ve seen is a brown lunch bag with a bottle of water, a NutriGrain breakfast bar, and an apple -- a banana if I’m lucky. But the Residence Inn in Wauwatosa, WI, just outside of Milwaukee, was having none of that a couple of weeks back. You had 4 options for the main breakfast course in your bag -- a turkey and waffle sandwich, a peanut and strawberry sandwich, an egg and cheese quiche, or one of 13 kinds of cereal boxes, accompanied by your choice of chocolate milk, or orange or apple juice. I’m not passing judgement on the food choices, but I was awfully impressed by their ambition -- yeah, we can’t lay out a breakfast buffet spread, but we’re gonna try our damndest to give you a decent alternative. I just had to give the turkey &amp; waffle sandwich a go. I had visions of a <a href=\"https://twitter.com/trev4president/status/857776562615308288\">Fyre Festival-like trainwreck of a sandwich</a> -- a deli slice of turkey breast between two Eggo waffles. But it was a little more reasonable -- a small wrapped sandwich of turkey sausage between two small waffles, meant to be heated in the microwave. I grabbed it on the way out for a bike ride, so missed the microwave step, which, I think, was critical. But like I said, I give that RI team huge props for the effort.</li><li>But outside the Wauwatosa gang, if this stripped down hotel service stays the norm for the next 12-18 months, it’s probably going to drive some big changes in the year-end traveler gift guides -- shifting from Away luggage and Aesop travel kits, last year’s big recommendations, to sets of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3izWHMJ\">wine tumblers</a>, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2PIgihg\">collapsible bowls</a>, and <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3an6BhJ\">camping mess kits</a>. And, of course, all sorts of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/30NAqF2\">upscale sporks</a>.</li><li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/03/21/podcast-161-new-crisis-old-question-driving-down-to-key-west/\">episode #161</a>, at the end of March, still in a bit of shock from the COVID lockdown and trying to figure out how long it was going to last, I said “I’m nothing if not an optimist. In the midst of this week’s unraveling, I found a deal on a direct American Air flight from ORD to Barcelona — 8½ hr 787 flight — so I booked it — 2 weeks in Barcelona at the end of September.”&nbsp; But here we are five months later and as we all know, things haven’t “re-raveled”. At the beginning of July, American announced that <a href=\"https://liveandletsfly.com/american-airlines-international-reset/\">direct 787 ORD-BCN flight won’t restart until next summer.</a> I checked our reservation on the AA iPhone app after I read this. It still showed us on that direct flight -- until I clicked through, which then, I guess, forced the app to pull the latest information from Dallas, and now showed us flight BA through Heathrow. Not that it really matters. The EU isn’t letting Americans in any time in the near future, and, last time I checked, Barcelona is in a voluntary lockdown because of a new spike in COVID cases. News articles are showing <a href=\"https://time.com/5876132/europe-coronavirus-second-wave/\">shuttered-up stalls at the La Boqueria market</a>; like I said earlier, if nothing’s open, why go? It was a gamble, and really, not even a big one. There’s no change fee, so it’s a push. We won’t lose any money -- unless American goes belly-up, but that’d never happen -- would it?!</li><li>Last year, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/podcast-150-travel-interruptus/\">episode #150</a>, (these show notes are gonna be chock full of backlinks), I talked about switching my carryon bag -- from a Timbuk2 backpack to a <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3izS991\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Timbuk2 messenger bag</a>. I gave two reasons for the switch: I wanted to carry something a little smaller that would stand up under a plane seat; and I wanted a non-black interior, I kept losing things in my backpack -- <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3iDWIiu\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">my tablet</a>, my Bose headphone case. But also because the backpack was breaking down a bit - the seam on one of the side pockets had blown out and one of the strap clips had broken. I was going to pitch it during our last downsizing binge before moving into the city and a friend said “You know, <a href=\"https://www.timbuk2.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Timbuk2</a> bags have <a href=\"https://www.timbuk2.com/pages/warranty-repairs\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">lifetime warranties</a>.” Huh. So I hung onto it because I still like the bag. And about 14 months later, I finally got around to sending it back to them in San Francisco. I wasn’t sure if they’d re-opened their factory, so I was ready for it to take awhile for them to process the bag and repair it. Tracking the package, I could see they received it on a Friday. I got a note from them the following Monday saying they’d inspected it and yes, it was covered by the warranty, and had the bag back in my hands that Saturday. I have to tell you that I am pretty damned impressed. I won’t be switching back from my messenger bag, but I have found that the backpack can carry 4 four-packs of 16-oz cans, perfect when I’m biking a circuit of Chicago microbreweries using curbside no-contact pick-up to grab whatever’s their newest thing. Timbuk2 is definitely “TravelCommons Approved.”</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — Xena\'s Kiss / Medea\'s Kiss by mwic (c) copyright 2018 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mwic/58883</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>The Meaning of Travel</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>This seems to be <em>the</em> existential question for a lot of travelers -- why do we travel? -- now that can’t, or at least can’t as easily and, well thoughtlessly is too strong a word, but when we could travel without having to plan as much. It’s been a whipsaw -- from overtourism to <a href=\"https://skift.com/2020/06/05/travel-sector-remains-thorn-in-a-falling-u-s-unemployment-rate-defying-expectations/\">36% unemployment in the travel and hospitality sector in the the US</a> -- so a bit soul-searching/navel-gazing is to be expected, if not encouraged. So when I saw the new book, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2DO07fV\"><em>The Meaning of Travel: Philosophers Abroad</em></a> by <a href=\"https://www.dur.ac.uk/research/directory/staff/?id=15319\">Dr. Emily</a> <a href=\"https://emilythomaswrites.co.uk/\">Thomas</a>, associate professor in philosophy at Durham University in the UK, immediately bought it and read it -- and then thought that I needed to have her on the podcast. Lucky for me, she’s a very nice person and agreed to spend a bit of time talking about “the meaning of travel”. It was a fun conversation; I hope you enjoy it.<ul><li>Mark: I\'ve got to admit that is as an engineer and an IT guy, my philosophy knowledge pretty much starts and ends with buying a T shirt that said “I Drink Therefore I Am.” It was a fundraiser for the Philosophy club for my undergrad. Emily, the first chapter “Why Do Philosophers Care About Travel” got me because you get straight into a topic we\'ve discussed often on the TravelCommons podcast about how travelers build travel bubbles around themselves. They isolate themselves from the places that they traveled to. Often times they do it in the name of efficiency, maybe to keep themselves safe from experiencing what you call the “otherness of travel.” What do philosophers say about that difference between everyday journeys and traveling?</li><li>Emily: So, I think the difference between these kinds of everyday journeys, like popping to the grocery store, visiting your grandmother and what we think of as travel lies in how much unfamiliarity or otherness we experience along the way. And it seems to me that when I popped to the grocery store, everything is super familiar. I know how things work; I know the roads; I know the products I\'m going to buy. If I were to go grocery shopping in an unfamiliar country, that experience is going to be really different. I don\'t know how the roads work anymore; I don\'t necessarily recognize the writing on the signs of the products; I may not understand the languages that I\'m overhearing. And so, an everyday experience becomes much more unfamiliar. And then seems to be much more about travel in the deeper sense. And several philosophers, including folks like <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9_Descartes\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">René Descartes</a> and <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_de_Montaigne\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Michel de Montagne</a>, have talked about how the benefits of travel lie in experiencing otherness, that this broadens your mind, that it forces you to think past the familiar everyday world of your experience and think about how things might be otherwise, how they could be in other places and they think that\'s a really good thing.Frequent travelers often build travel bubbles around themselves that isolates them from the places they travel to; doing it in the name of efficiency,  but also perhaps to keep themselves safe from experiencing what philosophers call “the otherness” of travel</li><li>Mark: I was thinking about this -- is there a spectrum of otherness? I\'ve got the complete travel bubble at one end; in the middle, curated sidebar experiences -- you find a local restaurant, or hunting down a microbrewery or a taproom in a not-great section of town that you would not normally go; and then at the other end, full immersion – I live here, I’ve got a flat.</li><li>Emily: I definitely think there\'s a spectrum. And you can imagine, in your bubble, it might not be the full-blown experience of taking all the same clothes with you and you using all familiar airports. But even if you have your laptop and your mobile phone with you, part of the way that you\'ll be connecting with the world is through these really familiar mediums. Maybe you\'re going there, and you\'re still using Trip Advisor to look for recommendations like you would back home or you\'re still using Google maps to navigate your way around the streets. And again, I think that\'s going to provide you with this kind of buffer between you and the unfamiliar.</li><li>Mark: Later on in the book, you riff on <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_David_Thoreau\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Henry David Thoreau</a> and<em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/33SYvw3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"> Walden</a></em> and <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3kEGjw6\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Cabin Porn</a> and Solitude. When the lock down started, I just decided I was going to dig into some early American literature that I had been threatened with in high school and college but never really got into. And so I kind of flipped a coin between Thoreau and Whitman\'s <em>Leaves of Grass</em> and, heads so it was Thoreau. I will admit I did this in the beginning of April, and I still have not finished <em>Walden</em> yet, and here we are in August. So it has been a bit of a slog, but I\'m still working it. But before get into that, I gotta ask – “cabin porn.” That\'s a new one on me. The term not so much the porn. But the term <em>cabin porn</em>, what is that?</li><li>Emily: And so despite what you might think (laughter), Cabin Porn refers to photography of beautiful, isolated cabins. So, picture wood-built cabins nestled in the woods with smoke curling from the chimney. Or maybe they are stone cottages perched on the edge of a cliff, looking out over a crevasse. And there’s this whole industry dedicated to people taking photographs of these gorgeous cabins. The idea is that they\'re kind of aspirational. If you stick these into Google images, you will find some of the most astounding dwellings; places that you can rent and live for a little. <em>Walden</em> seemingly kicked this whole thing off. So, Thoreau describes building a cabin in the woods by Walden Pond and while the book can be a little bit of a slog in places, there are beautiful bits of the book. When he\'s describing living in nature in this really kind of rustic way, lots of people credit their cabin aspirations to <em>Walden</em>.</li><li>Mark: What is the strain about solitude and travel and in the balance with “otherness”?</li><li>Emily: Solitude is often held up is one of the things we can get through travel that\'s hard to get home. Although it seems like you can go out into a crowded cafe or a bar and be alone there, it seems like it\'s much easier to do that by venturing out into wilderness, that you\'re not going to meet other human beings and you have objects in front of you – trees, plants, creatures – that you can connect with. So the idea is that you\'re not being solitary in the sense of just introspection, but you\'re also connecting with some part of the world around you. It might in turn cause you to reflect on that world, and then your own part in that wider network. And that\'s very much what Thoreau is all about. He thinks that being alone in wilderness allows you to better understand wilderness and your own part in the wider universe.</li><li>Mark: I often find when I\'m traveling, it is kind of easy to hold yourself at a distance, especially if, where you are, you don\'t speak that language. It\'s almost like white noise.</li><li></li><li>Global homogenization - every place seems like the other, but is this an old complaint?</li></ul><ul><li>Future topics on the philosophy of travel -- ethics of climate change, and impact of space tourism on our view of the Earth</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #166</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_166.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #166 — What Is The Meaning of Travel?','','inherit','closed','closed','','2807-revision-v1','','','2021-01-03 16:36:25','2021-01-03 21:36:25','',2807,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/03/2807-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2986,1,'2021-01-03 16:40:30','2021-01-03 21:40:30','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/IMG_0822-scaled.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2810 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/IMG_0822-300x278.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"278\"></a><figcaption>Reindeer are ruining my cabin porn</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>Trying to plan an August trip amidst dueling state quarantine lists and rapid lockdown changes while writing off my September plans for Barcelona. What\'s worse - hotels cutting back on housekeeping or breakfasts? And talking with <a href=\"https://emilythomaswrites.co.uk/about/\">Emily Thomas</a> about her new book <i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"https://amzn.to/2DO07fV\">The Meaning of Travel: Philosophers Abroad</a>. </span></i>All this and more, or listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below or by following this<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_166.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"> <strong>direct link</strong></a> to download the podcast file .</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/875150551&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #166: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after managing to front-run the city’s quarantine order on Wisconsin. Went up to Milwaukee to meet up with some friends and do a bit of biking a couple of weekends before the Chicago Health Department added Wisconsin to their list of 22 states where you’re required to self-quarantine for 14 days after returning from a trip. Mind you, they’re not setting up roadblock checkpoints like New York City is -- at least not as of the time of this recording. Reasonable people can differ on this -- New York’s governor claimed similar efforts back in March by Rhode Island and Florida aimed at New Yorkers were “unconstitutional” but seems OK with it when it’s pointed the other way -- but it does make travel planning for law abiding citizens a bit more of a challenge. And making me wonder about our downsizing move into Chicago last year -- was missing the yard, the extra rooms, and the basement gym in the suburbs during the lockdown earlier in the year; now after Chicago’s quarantine rules, am missing freedom of travel.</li><li>All this adds a couple orders of magnitude of complexity to our efforts to plan a week out of the city in a couple of weeks. Not only do we need to check Chicago’s quarantine list, but also the quarantine plans of any potential destinations. While New York isn’t on Chicago’s quarantine list, Illinois is on New York’s. Mapping it all out, we take the “clean destination” intersection of that quarantine Venn diagram and then look at what restrictions are in those places; if nothing’s open, it’s not worth traveling there. I’ve eaten more meals in my hotel rooms over the past 3 months than I have in the last couple of years.&nbsp;</li><li>But things are changing so fast, that even after you figure out what’s open now, we then start following local papers on Twitter to get any early warnings on new restrictions. Which also means paying a lot more attention to hotel cancellation policies than I ever did. And then overloading our itinerary with outdoor activities like hiking and biking so last-minute closures or restrictions don’t leave us with nothing to do. Which means spending more time trolling the AccuWeather and Weather Channel web sites because an outside-heavy itinerary is more vulnerable to big storm fronts and hurricanes. And to think I used to bitch about having to navigate TripAdvisor ratings.</li><li>Bridge Music — funkyGarden by Jeris (c) copyright 2020 Licensed under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/VJ_Memes/61356 Ft: airtone, SackJo22, Analog By Nature</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>First, a couple of shout-outs to folks who are helping me spread the word about the podcast</li><li>Thanks to GHLGB, an apparently long-time TravelCommons listener, who gave us a 5-star iTunes review the day after the last month’s episode dropped, writing:<ul><li>“Mark does a great job of relating the world of the road warrior with a bit of branching out to those of us who are miles and points nutty. Always a calm and reasonable voice one that’s been in my ears for four years”</li><li>Thanks for that. I appreciate the words, and the effort of wading through the iTunes interface to leave them</li></ul></li><li>Also, in last month’s episode, I mentioned Kev Monteith, a TravelCommons listener and Amtrak travel blogger, but didn’t thank him for calling us out in his <a href=\"https://travelswithkev.com/kevs-favorite-podcasts/\"><em>2020 Favorite Podcast</em> list</a> on his <a href=\"https://travelswithkev.com/\"><em>Travels With Kev</em> website</a>. So, I’m fixing that right now. Thanks, Kev! Check out the show notes for links to his site.</li><li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/06/09/podcast-164-first-post-lockdown-trips-travel-credit-cards/\">episode #164</a>, we talked about how hotels are pulling back on housekeeping during stays -- the Hampton Inn in Spring Hill, TN said they’d be 3 days between room visits while the Residence Inn up the road in Franklin said 7 days, which seems a bit excessive; more like a COVID-washing a cost-cutting move. Replacing the breakfast buffet with a “grab-&amp;-go” breakfast bag makes all the sense in the world, but here again, hotels are grabbing the opportunity to trim costs. Most of what I’ve seen is a brown lunch bag with a bottle of water, a NutriGrain breakfast bar, and an apple -- a banana if I’m lucky. But the Residence Inn in Wauwatosa, WI, just outside of Milwaukee, was having none of that a couple of weeks back. You had 4 options for the main breakfast course in your bag -- a turkey and waffle sandwich, a peanut and strawberry sandwich, an egg and cheese quiche, or one of 13 kinds of cereal boxes, accompanied by your choice of chocolate milk, or orange or apple juice. I’m not passing judgement on the food choices, but I was awfully impressed by their ambition -- yeah, we can’t lay out a breakfast buffet spread, but we’re gonna try our damndest to give you a decent alternative. I just had to give the turkey &amp; waffle sandwich a go. I had visions of a <a href=\"https://twitter.com/trev4president/status/857776562615308288\">Fyre Festival-like trainwreck of a sandwich</a> -- a deli slice of turkey breast between two Eggo waffles. But it was a little more reasonable -- a small wrapped sandwich of turkey sausage between two small waffles, meant to be heated in the microwave. I grabbed it on the way out for a bike ride, so missed the microwave step, which, I think, was critical. But like I said, I give that RI team huge props for the effort.</li><li>But outside the Wauwatosa gang, if this stripped down hotel service stays the norm for the next 12-18 months, it’s probably going to drive some big changes in the year-end traveler gift guides -- shifting from Away luggage and Aesop travel kits, last year’s big recommendations, to sets of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3izWHMJ\">wine tumblers</a>, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2PIgihg\">collapsible bowls</a>, and <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3an6BhJ\">camping mess kits</a>. And, of course, all sorts of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/30NAqF2\">upscale sporks</a>.</li><li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/03/21/podcast-161-new-crisis-old-question-driving-down-to-key-west/\">episode #161</a>, at the end of March, still in a bit of shock from the COVID lockdown and trying to figure out how long it was going to last, I said “I’m nothing if not an optimist. In the midst of this week’s unraveling, I found a deal on a direct American Air flight from ORD to Barcelona — 8½ hr 787 flight — so I booked it — 2 weeks in Barcelona at the end of September.”&nbsp; But here we are five months later and as we all know, things haven’t “re-raveled”. At the beginning of July, American announced that <a href=\"https://liveandletsfly.com/american-airlines-international-reset/\">direct 787 ORD-BCN flight won’t restart until next summer.</a> I checked our reservation on the AA iPhone app after I read this. It still showed us on that direct flight -- until I clicked through, which then, I guess, forced the app to pull the latest information from Dallas, and now showed us flight BA through Heathrow. Not that it really matters. The EU isn’t letting Americans in any time in the near future, and, last time I checked, Barcelona is in a voluntary lockdown because of a new spike in COVID cases. News articles are showing <a href=\"https://time.com/5876132/europe-coronavirus-second-wave/\">shuttered-up stalls at the La Boqueria market</a>; like I said earlier, if nothing’s open, why go? It was a gamble, and really, not even a big one. There’s no change fee, so it’s a push. We won’t lose any money -- unless American goes belly-up, but that’d never happen -- would it?!</li><li>Last year, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/podcast-150-travel-interruptus/\">episode #150</a>, (these show notes are gonna be chock full of backlinks), I talked about switching my carryon bag -- from a Timbuk2 backpack to a <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3izS991\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Timbuk2 messenger bag</a>. I gave two reasons for the switch: I wanted to carry something a little smaller that would stand up under a plane seat; and I wanted a non-black interior, I kept losing things in my backpack -- <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3iDWIiu\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">my tablet</a>, my Bose headphone case. But also because the backpack was breaking down a bit - the seam on one of the side pockets had blown out and one of the strap clips had broken. I was going to pitch it during our last downsizing binge before moving into the city and a friend said “You know, <a href=\"https://www.timbuk2.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Timbuk2</a> bags have <a href=\"https://www.timbuk2.com/pages/warranty-repairs\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">lifetime warranties</a>.” Huh. So I hung onto it because I still like the bag. And about 14 months later, I finally got around to sending it back to them in San Francisco. I wasn’t sure if they’d re-opened their factory, so I was ready for it to take awhile for them to process the bag and repair it. Tracking the package, I could see they received it on a Friday. I got a note from them the following Monday saying they’d inspected it and yes, it was covered by the warranty, and had the bag back in my hands that Saturday. I have to tell you that I am pretty damned impressed. I won’t be switching back from my messenger bag, but I have found that the backpack can carry 4 four-packs of 16-oz cans, perfect when I’m biking a circuit of Chicago microbreweries using curbside no-contact pick-up to grab whatever’s their newest thing. Timbuk2 is definitely “TravelCommons Approved.”</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — Xena\'s Kiss / Medea\'s Kiss by mwic (c) copyright 2018 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mwic/58883</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>The Meaning of Travel</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>This seems to be <em>the</em> existential question for a lot of travelers -- why do we travel? -- now that can’t, or at least can’t as easily and, well thoughtlessly is too strong a word, but when we could travel without having to plan as much. It’s been a whipsaw -- from overtourism to <a href=\"https://skift.com/2020/06/05/travel-sector-remains-thorn-in-a-falling-u-s-unemployment-rate-defying-expectations/\">36% unemployment in the travel and hospitality sector in the the US</a> -- so a bit soul-searching/navel-gazing is to be expected, if not encouraged. So when I saw the new book, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2DO07fV\"><em>The Meaning of Travel: Philosophers Abroad</em></a> by <a href=\"https://www.dur.ac.uk/research/directory/staff/?id=15319\">Dr. Emily</a> <a href=\"https://emilythomaswrites.co.uk/\">Thomas</a>, associate professor in philosophy at Durham University in the UK, immediately bought it and read it -- and then thought that I needed to have her on the podcast. Lucky for me, she’s a very nice person and agreed to spend a bit of time talking about “the meaning of travel”. It was a fun conversation; I hope you enjoy it.<ul><li>Mark: I\'ve got to admit that is as an engineer and an IT guy, my philosophy knowledge pretty much starts and ends with buying a T shirt that said “I Drink Therefore I Am.” It was a fundraiser for the Philosophy club for my undergrad. Emily, the first chapter “Why Do Philosophers Care About Travel” got me because you get straight into a topic we\'ve discussed often on the TravelCommons podcast about how travelers build travel bubbles around themselves. They isolate themselves from the places that they traveled to. Often times they do it in the name of efficiency, maybe to keep themselves safe from experiencing what you call the “otherness of travel.” What do philosophers say about that difference between everyday journeys and traveling?</li><li>Emily: So, I think the difference between these kinds of everyday journeys, like popping to the grocery store, visiting your grandmother and what we think of as travel lies in how much unfamiliarity or otherness we experience along the way. And it seems to me that when I popped to the grocery store, everything is super familiar. I know how things work; I know the roads; I know the products I\'m going to buy. If I were to go grocery shopping in an unfamiliar country, that experience is going to be really different. I don\'t know how the roads work anymore; I don\'t necessarily recognize the writing on the signs of the products; I may not understand the languages that I\'m overhearing. And so, an everyday experience becomes much more unfamiliar. And then seems to be much more about travel in the deeper sense. And several philosophers, including folks like <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9_Descartes\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">René Descartes</a> and <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_de_Montaigne\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Michel de Montagne</a>, have talked about how the benefits of travel lie in experiencing otherness, that this broadens your mind, that it forces you to think past the familiar everyday world of your experience and think about how things might be otherwise, how they could be in other places and they think that\'s a really good thing.Frequent travelers often build travel bubbles around themselves that isolates them from the places they travel to; doing it in the name of efficiency,  but also perhaps to keep themselves safe from experiencing what philosophers call “the otherness” of travel</li><li>Mark: I was thinking about this -- is there a spectrum of otherness? I\'ve got the complete travel bubble at one end; in the middle, curated sidebar experiences -- you find a local restaurant, or hunting down a microbrewery or a taproom in a not-great section of town that you would not normally go; and then at the other end, full immersion – I live here, I’ve got a flat.</li><li>Emily: I definitely think there\'s a spectrum. And you can imagine, in your bubble, it might not be the full-blown experience of taking all the same clothes with you and you using all familiar airports. But even if you have your laptop and your mobile phone with you, part of the way that you\'ll be connecting with the world is through these really familiar mediums. Maybe you\'re going there, and you\'re still using Trip Advisor to look for recommendations like you would back home or you\'re still using Google maps to navigate your way around the streets. And again, I think that\'s going to provide you with this kind of buffer between you and the unfamiliar.</li><li>Mark: Later on in the book, you riff on <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_David_Thoreau\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Henry David Thoreau</a> and<em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/33SYvw3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"> Walden</a></em> and <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3kEGjw6\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Cabin Porn</a> and Solitude. When the lock down started, I just decided I was going to dig into some early American literature that I had been threatened with in high school and college but never really got into. And so I kind of flipped a coin between Thoreau and Whitman\'s <em>Leaves of Grass</em> and, heads so it was Thoreau. I will admit I did this in the beginning of April, and I still have not finished <em>Walden</em> yet, and here we are in August. So it has been a bit of a slog, but I\'m still working it. But before get into that, I gotta ask – “cabin porn.” That\'s a new one on me. The term not so much the porn. But the term <em>cabin porn</em>, what is that?</li><li>Emily: And so despite what you might think (laughter), Cabin Porn refers to photography of beautiful, isolated cabins. So, picture wood-built cabins nestled in the woods with smoke curling from the chimney. Or maybe they are stone cottages perched on the edge of a cliff, looking out over a crevasse. And there’s this whole industry dedicated to people taking photographs of these gorgeous cabins. The idea is that they\'re kind of aspirational. If you stick these into Google images, you will find some of the most astounding dwellings; places that you can rent and live for a little. <em>Walden</em> seemingly kicked this whole thing off. So, Thoreau describes building a cabin in the woods by Walden Pond and while the book can be a little bit of a slog in places, there are beautiful bits of the book. When he\'s describing living in nature in this really kind of rustic way, lots of people credit their cabin aspirations to <em>Walden</em>.</li><li>Mark: What is the strain about solitude and travel and in the balance with “otherness”?</li><li>Emily: Solitude is often held up is one of the things we can get through travel that\'s hard to get home. Although it seems like you can go out into a crowded cafe or a bar and be alone there, it seems like it\'s much easier to do that by venturing out into wilderness, that you\'re not going to meet other human beings and you have objects in front of you – trees, plants, creatures – that you can connect with. So the idea is that you\'re not being solitary in the sense of just introspection, but you\'re also connecting with some part of the world around you. It might in turn cause you to reflect on that world, and then your own part in that wider network. And that\'s very much what Thoreau is all about. He thinks that being alone in wilderness allows you to better understand wilderness and your own part in the wider universe.</li><li>Mark: I often find when I\'m traveling, it is kinda easy to hold yourself at a distance, especially if, where you are, you don\'t speak that language. It\'s almost like white noise.</li><li>Emily: Yes, when you spend large chunks of time without hearing words that you understand is a strange experience. I think it allows you to focus on other things. I think then you end up paying more attention, maybe to like the sights and the smells, the things that you can understand. I quite enjoy it, actually, the experience of being somewhere and not understanding anything that\'s going on.</li><li>Global homogenization - every place seems like the other, but is this an old complaint?</li></ul><ul><li>Future topics on the philosophy of travel -- ethics of climate change, and impact of space tourism on our view of the Earth</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #166</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_166.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #166 — What Is The Meaning of Travel?','','inherit','closed','closed','','2807-revision-v1','','','2021-01-03 16:40:30','2021-01-03 21:40:30','',2807,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/03/2807-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2987,1,'2021-01-03 16:46:28','2021-01-03 21:46:28','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/IMG_0822-scaled.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2810 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/IMG_0822-300x278.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"278\"></a><figcaption>Reindeer are ruining my cabin porn</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>Trying to plan an August trip amidst dueling state quarantine lists and rapid lockdown changes while writing off my September plans for Barcelona. What\'s worse - hotels cutting back on housekeeping or breakfasts? And talking with <a href=\"https://emilythomaswrites.co.uk/about/\">Emily Thomas</a> about her new book <i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"https://amzn.to/2DO07fV\">The Meaning of Travel: Philosophers Abroad</a>. </span></i>All this and more, or listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below or by following this<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_166.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"> <strong>direct link</strong></a> to download the podcast file .</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/875150551&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #166: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after managing to front-run the city’s quarantine order on Wisconsin. Went up to Milwaukee to meet up with some friends and do a bit of biking a couple of weekends before the Chicago Health Department added Wisconsin to their list of 22 states where you’re required to self-quarantine for 14 days after returning from a trip. Mind you, they’re not setting up roadblock checkpoints like New York City is -- at least not as of the time of this recording. Reasonable people can differ on this -- New York’s governor claimed similar efforts back in March by Rhode Island and Florida aimed at New Yorkers were “unconstitutional” but seems OK with it when it’s pointed the other way -- but it does make travel planning for law abiding citizens a bit more of a challenge. And making me wonder about our downsizing move into Chicago last year -- was missing the yard, the extra rooms, and the basement gym in the suburbs during the lockdown earlier in the year; now after Chicago’s quarantine rules, am missing freedom of travel.</li><li>All this adds a couple orders of magnitude of complexity to our efforts to plan a week out of the city in a couple of weeks. Not only do we need to check Chicago’s quarantine list, but also the quarantine plans of any potential destinations. While New York isn’t on Chicago’s quarantine list, Illinois is on New York’s. Mapping it all out, we take the “clean destination” intersection of that quarantine Venn diagram and then look at what restrictions are in those places; if nothing’s open, it’s not worth traveling there. I’ve eaten more meals in my hotel rooms over the past 3 months than I have in the last couple of years.&nbsp;</li><li>But things are changing so fast, that even after you figure out what’s open now, we then start following local papers on Twitter to get any early warnings on new restrictions. Which also means paying a lot more attention to hotel cancellation policies than I ever did. And then overloading our itinerary with outdoor activities like hiking and biking so last-minute closures or restrictions don’t leave us with nothing to do. Which means spending more time trolling the AccuWeather and Weather Channel web sites because an outside-heavy itinerary is more vulnerable to big storm fronts and hurricanes. And to think I used to bitch about having to navigate TripAdvisor ratings.</li><li>Bridge Music — funkyGarden by Jeris (c) copyright 2020 Licensed under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/VJ_Memes/61356 Ft: airtone, SackJo22, Analog By Nature</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>First, a couple of shout-outs to folks who are helping me spread the word about the podcast</li><li>Thanks to GHLGB, an apparently long-time TravelCommons listener, who gave us a 5-star iTunes review the day after the last month’s episode dropped, writing:<ul><li>“Mark does a great job of relating the world of the road warrior with a bit of branching out to those of us who are miles and points nutty. Always a calm and reasonable voice one that’s been in my ears for four years”</li><li>Thanks for that. I appreciate the words, and the effort of wading through the iTunes interface to leave them</li></ul></li><li>Also, in last month’s episode, I mentioned Kev Monteith, a TravelCommons listener and Amtrak travel blogger, but didn’t thank him for calling us out in his <a href=\"https://travelswithkev.com/kevs-favorite-podcasts/\"><em>2020 Favorite Podcast</em> list</a> on his <a href=\"https://travelswithkev.com/\"><em>Travels With Kev</em> website</a>. So, I’m fixing that right now. Thanks, Kev! Check out the show notes for links to his site.</li><li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/06/09/podcast-164-first-post-lockdown-trips-travel-credit-cards/\">episode #164</a>, we talked about how hotels are pulling back on housekeeping during stays -- the Hampton Inn in Spring Hill, TN said they’d be 3 days between room visits while the Residence Inn up the road in Franklin said 7 days, which seems a bit excessive; more like a COVID-washing a cost-cutting move. Replacing the breakfast buffet with a “grab-&amp;-go” breakfast bag makes all the sense in the world, but here again, hotels are grabbing the opportunity to trim costs. Most of what I’ve seen is a brown lunch bag with a bottle of water, a NutriGrain breakfast bar, and an apple -- a banana if I’m lucky. But the Residence Inn in Wauwatosa, WI, just outside of Milwaukee, was having none of that a couple of weeks back. You had 4 options for the main breakfast course in your bag -- a turkey and waffle sandwich, a peanut and strawberry sandwich, an egg and cheese quiche, or one of 13 kinds of cereal boxes, accompanied by your choice of chocolate milk, or orange or apple juice. I’m not passing judgement on the food choices, but I was awfully impressed by their ambition -- yeah, we can’t lay out a breakfast buffet spread, but we’re gonna try our damndest to give you a decent alternative. I just had to give the turkey &amp; waffle sandwich a go. I had visions of a <a href=\"https://twitter.com/trev4president/status/857776562615308288\">Fyre Festival-like trainwreck of a sandwich</a> -- a deli slice of turkey breast between two Eggo waffles. But it was a little more reasonable -- a small wrapped sandwich of turkey sausage between two small waffles, meant to be heated in the microwave. I grabbed it on the way out for a bike ride, so missed the microwave step, which, I think, was critical. But like I said, I give that RI team huge props for the effort.</li><li>But outside the Wauwatosa gang, if this stripped down hotel service stays the norm for the next 12-18 months, it’s probably going to drive some big changes in the year-end traveler gift guides -- shifting from Away luggage and Aesop travel kits, last year’s big recommendations, to sets of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3izWHMJ\">wine tumblers</a>, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2PIgihg\">collapsible bowls</a>, and <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3an6BhJ\">camping mess kits</a>. And, of course, all sorts of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/30NAqF2\">upscale sporks</a>.</li><li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/03/21/podcast-161-new-crisis-old-question-driving-down-to-key-west/\">episode #161</a>, at the end of March, still in a bit of shock from the COVID lockdown and trying to figure out how long it was going to last, I said “I’m nothing if not an optimist. In the midst of this week’s unraveling, I found a deal on a direct American Air flight from ORD to Barcelona — 8½ hr 787 flight — so I booked it — 2 weeks in Barcelona at the end of September.”&nbsp; But here we are five months later and as we all know, things haven’t “re-raveled”. At the beginning of July, American announced that <a href=\"https://liveandletsfly.com/american-airlines-international-reset/\">direct 787 ORD-BCN flight won’t restart until next summer.</a> I checked our reservation on the AA iPhone app after I read this. It still showed us on that direct flight -- until I clicked through, which then, I guess, forced the app to pull the latest information from Dallas, and now showed us flight BA through Heathrow. Not that it really matters. The EU isn’t letting Americans in any time in the near future, and, last time I checked, Barcelona is in a voluntary lockdown because of a new spike in COVID cases. News articles are showing <a href=\"https://time.com/5876132/europe-coronavirus-second-wave/\">shuttered-up stalls at the La Boqueria market</a>; like I said earlier, if nothing’s open, why go? It was a gamble, and really, not even a big one. There’s no change fee, so it’s a push. We won’t lose any money -- unless American goes belly-up, but that’d never happen -- would it?!</li><li>Last year, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/podcast-150-travel-interruptus/\">episode #150</a>, (these show notes are gonna be chock full of backlinks), I talked about switching my carryon bag -- from a Timbuk2 backpack to a <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3izS991\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Timbuk2 messenger bag</a>. I gave two reasons for the switch: I wanted to carry something a little smaller that would stand up under a plane seat; and I wanted a non-black interior, I kept losing things in my backpack -- <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3iDWIiu\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">my tablet</a>, my Bose headphone case. But also because the backpack was breaking down a bit - the seam on one of the side pockets had blown out and one of the strap clips had broken. I was going to pitch it during our last downsizing binge before moving into the city and a friend said “You know, <a href=\"https://www.timbuk2.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Timbuk2</a> bags have <a href=\"https://www.timbuk2.com/pages/warranty-repairs\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">lifetime warranties</a>.” Huh. So I hung onto it because I still like the bag. And about 14 months later, I finally got around to sending it back to them in San Francisco. I wasn’t sure if they’d re-opened their factory, so I was ready for it to take awhile for them to process the bag and repair it. Tracking the package, I could see they received it on a Friday. I got a note from them the following Monday saying they’d inspected it and yes, it was covered by the warranty, and had the bag back in my hands that Saturday. I have to tell you that I am pretty damned impressed. I won’t be switching back from my messenger bag, but I have found that the backpack can carry 4 four-packs of 16-oz cans, perfect when I’m biking a circuit of Chicago microbreweries using curbside no-contact pick-up to grab whatever’s their newest thing. Timbuk2 is definitely “TravelCommons Approved.”</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — Xena\'s Kiss / Medea\'s Kiss by mwic (c) copyright 2018 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mwic/58883</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>The Meaning of Travel</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>This seems to be <em>the</em> existential question for a lot of travelers -- why do we travel? -- now that can’t, or at least can’t as easily and, well thoughtlessly is too strong a word, but when we could travel without having to plan as much. It’s been a whipsaw -- from overtourism to <a href=\"https://skift.com/2020/06/05/travel-sector-remains-thorn-in-a-falling-u-s-unemployment-rate-defying-expectations/\">36% unemployment in the travel and hospitality sector in the the US</a> -- so a bit soul-searching/navel-gazing is to be expected, if not encouraged. So when I saw the new book, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2DO07fV\"><em>The Meaning of Travel: Philosophers Abroad</em></a> by <a href=\"https://www.dur.ac.uk/research/directory/staff/?id=15319\">Dr. Emily</a> <a href=\"https://emilythomaswrites.co.uk/\">Thomas</a>, associate professor in philosophy at Durham University in the UK, immediately bought it and read it -- and then thought that I needed to have her on the podcast. Lucky for me, she’s a very nice person and agreed to spend a bit of time talking about “the meaning of travel”. It was a fun conversation; I hope you enjoy it.<ul><li>Mark: I\'ve got to admit that is as an engineer and an IT guy, my philosophy knowledge pretty much starts and ends with buying a T shirt that said “I Drink Therefore I Am.” It was a fundraiser for the Philosophy club for my undergrad. Emily, the first chapter “Why Do Philosophers Care About Travel” got me because you get straight into a topic we\'ve discussed often on the TravelCommons podcast about how travelers build travel bubbles around themselves. They isolate themselves from the places that they traveled to. Often times they do it in the name of efficiency, maybe to keep themselves safe from experiencing what you call the “otherness of travel.” What do philosophers say about that difference between everyday journeys and traveling?</li><li>Emily: So, I think the difference between these kinds of everyday journeys, like popping to the grocery store, visiting your grandmother and what we think of as travel lies in how much unfamiliarity or otherness we experience along the way. And it seems to me that when I popped to the grocery store, everything is super familiar. I know how things work; I know the roads; I know the products I\'m going to buy. If I were to go grocery shopping in an unfamiliar country, that experience is going to be really different. I don\'t know how the roads work anymore; I don\'t necessarily recognize the writing on the signs of the products; I may not understand the languages that I\'m overhearing. And so, an everyday experience becomes much more unfamiliar. And then seems to be much more about travel in the deeper sense. And several philosophers, including folks like <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9_Descartes\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">René Descartes</a> and <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_de_Montaigne\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Michel de Montagne</a>, have talked about how the benefits of travel lie in experiencing otherness, that this broadens your mind, that it forces you to think past the familiar everyday world of your experience and think about how things might be otherwise, how they could be in other places and they think that\'s a really good thing.Frequent travelers often build travel bubbles around themselves that isolates them from the places they travel to; doing it in the name of efficiency,  but also perhaps to keep themselves safe from experiencing what philosophers call “the otherness” of travel</li><li>Mark: I was thinking about this -- is there a spectrum of otherness? I\'ve got the complete travel bubble at one end; in the middle, curated sidebar experiences -- you find a local restaurant, or hunting down a microbrewery or a taproom in a not-great section of town that you would not normally go; and then at the other end, full immersion – I live here, I’ve got a flat.</li><li>Emily: I definitely think there\'s a spectrum. And you can imagine, in your bubble, it might not be the full-blown experience of taking all the same clothes with you and you using all familiar airports. But even if you have your laptop and your mobile phone with you, part of the way that you\'ll be connecting with the world is through these really familiar mediums. Maybe you\'re going there, and you\'re still using Trip Advisor to look for recommendations like you would back home or you\'re still using Google maps to navigate your way around the streets. And again, I think that\'s going to provide you with this kind of buffer between you and the unfamiliar.</li><li>Mark: Later on in the book, you riff on <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_David_Thoreau\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Henry David Thoreau</a> and<em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/33SYvw3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"> Walden</a></em> and <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3kEGjw6\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Cabin Porn</a> and Solitude. When the lock down started, I just decided I was going to dig into some early American literature that I had been threatened with in high school and college but never really got into. And so I kind of flipped a coin between Thoreau and Whitman\'s <em>Leaves of Grass</em> and, heads so it was Thoreau. I will admit I did this in the beginning of April, and I still have not finished <em>Walden</em> yet, and here we are in August. So it has been a bit of a slog, but I\'m still working it. But before get into that, I gotta ask – “cabin porn.” That\'s a new one on me. The term not so much the porn. But the term <em>cabin porn</em>, what is that?</li><li>Emily: And so despite what you might think (laughter), Cabin Porn refers to photography of beautiful, isolated cabins. So, picture wood-built cabins nestled in the woods with smoke curling from the chimney. Or maybe they are stone cottages perched on the edge of a cliff, looking out over a crevasse. And there’s this whole industry dedicated to people taking photographs of these gorgeous cabins. The idea is that they\'re kind of aspirational. If you stick these into Google images, you will find some of the most astounding dwellings; places that you can rent and live for a little. <em>Walden</em> seemingly kicked this whole thing off. So, Thoreau describes building a cabin in the woods by Walden Pond and while the book can be a little bit of a slog in places, there are beautiful bits of the book. When he\'s describing living in nature in this really kind of rustic way, lots of people credit their cabin aspirations to <em>Walden</em>.</li><li>Mark: What is the strain about solitude and travel and in the balance with “otherness”?</li><li>Emily: Solitude is often held up is one of the things we can get through travel that\'s hard to get home. Although it seems like you can go out into a crowded cafe or a bar and be alone there, it seems like it\'s much easier to do that by venturing out into wilderness, that you\'re not going to meet other human beings and you have objects in front of you – trees, plants, creatures – that you can connect with. So the idea is that you\'re not being solitary in the sense of just introspection, but you\'re also connecting with some part of the world around you. It might in turn cause you to reflect on that world, and then your own part in that wider network. And that\'s very much what Thoreau is all about. He thinks that being alone in wilderness allows you to better understand wilderness and your own part in the wider universe.</li><li>Mark: I often find when I\'m traveling, it is kinda easy to hold yourself at a distance, especially if, where you are, you don\'t speak that language. It\'s almost like white noise.</li><li>Emily: Yes, when you spend large chunks of time without hearing words that you understand is a strange experience. I think it allows you to focus on other things. I think then you end up paying more attention, maybe to like the sights and the smells, the things that you can understand. I quite enjoy it, actually, the experience of being somewhere and not understanding anything that\'s going on.</li><li>Mark: (laughter) The only challenge, though, is because you\'re so used to people saying things and you don\'t understand it that you just don\'t listen. And then when you actually come back to the UK or the US and people are talking to you and you\'re just so used to tuning them out, just like “Oh, wait, you said something to me?” There was another piece in the book that you talked about global homogenization. And I\'ve felt this, I would say over the past 10-15 years. I started traveling a lot in the mid-80’s, back in the Dark Ages. In that chapter you talk about that it\'s an old complaint. You talk about Rousseau bitching about it, and John Stuart Mills…. Are we\'re just repeating the same thing?</li><li>Future topics on the philosophy of travel -- ethics of climate change, and impact of space tourism on our view of the Earth</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #166</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_166.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #166 — What Is The Meaning of Travel?','','inherit','closed','closed','','2807-revision-v1','','','2021-01-03 16:46:28','2021-01-03 21:46:28','',2807,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/03/2807-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2988,1,'2021-01-03 19:42:38','2021-01-04 00:42:38','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/IMG_0822-scaled.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2810 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/IMG_0822-300x278.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"278\"></a><figcaption>Reindeer are ruining my cabin porn</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>Trying to plan an August trip amidst dueling state quarantine lists and rapid lockdown changes while writing off my September plans for Barcelona. What\'s worse - hotels cutting back on housekeeping or breakfasts? And talking with <a href=\"https://emilythomaswrites.co.uk/about/\">Emily Thomas</a> about her new book <i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"https://amzn.to/2DO07fV\">The Meaning of Travel: Philosophers Abroad</a>. </span></i>All this and more, or listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below or by following this<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_166.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"> <strong>direct link</strong></a> to download the podcast file .</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/875150551&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #166: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after managing to front-run the city’s quarantine order on Wisconsin. Went up to Milwaukee to meet up with some friends and do a bit of biking a couple of weekends before the Chicago Health Department added Wisconsin to their list of 22 states where you’re required to self-quarantine for 14 days after returning from a trip. Mind you, they’re not setting up roadblock checkpoints like New York City is -- at least not as of the time of this recording. Reasonable people can differ on this -- New York’s governor claimed similar efforts back in March by Rhode Island and Florida aimed at New Yorkers were “unconstitutional” but seems OK with it when it’s pointed the other way -- but it does make travel planning for law abiding citizens a bit more of a challenge. And making me wonder about our downsizing move into Chicago last year -- was missing the yard, the extra rooms, and the basement gym in the suburbs during the lockdown earlier in the year; now after Chicago’s quarantine rules, am missing freedom of travel.</li><li>All this adds a couple orders of magnitude of complexity to our efforts to plan a week out of the city in a couple of weeks. Not only do we need to check Chicago’s quarantine list, but also the quarantine plans of any potential destinations. While New York isn’t on Chicago’s quarantine list, Illinois is on New York’s. Mapping it all out, we take the “clean destination” intersection of that quarantine Venn diagram and then look at what restrictions are in those places; if nothing’s open, it’s not worth traveling there. I’ve eaten more meals in my hotel rooms over the past 3 months than I have in the last couple of years.&nbsp;</li><li>But things are changing so fast, that even after you figure out what’s open now, we then start following local papers on Twitter to get any early warnings on new restrictions. Which also means paying a lot more attention to hotel cancellation policies than I ever did. And then overloading our itinerary with outdoor activities like hiking and biking so last-minute closures or restrictions don’t leave us with nothing to do. Which means spending more time trolling the AccuWeather and Weather Channel web sites because an outside-heavy itinerary is more vulnerable to big storm fronts and hurricanes. And to think I used to bitch about having to navigate TripAdvisor ratings.</li><li>Bridge Music — funkyGarden by Jeris (c) copyright 2020 Licensed under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/VJ_Memes/61356 Ft: airtone, SackJo22, Analog By Nature</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>First, a couple of shout-outs to folks who are helping me spread the word about the podcast</li><li>Thanks to GHLGB, an apparently long-time TravelCommons listener, who gave us a 5-star iTunes review the day after the last month’s episode dropped, writing:<ul><li>“Mark does a great job of relating the world of the road warrior with a bit of branching out to those of us who are miles and points nutty. Always a calm and reasonable voice one that’s been in my ears for four years”</li><li>Thanks for that. I appreciate the words, and the effort of wading through the iTunes interface to leave them</li></ul></li><li>Also, in last month’s episode, I mentioned Kev Monteith, a TravelCommons listener and Amtrak travel blogger, but didn’t thank him for calling us out in his <a href=\"https://travelswithkev.com/kevs-favorite-podcasts/\"><em>2020 Favorite Podcast</em> list</a> on his <a href=\"https://travelswithkev.com/\"><em>Travels With Kev</em> website</a>. So, I’m fixing that right now. Thanks, Kev! Check out the show notes for links to his site.</li><li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/06/09/podcast-164-first-post-lockdown-trips-travel-credit-cards/\">episode #164</a>, we talked about how hotels are pulling back on housekeeping during stays -- the Hampton Inn in Spring Hill, TN said they’d be 3 days between room visits while the Residence Inn up the road in Franklin said 7 days, which seems a bit excessive; more like a COVID-washing a cost-cutting move. Replacing the breakfast buffet with a “grab-&amp;-go” breakfast bag makes all the sense in the world, but here again, hotels are grabbing the opportunity to trim costs. Most of what I’ve seen is a brown lunch bag with a bottle of water, a NutriGrain breakfast bar, and an apple -- a banana if I’m lucky. But the Residence Inn in Wauwatosa, WI, just outside of Milwaukee, was having none of that a couple of weeks back. You had 4 options for the main breakfast course in your bag -- a turkey and waffle sandwich, a peanut and strawberry sandwich, an egg and cheese quiche, or one of 13 kinds of cereal boxes, accompanied by your choice of chocolate milk, or orange or apple juice. I’m not passing judgement on the food choices, but I was awfully impressed by their ambition -- yeah, we can’t lay out a breakfast buffet spread, but we’re gonna try our damndest to give you a decent alternative. I just had to give the turkey &amp; waffle sandwich a go. I had visions of a <a href=\"https://twitter.com/trev4president/status/857776562615308288\">Fyre Festival-like trainwreck of a sandwich</a> -- a deli slice of turkey breast between two Eggo waffles. But it was a little more reasonable -- a small wrapped sandwich of turkey sausage between two small waffles, meant to be heated in the microwave. I grabbed it on the way out for a bike ride, so missed the microwave step, which, I think, was critical. But like I said, I give that RI team huge props for the effort.</li><li>But outside the Wauwatosa gang, if this stripped down hotel service stays the norm for the next 12-18 months, it’s probably going to drive some big changes in the year-end traveler gift guides -- shifting from Away luggage and Aesop travel kits, last year’s big recommendations, to sets of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3izWHMJ\">wine tumblers</a>, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2PIgihg\">collapsible bowls</a>, and <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3an6BhJ\">camping mess kits</a>. And, of course, all sorts of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/30NAqF2\">upscale sporks</a>.</li><li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/03/21/podcast-161-new-crisis-old-question-driving-down-to-key-west/\">episode #161</a>, at the end of March, still in a bit of shock from the COVID lockdown and trying to figure out how long it was going to last, I said “I’m nothing if not an optimist. In the midst of this week’s unraveling, I found a deal on a direct American Air flight from ORD to Barcelona — 8½ hr 787 flight — so I booked it — 2 weeks in Barcelona at the end of September.”&nbsp; But here we are five months later and as we all know, things haven’t “re-raveled”. At the beginning of July, American announced that <a href=\"https://liveandletsfly.com/american-airlines-international-reset/\">direct 787 ORD-BCN flight won’t restart until next summer.</a> I checked our reservation on the AA iPhone app after I read this. It still showed us on that direct flight -- until I clicked through, which then, I guess, forced the app to pull the latest information from Dallas, and now showed us flight BA through Heathrow. Not that it really matters. The EU isn’t letting Americans in any time in the near future, and, last time I checked, Barcelona is in a voluntary lockdown because of a new spike in COVID cases. News articles are showing <a href=\"https://time.com/5876132/europe-coronavirus-second-wave/\">shuttered-up stalls at the La Boqueria market</a>; like I said earlier, if nothing’s open, why go? It was a gamble, and really, not even a big one. There’s no change fee, so it’s a push. We won’t lose any money -- unless American goes belly-up, but that’d never happen -- would it?!</li><li>Last year, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/podcast-150-travel-interruptus/\">episode #150</a>, (these show notes are gonna be chock full of backlinks), I talked about switching my carryon bag -- from a Timbuk2 backpack to a <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3izS991\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Timbuk2 messenger bag</a>. I gave two reasons for the switch: I wanted to carry something a little smaller that would stand up under a plane seat; and I wanted a non-black interior, I kept losing things in my backpack -- <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3iDWIiu\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">my tablet</a>, my Bose headphone case. But also because the backpack was breaking down a bit - the seam on one of the side pockets had blown out and one of the strap clips had broken. I was going to pitch it during our last downsizing binge before moving into the city and a friend said “You know, <a href=\"https://www.timbuk2.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Timbuk2</a> bags have <a href=\"https://www.timbuk2.com/pages/warranty-repairs\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">lifetime warranties</a>.” Huh. So I hung onto it because I still like the bag. And about 14 months later, I finally got around to sending it back to them in San Francisco. I wasn’t sure if they’d re-opened their factory, so I was ready for it to take awhile for them to process the bag and repair it. Tracking the package, I could see they received it on a Friday. I got a note from them the following Monday saying they’d inspected it and yes, it was covered by the warranty, and had the bag back in my hands that Saturday. I have to tell you that I am pretty damned impressed. I won’t be switching back from my messenger bag, but I have found that the backpack can carry 4 four-packs of 16-oz cans, perfect when I’m biking a circuit of Chicago microbreweries using curbside no-contact pick-up to grab whatever’s their newest thing. Timbuk2 is definitely “TravelCommons Approved.”</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — Xena\'s Kiss / Medea\'s Kiss by mwic (c) copyright 2018 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mwic/58883</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>The Meaning of Travel</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>This seems to be <em>the</em> existential question for a lot of travelers -- why do we travel? -- now that can’t, or at least can’t as easily and, well thoughtlessly is too strong a word, but when we could travel without having to plan as much. It’s been a whipsaw -- from overtourism to <a href=\"https://skift.com/2020/06/05/travel-sector-remains-thorn-in-a-falling-u-s-unemployment-rate-defying-expectations/\">36% unemployment in the travel and hospitality sector in the the US</a> -- so a bit soul-searching/navel-gazing is to be expected, if not encouraged. So when I saw the new book, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2DO07fV\"><em>The Meaning of Travel: Philosophers Abroad</em></a> by <a href=\"https://www.dur.ac.uk/research/directory/staff/?id=15319\">Dr. Emily</a> <a href=\"https://emilythomaswrites.co.uk/\">Thomas</a>, associate professor in philosophy at Durham University in the UK, immediately bought it and read it -- and then thought that I needed to have her on the podcast. Lucky for me, she’s a very nice person and agreed to spend a bit of time talking about “the meaning of travel”. It was a fun conversation; I hope you enjoy it.<ul><li>Mark: I\'ve got to admit that is as an engineer and an IT guy, my philosophy knowledge pretty much starts and ends with buying a T shirt that said “I Drink Therefore I Am.” It was a fundraiser for the Philosophy club for my undergrad. Emily, the first chapter “Why Do Philosophers Care About Travel” got me because you get straight into a topic we\'ve discussed often on the TravelCommons podcast about how travelers build travel bubbles around themselves. They isolate themselves from the places that they traveled to. Often times they do it in the name of efficiency, maybe to keep themselves safe from experiencing what you call the “otherness of travel.” What do philosophers say about that difference between everyday journeys and traveling?</li><li>Emily: So, I think the difference between these kinds of everyday journeys, like popping to the grocery store, visiting your grandmother and what we think of as travel lies in how much unfamiliarity or otherness we experience along the way. And it seems to me that when I popped to the grocery store, everything is super familiar. I know how things work; I know the roads; I know the products I\'m going to buy. If I were to go grocery shopping in an unfamiliar country, that experience is going to be really different. I don\'t know how the roads work anymore; I don\'t necessarily recognize the writing on the signs of the products; I may not understand the languages that I\'m overhearing. And so, an everyday experience becomes much more unfamiliar. And then seems to be much more about travel in the deeper sense. And several philosophers, including folks like <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9_Descartes\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">René Descartes</a> and <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_de_Montaigne\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Michel de Montagne</a>, have talked about how the benefits of travel lie in experiencing otherness, that this broadens your mind, that it forces you to think past the familiar everyday world of your experience and think about how things might be otherwise, how they could be in other places and they think that\'s a really good thing.Frequent travelers often build travel bubbles around themselves that isolates them from the places they travel to; doing it in the name of efficiency,  but also perhaps to keep themselves safe from experiencing what philosophers call “the otherness” of travel</li><li>Mark: I was thinking about this -- is there a spectrum of otherness? I\'ve got the complete travel bubble at one end; in the middle, curated sidebar experiences -- you find a local restaurant, or hunting down a microbrewery or a taproom in a not-great section of town that you would not normally go; and then at the other end, full immersion – I live here, I’ve got a flat.</li><li>Emily: I definitely think there\'s a spectrum. And you can imagine, in your bubble, it might not be the full-blown experience of taking all the same clothes with you and you using all familiar airports. But even if you have your laptop and your mobile phone with you, part of the way that you\'ll be connecting with the world is through these really familiar mediums. Maybe you\'re going there, and you\'re still using Trip Advisor to look for recommendations like you would back home or you\'re still using Google maps to navigate your way around the streets. And again, I think that\'s going to provide you with this kind of buffer between you and the unfamiliar.</li><li>Mark: Later on in the book, you riff on <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_David_Thoreau\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Henry David Thoreau</a> and<em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/33SYvw3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"> Walden</a></em> and <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3kEGjw6\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Cabin Porn</a> and Solitude. When the lock down started, I just decided I was going to dig into some early American literature that I had been threatened with in high school and college but never really got into. And so I kind of flipped a coin between Thoreau and Whitman\'s <em>Leaves of Grass</em> and, heads so it was Thoreau. I will admit I did this in the beginning of April, and I still have not finished <em>Walden</em> yet, and here we are in August. So it has been a bit of a slog, but I\'m still working it. But before get into that, I gotta ask – “cabin porn.” That\'s a new one on me. The term not so much the porn. But the term <em>cabin porn</em>, what is that?</li><li>Emily: And so despite what you might think (laughter), Cabin Porn refers to photography of beautiful, isolated cabins. So, picture wood-built cabins nestled in the woods with smoke curling from the chimney. Or maybe they are stone cottages perched on the edge of a cliff, looking out over a crevasse. And there’s this whole industry dedicated to people taking photographs of these gorgeous cabins. The idea is that they\'re kind of aspirational. If you stick these into Google images, you will find some of the most astounding dwellings; places that you can rent and live for a little. <em>Walden</em> seemingly kicked this whole thing off. So, Thoreau describes building a cabin in the woods by Walden Pond and while the book can be a little bit of a slog in places, there are beautiful bits of the book. When he\'s describing living in nature in this really kind of rustic way, lots of people credit their cabin aspirations to <em>Walden</em>.</li><li>Mark: What is the strain about solitude and travel and in the balance with “otherness”?</li><li>Emily: Solitude is often held up is one of the things we can get through travel that\'s hard to get home. Although it seems like you can go out into a crowded cafe or a bar and be alone there, it seems like it\'s much easier to do that by venturing out into wilderness, that you\'re not going to meet other human beings and you have objects in front of you – trees, plants, creatures – that you can connect with. So the idea is that you\'re not being solitary in the sense of just introspection, but you\'re also connecting with some part of the world around you. It might in turn cause you to reflect on that world, and then your own part in that wider network. And that\'s very much what Thoreau is all about. He thinks that being alone in wilderness allows you to better understand wilderness and your own part in the wider universe.</li><li>Mark: I often find when I\'m traveling, it is kinda easy to hold yourself at a distance, especially if, where you are, you don\'t speak that language. It\'s almost like white noise.</li><li>Emily: Yes, when you spend large chunks of time without hearing words that you understand is a strange experience. I think it allows you to focus on other things. I think then you end up paying more attention, maybe to like the sights and the smells, the things that you can understand. I quite enjoy it, actually, the experience of being somewhere and not understanding anything that\'s going on.</li><li>Mark: (laughter) The only challenge, though, is because you\'re so used to people saying things and you don\'t understand it that you just don\'t listen. And then when you actually come back to the UK or the US and people are talking to you and you\'re just so used to tuning them out, just like “Oh, wait, you said something to me?” There was another piece in the book that you talked about global homogenization. And I\'ve felt this, I would say over the past 10-15 years. I started traveling a lot in the mid-80’s, back in the Dark Ages. In that chapter you talk about that it\'s an old complaint. You talk about Rousseau bitching about it, and John Stuart Mills…. Are we\'re just repeating the same thing?</li><li>Emily: So, people like Mills and Rousseau are writing a couple of hundred years ago, and they are bitching about how Paris and Rome “seemed to me to be the same city” and reading this now, it just seems so implausible! I am sure that a large part of this feeling has to do with context. I would imagine that these men are moving in intellectual circles and then they\'re going to be around people who speak the same kind of languages, and value the same kind of things that you would like to hope that if they had broken free of those circles that they might have found things that were more unfamiliar. I do suspect that the world has been becoming more the same now than it was before, and simply because of the rise of global companies – that was just not around before. And the idea that you can go into a city and find the same shops and restaurants that you do back home is really strange. I mean, that would not have been there back in them 17th and 18th centuries. That said, I do think what we were talking about before – using technology to find your way around – I think that\'s going to give you the impression that things are all the same because you\'re looking at them through the same medium. That is an illusion. The real world is not all the same. New York is very different than Paris.</li><li>Future topics on the philosophy of travel -- ethics of climate change, and impact of space tourism on our view of the Earth</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #166</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_166.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #166 — What Is The Meaning of Travel?','','inherit','closed','closed','','2807-revision-v1','','','2021-01-03 19:42:38','2021-01-04 00:42:38','',2807,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/03/2807-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2990,1,'2021-01-03 19:47:59','2021-01-04 00:47:59','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/IMG_0822-scaled.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2810 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/IMG_0822-300x278.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"278\"></a><figcaption>Reindeer are ruining my cabin porn</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>Trying to plan an August trip amidst dueling state quarantine lists and rapid lockdown changes while writing off my September plans for Barcelona. What\'s worse - hotels cutting back on housekeeping or breakfasts? And talking with <a href=\"https://emilythomaswrites.co.uk/about/\">Emily Thomas</a> about her new book <i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"https://amzn.to/2DO07fV\">The Meaning of Travel: Philosophers Abroad</a>. </span></i>All this and more, or listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below or by following this<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_166.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"> <strong>direct link</strong></a> to download the podcast file .</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/875150551&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #166: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after managing to front-run the city’s quarantine order on Wisconsin. Went up to Milwaukee to meet up with some friends and do a bit of biking a couple of weekends before the Chicago Health Department added Wisconsin to their list of 22 states where you’re required to self-quarantine for 14 days after returning from a trip. Mind you, they’re not setting up roadblock checkpoints like New York City is -- at least not as of the time of this recording. Reasonable people can differ on this -- New York’s governor claimed similar efforts back in March by Rhode Island and Florida aimed at New Yorkers were “unconstitutional” but seems OK with it when it’s pointed the other way -- but it does make travel planning for law abiding citizens a bit more of a challenge. And making me wonder about our downsizing move into Chicago last year -- was missing the yard, the extra rooms, and the basement gym in the suburbs during the lockdown earlier in the year; now after Chicago’s quarantine rules, am missing freedom of travel.</li><li>All this adds a couple orders of magnitude of complexity to our efforts to plan a week out of the city in a couple of weeks. Not only do we need to check Chicago’s quarantine list, but also the quarantine plans of any potential destinations. While New York isn’t on Chicago’s quarantine list, Illinois is on New York’s. Mapping it all out, we take the “clean destination” intersection of that quarantine Venn diagram and then look at what restrictions are in those places; if nothing’s open, it’s not worth traveling there. I’ve eaten more meals in my hotel rooms over the past 3 months than I have in the last couple of years.&nbsp;</li><li>But things are changing so fast, that even after you figure out what’s open now, we then start following local papers on Twitter to get any early warnings on new restrictions. Which also means paying a lot more attention to hotel cancellation policies than I ever did. And then overloading our itinerary with outdoor activities like hiking and biking so last-minute closures or restrictions don’t leave us with nothing to do. Which means spending more time trolling the AccuWeather and Weather Channel web sites because an outside-heavy itinerary is more vulnerable to big storm fronts and hurricanes. And to think I used to bitch about having to navigate TripAdvisor ratings.</li><li>Bridge Music — funkyGarden by Jeris (c) copyright 2020 Licensed under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/VJ_Memes/61356 Ft: airtone, SackJo22, Analog By Nature</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>First, a couple of shout-outs to folks who are helping me spread the word about the podcast</li><li>Thanks to GHLGB, an apparently long-time TravelCommons listener, who gave us a 5-star iTunes review the day after the last month’s episode dropped, writing:<ul><li>“Mark does a great job of relating the world of the road warrior with a bit of branching out to those of us who are miles and points nutty. Always a calm and reasonable voice one that’s been in my ears for four years”</li><li>Thanks for that. I appreciate the words, and the effort of wading through the iTunes interface to leave them</li></ul></li><li>Also, in last month’s episode, I mentioned Kev Monteith, a TravelCommons listener and Amtrak travel blogger, but didn’t thank him for calling us out in his <a href=\"https://travelswithkev.com/kevs-favorite-podcasts/\"><em>2020 Favorite Podcast</em> list</a> on his <a href=\"https://travelswithkev.com/\"><em>Travels With Kev</em> website</a>. So, I’m fixing that right now. Thanks, Kev! Check out the show notes for links to his site.</li><li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/06/09/podcast-164-first-post-lockdown-trips-travel-credit-cards/\">episode #164</a>, we talked about how hotels are pulling back on housekeeping during stays -- the Hampton Inn in Spring Hill, TN said they’d be 3 days between room visits while the Residence Inn up the road in Franklin said 7 days, which seems a bit excessive; more like a COVID-washing a cost-cutting move. Replacing the breakfast buffet with a “grab-&amp;-go” breakfast bag makes all the sense in the world, but here again, hotels are grabbing the opportunity to trim costs. Most of what I’ve seen is a brown lunch bag with a bottle of water, a NutriGrain breakfast bar, and an apple -- a banana if I’m lucky. But the Residence Inn in Wauwatosa, WI, just outside of Milwaukee, was having none of that a couple of weeks back. You had 4 options for the main breakfast course in your bag -- a turkey and waffle sandwich, a peanut and strawberry sandwich, an egg and cheese quiche, or one of 13 kinds of cereal boxes, accompanied by your choice of chocolate milk, or orange or apple juice. I’m not passing judgement on the food choices, but I was awfully impressed by their ambition -- yeah, we can’t lay out a breakfast buffet spread, but we’re gonna try our damndest to give you a decent alternative. I just had to give the turkey &amp; waffle sandwich a go. I had visions of a <a href=\"https://twitter.com/trev4president/status/857776562615308288\">Fyre Festival-like trainwreck of a sandwich</a> -- a deli slice of turkey breast between two Eggo waffles. But it was a little more reasonable -- a small wrapped sandwich of turkey sausage between two small waffles, meant to be heated in the microwave. I grabbed it on the way out for a bike ride, so missed the microwave step, which, I think, was critical. But like I said, I give that RI team huge props for the effort.</li><li>But outside the Wauwatosa gang, if this stripped down hotel service stays the norm for the next 12-18 months, it’s probably going to drive some big changes in the year-end traveler gift guides -- shifting from Away luggage and Aesop travel kits, last year’s big recommendations, to sets of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3izWHMJ\">wine tumblers</a>, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2PIgihg\">collapsible bowls</a>, and <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3an6BhJ\">camping mess kits</a>. And, of course, all sorts of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/30NAqF2\">upscale sporks</a>.</li><li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/03/21/podcast-161-new-crisis-old-question-driving-down-to-key-west/\">episode #161</a>, at the end of March, still in a bit of shock from the COVID lockdown and trying to figure out how long it was going to last, I said “I’m nothing if not an optimist. In the midst of this week’s unraveling, I found a deal on a direct American Air flight from ORD to Barcelona — 8½ hr 787 flight — so I booked it — 2 weeks in Barcelona at the end of September.”&nbsp; But here we are five months later and as we all know, things haven’t “re-raveled”. At the beginning of July, American announced that <a href=\"https://liveandletsfly.com/american-airlines-international-reset/\">direct 787 ORD-BCN flight won’t restart until next summer.</a> I checked our reservation on the AA iPhone app after I read this. It still showed us on that direct flight -- until I clicked through, which then, I guess, forced the app to pull the latest information from Dallas, and now showed us flight BA through Heathrow. Not that it really matters. The EU isn’t letting Americans in any time in the near future, and, last time I checked, Barcelona is in a voluntary lockdown because of a new spike in COVID cases. News articles are showing <a href=\"https://time.com/5876132/europe-coronavirus-second-wave/\">shuttered-up stalls at the La Boqueria market</a>; like I said earlier, if nothing’s open, why go? It was a gamble, and really, not even a big one. There’s no change fee, so it’s a push. We won’t lose any money -- unless American goes belly-up, but that’d never happen -- would it?!</li><li>Last year, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/podcast-150-travel-interruptus/\">episode #150</a>, (these show notes are gonna be chock full of backlinks), I talked about switching my carryon bag -- from a Timbuk2 backpack to a <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3izS991\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Timbuk2 messenger bag</a>. I gave two reasons for the switch: I wanted to carry something a little smaller that would stand up under a plane seat; and I wanted a non-black interior, I kept losing things in my backpack -- <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3iDWIiu\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">my tablet</a>, my Bose headphone case. But also because the backpack was breaking down a bit - the seam on one of the side pockets had blown out and one of the strap clips had broken. I was going to pitch it during our last downsizing binge before moving into the city and a friend said “You know, <a href=\"https://www.timbuk2.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Timbuk2</a> bags have <a href=\"https://www.timbuk2.com/pages/warranty-repairs\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">lifetime warranties</a>.” Huh. So I hung onto it because I still like the bag. And about 14 months later, I finally got around to sending it back to them in San Francisco. I wasn’t sure if they’d re-opened their factory, so I was ready for it to take awhile for them to process the bag and repair it. Tracking the package, I could see they received it on a Friday. I got a note from them the following Monday saying they’d inspected it and yes, it was covered by the warranty, and had the bag back in my hands that Saturday. I have to tell you that I am pretty damned impressed. I won’t be switching back from my messenger bag, but I have found that the backpack can carry 4 four-packs of 16-oz cans, perfect when I’m biking a circuit of Chicago microbreweries using curbside no-contact pick-up to grab whatever’s their newest thing. Timbuk2 is definitely “TravelCommons Approved.”</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — Xena\'s Kiss / Medea\'s Kiss by mwic (c) copyright 2018 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mwic/58883</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>The Meaning of Travel</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>This seems to be <em>the</em> existential question for a lot of travelers -- why do we travel? -- now that can’t, or at least can’t as easily and, well thoughtlessly is too strong a word, but when we could travel without having to plan as much. It’s been a whipsaw -- from overtourism to <a href=\"https://skift.com/2020/06/05/travel-sector-remains-thorn-in-a-falling-u-s-unemployment-rate-defying-expectations/\">36% unemployment in the travel and hospitality sector in the the US</a> -- so a bit soul-searching/navel-gazing is to be expected, if not encouraged. So when I saw the new book, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2DO07fV\"><em>The Meaning of Travel: Philosophers Abroad</em></a> by <a href=\"https://www.dur.ac.uk/research/directory/staff/?id=15319\">Dr. Emily</a> <a href=\"https://emilythomaswrites.co.uk/\">Thomas</a>, associate professor in philosophy at Durham University in the UK, immediately bought it and read it -- and then thought that I needed to have her on the podcast. Lucky for me, she’s a very nice person and agreed to spend a bit of time talking about “the meaning of travel”. It was a fun conversation; I hope you enjoy it.<ul><li>Mark: I\'ve got to admit that is as an engineer and an IT guy, my philosophy knowledge pretty much starts and ends with buying a T shirt that said “I Drink Therefore I Am.” It was a fundraiser for the Philosophy club for my undergrad. Emily, the first chapter “Why Do Philosophers Care About Travel” got me because you get straight into a topic we\'ve discussed often on the TravelCommons podcast about how travelers build travel bubbles around themselves. They isolate themselves from the places that they traveled to. Often times they do it in the name of efficiency, maybe to keep themselves safe from experiencing what you call the “otherness of travel.” What do philosophers say about that difference between everyday journeys and traveling?</li><li>Emily: So, I think the difference between these kinds of everyday journeys, like popping to the grocery store, visiting your grandmother and what we think of as travel lies in how much unfamiliarity or otherness we experience along the way. And it seems to me that when I popped to the grocery store, everything is super familiar. I know how things work; I know the roads; I know the products I\'m going to buy. If I were to go grocery shopping in an unfamiliar country, that experience is going to be really different. I don\'t know how the roads work anymore; I don\'t necessarily recognize the writing on the signs of the products; I may not understand the languages that I\'m overhearing. And so, an everyday experience becomes much more unfamiliar. And then seems to be much more about travel in the deeper sense. And several philosophers, including folks like <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9_Descartes\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">René Descartes</a> and <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_de_Montaigne\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Michel de Montagne</a>, have talked about how the benefits of travel lie in experiencing otherness, that this broadens your mind, that it forces you to think past the familiar everyday world of your experience and think about how things might be otherwise, how they could be in other places and they think that\'s a really good thing.Frequent travelers often build travel bubbles around themselves that isolates them from the places they travel to; doing it in the name of efficiency,  but also perhaps to keep themselves safe from experiencing what philosophers call “the otherness” of travel</li><li>Mark: I was thinking about this -- is there a spectrum of otherness? I\'ve got the complete travel bubble at one end; in the middle, curated sidebar experiences -- you find a local restaurant, or hunting down a microbrewery or a taproom in a not-great section of town that you would not normally go; and then at the other end, full immersion – I live here, I’ve got a flat.</li><li>Emily: I definitely think there\'s a spectrum. And you can imagine, in your bubble, it might not be the full-blown experience of taking all the same clothes with you and you using all familiar airports. But even if you have your laptop and your mobile phone with you, part of the way that you\'ll be connecting with the world is through these really familiar mediums. Maybe you\'re going there, and you\'re still using Trip Advisor to look for recommendations like you would back home or you\'re still using Google maps to navigate your way around the streets. And again, I think that\'s going to provide you with this kind of buffer between you and the unfamiliar.</li><li>Mark: Later on in the book, you riff on <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_David_Thoreau\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Henry David Thoreau</a> and<em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/33SYvw3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"> Walden</a></em> and <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3kEGjw6\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Cabin Porn</a> and Solitude. When the lock down started, I just decided I was going to dig into some early American literature that I had been threatened with in high school and college but never really got into. And so I kind of flipped a coin between Thoreau and Whitman\'s <em>Leaves of Grass</em> and, heads so it was Thoreau. I will admit I did this in the beginning of April, and I still have not finished <em>Walden</em> yet, and here we are in August. So it has been a bit of a slog, but I\'m still working it. But before get into that, I gotta ask – “cabin porn.” That\'s a new one on me. The term not so much the porn. But the term <em>cabin porn</em>, what is that?</li><li>Emily: And so despite what you might think (laughter), Cabin Porn refers to photography of beautiful, isolated cabins. So, picture wood-built cabins nestled in the woods with smoke curling from the chimney. Or maybe they are stone cottages perched on the edge of a cliff, looking out over a crevasse. And there’s this whole industry dedicated to people taking photographs of these gorgeous cabins. The idea is that they\'re kind of aspirational. If you stick these into Google images, you will find some of the most astounding dwellings; places that you can rent and live for a little. <em>Walden</em> seemingly kicked this whole thing off. So, Thoreau describes building a cabin in the woods by Walden Pond and while the book can be a little bit of a slog in places, there are beautiful bits of the book. When he\'s describing living in nature in this really kind of rustic way, lots of people credit their cabin aspirations to <em>Walden</em>.</li><li>Mark: What is the strain about solitude and travel and in the balance with “otherness”?</li><li>Emily: Solitude is often held up is one of the things we can get through travel that\'s hard to get home. Although it seems like you can go out into a crowded cafe or a bar and be alone there, it seems like it\'s much easier to do that by venturing out into wilderness, that you\'re not going to meet other human beings and you have objects in front of you – trees, plants, creatures – that you can connect with. So the idea is that you\'re not being solitary in the sense of just introspection, but you\'re also connecting with some part of the world around you. It might in turn cause you to reflect on that world, and then your own part in that wider network. And that\'s very much what Thoreau is all about. He thinks that being alone in wilderness allows you to better understand wilderness and your own part in the wider universe.</li><li>Mark: I often find when I\'m traveling, it is kinda easy to hold yourself at a distance, especially if, where you are, you don\'t speak that language. It\'s almost like white noise.</li><li>Emily: Yes, when you spend large chunks of time without hearing words that you understand is a strange experience. I think it allows you to focus on other things. I think then you end up paying more attention, maybe to like the sights and the smells, the things that you can understand. I quite enjoy it, actually, the experience of being somewhere and not understanding anything that\'s going on.</li><li>Mark: (laughter) The only challenge, though, is because you\'re so used to people saying things and you don\'t understand it that you just don\'t listen. And then when you actually come back to the UK or the US and people are talking to you and you\'re just so used to tuning them out, just like “Oh, wait, you said something to me?” There was another piece in the book that you talked about global homogenization. And I\'ve felt this, I would say over the past 10-15 years. I started traveling a lot in the mid-80’s, back in the Dark Ages. In that chapter you talk about that it\'s an old complaint. You talk about Rousseau bitching about it, and John Stuart Mills…. Are we\'re just repeating the same thing?</li><li>Emily: So, people like Mills and Rousseau are writing a couple of hundred years ago, and they are bitching about how Paris and Rome “seemed to me to be the same city” and reading this now, it just seems so implausible! I am sure that a large part of this feeling has to do with context. I would imagine that these men are moving in intellectual circles and then they\'re going to be around people who speak the same kind of languages, and value the same kind of things that you would like to hope that if they had broken free of those circles that they might have found things that were more unfamiliar. I do suspect that the world has been becoming more the same now than it was before, and simply because of the rise of global companies – that was just not around before. And the idea that you can go into a city and find the same shops and restaurants that you do back home is really strange. I mean, that would not have been there back in them 17th and 18th centuries. That said, I do think what we were talking about before – using technology to find your way around – I think that\'s going to give you the impression that things are all the same because you\'re looking at them through the same medium. That is an illusion. The real world is not all the same. New York is very different than Paris. Something in the US that I personally am really fond of is investigating small towns that are not listed in guidebooks on in search of what Bill Bryson once described as Anywhere, USA. I really enjoy that. Seeing how these small towns do differ from each other, but also what they have in common. For me, there\'s a really attraction in that, especially in the US.</li><li>Mark: Are there any that are top of the list for you?</li><li>Future topics on the philosophy of travel -- ethics of climate change, and impact of space tourism on our view of the Earth</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #166</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_166.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #166 — What Is The Meaning of Travel?','','inherit','closed','closed','','2807-revision-v1','','','2021-01-03 19:47:59','2021-01-04 00:47:59','',2807,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/03/2807-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2991,1,'2021-01-03 20:33:05','2021-01-04 01:33:05','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/IMG_0822-scaled.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2810 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/IMG_0822-300x278.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"278\"></a><figcaption>Reindeer are ruining my cabin porn</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>Trying to plan an August trip amidst dueling state quarantine lists and rapid lockdown changes while writing off my September plans for Barcelona. What\'s worse - hotels cutting back on housekeeping or breakfasts? And talking with <a href=\"https://emilythomaswrites.co.uk/about/\">Emily Thomas</a> about her new book <i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"https://amzn.to/2DO07fV\">The Meaning of Travel: Philosophers Abroad</a>. </span></i>All this and more, or listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below or by following this<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_166.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"> <strong>direct link</strong></a> to download the podcast file .</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/875150551&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #166: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after managing to front-run the city’s quarantine order on Wisconsin. Went up to Milwaukee to meet up with some friends and do a bit of biking a couple of weekends before the Chicago Health Department added Wisconsin to their list of 22 states where you’re required to self-quarantine for 14 days after returning from a trip. Mind you, they’re not setting up roadblock checkpoints like New York City is -- at least not as of the time of this recording. Reasonable people can differ on this -- New York’s governor claimed similar efforts back in March by Rhode Island and Florida aimed at New Yorkers were “unconstitutional” but seems OK with it when it’s pointed the other way -- but it does make travel planning for law abiding citizens a bit more of a challenge. And making me wonder about our downsizing move into Chicago last year -- was missing the yard, the extra rooms, and the basement gym in the suburbs during the lockdown earlier in the year; now after Chicago’s quarantine rules, am missing freedom of travel.</li><li>All this adds a couple orders of magnitude of complexity to our efforts to plan a week out of the city in a couple of weeks. Not only do we need to check Chicago’s quarantine list, but also the quarantine plans of any potential destinations. While New York isn’t on Chicago’s quarantine list, Illinois is on New York’s. Mapping it all out, we take the “clean destination” intersection of that quarantine Venn diagram and then look at what restrictions are in those places; if nothing’s open, it’s not worth traveling there. I’ve eaten more meals in my hotel rooms over the past 3 months than I have in the last couple of years.&nbsp;</li><li>But things are changing so fast, that even after you figure out what’s open now, we then start following local papers on Twitter to get any early warnings on new restrictions. Which also means paying a lot more attention to hotel cancellation policies than I ever did. And then overloading our itinerary with outdoor activities like hiking and biking so last-minute closures or restrictions don’t leave us with nothing to do. Which means spending more time trolling the AccuWeather and Weather Channel web sites because an outside-heavy itinerary is more vulnerable to big storm fronts and hurricanes. And to think I used to bitch about having to navigate TripAdvisor ratings.</li><li>Bridge Music — funkyGarden by Jeris (c) copyright 2020 Licensed under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/VJ_Memes/61356 Ft: airtone, SackJo22, Analog By Nature</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>First, a couple of shout-outs to folks who are helping me spread the word about the podcast</li><li>Thanks to GHLGB, an apparently long-time TravelCommons listener, who gave us a 5-star iTunes review the day after the last month’s episode dropped, writing:<ul><li>“Mark does a great job of relating the world of the road warrior with a bit of branching out to those of us who are miles and points nutty. Always a calm and reasonable voice one that’s been in my ears for four years”</li><li>Thanks for that. I appreciate the words, and the effort of wading through the iTunes interface to leave them</li></ul></li><li>Also, in last month’s episode, I mentioned Kev Monteith, a TravelCommons listener and Amtrak travel blogger, but didn’t thank him for calling us out in his <a href=\"https://travelswithkev.com/kevs-favorite-podcasts/\"><em>2020 Favorite Podcast</em> list</a> on his <a href=\"https://travelswithkev.com/\"><em>Travels With Kev</em> website</a>. So, I’m fixing that right now. Thanks, Kev! Check out the show notes for links to his site.</li><li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/06/09/podcast-164-first-post-lockdown-trips-travel-credit-cards/\">episode #164</a>, we talked about how hotels are pulling back on housekeeping during stays -- the Hampton Inn in Spring Hill, TN said they’d be 3 days between room visits while the Residence Inn up the road in Franklin said 7 days, which seems a bit excessive; more like a COVID-washing a cost-cutting move. Replacing the breakfast buffet with a “grab-&amp;-go” breakfast bag makes all the sense in the world, but here again, hotels are grabbing the opportunity to trim costs. Most of what I’ve seen is a brown lunch bag with a bottle of water, a NutriGrain breakfast bar, and an apple -- a banana if I’m lucky. But the Residence Inn in Wauwatosa, WI, just outside of Milwaukee, was having none of that a couple of weeks back. You had 4 options for the main breakfast course in your bag -- a turkey and waffle sandwich, a peanut and strawberry sandwich, an egg and cheese quiche, or one of 13 kinds of cereal boxes, accompanied by your choice of chocolate milk, or orange or apple juice. I’m not passing judgement on the food choices, but I was awfully impressed by their ambition -- yeah, we can’t lay out a breakfast buffet spread, but we’re gonna try our damndest to give you a decent alternative. I just had to give the turkey &amp; waffle sandwich a go. I had visions of a <a href=\"https://twitter.com/trev4president/status/857776562615308288\">Fyre Festival-like trainwreck of a sandwich</a> -- a deli slice of turkey breast between two Eggo waffles. But it was a little more reasonable -- a small wrapped sandwich of turkey sausage between two small waffles, meant to be heated in the microwave. I grabbed it on the way out for a bike ride, so missed the microwave step, which, I think, was critical. But like I said, I give that RI team huge props for the effort.</li><li>But outside the Wauwatosa gang, if this stripped down hotel service stays the norm for the next 12-18 months, it’s probably going to drive some big changes in the year-end traveler gift guides -- shifting from Away luggage and Aesop travel kits, last year’s big recommendations, to sets of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3izWHMJ\">wine tumblers</a>, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2PIgihg\">collapsible bowls</a>, and <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3an6BhJ\">camping mess kits</a>. And, of course, all sorts of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/30NAqF2\">upscale sporks</a>.</li><li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/03/21/podcast-161-new-crisis-old-question-driving-down-to-key-west/\">episode #161</a>, at the end of March, still in a bit of shock from the COVID lockdown and trying to figure out how long it was going to last, I said “I’m nothing if not an optimist. In the midst of this week’s unraveling, I found a deal on a direct American Air flight from ORD to Barcelona — 8½ hr 787 flight — so I booked it — 2 weeks in Barcelona at the end of September.”&nbsp; But here we are five months later and as we all know, things haven’t “re-raveled”. At the beginning of July, American announced that <a href=\"https://liveandletsfly.com/american-airlines-international-reset/\">direct 787 ORD-BCN flight won’t restart until next summer.</a> I checked our reservation on the AA iPhone app after I read this. It still showed us on that direct flight -- until I clicked through, which then, I guess, forced the app to pull the latest information from Dallas, and now showed us flight BA through Heathrow. Not that it really matters. The EU isn’t letting Americans in any time in the near future, and, last time I checked, Barcelona is in a voluntary lockdown because of a new spike in COVID cases. News articles are showing <a href=\"https://time.com/5876132/europe-coronavirus-second-wave/\">shuttered-up stalls at the La Boqueria market</a>; like I said earlier, if nothing’s open, why go? It was a gamble, and really, not even a big one. There’s no change fee, so it’s a push. We won’t lose any money -- unless American goes belly-up, but that’d never happen -- would it?!</li><li>Last year, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/podcast-150-travel-interruptus/\">episode #150</a>, (these show notes are gonna be chock full of backlinks), I talked about switching my carryon bag -- from a Timbuk2 backpack to a <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3izS991\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Timbuk2 messenger bag</a>. I gave two reasons for the switch: I wanted to carry something a little smaller that would stand up under a plane seat; and I wanted a non-black interior, I kept losing things in my backpack -- <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3iDWIiu\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">my tablet</a>, my Bose headphone case. But also because the backpack was breaking down a bit - the seam on one of the side pockets had blown out and one of the strap clips had broken. I was going to pitch it during our last downsizing binge before moving into the city and a friend said “You know, <a href=\"https://www.timbuk2.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Timbuk2</a> bags have <a href=\"https://www.timbuk2.com/pages/warranty-repairs\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">lifetime warranties</a>.” Huh. So I hung onto it because I still like the bag. And about 14 months later, I finally got around to sending it back to them in San Francisco. I wasn’t sure if they’d re-opened their factory, so I was ready for it to take awhile for them to process the bag and repair it. Tracking the package, I could see they received it on a Friday. I got a note from them the following Monday saying they’d inspected it and yes, it was covered by the warranty, and had the bag back in my hands that Saturday. I have to tell you that I am pretty damned impressed. I won’t be switching back from my messenger bag, but I have found that the backpack can carry 4 four-packs of 16-oz cans, perfect when I’m biking a circuit of Chicago microbreweries using curbside no-contact pick-up to grab whatever’s their newest thing. Timbuk2 is definitely “TravelCommons Approved.”</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — Xena\'s Kiss / Medea\'s Kiss by mwic (c) copyright 2018 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mwic/58883</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>The Meaning of Travel</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>This seems to be <em>the</em> existential question for a lot of travelers -- why do we travel? -- now that can’t, or at least can’t as easily and, well thoughtlessly is too strong a word, but when we could travel without having to plan as much. It’s been a whipsaw -- from overtourism to <a href=\"https://skift.com/2020/06/05/travel-sector-remains-thorn-in-a-falling-u-s-unemployment-rate-defying-expectations/\">36% unemployment in the travel and hospitality sector in the the US</a> -- so a bit soul-searching/navel-gazing is to be expected, if not encouraged. So when I saw the new book, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2DO07fV\"><em>The Meaning of Travel: Philosophers Abroad</em></a> by <a href=\"https://www.dur.ac.uk/research/directory/staff/?id=15319\">Dr. Emily</a> <a href=\"https://emilythomaswrites.co.uk/\">Thomas</a>, associate professor in philosophy at Durham University in the UK, immediately bought it and read it -- and then thought that I needed to have her on the podcast. Lucky for me, she’s a very nice person and agreed to spend a bit of time talking about “the meaning of travel”. It was a fun conversation; I hope you enjoy it.<ul><li>Mark: I\'ve got to admit that is as an engineer and an IT guy, my philosophy knowledge pretty much starts and ends with buying a T shirt that said “I Drink Therefore I Am.” It was a fundraiser for the Philosophy club for my undergrad. Emily, the first chapter “Why Do Philosophers Care About Travel” got me because you get straight into a topic we\'ve discussed often on the TravelCommons podcast about how travelers build travel bubbles around themselves. They isolate themselves from the places that they traveled to. Often times they do it in the name of efficiency, maybe to keep themselves safe from experiencing what you call the “otherness of travel.” What do philosophers say about that difference between everyday journeys and traveling?</li><li>Emily: So, I think the difference between these kinds of everyday journeys, like popping to the grocery store, visiting your grandmother and what we think of as travel lies in how much unfamiliarity or otherness we experience along the way. And it seems to me that when I popped to the grocery store, everything is super familiar. I know how things work; I know the roads; I know the products I\'m going to buy. If I were to go grocery shopping in an unfamiliar country, that experience is going to be really different. I don\'t know how the roads work anymore; I don\'t necessarily recognize the writing on the signs of the products; I may not understand the languages that I\'m overhearing. And so, an everyday experience becomes much more unfamiliar. And then seems to be much more about travel in the deeper sense. And several philosophers, including folks like <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9_Descartes\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">René Descartes</a> and <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_de_Montaigne\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Michel de Montagne</a>, have talked about how the benefits of travel lie in experiencing otherness, that this broadens your mind, that it forces you to think past the familiar everyday world of your experience and think about how things might be otherwise, how they could be in other places and they think that\'s a really good thing.Frequent travelers often build travel bubbles around themselves that isolates them from the places they travel to; doing it in the name of efficiency,  but also perhaps to keep themselves safe from experiencing what philosophers call “the otherness” of travel</li><li>Mark: I was thinking about this -- is there a spectrum of otherness? I\'ve got the complete travel bubble at one end; in the middle, curated sidebar experiences -- you find a local restaurant, or hunting down a microbrewery or a taproom in a not-great section of town that you would not normally go; and then at the other end, full immersion – I live here, I’ve got a flat.</li><li>Emily: I definitely think there\'s a spectrum. And you can imagine, in your bubble, it might not be the full-blown experience of taking all the same clothes with you and you using all familiar airports. But even if you have your laptop and your mobile phone with you, part of the way that you\'ll be connecting with the world is through these really familiar mediums. Maybe you\'re going there, and you\'re still using Trip Advisor to look for recommendations like you would back home or you\'re still using Google maps to navigate your way around the streets. And again, I think that\'s going to provide you with this kind of buffer between you and the unfamiliar.</li><li>Mark: Later on in the book, you riff on <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_David_Thoreau\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Henry David Thoreau</a> and<em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/33SYvw3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"> Walden</a></em> and <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3kEGjw6\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Cabin Porn</a> and Solitude. When the lock down started, I just decided I was going to dig into some early American literature that I had been threatened with in high school and college but never really got into. And so I kind of flipped a coin between Thoreau and Whitman\'s <em>Leaves of Grass</em> and, heads so it was Thoreau. I will admit I did this in the beginning of April, and I still have not finished <em>Walden</em> yet, and here we are in August. So it has been a bit of a slog, but I\'m still working it. But before get into that, I gotta ask – “cabin porn.” That\'s a new one on me. The term not so much the porn. But the term <em>cabin porn</em>, what is that?</li><li>Emily: And so despite what you might think (laughter), Cabin Porn refers to photography of beautiful, isolated cabins. So, picture wood-built cabins nestled in the woods with smoke curling from the chimney. Or maybe they are stone cottages perched on the edge of a cliff, looking out over a crevasse. And there’s this whole industry dedicated to people taking photographs of these gorgeous cabins. The idea is that they\'re kind of aspirational. If you stick these into Google images, you will find some of the most astounding dwellings; places that you can rent and live for a little. <em>Walden</em> seemingly kicked this whole thing off. So, Thoreau describes building a cabin in the woods by Walden Pond and while the book can be a little bit of a slog in places, there are beautiful bits of the book. When he\'s describing living in nature in this really kind of rustic way, lots of people credit their cabin aspirations to <em>Walden</em>.</li><li>Mark: What is the strain about solitude and travel and in the balance with “otherness”?</li><li>Emily: Solitude is often held up is one of the things we can get through travel that\'s hard to get home. Although it seems like you can go out into a crowded cafe or a bar and be alone there, it seems like it\'s much easier to do that by venturing out into wilderness, that you\'re not going to meet other human beings and you have objects in front of you – trees, plants, creatures – that you can connect with. So the idea is that you\'re not being solitary in the sense of just introspection, but you\'re also connecting with some part of the world around you. It might in turn cause you to reflect on that world, and then your own part in that wider network. And that\'s very much what Thoreau is all about. He thinks that being alone in wilderness allows you to better understand wilderness and your own part in the wider universe.</li><li>Mark: I often find when I\'m traveling, it is kinda easy to hold yourself at a distance, especially if, where you are, you don\'t speak that language. It\'s almost like white noise.</li><li>Emily: Yes, when you spend large chunks of time without hearing words that you understand is a strange experience. I think it allows you to focus on other things. I think then you end up paying more attention, maybe to like the sights and the smells, the things that you can understand. I quite enjoy it, actually, the experience of being somewhere and not understanding anything that\'s going on.</li><li>Mark: (laughter) The only challenge, though, is because you\'re so used to people saying things and you don\'t understand it that you just don\'t listen. And then when you actually come back to the UK or the US and people are talking to you and you\'re just so used to tuning them out, just like “Oh, wait, you said something to me?” There was another piece in the book that you talked about global homogenization. And I\'ve felt this, I would say over the past 10-15 years. I started traveling a lot in the mid-80’s, back in the Dark Ages. In that chapter you talk about that it\'s an old complaint. You talk about Rousseau bitching about it, and John Stuart Mills…. Are we\'re just repeating the same thing?</li><li>Emily: So, people like Mills and Rousseau are writing a couple of hundred years ago, and they are bitching about how Paris and Rome “seemed to me to be the same city” and reading this now, it just seems so implausible! I am sure that a large part of this feeling has to do with context. I would imagine that these men are moving in intellectual circles and then they\'re going to be around people who speak the same kind of languages, and value the same kind of things that you would like to hope that if they had broken free of those circles that they might have found things that were more unfamiliar. I do suspect that the world has been becoming more the same now than it was before, and simply because of the rise of global companies – that was just not around before. And the idea that you can go into a city and find the same shops and restaurants that you do back home is really strange. I mean, that would not have been there back in them 17th and 18th centuries. That said, I do think what we were talking about before – using technology to find your way around – I think that\'s going to give you the impression that things are all the same because you\'re looking at them through the same medium. That is an illusion. The real world is not all the same. New York is very different than Paris. Something in the US that I personally am really fond of is investigating small towns that are not listed in guidebooks on in search of what Bill Bryson once described as Anywhere, USA. I really enjoy that. Seeing how these small towns do differ from each other, but also what they have in common. For me, there\'s a really attraction in that, especially in the US.</li><li>Mark: Are there any that are top of the list for you?</li><li>Emily: Yes, <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silverton,_Colorado\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Silverton, Colorado</a>. I enjoyed that enormously. As a British tourist, so much of it is totally unfamiliar, even though I got the impression that to the people who lived there and are from Colorado, this is all just that are par for the course. It’s regular looking houses, it’s regular looking shops that, as is a non-American trying the local bars, seeing the local kind of pancake breakfast, all of this was completely new and really stunningly beautiful.</li><li></li><li>Future topics on the philosophy of travel -- ethics of climate change, and impact of space tourism on our view of the Earth</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #166</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_166.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #166 — What Is The Meaning of Travel?','','inherit','closed','closed','','2807-revision-v1','','','2021-01-03 20:33:05','2021-01-04 01:33:05','',2807,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/03/2807-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2993,1,'2021-01-03 20:45:42','2021-01-04 01:45:42','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/IMG_0822-scaled.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2810 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/IMG_0822-300x278.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"278\"></a><figcaption>Reindeer are ruining my cabin porn</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>Trying to plan an August trip amidst dueling state quarantine lists and rapid lockdown changes while writing off my September plans for Barcelona. What\'s worse - hotels cutting back on housekeeping or breakfasts? And talking with <a href=\"https://emilythomaswrites.co.uk/about/\">Emily Thomas</a> about her new book <i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"https://amzn.to/2DO07fV\">The Meaning of Travel: Philosophers Abroad</a>. </span></i>All this and more, or listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below or by following this<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_166.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"> <strong>direct link</strong></a> to download the podcast file .</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/875150551&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #166: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after managing to front-run the city’s quarantine order on Wisconsin. Went up to Milwaukee to meet up with some friends and do a bit of biking a couple of weekends before the Chicago Health Department added Wisconsin to their list of 22 states where you’re required to self-quarantine for 14 days after returning from a trip. Mind you, they’re not setting up roadblock checkpoints like New York City is -- at least not as of the time of this recording. Reasonable people can differ on this -- New York’s governor claimed similar efforts back in March by Rhode Island and Florida aimed at New Yorkers were “unconstitutional” but seems OK with it when it’s pointed the other way -- but it does make travel planning for law abiding citizens a bit more of a challenge. And making me wonder about our downsizing move into Chicago last year -- was missing the yard, the extra rooms, and the basement gym in the suburbs during the lockdown earlier in the year; now after Chicago’s quarantine rules, am missing freedom of travel.</li><li>All this adds a couple orders of magnitude of complexity to our efforts to plan a week out of the city in a couple of weeks. Not only do we need to check Chicago’s quarantine list, but also the quarantine plans of any potential destinations. While New York isn’t on Chicago’s quarantine list, Illinois is on New York’s. Mapping it all out, we take the “clean destination” intersection of that quarantine Venn diagram and then look at what restrictions are in those places; if nothing’s open, it’s not worth traveling there. I’ve eaten more meals in my hotel rooms over the past 3 months than I have in the last couple of years.&nbsp;</li><li>But things are changing so fast, that even after you figure out what’s open now, we then start following local papers on Twitter to get any early warnings on new restrictions. Which also means paying a lot more attention to hotel cancellation policies than I ever did. And then overloading our itinerary with outdoor activities like hiking and biking so last-minute closures or restrictions don’t leave us with nothing to do. Which means spending more time trolling the AccuWeather and Weather Channel web sites because an outside-heavy itinerary is more vulnerable to big storm fronts and hurricanes. And to think I used to bitch about having to navigate TripAdvisor ratings.</li><li>Bridge Music — funkyGarden by Jeris (c) copyright 2020 Licensed under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/VJ_Memes/61356 Ft: airtone, SackJo22, Analog By Nature</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>First, a couple of shout-outs to folks who are helping me spread the word about the podcast</li><li>Thanks to GHLGB, an apparently long-time TravelCommons listener, who gave us a 5-star iTunes review the day after the last month’s episode dropped, writing:<ul><li>“Mark does a great job of relating the world of the road warrior with a bit of branching out to those of us who are miles and points nutty. Always a calm and reasonable voice one that’s been in my ears for four years”</li><li>Thanks for that. I appreciate the words, and the effort of wading through the iTunes interface to leave them</li></ul></li><li>Also, in last month’s episode, I mentioned Kev Monteith, a TravelCommons listener and Amtrak travel blogger, but didn’t thank him for calling us out in his <a href=\"https://travelswithkev.com/kevs-favorite-podcasts/\"><em>2020 Favorite Podcast</em> list</a> on his <a href=\"https://travelswithkev.com/\"><em>Travels With Kev</em> website</a>. So, I’m fixing that right now. Thanks, Kev! Check out the show notes for links to his site.</li><li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/06/09/podcast-164-first-post-lockdown-trips-travel-credit-cards/\">episode #164</a>, we talked about how hotels are pulling back on housekeeping during stays -- the Hampton Inn in Spring Hill, TN said they’d be 3 days between room visits while the Residence Inn up the road in Franklin said 7 days, which seems a bit excessive; more like a COVID-washing a cost-cutting move. Replacing the breakfast buffet with a “grab-&amp;-go” breakfast bag makes all the sense in the world, but here again, hotels are grabbing the opportunity to trim costs. Most of what I’ve seen is a brown lunch bag with a bottle of water, a NutriGrain breakfast bar, and an apple -- a banana if I’m lucky. But the Residence Inn in Wauwatosa, WI, just outside of Milwaukee, was having none of that a couple of weeks back. You had 4 options for the main breakfast course in your bag -- a turkey and waffle sandwich, a peanut and strawberry sandwich, an egg and cheese quiche, or one of 13 kinds of cereal boxes, accompanied by your choice of chocolate milk, or orange or apple juice. I’m not passing judgement on the food choices, but I was awfully impressed by their ambition -- yeah, we can’t lay out a breakfast buffet spread, but we’re gonna try our damndest to give you a decent alternative. I just had to give the turkey &amp; waffle sandwich a go. I had visions of a <a href=\"https://twitter.com/trev4president/status/857776562615308288\">Fyre Festival-like trainwreck of a sandwich</a> -- a deli slice of turkey breast between two Eggo waffles. But it was a little more reasonable -- a small wrapped sandwich of turkey sausage between two small waffles, meant to be heated in the microwave. I grabbed it on the way out for a bike ride, so missed the microwave step, which, I think, was critical. But like I said, I give that RI team huge props for the effort.</li><li>But outside the Wauwatosa gang, if this stripped down hotel service stays the norm for the next 12-18 months, it’s probably going to drive some big changes in the year-end traveler gift guides -- shifting from Away luggage and Aesop travel kits, last year’s big recommendations, to sets of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3izWHMJ\">wine tumblers</a>, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2PIgihg\">collapsible bowls</a>, and <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3an6BhJ\">camping mess kits</a>. And, of course, all sorts of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/30NAqF2\">upscale sporks</a>.</li><li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/03/21/podcast-161-new-crisis-old-question-driving-down-to-key-west/\">episode #161</a>, at the end of March, still in a bit of shock from the COVID lockdown and trying to figure out how long it was going to last, I said “I’m nothing if not an optimist. In the midst of this week’s unraveling, I found a deal on a direct American Air flight from ORD to Barcelona — 8½ hr 787 flight — so I booked it — 2 weeks in Barcelona at the end of September.”&nbsp; But here we are five months later and as we all know, things haven’t “re-raveled”. At the beginning of July, American announced that <a href=\"https://liveandletsfly.com/american-airlines-international-reset/\">direct 787 ORD-BCN flight won’t restart until next summer.</a> I checked our reservation on the AA iPhone app after I read this. It still showed us on that direct flight -- until I clicked through, which then, I guess, forced the app to pull the latest information from Dallas, and now showed us flight BA through Heathrow. Not that it really matters. The EU isn’t letting Americans in any time in the near future, and, last time I checked, Barcelona is in a voluntary lockdown because of a new spike in COVID cases. News articles are showing <a href=\"https://time.com/5876132/europe-coronavirus-second-wave/\">shuttered-up stalls at the La Boqueria market</a>; like I said earlier, if nothing’s open, why go? It was a gamble, and really, not even a big one. There’s no change fee, so it’s a push. We won’t lose any money -- unless American goes belly-up, but that’d never happen -- would it?!</li><li>Last year, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/podcast-150-travel-interruptus/\">episode #150</a>, (these show notes are gonna be chock full of backlinks), I talked about switching my carryon bag -- from a Timbuk2 backpack to a <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3izS991\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Timbuk2 messenger bag</a>. I gave two reasons for the switch: I wanted to carry something a little smaller that would stand up under a plane seat; and I wanted a non-black interior, I kept losing things in my backpack -- <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3iDWIiu\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">my tablet</a>, my Bose headphone case. But also because the backpack was breaking down a bit - the seam on one of the side pockets had blown out and one of the strap clips had broken. I was going to pitch it during our last downsizing binge before moving into the city and a friend said “You know, <a href=\"https://www.timbuk2.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Timbuk2</a> bags have <a href=\"https://www.timbuk2.com/pages/warranty-repairs\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">lifetime warranties</a>.” Huh. So I hung onto it because I still like the bag. And about 14 months later, I finally got around to sending it back to them in San Francisco. I wasn’t sure if they’d re-opened their factory, so I was ready for it to take awhile for them to process the bag and repair it. Tracking the package, I could see they received it on a Friday. I got a note from them the following Monday saying they’d inspected it and yes, it was covered by the warranty, and had the bag back in my hands that Saturday. I have to tell you that I am pretty damned impressed. I won’t be switching back from my messenger bag, but I have found that the backpack can carry 4 four-packs of 16-oz cans, perfect when I’m biking a circuit of Chicago microbreweries using curbside no-contact pick-up to grab whatever’s their newest thing. Timbuk2 is definitely “TravelCommons Approved.”</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — Xena\'s Kiss / Medea\'s Kiss by mwic (c) copyright 2018 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mwic/58883</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>The Meaning of Travel</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>This seems to be <em>the</em> existential question for a lot of travelers -- why do we travel? -- now that can’t, or at least can’t as easily and, well thoughtlessly is too strong a word, but when we could travel without having to plan as much. It’s been a whipsaw -- from overtourism to <a href=\"https://skift.com/2020/06/05/travel-sector-remains-thorn-in-a-falling-u-s-unemployment-rate-defying-expectations/\">36% unemployment in the travel and hospitality sector in the the US</a> -- so a bit soul-searching/navel-gazing is to be expected, if not encouraged. So when I saw the new book, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2DO07fV\"><em>The Meaning of Travel: Philosophers Abroad</em></a> by <a href=\"https://www.dur.ac.uk/research/directory/staff/?id=15319\">Dr. Emily</a> <a href=\"https://emilythomaswrites.co.uk/\">Thomas</a>, associate professor in philosophy at Durham University in the UK, immediately bought it and read it -- and then thought that I needed to have her on the podcast. Lucky for me, she’s a very nice person and agreed to spend a bit of time talking about “the meaning of travel”. It was a fun conversation; I hope you enjoy it.<ul><li>Mark: I\'ve got to admit that is as an engineer and an IT guy, my philosophy knowledge pretty much starts and ends with buying a T shirt that said “I Drink Therefore I Am.” It was a fundraiser for the Philosophy club for my undergrad. Emily, the first chapter “Why Do Philosophers Care About Travel” got me because you get straight into a topic we\'ve discussed often on the TravelCommons podcast about how travelers build travel bubbles around themselves. They isolate themselves from the places that they traveled to. Often times they do it in the name of efficiency, maybe to keep themselves safe from experiencing what you call the “otherness of travel.” What do philosophers say about that difference between everyday journeys and traveling?</li><li>Emily: So, I think the difference between these kinds of everyday journeys, like popping to the grocery store, visiting your grandmother and what we think of as travel lies in how much unfamiliarity or otherness we experience along the way. And it seems to me that when I popped to the grocery store, everything is super familiar. I know how things work; I know the roads; I know the products I\'m going to buy. If I were to go grocery shopping in an unfamiliar country, that experience is going to be really different. I don\'t know how the roads work anymore; I don\'t necessarily recognize the writing on the signs of the products; I may not understand the languages that I\'m overhearing. And so, an everyday experience becomes much more unfamiliar. And then seems to be much more about travel in the deeper sense. And several philosophers, including folks like <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9_Descartes\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">René Descartes</a> and <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_de_Montaigne\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Michel de Montagne</a>, have talked about how the benefits of travel lie in experiencing otherness, that this broadens your mind, that it forces you to think past the familiar everyday world of your experience and think about how things might be otherwise, how they could be in other places and they think that\'s a really good thing.Frequent travelers often build travel bubbles around themselves that isolates them from the places they travel to; doing it in the name of efficiency,  but also perhaps to keep themselves safe from experiencing what philosophers call “the otherness” of travel</li><li>Mark: I was thinking about this -- is there a spectrum of otherness? I\'ve got the complete travel bubble at one end; in the middle, curated sidebar experiences -- you find a local restaurant, or hunting down a microbrewery or a taproom in a not-great section of town that you would not normally go; and then at the other end, full immersion – I live here, I’ve got a flat.</li><li>Emily: I definitely think there\'s a spectrum. And you can imagine, in your bubble, it might not be the full-blown experience of taking all the same clothes with you and you using all familiar airports. But even if you have your laptop and your mobile phone with you, part of the way that you\'ll be connecting with the world is through these really familiar mediums. Maybe you\'re going there, and you\'re still using Trip Advisor to look for recommendations like you would back home or you\'re still using Google maps to navigate your way around the streets. And again, I think that\'s going to provide you with this kind of buffer between you and the unfamiliar.</li><li>Mark: Later on in the book, you riff on <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_David_Thoreau\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Henry David Thoreau</a> and<em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/33SYvw3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"> Walden</a></em> and <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3kEGjw6\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Cabin Porn</a> and Solitude. When the lock down started, I just decided I was going to dig into some early American literature that I had been threatened with in high school and college but never really got into. And so I kind of flipped a coin between Thoreau and Whitman\'s <em>Leaves of Grass</em> and, heads so it was Thoreau. I will admit I did this in the beginning of April, and I still have not finished <em>Walden</em> yet, and here we are in August. So it has been a bit of a slog, but I\'m still working it. But before get into that, I gotta ask – “cabin porn.” That\'s a new one on me. The term not so much the porn. But the term <em>cabin porn</em>, what is that?</li><li>Emily: And so despite what you might think (laughter), Cabin Porn refers to photography of beautiful, isolated cabins. So, picture wood-built cabins nestled in the woods with smoke curling from the chimney. Or maybe they are stone cottages perched on the edge of a cliff, looking out over a crevasse. And there’s this whole industry dedicated to people taking photographs of these gorgeous cabins. The idea is that they\'re kind of aspirational. If you stick these into Google images, you will find some of the most astounding dwellings; places that you can rent and live for a little. <em>Walden</em> seemingly kicked this whole thing off. So, Thoreau describes building a cabin in the woods by Walden Pond and while the book can be a little bit of a slog in places, there are beautiful bits of the book. When he\'s describing living in nature in this really kind of rustic way, lots of people credit their cabin aspirations to <em>Walden</em>.</li><li>Mark: What is the strain about solitude and travel and in the balance with “otherness”?</li><li>Emily: Solitude is often held up is one of the things we can get through travel that\'s hard to get home. Although it seems like you can go out into a crowded cafe or a bar and be alone there, it seems like it\'s much easier to do that by venturing out into wilderness, that you\'re not going to meet other human beings and you have objects in front of you – trees, plants, creatures – that you can connect with. So the idea is that you\'re not being solitary in the sense of just introspection, but you\'re also connecting with some part of the world around you. It might in turn cause you to reflect on that world, and then your own part in that wider network. And that\'s very much what Thoreau is all about. He thinks that being alone in wilderness allows you to better understand wilderness and your own part in the wider universe.</li><li>Mark: I often find when I\'m traveling, it is kinda easy to hold yourself at a distance, especially if, where you are, you don\'t speak that language. It\'s almost like white noise.</li><li>Emily: Yes, when you spend large chunks of time without hearing words that you understand is a strange experience. I think it allows you to focus on other things. I think then you end up paying more attention, maybe to like the sights and the smells, the things that you can understand. I quite enjoy it, actually, the experience of being somewhere and not understanding anything that\'s going on.</li><li>Mark: (laughter) The only challenge, though, is because you\'re so used to people saying things and you don\'t understand it that you just don\'t listen. And then when you actually come back to the UK or the US and people are talking to you and you\'re just so used to tuning them out, just like “Oh, wait, you said something to me?” There was another piece in the book that you talked about global homogenization. And I\'ve felt this, I would say over the past 10-15 years. I started traveling a lot in the mid-80’s, back in the Dark Ages. In that chapter you talk about that it\'s an old complaint. You talk about Rousseau bitching about it, and John Stuart Mills…. Are we\'re just repeating the same thing?</li><li>Emily: So, people like Mills and Rousseau are writing a couple of hundred years ago, and they are bitching about how Paris and Rome “seemed to me to be the same city” and reading this now, it just seems so implausible! I am sure that a large part of this feeling has to do with context. I would imagine that these men are moving in intellectual circles and then they\'re going to be around people who speak the same kind of languages, and value the same kind of things that you would like to hope that if they had broken free of those circles that they might have found things that were more unfamiliar. I do suspect that the world has been becoming more the same now than it was before, and simply because of the rise of global companies – that was just not around before. And the idea that you can go into a city and find the same shops and restaurants that you do back home is really strange. I mean, that would not have been there back in them 17th and 18th centuries. That said, I do think what we were talking about before – using technology to find your way around – I think that\'s going to give you the impression that things are all the same because you\'re looking at them through the same medium. That is an illusion. The real world is not all the same. New York is very different than Paris. Something in the US that I personally am really fond of is investigating small towns that are not listed in guidebooks on in search of what Bill Bryson once described as Anywhere, USA. I really enjoy that. Seeing how these small towns do differ from each other, but also what they have in common. For me, there\'s a really attraction in that, especially in the US.</li><li>Mark: Are there any that are top of the list for you?</li><li>Emily: Yes, <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silverton,_Colorado\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Silverton, Colorado</a>. I enjoyed that enormously. As a British tourist, so much of it is totally unfamiliar, even though I got the impression that to the people who lived there and are from Colorado, this is all just that are par for the course. It’s regular looking houses, it’s regular looking shops that, as is a non-American trying the local bars, seeing the local kind of pancake breakfast, all of this was completely new and really stunningly beautiful.</li><li>Mark: Just to wrap up, if you look forward and you think about philosophy and travel, what are some of the new things that philosophers are thinking about on travel?</li><li>Emily: I think the big thing right now it is the ethics of climate change and how best to travel responsibly. I think that issue is going to dwarf everything else in the philosophy of travel for several decades to come. Whether or not we are partaking in carbon off-setting schemes is enough, whether or not we should be looking to educate ourselves more about the places that we travel, possibly even traveling less but aiming for higher quality experiences. I think that stuff is really going to dominate. However, there is other stuff going on too. Looking at the issues posed by space travel and space tourism, which I don\'t think is that far away, actually. I mean in the immediate decades, it\'s going to be the province of the super wealthy, but I think past that it will become more and more accessible and that\'s also going to pose some ethical issues like the cost of fuel to get people up out of the atmosphere is gonna be enormous. But also, that will prompt us to think about our place it in the world. I obviously have not been up into space, but were I to go, I imagine it would cause me to reflect on how little the planet Earth is in the grand scheme of things. And I wonder whether that will lead us to reconsider our place in the world and how we\'re treating the planet that we live on. I think space travel is going to be really rife with opportunities for philosophical reflection.</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #166</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_166.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #166 — What Is The Meaning of Travel?','','inherit','closed','closed','','2807-revision-v1','','','2021-01-03 20:45:42','2021-01-04 01:45:42','',2807,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/03/2807-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2995,1,'2021-01-03 20:57:57','2021-01-04 01:57:57','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/IMG_0822-scaled.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2810 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/IMG_0822-300x278.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"278\"></a><figcaption>Reindeer are ruining my cabin porn</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>Trying to plan an August trip amidst dueling state quarantine lists and rapid lockdown changes while writing off my September plans for Barcelona. What\'s worse - hotels cutting back on housekeeping or breakfasts? And talking with <a href=\"https://emilythomaswrites.co.uk/about/\">Emily Thomas</a> about her new book <i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"https://amzn.to/2DO07fV\">The Meaning of Travel: Philosophers Abroad</a>. </span></i>All this and more, or listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below or by following this<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_166.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"> <strong>direct link</strong></a> to download the podcast file .</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/875150551&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #166: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after managing to front-run the city’s quarantine order on Wisconsin. Went up to Milwaukee to meet up with some friends and do a bit of biking a couple of weekends before the Chicago Health Department added Wisconsin to their list of 22 states where you’re required to self-quarantine for 14 days after returning from a trip. Mind you, they’re not setting up roadblock checkpoints like New York City is -- at least not as of the time of this recording. Reasonable people can differ on this -- New York’s governor claimed similar efforts back in March by Rhode Island and Florida aimed at New Yorkers were “unconstitutional” but seems OK with it when it’s pointed the other way -- but it does make travel planning for law abiding citizens a bit more of a challenge. And making me wonder about our downsizing move into Chicago last year -- was missing the yard, the extra rooms, and the basement gym in the suburbs during the lockdown earlier in the year; now after Chicago’s quarantine rules, am missing freedom of travel.</li><li>All this adds a couple orders of magnitude of complexity to our efforts to plan a week out of the city in a couple of weeks. Not only do we need to check Chicago’s quarantine list, but also the quarantine plans of any potential destinations. While New York isn’t on Chicago’s quarantine list, Illinois is on New York’s. Mapping it all out, we take the “clean destination” intersection of that quarantine Venn diagram and then look at what restrictions are in those places; if nothing’s open, it’s not worth traveling there. I’ve eaten more meals in my hotel rooms over the past 3 months than I have in the last couple of years.&nbsp;</li><li>But things are changing so fast, that even after you figure out what’s open now, we then start following local papers on Twitter to get any early warnings on new restrictions. Which also means paying a lot more attention to hotel cancellation policies than I ever did. And then overloading our itinerary with outdoor activities like hiking and biking so last-minute closures or restrictions don’t leave us with nothing to do. Which means spending more time trolling the AccuWeather and Weather Channel web sites because an outside-heavy itinerary is more vulnerable to big storm fronts and hurricanes. And to think I used to bitch about having to navigate TripAdvisor ratings.</li><li>Bridge Music — funkyGarden by Jeris (c) copyright 2020 Licensed under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/VJ_Memes/61356 Ft: airtone, SackJo22, Analog By Nature</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>First, a couple of shout-outs to folks who are helping me spread the word about the podcast</li><li>Thanks to GHLGB, an apparently long-time TravelCommons listener, who gave us a 5-star iTunes review the day after the last month’s episode dropped, writing:<ul><li>“Mark does a great job of relating the world of the road warrior with a bit of branching out to those of us who are miles and points nutty. Always a calm and reasonable voice one that’s been in my ears for four years”</li><li>Thanks for that. I appreciate the words, and the effort of wading through the iTunes interface to leave them</li></ul></li><li>Also, in last month’s episode, I mentioned Kev Monteith, a TravelCommons listener and Amtrak travel blogger, but didn’t thank him for calling us out in his <a href=\"https://travelswithkev.com/kevs-favorite-podcasts/\"><em>2020 Favorite Podcast</em> list</a> on his <a href=\"https://travelswithkev.com/\"><em>Travels With Kev</em> website</a>. So, I’m fixing that right now. Thanks, Kev! Check out the show notes for links to his site.</li><li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/06/09/podcast-164-first-post-lockdown-trips-travel-credit-cards/\">episode #164</a>, we talked about how hotels are pulling back on housekeeping during stays -- the Hampton Inn in Spring Hill, TN said they’d be 3 days between room visits while the Residence Inn up the road in Franklin said 7 days, which seems a bit excessive; more like a COVID-washing a cost-cutting move. Replacing the breakfast buffet with a “grab-&amp;-go” breakfast bag makes all the sense in the world, but here again, hotels are grabbing the opportunity to trim costs. Most of what I’ve seen is a brown lunch bag with a bottle of water, a NutriGrain breakfast bar, and an apple -- a banana if I’m lucky. But the Residence Inn in Wauwatosa, WI, just outside of Milwaukee, was having none of that a couple of weeks back. You had 4 options for the main breakfast course in your bag -- a turkey and waffle sandwich, a peanut and strawberry sandwich, an egg and cheese quiche, or one of 13 kinds of cereal boxes, accompanied by your choice of chocolate milk, or orange or apple juice. I’m not passing judgement on the food choices, but I was awfully impressed by their ambition -- yeah, we can’t lay out a breakfast buffet spread, but we’re gonna try our damndest to give you a decent alternative. I just had to give the turkey &amp; waffle sandwich a go. I had visions of a <a href=\"https://twitter.com/trev4president/status/857776562615308288\">Fyre Festival-like trainwreck of a sandwich</a> -- a deli slice of turkey breast between two Eggo waffles. But it was a little more reasonable -- a small wrapped sandwich of turkey sausage between two small waffles, meant to be heated in the microwave. I grabbed it on the way out for a bike ride, so missed the microwave step, which, I think, was critical. But like I said, I give that RI team huge props for the effort.</li><li>But outside the Wauwatosa gang, if this stripped down hotel service stays the norm for the next 12-18 months, it’s probably going to drive some big changes in the year-end traveler gift guides -- shifting from Away luggage and Aesop travel kits, last year’s big recommendations, to sets of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3izWHMJ\">wine tumblers</a>, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2PIgihg\">collapsible bowls</a>, and <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3an6BhJ\">camping mess kits</a>. And, of course, all sorts of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/30NAqF2\">upscale sporks</a>.</li><li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/03/21/podcast-161-new-crisis-old-question-driving-down-to-key-west/\">episode #161</a>, at the end of March, still in a bit of shock from the COVID lockdown and trying to figure out how long it was going to last, I said “I’m nothing if not an optimist. In the midst of this week’s unraveling, I found a deal on a direct American Air flight from ORD to Barcelona — 8½ hr 787 flight — so I booked it — 2 weeks in Barcelona at the end of September.”&nbsp; But here we are five months later and as we all know, things haven’t “re-raveled”. At the beginning of July, American announced that <a href=\"https://liveandletsfly.com/american-airlines-international-reset/\">direct 787 ORD-BCN flight won’t restart until next summer.</a> I checked our reservation on the AA iPhone app after I read this. It still showed us on that direct flight -- until I clicked through, which then, I guess, forced the app to pull the latest information from Dallas, and now showed us flight BA through Heathrow. Not that it really matters. The EU isn’t letting Americans in any time in the near future, and, last time I checked, Barcelona is in a voluntary lockdown because of a new spike in COVID cases. News articles are showing <a href=\"https://time.com/5876132/europe-coronavirus-second-wave/\">shuttered-up stalls at the La Boqueria market</a>; like I said earlier, if nothing’s open, why go? It was a gamble, and really, not even a big one. There’s no change fee, so it’s a push. We won’t lose any money -- unless American goes belly-up, but that’d never happen -- would it?!</li><li>Last year, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/podcast-150-travel-interruptus/\">episode #150</a>, (these show notes are gonna be chock full of backlinks), I talked about switching my carryon bag -- from a Timbuk2 backpack to a <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3izS991\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Timbuk2 messenger bag</a>. I gave two reasons for the switch: I wanted to carry something a little smaller that would stand up under a plane seat; and I wanted a non-black interior, I kept losing things in my backpack -- <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3iDWIiu\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">my tablet</a>, my Bose headphone case. But also because the backpack was breaking down a bit - the seam on one of the side pockets had blown out and one of the strap clips had broken. I was going to pitch it during our last downsizing binge before moving into the city and a friend said “You know, <a href=\"https://www.timbuk2.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Timbuk2</a> bags have <a href=\"https://www.timbuk2.com/pages/warranty-repairs\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">lifetime warranties</a>.” Huh. So I hung onto it because I still like the bag. And about 14 months later, I finally got around to sending it back to them in San Francisco. I wasn’t sure if they’d re-opened their factory, so I was ready for it to take awhile for them to process the bag and repair it. Tracking the package, I could see they received it on a Friday. I got a note from them the following Monday saying they’d inspected it and yes, it was covered by the warranty, and had the bag back in my hands that Saturday. I have to tell you that I am pretty damned impressed. I won’t be switching back from my messenger bag, but I have found that the backpack can carry 4 four-packs of 16-oz cans, perfect when I’m biking a circuit of Chicago microbreweries using curbside no-contact pick-up to grab whatever’s their newest thing. Timbuk2 is definitely “TravelCommons Approved.”</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — Xena\'s Kiss / Medea\'s Kiss by mwic (c) copyright 2018 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mwic/58883</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>The Meaning of Travel</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>This seems to be <em>the</em> existential question for a lot of travelers -- why do we travel? -- now that can’t, or at least can’t as easily and, well thoughtlessly is too strong a word, but when we could travel without having to plan as much. It’s been a whipsaw -- from overtourism to <a href=\"https://skift.com/2020/06/05/travel-sector-remains-thorn-in-a-falling-u-s-unemployment-rate-defying-expectations/\">36% unemployment in the travel and hospitality sector in the the US</a> -- so a bit soul-searching/navel-gazing is to be expected, if not encouraged. So when I saw the new book, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2DO07fV\"><em>The Meaning of Travel: Philosophers Abroad</em></a> by <a href=\"https://www.dur.ac.uk/research/directory/staff/?id=15319\">Dr. Emily</a> <a href=\"https://emilythomaswrites.co.uk/\">Thomas</a>, associate professor in philosophy at Durham University in the UK, immediately bought it and read it -- and then thought that I needed to have her on the podcast. Lucky for me, she’s a very nice person and agreed to spend a bit of time talking about “the meaning of travel”. It was a fun conversation; I hope you enjoy it.<ul><li>Mark: I\'ve got to admit that, as an engineer and an IT guy, my philosophy knowledge pretty much starts and ends with buying a T shirt that said “I Drink Therefore I Am.” It was a fundraiser for the Philosophy club for my undergrad. Emily, the first chapter “Why Do Philosophers Care About Travel” got me because you get straight into a topic we\'ve discussed often on the TravelCommons podcast about how travelers build travel bubbles around themselves. They isolate themselves from the places that they traveled to. Oftentimes they do it in the name of efficiency, maybe to keep themselves safe from experiencing what you call the “otherness of travel.” What do philosophers say about that difference between everyday journeys and traveling?</li><li>Emily: So, I think the difference between these kinds of everyday journeys, like popping to the grocery store, visiting your grandmother and what we think of as travel lies in how much unfamiliarity or otherness we experience along the way. And it seems to me that when I popped to the grocery store, everything is super familiar. I know how things work; I know the roads; I know the products I\'m going to buy. If I were to go grocery shopping in an unfamiliar country, that experience is going to be really different. I don\'t know how the roads work anymore; I don\'t necessarily recognize the writing on the signs of the products; I may not understand the languages that I\'m overhearing. And so, an everyday experience becomes much more unfamiliar. And then seems to be much more about travel in the deeper sense. And several philosophers, including folks like <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9_Descartes\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">René Descartes</a> and <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_de_Montaigne\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Michel de Montagne</a>, have talked about how the benefits of travel lie in experiencing otherness, that this broadens your mind, that it forces you to think past the familiar everyday world of your experience and think about how things might be otherwise, how they could be in other places and they think that\'s a really good thing.Frequent travelers often build travel bubbles around themselves that isolates them from the places they travel to; doing it in the name of efficiency,  but also perhaps to keep themselves safe from experiencing what philosophers call “the otherness” of travel</li><li>Mark: I was thinking about this -- is there a spectrum of otherness? I\'ve got the complete travel bubble at one end; in the middle, curated sidebar experiences -- you find a local restaurant, or hunting down a microbrewery or a taproom in a not-great section of town that you would not normally go; and then at the other end, full immersion – I live here, I’ve got a flat.</li><li>Emily: I definitely think there\'s a spectrum. And you can imagine, in your bubble, it might not be the full-blown experience of taking all the same clothes with you and you using all familiar airports. But even if you have your laptop and your mobile phone with you, part of the way that you\'ll be connecting with the world is through these really familiar mediums. Maybe you\'re going there, and you\'re still using Trip Advisor to look for recommendations like you would back home or you\'re still using Google maps to navigate your way around the streets. And again, I think that\'s going to provide you with this kind of buffer between you and the unfamiliar.</li><li>Mark: Later on in the book, you riff on <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_David_Thoreau\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Henry David Thoreau</a> and<em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/33SYvw3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"> Walden</a></em> and <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3kEGjw6\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Cabin Porn</a> and Solitude. When the lock down started, I just decided I was going to dig into some early American literature that I had been threatened with in high school and college but never really got into. And so I kind of flipped a coin between Thoreau and Whitman\'s <em>Leaves of Grass</em> and, heads so it was Thoreau. I will admit I did this in the beginning of April, and I still have not finished <em>Walden</em> yet, and here we are in August. So it has been a bit of a slog, but I\'m still working it. But before I get into that, I gotta ask – “cabin porn.” That\'s a new one on me – the term, not so much the porn. But the term <em>cabin porn</em>, what is that?</li><li>Emily: And so despite what you might think (laughter), Cabin Porn refers to photography of beautiful, isolated cabins. So, picture wood-built cabins nestled in the woods with smoke curling from the chimney. Or maybe they are stone cottages perched on the edge of a cliff, looking out over a crevasse. And there’s this whole industry dedicated to people taking photographs of these gorgeous cabins. The idea is that they\'re kind of aspirational. If you stick these into Google images, you will find some of the most astounding dwellings; places that you can rent and live for a little. <em>Walden</em> seemingly kicked this whole thing off. So, Thoreau describes building a cabin in the woods by Walden Pond and while the book can be a little bit of a slog in places, there are beautiful bits of the book. When he\'s describing living in nature in this really kind of rustic way, lots of people credit their cabin aspirations to <em>Walden</em>.</li><li>Mark: What is the strain about solitude and travel and in the balance with “otherness”?</li><li>Emily: Solitude is often held up is one of the things we can get through travel that\'s hard to get home. Although it seems like you can go out into a crowded cafe or a bar and be alone there, it seems like it\'s much easier to do that by venturing out into wilderness, that you\'re not going to meet other human beings and you have objects in front of you – trees, plants, creatures – that you can connect with. So the idea is that you\'re not being solitary in the sense of just introspection, but you\'re also connecting with some part of the world around you. It might in turn cause you to reflect on that world, and then your own part in that wider network. And that\'s very much what Thoreau is all about. He thinks that being alone in wilderness allows you to better understand wilderness and your own part in the wider universe.</li><li>Mark: I often find when I\'m traveling, it is kinda easy to hold yourself at a distance, especially if, where you are, you don\'t speak that language. It\'s almost like white noise.</li><li>Emily: Yes, when you spend large chunks of time without hearing words that you understand is a strange experience. I think it allows you to focus on other things. I think then you end up paying more attention, maybe to like the sights and the smells, the things that you can understand. I quite enjoy it, actually, the experience of being somewhere and not understanding anything that\'s going on.</li><li>Mark: (laughter) The only challenge, though, is because you\'re so used to people saying things and you don\'t understand it that you just don\'t listen. And then when you actually come back to the UK or the US and people are talking to you and you\'re just so used to tuning them out, just like “Oh, wait, you said something to me?” There was another piece in the book that you talked about global homogenization. And I\'ve felt this, I would say over the past 10-15 years. I started traveling a lot in the mid-80’s, back in the Dark Ages. In that chapter you talk about that it\'s an old complaint. You talk about Rousseau bitching about it, and John Stuart Mills…. Are we just repeating the same thing?</li><li>Emily: So, people like Mills and Rousseau are writing a couple of hundred years ago, and they are bitching about how Paris and Rome “seemed to me to be the same city” and reading this now, it just seems so implausible! I am sure that a large part of this feeling has to do with context. I would imagine that these men are moving in intellectual circles and then they\'re going to be around people who speak the same kind of languages, and value the same kind of things that you would like to hope that if they had broken free of those circles that they might have found things that were more unfamiliar. I do suspect that the world has been becoming more the same now than it was before, and simply because of the rise of global companies – that was just not around before. And the idea that you can go into a city and find the same shops and restaurants that you do back home is really strange. I mean, that would not have been there back in the 17th and 18th centuries. That said, I do think what we were talking about before – using technology to find your way around – I think that\'s going to give you the impression that things are all the same because you\'re looking at them through the same medium. That is an illusion. The real world is not all the same. New York is very different than Paris. Something in the US that I personally am really fond of is investigating small towns that are not listed in guidebooks, in search of what Bill Bryson once described as Anywhere, USA. I really enjoy that. Seeing how these small towns do differ from each other, but also what they have in common. For me, there\'s a reall attraction in that, especially in the US.</li><li>Mark: Are there any that are top of the list for you?</li><li>Emily: Yes, <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silverton,_Colorado\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Silverton, Colorado</a>. I enjoyed that enormously. As a British tourist, so much of it is totally unfamiliar, even though I got the impression that, to the people who lived there and are from Colorado, this is all just par for the course. It’s regular looking houses, it’s regular looking shops that, as is a non-American trying the local bars, seeing the local kind of pancake breakfast, all of this was completely new and really stunningly beautiful.</li><li>Mark: Just to wrap up, if you look forward and you think about philosophy and travel, what are some of the new things that philosophers are thinking about on travel?</li><li>Emily: I think the big thing right now it is the ethics of climate change and how best to travel responsibly. I think that issue is going to dwarf everything else in the philosophy of travel for several decades to come. Whether or not we are partaking in carbon off-setting schemes is enough, whether or not we should be looking to educate ourselves more about the places that we travel, possibly even traveling less but aiming for higher quality experiences. I think that stuff is really going to dominate. However, there is other stuff going on too. Looking at the issues posed by space travel and space tourism, which I don\'t think is that far away, actually. I mean in the immediate decades, it\'s going to be the province of the super wealthy, but I think past that it will become more and more accessible and that\'s also going to pose some ethical issues like the cost of fuel to get people up out of the atmosphere is gonna be enormous. But also, that will prompt us to think about our place in the world. I obviously have not been up into space, but were I to go, I imagine it would cause me to reflect on how little the planet Earth is in the grand scheme of things. And I wonder whether that will lead us to reconsider our place in the world and how we\'re treating the planet that we live on. I think space travel is going to be really rife with opportunities for philosophical reflection.</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #166</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_166.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #166 — What Is The Meaning of Travel?','','inherit','closed','closed','','2807-revision-v1','','','2021-01-03 20:57:57','2021-01-04 01:57:57','',2807,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/03/2807-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2997,1,'2021-01-14 19:07:19','2021-01-15 00:07:19','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":2168,\"width\":300,\"height\":300,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large is-resized\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1-1024x1024.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2168\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"/></a><figcaption>Wait! I need to unpair my iPhone!</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Was all set to head to San Diego for a week\'s break from Chicago\'s grey January and then looked at the COVID restrictions... and then pivoted to Arizona. With people starting to think about 2021 travel, I pulled together my top 5 travel planning tips. Slow vaccine roll-out will probably keep us restricted for longer than we thought. Andrea Amico of <a href=\"https://www.privacy4cars.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Privacy4Cars</a> joins us to talk about the dangers of leaving our data behind in rental cars. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_171.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go over to the <em>Subscribe</em> section on the right to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #171: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>This Week</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. Stayed off the road over the entire holiday season which let me skip the TSA’s new post-lockdown checkpoint record of <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/coronavirus/passenger-throughput\">1.3 million on January 3rd</a>, the last Sunday of the holiday season -- though, to be fair,&nbsp; this is only just over half the 2.4 million passengers who flew on the same Sunday last year. And with every US airline except Delta now back to selling middle seats, it makes sense that load factors also ratcheted up over the holidays. I haven’t seen any industry-wide numbers yet, but <a href=\"https://www.ittn.ie/news/confidence-in-boeing-737-max-holding-firm/\">American’s COO did say that the load factor on their 737 Maxes over the last week of the holiday season was 90%</a>. Now, most of those Maxes are flying between LGA and MIA, always a busy holiday route, but I’ve seen reports of many other packed flights, as well as the much higher load . I was never a big fan of completely full flights pre-coronavirus and, as you can imagine, am even less so now pre-widespread vaccine distribution. So, I’m not too bothered that we didn’t try to get out of town over the holidays.</li><li>However, staying in town through the rest of January is a whole different thing because January is absolutely the worst part of Chicago’s winter. So, after&nbsp; Thanksgiving weekend, on what used to be called Cyber Monday when we actually shopped in physical stores, instead of trolling through Amazon, I was trolling through travel sites looking for cheap flights to someplace warm the 3rd wk of Jan. I figured that’d be long enough for any holiday COVID spike to work its way through the system.</li><li>I’d had some friends who’d gone down to Mexico, felt safe in the tourist zones, didn’t have any problems, came back healthy; but I don’t do well sitting on a beach for more than a day or two and I wanted to keep it a bit simpler, so we decided to stay in the US, which pretty quickly narrowed our search to Southern California, South Florida, and Arizona. Since we’d spent time last winter in both Arizona and Florida, we decided to do California and go as far down the coast as we could get, which was San Diego.&nbsp; And, as luck would have it, Southwest had cheap direct flights from Chicago Midway and I had Southwest travel credits from one of last spring’s flight cancellations burning a hole in my virtual pocket, so *boom* I booked it</li><li>On, what turned out to be, 3 days before the governor locked down most of California. But a friend hit the ground there a week before Christmas and said “Eh, it’s not a problem.” So, we stayed the course and didn’t really pay any attention to it until after New Years when we thought, you know, we should book a place to stay. And that’s when we started to pay attention. Bike and kayak rental places were open as “outdoor recreation” businesses. But vacation rental and hotel booking sites all pointed to the California Public Health Department statement -- “no hotel or lodging entity in California shall accept or honor out-of-state reservations for nonessential travel” which our January snowbird getaway definitely didn’t qualify as. Would things ease up in a couple of weeks? The trend lines on the state’s COVID website didn’t seem to be pointing in that direction.</li><li>So last Monday when I received another blast of airline sales emails, it seemed like the right time for a pivot. X-ing off California, we were back to Florida and Arizona. We talked to friends already down in Florida; they said the south beaches were already filling up with snowbirds, so we opted for drier sand and swung our Southwest flights over to Phoenix.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>But since we’d been in Phoenix last winter and continuing in the spirit of visiting not-quite-A-list places in the US we’ve never been while weaving around quarantines, we’re driving further south down I-10 to Tucson. We’re running the same travel planning play we did for our August trip to Michigan’s UP -- focus on outdoor activities like hiking and biking, have back-ups in case of last-minute closures, and above all, build a list of microbreweries with outdoor seating.</li><li>Bridge Music -- Say Their Names - Love and Remember by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2020 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/62230 Ft: DJ Lang</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Back at the beginning of December when the Pfizer vaccine approval was imminent and the Moderna approval wasn’t far behind, most travelers -- myself included -- got a bit giddy and started to think about the world opening up in the spring, the summer at the latest. Fast forward 30 days and, happy new year, that initial blast of vaccine optimism melted when it met the ugly realities of last-mile logistics. Spelunking through the stream of low-fare emails from American and Southwest and Delta and United and Iberia and British Airways filling my inbox, the consensus across airline demand forecasters seems to be that nothing’s going to change until the end of May. But even that doesn’t explain why, say, American, sends out an email pushing “Plan a European Vacation” that includes spring fares (March, April, May fares) to London, Manchester, and Madrid. I don’t know anyone who expects European vacation travel to open up in the next 3-4 months. Give credit to Delta for highlighting more achievable destinations -- Cancun, the Bahamas, Phoenix, and just about every airport in Florida with a runway long enough to handle a jet.&nbsp;</li><li>What will be as interesting is what the airlines and hotels do about elite status protection if travel continues to be slow through the summer. Remember that last spring, after it was clear that business travel was canceled for most of 2020, all the big travel companies grandfathered everyone into their status for this year. What you earned in 2019, you kept through this year, 2021. But now what? We talked about this a bit in t<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">he November episode (#169)</a> when the companies made their opening bid, knocking 20-30% off elite qualifying clip levels. Kinda like the low-fare sales -- it’ll be interesting to see what they offer come May.</li><li>We’ve talked in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\">prior episodes</a> about the challenges of planning a trip during COVID -- deciphering lockdown rules; parsing what can seem to be the almost theological differences between stay-at-home advisories vs. orders. And after all that, trying to keep up-to-date on last-minute changes. Things are changing so fast -- open, shut; outdoor seating vs just doing takeout -- that the normal crowdsourced tools we’d use -- things like Google Maps, Yelp -- can’t keep up because they don’t give a real-time view. The Foursquare app used to do it, but since they split <a href=\"https://www.swarmapp.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Swarm</a> from Foursquare, it seems that the real-time data is now sold just to business customers to target mobile ads. But, one app that I use does provide a real-time view into some traffic -- <a href=\"https://untappd.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Uptappd</a>. Yes, it’s just craft beer nerd traffic -- people checking in their beers at tap rooms and beer bars -- but that’s a kind of traffic that I’m pretty interested in.&nbsp; After our pivot to Tucson, I wanted to see what beer places were open for service, not just take-out. I could’ve spent time clicking around the app, but instead, I decided to put one of my lockdown self-improvement projects to use. Over the fall, I’d taken some on-line Python programming courses on Coursera, so I wrote a short program that pulled the most recent check-ins from the Tucson area and started making a list of places that are open. I probably could’ve made that list quicker by just plunking away on the app, but not with the same sense of achievement.</li><li>We talked about COVID-19 vaccination and test certification in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">last episode</a>. Over the last month, it seems that proof of negative test results rather than of vaccinations is the new hotness. Canada, the UK, and now the US are the latest countries requiring a negative COVID test for inbound passengers. It makes sense. The CDC released a paper in November -- in one of my favorite publications, the <a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/index.html\"><em>Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report</em></a> (I’ll link to it in the show notes) -- saying that <a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6945a4.htm\">temperature and symptom screening at airports is pretty worthless</a>; it only picked up 1 case for every 85,000 passengers screened. So not hard for the switch to pre-flight testing to be more effective. For Canada and the UK, though, they’ve layered the test requirements <em>on top of </em>their existing 14-day quarantine requirements, which just adds to the confusion -- especially since the Canadian government gave travelers one week’s notice of the new testing requirement. I haven’t seen the US regs yet, but the Canadian rules say you must have “proof in hand” of a negative test result, and that proof can be either electronic or paper. You gotta think that, pretty quick, that “proof in hand” has gotta default to “proof on phone” otherwise, forged paper results are going to be the new fake IDs from our teens. Last November, French cops <a href=\"https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2020/11/10/fake-tests-covid-flights/\">busted a ring selling fake test results at CDG</a>. The going rate was €150-300 which converts to something like $180-370. That compares to $125 for a <a href=\"https://fakeyourid.com/\">good fake driver’s license</a>.&nbsp; Since the last episode, the Caribbean country of <a href=\"https://skift.com/2020/12/18/airlines-still-waiting-on-governments-for-a-single-digital-health-passport-standard/\">Aruba was the first country</a> to standardize on one of the digital passport apps, <a href=\"https://commonpass.org/\">CommonPass</a>, the one backed by the World Economic Forum, the Davos gang, and, we mentioned, also used by United for their EWR-LHR flight. But then Sing Air picked its rival, <a href=\"https://www.iata.org/en/programs/passenger/travel-pass/\">Travel Pass</a> from IATA, to use on flights to/from Malaysia. So it still seems like, when it does go to “proof on phone”, we’re gonna need to set aside some memory screen space for a bunch of apps.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge music -- Staying Positive by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2019 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/59438 Ft: greg_baumont</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Leaving Data Behind in The Rental Car</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A couple of weeks back, I retweeted a news article - the third suspect charged in the fatal shooting of a retired Chicago fireman during a carjacking was caught because he’d synced his phone to the audio system of the stolen car.&nbsp; I dunno -- fleeing a murder but worrying about getting a ticket for not using hands free.&nbsp; I dunno. Good they caught the bad guy, but what about us law-abiding frequent travelers? When the Hertz or Avis person walks up to me at the car return lane, they always remind me not to leave anything behind; to remember to take my sunglasses and my mobile phone. But they never remind me to delete all the data I synced to the car.&nbsp;</li><li>And with more of our lives getting stored in our phones, I asked Andrea Amico, founder of the company <a href=\"https://www.privacy4cars.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Privacy4Cars</a>, to come onto the podcast to talk about the privacy problems at the intersection of cars and smartphones.<ul><li>Mark: Andrea, how did you get involved in this space?</li></ul><ul><li>Andrea: One of the companies that used to run was one of the largest used car inspection companies. We inspected a lot of vehicles that were ready to be sold. I just noticed that people were leaving their digital lives behind.</li><li>Mark: We first talked about the privacy/security issues around pairing your smartphone with your car rental about four years ago. Bluetooth-enabled entertainment systems were just becoming more common in rental car fleets as hands-free call laws became widespread. Even today, the first thing I do is to sync my iPhone. And I\'ve noticed more times than not, the sync slots are all full -- personalized names, Jan\'s iPhone, Timmy\'s iPhone. You end up having to delete at least one of them to make room for yours. And then, once paired, most phones by default, end up downloading all your contacts and your phone numbers and things like that. So, Jan and Timmy have left behind all of their contacts and all their phone numbers and that\'s just bad in so many ways.</li><li>Andrea: When you sync your phone through Bluetooth or you plug it into the USB port or now, in some newer cars, you just walk into the car and the car automatically sniffs your phone and start syncing to it, including those with Android Auto and Apple CarPlay. When that happens, you are creating a mini-clone of your phone inside the vehicle.</li><li>Mark: What other information are people leaving behind when they don\'t clear themselves out of a rental car?</li><li>Andrea: All sorts -- your phone book, your call logs, the text messages, including the body, meaning the actual text of the text messages; that stuff will be left behind. But also all sorts of meta data that allows criminals or law enforcement or just people who want to snoop on you to re-identify you, anything from the identifiers of your phones which are unique, your Bluetooth MAC address. Not to mention, of course, all your navigation data. I mean, you can reconstruct where people have been, just by data that has been stored in the infotainment system. And then you have, whether you are on Twitter and Facebook and what are the handles of those things, which are the last photos you have taken? What files have you synced, the emails, calendar entries. There\'s all sorts of stuff that people really don\'t understand that they\'re living behind.</li><li>Mark: But when people <em>do </em>delete pairings are they deleting all that information? Or is there some data still retained in that vehicle?</li><li>Andrea: &nbsp;By and large, deleting the data following the manufacturer\'s directions is helpful in preventing third parties to having access. And so if there is anything left behind, it requires a much deeper forensic type of analysis that is typically not accessible. But for most people, following the manufacturer\'s directions on how to remove the data, it is a very easy to do and very effective defense against getting their data being in the hands of somebody else.</li><li>Mark: That\'s where <a href=\"https://www.privacy4cars.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Privacy4Cars</a> comes in. That\'s where your app comes in -- helping people get that right?</li><li>Andrea: Yes, we have a free app that people can download, and you can just search for Privacy4Cars on the <a href=\"https://apps.apple.com/us/app/privacy4cars/id1370969499\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple App Store</a> or <a href=\"https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.privacy4cars\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Play</a>, depending what kind of phone you have, and download it for free.</li><li>Mark: The last time on the podcast we talked about this topic was a little over a year ago, October 2019. &nbsp;I\'d gotten a notice from Hertz that they had changed their terms and conditions. I noticed that Hertz had specifically carved out liability from me leaving information from a Bluetooth pairing. And now, on one hand, I could see that point. I\'ve actively and voluntarily synced my phone to the car and in doing so, caused my information to be downloaded. But at what point does that sort of digital maintenance, clearing personal identifiable information, after every rental become part of the rental company’s overall maintenance responsibility, like checking the oil levels and the tire pressure.</li><li>Andrea: I believe that the time has already passed, and it\'s been in the past for at least a year, right? At least, the passage of California Consumer Privacy Act. And probably you can go further back in the past because of other types of regulations. And there are some regulators who have actually spoken about this. So in the United States, you have the FTC that has issued already four guidances on the need to delete personal information. In Europe, they went as far as to give a guideline that mandates the removal of the personal information. Beyond rental, when people are traveling, sometimes they rent, sometimes they ride-share, and very often it happens to me that I in an Uber or Lyft and you have a very nice driver that tells you, “Hey, you need to fill up the tank on your battery? Here\'s a cable.” And the first thing I do is glance -- &nbsp;where does the cable end up? If it goes into the lighter, that\'s only power. So yes, I’ll recharge my phone. But if it goes straight &nbsp;into the USB port of the car, don\'t charge the phone unless you\'re really desperate, because as soon as your phone powers back up, it will start downloading all your information into a stranger\'s car. So you definitely don\'t want to do that.</li><li>Mark: Andrea Amico, founder of <a href=\"https://www.privacy4cars.com\">Privacy4Cars.com</a>, you can find his app on the <a href=\"https://apps.apple.com/us/app/privacy4cars/id1370969499\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple App store</a> and on <a href=\"https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.privacy4cars\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Play</a>. Andrea, thank you very much for taking the time to talk to us today.</li><li>Andrea: Thank you. Mark. I really enjoyed talking to you.</li></ul></li><li>Bridge music -- Latinium by Javolenus (c) copyright 2020 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Javolenus/62650 Ft: NiGiD</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>2021 Travel Planning Pro Tips</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I’ve been talking about travel planning in the time of COVID across maybe 6 months of episodes. And since January is always a big travel month, especially this year with some vouchers from last spring’s flight cancellations coming up on their 12-month expiration dates, combined with 10 months of pent-up demand and another 6, maybe 9 months to go, I thought I’d pull all my planning tips together here -- and probably in a blog post after I get back from Tucson.</li><li>First, book now. As I said earlier, there’s a steady stream of sales out there right now as airlines, hotels, and rental car companies are looking for cash to get through the start of the year. There are great domestic deals now, and if you can part with some cash now, good international deals for the second half of the year. Prices are only going to go up as vaccine rates improve, and that pent-up demand overwhelms any squeamishness about sitting next to a stranger. I’m eyeing that same American ORD-BCN 787 non-stop that I wasn’t able to take at the end of last September. The deals aren’t as smoking as they were last March when the travel world was in a freefall; the airlines have gotten a little smarter over the past year. But with cancellation fees still waived, there’s not much risk.&nbsp;</li><li>Second, check your destination’s health requirements -- and keep checking until you leave. Many of the airlines have built good web resources that summarize any restrictions by destination. Of the US majors, I think <a href=\"https://www.united.com/ual/en/us/fly/travel/restrictions-map.html\">United’s</a> is the easiest to use but I think American’s is the most complete. They actually link out to a Canadian company, <a href=\"https://apply.joinsherpa.com/travel-restrictions?affiliateId=americanairlines\">Sherpa</a>, that took my Arizona itinerary and noted that, while there’s no quarantine restrictions in Arizona, there are when I return to Chicago.&nbsp; <a href=\"https://www.delta.com/us/en/plan-your-next-trip/where-we-fly\">Delta’s</a> is pretty good too. I’ll put links to them in the show notes. But you can’t check once and be done. We talked at the top of the show about Canada putting in a new testing requirement with 7-days notice. And domestically, states are changing restrictions weekly. One trick I’ve talked about is to start following your destination’s local newspapers on Twitter to get any early warnings on anything new.&nbsp;</li><li>Third, read the cancellation rules a lot more closely. Being nimble and able to react to changes at your destination -- like Irene and I did with our pivot from San Diego to Tucson -- depends on being thoughtful about the cancellation risks you take. Right now, flights have the lowest cancellation risk; Airbnb and vacation rentals, the highest. Hotels are in-between. Our default strategy then is to book the flight as soon as we can, don’t do pre-paid hotel rooms or car rentals, and wait as long as we can before booking an Airbnb.</li><li>Fourth, overload your itinerary with outdoor activities like hiking and biking so last-minute closures or restrictions don’t leave you aimlessly flipping through the hotel TV channels. It was the big trend last summer -- airlines dialed down flights between big city airports like the ORD-LGA run and toward beaches and mountains. And it continues -- all the imagery in the airline and hotel “flash sale” emails over the past couple of weeks. But it does mean spending more time trolling the AccuWeather and Weather Channel web sites because an outside-heavy itinerary is more vulnerable to big storm fronts.</li><li>And finally, stay flexible, expect delays, and be patient. If there’s anything we learned from 2020, it’s that something will screw up your plans -- a positive COVID test will shut down the restaurant you really wanted to eat at, capacity restrictions will mean a line to get into something that was top of your list. Have back-up plans and give everyone you meet the benefit of the doubt. Like you, they’re just trying to get through this safe and sound.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #171</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li>In this episode’s tech notes, if you check out the show notes, you’ll find a full transcript of my interview with Andrea Amico courtesy of my free tier of Amazon Web Services which includes 60 minutes a month of their Transcribe service. I learned about it when watching a session during their virtual Re:Invent conference. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/12/17/podcast-147-holiday-travel-tips-notes-from-santa-fe/\">episode #147</a>, I talked about going to it in person in Las Vegas a couple of years ago -- me and 50,000 other attendees, mostly pudgy, pasty-faced guys power walking up and down the strip, backpacks strapped down tight, ignoring the showgirls on the corner so they wouldn’t be late to, say, the sold-out tutorial on best practices for ingesting streaming data from IoT devices into AWS’ time series database. Less stressful, though less entertaining this year. Anyhow, watching the session on Transcribe got me thinking about how I could use it for the interviews I’ve done over the past 12 months. I’ve started on the most current episodes, working my way back. So far I have three done --this interview with Andrea, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/09/19/podcast-167-6-months-on-why-keep-travel-cards/\">episode #167</a>’s interview with Matt Schulz about travel credit cards, and <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\">episode #166</a>’s interview with Emily Thomas about the meaning of travel. I’ll keep chipping away at the backlog as my 60 free minutes a month allows.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>, as well as asking Alexa, Siri, and Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_171.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips','Pivoting from San Diego to Tucson for COVID restrictions; planning tips for travel during COVID; CEO of Privacy4Cars talks about leaving data behind in rental cars','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips','','','2021-10-01 17:09:46','2021-10-01 22:09:46','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=2997',0,'post','',0),
(2998,1,'2021-01-11 13:35:23','2021-01-11 18:35:23','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":2960,\"width\":300,\"height\":300,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large is-resized\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2960\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"/><figcaption>How Do I Insert This Into My iPhone<br>(DoD photo by EJ Hersom)</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>No Thanksgiving travel, but looking at the travel volume for this, the busiest travel week of the year, shows just how far things have fallen. The Qantas CEO said \"No vax, no fly\", so we dig into the emerging world of digital vaccine passports. And then I trace my travel genealogy, wondering if road warrior-ism is hereditary. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_171.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go over to the <em>Subscribe</em> section on the right to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/949687216&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #171: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. And again, no travel since the last episode. Not too surprising given the way things are going right now. Back in April, I’d jumped on one of those smokin’ American Airlines’ promotions to book flights to London for Thanksgiving. Which then -- not surprisingly -- got cancelled at the beginning of September.&nbsp; So I was back to what has been my typical Thanksgiving travel pattern for the past 10-15 years -- staying at home to avoid the crowds on what is always the busiest travel week of the year. PK -- pre-kids -- Irene and I would always travel over the holidays, splitting Thanksgiving and Christmas between my family in Southern California and hers in Chicago. But post-kids -- which is also PK, so I guess it should be AK -- after kids -- we started staying at home. And I’d figure out how to “ground” myself from business travel also. I found that the challenge of holiday travel wasn’t necessarily the crowds; it’s the make-up of the crowds; what some road warriors might call “clueless” travelers. I think “amateur” is certainly a more charitable and probably more accurate term. Even more so this year with so many road warriors out of practice after being off the road since March. Lots of those folks definitely in danger of losing their “professional” traveler status.</li><li>I saw an interesting graph the other day comparing last year’s and this year’s day-by-day airport travel volumes over the Thanksgiving weekend. No surprises comparing the Wednesday travel volumes, what is traditionally the busiest travel day of the year. Last year’s Wednesday saw 2.6 million passengers, almost 2½ times busier than this year. I expected that. But what really caught my eye was that this year’s peak day -- <a href=\"https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/thanksgiving-travel-volume-2020-pandemic/index.html\">Sunday at about 1.2 million </a>-- was still a lot less than last year’s slowest day, Thanksgiving, at about 1.6 million. I didn’t travel last year at Thanksgiving, but did in 2018.&nbsp; Irene and I broke our no-travel rule and flew down to Santa Fe, NM on Thanksgiving Day. Back in episode <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/12/17/podcast-147-holiday-travel-tips-notes-from-santa-fe/\">#147</a>, I said that Thanksgiving Day flight was one of the least stressful travel experiences I’d ever had — no traffic on the drive to ORD, no lines. The TSA agents were hanging around just looking for people to screen. And that day, there were around 25% more people in airports than this year’s <em>busiest</em> day. I shouldn’t be surprised, but all the pictures I saw in the news coverage made it look like airports were a lot more crowded.&nbsp;</li><li>Our apartment is just south of one of the northern approaches to ORD. Flights from the east come in over the lake -- seats A, B, and C get a great view of the city skyline while seats D, E, and F get to look down into Wrigley Field -- then&nbsp; over the northwest side of the city, landing on one of the runways north of the terminal. I’ve always been impressed by the choreography of ORD. On a clear Friday afternoon, driving up the tollway that runs east of the airport, I’d see planes on parallel approaches landing simultaneously -- one to the north of the terminal and one to the south -- and looking up, see the lights of planes on approach behind them -- 2, 3, 4.... Back in April, during Chicago’s lockdown, I’d sit out on the rooftop deck -- because what else was I going to do? -- and maybe see one plane coming in over the lake on that approach. But now I’m seeing more planes -- sometimes 3, 4 in a row. Don’t know that they’re all carrying passengers -- some could be temporary cargo carriers taking some of that e-commerce money, with boxes instead of seats under the overhead bins. But I can feel travel starting to pick up. It could be a tough winter, but I’m trying to look out over the horizon a bit; trying to look forward to spring.</li><li>Bridge Music -- Leviathan by Kirkoid (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Kirkoid/31109</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>TravelCommons contributor Allan Marko commented on my little lockdown game with my Google Mini -- changing the voice to, say, an English accent and then asking about the weather in London.&nbsp; Allan wrote:<ul><li>I often change the Siri voice for a bit of variety. Currently “Australian Female” is providing my CarPlay directions. you can also ask Siri to “Play TravelCommons”…</li></ul></li><li>Which immediately got me digging into Siri’s settings, looking for the Voice options. I found I had a choice of American, Australian, British, Indian, Irish, and South African. Since I’d already used the first three with my Google Mini, it was between the last three. I chose Irish for now, but will probably switch to South African before the end of the month. Actually, Waze, the nav app, always impressed me with the number of voice and language options. Every once in a while, I switch Irene’s Waze over to Hungarian before she’s heading out somewhere. For some reason, I get more of a laugh out of it than she does.</li><li>TravelCommons listener Dan Grabon and I have been trading notes as we’ve each slogged through Thoreau’s <em>Walden</em>. We both started it back in April, in the height of the lockdown. Everybody was deciding that, with nothing much else to do, it was a good time to pick up that classic you’ve always been meaning to get to. Dan started out with <em>The Brothers Karamazov</em>, which I thought was damned impressive. I first reached for Whitman’s <em>Leaves of Grass</em>, but then thought I needed something a bit more down-to-earth, something that wouldn’t need quite that level of interpretation and abstract thinking. And <em>Walden</em>, about Thoreau’s self-isolation in the woods outside of Concord, MA, seemed a better fit with the lockdown. Dan finished last month, at the beginning of November. I was 50 pages behind, so I didn’t finish ‘til Thanksgiving -- it was tough cutting through the tryptophan fog, but I gutted it through. Dan said he was staying with Thoreau, moving onto <em>Civil Disobedience</em> before shelving the book. I pivoted to non-fiction, <em>Why We Sleep</em>, where a neuroscientist and sleep expert spends some 300+ pages saying “If you don’t sleep 8 hours, you’re killing yourself” which got me doing some mental math. Between jet lag from all the&nbsp; international flights and waking up at 4am to make 6am flights to LGA, I’ve probably dropped 5 years off my life. Though, given some dementia running through my family history, I might not have remembered those years anyways.</li><li>And I show up on the other side of the mic talking travel pro tips with Matt Wilson on his <a href=\"https://www.under30experiences.com/blog/travel-like-a-pro-with-mark-peacock-of-travelcommons\">Millennial Travel Podcast</a>.&nbsp; I’m trying to remember when we recorded this -- had to be pre-April 2019 because I was still in the suburban TravelCommons studio and Matt was hanging out down in Costa Rica. The connection fuzzes out now and again, but it was a fun conversation. I’ll put a link in the episode in the show notes but fair warning -- it’s mostly me rattling on for an hour. Listening back to it, I’m kinda embarrassed that I don’t give Matt much of a chance to get a word in edgewise.</li><li>In the last episode, I talked about the work-from-hotel offerings from Marriott, Hilton, and Hyatt. They all had their own twists, but Hyatt’s was the most unique in that their “Work from Hyatt” offer was resort-focused and had a 7-night minimum. I said it wasn’t so much a WeWork replacement as a digital nomad trial. Well, I’m guessing that they didn’t get much uptake on it because I just got another email from Hyatt with a new offering -- “Office for the Day” -- that pretty much matches Marriott’s Day Pass. Like I said last month, these offerings all feel a bit “toe in the water”, a bit opportunistic. And now that we’re starting to get better visibility into post-vaccine timelines, I wonder how long they’ll last -- will people still want to pay to work in a hotel room after all the Starbucks stores have reopened.</li><li>I’ve talked in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/12/podcast-120-where-do-guidebooks-fit-in-i-hate-shopping-for-suitcases\">past</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/09/28/podcast-124-craft-beer-hunting-i-hate-rick-steves\">episodes</a> about how I’m a bit of a knuckle-dragger regarding printed travel guides. I still find a physical book useful when traveling. But I’ve been wondering how quickly these physical guides will be able to push out post-COVID editions to reflect the closures of bars, restaurants, and independent shops they’ve recommended. I was running through my own Chicago recommendation list from 2019. A bunch of my favorite places have closed; it’s about an even split between “Closed forever, good-bye, we’ve taken down our sign” and “Closed until Spring… we hope.” The final proofs of the 2021 editions have to already be baked if not already at the printers. I dunno, maybe they’ll all post errata pages that you can download, print off, and then stick in your books.</li><li>In a massive intersection of all things social media, I posted a <a href=\"https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/tiktok-hotel-room-chef/index.html\">CNN article</a> on the TravelCommons Facebook page that a friend, a hotel company CIO, sent me on LinkedIn that showed TikTok videos of people cooking meals in hotel rooms using an iron for a griddle, a hot water kettle for a steamer, a pants presser as an oven, and the one that really wowed me -- a coffee maker as a sous vide water bath. I don’t know if I should be impressed by the ingenuity or looking to set up as a ghost kitchen/delivery service wherever they are because I’ve never seen anyone go to that extent to cook their own meal in a hotel room. Even guys I knew trying to squeeze the last pennies out of their per diems wouldn’t do much more than boil water for their Cup O’Noodles or work hard not to burn their microwave popcorn. I’ll also put a link in the show notes to the TikTok account of one of the guys, Jago Randles. His TikTok series,<a href=\"https://www.tiktok.com/@jagoscrandles\"> Isolation Kitchen</a>, has about 150,000 followers. He does some impressive stuff. But I will make sure, going forward, that I rinse out the coffee maker and wipe down the iron before using them.</li><li>For many frequent travelers, a key early milestone of the pandemic was when airlines and hotels gave them a year’s push on their status -- moving the expiration date from Jan 2021 to Jan 2022. Big sigh of relief. Then for Southwest fliers, another milestone -- drink coupon expiration dates all got pushed to the end of this year. Whew! All’s right in the traveling world. But a couple of days ago, I was rummaging around in my messenger bag and out tumbled 5 Southwest drink coupons -- one with a Sept expiration date; the rest, December 31. Look Southwest, I don’t want to seem greedy. I did get a year’s push on A-List and 6 months on Companion Pass. But I’d love you even more if you gave me another 6 months on those drink coupons. Nope, don’t say anything now; just think about it.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge music -- Ethereal (nop mix) by @nop (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Lancefield/34818</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Car Rental Privacy</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>xxx<ul><li>Mark: Andrea, how did you get involved in this space?</li><li>Andrea: One of the companies that used to run was one of the largest used car inspection companies. We inspected a lot of vehicles that were ready to be sold. I just noticed that people were leaving their digital lives behind.</li><li>Mark: We first talked about the privacy/security issues around pairing your smartphone with your car rental about four years ago. Bluetooth-enabled entertainment systems were just becoming more common in rental car fleets as hands-free call laws became widespread. Even today, the first thing I do is to sync my iPhone. And I\'ve noticed more times than not, the sync slots are all full -- personalized names, Jan\'s iPhone, Timmy\'s iPhone. You end up having to delete at least one of them to make room for yours. And then, once paired, most phones by default, end up downloading all your contacts and your phone numbers and things like that. So, Jan and Timmy have left behind all of their contacts and all their phone numbers and that\'s just bad in so many ways.</li><li>Andrea: When you sync your phone through Bluetooth or you plug it into the USB port or now, in some newer cars, you just walk into the car and the car automatically sniffs your phone and start syncing to it, including those with Android Auto and Apple CarPlay. When that happens, you are creating a mini-clone of your phone inside the vehicle.</li><li>Mark: What other information are people leaving behind when they don\'t clear themselves out of a rental car?</li><li>Andrea: All sorts -- your phone book, your call logs, the text messages, including the body, meaning the actual text of the text messages; that stuff will be left behind. But also all sorts of meta data that allows criminals or law enforcement or just people who want to snoop on you to re-identify you, anything from the identifiers of your phones which are unique, your Bluetooth MAC address. Not to mention, of course, all your navigation data. I mean, you can reconstruct where people have been, just by data that has been stored in the infotainment system. And then you have, whether you are on Twitter and Facebook and what are the handles of those things, which are the last photos you have taken? What files have you synced, the emails, calendar entries. There\'s all sorts of stuff that people really don\'t understand that they\'re living behind.</li><li>Mark: But when people <em>do </em>delete pairings are they deleting all that information? Or is there some data still retained in that vehicle?</li><li>Andrea:  By and large, deleting the data following the manufacturer\'s directions is helpful in preventing third parties to having access. And so if there is anything left behind, it requires a much deeper forensic type of analysis that is typically not accessible. But for most people, following the manufacturer\'s directions on how to remove the data, it is a very easy to do and very effective defense against getting their data being in the hands of somebody else.</li><li>Mark: That\'s where <a href=\"https://www.privacy4cars.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Privacy4Cars</a> comes in. That\'s where your app comes in -- helping people get that right?</li><li>Andrea: Yes, we have a free app that people can download, and you can just search for Privacy4Cars on the <a href=\"https://apps.apple.com/us/app/privacy4cars/id1370969499\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple App Store</a> or <a href=\"https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.privacy4cars\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Play</a>, depending what kind of phone you have, and download it for free.</li><li>Mark: The last time on the podcast we talked about this topic was a little over a year ago, October 2019.  I\'d gotten a notice from Hertz that they had changed their terms and conditions. I noticed that Hertz had specifically carved out liability from me leaving information from a Bluetooth pairing. And now, on one hand, I could see that point. I\'ve actively and voluntarily synced my phone to the car and in doing so, caused my information to be downloaded. But at what point does that sort of digital maintenance, clearing personal identifiable information, after every rental become part of the rental company’s overall maintenance responsibility, like checking the oil levels and the tire pressure.</li><li>Andrea: I believe that the time has already passed, and it\'s been in the past for at least a year, right? At least, the passage of California Consumer Privacy Act. And probably you can go further back in the past because of other types of regulations. And there are some regulators who have actually spoken about this. So in the United States, you have the FTC that has issued already four guidances on the need to delete personal information. In Europe, they went as far as to give a guideline that mandates the removal of the personal information. Beyond rental, when people are traveling, sometimes they rent, sometimes they ride-share, and very often it happens to me that I in an Uber or Lyft and you have a very nice driver that tells you, “Hey, you need to fill up the tank on your battery? Here\'s a cable.” And the first thing I do is glance --  where does the cable end up? If it goes into the lighter, that\'s only power. So yes, I’ll recharge my phone. But if it goes straight  into the USB port of the car, don\'t charge the phone unless you\'re really desperate, because as soon as your phone powers back up, it will start downloading all your information into a stranger\'s car. So you definitely don\'t want to do that.</li><li>Mark: Andrea Amico, founder of <a href=\"https://www.privacy4cars.com\">Privacy4Cars.com</a>, you can find his app on the <a href=\"https://apps.apple.com/us/app/privacy4cars/id1370969499\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple App store</a> and on <a href=\"https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.privacy4cars\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Play</a>. Andrea, thank you very much for taking the time to talk to us today.</li><li>Andrea: Thank you. Mark. I really enjoyed talking to you.</li></ul></li><li>I remember going to a travel clinic before my first flight to India; getting shot up with MMR, DTP, Hepatitis, and Typhoid vaccines and being given my <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carte_Jaune\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Yellow Card</a> -- officially my International Certificate of Vaccination or Prophylaxis -- listing all my shots. They told me to carry that with me to India, which I did and to Vietnam and Thailand and Singapore and China. No one ever asked to see it, not in an airport, an immigration line, a hotel,....  It looks like the plans are that we’ll get a vaccination card from the CDC after receiving the first dose of COVID-19 vaccine. But that card isn’t meant as a validated proof of vaccination; it’s more of a reminder to go back in a couple of weeks for the second shot. </li><li>That handwritten piece of paper probably won’t pass muster at the Qantas boarding gate, and so that’s why we’re starting to see a bit of a vaccine passport app land grab going on. United has been testing the <a href=\"https://thecommonsproject.org/commonpass\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">CommonPass app</a> on their COVID-free EWR-LHR flight. You get your COVID test at the United Club near gate C93 and the results are uploaded into the app which then will display a QR code to the gate agent. CommonPass is being spun up with support from the World Economic Forum. Cathay Pacific, Lufthansa, SwissAir, and JetBlue also have plans to use it. Delta and Alitalia are trialing the <a href=\"https://www.aokpass.com/en/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">AOKPass </a>developed by the Int’l Chamber of Commerce on their COVID-free ATL-Rome flight. It uses blockchain for medical certificate storage, so bonus points to them in technology buzzword bingo. IATA, the Int’l Air Transport Association, an airline trade group, says they’re finishing up their app, <a href=\"https://www.iata.org/en/programs/passenger/travel-pass/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Travel Pass</a>, and will be piloting it with IAG, the parent of British Airways, Iberia, and Aer Lingus, in early 2021. And the World Health Organization says they’re looking at Estonia’s e-vaccination certificates as <a href=\"https://www.who.int/news-room/feature-stories/detail/estonia-and-who-to-jointly-develop-digital-vaccine-certificate-to-strengthen-covax#:~:text=WHO%20and%20Estonia%20recently%20agreed,access%20to%20COVID%2D19%20vaccines.\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the basis of a sort of “smart” Yellow Card app</a>.</li><li>I’m sure I’m missing a whole lot more; I just got tired of reading the same rehashed press release verbiage about secure and verifiable storage of health certifications. Going through this, it starts to feel like the health equivalent of those scooter apps, where I need half-a-dozen of them on my phone so I can rent the closest scooter to me. Unless someone blinks, it seems like I’ll need 3 or 4 of these vaccine passports to cover all my travel bases. But after reading through all the press releases and the infographics and the FAQs, none of these apps were real clear on how I get my physical CDC vaccine card into their digital storage vault. And I’m guessing that doctors and clinics are going to be more focused on taking care of patients and keeping their COVID vaccines cold, and not all that interested in entering my vaccination information into all those apps. Maybe Australia is further ahead with electronic health records, but I’m thinking, at least for the next year or so, that my CDC card is gonna be the best that Qantas and the gang are going to get.</li><li>Bridge music -- My Flaming Heart by Wired Ant (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Wired_Ant/36862 Ft: Javolenus</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Hereditary Road Warriors</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I was reading some research, as one does during a lockdown advisory when one gets caught up running down a clickhole, about <a href=\"https://research.fb.com/blog/2016/03/do-jobs-run-in-families/\">jobs running in the family</a>. Some of the stats -- a son with a military father is 5 times more likely to enlist himself while if his mother is a lawyer, he’s 6.6 times more likely to follow her to the bar; a daughter with a scientist father is almost 4 times more likely to be a scientist. Indeed, when I was deciding my college major, I was leaning toward&nbsp; chemistry but chose chemical engineering mostly because my grandfather and father were both engineers.</li><li>Which got me thinking -- does traveling -- careers that require frequent traveling -- run in the family? Again, looking back on my family, my grandfather traveled a lot when he worked for Sears, checking out vendors for hard goods -- tools, small machinery -- and working with them on new products. My dad designed farm machinery -- things like hay balers and cotton pickers -- for International Harvester. He’d often be on the road for weeks at a time, testing prototypes at farms around the country, looking for different crop and field conditions, and then at plants helping to set up the manufacturing lines for the finished machine. And so I grew up seeing that rhythm of travel -- Dad at home, Dad packing, saying good-bye, and then getting on with our lives until he came back. This was back in the late ‘60’s and into the 70’s, so no cheap long-distance let alone messaging or email or video calls. He was gone, with the exception of a postcard or two, until he came back.</li><li>And then when I joined the workforce, the first day of my first real job out of school, I got on a plane and made the first of what’s been hundreds of flights between ORD and DFW.&nbsp; So many that, pretty soon, I got to know the women working the front desk at the DFW Admirals Club. One morning, one of them asks me if I’d maybe like to meet her daughter. Awkward. I asked her, “Would you want your daughter dating someone who’s out of town as much as I am?” She paused for a moment and then said, “No, not really”.&nbsp;</li><li>Also around this time, my dad had gotten promoted past the level of going out to the field and so was traveling a lot less. But my mother took a purchasing executive role and with that, the need for a lot of travel to vendors. So while travel was generational/ “hereditary” from my father to me, my mother and I started road warrior-ing at the same time, so we were more like travel “siblings” -- comparing hotel notes, competing on frequent flier status and perks.&nbsp;</li><li>Will traveling for a living continue to a 4th generation? Tough to tell right now; both kids measure their commute in feet rather than miles during the lockdown, and friends running consulting operations tell me the current state is great for staff productivity -- an hour sales call takes an hour, rather than a day’s worth of travel for that hour, and working remotely with clients saves the client money and consultants don’t get burnt out trying to balance work and home needs. As I said back in the March and July episodes, I don’t buy that 100% remote is the “new normal”, but I also don’t believe it will snap back to 2019 levels, not after what will have been a year’s-plus time working out the mechanics of virtual working. But will there be another generation of road warriors in my family? It’ll probably take a couple of years to figure that out.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #171</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li>I’ve made another little tweak to the RSS feed -- the file that all the podcast apps use to pull new episodes for your subscribed podcasts. This tweak affects the episode descriptions in the top podcast apps. For those apps that support it, there are now clickable links in the episode notes or descriptions. In last month’s episode, there were clickable links to the gift ideas blog post on the TravelCommons website as well as the episode show notes page. Going forward, there will always be a link to the episode’s show notes page. I’ve tested that this works on Apple Podcasts, Overcast (which is what I use), Stitcher, Pocket Casts, Podcast Addict, and Google Podcasts -- all of which make up 70-80% (depending on who’s doing the counting) of the TravelCommons downloads. So, if you get a chance, flip over to the episode description right now and check it out.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>, as well as asking Alexa, Siri, and Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_171.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #171 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors','','inherit','closed','closed','','2997-revision-v1','','','2021-01-11 13:35:23','2021-01-11 18:35:23','',2997,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/11/2997-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(2999,1,'2021-01-11 13:36:12','2021-01-11 18:36:12','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":2960,\"width\":300,\"height\":300,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large is-resized\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2960\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"/><figcaption>How Do I Insert This Into My iPhone<br>(DoD photo by EJ Hersom)</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>No Thanksgiving travel, but looking at the travel volume for this, the busiest travel week of the year, shows just how far things have fallen. The Qantas CEO said \"No vax, no fly\", so we dig into the emerging world of digital vaccine passports. And then I trace my travel genealogy, wondering if road warrior-ism is hereditary. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_171.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go over to the <em>Subscribe</em> section on the right to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/949687216&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #171: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. And again, no travel since the last episode. Not too surprising given the way things are going right now. Back in April, I’d jumped on one of those smokin’ American Airlines’ promotions to book flights to London for Thanksgiving. Which then -- not surprisingly -- got cancelled at the beginning of September.&nbsp; So I was back to what has been my typical Thanksgiving travel pattern for the past 10-15 years -- staying at home to avoid the crowds on what is always the busiest travel week of the year. PK -- pre-kids -- Irene and I would always travel over the holidays, splitting Thanksgiving and Christmas between my family in Southern California and hers in Chicago. But post-kids -- which is also PK, so I guess it should be AK -- after kids -- we started staying at home. And I’d figure out how to “ground” myself from business travel also. I found that the challenge of holiday travel wasn’t necessarily the crowds; it’s the make-up of the crowds; what some road warriors might call “clueless” travelers. I think “amateur” is certainly a more charitable and probably more accurate term. Even more so this year with so many road warriors out of practice after being off the road since March. Lots of those folks definitely in danger of losing their “professional” traveler status.</li><li>I saw an interesting graph the other day comparing last year’s and this year’s day-by-day airport travel volumes over the Thanksgiving weekend. No surprises comparing the Wednesday travel volumes, what is traditionally the busiest travel day of the year. Last year’s Wednesday saw 2.6 million passengers, almost 2½ times busier than this year. I expected that. But what really caught my eye was that this year’s peak day -- <a href=\"https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/thanksgiving-travel-volume-2020-pandemic/index.html\">Sunday at about 1.2 million </a>-- was still a lot less than last year’s slowest day, Thanksgiving, at about 1.6 million. I didn’t travel last year at Thanksgiving, but did in 2018.&nbsp; Irene and I broke our no-travel rule and flew down to Santa Fe, NM on Thanksgiving Day. Back in episode <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/12/17/podcast-147-holiday-travel-tips-notes-from-santa-fe/\">#147</a>, I said that Thanksgiving Day flight was one of the least stressful travel experiences I’d ever had — no traffic on the drive to ORD, no lines. The TSA agents were hanging around just looking for people to screen. And that day, there were around 25% more people in airports than this year’s <em>busiest</em> day. I shouldn’t be surprised, but all the pictures I saw in the news coverage made it look like airports were a lot more crowded.&nbsp;</li><li>Our apartment is just south of one of the northern approaches to ORD. Flights from the east come in over the lake -- seats A, B, and C get a great view of the city skyline while seats D, E, and F get to look down into Wrigley Field -- then&nbsp; over the northwest side of the city, landing on one of the runways north of the terminal. I’ve always been impressed by the choreography of ORD. On a clear Friday afternoon, driving up the tollway that runs east of the airport, I’d see planes on parallel approaches landing simultaneously -- one to the north of the terminal and one to the south -- and looking up, see the lights of planes on approach behind them -- 2, 3, 4.... Back in April, during Chicago’s lockdown, I’d sit out on the rooftop deck -- because what else was I going to do? -- and maybe see one plane coming in over the lake on that approach. But now I’m seeing more planes -- sometimes 3, 4 in a row. Don’t know that they’re all carrying passengers -- some could be temporary cargo carriers taking some of that e-commerce money, with boxes instead of seats under the overhead bins. But I can feel travel starting to pick up. It could be a tough winter, but I’m trying to look out over the horizon a bit; trying to look forward to spring.</li><li>Bridge Music -- Leviathan by Kirkoid (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Kirkoid/31109</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>TravelCommons contributor Allan Marko commented on my little lockdown game with my Google Mini -- changing the voice to, say, an English accent and then asking about the weather in London.&nbsp; Allan wrote:<ul><li>I often change the Siri voice for a bit of variety. Currently “Australian Female” is providing my CarPlay directions. you can also ask Siri to “Play TravelCommons”…</li></ul></li><li>Which immediately got me digging into Siri’s settings, looking for the Voice options. I found I had a choice of American, Australian, British, Indian, Irish, and South African. Since I’d already used the first three with my Google Mini, it was between the last three. I chose Irish for now, but will probably switch to South African before the end of the month. Actually, Waze, the nav app, always impressed me with the number of voice and language options. Every once in a while, I switch Irene’s Waze over to Hungarian before she’s heading out somewhere. For some reason, I get more of a laugh out of it than she does.</li><li>TravelCommons listener Dan Grabon and I have been trading notes as we’ve each slogged through Thoreau’s <em>Walden</em>. We both started it back in April, in the height of the lockdown. Everybody was deciding that, with nothing much else to do, it was a good time to pick up that classic you’ve always been meaning to get to. Dan started out with <em>The Brothers Karamazov</em>, which I thought was damned impressive. I first reached for Whitman’s <em>Leaves of Grass</em>, but then thought I needed something a bit more down-to-earth, something that wouldn’t need quite that level of interpretation and abstract thinking. And <em>Walden</em>, about Thoreau’s self-isolation in the woods outside of Concord, MA, seemed a better fit with the lockdown. Dan finished last month, at the beginning of November. I was 50 pages behind, so I didn’t finish ‘til Thanksgiving -- it was tough cutting through the tryptophan fog, but I gutted it through. Dan said he was staying with Thoreau, moving onto <em>Civil Disobedience</em> before shelving the book. I pivoted to non-fiction, <em>Why We Sleep</em>, where a neuroscientist and sleep expert spends some 300+ pages saying “If you don’t sleep 8 hours, you’re killing yourself” which got me doing some mental math. Between jet lag from all the&nbsp; international flights and waking up at 4am to make 6am flights to LGA, I’ve probably dropped 5 years off my life. Though, given some dementia running through my family history, I might not have remembered those years anyways.</li><li>And I show up on the other side of the mic talking travel pro tips with Matt Wilson on his <a href=\"https://www.under30experiences.com/blog/travel-like-a-pro-with-mark-peacock-of-travelcommons\">Millennial Travel Podcast</a>.&nbsp; I’m trying to remember when we recorded this -- had to be pre-April 2019 because I was still in the suburban TravelCommons studio and Matt was hanging out down in Costa Rica. The connection fuzzes out now and again, but it was a fun conversation. I’ll put a link in the episode in the show notes but fair warning -- it’s mostly me rattling on for an hour. Listening back to it, I’m kinda embarrassed that I don’t give Matt much of a chance to get a word in edgewise.</li><li>In the last episode, I talked about the work-from-hotel offerings from Marriott, Hilton, and Hyatt. They all had their own twists, but Hyatt’s was the most unique in that their “Work from Hyatt” offer was resort-focused and had a 7-night minimum. I said it wasn’t so much a WeWork replacement as a digital nomad trial. Well, I’m guessing that they didn’t get much uptake on it because I just got another email from Hyatt with a new offering -- “Office for the Day” -- that pretty much matches Marriott’s Day Pass. Like I said last month, these offerings all feel a bit “toe in the water”, a bit opportunistic. And now that we’re starting to get better visibility into post-vaccine timelines, I wonder how long they’ll last -- will people still want to pay to work in a hotel room after all the Starbucks stores have reopened.</li><li>I’ve talked in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/12/podcast-120-where-do-guidebooks-fit-in-i-hate-shopping-for-suitcases\">past</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/09/28/podcast-124-craft-beer-hunting-i-hate-rick-steves\">episodes</a> about how I’m a bit of a knuckle-dragger regarding printed travel guides. I still find a physical book useful when traveling. But I’ve been wondering how quickly these physical guides will be able to push out post-COVID editions to reflect the closures of bars, restaurants, and independent shops they’ve recommended. I was running through my own Chicago recommendation list from 2019. A bunch of my favorite places have closed; it’s about an even split between “Closed forever, good-bye, we’ve taken down our sign” and “Closed until Spring… we hope.” The final proofs of the 2021 editions have to already be baked if not already at the printers. I dunno, maybe they’ll all post errata pages that you can download, print off, and then stick in your books.</li><li>In a massive intersection of all things social media, I posted a <a href=\"https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/tiktok-hotel-room-chef/index.html\">CNN article</a> on the TravelCommons Facebook page that a friend, a hotel company CIO, sent me on LinkedIn that showed TikTok videos of people cooking meals in hotel rooms using an iron for a griddle, a hot water kettle for a steamer, a pants presser as an oven, and the one that really wowed me -- a coffee maker as a sous vide water bath. I don’t know if I should be impressed by the ingenuity or looking to set up as a ghost kitchen/delivery service wherever they are because I’ve never seen anyone go to that extent to cook their own meal in a hotel room. Even guys I knew trying to squeeze the last pennies out of their per diems wouldn’t do much more than boil water for their Cup O’Noodles or work hard not to burn their microwave popcorn. I’ll also put a link in the show notes to the TikTok account of one of the guys, Jago Randles. His TikTok series,<a href=\"https://www.tiktok.com/@jagoscrandles\"> Isolation Kitchen</a>, has about 150,000 followers. He does some impressive stuff. But I will make sure, going forward, that I rinse out the coffee maker and wipe down the iron before using them.</li><li>For many frequent travelers, a key early milestone of the pandemic was when airlines and hotels gave them a year’s push on their status -- moving the expiration date from Jan 2021 to Jan 2022. Big sigh of relief. Then for Southwest fliers, another milestone -- drink coupon expiration dates all got pushed to the end of this year. Whew! All’s right in the traveling world. But a couple of days ago, I was rummaging around in my messenger bag and out tumbled 5 Southwest drink coupons -- one with a Sept expiration date; the rest, December 31. Look Southwest, I don’t want to seem greedy. I did get a year’s push on A-List and 6 months on Companion Pass. But I’d love you even more if you gave me another 6 months on those drink coupons. Nope, don’t say anything now; just think about it.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge music -- Ethereal (nop mix) by @nop (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Lancefield/34818</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Car Rental Privacy</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>xxx<ul><li>Mark: Andrea, how did you get involved in this space?</li><li>Andrea: One of the companies that used to run was one of the largest used car inspection companies. We inspected a lot of vehicles that were ready to be sold. I just noticed that people were leaving their digital lives behind.</li><li>Mark: We first talked about the privacy/security issues around pairing your smartphone with your car rental about four years ago. Bluetooth-enabled entertainment systems were just becoming more common in rental car fleets as hands-free call laws became widespread. Even today, the first thing I do is to sync my iPhone. And I\'ve noticed more times than not, the sync slots are all full -- personalized names, Jan\'s iPhone, Timmy\'s iPhone. You end up having to delete at least one of them to make room for yours. And then, once paired, most phones by default, end up downloading all your contacts and your phone numbers and things like that. So, Jan and Timmy have left behind all of their contacts and all their phone numbers and that\'s just bad in so many ways.</li><li>Andrea: When you sync your phone through Bluetooth or you plug it into the USB port or now, in some newer cars, you just walk into the car and the car automatically sniffs your phone and start syncing to it, including those with Android Auto and Apple CarPlay. When that happens, you are creating a mini-clone of your phone inside the vehicle.</li><li>Mark: What other information are people leaving behind when they don\'t clear themselves out of a rental car?</li><li>Andrea: All sorts -- your phone book, your call logs, the text messages, including the body, meaning the actual text of the text messages; that stuff will be left behind. But also all sorts of meta data that allows criminals or law enforcement or just people who want to snoop on you to re-identify you, anything from the identifiers of your phones which are unique, your Bluetooth MAC address. Not to mention, of course, all your navigation data. I mean, you can reconstruct where people have been, just by data that has been stored in the infotainment system. And then you have, whether you are on Twitter and Facebook and what are the handles of those things, which are the last photos you have taken? What files have you synced, the emails, calendar entries. There\'s all sorts of stuff that people really don\'t understand that they\'re living behind.</li><li>Mark: But when people <em>do </em>delete pairings are they deleting all that information? Or is there some data still retained in that vehicle?</li><li>Andrea:  By and large, deleting the data following the manufacturer\'s directions is helpful in preventing third parties to having access. And so if there is anything left behind, it requires a much deeper forensic type of analysis that is typically not accessible. But for most people, following the manufacturer\'s directions on how to remove the data, it is a very easy to do and very effective defense against getting their data being in the hands of somebody else.</li><li>Mark: That\'s where <a href=\"https://www.privacy4cars.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Privacy4Cars</a> comes in. That\'s where your app comes in -- helping people get that right?</li><li>Andrea: Yes, we have a free app that people can download, and you can just search for Privacy4Cars on the <a href=\"https://apps.apple.com/us/app/privacy4cars/id1370969499\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple App Store</a> or <a href=\"https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.privacy4cars\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Play</a>, depending what kind of phone you have, and download it for free.</li><li>Mark: The last time on the podcast we talked about this topic was a little over a year ago, October 2019.  I\'d gotten a notice from Hertz that they had changed their terms and conditions. I noticed that Hertz had specifically carved out liability from me leaving information from a Bluetooth pairing. And now, on one hand, I could see that point. I\'ve actively and voluntarily synced my phone to the car and in doing so, caused my information to be downloaded. But at what point does that sort of digital maintenance, clearing personal identifiable information, after every rental become part of the rental company’s overall maintenance responsibility, like checking the oil levels and the tire pressure.</li><li>Andrea: I believe that the time has already passed, and it\'s been in the past for at least a year, right? At least, the passage of California Consumer Privacy Act. And probably you can go further back in the past because of other types of regulations. And there are some regulators who have actually spoken about this. So in the United States, you have the FTC that has issued already four guidances on the need to delete personal information. In Europe, they went as far as to give a guideline that mandates the removal of the personal information. Beyond rental, when people are traveling, sometimes they rent, sometimes they ride-share, and very often it happens to me that I in an Uber or Lyft and you have a very nice driver that tells you, “Hey, you need to fill up the tank on your battery? Here\'s a cable.” And the first thing I do is glance --  where does the cable end up? If it goes into the lighter, that\'s only power. So yes, I’ll recharge my phone. But if it goes straight  into the USB port of the car, don\'t charge the phone unless you\'re really desperate, because as soon as your phone powers back up, it will start downloading all your information into a stranger\'s car. So you definitely don\'t want to do that.</li><li>Mark: Andrea Amico, founder of <a href=\"https://www.privacy4cars.com\">Privacy4Cars.com</a>, you can find his app on the <a href=\"https://apps.apple.com/us/app/privacy4cars/id1370969499\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple App store</a> and on <a href=\"https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.privacy4cars\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Play</a>. Andrea, thank you very much for taking the time to talk to us today.</li><li>Andrea: Thank you. Mark. I really enjoyed talking to you.</li></ul></li><li>I remember going to a travel clinic before my first flight to India; getting shot up with MMR, DTP, Hepatitis, and Typhoid vaccines and being given my <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carte_Jaune\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Yellow Card</a> -- officially my International Certificate of Vaccination or Prophylaxis -- listing all my shots. They told me to carry that with me to India, which I did and to Vietnam and Thailand and Singapore and China. No one ever asked to see it, not in an airport, an immigration line, a hotel,....  It looks like the plans are that we’ll get a vaccination card from the CDC after receiving the first dose of COVID-19 vaccine. But that card isn’t meant as a validated proof of vaccination; it’s more of a reminder to go back in a couple of weeks for the second shot. </li><li>That handwritten piece of paper probably won’t pass muster at the Qantas boarding gate, and so that’s why we’re starting to see a bit of a vaccine passport app land grab going on. United has been testing the <a href=\"https://thecommonsproject.org/commonpass\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">CommonPass app</a> on their COVID-free EWR-LHR flight. You get your COVID test at the United Club near gate C93 and the results are uploaded into the app which then will display a QR code to the gate agent. CommonPass is being spun up with support from the World Economic Forum. Cathay Pacific, Lufthansa, SwissAir, and JetBlue also have plans to use it. Delta and Alitalia are trialing the <a href=\"https://www.aokpass.com/en/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">AOKPass </a>developed by the Int’l Chamber of Commerce on their COVID-free ATL-Rome flight. It uses blockchain for medical certificate storage, so bonus points to them in technology buzzword bingo. IATA, the Int’l Air Transport Association, an airline trade group, says they’re finishing up their app, <a href=\"https://www.iata.org/en/programs/passenger/travel-pass/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Travel Pass</a>, and will be piloting it with IAG, the parent of British Airways, Iberia, and Aer Lingus, in early 2021. And the World Health Organization says they’re looking at Estonia’s e-vaccination certificates as <a href=\"https://www.who.int/news-room/feature-stories/detail/estonia-and-who-to-jointly-develop-digital-vaccine-certificate-to-strengthen-covax#:~:text=WHO%20and%20Estonia%20recently%20agreed,access%20to%20COVID%2D19%20vaccines.\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the basis of a sort of “smart” Yellow Card app</a>.</li><li>I’m sure I’m missing a whole lot more; I just got tired of reading the same rehashed press release verbiage about secure and verifiable storage of health certifications. Going through this, it starts to feel like the health equivalent of those scooter apps, where I need half-a-dozen of them on my phone so I can rent the closest scooter to me. Unless someone blinks, it seems like I’ll need 3 or 4 of these vaccine passports to cover all my travel bases. But after reading through all the press releases and the infographics and the FAQs, none of these apps were real clear on how I get my physical CDC vaccine card into their digital storage vault. And I’m guessing that doctors and clinics are going to be more focused on taking care of patients and keeping their COVID vaccines cold, and not all that interested in entering my vaccination information into all those apps. Maybe Australia is further ahead with electronic health records, but I’m thinking, at least for the next year or so, that my CDC card is gonna be the best that Qantas and the gang are going to get.</li><li>Bridge music -- My Flaming Heart by Wired Ant (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Wired_Ant/36862 Ft: Javolenus</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Hereditary Road Warriors</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I was reading some research, as one does during a lockdown advisory when one gets caught up running down a clickhole, about <a href=\"https://research.fb.com/blog/2016/03/do-jobs-run-in-families/\">jobs running in the family</a>. Some of the stats -- a son with a military father is 5 times more likely to enlist himself while if his mother is a lawyer, he’s 6.6 times more likely to follow her to the bar; a daughter with a scientist father is almost 4 times more likely to be a scientist. Indeed, when I was deciding my college major, I was leaning toward&nbsp; chemistry but chose chemical engineering mostly because my grandfather and father were both engineers.</li><li>Which got me thinking -- does traveling -- careers that require frequent traveling -- run in the family? Again, looking back on my family, my grandfather traveled a lot when he worked for Sears, checking out vendors for hard goods -- tools, small machinery -- and working with them on new products. My dad designed farm machinery -- things like hay balers and cotton pickers -- for International Harvester. He’d often be on the road for weeks at a time, testing prototypes at farms around the country, looking for different crop and field conditions, and then at plants helping to set up the manufacturing lines for the finished machine. And so I grew up seeing that rhythm of travel -- Dad at home, Dad packing, saying good-bye, and then getting on with our lives until he came back. This was back in the late ‘60’s and into the 70’s, so no cheap long-distance let alone messaging or email or video calls. He was gone, with the exception of a postcard or two, until he came back.</li><li>And then when I joined the workforce, the first day of my first real job out of school, I got on a plane and made the first of what’s been hundreds of flights between ORD and DFW.&nbsp; So many that, pretty soon, I got to know the women working the front desk at the DFW Admirals Club. One morning, one of them asks me if I’d maybe like to meet her daughter. Awkward. I asked her, “Would you want your daughter dating someone who’s out of town as much as I am?” She paused for a moment and then said, “No, not really”.&nbsp;</li><li>Also around this time, my dad had gotten promoted past the level of going out to the field and so was traveling a lot less. But my mother took a purchasing executive role and with that, the need for a lot of travel to vendors. So while travel was generational/ “hereditary” from my father to me, my mother and I started road warrior-ing at the same time, so we were more like travel “siblings” -- comparing hotel notes, competing on frequent flier status and perks.&nbsp;</li><li>Will traveling for a living continue to a 4th generation? Tough to tell right now; both kids measure their commute in feet rather than miles during the lockdown, and friends running consulting operations tell me the current state is great for staff productivity -- an hour sales call takes an hour, rather than a day’s worth of travel for that hour, and working remotely with clients saves the client money and consultants don’t get burnt out trying to balance work and home needs. As I said back in the March and July episodes, I don’t buy that 100% remote is the “new normal”, but I also don’t believe it will snap back to 2019 levels, not after what will have been a year’s-plus time working out the mechanics of virtual working. But will there be another generation of road warriors in my family? It’ll probably take a couple of years to figure that out.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #171</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li>I’ve made another little tweak to the RSS feed -- the file that all the podcast apps use to pull new episodes for your subscribed podcasts. This tweak affects the episode descriptions in the top podcast apps. For those apps that support it, there are now clickable links in the episode notes or descriptions. In last month’s episode, there were clickable links to the gift ideas blog post on the TravelCommons website as well as the episode show notes page. Going forward, there will always be a link to the episode’s show notes page. I’ve tested that this works on Apple Podcasts, Overcast (which is what I use), Stitcher, Pocket Casts, Podcast Addict, and Google Podcasts -- all of which make up 70-80% (depending on who’s doing the counting) of the TravelCommons downloads. So, if you get a chance, flip over to the episode description right now and check it out.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>, as well as asking Alexa, Siri, and Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_171.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #171 — Car Rental Privacy','','inherit','closed','closed','','2997-revision-v1','','','2021-01-11 13:36:12','2021-01-11 18:36:12','',2997,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/11/2997-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3000,1,'2021-01-11 18:00:21','2021-01-11 23:00:21','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":2960,\"width\":300,\"height\":300,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large is-resized\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2960\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"/><figcaption>How Do I Insert This Into My iPhone<br>(DoD photo by EJ Hersom)</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>No Thanksgiving travel, but looking at the travel volume for this, the busiest travel week of the year, shows just how far things have fallen. The Qantas CEO said \"No vax, no fly\", so we dig into the emerging world of digital vaccine passports. And then I trace my travel genealogy, wondering if road warrior-ism is hereditary. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_171.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go over to the <em>Subscribe</em> section on the right to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/949687216&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #171: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. And again, no travel since the last episode. Not too surprising given the way things are going right now. Back in April, I’d jumped on one of those smokin’ American Airlines’ promotions to book flights to London for Thanksgiving. Which then -- not surprisingly -- got cancelled at the beginning of September.&nbsp; So I was back to what has been my typical Thanksgiving travel pattern for the past 10-15 years -- staying at home to avoid the crowds on what is always the busiest travel week of the year. PK -- pre-kids -- Irene and I would always travel over the holidays, splitting Thanksgiving and Christmas between my family in Southern California and hers in Chicago. But post-kids -- which is also PK, so I guess it should be AK -- after kids -- we started staying at home. And I’d figure out how to “ground” myself from business travel also. I found that the challenge of holiday travel wasn’t necessarily the crowds; it’s the make-up of the crowds; what some road warriors might call “clueless” travelers. I think “amateur” is certainly a more charitable and probably more accurate term. Even more so this year with so many road warriors out of practice after being off the road since March. Lots of those folks definitely in danger of losing their “professional” traveler status.</li><li>I saw an interesting graph the other day comparing last year’s and this year’s day-by-day airport travel volumes over the Thanksgiving weekend. No surprises comparing the Wednesday travel volumes, what is traditionally the busiest travel day of the year. Last year’s Wednesday saw 2.6 million passengers, almost 2½ times busier than this year. I expected that. But what really caught my eye was that this year’s peak day -- <a href=\"https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/thanksgiving-travel-volume-2020-pandemic/index.html\">Sunday at about 1.2 million </a>-- was still a lot less than last year’s slowest day, Thanksgiving, at about 1.6 million. I didn’t travel last year at Thanksgiving, but did in 2018.&nbsp; Irene and I broke our no-travel rule and flew down to Santa Fe, NM on Thanksgiving Day. Back in episode <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/12/17/podcast-147-holiday-travel-tips-notes-from-santa-fe/\">#147</a>, I said that Thanksgiving Day flight was one of the least stressful travel experiences I’d ever had — no traffic on the drive to ORD, no lines. The TSA agents were hanging around just looking for people to screen. And that day, there were around 25% more people in airports than this year’s <em>busiest</em> day. I shouldn’t be surprised, but all the pictures I saw in the news coverage made it look like airports were a lot more crowded.&nbsp;</li><li>Our apartment is just south of one of the northern approaches to ORD. Flights from the east come in over the lake -- seats A, B, and C get a great view of the city skyline while seats D, E, and F get to look down into Wrigley Field -- then&nbsp; over the northwest side of the city, landing on one of the runways north of the terminal. I’ve always been impressed by the choreography of ORD. On a clear Friday afternoon, driving up the tollway that runs east of the airport, I’d see planes on parallel approaches landing simultaneously -- one to the north of the terminal and one to the south -- and looking up, see the lights of planes on approach behind them -- 2, 3, 4.... Back in April, during Chicago’s lockdown, I’d sit out on the rooftop deck -- because what else was I going to do? -- and maybe see one plane coming in over the lake on that approach. But now I’m seeing more planes -- sometimes 3, 4 in a row. Don’t know that they’re all carrying passengers -- some could be temporary cargo carriers taking some of that e-commerce money, with boxes instead of seats under the overhead bins. But I can feel travel starting to pick up. It could be a tough winter, but I’m trying to look out over the horizon a bit; trying to look forward to spring.</li><li>Bridge Music -- Leviathan by Kirkoid (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Kirkoid/31109</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>TravelCommons contributor Allan Marko commented on my little lockdown game with my Google Mini -- changing the voice to, say, an English accent and then asking about the weather in London.&nbsp; Allan wrote:<ul><li>I often change the Siri voice for a bit of variety. Currently “Australian Female” is providing my CarPlay directions. you can also ask Siri to “Play TravelCommons”…</li></ul></li><li>Which immediately got me digging into Siri’s settings, looking for the Voice options. I found I had a choice of American, Australian, British, Indian, Irish, and South African. Since I’d already used the first three with my Google Mini, it was between the last three. I chose Irish for now, but will probably switch to South African before the end of the month. Actually, Waze, the nav app, always impressed me with the number of voice and language options. Every once in a while, I switch Irene’s Waze over to Hungarian before she’s heading out somewhere. For some reason, I get more of a laugh out of it than she does.</li><li>TravelCommons listener Dan Grabon and I have been trading notes as we’ve each slogged through Thoreau’s <em>Walden</em>. We both started it back in April, in the height of the lockdown. Everybody was deciding that, with nothing much else to do, it was a good time to pick up that classic you’ve always been meaning to get to. Dan started out with <em>The Brothers Karamazov</em>, which I thought was damned impressive. I first reached for Whitman’s <em>Leaves of Grass</em>, but then thought I needed something a bit more down-to-earth, something that wouldn’t need quite that level of interpretation and abstract thinking. And <em>Walden</em>, about Thoreau’s self-isolation in the woods outside of Concord, MA, seemed a better fit with the lockdown. Dan finished last month, at the beginning of November. I was 50 pages behind, so I didn’t finish ‘til Thanksgiving -- it was tough cutting through the tryptophan fog, but I gutted it through. Dan said he was staying with Thoreau, moving onto <em>Civil Disobedience</em> before shelving the book. I pivoted to non-fiction, <em>Why We Sleep</em>, where a neuroscientist and sleep expert spends some 300+ pages saying “If you don’t sleep 8 hours, you’re killing yourself” which got me doing some mental math. Between jet lag from all the&nbsp; international flights and waking up at 4am to make 6am flights to LGA, I’ve probably dropped 5 years off my life. Though, given some dementia running through my family history, I might not have remembered those years anyways.</li><li>And I show up on the other side of the mic talking travel pro tips with Matt Wilson on his <a href=\"https://www.under30experiences.com/blog/travel-like-a-pro-with-mark-peacock-of-travelcommons\">Millennial Travel Podcast</a>.&nbsp; I’m trying to remember when we recorded this -- had to be pre-April 2019 because I was still in the suburban TravelCommons studio and Matt was hanging out down in Costa Rica. The connection fuzzes out now and again, but it was a fun conversation. I’ll put a link in the episode in the show notes but fair warning -- it’s mostly me rattling on for an hour. Listening back to it, I’m kinda embarrassed that I don’t give Matt much of a chance to get a word in edgewise.</li><li>In the last episode, I talked about the work-from-hotel offerings from Marriott, Hilton, and Hyatt. They all had their own twists, but Hyatt’s was the most unique in that their “Work from Hyatt” offer was resort-focused and had a 7-night minimum. I said it wasn’t so much a WeWork replacement as a digital nomad trial. Well, I’m guessing that they didn’t get much uptake on it because I just got another email from Hyatt with a new offering -- “Office for the Day” -- that pretty much matches Marriott’s Day Pass. Like I said last month, these offerings all feel a bit “toe in the water”, a bit opportunistic. And now that we’re starting to get better visibility into post-vaccine timelines, I wonder how long they’ll last -- will people still want to pay to work in a hotel room after all the Starbucks stores have reopened.</li><li>I’ve talked in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/12/podcast-120-where-do-guidebooks-fit-in-i-hate-shopping-for-suitcases\">past</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/09/28/podcast-124-craft-beer-hunting-i-hate-rick-steves\">episodes</a> about how I’m a bit of a knuckle-dragger regarding printed travel guides. I still find a physical book useful when traveling. But I’ve been wondering how quickly these physical guides will be able to push out post-COVID editions to reflect the closures of bars, restaurants, and independent shops they’ve recommended. I was running through my own Chicago recommendation list from 2019. A bunch of my favorite places have closed; it’s about an even split between “Closed forever, good-bye, we’ve taken down our sign” and “Closed until Spring… we hope.” The final proofs of the 2021 editions have to already be baked if not already at the printers. I dunno, maybe they’ll all post errata pages that you can download, print off, and then stick in your books.</li><li>In a massive intersection of all things social media, I posted a <a href=\"https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/tiktok-hotel-room-chef/index.html\">CNN article</a> on the TravelCommons Facebook page that a friend, a hotel company CIO, sent me on LinkedIn that showed TikTok videos of people cooking meals in hotel rooms using an iron for a griddle, a hot water kettle for a steamer, a pants presser as an oven, and the one that really wowed me -- a coffee maker as a sous vide water bath. I don’t know if I should be impressed by the ingenuity or looking to set up as a ghost kitchen/delivery service wherever they are because I’ve never seen anyone go to that extent to cook their own meal in a hotel room. Even guys I knew trying to squeeze the last pennies out of their per diems wouldn’t do much more than boil water for their Cup O’Noodles or work hard not to burn their microwave popcorn. I’ll also put a link in the show notes to the TikTok account of one of the guys, Jago Randles. His TikTok series,<a href=\"https://www.tiktok.com/@jagoscrandles\"> Isolation Kitchen</a>, has about 150,000 followers. He does some impressive stuff. But I will make sure, going forward, that I rinse out the coffee maker and wipe down the iron before using them.</li><li>For many frequent travelers, a key early milestone of the pandemic was when airlines and hotels gave them a year’s push on their status -- moving the expiration date from Jan 2021 to Jan 2022. Big sigh of relief. Then for Southwest fliers, another milestone -- drink coupon expiration dates all got pushed to the end of this year. Whew! All’s right in the traveling world. But a couple of days ago, I was rummaging around in my messenger bag and out tumbled 5 Southwest drink coupons -- one with a Sept expiration date; the rest, December 31. Look Southwest, I don’t want to seem greedy. I did get a year’s push on A-List and 6 months on Companion Pass. But I’d love you even more if you gave me another 6 months on those drink coupons. Nope, don’t say anything now; just think about it.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge music -- Ethereal (nop mix) by @nop (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Lancefield/34818</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Leaving Data Behind in The Rental Car</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A couple of weeks back, I retweeted a news article - the third suspect charged in the fatal shooting of a retired Chicago fireman during a carjacking was caught because he’d synced his phone to the audio system of the stolen car.  I dunno -- fleeing a murder but worrying about getting a ticket for not using hands free.  I dunno. Good they caught the bad guy, but what about us law-abiding frequent travelers? When the Hertz or Avis person walks up to me at the car return lane, they always remind me not to leave anything behind; to remember to take my sunglasses and my mobile phone. But they never remind me to delete all the data I synced to the car. </li><li>And with more of our lives getting stored in our phones, I asked Andrea Amico, founder of the company <a href=\"https://www.privacy4cars.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Privacy4Cars</a>, to come onto the podcast to talk about the privacy problems at the intersection of cars and smartphones.<ul><li>Mark: Andrea, how did you get involved in this space?</li></ul><ul><li>Andrea: One of the companies that used to run was one of the largest used car inspection companies. We inspected a lot of vehicles that were ready to be sold. I just noticed that people were leaving their digital lives behind.</li><li>Mark: We first talked about the privacy/security issues around pairing your smartphone with your car rental about four years ago. Bluetooth-enabled entertainment systems were just becoming more common in rental car fleets as hands-free call laws became widespread. Even today, the first thing I do is to sync my iPhone. And I\'ve noticed more times than not, the sync slots are all full -- personalized names, Jan\'s iPhone, Timmy\'s iPhone. You end up having to delete at least one of them to make room for yours. And then, once paired, most phones by default, end up downloading all your contacts and your phone numbers and things like that. So, Jan and Timmy have left behind all of their contacts and all their phone numbers and that\'s just bad in so many ways.</li><li>Andrea: When you sync your phone through Bluetooth or you plug it into the USB port or now, in some newer cars, you just walk into the car and the car automatically sniffs your phone and start syncing to it, including those with Android Auto and Apple CarPlay. When that happens, you are creating a mini-clone of your phone inside the vehicle.</li><li>Mark: What other information are people leaving behind when they don\'t clear themselves out of a rental car?</li><li>Andrea: All sorts -- your phone book, your call logs, the text messages, including the body, meaning the actual text of the text messages; that stuff will be left behind. But also all sorts of meta data that allows criminals or law enforcement or just people who want to snoop on you to re-identify you, anything from the identifiers of your phones which are unique, your Bluetooth MAC address. Not to mention, of course, all your navigation data. I mean, you can reconstruct where people have been, just by data that has been stored in the infotainment system. And then you have, whether you are on Twitter and Facebook and what are the handles of those things, which are the last photos you have taken? What files have you synced, the emails, calendar entries. There\'s all sorts of stuff that people really don\'t understand that they\'re living behind.</li><li>Mark: But when people <em>do </em>delete pairings are they deleting all that information? Or is there some data still retained in that vehicle?</li><li>Andrea:  By and large, deleting the data following the manufacturer\'s directions is helpful in preventing third parties to having access. And so if there is anything left behind, it requires a much deeper forensic type of analysis that is typically not accessible. But for most people, following the manufacturer\'s directions on how to remove the data, it is a very easy to do and very effective defense against getting their data being in the hands of somebody else.</li><li>Mark: That\'s where <a href=\"https://www.privacy4cars.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Privacy4Cars</a> comes in. That\'s where your app comes in -- helping people get that right?</li><li>Andrea: Yes, we have a free app that people can download, and you can just search for Privacy4Cars on the <a href=\"https://apps.apple.com/us/app/privacy4cars/id1370969499\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple App Store</a> or <a href=\"https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.privacy4cars\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Play</a>, depending what kind of phone you have, and download it for free.</li><li>Mark: The last time on the podcast we talked about this topic was a little over a year ago, October 2019.  I\'d gotten a notice from Hertz that they had changed their terms and conditions. I noticed that Hertz had specifically carved out liability from me leaving information from a Bluetooth pairing. And now, on one hand, I could see that point. I\'ve actively and voluntarily synced my phone to the car and in doing so, caused my information to be downloaded. But at what point does that sort of digital maintenance, clearing personal identifiable information, after every rental become part of the rental company’s overall maintenance responsibility, like checking the oil levels and the tire pressure.</li><li>Andrea: I believe that the time has already passed, and it\'s been in the past for at least a year, right? At least, the passage of California Consumer Privacy Act. And probably you can go further back in the past because of other types of regulations. And there are some regulators who have actually spoken about this. So in the United States, you have the FTC that has issued already four guidances on the need to delete personal information. In Europe, they went as far as to give a guideline that mandates the removal of the personal information. Beyond rental, when people are traveling, sometimes they rent, sometimes they ride-share, and very often it happens to me that I in an Uber or Lyft and you have a very nice driver that tells you, “Hey, you need to fill up the tank on your battery? Here\'s a cable.” And the first thing I do is glance --  where does the cable end up? If it goes into the lighter, that\'s only power. So yes, I’ll recharge my phone. But if it goes straight  into the USB port of the car, don\'t charge the phone unless you\'re really desperate, because as soon as your phone powers back up, it will start downloading all your information into a stranger\'s car. So you definitely don\'t want to do that.</li><li>Mark: Andrea Amico, founder of <a href=\"https://www.privacy4cars.com\">Privacy4Cars.com</a>, you can find his app on the <a href=\"https://apps.apple.com/us/app/privacy4cars/id1370969499\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple App store</a> and on <a href=\"https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.privacy4cars\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Play</a>. Andrea, thank you very much for taking the time to talk to us today.</li><li>Andrea: Thank you. Mark. I really enjoyed talking to you.</li></ul></li><li>Bridge music -- My Flaming Heart by Wired Ant (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Wired_Ant/36862 Ft: Javolenus</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Hereditary Road Warriors</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I was reading some research, as one does during a lockdown advisory when one gets caught up running down a clickhole, about <a href=\"https://research.fb.com/blog/2016/03/do-jobs-run-in-families/\">jobs running in the family</a>. Some of the stats -- a son with a military father is 5 times more likely to enlist himself while if his mother is a lawyer, he’s 6.6 times more likely to follow her to the bar; a daughter with a scientist father is almost 4 times more likely to be a scientist. Indeed, when I was deciding my college major, I was leaning toward&nbsp; chemistry but chose chemical engineering mostly because my grandfather and father were both engineers.</li><li>Which got me thinking -- does traveling -- careers that require frequent traveling -- run in the family? Again, looking back on my family, my grandfather traveled a lot when he worked for Sears, checking out vendors for hard goods -- tools, small machinery -- and working with them on new products. My dad designed farm machinery -- things like hay balers and cotton pickers -- for International Harvester. He’d often be on the road for weeks at a time, testing prototypes at farms around the country, looking for different crop and field conditions, and then at plants helping to set up the manufacturing lines for the finished machine. And so I grew up seeing that rhythm of travel -- Dad at home, Dad packing, saying good-bye, and then getting on with our lives until he came back. This was back in the late ‘60’s and into the 70’s, so no cheap long-distance let alone messaging or email or video calls. He was gone, with the exception of a postcard or two, until he came back.</li><li>And then when I joined the workforce, the first day of my first real job out of school, I got on a plane and made the first of what’s been hundreds of flights between ORD and DFW.&nbsp; So many that, pretty soon, I got to know the women working the front desk at the DFW Admirals Club. One morning, one of them asks me if I’d maybe like to meet her daughter. Awkward. I asked her, “Would you want your daughter dating someone who’s out of town as much as I am?” She paused for a moment and then said, “No, not really”.&nbsp;</li><li>Also around this time, my dad had gotten promoted past the level of going out to the field and so was traveling a lot less. But my mother took a purchasing executive role and with that, the need for a lot of travel to vendors. So while travel was generational/ “hereditary” from my father to me, my mother and I started road warrior-ing at the same time, so we were more like travel “siblings” -- comparing hotel notes, competing on frequent flier status and perks.&nbsp;</li><li>Will traveling for a living continue to a 4th generation? Tough to tell right now; both kids measure their commute in feet rather than miles during the lockdown, and friends running consulting operations tell me the current state is great for staff productivity -- an hour sales call takes an hour, rather than a day’s worth of travel for that hour, and working remotely with clients saves the client money and consultants don’t get burnt out trying to balance work and home needs. As I said back in the March and July episodes, I don’t buy that 100% remote is the “new normal”, but I also don’t believe it will snap back to 2019 levels, not after what will have been a year’s-plus time working out the mechanics of virtual working. But will there be another generation of road warriors in my family? It’ll probably take a couple of years to figure that out.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #171</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li>I’ve made another little tweak to the RSS feed -- the file that all the podcast apps use to pull new episodes for your subscribed podcasts. This tweak affects the episode descriptions in the top podcast apps. For those apps that support it, there are now clickable links in the episode notes or descriptions. In last month’s episode, there were clickable links to the gift ideas blog post on the TravelCommons website as well as the episode show notes page. Going forward, there will always be a link to the episode’s show notes page. I’ve tested that this works on Apple Podcasts, Overcast (which is what I use), Stitcher, Pocket Casts, Podcast Addict, and Google Podcasts -- all of which make up 70-80% (depending on who’s doing the counting) of the TravelCommons downloads. So, if you get a chance, flip over to the episode description right now and check it out.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>, as well as asking Alexa, Siri, and Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_171.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #171 — Car Rental Privacy','','inherit','closed','closed','','2997-revision-v1','','','2021-01-11 18:00:21','2021-01-11 23:00:21','',2997,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/11/2997-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3001,1,'2021-01-11 18:51:53','2021-01-11 23:51:53','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":2960,\"width\":300,\"height\":300,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large is-resized\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2960\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"/><figcaption>How Do I Insert This Into My iPhone<br>(DoD photo by EJ Hersom)</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>No Thanksgiving travel, but looking at the travel volume for this, the busiest travel week of the year, shows just how far things have fallen. The Qantas CEO said \"No vax, no fly\", so we dig into the emerging world of digital vaccine passports. And then I trace my travel genealogy, wondering if road warrior-ism is hereditary. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_171.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go over to the <em>Subscribe</em> section on the right to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/949687216&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #171: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. Stayed off the road over the entire holiday season which let me skip the TSA’s new post-lockdown checkpoint record of <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/coronavirus/passenger-throughput\">1.3 million on January 3rd</a>, the last Sunday of the holiday season -- though, to be fair,  this is only just over half the 2.4 million passengers who flew on the same Sunday last year. And with every US airline except Delta now back to selling middle seats, it makes sense that load factors also ratcheted up over the holidays. I haven’t seen any industry-wide numbers yet, but <a href=\"https://www.ittn.ie/news/confidence-in-boeing-737-max-holding-firm/\">American’s COO did say that the load factor on their 737 Maxes over the last week of the holiday season was 90%</a>. Now, most of those Maxes are flying between LGA and MIA, always a busy holiday route, but I’ve seen reports of many other packed flights, as well as the much higher load . I was never a big fan of completely full flights pre-coronavirus and, as you can imagine, am even less so now pre-widespread vaccine distribution. So, I’m not too bothered that we didn’t try to get out of town over the holidays.</li><li>However, staying in town through the rest of January is a whole different thing because January is absolutely the worst part of Chicago’s winter. So, after  Thanksgiving weekend, on what used to be called Cyber Monday when we actually shopped in physical stores, instead of trolling through Amazon, I was trolling through travel sites looking for cheap flights to someplace warm the 3rd wk of Jan. I figured that’d be long enough for any holiday COVID spike to work its way through the system.</li><li>I’d had some friends who’d gone down to Mexico, felt safe in the tourist zones, didn’t have any problems, came back healthy; but I don’t do well sitting on a beach for more than a day or two and I wanted to keep it a bit simpler, so we decided to stay in the US, which pretty quickly narrowed our search to Southern California, South Florida, and Arizona. Since we’d spent time last winter in both Arizona and Florida, we decided to do California and go as far down the coast as we could get, which was San Diego.  And, as luck would have it, Southwest had cheap direct flights from Chicago Midway and I had Southwest travel credits from one of last spring’s flight cancellations burning a hole in my virtual pocket, so *boom* I booked it</li><li>On, what turned out to be, 3 days before the governor locked down most of California. But a friend hit the ground there a week before Christmas and said “Eh, it’s not a problem.” So, we stayed the course and didn’t really pay any attention to it until after New Years when we thought, you know, we should book a place to stay. And that’s when we started to pay attention. Bike and kayak rental places were open as “outdoor recreation” businesses. But vacation rental and hotel booking sites all pointed to the California Public Health Department statement -- “no hotel or lodging entity in California shall accept or honor out-of-state reservations for nonessential travel” which our January snowbird getaway definitely didn’t qualify as. Would things ease up in a couple of weeks? The trend lines on the state’s COVID website didn’t seem to be pointing in that direction.</li><li>So last Monday when I received another blast of airline sales emails, it seemed like the right time for a pivot. X-ing off California, we were back to Florida and Arizona. We talked to friends already down in Florida; they said the south beaches were already filling up with snowbirds, so we opted for drier sand and swung our Southwest flights over to Phoenix.  </li><li>But since we’d been in Phoenix last winter and continuing in the spirit of visiting not-quite-A-list places in the US we’ve never been while weaving around quarantines, we’re driving further south down I-10 to Tucson. We’re running the same travel planning play we did for our August trip to Michigan’s UP -- focus on outdoor activities like hiking and biking, have back-ups in case of last-minute closures, and above all, build a list of microbreweries with outdoor seating.</li><li>Bridge Music -- Leviathan by Kirkoid (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Kirkoid/31109</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>TravelCommons contributor Allan Marko commented on my little lockdown game with my Google Mini -- changing the voice to, say, an English accent and then asking about the weather in London.&nbsp; Allan wrote:<ul><li>I often change the Siri voice for a bit of variety. Currently “Australian Female” is providing my CarPlay directions. you can also ask Siri to “Play TravelCommons”…</li></ul></li><li>Which immediately got me digging into Siri’s settings, looking for the Voice options. I found I had a choice of American, Australian, British, Indian, Irish, and South African. Since I’d already used the first three with my Google Mini, it was between the last three. I chose Irish for now, but will probably switch to South African before the end of the month. Actually, Waze, the nav app, always impressed me with the number of voice and language options. Every once in a while, I switch Irene’s Waze over to Hungarian before she’s heading out somewhere. For some reason, I get more of a laugh out of it than she does.</li><li>TravelCommons listener Dan Grabon and I have been trading notes as we’ve each slogged through Thoreau’s <em>Walden</em>. We both started it back in April, in the height of the lockdown. Everybody was deciding that, with nothing much else to do, it was a good time to pick up that classic you’ve always been meaning to get to. Dan started out with <em>The Brothers Karamazov</em>, which I thought was damned impressive. I first reached for Whitman’s <em>Leaves of Grass</em>, but then thought I needed something a bit more down-to-earth, something that wouldn’t need quite that level of interpretation and abstract thinking. And <em>Walden</em>, about Thoreau’s self-isolation in the woods outside of Concord, MA, seemed a better fit with the lockdown. Dan finished last month, at the beginning of November. I was 50 pages behind, so I didn’t finish ‘til Thanksgiving -- it was tough cutting through the tryptophan fog, but I gutted it through. Dan said he was staying with Thoreau, moving onto <em>Civil Disobedience</em> before shelving the book. I pivoted to non-fiction, <em>Why We Sleep</em>, where a neuroscientist and sleep expert spends some 300+ pages saying “If you don’t sleep 8 hours, you’re killing yourself” which got me doing some mental math. Between jet lag from all the&nbsp; international flights and waking up at 4am to make 6am flights to LGA, I’ve probably dropped 5 years off my life. Though, given some dementia running through my family history, I might not have remembered those years anyways.</li><li>And I show up on the other side of the mic talking travel pro tips with Matt Wilson on his <a href=\"https://www.under30experiences.com/blog/travel-like-a-pro-with-mark-peacock-of-travelcommons\">Millennial Travel Podcast</a>.&nbsp; I’m trying to remember when we recorded this -- had to be pre-April 2019 because I was still in the suburban TravelCommons studio and Matt was hanging out down in Costa Rica. The connection fuzzes out now and again, but it was a fun conversation. I’ll put a link in the episode in the show notes but fair warning -- it’s mostly me rattling on for an hour. Listening back to it, I’m kinda embarrassed that I don’t give Matt much of a chance to get a word in edgewise.</li><li>In the last episode, I talked about the work-from-hotel offerings from Marriott, Hilton, and Hyatt. They all had their own twists, but Hyatt’s was the most unique in that their “Work from Hyatt” offer was resort-focused and had a 7-night minimum. I said it wasn’t so much a WeWork replacement as a digital nomad trial. Well, I’m guessing that they didn’t get much uptake on it because I just got another email from Hyatt with a new offering -- “Office for the Day” -- that pretty much matches Marriott’s Day Pass. Like I said last month, these offerings all feel a bit “toe in the water”, a bit opportunistic. And now that we’re starting to get better visibility into post-vaccine timelines, I wonder how long they’ll last -- will people still want to pay to work in a hotel room after all the Starbucks stores have reopened.</li><li>I’ve talked in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/12/podcast-120-where-do-guidebooks-fit-in-i-hate-shopping-for-suitcases\">past</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/09/28/podcast-124-craft-beer-hunting-i-hate-rick-steves\">episodes</a> about how I’m a bit of a knuckle-dragger regarding printed travel guides. I still find a physical book useful when traveling. But I’ve been wondering how quickly these physical guides will be able to push out post-COVID editions to reflect the closures of bars, restaurants, and independent shops they’ve recommended. I was running through my own Chicago recommendation list from 2019. A bunch of my favorite places have closed; it’s about an even split between “Closed forever, good-bye, we’ve taken down our sign” and “Closed until Spring… we hope.” The final proofs of the 2021 editions have to already be baked if not already at the printers. I dunno, maybe they’ll all post errata pages that you can download, print off, and then stick in your books.</li><li>In a massive intersection of all things social media, I posted a <a href=\"https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/tiktok-hotel-room-chef/index.html\">CNN article</a> on the TravelCommons Facebook page that a friend, a hotel company CIO, sent me on LinkedIn that showed TikTok videos of people cooking meals in hotel rooms using an iron for a griddle, a hot water kettle for a steamer, a pants presser as an oven, and the one that really wowed me -- a coffee maker as a sous vide water bath. I don’t know if I should be impressed by the ingenuity or looking to set up as a ghost kitchen/delivery service wherever they are because I’ve never seen anyone go to that extent to cook their own meal in a hotel room. Even guys I knew trying to squeeze the last pennies out of their per diems wouldn’t do much more than boil water for their Cup O’Noodles or work hard not to burn their microwave popcorn. I’ll also put a link in the show notes to the TikTok account of one of the guys, Jago Randles. His TikTok series,<a href=\"https://www.tiktok.com/@jagoscrandles\"> Isolation Kitchen</a>, has about 150,000 followers. He does some impressive stuff. But I will make sure, going forward, that I rinse out the coffee maker and wipe down the iron before using them.</li><li>For many frequent travelers, a key early milestone of the pandemic was when airlines and hotels gave them a year’s push on their status -- moving the expiration date from Jan 2021 to Jan 2022. Big sigh of relief. Then for Southwest fliers, another milestone -- drink coupon expiration dates all got pushed to the end of this year. Whew! All’s right in the traveling world. But a couple of days ago, I was rummaging around in my messenger bag and out tumbled 5 Southwest drink coupons -- one with a Sept expiration date; the rest, December 31. Look Southwest, I don’t want to seem greedy. I did get a year’s push on A-List and 6 months on Companion Pass. But I’d love you even more if you gave me another 6 months on those drink coupons. Nope, don’t say anything now; just think about it.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge music -- Ethereal (nop mix) by @nop (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Lancefield/34818</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Leaving Data Behind in The Rental Car</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A couple of weeks back, I retweeted a news article - the third suspect charged in the fatal shooting of a retired Chicago fireman during a carjacking was caught because he’d synced his phone to the audio system of the stolen car.  I dunno -- fleeing a murder but worrying about getting a ticket for not using hands free.  I dunno. Good they caught the bad guy, but what about us law-abiding frequent travelers? When the Hertz or Avis person walks up to me at the car return lane, they always remind me not to leave anything behind; to remember to take my sunglasses and my mobile phone. But they never remind me to delete all the data I synced to the car. </li><li>And with more of our lives getting stored in our phones, I asked Andrea Amico, founder of the company <a href=\"https://www.privacy4cars.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Privacy4Cars</a>, to come onto the podcast to talk about the privacy problems at the intersection of cars and smartphones.<ul><li>Mark: Andrea, how did you get involved in this space?</li></ul><ul><li>Andrea: One of the companies that used to run was one of the largest used car inspection companies. We inspected a lot of vehicles that were ready to be sold. I just noticed that people were leaving their digital lives behind.</li><li>Mark: We first talked about the privacy/security issues around pairing your smartphone with your car rental about four years ago. Bluetooth-enabled entertainment systems were just becoming more common in rental car fleets as hands-free call laws became widespread. Even today, the first thing I do is to sync my iPhone. And I\'ve noticed more times than not, the sync slots are all full -- personalized names, Jan\'s iPhone, Timmy\'s iPhone. You end up having to delete at least one of them to make room for yours. And then, once paired, most phones by default, end up downloading all your contacts and your phone numbers and things like that. So, Jan and Timmy have left behind all of their contacts and all their phone numbers and that\'s just bad in so many ways.</li><li>Andrea: When you sync your phone through Bluetooth or you plug it into the USB port or now, in some newer cars, you just walk into the car and the car automatically sniffs your phone and start syncing to it, including those with Android Auto and Apple CarPlay. When that happens, you are creating a mini-clone of your phone inside the vehicle.</li><li>Mark: What other information are people leaving behind when they don\'t clear themselves out of a rental car?</li><li>Andrea: All sorts -- your phone book, your call logs, the text messages, including the body, meaning the actual text of the text messages; that stuff will be left behind. But also all sorts of meta data that allows criminals or law enforcement or just people who want to snoop on you to re-identify you, anything from the identifiers of your phones which are unique, your Bluetooth MAC address. Not to mention, of course, all your navigation data. I mean, you can reconstruct where people have been, just by data that has been stored in the infotainment system. And then you have, whether you are on Twitter and Facebook and what are the handles of those things, which are the last photos you have taken? What files have you synced, the emails, calendar entries. There\'s all sorts of stuff that people really don\'t understand that they\'re living behind.</li><li>Mark: But when people <em>do </em>delete pairings are they deleting all that information? Or is there some data still retained in that vehicle?</li><li>Andrea:  By and large, deleting the data following the manufacturer\'s directions is helpful in preventing third parties to having access. And so if there is anything left behind, it requires a much deeper forensic type of analysis that is typically not accessible. But for most people, following the manufacturer\'s directions on how to remove the data, it is a very easy to do and very effective defense against getting their data being in the hands of somebody else.</li><li>Mark: That\'s where <a href=\"https://www.privacy4cars.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Privacy4Cars</a> comes in. That\'s where your app comes in -- helping people get that right?</li><li>Andrea: Yes, we have a free app that people can download, and you can just search for Privacy4Cars on the <a href=\"https://apps.apple.com/us/app/privacy4cars/id1370969499\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple App Store</a> or <a href=\"https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.privacy4cars\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Play</a>, depending what kind of phone you have, and download it for free.</li><li>Mark: The last time on the podcast we talked about this topic was a little over a year ago, October 2019.  I\'d gotten a notice from Hertz that they had changed their terms and conditions. I noticed that Hertz had specifically carved out liability from me leaving information from a Bluetooth pairing. And now, on one hand, I could see that point. I\'ve actively and voluntarily synced my phone to the car and in doing so, caused my information to be downloaded. But at what point does that sort of digital maintenance, clearing personal identifiable information, after every rental become part of the rental company’s overall maintenance responsibility, like checking the oil levels and the tire pressure.</li><li>Andrea: I believe that the time has already passed, and it\'s been in the past for at least a year, right? At least, the passage of California Consumer Privacy Act. And probably you can go further back in the past because of other types of regulations. And there are some regulators who have actually spoken about this. So in the United States, you have the FTC that has issued already four guidances on the need to delete personal information. In Europe, they went as far as to give a guideline that mandates the removal of the personal information. Beyond rental, when people are traveling, sometimes they rent, sometimes they ride-share, and very often it happens to me that I in an Uber or Lyft and you have a very nice driver that tells you, “Hey, you need to fill up the tank on your battery? Here\'s a cable.” And the first thing I do is glance --  where does the cable end up? If it goes into the lighter, that\'s only power. So yes, I’ll recharge my phone. But if it goes straight  into the USB port of the car, don\'t charge the phone unless you\'re really desperate, because as soon as your phone powers back up, it will start downloading all your information into a stranger\'s car. So you definitely don\'t want to do that.</li><li>Mark: Andrea Amico, founder of <a href=\"https://www.privacy4cars.com\">Privacy4Cars.com</a>, you can find his app on the <a href=\"https://apps.apple.com/us/app/privacy4cars/id1370969499\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple App store</a> and on <a href=\"https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.privacy4cars\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Play</a>. Andrea, thank you very much for taking the time to talk to us today.</li><li>Andrea: Thank you. Mark. I really enjoyed talking to you.</li></ul></li><li>Bridge music -- My Flaming Heart by Wired Ant (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Wired_Ant/36862 Ft: Javolenus</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Hereditary Road Warriors</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I was reading some research, as one does during a lockdown advisory when one gets caught up running down a clickhole, about <a href=\"https://research.fb.com/blog/2016/03/do-jobs-run-in-families/\">jobs running in the family</a>. Some of the stats -- a son with a military father is 5 times more likely to enlist himself while if his mother is a lawyer, he’s 6.6 times more likely to follow her to the bar; a daughter with a scientist father is almost 4 times more likely to be a scientist. Indeed, when I was deciding my college major, I was leaning toward&nbsp; chemistry but chose chemical engineering mostly because my grandfather and father were both engineers.</li><li>Which got me thinking -- does traveling -- careers that require frequent traveling -- run in the family? Again, looking back on my family, my grandfather traveled a lot when he worked for Sears, checking out vendors for hard goods -- tools, small machinery -- and working with them on new products. My dad designed farm machinery -- things like hay balers and cotton pickers -- for International Harvester. He’d often be on the road for weeks at a time, testing prototypes at farms around the country, looking for different crop and field conditions, and then at plants helping to set up the manufacturing lines for the finished machine. And so I grew up seeing that rhythm of travel -- Dad at home, Dad packing, saying good-bye, and then getting on with our lives until he came back. This was back in the late ‘60’s and into the 70’s, so no cheap long-distance let alone messaging or email or video calls. He was gone, with the exception of a postcard or two, until he came back.</li><li>And then when I joined the workforce, the first day of my first real job out of school, I got on a plane and made the first of what’s been hundreds of flights between ORD and DFW.&nbsp; So many that, pretty soon, I got to know the women working the front desk at the DFW Admirals Club. One morning, one of them asks me if I’d maybe like to meet her daughter. Awkward. I asked her, “Would you want your daughter dating someone who’s out of town as much as I am?” She paused for a moment and then said, “No, not really”.&nbsp;</li><li>Also around this time, my dad had gotten promoted past the level of going out to the field and so was traveling a lot less. But my mother took a purchasing executive role and with that, the need for a lot of travel to vendors. So while travel was generational/ “hereditary” from my father to me, my mother and I started road warrior-ing at the same time, so we were more like travel “siblings” -- comparing hotel notes, competing on frequent flier status and perks.&nbsp;</li><li>Will traveling for a living continue to a 4th generation? Tough to tell right now; both kids measure their commute in feet rather than miles during the lockdown, and friends running consulting operations tell me the current state is great for staff productivity -- an hour sales call takes an hour, rather than a day’s worth of travel for that hour, and working remotely with clients saves the client money and consultants don’t get burnt out trying to balance work and home needs. As I said back in the March and July episodes, I don’t buy that 100% remote is the “new normal”, but I also don’t believe it will snap back to 2019 levels, not after what will have been a year’s-plus time working out the mechanics of virtual working. But will there be another generation of road warriors in my family? It’ll probably take a couple of years to figure that out.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #171</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li>I’ve made another </li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>, as well as asking Alexa, Siri, and Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_171.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #171 — Car Rental Privacy','','inherit','closed','closed','','2997-revision-v1','','','2021-01-11 18:51:53','2021-01-11 23:51:53','',2997,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/11/2997-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3002,1,'2021-01-13 16:47:53','2021-01-13 21:47:53','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/189764_1571139330482_7074048_n.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-2607\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/189764_1571139330482_7074048_n-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a><figcaption>Good End to 2019</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>Skipping the Chicago winter with trips to Phoenix and Sedona, Arizona, and a Christmas morning flight to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. Talk about those trips, my good and bad Hertz experiences, and then gather up odds-‘n’-ends from my travel notebooks to see off 2019 in this New Year\'s Eve episode. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_158.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html /-->\n\n<p>[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_158.mp3\"]</p>\n<p></p>\n\n<!-- wp:html /-->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #158: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois, just back from a bone-thawing trip with the family to Cabo San Lucas, sorta the Land’s End of Mexico’s Baja California peninsula. We booked this trip back in May. Andrew has read on some budget traveler newsletter that Southwest was about to start service to Cabo. So the morning that the flights went on offer, we all went after Southwest’s website and snagged our flights for just over 30,000 points a person. We flew down early Christmas morning, connecting through HOU, and, thinking back to how empty ORD was last year at Thanksgiving, I was stunned that both of our flights were completely full. It seemed that half of our 6:45a flight out of MDW was also walking over to the Cabo gate. Guess that once the kids stop believing in Santa, Christmas morning travel is fair game.</li><li>Flying back out of Cabo last Sunday, I walk up to the gate and don’t see the usual Southwest boarding number pylons. It’s just a typical shared gate with the Southwest flight to Hobby at Gate 4A and a Delta flight to maybe Salt Lake at Gate 4B. And no plane, because there’s no jetway. It’s a bus. Southwest’s open seating works because everyone enters the plane in numerical order. Squeezing all the A group and half of the B group onto one bus… this’ll be interesting. It’s a 3-minute bus ride around the corner of the terminal. The doors open; we pour out. A ramp worker is trying to recreate the Southwest boarding process on the tarmac, asking everyone to line up in 3 lines -- pre-boards, A1-30, and A31-60. It kinda works, for the most part… until another ramp worker says “Hey, we’re boarding through the back door, too” just as the second bus opens its doors. Then it just devolves into a free-for-all. I imagine that first ramp worker looking like Kevin Bacon in “Animal House”, flattened by stampeding passengers. I was the first one through the rear door, so I was fine with it, but it does feel like Southwest needs to re-engineer how they board from shared gates.</li><li>I say “bone-thawing,” but it’s not like I was suffering too much from the Chicago December. I’ve been in Phoenix most of the month between Thanksgiving and Christmas, walking around in shirt sleeves in 65 degree weather, topping up my Vitamin D levels while kinda chuckling at the locals hurrying&nbsp; by in their puffy Patagonia parkas. I even extended my stay through one of the weekends -- doing some more of that “bleisure” travel, this time a hiking weekend in the <a href=\"https://www.fs.fed.us/wildflowers/regions/southwestern/RedRockCountry/index.shtml\">Red Rock Country</a> around Sedona, Arizona.&nbsp; An hour or so before picking up a car from Hertz for the weekend, I got an e-mail from the Hertz PHX station manager saying they’d upgraded me as an early birthday present. With equal parts anticipation and trepidation (I remember DFW Hertz “upgrading” me to a Ford F-150 pickup) Irene and I rolled up to spot 43 to find a Mercedes A220 sedan under a “Happy Birthday” sign. OK, now <em>this</em> is an exciting upgrade. Once we fought our way through the Phoenix traffic, the A220 made the 2-hour drive up I-17 a fun run, especially with a 75 mph speed limit. </li><li> Bridge Music -- Earth Soda by septahelix (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial Share-Alike  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/septahelix/34050  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I pushed a <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1206606966031675393/photo/1\">picture of the Hertz car under the Happy Birthday sign</a> to the TravelCommons Instagram Story roll. Steve Frick replied, saying that a friend of his had gotten a Hertz birthday upgrade too, to a Jag. Not to throw any shade, but I definitely think the PHX team did me a bit better with the Benz, but it’s nice of Hertz to give their customers a bit of a birthday surprise. With so many travel providers working hard to squeeze, to optimize, and then to charge for every little thing, getting a birthday present from one of them with a bit of luxury -- and in my case not an insignificant upgrade -- it’s a pleasant throwback to what travel was like when I started business travel coming on 35 years ago. </li><li>But all that love was blown away less than 2 weeks later when the Hertz team in Cabo put me through a 20-minute hard sell on insurance -- $85/day on a $50/day rental -- and then charged me $14/day for something called “Credit Card Care”, all for a beat-up VW Passat with 50,000 hard miles on it. Ugh.</li><li>Steve also hit the TravelCommons website to talk about mileage runs. In the last episode, I said that Mark Skinner’s DC-HKG up-and-back to carry a NASA cosmic ray detector on United’s over-the-pole route was one helluva mileage run. Steve said -<ul><li>I haven’t done a mileage run in years but came real close to losing my Southwest companion pass status for 2020. I had to change a few of my travel website profiles to use my Southwest card over my Hilton American Express card in order to hit it for 2020. It’s always a tough decision do I want 12 points per dollar at Hilton properties or free Southwest flights for my wife</li></ul></li><li>Thanks, Steve. I’ll tweak my travel credit cards now and then to hit some goals, but I hadn’t thought of it as an end-of-year mileage run. But it does make sense, especially with Southwest which counts credit card spend toward Companion Pass. I like that, a credit-card mileage run -- definitely more climate friendly.</li><li>I was talking about my flights to and from Phoenix a couple of weeks ago with one of the guys on the project team, a younger guy, and the look he gave me suggested that I’d hit peak travel nerdery -- at least in his eyes. I was telling him that I fly out to Phoenix on United from ORD because United has an 8am flight out, it’s easier to get a morning coffee at ORD than MDW, I get a free upgrade to Economy Plus which makes it easier to sleep, and because United uses PHX in Terminal 2, the older “slum” terminal that, because it’s separate from the main terminals, makes it easier to get an Uber or Lyft. But then I fly back to Chicago on Southwest because they have more flights back in the afternoon which gives me some flexibility with last-minute meetings, they don’t charge a change fee, they fly out of the newer Terminal 4 in PHX which gives me a much better selection of restaurants and bars than Terminal 2, and it puts me into Chicago-Midway where the wait for an Uber or Lyft is always shorter than at ORD. To me, it was a completely reasonable thought process -- optimizing each leg for the amenities I’d use. I turned to one of the other guys -- a guy who’s been traveling 20-some years -- “Yup, makes perfect sense to me,” he said. The younger guy was just shaking his head; probably muttering “OK Boomer” under his breath. But he’ll learn.</li><li>Back in November, during one of my semi-regular spelunks through Google Analytics, I noticed that <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/11/20/podcast-146-rental-demolition-derby-traveler-gift-guide/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #146 — Rental Demolition Derby; Traveler Gift Guide\">the November 2018 episode - #146: Rental Demolition Derby and Traveler Gift Guide</a> - was one of the top 5 pages on the TravelCommons website. I couldn’t figure how stories of rental car wrecks would get a lot of Google hits, so it must be the gift guide. Which suggested that maybe I should update it for 2019, but more as a blog post this time. I read through a half-dozen or so other gift guides, looking for some ideas I could steal, but they got pretty repetitious pretty quick -- pushing Away luggage, Huzi infinity pillows, and Aesop travel kits, which suggests to a cynical mind that these companies must’ve been splashing a lot of samples around the blog-o-sphere. And maybe didn’t age all that well after the Verge published an <a aria-label=\"exposé on Away’s toxic work culture (opens in a new tab)\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/5/20995453/away-luggage-ceo-steph-korey-toxic-work-environment-travel-inclusion\" target=\"_blank\">exposé on Away’s toxic work culture</a>. But anyway, I wanted something a bit different, and on one of my flights got thinking about a chat I’d had with a friend a while back. She was looking for gift ideas for her daughter who, a couple of years out of college, was starting a new job with a lot more business travel. Replaying that chat in my head, and thinking about the younger guy on my project team, I started going through my travel kit -- rummaging through my messenger bag and then cycling through my suitcase -- mentally, though; not enough space to physically pull it down from the overhead and open it up; and that would’ve looked a bit weird. I built <a aria-label=\"a list of the things I really use on my trips (opens in a new tab)\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/12/11/best-gift-ideas-for-a-new-traveler/\" target=\"_blank\">a list of the things I really use on my trips</a>, and that I miss when I forget to bring them along. Then I winnowed it down to 10 -- because “Top 10” is a key search term -- and there you have it. If you haven’t looked at it yet, give it a read and leave a comment with your suggestions.</li><li>Number 2 on <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/12/11/best-gift-ideas-for-a-new-traveler/\">my list of ideas</a>, after a 20-inch black roller bag, is picking up the application fee for TSA Global Entry for your new traveler. For $100, or for free with many airline and hotel reward credit cards, you can gift them with 5 years of hassle reduction with PreCheck for domestic travel and a fast path through Customs when they travel internationally. Coming back from Cabo, we connected again through Houston-Hobby and so had to clear Immigration and Customs there. It was my first time through Customs there, so it took me a minute to find the Global Entry kiosks. The interface was a bit different from the ORD ones. Instead of asking for my passport and prompting me for the fingerprint pad, it asked me to fit my face inside a red box before taking my picture. The camera didn’t look adjustable, so I squatted down ‘til my face was in the frame and then clicked the Take Photo button. A couple seconds later, the kiosk spit out my receipt and I was off to the exit -- no passport or fingerprint scans, no clicking through questions. Quick, but odd. Some Google searches when I got home told me that I’d hit the new generation of Global Entry kiosks -- Global Entry 2.0 -- that uses facial recognition to match the kiosk picture with my passport and Global Entry application pictures. Given how crappy the kiosk picture looked on the receipt -- and that I hadn’t taken my glasses off -- I’m either really impressed or really concerned about the accuracy of their facial recognition algorithm; I’m not quite sure which.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li> Bridge Music -- Absolutely Clear (ft Jeris &amp; Goldfish) by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/45578 Ft: Jeris, Goldfish  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong> Travel Potpourri for $400, Alex </strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Here it is, the last episode of the year that I’m trying to get out before cracking the Vueve and trying to stay awake until midnight. With the clock ticking, instead of a proper topic, all I can do is gather up some odds-‘n’-ends from my travel notebooks into a Jeopardy-like topic “Travel Potpourri”</li><li>And writing in my travel notebooks is something I like to do. I have a couple: a small one -- a 3½x5½-in or A6 size that fits in my back pocket -- to jot down notes, bullet points; and a larger one that I use as a proper travel journal. For that, I was using a B6 Muji notebook that I picked up in Lisbon 3 years ago. After I filled that one up, I switched to a taller, thinner Japanese traveler-sized notebook because… that’s what I had laying around. I’ve been writing in travel notebooks since I’ve started the podcast -- gotta feed the beast -- usually in public places -- in bars, a lotta bars, while drinking beers, or on planes, a lotta&nbsp; planes, though turbulence can be a problem. And for some reason, I’ve found that this act of writing in public generates a bit of interest, and a chunk of questions. Back in October, on the Finnair flight back from our Baltics tour, I was catching up, writing up my thoughts on our couple of days in Helsinki when the guy a few seats over started asking me what I was writing. He was a younger Finnish guy. He and his girlfriend and a group of 5 or 6 others were connecting through Chicago to Miami for a cruise, and they started their cruise party the minute the drink carts rolled. But he wanted to know what I was writing and why. The what was easy; he wanted to know what I thought of Helsinki; where I’d been, how I liked it. He was intrigued by our Baltic Riga-Tallinn-Helsinki itinerary, in kind of a “that’s weird, but interesting” way. The why I’m not sure made it through translation. It’s not a pure travelogue -- not a “we did this, and then did that”. It’s more about impressions; what I found unique; what caught my eye. Writing it down makes me think about it, and when I go back and read those pages, some 2 or 10 or 20 years later, it reminds me of that place, that time, those experiences.&nbsp;</li><li>And when I talk about travel with folks, when I tell them how often I travel, I’ll often get a story -- in a bar, on a plane, or… while getting my hair cut. The girl who does my hair told me about her trip to Peru with a yoga group. Not the whole trip (I don’t have that much hair), but on their flight back, out of Lima, the plane took off, rotating up, while the flight attendants were still in the aisle doing the final check. It was a bit of mayhem, she said. That had to be one quick taxi out and take-off, I thought, because you’d think those flight attendants would be sprinting to their seats once that plane started rolling down the runway. Which I have seen before, especially when the captain gets a quick release from a ground hold and wants to get airborne before the tower changes their mind. But I’ve never seen them leave the ground with anyone still in the aisle.</li><li>Maybe the pilot was distracted -- a message from the tower, an animal on the runway, a sudden thought crossed his mind. I thought about pilot distraction when walking the <a href=\"https://thehikehouse.com/trails/airport-mesa-trail\">Airport Mesa trail</a> in Sedona earlier this month. The trail name says it all -- it’s a 3½-mile loop around the mesa where Sedona’s general aviation airport is. The hikers aren’t the potential distraction, though. It’s one of Sedona’s famous energy vortexes that’s right next to the airport. The Airport Vortex is, according to<a href=\"https://sedonaverdevalley.natgeotourism.com/content/airport-mesa-vortex/svvc7d222a849df1d7d6\"> one website</a>, “an Upflow area (also called Electric or Masculine) that helps your spirit soar for a higher perspective and/or greater oneness and serenity.” Watching a couple of private jets take off while on our hike, I wondered what would happen if the pilot suddenly achieved greater oneness and serenity while rotating off the top of that mesa. For someone as unenlightened and non-serene as me, that would be one helluva distraction.</li><li>I think for many, maybe close to most frequent travelers, Uber and Lyft have replaced taxis, at least in the US, when not renting a car. So it got my attention when I hit a weird Uber app failure at ORD at the end of October. Coming back from Charlottesville, I light up both Uber and Lyft while getting off the plane to compare wait times and fares (you’d think their surge pricing would be consistent, but it rarely is for me). Uber is a bit better, so I go to book a ride. Except that the Uber app wouldn’t pick up at the domestic terminals, just the separate international terminal, Terminal 5. I check Lyft again; yup, they’ll pick me up at Terminal 2, so I book with them instead. But it’s weird, so I keep checking Uber. I walk out the door to the rideshare pick-up area. There’s nothing but cars with pink Lyft lights; not an Uber decal in sight. An older couple walks up to me -- “Where does Uber pick up?” Normally here, I tell them, but they seem to have deleted it from their app today. It was a good night to be a Lyft driver. I wondered how long it took Uber to notice that they weren’t getting any pick-ups from one of the country’s busiest airports.</li><li>Tonight, though -- New Year’s Eve night -- I’ll be skipping Uber and their after-midnight price surges. I’ll be happy to hang out at home, to skip any travel, and just pop a bottle... or two of Vueve and wish all you TravelCommons’ listeners a Happy New Year and fun and safe travels in 2020.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #158</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_158.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #158 — Travel Potpourri for $400, Alex','','inherit','closed','closed','','2609-revision-v1','','','2021-01-13 16:47:53','2021-01-13 21:47:53','',2609,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/13/2609-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3003,1,'2021-01-13 18:09:25','2021-01-13 23:09:25','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":2960,\"width\":300,\"height\":300,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large is-resized\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2960\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"/><figcaption>How Do I Insert This Into My iPhone<br>(DoD photo by EJ Hersom)</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>No Thanksgiving travel, but looking at the travel volume for this, the busiest travel week of the year, shows just how far things have fallen. The Qantas CEO said \"No vax, no fly\", so we dig into the emerging world of digital vaccine passports. And then I trace my travel genealogy, wondering if road warrior-ism is hereditary. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_171.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go over to the <em>Subscribe</em> section on the right to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/949687216&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #171: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. Stayed off the road over the entire holiday season which let me skip the TSA’s new post-lockdown checkpoint record of <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/coronavirus/passenger-throughput\">1.3 million on January 3rd</a>, the last Sunday of the holiday season -- though, to be fair,&nbsp; this is only just over half the 2.4 million passengers who flew on the same Sunday last year. And with every US airline except Delta now back to selling middle seats, it makes sense that load factors also ratcheted up over the holidays. I haven’t seen any industry-wide numbers yet, but <a href=\"https://www.ittn.ie/news/confidence-in-boeing-737-max-holding-firm/\">American’s COO did say that the load factor on their 737 Maxes over the last week of the holiday season was 90%</a>. Now, most of those Maxes are flying between LGA and MIA, always a busy holiday route, but I’ve seen reports of many other packed flights, as well as the much higher load . I was never a big fan of completely full flights pre-coronavirus and, as you can imagine, am even less so now pre-widespread vaccine distribution. So, I’m not too bothered that we didn’t try to get out of town over the holidays.</li><li>However, staying in town through the rest of January is a whole different thing because January is absolutely the worst part of Chicago’s winter. So, after&nbsp; Thanksgiving weekend, on what used to be called Cyber Monday when we actually shopped in physical stores, instead of trolling through Amazon, I was trolling through travel sites looking for cheap flights to someplace warm the 3rd wk of Jan. I figured that’d be long enough for any holiday COVID spike to work its way through the system.</li><li>I’d had some friends who’d gone down to Mexico, felt safe in the tourist zones, didn’t have any problems, came back healthy; but I don’t do well sitting on a beach for more than a day or two and I wanted to keep it a bit simpler, so we decided to stay in the US, which pretty quickly narrowed our search to Southern California, South Florida, and Arizona. Since we’d spent time last winter in both Arizona and Florida, we decided to do California and go as far down the coast as we could get, which was San Diego.&nbsp; And, as luck would have it, Southwest had cheap direct flights from Chicago Midway and I had Southwest travel credits from one of last spring’s flight cancellations burning a hole in my virtual pocket, so *boom* I booked it</li><li>On, what turned out to be, 3 days before the governor locked down most of California. But a friend hit the ground there a week before Christmas and said “Eh, it’s not a problem.” So, we stayed the course and didn’t really pay any attention to it until after New Years when we thought, you know, we should book a place to stay. And that’s when we started to pay attention. Bike and kayak rental places were open as “outdoor recreation” businesses. But vacation rental and hotel booking sites all pointed to the California Public Health Department statement -- “no hotel or lodging entity in California shall accept or honor out-of-state reservations for nonessential travel” which our January snowbird getaway definitely didn’t qualify as. Would things ease up in a couple of weeks? The trend lines on the state’s COVID website didn’t seem to be pointing in that direction.</li><li>So last Monday when I received another blast of airline sales emails, it seemed like the right time for a pivot. X-ing off California, we were back to Florida and Arizona. We talked to friends already down in Florida; they said the south beaches were already filling up with snowbirds, so we opted for drier sand and swung our Southwest flights over to Phoenix.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>But since we’d been in Phoenix last winter and continuing in the spirit of visiting not-quite-A-list places in the US we’ve never been while weaving around quarantines, we’re driving further south down I-10 to Tucson. We’re running the same travel planning play we did for our August trip to Michigan’s UP -- focus on outdoor activities like hiking and biking, have back-ups in case of last-minute closures, and above all, build a list of microbreweries with outdoor seating.</li><li>Bridge Music -- Leviathan by Kirkoid (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Kirkoid/31109</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>TravelCommons contributor Allan Marko commented on my little lockdown game with my Google Mini -- changing the voice to, say, an English accent and then asking about the weather in London.&nbsp; Allan wrote:<ul><li>I often change the Siri voice for a bit of variety. Currently “Australian Female” is providing my CarPlay directions. you can also ask Siri to “Play TravelCommons”…</li></ul></li><li>Which immediately got me digging into Siri’s settings, looking for the Voice options. I found I had a choice of American, Australian, British, Indian, Irish, and South African. Since I’d already used the first three with my Google Mini, it was between the last three. I chose Irish for now, but will probably switch to South African before the end of the month. Actually, Waze, the nav app, always impressed me with the number of voice and language options. Every once in a while, I switch Irene’s Waze over to Hungarian before she’s heading out somewhere. For some reason, I get more of a laugh out of it than she does.</li><li>TravelCommons listener Dan Grabon and I have been trading notes as we’ve each slogged through Thoreau’s <em>Walden</em>. We both started it back in April, in the height of the lockdown. Everybody was deciding that, with nothing much else to do, it was a good time to pick up that classic you’ve always been meaning to get to. Dan started out with <em>The Brothers Karamazov</em>, which I thought was damned impressive. I first reached for Whitman’s <em>Leaves of Grass</em>, but then thought I needed something a bit more down-to-earth, something that wouldn’t need quite that level of interpretation and abstract thinking. And <em>Walden</em>, about Thoreau’s self-isolation in the woods outside of Concord, MA, seemed a better fit with the lockdown. Dan finished last month, at the beginning of November. I was 50 pages behind, so I didn’t finish ‘til Thanksgiving -- it was tough cutting through the tryptophan fog, but I gutted it through. Dan said he was staying with Thoreau, moving onto <em>Civil Disobedience</em> before shelving the book. I pivoted to non-fiction, <em>Why We Sleep</em>, where a neuroscientist and sleep expert spends some 300+ pages saying “If you don’t sleep 8 hours, you’re killing yourself” which got me doing some mental math. Between jet lag from all the&nbsp; international flights and waking up at 4am to make 6am flights to LGA, I’ve probably dropped 5 years off my life. Though, given some dementia running through my family history, I might not have remembered those years anyways.</li><li>And I show up on the other side of the mic talking travel pro tips with Matt Wilson on his <a href=\"https://www.under30experiences.com/blog/travel-like-a-pro-with-mark-peacock-of-travelcommons\">Millennial Travel Podcast</a>.&nbsp; I’m trying to remember when we recorded this -- had to be pre-April 2019 because I was still in the suburban TravelCommons studio and Matt was hanging out down in Costa Rica. The connection fuzzes out now and again, but it was a fun conversation. I’ll put a link in the episode in the show notes but fair warning -- it’s mostly me rattling on for an hour. Listening back to it, I’m kinda embarrassed that I don’t give Matt much of a chance to get a word in edgewise.</li><li>In the last episode, I talked about the work-from-hotel offerings from Marriott, Hilton, and Hyatt. They all had their own twists, but Hyatt’s was the most unique in that their “Work from Hyatt” offer was resort-focused and had a 7-night minimum. I said it wasn’t so much a WeWork replacement as a digital nomad trial. Well, I’m guessing that they didn’t get much uptake on it because I just got another email from Hyatt with a new offering -- “Office for the Day” -- that pretty much matches Marriott’s Day Pass. Like I said last month, these offerings all feel a bit “toe in the water”, a bit opportunistic. And now that we’re starting to get better visibility into post-vaccine timelines, I wonder how long they’ll last -- will people still want to pay to work in a hotel room after all the Starbucks stores have reopened.</li><li>I’ve talked in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/12/podcast-120-where-do-guidebooks-fit-in-i-hate-shopping-for-suitcases\">past</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/09/28/podcast-124-craft-beer-hunting-i-hate-rick-steves\">episodes</a> about how I’m a bit of a knuckle-dragger regarding printed travel guides. I still find a physical book useful when traveling. But I’ve been wondering how quickly these physical guides will be able to push out post-COVID editions to reflect the closures of bars, restaurants, and independent shops they’ve recommended. I was running through my own Chicago recommendation list from 2019. A bunch of my favorite places have closed; it’s about an even split between “Closed forever, good-bye, we’ve taken down our sign” and “Closed until Spring… we hope.” The final proofs of the 2021 editions have to already be baked if not already at the printers. I dunno, maybe they’ll all post errata pages that you can download, print off, and then stick in your books.</li><li>In a massive intersection of all things social media, I posted a <a href=\"https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/tiktok-hotel-room-chef/index.html\">CNN article</a> on the TravelCommons Facebook page that a friend, a hotel company CIO, sent me on LinkedIn that showed TikTok videos of people cooking meals in hotel rooms using an iron for a griddle, a hot water kettle for a steamer, a pants presser as an oven, and the one that really wowed me -- a coffee maker as a sous vide water bath. I don’t know if I should be impressed by the ingenuity or looking to set up as a ghost kitchen/delivery service wherever they are because I’ve never seen anyone go to that extent to cook their own meal in a hotel room. Even guys I knew trying to squeeze the last pennies out of their per diems wouldn’t do much more than boil water for their Cup O’Noodles or work hard not to burn their microwave popcorn. I’ll also put a link in the show notes to the TikTok account of one of the guys, Jago Randles. His TikTok series,<a href=\"https://www.tiktok.com/@jagoscrandles\"> Isolation Kitchen</a>, has about 150,000 followers. He does some impressive stuff. But I will make sure, going forward, that I rinse out the coffee maker and wipe down the iron before using them.</li><li>For many frequent travelers, a key early milestone of the pandemic was when airlines and hotels gave them a year’s push on their status -- moving the expiration date from Jan 2021 to Jan 2022. Big sigh of relief. Then for Southwest fliers, another milestone -- drink coupon expiration dates all got pushed to the end of this year. Whew! All’s right in the traveling world. But a couple of days ago, I was rummaging around in my messenger bag and out tumbled 5 Southwest drink coupons -- one with a Sept expiration date; the rest, December 31. Look Southwest, I don’t want to seem greedy. I did get a year’s push on A-List and 6 months on Companion Pass. But I’d love you even more if you gave me another 6 months on those drink coupons. Nope, don’t say anything now; just think about it.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge music -- Ethereal (nop mix) by @nop (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Lancefield/34818</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Leaving Data Behind in The Rental Car</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A couple of weeks back, I retweeted a news article - the third suspect charged in the fatal shooting of a retired Chicago fireman during a carjacking was caught because he’d synced his phone to the audio system of the stolen car.&nbsp; I dunno -- fleeing a murder but worrying about getting a ticket for not using hands free.&nbsp; I dunno. Good they caught the bad guy, but what about us law-abiding frequent travelers? When the Hertz or Avis person walks up to me at the car return lane, they always remind me not to leave anything behind; to remember to take my sunglasses and my mobile phone. But they never remind me to delete all the data I synced to the car.&nbsp;</li><li>And with more of our lives getting stored in our phones, I asked Andrea Amico, founder of the company <a href=\"https://www.privacy4cars.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Privacy4Cars</a>, to come onto the podcast to talk about the privacy problems at the intersection of cars and smartphones.<ul><li>Mark: Andrea, how did you get involved in this space?</li></ul><ul><li>Andrea: One of the companies that used to run was one of the largest used car inspection companies. We inspected a lot of vehicles that were ready to be sold. I just noticed that people were leaving their digital lives behind.</li><li>Mark: We first talked about the privacy/security issues around pairing your smartphone with your car rental about four years ago. Bluetooth-enabled entertainment systems were just becoming more common in rental car fleets as hands-free call laws became widespread. Even today, the first thing I do is to sync my iPhone. And I\'ve noticed more times than not, the sync slots are all full -- personalized names, Jan\'s iPhone, Timmy\'s iPhone. You end up having to delete at least one of them to make room for yours. And then, once paired, most phones by default, end up downloading all your contacts and your phone numbers and things like that. So, Jan and Timmy have left behind all of their contacts and all their phone numbers and that\'s just bad in so many ways.</li><li>Andrea: When you sync your phone through Bluetooth or you plug it into the USB port or now, in some newer cars, you just walk into the car and the car automatically sniffs your phone and start syncing to it, including those with Android Auto and Apple CarPlay. When that happens, you are creating a mini-clone of your phone inside the vehicle.</li><li>Mark: What other information are people leaving behind when they don\'t clear themselves out of a rental car?</li><li>Andrea: All sorts -- your phone book, your call logs, the text messages, including the body, meaning the actual text of the text messages; that stuff will be left behind. But also all sorts of meta data that allows criminals or law enforcement or just people who want to snoop on you to re-identify you, anything from the identifiers of your phones which are unique, your Bluetooth MAC address. Not to mention, of course, all your navigation data. I mean, you can reconstruct where people have been, just by data that has been stored in the infotainment system. And then you have, whether you are on Twitter and Facebook and what are the handles of those things, which are the last photos you have taken? What files have you synced, the emails, calendar entries. There\'s all sorts of stuff that people really don\'t understand that they\'re living behind.</li><li>Mark: But when people <em>do </em>delete pairings are they deleting all that information? Or is there some data still retained in that vehicle?</li><li>Andrea: &nbsp;By and large, deleting the data following the manufacturer\'s directions is helpful in preventing third parties to having access. And so if there is anything left behind, it requires a much deeper forensic type of analysis that is typically not accessible. But for most people, following the manufacturer\'s directions on how to remove the data, it is a very easy to do and very effective defense against getting their data being in the hands of somebody else.</li><li>Mark: That\'s where <a href=\"https://www.privacy4cars.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Privacy4Cars</a> comes in. That\'s where your app comes in -- helping people get that right?</li><li>Andrea: Yes, we have a free app that people can download, and you can just search for Privacy4Cars on the <a href=\"https://apps.apple.com/us/app/privacy4cars/id1370969499\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple App Store</a> or <a href=\"https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.privacy4cars\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Play</a>, depending what kind of phone you have, and download it for free.</li><li>Mark: The last time on the podcast we talked about this topic was a little over a year ago, October 2019. &nbsp;I\'d gotten a notice from Hertz that they had changed their terms and conditions. I noticed that Hertz had specifically carved out liability from me leaving information from a Bluetooth pairing. And now, on one hand, I could see that point. I\'ve actively and voluntarily synced my phone to the car and in doing so, caused my information to be downloaded. But at what point does that sort of digital maintenance, clearing personal identifiable information, after every rental become part of the rental company’s overall maintenance responsibility, like checking the oil levels and the tire pressure.</li><li>Andrea: I believe that the time has already passed, and it\'s been in the past for at least a year, right? At least, the passage of California Consumer Privacy Act. And probably you can go further back in the past because of other types of regulations. And there are some regulators who have actually spoken about this. So in the United States, you have the FTC that has issued already four guidances on the need to delete personal information. In Europe, they went as far as to give a guideline that mandates the removal of the personal information. Beyond rental, when people are traveling, sometimes they rent, sometimes they ride-share, and very often it happens to me that I in an Uber or Lyft and you have a very nice driver that tells you, “Hey, you need to fill up the tank on your battery? Here\'s a cable.” And the first thing I do is glance -- &nbsp;where does the cable end up? If it goes into the lighter, that\'s only power. So yes, I’ll recharge my phone. But if it goes straight &nbsp;into the USB port of the car, don\'t charge the phone unless you\'re really desperate, because as soon as your phone powers back up, it will start downloading all your information into a stranger\'s car. So you definitely don\'t want to do that.</li><li>Mark: Andrea Amico, founder of <a href=\"https://www.privacy4cars.com\">Privacy4Cars.com</a>, you can find his app on the <a href=\"https://apps.apple.com/us/app/privacy4cars/id1370969499\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple App store</a> and on <a href=\"https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.privacy4cars\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Play</a>. Andrea, thank you very much for taking the time to talk to us today.</li><li>Andrea: Thank you. Mark. I really enjoyed talking to you.</li></ul></li><li>Bridge music -- My Flaming Heart by Wired Ant (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial &nbsp;(3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Wired_Ant/36862 Ft: Javolenus</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Hereditary Road Warriors</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I was reading some research, as one does during a lockdown advisory when one gets caught up running down a clickhole, about <a href=\"https://research.fb.com/blog/2016/03/do-jobs-run-in-families/\">jobs running in the family</a>. Some of the stats -- a son with a military father is 5 times more likely to enlist himself while if his mother is a lawyer, he’s 6.6 times more likely to follow her to the bar; a daughter with a scientist father is almost 4 times more likely to be a scientist. Indeed, when I was deciding my college major, I was leaning toward&nbsp; chemistry but chose chemical engineering mostly because my grandfather and father were both engineers.</li><li>Which got me thinking -- does traveling -- careers that require frequent traveling -- run in the family? Again, looking back on my family, my grandfather traveled a lot when he worked for Sears, checking out vendors for hard goods -- tools, small machinery -- and working with them on new products. My dad designed farm machinery -- things like hay balers and cotton pickers -- for International Harvester. He’d often be on the road for weeks at a time, testing prototypes at farms around the country, looking for different crop and field conditions, and then at plants helping to set up the manufacturing lines for the finished machine. And so I grew up seeing that rhythm of travel -- Dad at home, Dad packing, saying good-bye, and then getting on with our lives until he came back. This was back in the late ‘60’s and into the 70’s, so no cheap long-distance let alone messaging or email or video calls. He was gone, with the exception of a postcard or two, until he came back.</li><li>And then when I joined the workforce, the first day of my first real job out of school, I got on a plane and made the first of what’s been hundreds of flights between ORD and DFW.&nbsp; So many that, pretty soon, I got to know the women working the front desk at the DFW Admirals Club. One morning, one of them asks me if I’d maybe like to meet her daughter. Awkward. I asked her, “Would you want your daughter dating someone who’s out of town as much as I am?” She paused for a moment and then said, “No, not really”.&nbsp;</li><li>Also around this time, my dad had gotten promoted past the level of going out to the field and so was traveling a lot less. But my mother took a purchasing executive role and with that, the need for a lot of travel to vendors. So while travel was generational/ “hereditary” from my father to me, my mother and I started road warrior-ing at the same time, so we were more like travel “siblings” -- comparing hotel notes, competing on frequent flier status and perks.&nbsp;</li><li>Will traveling for a living continue to a 4th generation? Tough to tell right now; both kids measure their commute in feet rather than miles during the lockdown, and friends running consulting operations tell me the current state is great for staff productivity -- an hour sales call takes an hour, rather than a day’s worth of travel for that hour, and working remotely with clients saves the client money and consultants don’t get burnt out trying to balance work and home needs. As I said back in the March and July episodes, I don’t buy that 100% remote is the “new normal”, but I also don’t believe it will snap back to 2019 levels, not after what will have been a year’s-plus time working out the mechanics of virtual working. But will there be another generation of road warriors in my family? It’ll probably take a couple of years to figure that out.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #171</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li>I’ve made another </li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>, as well as asking Alexa, Siri, and Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_171.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #171 — Leaving Data in Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Pro Tips','','inherit','closed','closed','','2997-revision-v1','','','2021-01-13 18:09:25','2021-01-13 23:09:25','',2997,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/13/2997-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3004,1,'2021-01-13 18:11:08','2021-01-13 23:11:08','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":2960,\"width\":300,\"height\":300,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large is-resized\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2960\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"/><figcaption>How Do I Insert This Into My iPhone<br>(DoD photo by EJ Hersom)</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>No Thanksgiving travel, but looking at the travel volume for this, the busiest travel week of the year, shows just how far things have fallen. The Qantas CEO said \"No vax, no fly\", so we dig into the emerging world of digital vaccine passports. And then I trace my travel genealogy, wondering if road warrior-ism is hereditary. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_171.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go over to the <em>Subscribe</em> section on the right to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/949687216&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #171: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. Stayed off the road over the entire holiday season which let me skip the TSA’s new post-lockdown checkpoint record of <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/coronavirus/passenger-throughput\">1.3 million on January 3rd</a>, the last Sunday of the holiday season -- though, to be fair,&nbsp; this is only just over half the 2.4 million passengers who flew on the same Sunday last year. And with every US airline except Delta now back to selling middle seats, it makes sense that load factors also ratcheted up over the holidays. I haven’t seen any industry-wide numbers yet, but <a href=\"https://www.ittn.ie/news/confidence-in-boeing-737-max-holding-firm/\">American’s COO did say that the load factor on their 737 Maxes over the last week of the holiday season was 90%</a>. Now, most of those Maxes are flying between LGA and MIA, always a busy holiday route, but I’ve seen reports of many other packed flights, as well as the much higher load . I was never a big fan of completely full flights pre-coronavirus and, as you can imagine, am even less so now pre-widespread vaccine distribution. So, I’m not too bothered that we didn’t try to get out of town over the holidays.</li><li>However, staying in town through the rest of January is a whole different thing because January is absolutely the worst part of Chicago’s winter. So, after&nbsp; Thanksgiving weekend, on what used to be called Cyber Monday when we actually shopped in physical stores, instead of trolling through Amazon, I was trolling through travel sites looking for cheap flights to someplace warm the 3rd wk of Jan. I figured that’d be long enough for any holiday COVID spike to work its way through the system.</li><li>I’d had some friends who’d gone down to Mexico, felt safe in the tourist zones, didn’t have any problems, came back healthy; but I don’t do well sitting on a beach for more than a day or two and I wanted to keep it a bit simpler, so we decided to stay in the US, which pretty quickly narrowed our search to Southern California, South Florida, and Arizona. Since we’d spent time last winter in both Arizona and Florida, we decided to do California and go as far down the coast as we could get, which was San Diego.&nbsp; And, as luck would have it, Southwest had cheap direct flights from Chicago Midway and I had Southwest travel credits from one of last spring’s flight cancellations burning a hole in my virtual pocket, so *boom* I booked it</li><li>On, what turned out to be, 3 days before the governor locked down most of California. But a friend hit the ground there a week before Christmas and said “Eh, it’s not a problem.” So, we stayed the course and didn’t really pay any attention to it until after New Years when we thought, you know, we should book a place to stay. And that’s when we started to pay attention. Bike and kayak rental places were open as “outdoor recreation” businesses. But vacation rental and hotel booking sites all pointed to the California Public Health Department statement -- “no hotel or lodging entity in California shall accept or honor out-of-state reservations for nonessential travel” which our January snowbird getaway definitely didn’t qualify as. Would things ease up in a couple of weeks? The trend lines on the state’s COVID website didn’t seem to be pointing in that direction.</li><li>So last Monday when I received another blast of airline sales emails, it seemed like the right time for a pivot. X-ing off California, we were back to Florida and Arizona. We talked to friends already down in Florida; they said the south beaches were already filling up with snowbirds, so we opted for drier sand and swung our Southwest flights over to Phoenix.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>But since we’d been in Phoenix last winter and continuing in the spirit of visiting not-quite-A-list places in the US we’ve never been while weaving around quarantines, we’re driving further south down I-10 to Tucson. We’re running the same travel planning play we did for our August trip to Michigan’s UP -- focus on outdoor activities like hiking and biking, have back-ups in case of last-minute closures, and above all, build a list of microbreweries with outdoor seating.</li><li>Bridge Music -- Leviathan by Kirkoid (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Kirkoid/31109</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>TravelCommons contributor Allan Marko commented on my little lockdown game with my Google Mini -- changing the voice to, say, an English accent and then asking about the weather in London.&nbsp; Allan wrote:<ul><li>I often change the Siri voice for a bit of variety. Currently “Australian Female” is providing my CarPlay directions. you can also ask Siri to “Play TravelCommons”…</li></ul></li><li>Which immediately got me digging into Siri’s settings, looking for the Voice options. I found I had a choice of American, Australian, British, Indian, Irish, and South African. Since I’d already used the first three with my Google Mini, it was between the last three. I chose Irish for now, but will probably switch to South African before the end of the month. Actually, Waze, the nav app, always impressed me with the number of voice and language options. Every once in a while, I switch Irene’s Waze over to Hungarian before she’s heading out somewhere. For some reason, I get more of a laugh out of it than she does.</li><li>TravelCommons listener Dan Grabon and I have been trading notes as we’ve each slogged through Thoreau’s <em>Walden</em>. We both started it back in April, in the height of the lockdown. Everybody was deciding that, with nothing much else to do, it was a good time to pick up that classic you’ve always been meaning to get to. Dan started out with <em>The Brothers Karamazov</em>, which I thought was damned impressive. I first reached for Whitman’s <em>Leaves of Grass</em>, but then thought I needed something a bit more down-to-earth, something that wouldn’t need quite that level of interpretation and abstract thinking. And <em>Walden</em>, about Thoreau’s self-isolation in the woods outside of Concord, MA, seemed a better fit with the lockdown. Dan finished last month, at the beginning of November. I was 50 pages behind, so I didn’t finish ‘til Thanksgiving -- it was tough cutting through the tryptophan fog, but I gutted it through. Dan said he was staying with Thoreau, moving onto <em>Civil Disobedience</em> before shelving the book. I pivoted to non-fiction, <em>Why We Sleep</em>, where a neuroscientist and sleep expert spends some 300+ pages saying “If you don’t sleep 8 hours, you’re killing yourself” which got me doing some mental math. Between jet lag from all the&nbsp; international flights and waking up at 4am to make 6am flights to LGA, I’ve probably dropped 5 years off my life. Though, given some dementia running through my family history, I might not have remembered those years anyways.</li><li>And I show up on the other side of the mic talking travel pro tips with Matt Wilson on his <a href=\"https://www.under30experiences.com/blog/travel-like-a-pro-with-mark-peacock-of-travelcommons\">Millennial Travel Podcast</a>.&nbsp; I’m trying to remember when we recorded this -- had to be pre-April 2019 because I was still in the suburban TravelCommons studio and Matt was hanging out down in Costa Rica. The connection fuzzes out now and again, but it was a fun conversation. I’ll put a link in the episode in the show notes but fair warning -- it’s mostly me rattling on for an hour. Listening back to it, I’m kinda embarrassed that I don’t give Matt much of a chance to get a word in edgewise.</li><li>In the last episode, I talked about the work-from-hotel offerings from Marriott, Hilton, and Hyatt. They all had their own twists, but Hyatt’s was the most unique in that their “Work from Hyatt” offer was resort-focused and had a 7-night minimum. I said it wasn’t so much a WeWork replacement as a digital nomad trial. Well, I’m guessing that they didn’t get much uptake on it because I just got another email from Hyatt with a new offering -- “Office for the Day” -- that pretty much matches Marriott’s Day Pass. Like I said last month, these offerings all feel a bit “toe in the water”, a bit opportunistic. And now that we’re starting to get better visibility into post-vaccine timelines, I wonder how long they’ll last -- will people still want to pay to work in a hotel room after all the Starbucks stores have reopened.</li><li>I’ve talked in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/12/podcast-120-where-do-guidebooks-fit-in-i-hate-shopping-for-suitcases\">past</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/09/28/podcast-124-craft-beer-hunting-i-hate-rick-steves\">episodes</a> about how I’m a bit of a knuckle-dragger regarding printed travel guides. I still find a physical book useful when traveling. But I’ve been wondering how quickly these physical guides will be able to push out post-COVID editions to reflect the closures of bars, restaurants, and independent shops they’ve recommended. I was running through my own Chicago recommendation list from 2019. A bunch of my favorite places have closed; it’s about an even split between “Closed forever, good-bye, we’ve taken down our sign” and “Closed until Spring… we hope.” The final proofs of the 2021 editions have to already be baked if not already at the printers. I dunno, maybe they’ll all post errata pages that you can download, print off, and then stick in your books.</li><li>In a massive intersection of all things social media, I posted a <a href=\"https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/tiktok-hotel-room-chef/index.html\">CNN article</a> on the TravelCommons Facebook page that a friend, a hotel company CIO, sent me on LinkedIn that showed TikTok videos of people cooking meals in hotel rooms using an iron for a griddle, a hot water kettle for a steamer, a pants presser as an oven, and the one that really wowed me -- a coffee maker as a sous vide water bath. I don’t know if I should be impressed by the ingenuity or looking to set up as a ghost kitchen/delivery service wherever they are because I’ve never seen anyone go to that extent to cook their own meal in a hotel room. Even guys I knew trying to squeeze the last pennies out of their per diems wouldn’t do much more than boil water for their Cup O’Noodles or work hard not to burn their microwave popcorn. I’ll also put a link in the show notes to the TikTok account of one of the guys, Jago Randles. His TikTok series,<a href=\"https://www.tiktok.com/@jagoscrandles\"> Isolation Kitchen</a>, has about 150,000 followers. He does some impressive stuff. But I will make sure, going forward, that I rinse out the coffee maker and wipe down the iron before using them.</li><li>For many frequent travelers, a key early milestone of the pandemic was when airlines and hotels gave them a year’s push on their status -- moving the expiration date from Jan 2021 to Jan 2022. Big sigh of relief. Then for Southwest fliers, another milestone -- drink coupon expiration dates all got pushed to the end of this year. Whew! All’s right in the traveling world. But a couple of days ago, I was rummaging around in my messenger bag and out tumbled 5 Southwest drink coupons -- one with a Sept expiration date; the rest, December 31. Look Southwest, I don’t want to seem greedy. I did get a year’s push on A-List and 6 months on Companion Pass. But I’d love you even more if you gave me another 6 months on those drink coupons. Nope, don’t say anything now; just think about it.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge music -- Ethereal (nop mix) by @nop (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Lancefield/34818</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Leaving Data Behind in The Rental Car</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A couple of weeks back, I retweeted a news article - the third suspect charged in the fatal shooting of a retired Chicago fireman during a carjacking was caught because he’d synced his phone to the audio system of the stolen car.&nbsp; I dunno -- fleeing a murder but worrying about getting a ticket for not using hands free.&nbsp; I dunno. Good they caught the bad guy, but what about us law-abiding frequent travelers? When the Hertz or Avis person walks up to me at the car return lane, they always remind me not to leave anything behind; to remember to take my sunglasses and my mobile phone. But they never remind me to delete all the data I synced to the car.&nbsp;</li><li>And with more of our lives getting stored in our phones, I asked Andrea Amico, founder of the company <a href=\"https://www.privacy4cars.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Privacy4Cars</a>, to come onto the podcast to talk about the privacy problems at the intersection of cars and smartphones.<ul><li>Mark: Andrea, how did you get involved in this space?</li></ul><ul><li>Andrea: One of the companies that used to run was one of the largest used car inspection companies. We inspected a lot of vehicles that were ready to be sold. I just noticed that people were leaving their digital lives behind.</li><li>Mark: We first talked about the privacy/security issues around pairing your smartphone with your car rental about four years ago. Bluetooth-enabled entertainment systems were just becoming more common in rental car fleets as hands-free call laws became widespread. Even today, the first thing I do is to sync my iPhone. And I\'ve noticed more times than not, the sync slots are all full -- personalized names, Jan\'s iPhone, Timmy\'s iPhone. You end up having to delete at least one of them to make room for yours. And then, once paired, most phones by default, end up downloading all your contacts and your phone numbers and things like that. So, Jan and Timmy have left behind all of their contacts and all their phone numbers and that\'s just bad in so many ways.</li><li>Andrea: When you sync your phone through Bluetooth or you plug it into the USB port or now, in some newer cars, you just walk into the car and the car automatically sniffs your phone and start syncing to it, including those with Android Auto and Apple CarPlay. When that happens, you are creating a mini-clone of your phone inside the vehicle.</li><li>Mark: What other information are people leaving behind when they don\'t clear themselves out of a rental car?</li><li>Andrea: All sorts -- your phone book, your call logs, the text messages, including the body, meaning the actual text of the text messages; that stuff will be left behind. But also all sorts of meta data that allows criminals or law enforcement or just people who want to snoop on you to re-identify you, anything from the identifiers of your phones which are unique, your Bluetooth MAC address. Not to mention, of course, all your navigation data. I mean, you can reconstruct where people have been, just by data that has been stored in the infotainment system. And then you have, whether you are on Twitter and Facebook and what are the handles of those things, which are the last photos you have taken? What files have you synced, the emails, calendar entries. There\'s all sorts of stuff that people really don\'t understand that they\'re living behind.</li><li>Mark: But when people <em>do </em>delete pairings are they deleting all that information? Or is there some data still retained in that vehicle?</li><li>Andrea: &nbsp;By and large, deleting the data following the manufacturer\'s directions is helpful in preventing third parties to having access. And so if there is anything left behind, it requires a much deeper forensic type of analysis that is typically not accessible. But for most people, following the manufacturer\'s directions on how to remove the data, it is a very easy to do and very effective defense against getting their data being in the hands of somebody else.</li><li>Mark: That\'s where <a href=\"https://www.privacy4cars.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Privacy4Cars</a> comes in. That\'s where your app comes in -- helping people get that right?</li><li>Andrea: Yes, we have a free app that people can download, and you can just search for Privacy4Cars on the <a href=\"https://apps.apple.com/us/app/privacy4cars/id1370969499\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple App Store</a> or <a href=\"https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.privacy4cars\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Play</a>, depending what kind of phone you have, and download it for free.</li><li>Mark: The last time on the podcast we talked about this topic was a little over a year ago, October 2019. &nbsp;I\'d gotten a notice from Hertz that they had changed their terms and conditions. I noticed that Hertz had specifically carved out liability from me leaving information from a Bluetooth pairing. And now, on one hand, I could see that point. I\'ve actively and voluntarily synced my phone to the car and in doing so, caused my information to be downloaded. But at what point does that sort of digital maintenance, clearing personal identifiable information, after every rental become part of the rental company’s overall maintenance responsibility, like checking the oil levels and the tire pressure.</li><li>Andrea: I believe that the time has already passed, and it\'s been in the past for at least a year, right? At least, the passage of California Consumer Privacy Act. And probably you can go further back in the past because of other types of regulations. And there are some regulators who have actually spoken about this. So in the United States, you have the FTC that has issued already four guidances on the need to delete personal information. In Europe, they went as far as to give a guideline that mandates the removal of the personal information. Beyond rental, when people are traveling, sometimes they rent, sometimes they ride-share, and very often it happens to me that I in an Uber or Lyft and you have a very nice driver that tells you, “Hey, you need to fill up the tank on your battery? Here\'s a cable.” And the first thing I do is glance -- &nbsp;where does the cable end up? If it goes into the lighter, that\'s only power. So yes, I’ll recharge my phone. But if it goes straight &nbsp;into the USB port of the car, don\'t charge the phone unless you\'re really desperate, because as soon as your phone powers back up, it will start downloading all your information into a stranger\'s car. So you definitely don\'t want to do that.</li><li>Mark: Andrea Amico, founder of <a href=\"https://www.privacy4cars.com\">Privacy4Cars.com</a>, you can find his app on the <a href=\"https://apps.apple.com/us/app/privacy4cars/id1370969499\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple App store</a> and on <a href=\"https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.privacy4cars\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Play</a>. Andrea, thank you very much for taking the time to talk to us today.</li><li>Andrea: Thank you. Mark. I really enjoyed talking to you.</li></ul></li><li>Bridge music -- My Flaming Heart by Wired Ant (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial &nbsp;(3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Wired_Ant/36862 Ft: Javolenus</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Hereditary Road Warriors</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I was reading some research, as one does during a lockdown advisory when one gets caught up running down a clickhole, about <a href=\"https://research.fb.com/blog/2016/03/do-jobs-run-in-families/\">jobs running in the family</a>. Some of the stats -- a son with a military father is 5 times more likely to enlist himself while if his mother is a lawyer, he’s 6.6 times more likely to follow her to the bar; a daughter with a scientist father is almost 4 times more likely to be a scientist. Indeed, when I was deciding my college major, I was leaning toward&nbsp; chemistry but chose chemical engineering mostly because my grandfather and father were both engineers.</li><li>Which got me thinking -- does traveling -- careers that require frequent traveling -- run in the family? Again, looking back on my family, my grandfather traveled a lot when he worked for Sears, checking out vendors for hard goods -- tools, small machinery -- and working with them on new products. My dad designed farm machinery -- things like hay balers and cotton pickers -- for International Harvester. He’d often be on the road for weeks at a time, testing prototypes at farms around the country, looking for different crop and field conditions, and then at plants helping to set up the manufacturing lines for the finished machine. And so I grew up seeing that rhythm of travel -- Dad at home, Dad packing, saying good-bye, and then getting on with our lives until he came back. This was back in the late ‘60’s and into the 70’s, so no cheap long-distance let alone messaging or email or video calls. He was gone, with the exception of a postcard or two, until he came back.</li><li>And then when I joined the workforce, the first day of my first real job out of school, I got on a plane and made the first of what’s been hundreds of flights between ORD and DFW.&nbsp; So many that, pretty soon, I got to know the women working the front desk at the DFW Admirals Club. One morning, one of them asks me if I’d maybe like to meet her daughter. Awkward. I asked her, “Would you want your daughter dating someone who’s out of town as much as I am?” She paused for a moment and then said, “No, not really”.&nbsp;</li><li>Also around this time, my dad had gotten promoted past the level of going out to the field and so was traveling a lot less. But my mother took a purchasing executive role and with that, the need for a lot of travel to vendors. So while travel was generational/ “hereditary” from my father to me, my mother and I started road warrior-ing at the same time, so we were more like travel “siblings” -- comparing hotel notes, competing on frequent flier status and perks.&nbsp;</li><li>Will traveling for a living continue to a 4th generation? Tough to tell right now; both kids measure their commute in feet rather than miles during the lockdown, and friends running consulting operations tell me the current state is great for staff productivity -- an hour sales call takes an hour, rather than a day’s worth of travel for that hour, and working remotely with clients saves the client money and consultants don’t get burnt out trying to balance work and home needs. As I said back in the March and July episodes, I don’t buy that 100% remote is the “new normal”, but I also don’t believe it will snap back to 2019 levels, not after what will have been a year’s-plus time working out the mechanics of virtual working. But will there be another generation of road warriors in my family? It’ll probably take a couple of years to figure that out.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #171</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li>I’ve made another </li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>, as well as asking Alexa, Siri, and Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_171.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #171 — Leaving Data in Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips','','inherit','closed','closed','','2997-revision-v1','','','2021-01-13 18:11:08','2021-01-13 23:11:08','',2997,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/13/2997-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3005,1,'2021-01-13 18:12:52','2021-01-13 23:12:52','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":2960,\"width\":300,\"height\":300,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large is-resized\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2960\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"/><figcaption>How Do I Insert This Into My iPhone<br>(DoD photo by EJ Hersom)</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>No Thanksgiving travel, but looking at the travel volume for this, the busiest travel week of the year, shows just how far things have fallen. The Qantas CEO said \"No vax, no fly\", so we dig into the emerging world of digital vaccine passports. And then I trace my travel genealogy, wondering if road warrior-ism is hereditary. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_171.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go over to the <em>Subscribe</em> section on the right to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/949687216&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #171: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. Stayed off the road over the entire holiday season which let me skip the TSA’s new post-lockdown checkpoint record of <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/coronavirus/passenger-throughput\">1.3 million on January 3rd</a>, the last Sunday of the holiday season -- though, to be fair,&nbsp; this is only just over half the 2.4 million passengers who flew on the same Sunday last year. And with every US airline except Delta now back to selling middle seats, it makes sense that load factors also ratcheted up over the holidays. I haven’t seen any industry-wide numbers yet, but <a href=\"https://www.ittn.ie/news/confidence-in-boeing-737-max-holding-firm/\">American’s COO did say that the load factor on their 737 Maxes over the last week of the holiday season was 90%</a>. Now, most of those Maxes are flying between LGA and MIA, always a busy holiday route, but I’ve seen reports of many other packed flights, as well as the much higher load . I was never a big fan of completely full flights pre-coronavirus and, as you can imagine, am even less so now pre-widespread vaccine distribution. So, I’m not too bothered that we didn’t try to get out of town over the holidays.</li><li>However, staying in town through the rest of January is a whole different thing because January is absolutely the worst part of Chicago’s winter. So, after&nbsp; Thanksgiving weekend, on what used to be called Cyber Monday when we actually shopped in physical stores, instead of trolling through Amazon, I was trolling through travel sites looking for cheap flights to someplace warm the 3rd wk of Jan. I figured that’d be long enough for any holiday COVID spike to work its way through the system.</li><li>I’d had some friends who’d gone down to Mexico, felt safe in the tourist zones, didn’t have any problems, came back healthy; but I don’t do well sitting on a beach for more than a day or two and I wanted to keep it a bit simpler, so we decided to stay in the US, which pretty quickly narrowed our search to Southern California, South Florida, and Arizona. Since we’d spent time last winter in both Arizona and Florida, we decided to do California and go as far down the coast as we could get, which was San Diego.&nbsp; And, as luck would have it, Southwest had cheap direct flights from Chicago Midway and I had Southwest travel credits from one of last spring’s flight cancellations burning a hole in my virtual pocket, so *boom* I booked it</li><li>On, what turned out to be, 3 days before the governor locked down most of California. But a friend hit the ground there a week before Christmas and said “Eh, it’s not a problem.” So, we stayed the course and didn’t really pay any attention to it until after New Years when we thought, you know, we should book a place to stay. And that’s when we started to pay attention. Bike and kayak rental places were open as “outdoor recreation” businesses. But vacation rental and hotel booking sites all pointed to the California Public Health Department statement -- “no hotel or lodging entity in California shall accept or honor out-of-state reservations for nonessential travel” which our January snowbird getaway definitely didn’t qualify as. Would things ease up in a couple of weeks? The trend lines on the state’s COVID website didn’t seem to be pointing in that direction.</li><li>So last Monday when I received another blast of airline sales emails, it seemed like the right time for a pivot. X-ing off California, we were back to Florida and Arizona. We talked to friends already down in Florida; they said the south beaches were already filling up with snowbirds, so we opted for drier sand and swung our Southwest flights over to Phoenix.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>But since we’d been in Phoenix last winter and continuing in the spirit of visiting not-quite-A-list places in the US we’ve never been while weaving around quarantines, we’re driving further south down I-10 to Tucson. We’re running the same travel planning play we did for our August trip to Michigan’s UP -- focus on outdoor activities like hiking and biking, have back-ups in case of last-minute closures, and above all, build a list of microbreweries with outdoor seating.</li><li>Bridge Music -- Leviathan by Kirkoid (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Kirkoid/31109</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>TravelCommons contributor Allan Marko commented on my little lockdown game with my Google Mini -- changing the voice to, say, an English accent and then asking about the weather in London.&nbsp; Allan wrote:<ul><li>I often change the Siri voice for a bit of variety. Currently “Australian Female” is providing my CarPlay directions. you can also ask Siri to “Play TravelCommons”…</li></ul></li><li>Which immediately got me digging into Siri’s settings, looking for the Voice options. I found I had a choice of American, Australian, British, Indian, Irish, and South African. Since I’d already used the first three with my Google Mini, it was between the last three. I chose Irish for now, but will probably switch to South African before the end of the month. Actually, Waze, the nav app, always impressed me with the number of voice and language options. Every once in a while, I switch Irene’s Waze over to Hungarian before she’s heading out somewhere. For some reason, I get more of a laugh out of it than she does.</li><li>TravelCommons listener Dan Grabon and I have been trading notes as we’ve each slogged through Thoreau’s <em>Walden</em>. We both started it back in April, in the height of the lockdown. Everybody was deciding that, with nothing much else to do, it was a good time to pick up that classic you’ve always been meaning to get to. Dan started out with <em>The Brothers Karamazov</em>, which I thought was damned impressive. I first reached for Whitman’s <em>Leaves of Grass</em>, but then thought I needed something a bit more down-to-earth, something that wouldn’t need quite that level of interpretation and abstract thinking. And <em>Walden</em>, about Thoreau’s self-isolation in the woods outside of Concord, MA, seemed a better fit with the lockdown. Dan finished last month, at the beginning of November. I was 50 pages behind, so I didn’t finish ‘til Thanksgiving -- it was tough cutting through the tryptophan fog, but I gutted it through. Dan said he was staying with Thoreau, moving onto <em>Civil Disobedience</em> before shelving the book. I pivoted to non-fiction, <em>Why We Sleep</em>, where a neuroscientist and sleep expert spends some 300+ pages saying “If you don’t sleep 8 hours, you’re killing yourself” which got me doing some mental math. Between jet lag from all the&nbsp; international flights and waking up at 4am to make 6am flights to LGA, I’ve probably dropped 5 years off my life. Though, given some dementia running through my family history, I might not have remembered those years anyways.</li><li>And I show up on the other side of the mic talking travel pro tips with Matt Wilson on his <a href=\"https://www.under30experiences.com/blog/travel-like-a-pro-with-mark-peacock-of-travelcommons\">Millennial Travel Podcast</a>.&nbsp; I’m trying to remember when we recorded this -- had to be pre-April 2019 because I was still in the suburban TravelCommons studio and Matt was hanging out down in Costa Rica. The connection fuzzes out now and again, but it was a fun conversation. I’ll put a link in the episode in the show notes but fair warning -- it’s mostly me rattling on for an hour. Listening back to it, I’m kinda embarrassed that I don’t give Matt much of a chance to get a word in edgewise.</li><li>In the last episode, I talked about the work-from-hotel offerings from Marriott, Hilton, and Hyatt. They all had their own twists, but Hyatt’s was the most unique in that their “Work from Hyatt” offer was resort-focused and had a 7-night minimum. I said it wasn’t so much a WeWork replacement as a digital nomad trial. Well, I’m guessing that they didn’t get much uptake on it because I just got another email from Hyatt with a new offering -- “Office for the Day” -- that pretty much matches Marriott’s Day Pass. Like I said last month, these offerings all feel a bit “toe in the water”, a bit opportunistic. And now that we’re starting to get better visibility into post-vaccine timelines, I wonder how long they’ll last -- will people still want to pay to work in a hotel room after all the Starbucks stores have reopened.</li><li>I’ve talked in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/12/podcast-120-where-do-guidebooks-fit-in-i-hate-shopping-for-suitcases\">past</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/09/28/podcast-124-craft-beer-hunting-i-hate-rick-steves\">episodes</a> about how I’m a bit of a knuckle-dragger regarding printed travel guides. I still find a physical book useful when traveling. But I’ve been wondering how quickly these physical guides will be able to push out post-COVID editions to reflect the closures of bars, restaurants, and independent shops they’ve recommended. I was running through my own Chicago recommendation list from 2019. A bunch of my favorite places have closed; it’s about an even split between “Closed forever, good-bye, we’ve taken down our sign” and “Closed until Spring… we hope.” The final proofs of the 2021 editions have to already be baked if not already at the printers. I dunno, maybe they’ll all post errata pages that you can download, print off, and then stick in your books.</li><li>In a massive intersection of all things social media, I posted a <a href=\"https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/tiktok-hotel-room-chef/index.html\">CNN article</a> on the TravelCommons Facebook page that a friend, a hotel company CIO, sent me on LinkedIn that showed TikTok videos of people cooking meals in hotel rooms using an iron for a griddle, a hot water kettle for a steamer, a pants presser as an oven, and the one that really wowed me -- a coffee maker as a sous vide water bath. I don’t know if I should be impressed by the ingenuity or looking to set up as a ghost kitchen/delivery service wherever they are because I’ve never seen anyone go to that extent to cook their own meal in a hotel room. Even guys I knew trying to squeeze the last pennies out of their per diems wouldn’t do much more than boil water for their Cup O’Noodles or work hard not to burn their microwave popcorn. I’ll also put a link in the show notes to the TikTok account of one of the guys, Jago Randles. His TikTok series,<a href=\"https://www.tiktok.com/@jagoscrandles\"> Isolation Kitchen</a>, has about 150,000 followers. He does some impressive stuff. But I will make sure, going forward, that I rinse out the coffee maker and wipe down the iron before using them.</li><li>For many frequent travelers, a key early milestone of the pandemic was when airlines and hotels gave them a year’s push on their status -- moving the expiration date from Jan 2021 to Jan 2022. Big sigh of relief. Then for Southwest fliers, another milestone -- drink coupon expiration dates all got pushed to the end of this year. Whew! All’s right in the traveling world. But a couple of days ago, I was rummaging around in my messenger bag and out tumbled 5 Southwest drink coupons -- one with a Sept expiration date; the rest, December 31. Look Southwest, I don’t want to seem greedy. I did get a year’s push on A-List and 6 months on Companion Pass. But I’d love you even more if you gave me another 6 months on those drink coupons. Nope, don’t say anything now; just think about it.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge music -- Ethereal (nop mix) by @nop (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Lancefield/34818</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Leaving Data Behind in The Rental Car</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A couple of weeks back, I retweeted a news article - the third suspect charged in the fatal shooting of a retired Chicago fireman during a carjacking was caught because he’d synced his phone to the audio system of the stolen car.&nbsp; I dunno -- fleeing a murder but worrying about getting a ticket for not using hands free.&nbsp; I dunno. Good they caught the bad guy, but what about us law-abiding frequent travelers? When the Hertz or Avis person walks up to me at the car return lane, they always remind me not to leave anything behind; to remember to take my sunglasses and my mobile phone. But they never remind me to delete all the data I synced to the car.&nbsp;</li><li>And with more of our lives getting stored in our phones, I asked Andrea Amico, founder of the company <a href=\"https://www.privacy4cars.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Privacy4Cars</a>, to come onto the podcast to talk about the privacy problems at the intersection of cars and smartphones.<ul><li>Mark: Andrea, how did you get involved in this space?</li></ul><ul><li>Andrea: One of the companies that used to run was one of the largest used car inspection companies. We inspected a lot of vehicles that were ready to be sold. I just noticed that people were leaving their digital lives behind.</li><li>Mark: We first talked about the privacy/security issues around pairing your smartphone with your car rental about four years ago. Bluetooth-enabled entertainment systems were just becoming more common in rental car fleets as hands-free call laws became widespread. Even today, the first thing I do is to sync my iPhone. And I\'ve noticed more times than not, the sync slots are all full -- personalized names, Jan\'s iPhone, Timmy\'s iPhone. You end up having to delete at least one of them to make room for yours. And then, once paired, most phones by default, end up downloading all your contacts and your phone numbers and things like that. So, Jan and Timmy have left behind all of their contacts and all their phone numbers and that\'s just bad in so many ways.</li><li>Andrea: When you sync your phone through Bluetooth or you plug it into the USB port or now, in some newer cars, you just walk into the car and the car automatically sniffs your phone and start syncing to it, including those with Android Auto and Apple CarPlay. When that happens, you are creating a mini-clone of your phone inside the vehicle.</li><li>Mark: What other information are people leaving behind when they don\'t clear themselves out of a rental car?</li><li>Andrea: All sorts -- your phone book, your call logs, the text messages, including the body, meaning the actual text of the text messages; that stuff will be left behind. But also all sorts of meta data that allows criminals or law enforcement or just people who want to snoop on you to re-identify you, anything from the identifiers of your phones which are unique, your Bluetooth MAC address. Not to mention, of course, all your navigation data. I mean, you can reconstruct where people have been, just by data that has been stored in the infotainment system. And then you have, whether you are on Twitter and Facebook and what are the handles of those things, which are the last photos you have taken? What files have you synced, the emails, calendar entries. There\'s all sorts of stuff that people really don\'t understand that they\'re living behind.</li><li>Mark: But when people <em>do </em>delete pairings are they deleting all that information? Or is there some data still retained in that vehicle?</li><li>Andrea: &nbsp;By and large, deleting the data following the manufacturer\'s directions is helpful in preventing third parties to having access. And so if there is anything left behind, it requires a much deeper forensic type of analysis that is typically not accessible. But for most people, following the manufacturer\'s directions on how to remove the data, it is a very easy to do and very effective defense against getting their data being in the hands of somebody else.</li><li>Mark: That\'s where <a href=\"https://www.privacy4cars.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Privacy4Cars</a> comes in. That\'s where your app comes in -- helping people get that right?</li><li>Andrea: Yes, we have a free app that people can download, and you can just search for Privacy4Cars on the <a href=\"https://apps.apple.com/us/app/privacy4cars/id1370969499\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple App Store</a> or <a href=\"https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.privacy4cars\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Play</a>, depending what kind of phone you have, and download it for free.</li><li>Mark: The last time on the podcast we talked about this topic was a little over a year ago, October 2019. &nbsp;I\'d gotten a notice from Hertz that they had changed their terms and conditions. I noticed that Hertz had specifically carved out liability from me leaving information from a Bluetooth pairing. And now, on one hand, I could see that point. I\'ve actively and voluntarily synced my phone to the car and in doing so, caused my information to be downloaded. But at what point does that sort of digital maintenance, clearing personal identifiable information, after every rental become part of the rental company’s overall maintenance responsibility, like checking the oil levels and the tire pressure.</li><li>Andrea: I believe that the time has already passed, and it\'s been in the past for at least a year, right? At least, the passage of California Consumer Privacy Act. And probably you can go further back in the past because of other types of regulations. And there are some regulators who have actually spoken about this. So in the United States, you have the FTC that has issued already four guidances on the need to delete personal information. In Europe, they went as far as to give a guideline that mandates the removal of the personal information. Beyond rental, when people are traveling, sometimes they rent, sometimes they ride-share, and very often it happens to me that I in an Uber or Lyft and you have a very nice driver that tells you, “Hey, you need to fill up the tank on your battery? Here\'s a cable.” And the first thing I do is glance -- &nbsp;where does the cable end up? If it goes into the lighter, that\'s only power. So yes, I’ll recharge my phone. But if it goes straight &nbsp;into the USB port of the car, don\'t charge the phone unless you\'re really desperate, because as soon as your phone powers back up, it will start downloading all your information into a stranger\'s car. So you definitely don\'t want to do that.</li><li>Mark: Andrea Amico, founder of <a href=\"https://www.privacy4cars.com\">Privacy4Cars.com</a>, you can find his app on the <a href=\"https://apps.apple.com/us/app/privacy4cars/id1370969499\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple App store</a> and on <a href=\"https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.privacy4cars\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Play</a>. Andrea, thank you very much for taking the time to talk to us today.</li><li>Andrea: Thank you. Mark. I really enjoyed talking to you.</li></ul></li><li>Bridge music -- My Flaming Heart by Wired Ant (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial &nbsp;(3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Wired_Ant/36862 Ft: Javolenus</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Hereditary Road Warriors</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I was reading some research, as one does during a lockdown advisory when one gets caught up running down a clickhole, about <a href=\"https://research.fb.com/blog/2016/03/do-jobs-run-in-families/\">jobs running in the family</a>. Some of the stats -- a son with a military father is 5 times more likely to enlist himself while if his mother is a lawyer, he’s 6.6 times more likely to follow her to the bar; a daughter with a scientist father is almost 4 times more likely to be a scientist. Indeed, when I was deciding my college major, I was leaning toward&nbsp; chemistry but chose chemical engineering mostly because my grandfather and father were both engineers.</li><li>Which got me thinking -- does traveling -- careers that require frequent traveling -- run in the family? Again, looking back on my family, my grandfather traveled a lot when he worked for Sears, checking out vendors for hard goods -- tools, small machinery -- and working with them on new products. My dad designed farm machinery -- things like hay balers and cotton pickers -- for International Harvester. He’d often be on the road for weeks at a time, testing prototypes at farms around the country, looking for different crop and field conditions, and then at plants helping to set up the manufacturing lines for the finished machine. And so I grew up seeing that rhythm of travel -- Dad at home, Dad packing, saying good-bye, and then getting on with our lives until he came back. This was back in the late ‘60’s and into the 70’s, so no cheap long-distance let alone messaging or email or video calls. He was gone, with the exception of a postcard or two, until he came back.</li><li>And then when I joined the workforce, the first day of my first real job out of school, I got on a plane and made the first of what’s been hundreds of flights between ORD and DFW.&nbsp; So many that, pretty soon, I got to know the women working the front desk at the DFW Admirals Club. One morning, one of them asks me if I’d maybe like to meet her daughter. Awkward. I asked her, “Would you want your daughter dating someone who’s out of town as much as I am?” She paused for a moment and then said, “No, not really”.&nbsp;</li><li>Also around this time, my dad had gotten promoted past the level of going out to the field and so was traveling a lot less. But my mother took a purchasing executive role and with that, the need for a lot of travel to vendors. So while travel was generational/ “hereditary” from my father to me, my mother and I started road warrior-ing at the same time, so we were more like travel “siblings” -- comparing hotel notes, competing on frequent flier status and perks.&nbsp;</li><li>Will traveling for a living continue to a 4th generation? Tough to tell right now; both kids measure their commute in feet rather than miles during the lockdown, and friends running consulting operations tell me the current state is great for staff productivity -- an hour sales call takes an hour, rather than a day’s worth of travel for that hour, and working remotely with clients saves the client money and consultants don’t get burnt out trying to balance work and home needs. As I said back in the March and July episodes, I don’t buy that 100% remote is the “new normal”, but I also don’t believe it will snap back to 2019 levels, not after what will have been a year’s-plus time working out the mechanics of virtual working. But will there be another generation of road warriors in my family? It’ll probably take a couple of years to figure that out.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #171</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li>I’ve made another </li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>, as well as asking Alexa, Siri, and Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_171.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #171 — Leaving Data in Rental Cars; Planning 2021 Travel','','inherit','closed','closed','','2997-revision-v1','','','2021-01-13 18:12:52','2021-01-13 23:12:52','',2997,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/13/2997-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3006,1,'2021-01-13 18:13:46','2021-01-13 23:13:46','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":2960,\"width\":300,\"height\":300,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large is-resized\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2960\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"/><figcaption>How Do I Insert This Into My iPhone<br>(DoD photo by EJ Hersom)</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>No Thanksgiving travel, but looking at the travel volume for this, the busiest travel week of the year, shows just how far things have fallen. The Qantas CEO said \"No vax, no fly\", so we dig into the emerging world of digital vaccine passports. And then I trace my travel genealogy, wondering if road warrior-ism is hereditary. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_171.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go over to the <em>Subscribe</em> section on the right to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/949687216&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #171: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. Stayed off the road over the entire holiday season which let me skip the TSA’s new post-lockdown checkpoint record of <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/coronavirus/passenger-throughput\">1.3 million on January 3rd</a>, the last Sunday of the holiday season -- though, to be fair,&nbsp; this is only just over half the 2.4 million passengers who flew on the same Sunday last year. And with every US airline except Delta now back to selling middle seats, it makes sense that load factors also ratcheted up over the holidays. I haven’t seen any industry-wide numbers yet, but <a href=\"https://www.ittn.ie/news/confidence-in-boeing-737-max-holding-firm/\">American’s COO did say that the load factor on their 737 Maxes over the last week of the holiday season was 90%</a>. Now, most of those Maxes are flying between LGA and MIA, always a busy holiday route, but I’ve seen reports of many other packed flights, as well as the much higher load . I was never a big fan of completely full flights pre-coronavirus and, as you can imagine, am even less so now pre-widespread vaccine distribution. So, I’m not too bothered that we didn’t try to get out of town over the holidays.</li><li>However, staying in town through the rest of January is a whole different thing because January is absolutely the worst part of Chicago’s winter. So, after&nbsp; Thanksgiving weekend, on what used to be called Cyber Monday when we actually shopped in physical stores, instead of trolling through Amazon, I was trolling through travel sites looking for cheap flights to someplace warm the 3rd wk of Jan. I figured that’d be long enough for any holiday COVID spike to work its way through the system.</li><li>I’d had some friends who’d gone down to Mexico, felt safe in the tourist zones, didn’t have any problems, came back healthy; but I don’t do well sitting on a beach for more than a day or two and I wanted to keep it a bit simpler, so we decided to stay in the US, which pretty quickly narrowed our search to Southern California, South Florida, and Arizona. Since we’d spent time last winter in both Arizona and Florida, we decided to do California and go as far down the coast as we could get, which was San Diego.&nbsp; And, as luck would have it, Southwest had cheap direct flights from Chicago Midway and I had Southwest travel credits from one of last spring’s flight cancellations burning a hole in my virtual pocket, so *boom* I booked it</li><li>On, what turned out to be, 3 days before the governor locked down most of California. But a friend hit the ground there a week before Christmas and said “Eh, it’s not a problem.” So, we stayed the course and didn’t really pay any attention to it until after New Years when we thought, you know, we should book a place to stay. And that’s when we started to pay attention. Bike and kayak rental places were open as “outdoor recreation” businesses. But vacation rental and hotel booking sites all pointed to the California Public Health Department statement -- “no hotel or lodging entity in California shall accept or honor out-of-state reservations for nonessential travel” which our January snowbird getaway definitely didn’t qualify as. Would things ease up in a couple of weeks? The trend lines on the state’s COVID website didn’t seem to be pointing in that direction.</li><li>So last Monday when I received another blast of airline sales emails, it seemed like the right time for a pivot. X-ing off California, we were back to Florida and Arizona. We talked to friends already down in Florida; they said the south beaches were already filling up with snowbirds, so we opted for drier sand and swung our Southwest flights over to Phoenix.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>But since we’d been in Phoenix last winter and continuing in the spirit of visiting not-quite-A-list places in the US we’ve never been while weaving around quarantines, we’re driving further south down I-10 to Tucson. We’re running the same travel planning play we did for our August trip to Michigan’s UP -- focus on outdoor activities like hiking and biking, have back-ups in case of last-minute closures, and above all, build a list of microbreweries with outdoor seating.</li><li>Bridge Music -- Leviathan by Kirkoid (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Kirkoid/31109</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>TravelCommons contributor Allan Marko commented on my little lockdown game with my Google Mini -- changing the voice to, say, an English accent and then asking about the weather in London.&nbsp; Allan wrote:<ul><li>I often change the Siri voice for a bit of variety. Currently “Australian Female” is providing my CarPlay directions. you can also ask Siri to “Play TravelCommons”…</li></ul></li><li>Which immediately got me digging into Siri’s settings, looking for the Voice options. I found I had a choice of American, Australian, British, Indian, Irish, and South African. Since I’d already used the first three with my Google Mini, it was between the last three. I chose Irish for now, but will probably switch to South African before the end of the month. Actually, Waze, the nav app, always impressed me with the number of voice and language options. Every once in a while, I switch Irene’s Waze over to Hungarian before she’s heading out somewhere. For some reason, I get more of a laugh out of it than she does.</li><li>TravelCommons listener Dan Grabon and I have been trading notes as we’ve each slogged through Thoreau’s <em>Walden</em>. We both started it back in April, in the height of the lockdown. Everybody was deciding that, with nothing much else to do, it was a good time to pick up that classic you’ve always been meaning to get to. Dan started out with <em>The Brothers Karamazov</em>, which I thought was damned impressive. I first reached for Whitman’s <em>Leaves of Grass</em>, but then thought I needed something a bit more down-to-earth, something that wouldn’t need quite that level of interpretation and abstract thinking. And <em>Walden</em>, about Thoreau’s self-isolation in the woods outside of Concord, MA, seemed a better fit with the lockdown. Dan finished last month, at the beginning of November. I was 50 pages behind, so I didn’t finish ‘til Thanksgiving -- it was tough cutting through the tryptophan fog, but I gutted it through. Dan said he was staying with Thoreau, moving onto <em>Civil Disobedience</em> before shelving the book. I pivoted to non-fiction, <em>Why We Sleep</em>, where a neuroscientist and sleep expert spends some 300+ pages saying “If you don’t sleep 8 hours, you’re killing yourself” which got me doing some mental math. Between jet lag from all the&nbsp; international flights and waking up at 4am to make 6am flights to LGA, I’ve probably dropped 5 years off my life. Though, given some dementia running through my family history, I might not have remembered those years anyways.</li><li>And I show up on the other side of the mic talking travel pro tips with Matt Wilson on his <a href=\"https://www.under30experiences.com/blog/travel-like-a-pro-with-mark-peacock-of-travelcommons\">Millennial Travel Podcast</a>.&nbsp; I’m trying to remember when we recorded this -- had to be pre-April 2019 because I was still in the suburban TravelCommons studio and Matt was hanging out down in Costa Rica. The connection fuzzes out now and again, but it was a fun conversation. I’ll put a link in the episode in the show notes but fair warning -- it’s mostly me rattling on for an hour. Listening back to it, I’m kinda embarrassed that I don’t give Matt much of a chance to get a word in edgewise.</li><li>In the last episode, I talked about the work-from-hotel offerings from Marriott, Hilton, and Hyatt. They all had their own twists, but Hyatt’s was the most unique in that their “Work from Hyatt” offer was resort-focused and had a 7-night minimum. I said it wasn’t so much a WeWork replacement as a digital nomad trial. Well, I’m guessing that they didn’t get much uptake on it because I just got another email from Hyatt with a new offering -- “Office for the Day” -- that pretty much matches Marriott’s Day Pass. Like I said last month, these offerings all feel a bit “toe in the water”, a bit opportunistic. And now that we’re starting to get better visibility into post-vaccine timelines, I wonder how long they’ll last -- will people still want to pay to work in a hotel room after all the Starbucks stores have reopened.</li><li>I’ve talked in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/12/podcast-120-where-do-guidebooks-fit-in-i-hate-shopping-for-suitcases\">past</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/09/28/podcast-124-craft-beer-hunting-i-hate-rick-steves\">episodes</a> about how I’m a bit of a knuckle-dragger regarding printed travel guides. I still find a physical book useful when traveling. But I’ve been wondering how quickly these physical guides will be able to push out post-COVID editions to reflect the closures of bars, restaurants, and independent shops they’ve recommended. I was running through my own Chicago recommendation list from 2019. A bunch of my favorite places have closed; it’s about an even split between “Closed forever, good-bye, we’ve taken down our sign” and “Closed until Spring… we hope.” The final proofs of the 2021 editions have to already be baked if not already at the printers. I dunno, maybe they’ll all post errata pages that you can download, print off, and then stick in your books.</li><li>In a massive intersection of all things social media, I posted a <a href=\"https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/tiktok-hotel-room-chef/index.html\">CNN article</a> on the TravelCommons Facebook page that a friend, a hotel company CIO, sent me on LinkedIn that showed TikTok videos of people cooking meals in hotel rooms using an iron for a griddle, a hot water kettle for a steamer, a pants presser as an oven, and the one that really wowed me -- a coffee maker as a sous vide water bath. I don’t know if I should be impressed by the ingenuity or looking to set up as a ghost kitchen/delivery service wherever they are because I’ve never seen anyone go to that extent to cook their own meal in a hotel room. Even guys I knew trying to squeeze the last pennies out of their per diems wouldn’t do much more than boil water for their Cup O’Noodles or work hard not to burn their microwave popcorn. I’ll also put a link in the show notes to the TikTok account of one of the guys, Jago Randles. His TikTok series,<a href=\"https://www.tiktok.com/@jagoscrandles\"> Isolation Kitchen</a>, has about 150,000 followers. He does some impressive stuff. But I will make sure, going forward, that I rinse out the coffee maker and wipe down the iron before using them.</li><li>For many frequent travelers, a key early milestone of the pandemic was when airlines and hotels gave them a year’s push on their status -- moving the expiration date from Jan 2021 to Jan 2022. Big sigh of relief. Then for Southwest fliers, another milestone -- drink coupon expiration dates all got pushed to the end of this year. Whew! All’s right in the traveling world. But a couple of days ago, I was rummaging around in my messenger bag and out tumbled 5 Southwest drink coupons -- one with a Sept expiration date; the rest, December 31. Look Southwest, I don’t want to seem greedy. I did get a year’s push on A-List and 6 months on Companion Pass. But I’d love you even more if you gave me another 6 months on those drink coupons. Nope, don’t say anything now; just think about it.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge music -- Ethereal (nop mix) by @nop (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Lancefield/34818</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Leaving Data Behind in The Rental Car</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A couple of weeks back, I retweeted a news article - the third suspect charged in the fatal shooting of a retired Chicago fireman during a carjacking was caught because he’d synced his phone to the audio system of the stolen car.&nbsp; I dunno -- fleeing a murder but worrying about getting a ticket for not using hands free.&nbsp; I dunno. Good they caught the bad guy, but what about us law-abiding frequent travelers? When the Hertz or Avis person walks up to me at the car return lane, they always remind me not to leave anything behind; to remember to take my sunglasses and my mobile phone. But they never remind me to delete all the data I synced to the car.&nbsp;</li><li>And with more of our lives getting stored in our phones, I asked Andrea Amico, founder of the company <a href=\"https://www.privacy4cars.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Privacy4Cars</a>, to come onto the podcast to talk about the privacy problems at the intersection of cars and smartphones.<ul><li>Mark: Andrea, how did you get involved in this space?</li></ul><ul><li>Andrea: One of the companies that used to run was one of the largest used car inspection companies. We inspected a lot of vehicles that were ready to be sold. I just noticed that people were leaving their digital lives behind.</li><li>Mark: We first talked about the privacy/security issues around pairing your smartphone with your car rental about four years ago. Bluetooth-enabled entertainment systems were just becoming more common in rental car fleets as hands-free call laws became widespread. Even today, the first thing I do is to sync my iPhone. And I\'ve noticed more times than not, the sync slots are all full -- personalized names, Jan\'s iPhone, Timmy\'s iPhone. You end up having to delete at least one of them to make room for yours. And then, once paired, most phones by default, end up downloading all your contacts and your phone numbers and things like that. So, Jan and Timmy have left behind all of their contacts and all their phone numbers and that\'s just bad in so many ways.</li><li>Andrea: When you sync your phone through Bluetooth or you plug it into the USB port or now, in some newer cars, you just walk into the car and the car automatically sniffs your phone and start syncing to it, including those with Android Auto and Apple CarPlay. When that happens, you are creating a mini-clone of your phone inside the vehicle.</li><li>Mark: What other information are people leaving behind when they don\'t clear themselves out of a rental car?</li><li>Andrea: All sorts -- your phone book, your call logs, the text messages, including the body, meaning the actual text of the text messages; that stuff will be left behind. But also all sorts of meta data that allows criminals or law enforcement or just people who want to snoop on you to re-identify you, anything from the identifiers of your phones which are unique, your Bluetooth MAC address. Not to mention, of course, all your navigation data. I mean, you can reconstruct where people have been, just by data that has been stored in the infotainment system. And then you have, whether you are on Twitter and Facebook and what are the handles of those things, which are the last photos you have taken? What files have you synced, the emails, calendar entries. There\'s all sorts of stuff that people really don\'t understand that they\'re living behind.</li><li>Mark: But when people <em>do </em>delete pairings are they deleting all that information? Or is there some data still retained in that vehicle?</li><li>Andrea: &nbsp;By and large, deleting the data following the manufacturer\'s directions is helpful in preventing third parties to having access. And so if there is anything left behind, it requires a much deeper forensic type of analysis that is typically not accessible. But for most people, following the manufacturer\'s directions on how to remove the data, it is a very easy to do and very effective defense against getting their data being in the hands of somebody else.</li><li>Mark: That\'s where <a href=\"https://www.privacy4cars.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Privacy4Cars</a> comes in. That\'s where your app comes in -- helping people get that right?</li><li>Andrea: Yes, we have a free app that people can download, and you can just search for Privacy4Cars on the <a href=\"https://apps.apple.com/us/app/privacy4cars/id1370969499\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple App Store</a> or <a href=\"https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.privacy4cars\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Play</a>, depending what kind of phone you have, and download it for free.</li><li>Mark: The last time on the podcast we talked about this topic was a little over a year ago, October 2019. &nbsp;I\'d gotten a notice from Hertz that they had changed their terms and conditions. I noticed that Hertz had specifically carved out liability from me leaving information from a Bluetooth pairing. And now, on one hand, I could see that point. I\'ve actively and voluntarily synced my phone to the car and in doing so, caused my information to be downloaded. But at what point does that sort of digital maintenance, clearing personal identifiable information, after every rental become part of the rental company’s overall maintenance responsibility, like checking the oil levels and the tire pressure.</li><li>Andrea: I believe that the time has already passed, and it\'s been in the past for at least a year, right? At least, the passage of California Consumer Privacy Act. And probably you can go further back in the past because of other types of regulations. And there are some regulators who have actually spoken about this. So in the United States, you have the FTC that has issued already four guidances on the need to delete personal information. In Europe, they went as far as to give a guideline that mandates the removal of the personal information. Beyond rental, when people are traveling, sometimes they rent, sometimes they ride-share, and very often it happens to me that I in an Uber or Lyft and you have a very nice driver that tells you, “Hey, you need to fill up the tank on your battery? Here\'s a cable.” And the first thing I do is glance -- &nbsp;where does the cable end up? If it goes into the lighter, that\'s only power. So yes, I’ll recharge my phone. But if it goes straight &nbsp;into the USB port of the car, don\'t charge the phone unless you\'re really desperate, because as soon as your phone powers back up, it will start downloading all your information into a stranger\'s car. So you definitely don\'t want to do that.</li><li>Mark: Andrea Amico, founder of <a href=\"https://www.privacy4cars.com\">Privacy4Cars.com</a>, you can find his app on the <a href=\"https://apps.apple.com/us/app/privacy4cars/id1370969499\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple App store</a> and on <a href=\"https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.privacy4cars\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Play</a>. Andrea, thank you very much for taking the time to talk to us today.</li><li>Andrea: Thank you. Mark. I really enjoyed talking to you.</li></ul></li><li>Bridge music -- My Flaming Heart by Wired Ant (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial &nbsp;(3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Wired_Ant/36862 Ft: Javolenus</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Hereditary Road Warriors</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I was reading some research, as one does during a lockdown advisory when one gets caught up running down a clickhole, about <a href=\"https://research.fb.com/blog/2016/03/do-jobs-run-in-families/\">jobs running in the family</a>. Some of the stats -- a son with a military father is 5 times more likely to enlist himself while if his mother is a lawyer, he’s 6.6 times more likely to follow her to the bar; a daughter with a scientist father is almost 4 times more likely to be a scientist. Indeed, when I was deciding my college major, I was leaning toward&nbsp; chemistry but chose chemical engineering mostly because my grandfather and father were both engineers.</li><li>Which got me thinking -- does traveling -- careers that require frequent traveling -- run in the family? Again, looking back on my family, my grandfather traveled a lot when he worked for Sears, checking out vendors for hard goods -- tools, small machinery -- and working with them on new products. My dad designed farm machinery -- things like hay balers and cotton pickers -- for International Harvester. He’d often be on the road for weeks at a time, testing prototypes at farms around the country, looking for different crop and field conditions, and then at plants helping to set up the manufacturing lines for the finished machine. And so I grew up seeing that rhythm of travel -- Dad at home, Dad packing, saying good-bye, and then getting on with our lives until he came back. This was back in the late ‘60’s and into the 70’s, so no cheap long-distance let alone messaging or email or video calls. He was gone, with the exception of a postcard or two, until he came back.</li><li>And then when I joined the workforce, the first day of my first real job out of school, I got on a plane and made the first of what’s been hundreds of flights between ORD and DFW.&nbsp; So many that, pretty soon, I got to know the women working the front desk at the DFW Admirals Club. One morning, one of them asks me if I’d maybe like to meet her daughter. Awkward. I asked her, “Would you want your daughter dating someone who’s out of town as much as I am?” She paused for a moment and then said, “No, not really”.&nbsp;</li><li>Also around this time, my dad had gotten promoted past the level of going out to the field and so was traveling a lot less. But my mother took a purchasing executive role and with that, the need for a lot of travel to vendors. So while travel was generational/ “hereditary” from my father to me, my mother and I started road warrior-ing at the same time, so we were more like travel “siblings” -- comparing hotel notes, competing on frequent flier status and perks.&nbsp;</li><li>Will traveling for a living continue to a 4th generation? Tough to tell right now; both kids measure their commute in feet rather than miles during the lockdown, and friends running consulting operations tell me the current state is great for staff productivity -- an hour sales call takes an hour, rather than a day’s worth of travel for that hour, and working remotely with clients saves the client money and consultants don’t get burnt out trying to balance work and home needs. As I said back in the March and July episodes, I don’t buy that 100% remote is the “new normal”, but I also don’t believe it will snap back to 2019 levels, not after what will have been a year’s-plus time working out the mechanics of virtual working. But will there be another generation of road warriors in my family? It’ll probably take a couple of years to figure that out.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #171</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li>I’ve made another </li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>, as well as asking Alexa, Siri, and Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_171.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #171 — Leaving Data in Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips','','inherit','closed','closed','','2997-revision-v1','','','2021-01-13 18:13:46','2021-01-13 23:13:46','',2997,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/13/2997-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3007,1,'2021-01-13 18:16:29','2021-01-13 23:16:29','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":2960,\"width\":300,\"height\":300,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large is-resized\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2960\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"/><figcaption>How Do I Insert This Into My iPhone<br>(DoD photo by EJ Hersom)</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>No Thanksgiving travel, but looking at the travel volume for this, the busiest travel week of the year, shows just how far things have fallen. The Qantas CEO said \"No vax, no fly\", so we dig into the emerging world of digital vaccine passports. And then I trace my travel genealogy, wondering if road warrior-ism is hereditary. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_171.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go over to the <em>Subscribe</em> section on the right to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/949687216&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #171: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. Stayed off the road over the entire holiday season which let me skip the TSA’s new post-lockdown checkpoint record of <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/coronavirus/passenger-throughput\">1.3 million on January 3rd</a>, the last Sunday of the holiday season -- though, to be fair,&nbsp; this is only just over half the 2.4 million passengers who flew on the same Sunday last year. And with every US airline except Delta now back to selling middle seats, it makes sense that load factors also ratcheted up over the holidays. I haven’t seen any industry-wide numbers yet, but <a href=\"https://www.ittn.ie/news/confidence-in-boeing-737-max-holding-firm/\">American’s COO did say that the load factor on their 737 Maxes over the last week of the holiday season was 90%</a>. Now, most of those Maxes are flying between LGA and MIA, always a busy holiday route, but I’ve seen reports of many other packed flights, as well as the much higher load . I was never a big fan of completely full flights pre-coronavirus and, as you can imagine, am even less so now pre-widespread vaccine distribution. So, I’m not too bothered that we didn’t try to get out of town over the holidays.</li><li>However, staying in town through the rest of January is a whole different thing because January is absolutely the worst part of Chicago’s winter. So, after&nbsp; Thanksgiving weekend, on what used to be called Cyber Monday when we actually shopped in physical stores, instead of trolling through Amazon, I was trolling through travel sites looking for cheap flights to someplace warm the 3rd wk of Jan. I figured that’d be long enough for any holiday COVID spike to work its way through the system.</li><li>I’d had some friends who’d gone down to Mexico, felt safe in the tourist zones, didn’t have any problems, came back healthy; but I don’t do well sitting on a beach for more than a day or two and I wanted to keep it a bit simpler, so we decided to stay in the US, which pretty quickly narrowed our search to Southern California, South Florida, and Arizona. Since we’d spent time last winter in both Arizona and Florida, we decided to do California and go as far down the coast as we could get, which was San Diego.&nbsp; And, as luck would have it, Southwest had cheap direct flights from Chicago Midway and I had Southwest travel credits from one of last spring’s flight cancellations burning a hole in my virtual pocket, so *boom* I booked it</li><li>On, what turned out to be, 3 days before the governor locked down most of California. But a friend hit the ground there a week before Christmas and said “Eh, it’s not a problem.” So, we stayed the course and didn’t really pay any attention to it until after New Years when we thought, you know, we should book a place to stay. And that’s when we started to pay attention. Bike and kayak rental places were open as “outdoor recreation” businesses. But vacation rental and hotel booking sites all pointed to the California Public Health Department statement -- “no hotel or lodging entity in California shall accept or honor out-of-state reservations for nonessential travel” which our January snowbird getaway definitely didn’t qualify as. Would things ease up in a couple of weeks? The trend lines on the state’s COVID website didn’t seem to be pointing in that direction.</li><li>So last Monday when I received another blast of airline sales emails, it seemed like the right time for a pivot. X-ing off California, we were back to Florida and Arizona. We talked to friends already down in Florida; they said the south beaches were already filling up with snowbirds, so we opted for drier sand and swung our Southwest flights over to Phoenix.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>But since we’d been in Phoenix last winter and continuing in the spirit of visiting not-quite-A-list places in the US we’ve never been while weaving around quarantines, we’re driving further south down I-10 to Tucson. We’re running the same travel planning play we did for our August trip to Michigan’s UP -- focus on outdoor activities like hiking and biking, have back-ups in case of last-minute closures, and above all, build a list of microbreweries with outdoor seating.</li><li>Bridge Music -- Leviathan by Kirkoid (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Kirkoid/31109</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>TravelCommons contributor Allan Marko commented on my little lockdown game with my Google Mini -- changing the voice to, say, an English accent and then asking about the weather in London.&nbsp; Allan wrote:<ul><li>I often change the Siri voice for a bit of variety. Currently “Australian Female” is providing my CarPlay directions. you can also ask Siri to “Play TravelCommons”…</li></ul></li><li>Which immediately got me digging into Siri’s settings, looking for the Voice options. I found I had a choice of American, Australian, British, Indian, Irish, and South African. Since I’d already used the first three with my Google Mini, it was between the last three. I chose Irish for now, but will probably switch to South African before the end of the month. Actually, Waze, the nav app, always impressed me with the number of voice and language options. Every once in a while, I switch Irene’s Waze over to Hungarian before she’s heading out somewhere. For some reason, I get more of a laugh out of it than she does.</li><li>TravelCommons listener Dan Grabon and I have been trading notes as we’ve each slogged through Thoreau’s <em>Walden</em>. We both started it back in April, in the height of the lockdown. Everybody was deciding that, with nothing much else to do, it was a good time to pick up that classic you’ve always been meaning to get to. Dan started out with <em>The Brothers Karamazov</em>, which I thought was damned impressive. I first reached for Whitman’s <em>Leaves of Grass</em>, but then thought I needed something a bit more down-to-earth, something that wouldn’t need quite that level of interpretation and abstract thinking. And <em>Walden</em>, about Thoreau’s self-isolation in the woods outside of Concord, MA, seemed a better fit with the lockdown. Dan finished last month, at the beginning of November. I was 50 pages behind, so I didn’t finish ‘til Thanksgiving -- it was tough cutting through the tryptophan fog, but I gutted it through. Dan said he was staying with Thoreau, moving onto <em>Civil Disobedience</em> before shelving the book. I pivoted to non-fiction, <em>Why We Sleep</em>, where a neuroscientist and sleep expert spends some 300+ pages saying “If you don’t sleep 8 hours, you’re killing yourself” which got me doing some mental math. Between jet lag from all the&nbsp; international flights and waking up at 4am to make 6am flights to LGA, I’ve probably dropped 5 years off my life. Though, given some dementia running through my family history, I might not have remembered those years anyways.</li><li>And I show up on the other side of the mic talking travel pro tips with Matt Wilson on his <a href=\"https://www.under30experiences.com/blog/travel-like-a-pro-with-mark-peacock-of-travelcommons\">Millennial Travel Podcast</a>.&nbsp; I’m trying to remember when we recorded this -- had to be pre-April 2019 because I was still in the suburban TravelCommons studio and Matt was hanging out down in Costa Rica. The connection fuzzes out now and again, but it was a fun conversation. I’ll put a link in the episode in the show notes but fair warning -- it’s mostly me rattling on for an hour. Listening back to it, I’m kinda embarrassed that I don’t give Matt much of a chance to get a word in edgewise.</li><li>In the last episode, I talked about the work-from-hotel offerings from Marriott, Hilton, and Hyatt. They all had their own twists, but Hyatt’s was the most unique in that their “Work from Hyatt” offer was resort-focused and had a 7-night minimum. I said it wasn’t so much a WeWork replacement as a digital nomad trial. Well, I’m guessing that they didn’t get much uptake on it because I just got another email from Hyatt with a new offering -- “Office for the Day” -- that pretty much matches Marriott’s Day Pass. Like I said last month, these offerings all feel a bit “toe in the water”, a bit opportunistic. And now that we’re starting to get better visibility into post-vaccine timelines, I wonder how long they’ll last -- will people still want to pay to work in a hotel room after all the Starbucks stores have reopened.</li><li>I’ve talked in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/12/podcast-120-where-do-guidebooks-fit-in-i-hate-shopping-for-suitcases\">past</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/09/28/podcast-124-craft-beer-hunting-i-hate-rick-steves\">episodes</a> about how I’m a bit of a knuckle-dragger regarding printed travel guides. I still find a physical book useful when traveling. But I’ve been wondering how quickly these physical guides will be able to push out post-COVID editions to reflect the closures of bars, restaurants, and independent shops they’ve recommended. I was running through my own Chicago recommendation list from 2019. A bunch of my favorite places have closed; it’s about an even split between “Closed forever, good-bye, we’ve taken down our sign” and “Closed until Spring… we hope.” The final proofs of the 2021 editions have to already be baked if not already at the printers. I dunno, maybe they’ll all post errata pages that you can download, print off, and then stick in your books.</li><li>In a massive intersection of all things social media, I posted a <a href=\"https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/tiktok-hotel-room-chef/index.html\">CNN article</a> on the TravelCommons Facebook page that a friend, a hotel company CIO, sent me on LinkedIn that showed TikTok videos of people cooking meals in hotel rooms using an iron for a griddle, a hot water kettle for a steamer, a pants presser as an oven, and the one that really wowed me -- a coffee maker as a sous vide water bath. I don’t know if I should be impressed by the ingenuity or looking to set up as a ghost kitchen/delivery service wherever they are because I’ve never seen anyone go to that extent to cook their own meal in a hotel room. Even guys I knew trying to squeeze the last pennies out of their per diems wouldn’t do much more than boil water for their Cup O’Noodles or work hard not to burn their microwave popcorn. I’ll also put a link in the show notes to the TikTok account of one of the guys, Jago Randles. His TikTok series,<a href=\"https://www.tiktok.com/@jagoscrandles\"> Isolation Kitchen</a>, has about 150,000 followers. He does some impressive stuff. But I will make sure, going forward, that I rinse out the coffee maker and wipe down the iron before using them.</li><li>For many frequent travelers, a key early milestone of the pandemic was when airlines and hotels gave them a year’s push on their status -- moving the expiration date from Jan 2021 to Jan 2022. Big sigh of relief. Then for Southwest fliers, another milestone -- drink coupon expiration dates all got pushed to the end of this year. Whew! All’s right in the traveling world. But a couple of days ago, I was rummaging around in my messenger bag and out tumbled 5 Southwest drink coupons -- one with a Sept expiration date; the rest, December 31. Look Southwest, I don’t want to seem greedy. I did get a year’s push on A-List and 6 months on Companion Pass. But I’d love you even more if you gave me another 6 months on those drink coupons. Nope, don’t say anything now; just think about it.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge music -- Ethereal (nop mix) by @nop (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Lancefield/34818</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Leaving Data Behind in The Rental Car</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A couple of weeks back, I retweeted a news article - the third suspect charged in the fatal shooting of a retired Chicago fireman during a carjacking was caught because he’d synced his phone to the audio system of the stolen car.&nbsp; I dunno -- fleeing a murder but worrying about getting a ticket for not using hands free.&nbsp; I dunno. Good they caught the bad guy, but what about us law-abiding frequent travelers? When the Hertz or Avis person walks up to me at the car return lane, they always remind me not to leave anything behind; to remember to take my sunglasses and my mobile phone. But they never remind me to delete all the data I synced to the car.&nbsp;</li><li>And with more of our lives getting stored in our phones, I asked Andrea Amico, founder of the company <a href=\"https://www.privacy4cars.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Privacy4Cars</a>, to come onto the podcast to talk about the privacy problems at the intersection of cars and smartphones.<ul><li>Mark: Andrea, how did you get involved in this space?</li></ul><ul><li>Andrea: One of the companies that used to run was one of the largest used car inspection companies. We inspected a lot of vehicles that were ready to be sold. I just noticed that people were leaving their digital lives behind.</li><li>Mark: We first talked about the privacy/security issues around pairing your smartphone with your car rental about four years ago. Bluetooth-enabled entertainment systems were just becoming more common in rental car fleets as hands-free call laws became widespread. Even today, the first thing I do is to sync my iPhone. And I\'ve noticed more times than not, the sync slots are all full -- personalized names, Jan\'s iPhone, Timmy\'s iPhone. You end up having to delete at least one of them to make room for yours. And then, once paired, most phones by default, end up downloading all your contacts and your phone numbers and things like that. So, Jan and Timmy have left behind all of their contacts and all their phone numbers and that\'s just bad in so many ways.</li><li>Andrea: When you sync your phone through Bluetooth or you plug it into the USB port or now, in some newer cars, you just walk into the car and the car automatically sniffs your phone and start syncing to it, including those with Android Auto and Apple CarPlay. When that happens, you are creating a mini-clone of your phone inside the vehicle.</li><li>Mark: What other information are people leaving behind when they don\'t clear themselves out of a rental car?</li><li>Andrea: All sorts -- your phone book, your call logs, the text messages, including the body, meaning the actual text of the text messages; that stuff will be left behind. But also all sorts of meta data that allows criminals or law enforcement or just people who want to snoop on you to re-identify you, anything from the identifiers of your phones which are unique, your Bluetooth MAC address. Not to mention, of course, all your navigation data. I mean, you can reconstruct where people have been, just by data that has been stored in the infotainment system. And then you have, whether you are on Twitter and Facebook and what are the handles of those things, which are the last photos you have taken? What files have you synced, the emails, calendar entries. There\'s all sorts of stuff that people really don\'t understand that they\'re living behind.</li><li>Mark: But when people <em>do </em>delete pairings are they deleting all that information? Or is there some data still retained in that vehicle?</li><li>Andrea: &nbsp;By and large, deleting the data following the manufacturer\'s directions is helpful in preventing third parties to having access. And so if there is anything left behind, it requires a much deeper forensic type of analysis that is typically not accessible. But for most people, following the manufacturer\'s directions on how to remove the data, it is a very easy to do and very effective defense against getting their data being in the hands of somebody else.</li><li>Mark: That\'s where <a href=\"https://www.privacy4cars.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Privacy4Cars</a> comes in. That\'s where your app comes in -- helping people get that right?</li><li>Andrea: Yes, we have a free app that people can download, and you can just search for Privacy4Cars on the <a href=\"https://apps.apple.com/us/app/privacy4cars/id1370969499\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple App Store</a> or <a href=\"https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.privacy4cars\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Play</a>, depending what kind of phone you have, and download it for free.</li><li>Mark: The last time on the podcast we talked about this topic was a little over a year ago, October 2019. &nbsp;I\'d gotten a notice from Hertz that they had changed their terms and conditions. I noticed that Hertz had specifically carved out liability from me leaving information from a Bluetooth pairing. And now, on one hand, I could see that point. I\'ve actively and voluntarily synced my phone to the car and in doing so, caused my information to be downloaded. But at what point does that sort of digital maintenance, clearing personal identifiable information, after every rental become part of the rental company’s overall maintenance responsibility, like checking the oil levels and the tire pressure.</li><li>Andrea: I believe that the time has already passed, and it\'s been in the past for at least a year, right? At least, the passage of California Consumer Privacy Act. And probably you can go further back in the past because of other types of regulations. And there are some regulators who have actually spoken about this. So in the United States, you have the FTC that has issued already four guidances on the need to delete personal information. In Europe, they went as far as to give a guideline that mandates the removal of the personal information. Beyond rental, when people are traveling, sometimes they rent, sometimes they ride-share, and very often it happens to me that I in an Uber or Lyft and you have a very nice driver that tells you, “Hey, you need to fill up the tank on your battery? Here\'s a cable.” And the first thing I do is glance -- &nbsp;where does the cable end up? If it goes into the lighter, that\'s only power. So yes, I’ll recharge my phone. But if it goes straight &nbsp;into the USB port of the car, don\'t charge the phone unless you\'re really desperate, because as soon as your phone powers back up, it will start downloading all your information into a stranger\'s car. So you definitely don\'t want to do that.</li><li>Mark: Andrea Amico, founder of <a href=\"https://www.privacy4cars.com\">Privacy4Cars.com</a>, you can find his app on the <a href=\"https://apps.apple.com/us/app/privacy4cars/id1370969499\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple App store</a> and on <a href=\"https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.privacy4cars\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Play</a>. Andrea, thank you very much for taking the time to talk to us today.</li><li>Andrea: Thank you. Mark. I really enjoyed talking to you.</li></ul></li><li>Bridge music -- My Flaming Heart by Wired Ant (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial &nbsp;(3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Wired_Ant/36862 Ft: Javolenus</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Hereditary Road Warriors</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I was reading some research, as one does during a lockdown advisory when one gets caught up running down a clickhole, about <a href=\"https://research.fb.com/blog/2016/03/do-jobs-run-in-families/\">jobs running in the family</a>. Some of the stats -- a son with a military father is 5 times more likely to enlist himself while if his mother is a lawyer, he’s 6.6 times more likely to follow her to the bar; a daughter with a scientist father is almost 4 times more likely to be a scientist. Indeed, when I was deciding my college major, I was leaning toward&nbsp; chemistry but chose chemical engineering mostly because my grandfather and father were both engineers.</li><li>Which got me thinking -- does traveling -- careers that require frequent traveling -- run in the family? Again, looking back on my family, my grandfather traveled a lot when he worked for Sears, checking out vendors for hard goods -- tools, small machinery -- and working with them on new products. My dad designed farm machinery -- things like hay balers and cotton pickers -- for International Harvester. He’d often be on the road for weeks at a time, testing prototypes at farms around the country, looking for different crop and field conditions, and then at plants helping to set up the manufacturing lines for the finished machine. And so I grew up seeing that rhythm of travel -- Dad at home, Dad packing, saying good-bye, and then getting on with our lives until he came back. This was back in the late ‘60’s and into the 70’s, so no cheap long-distance let alone messaging or email or video calls. He was gone, with the exception of a postcard or two, until he came back.</li><li>And then when I joined the workforce, the first day of my first real job out of school, I got on a plane and made the first of what’s been hundreds of flights between ORD and DFW.&nbsp; So many that, pretty soon, I got to know the women working the front desk at the DFW Admirals Club. One morning, one of them asks me if I’d maybe like to meet her daughter. Awkward. I asked her, “Would you want your daughter dating someone who’s out of town as much as I am?” She paused for a moment and then said, “No, not really”.&nbsp;</li><li>Also around this time, my dad had gotten promoted past the level of going out to the field and so was traveling a lot less. But my mother took a purchasing executive role and with that, the need for a lot of travel to vendors. So while travel was generational/ “hereditary” from my father to me, my mother and I started road warrior-ing at the same time, so we were more like travel “siblings” -- comparing hotel notes, competing on frequent flier status and perks.&nbsp;</li><li>Will traveling for a living continue to a 4th generation? Tough to tell right now; both kids measure their commute in feet rather than miles during the lockdown, and friends running consulting operations tell me the current state is great for staff productivity -- an hour sales call takes an hour, rather than a day’s worth of travel for that hour, and working remotely with clients saves the client money and consultants don’t get burnt out trying to balance work and home needs. As I said back in the March and July episodes, I don’t buy that 100% remote is the “new normal”, but I also don’t believe it will snap back to 2019 levels, not after what will have been a year’s-plus time working out the mechanics of virtual working. But will there be another generation of road warriors in my family? It’ll probably take a couple of years to figure that out.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #171</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li>I’ve made another </li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>, as well as asking Alexa, Siri, and Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_171.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #171 — Leaving Data in Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Pro Tips','','inherit','closed','closed','','2997-revision-v1','','','2021-01-13 18:16:29','2021-01-13 23:16:29','',2997,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/13/2997-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3009,1,'2021-01-13 21:51:31','2021-01-14 02:51:31','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":2960,\"width\":300,\"height\":300,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large is-resized\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2960\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"/><figcaption>How Do I Insert This Into My iPhone<br>(DoD photo by EJ Hersom)</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>No Thanksgiving travel, but looking at the travel volume for this, the busiest travel week of the year, shows just how far things have fallen. The Qantas CEO said \"No vax, no fly\", so we dig into the emerging world of digital vaccine passports. And then I trace my travel genealogy, wondering if road warrior-ism is hereditary. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_170.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go over to the <em>Subscribe</em> section on the right to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/949687216&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #170: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. And again, no travel since the last episode. Not too surprising given the way things are going right now. Back in April, I’d jumped on one of those smokin’ American Airlines’ promotions to book flights to London for Thanksgiving. Which then -- not surprisingly -- got cancelled at the beginning of September.  So I was back to what has been my typical Thanksgiving travel pattern for the past 10-15 years -- staying at home to avoid the crowds on what is always the busiest travel week of the year. PK -- pre-kids -- Irene and I would always travel over the holidays, splitting Thanksgiving and Christmas between my family in Southern California and hers in Chicago. But post-kids -- which is also PK, so I guess it should be AK -- after kids -- we started staying at home. And I’d figure out how to “ground” myself from business travel also. I found that the challenge of holiday travel wasn’t necessarily the crowds; it’s the make-up of the crowds; what some road warriors might call “clueless” travelers. I think “amateur” is certainly a more charitable and probably more accurate term. Even more so this year with so many road warriors out of practice after being off the road since March. Lots of those folks definitely in danger of losing their “professional” traveler status.</li><li>I saw an interesting graph the other day comparing last year’s and this year’s day-by-day airport travel volumes over the Thanksgiving weekend. No surprises comparing the Wednesday travel volumes, what is traditionally the busiest travel day of the year. Last year’s Wednesday saw 2.6 million passengers, almost 2½ times busier than this year. I expected that. But what really caught my eye was that this year’s peak day -- <a href=\"https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/thanksgiving-travel-volume-2020-pandemic/index.html\">Sunday at about 1.2 million </a>-- was still a lot less than last year’s slowest day, Thanksgiving, at about 1.6 million. I didn’t travel last year at Thanksgiving, but did in 2018.  Irene and I broke our no-travel rule and flew down to Santa Fe, NM on Thanksgiving Day. Back in episode <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/12/17/podcast-147-holiday-travel-tips-notes-from-santa-fe/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">#147</a>, I said that Thanksgiving Day flight was one of the least stressful travel experiences I’d ever had — no traffic on the drive to ORD, no lines. The TSA agents were hanging around just looking for people to screen. And that day, there were around 25% more people in airports than this year’s <em>busiest</em> day. I shouldn’t be surprised, but all the pictures I saw in the news coverage made it look like airports were a lot more crowded. </li><li>Our apartment is just south of one of the northern approaches to ORD. Flights from the east come in over the lake -- seats A, B, and C get a great view of the city skyline while seats D, E, and F get to look down into Wrigley Field -- then  over the northwest side of the city, landing on one of the runways north of the terminal. I’ve always been impressed by the choreography of ORD. On a clear Friday afternoon, driving up the tollway that runs east of the airport, I’d see planes on parallel approaches landing simultaneously -- one to the north of the terminal and one to the south -- and looking up, see the lights of planes on approach behind them -- 2, 3, 4.... Back in April, during Chicago’s lockdown, I’d sit out on the rooftop deck -- because what else was I going to do? -- and maybe see one plane coming in over the lake on that approach. But now I’m seeing more planes -- sometimes 3, 4 in a row. Don’t know that they’re all carrying passengers -- some could be temporary cargo carriers taking some of that e-commerce money, with boxes instead of seats under the overhead bins. But I can feel travel starting to pick up. It could be a tough winter, but I’m trying to look out over the horizon a bit; trying to look forward to spring.</li><li>Bridge Music -- Leviathan by Kirkoid (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Kirkoid/31109</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>TravelCommons contributor Allan Marko commented on my little lockdown game with my Google Mini -- changing the voice to, say, an English accent and then asking about the weather in London.&nbsp; Allan wrote:<ul><li>I often change the Siri voice for a bit of variety. Currently “Australian Female” is providing my CarPlay directions. you can also ask Siri to “Play TravelCommons”…</li></ul></li><li>Which immediately got me digging into Siri’s settings, looking for the Voice options. I found I had a choice of American, Australian, British, Indian, Irish, and South African. Since I’d already used the first three with my Google Mini, it was between the last three. I chose Irish for now, but will probably switch to South African before the end of the month. Actually, Waze, the nav app, always impressed me with the number of voice and language options. Every once in a while, I switch Irene’s Waze over to Hungarian before she’s heading out somewhere. For some reason, I get more of a laugh out of it than she does.</li><li>TravelCommons listener Dan Grabon and I have been trading notes as we’ve each slogged through Thoreau’s <em>Walden</em>. We both started it back in April, in the height of the lockdown. Everybody was deciding that, with nothing much else to do, it was a good time to pick up that classic you’ve always been meaning to get to. Dan started out with <em>The Brothers Karamazov</em>, which I thought was damned impressive. I first reached for Whitman’s <em>Leaves of Grass</em>, but then thought I needed something a bit more down-to-earth, something that wouldn’t need quite that level of interpretation and abstract thinking. And <em>Walden</em>, about Thoreau’s self-isolation in the woods outside of Concord, MA, seemed a better fit with the lockdown. Dan finished last month, at the beginning of November. I was 50 pages behind, so I didn’t finish ‘til Thanksgiving -- it was tough cutting through the tryptophan fog, but I gutted it through. Dan said he was staying with Thoreau, moving onto <em>Civil Disobedience</em> before shelving the book. I pivoted to non-fiction, <em>Why We Sleep</em>, where a neuroscientist and sleep expert spends some 300+ pages saying “If you don’t sleep 8 hours, you’re killing yourself” which got me doing some mental math. Between jet lag from all the&nbsp; international flights and waking up at 4am to make 6am flights to LGA, I’ve probably dropped 5 years off my life. Though, given some dementia running through my family history, I might not have remembered those years anyways.</li><li>And I show up on the other side of the mic talking travel pro tips with Matt Wilson on his <a href=\"https://www.under30experiences.com/blog/travel-like-a-pro-with-mark-peacock-of-travelcommons\">Millennial Travel Podcast</a>.&nbsp; I’m trying to remember when we recorded this -- had to be pre-April 2019 because I was still in the suburban TravelCommons studio and Matt was hanging out down in Costa Rica. The connection fuzzes out now and again, but it was a fun conversation. I’ll put a link in the episode in the show notes but fair warning -- it’s mostly me rattling on for an hour. Listening back to it, I’m kinda embarrassed that I don’t give Matt much of a chance to get a word in edgewise.</li><li>In the last episode, I talked about the work-from-hotel offerings from Marriott, Hilton, and Hyatt. They all had their own twists, but Hyatt’s was the most unique in that their “Work from Hyatt” offer was resort-focused and had a 7-night minimum. I said it wasn’t so much a WeWork replacement as a digital nomad trial. Well, I’m guessing that they didn’t get much uptake on it because I just got another email from Hyatt with a new offering -- “Office for the Day” -- that pretty much matches Marriott’s Day Pass. Like I said last month, these offerings all feel a bit “toe in the water”, a bit opportunistic. And now that we’re starting to get better visibility into post-vaccine timelines, I wonder how long they’ll last -- will people still want to pay to work in a hotel room after all the Starbucks stores have reopened.</li><li>I’ve talked in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/12/podcast-120-where-do-guidebooks-fit-in-i-hate-shopping-for-suitcases\">past</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/09/28/podcast-124-craft-beer-hunting-i-hate-rick-steves\">episodes</a> about how I’m a bit of a knuckle-dragger regarding printed travel guides. I still find a physical book useful when traveling. But I’ve been wondering how quickly these physical guides will be able to push out post-COVID editions to reflect the closures of bars, restaurants, and independent shops they’ve recommended. I was running through my own Chicago recommendation list from 2019. A bunch of my favorite places have closed; it’s about an even split between “Closed forever, good-bye, we’ve taken down our sign” and “Closed until Spring… we hope.” The final proofs of the 2021 editions have to already be baked if not already at the printers. I dunno, maybe they’ll all post errata pages that you can download, print off, and then stick in your books.</li><li>In a massive intersection of all things social media, I posted a <a href=\"https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/tiktok-hotel-room-chef/index.html\">CNN article</a> on the TravelCommons Facebook page that a friend, a hotel company CIO, sent me on LinkedIn that showed TikTok videos of people cooking meals in hotel rooms using an iron for a griddle, a hot water kettle for a steamer, a pants presser as an oven, and the one that really wowed me -- a coffee maker as a sous vide water bath. I don’t know if I should be impressed by the ingenuity or looking to set up as a ghost kitchen/delivery service wherever they are because I’ve never seen anyone go to that extent to cook their own meal in a hotel room. Even guys I knew trying to squeeze the last pennies out of their per diems wouldn’t do much more than boil water for their Cup O’Noodles or work hard not to burn their microwave popcorn. I’ll also put a link in the show notes to the TikTok account of one of the guys, Jago Randles. His TikTok series,<a href=\"https://www.tiktok.com/@jagoscrandles\"> Isolation Kitchen</a>, has about 150,000 followers. He does some impressive stuff. But I will make sure, going forward, that I rinse out the coffee maker and wipe down the iron before using them.</li><li>For many frequent travelers, a key early milestone of the pandemic was when airlines and hotels gave them a year’s push on their status -- moving the expiration date from Jan 2021 to Jan 2022. Big sigh of relief. Then for Southwest fliers, another milestone -- drink coupon expiration dates all got pushed to the end of this year. Whew! All’s right in the traveling world. But a couple of days ago, I was rummaging around in my messenger bag and out tumbled 5 Southwest drink coupons -- one with a Sept expiration date; the rest, December 31. Look Southwest, I don’t want to seem greedy. I did get a year’s push on A-List and 6 months on Companion Pass. But I’d love you even more if you gave me another 6 months on those drink coupons. Nope, don’t say anything now; just think about it.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge music -- Ethereal (nop mix) by @nop (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Lancefield/34818</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Prove My Vax So I Can Fly</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Last month, I saw that quote from the Qantas CEO -- \"We will ask people to have a vaccination before they can get on the aircraft\'\' -- and thought, well it’s kinda the next logical step from Delta’s ATL-Rome and United’s EWR-LHR flights were you have to take COVID test and prove you’re negative before you can board.&nbsp;</li><li>I remember going to a travel clinic before my first flight to India; getting shot up with MMR, DTP, Hepatitis, and Typhoid vaccines and being given my <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carte_Jaune\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Yellow Card</a> -- officially my International Certificate of Vaccination or Prophylaxis -- listing all my shots. They told me to carry that with me to India, which I did and to Vietnam and Thailand and Singapore and China. No one ever asked to see it, not in an airport, an immigration line, a hotel,....&nbsp; It looks like the plans are that we’ll get a vaccination card from the CDC after receiving the first dose of COVID-19 vaccine. But that card isn’t meant as a validated proof of vaccination; it’s more of a reminder to go back in a couple of weeks for the second shot.&nbsp;</li><li>That handwritten piece of paper probably won’t pass muster at the Qantas boarding gate, and so that’s why we’re starting to see a bit of a vaccine passport app land grab going on. United has been testing the <a href=\"https://thecommonsproject.org/commonpass\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">CommonPass app</a> on their COVID-free EWR-LHR flight. You get your COVID test at the United Club near gate C93 and the results are uploaded into the app which then will display a QR code to the gate agent. CommonPass is being spun up with support from the World Economic Forum. Cathay Pacific, Lufthansa, SwissAir, and JetBlue also have plans to use it. Delta and Alitalia are trialing the <a href=\"https://www.aokpass.com/en/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">AOKPass </a>developed by the Int’l Chamber of Commerce on their COVID-free ATL-Rome flight. It uses blockchain for medical certificate storage, so bonus points to them in technology buzzword bingo. IATA, the Int’l Air Transport Association, an airline trade group, says they’re finishing up their app, <a href=\"https://www.iata.org/en/programs/passenger/travel-pass/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Travel Pass</a>, and will be piloting it with IAG, the parent of British Airways, Iberia, and Aer Lingus, in early 2021. And the World Health Organization says they’re looking at Estonia’s e-vaccination certificates as <a href=\"https://www.who.int/news-room/feature-stories/detail/estonia-and-who-to-jointly-develop-digital-vaccine-certificate-to-strengthen-covax#:~:text=WHO%20and%20Estonia%20recently%20agreed,access%20to%20COVID%2D19%20vaccines.\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the basis of a sort of “smart” Yellow Card app</a>.</li><li>I’m sure I’m missing a whole lot more; I just got tired of reading the same rehashed press release verbiage about secure and verifiable storage of health certifications. Going through this, it starts to feel like the health equivalent of those scooter apps, where I need half-a-dozen of them on my phone so I can rent the closest scooter to me. Unless someone blinks, it seems like I’ll need 3 or 4 of these vaccine passports to cover all my travel bases. But after reading through all the press releases and the infographics and the FAQs, none of these apps were real clear on how I get my physical CDC vaccine card into their digital storage vault. And I’m guessing that doctors and clinics are going to be more focused on taking care of patients and keeping their COVID vaccines cold, and not all that interested in entering my vaccination information into all those apps. Maybe Australia is further ahead with electronic health records, but I’m thinking, at least for the next year or so, that my CDC card is gonna be the best that Qantas and the gang are going to get.</li><li>Bridge music -- My Flaming Heart by Wired Ant (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial &nbsp;(3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Wired_Ant/36862 Ft: Javolenus</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Hereditary Road Warriors</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I was reading some research, as one does during a lockdown advisory when one gets caught up running down a clickhole, about <a href=\"https://research.fb.com/blog/2016/03/do-jobs-run-in-families/\">jobs running in the family</a>. Some of the stats -- a son with a military father is 5 times more likely to enlist himself while if his mother is a lawyer, he’s 6.6 times more likely to follow her to the bar; a daughter with a scientist father is almost 4 times more likely to be a scientist. Indeed, when I was deciding my college major, I was leaning toward&nbsp; chemistry but chose chemical engineering mostly because my grandfather and father were both engineers.</li><li>Which got me thinking -- does traveling -- careers that require frequent traveling -- run in the family? Again, looking back on my family, my grandfather traveled a lot when he worked for Sears, checking out vendors for hard goods -- tools, small machinery -- and working with them on new products. My dad designed farm machinery -- things like hay balers and cotton pickers -- for International Harvester. He’d often be on the road for weeks at a time, testing prototypes at farms around the country, looking for different crop and field conditions, and then at plants helping to set up the manufacturing lines for the finished machine. And so I grew up seeing that rhythm of travel -- Dad at home, Dad packing, saying good-bye, and then getting on with our lives until he came back. This was back in the late ‘60’s and into the 70’s, so no cheap long-distance let alone messaging or email or video calls. He was gone, with the exception of a postcard or two, until he came back.</li><li>And then when I joined the workforce, the first day of my first real job out of school, I got on a plane and made the first of what’s been hundreds of flights between ORD and DFW.&nbsp; So many that, pretty soon, I got to know the women working the front desk at the DFW Admirals Club. One morning, one of them asks me if I’d maybe like to meet her daughter. Awkward. I asked her, “Would you want your daughter dating someone who’s out of town as much as I am?” She paused for a moment and then said, “No, not really”.&nbsp;</li><li>Also around this time, my dad had gotten promoted past the level of going out to the field and so was traveling a lot less. But my mother took a purchasing executive role and with that, the need for a lot of travel to vendors. So while travel was generational/ “hereditary” from my father to me, my mother and I started road warrior-ing at the same time, so we were more like travel “siblings” -- comparing hotel notes, competing on frequent flier status and perks.&nbsp;</li><li>Will traveling for a living continue to a 4th generation? Tough to tell right now; both kids measure their commute in feet rather than miles during the lockdown, and friends running consulting operations tell me the current state is great for staff productivity -- an hour sales call takes an hour, rather than a day’s worth of travel for that hour, and working remotely with clients saves the client money and consultants don’t get burnt out trying to balance work and home needs. As I said back in the March and July episodes, I don’t buy that 100% remote is the “new normal”, but I also don’t believe it will snap back to 2019 levels, not after what will have been a year’s-plus time working out the mechanics of virtual working. But will there be another generation of road warriors in my family? It’ll probably take a couple of years to figure that out.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #170</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li>I’ve made another little tweak to the RSS feed -- the file that all the podcast apps use to pull new episodes for your subscribed podcasts. This tweak affects the episode descriptions in the top podcast apps. For those apps that support it, there are now clickable links in the episode notes or descriptions. In last month’s episode, there were clickable links to the gift ideas blog post on the TravelCommons website as well as the episode show notes page. Going forward, there will always be a link to the episode’s show notes page. I’ve tested that this works on Apple Podcasts, Overcast (which is what I use), Stitcher, Pocket Casts, Podcast Addict, and Google Podcasts -- all of which make up 70-80% (depending on who’s doing the counting) of the TravelCommons downloads. So, if you get a chance, flip over to the episode description right now and check it out.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>, as well as asking Alexa, Siri, and Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_170.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors','','inherit','closed','closed','','2957-revision-v1','','','2021-01-13 21:51:31','2021-01-14 02:51:31','',2957,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/13/2957-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3010,1,'2021-01-13 22:01:47','2021-01-14 03:01:47','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":2168,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1-1024x1024.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2168\"/></a><figcaption>Wait! I need to unpair my iPhone!</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>No Thanksgiving travel, but looking at the travel volume for this, the busiest travel week of the year, shows just how far things have fallen. The Qantas CEO said \"No vax, no fly\", so we dig into the emerging world of digital vaccine passports. And then I trace my travel genealogy, wondering if road warrior-ism is hereditary. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_171.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go over to the <em>Subscribe</em> section on the right to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/949687216&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #171: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. Stayed off the road over the entire holiday season which let me skip the TSA’s new post-lockdown checkpoint record of <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/coronavirus/passenger-throughput\">1.3 million on January 3rd</a>, the last Sunday of the holiday season -- though, to be fair,&nbsp; this is only just over half the 2.4 million passengers who flew on the same Sunday last year. And with every US airline except Delta now back to selling middle seats, it makes sense that load factors also ratcheted up over the holidays. I haven’t seen any industry-wide numbers yet, but <a href=\"https://www.ittn.ie/news/confidence-in-boeing-737-max-holding-firm/\">American’s COO did say that the load factor on their 737 Maxes over the last week of the holiday season was 90%</a>. Now, most of those Maxes are flying between LGA and MIA, always a busy holiday route, but I’ve seen reports of many other packed flights, as well as the much higher load . I was never a big fan of completely full flights pre-coronavirus and, as you can imagine, am even less so now pre-widespread vaccine distribution. So, I’m not too bothered that we didn’t try to get out of town over the holidays.</li><li>However, staying in town through the rest of January is a whole different thing because January is absolutely the worst part of Chicago’s winter. So, after&nbsp; Thanksgiving weekend, on what used to be called Cyber Monday when we actually shopped in physical stores, instead of trolling through Amazon, I was trolling through travel sites looking for cheap flights to someplace warm the 3rd wk of Jan. I figured that’d be long enough for any holiday COVID spike to work its way through the system.</li><li>I’d had some friends who’d gone down to Mexico, felt safe in the tourist zones, didn’t have any problems, came back healthy; but I don’t do well sitting on a beach for more than a day or two and I wanted to keep it a bit simpler, so we decided to stay in the US, which pretty quickly narrowed our search to Southern California, South Florida, and Arizona. Since we’d spent time last winter in both Arizona and Florida, we decided to do California and go as far down the coast as we could get, which was San Diego.&nbsp; And, as luck would have it, Southwest had cheap direct flights from Chicago Midway and I had Southwest travel credits from one of last spring’s flight cancellations burning a hole in my virtual pocket, so *boom* I booked it</li><li>On, what turned out to be, 3 days before the governor locked down most of California. But a friend hit the ground there a week before Christmas and said “Eh, it’s not a problem.” So, we stayed the course and didn’t really pay any attention to it until after New Years when we thought, you know, we should book a place to stay. And that’s when we started to pay attention. Bike and kayak rental places were open as “outdoor recreation” businesses. But vacation rental and hotel booking sites all pointed to the California Public Health Department statement -- “no hotel or lodging entity in California shall accept or honor out-of-state reservations for nonessential travel” which our January snowbird getaway definitely didn’t qualify as. Would things ease up in a couple of weeks? The trend lines on the state’s COVID website didn’t seem to be pointing in that direction.</li><li>So last Monday when I received another blast of airline sales emails, it seemed like the right time for a pivot. X-ing off California, we were back to Florida and Arizona. We talked to friends already down in Florida; they said the south beaches were already filling up with snowbirds, so we opted for drier sand and swung our Southwest flights over to Phoenix.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>But since we’d been in Phoenix last winter and continuing in the spirit of visiting not-quite-A-list places in the US we’ve never been while weaving around quarantines, we’re driving further south down I-10 to Tucson. We’re running the same travel planning play we did for our August trip to Michigan’s UP -- focus on outdoor activities like hiking and biking, have back-ups in case of last-minute closures, and above all, build a list of microbreweries with outdoor seating.</li><li>Bridge Music -- Leviathan by Kirkoid (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Kirkoid/31109</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Back at the beginning of December when the Pfizer vaccine approval was imminent and the Moderna approval wasn’t far behind, most travelers -- myself included -- got a bit giddy and started to think about the world opening up in the spring, the summer at the latest. Fast forward 30 days and, happy new year, that initial blast of vaccine optimism melted when it met the ugly realities of last-mile logistics. Spelunking through the stream of low-fare emails from American and Southwest and Delta and United and Iberia and British Airways filling my inbox, the consensus across airline demand forecasters seems to be that nothing’s going to change until the end of May. But even that doesn’t explain why, say, American, sends out an email pushing “Plan a European Vacation” that includes spring fares (March, April, May fares) to London, Manchester, and Madrid. I don’t know anyone who expects European vacation travel to open up in the next 3-4 months. Give credit to Delta for highlighting more achievable destinations -- Cancun, the Bahamas, Phoenix, and just about every airport in Florida with a runway long enough to handle a jet. </li><li>What will be as interesting is what the airlines and hotels do about elite status protection if travel continues to be slow through the summer. Remember that last spring, after it was clear that business travel was canceled for most of 2020, all the big travel companies grandfathered everyone into their status for this year. What you earned in 2019, you kept through this year, 2021. But now what? We talked about this a bit in t<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">he November episode (#169)</a> when the companies made their opening bid, knocking 20-30% off elite qualifying clip levels. Kinda like the low-fare sales -- it’ll be interesting to see what they offer come May.</li><li>We’ve talked in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\">prior episodes</a> about the challenges of planning a trip during COVID -- deciphering lockdown rules; parsing what can seem to be the almost theological differences between stay-at-home advisories vs. orders. And after all that, trying to keep up-to-date on last-minute changes. Things are changing so fast -- open, shut; outdoor seating vs just doing takeout -- that the normal crowdsourced tools we’d use -- things like Google Maps, Yelp -- can’t keep up because they don’t give a real-time view. The Foursquare app used to do it, but since they split Swarm from Foursquare, it seems that the real-time data is now sold just to business customers to target mobile ads. But, one app that I use does provide a real-time view into some traffic -- Uptappd. Yes, it’s just craft beer nerd traffic -- people checking in their beers at tap rooms and beer bars -- but that’s a kind of traffic that I’m pretty interested in.  After our pivot to Tucson, I wanted to see what beer places were open for service, not just take-out. I could’ve spent time clicking around the app, but instead, I decided to put one of my lockdown self-improvement projects to use. Over the fall, I’d taken some on-line Python programming courses on Coursera, so I wrote a short program that pulled the most recent check-ins from the Tucson area and started making a list of places that are open. I probably could’ve made that list quicker by just plunking away on the app, but not with the same sense of achievement.</li><li>We talked about COVID-19 vaccination and test certification in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">last episode</a>. Over the last month, it seems that proof of negative test results rather than of vaccinations is the new hotness. Canada, the UK, and now the US are the latest countries requiring a negative COVID test for inbound passengers. It makes sense. The CDC released a paper in November -- in one of my favorite publications, the <a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/index.html\"><em>Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report</em></a> (I’ll link to it in the show notes) -- saying that <a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6945a4.htm\">temperature and symptom screening at airports is pretty worthless</a>; it only picked up 1 case for every 85,000 passengers screened. So not hard for the switch to pre-flight testing to be more effective. For Canada and the UK, though, they’ve layered the test requirements <em>on top of </em>their existing 14-day quarantine requirements, which just adds to the confusion -- especially since the Canadian government gave travelers one week’s notice of the new testing requirement. I haven’t seen the US regs yet, but the Canadian rules say you must have “proof in hand” of a negative test result, and that proof can be either electronic or paper. You gotta think that, pretty quick, that “proof in hand” has gotta default to “proof on phone” otherwise, forged paper results are going to be the new fake IDs from our teens. Last November, French cops <a href=\"https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2020/11/10/fake-tests-covid-flights/\">busted a ring selling fake test results at CDG</a>. The going rate was €150-300 which converts to something like $180-370. That compares to $125 for a <a href=\"https://fakeyourid.com/\">good fake driver’s license</a>.  Since the last episode, the Caribbean country of <a href=\"https://skift.com/2020/12/18/airlines-still-waiting-on-governments-for-a-single-digital-health-passport-standard/\">Aruba was the first country</a> to standardize on one of the digital passport apps, <a href=\"https://commonpass.org/\">CommonPass</a>, the one backed by the World Economic Forum, the Davos gang, and, we mentioned, also used by United for their EWR-LHR flight. But then Sing Air picked its rival, <a href=\"https://www.iata.org/en/programs/passenger/travel-pass/\">Travel Pass</a> from IATA, to use on flights to/from Malaysia. So it still seems like, when it does go to “proof on phone”, we’re gonna need to set aside some memory screen space for a bunch of apps.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge music -- Ethereal (nop mix) by @nop (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Lancefield/34818</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Leaving Data Behind in The Rental Car</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A couple of weeks back, I retweeted a news article - the third suspect charged in the fatal shooting of a retired Chicago fireman during a carjacking was caught because he’d synced his phone to the audio system of the stolen car.&nbsp; I dunno -- fleeing a murder but worrying about getting a ticket for not using hands free.&nbsp; I dunno. Good they caught the bad guy, but what about us law-abiding frequent travelers? When the Hertz or Avis person walks up to me at the car return lane, they always remind me not to leave anything behind; to remember to take my sunglasses and my mobile phone. But they never remind me to delete all the data I synced to the car.&nbsp;</li><li>And with more of our lives getting stored in our phones, I asked Andrea Amico, founder of the company <a href=\"https://www.privacy4cars.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Privacy4Cars</a>, to come onto the podcast to talk about the privacy problems at the intersection of cars and smartphones.<ul><li>Mark: Andrea, how did you get involved in this space?</li></ul><ul><li>Andrea: One of the companies that used to run was one of the largest used car inspection companies. We inspected a lot of vehicles that were ready to be sold. I just noticed that people were leaving their digital lives behind.</li><li>Mark: We first talked about the privacy/security issues around pairing your smartphone with your car rental about four years ago. Bluetooth-enabled entertainment systems were just becoming more common in rental car fleets as hands-free call laws became widespread. Even today, the first thing I do is to sync my iPhone. And I\'ve noticed more times than not, the sync slots are all full -- personalized names, Jan\'s iPhone, Timmy\'s iPhone. You end up having to delete at least one of them to make room for yours. And then, once paired, most phones by default, end up downloading all your contacts and your phone numbers and things like that. So, Jan and Timmy have left behind all of their contacts and all their phone numbers and that\'s just bad in so many ways.</li><li>Andrea: When you sync your phone through Bluetooth or you plug it into the USB port or now, in some newer cars, you just walk into the car and the car automatically sniffs your phone and start syncing to it, including those with Android Auto and Apple CarPlay. When that happens, you are creating a mini-clone of your phone inside the vehicle.</li><li>Mark: What other information are people leaving behind when they don\'t clear themselves out of a rental car?</li><li>Andrea: All sorts -- your phone book, your call logs, the text messages, including the body, meaning the actual text of the text messages; that stuff will be left behind. But also all sorts of meta data that allows criminals or law enforcement or just people who want to snoop on you to re-identify you, anything from the identifiers of your phones which are unique, your Bluetooth MAC address. Not to mention, of course, all your navigation data. I mean, you can reconstruct where people have been, just by data that has been stored in the infotainment system. And then you have, whether you are on Twitter and Facebook and what are the handles of those things, which are the last photos you have taken? What files have you synced, the emails, calendar entries. There\'s all sorts of stuff that people really don\'t understand that they\'re living behind.</li><li>Mark: But when people <em>do </em>delete pairings are they deleting all that information? Or is there some data still retained in that vehicle?</li><li>Andrea: &nbsp;By and large, deleting the data following the manufacturer\'s directions is helpful in preventing third parties to having access. And so if there is anything left behind, it requires a much deeper forensic type of analysis that is typically not accessible. But for most people, following the manufacturer\'s directions on how to remove the data, it is a very easy to do and very effective defense against getting their data being in the hands of somebody else.</li><li>Mark: That\'s where <a href=\"https://www.privacy4cars.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Privacy4Cars</a> comes in. That\'s where your app comes in -- helping people get that right?</li><li>Andrea: Yes, we have a free app that people can download, and you can just search for Privacy4Cars on the <a href=\"https://apps.apple.com/us/app/privacy4cars/id1370969499\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple App Store</a> or <a href=\"https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.privacy4cars\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Play</a>, depending what kind of phone you have, and download it for free.</li><li>Mark: The last time on the podcast we talked about this topic was a little over a year ago, October 2019. &nbsp;I\'d gotten a notice from Hertz that they had changed their terms and conditions. I noticed that Hertz had specifically carved out liability from me leaving information from a Bluetooth pairing. And now, on one hand, I could see that point. I\'ve actively and voluntarily synced my phone to the car and in doing so, caused my information to be downloaded. But at what point does that sort of digital maintenance, clearing personal identifiable information, after every rental become part of the rental company’s overall maintenance responsibility, like checking the oil levels and the tire pressure.</li><li>Andrea: I believe that the time has already passed, and it\'s been in the past for at least a year, right? At least, the passage of California Consumer Privacy Act. And probably you can go further back in the past because of other types of regulations. And there are some regulators who have actually spoken about this. So in the United States, you have the FTC that has issued already four guidances on the need to delete personal information. In Europe, they went as far as to give a guideline that mandates the removal of the personal information. Beyond rental, when people are traveling, sometimes they rent, sometimes they ride-share, and very often it happens to me that I in an Uber or Lyft and you have a very nice driver that tells you, “Hey, you need to fill up the tank on your battery? Here\'s a cable.” And the first thing I do is glance -- &nbsp;where does the cable end up? If it goes into the lighter, that\'s only power. So yes, I’ll recharge my phone. But if it goes straight &nbsp;into the USB port of the car, don\'t charge the phone unless you\'re really desperate, because as soon as your phone powers back up, it will start downloading all your information into a stranger\'s car. So you definitely don\'t want to do that.</li><li>Mark: Andrea Amico, founder of <a href=\"https://www.privacy4cars.com\">Privacy4Cars.com</a>, you can find his app on the <a href=\"https://apps.apple.com/us/app/privacy4cars/id1370969499\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple App store</a> and on <a href=\"https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.privacy4cars\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Play</a>. Andrea, thank you very much for taking the time to talk to us today.</li><li>Andrea: Thank you. Mark. I really enjoyed talking to you.</li></ul></li><li>Bridge music -- My Flaming Heart by Wired Ant (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial &nbsp;(3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Wired_Ant/36862 Ft: Javolenus</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>2021 Travel Planning Pro Tips</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I’ve been talking about travel planning in the time of COVID across maybe 6 months of episodes. And since January is always a big travel month, especially this year with some vouchers from last spring’s flight cancellations coming up on their 12-month expiration dates, combined with 10 months of pent-up demand and another 6, maybe 9 months to go, I thought I’d pull all my planning tips together here -- and probably in a blog post after I get back from Tucson.</li><li>First, book now. As I said earlier, there’s a steady stream of sales out there right now as airlines, hotels, and rental car companies are looking for cash to get through the start of the year. There are great domestic deals now, and if you can part with some cash now, good international deals for the second half of the year. Prices are only going to go up as vaccine rates improve, and that pent-up demand overwhelms any squeamishness about sitting next to a stranger. I’m eyeing that same American ORD-BCN 787 non-stop that I wasn’t able to take at the end of last September. The deals aren’t as smoking as they were last March when the travel world was in a freefall; the airlines have gotten a little smarter over the past year. But with cancellation fees still waived, there’s not much risk.&nbsp;</li><li>Second, check your destination’s health requirements -- and keep checking until you leave. Many of the airlines have built good web resources that summarize any restrictions by destination. Of the US majors, I think <a href=\"https://www.united.com/ual/en/us/fly/travel/restrictions-map.html\">United’s</a> is the easiest to use but I think American’s is the most complete. They actually link out to a Canadian company, <a href=\"https://apply.joinsherpa.com/travel-restrictions?affiliateId=americanairlines\">Sherpa</a>, that took my Arizona itinerary and noted that, while there’s no quarantine restrictions in Arizona, there are when I return to Chicago.&nbsp; <a href=\"https://www.delta.com/us/en/plan-your-next-trip/where-we-fly\">Delta’s</a> is pretty good too. I’ll put links to them in the show notes. But you can’t check once and be done. We talked at the top of the show about Canada putting in a new testing requirement with 7-days notice. And domestically, states are changing restrictions weekly. One trick I’ve talked about is to start following your destination’s local newspapers on Twitter to get any early warnings on anything new.&nbsp;</li><li>Third, read the cancellation rules a lot more closely. Being nimble and able to react to changes at your destination -- like Irene and I did with our pivot from San Diego to Tucson -- depends on being thoughtful about the cancellation risks you take. Right now, flights have the lowest cancellation risk; Airbnb and vacation rentals, the highest. Hotels are in-between. Our default strategy then is to book the flight as soon as we can, don’t do pre-paid hotel rooms or car rentals, and wait as long as we can before booking an Airbnb.</li><li>Fourth, overload your itinerary with outdoor activities like hiking and biking so last-minute closures or restrictions don’t leave you aimlessly flipping through the hotel TV channels. It was the big trend last summer -- airlines dialed down flights between big city airports like the ORD-LGA run and toward beaches and mountains. And it continues -- all the imagery in the airline and hotel “flash sale” emails over the past couple of weeks. But it does mean spending more time trolling the AccuWeather and Weather Channel web sites because an outside-heavy itinerary is more vulnerable to big storm fronts.</li><li>And finally, stay flexible, expect delays, and be patient. If there’s anything we learned from 2020, it’s that something will screw up your plans -- a positive COVID test will shut down the restaurant you really wanted to eat at, capacity restrictions will mean a line to get into something that was top of your list. Have back-up plans and give everyone you meet the benefit of the doubt. Like you, they’re just trying to get through this safe and sound.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #171</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li>I’ve made another </li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>, as well as asking Alexa, Siri, and Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_171.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #171 — Leaving Data in Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Pro Tips','','inherit','closed','closed','','2997-revision-v1','','','2021-01-13 22:01:47','2021-01-14 03:01:47','',2997,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/13/2997-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3011,1,'2021-01-13 22:07:26','2021-01-14 03:07:26','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":2168,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1-1024x1024.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2168\"/></a><figcaption>Wait! I need to unpair my iPhone!</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>No Thanksgiving travel, but looking at the travel volume for this, the busiest travel week of the year, shows just how far things have fallen. The Qantas CEO said \"No vax, no fly\", so we dig into the emerging world of digital vaccine passports. And then I trace my travel genealogy, wondering if road warrior-ism is hereditary. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_171.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go over to the <em>Subscribe</em> section on the right to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/949687216&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #171: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. Stayed off the road over the entire holiday season which let me skip the TSA’s new post-lockdown checkpoint record of <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/coronavirus/passenger-throughput\">1.3 million on January 3rd</a>, the last Sunday of the holiday season -- though, to be fair,&nbsp; this is only just over half the 2.4 million passengers who flew on the same Sunday last year. And with every US airline except Delta now back to selling middle seats, it makes sense that load factors also ratcheted up over the holidays. I haven’t seen any industry-wide numbers yet, but <a href=\"https://www.ittn.ie/news/confidence-in-boeing-737-max-holding-firm/\">American’s COO did say that the load factor on their 737 Maxes over the last week of the holiday season was 90%</a>. Now, most of those Maxes are flying between LGA and MIA, always a busy holiday route, but I’ve seen reports of many other packed flights, as well as the much higher load . I was never a big fan of completely full flights pre-coronavirus and, as you can imagine, am even less so now pre-widespread vaccine distribution. So, I’m not too bothered that we didn’t try to get out of town over the holidays.</li><li>However, staying in town through the rest of January is a whole different thing because January is absolutely the worst part of Chicago’s winter. So, after&nbsp; Thanksgiving weekend, on what used to be called Cyber Monday when we actually shopped in physical stores, instead of trolling through Amazon, I was trolling through travel sites looking for cheap flights to someplace warm the 3rd wk of Jan. I figured that’d be long enough for any holiday COVID spike to work its way through the system.</li><li>I’d had some friends who’d gone down to Mexico, felt safe in the tourist zones, didn’t have any problems, came back healthy; but I don’t do well sitting on a beach for more than a day or two and I wanted to keep it a bit simpler, so we decided to stay in the US, which pretty quickly narrowed our search to Southern California, South Florida, and Arizona. Since we’d spent time last winter in both Arizona and Florida, we decided to do California and go as far down the coast as we could get, which was San Diego.&nbsp; And, as luck would have it, Southwest had cheap direct flights from Chicago Midway and I had Southwest travel credits from one of last spring’s flight cancellations burning a hole in my virtual pocket, so *boom* I booked it</li><li>On, what turned out to be, 3 days before the governor locked down most of California. But a friend hit the ground there a week before Christmas and said “Eh, it’s not a problem.” So, we stayed the course and didn’t really pay any attention to it until after New Years when we thought, you know, we should book a place to stay. And that’s when we started to pay attention. Bike and kayak rental places were open as “outdoor recreation” businesses. But vacation rental and hotel booking sites all pointed to the California Public Health Department statement -- “no hotel or lodging entity in California shall accept or honor out-of-state reservations for nonessential travel” which our January snowbird getaway definitely didn’t qualify as. Would things ease up in a couple of weeks? The trend lines on the state’s COVID website didn’t seem to be pointing in that direction.</li><li>So last Monday when I received another blast of airline sales emails, it seemed like the right time for a pivot. X-ing off California, we were back to Florida and Arizona. We talked to friends already down in Florida; they said the south beaches were already filling up with snowbirds, so we opted for drier sand and swung our Southwest flights over to Phoenix.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>But since we’d been in Phoenix last winter and continuing in the spirit of visiting not-quite-A-list places in the US we’ve never been while weaving around quarantines, we’re driving further south down I-10 to Tucson. We’re running the same travel planning play we did for our August trip to Michigan’s UP -- focus on outdoor activities like hiking and biking, have back-ups in case of last-minute closures, and above all, build a list of microbreweries with outdoor seating.</li><li>Bridge Music -- Leviathan by Kirkoid (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Kirkoid/31109</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Back at the beginning of December when the Pfizer vaccine approval was imminent and the Moderna approval wasn’t far behind, most travelers -- myself included -- got a bit giddy and started to think about the world opening up in the spring, the summer at the latest. Fast forward 30 days and, happy new year, that initial blast of vaccine optimism melted when it met the ugly realities of last-mile logistics. Spelunking through the stream of low-fare emails from American and Southwest and Delta and United and Iberia and British Airways filling my inbox, the consensus across airline demand forecasters seems to be that nothing’s going to change until the end of May. But even that doesn’t explain why, say, American, sends out an email pushing “Plan a European Vacation” that includes spring fares (March, April, May fares) to London, Manchester, and Madrid. I don’t know anyone who expects European vacation travel to open up in the next 3-4 months. Give credit to Delta for highlighting more achievable destinations -- Cancun, the Bahamas, Phoenix, and just about every airport in Florida with a runway long enough to handle a jet. </li><li>What will be as interesting is what the airlines and hotels do about elite status protection if travel continues to be slow through the summer. Remember that last spring, after it was clear that business travel was canceled for most of 2020, all the big travel companies grandfathered everyone into their status for this year. What you earned in 2019, you kept through this year, 2021. But now what? We talked about this a bit in t<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">he November episode (#169)</a> when the companies made their opening bid, knocking 20-30% off elite qualifying clip levels. Kinda like the low-fare sales -- it’ll be interesting to see what they offer come May.</li><li>We’ve talked in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\">prior episodes</a> about the challenges of planning a trip during COVID -- deciphering lockdown rules; parsing what can seem to be the almost theological differences between stay-at-home advisories vs. orders. And after all that, trying to keep up-to-date on last-minute changes. Things are changing so fast -- open, shut; outdoor seating vs just doing takeout -- that the normal crowdsourced tools we’d use -- things like Google Maps, Yelp -- can’t keep up because they don’t give a real-time view. The Foursquare app used to do it, but since they split <a href=\"https://www.swarmapp.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Swarm</a> from Foursquare, it seems that the real-time data is now sold just to business customers to target mobile ads. But, one app that I use does provide a real-time view into some traffic -- <a href=\"https://untappd.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Uptappd</a>. Yes, it’s just craft beer nerd traffic -- people checking in their beers at tap rooms and beer bars -- but that’s a kind of traffic that I’m pretty interested in.  After our pivot to Tucson, I wanted to see what beer places were open for service, not just take-out. I could’ve spent time clicking around the app, but instead, I decided to put one of my lockdown self-improvement projects to use. Over the fall, I’d taken some on-line Python programming courses on Coursera, so I wrote a short program that pulled the most recent check-ins from the Tucson area and started making a list of places that are open. I probably could’ve made that list quicker by just plunking away on the app, but not with the same sense of achievement.</li><li>We talked about COVID-19 vaccination and test certification in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">last episode</a>. Over the last month, it seems that proof of negative test results rather than of vaccinations is the new hotness. Canada, the UK, and now the US are the latest countries requiring a negative COVID test for inbound passengers. It makes sense. The CDC released a paper in November -- in one of my favorite publications, the <a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/index.html\"><em>Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report</em></a> (I’ll link to it in the show notes) -- saying that <a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6945a4.htm\">temperature and symptom screening at airports is pretty worthless</a>; it only picked up 1 case for every 85,000 passengers screened. So not hard for the switch to pre-flight testing to be more effective. For Canada and the UK, though, they’ve layered the test requirements <em>on top of </em>their existing 14-day quarantine requirements, which just adds to the confusion -- especially since the Canadian government gave travelers one week’s notice of the new testing requirement. I haven’t seen the US regs yet, but the Canadian rules say you must have “proof in hand” of a negative test result, and that proof can be either electronic or paper. You gotta think that, pretty quick, that “proof in hand” has gotta default to “proof on phone” otherwise, forged paper results are going to be the new fake IDs from our teens. Last November, French cops <a href=\"https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2020/11/10/fake-tests-covid-flights/\">busted a ring selling fake test results at CDG</a>. The going rate was €150-300 which converts to something like $180-370. That compares to $125 for a <a href=\"https://fakeyourid.com/\">good fake driver’s license</a>.  Since the last episode, the Caribbean country of <a href=\"https://skift.com/2020/12/18/airlines-still-waiting-on-governments-for-a-single-digital-health-passport-standard/\">Aruba was the first country</a> to standardize on one of the digital passport apps, <a href=\"https://commonpass.org/\">CommonPass</a>, the one backed by the World Economic Forum, the Davos gang, and, we mentioned, also used by United for their EWR-LHR flight. But then Sing Air picked its rival, <a href=\"https://www.iata.org/en/programs/passenger/travel-pass/\">Travel Pass</a> from IATA, to use on flights to/from Malaysia. So it still seems like, when it does go to “proof on phone”, we’re gonna need to set aside some memory screen space for a bunch of apps.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge music -- Ethereal (nop mix) by @nop (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Lancefield/34818</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Leaving Data Behind in The Rental Car</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A couple of weeks back, I retweeted a news article - the third suspect charged in the fatal shooting of a retired Chicago fireman during a carjacking was caught because he’d synced his phone to the audio system of the stolen car.&nbsp; I dunno -- fleeing a murder but worrying about getting a ticket for not using hands free.&nbsp; I dunno. Good they caught the bad guy, but what about us law-abiding frequent travelers? When the Hertz or Avis person walks up to me at the car return lane, they always remind me not to leave anything behind; to remember to take my sunglasses and my mobile phone. But they never remind me to delete all the data I synced to the car.&nbsp;</li><li>And with more of our lives getting stored in our phones, I asked Andrea Amico, founder of the company <a href=\"https://www.privacy4cars.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Privacy4Cars</a>, to come onto the podcast to talk about the privacy problems at the intersection of cars and smartphones.<ul><li>Mark: Andrea, how did you get involved in this space?</li></ul><ul><li>Andrea: One of the companies that used to run was one of the largest used car inspection companies. We inspected a lot of vehicles that were ready to be sold. I just noticed that people were leaving their digital lives behind.</li><li>Mark: We first talked about the privacy/security issues around pairing your smartphone with your car rental about four years ago. Bluetooth-enabled entertainment systems were just becoming more common in rental car fleets as hands-free call laws became widespread. Even today, the first thing I do is to sync my iPhone. And I\'ve noticed more times than not, the sync slots are all full -- personalized names, Jan\'s iPhone, Timmy\'s iPhone. You end up having to delete at least one of them to make room for yours. And then, once paired, most phones by default, end up downloading all your contacts and your phone numbers and things like that. So, Jan and Timmy have left behind all of their contacts and all their phone numbers and that\'s just bad in so many ways.</li><li>Andrea: When you sync your phone through Bluetooth or you plug it into the USB port or now, in some newer cars, you just walk into the car and the car automatically sniffs your phone and start syncing to it, including those with Android Auto and Apple CarPlay. When that happens, you are creating a mini-clone of your phone inside the vehicle.</li><li>Mark: What other information are people leaving behind when they don\'t clear themselves out of a rental car?</li><li>Andrea: All sorts -- your phone book, your call logs, the text messages, including the body, meaning the actual text of the text messages; that stuff will be left behind. But also all sorts of meta data that allows criminals or law enforcement or just people who want to snoop on you to re-identify you, anything from the identifiers of your phones which are unique, your Bluetooth MAC address. Not to mention, of course, all your navigation data. I mean, you can reconstruct where people have been, just by data that has been stored in the infotainment system. And then you have, whether you are on Twitter and Facebook and what are the handles of those things, which are the last photos you have taken? What files have you synced, the emails, calendar entries. There\'s all sorts of stuff that people really don\'t understand that they\'re living behind.</li><li>Mark: But when people <em>do </em>delete pairings are they deleting all that information? Or is there some data still retained in that vehicle?</li><li>Andrea: &nbsp;By and large, deleting the data following the manufacturer\'s directions is helpful in preventing third parties to having access. And so if there is anything left behind, it requires a much deeper forensic type of analysis that is typically not accessible. But for most people, following the manufacturer\'s directions on how to remove the data, it is a very easy to do and very effective defense against getting their data being in the hands of somebody else.</li><li>Mark: That\'s where <a href=\"https://www.privacy4cars.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Privacy4Cars</a> comes in. That\'s where your app comes in -- helping people get that right?</li><li>Andrea: Yes, we have a free app that people can download, and you can just search for Privacy4Cars on the <a href=\"https://apps.apple.com/us/app/privacy4cars/id1370969499\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple App Store</a> or <a href=\"https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.privacy4cars\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Play</a>, depending what kind of phone you have, and download it for free.</li><li>Mark: The last time on the podcast we talked about this topic was a little over a year ago, October 2019. &nbsp;I\'d gotten a notice from Hertz that they had changed their terms and conditions. I noticed that Hertz had specifically carved out liability from me leaving information from a Bluetooth pairing. And now, on one hand, I could see that point. I\'ve actively and voluntarily synced my phone to the car and in doing so, caused my information to be downloaded. But at what point does that sort of digital maintenance, clearing personal identifiable information, after every rental become part of the rental company’s overall maintenance responsibility, like checking the oil levels and the tire pressure.</li><li>Andrea: I believe that the time has already passed, and it\'s been in the past for at least a year, right? At least, the passage of California Consumer Privacy Act. And probably you can go further back in the past because of other types of regulations. And there are some regulators who have actually spoken about this. So in the United States, you have the FTC that has issued already four guidances on the need to delete personal information. In Europe, they went as far as to give a guideline that mandates the removal of the personal information. Beyond rental, when people are traveling, sometimes they rent, sometimes they ride-share, and very often it happens to me that I in an Uber or Lyft and you have a very nice driver that tells you, “Hey, you need to fill up the tank on your battery? Here\'s a cable.” And the first thing I do is glance -- &nbsp;where does the cable end up? If it goes into the lighter, that\'s only power. So yes, I’ll recharge my phone. But if it goes straight &nbsp;into the USB port of the car, don\'t charge the phone unless you\'re really desperate, because as soon as your phone powers back up, it will start downloading all your information into a stranger\'s car. So you definitely don\'t want to do that.</li><li>Mark: Andrea Amico, founder of <a href=\"https://www.privacy4cars.com\">Privacy4Cars.com</a>, you can find his app on the <a href=\"https://apps.apple.com/us/app/privacy4cars/id1370969499\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple App store</a> and on <a href=\"https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.privacy4cars\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Play</a>. Andrea, thank you very much for taking the time to talk to us today.</li><li>Andrea: Thank you. Mark. I really enjoyed talking to you.</li></ul></li><li>Bridge music -- My Flaming Heart by Wired Ant (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial &nbsp;(3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Wired_Ant/36862 Ft: Javolenus</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>2021 Travel Planning Pro Tips</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I’ve been talking about travel planning in the time of COVID across maybe 6 months of episodes. And since January is always a big travel month, especially this year with some vouchers from last spring’s flight cancellations coming up on their 12-month expiration dates, combined with 10 months of pent-up demand and another 6, maybe 9 months to go, I thought I’d pull all my planning tips together here -- and probably in a blog post after I get back from Tucson.</li><li>First, book now. As I said earlier, there’s a steady stream of sales out there right now as airlines, hotels, and rental car companies are looking for cash to get through the start of the year. There are great domestic deals now, and if you can part with some cash now, good international deals for the second half of the year. Prices are only going to go up as vaccine rates improve, and that pent-up demand overwhelms any squeamishness about sitting next to a stranger. I’m eyeing that same American ORD-BCN 787 non-stop that I wasn’t able to take at the end of last September. The deals aren’t as smoking as they were last March when the travel world was in a freefall; the airlines have gotten a little smarter over the past year. But with cancellation fees still waived, there’s not much risk.&nbsp;</li><li>Second, check your destination’s health requirements -- and keep checking until you leave. Many of the airlines have built good web resources that summarize any restrictions by destination. Of the US majors, I think <a href=\"https://www.united.com/ual/en/us/fly/travel/restrictions-map.html\">United’s</a> is the easiest to use but I think American’s is the most complete. They actually link out to a Canadian company, <a href=\"https://apply.joinsherpa.com/travel-restrictions?affiliateId=americanairlines\">Sherpa</a>, that took my Arizona itinerary and noted that, while there’s no quarantine restrictions in Arizona, there are when I return to Chicago.&nbsp; <a href=\"https://www.delta.com/us/en/plan-your-next-trip/where-we-fly\">Delta’s</a> is pretty good too. I’ll put links to them in the show notes. But you can’t check once and be done. We talked at the top of the show about Canada putting in a new testing requirement with 7-days notice. And domestically, states are changing restrictions weekly. One trick I’ve talked about is to start following your destination’s local newspapers on Twitter to get any early warnings on anything new.&nbsp;</li><li>Third, read the cancellation rules a lot more closely. Being nimble and able to react to changes at your destination -- like Irene and I did with our pivot from San Diego to Tucson -- depends on being thoughtful about the cancellation risks you take. Right now, flights have the lowest cancellation risk; Airbnb and vacation rentals, the highest. Hotels are in-between. Our default strategy then is to book the flight as soon as we can, don’t do pre-paid hotel rooms or car rentals, and wait as long as we can before booking an Airbnb.</li><li>Fourth, overload your itinerary with outdoor activities like hiking and biking so last-minute closures or restrictions don’t leave you aimlessly flipping through the hotel TV channels. It was the big trend last summer -- airlines dialed down flights between big city airports like the ORD-LGA run and toward beaches and mountains. And it continues -- all the imagery in the airline and hotel “flash sale” emails over the past couple of weeks. But it does mean spending more time trolling the AccuWeather and Weather Channel web sites because an outside-heavy itinerary is more vulnerable to big storm fronts.</li><li>And finally, stay flexible, expect delays, and be patient. If there’s anything we learned from 2020, it’s that something will screw up your plans -- a positive COVID test will shut down the restaurant you really wanted to eat at, capacity restrictions will mean a line to get into something that was top of your list. Have back-up plans and give everyone you meet the benefit of the doubt. Like you, they’re just trying to get through this safe and sound.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #171</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li>In this episode’s tech notes, if you check out the show notes, you’ll find a full transcript of my interview with Andrea Amico courtesy of my free tier of Amazon Web Services which includes 60 minutes a month of their Transcribe service. I learned about it when watching a session during their virtual Re:Invent conference. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/12/17/podcast-147-holiday-travel-tips-notes-from-santa-fe/\">episode #147</a>, I talked about going to it in person in Las Vegas a couple of years ago -- me and 50,000 other attendees, mostly pudgy, pasty-faced guys power walking up and down the strip, backpacks strapped down tight, ignoring the showgirls on the corner so they wouldn’t be late to, say, the sold-out tutorial on best practices for ingesting streaming data from IoT devices into AWS’ time series database. Less stressful, though less entertaining this year. Anyhow, watching the session on Transcribe got me thinking about how I could use it for the interviews I’ve done over the past 12 months. I’ve started on the most current episodes, working my way back. So far I have three done --this interview with Andrea, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/09/19/podcast-167-6-months-on-why-keep-travel-cards/\">episode #167</a>’s interview with Matt Schulz about travel credit cards, and <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\">episode #166</a>’s interview with Emily Thomas about the meaning of travel. I’ll keep chipping away at the backlog as my 60 free minutes a month allows.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>, as well as asking Alexa, Siri, and Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_171.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #171 — Leaving Data in Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Pro Tips','','inherit','closed','closed','','2997-revision-v1','','','2021-01-13 22:07:26','2021-01-14 03:07:26','',2997,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/13/2997-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3012,1,'2021-01-13 22:35:49','2021-01-14 03:35:49','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":2168,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1-1024x1024.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2168\"/></a><figcaption>Wait! I need to unpair my iPhone!</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Was all set to head to San Diego for a week\'s break from Chicago\'s grey January and then looked at the COVID restrictions... and then pivoted to Arizona. With people starting to think about 2021 travel, I pulled together my top 5 travel planning tips. Slow vaccine roll-out will probably keep us restricted for longer than we thought. Andrea Amico of <a href=\"https://www.privacy4cars.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Privacy4Cars</a> joins us to talk about the dangers of leaving our data behind in rental cars. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_171.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go over to the <em>Subscribe</em> section on the right to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/949687216&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #171: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. Stayed off the road over the entire holiday season which let me skip the TSA’s new post-lockdown checkpoint record of <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/coronavirus/passenger-throughput\">1.3 million on January 3rd</a>, the last Sunday of the holiday season -- though, to be fair,&nbsp; this is only just over half the 2.4 million passengers who flew on the same Sunday last year. And with every US airline except Delta now back to selling middle seats, it makes sense that load factors also ratcheted up over the holidays. I haven’t seen any industry-wide numbers yet, but <a href=\"https://www.ittn.ie/news/confidence-in-boeing-737-max-holding-firm/\">American’s COO did say that the load factor on their 737 Maxes over the last week of the holiday season was 90%</a>. Now, most of those Maxes are flying between LGA and MIA, always a busy holiday route, but I’ve seen reports of many other packed flights, as well as the much higher load . I was never a big fan of completely full flights pre-coronavirus and, as you can imagine, am even less so now pre-widespread vaccine distribution. So, I’m not too bothered that we didn’t try to get out of town over the holidays.</li><li>However, staying in town through the rest of January is a whole different thing because January is absolutely the worst part of Chicago’s winter. So, after&nbsp; Thanksgiving weekend, on what used to be called Cyber Monday when we actually shopped in physical stores, instead of trolling through Amazon, I was trolling through travel sites looking for cheap flights to someplace warm the 3rd wk of Jan. I figured that’d be long enough for any holiday COVID spike to work its way through the system.</li><li>I’d had some friends who’d gone down to Mexico, felt safe in the tourist zones, didn’t have any problems, came back healthy; but I don’t do well sitting on a beach for more than a day or two and I wanted to keep it a bit simpler, so we decided to stay in the US, which pretty quickly narrowed our search to Southern California, South Florida, and Arizona. Since we’d spent time last winter in both Arizona and Florida, we decided to do California and go as far down the coast as we could get, which was San Diego.&nbsp; And, as luck would have it, Southwest had cheap direct flights from Chicago Midway and I had Southwest travel credits from one of last spring’s flight cancellations burning a hole in my virtual pocket, so *boom* I booked it</li><li>On, what turned out to be, 3 days before the governor locked down most of California. But a friend hit the ground there a week before Christmas and said “Eh, it’s not a problem.” So, we stayed the course and didn’t really pay any attention to it until after New Years when we thought, you know, we should book a place to stay. And that’s when we started to pay attention. Bike and kayak rental places were open as “outdoor recreation” businesses. But vacation rental and hotel booking sites all pointed to the California Public Health Department statement -- “no hotel or lodging entity in California shall accept or honor out-of-state reservations for nonessential travel” which our January snowbird getaway definitely didn’t qualify as. Would things ease up in a couple of weeks? The trend lines on the state’s COVID website didn’t seem to be pointing in that direction.</li><li>So last Monday when I received another blast of airline sales emails, it seemed like the right time for a pivot. X-ing off California, we were back to Florida and Arizona. We talked to friends already down in Florida; they said the south beaches were already filling up with snowbirds, so we opted for drier sand and swung our Southwest flights over to Phoenix.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>But since we’d been in Phoenix last winter and continuing in the spirit of visiting not-quite-A-list places in the US we’ve never been while weaving around quarantines, we’re driving further south down I-10 to Tucson. We’re running the same travel planning play we did for our August trip to Michigan’s UP -- focus on outdoor activities like hiking and biking, have back-ups in case of last-minute closures, and above all, build a list of microbreweries with outdoor seating.</li><li>Bridge Music -- Leviathan by Kirkoid (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Kirkoid/31109</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Back at the beginning of December when the Pfizer vaccine approval was imminent and the Moderna approval wasn’t far behind, most travelers -- myself included -- got a bit giddy and started to think about the world opening up in the spring, the summer at the latest. Fast forward 30 days and, happy new year, that initial blast of vaccine optimism melted when it met the ugly realities of last-mile logistics. Spelunking through the stream of low-fare emails from American and Southwest and Delta and United and Iberia and British Airways filling my inbox, the consensus across airline demand forecasters seems to be that nothing’s going to change until the end of May. But even that doesn’t explain why, say, American, sends out an email pushing “Plan a European Vacation” that includes spring fares (March, April, May fares) to London, Manchester, and Madrid. I don’t know anyone who expects European vacation travel to open up in the next 3-4 months. Give credit to Delta for highlighting more achievable destinations -- Cancun, the Bahamas, Phoenix, and just about every airport in Florida with a runway long enough to handle a jet. </li><li>What will be as interesting is what the airlines and hotels do about elite status protection if travel continues to be slow through the summer. Remember that last spring, after it was clear that business travel was canceled for most of 2020, all the big travel companies grandfathered everyone into their status for this year. What you earned in 2019, you kept through this year, 2021. But now what? We talked about this a bit in t<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">he November episode (#169)</a> when the companies made their opening bid, knocking 20-30% off elite qualifying clip levels. Kinda like the low-fare sales -- it’ll be interesting to see what they offer come May.</li><li>We’ve talked in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\">prior episodes</a> about the challenges of planning a trip during COVID -- deciphering lockdown rules; parsing what can seem to be the almost theological differences between stay-at-home advisories vs. orders. And after all that, trying to keep up-to-date on last-minute changes. Things are changing so fast -- open, shut; outdoor seating vs just doing takeout -- that the normal crowdsourced tools we’d use -- things like Google Maps, Yelp -- can’t keep up because they don’t give a real-time view. The Foursquare app used to do it, but since they split <a href=\"https://www.swarmapp.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Swarm</a> from Foursquare, it seems that the real-time data is now sold just to business customers to target mobile ads. But, one app that I use does provide a real-time view into some traffic -- <a href=\"https://untappd.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Uptappd</a>. Yes, it’s just craft beer nerd traffic -- people checking in their beers at tap rooms and beer bars -- but that’s a kind of traffic that I’m pretty interested in.  After our pivot to Tucson, I wanted to see what beer places were open for service, not just take-out. I could’ve spent time clicking around the app, but instead, I decided to put one of my lockdown self-improvement projects to use. Over the fall, I’d taken some on-line Python programming courses on Coursera, so I wrote a short program that pulled the most recent check-ins from the Tucson area and started making a list of places that are open. I probably could’ve made that list quicker by just plunking away on the app, but not with the same sense of achievement.</li><li>We talked about COVID-19 vaccination and test certification in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">last episode</a>. Over the last month, it seems that proof of negative test results rather than of vaccinations is the new hotness. Canada, the UK, and now the US are the latest countries requiring a negative COVID test for inbound passengers. It makes sense. The CDC released a paper in November -- in one of my favorite publications, the <a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/index.html\"><em>Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report</em></a> (I’ll link to it in the show notes) -- saying that <a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6945a4.htm\">temperature and symptom screening at airports is pretty worthless</a>; it only picked up 1 case for every 85,000 passengers screened. So not hard for the switch to pre-flight testing to be more effective. For Canada and the UK, though, they’ve layered the test requirements <em>on top of </em>their existing 14-day quarantine requirements, which just adds to the confusion -- especially since the Canadian government gave travelers one week’s notice of the new testing requirement. I haven’t seen the US regs yet, but the Canadian rules say you must have “proof in hand” of a negative test result, and that proof can be either electronic or paper. You gotta think that, pretty quick, that “proof in hand” has gotta default to “proof on phone” otherwise, forged paper results are going to be the new fake IDs from our teens. Last November, French cops <a href=\"https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2020/11/10/fake-tests-covid-flights/\">busted a ring selling fake test results at CDG</a>. The going rate was €150-300 which converts to something like $180-370. That compares to $125 for a <a href=\"https://fakeyourid.com/\">good fake driver’s license</a>.  Since the last episode, the Caribbean country of <a href=\"https://skift.com/2020/12/18/airlines-still-waiting-on-governments-for-a-single-digital-health-passport-standard/\">Aruba was the first country</a> to standardize on one of the digital passport apps, <a href=\"https://commonpass.org/\">CommonPass</a>, the one backed by the World Economic Forum, the Davos gang, and, we mentioned, also used by United for their EWR-LHR flight. But then Sing Air picked its rival, <a href=\"https://www.iata.org/en/programs/passenger/travel-pass/\">Travel Pass</a> from IATA, to use on flights to/from Malaysia. So it still seems like, when it does go to “proof on phone”, we’re gonna need to set aside some memory screen space for a bunch of apps.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge music -- Ethereal (nop mix) by @nop (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Lancefield/34818</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Leaving Data Behind in The Rental Car</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A couple of weeks back, I retweeted a news article - the third suspect charged in the fatal shooting of a retired Chicago fireman during a carjacking was caught because he’d synced his phone to the audio system of the stolen car.&nbsp; I dunno -- fleeing a murder but worrying about getting a ticket for not using hands free.&nbsp; I dunno. Good they caught the bad guy, but what about us law-abiding frequent travelers? When the Hertz or Avis person walks up to me at the car return lane, they always remind me not to leave anything behind; to remember to take my sunglasses and my mobile phone. But they never remind me to delete all the data I synced to the car.&nbsp;</li><li>And with more of our lives getting stored in our phones, I asked Andrea Amico, founder of the company <a href=\"https://www.privacy4cars.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Privacy4Cars</a>, to come onto the podcast to talk about the privacy problems at the intersection of cars and smartphones.<ul><li>Mark: Andrea, how did you get involved in this space?</li></ul><ul><li>Andrea: One of the companies that used to run was one of the largest used car inspection companies. We inspected a lot of vehicles that were ready to be sold. I just noticed that people were leaving their digital lives behind.</li><li>Mark: We first talked about the privacy/security issues around pairing your smartphone with your car rental about four years ago. Bluetooth-enabled entertainment systems were just becoming more common in rental car fleets as hands-free call laws became widespread. Even today, the first thing I do is to sync my iPhone. And I\'ve noticed more times than not, the sync slots are all full -- personalized names, Jan\'s iPhone, Timmy\'s iPhone. You end up having to delete at least one of them to make room for yours. And then, once paired, most phones by default, end up downloading all your contacts and your phone numbers and things like that. So, Jan and Timmy have left behind all of their contacts and all their phone numbers and that\'s just bad in so many ways.</li><li>Andrea: When you sync your phone through Bluetooth or you plug it into the USB port or now, in some newer cars, you just walk into the car and the car automatically sniffs your phone and start syncing to it, including those with Android Auto and Apple CarPlay. When that happens, you are creating a mini-clone of your phone inside the vehicle.</li><li>Mark: What other information are people leaving behind when they don\'t clear themselves out of a rental car?</li><li>Andrea: All sorts -- your phone book, your call logs, the text messages, including the body, meaning the actual text of the text messages; that stuff will be left behind. But also all sorts of meta data that allows criminals or law enforcement or just people who want to snoop on you to re-identify you, anything from the identifiers of your phones which are unique, your Bluetooth MAC address. Not to mention, of course, all your navigation data. I mean, you can reconstruct where people have been, just by data that has been stored in the infotainment system. And then you have, whether you are on Twitter and Facebook and what are the handles of those things, which are the last photos you have taken? What files have you synced, the emails, calendar entries. There\'s all sorts of stuff that people really don\'t understand that they\'re living behind.</li><li>Mark: But when people <em>do </em>delete pairings are they deleting all that information? Or is there some data still retained in that vehicle?</li><li>Andrea: &nbsp;By and large, deleting the data following the manufacturer\'s directions is helpful in preventing third parties to having access. And so if there is anything left behind, it requires a much deeper forensic type of analysis that is typically not accessible. But for most people, following the manufacturer\'s directions on how to remove the data, it is a very easy to do and very effective defense against getting their data being in the hands of somebody else.</li><li>Mark: That\'s where <a href=\"https://www.privacy4cars.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Privacy4Cars</a> comes in. That\'s where your app comes in -- helping people get that right?</li><li>Andrea: Yes, we have a free app that people can download, and you can just search for Privacy4Cars on the <a href=\"https://apps.apple.com/us/app/privacy4cars/id1370969499\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple App Store</a> or <a href=\"https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.privacy4cars\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Play</a>, depending what kind of phone you have, and download it for free.</li><li>Mark: The last time on the podcast we talked about this topic was a little over a year ago, October 2019. &nbsp;I\'d gotten a notice from Hertz that they had changed their terms and conditions. I noticed that Hertz had specifically carved out liability from me leaving information from a Bluetooth pairing. And now, on one hand, I could see that point. I\'ve actively and voluntarily synced my phone to the car and in doing so, caused my information to be downloaded. But at what point does that sort of digital maintenance, clearing personal identifiable information, after every rental become part of the rental company’s overall maintenance responsibility, like checking the oil levels and the tire pressure.</li><li>Andrea: I believe that the time has already passed, and it\'s been in the past for at least a year, right? At least, the passage of California Consumer Privacy Act. And probably you can go further back in the past because of other types of regulations. And there are some regulators who have actually spoken about this. So in the United States, you have the FTC that has issued already four guidances on the need to delete personal information. In Europe, they went as far as to give a guideline that mandates the removal of the personal information. Beyond rental, when people are traveling, sometimes they rent, sometimes they ride-share, and very often it happens to me that I in an Uber or Lyft and you have a very nice driver that tells you, “Hey, you need to fill up the tank on your battery? Here\'s a cable.” And the first thing I do is glance -- &nbsp;where does the cable end up? If it goes into the lighter, that\'s only power. So yes, I’ll recharge my phone. But if it goes straight &nbsp;into the USB port of the car, don\'t charge the phone unless you\'re really desperate, because as soon as your phone powers back up, it will start downloading all your information into a stranger\'s car. So you definitely don\'t want to do that.</li><li>Mark: Andrea Amico, founder of <a href=\"https://www.privacy4cars.com\">Privacy4Cars.com</a>, you can find his app on the <a href=\"https://apps.apple.com/us/app/privacy4cars/id1370969499\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple App store</a> and on <a href=\"https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.privacy4cars\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Play</a>. Andrea, thank you very much for taking the time to talk to us today.</li><li>Andrea: Thank you. Mark. I really enjoyed talking to you.</li></ul></li><li>Bridge music -- My Flaming Heart by Wired Ant (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial &nbsp;(3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Wired_Ant/36862 Ft: Javolenus</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>2021 Travel Planning Pro Tips</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I’ve been talking about travel planning in the time of COVID across maybe 6 months of episodes. And since January is always a big travel month, especially this year with some vouchers from last spring’s flight cancellations coming up on their 12-month expiration dates, combined with 10 months of pent-up demand and another 6, maybe 9 months to go, I thought I’d pull all my planning tips together here -- and probably in a blog post after I get back from Tucson.</li><li>First, book now. As I said earlier, there’s a steady stream of sales out there right now as airlines, hotels, and rental car companies are looking for cash to get through the start of the year. There are great domestic deals now, and if you can part with some cash now, good international deals for the second half of the year. Prices are only going to go up as vaccine rates improve, and that pent-up demand overwhelms any squeamishness about sitting next to a stranger. I’m eyeing that same American ORD-BCN 787 non-stop that I wasn’t able to take at the end of last September. The deals aren’t as smoking as they were last March when the travel world was in a freefall; the airlines have gotten a little smarter over the past year. But with cancellation fees still waived, there’s not much risk.&nbsp;</li><li>Second, check your destination’s health requirements -- and keep checking until you leave. Many of the airlines have built good web resources that summarize any restrictions by destination. Of the US majors, I think <a href=\"https://www.united.com/ual/en/us/fly/travel/restrictions-map.html\">United’s</a> is the easiest to use but I think American’s is the most complete. They actually link out to a Canadian company, <a href=\"https://apply.joinsherpa.com/travel-restrictions?affiliateId=americanairlines\">Sherpa</a>, that took my Arizona itinerary and noted that, while there’s no quarantine restrictions in Arizona, there are when I return to Chicago.&nbsp; <a href=\"https://www.delta.com/us/en/plan-your-next-trip/where-we-fly\">Delta’s</a> is pretty good too. I’ll put links to them in the show notes. But you can’t check once and be done. We talked at the top of the show about Canada putting in a new testing requirement with 7-days notice. And domestically, states are changing restrictions weekly. One trick I’ve talked about is to start following your destination’s local newspapers on Twitter to get any early warnings on anything new.&nbsp;</li><li>Third, read the cancellation rules a lot more closely. Being nimble and able to react to changes at your destination -- like Irene and I did with our pivot from San Diego to Tucson -- depends on being thoughtful about the cancellation risks you take. Right now, flights have the lowest cancellation risk; Airbnb and vacation rentals, the highest. Hotels are in-between. Our default strategy then is to book the flight as soon as we can, don’t do pre-paid hotel rooms or car rentals, and wait as long as we can before booking an Airbnb.</li><li>Fourth, overload your itinerary with outdoor activities like hiking and biking so last-minute closures or restrictions don’t leave you aimlessly flipping through the hotel TV channels. It was the big trend last summer -- airlines dialed down flights between big city airports like the ORD-LGA run and toward beaches and mountains. And it continues -- all the imagery in the airline and hotel “flash sale” emails over the past couple of weeks. But it does mean spending more time trolling the AccuWeather and Weather Channel web sites because an outside-heavy itinerary is more vulnerable to big storm fronts.</li><li>And finally, stay flexible, expect delays, and be patient. If there’s anything we learned from 2020, it’s that something will screw up your plans -- a positive COVID test will shut down the restaurant you really wanted to eat at, capacity restrictions will mean a line to get into something that was top of your list. Have back-up plans and give everyone you meet the benefit of the doubt. Like you, they’re just trying to get through this safe and sound.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #171</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li>In this episode’s tech notes, if you check out the show notes, you’ll find a full transcript of my interview with Andrea Amico courtesy of my free tier of Amazon Web Services which includes 60 minutes a month of their Transcribe service. I learned about it when watching a session during their virtual Re:Invent conference. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/12/17/podcast-147-holiday-travel-tips-notes-from-santa-fe/\">episode #147</a>, I talked about going to it in person in Las Vegas a couple of years ago -- me and 50,000 other attendees, mostly pudgy, pasty-faced guys power walking up and down the strip, backpacks strapped down tight, ignoring the showgirls on the corner so they wouldn’t be late to, say, the sold-out tutorial on best practices for ingesting streaming data from IoT devices into AWS’ time series database. Less stressful, though less entertaining this year. Anyhow, watching the session on Transcribe got me thinking about how I could use it for the interviews I’ve done over the past 12 months. I’ve started on the most current episodes, working my way back. So far I have three done --this interview with Andrea, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/09/19/podcast-167-6-months-on-why-keep-travel-cards/\">episode #167</a>’s interview with Matt Schulz about travel credit cards, and <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\">episode #166</a>’s interview with Emily Thomas about the meaning of travel. I’ll keep chipping away at the backlog as my 60 free minutes a month allows.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>, as well as asking Alexa, Siri, and Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_171.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #171 — Leaving Data in Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Pro Tips','','inherit','closed','closed','','2997-revision-v1','','','2021-01-13 22:35:49','2021-01-14 03:35:49','',2997,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/13/2997-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3013,1,'2021-01-13 23:00:40','2021-01-14 04:00:40','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":2168,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1-1024x1024.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2168\"/></a><figcaption>Wait! I need to unpair my iPhone!</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Was all set to head to San Diego for a week\'s break from Chicago\'s grey January and then looked at the COVID restrictions... and then pivoted to Arizona. With people starting to think about 2021 travel, I pulled together my top 5 travel planning tips. Slow vaccine roll-out will probably keep us restricted for longer than we thought. Andrea Amico of <a href=\"https://www.privacy4cars.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Privacy4Cars</a> joins us to talk about the dangers of leaving our data behind in rental cars. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_171.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go over to the <em>Subscribe</em> section on the right to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/949687216&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #171: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. Stayed off the road over the entire holiday season which let me skip the TSA’s new post-lockdown checkpoint record of <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/coronavirus/passenger-throughput\">1.3 million on January 3rd</a>, the last Sunday of the holiday season -- though, to be fair,  this is only just over half the 2.4 million passengers who flew on the same Sunday last year. And with every US airline except Delta now back to selling middle seats, it makes sense that load factors also ratcheted up over the holidays. I haven’t seen any industry-wide numbers yet, but <a href=\"https://www.ittn.ie/news/confidence-in-boeing-737-max-holding-firm/\">American’s COO did say that the load factor on their 737 Maxes over the last week of the holiday season was 90%</a>. Now, most of those Maxes are flying between LGA and MIA, always a busy holiday route, but I’ve seen reports of many other packed flights, as well as the much higher load . I was never a big fan of completely full flights pre-coronavirus and, as you can imagine, am even less so now pre-widespread vaccine distribution. So, I’m not too bothered that we didn’t try to get out of town over the holidays.</li><li>However, staying in town through the rest of January is a whole different thing because January is absolutely the worst part of Chicago’s winter. So, after  Thanksgiving weekend, on what used to be called Cyber Monday when we actually shopped in physical stores, instead of trolling through Amazon, I was trolling through travel sites looking for cheap flights to someplace warm the 3rd wk of Jan. I figured that’d be long enough for any holiday COVID spike to work its way through the system.</li><li>I’d had some friends who’d gone down to Mexico, felt safe in the tourist zones, didn’t have any problems, came back healthy; but I don’t do well sitting on a beach for more than a day or two and I wanted to keep it a bit simpler, so we decided to stay in the US, which pretty quickly narrowed our search to Southern California, South Florida, and Arizona. Since we’d spent time last winter in both Arizona and Florida, we decided to do California and go as far down the coast as we could get, which was San Diego.  And, as luck would have it, Southwest had cheap direct flights from Chicago Midway and I had Southwest travel credits from one of last spring’s flight cancellations burning a hole in my virtual pocket, so *boom* I booked it</li><li>On, what turned out to be, 3 days before the governor locked down most of California. But a friend hit the ground there a week before Christmas and said “Eh, it’s not a problem.” So, we stayed the course and didn’t really pay any attention to it until after New Years when we thought, you know, we should book a place to stay. And that’s when we started to pay attention. Bike and kayak rental places were open as “outdoor recreation” businesses. But vacation rental and hotel booking sites all pointed to the California Public Health Department statement -- “no hotel or lodging entity in California shall accept or honor out-of-state reservations for nonessential travel” which our January snowbird getaway definitely didn’t qualify as. Would things ease up in a couple of weeks? The trend lines on the state’s COVID website didn’t seem to be pointing in that direction.</li><li>So last Monday when I received another blast of airline sales emails, it seemed like the right time for a pivot. X-ing off California, we were back to Florida and Arizona. We talked to friends already down in Florida; they said the south beaches were already filling up with snowbirds, so we opted for drier sand and swung our Southwest flights over to Phoenix.  </li><li>But since we’d been in Phoenix last winter and continuing in the spirit of visiting not-quite-A-list places in the US we’ve never been while weaving around quarantines, we’re driving further south down I-10 to Tucson. We’re running the same travel planning play we did for our August trip to Michigan’s UP -- focus on outdoor activities like hiking and biking, have back-ups in case of last-minute closures, and above all, build a list of microbreweries with outdoor seating.</li><li>Bridge Music -- Say Their Names - Love and Remember by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2020 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/62230 Ft: DJ Lang</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Back at the beginning of December when the Pfizer vaccine approval was imminent and the Moderna approval wasn’t far behind, most travelers -- myself included -- got a bit giddy and started to think about the world opening up in the spring, the summer at the latest. Fast forward 30 days and, happy new year, that initial blast of vaccine optimism melted when it met the ugly realities of last-mile logistics. Spelunking through the stream of low-fare emails from American and Southwest and Delta and United and Iberia and British Airways filling my inbox, the consensus across airline demand forecasters seems to be that nothing’s going to change until the end of May. But even that doesn’t explain why, say, American, sends out an email pushing “Plan a European Vacation” that includes spring fares (March, April, May fares) to London, Manchester, and Madrid. I don’t know anyone who expects European vacation travel to open up in the next 3-4 months. Give credit to Delta for highlighting more achievable destinations -- Cancun, the Bahamas, Phoenix, and just about every airport in Florida with a runway long enough to handle a jet. </li><li>What will be as interesting is what the airlines and hotels do about elite status protection if travel continues to be slow through the summer. Remember that last spring, after it was clear that business travel was canceled for most of 2020, all the big travel companies grandfathered everyone into their status for this year. What you earned in 2019, you kept through this year, 2021. But now what? We talked about this a bit in t<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">he November episode (#169)</a> when the companies made their opening bid, knocking 20-30% off elite qualifying clip levels. Kinda like the low-fare sales -- it’ll be interesting to see what they offer come May.</li><li>We’ve talked in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\">prior episodes</a> about the challenges of planning a trip during COVID -- deciphering lockdown rules; parsing what can seem to be the almost theological differences between stay-at-home advisories vs. orders. And after all that, trying to keep up-to-date on last-minute changes. Things are changing so fast -- open, shut; outdoor seating vs just doing takeout -- that the normal crowdsourced tools we’d use -- things like Google Maps, Yelp -- can’t keep up because they don’t give a real-time view. The Foursquare app used to do it, but since they split <a href=\"https://www.swarmapp.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Swarm</a> from Foursquare, it seems that the real-time data is now sold just to business customers to target mobile ads. But, one app that I use does provide a real-time view into some traffic -- <a href=\"https://untappd.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Uptappd</a>. Yes, it’s just craft beer nerd traffic -- people checking in their beers at tap rooms and beer bars -- but that’s a kind of traffic that I’m pretty interested in.  After our pivot to Tucson, I wanted to see what beer places were open for service, not just take-out. I could’ve spent time clicking around the app, but instead, I decided to put one of my lockdown self-improvement projects to use. Over the fall, I’d taken some on-line Python programming courses on Coursera, so I wrote a short program that pulled the most recent check-ins from the Tucson area and started making a list of places that are open. I probably could’ve made that list quicker by just plunking away on the app, but not with the same sense of achievement.</li><li>We talked about COVID-19 vaccination and test certification in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">last episode</a>. Over the last month, it seems that proof of negative test results rather than of vaccinations is the new hotness. Canada, the UK, and now the US are the latest countries requiring a negative COVID test for inbound passengers. It makes sense. The CDC released a paper in November -- in one of my favorite publications, the <a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/index.html\"><em>Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report</em></a> (I’ll link to it in the show notes) -- saying that <a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6945a4.htm\">temperature and symptom screening at airports is pretty worthless</a>; it only picked up 1 case for every 85,000 passengers screened. So not hard for the switch to pre-flight testing to be more effective. For Canada and the UK, though, they’ve layered the test requirements <em>on top of </em>their existing 14-day quarantine requirements, which just adds to the confusion -- especially since the Canadian government gave travelers one week’s notice of the new testing requirement. I haven’t seen the US regs yet, but the Canadian rules say you must have “proof in hand” of a negative test result, and that proof can be either electronic or paper. You gotta think that, pretty quick, that “proof in hand” has gotta default to “proof on phone” otherwise, forged paper results are going to be the new fake IDs from our teens. Last November, French cops <a href=\"https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2020/11/10/fake-tests-covid-flights/\">busted a ring selling fake test results at CDG</a>. The going rate was €150-300 which converts to something like $180-370. That compares to $125 for a <a href=\"https://fakeyourid.com/\">good fake driver’s license</a>.  Since the last episode, the Caribbean country of <a href=\"https://skift.com/2020/12/18/airlines-still-waiting-on-governments-for-a-single-digital-health-passport-standard/\">Aruba was the first country</a> to standardize on one of the digital passport apps, <a href=\"https://commonpass.org/\">CommonPass</a>, the one backed by the World Economic Forum, the Davos gang, and, we mentioned, also used by United for their EWR-LHR flight. But then Sing Air picked its rival, <a href=\"https://www.iata.org/en/programs/passenger/travel-pass/\">Travel Pass</a> from IATA, to use on flights to/from Malaysia. So it still seems like, when it does go to “proof on phone”, we’re gonna need to set aside some memory screen space for a bunch of apps.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge music -- Staying Positive by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2019 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/59438 Ft: greg_baumont</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Leaving Data Behind in The Rental Car</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A couple of weeks back, I retweeted a news article - the third suspect charged in the fatal shooting of a retired Chicago fireman during a carjacking was caught because he’d synced his phone to the audio system of the stolen car.  I dunno -- fleeing a murder but worrying about getting a ticket for not using hands free.  I dunno. Good they caught the bad guy, but what about us law-abiding frequent travelers? When the Hertz or Avis person walks up to me at the car return lane, they always remind me not to leave anything behind; to remember to take my sunglasses and my mobile phone. But they never remind me to delete all the data I synced to the car. </li><li>And with more of our lives getting stored in our phones, I asked Andrea Amico, founder of the company <a href=\"https://www.privacy4cars.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Privacy4Cars</a>, to come onto the podcast to talk about the privacy problems at the intersection of cars and smartphones.<ul><li>Mark: Andrea, how did you get involved in this space?</li></ul><ul><li>Andrea: One of the companies that used to run was one of the largest used car inspection companies. We inspected a lot of vehicles that were ready to be sold. I just noticed that people were leaving their digital lives behind.</li><li>Mark: We first talked about the privacy/security issues around pairing your smartphone with your car rental about four years ago. Bluetooth-enabled entertainment systems were just becoming more common in rental car fleets as hands-free call laws became widespread. Even today, the first thing I do is to sync my iPhone. And I\'ve noticed more times than not, the sync slots are all full -- personalized names, Jan\'s iPhone, Timmy\'s iPhone. You end up having to delete at least one of them to make room for yours. And then, once paired, most phones by default, end up downloading all your contacts and your phone numbers and things like that. So, Jan and Timmy have left behind all of their contacts and all their phone numbers and that\'s just bad in so many ways.</li><li>Andrea: When you sync your phone through Bluetooth or you plug it into the USB port or now, in some newer cars, you just walk into the car and the car automatically sniffs your phone and start syncing to it, including those with Android Auto and Apple CarPlay. When that happens, you are creating a mini-clone of your phone inside the vehicle.</li><li>Mark: What other information are people leaving behind when they don\'t clear themselves out of a rental car?</li><li>Andrea: All sorts -- your phone book, your call logs, the text messages, including the body, meaning the actual text of the text messages; that stuff will be left behind. But also all sorts of meta data that allows criminals or law enforcement or just people who want to snoop on you to re-identify you, anything from the identifiers of your phones which are unique, your Bluetooth MAC address. Not to mention, of course, all your navigation data. I mean, you can reconstruct where people have been, just by data that has been stored in the infotainment system. And then you have, whether you are on Twitter and Facebook and what are the handles of those things, which are the last photos you have taken? What files have you synced, the emails, calendar entries. There\'s all sorts of stuff that people really don\'t understand that they\'re living behind.</li><li>Mark: But when people <em>do </em>delete pairings are they deleting all that information? Or is there some data still retained in that vehicle?</li><li>Andrea:  By and large, deleting the data following the manufacturer\'s directions is helpful in preventing third parties to having access. And so if there is anything left behind, it requires a much deeper forensic type of analysis that is typically not accessible. But for most people, following the manufacturer\'s directions on how to remove the data, it is a very easy to do and very effective defense against getting their data being in the hands of somebody else.</li><li>Mark: That\'s where <a href=\"https://www.privacy4cars.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Privacy4Cars</a> comes in. That\'s where your app comes in -- helping people get that right?</li><li>Andrea: Yes, we have a free app that people can download, and you can just search for Privacy4Cars on the <a href=\"https://apps.apple.com/us/app/privacy4cars/id1370969499\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple App Store</a> or <a href=\"https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.privacy4cars\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Play</a>, depending what kind of phone you have, and download it for free.</li><li>Mark: The last time on the podcast we talked about this topic was a little over a year ago, October 2019.  I\'d gotten a notice from Hertz that they had changed their terms and conditions. I noticed that Hertz had specifically carved out liability from me leaving information from a Bluetooth pairing. And now, on one hand, I could see that point. I\'ve actively and voluntarily synced my phone to the car and in doing so, caused my information to be downloaded. But at what point does that sort of digital maintenance, clearing personal identifiable information, after every rental become part of the rental company’s overall maintenance responsibility, like checking the oil levels and the tire pressure.</li><li>Andrea: I believe that the time has already passed, and it\'s been in the past for at least a year, right? At least, the passage of California Consumer Privacy Act. And probably you can go further back in the past because of other types of regulations. And there are some regulators who have actually spoken about this. So in the United States, you have the FTC that has issued already four guidances on the need to delete personal information. In Europe, they went as far as to give a guideline that mandates the removal of the personal information. Beyond rental, when people are traveling, sometimes they rent, sometimes they ride-share, and very often it happens to me that I in an Uber or Lyft and you have a very nice driver that tells you, “Hey, you need to fill up the tank on your battery? Here\'s a cable.” And the first thing I do is glance --  where does the cable end up? If it goes into the lighter, that\'s only power. So yes, I’ll recharge my phone. But if it goes straight  into the USB port of the car, don\'t charge the phone unless you\'re really desperate, because as soon as your phone powers back up, it will start downloading all your information into a stranger\'s car. So you definitely don\'t want to do that.</li><li>Mark: Andrea Amico, founder of <a href=\"https://www.privacy4cars.com\">Privacy4Cars.com</a>, you can find his app on the <a href=\"https://apps.apple.com/us/app/privacy4cars/id1370969499\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple App store</a> and on <a href=\"https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.privacy4cars\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Play</a>. Andrea, thank you very much for taking the time to talk to us today.</li><li>Andrea: Thank you. Mark. I really enjoyed talking to you.</li></ul></li><li>Bridge music -- Latinium by Javolenus (c) copyright 2020 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Javolenus/62650 Ft: NiGiD</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>2021 Travel Planning Pro Tips</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I’ve been talking about travel planning in the time of COVID across maybe 6 months of episodes. And since January is always a big travel month, especially this year with some vouchers from last spring’s flight cancellations coming up on their 12-month expiration dates, combined with 10 months of pent-up demand and another 6, maybe 9 months to go, I thought I’d pull all my planning tips together here -- and probably in a blog post after I get back from Tucson.</li><li>First, book now. As I said earlier, there’s a steady stream of sales out there right now as airlines, hotels, and rental car companies are looking for cash to get through the start of the year. There are great domestic deals now, and if you can part with some cash now, good international deals for the second half of the year. Prices are only going to go up as vaccine rates improve, and that pent-up demand overwhelms any squeamishness about sitting next to a stranger. I’m eyeing that same American ORD-BCN 787 non-stop that I wasn’t able to take at the end of last September. The deals aren’t as smoking as they were last March when the travel world was in a freefall; the airlines have gotten a little smarter over the past year. But with cancellation fees still waived, there’s not much risk.&nbsp;</li><li>Second, check your destination’s health requirements -- and keep checking until you leave. Many of the airlines have built good web resources that summarize any restrictions by destination. Of the US majors, I think <a href=\"https://www.united.com/ual/en/us/fly/travel/restrictions-map.html\">United’s</a> is the easiest to use but I think American’s is the most complete. They actually link out to a Canadian company, <a href=\"https://apply.joinsherpa.com/travel-restrictions?affiliateId=americanairlines\">Sherpa</a>, that took my Arizona itinerary and noted that, while there’s no quarantine restrictions in Arizona, there are when I return to Chicago.&nbsp; <a href=\"https://www.delta.com/us/en/plan-your-next-trip/where-we-fly\">Delta’s</a> is pretty good too. I’ll put links to them in the show notes. But you can’t check once and be done. We talked at the top of the show about Canada putting in a new testing requirement with 7-days notice. And domestically, states are changing restrictions weekly. One trick I’ve talked about is to start following your destination’s local newspapers on Twitter to get any early warnings on anything new.&nbsp;</li><li>Third, read the cancellation rules a lot more closely. Being nimble and able to react to changes at your destination -- like Irene and I did with our pivot from San Diego to Tucson -- depends on being thoughtful about the cancellation risks you take. Right now, flights have the lowest cancellation risk; Airbnb and vacation rentals, the highest. Hotels are in-between. Our default strategy then is to book the flight as soon as we can, don’t do pre-paid hotel rooms or car rentals, and wait as long as we can before booking an Airbnb.</li><li>Fourth, overload your itinerary with outdoor activities like hiking and biking so last-minute closures or restrictions don’t leave you aimlessly flipping through the hotel TV channels. It was the big trend last summer -- airlines dialed down flights between big city airports like the ORD-LGA run and toward beaches and mountains. And it continues -- all the imagery in the airline and hotel “flash sale” emails over the past couple of weeks. But it does mean spending more time trolling the AccuWeather and Weather Channel web sites because an outside-heavy itinerary is more vulnerable to big storm fronts.</li><li>And finally, stay flexible, expect delays, and be patient. If there’s anything we learned from 2020, it’s that something will screw up your plans -- a positive COVID test will shut down the restaurant you really wanted to eat at, capacity restrictions will mean a line to get into something that was top of your list. Have back-up plans and give everyone you meet the benefit of the doubt. Like you, they’re just trying to get through this safe and sound.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #171</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li>In this episode’s tech notes, if you check out the show notes, you’ll find a full transcript of my interview with Andrea Amico courtesy of my free tier of Amazon Web Services which includes 60 minutes a month of their Transcribe service. I learned about it when watching a session during their virtual Re:Invent conference. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/12/17/podcast-147-holiday-travel-tips-notes-from-santa-fe/\">episode #147</a>, I talked about going to it in person in Las Vegas a couple of years ago -- me and 50,000 other attendees, mostly pudgy, pasty-faced guys power walking up and down the strip, backpacks strapped down tight, ignoring the showgirls on the corner so they wouldn’t be late to, say, the sold-out tutorial on best practices for ingesting streaming data from IoT devices into AWS’ time series database. Less stressful, though less entertaining this year. Anyhow, watching the session on Transcribe got me thinking about how I could use it for the interviews I’ve done over the past 12 months. I’ve started on the most current episodes, working my way back. So far I have three done --this interview with Andrea, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/09/19/podcast-167-6-months-on-why-keep-travel-cards/\">episode #167</a>’s interview with Matt Schulz about travel credit cards, and <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\">episode #166</a>’s interview with Emily Thomas about the meaning of travel. I’ll keep chipping away at the backlog as my 60 free minutes a month allows.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>, as well as asking Alexa, Siri, and Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_171.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #171 — Leaving Data in Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Pro Tips','','inherit','closed','closed','','2997-revision-v1','','','2021-01-13 23:00:40','2021-01-14 04:00:40','',2997,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/13/2997-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3014,1,'2021-01-14 15:19:21','2021-01-14 20:19:21','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":2168,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1-1024x1024.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2168\"/></a><figcaption>Wait! I need to unpair my iPhone!</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Was all set to head to San Diego for a week\'s break from Chicago\'s grey January and then looked at the COVID restrictions... and then pivoted to Arizona. With people starting to think about 2021 travel, I pulled together my top 5 travel planning tips. Slow vaccine roll-out will probably keep us restricted for longer than we thought. Andrea Amico of <a href=\"https://www.privacy4cars.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Privacy4Cars</a> joins us to talk about the dangers of leaving our data behind in rental cars. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_171.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go over to the <em>Subscribe</em> section on the right to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/949687216&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #171: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. Stayed off the road over the entire holiday season which let me skip the TSA’s new post-lockdown checkpoint record of <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/coronavirus/passenger-throughput\">1.3 million on January 3rd</a>, the last Sunday of the holiday season -- though, to be fair,&nbsp; this is only just over half the 2.4 million passengers who flew on the same Sunday last year. And with every US airline except Delta now back to selling middle seats, it makes sense that load factors also ratcheted up over the holidays. I haven’t seen any industry-wide numbers yet, but <a href=\"https://www.ittn.ie/news/confidence-in-boeing-737-max-holding-firm/\">American’s COO did say that the load factor on their 737 Maxes over the last week of the holiday season was 90%</a>. Now, most of those Maxes are flying between LGA and MIA, always a busy holiday route, but I’ve seen reports of many other packed flights, as well as the much higher load . I was never a big fan of completely full flights pre-coronavirus and, as you can imagine, am even less so now pre-widespread vaccine distribution. So, I’m not too bothered that we didn’t try to get out of town over the holidays.</li><li>However, staying in town through the rest of January is a whole different thing because January is absolutely the worst part of Chicago’s winter. So, after&nbsp; Thanksgiving weekend, on what used to be called Cyber Monday when we actually shopped in physical stores, instead of trolling through Amazon, I was trolling through travel sites looking for cheap flights to someplace warm the 3rd wk of Jan. I figured that’d be long enough for any holiday COVID spike to work its way through the system.</li><li>I’d had some friends who’d gone down to Mexico, felt safe in the tourist zones, didn’t have any problems, came back healthy; but I don’t do well sitting on a beach for more than a day or two and I wanted to keep it a bit simpler, so we decided to stay in the US, which pretty quickly narrowed our search to Southern California, South Florida, and Arizona. Since we’d spent time last winter in both Arizona and Florida, we decided to do California and go as far down the coast as we could get, which was San Diego.&nbsp; And, as luck would have it, Southwest had cheap direct flights from Chicago Midway and I had Southwest travel credits from one of last spring’s flight cancellations burning a hole in my virtual pocket, so *boom* I booked it</li><li>On, what turned out to be, 3 days before the governor locked down most of California. But a friend hit the ground there a week before Christmas and said “Eh, it’s not a problem.” So, we stayed the course and didn’t really pay any attention to it until after New Years when we thought, you know, we should book a place to stay. And that’s when we started to pay attention. Bike and kayak rental places were open as “outdoor recreation” businesses. But vacation rental and hotel booking sites all pointed to the California Public Health Department statement -- “no hotel or lodging entity in California shall accept or honor out-of-state reservations for nonessential travel” which our January snowbird getaway definitely didn’t qualify as. Would things ease up in a couple of weeks? The trend lines on the state’s COVID website didn’t seem to be pointing in that direction.</li><li>So last Monday when I received another blast of airline sales emails, it seemed like the right time for a pivot. X-ing off California, we were back to Florida and Arizona. We talked to friends already down in Florida; they said the south beaches were already filling up with snowbirds, so we opted for drier sand and swung our Southwest flights over to Phoenix.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>But since we’d been in Phoenix last winter and continuing in the spirit of visiting not-quite-A-list places in the US we’ve never been while weaving around quarantines, we’re driving further south down I-10 to Tucson. We’re running the same travel planning play we did for our August trip to Michigan’s UP -- focus on outdoor activities like hiking and biking, have back-ups in case of last-minute closures, and above all, build a list of microbreweries with outdoor seating.</li><li>Bridge Music -- Say Their Names - Love and Remember by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2020 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/62230 Ft: DJ Lang</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Back at the beginning of December when the Pfizer vaccine approval was imminent and the Moderna approval wasn’t far behind, most travelers -- myself included -- got a bit giddy and started to think about the world opening up in the spring, the summer at the latest. Fast forward 30 days and, happy new year, that initial blast of vaccine optimism melted when it met the ugly realities of last-mile logistics. Spelunking through the stream of low-fare emails from American and Southwest and Delta and United and Iberia and British Airways filling my inbox, the consensus across airline demand forecasters seems to be that nothing’s going to change until the end of May. But even that doesn’t explain why, say, American, sends out an email pushing “Plan a European Vacation” that includes spring fares (March, April, May fares) to London, Manchester, and Madrid. I don’t know anyone who expects European vacation travel to open up in the next 3-4 months. Give credit to Delta for highlighting more achievable destinations -- Cancun, the Bahamas, Phoenix, and just about every airport in Florida with a runway long enough to handle a jet.&nbsp;</li><li>What will be as interesting is what the airlines and hotels do about elite status protection if travel continues to be slow through the summer. Remember that last spring, after it was clear that business travel was canceled for most of 2020, all the big travel companies grandfathered everyone into their status for this year. What you earned in 2019, you kept through this year, 2021. But now what? We talked about this a bit in t<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">he November episode (#169)</a> when the companies made their opening bid, knocking 20-30% off elite qualifying clip levels. Kinda like the low-fare sales -- it’ll be interesting to see what they offer come May.</li><li>We’ve talked in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\">prior episodes</a> about the challenges of planning a trip during COVID -- deciphering lockdown rules; parsing what can seem to be the almost theological differences between stay-at-home advisories vs. orders. And after all that, trying to keep up-to-date on last-minute changes. Things are changing so fast -- open, shut; outdoor seating vs just doing takeout -- that the normal crowdsourced tools we’d use -- things like Google Maps, Yelp -- can’t keep up because they don’t give a real-time view. The Foursquare app used to do it, but since they split <a href=\"https://www.swarmapp.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Swarm</a> from Foursquare, it seems that the real-time data is now sold just to business customers to target mobile ads. But, one app that I use does provide a real-time view into some traffic -- <a href=\"https://untappd.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Uptappd</a>. Yes, it’s just craft beer nerd traffic -- people checking in their beers at tap rooms and beer bars -- but that’s a kind of traffic that I’m pretty interested in.&nbsp; After our pivot to Tucson, I wanted to see what beer places were open for service, not just take-out. I could’ve spent time clicking around the app, but instead, I decided to put one of my lockdown self-improvement projects to use. Over the fall, I’d taken some on-line Python programming courses on Coursera, so I wrote a short program that pulled the most recent check-ins from the Tucson area and started making a list of places that are open. I probably could’ve made that list quicker by just plunking away on the app, but not with the same sense of achievement.</li><li>We talked about COVID-19 vaccination and test certification in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">last episode</a>. Over the last month, it seems that proof of negative test results rather than of vaccinations is the new hotness. Canada, the UK, and now the US are the latest countries requiring a negative COVID test for inbound passengers. It makes sense. The CDC released a paper in November -- in one of my favorite publications, the <a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/index.html\"><em>Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report</em></a> (I’ll link to it in the show notes) -- saying that <a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6945a4.htm\">temperature and symptom screening at airports is pretty worthless</a>; it only picked up 1 case for every 85,000 passengers screened. So not hard for the switch to pre-flight testing to be more effective. For Canada and the UK, though, they’ve layered the test requirements <em>on top of </em>their existing 14-day quarantine requirements, which just adds to the confusion -- especially since the Canadian government gave travelers one week’s notice of the new testing requirement. I haven’t seen the US regs yet, but the Canadian rules say you must have “proof in hand” of a negative test result, and that proof can be either electronic or paper. You gotta think that, pretty quick, that “proof in hand” has gotta default to “proof on phone” otherwise, forged paper results are going to be the new fake IDs from our teens. Last November, French cops <a href=\"https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2020/11/10/fake-tests-covid-flights/\">busted a ring selling fake test results at CDG</a>. The going rate was €150-300 which converts to something like $180-370. That compares to $125 for a <a href=\"https://fakeyourid.com/\">good fake driver’s license</a>.&nbsp; Since the last episode, the Caribbean country of <a href=\"https://skift.com/2020/12/18/airlines-still-waiting-on-governments-for-a-single-digital-health-passport-standard/\">Aruba was the first country</a> to standardize on one of the digital passport apps, <a href=\"https://commonpass.org/\">CommonPass</a>, the one backed by the World Economic Forum, the Davos gang, and, we mentioned, also used by United for their EWR-LHR flight. But then Sing Air picked its rival, <a href=\"https://www.iata.org/en/programs/passenger/travel-pass/\">Travel Pass</a> from IATA, to use on flights to/from Malaysia. So it still seems like, when it does go to “proof on phone”, we’re gonna need to set aside some memory screen space for a bunch of apps.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge music -- Staying Positive by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2019 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/59438 Ft: greg_baumont</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Leaving Data Behind in The Rental Car</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A couple of weeks back, I retweeted a news article - the third suspect charged in the fatal shooting of a retired Chicago fireman during a carjacking was caught because he’d synced his phone to the audio system of the stolen car.&nbsp; I dunno -- fleeing a murder but worrying about getting a ticket for not using hands free.&nbsp; I dunno. Good they caught the bad guy, but what about us law-abiding frequent travelers? When the Hertz or Avis person walks up to me at the car return lane, they always remind me not to leave anything behind; to remember to take my sunglasses and my mobile phone. But they never remind me to delete all the data I synced to the car.&nbsp;</li><li>And with more of our lives getting stored in our phones, I asked Andrea Amico, founder of the company <a href=\"https://www.privacy4cars.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Privacy4Cars</a>, to come onto the podcast to talk about the privacy problems at the intersection of cars and smartphones.<ul><li>Mark: Andrea, how did you get involved in this space?</li></ul><ul><li>Andrea: One of the companies that used to run was one of the largest used car inspection companies. We inspected a lot of vehicles that were ready to be sold. I just noticed that people were leaving their digital lives behind.</li><li>Mark: We first talked about the privacy/security issues around pairing your smartphone with your car rental about four years ago. Bluetooth-enabled entertainment systems were just becoming more common in rental car fleets as hands-free call laws became widespread. Even today, the first thing I do is to sync my iPhone. And I\'ve noticed more times than not, the sync slots are all full -- personalized names, Jan\'s iPhone, Timmy\'s iPhone. You end up having to delete at least one of them to make room for yours. And then, once paired, most phones by default, end up downloading all your contacts and your phone numbers and things like that. So, Jan and Timmy have left behind all of their contacts and all their phone numbers and that\'s just bad in so many ways.</li><li>Andrea: When you sync your phone through Bluetooth or you plug it into the USB port or now, in some newer cars, you just walk into the car and the car automatically sniffs your phone and start syncing to it, including those with Android Auto and Apple CarPlay. When that happens, you are creating a mini-clone of your phone inside the vehicle.</li><li>Mark: What other information are people leaving behind when they don\'t clear themselves out of a rental car?</li><li>Andrea: All sorts -- your phone book, your call logs, the text messages, including the body, meaning the actual text of the text messages; that stuff will be left behind. But also all sorts of meta data that allows criminals or law enforcement or just people who want to snoop on you to re-identify you, anything from the identifiers of your phones which are unique, your Bluetooth MAC address. Not to mention, of course, all your navigation data. I mean, you can reconstruct where people have been, just by data that has been stored in the infotainment system. And then you have, whether you are on Twitter and Facebook and what are the handles of those things, which are the last photos you have taken? What files have you synced, the emails, calendar entries. There\'s all sorts of stuff that people really don\'t understand that they\'re living behind.</li><li>Mark: But when people <em>do </em>delete pairings are they deleting all that information? Or is there some data still retained in that vehicle?</li><li>Andrea: &nbsp;By and large, deleting the data following the manufacturer\'s directions is helpful in preventing third parties to having access. And so if there is anything left behind, it requires a much deeper forensic type of analysis that is typically not accessible. But for most people, following the manufacturer\'s directions on how to remove the data, it is a very easy to do and very effective defense against getting their data being in the hands of somebody else.</li><li>Mark: That\'s where <a href=\"https://www.privacy4cars.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Privacy4Cars</a> comes in. That\'s where your app comes in -- helping people get that right?</li><li>Andrea: Yes, we have a free app that people can download, and you can just search for Privacy4Cars on the <a href=\"https://apps.apple.com/us/app/privacy4cars/id1370969499\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple App Store</a> or <a href=\"https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.privacy4cars\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Play</a>, depending what kind of phone you have, and download it for free.</li><li>Mark: The last time on the podcast we talked about this topic was a little over a year ago, October 2019. &nbsp;I\'d gotten a notice from Hertz that they had changed their terms and conditions. I noticed that Hertz had specifically carved out liability from me leaving information from a Bluetooth pairing. And now, on one hand, I could see that point. I\'ve actively and voluntarily synced my phone to the car and in doing so, caused my information to be downloaded. But at what point does that sort of digital maintenance, clearing personal identifiable information, after every rental become part of the rental company’s overall maintenance responsibility, like checking the oil levels and the tire pressure.</li><li>Andrea: I believe that the time has already passed, and it\'s been in the past for at least a year, right? At least, the passage of California Consumer Privacy Act. And probably you can go further back in the past because of other types of regulations. And there are some regulators who have actually spoken about this. So in the United States, you have the FTC that has issued already four guidances on the need to delete personal information. In Europe, they went as far as to give a guideline that mandates the removal of the personal information. Beyond rental, when people are traveling, sometimes they rent, sometimes they ride-share, and very often it happens to me that I in an Uber or Lyft and you have a very nice driver that tells you, “Hey, you need to fill up the tank on your battery? Here\'s a cable.” And the first thing I do is glance -- &nbsp;where does the cable end up? If it goes into the lighter, that\'s only power. So yes, I’ll recharge my phone. But if it goes straight &nbsp;into the USB port of the car, don\'t charge the phone unless you\'re really desperate, because as soon as your phone powers back up, it will start downloading all your information into a stranger\'s car. So you definitely don\'t want to do that.</li><li>Mark: Andrea Amico, founder of <a href=\"https://www.privacy4cars.com\">Privacy4Cars.com</a>, you can find his app on the <a href=\"https://apps.apple.com/us/app/privacy4cars/id1370969499\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple App store</a> and on <a href=\"https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.privacy4cars\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Play</a>. Andrea, thank you very much for taking the time to talk to us today.</li><li>Andrea: Thank you. Mark. I really enjoyed talking to you.</li></ul></li><li>Bridge music -- Latinium by Javolenus (c) copyright 2020 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Javolenus/62650 Ft: NiGiD</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>2021 Travel Planning Pro Tips</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I’ve been talking about travel planning in the time of COVID across maybe 6 months of episodes. And since January is always a big travel month, especially this year with some vouchers from last spring’s flight cancellations coming up on their 12-month expiration dates, combined with 10 months of pent-up demand and another 6, maybe 9 months to go, I thought I’d pull all my planning tips together here -- and probably in a blog post after I get back from Tucson.</li><li>First, book now. As I said earlier, there’s a steady stream of sales out there right now as airlines, hotels, and rental car companies are looking for cash to get through the start of the year. There are great domestic deals now, and if you can part with some cash now, good international deals for the second half of the year. Prices are only going to go up as vaccine rates improve, and that pent-up demand overwhelms any squeamishness about sitting next to a stranger. I’m eyeing that same American ORD-BCN 787 non-stop that I wasn’t able to take at the end of last September. The deals aren’t as smoking as they were last March when the travel world was in a freefall; the airlines have gotten a little smarter over the past year. But with cancellation fees still waived, there’s not much risk.&nbsp;</li><li>Second, check your destination’s health requirements -- and keep checking until you leave. Many of the airlines have built good web resources that summarize any restrictions by destination. Of the US majors, I think <a href=\"https://www.united.com/ual/en/us/fly/travel/restrictions-map.html\">United’s</a> is the easiest to use but I think American’s is the most complete. They actually link out to a Canadian company, <a href=\"https://apply.joinsherpa.com/travel-restrictions?affiliateId=americanairlines\">Sherpa</a>, that took my Arizona itinerary and noted that, while there’s no quarantine restrictions in Arizona, there are when I return to Chicago.&nbsp; <a href=\"https://www.delta.com/us/en/plan-your-next-trip/where-we-fly\">Delta’s</a> is pretty good too. I’ll put links to them in the show notes. But you can’t check once and be done. We talked at the top of the show about Canada putting in a new testing requirement with 7-days notice. And domestically, states are changing restrictions weekly. One trick I’ve talked about is to start following your destination’s local newspapers on Twitter to get any early warnings on anything new.&nbsp;</li><li>Third, read the cancellation rules a lot more closely. Being nimble and able to react to changes at your destination -- like Irene and I did with our pivot from San Diego to Tucson -- depends on being thoughtful about the cancellation risks you take. Right now, flights have the lowest cancellation risk; Airbnb and vacation rentals, the highest. Hotels are in-between. Our default strategy then is to book the flight as soon as we can, don’t do pre-paid hotel rooms or car rentals, and wait as long as we can before booking an Airbnb.</li><li>Fourth, overload your itinerary with outdoor activities like hiking and biking so last-minute closures or restrictions don’t leave you aimlessly flipping through the hotel TV channels. It was the big trend last summer -- airlines dialed down flights between big city airports like the ORD-LGA run and toward beaches and mountains. And it continues -- all the imagery in the airline and hotel “flash sale” emails over the past couple of weeks. But it does mean spending more time trolling the AccuWeather and Weather Channel web sites because an outside-heavy itinerary is more vulnerable to big storm fronts.</li><li>And finally, stay flexible, expect delays, and be patient. If there’s anything we learned from 2020, it’s that something will screw up your plans -- a positive COVID test will shut down the restaurant you really wanted to eat at, capacity restrictions will mean a line to get into something that was top of your list. Have back-up plans and give everyone you meet the benefit of the doubt. Like you, they’re just trying to get through this safe and sound.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #171</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li>In this episode’s tech notes, if you check out the show notes, you’ll find a full transcript of my interview with Andrea Amico courtesy of my free tier of Amazon Web Services which includes 60 minutes a month of their Transcribe service. I learned about it when watching a session during their virtual Re:Invent conference. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/12/17/podcast-147-holiday-travel-tips-notes-from-santa-fe/\">episode #147</a>, I talked about going to it in person in Las Vegas a couple of years ago -- me and 50,000 other attendees, mostly pudgy, pasty-faced guys power walking up and down the strip, backpacks strapped down tight, ignoring the showgirls on the corner so they wouldn’t be late to, say, the sold-out tutorial on best practices for ingesting streaming data from IoT devices into AWS’ time series database. Less stressful, though less entertaining this year. Anyhow, watching the session on Transcribe got me thinking about how I could use it for the interviews I’ve done over the past 12 months. I’ve started on the most current episodes, working my way back. So far I have three done --this interview with Andrea, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/09/19/podcast-167-6-months-on-why-keep-travel-cards/\">episode #167</a>’s interview with Matt Schulz about travel credit cards, and <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\">episode #166</a>’s interview with Emily Thomas about the meaning of travel. I’ll keep chipping away at the backlog as my 60 free minutes a month allows.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>, as well as asking Alexa, Siri, and Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_171.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #171 — Data in Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Pro Tips','','inherit','closed','closed','','2997-revision-v1','','','2021-01-14 15:19:21','2021-01-14 20:19:21','',2997,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/2997-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3015,1,'2021-01-14 15:19:40','2021-01-14 20:19:40','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":2168,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1-1024x1024.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2168\"/></a><figcaption>Wait! I need to unpair my iPhone!</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Was all set to head to San Diego for a week\'s break from Chicago\'s grey January and then looked at the COVID restrictions... and then pivoted to Arizona. With people starting to think about 2021 travel, I pulled together my top 5 travel planning tips. Slow vaccine roll-out will probably keep us restricted for longer than we thought. Andrea Amico of <a href=\"https://www.privacy4cars.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Privacy4Cars</a> joins us to talk about the dangers of leaving our data behind in rental cars. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_171.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go over to the <em>Subscribe</em> section on the right to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/949687216&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #171: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. Stayed off the road over the entire holiday season which let me skip the TSA’s new post-lockdown checkpoint record of <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/coronavirus/passenger-throughput\">1.3 million on January 3rd</a>, the last Sunday of the holiday season -- though, to be fair,&nbsp; this is only just over half the 2.4 million passengers who flew on the same Sunday last year. And with every US airline except Delta now back to selling middle seats, it makes sense that load factors also ratcheted up over the holidays. I haven’t seen any industry-wide numbers yet, but <a href=\"https://www.ittn.ie/news/confidence-in-boeing-737-max-holding-firm/\">American’s COO did say that the load factor on their 737 Maxes over the last week of the holiday season was 90%</a>. Now, most of those Maxes are flying between LGA and MIA, always a busy holiday route, but I’ve seen reports of many other packed flights, as well as the much higher load . I was never a big fan of completely full flights pre-coronavirus and, as you can imagine, am even less so now pre-widespread vaccine distribution. So, I’m not too bothered that we didn’t try to get out of town over the holidays.</li><li>However, staying in town through the rest of January is a whole different thing because January is absolutely the worst part of Chicago’s winter. So, after&nbsp; Thanksgiving weekend, on what used to be called Cyber Monday when we actually shopped in physical stores, instead of trolling through Amazon, I was trolling through travel sites looking for cheap flights to someplace warm the 3rd wk of Jan. I figured that’d be long enough for any holiday COVID spike to work its way through the system.</li><li>I’d had some friends who’d gone down to Mexico, felt safe in the tourist zones, didn’t have any problems, came back healthy; but I don’t do well sitting on a beach for more than a day or two and I wanted to keep it a bit simpler, so we decided to stay in the US, which pretty quickly narrowed our search to Southern California, South Florida, and Arizona. Since we’d spent time last winter in both Arizona and Florida, we decided to do California and go as far down the coast as we could get, which was San Diego.&nbsp; And, as luck would have it, Southwest had cheap direct flights from Chicago Midway and I had Southwest travel credits from one of last spring’s flight cancellations burning a hole in my virtual pocket, so *boom* I booked it</li><li>On, what turned out to be, 3 days before the governor locked down most of California. But a friend hit the ground there a week before Christmas and said “Eh, it’s not a problem.” So, we stayed the course and didn’t really pay any attention to it until after New Years when we thought, you know, we should book a place to stay. And that’s when we started to pay attention. Bike and kayak rental places were open as “outdoor recreation” businesses. But vacation rental and hotel booking sites all pointed to the California Public Health Department statement -- “no hotel or lodging entity in California shall accept or honor out-of-state reservations for nonessential travel” which our January snowbird getaway definitely didn’t qualify as. Would things ease up in a couple of weeks? The trend lines on the state’s COVID website didn’t seem to be pointing in that direction.</li><li>So last Monday when I received another blast of airline sales emails, it seemed like the right time for a pivot. X-ing off California, we were back to Florida and Arizona. We talked to friends already down in Florida; they said the south beaches were already filling up with snowbirds, so we opted for drier sand and swung our Southwest flights over to Phoenix.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>But since we’d been in Phoenix last winter and continuing in the spirit of visiting not-quite-A-list places in the US we’ve never been while weaving around quarantines, we’re driving further south down I-10 to Tucson. We’re running the same travel planning play we did for our August trip to Michigan’s UP -- focus on outdoor activities like hiking and biking, have back-ups in case of last-minute closures, and above all, build a list of microbreweries with outdoor seating.</li><li>Bridge Music -- Say Their Names - Love and Remember by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2020 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/62230 Ft: DJ Lang</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Back at the beginning of December when the Pfizer vaccine approval was imminent and the Moderna approval wasn’t far behind, most travelers -- myself included -- got a bit giddy and started to think about the world opening up in the spring, the summer at the latest. Fast forward 30 days and, happy new year, that initial blast of vaccine optimism melted when it met the ugly realities of last-mile logistics. Spelunking through the stream of low-fare emails from American and Southwest and Delta and United and Iberia and British Airways filling my inbox, the consensus across airline demand forecasters seems to be that nothing’s going to change until the end of May. But even that doesn’t explain why, say, American, sends out an email pushing “Plan a European Vacation” that includes spring fares (March, April, May fares) to London, Manchester, and Madrid. I don’t know anyone who expects European vacation travel to open up in the next 3-4 months. Give credit to Delta for highlighting more achievable destinations -- Cancun, the Bahamas, Phoenix, and just about every airport in Florida with a runway long enough to handle a jet.&nbsp;</li><li>What will be as interesting is what the airlines and hotels do about elite status protection if travel continues to be slow through the summer. Remember that last spring, after it was clear that business travel was canceled for most of 2020, all the big travel companies grandfathered everyone into their status for this year. What you earned in 2019, you kept through this year, 2021. But now what? We talked about this a bit in t<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">he November episode (#169)</a> when the companies made their opening bid, knocking 20-30% off elite qualifying clip levels. Kinda like the low-fare sales -- it’ll be interesting to see what they offer come May.</li><li>We’ve talked in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\">prior episodes</a> about the challenges of planning a trip during COVID -- deciphering lockdown rules; parsing what can seem to be the almost theological differences between stay-at-home advisories vs. orders. And after all that, trying to keep up-to-date on last-minute changes. Things are changing so fast -- open, shut; outdoor seating vs just doing takeout -- that the normal crowdsourced tools we’d use -- things like Google Maps, Yelp -- can’t keep up because they don’t give a real-time view. The Foursquare app used to do it, but since they split <a href=\"https://www.swarmapp.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Swarm</a> from Foursquare, it seems that the real-time data is now sold just to business customers to target mobile ads. But, one app that I use does provide a real-time view into some traffic -- <a href=\"https://untappd.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Uptappd</a>. Yes, it’s just craft beer nerd traffic -- people checking in their beers at tap rooms and beer bars -- but that’s a kind of traffic that I’m pretty interested in.&nbsp; After our pivot to Tucson, I wanted to see what beer places were open for service, not just take-out. I could’ve spent time clicking around the app, but instead, I decided to put one of my lockdown self-improvement projects to use. Over the fall, I’d taken some on-line Python programming courses on Coursera, so I wrote a short program that pulled the most recent check-ins from the Tucson area and started making a list of places that are open. I probably could’ve made that list quicker by just plunking away on the app, but not with the same sense of achievement.</li><li>We talked about COVID-19 vaccination and test certification in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">last episode</a>. Over the last month, it seems that proof of negative test results rather than of vaccinations is the new hotness. Canada, the UK, and now the US are the latest countries requiring a negative COVID test for inbound passengers. It makes sense. The CDC released a paper in November -- in one of my favorite publications, the <a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/index.html\"><em>Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report</em></a> (I’ll link to it in the show notes) -- saying that <a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6945a4.htm\">temperature and symptom screening at airports is pretty worthless</a>; it only picked up 1 case for every 85,000 passengers screened. So not hard for the switch to pre-flight testing to be more effective. For Canada and the UK, though, they’ve layered the test requirements <em>on top of </em>their existing 14-day quarantine requirements, which just adds to the confusion -- especially since the Canadian government gave travelers one week’s notice of the new testing requirement. I haven’t seen the US regs yet, but the Canadian rules say you must have “proof in hand” of a negative test result, and that proof can be either electronic or paper. You gotta think that, pretty quick, that “proof in hand” has gotta default to “proof on phone” otherwise, forged paper results are going to be the new fake IDs from our teens. Last November, French cops <a href=\"https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2020/11/10/fake-tests-covid-flights/\">busted a ring selling fake test results at CDG</a>. The going rate was €150-300 which converts to something like $180-370. That compares to $125 for a <a href=\"https://fakeyourid.com/\">good fake driver’s license</a>.&nbsp; Since the last episode, the Caribbean country of <a href=\"https://skift.com/2020/12/18/airlines-still-waiting-on-governments-for-a-single-digital-health-passport-standard/\">Aruba was the first country</a> to standardize on one of the digital passport apps, <a href=\"https://commonpass.org/\">CommonPass</a>, the one backed by the World Economic Forum, the Davos gang, and, we mentioned, also used by United for their EWR-LHR flight. But then Sing Air picked its rival, <a href=\"https://www.iata.org/en/programs/passenger/travel-pass/\">Travel Pass</a> from IATA, to use on flights to/from Malaysia. So it still seems like, when it does go to “proof on phone”, we’re gonna need to set aside some memory screen space for a bunch of apps.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge music -- Staying Positive by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2019 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/59438 Ft: greg_baumont</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Leaving Data Behind in The Rental Car</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A couple of weeks back, I retweeted a news article - the third suspect charged in the fatal shooting of a retired Chicago fireman during a carjacking was caught because he’d synced his phone to the audio system of the stolen car.&nbsp; I dunno -- fleeing a murder but worrying about getting a ticket for not using hands free.&nbsp; I dunno. Good they caught the bad guy, but what about us law-abiding frequent travelers? When the Hertz or Avis person walks up to me at the car return lane, they always remind me not to leave anything behind; to remember to take my sunglasses and my mobile phone. But they never remind me to delete all the data I synced to the car.&nbsp;</li><li>And with more of our lives getting stored in our phones, I asked Andrea Amico, founder of the company <a href=\"https://www.privacy4cars.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Privacy4Cars</a>, to come onto the podcast to talk about the privacy problems at the intersection of cars and smartphones.<ul><li>Mark: Andrea, how did you get involved in this space?</li></ul><ul><li>Andrea: One of the companies that used to run was one of the largest used car inspection companies. We inspected a lot of vehicles that were ready to be sold. I just noticed that people were leaving their digital lives behind.</li><li>Mark: We first talked about the privacy/security issues around pairing your smartphone with your car rental about four years ago. Bluetooth-enabled entertainment systems were just becoming more common in rental car fleets as hands-free call laws became widespread. Even today, the first thing I do is to sync my iPhone. And I\'ve noticed more times than not, the sync slots are all full -- personalized names, Jan\'s iPhone, Timmy\'s iPhone. You end up having to delete at least one of them to make room for yours. And then, once paired, most phones by default, end up downloading all your contacts and your phone numbers and things like that. So, Jan and Timmy have left behind all of their contacts and all their phone numbers and that\'s just bad in so many ways.</li><li>Andrea: When you sync your phone through Bluetooth or you plug it into the USB port or now, in some newer cars, you just walk into the car and the car automatically sniffs your phone and start syncing to it, including those with Android Auto and Apple CarPlay. When that happens, you are creating a mini-clone of your phone inside the vehicle.</li><li>Mark: What other information are people leaving behind when they don\'t clear themselves out of a rental car?</li><li>Andrea: All sorts -- your phone book, your call logs, the text messages, including the body, meaning the actual text of the text messages; that stuff will be left behind. But also all sorts of meta data that allows criminals or law enforcement or just people who want to snoop on you to re-identify you, anything from the identifiers of your phones which are unique, your Bluetooth MAC address. Not to mention, of course, all your navigation data. I mean, you can reconstruct where people have been, just by data that has been stored in the infotainment system. And then you have, whether you are on Twitter and Facebook and what are the handles of those things, which are the last photos you have taken? What files have you synced, the emails, calendar entries. There\'s all sorts of stuff that people really don\'t understand that they\'re living behind.</li><li>Mark: But when people <em>do </em>delete pairings are they deleting all that information? Or is there some data still retained in that vehicle?</li><li>Andrea: &nbsp;By and large, deleting the data following the manufacturer\'s directions is helpful in preventing third parties to having access. And so if there is anything left behind, it requires a much deeper forensic type of analysis that is typically not accessible. But for most people, following the manufacturer\'s directions on how to remove the data, it is a very easy to do and very effective defense against getting their data being in the hands of somebody else.</li><li>Mark: That\'s where <a href=\"https://www.privacy4cars.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Privacy4Cars</a> comes in. That\'s where your app comes in -- helping people get that right?</li><li>Andrea: Yes, we have a free app that people can download, and you can just search for Privacy4Cars on the <a href=\"https://apps.apple.com/us/app/privacy4cars/id1370969499\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple App Store</a> or <a href=\"https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.privacy4cars\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Play</a>, depending what kind of phone you have, and download it for free.</li><li>Mark: The last time on the podcast we talked about this topic was a little over a year ago, October 2019. &nbsp;I\'d gotten a notice from Hertz that they had changed their terms and conditions. I noticed that Hertz had specifically carved out liability from me leaving information from a Bluetooth pairing. And now, on one hand, I could see that point. I\'ve actively and voluntarily synced my phone to the car and in doing so, caused my information to be downloaded. But at what point does that sort of digital maintenance, clearing personal identifiable information, after every rental become part of the rental company’s overall maintenance responsibility, like checking the oil levels and the tire pressure.</li><li>Andrea: I believe that the time has already passed, and it\'s been in the past for at least a year, right? At least, the passage of California Consumer Privacy Act. And probably you can go further back in the past because of other types of regulations. And there are some regulators who have actually spoken about this. So in the United States, you have the FTC that has issued already four guidances on the need to delete personal information. In Europe, they went as far as to give a guideline that mandates the removal of the personal information. Beyond rental, when people are traveling, sometimes they rent, sometimes they ride-share, and very often it happens to me that I in an Uber or Lyft and you have a very nice driver that tells you, “Hey, you need to fill up the tank on your battery? Here\'s a cable.” And the first thing I do is glance -- &nbsp;where does the cable end up? If it goes into the lighter, that\'s only power. So yes, I’ll recharge my phone. But if it goes straight &nbsp;into the USB port of the car, don\'t charge the phone unless you\'re really desperate, because as soon as your phone powers back up, it will start downloading all your information into a stranger\'s car. So you definitely don\'t want to do that.</li><li>Mark: Andrea Amico, founder of <a href=\"https://www.privacy4cars.com\">Privacy4Cars.com</a>, you can find his app on the <a href=\"https://apps.apple.com/us/app/privacy4cars/id1370969499\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple App store</a> and on <a href=\"https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.privacy4cars\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Play</a>. Andrea, thank you very much for taking the time to talk to us today.</li><li>Andrea: Thank you. Mark. I really enjoyed talking to you.</li></ul></li><li>Bridge music -- Latinium by Javolenus (c) copyright 2020 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Javolenus/62650 Ft: NiGiD</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>2021 Travel Planning Pro Tips</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I’ve been talking about travel planning in the time of COVID across maybe 6 months of episodes. And since January is always a big travel month, especially this year with some vouchers from last spring’s flight cancellations coming up on their 12-month expiration dates, combined with 10 months of pent-up demand and another 6, maybe 9 months to go, I thought I’d pull all my planning tips together here -- and probably in a blog post after I get back from Tucson.</li><li>First, book now. As I said earlier, there’s a steady stream of sales out there right now as airlines, hotels, and rental car companies are looking for cash to get through the start of the year. There are great domestic deals now, and if you can part with some cash now, good international deals for the second half of the year. Prices are only going to go up as vaccine rates improve, and that pent-up demand overwhelms any squeamishness about sitting next to a stranger. I’m eyeing that same American ORD-BCN 787 non-stop that I wasn’t able to take at the end of last September. The deals aren’t as smoking as they were last March when the travel world was in a freefall; the airlines have gotten a little smarter over the past year. But with cancellation fees still waived, there’s not much risk.&nbsp;</li><li>Second, check your destination’s health requirements -- and keep checking until you leave. Many of the airlines have built good web resources that summarize any restrictions by destination. Of the US majors, I think <a href=\"https://www.united.com/ual/en/us/fly/travel/restrictions-map.html\">United’s</a> is the easiest to use but I think American’s is the most complete. They actually link out to a Canadian company, <a href=\"https://apply.joinsherpa.com/travel-restrictions?affiliateId=americanairlines\">Sherpa</a>, that took my Arizona itinerary and noted that, while there’s no quarantine restrictions in Arizona, there are when I return to Chicago.&nbsp; <a href=\"https://www.delta.com/us/en/plan-your-next-trip/where-we-fly\">Delta’s</a> is pretty good too. I’ll put links to them in the show notes. But you can’t check once and be done. We talked at the top of the show about Canada putting in a new testing requirement with 7-days notice. And domestically, states are changing restrictions weekly. One trick I’ve talked about is to start following your destination’s local newspapers on Twitter to get any early warnings on anything new.&nbsp;</li><li>Third, read the cancellation rules a lot more closely. Being nimble and able to react to changes at your destination -- like Irene and I did with our pivot from San Diego to Tucson -- depends on being thoughtful about the cancellation risks you take. Right now, flights have the lowest cancellation risk; Airbnb and vacation rentals, the highest. Hotels are in-between. Our default strategy then is to book the flight as soon as we can, don’t do pre-paid hotel rooms or car rentals, and wait as long as we can before booking an Airbnb.</li><li>Fourth, overload your itinerary with outdoor activities like hiking and biking so last-minute closures or restrictions don’t leave you aimlessly flipping through the hotel TV channels. It was the big trend last summer -- airlines dialed down flights between big city airports like the ORD-LGA run and toward beaches and mountains. And it continues -- all the imagery in the airline and hotel “flash sale” emails over the past couple of weeks. But it does mean spending more time trolling the AccuWeather and Weather Channel web sites because an outside-heavy itinerary is more vulnerable to big storm fronts.</li><li>And finally, stay flexible, expect delays, and be patient. If there’s anything we learned from 2020, it’s that something will screw up your plans -- a positive COVID test will shut down the restaurant you really wanted to eat at, capacity restrictions will mean a line to get into something that was top of your list. Have back-up plans and give everyone you meet the benefit of the doubt. Like you, they’re just trying to get through this safe and sound.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #171</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li>In this episode’s tech notes, if you check out the show notes, you’ll find a full transcript of my interview with Andrea Amico courtesy of my free tier of Amazon Web Services which includes 60 minutes a month of their Transcribe service. I learned about it when watching a session during their virtual Re:Invent conference. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/12/17/podcast-147-holiday-travel-tips-notes-from-santa-fe/\">episode #147</a>, I talked about going to it in person in Las Vegas a couple of years ago -- me and 50,000 other attendees, mostly pudgy, pasty-faced guys power walking up and down the strip, backpacks strapped down tight, ignoring the showgirls on the corner so they wouldn’t be late to, say, the sold-out tutorial on best practices for ingesting streaming data from IoT devices into AWS’ time series database. Less stressful, though less entertaining this year. Anyhow, watching the session on Transcribe got me thinking about how I could use it for the interviews I’ve done over the past 12 months. I’ve started on the most current episodes, working my way back. So far I have three done --this interview with Andrea, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/09/19/podcast-167-6-months-on-why-keep-travel-cards/\">episode #167</a>’s interview with Matt Schulz about travel credit cards, and <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\">episode #166</a>’s interview with Emily Thomas about the meaning of travel. I’ll keep chipping away at the backlog as my 60 free minutes a month allows.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>, as well as asking Alexa, Siri, and Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_171.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #171 — Data in Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips','','inherit','closed','closed','','2997-revision-v1','','','2021-01-14 15:19:40','2021-01-14 20:19:40','',2997,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/2997-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0);
INSERT INTO `wp_posts` VALUES
(3016,1,'2021-01-14 15:19:54','2021-01-14 20:19:54','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":2168,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1-1024x1024.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2168\"/></a><figcaption>Wait! I need to unpair my iPhone!</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Was all set to head to San Diego for a week\'s break from Chicago\'s grey January and then looked at the COVID restrictions... and then pivoted to Arizona. With people starting to think about 2021 travel, I pulled together my top 5 travel planning tips. Slow vaccine roll-out will probably keep us restricted for longer than we thought. Andrea Amico of <a href=\"https://www.privacy4cars.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Privacy4Cars</a> joins us to talk about the dangers of leaving our data behind in rental cars. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_171.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go over to the <em>Subscribe</em> section on the right to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/949687216&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #171: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. Stayed off the road over the entire holiday season which let me skip the TSA’s new post-lockdown checkpoint record of <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/coronavirus/passenger-throughput\">1.3 million on January 3rd</a>, the last Sunday of the holiday season -- though, to be fair,&nbsp; this is only just over half the 2.4 million passengers who flew on the same Sunday last year. And with every US airline except Delta now back to selling middle seats, it makes sense that load factors also ratcheted up over the holidays. I haven’t seen any industry-wide numbers yet, but <a href=\"https://www.ittn.ie/news/confidence-in-boeing-737-max-holding-firm/\">American’s COO did say that the load factor on their 737 Maxes over the last week of the holiday season was 90%</a>. Now, most of those Maxes are flying between LGA and MIA, always a busy holiday route, but I’ve seen reports of many other packed flights, as well as the much higher load . I was never a big fan of completely full flights pre-coronavirus and, as you can imagine, am even less so now pre-widespread vaccine distribution. So, I’m not too bothered that we didn’t try to get out of town over the holidays.</li><li>However, staying in town through the rest of January is a whole different thing because January is absolutely the worst part of Chicago’s winter. So, after&nbsp; Thanksgiving weekend, on what used to be called Cyber Monday when we actually shopped in physical stores, instead of trolling through Amazon, I was trolling through travel sites looking for cheap flights to someplace warm the 3rd wk of Jan. I figured that’d be long enough for any holiday COVID spike to work its way through the system.</li><li>I’d had some friends who’d gone down to Mexico, felt safe in the tourist zones, didn’t have any problems, came back healthy; but I don’t do well sitting on a beach for more than a day or two and I wanted to keep it a bit simpler, so we decided to stay in the US, which pretty quickly narrowed our search to Southern California, South Florida, and Arizona. Since we’d spent time last winter in both Arizona and Florida, we decided to do California and go as far down the coast as we could get, which was San Diego.&nbsp; And, as luck would have it, Southwest had cheap direct flights from Chicago Midway and I had Southwest travel credits from one of last spring’s flight cancellations burning a hole in my virtual pocket, so *boom* I booked it</li><li>On, what turned out to be, 3 days before the governor locked down most of California. But a friend hit the ground there a week before Christmas and said “Eh, it’s not a problem.” So, we stayed the course and didn’t really pay any attention to it until after New Years when we thought, you know, we should book a place to stay. And that’s when we started to pay attention. Bike and kayak rental places were open as “outdoor recreation” businesses. But vacation rental and hotel booking sites all pointed to the California Public Health Department statement -- “no hotel or lodging entity in California shall accept or honor out-of-state reservations for nonessential travel” which our January snowbird getaway definitely didn’t qualify as. Would things ease up in a couple of weeks? The trend lines on the state’s COVID website didn’t seem to be pointing in that direction.</li><li>So last Monday when I received another blast of airline sales emails, it seemed like the right time for a pivot. X-ing off California, we were back to Florida and Arizona. We talked to friends already down in Florida; they said the south beaches were already filling up with snowbirds, so we opted for drier sand and swung our Southwest flights over to Phoenix.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>But since we’d been in Phoenix last winter and continuing in the spirit of visiting not-quite-A-list places in the US we’ve never been while weaving around quarantines, we’re driving further south down I-10 to Tucson. We’re running the same travel planning play we did for our August trip to Michigan’s UP -- focus on outdoor activities like hiking and biking, have back-ups in case of last-minute closures, and above all, build a list of microbreweries with outdoor seating.</li><li>Bridge Music -- Say Their Names - Love and Remember by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2020 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/62230 Ft: DJ Lang</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Back at the beginning of December when the Pfizer vaccine approval was imminent and the Moderna approval wasn’t far behind, most travelers -- myself included -- got a bit giddy and started to think about the world opening up in the spring, the summer at the latest. Fast forward 30 days and, happy new year, that initial blast of vaccine optimism melted when it met the ugly realities of last-mile logistics. Spelunking through the stream of low-fare emails from American and Southwest and Delta and United and Iberia and British Airways filling my inbox, the consensus across airline demand forecasters seems to be that nothing’s going to change until the end of May. But even that doesn’t explain why, say, American, sends out an email pushing “Plan a European Vacation” that includes spring fares (March, April, May fares) to London, Manchester, and Madrid. I don’t know anyone who expects European vacation travel to open up in the next 3-4 months. Give credit to Delta for highlighting more achievable destinations -- Cancun, the Bahamas, Phoenix, and just about every airport in Florida with a runway long enough to handle a jet.&nbsp;</li><li>What will be as interesting is what the airlines and hotels do about elite status protection if travel continues to be slow through the summer. Remember that last spring, after it was clear that business travel was canceled for most of 2020, all the big travel companies grandfathered everyone into their status for this year. What you earned in 2019, you kept through this year, 2021. But now what? We talked about this a bit in t<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">he November episode (#169)</a> when the companies made their opening bid, knocking 20-30% off elite qualifying clip levels. Kinda like the low-fare sales -- it’ll be interesting to see what they offer come May.</li><li>We’ve talked in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\">prior episodes</a> about the challenges of planning a trip during COVID -- deciphering lockdown rules; parsing what can seem to be the almost theological differences between stay-at-home advisories vs. orders. And after all that, trying to keep up-to-date on last-minute changes. Things are changing so fast -- open, shut; outdoor seating vs just doing takeout -- that the normal crowdsourced tools we’d use -- things like Google Maps, Yelp -- can’t keep up because they don’t give a real-time view. The Foursquare app used to do it, but since they split <a href=\"https://www.swarmapp.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Swarm</a> from Foursquare, it seems that the real-time data is now sold just to business customers to target mobile ads. But, one app that I use does provide a real-time view into some traffic -- <a href=\"https://untappd.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Uptappd</a>. Yes, it’s just craft beer nerd traffic -- people checking in their beers at tap rooms and beer bars -- but that’s a kind of traffic that I’m pretty interested in.&nbsp; After our pivot to Tucson, I wanted to see what beer places were open for service, not just take-out. I could’ve spent time clicking around the app, but instead, I decided to put one of my lockdown self-improvement projects to use. Over the fall, I’d taken some on-line Python programming courses on Coursera, so I wrote a short program that pulled the most recent check-ins from the Tucson area and started making a list of places that are open. I probably could’ve made that list quicker by just plunking away on the app, but not with the same sense of achievement.</li><li>We talked about COVID-19 vaccination and test certification in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">last episode</a>. Over the last month, it seems that proof of negative test results rather than of vaccinations is the new hotness. Canada, the UK, and now the US are the latest countries requiring a negative COVID test for inbound passengers. It makes sense. The CDC released a paper in November -- in one of my favorite publications, the <a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/index.html\"><em>Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report</em></a> (I’ll link to it in the show notes) -- saying that <a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6945a4.htm\">temperature and symptom screening at airports is pretty worthless</a>; it only picked up 1 case for every 85,000 passengers screened. So not hard for the switch to pre-flight testing to be more effective. For Canada and the UK, though, they’ve layered the test requirements <em>on top of </em>their existing 14-day quarantine requirements, which just adds to the confusion -- especially since the Canadian government gave travelers one week’s notice of the new testing requirement. I haven’t seen the US regs yet, but the Canadian rules say you must have “proof in hand” of a negative test result, and that proof can be either electronic or paper. You gotta think that, pretty quick, that “proof in hand” has gotta default to “proof on phone” otherwise, forged paper results are going to be the new fake IDs from our teens. Last November, French cops <a href=\"https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2020/11/10/fake-tests-covid-flights/\">busted a ring selling fake test results at CDG</a>. The going rate was €150-300 which converts to something like $180-370. That compares to $125 for a <a href=\"https://fakeyourid.com/\">good fake driver’s license</a>.&nbsp; Since the last episode, the Caribbean country of <a href=\"https://skift.com/2020/12/18/airlines-still-waiting-on-governments-for-a-single-digital-health-passport-standard/\">Aruba was the first country</a> to standardize on one of the digital passport apps, <a href=\"https://commonpass.org/\">CommonPass</a>, the one backed by the World Economic Forum, the Davos gang, and, we mentioned, also used by United for their EWR-LHR flight. But then Sing Air picked its rival, <a href=\"https://www.iata.org/en/programs/passenger/travel-pass/\">Travel Pass</a> from IATA, to use on flights to/from Malaysia. So it still seems like, when it does go to “proof on phone”, we’re gonna need to set aside some memory screen space for a bunch of apps.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge music -- Staying Positive by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2019 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/59438 Ft: greg_baumont</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Leaving Data Behind in The Rental Car</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A couple of weeks back, I retweeted a news article - the third suspect charged in the fatal shooting of a retired Chicago fireman during a carjacking was caught because he’d synced his phone to the audio system of the stolen car.&nbsp; I dunno -- fleeing a murder but worrying about getting a ticket for not using hands free.&nbsp; I dunno. Good they caught the bad guy, but what about us law-abiding frequent travelers? When the Hertz or Avis person walks up to me at the car return lane, they always remind me not to leave anything behind; to remember to take my sunglasses and my mobile phone. But they never remind me to delete all the data I synced to the car.&nbsp;</li><li>And with more of our lives getting stored in our phones, I asked Andrea Amico, founder of the company <a href=\"https://www.privacy4cars.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Privacy4Cars</a>, to come onto the podcast to talk about the privacy problems at the intersection of cars and smartphones.<ul><li>Mark: Andrea, how did you get involved in this space?</li></ul><ul><li>Andrea: One of the companies that used to run was one of the largest used car inspection companies. We inspected a lot of vehicles that were ready to be sold. I just noticed that people were leaving their digital lives behind.</li><li>Mark: We first talked about the privacy/security issues around pairing your smartphone with your car rental about four years ago. Bluetooth-enabled entertainment systems were just becoming more common in rental car fleets as hands-free call laws became widespread. Even today, the first thing I do is to sync my iPhone. And I\'ve noticed more times than not, the sync slots are all full -- personalized names, Jan\'s iPhone, Timmy\'s iPhone. You end up having to delete at least one of them to make room for yours. And then, once paired, most phones by default, end up downloading all your contacts and your phone numbers and things like that. So, Jan and Timmy have left behind all of their contacts and all their phone numbers and that\'s just bad in so many ways.</li><li>Andrea: When you sync your phone through Bluetooth or you plug it into the USB port or now, in some newer cars, you just walk into the car and the car automatically sniffs your phone and start syncing to it, including those with Android Auto and Apple CarPlay. When that happens, you are creating a mini-clone of your phone inside the vehicle.</li><li>Mark: What other information are people leaving behind when they don\'t clear themselves out of a rental car?</li><li>Andrea: All sorts -- your phone book, your call logs, the text messages, including the body, meaning the actual text of the text messages; that stuff will be left behind. But also all sorts of meta data that allows criminals or law enforcement or just people who want to snoop on you to re-identify you, anything from the identifiers of your phones which are unique, your Bluetooth MAC address. Not to mention, of course, all your navigation data. I mean, you can reconstruct where people have been, just by data that has been stored in the infotainment system. And then you have, whether you are on Twitter and Facebook and what are the handles of those things, which are the last photos you have taken? What files have you synced, the emails, calendar entries. There\'s all sorts of stuff that people really don\'t understand that they\'re living behind.</li><li>Mark: But when people <em>do </em>delete pairings are they deleting all that information? Or is there some data still retained in that vehicle?</li><li>Andrea: &nbsp;By and large, deleting the data following the manufacturer\'s directions is helpful in preventing third parties to having access. And so if there is anything left behind, it requires a much deeper forensic type of analysis that is typically not accessible. But for most people, following the manufacturer\'s directions on how to remove the data, it is a very easy to do and very effective defense against getting their data being in the hands of somebody else.</li><li>Mark: That\'s where <a href=\"https://www.privacy4cars.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Privacy4Cars</a> comes in. That\'s where your app comes in -- helping people get that right?</li><li>Andrea: Yes, we have a free app that people can download, and you can just search for Privacy4Cars on the <a href=\"https://apps.apple.com/us/app/privacy4cars/id1370969499\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple App Store</a> or <a href=\"https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.privacy4cars\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Play</a>, depending what kind of phone you have, and download it for free.</li><li>Mark: The last time on the podcast we talked about this topic was a little over a year ago, October 2019. &nbsp;I\'d gotten a notice from Hertz that they had changed their terms and conditions. I noticed that Hertz had specifically carved out liability from me leaving information from a Bluetooth pairing. And now, on one hand, I could see that point. I\'ve actively and voluntarily synced my phone to the car and in doing so, caused my information to be downloaded. But at what point does that sort of digital maintenance, clearing personal identifiable information, after every rental become part of the rental company’s overall maintenance responsibility, like checking the oil levels and the tire pressure.</li><li>Andrea: I believe that the time has already passed, and it\'s been in the past for at least a year, right? At least, the passage of California Consumer Privacy Act. And probably you can go further back in the past because of other types of regulations. And there are some regulators who have actually spoken about this. So in the United States, you have the FTC that has issued already four guidances on the need to delete personal information. In Europe, they went as far as to give a guideline that mandates the removal of the personal information. Beyond rental, when people are traveling, sometimes they rent, sometimes they ride-share, and very often it happens to me that I in an Uber or Lyft and you have a very nice driver that tells you, “Hey, you need to fill up the tank on your battery? Here\'s a cable.” And the first thing I do is glance -- &nbsp;where does the cable end up? If it goes into the lighter, that\'s only power. So yes, I’ll recharge my phone. But if it goes straight &nbsp;into the USB port of the car, don\'t charge the phone unless you\'re really desperate, because as soon as your phone powers back up, it will start downloading all your information into a stranger\'s car. So you definitely don\'t want to do that.</li><li>Mark: Andrea Amico, founder of <a href=\"https://www.privacy4cars.com\">Privacy4Cars.com</a>, you can find his app on the <a href=\"https://apps.apple.com/us/app/privacy4cars/id1370969499\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple App store</a> and on <a href=\"https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.privacy4cars\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Play</a>. Andrea, thank you very much for taking the time to talk to us today.</li><li>Andrea: Thank you. Mark. I really enjoyed talking to you.</li></ul></li><li>Bridge music -- Latinium by Javolenus (c) copyright 2020 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Javolenus/62650 Ft: NiGiD</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>2021 Travel Planning Pro Tips</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I’ve been talking about travel planning in the time of COVID across maybe 6 months of episodes. And since January is always a big travel month, especially this year with some vouchers from last spring’s flight cancellations coming up on their 12-month expiration dates, combined with 10 months of pent-up demand and another 6, maybe 9 months to go, I thought I’d pull all my planning tips together here -- and probably in a blog post after I get back from Tucson.</li><li>First, book now. As I said earlier, there’s a steady stream of sales out there right now as airlines, hotels, and rental car companies are looking for cash to get through the start of the year. There are great domestic deals now, and if you can part with some cash now, good international deals for the second half of the year. Prices are only going to go up as vaccine rates improve, and that pent-up demand overwhelms any squeamishness about sitting next to a stranger. I’m eyeing that same American ORD-BCN 787 non-stop that I wasn’t able to take at the end of last September. The deals aren’t as smoking as they were last March when the travel world was in a freefall; the airlines have gotten a little smarter over the past year. But with cancellation fees still waived, there’s not much risk.&nbsp;</li><li>Second, check your destination’s health requirements -- and keep checking until you leave. Many of the airlines have built good web resources that summarize any restrictions by destination. Of the US majors, I think <a href=\"https://www.united.com/ual/en/us/fly/travel/restrictions-map.html\">United’s</a> is the easiest to use but I think American’s is the most complete. They actually link out to a Canadian company, <a href=\"https://apply.joinsherpa.com/travel-restrictions?affiliateId=americanairlines\">Sherpa</a>, that took my Arizona itinerary and noted that, while there’s no quarantine restrictions in Arizona, there are when I return to Chicago.&nbsp; <a href=\"https://www.delta.com/us/en/plan-your-next-trip/where-we-fly\">Delta’s</a> is pretty good too. I’ll put links to them in the show notes. But you can’t check once and be done. We talked at the top of the show about Canada putting in a new testing requirement with 7-days notice. And domestically, states are changing restrictions weekly. One trick I’ve talked about is to start following your destination’s local newspapers on Twitter to get any early warnings on anything new.&nbsp;</li><li>Third, read the cancellation rules a lot more closely. Being nimble and able to react to changes at your destination -- like Irene and I did with our pivot from San Diego to Tucson -- depends on being thoughtful about the cancellation risks you take. Right now, flights have the lowest cancellation risk; Airbnb and vacation rentals, the highest. Hotels are in-between. Our default strategy then is to book the flight as soon as we can, don’t do pre-paid hotel rooms or car rentals, and wait as long as we can before booking an Airbnb.</li><li>Fourth, overload your itinerary with outdoor activities like hiking and biking so last-minute closures or restrictions don’t leave you aimlessly flipping through the hotel TV channels. It was the big trend last summer -- airlines dialed down flights between big city airports like the ORD-LGA run and toward beaches and mountains. And it continues -- all the imagery in the airline and hotel “flash sale” emails over the past couple of weeks. But it does mean spending more time trolling the AccuWeather and Weather Channel web sites because an outside-heavy itinerary is more vulnerable to big storm fronts.</li><li>And finally, stay flexible, expect delays, and be patient. If there’s anything we learned from 2020, it’s that something will screw up your plans -- a positive COVID test will shut down the restaurant you really wanted to eat at, capacity restrictions will mean a line to get into something that was top of your list. Have back-up plans and give everyone you meet the benefit of the doubt. Like you, they’re just trying to get through this safe and sound.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #171</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li>In this episode’s tech notes, if you check out the show notes, you’ll find a full transcript of my interview with Andrea Amico courtesy of my free tier of Amazon Web Services which includes 60 minutes a month of their Transcribe service. I learned about it when watching a session during their virtual Re:Invent conference. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/12/17/podcast-147-holiday-travel-tips-notes-from-santa-fe/\">episode #147</a>, I talked about going to it in person in Las Vegas a couple of years ago -- me and 50,000 other attendees, mostly pudgy, pasty-faced guys power walking up and down the strip, backpacks strapped down tight, ignoring the showgirls on the corner so they wouldn’t be late to, say, the sold-out tutorial on best practices for ingesting streaming data from IoT devices into AWS’ time series database. Less stressful, though less entertaining this year. Anyhow, watching the session on Transcribe got me thinking about how I could use it for the interviews I’ve done over the past 12 months. I’ve started on the most current episodes, working my way back. So far I have three done --this interview with Andrea, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/09/19/podcast-167-6-months-on-why-keep-travel-cards/\">episode #167</a>’s interview with Matt Schulz about travel credit cards, and <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\">episode #166</a>’s interview with Emily Thomas about the meaning of travel. I’ll keep chipping away at the backlog as my 60 free minutes a month allows.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>, as well as asking Alexa, Siri, and Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_171.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #171 — Data in Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Pro Tips','','inherit','closed','closed','','2997-revision-v1','','','2021-01-14 15:19:54','2021-01-14 20:19:54','',2997,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/2997-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3017,1,'2021-01-14 15:21:43','2021-01-14 20:21:43','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":2168,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1-1024x1024.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2168\"/></a><figcaption>Wait! I need to unpair my iPhone!</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Was all set to head to San Diego for a week\'s break from Chicago\'s grey January and then looked at the COVID restrictions... and then pivoted to Arizona. With people starting to think about 2021 travel, I pulled together my top 5 travel planning tips. Slow vaccine roll-out will probably keep us restricted for longer than we thought. Andrea Amico of <a href=\"https://www.privacy4cars.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Privacy4Cars</a> joins us to talk about the dangers of leaving our data behind in rental cars. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_171.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go over to the <em>Subscribe</em> section on the right to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/949687216&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #171: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. Stayed off the road over the entire holiday season which let me skip the TSA’s new post-lockdown checkpoint record of <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/coronavirus/passenger-throughput\">1.3 million on January 3rd</a>, the last Sunday of the holiday season -- though, to be fair,&nbsp; this is only just over half the 2.4 million passengers who flew on the same Sunday last year. And with every US airline except Delta now back to selling middle seats, it makes sense that load factors also ratcheted up over the holidays. I haven’t seen any industry-wide numbers yet, but <a href=\"https://www.ittn.ie/news/confidence-in-boeing-737-max-holding-firm/\">American’s COO did say that the load factor on their 737 Maxes over the last week of the holiday season was 90%</a>. Now, most of those Maxes are flying between LGA and MIA, always a busy holiday route, but I’ve seen reports of many other packed flights, as well as the much higher load . I was never a big fan of completely full flights pre-coronavirus and, as you can imagine, am even less so now pre-widespread vaccine distribution. So, I’m not too bothered that we didn’t try to get out of town over the holidays.</li><li>However, staying in town through the rest of January is a whole different thing because January is absolutely the worst part of Chicago’s winter. So, after&nbsp; Thanksgiving weekend, on what used to be called Cyber Monday when we actually shopped in physical stores, instead of trolling through Amazon, I was trolling through travel sites looking for cheap flights to someplace warm the 3rd wk of Jan. I figured that’d be long enough for any holiday COVID spike to work its way through the system.</li><li>I’d had some friends who’d gone down to Mexico, felt safe in the tourist zones, didn’t have any problems, came back healthy; but I don’t do well sitting on a beach for more than a day or two and I wanted to keep it a bit simpler, so we decided to stay in the US, which pretty quickly narrowed our search to Southern California, South Florida, and Arizona. Since we’d spent time last winter in both Arizona and Florida, we decided to do California and go as far down the coast as we could get, which was San Diego.&nbsp; And, as luck would have it, Southwest had cheap direct flights from Chicago Midway and I had Southwest travel credits from one of last spring’s flight cancellations burning a hole in my virtual pocket, so *boom* I booked it</li><li>On, what turned out to be, 3 days before the governor locked down most of California. But a friend hit the ground there a week before Christmas and said “Eh, it’s not a problem.” So, we stayed the course and didn’t really pay any attention to it until after New Years when we thought, you know, we should book a place to stay. And that’s when we started to pay attention. Bike and kayak rental places were open as “outdoor recreation” businesses. But vacation rental and hotel booking sites all pointed to the California Public Health Department statement -- “no hotel or lodging entity in California shall accept or honor out-of-state reservations for nonessential travel” which our January snowbird getaway definitely didn’t qualify as. Would things ease up in a couple of weeks? The trend lines on the state’s COVID website didn’t seem to be pointing in that direction.</li><li>So last Monday when I received another blast of airline sales emails, it seemed like the right time for a pivot. X-ing off California, we were back to Florida and Arizona. We talked to friends already down in Florida; they said the south beaches were already filling up with snowbirds, so we opted for drier sand and swung our Southwest flights over to Phoenix.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>But since we’d been in Phoenix last winter and continuing in the spirit of visiting not-quite-A-list places in the US we’ve never been while weaving around quarantines, we’re driving further south down I-10 to Tucson. We’re running the same travel planning play we did for our August trip to Michigan’s UP -- focus on outdoor activities like hiking and biking, have back-ups in case of last-minute closures, and above all, build a list of microbreweries with outdoor seating.</li><li>Bridge Music -- Say Their Names - Love and Remember by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2020 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/62230 Ft: DJ Lang</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Back at the beginning of December when the Pfizer vaccine approval was imminent and the Moderna approval wasn’t far behind, most travelers -- myself included -- got a bit giddy and started to think about the world opening up in the spring, the summer at the latest. Fast forward 30 days and, happy new year, that initial blast of vaccine optimism melted when it met the ugly realities of last-mile logistics. Spelunking through the stream of low-fare emails from American and Southwest and Delta and United and Iberia and British Airways filling my inbox, the consensus across airline demand forecasters seems to be that nothing’s going to change until the end of May. But even that doesn’t explain why, say, American, sends out an email pushing “Plan a European Vacation” that includes spring fares (March, April, May fares) to London, Manchester, and Madrid. I don’t know anyone who expects European vacation travel to open up in the next 3-4 months. Give credit to Delta for highlighting more achievable destinations -- Cancun, the Bahamas, Phoenix, and just about every airport in Florida with a runway long enough to handle a jet.&nbsp;</li><li>What will be as interesting is what the airlines and hotels do about elite status protection if travel continues to be slow through the summer. Remember that last spring, after it was clear that business travel was canceled for most of 2020, all the big travel companies grandfathered everyone into their status for this year. What you earned in 2019, you kept through this year, 2021. But now what? We talked about this a bit in t<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">he November episode (#169)</a> when the companies made their opening bid, knocking 20-30% off elite qualifying clip levels. Kinda like the low-fare sales -- it’ll be interesting to see what they offer come May.</li><li>We’ve talked in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\">prior episodes</a> about the challenges of planning a trip during COVID -- deciphering lockdown rules; parsing what can seem to be the almost theological differences between stay-at-home advisories vs. orders. And after all that, trying to keep up-to-date on last-minute changes. Things are changing so fast -- open, shut; outdoor seating vs just doing takeout -- that the normal crowdsourced tools we’d use -- things like Google Maps, Yelp -- can’t keep up because they don’t give a real-time view. The Foursquare app used to do it, but since they split <a href=\"https://www.swarmapp.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Swarm</a> from Foursquare, it seems that the real-time data is now sold just to business customers to target mobile ads. But, one app that I use does provide a real-time view into some traffic -- <a href=\"https://untappd.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Uptappd</a>. Yes, it’s just craft beer nerd traffic -- people checking in their beers at tap rooms and beer bars -- but that’s a kind of traffic that I’m pretty interested in.&nbsp; After our pivot to Tucson, I wanted to see what beer places were open for service, not just take-out. I could’ve spent time clicking around the app, but instead, I decided to put one of my lockdown self-improvement projects to use. Over the fall, I’d taken some on-line Python programming courses on Coursera, so I wrote a short program that pulled the most recent check-ins from the Tucson area and started making a list of places that are open. I probably could’ve made that list quicker by just plunking away on the app, but not with the same sense of achievement.</li><li>We talked about COVID-19 vaccination and test certification in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">last episode</a>. Over the last month, it seems that proof of negative test results rather than of vaccinations is the new hotness. Canada, the UK, and now the US are the latest countries requiring a negative COVID test for inbound passengers. It makes sense. The CDC released a paper in November -- in one of my favorite publications, the <a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/index.html\"><em>Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report</em></a> (I’ll link to it in the show notes) -- saying that <a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6945a4.htm\">temperature and symptom screening at airports is pretty worthless</a>; it only picked up 1 case for every 85,000 passengers screened. So not hard for the switch to pre-flight testing to be more effective. For Canada and the UK, though, they’ve layered the test requirements <em>on top of </em>their existing 14-day quarantine requirements, which just adds to the confusion -- especially since the Canadian government gave travelers one week’s notice of the new testing requirement. I haven’t seen the US regs yet, but the Canadian rules say you must have “proof in hand” of a negative test result, and that proof can be either electronic or paper. You gotta think that, pretty quick, that “proof in hand” has gotta default to “proof on phone” otherwise, forged paper results are going to be the new fake IDs from our teens. Last November, French cops <a href=\"https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2020/11/10/fake-tests-covid-flights/\">busted a ring selling fake test results at CDG</a>. The going rate was €150-300 which converts to something like $180-370. That compares to $125 for a <a href=\"https://fakeyourid.com/\">good fake driver’s license</a>.&nbsp; Since the last episode, the Caribbean country of <a href=\"https://skift.com/2020/12/18/airlines-still-waiting-on-governments-for-a-single-digital-health-passport-standard/\">Aruba was the first country</a> to standardize on one of the digital passport apps, <a href=\"https://commonpass.org/\">CommonPass</a>, the one backed by the World Economic Forum, the Davos gang, and, we mentioned, also used by United for their EWR-LHR flight. But then Sing Air picked its rival, <a href=\"https://www.iata.org/en/programs/passenger/travel-pass/\">Travel Pass</a> from IATA, to use on flights to/from Malaysia. So it still seems like, when it does go to “proof on phone”, we’re gonna need to set aside some memory screen space for a bunch of apps.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge music -- Staying Positive by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2019 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/59438 Ft: greg_baumont</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Leaving Data Behind in The Rental Car</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A couple of weeks back, I retweeted a news article - the third suspect charged in the fatal shooting of a retired Chicago fireman during a carjacking was caught because he’d synced his phone to the audio system of the stolen car.&nbsp; I dunno -- fleeing a murder but worrying about getting a ticket for not using hands free.&nbsp; I dunno. Good they caught the bad guy, but what about us law-abiding frequent travelers? When the Hertz or Avis person walks up to me at the car return lane, they always remind me not to leave anything behind; to remember to take my sunglasses and my mobile phone. But they never remind me to delete all the data I synced to the car.&nbsp;</li><li>And with more of our lives getting stored in our phones, I asked Andrea Amico, founder of the company <a href=\"https://www.privacy4cars.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Privacy4Cars</a>, to come onto the podcast to talk about the privacy problems at the intersection of cars and smartphones.<ul><li>Mark: Andrea, how did you get involved in this space?</li></ul><ul><li>Andrea: One of the companies that used to run was one of the largest used car inspection companies. We inspected a lot of vehicles that were ready to be sold. I just noticed that people were leaving their digital lives behind.</li><li>Mark: We first talked about the privacy/security issues around pairing your smartphone with your car rental about four years ago. Bluetooth-enabled entertainment systems were just becoming more common in rental car fleets as hands-free call laws became widespread. Even today, the first thing I do is to sync my iPhone. And I\'ve noticed more times than not, the sync slots are all full -- personalized names, Jan\'s iPhone, Timmy\'s iPhone. You end up having to delete at least one of them to make room for yours. And then, once paired, most phones by default, end up downloading all your contacts and your phone numbers and things like that. So, Jan and Timmy have left behind all of their contacts and all their phone numbers and that\'s just bad in so many ways.</li><li>Andrea: When you sync your phone through Bluetooth or you plug it into the USB port or now, in some newer cars, you just walk into the car and the car automatically sniffs your phone and start syncing to it, including those with Android Auto and Apple CarPlay. When that happens, you are creating a mini-clone of your phone inside the vehicle.</li><li>Mark: What other information are people leaving behind when they don\'t clear themselves out of a rental car?</li><li>Andrea: All sorts -- your phone book, your call logs, the text messages, including the body, meaning the actual text of the text messages; that stuff will be left behind. But also all sorts of meta data that allows criminals or law enforcement or just people who want to snoop on you to re-identify you, anything from the identifiers of your phones which are unique, your Bluetooth MAC address. Not to mention, of course, all your navigation data. I mean, you can reconstruct where people have been, just by data that has been stored in the infotainment system. And then you have, whether you are on Twitter and Facebook and what are the handles of those things, which are the last photos you have taken? What files have you synced, the emails, calendar entries. There\'s all sorts of stuff that people really don\'t understand that they\'re living behind.</li><li>Mark: But when people <em>do </em>delete pairings are they deleting all that information? Or is there some data still retained in that vehicle?</li><li>Andrea: &nbsp;By and large, deleting the data following the manufacturer\'s directions is helpful in preventing third parties to having access. And so if there is anything left behind, it requires a much deeper forensic type of analysis that is typically not accessible. But for most people, following the manufacturer\'s directions on how to remove the data, it is a very easy to do and very effective defense against getting their data being in the hands of somebody else.</li><li>Mark: That\'s where <a href=\"https://www.privacy4cars.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Privacy4Cars</a> comes in. That\'s where your app comes in -- helping people get that right?</li><li>Andrea: Yes, we have a free app that people can download, and you can just search for Privacy4Cars on the <a href=\"https://apps.apple.com/us/app/privacy4cars/id1370969499\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple App Store</a> or <a href=\"https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.privacy4cars\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Play</a>, depending what kind of phone you have, and download it for free.</li><li>Mark: The last time on the podcast we talked about this topic was a little over a year ago, October 2019. &nbsp;I\'d gotten a notice from Hertz that they had changed their terms and conditions. I noticed that Hertz had specifically carved out liability from me leaving information from a Bluetooth pairing. And now, on one hand, I could see that point. I\'ve actively and voluntarily synced my phone to the car and in doing so, caused my information to be downloaded. But at what point does that sort of digital maintenance, clearing personal identifiable information, after every rental become part of the rental company’s overall maintenance responsibility, like checking the oil levels and the tire pressure.</li><li>Andrea: I believe that the time has already passed, and it\'s been in the past for at least a year, right? At least, the passage of California Consumer Privacy Act. And probably you can go further back in the past because of other types of regulations. And there are some regulators who have actually spoken about this. So in the United States, you have the FTC that has issued already four guidances on the need to delete personal information. In Europe, they went as far as to give a guideline that mandates the removal of the personal information. Beyond rental, when people are traveling, sometimes they rent, sometimes they ride-share, and very often it happens to me that I in an Uber or Lyft and you have a very nice driver that tells you, “Hey, you need to fill up the tank on your battery? Here\'s a cable.” And the first thing I do is glance -- &nbsp;where does the cable end up? If it goes into the lighter, that\'s only power. So yes, I’ll recharge my phone. But if it goes straight &nbsp;into the USB port of the car, don\'t charge the phone unless you\'re really desperate, because as soon as your phone powers back up, it will start downloading all your information into a stranger\'s car. So you definitely don\'t want to do that.</li><li>Mark: Andrea Amico, founder of <a href=\"https://www.privacy4cars.com\">Privacy4Cars.com</a>, you can find his app on the <a href=\"https://apps.apple.com/us/app/privacy4cars/id1370969499\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple App store</a> and on <a href=\"https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.privacy4cars\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Play</a>. Andrea, thank you very much for taking the time to talk to us today.</li><li>Andrea: Thank you. Mark. I really enjoyed talking to you.</li></ul></li><li>Bridge music -- Latinium by Javolenus (c) copyright 2020 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Javolenus/62650 Ft: NiGiD</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>2021 Travel Planning Pro Tips</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I’ve been talking about travel planning in the time of COVID across maybe 6 months of episodes. And since January is always a big travel month, especially this year with some vouchers from last spring’s flight cancellations coming up on their 12-month expiration dates, combined with 10 months of pent-up demand and another 6, maybe 9 months to go, I thought I’d pull all my planning tips together here -- and probably in a blog post after I get back from Tucson.</li><li>First, book now. As I said earlier, there’s a steady stream of sales out there right now as airlines, hotels, and rental car companies are looking for cash to get through the start of the year. There are great domestic deals now, and if you can part with some cash now, good international deals for the second half of the year. Prices are only going to go up as vaccine rates improve, and that pent-up demand overwhelms any squeamishness about sitting next to a stranger. I’m eyeing that same American ORD-BCN 787 non-stop that I wasn’t able to take at the end of last September. The deals aren’t as smoking as they were last March when the travel world was in a freefall; the airlines have gotten a little smarter over the past year. But with cancellation fees still waived, there’s not much risk.&nbsp;</li><li>Second, check your destination’s health requirements -- and keep checking until you leave. Many of the airlines have built good web resources that summarize any restrictions by destination. Of the US majors, I think <a href=\"https://www.united.com/ual/en/us/fly/travel/restrictions-map.html\">United’s</a> is the easiest to use but I think American’s is the most complete. They actually link out to a Canadian company, <a href=\"https://apply.joinsherpa.com/travel-restrictions?affiliateId=americanairlines\">Sherpa</a>, that took my Arizona itinerary and noted that, while there’s no quarantine restrictions in Arizona, there are when I return to Chicago.&nbsp; <a href=\"https://www.delta.com/us/en/plan-your-next-trip/where-we-fly\">Delta’s</a> is pretty good too. I’ll put links to them in the show notes. But you can’t check once and be done. We talked at the top of the show about Canada putting in a new testing requirement with 7-days notice. And domestically, states are changing restrictions weekly. One trick I’ve talked about is to start following your destination’s local newspapers on Twitter to get any early warnings on anything new.&nbsp;</li><li>Third, read the cancellation rules a lot more closely. Being nimble and able to react to changes at your destination -- like Irene and I did with our pivot from San Diego to Tucson -- depends on being thoughtful about the cancellation risks you take. Right now, flights have the lowest cancellation risk; Airbnb and vacation rentals, the highest. Hotels are in-between. Our default strategy then is to book the flight as soon as we can, don’t do pre-paid hotel rooms or car rentals, and wait as long as we can before booking an Airbnb.</li><li>Fourth, overload your itinerary with outdoor activities like hiking and biking so last-minute closures or restrictions don’t leave you aimlessly flipping through the hotel TV channels. It was the big trend last summer -- airlines dialed down flights between big city airports like the ORD-LGA run and toward beaches and mountains. And it continues -- all the imagery in the airline and hotel “flash sale” emails over the past couple of weeks. But it does mean spending more time trolling the AccuWeather and Weather Channel web sites because an outside-heavy itinerary is more vulnerable to big storm fronts.</li><li>And finally, stay flexible, expect delays, and be patient. If there’s anything we learned from 2020, it’s that something will screw up your plans -- a positive COVID test will shut down the restaurant you really wanted to eat at, capacity restrictions will mean a line to get into something that was top of your list. Have back-up plans and give everyone you meet the benefit of the doubt. Like you, they’re just trying to get through this safe and sound.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #171</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li>In this episode’s tech notes, if you check out the show notes, you’ll find a full transcript of my interview with Andrea Amico courtesy of my free tier of Amazon Web Services which includes 60 minutes a month of their Transcribe service. I learned about it when watching a session during their virtual Re:Invent conference. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/12/17/podcast-147-holiday-travel-tips-notes-from-santa-fe/\">episode #147</a>, I talked about going to it in person in Las Vegas a couple of years ago -- me and 50,000 other attendees, mostly pudgy, pasty-faced guys power walking up and down the strip, backpacks strapped down tight, ignoring the showgirls on the corner so they wouldn’t be late to, say, the sold-out tutorial on best practices for ingesting streaming data from IoT devices into AWS’ time series database. Less stressful, though less entertaining this year. Anyhow, watching the session on Transcribe got me thinking about how I could use it for the interviews I’ve done over the past 12 months. I’ve started on the most current episodes, working my way back. So far I have three done --this interview with Andrea, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/09/19/podcast-167-6-months-on-why-keep-travel-cards/\">episode #167</a>’s interview with Matt Schulz about travel credit cards, and <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\">episode #166</a>’s interview with Emily Thomas about the meaning of travel. I’ll keep chipping away at the backlog as my 60 free minutes a month allows.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>, as well as asking Alexa, Siri, and Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_171.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #171 — Data Privacy in Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Pro Tips','','inherit','closed','closed','','2997-revision-v1','','','2021-01-14 15:21:43','2021-01-14 20:21:43','',2997,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/2997-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3018,1,'2021-01-14 15:21:56','2021-01-14 20:21:56','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":2168,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1-1024x1024.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2168\"/></a><figcaption>Wait! I need to unpair my iPhone!</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Was all set to head to San Diego for a week\'s break from Chicago\'s grey January and then looked at the COVID restrictions... and then pivoted to Arizona. With people starting to think about 2021 travel, I pulled together my top 5 travel planning tips. Slow vaccine roll-out will probably keep us restricted for longer than we thought. Andrea Amico of <a href=\"https://www.privacy4cars.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Privacy4Cars</a> joins us to talk about the dangers of leaving our data behind in rental cars. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_171.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go over to the <em>Subscribe</em> section on the right to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/949687216&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #171: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. Stayed off the road over the entire holiday season which let me skip the TSA’s new post-lockdown checkpoint record of <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/coronavirus/passenger-throughput\">1.3 million on January 3rd</a>, the last Sunday of the holiday season -- though, to be fair,&nbsp; this is only just over half the 2.4 million passengers who flew on the same Sunday last year. And with every US airline except Delta now back to selling middle seats, it makes sense that load factors also ratcheted up over the holidays. I haven’t seen any industry-wide numbers yet, but <a href=\"https://www.ittn.ie/news/confidence-in-boeing-737-max-holding-firm/\">American’s COO did say that the load factor on their 737 Maxes over the last week of the holiday season was 90%</a>. Now, most of those Maxes are flying between LGA and MIA, always a busy holiday route, but I’ve seen reports of many other packed flights, as well as the much higher load . I was never a big fan of completely full flights pre-coronavirus and, as you can imagine, am even less so now pre-widespread vaccine distribution. So, I’m not too bothered that we didn’t try to get out of town over the holidays.</li><li>However, staying in town through the rest of January is a whole different thing because January is absolutely the worst part of Chicago’s winter. So, after&nbsp; Thanksgiving weekend, on what used to be called Cyber Monday when we actually shopped in physical stores, instead of trolling through Amazon, I was trolling through travel sites looking for cheap flights to someplace warm the 3rd wk of Jan. I figured that’d be long enough for any holiday COVID spike to work its way through the system.</li><li>I’d had some friends who’d gone down to Mexico, felt safe in the tourist zones, didn’t have any problems, came back healthy; but I don’t do well sitting on a beach for more than a day or two and I wanted to keep it a bit simpler, so we decided to stay in the US, which pretty quickly narrowed our search to Southern California, South Florida, and Arizona. Since we’d spent time last winter in both Arizona and Florida, we decided to do California and go as far down the coast as we could get, which was San Diego.&nbsp; And, as luck would have it, Southwest had cheap direct flights from Chicago Midway and I had Southwest travel credits from one of last spring’s flight cancellations burning a hole in my virtual pocket, so *boom* I booked it</li><li>On, what turned out to be, 3 days before the governor locked down most of California. But a friend hit the ground there a week before Christmas and said “Eh, it’s not a problem.” So, we stayed the course and didn’t really pay any attention to it until after New Years when we thought, you know, we should book a place to stay. And that’s when we started to pay attention. Bike and kayak rental places were open as “outdoor recreation” businesses. But vacation rental and hotel booking sites all pointed to the California Public Health Department statement -- “no hotel or lodging entity in California shall accept or honor out-of-state reservations for nonessential travel” which our January snowbird getaway definitely didn’t qualify as. Would things ease up in a couple of weeks? The trend lines on the state’s COVID website didn’t seem to be pointing in that direction.</li><li>So last Monday when I received another blast of airline sales emails, it seemed like the right time for a pivot. X-ing off California, we were back to Florida and Arizona. We talked to friends already down in Florida; they said the south beaches were already filling up with snowbirds, so we opted for drier sand and swung our Southwest flights over to Phoenix.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>But since we’d been in Phoenix last winter and continuing in the spirit of visiting not-quite-A-list places in the US we’ve never been while weaving around quarantines, we’re driving further south down I-10 to Tucson. We’re running the same travel planning play we did for our August trip to Michigan’s UP -- focus on outdoor activities like hiking and biking, have back-ups in case of last-minute closures, and above all, build a list of microbreweries with outdoor seating.</li><li>Bridge Music -- Say Their Names - Love and Remember by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2020 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/62230 Ft: DJ Lang</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Back at the beginning of December when the Pfizer vaccine approval was imminent and the Moderna approval wasn’t far behind, most travelers -- myself included -- got a bit giddy and started to think about the world opening up in the spring, the summer at the latest. Fast forward 30 days and, happy new year, that initial blast of vaccine optimism melted when it met the ugly realities of last-mile logistics. Spelunking through the stream of low-fare emails from American and Southwest and Delta and United and Iberia and British Airways filling my inbox, the consensus across airline demand forecasters seems to be that nothing’s going to change until the end of May. But even that doesn’t explain why, say, American, sends out an email pushing “Plan a European Vacation” that includes spring fares (March, April, May fares) to London, Manchester, and Madrid. I don’t know anyone who expects European vacation travel to open up in the next 3-4 months. Give credit to Delta for highlighting more achievable destinations -- Cancun, the Bahamas, Phoenix, and just about every airport in Florida with a runway long enough to handle a jet.&nbsp;</li><li>What will be as interesting is what the airlines and hotels do about elite status protection if travel continues to be slow through the summer. Remember that last spring, after it was clear that business travel was canceled for most of 2020, all the big travel companies grandfathered everyone into their status for this year. What you earned in 2019, you kept through this year, 2021. But now what? We talked about this a bit in t<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">he November episode (#169)</a> when the companies made their opening bid, knocking 20-30% off elite qualifying clip levels. Kinda like the low-fare sales -- it’ll be interesting to see what they offer come May.</li><li>We’ve talked in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\">prior episodes</a> about the challenges of planning a trip during COVID -- deciphering lockdown rules; parsing what can seem to be the almost theological differences between stay-at-home advisories vs. orders. And after all that, trying to keep up-to-date on last-minute changes. Things are changing so fast -- open, shut; outdoor seating vs just doing takeout -- that the normal crowdsourced tools we’d use -- things like Google Maps, Yelp -- can’t keep up because they don’t give a real-time view. The Foursquare app used to do it, but since they split <a href=\"https://www.swarmapp.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Swarm</a> from Foursquare, it seems that the real-time data is now sold just to business customers to target mobile ads. But, one app that I use does provide a real-time view into some traffic -- <a href=\"https://untappd.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Uptappd</a>. Yes, it’s just craft beer nerd traffic -- people checking in their beers at tap rooms and beer bars -- but that’s a kind of traffic that I’m pretty interested in.&nbsp; After our pivot to Tucson, I wanted to see what beer places were open for service, not just take-out. I could’ve spent time clicking around the app, but instead, I decided to put one of my lockdown self-improvement projects to use. Over the fall, I’d taken some on-line Python programming courses on Coursera, so I wrote a short program that pulled the most recent check-ins from the Tucson area and started making a list of places that are open. I probably could’ve made that list quicker by just plunking away on the app, but not with the same sense of achievement.</li><li>We talked about COVID-19 vaccination and test certification in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">last episode</a>. Over the last month, it seems that proof of negative test results rather than of vaccinations is the new hotness. Canada, the UK, and now the US are the latest countries requiring a negative COVID test for inbound passengers. It makes sense. The CDC released a paper in November -- in one of my favorite publications, the <a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/index.html\"><em>Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report</em></a> (I’ll link to it in the show notes) -- saying that <a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6945a4.htm\">temperature and symptom screening at airports is pretty worthless</a>; it only picked up 1 case for every 85,000 passengers screened. So not hard for the switch to pre-flight testing to be more effective. For Canada and the UK, though, they’ve layered the test requirements <em>on top of </em>their existing 14-day quarantine requirements, which just adds to the confusion -- especially since the Canadian government gave travelers one week’s notice of the new testing requirement. I haven’t seen the US regs yet, but the Canadian rules say you must have “proof in hand” of a negative test result, and that proof can be either electronic or paper. You gotta think that, pretty quick, that “proof in hand” has gotta default to “proof on phone” otherwise, forged paper results are going to be the new fake IDs from our teens. Last November, French cops <a href=\"https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2020/11/10/fake-tests-covid-flights/\">busted a ring selling fake test results at CDG</a>. The going rate was €150-300 which converts to something like $180-370. That compares to $125 for a <a href=\"https://fakeyourid.com/\">good fake driver’s license</a>.&nbsp; Since the last episode, the Caribbean country of <a href=\"https://skift.com/2020/12/18/airlines-still-waiting-on-governments-for-a-single-digital-health-passport-standard/\">Aruba was the first country</a> to standardize on one of the digital passport apps, <a href=\"https://commonpass.org/\">CommonPass</a>, the one backed by the World Economic Forum, the Davos gang, and, we mentioned, also used by United for their EWR-LHR flight. But then Sing Air picked its rival, <a href=\"https://www.iata.org/en/programs/passenger/travel-pass/\">Travel Pass</a> from IATA, to use on flights to/from Malaysia. So it still seems like, when it does go to “proof on phone”, we’re gonna need to set aside some memory screen space for a bunch of apps.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge music -- Staying Positive by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2019 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/59438 Ft: greg_baumont</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Leaving Data Behind in The Rental Car</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A couple of weeks back, I retweeted a news article - the third suspect charged in the fatal shooting of a retired Chicago fireman during a carjacking was caught because he’d synced his phone to the audio system of the stolen car.&nbsp; I dunno -- fleeing a murder but worrying about getting a ticket for not using hands free.&nbsp; I dunno. Good they caught the bad guy, but what about us law-abiding frequent travelers? When the Hertz or Avis person walks up to me at the car return lane, they always remind me not to leave anything behind; to remember to take my sunglasses and my mobile phone. But they never remind me to delete all the data I synced to the car.&nbsp;</li><li>And with more of our lives getting stored in our phones, I asked Andrea Amico, founder of the company <a href=\"https://www.privacy4cars.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Privacy4Cars</a>, to come onto the podcast to talk about the privacy problems at the intersection of cars and smartphones.<ul><li>Mark: Andrea, how did you get involved in this space?</li></ul><ul><li>Andrea: One of the companies that used to run was one of the largest used car inspection companies. We inspected a lot of vehicles that were ready to be sold. I just noticed that people were leaving their digital lives behind.</li><li>Mark: We first talked about the privacy/security issues around pairing your smartphone with your car rental about four years ago. Bluetooth-enabled entertainment systems were just becoming more common in rental car fleets as hands-free call laws became widespread. Even today, the first thing I do is to sync my iPhone. And I\'ve noticed more times than not, the sync slots are all full -- personalized names, Jan\'s iPhone, Timmy\'s iPhone. You end up having to delete at least one of them to make room for yours. And then, once paired, most phones by default, end up downloading all your contacts and your phone numbers and things like that. So, Jan and Timmy have left behind all of their contacts and all their phone numbers and that\'s just bad in so many ways.</li><li>Andrea: When you sync your phone through Bluetooth or you plug it into the USB port or now, in some newer cars, you just walk into the car and the car automatically sniffs your phone and start syncing to it, including those with Android Auto and Apple CarPlay. When that happens, you are creating a mini-clone of your phone inside the vehicle.</li><li>Mark: What other information are people leaving behind when they don\'t clear themselves out of a rental car?</li><li>Andrea: All sorts -- your phone book, your call logs, the text messages, including the body, meaning the actual text of the text messages; that stuff will be left behind. But also all sorts of meta data that allows criminals or law enforcement or just people who want to snoop on you to re-identify you, anything from the identifiers of your phones which are unique, your Bluetooth MAC address. Not to mention, of course, all your navigation data. I mean, you can reconstruct where people have been, just by data that has been stored in the infotainment system. And then you have, whether you are on Twitter and Facebook and what are the handles of those things, which are the last photos you have taken? What files have you synced, the emails, calendar entries. There\'s all sorts of stuff that people really don\'t understand that they\'re living behind.</li><li>Mark: But when people <em>do </em>delete pairings are they deleting all that information? Or is there some data still retained in that vehicle?</li><li>Andrea: &nbsp;By and large, deleting the data following the manufacturer\'s directions is helpful in preventing third parties to having access. And so if there is anything left behind, it requires a much deeper forensic type of analysis that is typically not accessible. But for most people, following the manufacturer\'s directions on how to remove the data, it is a very easy to do and very effective defense against getting their data being in the hands of somebody else.</li><li>Mark: That\'s where <a href=\"https://www.privacy4cars.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Privacy4Cars</a> comes in. That\'s where your app comes in -- helping people get that right?</li><li>Andrea: Yes, we have a free app that people can download, and you can just search for Privacy4Cars on the <a href=\"https://apps.apple.com/us/app/privacy4cars/id1370969499\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple App Store</a> or <a href=\"https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.privacy4cars\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Play</a>, depending what kind of phone you have, and download it for free.</li><li>Mark: The last time on the podcast we talked about this topic was a little over a year ago, October 2019. &nbsp;I\'d gotten a notice from Hertz that they had changed their terms and conditions. I noticed that Hertz had specifically carved out liability from me leaving information from a Bluetooth pairing. And now, on one hand, I could see that point. I\'ve actively and voluntarily synced my phone to the car and in doing so, caused my information to be downloaded. But at what point does that sort of digital maintenance, clearing personal identifiable information, after every rental become part of the rental company’s overall maintenance responsibility, like checking the oil levels and the tire pressure.</li><li>Andrea: I believe that the time has already passed, and it\'s been in the past for at least a year, right? At least, the passage of California Consumer Privacy Act. And probably you can go further back in the past because of other types of regulations. And there are some regulators who have actually spoken about this. So in the United States, you have the FTC that has issued already four guidances on the need to delete personal information. In Europe, they went as far as to give a guideline that mandates the removal of the personal information. Beyond rental, when people are traveling, sometimes they rent, sometimes they ride-share, and very often it happens to me that I in an Uber or Lyft and you have a very nice driver that tells you, “Hey, you need to fill up the tank on your battery? Here\'s a cable.” And the first thing I do is glance -- &nbsp;where does the cable end up? If it goes into the lighter, that\'s only power. So yes, I’ll recharge my phone. But if it goes straight &nbsp;into the USB port of the car, don\'t charge the phone unless you\'re really desperate, because as soon as your phone powers back up, it will start downloading all your information into a stranger\'s car. So you definitely don\'t want to do that.</li><li>Mark: Andrea Amico, founder of <a href=\"https://www.privacy4cars.com\">Privacy4Cars.com</a>, you can find his app on the <a href=\"https://apps.apple.com/us/app/privacy4cars/id1370969499\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple App store</a> and on <a href=\"https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.privacy4cars\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Play</a>. Andrea, thank you very much for taking the time to talk to us today.</li><li>Andrea: Thank you. Mark. I really enjoyed talking to you.</li></ul></li><li>Bridge music -- Latinium by Javolenus (c) copyright 2020 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Javolenus/62650 Ft: NiGiD</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>2021 Travel Planning Pro Tips</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I’ve been talking about travel planning in the time of COVID across maybe 6 months of episodes. And since January is always a big travel month, especially this year with some vouchers from last spring’s flight cancellations coming up on their 12-month expiration dates, combined with 10 months of pent-up demand and another 6, maybe 9 months to go, I thought I’d pull all my planning tips together here -- and probably in a blog post after I get back from Tucson.</li><li>First, book now. As I said earlier, there’s a steady stream of sales out there right now as airlines, hotels, and rental car companies are looking for cash to get through the start of the year. There are great domestic deals now, and if you can part with some cash now, good international deals for the second half of the year. Prices are only going to go up as vaccine rates improve, and that pent-up demand overwhelms any squeamishness about sitting next to a stranger. I’m eyeing that same American ORD-BCN 787 non-stop that I wasn’t able to take at the end of last September. The deals aren’t as smoking as they were last March when the travel world was in a freefall; the airlines have gotten a little smarter over the past year. But with cancellation fees still waived, there’s not much risk.&nbsp;</li><li>Second, check your destination’s health requirements -- and keep checking until you leave. Many of the airlines have built good web resources that summarize any restrictions by destination. Of the US majors, I think <a href=\"https://www.united.com/ual/en/us/fly/travel/restrictions-map.html\">United’s</a> is the easiest to use but I think American’s is the most complete. They actually link out to a Canadian company, <a href=\"https://apply.joinsherpa.com/travel-restrictions?affiliateId=americanairlines\">Sherpa</a>, that took my Arizona itinerary and noted that, while there’s no quarantine restrictions in Arizona, there are when I return to Chicago.&nbsp; <a href=\"https://www.delta.com/us/en/plan-your-next-trip/where-we-fly\">Delta’s</a> is pretty good too. I’ll put links to them in the show notes. But you can’t check once and be done. We talked at the top of the show about Canada putting in a new testing requirement with 7-days notice. And domestically, states are changing restrictions weekly. One trick I’ve talked about is to start following your destination’s local newspapers on Twitter to get any early warnings on anything new.&nbsp;</li><li>Third, read the cancellation rules a lot more closely. Being nimble and able to react to changes at your destination -- like Irene and I did with our pivot from San Diego to Tucson -- depends on being thoughtful about the cancellation risks you take. Right now, flights have the lowest cancellation risk; Airbnb and vacation rentals, the highest. Hotels are in-between. Our default strategy then is to book the flight as soon as we can, don’t do pre-paid hotel rooms or car rentals, and wait as long as we can before booking an Airbnb.</li><li>Fourth, overload your itinerary with outdoor activities like hiking and biking so last-minute closures or restrictions don’t leave you aimlessly flipping through the hotel TV channels. It was the big trend last summer -- airlines dialed down flights between big city airports like the ORD-LGA run and toward beaches and mountains. And it continues -- all the imagery in the airline and hotel “flash sale” emails over the past couple of weeks. But it does mean spending more time trolling the AccuWeather and Weather Channel web sites because an outside-heavy itinerary is more vulnerable to big storm fronts.</li><li>And finally, stay flexible, expect delays, and be patient. If there’s anything we learned from 2020, it’s that something will screw up your plans -- a positive COVID test will shut down the restaurant you really wanted to eat at, capacity restrictions will mean a line to get into something that was top of your list. Have back-up plans and give everyone you meet the benefit of the doubt. Like you, they’re just trying to get through this safe and sound.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #171</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li>In this episode’s tech notes, if you check out the show notes, you’ll find a full transcript of my interview with Andrea Amico courtesy of my free tier of Amazon Web Services which includes 60 minutes a month of their Transcribe service. I learned about it when watching a session during their virtual Re:Invent conference. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/12/17/podcast-147-holiday-travel-tips-notes-from-santa-fe/\">episode #147</a>, I talked about going to it in person in Las Vegas a couple of years ago -- me and 50,000 other attendees, mostly pudgy, pasty-faced guys power walking up and down the strip, backpacks strapped down tight, ignoring the showgirls on the corner so they wouldn’t be late to, say, the sold-out tutorial on best practices for ingesting streaming data from IoT devices into AWS’ time series database. Less stressful, though less entertaining this year. Anyhow, watching the session on Transcribe got me thinking about how I could use it for the interviews I’ve done over the past 12 months. I’ve started on the most current episodes, working my way back. So far I have three done --this interview with Andrea, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/09/19/podcast-167-6-months-on-why-keep-travel-cards/\">episode #167</a>’s interview with Matt Schulz about travel credit cards, and <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\">episode #166</a>’s interview with Emily Thomas about the meaning of travel. I’ll keep chipping away at the backlog as my 60 free minutes a month allows.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>, as well as asking Alexa, Siri, and Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_171.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #171 — Data Privacy in Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips','','inherit','closed','closed','','2997-revision-v1','','','2021-01-14 15:21:56','2021-01-14 20:21:56','',2997,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/2997-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3019,1,'2021-01-14 17:30:41','2021-01-14 22:30:41','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":2168,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1-1024x1024.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2168\"/></a><figcaption>Wait! I need to unpair my iPhone!</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Was all set to head to San Diego for a week\'s break from Chicago\'s grey January and then looked at the COVID restrictions... and then pivoted to Arizona. With people starting to think about 2021 travel, I pulled together my top 5 travel planning tips. Slow vaccine roll-out will probably keep us restricted for longer than we thought. Andrea Amico of <a href=\"https://www.privacy4cars.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Privacy4Cars</a> joins us to talk about the dangers of leaving our data behind in rental cars. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_171.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go over to the <em>Subscribe</em> section on the right to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/949687216&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #171: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. Stayed off the road over the entire holiday season which let me skip the TSA’s new post-lockdown checkpoint record of <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/coronavirus/passenger-throughput\">1.3 million on January 3rd</a>, the last Sunday of the holiday season -- though, to be fair,&nbsp; this is only just over half the 2.4 million passengers who flew on the same Sunday last year. And with every US airline except Delta now back to selling middle seats, it makes sense that load factors also ratcheted up over the holidays. I haven’t seen any industry-wide numbers yet, but <a href=\"https://www.ittn.ie/news/confidence-in-boeing-737-max-holding-firm/\">American’s COO did say that the load factor on their 737 Maxes over the last week of the holiday season was 90%</a>. Now, most of those Maxes are flying between LGA and MIA, always a busy holiday route, but I’ve seen reports of many other packed flights, as well as the much higher load . I was never a big fan of completely full flights pre-coronavirus and, as you can imagine, am even less so now pre-widespread vaccine distribution. So, I’m not too bothered that we didn’t try to get out of town over the holidays.</li><li>However, staying in town through the rest of January is a whole different thing because January is absolutely the worst part of Chicago’s winter. So, after&nbsp; Thanksgiving weekend, on what used to be called Cyber Monday when we actually shopped in physical stores, instead of trolling through Amazon, I was trolling through travel sites looking for cheap flights to someplace warm the 3rd wk of Jan. I figured that’d be long enough for any holiday COVID spike to work its way through the system.</li><li>I’d had some friends who’d gone down to Mexico, felt safe in the tourist zones, didn’t have any problems, came back healthy; but I don’t do well sitting on a beach for more than a day or two and I wanted to keep it a bit simpler, so we decided to stay in the US, which pretty quickly narrowed our search to Southern California, South Florida, and Arizona. Since we’d spent time last winter in both Arizona and Florida, we decided to do California and go as far down the coast as we could get, which was San Diego.&nbsp; And, as luck would have it, Southwest had cheap direct flights from Chicago Midway and I had Southwest travel credits from one of last spring’s flight cancellations burning a hole in my virtual pocket, so *boom* I booked it</li><li>On, what turned out to be, 3 days before the governor locked down most of California. But a friend hit the ground there a week before Christmas and said “Eh, it’s not a problem.” So, we stayed the course and didn’t really pay any attention to it until after New Years when we thought, you know, we should book a place to stay. And that’s when we started to pay attention. Bike and kayak rental places were open as “outdoor recreation” businesses. But vacation rental and hotel booking sites all pointed to the California Public Health Department statement -- “no hotel or lodging entity in California shall accept or honor out-of-state reservations for nonessential travel” which our January snowbird getaway definitely didn’t qualify as. Would things ease up in a couple of weeks? The trend lines on the state’s COVID website didn’t seem to be pointing in that direction.</li><li>So last Monday when I received another blast of airline sales emails, it seemed like the right time for a pivot. X-ing off California, we were back to Florida and Arizona. We talked to friends already down in Florida; they said the south beaches were already filling up with snowbirds, so we opted for drier sand and swung our Southwest flights over to Phoenix.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>But since we’d been in Phoenix last winter and continuing in the spirit of visiting not-quite-A-list places in the US we’ve never been while weaving around quarantines, we’re driving further south down I-10 to Tucson. We’re running the same travel planning play we did for our August trip to Michigan’s UP -- focus on outdoor activities like hiking and biking, have back-ups in case of last-minute closures, and above all, build a list of microbreweries with outdoor seating.</li><li>Bridge Music -- Say Their Names - Love and Remember by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2020 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/62230 Ft: DJ Lang</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Back at the beginning of December when the Pfizer vaccine approval was imminent and the Moderna approval wasn’t far behind, most travelers -- myself included -- got a bit giddy and started to think about the world opening up in the spring, the summer at the latest. Fast forward 30 days and, happy new year, that initial blast of vaccine optimism melted when it met the ugly realities of last-mile logistics. Spelunking through the stream of low-fare emails from American and Southwest and Delta and United and Iberia and British Airways filling my inbox, the consensus across airline demand forecasters seems to be that nothing’s going to change until the end of May. But even that doesn’t explain why, say, American, sends out an email pushing “Plan a European Vacation” that includes spring fares (March, April, May fares) to London, Manchester, and Madrid. I don’t know anyone who expects European vacation travel to open up in the next 3-4 months. Give credit to Delta for highlighting more achievable destinations -- Cancun, the Bahamas, Phoenix, and just about every airport in Florida with a runway long enough to handle a jet.&nbsp;</li><li>What will be as interesting is what the airlines and hotels do about elite status protection if travel continues to be slow through the summer. Remember that last spring, after it was clear that business travel was canceled for most of 2020, all the big travel companies grandfathered everyone into their status for this year. What you earned in 2019, you kept through this year, 2021. But now what? We talked about this a bit in t<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">he November episode (#169)</a> when the companies made their opening bid, knocking 20-30% off elite qualifying clip levels. Kinda like the low-fare sales -- it’ll be interesting to see what they offer come May.</li><li>We’ve talked in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\">prior episodes</a> about the challenges of planning a trip during COVID -- deciphering lockdown rules; parsing what can seem to be the almost theological differences between stay-at-home advisories vs. orders. And after all that, trying to keep up-to-date on last-minute changes. Things are changing so fast -- open, shut; outdoor seating vs just doing takeout -- that the normal crowdsourced tools we’d use -- things like Google Maps, Yelp -- can’t keep up because they don’t give a real-time view. The Foursquare app used to do it, but since they split <a href=\"https://www.swarmapp.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Swarm</a> from Foursquare, it seems that the real-time data is now sold just to business customers to target mobile ads. But, one app that I use does provide a real-time view into some traffic -- <a href=\"https://untappd.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Uptappd</a>. Yes, it’s just craft beer nerd traffic -- people checking in their beers at tap rooms and beer bars -- but that’s a kind of traffic that I’m pretty interested in.&nbsp; After our pivot to Tucson, I wanted to see what beer places were open for service, not just take-out. I could’ve spent time clicking around the app, but instead, I decided to put one of my lockdown self-improvement projects to use. Over the fall, I’d taken some on-line Python programming courses on Coursera, so I wrote a short program that pulled the most recent check-ins from the Tucson area and started making a list of places that are open. I probably could’ve made that list quicker by just plunking away on the app, but not with the same sense of achievement.</li><li>We talked about COVID-19 vaccination and test certification in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">last episode</a>. Over the last month, it seems that proof of negative test results rather than of vaccinations is the new hotness. Canada, the UK, and now the US are the latest countries requiring a negative COVID test for inbound passengers. It makes sense. The CDC released a paper in November -- in one of my favorite publications, the <a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/index.html\"><em>Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report</em></a> (I’ll link to it in the show notes) -- saying that <a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6945a4.htm\">temperature and symptom screening at airports is pretty worthless</a>; it only picked up 1 case for every 85,000 passengers screened. So not hard for the switch to pre-flight testing to be more effective. For Canada and the UK, though, they’ve layered the test requirements <em>on top of </em>their existing 14-day quarantine requirements, which just adds to the confusion -- especially since the Canadian government gave travelers one week’s notice of the new testing requirement. I haven’t seen the US regs yet, but the Canadian rules say you must have “proof in hand” of a negative test result, and that proof can be either electronic or paper. You gotta think that, pretty quick, that “proof in hand” has gotta default to “proof on phone” otherwise, forged paper results are going to be the new fake IDs from our teens. Last November, French cops <a href=\"https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2020/11/10/fake-tests-covid-flights/\">busted a ring selling fake test results at CDG</a>. The going rate was €150-300 which converts to something like $180-370. That compares to $125 for a <a href=\"https://fakeyourid.com/\">good fake driver’s license</a>.&nbsp; Since the last episode, the Caribbean country of <a href=\"https://skift.com/2020/12/18/airlines-still-waiting-on-governments-for-a-single-digital-health-passport-standard/\">Aruba was the first country</a> to standardize on one of the digital passport apps, <a href=\"https://commonpass.org/\">CommonPass</a>, the one backed by the World Economic Forum, the Davos gang, and, we mentioned, also used by United for their EWR-LHR flight. But then Sing Air picked its rival, <a href=\"https://www.iata.org/en/programs/passenger/travel-pass/\">Travel Pass</a> from IATA, to use on flights to/from Malaysia. So it still seems like, when it does go to “proof on phone”, we’re gonna need to set aside some memory screen space for a bunch of apps.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge music -- Staying Positive by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2019 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/59438 Ft: greg_baumont</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Leaving Data Behind in The Rental Car</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A couple of weeks back, I retweeted a news article - the third suspect charged in the fatal shooting of a retired Chicago fireman during a carjacking was caught because he’d synced his phone to the audio system of the stolen car.&nbsp; I dunno -- fleeing a murder but worrying about getting a ticket for not using hands free.&nbsp; I dunno. Good they caught the bad guy, but what about us law-abiding frequent travelers? When the Hertz or Avis person walks up to me at the car return lane, they always remind me not to leave anything behind; to remember to take my sunglasses and my mobile phone. But they never remind me to delete all the data I synced to the car.&nbsp;</li><li>And with more of our lives getting stored in our phones, I asked Andrea Amico, founder of the company <a href=\"https://www.privacy4cars.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Privacy4Cars</a>, to come onto the podcast to talk about the privacy problems at the intersection of cars and smartphones.<ul><li>Mark: Andrea, how did you get involved in this space?</li></ul><ul><li>Andrea: One of the companies that used to run was one of the largest used car inspection companies. We inspected a lot of vehicles that were ready to be sold. I just noticed that people were leaving their digital lives behind.</li><li>Mark: We first talked about the privacy/security issues around pairing your smartphone with your car rental about four years ago. Bluetooth-enabled entertainment systems were just becoming more common in rental car fleets as hands-free call laws became widespread. Even today, the first thing I do is to sync my iPhone. And I\'ve noticed more times than not, the sync slots are all full -- personalized names, Jan\'s iPhone, Timmy\'s iPhone. You end up having to delete at least one of them to make room for yours. And then, once paired, most phones by default, end up downloading all your contacts and your phone numbers and things like that. So, Jan and Timmy have left behind all of their contacts and all their phone numbers and that\'s just bad in so many ways.</li><li>Andrea: When you sync your phone through Bluetooth or you plug it into the USB port or now, in some newer cars, you just walk into the car and the car automatically sniffs your phone and start syncing to it, including those with Android Auto and Apple CarPlay. When that happens, you are creating a mini-clone of your phone inside the vehicle.</li><li>Mark: What other information are people leaving behind when they don\'t clear themselves out of a rental car?</li><li>Andrea: All sorts -- your phone book, your call logs, the text messages, including the body, meaning the actual text of the text messages; that stuff will be left behind. But also all sorts of meta data that allows criminals or law enforcement or just people who want to snoop on you to re-identify you, anything from the identifiers of your phones which are unique, your Bluetooth MAC address. Not to mention, of course, all your navigation data. I mean, you can reconstruct where people have been, just by data that has been stored in the infotainment system. And then you have, whether you are on Twitter and Facebook and what are the handles of those things, which are the last photos you have taken? What files have you synced, the emails, calendar entries. There\'s all sorts of stuff that people really don\'t understand that they\'re living behind.</li><li>Mark: But when people <em>do </em>delete pairings are they deleting all that information? Or is there some data still retained in that vehicle?</li><li>Andrea: &nbsp;By and large, deleting the data following the manufacturer\'s directions is helpful in preventing third parties to having access. And so if there is anything left behind, it requires a much deeper forensic type of analysis that is typically not accessible. But for most people, following the manufacturer\'s directions on how to remove the data, it is a very easy to do and very effective defense against getting their data being in the hands of somebody else.</li><li>Mark: That\'s where <a href=\"https://www.privacy4cars.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Privacy4Cars</a> comes in. That\'s where your app comes in -- helping people get that right?</li><li>Andrea: Yes, we have a free app that people can download, and you can just search for Privacy4Cars on the <a href=\"https://apps.apple.com/us/app/privacy4cars/id1370969499\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple App Store</a> or <a href=\"https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.privacy4cars\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Play</a>, depending what kind of phone you have, and download it for free.</li><li>Mark: The last time on the podcast we talked about this topic was a little over a year ago, October 2019. &nbsp;I\'d gotten a notice from Hertz that they had changed their terms and conditions. I noticed that Hertz had specifically carved out liability from me leaving information from a Bluetooth pairing. And now, on one hand, I could see that point. I\'ve actively and voluntarily synced my phone to the car and in doing so, caused my information to be downloaded. But at what point does that sort of digital maintenance, clearing personal identifiable information, after every rental become part of the rental company’s overall maintenance responsibility, like checking the oil levels and the tire pressure.</li><li>Andrea: I believe that the time has already passed, and it\'s been in the past for at least a year, right? At least, the passage of California Consumer Privacy Act. And probably you can go further back in the past because of other types of regulations. And there are some regulators who have actually spoken about this. So in the United States, you have the FTC that has issued already four guidances on the need to delete personal information. In Europe, they went as far as to give a guideline that mandates the removal of the personal information. Beyond rental, when people are traveling, sometimes they rent, sometimes they ride-share, and very often it happens to me that I in an Uber or Lyft and you have a very nice driver that tells you, “Hey, you need to fill up the tank on your battery? Here\'s a cable.” And the first thing I do is glance -- &nbsp;where does the cable end up? If it goes into the lighter, that\'s only power. So yes, I’ll recharge my phone. But if it goes straight &nbsp;into the USB port of the car, don\'t charge the phone unless you\'re really desperate, because as soon as your phone powers back up, it will start downloading all your information into a stranger\'s car. So you definitely don\'t want to do that.</li><li>Mark: Andrea Amico, founder of <a href=\"https://www.privacy4cars.com\">Privacy4Cars.com</a>, you can find his app on the <a href=\"https://apps.apple.com/us/app/privacy4cars/id1370969499\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple App store</a> and on <a href=\"https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.privacy4cars\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Play</a>. Andrea, thank you very much for taking the time to talk to us today.</li><li>Andrea: Thank you. Mark. I really enjoyed talking to you.</li></ul></li><li>Bridge music -- Latinium by Javolenus (c) copyright 2020 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Javolenus/62650 Ft: NiGiD</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>2021 Travel Planning Pro Tips</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I’ve been talking about travel planning in the time of COVID across maybe 6 months of episodes. And since January is always a big travel month, especially this year with some vouchers from last spring’s flight cancellations coming up on their 12-month expiration dates, combined with 10 months of pent-up demand and another 6, maybe 9 months to go, I thought I’d pull all my planning tips together here -- and probably in a blog post after I get back from Tucson.</li><li>First, book now. As I said earlier, there’s a steady stream of sales out there right now as airlines, hotels, and rental car companies are looking for cash to get through the start of the year. There are great domestic deals now, and if you can part with some cash now, good international deals for the second half of the year. Prices are only going to go up as vaccine rates improve, and that pent-up demand overwhelms any squeamishness about sitting next to a stranger. I’m eyeing that same American ORD-BCN 787 non-stop that I wasn’t able to take at the end of last September. The deals aren’t as smoking as they were last March when the travel world was in a freefall; the airlines have gotten a little smarter over the past year. But with cancellation fees still waived, there’s not much risk.&nbsp;</li><li>Second, check your destination’s health requirements -- and keep checking until you leave. Many of the airlines have built good web resources that summarize any restrictions by destination. Of the US majors, I think <a href=\"https://www.united.com/ual/en/us/fly/travel/restrictions-map.html\">United’s</a> is the easiest to use but I think American’s is the most complete. They actually link out to a Canadian company, <a href=\"https://apply.joinsherpa.com/travel-restrictions?affiliateId=americanairlines\">Sherpa</a>, that took my Arizona itinerary and noted that, while there’s no quarantine restrictions in Arizona, there are when I return to Chicago.&nbsp; <a href=\"https://www.delta.com/us/en/plan-your-next-trip/where-we-fly\">Delta’s</a> is pretty good too. I’ll put links to them in the show notes. But you can’t check once and be done. We talked at the top of the show about Canada putting in a new testing requirement with 7-days notice. And domestically, states are changing restrictions weekly. One trick I’ve talked about is to start following your destination’s local newspapers on Twitter to get any early warnings on anything new.&nbsp;</li><li>Third, read the cancellation rules a lot more closely. Being nimble and able to react to changes at your destination -- like Irene and I did with our pivot from San Diego to Tucson -- depends on being thoughtful about the cancellation risks you take. Right now, flights have the lowest cancellation risk; Airbnb and vacation rentals, the highest. Hotels are in-between. Our default strategy then is to book the flight as soon as we can, don’t do pre-paid hotel rooms or car rentals, and wait as long as we can before booking an Airbnb.</li><li>Fourth, overload your itinerary with outdoor activities like hiking and biking so last-minute closures or restrictions don’t leave you aimlessly flipping through the hotel TV channels. It was the big trend last summer -- airlines dialed down flights between big city airports like the ORD-LGA run and toward beaches and mountains. And it continues -- all the imagery in the airline and hotel “flash sale” emails over the past couple of weeks. But it does mean spending more time trolling the AccuWeather and Weather Channel web sites because an outside-heavy itinerary is more vulnerable to big storm fronts.</li><li>And finally, stay flexible, expect delays, and be patient. If there’s anything we learned from 2020, it’s that something will screw up your plans -- a positive COVID test will shut down the restaurant you really wanted to eat at, capacity restrictions will mean a line to get into something that was top of your list. Have back-up plans and give everyone you meet the benefit of the doubt. Like you, they’re just trying to get through this safe and sound.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #171</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li>In this episode’s tech notes, if you check out the show notes, you’ll find a full transcript of my interview with Andrea Amico courtesy of my free tier of Amazon Web Services which includes 60 minutes a month of their Transcribe service. I learned about it when watching a session during their virtual Re:Invent conference. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/12/17/podcast-147-holiday-travel-tips-notes-from-santa-fe/\">episode #147</a>, I talked about going to it in person in Las Vegas a couple of years ago -- me and 50,000 other attendees, mostly pudgy, pasty-faced guys power walking up and down the strip, backpacks strapped down tight, ignoring the showgirls on the corner so they wouldn’t be late to, say, the sold-out tutorial on best practices for ingesting streaming data from IoT devices into AWS’ time series database. Less stressful, though less entertaining this year. Anyhow, watching the session on Transcribe got me thinking about how I could use it for the interviews I’ve done over the past 12 months. I’ve started on the most current episodes, working my way back. So far I have three done --this interview with Andrea, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/09/19/podcast-167-6-months-on-why-keep-travel-cards/\">episode #167</a>’s interview with Matt Schulz about travel credit cards, and <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\">episode #166</a>’s interview with Emily Thomas about the meaning of travel. I’ll keep chipping away at the backlog as my 60 free minutes a month allows.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>, as well as asking Alexa, Siri, and Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_171.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips','','inherit','closed','closed','','2997-revision-v1','','','2021-01-14 17:30:41','2021-01-14 22:30:41','',2997,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/2997-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3020,1,'2021-01-14 18:59:11','2021-01-14 23:59:11','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":2168,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1-1024x1024.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2168\"/></a><figcaption>Wait! I need to unpair my iPhone!</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Was all set to head to San Diego for a week\'s break from Chicago\'s grey January and then looked at the COVID restrictions... and then pivoted to Arizona. With people starting to think about 2021 travel, I pulled together my top 5 travel planning tips. Slow vaccine roll-out will probably keep us restricted for longer than we thought. Andrea Amico of <a href=\"https://www.privacy4cars.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Privacy4Cars</a> joins us to talk about the dangers of leaving our data behind in rental cars. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_171.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go over to the <em>Subscribe</em> section on the right to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/965852275&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #171: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. Stayed off the road over the entire holiday season which let me skip the TSA’s new post-lockdown checkpoint record of <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/coronavirus/passenger-throughput\">1.3 million on January 3rd</a>, the last Sunday of the holiday season -- though, to be fair,&nbsp; this is only just over half the 2.4 million passengers who flew on the same Sunday last year. And with every US airline except Delta now back to selling middle seats, it makes sense that load factors also ratcheted up over the holidays. I haven’t seen any industry-wide numbers yet, but <a href=\"https://www.ittn.ie/news/confidence-in-boeing-737-max-holding-firm/\">American’s COO did say that the load factor on their 737 Maxes over the last week of the holiday season was 90%</a>. Now, most of those Maxes are flying between LGA and MIA, always a busy holiday route, but I’ve seen reports of many other packed flights, as well as the much higher load . I was never a big fan of completely full flights pre-coronavirus and, as you can imagine, am even less so now pre-widespread vaccine distribution. So, I’m not too bothered that we didn’t try to get out of town over the holidays.</li><li>However, staying in town through the rest of January is a whole different thing because January is absolutely the worst part of Chicago’s winter. So, after&nbsp; Thanksgiving weekend, on what used to be called Cyber Monday when we actually shopped in physical stores, instead of trolling through Amazon, I was trolling through travel sites looking for cheap flights to someplace warm the 3rd wk of Jan. I figured that’d be long enough for any holiday COVID spike to work its way through the system.</li><li>I’d had some friends who’d gone down to Mexico, felt safe in the tourist zones, didn’t have any problems, came back healthy; but I don’t do well sitting on a beach for more than a day or two and I wanted to keep it a bit simpler, so we decided to stay in the US, which pretty quickly narrowed our search to Southern California, South Florida, and Arizona. Since we’d spent time last winter in both Arizona and Florida, we decided to do California and go as far down the coast as we could get, which was San Diego.&nbsp; And, as luck would have it, Southwest had cheap direct flights from Chicago Midway and I had Southwest travel credits from one of last spring’s flight cancellations burning a hole in my virtual pocket, so *boom* I booked it</li><li>On, what turned out to be, 3 days before the governor locked down most of California. But a friend hit the ground there a week before Christmas and said “Eh, it’s not a problem.” So, we stayed the course and didn’t really pay any attention to it until after New Years when we thought, you know, we should book a place to stay. And that’s when we started to pay attention. Bike and kayak rental places were open as “outdoor recreation” businesses. But vacation rental and hotel booking sites all pointed to the California Public Health Department statement -- “no hotel or lodging entity in California shall accept or honor out-of-state reservations for nonessential travel” which our January snowbird getaway definitely didn’t qualify as. Would things ease up in a couple of weeks? The trend lines on the state’s COVID website didn’t seem to be pointing in that direction.</li><li>So last Monday when I received another blast of airline sales emails, it seemed like the right time for a pivot. X-ing off California, we were back to Florida and Arizona. We talked to friends already down in Florida; they said the south beaches were already filling up with snowbirds, so we opted for drier sand and swung our Southwest flights over to Phoenix.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>But since we’d been in Phoenix last winter and continuing in the spirit of visiting not-quite-A-list places in the US we’ve never been while weaving around quarantines, we’re driving further south down I-10 to Tucson. We’re running the same travel planning play we did for our August trip to Michigan’s UP -- focus on outdoor activities like hiking and biking, have back-ups in case of last-minute closures, and above all, build a list of microbreweries with outdoor seating.</li><li>Bridge Music -- Say Their Names - Love and Remember by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2020 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/62230 Ft: DJ Lang</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Back at the beginning of December when the Pfizer vaccine approval was imminent and the Moderna approval wasn’t far behind, most travelers -- myself included -- got a bit giddy and started to think about the world opening up in the spring, the summer at the latest. Fast forward 30 days and, happy new year, that initial blast of vaccine optimism melted when it met the ugly realities of last-mile logistics. Spelunking through the stream of low-fare emails from American and Southwest and Delta and United and Iberia and British Airways filling my inbox, the consensus across airline demand forecasters seems to be that nothing’s going to change until the end of May. But even that doesn’t explain why, say, American, sends out an email pushing “Plan a European Vacation” that includes spring fares (March, April, May fares) to London, Manchester, and Madrid. I don’t know anyone who expects European vacation travel to open up in the next 3-4 months. Give credit to Delta for highlighting more achievable destinations -- Cancun, the Bahamas, Phoenix, and just about every airport in Florida with a runway long enough to handle a jet.&nbsp;</li><li>What will be as interesting is what the airlines and hotels do about elite status protection if travel continues to be slow through the summer. Remember that last spring, after it was clear that business travel was canceled for most of 2020, all the big travel companies grandfathered everyone into their status for this year. What you earned in 2019, you kept through this year, 2021. But now what? We talked about this a bit in t<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">he November episode (#169)</a> when the companies made their opening bid, knocking 20-30% off elite qualifying clip levels. Kinda like the low-fare sales -- it’ll be interesting to see what they offer come May.</li><li>We’ve talked in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\">prior episodes</a> about the challenges of planning a trip during COVID -- deciphering lockdown rules; parsing what can seem to be the almost theological differences between stay-at-home advisories vs. orders. And after all that, trying to keep up-to-date on last-minute changes. Things are changing so fast -- open, shut; outdoor seating vs just doing takeout -- that the normal crowdsourced tools we’d use -- things like Google Maps, Yelp -- can’t keep up because they don’t give a real-time view. The Foursquare app used to do it, but since they split <a href=\"https://www.swarmapp.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Swarm</a> from Foursquare, it seems that the real-time data is now sold just to business customers to target mobile ads. But, one app that I use does provide a real-time view into some traffic -- <a href=\"https://untappd.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Uptappd</a>. Yes, it’s just craft beer nerd traffic -- people checking in their beers at tap rooms and beer bars -- but that’s a kind of traffic that I’m pretty interested in.&nbsp; After our pivot to Tucson, I wanted to see what beer places were open for service, not just take-out. I could’ve spent time clicking around the app, but instead, I decided to put one of my lockdown self-improvement projects to use. Over the fall, I’d taken some on-line Python programming courses on Coursera, so I wrote a short program that pulled the most recent check-ins from the Tucson area and started making a list of places that are open. I probably could’ve made that list quicker by just plunking away on the app, but not with the same sense of achievement.</li><li>We talked about COVID-19 vaccination and test certification in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">last episode</a>. Over the last month, it seems that proof of negative test results rather than of vaccinations is the new hotness. Canada, the UK, and now the US are the latest countries requiring a negative COVID test for inbound passengers. It makes sense. The CDC released a paper in November -- in one of my favorite publications, the <a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/index.html\"><em>Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report</em></a> (I’ll link to it in the show notes) -- saying that <a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6945a4.htm\">temperature and symptom screening at airports is pretty worthless</a>; it only picked up 1 case for every 85,000 passengers screened. So not hard for the switch to pre-flight testing to be more effective. For Canada and the UK, though, they’ve layered the test requirements <em>on top of </em>their existing 14-day quarantine requirements, which just adds to the confusion -- especially since the Canadian government gave travelers one week’s notice of the new testing requirement. I haven’t seen the US regs yet, but the Canadian rules say you must have “proof in hand” of a negative test result, and that proof can be either electronic or paper. You gotta think that, pretty quick, that “proof in hand” has gotta default to “proof on phone” otherwise, forged paper results are going to be the new fake IDs from our teens. Last November, French cops <a href=\"https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2020/11/10/fake-tests-covid-flights/\">busted a ring selling fake test results at CDG</a>. The going rate was €150-300 which converts to something like $180-370. That compares to $125 for a <a href=\"https://fakeyourid.com/\">good fake driver’s license</a>.&nbsp; Since the last episode, the Caribbean country of <a href=\"https://skift.com/2020/12/18/airlines-still-waiting-on-governments-for-a-single-digital-health-passport-standard/\">Aruba was the first country</a> to standardize on one of the digital passport apps, <a href=\"https://commonpass.org/\">CommonPass</a>, the one backed by the World Economic Forum, the Davos gang, and, we mentioned, also used by United for their EWR-LHR flight. But then Sing Air picked its rival, <a href=\"https://www.iata.org/en/programs/passenger/travel-pass/\">Travel Pass</a> from IATA, to use on flights to/from Malaysia. So it still seems like, when it does go to “proof on phone”, we’re gonna need to set aside some memory screen space for a bunch of apps.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge music -- Staying Positive by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2019 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/59438 Ft: greg_baumont</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Leaving Data Behind in The Rental Car</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A couple of weeks back, I retweeted a news article - the third suspect charged in the fatal shooting of a retired Chicago fireman during a carjacking was caught because he’d synced his phone to the audio system of the stolen car.&nbsp; I dunno -- fleeing a murder but worrying about getting a ticket for not using hands free.&nbsp; I dunno. Good they caught the bad guy, but what about us law-abiding frequent travelers? When the Hertz or Avis person walks up to me at the car return lane, they always remind me not to leave anything behind; to remember to take my sunglasses and my mobile phone. But they never remind me to delete all the data I synced to the car.&nbsp;</li><li>And with more of our lives getting stored in our phones, I asked Andrea Amico, founder of the company <a href=\"https://www.privacy4cars.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Privacy4Cars</a>, to come onto the podcast to talk about the privacy problems at the intersection of cars and smartphones.<ul><li>Mark: Andrea, how did you get involved in this space?</li></ul><ul><li>Andrea: One of the companies that used to run was one of the largest used car inspection companies. We inspected a lot of vehicles that were ready to be sold. I just noticed that people were leaving their digital lives behind.</li><li>Mark: We first talked about the privacy/security issues around pairing your smartphone with your car rental about four years ago. Bluetooth-enabled entertainment systems were just becoming more common in rental car fleets as hands-free call laws became widespread. Even today, the first thing I do is to sync my iPhone. And I\'ve noticed more times than not, the sync slots are all full -- personalized names, Jan\'s iPhone, Timmy\'s iPhone. You end up having to delete at least one of them to make room for yours. And then, once paired, most phones by default, end up downloading all your contacts and your phone numbers and things like that. So, Jan and Timmy have left behind all of their contacts and all their phone numbers and that\'s just bad in so many ways.</li><li>Andrea: When you sync your phone through Bluetooth or you plug it into the USB port or now, in some newer cars, you just walk into the car and the car automatically sniffs your phone and start syncing to it, including those with Android Auto and Apple CarPlay. When that happens, you are creating a mini-clone of your phone inside the vehicle.</li><li>Mark: What other information are people leaving behind when they don\'t clear themselves out of a rental car?</li><li>Andrea: All sorts -- your phone book, your call logs, the text messages, including the body, meaning the actual text of the text messages; that stuff will be left behind. But also all sorts of meta data that allows criminals or law enforcement or just people who want to snoop on you to re-identify you, anything from the identifiers of your phones which are unique, your Bluetooth MAC address. Not to mention, of course, all your navigation data. I mean, you can reconstruct where people have been, just by data that has been stored in the infotainment system. And then you have, whether you are on Twitter and Facebook and what are the handles of those things, which are the last photos you have taken? What files have you synced, the emails, calendar entries. There\'s all sorts of stuff that people really don\'t understand that they\'re living behind.</li><li>Mark: But when people <em>do </em>delete pairings are they deleting all that information? Or is there some data still retained in that vehicle?</li><li>Andrea: &nbsp;By and large, deleting the data following the manufacturer\'s directions is helpful in preventing third parties to having access. And so if there is anything left behind, it requires a much deeper forensic type of analysis that is typically not accessible. But for most people, following the manufacturer\'s directions on how to remove the data, it is a very easy to do and very effective defense against getting their data being in the hands of somebody else.</li><li>Mark: That\'s where <a href=\"https://www.privacy4cars.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Privacy4Cars</a> comes in. That\'s where your app comes in -- helping people get that right?</li><li>Andrea: Yes, we have a free app that people can download, and you can just search for Privacy4Cars on the <a href=\"https://apps.apple.com/us/app/privacy4cars/id1370969499\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple App Store</a> or <a href=\"https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.privacy4cars\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Play</a>, depending what kind of phone you have, and download it for free.</li><li>Mark: The last time on the podcast we talked about this topic was a little over a year ago, October 2019. &nbsp;I\'d gotten a notice from Hertz that they had changed their terms and conditions. I noticed that Hertz had specifically carved out liability from me leaving information from a Bluetooth pairing. And now, on one hand, I could see that point. I\'ve actively and voluntarily synced my phone to the car and in doing so, caused my information to be downloaded. But at what point does that sort of digital maintenance, clearing personal identifiable information, after every rental become part of the rental company’s overall maintenance responsibility, like checking the oil levels and the tire pressure.</li><li>Andrea: I believe that the time has already passed, and it\'s been in the past for at least a year, right? At least, the passage of California Consumer Privacy Act. And probably you can go further back in the past because of other types of regulations. And there are some regulators who have actually spoken about this. So in the United States, you have the FTC that has issued already four guidances on the need to delete personal information. In Europe, they went as far as to give a guideline that mandates the removal of the personal information. Beyond rental, when people are traveling, sometimes they rent, sometimes they ride-share, and very often it happens to me that I in an Uber or Lyft and you have a very nice driver that tells you, “Hey, you need to fill up the tank on your battery? Here\'s a cable.” And the first thing I do is glance -- &nbsp;where does the cable end up? If it goes into the lighter, that\'s only power. So yes, I’ll recharge my phone. But if it goes straight &nbsp;into the USB port of the car, don\'t charge the phone unless you\'re really desperate, because as soon as your phone powers back up, it will start downloading all your information into a stranger\'s car. So you definitely don\'t want to do that.</li><li>Mark: Andrea Amico, founder of <a href=\"https://www.privacy4cars.com\">Privacy4Cars.com</a>, you can find his app on the <a href=\"https://apps.apple.com/us/app/privacy4cars/id1370969499\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple App store</a> and on <a href=\"https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.privacy4cars\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Play</a>. Andrea, thank you very much for taking the time to talk to us today.</li><li>Andrea: Thank you. Mark. I really enjoyed talking to you.</li></ul></li><li>Bridge music -- Latinium by Javolenus (c) copyright 2020 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Javolenus/62650 Ft: NiGiD</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>2021 Travel Planning Pro Tips</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I’ve been talking about travel planning in the time of COVID across maybe 6 months of episodes. And since January is always a big travel month, especially this year with some vouchers from last spring’s flight cancellations coming up on their 12-month expiration dates, combined with 10 months of pent-up demand and another 6, maybe 9 months to go, I thought I’d pull all my planning tips together here -- and probably in a blog post after I get back from Tucson.</li><li>First, book now. As I said earlier, there’s a steady stream of sales out there right now as airlines, hotels, and rental car companies are looking for cash to get through the start of the year. There are great domestic deals now, and if you can part with some cash now, good international deals for the second half of the year. Prices are only going to go up as vaccine rates improve, and that pent-up demand overwhelms any squeamishness about sitting next to a stranger. I’m eyeing that same American ORD-BCN 787 non-stop that I wasn’t able to take at the end of last September. The deals aren’t as smoking as they were last March when the travel world was in a freefall; the airlines have gotten a little smarter over the past year. But with cancellation fees still waived, there’s not much risk.&nbsp;</li><li>Second, check your destination’s health requirements -- and keep checking until you leave. Many of the airlines have built good web resources that summarize any restrictions by destination. Of the US majors, I think <a href=\"https://www.united.com/ual/en/us/fly/travel/restrictions-map.html\">United’s</a> is the easiest to use but I think American’s is the most complete. They actually link out to a Canadian company, <a href=\"https://apply.joinsherpa.com/travel-restrictions?affiliateId=americanairlines\">Sherpa</a>, that took my Arizona itinerary and noted that, while there’s no quarantine restrictions in Arizona, there are when I return to Chicago.&nbsp; <a href=\"https://www.delta.com/us/en/plan-your-next-trip/where-we-fly\">Delta’s</a> is pretty good too. I’ll put links to them in the show notes. But you can’t check once and be done. We talked at the top of the show about Canada putting in a new testing requirement with 7-days notice. And domestically, states are changing restrictions weekly. One trick I’ve talked about is to start following your destination’s local newspapers on Twitter to get any early warnings on anything new.&nbsp;</li><li>Third, read the cancellation rules a lot more closely. Being nimble and able to react to changes at your destination -- like Irene and I did with our pivot from San Diego to Tucson -- depends on being thoughtful about the cancellation risks you take. Right now, flights have the lowest cancellation risk; Airbnb and vacation rentals, the highest. Hotels are in-between. Our default strategy then is to book the flight as soon as we can, don’t do pre-paid hotel rooms or car rentals, and wait as long as we can before booking an Airbnb.</li><li>Fourth, overload your itinerary with outdoor activities like hiking and biking so last-minute closures or restrictions don’t leave you aimlessly flipping through the hotel TV channels. It was the big trend last summer -- airlines dialed down flights between big city airports like the ORD-LGA run and toward beaches and mountains. And it continues -- all the imagery in the airline and hotel “flash sale” emails over the past couple of weeks. But it does mean spending more time trolling the AccuWeather and Weather Channel web sites because an outside-heavy itinerary is more vulnerable to big storm fronts.</li><li>And finally, stay flexible, expect delays, and be patient. If there’s anything we learned from 2020, it’s that something will screw up your plans -- a positive COVID test will shut down the restaurant you really wanted to eat at, capacity restrictions will mean a line to get into something that was top of your list. Have back-up plans and give everyone you meet the benefit of the doubt. Like you, they’re just trying to get through this safe and sound.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #171</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li>In this episode’s tech notes, if you check out the show notes, you’ll find a full transcript of my interview with Andrea Amico courtesy of my free tier of Amazon Web Services which includes 60 minutes a month of their Transcribe service. I learned about it when watching a session during their virtual Re:Invent conference. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/12/17/podcast-147-holiday-travel-tips-notes-from-santa-fe/\">episode #147</a>, I talked about going to it in person in Las Vegas a couple of years ago -- me and 50,000 other attendees, mostly pudgy, pasty-faced guys power walking up and down the strip, backpacks strapped down tight, ignoring the showgirls on the corner so they wouldn’t be late to, say, the sold-out tutorial on best practices for ingesting streaming data from IoT devices into AWS’ time series database. Less stressful, though less entertaining this year. Anyhow, watching the session on Transcribe got me thinking about how I could use it for the interviews I’ve done over the past 12 months. I’ve started on the most current episodes, working my way back. So far I have three done --this interview with Andrea, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/09/19/podcast-167-6-months-on-why-keep-travel-cards/\">episode #167</a>’s interview with Matt Schulz about travel credit cards, and <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\">episode #166</a>’s interview with Emily Thomas about the meaning of travel. I’ll keep chipping away at the backlog as my 60 free minutes a month allows.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>, as well as asking Alexa, Siri, and Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_171.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips','','inherit','closed','closed','','2997-revision-v1','','','2021-01-14 18:59:11','2021-01-14 23:59:11','',2997,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/2997-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3021,1,'2021-01-14 19:06:00','2021-01-15 00:06:00','[caption id=\"attachment_1667\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/IMG_0201.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1667\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/IMG_0201-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"An aggressive Uber Pool driver\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> An aggressive Uber Pool driver[/caption]\n\nBack from 10 days in Tuscany where, among other things, we thought we\'d avoid all the noise of the US presidential election. We succeeded... almost. One of my latest travel hobbies has been to quiz Uber drivers for their life stories. It makes for interesting rides to and from the airport. We also continue the ongoing thread about travel safety. This time, we talk about using Bluetooth in rental cars. All this and more at the&nbsp;<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_125.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_125.mp3\"]\n<!--more-->\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #125:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, with a new episode just in time for the TSA Thanksgiving lines. I’m once again thankful that I’m able to avoid O’Hare this week -- the busiest travel week of the year. Since the last episode, I’ve been in Boston, Baltimore, Charlottesville, Hoboken, and, for the first time, I landed at Lehigh Valley Regional Airport in Allentown, PA. I was surprised how nice an airport it is. I was expecting something smaller -- just a handful of gates -- and perhaps a bit dingier -- maybe something along the lines of White Plains, NY. But it was clean and bright with big concourses -- not a lot of people, but a lot of space.</li>\n 	<li>Then I had 3 weeks at home -- my longest non-travel streak this year. There is something relaxing about not packing and unpacking. It also makes you realize how much time you lose in the act of travel -- standing in lines, waiting for security, to board the plane, to check in to your hotel, to get a cup of coffee…. The whole time, though, I was looking forward to getting back on the road -- because my next trip was with my wife to Tuscany for our 25th anniversary, revisiting the scene of our honeymoon.</li>\n 	<li>We flew into Pisa by way of Munich, another new airport for me. But I was much less impressed by this one. Things were going fine -- nothing special in typical German airport style -- until we hit security. There were a dozen lines that were just crawling. There weren’t that many people trying to go through security -- it was 10 or 11am on a Friday -- but maybe the security union was on a work slowdown because they had to be going out of their way to work that slow. As is my wont, I bitch tweeted that out. Colin McDowell tweeted back -- “Totally agree. Slowest security of any major airport, like Gatwick in the ‘80’s. Shops must be suffering”. And the bars too. I didn’t have time for my traditional German airport breakfast beer.</li>\n 	<li>Things got better at Pisa Airport though. This was not a new airport; we had flown in here for our honeymoon. I had booked a Fiat 500 from Hertz for kinda old times sake; we’d driven a Fiat Panda 25 years ago. I was pleasantly surprised to find an Alfa Romeo in the parking slot. Definitely a move up from the Panda. And it was an automatic -- the first time I haven’t driven a stick in Europe. At first I was kinda disappointed, but later, when I was winding through the Tuscan hills and picking my way through rutted dirt roads, I was happy that the car was doing the shifting.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/buy_album.php?id=39CE51194FB95B63577FBFD7E2EC168C99277BD6CE86C10FDC39095666B5D6CF\"><em>Heaven</em></a> by <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=BB22CBFF24501120EEC6ABA18AB0A15FEB05A36360E7FDA122C8D7A5C140F8DC\" rel=\"nofollow\">Los Lonely Boys</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>A <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/08/13/podcast-123-how-to-avoid-travel-delays/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">few episodes</a> back, I complained about having to do an interview for my Global Entry renewal. I’d read online about others getting renewed without the interview, so I was a bit peeved to have to make my way past the lines at the McDonalds in the lower lever of ORD Terminal 5 yet again. But, other than the smell of fries at 9am on a Friday (I’m too old to start my weekends on Thursday nights), it was a fairly painless experience. I was ushered back less than 5 minutes after I’d arrived and had a very straight forward interview with the Customs and Border Protection agent. He was a great guy; good conversation. Asked me a couple of questions -- including one about my stolen passport -- took a new picture and a new set of fingerprints and I was done. 10 minutes later, I was making my way past the McDonalds again. As I thought about it, I had no reason to be peeved. Seems reasonable that they’d want to put an eyeball on me after 5 years.</li>\n 	<li>Jim McDonough posted a comment on the TravelCommons web site about my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/09/28/podcast-124-craft-beer-hunting-i-hate-rick-steves/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Rick Steves rant</a>. Jim writes:\n<ul>\n 	<li>My wife and I love Rick Steves (we call ourselves Rickheads) and use his books all the time. But I know what you mean about his fans overwhelming a particular place. It’s funny how many people in the States have no idea who he is, but in Europe, Rick Steves sits at the right hand of the father. Get your restaurant or hotel into his book, and you have it made</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>And while I was able to dodge the Rickheads in Aberdeen, I knew I was toast in Tuscany. Even in November, I was shoulder-to-shoulder with older, sensibly dressed, empty-nester Rickheads toting their blue bibles through Pisa, Lucca, and Florence. Only when we were staying on a farm in Chianti a couple of miles up a rutted dirt road were we free of them.</li>\n 	<li>David Glickman sent me a note recommending a more detailed guide of Scotland for my next visit:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Living just outside London I am not sure I have never read a Rick Steves Guidebook, but what I recommend getting hold of Peter Irvine’s really excellent guide ‘Scotland The Best’ before your next trip to St.Andrews. My wife and I are regular visitors to the States, and my wife travels to Madison Wi about 6 times a year through ORD so we really enjoy your podcasts. We have just returned from a trip and boy is your country now expensive to us poor post-Brexit Brits!</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>I immediately hit Amazon and ordered the new 2016 edition of <a href=\"https://www.amazon.com/Scotland-Best-Peter-Irvine/dp/0007559348/ref=dp_ob_title_bk\"><em>Scotland The Best</em></a>. Very detailed, with lots of suggestions. Looking forward to giving it a workout on my next visit. And I can imagine the US looks very expensive for pound- and euro-based tourists. The euro dropped another 5% in the week-and-a-half we’ve been back from Italy.</li>\n 	<li>About a year ago in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/10/11/podcast-117-random-thoughts-about-eggs-scotland-car-rentals/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">episode #117</a>, I first talked about Revolut, a virtual and real chip-and-pin debit card with great exchange rates. I first used it last fall on a trip to the UK. I’d transfer funds into it using my US debit card and manage conversions with a smartphone app. It was great. But note my use of the past tense. Over the past 3 months, the service has been deteriorating for US users. First, they began charging a 3% fee on fund transfers using US debit cards. I soon found that they only charged the fee if those transfers were in dollars. If I transferred funds in euros or pounds, there was no charge. Weird, but OK, it still worked. But when I tried that trick before my trips to Scotland and Italy, no dice. All US debit transfers were blocked. I suppose I could’ve tried an interbank transfer using something like TransferWise, but that’s way too much of a hassle. They say they “aim to change it ASAP” but it’s been 3 months now and no update. I have to retract my praise for Revolut and delete the app from my iPhone.</li>\n 	<li>I mentioned in the last episode, that the lack of a chip-&amp;-pin card in Scotland has become less of a hassle with the spread of contactless card readers that let me use Apple Pay on my iPhone. I didn’t find that same convenience in Italy. I didn’t see one place with a contactless reader. Other than large restaurant bills (we managed to find tables at a few Michelin starred restaurants during our stay), I paid mostly cash. It seemed much less of a hassle.</li>\n 	<li>Over the last 3-4 episodes, we had one blurb that’s talked about travel security. Last episode was VPNs, the one before that video jacking. So in this installment of <em>Travel Security</em>, I want to talk about car rentals; specifically, about when you use Bluetooth to pair your smartphone with your rental’s audio system. I do this all the time. It’s safer -- let’s me talk handsfree, avoiding wrecks and tickets. And it lets me listen to podcasts or Pandora or Spotify when I’m driving instead of fiddling around, finding a local radio station that I don’t hate. However, if you do this, you need to remember to delete your pairing when you return your car. There hasn’t been one time when I haven’t gone through and deleted 3-5 pairings before pairing my own. And if you scroll through the devices, they all have personalized names like “Timmy’s iPhone”. And most phones by default will download your contacts to the car when paired. You can turn this default behavior off in an Android phone, but I haven’t found that capabilities with iPhones. Instead, every time I pair my iPhone, I have to remember to flip the switch that prevents it. So for most people, they leave behind a profile in their rental with all of their contacts and phone numbers. That is just bad in so many ways.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://cyberset.cc/artists2.php?tr_release_id=104\"><em>Heaven</em></a> by <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=A951998E6011FA9B2D22387EB3CAC0B5EB05A36360E7FDA122C8D7A5C140F8DC\" rel=\"nofollow\">Electric Skychurch</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Uber Driver Stories</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>I find myself taking more and more Ubers as opposed to regular taxi cabs. I like cabs, I like cab drivers, but Uber is usually a better experience. Thumbing the app is so much easier than trying to hail a cab, or finding the number of the local cab company and then dealing with an often(?)/usually(?) cab dispatcher. And the condition of the car is, 9 times out of 10, vastly superior to the beat-up cab I usually get. The Baltimore cabs I’d take from the Inner Harbor to the airport were some of the worst. But then in Chicago I got picked by an Uber driver in a BMW X3 and by a spotless Mercedes SUV at EWR. Indeed, 9 times out of 10 is giving cabs way too much of the benefit of the doubt. I’ve yet to ride in an Uber that was worse than a cab.</li>\n 	<li>But the best thing about taking an Uber is driver stories. Every Uber I take, I ask the driver how he/she likes it, how long they’ve been doing it, and what else they do -- if it’s not their full time gig (which is the definite minority)</li>\n 	<li>A lotta drivers I talk with are retired. One guy in Vegas told me he was a bit lonely and bored. He wanted to get out of the house, but really had nowhere to go. He didn’t want to gamble or sit in a bar at 10 in the morning, so driving Uber gave him a reason to get off the sofa.</li>\n 	<li>A Charlottesville, VA retired fireman drives the late night weekend shift when kids from UVa are willing to pay anything (or willing to charge anything to their parents’ accounts) for a ride home from the bars. He told me he gets huge surge fares, but he’s driving ‘til 3 or 4 in the morning.</li>\n 	<li>A woman in Baltimore is a retired teacher and principal. She drives to take a break from studying for her PhD. She too gets bored sitting around the house, and she likes to drive. She told me that it was her husband who got her to sign up for Uber. She was driving him crazy around the house. Another guy, non-retired, who is studying full-time for his CFA exam -- chartered financial analyst -- does the same thing, drives during his study breaks.</li>\n 	<li>I find that many morning drivers -- the ones taking me from my hotel to a client site -- are doing a little moonlighting; fitting in a few rides before they go to work, and then again at the end of the day. I was surprised to find out that Uber drivers don’t know your destination until they accept the ride. Thinking about it, it makes sense; keeps drivers from cherry picking, say, rides to the airport. But one woman told me about accepting a ride and finding out it was to some suburb 40 minutes away -- and she only had a quarter tank.</li>\n 	<li>Of course, there’s more to ridesharing than Uber. I’ve also used Lyft. During busy times, I’ll fire them both up to see which has less of a surge charge, or a shorter wait time. Most drivers will drive for both. In my unscientific polling, most prefer Lyft but get more traffic from Uber. One driver told my wife he prefers Lyft because the Lyft riders talk more. And then he proceeded to unload his life story on my wife and her friend for the next 40 minutes as they battled traffic into Chicago.</li>\n 	<li>I’m always interested in how the gig economy is working for them. For a while, we were reading that the sharing economy, the gig economy of Uber and Airbnb was the next wave. The froth seems to have worn off of that wave, but a lot of the Uber drivers I talk to need that extra money, though often they wonder if it’s worth it. The Mercedes SUV driver who took me from EWR to Hoboken wondered if it was worth hassle of waiting for an airport fare. The only full-time driver I had was in Baltimore, and she said she makes more money delivering packages for Uber than she does delivering passengers, and the packages are much quieter and more pleasant.</li>\n 	<li>But as good as these stories are, the best one I recently heard wasn’t from an Uber driver; it was from the manager of the Chianti farm we stayed at for a couple of days during our trip to Italy. He had lived in the Chicago area for about 10 years. He got his PhD in geochemistry at Univ of Illinois and then worked at Argonne National Labs doing research. After a while, he missed his family and the countryside where he’d grown up, so he moved back to Tuscany, married, had a kid, and now manages a cattle farm with a growing sideline in agritourism. Forget driving for Uber. I want to be this guy.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://www.podsafeaudio.com/jamroom/play.php?band_id=1258&amp;song_id=4378&amp;mode=song_hifi\"><em>Shadows</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.podsafeaudio.com/jamroom/bands/1258/\">Antardhyan</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Overseas for the Election</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>My wife and I flew to Italy the Thursday night before the election. We both voted early, so we didn’t shirk our civic duties. What we did do, though, was leave behind the last blast of election ads and media coverage. I mean, the one bad thing about Game 7 of the World Series going into extra innings was that it gave more time for political ads. We were very happy to leave all that noise behind us.</li>\n 	<li>On Election Day, we had dinner in a nice restaurant in a small town that was 45 minutes of switchbacks and rutted dirt roads away from our hotel. On the way back, I think we dodged a boar and a deer as we crossed back over the ridge of hills and headed down to our hotel. We went to bed while the polls in the US were still open and didn’t really think a thing about it.</li>\n 	<li>I woke up around 7 on Weds morning; Tuesday midnight in Chicago. I glanced at my iPhone and saw a cascade of notifications from the Wall Street Journal and Chicago Tribune about the election results. The election still hadn’t been called, but by the time we sat down for breakfast, it was done. Donald Trump had won.</li>\n 	<li>The Austrian guy working the desk and the breakfast (it was a small hotel) laughed when he walked up -- “At least you guys aren’t having a do-over” The July Austrian presidential election was set aside for problems with absentee ballots and they still haven’t done the revote. “Or Spain, going through two elections without getting a government.”</li>\n 	<li>Now, TravelCommons has never had a political point-of-view and I’m not about to change that here. I have good friends on both sides of the debate. What I will say is that I, like many others, was surprised by the results given all the predictions we’d heard right up until we were wheels up at ORD. All through breakfast, we refreshed our Twitter feeds and hit the Wall Street Journal and New York Times apps, trying to catch up on the coverage we’d slept through the night before. Where the night before, we were happy not to hear about politics, now we were digging for an explanation for this upset.</li>\n 	<li>After an hour of this, and an extra cappuccino, we set the phones aside again. It was nice that we could do that -- walk away from the disbelief (and some might say panic) at the result that was spreading over the media (social and traditional), and schools, and I imagine in the workplaces. Instead, we were driving our little Alfa Romeo through some beautiful Chianti vineyards that were brilliantly yellow with the vine leaves changing colors. We stopped off at the Antinori winery for a bit of a tasting and then continued our drive to Florence. We knew we’d eventually get pulled into the post-election vortex, but we knew we were lucky -- we would be in a cone of silence for another 3 days.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #125</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://promonet.iodalliance.com\">IODA Promonet</a> and <a href=\"http://podsafeaudio.com/\">PodSafe Audio</a></li>\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_125.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #125 — Uber Driver Stories; Overseas for the Election','','inherit','closed','closed','','1666-revision-v1','','','2021-01-14 19:06:00','2021-01-15 00:06:00','',1666,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/1666-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3022,1,'2021-01-14 19:08:30','2021-01-15 00:08:30','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":2168,\"width\":300,\"height\":300,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large is-resized\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1-1024x1024.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2168\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"/></a><figcaption>Wait! I need to unpair my iPhone!</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Was all set to head to San Diego for a week\'s break from Chicago\'s grey January and then looked at the COVID restrictions... and then pivoted to Arizona. With people starting to think about 2021 travel, I pulled together my top 5 travel planning tips. Slow vaccine roll-out will probably keep us restricted for longer than we thought. Andrea Amico of <a href=\"https://www.privacy4cars.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Privacy4Cars</a> joins us to talk about the dangers of leaving our data behind in rental cars. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_171.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go over to the <em>Subscribe</em> section on the right to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/965852275&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #171: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. Stayed off the road over the entire holiday season which let me skip the TSA’s new post-lockdown checkpoint record of <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/coronavirus/passenger-throughput\">1.3 million on January 3rd</a>, the last Sunday of the holiday season -- though, to be fair,&nbsp; this is only just over half the 2.4 million passengers who flew on the same Sunday last year. And with every US airline except Delta now back to selling middle seats, it makes sense that load factors also ratcheted up over the holidays. I haven’t seen any industry-wide numbers yet, but <a href=\"https://www.ittn.ie/news/confidence-in-boeing-737-max-holding-firm/\">American’s COO did say that the load factor on their 737 Maxes over the last week of the holiday season was 90%</a>. Now, most of those Maxes are flying between LGA and MIA, always a busy holiday route, but I’ve seen reports of many other packed flights, as well as the much higher load . I was never a big fan of completely full flights pre-coronavirus and, as you can imagine, am even less so now pre-widespread vaccine distribution. So, I’m not too bothered that we didn’t try to get out of town over the holidays.</li><li>However, staying in town through the rest of January is a whole different thing because January is absolutely the worst part of Chicago’s winter. So, after&nbsp; Thanksgiving weekend, on what used to be called Cyber Monday when we actually shopped in physical stores, instead of trolling through Amazon, I was trolling through travel sites looking for cheap flights to someplace warm the 3rd wk of Jan. I figured that’d be long enough for any holiday COVID spike to work its way through the system.</li><li>I’d had some friends who’d gone down to Mexico, felt safe in the tourist zones, didn’t have any problems, came back healthy; but I don’t do well sitting on a beach for more than a day or two and I wanted to keep it a bit simpler, so we decided to stay in the US, which pretty quickly narrowed our search to Southern California, South Florida, and Arizona. Since we’d spent time last winter in both Arizona and Florida, we decided to do California and go as far down the coast as we could get, which was San Diego.&nbsp; And, as luck would have it, Southwest had cheap direct flights from Chicago Midway and I had Southwest travel credits from one of last spring’s flight cancellations burning a hole in my virtual pocket, so *boom* I booked it</li><li>On, what turned out to be, 3 days before the governor locked down most of California. But a friend hit the ground there a week before Christmas and said “Eh, it’s not a problem.” So, we stayed the course and didn’t really pay any attention to it until after New Years when we thought, you know, we should book a place to stay. And that’s when we started to pay attention. Bike and kayak rental places were open as “outdoor recreation” businesses. But vacation rental and hotel booking sites all pointed to the California Public Health Department statement -- “no hotel or lodging entity in California shall accept or honor out-of-state reservations for nonessential travel” which our January snowbird getaway definitely didn’t qualify as. Would things ease up in a couple of weeks? The trend lines on the state’s COVID website didn’t seem to be pointing in that direction.</li><li>So last Monday when I received another blast of airline sales emails, it seemed like the right time for a pivot. X-ing off California, we were back to Florida and Arizona. We talked to friends already down in Florida; they said the south beaches were already filling up with snowbirds, so we opted for drier sand and swung our Southwest flights over to Phoenix.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>But since we’d been in Phoenix last winter and continuing in the spirit of visiting not-quite-A-list places in the US we’ve never been while weaving around quarantines, we’re driving further south down I-10 to Tucson. We’re running the same travel planning play we did for our August trip to Michigan’s UP -- focus on outdoor activities like hiking and biking, have back-ups in case of last-minute closures, and above all, build a list of microbreweries with outdoor seating.</li><li>Bridge Music -- Say Their Names - Love and Remember by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2020 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/62230 Ft: DJ Lang</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Back at the beginning of December when the Pfizer vaccine approval was imminent and the Moderna approval wasn’t far behind, most travelers -- myself included -- got a bit giddy and started to think about the world opening up in the spring, the summer at the latest. Fast forward 30 days and, happy new year, that initial blast of vaccine optimism melted when it met the ugly realities of last-mile logistics. Spelunking through the stream of low-fare emails from American and Southwest and Delta and United and Iberia and British Airways filling my inbox, the consensus across airline demand forecasters seems to be that nothing’s going to change until the end of May. But even that doesn’t explain why, say, American, sends out an email pushing “Plan a European Vacation” that includes spring fares (March, April, May fares) to London, Manchester, and Madrid. I don’t know anyone who expects European vacation travel to open up in the next 3-4 months. Give credit to Delta for highlighting more achievable destinations -- Cancun, the Bahamas, Phoenix, and just about every airport in Florida with a runway long enough to handle a jet.&nbsp;</li><li>What will be as interesting is what the airlines and hotels do about elite status protection if travel continues to be slow through the summer. Remember that last spring, after it was clear that business travel was canceled for most of 2020, all the big travel companies grandfathered everyone into their status for this year. What you earned in 2019, you kept through this year, 2021. But now what? We talked about this a bit in t<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">he November episode (#169)</a> when the companies made their opening bid, knocking 20-30% off elite qualifying clip levels. Kinda like the low-fare sales -- it’ll be interesting to see what they offer come May.</li><li>We’ve talked in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\">prior episodes</a> about the challenges of planning a trip during COVID -- deciphering lockdown rules; parsing what can seem to be the almost theological differences between stay-at-home advisories vs. orders. And after all that, trying to keep up-to-date on last-minute changes. Things are changing so fast -- open, shut; outdoor seating vs just doing takeout -- that the normal crowdsourced tools we’d use -- things like Google Maps, Yelp -- can’t keep up because they don’t give a real-time view. The Foursquare app used to do it, but since they split <a href=\"https://www.swarmapp.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Swarm</a> from Foursquare, it seems that the real-time data is now sold just to business customers to target mobile ads. But, one app that I use does provide a real-time view into some traffic -- <a href=\"https://untappd.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Uptappd</a>. Yes, it’s just craft beer nerd traffic -- people checking in their beers at tap rooms and beer bars -- but that’s a kind of traffic that I’m pretty interested in.&nbsp; After our pivot to Tucson, I wanted to see what beer places were open for service, not just take-out. I could’ve spent time clicking around the app, but instead, I decided to put one of my lockdown self-improvement projects to use. Over the fall, I’d taken some on-line Python programming courses on Coursera, so I wrote a short program that pulled the most recent check-ins from the Tucson area and started making a list of places that are open. I probably could’ve made that list quicker by just plunking away on the app, but not with the same sense of achievement.</li><li>We talked about COVID-19 vaccination and test certification in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">last episode</a>. Over the last month, it seems that proof of negative test results rather than of vaccinations is the new hotness. Canada, the UK, and now the US are the latest countries requiring a negative COVID test for inbound passengers. It makes sense. The CDC released a paper in November -- in one of my favorite publications, the <a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/index.html\"><em>Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report</em></a> (I’ll link to it in the show notes) -- saying that <a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6945a4.htm\">temperature and symptom screening at airports is pretty worthless</a>; it only picked up 1 case for every 85,000 passengers screened. So not hard for the switch to pre-flight testing to be more effective. For Canada and the UK, though, they’ve layered the test requirements <em>on top of </em>their existing 14-day quarantine requirements, which just adds to the confusion -- especially since the Canadian government gave travelers one week’s notice of the new testing requirement. I haven’t seen the US regs yet, but the Canadian rules say you must have “proof in hand” of a negative test result, and that proof can be either electronic or paper. You gotta think that, pretty quick, that “proof in hand” has gotta default to “proof on phone” otherwise, forged paper results are going to be the new fake IDs from our teens. Last November, French cops <a href=\"https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2020/11/10/fake-tests-covid-flights/\">busted a ring selling fake test results at CDG</a>. The going rate was €150-300 which converts to something like $180-370. That compares to $125 for a <a href=\"https://fakeyourid.com/\">good fake driver’s license</a>.&nbsp; Since the last episode, the Caribbean country of <a href=\"https://skift.com/2020/12/18/airlines-still-waiting-on-governments-for-a-single-digital-health-passport-standard/\">Aruba was the first country</a> to standardize on one of the digital passport apps, <a href=\"https://commonpass.org/\">CommonPass</a>, the one backed by the World Economic Forum, the Davos gang, and, we mentioned, also used by United for their EWR-LHR flight. But then Sing Air picked its rival, <a href=\"https://www.iata.org/en/programs/passenger/travel-pass/\">Travel Pass</a> from IATA, to use on flights to/from Malaysia. So it still seems like, when it does go to “proof on phone”, we’re gonna need to set aside some memory screen space for a bunch of apps.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge music -- Staying Positive by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2019 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/59438 Ft: greg_baumont</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Leaving Data Behind in The Rental Car</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A couple of weeks back, I retweeted a news article - the third suspect charged in the fatal shooting of a retired Chicago fireman during a carjacking was caught because he’d synced his phone to the audio system of the stolen car.&nbsp; I dunno -- fleeing a murder but worrying about getting a ticket for not using hands free.&nbsp; I dunno. Good they caught the bad guy, but what about us law-abiding frequent travelers? When the Hertz or Avis person walks up to me at the car return lane, they always remind me not to leave anything behind; to remember to take my sunglasses and my mobile phone. But they never remind me to delete all the data I synced to the car.&nbsp;</li><li>And with more of our lives getting stored in our phones, I asked Andrea Amico, founder of the company <a href=\"https://www.privacy4cars.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Privacy4Cars</a>, to come onto the podcast to talk about the privacy problems at the intersection of cars and smartphones.<ul><li>Mark: Andrea, how did you get involved in this space?</li></ul><ul><li>Andrea: One of the companies that used to run was one of the largest used car inspection companies. We inspected a lot of vehicles that were ready to be sold. I just noticed that people were leaving their digital lives behind.</li><li>Mark: We first talked about the privacy/security issues around pairing your smartphone with your car rental about four years ago. Bluetooth-enabled entertainment systems were just becoming more common in rental car fleets as hands-free call laws became widespread. Even today, the first thing I do is to sync my iPhone. And I\'ve noticed more times than not, the sync slots are all full -- personalized names, Jan\'s iPhone, Timmy\'s iPhone. You end up having to delete at least one of them to make room for yours. And then, once paired, most phones by default, end up downloading all your contacts and your phone numbers and things like that. So, Jan and Timmy have left behind all of their contacts and all their phone numbers and that\'s just bad in so many ways.</li><li>Andrea: When you sync your phone through Bluetooth or you plug it into the USB port or now, in some newer cars, you just walk into the car and the car automatically sniffs your phone and start syncing to it, including those with Android Auto and Apple CarPlay. When that happens, you are creating a mini-clone of your phone inside the vehicle.</li><li>Mark: What other information are people leaving behind when they don\'t clear themselves out of a rental car?</li><li>Andrea: All sorts -- your phone book, your call logs, the text messages, including the body, meaning the actual text of the text messages; that stuff will be left behind. But also all sorts of meta data that allows criminals or law enforcement or just people who want to snoop on you to re-identify you, anything from the identifiers of your phones which are unique, your Bluetooth MAC address. Not to mention, of course, all your navigation data. I mean, you can reconstruct where people have been, just by data that has been stored in the infotainment system. And then you have, whether you are on Twitter and Facebook and what are the handles of those things, which are the last photos you have taken? What files have you synced, the emails, calendar entries. There\'s all sorts of stuff that people really don\'t understand that they\'re living behind.</li><li>Mark: But when people <em>do </em>delete pairings are they deleting all that information? Or is there some data still retained in that vehicle?</li><li>Andrea: &nbsp;By and large, deleting the data following the manufacturer\'s directions is helpful in preventing third parties to having access. And so if there is anything left behind, it requires a much deeper forensic type of analysis that is typically not accessible. But for most people, following the manufacturer\'s directions on how to remove the data, it is a very easy to do and very effective defense against getting their data being in the hands of somebody else.</li><li>Mark: That\'s where <a href=\"https://www.privacy4cars.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Privacy4Cars</a> comes in. That\'s where your app comes in -- helping people get that right?</li><li>Andrea: Yes, we have a free app that people can download, and you can just search for Privacy4Cars on the <a href=\"https://apps.apple.com/us/app/privacy4cars/id1370969499\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple App Store</a> or <a href=\"https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.privacy4cars\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Play</a>, depending what kind of phone you have, and download it for free.</li><li>Mark: The last time on the podcast we talked about this topic was a little over a year ago, October 2019. &nbsp;I\'d gotten a notice from Hertz that they had changed their terms and conditions. I noticed that Hertz had specifically carved out liability from me leaving information from a Bluetooth pairing. And now, on one hand, I could see that point. I\'ve actively and voluntarily synced my phone to the car and in doing so, caused my information to be downloaded. But at what point does that sort of digital maintenance, clearing personal identifiable information, after every rental become part of the rental company’s overall maintenance responsibility, like checking the oil levels and the tire pressure.</li><li>Andrea: I believe that the time has already passed, and it\'s been in the past for at least a year, right? At least, the passage of California Consumer Privacy Act. And probably you can go further back in the past because of other types of regulations. And there are some regulators who have actually spoken about this. So in the United States, you have the FTC that has issued already four guidances on the need to delete personal information. In Europe, they went as far as to give a guideline that mandates the removal of the personal information. Beyond rental, when people are traveling, sometimes they rent, sometimes they ride-share, and very often it happens to me that I in an Uber or Lyft and you have a very nice driver that tells you, “Hey, you need to fill up the tank on your battery? Here\'s a cable.” And the first thing I do is glance -- &nbsp;where does the cable end up? If it goes into the lighter, that\'s only power. So yes, I’ll recharge my phone. But if it goes straight &nbsp;into the USB port of the car, don\'t charge the phone unless you\'re really desperate, because as soon as your phone powers back up, it will start downloading all your information into a stranger\'s car. So you definitely don\'t want to do that.</li><li>Mark: Andrea Amico, founder of <a href=\"https://www.privacy4cars.com\">Privacy4Cars.com</a>, you can find his app on the <a href=\"https://apps.apple.com/us/app/privacy4cars/id1370969499\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple App store</a> and on <a href=\"https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.privacy4cars\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Play</a>. Andrea, thank you very much for taking the time to talk to us today.</li><li>Andrea: Thank you. Mark. I really enjoyed talking to you.</li></ul></li><li>Bridge music -- Latinium by Javolenus (c) copyright 2020 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Javolenus/62650 Ft: NiGiD</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>2021 Travel Planning Pro Tips</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I’ve been talking about travel planning in the time of COVID across maybe 6 months of episodes. And since January is always a big travel month, especially this year with some vouchers from last spring’s flight cancellations coming up on their 12-month expiration dates, combined with 10 months of pent-up demand and another 6, maybe 9 months to go, I thought I’d pull all my planning tips together here -- and probably in a blog post after I get back from Tucson.</li><li>First, book now. As I said earlier, there’s a steady stream of sales out there right now as airlines, hotels, and rental car companies are looking for cash to get through the start of the year. There are great domestic deals now, and if you can part with some cash now, good international deals for the second half of the year. Prices are only going to go up as vaccine rates improve, and that pent-up demand overwhelms any squeamishness about sitting next to a stranger. I’m eyeing that same American ORD-BCN 787 non-stop that I wasn’t able to take at the end of last September. The deals aren’t as smoking as they were last March when the travel world was in a freefall; the airlines have gotten a little smarter over the past year. But with cancellation fees still waived, there’s not much risk.&nbsp;</li><li>Second, check your destination’s health requirements -- and keep checking until you leave. Many of the airlines have built good web resources that summarize any restrictions by destination. Of the US majors, I think <a href=\"https://www.united.com/ual/en/us/fly/travel/restrictions-map.html\">United’s</a> is the easiest to use but I think American’s is the most complete. They actually link out to a Canadian company, <a href=\"https://apply.joinsherpa.com/travel-restrictions?affiliateId=americanairlines\">Sherpa</a>, that took my Arizona itinerary and noted that, while there’s no quarantine restrictions in Arizona, there are when I return to Chicago.&nbsp; <a href=\"https://www.delta.com/us/en/plan-your-next-trip/where-we-fly\">Delta’s</a> is pretty good too. I’ll put links to them in the show notes. But you can’t check once and be done. We talked at the top of the show about Canada putting in a new testing requirement with 7-days notice. And domestically, states are changing restrictions weekly. One trick I’ve talked about is to start following your destination’s local newspapers on Twitter to get any early warnings on anything new.&nbsp;</li><li>Third, read the cancellation rules a lot more closely. Being nimble and able to react to changes at your destination -- like Irene and I did with our pivot from San Diego to Tucson -- depends on being thoughtful about the cancellation risks you take. Right now, flights have the lowest cancellation risk; Airbnb and vacation rentals, the highest. Hotels are in-between. Our default strategy then is to book the flight as soon as we can, don’t do pre-paid hotel rooms or car rentals, and wait as long as we can before booking an Airbnb.</li><li>Fourth, overload your itinerary with outdoor activities like hiking and biking so last-minute closures or restrictions don’t leave you aimlessly flipping through the hotel TV channels. It was the big trend last summer -- airlines dialed down flights between big city airports like the ORD-LGA run and toward beaches and mountains. And it continues -- all the imagery in the airline and hotel “flash sale” emails over the past couple of weeks. But it does mean spending more time trolling the AccuWeather and Weather Channel web sites because an outside-heavy itinerary is more vulnerable to big storm fronts.</li><li>And finally, stay flexible, expect delays, and be patient. If there’s anything we learned from 2020, it’s that something will screw up your plans -- a positive COVID test will shut down the restaurant you really wanted to eat at, capacity restrictions will mean a line to get into something that was top of your list. Have back-up plans and give everyone you meet the benefit of the doubt. Like you, they’re just trying to get through this safe and sound.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #171</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li>In this episode’s tech notes, if you check out the show notes, you’ll find a full transcript of my interview with Andrea Amico courtesy of my free tier of Amazon Web Services which includes 60 minutes a month of their Transcribe service. I learned about it when watching a session during their virtual Re:Invent conference. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/12/17/podcast-147-holiday-travel-tips-notes-from-santa-fe/\">episode #147</a>, I talked about going to it in person in Las Vegas a couple of years ago -- me and 50,000 other attendees, mostly pudgy, pasty-faced guys power walking up and down the strip, backpacks strapped down tight, ignoring the showgirls on the corner so they wouldn’t be late to, say, the sold-out tutorial on best practices for ingesting streaming data from IoT devices into AWS’ time series database. Less stressful, though less entertaining this year. Anyhow, watching the session on Transcribe got me thinking about how I could use it for the interviews I’ve done over the past 12 months. I’ve started on the most current episodes, working my way back. So far I have three done --this interview with Andrea, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/09/19/podcast-167-6-months-on-why-keep-travel-cards/\">episode #167</a>’s interview with Matt Schulz about travel credit cards, and <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\">episode #166</a>’s interview with Emily Thomas about the meaning of travel. I’ll keep chipping away at the backlog as my 60 free minutes a month allows.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>, as well as asking Alexa, Siri, and Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_171.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips','','inherit','closed','closed','','2997-revision-v1','','','2021-01-14 19:08:30','2021-01-15 00:08:30','',2997,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/2997-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3023,1,'2021-01-14 19:21:12','2021-01-15 00:21:12','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/IMG_2073.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2789 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/IMG_2073-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a><figcaption>The hop taste isn\'t coming through</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>My first post-lockdown flight was a 90-minute Southwest non-stop from Chicago to Nashville. It wasn\'t bad, but not as casually easy as my last pre-coronavirus flight in February. We talk about that experience as well as Hertz\'s new cleaning program, my latest pair of Bose noise-cancelling headphones, and then wonder when business travel will return. All this and more at the<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_165.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"> <strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_165.mp3\"]\n<p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #165: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after a couple of runs back down to Nashville for family stuff -- one in the air and the other on the ground. And with COVID cases spiking in vacation spots like California and south Florida, it seems like that’s the market segment -- folks traveling to see friends and family -- that the airline and hotel companies are banking on. And that’s most of what I saw when flying back from Nashville a few Thursdays ago -- lots of families with kids, groups of people meeting up on the other side of security for maybe some 4 day-weekend trips? The tip-off for me on the business vs. leisure traveler mix was the TSA lines -- solid lines for regular TSA, while I pretty much walked straight through PreCheck. Another tip-off used to be mid-day lines at the bars, but with most of the airport restaurants closed up, that’s not a valid indicator right now.</li><li>Traveling right now requires a bit of nimbleness. On my first post-lockdown trip in May, the workout room at the Spring Hill Hampton Inn was open and I used it every day. Back down in June, there was a piece of paper taped to the door -- “Closed by order of the Health Department”. The front desk agent told me it was a couple of days old -- which explained all the banging in the room above me; somebody must’ve been doing their HIIT workout in their room. I didn’t know if I should be annoyed or impressed at how long they went at it. So for this last trip, I called the hotel the night before I left, before I packed my gym clothes vs. a yoga mat. They told me that they’d just reopened the workout room the day before, so the yoga mat went back in the closet.&nbsp;</li><li>It’s kinda the same very fluid situation right now with bars and restaurants. A few days before we got to Nashville, the mayor closed down any establishment with less than 50% of their sales in food, so pretty much all the bars and taprooms. Makes sense, not arguing it; just forced us to quickly pivot some of our plans. It also forced us to go a bit “old school”, back to making actual phone calls, asking “are you open; dine-in or just take-away?” since places seem to be having trouble updating their websites and their Facebook/Yelp/Google/OpenTable listings fast enough to keep up with the changes.</li><li>It proved out our decision to book the Residence Inn rather than the mainline Marriott a few blocks away. The full-size fridge held a lot more beer, and that kitchenette came in handy when we found out that<a href=\"https://www.princeshotchicken.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"https://www.princeshotchicken.com/\"> Prince’s Hot Chicken</a> was only doing take-away -- I can’t imagine trying to eat an extra-hot half-chicken perched on a king-size bed.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/JeffSpeed68/54450\">Hula Hoop Party</a> by Stefan Kartenberg (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. &nbsp;Ft: Martijn de Boer, Blue Wave Theory</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Lots has been written about how the COVID pandemic has massively accelerated changes toward contactless transactions. Microsoft’s CEO famously said back in April “We’ve seen two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months”.&nbsp; Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #136 — Is Cash A Waning King; Don’t Make It Hard to Cash in on Loyalty\">episode #136</a>, I said I felt like the last generation of cash payers, that my younger colleagues rarely carried cash; they paid for everything with a card. Looking into my wallet, I had the same $200 worth of 20’s in June that I’d taken out of an ATM in March. Nobody wants to handle cash; they don’t even want to handle my card (Most extreme experience - A bartender at Asgard Brewing’s taproom in Columbia, TN sprayed my Visa card with diluted chlorine bleach before swiping it to pay my bill. Made my wallet smell like a swimming pool). As much as possible, places want us to pre-order and pre-pay, so we just pick up our purchases in a socially distant way and then head home. It’s also switched up some opinions on using facial recognition for flight check ins. Pre-coronavirus, the push was from governments as a better way to do security screenings and to improve immigration compliance, and this was getting big pushback on privacy concerns. Now, it’s pivoted. The push is from travel companies using facial recognition as a way of providing the touchless check-in experience that most travelers now want.&nbsp;</li><li>But facial recognition is stymied by face masks which we wear when we’re checking in at airports and hotel lobbies. As is Face ID when trying to unlock my iPhone to get to my boarding pass or digital room key. Until I can downgrade to an iPhone SE with that old-school Touch ID that unlocks using my thumb print, I think I’m going to have to shorten the PIN code on my iPhone 11 Pro. I lengthened it for better security but am banging it in more and more often. And I’ve noticed the iPhone is really slow about recognizing my number presses -- or it misses some when I go too fast (like when I’m trying to pull up a boarding pass in line) and errors out.&nbsp;</li><li>Walking down the Hertz Five Star aisle at Nashville Airport, I saw their version of paper rings that hotels used to put around toilet seats to “certify” they’d been cleaned. In Hertz’s case, they put a “<a href=\"http://ir.hertz.com/2020-05-15-Hertz-Introduces-Hertz-Gold-Standard-Clean-Sealed-and-Certified-Vehicles\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Hertz Gold Standard Clean</a>” sticker across the driver-side center pillar (the B pillar for all my gearhead listeners) so that you break it when you open the driver door to get it. Nice gesture, though it kept me from doing my usual walk down the aisle, opening the door of a bunch of cars to check their mileage. Seemed rude to break all those stickers, though I did notice more than a few broken ones when choosing my car. Way back in the old days of TravelCommons, we used to talk about the TSA doing “security theater” in the screening lines. This feels a bit like “sanitation theater”.&nbsp;</li><li>I finally broke down and bought a new set of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2BbOqyA\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bose noise cancelling headphones -- the new 700’s</a>. This is my third set of Bose cans. Bought my first pair in 2009. I was flying a lot of short flights at the time, and in those days before regional jets, I was on a lot of prop planes. And they’re noisy -- not just on take-off, but the entire flight. After a while, I started to notice fatigue when getting off those planes. Talking to a few folks, they said the noise heightens stress. A friend told me how much he liked his Bose cans, and so I burnt some Amex Membership Rewards points on Amazon for a pair of Quiet Comfort 2’s. It was a revelation; flick the switch and, whoosh, quiet. I took them on every flight, until 3 years later, I left them in a seatback pocket when rushing off a plane to make a tight connection. I immediately lit up some more Membership Rewards points for a new pair - <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3eF2iPk\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">QC-15’s</a>. Four years later, I replaced a worn out set of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2OwiIPF\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">ear cushions</a>. And though the non-replaceable headband cushion is looking pretty ratty, the now 8-year-old headphones still work great. What got me to replace them was the wire. I’d be sitting in my usual aisle seat, plugged into my iPhone (using one of those dongles that Apple no longer gives you with a new phone). At some point in the flight, the folks in the middle and window seats would want to get up and use the toilet and inevitably, I’d snag the wire on the arm of the seat, pull the headphones off my head, and/or launch my phone a row forward.&nbsp; I could’ve gotten a pair of the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3eFWLYJ\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">QC-35’s</a> -- same form factor without the wire -- but decided to go all next-generation with the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2BbOqyA\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">700’s</a>, which has meant some adjustment pains. Like there are buttons in places where they never were before. So when I grab the ear cups to slip the headphones off, I manage to hit a button that changes the noise reduction level or summons Siri. Also new is using the touch surface on the right ear cup to control things. You tap or swipe the right ear cup to accept or drop a call, pause a song, raise or lower the volume, or skip 30 seconds to fast-forward past a podcast ad. I’m learning to be a bit more precise in my motions; I’ve already dropped a couple of calls when I was just trying to turn down the call volume.&nbsp; One thing I really like -- more for working-at-home than in-flight usage -- is that the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2BbOqyA\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">700’s</a> can pair with two Bluetooth devices at the same time. So, for me, I have them paired with my MacBook Air and my iPhone and they switch seamlessly between the two. Nice when I’ve got Zoom calls on my Mac and then a phone call on my iPhone. And, call me shallow, but they look a bit cooler than my old <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3eF2iPk\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">QC-15’s</a>. I’ve had the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2BbOqyA\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">700’s</a> for about a month now and really like them. I guess you could say they’re “TravelCommons Approved.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/bridges/15563\">i knew</a> by bridges (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp;Ft: shannonsongs</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>First Post-Lockdown Flight</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Way back at the beginning of the lockdown, the first Saturday of April, I was on a Zoom beer drinking call with Rob Cheshire, a long-time TravelCommons listener and now a podcaster -- he interviews UK craft brewers on his <em><a href=\"https://thisweekincraft.beer/podcast/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">This Week in Craft Beer</a></em>. It was a Saturday afternoon call, for Rob and the other guys in London; just past noon for me in Chicago, but hey…. And somewhere around our second or third beer, Rob asked me “When will you be comfortable getting on a plane again?” I really didn\'t have a good answer. It was early days; I wasn’t sure.</li><li>Fast forward to the back half of June. I needed to get down to Nashville again and didn’t have the time to burn 8 hrs for the drive down and another 8 on the way back. I had some travel funds sitting in my Southwest account from a couple of April trip cancellations, and Southwest flies 6 non-stop 737s between Chicago and Nashville while American and United only do smaller regional jets, and Southwest isn’t packing them full -- booking those bigger planes at ⅔’s capacity -- while American and United say they’ll let you know if your flight books solid. All told, a pretty easy decision to fly Southwest. One of the benefits of living in Chicago, a rare 3-hub town.</li><li>The day before my flight, when getting my boarding pass on the Southwest app (my usual process; I was contactless before it was a thing), I had to click through a certification that I wasn’t running a temperature and that I hadn’t been exposed to or tested positive for COVID-19. OK, click. Then I get a screen telling me that face masks are required to board. Makes sense, click. And now I get my boarding pass.</li><li>Monday morning, Irene drops me off at a pretty sedate departures curb at Midway. I mask up and walk in. It’s not empty, but it’s definitely not the normal Monday morning bustle. It feels more like a Wednesday early afternoon. There’s a bit of a line at regular security, but no line at PreCheck. The TSA agent asks me to drop my mask for a moment to check my ID and then waves me through. I noticed that TSA still has their October 2020 Real ID deadline warning signs on the podium. Hmm… I remember reading at the end of March that the TSA has <a href=\"https://www.dhs.gov/real-id\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">pushed the deadline a year to October 2021</a>. Guess they haven’t had a chance to issue updated signs. You’d think they’d just take the old ones down.</li><li>Most of the restaurants and stores were closed; a pretty common situation. Kev Monteith, a TravelCommons listener and <a href=\"https://travelswithkev.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amtrak travel blogger</a>, replied to one of my Twitter posts saying “I flew Southwest a few weeks ago. Layovers are rough because most places in the airports are closed. I was at STL and only found beer at Burger King and Dunkin Doughnuts.” I would’ve been happy for just a coffee. Down in the main Southwest concourse, some gates were closed off with curtains which I assume was to keep people from sitting there so they don’t have to clean it.</li><li>Looking around the terminal, it felt like mask usage was about 80%. Just about everyone was wearing them when walking around. I’d see some people not wearing them while sitting at the gate, though those folks were distancing themselves from everyone else. I’d see kids ripping their masks off as soon as they got off the jetway. I did notice, though, a sizable minority of mask wearers were just covering their mouths, leaving their noses uncovered -- pilots, cleaning crew, passengers, wheelchair people. Now I’m no epidemiologist, but that seems to defeat the purpose.</li><li>When the agent called boarding, she said “There’s 40 of you on a plane with 175 seats. So everyone gets their own row, and please, don’t everyone sit up front. We need a bit of weight distribution.” It was a quick boarding; we pushed back and took off early. These truly are unprecedented times.</li><li>Nashville was more crowded on Thursday morning when I headed back home. Mostly families as I said at the top of the show. The end of the concourse where the&nbsp; Southwest gates are was as crowded as usual. There were signs around saying that 3 seats between people equals 6 ft, but there were too many people waiting to make it practical; at least everyone is masked up. I walked back up the terminal to find a bit more space and there, tucked away behind some construction sheeting, I found an empty gate. I’m all alone, mega social distanced, so I take off my mask, log into the WiFi and do some work until the Southwest app on my phone bings, telling me that boarding has begun.&nbsp;</li><li>There were a lot more than 40 people on this flight. I found an empty row and slid all the way over to the window seat since it’s only a 90-minute flight. About 3 minutes later, a guy sat down in the aisle seat. Nobody in the middle seat. Everyone wearing masks and nobody’s head right next to mine, I was good to go. Maybe helped just a bit by the fact that, in those 3 minutes, I pointed all three air jets toward the empty middle seat and turned them on full blast, creating an air curtain between me and the aisle seat -- just in case.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/3lb3r3th/44072\">Misunderstood</a> by 3lb3r3th (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. &nbsp;Ft: Alchemistry</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>When Does Business Travel Come Back?</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>My son Andrew and his girlfriend took the 6am flight to LGA earlier this week. I asked him “How full was the flight?” “Maybe 20 people; mostly families,” he said. Didn’t surprise me that a Thursday 6am LGA flight was only at 11% capacity. That’s normally a business travel run; people getting up at 0 dark 30 in Chicago to make 10am meetings in Manhattan. But there’s not many business travelers now.&nbsp; While business travelers only make up about 10% of passengers on major airlines, they provide between 55 and 75% of the profits. You might could think they’re subsidizing the budget fares those families are using.</li><li>Over the past month, I’ve been talking with Sales VPs at companies that deliver complex IT services. If anybody would be feeling the bite of not traveling, I thought it would be these guys. I’ve done a number of these deals, and they always involved locking all the right decision makers in a conference room to hash out all the contract details and ride herd over the transition. But I was completely wrong. They all said that work hasn’t slowed down during the lockdown. They’ve been able to do all that conference room work over Zoom. Indeed, they said being virtual has made it easier for them. Pre-lockdown, one of their biggest challenges was calendar wrangling -- being able to get all their execs and the client execs into that conference room at the same time. Now, they just click some buttons and everyone shows up in Zoom gallery mode -- no travel planning, no scrambling after cancelled or delayed flights. They all said they love the ease of virtual meetings and, at the end of the day, closing the lid on their laptops and having dinner with the family every night.</li><li>Kinda supports the narrative that business travel will never rebound; back to the Microsoft CEO’s quote: in 2 months, we’ve advanced 2 years in virtual work culture. But when I probed a bit, I found that Zoom hasn’t completely replaced an airplane ticket. While these guys have been able to virtually close deals they had in their sales funnel, virtual meetings don’t seem to be replacing these deals; getting new prospects into the top of the sales funnel. So while things are looking good now, they’re beginning to worry about 4-6 months from now.</li><li>This was the exact opposite of what I’d expected. I thought the give and take of negotiations, the sidebar conversations, the emotional content, wouldn’t translate into video calls. But it looks like I was wrong; that once a deal has some momentum and a structure to guide everyone, the in-person hammering out turns out to be a nice-to-have. And the reason new opportunities aren’t coming in is that they need more exploratory, abstract, wide-ranging conversations that lack that guiding structure and selling a team as much as a product -- at least for complex services -- and that’s tough to do over a pane of glass.</li><li>And so they all said that they’d probably start traveling again -- reluctantly -- by the end of this month. But I do think this, call it a 4-month exercise in figuring out virtual work methods and cultures will move the set point, everybody’s default decision toward virtual meetings. And so maybe a bit less focused on high-profit road warriors and more dependent on those cost-conscious families. Does this mean repointing the 6am LGA flights to Cancun? They’re going to have to seriously reengineer those drink carts.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #165</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_165.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #165 — First Post Lockdown Flight; When Do We Travel For Business Again?','','inherit','closed','closed','','2788-revision-v1','','','2021-01-14 19:21:12','2021-01-15 00:21:12','',2788,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/2788-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3026,1,'2021-02-01 11:10:38','2021-02-01 16:10:38','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3029,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain-e1615489487801.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3029\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I left my suitcase at the door of our West Tucson Airbnb and walked out onto the back patio to watch the sun slip behind the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tucson_Mountains\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tucson Mountains</a>. The shades of red and orange on the undersides of a couple of clouds stood out in the pale blue sky. This was exactly what we were looking for when we left a cold grey Chicago nine hours ago. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3051,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7789-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7789-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3051\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>But then I heard a rustling from the far edge of the patio. A good-sized boar, a wild pig, walked out from between two bushes and walked across the backyard. Then another one. They stopped, turned to look at me, and then kept walking. More kept coming – another six followed the leaders, walking the same path across the backyard, stopping to sniff at a little tree. A quick Google search told me they weren\'t wild pigs but <a href=\"https://www.azgfd.com/wildlife/livingwith/javelina/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">javelinas</a>, a New World relative of the pig. They range from southern Arizona all the way down to Argentina in social groups called \"squadrons\".  Our squad looked comfortable here, like they were taking their usual end-of-day stroll back to wherever they bed down to stay safe from mountain lions. A couple of them came back to check on us the next morning, reminding us to keep the patio door closed.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:quote {\"className\":\"is-style-default\"} -->\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-style-default\"><p>To see a video of the javelina visitation and more, check out my <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/s/aGlnaGxpZ2h0OjE3ODc3MTkxNjk2MTM2MTcx?igshid=18auew1hwvjvo&amp;story_media_id=2489441232116364521\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tucson Instagram Story</a> on the TravelCommons Instagram Page</p></blockquote>\n<!-- /wp:quote -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3,\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h3 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Hiking</strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>As I mentioned in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the last podcast</a>, our plans for this trip were all about outside activities so any last-minute COVID closures or restrictions didn\'t strand us in our Airbnb, aimlessly flipping through TV channels. Since Tucson is <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tucson,_Arizona#Geography\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">surrounded by five small-ish mountain ranges,</a> we focused on hiking.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saguaro_National_Park\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Saguaro National Park</a></strong> is split into two physically separate areas, the Tucson Mountain District (TMD) on the west side of town near where we were staying, and across town to the east, the Rincon Mountain District (RMD). Our drive to the west district wound through the northern part of Tucson Mountain Park; two lanes twisting through gaps between the hilltops. The forecast said it would be the best weather of our stay, the highest temperatures and the lowest chance of rain, so we went for our biggest hike, <a href=\"https://www.arizonahighways.com/explore/hiking/king-canyon-trail\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">an 8-mile loop</a> that would take us to the top of 4,687-foot Wasson Peak. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We planned to park at the <a href=\"https://goo.gl/maps/KPGPZhBw8hDt7aiJ6\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">King Canyon Trailhead</a>, but it was filled with construction equipment that had completely torn up the parking lot. We hung a quick U-turn and, ignoring the warning signs, parked across the street in the far corner of the Arizona-Sonoma Desert Museum. We cut through some brush, crossed the street, and found the start of the trail.  It was sand and larger stones that climbed up from a dry wash. The Park Service has done a nice job of marking the trail, carving out steps on the steeper parts, and putting up signs at the trail intersections. I was glad, though, that I\'d downloaded enough off-line Google Maps data so I could double-check the signs when my mobile connection dropped.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"center\",\"id\":3034,\"width\":512,\"height\":384,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"aligncenter size-large is-resized\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2763.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2763-1024x768.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3034\" width=\"512\" height=\"384\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We walked up through what seemed the cactus version of a forest. The hills were full of all sorts of cacti: tall saguaro, low-to-the ground prickly pear and barrel, and twisted, tangled cholla. The top of Wasson Peak gave a panoramic view of the rocky hills that jutted straight up from the desert floor, and of Tucson sitting at the bottom of them. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3037,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2776-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2776-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3037\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://webcms.pima.gov/cms/One.aspx?pageId=1539\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tucson Mountain Park</a></strong> is directly south of western part of Saguaro National Park. We walked 10 minutes from our Airbnb to the <a href=\"https://goo.gl/maps/jhUVr4RvBoptxDvZ8\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Starr Pass Trailhead</a>. This hike was a 5½-mile loop around the valley floor, not as long nor as scenic as yesterday\'s Saguaro hike, but more leisurely and certainly easier on the feet. We took a bit more time, looking up at the tall saguaro cactuses with all their different arm configurations, and then down at the barrel cactuses that were just beginning to show the light green shoots of new growth. There were more people using these trails; the level terrain made it popular with mountain bikers and runners. And here too, the trails were well-marked and well-maintained.  It was a good afternoon\'s hike.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://www.fs.usda.gov/recarea/coronado/recarea/?recid=80532\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Sabino Canyon Recreational Area</a></strong> was our last hiking spot. It\'s across town, on the northeast side of Tucson in the foothills of the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Catalina_Mountains\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Santa Catalina Mountains</a>.  It was much more crowded than Saguaro or Tucson Mountain, but I might not be making a fair comparison. At Sabino Canyon, we drove to the main visitors center to step off on our hike while our other hikes started at smaller, more remote trailheads. Here again, there was beautiful rugged desert scenery, looking up the mountains and down into the canyons. But the trails weren\'t as well-marked as the other parks. We would lose the trail coming up out of a wash and then wander through cactus and javelina tracks trying to pick it up again. It was a pretty hike, but frustrating.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3,\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h3 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Eating</strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>All the hiking freed up the caloric space we needed to get deep into <a href=\"https://thisistucson.com/eat/sonoran-food-is-having-a-moment-la-writer-gustavo-arellano-will-talk-burritos-and-mexican/article_e409de98-e53d-11e9-892b-73157f4df357.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Sonoran food</a>, a style of Mexican cuisine that hasn\'t yet broken out of its birthplace, <a href=\"https://rovingdecanter.com/2014/10/22/what-is-sonoran-style-mexican-food/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">in this case, Southern Arizona and the Mexican state of Sonora</a>, the way that Tex-Mex, Baja, and Oaxacan cuisines have.  Picking up the menus, I immediately saw some differences – it\'s a <em>burro</em>, not a burrito; a <em>caramelo</em>, not a quesadilla; and tacos are garnished with chopped cabbage instead of the chopped cilantro and raw white onion that is the standard in Chicago. Beef, especially <em>carne asada</em> grilled over mesquite, is the default filling and it\'s served in a thin flour tortilla that\'s more like Chinese moo shu or Peking Duck wrappers than the thick flour tortillas you get with fajitas. <a href=\"https://tucsonfoodie.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tucson Foodie</a> and Andi Berlin, food writer at <a href=\"https://thisistucson.com/eat/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">#ThisIsTucson</a>, were my main guides to Sonoran food.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3046,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7836-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7836-300x238.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3046\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><a href=\"https://www.yelp.com/biz/ruiz-hot-dogs-tucson\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>Ruiz Hot Dogs</strong></a> food truck was our first stop. I\'d read a lot about the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonoran_hot_dog\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Sonoran hot dog</a> and coming from Chicago, another town with its own <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago-style_hot_dog\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">unique twist on a hot dog</a>, I had to give it a try. The Sonoran dog is a bacon-wrapped hot dog topped with chopped tomatoes and onions, pinto beans, mayonnaise, mustard, and salsa verde, served in a slightly sweet split-top bun with a grilled yellow pepper on the side. We ate ours on the hood of our rental car. It was great and a bargain at $3. (1140 S 6th Ave at W 22nd St)</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://www.tacorustico.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">El Taco Rustico</a></strong> was next on our list for tacos – more specifically, quesabirras and cabrito (goat) tacos. We tried the quesabirras first. They\'re  crispy tacos filled with beef birra (juicy stewed beef) and melted cheese, served with a little styrofoam cup of broth, a sort of \"Mexican a jus,\" for dipping. The broth, with a deep roasted dried chile flavor, pulled everything together. What the quesabirras didn\'t soak up, we drank like a chaser from a styrofoam shot glass. Next were tacos. We had cabrito and pollo asado (grilled chicken) tacos, and they were a revelation. The taste of the meat, the mesquite smoke on the grilled chicken and the tang of the goat, punched through the condiments and the tortilla. That this made such an impression on us is a credit to Chef Juan Almanza but also a sad commentary on how the meat at too many taco joints is just an underseasoned carrier for the salsa and garnish. (2281 N Oracle Rd)</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3048,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2804-scaled.jpeg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2804-300x284.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3048\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://www.tacosapson.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tacos Apson</a></strong> was our last stop, down in South Tucson across the street from a high school, and the best stop. We smelled the mesquite coming off the grill when we opened the car door. We walked up to the window and ordered two burros, carne asada and haas, which is a mix of asada, cheese, and roasted green chiles. Then scanning the menu, I added a couple <em>costillas</em> tacos, grilled beef ribs.  Back at the Airbnb, I cut burros in half. The thin flour tortilla was wrapped around nothing but the meat; none of typical burrito fillings, no rice or beans or lettuce or crema. There was nothing to mask the mesquite on the carne asada or the beef ribs, and the cheese and green chile in the haas burro accentuated rather than overwhelmed the beef. (3501 S 12th Ave)</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3,\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h3 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Drinking</strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I can\'t hike and eat Mexican food without beer. Tucson isn\'t on anyone\'s <a href=\"https://beerandbrewing.com/best-in-beer-2020-readers-choice-your-favorite-beer-cities/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">list of top beer cities</a>, but I found a couple of solid microbreweries to recommend.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3063,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2789-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2789-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3063\"/></a><figcaption>1912 Brewing Menu Board</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://1912brewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">1912 Brewing Company</a></strong> is in a strip of nondescript light industrial buildings just west of I-10, a quick 5-minute drive from El Taco Rustico. They have 20 taps and turn out good beer over a wider variety of styles than most places – goses, saisons, and some German styles in addition to the usual IPAs. (2045 N Forbes Blvd, Ste 105) </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://www.pueblovidabrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pueblo Vida Brewing Company</a></strong> is in downtown Tucson. After navigating one-way streets and dodging street car, we found parking and walked over to the taproom only to find that the taproom was still closed due to COVID restrictions. But they were selling cans from a walk-up window. We had a nice chat with the woman helping us and bought a mixed 4-pack to go with our Tacos Apson take-away – a Vietnamese-inspired rice lager, a couple of hazy IPAs made with local Sonoran white wheat, and what I was most excited for, a black IPA. They were the best beers of the trip. (115 E Broadway Blvd)</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3,\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h3 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Resources</strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Travel and Lodging</strong><ul><li>We flew Southwest Airline to Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport (PHX) from Chicago Midway (MDW). Prices and flight selection were much better than flying into Tucson (TUS).</li><li>We rented a car from Hertz at PHX and drove the 115 miles down I-10 to Tucson.  It was an easy drive that took us an hour and 40 minutes. PHX is on the south side of Phoenix right by I-10, so we didn\'t hit any Phoenix traffic on the drive.</li><li>Our Airbnb was a one-bedroom time-share suite at <a href=\"https://clubwyndham.wyndhamdestinations.com/us/en/resorts/wyndham-hotels-resorts/united-states-of-america/arizona/tucson/starr-pass-golf-suites\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Starr Pass Golf Suites</a>.   It was a nice resort though we didn\'t get around to using any of the amenities (pool, golf course, restaurant). We\'re glad we stayed out near the Tucson Mountains rather than a downtown hotel. Tucson isn\'t that big, so we weren\'t more than 25 minutes from anywhere we wanted to be.</li></ul></li><li><strong>Hiking</strong> <ul><li><a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saguaro_National_Park\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Saguaro National Park</a></li><li><a href=\"https://webcms.pima.gov/cms/One.aspx?pageId=1539\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tucson Mountain Park</a></li><li><a href=\"https://www.fs.usda.gov/recarea/coronado/recarea/?recid=80532\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Sabino Canyon Recreational Area</a></li></ul></li><li><strong>Sonoran Food</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.yelp.com/biz/ruiz-hot-dogs-tucson\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Ruiz Hot Dogs</a>, 1140 S 6th Ave at W 22nd St</li><li><a href=\"https://www.tacorustico.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">El Taco Rustico</a>, 2281 N Oracle Rd</li><li><a href=\"https://www.tacosapson.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tacos Apson</a>, 3501 S 12th Ave</li></ul></li><li><strong>Craft Beer</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://1912brewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">1912 Brewing Company</a>, 2045 N Forbes Blvd, Ste 105</li><li><a href=\"https://www.pueblovidabrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pueblo Vida Brewing Company</a>, 115 E Broadway Blvd</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Quick Notes on Our Trip to Tucson','','publish','closed','closed','','quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson','','https://rovingdecanter.com/2014/10/22/what-is-sonoran-style-mexican-food/\nhttps://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/','2021-03-11 14:08:33','2021-03-11 19:08:33','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3026',0,'post','',1),
(3027,1,'2021-01-27 17:22:52','2021-01-27 22:22:52','','Quick Notes on Tucson Trip','','inherit','closed','closed','','3026-revision-v1','','','2021-01-27 17:22:52','2021-01-27 22:22:52','',3026,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/27/3026-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3028,1,'2021-01-27 18:35:59','2021-01-27 23:35:59','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I left my suitcase at the door of our West Tucson Airbnb, pulled open the patio door, and watched the sun slip behind the Tucson Mountains. The shades of red and orange on the undersides of a couple of clouds in the sky stood out in the pale blue sky. This was exactly what we were looking for when we left behind a cold grey Chicago sky 9 hours ago. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>But then a noise pulled my attention to the edge of the patio. A good-sized boar, a wild pig, came up out of the brush and walked across the backyard. Then another one. They stopped, looked at me, and then kept walking. And then another 5-6 of them emerged and followed the same path. A quick Google search told me they weren\'t wild pigs but <a href=\"https://www.azgfd.com/wildlife/livingwith/javelina/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">javelinas</a>, a New World relative of the pig. They range from southern Arizona all the way down to Argentina in social groups called \"squadrons\".  Our squad checked in on us a couple more times while we were there.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Quick Notes on Tucson Trip','','inherit','closed','closed','','3026-revision-v1','','','2021-01-27 18:35:59','2021-01-27 23:35:59','',3026,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/27/3026-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3029,1,'2021-01-28 12:46:04','2021-01-28 17:46:04','','Tuscon_Mountain','','inherit','open','closed','','tuscon_mountain','','','2021-01-28 12:46:04','2021-01-28 17:46:04','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(3030,1,'2021-01-28 12:54:20','2021-01-28 17:54:20','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3029,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3029\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I left my suitcase at the door of our West Tucson Airbnb, pulled open the patio door, and watched the sun slip behind the Tucson Mountains. The shades of red and orange on the undersides of a couple of clouds in the sky stood out in the pale blue sky. This was exactly what we were looking for when we left behind a cold grey Chicago sky 9 hours ago. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>But then a noise pulled my attention to the edge of the patio. A good-sized boar, a wild pig, came up out of the brush and walked across the backyard. Then another one. They stopped, looked at me, and then kept walking. And then another 5-6 of them emerged and followed the same path. A quick Google search told me they weren\'t wild pigs but <a href=\"https://www.azgfd.com/wildlife/livingwith/javelina/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">javelinas</a>, a New World relative of the pig. They range from southern Arizona all the way down to Argentina in social groups called \"squadrons\".  Our squad checked in on us a couple more times while we were there.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Quick Notes on Tucson Trip','','inherit','closed','closed','','3026-revision-v1','','','2021-01-28 12:54:20','2021-01-28 17:54:20','',3026,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/28/3026-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3032,1,'2021-01-28 13:03:14','2021-01-28 18:03:14','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3029,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3029\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I left my suitcase at the door of our West Tucson Airbnb, pulled open the patio door, and watched the sun slip behind the Tucson Mountains. The shades of red and orange on the undersides of a couple of clouds in the sky stood out in the pale blue sky. This was exactly what we were looking for when we left behind a cold grey Chicago sky 9 hours ago. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:video {\"id\":3031,\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-video alignright\"><video controls src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2742.mov\" playsinline></video><figcaption>Visiting javelina squad</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:video -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>But then a noise pulled my attention to the edge of the patio. A good-sized boar, a wild pig, came up out of the brush and walked across the backyard. Then another one. They stopped, looked at me, and then kept walking. And then another 5-6 of them emerged and followed the same path. A quick Google search told me they weren\'t wild pigs but <a href=\"https://www.azgfd.com/wildlife/livingwith/javelina/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">javelinas</a>, a New World relative of the pig. They range from southern Arizona all the way down to Argentina in social groups called \"squadrons\".  Our squad checked in on us a couple more times while we were there.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Quick Notes on Tucson Trip','','inherit','closed','closed','','3026-revision-v1','','','2021-01-28 13:03:14','2021-01-28 18:03:14','',3026,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/28/3026-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3033,1,'2021-01-28 16:55:44','2021-01-28 21:55:44','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3029,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3029\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I left my suitcase at the door of our West Tucson Airbnb, pulled open the patio door, and watched the sun slip behind the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tucson_Mountains\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tucson Mountains</a>. The shades of red and orange on the undersides of a couple of clouds in the sky stood out in the pale blue sky. This was exactly what we were looking for when we left behind a cold grey Chicago sky 9 hours ago. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>But then a noise pulled my attention to the edge of the patio. A good-sized boar, a wild pig, came up out of the brush and walked across the backyard. Then another one. They stopped, looked at me, and then kept walking. And then another 5-6 of them emerged and followed the same path. A quick Google search told me they weren\'t wild pigs but <a href=\"https://www.azgfd.com/wildlife/livingwith/javelina/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">javelinas</a>, a New World relative of the pig. They range from southern Arizona all the way down to Argentina in social groups called \"squadrons\".  Our squad checked in on us a couple more times while we were there.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"normal\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-normal-font-size\">Hiking</h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>As I mentioned in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the last podcast</a>, our plans for this trip focused on outside activities so any last-minute COVID closures or restrictions didn\'t leave us aimlessly flipping through TV channels in our Airbnb. Tucson is <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tucson,_Arizona#Geography\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">surrounded by five small-ish mountain ranges,</a> so we narrowed in on hiking.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saguaro_National_Park\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Saguaro National Park</a></strong> is split into two separate areas, the Tucson Mountain District (TMD) on the west side of town and the Rincon Mountain District (RMD) on the east. Our drive to the west district wound through the northern part of Tucson Mountain Park; two lanes twisting through gaps between the hilltops. This day had the best weather forecast of our stay, the warmest temperatures and the least probability for rain, so we went for the biggest hike, <a href=\"https://www.arizonahighways.com/explore/hiking/king-canyon-trail\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">an 8-mile loop</a> that included reaching the top of 4,687-foot Wasson Peak. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>The King Canyon Trail was sand and larger stones that climbed up from a dry wash. The Park Service has done a nice job of carving out steps on the steeper parts and putting up signs at the trail intersections. I was still glad, though, that I\'d downloaded enough off-line Google Maps data to double-check the signs even when I didn\'t have mobile coverage</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We walked up through what seemed to be the cactus version of a forest. The hills were full of saguaro cactus, paddle or prickly pear cactus, barrel cactus, and cholla cactus. As we got further up, we looked out to the south over the hills we\'d walked up and across to the next range of rocky hills that seemed to jut straight up from the desert floor. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Quick Notes on Tucson Trip','','inherit','closed','closed','','3026-revision-v1','','','2021-01-28 16:55:44','2021-01-28 21:55:44','',3026,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/28/3026-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3034,1,'2021-01-28 18:19:33','2021-01-28 23:19:33','','IMG_2763','','inherit','open','closed','','img_2763','','','2021-01-28 18:19:33','2021-01-28 23:19:33','',3026,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2763.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(3035,1,'2021-01-28 18:21:10','2021-01-28 23:21:10','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3029,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3029\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I left my suitcase at the door of our West Tucson Airbnb, pulled open the patio door, and watched the sun slip behind the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tucson_Mountains\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tucson Mountains</a>. The shades of red and orange on the undersides of a couple of clouds in the sky stood out in the pale blue sky. This was exactly what we were looking for when we left behind a cold grey Chicago sky 9 hours ago. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>But then a noise pulled my attention to the edge of the patio. A good-sized boar, a wild pig, came up out of the brush and walked across the backyard. Then another one. They stopped, looked at me, and then kept walking. And then another 5-6 of them emerged and followed the same path. A quick Google search told me they weren\'t wild pigs but <a href=\"https://www.azgfd.com/wildlife/livingwith/javelina/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">javelinas</a>, a New World relative of the pig. They range from southern Arizona all the way down to Argentina in social groups called \"squadrons\".  Our squad checked in on us a couple more times while we were there.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"normal\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-normal-font-size\">Hiking</h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>As I mentioned in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the last podcast</a>, our plans for this trip focused on outside activities so any last-minute COVID closures or restrictions didn\'t leave us aimlessly flipping through TV channels in our Airbnb. Tucson is <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tucson,_Arizona#Geography\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">surrounded by five small-ish mountain ranges,</a> so we narrowed in on hiking.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saguaro_National_Park\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Saguaro National Park</a></strong> is split into two separate areas, the Tucson Mountain District (TMD) on the west side of town and the Rincon Mountain District (RMD) on the east. Our drive to the west district wound through the northern part of Tucson Mountain Park; two lanes twisting through gaps between the hilltops. This day had the best weather forecast of our stay, the warmest temperatures and the least probability for rain, so we went for the biggest hike, <a href=\"https://www.arizonahighways.com/explore/hiking/king-canyon-trail\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">an 8-mile loop</a> that included reaching the top of 4,687-foot Wasson Peak. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>The trail was sand and larger stones that climbed up from a dry wash. The Park Service has done a nice job of carving out steps on the steeper parts and putting up signs at the trail intersections. I was still glad, though, that I\'d downloaded enough off-line Google Maps data to double-check the signs even when I didn\'t have mobile coverage</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"center\",\"id\":3034,\"width\":512,\"height\":384,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"aligncenter size-large is-resized\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2763.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2763-1024x768.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3034\" width=\"512\" height=\"384\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We walked up through what seemed to be the cactus version of a forest. The hills were full of saguaro cactus, paddle or prickly pear cactus, barrel cactus, and cholla cactus. The top of Wasson Peak offered a panoramic view of the rocky hills that seemed to jut straight up from the desert floor, and of Tucson sitting at the bottom of them. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://webcms.pima.gov/cms/One.aspx?pageId=1539\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tucson Mountain Park</a></strong> is directly south of Saguaro National Park - TMD. Our stepping-off point, the Starr Pass trailhead, was a 10-minute walk from our Airbnb. The hike was 5½ miles that looped around the valley floor, so not as long nor as scenic as our Saguaro hike, but more relaxed. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Quick Notes on Tucson Trip','','inherit','closed','closed','','3026-revision-v1','','','2021-01-28 18:21:10','2021-01-28 23:21:10','',3026,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/28/3026-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3036,1,'2021-01-28 18:36:17','2021-01-28 23:36:17','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3029,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3029\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I left my suitcase at the door of our West Tucson Airbnb, pulled open the patio door, and watched the sun slip behind the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tucson_Mountains\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tucson Mountains</a>. The shades of red and orange on the undersides of a couple of clouds in the sky stood out in the pale blue sky. This was exactly what we were looking for when we left behind a cold grey Chicago sky 9 hours ago. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>But then a noise pulled my attention to the edge of the patio. A good-sized boar, a wild pig, came up out of the brush and walked across the backyard. Then another one. They stopped, looked at me, and then kept walking. And then another 5-6 of them emerged and followed the same path. A quick Google search told me they weren\'t wild pigs but <a href=\"https://www.azgfd.com/wildlife/livingwith/javelina/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">javelinas</a>, a New World relative of the pig. They range from southern Arizona all the way down to Argentina in social groups called \"squadrons\".  Our squad checked in on us a couple more times while we were there.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"normal\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-normal-font-size\">Hiking</h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>As I mentioned in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the last podcast</a>, our plans for this trip focused on outside activities so any last-minute COVID closures or restrictions didn\'t leave us aimlessly flipping through TV channels in our Airbnb. Tucson is <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tucson,_Arizona#Geography\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">surrounded by five small-ish mountain ranges,</a> so we narrowed in on hiking.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saguaro_National_Park\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Saguaro National Park</a></strong> is split into two separate areas, the Tucson Mountain District (TMD) on the west side of town and the Rincon Mountain District (RMD) on the east. Our drive to the west district wound through the northern part of Tucson Mountain Park; two lanes twisting through gaps between the hilltops. This day had the best weather forecast of our stay, the warmest temperatures and the least probability for rain, so we went for the biggest hike, <a href=\"https://www.arizonahighways.com/explore/hiking/king-canyon-trail\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">an 8-mile loop</a> that included reaching the top of 4,687-foot Wasson Peak. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>The trail was sand and larger stones that climbed up from a dry wash. The Park Service has done a nice job of carving out steps on the steeper parts and putting up signs at the trail intersections. I was still glad, though, that I\'d downloaded enough off-line Google Maps data to double-check the signs even when I didn\'t have mobile coverage</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"center\",\"id\":3034,\"width\":512,\"height\":384,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"aligncenter size-large is-resized\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2763.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2763-1024x768.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3034\" width=\"512\" height=\"384\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We walked up through what seemed to be the cactus version of a forest. The hills were full of saguaro cactus, paddle or prickly pear cactus, barrel cactus, and cholla cactus. The top of Wasson Peak offered a panoramic view of the rocky hills that seemed to jut straight up from the desert floor, and of Tucson sitting at the bottom of them. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://webcms.pima.gov/cms/One.aspx?pageId=1539\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tucson Mountain Park</a></strong> is directly south of Saguaro National Park - TMD. Our stepping-off point, the Starr Pass trailhead, was a 10-minute walk from our Airbnb. The hike was 5½ miles that looped around the valley floor, so not as long nor as scenic as our Saguaro hike, but more relaxed.  There were also more people on the trails – mountain bikers, runners, as well as other hikers. So what the hike lacked in scenery and physical challenge, it made up in equanimity.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://www.fs.usda.gov/recarea/coronado/recarea/?recid=80532\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Sabino Canyon Recreational Area</a></strong> was our last hiking spot. It\'s on the northeast side of Tucson, in the foothills of the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Catalina_Mountains\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Santa Catalina Mountains</a>.  Sabino Canyon was much more crowded than Saguaro or Tucson Mountain, but here, we drove to the main visitors center. We started our other hikes at smaller trailheads, so it might not be a fair comparison. Sabino Canyon </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Quick Notes on Tucson Trip','','inherit','closed','closed','','3026-revision-v1','','','2021-01-28 18:36:17','2021-01-28 23:36:17','',3026,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/28/3026-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3037,1,'2021-01-28 21:24:45','2021-01-29 02:24:45','','IMG_2776','','inherit','open','closed','','img_2776','','','2021-01-28 21:24:45','2021-01-29 02:24:45','',3026,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2776.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(3038,1,'2021-01-28 21:37:14','2021-01-29 02:37:14','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3029,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3029\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I left my suitcase at the door of our West Tucson Airbnb, pulled open the patio door, and watched the sun slip behind the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tucson_Mountains\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tucson Mountains</a>. The shades of red and orange on the undersides of a couple of clouds in the sky stood out in the pale blue sky. This was exactly what we were looking for when we left behind a cold grey Chicago sky 9 hours ago. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>But then a noise pulled my attention to the edge of the patio. A good-sized boar, a wild pig, came up out of the brush and walked across the backyard. Then another one. They stopped, looked at me, and then kept walking. And then another 5-6 of them emerged and followed the same path. A quick Google search told me they weren\'t wild pigs but <a href=\"https://www.azgfd.com/wildlife/livingwith/javelina/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">javelinas</a>, a New World relative of the pig. They range from southern Arizona all the way down to Argentina in social groups called \"squadrons\".  Our squad checked in on us a couple more times while we were there.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\">Hiking</h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>As I mentioned in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the last podcast</a>, our plans for this trip focused on outside activities so any last-minute COVID closures or restrictions didn\'t leave us aimlessly flipping through TV channels in our Airbnb. Tucson is <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tucson,_Arizona#Geography\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">surrounded by five small-ish mountain ranges,</a> so we narrowed in on hiking.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saguaro_National_Park\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Saguaro National Park</a></strong> is split into two separate areas, the Tucson Mountain District (TMD) on the west side of town and the Rincon Mountain District (RMD) on the east. Our drive to the west district wound through the northern part of Tucson Mountain Park; two lanes twisting through gaps between the hilltops. This day had the best weather forecast of our stay, the warmest temperatures and the least probability for rain, so we went for the biggest hike, <a href=\"https://www.arizonahighways.com/explore/hiking/king-canyon-trail\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">an 8-mile loop</a> that included reaching the top of 4,687-foot Wasson Peak. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>The trail was sand and larger stones that climbed up from a dry wash. The Park Service has done a nice job of carving out steps on the steeper parts and putting up signs at the trail intersections. I was still glad, though, that I\'d downloaded enough off-line Google Maps data to double-check the signs even when I didn\'t have mobile coverage</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"center\",\"id\":3034,\"width\":512,\"height\":384,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"aligncenter size-large is-resized\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2763.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2763-1024x768.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3034\" width=\"512\" height=\"384\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We walked up through what seemed to be the cactus version of a forest. The hills were full of saguaro cactus, paddle or prickly pear cactus, barrel cactus, and cholla cactus. The top of Wasson Peak offered a panoramic view of the rocky hills that seemed to jut straight up from the desert floor, and of Tucson sitting at the bottom of them. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3037,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2776-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2776-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3037\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://webcms.pima.gov/cms/One.aspx?pageId=1539\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tucson Mountain Park</a></strong> is directly south of Saguaro National Park - TMD. Our stepping-off point, the Starr Pass trailhead, was a 10-minute walk from our Airbnb. The hike was 5½ miles that looped around the valley floor, so not as long nor as scenic as our Saguaro hike, but a bit more leisurely. Here too we wound our way around, looking up at the tall saguaro cactuses and then down at the barrel cactuses just beginning to show the light green shoots of new growth. There were more people using the trails; the level terrain made it popular with mountain bikers and runners. But here too, the trails were well-marked and well-maintained, and with a good variety of cactus.  It was a good afternoon\'s hike.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://www.fs.usda.gov/recarea/coronado/recarea/?recid=80532\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Sabino Canyon Recreational Area</a></strong> was our last hiking spot. It\'s on the northeast side of Tucson, in the foothills of the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Catalina_Mountains\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Santa Catalina Mountains</a>.  Sabino Canyon was much more crowded than Saguaro or Tucson Mountain, but I might not be making a fair comparison. At Sabino Canyon, we drove to the main visitors center for our hike while we started our other hikes at smaller, more remote trailheads. Here again, there was beautiful rugged desert scenery, looking up the mountains and down into the canyons. But the trails weren\'t well-marked. We would lose the trail coming up out of a wash and then wander through cactus and javelina tracks trying to pick it up again. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\">Eating</h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->','Quick Notes on Tucson Trip','','inherit','closed','closed','','3026-revision-v1','','','2021-01-28 21:37:14','2021-01-29 02:37:14','',3026,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/28/3026-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3040,1,'2021-01-28 21:42:24','2021-01-29 02:42:24','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":2168,\"width\":300,\"height\":300,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large is-resized\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1-1024x1024.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2168\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"/></a><figcaption>Wait! I need to unpair my iPhone!</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Was all set to head to San Diego for a week\'s break from Chicago\'s grey January and then looked at the COVID restrictions... and then pivoted to Arizona. With people starting to think about 2021 travel, I pulled together my top 5 travel planning tips. Slow vaccine roll-out will probably keep us restricted for longer than we thought. Andrea Amico of <a href=\"https://www.privacy4cars.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Privacy4Cars</a> joins us to talk about the dangers of leaving our data behind in rental cars. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_171.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go over to the <em>Subscribe</em> section on the right to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/965852275&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #171: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\">This Week</h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. Stayed off the road over the entire holiday season which let me skip the TSA’s new post-lockdown checkpoint record of <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/coronavirus/passenger-throughput\">1.3 million on January 3rd</a>, the last Sunday of the holiday season -- though, to be fair,&nbsp; this is only just over half the 2.4 million passengers who flew on the same Sunday last year. And with every US airline except Delta now back to selling middle seats, it makes sense that load factors also ratcheted up over the holidays. I haven’t seen any industry-wide numbers yet, but <a href=\"https://www.ittn.ie/news/confidence-in-boeing-737-max-holding-firm/\">American’s COO did say that the load factor on their 737 Maxes over the last week of the holiday season was 90%</a>. Now, most of those Maxes are flying between LGA and MIA, always a busy holiday route, but I’ve seen reports of many other packed flights, as well as the much higher load . I was never a big fan of completely full flights pre-coronavirus and, as you can imagine, am even less so now pre-widespread vaccine distribution. So, I’m not too bothered that we didn’t try to get out of town over the holidays.</li><li>However, staying in town through the rest of January is a whole different thing because January is absolutely the worst part of Chicago’s winter. So, after&nbsp; Thanksgiving weekend, on what used to be called Cyber Monday when we actually shopped in physical stores, instead of trolling through Amazon, I was trolling through travel sites looking for cheap flights to someplace warm the 3rd wk of Jan. I figured that’d be long enough for any holiday COVID spike to work its way through the system.</li><li>I’d had some friends who’d gone down to Mexico, felt safe in the tourist zones, didn’t have any problems, came back healthy; but I don’t do well sitting on a beach for more than a day or two and I wanted to keep it a bit simpler, so we decided to stay in the US, which pretty quickly narrowed our search to Southern California, South Florida, and Arizona. Since we’d spent time last winter in both Arizona and Florida, we decided to do California and go as far down the coast as we could get, which was San Diego.&nbsp; And, as luck would have it, Southwest had cheap direct flights from Chicago Midway and I had Southwest travel credits from one of last spring’s flight cancellations burning a hole in my virtual pocket, so *boom* I booked it</li><li>On, what turned out to be, 3 days before the governor locked down most of California. But a friend hit the ground there a week before Christmas and said “Eh, it’s not a problem.” So, we stayed the course and didn’t really pay any attention to it until after New Years when we thought, you know, we should book a place to stay. And that’s when we started to pay attention. Bike and kayak rental places were open as “outdoor recreation” businesses. But vacation rental and hotel booking sites all pointed to the California Public Health Department statement -- “no hotel or lodging entity in California shall accept or honor out-of-state reservations for nonessential travel” which our January snowbird getaway definitely didn’t qualify as. Would things ease up in a couple of weeks? The trend lines on the state’s COVID website didn’t seem to be pointing in that direction.</li><li>So last Monday when I received another blast of airline sales emails, it seemed like the right time for a pivot. X-ing off California, we were back to Florida and Arizona. We talked to friends already down in Florida; they said the south beaches were already filling up with snowbirds, so we opted for drier sand and swung our Southwest flights over to Phoenix.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>But since we’d been in Phoenix last winter and continuing in the spirit of visiting not-quite-A-list places in the US we’ve never been while weaving around quarantines, we’re driving further south down I-10 to Tucson. We’re running the same travel planning play we did for our August trip to Michigan’s UP -- focus on outdoor activities like hiking and biking, have back-ups in case of last-minute closures, and above all, build a list of microbreweries with outdoor seating.</li><li>Bridge Music -- Say Their Names - Love and Remember by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2020 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/62230 Ft: DJ Lang</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\">Following Up</h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Back at the beginning of December when the Pfizer vaccine approval was imminent and the Moderna approval wasn’t far behind, most travelers -- myself included -- got a bit giddy and started to think about the world opening up in the spring, the summer at the latest. Fast forward 30 days and, happy new year, that initial blast of vaccine optimism melted when it met the ugly realities of last-mile logistics. Spelunking through the stream of low-fare emails from American and Southwest and Delta and United and Iberia and British Airways filling my inbox, the consensus across airline demand forecasters seems to be that nothing’s going to change until the end of May. But even that doesn’t explain why, say, American, sends out an email pushing “Plan a European Vacation” that includes spring fares (March, April, May fares) to London, Manchester, and Madrid. I don’t know anyone who expects European vacation travel to open up in the next 3-4 months. Give credit to Delta for highlighting more achievable destinations -- Cancun, the Bahamas, Phoenix, and just about every airport in Florida with a runway long enough to handle a jet.&nbsp;</li><li>What will be as interesting is what the airlines and hotels do about elite status protection if travel continues to be slow through the summer. Remember that last spring, after it was clear that business travel was canceled for most of 2020, all the big travel companies grandfathered everyone into their status for this year. What you earned in 2019, you kept through this year, 2021. But now what? We talked about this a bit in t<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">he November episode (#169)</a> when the companies made their opening bid, knocking 20-30% off elite qualifying clip levels. Kinda like the low-fare sales -- it’ll be interesting to see what they offer come May.</li><li>We’ve talked in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\">prior episodes</a> about the challenges of planning a trip during COVID -- deciphering lockdown rules; parsing what can seem to be the almost theological differences between stay-at-home advisories vs. orders. And after all that, trying to keep up-to-date on last-minute changes. Things are changing so fast -- open, shut; outdoor seating vs just doing takeout -- that the normal crowdsourced tools we’d use -- things like Google Maps, Yelp -- can’t keep up because they don’t give a real-time view. The Foursquare app used to do it, but since they split <a href=\"https://www.swarmapp.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Swarm</a> from Foursquare, it seems that the real-time data is now sold just to business customers to target mobile ads. But, one app that I use does provide a real-time view into some traffic -- <a href=\"https://untappd.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Uptappd</a>. Yes, it’s just craft beer nerd traffic -- people checking in their beers at tap rooms and beer bars -- but that’s a kind of traffic that I’m pretty interested in.&nbsp; After our pivot to Tucson, I wanted to see what beer places were open for service, not just take-out. I could’ve spent time clicking around the app, but instead, I decided to put one of my lockdown self-improvement projects to use. Over the fall, I’d taken some on-line Python programming courses on Coursera, so I wrote a short program that pulled the most recent check-ins from the Tucson area and started making a list of places that are open. I probably could’ve made that list quicker by just plunking away on the app, but not with the same sense of achievement.</li><li>We talked about COVID-19 vaccination and test certification in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">last episode</a>. Over the last month, it seems that proof of negative test results rather than of vaccinations is the new hotness. Canada, the UK, and now the US are the latest countries requiring a negative COVID test for inbound passengers. It makes sense. The CDC released a paper in November -- in one of my favorite publications, the <a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/index.html\"><em>Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report</em></a> (I’ll link to it in the show notes) -- saying that <a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6945a4.htm\">temperature and symptom screening at airports is pretty worthless</a>; it only picked up 1 case for every 85,000 passengers screened. So not hard for the switch to pre-flight testing to be more effective. For Canada and the UK, though, they’ve layered the test requirements <em>on top of </em>their existing 14-day quarantine requirements, which just adds to the confusion -- especially since the Canadian government gave travelers one week’s notice of the new testing requirement. I haven’t seen the US regs yet, but the Canadian rules say you must have “proof in hand” of a negative test result, and that proof can be either electronic or paper. You gotta think that, pretty quick, that “proof in hand” has gotta default to “proof on phone” otherwise, forged paper results are going to be the new fake IDs from our teens. Last November, French cops <a href=\"https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2020/11/10/fake-tests-covid-flights/\">busted a ring selling fake test results at CDG</a>. The going rate was €150-300 which converts to something like $180-370. That compares to $125 for a <a href=\"https://fakeyourid.com/\">good fake driver’s license</a>.&nbsp; Since the last episode, the Caribbean country of <a href=\"https://skift.com/2020/12/18/airlines-still-waiting-on-governments-for-a-single-digital-health-passport-standard/\">Aruba was the first country</a> to standardize on one of the digital passport apps, <a href=\"https://commonpass.org/\">CommonPass</a>, the one backed by the World Economic Forum, the Davos gang, and, we mentioned, also used by United for their EWR-LHR flight. But then Sing Air picked its rival, <a href=\"https://www.iata.org/en/programs/passenger/travel-pass/\">Travel Pass</a> from IATA, to use on flights to/from Malaysia. So it still seems like, when it does go to “proof on phone”, we’re gonna need to set aside some memory screen space for a bunch of apps.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge music -- Staying Positive by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2019 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/59438 Ft: greg_baumont</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\">Leaving Data Behind in The Rental Car</h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A couple of weeks back, I retweeted a news article - the third suspect charged in the fatal shooting of a retired Chicago fireman during a carjacking was caught because he’d synced his phone to the audio system of the stolen car.&nbsp; I dunno -- fleeing a murder but worrying about getting a ticket for not using hands free.&nbsp; I dunno. Good they caught the bad guy, but what about us law-abiding frequent travelers? When the Hertz or Avis person walks up to me at the car return lane, they always remind me not to leave anything behind; to remember to take my sunglasses and my mobile phone. But they never remind me to delete all the data I synced to the car.&nbsp;</li><li>And with more of our lives getting stored in our phones, I asked Andrea Amico, founder of the company <a href=\"https://www.privacy4cars.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Privacy4Cars</a>, to come onto the podcast to talk about the privacy problems at the intersection of cars and smartphones.<ul><li>Mark: Andrea, how did you get involved in this space?</li></ul><ul><li>Andrea: One of the companies that used to run was one of the largest used car inspection companies. We inspected a lot of vehicles that were ready to be sold. I just noticed that people were leaving their digital lives behind.</li><li>Mark: We first talked about the privacy/security issues around pairing your smartphone with your car rental about four years ago. Bluetooth-enabled entertainment systems were just becoming more common in rental car fleets as hands-free call laws became widespread. Even today, the first thing I do is to sync my iPhone. And I\'ve noticed more times than not, the sync slots are all full -- personalized names, Jan\'s iPhone, Timmy\'s iPhone. You end up having to delete at least one of them to make room for yours. And then, once paired, most phones by default, end up downloading all your contacts and your phone numbers and things like that. So, Jan and Timmy have left behind all of their contacts and all their phone numbers and that\'s just bad in so many ways.</li><li>Andrea: When you sync your phone through Bluetooth or you plug it into the USB port or now, in some newer cars, you just walk into the car and the car automatically sniffs your phone and start syncing to it, including those with Android Auto and Apple CarPlay. When that happens, you are creating a mini-clone of your phone inside the vehicle.</li><li>Mark: What other information are people leaving behind when they don\'t clear themselves out of a rental car?</li><li>Andrea: All sorts -- your phone book, your call logs, the text messages, including the body, meaning the actual text of the text messages; that stuff will be left behind. But also all sorts of meta data that allows criminals or law enforcement or just people who want to snoop on you to re-identify you, anything from the identifiers of your phones which are unique, your Bluetooth MAC address. Not to mention, of course, all your navigation data. I mean, you can reconstruct where people have been, just by data that has been stored in the infotainment system. And then you have, whether you are on Twitter and Facebook and what are the handles of those things, which are the last photos you have taken? What files have you synced, the emails, calendar entries. There\'s all sorts of stuff that people really don\'t understand that they\'re living behind.</li><li>Mark: But when people <em>do </em>delete pairings are they deleting all that information? Or is there some data still retained in that vehicle?</li><li>Andrea: &nbsp;By and large, deleting the data following the manufacturer\'s directions is helpful in preventing third parties to having access. And so if there is anything left behind, it requires a much deeper forensic type of analysis that is typically not accessible. But for most people, following the manufacturer\'s directions on how to remove the data, it is a very easy to do and very effective defense against getting their data being in the hands of somebody else.</li><li>Mark: That\'s where <a href=\"https://www.privacy4cars.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Privacy4Cars</a> comes in. That\'s where your app comes in -- helping people get that right?</li><li>Andrea: Yes, we have a free app that people can download, and you can just search for Privacy4Cars on the <a href=\"https://apps.apple.com/us/app/privacy4cars/id1370969499\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple App Store</a> or <a href=\"https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.privacy4cars\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Play</a>, depending what kind of phone you have, and download it for free.</li><li>Mark: The last time on the podcast we talked about this topic was a little over a year ago, October 2019. &nbsp;I\'d gotten a notice from Hertz that they had changed their terms and conditions. I noticed that Hertz had specifically carved out liability from me leaving information from a Bluetooth pairing. And now, on one hand, I could see that point. I\'ve actively and voluntarily synced my phone to the car and in doing so, caused my information to be downloaded. But at what point does that sort of digital maintenance, clearing personal identifiable information, after every rental become part of the rental company’s overall maintenance responsibility, like checking the oil levels and the tire pressure.</li><li>Andrea: I believe that the time has already passed, and it\'s been in the past for at least a year, right? At least, the passage of California Consumer Privacy Act. And probably you can go further back in the past because of other types of regulations. And there are some regulators who have actually spoken about this. So in the United States, you have the FTC that has issued already four guidances on the need to delete personal information. In Europe, they went as far as to give a guideline that mandates the removal of the personal information. Beyond rental, when people are traveling, sometimes they rent, sometimes they ride-share, and very often it happens to me that I in an Uber or Lyft and you have a very nice driver that tells you, “Hey, you need to fill up the tank on your battery? Here\'s a cable.” And the first thing I do is glance -- &nbsp;where does the cable end up? If it goes into the lighter, that\'s only power. So yes, I’ll recharge my phone. But if it goes straight &nbsp;into the USB port of the car, don\'t charge the phone unless you\'re really desperate, because as soon as your phone powers back up, it will start downloading all your information into a stranger\'s car. So you definitely don\'t want to do that.</li><li>Mark: Andrea Amico, founder of <a href=\"https://www.privacy4cars.com\">Privacy4Cars.com</a>, you can find his app on the <a href=\"https://apps.apple.com/us/app/privacy4cars/id1370969499\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple App store</a> and on <a href=\"https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.privacy4cars\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Play</a>. Andrea, thank you very much for taking the time to talk to us today.</li><li>Andrea: Thank you. Mark. I really enjoyed talking to you.</li></ul></li><li>Bridge music -- Latinium by Javolenus (c) copyright 2020 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Javolenus/62650 Ft: NiGiD</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\">2021 Travel Planning Pro Tips</h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I’ve been talking about travel planning in the time of COVID across maybe 6 months of episodes. And since January is always a big travel month, especially this year with some vouchers from last spring’s flight cancellations coming up on their 12-month expiration dates, combined with 10 months of pent-up demand and another 6, maybe 9 months to go, I thought I’d pull all my planning tips together here -- and probably in a blog post after I get back from Tucson.</li><li>First, book now. As I said earlier, there’s a steady stream of sales out there right now as airlines, hotels, and rental car companies are looking for cash to get through the start of the year. There are great domestic deals now, and if you can part with some cash now, good international deals for the second half of the year. Prices are only going to go up as vaccine rates improve, and that pent-up demand overwhelms any squeamishness about sitting next to a stranger. I’m eyeing that same American ORD-BCN 787 non-stop that I wasn’t able to take at the end of last September. The deals aren’t as smoking as they were last March when the travel world was in a freefall; the airlines have gotten a little smarter over the past year. But with cancellation fees still waived, there’s not much risk.&nbsp;</li><li>Second, check your destination’s health requirements -- and keep checking until you leave. Many of the airlines have built good web resources that summarize any restrictions by destination. Of the US majors, I think <a href=\"https://www.united.com/ual/en/us/fly/travel/restrictions-map.html\">United’s</a> is the easiest to use but I think American’s is the most complete. They actually link out to a Canadian company, <a href=\"https://apply.joinsherpa.com/travel-restrictions?affiliateId=americanairlines\">Sherpa</a>, that took my Arizona itinerary and noted that, while there’s no quarantine restrictions in Arizona, there are when I return to Chicago.&nbsp; <a href=\"https://www.delta.com/us/en/plan-your-next-trip/where-we-fly\">Delta’s</a> is pretty good too. I’ll put links to them in the show notes. But you can’t check once and be done. We talked at the top of the show about Canada putting in a new testing requirement with 7-days notice. And domestically, states are changing restrictions weekly. One trick I’ve talked about is to start following your destination’s local newspapers on Twitter to get any early warnings on anything new.&nbsp;</li><li>Third, read the cancellation rules a lot more closely. Being nimble and able to react to changes at your destination -- like Irene and I did with our pivot from San Diego to Tucson -- depends on being thoughtful about the cancellation risks you take. Right now, flights have the lowest cancellation risk; Airbnb and vacation rentals, the highest. Hotels are in-between. Our default strategy then is to book the flight as soon as we can, don’t do pre-paid hotel rooms or car rentals, and wait as long as we can before booking an Airbnb.</li><li>Fourth, overload your itinerary with outdoor activities like hiking and biking so last-minute closures or restrictions don’t leave you aimlessly flipping through the hotel TV channels. It was the big trend last summer -- airlines dialed down flights between big city airports like the ORD-LGA run and toward beaches and mountains. And it continues -- all the imagery in the airline and hotel “flash sale” emails over the past couple of weeks. But it does mean spending more time trolling the AccuWeather and Weather Channel web sites because an outside-heavy itinerary is more vulnerable to big storm fronts.</li><li>And finally, stay flexible, expect delays, and be patient. If there’s anything we learned from 2020, it’s that something will screw up your plans -- a positive COVID test will shut down the restaurant you really wanted to eat at, capacity restrictions will mean a line to get into something that was top of your list. Have back-up plans and give everyone you meet the benefit of the doubt. Like you, they’re just trying to get through this safe and sound.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\">Closing</h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #171</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li>In this episode’s tech notes, if you check out the show notes, you’ll find a full transcript of my interview with Andrea Amico courtesy of my free tier of Amazon Web Services which includes 60 minutes a month of their Transcribe service. I learned about it when watching a session during their virtual Re:Invent conference. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/12/17/podcast-147-holiday-travel-tips-notes-from-santa-fe/\">episode #147</a>, I talked about going to it in person in Las Vegas a couple of years ago -- me and 50,000 other attendees, mostly pudgy, pasty-faced guys power walking up and down the strip, backpacks strapped down tight, ignoring the showgirls on the corner so they wouldn’t be late to, say, the sold-out tutorial on best practices for ingesting streaming data from IoT devices into AWS’ time series database. Less stressful, though less entertaining this year. Anyhow, watching the session on Transcribe got me thinking about how I could use it for the interviews I’ve done over the past 12 months. I’ve started on the most current episodes, working my way back. So far I have three done --this interview with Andrea, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/09/19/podcast-167-6-months-on-why-keep-travel-cards/\">episode #167</a>’s interview with Matt Schulz about travel credit cards, and <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\">episode #166</a>’s interview with Emily Thomas about the meaning of travel. I’ll keep chipping away at the backlog as my 60 free minutes a month allows.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>, as well as asking Alexa, Siri, and Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_171.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips','','inherit','closed','closed','','2997-revision-v1','','','2021-01-28 21:42:24','2021-01-29 02:42:24','',2997,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/28/2997-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3041,1,'2021-01-30 15:17:25','2021-01-30 20:17:25','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3029,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3029\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I left my suitcase at the door of our West Tucson Airbnb, pulled open the patio door, and watched the sun slip behind the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tucson_Mountains\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tucson Mountains</a>. The shades of red and orange on the undersides of a couple of clouds stood out in the pale blue sky. This was exactly what we were looking for when we left a cold grey Chicago 9 hours ago. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>But then I heard a rustling from the far edge of the patio. A good-sized boar, a wild pig, walked out from between two bushes and walked across the backyard. Then another one. They stopped, turned to look at me, and then kept walking. They kept coming – another six of them followed, walking the same path across the backyard, stopping to sniff at a little tree. A quick Google search told me they weren\'t wild pigs but <a href=\"https://www.azgfd.com/wildlife/livingwith/javelina/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">javelinas</a>, a New World relative of the pig. They range from southern Arizona all the way down to Argentina in social groups called \"squadrons\".  Our squad looked comfortable here, like they were taking their usual end-of-day stroll back to wherever they spend the night. A few checked in on us the next morning, maybe looking for an invitation to breakfast.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\">Hiking</h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>As I mentioned in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the last podcast</a>, our plans for this trip focused on outside activities so any last-minute COVID closures or restrictions didn\'t leave us aimlessly flipping through TV channels in our Airbnb. Tucson is <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tucson,_Arizona#Geography\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">surrounded by five small-ish mountain ranges,</a> so we narrowed in on hiking.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saguaro_National_Park\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Saguaro National Park</a></strong> is split into two separate areas, the Tucson Mountain District (TMD) on the west side of town and the Rincon Mountain District (RMD) on the east. Our drive to the west district wound through the northern part of Tucson Mountain Park; two lanes twisting through gaps between the hilltops. This day had the best weather forecast of our stay, the warmest temperatures and the least probability for rain, so we went for the biggest hike, <a href=\"https://www.arizonahighways.com/explore/hiking/king-canyon-trail\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">an 8-mile loop</a> that included reaching the top of 4,687-foot Wasson Peak. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>The trail was sand and larger stones that climbed up from a dry wash. The Park Service has done a nice job of carving out steps on the steeper parts and putting up signs at the trail intersections. I was still glad, though, that I\'d downloaded enough off-line Google Maps data to double-check the signs even when I didn\'t have mobile coverage</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"center\",\"id\":3034,\"width\":512,\"height\":384,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"aligncenter size-large is-resized\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2763.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2763-1024x768.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3034\" width=\"512\" height=\"384\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We walked up through what seemed to be the cactus version of a forest. The hills were full of saguaro cactus, paddle or prickly pear cactus, barrel cactus, and cholla cactus. The top of Wasson Peak offered a panoramic view of the rocky hills that seemed to jut straight up from the desert floor, and of Tucson sitting at the bottom of them. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3037,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2776-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2776-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3037\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://webcms.pima.gov/cms/One.aspx?pageId=1539\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tucson Mountain Park</a></strong> is directly south of Saguaro National Park - TMD. Our stepping-off point, the Starr Pass trailhead, was a 10-minute walk from our Airbnb. The hike was 5½ miles that looped around the valley floor, so not as long nor as scenic as our Saguaro hike, but a bit more leisurely. Here too we wound our way around, looking up at the tall saguaro cactuses and then down at the barrel cactuses just beginning to show the light green shoots of new growth. There were more people using the trails; the level terrain made it popular with mountain bikers and runners. But here too, the trails were well-marked and well-maintained, and with a good variety of cactus.  It was a good afternoon\'s hike.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://www.fs.usda.gov/recarea/coronado/recarea/?recid=80532\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Sabino Canyon Recreational Area</a></strong> was our last hiking spot. It\'s on the northeast side of Tucson, in the foothills of the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Catalina_Mountains\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Santa Catalina Mountains</a>.  Sabino Canyon was much more crowded than Saguaro or Tucson Mountain, but I might not be making a fair comparison. At Sabino Canyon, we drove to the main visitors center for our hike while we started our other hikes at smaller, more remote trailheads. Here again, there was beautiful rugged desert scenery, looking up the mountains and down into the canyons. But the trails weren\'t well-marked. We would lose the trail coming up out of a wash and then wander through cactus and javelina tracks trying to pick it up again. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\">Eating</h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->','Quick Notes on Tucson Trip','','inherit','closed','closed','','3026-revision-v1','','','2021-01-30 15:17:25','2021-01-30 20:17:25','',3026,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/30/3026-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3042,1,'2021-01-30 15:41:18','2021-01-30 20:41:18','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3029,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3029\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I left my suitcase at the door of our West Tucson Airbnb, pulled open the patio door, and watched the sun slip behind the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tucson_Mountains\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tucson Mountains</a>. The shades of red and orange on the undersides of a couple of clouds stood out in the pale blue sky. This was exactly what we were looking for when we left a cold grey Chicago 9 hours ago. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>But then I heard a rustling from the far edge of the patio. A good-sized boar, a wild pig, walked out from between two bushes and walked across the backyard. Then another one. They stopped, turned to look at me, and then kept walking. They kept coming – another six of them followed, walking the same path across the backyard, stopping to sniff at a little tree. A quick Google search told me they weren\'t wild pigs but <a href=\"https://www.azgfd.com/wildlife/livingwith/javelina/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">javelinas</a>, a New World relative of the pig. They range from southern Arizona all the way down to Argentina in social groups called \"squadrons\".  Our squad looked comfortable here, like they were taking their usual end-of-day stroll back to wherever they bed down to stay safe from mountain lions. A couple of them came back to check on us the next morning, reminding us to keep the patio door closed.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\">Hiking</h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>As I mentioned in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the last podcast</a>, our plans for this trip were all about outside activities so any last-minute COVID closures or restrictions didn\'t leave us aimlessly flipping through TV channels in our Airbnb. Tucson is <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tucson,_Arizona#Geography\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">surrounded by five small-ish mountain ranges,</a> so we focused on hiking.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saguaro_National_Park\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Saguaro National Park</a></strong> is split into two physically separate areas, the Tucson Mountain District (TMD) on the west side of town near where we were staying, and across town to the east, the Rincon Mountain District (RMD). Our drive to the west district wound through the northern part of Tucson Mountain Park; two lanes twisting through gaps between the hilltops. The forecast said this would be the best weather of our stay, the highest temperatures and the lowest chance of rain, so we went for our biggest hike, <a href=\"https://www.arizonahighways.com/explore/hiking/king-canyon-trail\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">an 8-mile loop</a> that would take us to the top of 4,687-foot Wasson Peak. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Our plan was to park at the <a href=\"https://goo.gl/maps/KPGPZhBw8hDt7aiJ6\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">King Canyon Trailhead</a>, but it was closed for construction. We hung a quick U-turn and, ignoring the warning signs, parked across the street in the far corner of the Arizona-Sonoma Desert Museum. We cut through some brush, crossed the street, and found the start of the trail.  It was sand and larger stones that climbed up from a dry wash. The Park Service has done a nice job of marking the trail, carving out steps on the steeper parts, and putting up signs at the trail intersections. I was still glad, though, that I\'d downloaded enough off-line Google Maps data so I could double-check the signs when my mobile connection dropped.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"center\",\"id\":3034,\"width\":512,\"height\":384,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"aligncenter size-large is-resized\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2763.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2763-1024x768.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3034\" width=\"512\" height=\"384\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We walked up through what seemed like a cactus version of a forest. The hills were full of saguaro cactus, paddle or prickly pear cactus, barrel cactus, and cholla cactus. The top of Wasson Peak offered a panoramic view of the rocky hills that seemed to jut straight up from the desert floor, and of Tucson sitting at the bottom of them. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3037,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2776-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2776-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3037\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://webcms.pima.gov/cms/One.aspx?pageId=1539\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tucson Mountain Park</a></strong> is directly south of Saguaro National Park - TMD. Our stepping-off point, the Starr Pass trailhead, was a 10-minute walk from our Airbnb. The hike was 5½ miles that looped around the valley floor, so not as long nor as scenic as our Saguaro hike, but a bit more leisurely. Here too we wound our way around, looking up at the tall saguaro cactuses and then down at the barrel cactuses just beginning to show the light green shoots of new growth. There were more people using the trails; the level terrain made it popular with mountain bikers and runners. But here too, the trails were well-marked and well-maintained, and with a good variety of cactus.  It was a good afternoon\'s hike.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://www.fs.usda.gov/recarea/coronado/recarea/?recid=80532\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Sabino Canyon Recreational Area</a></strong> was our last hiking spot. It\'s on the northeast side of Tucson, in the foothills of the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Catalina_Mountains\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Santa Catalina Mountains</a>.  Sabino Canyon was much more crowded than Saguaro or Tucson Mountain, but I might not be making a fair comparison. At Sabino Canyon, we drove to the main visitors center for our hike while we started our other hikes at smaller, more remote trailheads. Here again, there was beautiful rugged desert scenery, looking up the mountains and down into the canyons. But the trails weren\'t well-marked. We would lose the trail coming up out of a wash and then wander through cactus and javelina tracks trying to pick it up again. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\">Eating</h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->','Quick Notes on a Winter Trip to Tucson','','inherit','closed','closed','','3026-revision-v1','','','2021-01-30 15:41:18','2021-01-30 20:41:18','',3026,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/30/3026-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3043,1,'2021-01-30 15:51:07','2021-01-30 20:51:07','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3029,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3029\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I left my suitcase at the door of our West Tucson Airbnb, pulled open the patio door, and watched the sun slip behind the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tucson_Mountains\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tucson Mountains</a>. The shades of red and orange on the undersides of a couple of clouds stood out in the pale blue sky. This was exactly what we were looking for when we left a cold grey Chicago 9 hours ago. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>But then I heard a rustling from the far edge of the patio. A good-sized boar, a wild pig, walked out from between two bushes and walked across the backyard. Then another one. They stopped, turned to look at me, and then kept walking. They kept coming – another six of them followed, walking the same path across the backyard, stopping to sniff at a little tree. A quick Google search told me they weren\'t wild pigs but <a href=\"https://www.azgfd.com/wildlife/livingwith/javelina/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">javelinas</a>, a New World relative of the pig. They range from southern Arizona all the way down to Argentina in social groups called \"squadrons\".  Our squad looked comfortable here, like they were taking their usual end-of-day stroll back to wherever they bed down to stay safe from mountain lions. A couple of them came back to check on us the next morning, reminding us to keep the patio door closed.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\">Hiking</h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>As I mentioned in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the last podcast</a>, our plans for this trip were all about outside activities so any last-minute COVID closures or restrictions didn\'t leave us aimlessly flipping through TV channels in our Airbnb. Tucson is <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tucson,_Arizona#Geography\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">surrounded by five small-ish mountain ranges,</a> so we focused on hiking.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saguaro_National_Park\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Saguaro National Park</a></strong> is split into two physically separate areas, the Tucson Mountain District (TMD) on the west side of town near where we were staying, and across town to the east, the Rincon Mountain District (RMD). Our drive to the west district wound through the northern part of Tucson Mountain Park; two lanes twisting through gaps between the hilltops. The forecast said this would be the best weather of our stay, the highest temperatures and the lowest chance of rain, so we went for our biggest hike, <a href=\"https://www.arizonahighways.com/explore/hiking/king-canyon-trail\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">an 8-mile loop</a> that would take us to the top of 4,687-foot Wasson Peak. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Our plan was to park at the <a href=\"https://goo.gl/maps/KPGPZhBw8hDt7aiJ6\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">King Canyon Trailhead</a>, but it was closed for construction. We hung a quick U-turn and, ignoring the warning signs, parked across the street in the far corner of the Arizona-Sonoma Desert Museum. We cut through some brush, crossed the street, and found the start of the trail.  It was sand and larger stones that climbed up from a dry wash. The Park Service has done a nice job of marking the trail, carving out steps on the steeper parts, and putting up signs at the trail intersections. I was still glad, though, that I\'d downloaded enough off-line Google Maps data so I could double-check the signs when my mobile connection dropped.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"center\",\"id\":3034,\"width\":512,\"height\":384,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"aligncenter size-large is-resized\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2763.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2763-1024x768.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3034\" width=\"512\" height=\"384\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We walked up through what seemed like a cactus version of a forest. The hills were full of saguaro cactus, paddle or prickly pear cactus, barrel cactus, and cholla cactus. The top of Wasson Peak offered a panoramic view of the rocky hills that seemed to jut straight up from the desert floor, and of Tucson sitting at the bottom of them. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3037,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2776-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2776-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3037\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://webcms.pima.gov/cms/One.aspx?pageId=1539\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tucson Mountain Park</a></strong> is directly south of western part of Saguaro National Park. We walked 10 minutes from our Airbnb to the <a href=\"https://goo.gl/maps/jhUVr4RvBoptxDvZ8\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Starr Pass Trailhead</a>. This hike was only 5½-mile loop around the valley floor, so not as long nor as scenic as yesterday\'s Saguaro hike, but a bit more leisurely and easier on the feet. We took a bit more time, looking up at the tall saguaro cactuses with all their different arm configurations, and then down at the barrel cactuses that were just beginning to show the light green shoots of new growth. There were more people using these trails; the level terrain made it popular with mountain bikers and runners. But here too, the trails were well-marked and well-maintained.  It was a good afternoon\'s hike.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://www.fs.usda.gov/recarea/coronado/recarea/?recid=80532\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Sabino Canyon Recreational Area</a></strong> was our last hiking spot. It\'s on the northeast side of Tucson, in the foothills of the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Catalina_Mountains\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Santa Catalina Mountains</a>.  It was much more crowded than Saguaro or Tucson Mountain, but I might not be making a fair comparison. At Sabino Canyon, we drove to the main visitors center to step off on our hike while our other hikes started at smaller, more remote trailheads. Here again, there was beautiful rugged desert scenery, looking up the mountains and down into the canyons. But the trails weren\'t well-marked. We would lose the trail coming up out of a wash and then wander through cactus and javelina tracks trying to pick it up again. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\">Eating</h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Quick Notes on a Winter Trip to Tucson','','inherit','closed','closed','','3026-revision-v1','','','2021-01-30 15:51:07','2021-01-30 20:51:07','',3026,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/30/3026-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3044,1,'2021-01-30 16:40:48','2021-01-30 21:40:48','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3029,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3029\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I left my suitcase at the door of our West Tucson Airbnb, pulled open the patio door, and watched the sun slip behind the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tucson_Mountains\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tucson Mountains</a>. The shades of red and orange on the undersides of a couple of clouds stood out in the pale blue sky. This was exactly what we were looking for when we left a cold grey Chicago 9 hours ago. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>But then I heard a rustling from the far edge of the patio. A good-sized boar, a wild pig, walked out from between two bushes and walked across the backyard. Then another one. They stopped, turned to look at me, and then kept walking. They kept coming – another six of them followed, walking the same path across the backyard, stopping to sniff at a little tree. A quick Google search told me they weren\'t wild pigs but <a href=\"https://www.azgfd.com/wildlife/livingwith/javelina/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">javelinas</a>, a New World relative of the pig. They range from southern Arizona all the way down to Argentina in social groups called \"squadrons\".  Our squad looked comfortable here, like they were taking their usual end-of-day stroll back to wherever they bed down to stay safe from mountain lions. A couple of them came back to check on us the next morning, reminding us to keep the patio door closed.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\">Hiking</h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>As I mentioned in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the last podcast</a>, our plans for this trip were all about outside activities so any last-minute COVID closures or restrictions didn\'t leave us aimlessly flipping through TV channels in our Airbnb. Tucson is <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tucson,_Arizona#Geography\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">surrounded by five small-ish mountain ranges,</a> so we focused on hiking.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saguaro_National_Park\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Saguaro National Park</a></strong> is split into two physically separate areas, the Tucson Mountain District (TMD) on the west side of town near where we were staying, and across town to the east, the Rincon Mountain District (RMD). Our drive to the west district wound through the northern part of Tucson Mountain Park; two lanes twisting through gaps between the hilltops. The forecast said this would be the best weather of our stay, the highest temperatures and the lowest chance of rain, so we went for our biggest hike, <a href=\"https://www.arizonahighways.com/explore/hiking/king-canyon-trail\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">an 8-mile loop</a> that would take us to the top of 4,687-foot Wasson Peak. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Our plan was to park at the <a href=\"https://goo.gl/maps/KPGPZhBw8hDt7aiJ6\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">King Canyon Trailhead</a>, but it was closed for construction. We hung a quick U-turn and, ignoring the warning signs, parked across the street in the far corner of the Arizona-Sonoma Desert Museum. We cut through some brush, crossed the street, and found the start of the trail.  It was sand and larger stones that climbed up from a dry wash. The Park Service has done a nice job of marking the trail, carving out steps on the steeper parts, and putting up signs at the trail intersections. I was still glad, though, that I\'d downloaded enough off-line Google Maps data so I could double-check the signs when my mobile connection dropped.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"center\",\"id\":3034,\"width\":512,\"height\":384,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"aligncenter size-large is-resized\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2763.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2763-1024x768.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3034\" width=\"512\" height=\"384\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We walked up through what seemed like a cactus version of a forest. The hills were full of saguaro cactus, paddle or prickly pear cactus, barrel cactus, and cholla cactus. The top of Wasson Peak offered a panoramic view of the rocky hills that seemed to jut straight up from the desert floor, and of Tucson sitting at the bottom of them. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3037,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2776-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2776-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3037\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://webcms.pima.gov/cms/One.aspx?pageId=1539\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tucson Mountain Park</a></strong> is directly south of western part of Saguaro National Park. We walked 10 minutes from our Airbnb to the <a href=\"https://goo.gl/maps/jhUVr4RvBoptxDvZ8\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Starr Pass Trailhead</a>. This hike was only 5½-mile loop around the valley floor, so not as long nor as scenic as yesterday\'s Saguaro hike, but a bit more leisurely and easier on the feet. We took a bit more time, looking up at the tall saguaro cactuses with all their different arm configurations, and then down at the barrel cactuses that were just beginning to show the light green shoots of new growth. There were more people using these trails; the level terrain made it popular with mountain bikers and runners. But here too, the trails were well-marked and well-maintained.  It was a good afternoon\'s hike.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://www.fs.usda.gov/recarea/coronado/recarea/?recid=80532\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Sabino Canyon Recreational Area</a></strong> was our last hiking spot. It\'s on the northeast side of Tucson, in the foothills of the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Catalina_Mountains\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Santa Catalina Mountains</a>.  It was much more crowded than Saguaro or Tucson Mountain, but I might not be making a fair comparison. At Sabino Canyon, we drove to the main visitors center to step off on our hike while our other hikes started at smaller, more remote trailheads. Here again, there was beautiful rugged desert scenery, looking up the mountains and down into the canyons. But the trails weren\'t well-marked. We would lose the trail coming up out of a wash and then wander through cactus and javelina tracks trying to pick it up again. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\">Eating</h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>All the hiking freed up the caloric space we needed to get deep into <a href=\"https://thisistucson.com/eat/sonoran-food-is-having-a-moment-la-writer-gustavo-arellano-will-talk-burritos-and-mexican/article_e409de98-e53d-11e9-892b-73157f4df357.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Sonoran food</a>, a style of Mexican food that hasn\'t made its way out of <a href=\"https://rovingdecanter.com/2014/10/22/what-is-sonoran-style-mexican-food/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">its roots in Southern Arizona and the Mexican state of Sonora</a> the way that, say, Tex-Mex, Baja, and Oaxacan cuisines have.  Picking up the menus, I immediately saw some differences -- it\'s a <em>burro</em>, not a burrito; a <em>caramelo</em>, not a quesadilla; and tacos are garnished with chopped cabbage instead of the chopped cilantro and raw white onion that is the standard in Chicago. Beef, especially <em>carne asada</em>, is the default filling and it\'s served in a thin flour tortilla that\'s more like Chinese moo shu or Peking Duck wrappers than the thick flour tortillas you get with fajitas. <a href=\"https://tucsonfoodie.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tucson Foodie</a> and Andi Berlin, food writer at <a href=\"https://thisistucson.com/eat/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">#ThisIsTucson</a>, were my main guides in Sonoran food.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Quick Notes on a Winter Trip to Tucson','','inherit','closed','closed','','3026-revision-v1','','','2021-01-30 16:40:48','2021-01-30 21:40:48','',3026,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/30/3026-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3045,1,'2021-01-30 16:51:18','2021-01-30 21:51:18','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3029,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3029\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I left my suitcase at the door of our West Tucson Airbnb, pulled open the patio door, and watched the sun slip behind the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tucson_Mountains\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tucson Mountains</a>. The shades of red and orange on the undersides of a couple of clouds stood out in the pale blue sky. This was exactly what we were looking for when we left a cold grey Chicago 9 hours ago. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>But then I heard a rustling from the far edge of the patio. A good-sized boar, a wild pig, walked out from between two bushes and walked across the backyard. Then another one. They stopped, turned to look at me, and then kept walking. They kept coming – another six of them followed, walking the same path across the backyard, stopping to sniff at a little tree. A quick Google search told me they weren\'t wild pigs but <a href=\"https://www.azgfd.com/wildlife/livingwith/javelina/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">javelinas</a>, a New World relative of the pig. They range from southern Arizona all the way down to Argentina in social groups called \"squadrons\".  Our squad looked comfortable here, like they were taking their usual end-of-day stroll back to wherever they bed down to stay safe from mountain lions. A couple of them came back to check on us the next morning, reminding us to keep the patio door closed.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:quote {\"className\":\"is-style-default\"} -->\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-style-default\"><p>For more pictures, check out the <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/s/aGlnaGxpZ2h0OjE3ODc3MTkxNjk2MTM2MTcx?igshid=18auew1hwvjvo&amp;story_media_id=2489441232116364521\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tucson Instagram Story</a> on the TravelCommons Instagram Page</p></blockquote>\n<!-- /wp:quote -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\">Hiking</h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>As I mentioned in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the last podcast</a>, our plans for this trip were all about outside activities so any last-minute COVID closures or restrictions didn\'t leave us aimlessly flipping through TV channels in our Airbnb. Tucson is <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tucson,_Arizona#Geography\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">surrounded by five small-ish mountain ranges,</a> so we focused on hiking.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saguaro_National_Park\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Saguaro National Park</a></strong> is split into two physically separate areas, the Tucson Mountain District (TMD) on the west side of town near where we were staying, and across town to the east, the Rincon Mountain District (RMD). Our drive to the west district wound through the northern part of Tucson Mountain Park; two lanes twisting through gaps between the hilltops. The forecast said this would be the best weather of our stay, the highest temperatures and the lowest chance of rain, so we went for our biggest hike, <a href=\"https://www.arizonahighways.com/explore/hiking/king-canyon-trail\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">an 8-mile loop</a> that would take us to the top of 4,687-foot Wasson Peak. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Our plan was to park at the <a href=\"https://goo.gl/maps/KPGPZhBw8hDt7aiJ6\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">King Canyon Trailhead</a>, but it was closed for construction. We hung a quick U-turn and, ignoring the warning signs, parked across the street in the far corner of the Arizona-Sonoma Desert Museum. We cut through some brush, crossed the street, and found the start of the trail.  It was sand and larger stones that climbed up from a dry wash. The Park Service has done a nice job of marking the trail, carving out steps on the steeper parts, and putting up signs at the trail intersections. I was still glad, though, that I\'d downloaded enough off-line Google Maps data so I could double-check the signs when my mobile connection dropped.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"center\",\"id\":3034,\"width\":512,\"height\":384,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"aligncenter size-large is-resized\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2763.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2763-1024x768.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3034\" width=\"512\" height=\"384\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We walked up through what seemed like a cactus version of a forest. The hills were full of saguaro cactus, paddle or prickly pear cactus, barrel cactus, and cholla cactus. The top of Wasson Peak offered a panoramic view of the rocky hills that seemed to jut straight up from the desert floor, and of Tucson sitting at the bottom of them. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3037,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2776-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2776-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3037\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://webcms.pima.gov/cms/One.aspx?pageId=1539\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tucson Mountain Park</a></strong> is directly south of western part of Saguaro National Park. We walked 10 minutes from our Airbnb to the <a href=\"https://goo.gl/maps/jhUVr4RvBoptxDvZ8\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Starr Pass Trailhead</a>. This hike was only 5½-mile loop around the valley floor, so not as long nor as scenic as yesterday\'s Saguaro hike, but a bit more leisurely and easier on the feet. We took a bit more time, looking up at the tall saguaro cactuses with all their different arm configurations, and then down at the barrel cactuses that were just beginning to show the light green shoots of new growth. There were more people using these trails; the level terrain made it popular with mountain bikers and runners. But here too, the trails were well-marked and well-maintained.  It was a good afternoon\'s hike.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://www.fs.usda.gov/recarea/coronado/recarea/?recid=80532\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Sabino Canyon Recreational Area</a></strong> was our last hiking spot. It\'s on the northeast side of Tucson, in the foothills of the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Catalina_Mountains\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Santa Catalina Mountains</a>.  It was much more crowded than Saguaro or Tucson Mountain, but I might not be making a fair comparison. At Sabino Canyon, we drove to the main visitors center to step off on our hike while our other hikes started at smaller, more remote trailheads. Here again, there was beautiful rugged desert scenery, looking up the mountains and down into the canyons. But the trails weren\'t well-marked. We would lose the trail coming up out of a wash and then wander through cactus and javelina tracks trying to pick it up again. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\">Eating</h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>All the hiking freed up the caloric space we needed to get deep into <a href=\"https://thisistucson.com/eat/sonoran-food-is-having-a-moment-la-writer-gustavo-arellano-will-talk-burritos-and-mexican/article_e409de98-e53d-11e9-892b-73157f4df357.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Sonoran food</a>, a style of Mexican food that hasn\'t made its way out of <a href=\"https://rovingdecanter.com/2014/10/22/what-is-sonoran-style-mexican-food/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">its roots in Southern Arizona and the Mexican state of Sonora</a> the way that, say, Tex-Mex, Baja, and Oaxacan cuisines have.  Picking up the menus, I immediately saw some differences -- it\'s a <em>burro</em>, not a burrito; a <em>caramelo</em>, not a quesadilla; and tacos are garnished with chopped cabbage instead of the chopped cilantro and raw white onion that is the standard in Chicago. Beef, especially <em>carne asada</em>, is the default filling and it\'s served in a thin flour tortilla that\'s more like Chinese moo shu or Peking Duck wrappers than the thick flour tortillas you get with fajitas. <a href=\"https://tucsonfoodie.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tucson Foodie</a> and Andi Berlin, food writer at <a href=\"https://thisistucson.com/eat/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">#ThisIsTucson</a>, were my main guides in Sonoran food.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Quick Notes on a Winter Trip to Tucson','','inherit','closed','closed','','3026-revision-v1','','','2021-01-30 16:51:18','2021-01-30 21:51:18','',3026,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/30/3026-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3046,1,'2021-01-30 18:32:39','2021-01-30 23:32:39','','IMG_7836','','inherit','open','closed','','img_7836','','','2021-01-30 18:32:39','2021-01-30 23:32:39','',3026,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7836.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(3047,1,'2021-01-30 18:33:47','2021-01-30 23:33:47','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3029,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3029\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I left my suitcase at the door of our West Tucson Airbnb, pulled open the patio door, and watched the sun slip behind the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tucson_Mountains\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tucson Mountains</a>. The shades of red and orange on the undersides of a couple of clouds stood out in the pale blue sky. This was exactly what we were looking for when we left a cold grey Chicago 9 hours ago. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>But then I heard a rustling from the far edge of the patio. A good-sized boar, a wild pig, walked out from between two bushes and walked across the backyard. Then another one. They stopped, turned to look at me, and then kept walking. They kept coming – another six of them followed, walking the same path across the backyard, stopping to sniff at a little tree. A quick Google search told me they weren\'t wild pigs but <a href=\"https://www.azgfd.com/wildlife/livingwith/javelina/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">javelinas</a>, a New World relative of the pig. They range from southern Arizona all the way down to Argentina in social groups called \"squadrons\".  Our squad looked comfortable here, like they were taking their usual end-of-day stroll back to wherever they bed down to stay safe from mountain lions. A couple of them came back to check on us the next morning, reminding us to keep the patio door closed.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:quote {\"className\":\"is-style-default\"} -->\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-style-default\"><p>To see a video of the javelina visitation and more, check out this <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/s/aGlnaGxpZ2h0OjE3ODc3MTkxNjk2MTM2MTcx?igshid=18auew1hwvjvo&amp;story_media_id=2489441232116364521\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tucson Instagram Story</a> on the TravelCommons Instagram Page</p></blockquote>\n<!-- /wp:quote -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\">Hiking</h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>As I mentioned in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the last podcast</a>, our plans for this trip were all about outside activities so any last-minute COVID closures or restrictions didn\'t leave us aimlessly flipping through TV channels in our Airbnb. Tucson is <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tucson,_Arizona#Geography\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">surrounded by five small-ish mountain ranges,</a> so we focused on hiking.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saguaro_National_Park\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Saguaro National Park</a></strong> is split into two physically separate areas, the Tucson Mountain District (TMD) on the west side of town near where we were staying, and across town to the east, the Rincon Mountain District (RMD). Our drive to the west district wound through the northern part of Tucson Mountain Park; two lanes twisting through gaps between the hilltops. The forecast said this would be the best weather of our stay, the highest temperatures and the lowest chance of rain, so we went for our biggest hike, <a href=\"https://www.arizonahighways.com/explore/hiking/king-canyon-trail\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">an 8-mile loop</a> that would take us to the top of 4,687-foot Wasson Peak. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Our plan was to park at the <a href=\"https://goo.gl/maps/KPGPZhBw8hDt7aiJ6\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">King Canyon Trailhead</a>, but it was closed for construction. We hung a quick U-turn and, ignoring the warning signs, parked across the street in the far corner of the Arizona-Sonoma Desert Museum. We cut through some brush, crossed the street, and found the start of the trail.  It was sand and larger stones that climbed up from a dry wash. The Park Service has done a nice job of marking the trail, carving out steps on the steeper parts, and putting up signs at the trail intersections. I was still glad, though, that I\'d downloaded enough off-line Google Maps data so I could double-check the signs when my mobile connection dropped.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"center\",\"id\":3034,\"width\":512,\"height\":384,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"aligncenter size-large is-resized\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2763.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2763-1024x768.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3034\" width=\"512\" height=\"384\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We walked up through what seemed like a cactus version of a forest. The hills were full of saguaro cactus, paddle or prickly pear cactus, barrel cactus, and cholla cactus. The top of Wasson Peak offered a panoramic view of the rocky hills that seemed to jut straight up from the desert floor, and of Tucson sitting at the bottom of them. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3037,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2776-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2776-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3037\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://webcms.pima.gov/cms/One.aspx?pageId=1539\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tucson Mountain Park</a></strong> is directly south of western part of Saguaro National Park. We walked 10 minutes from our Airbnb to the <a href=\"https://goo.gl/maps/jhUVr4RvBoptxDvZ8\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Starr Pass Trailhead</a>. This hike was only 5½-mile loop around the valley floor, so not as long nor as scenic as yesterday\'s Saguaro hike, but a bit more leisurely and easier on the feet. We took a bit more time, looking up at the tall saguaro cactuses with all their different arm configurations, and then down at the barrel cactuses that were just beginning to show the light green shoots of new growth. There were more people using these trails; the level terrain made it popular with mountain bikers and runners. But here too, the trails were well-marked and well-maintained.  It was a good afternoon\'s hike.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://www.fs.usda.gov/recarea/coronado/recarea/?recid=80532\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Sabino Canyon Recreational Area</a></strong> was our last hiking spot. It\'s on the northeast side of Tucson, in the foothills of the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Catalina_Mountains\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Santa Catalina Mountains</a>.  It was much more crowded than Saguaro or Tucson Mountain, but I might not be making a fair comparison. At Sabino Canyon, we drove to the main visitors center to step off on our hike while our other hikes started at smaller, more remote trailheads. Here again, there was beautiful rugged desert scenery, looking up the mountains and down into the canyons. But the trails weren\'t well-marked. We would lose the trail coming up out of a wash and then wander through cactus and javelina tracks trying to pick it up again. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\">Eating</h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>All the hiking freed up the caloric space we needed to get deep into <a href=\"https://thisistucson.com/eat/sonoran-food-is-having-a-moment-la-writer-gustavo-arellano-will-talk-burritos-and-mexican/article_e409de98-e53d-11e9-892b-73157f4df357.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Sonoran food</a>, a style of Mexican food that hasn\'t made its way out of <a href=\"https://rovingdecanter.com/2014/10/22/what-is-sonoran-style-mexican-food/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">its roots in Southern Arizona and the Mexican state of Sonora</a> the way that, say, Tex-Mex, Baja, and Oaxacan cuisines have.  Picking up the menus, I immediately saw some differences – it\'s a <em>burro</em>, not a burrito; a <em>caramelo</em>, not a quesadilla; and tacos are garnished with chopped cabbage instead of the chopped cilantro and raw white onion that is the standard in Chicago. Beef, especially <em>carne asada</em>, is the default filling and it\'s served in a thin flour tortilla that\'s more like Chinese moo shu or Peking Duck wrappers than the thick flour tortillas you get with fajitas. <a href=\"https://tucsonfoodie.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tucson Foodie</a> and Andi Berlin, food writer at <a href=\"https://thisistucson.com/eat/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">#ThisIsTucson</a>, were my main guides in Sonoran food.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3046,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7836-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7836-300x238.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3046\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><a href=\"https://www.yelp.com/biz/ruiz-hot-dogs-tucson\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>Ruiz Hot Dogs</strong></a> food truck was our first stop. I\'d heard about the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonoran_hot_dog\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Sonoran hot dog</a> and coming from Chicago, another town with its own <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago-style_hot_dog\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">unique twist on a hot dog</a>, I had to give it a try. The Sonoran dog is a bacon-wrapped hot dog topped with chopped tomatoes and onions, pinto beans, mayonnaise, mustard, and salsa verde, served in a slightly sweet split-top bun with a grilled yellow pepper on the side. We ate ours on the hood of our rental car. It was great and a bargain at $3.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Quick Notes on a Winter Trip to Tucson','','inherit','closed','closed','','3026-revision-v1','','','2021-01-30 18:33:47','2021-01-30 23:33:47','',3026,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/30/3026-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3048,1,'2021-01-30 19:55:19','2021-01-31 00:55:19','','IMG_2804','','inherit','open','closed','','img_2804','','','2021-01-30 19:55:19','2021-01-31 00:55:19','',3026,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2804.jpeg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(3049,1,'2021-01-30 20:22:19','2021-01-31 01:22:19','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3029,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3029\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I left my suitcase at the door of our West Tucson Airbnb, pulled open the patio door, and watched the sun slip behind the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tucson_Mountains\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tucson Mountains</a>. The shades of red and orange on the undersides of a couple of clouds stood out in the pale blue sky. This was exactly what we were looking for when we left a cold grey Chicago 9 hours ago. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>But then I heard a rustling from the far edge of the patio. A good-sized boar, a wild pig, walked out from between two bushes and walked across the backyard. Then another one. They stopped, turned to look at me, and then kept walking. They kept coming – another six of them followed, walking the same path across the backyard, stopping to sniff at a little tree. A quick Google search told me they weren\'t wild pigs but <a href=\"https://www.azgfd.com/wildlife/livingwith/javelina/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">javelinas</a>, a New World relative of the pig. They range from southern Arizona all the way down to Argentina in social groups called \"squadrons\".  Our squad looked comfortable here, like they were taking their usual end-of-day stroll back to wherever they bed down to stay safe from mountain lions. A couple of them came back to check on us the next morning, reminding us to keep the patio door closed.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:quote {\"className\":\"is-style-default\"} -->\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-style-default\"><p>To see a video of the javelina visitation and more, check out this <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/s/aGlnaGxpZ2h0OjE3ODc3MTkxNjk2MTM2MTcx?igshid=18auew1hwvjvo&amp;story_media_id=2489441232116364521\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tucson Instagram Story</a> on the TravelCommons Instagram Page</p></blockquote>\n<!-- /wp:quote -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\">Hiking</h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>As I mentioned in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the last podcast</a>, our plans for this trip were all about outside activities so any last-minute COVID closures or restrictions didn\'t leave us aimlessly flipping through TV channels in our Airbnb. Tucson is <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tucson,_Arizona#Geography\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">surrounded by five small-ish mountain ranges,</a> so we focused on hiking.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saguaro_National_Park\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Saguaro National Park</a></strong> is split into two physically separate areas, the Tucson Mountain District (TMD) on the west side of town near where we were staying, and across town to the east, the Rincon Mountain District (RMD). Our drive to the west district wound through the northern part of Tucson Mountain Park; two lanes twisting through gaps between the hilltops. The forecast said this would be the best weather of our stay, the highest temperatures and the lowest chance of rain, so we went for our biggest hike, <a href=\"https://www.arizonahighways.com/explore/hiking/king-canyon-trail\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">an 8-mile loop</a> that would take us to the top of 4,687-foot Wasson Peak. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Our plan was to park at the <a href=\"https://goo.gl/maps/KPGPZhBw8hDt7aiJ6\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">King Canyon Trailhead</a>, but it was closed for construction. We hung a quick U-turn and, ignoring the warning signs, parked across the street in the far corner of the Arizona-Sonoma Desert Museum. We cut through some brush, crossed the street, and found the start of the trail.  It was sand and larger stones that climbed up from a dry wash. The Park Service has done a nice job of marking the trail, carving out steps on the steeper parts, and putting up signs at the trail intersections. I was still glad, though, that I\'d downloaded enough off-line Google Maps data so I could double-check the signs when my mobile connection dropped.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"center\",\"id\":3034,\"width\":512,\"height\":384,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"aligncenter size-large is-resized\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2763.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2763-1024x768.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3034\" width=\"512\" height=\"384\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We walked up through what seemed like a cactus version of a forest. The hills were full of saguaro cactus, paddle or prickly pear cactus, barrel cactus, and cholla cactus. The top of Wasson Peak offered a panoramic view of the rocky hills that seemed to jut straight up from the desert floor, and of Tucson sitting at the bottom of them. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3037,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2776-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2776-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3037\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://webcms.pima.gov/cms/One.aspx?pageId=1539\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tucson Mountain Park</a></strong> is directly south of western part of Saguaro National Park. We walked 10 minutes from our Airbnb to the <a href=\"https://goo.gl/maps/jhUVr4RvBoptxDvZ8\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Starr Pass Trailhead</a>. This hike was only 5½-mile loop around the valley floor, so not as long nor as scenic as yesterday\'s Saguaro hike, but a bit more leisurely and easier on the feet. We took a bit more time, looking up at the tall saguaro cactuses with all their different arm configurations, and then down at the barrel cactuses that were just beginning to show the light green shoots of new growth. There were more people using these trails; the level terrain made it popular with mountain bikers and runners. But here too, the trails were well-marked and well-maintained.  It was a good afternoon\'s hike.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://www.fs.usda.gov/recarea/coronado/recarea/?recid=80532\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Sabino Canyon Recreational Area</a></strong> was our last hiking spot. It\'s on the northeast side of Tucson, in the foothills of the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Catalina_Mountains\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Santa Catalina Mountains</a>.  It was much more crowded than Saguaro or Tucson Mountain, but I might not be making a fair comparison. At Sabino Canyon, we drove to the main visitors center to step off on our hike while our other hikes started at smaller, more remote trailheads. Here again, there was beautiful rugged desert scenery, looking up the mountains and down into the canyons. But the trails weren\'t well-marked. We would lose the trail coming up out of a wash and then wander through cactus and javelina tracks trying to pick it up again. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\">Eating</h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>All the hiking freed up the caloric space we needed to get deep into <a href=\"https://thisistucson.com/eat/sonoran-food-is-having-a-moment-la-writer-gustavo-arellano-will-talk-burritos-and-mexican/article_e409de98-e53d-11e9-892b-73157f4df357.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Sonoran food</a>, a style of Mexican food that hasn\'t made its way out of <a href=\"https://rovingdecanter.com/2014/10/22/what-is-sonoran-style-mexican-food/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">its roots in Southern Arizona and the Mexican state of Sonora</a> the way that, say, Tex-Mex, Baja, and Oaxacan cuisines have.  Picking up the menus, I immediately saw some differences – it\'s a <em>burro</em>, not a burrito; a <em>caramelo</em>, not a quesadilla; and tacos are garnished with chopped cabbage instead of the chopped cilantro and raw white onion that is the standard in Chicago. Beef, especially <em>carne asada</em>, is the default filling and it\'s served in a thin flour tortilla that\'s more like Chinese moo shu or Peking Duck wrappers than the thick flour tortillas you get with fajitas. <a href=\"https://tucsonfoodie.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tucson Foodie</a> and Andi Berlin, food writer at <a href=\"https://thisistucson.com/eat/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">#ThisIsTucson</a>, were my main guides in Sonoran food.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3046,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7836-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7836-300x238.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3046\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><a href=\"https://www.yelp.com/biz/ruiz-hot-dogs-tucson\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>Ruiz Hot Dogs</strong></a> food truck was our first stop. I\'d heard about the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonoran_hot_dog\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Sonoran hot dog</a> and coming from Chicago, another town with its own <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago-style_hot_dog\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">unique twist on a hot dog</a>, I had to give it a try. The Sonoran dog is a bacon-wrapped hot dog topped with chopped tomatoes and onions, pinto beans, mayonnaise, mustard, and salsa verde, served in a slightly sweet split-top bun with a grilled yellow pepper on the side. We ate ours on the hood of our rental car. It was great and a bargain at $3.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://www.tacorustico.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">El Taco Rustico</a></strong> was next on our list for tacos – more specifically, quesabirras and cabrito (goat) tacos. We tried the quesabirras first. They\'re  crispy tacos filled with beef birra (juicy stewed beef) and melted cheese, served with a little styrofoam cup of broth, what I\'ll call \"Mexican a jus,\" for dipping. The broth, with a deep roasted dried chile flavor, pulled everything together. What the quesabirras didn\'t soak up, we drank like a chaser from a styrofoam shot glass. Next were tacos. We had cabrito and pollo asado (grilled chicken) tacos, and they were a revelation. The taste of the meat, the smoke on the grilled chicken and the tang of the goat, shown through the condiments and the tortilla. That this made such an impression is really a sad commentary on how often the meat in most tacos is just an unseasoned carrier for the salsa and garnish.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3048,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2804-scaled.jpeg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2804-300x284.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3048\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://www.tacosapson.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tacos Apson</a></strong> was our last stop, down in South Tucson across the street from a high school, was the best stop. We smelled the mesquite coming off the grill when we opened the car door. We walked up to the window and ordered two burros, carne asada and haas, which is a mix of asada, cheese, and roasted green chiles. Then scanning the menu, I added a couple <em>costillas</em> tacos, grilled beef ribs.  Back at the Airbnb, I cut burros in half. The thin flour tortilla was wrapped around nothing but the meat with none of typical burrito fillings, no rice or beans or lettuce or crema. There was nothing to mask the mesquite on the carne asada or the beef ribs, and the cheese and green chile in the haas burro accentuated rather than overwhelmed the beef. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\">Drinking</h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Quick Notes on a Winter Trip to Tucson','','inherit','closed','closed','','3026-revision-v1','','','2021-01-30 20:22:19','2021-01-31 01:22:19','',3026,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/30/3026-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3050,1,'2021-01-30 20:23:25','2021-01-31 01:23:25','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3029,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3029\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I left my suitcase at the door of our West Tucson Airbnb, pulled open the patio door, and watched the sun slip behind the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tucson_Mountains\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tucson Mountains</a>. The shades of red and orange on the undersides of a couple of clouds stood out in the pale blue sky. This was exactly what we were looking for when we left a cold grey Chicago 9 hours ago. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>But then I heard a rustling from the far edge of the patio. A good-sized boar, a wild pig, walked out from between two bushes and walked across the backyard. Then another one. They stopped, turned to look at me, and then kept walking. They kept coming – another six of them followed, walking the same path across the backyard, stopping to sniff at a little tree. A quick Google search told me they weren\'t wild pigs but <a href=\"https://www.azgfd.com/wildlife/livingwith/javelina/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">javelinas</a>, a New World relative of the pig. They range from southern Arizona all the way down to Argentina in social groups called \"squadrons\".  Our squad looked comfortable here, like they were taking their usual end-of-day stroll back to wherever they bed down to stay safe from mountain lions. A couple of them came back to check on us the next morning, reminding us to keep the patio door closed.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:quote {\"className\":\"is-style-default\"} -->\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-style-default\"><p>To see a video of the javelina visitation and more, check out this <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/s/aGlnaGxpZ2h0OjE3ODc3MTkxNjk2MTM2MTcx?igshid=18auew1hwvjvo&amp;story_media_id=2489441232116364521\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tucson Instagram Story</a> on the TravelCommons Instagram Page</p></blockquote>\n<!-- /wp:quote -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\">Hiking</h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>As I mentioned in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the last podcast</a>, our plans for this trip were all about outside activities so any last-minute COVID closures or restrictions didn\'t leave us aimlessly flipping through TV channels in our Airbnb. Tucson is <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tucson,_Arizona#Geography\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">surrounded by five small-ish mountain ranges,</a> so we focused on hiking.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saguaro_National_Park\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Saguaro National Park</a></strong> is split into two physically separate areas, the Tucson Mountain District (TMD) on the west side of town near where we were staying, and across town to the east, the Rincon Mountain District (RMD). Our drive to the west district wound through the northern part of Tucson Mountain Park; two lanes twisting through gaps between the hilltops. The forecast said this would be the best weather of our stay, the highest temperatures and the lowest chance of rain, so we went for our biggest hike, <a href=\"https://www.arizonahighways.com/explore/hiking/king-canyon-trail\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">an 8-mile loop</a> that would take us to the top of 4,687-foot Wasson Peak. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Our plan was to park at the <a href=\"https://goo.gl/maps/KPGPZhBw8hDt7aiJ6\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">King Canyon Trailhead</a>, but it was closed for construction. We hung a quick U-turn and, ignoring the warning signs, parked across the street in the far corner of the Arizona-Sonoma Desert Museum. We cut through some brush, crossed the street, and found the start of the trail.  It was sand and larger stones that climbed up from a dry wash. The Park Service has done a nice job of marking the trail, carving out steps on the steeper parts, and putting up signs at the trail intersections. I was still glad, though, that I\'d downloaded enough off-line Google Maps data so I could double-check the signs when my mobile connection dropped.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"center\",\"id\":3034,\"width\":512,\"height\":384,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"aligncenter size-large is-resized\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2763.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2763-1024x768.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3034\" width=\"512\" height=\"384\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We walked up through what seemed like a cactus version of a forest. The hills were full of saguaro cactus, paddle or prickly pear cactus, barrel cactus, and cholla cactus. The top of Wasson Peak offered a panoramic view of the rocky hills that seemed to jut straight up from the desert floor, and of Tucson sitting at the bottom of them. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3037,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2776-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2776-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3037\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://webcms.pima.gov/cms/One.aspx?pageId=1539\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tucson Mountain Park</a></strong> is directly south of western part of Saguaro National Park. We walked 10 minutes from our Airbnb to the <a href=\"https://goo.gl/maps/jhUVr4RvBoptxDvZ8\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Starr Pass Trailhead</a>. This hike was only 5½-mile loop around the valley floor, so not as long nor as scenic as yesterday\'s Saguaro hike, but a bit more leisurely and easier on the feet. We took a bit more time, looking up at the tall saguaro cactuses with all their different arm configurations, and then down at the barrel cactuses that were just beginning to show the light green shoots of new growth. There were more people using these trails; the level terrain made it popular with mountain bikers and runners. But here too, the trails were well-marked and well-maintained.  It was a good afternoon\'s hike.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://www.fs.usda.gov/recarea/coronado/recarea/?recid=80532\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Sabino Canyon Recreational Area</a></strong> was our last hiking spot. It\'s on the northeast side of Tucson, in the foothills of the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Catalina_Mountains\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Santa Catalina Mountains</a>.  It was much more crowded than Saguaro or Tucson Mountain, but I might not be making a fair comparison. At Sabino Canyon, we drove to the main visitors center to step off on our hike while our other hikes started at smaller, more remote trailheads. Here again, there was beautiful rugged desert scenery, looking up the mountains and down into the canyons. But the trails weren\'t well-marked. We would lose the trail coming up out of a wash and then wander through cactus and javelina tracks trying to pick it up again. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\">Eating</h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>All the hiking freed up the caloric space we needed to get deep into <a href=\"https://thisistucson.com/eat/sonoran-food-is-having-a-moment-la-writer-gustavo-arellano-will-talk-burritos-and-mexican/article_e409de98-e53d-11e9-892b-73157f4df357.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Sonoran food</a>, a style of Mexican food that hasn\'t made its way out of <a href=\"https://rovingdecanter.com/2014/10/22/what-is-sonoran-style-mexican-food/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">its roots in Southern Arizona and the Mexican state of Sonora</a> the way that, say, Tex-Mex, Baja, and Oaxacan cuisines have.  Picking up the menus, I immediately saw some differences – it\'s a <em>burro</em>, not a burrito; a <em>caramelo</em>, not a quesadilla; and tacos are garnished with chopped cabbage instead of the chopped cilantro and raw white onion that is the standard in Chicago. Beef, especially <em>carne asada</em>, is the default filling and it\'s served in a thin flour tortilla that\'s more like Chinese moo shu or Peking Duck wrappers than the thick flour tortillas you get with fajitas. <a href=\"https://tucsonfoodie.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tucson Foodie</a> and Andi Berlin, food writer at <a href=\"https://thisistucson.com/eat/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">#ThisIsTucson</a>, were my main guides in Sonoran food.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3046,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7836-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7836-300x238.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3046\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><a href=\"https://www.yelp.com/biz/ruiz-hot-dogs-tucson\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>Ruiz Hot Dogs</strong></a> food truck was our first stop. I\'d heard about the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonoran_hot_dog\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Sonoran hot dog</a> and coming from Chicago, another town with its own <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago-style_hot_dog\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">unique twist on a hot dog</a>, I had to give it a try. The Sonoran dog is a bacon-wrapped hot dog topped with chopped tomatoes and onions, pinto beans, mayonnaise, mustard, and salsa verde, served in a slightly sweet split-top bun with a grilled yellow pepper on the side. We ate ours on the hood of our rental car. It was great and a bargain at $3.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://www.tacorustico.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">El Taco Rustico</a></strong> was next on our list for tacos – more specifically, quesabirras and cabrito (goat) tacos. We tried the quesabirras first. They\'re  crispy tacos filled with beef birra (juicy stewed beef) and melted cheese, served with a little styrofoam cup of broth, what I\'ll call \"Mexican a jus,\" for dipping. The broth, with a deep roasted dried chile flavor, pulled everything together. What the quesabirras didn\'t soak up, we drank like a chaser from a styrofoam shot glass. Next were tacos. We had cabrito and pollo asado (grilled chicken) tacos, and they were a revelation. The taste of the meat, the smoke on the grilled chicken and the tang of the goat, shown through the condiments and the tortilla. That this made such an impression is really a sad commentary on how often the meat in most tacos is just an unseasoned carrier for the salsa and garnish.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3048,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2804-scaled.jpeg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2804-300x284.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3048\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://www.tacosapson.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tacos Apson</a></strong> was our last stop, down in South Tucson across the street from a high school, was the best stop. We smelled the mesquite coming off the grill when we opened the car door. We walked up to the window and ordered two burros, carne asada and haas, which is a mix of asada, cheese, and roasted green chiles. Then scanning the menu, I added a couple <em>costillas</em> tacos, grilled beef ribs.  Back at the Airbnb, I cut burros in half. The thin flour tortilla was wrapped around nothing but the meat with none of typical burrito fillings, no rice or beans or lettuce or crema. There was nothing to mask the mesquite on the carne asada or the beef ribs, and the cheese and green chile in the haas burro accentuated rather than overwhelmed the beef. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\">Drinking</h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\">Wrapping Up</h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->','Quick Notes on a Winter Trip to Tucson','','inherit','closed','closed','','3026-revision-v1','','','2021-01-30 20:23:25','2021-01-31 01:23:25','',3026,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/30/3026-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3051,1,'2021-01-31 20:25:23','2021-02-01 01:25:23','','IMG_7789','','inherit','open','closed','','img_7789','','','2021-01-31 20:25:23','2021-02-01 01:25:23','',3026,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7789.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(3052,1,'2021-01-31 20:33:57','2021-02-01 01:33:57','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3029,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3029\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I left my suitcase at the door of our West Tucson Airbnb and walked out onto the back patio to watch the sun slip behind the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tucson_Mountains\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tucson Mountains</a>. The shades of red and orange on the undersides of a couple of clouds stood out in the pale blue sky. This was exactly what we were looking for when we left a cold grey Chicago nine hours ago. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3051,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7789-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7789-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3051\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>But then I heard a rustling from the far edge of the patio. A good-sized boar, a wild pig, walked out from between two bushes and walked across the backyard. Then another one. They stopped, turned to look at me, and then kept walking. More kept coming – another six followed the leaders, walking the same path across the backyard, stopping to sniff at a little tree. A quick Google search told me they weren\'t wild pigs but <a href=\"https://www.azgfd.com/wildlife/livingwith/javelina/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">javelinas</a>, a New World relative of the pig. They range from southern Arizona all the way down to Argentina in social groups called \"squadrons\".  Our squad looked comfortable here, like they were taking their usual end-of-day stroll back to wherever they bed down to stay safe from mountain lions. A couple of them came back to check on us the next morning, reminding us to keep the patio door closed.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:quote {\"className\":\"is-style-default\"} -->\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-style-default\"><p>To see a video of the javelina visitation and more, check out my <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/s/aGlnaGxpZ2h0OjE3ODc3MTkxNjk2MTM2MTcx?igshid=18auew1hwvjvo&amp;story_media_id=2489441232116364521\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tucson Instagram Story</a> on the TravelCommons Instagram Page</p></blockquote>\n<!-- /wp:quote -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\">Hiking</h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>As I mentioned in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the last podcast</a>, our plans for this trip were all about outside activities so any last-minute COVID closures or restrictions didn\'t strand us in our Airbnb, aimlessly flipping through TV channels. Since Tucson is <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tucson,_Arizona#Geography\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">surrounded by five small-ish mountain ranges,</a> we focused on hiking.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saguaro_National_Park\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Saguaro National Park</a></strong> is split into two physically separate areas, the Tucson Mountain District (TMD) on the west side of town near where we were staying, and across town to the east, the Rincon Mountain District (RMD). Our drive to the west district wound through the northern part of Tucson Mountain Park; two lanes twisting through gaps between the hilltops. The forecast said it would be the best weather of our stay, the highest temperatures and the lowest chance of rain, so we went for our biggest hike, <a href=\"https://www.arizonahighways.com/explore/hiking/king-canyon-trail\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">an 8-mile loop</a> that would take us to the top of 4,687-foot Wasson Peak. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Our plan was to park at the <a href=\"https://goo.gl/maps/KPGPZhBw8hDt7aiJ6\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">King Canyon Trailhead</a>, but it was closed for construction. We hung a quick U-turn and, ignoring the warning signs, parked across the street in the far corner of the Arizona-Sonoma Desert Museum. We cut through some brush, crossed the street, and found the start of the trail.  It was sand and larger stones that climbed up from a dry wash. The Park Service has done a nice job of marking the trail, carving out steps on the steeper parts, and putting up signs at the trail intersections. I was still glad, though, that I\'d downloaded enough off-line Google Maps data so I could double-check the signs when my mobile connection dropped.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"center\",\"id\":3034,\"width\":512,\"height\":384,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"aligncenter size-large is-resized\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2763.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2763-1024x768.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3034\" width=\"512\" height=\"384\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We walked up through what seemed like a cactus version of a forest. The hills were full of saguaro cactus, paddle or prickly pear cactus, barrel cactus, and cholla cactus. The top of Wasson Peak offered a panoramic view of the rocky hills that seemed to jut straight up from the desert floor, and of Tucson sitting at the bottom of them. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3037,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2776-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2776-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3037\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://webcms.pima.gov/cms/One.aspx?pageId=1539\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tucson Mountain Park</a></strong> is directly south of western part of Saguaro National Park. We walked 10 minutes from our Airbnb to the <a href=\"https://goo.gl/maps/jhUVr4RvBoptxDvZ8\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Starr Pass Trailhead</a>. This hike was only 5½-mile loop around the valley floor, so not as long nor as scenic as yesterday\'s Saguaro hike, but a bit more leisurely and easier on the feet. We took a bit more time, looking up at the tall saguaro cactuses with all their different arm configurations, and then down at the barrel cactuses that were just beginning to show the light green shoots of new growth. There were more people using these trails; the level terrain made it popular with mountain bikers and runners. But here too, the trails were well-marked and well-maintained.  It was a good afternoon\'s hike.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://www.fs.usda.gov/recarea/coronado/recarea/?recid=80532\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Sabino Canyon Recreational Area</a></strong> was our last hiking spot. It\'s on the northeast side of Tucson, in the foothills of the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Catalina_Mountains\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Santa Catalina Mountains</a>.  It was much more crowded than Saguaro or Tucson Mountain, but I might not be making a fair comparison. At Sabino Canyon, we drove to the main visitors center to step off on our hike while our other hikes started at smaller, more remote trailheads. Here again, there was beautiful rugged desert scenery, looking up the mountains and down into the canyons. But the trails weren\'t well-marked. We would lose the trail coming up out of a wash and then wander through cactus and javelina tracks trying to pick it up again. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\">Eating</h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>All the hiking freed up the caloric space we needed to get deep into <a href=\"https://thisistucson.com/eat/sonoran-food-is-having-a-moment-la-writer-gustavo-arellano-will-talk-burritos-and-mexican/article_e409de98-e53d-11e9-892b-73157f4df357.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Sonoran food</a>, a style of Mexican food that hasn\'t made its way out of <a href=\"https://rovingdecanter.com/2014/10/22/what-is-sonoran-style-mexican-food/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">its roots in Southern Arizona and the Mexican state of Sonora</a> the way that, say, Tex-Mex, Baja, and Oaxacan cuisines have.  Picking up the menus, I immediately saw some differences – it\'s a <em>burro</em>, not a burrito; a <em>caramelo</em>, not a quesadilla; and tacos are garnished with chopped cabbage instead of the chopped cilantro and raw white onion that is the standard in Chicago. Beef, especially <em>carne asada</em>, is the default filling and it\'s served in a thin flour tortilla that\'s more like Chinese moo shu or Peking Duck wrappers than the thick flour tortillas you get with fajitas. <a href=\"https://tucsonfoodie.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tucson Foodie</a> and Andi Berlin, food writer at <a href=\"https://thisistucson.com/eat/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">#ThisIsTucson</a>, were my main guides in Sonoran food.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3046,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7836-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7836-300x238.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3046\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><a href=\"https://www.yelp.com/biz/ruiz-hot-dogs-tucson\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>Ruiz Hot Dogs</strong></a> food truck was our first stop. I\'d heard about the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonoran_hot_dog\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Sonoran hot dog</a> and coming from Chicago, another town with its own <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago-style_hot_dog\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">unique twist on a hot dog</a>, I had to give it a try. The Sonoran dog is a bacon-wrapped hot dog topped with chopped tomatoes and onions, pinto beans, mayonnaise, mustard, and salsa verde, served in a slightly sweet split-top bun with a grilled yellow pepper on the side. We ate ours on the hood of our rental car. It was great and a bargain at $3.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://www.tacorustico.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">El Taco Rustico</a></strong> was next on our list for tacos – more specifically, quesabirras and cabrito (goat) tacos. We tried the quesabirras first. They\'re  crispy tacos filled with beef birra (juicy stewed beef) and melted cheese, served with a little styrofoam cup of broth, what I\'ll call \"Mexican a jus,\" for dipping. The broth, with a deep roasted dried chile flavor, pulled everything together. What the quesabirras didn\'t soak up, we drank like a chaser from a styrofoam shot glass. Next were tacos. We had cabrito and pollo asado (grilled chicken) tacos, and they were a revelation. The taste of the meat, the smoke on the grilled chicken and the tang of the goat, shown through the condiments and the tortilla. That this made such an impression is really a sad commentary on how often the meat in most tacos is just an unseasoned carrier for the salsa and garnish.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3048,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2804-scaled.jpeg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2804-300x284.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3048\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://www.tacosapson.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tacos Apson</a></strong> was our last stop, down in South Tucson across the street from a high school, was the best stop. We smelled the mesquite coming off the grill when we opened the car door. We walked up to the window and ordered two burros, carne asada and haas, which is a mix of asada, cheese, and roasted green chiles. Then scanning the menu, I added a couple <em>costillas</em> tacos, grilled beef ribs.  Back at the Airbnb, I cut burros in half. The thin flour tortilla was wrapped around nothing but the meat with none of typical burrito fillings, no rice or beans or lettuce or crema. There was nothing to mask the mesquite on the carne asada or the beef ribs, and the cheese and green chile in the haas burro accentuated rather than overwhelmed the beef. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\">Drinking</h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\">Wrapping Up</h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->','Quick Notes on a Winter Trip to Tucson','','inherit','closed','closed','','3026-revision-v1','','','2021-01-31 20:33:57','2021-02-01 01:33:57','',3026,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/31/3026-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3053,1,'2021-01-31 20:44:26','2021-02-01 01:44:26','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3029,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3029\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I left my suitcase at the door of our West Tucson Airbnb and walked out onto the back patio to watch the sun slip behind the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tucson_Mountains\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tucson Mountains</a>. The shades of red and orange on the undersides of a couple of clouds stood out in the pale blue sky. This was exactly what we were looking for when we left a cold grey Chicago nine hours ago. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3051,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7789-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7789-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3051\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>But then I heard a rustling from the far edge of the patio. A good-sized boar, a wild pig, walked out from between two bushes and walked across the backyard. Then another one. They stopped, turned to look at me, and then kept walking. More kept coming – another six followed the leaders, walking the same path across the backyard, stopping to sniff at a little tree. A quick Google search told me they weren\'t wild pigs but <a href=\"https://www.azgfd.com/wildlife/livingwith/javelina/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">javelinas</a>, a New World relative of the pig. They range from southern Arizona all the way down to Argentina in social groups called \"squadrons\".  Our squad looked comfortable here, like they were taking their usual end-of-day stroll back to wherever they bed down to stay safe from mountain lions. A couple of them came back to check on us the next morning, reminding us to keep the patio door closed.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:quote {\"className\":\"is-style-default\"} -->\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-style-default\"><p>To see a video of the javelina visitation and more, check out my <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/s/aGlnaGxpZ2h0OjE3ODc3MTkxNjk2MTM2MTcx?igshid=18auew1hwvjvo&amp;story_media_id=2489441232116364521\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tucson Instagram Story</a> on the TravelCommons Instagram Page</p></blockquote>\n<!-- /wp:quote -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\">Hiking</h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>As I mentioned in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the last podcast</a>, our plans for this trip were all about outside activities so any last-minute COVID closures or restrictions didn\'t strand us in our Airbnb, aimlessly flipping through TV channels. Since Tucson is <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tucson,_Arizona#Geography\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">surrounded by five small-ish mountain ranges,</a> we focused on hiking.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saguaro_National_Park\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Saguaro National Park</a></strong> is split into two physically separate areas, the Tucson Mountain District (TMD) on the west side of town near where we were staying, and across town to the east, the Rincon Mountain District (RMD). Our drive to the west district wound through the northern part of Tucson Mountain Park; two lanes twisting through gaps between the hilltops. The forecast said it would be the best weather of our stay, the highest temperatures and the lowest chance of rain, so we went for our biggest hike, <a href=\"https://www.arizonahighways.com/explore/hiking/king-canyon-trail\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">an 8-mile loop</a> that would take us to the top of 4,687-foot Wasson Peak. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Our plan was to park at the <a href=\"https://goo.gl/maps/KPGPZhBw8hDt7aiJ6\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">King Canyon Trailhead</a>, but it was closed for construction. We hung a quick U-turn and, ignoring the warning signs, parked across the street in the far corner of the Arizona-Sonoma Desert Museum. We cut through some brush, crossed the street, and found the start of the trail.  It was sand and larger stones that climbed up from a dry wash. The Park Service has done a nice job of marking the trail, carving out steps on the steeper parts, and putting up signs at the trail intersections. I was still glad, though, that I\'d downloaded enough off-line Google Maps data so I could double-check the signs when my mobile connection dropped.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"center\",\"id\":3034,\"width\":512,\"height\":384,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"aligncenter size-large is-resized\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2763.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2763-1024x768.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3034\" width=\"512\" height=\"384\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We walked up through what seemed like a cactus version of a forest. The hills were full of saguaro cactus, paddle or prickly pear cactus, barrel cactus, and cholla cactus. The top of Wasson Peak offered a panoramic view of the rocky hills that seemed to jut straight up from the desert floor, and of Tucson sitting at the bottom of them. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3037,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2776-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2776-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3037\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://webcms.pima.gov/cms/One.aspx?pageId=1539\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tucson Mountain Park</a></strong> is directly south of western part of Saguaro National Park. We walked 10 minutes from our Airbnb to the <a href=\"https://goo.gl/maps/jhUVr4RvBoptxDvZ8\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Starr Pass Trailhead</a>. This hike was only a 5½-mile loop around the valley floor, not as long nor as scenic as yesterday\'s Saguaro hike, but more leisurely and certainly easier on the feet. We took a bit more time, looking up at the tall saguaro cactuses with all their different arm configurations, and then down at the barrel cactuses that were just beginning to show the light green shoots of new growth. There were more people using these trails; the level terrain made it popular with mountain bikers and runners. And here too, the trails were well-marked and well-maintained.  It was a good afternoon\'s hike.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://www.fs.usda.gov/recarea/coronado/recarea/?recid=80532\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Sabino Canyon Recreational Area</a></strong> was our last hiking spot. It\'s across town, on the northeast side of Tucson in the foothills of the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Catalina_Mountains\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Santa Catalina Mountains</a>.  It was much more crowded than Saguaro or Tucson Mountain, but I might not be making a fair comparison. At Sabino Canyon, we drove to the main visitors center to step off on our hike while our other hikes started at smaller, more remote trailheads. Here again, there was beautiful rugged desert scenery, looking up the mountains and down into the canyons. But the trails weren\'t as well-marked as the other parks. We would lose the trail coming up out of a wash and then wander through cactus and javelina tracks trying to pick it up again. It was a pretty hike, but frustrating.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\">Eating</h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>All the hiking freed up the caloric space we needed to get deep into <a href=\"https://thisistucson.com/eat/sonoran-food-is-having-a-moment-la-writer-gustavo-arellano-will-talk-burritos-and-mexican/article_e409de98-e53d-11e9-892b-73157f4df357.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Sonoran food</a>, a style of Mexican cuisine that hasn\'t broken out of its birthplace, <a href=\"https://rovingdecanter.com/2014/10/22/what-is-sonoran-style-mexican-food/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">in this case, Southern Arizona and the Mexican state of Sonora</a>, the way that, say, Tex-Mex, Baja, and Oaxacan cuisines have.  Picking up the menus, I immediately saw some differences – it\'s a <em>burro</em>, not a burrito; a <em>caramelo</em>, not a quesadilla; and tacos are garnished with chopped cabbage instead of the chopped cilantro and raw white onion that is the standard in Chicago. Beef, especially <em>carne asada</em>, is the default filling and it\'s served in a thin flour tortilla that\'s more like Chinese moo shu or Peking Duck wrappers than the thick flour tortillas you get with fajitas. <a href=\"https://tucsonfoodie.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tucson Foodie</a> and Andi Berlin, food writer at <a href=\"https://thisistucson.com/eat/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">#ThisIsTucson</a>, were my main guides to Sonoran food.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3046,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7836-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7836-300x238.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3046\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><a href=\"https://www.yelp.com/biz/ruiz-hot-dogs-tucson\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>Ruiz Hot Dogs</strong></a> food truck was our first stop. I\'d read a lot about the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonoran_hot_dog\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Sonoran hot dog</a> and coming from Chicago, another town with its own <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago-style_hot_dog\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">unique twist on a hot dog</a>, I had to give it a try. The Sonoran dog is a bacon-wrapped hot dog topped with chopped tomatoes and onions, pinto beans, mayonnaise, mustard, and salsa verde, served in a slightly sweet split-top bun with a grilled yellow pepper on the side. We ate ours on the hood of our rental car. It was great and a bargain at $3.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://www.tacorustico.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">El Taco Rustico</a></strong> was next on our list for tacos – more specifically, quesabirras and cabrito (goat) tacos. We tried the quesabirras first. They\'re  crispy tacos filled with beef birra (juicy stewed beef) and melted cheese, served with a little styrofoam cup of broth, what I\'ll call \"Mexican a jus,\" for dipping. The broth, with a deep roasted dried chile flavor, pulled everything together. What the quesabirras didn\'t soak up, we drank like a chaser from a styrofoam shot glass. Next were tacos. We had cabrito and pollo asado (grilled chicken) tacos, and they were a revelation. The taste of the meat, the smoke on the grilled chicken and the tang of the goat, shown through the condiments and the tortilla. That this made such an impression is really a sad commentary on how often the meat in most tacos is just an unseasoned carrier for the salsa and garnish.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3048,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2804-scaled.jpeg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2804-300x284.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3048\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://www.tacosapson.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tacos Apson</a></strong> was our last stop, down in South Tucson across the street from a high school, was the best stop. We smelled the mesquite coming off the grill when we opened the car door. We walked up to the window and ordered two burros, carne asada and haas, which is a mix of asada, cheese, and roasted green chiles. Then scanning the menu, I added a couple <em>costillas</em> tacos, grilled beef ribs.  Back at the Airbnb, I cut burros in half. The thin flour tortilla was wrapped around nothing but the meat with none of typical burrito fillings, no rice or beans or lettuce or crema. There was nothing to mask the mesquite on the carne asada or the beef ribs, and the cheese and green chile in the haas burro accentuated rather than overwhelmed the beef. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\">Drinking</h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\">Wrapping Up</h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->','Quick Notes on a Winter Trip to Tucson','','inherit','closed','closed','','3026-revision-v1','','','2021-01-31 20:44:26','2021-02-01 01:44:26','',3026,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/31/3026-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3054,1,'2021-01-31 20:47:48','2021-02-01 01:47:48','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3029,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3029\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I left my suitcase at the door of our West Tucson Airbnb and walked out onto the back patio to watch the sun slip behind the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tucson_Mountains\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tucson Mountains</a>. The shades of red and orange on the undersides of a couple of clouds stood out in the pale blue sky. This was exactly what we were looking for when we left a cold grey Chicago nine hours ago. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3051,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7789-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7789-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3051\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>But then I heard a rustling from the far edge of the patio. A good-sized boar, a wild pig, walked out from between two bushes and walked across the backyard. Then another one. They stopped, turned to look at me, and then kept walking. More kept coming – another six followed the leaders, walking the same path across the backyard, stopping to sniff at a little tree. A quick Google search told me they weren\'t wild pigs but <a href=\"https://www.azgfd.com/wildlife/livingwith/javelina/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">javelinas</a>, a New World relative of the pig. They range from southern Arizona all the way down to Argentina in social groups called \"squadrons\".  Our squad looked comfortable here, like they were taking their usual end-of-day stroll back to wherever they bed down to stay safe from mountain lions. A couple of them came back to check on us the next morning, reminding us to keep the patio door closed.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:quote {\"className\":\"is-style-default\"} -->\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-style-default\"><p>To see a video of the javelina visitation and more, check out my <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/s/aGlnaGxpZ2h0OjE3ODc3MTkxNjk2MTM2MTcx?igshid=18auew1hwvjvo&amp;story_media_id=2489441232116364521\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tucson Instagram Story</a> on the TravelCommons Instagram Page</p></blockquote>\n<!-- /wp:quote -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\">Hiking</h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>As I mentioned in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the last podcast</a>, our plans for this trip were all about outside activities so any last-minute COVID closures or restrictions didn\'t strand us in our Airbnb, aimlessly flipping through TV channels. Since Tucson is <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tucson,_Arizona#Geography\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">surrounded by five small-ish mountain ranges,</a> we focused on hiking.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saguaro_National_Park\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Saguaro National Park</a></strong> is split into two physically separate areas, the Tucson Mountain District (TMD) on the west side of town near where we were staying, and across town to the east, the Rincon Mountain District (RMD). Our drive to the west district wound through the northern part of Tucson Mountain Park; two lanes twisting through gaps between the hilltops. The forecast said it would be the best weather of our stay, the highest temperatures and the lowest chance of rain, so we went for our biggest hike, <a href=\"https://www.arizonahighways.com/explore/hiking/king-canyon-trail\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">an 8-mile loop</a> that would take us to the top of 4,687-foot Wasson Peak. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Our plan was to park at the <a href=\"https://goo.gl/maps/KPGPZhBw8hDt7aiJ6\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">King Canyon Trailhead</a>, but it was closed for construction. We hung a quick U-turn and, ignoring the warning signs, parked across the street in the far corner of the Arizona-Sonoma Desert Museum. We cut through some brush, crossed the street, and found the start of the trail.  It was sand and larger stones that climbed up from a dry wash. The Park Service has done a nice job of marking the trail, carving out steps on the steeper parts, and putting up signs at the trail intersections. I was still glad, though, that I\'d downloaded enough off-line Google Maps data so I could double-check the signs when my mobile connection dropped.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"center\",\"id\":3034,\"width\":512,\"height\":384,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"aligncenter size-large is-resized\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2763.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2763-1024x768.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3034\" width=\"512\" height=\"384\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We walked up through what seemed like a cactus version of a forest. The hills were full of saguaro cactus, paddle or prickly pear cactus, barrel cactus, and cholla cactus. The top of Wasson Peak offered a panoramic view of the rocky hills that seemed to jut straight up from the desert floor, and of Tucson sitting at the bottom of them. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3037,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2776-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2776-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3037\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://webcms.pima.gov/cms/One.aspx?pageId=1539\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tucson Mountain Park</a></strong> is directly south of western part of Saguaro National Park. We walked 10 minutes from our Airbnb to the <a href=\"https://goo.gl/maps/jhUVr4RvBoptxDvZ8\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Starr Pass Trailhead</a>. This hike was only a 5½-mile loop around the valley floor, not as long nor as scenic as yesterday\'s Saguaro hike, but more leisurely and certainly easier on the feet. We took a bit more time, looking up at the tall saguaro cactuses with all their different arm configurations, and then down at the barrel cactuses that were just beginning to show the light green shoots of new growth. There were more people using these trails; the level terrain made it popular with mountain bikers and runners. And here too, the trails were well-marked and well-maintained.  It was a good afternoon\'s hike.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://www.fs.usda.gov/recarea/coronado/recarea/?recid=80532\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Sabino Canyon Recreational Area</a></strong> was our last hiking spot. It\'s across town, on the northeast side of Tucson in the foothills of the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Catalina_Mountains\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Santa Catalina Mountains</a>.  It was much more crowded than Saguaro or Tucson Mountain, but I might not be making a fair comparison. At Sabino Canyon, we drove to the main visitors center to step off on our hike while our other hikes started at smaller, more remote trailheads. Here again, there was beautiful rugged desert scenery, looking up the mountains and down into the canyons. But the trails weren\'t as well-marked as the other parks. We would lose the trail coming up out of a wash and then wander through cactus and javelina tracks trying to pick it up again. It was a pretty hike, but frustrating.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\">Eating</h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>All the hiking freed up the caloric space we needed to get deep into <a href=\"https://thisistucson.com/eat/sonoran-food-is-having-a-moment-la-writer-gustavo-arellano-will-talk-burritos-and-mexican/article_e409de98-e53d-11e9-892b-73157f4df357.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Sonoran food</a>, a style of Mexican cuisine that hasn\'t broken out of its birthplace, <a href=\"https://rovingdecanter.com/2014/10/22/what-is-sonoran-style-mexican-food/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">in this case, Southern Arizona and the Mexican state of Sonora</a>, the way that, say, Tex-Mex, Baja, and Oaxacan cuisines have.  Picking up the menus, I immediately saw some differences – it\'s a <em>burro</em>, not a burrito; a <em>caramelo</em>, not a quesadilla; and tacos are garnished with chopped cabbage instead of the chopped cilantro and raw white onion that is the standard in Chicago. Beef, especially <em>carne asada</em>, is the default filling and it\'s served in a thin flour tortilla that\'s more like Chinese moo shu or Peking Duck wrappers than the thick flour tortillas you get with fajitas. <a href=\"https://tucsonfoodie.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tucson Foodie</a> and Andi Berlin, food writer at <a href=\"https://thisistucson.com/eat/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">#ThisIsTucson</a>, were my main guides to Sonoran food.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3046,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7836-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7836-300x238.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3046\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><a href=\"https://www.yelp.com/biz/ruiz-hot-dogs-tucson\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>Ruiz Hot Dogs</strong></a> food truck was our first stop. I\'d read a lot about the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonoran_hot_dog\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Sonoran hot dog</a> and coming from Chicago, another town with its own <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago-style_hot_dog\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">unique twist on a hot dog</a>, I had to give it a try. The Sonoran dog is a bacon-wrapped hot dog topped with chopped tomatoes and onions, pinto beans, mayonnaise, mustard, and salsa verde, served in a slightly sweet split-top bun with a grilled yellow pepper on the side. We ate ours on the hood of our rental car. It was great and a bargain at $3.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://www.tacorustico.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">El Taco Rustico</a></strong> was next on our list for tacos – more specifically, quesabirras and cabrito (goat) tacos. We tried the quesabirras first. They\'re  crispy tacos filled with beef birra (juicy stewed beef) and melted cheese, served with a little styrofoam cup of broth, what I\'ll call \"Mexican a jus,\" for dipping. The broth, with a deep roasted dried chile flavor, pulled everything together. What the quesabirras didn\'t soak up, we drank like a chaser from a styrofoam shot glass. Next were tacos. We had cabrito and pollo asado (grilled chicken) tacos, and they were a revelation. The taste of the meat, the mesquite smoke on the grilled chicken and the tang of the goat, punched through the condiments and the tortilla. That this made such an impression is really a sad commentary on how often the meat in most tacos is just an underseasoned carrier for the salsa and garnish.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3048,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2804-scaled.jpeg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2804-300x284.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3048\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://www.tacosapson.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tacos Apson</a></strong> was our last stop, down in South Tucson across the street from a high school, and the best stop. We smelled the mesquite coming off the grill when we opened the car door. We walked up to the window and ordered two burros, carne asada and haas, which is a mix of asada, cheese, and roasted green chiles. Then scanning the menu, I added a couple <em>costillas</em> tacos, grilled beef ribs.  Back at the Airbnb, I cut burros in half. The thin flour tortilla was wrapped around nothing but the meat; none of typical burrito fillings, no rice or beans or lettuce or crema. There was nothing to mask the mesquite on the carne asada or the beef ribs, and the cheese and green chile in the haas burro accentuated rather than overwhelmed the beef. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\">Drinking</h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\">Wrapping Up</h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->','Quick Notes on a Winter Trip to Tucson','','inherit','closed','closed','','3026-revision-v1','','','2021-01-31 20:47:48','2021-02-01 01:47:48','',3026,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/31/3026-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3055,1,'2021-01-31 22:02:31','2021-02-01 03:02:31','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":2591,\"width\":316,\"height\":210} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright is-resized\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/DSC_2534-1024x683.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2591\" width=\"316\" height=\"210\"/></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Coming into the heart of the Christmas shopping season, when people are getting desperate for gift ideas, I thought I\'d offer up 10 suggestions for gifts that a new frequent traveler will actually use. While many gift lists are pushing Away luggage, Huzi infinity pillows, and Aesop travel kits (these companies must\'ve splashed a lot of samples around the blog-o-sphere), I built my list based on my own travel kit; the things I use every travel day in the 40-50 trips I take each year.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read the Gift List\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:list {\"ordered\":true} -->\n<ol><li><strong>Black 20-inch carry-on suitcase</strong> <strong>—</strong> Black not only makes you look thinner, it makes your bag look thinner to gate agents hunting for bag-sizer bait. Black also doesn’t show stains. A 20-incher should get your traveler on-board for 90% of airlines without a hassle. I go for the 2-wheeler with the biggest wheels I can find to make it an easier, smoother pull. But that\'s my personal preference; a lot of travelers (including my wife) swear by their 4-wheel spinners. I bought the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/32lIURe\">TravelPro Maxlite 5</a> a few months ago and highly recommend it.</li><li><strong>TSA Global Entry or Pre-Check</strong> <strong>—</strong> Gift your new traveler with 5 years of time and hassle reduction. <a aria-label=\"$100 for both (opens in a new tab)\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.cbp.gov/travel/trusted-traveler-programs/global-entry\" target=\"_blank\">$100 for both</a>; $85 for just <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Pre-Check. (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/precheck\" target=\"_blank\">Pre-Check.</a> If you have a high-end card like an <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Amex Platinum (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.americanexpress.com/us/expedite-your-travel.html\" target=\"_blank\">Amex Platinum</a>, you might be able to put your card on their application and get the $100 fee back in a statement credit.</li><li><strong>Noise Canceling Headphones</strong> <strong>—</strong> I mentioned in <a aria-label=\"$100 for both (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/11/30/podcast-157-notes-from-the-baltics-riga-latvia-and-tallinn-estonia/\">the last podcast episode</a> how my trusty Bose QC-15s saved me from the propeller drone on my flights around the Baltics. The drone of jet or propeller engines disappear with the flick of a switch. But it\'s the drop in stress level and blood pressure that accompanies that flick of the switch — you don’t realize how much that drone affects you. Everything in my briefcase has to earn its space. I’ve been carrying Bose headphones for, I dunno, 10, 15 years. They’re nowhere near compact, but I’ve never thought of leaving them behind. The models you want to look for -- either the <a aria-label=\" (opens in a new tab)\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2RG7V80\" target=\"_blank\">Bose QC-35 II</a> or the <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Sony WH-1000XM3 (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2LGlVuK\" target=\"_blank\">Sony WH-1000XM3</a>. Your generous gift will be lovingly appreciated by your new traveler.</li><li><strong>VPN Subscription</strong> <strong>—</strong> Frequent travelers spend much of their time on public WiFi networks -- airports, hotels, bars, coffee shops, ....  Help them surf safe with a VPN subscription. I\'ve used <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"NordVPN (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"http://nordvpn.com\" target=\"_blank\">NordVPN</a> and <a aria-label=\" (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/\">PIA</a>.  They both protect laptops, and iOS and Android phones and tablets. VPN providers always have some promotion going on. A one-year subscription is usually in the $35-85 range.</li><li><strong>Portable Power Bank</strong> <strong>—</strong> Whatever the size or form factor -- slimline, lipstick, high-capacity brick -- having that second or third charge readily available is critical to get last-minute gate change notifications and when you’re using electronic boarding passes. It saves you from stalking cleaning crews to find a live power outlet on your layover, or negotiating with your seat mate for possession of outlet between you. It’s cheap peace of mind.  The <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Anker PowerCore+ Mini (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2E6HMri\" target=\"_blank\">Anker PowerCore+ Mini</a> is light enough (under 3 oz) to carry any time. I\'ve also started carrying a <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Zendure Power Bank Supermini (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/34fcbON\" target=\"_blank\">Zendure Power Bank Supermini</a> for faster iPhone 11 charging.</li><li><strong>Badger Hair Shaving Brush</strong> <strong>—</strong> I switched from an electric razor to blade to make it easier to pass through London-Heathrow during one of their security crack-downs and never went back. To do it right, though, you need to have a badger hair shaving brush. I use a not-too-expensive <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Edwin Jagger brush (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2Pcm1wy\" target=\"_blank\">Edwin Jagger brush</a> that makes my morning shave into a bit of a meditation. If you want to go all in, get your traveler the <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Alluvian Shave Soap 5-Piece Travel Size Sampler. (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://alluvian.co/shop/shave-soap-travel-size-sampler\" target=\"_blank\">Alluvian Shave Soap 5-Piece Travel Size Sampler.</a> They smell great and are the perfect travel size.</li><li><strong>Merino Wool Scarf</strong> <strong>—</strong>&nbsp;A man’s scarf is an incredibly undervalued piece of intermediate winter wear. In an airplane cabin or hotel room where a coat is too much (especially in a middle seat), but there’s a draft that chills you, a scarf around the neck is just enough without being too much. You may have to teach your new traveler how to wear it, but you can have fun with colors. I\'m a big fan of <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"merino wool scarves (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/35ckwUq\" target=\"_blank\">merino wool scarves</a> -- they\'re warm, soft, and dry out if you spill water on them.</li><li><strong>Compression Socks</strong> <strong>—</strong> Yes, I know that compression socks won\'t generate the most ooh\'s and aah\'s when their wrapping is torn off. But not having to stuff swollen feet back into shoes after an international or transcontinental flight has made me appreciate them. I wear <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"SB SOX Compression Socks (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/38kJGCi\" target=\"_blank\">SB SOX Compression Socks</a>, but any moderate compression sock should be fine.</li><li><strong>Short HDMI Cable and Dongle</strong> <strong>—</strong> It\'s a rare hotel room I walk into that doesn\'t have a big flat-screen TV mounted to the wall. Many of these will let you log into your Netflix or HBO Go account so you can watch your content on the big screen. But why go through all that (and trust their data and network security set-up) when you can just plug your laptop into one of their spare HDMI ports? I use a <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"basic 3-foot HDMI cable (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2PbFBZx\" target=\"_blank\">basic 3-foot HDMI cable</a>. Most of the common business laptops from Dell and Lenovo have HDMI ports but, because I have a MacBook Air, I also carry an <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Apple USB-C-to-HDMI adapter (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2E4HfpI\" target=\"_blank\">Apple USB-C-to-HDMI adapter</a>. </li><li><strong>Travel Notebook</strong> <strong>—</strong> And finally, a stocking stuffer idea — a travel notebook, something to jot down thoughts, ideas, observations, to do lists while waiting for the flight to board, the train to come, or the room to be made up. Nothing extravagant — no leather embossed cover — but it should be small enough to fit in a pocket, but substantial, something that can survive being knocked around in the bottom of a briefcase, and with paper quality that will hold onto those thoughts for a while. I used to use a <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Moleskine pocket notebook (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/36mN8dZ\" target=\"_blank\">Moleskine pocket notebook</a> but have switched over a similar-sized <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Clairefontaine A6 notebook (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2LMAOM9\" target=\"_blank\">Clairefontaine A6 notebook</a>. The soft cover fits better in a jeans back pocket, and the paper is more fountain-pen friendly. Or go a bit more whimsical and get <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"a pack of Field Notes (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/36pK68D\" target=\"_blank\">a pack of Field Notes</a>.</li></ol>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:block {\"ref\":2601} /-->','Best Gift Ideas for a New Traveler','','inherit','closed','closed','','2590-revision-v1','','','2021-01-31 22:02:31','2021-02-01 03:02:31','',2590,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/31/2590-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3057,1,'2021-01-31 22:05:32','2021-02-01 03:05:32','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":2591,\"width\":316,\"height\":210} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright is-resized\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/DSC_2534-1024x683.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2591\" width=\"316\" height=\"210\"/></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Coming into the heart of the Christmas shopping season, when people are getting desperate for gift ideas, I thought I\'d offer up 10 suggestions for gifts that a new frequent traveler will actually use. While many gift lists are pushing Away luggage, Huzi infinity pillows, and Aesop travel kits (these companies must\'ve splashed a lot of samples around the blog-o-sphere), I built my list based on my own travel kit; the things I use every travel day in the 40-50 trips I take each year.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:block {\"ref\":2408} /-->\n\n<!-- wp:list {\"ordered\":true} -->\n<ol><li><strong>Black 20-inch carry-on suitcase</strong> <strong>—</strong> Black not only makes you look thinner, it makes your bag look thinner to gate agents hunting for bag-sizer bait. Black also doesn’t show stains. A 20-incher should get your traveler on-board for 90% of airlines without a hassle. I go for the 2-wheeler with the biggest wheels I can find to make it an easier, smoother pull. But that\'s my personal preference; a lot of travelers (including my wife) swear by their 4-wheel spinners. I bought the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/32lIURe\">TravelPro Maxlite 5</a> a few months ago and highly recommend it.</li><li><strong>TSA Global Entry or Pre-Check</strong> <strong>—</strong> Gift your new traveler with 5 years of time and hassle reduction. <a aria-label=\"$100 for both (opens in a new tab)\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.cbp.gov/travel/trusted-traveler-programs/global-entry\" target=\"_blank\">$100 for both</a>; $85 for just <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Pre-Check. (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/precheck\" target=\"_blank\">Pre-Check.</a> If you have a high-end card like an <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Amex Platinum (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.americanexpress.com/us/expedite-your-travel.html\" target=\"_blank\">Amex Platinum</a>, you might be able to put your card on their application and get the $100 fee back in a statement credit.</li><li><strong>Noise Canceling Headphones</strong> <strong>—</strong> I mentioned in <a aria-label=\"$100 for both (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/11/30/podcast-157-notes-from-the-baltics-riga-latvia-and-tallinn-estonia/\">the last podcast episode</a> how my trusty Bose QC-15s saved me from the propeller drone on my flights around the Baltics. The drone of jet or propeller engines disappear with the flick of a switch. But it\'s the drop in stress level and blood pressure that accompanies that flick of the switch — you don’t realize how much that drone affects you. Everything in my briefcase has to earn its space. I’ve been carrying Bose headphones for, I dunno, 10, 15 years. They’re nowhere near compact, but I’ve never thought of leaving them behind. The models you want to look for -- either the <a aria-label=\" (opens in a new tab)\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2RG7V80\" target=\"_blank\">Bose QC-35 II</a> or the <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Sony WH-1000XM3 (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2LGlVuK\" target=\"_blank\">Sony WH-1000XM3</a>. Your generous gift will be lovingly appreciated by your new traveler.</li><li><strong>VPN Subscription</strong> <strong>—</strong> Frequent travelers spend much of their time on public WiFi networks -- airports, hotels, bars, coffee shops, ....  Help them surf safe with a VPN subscription. I\'ve used <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"NordVPN (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"http://nordvpn.com\" target=\"_blank\">NordVPN</a> and <a aria-label=\" (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/\">PIA</a>.  They both protect laptops, and iOS and Android phones and tablets. VPN providers always have some promotion going on. A one-year subscription is usually in the $35-85 range.</li><li><strong>Portable Power Bank</strong> <strong>—</strong> Whatever the size or form factor -- slimline, lipstick, high-capacity brick -- having that second or third charge readily available is critical to get last-minute gate change notifications and when you’re using electronic boarding passes. It saves you from stalking cleaning crews to find a live power outlet on your layover, or negotiating with your seat mate for possession of outlet between you. It’s cheap peace of mind.  The <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Anker PowerCore+ Mini (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2E6HMri\" target=\"_blank\">Anker PowerCore+ Mini</a> is light enough (under 3 oz) to carry any time. I\'ve also started carrying a <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Zendure Power Bank Supermini (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/34fcbON\" target=\"_blank\">Zendure Power Bank Supermini</a> for faster iPhone 11 charging.</li><li><strong>Badger Hair Shaving Brush</strong> <strong>—</strong> I switched from an electric razor to blade to make it easier to pass through London-Heathrow during one of their security crack-downs and never went back. To do it right, though, you need to have a badger hair shaving brush. I use a not-too-expensive <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Edwin Jagger brush (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2Pcm1wy\" target=\"_blank\">Edwin Jagger brush</a> that makes my morning shave into a bit of a meditation. If you want to go all in, get your traveler the <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Alluvian Shave Soap 5-Piece Travel Size Sampler. (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://alluvian.co/shop/shave-soap-travel-size-sampler\" target=\"_blank\">Alluvian Shave Soap 5-Piece Travel Size Sampler.</a> They smell great and are the perfect travel size.</li><li><strong>Merino Wool Scarf</strong> <strong>—</strong>&nbsp;A man’s scarf is an incredibly undervalued piece of intermediate winter wear. In an airplane cabin or hotel room where a coat is too much (especially in a middle seat), but there’s a draft that chills you, a scarf around the neck is just enough without being too much. You may have to teach your new traveler how to wear it, but you can have fun with colors. I\'m a big fan of <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"merino wool scarves (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/35ckwUq\" target=\"_blank\">merino wool scarves</a> -- they\'re warm, soft, and dry out if you spill water on them.</li><li><strong>Compression Socks</strong> <strong>—</strong> Yes, I know that compression socks won\'t generate the most ooh\'s and aah\'s when their wrapping is torn off. But not having to stuff swollen feet back into shoes after an international or transcontinental flight has made me appreciate them. I wear <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"SB SOX Compression Socks (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/38kJGCi\" target=\"_blank\">SB SOX Compression Socks</a>, but any moderate compression sock should be fine.</li><li><strong>Short HDMI Cable and Dongle</strong> <strong>—</strong> It\'s a rare hotel room I walk into that doesn\'t have a big flat-screen TV mounted to the wall. Many of these will let you log into your Netflix or HBO Go account so you can watch your content on the big screen. But why go through all that (and trust their data and network security set-up) when you can just plug your laptop into one of their spare HDMI ports? I use a <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"basic 3-foot HDMI cable (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2PbFBZx\" target=\"_blank\">basic 3-foot HDMI cable</a>. Most of the common business laptops from Dell and Lenovo have HDMI ports but, because I have a MacBook Air, I also carry an <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Apple USB-C-to-HDMI adapter (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2E4HfpI\" target=\"_blank\">Apple USB-C-to-HDMI adapter</a>. </li><li><strong>Travel Notebook</strong> <strong>—</strong> And finally, a stocking stuffer idea — a travel notebook, something to jot down thoughts, ideas, observations, to do lists while waiting for the flight to board, the train to come, or the room to be made up. Nothing extravagant — no leather embossed cover — but it should be small enough to fit in a pocket, but substantial, something that can survive being knocked around in the bottom of a briefcase, and with paper quality that will hold onto those thoughts for a while. I used to use a <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Moleskine pocket notebook (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/36mN8dZ\" target=\"_blank\">Moleskine pocket notebook</a> but have switched over a similar-sized <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Clairefontaine A6 notebook (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2LMAOM9\" target=\"_blank\">Clairefontaine A6 notebook</a>. The soft cover fits better in a jeans back pocket, and the paper is more fountain-pen friendly. Or go a bit more whimsical and get <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"a pack of Field Notes (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/36pK68D\" target=\"_blank\">a pack of Field Notes</a>.</li></ol>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:block {\"ref\":2601} /-->','Best Gift Ideas for a New Traveler','','inherit','closed','closed','','2590-revision-v1','','','2021-01-31 22:05:32','2021-02-01 03:05:32','',2590,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/31/2590-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3060,1,'2021-01-31 22:08:20','2021-02-01 03:08:20','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":2591,\"width\":316,\"height\":210} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright is-resized\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/DSC_2534-1024x683.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2591\" width=\"316\" height=\"210\"/></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Coming into the heart of the Christmas shopping season, when people are getting desperate for gift ideas, I thought I\'d offer up 10 suggestions for gifts that a new frequent traveler will actually use. While many gift lists are pushing Away luggage, Huzi infinity pillows, and Aesop travel kits (these companies must\'ve splashed a lot of samples around the blog-o-sphere), I built my list based on my own travel kit; the things I use every travel day in the 40-50 trips I take each year.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:list {\"ordered\":true} -->\n<ol><li><strong>Black 20-inch carry-on suitcase</strong> <strong>—</strong> Black not only makes you look thinner, it makes your bag look thinner to gate agents hunting for bag-sizer bait. Black also doesn’t show stains. A 20-incher should get your traveler on-board for 90% of airlines without a hassle. I go for the 2-wheeler with the biggest wheels I can find to make it an easier, smoother pull. But that\'s my personal preference; a lot of travelers (including my wife) swear by their 4-wheel spinners. I bought the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/32lIURe\">TravelPro Maxlite 5</a> a few months ago and highly recommend it.</li><li><strong>TSA Global Entry or Pre-Check</strong> <strong>—</strong> Gift your new traveler with 5 years of time and hassle reduction. <a aria-label=\"$100 for both (opens in a new tab)\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.cbp.gov/travel/trusted-traveler-programs/global-entry\" target=\"_blank\">$100 for both</a>; $85 for just <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Pre-Check. (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/precheck\" target=\"_blank\">Pre-Check.</a> If you have a high-end card like an <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Amex Platinum (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.americanexpress.com/us/expedite-your-travel.html\" target=\"_blank\">Amex Platinum</a>, you might be able to put your card on their application and get the $100 fee back in a statement credit.</li><li><strong>Noise Canceling Headphones</strong> <strong>—</strong> I mentioned in <a aria-label=\"$100 for both (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/11/30/podcast-157-notes-from-the-baltics-riga-latvia-and-tallinn-estonia/\">the last podcast episode</a> how my trusty Bose QC-15s saved me from the propeller drone on my flights around the Baltics. The drone of jet or propeller engines disappear with the flick of a switch. But it\'s the drop in stress level and blood pressure that accompanies that flick of the switch — you don’t realize how much that drone affects you. Everything in my briefcase has to earn its space. I’ve been carrying Bose headphones for, I dunno, 10, 15 years. They’re nowhere near compact, but I’ve never thought of leaving them behind. The models you want to look for -- either the <a aria-label=\" (opens in a new tab)\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2RG7V80\" target=\"_blank\">Bose QC-35 II</a> or the <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Sony WH-1000XM3 (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2LGlVuK\" target=\"_blank\">Sony WH-1000XM3</a>. Your generous gift will be lovingly appreciated by your new traveler.</li><li><strong>VPN Subscription</strong> <strong>—</strong> Frequent travelers spend much of their time on public WiFi networks -- airports, hotels, bars, coffee shops, ....  Help them surf safe with a VPN subscription. I\'ve used <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"NordVPN (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"http://nordvpn.com\" target=\"_blank\">NordVPN</a> and <a aria-label=\" (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/\">PIA</a>.  They both protect laptops, and iOS and Android phones and tablets. VPN providers always have some promotion going on. A one-year subscription is usually in the $35-85 range.</li><li><strong>Portable Power Bank</strong> <strong>—</strong> Whatever the size or form factor -- slimline, lipstick, high-capacity brick -- having that second or third charge readily available is critical to get last-minute gate change notifications and when you’re using electronic boarding passes. It saves you from stalking cleaning crews to find a live power outlet on your layover, or negotiating with your seat mate for possession of outlet between you. It’s cheap peace of mind.  The <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Anker PowerCore+ Mini (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2E6HMri\" target=\"_blank\">Anker PowerCore+ Mini</a> is light enough (under 3 oz) to carry any time. I\'ve also started carrying a <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Zendure Power Bank Supermini (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/34fcbON\" target=\"_blank\">Zendure Power Bank Supermini</a> for faster iPhone 11 charging.</li><li><strong>Badger Hair Shaving Brush</strong> <strong>—</strong> I switched from an electric razor to blade to make it easier to pass through London-Heathrow during one of their security crack-downs and never went back. To do it right, though, you need to have a badger hair shaving brush. I use a not-too-expensive <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Edwin Jagger brush (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2Pcm1wy\" target=\"_blank\">Edwin Jagger brush</a> that makes my morning shave into a bit of a meditation. If you want to go all in, get your traveler the <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Alluvian Shave Soap 5-Piece Travel Size Sampler. (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://alluvian.co/shop/shave-soap-travel-size-sampler\" target=\"_blank\">Alluvian Shave Soap 5-Piece Travel Size Sampler.</a> They smell great and are the perfect travel size.</li><li><strong>Merino Wool Scarf</strong> <strong>—</strong>&nbsp;A man’s scarf is an incredibly undervalued piece of intermediate winter wear. In an airplane cabin or hotel room where a coat is too much (especially in a middle seat), but there’s a draft that chills you, a scarf around the neck is just enough without being too much. You may have to teach your new traveler how to wear it, but you can have fun with colors. I\'m a big fan of <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"merino wool scarves (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/35ckwUq\" target=\"_blank\">merino wool scarves</a> -- they\'re warm, soft, and dry out if you spill water on them.</li><li><strong>Compression Socks</strong> <strong>—</strong> Yes, I know that compression socks won\'t generate the most ooh\'s and aah\'s when their wrapping is torn off. But not having to stuff swollen feet back into shoes after an international or transcontinental flight has made me appreciate them. I wear <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"SB SOX Compression Socks (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/38kJGCi\" target=\"_blank\">SB SOX Compression Socks</a>, but any moderate compression sock should be fine.</li><li><strong>Short HDMI Cable and Dongle</strong> <strong>—</strong> It\'s a rare hotel room I walk into that doesn\'t have a big flat-screen TV mounted to the wall. Many of these will let you log into your Netflix or HBO Go account so you can watch your content on the big screen. But why go through all that (and trust their data and network security set-up) when you can just plug your laptop into one of their spare HDMI ports? I use a <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"basic 3-foot HDMI cable (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2PbFBZx\" target=\"_blank\">basic 3-foot HDMI cable</a>. Most of the common business laptops from Dell and Lenovo have HDMI ports but, because I have a MacBook Air, I also carry an <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Apple USB-C-to-HDMI adapter (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2E4HfpI\" target=\"_blank\">Apple USB-C-to-HDMI adapter</a>. </li><li><strong>Travel Notebook</strong> <strong>—</strong> And finally, a stocking stuffer idea — a travel notebook, something to jot down thoughts, ideas, observations, to do lists while waiting for the flight to board, the train to come, or the room to be made up. Nothing extravagant — no leather embossed cover — but it should be small enough to fit in a pocket, but substantial, something that can survive being knocked around in the bottom of a briefcase, and with paper quality that will hold onto those thoughts for a while. I used to use a <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Moleskine pocket notebook (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/36mN8dZ\" target=\"_blank\">Moleskine pocket notebook</a> but have switched over a similar-sized <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Clairefontaine A6 notebook (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2LMAOM9\" target=\"_blank\">Clairefontaine A6 notebook</a>. The soft cover fits better in a jeans back pocket, and the paper is more fountain-pen friendly. Or go a bit more whimsical and get <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"a pack of Field Notes (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/36pK68D\" target=\"_blank\">a pack of Field Notes</a>.</li></ol>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:block {\"ref\":2601} /-->','Best Gift Ideas for a New Traveler','','inherit','closed','closed','','2590-revision-v1','','','2021-01-31 22:08:20','2021-02-01 03:08:20','',2590,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/31/2590-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3062,1,'2021-01-31 22:11:58','2021-02-01 03:11:58','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":2591,\"width\":316,\"height\":210} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright is-resized\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/DSC_2534-1024x683.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2591\" width=\"316\" height=\"210\"/></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Coming into the heart of the Christmas shopping season, when people are getting desperate for gift ideas, I thought I\'d offer up 10 suggestions for gifts that a new frequent traveler will actually use. While many gift lists are pushing Away luggage, Huzi infinity pillows, and Aesop travel kits (these companies must\'ve splashed a lot of samples around the blog-o-sphere), I built my list based on my own travel kit; the things I use every travel day in the 40-50 trips I take each year.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list {\"ordered\":true} -->\n<ol><li><strong>Black 20-inch carry-on suitcase</strong> <strong>—</strong> Black not only makes you look thinner, it makes your bag look thinner to gate agents hunting for bag-sizer bait. Black also doesn’t show stains. A 20-incher should get your traveler on-board for 90% of airlines without a hassle. I go for the 2-wheeler with the biggest wheels I can find to make it an easier, smoother pull. But that\'s my personal preference; a lot of travelers (including my wife) swear by their 4-wheel spinners. I bought the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/32lIURe\">TravelPro Maxlite 5</a> a few months ago and highly recommend it.</li><li><strong>TSA Global Entry or Pre-Check</strong> <strong>—</strong> Gift your new traveler with 5 years of time and hassle reduction. <a aria-label=\"$100 for both (opens in a new tab)\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.cbp.gov/travel/trusted-traveler-programs/global-entry\" target=\"_blank\">$100 for both</a>; $85 for just <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Pre-Check. (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/precheck\" target=\"_blank\">Pre-Check.</a> If you have a high-end card like an <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Amex Platinum (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.americanexpress.com/us/expedite-your-travel.html\" target=\"_blank\">Amex Platinum</a>, you might be able to put your card on their application and get the $100 fee back in a statement credit.</li><li><strong>Noise Canceling Headphones</strong> <strong>—</strong> I mentioned in <a aria-label=\"$100 for both (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/11/30/podcast-157-notes-from-the-baltics-riga-latvia-and-tallinn-estonia/\">the last podcast episode</a> how my trusty Bose QC-15s saved me from the propeller drone on my flights around the Baltics. The drone of jet or propeller engines disappear with the flick of a switch. But it\'s the drop in stress level and blood pressure that accompanies that flick of the switch — you don’t realize how much that drone affects you. Everything in my briefcase has to earn its space. I’ve been carrying Bose headphones for, I dunno, 10, 15 years. They’re nowhere near compact, but I’ve never thought of leaving them behind. The models you want to look for -- either the <a aria-label=\" (opens in a new tab)\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2RG7V80\" target=\"_blank\">Bose QC-35 II</a> or the <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Sony WH-1000XM3 (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2LGlVuK\" target=\"_blank\">Sony WH-1000XM3</a>. Your generous gift will be lovingly appreciated by your new traveler.</li><li><strong>VPN Subscription</strong> <strong>—</strong> Frequent travelers spend much of their time on public WiFi networks -- airports, hotels, bars, coffee shops, ....  Help them surf safe with a VPN subscription. I\'ve used <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"NordVPN (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"http://nordvpn.com\" target=\"_blank\">NordVPN</a> and <a aria-label=\" (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/\">PIA</a>.  They both protect laptops, and iOS and Android phones and tablets. VPN providers always have some promotion going on. A one-year subscription is usually in the $35-85 range.</li><li><strong>Portable Power Bank</strong> <strong>—</strong> Whatever the size or form factor -- slimline, lipstick, high-capacity brick -- having that second or third charge readily available is critical to get last-minute gate change notifications and when you’re using electronic boarding passes. It saves you from stalking cleaning crews to find a live power outlet on your layover, or negotiating with your seat mate for possession of outlet between you. It’s cheap peace of mind.  The <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Anker PowerCore+ Mini (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2E6HMri\" target=\"_blank\">Anker PowerCore+ Mini</a> is light enough (under 3 oz) to carry any time. I\'ve also started carrying a <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Zendure Power Bank Supermini (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/34fcbON\" target=\"_blank\">Zendure Power Bank Supermini</a> for faster iPhone 11 charging.</li><li><strong>Badger Hair Shaving Brush</strong> <strong>—</strong> I switched from an electric razor to blade to make it easier to pass through London-Heathrow during one of their security crack-downs and never went back. To do it right, though, you need to have a badger hair shaving brush. I use a not-too-expensive <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Edwin Jagger brush (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2Pcm1wy\" target=\"_blank\">Edwin Jagger brush</a> that makes my morning shave into a bit of a meditation. If you want to go all in, get your traveler the <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Alluvian Shave Soap 5-Piece Travel Size Sampler. (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://alluvian.co/shop/shave-soap-travel-size-sampler\" target=\"_blank\">Alluvian Shave Soap 5-Piece Travel Size Sampler.</a> They smell great and are the perfect travel size.</li><li><strong>Merino Wool Scarf</strong> <strong>—</strong>&nbsp;A man’s scarf is an incredibly undervalued piece of intermediate winter wear. In an airplane cabin or hotel room where a coat is too much (especially in a middle seat), but there’s a draft that chills you, a scarf around the neck is just enough without being too much. You may have to teach your new traveler how to wear it, but you can have fun with colors. I\'m a big fan of <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"merino wool scarves (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/35ckwUq\" target=\"_blank\">merino wool scarves</a> -- they\'re warm, soft, and dry out if you spill water on them.</li><li><strong>Compression Socks</strong> <strong>—</strong> Yes, I know that compression socks won\'t generate the most ooh\'s and aah\'s when their wrapping is torn off. But not having to stuff swollen feet back into shoes after an international or transcontinental flight has made me appreciate them. I wear <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"SB SOX Compression Socks (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/38kJGCi\" target=\"_blank\">SB SOX Compression Socks</a>, but any moderate compression sock should be fine.</li><li><strong>Short HDMI Cable and Dongle</strong> <strong>—</strong> It\'s a rare hotel room I walk into that doesn\'t have a big flat-screen TV mounted to the wall. Many of these will let you log into your Netflix or HBO Go account so you can watch your content on the big screen. But why go through all that (and trust their data and network security set-up) when you can just plug your laptop into one of their spare HDMI ports? I use a <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"basic 3-foot HDMI cable (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2PbFBZx\" target=\"_blank\">basic 3-foot HDMI cable</a>. Most of the common business laptops from Dell and Lenovo have HDMI ports but, because I have a MacBook Air, I also carry an <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Apple USB-C-to-HDMI adapter (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2E4HfpI\" target=\"_blank\">Apple USB-C-to-HDMI adapter</a>. </li><li><strong>Travel Notebook</strong> <strong>—</strong> And finally, a stocking stuffer idea — a travel notebook, something to jot down thoughts, ideas, observations, to do lists while waiting for the flight to board, the train to come, or the room to be made up. Nothing extravagant — no leather embossed cover — but it should be small enough to fit in a pocket, but substantial, something that can survive being knocked around in the bottom of a briefcase, and with paper quality that will hold onto those thoughts for a while. I used to use a <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Moleskine pocket notebook (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/36mN8dZ\" target=\"_blank\">Moleskine pocket notebook</a> but have switched over a similar-sized <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Clairefontaine A6 notebook (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2LMAOM9\" target=\"_blank\">Clairefontaine A6 notebook</a>. The soft cover fits better in a jeans back pocket, and the paper is more fountain-pen friendly. Or go a bit more whimsical and get <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"a pack of Field Notes (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/36pK68D\" target=\"_blank\">a pack of Field Notes</a>.</li></ol>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:block {\"ref\":2601} /-->','Best Gift Ideas for a New Traveler','','inherit','closed','closed','','2590-revision-v1','','','2021-01-31 22:11:58','2021-02-01 03:11:58','',2590,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/31/2590-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3063,1,'2021-01-31 22:39:34','2021-02-01 03:39:34','','IMG_2789','','inherit','open','closed','','img_2789','','','2021-01-31 22:39:34','2021-02-01 03:39:34','',3026,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2789.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(3064,1,'2021-01-31 22:55:48','2021-02-01 03:55:48','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3029,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3029\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I left my suitcase at the door of our West Tucson Airbnb and walked out onto the back patio to watch the sun slip behind the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tucson_Mountains\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tucson Mountains</a>. The shades of red and orange on the undersides of a couple of clouds stood out in the pale blue sky. This was exactly what we were looking for when we left a cold grey Chicago nine hours ago. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3051,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7789-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7789-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3051\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>But then I heard a rustling from the far edge of the patio. A good-sized boar, a wild pig, walked out from between two bushes and walked across the backyard. Then another one. They stopped, turned to look at me, and then kept walking. More kept coming – another six followed the leaders, walking the same path across the backyard, stopping to sniff at a little tree. A quick Google search told me they weren\'t wild pigs but <a href=\"https://www.azgfd.com/wildlife/livingwith/javelina/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">javelinas</a>, a New World relative of the pig. They range from southern Arizona all the way down to Argentina in social groups called \"squadrons\".  Our squad looked comfortable here, like they were taking their usual end-of-day stroll back to wherever they bed down to stay safe from mountain lions. A couple of them came back to check on us the next morning, reminding us to keep the patio door closed.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:quote {\"className\":\"is-style-default\"} -->\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-style-default\"><p>To see a video of the javelina visitation and more, check out my <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/s/aGlnaGxpZ2h0OjE3ODc3MTkxNjk2MTM2MTcx?igshid=18auew1hwvjvo&amp;story_media_id=2489441232116364521\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tucson Instagram Story</a> on the TravelCommons Instagram Page</p></blockquote>\n<!-- /wp:quote -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\">Hiking</h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>As I mentioned in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the last podcast</a>, our plans for this trip were all about outside activities so any last-minute COVID closures or restrictions didn\'t strand us in our Airbnb, aimlessly flipping through TV channels. Since Tucson is <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tucson,_Arizona#Geography\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">surrounded by five small-ish mountain ranges,</a> we focused on hiking.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saguaro_National_Park\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Saguaro National Park</a></strong> is split into two physically separate areas, the Tucson Mountain District (TMD) on the west side of town near where we were staying, and across town to the east, the Rincon Mountain District (RMD). Our drive to the west district wound through the northern part of Tucson Mountain Park; two lanes twisting through gaps between the hilltops. The forecast said it would be the best weather of our stay, the highest temperatures and the lowest chance of rain, so we went for our biggest hike, <a href=\"https://www.arizonahighways.com/explore/hiking/king-canyon-trail\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">an 8-mile loop</a> that would take us to the top of 4,687-foot Wasson Peak. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Our plan was to park at the <a href=\"https://goo.gl/maps/KPGPZhBw8hDt7aiJ6\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">King Canyon Trailhead</a>, but it was closed for construction. We hung a quick U-turn and, ignoring the warning signs, parked across the street in the far corner of the Arizona-Sonoma Desert Museum. We cut through some brush, crossed the street, and found the start of the trail.  It was sand and larger stones that climbed up from a dry wash. The Park Service has done a nice job of marking the trail, carving out steps on the steeper parts, and putting up signs at the trail intersections. I was still glad, though, that I\'d downloaded enough off-line Google Maps data so I could double-check the signs when my mobile connection dropped.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"center\",\"id\":3034,\"width\":512,\"height\":384,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"aligncenter size-large is-resized\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2763.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2763-1024x768.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3034\" width=\"512\" height=\"384\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We walked up through what seemed like a cactus version of a forest. The hills were full of saguaro cactus, paddle or prickly pear cactus, barrel cactus, and cholla cactus. The top of Wasson Peak offered a panoramic view of the rocky hills that seemed to jut straight up from the desert floor, and of Tucson sitting at the bottom of them. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3037,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2776-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2776-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3037\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://webcms.pima.gov/cms/One.aspx?pageId=1539\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tucson Mountain Park</a></strong> is directly south of western part of Saguaro National Park. We walked 10 minutes from our Airbnb to the <a href=\"https://goo.gl/maps/jhUVr4RvBoptxDvZ8\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Starr Pass Trailhead</a>. This hike was only a 5½-mile loop around the valley floor, not as long nor as scenic as yesterday\'s Saguaro hike, but more leisurely and certainly easier on the feet. We took a bit more time, looking up at the tall saguaro cactuses with all their different arm configurations, and then down at the barrel cactuses that were just beginning to show the light green shoots of new growth. There were more people using these trails; the level terrain made it popular with mountain bikers and runners. And here too, the trails were well-marked and well-maintained.  It was a good afternoon\'s hike.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://www.fs.usda.gov/recarea/coronado/recarea/?recid=80532\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Sabino Canyon Recreational Area</a></strong> was our last hiking spot. It\'s across town, on the northeast side of Tucson in the foothills of the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Catalina_Mountains\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Santa Catalina Mountains</a>.  It was much more crowded than Saguaro or Tucson Mountain, but I might not be making a fair comparison. At Sabino Canyon, we drove to the main visitors center to step off on our hike while our other hikes started at smaller, more remote trailheads. Here again, there was beautiful rugged desert scenery, looking up the mountains and down into the canyons. But the trails weren\'t as well-marked as the other parks. We would lose the trail coming up out of a wash and then wander through cactus and javelina tracks trying to pick it up again. It was a pretty hike, but frustrating.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\">Eating</h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>All the hiking freed up the caloric space we needed to get deep into <a href=\"https://thisistucson.com/eat/sonoran-food-is-having-a-moment-la-writer-gustavo-arellano-will-talk-burritos-and-mexican/article_e409de98-e53d-11e9-892b-73157f4df357.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Sonoran food</a>, a style of Mexican cuisine that hasn\'t broken out of its birthplace, <a href=\"https://rovingdecanter.com/2014/10/22/what-is-sonoran-style-mexican-food/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">in this case, Southern Arizona and the Mexican state of Sonora</a>, the way that, say, Tex-Mex, Baja, and Oaxacan cuisines have.  Picking up the menus, I immediately saw some differences – it\'s a <em>burro</em>, not a burrito; a <em>caramelo</em>, not a quesadilla; and tacos are garnished with chopped cabbage instead of the chopped cilantro and raw white onion that is the standard in Chicago. Beef, especially <em>carne asada</em>, is the default filling and it\'s served in a thin flour tortilla that\'s more like Chinese moo shu or Peking Duck wrappers than the thick flour tortillas you get with fajitas. <a href=\"https://tucsonfoodie.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tucson Foodie</a> and Andi Berlin, food writer at <a href=\"https://thisistucson.com/eat/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">#ThisIsTucson</a>, were my main guides to Sonoran food.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3046,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7836-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7836-300x238.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3046\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><a href=\"https://www.yelp.com/biz/ruiz-hot-dogs-tucson\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>Ruiz Hot Dogs</strong></a> food truck was our first stop. I\'d read a lot about the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonoran_hot_dog\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Sonoran hot dog</a> and coming from Chicago, another town with its own <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago-style_hot_dog\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">unique twist on a hot dog</a>, I had to give it a try. The Sonoran dog is a bacon-wrapped hot dog topped with chopped tomatoes and onions, pinto beans, mayonnaise, mustard, and salsa verde, served in a slightly sweet split-top bun with a grilled yellow pepper on the side. We ate ours on the hood of our rental car. It was great and a bargain at $3. (1140 S 6th Ave at W 22nd St)</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://www.tacorustico.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">El Taco Rustico</a></strong> was next on our list for tacos – more specifically, quesabirras and cabrito (goat) tacos. We tried the quesabirras first. They\'re  crispy tacos filled with beef birra (juicy stewed beef) and melted cheese, served with a little styrofoam cup of broth, what I\'ll call \"Mexican a jus,\" for dipping. The broth, with a deep roasted dried chile flavor, pulled everything together. What the quesabirras didn\'t soak up, we drank like a chaser from a styrofoam shot glass. Next were tacos. We had cabrito and pollo asado (grilled chicken) tacos, and they were a revelation. The taste of the meat, the mesquite smoke on the grilled chicken and the tang of the goat, punched through the condiments and the tortilla. That this made such an impression is really a sad commentary on how often the meat in most tacos is just an underseasoned carrier for the salsa and garnish. (2281 N Oracle Rd)</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3048,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2804-scaled.jpeg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2804-300x284.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3048\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://www.tacosapson.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tacos Apson</a></strong> was our last stop, down in South Tucson across the street from a high school, and the best stop. We smelled the mesquite coming off the grill when we opened the car door. We walked up to the window and ordered two burros, carne asada and haas, which is a mix of asada, cheese, and roasted green chiles. Then scanning the menu, I added a couple <em>costillas</em> tacos, grilled beef ribs.  Back at the Airbnb, I cut burros in half. The thin flour tortilla was wrapped around nothing but the meat; none of typical burrito fillings, no rice or beans or lettuce or crema. There was nothing to mask the mesquite on the carne asada or the beef ribs, and the cheese and green chile in the haas burro accentuated rather than overwhelmed the beef. (3501 S 12th Ave)</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\">Drinking</h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I can\'t hike and eat Mexican food without beer. Tucson isn\'t on anyone\'s <a href=\"https://beerandbrewing.com/best-in-beer-2020-readers-choice-your-favorite-beer-cities/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">list of top beer cities</a>, but I found a couple of solid microbreweries to recommend.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3063,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2789-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2789-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3063\"/></a><figcaption>1912 Brewing Menu Board</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://1912brewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">1912 Brewing Company</a></strong> is in a strip of nondescript light industrial buildings just west of I-10, a quick 5-minute drive from El Taco Rustico. They have 20 taps and a wide selection of styles – goses, saisons, and some German styles in addition to the usual IPAs. (2045 N. Forbes Blvd, Ste 105) </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://www.pueblovidabrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pueblo Vida Brewing Company</a></strong> kl;k;k</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\">Wrapping Up</h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Quick Notes on a Winter Trip to Tucson','','inherit','closed','closed','','3026-revision-v1','','','2021-01-31 22:55:48','2021-02-01 03:55:48','',3026,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/31/3026-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3065,1,'2021-01-31 23:31:46','2021-02-01 04:31:46','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3029,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3029\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I left my suitcase at the door of our West Tucson Airbnb and walked out onto the back patio to watch the sun slip behind the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tucson_Mountains\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tucson Mountains</a>. The shades of red and orange on the undersides of a couple of clouds stood out in the pale blue sky. This was exactly what we were looking for when we left a cold grey Chicago nine hours ago. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3051,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7789-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7789-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3051\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>But then I heard a rustling from the far edge of the patio. A good-sized boar, a wild pig, walked out from between two bushes and walked across the backyard. Then another one. They stopped, turned to look at me, and then kept walking. More kept coming – another six followed the leaders, walking the same path across the backyard, stopping to sniff at a little tree. A quick Google search told me they weren\'t wild pigs but <a href=\"https://www.azgfd.com/wildlife/livingwith/javelina/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">javelinas</a>, a New World relative of the pig. They range from southern Arizona all the way down to Argentina in social groups called \"squadrons\".  Our squad looked comfortable here, like they were taking their usual end-of-day stroll back to wherever they bed down to stay safe from mountain lions. A couple of them came back to check on us the next morning, reminding us to keep the patio door closed.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:quote {\"className\":\"is-style-default\"} -->\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-style-default\"><p>To see a video of the javelina visitation and more, check out my <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/s/aGlnaGxpZ2h0OjE3ODc3MTkxNjk2MTM2MTcx?igshid=18auew1hwvjvo&amp;story_media_id=2489441232116364521\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tucson Instagram Story</a> on the TravelCommons Instagram Page</p></blockquote>\n<!-- /wp:quote -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\">Hiking</h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>As I mentioned in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the last podcast</a>, our plans for this trip were all about outside activities so any last-minute COVID closures or restrictions didn\'t strand us in our Airbnb, aimlessly flipping through TV channels. Since Tucson is <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tucson,_Arizona#Geography\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">surrounded by five small-ish mountain ranges,</a> we focused on hiking.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saguaro_National_Park\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Saguaro National Park</a></strong> is split into two physically separate areas, the Tucson Mountain District (TMD) on the west side of town near where we were staying, and across town to the east, the Rincon Mountain District (RMD). Our drive to the west district wound through the northern part of Tucson Mountain Park; two lanes twisting through gaps between the hilltops. The forecast said it would be the best weather of our stay, the highest temperatures and the lowest chance of rain, so we went for our biggest hike, <a href=\"https://www.arizonahighways.com/explore/hiking/king-canyon-trail\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">an 8-mile loop</a> that would take us to the top of 4,687-foot Wasson Peak. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Our plan was to park at the <a href=\"https://goo.gl/maps/KPGPZhBw8hDt7aiJ6\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">King Canyon Trailhead</a>, but it was closed for construction. We hung a quick U-turn and, ignoring the warning signs, parked across the street in the far corner of the Arizona-Sonoma Desert Museum. We cut through some brush, crossed the street, and found the start of the trail.  It was sand and larger stones that climbed up from a dry wash. The Park Service has done a nice job of marking the trail, carving out steps on the steeper parts, and putting up signs at the trail intersections. I was still glad, though, that I\'d downloaded enough off-line Google Maps data so I could double-check the signs when my mobile connection dropped.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"center\",\"id\":3034,\"width\":512,\"height\":384,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"aligncenter size-large is-resized\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2763.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2763-1024x768.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3034\" width=\"512\" height=\"384\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We walked up through what seemed like a cactus version of a forest. The hills were full of saguaro cactus, paddle or prickly pear cactus, barrel cactus, and cholla cactus. The top of Wasson Peak offered a panoramic view of the rocky hills that seemed to jut straight up from the desert floor, and of Tucson sitting at the bottom of them. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3037,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2776-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2776-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3037\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://webcms.pima.gov/cms/One.aspx?pageId=1539\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tucson Mountain Park</a></strong> is directly south of western part of Saguaro National Park. We walked 10 minutes from our Airbnb to the <a href=\"https://goo.gl/maps/jhUVr4RvBoptxDvZ8\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Starr Pass Trailhead</a>. This hike was only a 5½-mile loop around the valley floor, not as long nor as scenic as yesterday\'s Saguaro hike, but more leisurely and certainly easier on the feet. We took a bit more time, looking up at the tall saguaro cactuses with all their different arm configurations, and then down at the barrel cactuses that were just beginning to show the light green shoots of new growth. There were more people using these trails; the level terrain made it popular with mountain bikers and runners. And here too, the trails were well-marked and well-maintained.  It was a good afternoon\'s hike.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://www.fs.usda.gov/recarea/coronado/recarea/?recid=80532\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Sabino Canyon Recreational Area</a></strong> was our last hiking spot. It\'s across town, on the northeast side of Tucson in the foothills of the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Catalina_Mountains\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Santa Catalina Mountains</a>.  It was much more crowded than Saguaro or Tucson Mountain, but I might not be making a fair comparison. At Sabino Canyon, we drove to the main visitors center to step off on our hike while our other hikes started at smaller, more remote trailheads. Here again, there was beautiful rugged desert scenery, looking up the mountains and down into the canyons. But the trails weren\'t as well-marked as the other parks. We would lose the trail coming up out of a wash and then wander through cactus and javelina tracks trying to pick it up again. It was a pretty hike, but frustrating.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\">Eating</h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>All the hiking freed up the caloric space we needed to get deep into <a href=\"https://thisistucson.com/eat/sonoran-food-is-having-a-moment-la-writer-gustavo-arellano-will-talk-burritos-and-mexican/article_e409de98-e53d-11e9-892b-73157f4df357.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Sonoran food</a>, a style of Mexican cuisine that hasn\'t broken out of its birthplace, <a href=\"https://rovingdecanter.com/2014/10/22/what-is-sonoran-style-mexican-food/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">in this case, Southern Arizona and the Mexican state of Sonora</a>, the way that, say, Tex-Mex, Baja, and Oaxacan cuisines have.  Picking up the menus, I immediately saw some differences – it\'s a <em>burro</em>, not a burrito; a <em>caramelo</em>, not a quesadilla; and tacos are garnished with chopped cabbage instead of the chopped cilantro and raw white onion that is the standard in Chicago. Beef, especially <em>carne asada</em>, is the default filling and it\'s served in a thin flour tortilla that\'s more like Chinese moo shu or Peking Duck wrappers than the thick flour tortillas you get with fajitas. <a href=\"https://tucsonfoodie.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tucson Foodie</a> and Andi Berlin, food writer at <a href=\"https://thisistucson.com/eat/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">#ThisIsTucson</a>, were my main guides to Sonoran food.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3046,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7836-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7836-300x238.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3046\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><a href=\"https://www.yelp.com/biz/ruiz-hot-dogs-tucson\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>Ruiz Hot Dogs</strong></a> food truck was our first stop. I\'d read a lot about the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonoran_hot_dog\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Sonoran hot dog</a> and coming from Chicago, another town with its own <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago-style_hot_dog\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">unique twist on a hot dog</a>, I had to give it a try. The Sonoran dog is a bacon-wrapped hot dog topped with chopped tomatoes and onions, pinto beans, mayonnaise, mustard, and salsa verde, served in a slightly sweet split-top bun with a grilled yellow pepper on the side. We ate ours on the hood of our rental car. It was great and a bargain at $3. (1140 S 6th Ave at W 22nd St)</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://www.tacorustico.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">El Taco Rustico</a></strong> was next on our list for tacos – more specifically, quesabirras and cabrito (goat) tacos. We tried the quesabirras first. They\'re  crispy tacos filled with beef birra (juicy stewed beef) and melted cheese, served with a little styrofoam cup of broth, what I\'ll call \"Mexican a jus,\" for dipping. The broth, with a deep roasted dried chile flavor, pulled everything together. What the quesabirras didn\'t soak up, we drank like a chaser from a styrofoam shot glass. Next were tacos. We had cabrito and pollo asado (grilled chicken) tacos, and they were a revelation. The taste of the meat, the mesquite smoke on the grilled chicken and the tang of the goat, punched through the condiments and the tortilla. That this made such an impression is really a sad commentary on how often the meat in most tacos is just an underseasoned carrier for the salsa and garnish. (2281 N Oracle Rd)</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3048,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2804-scaled.jpeg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2804-300x284.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3048\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://www.tacosapson.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tacos Apson</a></strong> was our last stop, down in South Tucson across the street from a high school, and the best stop. We smelled the mesquite coming off the grill when we opened the car door. We walked up to the window and ordered two burros, carne asada and haas, which is a mix of asada, cheese, and roasted green chiles. Then scanning the menu, I added a couple <em>costillas</em> tacos, grilled beef ribs.  Back at the Airbnb, I cut burros in half. The thin flour tortilla was wrapped around nothing but the meat; none of typical burrito fillings, no rice or beans or lettuce or crema. There was nothing to mask the mesquite on the carne asada or the beef ribs, and the cheese and green chile in the haas burro accentuated rather than overwhelmed the beef. (3501 S 12th Ave)</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\">Drinking</h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I can\'t hike and eat Mexican food without beer. Tucson isn\'t on anyone\'s <a href=\"https://beerandbrewing.com/best-in-beer-2020-readers-choice-your-favorite-beer-cities/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">list of top beer cities</a>, but I found a couple of solid microbreweries to recommend.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3063,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2789-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2789-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3063\"/></a><figcaption>1912 Brewing Menu Board</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://1912brewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">1912 Brewing Company</a></strong> is in a strip of nondescript light industrial buildings just west of I-10, a quick 5-minute drive from El Taco Rustico. They have 20 taps and a wide selection of styles – goses, saisons, and some German styles in addition to the usual IPAs. (2045 N Forbes Blvd, Ste 105) </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://www.pueblovidabrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pueblo Vida Brewing Company</a></strong> is in downtown Tucson. After navigating one-way streets and dodging street car, we found parking and walked over to the taproom only to find that the taproom was closed for COVID restrictions. But they were selling cans from from a walk-up window, so we had a nice chat with the woman helping us and bought a mixed 4-pack to go with our Tacos Apson take-away – a Vietnamese-inspired rice lager, a couple of hazy IPAs made with local Sonoran white wheat, and what I was most excited for, a black IPA. They were the best beers of the trip. (115 E Broadway Blvd)</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\">Wrapping Up</h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Quick Notes on a Winter Trip to Tucson','','inherit','closed','closed','','3026-revision-v1','','','2021-01-31 23:31:46','2021-02-01 04:31:46','',3026,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/31/3026-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3066,1,'2021-01-31 23:55:21','2021-02-01 04:55:21','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3029,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3029\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I left my suitcase at the door of our West Tucson Airbnb and walked out onto the back patio to watch the sun slip behind the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tucson_Mountains\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tucson Mountains</a>. The shades of red and orange on the undersides of a couple of clouds stood out in the pale blue sky. This was exactly what we were looking for when we left a cold grey Chicago nine hours ago. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3051,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7789-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7789-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3051\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>But then I heard a rustling from the far edge of the patio. A good-sized boar, a wild pig, walked out from between two bushes and walked across the backyard. Then another one. They stopped, turned to look at me, and then kept walking. More kept coming – another six followed the leaders, walking the same path across the backyard, stopping to sniff at a little tree. A quick Google search told me they weren\'t wild pigs but <a href=\"https://www.azgfd.com/wildlife/livingwith/javelina/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">javelinas</a>, a New World relative of the pig. They range from southern Arizona all the way down to Argentina in social groups called \"squadrons\".  Our squad looked comfortable here, like they were taking their usual end-of-day stroll back to wherever they bed down to stay safe from mountain lions. A couple of them came back to check on us the next morning, reminding us to keep the patio door closed.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:quote {\"className\":\"is-style-default\"} -->\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-style-default\"><p>To see a video of the javelina visitation and more, check out my <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/s/aGlnaGxpZ2h0OjE3ODc3MTkxNjk2MTM2MTcx?igshid=18auew1hwvjvo&amp;story_media_id=2489441232116364521\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tucson Instagram Story</a> on the TravelCommons Instagram Page</p></blockquote>\n<!-- /wp:quote -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\">Hiking</h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>As I mentioned in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the last podcast</a>, our plans for this trip were all about outside activities so any last-minute COVID closures or restrictions didn\'t strand us in our Airbnb, aimlessly flipping through TV channels. Since Tucson is <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tucson,_Arizona#Geography\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">surrounded by five small-ish mountain ranges,</a> we focused on hiking.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saguaro_National_Park\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Saguaro National Park</a></strong> is split into two physically separate areas, the Tucson Mountain District (TMD) on the west side of town near where we were staying, and across town to the east, the Rincon Mountain District (RMD). Our drive to the west district wound through the northern part of Tucson Mountain Park; two lanes twisting through gaps between the hilltops. The forecast said it would be the best weather of our stay, the highest temperatures and the lowest chance of rain, so we went for our biggest hike, <a href=\"https://www.arizonahighways.com/explore/hiking/king-canyon-trail\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">an 8-mile loop</a> that would take us to the top of 4,687-foot Wasson Peak. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Our plan was to park at the <a href=\"https://goo.gl/maps/KPGPZhBw8hDt7aiJ6\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">King Canyon Trailhead</a>, but it was closed for construction. We hung a quick U-turn and, ignoring the warning signs, parked across the street in the far corner of the Arizona-Sonoma Desert Museum. We cut through some brush, crossed the street, and found the start of the trail.  It was sand and larger stones that climbed up from a dry wash. The Park Service has done a nice job of marking the trail, carving out steps on the steeper parts, and putting up signs at the trail intersections. I was still glad, though, that I\'d downloaded enough off-line Google Maps data so I could double-check the signs when my mobile connection dropped.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"center\",\"id\":3034,\"width\":512,\"height\":384,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"aligncenter size-large is-resized\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2763.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2763-1024x768.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3034\" width=\"512\" height=\"384\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We walked up through what seemed like a cactus version of a forest. The hills were full of saguaro cactus, paddle or prickly pear cactus, barrel cactus, and cholla cactus. The top of Wasson Peak offered a panoramic view of the rocky hills that seemed to jut straight up from the desert floor, and of Tucson sitting at the bottom of them. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3037,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2776-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2776-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3037\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://webcms.pima.gov/cms/One.aspx?pageId=1539\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tucson Mountain Park</a></strong> is directly south of western part of Saguaro National Park. We walked 10 minutes from our Airbnb to the <a href=\"https://goo.gl/maps/jhUVr4RvBoptxDvZ8\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Starr Pass Trailhead</a>. This hike was only a 5½-mile loop around the valley floor, not as long nor as scenic as yesterday\'s Saguaro hike, but more leisurely and certainly easier on the feet. We took a bit more time, looking up at the tall saguaro cactuses with all their different arm configurations, and then down at the barrel cactuses that were just beginning to show the light green shoots of new growth. There were more people using these trails; the level terrain made it popular with mountain bikers and runners. And here too, the trails were well-marked and well-maintained.  It was a good afternoon\'s hike.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://www.fs.usda.gov/recarea/coronado/recarea/?recid=80532\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Sabino Canyon Recreational Area</a></strong> was our last hiking spot. It\'s across town, on the northeast side of Tucson in the foothills of the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Catalina_Mountains\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Santa Catalina Mountains</a>.  It was much more crowded than Saguaro or Tucson Mountain, but I might not be making a fair comparison. At Sabino Canyon, we drove to the main visitors center to step off on our hike while our other hikes started at smaller, more remote trailheads. Here again, there was beautiful rugged desert scenery, looking up the mountains and down into the canyons. But the trails weren\'t as well-marked as the other parks. We would lose the trail coming up out of a wash and then wander through cactus and javelina tracks trying to pick it up again. It was a pretty hike, but frustrating.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\">Eating</h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>All the hiking freed up the caloric space we needed to get deep into <a href=\"https://thisistucson.com/eat/sonoran-food-is-having-a-moment-la-writer-gustavo-arellano-will-talk-burritos-and-mexican/article_e409de98-e53d-11e9-892b-73157f4df357.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Sonoran food</a>, a style of Mexican cuisine that hasn\'t broken out of its birthplace, <a href=\"https://rovingdecanter.com/2014/10/22/what-is-sonoran-style-mexican-food/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">in this case, Southern Arizona and the Mexican state of Sonora</a>, the way that, say, Tex-Mex, Baja, and Oaxacan cuisines have.  Picking up the menus, I immediately saw some differences – it\'s a <em>burro</em>, not a burrito; a <em>caramelo</em>, not a quesadilla; and tacos are garnished with chopped cabbage instead of the chopped cilantro and raw white onion that is the standard in Chicago. Beef, especially <em>carne asada</em>, is the default filling and it\'s served in a thin flour tortilla that\'s more like Chinese moo shu or Peking Duck wrappers than the thick flour tortillas you get with fajitas. <a href=\"https://tucsonfoodie.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tucson Foodie</a> and Andi Berlin, food writer at <a href=\"https://thisistucson.com/eat/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">#ThisIsTucson</a>, were my main guides to Sonoran food.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3046,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7836-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7836-300x238.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3046\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><a href=\"https://www.yelp.com/biz/ruiz-hot-dogs-tucson\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>Ruiz Hot Dogs</strong></a> food truck was our first stop. I\'d read a lot about the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonoran_hot_dog\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Sonoran hot dog</a> and coming from Chicago, another town with its own <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago-style_hot_dog\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">unique twist on a hot dog</a>, I had to give it a try. The Sonoran dog is a bacon-wrapped hot dog topped with chopped tomatoes and onions, pinto beans, mayonnaise, mustard, and salsa verde, served in a slightly sweet split-top bun with a grilled yellow pepper on the side. We ate ours on the hood of our rental car. It was great and a bargain at $3. (1140 S 6th Ave at W 22nd St)</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://www.tacorustico.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">El Taco Rustico</a></strong> was next on our list for tacos – more specifically, quesabirras and cabrito (goat) tacos. We tried the quesabirras first. They\'re  crispy tacos filled with beef birra (juicy stewed beef) and melted cheese, served with a little styrofoam cup of broth, what I\'ll call \"Mexican a jus,\" for dipping. The broth, with a deep roasted dried chile flavor, pulled everything together. What the quesabirras didn\'t soak up, we drank like a chaser from a styrofoam shot glass. Next were tacos. We had cabrito and pollo asado (grilled chicken) tacos, and they were a revelation. The taste of the meat, the mesquite smoke on the grilled chicken and the tang of the goat, punched through the condiments and the tortilla. That this made such an impression is really a sad commentary on how often the meat in most tacos is just an underseasoned carrier for the salsa and garnish. (2281 N Oracle Rd)</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3048,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2804-scaled.jpeg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2804-300x284.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3048\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://www.tacosapson.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tacos Apson</a></strong> was our last stop, down in South Tucson across the street from a high school, and the best stop. We smelled the mesquite coming off the grill when we opened the car door. We walked up to the window and ordered two burros, carne asada and haas, which is a mix of asada, cheese, and roasted green chiles. Then scanning the menu, I added a couple <em>costillas</em> tacos, grilled beef ribs.  Back at the Airbnb, I cut burros in half. The thin flour tortilla was wrapped around nothing but the meat; none of typical burrito fillings, no rice or beans or lettuce or crema. There was nothing to mask the mesquite on the carne asada or the beef ribs, and the cheese and green chile in the haas burro accentuated rather than overwhelmed the beef. (3501 S 12th Ave)</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\">Drinking</h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I can\'t hike and eat Mexican food without beer. Tucson isn\'t on anyone\'s <a href=\"https://beerandbrewing.com/best-in-beer-2020-readers-choice-your-favorite-beer-cities/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">list of top beer cities</a>, but I found a couple of solid microbreweries to recommend.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3063,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2789-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2789-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3063\"/></a><figcaption>1912 Brewing Menu Board</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://1912brewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">1912 Brewing Company</a></strong> is in a strip of nondescript light industrial buildings just west of I-10, a quick 5-minute drive from El Taco Rustico. They have 20 taps and a wide selection of styles – goses, saisons, and some German styles in addition to the usual IPAs. (2045 N Forbes Blvd, Ste 105) </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://www.pueblovidabrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pueblo Vida Brewing Company</a></strong> is in downtown Tucson. After navigating one-way streets and dodging street car, we found parking and walked over to the taproom only to find that the taproom was closed for COVID restrictions. But they were selling cans from from a walk-up window, so we had a nice chat with the woman helping us and bought a mixed 4-pack to go with our Tacos Apson take-away – a Vietnamese-inspired rice lager, a couple of hazy IPAs made with local Sonoran white wheat, and what I was most excited for, a black IPA. They were the best beers of the trip. (115 E Broadway Blvd)</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\">Resources</h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Travel and Lodging</strong><ul><li>We flew Southwest Airline to Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport (PHX) from Chicago Midway (MDW). Prices and flight selection were much better than flying into Tucson (TUS).</li><li>We rented a car from Hertz at PHX and drove the 115 miles down I-10 to Tucson.  It was an easy drive that us an hour and 40 minutes. PHX is on the south side of Phoenix right by I-10, so we didn\'t hit any Phoenix traffic on the drive.</li><li>Our Airbnb was a one-bedroom time-share suite at <a href=\"https://clubwyndham.wyndhamdestinations.com/us/en/resorts/wyndham-hotels-resorts/united-states-of-america/arizona/tucson/starr-pass-golf-suites\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Starr Pass Golf Suites</a>.   It was a nice resort. We didn\'t use any of the amenities (pool, golf course, restaurant). We\'re glad we stayed out near the Tucson Mountains rather than a downtown hotel. Tucson isn\'t that big, so we weren\'t more than 25 minutes from anywhere we wanted to be.</li></ul></li><li><strong>Hiking</strong> <ul><li><a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saguaro_National_Park\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Saguaro National Park</a></li><li><a href=\"https://webcms.pima.gov/cms/One.aspx?pageId=1539\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tucson Mountain Park</a></li><li><a href=\"https://www.fs.usda.gov/recarea/coronado/recarea/?recid=80532\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Sabino Canyon Recreational Area</a></li></ul></li><li><strong>Sonoran Food</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.yelp.com/biz/ruiz-hot-dogs-tucson\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Ruiz Hot Dogs</a>, 1140 S 6th Ave at W 22nd St</li><li><a href=\"https://www.tacorustico.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">El Taco Rustico</a>, 2281 N Oracle Rd</li><li><a href=\"https://www.tacosapson.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tacos Apson</a>, 3501 S 12th Ave</li></ul></li><li><strong>Craft Beer</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://1912brewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">1912 Brewing Company</a>, 2045 N Forbes Blvd, Ste 105</li><li><a href=\"https://www.pueblovidabrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pueblo Vida Brewing Company</a>, 115 E Broadway Blvd</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Quick Notes on a Winter Trip to Tucson','','inherit','closed','closed','','3026-revision-v1','','','2021-01-31 23:55:21','2021-02-01 04:55:21','',3026,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/31/3026-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3068,1,'2021-02-01 10:58:27','2021-02-01 15:58:27','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3029,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3029\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I left my suitcase at the door of our West Tucson Airbnb and walked out onto the back patio to watch the sun slip behind the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tucson_Mountains\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tucson Mountains</a>. The shades of red and orange on the undersides of a couple of clouds stood out in the pale blue sky. This was exactly what we were looking for when we left a cold grey Chicago nine hours ago. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3051,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7789-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7789-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3051\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>But then I heard a rustling from the far edge of the patio. A good-sized boar, a wild pig, walked out from between two bushes and walked across the backyard. Then another one. They stopped, turned to look at me, and then kept walking. More kept coming – another six followed the leaders, walking the same path across the backyard, stopping to sniff at a little tree. A quick Google search told me they weren\'t wild pigs but <a href=\"https://www.azgfd.com/wildlife/livingwith/javelina/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">javelinas</a>, a New World relative of the pig. They range from southern Arizona all the way down to Argentina in social groups called \"squadrons\".  Our squad looked comfortable here, like they were taking their usual end-of-day stroll back to wherever they bed down to stay safe from mountain lions. A couple of them came back to check on us the next morning, reminding us to keep the patio door closed.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:quote {\"className\":\"is-style-default\"} -->\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-style-default\"><p>To see a video of the javelina visitation and more, check out my <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/s/aGlnaGxpZ2h0OjE3ODc3MTkxNjk2MTM2MTcx?igshid=18auew1hwvjvo&amp;story_media_id=2489441232116364521\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tucson Instagram Story</a> on the TravelCommons Instagram Page</p></blockquote>\n<!-- /wp:quote -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\">Hiking</h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>As I mentioned in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the last podcast</a>, our plans for this trip were all about outside activities so any last-minute COVID closures or restrictions didn\'t strand us in our Airbnb, aimlessly flipping through TV channels. Since Tucson is <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tucson,_Arizona#Geography\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">surrounded by five small-ish mountain ranges,</a> we focused on hiking.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saguaro_National_Park\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Saguaro National Park</a></strong> is split into two physically separate areas, the Tucson Mountain District (TMD) on the west side of town near where we were staying, and across town to the east, the Rincon Mountain District (RMD). Our drive to the west district wound through the northern part of Tucson Mountain Park; two lanes twisting through gaps between the hilltops. The forecast said it would be the best weather of our stay, the highest temperatures and the lowest chance of rain, so we went for our biggest hike, <a href=\"https://www.arizonahighways.com/explore/hiking/king-canyon-trail\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">an 8-mile loop</a> that would take us to the top of 4,687-foot Wasson Peak. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We planned to park at the <a href=\"https://goo.gl/maps/KPGPZhBw8hDt7aiJ6\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">King Canyon Trailhead</a>, but it was filled with construction equipment that had completely torn up the parking lot. We hung a quick U-turn and, ignoring the warning signs, parked across the street in the far corner of the Arizona-Sonoma Desert Museum. We cut through some brush, crossed the street, and found the start of the trail.  It was sand and larger stones that climbed up from a dry wash. The Park Service has done a nice job of marking the trail, carving out steps on the steeper parts, and putting up signs at the trail intersections. I was glad, though, that I\'d downloaded enough off-line Google Maps data so I could double-check the signs when my mobile connection dropped.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"center\",\"id\":3034,\"width\":512,\"height\":384,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"aligncenter size-large is-resized\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2763.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2763-1024x768.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3034\" width=\"512\" height=\"384\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We walked up through what seemed the cactus version of a forest. The hills were full of all sorts of cacti: tall saguaro, low-to-the ground prickly pear and barrel, and twisted, tangled cholla. The top of Wasson Peak gave a panoramic view of the rocky hills that jutted straight up from the desert floor, and of Tucson sitting at the bottom of them. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3037,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2776-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2776-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3037\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://webcms.pima.gov/cms/One.aspx?pageId=1539\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tucson Mountain Park</a></strong> is directly south of western part of Saguaro National Park. We walked 10 minutes from our Airbnb to the <a href=\"https://goo.gl/maps/jhUVr4RvBoptxDvZ8\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Starr Pass Trailhead</a>. This hike was only a 5½-mile loop around the valley floor, not as long nor as scenic as yesterday\'s Saguaro hike, but more leisurely and certainly easier on the feet. We took a bit more time, looking up at the tall saguaro cactuses with all their different arm configurations, and then down at the barrel cactuses that were just beginning to show the light green shoots of new growth. There were more people using these trails; the level terrain made it popular with mountain bikers and runners. And here too, the trails were well-marked and well-maintained.  It was a good afternoon\'s hike.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://www.fs.usda.gov/recarea/coronado/recarea/?recid=80532\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Sabino Canyon Recreational Area</a></strong> was our last hiking spot. It\'s across town, on the northeast side of Tucson in the foothills of the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Catalina_Mountains\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Santa Catalina Mountains</a>.  It was much more crowded than Saguaro or Tucson Mountain, but I might not be making a fair comparison. At Sabino Canyon, we drove to the main visitors center to step off on our hike while our other hikes started at smaller, more remote trailheads. Here again, there was beautiful rugged desert scenery, looking up the mountains and down into the canyons. But the trails weren\'t as well-marked as the other parks. We would lose the trail coming up out of a wash and then wander through cactus and javelina tracks trying to pick it up again. It was a pretty hike, but frustrating.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\">Eating</h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>All the hiking freed up the caloric space we needed to get deep into <a href=\"https://thisistucson.com/eat/sonoran-food-is-having-a-moment-la-writer-gustavo-arellano-will-talk-burritos-and-mexican/article_e409de98-e53d-11e9-892b-73157f4df357.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Sonoran food</a>, a style of Mexican cuisine that hasn\'t broken out of its birthplace, <a href=\"https://rovingdecanter.com/2014/10/22/what-is-sonoran-style-mexican-food/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">in this case, Southern Arizona and the Mexican state of Sonora</a>, the way that, say, Tex-Mex, Baja, and Oaxacan cuisines have.  Picking up the menus, I immediately saw some differences – it\'s a <em>burro</em>, not a burrito; a <em>caramelo</em>, not a quesadilla; and tacos are garnished with chopped cabbage instead of the chopped cilantro and raw white onion that is the standard in Chicago. Beef, especially <em>carne asada</em>, is the default filling and it\'s served in a thin flour tortilla that\'s more like Chinese moo shu or Peking Duck wrappers than the thick flour tortillas you get with fajitas. <a href=\"https://tucsonfoodie.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tucson Foodie</a> and Andi Berlin, food writer at <a href=\"https://thisistucson.com/eat/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">#ThisIsTucson</a>, were my main guides to Sonoran food.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3046,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7836-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7836-300x238.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3046\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><a href=\"https://www.yelp.com/biz/ruiz-hot-dogs-tucson\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>Ruiz Hot Dogs</strong></a> food truck was our first stop. I\'d read a lot about the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonoran_hot_dog\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Sonoran hot dog</a> and coming from Chicago, another town with its own <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago-style_hot_dog\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">unique twist on a hot dog</a>, I had to give it a try. The Sonoran dog is a bacon-wrapped hot dog topped with chopped tomatoes and onions, pinto beans, mayonnaise, mustard, and salsa verde, served in a slightly sweet split-top bun with a grilled yellow pepper on the side. We ate ours on the hood of our rental car. It was great and a bargain at $3. (1140 S 6th Ave at W 22nd St)</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://www.tacorustico.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">El Taco Rustico</a></strong> was next on our list for tacos – more specifically, quesabirras and cabrito (goat) tacos. We tried the quesabirras first. They\'re  crispy tacos filled with beef birra (juicy stewed beef) and melted cheese, served with a little styrofoam cup of broth, what I\'ll call \"Mexican a jus,\" for dipping. The broth, with a deep roasted dried chile flavor, pulled everything together. What the quesabirras didn\'t soak up, we drank like a chaser from a styrofoam shot glass. Next were tacos. We had cabrito and pollo asado (grilled chicken) tacos, and they were a revelation. The taste of the meat, the mesquite smoke on the grilled chicken and the tang of the goat, punched through the condiments and the tortilla. That this made such an impression is really a sad commentary on how often the meat in most tacos is just an underseasoned carrier for the salsa and garnish. (2281 N Oracle Rd)</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3048,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2804-scaled.jpeg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2804-300x284.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3048\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://www.tacosapson.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tacos Apson</a></strong> was our last stop, down in South Tucson across the street from a high school, and the best stop. We smelled the mesquite coming off the grill when we opened the car door. We walked up to the window and ordered two burros, carne asada and haas, which is a mix of asada, cheese, and roasted green chiles. Then scanning the menu, I added a couple <em>costillas</em> tacos, grilled beef ribs.  Back at the Airbnb, I cut burros in half. The thin flour tortilla was wrapped around nothing but the meat; none of typical burrito fillings, no rice or beans or lettuce or crema. There was nothing to mask the mesquite on the carne asada or the beef ribs, and the cheese and green chile in the haas burro accentuated rather than overwhelmed the beef. (3501 S 12th Ave)</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\">Drinking</h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I can\'t hike and eat Mexican food without beer. Tucson isn\'t on anyone\'s <a href=\"https://beerandbrewing.com/best-in-beer-2020-readers-choice-your-favorite-beer-cities/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">list of top beer cities</a>, but I found a couple of solid microbreweries to recommend.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3063,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2789-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2789-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3063\"/></a><figcaption>1912 Brewing Menu Board</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://1912brewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">1912 Brewing Company</a></strong> is in a strip of nondescript light industrial buildings just west of I-10, a quick 5-minute drive from El Taco Rustico. They have 20 taps and a wide selection of styles – goses, saisons, and some German styles in addition to the usual IPAs. (2045 N Forbes Blvd, Ste 105) </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://www.pueblovidabrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pueblo Vida Brewing Company</a></strong> is in downtown Tucson. After navigating one-way streets and dodging street car, we found parking and walked over to the taproom only to find that the taproom was closed for COVID restrictions. But they were selling cans from from a walk-up window, so we had a nice chat with the woman helping us and bought a mixed 4-pack to go with our Tacos Apson take-away – a Vietnamese-inspired rice lager, a couple of hazy IPAs made with local Sonoran white wheat, and what I was most excited for, a black IPA. They were the best beers of the trip. (115 E Broadway Blvd)</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\">Resources</h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Travel and Lodging</strong><ul><li>We flew Southwest Airline to Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport (PHX) from Chicago Midway (MDW). Prices and flight selection were much better than flying into Tucson (TUS).</li><li>We rented a car from Hertz at PHX and drove the 115 miles down I-10 to Tucson.  It was an easy drive that us an hour and 40 minutes. PHX is on the south side of Phoenix right by I-10, so we didn\'t hit any Phoenix traffic on the drive.</li><li>Our Airbnb was a one-bedroom time-share suite at <a href=\"https://clubwyndham.wyndhamdestinations.com/us/en/resorts/wyndham-hotels-resorts/united-states-of-america/arizona/tucson/starr-pass-golf-suites\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Starr Pass Golf Suites</a>.   It was a nice resort. We didn\'t use any of the amenities (pool, golf course, restaurant). We\'re glad we stayed out near the Tucson Mountains rather than a downtown hotel. Tucson isn\'t that big, so we weren\'t more than 25 minutes from anywhere we wanted to be.</li></ul></li><li><strong>Hiking</strong> <ul><li><a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saguaro_National_Park\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Saguaro National Park</a></li><li><a href=\"https://webcms.pima.gov/cms/One.aspx?pageId=1539\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tucson Mountain Park</a></li><li><a href=\"https://www.fs.usda.gov/recarea/coronado/recarea/?recid=80532\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Sabino Canyon Recreational Area</a></li></ul></li><li><strong>Sonoran Food</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.yelp.com/biz/ruiz-hot-dogs-tucson\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Ruiz Hot Dogs</a>, 1140 S 6th Ave at W 22nd St</li><li><a href=\"https://www.tacorustico.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">El Taco Rustico</a>, 2281 N Oracle Rd</li><li><a href=\"https://www.tacosapson.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tacos Apson</a>, 3501 S 12th Ave</li></ul></li><li><strong>Craft Beer</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://1912brewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">1912 Brewing Company</a>, 2045 N Forbes Blvd, Ste 105</li><li><a href=\"https://www.pueblovidabrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pueblo Vida Brewing Company</a>, 115 E Broadway Blvd</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Quick Notes on Our Trip to Tucson','','inherit','closed','closed','','3026-revision-v1','','','2021-02-01 10:58:27','2021-02-01 15:58:27','',3026,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/3026-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3069,1,'2021-02-01 11:10:38','2021-02-01 16:10:38','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3029,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3029\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I left my suitcase at the door of our West Tucson Airbnb and walked out onto the back patio to watch the sun slip behind the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tucson_Mountains\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tucson Mountains</a>. The shades of red and orange on the undersides of a couple of clouds stood out in the pale blue sky. This was exactly what we were looking for when we left a cold grey Chicago nine hours ago. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3051,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7789-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7789-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3051\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>But then I heard a rustling from the far edge of the patio. A good-sized boar, a wild pig, walked out from between two bushes and walked across the backyard. Then another one. They stopped, turned to look at me, and then kept walking. More kept coming – another six followed the leaders, walking the same path across the backyard, stopping to sniff at a little tree. A quick Google search told me they weren\'t wild pigs but <a href=\"https://www.azgfd.com/wildlife/livingwith/javelina/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">javelinas</a>, a New World relative of the pig. They range from southern Arizona all the way down to Argentina in social groups called \"squadrons\".  Our squad looked comfortable here, like they were taking their usual end-of-day stroll back to wherever they bed down to stay safe from mountain lions. A couple of them came back to check on us the next morning, reminding us to keep the patio door closed.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:quote {\"className\":\"is-style-default\"} -->\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-style-default\"><p>To see a video of the javelina visitation and more, check out my <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/s/aGlnaGxpZ2h0OjE3ODc3MTkxNjk2MTM2MTcx?igshid=18auew1hwvjvo&amp;story_media_id=2489441232116364521\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tucson Instagram Story</a> on the TravelCommons Instagram Page</p></blockquote>\n<!-- /wp:quote -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\">Hiking</h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>As I mentioned in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the last podcast</a>, our plans for this trip were all about outside activities so any last-minute COVID closures or restrictions didn\'t strand us in our Airbnb, aimlessly flipping through TV channels. Since Tucson is <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tucson,_Arizona#Geography\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">surrounded by five small-ish mountain ranges,</a> we focused on hiking.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saguaro_National_Park\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Saguaro National Park</a></strong> is split into two physically separate areas, the Tucson Mountain District (TMD) on the west side of town near where we were staying, and across town to the east, the Rincon Mountain District (RMD). Our drive to the west district wound through the northern part of Tucson Mountain Park; two lanes twisting through gaps between the hilltops. The forecast said it would be the best weather of our stay, the highest temperatures and the lowest chance of rain, so we went for our biggest hike, <a href=\"https://www.arizonahighways.com/explore/hiking/king-canyon-trail\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">an 8-mile loop</a> that would take us to the top of 4,687-foot Wasson Peak. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We planned to park at the <a href=\"https://goo.gl/maps/KPGPZhBw8hDt7aiJ6\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">King Canyon Trailhead</a>, but it was filled with construction equipment that had completely torn up the parking lot. We hung a quick U-turn and, ignoring the warning signs, parked across the street in the far corner of the Arizona-Sonoma Desert Museum. We cut through some brush, crossed the street, and found the start of the trail.  It was sand and larger stones that climbed up from a dry wash. The Park Service has done a nice job of marking the trail, carving out steps on the steeper parts, and putting up signs at the trail intersections. I was glad, though, that I\'d downloaded enough off-line Google Maps data so I could double-check the signs when my mobile connection dropped.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"center\",\"id\":3034,\"width\":512,\"height\":384,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"aligncenter size-large is-resized\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2763.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2763-1024x768.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3034\" width=\"512\" height=\"384\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We walked up through what seemed the cactus version of a forest. The hills were full of all sorts of cacti: tall saguaro, low-to-the ground prickly pear and barrel, and twisted, tangled cholla. The top of Wasson Peak gave a panoramic view of the rocky hills that jutted straight up from the desert floor, and of Tucson sitting at the bottom of them. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3037,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2776-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2776-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3037\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://webcms.pima.gov/cms/One.aspx?pageId=1539\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tucson Mountain Park</a></strong> is directly south of western part of Saguaro National Park. We walked 10 minutes from our Airbnb to the <a href=\"https://goo.gl/maps/jhUVr4RvBoptxDvZ8\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Starr Pass Trailhead</a>. This hike was a 5½-mile loop around the valley floor, not as long nor as scenic as yesterday\'s Saguaro hike, but more leisurely and certainly easier on the feet. We took a bit more time, looking up at the tall saguaro cactuses with all their different arm configurations, and then down at the barrel cactuses that were just beginning to show the light green shoots of new growth. There were more people using these trails; the level terrain made it popular with mountain bikers and runners. And here too, the trails were well-marked and well-maintained.  It was a good afternoon\'s hike.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://www.fs.usda.gov/recarea/coronado/recarea/?recid=80532\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Sabino Canyon Recreational Area</a></strong> was our last hiking spot. It\'s across town, on the northeast side of Tucson in the foothills of the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Catalina_Mountains\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Santa Catalina Mountains</a>.  It was much more crowded than Saguaro or Tucson Mountain, but I might not be making a fair comparison. At Sabino Canyon, we drove to the main visitors center to step off on our hike while our other hikes started at smaller, more remote trailheads. Here again, there was beautiful rugged desert scenery, looking up the mountains and down into the canyons. But the trails weren\'t as well-marked as the other parks. We would lose the trail coming up out of a wash and then wander through cactus and javelina tracks trying to pick it up again. It was a pretty hike, but frustrating.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\">Eating</h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>All the hiking freed up the caloric space we needed to get deep into <a href=\"https://thisistucson.com/eat/sonoran-food-is-having-a-moment-la-writer-gustavo-arellano-will-talk-burritos-and-mexican/article_e409de98-e53d-11e9-892b-73157f4df357.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Sonoran food</a>, a style of Mexican cuisine that hasn\'t yet broken out of its birthplace, <a href=\"https://rovingdecanter.com/2014/10/22/what-is-sonoran-style-mexican-food/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">in this case, Southern Arizona and the Mexican state of Sonora</a>, the way that Tex-Mex, Baja, and Oaxacan cuisines have.  Picking up the menus, I immediately saw some differences – it\'s a <em>burro</em>, not a burrito; a <em>caramelo</em>, not a quesadilla; and tacos are garnished with chopped cabbage instead of the chopped cilantro and raw white onion that is the standard in Chicago. Beef, especially <em>carne asada</em> grilled over mesquite, is the default filling and it\'s served in a thin flour tortilla that\'s more like Chinese moo shu or Peking Duck wrappers than the thick flour tortillas you get with fajitas. <a href=\"https://tucsonfoodie.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tucson Foodie</a> and Andi Berlin, food writer at <a href=\"https://thisistucson.com/eat/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">#ThisIsTucson</a>, were my main guides to Sonoran food.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3046,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7836-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7836-300x238.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3046\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><a href=\"https://www.yelp.com/biz/ruiz-hot-dogs-tucson\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>Ruiz Hot Dogs</strong></a> food truck was our first stop. I\'d read a lot about the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonoran_hot_dog\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Sonoran hot dog</a> and coming from Chicago, another town with its own <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago-style_hot_dog\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">unique twist on a hot dog</a>, I had to give it a try. The Sonoran dog is a bacon-wrapped hot dog topped with chopped tomatoes and onions, pinto beans, mayonnaise, mustard, and salsa verde, served in a slightly sweet split-top bun with a grilled yellow pepper on the side. We ate ours on the hood of our rental car. It was great and a bargain at $3. (1140 S 6th Ave at W 22nd St)</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://www.tacorustico.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">El Taco Rustico</a></strong> was next on our list for tacos – more specifically, quesabirras and cabrito (goat) tacos. We tried the quesabirras first. They\'re  crispy tacos filled with beef birra (juicy stewed beef) and melted cheese, served with a little styrofoam cup of broth, a sort of \"Mexican a jus,\" for dipping. The broth, with a deep roasted dried chile flavor, pulled everything together. What the quesabirras didn\'t soak up, we drank like a chaser from a styrofoam shot glass. Next were tacos. We had cabrito and pollo asado (grilled chicken) tacos, and they were a revelation. The taste of the meat, the mesquite smoke on the grilled chicken and the tang of the goat, punched through the condiments and the tortilla. That this made such an impression on us is a credit to Chef Juan Almanza but also a sad commentary on how the meat at too many taco joints is just an underseasoned carrier for the salsa and garnish. (2281 N Oracle Rd)</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3048,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2804-scaled.jpeg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2804-300x284.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3048\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://www.tacosapson.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tacos Apson</a></strong> was our last stop, down in South Tucson across the street from a high school, and the best stop. We smelled the mesquite coming off the grill when we opened the car door. We walked up to the window and ordered two burros, carne asada and haas, which is a mix of asada, cheese, and roasted green chiles. Then scanning the menu, I added a couple <em>costillas</em> tacos, grilled beef ribs.  Back at the Airbnb, I cut burros in half. The thin flour tortilla was wrapped around nothing but the meat; none of typical burrito fillings, no rice or beans or lettuce or crema. There was nothing to mask the mesquite on the carne asada or the beef ribs, and the cheese and green chile in the haas burro accentuated rather than overwhelmed the beef. (3501 S 12th Ave)</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\">Drinking</h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I can\'t hike and eat Mexican food without beer. Tucson isn\'t on anyone\'s <a href=\"https://beerandbrewing.com/best-in-beer-2020-readers-choice-your-favorite-beer-cities/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">list of top beer cities</a>, but I found a couple of solid microbreweries to recommend.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3063,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2789-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2789-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3063\"/></a><figcaption>1912 Brewing Menu Board</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://1912brewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">1912 Brewing Company</a></strong> is in a strip of nondescript light industrial buildings just west of I-10, a quick 5-minute drive from El Taco Rustico. They have 20 taps and turn out good beer over a wider variety of styles than most places – goses, saisons, and some German styles in addition to the usual IPAs. (2045 N Forbes Blvd, Ste 105) </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://www.pueblovidabrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pueblo Vida Brewing Company</a></strong> is in downtown Tucson. After navigating one-way streets and dodging street car, we found parking and walked over to the taproom only to find that the taproom was still closed due to COVID restrictions. But they were selling cans from a walk-up window. We had a nice chat with the woman helping us and bought a mixed 4-pack to go with our Tacos Apson take-away – a Vietnamese-inspired rice lager, a couple of hazy IPAs made with local Sonoran white wheat, and what I was most excited for, a black IPA. They were the best beers of the trip. (115 E Broadway Blvd)</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\">Resources</h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Travel and Lodging</strong><ul><li>We flew Southwest Airline to Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport (PHX) from Chicago Midway (MDW). Prices and flight selection were much better than flying into Tucson (TUS).</li><li>We rented a car from Hertz at PHX and drove the 115 miles down I-10 to Tucson.  It was an easy drive that took us an hour and 40 minutes. PHX is on the south side of Phoenix right by I-10, so we didn\'t hit any Phoenix traffic on the drive.</li><li>Our Airbnb was a one-bedroom time-share suite at <a href=\"https://clubwyndham.wyndhamdestinations.com/us/en/resorts/wyndham-hotels-resorts/united-states-of-america/arizona/tucson/starr-pass-golf-suites\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Starr Pass Golf Suites</a>.   It was a nice resort though we didn\'t get around to using any of the amenities (pool, golf course, restaurant). We\'re glad we stayed out near the Tucson Mountains rather than a downtown hotel. Tucson isn\'t that big, so we weren\'t more than 25 minutes from anywhere we wanted to be.</li></ul></li><li><strong>Hiking</strong> <ul><li><a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saguaro_National_Park\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Saguaro National Park</a></li><li><a href=\"https://webcms.pima.gov/cms/One.aspx?pageId=1539\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tucson Mountain Park</a></li><li><a href=\"https://www.fs.usda.gov/recarea/coronado/recarea/?recid=80532\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Sabino Canyon Recreational Area</a></li></ul></li><li><strong>Sonoran Food</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.yelp.com/biz/ruiz-hot-dogs-tucson\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Ruiz Hot Dogs</a>, 1140 S 6th Ave at W 22nd St</li><li><a href=\"https://www.tacorustico.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">El Taco Rustico</a>, 2281 N Oracle Rd</li><li><a href=\"https://www.tacosapson.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tacos Apson</a>, 3501 S 12th Ave</li></ul></li><li><strong>Craft Beer</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://1912brewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">1912 Brewing Company</a>, 2045 N Forbes Blvd, Ste 105</li><li><a href=\"https://www.pueblovidabrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pueblo Vida Brewing Company</a>, 115 E Broadway Blvd</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Quick Notes on Our Trip to Tucson','','inherit','closed','closed','','3026-revision-v1','','','2021-02-01 11:10:38','2021-02-01 16:10:38','',3026,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/3026-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
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(3072,1,'2021-02-08 13:02:19','2021-02-08 18:02:19','Mark Peacock has been a frequent business traveler for over 30 years. Beginning with his first flight on his first day of work (ORD to DFW), Mark has traveled extensively for high-tech companies and management consultancies.\n\n<img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/sa_head_shot.jpg\" alt=\"Mark Peacock Portrait\" width=\"200\" height=\"195\" align=\"left\">The first TravelCommons podcast was recorded May 2005 in the bathroom of the Wardman Park Marriott in Washington, DC. TravelCommons was supposed to be a travel blog, an outlet for the travel journal entries Mark would jot down while waiting out flight delays. However, he soon combined those travel stories with his high school radio broadcasting experience to produce the \"Voice of the Traveler\" podcast.\n\nMark has lived in Chicago, Memphis, Louisville, Washington DC, the Bay Area, Dallas, Philadelphia, and Detroit. He is back in Chicago for the third time, where he lives with his wife and two children.','About Mark Peacock','','inherit','closed','closed','','85-revision-v1','','','2021-02-08 13:02:19','2021-02-08 18:02:19','',85,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/08/85-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
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(3080,1,'2021-02-08 16:02:31','2021-02-08 21:02:31','','Oldsmar_map','','inherit','open','closed','','oldsmar_map','','','2021-02-08 16:02:31','2021-02-08 21:02:31','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Oldsmar_map.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(3081,1,'2021-02-08 16:02:33','2021-02-08 21:02:33','','ord-mem','','inherit','open','closed','','ord-mem','','','2021-02-08 16:22:33','2021-02-08 21:22:33','',28,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/ord-mem.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(3082,1,'2021-02-08 16:02:35','2021-02-08 21:02:35','','phx_philo','','inherit','open','closed','','phx_philo','','','2021-02-08 16:07:30','2021-02-08 21:07:30','',6,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/phx_philo.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(3083,1,'2021-02-08 16:02:37','2021-02-08 21:02:37','','phx_temp','','inherit','open','closed','','phx_temp','','','2021-02-08 16:06:56','2021-02-08 21:06:56','',6,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/phx_temp.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(3084,1,'2021-02-08 16:02:39','2021-02-08 21:02:39','','SAN_20_minute_sign','','inherit','open','closed','','san_20_minute_sign','','','2021-02-08 16:02:39','2021-02-08 21:02:39','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/SAN_20_minute_sign.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(3085,1,'2021-02-08 16:02:41','2021-02-08 21:02:41','','santa_fe_bobcat_inside','','inherit','open','closed','','santa_fe_bobcat_inside','','','2021-02-08 16:02:41','2021-02-08 21:02:41','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/santa_fe_bobcat_inside.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(3086,1,'2021-02-08 16:02:42','2021-02-08 21:02:42','','santa_fe_don_gaspar_exterior','','inherit','open','closed','','santa_fe_don_gaspar_exterior','','','2021-02-08 16:02:42','2021-02-08 21:02:42','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/santa_fe_don_gaspar_exterior.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(3087,1,'2021-02-08 16:02:44','2021-02-08 21:02:44','','santa_fe_don_gaspar_interior','','inherit','open','closed','','santa_fe_don_gaspar_interior','','','2021-02-08 16:02:44','2021-02-08 21:02:44','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/santa_fe_don_gaspar_interior.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(3088,1,'2021-02-08 16:02:46','2021-02-08 21:02:46','','tsa_chain_saw','','inherit','open','closed','','tsa_chain_saw','','','2021-02-08 16:19:04','2021-02-08 21:19:04','',25,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/tsa_chain_saw.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(3089,1,'2021-02-08 16:02:48','2021-02-08 21:02:48','','airport_dance','','inherit','open','closed','','airport_dance','','','2021-02-08 16:02:48','2021-02-08 21:02:48','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/airport_dance.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(3090,1,'2021-02-08 16:02:49','2021-02-08 21:02:49','','arch','','inherit','open','closed','','arch','','','2021-02-08 16:17:20','2021-02-08 21:17:20','',19,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/arch.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(3091,1,'2021-02-08 16:02:51','2021-02-08 21:02:51','','arch_ticket','','inherit','open','closed','','arch_ticket','','','2021-02-08 16:17:32','2021-02-08 21:17:32','',19,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/arch_ticket.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(3092,1,'2021-02-08 16:02:53','2021-02-08 21:02:53','','brew_pub_map','','inherit','open','closed','','brew_pub_map','','','2021-02-08 16:09:50','2021-02-08 21:09:50','',7,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/brew_pub_map.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(3093,1,'2021-02-08 16:02:54','2021-02-08 21:02:54','','brew_pub_menu','','inherit','open','closed','','brew_pub_menu','','','2021-02-08 16:10:03','2021-02-08 21:10:03','',7,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/brew_pub_menu.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(3095,1,'2021-02-08 16:07:46','2021-02-08 21:07:46','Here\'s the third TravelCommons podcast, each segment recorded in a different place. This week, after 7 flights in 5 days, I seem to be on quite a tear on the TSA. I talk about bad TSA experiences at Chicago Midway and good ones at O\'Hare, Tampa, and Columbus, OH. Also, I talk about using the iPod to reduce travel stress and the first Classic Travel Story-- about Cleveland travelers eager to get to Chicago. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_3.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_3.mp3\"]\n\n<!--more-->\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the shownotes from the third TravelCommons podcast:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <em>Warmth</em> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Tough travel week -- 7 flights and 4 cities in 5 days</li>\n 	<li>Recording from the bathroom of the Camelback Inn in Scottsdale, AZ</li>\n 	<li>Hot weather and turndown philosophy cards at the Camelback Inn</li>\n</ul>\n<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/phx_temp.jpg\"><img class=\"alignleft wp-image-3083 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/phx_temp-300x217.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"217\" /></a>\n<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/phx_philo.jpg\"><img class=\"alignleft size-medium wp-image-3082\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/phx_philo-300x289.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"289\" /></a>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Rant on TSA screeners at Chicago Midway airport; compliments to the TSA screeners at Tampa and Columbus, OH</li>\n 	<li>Using my iPod to reduce travel stress</li>\n 	<li>First of a recurring feature -- Classic Travel Stories</li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_3.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','TravelCommons Podcast #3','','inherit','closed','closed','','6-revision-v1','','','2021-02-08 16:07:46','2021-02-08 21:07:46','',6,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/08/6-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3096,1,'2021-02-08 16:08:59','2021-02-08 21:08:59','Here\'s the third TravelCommons podcast, each segment recorded in a different place. This week, after 7 flights in 5 days, I seem to be on quite a tear on the TSA. I talk about bad TSA experiences at Chicago Midway and good ones at O\'Hare, Tampa, and Columbus, OH. Also, I talk about using the iPod to reduce travel stress and the first Classic Travel Story-- about Cleveland travelers eager to get to Chicago. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_3.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_3.mp3\"]\n\n<!--more-->\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the shownotes from the third TravelCommons podcast:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <em>Warmth</em> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Tough travel week -- 7 flights and 4 cities in 5 days</li>\n 	<li>Recording from the bathroom of the Camelback Inn in Scottsdale, AZ</li>\n 	<li>Hot weather and turndown philosophy cards at the Camelback Inn</li>\n</ul>\n<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/phx_temp.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-3083 size-medium aligncenter\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/phx_temp-300x217.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"217\" /></a>\n<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/phx_philo.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-3082 aligncenter\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/phx_philo-300x289.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"289\" /></a>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Rant on TSA screeners at Chicago Midway airport; compliments to the TSA screeners at Tampa and Columbus, OH</li>\n 	<li>Using my iPod to reduce travel stress</li>\n 	<li>First of a recurring feature -- Classic Travel Stories</li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_3.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','TravelCommons Podcast #3','','inherit','closed','closed','','6-revision-v1','','','2021-02-08 16:08:59','2021-02-08 21:08:59','',6,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/08/6-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3097,1,'2021-02-08 16:10:12','2021-02-08 21:10:12','This week\'s TravelCommons podcast focuses on the good things about travel. Last week\'s podcast seemed a bit negative, so I try to bring a bit of balance this week. Recorded in the LAX Westin, I stow the laptop for a night and walk the Manhattan Beach, CA pier, reflect on a rare window seat ride on a flight out of Phoenix, and read from a friend\'s letter as he starts a new life in Sao Paulo. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_4.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_4.mp3\"]\n\n<!--more-->\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the shownotes from the TravelCommons podcast #4:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <em>Warmth</em> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recording from the bathroom of the LAX Westin in Los Angeles</li>\n 	<li>Made changes to the travelcommons.com website to allow everyone to leave comments about the podcasts</li>\n 	<li>Sounds from a walk down the Manhattan Beach, CA pier and the Manhattan Beach Brewing Company</li>\n</ul>\n<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/brew_pub_map.jpg\"><img class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-3092\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/brew_pub_map-184x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"184\" height=\"300\" /></a><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/brew_pub_menu.jpg\"><img class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-3093\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/brew_pub_menu-282x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"282\" height=\"300\" /></a>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Looking out the window of a night flight from Phoenix to Chicago</li>\n 	<li>Somebody types \"Cabo San Lucas prostitutes\" into Yahoo and ends up at the travelcommons.com website!</li>\n 	<li>Business travel to Brazil causes a friend to chuck it all and move south</li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_4.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #4 - The Good Things About Travel','','inherit','closed','closed','','7-revision-v1','','','2021-02-08 16:10:12','2021-02-08 21:10:12','',7,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/08/7-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3098,1,'2021-02-08 16:11:38','2021-02-08 21:11:38','Down in Florida this week, picking up a bit of the local heat and humidity. Recorded in the bathroom of the Marriott Courtyard in Oldsmar, FL, somewhere between Tampa and Clearwater, we talk about how travel skills are passed from parents to children, spotting some famous people in ORD and LAX, rare emotions in the Frequent Traveler screening line, and a review of travel podcasts. Also, the final results of our Worst US Airport poll. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_12.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file\n\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_12.mp3\"]\n<!--more-->\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #12:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <em>Warmth</em> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in the bathroom of the Oldsmar, FL Marriott Courtyard</li>\n 	<li>Denver Int\'l Airport wins the <em>Worst US Airport</em> poll by one vote over LAX</li>\n 	<li>Stories of how parents pass down business travel skills to their kids</li>\n 	<li>Airport celebrity sightings -- Steve Case, Julie Delpy</li>\n 	<li>Intense emotions in the Frequent Traveler screening line</li>\n 	<li>A 2x2 matrix classifying travel podcasts</li>\n</ul>\n<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/matrix.jpg\"><img class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-3078\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/matrix.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"295\" /></a>\n<ul>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://www.emptyseat.net/emptyseatblog/\">The Emptyseat podcast</a></li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://www.connectedtraveler.com/blog/index.html\">The Connected Traveler</a></li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_12.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #12 - Emotions in the Screening Line; Other Travel Podcasts','','inherit','closed','closed','','15-revision-v1','','','2021-02-08 16:11:38','2021-02-08 21:11:38','',15,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/08/15-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3099,1,'2021-02-08 16:12:31','2021-02-08 21:12:31','A hurricane came between me and my meetings in Tampa, so I stayed home for an entire week. This week\'s podcast has a bit of local flavor and sound, talking about how to spend rare time off the road, what we\'ll do for sleep, and introducing a new poll -- what\'s your favorite US airline? Also, some pointers to people who are linking to the TravelCommons website. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_13.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_13.mp3\"]\n<!--more-->\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #13:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <em>Warmth</em> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago</li>\n 	<li>Thoughts going out to the folks in southern Mississippi who received the full force of Hurricane Katrina</li>\n 	<li>Lots of feedback on last week\'s \"Generations of Travelers\" topic</li>\n 	<li>Links to bloggers who point to TravelCommons -- <a href=\"http://www.mikebladon.com/blog/\">Mike Bladon</a> and <a href=\"http://hilary.fascinationdesign.com/\">Hilary Baumann</a></li>\n 	<li>Catching up with the local flavors at home</li>\n</ul>\n<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/chicago_dog.jpg\"><img class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-3073\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/chicago_dog.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\n<ul>\n 	<li>The hunt for sleep</li>\n 	<li>Revised final results of the Worst US Airport poll -- a tie between LAX and Denver</li>\n 	<li>A new poll -- Your Favorite US Airline?</li>\n 	<li>What makes you like an airline?</li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_13.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #13 - Enjoying Home; The Battle for Sleep','','inherit','closed','closed','','16-revision-v1','','','2021-02-08 16:12:31','2021-02-08 21:12:31','',16,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/08/16-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3100,1,'2021-02-08 16:17:39','2021-02-08 21:17:39','Bouncing around this week, I recorded this podcast in the bathroom of the Stamford, CT Marriott. Visiting St Louis\'s Gateway Arch, we talk about wedging a bit of personal tourism into a packed business itinerary, how people keep mistaking physical closeness with personal closeness, and recounting some stories about mistakes even before the trip starts. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_16.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_16.mp3\"]\n<!--more-->\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #16:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in the bathroom of the Stamford, CT Marriott</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewArtist?artistId=75387518&amp;forceArtistPage=1\"><strong>Direct Link</strong></a> to iTunes page for the Scottish Band Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>Pocket tourism -- fitting a bit of personal tourism into the usual packed business travel itinerary</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://www.travelandleisure.com/invoke.cfm?ObjectID=93F3A055-3C2C-42BF-89C54855C05C0056\"><strong>Direct Link</strong></a> to the Travel + Leisure editorial</li>\n 	<li>Touring the Gateway Arch in St Louis</li>\n</ul>\n<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/arch.jpg\"><img class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-3090\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/arch.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\" /></a>\n<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/arch_ticket.jpg\"><img class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-3091\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/arch_ticket.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"151\" /></a>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Too much personal information sharing in confined physical spaces</li>\n 	<li>Two stories about mistaken trips to the airport</li>\n 	<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/modules.php?op=modload&amp;name=News&amp;file=article&amp;sid=24&amp;mode=nested&amp;order=0&amp;thold=0\">Direct Link</a></strong> to the comments posted under Podcast #14</li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_16.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #16 - Squeezing in Tourism; Can We Stop Sharing?','','inherit','closed','closed','','19-revision-v1','','','2021-02-08 16:17:39','2021-02-08 21:17:39','',19,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/08/19-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3101,1,'2021-02-08 16:19:29','2021-02-08 21:19:29','Another visit down to <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/memphis\">Memphis</a> prompts a confession about my obsession with pork barbecue and thoughts on how to find the best food in a new city. Other topics include \"voice of the travel company\" -- a letter from a British Airways manager gives his thoughts on the travel experiences of some TravelCommons listeners, and more Classic Travel Stories -- after-dinner stories about interrupted train trips in Eastern Europe. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_22.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_22.mp3\"]\n\n<!--more-->\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons Podcast #22:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Down in Memphis again at the beginning of the week</li>\n 	<li>Picture of the re-wrapped chain saw that caused problems in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/modules.php?op=modload&amp;name=News&amp;file=article&amp;sid=30&amp;mode=nested&amp;order=0&amp;thold=0\">Podcast #18</a></li>\n</ul>\n<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/tsa_chain_saw.jpg\"><img class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-3088\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/tsa_chain_saw.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"200\" /></a>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em>Damn Shame (Memphis Mix)</em> by <a href=\"http://jayfarrar.net/\">Jay Farrar</a></li>\n 	<li>A British Airways manager provides his perspectives on the \"voice of the traveler\" stories in Podcasts #17 and #20</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://www.garageband.com/song?|pe1|S8LTM0LdsaSgZle_ZA\"><strong>GarageBand link</strong></a> to <em>Get Out of Memphis</em> by Chicago Kingsnakes</li>\n 	<li>Traveling to Memphis reveals an obsession</li>\n 	<li>Here\'s a picture of the Corky\'s pork barbecue plate in Memphis\'s airport<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/mem_bbq_plate.jpg\"><img class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-3079\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/mem_bbq_plate.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\" /></a></li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://www.chowhound.com/main.html\"><strong>Direct Link</strong></a> to the Chowhound.com website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>People Get Ready</em> by <a href=\"http://www.jeffbeck.com\">Jeff Beck</a> and <a href=\"http://www.rodstewart.com/\">Rod Stewart</a></li>\n 	<li>Classic Travel Stories -- Interrupted train trips in Slovakia and Hungary</li>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Ramblin\' Man</em> by the Allman Brothers Band</li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_22.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #22 - Other Side of the Ticket Counter; Finding Local Food','','inherit','closed','closed','','25-revision-v1','','','2021-02-08 16:19:29','2021-02-08 21:19:29','',25,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/08/25-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3103,1,'2021-02-08 16:21:50','2021-02-08 21:21:50','Back on the road after the Thanksgiving holiday, this week\'s podcast is recorded in the bathroom of the Durham, NC Marriott and edited in the RDU Admirals Club. A listener asks \"What do you miss when you travel?\" Also, some ideas on staying connected with the family -- replacing those random bits of conversation while on the road, and some careless moments with rental cars. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommon_24.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_24.mp3\"]\n\n<!--more-->\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #24:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in the bathroom of the Durham, NC Marriott</li>\n 	<li>Paying for last week\'s holiday with a rough triangulation trip across Tampa, Memphis, and <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/the-south/the-triangle\">Raleigh-Durham</a></li>\n 	<li>Audio clip of an Atlanta-Hartsfield emergency alarm</li>\n 	<li>Here\'s the ClustrMap image showing web site traffic for the month of November<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/clustermap.jpg\"><img class=\"aligncenter wp-image-3074 size-full\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/clustermap.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"215\" /></a></li>\n 	<li>Please click through to the Listener Survey on the left side of the screen</li>\n 	<li>Another listener experience with <a href=\"http://www.ba.com\">British Airways</a> -- a positive one</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>A listener asks \"What do I miss when I travel?\"</li>\n 	<li>Recreating my morning routine in hotels</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Miss You</em> by the Rolling Stones</li>\n 	<li>The regular rhythms of conversation get disrupted when one party is on travel</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Fast Car</em> by Tracy Chapman</li>\n 	<li>A couple of stories about abusing rental cars</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/21561359@N00/103066097/\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to a picture of the Mustang speedometer in Phoenix</li>\n 	<li>Closing music --  <em>Ramblin\' Man</em> by the Allman Brothers Band</li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_24.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #24 - What Do You Miss When You Travel; Fun with Rental Cars','','inherit','closed','closed','','27-revision-v1','','','2021-02-08 16:21:50','2021-02-08 21:21:50','',27,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/08/27-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3104,1,'2021-02-08 16:22:55','2021-02-08 21:22:55','This week\'s podcast is recorded in the bathroom of the <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldsmar%2C_Florida\">Oldsmar, FL</a> Marriott. In the midst of a bunch of work and a tough travel itinerary, why am I surprised that I just can\'t get into the holiday spirit? A huge snowstorm blowing through <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/chicago\">Chicago</a> threatens to strand me in <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/memphis\">Memphis</a> -- until another traveler suggests driving the 550 miles home. And a Classic Travel Story from a former road warrior about finding love in a hotel bar. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_25.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_25.mp3\"]\n\n<!--more-->\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #25:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in the bathroom of the Oldsmar, FL Courtyard</li>\n 	<li>Another tough travel week -- sleep deprivation from early morning flights, severe winter travel problems, and a whole lot of work</li>\n 	<li>Starting a 5-week sponsorship from <a href=\"http://expertflyer.com/travelcommons\">ExpertFlyer.com</a></li>\n 	<li>Steve Frick from <a href=\"http://fricksworld.blogspot.com/\">Frick\'s World</a> posts a great rental car comment on podcast #24</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music --  <em>I\'ll Be Home by Christmas</em> by <a href=\"http://elvis.com\">Elvis Presley</a></li>\n 	<li>I\'m having a tough time getting into the holiday spirit</li>\n 	<li>Maybe I\'ll have an \"espresso\" Christmas -- a concentrated, more intense holiday experience</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Run Run Rudolph</em> by <a href=\"http://www.dwightyoakam.com/\">Dwight Yoakam</a></li>\n 	<li>A winter storm in Chicago cancels flights and forces a decision -- wait \'til the morning or drive home tonight</li>\n</ul>\n<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/ord-mem.jpg\"><img class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-3081\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/ord-mem.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"287\" height=\"300\" /></a>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Every Picture Tells a Story</em> by <a href=\"http://www.rodstewart.com/\">Rod Stewart</a></li>\n 	<li>Classic Travel Story -- Meeting a husband in a hotel bar</li>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Ramblin\' Man</em> by the Allman Brothers Band</li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommon_25.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #25 - Long Drive Home; Meeting Your Future in a Hotel Bar','','inherit','closed','closed','','28-revision-v1','','','2021-02-08 16:22:55','2021-02-08 21:22:55','',28,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/08/28-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3105,1,'2021-02-08 16:27:49','2021-02-08 21:27:49','Recorded in the TravelCommons studio outside Chicago, I\'ve been bi-coastal since the last episode, bouncing between New York and San Francisco.  A side trip down to <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/pennsylvania/philadelphia\">Philadelphia</a> yields a great street-food breakfast when I take the time to walk outside my hotel. Delays in my flights between O\'Hare and <a href=\"http://www.laguardiaairport.com\">LaGuardia airports</a> cause me to dig for the FAA\'s latest airport capacity report and gnash my teeth against the <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NIMBY\">NIMBYs</a> standing in the way of reasonable fixes.  Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_57.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_57.mp3\"]\n<!--more-->\n\n<hr>\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #57:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in TravelCommons studio outside of Chicago, hopefully the <a href=\"http://www.chicago2016.org/\">home of the 2016 Summer Olympics</a></li>\n 	<li>Continue to bounce between the East and West coasts</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/media/files/DJBLUE/11541\">Hear Me</a></em> by DJ Blue</li>\n 	<li>Made United\'s top-tier status level in August. Get to walk on the red carpet all the time now, though it feels a bit dangerous cutting in front of other passengers</li>\n 	<li>Not flying American that much anymore, so dropping my Admirals Club membership after 10 years</li>\n 	<li>Leo Vegoda received a \"close\" patdown similar to the one I received in Schipol last month</li>\n 	<li>Craig Martin of the <em><a href=\"http://www.indietravelpodcast.com\">Indie Travel Podcast</a></em> gives a suggestion on Bluetooth keyboards</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/media/files/savoyard/10743\">Madrugada</a></em> by Savoyard</li>\n 	<li>After my morning workout in the Philadelphia Westin, I went for a walk looking for a breakfast place</li>\n 	<li>Bought a real Philadelphia breakfast -- an egg, cheese, and <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrapple\">scrapple</a> sandwich from a lunch truck</li>\n 	<li>Takes time to find real local fare</li>\n 	<li>A <a href=\"http://www.usatoday.com/travel/flights/2007-08-27-local-food_N.htm\">USAToday article</a> says local restaurants make up 20% to 40% of all eateries at most big U.S. airports</li>\n 	<li>On the same day, enjoyed a <a href=\"http://www.lancasterbrewing.com/HopHogIPA.html\">beer</a> in Philadelphia Airport from Lancaster County and an espresso in <a href=\"http://www.mwaa.com/dulles/dulles.htm\">Washington Dulles airport</a> from a <a href=\"http://www.mayorgacoffee.com/index.php\">Maryland coffee roaster</a></li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/media/files/djlang59/10579\">Crazy Love</a></em> by DJ Lang</li>\n 	<li>A trip from Chicago to New York gave me 2 hour delays each way, doubling the scheduled length of each flight</li>\n 	<li>On my outbound flight, the United pilot sent back personal apologizes to top-tier status fliers, similar to his colleague who made the <a href=\"http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118826634834410559.html\">front page</a> of the <em>Wall Street Journal</em></li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20724859/\"><em>BusinessWeek</em> cover story</a> from earlier this month says the <a href=\"http://www.faa.gov/\">Federal Aviation Administration</a> predicts there will be 1 billion people a year flying by 2015, a 36% increase from today</li>\n 	<li>FAA\'s <a href=\"http://www.faa.gov/airports_airtraffic/airports/resources/publications/reports/media/fact_2.pdf\">FACT 2 study</a> predicts 18 airports will need additional capacity, and 7 metro areas will need additional capacity by 2015</li>\n 	<li>The most important expansion -- the <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O\'Hare_International_Airport#Modernization_plan\">O\'Hare Modernization Program</a> -- is being held up by a <a href=\"http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-cemeterysuit_web_14sep14,0,2656304.story\">suit over moving a cemetery</a></li>\n 	<li>NIMBY-ism is responsible for much of today\'s travel hassles</li>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917625.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\"><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org\">ccMixter</a></li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_57.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #57 - Making Time for Local Fare; What’s Standing in the Way of Fixing Our Airports','','inherit','closed','closed','','80-revision-v1','','','2021-02-08 16:27:49','2021-02-08 21:27:49','',80,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/08/80-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3106,1,'2021-02-08 16:28:52','2021-02-08 21:28:52','Recorded in the <a href=\"http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=39.1319444444,-77.2263888889&amp;spn=0.1,0.1&amp;q=39.1319444444,-77.2263888889 (Gaithersburg%2C%20Maryland)&amp;t=h\">Gaithersburg, MD</a> Marriott outside <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/washington-dc\">Washington, DC</a> at the end of an intense week of travel that had me flying from the East Coast to the West Coast and then back east again... on four different airlines.  With many airlines\' plummeting customer satisfaction scores, we ask the question \"Who raves about their airline?\" Recent trips allow me to do a \"seat-to-seat\" comparison of two high-buzz airlines -- <a href=\"http://www.jetblue.com/\">JetBlue</a> and Virgin America.  Our recurring <em>Travel Tech</em> topic talks about replacing a laptop with the latest evolution of Nokia\'s Internet tablet, and hunting down power outlets in airports.  Also, a listener suggestion on local food in DC\'s <a href=\"http://www.mwaa.com/national/\">Reagan National Airport</a> leads to frustration at missing a great burger. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_58.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_58.mp3\"]\n<!--more-->\n\n<hr>\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #58:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in the Gaithersburg, MD Marriott outside Washington, DC</li>\n 	<li>Had an extensive tour of East and West Coast airports over the past three weeks -- EWR, DCA, IAD, FLL, RDU, SNA, OAK, and SFO</li>\n 	<li>Flying to the Northeast is much more painful than flying to the West Coast, even though the ORD-SFO flight is twice as long</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/junoon-infiniti/\">Nachoon Gi</a></em> by Junoon</li>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n 	<li>Dave of the <a href=\"http://sandandtsunamis.blogspot.com\">Sand and Tsunamis blog</a> talked about hitting the <a href=\"http://www.fiveguys.com/\">Five Guys Famous Burger</a> stand in DC\'s Reagan National Airport.  I wanted to try it out on my DC trip last week.  Unfortunately, Five Guys is buried behind security in the <a href=\"http://www.usairways.com\">USAir</a> concourse and I was flying United</li>\n 	<li>Chris Christensen of the <a href=\"http://AmateurTraveler.com\">Amateur Traveler</a> podcast sent along a review of TravelCommons from Acura Style magazine</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/lucas-divine/\">Old Mexico</a></em> by Jeffery Luck Lucas</li>\n<strong>Who Raves about Their Airline?</strong>\n 	<li>Most of the airline customer satisfaction problems are with what used to be called \"legacy\" carriers, now called \"network\" carriers -- USAir, Northwest, Delta, American, United</li>\n 	<li>Many elite fliers living in hub cities of network carriers (e.g., Philadelphia for USAir, Detroit for Northwest) complain about being \"trapped\"</li>\n 	<li>A stark comparison to the ringing endorsement of JetBlue offered by Business Week\'s executive editor in this <a href=\"http://www.businessweek.com/mediacenter/podcasts/cover_stories/covercast_02_22_07.htm\">podcast</a></li>\n 	<li>Virgin America still feels like they\'re in \"beta\" mode</li>\n 	<li>JetBlue offers a great in-flight experience -- good leg room, choice of snacks, free <a href=\"http://www.directv.com\">DirecTV</a> in seatback screens -- but the ground experience in JFK is a hassle</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://udayantripathi.com\">Udayan Tripathi</a> describes his flight across the US on Frontier Airlines</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://www.brunomisonne.com/aviation%20music_003.htm\">Johannesburg airport tower party</a></em> by <a href=\"http://www.brunomisonne.com\">Bruno Misonne</a></li>\n<strong>Travel Tech Potpourri</strong>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://marcloehrwald.com/\">Marc Löhrwald</a> is very satisfied with the <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N800\">Nokia N800</a> as a PC replacement, and doesn\'t have to take it out of his briefcase when passing through security. He is, though, going to upgrade to the new N810</li>\n 	<li>Finding power outlets in airports can be a bit of an Easter Egg hunt</li>\n 	<li>O\'Hare\'s Terminal 1 has put in a number of free workstations with plenty of plugs at eye level</li>\n 	<li>Other airports push their  pay-to-charge vending machines</li>\n 	<li>Here\'s a <a href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/travelcommons/1736936801/\">picture</a> of the Medusa-like cell phone and PDA charger in <a href=\"http://www.rdu.com\">Raleigh-Durham airport</a></li>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917626.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\"><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\">Magnatune</a> and <a href=\"http://www.brunomisonne.com\">Bruno Misonne</a></li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments@travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_58.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #58 - Who Raves About Their Airline; Powering Up in Airports','','inherit','closed','closed','','82-revision-v1','','','2021-02-08 16:28:52','2021-02-08 21:28:52','',82,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/08/82-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3107,1,'2021-02-08 16:35:37','2021-02-08 21:35:37','Recorded in the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, back doing my thing to support the travel industry with lots of travel in January. We talk about some recent TSA observations, good and bad; my latest spin of the \"travel roulette\" wheel, trading the plane for a train in an East Coast snow storm; a look back at last year\'s travel courtesy of Dopplr\'s Personal Annual Report; and being saved by duct tape while flying the tatty skies of United. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_71.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_71.mp3\"]\n<!--more-->\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #71:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded at the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago</li>\n 	<li>Back doing my thing to support the travel industry, visiting Washington DC, Denver, Phoenix, San Francisco, Stamford, CT, and Jackson, MI</li>\n 	<li>Noticing a lot more passengers paying attention to the pre-flight safety demo since the US Air Hudson River splashdown</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Beneath the Skin</em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/birdy-alter/\">Jerry Berlongieri</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Belated shout-out to Tim Grubb of <a href=\"http://www.sizeoflife.com/blog/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">The Size of Life blog</a> -- \"lifestyle news and reviews for the big and tall man\"</li>\n 	<li>Tim is doing a series of articles on \"Flying the (Big &amp; Tall) Friendly Skies\". The <a href=\"http://seatguru.com\" target=\"_self\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">SeatGuru</a> map he uses as an illustration points out the best coach seat for a big &amp; tall man -- the window seat on the second exit row of a United Airbus 319</li>\n 	<li>The new security checkpoint for <a href=\"https://phl-airport.com/\">Philadelphia Airport</a>\'s Terminal\'s D and E replace a near-medieval set-up with a much better experience</li>\n 	<li>Watched the TSA do a full body patdown on <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_George\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Cardinal Francis George</a>, the 72-yr-old Catholic Archbishop of Chicago.  Couldn\'t that screener\'s time been used more productively checking out someone who could <em>actually</em> be a threat?</li>\n 	<li>Lost a recent game of \"travel roulette\". Moved from the Shuttle to Amtrak\'s Acela Express to avoid delays from an East Coast snow storm. The train ended up 2½ hours late because of equipment problems caused by the snow.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Hurt Me So I Can Walk Away </em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/joy-float/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Michael Joy</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Looking Back at Last Year\'s Travel\n</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Dopplr sent me a 2008 Personal Annual Report on my travel last year</li>\n 	<li>Has some interesting factoids, such as my \"personal velocity\" in 2008 was the same as that of a squirrel</li>\n 	<li>And that my 2008 carbon footprint was equivalent to 2.3 Hummers</li>\n</ul>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/hummer.jpg\"><img class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-3077\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/hummer.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"194\" height=\"139\" /></a></p>\n\n<ul>\n 	<li>Of course, they could have used, say a Mercedes Benz S-600 sedan, which gets worse mileage than a Hummer H3, but I guess chest-pounding about big gas-guzzling American SUVs is easier self-awareness about big gas-guzzling Euro sedans – especially when your company is based in Helsinki.</li>\n 	<li>The factoid that grabbed my attention was this one – “In 2008, you spent 214 days at home; 152 days traveling”</li>\n</ul>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/days_home.jpg\"><img class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-3075\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/days_home.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"149\" height=\"65\" /></a></p>\n\n<ul>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Bulletproof</em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/musicinside-forces/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Music Inside</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Flying the Tatty Skies of United </strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>My ORD-PHX flight was almost scuttled by a broken luggage bin door.</li>\n 	<li>Those of us who spend a good bit of time flying United know that duct tape is not an uncommon sight. United is fraying around the edges.</li>\n 	<li>United is the only major US airline to not have any current orders placed with any aircraft manufacturer</li>\n 	<li>And the service has gotten a bit frayed around the edges. The 2008 American Customer Satisfaction Index has United ahead of only US Airways</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://crankyflier.com/2008/11/20/united-gets-beaten-down-over-phocuswright-presentation-on-customer-experience\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Brett Snyder</a> was at a travel industry conference last November where a United executive gave a talk titled <em>Customer Experience and Flying: Not an Oxymoron</em> and admitted that United would be \"overstretching\" if they tried to be as good as Singapore Air or Virgin Atlantic</li>\n 	<li>Was refused entry to United\'s London-Heathrow business class arrivals lounge because I was flying on an upgraded coach ticket, not a full-fare business class ticket</li>\n 	<li>United\'s employees continue to hold together their frayed company by reaching out to passengers</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img style=\"display: none !important;\" src=\"http://ad.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/show?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;bids=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Magnatune</a></li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments@travelcommons.com or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_71.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #71 - Winter Travel, Last Year\'s Travel, Tatty United','','inherit','closed','closed','','115-revision-v1','','','2021-02-08 16:35:37','2021-02-08 21:35:37','',115,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/08/115-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3108,1,'2021-02-08 16:38:47','2021-02-08 21:38:47','[caption id=\"attachment_491\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/MacBookAir1.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-491 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/MacBookAir1-300x225.jpg\" alt=\"My MacBook Air on the desk of the Hyatt Grand Cypress in Orlando\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\" /></a> My MacBook Air on the desk of the Hyatt Grand Cypress in Orlando[/caption]\n\nI\'ve been working with my 11-inch MacBook Air for two weeks -- time to walk through my initial impressions. First, though, it\'s important that I lay out what in technology-land is called my <em>use case</em> -- what I need my MacBook Air to do. If you don\'t understand my expectations, my conclusions might not make sense to you.\n\nI\'ve been looking for a Travel PC since the beginning of the year when I changed jobs and had to give back my Lenovo <a href=\"http://www.notebookreview.com/default.asp?newsID=3765\">ThinkPad X61</a>. With a 12-inch screen, a full-sized keyboard, a battery that would last from Chicago to LA, and weighing only 3½ pounds, it was the perfect Travel PC for me. Some might look at those specs and think <em>\"What a wimpy machine!\"</em>, but that\'s why it\'s important to know the use case.\n\nMy Travel PC is not my primary computer.  My primary rig is a big custom-built Windows 7 box that\'s spread across and under the desktop in my home office, complete with a quad-core AMD processor, 2 21-inch monitors, 3 500-GB hard drives, a Blu-Ray DVD burner, and a combo sub-woofer/foot rest.  If I want to do video editing or play with After Effects or have a serious Photoshop session, my desktop is purpose-built for it.\n\nWhich allows my Travel PC to be purpose-\"spec\'d\" for what\'s important to a frequent traveler -- light weight, long battery life, and reasonable processing power (in that order) -- and leaving behind what\'s not -- optical drives, superfast processors and video cards, big hard drives, and large monitors.  For the past 5 months, my Travel PC was an HP netbook, which I compared to my iPad in an <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2010/05/17/ipad-vs-netbook-first-impressions/\">earlier blog post</a>.  It worked pretty well, though the 10-inch screen was a bit tight for comfortably working in Outlook, and the Atom processor choked whenever my boss rang through to me on a video call (which is surprisingly often). Looking for the next step up from the netbook, there weren\'t many machines that met my Travel PC spec.\n\nAnd then Apple announced their new MacBook Air.  The specs are perfect.  And it is a very cool looking machine -- something my old ThinkPad X61 was definitely <em>not</em>.  But is there enough substance under that brushed aluminum unibody?  The answer is <em>\"yes\"</em>, provided you\'re willing to upgrade off the base package.\n\nThe solid state disk drive makes the MacBook Air <em>fast</em>.  Small applications like Cisco\'s VPN client instantly <em>appear</em>.  And when you open the lid, the MacBook Air instantly wakes up -- much quicker than any PC coming out of Sleep mode.  Such performance reminds us how artificial many of the tech web site benchmarks are. Though many reviews have commented on the Air\'s under-powered processor, for most knowledge workers who spend their time in e-mail, Office, and a few web apps like Salesforce.com, memory and disk speed are at least as important as CPU speed.\n\nHowever, for most corporate users, the 64 GB drive that comes standard with the 11-inch MacBook Air just isn\'t big enough -- because you\'re going to need at least 30 GBs for a Windows image.  Though Apples seem to be popping up everywhere, Microsoft still owns the world. On a Mac, the easiest way to do things like resetting network passwords or editing Microsoft <a href=\"http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/visio/\">Visio</a> diagrams is to run a virtual Windows 7 session.  I tested <a href=\"http://www.parallels.com/products/desktop/\">Parallels</a> and VMWare\'s <a href=\"http://www.vmware.com/products/fusion/\">Fusion</a> virtualization products. After a week of using them both, I didn\'t have a clear favorite, so I went with the cheaper one -- VMWare\'s Fusion.\n\nThe other add-on you\'ll need is the USB Ethernet adapter.  Contrary to Apple\'s view of the world, many companies (especially those in the defense and financial services industries) frown on the use of wireless networks.  Even at my company, I needed to \"jack in\" to the network to configure my MacBook Air for wireless access.  You probably won\'t need the Ethernet adapter often, but when you do...\n\nI\'m surprised how much I like the Multi-Touch trackpad.  I\'ve always hated the \"mushpads\" on PCs.  I usually turn them off and use the ThinkPad-like pointer on the keyboard (which I love) or an external mouse.  However, after watching the Help video a couple of times and practicing the different 1-, 2-, 3-, and 4-finger trackpad swipes, I\'ve grown to like this trackpad enough to leave my wireless mouse at home.\n\nAfter two weeks of hands-on-the-keyboard experience with my MacBook Air, it is the best Travel PC yet.  It\'s over a pound lighter than my ThinkPad X61. The screen, though smaller, is brighter and easier to read.  The battery life takes me to the West Coast with power to spare.  The solid state drive makes it applications <em>snap</em> onto the screen.  It instantly wakes up when I open the lid, making it easy to dash off a quick e-mail before the airplane door closes.  But the feature that cements it as the best Travel PC yet -- the TSA says that it can stay in my backpack during security screening.','Two Weeks with a MacBook Air','','inherit','closed','closed','','379-revision-v1','','','2021-02-08 16:38:47','2021-02-08 21:38:47','',379,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/08/379-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3109,1,'2021-02-08 16:39:55','2021-02-08 21:39:55','[caption id=\"attachment_528\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/5314961468_c424e091a81.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-528 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/5314961468_c424e091a81-300x224.jpg\" alt=\"View from my new office atop Squaw Peak\" width=\"300\" height=\"224\" /></a> View from my new office atop Squaw Peak[/caption]\n\nFinishing up the year in front of a warm fire in the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago after a couple of warm-up trips to <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Phoenix, Arizona\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix%2C_Arizona\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Phoenix</a>.  I carved myself out an mini-vacation during one of the trips and worked at the summit of <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Squaw Peak\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squaw_Peak\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Squaw Peak</a> for part of an afternoon. My <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"MacBook Air\" href=\"http://www.apple.com/macbookair\" rel=\"homepage\">MacBook Air</a> -- my perfect travel PC -- turned itself into a good-looking brushed metal brick on my last day in Phoenix, forcing an unplanned stop at the Scottsdale <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Apple Store\" href=\"http://www.apple.com/retail\" rel=\"homepage\">Apple Store</a> before my flight home.  Trying to get some work done while I waited reminded me of the difficulty of finding a quiet spot for a phone call while living on the road.  Missed connections caused by recent snow storms reminded me of ways you can have a little fun when stranded -- if you embrace the adventure of it.  Responding to a couple of listener questions on the closing song (<a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><em>Pictures of You</em></a> by Evangeline), I replay the song\'s back story as related by the band\'s manager.  Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_86.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_86.mp3\"]\n\n<!--more-->\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the transcript from TravelCommons podcast #86:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you once again from the TravelCommons studios, wrapping up the year in the white icebox that is Chicago this winter.  And it’s a cold one.  Not as bad as what they’re getting in Minneapolis-St Paul – watching the video of the Metrodome’s ceiling collapse was pretty amazing – nor what New York is getting tonight, but I think I read that this has been something like the 7<sup>th</sup> coldest December on record.  So I can tell you that I wasn’t too upset when my travel plans had me in Phoenix two out of the last three weeks.</li>\n 	<li>Packing for my last trip, I promised myself that, somewhere in the 4 days that I was in Phoenix, I’d find a couple of hours to get out of the office and go hike up <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Camelback Mountain\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camelback_Mountain\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Camelback Mountain</a>.  It was 12 degrees in Chicago when I was packing and the forecast for Phoenix was 70’s and 80’s all week.  I’ve always said that if you don’t take at least a little something for yourself from even business travel, you’ll hate your life.</li>\n 	<li>So I start looking for my opening.  Monday, nope – inbound travel days are usually jam packed and American Airlines just added to it – making it like an overstuffed carryon – with a 2-hr maintenance delay, complete with swapping out planes.  Makes me misty for the days when preventative maintenance meant more than…</li>\n 	<li>Tuesday goes by, Wednesday morning I think – ah, I’ll do it on Thursday before I fly home – but I stop myself.  My Weds afternoon isn’t that full.  I push some stuff around and, presto, there’s my couple of hours.  I race back to the hotel, change, look at the map – hmmm, Camelback might be a bit too far of a drive, especially if I hit traffic.  But Squaw Peak looks doable.  And so off I raced. After 1.2 miles, 1,200 vertical feet, and 19 ounces of Propel sports drink, I was at the top.  It’s a pretty view – with the hills to the north and the city to the south.  I sat for a bit, caught my breath, and then looked at my <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"iPhone\" href=\"http://www.apple.com/iphone\" rel=\"homepage\">iPhone</a>.  Hmm, full bars.  Started running e-mail and turned the summit into my office for the next 30 minutes – reading a couple of documents, cranking out some quick notes while watching the planes and birds fly by.  I took a photo at the summit, which I <em>later</em> posted to the TravelCommons Facebook page and Twitter feed if you’d like to take a look at my new office.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/swivel-deep/\"><em>Arlos Auto Parts and Salvation</em></a> by Swivel Neck Jones</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>In the last <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2010/11/30/podcast-85-importance-of-hotel-bathrooms-maximizing-miles/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">episode</a> and in a prior TravelCommons <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2010/11/15/two-weeks-with-a-macbook-air/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">post</a> I sang the praises of my 11-inch MacBook Air as the perfect travel PC.  Which, of course, meant I had tempted the technology gods who, in response last week, reached out from their Valhalla data center and smote the little unibody of brushed metal – bricking it on my last day in Scottsdale.  I opened the lid – no instant on.  I pressed the power button, no instant on.  I held the power button for 5 seconds, 15 seconds, 5 minutes, nothing but a dead screen.</li>\n 	<li>If this happened on any other laptop, my first course of action would’ve been to drop the battery to try and reset the power management.  But, that ain’t happening with a MacBook Air, so after stabbing the Power button another half-dozen times, I gave up and headed over to the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Genius Bar\" href=\"http://apple.com/retail/geniusbar\" rel=\"homepage\">Genius Bar</a> at the Scottsdale Apple Store.</li>\n 	<li>Since our company allows Macs but doesn’t provide help desk support – the Development teams use Macs and stooping to call a Help Desk would be the furthest thing from their minds – the Genius Bar is the defacto help desk.  Since it was near lunch time, I stopped off at <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Smashburger\" href=\"http://www.smashburger.com\" rel=\"homepage\">Smashburger</a>.  A TravelCommons listener – I forget who – had replied to one of my <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"In-N-Out Burger\" href=\"http://www.in-n-out.com/\" rel=\"homepage\">In-N-Out Burger</a> tweets, asking if I’d tried Smashburger.  It was a god burger – not quite the mystique or ambiance of In-N-Out – but a good burger.</li>\n 	<li>One thing that I should’ve done while waiting for my Smashburger was book a time at the Genius Bar. Walking into the Apple Store, the hipster with an iPhone told me it’d be a 30-minute wait.  I checked my watch – I had enough time before my flight back home.  Right at the 30-minute mark, a guy walked over to me, opened my Mac, punched the power button a couple of times to no avail and said “Wow” and took it into the back room.  OK, it’s a bit better than having some guy in India tell me to restart my PC a half-dozen times, but still… I look at my watch again.  How long before I have to fetch this guy and dash to the airport?</li>\n 	<li>Not long as it turns out.  5 minutes later, the guy comes back with my now-working Mac.  My initial diagnosis was right – it was the battery, or the PMU – power management unit?  Since you can’t drop the battery, there’s a multi-finger key sequence – hold down the shift, control, option, and command keys with your left hand and then hit the power key with your right.  I wrote it down so I could “self-serve” next time.  Not sure if the whole experience was any better than hanging on hold for a help desk.  I am paying more attention, though, to the location of Apple stores.</li>\n 	<li>Now, the 30-minute wait wasn’t a complete loss.  Though my Mac was dead, my iPad and iPhone were fine.  So while I was waiting for my Genius to arrive, I was running e-mail and reading documents on my iPad.  Not a complete loss, but it wouldn’t have worked if I had needed to talk to someone, if I’ve had a conference call.</li>\n 	<li>And that is a big problem with the “digital nomad” work style – no office, working out of Starbucks and airport clubs and the like – there’s no good place to take a conference call.  You can IM, e-mail, and text all you want, but once you need to open that voice channel, it’s a very different story.  Nobody wants to be the guy flooding the conference bridge with overhead Muzak or the signature sound of a barista steaming a pitcher of milk.  Airports are no better.  If they don’t have an Admirals or Red Carpet Club – or if I’m flying Southwest – then the hunt is on for a spot not under a PA speaker and away from the aisles with the beeping carts.  And you think the hunt for a working electrical outlet is tough.  I’m forever trolling through the new issues of Skymall magazine looking for a real-life “cone of silence” like they had in <em>Get Smart</em>.  I wonder if the Brookstone in ORD T3 has one?</li>\n 	<li>In the last episode, we talked about the bathroom being one of the most important rooms in a hotel.  For me, the workout room is another important place. I stayed in the <a href=\"http://www.theashtonhotel.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Ashton Hotel</a> in downtown Fort Worth earlier this month.  Nice place – a boutique hotel in a historical building right near Sundance Square and a great beer bar – the Flying Saucer.  But would I recommend it to friends?  Hmmm… I don’t think so, because the workout room is so limited?  Or lame.  A small room in the basement with a couple of treadmills and an elliptical – with a stand up fan pointed at them.</li>\n 	<li>That might be good for a 1-night stay, but I was there for 3.  I, like many frequent travelers, depend upon hotel fitness rooms to stay in some semblance of shape.  A couple of treadmills stuffed in a closet just doesn’t cut it anymore.</li>\n 	<li>And finally, I just want to remind everyone that Google’s Christmas <a href=\"http://www.freeholidaywifi.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">present</a> of free Gogo in-flight WiFi on Delta, AirTran, and Virgin America airlines is still on. It runs through Jan 2.  Perfect way to post your family Christmas pics on the flight how.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a question, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a></span>, you can send me a <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Twitter message</a> at mpeacock, or you can post them on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/153475331351358\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Facebook page</a> or the web site at travelcommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/fuzz-messy/\"><em>Smiling Perspective</em></a> by General Fuzz</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Fun With Layovers</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>One of the most sacred frequent traveler rules is <em>Fly Direct</em>.  Be it winter with snow or summer with thunderstorms, adding that intermediate stop adds one more point of failure, one more opportunity for the airlines to screw up.</li>\n 	<li>And while many connecting flights are cheaper than direct ones, for a true comparison, you have to factor in the potential costs of a delay – hotel room (because the airlines won’t pay for weather delays), meals, replacement clothes and toiletries for misrouted luggage…  In an episode last year, I calculated the cost – the breakeven premium between a direct and connecting flight -- to be $100-150.</li>\n 	<li>But, with the right frame of mind – an “adventuring” frame of mind as one person put it – you can actually manufacture something good out of a connection.</li>\n 	<li>The first requirement is to step away from the 1-hour connection.  Yes, we usually want to get to our destination in the shortest possible time, but accepting a connection of 1 hour or less…. Think about it – a 15-minute delay on your inbound flight – which is as good as on-time for most airlines – and you’re sprinting through the terminal (remember when we used to call it “OJ-ing” it – that was a long time ago) and probably having to check your carry-one.  A 1-hr connection is just asking for a stress attack and/or an overnight stay at the airport branch of the Bates Motel.</li>\n 	<li>The second requirement is to connect through some place you might want to visit.  On those rare occasions where I’m forced to take a connection, I look at the flight choices and think – where would I not mind being stuck?</li>\n 	<li>OK, sounds a bit odd, but think about it.  I’m flying from Phoenix to Ft Myers, FL – zero direct flight – no surprise there.  So where do I want to connect through – Miami, Dallas, Houston, O’Hare, Atlanta?  The total flight duration for any of these connections is within 90 minutes of each other.  For me, it’s an easy choice – I go through Chicago.  If I get stranded, I sleep in my own bed.  If I get delayed, I call up my wife and we grab dinner.</li>\n 	<li>Traveling with my family to Cape Town, South Africa, I chose the connection through Frankfurt because I knew the airport wasn’t too far out of town.  We landed after the overnight flight from Chicago, passed through Customs and headed straight for a cab that took us to downtown to Romer Square.  We had lunch, I had a beer, and then we walked around downtown for 4 hours – a quick sightseeing excursion between our overnight flights.</li>\n 	<li>Some years back, my parents flew from Denver to Paducah, KY to visit my aunt and grandmother.  Again, no direct flights so they connected through ORD.  And, as you can guess, on the way home, their commuter flight was late out of Paducah and they missed a tight connection.  My dad called me from the airport.  It was New Year’s Eve night and we were having 3 or 4 couples over.  “Get your luggage and book the flight out tomorrow,” I told him, “you can help me cook dinner.” Completely unplanned.  I picked them up, brought them home, threw an apron at my dad, and we had a great time.</li>\n 	<li>Planning ahead for these possibilities is key, though.  Last week, friends and longtime TravelCommons listeners Allan Marko and Chris Chufo got caught at ORD when a snow storm caused the crew for their flight to JAX to time out.  That was a bad night – some 1,500 flights were cancelled between ORD and MDW.  The United customer service line stretched all the way down Concourse C.  A frequent traveler, Allan immediately rang United’s Premiere Exec line and got seats on the next day’s flight to JAX, then found a room at a nearby Hilton Garden Inn and stepped out of line to go to bed.</li>\n 	<li>But without luggage.  United didn’t even try to give it back.  And because they had to check one bag anyhow with presents, they decided not to carry on – avoid the battle for carry-on space on full planes because they had time – no need to power directly from the flight to a meeting.  But now, though they had a hotel room, they had no change of clothes and just the toiletries they could scrounge from the Hilton.</li>\n 	<li>A small inconvenience, though.  Since their flight didn’t leave ‘til 7:30 the next night, I shuffled my calendar around, picked them at the Hilton and took them into Chicago for lunch.  We ate at <a href=\"http://longmanandeagle.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Longman &amp; Eagle</a>, a Logan Square gastro-pub that picked up a Michelin star last month – Chris and I had wild boar sloppy joes while Allan had the pork belly BLT, and then ran down a couple of blocks to a brew pub, <a href=\"http://revbrew.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Revolution Brewery</a>, where they picked up some fresh t-shirts and I refilled a growler with a <a href=\"http://beeradvocate.com/beer/style/140\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">double India Pale Ale</a> – though we thought hard about it, we just couldn’t figure out a way they could get a 64 oz jug of beer through security.  By 5, they were back at ORD, fed, beered up, and ready to try again.</li>\n 	<li>It’s all about attitude. Do you lean into it – figure out how to get everything you can out of it – or do you back away? On her extended journey to JAX, Chris Chufo kept chanting a mantra -- “It’s an adventure” – and came out smiling at the end</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/atek-phoenix/\"><em>Goa Life</em></a> by Ambient Teknology</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>From the Archives – Story Behind The Closing Song</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>I’ve received a couple of requests over the past months for information on the closing song – the tune that wraps each episode of TravelCommons.</li>\n 	<li>Earlier this month, Becky Boyd wrote – “I can\'t find the name of the song you use at the end of the show by lyrics.  It is so appropriate to me and my husband.  We relocated from California to South Carolina, then purchased a vacation home back in California.  We often find ourselves on different coasts from each other.”</li>\n 	<li>The song is <em>Pictures of You,</em> done by a now-defunct country band from Glasgow, Scotland called Evangeline – which is now confused on the Internet with a defunct country band from New Orleans called Evangeline.  Probably explains why Becky couldn’t find the song through its lyrics.</li>\n 	<li>Back in 2005, though, the Scottish Evangeline was playing festivals in the UK.  I found them through the Tartan Podcast which, as the name kinda hints at, covered the Scottish music scene.  It too is defunct.  This story is starting to get a bit lonely.</li>\n 	<li>Anyhow, after hearing the song, I sent a note to the band’s manager Willie Evans asking for a couple of words – a bit of back story on the song.  Here’s his response.</li>\n 	<li>Five years on, I still think it’s a great song about life on the road.  If you like it, <a href=\"http://itunes.apple.com/us/album/hard-way/id75388292\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">iTunes</a> or <a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/Hard-Way/dp/B000QQW5D8/ref=sr_1_cc_2?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1293560032&amp;sr=1-2-catcorr\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Amazon</a> are probably the best places to pick to it up.  Given the on-line confusion between the bands, I’ll post links in the show notes at travelcommons.com and on the TravelCommons Facebook page.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids99176264.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #86</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\">Magnatune</a></li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or MP3 file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to @mpeacock on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/153475331351358\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_86.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #86 -- Fun with Layovers; Story Behind the Closing Tune','','inherit','closed','closed','','435-revision-v1','','','2021-02-08 16:39:55','2021-02-08 21:39:55','',435,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/08/435-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3110,1,'2021-02-08 16:41:20','2021-02-08 21:41:20','[caption id=\"attachment_492\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/times-square-confetti1.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-492 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/times-square-confetti1-300x225.jpg\" alt=\"Times Square in a Confetti Shower by Carol Tsang\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\" /></a> Times Square in a Confetti Shower by Carol Tsang[/caption]\n\nI\'ve never been a big <a href=\"http://www.buzzfeed.com/melismashable/the-best-new-years-resolutions-for-2011\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">New Year\'s Resolution</a> guy.  Mine seem to have a 3-week half-life -- they don\'t even last to February.  However, in the spirit of \"<em>The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results\"</em> (a quote which has been attributed to <a href=\"http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Benjamin_Franklin\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Benjamin Franklin</a> and <a href=\"http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Albert Einstein</a>), here are the resolutions I\'ll be taking into the O\'Hare TSA security line with me next week:\n<ol>\n 	<li><strong>Plan Further Ahead</strong> -- If for no other reason than to avoid frustration.  The travel industry is recovering after two tough years.  2010 ended with US domestic airlines pushing through <a href=\"http://www.marketwatch.com/story/airfares-rise-more-hikes-likely-on-the-way-2010-12-29\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">two price increases</a> and data showing business travel bookings <a href=\"http://press.pegs.com/News-Releases/The-Pegasus-View-November-2010-Corporate-Booking-Volumes-Set-New-Growth-Record-of-30-6-Over-2009-13e.aspx\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">increasing 30%</a>.  Booking my travel earlier may not save me any more money, but at least I\'ll have a better shot at a plane seat and hotel bed.</li>\n 	<li><strong>Unpack/Repack My Briefcase</strong> -- I keep putting more things into my briefcase, but rarely pull things out.  Do I really need 5 pens or a half-dozen <a href=\"http://www.starbucksstore.com/products/shprodde.asp?SKU=647324\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Tazo Zen</a> teabags? When I add the <a href=\"http://www.motorola.com/Consumers/US-EN/Consumer-Product-and-Services/Mobile+Phone+Accessories/Headsets/Motorola-S10-HD-US-EN\">Bluetooth headphones</a> I got for Christmas, do I need to keep the two pair that are already there?  I only slightly comforted that I\'m not alone in this <a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/groups/whats_in_your_bag/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">OCD</a>.</li>\n 	<li><strong>Take More Quick Breaks</strong> -- In 2010, I took just three quick breaks during business trips -- a <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=1380114434979\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">walk</a> along the beach in Naples, FL a hike up Phoenix\'s <a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/travelcommons/5314961468/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Squaw Peak</a>, and a side trip to see the Taj Mahal while in <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/album.php?fbid=153481218017436&amp;id=153475331351358&amp;aid=33880\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">India</a>.  I have to grab a bit more time for myself -- maybe a bit more advanced planning (see #1) will help.</li>\n 	<li><strong>Take more pictures</strong> -- In 2008, I made a resolution to take at least one picture a day.  A simple enough resolution -- it lasted 3 days.  Maybe I need more inspiration (see #3).  And to carry a <em>real</em> camera with me more often.</li>\n 	<li><strong>Be nicer to TSA agents</strong> -- Repeat to the mantra -- <em>They\'re just doing their job</em>, <em>they\'re just doing their job</em>.  Even when they\'re feeling me up.</li>\n</ol>\n<div class=\"zemanta-pixie\" style=\"margin-top: 10px; height: 15px;\"><img class=\"zemanta-pixie-img\" style=\"border: none; float: right;\" src=\"http://img.zemanta.com/pixy.gif?x-id=c86501bb-338f-4af3-b047-fb57c335a5d7\" alt=\"\" /></div>','New Year\'s Travel Resolutions','','inherit','closed','closed','','447-revision-v1','','','2021-02-08 16:41:20','2021-02-08 21:41:20','',447,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/08/447-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3112,1,'2021-02-08 16:43:12','2021-02-08 21:43:12','[caption id=\"attachment_565\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"215\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/Frequent-Flyer-Cards1.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-565 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/Frequent-Flyer-Cards1-215x300.jpg\" alt=\"Full House, Platinum over 1K\" width=\"215\" height=\"300\" /></a> Full House, Platinum over 1K[/caption]\n\nI\'m getting ready for a stint of international travel -- a couple trips to the UK, a vacation to Venice, and then bouncing around southern India. I visited the <a href=\"http://www.travel-goods.org/the-travel-goods-show/\">2011 Travel Goods show</a> in Chicago for a preview of the new travel goodies I\'d be seeing in the shops this spring.  Wading through a front room stacked with luggage, I hit the gadget room with the interesting stuff and interviewed some of the company owners. I also talk about the growing number of wireless <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Wi-Fi\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi-Fi\" rel=\"wikipedia\">WiFi</a> hotspots I\'m seeing in hotels, and about the different ways Marriott and United Airlines dropped my frequent flier/frequent sleeper status after my traveling patterns changed.  Also, a listener tells us about a good <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Air France\" href=\"http://www.airfrance.com\" rel=\"homepage\">Air France</a> experience re-routing around an East Coast snow storm, and an audio comment about being sick on the road. Listen through to the end of the podcast for how to enter the latest TravelCommons contest. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_88.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_88.mp3\"]\n\n<!--more-->\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the transcript from TravelCommons podcast #88:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you yet again from the TravelCommons studios. I just can’t seem to get my act together enough to have everything written in time to record from a hotel room, though if there’s going to be an April episode, I’ll need to.  The beginning of April finds me in Venice, wrapping up the Spring Break I discussed in an earlier episode.  I then get a week at home with some family coming in, then down to Florida for a week, then to the UK, and then, the last week of April in India, bouncing across the usual suspects – Bangalore, Pune, and Chennai – with a weekend in the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Kerala backwaters\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerala_backwaters\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Kerala backwaters</a>.</li>\n 	<li>Not that March has been quiet.  I’m just back from a trip to New York earlier this week and then head down to Phoenix next week. I’m hoping to catch a Spring Training ball game while I’m down there.  I\'ve been working off and on in Phoenix since the mid-‘90’s and have never been to a Spring Training game.  Every year I say I’m going to carve out time, and every year something comes up.  This year, though.  This will be the year.  Again working on that New Year’s travel resolution about taking more quick breaks.  The fact that I’m still thinking about a New Year’s resolution has to be breaking some sort of rule.</li>\n 	<li>Stay with me ‘til the end of this episode – either the preferred way by listening or the ADD way by scrubbing – for a quick TravelCommons contest.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Keep Your Motor Running</em> by Dave Hole</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>OK, let’s see what bits and bobs I have been keeping track of on Evernote, and Twitter, and Facebook…</li>\n 	<li>For everyone who watched all the way to the end of the <a title=\"Video #1 – Impressions of Vietnam\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2010/09/06/video-1-impressions-of-vietnam/\">Vietnam video</a> back in September – and for those of you who haven’t, it’s still available on the web site, on the iTunes feed, and on the TravelCommons Facebook page – there’s a picture, a head shot of me, with a boa – the large snake, not the feathered thing -- draped around my neck.  You can plainly see the receding graying hair. So it caught me up short when a United gate agent looked at my boarding pass, and then at me, and said “You look too young to have a <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"United Airlines\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Mileage Plus</a> number this low.”  It worked – I gave her one of those customer service “attaboys’ they always send to their status fliers.  It reminded me of my last trip to India when the immigration agent looked at me a couple of times and said that I looked much younger than my passport photo.  Either I’ve unknowingly picked up the ability to cloud men’s minds or that picture of Dorian Grey I picked up at a garage sale actually works.</li>\n 	<li>We’ve talked in past episodes about how for frequent travelers, the cost of wireless data plans can quickly pay for themselves in avoided hotel WiFi charges – 3-4 nights in a month -- if you tend to stay in hotels that still charge for wireless or don’t have precious metal status at chains like Hilton or Marriott.  Anyhow, I’ve seen over the past few months a growing number of wireless hotspots when I pop open my laptop in my hotel room.  I see in the network browser at least 2-3 Verizon hotspots, a Sprint, and every once in a while, a Virgin hotspot.  I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised – most Android phones have 3G hotspot capabilities built in.  I guess it’s the power I’m more surprised about.  If I’m seeing 5 or 6 of these, they’re broadcasting farther than just the adjacent room.  And while most have security enabled, there’s always 1 or 2 running naked.  And this will only increase after AT&amp;T iPhones get hotspot capability with iOS 4.3.  With only 11 channels in the US implementation of WiFi, there’s gonna be some congestion in the air soon.</li>\n 	<li>Some good comments also came into the web site, the e-mail box and Twitter since the last episode…</li>\n 	<li>Andre – who describes himself as a “long-time listener from Germany” – left this comment on the Winter Travel Tips post\n<ul>\n 	<li>Wanted to share a positive experience with an airline call center when I was travelling to the US in January. I flew Air France on the international legs – Stuttgart to Paris-DeGaulle to JFK and back, and used United miles for the domestic portion to Florida – JFK to Washington-Dulles to Miami.</li>\n 	<li>As my departure approached, so did a massive snowstorm. Just as I finished packing my luggage the night before departure, Air France e-mailed me that my flight out of Kennedy was canceled.  Indeed, AF kept all 4 of their JFK flights in Paris to keep their schedule from getting screwed up. I called the AF call center. I said that I\'m currently in Miami and asked if there was flight to Paris out of here or DC. After waiting on hold for a while the agent transferred me to a special Delta help desk, warning me that I might have to pay extra to fly out of MIA. Next agent told me the same, but she had to talk to AF in Paris anyways.</li>\n 	<li>After another wait, she came back, totally astonished that AF, not only accepted the re-routing, but also did that free of charge. I guess they were just happy to have one less passenger standing around in New York.</li>\n 	<li>So, there are still moments where you think that you are a valued customer and they care about you.</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Andre, thanks for that story.  This was a tough winter in the US.  I have a friend from Detroit who was in Boston one week and supposed to be in New York the next.  One of those storms blew through, cancelled his flight, and his next available flight home was the following Monday, when he was supposed to be flying back to New York.  He just hung around Boston for the weekend, bought some new underwear, and then caught Amtrak down to New York Monday morning – much less stressful.</li>\n 	<li>Peter Zurich sent in a note about the running thread on the TSA’s full body scanners, specifically about my observation in the last episode about the partial roll out of the scanners.  What good was it to scan 100% of the passengers in ORD’s Terminal 1 last Monday morning – pushing security lines down the concourse, and yet have no scanners at all in alternative airports like Ft Myers, FL.  In this same vein, Peter writes\n<ul>\n 	<li>I am all onboard for security, but what we have now is security theatre that is just another meaningless escalation from x-ray to liquid ban to shoes off.  We joked about what a good thing it was that Richard Reid, the shoe bomber, didn’t have it in his underwear, and of course, that’s the next thing that happens, and we get the naked scanners.  On and on it goes…</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Yes, Peter, and so it does.  One thing the housing market meltdown has done is make people less mobile – they can’t easily get out of their houses to move to another city for a new job.  The number of people flying every week to their jobs is growing.  Making this work requires smooth predictable travel – something the TSA seems to have no interest in facilitating.</li>\n 	<li>And finally, yet another audio comment – I love these – this time from Lori Humm, another long-time TravelCommons listener, about a time when she was sick while on the road</li>\n 	<li>Lori Humm audio clip</li>\n 	<li>Lori, thanks for that story.  Makes me feel a bit of a whiner -- Type A flu definitely tops my cold I whined about in the last episode.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a question, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is <a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a> -- use the Voice Memo app on your iPhone or something like Virtual Recorder on your Android phone to record and send in an audio comment like Lori or Gary in last month’s episode; send a <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Twitter</a> message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/153475331351358\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Facebook</a> page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Baja Taxi</em> by Brian Buckit</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>New Travel Goodies</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Chris Truelove, another long time TravelCommons listener from the UK, dropped me a line a couple of weeks back, saying that he would be in Chicago for the 2011 Travel Goods show to launch the latest version of his luggage locator tag business. I had mentioned his globalbagtag.com business some episodes ago, and now he’s launching a new line – back2you.com.</li>\n 	<li>Always looking for some podcast content – as well as the opportunity to meet a listener – I headed down on Sunday afternoon.</li>\n 	<li>McCormick Center in Chicago is one of the world’s largest exhibition spaces, so finding the show took a little bit.  Walking in, it was luggage as far as I could see.  There were lots of colors on display.  Everybody – well, except for Tumi – was looking to make a break from black.  I couldn’t discern a clear alternative, though – was red the new black or was beige.  I did see a surprising number of hardshell rolling bags and in all sorts of wild prints.  Perhaps those are more targeted at the recreational market – can’t say I saw a lot of cheetah-print hardshell bags being put in the overhead on my morning flight to New York last week.</li>\n 	<li>In spite of all the colors, my eyes began to glaze over – you can only look at so many suitcases before sleep – or boredom – begins to wash over you.  Then I walked into the back room and things got much more interesting.  Rather than 2-story luggage displays, in here were smaller booths filled with all sorts of travel gadgets.  Even the bags back here had interesting twists. Powerbag showed backpacks and briefcases with built-in batteries, complete with built-in iPhone and USB cords to keep your phones and iPods topped off while walking down the concourse.  And a company called Runnur (<a href=\"http://gorunnur.com/\">http://gorunnur.com/</a>) was selling a fanny pack reengineered into something like a bandolier, slinging everything across one shoulder instead of resting on your back-side.</li>\n 	<li>It was here that I found Chris and so, using the Voice Memo app on my iPhone, I asked him to tell me about Back2You (<a href=\"http://back2you.com/\">http://back2you.com/</a>)</li>\n 	<li>Back2You interview\n\n[caption id=\"attachment_577\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"150\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/DSC_7791-copy11.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-577 size-thumbnail\" title=\"Back2You Tag\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/DSC_7791-copy1-150x150.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"150\" height=\"150\" /></a> Back2You Bag Tag[/caption]</li>\n 	<li>Thanks Chris.  Those tags could come in handy on my upcoming trips to Italy, the UK, and India where I won’t be in any single place more than a couple of days.</li>\n 	<li>Walking around the back room, I found some other interesting products</li>\n 	<li>TuGo interview</li>\n 	<li>I’ll post a picture in the show notes.  I tried TuGo (<a href=\"http://goodtugo.com/\">http://goodtugo.com/</a>)  out last Monday morning in ORD.  It got it on my bag in less than a minute, put my coffee in there, then put my backpack on top of my bag and it worked like a charm.  Not sure if the problem it’s solving is worth the space it takes up in my bag, but it definitely works.</li>\n 	<li>One of the themes in the back room seemed to be comfort – as the seat pitch – the distance between rows – shrink and planes get more crowded, people are looking to buy a little something to make the journey more bearable.</li>\n 	<li>Kuhi Comfort interview\n\n[caption id=\"attachment_576\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"150\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/DSC_7788-copy11.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-576 size-thumbnail\" title=\"TuGo Cupholder\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/DSC_7788-copy1-150x150.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"150\" height=\"150\" /></a> TuGo Cupholder[/caption]</li>\n 	<li>I tried the Kuhi Comfort (<a href=\"http://www.kuhicomfort.com/\">http://www.kuhicomfort.com/</a>).  It was more comfortable than the typical neck pillow. I’m not sure about the pouch for aromatherapy. I like a little lavender oil as much as the next person, but in coach, where you’re less than a foot from the other passenger’s head – one person’s relaxing aromatherapy is the next person’s eye watering stench…</li>\n 	<li>The other theme I picked up was hygiene.  There were a handful of booths selling bed bug powders and plastic barriers.  The booth across from Chris Truelove’s --Shelves to Go (<a href=\"http://www.shelvestogo.net\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">http://www.shelvestogo.net</a>) was selling a packable shelving system – lifts straight out of your bag and hangs on the closet rod – avoiding, as the brochure says, “the risk of possible exposure to dirt and insect infestation” from putting your close in the hotel dresser  -- I’ll put a picture in the show notes.</li>\n 	<li>And then there was this new twist on the lowly wipe</li>\n 	<li>Paper Shower (<a href=\"http://papershower.com/\">http://papershower.com/</a>) interview</li>\n 	<li>So there you go, no end of stuff to make your travel life a bit easier, and your bag a bit heavier.\n\n[caption id=\"attachment_579\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"150\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/DSC_7790-copy11.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-579 size-thumbnail\" title=\"Shelves to Go\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/DSC_7790-copy1-150x150.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"150\" height=\"150\" /></a> Shelves to Go[/caption]</li>\n 	<li>I’ll put URLs and any pictures I have of these products in the show notes.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Emily C</em> by Fiasco</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Losing Status</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Back in <a title=\"Podcast #82 – Changing My Travel; New Mileage Programs in a New Year\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2010/02/20/podcast-82-changing-my-travel-new-mileage-programs-in-a-new-year/\">episode 82</a>, I talked about how my job switch – moving from consulting to being the CIO of a technology company – was changing the way I travel, and how the new destinations were shaking up my frequent traveler program status.</li>\n 	<li>It all sorted out in mid-January.  Because of our office locations, I switched from Marriott – where I’d been top-tier Platinum status for at least 7 years – to Hilton for no other reason than sheer convenience.  I hit top tier Hilton – Diamond; gem stones rather than precious metals for Hilton – in December.  And, oddly enough, still haven’t received a new card or welcome packet.  Every other program – you hit a major tier and there are all sorts of thank you letters and program brochures showing up on your doorstep.  Hilton – nothing.</li>\n 	<li>As interesting, though was Marriott’s reaction.  I don’t think I stayed enough nights to qualify for any status, but they “soft landed” me.  They dropped me one level down – to Gold, which still gets you free WiFi and free breakfast in the concierge lounge – and an offer to let me buy back my Platinum status for 40,000 points.  Nice approach.  If I thought I’d be staying at more Marriotts this year, I’d have considered the buy back, but I appreciated the soft landing and have stayed at a couple of Marriott since them.</li>\n 	<li>United Airlines – not as nice.  No soft landing here.  I dropped two tiers – from 1K to Premiere, which is the status level I’d qualified for by the end of the year.  As I mentioned in<a title=\"Podcast #84 – End of Year Status Calculus; TSA Porn\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2010/10/30/podcast-84-end-of-year-status-calculus-tsa-porn/\"> episode 84</a>, when I saw in October that I would miss American’s Exec Platinum by about 10,000 miles, I flipped over to United to preserve a minimum level of status.  Which is exactly what I received.  Like Marriott, though, I received an offer to buy back my 1K status, but the price was a bit steeper -- $999 plus flying 35,000 qualifying miles in the first quarter 0f 2011.  Neither of those made any sense.</li>\n 	<li>I’ll probably go back to my old ways – splitting my mileage between United and American and keeping mid-tier status – Premiere Exec -- on United because, with monthly flights to Dallas and Fort Myers, FL where United has little to none non-stop service, there’s no way I’ll make 1K.</li>\n 	<li>Friends who left consulting used to joke that first January was one of their most conflicted times – down because they lost status and were now traveling with the peons; but happy with what it represented – that they were spending a lot more time with their families.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids991762681.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #88</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://musicalley.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Music Alley</a></li>\n 	<li>And now for the contest.  In the past, I\'ve run some quick contests to drive iTunes reviews.  This time, I – like every podcaster – am looking to drive Facebook “likes” – there’s got to be a better noun than that – “followers” on Twitter may be a bit creepy, but at least it’s not pathetic.  But, that’s the lingo, so I’ll have to go with it.  Go to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/153475331351358\">Facebook</a> page – there’s link in the shownotes and a badge above the fold on the first page of the web site – “like” it, and leave a comment.  The best comment, funniest or most insightful as judged by me, wins 2 drink coupons on United Airlines.  I look forward to some good stuff</li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or MP3 file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n</ul>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/153475331351358\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_88.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #88 -- New Travel Goodies; Losing Elite Status','','inherit','closed','closed','','554-revision-v1','','','2021-02-08 16:43:12','2021-02-08 21:43:12','',554,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/08/554-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
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(3141,1,'2020-07-22 14:12:00','2020-07-22 14:12:00','<h2>TravelCommons</h2>		\n			The podcast giving the voice of the traveler<br><br>It\'s more about the journey than the destination		\n			<ul>\n								<li>\n						<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/01/16/podcast-183-covid-test-anxiety-michelin-food-adventures/\"><h2>Podcast #183 — COVID Test Anxiety; Michelin Food Adventures</h2></a>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/01/16/podcast-183-covid-test-anxiety-michelin-food-adventures/\">January 16, 2022</a>\n									Episode 183								\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n																	<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n								25:17								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/01/16/podcast-183-covid-test-anxiety-michelin-food-adventures/#respond\">0 Comments</a>\n									<p>\n										No travel since the last episode, but lots of travel planning. Are we making our way back to pre-COVID travel planning patterns? Omicron has lots of people worried about testing positive and getting stuck abroad. Michael Giusti of&nbsp;InsuranceQuotes.com talks about how travel insurance can help. A blogger’s brutal review of a Michelin-starred restaurant where we...																			</p>									\n							<!--[if lt IE 9]><![endif]-->\n<audio id=\"audio-4063-1\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/4063/podcast-183-covid-test-anxiety-michelin-food-adventures.mp3?_=1\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/4063/podcast-183-covid-test-anxiety-michelin-food-adventures.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/4063/podcast-183-covid-test-anxiety-michelin-food-adventures.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/4063/podcast-183-covid-test-anxiety-michelin-food-adventures.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #183 — COVID Test Anxiety; Michelin Food Adventures \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/4063/podcast-183-covid-test-anxiety-michelin-food-adventures.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #183 — COVID Test Anxiety; Michelin Food Adventures \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a> | Duration: 25:17 | Recorded on January 16, 2022</p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>						\n			<!-- close .slider-content-max-width -->\n		<!-- close .slider-text-floating-container -->\n	<!-- close .slider-elements-display-table -->\n<!-- close .secondline-elements-slider-background -->\n				</li>\n								<li>\n						<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/31/my-best-restaurants-and-bars-of-2021/\"><h2>My Best Restaurants and Bars of 2021</h2></a>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/31/my-best-restaurants-and-bars-of-2021/\">December 31, 2021</a>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n																	<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/beer/\" rel=\"category tag\">Beer</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/food-2/\" rel=\"category tag\">Food</a>\n																<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/31/my-best-restaurants-and-bars-of-2021/#respond\">0 Comments</a>\n									<p>\n										It&#8217;ll take travel guide books a while to catch up with all the restaurants and bars closures caused by the COVID lockdowns. To help fill that gap, here are the best places I&#8217;ve ate and drank at during my 2021 travels. I&#8217;ll update this after each trip, so keep it bookmarked. Chicago NoodleBird at Fat...																			</p>									\n			<!-- close .slider-content-max-width -->\n		<!-- close .slider-text-floating-container -->\n	<!-- close .slider-elements-display-table -->\n<!-- close .secondline-elements-slider-background -->\n				</li>\n								<li>\n						<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/30/easy-way-to-do-1-day-testing-for-returning-to-us/\"><h2>Easy Way to Do 1-Day Testing For Returning to US</h2></a>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/30/easy-way-to-do-1-day-testing-for-returning-to-us/\">December 30, 2021</a>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n																	<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-journal/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Journal</a>\n																<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/30/easy-way-to-do-1-day-testing-for-returning-to-us/#respond\">0 Comments</a>\n									<p>\n										How to meet the US 1-day COVID testing window by packing Abbott BinaxNOW kits so you can self-test in your hotel the day before your flight home																			</p>									\n			<!-- close .slider-content-max-width -->\n		<!-- close .slider-text-floating-container -->\n	<!-- close .slider-elements-display-table -->\n<!-- close .secondline-elements-slider-background -->\n				</li>\n								<li>\n						<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/10/podcast-182-more-covid-changes-words-that-mean-adventure/\"><h2>Podcast #182 — More COVID Changes; Words That Mean Adventure</h2></a>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/10/podcast-182-more-covid-changes-words-that-mean-adventure/\">December 10, 2021</a>\n									Episode 182								\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n																	<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n								28:34								Comments Off on Podcast #182 — More COVID Changes; Words That Mean Adventure\n									<p>\n										Back in front of the microphone after a two-week trip to the UK, getting back home just before the new Omicron travel restrictions hit. We talk about getting to London, surfing the waves of changing travel requirements, a new way to renew Global Entry, moan a bit more about the inexorable advance of the cashless...																			</p>									\n							<audio id=\"audio-4020-2\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/4020/podcast-182-more-covid-changes-words-that-mean-adventure.mp3?_=2\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/4020/podcast-182-more-covid-changes-words-that-mean-adventure.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/4020/podcast-182-more-covid-changes-words-that-mean-adventure.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/4020/podcast-182-more-covid-changes-words-that-mean-adventure.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #182 — More COVID Changes; Words That Mean Adventure \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/4020/podcast-182-more-covid-changes-words-that-mean-adventure.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #182 — More COVID Changes; Words That Mean Adventure \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a> | Duration: 28:34 | Recorded on December 10, 2021</p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>						\n			<!-- close .slider-content-max-width -->\n		<!-- close .slider-text-floating-container -->\n	<!-- close .slider-elements-display-table -->\n<!-- close .secondline-elements-slider-background -->\n				</li>\n							</ul>\n		<!-- #-elements-secondline-flexslider-56656ff -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-slider-main -->\n<a onMouseOver=\"this.style.color=`#2d2d2d`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#ffffff`\" onMouseOut=\"this.style.color=`#ffffff`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#c01f2c`\" style=\"color:#ffffff; background-color:#c01f2c\" href=\"\">Subscribe</a>\n<!-- Modal HTML embedded directly into document. -->\n	<ul><li><a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Apple-Podcasts.svg\" alt=\"Apple Podcasts\" />Apple Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Google-Podcasts.png\" alt=\"Google Podcasts\" />Google Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Spotify.svg\" alt=\"Spotify\" />Spotify</a></li><li><a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/SoundCloud.svg\" alt=\"SoundCloud\" />SoundCloud</a></li><li><a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Stitcher.svg\" alt=\"Stitcher\" />Stitcher</a></li><li><a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Amazon-Music.svg\" alt=\"Amazon Music\" />Amazon Music</a></li><li><a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/TravelcommonsPodcast\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/RSS.svg\" alt=\"RSS\" />RSS</a></li></ul>                                       \n			<!-- close .secondline-addons-subscribe-button-container -->\n			<h2>Latest Posts</h2>		\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/01/16/podcast-183-covid-test-anxiety-michelin-food-adventures/\">\n					<img width=\"800\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/IMG_3929-800x500.jpeg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/IMG_3929-scaled.jpeg?resize=800%2C500 800w, https://i0.wp.com/travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/IMG_3929-scaled.jpeg?resize=400%2C250 400w, https://i0.wp.com/travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/IMG_3929-scaled.jpeg?zoom=2&amp;resize=800%2C500 1600w, https://i0.wp.com/travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/IMG_3929-scaled.jpeg?zoom=3&amp;resize=800%2C500 2400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/01/16/podcast-183-covid-test-anxiety-michelin-food-adventures/\">\nPodcast #183 — COVID Test Anxiety; Michelin Food Adventures</a></h2>\n					January 16, 2022\n						Episode 183										\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					25:17\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/01/16/podcast-183-covid-test-anxiety-michelin-food-adventures/#respond\">0 Comments</a>\n						<p>No travel since the last episode, but lots of travel planning. Are we making our way back to pre-COVID travel planning patterns? Omicron has lots of people worried about...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/01/16/podcast-183-covid-test-anxiety-michelin-food-adventures/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-4063-3\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/4063/podcast-183-covid-test-anxiety-michelin-food-adventures.mp3?_=3\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/4063/podcast-183-covid-test-anxiety-michelin-food-adventures.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/4063/podcast-183-covid-test-anxiety-michelin-food-adventures.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/4063/podcast-183-covid-test-anxiety-michelin-food-adventures.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #183 — COVID Test Anxiety; Michelin Food Adventures \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/4063/podcast-183-covid-test-anxiety-michelin-food-adventures.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #183 — COVID Test Anxiety; Michelin Food Adventures \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a> | Duration: 25:17 | Recorded on January 16, 2022</p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/31/my-best-restaurants-and-bars-of-2021/\">\n					<img width=\"631\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7836-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7836-scaled.jpg?w=2560 2560w, https://i0.wp.com/travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7836-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C238 300w, https://i0.wp.com/travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7836-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C811 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7836-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C608 768w, https://i0.wp.com/travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7836-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1217 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7836-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C1622 2048w, https://i0.wp.com/travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7836-scaled.jpg?w=2400 2400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 631px) 100vw, 631px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/31/my-best-restaurants-and-bars-of-2021/\">\nMy Best Restaurants and Bars of 2021</a></h2>\n					December 31, 2021\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/beer/\" rel=\"category tag\">Beer</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/food-2/\" rel=\"category tag\">Food</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/31/my-best-restaurants-and-bars-of-2021/#respond\">0 Comments</a>\n						<p>It&#8217;ll take travel guide books a while to catch up with all the restaurants and bars closures caused by the COVID lockdowns. To help fill that gap, here are...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/31/my-best-restaurants-and-bars-of-2021/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/30/easy-way-to-do-1-day-testing-for-returning-to-us/\">\n					<img width=\"800\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/116C8D86-ED66-4E5F-A516-D3E6046CA582-800x500.jpg\" alt=\"BinaxNOW COVID testing session\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/116C8D86-ED66-4E5F-A516-D3E6046CA582.jpg?resize=800%2C500 800w, https://i0.wp.com/travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/116C8D86-ED66-4E5F-A516-D3E6046CA582.jpg?resize=400%2C250 400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/30/easy-way-to-do-1-day-testing-for-returning-to-us/\">\nEasy Way to Do 1-Day Testing For Returning to US</a></h2>\n					December 30, 2021\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-journal/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Journal</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/30/easy-way-to-do-1-day-testing-for-returning-to-us/#respond\">0 Comments</a>\n						<p>How to meet the US 1-day COVID testing window by packing Abbott BinaxNOW kits so you can self-test in your hotel the day before your flight home</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/30/easy-way-to-do-1-day-testing-for-returning-to-us/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/10/podcast-182-more-covid-changes-words-that-mean-adventure/\">\n					<img width=\"800\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/JPEG-image-800x500.jpeg\" alt=\"Two negative COVID rapid antigen tests\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/JPEG-image.jpeg?resize=800%2C500 800w, https://i0.wp.com/travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/JPEG-image.jpeg?resize=400%2C250 400w, https://i0.wp.com/travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/JPEG-image.jpeg?zoom=2&amp;resize=800%2C500 1600w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/10/podcast-182-more-covid-changes-words-that-mean-adventure/\">\nPodcast #182 — More COVID Changes; Words That Mean Adventure</a></h2>\n					December 10, 2021\n						Episode 182										\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					28:34\n					Comments Off on Podcast #182 — More COVID Changes; Words That Mean Adventure\n						<p>Back in front of the microphone after a two-week trip to the UK, getting back home just before the new Omicron travel restrictions hit. We talk about getting to...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/10/podcast-182-more-covid-changes-words-that-mean-adventure/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-4020-4\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/4020/podcast-182-more-covid-changes-words-that-mean-adventure.mp3?_=4\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/4020/podcast-182-more-covid-changes-words-that-mean-adventure.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/4020/podcast-182-more-covid-changes-words-that-mean-adventure.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/4020/podcast-182-more-covid-changes-words-that-mean-adventure.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #182 — More COVID Changes; Words That Mean Adventure \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/4020/podcast-182-more-covid-changes-words-that-mean-adventure.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #182 — More COVID Changes; Words That Mean Adventure \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a> | Duration: 28:34 | Recorded on December 10, 2021</p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/11/13/podcast-181-travel-potpourri-2021-travelers-gift-guide/\">\n					<img width=\"800\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/IMG_3657-800x500.jpg\" alt=\"Jumble of US Road Signs\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/IMG_3657-scaled.jpg?resize=800%2C500 800w, https://i0.wp.com/travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/IMG_3657-scaled.jpg?resize=400%2C250 400w, https://i0.wp.com/travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/IMG_3657-scaled.jpg?zoom=2&amp;resize=800%2C500 1600w, https://i0.wp.com/travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/IMG_3657-scaled.jpg?zoom=3&amp;resize=800%2C500 2400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/11/13/podcast-181-travel-potpourri-2021-travelers-gift-guide/\">\nPodcast #181 — Travel Potpourri; 2021 Traveler’s Gift Guide</a></h2>\n					November 13, 2021\n						Episode 181										\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-tech/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Tech</a>\n					24:40\n					Comments Off on Podcast #181 — Travel Potpourri; 2021 Traveler’s Gift Guide\n						<p>No travel since the last episode, so just talking through a random potpourri of travel stuff. There&#8217;s more travel planning; this time for a couple of weeks split between...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/11/13/podcast-181-travel-potpourri-2021-travelers-gift-guide/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-4001-5\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/4001/podcast-181-travel-potpourri-2021-travelers-gift-guide.mp3?_=5\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/4001/podcast-181-travel-potpourri-2021-travelers-gift-guide.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/4001/podcast-181-travel-potpourri-2021-travelers-gift-guide.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/4001/podcast-181-travel-potpourri-2021-travelers-gift-guide.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #181 — Travel Potpourri; 2021 Traveler’s Gift Guide \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/4001/podcast-181-travel-potpourri-2021-travelers-gift-guide.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #181 — Travel Potpourri; 2021 Traveler’s Gift Guide \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a> | Duration: 24:40 | Recorded on November 13, 2021</p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-to-survive-post-pandemic-travel/\">\n					<img width=\"800\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/E30FECE9-6481-4CD6-835A-6CDF0206F770-800x500.jpeg\" alt=\"Christmas tree on baggage carousel\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/E30FECE9-6481-4CD6-835A-6CDF0206F770.jpeg?resize=800%2C500 800w, https://i0.wp.com/travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/E30FECE9-6481-4CD6-835A-6CDF0206F770.jpeg?resize=400%2C250 400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-to-survive-post-pandemic-travel/\">\n10 Best Travel Gift Ideas To Survive Post-Pandemic Travel</a></h2>\n					November 4, 2021\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-journal/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Journal</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-tech/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Tech</a>\n					Comments Off on 10 Best Travel Gift Ideas To Survive Post-Pandemic Travel\n						<p>If last year&#8217;s gift guide was all about helping folks travel while dodging last-minute lockdowns, this year&#8217;s guide is stacked with the best travel gift ideas to help the...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-to-survive-post-pandemic-travel/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php?paged=2\" >More Posts</a>\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-list-main -->','Home','','publish','closed','closed','','home','','','2022-01-31 17:52:22','2022-01-31 22:52:22','',0,'https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/?page_id=13',0,'page','',0),
(3174,1,'2021-02-08 17:55:03','2021-02-08 22:55:03','<h2>Welcome To Satchmo</h2>		\n			A Powerful WordPress Theme for Podcasters.		\n<a onMouseOver=\"this.style.color=`#2d2d2d`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#ffffff`\" onMouseOut=\"this.style.color=`#ffffff`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#c01f2c`\" style=\"color:#ffffff; background-color:#c01f2c\" href=\"#!\">Subscribe</a>   \n<!-- Modal HTML embedded directly into document. -->\n	<ul><li><a href=\"#!\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><img src=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Apple-Podcasts.png\" />Apple Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"#!\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><img src=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Google-Podcasts.png\" />Google Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"#!\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><img 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href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast/episode-1-how-we-started-podcasting/\">\n					<img width=\"800\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-1.jpg 800w, https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-1-300x188.jpg 300w, https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-1-768x480.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast/episode-1-how-we-started-podcasting/\">\nEpisode 1: How We Started Podcasting</a></h2>\n					July 22, 2019\n					<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/author/satchmo/\">Admin</a>\n							Featured, Tutorials						\n					02:16\n					<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast/episode-1-how-we-started-podcasting/#respond\">0 Comments</a>\n								<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast/episode-1-how-we-started-podcasting/\"> Read More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-43-6\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast-player/43/episode-1-how-we-started-podcasting.mp3?_=6\" /><a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast-player/43/episode-1-how-we-started-podcasting.mp3\">https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast-player/43/episode-1-how-we-started-podcasting.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast-download/43/episode-1-how-we-started-podcasting.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Episode 1: How We Started Podcasting \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast-download/43/episode-1-how-we-started-podcasting.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Episode 1: How We Started Podcasting \" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Play in new window</a> | Duration: 02:16</p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-list-main -->\n			<h2>Latest Episodes</h2>		\n			<ul>\n									<li data-filter=\"*\">All</li> <li data-filter=\".entrepreneurship\">Entrepreneurship</li> <li data-filter=\".featured\">Featured</li> <li data-filter=\".media\">Media</li> <li data-filter=\".tech\">Tech</li> <li data-filter=\".tutorials\">Tutorials</li> 							</ul>\n				<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast/episode-10-season-finale/\">\n					<img width=\"800\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-10.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-10.jpg 800w, https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-10-300x188.jpg 300w, https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-10-768x480.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast/episode-10-season-finale/\">\nEpisode 10: Season Finale</a></h2>\n					July 24, 2019\n					<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/author/satchmo/\">Admin</a>\n							Media						\n					02:16\n					<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast/episode-10-season-finale/#respond\">0 Comments</a>\n						<p>A wonderful serenity has taken possession of my entire soul, like these sweet mornings of spring which I enjoy with my whole heart. I am alone, and feel the...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast/episode-10-season-finale/\"> Play Episode</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-82-7\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast-player/82/episode-10-season-finale.mp3?_=7\" /><a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast-player/82/episode-10-season-finale.mp3\">https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast-player/82/episode-10-season-finale.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast-download/82/episode-10-season-finale.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Episode 10: Season Finale \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast-download/82/episode-10-season-finale.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Episode 10: Season Finale \" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Play in new window</a> | Duration: 02:16</p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast/episode-9-building-an-audience/\">\n					<img width=\"800\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-9.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-9.jpg 800w, https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-9-300x188.jpg 300w, https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-9-768x480.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast/episode-9-building-an-audience/\">\nEpisode 9: Building an Audience</a></h2>\n					July 24, 2019\n					<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/author/satchmo/\">Admin</a>\n							Entrepreneurship						\n					02:16\n					<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast/episode-9-building-an-audience/#respond\">0 Comments</a>\n						<p>A wonderful serenity has taken possession of my entire soul, like these sweet mornings of spring which I enjoy with my whole heart. I am alone, and feel the...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast/episode-9-building-an-audience/\"> Play Episode</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-79-8\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast-player/79/episode-9-building-an-audience.mp3?_=8\" /><a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast-player/79/episode-9-building-an-audience.mp3\">https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast-player/79/episode-9-building-an-audience.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast-download/79/episode-9-building-an-audience.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Episode 9: Building an Audience \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast-download/79/episode-9-building-an-audience.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Episode 9: Building an Audience \" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Play in new window</a> | Duration: 02:16</p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast/episode-8-audio-software-for-podcasters/\">\n					<img width=\"800\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-8.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-8.jpg 800w, https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-8-300x188.jpg 300w, https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-8-768x480.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast/episode-8-audio-software-for-podcasters/\">\nEpisode 8: Audio Software for Podcasters</a></h2>\n					July 24, 2019\n					<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/author/satchmo/\">Admin</a>\n							Media, Tech						\n					02:16\n					<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast/episode-8-audio-software-for-podcasters/#respond\">0 Comments</a>\n						<p>A wonderful serenity has taken possession of my entire soul, like these sweet mornings of spring which I enjoy with my whole heart. I am alone, and feel the...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast/episode-8-audio-software-for-podcasters/\"> Play Episode</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-70-9\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast-player/70/episode-8-audio-software-for-podcasters.mp3?_=9\" /><a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast-player/70/episode-8-audio-software-for-podcasters.mp3\">https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast-player/70/episode-8-audio-software-for-podcasters.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast-download/70/episode-8-audio-software-for-podcasters.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Episode 8: Audio Software for Podcasters \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast-download/70/episode-8-audio-software-for-podcasters.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Episode 8: Audio Software for Podcasters \" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Play in new window</a> | Duration: 02:16</p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast/episode-7-best-mics-for-podcasting/\">\n					<img width=\"800\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-7.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-7.jpg 800w, https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-7-300x188.jpg 300w, https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-7-768x480.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast/episode-7-best-mics-for-podcasting/\">\nEpisode 7: Best Mics for Podcasting</a></h2>\n					July 24, 2019\n					<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/author/satchmo/\">Admin</a>\n							Tech, Tutorials						\n					02:16\n					<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast/episode-7-best-mics-for-podcasting/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n						<p>A wonderful serenity has taken possession of my entire soul, like these sweet mornings of spring which I enjoy with my whole heart. I am alone, and feel the...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast/episode-7-best-mics-for-podcasting/\"> Play Episode</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-67-10\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast-player/67/episode-7-best-mics-for-podcasting.mp3?_=10\" /><a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast-player/67/episode-7-best-mics-for-podcasting.mp3\">https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast-player/67/episode-7-best-mics-for-podcasting.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast-download/67/episode-7-best-mics-for-podcasting.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Episode 7: Best Mics for Podcasting \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast-download/67/episode-7-best-mics-for-podcasting.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Episode 7: Best Mics for Podcasting \" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Play in new window</a> | Duration: 02:16</p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast/episode-6-soundcloud-example/\">\n					<img width=\"800\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-6.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-6.jpg 800w, https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-6-300x188.jpg 300w, https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-6-768x480.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast/episode-6-soundcloud-example/\">\nEpisode 6: SoundCloud Example</a></h2>\n					July 24, 2019\n					<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/author/satchmo/\">Admin</a>\n							Media, Tutorials						\n					<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast/episode-6-soundcloud-example/#respond\">0 Comments</a>\n						<p>A wonderful serenity has taken possession of my entire soul, like these sweet mornings of spring which I enjoy with my whole heart. I am alone, and feel the...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast/episode-6-soundcloud-example/\"> Play Episode</a>\n					<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"150\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/261000171&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true\"></iframe>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast/episode-5-mixcloud-example/\">\n					<img width=\"800\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-2.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-2.jpg 800w, https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-2-300x188.jpg 300w, https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-2-768x480.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast/episode-5-mixcloud-example/\">\nEpisode 5: MixCloud Example</a></h2>\n					July 24, 2019\n					<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/author/satchmo/\">Admin</a>\n							Media						\n					<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast/episode-5-mixcloud-example/#respond\">0 Comments</a>\n						<p>A wonderful serenity has taken possession of my entire soul, like these sweet mornings of spring which I enjoy with my whole heart. I am alone, and feel the...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast/episode-5-mixcloud-example/\"> Play Episode</a>\n					<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"120\" src=\"https://www.mixcloud.com/widget/iframe/?feed=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.mixcloud.com%2Ftukatz%2Fbillys-jazz-swing-dixieland-favourites%2F&hide_cover=1&light=1\" frameborder=\"0\"></iframe>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php?paged=2\" >More Episodes</a>\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-list-main -->\n			<h2>Featured Guests</h2>		\n										<img src=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/wp-content/uploads/elementor/thumbs/guest-6-nbbdoyjxsihbr5d6hka939dzcs74pk7n8cdzxm6574-oijgxdr2asdfqt3q6ghnugamvdxyi6c4d2py534yrk.jpg\" title=\"guest-6-nbbdoyjxsihbr5d6hka939dzcs74pk7n8cdzxm6574\" alt=\"guest-6-nbbdoyjxsihbr5d6hka939dzcs74pk7n8cdzxm6574\" />											\n			<h2>Emma Thomas</h2>		\n			Producer		\n		<p style=\"text-align: center;\">I throw myself down among the tall grass by the trickling stream. As I lie close to the earth, a thousand unknown plants.</p>		\n										<img src=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/wp-content/uploads/elementor/thumbs/guest-2-nb872339vf3o49vpj76jc5vbq718tnt467py1v4low-oijgwgupnl4eggfiik9px6li2wg40rpikjvycehqtc.jpg\" title=\"guest-2-nb872339vf3o49vpj76jc5vbq718tnt467py1v4low\" alt=\"guest-2-nb872339vf3o49vpj76jc5vbq718tnt467py1v4low\" />											\n			<h2>Earn Palmer</h2>		\n			Drummer		\n		<p style=\"text-align: center;\">I throw myself down among the tall grass by the trickling stream. As I lie close to the earth, a thousand unknown plants.</p>		\n										<img src=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/wp-content/uploads/elementor/thumbs/guest-5-nb873d5d6aupx60t29398c8wu2q8atvyojoqkf8b80-oijgwd3cw8z960kz4in7n7jnpcyn5zal81a0fanbi8.jpg\" title=\"guest-5-nb873d5d6aupx60t29398c8wu2q8atvyojoqkf8b80\" alt=\"guest-5-nb873d5d6aupx60t29398c8wu2q8atvyojoqkf8b80\" />											\n			<h2>Halie Jackson</h2>		\n			Entrepreneur		\n		<p style=\"text-align: center;\">I throw myself down among the tall grass by the trickling stream. As I lie close to the earth, a thousand unknown plants.</p>		\n										<img src=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/wp-content/uploads/elementor/thumbs/guest-4-nb873nhl9h8vgvlsdvk5hrmzdbb9ni10dyv2ugszbk-oijgw5kndkoyl4vwcfe739fyy9zpgegqj024l2ygw0.jpg\" title=\"guest-4-nb873nhl9h8vgvlsdvk5hrmzdbb9ni10dyv2ugszbk\" alt=\"guest-4-nb873nhl9h8vgvlsdvk5hrmzdbb9ni10dyv2ugszbk\" />											\n			<h2>The Cat</h2>		\n			celebrity		\n		<p style=\"text-align: center;\">I throw myself down among the tall grass by the trickling stream. As I lie close to the earth, a thousand unknown plants.</p>		\n			<h2>Subscribe To Our Newsletter</h2>		\n		<p>Subscribe to receive info on our latest news and episodes</p>[mc4wp_form id=\"22\"]','Home','','inherit','closed','closed','','3141-revision-v1','','','2021-02-08 17:55:03','2021-02-08 22:55:03','',3141,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/08/3141-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3175,1,'2021-02-08 17:55:03','2021-02-08 22:55:03','<h2>Welcome To Satchmo</h2>		\n			A Powerful WordPress Theme for Podcasters.		\n<a onMouseOver=\"this.style.color=`#2d2d2d`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#ffffff`\" onMouseOut=\"this.style.color=`#ffffff`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#c01f2c`\" style=\"color:#ffffff; background-color:#c01f2c\" href=\"#!\">Subscribe</a>   \n<!-- Modal HTML embedded directly into document. -->\n	<ul><li><a href=\"#!\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><img src=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Apple-Podcasts.png\" />Apple Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"#!\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><img src=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Google-Podcasts.png\" />Google Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"#!\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><img 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href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast/episode-1-how-we-started-podcasting/\">\n					<img width=\"800\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-1.jpg 800w, https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-1-300x188.jpg 300w, https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-1-768x480.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast/episode-1-how-we-started-podcasting/\">\nEpisode 1: How We Started Podcasting</a></h2>\n					July 22, 2019\n					<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/author/satchmo/\">Admin</a>\n							Featured, Tutorials						\n					02:16\n					<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast/episode-1-how-we-started-podcasting/#respond\">0 Comments</a>\n								<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast/episode-1-how-we-started-podcasting/\"> Read More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-43-6\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast-player/43/episode-1-how-we-started-podcasting.mp3?_=6\" /><a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast-player/43/episode-1-how-we-started-podcasting.mp3\">https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast-player/43/episode-1-how-we-started-podcasting.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast-download/43/episode-1-how-we-started-podcasting.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Episode 1: How We Started Podcasting \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast-download/43/episode-1-how-we-started-podcasting.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Episode 1: How We Started Podcasting \" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Play in new window</a> | Duration: 02:16</p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-list-main -->\n			<h2>Latest Episodes</h2>		\n			<ul>\n									<li data-filter=\"*\">All</li> <li data-filter=\".entrepreneurship\">Entrepreneurship</li> <li data-filter=\".featured\">Featured</li> <li data-filter=\".media\">Media</li> <li data-filter=\".tech\">Tech</li> <li data-filter=\".tutorials\">Tutorials</li> 							</ul>\n				<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast/episode-10-season-finale/\">\n					<img width=\"800\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-10.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-10.jpg 800w, https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-10-300x188.jpg 300w, https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-10-768x480.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast/episode-10-season-finale/\">\nEpisode 10: Season Finale</a></h2>\n					July 24, 2019\n					<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/author/satchmo/\">Admin</a>\n							Media						\n					02:16\n					<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast/episode-10-season-finale/#respond\">0 Comments</a>\n						<p>A wonderful serenity has taken possession of my entire soul, like these sweet mornings of spring which I enjoy with my whole heart. I am alone, and feel the...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast/episode-10-season-finale/\"> Play Episode</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-82-7\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast-player/82/episode-10-season-finale.mp3?_=7\" /><a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast-player/82/episode-10-season-finale.mp3\">https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast-player/82/episode-10-season-finale.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast-download/82/episode-10-season-finale.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Episode 10: Season Finale \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast-download/82/episode-10-season-finale.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Episode 10: Season Finale \" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Play in new window</a> | Duration: 02:16</p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast/episode-9-building-an-audience/\">\n					<img width=\"800\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-9.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-9.jpg 800w, https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-9-300x188.jpg 300w, https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-9-768x480.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast/episode-9-building-an-audience/\">\nEpisode 9: Building an Audience</a></h2>\n					July 24, 2019\n					<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/author/satchmo/\">Admin</a>\n							Entrepreneurship						\n					02:16\n					<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast/episode-9-building-an-audience/#respond\">0 Comments</a>\n						<p>A wonderful serenity has taken possession of my entire soul, like these sweet mornings of spring which I enjoy with my whole heart. I am alone, and feel the...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast/episode-9-building-an-audience/\"> Play Episode</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-79-8\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast-player/79/episode-9-building-an-audience.mp3?_=8\" /><a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast-player/79/episode-9-building-an-audience.mp3\">https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast-player/79/episode-9-building-an-audience.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast-download/79/episode-9-building-an-audience.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Episode 9: Building an Audience \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast-download/79/episode-9-building-an-audience.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Episode 9: Building an Audience \" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Play in new window</a> | Duration: 02:16</p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast/episode-8-audio-software-for-podcasters/\">\n					<img width=\"800\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-8.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-8.jpg 800w, https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-8-300x188.jpg 300w, https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-8-768x480.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast/episode-8-audio-software-for-podcasters/\">\nEpisode 8: Audio Software for Podcasters</a></h2>\n					July 24, 2019\n					<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/author/satchmo/\">Admin</a>\n							Media, Tech						\n					02:16\n					<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast/episode-8-audio-software-for-podcasters/#respond\">0 Comments</a>\n						<p>A wonderful serenity has taken possession of my entire soul, like these sweet mornings of spring which I enjoy with my whole heart. I am alone, and feel the...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast/episode-8-audio-software-for-podcasters/\"> Play Episode</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-70-9\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast-player/70/episode-8-audio-software-for-podcasters.mp3?_=9\" /><a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast-player/70/episode-8-audio-software-for-podcasters.mp3\">https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast-player/70/episode-8-audio-software-for-podcasters.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast-download/70/episode-8-audio-software-for-podcasters.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Episode 8: Audio Software for Podcasters \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast-download/70/episode-8-audio-software-for-podcasters.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Episode 8: Audio Software for Podcasters \" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Play in new window</a> | Duration: 02:16</p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast/episode-7-best-mics-for-podcasting/\">\n					<img width=\"800\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-7.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-7.jpg 800w, https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-7-300x188.jpg 300w, https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-7-768x480.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast/episode-7-best-mics-for-podcasting/\">\nEpisode 7: Best Mics for Podcasting</a></h2>\n					July 24, 2019\n					<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/author/satchmo/\">Admin</a>\n							Tech, Tutorials						\n					02:16\n					<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast/episode-7-best-mics-for-podcasting/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n						<p>A wonderful serenity has taken possession of my entire soul, like these sweet mornings of spring which I enjoy with my whole heart. I am alone, and feel the...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast/episode-7-best-mics-for-podcasting/\"> Play Episode</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-67-10\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast-player/67/episode-7-best-mics-for-podcasting.mp3?_=10\" /><a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast-player/67/episode-7-best-mics-for-podcasting.mp3\">https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast-player/67/episode-7-best-mics-for-podcasting.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast-download/67/episode-7-best-mics-for-podcasting.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Episode 7: Best Mics for Podcasting \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast-download/67/episode-7-best-mics-for-podcasting.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Episode 7: Best Mics for Podcasting \" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Play in new window</a> | Duration: 02:16</p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast/episode-6-soundcloud-example/\">\n					<img width=\"800\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-6.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-6.jpg 800w, https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-6-300x188.jpg 300w, https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-6-768x480.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast/episode-6-soundcloud-example/\">\nEpisode 6: SoundCloud Example</a></h2>\n					July 24, 2019\n					<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/author/satchmo/\">Admin</a>\n							Media, Tutorials						\n					<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast/episode-6-soundcloud-example/#respond\">0 Comments</a>\n						<p>A wonderful serenity has taken possession of my entire soul, like these sweet mornings of spring which I enjoy with my whole heart. I am alone, and feel the...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast/episode-6-soundcloud-example/\"> Play Episode</a>\n					<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"150\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/261000171&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true\"></iframe>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast/episode-5-mixcloud-example/\">\n					<img width=\"800\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-2.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-2.jpg 800w, https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-2-300x188.jpg 300w, https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-2-768x480.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast/episode-5-mixcloud-example/\">\nEpisode 5: MixCloud Example</a></h2>\n					July 24, 2019\n					<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/author/satchmo/\">Admin</a>\n							Media						\n					<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast/episode-5-mixcloud-example/#respond\">0 Comments</a>\n						<p>A wonderful serenity has taken possession of my entire soul, like these sweet mornings of spring which I enjoy with my whole heart. I am alone, and feel the...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/podcast/episode-5-mixcloud-example/\"> Play Episode</a>\n					<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"120\" src=\"https://www.mixcloud.com/widget/iframe/?feed=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.mixcloud.com%2Ftukatz%2Fbillys-jazz-swing-dixieland-favourites%2F&hide_cover=1&light=1\" frameborder=\"0\"></iframe>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php?paged=2\" >More Episodes</a>\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-list-main -->\n			<h2>Featured Guests</h2>		\n										<img src=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/wp-content/uploads/elementor/thumbs/guest-6-nbbdoyjxsihbr5d6hka939dzcs74pk7n8cdzxm6574-oijgxdr2asdfqt3q6ghnugamvdxyi6c4d2py534yrk.jpg\" title=\"guest-6-nbbdoyjxsihbr5d6hka939dzcs74pk7n8cdzxm6574\" alt=\"guest-6-nbbdoyjxsihbr5d6hka939dzcs74pk7n8cdzxm6574\" />											\n			<h2>Emma Thomas</h2>		\n			Producer		\n		<p style=\"text-align: center;\">I throw myself down among the tall grass by the trickling stream. As I lie close to the earth, a thousand unknown plants.</p>		\n										<img src=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/wp-content/uploads/elementor/thumbs/guest-2-nb872339vf3o49vpj76jc5vbq718tnt467py1v4low-oijgwgupnl4eggfiik9px6li2wg40rpikjvycehqtc.jpg\" title=\"guest-2-nb872339vf3o49vpj76jc5vbq718tnt467py1v4low\" alt=\"guest-2-nb872339vf3o49vpj76jc5vbq718tnt467py1v4low\" />											\n			<h2>Earn Palmer</h2>		\n			Drummer		\n		<p style=\"text-align: center;\">I throw myself down among the tall grass by the trickling stream. As I lie close to the earth, a thousand unknown plants.</p>		\n										<img src=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/wp-content/uploads/elementor/thumbs/guest-5-nb873d5d6aupx60t29398c8wu2q8atvyojoqkf8b80-oijgwd3cw8z960kz4in7n7jnpcyn5zal81a0fanbi8.jpg\" title=\"guest-5-nb873d5d6aupx60t29398c8wu2q8atvyojoqkf8b80\" alt=\"guest-5-nb873d5d6aupx60t29398c8wu2q8atvyojoqkf8b80\" />											\n			<h2>Halie Jackson</h2>		\n			Entrepreneur		\n		<p style=\"text-align: center;\">I throw myself down among the tall grass by the trickling stream. As I lie close to the earth, a thousand unknown plants.</p>		\n										<img src=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/wp-content/uploads/elementor/thumbs/guest-4-nb873nhl9h8vgvlsdvk5hrmzdbb9ni10dyv2ugszbk-oijgw5kndkoyl4vwcfe739fyy9zpgegqj024l2ygw0.jpg\" title=\"guest-4-nb873nhl9h8vgvlsdvk5hrmzdbb9ni10dyv2ugszbk\" alt=\"guest-4-nb873nhl9h8vgvlsdvk5hrmzdbb9ni10dyv2ugszbk\" />											\n			<h2>The Cat</h2>		\n			celebrity		\n		<p style=\"text-align: center;\">I throw myself down among the tall grass by the trickling stream. As I lie close to the earth, a thousand unknown plants.</p>		\n			<h2>Subscribe To Our Newsletter</h2>		\n		<p>Subscribe to receive info on our latest news and episodes</p>[mc4wp_form id=\"22\"]','Home','','inherit','closed','closed','','3141-revision-v1','','','2021-02-08 17:55:03','2021-02-08 22:55:03','',3141,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/08/3141-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3176,1,'2021-02-08 17:55:03','2021-02-08 22:55:03','<h2>Welcome To Satchmo</h2>		\n			A Powerful WordPress Theme for Podcasters.		\n<a onMouseOver=\"this.style.color=`#2d2d2d`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#ffffff`\" onMouseOut=\"this.style.color=`#ffffff`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#c01f2c`\" style=\"color:#ffffff; background-color:#c01f2c\" href=\"#!\">Subscribe</a>   \n<!-- Modal HTML embedded directly into document. -->\n	<ul><li><a href=\"#!\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Apple-Podcasts.png\" />Apple Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"#!\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Google-Podcasts.png\" />Google Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"#!\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Spotify.png\" />Spotify</a></li><li><a href=\"#!\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/SoundCloud.png\" />SoundCloud</a></li><li><a href=\"#!\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Stitcher.png\" />Stitcher</a></li><li><a href=\"#!\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/RSS.png\" />RSS</a></li></ul>                                       \n			<!-- close .secondline-addons-subscribe-button-container -->\n			<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/episodes/\" role=\"button\">\n						View Episodes\n					</a>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?w=1334 1334w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\nPodcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips</a></h2>\n					January 14, 2021\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\"> Read More</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_171.mp30audio/mpeg\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_171.mp3\n0\naudio/mpeg\n</a><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-list-main -->\n			<h2>Latest Episodes</h2>		\n			<ul>\n									<li data-filter=\"*\">All</li> <li data-filter=\".entrepreneurship\">Entrepreneurship</li> <li data-filter=\".featured\">Featured</li> <li data-filter=\".media\">Media</li> <li data-filter=\".tech\">Tech</li> <li data-filter=\".tutorials\">Tutorials</li> 							</ul>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?w=1334 1334w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\nPodcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips</a></h2>\n					January 14, 2021\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n						<p>Was all set to head to San Diego for a week&#8217;s break from Chicago&#8217;s grey January and then looked at the COVID restrictions&#8230; and then pivoted to Arizona. With...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\"> Play Episode</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_171.mp30audio/mpeg\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_171.mp3\n0\naudio/mpeg\n</a><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?w=919 919w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">\nPodcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors</a></h2>\n					December 16, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n					Comments Off on Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors\n						<p>No Thanksgiving travel, but looking at the travel volume for this, the busiest travel week of the year, shows just how far things have fallen. The Qantas CEO said...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\"> Play Episode</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_170.mp30audio/mpeg\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_170.mp3\n0\naudio/mpeg\n</a><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?w=1299 1299w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">\nPodcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers</a></h2>\n					November 12, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/#comments\">3 Comments</a>\n						<p>No travel since the last episode, so I had some time to think back through my post-lockdown travel and come up with my top 10 gift ideas for your...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\"> Play Episode</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_169.mp30audio/mpeg\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_169.mp3\n0\naudio/mpeg\n</a><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?w=2560 2560w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C2048 2048w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?w=2400 2400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\">\nPodcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food</a></h2>\n					October 16, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n					Comments Off on Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food\n						<p>Trying to recover from a long weekend of eating and drinking through the neighborhoods of South Philly. Our movable feast reminded me that food may be the one experience...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\"> Play Episode</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_168.mp30audio/mpeg\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_168.mp3\n0\naudio/mpeg\n</a><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-167-6-months-on-why-keep-travel-cards/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/F3E28DAE-0026-4E8A-957E-D6CE914F717C.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/F3E28DAE-0026-4E8A-957E-D6CE914F717C.jpg?w=503 503w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/F3E28DAE-0026-4E8A-957E-D6CE914F717C.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/F3E28DAE-0026-4E8A-957E-D6CE914F717C.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/F3E28DAE-0026-4E8A-957E-D6CE914F717C.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-167-6-months-on-why-keep-travel-cards/\">\nPodcast #167 — 6 Months On; Why Keep Travel Cards?</a></h2>\n					September 19, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n					Comments Off on Podcast #167 — 6 Months On; Why Keep Travel Cards?\n						<p>Spent a week in Michigan&#8217;s Upper Peninsula hiking, biking, kayaking, and running into a lot of other people getting away to do the same, which got me looking back...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-167-6-months-on-why-keep-travel-cards/\"> Play Episode</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_167.mp30audio/mpeg\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_167.mp3\n0\naudio/mpeg\n</a><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2856/podcast-167-6-months-on-why-keep-travel-cards.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #167 — 6 Months On; Why Keep Travel Cards? \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2856/podcast-167-6-months-on-why-keep-travel-cards.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #167 — 6 Months On; Why Keep Travel Cards? \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\">\n					<img width=\"540\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/IMG_0822-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i2.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/IMG_0822-scaled.jpg?w=2560 2560w, https://i2.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/IMG_0822-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C278 300w, https://i2.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/IMG_0822-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C948 1024w, https://i2.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/IMG_0822-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C711 768w, https://i2.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/IMG_0822-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1423 1536w, https://i2.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/IMG_0822-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C1897 2048w, https://i2.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/IMG_0822-scaled.jpg?w=2400 2400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 540px) 100vw, 540px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\">\nPodcast #166 — What Is The Meaning of Travel?</a></h2>\n					August 13, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n					Comments Off on Podcast #166 — What Is The Meaning of Travel?\n						<p>Reindeer are ruining my cabin porn Trying to plan an August trip amidst dueling state quarantine lists and rapid lockdown changes while writing off my September plans for Barcelona....</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\"> Play Episode</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_166.mp30audio/mpeg\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_166.mp3\n0\naudio/mpeg\n</a><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2807/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #166 — What Is The Meaning of Travel? \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2807/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #166 — What Is The Meaning of Travel? \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php?paged=2\" >More Episodes</a>\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-list-main -->\n			<h2>Featured Guests</h2>		\n										<img src=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/guest-6-nbbdoyjxsihbr5d6hka939dzcs74pk7n8cdzxm6574.jpg\" title=\"\" alt=\"\" />											\n			<h2>Emma Thomas</h2>		\n			Producer		\n		<p style=\"text-align: center;\">I throw myself down among the tall grass by the trickling stream. As I lie close to the earth, a thousand unknown plants.</p>		\n										<img src=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/guest-2-nb872339vf3o49vpj76jc5vbq718tnt467py1v4low.jpg\" title=\"\" alt=\"\" />											\n			<h2>Earn Palmer</h2>		\n			Drummer		\n		<p style=\"text-align: center;\">I throw myself down among the tall grass by the trickling stream. As I lie close to the earth, a thousand unknown plants.</p>		\n										<img src=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/guest-5-nb873d5d6aupx60t29398c8wu2q8atvyojoqkf8b80.jpg\" title=\"\" alt=\"\" />											\n			<h2>Halie Jackson</h2>		\n			Entrepreneur		\n		<p style=\"text-align: center;\">I throw myself down among the tall grass by the trickling stream. As I lie close to the earth, a thousand unknown plants.</p>		\n										<img src=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/guest-4-nb873nhl9h8vgvlsdvk5hrmzdbb9ni10dyv2ugszbk.jpg\" title=\"\" alt=\"\" />											\n			<h2>The Cat</h2>		\n			celebrity		\n		<p style=\"text-align: center;\">I throw myself down among the tall grass by the trickling stream. As I lie close to the earth, a thousand unknown plants.</p>		\n			<h2>Subscribe To Our Newsletter</h2>		\n		<p>Subscribe to receive info on our latest news and episodes</p>[mc4wp_form id=\"22\"]','Home','','inherit','closed','closed','','3141-revision-v1','','','2021-02-08 17:55:03','2021-02-08 22:55:03','',3141,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/08/3141-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3178,1,'2021-02-08 18:09:41','2021-02-08 23:09:41','<h2>Welcome To Satchmo</h2>		\n			A Powerful WordPress Theme for Podcasters.		\n<a onMouseOver=\"this.style.color=`#2d2d2d`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#ffffff`\" onMouseOut=\"this.style.color=`#ffffff`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#c01f2c`\" style=\"color:#ffffff; background-color:#c01f2c\" href=\"#!\">Subscribe</a>   \n<!-- Modal HTML embedded directly into document. -->\n	<ul><li><a href=\"#!\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Apple-Podcasts.png\" />Apple Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"#!\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Google-Podcasts.png\" />Google Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"#!\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Spotify.png\" />Spotify</a></li><li><a href=\"#!\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/SoundCloud.png\" />SoundCloud</a></li><li><a href=\"#!\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Stitcher.png\" />Stitcher</a></li><li><a href=\"#!\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/RSS.png\" />RSS</a></li></ul>                                       \n			<!-- close .secondline-addons-subscribe-button-container -->\n			<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/episodes/\" role=\"button\">\n						View Episodes\n					</a>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?w=1334 1334w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\nPodcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips</a></h2>\n					January 14, 2021\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\"> Read More</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_171.mp30audio/mpeg\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_171.mp3\n0\naudio/mpeg\n</a><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-list-main -->\n			<h2>Latest Episodes</h2>		\n			<ul>\n									<li data-filter=\"*\">All</li> <li data-filter=\".entrepreneurship\">Entrepreneurship</li> <li data-filter=\".featured\">Featured</li> <li data-filter=\".media\">Media</li> <li data-filter=\".tech\">Tech</li> <li data-filter=\".tutorials\">Tutorials</li> 							</ul>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?w=1334 1334w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\nPodcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips</a></h2>\n					January 14, 2021\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n						<p>Was all set to head to San Diego for a week&#8217;s break from Chicago&#8217;s grey January and then looked at the COVID restrictions&#8230; and then pivoted to Arizona. With...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\"> Play Episode</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_171.mp30audio/mpeg\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_171.mp3\n0\naudio/mpeg\n</a><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?w=919 919w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">\nPodcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors</a></h2>\n					December 16, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n					Comments Off on Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors\n						<p>No Thanksgiving travel, but looking at the travel volume for this, the busiest travel week of the year, shows just how far things have fallen. The Qantas CEO said...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\"> Play Episode</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_170.mp30audio/mpeg\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_170.mp3\n0\naudio/mpeg\n</a><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?w=1299 1299w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">\nPodcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers</a></h2>\n					November 12, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/#comments\">3 Comments</a>\n						<p>No travel since the last episode, so I had some time to think back through my post-lockdown travel and come up with my top 10 gift ideas for your...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\"> Play Episode</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_169.mp30audio/mpeg\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_169.mp3\n0\naudio/mpeg\n</a><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?w=2560 2560w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C2048 2048w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?w=2400 2400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\">\nPodcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food</a></h2>\n					October 16, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n					Comments Off on Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food\n						<p>Trying to recover from a long weekend of eating and drinking through the neighborhoods of South Philly. Our movable feast reminded me that food may be the one experience...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\"> Play Episode</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_168.mp30audio/mpeg\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_168.mp3\n0\naudio/mpeg\n</a><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-167-6-months-on-why-keep-travel-cards/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/F3E28DAE-0026-4E8A-957E-D6CE914F717C.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/F3E28DAE-0026-4E8A-957E-D6CE914F717C.jpg?w=503 503w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/F3E28DAE-0026-4E8A-957E-D6CE914F717C.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/F3E28DAE-0026-4E8A-957E-D6CE914F717C.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/F3E28DAE-0026-4E8A-957E-D6CE914F717C.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-167-6-months-on-why-keep-travel-cards/\">\nPodcast #167 — 6 Months On; Why Keep Travel Cards?</a></h2>\n					September 19, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n					Comments Off on Podcast #167 — 6 Months On; Why Keep Travel Cards?\n						<p>Spent a week in Michigan&#8217;s Upper Peninsula hiking, biking, kayaking, and running into a lot of other people getting away to do the same, which got me looking back...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-167-6-months-on-why-keep-travel-cards/\"> Play Episode</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_167.mp30audio/mpeg\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_167.mp3\n0\naudio/mpeg\n</a><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2856/podcast-167-6-months-on-why-keep-travel-cards.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #167 — 6 Months On; Why Keep Travel Cards? \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2856/podcast-167-6-months-on-why-keep-travel-cards.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #167 — 6 Months On; Why Keep Travel Cards? \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\">\n					<img width=\"540\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/IMG_0822-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i2.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/IMG_0822-scaled.jpg?w=2560 2560w, https://i2.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/IMG_0822-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C278 300w, https://i2.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/IMG_0822-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C948 1024w, https://i2.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/IMG_0822-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C711 768w, https://i2.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/IMG_0822-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1423 1536w, https://i2.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/IMG_0822-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C1897 2048w, https://i2.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/IMG_0822-scaled.jpg?w=2400 2400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 540px) 100vw, 540px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\">\nPodcast #166 — What Is The Meaning of Travel?</a></h2>\n					August 13, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n					Comments Off on Podcast #166 — What Is The Meaning of Travel?\n						<p>Reindeer are ruining my cabin porn Trying to plan an August trip amidst dueling state quarantine lists and rapid lockdown changes while writing off my September plans for Barcelona....</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\"> Play Episode</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_166.mp30audio/mpeg\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_166.mp3\n0\naudio/mpeg\n</a><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2807/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #166 — What Is The Meaning of Travel? \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2807/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #166 — What Is The Meaning of Travel? \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php?paged=2\" >More Episodes</a>\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-list-main -->\n			<h2>Featured Guests</h2>		\n										<img src=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/guest-6-nbbdoyjxsihbr5d6hka939dzcs74pk7n8cdzxm6574.jpg\" title=\"\" alt=\"\" />											\n			<h2>Emma Thomas</h2>		\n			Producer		\n		<p style=\"text-align: center;\">I throw myself down among the tall grass by the trickling stream. As I lie close to the earth, a thousand unknown plants.</p>		\n										<img src=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/guest-2-nb872339vf3o49vpj76jc5vbq718tnt467py1v4low.jpg\" title=\"\" alt=\"\" />											\n			<h2>Earn Palmer</h2>		\n			Drummer		\n		<p style=\"text-align: center;\">I throw myself down among the tall grass by the trickling stream. As I lie close to the earth, a thousand unknown plants.</p>		\n										<img src=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/guest-5-nb873d5d6aupx60t29398c8wu2q8atvyojoqkf8b80.jpg\" title=\"\" alt=\"\" />											\n			<h2>Halie Jackson</h2>		\n			Entrepreneur		\n		<p style=\"text-align: center;\">I throw myself down among the tall grass by the trickling stream. As I lie close to the earth, a thousand unknown plants.</p>		\n										<img src=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/guest-4-nb873nhl9h8vgvlsdvk5hrmzdbb9ni10dyv2ugszbk.jpg\" title=\"\" alt=\"\" />											\n			<h2>The Cat</h2>		\n			celebrity		\n		<p style=\"text-align: center;\">I throw myself down among the tall grass by the trickling stream. As I lie close to the earth, a thousand unknown plants.</p>		\n			<h2>Subscribe To Our Newsletter</h2>		\n		<p>Subscribe to receive info on our latest news and episodes</p>[mc4wp_form id=\"22\"]','Home','','inherit','closed','closed','','3141-revision-v1','','','2021-02-08 18:09:41','2021-02-08 23:09:41','',3141,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/08/3141-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3179,1,'2021-02-08 18:09:41','2021-02-08 23:09:41','<h2>Welcome To Satchmo</h2>		\n			A Powerful WordPress Theme for Podcasters.		\n<a onMouseOver=\"this.style.color=`#2d2d2d`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#ffffff`\" onMouseOut=\"this.style.color=`#ffffff`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#c01f2c`\" style=\"color:#ffffff; background-color:#c01f2c\" href=\"#!\">Subscribe</a>   \n<!-- Modal HTML embedded directly into document. -->\n	<ul><li><a href=\"#!\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Apple-Podcasts.png\" />Apple Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"#!\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Google-Podcasts.png\" />Google Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"#!\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Spotify.png\" />Spotify</a></li><li><a href=\"#!\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/SoundCloud.png\" />SoundCloud</a></li><li><a href=\"#!\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Stitcher.png\" />Stitcher</a></li><li><a href=\"#!\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/RSS.png\" />RSS</a></li></ul>                                       \n			<!-- close .secondline-addons-subscribe-button-container -->\n			<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/episodes/\" role=\"button\">\n						View Episodes\n					</a>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?w=1334 1334w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\nPodcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips</a></h2>\n					January 14, 2021\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\"> Read More</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_171.mp30audio/mpeg\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_171.mp3\n0\naudio/mpeg\n</a><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-list-main -->\n			<h2>Latest Episodes</h2>		\n			<ul>\n									<li data-filter=\"*\">All</li> <li data-filter=\".entrepreneurship\">Entrepreneurship</li> <li data-filter=\".featured\">Featured</li> <li data-filter=\".media\">Media</li> <li data-filter=\".tech\">Tech</li> <li data-filter=\".tutorials\">Tutorials</li> 							</ul>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?w=1334 1334w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\nPodcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips</a></h2>\n					January 14, 2021\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n						<p>Was all set to head to San Diego for a week&#8217;s break from Chicago&#8217;s grey January and then looked at the COVID restrictions&#8230; and then pivoted to Arizona. With...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\"> Play Episode</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_171.mp30audio/mpeg\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_171.mp3\n0\naudio/mpeg\n</a><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?w=919 919w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">\nPodcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors</a></h2>\n					December 16, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n					Comments Off on Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors\n						<p>No Thanksgiving travel, but looking at the travel volume for this, the busiest travel week of the year, shows just how far things have fallen. The Qantas CEO said...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\"> Play Episode</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_170.mp30audio/mpeg\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_170.mp3\n0\naudio/mpeg\n</a><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?w=1299 1299w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">\nPodcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers</a></h2>\n					November 12, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/#comments\">3 Comments</a>\n						<p>No travel since the last episode, so I had some time to think back through my post-lockdown travel and come up with my top 10 gift ideas for your...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\"> Play Episode</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_169.mp30audio/mpeg\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_169.mp3\n0\naudio/mpeg\n</a><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?w=2560 2560w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C2048 2048w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?w=2400 2400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\">\nPodcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food</a></h2>\n					October 16, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n					Comments Off on Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food\n						<p>Trying to recover from a long weekend of eating and drinking through the neighborhoods of South Philly. Our movable feast reminded me that food may be the one experience...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\"> Play Episode</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_168.mp30audio/mpeg\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_168.mp3\n0\naudio/mpeg\n</a><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-167-6-months-on-why-keep-travel-cards/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/F3E28DAE-0026-4E8A-957E-D6CE914F717C.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/F3E28DAE-0026-4E8A-957E-D6CE914F717C.jpg?w=503 503w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/F3E28DAE-0026-4E8A-957E-D6CE914F717C.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/F3E28DAE-0026-4E8A-957E-D6CE914F717C.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/F3E28DAE-0026-4E8A-957E-D6CE914F717C.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-167-6-months-on-why-keep-travel-cards/\">\nPodcast #167 — 6 Months On; Why Keep Travel Cards?</a></h2>\n					September 19, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n					Comments Off on Podcast #167 — 6 Months On; Why Keep Travel Cards?\n						<p>Spent a week in Michigan&#8217;s Upper Peninsula hiking, biking, kayaking, and running into a lot of other people getting away to do the same, which got me looking back...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-167-6-months-on-why-keep-travel-cards/\"> Play Episode</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_167.mp30audio/mpeg\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_167.mp3\n0\naudio/mpeg\n</a><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2856/podcast-167-6-months-on-why-keep-travel-cards.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #167 — 6 Months On; Why Keep Travel Cards? \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2856/podcast-167-6-months-on-why-keep-travel-cards.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #167 — 6 Months On; Why Keep Travel Cards? \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\">\n					<img width=\"540\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/IMG_0822-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i2.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/IMG_0822-scaled.jpg?w=2560 2560w, https://i2.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/IMG_0822-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C278 300w, https://i2.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/IMG_0822-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C948 1024w, https://i2.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/IMG_0822-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C711 768w, https://i2.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/IMG_0822-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1423 1536w, https://i2.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/IMG_0822-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C1897 2048w, https://i2.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/IMG_0822-scaled.jpg?w=2400 2400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 540px) 100vw, 540px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\">\nPodcast #166 — What Is The Meaning of Travel?</a></h2>\n					August 13, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n					Comments Off on Podcast #166 — What Is The Meaning of Travel?\n						<p>Reindeer are ruining my cabin porn Trying to plan an August trip amidst dueling state quarantine lists and rapid lockdown changes while writing off my September plans for Barcelona....</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\"> Play Episode</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_166.mp30audio/mpeg\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_166.mp3\n0\naudio/mpeg\n</a><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2807/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #166 — What Is The Meaning of Travel? \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2807/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #166 — What Is The Meaning of Travel? \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php?paged=2\" >More Episodes</a>\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-list-main -->\n			<h2>Featured Guests</h2>		\n										<img src=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/guest-6-nbbdoyjxsihbr5d6hka939dzcs74pk7n8cdzxm6574.jpg\" title=\"\" alt=\"\" />											\n			<h2>Emma Thomas</h2>		\n			Producer		\n		<p style=\"text-align: center;\">I throw myself down among the tall grass by the trickling stream. As I lie close to the earth, a thousand unknown plants.</p>		\n										<img src=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/guest-2-nb872339vf3o49vpj76jc5vbq718tnt467py1v4low.jpg\" title=\"\" alt=\"\" />											\n			<h2>Earn Palmer</h2>		\n			Drummer		\n		<p style=\"text-align: center;\">I throw myself down among the tall grass by the trickling stream. As I lie close to the earth, a thousand unknown plants.</p>		\n										<img src=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/guest-5-nb873d5d6aupx60t29398c8wu2q8atvyojoqkf8b80.jpg\" title=\"\" alt=\"\" />											\n			<h2>Halie Jackson</h2>		\n			Entrepreneur		\n		<p style=\"text-align: center;\">I throw myself down among the tall grass by the trickling stream. As I lie close to the earth, a thousand unknown plants.</p>		\n										<img src=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/guest-4-nb873nhl9h8vgvlsdvk5hrmzdbb9ni10dyv2ugszbk.jpg\" title=\"\" alt=\"\" />											\n			<h2>The Cat</h2>		\n			celebrity		\n		<p style=\"text-align: center;\">I throw myself down among the tall grass by the trickling stream. As I lie close to the earth, a thousand unknown plants.</p>		\n			<h2>Subscribe To Our Newsletter</h2>		\n		<p>Subscribe to receive info on our latest news and episodes</p>[mc4wp_form id=\"22\"]','Home','','inherit','closed','closed','','3141-revision-v1','','','2021-02-08 18:09:41','2021-02-08 23:09:41','',3141,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/08/3141-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3180,1,'2021-02-08 18:09:41','2021-02-08 23:09:41','<h2>Welcome To Satchmo</h2>		\n			A Powerful WordPress Theme for Podcasters.		\n<a onMouseOver=\"this.style.color=`#2d2d2d`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#ffffff`\" onMouseOut=\"this.style.color=`#ffffff`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#c01f2c`\" style=\"color:#ffffff; background-color:#c01f2c\" href=\"#!\">Subscribe</a>   \n<!-- Modal HTML embedded directly into document. -->\n	<ul><li><a href=\"#!\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Apple-Podcasts.png\" />Apple Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"#!\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Google-Podcasts.png\" />Google Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"#!\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Spotify.png\" />Spotify</a></li><li><a href=\"#!\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/SoundCloud.png\" />SoundCloud</a></li><li><a href=\"#!\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Stitcher.png\" />Stitcher</a></li><li><a href=\"#!\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/RSS.png\" />RSS</a></li></ul>                                       \n			<!-- close .secondline-addons-subscribe-button-container -->\n			<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/episodes/\" role=\"button\">\n						View Episodes\n					</a>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?w=1334 1334w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\nPodcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips</a></h2>\n					January 14, 2021\n						Episode 171										\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\"> Read More</a>\n					<!--[if lt IE 9]><![endif]-->\n<audio id=\"audio-2997-1\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_171.mp3?_=1\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_171.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_171.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-list-main -->\n			<h2>Latest Episodes</h2>		\n			<ul>\n									<li data-filter=\"*\">All</li> <li data-filter=\".entrepreneurship\">Entrepreneurship</li> <li data-filter=\".featured\">Featured</li> <li data-filter=\".media\">Media</li> <li data-filter=\".tech\">Tech</li> <li data-filter=\".tutorials\">Tutorials</li> 							</ul>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?w=1334 1334w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\nPodcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips</a></h2>\n					January 14, 2021\n						Episode 171										\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n						<p>Pivoting from San Diego to Tucson for COVID restrictions; planning tips for travel during COVID; CEO of Privacy4Cars talks about leaving data behind in rental cars</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\"> Play Episode</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2997-2\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_171.mp3?_=2\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_171.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_171.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?w=919 919w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">\nPodcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors</a></h2>\n					December 16, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n					Comments Off on Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors\n						<p>No Thanksgiving travel, but looking at the travel volume for this, the busiest travel week of the year, shows just how far things have fallen. The Qantas CEO said...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\"> Play Episode</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_170.mp30audio/mpeg\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_170.mp3\n0\naudio/mpeg\n</a><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?w=1299 1299w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">\nPodcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers</a></h2>\n					November 12, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/#comments\">3 Comments</a>\n						<p>No travel since the last episode, so I had some time to think back through my post-lockdown travel and come up with my top 10 gift ideas for your...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\"> Play Episode</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_169.mp30audio/mpeg\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_169.mp3\n0\naudio/mpeg\n</a><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?w=2560 2560w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C2048 2048w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?w=2400 2400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\">\nPodcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food</a></h2>\n					October 16, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n					Comments Off on Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food\n						<p>Trying to recover from a long weekend of eating and drinking through the neighborhoods of South Philly. Our movable feast reminded me that food may be the one experience...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\"> Play Episode</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_168.mp30audio/mpeg\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_168.mp3\n0\naudio/mpeg\n</a><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-167-6-months-on-why-keep-travel-cards/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/F3E28DAE-0026-4E8A-957E-D6CE914F717C.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/F3E28DAE-0026-4E8A-957E-D6CE914F717C.jpg?w=503 503w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/F3E28DAE-0026-4E8A-957E-D6CE914F717C.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/F3E28DAE-0026-4E8A-957E-D6CE914F717C.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/F3E28DAE-0026-4E8A-957E-D6CE914F717C.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-167-6-months-on-why-keep-travel-cards/\">\nPodcast #167 — 6 Months On; Why Keep Travel Cards?</a></h2>\n					September 19, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n					Comments Off on Podcast #167 — 6 Months On; Why Keep Travel Cards?\n						<p>Spent a week in Michigan&#8217;s Upper Peninsula hiking, biking, kayaking, and running into a lot of other people getting away to do the same, which got me looking back...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-167-6-months-on-why-keep-travel-cards/\"> Play Episode</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_167.mp30audio/mpeg\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_167.mp3\n0\naudio/mpeg\n</a><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2856/podcast-167-6-months-on-why-keep-travel-cards.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #167 — 6 Months On; Why Keep Travel Cards? \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2856/podcast-167-6-months-on-why-keep-travel-cards.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #167 — 6 Months On; Why Keep Travel Cards? \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\">\n					<img width=\"540\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/IMG_0822-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i2.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/IMG_0822-scaled.jpg?w=2560 2560w, https://i2.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/IMG_0822-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C278 300w, https://i2.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/IMG_0822-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C948 1024w, https://i2.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/IMG_0822-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C711 768w, https://i2.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/IMG_0822-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1423 1536w, https://i2.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/IMG_0822-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C1897 2048w, https://i2.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/IMG_0822-scaled.jpg?w=2400 2400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 540px) 100vw, 540px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\">\nPodcast #166 — What Is The Meaning of Travel?</a></h2>\n					August 13, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n					Comments Off on Podcast #166 — What Is The Meaning of Travel?\n						<p>Reindeer are ruining my cabin porn Trying to plan an August trip amidst dueling state quarantine lists and rapid lockdown changes while writing off my September plans for Barcelona....</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\"> Play Episode</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_166.mp30audio/mpeg\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_166.mp3\n0\naudio/mpeg\n</a><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2807/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #166 — What Is The Meaning of Travel? \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2807/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #166 — What Is The Meaning of Travel? \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php?paged=2\" >More Episodes</a>\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-list-main -->\n			<h2>Featured Guests</h2>		\n										<img src=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/guest-6-nbbdoyjxsihbr5d6hka939dzcs74pk7n8cdzxm6574.jpg\" title=\"\" alt=\"\" />											\n			<h2>Emma Thomas</h2>		\n			Producer		\n		<p style=\"text-align: center;\">I throw myself down among the tall grass by the trickling stream. 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As I lie close to the earth, a thousand unknown plants.</p>		\n										<img src=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/guest-4-nb873nhl9h8vgvlsdvk5hrmzdbb9ni10dyv2ugszbk.jpg\" title=\"\" alt=\"\" />											\n			<h2>The Cat</h2>		\n			celebrity		\n		<p style=\"text-align: center;\">I throw myself down among the tall grass by the trickling stream. As I lie close to the earth, a thousand unknown plants.</p>		\n			<h2>Subscribe To Our Newsletter</h2>		\n		<p>Subscribe to receive info on our latest news and episodes</p>[mc4wp_form id=\"22\"]','Home','','inherit','closed','closed','','3141-revision-v1','','','2021-02-08 18:09:41','2021-02-08 23:09:41','',3141,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/08/3141-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
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(3198,1,'2021-02-09 23:34:06','2021-02-10 04:34:06','','travelcommons_logo_1400','','inherit','open','closed','','travelcommons_logo_1400','','','2021-02-09 23:34:06','2021-02-10 04:34:06','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/travelcommons_logo_1400.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(3199,1,'2021-02-09 23:36:57','2021-02-10 04:36:57','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":2168,\"width\":300,\"height\":300,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large is-resized\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1-1024x1024.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2168\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"/></a><figcaption>Wait! I need to unpair my iPhone!</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Was all set to head to San Diego for a week\'s break from Chicago\'s grey January and then looked at the COVID restrictions... and then pivoted to Arizona. With people starting to think about 2021 travel, I pulled together my top 5 travel planning tips. Slow vaccine roll-out will probably keep us restricted for longer than we thought. Andrea Amico of <a href=\"https://www.privacy4cars.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Privacy4Cars</a> joins us to talk about the dangers of leaving our data behind in rental cars. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_171.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go over to the <em>Subscribe</em> section on the right to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/965852275&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #171: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\">This Week</h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. Stayed off the road over the entire holiday season which let me skip the TSA’s new post-lockdown checkpoint record of <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/coronavirus/passenger-throughput\">1.3 million on January 3rd</a>, the last Sunday of the holiday season -- though, to be fair,&nbsp; this is only just over half the 2.4 million passengers who flew on the same Sunday last year. And with every US airline except Delta now back to selling middle seats, it makes sense that load factors also ratcheted up over the holidays. I haven’t seen any industry-wide numbers yet, but <a href=\"https://www.ittn.ie/news/confidence-in-boeing-737-max-holding-firm/\">American’s COO did say that the load factor on their 737 Maxes over the last week of the holiday season was 90%</a>. Now, most of those Maxes are flying between LGA and MIA, always a busy holiday route, but I’ve seen reports of many other packed flights, as well as the much higher load . I was never a big fan of completely full flights pre-coronavirus and, as you can imagine, am even less so now pre-widespread vaccine distribution. So, I’m not too bothered that we didn’t try to get out of town over the holidays.</li><li>However, staying in town through the rest of January is a whole different thing because January is absolutely the worst part of Chicago’s winter. So, after&nbsp; Thanksgiving weekend, on what used to be called Cyber Monday when we actually shopped in physical stores, instead of trolling through Amazon, I was trolling through travel sites looking for cheap flights to someplace warm the 3rd wk of Jan. I figured that’d be long enough for any holiday COVID spike to work its way through the system.</li><li>I’d had some friends who’d gone down to Mexico, felt safe in the tourist zones, didn’t have any problems, came back healthy; but I don’t do well sitting on a beach for more than a day or two and I wanted to keep it a bit simpler, so we decided to stay in the US, which pretty quickly narrowed our search to Southern California, South Florida, and Arizona. Since we’d spent time last winter in both Arizona and Florida, we decided to do California and go as far down the coast as we could get, which was San Diego.&nbsp; And, as luck would have it, Southwest had cheap direct flights from Chicago Midway and I had Southwest travel credits from one of last spring’s flight cancellations burning a hole in my virtual pocket, so *boom* I booked it</li><li>On, what turned out to be, 3 days before the governor locked down most of California. But a friend hit the ground there a week before Christmas and said “Eh, it’s not a problem.” So, we stayed the course and didn’t really pay any attention to it until after New Years when we thought, you know, we should book a place to stay. And that’s when we started to pay attention. Bike and kayak rental places were open as “outdoor recreation” businesses. But vacation rental and hotel booking sites all pointed to the California Public Health Department statement -- “no hotel or lodging entity in California shall accept or honor out-of-state reservations for nonessential travel” which our January snowbird getaway definitely didn’t qualify as. Would things ease up in a couple of weeks? The trend lines on the state’s COVID website didn’t seem to be pointing in that direction.</li><li>So last Monday when I received another blast of airline sales emails, it seemed like the right time for a pivot. X-ing off California, we were back to Florida and Arizona. We talked to friends already down in Florida; they said the south beaches were already filling up with snowbirds, so we opted for drier sand and swung our Southwest flights over to Phoenix.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>But since we’d been in Phoenix last winter and continuing in the spirit of visiting not-quite-A-list places in the US we’ve never been while weaving around quarantines, we’re driving further south down I-10 to Tucson. We’re running the same travel planning play we did for our August trip to Michigan’s UP -- focus on outdoor activities like hiking and biking, have back-ups in case of last-minute closures, and above all, build a list of microbreweries with outdoor seating.</li><li>Bridge Music -- Say Their Names - Love and Remember by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2020 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/62230 Ft: DJ Lang</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\">Following Up</h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Back at the beginning of December when the Pfizer vaccine approval was imminent and the Moderna approval wasn’t far behind, most travelers -- myself included -- got a bit giddy and started to think about the world opening up in the spring, the summer at the latest. Fast forward 30 days and, happy new year, that initial blast of vaccine optimism melted when it met the ugly realities of last-mile logistics. Spelunking through the stream of low-fare emails from American and Southwest and Delta and United and Iberia and British Airways filling my inbox, the consensus across airline demand forecasters seems to be that nothing’s going to change until the end of May. But even that doesn’t explain why, say, American, sends out an email pushing “Plan a European Vacation” that includes spring fares (March, April, May fares) to London, Manchester, and Madrid. I don’t know anyone who expects European vacation travel to open up in the next 3-4 months. Give credit to Delta for highlighting more achievable destinations -- Cancun, the Bahamas, Phoenix, and just about every airport in Florida with a runway long enough to handle a jet.&nbsp;</li><li>What will be as interesting is what the airlines and hotels do about elite status protection if travel continues to be slow through the summer. Remember that last spring, after it was clear that business travel was canceled for most of 2020, all the big travel companies grandfathered everyone into their status for this year. What you earned in 2019, you kept through this year, 2021. But now what? We talked about this a bit in t<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">he November episode (#169)</a> when the companies made their opening bid, knocking 20-30% off elite qualifying clip levels. Kinda like the low-fare sales -- it’ll be interesting to see what they offer come May.</li><li>We’ve talked in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\">prior episodes</a> about the challenges of planning a trip during COVID -- deciphering lockdown rules; parsing what can seem to be the almost theological differences between stay-at-home advisories vs. orders. And after all that, trying to keep up-to-date on last-minute changes. Things are changing so fast -- open, shut; outdoor seating vs just doing takeout -- that the normal crowdsourced tools we’d use -- things like Google Maps, Yelp -- can’t keep up because they don’t give a real-time view. The Foursquare app used to do it, but since they split <a href=\"https://www.swarmapp.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Swarm</a> from Foursquare, it seems that the real-time data is now sold just to business customers to target mobile ads. But, one app that I use does provide a real-time view into some traffic -- <a href=\"https://untappd.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Uptappd</a>. Yes, it’s just craft beer nerd traffic -- people checking in their beers at tap rooms and beer bars -- but that’s a kind of traffic that I’m pretty interested in.&nbsp; After our pivot to Tucson, I wanted to see what beer places were open for service, not just take-out. I could’ve spent time clicking around the app, but instead, I decided to put one of my lockdown self-improvement projects to use. Over the fall, I’d taken some on-line Python programming courses on Coursera, so I wrote a short program that pulled the most recent check-ins from the Tucson area and started making a list of places that are open. I probably could’ve made that list quicker by just plunking away on the app, but not with the same sense of achievement.</li><li>We talked about COVID-19 vaccination and test certification in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">last episode</a>. Over the last month, it seems that proof of negative test results rather than of vaccinations is the new hotness. Canada, the UK, and now the US are the latest countries requiring a negative COVID test for inbound passengers. It makes sense. The CDC released a paper in November -- in one of my favorite publications, the <a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/index.html\"><em>Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report</em></a> (I’ll link to it in the show notes) -- saying that <a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6945a4.htm\">temperature and symptom screening at airports is pretty worthless</a>; it only picked up 1 case for every 85,000 passengers screened. So not hard for the switch to pre-flight testing to be more effective. For Canada and the UK, though, they’ve layered the test requirements <em>on top of </em>their existing 14-day quarantine requirements, which just adds to the confusion -- especially since the Canadian government gave travelers one week’s notice of the new testing requirement. I haven’t seen the US regs yet, but the Canadian rules say you must have “proof in hand” of a negative test result, and that proof can be either electronic or paper. You gotta think that, pretty quick, that “proof in hand” has gotta default to “proof on phone” otherwise, forged paper results are going to be the new fake IDs from our teens. Last November, French cops <a href=\"https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2020/11/10/fake-tests-covid-flights/\">busted a ring selling fake test results at CDG</a>. The going rate was €150-300 which converts to something like $180-370. That compares to $125 for a <a href=\"https://fakeyourid.com/\">good fake driver’s license</a>.&nbsp; Since the last episode, the Caribbean country of <a href=\"https://skift.com/2020/12/18/airlines-still-waiting-on-governments-for-a-single-digital-health-passport-standard/\">Aruba was the first country</a> to standardize on one of the digital passport apps, <a href=\"https://commonpass.org/\">CommonPass</a>, the one backed by the World Economic Forum, the Davos gang, and, we mentioned, also used by United for their EWR-LHR flight. But then Sing Air picked its rival, <a href=\"https://www.iata.org/en/programs/passenger/travel-pass/\">Travel Pass</a> from IATA, to use on flights to/from Malaysia. So it still seems like, when it does go to “proof on phone”, we’re gonna need to set aside some memory screen space for a bunch of apps.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge music -- Staying Positive by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2019 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/59438 Ft: greg_baumont</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\">Leaving Data Behind in The Rental Car</h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A couple of weeks back, I retweeted a news article - the third suspect charged in the fatal shooting of a retired Chicago fireman during a carjacking was caught because he’d synced his phone to the audio system of the stolen car.&nbsp; I dunno -- fleeing a murder but worrying about getting a ticket for not using hands free.&nbsp; I dunno. Good they caught the bad guy, but what about us law-abiding frequent travelers? When the Hertz or Avis person walks up to me at the car return lane, they always remind me not to leave anything behind; to remember to take my sunglasses and my mobile phone. But they never remind me to delete all the data I synced to the car.&nbsp;</li><li>And with more of our lives getting stored in our phones, I asked Andrea Amico, founder of the company <a href=\"https://www.privacy4cars.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Privacy4Cars</a>, to come onto the podcast to talk about the privacy problems at the intersection of cars and smartphones.<ul><li>Mark: Andrea, how did you get involved in this space?</li></ul><ul><li>Andrea: One of the companies that used to run was one of the largest used car inspection companies. We inspected a lot of vehicles that were ready to be sold. I just noticed that people were leaving their digital lives behind.</li><li>Mark: We first talked about the privacy/security issues around pairing your smartphone with your car rental about four years ago. Bluetooth-enabled entertainment systems were just becoming more common in rental car fleets as hands-free call laws became widespread. Even today, the first thing I do is to sync my iPhone. And I\'ve noticed more times than not, the sync slots are all full -- personalized names, Jan\'s iPhone, Timmy\'s iPhone. You end up having to delete at least one of them to make room for yours. And then, once paired, most phones by default, end up downloading all your contacts and your phone numbers and things like that. So, Jan and Timmy have left behind all of their contacts and all their phone numbers and that\'s just bad in so many ways.</li><li>Andrea: When you sync your phone through Bluetooth or you plug it into the USB port or now, in some newer cars, you just walk into the car and the car automatically sniffs your phone and start syncing to it, including those with Android Auto and Apple CarPlay. When that happens, you are creating a mini-clone of your phone inside the vehicle.</li><li>Mark: What other information are people leaving behind when they don\'t clear themselves out of a rental car?</li><li>Andrea: All sorts -- your phone book, your call logs, the text messages, including the body, meaning the actual text of the text messages; that stuff will be left behind. But also all sorts of meta data that allows criminals or law enforcement or just people who want to snoop on you to re-identify you, anything from the identifiers of your phones which are unique, your Bluetooth MAC address. Not to mention, of course, all your navigation data. I mean, you can reconstruct where people have been, just by data that has been stored in the infotainment system. And then you have, whether you are on Twitter and Facebook and what are the handles of those things, which are the last photos you have taken? What files have you synced, the emails, calendar entries. There\'s all sorts of stuff that people really don\'t understand that they\'re living behind.</li><li>Mark: But when people <em>do </em>delete pairings are they deleting all that information? Or is there some data still retained in that vehicle?</li><li>Andrea: &nbsp;By and large, deleting the data following the manufacturer\'s directions is helpful in preventing third parties to having access. And so if there is anything left behind, it requires a much deeper forensic type of analysis that is typically not accessible. But for most people, following the manufacturer\'s directions on how to remove the data, it is a very easy to do and very effective defense against getting their data being in the hands of somebody else.</li><li>Mark: That\'s where <a href=\"https://www.privacy4cars.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Privacy4Cars</a> comes in. That\'s where your app comes in -- helping people get that right?</li><li>Andrea: Yes, we have a free app that people can download, and you can just search for Privacy4Cars on the <a href=\"https://apps.apple.com/us/app/privacy4cars/id1370969499\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple App Store</a> or <a href=\"https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.privacy4cars\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Play</a>, depending what kind of phone you have, and download it for free.</li><li>Mark: The last time on the podcast we talked about this topic was a little over a year ago, October 2019. &nbsp;I\'d gotten a notice from Hertz that they had changed their terms and conditions. I noticed that Hertz had specifically carved out liability from me leaving information from a Bluetooth pairing. And now, on one hand, I could see that point. I\'ve actively and voluntarily synced my phone to the car and in doing so, caused my information to be downloaded. But at what point does that sort of digital maintenance, clearing personal identifiable information, after every rental become part of the rental company’s overall maintenance responsibility, like checking the oil levels and the tire pressure.</li><li>Andrea: I believe that the time has already passed, and it\'s been in the past for at least a year, right? At least, the passage of California Consumer Privacy Act. And probably you can go further back in the past because of other types of regulations. And there are some regulators who have actually spoken about this. So in the United States, you have the FTC that has issued already four guidances on the need to delete personal information. In Europe, they went as far as to give a guideline that mandates the removal of the personal information. Beyond rental, when people are traveling, sometimes they rent, sometimes they ride-share, and very often it happens to me that I in an Uber or Lyft and you have a very nice driver that tells you, “Hey, you need to fill up the tank on your battery? Here\'s a cable.” And the first thing I do is glance -- &nbsp;where does the cable end up? If it goes into the lighter, that\'s only power. So yes, I’ll recharge my phone. But if it goes straight &nbsp;into the USB port of the car, don\'t charge the phone unless you\'re really desperate, because as soon as your phone powers back up, it will start downloading all your information into a stranger\'s car. So you definitely don\'t want to do that.</li><li>Mark: Andrea Amico, founder of <a href=\"https://www.privacy4cars.com\">Privacy4Cars.com</a>, you can find his app on the <a href=\"https://apps.apple.com/us/app/privacy4cars/id1370969499\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple App store</a> and on <a href=\"https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.privacy4cars\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Play</a>. Andrea, thank you very much for taking the time to talk to us today.</li><li>Andrea: Thank you. Mark. I really enjoyed talking to you.</li></ul></li><li>Bridge music -- Latinium by Javolenus (c) copyright 2020 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Javolenus/62650 Ft: NiGiD</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\">2021 Travel Planning Pro Tips</h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I’ve been talking about travel planning in the time of COVID across maybe 6 months of episodes. And since January is always a big travel month, especially this year with some vouchers from last spring’s flight cancellations coming up on their 12-month expiration dates, combined with 10 months of pent-up demand and another 6, maybe 9 months to go, I thought I’d pull all my planning tips together here -- and probably in a blog post after I get back from Tucson.</li><li>First, book now. As I said earlier, there’s a steady stream of sales out there right now as airlines, hotels, and rental car companies are looking for cash to get through the start of the year. There are great domestic deals now, and if you can part with some cash now, good international deals for the second half of the year. Prices are only going to go up as vaccine rates improve, and that pent-up demand overwhelms any squeamishness about sitting next to a stranger. I’m eyeing that same American ORD-BCN 787 non-stop that I wasn’t able to take at the end of last September. The deals aren’t as smoking as they were last March when the travel world was in a freefall; the airlines have gotten a little smarter over the past year. But with cancellation fees still waived, there’s not much risk.&nbsp;</li><li>Second, check your destination’s health requirements -- and keep checking until you leave. Many of the airlines have built good web resources that summarize any restrictions by destination. Of the US majors, I think <a href=\"https://www.united.com/ual/en/us/fly/travel/restrictions-map.html\">United’s</a> is the easiest to use but I think American’s is the most complete. They actually link out to a Canadian company, <a href=\"https://apply.joinsherpa.com/travel-restrictions?affiliateId=americanairlines\">Sherpa</a>, that took my Arizona itinerary and noted that, while there’s no quarantine restrictions in Arizona, there are when I return to Chicago.&nbsp; <a href=\"https://www.delta.com/us/en/plan-your-next-trip/where-we-fly\">Delta’s</a> is pretty good too. I’ll put links to them in the show notes. But you can’t check once and be done. We talked at the top of the show about Canada putting in a new testing requirement with 7-days notice. And domestically, states are changing restrictions weekly. One trick I’ve talked about is to start following your destination’s local newspapers on Twitter to get any early warnings on anything new.&nbsp;</li><li>Third, read the cancellation rules a lot more closely. Being nimble and able to react to changes at your destination -- like Irene and I did with our pivot from San Diego to Tucson -- depends on being thoughtful about the cancellation risks you take. Right now, flights have the lowest cancellation risk; Airbnb and vacation rentals, the highest. Hotels are in-between. Our default strategy then is to book the flight as soon as we can, don’t do pre-paid hotel rooms or car rentals, and wait as long as we can before booking an Airbnb.</li><li>Fourth, overload your itinerary with outdoor activities like hiking and biking so last-minute closures or restrictions don’t leave you aimlessly flipping through the hotel TV channels. It was the big trend last summer -- airlines dialed down flights between big city airports like the ORD-LGA run and toward beaches and mountains. And it continues -- all the imagery in the airline and hotel “flash sale” emails over the past couple of weeks. But it does mean spending more time trolling the AccuWeather and Weather Channel web sites because an outside-heavy itinerary is more vulnerable to big storm fronts.</li><li>And finally, stay flexible, expect delays, and be patient. If there’s anything we learned from 2020, it’s that something will screw up your plans -- a positive COVID test will shut down the restaurant you really wanted to eat at, capacity restrictions will mean a line to get into something that was top of your list. Have back-up plans and give everyone you meet the benefit of the doubt. Like you, they’re just trying to get through this safe and sound.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\">Closing</h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #171</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li>In this episode’s tech notes, if you check out the show notes, you’ll find a full transcript of my interview with Andrea Amico courtesy of my free tier of Amazon Web Services which includes 60 minutes a month of their Transcribe service. I learned about it when watching a session during their virtual Re:Invent conference. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/12/17/podcast-147-holiday-travel-tips-notes-from-santa-fe/\">episode #147</a>, I talked about going to it in person in Las Vegas a couple of years ago -- me and 50,000 other attendees, mostly pudgy, pasty-faced guys power walking up and down the strip, backpacks strapped down tight, ignoring the showgirls on the corner so they wouldn’t be late to, say, the sold-out tutorial on best practices for ingesting streaming data from IoT devices into AWS’ time series database. Less stressful, though less entertaining this year. Anyhow, watching the session on Transcribe got me thinking about how I could use it for the interviews I’ve done over the past 12 months. I’ve started on the most current episodes, working my way back. So far I have three done --this interview with Andrea, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/09/19/podcast-167-6-months-on-why-keep-travel-cards/\">episode #167</a>’s interview with Matt Schulz about travel credit cards, and <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\">episode #166</a>’s interview with Emily Thomas about the meaning of travel. I’ll keep chipping away at the backlog as my 60 free minutes a month allows.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>, as well as asking Alexa, Siri, and Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_171.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips','Pivoting from San Diego to Tucson for COVID restrictions; planning tips for travel during COVID; CEO of Privacy4Cars talks about leaving data behind in rental cars','inherit','closed','closed','','2997-revision-v1','','','2021-02-09 23:36:57','2021-02-10 04:36:57','',2997,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/09/2997-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3200,1,'2021-02-09 23:43:07','2021-02-10 04:43:07','<h2>Welcome To Satchmo</h2>		\n			A Powerful WordPress Theme for Podcasters.		\n<a onMouseOver=\"this.style.color=`#2d2d2d`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#ffffff`\" onMouseOut=\"this.style.color=`#ffffff`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#c01f2c`\" style=\"color:#ffffff; background-color:#c01f2c\" href=\"#!\">Subscribe</a>   \n<!-- Modal HTML embedded directly into document. -->\n	<ul><li><a href=\"#!\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Apple-Podcasts.png\" />Apple Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"#!\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Google-Podcasts.png\" />Google Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"#!\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Spotify.png\" />Spotify</a></li><li><a href=\"#!\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/SoundCloud.png\" />SoundCloud</a></li><li><a href=\"#!\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Stitcher.png\" />Stitcher</a></li><li><a href=\"#!\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/RSS.png\" />RSS</a></li></ul>                                       \n			<!-- close .secondline-addons-subscribe-button-container -->\n			<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/episodes/\" role=\"button\">\n						View Episodes\n					</a>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?w=1334 1334w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\nPodcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips</a></h2>\n					January 14, 2021\n						Episode 171										\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\"> Read More</a>\n					<!--[if lt IE 9]><![endif]-->\n<audio id=\"audio-2997-1\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_171.mp3?_=1\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_171.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_171.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-list-main -->\n			<h2>Latest Episodes</h2>		\n			<ul>\n									<li data-filter=\"*\">All</li> <li data-filter=\".entrepreneurship\">Entrepreneurship</li> <li data-filter=\".featured\">Featured</li> <li data-filter=\".media\">Media</li> <li data-filter=\".tech\">Tech</li> <li data-filter=\".tutorials\">Tutorials</li> 							</ul>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?w=1334 1334w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\nPodcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips</a></h2>\n					January 14, 2021\n						Episode 171										\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n						<p>Pivoting from San Diego to Tucson for COVID restrictions; planning tips for travel during COVID; CEO of Privacy4Cars talks about leaving data behind in rental cars</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\"> Play Episode</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2997-2\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_171.mp3?_=2\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_171.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_171.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?w=919 919w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">\nPodcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors</a></h2>\n					December 16, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n					Comments Off on Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors\n						<p>No Thanksgiving travel, but looking at the travel volume for this, the busiest travel week of the year, shows just how far things have fallen. The Qantas CEO said...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\"> Play Episode</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_170.mp30audio/mpeg\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_170.mp3\n0\naudio/mpeg\n</a><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?w=1299 1299w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">\nPodcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers</a></h2>\n					November 12, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/#comments\">3 Comments</a>\n						<p>No travel since the last episode, so I had some time to think back through my post-lockdown travel and come up with my top 10 gift ideas for your...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\"> Play Episode</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_169.mp30audio/mpeg\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_169.mp3\n0\naudio/mpeg\n</a><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?w=2560 2560w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C2048 2048w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?w=2400 2400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\">\nPodcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food</a></h2>\n					October 16, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n					Comments Off on Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food\n						<p>Trying to recover from a long weekend of eating and drinking through the neighborhoods of South Philly. Our movable feast reminded me that food may be the one experience...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\"> Play Episode</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_168.mp30audio/mpeg\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_168.mp3\n0\naudio/mpeg\n</a><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-167-6-months-on-why-keep-travel-cards/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/F3E28DAE-0026-4E8A-957E-D6CE914F717C.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/F3E28DAE-0026-4E8A-957E-D6CE914F717C.jpg?w=503 503w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/F3E28DAE-0026-4E8A-957E-D6CE914F717C.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/F3E28DAE-0026-4E8A-957E-D6CE914F717C.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/F3E28DAE-0026-4E8A-957E-D6CE914F717C.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-167-6-months-on-why-keep-travel-cards/\">\nPodcast #167 — 6 Months On; Why Keep Travel Cards?</a></h2>\n					September 19, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n					Comments Off on Podcast #167 — 6 Months On; Why Keep Travel Cards?\n						<p>Spent a week in Michigan&#8217;s Upper Peninsula hiking, biking, kayaking, and running into a lot of other people getting away to do the same, which got me looking back...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-167-6-months-on-why-keep-travel-cards/\"> Play Episode</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_167.mp30audio/mpeg\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_167.mp3\n0\naudio/mpeg\n</a><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2856/podcast-167-6-months-on-why-keep-travel-cards.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #167 — 6 Months On; Why Keep Travel Cards? \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2856/podcast-167-6-months-on-why-keep-travel-cards.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #167 — 6 Months On; Why Keep Travel Cards? \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\">\n					<img width=\"540\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/IMG_0822-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i2.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/IMG_0822-scaled.jpg?w=2560 2560w, https://i2.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/IMG_0822-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C278 300w, https://i2.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/IMG_0822-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C948 1024w, https://i2.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/IMG_0822-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C711 768w, https://i2.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/IMG_0822-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1423 1536w, https://i2.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/IMG_0822-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C1897 2048w, https://i2.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/IMG_0822-scaled.jpg?w=2400 2400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 540px) 100vw, 540px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\">\nPodcast #166 — What Is The Meaning of Travel?</a></h2>\n					August 13, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n					Comments Off on Podcast #166 — What Is The Meaning of Travel?\n						<p>Reindeer are ruining my cabin porn Trying to plan an August trip amidst dueling state quarantine lists and rapid lockdown changes while writing off my September plans for Barcelona....</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\"> Play Episode</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_166.mp30audio/mpeg\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_166.mp3\n0\naudio/mpeg\n</a><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2807/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #166 — What Is The Meaning of Travel? \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2807/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #166 — What Is The Meaning of Travel? \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php?paged=2\" >More Episodes</a>\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-list-main -->\n			<h2>Featured Guests</h2>		\n										<img src=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/guest-6-nbbdoyjxsihbr5d6hka939dzcs74pk7n8cdzxm6574.jpg\" title=\"\" alt=\"\" />											\n			<h2>Emma Thomas</h2>		\n			Producer		\n		<p style=\"text-align: center;\">I throw myself down among the tall grass by the trickling stream. 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As I lie close to the earth, a thousand unknown plants.</p>		\n										<img src=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/guest-4-nb873nhl9h8vgvlsdvk5hrmzdbb9ni10dyv2ugszbk.jpg\" title=\"\" alt=\"\" />											\n			<h2>The Cat</h2>		\n			celebrity		\n		<p style=\"text-align: center;\">I throw myself down among the tall grass by the trickling stream. As I lie close to the earth, a thousand unknown plants.</p>		\n			<h2>Subscribe To Our Newsletter</h2>		\n		<p>Subscribe to receive info on our latest news and episodes</p>[mc4wp_form id=\"22\"]','Home','','inherit','closed','closed','','3141-revision-v1','','','2021-02-09 23:43:07','2021-02-10 04:43:07','',3141,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/09/3141-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3201,1,'2021-02-09 23:43:07','2021-02-10 04:43:07','<h2>Welcome To Satchmo</h2>		\n			A Powerful WordPress Theme for Podcasters.		\n<a onMouseOver=\"this.style.color=`#2d2d2d`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#ffffff`\" onMouseOut=\"this.style.color=`#ffffff`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#c01f2c`\" style=\"color:#ffffff; background-color:#c01f2c\" href=\"#!\">Subscribe</a>   \n<!-- Modal HTML embedded directly into document. -->\n	<ul><li><a href=\"#!\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Apple-Podcasts.png\" />Apple Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"#!\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Google-Podcasts.png\" />Google Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"#!\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Spotify.png\" />Spotify</a></li><li><a href=\"#!\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/SoundCloud.png\" />SoundCloud</a></li><li><a href=\"#!\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Stitcher.png\" />Stitcher</a></li><li><a href=\"#!\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/RSS.png\" />RSS</a></li></ul>                                       \n			<!-- close .secondline-addons-subscribe-button-container -->\n			<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/episodes/\" role=\"button\">\n						View Episodes\n					</a>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?w=1334 1334w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\nPodcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips</a></h2>\n					January 14, 2021\n						Episode 171										\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\"> Read More</a>\n					<!--[if lt IE 9]><![endif]-->\n<audio id=\"audio-2997-1\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_171.mp3?_=1\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_171.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_171.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-list-main -->\n			<h2>Latest Episodes</h2>		\n			<ul>\n									<li data-filter=\"*\">All</li> <li data-filter=\".entrepreneurship\">Entrepreneurship</li> <li data-filter=\".featured\">Featured</li> <li data-filter=\".media\">Media</li> <li data-filter=\".tech\">Tech</li> <li data-filter=\".tutorials\">Tutorials</li> 							</ul>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?w=1334 1334w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\nPodcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips</a></h2>\n					January 14, 2021\n						Episode 171										\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n						<p>Pivoting from San Diego to Tucson for COVID restrictions; planning tips for travel during COVID; CEO of Privacy4Cars talks about leaving data behind in rental cars</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\"> Play Episode</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2997-2\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_171.mp3?_=2\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_171.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_171.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?w=919 919w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">\nPodcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors</a></h2>\n					December 16, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n					Comments Off on Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors\n						<p>No Thanksgiving travel, but looking at the travel volume for this, the busiest travel week of the year, shows just how far things have fallen. The Qantas CEO said...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\"> Play Episode</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_170.mp30audio/mpeg\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_170.mp3\n0\naudio/mpeg\n</a><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?w=1299 1299w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">\nPodcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers</a></h2>\n					November 12, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/#comments\">3 Comments</a>\n						<p>No travel since the last episode, so I had some time to think back through my post-lockdown travel and come up with my top 10 gift ideas for your...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\"> Play Episode</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_169.mp30audio/mpeg\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_169.mp3\n0\naudio/mpeg\n</a><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?w=2560 2560w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C2048 2048w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?w=2400 2400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\">\nPodcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food</a></h2>\n					October 16, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n					Comments Off on Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food\n						<p>Trying to recover from a long weekend of eating and drinking through the neighborhoods of South Philly. Our movable feast reminded me that food may be the one experience...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\"> Play Episode</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_168.mp30audio/mpeg\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_168.mp3\n0\naudio/mpeg\n</a><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-167-6-months-on-why-keep-travel-cards/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/F3E28DAE-0026-4E8A-957E-D6CE914F717C.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/F3E28DAE-0026-4E8A-957E-D6CE914F717C.jpg?w=503 503w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/F3E28DAE-0026-4E8A-957E-D6CE914F717C.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/F3E28DAE-0026-4E8A-957E-D6CE914F717C.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/F3E28DAE-0026-4E8A-957E-D6CE914F717C.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-167-6-months-on-why-keep-travel-cards/\">\nPodcast #167 — 6 Months On; Why Keep Travel Cards?</a></h2>\n					September 19, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n					Comments Off on Podcast #167 — 6 Months On; Why Keep Travel Cards?\n						<p>Spent a week in Michigan&#8217;s Upper Peninsula hiking, biking, kayaking, and running into a lot of other people getting away to do the same, which got me looking back...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-167-6-months-on-why-keep-travel-cards/\"> Play Episode</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_167.mp30audio/mpeg\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_167.mp3\n0\naudio/mpeg\n</a><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2856/podcast-167-6-months-on-why-keep-travel-cards.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #167 — 6 Months On; Why Keep Travel Cards? \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2856/podcast-167-6-months-on-why-keep-travel-cards.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #167 — 6 Months On; Why Keep Travel Cards? \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\">\n					<img width=\"540\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/IMG_0822-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i2.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/IMG_0822-scaled.jpg?w=2560 2560w, https://i2.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/IMG_0822-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C278 300w, https://i2.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/IMG_0822-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C948 1024w, https://i2.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/IMG_0822-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C711 768w, https://i2.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/IMG_0822-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1423 1536w, https://i2.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/IMG_0822-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C1897 2048w, https://i2.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/IMG_0822-scaled.jpg?w=2400 2400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 540px) 100vw, 540px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\">\nPodcast #166 — What Is The Meaning of Travel?</a></h2>\n					August 13, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n					Comments Off on Podcast #166 — What Is The Meaning of Travel?\n						<p>Reindeer are ruining my cabin porn Trying to plan an August trip amidst dueling state quarantine lists and rapid lockdown changes while writing off my September plans for Barcelona....</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\"> Play Episode</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_166.mp30audio/mpeg\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_166.mp3\n0\naudio/mpeg\n</a><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2807/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #166 — What Is The Meaning of Travel? \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2807/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #166 — What Is The Meaning of Travel? \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php?paged=2\" >More Episodes</a>\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-list-main -->\n			<h2>Featured Guests</h2>		\n										<img src=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/guest-6-nbbdoyjxsihbr5d6hka939dzcs74pk7n8cdzxm6574.jpg\" title=\"\" alt=\"\" />											\n			<h2>Emma Thomas</h2>		\n			Producer		\n		<p style=\"text-align: center;\">I throw myself down among the tall grass by the trickling stream. As I lie close to the earth, a thousand unknown plants.</p>		\n										<img src=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/guest-2-nb872339vf3o49vpj76jc5vbq718tnt467py1v4low.jpg\" title=\"\" alt=\"\" />											\n			<h2>Earn Palmer</h2>		\n			Drummer		\n		<p style=\"text-align: center;\">I throw myself down among the tall grass by the trickling stream. As I lie close to the earth, a thousand unknown plants.</p>		\n										<img src=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/guest-5-nb873d5d6aupx60t29398c8wu2q8atvyojoqkf8b80.jpg\" title=\"\" alt=\"\" />											\n			<h2>Halie Jackson</h2>		\n			Entrepreneur		\n		<p style=\"text-align: center;\">I throw myself down among the tall grass by the trickling stream. As I lie close to the earth, a thousand unknown plants.</p>		\n										<img src=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/guest-4-nb873nhl9h8vgvlsdvk5hrmzdbb9ni10dyv2ugszbk.jpg\" title=\"\" alt=\"\" />											\n			<h2>The Cat</h2>		\n			celebrity		\n		<p style=\"text-align: center;\">I throw myself down among the tall grass by the trickling stream. As I lie close to the earth, a thousand unknown plants.</p>		\n			<h2>Subscribe To Our Newsletter</h2>		\n		<p>Subscribe to receive info on our latest news and episodes</p>[mc4wp_form id=\"22\"]','Home','','inherit','closed','closed','','3141-revision-v1','','','2021-02-09 23:43:07','2021-02-10 04:43:07','',3141,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/09/3141-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3202,1,'2021-02-09 23:43:08','2021-02-10 04:43:08','<h2>Welcome To Satchmo</h2>		\n			A Powerful WordPress Theme for Podcasters.		\n<a onMouseOver=\"this.style.color=`#2d2d2d`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#ffffff`\" onMouseOut=\"this.style.color=`#ffffff`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#c01f2c`\" style=\"color:#ffffff; background-color:#c01f2c\" href=\"#!\">Subscribe</a>   \n<!-- Modal HTML embedded directly into document. -->\n	<ul><li><a href=\"#!\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Apple-Podcasts.png\" />Apple Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"#!\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Google-Podcasts.png\" />Google Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"#!\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Spotify.png\" />Spotify</a></li><li><a href=\"#!\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/SoundCloud.png\" />SoundCloud</a></li><li><a href=\"#!\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Stitcher.png\" />Stitcher</a></li><li><a href=\"#!\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/RSS.png\" />RSS</a></li></ul>                                       \n			<!-- close .secondline-addons-subscribe-button-container -->\n			<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/episodes/\" role=\"button\">\n						View Episodes\n					</a>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?w=1334 1334w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\nPodcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips</a></h2>\n					January 14, 2021\n						Episode 171										\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n						<p>Pivoting from San Diego to Tucson for COVID restrictions; planning tips for travel during COVID; CEO of Privacy4Cars talks about leaving data behind in rental cars</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\"> Click Here for the Episode Show Notes</a>\n					<!--[if lt IE 9]><![endif]-->\n<audio id=\"audio-2997-1\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?_=1\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-list-main -->\n			<h2>Latest Episodes</h2>		\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/episode-10-season-finale/\">\n					<img width=\"800\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-10.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-10.jpg?w=800 800w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-10.jpg?resize=300%2C188 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-10.jpg?resize=768%2C480 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-10.jpg?resize=400%2C250 400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/episode-10-season-finale/\">\nEpisode 10: Season Finale</a></h2>\n					July 24, 2019\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n							Media						\n					02:16\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/episode-10-season-finale/#respond\">0 Comments</a>\n						<p>A wonderful serenity has taken possession of my entire soul, like these sweet mornings of spring which I enjoy with my whole heart. I am alone, and feel the...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/episode-10-season-finale/\"> Play Episode</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-3164-2\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/3164/episode-10-season-finale.mp3?_=2\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/3164/episode-10-season-finale.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/3164/episode-10-season-finale.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/3164/episode-10-season-finale.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Episode 10: Season Finale \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/3164/episode-10-season-finale.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Episode 10: Season Finale \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a> | Duration: 02:16</p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/episode-9-building-an-audience/\">\n					<img width=\"800\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-9.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-9.jpg?w=800 800w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-9.jpg?resize=300%2C188 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-9.jpg?resize=768%2C480 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-9.jpg?resize=400%2C250 400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/episode-9-building-an-audience/\">\nEpisode 9: Building an Audience</a></h2>\n					July 24, 2019\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n							Entrepreneurship						\n					02:16\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/episode-9-building-an-audience/#respond\">0 Comments</a>\n						<p>A wonderful serenity has taken possession of my entire soul, like these sweet mornings of spring which I enjoy with my whole heart. I am alone, and feel the...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/episode-9-building-an-audience/\"> Play Episode</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-3163-3\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/3163/episode-9-building-an-audience.mp3?_=3\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/3163/episode-9-building-an-audience.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/3163/episode-9-building-an-audience.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/3163/episode-9-building-an-audience.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Episode 9: Building an Audience \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/3163/episode-9-building-an-audience.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Episode 9: Building an Audience \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a> | Duration: 02:16</p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/episode-8-audio-software-for-podcasters/\">\n					<img width=\"800\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-8.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i2.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-8.jpg?w=800 800w, https://i2.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-8.jpg?resize=300%2C188 300w, https://i2.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-8.jpg?resize=768%2C480 768w, https://i2.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-8.jpg?resize=400%2C250 400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/episode-8-audio-software-for-podcasters/\">\nEpisode 8: Audio Software for Podcasters</a></h2>\n					July 24, 2019\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n							Media, Tech						\n					02:16\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/episode-8-audio-software-for-podcasters/#respond\">0 Comments</a>\n						<p>A wonderful serenity has taken possession of my entire soul, like these sweet mornings of spring which I enjoy with my whole heart. I am alone, and feel the...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/episode-8-audio-software-for-podcasters/\"> Play Episode</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-3162-4\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/3162/episode-8-audio-software-for-podcasters.mp3?_=4\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/3162/episode-8-audio-software-for-podcasters.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/3162/episode-8-audio-software-for-podcasters.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/3162/episode-8-audio-software-for-podcasters.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Episode 8: Audio Software for Podcasters \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/3162/episode-8-audio-software-for-podcasters.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Episode 8: Audio Software for Podcasters \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a> | Duration: 02:16</p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/episode-7-best-mics-for-podcasting/\">\n					<img width=\"800\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-7.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-7.jpg?w=800 800w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-7.jpg?resize=300%2C188 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-7.jpg?resize=768%2C480 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-7.jpg?resize=400%2C250 400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/episode-7-best-mics-for-podcasting/\">\nEpisode 7: Best Mics for Podcasting</a></h2>\n					July 24, 2019\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n							Tech, Tutorials						\n					02:16\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/episode-7-best-mics-for-podcasting/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n						<p>A wonderful serenity has taken possession of my entire soul, like these sweet mornings of spring which I enjoy with my whole heart. I am alone, and feel the...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/episode-7-best-mics-for-podcasting/\"> Play Episode</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-3161-5\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/3161/episode-7-best-mics-for-podcasting.mp3?_=5\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/3161/episode-7-best-mics-for-podcasting.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/3161/episode-7-best-mics-for-podcasting.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/3161/episode-7-best-mics-for-podcasting.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Episode 7: Best Mics for Podcasting \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/3161/episode-7-best-mics-for-podcasting.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Episode 7: Best Mics for Podcasting \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a> | Duration: 02:16</p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/episode-6-soundcloud-example/\">\n					<img width=\"800\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-6.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-6.jpg?w=800 800w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-6.jpg?resize=300%2C188 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-6.jpg?resize=768%2C480 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-6.jpg?resize=400%2C250 400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/episode-6-soundcloud-example/\">\nEpisode 6: SoundCloud Example</a></h2>\n					July 24, 2019\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n							Media, Tutorials						\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/episode-6-soundcloud-example/#respond\">0 Comments</a>\n						<p>A wonderful serenity has taken possession of my entire soul, like these sweet mornings of spring which I enjoy with my whole heart. I am alone, and feel the...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/episode-6-soundcloud-example/\"> Play Episode</a>\n					<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"150\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/261000171&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true\"></iframe>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/episode-5-mixcloud-example/\">\n					<img width=\"800\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-2.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-2.jpg?w=800 800w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-2.jpg?resize=300%2C188 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-2.jpg?resize=768%2C480 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-2.jpg?resize=400%2C250 400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/episode-5-mixcloud-example/\">\nEpisode 5: MixCloud Example</a></h2>\n					July 24, 2019\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n							Media						\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/episode-5-mixcloud-example/#respond\">0 Comments</a>\n						<p>A wonderful serenity has taken possession of my entire soul, like these sweet mornings of spring which I enjoy with my whole heart. I am alone, and feel the...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/episode-5-mixcloud-example/\"> Play Episode</a>\n					<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"120\" src=\"https://www.mixcloud.com/widget/iframe/?feed=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.mixcloud.com%2Ftukatz%2Fbillys-jazz-swing-dixieland-favourites%2F&hide_cover=1&light=1\" frameborder=\"0\"></iframe>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php?paged=2\" >More Episodes</a>\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-list-main -->','Home','','inherit','closed','closed','','3141-revision-v1','','','2021-02-09 23:43:08','2021-02-10 04:43:08','',3141,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/09/3141-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3203,1,'2021-02-09 23:43:46','2021-02-10 04:43:46','<h2>Welcome To Satchmo</h2>		\n			A Powerful WordPress Theme for Podcasters.		\n<a onMouseOver=\"this.style.color=`#2d2d2d`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#ffffff`\" onMouseOut=\"this.style.color=`#ffffff`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#c01f2c`\" style=\"color:#ffffff; background-color:#c01f2c\" href=\"#!\">Subscribe</a>   \n<!-- Modal HTML embedded directly into document. -->\n	<ul><li><a href=\"#!\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Apple-Podcasts.png\" />Apple Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"#!\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Google-Podcasts.png\" />Google Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"#!\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Spotify.png\" />Spotify</a></li><li><a href=\"#!\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/SoundCloud.png\" />SoundCloud</a></li><li><a href=\"#!\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Stitcher.png\" />Stitcher</a></li><li><a href=\"#!\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/RSS.png\" />RSS</a></li></ul>                                       \n			<!-- close .secondline-addons-subscribe-button-container -->\n			<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/episodes/\" role=\"button\">\n						View Episodes\n					</a>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?w=1334 1334w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\nPodcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips</a></h2>\n					January 14, 2021\n						Episode 171										\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n						<p>Pivoting from San Diego to Tucson for COVID restrictions; planning tips for travel during COVID; CEO of Privacy4Cars talks about leaving data behind in rental cars</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\"> Click Here for the Episode Show Notes</a>\n					<!--[if lt IE 9]><![endif]-->\n<audio id=\"audio-2997-1\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?_=1\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-list-main -->\n			<h2>Latest Episodes</h2>		\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/episode-10-season-finale/\">\n					<img width=\"800\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-10.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-10.jpg?w=800 800w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-10.jpg?resize=300%2C188 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-10.jpg?resize=768%2C480 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-10.jpg?resize=400%2C250 400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/episode-10-season-finale/\">\nEpisode 10: Season Finale</a></h2>\n					July 24, 2019\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n							Media						\n					02:16\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/episode-10-season-finale/#respond\">0 Comments</a>\n						<p>A wonderful serenity has taken possession of my entire soul, like these sweet mornings of spring which I enjoy with my whole heart. I am alone, and feel the...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/episode-10-season-finale/\"> Play Episode</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-3164-2\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/3164/episode-10-season-finale.mp3?_=2\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/3164/episode-10-season-finale.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/3164/episode-10-season-finale.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/3164/episode-10-season-finale.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Episode 10: Season Finale \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/3164/episode-10-season-finale.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Episode 10: Season Finale \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a> | Duration: 02:16</p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/episode-9-building-an-audience/\">\n					<img width=\"800\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-9.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-9.jpg?w=800 800w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-9.jpg?resize=300%2C188 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-9.jpg?resize=768%2C480 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-9.jpg?resize=400%2C250 400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/episode-9-building-an-audience/\">\nEpisode 9: Building an Audience</a></h2>\n					July 24, 2019\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n							Entrepreneurship						\n					02:16\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/episode-9-building-an-audience/#respond\">0 Comments</a>\n						<p>A wonderful serenity has taken possession of my entire soul, like these sweet mornings of spring which I enjoy with my whole heart. I am alone, and feel the...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/episode-9-building-an-audience/\"> Play Episode</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-3163-3\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/3163/episode-9-building-an-audience.mp3?_=3\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/3163/episode-9-building-an-audience.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/3163/episode-9-building-an-audience.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/3163/episode-9-building-an-audience.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Episode 9: Building an Audience \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/3163/episode-9-building-an-audience.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Episode 9: Building an Audience \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a> | Duration: 02:16</p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/episode-8-audio-software-for-podcasters/\">\n					<img width=\"800\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-8.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i2.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-8.jpg?w=800 800w, https://i2.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-8.jpg?resize=300%2C188 300w, https://i2.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-8.jpg?resize=768%2C480 768w, https://i2.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-8.jpg?resize=400%2C250 400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/episode-8-audio-software-for-podcasters/\">\nEpisode 8: Audio Software for Podcasters</a></h2>\n					July 24, 2019\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n							Media, Tech						\n					02:16\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/episode-8-audio-software-for-podcasters/#respond\">0 Comments</a>\n						<p>A wonderful serenity has taken possession of my entire soul, like these sweet mornings of spring which I enjoy with my whole heart. I am alone, and feel the...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/episode-8-audio-software-for-podcasters/\"> Play Episode</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-3162-4\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/3162/episode-8-audio-software-for-podcasters.mp3?_=4\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/3162/episode-8-audio-software-for-podcasters.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/3162/episode-8-audio-software-for-podcasters.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/3162/episode-8-audio-software-for-podcasters.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Episode 8: Audio Software for Podcasters \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/3162/episode-8-audio-software-for-podcasters.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Episode 8: Audio Software for Podcasters \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a> | Duration: 02:16</p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/episode-7-best-mics-for-podcasting/\">\n					<img width=\"800\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-7.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-7.jpg?w=800 800w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-7.jpg?resize=300%2C188 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-7.jpg?resize=768%2C480 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-7.jpg?resize=400%2C250 400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/episode-7-best-mics-for-podcasting/\">\nEpisode 7: Best Mics for Podcasting</a></h2>\n					July 24, 2019\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n							Tech, Tutorials						\n					02:16\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/episode-7-best-mics-for-podcasting/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n						<p>A wonderful serenity has taken possession of my entire soul, like these sweet mornings of spring which I enjoy with my whole heart. I am alone, and feel the...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/episode-7-best-mics-for-podcasting/\"> Play Episode</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-3161-5\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/3161/episode-7-best-mics-for-podcasting.mp3?_=5\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/3161/episode-7-best-mics-for-podcasting.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/3161/episode-7-best-mics-for-podcasting.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/3161/episode-7-best-mics-for-podcasting.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Episode 7: Best Mics for Podcasting \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/3161/episode-7-best-mics-for-podcasting.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Episode 7: Best Mics for Podcasting \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a> | Duration: 02:16</p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/episode-6-soundcloud-example/\">\n					<img width=\"800\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-6.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-6.jpg?w=800 800w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-6.jpg?resize=300%2C188 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-6.jpg?resize=768%2C480 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-6.jpg?resize=400%2C250 400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/episode-6-soundcloud-example/\">\nEpisode 6: SoundCloud Example</a></h2>\n					July 24, 2019\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n							Media, Tutorials						\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/episode-6-soundcloud-example/#respond\">0 Comments</a>\n						<p>A wonderful serenity has taken possession of my entire soul, like these sweet mornings of spring which I enjoy with my whole heart. I am alone, and feel the...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/episode-6-soundcloud-example/\"> Play Episode</a>\n					<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"150\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/261000171&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true\"></iframe>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/episode-5-mixcloud-example/\">\n					<img width=\"800\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-2.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-2.jpg?w=800 800w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-2.jpg?resize=300%2C188 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-2.jpg?resize=768%2C480 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-2.jpg?resize=400%2C250 400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/episode-5-mixcloud-example/\">\nEpisode 5: MixCloud Example</a></h2>\n					July 24, 2019\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n							Media						\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/episode-5-mixcloud-example/#respond\">0 Comments</a>\n						<p>A wonderful serenity has taken possession of my entire soul, like these sweet mornings of spring which I enjoy with my whole heart. I am alone, and feel the...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/episode-5-mixcloud-example/\"> Play Episode</a>\n					<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"120\" src=\"https://www.mixcloud.com/widget/iframe/?feed=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.mixcloud.com%2Ftukatz%2Fbillys-jazz-swing-dixieland-favourites%2F&hide_cover=1&light=1\" frameborder=\"0\"></iframe>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php?paged=2\" >More Episodes</a>\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-list-main -->','Home','','inherit','closed','closed','','3141-revision-v1','','','2021-02-09 23:43:46','2021-02-10 04:43:46','',3141,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/09/3141-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3204,1,'2021-02-09 23:43:47','2021-02-10 04:43:47','<h2>Welcome To Satchmo</h2>		\n			A Powerful WordPress Theme for Podcasters.		\n<a onMouseOver=\"this.style.color=`#2d2d2d`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#ffffff`\" onMouseOut=\"this.style.color=`#ffffff`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#c01f2c`\" style=\"color:#ffffff; background-color:#c01f2c\" href=\"#!\">Subscribe</a>   \n<!-- Modal HTML embedded directly into document. -->\n	<ul><li><a href=\"#!\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Apple-Podcasts.png\" />Apple Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"#!\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Google-Podcasts.png\" />Google Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"#!\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Spotify.png\" />Spotify</a></li><li><a href=\"#!\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/SoundCloud.png\" />SoundCloud</a></li><li><a href=\"#!\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Stitcher.png\" />Stitcher</a></li><li><a href=\"#!\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/RSS.png\" />RSS</a></li></ul>                                       \n			<!-- close .secondline-addons-subscribe-button-container -->\n			<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/episodes/\" role=\"button\">\n						View Episodes\n					</a>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?w=1334 1334w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\nPodcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips</a></h2>\n					January 14, 2021\n						Episode 171										\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n						<p>Pivoting from San Diego to Tucson for COVID restrictions; planning tips for travel during COVID; CEO of Privacy4Cars talks about leaving data behind in rental cars</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\"> Click Here for the Episode Show Notes</a>\n					<!--[if lt IE 9]><![endif]-->\n<audio id=\"audio-2997-1\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?_=1\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-list-main -->\n			<h2>Latest Episodes</h2>		\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/episode-10-season-finale/\">\n					<img width=\"800\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-10.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-10.jpg?w=800 800w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-10.jpg?resize=300%2C188 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-10.jpg?resize=768%2C480 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-10.jpg?resize=400%2C250 400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/episode-10-season-finale/\">\nEpisode 10: Season Finale</a></h2>\n					July 24, 2019\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n							Media						\n					02:16\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/episode-10-season-finale/#respond\">0 Comments</a>\n						<p>A wonderful serenity has taken possession of my entire soul, like these sweet mornings of spring which I enjoy with my whole heart. I am alone, and feel the...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/episode-10-season-finale/\"> Play Episode</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-3164-2\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/3164/episode-10-season-finale.mp3?_=2\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/3164/episode-10-season-finale.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/3164/episode-10-season-finale.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/3164/episode-10-season-finale.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Episode 10: Season Finale \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/3164/episode-10-season-finale.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Episode 10: Season Finale \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a> | Duration: 02:16</p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/episode-9-building-an-audience/\">\n					<img width=\"800\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-9.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-9.jpg?w=800 800w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-9.jpg?resize=300%2C188 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-9.jpg?resize=768%2C480 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-9.jpg?resize=400%2C250 400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/episode-9-building-an-audience/\">\nEpisode 9: Building an Audience</a></h2>\n					July 24, 2019\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n							Entrepreneurship						\n					02:16\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/episode-9-building-an-audience/#respond\">0 Comments</a>\n						<p>A wonderful serenity has taken possession of my entire soul, like these sweet mornings of spring which I enjoy with my whole heart. I am alone, and feel the...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/episode-9-building-an-audience/\"> Play Episode</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-3163-3\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/3163/episode-9-building-an-audience.mp3?_=3\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/3163/episode-9-building-an-audience.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/3163/episode-9-building-an-audience.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/3163/episode-9-building-an-audience.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Episode 9: Building an Audience \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/3163/episode-9-building-an-audience.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Episode 9: Building an Audience \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a> | Duration: 02:16</p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/episode-8-audio-software-for-podcasters/\">\n					<img width=\"800\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-8.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i2.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-8.jpg?w=800 800w, https://i2.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-8.jpg?resize=300%2C188 300w, https://i2.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-8.jpg?resize=768%2C480 768w, https://i2.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-8.jpg?resize=400%2C250 400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/episode-8-audio-software-for-podcasters/\">\nEpisode 8: Audio Software for Podcasters</a></h2>\n					July 24, 2019\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n							Media, Tech						\n					02:16\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/episode-8-audio-software-for-podcasters/#respond\">0 Comments</a>\n						<p>A wonderful serenity has taken possession of my entire soul, like these sweet mornings of spring which I enjoy with my whole heart. I am alone, and feel the...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/episode-8-audio-software-for-podcasters/\"> Play Episode</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-3162-4\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/3162/episode-8-audio-software-for-podcasters.mp3?_=4\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/3162/episode-8-audio-software-for-podcasters.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/3162/episode-8-audio-software-for-podcasters.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/3162/episode-8-audio-software-for-podcasters.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Episode 8: Audio Software for Podcasters \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/3162/episode-8-audio-software-for-podcasters.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Episode 8: Audio Software for Podcasters \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a> | Duration: 02:16</p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/episode-7-best-mics-for-podcasting/\">\n					<img width=\"800\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-7.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-7.jpg?w=800 800w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-7.jpg?resize=300%2C188 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-7.jpg?resize=768%2C480 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-7.jpg?resize=400%2C250 400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/episode-7-best-mics-for-podcasting/\">\nEpisode 7: Best Mics for Podcasting</a></h2>\n					July 24, 2019\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n							Tech, Tutorials						\n					02:16\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/episode-7-best-mics-for-podcasting/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n						<p>A wonderful serenity has taken possession of my entire soul, like these sweet mornings of spring which I enjoy with my whole heart. I am alone, and feel the...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/episode-7-best-mics-for-podcasting/\"> Play Episode</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-3161-5\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/3161/episode-7-best-mics-for-podcasting.mp3?_=5\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/3161/episode-7-best-mics-for-podcasting.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/3161/episode-7-best-mics-for-podcasting.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/3161/episode-7-best-mics-for-podcasting.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Episode 7: Best Mics for Podcasting \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/3161/episode-7-best-mics-for-podcasting.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Episode 7: Best Mics for Podcasting \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a> | Duration: 02:16</p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/episode-6-soundcloud-example/\">\n					<img width=\"800\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-6.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-6.jpg?w=800 800w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-6.jpg?resize=300%2C188 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-6.jpg?resize=768%2C480 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-6.jpg?resize=400%2C250 400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/episode-6-soundcloud-example/\">\nEpisode 6: SoundCloud Example</a></h2>\n					July 24, 2019\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n							Media, Tutorials						\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/episode-6-soundcloud-example/#respond\">0 Comments</a>\n						<p>A wonderful serenity has taken possession of my entire soul, like these sweet mornings of spring which I enjoy with my whole heart. I am alone, and feel the...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/episode-6-soundcloud-example/\"> Play Episode</a>\n					<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"150\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/261000171&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true\"></iframe>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/episode-5-mixcloud-example/\">\n					<img width=\"800\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-2.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-2.jpg?w=800 800w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-2.jpg?resize=300%2C188 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-2.jpg?resize=768%2C480 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ep-2.jpg?resize=400%2C250 400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/episode-5-mixcloud-example/\">\nEpisode 5: MixCloud Example</a></h2>\n					July 24, 2019\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n							Media						\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/episode-5-mixcloud-example/#respond\">0 Comments</a>\n						<p>A wonderful serenity has taken possession of my entire soul, like these sweet mornings of spring which I enjoy with my whole heart. I am alone, and feel the...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/episode-5-mixcloud-example/\"> Play Episode</a>\n					<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"120\" src=\"https://www.mixcloud.com/widget/iframe/?feed=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.mixcloud.com%2Ftukatz%2Fbillys-jazz-swing-dixieland-favourites%2F&hide_cover=1&light=1\" frameborder=\"0\"></iframe>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php?paged=2\" >More Episodes</a>\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-list-main -->','Home','','inherit','closed','closed','','3141-revision-v1','','','2021-02-09 23:43:47','2021-02-10 04:43:47','',3141,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/09/3141-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3205,1,'2021-02-09 23:43:47','2021-02-10 04:43:47','<h2>Welcome To Satchmo</h2>		\n			A Powerful WordPress Theme for Podcasters.		\n<a onMouseOver=\"this.style.color=`#2d2d2d`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#ffffff`\" onMouseOut=\"this.style.color=`#ffffff`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#c01f2c`\" style=\"color:#ffffff; background-color:#c01f2c\" href=\"#!\">Subscribe</a>   \n<!-- Modal HTML embedded directly into document. -->\n	<ul><li><a href=\"#!\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Apple-Podcasts.png\" />Apple Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"#!\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Google-Podcasts.png\" />Google Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"#!\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Spotify.png\" />Spotify</a></li><li><a href=\"#!\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/SoundCloud.png\" />SoundCloud</a></li><li><a href=\"#!\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Stitcher.png\" />Stitcher</a></li><li><a href=\"#!\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/RSS.png\" />RSS</a></li></ul>                                       \n			<!-- close .secondline-addons-subscribe-button-container -->\n			<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/episodes/\" role=\"button\">\n						View Episodes\n					</a>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?w=1334 1334w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\nPodcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips</a></h2>\n					January 14, 2021\n						Episode 171										\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n						<p>Pivoting from San Diego to Tucson for COVID restrictions; planning tips for travel during COVID; CEO of Privacy4Cars talks about leaving data behind in rental cars</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\"> Click Here for the Episode Show Notes</a>\n					<!--[if lt IE 9]><![endif]-->\n<audio id=\"audio-2997-1\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?_=1\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-list-main -->\n			<h2>Latest Posts</h2>		\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?w=2000 2000w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\">\nQuick Notes on Our Trip to Tucson</a></h2>\n					February 1, 2021\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/beer/\" rel=\"category tag\">Beer</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/food-2/\" rel=\"category tag\">Food</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-journal/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Journal</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/#comments\">2 Comments</a>\n						<p>I left my suitcase at the door of our West Tucson Airbnb and walked out onto the back patio to watch the sun slip behind the Tucson Mountains. The...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\"> Play Episode</a>\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?w=1334 1334w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\nPodcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips</a></h2>\n					January 14, 2021\n						Episode 171										\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n						<p>Pivoting from San Diego to Tucson for COVID restrictions; planning tips for travel during COVID; CEO of Privacy4Cars talks about leaving data behind in rental cars</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\"> Play Episode</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2997-2\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?_=2\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?w=919 919w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">\nPodcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors</a></h2>\n					December 16, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					Comments Off on Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors\n						<p>No Thanksgiving travel, but looking at the travel volume for this, the busiest travel week of the year, shows just how far things have fallen. The Qantas CEO said...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\"> Play Episode</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2957-3\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?_=3\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?w=1299 1299w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">\nPodcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers</a></h2>\n					November 12, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-tech/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Tech</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/#comments\">3 Comments</a>\n						<p>No travel since the last episode, so I had some time to think back through my post-lockdown travel and come up with my top 10 gift ideas for your...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\"> Play Episode</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2936-4\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?_=4\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?w=2560 2560w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C2048 2048w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?w=2400 2400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">\n10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times</a></h2>\n					November 4, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-journal/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Journal</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-tech/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Tech</a>\n					Comments Off on 10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times\n						<p>With public health officials saying things like &#8220;it will be easily by the end of 2021 and perhaps into the next year before we start having some semblance of...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\"> Play Episode</a>\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?w=2560 2560w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C2048 2048w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?w=2400 2400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\">\nPodcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food</a></h2>\n					October 16, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/food-2/\" rel=\"category tag\">Food</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					Comments Off on Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food\n						<p>Trying to recover from a long weekend of eating and drinking through the neighborhoods of South Philly. Our movable feast reminded me that food may be the one experience...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\"> Play Episode</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2896-5\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?_=5\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php?paged=2\" >More Episodes</a>\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-list-main -->','Home','','inherit','closed','closed','','3141-revision-v1','','','2021-02-09 23:43:47','2021-02-10 04:43:47','',3141,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/09/3141-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3206,1,'2021-02-09 23:45:52','2021-02-10 04:45:52','<h2>Welcome To Satchmo</h2>		\n			A Powerful WordPress Theme for Podcasters.		\n<a onMouseOver=\"this.style.color=`#2d2d2d`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#ffffff`\" onMouseOut=\"this.style.color=`#ffffff`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#c01f2c`\" style=\"color:#ffffff; background-color:#c01f2c\" href=\"#!\">Subscribe</a>   \n<!-- Modal HTML embedded directly into document. -->\n	<ul><li><a href=\"#!\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Apple-Podcasts.png\" />Apple Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"#!\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Google-Podcasts.png\" />Google Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"#!\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Spotify.png\" />Spotify</a></li><li><a href=\"#!\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/SoundCloud.png\" />SoundCloud</a></li><li><a href=\"#!\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Stitcher.png\" />Stitcher</a></li><li><a href=\"#!\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/RSS.png\" />RSS</a></li></ul>                                       \n			<!-- close .secondline-addons-subscribe-button-container -->\n			<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/episodes/\" role=\"button\">\n						View Episodes\n					</a>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?w=1334 1334w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\nPodcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips</a></h2>\n					January 14, 2021\n						Episode 171										\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n						<p>Pivoting from San Diego to Tucson for COVID restrictions; planning tips for travel during COVID; CEO of Privacy4Cars talks about leaving data behind in rental cars</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\"> Click Here for the Episode Show Notes</a>\n					<!--[if lt IE 9]><![endif]-->\n<audio id=\"audio-2997-1\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?_=1\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-list-main -->\n			<h2>Latest Posts</h2>		\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?w=2000 2000w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\">\nQuick Notes on Our Trip to Tucson</a></h2>\n					February 1, 2021\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/beer/\" rel=\"category tag\">Beer</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/food-2/\" rel=\"category tag\">Food</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-journal/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Journal</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/#comments\">2 Comments</a>\n						<p>I left my suitcase at the door of our West Tucson Airbnb and walked out onto the back patio to watch the sun slip behind the Tucson Mountains. The...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\"> Play Episode</a>\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?w=1334 1334w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\nPodcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips</a></h2>\n					January 14, 2021\n						Episode 171										\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n						<p>Pivoting from San Diego to Tucson for COVID restrictions; planning tips for travel during COVID; CEO of Privacy4Cars talks about leaving data behind in rental cars</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\"> Play Episode</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2997-2\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?_=2\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?w=919 919w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">\nPodcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors</a></h2>\n					December 16, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					Comments Off on Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors\n						<p>No Thanksgiving travel, but looking at the travel volume for this, the busiest travel week of the year, shows just how far things have fallen. The Qantas CEO said...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\"> Play Episode</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2957-3\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?_=3\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?w=1299 1299w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">\nPodcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers</a></h2>\n					November 12, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-tech/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Tech</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/#comments\">3 Comments</a>\n						<p>No travel since the last episode, so I had some time to think back through my post-lockdown travel and come up with my top 10 gift ideas for your...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\"> Play Episode</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2936-4\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?_=4\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?w=2560 2560w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C2048 2048w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?w=2400 2400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">\n10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times</a></h2>\n					November 4, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-journal/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Journal</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-tech/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Tech</a>\n					Comments Off on 10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times\n						<p>With public health officials saying things like &#8220;it will be easily by the end of 2021 and perhaps into the next year before we start having some semblance of...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\"> Play Episode</a>\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?w=2560 2560w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C2048 2048w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?w=2400 2400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\">\nPodcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food</a></h2>\n					October 16, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/food-2/\" rel=\"category tag\">Food</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					Comments Off on Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food\n						<p>Trying to recover from a long weekend of eating and drinking through the neighborhoods of South Philly. Our movable feast reminded me that food may be the one experience...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\"> Play Episode</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2896-5\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?_=5\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php?paged=2\" >More Episodes</a>\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-list-main -->','Home','','inherit','closed','closed','','3141-revision-v1','','','2021-02-09 23:45:52','2021-02-10 04:45:52','',3141,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/09/3141-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0);
INSERT INTO `wp_posts` VALUES
(3207,1,'2021-02-09 23:45:52','2021-02-10 04:45:52','<h2>Welcome To Satchmo</h2>		\n			A Powerful WordPress Theme for Podcasters.		\n<a onMouseOver=\"this.style.color=`#2d2d2d`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#ffffff`\" onMouseOut=\"this.style.color=`#ffffff`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#c01f2c`\" style=\"color:#ffffff; background-color:#c01f2c\" href=\"#!\">Subscribe</a>   \n<!-- Modal HTML embedded directly into document. -->\n	<ul><li><a href=\"#!\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Apple-Podcasts.png\" />Apple Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"#!\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Google-Podcasts.png\" />Google Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"#!\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Spotify.png\" />Spotify</a></li><li><a href=\"#!\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/SoundCloud.png\" />SoundCloud</a></li><li><a href=\"#!\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Stitcher.png\" />Stitcher</a></li><li><a href=\"#!\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/RSS.png\" />RSS</a></li></ul>                                       \n			<!-- close .secondline-addons-subscribe-button-container -->\n			<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/episodes/\" role=\"button\">\n						View Episodes\n					</a>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?w=1334 1334w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\nPodcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips</a></h2>\n					January 14, 2021\n						Episode 171										\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n						<p>Pivoting from San Diego to Tucson for COVID restrictions; planning tips for travel during COVID; CEO of Privacy4Cars talks about leaving data behind in rental cars</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\"> Click Here for the Episode Show Notes</a>\n					<!--[if lt IE 9]><![endif]-->\n<audio id=\"audio-2997-1\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?_=1\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-list-main -->\n			<h2>Latest Posts</h2>		\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?w=2000 2000w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\">\nQuick Notes on Our Trip to Tucson</a></h2>\n					February 1, 2021\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/beer/\" rel=\"category tag\">Beer</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/food-2/\" rel=\"category tag\">Food</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-journal/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Journal</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/#comments\">2 Comments</a>\n						<p>I left my suitcase at the door of our West Tucson Airbnb and walked out onto the back patio to watch the sun slip behind the Tucson Mountains. The...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\"> Play Episode</a>\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?w=1334 1334w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\nPodcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips</a></h2>\n					January 14, 2021\n						Episode 171										\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n						<p>Pivoting from San Diego to Tucson for COVID restrictions; planning tips for travel during COVID; CEO of Privacy4Cars talks about leaving data behind in rental cars</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\"> Play Episode</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2997-2\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?_=2\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?w=919 919w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">\nPodcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors</a></h2>\n					December 16, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					Comments Off on Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors\n						<p>No Thanksgiving travel, but looking at the travel volume for this, the busiest travel week of the year, shows just how far things have fallen. The Qantas CEO said...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\"> Play Episode</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2957-3\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?_=3\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?w=1299 1299w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">\nPodcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers</a></h2>\n					November 12, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-tech/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Tech</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/#comments\">3 Comments</a>\n						<p>No travel since the last episode, so I had some time to think back through my post-lockdown travel and come up with my top 10 gift ideas for your...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\"> Play Episode</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2936-4\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?_=4\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?w=2560 2560w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C2048 2048w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?w=2400 2400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">\n10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times</a></h2>\n					November 4, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-journal/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Journal</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-tech/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Tech</a>\n					Comments Off on 10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times\n						<p>With public health officials saying things like &#8220;it will be easily by the end of 2021 and perhaps into the next year before we start having some semblance of...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\"> Play Episode</a>\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?w=2560 2560w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C2048 2048w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?w=2400 2400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\">\nPodcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food</a></h2>\n					October 16, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/food-2/\" rel=\"category tag\">Food</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					Comments Off on Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food\n						<p>Trying to recover from a long weekend of eating and drinking through the neighborhoods of South Philly. Our movable feast reminded me that food may be the one experience...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\"> Play Episode</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2896-5\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?_=5\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php?paged=2\" >More Episodes</a>\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-list-main -->','Home','','inherit','closed','closed','','3141-revision-v1','','','2021-02-09 23:45:52','2021-02-10 04:45:52','',3141,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/09/3141-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3208,1,'2021-02-09 23:45:52','2021-02-10 04:45:52','<h2>Welcome To Satchmo</h2>		\n			A Powerful WordPress Theme for Podcasters.		\n<a onMouseOver=\"this.style.color=`#2d2d2d`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#ffffff`\" onMouseOut=\"this.style.color=`#ffffff`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#c01f2c`\" style=\"color:#ffffff; background-color:#c01f2c\" href=\"#!\">Subscribe</a>   \n<!-- Modal HTML embedded directly into document. -->\n	<ul><li><a href=\"#!\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Apple-Podcasts.png\" />Apple Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"#!\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Google-Podcasts.png\" />Google Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"#!\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Spotify.png\" />Spotify</a></li><li><a href=\"#!\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/SoundCloud.png\" />SoundCloud</a></li><li><a href=\"#!\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Stitcher.png\" />Stitcher</a></li><li><a href=\"#!\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/RSS.png\" />RSS</a></li></ul>                                       \n			<!-- close .secondline-addons-subscribe-button-container -->\n			<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/episodes/\" role=\"button\">\n						View Episodes\n					</a>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?w=1334 1334w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\nPodcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips</a></h2>\n					January 14, 2021\n						Episode 171										\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n						<p>Pivoting from San Diego to Tucson for COVID restrictions; planning tips for travel during COVID; CEO of Privacy4Cars talks about leaving data behind in rental cars</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\"> Click Here for the Episode Show Notes</a>\n					<!--[if lt IE 9]><![endif]-->\n<audio id=\"audio-2997-1\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?_=1\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-list-main -->\n			<h2>Latest Posts</h2>		\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?w=2000 2000w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\">\nQuick Notes on Our Trip to Tucson</a></h2>\n					February 1, 2021\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/beer/\" rel=\"category tag\">Beer</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/food-2/\" rel=\"category tag\">Food</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-journal/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Journal</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/#comments\">2 Comments</a>\n						<p>I left my suitcase at the door of our West Tucson Airbnb and walked out onto the back patio to watch the sun slip behind the Tucson Mountains. The...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?w=1334 1334w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\nPodcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips</a></h2>\n					January 14, 2021\n						Episode 171										\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n						<p>Pivoting from San Diego to Tucson for COVID restrictions; planning tips for travel during COVID; CEO of Privacy4Cars talks about leaving data behind in rental cars</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2997-2\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?_=2\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?w=919 919w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">\nPodcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors</a></h2>\n					December 16, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					Comments Off on Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors\n						<p>No Thanksgiving travel, but looking at the travel volume for this, the busiest travel week of the year, shows just how far things have fallen. The Qantas CEO said...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2957-3\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?_=3\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?w=1299 1299w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">\nPodcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers</a></h2>\n					November 12, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-tech/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Tech</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/#comments\">3 Comments</a>\n						<p>No travel since the last episode, so I had some time to think back through my post-lockdown travel and come up with my top 10 gift ideas for your...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2936-4\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?_=4\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?w=2560 2560w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C2048 2048w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?w=2400 2400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">\n10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times</a></h2>\n					November 4, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-journal/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Journal</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-tech/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Tech</a>\n					Comments Off on 10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times\n						<p>With public health officials saying things like &#8220;it will be easily by the end of 2021 and perhaps into the next year before we start having some semblance of...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?w=2560 2560w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C2048 2048w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?w=2400 2400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\">\nPodcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food</a></h2>\n					October 16, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/food-2/\" rel=\"category tag\">Food</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					Comments Off on Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food\n						<p>Trying to recover from a long weekend of eating and drinking through the neighborhoods of South Philly. Our movable feast reminded me that food may be the one experience...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2896-5\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?_=5\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php?paged=2\" >More Posts</a>\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-list-main -->','Home','','inherit','closed','closed','','3141-revision-v1','','','2021-02-09 23:45:52','2021-02-10 04:45:52','',3141,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/09/3141-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3238,1,'2021-03-02 11:00:16','2021-03-02 16:00:16','<h2>Welcome To Satchmo</h2>		\n			A Powerful WordPress Theme for Podcasters.		\n<a onMouseOver=\"this.style.color=`#2d2d2d`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#ffffff`\" onMouseOut=\"this.style.color=`#ffffff`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#c01f2c`\" style=\"color:#ffffff; background-color:#c01f2c\" href=\"#!\">Subscribe</a>   \n<!-- Modal HTML embedded directly into document. -->\n	<ul><li><a href=\"#!\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Apple-Podcasts.png\" />Apple Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"#!\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Google-Podcasts.png\" />Google Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"#!\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Spotify.png\" />Spotify</a></li><li><a href=\"#!\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/SoundCloud.png\" />SoundCloud</a></li><li><a href=\"#!\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Stitcher.png\" />Stitcher</a></li><li><a href=\"#!\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/RSS.png\" />RSS</a></li></ul>                                       \n			<!-- close .secondline-addons-subscribe-button-container -->\n			<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/episodes/\" role=\"button\">\n						View Episodes\n					</a>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?w=1334 1334w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\nPodcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips</a></h2>\n					January 14, 2021\n						Episode 171										\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n						<p>Pivoting from San Diego to Tucson for COVID restrictions; planning tips for travel during COVID; CEO of Privacy4Cars talks about leaving data behind in rental cars</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\"> Click Here for the Episode Show Notes</a>\n					<!--[if lt IE 9]><![endif]-->\n<audio id=\"audio-2997-1\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?_=1\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-list-main -->\n			<h2>Latest Posts</h2>		\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?w=2000 2000w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\">\nQuick Notes on Our Trip to Tucson</a></h2>\n					February 1, 2021\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/beer/\" rel=\"category tag\">Beer</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/food-2/\" rel=\"category tag\">Food</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-journal/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Journal</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/#comments\">2 Comments</a>\n						<p>I left my suitcase at the door of our West Tucson Airbnb and walked out onto the back patio to watch the sun slip behind the Tucson Mountains. The...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?w=1334 1334w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\nPodcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips</a></h2>\n					January 14, 2021\n						Episode 171										\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n						<p>Pivoting from San Diego to Tucson for COVID restrictions; planning tips for travel during COVID; CEO of Privacy4Cars talks about leaving data behind in rental cars</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2997-2\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?_=2\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?w=919 919w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">\nPodcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors</a></h2>\n					December 16, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					Comments Off on Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors\n						<p>No Thanksgiving travel, but looking at the travel volume for this, the busiest travel week of the year, shows just how far things have fallen. The Qantas CEO said...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2957-3\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?_=3\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?w=1299 1299w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">\nPodcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers</a></h2>\n					November 12, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-tech/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Tech</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/#comments\">3 Comments</a>\n						<p>No travel since the last episode, so I had some time to think back through my post-lockdown travel and come up with my top 10 gift ideas for your...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2936-4\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?_=4\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?w=2560 2560w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C2048 2048w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?w=2400 2400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">\n10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times</a></h2>\n					November 4, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-journal/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Journal</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-tech/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Tech</a>\n					Comments Off on 10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times\n						<p>With public health officials saying things like &#8220;it will be easily by the end of 2021 and perhaps into the next year before we start having some semblance of...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?w=2560 2560w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C2048 2048w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?w=2400 2400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\">\nPodcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food</a></h2>\n					October 16, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/food-2/\" rel=\"category tag\">Food</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					Comments Off on Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food\n						<p>Trying to recover from a long weekend of eating and drinking through the neighborhoods of South Philly. Our movable feast reminded me that food may be the one experience...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2896-5\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?_=5\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php?paged=2\" >More Posts</a>\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-list-main -->','Home','','inherit','closed','closed','','3141-revision-v1','','','2021-03-02 11:00:16','2021-03-02 16:00:16','',3141,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/02/3141-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3239,1,'2021-03-02 11:00:16','2021-03-02 16:00:16','<h2>Welcome To Satchmo</h2>		\n			A Powerful WordPress Theme for Podcasters.		\n<a onMouseOver=\"this.style.color=`#2d2d2d`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#ffffff`\" onMouseOut=\"this.style.color=`#ffffff`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#c01f2c`\" style=\"color:#ffffff; background-color:#c01f2c\" href=\"#!\">Subscribe</a>   \n<!-- Modal HTML embedded directly into document. -->\n	<ul><li><a href=\"#!\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Apple-Podcasts.png\" />Apple Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"#!\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Google-Podcasts.png\" />Google Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"#!\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Spotify.png\" />Spotify</a></li><li><a href=\"#!\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/SoundCloud.png\" />SoundCloud</a></li><li><a href=\"#!\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Stitcher.png\" />Stitcher</a></li><li><a href=\"#!\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/RSS.png\" />RSS</a></li></ul>                                       \n			<!-- close .secondline-addons-subscribe-button-container -->\n			<a href=\"https://satchmo.secondlinethemes.com/episodes/\" role=\"button\">\n						View Episodes\n					</a>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?w=1334 1334w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\nPodcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips</a></h2>\n					January 14, 2021\n						Episode 171										\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n						<p>Pivoting from San Diego to Tucson for COVID restrictions; planning tips for travel during COVID; CEO of Privacy4Cars talks about leaving data behind in rental cars</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\"> Click Here for the Episode Show Notes</a>\n					<!--[if lt IE 9]><![endif]-->\n<audio id=\"audio-2997-1\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?_=1\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-list-main -->\n			<h2>Latest Posts</h2>		\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?w=2000 2000w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\">\nQuick Notes on Our Trip to Tucson</a></h2>\n					February 1, 2021\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/beer/\" rel=\"category tag\">Beer</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/food-2/\" rel=\"category tag\">Food</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-journal/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Journal</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/#comments\">2 Comments</a>\n						<p>I left my suitcase at the door of our West Tucson Airbnb and walked out onto the back patio to watch the sun slip behind the Tucson Mountains. The...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?w=1334 1334w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\nPodcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips</a></h2>\n					January 14, 2021\n						Episode 171										\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n						<p>Pivoting from San Diego to Tucson for COVID restrictions; planning tips for travel during COVID; CEO of Privacy4Cars talks about leaving data behind in rental cars</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2997-2\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?_=2\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?w=919 919w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">\nPodcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors</a></h2>\n					December 16, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					Comments Off on Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors\n						<p>No Thanksgiving travel, but looking at the travel volume for this, the busiest travel week of the year, shows just how far things have fallen. The Qantas CEO said...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2957-3\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?_=3\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?w=1299 1299w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">\nPodcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers</a></h2>\n					November 12, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-tech/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Tech</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/#comments\">3 Comments</a>\n						<p>No travel since the last episode, so I had some time to think back through my post-lockdown travel and come up with my top 10 gift ideas for your...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2936-4\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?_=4\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?w=2560 2560w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C2048 2048w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?w=2400 2400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">\n10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times</a></h2>\n					November 4, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-journal/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Journal</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-tech/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Tech</a>\n					Comments Off on 10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times\n						<p>With public health officials saying things like &#8220;it will be easily by the end of 2021 and perhaps into the next year before we start having some semblance of...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?w=2560 2560w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C2048 2048w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?w=2400 2400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\">\nPodcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food</a></h2>\n					October 16, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/food-2/\" rel=\"category tag\">Food</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					Comments Off on Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food\n						<p>Trying to recover from a long weekend of eating and drinking through the neighborhoods of South Philly. Our movable feast reminded me that food may be the one experience...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2896-5\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?_=5\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php?paged=2\" >More Posts</a>\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-list-main -->','Home','','inherit','closed','closed','','3141-revision-v1','','','2021-03-02 11:00:16','2021-03-02 16:00:16','',3141,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/02/3141-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3240,1,'2021-03-02 11:00:16','2021-03-02 16:00:16','<h2>TravelCommons</h2>		\n			The podcast giving the voice of the traveler<br><br>It\'s more about the journey than the destination		\n<a onMouseOver=\"this.style.color=`#2d2d2d`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#ffffff`\" onMouseOut=\"this.style.color=`#ffffff`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#c01f2c`\" style=\"color:#ffffff; background-color:#c01f2c\" href=\"#!\">Subscribe</a>   \n<!-- Modal HTML embedded directly into document. -->\n	<ul><li><a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Apple-Podcasts.png\" />Apple Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Google-Podcasts.png\" />Google Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Spotify.png\" />Spotify</a></li><li><a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/SoundCloud.png\" />SoundCloud</a></li><li><a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Stitcher.png\" />Stitcher</a></li><li><a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Amazon-Music.png\" />Amazon Music</a></li><li><a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/TravelcommonsPodcast\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/RSS.png\" />RSS</a></li></ul>                                       \n			<!-- close .secondline-addons-subscribe-button-container -->\n			<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/episodes/\" role=\"button\">\n						View Episodes\n					</a>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?w=1334 1334w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\nPodcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips</a></h2>\n					January 14, 2021\n						Episode 171										\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n						<p>Pivoting from San Diego to Tucson for COVID restrictions; planning tips for travel during COVID; CEO of Privacy4Cars talks about leaving data behind in rental cars</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\"> Click Here for the Episode Show Notes</a>\n					<!--[if lt IE 9]><![endif]-->\n<audio id=\"audio-2997-1\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?_=1\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-list-main -->\n			<h2>Latest Posts</h2>		\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?w=2000 2000w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\">\nQuick Notes on Our Trip to Tucson</a></h2>\n					February 1, 2021\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/beer/\" rel=\"category tag\">Beer</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/food-2/\" rel=\"category tag\">Food</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-journal/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Journal</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/#comments\">2 Comments</a>\n						<p>I left my suitcase at the door of our West Tucson Airbnb and walked out onto the back patio to watch the sun slip behind the Tucson Mountains. The...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?w=1334 1334w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\nPodcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips</a></h2>\n					January 14, 2021\n						Episode 171										\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n						<p>Pivoting from San Diego to Tucson for COVID restrictions; planning tips for travel during COVID; CEO of Privacy4Cars talks about leaving data behind in rental cars</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2997-2\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?_=2\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?w=919 919w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">\nPodcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors</a></h2>\n					December 16, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					Comments Off on Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors\n						<p>No Thanksgiving travel, but looking at the travel volume for this, the busiest travel week of the year, shows just how far things have fallen. The Qantas CEO said...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2957-3\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?_=3\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?w=1299 1299w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">\nPodcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers</a></h2>\n					November 12, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-tech/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Tech</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/#comments\">3 Comments</a>\n						<p>No travel since the last episode, so I had some time to think back through my post-lockdown travel and come up with my top 10 gift ideas for your...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2936-4\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?_=4\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?w=2560 2560w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C2048 2048w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?w=2400 2400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">\n10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times</a></h2>\n					November 4, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-journal/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Journal</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-tech/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Tech</a>\n					Comments Off on 10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times\n						<p>With public health officials saying things like &#8220;it will be easily by the end of 2021 and perhaps into the next year before we start having some semblance of...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?w=2560 2560w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C2048 2048w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?w=2400 2400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\">\nPodcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food</a></h2>\n					October 16, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/food-2/\" rel=\"category tag\">Food</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					Comments Off on Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food\n						<p>Trying to recover from a long weekend of eating and drinking through the neighborhoods of South Philly. Our movable feast reminded me that food may be the one experience...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2896-5\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?_=5\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php?paged=2\" >More Posts</a>\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-list-main -->','Home','','inherit','closed','closed','','3141-revision-v1','','','2021-03-02 11:00:16','2021-03-02 16:00:16','',3141,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/02/3141-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3241,1,'2021-03-02 11:02:45','2021-03-02 16:02:45','','Default Kit','','inherit','closed','closed','','3115-revision-v1','','','2021-03-02 11:02:45','2021-03-02 16:02:45','',3115,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/02/3115-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3242,1,'2021-03-02 11:02:45','2021-03-02 16:02:45','','Default Kit','','inherit','closed','closed','','3115-revision-v1','','','2021-03-02 11:02:45','2021-03-02 16:02:45','',3115,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/02/3115-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3245,1,'2021-03-02 11:54:49','2021-03-02 16:54:49','','travelcommons_logo_80x80','','inherit','open','closed','','travelcommons_logo_80x80','','','2021-03-02 11:54:49','2021-03-02 16:54:49','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/travelcommons_logo_80x80.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(3246,1,'2021-03-02 14:11:44','2021-03-02 19:11:44','','new_website_logo_luggage','','inherit','open','closed','','new_website_logo_luggage','','','2021-03-02 14:11:44','2021-03-02 19:11:44','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/new_website_logo_luggage.png',0,'attachment','image/png',0),
(3250,1,'2021-03-02 15:41:45','2021-03-02 20:41:45','<h2>TravelCommons</h2>		\n			The podcast giving the voice of the traveler<br><br>It\'s more about the journey than the destination		\n<a onMouseOver=\"this.style.color=`#2d2d2d`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#ffffff`\" onMouseOut=\"this.style.color=`#ffffff`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#c01f2c`\" style=\"color:#ffffff; background-color:#c01f2c\" href=\"#!\">Subscribe</a>   \n<!-- Modal HTML embedded directly into document. -->\n	<ul><li><a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Apple-Podcasts.png\" />Apple Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Google-Podcasts.png\" />Google Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Spotify.png\" />Spotify</a></li><li><a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/SoundCloud.png\" />SoundCloud</a></li><li><a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Stitcher.png\" />Stitcher</a></li><li><a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Amazon-Music.png\" />Amazon Music</a></li><li><a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/TravelcommonsPodcast\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/RSS.png\" />RSS</a></li></ul>                                       \n			<!-- close .secondline-addons-subscribe-button-container -->\n			<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/episodes/\" role=\"button\">\n						View Episodes\n					</a>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?w=1334 1334w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\nPodcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips</a></h2>\n					January 14, 2021\n						Episode 171										\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n						<p>Pivoting from San Diego to Tucson for COVID restrictions; planning tips for travel during COVID; CEO of Privacy4Cars talks about leaving data behind in rental cars</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\"> Click Here for the Episode Show Notes</a>\n					<!--[if lt IE 9]><![endif]-->\n<audio id=\"audio-2997-1\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?_=1\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-list-main -->\n			<h2>Latest Posts</h2>		\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?w=2000 2000w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\">\nQuick Notes on Our Trip to Tucson</a></h2>\n					February 1, 2021\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/beer/\" rel=\"category tag\">Beer</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/food-2/\" rel=\"category tag\">Food</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-journal/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Journal</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/#comments\">2 Comments</a>\n						<p>I left my suitcase at the door of our West Tucson Airbnb and walked out onto the back patio to watch the sun slip behind the Tucson Mountains. The...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?w=1334 1334w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\nPodcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips</a></h2>\n					January 14, 2021\n						Episode 171										\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n						<p>Pivoting from San Diego to Tucson for COVID restrictions; planning tips for travel during COVID; CEO of Privacy4Cars talks about leaving data behind in rental cars</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2997-2\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?_=2\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?w=919 919w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">\nPodcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors</a></h2>\n					December 16, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					Comments Off on Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors\n						<p>No Thanksgiving travel, but looking at the travel volume for this, the busiest travel week of the year, shows just how far things have fallen. The Qantas CEO said...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2957-3\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?_=3\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?w=1299 1299w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">\nPodcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers</a></h2>\n					November 12, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-tech/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Tech</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/#comments\">3 Comments</a>\n						<p>No travel since the last episode, so I had some time to think back through my post-lockdown travel and come up with my top 10 gift ideas for your...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2936-4\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?_=4\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?w=2560 2560w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C2048 2048w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?w=2400 2400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">\n10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times</a></h2>\n					November 4, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-journal/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Journal</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-tech/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Tech</a>\n					Comments Off on 10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times\n						<p>With public health officials saying things like &#8220;it will be easily by the end of 2021 and perhaps into the next year before we start having some semblance of...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?w=2560 2560w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C2048 2048w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?w=2400 2400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\">\nPodcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food</a></h2>\n					October 16, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/food-2/\" rel=\"category tag\">Food</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					Comments Off on Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food\n						<p>Trying to recover from a long weekend of eating and drinking through the neighborhoods of South Philly. Our movable feast reminded me that food may be the one experience...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2896-5\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?_=5\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php?paged=2\" >More Posts</a>\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-list-main -->','Home','','inherit','closed','closed','','3141-revision-v1','','','2021-03-02 15:41:45','2021-03-02 20:41:45','',3141,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/02/3141-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3251,1,'2021-03-02 15:41:45','2021-03-02 20:41:45','<h2>TravelCommons</h2>		\n			The podcast giving the voice of the traveler<br><br>It\'s more about the journey than the destination		\n<a onMouseOver=\"this.style.color=`#2d2d2d`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#ffffff`\" onMouseOut=\"this.style.color=`#ffffff`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#c01f2c`\" style=\"color:#ffffff; background-color:#c01f2c\" href=\"#!\">Subscribe</a>   \n<!-- Modal HTML embedded directly into document. -->\n	<ul><li><a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Apple-Podcasts.png\" />Apple Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Google-Podcasts.png\" />Google Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Spotify.png\" />Spotify</a></li><li><a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/SoundCloud.png\" />SoundCloud</a></li><li><a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Stitcher.png\" />Stitcher</a></li><li><a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Amazon-Music.png\" />Amazon Music</a></li><li><a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/TravelcommonsPodcast\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/RSS.png\" />RSS</a></li></ul>                                       \n			<!-- close .secondline-addons-subscribe-button-container -->\n			<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/episodes/\" role=\"button\">\n						View Episodes\n					</a>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?w=1334 1334w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\nPodcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips</a></h2>\n					January 14, 2021\n						Episode 171										\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n						<p>Pivoting from San Diego to Tucson for COVID restrictions; planning tips for travel during COVID; CEO of Privacy4Cars talks about leaving data behind in rental cars</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\"> Click Here for the Episode Show Notes</a>\n					<!--[if lt IE 9]><![endif]-->\n<audio id=\"audio-2997-1\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?_=1\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-list-main -->\n			<h2>Latest Posts</h2>		\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?w=2000 2000w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\">\nQuick Notes on Our Trip to Tucson</a></h2>\n					February 1, 2021\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/beer/\" rel=\"category tag\">Beer</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/food-2/\" rel=\"category tag\">Food</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-journal/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Journal</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/#comments\">2 Comments</a>\n						<p>I left my suitcase at the door of our West Tucson Airbnb and walked out onto the back patio to watch the sun slip behind the Tucson Mountains. The...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?w=1334 1334w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\nPodcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips</a></h2>\n					January 14, 2021\n						Episode 171										\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n						<p>Pivoting from San Diego to Tucson for COVID restrictions; planning tips for travel during COVID; CEO of Privacy4Cars talks about leaving data behind in rental cars</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2997-2\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?_=2\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?w=919 919w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">\nPodcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors</a></h2>\n					December 16, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					Comments Off on Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors\n						<p>No Thanksgiving travel, but looking at the travel volume for this, the busiest travel week of the year, shows just how far things have fallen. The Qantas CEO said...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2957-3\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?_=3\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?w=1299 1299w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">\nPodcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers</a></h2>\n					November 12, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-tech/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Tech</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/#comments\">3 Comments</a>\n						<p>No travel since the last episode, so I had some time to think back through my post-lockdown travel and come up with my top 10 gift ideas for your...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2936-4\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?_=4\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?w=2560 2560w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C2048 2048w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?w=2400 2400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">\n10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times</a></h2>\n					November 4, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-journal/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Journal</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-tech/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Tech</a>\n					Comments Off on 10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times\n						<p>With public health officials saying things like &#8220;it will be easily by the end of 2021 and perhaps into the next year before we start having some semblance of...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?w=2560 2560w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C2048 2048w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?w=2400 2400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\">\nPodcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food</a></h2>\n					October 16, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/food-2/\" rel=\"category tag\">Food</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					Comments Off on Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food\n						<p>Trying to recover from a long weekend of eating and drinking through the neighborhoods of South Philly. Our movable feast reminded me that food may be the one experience...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2896-5\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?_=5\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php?paged=2\" >More Posts</a>\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-list-main -->','Home','','inherit','closed','closed','','3141-revision-v1','','','2021-03-02 15:41:45','2021-03-02 20:41:45','',3141,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/02/3141-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3252,1,'2021-03-02 15:41:45','2021-03-02 20:41:45','<h2>TravelCommons</h2>		\n			The podcast giving the voice of the traveler<br><br>It\'s more about the journey than the destination		\n<a onMouseOver=\"this.style.color=`#2d2d2d`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#ffffff`\" onMouseOut=\"this.style.color=`#ffffff`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#c01f2c`\" style=\"color:#ffffff; background-color:#c01f2c\" href=\"#!\">Subscribe</a>   \n<!-- Modal HTML embedded directly into document. -->\n	<ul><li><a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Apple-Podcasts.png\" />Apple Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Google-Podcasts.png\" />Google Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Spotify.png\" />Spotify</a></li><li><a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/SoundCloud.png\" />SoundCloud</a></li><li><a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Stitcher.png\" />Stitcher</a></li><li><a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Amazon-Music.png\" />Amazon Music</a></li><li><a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/TravelcommonsPodcast\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/RSS.png\" />RSS</a></li></ul>                                       \n			<!-- close .secondline-addons-subscribe-button-container -->\n			<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/episodes/\" role=\"button\">\n						View Episodes\n					</a>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?w=1334 1334w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\nPodcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips</a></h2>\n					January 14, 2021\n						Episode 171										\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n						<p>Pivoting from San Diego to Tucson for COVID restrictions; planning tips for travel during COVID; CEO of Privacy4Cars talks about leaving data behind in rental cars</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\"> Click Here for the Episode Show Notes</a>\n					<!--[if lt IE 9]><![endif]-->\n<audio id=\"audio-2997-1\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?_=1\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-list-main -->\n			<h2>Latest Posts</h2>		\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?w=2000 2000w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\">\nQuick Notes on Our Trip to Tucson</a></h2>\n					February 1, 2021\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/beer/\" rel=\"category tag\">Beer</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/food-2/\" rel=\"category tag\">Food</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-journal/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Journal</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/#comments\">2 Comments</a>\n						<p>I left my suitcase at the door of our West Tucson Airbnb and walked out onto the back patio to watch the sun slip behind the Tucson Mountains. The...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?w=1334 1334w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\nPodcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips</a></h2>\n					January 14, 2021\n						Episode 171										\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n						<p>Pivoting from San Diego to Tucson for COVID restrictions; planning tips for travel during COVID; CEO of Privacy4Cars talks about leaving data behind in rental cars</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2997-2\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?_=2\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?w=919 919w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">\nPodcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors</a></h2>\n					December 16, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					Comments Off on Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors\n						<p>No Thanksgiving travel, but looking at the travel volume for this, the busiest travel week of the year, shows just how far things have fallen. The Qantas CEO said...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2957-3\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?_=3\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?w=1299 1299w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">\nPodcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers</a></h2>\n					November 12, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-tech/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Tech</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/#comments\">3 Comments</a>\n						<p>No travel since the last episode, so I had some time to think back through my post-lockdown travel and come up with my top 10 gift ideas for your...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2936-4\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?_=4\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?w=2560 2560w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C2048 2048w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?w=2400 2400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">\n10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times</a></h2>\n					November 4, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-journal/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Journal</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-tech/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Tech</a>\n					Comments Off on 10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times\n						<p>With public health officials saying things like &#8220;it will be easily by the end of 2021 and perhaps into the next year before we start having some semblance of...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?w=2560 2560w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C2048 2048w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?w=2400 2400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\">\nPodcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food</a></h2>\n					October 16, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/food-2/\" rel=\"category tag\">Food</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					Comments Off on Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food\n						<p>Trying to recover from a long weekend of eating and drinking through the neighborhoods of South Philly. Our movable feast reminded me that food may be the one experience...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2896-5\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?_=5\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php?paged=2\" >More Posts</a>\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-list-main -->','Home','','inherit','closed','closed','','3141-revision-v1','','','2021-03-02 15:41:45','2021-03-02 20:41:45','',3141,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/02/3141-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3256,1,'2021-03-02 18:38:01','2021-03-02 23:38:01','','20191015_121954620_iOS','','inherit','open','closed','','20191015_121954620_ios','','','2021-03-02 18:38:01','2021-03-02 23:38:01','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/20191015_121954620_iOS.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(3257,1,'2021-03-02 18:38:03','2021-03-02 23:38:03','','IMG_0536','','inherit','open','closed','','img_0536','','','2021-03-02 18:38:03','2021-03-02 23:38:03','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/IMG_0536.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(3264,1,'2021-03-02 19:19:18','2021-03-03 00:19:18','<h2>TravelCommons</h2>		\n			The podcast giving the voice of the traveler<br><br>It\'s more about the journey than the destination		\n<a onMouseOver=\"this.style.color=`#2d2d2d`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#ffffff`\" onMouseOut=\"this.style.color=`#ffffff`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#c01f2c`\" style=\"color:#ffffff; background-color:#c01f2c\" href=\"#!\">Subscribe</a>   \n<!-- Modal HTML embedded directly into document. -->\n	<ul><li><a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Apple-Podcasts.png\" />Apple Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Google-Podcasts.png\" />Google Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Spotify.png\" />Spotify</a></li><li><a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/SoundCloud.png\" />SoundCloud</a></li><li><a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Stitcher.png\" />Stitcher</a></li><li><a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Amazon-Music.png\" />Amazon Music</a></li><li><a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/TravelcommonsPodcast\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/RSS.png\" />RSS</a></li></ul>                                       \n			<!-- close .secondline-addons-subscribe-button-container -->\n			<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/episodes/\" role=\"button\">\n						View Episodes\n					</a>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?w=1334 1334w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\nPodcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips</a></h2>\n					January 14, 2021\n						Episode 171										\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n						<p>Pivoting from San Diego to Tucson for COVID restrictions; planning tips for travel during COVID; CEO of Privacy4Cars talks about leaving data behind in rental cars</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\"> Click Here for the Episode Show Notes</a>\n					<!--[if lt IE 9]><![endif]-->\n<audio id=\"audio-2997-1\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?_=1\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-list-main -->\n			<h2>Latest Posts</h2>		\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?w=2000 2000w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\">\nQuick Notes on Our Trip to Tucson</a></h2>\n					February 1, 2021\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/beer/\" rel=\"category tag\">Beer</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/food-2/\" rel=\"category tag\">Food</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-journal/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Journal</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/#comments\">2 Comments</a>\n						<p>I left my suitcase at the door of our West Tucson Airbnb and walked out onto the back patio to watch the sun slip behind the Tucson Mountains. The...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?w=1334 1334w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\nPodcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips</a></h2>\n					January 14, 2021\n						Episode 171										\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n						<p>Pivoting from San Diego to Tucson for COVID restrictions; planning tips for travel during COVID; CEO of Privacy4Cars talks about leaving data behind in rental cars</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2997-2\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?_=2\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?w=919 919w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">\nPodcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors</a></h2>\n					December 16, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					Comments Off on Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors\n						<p>No Thanksgiving travel, but looking at the travel volume for this, the busiest travel week of the year, shows just how far things have fallen. The Qantas CEO said...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2957-3\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?_=3\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?w=1299 1299w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">\nPodcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers</a></h2>\n					November 12, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-tech/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Tech</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/#comments\">3 Comments</a>\n						<p>No travel since the last episode, so I had some time to think back through my post-lockdown travel and come up with my top 10 gift ideas for your...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2936-4\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?_=4\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?w=2560 2560w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C2048 2048w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?w=2400 2400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">\n10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times</a></h2>\n					November 4, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-journal/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Journal</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-tech/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Tech</a>\n					Comments Off on 10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times\n						<p>With public health officials saying things like &#8220;it will be easily by the end of 2021 and perhaps into the next year before we start having some semblance of...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?w=2560 2560w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C2048 2048w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?w=2400 2400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\">\nPodcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food</a></h2>\n					October 16, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/food-2/\" rel=\"category tag\">Food</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					Comments Off on Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food\n						<p>Trying to recover from a long weekend of eating and drinking through the neighborhoods of South Philly. Our movable feast reminded me that food may be the one experience...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2896-5\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?_=5\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php?paged=2\" >More Posts</a>\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-list-main -->','Home','','inherit','closed','closed','','3141-revision-v1','','','2021-03-02 19:19:18','2021-03-03 00:19:18','',3141,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/02/3141-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3265,1,'2021-03-02 19:19:18','2021-03-03 00:19:18','<h2>TravelCommons</h2>		\n			The podcast giving the voice of the traveler<br><br>It\'s more about the journey than the destination		\n<a onMouseOver=\"this.style.color=`#2d2d2d`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#ffffff`\" onMouseOut=\"this.style.color=`#ffffff`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#c01f2c`\" style=\"color:#ffffff; background-color:#c01f2c\" href=\"#!\">Subscribe</a>   \n<!-- Modal HTML embedded directly into document. -->\n	<ul><li><a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Apple-Podcasts.png\" />Apple Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Google-Podcasts.png\" />Google Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Spotify.png\" />Spotify</a></li><li><a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/SoundCloud.png\" />SoundCloud</a></li><li><a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Stitcher.png\" />Stitcher</a></li><li><a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Amazon-Music.png\" />Amazon Music</a></li><li><a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/TravelcommonsPodcast\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/RSS.png\" />RSS</a></li></ul>                                       \n			<!-- close .secondline-addons-subscribe-button-container -->\n			<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/episodes/\" role=\"button\">\n						View Episodes\n					</a>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?w=1334 1334w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\nPodcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips</a></h2>\n					January 14, 2021\n						Episode 171										\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n						<p>Pivoting from San Diego to Tucson for COVID restrictions; planning tips for travel during COVID; CEO of Privacy4Cars talks about leaving data behind in rental cars</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\"> Click Here for the Episode Show Notes</a>\n					<!--[if lt IE 9]><![endif]-->\n<audio id=\"audio-2997-1\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?_=1\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-list-main -->\n			<h2>Latest Posts</h2>		\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?w=2000 2000w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\">\nQuick Notes on Our Trip to Tucson</a></h2>\n					February 1, 2021\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/beer/\" rel=\"category tag\">Beer</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/food-2/\" rel=\"category tag\">Food</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-journal/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Journal</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/#comments\">2 Comments</a>\n						<p>I left my suitcase at the door of our West Tucson Airbnb and walked out onto the back patio to watch the sun slip behind the Tucson Mountains. The...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?w=1334 1334w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\nPodcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips</a></h2>\n					January 14, 2021\n						Episode 171										\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n						<p>Pivoting from San Diego to Tucson for COVID restrictions; planning tips for travel during COVID; CEO of Privacy4Cars talks about leaving data behind in rental cars</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2997-2\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?_=2\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?w=919 919w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">\nPodcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors</a></h2>\n					December 16, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					Comments Off on Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors\n						<p>No Thanksgiving travel, but looking at the travel volume for this, the busiest travel week of the year, shows just how far things have fallen. The Qantas CEO said...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2957-3\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?_=3\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?w=1299 1299w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">\nPodcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers</a></h2>\n					November 12, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-tech/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Tech</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/#comments\">3 Comments</a>\n						<p>No travel since the last episode, so I had some time to think back through my post-lockdown travel and come up with my top 10 gift ideas for your...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2936-4\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?_=4\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?w=2560 2560w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C2048 2048w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?w=2400 2400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">\n10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times</a></h2>\n					November 4, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-journal/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Journal</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-tech/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Tech</a>\n					Comments Off on 10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times\n						<p>With public health officials saying things like &#8220;it will be easily by the end of 2021 and perhaps into the next year before we start having some semblance of...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?w=2560 2560w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C2048 2048w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?w=2400 2400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\">\nPodcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food</a></h2>\n					October 16, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/food-2/\" rel=\"category tag\">Food</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					Comments Off on Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food\n						<p>Trying to recover from a long weekend of eating and drinking through the neighborhoods of South Philly. Our movable feast reminded me that food may be the one experience...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2896-5\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?_=5\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php?paged=2\" >More Posts</a>\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-list-main -->','Home','','inherit','closed','closed','','3141-revision-v1','','','2021-03-02 19:19:18','2021-03-03 00:19:18','',3141,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/02/3141-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3266,1,'2021-03-02 19:19:18','2021-03-03 00:19:18','<h2>TravelCommons</h2>		\n			The podcast giving the voice of the traveler<br><br>It\'s more about the journey than the destination		\n<a onMouseOver=\"this.style.color=`#2d2d2d`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#ffffff`\" onMouseOut=\"this.style.color=`#ffffff`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#c01f2c`\" style=\"color:#ffffff; background-color:#c01f2c\" href=\"#!\">Subscribe</a>   \n<!-- Modal HTML embedded directly into document. -->\n	<ul><li><a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Apple-Podcasts.png\" />Apple Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Google-Podcasts.png\" />Google Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Spotify.png\" />Spotify</a></li><li><a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/SoundCloud.png\" />SoundCloud</a></li><li><a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Stitcher.png\" />Stitcher</a></li><li><a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Amazon-Music.png\" />Amazon Music</a></li><li><a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/TravelcommonsPodcast\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/RSS.png\" />RSS</a></li></ul>                                       \n			<!-- close .secondline-addons-subscribe-button-container -->\n			<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/episodes/\" role=\"button\">\n						View Episodes\n					</a>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?w=1334 1334w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\nPodcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips</a></h2>\n					January 14, 2021\n						Episode 171										\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n						<p>Pivoting from San Diego to Tucson for COVID restrictions; planning tips for travel during COVID; CEO of Privacy4Cars talks about leaving data behind in rental cars</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\"> Click Here for the Episode Show Notes</a>\n					<!--[if lt IE 9]><![endif]-->\n<audio id=\"audio-2997-1\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?_=1\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-list-main -->\n			<h2>Latest Posts</h2>		\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?w=2000 2000w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\">\nQuick Notes on Our Trip to Tucson</a></h2>\n					February 1, 2021\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/beer/\" rel=\"category tag\">Beer</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/food-2/\" rel=\"category tag\">Food</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-journal/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Journal</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/#comments\">2 Comments</a>\n						<p>I left my suitcase at the door of our West Tucson Airbnb and walked out onto the back patio to watch the sun slip behind the Tucson Mountains. The...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?w=1334 1334w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\nPodcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips</a></h2>\n					January 14, 2021\n						Episode 171										\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n						<p>Pivoting from San Diego to Tucson for COVID restrictions; planning tips for travel during COVID; CEO of Privacy4Cars talks about leaving data behind in rental cars</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2997-2\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?_=2\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?w=919 919w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">\nPodcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors</a></h2>\n					December 16, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					Comments Off on Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors\n						<p>No Thanksgiving travel, but looking at the travel volume for this, the busiest travel week of the year, shows just how far things have fallen. The Qantas CEO said...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2957-3\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?_=3\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?w=1299 1299w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">\nPodcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers</a></h2>\n					November 12, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-tech/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Tech</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/#comments\">3 Comments</a>\n						<p>No travel since the last episode, so I had some time to think back through my post-lockdown travel and come up with my top 10 gift ideas for your...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2936-4\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?_=4\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?w=2560 2560w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C2048 2048w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?w=2400 2400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">\n10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times</a></h2>\n					November 4, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-journal/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Journal</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-tech/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Tech</a>\n					Comments Off on 10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times\n						<p>With public health officials saying things like &#8220;it will be easily by the end of 2021 and perhaps into the next year before we start having some semblance of...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?w=2560 2560w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C2048 2048w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?w=2400 2400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\">\nPodcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food</a></h2>\n					October 16, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/food-2/\" rel=\"category tag\">Food</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					Comments Off on Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food\n						<p>Trying to recover from a long weekend of eating and drinking through the neighborhoods of South Philly. Our movable feast reminded me that food may be the one experience...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2896-5\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?_=5\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php?paged=2\" >More Posts</a>\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-list-main -->','Home','','inherit','closed','closed','','3141-revision-v1','','','2021-03-02 19:19:18','2021-03-03 00:19:18','',3141,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/02/3141-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3267,1,'2021-03-02 19:19:38','2021-03-03 00:19:38','<h2>TravelCommons</h2>		\n			The podcast giving the voice of the traveler<br><br>It\'s more about the journey than the destination		\n<a onMouseOver=\"this.style.color=`#2d2d2d`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#ffffff`\" onMouseOut=\"this.style.color=`#ffffff`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#c01f2c`\" style=\"color:#ffffff; background-color:#c01f2c\" href=\"#!\">Subscribe</a>   \n<!-- Modal HTML embedded directly into document. -->\n	<ul><li><a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Apple-Podcasts.png\" />Apple Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Google-Podcasts.png\" />Google Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Spotify.png\" />Spotify</a></li><li><a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/SoundCloud.png\" />SoundCloud</a></li><li><a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Stitcher.png\" />Stitcher</a></li><li><a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Amazon-Music.png\" />Amazon Music</a></li><li><a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/TravelcommonsPodcast\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/RSS.png\" />RSS</a></li></ul>                                       \n			<!-- close .secondline-addons-subscribe-button-container -->\n			<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/episodes/\" role=\"button\">\n						View Episodes\n					</a>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?w=1334 1334w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\nPodcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips</a></h2>\n					January 14, 2021\n						Episode 171										\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n						<p>Pivoting from San Diego to Tucson for COVID restrictions; planning tips for travel during COVID; CEO of Privacy4Cars talks about leaving data behind in rental cars</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\"> Click Here for the Episode Show Notes</a>\n					<!--[if lt IE 9]><![endif]-->\n<audio id=\"audio-2997-1\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?_=1\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-list-main -->\n			<h2>Latest Posts</h2>		\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?w=2000 2000w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\">\nQuick Notes on Our Trip to Tucson</a></h2>\n					February 1, 2021\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/beer/\" rel=\"category tag\">Beer</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/food-2/\" rel=\"category tag\">Food</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-journal/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Journal</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/#comments\">2 Comments</a>\n						<p>I left my suitcase at the door of our West Tucson Airbnb and walked out onto the back patio to watch the sun slip behind the Tucson Mountains. The...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?w=1334 1334w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\nPodcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips</a></h2>\n					January 14, 2021\n						Episode 171										\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n						<p>Pivoting from San Diego to Tucson for COVID restrictions; planning tips for travel during COVID; CEO of Privacy4Cars talks about leaving data behind in rental cars</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2997-2\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?_=2\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?w=919 919w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">\nPodcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors</a></h2>\n					December 16, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					Comments Off on Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors\n						<p>No Thanksgiving travel, but looking at the travel volume for this, the busiest travel week of the year, shows just how far things have fallen. The Qantas CEO said...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2957-3\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?_=3\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?w=1299 1299w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">\nPodcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers</a></h2>\n					November 12, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-tech/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Tech</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/#comments\">3 Comments</a>\n						<p>No travel since the last episode, so I had some time to think back through my post-lockdown travel and come up with my top 10 gift ideas for your...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2936-4\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?_=4\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?w=2560 2560w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C2048 2048w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?w=2400 2400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">\n10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times</a></h2>\n					November 4, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-journal/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Journal</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-tech/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Tech</a>\n					Comments Off on 10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times\n						<p>With public health officials saying things like &#8220;it will be easily by the end of 2021 and perhaps into the next year before we start having some semblance of...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?w=2560 2560w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C2048 2048w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?w=2400 2400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\">\nPodcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food</a></h2>\n					October 16, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/food-2/\" rel=\"category tag\">Food</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					Comments Off on Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food\n						<p>Trying to recover from a long weekend of eating and drinking through the neighborhoods of South Philly. Our movable feast reminded me that food may be the one experience...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2896-5\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?_=5\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php?paged=2\" >More Posts</a>\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-list-main -->','Home','','inherit','closed','closed','','3141-revision-v1','','','2021-03-02 19:19:38','2021-03-03 00:19:38','',3141,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/02/3141-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3268,1,'2021-03-02 19:19:38','2021-03-03 00:19:38','<h2>TravelCommons</h2>		\n			The podcast giving the voice of the traveler<br><br>It\'s more about the journey than the destination		\n<a onMouseOver=\"this.style.color=`#2d2d2d`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#ffffff`\" onMouseOut=\"this.style.color=`#ffffff`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#c01f2c`\" style=\"color:#ffffff; background-color:#c01f2c\" href=\"#!\">Subscribe</a>   \n<!-- Modal HTML embedded directly into document. -->\n	<ul><li><a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Apple-Podcasts.png\" />Apple Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Google-Podcasts.png\" />Google Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Spotify.png\" />Spotify</a></li><li><a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/SoundCloud.png\" />SoundCloud</a></li><li><a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Stitcher.png\" />Stitcher</a></li><li><a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Amazon-Music.png\" />Amazon Music</a></li><li><a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/TravelcommonsPodcast\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/RSS.png\" />RSS</a></li></ul>                                       \n			<!-- close .secondline-addons-subscribe-button-container -->\n			<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/episodes/\" role=\"button\">\n						View Episodes\n					</a>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?w=1334 1334w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\nPodcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips</a></h2>\n					January 14, 2021\n						Episode 171										\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n						<p>Pivoting from San Diego to Tucson for COVID restrictions; planning tips for travel during COVID; CEO of Privacy4Cars talks about leaving data behind in rental cars</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\"> Click Here for the Episode Show Notes</a>\n					<!--[if lt IE 9]><![endif]-->\n<audio id=\"audio-2997-1\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?_=1\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-list-main -->\n			<h2>Latest Posts</h2>		\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?w=2000 2000w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\">\nQuick Notes on Our Trip to Tucson</a></h2>\n					February 1, 2021\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/beer/\" rel=\"category tag\">Beer</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/food-2/\" rel=\"category tag\">Food</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-journal/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Journal</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/#comments\">2 Comments</a>\n						<p>I left my suitcase at the door of our West Tucson Airbnb and walked out onto the back patio to watch the sun slip behind the Tucson Mountains. The...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?w=1334 1334w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\nPodcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips</a></h2>\n					January 14, 2021\n						Episode 171										\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n						<p>Pivoting from San Diego to Tucson for COVID restrictions; planning tips for travel during COVID; CEO of Privacy4Cars talks about leaving data behind in rental cars</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2997-2\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?_=2\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?w=919 919w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">\nPodcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors</a></h2>\n					December 16, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					Comments Off on Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors\n						<p>No Thanksgiving travel, but looking at the travel volume for this, the busiest travel week of the year, shows just how far things have fallen. The Qantas CEO said...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2957-3\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?_=3\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?w=1299 1299w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">\nPodcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers</a></h2>\n					November 12, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-tech/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Tech</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/#comments\">3 Comments</a>\n						<p>No travel since the last episode, so I had some time to think back through my post-lockdown travel and come up with my top 10 gift ideas for your...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2936-4\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?_=4\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?w=2560 2560w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C2048 2048w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?w=2400 2400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">\n10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times</a></h2>\n					November 4, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-journal/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Journal</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-tech/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Tech</a>\n					Comments Off on 10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times\n						<p>With public health officials saying things like &#8220;it will be easily by the end of 2021 and perhaps into the next year before we start having some semblance of...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?w=2560 2560w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C2048 2048w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?w=2400 2400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\">\nPodcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food</a></h2>\n					October 16, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/food-2/\" rel=\"category tag\">Food</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					Comments Off on Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food\n						<p>Trying to recover from a long weekend of eating and drinking through the neighborhoods of South Philly. Our movable feast reminded me that food may be the one experience...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2896-5\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?_=5\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php?paged=2\" >More Posts</a>\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-list-main -->','Home','','inherit','closed','closed','','3141-revision-v1','','','2021-03-02 19:19:38','2021-03-03 00:19:38','',3141,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/02/3141-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3269,1,'2021-03-02 19:19:38','2021-03-03 00:19:38','<h2>Travel Commons</h2>		\n			The podcast giving the voice of the traveler<br><br>It\'s more about the journey than the destination		\n<a onMouseOver=\"this.style.color=`#2d2d2d`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#ffffff`\" onMouseOut=\"this.style.color=`#ffffff`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#c01f2c`\" style=\"color:#ffffff; background-color:#c01f2c\" href=\"#!\">Subscribe</a>   \n<!-- Modal HTML embedded directly into document. -->\n	<ul><li><a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Apple-Podcasts.png\" />Apple Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Google-Podcasts.png\" />Google Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Spotify.png\" />Spotify</a></li><li><a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/SoundCloud.png\" />SoundCloud</a></li><li><a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Stitcher.png\" />Stitcher</a></li><li><a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Amazon-Music.png\" />Amazon Music</a></li><li><a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/TravelcommonsPodcast\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/RSS.png\" />RSS</a></li></ul>                                       \n			<!-- close .secondline-addons-subscribe-button-container -->\n			<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/episodes/\" role=\"button\">\n						View Episodes\n					</a>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?w=1334 1334w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\nPodcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips</a></h2>\n					January 14, 2021\n						Episode 171										\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n						<p>Pivoting from San Diego to Tucson for COVID restrictions; planning tips for travel during COVID; CEO of Privacy4Cars talks about leaving data behind in rental cars</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\"> Click Here for the Episode Show Notes</a>\n					<!--[if lt IE 9]><![endif]-->\n<audio id=\"audio-2997-1\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?_=1\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-list-main -->\n			<h2>Latest Posts</h2>		\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?w=2000 2000w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\">\nQuick Notes on Our Trip to Tucson</a></h2>\n					February 1, 2021\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/beer/\" rel=\"category tag\">Beer</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/food-2/\" rel=\"category tag\">Food</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-journal/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Journal</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/#comments\">2 Comments</a>\n						<p>I left my suitcase at the door of our West Tucson Airbnb and walked out onto the back patio to watch the sun slip behind the Tucson Mountains. The...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?w=1334 1334w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\nPodcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips</a></h2>\n					January 14, 2021\n						Episode 171										\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n						<p>Pivoting from San Diego to Tucson for COVID restrictions; planning tips for travel during COVID; CEO of Privacy4Cars talks about leaving data behind in rental cars</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2997-2\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?_=2\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?w=919 919w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">\nPodcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors</a></h2>\n					December 16, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					Comments Off on Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors\n						<p>No Thanksgiving travel, but looking at the travel volume for this, the busiest travel week of the year, shows just how far things have fallen. The Qantas CEO said...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2957-3\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?_=3\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?w=1299 1299w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">\nPodcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers</a></h2>\n					November 12, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-tech/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Tech</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/#comments\">3 Comments</a>\n						<p>No travel since the last episode, so I had some time to think back through my post-lockdown travel and come up with my top 10 gift ideas for your...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2936-4\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?_=4\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?w=2560 2560w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C2048 2048w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?w=2400 2400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">\n10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times</a></h2>\n					November 4, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-journal/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Journal</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-tech/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Tech</a>\n					Comments Off on 10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times\n						<p>With public health officials saying things like &#8220;it will be easily by the end of 2021 and perhaps into the next year before we start having some semblance of...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?w=2560 2560w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C2048 2048w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?w=2400 2400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\">\nPodcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food</a></h2>\n					October 16, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/food-2/\" rel=\"category tag\">Food</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					Comments Off on Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food\n						<p>Trying to recover from a long weekend of eating and drinking through the neighborhoods of South Philly. Our movable feast reminded me that food may be the one experience...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2896-5\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?_=5\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php?paged=2\" >More Posts</a>\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-list-main -->','Home','','inherit','closed','closed','','3141-revision-v1','','','2021-03-02 19:19:38','2021-03-03 00:19:38','',3141,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/02/3141-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3270,1,'2021-03-02 19:21:39','2021-03-03 00:21:39','<h2>Travel Commons</h2>		\n			The podcast giving the voice of the traveler<br><br>It\'s more about the journey than the destination		\n<a onMouseOver=\"this.style.color=`#2d2d2d`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#ffffff`\" onMouseOut=\"this.style.color=`#ffffff`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#c01f2c`\" style=\"color:#ffffff; background-color:#c01f2c\" href=\"#!\">Subscribe</a>   \n<!-- Modal HTML embedded directly into document. -->\n	<ul><li><a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Apple-Podcasts.png\" />Apple Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Google-Podcasts.png\" />Google Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Spotify.png\" />Spotify</a></li><li><a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/SoundCloud.png\" />SoundCloud</a></li><li><a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Stitcher.png\" />Stitcher</a></li><li><a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Amazon-Music.png\" />Amazon Music</a></li><li><a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/TravelcommonsPodcast\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/RSS.png\" />RSS</a></li></ul>                                       \n			<!-- close .secondline-addons-subscribe-button-container -->\n			<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/episodes/\" role=\"button\">\n						View Episodes\n					</a>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?w=1334 1334w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\nPodcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips</a></h2>\n					January 14, 2021\n						Episode 171										\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n						<p>Pivoting from San Diego to Tucson for COVID restrictions; planning tips for travel during COVID; CEO of Privacy4Cars talks about leaving data behind in rental cars</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\"> Click Here for the Episode Show Notes</a>\n					<!--[if lt IE 9]><![endif]-->\n<audio id=\"audio-2997-1\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?_=1\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-list-main -->\n			<h2>Latest Posts</h2>		\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?w=2000 2000w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\">\nQuick Notes on Our Trip to Tucson</a></h2>\n					February 1, 2021\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/beer/\" rel=\"category tag\">Beer</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/food-2/\" rel=\"category tag\">Food</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-journal/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Journal</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/#comments\">2 Comments</a>\n						<p>I left my suitcase at the door of our West Tucson Airbnb and walked out onto the back patio to watch the sun slip behind the Tucson Mountains. The...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?w=1334 1334w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\nPodcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips</a></h2>\n					January 14, 2021\n						Episode 171										\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n						<p>Pivoting from San Diego to Tucson for COVID restrictions; planning tips for travel during COVID; CEO of Privacy4Cars talks about leaving data behind in rental cars</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2997-2\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?_=2\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?w=919 919w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">\nPodcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors</a></h2>\n					December 16, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					Comments Off on Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors\n						<p>No Thanksgiving travel, but looking at the travel volume for this, the busiest travel week of the year, shows just how far things have fallen. The Qantas CEO said...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2957-3\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?_=3\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?w=1299 1299w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">\nPodcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers</a></h2>\n					November 12, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-tech/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Tech</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/#comments\">3 Comments</a>\n						<p>No travel since the last episode, so I had some time to think back through my post-lockdown travel and come up with my top 10 gift ideas for your...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2936-4\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?_=4\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?w=2560 2560w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C2048 2048w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?w=2400 2400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">\n10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times</a></h2>\n					November 4, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-journal/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Journal</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-tech/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Tech</a>\n					Comments Off on 10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times\n						<p>With public health officials saying things like &#8220;it will be easily by the end of 2021 and perhaps into the next year before we start having some semblance of...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?w=2560 2560w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C2048 2048w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?w=2400 2400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\">\nPodcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food</a></h2>\n					October 16, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/food-2/\" rel=\"category tag\">Food</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					Comments Off on Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food\n						<p>Trying to recover from a long weekend of eating and drinking through the neighborhoods of South Philly. Our movable feast reminded me that food may be the one experience...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2896-5\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?_=5\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php?paged=2\" >More Posts</a>\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-list-main -->','Home','','inherit','closed','closed','','3141-revision-v1','','','2021-03-02 19:21:39','2021-03-03 00:21:39','',3141,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/02/3141-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3271,1,'2021-03-02 19:21:39','2021-03-03 00:21:39','<h2>Travel Commons</h2>		\n			The podcast giving the voice of the traveler<br><br>It\'s more about the journey than the destination		\n<a onMouseOver=\"this.style.color=`#2d2d2d`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#ffffff`\" onMouseOut=\"this.style.color=`#ffffff`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#c01f2c`\" style=\"color:#ffffff; background-color:#c01f2c\" href=\"#!\">Subscribe</a>   \n<!-- Modal HTML embedded directly into document. -->\n	<ul><li><a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Apple-Podcasts.png\" />Apple Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Google-Podcasts.png\" />Google Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Spotify.png\" />Spotify</a></li><li><a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/SoundCloud.png\" />SoundCloud</a></li><li><a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Stitcher.png\" />Stitcher</a></li><li><a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Amazon-Music.png\" />Amazon Music</a></li><li><a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/TravelcommonsPodcast\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/RSS.png\" />RSS</a></li></ul>                                       \n			<!-- close .secondline-addons-subscribe-button-container -->\n			<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/episodes/\" role=\"button\">\n						View Episodes\n					</a>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?w=1334 1334w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\nPodcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips</a></h2>\n					January 14, 2021\n						Episode 171										\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n						<p>Pivoting from San Diego to Tucson for COVID restrictions; planning tips for travel during COVID; CEO of Privacy4Cars talks about leaving data behind in rental cars</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\"> Click Here for the Episode Show Notes</a>\n					<!--[if lt IE 9]><![endif]-->\n<audio id=\"audio-2997-1\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?_=1\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-list-main -->\n			<h2>Latest Posts</h2>		\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?w=2000 2000w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\">\nQuick Notes on Our Trip to Tucson</a></h2>\n					February 1, 2021\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/beer/\" rel=\"category tag\">Beer</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/food-2/\" rel=\"category tag\">Food</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-journal/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Journal</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/#comments\">2 Comments</a>\n						<p>I left my suitcase at the door of our West Tucson Airbnb and walked out onto the back patio to watch the sun slip behind the Tucson Mountains. The...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?w=1334 1334w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\nPodcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips</a></h2>\n					January 14, 2021\n						Episode 171										\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n						<p>Pivoting from San Diego to Tucson for COVID restrictions; planning tips for travel during COVID; CEO of Privacy4Cars talks about leaving data behind in rental cars</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2997-2\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?_=2\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?w=919 919w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">\nPodcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors</a></h2>\n					December 16, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					Comments Off on Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors\n						<p>No Thanksgiving travel, but looking at the travel volume for this, the busiest travel week of the year, shows just how far things have fallen. The Qantas CEO said...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2957-3\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?_=3\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?w=1299 1299w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">\nPodcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers</a></h2>\n					November 12, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-tech/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Tech</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/#comments\">3 Comments</a>\n						<p>No travel since the last episode, so I had some time to think back through my post-lockdown travel and come up with my top 10 gift ideas for your...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2936-4\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?_=4\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?w=2560 2560w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C2048 2048w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?w=2400 2400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">\n10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times</a></h2>\n					November 4, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-journal/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Journal</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-tech/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Tech</a>\n					Comments Off on 10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times\n						<p>With public health officials saying things like &#8220;it will be easily by the end of 2021 and perhaps into the next year before we start having some semblance of...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?w=2560 2560w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C2048 2048w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?w=2400 2400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\">\nPodcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food</a></h2>\n					October 16, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/food-2/\" rel=\"category tag\">Food</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					Comments Off on Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food\n						<p>Trying to recover from a long weekend of eating and drinking through the neighborhoods of South Philly. Our movable feast reminded me that food may be the one experience...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2896-5\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?_=5\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php?paged=2\" >More Posts</a>\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-list-main -->','Home','','inherit','closed','closed','','3141-revision-v1','','','2021-03-02 19:21:39','2021-03-03 00:21:39','',3141,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/02/3141-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3272,1,'2021-03-02 19:21:39','2021-03-03 00:21:39','<h2>TravelCommons</h2>		\n			The podcast giving the voice of the traveler<br><br>It\'s more about the journey than the destination		\n<a onMouseOver=\"this.style.color=`#2d2d2d`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#ffffff`\" onMouseOut=\"this.style.color=`#ffffff`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#c01f2c`\" style=\"color:#ffffff; background-color:#c01f2c\" href=\"#!\">Subscribe</a>   \n<!-- Modal HTML embedded directly into document. -->\n	<ul><li><a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Apple-Podcasts.png\" />Apple Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Google-Podcasts.png\" />Google Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Spotify.png\" />Spotify</a></li><li><a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/SoundCloud.png\" />SoundCloud</a></li><li><a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Stitcher.png\" />Stitcher</a></li><li><a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Amazon-Music.png\" />Amazon Music</a></li><li><a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/TravelcommonsPodcast\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/RSS.png\" />RSS</a></li></ul>                                       \n			<!-- close .secondline-addons-subscribe-button-container -->\n			<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/episodes/\" role=\"button\">\n						View Episodes\n					</a>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?w=1334 1334w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\nPodcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips</a></h2>\n					January 14, 2021\n						Episode 171										\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n						<p>Pivoting from San Diego to Tucson for COVID restrictions; planning tips for travel during COVID; CEO of Privacy4Cars talks about leaving data behind in rental cars</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\"> Click Here for the Episode Show Notes</a>\n					<!--[if lt IE 9]><![endif]-->\n<audio id=\"audio-2997-1\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?_=1\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-list-main -->\n			<h2>Latest Posts</h2>		\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?w=2000 2000w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\">\nQuick Notes on Our Trip to Tucson</a></h2>\n					February 1, 2021\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/beer/\" rel=\"category tag\">Beer</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/food-2/\" rel=\"category tag\">Food</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-journal/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Journal</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/#comments\">2 Comments</a>\n						<p>I left my suitcase at the door of our West Tucson Airbnb and walked out onto the back patio to watch the sun slip behind the Tucson Mountains. The...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?w=1334 1334w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\nPodcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips</a></h2>\n					January 14, 2021\n						Episode 171										\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n						<p>Pivoting from San Diego to Tucson for COVID restrictions; planning tips for travel during COVID; CEO of Privacy4Cars talks about leaving data behind in rental cars</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2997-2\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?_=2\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?w=919 919w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">\nPodcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors</a></h2>\n					December 16, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					Comments Off on Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors\n						<p>No Thanksgiving travel, but looking at the travel volume for this, the busiest travel week of the year, shows just how far things have fallen. The Qantas CEO said...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2957-3\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?_=3\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?w=1299 1299w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">\nPodcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers</a></h2>\n					November 12, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-tech/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Tech</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/#comments\">3 Comments</a>\n						<p>No travel since the last episode, so I had some time to think back through my post-lockdown travel and come up with my top 10 gift ideas for your...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2936-4\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?_=4\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?w=2560 2560w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C2048 2048w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?w=2400 2400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">\n10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times</a></h2>\n					November 4, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-journal/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Journal</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-tech/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Tech</a>\n					Comments Off on 10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times\n						<p>With public health officials saying things like &#8220;it will be easily by the end of 2021 and perhaps into the next year before we start having some semblance of...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?w=2560 2560w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C2048 2048w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?w=2400 2400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\">\nPodcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food</a></h2>\n					October 16, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/food-2/\" rel=\"category tag\">Food</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					Comments Off on Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food\n						<p>Trying to recover from a long weekend of eating and drinking through the neighborhoods of South Philly. Our movable feast reminded me that food may be the one experience...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2896-5\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?_=5\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php?paged=2\" >More Posts</a>\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-list-main -->','Home','','inherit','closed','closed','','3141-revision-v1','','','2021-03-02 19:21:39','2021-03-03 00:21:39','',3141,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/02/3141-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3273,1,'2021-03-02 19:22:01','2021-03-03 00:22:01','<h2>TravelCommons</h2>		\n			The podcast giving the voice of the traveler<br><br>It\'s more about the journey than the destination		\n<a onMouseOver=\"this.style.color=`#2d2d2d`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#ffffff`\" onMouseOut=\"this.style.color=`#ffffff`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#c01f2c`\" style=\"color:#ffffff; background-color:#c01f2c\" href=\"#!\">Subscribe</a>   \n<!-- Modal HTML embedded directly into document. -->\n	<ul><li><a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Apple-Podcasts.png\" />Apple Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Google-Podcasts.png\" />Google Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Spotify.png\" />Spotify</a></li><li><a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/SoundCloud.png\" />SoundCloud</a></li><li><a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Stitcher.png\" />Stitcher</a></li><li><a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Amazon-Music.png\" />Amazon Music</a></li><li><a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/TravelcommonsPodcast\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/RSS.png\" />RSS</a></li></ul>                                       \n			<!-- close .secondline-addons-subscribe-button-container -->\n			<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/episodes/\" role=\"button\">\n						View Episodes\n					</a>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?w=1334 1334w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\nPodcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips</a></h2>\n					January 14, 2021\n						Episode 171										\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n						<p>Pivoting from San Diego to Tucson for COVID restrictions; planning tips for travel during COVID; CEO of Privacy4Cars talks about leaving data behind in rental cars</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\"> Click Here for the Episode Show Notes</a>\n					<!--[if lt IE 9]><![endif]-->\n<audio id=\"audio-2997-1\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?_=1\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-list-main -->\n			<h2>Latest Posts</h2>		\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?w=2000 2000w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\">\nQuick Notes on Our Trip to Tucson</a></h2>\n					February 1, 2021\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/beer/\" rel=\"category tag\">Beer</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/food-2/\" rel=\"category tag\">Food</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-journal/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Journal</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/#comments\">2 Comments</a>\n						<p>I left my suitcase at the door of our West Tucson Airbnb and walked out onto the back patio to watch the sun slip behind the Tucson Mountains. The...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?w=1334 1334w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\nPodcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips</a></h2>\n					January 14, 2021\n						Episode 171										\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n						<p>Pivoting from San Diego to Tucson for COVID restrictions; planning tips for travel during COVID; CEO of Privacy4Cars talks about leaving data behind in rental cars</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2997-2\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?_=2\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?w=919 919w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">\nPodcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors</a></h2>\n					December 16, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					Comments Off on Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors\n						<p>No Thanksgiving travel, but looking at the travel volume for this, the busiest travel week of the year, shows just how far things have fallen. The Qantas CEO said...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2957-3\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?_=3\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?w=1299 1299w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">\nPodcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers</a></h2>\n					November 12, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-tech/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Tech</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/#comments\">3 Comments</a>\n						<p>No travel since the last episode, so I had some time to think back through my post-lockdown travel and come up with my top 10 gift ideas for your...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2936-4\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?_=4\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?w=2560 2560w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C2048 2048w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?w=2400 2400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">\n10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times</a></h2>\n					November 4, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-journal/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Journal</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-tech/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Tech</a>\n					Comments Off on 10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times\n						<p>With public health officials saying things like &#8220;it will be easily by the end of 2021 and perhaps into the next year before we start having some semblance of...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?w=2560 2560w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C2048 2048w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?w=2400 2400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\">\nPodcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food</a></h2>\n					October 16, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/food-2/\" rel=\"category tag\">Food</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					Comments Off on Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food\n						<p>Trying to recover from a long weekend of eating and drinking through the neighborhoods of South Philly. Our movable feast reminded me that food may be the one experience...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2896-5\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?_=5\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php?paged=2\" >More Posts</a>\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-list-main -->','Home','','inherit','closed','closed','','3141-revision-v1','','','2021-03-02 19:22:01','2021-03-03 00:22:01','',3141,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/02/3141-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3274,1,'2021-03-02 19:22:02','2021-03-03 00:22:02','<h2>TravelCommons</h2>		\n			The podcast giving the voice of the traveler<br><br>It\'s more about the journey than the destination		\n<a onMouseOver=\"this.style.color=`#2d2d2d`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#ffffff`\" onMouseOut=\"this.style.color=`#ffffff`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#c01f2c`\" style=\"color:#ffffff; background-color:#c01f2c\" href=\"#!\">Subscribe</a>   \n<!-- Modal HTML embedded directly into document. -->\n	<ul><li><a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Apple-Podcasts.png\" />Apple Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Google-Podcasts.png\" />Google Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Spotify.png\" />Spotify</a></li><li><a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/SoundCloud.png\" />SoundCloud</a></li><li><a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Stitcher.png\" />Stitcher</a></li><li><a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Amazon-Music.png\" />Amazon Music</a></li><li><a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/TravelcommonsPodcast\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/RSS.png\" />RSS</a></li></ul>                                       \n			<!-- close .secondline-addons-subscribe-button-container -->\n			<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/episodes/\" role=\"button\">\n						View Episodes\n					</a>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?w=1334 1334w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\nPodcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips</a></h2>\n					January 14, 2021\n						Episode 171										\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n						<p>Pivoting from San Diego to Tucson for COVID restrictions; planning tips for travel during COVID; CEO of Privacy4Cars talks about leaving data behind in rental cars</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\"> Click Here for the Episode Show Notes</a>\n					<!--[if lt IE 9]><![endif]-->\n<audio id=\"audio-2997-1\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?_=1\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-list-main -->\n			<h2>Latest Posts</h2>		\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?w=2000 2000w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\">\nQuick Notes on Our Trip to Tucson</a></h2>\n					February 1, 2021\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/beer/\" rel=\"category tag\">Beer</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/food-2/\" rel=\"category tag\">Food</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-journal/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Journal</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/#comments\">2 Comments</a>\n						<p>I left my suitcase at the door of our West Tucson Airbnb and walked out onto the back patio to watch the sun slip behind the Tucson Mountains. The...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?w=1334 1334w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\nPodcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips</a></h2>\n					January 14, 2021\n						Episode 171										\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n						<p>Pivoting from San Diego to Tucson for COVID restrictions; planning tips for travel during COVID; CEO of Privacy4Cars talks about leaving data behind in rental cars</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2997-2\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?_=2\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?w=919 919w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">\nPodcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors</a></h2>\n					December 16, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					Comments Off on Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors\n						<p>No Thanksgiving travel, but looking at the travel volume for this, the busiest travel week of the year, shows just how far things have fallen. The Qantas CEO said...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2957-3\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?_=3\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?w=1299 1299w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">\nPodcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers</a></h2>\n					November 12, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-tech/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Tech</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/#comments\">3 Comments</a>\n						<p>No travel since the last episode, so I had some time to think back through my post-lockdown travel and come up with my top 10 gift ideas for your...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2936-4\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?_=4\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?w=2560 2560w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C2048 2048w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?w=2400 2400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">\n10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times</a></h2>\n					November 4, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-journal/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Journal</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-tech/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Tech</a>\n					Comments Off on 10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times\n						<p>With public health officials saying things like &#8220;it will be easily by the end of 2021 and perhaps into the next year before we start having some semblance of...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?w=2560 2560w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C2048 2048w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?w=2400 2400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\">\nPodcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food</a></h2>\n					October 16, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/food-2/\" rel=\"category tag\">Food</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					Comments Off on Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food\n						<p>Trying to recover from a long weekend of eating and drinking through the neighborhoods of South Philly. Our movable feast reminded me that food may be the one experience...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2896-5\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?_=5\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php?paged=2\" >More Posts</a>\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-list-main -->','Home','','inherit','closed','closed','','3141-revision-v1','','','2021-03-02 19:22:02','2021-03-03 00:22:02','',3141,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/02/3141-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3275,1,'2021-03-02 19:22:02','2021-03-03 00:22:02','<h2>TravelCommons</h2>		\n			The podcast giving the voice of the traveler<br><br>It\'s more about the journey than the destination		\n<a onMouseOver=\"this.style.color=`#2d2d2d`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#ffffff`\" onMouseOut=\"this.style.color=`#ffffff`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#c01f2c`\" style=\"color:#ffffff; background-color:#c01f2c\" href=\"#!\">Subscribe</a>   \n<!-- Modal HTML embedded directly into document. -->\n	<ul><li><a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Apple-Podcasts.png\" />Apple Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Google-Podcasts.png\" />Google Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Spotify.png\" />Spotify</a></li><li><a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/SoundCloud.png\" />SoundCloud</a></li><li><a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Stitcher.png\" />Stitcher</a></li><li><a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Amazon-Music.png\" />Amazon Music</a></li><li><a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/TravelcommonsPodcast\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/RSS.png\" />RSS</a></li></ul>                                       \n			<!-- close .secondline-addons-subscribe-button-container -->\n			<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/episodes/\" role=\"button\">\n						View Episodes\n					</a>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?w=1334 1334w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\nPodcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips</a></h2>\n					January 14, 2021\n						Episode 171										\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n						<p>Pivoting from San Diego to Tucson for COVID restrictions; planning tips for travel during COVID; CEO of Privacy4Cars talks about leaving data behind in rental cars</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\"> Click Here for the Episode Show Notes</a>\n					<!--[if lt IE 9]><![endif]-->\n<audio id=\"audio-2997-1\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?_=1\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-list-main -->\n			<h2>Latest Posts</h2>		\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?w=2000 2000w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\">\nQuick Notes on Our Trip to Tucson</a></h2>\n					February 1, 2021\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/beer/\" rel=\"category tag\">Beer</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/food-2/\" rel=\"category tag\">Food</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-journal/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Journal</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/#comments\">2 Comments</a>\n						<p>I left my suitcase at the door of our West Tucson Airbnb and walked out onto the back patio to watch the sun slip behind the Tucson Mountains. The...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?w=1334 1334w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\nPodcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips</a></h2>\n					January 14, 2021\n						Episode 171										\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n						<p>Pivoting from San Diego to Tucson for COVID restrictions; planning tips for travel during COVID; CEO of Privacy4Cars talks about leaving data behind in rental cars</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2997-2\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?_=2\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?w=919 919w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">\nPodcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors</a></h2>\n					December 16, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					Comments Off on Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors\n						<p>No Thanksgiving travel, but looking at the travel volume for this, the busiest travel week of the year, shows just how far things have fallen. The Qantas CEO said...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2957-3\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?_=3\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?w=1299 1299w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">\nPodcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers</a></h2>\n					November 12, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-tech/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Tech</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/#comments\">3 Comments</a>\n						<p>No travel since the last episode, so I had some time to think back through my post-lockdown travel and come up with my top 10 gift ideas for your...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2936-4\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?_=4\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?w=2560 2560w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C2048 2048w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?w=2400 2400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">\n10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times</a></h2>\n					November 4, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-journal/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Journal</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-tech/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Tech</a>\n					Comments Off on 10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times\n						<p>With public health officials saying things like &#8220;it will be easily by the end of 2021 and perhaps into the next year before we start having some semblance of...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?w=2560 2560w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C2048 2048w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?w=2400 2400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\">\nPodcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food</a></h2>\n					October 16, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/food-2/\" rel=\"category tag\">Food</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					Comments Off on Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food\n						<p>Trying to recover from a long weekend of eating and drinking through the neighborhoods of South Philly. Our movable feast reminded me that food may be the one experience...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2896-5\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?_=5\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php?paged=2\" >More Posts</a>\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-list-main -->','Home','','inherit','closed','closed','','3141-revision-v1','','','2021-03-02 19:22:02','2021-03-03 00:22:02','',3141,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/02/3141-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3276,1,'2021-03-02 19:24:05','2021-03-03 00:24:05','<h2>TravelCommons</h2>		\n			The podcast giving the voice of the traveler<br><br>It\'s more about the journey than the destination		\n<a onMouseOver=\"this.style.color=`#2d2d2d`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#ffffff`\" onMouseOut=\"this.style.color=`#ffffff`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#c01f2c`\" style=\"color:#ffffff; background-color:#c01f2c\" href=\"#!\">Subscribe</a>   \n<!-- Modal HTML embedded directly into document. -->\n	<ul><li><a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Apple-Podcasts.png\" />Apple Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Google-Podcasts.png\" />Google Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Spotify.png\" />Spotify</a></li><li><a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/SoundCloud.png\" />SoundCloud</a></li><li><a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Stitcher.png\" />Stitcher</a></li><li><a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Amazon-Music.png\" />Amazon Music</a></li><li><a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/TravelcommonsPodcast\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/RSS.png\" />RSS</a></li></ul>                                       \n			<!-- close .secondline-addons-subscribe-button-container -->\n			<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/episodes/\" role=\"button\">\n						View Episodes\n					</a>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?w=1334 1334w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\nPodcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips</a></h2>\n					January 14, 2021\n						Episode 171										\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n						<p>Pivoting from San Diego to Tucson for COVID restrictions; planning tips for travel during COVID; CEO of Privacy4Cars talks about leaving data behind in rental cars</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\"> Click Here for the Episode Show Notes</a>\n					<!--[if lt IE 9]><![endif]-->\n<audio id=\"audio-2997-1\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?_=1\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-list-main -->\n			<h2>Latest Posts</h2>		\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?w=2000 2000w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\">\nQuick Notes on Our Trip to Tucson</a></h2>\n					February 1, 2021\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/beer/\" rel=\"category tag\">Beer</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/food-2/\" rel=\"category tag\">Food</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-journal/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Journal</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/#comments\">2 Comments</a>\n						<p>I left my suitcase at the door of our West Tucson Airbnb and walked out onto the back patio to watch the sun slip behind the Tucson Mountains. The...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?w=1334 1334w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\nPodcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips</a></h2>\n					January 14, 2021\n						Episode 171										\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n						<p>Pivoting from San Diego to Tucson for COVID restrictions; planning tips for travel during COVID; CEO of Privacy4Cars talks about leaving data behind in rental cars</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2997-2\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?_=2\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?w=919 919w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">\nPodcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors</a></h2>\n					December 16, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					Comments Off on Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors\n						<p>No Thanksgiving travel, but looking at the travel volume for this, the busiest travel week of the year, shows just how far things have fallen. The Qantas CEO said...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2957-3\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?_=3\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?w=1299 1299w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">\nPodcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers</a></h2>\n					November 12, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-tech/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Tech</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/#comments\">3 Comments</a>\n						<p>No travel since the last episode, so I had some time to think back through my post-lockdown travel and come up with my top 10 gift ideas for your...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2936-4\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?_=4\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?w=2560 2560w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C2048 2048w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?w=2400 2400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">\n10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times</a></h2>\n					November 4, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-journal/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Journal</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-tech/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Tech</a>\n					Comments Off on 10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times\n						<p>With public health officials saying things like &#8220;it will be easily by the end of 2021 and perhaps into the next year before we start having some semblance of...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?w=2560 2560w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C2048 2048w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?w=2400 2400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\">\nPodcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food</a></h2>\n					October 16, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/food-2/\" rel=\"category tag\">Food</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					Comments Off on Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food\n						<p>Trying to recover from a long weekend of eating and drinking through the neighborhoods of South Philly. Our movable feast reminded me that food may be the one experience...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2896-5\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?_=5\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php?paged=2\" >More Posts</a>\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-list-main -->','Home','','inherit','closed','closed','','3141-revision-v1','','','2021-03-02 19:24:05','2021-03-03 00:24:05','',3141,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/02/3141-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3277,1,'2021-03-02 19:24:05','2021-03-03 00:24:05','<h2>TravelCommons</h2>		\n			The podcast giving the voice of the traveler<br><br>It\'s more about the journey than the destination		\n<a onMouseOver=\"this.style.color=`#2d2d2d`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#ffffff`\" onMouseOut=\"this.style.color=`#ffffff`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#c01f2c`\" style=\"color:#ffffff; background-color:#c01f2c\" href=\"#!\">Subscribe</a>   \n<!-- Modal HTML embedded directly into document. -->\n	<ul><li><a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Apple-Podcasts.png\" />Apple Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Google-Podcasts.png\" />Google Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Spotify.png\" />Spotify</a></li><li><a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/SoundCloud.png\" />SoundCloud</a></li><li><a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Stitcher.png\" />Stitcher</a></li><li><a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Amazon-Music.png\" />Amazon Music</a></li><li><a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/TravelcommonsPodcast\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/RSS.png\" />RSS</a></li></ul>                                       \n			<!-- close .secondline-addons-subscribe-button-container -->\n			<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/episodes/\" role=\"button\">\n						View Episodes\n					</a>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?w=1334 1334w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\nPodcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips</a></h2>\n					January 14, 2021\n						Episode 171										\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n						<p>Pivoting from San Diego to Tucson for COVID restrictions; planning tips for travel during COVID; CEO of Privacy4Cars talks about leaving data behind in rental cars</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\"> Click Here for the Episode Show Notes</a>\n					<!--[if lt IE 9]><![endif]-->\n<audio id=\"audio-2997-1\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?_=1\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-list-main -->\n			<h2>Latest Posts</h2>		\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?w=2000 2000w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\">\nQuick Notes on Our Trip to Tucson</a></h2>\n					February 1, 2021\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/beer/\" rel=\"category tag\">Beer</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/food-2/\" rel=\"category tag\">Food</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-journal/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Journal</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/#comments\">2 Comments</a>\n						<p>I left my suitcase at the door of our West Tucson Airbnb and walked out onto the back patio to watch the sun slip behind the Tucson Mountains. The...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?w=1334 1334w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\nPodcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips</a></h2>\n					January 14, 2021\n						Episode 171										\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n						<p>Pivoting from San Diego to Tucson for COVID restrictions; planning tips for travel during COVID; CEO of Privacy4Cars talks about leaving data behind in rental cars</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2997-2\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?_=2\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?w=919 919w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">\nPodcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors</a></h2>\n					December 16, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					Comments Off on Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors\n						<p>No Thanksgiving travel, but looking at the travel volume for this, the busiest travel week of the year, shows just how far things have fallen. The Qantas CEO said...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2957-3\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?_=3\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?w=1299 1299w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">\nPodcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers</a></h2>\n					November 12, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-tech/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Tech</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/#comments\">3 Comments</a>\n						<p>No travel since the last episode, so I had some time to think back through my post-lockdown travel and come up with my top 10 gift ideas for your...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2936-4\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?_=4\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?w=2560 2560w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C2048 2048w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?w=2400 2400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">\n10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times</a></h2>\n					November 4, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-journal/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Journal</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-tech/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Tech</a>\n					Comments Off on 10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times\n						<p>With public health officials saying things like &#8220;it will be easily by the end of 2021 and perhaps into the next year before we start having some semblance of...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?w=2560 2560w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C2048 2048w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?w=2400 2400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\">\nPodcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food</a></h2>\n					October 16, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/food-2/\" rel=\"category tag\">Food</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					Comments Off on Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food\n						<p>Trying to recover from a long weekend of eating and drinking through the neighborhoods of South Philly. Our movable feast reminded me that food may be the one experience...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2896-5\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?_=5\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php?paged=2\" >More Posts</a>\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-list-main -->','Home','','inherit','closed','closed','','3141-revision-v1','','','2021-03-02 19:24:05','2021-03-03 00:24:05','',3141,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/02/3141-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3278,1,'2021-03-02 19:24:05','2021-03-03 00:24:05','<h2>TravelCommons</h2>		\n			The podcast giving the voice of the traveler<br><br>It\'s more about the journey than the destination		\n<a onMouseOver=\"this.style.color=`#2d2d2d`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#ffffff`\" onMouseOut=\"this.style.color=`#ffffff`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#c01f2c`\" style=\"color:#ffffff; background-color:#c01f2c\" href=\"#!\">Subscribe</a>   \n<!-- Modal HTML embedded directly into document. -->\n	<ul><li><a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Apple-Podcasts.png\" />Apple Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Google-Podcasts.png\" />Google Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Spotify.png\" />Spotify</a></li><li><a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/SoundCloud.png\" />SoundCloud</a></li><li><a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Stitcher.png\" />Stitcher</a></li><li><a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Amazon-Music.png\" />Amazon Music</a></li><li><a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/TravelcommonsPodcast\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/RSS.png\" />RSS</a></li></ul>                                       \n			<!-- close .secondline-addons-subscribe-button-container -->\n			<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/episodes/\" role=\"button\">\n						View Episodes\n					</a>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?w=1334 1334w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\nPodcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips</a></h2>\n					January 14, 2021\n						Episode 171										\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n						<p>Pivoting from San Diego to Tucson for COVID restrictions; planning tips for travel during COVID; CEO of Privacy4Cars talks about leaving data behind in rental cars</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\"> Click Here for the Episode Show Notes</a>\n					<!--[if lt IE 9]><![endif]-->\n<audio id=\"audio-2997-1\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?_=1\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-list-main -->\n			<h2>Latest Posts</h2>		\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?w=2000 2000w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\">\nQuick Notes on Our Trip to Tucson</a></h2>\n					February 1, 2021\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/beer/\" rel=\"category tag\">Beer</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/food-2/\" rel=\"category tag\">Food</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-journal/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Journal</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/#comments\">2 Comments</a>\n						<p>I left my suitcase at the door of our West Tucson Airbnb and walked out onto the back patio to watch the sun slip behind the Tucson Mountains. The...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?w=1334 1334w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\nPodcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips</a></h2>\n					January 14, 2021\n						Episode 171										\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n						<p>Pivoting from San Diego to Tucson for COVID restrictions; planning tips for travel during COVID; CEO of Privacy4Cars talks about leaving data behind in rental cars</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2997-2\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?_=2\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?w=919 919w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">\nPodcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors</a></h2>\n					December 16, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					Comments Off on Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors\n						<p>No Thanksgiving travel, but looking at the travel volume for this, the busiest travel week of the year, shows just how far things have fallen. The Qantas CEO said...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2957-3\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?_=3\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?w=1299 1299w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">\nPodcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers</a></h2>\n					November 12, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-tech/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Tech</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/#comments\">3 Comments</a>\n						<p>No travel since the last episode, so I had some time to think back through my post-lockdown travel and come up with my top 10 gift ideas for your...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2936-4\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?_=4\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?w=2560 2560w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C2048 2048w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?w=2400 2400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">\n10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times</a></h2>\n					November 4, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-journal/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Journal</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-tech/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Tech</a>\n					Comments Off on 10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times\n						<p>With public health officials saying things like &#8220;it will be easily by the end of 2021 and perhaps into the next year before we start having some semblance of...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?w=2560 2560w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C2048 2048w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?w=2400 2400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\">\nPodcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food</a></h2>\n					October 16, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/food-2/\" rel=\"category tag\">Food</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					Comments Off on Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food\n						<p>Trying to recover from a long weekend of eating and drinking through the neighborhoods of South Philly. Our movable feast reminded me that food may be the one experience...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2896-5\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?_=5\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php?paged=2\" >More Posts</a>\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-list-main -->','Home','','inherit','closed','closed','','3141-revision-v1','','','2021-03-02 19:24:05','2021-03-03 00:24:05','',3141,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/02/3141-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3279,1,'2021-03-02 19:26:24','2021-03-03 00:26:24','<h2>TravelCommons</h2>		\n			The podcast giving the voice of the traveler<br><br>It\'s more about the journey than the destination		\n<a onMouseOver=\"this.style.color=`#2d2d2d`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#ffffff`\" onMouseOut=\"this.style.color=`#ffffff`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#c01f2c`\" style=\"color:#ffffff; background-color:#c01f2c\" href=\"#!\">Subscribe</a>   \n<!-- Modal HTML embedded directly into document. -->\n	<ul><li><a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Apple-Podcasts.png\" />Apple Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Google-Podcasts.png\" />Google Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Spotify.png\" />Spotify</a></li><li><a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/SoundCloud.png\" />SoundCloud</a></li><li><a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Stitcher.png\" />Stitcher</a></li><li><a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Amazon-Music.png\" />Amazon Music</a></li><li><a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/TravelcommonsPodcast\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/RSS.png\" />RSS</a></li></ul>                                       \n			<!-- close .secondline-addons-subscribe-button-container -->\n			<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/episodes/\" role=\"button\">\n						View Episodes\n					</a>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?w=1334 1334w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\nPodcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips</a></h2>\n					January 14, 2021\n						Episode 171										\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n						<p>Pivoting from San Diego to Tucson for COVID restrictions; planning tips for travel during COVID; CEO of Privacy4Cars talks about leaving data behind in rental cars</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\"> Click Here for the Episode Show Notes</a>\n					<!--[if lt IE 9]><![endif]-->\n<audio id=\"audio-2997-1\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?_=1\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-list-main -->\n			<h2>Latest Posts</h2>		\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?w=2000 2000w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\">\nQuick Notes on Our Trip to Tucson</a></h2>\n					February 1, 2021\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/beer/\" rel=\"category tag\">Beer</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/food-2/\" rel=\"category tag\">Food</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-journal/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Journal</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/#comments\">2 Comments</a>\n						<p>I left my suitcase at the door of our West Tucson Airbnb and walked out onto the back patio to watch the sun slip behind the Tucson Mountains. The...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?w=1334 1334w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\nPodcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips</a></h2>\n					January 14, 2021\n						Episode 171										\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n						<p>Pivoting from San Diego to Tucson for COVID restrictions; planning tips for travel during COVID; CEO of Privacy4Cars talks about leaving data behind in rental cars</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2997-2\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?_=2\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?w=919 919w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">\nPodcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors</a></h2>\n					December 16, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					Comments Off on Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors\n						<p>No Thanksgiving travel, but looking at the travel volume for this, the busiest travel week of the year, shows just how far things have fallen. The Qantas CEO said...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2957-3\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?_=3\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?w=1299 1299w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">\nPodcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers</a></h2>\n					November 12, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-tech/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Tech</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/#comments\">3 Comments</a>\n						<p>No travel since the last episode, so I had some time to think back through my post-lockdown travel and come up with my top 10 gift ideas for your...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2936-4\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?_=4\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?w=2560 2560w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C2048 2048w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?w=2400 2400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">\n10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times</a></h2>\n					November 4, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-journal/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Journal</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-tech/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Tech</a>\n					Comments Off on 10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times\n						<p>With public health officials saying things like &#8220;it will be easily by the end of 2021 and perhaps into the next year before we start having some semblance of...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?w=2560 2560w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C2048 2048w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?w=2400 2400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\">\nPodcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food</a></h2>\n					October 16, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/food-2/\" rel=\"category tag\">Food</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					Comments Off on Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food\n						<p>Trying to recover from a long weekend of eating and drinking through the neighborhoods of South Philly. Our movable feast reminded me that food may be the one experience...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2896-5\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?_=5\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php?paged=2\" >More Posts</a>\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-list-main -->','Home','','inherit','closed','closed','','3141-revision-v1','','','2021-03-02 19:26:24','2021-03-03 00:26:24','',3141,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/02/3141-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3280,1,'2021-03-02 19:26:24','2021-03-03 00:26:24','<h2>TravelCommons</h2>		\n			The podcast giving the voice of the traveler<br><br>It\'s more about the journey than the destination		\n<a onMouseOver=\"this.style.color=`#2d2d2d`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#ffffff`\" onMouseOut=\"this.style.color=`#ffffff`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#c01f2c`\" style=\"color:#ffffff; background-color:#c01f2c\" href=\"#!\">Subscribe</a>   \n<!-- Modal HTML embedded directly into document. -->\n	<ul><li><a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Apple-Podcasts.png\" />Apple Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Google-Podcasts.png\" />Google Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Spotify.png\" />Spotify</a></li><li><a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/SoundCloud.png\" />SoundCloud</a></li><li><a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Stitcher.png\" />Stitcher</a></li><li><a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Amazon-Music.png\" />Amazon Music</a></li><li><a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/TravelcommonsPodcast\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/RSS.png\" />RSS</a></li></ul>                                       \n			<!-- close .secondline-addons-subscribe-button-container -->\n			<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/episodes/\" role=\"button\">\n						View Episodes\n					</a>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?w=1334 1334w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\nPodcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips</a></h2>\n					January 14, 2021\n						Episode 171										\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n						<p>Pivoting from San Diego to Tucson for COVID restrictions; planning tips for travel during COVID; CEO of Privacy4Cars talks about leaving data behind in rental cars</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\"> Click Here for the Episode Show Notes</a>\n					<!--[if lt IE 9]><![endif]-->\n<audio id=\"audio-2997-1\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?_=1\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-list-main -->\n			<h2>Latest Posts</h2>		\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?w=2000 2000w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\">\nQuick Notes on Our Trip to Tucson</a></h2>\n					February 1, 2021\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/beer/\" rel=\"category tag\">Beer</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/food-2/\" rel=\"category tag\">Food</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-journal/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Journal</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/#comments\">2 Comments</a>\n						<p>I left my suitcase at the door of our West Tucson Airbnb and walked out onto the back patio to watch the sun slip behind the Tucson Mountains. The...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?w=1334 1334w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\nPodcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips</a></h2>\n					January 14, 2021\n						Episode 171										\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n						<p>Pivoting from San Diego to Tucson for COVID restrictions; planning tips for travel during COVID; CEO of Privacy4Cars talks about leaving data behind in rental cars</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2997-2\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?_=2\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?w=919 919w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">\nPodcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors</a></h2>\n					December 16, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					Comments Off on Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors\n						<p>No Thanksgiving travel, but looking at the travel volume for this, the busiest travel week of the year, shows just how far things have fallen. The Qantas CEO said...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2957-3\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?_=3\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?w=1299 1299w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">\nPodcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers</a></h2>\n					November 12, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-tech/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Tech</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/#comments\">3 Comments</a>\n						<p>No travel since the last episode, so I had some time to think back through my post-lockdown travel and come up with my top 10 gift ideas for your...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2936-4\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?_=4\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?w=2560 2560w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C2048 2048w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?w=2400 2400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">\n10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times</a></h2>\n					November 4, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-journal/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Journal</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-tech/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Tech</a>\n					Comments Off on 10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times\n						<p>With public health officials saying things like &#8220;it will be easily by the end of 2021 and perhaps into the next year before we start having some semblance of...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?w=2560 2560w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C2048 2048w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?w=2400 2400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\">\nPodcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food</a></h2>\n					October 16, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/food-2/\" rel=\"category tag\">Food</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					Comments Off on Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food\n						<p>Trying to recover from a long weekend of eating and drinking through the neighborhoods of South Philly. Our movable feast reminded me that food may be the one experience...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2896-5\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?_=5\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php?paged=2\" >More Posts</a>\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-list-main -->','Home','','inherit','closed','closed','','3141-revision-v1','','','2021-03-02 19:26:24','2021-03-03 00:26:24','',3141,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/02/3141-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3281,1,'2021-03-02 19:26:24','2021-03-03 00:26:24','<h2>TravelCommons</h2>		\n			The podcast giving the voice of the traveler<br><br>It\'s more about the journey than the destination		\n<a onMouseOver=\"this.style.color=`#2d2d2d`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#ffffff`\" onMouseOut=\"this.style.color=`#ffffff`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#c01f2c`\" style=\"color:#ffffff; background-color:#c01f2c\" href=\"#!\">Subscribe</a>   \n<!-- Modal HTML embedded directly into document. -->\n	<ul><li><a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Apple-Podcasts.png\" />Apple Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Google-Podcasts.png\" />Google Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Spotify.png\" />Spotify</a></li><li><a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/SoundCloud.png\" />SoundCloud</a></li><li><a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Stitcher.png\" />Stitcher</a></li><li><a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Amazon-Music.png\" />Amazon Music</a></li><li><a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/TravelcommonsPodcast\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/RSS.png\" />RSS</a></li></ul>                                       \n			<!-- close .secondline-addons-subscribe-button-container -->\n			<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/episodes/\" role=\"button\">\n						View Episodes\n					</a>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?w=1334 1334w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\nPodcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips</a></h2>\n					January 14, 2021\n						Episode 171										\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n						<p>Pivoting from San Diego to Tucson for COVID restrictions; planning tips for travel during COVID; CEO of Privacy4Cars talks about leaving data behind in rental cars</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\"> Click Here for the Episode Show Notes</a>\n					<!--[if lt IE 9]><![endif]-->\n<audio id=\"audio-2997-1\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?_=1\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-list-main -->\n			<h2>Latest Posts</h2>		\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?w=2000 2000w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\">\nQuick Notes on Our Trip to Tucson</a></h2>\n					February 1, 2021\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/beer/\" rel=\"category tag\">Beer</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/food-2/\" rel=\"category tag\">Food</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-journal/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Journal</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/#comments\">2 Comments</a>\n						<p>I left my suitcase at the door of our West Tucson Airbnb and walked out onto the back patio to watch the sun slip behind the Tucson Mountains. The...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?w=1334 1334w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\nPodcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips</a></h2>\n					January 14, 2021\n						Episode 171										\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n						<p>Pivoting from San Diego to Tucson for COVID restrictions; planning tips for travel during COVID; CEO of Privacy4Cars talks about leaving data behind in rental cars</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2997-2\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?_=2\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?w=919 919w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">\nPodcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors</a></h2>\n					December 16, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					Comments Off on Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors\n						<p>No Thanksgiving travel, but looking at the travel volume for this, the busiest travel week of the year, shows just how far things have fallen. The Qantas CEO said...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2957-3\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?_=3\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?w=1299 1299w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">\nPodcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers</a></h2>\n					November 12, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-tech/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Tech</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/#comments\">3 Comments</a>\n						<p>No travel since the last episode, so I had some time to think back through my post-lockdown travel and come up with my top 10 gift ideas for your...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2936-4\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?_=4\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?w=2560 2560w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C2048 2048w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?w=2400 2400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">\n10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times</a></h2>\n					November 4, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-journal/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Journal</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-tech/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Tech</a>\n					Comments Off on 10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times\n						<p>With public health officials saying things like &#8220;it will be easily by the end of 2021 and perhaps into the next year before we start having some semblance of...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?w=2560 2560w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C2048 2048w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?w=2400 2400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\">\nPodcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food</a></h2>\n					October 16, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/food-2/\" rel=\"category tag\">Food</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					Comments Off on Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food\n						<p>Trying to recover from a long weekend of eating and drinking through the neighborhoods of South Philly. Our movable feast reminded me that food may be the one experience...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2896-5\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?_=5\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php?paged=2\" >More Posts</a>\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-list-main -->','Home','','inherit','closed','closed','','3141-revision-v1','','','2021-03-02 19:26:24','2021-03-03 00:26:24','',3141,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/02/3141-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3287,1,'2021-03-02 20:56:37','2021-03-03 01:56:37','<h2>TravelCommons</h2>		\n			The podcast giving the voice of the traveler<br><br>It\'s more about the journey than the destination		\n<a onMouseOver=\"this.style.color=`#2d2d2d`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#ffffff`\" onMouseOut=\"this.style.color=`#ffffff`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#c01f2c`\" style=\"color:#ffffff; background-color:#c01f2c\" href=\"#!\">Subscribe</a>   \n<!-- Modal HTML embedded directly into document. -->\n	<ul><li><a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Apple-Podcasts.png\" />Apple Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Google-Podcasts.png\" />Google Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Spotify.png\" />Spotify</a></li><li><a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/SoundCloud.png\" />SoundCloud</a></li><li><a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Stitcher.png\" />Stitcher</a></li><li><a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Amazon-Music.png\" />Amazon Music</a></li><li><a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/TravelcommonsPodcast\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/RSS.png\" />RSS</a></li></ul>                                       \n			<!-- close .secondline-addons-subscribe-button-container -->\n			<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/episodes/\" role=\"button\">\n						View Episodes\n					</a>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?w=1334 1334w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\nPodcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips</a></h2>\n					January 14, 2021\n						Episode 171										\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n						<p>Pivoting from San Diego to Tucson for COVID restrictions; planning tips for travel during COVID; CEO of Privacy4Cars talks about leaving data behind in rental cars</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\"> Click Here for the Episode Show Notes</a>\n					<!--[if lt IE 9]><![endif]-->\n<audio id=\"audio-2997-1\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?_=1\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-list-main -->\n			<h2>Latest Posts</h2>		\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?w=2000 2000w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\">\nQuick Notes on Our Trip to Tucson</a></h2>\n					February 1, 2021\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/beer/\" rel=\"category tag\">Beer</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/food-2/\" rel=\"category tag\">Food</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-journal/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Journal</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/#comments\">2 Comments</a>\n						<p>I left my suitcase at the door of our West Tucson Airbnb and walked out onto the back patio to watch the sun slip behind the Tucson Mountains. The...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?w=1334 1334w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\nPodcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips</a></h2>\n					January 14, 2021\n						Episode 171										\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n						<p>Pivoting from San Diego to Tucson for COVID restrictions; planning tips for travel during COVID; CEO of Privacy4Cars talks about leaving data behind in rental cars</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2997-2\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?_=2\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?w=919 919w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">\nPodcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors</a></h2>\n					December 16, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					Comments Off on Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors\n						<p>No Thanksgiving travel, but looking at the travel volume for this, the busiest travel week of the year, shows just how far things have fallen. The Qantas CEO said...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2957-3\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?_=3\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?w=1299 1299w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">\nPodcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers</a></h2>\n					November 12, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-tech/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Tech</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/#comments\">3 Comments</a>\n						<p>No travel since the last episode, so I had some time to think back through my post-lockdown travel and come up with my top 10 gift ideas for your...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2936-4\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?_=4\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?w=2560 2560w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C2048 2048w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?w=2400 2400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">\n10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times</a></h2>\n					November 4, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-journal/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Journal</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-tech/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Tech</a>\n					Comments Off on 10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times\n						<p>With public health officials saying things like &#8220;it will be easily by the end of 2021 and perhaps into the next year before we start having some semblance of...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?w=2560 2560w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C2048 2048w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?w=2400 2400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\">\nPodcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food</a></h2>\n					October 16, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/food-2/\" rel=\"category tag\">Food</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					Comments Off on Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food\n						<p>Trying to recover from a long weekend of eating and drinking through the neighborhoods of South Philly. Our movable feast reminded me that food may be the one experience...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2896-5\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?_=5\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php?paged=2\" >More Posts</a>\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-list-main -->','Home','','inherit','closed','closed','','3141-revision-v1','','','2021-03-02 20:56:37','2021-03-03 01:56:37','',3141,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/02/3141-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3288,1,'2021-03-02 20:56:37','2021-03-03 01:56:37','<h2>TravelCommons</h2>		\n			The podcast giving the voice of the traveler<br><br>It\'s more about the journey than the destination		\n<a onMouseOver=\"this.style.color=`#2d2d2d`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#ffffff`\" onMouseOut=\"this.style.color=`#ffffff`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#c01f2c`\" style=\"color:#ffffff; background-color:#c01f2c\" href=\"#!\">Subscribe</a>   \n<!-- Modal HTML embedded directly into document. -->\n	<ul><li><a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Apple-Podcasts.png\" />Apple Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Google-Podcasts.png\" />Google Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Spotify.png\" />Spotify</a></li><li><a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/SoundCloud.png\" />SoundCloud</a></li><li><a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Stitcher.png\" />Stitcher</a></li><li><a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Amazon-Music.png\" />Amazon Music</a></li><li><a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/TravelcommonsPodcast\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/RSS.png\" />RSS</a></li></ul>                                       \n			<!-- close .secondline-addons-subscribe-button-container -->\n			<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/episodes/\" role=\"button\">\n						View Episodes\n					</a>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?w=1334 1334w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\nPodcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips</a></h2>\n					January 14, 2021\n						Episode 171										\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n						<p>Pivoting from San Diego to Tucson for COVID restrictions; planning tips for travel during COVID; CEO of Privacy4Cars talks about leaving data behind in rental cars</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\"> Click Here for the Episode Show Notes</a>\n					<!--[if lt IE 9]><![endif]-->\n<audio id=\"audio-2997-1\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?_=1\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-list-main -->\n			<h2>Latest Posts</h2>		\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?w=2000 2000w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\">\nQuick Notes on Our Trip to Tucson</a></h2>\n					February 1, 2021\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/beer/\" rel=\"category tag\">Beer</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/food-2/\" rel=\"category tag\">Food</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-journal/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Journal</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/#comments\">2 Comments</a>\n						<p>I left my suitcase at the door of our West Tucson Airbnb and walked out onto the back patio to watch the sun slip behind the Tucson Mountains. The...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?w=1334 1334w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\nPodcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips</a></h2>\n					January 14, 2021\n						Episode 171										\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n						<p>Pivoting from San Diego to Tucson for COVID restrictions; planning tips for travel during COVID; CEO of Privacy4Cars talks about leaving data behind in rental cars</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2997-2\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?_=2\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?w=919 919w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">\nPodcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors</a></h2>\n					December 16, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					Comments Off on Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors\n						<p>No Thanksgiving travel, but looking at the travel volume for this, the busiest travel week of the year, shows just how far things have fallen. The Qantas CEO said...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2957-3\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?_=3\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?w=1299 1299w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">\nPodcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers</a></h2>\n					November 12, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-tech/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Tech</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/#comments\">3 Comments</a>\n						<p>No travel since the last episode, so I had some time to think back through my post-lockdown travel and come up with my top 10 gift ideas for your...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2936-4\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?_=4\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?w=2560 2560w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C2048 2048w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?w=2400 2400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">\n10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times</a></h2>\n					November 4, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-journal/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Journal</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-tech/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Tech</a>\n					Comments Off on 10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times\n						<p>With public health officials saying things like &#8220;it will be easily by the end of 2021 and perhaps into the next year before we start having some semblance of...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?w=2560 2560w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C2048 2048w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?w=2400 2400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\">\nPodcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food</a></h2>\n					October 16, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/food-2/\" rel=\"category tag\">Food</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					Comments Off on Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food\n						<p>Trying to recover from a long weekend of eating and drinking through the neighborhoods of South Philly. Our movable feast reminded me that food may be the one experience...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2896-5\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?_=5\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php?paged=2\" >More Posts</a>\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-list-main -->','Home','','inherit','closed','closed','','3141-revision-v1','','','2021-03-02 20:56:37','2021-03-03 01:56:37','',3141,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/02/3141-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3289,1,'2021-03-02 20:56:38','2021-03-03 01:56:38','<h2>TravelCommons</h2>		\n			The podcast giving the voice of the traveler<br><br>It\'s more about the journey than the destination		\n			<ul>\n								<li>\n						<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\"><h2>Quick Notes on Our Trip to Tucson</h2></a>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\">February 1, 2021</a>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n																	<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/beer/\" rel=\"category tag\">Beer</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/food-2/\" rel=\"category tag\">Food</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-journal/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Journal</a>\n																<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/#comments\">2 Comments</a>\n									<p>\n										I left my suitcase at the door of our West Tucson Airbnb and walked out onto the back patio to watch the sun slip behind the Tucson Mountains. The shades of red and orange on the undersides of a couple of clouds stood out in the pale blue sky. This was exactly what we were...																			</p>									\n			<!-- close .slider-content-max-width -->\n		<!-- close .slider-text-floating-container -->\n	<!-- close .slider-elements-display-table -->\n<!-- close .secondline-elements-slider-background -->\n				</li>\n								<li>\n						<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\"><h2>Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips</h2></a>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">January 14, 2021</a>\n									Episode 171								\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n																	<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n																<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n									<p>\n										Pivoting from San Diego to Tucson for COVID restrictions; planning tips for travel during COVID; CEO of Privacy4Cars talks about leaving data behind in rental cars																			</p>									\n							<!--[if lt IE 9]><![endif]-->\n<audio id=\"audio-2997-1\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?_=1\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>						\n			<!-- close .slider-content-max-width -->\n		<!-- close .slider-text-floating-container -->\n	<!-- close .slider-elements-display-table -->\n<!-- close .secondline-elements-slider-background -->\n				</li>\n								<li>\n						<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\"><h2>Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors</h2></a>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">December 16, 2020</a>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n																	<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n																Comments Off on Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors\n									<p>\n										No Thanksgiving travel, but looking at the travel volume for this, the busiest travel week of the year, shows just how far things have fallen. The Qantas CEO said &#8220;No vax, no fly&#8221;, so we dig into the emerging world of digital vaccine passports. And then I trace my travel genealogy, wondering if road warrior-ism...																			</p>									\n							<audio id=\"audio-2957-2\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?_=2\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>						\n			<!-- close .slider-content-max-width -->\n		<!-- close .slider-text-floating-container -->\n	<!-- close .slider-elements-display-table -->\n<!-- close .secondline-elements-slider-background -->\n				</li>\n							</ul>\n		<!-- #-elements-secondline-flexslider-56656ff -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-slider-main -->\n<a onMouseOver=\"this.style.color=`#2d2d2d`; 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The...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?w=1334 1334w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\nPodcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips</a></h2>\n					January 14, 2021\n						Episode 171										\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n						<p>Pivoting from San Diego to Tucson for COVID restrictions; planning tips for travel during COVID; CEO of Privacy4Cars talks about leaving data behind in rental cars</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2997-3\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?_=3\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?w=919 919w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">\nPodcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors</a></h2>\n					December 16, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					Comments Off on Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors\n						<p>No Thanksgiving travel, but looking at the travel volume for this, the busiest travel week of the year, shows just how far things have fallen. The Qantas CEO said...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2957-4\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?_=4\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?w=1299 1299w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">\nPodcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers</a></h2>\n					November 12, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-tech/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Tech</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/#comments\">3 Comments</a>\n						<p>No travel since the last episode, so I had some time to think back through my post-lockdown travel and come up with my top 10 gift ideas for your...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2936-5\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?_=5\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?w=2560 2560w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C2048 2048w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?w=2400 2400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">\n10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times</a></h2>\n					November 4, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-journal/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Journal</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-tech/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Tech</a>\n					Comments Off on 10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times\n						<p>With public health officials saying things like &#8220;it will be easily by the end of 2021 and perhaps into the next year before we start having some semblance of...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?w=2560 2560w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C2048 2048w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?w=2400 2400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\">\nPodcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food</a></h2>\n					October 16, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/food-2/\" rel=\"category tag\">Food</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					Comments Off on Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food\n						<p>Trying to recover from a long weekend of eating and drinking through the neighborhoods of South Philly. Our movable feast reminded me that food may be the one experience...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2896-6\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?_=6\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php?paged=2\" >More Posts</a>\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-list-main -->','Home','','inherit','closed','closed','','3141-revision-v1','','','2021-03-02 20:56:38','2021-03-03 01:56:38','',3141,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/02/3141-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3290,1,'2021-03-02 21:11:55','2021-03-03 02:11:55','<h2>TravelCommons</h2>		\n			The podcast giving the voice of the traveler<br><br>It\'s more about the journey than the destination		\n			<ul>\n								<li>\n						<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\"><h2>Quick Notes on Our Trip to Tucson</h2></a>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\">February 1, 2021</a>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n																	<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/beer/\" rel=\"category tag\">Beer</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/food-2/\" rel=\"category tag\">Food</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-journal/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Journal</a>\n																<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/#comments\">2 Comments</a>\n									<p>\n										I left my suitcase at the door of our West Tucson Airbnb and walked out onto the back patio to watch the sun slip behind the Tucson Mountains. The shades of red and orange on the undersides of a couple of clouds stood out in the pale blue sky. This was exactly what we were...																			</p>									\n			<!-- close .slider-content-max-width -->\n		<!-- close .slider-text-floating-container -->\n	<!-- close .slider-elements-display-table -->\n<!-- close .secondline-elements-slider-background -->\n				</li>\n								<li>\n						<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\"><h2>Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips</h2></a>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">January 14, 2021</a>\n									Episode 171								\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n																	<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n																<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n									<p>\n										Pivoting from San Diego to Tucson for COVID restrictions; planning tips for travel during COVID; CEO of Privacy4Cars talks about leaving data behind in rental cars																			</p>									\n							<!--[if lt IE 9]><![endif]-->\n<audio id=\"audio-2997-1\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?_=1\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>						\n			<!-- close .slider-content-max-width -->\n		<!-- close .slider-text-floating-container -->\n	<!-- close .slider-elements-display-table -->\n<!-- close .secondline-elements-slider-background -->\n				</li>\n								<li>\n						<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\"><h2>Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors</h2></a>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">December 16, 2020</a>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n																	<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n																Comments Off on Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors\n									<p>\n										No Thanksgiving travel, but looking at the travel volume for this, the busiest travel week of the year, shows just how far things have fallen. The Qantas CEO said &#8220;No vax, no fly&#8221;, so we dig into the emerging world of digital vaccine passports. And then I trace my travel genealogy, wondering if road warrior-ism...																			</p>									\n							<audio id=\"audio-2957-2\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?_=2\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>						\n			<!-- close .slider-content-max-width -->\n		<!-- close .slider-text-floating-container -->\n	<!-- close .slider-elements-display-table -->\n<!-- close .secondline-elements-slider-background -->\n				</li>\n							</ul>\n		<!-- #-elements-secondline-flexslider-56656ff -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-slider-main -->\n<a onMouseOver=\"this.style.color=`#2d2d2d`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#ffffff`\" onMouseOut=\"this.style.color=`#ffffff`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#c01f2c`\" style=\"color:#ffffff; background-color:#c01f2c\" href=\"#!\">Subscribe</a>   \n<!-- Modal HTML embedded directly into document. -->\n	<ul><li><a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Apple-Podcasts.png\" />Apple Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Google-Podcasts.png\" />Google Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Spotify.png\" />Spotify</a></li><li><a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/SoundCloud.png\" />SoundCloud</a></li><li><a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Stitcher.png\" />Stitcher</a></li><li><a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Amazon-Music.png\" />Amazon Music</a></li><li><a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/TravelcommonsPodcast\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/RSS.png\" />RSS</a></li></ul>                                       \n			<!-- close .secondline-addons-subscribe-button-container -->\n			<h2>Latest Posts</h2>		\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?w=2000 2000w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\">\nQuick Notes on Our Trip to Tucson</a></h2>\n					February 1, 2021\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/beer/\" rel=\"category tag\">Beer</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/food-2/\" rel=\"category tag\">Food</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-journal/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Journal</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/#comments\">2 Comments</a>\n						<p>I left my suitcase at the door of our West Tucson Airbnb and walked out onto the back patio to watch the sun slip behind the Tucson Mountains. The...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?w=1334 1334w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\nPodcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips</a></h2>\n					January 14, 2021\n						Episode 171										\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n						<p>Pivoting from San Diego to Tucson for COVID restrictions; planning tips for travel during COVID; CEO of Privacy4Cars talks about leaving data behind in rental cars</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2997-3\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?_=3\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?w=919 919w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">\nPodcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors</a></h2>\n					December 16, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					Comments Off on Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors\n						<p>No Thanksgiving travel, but looking at the travel volume for this, the busiest travel week of the year, shows just how far things have fallen. The Qantas CEO said...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2957-4\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?_=4\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?w=1299 1299w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">\nPodcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers</a></h2>\n					November 12, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-tech/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Tech</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/#comments\">3 Comments</a>\n						<p>No travel since the last episode, so I had some time to think back through my post-lockdown travel and come up with my top 10 gift ideas for your...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2936-5\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?_=5\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?w=2560 2560w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C2048 2048w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?w=2400 2400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">\n10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times</a></h2>\n					November 4, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-journal/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Journal</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-tech/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Tech</a>\n					Comments Off on 10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times\n						<p>With public health officials saying things like &#8220;it will be easily by the end of 2021 and perhaps into the next year before we start having some semblance of...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?w=2560 2560w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C2048 2048w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?w=2400 2400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\">\nPodcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food</a></h2>\n					October 16, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/food-2/\" rel=\"category tag\">Food</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					Comments Off on Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food\n						<p>Trying to recover from a long weekend of eating and drinking through the neighborhoods of South Philly. Our movable feast reminded me that food may be the one experience...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2896-6\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?_=6\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php?paged=2\" >More Posts</a>\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-list-main -->','Home','','inherit','closed','closed','','3141-revision-v1','','','2021-03-02 21:11:55','2021-03-03 02:11:55','',3141,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/02/3141-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3291,1,'2021-03-02 21:11:55','2021-03-03 02:11:55','<h2>TravelCommons</h2>		\n			The podcast giving the voice of the traveler<br><br>It\'s more about the journey than the destination		\n			<ul>\n								<li>\n						<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\"><h2>Quick Notes on Our Trip to Tucson</h2></a>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\">February 1, 2021</a>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n																	<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/beer/\" rel=\"category tag\">Beer</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/food-2/\" rel=\"category tag\">Food</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-journal/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Journal</a>\n																<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/#comments\">2 Comments</a>\n									<p>\n										I left my suitcase at the door of our West Tucson Airbnb and walked out onto the back patio to watch the sun slip behind the Tucson Mountains. The shades of red and orange on the undersides of a couple of clouds stood out in the pale blue sky. This was exactly what we were...																			</p>									\n			<!-- close .slider-content-max-width -->\n		<!-- close .slider-text-floating-container -->\n	<!-- close .slider-elements-display-table -->\n<!-- close .secondline-elements-slider-background -->\n				</li>\n								<li>\n						<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\"><h2>Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips</h2></a>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">January 14, 2021</a>\n									Episode 171								\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n																	<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n																<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n									<p>\n										Pivoting from San Diego to Tucson for COVID restrictions; planning tips for travel during COVID; CEO of Privacy4Cars talks about leaving data behind in rental cars																			</p>									\n							<!--[if lt IE 9]><![endif]-->\n<audio id=\"audio-2997-1\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?_=1\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>						\n			<!-- close .slider-content-max-width -->\n		<!-- close .slider-text-floating-container -->\n	<!-- close .slider-elements-display-table -->\n<!-- close .secondline-elements-slider-background -->\n				</li>\n								<li>\n						<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\"><h2>Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors</h2></a>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">December 16, 2020</a>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n																	<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n																Comments Off on Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors\n									<p>\n										No Thanksgiving travel, but looking at the travel volume for this, the busiest travel week of the year, shows just how far things have fallen. The Qantas CEO said &#8220;No vax, no fly&#8221;, so we dig into the emerging world of digital vaccine passports. And then I trace my travel genealogy, wondering if road warrior-ism...																			</p>									\n							<audio id=\"audio-2957-2\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?_=2\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>						\n			<!-- close .slider-content-max-width -->\n		<!-- close .slider-text-floating-container -->\n	<!-- close .slider-elements-display-table -->\n<!-- close .secondline-elements-slider-background -->\n				</li>\n							</ul>\n		<!-- #-elements-secondline-flexslider-56656ff -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-slider-main -->\n<a onMouseOver=\"this.style.color=`#2d2d2d`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#ffffff`\" onMouseOut=\"this.style.color=`#ffffff`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#c01f2c`\" style=\"color:#ffffff; background-color:#c01f2c\" href=\"#!\">Subscribe</a>   \n<!-- Modal HTML embedded directly into document. -->\n	<ul><li><a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Apple-Podcasts.png\" />Apple Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Google-Podcasts.png\" />Google Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Spotify.png\" />Spotify</a></li><li><a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/SoundCloud.png\" />SoundCloud</a></li><li><a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Stitcher.png\" />Stitcher</a></li><li><a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Amazon-Music.png\" />Amazon Music</a></li><li><a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/TravelcommonsPodcast\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/RSS.png\" />RSS</a></li></ul>                                       \n			<!-- close .secondline-addons-subscribe-button-container -->\n			<h2>Latest Posts</h2>		\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?w=2000 2000w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\">\nQuick Notes on Our Trip to Tucson</a></h2>\n					February 1, 2021\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/beer/\" rel=\"category tag\">Beer</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/food-2/\" rel=\"category tag\">Food</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-journal/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Journal</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/#comments\">2 Comments</a>\n						<p>I left my suitcase at the door of our West Tucson Airbnb and walked out onto the back patio to watch the sun slip behind the Tucson Mountains. The...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?w=1334 1334w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\nPodcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips</a></h2>\n					January 14, 2021\n						Episode 171										\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n						<p>Pivoting from San Diego to Tucson for COVID restrictions; planning tips for travel during COVID; CEO of Privacy4Cars talks about leaving data behind in rental cars</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2997-3\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?_=3\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?w=919 919w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">\nPodcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors</a></h2>\n					December 16, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					Comments Off on Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors\n						<p>No Thanksgiving travel, but looking at the travel volume for this, the busiest travel week of the year, shows just how far things have fallen. The Qantas CEO said...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2957-4\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?_=4\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?w=1299 1299w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">\nPodcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers</a></h2>\n					November 12, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-tech/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Tech</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/#comments\">3 Comments</a>\n						<p>No travel since the last episode, so I had some time to think back through my post-lockdown travel and come up with my top 10 gift ideas for your...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2936-5\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?_=5\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?w=2560 2560w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C2048 2048w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?w=2400 2400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">\n10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times</a></h2>\n					November 4, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-journal/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Journal</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-tech/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Tech</a>\n					Comments Off on 10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times\n						<p>With public health officials saying things like &#8220;it will be easily by the end of 2021 and perhaps into the next year before we start having some semblance of...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?w=2560 2560w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C2048 2048w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?w=2400 2400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\">\nPodcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food</a></h2>\n					October 16, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/food-2/\" rel=\"category tag\">Food</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					Comments Off on Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food\n						<p>Trying to recover from a long weekend of eating and drinking through the neighborhoods of South Philly. Our movable feast reminded me that food may be the one experience...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2896-6\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?_=6\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php?paged=2\" >More Posts</a>\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-list-main -->','Home','','inherit','closed','closed','','3141-revision-v1','','','2021-03-02 21:11:55','2021-03-03 02:11:55','',3141,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/02/3141-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3292,1,'2021-03-02 21:11:55','2021-03-03 02:11:55','<h2>TravelCommons</h2>		\n			The podcast giving the voice of the traveler<br><br>It\'s more about the journey than the destination		\n			<ul>\n								<li>\n						<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\"><h2>Quick Notes on Our Trip to Tucson</h2></a>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\">February 1, 2021</a>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n																	<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/beer/\" rel=\"category tag\">Beer</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/food-2/\" rel=\"category tag\">Food</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-journal/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Journal</a>\n																<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/#comments\">2 Comments</a>\n									<p>\n										I left my suitcase at the door of our West Tucson Airbnb and walked out onto the back patio to watch the sun slip behind the Tucson Mountains. The shades of red and orange on the undersides of a couple of clouds stood out in the pale blue sky. This was exactly what we were...																			</p>									\n			<!-- close .slider-content-max-width -->\n		<!-- close .slider-text-floating-container -->\n	<!-- close .slider-elements-display-table -->\n<!-- close .secondline-elements-slider-background -->\n				</li>\n								<li>\n						<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\"><h2>Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips</h2></a>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">January 14, 2021</a>\n									Episode 171								\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n																	<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n																<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n									<p>\n										Pivoting from San Diego to Tucson for COVID restrictions; planning tips for travel during COVID; CEO of Privacy4Cars talks about leaving data behind in rental cars																			</p>									\n							<!--[if lt IE 9]><![endif]-->\n<audio id=\"audio-2997-1\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?_=1\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>						\n			<!-- close .slider-content-max-width -->\n		<!-- close .slider-text-floating-container -->\n	<!-- close .slider-elements-display-table -->\n<!-- close .secondline-elements-slider-background -->\n				</li>\n								<li>\n						<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\"><h2>Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors</h2></a>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">December 16, 2020</a>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n																	<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n																Comments Off on Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors\n									<p>\n										No Thanksgiving travel, but looking at the travel volume for this, the busiest travel week of the year, shows just how far things have fallen. The Qantas CEO said &#8220;No vax, no fly&#8221;, so we dig into the emerging world of digital vaccine passports. And then I trace my travel genealogy, wondering if road warrior-ism...																			</p>									\n							<audio id=\"audio-2957-2\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?_=2\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>						\n			<!-- close .slider-content-max-width -->\n		<!-- close .slider-text-floating-container -->\n	<!-- close .slider-elements-display-table -->\n<!-- close .secondline-elements-slider-background -->\n				</li>\n							</ul>\n		<!-- #-elements-secondline-flexslider-56656ff -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-slider-main -->\n<a onMouseOver=\"this.style.color=`#2d2d2d`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#ffffff`\" onMouseOut=\"this.style.color=`#ffffff`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#c01f2c`\" style=\"color:#ffffff; background-color:#c01f2c\" href=\"#!\">Subscribe</a>   \n<!-- Modal HTML embedded directly into document. -->\n	<ul><li><a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Apple-Podcasts.png\" />Apple Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Google-Podcasts.png\" />Google Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Spotify.png\" />Spotify</a></li><li><a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/SoundCloud.png\" />SoundCloud</a></li><li><a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Stitcher.png\" />Stitcher</a></li><li><a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Amazon-Music.png\" />Amazon Music</a></li><li><a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/TravelcommonsPodcast\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/RSS.png\" />RSS</a></li></ul>                                       \n			<!-- close .secondline-addons-subscribe-button-container -->\n			<h2>Latest Posts</h2>		\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?w=2000 2000w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\">\nQuick Notes on Our Trip to Tucson</a></h2>\n					February 1, 2021\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/beer/\" rel=\"category tag\">Beer</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/food-2/\" rel=\"category tag\">Food</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-journal/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Journal</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/#comments\">2 Comments</a>\n						<p>I left my suitcase at the door of our West Tucson Airbnb and walked out onto the back patio to watch the sun slip behind the Tucson Mountains. The...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?w=1334 1334w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\nPodcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips</a></h2>\n					January 14, 2021\n						Episode 171										\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n						<p>Pivoting from San Diego to Tucson for COVID restrictions; planning tips for travel during COVID; CEO of Privacy4Cars talks about leaving data behind in rental cars</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2997-3\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?_=3\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?w=919 919w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">\nPodcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors</a></h2>\n					December 16, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					Comments Off on Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors\n						<p>No Thanksgiving travel, but looking at the travel volume for this, the busiest travel week of the year, shows just how far things have fallen. The Qantas CEO said...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2957-4\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?_=4\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?w=1299 1299w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">\nPodcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers</a></h2>\n					November 12, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-tech/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Tech</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/#comments\">3 Comments</a>\n						<p>No travel since the last episode, so I had some time to think back through my post-lockdown travel and come up with my top 10 gift ideas for your...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2936-5\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?_=5\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?w=2560 2560w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C2048 2048w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?w=2400 2400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">\n10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times</a></h2>\n					November 4, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-journal/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Journal</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-tech/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Tech</a>\n					Comments Off on 10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times\n						<p>With public health officials saying things like &#8220;it will be easily by the end of 2021 and perhaps into the next year before we start having some semblance of...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?w=2560 2560w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C2048 2048w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?w=2400 2400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\">\nPodcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food</a></h2>\n					October 16, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/food-2/\" rel=\"category tag\">Food</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					Comments Off on Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food\n						<p>Trying to recover from a long weekend of eating and drinking through the neighborhoods of South Philly. Our movable feast reminded me that food may be the one experience...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2896-6\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?_=6\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php?paged=2\" >More Posts</a>\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-list-main -->','Home','','inherit','closed','closed','','3141-revision-v1','','','2021-03-02 21:11:55','2021-03-03 02:11:55','',3141,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/02/3141-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3311,1,'2021-03-02 21:53:34','2021-03-03 02:53:34','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":2168,\"width\":300,\"height\":300,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large is-resized\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1-1024x1024.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2168\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"/></a><figcaption>Wait! I need to unpair my iPhone!</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Was all set to head to San Diego for a week\'s break from Chicago\'s grey January and then looked at the COVID restrictions... and then pivoted to Arizona. With people starting to think about 2021 travel, I pulled together my top 5 travel planning tips. Slow vaccine roll-out will probably keep us restricted for longer than we thought. Andrea Amico of <a href=\"https://www.privacy4cars.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Privacy4Cars</a> joins us to talk about the dangers of leaving our data behind in rental cars. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_171.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go over to the <em>Subscribe</em> section on the right to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #171: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\">This Week</h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. Stayed off the road over the entire holiday season which let me skip the TSA’s new post-lockdown checkpoint record of <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/coronavirus/passenger-throughput\">1.3 million on January 3rd</a>, the last Sunday of the holiday season -- though, to be fair,&nbsp; this is only just over half the 2.4 million passengers who flew on the same Sunday last year. And with every US airline except Delta now back to selling middle seats, it makes sense that load factors also ratcheted up over the holidays. I haven’t seen any industry-wide numbers yet, but <a href=\"https://www.ittn.ie/news/confidence-in-boeing-737-max-holding-firm/\">American’s COO did say that the load factor on their 737 Maxes over the last week of the holiday season was 90%</a>. Now, most of those Maxes are flying between LGA and MIA, always a busy holiday route, but I’ve seen reports of many other packed flights, as well as the much higher load . I was never a big fan of completely full flights pre-coronavirus and, as you can imagine, am even less so now pre-widespread vaccine distribution. So, I’m not too bothered that we didn’t try to get out of town over the holidays.</li><li>However, staying in town through the rest of January is a whole different thing because January is absolutely the worst part of Chicago’s winter. So, after&nbsp; Thanksgiving weekend, on what used to be called Cyber Monday when we actually shopped in physical stores, instead of trolling through Amazon, I was trolling through travel sites looking for cheap flights to someplace warm the 3rd wk of Jan. I figured that’d be long enough for any holiday COVID spike to work its way through the system.</li><li>I’d had some friends who’d gone down to Mexico, felt safe in the tourist zones, didn’t have any problems, came back healthy; but I don’t do well sitting on a beach for more than a day or two and I wanted to keep it a bit simpler, so we decided to stay in the US, which pretty quickly narrowed our search to Southern California, South Florida, and Arizona. Since we’d spent time last winter in both Arizona and Florida, we decided to do California and go as far down the coast as we could get, which was San Diego.&nbsp; And, as luck would have it, Southwest had cheap direct flights from Chicago Midway and I had Southwest travel credits from one of last spring’s flight cancellations burning a hole in my virtual pocket, so *boom* I booked it</li><li>On, what turned out to be, 3 days before the governor locked down most of California. But a friend hit the ground there a week before Christmas and said “Eh, it’s not a problem.” So, we stayed the course and didn’t really pay any attention to it until after New Years when we thought, you know, we should book a place to stay. And that’s when we started to pay attention. Bike and kayak rental places were open as “outdoor recreation” businesses. But vacation rental and hotel booking sites all pointed to the California Public Health Department statement -- “no hotel or lodging entity in California shall accept or honor out-of-state reservations for nonessential travel” which our January snowbird getaway definitely didn’t qualify as. Would things ease up in a couple of weeks? The trend lines on the state’s COVID website didn’t seem to be pointing in that direction.</li><li>So last Monday when I received another blast of airline sales emails, it seemed like the right time for a pivot. X-ing off California, we were back to Florida and Arizona. We talked to friends already down in Florida; they said the south beaches were already filling up with snowbirds, so we opted for drier sand and swung our Southwest flights over to Phoenix.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>But since we’d been in Phoenix last winter and continuing in the spirit of visiting not-quite-A-list places in the US we’ve never been while weaving around quarantines, we’re driving further south down I-10 to Tucson. We’re running the same travel planning play we did for our August trip to Michigan’s UP -- focus on outdoor activities like hiking and biking, have back-ups in case of last-minute closures, and above all, build a list of microbreweries with outdoor seating.</li><li>Bridge Music -- Say Their Names - Love and Remember by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2020 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/62230 Ft: DJ Lang</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\">Following Up</h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Back at the beginning of December when the Pfizer vaccine approval was imminent and the Moderna approval wasn’t far behind, most travelers -- myself included -- got a bit giddy and started to think about the world opening up in the spring, the summer at the latest. Fast forward 30 days and, happy new year, that initial blast of vaccine optimism melted when it met the ugly realities of last-mile logistics. Spelunking through the stream of low-fare emails from American and Southwest and Delta and United and Iberia and British Airways filling my inbox, the consensus across airline demand forecasters seems to be that nothing’s going to change until the end of May. But even that doesn’t explain why, say, American, sends out an email pushing “Plan a European Vacation” that includes spring fares (March, April, May fares) to London, Manchester, and Madrid. I don’t know anyone who expects European vacation travel to open up in the next 3-4 months. Give credit to Delta for highlighting more achievable destinations -- Cancun, the Bahamas, Phoenix, and just about every airport in Florida with a runway long enough to handle a jet.&nbsp;</li><li>What will be as interesting is what the airlines and hotels do about elite status protection if travel continues to be slow through the summer. Remember that last spring, after it was clear that business travel was canceled for most of 2020, all the big travel companies grandfathered everyone into their status for this year. What you earned in 2019, you kept through this year, 2021. But now what? We talked about this a bit in t<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">he November episode (#169)</a> when the companies made their opening bid, knocking 20-30% off elite qualifying clip levels. Kinda like the low-fare sales -- it’ll be interesting to see what they offer come May.</li><li>We’ve talked in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\">prior episodes</a> about the challenges of planning a trip during COVID -- deciphering lockdown rules; parsing what can seem to be the almost theological differences between stay-at-home advisories vs. orders. And after all that, trying to keep up-to-date on last-minute changes. Things are changing so fast -- open, shut; outdoor seating vs just doing takeout -- that the normal crowdsourced tools we’d use -- things like Google Maps, Yelp -- can’t keep up because they don’t give a real-time view. The Foursquare app used to do it, but since they split <a href=\"https://www.swarmapp.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Swarm</a> from Foursquare, it seems that the real-time data is now sold just to business customers to target mobile ads. But, one app that I use does provide a real-time view into some traffic -- <a href=\"https://untappd.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Uptappd</a>. Yes, it’s just craft beer nerd traffic -- people checking in their beers at tap rooms and beer bars -- but that’s a kind of traffic that I’m pretty interested in.&nbsp; After our pivot to Tucson, I wanted to see what beer places were open for service, not just take-out. I could’ve spent time clicking around the app, but instead, I decided to put one of my lockdown self-improvement projects to use. Over the fall, I’d taken some on-line Python programming courses on Coursera, so I wrote a short program that pulled the most recent check-ins from the Tucson area and started making a list of places that are open. I probably could’ve made that list quicker by just plunking away on the app, but not with the same sense of achievement.</li><li>We talked about COVID-19 vaccination and test certification in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">last episode</a>. Over the last month, it seems that proof of negative test results rather than of vaccinations is the new hotness. Canada, the UK, and now the US are the latest countries requiring a negative COVID test for inbound passengers. It makes sense. The CDC released a paper in November -- in one of my favorite publications, the <a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/index.html\"><em>Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report</em></a> (I’ll link to it in the show notes) -- saying that <a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6945a4.htm\">temperature and symptom screening at airports is pretty worthless</a>; it only picked up 1 case for every 85,000 passengers screened. So not hard for the switch to pre-flight testing to be more effective. For Canada and the UK, though, they’ve layered the test requirements <em>on top of </em>their existing 14-day quarantine requirements, which just adds to the confusion -- especially since the Canadian government gave travelers one week’s notice of the new testing requirement. I haven’t seen the US regs yet, but the Canadian rules say you must have “proof in hand” of a negative test result, and that proof can be either electronic or paper. You gotta think that, pretty quick, that “proof in hand” has gotta default to “proof on phone” otherwise, forged paper results are going to be the new fake IDs from our teens. Last November, French cops <a href=\"https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2020/11/10/fake-tests-covid-flights/\">busted a ring selling fake test results at CDG</a>. The going rate was €150-300 which converts to something like $180-370. That compares to $125 for a <a href=\"https://fakeyourid.com/\">good fake driver’s license</a>.&nbsp; Since the last episode, the Caribbean country of <a href=\"https://skift.com/2020/12/18/airlines-still-waiting-on-governments-for-a-single-digital-health-passport-standard/\">Aruba was the first country</a> to standardize on one of the digital passport apps, <a href=\"https://commonpass.org/\">CommonPass</a>, the one backed by the World Economic Forum, the Davos gang, and, we mentioned, also used by United for their EWR-LHR flight. But then Sing Air picked its rival, <a href=\"https://www.iata.org/en/programs/passenger/travel-pass/\">Travel Pass</a> from IATA, to use on flights to/from Malaysia. So it still seems like, when it does go to “proof on phone”, we’re gonna need to set aside some memory screen space for a bunch of apps.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge music -- Staying Positive by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2019 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/59438 Ft: greg_baumont</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\">Leaving Data Behind in The Rental Car</h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A couple of weeks back, I retweeted a news article - the third suspect charged in the fatal shooting of a retired Chicago fireman during a carjacking was caught because he’d synced his phone to the audio system of the stolen car.&nbsp; I dunno -- fleeing a murder but worrying about getting a ticket for not using hands free.&nbsp; I dunno. Good they caught the bad guy, but what about us law-abiding frequent travelers? When the Hertz or Avis person walks up to me at the car return lane, they always remind me not to leave anything behind; to remember to take my sunglasses and my mobile phone. But they never remind me to delete all the data I synced to the car.&nbsp;</li><li>And with more of our lives getting stored in our phones, I asked Andrea Amico, founder of the company <a href=\"https://www.privacy4cars.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Privacy4Cars</a>, to come onto the podcast to talk about the privacy problems at the intersection of cars and smartphones.<ul><li>Mark: Andrea, how did you get involved in this space?</li></ul><ul><li>Andrea: One of the companies that used to run was one of the largest used car inspection companies. We inspected a lot of vehicles that were ready to be sold. I just noticed that people were leaving their digital lives behind.</li><li>Mark: We first talked about the privacy/security issues around pairing your smartphone with your car rental about four years ago. Bluetooth-enabled entertainment systems were just becoming more common in rental car fleets as hands-free call laws became widespread. Even today, the first thing I do is to sync my iPhone. And I\'ve noticed more times than not, the sync slots are all full -- personalized names, Jan\'s iPhone, Timmy\'s iPhone. You end up having to delete at least one of them to make room for yours. And then, once paired, most phones by default, end up downloading all your contacts and your phone numbers and things like that. So, Jan and Timmy have left behind all of their contacts and all their phone numbers and that\'s just bad in so many ways.</li><li>Andrea: When you sync your phone through Bluetooth or you plug it into the USB port or now, in some newer cars, you just walk into the car and the car automatically sniffs your phone and start syncing to it, including those with Android Auto and Apple CarPlay. When that happens, you are creating a mini-clone of your phone inside the vehicle.</li><li>Mark: What other information are people leaving behind when they don\'t clear themselves out of a rental car?</li><li>Andrea: All sorts -- your phone book, your call logs, the text messages, including the body, meaning the actual text of the text messages; that stuff will be left behind. But also all sorts of meta data that allows criminals or law enforcement or just people who want to snoop on you to re-identify you, anything from the identifiers of your phones which are unique, your Bluetooth MAC address. Not to mention, of course, all your navigation data. I mean, you can reconstruct where people have been, just by data that has been stored in the infotainment system. And then you have, whether you are on Twitter and Facebook and what are the handles of those things, which are the last photos you have taken? What files have you synced, the emails, calendar entries. There\'s all sorts of stuff that people really don\'t understand that they\'re living behind.</li><li>Mark: But when people <em>do </em>delete pairings are they deleting all that information? Or is there some data still retained in that vehicle?</li><li>Andrea: &nbsp;By and large, deleting the data following the manufacturer\'s directions is helpful in preventing third parties to having access. And so if there is anything left behind, it requires a much deeper forensic type of analysis that is typically not accessible. But for most people, following the manufacturer\'s directions on how to remove the data, it is a very easy to do and very effective defense against getting their data being in the hands of somebody else.</li><li>Mark: That\'s where <a href=\"https://www.privacy4cars.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Privacy4Cars</a> comes in. That\'s where your app comes in -- helping people get that right?</li><li>Andrea: Yes, we have a free app that people can download, and you can just search for Privacy4Cars on the <a href=\"https://apps.apple.com/us/app/privacy4cars/id1370969499\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple App Store</a> or <a href=\"https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.privacy4cars\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Play</a>, depending what kind of phone you have, and download it for free.</li><li>Mark: The last time on the podcast we talked about this topic was a little over a year ago, October 2019. &nbsp;I\'d gotten a notice from Hertz that they had changed their terms and conditions. I noticed that Hertz had specifically carved out liability from me leaving information from a Bluetooth pairing. And now, on one hand, I could see that point. I\'ve actively and voluntarily synced my phone to the car and in doing so, caused my information to be downloaded. But at what point does that sort of digital maintenance, clearing personal identifiable information, after every rental become part of the rental company’s overall maintenance responsibility, like checking the oil levels and the tire pressure.</li><li>Andrea: I believe that the time has already passed, and it\'s been in the past for at least a year, right? At least, the passage of California Consumer Privacy Act. And probably you can go further back in the past because of other types of regulations. And there are some regulators who have actually spoken about this. So in the United States, you have the FTC that has issued already four guidances on the need to delete personal information. In Europe, they went as far as to give a guideline that mandates the removal of the personal information. Beyond rental, when people are traveling, sometimes they rent, sometimes they ride-share, and very often it happens to me that I in an Uber or Lyft and you have a very nice driver that tells you, “Hey, you need to fill up the tank on your battery? Here\'s a cable.” And the first thing I do is glance -- &nbsp;where does the cable end up? If it goes into the lighter, that\'s only power. So yes, I’ll recharge my phone. But if it goes straight &nbsp;into the USB port of the car, don\'t charge the phone unless you\'re really desperate, because as soon as your phone powers back up, it will start downloading all your information into a stranger\'s car. So you definitely don\'t want to do that.</li><li>Mark: Andrea Amico, founder of <a href=\"https://www.privacy4cars.com\">Privacy4Cars.com</a>, you can find his app on the <a href=\"https://apps.apple.com/us/app/privacy4cars/id1370969499\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple App store</a> and on <a href=\"https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.privacy4cars\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Play</a>. Andrea, thank you very much for taking the time to talk to us today.</li><li>Andrea: Thank you. Mark. I really enjoyed talking to you.</li></ul></li><li>Bridge music -- Latinium by Javolenus (c) copyright 2020 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Javolenus/62650 Ft: NiGiD</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\">2021 Travel Planning Pro Tips</h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I’ve been talking about travel planning in the time of COVID across maybe 6 months of episodes. And since January is always a big travel month, especially this year with some vouchers from last spring’s flight cancellations coming up on their 12-month expiration dates, combined with 10 months of pent-up demand and another 6, maybe 9 months to go, I thought I’d pull all my planning tips together here -- and probably in a blog post after I get back from Tucson.</li><li>First, book now. As I said earlier, there’s a steady stream of sales out there right now as airlines, hotels, and rental car companies are looking for cash to get through the start of the year. There are great domestic deals now, and if you can part with some cash now, good international deals for the second half of the year. Prices are only going to go up as vaccine rates improve, and that pent-up demand overwhelms any squeamishness about sitting next to a stranger. I’m eyeing that same American ORD-BCN 787 non-stop that I wasn’t able to take at the end of last September. The deals aren’t as smoking as they were last March when the travel world was in a freefall; the airlines have gotten a little smarter over the past year. But with cancellation fees still waived, there’s not much risk.&nbsp;</li><li>Second, check your destination’s health requirements -- and keep checking until you leave. Many of the airlines have built good web resources that summarize any restrictions by destination. Of the US majors, I think <a href=\"https://www.united.com/ual/en/us/fly/travel/restrictions-map.html\">United’s</a> is the easiest to use but I think American’s is the most complete. They actually link out to a Canadian company, <a href=\"https://apply.joinsherpa.com/travel-restrictions?affiliateId=americanairlines\">Sherpa</a>, that took my Arizona itinerary and noted that, while there’s no quarantine restrictions in Arizona, there are when I return to Chicago.&nbsp; <a href=\"https://www.delta.com/us/en/plan-your-next-trip/where-we-fly\">Delta’s</a> is pretty good too. I’ll put links to them in the show notes. But you can’t check once and be done. We talked at the top of the show about Canada putting in a new testing requirement with 7-days notice. And domestically, states are changing restrictions weekly. One trick I’ve talked about is to start following your destination’s local newspapers on Twitter to get any early warnings on anything new.&nbsp;</li><li>Third, read the cancellation rules a lot more closely. Being nimble and able to react to changes at your destination -- like Irene and I did with our pivot from San Diego to Tucson -- depends on being thoughtful about the cancellation risks you take. Right now, flights have the lowest cancellation risk; Airbnb and vacation rentals, the highest. Hotels are in-between. Our default strategy then is to book the flight as soon as we can, don’t do pre-paid hotel rooms or car rentals, and wait as long as we can before booking an Airbnb.</li><li>Fourth, overload your itinerary with outdoor activities like hiking and biking so last-minute closures or restrictions don’t leave you aimlessly flipping through the hotel TV channels. It was the big trend last summer -- airlines dialed down flights between big city airports like the ORD-LGA run and toward beaches and mountains. And it continues -- all the imagery in the airline and hotel “flash sale” emails over the past couple of weeks. But it does mean spending more time trolling the AccuWeather and Weather Channel web sites because an outside-heavy itinerary is more vulnerable to big storm fronts.</li><li>And finally, stay flexible, expect delays, and be patient. If there’s anything we learned from 2020, it’s that something will screw up your plans -- a positive COVID test will shut down the restaurant you really wanted to eat at, capacity restrictions will mean a line to get into something that was top of your list. Have back-up plans and give everyone you meet the benefit of the doubt. Like you, they’re just trying to get through this safe and sound.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\">Closing</h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #171</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li>In this episode’s tech notes, if you check out the show notes, you’ll find a full transcript of my interview with Andrea Amico courtesy of my free tier of Amazon Web Services which includes 60 minutes a month of their Transcribe service. I learned about it when watching a session during their virtual Re:Invent conference. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/12/17/podcast-147-holiday-travel-tips-notes-from-santa-fe/\">episode #147</a>, I talked about going to it in person in Las Vegas a couple of years ago -- me and 50,000 other attendees, mostly pudgy, pasty-faced guys power walking up and down the strip, backpacks strapped down tight, ignoring the showgirls on the corner so they wouldn’t be late to, say, the sold-out tutorial on best practices for ingesting streaming data from IoT devices into AWS’ time series database. Less stressful, though less entertaining this year. Anyhow, watching the session on Transcribe got me thinking about how I could use it for the interviews I’ve done over the past 12 months. I’ve started on the most current episodes, working my way back. So far I have three done --this interview with Andrea, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/09/19/podcast-167-6-months-on-why-keep-travel-cards/\">episode #167</a>’s interview with Matt Schulz about travel credit cards, and <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\">episode #166</a>’s interview with Emily Thomas about the meaning of travel. I’ll keep chipping away at the backlog as my 60 free minutes a month allows.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>, as well as asking Alexa, Siri, and Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_171.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips','Pivoting from San Diego to Tucson for COVID restrictions; planning tips for travel during COVID; CEO of Privacy4Cars talks about leaving data behind in rental cars','inherit','closed','closed','','2997-revision-v1','','','2021-03-02 21:53:34','2021-03-03 02:53:34','',2997,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/02/2997-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3323,1,'2021-03-02 22:40:43','2021-03-03 03:40:43','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3029,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3029\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I left my suitcase at the door of our West Tucson Airbnb and walked out onto the back patio to watch the sun slip behind the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tucson_Mountains\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tucson Mountains</a>. The shades of red and orange on the undersides of a couple of clouds stood out in the pale blue sky. This was exactly what we were looking for when we left a cold grey Chicago nine hours ago. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3051,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7789-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7789-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3051\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>But then I heard a rustling from the far edge of the patio. A good-sized boar, a wild pig, walked out from between two bushes and walked across the backyard. Then another one. They stopped, turned to look at me, and then kept walking. More kept coming – another six followed the leaders, walking the same path across the backyard, stopping to sniff at a little tree. A quick Google search told me they weren\'t wild pigs but <a href=\"https://www.azgfd.com/wildlife/livingwith/javelina/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">javelinas</a>, a New World relative of the pig. They range from southern Arizona all the way down to Argentina in social groups called \"squadrons\".  Our squad looked comfortable here, like they were taking their usual end-of-day stroll back to wherever they bed down to stay safe from mountain lions. A couple of them came back to check on us the next morning, reminding us to keep the patio door closed.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:quote {\"className\":\"is-style-default\"} -->\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-style-default\"><p>To see a video of the javelina visitation and more, check out my <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/s/aGlnaGxpZ2h0OjE3ODc3MTkxNjk2MTM2MTcx?igshid=18auew1hwvjvo&amp;story_media_id=2489441232116364521\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tucson Instagram Story</a> on the TravelCommons Instagram Page</p></blockquote>\n<!-- /wp:quote -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Hiking</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>As I mentioned in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the last podcast</a>, our plans for this trip were all about outside activities so any last-minute COVID closures or restrictions didn\'t strand us in our Airbnb, aimlessly flipping through TV channels. Since Tucson is <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tucson,_Arizona#Geography\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">surrounded by five small-ish mountain ranges,</a> we focused on hiking.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saguaro_National_Park\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Saguaro National Park</a></strong> is split into two physically separate areas, the Tucson Mountain District (TMD) on the west side of town near where we were staying, and across town to the east, the Rincon Mountain District (RMD). Our drive to the west district wound through the northern part of Tucson Mountain Park; two lanes twisting through gaps between the hilltops. The forecast said it would be the best weather of our stay, the highest temperatures and the lowest chance of rain, so we went for our biggest hike, <a href=\"https://www.arizonahighways.com/explore/hiking/king-canyon-trail\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">an 8-mile loop</a> that would take us to the top of 4,687-foot Wasson Peak. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We planned to park at the <a href=\"https://goo.gl/maps/KPGPZhBw8hDt7aiJ6\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">King Canyon Trailhead</a>, but it was filled with construction equipment that had completely torn up the parking lot. We hung a quick U-turn and, ignoring the warning signs, parked across the street in the far corner of the Arizona-Sonoma Desert Museum. We cut through some brush, crossed the street, and found the start of the trail.  It was sand and larger stones that climbed up from a dry wash. The Park Service has done a nice job of marking the trail, carving out steps on the steeper parts, and putting up signs at the trail intersections. I was glad, though, that I\'d downloaded enough off-line Google Maps data so I could double-check the signs when my mobile connection dropped.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"center\",\"id\":3034,\"width\":512,\"height\":384,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"aligncenter size-large is-resized\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2763.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2763-1024x768.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3034\" width=\"512\" height=\"384\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We walked up through what seemed the cactus version of a forest. The hills were full of all sorts of cacti: tall saguaro, low-to-the ground prickly pear and barrel, and twisted, tangled cholla. The top of Wasson Peak gave a panoramic view of the rocky hills that jutted straight up from the desert floor, and of Tucson sitting at the bottom of them. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3037,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2776-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2776-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3037\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://webcms.pima.gov/cms/One.aspx?pageId=1539\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tucson Mountain Park</a></strong> is directly south of western part of Saguaro National Park. We walked 10 minutes from our Airbnb to the <a href=\"https://goo.gl/maps/jhUVr4RvBoptxDvZ8\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Starr Pass Trailhead</a>. This hike was a 5½-mile loop around the valley floor, not as long nor as scenic as yesterday\'s Saguaro hike, but more leisurely and certainly easier on the feet. We took a bit more time, looking up at the tall saguaro cactuses with all their different arm configurations, and then down at the barrel cactuses that were just beginning to show the light green shoots of new growth. There were more people using these trails; the level terrain made it popular with mountain bikers and runners. And here too, the trails were well-marked and well-maintained.  It was a good afternoon\'s hike.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://www.fs.usda.gov/recarea/coronado/recarea/?recid=80532\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Sabino Canyon Recreational Area</a></strong> was our last hiking spot. It\'s across town, on the northeast side of Tucson in the foothills of the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Catalina_Mountains\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Santa Catalina Mountains</a>.  It was much more crowded than Saguaro or Tucson Mountain, but I might not be making a fair comparison. At Sabino Canyon, we drove to the main visitors center to step off on our hike while our other hikes started at smaller, more remote trailheads. Here again, there was beautiful rugged desert scenery, looking up the mountains and down into the canyons. But the trails weren\'t as well-marked as the other parks. We would lose the trail coming up out of a wash and then wander through cactus and javelina tracks trying to pick it up again. It was a pretty hike, but frustrating.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Eating</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>All the hiking freed up the caloric space we needed to get deep into <a href=\"https://thisistucson.com/eat/sonoran-food-is-having-a-moment-la-writer-gustavo-arellano-will-talk-burritos-and-mexican/article_e409de98-e53d-11e9-892b-73157f4df357.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Sonoran food</a>, a style of Mexican cuisine that hasn\'t yet broken out of its birthplace, <a href=\"https://rovingdecanter.com/2014/10/22/what-is-sonoran-style-mexican-food/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">in this case, Southern Arizona and the Mexican state of Sonora</a>, the way that Tex-Mex, Baja, and Oaxacan cuisines have.  Picking up the menus, I immediately saw some differences – it\'s a <em>burro</em>, not a burrito; a <em>caramelo</em>, not a quesadilla; and tacos are garnished with chopped cabbage instead of the chopped cilantro and raw white onion that is the standard in Chicago. Beef, especially <em>carne asada</em> grilled over mesquite, is the default filling and it\'s served in a thin flour tortilla that\'s more like Chinese moo shu or Peking Duck wrappers than the thick flour tortillas you get with fajitas. <a href=\"https://tucsonfoodie.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tucson Foodie</a> and Andi Berlin, food writer at <a href=\"https://thisistucson.com/eat/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">#ThisIsTucson</a>, were my main guides to Sonoran food.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3046,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7836-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7836-300x238.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3046\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><a href=\"https://www.yelp.com/biz/ruiz-hot-dogs-tucson\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>Ruiz Hot Dogs</strong></a> food truck was our first stop. I\'d read a lot about the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonoran_hot_dog\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Sonoran hot dog</a> and coming from Chicago, another town with its own <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago-style_hot_dog\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">unique twist on a hot dog</a>, I had to give it a try. The Sonoran dog is a bacon-wrapped hot dog topped with chopped tomatoes and onions, pinto beans, mayonnaise, mustard, and salsa verde, served in a slightly sweet split-top bun with a grilled yellow pepper on the side. We ate ours on the hood of our rental car. It was great and a bargain at $3. (1140 S 6th Ave at W 22nd St)</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://www.tacorustico.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">El Taco Rustico</a></strong> was next on our list for tacos – more specifically, quesabirras and cabrito (goat) tacos. We tried the quesabirras first. They\'re  crispy tacos filled with beef birra (juicy stewed beef) and melted cheese, served with a little styrofoam cup of broth, a sort of \"Mexican a jus,\" for dipping. The broth, with a deep roasted dried chile flavor, pulled everything together. What the quesabirras didn\'t soak up, we drank like a chaser from a styrofoam shot glass. Next were tacos. We had cabrito and pollo asado (grilled chicken) tacos, and they were a revelation. The taste of the meat, the mesquite smoke on the grilled chicken and the tang of the goat, punched through the condiments and the tortilla. That this made such an impression on us is a credit to Chef Juan Almanza but also a sad commentary on how the meat at too many taco joints is just an underseasoned carrier for the salsa and garnish. (2281 N Oracle Rd)</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3048,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2804-scaled.jpeg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2804-300x284.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3048\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://www.tacosapson.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tacos Apson</a></strong> was our last stop, down in South Tucson across the street from a high school, and the best stop. We smelled the mesquite coming off the grill when we opened the car door. We walked up to the window and ordered two burros, carne asada and haas, which is a mix of asada, cheese, and roasted green chiles. Then scanning the menu, I added a couple <em>costillas</em> tacos, grilled beef ribs.  Back at the Airbnb, I cut burros in half. The thin flour tortilla was wrapped around nothing but the meat; none of typical burrito fillings, no rice or beans or lettuce or crema. There was nothing to mask the mesquite on the carne asada or the beef ribs, and the cheese and green chile in the haas burro accentuated rather than overwhelmed the beef. (3501 S 12th Ave)</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Drinking</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I can\'t hike and eat Mexican food without beer. Tucson isn\'t on anyone\'s <a href=\"https://beerandbrewing.com/best-in-beer-2020-readers-choice-your-favorite-beer-cities/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">list of top beer cities</a>, but I found a couple of solid microbreweries to recommend.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3063,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2789-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2789-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3063\"/></a><figcaption>1912 Brewing Menu Board</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://1912brewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">1912 Brewing Company</a></strong> is in a strip of nondescript light industrial buildings just west of I-10, a quick 5-minute drive from El Taco Rustico. They have 20 taps and turn out good beer over a wider variety of styles than most places – goses, saisons, and some German styles in addition to the usual IPAs. (2045 N Forbes Blvd, Ste 105) </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://www.pueblovidabrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pueblo Vida Brewing Company</a></strong> is in downtown Tucson. After navigating one-way streets and dodging street car, we found parking and walked over to the taproom only to find that the taproom was still closed due to COVID restrictions. But they were selling cans from a walk-up window. We had a nice chat with the woman helping us and bought a mixed 4-pack to go with our Tacos Apson take-away – a Vietnamese-inspired rice lager, a couple of hazy IPAs made with local Sonoran white wheat, and what I was most excited for, a black IPA. They were the best beers of the trip. (115 E Broadway Blvd)</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Resources</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Travel and Lodging</strong><ul><li>We flew Southwest Airline to Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport (PHX) from Chicago Midway (MDW). Prices and flight selection were much better than flying into Tucson (TUS).</li><li>We rented a car from Hertz at PHX and drove the 115 miles down I-10 to Tucson.  It was an easy drive that took us an hour and 40 minutes. PHX is on the south side of Phoenix right by I-10, so we didn\'t hit any Phoenix traffic on the drive.</li><li>Our Airbnb was a one-bedroom time-share suite at <a href=\"https://clubwyndham.wyndhamdestinations.com/us/en/resorts/wyndham-hotels-resorts/united-states-of-america/arizona/tucson/starr-pass-golf-suites\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Starr Pass Golf Suites</a>.   It was a nice resort though we didn\'t get around to using any of the amenities (pool, golf course, restaurant). We\'re glad we stayed out near the Tucson Mountains rather than a downtown hotel. Tucson isn\'t that big, so we weren\'t more than 25 minutes from anywhere we wanted to be.</li></ul></li><li><strong>Hiking</strong> <ul><li><a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saguaro_National_Park\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Saguaro National Park</a></li><li><a href=\"https://webcms.pima.gov/cms/One.aspx?pageId=1539\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tucson Mountain Park</a></li><li><a href=\"https://www.fs.usda.gov/recarea/coronado/recarea/?recid=80532\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Sabino Canyon Recreational Area</a></li></ul></li><li><strong>Sonoran Food</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.yelp.com/biz/ruiz-hot-dogs-tucson\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Ruiz Hot Dogs</a>, 1140 S 6th Ave at W 22nd St</li><li><a href=\"https://www.tacorustico.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">El Taco Rustico</a>, 2281 N Oracle Rd</li><li><a href=\"https://www.tacosapson.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tacos Apson</a>, 3501 S 12th Ave</li></ul></li><li><strong>Craft Beer</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://1912brewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">1912 Brewing Company</a>, 2045 N Forbes Blvd, Ste 105</li><li><a href=\"https://www.pueblovidabrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pueblo Vida Brewing Company</a>, 115 E Broadway Blvd</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Quick Notes on Our Trip to Tucson','','inherit','closed','closed','','3026-revision-v1','','','2021-03-02 22:40:43','2021-03-03 03:40:43','',3026,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/02/3026-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3330,1,'2021-03-02 23:03:13','2021-03-03 04:03:13','<h2>TravelCommons</h2>		\n			The podcast giving the voice of the traveler<br><br>It\'s more about the journey than the destination		\n			<ul>\n								<li>\n						<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\"><h2>Quick Notes on Our Trip to Tucson</h2></a>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\">February 1, 2021</a>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n																	<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/beer/\" rel=\"category tag\">Beer</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/food-2/\" rel=\"category tag\">Food</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-journal/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Journal</a>\n																<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/#comments\">2 Comments</a>\n									<p>\n										I left my suitcase at the door of our West Tucson Airbnb and walked out onto the back patio to watch the sun slip behind the Tucson Mountains. The shades of red and orange on the undersides of a couple of clouds stood out in the pale blue sky. This was exactly what we were...																			</p>									\n			<!-- close .slider-content-max-width -->\n		<!-- close .slider-text-floating-container -->\n	<!-- close .slider-elements-display-table -->\n<!-- close .secondline-elements-slider-background -->\n				</li>\n								<li>\n						<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\"><h2>Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips</h2></a>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">January 14, 2021</a>\n									Episode 171								\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n																	<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n																<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n									<p>\n										Pivoting from San Diego to Tucson for COVID restrictions; planning tips for travel during COVID; CEO of Privacy4Cars talks about leaving data behind in rental cars																			</p>									\n							<!--[if lt IE 9]><![endif]-->\n<audio id=\"audio-2997-1\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?_=1\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>						\n			<!-- close .slider-content-max-width -->\n		<!-- close .slider-text-floating-container -->\n	<!-- close .slider-elements-display-table -->\n<!-- close .secondline-elements-slider-background -->\n				</li>\n								<li>\n						<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\"><h2>Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors</h2></a>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">December 16, 2020</a>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n																	<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n																Comments Off on Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors\n									<p>\n										No Thanksgiving travel, but looking at the travel volume for this, the busiest travel week of the year, shows just how far things have fallen. The Qantas CEO said &#8220;No vax, no fly&#8221;, so we dig into the emerging world of digital vaccine passports. And then I trace my travel genealogy, wondering if road warrior-ism...																			</p>									\n							<audio id=\"audio-2957-2\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?_=2\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>						\n			<!-- close .slider-content-max-width -->\n		<!-- close .slider-text-floating-container -->\n	<!-- close .slider-elements-display-table -->\n<!-- close .secondline-elements-slider-background -->\n				</li>\n							</ul>\n		<!-- #-elements-secondline-flexslider-56656ff -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-slider-main -->\n<a onMouseOver=\"this.style.color=`#2d2d2d`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#ffffff`\" onMouseOut=\"this.style.color=`#ffffff`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#c01f2c`\" style=\"color:#ffffff; background-color:#c01f2c\" href=\"#!\">Subscribe</a>   \n<!-- Modal HTML embedded directly into document. -->\n	<ul><li><a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Apple-Podcasts.png\" />Apple Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Google-Podcasts.png\" />Google Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Spotify.png\" />Spotify</a></li><li><a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/SoundCloud.png\" />SoundCloud</a></li><li><a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Stitcher.png\" />Stitcher</a></li><li><a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Amazon-Music.png\" />Amazon Music</a></li><li><a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/TravelcommonsPodcast\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/RSS.png\" />RSS</a></li></ul>                                       \n			<!-- close .secondline-addons-subscribe-button-container -->\n			<h2>Latest Posts</h2>		\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?w=2000 2000w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\">\nQuick Notes on Our Trip to Tucson</a></h2>\n					February 1, 2021\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/beer/\" rel=\"category tag\">Beer</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/food-2/\" rel=\"category tag\">Food</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-journal/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Journal</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/#comments\">2 Comments</a>\n						<p>I left my suitcase at the door of our West Tucson Airbnb and walked out onto the back patio to watch the sun slip behind the Tucson Mountains. The...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?w=1334 1334w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\nPodcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips</a></h2>\n					January 14, 2021\n						Episode 171										\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n						<p>Pivoting from San Diego to Tucson for COVID restrictions; planning tips for travel during COVID; CEO of Privacy4Cars talks about leaving data behind in rental cars</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2997-3\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?_=3\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?w=919 919w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">\nPodcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors</a></h2>\n					December 16, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					Comments Off on Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors\n						<p>No Thanksgiving travel, but looking at the travel volume for this, the busiest travel week of the year, shows just how far things have fallen. The Qantas CEO said...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2957-4\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?_=4\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?w=1299 1299w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">\nPodcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers</a></h2>\n					November 12, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-tech/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Tech</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/#comments\">3 Comments</a>\n						<p>No travel since the last episode, so I had some time to think back through my post-lockdown travel and come up with my top 10 gift ideas for your...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2936-5\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?_=5\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?w=2560 2560w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C2048 2048w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?w=2400 2400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">\n10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times</a></h2>\n					November 4, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-journal/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Journal</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-tech/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Tech</a>\n					Comments Off on 10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times\n						<p>With public health officials saying things like &#8220;it will be easily by the end of 2021 and perhaps into the next year before we start having some semblance of...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?w=2560 2560w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C2048 2048w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?w=2400 2400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\">\nPodcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food</a></h2>\n					October 16, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/food-2/\" rel=\"category tag\">Food</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					Comments Off on Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food\n						<p>Trying to recover from a long weekend of eating and drinking through the neighborhoods of South Philly. Our movable feast reminded me that food may be the one experience...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2896-6\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?_=6\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php?paged=2\" >More Posts</a>\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-list-main -->','Home','','inherit','closed','closed','','3141-revision-v1','','','2021-03-02 23:03:13','2021-03-03 04:03:13','',3141,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/02/3141-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3331,1,'2021-03-02 23:03:13','2021-03-03 04:03:13','<h2>TravelCommons</h2>		\n			The podcast giving the voice of the traveler<br><br>It\'s more about the journey than the destination		\n			<ul>\n								<li>\n						<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\"><h2>Quick Notes on Our Trip to Tucson</h2></a>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\">February 1, 2021</a>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n																	<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/beer/\" rel=\"category tag\">Beer</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/food-2/\" rel=\"category tag\">Food</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-journal/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Journal</a>\n																<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/#comments\">2 Comments</a>\n									<p>\n										I left my suitcase at the door of our West Tucson Airbnb and walked out onto the back patio to watch the sun slip behind the Tucson Mountains. The shades of red and orange on the undersides of a couple of clouds stood out in the pale blue sky. This was exactly what we were...																			</p>									\n			<!-- close .slider-content-max-width -->\n		<!-- close .slider-text-floating-container -->\n	<!-- close .slider-elements-display-table -->\n<!-- close .secondline-elements-slider-background -->\n				</li>\n								<li>\n						<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\"><h2>Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips</h2></a>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">January 14, 2021</a>\n									Episode 171								\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n																	<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n																<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n									<p>\n										Pivoting from San Diego to Tucson for COVID restrictions; planning tips for travel during COVID; CEO of Privacy4Cars talks about leaving data behind in rental cars																			</p>									\n							<!--[if lt IE 9]><![endif]-->\n<audio id=\"audio-2997-1\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?_=1\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>						\n			<!-- close .slider-content-max-width -->\n		<!-- close .slider-text-floating-container -->\n	<!-- close .slider-elements-display-table -->\n<!-- close .secondline-elements-slider-background -->\n				</li>\n								<li>\n						<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\"><h2>Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors</h2></a>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">December 16, 2020</a>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n																	<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n																Comments Off on Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors\n									<p>\n										No Thanksgiving travel, but looking at the travel volume for this, the busiest travel week of the year, shows just how far things have fallen. The Qantas CEO said &#8220;No vax, no fly&#8221;, so we dig into the emerging world of digital vaccine passports. And then I trace my travel genealogy, wondering if road warrior-ism...																			</p>									\n							<audio id=\"audio-2957-2\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?_=2\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>						\n			<!-- close .slider-content-max-width -->\n		<!-- close .slider-text-floating-container -->\n	<!-- close .slider-elements-display-table -->\n<!-- close .secondline-elements-slider-background -->\n				</li>\n							</ul>\n		<!-- #-elements-secondline-flexslider-56656ff -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-slider-main -->\n<a onMouseOver=\"this.style.color=`#2d2d2d`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#ffffff`\" onMouseOut=\"this.style.color=`#ffffff`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#c01f2c`\" style=\"color:#ffffff; background-color:#c01f2c\" href=\"#!\">Subscribe</a>   \n<!-- Modal HTML embedded directly into document. -->\n	<ul><li><a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Apple-Podcasts.png\" />Apple Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Google-Podcasts.png\" />Google Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Spotify.png\" />Spotify</a></li><li><a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/SoundCloud.png\" />SoundCloud</a></li><li><a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Stitcher.png\" />Stitcher</a></li><li><a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Amazon-Music.png\" />Amazon Music</a></li><li><a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/TravelcommonsPodcast\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/RSS.png\" />RSS</a></li></ul>                                       \n			<!-- close .secondline-addons-subscribe-button-container -->\n			<h2>Latest Posts</h2>		\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?w=2000 2000w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\">\nQuick Notes on Our Trip to Tucson</a></h2>\n					February 1, 2021\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/beer/\" rel=\"category tag\">Beer</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/food-2/\" rel=\"category tag\">Food</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-journal/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Journal</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/#comments\">2 Comments</a>\n						<p>I left my suitcase at the door of our West Tucson Airbnb and walked out onto the back patio to watch the sun slip behind the Tucson Mountains. The...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?w=1334 1334w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\nPodcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips</a></h2>\n					January 14, 2021\n						Episode 171										\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n						<p>Pivoting from San Diego to Tucson for COVID restrictions; planning tips for travel during COVID; CEO of Privacy4Cars talks about leaving data behind in rental cars</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2997-3\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?_=3\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?w=919 919w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">\nPodcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors</a></h2>\n					December 16, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					Comments Off on Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors\n						<p>No Thanksgiving travel, but looking at the travel volume for this, the busiest travel week of the year, shows just how far things have fallen. The Qantas CEO said...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2957-4\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?_=4\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?w=1299 1299w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">\nPodcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers</a></h2>\n					November 12, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-tech/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Tech</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/#comments\">3 Comments</a>\n						<p>No travel since the last episode, so I had some time to think back through my post-lockdown travel and come up with my top 10 gift ideas for your...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2936-5\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?_=5\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?w=2560 2560w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C2048 2048w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?w=2400 2400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">\n10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times</a></h2>\n					November 4, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-journal/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Journal</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-tech/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Tech</a>\n					Comments Off on 10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times\n						<p>With public health officials saying things like &#8220;it will be easily by the end of 2021 and perhaps into the next year before we start having some semblance of...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?w=2560 2560w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C2048 2048w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?w=2400 2400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\">\nPodcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food</a></h2>\n					October 16, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/food-2/\" rel=\"category tag\">Food</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					Comments Off on Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food\n						<p>Trying to recover from a long weekend of eating and drinking through the neighborhoods of South Philly. Our movable feast reminded me that food may be the one experience...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2896-6\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?_=6\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php?paged=2\" >More Posts</a>\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-list-main -->','Home','','inherit','closed','closed','','3141-revision-v1','','','2021-03-02 23:03:13','2021-03-03 04:03:13','',3141,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/02/3141-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3332,1,'2021-03-02 23:03:13','2021-03-03 04:03:13','<h2>TravelCommons</h2>		\n			The podcast giving the voice of the traveler<br><br>It\'s more about the journey than the destination		\n			<ul>\n								<li>\n						<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\"><h2>Quick Notes on Our Trip to Tucson</h2></a>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\">February 1, 2021</a>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n																	<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/beer/\" rel=\"category tag\">Beer</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/food-2/\" rel=\"category tag\">Food</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-journal/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Journal</a>\n																<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/#comments\">2 Comments</a>\n									<p>\n										I left my suitcase at the door of our West Tucson Airbnb and walked out onto the back patio to watch the sun slip behind the Tucson Mountains. The shades of red and orange on the undersides of a couple of clouds stood out in the pale blue sky. This was exactly what we were...																			</p>									\n			<!-- close .slider-content-max-width -->\n		<!-- close .slider-text-floating-container -->\n	<!-- close .slider-elements-display-table -->\n<!-- close .secondline-elements-slider-background -->\n				</li>\n								<li>\n						<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\"><h2>Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips</h2></a>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">January 14, 2021</a>\n									Episode 171								\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n																	<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n								28:17								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n									<p>\n										Pivoting from San Diego to Tucson for COVID restrictions; planning tips for travel during COVID; CEO of Privacy4Cars talks about leaving data behind in rental cars																			</p>									\n							<!--[if lt IE 9]><![endif]-->\n<audio id=\"audio-2997-1\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?_=1\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a> | Duration: 28:17 | Recorded on January 14, 2021</p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>						\n			<!-- close .slider-content-max-width -->\n		<!-- close .slider-text-floating-container -->\n	<!-- close .slider-elements-display-table -->\n<!-- close .secondline-elements-slider-background -->\n				</li>\n								<li>\n						<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\"><h2>Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors</h2></a>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">December 16, 2020</a>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n																	<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n																Comments Off on Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors\n									<p>\n										No Thanksgiving travel, but looking at the travel volume for this, the busiest travel week of the year, shows just how far things have fallen. The Qantas CEO said &#8220;No vax, no fly&#8221;, so we dig into the emerging world of digital vaccine passports. And then I trace my travel genealogy, wondering if road warrior-ism...																			</p>									\n							<audio id=\"audio-2957-2\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?_=2\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>						\n			<!-- close .slider-content-max-width -->\n		<!-- close .slider-text-floating-container -->\n	<!-- close .slider-elements-display-table -->\n<!-- close .secondline-elements-slider-background -->\n				</li>\n							</ul>\n		<!-- #-elements-secondline-flexslider-56656ff -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-slider-main -->\n<a onMouseOver=\"this.style.color=`#2d2d2d`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#ffffff`\" onMouseOut=\"this.style.color=`#ffffff`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#c01f2c`\" style=\"color:#ffffff; background-color:#c01f2c\" href=\"#!\">Subscribe</a>   \n<!-- Modal HTML embedded directly into document. -->\n	<ul><li><a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Apple-Podcasts.png\" />Apple Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Google-Podcasts.png\" />Google Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Spotify.png\" />Spotify</a></li><li><a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/SoundCloud.png\" />SoundCloud</a></li><li><a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Stitcher.png\" />Stitcher</a></li><li><a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Amazon-Music.png\" />Amazon Music</a></li><li><a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/TravelcommonsPodcast\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/RSS.png\" />RSS</a></li></ul>                                       \n			<!-- close .secondline-addons-subscribe-button-container -->\n			<h2>Latest Posts</h2>		\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?w=2000 2000w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\">\nQuick Notes on Our Trip to Tucson</a></h2>\n					February 1, 2021\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/beer/\" rel=\"category tag\">Beer</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/food-2/\" rel=\"category tag\">Food</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-journal/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Journal</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/#comments\">2 Comments</a>\n						<p>I left my suitcase at the door of our West Tucson Airbnb and walked out onto the back patio to watch the sun slip behind the Tucson Mountains. The...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?w=1334 1334w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\nPodcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips</a></h2>\n					January 14, 2021\n						Episode 171										\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					28:17\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n						<p>Pivoting from San Diego to Tucson for COVID restrictions; planning tips for travel during COVID; CEO of Privacy4Cars talks about leaving data behind in rental cars</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2997-3\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?_=3\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a> | Duration: 28:17 | Recorded on January 14, 2021</p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?w=919 919w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">\nPodcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors</a></h2>\n					December 16, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					Comments Off on Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors\n						<p>No Thanksgiving travel, but looking at the travel volume for this, the busiest travel week of the year, shows just how far things have fallen. The Qantas CEO said...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2957-4\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?_=4\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?w=1299 1299w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">\nPodcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers</a></h2>\n					November 12, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-tech/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Tech</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/#comments\">3 Comments</a>\n						<p>No travel since the last episode, so I had some time to think back through my post-lockdown travel and come up with my top 10 gift ideas for your...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2936-5\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?_=5\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?w=2560 2560w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C2048 2048w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?w=2400 2400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">\n10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times</a></h2>\n					November 4, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-journal/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Journal</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-tech/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Tech</a>\n					Comments Off on 10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times\n						<p>With public health officials saying things like &#8220;it will be easily by the end of 2021 and perhaps into the next year before we start having some semblance of...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?w=2560 2560w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C2048 2048w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?w=2400 2400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\">\nPodcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food</a></h2>\n					October 16, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/food-2/\" rel=\"category tag\">Food</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					Comments Off on Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food\n						<p>Trying to recover from a long weekend of eating and drinking through the neighborhoods of South Philly. Our movable feast reminded me that food may be the one experience...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2896-6\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?_=6\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php?paged=2\" >More Posts</a>\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-list-main -->','Home','','inherit','closed','closed','','3141-revision-v1','','','2021-03-02 23:03:13','2021-03-03 04:03:13','',3141,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/02/3141-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0);
INSERT INTO `wp_posts` VALUES
(3342,1,'2021-02-16 23:14:47','2021-02-17 04:14:47','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3037,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2776-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2776-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3037\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Escaped the Chicago winter for a week of hiking in the mountains around Tucson and searching for good Sonoran food. We also talk with Mike Kennedy, CEO and Co-Founder of <a href=\"http://www.go-koala.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Koala </a>about how he\'s making it easy to rent timeshares without buying into them. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_172.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go over to the <em>Subscribe</em> section on the right to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #172: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>This Week</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois on, depending where you are, Fat Tuesday or Shrove Tuesday or Pancake Tuesday. Here in Chicago, <a href=\"https://culture.pl/en/article/how-chicago-became-a-distinctly-polish-american-city\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">with a big Polish population</a>, it’s <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P%C4%85czki\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pączki</a> Day and I had mine for breakfast -- Polish-filled donuts; I went for a raspberry jam and a custard one. What had been one of the mildest winters on record started reverting to the mean in February. The last day the temperature cracked freezing was almost 2 weeks ago and it has snowed 13 of the past 17 days. We were all waiting for this, veterans of Midwest winters. It got me thinking that maybe Irene and I should’ve delayed our trip to Tucson from the third week of January when the temperatures here were hitting the mid-40’s, to last week or this week when we could’ve enjoyed 50-60° temperature differentials.</li><li>But even without the guilty pleasure of posting schadenfreude-trolling Instagram pictures of sunshine and temperature readings, we had a good week in Tucson. The flights out and back on Southwest were uneventful, <em>and</em> not full; the Airbnb was fine; the desert hikes were great, and we hit some good restaurants and taprooms, which, as I talked about in the last episode, was the main reason we pivoted from original destination, locked-down/shutdown San Diego to Tucson. Probably our only disappointment was not finding a great margarita -- which we fixed in the Amex Centurion Lounge in PHX while waiting for our flight home. I’ll talk more about Tucson later in the episode, but I also wrote up a blog post with all the details. If you go to the episode description in your podcast app, there’s a link that should be clickable to take you straight to the post.</li><li>Even though Southwest’s open middle seat pledge expired in December (<a href=\"https://news.delta.com/delta-only-us-airline-block-middle-seats-limit-onboard-capacity-through-march-30-2021\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Delta’s the last one standing</a>), no one landed in our middle seat on our MDW-PHX flight. That flight was a lot longer than I remember it being last year. I think it had something to do with the mask. Before getting on the plane, I switched from my standard EvolveTogether surgical style mask to a Korean version of the N-95 mask, decided to dial it up not knowing if I was going to be shoulder-to-shoulder with a stranger for 3+ hours. The KN-95 wasn’t too uncomfortable, as masks go, so I didn’t swap it out for my other mask when the middle seat stayed empty. My strategy with Southwest’s open seating was to go ¾’s of the way to the back of the plane, about halfway past the exit row. I figured this would mean fewer people walking past us but far enough away from the rear lavs to avoid the in-flight queues. And, since people still want to deplane quickly, if the last boarding groups, the C groups, were left with just middle seats, they’d take them in the front of the cabin. As it turned out, I probably over-thought that a bit; I didn’t see any occupied middle seat in the front or the back.</li><li>Then, a couple of days before our flight home, I got the dreaded e-mail from Southwest -- the flight “may not allow for an open middle seat next to you.” I waited until the night before to tell Irene. She’s a little more COVID risk-averse than me and didn’t want her stewing on it. But it turned out OK. She grabbed the 2-seat second exit row -- aisle and middle seat; no window seat. And looking behind us, I didn’t see any row with an occupied middle seat, so either people swapped their flights after receiving that email, or the flight was just a shade over ⅔’s full with any occupied middle seats in the front of the plane. And, those margaritas from the Centurion Lounge helped the flight home go by just a wee bit easier.</li><li>Bridge Music -- P.I.H.E. by Budapest BluesBoy (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hepepe/26362 Ft: Inna Barmash – Zhurbin</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>The <a href=\"https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/breaking/ct-ohare-trespasser-arrest-20210117-aad2craysvehzmk5rm6l23p3l4-story.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">story</a> of the guy who lived for 3 months on the secure side of O’Hare’s domestic terminals after getting off his flight from LA using an airport ID badge that an airport operations manager had reported missing back in October.&nbsp; Shades of Tom Hanks’ character in “The Terminal”. Now, O’Hare is a big airport but it’s not “hang out for 3 months unnoticed” big. There are hundreds of TSA, Chicago Police, and airport security staff -- not to mention all the airline gate agents, wheelchair porters, restaurant workers, and airport maintenance staff. And not one of them noticed this guy wandering around at all hours with an expired badge, even when passenger volumes are cut in half -- until finally, 2 United Airlines workers asked to see his ID. This is bad -- like Cats, The Movie-level bad, like Fyre Festival bad. Seems that, 20 years on from 9/11, “see something, say something” has faded. The TSA and Chicago Dept of Aviation should have to come up with some answers -- but a month on, I think they’ll quietly drop the charges and bury this thing, hoping that the next guy is a bit more obvious.</li><li>In the last episode, I wondered what the airlines and hotels will do about elite status protection if travel continues to be slow through the summer and closed saying “it’ll be interesting to see what they offer come May”. Well, I was off by, say 4-5 months. Things are moving fast. A week after posting that episode, I got an email from Southwest saying they were extending my Companion Pass from June to Dec, and then offers from American and United for status qualifier accelerators. The slooow roll-out of coronavirus vaccines is cutting into what was an end-of-year travel planning spurt. <a href=\"https://www.valuepenguin.com/news/consumers-travel-rewards-covid-2021\">ValuePenguin</a> -- we’ve talked to them in prior episodes about travel credit cards -- they did a survey in December and found people getting rev’d up for travel -- 16% of respondents booked travel as a result of vaccine approvals, 34% had bought plane tickets within the last month, and, in a turnaround from earlier in the year, 47% had increased use of travel credit cards to earn miles to fund their next trip. But two months on from that survey, you already hear some folks starting to write off the summer. Which, with airlines talking about new furloughs and <a href=\"https://skift.com/2021/02/05/u-s-hotel-jobs-recovery-stalls-unemployment-rises/\">hotel unemployment back up to 23%</a> in January, isn’t great news for anyone.</li><li>I also got emails from Iberia and British Airways reminding me that I have Avios balances with each of them that are expiring; Iberia’s at the end of March; BA’s the end of the year (interesting difference in warning periods). Iberia and BA merged 10-11 years ago to form IAG which later bought Aer Lingus, and all 3 use Avios points for their frequent flyer programs but they keep their programs separate. So I have different Avios balances at all three. For most of these programs, you need to have some activity over 24-36 months to keep your point balance. Some airlines have extended these timelines for COVID, but apparently not Iberia or BA. In the past, the easiest thing to do was transfer over the minimum number of credit card points from Chase or Amex -- usually 1,000 points -- and that activity would reset the clock. I was about to run that play again, but something made me check out the rules first. And, sure as hell, the Iberia website says that transferring miles <em>doesn’t</em> count as activity. Now while Iberia’s and BA’s Avios programs are separate, you can transfer points between them if you dig hard enough -- I talked about burning a Saturday afternoon on this back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">episode #136</a>. But they’ve made it easier in the intervening years; I scrounged around and found the page I needed to transfer all my Iberia Avios points to my BA account. I’ll give it a month to see if BA considers this transfer as enough “activity” to reset the 36-month clock. If not, I have until the end of the year to try an Amex transfer or, failing that, code a night’s Marriott or Hyatt stay to my BA account. Reminds me to make the rounds of my other odds-n-ends loyalty programs and see what else might be expiring.</li><li>I mentioned in the last segment that we hit the <a href=\"https://thecenturionlounge.com/locations/phx/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">PHX Amex Centurion Lounge</a> before flying home from our desert hiking week. I’ve talked in past episodes about how these lounges are head-and-shoulders above the regular US airline lounges -- great food, open bars. The only problems -- not enough of them and, because they’re a great deal, they get crowded. Or did pre-COVID. Walking into the PHX lounge, we saw maybe a dozen people. They’re still serving food, but they now have staff dishing it out for you from the buffet line. But we’d picked up a couple of sandwiches from Pizzeria Bianco, a great pizza and panini place, so we were just looking for drinks. I thought about a beer, walking up to the bar, the tequila bottle caught my eye, reminding me we hadn’t been able to find a good margarita in Tucson. The bartender solved that problem; she made two great margaritas. So good, that I wanted to squeeze one more in before heading down to the gate. I walked up to the bar; different bartender; I hoped her margaritas were as good. She looked at me for a moment and then said, “I have to be honest with you; I’ve never made a margarita before, but I’ll give it a try.” She was one of the girls from the buffet line standing in for the bartender while she was on break. I could’ve pivoted to a beer, but when she said “I’ll give it a try.” “No problem,” I said, “I’ll walk you through it.” Grab the shaker, fill it with ice. Take the tequila bottle, fill the large end of the jigger, pour it into the shaker. Now turn the jigger over and fill the short end with Cointreau. Pour that in. Now a short shot of lime juice. Now put the lid on and shake it. Now strain it into that martini glass; we’ll skip the salt rim. She was great; a little nervous, but game for it. We thanked each other -- me thanking her for yet another good margarita; she thanking me... but for what, not being another miserable, entitled Platinum card holder? Absolutely my best Centurion Lounge experience yet.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge music -- ~aether theories~ by Vidian (c) copyright 2018 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Vidian/57398 Ft: Gurdonark, White-throated Sparrow</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Timeshares Without The Pitch</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>For our Tucson trip, Irene ended up booking on Airbnb what turned out to be someone’s timeshare rental in a golf resort west of Tucson. It was a new one for us, and a little different than the typical Airbnb experience -- we had to put down a credit card for incidentals, and then had to check-out and check back in halfway thru the stay -- but it was a nice place and, better yet, we didn’t get trapped in a small room for an hour-long sales pitch.</li><li>And so when we got back home and I got a note from <a href=\"https://www.go-koala.com/about/team\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Mike Kennedy</a> introducing me to <a href=\"https://www.go-koala.com/\">Koala</a>, the timeshare rental search platform he co-founded and launched last August, I asked him to come onto the podcast to talk about timeshare rentals and how they fit into the travel eco-system:<ul><li>Mark: Mike, help us understand how timeshare rental fits into that spectrum of accommodations that travelers might be more familiar with. If I think about that spectrum, I could go from hotels to B &amp; Bs to vacation rentals to private home rentals. Where does timeshare rental fit?</li><li>Mike: That\'s a great question. There\'s kind of a natural bifurcation in options when you\'re selecting accommodations for vacations. You\'re either going down the route of an <a href=\"https://www.airbnb.com\">Airbnb</a> or a <a href=\"https://www.vrbo.com/\">VRBO</a>.&nbsp; You want to rent a home because you want some space, or you want to stay in something that is a hotel. But in those two scenarios, you typically have compromises, and the compromise with hotels is that, especially if you have a family, you\'re typically getting one hotel room in cramming your family in or getting adjoining hotel rooms. But you get the confidence that it’s managed by Mariott or Hilton, etc. Conversely, if you\'re getting a home rental, it\'s the opposite. You have the ability to rent a whole home. You don\'t have to leave three times a day for meals. However, you don\'t know who it\'s being cleaned by, or what protocols are being upheld. And in today\'s world, those things are really important. The timeshare product is the only natural hybrid product in the marketplace. You have all the benefits and features of your vacation rentals like the living rooms, the shared bedrooms, washer and dryer; all that space that you want from a vacation rental. But it\'s managed by a Marriott or Hilton, and it has resort amenities like swimming pools, check-in desks; things like that that give you the confidence again in today\'s world with that, people really want. Before us, the options to get one of these was to pay a lot of money on these OTAs, these online travel agencies through a rental, or to go and buy into one of these programs. And that\'s not really either affordable or even appealing to a lot of people.</li><li>Mark: What does Koala offer travelers that, say, Airbnb doesn\'t? I recently rented a Club Wyndham timeshare in Tucson from an owner on Airbnb. So how would that transaction be different/better/more optimized on Koala?</li><li>Mike: So, a couple things. One. You don\'t see a lot of timeshare inventory on Airbnb for the reasons I\'m about to discuss. And that is because it is not a platform that is built for that product.</li><li>Mark: What are some of the unique pieces that make Airbnb not optimized for timeshare rental?</li><li>Mike: If you own a home, you can open up a calendar for 365 and you can set different prices and different availability based off of that open calendar. If you own a timeshare, you typically own a seven-day interval.&nbsp; And how do you fit that into some place where it gets visibility for someone that may not be searching for those exact beginning and end dates? So, what ends up happening is that a lot of people show up to the resorts and the reservations are incorrect or wrong, or just not there at all. You know, it is a system because there\'s a little bit of a square peg in a round hole. Don’t get me wrong. It sounds like you had a fine experience, but they don\'t manage that in a way that is designed to be managed. There\'s a third party involved in this, the resort.&nbsp; When it\'s an Airbnb, it\'s a host and it\'s a traveler, and those two will figure out and arrange something. With a resort stay, there is a third party. There\'s a guest certificate transfer that happens on the back end to ensure that your name as a traveler gets switched to the reservation ledger in the system to ensure that the guest gets to walk into that check-in successfully. We do all that. There are extra steps involved that we ensure. And we handle all of that.</li><li>Mark: So it feels like you\'re acting as an OTA, an online travel agency like an Orbitz or an Expedia, to provide search, discovery and then booking.</li><li>Mike: Correct, yes</li><li>Mark: As you were working towards your August launch, what were some of the biggest challenges you faced in getting that inventory so that people could search and book?</li><li>Mike: That is the question, right? So, I know this from my time in Hilton Club that there was a problem in how people underutilize their timeshares but still had fees to pay. And that went from “I bought this thing; I don\'t understand it” all the way up to “I loved it for 10 years; I\'m just done with it and now what?” and everything in between. But at the end of the day, if you have a $2000 annual fee to pay, it becomes a problem. So, I knew that it was something that if we connected with these owners, we could help solve that problem for them. What we didn\'t understand was that, in many cases, these owners don\'t even know what they own. They don\'t know where to start. It\'s not like you have a vacation rental, and you\'re like “Oh, here\'s the house; I take some photos; I’m going to throw up a price and I’m going to rent a couple nights out, and I\'ll adjust the cost per night based off of rentals.” You have this thing that is either a fixed week or it\'s not; it\'s a specific resort or it\'s not. And in many cases, people don\'t really know what they bought. And in some cases, they bought something and then upgraded to something else. So that was by far the biggest problem was getting people to understand what they own. How do you create an asset out of that and leverage that asset in a way that could earn you some revenue? It\'s still a process that we\'re going through, like really making it very, very simple. You know, we\'re not really just tapping into this supply; we’re really empowering a whole group of people to understand this process.</li><li>Mark: Mike, last question. How did you get this idea? How\'d you get started on this down this path?</li><li>Mike: Yeah, good question. I was a musician when I was in my twenties, and I kind of meandered into residential real estate. And the real estate market in 2007 in New York, everywhere was just kind of flat. So, one of my good friends was like, “You should come check out this condo hotel; it\'s fractional real estate.” I ask “What the heck is fractional real estate?” “No, come check it out. It\'s Hilton.” “Alright.” I went in there. I\'m like, This is cool. There\'s a lot of hustle and bustle. My office is kind of dead; this office is moving. So, I joined the team. Three weeks into training, I ask “Is this a timeshare?”&nbsp; They\'re like “Yeah…”, but I was already hired in the job. It really started to resonate with me -- the more and more time I spent with people that I sold, after they\'re coming in over and over again, and we\'re trying to upgrade them into something else. It was cool, this product is great, but now people are looking for ways out, and I don\'t have answers for them. The solutions weren\'t there on the back end that I was hoping for. So, it really was a direct result of me being in touch with those situations that I felt like I could help. And yeah, I took the leap and I said, Look, this is where this is a problem we\'re solving. I think the industry is great. I think there\'s a lot of upside. I think it\'s got a bad rap, but I think if we mitigate some of that and amplify what people love about this industry, I think it will go a long way.</li><li>Mark: Fantastic. Mike Kennedy, CEO and Co-Founder of KOALA. Mike, thanks for joining us on the TravelCommons podcast</li><li>Mike: Thanks, Mark.</li></ul></li><li>Bridge music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/flatwound/14476\">The Long Goodbye</a>&nbsp;by John Pazdan (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/flatwound/14476</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Notes on Tucson</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>As I said at the top of the show, Irene and I had a good trip to Tucson at the end of January -- pretty much just hiking, eating, and drinking. I wrote it up in a blog post on the TravelCommons website -- <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Quick Notes on Our Trip to Tucson\">“Quick Notes on our Trip to Tucson”</a>, though at over 1,700 words, I’m not sure it necessarily qualified as “quick.” But there are some pictures, and links to all the parks, restaurants, and taprooms we enjoyed. Also a link to the Tucson Instagram story on the TravelCommons Instagram page if you want to see some more informal pictures.</li><li>We flew into PHX rather than TUS because the non-stop flights were cheaper and there were more of them. I was going to rent a car anyways, so the 100-mile drive straight down I-10 seemed a good trade-off for better flights. The only hitch in that plan was the bus between the terminal and the rental car center. They limited capacity to 15 people, which made sense. However, they didn’t add buses to make up that lost capacity. Wasn’t a problem when we got on the bus at the terminal, but the queue at the rental car center stretched the length of the center; hundreds of people trying to get back to make their flight. I saw some folks bailing out and calling Ubers. Made a note to add an extra 30 minutes to our return time. Turned out we didn’t need it; walked straight from the Hertz lot onto a bus. But that was OK. I used that time for my margarita lesson -- definitely a greater good.</li><li>Tucson sits kinda at the bottom of five sets of small-ish mountains; they’re an awkward size -- bigger than hills, but except for the Santa Catalinas, don’t feel big enough to be “mountains”. Which was OK because all we wanted to do was hike, well really walk, the trails. To be outside under blue skies in the high 60’s/low 70’s; that’s what we really wanted to do; to take a break from grey Chicago and to be far enough away from people that we could walk around without masks.&nbsp;</li><li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\">episode #168</a>, we talked about traveling for food, that food is one experience of a place that can’t be easily exported and bought on-line. In that episode, I talked about eating our way through South Philly and a pasty tour of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. In Tucson, it was the hunt for Sonoran food, a type of Mexican cuisine that you don’t see much outside of, well, the Sonoran desert -- Southern Arizona and the Mexican state of Sonora. It hasn’t “broken out” the way that, say, Tex-Mex and Baja and Oaxacan styles have. It’s all about beef, mostly <em>carne asada</em> grilled over mesquite and served in a thin flour tortilla that\'s more like the wrappers you get with Chinese Mandarin food than the thick flour tortillas you get with fajitas. Cross-referencing a couple of local food blogs, I had a list of places to try. And honestly, it was a bit of hit-and-miss; mostly misses the first couple of nights, but then we hit gold at the end of our stay. Looking back, I think we tried the nicer places on the list first. They weren’t <em>bad</em>; they were fine, but not places I’d go out of my way to recommend. And after that -- disappointment is too strong of a word, we kinda said, screw it. We found the Sonoran hot dog truck and ate a couple of $3 bacon-wrapped hot dogs topped with chopped tomatoes and onions, pinto beans, mayonnaise, mustard, and salsa verde off the hood of our rental car. And then drove over to a restaurant that’s website made it look very foody -- scrolling photos of nicely plated dishes -- but almost passed the building by; it looked like a repurposed Arby’s or Hardee’s with a vinyl sign pulled over the original one. But the food, especially the cabrito, the goat tacos, were phenomenal. Not all the dives were great; some disappointed, some were “meh”. But the ones that were great made it worth the “meh’s”.</li><li>But the absolute highlight of the trip? I was standing out on the back patio of our timeshare watching the sun set over the Tucson Mountains; it was beautiful; when I heard some rustling off to the right. What looked like a good-sized wild pig walked out from between two bushes and across the backyard. And then another one. They stopped, turned to look at me, and then kept walking. More kept coming – walking the same path across the backyard. They were <a href=\"https://www.azgfd.com/wildlife/livingwith/javelina/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">javelinas</a>, and <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peccary\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Wikipedia</a> told us that their groups are called \"squadrons\".&nbsp; Well, our squad looked comfortable here, like they were taking their usual end-of-day stroll back to wherever they bed down to stay safe from mountain lions. And the next morning, a couple came back sniffing around the patio door. I wondered if they smelled the egg and toast I made for breakfast. They reminded us to keep that patio door closed.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #172</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li>Nothing new on the tech front this month, but I should have the website freshened up by the next episode. I’ve had the current look since the beginning of 2006 courtesy of TravelCommons listener Hilary Baumann and her <a href=\"https://fascinationdesign.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Fascination Design</a> firm. The change is absolutely not a knock against Hilary’s work. It’s just that, after 15 years, I wanted to freshen things up a bit. So look for that by the end of February or beginning of March.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>, as well as asking Alexa, Siri, and Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_172.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #172 — Timeshares Without the Pitch; Notes on Tucson','Escaped Chicago winter for a week of hiking and eating in Tucson; CEO of Koala talks about renting timeshares; travel planning gets hot and then cools back down','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-172-timeshares-without-the-pitch-notes-on-tucson','','','2021-10-01 17:10:44','2021-10-01 22:10:44','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3117',0,'post','',0),
(3344,1,'2021-03-02 23:36:53','2021-03-03 04:36:53','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3121,\"width\":300,\"height\":300,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large is-resized\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/IMG_2760X-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/IMG_2760X-1024x1024.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3121\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Escaped the Chicago winter for a week of hiking in the mountains around Tucson and searching for good Sonoran food. We also talk with Mike Kennedy, CEO and Co-Founder of <a href=\"http://www.go-koala.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Koala </a>about how he\'s making it easy to rent timeshares without buying into them. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_172.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go over to the <em>Subscribe</em> section on the right to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show Notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show Notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #172: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>This Week</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois on, depending where you are, Fat Tuesday or Shrove Tuesday or Pancake Tuesday. Here in Chicago, <a href=\"https://culture.pl/en/article/how-chicago-became-a-distinctly-polish-american-city\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">with a big Polish population</a>, it’s <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P%C4%85czki\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pączki</a> Day and I had mine for breakfast -- Polish-filled donuts; I went for a raspberry jam and a custard one. What had been one of the mildest winters on record started reverting to the mean in February. The last day the temperature cracked freezing was almost 2 weeks ago and it has snowed 13 of the past 17 days. We were all waiting for this, veterans of Midwest winters. It got me thinking that maybe Irene and I should’ve delayed our trip to Tucson from the third week of January when the temperatures here were hitting the mid-40’s, to last week or this week when we could’ve enjoyed 50-60° temperature differentials.</li><li>But even without the guilty pleasure of posting schadenfreude-trolling Instagram pictures of sunshine and temperature readings, we had a good week in Tucson. The flights out and back on Southwest were uneventful, <em>and</em> not full; the Airbnb was fine; the desert hikes were great, and we hit some good restaurants and taprooms, which, as I talked about in the last episode, was the main reason we pivoted from original destination, locked-down/shutdown San Diego to Tucson. Probably our only disappointment was not finding a great margarita -- which we fixed in the Amex Centurion Lounge in PHX while waiting for our flight home. I’ll talk more about Tucson later in the episode, but I also wrote up a blog post with all the details. If you go to the episode description in your podcast app, there’s a link that should be clickable to take you straight to the post.</li><li>Even though Southwest’s open middle seat pledge expired in December (<a href=\"https://news.delta.com/delta-only-us-airline-block-middle-seats-limit-onboard-capacity-through-march-30-2021\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Delta’s the last one standing</a>), no one landed in our middle seat on our MDW-PHX flight. That flight was a lot longer than I remember it being last year. I think it had something to do with the mask. Before getting on the plane, I switched from my standard EvolveTogether surgical style mask to a Korean version of the N-95 mask, decided to dial it up not knowing if I was going to be shoulder-to-shoulder with a stranger for 3+ hours. The KN-95 wasn’t too uncomfortable, as masks go, so I didn’t swap it out for my other mask when the middle seat stayed empty. My strategy with Southwest’s open seating was to go ¾’s of the way to the back of the plane, about halfway past the exit row. I figured this would mean fewer people walking past us but far enough away from the rear lavs to avoid the in-flight queues. And, since people still want to deplane quickly, if the last boarding groups, the C groups, were left with just middle seats, they’d take them in the front of the cabin. As it turned out, I probably over-thought that a bit; I didn’t see any occupied middle seat in the front or the back.</li><li>Then, a couple of days before our flight home, I got the dreaded e-mail from Southwest -- the flight “may not allow for an open middle seat next to you.” I waited until the night before to tell Irene. She’s a little more COVID risk-averse than me and didn’t want her stewing on it. But it turned out OK. She grabbed the 2-seat second exit row -- aisle and middle seat; no window seat. And looking behind us, I didn’t see any row with an occupied middle seat, so either people swapped their flights after receiving that email, or the flight was just a shade over ⅔’s full with any occupied middle seats in the front of the plane. And, those margaritas from the Centurion Lounge helped the flight home go by just a wee bit easier.</li><li>Bridge Music -- P.I.H.E. by Budapest BluesBoy (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hepepe/26362 Ft: Inna Barmash – Zhurbin</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>The <a href=\"https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/breaking/ct-ohare-trespasser-arrest-20210117-aad2craysvehzmk5rm6l23p3l4-story.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">story</a> of the guy who lived for 3 months on the secure side of O’Hare’s domestic terminals after getting off his flight from LA using an airport ID badge that an airport operations manager had reported missing back in October.&nbsp; Shades of Tom Hanks’ character in “The Terminal”. Now, O’Hare is a big airport but it’s not “hang out for 3 months unnoticed” big. There are hundreds of TSA, Chicago Police, and airport security staff -- not to mention all the airline gate agents, wheelchair porters, restaurant workers, and airport maintenance staff. And not one of them noticed this guy wandering around at all hours with an expired badge, even when passenger volumes are cut in half -- until finally, 2 United Airlines workers asked to see his ID. This is bad -- like Cats, The Movie-level bad, like Fyre Festival bad. Seems that, 20 years on from 9/11, “see something, say something” has faded. The TSA and Chicago Dept of Aviation should have to come up with some answers -- but a month on, I think they’ll quietly drop the charges and bury this thing, hoping that the next guy is a bit more obvious.</li><li>In the last episode, I wondered what the airlines and hotels will do about elite status protection if travel continues to be slow through the summer and closed saying “it’ll be interesting to see what they offer come May”. Well, I was off by, say 4-5 months. Things are moving fast. A week after posting that episode, I got an email from Southwest saying they were extending my Companion Pass from June to Dec, and then offers from American and United for status qualifier accelerators. The slooow roll-out of coronavirus vaccines is cutting into what was an end-of-year travel planning spurt. <a href=\"https://www.valuepenguin.com/news/consumers-travel-rewards-covid-2021\">ValuePenguin</a> -- we’ve talked to them in prior episodes about travel credit cards -- they did a survey in December and found people getting rev’d up for travel -- 16% of respondents booked travel as a result of vaccine approvals, 34% had bought plane tickets within the last month, and, in a turnaround from earlier in the year, 47% had increased use of travel credit cards to earn miles to fund their next trip. But two months on from that survey, you already hear some folks starting to write off the summer. Which, with airlines talking about new furloughs and <a href=\"https://skift.com/2021/02/05/u-s-hotel-jobs-recovery-stalls-unemployment-rises/\">hotel unemployment back up to 23%</a> in January, isn’t great news for anyone.</li><li>I also got emails from Iberia and British Airways reminding me that I have Avios balances with each of them that are expiring; Iberia’s at the end of March; BA’s the end of the year (interesting difference in warning periods). Iberia and BA merged 10-11 years ago to form IAG which later bought Aer Lingus, and all 3 use Avios points for their frequent flyer programs but they keep their programs separate. So I have different Avios balances at all three. For most of these programs, you need to have some activity over 24-36 months to keep your point balance. Some airlines have extended these timelines for COVID, but apparently not Iberia or BA. In the past, the easiest thing to do was transfer over the minimum number of credit card points from Chase or Amex -- usually 1,000 points -- and that activity would reset the clock. I was about to run that play again, but something made me check out the rules first. And, sure as hell, the Iberia website says that transferring miles <em>doesn’t</em> count as activity. Now while Iberia’s and BA’s Avios programs are separate, you can transfer points between them if you dig hard enough -- I talked about burning a Saturday afternoon on this back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">episode #136</a>. But they’ve made it easier in the intervening years; I scrounged around and found the page I needed to transfer all my Iberia Avios points to my BA account. I’ll give it a month to see if BA considers this transfer as enough “activity” to reset the 36-month clock. If not, I have until the end of the year to try an Amex transfer or, failing that, code a night’s Marriott or Hyatt stay to my BA account. Reminds me to make the rounds of my other odds-n-ends loyalty programs and see what else might be expiring.</li><li>I mentioned in the last segment that we hit the <a href=\"https://thecenturionlounge.com/locations/phx/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">PHX Amex Centurion Lounge</a> before flying home from our desert hiking week. I’ve talked in past episodes about how these lounges are head-and-shoulders above the regular US airline lounges -- great food, open bars. The only problems -- not enough of them and, because they’re a great deal, they get crowded. Or did pre-COVID. Walking into the PHX lounge, we saw maybe a dozen people. They’re still serving food, but they now have staff dishing it out for you from the buffet line. But we’d picked up a couple of sandwiches from Pizzeria Bianco, a great pizza and panini place, so we were just looking for drinks. I thought about a beer, walking up to the bar, the tequila bottle caught my eye, reminding me we hadn’t been able to find a good margarita in Tucson. The bartender solved that problem; she made two great margaritas. So good, that I wanted to squeeze one more in before heading down to the gate. I walked up to the bar; different bartender; I hoped her margaritas were as good. She looked at me for a moment and then said, “I have to be honest with you; I’ve never made a margarita before, but I’ll give it a try.” She was one of the girls from the buffet line standing in for the bartender while she was on break. I could’ve pivoted to a beer, but when she said “I’ll give it a try.” “No problem,” I said, “I’ll walk you through it.” Grab the shaker, fill it with ice. Take the tequila bottle, fill the large end of the jigger, pour it into the shaker. Now turn the jigger over and fill the short end with Cointreau. Pour that in. Now a short shot of lime juice. Now put the lid on and shake it. Now strain it into that martini glass; we’ll skip the salt rim. She was great; a little nervous, but game for it. We thanked each other -- me thanking her for yet another good margarita; she thanking me... but for what, not being another miserable, entitled Platinum card holder? Absolutely my best Centurion Lounge experience yet.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge music -- ~aether theories~ by Vidian (c) copyright 2018 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Vidian/57398 Ft: Gurdonark, White-throated Sparrow</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Timeshares Without The Pitch</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>For our Tucson trip, Irene ended up booking on Airbnb what turned out to be someone’s timeshare rental in a golf resort west of Tucson. It was a new one for us, and a little different than the typical Airbnb experience -- we had to put down a credit card for incidentals, and then had to check-out and check back in halfway thru the stay -- but it was a nice place and, better yet, we didn’t get trapped in a small room for an hour-long sales pitch.</li><li>And so when we got back home and I got a note from <a href=\"https://www.go-koala.com/about/team\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Mike Kennedy</a> introducing me to <a href=\"https://www.go-koala.com/\">Koala</a>, the timeshare rental search platform he co-founded and launched last August, I asked him to come onto the podcast to talk about timeshare rentals and how they fit into the travel eco-system:<ul><li>Mark: Mike, help us understand how timeshare rental fits into that spectrum of accommodations that travelers might be more familiar with. If I think about that spectrum, I could go from hotels to B &amp; Bs to vacation rentals to private home rentals. Where does timeshare rental fit?</li><li>Mike: That\'s a great question. There\'s kind of a natural bifurcation in options when you\'re selecting accommodations for vacations. You\'re either going down the route of an <a href=\"https://www.airbnb.com\">Airbnb</a> or a <a href=\"https://www.vrbo.com/\">VRBO</a>.&nbsp; You want to rent a home because you want some space, or you want to stay in something that is a hotel. But in those two scenarios, you typically have compromises, and the compromise with hotels is that, especially if you have a family, you\'re typically getting one hotel room in cramming your family in or getting adjoining hotel rooms. But you get the confidence that it’s managed by Mariott or Hilton, etc. Conversely, if you\'re getting a home rental, it\'s the opposite. You have the ability to rent a whole home. You don\'t have to leave three times a day for meals. However, you don\'t know who it\'s being cleaned by, or what protocols are being upheld. And in today\'s world, those things are really important. The timeshare product is the only natural hybrid product in the marketplace. You have all the benefits and features of your vacation rentals like the living rooms, the shared bedrooms, washer and dryer; all that space that you want from a vacation rental. But it\'s managed by a Marriott or Hilton, and it has resort amenities like swimming pools, check-in desks; things like that that give you the confidence again in today\'s world with that, people really want. Before us, the options to get one of these was to pay a lot of money on these OTAs, these online travel agencies through a rental, or to go and buy into one of these programs. And that\'s not really either affordable or even appealing to a lot of people.</li><li>Mark: What does Koala offer travelers that, say, Airbnb doesn\'t? I recently rented a Club Wyndham timeshare in Tucson from an owner on Airbnb. So how would that transaction be different/better/more optimized on Koala?</li><li>Mike: So, a couple things. One. You don\'t see a lot of timeshare inventory on Airbnb for the reasons I\'m about to discuss. And that is because it is not a platform that is built for that product.</li><li>Mark: What are some of the unique pieces that make Airbnb not optimized for timeshare rental?</li><li>Mike: If you own a home, you can open up a calendar for 365 and you can set different prices and different availability based off of that open calendar. If you own a timeshare, you typically own a seven-day interval.&nbsp; And how do you fit that into some place where it gets visibility for someone that may not be searching for those exact beginning and end dates? So, what ends up happening is that a lot of people show up to the resorts and the reservations are incorrect or wrong, or just not there at all. You know, it is a system because there\'s a little bit of a square peg in a round hole. Don’t get me wrong. It sounds like you had a fine experience, but they don\'t manage that in a way that is designed to be managed. There\'s a third party involved in this, the resort.&nbsp; When it\'s an Airbnb, it\'s a host and it\'s a traveler, and those two will figure out and arrange something. With a resort stay, there is a third party. There\'s a guest certificate transfer that happens on the back end to ensure that your name as a traveler gets switched to the reservation ledger in the system to ensure that the guest gets to walk into that check-in successfully. We do all that. There are extra steps involved that we ensure. And we handle all of that.</li><li>Mark: So it feels like you\'re acting as an OTA, an online travel agency like an Orbitz or an Expedia, to provide search, discovery and then booking.</li><li>Mike: Correct, yes</li><li>Mark: As you were working towards your August launch, what were some of the biggest challenges you faced in getting that inventory so that people could search and book?</li><li>Mike: That is the question, right? So, I know this from my time in Hilton Club that there was a problem in how people underutilize their timeshares but still had fees to pay. And that went from “I bought this thing; I don\'t understand it” all the way up to “I loved it for 10 years; I\'m just done with it and now what?” and everything in between. But at the end of the day, if you have a $2000 annual fee to pay, it becomes a problem. So, I knew that it was something that if we connected with these owners, we could help solve that problem for them. What we didn\'t understand was that, in many cases, these owners don\'t even know what they own. They don\'t know where to start. It\'s not like you have a vacation rental, and you\'re like “Oh, here\'s the house; I take some photos; I’m going to throw up a price and I’m going to rent a couple nights out, and I\'ll adjust the cost per night based off of rentals.” You have this thing that is either a fixed week or it\'s not; it\'s a specific resort or it\'s not. And in many cases, people don\'t really know what they bought. And in some cases, they bought something and then upgraded to something else. So that was by far the biggest problem was getting people to understand what they own. How do you create an asset out of that and leverage that asset in a way that could earn you some revenue? It\'s still a process that we\'re going through, like really making it very, very simple. You know, we\'re not really just tapping into this supply; we’re really empowering a whole group of people to understand this process.</li><li>Mark: Mike, last question. How did you get this idea? How\'d you get started on this down this path?</li><li>Mike: Yeah, good question. I was a musician when I was in my twenties, and I kind of meandered into residential real estate. And the real estate market in 2007 in New York, everywhere was just kind of flat. So, one of my good friends was like, “You should come check out this condo hotel; it\'s fractional real estate.” I ask “What the heck is fractional real estate?” “No, come check it out. It\'s Hilton.” “Alright.” I went in there. I\'m like, This is cool. There\'s a lot of hustle and bustle. My office is kind of dead; this office is moving. So, I joined the team. Three weeks into training, I ask “Is this a timeshare?”&nbsp; They\'re like “Yeah…”, but I was already hired in the job. It really started to resonate with me -- the more and more time I spent with people that I sold, after they\'re coming in over and over again, and we\'re trying to upgrade them into something else. It was cool, this product is great, but now people are looking for ways out, and I don\'t have answers for them. The solutions weren\'t there on the back end that I was hoping for. So, it really was a direct result of me being in touch with those situations that I felt like I could help. And yeah, I took the leap and I said, Look, this is where this is a problem we\'re solving. I think the industry is great. I think there\'s a lot of upside. I think it\'s got a bad rap, but I think if we mitigate some of that and amplify what people love about this industry, I think it will go a long way.</li><li>Mark: Fantastic. Mike Kennedy, CEO and Co-Founder of KOALA. Mike, thanks for joining us on the TravelCommons podcast</li><li>Mike: Thanks, Mark.</li></ul></li><li>Bridge music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/flatwound/14476\">The Long Goodbye</a>&nbsp;by John Pazdan (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/flatwound/14476</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Notes on Tucson</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>As I said at the top of the show, Irene and I had a good trip to Tucson at the end of January -- pretty much just hiking, eating, and drinking. I wrote it up in a blog post on the TravelCommons website -- <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Quick Notes on Our Trip to Tucson\">“Quick Notes on our Trip to Tucson”</a>, though at over 1,700 words, I’m not sure it necessarily qualified as “quick.” But there are some pictures, and links to all the parks, restaurants, and taprooms we enjoyed. Also a link to the Tucson Instagram story on the TravelCommons Instagram page if you want to see some more informal pictures.</li><li>We flew into PHX rather than TUS because the non-stop flights were cheaper and there were more of them. I was going to rent a car anyways, so the 100-mile drive straight down I-10 seemed a good trade-off for better flights. The only hitch in that plan was the bus between the terminal and the rental car center. They limited capacity to 15 people, which made sense. However, they didn’t add buses to make up that lost capacity. Wasn’t a problem when we got on the bus at the terminal, but the queue at the rental car center stretched the length of the center; hundreds of people trying to get back to make their flight. I saw some folks bailing out and calling Ubers. Made a note to add an extra 30 minutes to our return time. Turned out we didn’t need it; walked straight from the Hertz lot onto a bus. But that was OK. I used that time for my margarita lesson -- definitely a greater good.</li><li>Tucson sits kinda at the bottom of five sets of small-ish mountains; they’re an awkward size -- bigger than hills, but except for the Santa Catalinas, don’t feel big enough to be “mountains”. Which was OK because all we wanted to do was hike, well really walk, the trails. To be outside under blue skies in the high 60’s/low 70’s; that’s what we really wanted to do; to take a break from grey Chicago and to be far enough away from people that we could walk around without masks.&nbsp;</li><li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\">episode #168</a>, we talked about traveling for food, that food is one experience of a place that can’t be easily exported and bought on-line. In that episode, I talked about eating our way through South Philly and a pasty tour of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. In Tucson, it was the hunt for Sonoran food, a type of Mexican cuisine that you don’t see much outside of, well, the Sonoran desert -- Southern Arizona and the Mexican state of Sonora. It hasn’t “broken out” the way that, say, Tex-Mex and Baja and Oaxacan styles have. It’s all about beef, mostly <em>carne asada</em> grilled over mesquite and served in a thin flour tortilla that\'s more like the wrappers you get with Chinese Mandarin food than the thick flour tortillas you get with fajitas. Cross-referencing a couple of local food blogs, I had a list of places to try. And honestly, it was a bit of hit-and-miss; mostly misses the first couple of nights, but then we hit gold at the end of our stay. Looking back, I think we tried the nicer places on the list first. They weren’t <em>bad</em>; they were fine, but not places I’d go out of my way to recommend. And after that -- disappointment is too strong of a word, we kinda said, screw it. We found the Sonoran hot dog truck and ate a couple of $3 bacon-wrapped hot dogs topped with chopped tomatoes and onions, pinto beans, mayonnaise, mustard, and salsa verde off the hood of our rental car. And then drove over to a restaurant that’s website made it look very foody -- scrolling photos of nicely plated dishes -- but almost passed the building by; it looked like a repurposed Arby’s or Hardee’s with a vinyl sign pulled over the original one. But the food, especially the cabrito, the goat tacos, were phenomenal. Not all the dives were great; some disappointed, some were “meh”. But the ones that were great made it worth the “meh’s”.</li><li>But the absolute highlight of the trip? I was standing out on the back patio of our timeshare watching the sun set over the Tucson Mountains; it was beautiful; when I heard some rustling off to the right. What looked like a good-sized wild pig walked out from between two bushes and across the backyard. And then another one. They stopped, turned to look at me, and then kept walking. More kept coming – walking the same path across the backyard. They were <a href=\"https://www.azgfd.com/wildlife/livingwith/javelina/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">javelinas</a>, and <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peccary\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Wikipedia</a> told us that their groups are called \"squadrons\".&nbsp; Well, our squad looked comfortable here, like they were taking their usual end-of-day stroll back to wherever they bed down to stay safe from mountain lions. And the next morning, a couple came back sniffing around the patio door. I wondered if they smelled the egg and toast I made for breakfast. They reminded us to keep that patio door closed.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #172</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li>Nothing new on the tech front this month, but I should have the website freshened up by the next episode. I’ve had the current look since the beginning of 2006 courtesy of TravelCommons listener Hilary Baumann and her <a href=\"https://fascinationdesign.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Fascination Design</a> firm. The change is absolutely not a knock against Hilary’s work. It’s just that, after 15 years, I wanted to freshen things up a bit. So look for that by the end of February or beginning of March.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>, as well as asking Alexa, Siri, and Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_172.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #172 — Timeshares Without the Pitch; Notes on Tucson','Escaped Chicago winter for a week of hiking and eating in Tucson; CEO of Koala talks about renting timeshares; travel planning gets hot and then cools back down','inherit','closed','closed','','3342-revision-v1','','','2021-03-02 23:36:53','2021-03-03 04:36:53','',3342,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/02/3342-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3346,1,'2021-03-02 23:48:20','2021-03-03 04:48:20','<h2>TravelCommons</h2>		\n			The podcast giving the voice of the traveler<br><br>It\'s more about the journey than the destination		\n			<ul>\n								<li>\n						<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\"><h2>Quick Notes on Our Trip to Tucson</h2></a>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\">February 1, 2021</a>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n																	<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/beer/\" rel=\"category tag\">Beer</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/food-2/\" rel=\"category tag\">Food</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-journal/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Journal</a>\n																<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/#comments\">2 Comments</a>\n									<p>\n										I left my suitcase at the door of our West Tucson Airbnb and walked out onto the back patio to watch the sun slip behind the Tucson Mountains. The shades of red and orange on the undersides of a couple of clouds stood out in the pale blue sky. This was exactly what we were...																			</p>									\n			<!-- close .slider-content-max-width -->\n		<!-- close .slider-text-floating-container -->\n	<!-- close .slider-elements-display-table -->\n<!-- close .secondline-elements-slider-background -->\n				</li>\n								<li>\n						<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\"><h2>Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips</h2></a>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">January 14, 2021</a>\n									Episode 171								\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n																	<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n								28:17								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n									<p>\n										Pivoting from San Diego to Tucson for COVID restrictions; planning tips for travel during COVID; CEO of Privacy4Cars talks about leaving data behind in rental cars																			</p>									\n							<!--[if lt IE 9]><![endif]-->\n<audio id=\"audio-2997-1\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?_=1\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a> | Duration: 28:17 | Recorded on January 14, 2021</p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>						\n			<!-- close .slider-content-max-width -->\n		<!-- close .slider-text-floating-container -->\n	<!-- close .slider-elements-display-table -->\n<!-- close .secondline-elements-slider-background -->\n				</li>\n								<li>\n						<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\"><h2>Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors</h2></a>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">December 16, 2020</a>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n																	<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n																Comments Off on Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors\n									<p>\n										No Thanksgiving travel, but looking at the travel volume for this, the busiest travel week of the year, shows just how far things have fallen. The Qantas CEO said &#8220;No vax, no fly&#8221;, so we dig into the emerging world of digital vaccine passports. And then I trace my travel genealogy, wondering if road warrior-ism...																			</p>									\n							<audio id=\"audio-2957-2\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?_=2\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>						\n			<!-- close .slider-content-max-width -->\n		<!-- close .slider-text-floating-container -->\n	<!-- close .slider-elements-display-table -->\n<!-- close .secondline-elements-slider-background -->\n				</li>\n							</ul>\n		<!-- #-elements-secondline-flexslider-56656ff -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-slider-main -->\n<a onMouseOver=\"this.style.color=`#2d2d2d`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#ffffff`\" onMouseOut=\"this.style.color=`#ffffff`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#c01f2c`\" style=\"color:#ffffff; background-color:#c01f2c\" href=\"#!\">Subscribe</a>   \n<!-- Modal HTML embedded directly into document. -->\n	<ul><li><a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Apple-Podcasts.png\" />Apple Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Google-Podcasts.png\" />Google Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Spotify.png\" />Spotify</a></li><li><a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/SoundCloud.png\" />SoundCloud</a></li><li><a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Stitcher.png\" />Stitcher</a></li><li><a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Amazon-Music.png\" />Amazon Music</a></li><li><a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/TravelcommonsPodcast\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/RSS.png\" />RSS</a></li></ul>                                       \n			<!-- close .secondline-addons-subscribe-button-container -->\n			<h2>Latest Posts</h2>		\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?w=2000 2000w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\">\nQuick Notes on Our Trip to Tucson</a></h2>\n					February 1, 2021\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/beer/\" rel=\"category tag\">Beer</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/food-2/\" rel=\"category tag\">Food</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-journal/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Journal</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/#comments\">2 Comments</a>\n						<p>I left my suitcase at the door of our West Tucson Airbnb and walked out onto the back patio to watch the sun slip behind the Tucson Mountains. The...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?w=1334 1334w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\nPodcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips</a></h2>\n					January 14, 2021\n						Episode 171										\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					28:17\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n						<p>Pivoting from San Diego to Tucson for COVID restrictions; planning tips for travel during COVID; CEO of Privacy4Cars talks about leaving data behind in rental cars</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2997-3\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?_=3\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a> | Duration: 28:17 | Recorded on January 14, 2021</p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?w=919 919w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">\nPodcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors</a></h2>\n					December 16, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					Comments Off on Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors\n						<p>No Thanksgiving travel, but looking at the travel volume for this, the busiest travel week of the year, shows just how far things have fallen. The Qantas CEO said...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2957-4\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?_=4\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?w=1299 1299w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">\nPodcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers</a></h2>\n					November 12, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-tech/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Tech</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/#comments\">3 Comments</a>\n						<p>No travel since the last episode, so I had some time to think back through my post-lockdown travel and come up with my top 10 gift ideas for your...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2936-5\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?_=5\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?w=2560 2560w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C2048 2048w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?w=2400 2400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">\n10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times</a></h2>\n					November 4, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-journal/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Journal</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-tech/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Tech</a>\n					Comments Off on 10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times\n						<p>With public health officials saying things like &#8220;it will be easily by the end of 2021 and perhaps into the next year before we start having some semblance of...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?w=2560 2560w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C2048 2048w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?w=2400 2400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\">\nPodcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food</a></h2>\n					October 16, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/food-2/\" rel=\"category tag\">Food</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					Comments Off on Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food\n						<p>Trying to recover from a long weekend of eating and drinking through the neighborhoods of South Philly. Our movable feast reminded me that food may be the one experience...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2896-6\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?_=6\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php?paged=2\" >More Posts</a>\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-list-main -->','Home','','inherit','closed','closed','','3141-revision-v1','','','2021-03-02 23:48:20','2021-03-03 04:48:20','',3141,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/02/3141-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3347,1,'2021-03-02 23:48:20','2021-03-03 04:48:20','<h2>TravelCommons</h2>		\n			The podcast giving the voice of the traveler<br><br>It\'s more about the journey than the destination		\n			<ul>\n								<li>\n						<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\"><h2>Quick Notes on Our Trip to Tucson</h2></a>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\">February 1, 2021</a>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n																	<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/beer/\" rel=\"category tag\">Beer</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/food-2/\" rel=\"category tag\">Food</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-journal/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Journal</a>\n																<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/#comments\">2 Comments</a>\n									<p>\n										I left my suitcase at the door of our West Tucson Airbnb and walked out onto the back patio to watch the sun slip behind the Tucson Mountains. The shades of red and orange on the undersides of a couple of clouds stood out in the pale blue sky. This was exactly what we were...																			</p>									\n			<!-- close .slider-content-max-width -->\n		<!-- close .slider-text-floating-container -->\n	<!-- close .slider-elements-display-table -->\n<!-- close .secondline-elements-slider-background -->\n				</li>\n								<li>\n						<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\"><h2>Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips</h2></a>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">January 14, 2021</a>\n									Episode 171								\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n																	<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n								28:17								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n									<p>\n										Pivoting from San Diego to Tucson for COVID restrictions; planning tips for travel during COVID; CEO of Privacy4Cars talks about leaving data behind in rental cars																			</p>									\n							<!--[if lt IE 9]><![endif]-->\n<audio id=\"audio-2997-1\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?_=1\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a> | Duration: 28:17 | Recorded on January 14, 2021</p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>						\n			<!-- close .slider-content-max-width -->\n		<!-- close .slider-text-floating-container -->\n	<!-- close .slider-elements-display-table -->\n<!-- close .secondline-elements-slider-background -->\n				</li>\n								<li>\n						<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\"><h2>Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors</h2></a>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">December 16, 2020</a>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n																	<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n																Comments Off on Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors\n									<p>\n										No Thanksgiving travel, but looking at the travel volume for this, the busiest travel week of the year, shows just how far things have fallen. The Qantas CEO said &#8220;No vax, no fly&#8221;, so we dig into the emerging world of digital vaccine passports. And then I trace my travel genealogy, wondering if road warrior-ism...																			</p>									\n							<audio id=\"audio-2957-2\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?_=2\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>						\n			<!-- close .slider-content-max-width -->\n		<!-- close .slider-text-floating-container -->\n	<!-- close .slider-elements-display-table -->\n<!-- close .secondline-elements-slider-background -->\n				</li>\n							</ul>\n		<!-- #-elements-secondline-flexslider-56656ff -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-slider-main -->\n<a onMouseOver=\"this.style.color=`#2d2d2d`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#ffffff`\" onMouseOut=\"this.style.color=`#ffffff`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#c01f2c`\" style=\"color:#ffffff; background-color:#c01f2c\" href=\"#!\">Subscribe</a>   \n<!-- Modal HTML embedded directly into document. -->\n	<ul><li><a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Apple-Podcasts.png\" />Apple Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Google-Podcasts.png\" />Google Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Spotify.png\" />Spotify</a></li><li><a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/SoundCloud.png\" />SoundCloud</a></li><li><a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Stitcher.png\" />Stitcher</a></li><li><a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Amazon-Music.png\" />Amazon Music</a></li><li><a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/TravelcommonsPodcast\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/RSS.png\" />RSS</a></li></ul>                                       \n			<!-- close .secondline-addons-subscribe-button-container -->\n			<h2>Latest Posts</h2>		\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?w=2000 2000w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\">\nQuick Notes on Our Trip to Tucson</a></h2>\n					February 1, 2021\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/beer/\" rel=\"category tag\">Beer</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/food-2/\" rel=\"category tag\">Food</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-journal/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Journal</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/#comments\">2 Comments</a>\n						<p>I left my suitcase at the door of our West Tucson Airbnb and walked out onto the back patio to watch the sun slip behind the Tucson Mountains. The...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?w=1334 1334w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\nPodcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips</a></h2>\n					January 14, 2021\n						Episode 171										\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					28:17\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n						<p>Pivoting from San Diego to Tucson for COVID restrictions; planning tips for travel during COVID; CEO of Privacy4Cars talks about leaving data behind in rental cars</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2997-3\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?_=3\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a> | Duration: 28:17 | Recorded on January 14, 2021</p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?w=919 919w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">\nPodcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors</a></h2>\n					December 16, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					Comments Off on Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors\n						<p>No Thanksgiving travel, but looking at the travel volume for this, the busiest travel week of the year, shows just how far things have fallen. The Qantas CEO said...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2957-4\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?_=4\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?w=1299 1299w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">\nPodcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers</a></h2>\n					November 12, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-tech/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Tech</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/#comments\">3 Comments</a>\n						<p>No travel since the last episode, so I had some time to think back through my post-lockdown travel and come up with my top 10 gift ideas for your...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2936-5\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?_=5\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?w=2560 2560w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C2048 2048w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?w=2400 2400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">\n10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times</a></h2>\n					November 4, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-journal/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Journal</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-tech/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Tech</a>\n					Comments Off on 10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times\n						<p>With public health officials saying things like &#8220;it will be easily by the end of 2021 and perhaps into the next year before we start having some semblance of...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?w=2560 2560w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C2048 2048w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-scaled.jpg?w=2400 2400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\">\nPodcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food</a></h2>\n					October 16, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/food-2/\" rel=\"category tag\">Food</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					Comments Off on Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food\n						<p>Trying to recover from a long weekend of eating and drinking through the neighborhoods of South Philly. Our movable feast reminded me that food may be the one experience...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2896-6\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?_=6\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2896/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php?paged=2\" >More Posts</a>\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-list-main -->','Home','','inherit','closed','closed','','3141-revision-v1','','','2021-03-02 23:48:20','2021-03-03 04:48:20','',3141,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/02/3141-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3348,1,'2021-03-02 23:48:20','2021-03-03 04:48:20','<h2>TravelCommons</h2>		\n			The podcast giving the voice of the traveler<br><br>It\'s more about the journey than the destination		\n			<ul>\n								<li>\n						<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/16/podcast-172-timeshares-without-the-pitch-notes-on-tucson/\"><h2>Podcast #172 — Timeshares Without the Pitch; Notes on Tucson</h2></a>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/16/podcast-172-timeshares-without-the-pitch-notes-on-tucson/\">February 16, 2021</a>\n									Episode 172								\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n																	<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n								28.17								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/16/podcast-172-timeshares-without-the-pitch-notes-on-tucson/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n									<p>\n										Escaped Chicago winter for a week of hiking and eating in Tucson; CEO of Koala talks about renting timeshares; travel planning gets hot and then cools back down																			</p>									\n							<!--[if lt IE 9]><![endif]-->\n<audio id=\"audio-3342-1\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/3342/podcast-172-timeshares-without-the-pitch-notes-on-tucson.mp3?_=1\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/3342/podcast-172-timeshares-without-the-pitch-notes-on-tucson.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/3342/podcast-172-timeshares-without-the-pitch-notes-on-tucson.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/3342/podcast-172-timeshares-without-the-pitch-notes-on-tucson.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #172 — Timeshares Without the Pitch; Notes on Tucson \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/3342/podcast-172-timeshares-without-the-pitch-notes-on-tucson.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #172 — Timeshares Without the Pitch; Notes on Tucson \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a> | Duration: 28.17 | Recorded on February 16, 2021</p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>						\n			<!-- close .slider-content-max-width -->\n		<!-- close .slider-text-floating-container -->\n	<!-- close .slider-elements-display-table -->\n<!-- close .secondline-elements-slider-background -->\n				</li>\n								<li>\n						<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\"><h2>Quick Notes on Our Trip to Tucson</h2></a>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\">February 1, 2021</a>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n																	<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/beer/\" rel=\"category tag\">Beer</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/food-2/\" rel=\"category tag\">Food</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-journal/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Journal</a>\n																<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/#comments\">2 Comments</a>\n									<p>\n										I left my suitcase at the door of our West Tucson Airbnb and walked out onto the back patio to watch the sun slip behind the Tucson Mountains. The shades of red and orange on the undersides of a couple of clouds stood out in the pale blue sky. This was exactly what we were...																			</p>									\n			<!-- close .slider-content-max-width -->\n		<!-- close .slider-text-floating-container -->\n	<!-- close .slider-elements-display-table -->\n<!-- close .secondline-elements-slider-background -->\n				</li>\n								<li>\n						<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\"><h2>Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips</h2></a>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">January 14, 2021</a>\n									Episode 171								\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n																	<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n								28:17								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n									<p>\n										Pivoting from San Diego to Tucson for COVID restrictions; planning tips for travel during COVID; CEO of Privacy4Cars talks about leaving data behind in rental cars																			</p>									\n							<audio id=\"audio-2997-2\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?_=2\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a> | Duration: 28:17 | Recorded on January 14, 2021</p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>						\n			<!-- close .slider-content-max-width -->\n		<!-- close .slider-text-floating-container -->\n	<!-- close .slider-elements-display-table -->\n<!-- close .secondline-elements-slider-background -->\n				</li>\n							</ul>\n		<!-- #-elements-secondline-flexslider-56656ff -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-slider-main -->\n<a onMouseOver=\"this.style.color=`#2d2d2d`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#ffffff`\" onMouseOut=\"this.style.color=`#ffffff`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#c01f2c`\" style=\"color:#ffffff; background-color:#c01f2c\" href=\"#!\">Subscribe</a>   \n<!-- Modal HTML embedded directly into document. -->\n	<ul><li><a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Apple-Podcasts.png\" />Apple Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Google-Podcasts.png\" />Google Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Spotify.png\" />Spotify</a></li><li><a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/SoundCloud.png\" />SoundCloud</a></li><li><a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Stitcher.png\" />Stitcher</a></li><li><a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Amazon-Music.png\" />Amazon Music</a></li><li><a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/TravelcommonsPodcast\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/RSS.png\" />RSS</a></li></ul>                                       \n			<!-- close .secondline-addons-subscribe-button-container -->\n			<h2>Latest Posts</h2>		\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/16/podcast-172-timeshares-without-the-pitch-notes-on-tucson/\">\n					<img width=\"375\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2776-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2776-scaled.jpg?w=1920 1920w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2776-scaled.jpg?resize=225%2C300 225w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2776-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C1024 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2776-scaled.jpg?resize=1152%2C1536 1152w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2776-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C2048 1536w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 375px) 100vw, 375px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/16/podcast-172-timeshares-without-the-pitch-notes-on-tucson/\">\nPodcast #172 — Timeshares Without the Pitch; Notes on Tucson</a></h2>\n					February 16, 2021\n						Episode 172										\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					28.17\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/16/podcast-172-timeshares-without-the-pitch-notes-on-tucson/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n						<p>Escaped Chicago winter for a week of hiking and eating in Tucson; CEO of Koala talks about renting timeshares; travel planning gets hot and then cools back down</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/16/podcast-172-timeshares-without-the-pitch-notes-on-tucson/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-3342-3\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/3342/podcast-172-timeshares-without-the-pitch-notes-on-tucson.mp3?_=3\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/3342/podcast-172-timeshares-without-the-pitch-notes-on-tucson.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/3342/podcast-172-timeshares-without-the-pitch-notes-on-tucson.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/3342/podcast-172-timeshares-without-the-pitch-notes-on-tucson.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #172 — Timeshares Without the Pitch; Notes on Tucson \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/3342/podcast-172-timeshares-without-the-pitch-notes-on-tucson.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #172 — Timeshares Without the Pitch; Notes on Tucson \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a> | Duration: 28.17 | Recorded on February 16, 2021</p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?w=2000 2000w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\">\nQuick Notes on Our Trip to Tucson</a></h2>\n					February 1, 2021\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/beer/\" rel=\"category tag\">Beer</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/food-2/\" rel=\"category tag\">Food</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-journal/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Journal</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/#comments\">2 Comments</a>\n						<p>I left my suitcase at the door of our West Tucson Airbnb and walked out onto the back patio to watch the sun slip behind the Tucson Mountains. The...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?w=1334 1334w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\nPodcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips</a></h2>\n					January 14, 2021\n						Episode 171										\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					28:17\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n						<p>Pivoting from San Diego to Tucson for COVID restrictions; planning tips for travel during COVID; CEO of Privacy4Cars talks about leaving data behind in rental cars</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2997-4\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?_=4\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a> | Duration: 28:17 | Recorded on January 14, 2021</p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?w=919 919w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">\nPodcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors</a></h2>\n					December 16, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					Comments Off on Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors\n						<p>No Thanksgiving travel, but looking at the travel volume for this, the busiest travel week of the year, shows just how far things have fallen. The Qantas CEO said...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2957-5\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?_=5\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?w=1299 1299w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">\nPodcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers</a></h2>\n					November 12, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-tech/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Tech</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/#comments\">3 Comments</a>\n						<p>No travel since the last episode, so I had some time to think back through my post-lockdown travel and come up with my top 10 gift ideas for your...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2936-6\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?_=6\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?w=2560 2560w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C2048 2048w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?w=2400 2400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">\n10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times</a></h2>\n					November 4, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-journal/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Journal</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-tech/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Tech</a>\n					Comments Off on 10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times\n						<p>With public health officials saying things like &#8220;it will be easily by the end of 2021 and perhaps into the next year before we start having some semblance of...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php?paged=2\" >More Posts</a>\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-list-main -->','Home','','inherit','closed','closed','','3141-revision-v1','','','2021-03-02 23:48:20','2021-03-03 04:48:20','',3141,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/02/3141-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3350,1,'2021-03-03 11:41:39','2021-03-03 16:41:39','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":2960,\"width\":300,\"height\":300,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large is-resized\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2960\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"/><figcaption>How Do I Insert This Into My iPhone<br>(DoD photo by EJ Hersom)</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>No Thanksgiving travel, but looking at the travel volume for this, the busiest travel week of the year, shows just how far things have fallen. The Qantas CEO said \"No vax, no fly\", so we dig into the emerging world of digital vaccine passports. And then I trace my travel genealogy, wondering if road warrior-ism is hereditary. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_170.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go over to the <em>Subscribe</em> section on the right to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/949687216&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #170: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. And again, no travel since the last episode. Not too surprising given the way things are going right now. Back in April, I’d jumped on one of those smokin’ American Airlines’ promotions to book flights to London for Thanksgiving. Which then -- not surprisingly -- got cancelled at the beginning of September.&nbsp; So I was back to what has been my typical Thanksgiving travel pattern for the past 10-15 years -- staying at home to avoid the crowds on what is always the busiest travel week of the year. PK -- pre-kids -- Irene and I would always travel over the holidays, splitting Thanksgiving and Christmas between my family in Southern California and hers in Chicago. But post-kids -- which is also PK, so I guess it should be AK -- after kids -- we started staying at home. And I’d figure out how to “ground” myself from business travel also. I found that the challenge of holiday travel wasn’t necessarily the crowds; it’s the make-up of the crowds; what some road warriors might call “clueless” travelers. I think “amateur” is certainly a more charitable and probably more accurate term. Even more so this year with so many road warriors out of practice after being off the road since March. Lots of those folks definitely in danger of losing their “professional” traveler status.</li><li>I saw an interesting graph the other day comparing last year’s and this year’s day-by-day airport travel volumes over the Thanksgiving weekend. No surprises comparing the Wednesday travel volumes, what is traditionally the busiest travel day of the year. Last year’s Wednesday saw 2.6 million passengers, almost 2½ times busier than this year. I expected that. But what really caught my eye was that this year’s peak day -- <a href=\"https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/thanksgiving-travel-volume-2020-pandemic/index.html\">Sunday at about 1.2 million </a>-- was still a lot less than last year’s slowest day, Thanksgiving, at about 1.6 million. I didn’t travel last year at Thanksgiving, but did in 2018.&nbsp; Irene and I broke our no-travel rule and flew down to Santa Fe, NM on Thanksgiving Day. Back in episode <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/12/17/podcast-147-holiday-travel-tips-notes-from-santa-fe/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">#147</a>, I said that Thanksgiving Day flight was one of the least stressful travel experiences I’d ever had — no traffic on the drive to ORD, no lines. The TSA agents were hanging around just looking for people to screen. And that day, there were around 25% more people in airports than this year’s <em>busiest</em> day. I shouldn’t be surprised, but all the pictures I saw in the news coverage made it look like airports were a lot more crowded.&nbsp;</li><li>Our apartment is just south of one of the northern approaches to ORD. Flights from the east come in over the lake -- seats A, B, and C get a great view of the city skyline while seats D, E, and F get to look down into Wrigley Field -- then&nbsp; over the northwest side of the city, landing on one of the runways north of the terminal. I’ve always been impressed by the choreography of ORD. On a clear Friday afternoon, driving up the tollway that runs east of the airport, I’d see planes on parallel approaches landing simultaneously -- one to the north of the terminal and one to the south -- and looking up, see the lights of planes on approach behind them -- 2, 3, 4.... Back in April, during Chicago’s lockdown, I’d sit out on the rooftop deck -- because what else was I going to do? -- and maybe see one plane coming in over the lake on that approach. But now I’m seeing more planes -- sometimes 3, 4 in a row. Don’t know that they’re all carrying passengers -- some could be temporary cargo carriers taking some of that e-commerce money, with boxes instead of seats under the overhead bins. But I can feel travel starting to pick up. It could be a tough winter, but I’m trying to look out over the horizon a bit; trying to look forward to spring.</li><li>Bridge Music -- Leviathan by Kirkoid (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Kirkoid/31109</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>TravelCommons contributor Allan Marko commented on my little lockdown game with my Google Mini -- changing the voice to, say, an English accent and then asking about the weather in London.&nbsp; Allan wrote:<ul><li>I often change the Siri voice for a bit of variety. Currently “Australian Female” is providing my CarPlay directions. you can also ask Siri to “Play TravelCommons”…</li></ul></li><li>Which immediately got me digging into Siri’s settings, looking for the Voice options. I found I had a choice of American, Australian, British, Indian, Irish, and South African. Since I’d already used the first three with my Google Mini, it was between the last three. I chose Irish for now, but will probably switch to South African before the end of the month. Actually, Waze, the nav app, always impressed me with the number of voice and language options. Every once in a while, I switch Irene’s Waze over to Hungarian before she’s heading out somewhere. For some reason, I get more of a laugh out of it than she does.</li><li>TravelCommons listener Dan Grabon and I have been trading notes as we’ve each slogged through Thoreau’s <em>Walden</em>. We both started it back in April, in the height of the lockdown. Everybody was deciding that, with nothing much else to do, it was a good time to pick up that classic you’ve always been meaning to get to. Dan started out with <em>The Brothers Karamazov</em>, which I thought was damned impressive. I first reached for Whitman’s <em>Leaves of Grass</em>, but then thought I needed something a bit more down-to-earth, something that wouldn’t need quite that level of interpretation and abstract thinking. And <em>Walden</em>, about Thoreau’s self-isolation in the woods outside of Concord, MA, seemed a better fit with the lockdown. Dan finished last month, at the beginning of November. I was 50 pages behind, so I didn’t finish ‘til Thanksgiving -- it was tough cutting through the tryptophan fog, but I gutted it through. Dan said he was staying with Thoreau, moving onto <em>Civil Disobedience</em> before shelving the book. I pivoted to non-fiction, <em>Why We Sleep</em>, where a neuroscientist and sleep expert spends some 300+ pages saying “If you don’t sleep 8 hours, you’re killing yourself” which got me doing some mental math. Between jet lag from all the&nbsp; international flights and waking up at 4am to make 6am flights to LGA, I’ve probably dropped 5 years off my life. Though, given some dementia running through my family history, I might not have remembered those years anyways.</li><li>And I show up on the other side of the mic talking travel pro tips with Matt Wilson on his <a href=\"https://www.under30experiences.com/blog/travel-like-a-pro-with-mark-peacock-of-travelcommons\">Millennial Travel Podcast</a>.&nbsp; I’m trying to remember when we recorded this -- had to be pre-April 2019 because I was still in the suburban TravelCommons studio and Matt was hanging out down in Costa Rica. The connection fuzzes out now and again, but it was a fun conversation. I’ll put a link in the episode in the show notes but fair warning -- it’s mostly me rattling on for an hour. Listening back to it, I’m kinda embarrassed that I don’t give Matt much of a chance to get a word in edgewise.</li><li>In the last episode, I talked about the work-from-hotel offerings from Marriott, Hilton, and Hyatt. They all had their own twists, but Hyatt’s was the most unique in that their “Work from Hyatt” offer was resort-focused and had a 7-night minimum. I said it wasn’t so much a WeWork replacement as a digital nomad trial. Well, I’m guessing that they didn’t get much uptake on it because I just got another email from Hyatt with a new offering -- “Office for the Day” -- that pretty much matches Marriott’s Day Pass. Like I said last month, these offerings all feel a bit “toe in the water”, a bit opportunistic. And now that we’re starting to get better visibility into post-vaccine timelines, I wonder how long they’ll last -- will people still want to pay to work in a hotel room after all the Starbucks stores have reopened.</li><li>I’ve talked in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/12/podcast-120-where-do-guidebooks-fit-in-i-hate-shopping-for-suitcases\">past</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/09/28/podcast-124-craft-beer-hunting-i-hate-rick-steves\">episodes</a> about how I’m a bit of a knuckle-dragger regarding printed travel guides. I still find a physical book useful when traveling. But I’ve been wondering how quickly these physical guides will be able to push out post-COVID editions to reflect the closures of bars, restaurants, and independent shops they’ve recommended. I was running through my own Chicago recommendation list from 2019. A bunch of my favorite places have closed; it’s about an even split between “Closed forever, good-bye, we’ve taken down our sign” and “Closed until Spring… we hope.” The final proofs of the 2021 editions have to already be baked if not already at the printers. I dunno, maybe they’ll all post errata pages that you can download, print off, and then stick in your books.</li><li>In a massive intersection of all things social media, I posted a <a href=\"https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/tiktok-hotel-room-chef/index.html\">CNN article</a> on the TravelCommons Facebook page that a friend, a hotel company CIO, sent me on LinkedIn that showed TikTok videos of people cooking meals in hotel rooms using an iron for a griddle, a hot water kettle for a steamer, a pants presser as an oven, and the one that really wowed me -- a coffee maker as a sous vide water bath. I don’t know if I should be impressed by the ingenuity or looking to set up as a ghost kitchen/delivery service wherever they are because I’ve never seen anyone go to that extent to cook their own meal in a hotel room. Even guys I knew trying to squeeze the last pennies out of their per diems wouldn’t do much more than boil water for their Cup O’Noodles or work hard not to burn their microwave popcorn. I’ll also put a link in the show notes to the TikTok account of one of the guys, Jago Randles. His TikTok series,<a href=\"https://www.tiktok.com/@jagoscrandles\"> Isolation Kitchen</a>, has about 150,000 followers. He does some impressive stuff. But I will make sure, going forward, that I rinse out the coffee maker and wipe down the iron before using them.</li><li>For many frequent travelers, a key early milestone of the pandemic was when airlines and hotels gave them a year’s push on their status -- moving the expiration date from Jan 2021 to Jan 2022. Big sigh of relief. Then for Southwest fliers, another milestone -- drink coupon expiration dates all got pushed to the end of this year. Whew! All’s right in the traveling world. But a couple of days ago, I was rummaging around in my messenger bag and out tumbled 5 Southwest drink coupons -- one with a Sept expiration date; the rest, December 31. Look Southwest, I don’t want to seem greedy. I did get a year’s push on A-List and 6 months on Companion Pass. But I’d love you even more if you gave me another 6 months on those drink coupons. Nope, don’t say anything now; just think about it.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge music -- Ethereal (nop mix) by @nop (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Lancefield/34818</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Prove My Vax So I Can Fly</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Last month, I saw that quote from the Qantas CEO -- \"We will ask people to have a vaccination before they can get on the aircraft\'\' -- and thought, well it’s kinda the next logical step from Delta’s ATL-Rome and United’s EWR-LHR flights were you have to take COVID test and prove you’re negative before you can board.&nbsp;</li><li>I remember going to a travel clinic before my first flight to India; getting shot up with MMR, DTP, Hepatitis, and Typhoid vaccines and being given my <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carte_Jaune\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Yellow Card</a> -- officially my International Certificate of Vaccination or Prophylaxis -- listing all my shots. They told me to carry that with me to India, which I did and to Vietnam and Thailand and Singapore and China. No one ever asked to see it, not in an airport, an immigration line, a hotel,....&nbsp; It looks like the plans are that we’ll get a vaccination card from the CDC after receiving the first dose of COVID-19 vaccine. But that card isn’t meant as a validated proof of vaccination; it’s more of a reminder to go back in a couple of weeks for the second shot.&nbsp;</li><li>That handwritten piece of paper probably won’t pass muster at the Qantas boarding gate, and so that’s why we’re starting to see a bit of a vaccine passport app land grab going on. United has been testing the <a href=\"https://thecommonsproject.org/commonpass\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">CommonPass app</a> on their COVID-free EWR-LHR flight. You get your COVID test at the United Club near gate C93 and the results are uploaded into the app which then will display a QR code to the gate agent. CommonPass is being spun up with support from the World Economic Forum. Cathay Pacific, Lufthansa, SwissAir, and JetBlue also have plans to use it. Delta and Alitalia are trialing the <a href=\"https://www.aokpass.com/en/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">AOKPass </a>developed by the Int’l Chamber of Commerce on their COVID-free ATL-Rome flight. It uses blockchain for medical certificate storage, so bonus points to them in technology buzzword bingo. IATA, the Int’l Air Transport Association, an airline trade group, says they’re finishing up their app, <a href=\"https://www.iata.org/en/programs/passenger/travel-pass/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Travel Pass</a>, and will be piloting it with IAG, the parent of British Airways, Iberia, and Aer Lingus, in early 2021. And the World Health Organization says they’re looking at Estonia’s e-vaccination certificates as <a href=\"https://www.who.int/news-room/feature-stories/detail/estonia-and-who-to-jointly-develop-digital-vaccine-certificate-to-strengthen-covax#:~:text=WHO%20and%20Estonia%20recently%20agreed,access%20to%20COVID%2D19%20vaccines.\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the basis of a sort of “smart” Yellow Card app</a>.</li><li>I’m sure I’m missing a whole lot more; I just got tired of reading the same rehashed press release verbiage about secure and verifiable storage of health certifications. Going through this, it starts to feel like the health equivalent of those scooter apps, where I need half-a-dozen of them on my phone so I can rent the closest scooter to me. Unless someone blinks, it seems like I’ll need 3 or 4 of these vaccine passports to cover all my travel bases. But after reading through all the press releases and the infographics and the FAQs, none of these apps were real clear on how I get my physical CDC vaccine card into their digital storage vault. And I’m guessing that doctors and clinics are going to be more focused on taking care of patients and keeping their COVID vaccines cold, and not all that interested in entering my vaccination information into all those apps. Maybe Australia is further ahead with electronic health records, but I’m thinking, at least for the next year or so, that my CDC card is gonna be the best that Qantas and the gang are going to get.</li><li>Bridge music -- My Flaming Heart by Wired Ant (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial &nbsp;(3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Wired_Ant/36862 Ft: Javolenus</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Hereditary Road Warriors</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I was reading some research, as one does during a lockdown advisory when one gets caught up running down a clickhole, about <a href=\"https://research.fb.com/blog/2016/03/do-jobs-run-in-families/\">jobs running in the family</a>. Some of the stats -- a son with a military father is 5 times more likely to enlist himself while if his mother is a lawyer, he’s 6.6 times more likely to follow her to the bar; a daughter with a scientist father is almost 4 times more likely to be a scientist. Indeed, when I was deciding my college major, I was leaning toward&nbsp; chemistry but chose chemical engineering mostly because my grandfather and father were both engineers.</li><li>Which got me thinking -- does traveling -- careers that require frequent traveling -- run in the family? Again, looking back on my family, my grandfather traveled a lot when he worked for Sears, checking out vendors for hard goods -- tools, small machinery -- and working with them on new products. My dad designed farm machinery -- things like hay balers and cotton pickers -- for International Harvester. He’d often be on the road for weeks at a time, testing prototypes at farms around the country, looking for different crop and field conditions, and then at plants helping to set up the manufacturing lines for the finished machine. And so I grew up seeing that rhythm of travel -- Dad at home, Dad packing, saying good-bye, and then getting on with our lives until he came back. This was back in the late ‘60’s and into the 70’s, so no cheap long-distance let alone messaging or email or video calls. He was gone, with the exception of a postcard or two, until he came back.</li><li>And then when I joined the workforce, the first day of my first real job out of school, I got on a plane and made the first of what’s been hundreds of flights between ORD and DFW.&nbsp; So many that, pretty soon, I got to know the women working the front desk at the DFW Admirals Club. One morning, one of them asks me if I’d maybe like to meet her daughter. Awkward. I asked her, “Would you want your daughter dating someone who’s out of town as much as I am?” She paused for a moment and then said, “No, not really”.&nbsp;</li><li>Also around this time, my dad had gotten promoted past the level of going out to the field and so was traveling a lot less. But my mother took a purchasing executive role and with that, the need for a lot of travel to vendors. So while travel was generational/ “hereditary” from my father to me, my mother and I started road warrior-ing at the same time, so we were more like travel “siblings” -- comparing hotel notes, competing on frequent flier status and perks.&nbsp;</li><li>Will traveling for a living continue to a 4th generation? Tough to tell right now; both kids measure their commute in feet rather than miles during the lockdown, and friends running consulting operations tell me the current state is great for staff productivity -- an hour sales call takes an hour, rather than a day’s worth of travel for that hour, and working remotely with clients saves the client money and consultants don’t get burnt out trying to balance work and home needs. As I said back in the March and July episodes, I don’t buy that 100% remote is the “new normal”, but I also don’t believe it will snap back to 2019 levels, not after what will have been a year’s-plus time working out the mechanics of virtual working. But will there be another generation of road warriors in my family? It’ll probably take a couple of years to figure that out.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #170</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li>I’ve made another little tweak to the RSS feed -- the file that all the podcast apps use to pull new episodes for your subscribed podcasts. This tweak affects the episode descriptions in the top podcast apps. For those apps that support it, there are now clickable links in the episode notes or descriptions. In last month’s episode, there were clickable links to the gift ideas blog post on the TravelCommons website as well as the episode show notes page. Going forward, there will always be a link to the episode’s show notes page. I’ve tested that this works on Apple Podcasts, Overcast (which is what I use), Stitcher, Pocket Casts, Podcast Addict, and Google Podcasts -- all of which make up 70-80% (depending on who’s doing the counting) of the TravelCommons downloads. So, if you get a chance, flip over to the episode description right now and check it out.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>, as well as asking Alexa, Siri, and Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_170.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors','','inherit','closed','closed','','2957-revision-v1','','','2021-03-03 11:41:39','2021-03-03 16:41:39','',2957,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/03/2957-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3351,1,'2021-03-03 11:44:59','2021-03-03 16:44:59','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":2935,\"width\":300,\"height\":300,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large is-resized\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714-1024x1024.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2935\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"/><figcaption>Locking Down The Christmas Tree</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>No travel since the last episode, so I had some time to think back through my post-lockdown travel and come up with my top 10 <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">gift ideas</a> for your pandemic travelers.  We look at the start of the year-end efforts by airlines, hotels, and credit card companies to keep their grounded travelers, unpack the work-from-hotel offerings from Marriott, Hilton, and Hyatt, and dissect the latest hotel reservation system data breach. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_169.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go over to the <em>Subscribe</em> section on the right to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/928852471&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true\"></iframe><p>\n<!-- /wp:html -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #169: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. No travel, but a November week with temps in the 70’s felt like I was someplace other than Chicago. But the weather reverted to the mean yesterday, which chased me back indoors to finish this podcast.</li><li>Last week was a boon to Chicago’s bars and restaurants. The week before, the governor banned indoor service again as COVID cases began to rise. The bonus week of warm sunny weather gifted them with some needed outdoor dining revenue. Last Friday, a friend and I met for lunch at a neighborhood place that had been able to expand their outdoor seating by putting tables on the sidewalk in front of the shuttered retailer next door to them. We showed up at 11:30; the tables were full by 12.</li><li>One of the things we talked about was travel; how, over the past 8 months, we’d more or less adjusted to all of the COVID restrictions, the masks, the social distance, all of it -- except for travel. Yes, we’ve done the car trips and long weekends, but we miss the big trips -- I’d just cancelled our Thanksgiving trip to London and he’s trying to think through their annual Christmas trip to December. Now, I know this is definitely a “First World problem” for folks who’ve had families, friends, and even themselves hit with COVID, so I’m not trying to overplay this. But as the end of the year approaches, and I start hearing more public health experts reset expectation -- for the worse, saying <a href=\"https://www.smh.com.au/national/vaccine-is-imminent-but-virus-fight-has-long-way-to-go-fauci-20201028-p569h2.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">“Well, it’s probably more like the end of 2021 or maybe into the beginning of 2022 before things start feeling normal”</a> -- I dunno, for people who love travel, I don’t think they want to put it on hold for another year or two. You start hearing about people looking for openings -- Mexico, Costa Rica -- as they figure out their own personal risk profiles. Maybe <a href=\"https://hub.united.com/2020-10-29-united-airlines-launches-worlds-first-free-transatlantic-covid-19-testing-pilot-2648544789.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">United Airlines’ testing program</a> that they’re trialing on flights to Hawaii and London is part of the answer; certainly <a href=\"https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/11/heres-everything-to-know-about-pfizers-positive-vaccine-news/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pfizer’s release of preliminary vaccine results</a> on Monday got everybody hopeful again. I don’t think anyone expects -- or really wants -- an immediate snap-back to 2019. But the ability to stretch things a bit more would be greatly appreciated.</li><li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mactonite/29469\">Static</a>&nbsp;by Darkroom (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mactonite/29469</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>First, a quick program note. As I tweak things with the underlying TravelCommons infrastructure -- the audio file, the RSS feed, the website -- I’ll talk about the changes at the end of the podcast, so I don’t muck up the content that you come to listen to with the “inside baseball” sorta podcast stuff. If you’re not interested, you can skip to the end without missing anything. I will say, though, that I was pleasantly surprised when I looked at the Apple Podcast stats showing about 80% of you stay through the end of an episode. I’d fully expected to see at least 50% of folks hitting the “skip to next podcast” button when they heard the “Pictures of You” song clip. Thanks to everybody for sticking all the way through.</li><li>And congrats to Emily Thomas, our guest on the August episode, for winning the <a href=\"https://www.leverhulme.ac.uk/philip-leverhulme-prizes\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Leverhulme prize</a> last month. The prize recognizes the achievement of outstanding researchers across a broad range of disciplines whose work has already attracted international recognition and whose future career is exceptionally promising. I interviewed Emily about her book <em>The Meaning of Travel: Philosophers Abroad</em> and had a great time talking to her. A well-deserved award. I just may go back and listen to that interview again.</li><li>I got an email from Marriott last week announcing their work-from-hotel offerings. We\'ve talked about this trend in the past couple of episodes -- first as a way for downtown hotels to do something/anything about their low occupancy rates, and then in the last episode with the FBI\'s cyber security advisory to people moving from work-at-home to work-at-hotels. The Day Pass gives you a room from 6am to 6pm, wi-fi, bottled water, and lounge access if you’re a high-status Marriott Bonvoy member. They’re piloting it in Atlanta, Dallas, New York, and Phoenix. Scanning the pricing, the range looked to be in the $60-$90 range, though the Phoenician in Scottsdale did price out at $260. If you looked hard, you could probably get a day pass at a co-working place for cheaper, but if you can expense it, the Marriott offer is probably not a bad deal -- especially for those days that you have a big sales presentation or maybe a webinar, where you need that guaranteed alone time to focus on preparation and then delivery, and a video backdrop that’s not your closet door or a semi-made bed or random people walking past. Hilton and Hyatt are also offering work-from hotel plans, but with different spins. Hilton’s WorkSpaces will give you 10,000 Honors points for your first booking and, unlike Marriott, is across all of their properties, but it doesn’t feel as put together as Marriott’s. You have to ring up the property directly; looks like Hilton can’t figure out a way to shoehorn this day rate concept into their reservation system. Work from Hyatt, on the other hand, isn’t so much a WeWork replacement as a digital nomad trial package with its 7-night minimum stay requirement and a focus on resort locations like the Grand Hyatts in Kauai or Vail, CO. Kinda the complete opposite of spending 12 hours in a room at the Marriott by DFW. They all feel a bit “toe in the water”, a bit opportunistic in their own way.&nbsp;</li><li>At the beginning of this week, Candid Wueest, a cyber security researcher who joined us last year in episode #151 to talk about hotel websites that leaked traveler data, tweeted out a link to yet <a href=\"https://www.websiteplanet.com/blog/prestige-soft-breach-report/\">another hotel data breach</a>. This time it was channel management software, something that hotels use to automate the task of updating room availability and rates across all the on-line booking sites like Expedia and Booking.com and Hotels.com and on and on. Turns out this channel manager, Prestige Software, stored 24 GB of names and emails and credit card data and reservation records -- 10 million log files going back to 2013 -- in a misconfigured AWS S3 bucket -- storage space on Amazon’s cloud. The pandemic has massively accelerated companies moving from their own data centers to cloud services like Amazon and Microsoft. But sometimes it feels like the speed of that migration has overrun the skills of the teams supporting it.&nbsp; What can you do about it? In this case, not much. You would’ve booked your room on Expedia or Trivago and not known anything about something called a channel manager piping your data down to the hotel. We’ve talked about these breaches in so many past episodes. What I said then still stands: you need to be realistic -- it’s not <em>if</em> your personal data will get breached, it’s <em>when</em>. If you can, put your on-line purchases on a separate card and watch those transactions on the bank’s website or mobile app so you can quickly shut it down if you see something that doesn’t look right. I remember one time, years ago, seeing a Northwest Air flight from Tokyo to Beijing show up on my card. Struck me as odd because I was in Chicago with no plans to be in Asia. Immediately called the bank, disputed the charge, and they closed down the card. Interesting thing is that the crook had booked an economy class ticket. You’d think if you’re going to risk it, go big -- book the front of the plane -- business class if not first.&nbsp;</li><li>The quarantine theater we talked about in the last episode just keeps keeping on. Chicago now has 43 states on its list, 31 of which have <em>lower</em> COVID rates than Chicago. And, I guess in admission that no one’s paying attention, they’re moving from weekly updates to every other week. I guess ‘cause there’s not that many more states they can add. New York gave up on its quarantine list when COVID rates in neighboring Connecticut and New Jersey qualified them for the list. \"There will be no quarantine list, there will be no metrics,\" Governor Cuomo says. Everyone needs to test negative, except for people coming in from Connecticut, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania because, at some point, you just gotta be realistic. Especially in the face of this, what is it, a third wave? I’ve lost count.</li><li>And just to show how deeply all of this -- the quarantine, the lack of travel has gotten me, here’s a fun game I now play with my Google Mini.&nbsp;I dug around in the Google Home app and found where I can change the voice. I’ll switch to the British Racing Green voice to check the weather in London and then click over on Sydney Harbour Blue to check the weather there. Then I flip back to the default voice to get the weather at the Googleplex. And, of course, I ask it to play TravelCommons.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter message</a> to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> or our <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a> account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge music —&nbsp;<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Psykick/52938\">Another Way</a>&nbsp;by Psykick (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Psykick/52938</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Holiday Gift Guide for the Pandemic Traveler</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Like I mentioned at the top of the show, hearing public health officials saying things like “it will be easily by the end of 2021 and perhaps into the next year before we start having some semblance of normality” got my attention; got me thinking that this year’s travel gift guide needs to be a bit different. So I flipped through my 2020 travel journal, thought back through all of my post-lockdown travel to come up with my top shopping ideas for your pandemic travelers.</li><li>Check out this year\'s pandemic gift guide on the front page of the TravelCommons\' website or <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times\">here </a>at https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/2879\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Slinky Blues</a> by Admiral Bob (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/28792 Ft: unreal_dm</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>End of Year “Don’t Leave Me” Offers</strong> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Back in September, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/09/19/podcast-167-6-months-on-why-keep-travel-cards/\" title=\"Podcast #167 — 6 Months On; Why Keep Travel Cards?\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">episode #167</a>, we talked with <a href=\"https://www.lendingtree.com/writer/matt-schulz/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Matt Schulz, chief credit analyst at LendingTree</a>, about travel credit cards. Matt told us that their late summer surveys showed trends toward people canceling travel cards and cashing out points. But then earlier this week, <a href=\"https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-11-10/amex-says-its-cardholders-are-stockpiling-their-points-and-miles\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">American Express’ CFO said that their card customers <em>weren’t</em> cashing out points, and instead stocking them up to travel</a>.&nbsp; The two comments aren’t necessarily at odds. If you’re laid off, you can use those miles to buy groceries or clothes via gift cards or on Amazon. But if you don’t have to, the best value you’ll get for those points will be on travel. You’ll get less than a penny a point when cashing out Amex points on Amazon, but you can double that when you use them to book flights on, say, Singapore Air or KLM.&nbsp; So the hoarding makes sense -- if you can.</li><li>One of Matt’s points in our interview was that card companies will continue to tweak their rewards to keep people holding and using their cards because travelers are a valuable customer segment because, well, they typically spend chunks of money to travel. So as we come up on the end of the year, it’ll be interesting to see what those tweaks will be. Chase keeps extending the 5x grocery and gas bonus on their Southwest card while <a href=\"https://thepointsguy.com/news/amex-platinum-current-offer/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amex just announced a <em>10x</em> grocery and gas bonus as well as a 75K sign-up bonus for their Platinum card</a>.</li><li>Airlines and hotels are also rolling out their year-end offers. Back in the spring, all the majors gave existing status holders a push, extending elite expiration dates to Jan 2022 to keep them in the fold. So that settled everyone down for 2020. But now, with 2021 coming up and travel still in the hole, we’re starting to see new offers.<a href=\"http://news.aa.com/news/news-details/2020/Rewarding-AAdvantage-Members-With-More-Benefits-and-Flexibility-in-2021-AADV-10/default.aspx\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"> American opened the bidding last month</a>, knocking 20% off of 2021 status qualifying mileage clip levels (e.g., 40,000 instead of 50,000 to qualify for AAdvantage Platinum) and trying to get whatever they can for this year by counting October (last month), November, and December flights&nbsp; towards earning status in 2021, which is then good through Jan 2023. This afternoon, I got an email from <a href=\"https://hub.united.com/2020-11-12-united-airlines-makes-it-easier-to-earn-mileageplus-premier-status-for-2022-2648871852.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">United announcing their deal</a>. United’s status qualification methodology has gotten ridiculously complex over the past couple of years, but by at least one of their metrics, it looks like they’re dropping their status qualifying point (PQP -- don’t ask) clip levels by at least 30% <em>and</em> offering double points for flights taken in Q1 -- January, February, March -- next year. <a href=\"https://newsroom.hilton.com/hilton-honors/news/hilton-honors-adds-flexibility-value-for-members\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Hilton, though, made the simplest and deepest offer</a> -- knocking 50% off of all status qualifying measures -- stays, nights, points -- boom, mike drop.</li><li>It makes sense. Most statused travelers are business travelers and depending on which CEO is talking, business travel is down 85% (Delta), 90% (Southwest), and will be 3-4 years before it’s back to pre-pandemic levels (United). And those business travelers are the airlines’ and hotels’ most profitable customers. So expect to see Delta and Southwest and Marriott announcements soon, and maybe again this time next year if that “Well, it’s probably more like the end of 2021 or maybe into the beginning of 2022 before things start feeling normal” forecast turns out to be true.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #169</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li>As I mentioned at the end of the last episode, I restructured the RSS feed a bit so that I shouldn’t accidently trigger any more episode re-downloads. And I moved the episode number from the title to its own XML tag just to clean up how everything looks in your podcast app. Also, a few months ago, I tweaked the production workflow to add chapter markers in each episode. So, if your app supports them (Apple Podcasts and Overcast do), you can skip forward to the next section or, if you wanted to go back and listen to, say, the interview with Emily Thomas, you can go straight to it.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>, as well as asking Alexa and Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_169.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers','','inherit','closed','closed','','2936-revision-v1','','','2021-03-03 11:44:59','2021-03-03 16:44:59','',2936,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/03/2936-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3352,1,'2021-03-03 20:31:35','2021-03-04 01:31:35','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":2931,\"width\":300,\"height\":300,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large is-resized\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-1024x1024.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2931\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"/><figcaption>Social distancing the reindeer will be tough</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>With public health officials saying things like <a href=\"https://www.smh.com.au/national/vaccine-is-imminent-but-virus-fight-has-long-way-to-go-fauci-20201028-p569h2.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">\"it will be easily by the end of 2021 and perhaps into the next year before we start having some semblance of normality,\"</a> I figured this year\'s travel gift guide would need to be a bit different. Here are my top shopping ideas for your pandemic traveler.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list {\"ordered\":true} -->\n<ol><li><strong>Comfortable Masks —</strong> If your traveler is a bandana/buff wearer, they\'re going to need a more conventional mask to get on an airplane. And since they\'ll be wearing it for 2 or 3 or 4 hours straight, they\'ll want something a bit more breathable than the bargain-basement masks the gate agent give away for free. I\'m a big fan of the <a href=\"https://evolvetogether.com/collections/adult-masks/products/black-milan-coordinates-30-face-masks\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">evolvetogether masks in basic black</a>. They\'re breathable, they come with a pocket carrier for spares, and at $1.20/mask, they hit the right cost/quality balance point.</li><li><strong>Battery Packs</strong> <strong>—</strong> With more things going contactless -- electronic boarding passes, digital hotel door locks, order-ahead food and beer -- a dead phone is more than just a bit of an inconvenience, and having that second or third charge immediately available is a lot more important. I carry a mix of sizes. The <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2E6HMri\" target=\"_blank\">Anker PowerCore+ Mini</a> lipstick charger is light enough (under 3 oz) for my pocket while the heavier/higher-capacity <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://amzn.to/34fcbON\" target=\"_blank\">Zendure Power Bank Supermini</a> waits for me in my computer bag.</li><li><strong>TSA Pre-Check or Global Entry —</strong> A perennial on the gift guide, but even more important when we want to limit time spent in security lines because no one is really staying 6 feet away from each other. It\'s $85 for 5 years of <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/precheck\" target=\"_blank\">Pre-Check</a> or, if you\'re feeling optimistic about international travel opening soon, <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.cbp.gov/travel/trusted-traveler-programs/global-entry\" target=\"_blank\">$100 for both Global Entry and Pre-Check.</a> You might be able to use a high-end travel card like an <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.americanexpress.com/us/expedite-your-travel.html\" target=\"_blank\">Amex Platinum</a> to pay for your traveler\'s application and get the TSA fee back as a statement credit.</li><li><strong>Car Phone Mount —</strong> If your traveler isn\'t buying <a href=\"https://youtu.be/4ZvIoVfqbw0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the airlines\' \"HEPA filters are great!\" pitch</a>, they\'ll be doing more road trips -- and so could probably could use a phone mount upgrade. I like the simplicity and low profile of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/34VrMX4\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">air vent mounts</a>. If your traveler just upgraded to a new iPhone 12, you could go all-in for a matching <a href=\"https://www.belkin.com/us/p/P-WIC002/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">MagSafe vent mount</a>.</li><li><strong>VPN Subscription</strong> <strong>—</strong> Another suggestion that\'s on every one of my gift guides. When you travel away from home or the office, you spend most of your time on public WiFi networks. In the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">last podcast episode</a>, we talked about an <a href=\"https://www.ic3.gov/Media/Y2020/PSA201006\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" target=\"_blank\">FBI consumer alert</a> reminding folks about the risks of these networks. Help your traveler surf safe with a VPN subscription. I’ve always used one of the top paid VPN providers:  <a href=\"http://nordvpn.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">NordVPN</a>, <a href=\"http://expressvpn.com\" title=\"expressvpn.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">ExpressVPN</a>, or <a href=\"https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/\">PIA</a>. A single subscription, usually in the $35-$85 range, will cover their laptop, phone, and tablet. VPN providers always have some promotion going on so it pays to shop around.</li><li><strong>Bring-Your-Own Dining Sets —</strong> Trying to navigate all the restaurant lockdowns and indoor dining limits, I\'ve eaten more take-away meals in my hotel room in the past 6 month than I have in the prior 6 years.  Rather than struggling with plastic knives on styrofoam plates, upgrade your traveler\'s dining experience with their own non-breakable&nbsp;<a href=\"https://amzn.to/3izWHMJ\">wine tumblers</a>, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/364UTXc\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">IPA glasses</a>, and&nbsp;<a href=\"https://amzn.to/3an6BhJ\">camping mess kit</a>. And don\'t forget the non-plastic <a href=\"https://amzn.to/30NAqF2\">upscale sporks</a>.</li><li><strong>In-Room Coffee Brewing Kit —</strong> In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/03/29/podcast-139-brewing-best-hotel-room-coffee-notes-from-spain/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #139 — Brewing Best Hotel Room Coffee; Notes from Spain\">episode #139</a>, I interviewed Coleman Collins about <a href=\"https://roadwarrior.blog/hotel-room-coffee/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">brewing the best hotel room coffee</a>.  Back then, it was only a thing for coffee geeks (snobs?) because just about every hotel lobby offered free coffee. But now, those coffee pots are locked up with the rest of the free breakfast gear, and most hotels aren\'t restocking the in-room coffee makers. So keep your traveler caffeinated with their own coffee brewing kit. I like keeping things simple with a <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3864wYy\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">plastic Hario V60 cone</a> over a coffee mug, but you could go all-barista with an <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2I7RsqR\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Aeropress Go travel press</a> and <a href=\"https://amzn.to/362FQ0u\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Hario mini-mill coffee grinder</a>.</li><li><strong>Portable Bluetooth Speaker —</strong> Last-minute restrictions and closures could have your traveler spending more time than planned in their hotel room or Airbnb, and needing a way to keep themselves entertained. Wearing headphones is OK for a day or two if you\'re by yourself, but when I’m with the family, I want something a bit more social. I\'m a Bose fan, so I like their <a href=\"https://amzn.to/328yhUP\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundLink Micro</a>, but there\'s a broad selection of makers, form factors, and price points to choose from.</li><li><strong>Smartphone Tripod —</strong> It\'s tough to get everyone into an arms-length selfie <em>and</em> maintain social distance. A tabletop tripod with a smartphone clamp like the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/34Vk5QS\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Manfrotto PIXI</a> can help your traveler get those group shots as well as taking some night shots and maybe a cool timelapse video.</li><li><strong>Travel Notebook</strong> <strong>—</strong> Nothing fancy, no leather embossed cover, just something to jot down thoughts, ideas, observations, or to do lists while traveling in this time of COVID. My first travel notebooks were <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://amzn.to/36mN8dZ\" target=\"_blank\">Moleskine pocket notebooks</a> but I\'ve switched over similar-sized <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2LMAOM9\" target=\"_blank\">Clairefontaine A6 notebooks</a>. Their soft cover fits better in the back pocket of my Levis and the paper is more fountain-pen friendly. Or you could go a bit more whimsical and get <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://amzn.to/36pK68D\" target=\"_blank\">a pack of Field Notes</a>.</li></ol>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:block {\"ref\":2601} /-->','10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times','','inherit','closed','closed','','2917-revision-v1','','','2021-03-03 20:31:35','2021-03-04 01:31:35','',2917,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/03/2917-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3354,1,'2021-03-03 20:44:58','2021-03-04 01:44:58','','IMG_9711','','inherit','open','closed','','img_9711','','','2021-03-03 20:44:58','2021-03-04 01:44:58','',85,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/IMG_9711.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(3355,1,'2021-03-03 20:51:56','2021-03-04 01:51:56','<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2><strong>About Mark Peacock</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:image -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignleft size-large is-resized\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/IMG_9711.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/IMG_9711.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3354\" width=\"167\" height=\"250\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Mark Peacock has been a frequent business traveler for over 30 years. Beginning with his first flight on his first day of work (ORD to DFW), Mark has traveled extensively for high-tech companies and management consultancies.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><p>Mark has lived in Chicago, Memphis, Louisville, Washington DC, the Bay Area, Dallas, Philadelphia, and Detroit. He is back in Chicago for the third time, where he lives with his wife and two children.</p>\n<br><br><br></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2><strong>Contact Us</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>EMAIL – comments@travelcommons.com</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2><strong>About the TravelCommons Podcast</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Click here to download a media fact sheet</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','About US','','inherit','closed','closed','','85-revision-v1','','','2021-03-03 20:51:56','2021-03-04 01:51:56','',85,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/03/85-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3358,1,'2021-03-03 21:44:15','2021-03-04 02:44:15','<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2><strong>About Mark Peacock</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:image -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignleft size-large is-resized\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/IMG_9711.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/IMG_9711.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3354\" width=\"167\" height=\"250\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Mark Peacock has been a near-constant business traveler for over 35 years. Beginning with his first flight on his first day of work (an American Airline MD-80 from ORD to DFW), Mark has traveled extensively for high-tech companies and management consultancies.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><p>Mark has lived in Chicago, Memphis, Louisville, Washington DC, the Bay Area, Dallas, Philadelphia, and Detroit. He is back in Chicago for the third time, where he lives with his wife and two children.</p>\n<br><br><br></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2><strong>Contact Us</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>EMAIL – comments@travelcommons.com</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2><strong>About the TravelCommons Podcast</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Click here to download a media fact sheet</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','About US','','inherit','closed','closed','','85-revision-v1','','','2021-03-03 21:44:15','2021-03-04 02:44:15','',85,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/03/85-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3359,1,'2021-03-03 21:44:28','2021-03-04 02:44:28','<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2><strong>About Mark Peacock</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:image -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignleft size-large is-resized\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/IMG_9711.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/IMG_9711.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3354\" width=\"167\" height=\"250\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Mark Peacock has been a near-constant business traveler for over 35 years. Beginning with his first flight on his first day of work (an American Airline MD-80 from ORD to DFW), Mark has traveled extensively for high-tech companies and management consultancies.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><p>Mark has lived in Chicago, Memphis, Louisville, Washington DC, the Bay Area, Dallas, Philadelphia, and Detroit. He is back in Chicago for the third time, where he lives with his wife and two children.</p>\n<br><br><br></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2><strong>Contact Us</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>EMAIL – comments@travelcommons.com</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2><strong>About the TravelCommons Podcast</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Click here to download a media fact sheet</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','About Us','','inherit','closed','closed','','85-revision-v1','','','2021-03-03 21:44:28','2021-03-04 02:44:28','',85,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/03/85-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3361,1,'2021-03-03 21:58:39','2021-03-04 02:58:39','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3037,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2776-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2776-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3037\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Escaped the Chicago winter for a week of hiking in the mountains around Tucson and searching for good Sonoran food. We also talk with Mike Kennedy, CEO and Co-Founder of <a href=\"http://www.go-koala.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Koala </a>about how he\'s making it easy to rent timeshares without buying into them. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_172.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go over to the <em>Subscribe</em> section on the right to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show Notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show Notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #172: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>This Week</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois on, depending where you are, Fat Tuesday or Shrove Tuesday or Pancake Tuesday. Here in Chicago, <a href=\"https://culture.pl/en/article/how-chicago-became-a-distinctly-polish-american-city\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">with a big Polish population</a>, it’s <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P%C4%85czki\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pączki</a> Day and I had mine for breakfast -- Polish-filled donuts; I went for a raspberry jam and a custard one. What had been one of the mildest winters on record started reverting to the mean in February. The last day the temperature cracked freezing was almost 2 weeks ago and it has snowed 13 of the past 17 days. We were all waiting for this, veterans of Midwest winters. It got me thinking that maybe Irene and I should’ve delayed our trip to Tucson from the third week of January when the temperatures here were hitting the mid-40’s, to last week or this week when we could’ve enjoyed 50-60° temperature differentials.</li><li>But even without the guilty pleasure of posting schadenfreude-trolling Instagram pictures of sunshine and temperature readings, we had a good week in Tucson. The flights out and back on Southwest were uneventful, <em>and</em> not full; the Airbnb was fine; the desert hikes were great, and we hit some good restaurants and taprooms, which, as I talked about in the last episode, was the main reason we pivoted from original destination, locked-down/shutdown San Diego to Tucson. Probably our only disappointment was not finding a great margarita -- which we fixed in the Amex Centurion Lounge in PHX while waiting for our flight home. I’ll talk more about Tucson later in the episode, but I also wrote up a blog post with all the details. If you go to the episode description in your podcast app, there’s a link that should be clickable to take you straight to the post.</li><li>Even though Southwest’s open middle seat pledge expired in December (<a href=\"https://news.delta.com/delta-only-us-airline-block-middle-seats-limit-onboard-capacity-through-march-30-2021\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Delta’s the last one standing</a>), no one landed in our middle seat on our MDW-PHX flight. That flight was a lot longer than I remember it being last year. I think it had something to do with the mask. Before getting on the plane, I switched from my standard EvolveTogether surgical style mask to a Korean version of the N-95 mask, decided to dial it up not knowing if I was going to be shoulder-to-shoulder with a stranger for 3+ hours. The KN-95 wasn’t too uncomfortable, as masks go, so I didn’t swap it out for my other mask when the middle seat stayed empty. My strategy with Southwest’s open seating was to go ¾’s of the way to the back of the plane, about halfway past the exit row. I figured this would mean fewer people walking past us but far enough away from the rear lavs to avoid the in-flight queues. And, since people still want to deplane quickly, if the last boarding groups, the C groups, were left with just middle seats, they’d take them in the front of the cabin. As it turned out, I probably over-thought that a bit; I didn’t see any occupied middle seat in the front or the back.</li><li>Then, a couple of days before our flight home, I got the dreaded e-mail from Southwest -- the flight “may not allow for an open middle seat next to you.” I waited until the night before to tell Irene. She’s a little more COVID risk-averse than me and didn’t want her stewing on it. But it turned out OK. She grabbed the 2-seat second exit row -- aisle and middle seat; no window seat. And looking behind us, I didn’t see any row with an occupied middle seat, so either people swapped their flights after receiving that email, or the flight was just a shade over ⅔’s full with any occupied middle seats in the front of the plane. And, those margaritas from the Centurion Lounge helped the flight home go by just a wee bit easier.</li><li>Bridge Music -- P.I.H.E. by Budapest BluesBoy (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hepepe/26362 Ft: Inna Barmash – Zhurbin</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>The <a href=\"https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/breaking/ct-ohare-trespasser-arrest-20210117-aad2craysvehzmk5rm6l23p3l4-story.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">story</a> of the guy who lived for 3 months on the secure side of O’Hare’s domestic terminals after getting off his flight from LA using an airport ID badge that an airport operations manager had reported missing back in October.&nbsp; Shades of Tom Hanks’ character in “The Terminal”. Now, O’Hare is a big airport but it’s not “hang out for 3 months unnoticed” big. There are hundreds of TSA, Chicago Police, and airport security staff -- not to mention all the airline gate agents, wheelchair porters, restaurant workers, and airport maintenance staff. And not one of them noticed this guy wandering around at all hours with an expired badge, even when passenger volumes are cut in half -- until finally, 2 United Airlines workers asked to see his ID. This is bad -- like Cats, The Movie-level bad, like Fyre Festival bad. Seems that, 20 years on from 9/11, “see something, say something” has faded. The TSA and Chicago Dept of Aviation should have to come up with some answers -- but a month on, I think they’ll quietly drop the charges and bury this thing, hoping that the next guy is a bit more obvious.</li><li>In the last episode, I wondered what the airlines and hotels will do about elite status protection if travel continues to be slow through the summer and closed saying “it’ll be interesting to see what they offer come May”. Well, I was off by, say 4-5 months. Things are moving fast. A week after posting that episode, I got an email from Southwest saying they were extending my Companion Pass from June to Dec, and then offers from American and United for status qualifier accelerators. The slooow roll-out of coronavirus vaccines is cutting into what was an end-of-year travel planning spurt. <a href=\"https://www.valuepenguin.com/news/consumers-travel-rewards-covid-2021\">ValuePenguin</a> -- we’ve talked to them in prior episodes about travel credit cards -- they did a survey in December and found people getting rev’d up for travel -- 16% of respondents booked travel as a result of vaccine approvals, 34% had bought plane tickets within the last month, and, in a turnaround from earlier in the year, 47% had increased use of travel credit cards to earn miles to fund their next trip. But two months on from that survey, you already hear some folks starting to write off the summer. Which, with airlines talking about new furloughs and <a href=\"https://skift.com/2021/02/05/u-s-hotel-jobs-recovery-stalls-unemployment-rises/\">hotel unemployment back up to 23%</a> in January, isn’t great news for anyone.</li><li>I also got emails from Iberia and British Airways reminding me that I have Avios balances with each of them that are expiring; Iberia’s at the end of March; BA’s the end of the year (interesting difference in warning periods). Iberia and BA merged 10-11 years ago to form IAG which later bought Aer Lingus, and all 3 use Avios points for their frequent flyer programs but they keep their programs separate. So I have different Avios balances at all three. For most of these programs, you need to have some activity over 24-36 months to keep your point balance. Some airlines have extended these timelines for COVID, but apparently not Iberia or BA. In the past, the easiest thing to do was transfer over the minimum number of credit card points from Chase or Amex -- usually 1,000 points -- and that activity would reset the clock. I was about to run that play again, but something made me check out the rules first. And, sure as hell, the Iberia website says that transferring miles <em>doesn’t</em> count as activity. Now while Iberia’s and BA’s Avios programs are separate, you can transfer points between them if you dig hard enough -- I talked about burning a Saturday afternoon on this back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">episode #136</a>. But they’ve made it easier in the intervening years; I scrounged around and found the page I needed to transfer all my Iberia Avios points to my BA account. I’ll give it a month to see if BA considers this transfer as enough “activity” to reset the 36-month clock. If not, I have until the end of the year to try an Amex transfer or, failing that, code a night’s Marriott or Hyatt stay to my BA account. Reminds me to make the rounds of my other odds-n-ends loyalty programs and see what else might be expiring.</li><li>I mentioned in the last segment that we hit the <a href=\"https://thecenturionlounge.com/locations/phx/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">PHX Amex Centurion Lounge</a> before flying home from our desert hiking week. I’ve talked in past episodes about how these lounges are head-and-shoulders above the regular US airline lounges -- great food, open bars. The only problems -- not enough of them and, because they’re a great deal, they get crowded. Or did pre-COVID. Walking into the PHX lounge, we saw maybe a dozen people. They’re still serving food, but they now have staff dishing it out for you from the buffet line. But we’d picked up a couple of sandwiches from Pizzeria Bianco, a great pizza and panini place, so we were just looking for drinks. I thought about a beer, walking up to the bar, the tequila bottle caught my eye, reminding me we hadn’t been able to find a good margarita in Tucson. The bartender solved that problem; she made two great margaritas. So good, that I wanted to squeeze one more in before heading down to the gate. I walked up to the bar; different bartender; I hoped her margaritas were as good. She looked at me for a moment and then said, “I have to be honest with you; I’ve never made a margarita before, but I’ll give it a try.” She was one of the girls from the buffet line standing in for the bartender while she was on break. I could’ve pivoted to a beer, but when she said “I’ll give it a try.” “No problem,” I said, “I’ll walk you through it.” Grab the shaker, fill it with ice. Take the tequila bottle, fill the large end of the jigger, pour it into the shaker. Now turn the jigger over and fill the short end with Cointreau. Pour that in. Now a short shot of lime juice. Now put the lid on and shake it. Now strain it into that martini glass; we’ll skip the salt rim. She was great; a little nervous, but game for it. We thanked each other -- me thanking her for yet another good margarita; she thanking me... but for what, not being another miserable, entitled Platinum card holder? Absolutely my best Centurion Lounge experience yet.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge music -- ~aether theories~ by Vidian (c) copyright 2018 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Vidian/57398 Ft: Gurdonark, White-throated Sparrow</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Timeshares Without The Pitch</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>For our Tucson trip, Irene ended up booking on Airbnb what turned out to be someone’s timeshare rental in a golf resort west of Tucson. It was a new one for us, and a little different than the typical Airbnb experience -- we had to put down a credit card for incidentals, and then had to check-out and check back in halfway thru the stay -- but it was a nice place and, better yet, we didn’t get trapped in a small room for an hour-long sales pitch.</li><li>And so when we got back home and I got a note from <a href=\"https://www.go-koala.com/about/team\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Mike Kennedy</a> introducing me to <a href=\"https://www.go-koala.com/\">Koala</a>, the timeshare rental search platform he co-founded and launched last August, I asked him to come onto the podcast to talk about timeshare rentals and how they fit into the travel eco-system:<ul><li>Mark: Mike, help us understand how timeshare rental fits into that spectrum of accommodations that travelers might be more familiar with. If I think about that spectrum, I could go from hotels to B &amp; Bs to vacation rentals to private home rentals. Where does timeshare rental fit?</li><li>Mike: That\'s a great question. There\'s kind of a natural bifurcation in options when you\'re selecting accommodations for vacations. You\'re either going down the route of an <a href=\"https://www.airbnb.com\">Airbnb</a> or a <a href=\"https://www.vrbo.com/\">VRBO</a>.&nbsp; You want to rent a home because you want some space, or you want to stay in something that is a hotel. But in those two scenarios, you typically have compromises, and the compromise with hotels is that, especially if you have a family, you\'re typically getting one hotel room in cramming your family in or getting adjoining hotel rooms. But you get the confidence that it’s managed by Mariott or Hilton, etc. Conversely, if you\'re getting a home rental, it\'s the opposite. You have the ability to rent a whole home. You don\'t have to leave three times a day for meals. However, you don\'t know who it\'s being cleaned by, or what protocols are being upheld. And in today\'s world, those things are really important. The timeshare product is the only natural hybrid product in the marketplace. You have all the benefits and features of your vacation rentals like the living rooms, the shared bedrooms, washer and dryer; all that space that you want from a vacation rental. But it\'s managed by a Marriott or Hilton, and it has resort amenities like swimming pools, check-in desks; things like that that give you the confidence again in today\'s world with that, people really want. Before us, the options to get one of these was to pay a lot of money on these OTAs, these online travel agencies through a rental, or to go and buy into one of these programs. And that\'s not really either affordable or even appealing to a lot of people.</li><li>Mark: What does Koala offer travelers that, say, Airbnb doesn\'t? I recently rented a Club Wyndham timeshare in Tucson from an owner on Airbnb. So how would that transaction be different/better/more optimized on Koala?</li><li>Mike: So, a couple things. One. You don\'t see a lot of timeshare inventory on Airbnb for the reasons I\'m about to discuss. And that is because it is not a platform that is built for that product.</li><li>Mark: What are some of the unique pieces that make Airbnb not optimized for timeshare rental?</li><li>Mike: If you own a home, you can open up a calendar for 365 and you can set different prices and different availability based off of that open calendar. If you own a timeshare, you typically own a seven-day interval.&nbsp; And how do you fit that into some place where it gets visibility for someone that may not be searching for those exact beginning and end dates? So, what ends up happening is that a lot of people show up to the resorts and the reservations are incorrect or wrong, or just not there at all. You know, it is a system because there\'s a little bit of a square peg in a round hole. Don’t get me wrong. It sounds like you had a fine experience, but they don\'t manage that in a way that is designed to be managed. There\'s a third party involved in this, the resort.&nbsp; When it\'s an Airbnb, it\'s a host and it\'s a traveler, and those two will figure out and arrange something. With a resort stay, there is a third party. There\'s a guest certificate transfer that happens on the back end to ensure that your name as a traveler gets switched to the reservation ledger in the system to ensure that the guest gets to walk into that check-in successfully. We do all that. There are extra steps involved that we ensure. And we handle all of that.</li><li>Mark: So it feels like you\'re acting as an OTA, an online travel agency like an Orbitz or an Expedia, to provide search, discovery and then booking.</li><li>Mike: Correct, yes</li><li>Mark: As you were working towards your August launch, what were some of the biggest challenges you faced in getting that inventory so that people could search and book?</li><li>Mike: That is the question, right? So, I know this from my time in Hilton Club that there was a problem in how people underutilize their timeshares but still had fees to pay. And that went from “I bought this thing; I don\'t understand it” all the way up to “I loved it for 10 years; I\'m just done with it and now what?” and everything in between. But at the end of the day, if you have a $2000 annual fee to pay, it becomes a problem. So, I knew that it was something that if we connected with these owners, we could help solve that problem for them. What we didn\'t understand was that, in many cases, these owners don\'t even know what they own. They don\'t know where to start. It\'s not like you have a vacation rental, and you\'re like “Oh, here\'s the house; I take some photos; I’m going to throw up a price and I’m going to rent a couple nights out, and I\'ll adjust the cost per night based off of rentals.” You have this thing that is either a fixed week or it\'s not; it\'s a specific resort or it\'s not. And in many cases, people don\'t really know what they bought. And in some cases, they bought something and then upgraded to something else. So that was by far the biggest problem was getting people to understand what they own. How do you create an asset out of that and leverage that asset in a way that could earn you some revenue? It\'s still a process that we\'re going through, like really making it very, very simple. You know, we\'re not really just tapping into this supply; we’re really empowering a whole group of people to understand this process.</li><li>Mark: Mike, last question. How did you get this idea? How\'d you get started on this down this path?</li><li>Mike: Yeah, good question. I was a musician when I was in my twenties, and I kind of meandered into residential real estate. And the real estate market in 2007 in New York, everywhere was just kind of flat. So, one of my good friends was like, “You should come check out this condo hotel; it\'s fractional real estate.” I ask “What the heck is fractional real estate?” “No, come check it out. It\'s Hilton.” “Alright.” I went in there. I\'m like, This is cool. There\'s a lot of hustle and bustle. My office is kind of dead; this office is moving. So, I joined the team. Three weeks into training, I ask “Is this a timeshare?”&nbsp; They\'re like “Yeah…”, but I was already hired in the job. It really started to resonate with me -- the more and more time I spent with people that I sold, after they\'re coming in over and over again, and we\'re trying to upgrade them into something else. It was cool, this product is great, but now people are looking for ways out, and I don\'t have answers for them. The solutions weren\'t there on the back end that I was hoping for. So, it really was a direct result of me being in touch with those situations that I felt like I could help. And yeah, I took the leap and I said, Look, this is where this is a problem we\'re solving. I think the industry is great. I think there\'s a lot of upside. I think it\'s got a bad rap, but I think if we mitigate some of that and amplify what people love about this industry, I think it will go a long way.</li><li>Mark: Fantastic. Mike Kennedy, CEO and Co-Founder of KOALA. Mike, thanks for joining us on the TravelCommons podcast</li><li>Mike: Thanks, Mark.</li></ul></li><li>Bridge music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/flatwound/14476\">The Long Goodbye</a>&nbsp;by John Pazdan (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/flatwound/14476</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Notes on Tucson</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>As I said at the top of the show, Irene and I had a good trip to Tucson at the end of January -- pretty much just hiking, eating, and drinking. I wrote it up in a blog post on the TravelCommons website -- <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Quick Notes on Our Trip to Tucson\">“Quick Notes on our Trip to Tucson”</a>, though at over 1,700 words, I’m not sure it necessarily qualified as “quick.” But there are some pictures, and links to all the parks, restaurants, and taprooms we enjoyed. Also a link to the Tucson Instagram story on the TravelCommons Instagram page if you want to see some more informal pictures.</li><li>We flew into PHX rather than TUS because the non-stop flights were cheaper and there were more of them. I was going to rent a car anyways, so the 100-mile drive straight down I-10 seemed a good trade-off for better flights. The only hitch in that plan was the bus between the terminal and the rental car center. They limited capacity to 15 people, which made sense. However, they didn’t add buses to make up that lost capacity. Wasn’t a problem when we got on the bus at the terminal, but the queue at the rental car center stretched the length of the center; hundreds of people trying to get back to make their flight. I saw some folks bailing out and calling Ubers. Made a note to add an extra 30 minutes to our return time. Turned out we didn’t need it; walked straight from the Hertz lot onto a bus. But that was OK. I used that time for my margarita lesson -- definitely a greater good.</li><li>Tucson sits kinda at the bottom of five sets of small-ish mountains; they’re an awkward size -- bigger than hills, but except for the Santa Catalinas, don’t feel big enough to be “mountains”. Which was OK because all we wanted to do was hike, well really walk, the trails. To be outside under blue skies in the high 60’s/low 70’s; that’s what we really wanted to do; to take a break from grey Chicago and to be far enough away from people that we could walk around without masks.&nbsp;</li><li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\">episode #168</a>, we talked about traveling for food, that food is one experience of a place that can’t be easily exported and bought on-line. In that episode, I talked about eating our way through South Philly and a pasty tour of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. In Tucson, it was the hunt for Sonoran food, a type of Mexican cuisine that you don’t see much outside of, well, the Sonoran desert -- Southern Arizona and the Mexican state of Sonora. It hasn’t “broken out” the way that, say, Tex-Mex and Baja and Oaxacan styles have. It’s all about beef, mostly <em>carne asada</em> grilled over mesquite and served in a thin flour tortilla that\'s more like the wrappers you get with Chinese Mandarin food than the thick flour tortillas you get with fajitas. Cross-referencing a couple of local food blogs, I had a list of places to try. And honestly, it was a bit of hit-and-miss; mostly misses the first couple of nights, but then we hit gold at the end of our stay. Looking back, I think we tried the nicer places on the list first. They weren’t <em>bad</em>; they were fine, but not places I’d go out of my way to recommend. And after that -- disappointment is too strong of a word, we kinda said, screw it. We found the Sonoran hot dog truck and ate a couple of $3 bacon-wrapped hot dogs topped with chopped tomatoes and onions, pinto beans, mayonnaise, mustard, and salsa verde off the hood of our rental car. And then drove over to a restaurant that’s website made it look very foody -- scrolling photos of nicely plated dishes -- but almost passed the building by; it looked like a repurposed Arby’s or Hardee’s with a vinyl sign pulled over the original one. But the food, especially the cabrito, the goat tacos, were phenomenal. Not all the dives were great; some disappointed, some were “meh”. But the ones that were great made it worth the “meh’s”.</li><li>But the absolute highlight of the trip? I was standing out on the back patio of our timeshare watching the sun set over the Tucson Mountains; it was beautiful; when I heard some rustling off to the right. What looked like a good-sized wild pig walked out from between two bushes and across the backyard. And then another one. They stopped, turned to look at me, and then kept walking. More kept coming – walking the same path across the backyard. They were <a href=\"https://www.azgfd.com/wildlife/livingwith/javelina/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">javelinas</a>, and <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peccary\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Wikipedia</a> told us that their groups are called \"squadrons\".&nbsp; Well, our squad looked comfortable here, like they were taking their usual end-of-day stroll back to wherever they bed down to stay safe from mountain lions. And the next morning, a couple came back sniffing around the patio door. I wondered if they smelled the egg and toast I made for breakfast. They reminded us to keep that patio door closed.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #172</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li>Nothing new on the tech front this month, but I should have the website freshened up by the next episode. I’ve had the current look since the beginning of 2006 courtesy of TravelCommons listener Hilary Baumann and her <a href=\"https://fascinationdesign.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Fascination Design</a> firm. The change is absolutely not a knock against Hilary’s work. It’s just that, after 15 years, I wanted to freshen things up a bit. So look for that by the end of February or beginning of March.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>, as well as asking Alexa, Siri, and Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_172.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #172 — Timeshares Without the Pitch; Notes on Tucson','Escaped Chicago winter for a week of hiking and eating in Tucson; CEO of Koala talks about renting timeshares; travel planning gets hot and then cools back down','inherit','closed','closed','','3342-revision-v1','','','2021-03-03 21:58:39','2021-03-04 02:58:39','',3342,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/03/3342-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3363,1,'2021-03-03 22:04:03','2021-03-04 03:04:03','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":2899,\"width\":300,\"height\":300,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large is-resized\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-1024x1024.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2899\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"/><figcaption>My mission is clear</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Trying to recover from a long weekend of eating and drinking through the neighborhoods of South Philly. Our movable feast reminded me that food may be the one experience of a place left that can’t be easily exported and bought on-line. We talk about the FBI\'s cybersecurity warning to work-from-home types using hotels for getaway offices, and are a bit amazed at how fast last year\'s \"flight shaming\" gave way to \"flights to nowhere.\" And we think about \"quarantine theater\" -- how cities and states are focusing on activities to signal they are serious about COVID, but that most folks know aren’t really effective. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_168.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>download</strong></a> the podcast file, go over to the <em>Subscribe</em> section on the right to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #168: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after a long weekend of eating and drinking and eating some more with friends in Philadelphia, a family we’ve traveled with before - South Africa, Singapore, Spain… and now, with COVID lockdowns, Philly. And while we’ll do a cultural thing or two, what we really like to do together is eat. It is the kind of group where comments like: “OK, we need to stop eating at 1:30 because we have 5:30 reservations” and “We’re only going to order the half-kilo of barbacoa because we’re eating again in 4 hours” are met with “Yeah, that’s a good point,” and “makes sense” rather than “I think we have a problem here.”&nbsp;</li><li>And Pennsylvania’s reopening regulation about needing to buy food when getting a beer didn’t help. After sneaking in a cheesesteak right before that 1:30 cutoff, we had to order some food with our afternoon beers -- the beer, of course, not subject to that 1:30 deadline because it’s liquid, so it’s not really food, so it doesn’t count. But we had to order some real, solid food with our beers. So we look at the menu -- ah, brussels sprouts, it’s a vegetable, that’s kinda healthy. Five minutes later, our beers arrive with a wire basket full of deep-fried brussels sprouts doused in a sweet chili sauce. So much for healthy.</li><li>But some of the bars, the smaller ones, the neighborhood ones, gamed it -- as these places are wont to do -- by putting a $1 food item on the menu -- 2 hard boiled eggs at one bar, a PB&amp;J at another. The best, though, was the Pop Tart we had with our last beer at Ray’s Happy Birthday Bar in South Philly. That one won the prize.</li><li>Which we found because we skipped the usual downtown/Center City/Society Hill hotels and grabbed an Airbnb in South Philly - kinda sandwiched between the older Italian neighborhoods and the newer Little Saigon area. We spent a lot of time outdoors, walking the neighborhoods -- and walking off our food -- and stopping in at neighborhood joints. One day, we’re picking up salamis and cheese from the Italian Market; another day, we’re buying banh mi’s from a Vietnamese bakery. I’ll write up a list of our favorite places for the TravelCommons website in a couple of weeks -- after my cholesterol level gets back to some semblance of normal.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/duckett/2333\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Another Girl (instrumental)</a> by duckett (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/duckett/23334 Ft: fourstones, miafas</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>First, a big “Thank You” to Gary Learned who goes by Denrael on social media for his review in Apple Podcasts. Gary is a long-time TravelCommons listener. Indeed, he’s pointed me to some great restaurants in places like Seattle and Memphis. Gary wrote a couple of weeks ago:<ul><li>“When people ask where I live, I usually just say airports and hilton. As someone who lives the life of the road warrior, I find this podcast strikes an all-to-familiar chord with my own experiences. A definite must-listen to understand the life of the traveller.</li><li>“I wrote the above a number of years ago and it is as true now as it was then, I look forward to Mark’s take on travel, it’s more about the journey, and cannot count the number of times when I’ve shook my head, laughed and said “yep, been there.”</li></ul></li><li>Gary, thanks for that. And thanks for staying with me this long.</li><li>The FBI pushed out a consumer alert last week to remind folks about the risks when using hotel wi-fi. We’ve talked about this many times and I think most frequent travelers know the drill when accessing any shared wi-fi, whether it be in a hotel or an airport or a bar or a Starbucks. Nothing new there, so why the FBI alert? Because the “FBI has observed a trend where individuals who were previously teleworking from home are beginning to telework from hotels. US hotels, predominantly in major cities, have begun to advertise daytime room reservations for guests seeking a quiet, distraction-free work environment.” So people who used to work in offices and have been working from home since March, are looking for a change of scenery, but either can’t or aren’t keen to go back to the group office setting. Enter downtown hotels, many of whom, we mentioned last month, are slouching towards bankruptcy because of low occupancy. Don’t want a bed for the night? How ‘bout a desk for the day? I just got an email from Omni Hotels pitching just that -- “Trade up your classroom for everything you need for a productive day of work plus downtown Los Angeles views.” I guess the FBI thinks these displaced office workers, used to working on secure corporate or home networks, might not be as careful. But even for frequent travelers, the alert is a good read:&nbsp; talking about the dangers of an “evil twin” attack, logging onto what looks like a hotel wi-fi but is actually a hacker’s network; logging into the actual hotel wi-fi which has been compromised through exploits in out-of-date or unpatched network hardware. The FBI’s top recommendations are ones we’ve <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/09/20/podcast-155-rj-delays-street-food-in-poland-and-hungary/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #155 — RJ Delays; Street Food in Poland and Hungary\">repeated</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/02/20/podcast-127-critiquing-my-top-10-travel-tips-reviewing-vpns/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #127 — Critiquing My Top 10 Travel Tips; Reviewing VPNs\">numerous</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/12/20/podcast-119-digital-security-on-the-road-us-airports-getting-better/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #119 — Digital Security On The Road; US Airports Getting Better?\">times</a> - use a VPN when you connect to public wi-fi, or avoid them altogether with a mobile hotspot. Even when I’ve had a corporate VPN, I’ve always used one of the top paid VPN providers - NordVPN, PIA or ExpressVPN - because their software is so much better. I’m using NordVPN now, and whenever I’m not on a private network, I fire up the Nord client and it handles everything -- connects to the best server, reconnects automatically when I open the lid to wake up my Mac again. I don’t have to think about it. Indeed, half the time I forget to shut it off at home, until I’m wondering why I can’t move a file to another PC. Also, only access secure websites; I used to say “look for https://” but I guess that was too geeky, so you need to look for lock icons instead. And, of course, enable 2-factor authentication whenever you can. Nothing new, but a good reminder nonetheless. I’ll put a <a href=\"https://www.ic3.gov/media/2020/201006.aspx\">link to the alert</a> in the show notes, but you can also find links on the TravelCommons Facebook page and Twitter account.</li><li>OK, I gotta ask “what happened to Greta Thunberg\'s ‘flygskam’ or ‘flight shaming’ -- the 2019 existential travel threat? Because the whole Asian thing of “flights to nowhere” -- EVA Air from Taiwan filling up its “Hello Kitty” plane, All Nippon doing a fake flight to Hawaii, and then Qantas selling out a 787 for a lap around Australia. Singapore Air scrapped their “flight to nowhere” at the last minute, instead turning one of their A380s into a pop-up restaurant. I have to tell you that, honestly, I just don’t get this. For me, the flight is a means to an end -- something I’ve got to bear to get where I want to go. Getting on that American 737 in ORD last week didn’t fill me with joy; it was just simple math -- 2 hrs in a plane vs. 11 hrs in a car. And all that I just said… goes double for the idea of voluntarily buying airplane meals to eat at home. Words fail me.</li><li>At the end of September, the CDC did an early release of an article slated for the November issue of their peer-reviewed journal <em>Emerging Infectious Diseases</em> (and I thought <em>Walden Pond</em> was a cure for insomnia). The article analyzed the in-flight transmission of coronavirus from one business class passenger to 14 other passengers and a crew member on a 10-hour Vietnam Air flight from London to Hanoi. Most of the reactions in the press and on Twitter were “Yikes! Single passenger infects 15 people!”. While noting the CDC’s disclaimer “Early release articles are not considered as final versions” (which I didn’t see mentioned in any of the press articles), I came away with a less-than- “Yikes” after reading the whole paper. The flight was on March 2nd, so while the world was still trying to figure this novel coronavirus thing out and way before mandatory in-flight masks. And the passenger was symptomatic with a cough and a sore throat. Of the 14 passengers infected, 12 were in the same business class cabin and of those, all but one were within a 2-seat radius. And the authors aren’t sure if the 2 economy class infections were from the business class index case or from a different source. My takeaways: 1) Don’t let symptomatic people on planes - even if temperature checks aren’t perfect, it might catch some folks and will certainly make people think about their condition before flying; 2) Because this appears to validate the risk of being kept in close proximity to an infected person over a prolonged period; 3) Which, to me, justifies the airlines’ no-excuses mask requirements; but 4) In spite of a symptomatic un-masked passenger coughing away in the front of the plane, no non-adjacent passengers got infected -- so maybe the airline execs’ confidence in HEPA filters kinda justified. I’ll put <a href=\"https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/11/20-3299_article\">a link to the CDC paper</a> in the show notes. It’s not that long. It’s interesting to read the source document rather than just a headline or a short USAToday blurb.</li><li>Having said all that, I’m in no way, shape, or form justifying the “hygiene theater” that the travel industry seems to be trying to use to bring folks back. I talked back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/07/17/podcast-165-first-post-lockdown-flight-when-does-business-travel-come-back/\">the July episode</a> about the “Hertz Gold Standard Clean” sticker Hertz is slapping across driver-side doors. And there are some hotels now scheduling cleaning during the day rather than overnight so guests can see it. And then, on my American flights between Chicago and Philly last week, the banner across the top of the American Way magazine cover in the seatback pocket - “This magazine has been treated with an antimicrobial process” -- which I guess means “Please, feel safe to open it up and look at the advertisements.” I dunno, it feels a bit like the “security theater” we all went through after 9/11 - it was less about actually making things safer and more about making us “feel” safer -- and so, more willing to get on a plane. But maybe if I’m an airline or hotel exec facing down the pain of laying off thousands or tens of thousands of people if travelers don’t come back, that distinction is meaningless; I’m just trying to survive.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/snowflake/56508\">Rise Up (Like the Sun)</a> by Snowflake (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: Bluemillenium, Sackjo22, Martin Luther King, Kara Square</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2><strong>Quarantine Theater</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>While some folks in the hospitality industry are talking about “hygiene theater”, what about “quarantine theater”? Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #166 — What Is The Meaning of Travel?\">August episode</a>, I talked about the complexity local and state travel bans and quarantine measures are causing for people trying to plan some sort of travel.&nbsp;</li><li>My son Andrew and his significant other headed out to Portland, ME last month for work. The week before they left, the Marriott emailed him a form - “Please certify one of the following is true - I have received a negative COVID test performed no later than 72 hours prior to my arrival, or will quarantine for 14 days upon my arrival in Maine.” Since they were only going to be in Portland for 4 days, they trundled down to the nearest testing site for the quick test 2 days before they left -- where they got chewed out by one of the testers. “We’re running out of the quick tests. You should’ve planned better.” OK, how long to get results from the other test? “5 days” But that won’t meet Maine’s 3-day requirement. Tester just walks away. But they got their negative test results and got on their plane to Portland -- where no one in the airport or the hotel asked to see it.&nbsp; OK, not harm done other than the discomfort of a Q-tip probing their sinuses and a random bit of yelling, but waste scarce testing resources?</li><li>Chicago’s quarantine is also a bit of kabuki. Once a week the city’s health commission gets in front of the press to scold another state or two -- this week was Indiana and Wisconsin. There’s now 25 states and Puerto Rico that if you’re traveling from there to Chicago, you’re supposed to self-quarantine for 14 days or face fines up to $7,000. More interesting is that Chicago’s threshold for getting on the list is 15 new daily cases per 100,000 residents. On this week’s <a href=\"https://www.chicago.gov/city/en/sites/covid-19/home/emergency-travel-order.html\">tally,</a> Indiana is running in the 20-30 range, but so is the state of Illinois. You could call it hypocritical or pragmatic or keeping its powder dry for when the city needs another bucket of money from the state, but Chicago hasn’t put the rest of Illinois on its quarantine list.</li><li>Now, I’ve yet to hear of anyone who has actually self-quarantined and as of last week, <a href=\"https://chicago.cbslocal.com/2020/10/02/three-months-into-chicagos-emergency-travel-order-no-fines-issued-enforcement-focus-remains-on-education/\">no one has been rung up for not doing so</a>. But last month, a friend told me about how Chicago’s quarantine theater hit her last month. She finally got ‘round to taking some vacation at the end of the summer. She lives in Chicago, but is a big outdoors person; looking at airfares and tossing some darts at a map, she decided to go hit Bryce Canyon and Zion National Parks in Southern Utah. So she’s down there for a couple of days when her boss calls her. “They just announced that Utah is going on the city’s quarantine list. It’s not official until Friday, so I guess if you get out of there by Thursday, you won’t have to quarantine for 2 weeks before coming back to work.” And, it didn’t need to be said, those 2 weeks of self-quarantine wouldn’t be paid. My friend is unique in that she works for maybe the one company in Chicago that takes the city’s quarantine order seriously. So my friend fought through lousy cell coverage to see what she could salvage of the back half of her vacation. Luckily, she has friends in Oregon, which isn’t on the city’s list. So Thursday, she cut her hiking short, schlepped the 4½ hours back up to SLC and caught the last flight out to Portland -- which let her come back to work and make some money the next week.</li><li>Theater isn’t a new thing. If you’re, say, a <em>mature</em> traveler, you got to play a bit part in the security theater that premiered after 9/11 and the underwear bomber. While not a perfect analogy (and really, nothing ever is), we can see some similar theatrics -- government agencies (TSA then, health departments now) investing in activities that signal they are serious, but that most folks know aren’t really effective. For me and I think for most frequent travelers, the security theater ended with TSA PreCheck -- it seemed, again to most of us, as a reasonable balance between risk and getting on with our traveling lives. I don’t know what that looks like for quarantine theater, but I sure hope it doesn’t take the 10 years it took to figure out PreCheck.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/52154\">release.JOY.release</a> by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: essesq, Haskel (hej31)</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2><strong>Traveling For Food</strong> </h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I talked at the start of the episode about eating my way through Philadelphia a couple of weeks back, and it was just that. We landed Thursday around 11:30a and were hitting our favs at Reading Terminal Market by 1:30p. I went straight for Tommy Dinic’s for the roast pork sandwich with sharp provolone and broccoli rabe while Irene and Claire made for the Mennonite pretzel place and Termini Brothers for fresh-filled cannolis. And then as we were leaving, I swung past one of the PA Dutch stands to buy a 1-lb block of <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrapple\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">scrapple</a> for breakfast the rest of the stay.</li><li>Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #166 — What Is The Meaning of Travel?\">August episode</a> in the interview with Emily Thomas about her book <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2IpLXnd\"><em>The Meaning of Travel</em></a><em>, </em>we talked about a chapter on global homogenization. One of the bits that I edited out was the observation that, back 10-20 year ago, it was fun to go shopping and bring something unique back home. But now, with globalized e-commerce, there’s not much that you can’t find easier (and often cheaper) on Amazon or Taobao or Rakuten. And so, for me, food is the one experience of a place that can’t be easily exported and bought on-line.</li><li>On our trip to the UP -- Michigan’s Upper Peninsula -- along with the biking, hiking, and kayaking, we were also on a bit of a <a href=\"https://thepastyguy.com/portfolio/the-pasty-trail-best-pasties-in-up/\">pasty tasting tour</a>. The UP is pretty well known -- in the Midwest at least -- for their <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pasty\">pasties</a>, brought over by Cornish miners working the copper mines. We had traditional pasties filled with steak, potatoes, onions, and rutabagas, and breakfast pasties. We worked our ways through the finer points of pasty critique -- picking out the pasties made from lard-based doughs, and fillings that held together so you could eat the pasty with your hand but weren’t just complete mush.</li><li>It’s funny how these comparison dishes can crop up on a vacation. On a trip to Phuket, Thailand, Andrew ordered pad thai everywhere we ate. On a trip to Hungary, Irene searched every menu for <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisherman\'s_soup\">halászlé</a> - a spicy fish soup - after having a great bowl of it at lunch with her cousin in some little town on the shores of <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Balaton\">Lake Balaton</a>. And again Irene, in Spain now, searched every city we visited for <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salmorejo\">salmorejo</a>, not quite soup, more of a tomato and bread and olive oil and garlic purée. These sorta horizontal tasting, some would be planned -- like our pasty tour -- and some would just come up, like Irene’s halászlé hunt. But it’d be fun, getting a feel for what the base of the dish is, what everyone agrees on, and what people put their own spin on, because usually for these core dishes -- dishes that everyone around has eaten all their lives -- everyone has an opinion about them. And that’s part of what makes the broad/horizontal tasting fun.</li><li>And also, these dishes don’t seem to be “industrialized.” While I’ve had mass produced pasties in the UK, grabbing something out from the West Cornish Pasty hut in Waterloo Station while running for a train, the pasties in the UP were much more -- not “artisanal” because I don’t think anyone making pasties in the UP would use that word, but “family made”. At Miners Pasties in Munising, which came out top in our pasty ranks, the woman helping us at the counter said the lard pastry recipe came from the owner’s grandmother and only 3 people know it -- the granddaughters and their niece. And only those three make the pastry each day.&nbsp; We sat back and enjoyed those pasties because we knew we wouldn’t be eating them again unless and until we found our way back to this bench again some day.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #168</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_168.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food','','inherit','closed','closed','','2896-revision-v1','','','2021-03-03 22:04:03','2021-03-04 03:04:03','',2896,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/03/2896-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3376,1,'2021-03-04 15:23:49','2021-03-04 20:23:49','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":2857,\"width\":300,\"height\":300,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large is-resized\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/F3E28DAE-0026-4E8A-957E-D6CE914F717C.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2857\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"/><figcaption>I seem to have put on a Quarantine 15</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Spent a week in <a href=\"https://www.uptravel.com/\">Michigan\'s Upper Peninsula</a> hiking, biking, kayaking, and running into a lot of other people getting away to do the same, which got me looking back six months to the start of the pandemic. I talk about a surprisingly good flight cancellation experience with American Airlines, and figuring out how to download 12 years of <a href=\"https://www.tripit.com/\">TripIt</a> data. We wrap up talking to <a href=\"https://www.lendingtree.com/writer/matt-schulz/\">Matt Schulz</a> of <a href=\"https://www.lendingtree.com/\">LendingTree</a>, asking him what are we doing with travel credit cards that are generating frequent traveler points we can’t use? All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_167.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>download</strong></a> the podcast file, subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #167: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after a week’s tour of the UP -- Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Did a counter-clockwise circle route around Lake Michigan. Headed out east on Friday morning; stopped at a brewery in Grand Rapids for lunch; drove the 5 miles across the Mackinac Bridge just before dusk; and had my first UP pasty (the first of many) and a local beer for dinner that night in Sault Ste Marie. Spent a couple of days in Soo; watched 700-ft lake freighters make their way through the locks that connect Lake Superior to Lake Huron; I’m still enough of an engineer to geek out on that kind of stuff. We then drove west to Marquette for 3 days and again west to Houghton for 2 days before heading home through Wisconsin down the west side of Lake Michigan. It was all outdoors stuff -- hiking, biking, kayaking; the things that last-minute COVID closures or restrictions won’t muck up.&nbsp; The UP has always been on my list of places to visit, but it’s always on sorta the B-list, and so plans to go someplace else -- Spain, Napa, Ireland -- would always push it down the list. But now, with most places blocked off with travel restrictions and quarantines, the UP -- drivable with lots of outdoor activities -- bubbled to the top of the list.</li><li>And I wasn’t the only one thinking that way. The guy renting rowboats at <a href=\"https://www2.dnr.state.mi.us/ParksandTrails/Details.aspx?id=428&amp;type=SPRK\">Tahquamenon Falls State Park</a> looked at our release forms and said “We’ve had a lot of people up here from Chicago. It’s been crazy busy. We can’t get enough people to handle it.” And biking around <a href=\"https://www.travelmarquette.com/things-to-do/attractions/presque-isle-park/\">Presque Isle Park</a> in Marquette, we got talking, in a socially distant way, to a biking couple up from St Louis. It was also their first time up. A bunch of their friends and family had been up earlier; they’d seen nothing but UP pictures in their Facebook feed for the past month.</li><li>The husband said that he had an underlying medical condition and so they were looking for places away from people; they’d rented a cabin in the little town of Au Train. Which got me thinking about the place we stayed in Soo -- the <a href=\"https://www.plazamotormotel.com/\">Plaza Motor Motel</a>. No lobby, no elevators, no hallways; no places to run into other guests; no need to have to remember to mask up when you leave your room. Just open your room door and there’s your car. Most frequent travelers would never think of voluntarily staying in a motor inn, a <em>mo</em>-tel. But with so many things changing in these unprecedented times, maybe COVID will have folks give motels another chance.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/11510\">Funkist</a> - cdk dub mix by cdk (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: teru</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>First, a big shout out to the folks in Hanoi, Vietnam listening to TravelCommons on Soundcloud. One of the fun things about the podcast is looking at where people are listening from. For the most part, the stats make sense -- most of the listeners are from the US, and then English-speaking countries -- the UK, Canada, Australia. But every once in a while, there’s a spike that I just can’t figure out. I’ll see it, go look at the episode notes to see if I’ve mentioned that country, but I usually can’t make sense of it. Last fall, it was Argentina., but over the past couple of months, it’s been folks from Hanoi, primarily listening to <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/04/11/podcast-162-post-corona-trip-planning-keeping-a-travel-journal/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #162 — Post-Corona Trip Planning; Keeping a Travel Journal\">April episode, #162</a>, about post-lockdown trip planning and keeping a travel journal. Not sure why, but if you’re in Hanoi and you’ve made it to this episode - Hi! And thanks for listening!</li><li>Dan Grabon sent me a note at the beginning of the month about my lockdown reading that I mentioned during <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #166 — What Is The Meaning of Travel?\">last month’s interview</a> with Dr Emily Thomas<ul><li>“Mark,&nbsp; I feel your pain. I started re-reading Walden back in April, and I just passed the halfway mark at the end of August. This was part of an overly ambitious effort to read one great book a month from a literary calendar that I bought. The Brothers Karamazov took up January through March, and even though COVID should have meant more time to read, it just hasn’t turned out that way.</li><li>“Writing this from a long overdue vacation near Lake George, where I saw the book Cabin Porn in a gift shop. Good timing.</li><li>“Thanks for keeping the podcast going— helps keep me going in this time of not going much of anywhere!”</li></ul></li><li>Dan, Thanks for the note. <em>The Brothers Karamazov</em> -- you are a better man than I.&nbsp; I swore off of Russian fiction after suffering through <em>Crime and Punishment</em> in high school. That and Charles Dickens, just can’t do ‘em. And I am still working my way through <em>Walden</em>. Just got through his half-dozen pages on hoeing his bean field. I find if I try to read more than a dozen pages in a sitting, I just start skimming -- or sleeping. Glad you were able to get away to the wilderness of Lake George. Feel like the perfect place to find that Cabin Porn book.</li><li>Jim McDonough hit the TravelCommons Facebook page, following up on my comment in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\" title=\"Podcast #166 — What Is The Meaning of Travel?\">last month’s episode</a> about my disappearing American flight from ORD to BCN. Jim writes...<ul><li>“We were going to Barcelona and Madrid with Rick Steves Europe in October, but of course Rick has canceled every tour for the rest of the year. Interestingly, AA says we are still booked on a BA 747 from SAN to LHR as part of this trip. BA has no more 747\'s and doesn\'t serve SAN any more.”</li></ul></li><li>I sometimes think any of the airline’s schedules more than one month out are more like aspirational projections than reflections of reality. Especially given how fast they’re shifting schedules to capture any sort of bump in passenger volume. Like United having <a href=\"https://airlineweekly.com/airlines-feeling-a-lift-from-rocky-mountain-hubs\">some transcontinental flights stop in DEN to pick up a bump in volume from people visiting national parks</a> -- there’s that outdoor activity trend again.</li><li>But back to that BCN trip, I should be getting things here in Chicago sorted before heading off for 2 weeks in Catalonia, but you’ve probably already guessed, that trip isn’t happening. Not a surprise. The EU still isn’t letting US travelers in and the case count in Spain’s second COVID wave has gotten worse in the last month. So at the beginning of the month, I gritted my teeth, called American and cancelled the flights. Actually, American had called me the prior week while we were in the UP, but I let it go to voicemail. We were in a taproom in Marquette and I didn’t feel ready to have that conversation. I wanted to have all our booking info in front of me and be clear minded (tough during a taproom session) and mentally girded for battle. So when I returned their call the next week, I was sitting in front of my laptop with all my itinerary documents up and was ready to go. It was a quick trip through the automated phone tree to a very nice woman in Dallas. No hassles with canceling. I was asking her about the logistics of the travel credit - how long will it be good for - when she said, “Since your flight was canceled and you were re-booked, you can get a refund if you like.” Wow. “Uh, yes,” I quickly said, not wanting her offer to disappear, “I think I’ll take the refund instead.” That was not what I expected from all the stories about American trying to keep as much cash as possible. It took her a couple of minutes to process the refunds during which we compared the weather between Chicago and Dallas. The refunds hit my credit card the following week, so full kudos to American on handling this. I’m hoping I don’t need to repeat in November for my Thanksgiving trip to London.</li><li>A couple of weeks back I was trading notes with TravelCommons contributor Allan Marko about <a href=\"https://www.sfgate.com/travel/article/United-bangalore-SFO-15551358.php\">United’s new SFO-Bangalore non-stop</a>. It’ll be their longest flight at 17½ hours. My immediate reaction was, of course, “that’s a helluva long time to wear a mask.” United is using a 787-9 with a special engine enhancement that makes the flight possible. Which got me thinking about what planes I’d flown into BLR. I’ve been using <a href=\"https://www.tripit.com/\">TripIt</a> since 2008 when it first broke out of the Silicon Valley venture cap bubble, so I logged in, clicked over to Past Trips and started clicking back through the pages -- and clicking and clicking because the last time I was in Bangalore was April 2014. I kept looking around the screen - there’s gotta be a way to export all my trip data; but I couldn’t find anything. So I sent a note to <a href=\"mailto:support@tripit.com\">support@tripit.com</a>. And, to my huge surprise, Andy from the Tripit Help Center replied in <em>15 minutes</em> saying “We currently do not offer customer driven travel data export capability. We have passed your suggestion on to the appropriate team for review.” Having run a software product team, I knew what that meant -- never. But, in the next paragraph, Andy offered a solution -- “You can check out a third party app Openflights. They have an API with TripIt that will allow you to import trips from your TripIt account to their site. From there you can create a list of all of your flights and download them to a csv file. Their basic account is free to use.” Sweet. I thanked Andy for his quick reply and hit <a href=\"https://openflights.org/\">Openflights</a>. I set up an account, hit the “Import” button and connected to my TripIt account. The import was a touch kludgy -- I had to go page by page, review each trip, and mark it to import. After 88 pages, I had imported 1006 flight segments, which they displayed on a world map. I clicked on BLR and a little card popped up. I clicked on the first option and it listed the 8 flights I’d taken to and from BLR. Turns out I’d mostly flown Airbus A320s, though I did once fly a 747-400 in from FRA. It has a couple of analysis buttons -- like my longest flight -- Joburg to IAD at 17:40 (ha! 10 minutes longer than the SFO-BLR flight); and my shortest -- IAD again, but this time a 44-minute flight to CHO. And of course, I was able to download all my trips into Excel so I can noodle around to my heart’s content. Openflights is free, but I’m going to <a href=\"https://openflights.org/donate\">donate</a> to help keep them going. <a href=\"https://openflights.org/\">Openflights.org</a> -- definitely recommended. I’ll put a link in the show notes.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/48705\">Jolanta Blues</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: Admiral Bob, Martijn de Boer</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2><strong>6 Months of Pandemic</strong> </h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Finally giving into reality and canceling my Barcelona flight 6 months after booking it got me thinking back on these -- you know what’s coming -- <em>unprecedented</em> times. Airlines canceled flights to China at the end of January, then to South Korea, Iran, and Italy in February, until, by the beginning of March, airline traffic joined the stock market in a free fall. But back then, we thought it was a one-off event, kinda like Sept 11th; a sharp, scary event that came out of nowhere with no warning but that would soon pass. So taking advantage of one of the many March fare sales to book a flight at the end of September didn’t seem that risky.</li><li>I was talking to one of my consulting friends a couple of weeks ago. His travel schedule was similar to mine - a week without seeing an airport was a rare exception. He hasn’t been on a plane since March and doesn’t know when he’ll get on one next. He just started a project with a manufacturer in Cincinnati. Most of the project will be virtual, but he’s pretty sure he ought to at least put eyes on their plant. He lives outside Detroit. In the past, he’d be flying down every week. Now, he fires up Google Maps -- it’s a 4½ drive down I-75. He’ll drive down once, stay a couple of days, and then head back home.&nbsp;</li><li>I can’t say that anyone I’ve talked to misses the act of business travel -- getting up at 0 dark 30 Monday morning to get to the airport, shuffle through the PreCheck line for 15-20 minutes, and then shoehorn into a full flight for an hour or 3.&nbsp; But we did it because that was part of the job. But now that it’s not, at least for now and what seems like (for now) through the end of the year, everybody is taking full advantage of sleeping in -- in their own beds.</li><li>Which explains why, of all the US airlines, Spirit Airlines, with its complete focus on low-cost leisure travelers, is the only one sounding even somewhat non-negative.&nbsp; And hotel chains like Choice, focused on what they call “drive-to” locations and extended stay properties getting occupancy rates over 50% while center city hotels like Chicago’s Hilton Palmer House are missing rent payments and slouching towards bankruptcy.</li><li>Irene and I were sitting outside at a microbrewery a couple of days ago, enjoying a sunny afternoon full in the knowledge that we have maybe 4 weeks of outdoor eating and drinking left in Chicago. We talked about what kind of travel we would do over the next 12 months, figuring travel restrictions and periodic lockdowns are going to be the norm for at least that long. No big plans; nothing that COVID could blow up but seeing some new places -- some skiing, maybe trying out Montana; some hiking, maybe checking out the Texas Hill Country. But next month, we’re trading Barcelona for Philadelphia; now that they’ve opened up the restaurants again, check out our old neighborhood and visit with some friends. It’ll be Irene’s first flight since February. It took a bit of talking, but I really think the threat of a total of 22 hrs in a car with me -- alone -- tipped her over.&nbsp;</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djiz/10514\">Nube - Djiz Rmx</a> by Kwame (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: SylviaO</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2><strong>Do We Keep Travel Credit Cards?</strong> </h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Last week, <a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/14/delta-launches-6point5-billion-debt-deal-backed-by-its-frequent-flyer-program.html\">Delta used their SkyMiles program to back $6.5 billion in debt</a>, running the same play that United and American did in June. What caught my eye was some of the stats that came out with the debt filing -- that <a href=\"https://skift.com/2020/09/15/how-delta-looks-to-leverage-rewards-from-its-own-frequent-flyer-program/\">SkyMiles had about $6.1 billion in revenue in 2019, about two-thirds from American Express</a> which issues a co-branded Delta card, and that <a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/14/delta-launches-6point5-billion-debt-deal-backed-by-its-frequent-flyer-program.html\">total miles redeemed fell by 78% in the first half of this year.</a> The big carriers are leaning on their loyalty programs for cash, their biggest customers are credit card issuers, but those card users - us - are generating points that we’ve stopped using.&nbsp;</li><li>It’s against this background that I called up Matt Schulz, chief credit analyst at LendingTree, and to ask him -- do we want to keep travel credit cards?<ul><li>Mark: Matt, a lot of folks carry at least one travel credit card and I don’t think I’m going too far out on a limb guessing that damn close to every TravelCommons listeners carry them. We’re 6 months on from the COVID lockdowns and the resulting cratering of the travel industry. But with travel not recovering -- airline demand is still just a third of pre-pandemic levels and United Airlines’ CEO said last week it could be 3-4 years before it’s back to 2019 levels -- what are card holders doing with these cards generating frequent traveler points that they can’t or don’t want to use?</li><li>Matt: An awful lot of people are closing them simply because they may need to use those points that they had been planning to go on a trip to Paris or to Hawaii. But they need to use that money or those points to keep food on the table. Our survey that we just did found that about 30% of respondents with travel rewards card said that they had closed one and that number is even higher for Millennials. And that\'s got to be something that that scares the banks to death. It\'s not terribly surprising for all the reasons that you that you ticked off a minute ago, and I don\'t think that\'s going to slow down anytime soon either.</li><li>Mark: So, people are closing them out, so they\'re not taking those annual fees.</li><li>Matt: Our survey found that about half of those who had been laid off or furloughed had cashed out some of their points or miles. And again, it stands to reason because when you\'re trying to keep the lights on and keep food on the table, there are things more important than travel rewards. And I think that\'s a lot of what this comes down to -- if you are somebody who feels pretty stable in your job, has a decent emergency fund and generally feels kinda OK about things despite all of economic chaos, you\'re probably going to try and hold on to those miles</li><li>Mark: Back in March and April, it seemed the strategy for the big travel card issuers -- Chase, Citi, Amex -- seemed to be to sacrifice revenue to hold share -- statement credits for annual fees if you called them to cancel, new bonuses for stay-at-home purchases to keep wallet share -- seemed like 5x bonuses for grocery and gas was the most popular. Made sense when everyone was talking about 2-week shutdowns and a V-shaped recovery. But, as we said before, travel is gonna stay depressed for a while -- between state and country quarantines and many people not wanting to get in a plane -- how are travel card companies going to handle the next round of renewals? When I call Chase and Amex again, do I get more statement credits -- do they continue to fight for share? And if they don’t, what do I do with the balance of Ultimate or Membership Rewards points that I’ll lose if I don’t re-up and pay the fee?</li><li>Matt: I think what\'s gonna happen is that issuers are going to continue to tinker around the edges to see what people like and what is impactful. And the truth is that issuers desperately want to keep the customers on cards like Chase Sapphire Reserve, Amex Platinum -- all the high end and the next-step-down cards because those customers are so valuable from a lifetime value perspective. You may get a travel card when you\'re 25 and the bank will do what they can to keep you around to try and upsell you to other products that they might have. The issuers are going to try and do what they can to figure out how to make you stay. And right now, that may not look like giving a ton of travel rewards points.</li><li>Mark: Any recommendations for travel card holders as we\'re going forward to the end of the year and into the beginning of next year?</li><li>Matt: You really have to know your situation and understand it, and you also have to not feel guilty if you have to cash in your points that you had been saving up for that dream trip in order to help you extend your budget. Nobody gets a high-end travel card with a high annual fee hoping to eventually cash that in for groceries at Walmart, but sometimes these things have to happen. If you have the financial wherewithal and you can hold on to those points, I think it\'s worth doing because we are going to travel again. Nobody knows when. But we are going to travel again and assuming that your whole financial situation is generally OK, I think there is value in holding on to those points as something to look forward to in the future.</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #167</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and now, <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_167.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #167 — 6 Months On; Why Keep Travel Cards?','','inherit','closed','closed','','2856-revision-v1','','','2021-03-04 15:23:49','2021-03-04 20:23:49','',2856,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/04/2856-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3380,1,'2021-03-04 15:42:22','2021-03-04 20:42:22','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":2899,\"width\":300,\"height\":300,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large is-resized\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-1024x1024.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2899\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"/><figcaption>My mission is clear</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Trying to recover from a long weekend of eating and drinking through the neighborhoods of South Philly. Our movable feast reminded me that food may be the one experience of a place left that can’t be easily exported and bought on-line. We talk about the FBI\'s cybersecurity warning to work-from-home types using hotels for getaway offices, and are a bit amazed at how fast last year\'s \"flight shaming\" gave way to \"flights to nowhere.\" And we think about \"quarantine theater\" -- how cities and states are focusing on activities to signal they are serious about COVID, but that most folks know aren’t really effective. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_168.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>download</strong></a> the podcast file, go over to the <em>Subscribe</em> section on the right to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #168: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after a long weekend of eating and drinking and eating some more with friends in Philadelphia, a family we’ve traveled with before - South Africa, Singapore, Spain… and now, with COVID lockdowns, Philly. And while we’ll do a cultural thing or two, what we really like to do together is eat. It is the kind of group where comments like: “OK, we need to stop eating at 1:30 because we have 5:30 reservations” and “We’re only going to order the half-kilo of barbacoa because we’re eating again in 4 hours” are met with “Yeah, that’s a good point,” and “makes sense” rather than “I think we have a problem here.”&nbsp;</li><li>And Pennsylvania’s reopening regulation about needing to buy food when getting a beer didn’t help. After sneaking in a cheesesteak right before that 1:30 cutoff, we had to order some food with our afternoon beers -- the beer, of course, not subject to that 1:30 deadline because it’s liquid, so it’s not really food, so it doesn’t count. But we had to order some real, solid food with our beers. So we look at the menu -- ah, brussels sprouts, it’s a vegetable, that’s kinda healthy. Five minutes later, our beers arrive with a wire basket full of deep-fried brussels sprouts doused in a sweet chili sauce. So much for healthy.</li><li>But some of the bars, the smaller ones, the neighborhood ones, gamed it -- as these places are wont to do -- by putting a $1 food item on the menu -- 2 hard boiled eggs at one bar, a PB&amp;J at another. The best, though, was the Pop Tart we had with our last beer at Ray’s Happy Birthday Bar in South Philly. That one won the prize.</li><li>Which we found because we skipped the usual downtown/Center City/Society Hill hotels and grabbed an Airbnb in South Philly - kinda sandwiched between the older Italian neighborhoods and the newer Little Saigon area. We spent a lot of time outdoors, walking the neighborhoods -- and walking off our food -- and stopping in at neighborhood joints. One day, we’re picking up salamis and cheese from the Italian Market; another day, we’re buying banh mi’s from a Vietnamese bakery. I’ll write up a list of our favorite places for the TravelCommons website in a couple of weeks -- after my cholesterol level gets back to some semblance of normal.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/duckett/2333\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Another Girl (instrumental)</a> by duckett (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/duckett/23334 Ft: fourstones, miafas</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3><strong>Following Up</strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>First, a big “Thank You” to Gary Learned who goes by Denrael on social media for his review in Apple Podcasts. Gary is a long-time TravelCommons listener. Indeed, he’s pointed me to some great restaurants in places like Seattle and Memphis. Gary wrote a couple of weeks ago:<ul><li>“When people ask where I live, I usually just say airports and hilton. As someone who lives the life of the road warrior, I find this podcast strikes an all-to-familiar chord with my own experiences. A definite must-listen to understand the life of the traveller.</li><li>“I wrote the above a number of years ago and it is as true now as it was then, I look forward to Mark’s take on travel, it’s more about the journey, and cannot count the number of times when I’ve shook my head, laughed and said “yep, been there.”</li></ul></li><li>Gary, thanks for that. And thanks for staying with me this long.</li><li>The FBI pushed out a consumer alert last week to remind folks about the risks when using hotel wi-fi. We’ve talked about this many times and I think most frequent travelers know the drill when accessing any shared wi-fi, whether it be in a hotel or an airport or a bar or a Starbucks. Nothing new there, so why the FBI alert? Because the “FBI has observed a trend where individuals who were previously teleworking from home are beginning to telework from hotels. US hotels, predominantly in major cities, have begun to advertise daytime room reservations for guests seeking a quiet, distraction-free work environment.” So people who used to work in offices and have been working from home since March, are looking for a change of scenery, but either can’t or aren’t keen to go back to the group office setting. Enter downtown hotels, many of whom, we mentioned last month, are slouching towards bankruptcy because of low occupancy. Don’t want a bed for the night? How ‘bout a desk for the day? I just got an email from Omni Hotels pitching just that -- “Trade up your classroom for everything you need for a productive day of work plus downtown Los Angeles views.” I guess the FBI thinks these displaced office workers, used to working on secure corporate or home networks, might not be as careful. But even for frequent travelers, the alert is a good read:&nbsp; talking about the dangers of an “evil twin” attack, logging onto what looks like a hotel wi-fi but is actually a hacker’s network; logging into the actual hotel wi-fi which has been compromised through exploits in out-of-date or unpatched network hardware. The FBI’s top recommendations are ones we’ve <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/09/20/podcast-155-rj-delays-street-food-in-poland-and-hungary/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #155 — RJ Delays; Street Food in Poland and Hungary\">repeated</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/02/20/podcast-127-critiquing-my-top-10-travel-tips-reviewing-vpns/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #127 — Critiquing My Top 10 Travel Tips; Reviewing VPNs\">numerous</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/12/20/podcast-119-digital-security-on-the-road-us-airports-getting-better/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #119 — Digital Security On The Road; US Airports Getting Better?\">times</a> - use a VPN when you connect to public wi-fi, or avoid them altogether with a mobile hotspot. Even when I’ve had a corporate VPN, I’ve always used one of the top paid VPN providers - NordVPN, PIA or ExpressVPN - because their software is so much better. I’m using NordVPN now, and whenever I’m not on a private network, I fire up the Nord client and it handles everything -- connects to the best server, reconnects automatically when I open the lid to wake up my Mac again. I don’t have to think about it. Indeed, half the time I forget to shut it off at home, until I’m wondering why I can’t move a file to another PC. Also, only access secure websites; I used to say “look for https://” but I guess that was too geeky, so you need to look for lock icons instead. And, of course, enable 2-factor authentication whenever you can. Nothing new, but a good reminder nonetheless. I’ll put a <a href=\"https://www.ic3.gov/media/2020/201006.aspx\">link to the alert</a> in the show notes, but you can also find links on the TravelCommons Facebook page and Twitter account.</li><li>OK, I gotta ask “what happened to Greta Thunberg\'s ‘flygskam’ or ‘flight shaming’ -- the 2019 existential travel threat? Because the whole Asian thing of “flights to nowhere” -- EVA Air from Taiwan filling up its “Hello Kitty” plane, All Nippon doing a fake flight to Hawaii, and then Qantas selling out a 787 for a lap around Australia. Singapore Air scrapped their “flight to nowhere” at the last minute, instead turning one of their A380s into a pop-up restaurant. I have to tell you that, honestly, I just don’t get this. For me, the flight is a means to an end -- something I’ve got to bear to get where I want to go. Getting on that American 737 in ORD last week didn’t fill me with joy; it was just simple math -- 2 hrs in a plane vs. 11 hrs in a car. And all that I just said… goes double for the idea of voluntarily buying airplane meals to eat at home. Words fail me.</li><li>At the end of September, the CDC did an early release of an article slated for the November issue of their peer-reviewed journal <em>Emerging Infectious Diseases</em> (and I thought <em>Walden Pond</em> was a cure for insomnia). The article analyzed the in-flight transmission of coronavirus from one business class passenger to 14 other passengers and a crew member on a 10-hour Vietnam Air flight from London to Hanoi. Most of the reactions in the press and on Twitter were “Yikes! Single passenger infects 15 people!”. While noting the CDC’s disclaimer “Early release articles are not considered as final versions” (which I didn’t see mentioned in any of the press articles), I came away with a less-than- “Yikes” after reading the whole paper. The flight was on March 2nd, so while the world was still trying to figure this novel coronavirus thing out and way before mandatory in-flight masks. And the passenger was symptomatic with a cough and a sore throat. Of the 14 passengers infected, 12 were in the same business class cabin and of those, all but one were within a 2-seat radius. And the authors aren’t sure if the 2 economy class infections were from the business class index case or from a different source. My takeaways: 1) Don’t let symptomatic people on planes - even if temperature checks aren’t perfect, it might catch some folks and will certainly make people think about their condition before flying; 2) Because this appears to validate the risk of being kept in close proximity to an infected person over a prolonged period; 3) Which, to me, justifies the airlines’ no-excuses mask requirements; but 4) In spite of a symptomatic un-masked passenger coughing away in the front of the plane, no non-adjacent passengers got infected -- so maybe the airline execs’ confidence in HEPA filters kinda justified. I’ll put <a href=\"https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/11/20-3299_article\">a link to the CDC paper</a> in the show notes. It’s not that long. It’s interesting to read the source document rather than just a headline or a short USAToday blurb.</li><li>Having said all that, I’m in no way, shape, or form justifying the “hygiene theater” that the travel industry seems to be trying to use to bring folks back. I talked back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/07/17/podcast-165-first-post-lockdown-flight-when-does-business-travel-come-back/\">the July episode</a> about the “Hertz Gold Standard Clean” sticker Hertz is slapping across driver-side doors. And there are some hotels now scheduling cleaning during the day rather than overnight so guests can see it. And then, on my American flights between Chicago and Philly last week, the banner across the top of the American Way magazine cover in the seatback pocket - “This magazine has been treated with an antimicrobial process” -- which I guess means “Please, feel safe to open it up and look at the advertisements.” I dunno, it feels a bit like the “security theater” we all went through after 9/11 - it was less about actually making things safer and more about making us “feel” safer -- and so, more willing to get on a plane. But maybe if I’m an airline or hotel exec facing down the pain of laying off thousands or tens of thousands of people if travelers don’t come back, that distinction is meaningless; I’m just trying to survive.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/snowflake/56508\">Rise Up (Like the Sun)</a> by Snowflake (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: Bluemillenium, Sackjo22, Martin Luther King, Kara Square</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2><strong>Quarantine Theater</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>While some folks in the hospitality industry are talking about “hygiene theater”, what about “quarantine theater”? Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #166 — What Is The Meaning of Travel?\">August episode</a>, I talked about the complexity local and state travel bans and quarantine measures are causing for people trying to plan some sort of travel.&nbsp;</li><li>My son Andrew and his significant other headed out to Portland, ME last month for work. The week before they left, the Marriott emailed him a form - “Please certify one of the following is true - I have received a negative COVID test performed no later than 72 hours prior to my arrival, or will quarantine for 14 days upon my arrival in Maine.” Since they were only going to be in Portland for 4 days, they trundled down to the nearest testing site for the quick test 2 days before they left -- where they got chewed out by one of the testers. “We’re running out of the quick tests. You should’ve planned better.” OK, how long to get results from the other test? “5 days” But that won’t meet Maine’s 3-day requirement. Tester just walks away. But they got their negative test results and got on their plane to Portland -- where no one in the airport or the hotel asked to see it.&nbsp; OK, not harm done other than the discomfort of a Q-tip probing their sinuses and a random bit of yelling, but waste scarce testing resources?</li><li>Chicago’s quarantine is also a bit of kabuki. Once a week the city’s health commission gets in front of the press to scold another state or two -- this week was Indiana and Wisconsin. There’s now 25 states and Puerto Rico that if you’re traveling from there to Chicago, you’re supposed to self-quarantine for 14 days or face fines up to $7,000. More interesting is that Chicago’s threshold for getting on the list is 15 new daily cases per 100,000 residents. On this week’s <a href=\"https://www.chicago.gov/city/en/sites/covid-19/home/emergency-travel-order.html\">tally,</a> Indiana is running in the 20-30 range, but so is the state of Illinois. You could call it hypocritical or pragmatic or keeping its powder dry for when the city needs another bucket of money from the state, but Chicago hasn’t put the rest of Illinois on its quarantine list.</li><li>Now, I’ve yet to hear of anyone who has actually self-quarantined and as of last week, <a href=\"https://chicago.cbslocal.com/2020/10/02/three-months-into-chicagos-emergency-travel-order-no-fines-issued-enforcement-focus-remains-on-education/\">no one has been rung up for not doing so</a>. But last month, a friend told me about how Chicago’s quarantine theater hit her last month. She finally got ‘round to taking some vacation at the end of the summer. She lives in Chicago, but is a big outdoors person; looking at airfares and tossing some darts at a map, she decided to go hit Bryce Canyon and Zion National Parks in Southern Utah. So she’s down there for a couple of days when her boss calls her. “They just announced that Utah is going on the city’s quarantine list. It’s not official until Friday, so I guess if you get out of there by Thursday, you won’t have to quarantine for 2 weeks before coming back to work.” And, it didn’t need to be said, those 2 weeks of self-quarantine wouldn’t be paid. My friend is unique in that she works for maybe the one company in Chicago that takes the city’s quarantine order seriously. So my friend fought through lousy cell coverage to see what she could salvage of the back half of her vacation. Luckily, she has friends in Oregon, which isn’t on the city’s list. So Thursday, she cut her hiking short, schlepped the 4½ hours back up to SLC and caught the last flight out to Portland -- which let her come back to work and make some money the next week.</li><li>Theater isn’t a new thing. If you’re, say, a <em>mature</em> traveler, you got to play a bit part in the security theater that premiered after 9/11 and the underwear bomber. While not a perfect analogy (and really, nothing ever is), we can see some similar theatrics -- government agencies (TSA then, health departments now) investing in activities that signal they are serious, but that most folks know aren’t really effective. For me and I think for most frequent travelers, the security theater ended with TSA PreCheck -- it seemed, again to most of us, as a reasonable balance between risk and getting on with our traveling lives. I don’t know what that looks like for quarantine theater, but I sure hope it doesn’t take the 10 years it took to figure out PreCheck.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/52154\">release.JOY.release</a> by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: essesq, Haskel (hej31)</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2><strong>Traveling For Food</strong> </h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I talked at the start of the episode about eating my way through Philadelphia a couple of weeks back, and it was just that. We landed Thursday around 11:30a and were hitting our favs at Reading Terminal Market by 1:30p. I went straight for Tommy Dinic’s for the roast pork sandwich with sharp provolone and broccoli rabe while Irene and Claire made for the Mennonite pretzel place and Termini Brothers for fresh-filled cannolis. And then as we were leaving, I swung past one of the PA Dutch stands to buy a 1-lb block of <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrapple\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">scrapple</a> for breakfast the rest of the stay.</li><li>Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #166 — What Is The Meaning of Travel?\">August episode</a> in the interview with Emily Thomas about her book <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2IpLXnd\"><em>The Meaning of Travel</em></a><em>, </em>we talked about a chapter on global homogenization. One of the bits that I edited out was the observation that, back 10-20 year ago, it was fun to go shopping and bring something unique back home. But now, with globalized e-commerce, there’s not much that you can’t find easier (and often cheaper) on Amazon or Taobao or Rakuten. And so, for me, food is the one experience of a place that can’t be easily exported and bought on-line.</li><li>On our trip to the UP -- Michigan’s Upper Peninsula -- along with the biking, hiking, and kayaking, we were also on a bit of a <a href=\"https://thepastyguy.com/portfolio/the-pasty-trail-best-pasties-in-up/\">pasty tasting tour</a>. The UP is pretty well known -- in the Midwest at least -- for their <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pasty\">pasties</a>, brought over by Cornish miners working the copper mines. We had traditional pasties filled with steak, potatoes, onions, and rutabagas, and breakfast pasties. We worked our ways through the finer points of pasty critique -- picking out the pasties made from lard-based doughs, and fillings that held together so you could eat the pasty with your hand but weren’t just complete mush.</li><li>It’s funny how these comparison dishes can crop up on a vacation. On a trip to Phuket, Thailand, Andrew ordered pad thai everywhere we ate. On a trip to Hungary, Irene searched every menu for <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisherman\'s_soup\">halászlé</a> - a spicy fish soup - after having a great bowl of it at lunch with her cousin in some little town on the shores of <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Balaton\">Lake Balaton</a>. And again Irene, in Spain now, searched every city we visited for <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salmorejo\">salmorejo</a>, not quite soup, more of a tomato and bread and olive oil and garlic purée. These sorta horizontal tasting, some would be planned -- like our pasty tour -- and some would just come up, like Irene’s halászlé hunt. But it’d be fun, getting a feel for what the base of the dish is, what everyone agrees on, and what people put their own spin on, because usually for these core dishes -- dishes that everyone around has eaten all their lives -- everyone has an opinion about them. And that’s part of what makes the broad/horizontal tasting fun.</li><li>And also, these dishes don’t seem to be “industrialized.” While I’ve had mass produced pasties in the UK, grabbing something out from the West Cornish Pasty hut in Waterloo Station while running for a train, the pasties in the UP were much more -- not “artisanal” because I don’t think anyone making pasties in the UP would use that word, but “family made”. At Miners Pasties in Munising, which came out top in our pasty ranks, the woman helping us at the counter said the lard pastry recipe came from the owner’s grandmother and only 3 people know it -- the granddaughters and their niece. And only those three make the pastry each day.&nbsp; We sat back and enjoyed those pasties because we knew we wouldn’t be eating them again unless and until we found our way back to this bench again some day.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #168</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_168.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food','','inherit','closed','closed','','2896-revision-v1','','','2021-03-04 15:42:22','2021-03-04 20:42:22','',2896,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/04/2896-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3382,1,'2021-03-04 15:48:04','2021-03-04 20:48:04','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":2899,\"width\":300,\"height\":300,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large is-resized\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-1024x1024.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2899\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"/><figcaption>My mission is clear</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Trying to recover from a long weekend of eating and drinking through the neighborhoods of South Philly. Our movable feast reminded me that food may be the one experience of a place left that can’t be easily exported and bought on-line. We talk about the FBI\'s cybersecurity warning to work-from-home types using hotels for getaway offices, and are a bit amazed at how fast last year\'s \"flight shaming\" gave way to \"flights to nowhere.\" And we think about \"quarantine theater\" -- how cities and states are focusing on activities to signal they are serious about COVID, but that most folks know aren’t really effective. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_168.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>download</strong></a> the podcast file, go over to the <em>Subscribe</em> section on the right to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #168: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after a long weekend of eating and drinking and eating some more with friends in Philadelphia, a family we’ve traveled with before - South Africa, Singapore, Spain… and now, with COVID lockdowns, Philly. And while we’ll do a cultural thing or two, what we really like to do together is eat. It is the kind of group where comments like: “OK, we need to stop eating at 1:30 because we have 5:30 reservations” and “We’re only going to order the half-kilo of barbacoa because we’re eating again in 4 hours” are met with “Yeah, that’s a good point,” and “makes sense” rather than “I think we have a problem here.”&nbsp;</li><li>And Pennsylvania’s reopening regulation about needing to buy food when getting a beer didn’t help. After sneaking in a cheesesteak right before that 1:30 cutoff, we had to order some food with our afternoon beers -- the beer, of course, not subject to that 1:30 deadline because it’s liquid, so it’s not really food, so it doesn’t count. But we had to order some real, solid food with our beers. So we look at the menu -- ah, brussels sprouts, it’s a vegetable, that’s kinda healthy. Five minutes later, our beers arrive with a wire basket full of deep-fried brussels sprouts doused in a sweet chili sauce. So much for healthy.</li><li>But some of the bars, the smaller ones, the neighborhood ones, gamed it -- as these places are wont to do -- by putting a $1 food item on the menu -- 2 hard boiled eggs at one bar, a PB&amp;J at another. The best, though, was the Pop Tart we had with our last beer at Ray’s Happy Birthday Bar in South Philly. That one won the prize.</li><li>Which we found because we skipped the usual downtown/Center City/Society Hill hotels and grabbed an Airbnb in South Philly - kinda sandwiched between the older Italian neighborhoods and the newer Little Saigon area. We spent a lot of time outdoors, walking the neighborhoods -- and walking off our food -- and stopping in at neighborhood joints. One day, we’re picking up salamis and cheese from the Italian Market; another day, we’re buying banh mi’s from a Vietnamese bakery. I’ll write up a list of our favorite places for the TravelCommons website in a couple of weeks -- after my cholesterol level gets back to some semblance of normal.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/duckett/2333\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Another Girl (instrumental)</a> by duckett (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/duckett/23334 Ft: fourstones, miafas</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3><strong>Following Up</strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>First, a big “Thank You” to Gary Learned who goes by Denrael on social media for his review in Apple Podcasts. Gary is a long-time TravelCommons listener. Indeed, he’s pointed me to some great restaurants in places like Seattle and Memphis. Gary wrote a couple of weeks ago:<ul><li>“When people ask where I live, I usually just say airports and hilton. As someone who lives the life of the road warrior, I find this podcast strikes an all-to-familiar chord with my own experiences. A definite must-listen to understand the life of the traveller.</li><li>“I wrote the above a number of years ago and it is as true now as it was then, I look forward to Mark’s take on travel, it’s more about the journey, and cannot count the number of times when I’ve shook my head, laughed and said “yep, been there.”</li></ul></li><li>Gary, thanks for that. And thanks for staying with me this long.</li><li>The FBI pushed out a consumer alert last week to remind folks about the risks when using hotel wi-fi. We’ve talked about this many times and I think most frequent travelers know the drill when accessing any shared wi-fi, whether it be in a hotel or an airport or a bar or a Starbucks. Nothing new there, so why the FBI alert? Because the “FBI has observed a trend where individuals who were previously teleworking from home are beginning to telework from hotels. US hotels, predominantly in major cities, have begun to advertise daytime room reservations for guests seeking a quiet, distraction-free work environment.” So people who used to work in offices and have been working from home since March, are looking for a change of scenery, but either can’t or aren’t keen to go back to the group office setting. Enter downtown hotels, many of whom, we mentioned last month, are slouching towards bankruptcy because of low occupancy. Don’t want a bed for the night? How ‘bout a desk for the day? I just got an email from Omni Hotels pitching just that -- “Trade up your classroom for everything you need for a productive day of work plus downtown Los Angeles views.” I guess the FBI thinks these displaced office workers, used to working on secure corporate or home networks, might not be as careful. But even for frequent travelers, the alert is a good read:&nbsp; talking about the dangers of an “evil twin” attack, logging onto what looks like a hotel wi-fi but is actually a hacker’s network; logging into the actual hotel wi-fi which has been compromised through exploits in out-of-date or unpatched network hardware. The FBI’s top recommendations are ones we’ve <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/09/20/podcast-155-rj-delays-street-food-in-poland-and-hungary/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #155 — RJ Delays; Street Food in Poland and Hungary\">repeated</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/02/20/podcast-127-critiquing-my-top-10-travel-tips-reviewing-vpns/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #127 — Critiquing My Top 10 Travel Tips; Reviewing VPNs\">numerous</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/12/20/podcast-119-digital-security-on-the-road-us-airports-getting-better/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #119 — Digital Security On The Road; US Airports Getting Better?\">times</a> - use a VPN when you connect to public wi-fi, or avoid them altogether with a mobile hotspot. Even when I’ve had a corporate VPN, I’ve always used one of the top paid VPN providers - NordVPN, PIA or ExpressVPN - because their software is so much better. I’m using NordVPN now, and whenever I’m not on a private network, I fire up the Nord client and it handles everything -- connects to the best server, reconnects automatically when I open the lid to wake up my Mac again. I don’t have to think about it. Indeed, half the time I forget to shut it off at home, until I’m wondering why I can’t move a file to another PC. Also, only access secure websites; I used to say “look for https://” but I guess that was too geeky, so you need to look for lock icons instead. And, of course, enable 2-factor authentication whenever you can. Nothing new, but a good reminder nonetheless. I’ll put a <a href=\"https://www.ic3.gov/media/2020/201006.aspx\">link to the alert</a> in the show notes, but you can also find links on the TravelCommons Facebook page and Twitter account.</li><li>OK, I gotta ask “what happened to Greta Thunberg\'s ‘flygskam’ or ‘flight shaming’ -- the 2019 existential travel threat? Because the whole Asian thing of “flights to nowhere” -- EVA Air from Taiwan filling up its “Hello Kitty” plane, All Nippon doing a fake flight to Hawaii, and then Qantas selling out a 787 for a lap around Australia. Singapore Air scrapped their “flight to nowhere” at the last minute, instead turning one of their A380s into a pop-up restaurant. I have to tell you that, honestly, I just don’t get this. For me, the flight is a means to an end -- something I’ve got to bear to get where I want to go. Getting on that American 737 in ORD last week didn’t fill me with joy; it was just simple math -- 2 hrs in a plane vs. 11 hrs in a car. And all that I just said… goes double for the idea of voluntarily buying airplane meals to eat at home. Words fail me.</li><li>At the end of September, the CDC did an early release of an article slated for the November issue of their peer-reviewed journal <em>Emerging Infectious Diseases</em> (and I thought <em>Walden Pond</em> was a cure for insomnia). The article analyzed the in-flight transmission of coronavirus from one business class passenger to 14 other passengers and a crew member on a 10-hour Vietnam Air flight from London to Hanoi. Most of the reactions in the press and on Twitter were “Yikes! Single passenger infects 15 people!”. While noting the CDC’s disclaimer “Early release articles are not considered as final versions” (which I didn’t see mentioned in any of the press articles), I came away with a less-than- “Yikes” after reading the whole paper. The flight was on March 2nd, so while the world was still trying to figure this novel coronavirus thing out and way before mandatory in-flight masks. And the passenger was symptomatic with a cough and a sore throat. Of the 14 passengers infected, 12 were in the same business class cabin and of those, all but one were within a 2-seat radius. And the authors aren’t sure if the 2 economy class infections were from the business class index case or from a different source. My takeaways: 1) Don’t let symptomatic people on planes - even if temperature checks aren’t perfect, it might catch some folks and will certainly make people think about their condition before flying; 2) Because this appears to validate the risk of being kept in close proximity to an infected person over a prolonged period; 3) Which, to me, justifies the airlines’ no-excuses mask requirements; but 4) In spite of a symptomatic un-masked passenger coughing away in the front of the plane, no non-adjacent passengers got infected -- so maybe the airline execs’ confidence in HEPA filters kinda justified. I’ll put <a href=\"https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/11/20-3299_article\">a link to the CDC paper</a> in the show notes. It’s not that long. It’s interesting to read the source document rather than just a headline or a short USAToday blurb.</li><li>Having said all that, I’m in no way, shape, or form justifying the “hygiene theater” that the travel industry seems to be trying to use to bring folks back. I talked back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/07/17/podcast-165-first-post-lockdown-flight-when-does-business-travel-come-back/\">the July episode</a> about the “Hertz Gold Standard Clean” sticker Hertz is slapping across driver-side doors. And there are some hotels now scheduling cleaning during the day rather than overnight so guests can see it. And then, on my American flights between Chicago and Philly last week, the banner across the top of the American Way magazine cover in the seatback pocket - “This magazine has been treated with an antimicrobial process” -- which I guess means “Please, feel safe to open it up and look at the advertisements.” I dunno, it feels a bit like the “security theater” we all went through after 9/11 - it was less about actually making things safer and more about making us “feel” safer -- and so, more willing to get on a plane. But maybe if I’m an airline or hotel exec facing down the pain of laying off thousands or tens of thousands of people if travelers don’t come back, that distinction is meaningless; I’m just trying to survive.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/snowflake/56508\">Rise Up (Like the Sun)</a> by Snowflake (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: Bluemillenium, Sackjo22, Martin Luther King, Kara Square</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3><strong>Quarantine Theater</strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>While some folks in the hospitality industry are talking about “hygiene theater”, what about “quarantine theater”? Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #166 — What Is The Meaning of Travel?\">August episode</a>, I talked about the complexity local and state travel bans and quarantine measures are causing for people trying to plan some sort of travel.&nbsp;</li><li>My son Andrew and his significant other headed out to Portland, ME last month for work. The week before they left, the Marriott emailed him a form - “Please certify one of the following is true - I have received a negative COVID test performed no later than 72 hours prior to my arrival, or will quarantine for 14 days upon my arrival in Maine.” Since they were only going to be in Portland for 4 days, they trundled down to the nearest testing site for the quick test 2 days before they left -- where they got chewed out by one of the testers. “We’re running out of the quick tests. You should’ve planned better.” OK, how long to get results from the other test? “5 days” But that won’t meet Maine’s 3-day requirement. Tester just walks away. But they got their negative test results and got on their plane to Portland -- where no one in the airport or the hotel asked to see it.&nbsp; OK, not harm done other than the discomfort of a Q-tip probing their sinuses and a random bit of yelling, but waste scarce testing resources?</li><li>Chicago’s quarantine is also a bit of kabuki. Once a week the city’s health commission gets in front of the press to scold another state or two -- this week was Indiana and Wisconsin. There’s now 25 states and Puerto Rico that if you’re traveling from there to Chicago, you’re supposed to self-quarantine for 14 days or face fines up to $7,000. More interesting is that Chicago’s threshold for getting on the list is 15 new daily cases per 100,000 residents. On this week’s <a href=\"https://www.chicago.gov/city/en/sites/covid-19/home/emergency-travel-order.html\">tally,</a> Indiana is running in the 20-30 range, but so is the state of Illinois. You could call it hypocritical or pragmatic or keeping its powder dry for when the city needs another bucket of money from the state, but Chicago hasn’t put the rest of Illinois on its quarantine list.</li><li>Now, I’ve yet to hear of anyone who has actually self-quarantined and as of last week, <a href=\"https://chicago.cbslocal.com/2020/10/02/three-months-into-chicagos-emergency-travel-order-no-fines-issued-enforcement-focus-remains-on-education/\">no one has been rung up for not doing so</a>. But last month, a friend told me about how Chicago’s quarantine theater hit her last month. She finally got ‘round to taking some vacation at the end of the summer. She lives in Chicago, but is a big outdoors person; looking at airfares and tossing some darts at a map, she decided to go hit Bryce Canyon and Zion National Parks in Southern Utah. So she’s down there for a couple of days when her boss calls her. “They just announced that Utah is going on the city’s quarantine list. It’s not official until Friday, so I guess if you get out of there by Thursday, you won’t have to quarantine for 2 weeks before coming back to work.” And, it didn’t need to be said, those 2 weeks of self-quarantine wouldn’t be paid. My friend is unique in that she works for maybe the one company in Chicago that takes the city’s quarantine order seriously. So my friend fought through lousy cell coverage to see what she could salvage of the back half of her vacation. Luckily, she has friends in Oregon, which isn’t on the city’s list. So Thursday, she cut her hiking short, schlepped the 4½ hours back up to SLC and caught the last flight out to Portland -- which let her come back to work and make some money the next week.</li><li>Theater isn’t a new thing. If you’re, say, a <em>mature</em> traveler, you got to play a bit part in the security theater that premiered after 9/11 and the underwear bomber. While not a perfect analogy (and really, nothing ever is), we can see some similar theatrics -- government agencies (TSA then, health departments now) investing in activities that signal they are serious, but that most folks know aren’t really effective. For me and I think for most frequent travelers, the security theater ended with TSA PreCheck -- it seemed, again to most of us, as a reasonable balance between risk and getting on with our traveling lives. I don’t know what that looks like for quarantine theater, but I sure hope it doesn’t take the 10 years it took to figure out PreCheck.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/52154\">release.JOY.release</a> by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: essesq, Haskel (hej31)</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3><strong>Traveling For Food</strong> </h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I talked at the start of the episode about eating my way through Philadelphia a couple of weeks back, and it was just that. We landed Thursday around 11:30a and were hitting our favs at Reading Terminal Market by 1:30p. I went straight for Tommy Dinic’s for the roast pork sandwich with sharp provolone and broccoli rabe while Irene and Claire made for the Mennonite pretzel place and Termini Brothers for fresh-filled cannolis. And then as we were leaving, I swung past one of the PA Dutch stands to buy a 1-lb block of <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrapple\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">scrapple</a> for breakfast the rest of the stay.</li><li>Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #166 — What Is The Meaning of Travel?\">August episode</a> in the interview with Emily Thomas about her book <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2IpLXnd\"><em>The Meaning of Travel</em></a><em>, </em>we talked about a chapter on global homogenization. One of the bits that I edited out was the observation that, back 10-20 year ago, it was fun to go shopping and bring something unique back home. But now, with globalized e-commerce, there’s not much that you can’t find easier (and often cheaper) on Amazon or Taobao or Rakuten. And so, for me, food is the one experience of a place that can’t be easily exported and bought on-line.</li><li>On our trip to the UP -- Michigan’s Upper Peninsula -- along with the biking, hiking, and kayaking, we were also on a bit of a <a href=\"https://thepastyguy.com/portfolio/the-pasty-trail-best-pasties-in-up/\">pasty tasting tour</a>. The UP is pretty well known -- in the Midwest at least -- for their <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pasty\">pasties</a>, brought over by Cornish miners working the copper mines. We had traditional pasties filled with steak, potatoes, onions, and rutabagas, and breakfast pasties. We worked our ways through the finer points of pasty critique -- picking out the pasties made from lard-based doughs, and fillings that held together so you could eat the pasty with your hand but weren’t just complete mush.</li><li>It’s funny how these comparison dishes can crop up on a vacation. On a trip to Phuket, Thailand, Andrew ordered pad thai everywhere we ate. On a trip to Hungary, Irene searched every menu for <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisherman\'s_soup\">halászlé</a> - a spicy fish soup - after having a great bowl of it at lunch with her cousin in some little town on the shores of <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Balaton\">Lake Balaton</a>. And again Irene, in Spain now, searched every city we visited for <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salmorejo\">salmorejo</a>, not quite soup, more of a tomato and bread and olive oil and garlic purée. These sorta horizontal tasting, some would be planned -- like our pasty tour -- and some would just come up, like Irene’s halászlé hunt. But it’d be fun, getting a feel for what the base of the dish is, what everyone agrees on, and what people put their own spin on, because usually for these core dishes -- dishes that everyone around has eaten all their lives -- everyone has an opinion about them. And that’s part of what makes the broad/horizontal tasting fun.</li><li>And also, these dishes don’t seem to be “industrialized.” While I’ve had mass produced pasties in the UK, grabbing something out from the West Cornish Pasty hut in Waterloo Station while running for a train, the pasties in the UP were much more -- not “artisanal” because I don’t think anyone making pasties in the UP would use that word, but “family made”. At Miners Pasties in Munising, which came out top in our pasty ranks, the woman helping us at the counter said the lard pastry recipe came from the owner’s grandmother and only 3 people know it -- the granddaughters and their niece. And only those three make the pastry each day.&nbsp; We sat back and enjoyed those pasties because we knew we wouldn’t be eating them again unless and until we found our way back to this bench again some day.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3><strong>Closing</strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #168</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_168.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food','','inherit','closed','closed','','2896-revision-v1','','','2021-03-04 15:48:04','2021-03-04 20:48:04','',2896,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/04/2896-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3383,1,'2021-03-04 15:49:45','2021-03-04 20:49:45','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":2857,\"width\":300,\"height\":300,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large is-resized\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/F3E28DAE-0026-4E8A-957E-D6CE914F717C.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2857\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"/><figcaption>I seem to have put on a Quarantine 15</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Spent a week in <a href=\"https://www.uptravel.com/\">Michigan\'s Upper Peninsula</a> hiking, biking, kayaking, and running into a lot of other people getting away to do the same, which got me looking back six months to the start of the pandemic. I talk about a surprisingly good flight cancellation experience with American Airlines, and figuring out how to download 12 years of <a href=\"https://www.tripit.com/\">TripIt</a> data. We wrap up talking to <a href=\"https://www.lendingtree.com/writer/matt-schulz/\">Matt Schulz</a> of <a href=\"https://www.lendingtree.com/\">LendingTree</a>, asking him what are we doing with travel credit cards that are generating frequent traveler points we can’t use? All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_167.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>download</strong></a> the podcast file, subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #167: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after a week’s tour of the UP -- Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Did a counter-clockwise circle route around Lake Michigan. Headed out east on Friday morning; stopped at a brewery in Grand Rapids for lunch; drove the 5 miles across the Mackinac Bridge just before dusk; and had my first UP pasty (the first of many) and a local beer for dinner that night in Sault Ste Marie. Spent a couple of days in Soo; watched 700-ft lake freighters make their way through the locks that connect Lake Superior to Lake Huron; I’m still enough of an engineer to geek out on that kind of stuff. We then drove west to Marquette for 3 days and again west to Houghton for 2 days before heading home through Wisconsin down the west side of Lake Michigan. It was all outdoors stuff -- hiking, biking, kayaking; the things that last-minute COVID closures or restrictions won’t muck up.&nbsp; The UP has always been on my list of places to visit, but it’s always on sorta the B-list, and so plans to go someplace else -- Spain, Napa, Ireland -- would always push it down the list. But now, with most places blocked off with travel restrictions and quarantines, the UP -- drivable with lots of outdoor activities -- bubbled to the top of the list.</li><li>And I wasn’t the only one thinking that way. The guy renting rowboats at <a href=\"https://www2.dnr.state.mi.us/ParksandTrails/Details.aspx?id=428&amp;type=SPRK\">Tahquamenon Falls State Park</a> looked at our release forms and said “We’ve had a lot of people up here from Chicago. It’s been crazy busy. We can’t get enough people to handle it.” And biking around <a href=\"https://www.travelmarquette.com/things-to-do/attractions/presque-isle-park/\">Presque Isle Park</a> in Marquette, we got talking, in a socially distant way, to a biking couple up from St Louis. It was also their first time up. A bunch of their friends and family had been up earlier; they’d seen nothing but UP pictures in their Facebook feed for the past month.</li><li>The husband said that he had an underlying medical condition and so they were looking for places away from people; they’d rented a cabin in the little town of Au Train. Which got me thinking about the place we stayed in Soo -- the <a href=\"https://www.plazamotormotel.com/\">Plaza Motor Motel</a>. No lobby, no elevators, no hallways; no places to run into other guests; no need to have to remember to mask up when you leave your room. Just open your room door and there’s your car. Most frequent travelers would never think of voluntarily staying in a motor inn, a <em>mo</em>-tel. But with so many things changing in these unprecedented times, maybe COVID will have folks give motels another chance.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/11510\">Funkist</a> - cdk dub mix by cdk (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: teru</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3><strong>Following Up</strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>First, a big shout out to the folks in Hanoi, Vietnam listening to TravelCommons on Soundcloud. One of the fun things about the podcast is looking at where people are listening from. For the most part, the stats make sense -- most of the listeners are from the US, and then English-speaking countries -- the UK, Canada, Australia. But every once in a while, there’s a spike that I just can’t figure out. I’ll see it, go look at the episode notes to see if I’ve mentioned that country, but I usually can’t make sense of it. Last fall, it was Argentina., but over the past couple of months, it’s been folks from Hanoi, primarily listening to <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/04/11/podcast-162-post-corona-trip-planning-keeping-a-travel-journal/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #162 — Post-Corona Trip Planning; Keeping a Travel Journal\">April episode, #162</a>, about post-lockdown trip planning and keeping a travel journal. Not sure why, but if you’re in Hanoi and you’ve made it to this episode - Hi! And thanks for listening!</li><li>Dan Grabon sent me a note at the beginning of the month about my lockdown reading that I mentioned during <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #166 — What Is The Meaning of Travel?\">last month’s interview</a> with Dr Emily Thomas<ul><li>“Mark,&nbsp; I feel your pain. I started re-reading Walden back in April, and I just passed the halfway mark at the end of August. This was part of an overly ambitious effort to read one great book a month from a literary calendar that I bought. The Brothers Karamazov took up January through March, and even though COVID should have meant more time to read, it just hasn’t turned out that way.</li><li>“Writing this from a long overdue vacation near Lake George, where I saw the book Cabin Porn in a gift shop. Good timing.</li><li>“Thanks for keeping the podcast going— helps keep me going in this time of not going much of anywhere!”</li></ul></li><li>Dan, Thanks for the note. <em>The Brothers Karamazov</em> -- you are a better man than I.&nbsp; I swore off of Russian fiction after suffering through <em>Crime and Punishment</em> in high school. That and Charles Dickens, just can’t do ‘em. And I am still working my way through <em>Walden</em>. Just got through his half-dozen pages on hoeing his bean field. I find if I try to read more than a dozen pages in a sitting, I just start skimming -- or sleeping. Glad you were able to get away to the wilderness of Lake George. Feel like the perfect place to find that Cabin Porn book.</li><li>Jim McDonough hit the TravelCommons Facebook page, following up on my comment in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\" title=\"Podcast #166 — What Is The Meaning of Travel?\">last month’s episode</a> about my disappearing American flight from ORD to BCN. Jim writes...<ul><li>“We were going to Barcelona and Madrid with Rick Steves Europe in October, but of course Rick has canceled every tour for the rest of the year. Interestingly, AA says we are still booked on a BA 747 from SAN to LHR as part of this trip. BA has no more 747\'s and doesn\'t serve SAN any more.”</li></ul></li><li>I sometimes think any of the airline’s schedules more than one month out are more like aspirational projections than reflections of reality. Especially given how fast they’re shifting schedules to capture any sort of bump in passenger volume. Like United having <a href=\"https://airlineweekly.com/airlines-feeling-a-lift-from-rocky-mountain-hubs\">some transcontinental flights stop in DEN to pick up a bump in volume from people visiting national parks</a> -- there’s that outdoor activity trend again.</li><li>But back to that BCN trip, I should be getting things here in Chicago sorted before heading off for 2 weeks in Catalonia, but you’ve probably already guessed, that trip isn’t happening. Not a surprise. The EU still isn’t letting US travelers in and the case count in Spain’s second COVID wave has gotten worse in the last month. So at the beginning of the month, I gritted my teeth, called American and cancelled the flights. Actually, American had called me the prior week while we were in the UP, but I let it go to voicemail. We were in a taproom in Marquette and I didn’t feel ready to have that conversation. I wanted to have all our booking info in front of me and be clear minded (tough during a taproom session) and mentally girded for battle. So when I returned their call the next week, I was sitting in front of my laptop with all my itinerary documents up and was ready to go. It was a quick trip through the automated phone tree to a very nice woman in Dallas. No hassles with canceling. I was asking her about the logistics of the travel credit - how long will it be good for - when she said, “Since your flight was canceled and you were re-booked, you can get a refund if you like.” Wow. “Uh, yes,” I quickly said, not wanting her offer to disappear, “I think I’ll take the refund instead.” That was not what I expected from all the stories about American trying to keep as much cash as possible. It took her a couple of minutes to process the refunds during which we compared the weather between Chicago and Dallas. The refunds hit my credit card the following week, so full kudos to American on handling this. I’m hoping I don’t need to repeat in November for my Thanksgiving trip to London.</li><li>A couple of weeks back I was trading notes with TravelCommons contributor Allan Marko about <a href=\"https://www.sfgate.com/travel/article/United-bangalore-SFO-15551358.php\">United’s new SFO-Bangalore non-stop</a>. It’ll be their longest flight at 17½ hours. My immediate reaction was, of course, “that’s a helluva long time to wear a mask.” United is using a 787-9 with a special engine enhancement that makes the flight possible. Which got me thinking about what planes I’d flown into BLR. I’ve been using <a href=\"https://www.tripit.com/\">TripIt</a> since 2008 when it first broke out of the Silicon Valley venture cap bubble, so I logged in, clicked over to Past Trips and started clicking back through the pages -- and clicking and clicking because the last time I was in Bangalore was April 2014. I kept looking around the screen - there’s gotta be a way to export all my trip data; but I couldn’t find anything. So I sent a note to <a href=\"mailto:support@tripit.com\">support@tripit.com</a>. And, to my huge surprise, Andy from the Tripit Help Center replied in <em>15 minutes</em> saying “We currently do not offer customer driven travel data export capability. We have passed your suggestion on to the appropriate team for review.” Having run a software product team, I knew what that meant -- never. But, in the next paragraph, Andy offered a solution -- “You can check out a third party app Openflights. They have an API with TripIt that will allow you to import trips from your TripIt account to their site. From there you can create a list of all of your flights and download them to a csv file. Their basic account is free to use.” Sweet. I thanked Andy for his quick reply and hit <a href=\"https://openflights.org/\">Openflights</a>. I set up an account, hit the “Import” button and connected to my TripIt account. The import was a touch kludgy -- I had to go page by page, review each trip, and mark it to import. After 88 pages, I had imported 1006 flight segments, which they displayed on a world map. I clicked on BLR and a little card popped up. I clicked on the first option and it listed the 8 flights I’d taken to and from BLR. Turns out I’d mostly flown Airbus A320s, though I did once fly a 747-400 in from FRA. It has a couple of analysis buttons -- like my longest flight -- Joburg to IAD at 17:40 (ha! 10 minutes longer than the SFO-BLR flight); and my shortest -- IAD again, but this time a 44-minute flight to CHO. And of course, I was able to download all my trips into Excel so I can noodle around to my heart’s content. Openflights is free, but I’m going to <a href=\"https://openflights.org/donate\">donate</a> to help keep them going. <a href=\"https://openflights.org/\">Openflights.org</a> -- definitely recommended. I’ll put a link in the show notes.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/48705\">Jolanta Blues</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: Admiral Bob, Martijn de Boer</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3><strong>6 Months of Pandemic</strong> </h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Finally giving into reality and canceling my Barcelona flight 6 months after booking it got me thinking back on these -- you know what’s coming -- <em>unprecedented</em> times. Airlines canceled flights to China at the end of January, then to South Korea, Iran, and Italy in February, until, by the beginning of March, airline traffic joined the stock market in a free fall. But back then, we thought it was a one-off event, kinda like Sept 11th; a sharp, scary event that came out of nowhere with no warning but that would soon pass. So taking advantage of one of the many March fare sales to book a flight at the end of September didn’t seem that risky.</li><li>I was talking to one of my consulting friends a couple of weeks ago. His travel schedule was similar to mine - a week without seeing an airport was a rare exception. He hasn’t been on a plane since March and doesn’t know when he’ll get on one next. He just started a project with a manufacturer in Cincinnati. Most of the project will be virtual, but he’s pretty sure he ought to at least put eyes on their plant. He lives outside Detroit. In the past, he’d be flying down every week. Now, he fires up Google Maps -- it’s a 4½ drive down I-75. He’ll drive down once, stay a couple of days, and then head back home.&nbsp;</li><li>I can’t say that anyone I’ve talked to misses the act of business travel -- getting up at 0 dark 30 Monday morning to get to the airport, shuffle through the PreCheck line for 15-20 minutes, and then shoehorn into a full flight for an hour or 3.&nbsp; But we did it because that was part of the job. But now that it’s not, at least for now and what seems like (for now) through the end of the year, everybody is taking full advantage of sleeping in -- in their own beds.</li><li>Which explains why, of all the US airlines, Spirit Airlines, with its complete focus on low-cost leisure travelers, is the only one sounding even somewhat non-negative.&nbsp; And hotel chains like Choice, focused on what they call “drive-to” locations and extended stay properties getting occupancy rates over 50% while center city hotels like Chicago’s Hilton Palmer House are missing rent payments and slouching towards bankruptcy.</li><li>Irene and I were sitting outside at a microbrewery a couple of days ago, enjoying a sunny afternoon full in the knowledge that we have maybe 4 weeks of outdoor eating and drinking left in Chicago. We talked about what kind of travel we would do over the next 12 months, figuring travel restrictions and periodic lockdowns are going to be the norm for at least that long. No big plans; nothing that COVID could blow up but seeing some new places -- some skiing, maybe trying out Montana; some hiking, maybe checking out the Texas Hill Country. But next month, we’re trading Barcelona for Philadelphia; now that they’ve opened up the restaurants again, check out our old neighborhood and visit with some friends. It’ll be Irene’s first flight since February. It took a bit of talking, but I really think the threat of a total of 22 hrs in a car with me -- alone -- tipped her over.&nbsp;</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djiz/10514\">Nube - Djiz Rmx</a> by Kwame (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: SylviaO</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3><strong>Do We Keep Travel Credit Cards?</strong> </h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Last week, <a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/14/delta-launches-6point5-billion-debt-deal-backed-by-its-frequent-flyer-program.html\">Delta used their SkyMiles program to back $6.5 billion in debt</a>, running the same play that United and American did in June. What caught my eye was some of the stats that came out with the debt filing -- that <a href=\"https://skift.com/2020/09/15/how-delta-looks-to-leverage-rewards-from-its-own-frequent-flyer-program/\">SkyMiles had about $6.1 billion in revenue in 2019, about two-thirds from American Express</a> which issues a co-branded Delta card, and that <a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/14/delta-launches-6point5-billion-debt-deal-backed-by-its-frequent-flyer-program.html\">total miles redeemed fell by 78% in the first half of this year.</a> The big carriers are leaning on their loyalty programs for cash, their biggest customers are credit card issuers, but those card users - us - are generating points that we’ve stopped using.&nbsp;</li><li>It’s against this background that I called up Matt Schulz, chief credit analyst at LendingTree, and to ask him -- do we want to keep travel credit cards?<ul><li>Mark: Matt, a lot of folks carry at least one travel credit card and I don’t think I’m going too far out on a limb guessing that damn close to every TravelCommons listeners carry them. We’re 6 months on from the COVID lockdowns and the resulting cratering of the travel industry. But with travel not recovering -- airline demand is still just a third of pre-pandemic levels and United Airlines’ CEO said last week it could be 3-4 years before it’s back to 2019 levels -- what are card holders doing with these cards generating frequent traveler points that they can’t or don’t want to use?</li><li>Matt: An awful lot of people are closing them simply because they may need to use those points that they had been planning to go on a trip to Paris or to Hawaii. But they need to use that money or those points to keep food on the table. Our survey that we just did found that about 30% of respondents with travel rewards card said that they had closed one and that number is even higher for Millennials. And that\'s got to be something that that scares the banks to death. It\'s not terribly surprising for all the reasons that you that you ticked off a minute ago, and I don\'t think that\'s going to slow down anytime soon either.</li><li>Mark: So, people are closing them out, so they\'re not taking those annual fees.</li><li>Matt: Our survey found that about half of those who had been laid off or furloughed had cashed out some of their points or miles. And again, it stands to reason because when you\'re trying to keep the lights on and keep food on the table, there are things more important than travel rewards. And I think that\'s a lot of what this comes down to -- if you are somebody who feels pretty stable in your job, has a decent emergency fund and generally feels kinda OK about things despite all of economic chaos, you\'re probably going to try and hold on to those miles</li><li>Mark: Back in March and April, it seemed the strategy for the big travel card issuers -- Chase, Citi, Amex -- seemed to be to sacrifice revenue to hold share -- statement credits for annual fees if you called them to cancel, new bonuses for stay-at-home purchases to keep wallet share -- seemed like 5x bonuses for grocery and gas was the most popular. Made sense when everyone was talking about 2-week shutdowns and a V-shaped recovery. But, as we said before, travel is gonna stay depressed for a while -- between state and country quarantines and many people not wanting to get in a plane -- how are travel card companies going to handle the next round of renewals? When I call Chase and Amex again, do I get more statement credits -- do they continue to fight for share? And if they don’t, what do I do with the balance of Ultimate or Membership Rewards points that I’ll lose if I don’t re-up and pay the fee?</li><li>Matt: I think what\'s gonna happen is that issuers are going to continue to tinker around the edges to see what people like and what is impactful. And the truth is that issuers desperately want to keep the customers on cards like Chase Sapphire Reserve, Amex Platinum -- all the high end and the next-step-down cards because those customers are so valuable from a lifetime value perspective. You may get a travel card when you\'re 25 and the bank will do what they can to keep you around to try and upsell you to other products that they might have. The issuers are going to try and do what they can to figure out how to make you stay. And right now, that may not look like giving a ton of travel rewards points.</li><li>Mark: Any recommendations for travel card holders as we\'re going forward to the end of the year and into the beginning of next year?</li><li>Matt: You really have to know your situation and understand it, and you also have to not feel guilty if you have to cash in your points that you had been saving up for that dream trip in order to help you extend your budget. Nobody gets a high-end travel card with a high annual fee hoping to eventually cash that in for groceries at Walmart, but sometimes these things have to happen. If you have the financial wherewithal and you can hold on to those points, I think it\'s worth doing because we are going to travel again. Nobody knows when. But we are going to travel again and assuming that your whole financial situation is generally OK, I think there is value in holding on to those points as something to look forward to in the future.</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3><strong>Closing</strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #167</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and now, <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_167.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #167 — 6 Months On; Why Keep Travel Cards?','','inherit','closed','closed','','2856-revision-v1','','','2021-03-04 15:49:45','2021-03-04 20:49:45','',2856,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/04/2856-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3384,1,'2021-03-04 21:35:17','2021-03-05 02:35:17','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3029,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3029\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I left my suitcase at the door of our West Tucson Airbnb and walked out onto the back patio to watch the sun slip behind the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tucson_Mountains\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tucson Mountains</a>. The shades of red and orange on the undersides of a couple of clouds stood out in the pale blue sky. This was exactly what we were looking for when we left a cold grey Chicago nine hours ago. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3051,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7789-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7789-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3051\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>But then I heard a rustling from the far edge of the patio. A good-sized boar, a wild pig, walked out from between two bushes and walked across the backyard. Then another one. They stopped, turned to look at me, and then kept walking. More kept coming – another six followed the leaders, walking the same path across the backyard, stopping to sniff at a little tree. A quick Google search told me they weren\'t wild pigs but <a href=\"https://www.azgfd.com/wildlife/livingwith/javelina/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">javelinas</a>, a New World relative of the pig. They range from southern Arizona all the way down to Argentina in social groups called \"squadrons\".  Our squad looked comfortable here, like they were taking their usual end-of-day stroll back to wherever they bed down to stay safe from mountain lions. A couple of them came back to check on us the next morning, reminding us to keep the patio door closed.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:quote {\"className\":\"is-style-default\"} -->\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-style-default\"><p>To see a video of the javelina visitation and more, check out my <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/s/aGlnaGxpZ2h0OjE3ODc3MTkxNjk2MTM2MTcx?igshid=18auew1hwvjvo&amp;story_media_id=2489441232116364521\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tucson Instagram Story</a> on the TravelCommons Instagram Page</p></blockquote>\n<!-- /wp:quote -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3,\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h3 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Hiking</strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>As I mentioned in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the last podcast</a>, our plans for this trip were all about outside activities so any last-minute COVID closures or restrictions didn\'t strand us in our Airbnb, aimlessly flipping through TV channels. Since Tucson is <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tucson,_Arizona#Geography\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">surrounded by five small-ish mountain ranges,</a> we focused on hiking.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saguaro_National_Park\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Saguaro National Park</a></strong> is split into two physically separate areas, the Tucson Mountain District (TMD) on the west side of town near where we were staying, and across town to the east, the Rincon Mountain District (RMD). Our drive to the west district wound through the northern part of Tucson Mountain Park; two lanes twisting through gaps between the hilltops. The forecast said it would be the best weather of our stay, the highest temperatures and the lowest chance of rain, so we went for our biggest hike, <a href=\"https://www.arizonahighways.com/explore/hiking/king-canyon-trail\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">an 8-mile loop</a> that would take us to the top of 4,687-foot Wasson Peak. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We planned to park at the <a href=\"https://goo.gl/maps/KPGPZhBw8hDt7aiJ6\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">King Canyon Trailhead</a>, but it was filled with construction equipment that had completely torn up the parking lot. We hung a quick U-turn and, ignoring the warning signs, parked across the street in the far corner of the Arizona-Sonoma Desert Museum. We cut through some brush, crossed the street, and found the start of the trail.  It was sand and larger stones that climbed up from a dry wash. The Park Service has done a nice job of marking the trail, carving out steps on the steeper parts, and putting up signs at the trail intersections. I was glad, though, that I\'d downloaded enough off-line Google Maps data so I could double-check the signs when my mobile connection dropped.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"center\",\"id\":3034,\"width\":512,\"height\":384,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"aligncenter size-large is-resized\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2763.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2763-1024x768.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3034\" width=\"512\" height=\"384\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We walked up through what seemed the cactus version of a forest. The hills were full of all sorts of cacti: tall saguaro, low-to-the ground prickly pear and barrel, and twisted, tangled cholla. The top of Wasson Peak gave a panoramic view of the rocky hills that jutted straight up from the desert floor, and of Tucson sitting at the bottom of them. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3037,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2776-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2776-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3037\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://webcms.pima.gov/cms/One.aspx?pageId=1539\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tucson Mountain Park</a></strong> is directly south of western part of Saguaro National Park. We walked 10 minutes from our Airbnb to the <a href=\"https://goo.gl/maps/jhUVr4RvBoptxDvZ8\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Starr Pass Trailhead</a>. This hike was a 5½-mile loop around the valley floor, not as long nor as scenic as yesterday\'s Saguaro hike, but more leisurely and certainly easier on the feet. We took a bit more time, looking up at the tall saguaro cactuses with all their different arm configurations, and then down at the barrel cactuses that were just beginning to show the light green shoots of new growth. There were more people using these trails; the level terrain made it popular with mountain bikers and runners. And here too, the trails were well-marked and well-maintained.  It was a good afternoon\'s hike.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://www.fs.usda.gov/recarea/coronado/recarea/?recid=80532\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Sabino Canyon Recreational Area</a></strong> was our last hiking spot. It\'s across town, on the northeast side of Tucson in the foothills of the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Catalina_Mountains\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Santa Catalina Mountains</a>.  It was much more crowded than Saguaro or Tucson Mountain, but I might not be making a fair comparison. At Sabino Canyon, we drove to the main visitors center to step off on our hike while our other hikes started at smaller, more remote trailheads. Here again, there was beautiful rugged desert scenery, looking up the mountains and down into the canyons. But the trails weren\'t as well-marked as the other parks. We would lose the trail coming up out of a wash and then wander through cactus and javelina tracks trying to pick it up again. It was a pretty hike, but frustrating.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3,\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h3 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Eating</strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>All the hiking freed up the caloric space we needed to get deep into <a href=\"https://thisistucson.com/eat/sonoran-food-is-having-a-moment-la-writer-gustavo-arellano-will-talk-burritos-and-mexican/article_e409de98-e53d-11e9-892b-73157f4df357.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Sonoran food</a>, a style of Mexican cuisine that hasn\'t yet broken out of its birthplace, <a href=\"https://rovingdecanter.com/2014/10/22/what-is-sonoran-style-mexican-food/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">in this case, Southern Arizona and the Mexican state of Sonora</a>, the way that Tex-Mex, Baja, and Oaxacan cuisines have.  Picking up the menus, I immediately saw some differences – it\'s a <em>burro</em>, not a burrito; a <em>caramelo</em>, not a quesadilla; and tacos are garnished with chopped cabbage instead of the chopped cilantro and raw white onion that is the standard in Chicago. Beef, especially <em>carne asada</em> grilled over mesquite, is the default filling and it\'s served in a thin flour tortilla that\'s more like Chinese moo shu or Peking Duck wrappers than the thick flour tortillas you get with fajitas. <a href=\"https://tucsonfoodie.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tucson Foodie</a> and Andi Berlin, food writer at <a href=\"https://thisistucson.com/eat/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">#ThisIsTucson</a>, were my main guides to Sonoran food.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3046,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7836-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7836-300x238.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3046\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><a href=\"https://www.yelp.com/biz/ruiz-hot-dogs-tucson\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>Ruiz Hot Dogs</strong></a> food truck was our first stop. I\'d read a lot about the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonoran_hot_dog\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Sonoran hot dog</a> and coming from Chicago, another town with its own <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago-style_hot_dog\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">unique twist on a hot dog</a>, I had to give it a try. The Sonoran dog is a bacon-wrapped hot dog topped with chopped tomatoes and onions, pinto beans, mayonnaise, mustard, and salsa verde, served in a slightly sweet split-top bun with a grilled yellow pepper on the side. We ate ours on the hood of our rental car. It was great and a bargain at $3. (1140 S 6th Ave at W 22nd St)</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://www.tacorustico.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">El Taco Rustico</a></strong> was next on our list for tacos – more specifically, quesabirras and cabrito (goat) tacos. We tried the quesabirras first. They\'re  crispy tacos filled with beef birra (juicy stewed beef) and melted cheese, served with a little styrofoam cup of broth, a sort of \"Mexican a jus,\" for dipping. The broth, with a deep roasted dried chile flavor, pulled everything together. What the quesabirras didn\'t soak up, we drank like a chaser from a styrofoam shot glass. Next were tacos. We had cabrito and pollo asado (grilled chicken) tacos, and they were a revelation. The taste of the meat, the mesquite smoke on the grilled chicken and the tang of the goat, punched through the condiments and the tortilla. That this made such an impression on us is a credit to Chef Juan Almanza but also a sad commentary on how the meat at too many taco joints is just an underseasoned carrier for the salsa and garnish. (2281 N Oracle Rd)</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3048,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2804-scaled.jpeg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2804-300x284.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3048\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://www.tacosapson.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tacos Apson</a></strong> was our last stop, down in South Tucson across the street from a high school, and the best stop. We smelled the mesquite coming off the grill when we opened the car door. We walked up to the window and ordered two burros, carne asada and haas, which is a mix of asada, cheese, and roasted green chiles. Then scanning the menu, I added a couple <em>costillas</em> tacos, grilled beef ribs.  Back at the Airbnb, I cut burros in half. The thin flour tortilla was wrapped around nothing but the meat; none of typical burrito fillings, no rice or beans or lettuce or crema. There was nothing to mask the mesquite on the carne asada or the beef ribs, and the cheese and green chile in the haas burro accentuated rather than overwhelmed the beef. (3501 S 12th Ave)</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3,\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h3 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Drinking</strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I can\'t hike and eat Mexican food without beer. Tucson isn\'t on anyone\'s <a href=\"https://beerandbrewing.com/best-in-beer-2020-readers-choice-your-favorite-beer-cities/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">list of top beer cities</a>, but I found a couple of solid microbreweries to recommend.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3063,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2789-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2789-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3063\"/></a><figcaption>1912 Brewing Menu Board</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://1912brewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">1912 Brewing Company</a></strong> is in a strip of nondescript light industrial buildings just west of I-10, a quick 5-minute drive from El Taco Rustico. They have 20 taps and turn out good beer over a wider variety of styles than most places – goses, saisons, and some German styles in addition to the usual IPAs. (2045 N Forbes Blvd, Ste 105) </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://www.pueblovidabrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pueblo Vida Brewing Company</a></strong> is in downtown Tucson. After navigating one-way streets and dodging street car, we found parking and walked over to the taproom only to find that the taproom was still closed due to COVID restrictions. But they were selling cans from a walk-up window. We had a nice chat with the woman helping us and bought a mixed 4-pack to go with our Tacos Apson take-away – a Vietnamese-inspired rice lager, a couple of hazy IPAs made with local Sonoran white wheat, and what I was most excited for, a black IPA. They were the best beers of the trip. (115 E Broadway Blvd)</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3,\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h3 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Resources</strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Travel and Lodging</strong><ul><li>We flew Southwest Airline to Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport (PHX) from Chicago Midway (MDW). Prices and flight selection were much better than flying into Tucson (TUS).</li><li>We rented a car from Hertz at PHX and drove the 115 miles down I-10 to Tucson.  It was an easy drive that took us an hour and 40 minutes. PHX is on the south side of Phoenix right by I-10, so we didn\'t hit any Phoenix traffic on the drive.</li><li>Our Airbnb was a one-bedroom time-share suite at <a href=\"https://clubwyndham.wyndhamdestinations.com/us/en/resorts/wyndham-hotels-resorts/united-states-of-america/arizona/tucson/starr-pass-golf-suites\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Starr Pass Golf Suites</a>.   It was a nice resort though we didn\'t get around to using any of the amenities (pool, golf course, restaurant). We\'re glad we stayed out near the Tucson Mountains rather than a downtown hotel. Tucson isn\'t that big, so we weren\'t more than 25 minutes from anywhere we wanted to be.</li></ul></li><li><strong>Hiking</strong> <ul><li><a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saguaro_National_Park\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Saguaro National Park</a></li><li><a href=\"https://webcms.pima.gov/cms/One.aspx?pageId=1539\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tucson Mountain Park</a></li><li><a href=\"https://www.fs.usda.gov/recarea/coronado/recarea/?recid=80532\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Sabino Canyon Recreational Area</a></li></ul></li><li><strong>Sonoran Food</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.yelp.com/biz/ruiz-hot-dogs-tucson\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Ruiz Hot Dogs</a>, 1140 S 6th Ave at W 22nd St</li><li><a href=\"https://www.tacorustico.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">El Taco Rustico</a>, 2281 N Oracle Rd</li><li><a href=\"https://www.tacosapson.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tacos Apson</a>, 3501 S 12th Ave</li></ul></li><li><strong>Craft Beer</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://1912brewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">1912 Brewing Company</a>, 2045 N Forbes Blvd, Ste 105</li><li><a href=\"https://www.pueblovidabrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pueblo Vida Brewing Company</a>, 115 E Broadway Blvd</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Quick Notes on Our Trip to Tucson','','inherit','closed','closed','','3026-revision-v1','','','2021-03-04 21:35:17','2021-03-05 02:35:17','',3026,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/04/3026-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3386,1,'2021-03-04 21:40:02','2021-03-05 02:40:02','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":2168,\"width\":300,\"height\":300,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large is-resized\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1-1024x1024.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2168\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"/></a><figcaption>Wait! I need to unpair my iPhone!</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Was all set to head to San Diego for a week\'s break from Chicago\'s grey January and then looked at the COVID restrictions... and then pivoted to Arizona. With people starting to think about 2021 travel, I pulled together my top 5 travel planning tips. Slow vaccine roll-out will probably keep us restricted for longer than we thought. Andrea Amico of <a href=\"https://www.privacy4cars.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Privacy4Cars</a> joins us to talk about the dangers of leaving our data behind in rental cars. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_171.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go over to the <em>Subscribe</em> section on the right to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #171: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3,\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h3 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>This Week</strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. Stayed off the road over the entire holiday season which let me skip the TSA’s new post-lockdown checkpoint record of <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/coronavirus/passenger-throughput\">1.3 million on January 3rd</a>, the last Sunday of the holiday season -- though, to be fair,&nbsp; this is only just over half the 2.4 million passengers who flew on the same Sunday last year. And with every US airline except Delta now back to selling middle seats, it makes sense that load factors also ratcheted up over the holidays. I haven’t seen any industry-wide numbers yet, but <a href=\"https://www.ittn.ie/news/confidence-in-boeing-737-max-holding-firm/\">American’s COO did say that the load factor on their 737 Maxes over the last week of the holiday season was 90%</a>. Now, most of those Maxes are flying between LGA and MIA, always a busy holiday route, but I’ve seen reports of many other packed flights, as well as the much higher load . I was never a big fan of completely full flights pre-coronavirus and, as you can imagine, am even less so now pre-widespread vaccine distribution. So, I’m not too bothered that we didn’t try to get out of town over the holidays.</li><li>However, staying in town through the rest of January is a whole different thing because January is absolutely the worst part of Chicago’s winter. So, after&nbsp; Thanksgiving weekend, on what used to be called Cyber Monday when we actually shopped in physical stores, instead of trolling through Amazon, I was trolling through travel sites looking for cheap flights to someplace warm the 3rd wk of Jan. I figured that’d be long enough for any holiday COVID spike to work its way through the system.</li><li>I’d had some friends who’d gone down to Mexico, felt safe in the tourist zones, didn’t have any problems, came back healthy; but I don’t do well sitting on a beach for more than a day or two and I wanted to keep it a bit simpler, so we decided to stay in the US, which pretty quickly narrowed our search to Southern California, South Florida, and Arizona. Since we’d spent time last winter in both Arizona and Florida, we decided to do California and go as far down the coast as we could get, which was San Diego.&nbsp; And, as luck would have it, Southwest had cheap direct flights from Chicago Midway and I had Southwest travel credits from one of last spring’s flight cancellations burning a hole in my virtual pocket, so *boom* I booked it</li><li>On, what turned out to be, 3 days before the governor locked down most of California. But a friend hit the ground there a week before Christmas and said “Eh, it’s not a problem.” So, we stayed the course and didn’t really pay any attention to it until after New Years when we thought, you know, we should book a place to stay. And that’s when we started to pay attention. Bike and kayak rental places were open as “outdoor recreation” businesses. But vacation rental and hotel booking sites all pointed to the California Public Health Department statement -- “no hotel or lodging entity in California shall accept or honor out-of-state reservations for nonessential travel” which our January snowbird getaway definitely didn’t qualify as. Would things ease up in a couple of weeks? The trend lines on the state’s COVID website didn’t seem to be pointing in that direction.</li><li>So last Monday when I received another blast of airline sales emails, it seemed like the right time for a pivot. X-ing off California, we were back to Florida and Arizona. We talked to friends already down in Florida; they said the south beaches were already filling up with snowbirds, so we opted for drier sand and swung our Southwest flights over to Phoenix.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>But since we’d been in Phoenix last winter and continuing in the spirit of visiting not-quite-A-list places in the US we’ve never been while weaving around quarantines, we’re driving further south down I-10 to Tucson. We’re running the same travel planning play we did for our August trip to Michigan’s UP -- focus on outdoor activities like hiking and biking, have back-ups in case of last-minute closures, and above all, build a list of microbreweries with outdoor seating.</li><li>Bridge Music -- Say Their Names - Love and Remember by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2020 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/62230 Ft: DJ Lang</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3,\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h3 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Back at the beginning of December when the Pfizer vaccine approval was imminent and the Moderna approval wasn’t far behind, most travelers -- myself included -- got a bit giddy and started to think about the world opening up in the spring, the summer at the latest. Fast forward 30 days and, happy new year, that initial blast of vaccine optimism melted when it met the ugly realities of last-mile logistics. Spelunking through the stream of low-fare emails from American and Southwest and Delta and United and Iberia and British Airways filling my inbox, the consensus across airline demand forecasters seems to be that nothing’s going to change until the end of May. But even that doesn’t explain why, say, American, sends out an email pushing “Plan a European Vacation” that includes spring fares (March, April, May fares) to London, Manchester, and Madrid. I don’t know anyone who expects European vacation travel to open up in the next 3-4 months. Give credit to Delta for highlighting more achievable destinations -- Cancun, the Bahamas, Phoenix, and just about every airport in Florida with a runway long enough to handle a jet.&nbsp;</li><li>What will be as interesting is what the airlines and hotels do about elite status protection if travel continues to be slow through the summer. Remember that last spring, after it was clear that business travel was canceled for most of 2020, all the big travel companies grandfathered everyone into their status for this year. What you earned in 2019, you kept through this year, 2021. But now what? We talked about this a bit in t<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">he November episode (#169)</a> when the companies made their opening bid, knocking 20-30% off elite qualifying clip levels. Kinda like the low-fare sales -- it’ll be interesting to see what they offer come May.</li><li>We’ve talked in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\">prior episodes</a> about the challenges of planning a trip during COVID -- deciphering lockdown rules; parsing what can seem to be the almost theological differences between stay-at-home advisories vs. orders. And after all that, trying to keep up-to-date on last-minute changes. Things are changing so fast -- open, shut; outdoor seating vs just doing takeout -- that the normal crowdsourced tools we’d use -- things like Google Maps, Yelp -- can’t keep up because they don’t give a real-time view. The Foursquare app used to do it, but since they split <a href=\"https://www.swarmapp.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Swarm</a> from Foursquare, it seems that the real-time data is now sold just to business customers to target mobile ads. But, one app that I use does provide a real-time view into some traffic -- <a href=\"https://untappd.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Uptappd</a>. Yes, it’s just craft beer nerd traffic -- people checking in their beers at tap rooms and beer bars -- but that’s a kind of traffic that I’m pretty interested in.&nbsp; After our pivot to Tucson, I wanted to see what beer places were open for service, not just take-out. I could’ve spent time clicking around the app, but instead, I decided to put one of my lockdown self-improvement projects to use. Over the fall, I’d taken some on-line Python programming courses on Coursera, so I wrote a short program that pulled the most recent check-ins from the Tucson area and started making a list of places that are open. I probably could’ve made that list quicker by just plunking away on the app, but not with the same sense of achievement.</li><li>We talked about COVID-19 vaccination and test certification in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">last episode</a>. Over the last month, it seems that proof of negative test results rather than of vaccinations is the new hotness. Canada, the UK, and now the US are the latest countries requiring a negative COVID test for inbound passengers. It makes sense. The CDC released a paper in November -- in one of my favorite publications, the <a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/index.html\"><em>Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report</em></a> (I’ll link to it in the show notes) -- saying that <a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6945a4.htm\">temperature and symptom screening at airports is pretty worthless</a>; it only picked up 1 case for every 85,000 passengers screened. So not hard for the switch to pre-flight testing to be more effective. For Canada and the UK, though, they’ve layered the test requirements <em>on top of </em>their existing 14-day quarantine requirements, which just adds to the confusion -- especially since the Canadian government gave travelers one week’s notice of the new testing requirement. I haven’t seen the US regs yet, but the Canadian rules say you must have “proof in hand” of a negative test result, and that proof can be either electronic or paper. You gotta think that, pretty quick, that “proof in hand” has gotta default to “proof on phone” otherwise, forged paper results are going to be the new fake IDs from our teens. Last November, French cops <a href=\"https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2020/11/10/fake-tests-covid-flights/\">busted a ring selling fake test results at CDG</a>. The going rate was €150-300 which converts to something like $180-370. That compares to $125 for a <a href=\"https://fakeyourid.com/\">good fake driver’s license</a>.&nbsp; Since the last episode, the Caribbean country of <a href=\"https://skift.com/2020/12/18/airlines-still-waiting-on-governments-for-a-single-digital-health-passport-standard/\">Aruba was the first country</a> to standardize on one of the digital passport apps, <a href=\"https://commonpass.org/\">CommonPass</a>, the one backed by the World Economic Forum, the Davos gang, and, we mentioned, also used by United for their EWR-LHR flight. But then Sing Air picked its rival, <a href=\"https://www.iata.org/en/programs/passenger/travel-pass/\">Travel Pass</a> from IATA, to use on flights to/from Malaysia. So it still seems like, when it does go to “proof on phone”, we’re gonna need to set aside some memory screen space for a bunch of apps.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge music -- Staying Positive by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2019 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/59438 Ft: greg_baumont</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3,\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h3 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Leaving Data Behind in The Rental Car</strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A couple of weeks back, I retweeted a news article - the third suspect charged in the fatal shooting of a retired Chicago fireman during a carjacking was caught because he’d synced his phone to the audio system of the stolen car.&nbsp; I dunno -- fleeing a murder but worrying about getting a ticket for not using hands free.&nbsp; I dunno. Good they caught the bad guy, but what about us law-abiding frequent travelers? When the Hertz or Avis person walks up to me at the car return lane, they always remind me not to leave anything behind; to remember to take my sunglasses and my mobile phone. But they never remind me to delete all the data I synced to the car.&nbsp;</li><li>And with more of our lives getting stored in our phones, I asked Andrea Amico, founder of the company <a href=\"https://www.privacy4cars.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Privacy4Cars</a>, to come onto the podcast to talk about the privacy problems at the intersection of cars and smartphones.<ul><li>Mark: Andrea, how did you get involved in this space?</li></ul><ul><li>Andrea: One of the companies that used to run was one of the largest used car inspection companies. We inspected a lot of vehicles that were ready to be sold. I just noticed that people were leaving their digital lives behind.</li><li>Mark: We first talked about the privacy/security issues around pairing your smartphone with your car rental about four years ago. Bluetooth-enabled entertainment systems were just becoming more common in rental car fleets as hands-free call laws became widespread. Even today, the first thing I do is to sync my iPhone. And I\'ve noticed more times than not, the sync slots are all full -- personalized names, Jan\'s iPhone, Timmy\'s iPhone. You end up having to delete at least one of them to make room for yours. And then, once paired, most phones by default, end up downloading all your contacts and your phone numbers and things like that. So, Jan and Timmy have left behind all of their contacts and all their phone numbers and that\'s just bad in so many ways.</li><li>Andrea: When you sync your phone through Bluetooth or you plug it into the USB port or now, in some newer cars, you just walk into the car and the car automatically sniffs your phone and start syncing to it, including those with Android Auto and Apple CarPlay. When that happens, you are creating a mini-clone of your phone inside the vehicle.</li><li>Mark: What other information are people leaving behind when they don\'t clear themselves out of a rental car?</li><li>Andrea: All sorts -- your phone book, your call logs, the text messages, including the body, meaning the actual text of the text messages; that stuff will be left behind. But also all sorts of meta data that allows criminals or law enforcement or just people who want to snoop on you to re-identify you, anything from the identifiers of your phones which are unique, your Bluetooth MAC address. Not to mention, of course, all your navigation data. I mean, you can reconstruct where people have been, just by data that has been stored in the infotainment system. And then you have, whether you are on Twitter and Facebook and what are the handles of those things, which are the last photos you have taken? What files have you synced, the emails, calendar entries. There\'s all sorts of stuff that people really don\'t understand that they\'re living behind.</li><li>Mark: But when people <em>do </em>delete pairings are they deleting all that information? Or is there some data still retained in that vehicle?</li><li>Andrea: &nbsp;By and large, deleting the data following the manufacturer\'s directions is helpful in preventing third parties to having access. And so if there is anything left behind, it requires a much deeper forensic type of analysis that is typically not accessible. But for most people, following the manufacturer\'s directions on how to remove the data, it is a very easy to do and very effective defense against getting their data being in the hands of somebody else.</li><li>Mark: That\'s where <a href=\"https://www.privacy4cars.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Privacy4Cars</a> comes in. That\'s where your app comes in -- helping people get that right?</li><li>Andrea: Yes, we have a free app that people can download, and you can just search for Privacy4Cars on the <a href=\"https://apps.apple.com/us/app/privacy4cars/id1370969499\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple App Store</a> or <a href=\"https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.privacy4cars\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Play</a>, depending what kind of phone you have, and download it for free.</li><li>Mark: The last time on the podcast we talked about this topic was a little over a year ago, October 2019. &nbsp;I\'d gotten a notice from Hertz that they had changed their terms and conditions. I noticed that Hertz had specifically carved out liability from me leaving information from a Bluetooth pairing. And now, on one hand, I could see that point. I\'ve actively and voluntarily synced my phone to the car and in doing so, caused my information to be downloaded. But at what point does that sort of digital maintenance, clearing personal identifiable information, after every rental become part of the rental company’s overall maintenance responsibility, like checking the oil levels and the tire pressure.</li><li>Andrea: I believe that the time has already passed, and it\'s been in the past for at least a year, right? At least, the passage of California Consumer Privacy Act. And probably you can go further back in the past because of other types of regulations. And there are some regulators who have actually spoken about this. So in the United States, you have the FTC that has issued already four guidances on the need to delete personal information. In Europe, they went as far as to give a guideline that mandates the removal of the personal information. Beyond rental, when people are traveling, sometimes they rent, sometimes they ride-share, and very often it happens to me that I in an Uber or Lyft and you have a very nice driver that tells you, “Hey, you need to fill up the tank on your battery? Here\'s a cable.” And the first thing I do is glance -- &nbsp;where does the cable end up? If it goes into the lighter, that\'s only power. So yes, I’ll recharge my phone. But if it goes straight &nbsp;into the USB port of the car, don\'t charge the phone unless you\'re really desperate, because as soon as your phone powers back up, it will start downloading all your information into a stranger\'s car. So you definitely don\'t want to do that.</li><li>Mark: Andrea Amico, founder of <a href=\"https://www.privacy4cars.com\">Privacy4Cars.com</a>, you can find his app on the <a href=\"https://apps.apple.com/us/app/privacy4cars/id1370969499\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple App store</a> and on <a href=\"https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.privacy4cars\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Play</a>. Andrea, thank you very much for taking the time to talk to us today.</li><li>Andrea: Thank you. Mark. I really enjoyed talking to you.</li></ul></li><li>Bridge music -- Latinium by Javolenus (c) copyright 2020 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Javolenus/62650 Ft: NiGiD</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3,\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h3 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>2021 Travel Planning Pro Tips</strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I’ve been talking about travel planning in the time of COVID across maybe 6 months of episodes. And since January is always a big travel month, especially this year with some vouchers from last spring’s flight cancellations coming up on their 12-month expiration dates, combined with 10 months of pent-up demand and another 6, maybe 9 months to go, I thought I’d pull all my planning tips together here -- and probably in a blog post after I get back from Tucson.</li><li>First, book now. As I said earlier, there’s a steady stream of sales out there right now as airlines, hotels, and rental car companies are looking for cash to get through the start of the year. There are great domestic deals now, and if you can part with some cash now, good international deals for the second half of the year. Prices are only going to go up as vaccine rates improve, and that pent-up demand overwhelms any squeamishness about sitting next to a stranger. I’m eyeing that same American ORD-BCN 787 non-stop that I wasn’t able to take at the end of last September. The deals aren’t as smoking as they were last March when the travel world was in a freefall; the airlines have gotten a little smarter over the past year. But with cancellation fees still waived, there’s not much risk.&nbsp;</li><li>Second, check your destination’s health requirements -- and keep checking until you leave. Many of the airlines have built good web resources that summarize any restrictions by destination. Of the US majors, I think <a href=\"https://www.united.com/ual/en/us/fly/travel/restrictions-map.html\">United’s</a> is the easiest to use but I think American’s is the most complete. They actually link out to a Canadian company, <a href=\"https://apply.joinsherpa.com/travel-restrictions?affiliateId=americanairlines\">Sherpa</a>, that took my Arizona itinerary and noted that, while there’s no quarantine restrictions in Arizona, there are when I return to Chicago.&nbsp; <a href=\"https://www.delta.com/us/en/plan-your-next-trip/where-we-fly\">Delta’s</a> is pretty good too. I’ll put links to them in the show notes. But you can’t check once and be done. We talked at the top of the show about Canada putting in a new testing requirement with 7-days notice. And domestically, states are changing restrictions weekly. One trick I’ve talked about is to start following your destination’s local newspapers on Twitter to get any early warnings on anything new.&nbsp;</li><li>Third, read the cancellation rules a lot more closely. Being nimble and able to react to changes at your destination -- like Irene and I did with our pivot from San Diego to Tucson -- depends on being thoughtful about the cancellation risks you take. Right now, flights have the lowest cancellation risk; Airbnb and vacation rentals, the highest. Hotels are in-between. Our default strategy then is to book the flight as soon as we can, don’t do pre-paid hotel rooms or car rentals, and wait as long as we can before booking an Airbnb.</li><li>Fourth, overload your itinerary with outdoor activities like hiking and biking so last-minute closures or restrictions don’t leave you aimlessly flipping through the hotel TV channels. It was the big trend last summer -- airlines dialed down flights between big city airports like the ORD-LGA run and toward beaches and mountains. And it continues -- all the imagery in the airline and hotel “flash sale” emails over the past couple of weeks. But it does mean spending more time trolling the AccuWeather and Weather Channel web sites because an outside-heavy itinerary is more vulnerable to big storm fronts.</li><li>And finally, stay flexible, expect delays, and be patient. If there’s anything we learned from 2020, it’s that something will screw up your plans -- a positive COVID test will shut down the restaurant you really wanted to eat at, capacity restrictions will mean a line to get into something that was top of your list. Have back-up plans and give everyone you meet the benefit of the doubt. Like you, they’re just trying to get through this safe and sound.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3,\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h3 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #171</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li>In this episode’s tech notes, if you check out the show notes, you’ll find a full transcript of my interview with Andrea Amico courtesy of my free tier of Amazon Web Services which includes 60 minutes a month of their Transcribe service. I learned about it when watching a session during their virtual Re:Invent conference. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/12/17/podcast-147-holiday-travel-tips-notes-from-santa-fe/\">episode #147</a>, I talked about going to it in person in Las Vegas a couple of years ago -- me and 50,000 other attendees, mostly pudgy, pasty-faced guys power walking up and down the strip, backpacks strapped down tight, ignoring the showgirls on the corner so they wouldn’t be late to, say, the sold-out tutorial on best practices for ingesting streaming data from IoT devices into AWS’ time series database. Less stressful, though less entertaining this year. Anyhow, watching the session on Transcribe got me thinking about how I could use it for the interviews I’ve done over the past 12 months. I’ve started on the most current episodes, working my way back. So far I have three done --this interview with Andrea, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/09/19/podcast-167-6-months-on-why-keep-travel-cards/\">episode #167</a>’s interview with Matt Schulz about travel credit cards, and <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\">episode #166</a>’s interview with Emily Thomas about the meaning of travel. I’ll keep chipping away at the backlog as my 60 free minutes a month allows.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>, as well as asking Alexa, Siri, and Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_171.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips','Pivoting from San Diego to Tucson for COVID restrictions; planning tips for travel during COVID; CEO of Privacy4Cars talks about leaving data behind in rental cars','inherit','closed','closed','','2997-revision-v1','','','2021-03-04 21:40:02','2021-03-05 02:40:02','',2997,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/04/2997-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3388,1,'2021-03-04 21:42:19','2021-03-05 02:42:19','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":2960,\"width\":300,\"height\":300,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large is-resized\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2960\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"/><figcaption>How Do I Insert This Into My iPhone<br>(DoD photo by EJ Hersom)</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>No Thanksgiving travel, but looking at the travel volume for this, the busiest travel week of the year, shows just how far things have fallen. The Qantas CEO said \"No vax, no fly\", so we dig into the emerging world of digital vaccine passports. And then I trace my travel genealogy, wondering if road warrior-ism is hereditary. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_170.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go over to the <em>Subscribe</em> section on the right to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #170: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. And again, no travel since the last episode. Not too surprising given the way things are going right now. Back in April, I’d jumped on one of those smokin’ American Airlines’ promotions to book flights to London for Thanksgiving. Which then -- not surprisingly -- got cancelled at the beginning of September.&nbsp; So I was back to what has been my typical Thanksgiving travel pattern for the past 10-15 years -- staying at home to avoid the crowds on what is always the busiest travel week of the year. PK -- pre-kids -- Irene and I would always travel over the holidays, splitting Thanksgiving and Christmas between my family in Southern California and hers in Chicago. But post-kids -- which is also PK, so I guess it should be AK -- after kids -- we started staying at home. And I’d figure out how to “ground” myself from business travel also. I found that the challenge of holiday travel wasn’t necessarily the crowds; it’s the make-up of the crowds; what some road warriors might call “clueless” travelers. I think “amateur” is certainly a more charitable and probably more accurate term. Even more so this year with so many road warriors out of practice after being off the road since March. Lots of those folks definitely in danger of losing their “professional” traveler status.</li><li>I saw an interesting graph the other day comparing last year’s and this year’s day-by-day airport travel volumes over the Thanksgiving weekend. No surprises comparing the Wednesday travel volumes, what is traditionally the busiest travel day of the year. Last year’s Wednesday saw 2.6 million passengers, almost 2½ times busier than this year. I expected that. But what really caught my eye was that this year’s peak day -- <a href=\"https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/thanksgiving-travel-volume-2020-pandemic/index.html\">Sunday at about 1.2 million </a>-- was still a lot less than last year’s slowest day, Thanksgiving, at about 1.6 million. I didn’t travel last year at Thanksgiving, but did in 2018.&nbsp; Irene and I broke our no-travel rule and flew down to Santa Fe, NM on Thanksgiving Day. Back in episode <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/12/17/podcast-147-holiday-travel-tips-notes-from-santa-fe/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">#147</a>, I said that Thanksgiving Day flight was one of the least stressful travel experiences I’d ever had — no traffic on the drive to ORD, no lines. The TSA agents were hanging around just looking for people to screen. And that day, there were around 25% more people in airports than this year’s <em>busiest</em> day. I shouldn’t be surprised, but all the pictures I saw in the news coverage made it look like airports were a lot more crowded.&nbsp;</li><li>Our apartment is just south of one of the northern approaches to ORD. Flights from the east come in over the lake -- seats A, B, and C get a great view of the city skyline while seats D, E, and F get to look down into Wrigley Field -- then&nbsp; over the northwest side of the city, landing on one of the runways north of the terminal. I’ve always been impressed by the choreography of ORD. On a clear Friday afternoon, driving up the tollway that runs east of the airport, I’d see planes on parallel approaches landing simultaneously -- one to the north of the terminal and one to the south -- and looking up, see the lights of planes on approach behind them -- 2, 3, 4.... Back in April, during Chicago’s lockdown, I’d sit out on the rooftop deck -- because what else was I going to do? -- and maybe see one plane coming in over the lake on that approach. But now I’m seeing more planes -- sometimes 3, 4 in a row. Don’t know that they’re all carrying passengers -- some could be temporary cargo carriers taking some of that e-commerce money, with boxes instead of seats under the overhead bins. But I can feel travel starting to pick up. It could be a tough winter, but I’m trying to look out over the horizon a bit; trying to look forward to spring.</li><li>Bridge Music -- Leviathan by Kirkoid (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Kirkoid/31109</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3><strong>Following Up</strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>TravelCommons contributor Allan Marko commented on my little lockdown game with my Google Mini -- changing the voice to, say, an English accent and then asking about the weather in London.&nbsp; Allan wrote:<ul><li>I often change the Siri voice for a bit of variety. Currently “Australian Female” is providing my CarPlay directions. you can also ask Siri to “Play TravelCommons”…</li></ul></li><li>Which immediately got me digging into Siri’s settings, looking for the Voice options. I found I had a choice of American, Australian, British, Indian, Irish, and South African. Since I’d already used the first three with my Google Mini, it was between the last three. I chose Irish for now, but will probably switch to South African before the end of the month. Actually, Waze, the nav app, always impressed me with the number of voice and language options. Every once in a while, I switch Irene’s Waze over to Hungarian before she’s heading out somewhere. For some reason, I get more of a laugh out of it than she does.</li><li>TravelCommons listener Dan Grabon and I have been trading notes as we’ve each slogged through Thoreau’s <em>Walden</em>. We both started it back in April, in the height of the lockdown. Everybody was deciding that, with nothing much else to do, it was a good time to pick up that classic you’ve always been meaning to get to. Dan started out with <em>The Brothers Karamazov</em>, which I thought was damned impressive. I first reached for Whitman’s <em>Leaves of Grass</em>, but then thought I needed something a bit more down-to-earth, something that wouldn’t need quite that level of interpretation and abstract thinking. And <em>Walden</em>, about Thoreau’s self-isolation in the woods outside of Concord, MA, seemed a better fit with the lockdown. Dan finished last month, at the beginning of November. I was 50 pages behind, so I didn’t finish ‘til Thanksgiving -- it was tough cutting through the tryptophan fog, but I gutted it through. Dan said he was staying with Thoreau, moving onto <em>Civil Disobedience</em> before shelving the book. I pivoted to non-fiction, <em>Why We Sleep</em>, where a neuroscientist and sleep expert spends some 300+ pages saying “If you don’t sleep 8 hours, you’re killing yourself” which got me doing some mental math. Between jet lag from all the&nbsp; international flights and waking up at 4am to make 6am flights to LGA, I’ve probably dropped 5 years off my life. Though, given some dementia running through my family history, I might not have remembered those years anyways.</li><li>And I show up on the other side of the mic talking travel pro tips with Matt Wilson on his <a href=\"https://www.under30experiences.com/blog/travel-like-a-pro-with-mark-peacock-of-travelcommons\">Millennial Travel Podcast</a>.&nbsp; I’m trying to remember when we recorded this -- had to be pre-April 2019 because I was still in the suburban TravelCommons studio and Matt was hanging out down in Costa Rica. The connection fuzzes out now and again, but it was a fun conversation. I’ll put a link in the episode in the show notes but fair warning -- it’s mostly me rattling on for an hour. Listening back to it, I’m kinda embarrassed that I don’t give Matt much of a chance to get a word in edgewise.</li><li>In the last episode, I talked about the work-from-hotel offerings from Marriott, Hilton, and Hyatt. They all had their own twists, but Hyatt’s was the most unique in that their “Work from Hyatt” offer was resort-focused and had a 7-night minimum. I said it wasn’t so much a WeWork replacement as a digital nomad trial. Well, I’m guessing that they didn’t get much uptake on it because I just got another email from Hyatt with a new offering -- “Office for the Day” -- that pretty much matches Marriott’s Day Pass. Like I said last month, these offerings all feel a bit “toe in the water”, a bit opportunistic. And now that we’re starting to get better visibility into post-vaccine timelines, I wonder how long they’ll last -- will people still want to pay to work in a hotel room after all the Starbucks stores have reopened.</li><li>I’ve talked in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/12/podcast-120-where-do-guidebooks-fit-in-i-hate-shopping-for-suitcases\">past</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/09/28/podcast-124-craft-beer-hunting-i-hate-rick-steves\">episodes</a> about how I’m a bit of a knuckle-dragger regarding printed travel guides. I still find a physical book useful when traveling. But I’ve been wondering how quickly these physical guides will be able to push out post-COVID editions to reflect the closures of bars, restaurants, and independent shops they’ve recommended. I was running through my own Chicago recommendation list from 2019. A bunch of my favorite places have closed; it’s about an even split between “Closed forever, good-bye, we’ve taken down our sign” and “Closed until Spring… we hope.” The final proofs of the 2021 editions have to already be baked if not already at the printers. I dunno, maybe they’ll all post errata pages that you can download, print off, and then stick in your books.</li><li>In a massive intersection of all things social media, I posted a <a href=\"https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/tiktok-hotel-room-chef/index.html\">CNN article</a> on the TravelCommons Facebook page that a friend, a hotel company CIO, sent me on LinkedIn that showed TikTok videos of people cooking meals in hotel rooms using an iron for a griddle, a hot water kettle for a steamer, a pants presser as an oven, and the one that really wowed me -- a coffee maker as a sous vide water bath. I don’t know if I should be impressed by the ingenuity or looking to set up as a ghost kitchen/delivery service wherever they are because I’ve never seen anyone go to that extent to cook their own meal in a hotel room. Even guys I knew trying to squeeze the last pennies out of their per diems wouldn’t do much more than boil water for their Cup O’Noodles or work hard not to burn their microwave popcorn. I’ll also put a link in the show notes to the TikTok account of one of the guys, Jago Randles. His TikTok series,<a href=\"https://www.tiktok.com/@jagoscrandles\"> Isolation Kitchen</a>, has about 150,000 followers. He does some impressive stuff. But I will make sure, going forward, that I rinse out the coffee maker and wipe down the iron before using them.</li><li>For many frequent travelers, a key early milestone of the pandemic was when airlines and hotels gave them a year’s push on their status -- moving the expiration date from Jan 2021 to Jan 2022. Big sigh of relief. Then for Southwest fliers, another milestone -- drink coupon expiration dates all got pushed to the end of this year. Whew! All’s right in the traveling world. But a couple of days ago, I was rummaging around in my messenger bag and out tumbled 5 Southwest drink coupons -- one with a Sept expiration date; the rest, December 31. Look Southwest, I don’t want to seem greedy. I did get a year’s push on A-List and 6 months on Companion Pass. But I’d love you even more if you gave me another 6 months on those drink coupons. Nope, don’t say anything now; just think about it.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge music -- Ethereal (nop mix) by @nop (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Lancefield/34818</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3><strong>Prove My Vax So I Can Fly</strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Last month, I saw that quote from the Qantas CEO -- \"We will ask people to have a vaccination before they can get on the aircraft\'\' -- and thought, well it’s kinda the next logical step from Delta’s ATL-Rome and United’s EWR-LHR flights were you have to take COVID test and prove you’re negative before you can board.&nbsp;</li><li>I remember going to a travel clinic before my first flight to India; getting shot up with MMR, DTP, Hepatitis, and Typhoid vaccines and being given my <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carte_Jaune\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Yellow Card</a> -- officially my International Certificate of Vaccination or Prophylaxis -- listing all my shots. They told me to carry that with me to India, which I did and to Vietnam and Thailand and Singapore and China. No one ever asked to see it, not in an airport, an immigration line, a hotel,....&nbsp; It looks like the plans are that we’ll get a vaccination card from the CDC after receiving the first dose of COVID-19 vaccine. But that card isn’t meant as a validated proof of vaccination; it’s more of a reminder to go back in a couple of weeks for the second shot.&nbsp;</li><li>That handwritten piece of paper probably won’t pass muster at the Qantas boarding gate, and so that’s why we’re starting to see a bit of a vaccine passport app land grab going on. United has been testing the <a href=\"https://thecommonsproject.org/commonpass\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">CommonPass app</a> on their COVID-free EWR-LHR flight. You get your COVID test at the United Club near gate C93 and the results are uploaded into the app which then will display a QR code to the gate agent. CommonPass is being spun up with support from the World Economic Forum. Cathay Pacific, Lufthansa, SwissAir, and JetBlue also have plans to use it. Delta and Alitalia are trialing the <a href=\"https://www.aokpass.com/en/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">AOKPass </a>developed by the Int’l Chamber of Commerce on their COVID-free ATL-Rome flight. It uses blockchain for medical certificate storage, so bonus points to them in technology buzzword bingo. IATA, the Int’l Air Transport Association, an airline trade group, says they’re finishing up their app, <a href=\"https://www.iata.org/en/programs/passenger/travel-pass/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Travel Pass</a>, and will be piloting it with IAG, the parent of British Airways, Iberia, and Aer Lingus, in early 2021. And the World Health Organization says they’re looking at Estonia’s e-vaccination certificates as <a href=\"https://www.who.int/news-room/feature-stories/detail/estonia-and-who-to-jointly-develop-digital-vaccine-certificate-to-strengthen-covax#:~:text=WHO%20and%20Estonia%20recently%20agreed,access%20to%20COVID%2D19%20vaccines.\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the basis of a sort of “smart” Yellow Card app</a>.</li><li>I’m sure I’m missing a whole lot more; I just got tired of reading the same rehashed press release verbiage about secure and verifiable storage of health certifications. Going through this, it starts to feel like the health equivalent of those scooter apps, where I need half-a-dozen of them on my phone so I can rent the closest scooter to me. Unless someone blinks, it seems like I’ll need 3 or 4 of these vaccine passports to cover all my travel bases. But after reading through all the press releases and the infographics and the FAQs, none of these apps were real clear on how I get my physical CDC vaccine card into their digital storage vault. And I’m guessing that doctors and clinics are going to be more focused on taking care of patients and keeping their COVID vaccines cold, and not all that interested in entering my vaccination information into all those apps. Maybe Australia is further ahead with electronic health records, but I’m thinking, at least for the next year or so, that my CDC card is gonna be the best that Qantas and the gang are going to get.</li><li>Bridge music -- My Flaming Heart by Wired Ant (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial &nbsp;(3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Wired_Ant/36862 Ft: Javolenus</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3><strong>Hereditary Road Warriors</strong> </h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I was reading some research, as one does during a lockdown advisory when one gets caught up running down a clickhole, about <a href=\"https://research.fb.com/blog/2016/03/do-jobs-run-in-families/\">jobs running in the family</a>. Some of the stats -- a son with a military father is 5 times more likely to enlist himself while if his mother is a lawyer, he’s 6.6 times more likely to follow her to the bar; a daughter with a scientist father is almost 4 times more likely to be a scientist. Indeed, when I was deciding my college major, I was leaning toward&nbsp; chemistry but chose chemical engineering mostly because my grandfather and father were both engineers.</li><li>Which got me thinking -- does traveling -- careers that require frequent traveling -- run in the family? Again, looking back on my family, my grandfather traveled a lot when he worked for Sears, checking out vendors for hard goods -- tools, small machinery -- and working with them on new products. My dad designed farm machinery -- things like hay balers and cotton pickers -- for International Harvester. He’d often be on the road for weeks at a time, testing prototypes at farms around the country, looking for different crop and field conditions, and then at plants helping to set up the manufacturing lines for the finished machine. And so I grew up seeing that rhythm of travel -- Dad at home, Dad packing, saying good-bye, and then getting on with our lives until he came back. This was back in the late ‘60’s and into the 70’s, so no cheap long-distance let alone messaging or email or video calls. He was gone, with the exception of a postcard or two, until he came back.</li><li>And then when I joined the workforce, the first day of my first real job out of school, I got on a plane and made the first of what’s been hundreds of flights between ORD and DFW.&nbsp; So many that, pretty soon, I got to know the women working the front desk at the DFW Admirals Club. One morning, one of them asks me if I’d maybe like to meet her daughter. Awkward. I asked her, “Would you want your daughter dating someone who’s out of town as much as I am?” She paused for a moment and then said, “No, not really”.&nbsp;</li><li>Also around this time, my dad had gotten promoted past the level of going out to the field and so was traveling a lot less. But my mother took a purchasing executive role and with that, the need for a lot of travel to vendors. So while travel was generational/ “hereditary” from my father to me, my mother and I started road warrior-ing at the same time, so we were more like travel “siblings” -- comparing hotel notes, competing on frequent flier status and perks.&nbsp;</li><li>Will traveling for a living continue to a 4th generation? Tough to tell right now; both kids measure their commute in feet rather than miles during the lockdown, and friends running consulting operations tell me the current state is great for staff productivity -- an hour sales call takes an hour, rather than a day’s worth of travel for that hour, and working remotely with clients saves the client money and consultants don’t get burnt out trying to balance work and home needs. As I said back in the March and July episodes, I don’t buy that 100% remote is the “new normal”, but I also don’t believe it will snap back to 2019 levels, not after what will have been a year’s-plus time working out the mechanics of virtual working. But will there be another generation of road warriors in my family? It’ll probably take a couple of years to figure that out.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3><strong>Closing</strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #170</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li>I’ve made another little tweak to the RSS feed -- the file that all the podcast apps use to pull new episodes for your subscribed podcasts. This tweak affects the episode descriptions in the top podcast apps. For those apps that support it, there are now clickable links in the episode notes or descriptions. In last month’s episode, there were clickable links to the gift ideas blog post on the TravelCommons website as well as the episode show notes page. Going forward, there will always be a link to the episode’s show notes page. I’ve tested that this works on Apple Podcasts, Overcast (which is what I use), Stitcher, Pocket Casts, Podcast Addict, and Google Podcasts -- all of which make up 70-80% (depending on who’s doing the counting) of the TravelCommons downloads. So, if you get a chance, flip over to the episode description right now and check it out.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>, as well as asking Alexa, Siri, and Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_170.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors','','inherit','closed','closed','','2957-revision-v1','','','2021-03-04 21:42:19','2021-03-05 02:42:19','',2957,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/04/2957-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3390,1,'2021-03-04 21:48:49','2021-03-05 02:48:49','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":2935,\"width\":300,\"height\":300,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large is-resized\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714-1024x1024.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2935\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"/><figcaption>Locking Down The Christmas Tree</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>No travel since the last episode, so I had some time to think back through my post-lockdown travel and come up with my top 10 <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">gift ideas</a> for your pandemic travelers.  We look at the start of the year-end efforts by airlines, hotels, and credit card companies to keep their grounded travelers, unpack the work-from-hotel offerings from Marriott, Hilton, and Hyatt, and dissect the latest hotel reservation system data breach. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_169.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go over to the <em>Subscribe</em> section on the right to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #169: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. No travel, but a November week with temps in the 70’s felt like I was someplace other than Chicago. But the weather reverted to the mean yesterday, which chased me back indoors to finish this podcast.</li><li>Last week was a boon to Chicago’s bars and restaurants. The week before, the governor banned indoor service again as COVID cases began to rise. The bonus week of warm sunny weather gifted them with some needed outdoor dining revenue. Last Friday, a friend and I met for lunch at a neighborhood place that had been able to expand their outdoor seating by putting tables on the sidewalk in front of the shuttered retailer next door to them. We showed up at 11:30; the tables were full by 12.</li><li>One of the things we talked about was travel; how, over the past 8 months, we’d more or less adjusted to all of the COVID restrictions, the masks, the social distance, all of it -- except for travel. Yes, we’ve done the car trips and long weekends, but we miss the big trips -- I’d just cancelled our Thanksgiving trip to London and he’s trying to think through their annual Christmas trip to December. Now, I know this is definitely a “First World problem” for folks who’ve had families, friends, and even themselves hit with COVID, so I’m not trying to overplay this. But as the end of the year approaches, and I start hearing more public health experts reset expectation -- for the worse, saying <a href=\"https://www.smh.com.au/national/vaccine-is-imminent-but-virus-fight-has-long-way-to-go-fauci-20201028-p569h2.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">“Well, it’s probably more like the end of 2021 or maybe into the beginning of 2022 before things start feeling normal”</a> -- I dunno, for people who love travel, I don’t think they want to put it on hold for another year or two. You start hearing about people looking for openings -- Mexico, Costa Rica -- as they figure out their own personal risk profiles. Maybe <a href=\"https://hub.united.com/2020-10-29-united-airlines-launches-worlds-first-free-transatlantic-covid-19-testing-pilot-2648544789.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">United Airlines’ testing program</a> that they’re trialing on flights to Hawaii and London is part of the answer; certainly <a href=\"https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/11/heres-everything-to-know-about-pfizers-positive-vaccine-news/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pfizer’s release of preliminary vaccine results</a> on Monday got everybody hopeful again. I don’t think anyone expects -- or really wants -- an immediate snap-back to 2019. But the ability to stretch things a bit more would be greatly appreciated.</li><li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mactonite/29469\">Static</a>&nbsp;by Darkroom (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mactonite/29469</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3><strong>Following Up</strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>First, a quick program note. As I tweak things with the underlying TravelCommons infrastructure -- the audio file, the RSS feed, the website -- I’ll talk about the changes at the end of the podcast, so I don’t muck up the content that you come to listen to with the “inside baseball” sorta podcast stuff. If you’re not interested, you can skip to the end without missing anything. I will say, though, that I was pleasantly surprised when I looked at the Apple Podcast stats showing about 80% of you stay through the end of an episode. I’d fully expected to see at least 50% of folks hitting the “skip to next podcast” button when they heard the “Pictures of You” song clip. Thanks to everybody for sticking all the way through.</li><li>And congrats to Emily Thomas, our guest on the August episode, for winning the <a href=\"https://www.leverhulme.ac.uk/philip-leverhulme-prizes\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Leverhulme prize</a> last month. The prize recognizes the achievement of outstanding researchers across a broad range of disciplines whose work has already attracted international recognition and whose future career is exceptionally promising. I interviewed Emily about her book <em>The Meaning of Travel: Philosophers Abroad</em> and had a great time talking to her. A well-deserved award. I just may go back and listen to that interview again.</li><li>I got an email from Marriott last week announcing their work-from-hotel offerings. We\'ve talked about this trend in the past couple of episodes -- first as a way for downtown hotels to do something/anything about their low occupancy rates, and then in the last episode with the FBI\'s cyber security advisory to people moving from work-at-home to work-at-hotels. The Day Pass gives you a room from 6am to 6pm, wi-fi, bottled water, and lounge access if you’re a high-status Marriott Bonvoy member. They’re piloting it in Atlanta, Dallas, New York, and Phoenix. Scanning the pricing, the range looked to be in the $60-$90 range, though the Phoenician in Scottsdale did price out at $260. If you looked hard, you could probably get a day pass at a co-working place for cheaper, but if you can expense it, the Marriott offer is probably not a bad deal -- especially for those days that you have a big sales presentation or maybe a webinar, where you need that guaranteed alone time to focus on preparation and then delivery, and a video backdrop that’s not your closet door or a semi-made bed or random people walking past. Hilton and Hyatt are also offering work-from hotel plans, but with different spins. Hilton’s WorkSpaces will give you 10,000 Honors points for your first booking and, unlike Marriott, is across all of their properties, but it doesn’t feel as put together as Marriott’s. You have to ring up the property directly; looks like Hilton can’t figure out a way to shoehorn this day rate concept into their reservation system. Work from Hyatt, on the other hand, isn’t so much a WeWork replacement as a digital nomad trial package with its 7-night minimum stay requirement and a focus on resort locations like the Grand Hyatts in Kauai or Vail, CO. Kinda the complete opposite of spending 12 hours in a room at the Marriott by DFW. They all feel a bit “toe in the water”, a bit opportunistic in their own way.&nbsp;</li><li>At the beginning of this week, Candid Wueest, a cyber security researcher who joined us last year in episode #151 to talk about hotel websites that leaked traveler data, tweeted out a link to yet <a href=\"https://www.websiteplanet.com/blog/prestige-soft-breach-report/\">another hotel data breach</a>. This time it was channel management software, something that hotels use to automate the task of updating room availability and rates across all the on-line booking sites like Expedia and Booking.com and Hotels.com and on and on. Turns out this channel manager, Prestige Software, stored 24 GB of names and emails and credit card data and reservation records -- 10 million log files going back to 2013 -- in a misconfigured AWS S3 bucket -- storage space on Amazon’s cloud. The pandemic has massively accelerated companies moving from their own data centers to cloud services like Amazon and Microsoft. But sometimes it feels like the speed of that migration has overrun the skills of the teams supporting it.&nbsp; What can you do about it? In this case, not much. You would’ve booked your room on Expedia or Trivago and not known anything about something called a channel manager piping your data down to the hotel. We’ve talked about these breaches in so many past episodes. What I said then still stands: you need to be realistic -- it’s not <em>if</em> your personal data will get breached, it’s <em>when</em>. If you can, put your on-line purchases on a separate card and watch those transactions on the bank’s website or mobile app so you can quickly shut it down if you see something that doesn’t look right. I remember one time, years ago, seeing a Northwest Air flight from Tokyo to Beijing show up on my card. Struck me as odd because I was in Chicago with no plans to be in Asia. Immediately called the bank, disputed the charge, and they closed down the card. Interesting thing is that the crook had booked an economy class ticket. You’d think if you’re going to risk it, go big -- book the front of the plane -- business class if not first.&nbsp;</li><li>The quarantine theater we talked about in the last episode just keeps keeping on. Chicago now has 43 states on its list, 31 of which have <em>lower</em> COVID rates than Chicago. And, I guess in admission that no one’s paying attention, they’re moving from weekly updates to every other week. I guess ‘cause there’s not that many more states they can add. New York gave up on its quarantine list when COVID rates in neighboring Connecticut and New Jersey qualified them for the list. \"There will be no quarantine list, there will be no metrics,\" Governor Cuomo says. Everyone needs to test negative, except for people coming in from Connecticut, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania because, at some point, you just gotta be realistic. Especially in the face of this, what is it, a third wave? I’ve lost count.</li><li>And just to show how deeply all of this -- the quarantine, the lack of travel has gotten me, here’s a fun game I now play with my Google Mini.&nbsp;I dug around in the Google Home app and found where I can change the voice. I’ll switch to the British Racing Green voice to check the weather in London and then click over on Sydney Harbour Blue to check the weather there. Then I flip back to the default voice to get the weather at the Googleplex. And, of course, I ask it to play TravelCommons.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter message</a> to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> or our <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a> account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge music —&nbsp;<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Psykick/52938\">Another Way</a>&nbsp;by Psykick (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Psykick/52938</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3><strong>Holiday Gift Guide for the Pandemic Traveler</strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Like I mentioned at the top of the show, hearing public health officials saying things like “it will be easily by the end of 2021 and perhaps into the next year before we start having some semblance of normality” got my attention; got me thinking that this year’s travel gift guide needs to be a bit different. So I flipped through my 2020 travel journal, thought back through all of my post-lockdown travel to come up with my top shopping ideas for your pandemic travelers.</li><li>Check out this year\'s pandemic gift guide on the front page of the TravelCommons\' website or <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times\">here </a>at https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/2879\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Slinky Blues</a> by Admiral Bob (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/28792 Ft: unreal_dm</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3><strong>End of Year “Don’t Leave Me” Offers</strong> </h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Back in September, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/09/19/podcast-167-6-months-on-why-keep-travel-cards/\" title=\"Podcast #167 — 6 Months On; Why Keep Travel Cards?\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">episode #167</a>, we talked with <a href=\"https://www.lendingtree.com/writer/matt-schulz/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Matt Schulz, chief credit analyst at LendingTree</a>, about travel credit cards. Matt told us that their late summer surveys showed trends toward people canceling travel cards and cashing out points. But then earlier this week, <a href=\"https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-11-10/amex-says-its-cardholders-are-stockpiling-their-points-and-miles\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">American Express’ CFO said that their card customers <em>weren’t</em> cashing out points, and instead stocking them up to travel</a>.&nbsp; The two comments aren’t necessarily at odds. If you’re laid off, you can use those miles to buy groceries or clothes via gift cards or on Amazon. But if you don’t have to, the best value you’ll get for those points will be on travel. You’ll get less than a penny a point when cashing out Amex points on Amazon, but you can double that when you use them to book flights on, say, Singapore Air or KLM.&nbsp; So the hoarding makes sense -- if you can.</li><li>One of Matt’s points in our interview was that card companies will continue to tweak their rewards to keep people holding and using their cards because travelers are a valuable customer segment because, well, they typically spend chunks of money to travel. So as we come up on the end of the year, it’ll be interesting to see what those tweaks will be. Chase keeps extending the 5x grocery and gas bonus on their Southwest card while <a href=\"https://thepointsguy.com/news/amex-platinum-current-offer/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amex just announced a <em>10x</em> grocery and gas bonus as well as a 75K sign-up bonus for their Platinum card</a>.</li><li>Airlines and hotels are also rolling out their year-end offers. Back in the spring, all the majors gave existing status holders a push, extending elite expiration dates to Jan 2022 to keep them in the fold. So that settled everyone down for 2020. But now, with 2021 coming up and travel still in the hole, we’re starting to see new offers.<a href=\"http://news.aa.com/news/news-details/2020/Rewarding-AAdvantage-Members-With-More-Benefits-and-Flexibility-in-2021-AADV-10/default.aspx\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"> American opened the bidding last month</a>, knocking 20% off of 2021 status qualifying mileage clip levels (e.g., 40,000 instead of 50,000 to qualify for AAdvantage Platinum) and trying to get whatever they can for this year by counting October (last month), November, and December flights&nbsp; towards earning status in 2021, which is then good through Jan 2023. This afternoon, I got an email from <a href=\"https://hub.united.com/2020-11-12-united-airlines-makes-it-easier-to-earn-mileageplus-premier-status-for-2022-2648871852.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">United announcing their deal</a>. United’s status qualification methodology has gotten ridiculously complex over the past couple of years, but by at least one of their metrics, it looks like they’re dropping their status qualifying point (PQP -- don’t ask) clip levels by at least 30% <em>and</em> offering double points for flights taken in Q1 -- January, February, March -- next year. <a href=\"https://newsroom.hilton.com/hilton-honors/news/hilton-honors-adds-flexibility-value-for-members\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Hilton, though, made the simplest and deepest offer</a> -- knocking 50% off of all status qualifying measures -- stays, nights, points -- boom, mike drop.</li><li>It makes sense. Most statused travelers are business travelers and depending on which CEO is talking, business travel is down 85% (Delta), 90% (Southwest), and will be 3-4 years before it’s back to pre-pandemic levels (United). And those business travelers are the airlines’ and hotels’ most profitable customers. So expect to see Delta and Southwest and Marriott announcements soon, and maybe again this time next year if that “Well, it’s probably more like the end of 2021 or maybe into the beginning of 2022 before things start feeling normal” forecast turns out to be true.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3><strong>Closing</strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #169</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li>As I mentioned at the end of the last episode, I restructured the RSS feed a bit so that I shouldn’t accidently trigger any more episode re-downloads. And I moved the episode number from the title to its own XML tag just to clean up how everything looks in your podcast app. Also, a few months ago, I tweaked the production workflow to add chapter markers in each episode. So, if your app supports them (Apple Podcasts and Overcast do), you can skip forward to the next section or, if you wanted to go back and listen to, say, the interview with Emily Thomas, you can go straight to it.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>, as well as asking Alexa and Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_169.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers','','inherit','closed','closed','','2936-revision-v1','','','2021-03-04 21:48:49','2021-03-05 02:48:49','',2936,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/04/2936-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3392,1,'2021-03-04 21:57:24','2021-03-05 02:57:24','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/IMG_0822-scaled.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2810 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/IMG_0822-300x278.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"278\" /></a>\n<figcaption>Reindeer are ruining my cabin porn</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p>Trying to plan an August trip amidst dueling state quarantine lists and rapid lockdown changes while writing off my September plans for Barcelona. What\'s worse - hotels cutting back on housekeeping or breakfasts? And talking with <a href=\"https://emilythomaswrites.co.uk/about/\">Emily Thomas</a> about her new book <i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"https://amzn.to/2DO07fV\">The Meaning of Travel: Philosophers Abroad</a>. </span></i>All this and more, or listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below or by following this<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_166.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"> <strong>direct link</strong></a> to download the podcast file .</p>\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #166: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after managing to front-run the city’s quarantine order on Wisconsin. Went up to Milwaukee to meet up with some friends and do a bit of biking a couple of weekends before the Chicago Health Department added Wisconsin to their list of 22 states where you’re required to self-quarantine for 14 days after returning from a trip. Mind you, they’re not setting up roadblock checkpoints like New York City is -- at least not as of the time of this recording. Reasonable people can differ on this -- New York’s governor claimed similar efforts back in March by Rhode Island and Florida aimed at New Yorkers were “unconstitutional” but seems OK with it when it’s pointed the other way -- but it does make travel planning for law abiding citizens a bit more of a challenge. And making me wonder about our downsizing move into Chicago last year -- was missing the yard, the extra rooms, and the basement gym in the suburbs during the lockdown earlier in the year; now after Chicago’s quarantine rules, am missing freedom of travel.</li><li>All this adds a couple orders of magnitude of complexity to our efforts to plan a week out of the city in a couple of weeks. Not only do we need to check Chicago’s quarantine list, but also the quarantine plans of any potential destinations. While New York isn’t on Chicago’s quarantine list, Illinois is on New York’s. Mapping it all out, we take the “clean destination” intersection of that quarantine Venn diagram and then look at what restrictions are in those places; if nothing’s open, it’s not worth traveling there. I’ve eaten more meals in my hotel rooms over the past 3 months than I have in the last couple of years.&nbsp;</li><li>But things are changing so fast, that even after you figure out what’s open now, we then start following local papers on Twitter to get any early warnings on new restrictions. Which also means paying a lot more attention to hotel cancellation policies than I ever did. And then overloading our itinerary with outdoor activities like hiking and biking so last-minute closures or restrictions don’t leave us with nothing to do. Which means spending more time trolling the AccuWeather and Weather Channel web sites because an outside-heavy itinerary is more vulnerable to big storm fronts and hurricanes. And to think I used to bitch about having to navigate TripAdvisor ratings.</li><li>Bridge Music — funkyGarden by Jeris (c) copyright 2020 Licensed under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/VJ_Memes/61356 Ft: airtone, SackJo22, Analog By Nature</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3><strong>Following Up</strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>First, a couple of shout-outs to folks who are helping me spread the word about the podcast</li><li>Thanks to GHLGB, an apparently long-time TravelCommons listener, who gave us a 5-star iTunes review the day after the last month’s episode dropped, writing:<ul><li>“Mark does a great job of relating the world of the road warrior with a bit of branching out to those of us who are miles and points nutty. Always a calm and reasonable voice one that’s been in my ears for four years”</li><li>Thanks for that. I appreciate the words, and the effort of wading through the iTunes interface to leave them</li></ul></li><li>Also, in last month’s episode, I mentioned Kev Monteith, a TravelCommons listener and Amtrak travel blogger, but didn’t thank him for calling us out in his <a href=\"https://travelswithkev.com/kevs-favorite-podcasts/\"><em>2020 Favorite Podcast</em> list</a> on his <a href=\"https://travelswithkev.com/\"><em>Travels With Kev</em> website</a>. So, I’m fixing that right now. Thanks, Kev! Check out the show notes for links to his site.</li><li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/06/09/podcast-164-first-post-lockdown-trips-travel-credit-cards/\">episode #164</a>, we talked about how hotels are pulling back on housekeeping during stays -- the Hampton Inn in Spring Hill, TN said they’d be 3 days between room visits while the Residence Inn up the road in Franklin said 7 days, which seems a bit excessive; more like a COVID-washing a cost-cutting move. Replacing the breakfast buffet with a “grab-&amp;-go” breakfast bag makes all the sense in the world, but here again, hotels are grabbing the opportunity to trim costs. Most of what I’ve seen is a brown lunch bag with a bottle of water, a NutriGrain breakfast bar, and an apple -- a banana if I’m lucky. But the Residence Inn in Wauwatosa, WI, just outside of Milwaukee, was having none of that a couple of weeks back. You had 4 options for the main breakfast course in your bag -- a turkey and waffle sandwich, a peanut and strawberry sandwich, an egg and cheese quiche, or one of 13 kinds of cereal boxes, accompanied by your choice of chocolate milk, or orange or apple juice. I’m not passing judgement on the food choices, but I was awfully impressed by their ambition -- yeah, we can’t lay out a breakfast buffet spread, but we’re gonna try our damndest to give you a decent alternative. I just had to give the turkey &amp; waffle sandwich a go. I had visions of a <a href=\"https://twitter.com/trev4president/status/857776562615308288\">Fyre Festival-like trainwreck of a sandwich</a> -- a deli slice of turkey breast between two Eggo waffles. But it was a little more reasonable -- a small wrapped sandwich of turkey sausage between two small waffles, meant to be heated in the microwave. I grabbed it on the way out for a bike ride, so missed the microwave step, which, I think, was critical. But like I said, I give that RI team huge props for the effort.</li><li>But outside the Wauwatosa gang, if this stripped down hotel service stays the norm for the next 12-18 months, it’s probably going to drive some big changes in the year-end traveler gift guides -- shifting from Away luggage and Aesop travel kits, last year’s big recommendations, to sets of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3izWHMJ\">wine tumblers</a>, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2PIgihg\">collapsible bowls</a>, and <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3an6BhJ\">camping mess kits</a>. And, of course, all sorts of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/30NAqF2\">upscale sporks</a>.</li><li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/03/21/podcast-161-new-crisis-old-question-driving-down-to-key-west/\">episode #161</a>, at the end of March, still in a bit of shock from the COVID lockdown and trying to figure out how long it was going to last, I said “I’m nothing if not an optimist. In the midst of this week’s unraveling, I found a deal on a direct American Air flight from ORD to Barcelona — 8½ hr 787 flight — so I booked it — 2 weeks in Barcelona at the end of September.”&nbsp; But here we are five months later and as we all know, things haven’t “re-raveled”. At the beginning of July, American announced that <a href=\"https://liveandletsfly.com/american-airlines-international-reset/\">direct 787 ORD-BCN flight won’t restart until next summer.</a> I checked our reservation on the AA iPhone app after I read this. It still showed us on that direct flight -- until I clicked through, which then, I guess, forced the app to pull the latest information from Dallas, and now showed us flight BA through Heathrow. Not that it really matters. The EU isn’t letting Americans in any time in the near future, and, last time I checked, Barcelona is in a voluntary lockdown because of a new spike in COVID cases. News articles are showing <a href=\"https://time.com/5876132/europe-coronavirus-second-wave/\">shuttered-up stalls at the La Boqueria market</a>; like I said earlier, if nothing’s open, why go? It was a gamble, and really, not even a big one. There’s no change fee, so it’s a push. We won’t lose any money -- unless American goes belly-up, but that’d never happen -- would it?!</li><li>Last year, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/podcast-150-travel-interruptus/\">episode #150</a>, (these show notes are gonna be chock full of backlinks), I talked about switching my carryon bag -- from a Timbuk2 backpack to a <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3izS991\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Timbuk2 messenger bag</a>. I gave two reasons for the switch: I wanted to carry something a little smaller that would stand up under a plane seat; and I wanted a non-black interior, I kept losing things in my backpack -- <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3iDWIiu\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">my tablet</a>, my Bose headphone case. But also because the backpack was breaking down a bit - the seam on one of the side pockets had blown out and one of the strap clips had broken. I was going to pitch it during our last downsizing binge before moving into the city and a friend said “You know, <a href=\"https://www.timbuk2.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Timbuk2</a> bags have <a href=\"https://www.timbuk2.com/pages/warranty-repairs\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">lifetime warranties</a>.” Huh. So I hung onto it because I still like the bag. And about 14 months later, I finally got around to sending it back to them in San Francisco. I wasn’t sure if they’d re-opened their factory, so I was ready for it to take awhile for them to process the bag and repair it. Tracking the package, I could see they received it on a Friday. I got a note from them the following Monday saying they’d inspected it and yes, it was covered by the warranty, and had the bag back in my hands that Saturday. I have to tell you that I am pretty damned impressed. I won’t be switching back from my messenger bag, but I have found that the backpack can carry 4 four-packs of 16-oz cans, perfect when I’m biking a circuit of Chicago microbreweries using curbside no-contact pick-up to grab whatever’s their newest thing. Timbuk2 is definitely “TravelCommons Approved.”</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — Xena\'s Kiss / Medea\'s Kiss by mwic (c) copyright 2018 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mwic/58883</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3><strong>The Meaning of Travel</strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>This seems to be <em>the</em> existential question for a lot of travelers -- why do we travel? -- now that can’t, or at least can’t as easily and, well thoughtlessly is too strong a word, but when we could travel without having to plan as much. It’s been a whipsaw -- from overtourism to <a href=\"https://skift.com/2020/06/05/travel-sector-remains-thorn-in-a-falling-u-s-unemployment-rate-defying-expectations/\">36% unemployment in the travel and hospitality sector in the the US</a> -- so a bit soul-searching/navel-gazing is to be expected, if not encouraged. So when I saw the new book, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2DO07fV\"><em>The Meaning of Travel: Philosophers Abroad</em></a> by <a href=\"https://www.dur.ac.uk/research/directory/staff/?id=15319\">Dr. Emily</a> <a href=\"https://emilythomaswrites.co.uk/\">Thomas</a>, associate professor in philosophy at Durham University in the UK, immediately bought it and read it -- and then thought that I needed to have her on the podcast. Lucky for me, she’s a very nice person and agreed to spend a bit of time talking about “the meaning of travel”. It was a fun conversation; I hope you enjoy it.<ul><li>Mark: I\'ve got to admit that, as an engineer and an IT guy, my philosophy knowledge pretty much starts and ends with buying a T shirt that said “I Drink Therefore I Am.” It was a fundraiser for the Philosophy club for my undergrad. Emily, the first chapter “Why Do Philosophers Care About Travel” got me because you get straight into a topic we\'ve discussed often on the TravelCommons podcast about how travelers build travel bubbles around themselves. They isolate themselves from the places that they traveled to. Oftentimes they do it in the name of efficiency, maybe to keep themselves safe from experiencing what you call the “otherness of travel.” What do philosophers say about that difference between everyday journeys and traveling?</li><li>Emily: So, I think the difference between these kinds of everyday journeys, like popping to the grocery store, visiting your grandmother and what we think of as travel lies in how much unfamiliarity or otherness we experience along the way. And it seems to me that when I popped to the grocery store, everything is super familiar. I know how things work; I know the roads; I know the products I\'m going to buy. If I were to go grocery shopping in an unfamiliar country, that experience is going to be really different. I don\'t know how the roads work anymore; I don\'t necessarily recognize the writing on the signs of the products; I may not understand the languages that I\'m overhearing. And so, an everyday experience becomes much more unfamiliar. And then seems to be much more about travel in the deeper sense. And several philosophers, including folks like <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9_Descartes\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">René Descartes</a> and <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_de_Montaigne\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Michel de Montagne</a>, have talked about how the benefits of travel lie in experiencing otherness, that this broadens your mind, that it forces you to think past the familiar everyday world of your experience and think about how things might be otherwise, how they could be in other places and they think that\'s a really good thing.Frequent travelers often build travel bubbles around themselves that isolates them from the places they travel to; doing it in the name of efficiency,  but also perhaps to keep themselves safe from experiencing what philosophers call “the otherness” of travel</li><li>Mark: I was thinking about this -- is there a spectrum of otherness? I\'ve got the complete travel bubble at one end; in the middle, curated sidebar experiences -- you find a local restaurant, or hunting down a microbrewery or a taproom in a not-great section of town that you would not normally go; and then at the other end, full immersion – I live here, I’ve got a flat.</li><li>Emily: I definitely think there\'s a spectrum. And you can imagine, in your bubble, it might not be the full-blown experience of taking all the same clothes with you and you using all familiar airports. But even if you have your laptop and your mobile phone with you, part of the way that you\'ll be connecting with the world is through these really familiar mediums. Maybe you\'re going there, and you\'re still using Trip Advisor to look for recommendations like you would back home or you\'re still using Google maps to navigate your way around the streets. And again, I think that\'s going to provide you with this kind of buffer between you and the unfamiliar.</li><li>Mark: Later on in the book, you riff on <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_David_Thoreau\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Henry David Thoreau</a> and<em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/33SYvw3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"> Walden</a></em> and <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3kEGjw6\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Cabin Porn</a> and Solitude. When the lock down started, I just decided I was going to dig into some early American literature that I had been threatened with in high school and college but never really got into. And so I kind of flipped a coin between Thoreau and Whitman\'s <em>Leaves of Grass</em> and, heads so it was Thoreau. I will admit I did this in the beginning of April, and I still have not finished <em>Walden</em> yet, and here we are in August. So it has been a bit of a slog, but I\'m still working it. But before I get into that, I gotta ask – “cabin porn.” That\'s a new one on me – the term, not so much the porn. But the term <em>cabin porn</em>, what is that?</li><li>Emily: And so despite what you might think (laughter), Cabin Porn refers to photography of beautiful, isolated cabins. So, picture wood-built cabins nestled in the woods with smoke curling from the chimney. Or maybe they are stone cottages perched on the edge of a cliff, looking out over a crevasse. And there’s this whole industry dedicated to people taking photographs of these gorgeous cabins. The idea is that they\'re kind of aspirational. If you stick these into Google images, you will find some of the most astounding dwellings; places that you can rent and live for a little. <em>Walden</em> seemingly kicked this whole thing off. So, Thoreau describes building a cabin in the woods by Walden Pond and while the book can be a little bit of a slog in places, there are beautiful bits of the book. When he\'s describing living in nature in this really kind of rustic way, lots of people credit their cabin aspirations to <em>Walden</em>.</li><li>Mark: What is the strain about solitude and travel and in the balance with “otherness”?</li><li>Emily: Solitude is often held up is one of the things we can get through travel that\'s hard to get home. Although it seems like you can go out into a crowded cafe or a bar and be alone there, it seems like it\'s much easier to do that by venturing out into wilderness, that you\'re not going to meet other human beings and you have objects in front of you – trees, plants, creatures – that you can connect with. So the idea is that you\'re not being solitary in the sense of just introspection, but you\'re also connecting with some part of the world around you. It might in turn cause you to reflect on that world, and then your own part in that wider network. And that\'s very much what Thoreau is all about. He thinks that being alone in wilderness allows you to better understand wilderness and your own part in the wider universe.</li><li>Mark: I often find when I\'m traveling, it is kinda easy to hold yourself at a distance, especially if, where you are, you don\'t speak that language. It\'s almost like white noise.</li><li>Emily: Yes, when you spend large chunks of time without hearing words that you understand is a strange experience. I think it allows you to focus on other things. I think then you end up paying more attention, maybe to like the sights and the smells, the things that you can understand. I quite enjoy it, actually, the experience of being somewhere and not understanding anything that\'s going on.</li><li>Mark: (laughter) The only challenge, though, is because you\'re so used to people saying things and you don\'t understand it that you just don\'t listen. And then when you actually come back to the UK or the US and people are talking to you and you\'re just so used to tuning them out, just like “Oh, wait, you said something to me?” There was another piece in the book that you talked about global homogenization. And I\'ve felt this, I would say over the past 10-15 years. I started traveling a lot in the mid-80’s, back in the Dark Ages. In that chapter you talk about that it\'s an old complaint. You talk about Rousseau bitching about it, and John Stuart Mills…. Are we just repeating the same thing?</li><li>Emily: So, people like Mills and Rousseau are writing a couple of hundred years ago, and they are bitching about how Paris and Rome “seemed to me to be the same city” and reading this now, it just seems so implausible! I am sure that a large part of this feeling has to do with context. I would imagine that these men are moving in intellectual circles and then they\'re going to be around people who speak the same kind of languages, and value the same kind of things that you would like to hope that if they had broken free of those circles that they might have found things that were more unfamiliar. I do suspect that the world has been becoming more the same now than it was before, and simply because of the rise of global companies – that was just not around before. And the idea that you can go into a city and find the same shops and restaurants that you do back home is really strange. I mean, that would not have been there back in the 17th and 18th centuries. That said, I do think what we were talking about before – using technology to find your way around – I think that\'s going to give you the impression that things are all the same because you\'re looking at them through the same medium. That is an illusion. The real world is not all the same. New York is very different than Paris. Something in the US that I personally am really fond of is investigating small towns that are not listed in guidebooks, in search of what Bill Bryson once described as Anywhere, USA. I really enjoy that. Seeing how these small towns do differ from each other, but also what they have in common. For me, there\'s a reall attraction in that, especially in the US.</li><li>Mark: Are there any that are top of the list for you?</li><li>Emily: Yes, <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silverton,_Colorado\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Silverton, Colorado</a>. I enjoyed that enormously. As a British tourist, so much of it is totally unfamiliar, even though I got the impression that, to the people who lived there and are from Colorado, this is all just par for the course. It’s regular looking houses, it’s regular looking shops that, as is a non-American trying the local bars, seeing the local kind of pancake breakfast, all of this was completely new and really stunningly beautiful.</li><li>Mark: Just to wrap up, if you look forward and you think about philosophy and travel, what are some of the new things that philosophers are thinking about on travel?</li><li>Emily: I think the big thing right now it is the ethics of climate change and how best to travel responsibly. I think that issue is going to dwarf everything else in the philosophy of travel for several decades to come. Whether or not we are partaking in carbon off-setting schemes is enough, whether or not we should be looking to educate ourselves more about the places that we travel, possibly even traveling less but aiming for higher quality experiences. I think that stuff is really going to dominate. However, there is other stuff going on too. Looking at the issues posed by space travel and space tourism, which I don\'t think is that far away, actually. I mean in the immediate decades, it\'s going to be the province of the super wealthy, but I think past that it will become more and more accessible and that\'s also going to pose some ethical issues like the cost of fuel to get people up out of the atmosphere is gonna be enormous. But also, that will prompt us to think about our place in the world. I obviously have not been up into space, but were I to go, I imagine it would cause me to reflect on how little the planet Earth is in the grand scheme of things. And I wonder whether that will lead us to reconsider our place in the world and how we\'re treating the planet that we live on. I think space travel is going to be really rife with opportunities for philosophical reflection.</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3><strong>Closing</strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #166</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_166.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #166 — What Is The Meaning of Travel?','','inherit','closed','closed','','2807-revision-v1','','','2021-03-04 21:57:24','2021-03-05 02:57:24','',2807,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/04/2807-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3394,1,'2021-03-04 22:02:06','2021-03-05 03:02:06','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/IMG_2073.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2789 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/IMG_2073-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\n<figcaption>The hop taste isn\'t coming through</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p>My first post-lockdown flight was a 90-minute Southwest non-stop from Chicago to Nashville. It wasn\'t bad, but not as casually easy as my last pre-coronavirus flight in February. We talk about that experience as well as Hertz\'s new cleaning program, my latest pair of Bose noise-cancelling headphones, and then wonder when business travel will return. All this and more at the<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_165.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"> <strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #165: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after a couple of runs back down to Nashville for family stuff -- one in the air and the other on the ground. And with COVID cases spiking in vacation spots like California and south Florida, it seems like that’s the market segment -- folks traveling to see friends and family -- that the airline and hotel companies are banking on. And that’s most of what I saw when flying back from Nashville a few Thursdays ago -- lots of families with kids, groups of people meeting up on the other side of security for maybe some 4 day-weekend trips? The tip-off for me on the business vs. leisure traveler mix was the TSA lines -- solid lines for regular TSA, while I pretty much walked straight through PreCheck. Another tip-off used to be mid-day lines at the bars, but with most of the airport restaurants closed up, that’s not a valid indicator right now.</li><li>Traveling right now requires a bit of nimbleness. On my first post-lockdown trip in May, the workout room at the Spring Hill Hampton Inn was open and I used it every day. Back down in June, there was a piece of paper taped to the door -- “Closed by order of the Health Department”. The front desk agent told me it was a couple of days old -- which explained all the banging in the room above me; somebody must’ve been doing their HIIT workout in their room. I didn’t know if I should be annoyed or impressed at how long they went at it. So for this last trip, I called the hotel the night before I left, before I packed my gym clothes vs. a yoga mat. They told me that they’d just reopened the workout room the day before, so the yoga mat went back in the closet.&nbsp;</li><li>It’s kinda the same very fluid situation right now with bars and restaurants. A few days before we got to Nashville, the mayor closed down any establishment with less than 50% of their sales in food, so pretty much all the bars and taprooms. Makes sense, not arguing it; just forced us to quickly pivot some of our plans. It also forced us to go a bit “old school”, back to making actual phone calls, asking “are you open; dine-in or just take-away?” since places seem to be having trouble updating their websites and their Facebook/Yelp/Google/OpenTable listings fast enough to keep up with the changes.</li><li>It proved out our decision to book the Residence Inn rather than the mainline Marriott a few blocks away. The full-size fridge held a lot more beer, and that kitchenette came in handy when we found out that<a href=\"https://www.princeshotchicken.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"https://www.princeshotchicken.com/\"> Prince’s Hot Chicken</a> was only doing take-away -- I can’t imagine trying to eat an extra-hot half-chicken perched on a king-size bed.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/JeffSpeed68/54450\">Hula Hoop Party</a> by Stefan Kartenberg (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. &nbsp;Ft: Martijn de Boer, Blue Wave Theory</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3><strong>Following Up</strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Lots has been written about how the COVID pandemic has massively accelerated changes toward contactless transactions. Microsoft’s CEO famously said back in April “We’ve seen two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months”.&nbsp; Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #136 — Is Cash A Waning King; Don’t Make It Hard to Cash in on Loyalty\">episode #136</a>, I said I felt like the last generation of cash payers, that my younger colleagues rarely carried cash; they paid for everything with a card. Looking into my wallet, I had the same $200 worth of 20’s in June that I’d taken out of an ATM in March. Nobody wants to handle cash; they don’t even want to handle my card (Most extreme experience - A bartender at Asgard Brewing’s taproom in Columbia, TN sprayed my Visa card with diluted chlorine bleach before swiping it to pay my bill. Made my wallet smell like a swimming pool). As much as possible, places want us to pre-order and pre-pay, so we just pick up our purchases in a socially distant way and then head home. It’s also switched up some opinions on using facial recognition for flight check ins. Pre-coronavirus, the push was from governments as a better way to do security screenings and to improve immigration compliance, and this was getting big pushback on privacy concerns. Now, it’s pivoted. The push is from travel companies using facial recognition as a way of providing the touchless check-in experience that most travelers now want.&nbsp;</li><li>But facial recognition is stymied by face masks which we wear when we’re checking in at airports and hotel lobbies. As is Face ID when trying to unlock my iPhone to get to my boarding pass or digital room key. Until I can downgrade to an iPhone SE with that old-school Touch ID that unlocks using my thumb print, I think I’m going to have to shorten the PIN code on my iPhone 11 Pro. I lengthened it for better security but am banging it in more and more often. And I’ve noticed the iPhone is really slow about recognizing my number presses -- or it misses some when I go too fast (like when I’m trying to pull up a boarding pass in line) and errors out.&nbsp;</li><li>Walking down the Hertz Five Star aisle at Nashville Airport, I saw their version of paper rings that hotels used to put around toilet seats to “certify” they’d been cleaned. In Hertz’s case, they put a “<a href=\"http://ir.hertz.com/2020-05-15-Hertz-Introduces-Hertz-Gold-Standard-Clean-Sealed-and-Certified-Vehicles\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Hertz Gold Standard Clean</a>” sticker across the driver-side center pillar (the B pillar for all my gearhead listeners) so that you break it when you open the driver door to get it. Nice gesture, though it kept me from doing my usual walk down the aisle, opening the door of a bunch of cars to check their mileage. Seemed rude to break all those stickers, though I did notice more than a few broken ones when choosing my car. Way back in the old days of TravelCommons, we used to talk about the TSA doing “security theater” in the screening lines. This feels a bit like “sanitation theater”.&nbsp;</li><li>I finally broke down and bought a new set of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2BbOqyA\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bose noise cancelling headphones -- the new 700’s</a>. This is my third set of Bose cans. Bought my first pair in 2009. I was flying a lot of short flights at the time, and in those days before regional jets, I was on a lot of prop planes. And they’re noisy -- not just on take-off, but the entire flight. After a while, I started to notice fatigue when getting off those planes. Talking to a few folks, they said the noise heightens stress. A friend told me how much he liked his Bose cans, and so I burnt some Amex Membership Rewards points on Amazon for a pair of Quiet Comfort 2’s. It was a revelation; flick the switch and, whoosh, quiet. I took them on every flight, until 3 years later, I left them in a seatback pocket when rushing off a plane to make a tight connection. I immediately lit up some more Membership Rewards points for a new pair - <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3eF2iPk\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">QC-15’s</a>. Four years later, I replaced a worn out set of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2OwiIPF\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">ear cushions</a>. And though the non-replaceable headband cushion is looking pretty ratty, the now 8-year-old headphones still work great. What got me to replace them was the wire. I’d be sitting in my usual aisle seat, plugged into my iPhone (using one of those dongles that Apple no longer gives you with a new phone). At some point in the flight, the folks in the middle and window seats would want to get up and use the toilet and inevitably, I’d snag the wire on the arm of the seat, pull the headphones off my head, and/or launch my phone a row forward.&nbsp; I could’ve gotten a pair of the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3eFWLYJ\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">QC-35’s</a> -- same form factor without the wire -- but decided to go all next-generation with the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2BbOqyA\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">700’s</a>, which has meant some adjustment pains. Like there are buttons in places where they never were before. So when I grab the ear cups to slip the headphones off, I manage to hit a button that changes the noise reduction level or summons Siri. Also new is using the touch surface on the right ear cup to control things. You tap or swipe the right ear cup to accept or drop a call, pause a song, raise or lower the volume, or skip 30 seconds to fast-forward past a podcast ad. I’m learning to be a bit more precise in my motions; I’ve already dropped a couple of calls when I was just trying to turn down the call volume.&nbsp; One thing I really like -- more for working-at-home than in-flight usage -- is that the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2BbOqyA\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">700’s</a> can pair with two Bluetooth devices at the same time. So, for me, I have them paired with my MacBook Air and my iPhone and they switch seamlessly between the two. Nice when I’ve got Zoom calls on my Mac and then a phone call on my iPhone. And, call me shallow, but they look a bit cooler than my old <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3eF2iPk\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">QC-15’s</a>. I’ve had the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2BbOqyA\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">700’s</a> for about a month now and really like them. I guess you could say they’re “TravelCommons Approved.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/bridges/15563\">i knew</a> by bridges (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp;Ft: shannonsongs</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3><strong>First Post-Lockdown Flight</strong> </h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Way back at the beginning of the lockdown, the first Saturday of April, I was on a Zoom beer drinking call with Rob Cheshire, a long-time TravelCommons listener and now a podcaster -- he interviews UK craft brewers on his <em><a href=\"https://thisweekincraft.beer/podcast/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">This Week in Craft Beer</a></em>. It was a Saturday afternoon call, for Rob and the other guys in London; just past noon for me in Chicago, but hey…. And somewhere around our second or third beer, Rob asked me “When will you be comfortable getting on a plane again?” I really didn\'t have a good answer. It was early days; I wasn’t sure.</li><li>Fast forward to the back half of June. I needed to get down to Nashville again and didn’t have the time to burn 8 hrs for the drive down and another 8 on the way back. I had some travel funds sitting in my Southwest account from a couple of April trip cancellations, and Southwest flies 6 non-stop 737s between Chicago and Nashville while American and United only do smaller regional jets, and Southwest isn’t packing them full -- booking those bigger planes at ⅔’s capacity -- while American and United say they’ll let you know if your flight books solid. All told, a pretty easy decision to fly Southwest. One of the benefits of living in Chicago, a rare 3-hub town.</li><li>The day before my flight, when getting my boarding pass on the Southwest app (my usual process; I was contactless before it was a thing), I had to click through a certification that I wasn’t running a temperature and that I hadn’t been exposed to or tested positive for COVID-19. OK, click. Then I get a screen telling me that face masks are required to board. Makes sense, click. And now I get my boarding pass.</li><li>Monday morning, Irene drops me off at a pretty sedate departures curb at Midway. I mask up and walk in. It’s not empty, but it’s definitely not the normal Monday morning bustle. It feels more like a Wednesday early afternoon. There’s a bit of a line at regular security, but no line at PreCheck. The TSA agent asks me to drop my mask for a moment to check my ID and then waves me through. I noticed that TSA still has their October 2020 Real ID deadline warning signs on the podium. Hmm… I remember reading at the end of March that the TSA has <a href=\"https://www.dhs.gov/real-id\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">pushed the deadline a year to October 2021</a>. Guess they haven’t had a chance to issue updated signs. You’d think they’d just take the old ones down.</li><li>Most of the restaurants and stores were closed; a pretty common situation. Kev Monteith, a TravelCommons listener and <a href=\"https://travelswithkev.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amtrak travel blogger</a>, replied to one of my Twitter posts saying “I flew Southwest a few weeks ago. Layovers are rough because most places in the airports are closed. I was at STL and only found beer at Burger King and Dunkin Doughnuts.” I would’ve been happy for just a coffee. Down in the main Southwest concourse, some gates were closed off with curtains which I assume was to keep people from sitting there so they don’t have to clean it.</li><li>Looking around the terminal, it felt like mask usage was about 80%. Just about everyone was wearing them when walking around. I’d see some people not wearing them while sitting at the gate, though those folks were distancing themselves from everyone else. I’d see kids ripping their masks off as soon as they got off the jetway. I did notice, though, a sizable minority of mask wearers were just covering their mouths, leaving their noses uncovered -- pilots, cleaning crew, passengers, wheelchair people. Now I’m no epidemiologist, but that seems to defeat the purpose.</li><li>When the agent called boarding, she said “There’s 40 of you on a plane with 175 seats. So everyone gets their own row, and please, don’t everyone sit up front. We need a bit of weight distribution.” It was a quick boarding; we pushed back and took off early. These truly are unprecedented times.</li><li>Nashville was more crowded on Thursday morning when I headed back home. Mostly families as I said at the top of the show. The end of the concourse where the&nbsp; Southwest gates are was as crowded as usual. There were signs around saying that 3 seats between people equals 6 ft, but there were too many people waiting to make it practical; at least everyone is masked up. I walked back up the terminal to find a bit more space and there, tucked away behind some construction sheeting, I found an empty gate. I’m all alone, mega social distanced, so I take off my mask, log into the WiFi and do some work until the Southwest app on my phone bings, telling me that boarding has begun.&nbsp;</li><li>There were a lot more than 40 people on this flight. I found an empty row and slid all the way over to the window seat since it’s only a 90-minute flight. About 3 minutes later, a guy sat down in the aisle seat. Nobody in the middle seat. Everyone wearing masks and nobody’s head right next to mine, I was good to go. Maybe helped just a bit by the fact that, in those 3 minutes, I pointed all three air jets toward the empty middle seat and turned them on full blast, creating an air curtain between me and the aisle seat -- just in case.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/3lb3r3th/44072\">Misunderstood</a> by 3lb3r3th (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. &nbsp;Ft: Alchemistry</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3><strong>When Does Business Travel Come Back?</strong> </h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>My son Andrew and his girlfriend took the 6am flight to LGA earlier this week. I asked him “How full was the flight?” “Maybe 20 people; mostly families,” he said. Didn’t surprise me that a Thursday 6am LGA flight was only at 11% capacity. That’s normally a business travel run; people getting up at 0 dark 30 in Chicago to make 10am meetings in Manhattan. But there’s not many business travelers now.&nbsp; While business travelers only make up about 10% of passengers on major airlines, they provide between 55 and 75% of the profits. You might could think they’re subsidizing the budget fares those families are using.</li><li>Over the past month, I’ve been talking with Sales VPs at companies that deliver complex IT services. If anybody would be feeling the bite of not traveling, I thought it would be these guys. I’ve done a number of these deals, and they always involved locking all the right decision makers in a conference room to hash out all the contract details and ride herd over the transition. But I was completely wrong. They all said that work hasn’t slowed down during the lockdown. They’ve been able to do all that conference room work over Zoom. Indeed, they said being virtual has made it easier for them. Pre-lockdown, one of their biggest challenges was calendar wrangling -- being able to get all their execs and the client execs into that conference room at the same time. Now, they just click some buttons and everyone shows up in Zoom gallery mode -- no travel planning, no scrambling after cancelled or delayed flights. They all said they love the ease of virtual meetings and, at the end of the day, closing the lid on their laptops and having dinner with the family every night.</li><li>Kinda supports the narrative that business travel will never rebound; back to the Microsoft CEO’s quote: in 2 months, we’ve advanced 2 years in virtual work culture. But when I probed a bit, I found that Zoom hasn’t completely replaced an airplane ticket. While these guys have been able to virtually close deals they had in their sales funnel, virtual meetings don’t seem to be replacing these deals; getting new prospects into the top of the sales funnel. So while things are looking good now, they’re beginning to worry about 4-6 months from now.</li><li>This was the exact opposite of what I’d expected. I thought the give and take of negotiations, the sidebar conversations, the emotional content, wouldn’t translate into video calls. But it looks like I was wrong; that once a deal has some momentum and a structure to guide everyone, the in-person hammering out turns out to be a nice-to-have. And the reason new opportunities aren’t coming in is that they need more exploratory, abstract, wide-ranging conversations that lack that guiding structure and selling a team as much as a product -- at least for complex services -- and that’s tough to do over a pane of glass.</li><li>And so they all said that they’d probably start traveling again -- reluctantly -- by the end of this month. But I do think this, call it a 4-month exercise in figuring out virtual work methods and cultures will move the set point, everybody’s default decision toward virtual meetings. And so maybe a bit less focused on high-profit road warriors and more dependent on those cost-conscious families. Does this mean repointing the 6am LGA flights to Cancun? They’re going to have to seriously reengineer those drink carts.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3><strong>Closing</strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #165</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_165.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #165 — First Post Lockdown Flight; When Do We Travel For Business Again?','','inherit','closed','closed','','2788-revision-v1','','','2021-03-04 22:02:06','2021-03-05 03:02:06','',2788,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/04/2788-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3396,1,'2021-03-04 22:24:10','2021-03-05 03:24:10','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/DSC_6306-edit.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2770 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/DSC_6306-edit-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\n<figcaption>Can I leave my house now?</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p>I broke Chicago\'s containment for my first post-lockdown trip, a fast drive down I-65. We talk about hotels swapping hospitality for sanitation, Hertz\'s bankruptcy, and tips for travel credit card usage from Brett Holzhauer, the travel card expert at <a title=\"valuepenguin.com\" href=\"http://valuepenguin.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">ValuePenguin.com.</a> All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_164.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #164: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois, as the lockdown here is starting to lift. What’s open and what’s not is still a bit spotty, though I’ve managed to hit a couple of microbreweries with outdoor patios. The opening in Chicago is not dissimilar to what I experienced down in Tennessee last month. I was down in Spring Hill, south of Nashville, two weeks after the non-urban lockdown lifted -- for every place other than the cities of Nashville, Memphis, Knoxville, and Chattanooga. It seemed that everyone was still trying to figure out what to do -- the bar/pizza joint next to my hotel was fully open, but the local bar-be-que joints and the Starbucks were still only doing take-away. Which makes sense; it’s not like there’s a standard playbook on how to re-open an economy. And throughout my consulting career, I’ve learned it’s always easier to shut things down than to start them up.</li><li>The drive south on I-65 from Chicago is one that, I’m not gonna say I can do with my eyes closed, but I’ve been doing it for almost 40 years, starting when I was in business school at the University of Chicago and my family was living in Louisville, KY. I mean, there’s a clump of trees in the median between West Lafayette and Crown Point that’s a milestone for me; I know I’m an hour from home. Which just goes to show you how boring the drive through northern Indiana is when trees in the median are a notable feature.</li><li>The drive between Chicago and Nashville, while not the most exciting, especially through Indiana, it does usually require a bit of timing to thread through Chicago, Indianapolis, Louisville, and Nashville to avoid rush hour in each. On this trip, not so much. I left Chicago after breakfast and was driving 80 mph most of the way, maybe dropping down to 70 through the cities. And I was still getting passed by guys going aggressively faster. And the only time I saw police or state troopers was in front of big road construction sites, cars running with all their lights flashing in front of big barriers, more as a warning to speeders than an attempt to get them. It was, hands down, the easiest drive down I-65 I’ve ever done.</li><li>That wide-open drive may be one of the few things I’ll actually appreciate about this lockdown. Well, that and the $2/gallon gas along the way...</li><li>Bridge Music — Brilliant Day by Hans Atom (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hansatom/47919 Ft: Lisa DeBenedictis</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3><strong>Following Up</strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>First up, thanks to the TravelCommons listener who goes by the handle Abe Froman, Ferris Bueller’s sausage king of Chicago, for dropping a 5-star review on <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">our iTunes page</a>. Abe writes:<ul><li>“I have been a fan of this podcast for many years. If you are a road warrior or a mileage runner, you will love the tips to make your travel easier.”</li><li>Abe, thanks a lot for this.&nbsp; I’m glad you’ve enjoyed the podcast</li></ul></li><li>Last year in episodes <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/07/26/podcast-153-travel-by-algorithm-leaving-places-behind/\" title=\"Podcast #153 — Travel By Algorithm; Leaving Places Behind\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">153</a> and <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/09/20/podcast-155-rj-delays-street-food-in-poland-and-hungary/\" title=\"Podcast #155 — RJ Delays; Street Food in Poland and Hungary\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">155</a>, we talked about American Airlines’ retirement of their MD-80’s, the “Mad Dog 80”, the plane on which I earned my first Advantage status -- Gold, and there wasn’t anything higher back then. Last week, <a href=\"https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/delta-air-lines-md-80-last-flight/index.html\">Delta finally retired their last Mad Dogs</a> -- MD-88’s and -90’s. They were supposed to run through the end of the year, but with late ‘80’s technology and fuel efficiency, they were among the first planes in the fleet to be grounded when the lockdown hit. Delta said that “at their peak, the planes accounted for 50% of Delta’s arrivals and departures from” their Atlanta hub.&nbsp; Which will be a relief to longtime TravelCommons listener Darren Mak, who tweeted at me back at the beginning of March, a picture out the window seat of a Delta MD-88 just in front of the engine cowl, thanking me for mentioning, in episode <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/09/20/podcast-155-rj-delays-street-food-in-poland-and-hungary/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #155 — RJ Delays; Street Food in Poland and Hungary\">155</a>, that whenever I would end up in that same seat, I would wonder — if that engine blows up, will the shrapnel blow out or blow into the cabin. Well Darren, no more worries. We both survived the Mad Dog’s back seat.</li><li>We’ve talked in the past couple of episodes about the first post-lockdown trips would be by car -- more schedule flexibility; no worries of a stranger in the middle seat exhaling 18 inches away from you.&nbsp; CNBC ran <a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/31/five-charts-that-track-the-us-economy-as-states-reopen.html\">a story</a> last week analyzing the change in the number of requests for directions on Apple Maps in 2020. Using January 13th as the baseline for their comparison, requests for driving and walking directions dropped by 50% in the first month of the lockdowns, but had recovered by May 29th -- the last day of the data series. Transit direction requests had dropped by 75% and were still more than 50% down by the end of May. Now, using January 13th as the baseline probably exaggerates the recovery -- you’d think the number of walking and driving direction requests on a normal Memorial Day weekend would be hugely higher than for the second Monday of January when it was in or below the 30’s for about ⅔’s of the country -- but I don’t want to kill a green shoot with too much skepticism.</li><li>American talked about their own green shoots last week, saying they would be operating 55% of last year’s schedule in July, up from 20% in April and May. Driven mostly by demand from states opening up -- Texas, Florida, and Arizona -- rather than cities like New York, Chicago, and San Francisco that are still under stricter lockdown orders. If I keep pulling on this trend line, I’m thinking by September all those voluntary capacity limits and empty middle seat promises will have faded away.</li><li>The absence of update emails from airline and hotel CEOs this week I think is another green shoot. If things are starting to look up, no need to send me an email extending a bonus award offer or cancellation fee waivers. This has cut into a new hobby of mine, though -- comparing the use of \"in these uncertain times,\" \"in these challenging times,\" and “in these unprecedented times” in these emails. I have a stroke count going. Right now, “unprecedented” is the runaway leader, with “challenging” second, and “uncertain” third.</li><li>I’ve been a Hertz customer on and off over my 35-year travel career -- mostly on. I started my business traveling when I was at IBM, and in the mid-80’s, they had negotiated a smoking rate with Hertz. In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/09/15/podcast-144-outside-airports-hospitality-mentality\">episode 144</a>, I talked about getting to know the woman working in the little Hertz hut at SJC back then, when SJC was still an outdoor airport; and before Hertz Gold, that’s all I needed to get an upgrade. And more recently, I’ve, on balance, had good experiences with Hertz. So I was bummed for a moment when I saw they filed for bankruptcy last month. It wasn’t surprising, though. Hertz was still carrying a big debt load courtesy of a 2005 PE leveraged buyout, and we’ve talked in past episodes about how Uber and Lyft have been eating away at its core airport rental market. So, when travel stopped in March and used car auction prices cratered in April, Hertz tipped over. By now though, we’re kinda used to big travel companies cleaning their debt problems in bankruptcy -- United and American Airlines the most recent examples. So I’m not too worried about losing the rest of my Gold points. In the short term, though, I will be paying more attention to the mileage on the Hertz cars in the Five Star aisle. That’s where I usually see signs of financial distress -- a lot less 500-mile cars and a lot more 25,000-mile cars. And while 25,000 miles on a car doesn’t seem like a lot, remember that rental car miles are kinda like dog years -- you gotta multiply them by, like, 7 to get to regular car miles.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook page</a> or our Instagram account at <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">travelcommons</a> -- or you can post comments on the web site at <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">TravelCommons.com</a>.</li><li>Bridge Music — &nbsp;<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Suenjo/11162\">Natchoongi (New Hope Remix)</a>&nbsp;by Suenjo (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3><strong>First Post-Lockdown Trips</strong> </h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>As we talked about a few minutes ago, travel is starting to pick up as the lockdowns ease and people want to see something other than the 4 walls that have surrounded them since mid-March.&nbsp;</li><li>TravelCommons listener Mark Skinner dropped me a line towards the end of May about his first lockdown trip. You may remember Mark from <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/11/30/podcast-157-notes-from-the-baltics-riga-latvia-and-tallinn-estonia/\" title=\"Podcast #157 — Notes from the Baltics: Riga, Latvia and Tallinn, Estonia\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">episode 157</a> back in November when he wrote in to tell us about his day trip from Washington, DC to Hong Kong -- flying out Monday afternoon, returning Tuesday morning -- to take a NASA cosmic ray detector on an over-the-pole flight.&nbsp; This time, Mark writes -<ul><li>So I had my first trip this past week, since the “before times”. On the way back, I was listening to your recent podcast. Yes, my first trip was via automobile, down to the outer banks of North Carolina. Dare County had recently opened up (the day before!) to allow visitors into the county.&nbsp;</li><li>Stayed at the Hilton Garden Inn. No servicing of the room, and after a few days at this hotel on the beach, things were looking a little dingy. Tropical Storm Arthur squashed any hopes of long walks on the beach. Departed a day early because the storm wasn’t letting up. I thought this was a good use of Hilton points… Take-out only that week, and hotel not helping out by lending any china, glass or utensils. Ending up getting a couple of sets at a dollar store… I contrast this to my last trip in the before time, to Maui, just as things were buttoning up. The Grand Wailea was happy to provide all sorts of stuff to enjoy one’s take-out on the lanai! That trip got cut short as well, due to flights evaporating.&nbsp;</li><li>A highlight of the trip was stopping for lunch in Virginia Beach, which had recently opened out-door seating at restaurants, and enjoyed lunch at a seafood restaurant at an outside table, by the ocean, and greatly enjoyed ordering food and having it brought to the table! The previous “normal” meal had been first evening on Maui, before they went take-out only.&nbsp;</li><li>Next trip that is getting kicked around is Hilton Head in June…. that would involve flying. Crossing fingers about a trip to Austria in August…</li></ul></li><li>Mark, thanks for sending that along. Your experience on the Outer Banks was similar to mine down in Spring Hill, TN. I went back and forth about staying in a hotel vs. an Airbnb. Airbnb -- not as many people passing through the property and some time buffer (24 hours, 72 hours) between guests in the same rooms, but a major hotel chain should have the corporate resources to build out and maybe test a more thorough cleaning program for its properties; maybe with access to stronger, more industrial cleaners. Procrastination ended up making my decision -- while I was going back and forth, the Airbnb property in Spring Hill I was looking at got booked for the front of that week, so I ended up in the Spring Hill Hampton Inn -- another Hilton brand.</li><li>That Monday morning, right before I left Chicago, I checked in on the Hilton app. It even let me pick out my room. This may be old news to Hilton Diamond listeners, but I haven’t stayed in a Hilton for at least a year, and so haven’t been tracking their app improvements. When I arrived at 5:30pm, the front doors were locked, but opening up the app showed me a digital key that opened the front door and my room door. I didn\'t have to physically check in at the front desk which only struck me odd later that night. Whenever I’ve checked in on a hotel’s app before, I’ve still had to go to the front desk so they could see my ID, which was why I’ve never paid much attention to app check-ins. But at this Hampton Inn with full check-in and digital keys, it worked the way I’d always thought it should.</li><li>My in-room experience was the same as Mark’s -- nobody servicing the room, though a guy did stop by the room every now and again asking if I needed extra towels; no morning coffee or breakfast buffet, and eating mostly take-out in the room with some cans of local craft beer bought from the liquor store a couple of doors down. I was pretty rigorous about dumping the food trash right after eating. Waking up to the smell of 8-hour-old bar-be-que rib and cole slaw remnants is never a good start to the day. Hotels are saying it’s all about cleaning and sanitation, but I can’t say that I saw any out-of-the-ordinary efforts while I was there. Maybe what I was experiencing was the cost reductions to fund that behind-the-scenes deep cleaning.</li><li>While Mark’s highlight was his lunch in Virginia Beach, mine was being able to walk into a little family-owned craft beer joint in a strip mall on Spring Hill\'s Main St, order a beer, and then sit down and drink it at the bar. I go into this place every time I\'m there to visit my mother. Seeing them open was a nice little bit of normality -- especially since Chicago didn’t start opening up until last week.</li><li>Don\'t know my next trip yet, but I\'m keeping my eye on Spain, hoping there\'s no second wave before our trip to Barcelona at the end of September.</li><li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/53277\">Fistful of Dub</a>&nbsp;(Feat. Snowflake and DJ Vadim) by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. &nbsp;Ft: snowflake and DJ Vadim</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3><strong>Travel Credit Cards</strong> </h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>As we start traveling again, we’ll start pulling out those travel cards -- Hilton or Delta Amex, United or Southwest or Marriott Visas, American MasterCards -- and so I invited Brett Holzhauer, the travel card expert at <a href=\"http://ValuePenguin.com\" title=\"ValuePenguin.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">ValuePenguin.com</a>, a site that goes deep into these cards, to give us some of his advice as we “un-lockdown” ourselves. First up, he reads out the results of a recent survey on travel planning, and then talks about travel cards<ul><li>Mark: Brett, thanks for joining us on the TravelCommons podcast.</li><li>Brett: Thank you so much for having me. I\'m excited</li><li>Mark: Brett, I wanted to talk to you about a recent survey that ValuePenguin.com has done on travel planning. And we\'ve had sort of an arc through the past couple of episodes of the TravelCommons podcast around travel planning. As we think about post-lock-down/pre-vaccine where people are still concerned about coronavirus and Covid, but they gotta move on with their lives. So, in the survey that ValuePenguin did, where are people going?</li><li>Brett: One of the biggest notes was the amount of people going to Florida, and it\'s a couple of reasons: 1) good weather; 2) it\'s affordable; 3) there\'s a lot of the older generation that lives in Florida, so maybe people are itching to see their parents or grandparents or just older relatives. So, it\'s a mixture of all of those things leading to people wanting to travel to the beaches and get outside.</li><li>Mark: I think that kind of ties into some things we\'re seeing, which is more of a focus on outdoors with the theory that coronavirus transmission is less efficient outdoors than indoors. As a travel card expert, as people begin to travel again, what are some of the strategies as far as being able to maximize the value of the travel credit cards? Because really most frequent travelers already have got them in their wallets, at least one if not multiple award cards, but they\'ll tend to focus on maximizing award points.</li><li>Brett: So one of the biggest things that\'s gonna eventually happen is huge bonuses. These companies like Chase and American Express. They\'re gonna really incentivize people to get back on the road. So if you’re brand new into the Points and Miles game, this is a very good opportunity to start understanding how this whole thing works. So that way, when these big bonuses start coming out, you can find some really great bonuses to start your travels once again, maybe late 2020 or early 2021. So that\'s one thing, Number two, obviously, the uptick in in travel insurance. People can get travel insurance through credit cards.</li><li>Mark: Typically, what are the travel insurance capabilities?</li><li>Brett: A lot of credit cards beyond the big sign-up bonuses have travel insurance, and a lot of consumers either don\'t know that they have it, they forget, or they just don\'t really pay too much attention to it. I\'m going to use a personal example. My wife and I both have the American Express Platinum Card. It\'s a $550 annual fee, and your first thought is -- that\'s a lot of money to invest in a credit card. Is that really worth it? And beyond all of the perks and the sign-up bonuses, the travel insurance through that specific credit card is comprehensive. You get trip cancelation, trip interruption. Also, you get rental car insurance, and so it\'s it\'s important to know the difference between primary and secondary. If you do have a credit card that has primary car insurance, that will go first so your personal car insurance will not be affected.</li><li>Mark: I\'ve talked in a previous TravelCommons episode about my own personal experience with using the Chase Sapphire Visa that ended up covering an accident and St Andrews, Scotland. When I got back home, I filed with Chase. Took me a little bit, but I got full coverage on it.</li><li>Brett: There\'s also baggage insurance. Those are kind of the big ones. There\'s also emergency medical assistant. It\'s important to know that consumers have these protections. I just feel that a lot of times we have these cards in our wallets. We\'re overlooking the value proposition of what these cards can really do.</li><li>Mark: Let me pivot to your set up as a digital nomad. What are what are you up to?</li><li>Brett: My wife and I, we met in 2015. I knew on the first date that I was gonna marry her by some way, somehow and sure enough ended up happening.</li><li>Mark: Did she have that same sense, or was there some selling involved there?</li><li>Brett: No, we definitely sold each other. And we walked away from that first date knowing that what she sold me on was traveling. I had a traveler’s itch. She had the traveling bug. So really sold me on the idea of doing this full time travel. In July of 2019, we officially sold everything. We drove back to her parents house in Los Angeles. Then in August of 2019, we took a one way flight from LAX to Fiji. We bounced between 10 countries in 3.5 months. We returned home in December for the holidays from Japan back to Los Angeles. And we had the plan of leaving again in February, and everything unfortunately started to melt. So now we\'re stuck in Los Angeles just itching to get back on the road. But yeah, we love taking advantage of rewards. If it wasn\'t for credit card points of miles, we wouldn\'t be able to afford these types of travels.</li><li>Mark: So, when do you think you and your wife will head out next?</li><li>Brett: Yeah, so our plan was to go to Europe. Obviously, that\'s been immensely hit by Covid-19. So for us, luckily, so I\'m 26 years old, she\'s 24. We’re both very healthy, we’re of the mindset that life is a little bit risky, and you have to take those risks to get those rewards. So, we approach travel with that mentality that it is a risk. Everything in life is a risk -- walking across the street, driving your car So, there\'s always a risk to it. I think if I had to guess, probably August. But again, God forbid there\'s a second wind of coronavirus. We might be here for extended period of time, But, you know, we are very blessed and very privilege that we have parents that will take us in. And we have a free place to stay, which is nice to save up more money for travel and pay down on my student loan.</li><li>Mark: Brett Holzhauer, travel awards expert from ValuePenguin.com Thanks very much for taking the time to join us on the TravelCommons Podcast.</li><li>Brett: Thank you so much</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3><strong>Closing</strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #164</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_164.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #164 — First-Post Lockdown Trips; Travel Credit Cards','','inherit','closed','closed','','2771-revision-v1','','','2021-03-04 22:24:10','2021-03-05 03:24:10','',2771,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/04/2771-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3397,1,'2021-03-04 22:45:20','2021-03-05 03:45:20','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/DSC_6306-edit.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2770 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/DSC_6306-edit-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a><figcaption>Can I leave my house now?</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>I broke Chicago\'s containment for my first post-lockdown trip, a fast drive down I-65. We talk about hotels swapping hospitality for sanitation, Hertz\'s bankruptcy, and tips for travel credit card usage from Brett Holzhauer, the travel card expert at <a title=\"valuepenguin.com\" href=\"http://valuepenguin.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">ValuePenguin.com.</a>&nbsp;All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_164.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #164: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois, as the lockdown here is starting to lift. What’s open and what’s not is still a bit spotty, though I’ve managed to hit a couple of microbreweries with outdoor patios. The opening in Chicago is not dissimilar to what I experienced down in Tennessee last month. I was down in Spring Hill, south of Nashville, two weeks after the non-urban lockdown lifted -- for every place other than the cities of Nashville, Memphis, Knoxville, and Chattanooga. It seemed that everyone was still trying to figure out what to do -- the bar/pizza joint next to my hotel was fully open, but the local bar-be-que joints and the Starbucks were still only doing take-away. Which makes sense; it’s not like there’s a standard playbook on how to re-open an economy. And throughout my consulting career, I’ve learned it’s always easier to shut things down than to start them up.</li><li>The drive south on I-65 from Chicago is one that, I’m not gonna say I can do with my eyes closed, but I’ve been doing it for almost 40 years, starting when I was in business school at the University of Chicago and my family was living in Louisville, KY. I mean, there’s a clump of trees in the median between West Lafayette and Crown Point that’s a milestone for me; I know I’m an hour from home. Which just goes to show you how boring the drive through northern Indiana is when trees in the median are a notable feature.</li><li>The drive between Chicago and Nashville, while not the most exciting, especially through Indiana, it does usually require a bit of timing to thread through Chicago, Indianapolis, Louisville, and Nashville to avoid rush hour in each. On this trip, not so much. I left Chicago after breakfast and was driving 80 mph most of the way, maybe dropping down to 70 through the cities. And I was still getting passed by guys going aggressively faster. And the only time I saw police or state troopers was in front of big road construction sites, cars running with all their lights flashing in front of big barriers, more as a warning to speeders than an attempt to get them. It was, hands down, the easiest drive down I-65 I’ve ever done.</li><li>That wide-open drive may be one of the few things I’ll actually appreciate about this lockdown. Well, that and the $2/gallon gas along the way...</li><li>Bridge Music — Brilliant Day by Hans Atom (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hansatom/47919 Ft: Lisa DeBenedictis</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3><strong>Following Up</strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>First up, thanks to the TravelCommons listener who goes by the handle Abe Froman, Ferris Bueller’s sausage king of Chicago, for dropping a 5-star review on <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">our iTunes page</a>. Abe writes:<ul><li>“I have been a fan of this podcast for many years. If you are a road warrior or a mileage runner, you will love the tips to make your travel easier.”</li><li>Abe, thanks a lot for this.&nbsp; I’m glad you’ve enjoyed the podcast</li></ul></li><li>Last year in episodes <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/07/26/podcast-153-travel-by-algorithm-leaving-places-behind/\" title=\"Podcast #153 — Travel By Algorithm; Leaving Places Behind\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">153</a> and <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/09/20/podcast-155-rj-delays-street-food-in-poland-and-hungary/\" title=\"Podcast #155 — RJ Delays; Street Food in Poland and Hungary\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">155</a>, we talked about American Airlines’ retirement of their MD-80’s, the “Mad Dog 80”, the plane on which I earned my first Advantage status -- Gold, and there wasn’t anything higher back then. Last week, <a href=\"https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/delta-air-lines-md-80-last-flight/index.html\">Delta finally retired their last Mad Dogs</a> -- MD-88’s and -90’s. They were supposed to run through the end of the year, but with late ‘80’s technology and fuel efficiency, they were among the first planes in the fleet to be grounded when the lockdown hit. Delta said that “at their peak, the planes accounted for 50% of Delta’s arrivals and departures from” their Atlanta hub.&nbsp; Which will be a relief to longtime TravelCommons listener Darren Mak, who tweeted at me back at the beginning of March, a picture out the window seat of a Delta MD-88 just in front of the engine cowl, thanking me for mentioning, in episode <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/09/20/podcast-155-rj-delays-street-food-in-poland-and-hungary/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #155 — RJ Delays; Street Food in Poland and Hungary\">155</a>, that whenever I would end up in that same seat, I would wonder — if that engine blows up, will the shrapnel blow out or blow into the cabin. Well Darren, no more worries. We both survived the Mad Dog’s back seat.</li><li>We’ve talked in the past couple of episodes about the first post-lockdown trips would be by car -- more schedule flexibility; no worries of a stranger in the middle seat exhaling 18 inches away from you.&nbsp; CNBC ran <a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/31/five-charts-that-track-the-us-economy-as-states-reopen.html\">a story</a> last week analyzing the change in the number of requests for directions on Apple Maps in 2020. Using January 13th as the baseline for their comparison, requests for driving and walking directions dropped by 50% in the first month of the lockdowns, but had recovered by May 29th -- the last day of the data series. Transit direction requests had dropped by 75% and were still more than 50% down by the end of May. Now, using January 13th as the baseline probably exaggerates the recovery -- you’d think the number of walking and driving direction requests on a normal Memorial Day weekend would be hugely higher than for the second Monday of January when it was in or below the 30’s for about ⅔’s of the country -- but I don’t want to kill a green shoot with too much skepticism.</li><li>American talked about their own green shoots last week, saying they would be operating 55% of last year’s schedule in July, up from 20% in April and May. Driven mostly by demand from states opening up -- Texas, Florida, and Arizona -- rather than cities like New York, Chicago, and San Francisco that are still under stricter lockdown orders. If I keep pulling on this trend line, I’m thinking by September all those voluntary capacity limits and empty middle seat promises will have faded away.</li><li>The absence of update emails from airline and hotel CEOs this week I think is another green shoot. If things are starting to look up, no need to send me an email extending a bonus award offer or cancellation fee waivers. This has cut into a new hobby of mine, though -- comparing the use of \"in these uncertain times,\" \"in these challenging times,\" and “in these unprecedented times” in these emails. I have a stroke count going. Right now, “unprecedented” is the runaway leader, with “challenging” second, and “uncertain” third.</li><li>I’ve been a Hertz customer on and off over my 35-year travel career -- mostly on. I started my business traveling when I was at IBM, and in the mid-80’s, they had negotiated a smoking rate with Hertz. In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/09/15/podcast-144-outside-airports-hospitality-mentality\">episode 144</a>, I talked about getting to know the woman working in the little Hertz hut at SJC back then, when SJC was still an outdoor airport; and before Hertz Gold, that’s all I needed to get an upgrade. And more recently, I’ve, on balance, had good experiences with Hertz. So I was bummed for a moment when I saw they filed for bankruptcy last month. It wasn’t surprising, though. Hertz was still carrying a big debt load courtesy of a 2005 PE leveraged buyout, and we’ve talked in past episodes about how Uber and Lyft have been eating away at its core airport rental market. So, when travel stopped in March and used car auction prices cratered in April, Hertz tipped over. By now though, we’re kinda used to big travel companies cleaning their debt problems in bankruptcy -- United and American Airlines the most recent examples. So I’m not too worried about losing the rest of my Gold points. In the short term, though, I will be paying more attention to the mileage on the Hertz cars in the Five Star aisle. That’s where I usually see signs of financial distress -- a lot less 500-mile cars and a lot more 25,000-mile cars. And while 25,000 miles on a car doesn’t seem like a lot, remember that rental car miles are kinda like dog years -- you gotta multiply them by, like, 7 to get to regular car miles.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook page</a> or our Instagram account at <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">travelcommons</a> -- or you can post comments on the web site at <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">TravelCommons.com</a>.</li><li>Bridge Music — &nbsp;<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Suenjo/11162\">Natchoongi (New Hope Remix)</a>&nbsp;by Suenjo (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3><strong>First Post-Lockdown Trips</strong> </h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>As we talked about a few minutes ago, travel is starting to pick up as the lockdowns ease and people want to see something other than the 4 walls that have surrounded them since mid-March.&nbsp;</li><li>TravelCommons listener Mark Skinner dropped me a line towards the end of May about his first lockdown trip. You may remember Mark from <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/11/30/podcast-157-notes-from-the-baltics-riga-latvia-and-tallinn-estonia/\" title=\"Podcast #157 — Notes from the Baltics: Riga, Latvia and Tallinn, Estonia\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">episode 157</a> back in November when he wrote in to tell us about his day trip from Washington, DC to Hong Kong -- flying out Monday afternoon, returning Tuesday morning -- to take a NASA cosmic ray detector on an over-the-pole flight.&nbsp; This time, Mark writes -<ul><li>So I had my first trip this past week, since the “before times”. On the way back, I was listening to your recent podcast. Yes, my first trip was via automobile, down to the outer banks of North Carolina. Dare County had recently opened up (the day before!) to allow visitors into the county.&nbsp;</li><li>Stayed at the Hilton Garden Inn. No servicing of the room, and after a few days at this hotel on the beach, things were looking a little dingy. Tropical Storm Arthur squashed any hopes of long walks on the beach. Departed a day early because the storm wasn’t letting up. I thought this was a good use of Hilton points… Take-out only that week, and hotel not helping out by lending any china, glass or utensils. Ending up getting a couple of sets at a dollar store… I contrast this to my last trip in the before time, to Maui, just as things were buttoning up. The Grand Wailea was happy to provide all sorts of stuff to enjoy one’s take-out on the lanai! That trip got cut short as well, due to flights evaporating.&nbsp;</li><li>A highlight of the trip was stopping for lunch in Virginia Beach, which had recently opened out-door seating at restaurants, and enjoyed lunch at a seafood restaurant at an outside table, by the ocean, and greatly enjoyed ordering food and having it brought to the table! The previous “normal” meal had been first evening on Maui, before they went take-out only.&nbsp;</li><li>Next trip that is getting kicked around is Hilton Head in June…. that would involve flying. Crossing fingers about a trip to Austria in August…</li></ul></li><li>Mark, thanks for sending that along. Your experience on the Outer Banks was similar to mine down in Spring Hill, TN. I went back and forth about staying in a hotel vs. an Airbnb. Airbnb -- not as many people passing through the property and some time buffer (24 hours, 72 hours) between guests in the same rooms, but a major hotel chain should have the corporate resources to build out and maybe test a more thorough cleaning program for its properties; maybe with access to stronger, more industrial cleaners. Procrastination ended up making my decision -- while I was going back and forth, the Airbnb property in Spring Hill I was looking at got booked for the front of that week, so I ended up in the Spring Hill Hampton Inn -- another Hilton brand.</li><li>That Monday morning, right before I left Chicago, I checked in on the Hilton app. It even let me pick out my room. This may be old news to Hilton Diamond listeners, but I haven’t stayed in a Hilton for at least a year, and so haven’t been tracking their app improvements. When I arrived at 5:30pm, the front doors were locked, but opening up the app showed me a digital key that opened the front door and my room door. I didn\'t have to physically check in at the front desk which only struck me odd later that night. Whenever I’ve checked in on a hotel’s app before, I’ve still had to go to the front desk so they could see my ID, which was why I’ve never paid much attention to app check-ins. But at this Hampton Inn with full check-in and digital keys, it worked the way I’d always thought it should.</li><li>My in-room experience was the same as Mark’s -- nobody servicing the room, though a guy did stop by the room every now and again asking if I needed extra towels; no morning coffee or breakfast buffet, and eating mostly take-out in the room with some cans of local craft beer bought from the liquor store a couple of doors down. I was pretty rigorous about dumping the food trash right after eating. Waking up to the smell of 8-hour-old bar-be-que rib and cole slaw remnants is never a good start to the day. Hotels are saying it’s all about cleaning and sanitation, but I can’t say that I saw any out-of-the-ordinary efforts while I was there. Maybe what I was experiencing was the cost reductions to fund that behind-the-scenes deep cleaning.</li><li>While Mark’s highlight was his lunch in Virginia Beach, mine was being able to walk into a little family-owned craft beer joint in a strip mall on Spring Hill\'s Main St, order a beer, and then sit down and drink it at the bar. I go into this place every time I\'m there to visit my mother. Seeing them open was a nice little bit of normality -- especially since Chicago didn’t start opening up until last week.</li><li>Don\'t know my next trip yet, but I\'m keeping my eye on Spain, hoping there\'s no second wave before our trip to Barcelona at the end of September.</li><li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/53277\">Fistful of Dub</a>&nbsp;(Feat. Snowflake and DJ Vadim) by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. &nbsp;Ft: snowflake and DJ Vadim</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3><strong>Travel Credit Cards</strong> </h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>As we start traveling again, we’ll start pulling out those travel cards -- Hilton or Delta Amex, United or Southwest or Marriott Visas, American MasterCards -- and so I invited Brett Holzhauer, the travel card expert at <a href=\"http://ValuePenguin.com\" title=\"ValuePenguin.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">ValuePenguin.com</a>, a site that goes deep into these cards, to give us some of his advice as we “un-lockdown” ourselves. First up, he reads out the results of a recent survey on travel planning, and then talks about travel cards<ul><li>Mark: Brett, thanks for joining us on the TravelCommons podcast.</li><li>Brett: Thank you so much for having me. I\'m excited</li><li>Mark: Brett, I wanted to talk to you about a recent survey that ValuePenguin.com has done on travel planning. And we\'ve had sort of an arc through the past couple of episodes of the TravelCommons podcast around travel planning. As we think about post-lock-down/pre-vaccine where people are still concerned about coronavirus and Covid, but they gotta move on with their lives. So, in the survey that ValuePenguin did, where are people going?</li><li>Brett: One of the biggest notes was the amount of people going to Florida, and it\'s a couple of reasons: 1) good weather; 2) it\'s affordable; 3) there\'s a lot of the older generation that lives in Florida, so maybe people are itching to see their parents or grandparents or just older relatives. So, it\'s a mixture of all of those things leading to people wanting to travel to the beaches and get outside.</li><li>Mark: I think that kind of ties into some things we\'re seeing, which is more of a focus on outdoors with the theory that coronavirus transmission is less efficient outdoors than indoors. As a travel card expert, as people begin to travel again, what are some of the strategies as far as being able to maximize the value of the travel credit cards? Because really most frequent travelers already have got them in their wallets, at least one if not multiple award cards, but they\'ll tend to focus on maximizing award points.</li><li>Brett: So one of the biggest things that\'s gonna eventually happen is huge bonuses. These companies like Chase and American Express. They\'re gonna really incentivize people to get back on the road. So if you’re brand new into the Points and Miles game, this is a very good opportunity to start understanding how this whole thing works. So that way, when these big bonuses start coming out, you can find some really great bonuses to start your travels once again, maybe late 2020 or early 2021. So that\'s one thing, Number two, obviously, the uptick in in travel insurance. People can get travel insurance through credit cards.</li><li>Mark: Typically, what are the travel insurance capabilities?</li><li>Brett: A lot of credit cards beyond the big sign-up bonuses have travel insurance, and a lot of consumers either don\'t know that they have it, they forget, or they just don\'t really pay too much attention to it. I\'m going to use a personal example. My wife and I both have the American Express Platinum Card. It\'s a $550 annual fee, and your first thought is -- that\'s a lot of money to invest in a credit card. Is that really worth it? And beyond all of the perks and the sign-up bonuses, the travel insurance through that specific credit card is comprehensive. You get trip cancelation, trip interruption. Also, you get rental car insurance, and so it\'s it\'s important to know the difference between primary and secondary. If you do have a credit card that has primary car insurance, that will go first so your personal car insurance will not be affected.</li><li>Mark: I\'ve talked in a previous TravelCommons episode about my own personal experience with using the Chase Sapphire Visa that ended up covering an accident and St Andrews, Scotland. When I got back home, I filed with Chase. Took me a little bit, but I got full coverage on it.</li><li>Brett: There\'s also baggage insurance. Those are kind of the big ones. There\'s also emergency medical assistant. It\'s important to know that consumers have these protections. I just feel that a lot of times we have these cards in our wallets. We\'re overlooking the value proposition of what these cards can really do.</li><li>Mark: Let me pivot to your set up as a digital nomad. What are what are you up to?</li><li>Brett: My wife and I, we met in 2015. I knew on the first date that I was gonna marry her by some way, somehow and sure enough ended up happening.</li><li>Mark: Did she have that same sense, or was there some selling involved there?</li><li>Brett: No, we definitely sold each other. And we walked away from that first date knowing that what she sold me on was traveling. I had a traveler’s itch. She had the traveling bug. So really sold me on the idea of doing this full time travel. In July of 2019, we officially sold everything. We drove back to her parents house in Los Angeles. Then in August of 2019, we took a one way flight from LAX to Fiji. We bounced between 10 countries in 3.5 months. We returned home in December for the holidays from Japan back to Los Angeles. And we had the plan of leaving again in February, and everything unfortunately started to melt. So now we\'re stuck in Los Angeles just itching to get back on the road. But yeah, we love taking advantage of rewards. If it wasn\'t for credit card points of miles, we wouldn\'t be able to afford these types of travels.</li><li>Mark: So, when do you think you and your wife will head out next?</li><li>Brett: Yeah, so our plan was to go to Europe. Obviously, that\'s been immensely hit by Covid-19. So for us, luckily, so I\'m 26 years old, she\'s 24. We’re both very healthy, we’re of the mindset that life is a little bit risky, and you have to take those risks to get those rewards. So, we approach travel with that mentality that it is a risk. Everything in life is a risk -- walking across the street, driving your car So, there\'s always a risk to it. I think if I had to guess, probably August. But again, God forbid there\'s a second wind of coronavirus. We might be here for extended period of time, But, you know, we are very blessed and very privilege that we have parents that will take us in. And we have a free place to stay, which is nice to save up more money for travel and pay down on my student loan.</li><li>Mark: Brett Holzhauer, travel awards expert from ValuePenguin.com Thanks very much for taking the time to join us on the TravelCommons Podcast.</li><li>Brett: Thank you so much</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3><strong>Closing</strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #164</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_164.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #164 — First-Post Lockdown Trips; Travel Credit Cards','','inherit','closed','closed','','2771-revision-v1','','','2021-03-04 22:45:20','2021-03-05 03:45:20','',2771,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/04/2771-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3399,1,'2021-03-04 22:54:14','2021-03-05 03:54:14','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/IMG_1615-1.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2732 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/IMG_1615-1-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\n<figcaption>I think I put off finding a doc too long</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Though I\'m still locked down on the shores of Lake Michigan, data shows that people are starting to do short car trips. What will people need to feel comfortable to do more extensive travel -- spacing in aircraft, we talk with Erik Josowitz of <a href=\"https://insurancequotes.com\">insuranceQuotes.com</a> about trends in travel insurance, and a story about finding medical attention while traveling through Southeast Asia. </span>All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_163.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #163: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois, probably 10 lbs heavier, half of which is beer (my doing) and the other half baked goods courtesy of Irene. While the coronavirus restrictions are beginning to ease in some parts of the US and Europe, everything is still locked down here on the shores of Lake Michigan. So my travels since the last episode have mostly been between the kitchen and the couch, and occasionally out in search of carbohydrate comfort foods -- to grocery stores in an endless and fruitless search for King Arthur Bread Flour, and then running a circuit of Chicago microbreweries using curbside no-contact pick-up to collect 4-packs of whatever is new that week. A couple of breweries are even doing curbside sales of ⅙ barrel kegs -- tempting, but seems a bit of overkill for a 3-person flat, though Amazon claims they can get a kegerator to me next week. Must be on Amazon’s essential items list.&nbsp;</li><li>But with the lockdown easing in non-urban places like the exurbs of Nashville, I’m starting to prep for my first post-Corona trip that I talked about in the last episode, a drive down to Spring Hill, TN to see my mother. Got the oil and tires changed on the BMW to avoid any unplanned stops. Figure I’ll pack a lunch which’ll let me do the drive with just one gas stop. I also tuned up my Trek Madone road bike -- cleaned and lubed the gears, re-wrapped the handlebars -- to take that down with me. Haven’t been able to ride much after Chicago shut down the lake shore path, and so riding solo on small country roads would seem to be a pretty good match for “social distancing” criteria.</li><li>All this spare time has allowed me to be a bit more “planful” as one client used to say, one of those ugly adjective constructions meant to turn an activity “we need to do more planning” into a quality “we need to be more planful”. But anyhow, whether the lockdown allows me to be more planful about the podcast or to do a bit more planning, it has. Which, for this episode, means you’ll hear less of me, and more from informed people. First up is Erik Josowitz, an analyst at <a href=\"https://www.insurancequotes.com\" class=\"aioseop-link\">insuranceQuotes.com</a>. Erik and I did an old-school remote interview -- using Skype instead of Zoom -- talking about what travel insurance looks like in the post-Corona world. And then Allan Marko returns with his wife Chris, following up our conversation in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/01/25/podcast-159-planning-the-trip-of-a-lifetime-in-southeast-asia/\" class=\"aioseop-link\">January travel planning episode</a> with a story from their Southeast Asia sabbatical last year; how they tracked down a doctor in Thailand when his wife became ill; a topic that could weigh on us more when we venture out into the post-lockdown/ pre-corona vaccine world that we\'ll be in for the next 18-24 months.</li><li>But right now, for my Tennessee trip, I think I’m less concerned about finding a doctor, and a bit more concerned about reconnoitering open drive-thru Taco Bells along I-65.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/50485\">Sunset Boulevard</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Siobhan Dakay, unreal_dm</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3><strong>Following Up</strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Videoconferencing is having its moment during the pandemic. Maybe it’s because people are looking for more of a connection in their lockdown isolations, or because we know that everyone is sitting at home in front of a video-equipped laptop and has no excuse not to video, nothing like “Can only call in because I’ll be running through airport security then.” I haven’t done a straight conference call in forever. Doing interviews for this episode, I hit the videoconference trifecta&nbsp; - Skype with Erik, FaceTime with Allan and Chris,&nbsp;</li><li>and then Zoom to be on the other side of the microphone on Steve Frick’s <a href=\"https://anchor.fm/steve-frick/episodes/Travel-Commons---Stories-From-Home-Episode-83-edipo7\">Back &amp; Gone Again podcast</a>.&nbsp; This is the 15th year of TravelCommons; I started in May 2005, and here Steve and I talk about that first episode.</li><li>&nbsp;We had a lot of fun, telling travel stories and talking about our current life-off-the-road. Give it a listen. There’s a link in the show notes, on the TravelCommons Facebook page, and in the Twitter feed.</li><li>Cate Rose left a comment on the Facebook page on the April episode.<ul><li>“I don\'t travel nearly as much as you do Mark but I enjoy your podcasts. These are unprecedented times. We arrived home from a month long rail trip from Italy, up to Sweden at the end of January just as this whole thing was blowing up. And now people, including us, are locked down all over the world. Unbelievable. And here you are with plenty of time to write, but no place to go! We are on Week 4 of social isolation in Western Australia and the novelty is wearing off a little ;-) but it seems to be working so all for the greater good. Thanks for keeping up with the storytelling and letting a crack of life into home isolation! Stay safe.</li><li>Cate - thanks for that note. Sounds like you just got out of Italy in time. If I remember correctly, they started locking down Italy in mid-February. Glad you made it back home safely. And it sounds like Australia and New Zealand have done the best in crushing the Covid curve.</li></ul></li><li>In that same episode, when we talked about post-corona trip planning, I said I thought the first post-lockdown trip most people would take would be a car ride -- more flexibility; easier social distancing. Turns out I was right -- at least according to the company <a href=\"https://www.arrivalist.com/\">Arrivalist</a>, a “visitation intelligence company” that has started publishing a Daily Travel Index measuring consumer road trips of 50 miles or more using data drawn from GPS signals. Road trips on Friday, May 1 were almost back to the pre-pandemic levels of February, with the number of trips in the 100-250 mile range higher than February’s number for the first time since the lockdowns started. You can go to Arrivalist’s website and <a href=\"https://www.arrivalist.com/daily-travel-index/\">play with the data yourself</a> or read an <a href=\"https://www.phocuswire.com/arrivalist-road-trip-surge-data\">analysis by Phocuswright</a>, a travel research firm. Links are in the show notes and my Twitter feed.</li><li>I got yet another email survey, this time from United asking me what would make me comfortable to fly again, and to rank some of their plans. For me, it was pretty easy. I’m not excited about standing in a packed gate area, hearing the gate agent say “This is a completely full flight”, and then spend 2-3 hours shoulder-to-shoulder with a complete stranger, in effect letting that person into my family’s corona exposure space.</li><li>A couple of weeks later (not implying causation, only correlation), all the major US airlines announced that passengers and crew will have to wear masks, they’re moving to strict back-to-front boarding schemes to reduce the number of passengers passing one another, and that they’re blocking/not booking the middle seats, reducing capacity from what had been running over 80% at the beginning of the year down to the 60’s. It was then interesting to watch what happened after Frontier’s CEO did a round of TV interviews at the beginning of this week, saying that they too would block the middle seat -- if a passenger bought a More Room seat for at least $39. Today, after getting a blizzard of red challenge flags from Washington, Frontier reversed course. Just kidding - “It was never our intent” they said, “to profit… from safety”. “ We simply wanted to provide our customers with an option for more space.” Yup. Frontier continuing to position their brand as the Ryanair of the US.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Vidian/52190\">Memories (infiniti loop)</a> by Vidian (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license. Ft: TheDice</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3><strong>New World of Travel Insurance</strong> </h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Interview with Erik Josowitz, an analyst at <a class=\"aioseop-link\" href=\"http://www.insurancequotes.com/\">insuranceQuotes.com</a><ul><li>Mark: Eric, thanks for joining us on the TravelCommons Podcast. Could you just give us a little background on yourself?</li><li>Eric: My name is Eric Josowitz. I’m an insurance analyst at InsuranceQuotes. We publish in-depth studies, data and analysis related to auto, home, health, life, and small business insurance. And my role is to study the insurance industry and provide tips and advice and insights that are relevant to consumers and small business owners.</li><li>Mark: The reason I asked you to join us today is, in the past couple of episodes, we\'ve been talking about travel planning. If we continue this thread, what do travelers need to think about from an insurance standpoint in the upcoming post-lock down but pre-Coronavirus vaccine world, which depending on who you read, we\'re gonna be in for the next 18 to 24 months.</li><li>Eric: Travel insurance was kind of a nice to-have pre-pandemic, except in cases of very, very large and elaborate trips where the investment and potential loss was substantial. And I think coming out of this, travel insurance is much more important. There are really two things that travel insurance gets you. One is protection for cancelations that might occur before you actually take the trip, which with the level of uncertainty, that\'s pretty important. And the second thing, travel insurance provides benefits if things happen while you\'re on the trip, ranging from interruptions and delays to medical issues that may pop up while you\'re actually traveling.</li><li>Mark: When people are looking and thinking about travel insurance going forward, what are some of the key things that they need to look for and think about given in the past it was kind of a nice-to-have. It was a check box that showed up on the bottom of a website that three quarters of us ignored. And now we\'re gonna pay a lot more attention to that.</li><li>Eric: I think that\'s a great question. And I\'m glad you mentioned checking the box or not checking the box before. I think as this crisis started to build and spread from the rest of the world into the US, I talked to a lot of people that had travel insurance but didn\'t actually know what it covered because they had just checked the box. And so, I think one thing that that needs to happen moving forward is travelers need to actually look at the specific coverage and specific exclusions associated with travel insurance policy before they purchase it. And so those exclusions in many cases turned out to include communicable diseases; turned out to include cases where, for example, the US State Department has issued travel warnings or travel bans. Many people were also surprised to learn that if they decided to cancel a trip because they were afraid of traveling to an area that had higher risk, that their travel insurance didn\'t actually cover cancelation in cases of fear. And so, one thing I would encourage everyone to look into is what\'s called a cancel-for-any-reason rider or endorsement on their travel insurance policy. And what that in most cases will buy you is the ability to cancel for any reason, no questions asked. You know when you\'re traveling, what you wanna look at on the travel insurance policy is to make sure that any medical issues or interruptions or delays that could occur while you\'re traveling are covered, even though there\'s been a declaration that this is a pandemic by the World Health Organization, there have been these warnings by the US State Dept. Make sure that those things are not specifically excluded in terms of the coverage that you can receive</li><li>Mark: As people need to read the coverage more closely now, any tips on how they should click through or where they ought to look for guidance on those terms?</li><li>Eric: I\'ve had people say to me that they\'re not able to easily find the specific terms and conditions when they\'re using the click-thru form on, you know, a booking website. And so if they feel that they can\'t easily access those terms and conditions, I would encourage them to actually search separately for travel insurance policies. And there are major carriers that offer travel insurance coverage on a regular basis who have packages of policies available for different types of travel, and they do have good frequently asked questions pages on their websites. They do have clearly outlined terms and conditions</li><li>Mark: Searching using the control-F function on your browser for things like communicable diseases. Try saying that three times fast and cancelation for any reason, as you mentioned before is probably some good search terms. Are you seeing any trends in pricing and coverage and riders? Has the travel insurance market reacted to Covid-19 coronavirus yet or is that still a work in progress?</li><li>Eric: Well, many companies have stopped offering travel insurance temporarily. And so, one of the indications that it\'s perhaps safe to travel again is going to be the ability to actually purchase travel insurance coverage at that time. Now there are certain companies that are continuing to offer policies and many of those policies don\'t have exclusions in the case of communicable disease, but they are pretty explicit about what they do and don\'t cover right now. So that yes, the insurance companies are reacting to this crisis in near-real time.</li><li>Mark: Eric, thank you very much for joining us on the TravelCommons podcast. Great insights, good information, good suggestions. Again, thanks for joining us.</li><li>Eric: My pleasure, Mark. Have a great week.</li></ul></li><li>Bridge Music --<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/ramblinglibrarian/55007\">Dawn at the Top of the World ft. copperhead &amp; Robert Seikawitch</a> by Ivan Chew (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3><strong>Getting Medical Help on the Road</strong> </h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Back in January, long-time TravelCommons listener Allan Marko talked about the planning he did for the 9-week SE Asia sabbatical he and his wife Chris took last year. Fast forward 4 months, and health care on the road will now become much more important when traveling in the post-lockdown/pre-vaccine world. So let’s continue our conversation with Allan, joined now by his wife Chris, to talk about how they thought about getting health care when they were half a world away from home.&nbsp; It started with the research before they left home…</li><li>Interview with Allan Marko and Chris Chufo</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3><strong>Closing</strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #163</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_163.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #163 — New World of Travel Insurance; Getting Medical Help on the Road','','inherit','closed','closed','','2747-revision-v1','','','2021-03-04 22:54:14','2021-03-05 03:54:14','',2747,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/04/2747-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3401,1,'2021-03-04 23:03:36','2021-03-05 04:03:36','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/DSC00969.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2732 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/DSC00969-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\n<figcaption>Early attempts at travel journaling</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Kinda tough to do a podcast that’s more about the journey than the destination if I’m not “journeying,” but I give it a go. We talk about cyberattacks on frequent flyer accounts now that we don\'t have a reason to check them, planning for my first post-pandemic trips, and how re-reading my travel journals is pinch-hitting right now. </span>All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_162.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #162: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you, as you might expect, from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois, going into what is either the 3rd or 4th week of Lockdown, depending on how one scores the executive orders. I usually kick off each episode talking about my travel since the last episode -- which is going to be a very short conversation since I recorded the last episode at the end of Lockdown Week 1. Does make it kinda tough to do a podcast that’s more about the journey if I’m not “journeying”. Indeed, longtime TravelCommons listener Steve Frick pinged me on Twitter - “How are you holding up being off the road?” I told him I was taking some long walks to relieve the itching on the soles of my feet, but I’m not sure it’s working.&nbsp;</li><li>I thought I could keep myself occupied by working out more; drop the winter weight a little earlier than usual; be in better biking shape for when the Midwest weather breaks. But I had to call an audible on that when the city closed all the gyms, and then the running and biking path along Lake Michigan. Now I’m trying out a lot of new in-room/no-weight workouts. There’s a lot of them out there, even the Wall Street Journal published “Five Home Workouts to Do During the Coronavirus Outbreak”. I’ve never been a big HIIT guy, high-intensity interval training, so things like squat jumps, burpees, and mountain climbers haven’t been in my repertoire. But I’m kinda liking it and thinking that, when I’m back traveling, this could be a great in-room workout for those days when the hotel gym is jammed, especially those Marriott Courtyard gyms, when all four of the ellipticals and treadmills are taken, and there’s a queue for the handful of dumbells. Of course, I might have to warm up with some furniture jenga -- stacking the chairs and magazine table out of the way, maybe with one of the end tables -- but most US hotel rooms should have enough open space, except maybe in Manhattan.</li><li>However, my other new workout -- stair intervals, sprinting up the stairs in our 20-floor apartment building -- might not translate as well to hotels, especially those 4-story Courtyards.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Javolenus/41932\">Ianiscus</a> by Javolenus (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/\">Attribution (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Wired_Ant</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3><strong>Following Up</strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>The waves of Covid-19 e-mails from travel companies have been interesting.&nbsp; The first wave was at the beginning of March. I tweeted out a screenshot of what I received from United, but all the travel companies seem to be working off similar scripts -- “We care about you; let me tell you about the great job that HEPA air filters do; we’re cleaning the planes a bit more every night; we’ll get back to you later on your elite status.” Then the second wave as travel started to crater a couple of weeks later -- “We really care about you, so if you book a flight/room/car with us and give us money this month, we won’t charge you to change your dates if things are still mucked up… but we’ll keep your money; oh, and we cleaning the planes/rooms/cars real hard now”. This wave did get my attention. I mentioned in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/03/21/podcast-161-new-crisis-old-question-driving-down-to-key-west/\">last episode</a> how the combination of change fee waiver and a smokin’ deal on American’s direct ORD-BCN flight got me to open up my wallet for an end-of-September trip. Friends of ours are saying we’re crazy, but I’m an optimist. And now, starting last week, I’m starting to get the third wave of e-mails wherein the dam finally broke -- “Honest, we care a whole lot about you, so we’ve extended that change fee waiver for the next couple of months -- so long as you give us money now -- and, since we’re all sorta throwing in the towel on 2020, we’re giving you elites a push on your status -- whatever you have now, you keep through next year -- and extending your club memberships by 6 months; oh, and we’re still spraying disinfectant everywhere.” For me, hotel brands were the first -- Hilton and Hyatt, and Marriott notable in its absence. Then, this week,&nbsp; some of the airlines finally dropped -- Delta, United, and Alaska, with American and Southwest notable in <em>their</em> absence. And then, in mid-week, Marriott finally gave it. It’ll be interesting to see how long American and Southwest feel they can hold out. The longer the travel shutdown, the more the pressure will build. Internationally, the trend for airlines seems to be a bit more of a hedge -- not extending status, but reducing qualification levels by 25-30%. BA, KLM, Emirates all seem to be trying this. It’ll be interesting to see how long they can hold out.</li><li>As if this wasn’t enough, Marriott announced at the end of March yet <a href=\"https://hospitalitytech.com/52m-guests-affected-new-marriott-data-breach\">another security breach</a> -- <a href=\"https://www.wired.com/story/marriott-hacked-yes-again-2020/\" class=\"aioseop-link\">the second one in 16 months</a>. This one was in a PMS, a property management system, used at some of the properties managed by Marriott. They estimate that 5.2 million guests are affected. We’ve said many times before, it’s gotten to the point with all these hacks that you gotta assume that you’ve been compromised. But the coronavirus lockdown adds a bit of a twist. A security firm, PerimeterX, says that, in the past month, they’ve <a href=\"https://www.perimeterx.com/resources/blog/2020/covid-19-part-2-data-tells-the-story/\">seen account takeover attacks surge</a> to as high as 80% of all login attempts on travel sites. Kinda makes sense -- if we’re not traveling, we’re not hitting airline or hotel sites to book trips, or to check our account balances or figure out where we are on a status match. As we drop off, the remaining traffic -- from the bad guys -- becomes a higher percentage. And there is some money to be had there. I’ve said in past episodes that I tend to use 2¢/mile as the breakeven point between buying a flight or using miles, though that number might have drifted down to 1.5¢ with recent award chart changes. Crack and drain an account with 100,000 miles -- not a high balance for a frequent traveler who’s getting elite bonuses and uses the airline’s credit card -- and that’s $1,500. Would be nice if these companies used two-factor authentication, but I haven’t seen that with any of my accounts. So I make sure each account has a strong and unique password, and run the circuit -- logging into each of them, or at least the ones with big balances -- every month.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/48914\">In Peace (Somewhere Else Mix)</a> by cdk (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/\">Attribution (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Snowflake</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3><strong>Post-Corona Trip Planning</strong> </h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I took a survey from Conde Nast Traveler magazine, asking about my post-coronavirus travel plans. Good timing because, as I mentioned earlier, I’ve been thinking about just that topic, because this will be the longest stretch I’ve stayed home in I don’t know how long. And you can imagine that topic is hot across the travel industry -- with airlines, hotels, trip planning apps -- hence, probably the reason for the Conde Nast survey. But before you can plan, you have to know when the lockdown will be released and how. Nobody in Chicago or anywhere else in the US seems to want to talk about that quite yet, but some European countries are -- Austria, Denmark, the Czech Republic, even Italy -- and as you’d guess, it’s looking like it’ll be more of a gradual release than a big bang; and happen first in places less impacted by Covid-19 -- rural before urban, then smaller cities; New York probably the last in line.&nbsp;</li><li>If that plays out, then I’m thinking that leisure travel will be the first to come back. A lot of business travel is between cities, and when those lockdowns finally release, companies will first be figuring out who they want to bring back to their offices. And they’ll be looking to cut expenses going into the expected recession. So the weekend warriors may be on the move before the road warriors.</li><li>Pulling on that thread a bit more, I think it means that, for many folks, their first post-lockdown trip is going to be a car ride. With a car, you have more control than a plane or a train -- more flexibility, no waiting for airlines to un-furlough their crews and spin up their route systems, and no worries about who you’re sitting next to. Maybe a drive requires a bit more planning -- probably want to make sure the lockdown is lifted in all the places you have to drive through. But when I add low gas prices to this flexibility, driving is probably the way I’ll go.</li><li>OK, but to where? Probably not too far initially -- not more than, say, a 6-8 hour drive, a day -- so no “let’s re-trace Route 66” out to LA or beeline for the Florida beaches. Also, given some of the blowback around some of those pre-lockdown Spring Break antics, I gotta think that party places like Florida beaches and Nashville’s Lower Broadway are gonna be some of the last spots released from lockdown, and even when they are, they’ll be different places. Not every bar and restaurant will survive this lockdown. With still maybe a month to go, I’m already seeing places in Chicago give up and shut down for good.</li><li>But that doesn’t really impact my planning. The first trip I want to do after the lockdown wasn’t some bachelor party long weekend blow out. I think I want to go see some family first, not least because there’s still uncertainty about if and when future waves of Covid-19 might prompt future lockdowns. So I’m thinking, right now, that first drive will be down to Spring Hill, TN to see my mother. It’s an 8-hr drive, so about as far as I can get in a day. I’ll throw my bike on the back of the car; take some solo rides on the roads that thread through horse country, hoping to hit an open barbeque joint, and a taproom or two.&nbsp;</li><li>Then some business travel comes back. People can only get so much done through Zoom and Microsoft Teams. Though we’ve pushed it off for 6-8 weeks, at some point people need to get together -- physically -- to close deals, do projects, work with employees. The ramp up will depend on how deep of a recession we find ourselves in. Maybe it’ll start up by cashing in some of those vouchers from cancelled March and April trips that airlines have been loath to refund.</li><li>Which, hopefully, works Irene, Claire and I up some trans-Atlantic trips in the late fall -- Barcelona in late September and perhaps London over Thanksgiving. They’ll probably still be sedate -- still some social distancing; not sure if we’ll be able to catch La Liga or Premier League matches. That’s OK, though. I’d be happy to walk again through the Gothic District, check out Cat Bar Cat, my craft beer hangout the last time I was in Barcelona, and to shop and eat through Mercado de La Boqueria. And then to walk through London streets for the Christmas lights.&nbsp;</li><li>But if I’m going to do any of this, I’ll probably need to get a hair cut first.</li><li>Bridge Music --<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/35724\">Blue Like Venus</a> by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/\">Attribution (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Admiral Bob</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3><strong>Keeping a Travel Journal</strong> </h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>One of the questions on the Conde Nast Traveler survey was “How are you getting your travel fix during the lockdown?” My initial response was curt “I’m not”. But I paused for a minute and then backspaced over that and typed “I’m paging through my old travel journals”.</li><li>Travel journaling is kinda at the core of the TravelCommons podcast or at least its creation myth. I had been writing a weekly business column for an alternative newspaper in Philadelphia. An editorial change dropped my column right about the same time my career change to consulting put me on the road just about every week. I picked up a small Moleskine notebook in SFO while waiting out yet another Northwest Airlines flight delay, found an empty bar stool, ordered an Anchor Steam, and killed time writing down some of the goofier travel stories that had happened to me or that other guys had told me. When I had just about filled it up, I thought about starting a travel blog. But right about then, the first wave of podcasting hit the mainstream. I’d been in radio during high school in Memphis, so thought I’d give it a go. And here we are, coming on 15 years later.</li><li>If I go back even further -- before Moleskines became a thing -- I might say I started travel journaling by way of postcards. If I was in a new or interesting place -- think Tuscany or Lake Tahoe, not Dover, OH or Southfield, MI -- I’d write postcards to my folks, my girlfriend-later-wife, the kids, usually while sitting at the bar having an end-of-the-day beer or wine. Irene saved some of those postcards. Flipping through them and my travel journals, I didn’t find diaries of my travel days -- I did this, went there, ate at these dishes at that restaurant -- but rather little vignettes of things that caught my eye, things like “the favorite pastime in Bologna appears to be trying on sunglasses at the corner stand and then checking out ‘the look’ in the side mirrors of parked cars” or “I was told by law, a Swiss office worker has to be within 50 ft of a window. Explains why all the buildings I see in Basel are thin or doughnuts” or “Roadside billboards in Detroit are different from anywhere else I’ve been. Rather than pitching hotels or consumer products, the billboards on I-94 in from the airport are all selling auto parts, punctuated by that massive Uniroyal tire”</li><li>I’ve pretty much stuck to an end-of-the-day routine; maybe that beer or glass of wine helps me reflect back on the day and ID the things that stood out; the things that taught me something, and then write it down. I don’t have a goal, trying to write X number of pages; I just let each day dictate. Sometimes it’s a bit prosaic, and sometimes it feeds TravelCommons. The journal pages from our <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/01/24/road-trip-lowbrow-santa-fe/\" class=\"aioseop-link\">Thanksgiving getaway to Santa Fe a couple of years ago turned into a 2,000-word blog post</a>; and what poured out of my pen in frustration in France a year ago was at the core of the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/podcast-150-travel-interruptus/\" class=\"aioseop-link\">Travel Interruptus</a> episode, what I called “A Greek tragedy where the travel gods toy with our anti-hero for fun and entertainment”.</li><li>But more than anything, right now when the lockdown is aggravating my wanderlust, reading the pages that I wrote some 2 or 10 or 20 years ago, reminds me of those places, those times, those experiences, and gives me the travel fix that I need right now in this lockdown.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3><strong>Closing</strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #162</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_162.mp3\" class=\"aioseop-link\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #162 — Post-Corona Trip Planning; Keeping a Travel Journal','','inherit','closed','closed','','2725-revision-v1','','','2021-03-04 23:03:36','2021-03-05 04:03:36','',2725,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/04/2725-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3403,1,'2021-03-04 23:07:24','2021-03-05 04:07:24','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/738DE79A-D927-423E-A890-569A5F3A0AB1-scaled.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2682 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/738DE79A-D927-423E-A890-569A5F3A0AB1-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\n<figcaption>You have reached your destination</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p>Things started out well, skipping out on Chicago winter for a drive down to Key West. But then last week, coronavirus hit the US and everything unraveled. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_161.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #161: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you hunkered down in the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois, trying to figure out exactly what the governor’s “shelter-in-place” directive means. Not a lot of travel since the last episode, and that’s not just because of coronavirus. No business travel booked, so it was just one trip in the back half of February to visit some friends who are snowbirding in Key West, Florida. 80 degrees and sunny vs. 30 degrees and grey skies in Chicago -- tough duty. Our friends rented a nice house up a dead end street in the Historic District, just a couple of blocks off Duval Street. They had it for two months, Feb through the end of March, but left early, giving up their last 2 weeks of sunny weather to drive back to Chicago because they’re afraid hotels will be closing along their route home.&nbsp;</li><li>Hadn’t planned any travel in March, but watched our April plans dissolve as Covid-19 spread. First, a friend from Poland canceled his wedding in Sedona, AZ shortly after the US announced the 30-day travel ban for Europeans. While their wedding date was past the 30 days, they figured this was just the start -- which it was. Over the next 5 days, travel bans started popping up across Europe. We joked to ourselves, “Lucky timing -- first time in 4 years we’re not doing Spring Break in Europe”, opting instead for some wine tasting in Howell Mountain and Napa Valley. Until the next day when California locked everything down, closing everything including restaurants and wineries…</li><li>For some families, kids home from school and mom or dad off the road and working from home -- the forced family togetherness is adding to the stress. I was talking to a friend this week -- “I’m usually on the road 75% of the time, and the kids are in school or sports. After 2 days of this, my wife laid down the rules -- my son is in the basement, my wife and daughter are on the second floor, I’m on the third floor, and the first floor with the kitchen is neutral territory -- you can pass through, but you can’t claim table or counter space there.” Last time I checked in with him, everyone was still alive -- that is, they hadn’t killed each other yet.</li><li>But I’m nothing if not an optimist, so in the midst of this week’s unraveling, I found a deal on a direct American Air flight from ORD to Barcelona -- 8½ hr 787 flight -- so I booked it -- 2 weeks in Barcelona at the end of September. I don’t know what we’ll do yet or where we’ll stay, but I’m already looking forward to it.</li><li>Bridge Music --  <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/snowflake/46164\">A Foolish Game</a> by Snowflake (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/snowflake/46164 Ft: Admiral Bob  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3><strong>Following Up</strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Steve Frick, a longtime TravelCommons listener and Untappd buddy who also does a podcast, <a href=\"http://hypeamerica.com/back-and-gone-again\">Travel Stories from Back and Gone Again</a>, took some time to record and send in an audio comment on last month’s episode -<ul><li>Gotta love the text-to-speech robot voice. Steve, would’ve been great to see that selfie on your Twitter feed. Also, check out the show notes for a link to Steve’s podcast</li></ul></li><li>Darren Mak hit me up on Twitter<ul><li>“Hey Mark,&nbsp; just listened to Travel Commons <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/09/20/podcast-155-rj-delays-street-food-in-poland-and-hungary/\">episode 155</a> on my last flight... board my next one which is a Delta MD88. Look out the window and see this... thanks for putting that in my head buddy!”&nbsp;</li><li>From the picture on his tweet, you can see he’s sitting in the window seat of an MD-88 just in front of the engine cowl. In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/09/20/podcast-155-rj-delays-street-food-in-poland-and-hungary/\">episode 155</a>, we talked about American Airlines’ retirement of their MD-80’s. I mentioned that when I ended up in a seat like Darren’s, my mind would sometimes wander -- if the engine next to my head blows up, will the shrapnel blow out or blow into the cabin. I never heard of such a catastrophic failure on an MD-80 -- but that didn’t keep me from wondering. And now, Darren can’t keep from wondering. Sorry about that, Darren. You won’t be able to un-think that. I’m guessing, though, that those MD’s were the first planes Delta parked as air traffic cratered and will be the last to return -- if they ever do. Savor that pic...</li></ul></li><li>And for our UK subscribers, a shout out to another TravelCommons listener and Untappd friend Rob Cheshire who launched <a href=\"https://thisweekincraft.beer/\">This Week in Craft.Beer</a>, a weekly newsletter covering the UK craft beer scene. He’s four issues in and is on a good roll. We’re thinking about heading over to the UK for Thanksgiving and the taproom directory in Rob’s newsletter will be key to planning that trip. I also love that he’s using a .Beer domain name. Check out the show notes for a link.</li><li>I think I’ve mentioned in a past episode that I’ve switched my carryon from a Timbuk 2 backpack to a Timbuk 2 messenger bag. Digitizing means carrying less physical stuff; the backpack was feeling half empty, so I switched to the smaller messenger bag. I like it except for one thing -- it’ll only hold a short water bottle. The big 20oz’er my daughter gave me for Christmas? Fits great in the backpack side pocket, but is too tall for the messenger bag. I played around with a lot of water bottles, but the best one has turned out to be a 500 ml Evian bottle. Now I know that single use plastic is a bad thing, but I can get a week’s use out of one Evian bottle. Until I fill it up in the gym or the concierge lounge the morning before my flight home and forget about it -- until the TSA person pulls it out of my bag on the other side of security and asks me, a bit sarcastically, if I want to go back and check it in my luggage. Yeah, no -- just pitch it. Which is why I can’t have nice things -- like a $35 teakwood S’well bottle. Instead, I walk down the terminal and just spend $3.50 for another bottle of Evian.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>For my trip to Key West, I got back to an old habit of reading some non-guidebook books -- either fiction or non-fiction -- about my destination before going. Before driving down the Overseas Highway, I read <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2QzesjI\"><em>Last Train to Paradise</em></a> about the incredible effort that went into building a railroad line to Key West 100 years ago -- that was later repurposed for the first iteration of the highway, and then read Hemingway’s <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3a72oOv\"><em>To Have and Have Not</em></a> because, well,&nbsp; it’s Hemingway and it’s about Key West, and so you just have to. I used to do this a lot more. I started when I read Paul Theroux’s <a href=\"https://amzn.to/398SvhE\"><em>Kingdom by the Sea</em></a> before my first trip to the UK back in 1985. I read John Lukacs’ history <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2xNS9A7\"><em>Budapest 1900</em></a> before my first trip to Hungary in 1989, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3a7KDhX\"><em>Watermark</em></a> by Joseph Brodsky before a trip to Venice, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/394bji3\"><em>His Bloody Project</em></a> by Grahame Burnet before going to Scotland’s Western Highlands. As you’d guess, none of these were about what to do or see, but instead they gave some context about the place -- even the fiction books. Gives a bit of balance to the go-here/see-that stuff in guidebooks and web sites.&nbsp; Something new for this trip -- a Spotify playlist of Jimmy Buffet tunes from those 1970’s Key West albums -- <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2whAqRs\"><em>Living And Dying In ¾ Time</em></a>, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2vG6wG8\"><em>Havana Daydreamin\'</em></a> -- for some additional context for that 3 hour drive down through the Keys.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com. </li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/THE_CONCEPT_OF_ENERGY/55008\">ABANDONED BUTTERFLIES</a> by THE_CONCEPT_OF_ENERGY (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/THE_CONCEPT_OF_ENERGY/55008 Ft: Doxent Zsigmond, Snowflake</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3><strong>New Crisis, Old Question</strong> </h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I’m not gonna try to do any hot takes on what this whole coronavirus/Covid-19/ social distancing experience means because: a) I hate the whole “insta-punditry” that social media has spawned; and b) there are so many unknowns and things are changing so fast that any attempt at meaningful analysis right now won’t age very well. Indeed, I’ve had to re-write this episode 3 times now. I gotta get it recorded before things change and I have to re-do it again.</li><li>At first, it felt like the Black Monday crash of 1987 (which, I hate to admit, I’m old enough to have experienced) or Sept 11, 2001 were good comparison points -- significant, sharp, scary events that came out of nowhere with no warning, and when we were in it, felt like a free fall with no bottom in sight. But after a week or so, even though the stock market was still down or airports and airplanes were still empty, we could see a path to the other side -- maybe not turn-by-turn directions, but at least it felt like we could point ourselves in the general direction. But with this, we’re, what 2-3 weeks in?, and it still feels like we’re in that free fall; we don’t know where the bottom is, let alone the direction to get out.</li><li>I remember, after Sept 11th and the 2008 Great Recession, people saying “everything has changed” and wondering if travel would rebound, if people would get on planes again in the same numbers. And it did and then some -- though the growth has been driven more by leisure travelers than the road warriors. But the travel industry makes its money off the frequent business traveler, and that question pops up again -- will they come back? Because it’s a bit different this time. In 2001, remote work options were pretty much just AOL or Yahoo instant messaging. Video was limited to special rooms with ISDN lines; Skype didn’t launch for another 2 years. In 2008, things were a bit better, but we’re a few months after the second version of the iPhone is released (the iPhone 3G), WhatsApp doesn’t launch for another year, and Slack doesn’t show up for another 5. But now 12 years on, we have bandwidth, we have tools. Last fall, we had <em><a href=\"https://www.ft.com/content/5c635430-1dbc-11ea-97df-cc63de1d73f4\">flygskam</a></em>  -- flight shaming -- hit the mainstream, and now the Covid-19 pandemic that’s just about shut down international air travel. Were we ready to step back from business travel and the coronavirus is just the forcing function?</li><li>I’m coming up on the 35th anniversary of my first business flight, and in that time, I’ve known maybe a handful of guys (and they were all men) who went out of their way to do more business travel; when offered the choice between a conference call or a plane trip, they chose the plane trip. The vast majority got on the plane or the train or behind the wheel because that’s what they needed to do to get the job done -- to close a deal, to do a project, to work with an employee. As remote tools get better and get more ingrained in the culture, the ability to get tasks done remotely increases. But we are social animals. And for all the data and processes, most business is about relationships. And as long as that’s true, we’ll want to meet people face-to-face -- over a coffee or a beer or a meal -- once we finally touch bottom after this coronavirus free fall and can feel safe sitting next to each other again.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/49674\">H2O</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/49674  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3><strong>Driving Down to Key West</strong> </h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Back to the pre-lock down days of February, it was the first time I’d been to Key West. We decided to drive down, run the whole <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overseas_Highway\">Overseas Highway</a>, the 113-mile stretch of US 1 from Homestead, south of Miami, to Key West. We flew into FLL because -- well, it’s a bit less of a zoo parade than MIA. We landed, walked straight out of the terminal, across the street and into the rental car center -- no shuttle bus ride to the back-40. RSW is the same on the Gulf side. There are damn few on-site rental sites left, and so I appreciate them when I can. Walking down the Hertz Five-Star aisle with Irene (I fell out of top-tier President’s Circle a few years back; too many in-city clients where Uber and Lyft were more convenient), I see a bunch of <a href=\"https://www.hyundaiusa.com/us/en/vehicles/kona/gallery\">Hyundai Konas</a> -- which is a new model for me, it’s a subcompact SUV -- a few Chevy Malibus and, as always, the requisite bunch of Nissan Altimas. I do my normal drill -- looking for non-beat up cars (so I don’t have to argue about damage when I return it) and low mileage (so it won’t break down during the rental). Irene, she’s looking for a cute color. Lucky for us, the car that was at the intersection of all those criteria was right in front of us -- a Surf Blue Hyundai Kona with 126 miles on the odometer. We threw our luggage in, dialed up Key West on Google Maps on Car Play, and pulled out -- into a 15-minute line to get out of the Hertz lot. Somehow that partnership with Clear doesn’t seem to be making much of a dent.</li><li>When we were planning this trip, everyone warned us off the drive -- “It’s slow”, “you’ll get caught behind a bunch of trucks”, “an accident will shut the whole road down” -- but I was as excited for the drive as I was the time in Key West. I think the Overseas Highway is one of the iconic drives in the US -- in my mind, it’s in the same league with Pacific Coast Highway between San Francisco and LA and Route 66 from Chicago to LA.&nbsp;</li><li>Even before we left the mainland, the drive was cool, with the Everglades on one side and the marinas and ocean inlets on the other. The drive through Key Largo was less interesting -- not much more than bait shops and boat parking. A bit further along, we crawled through Islamorada and Marathon in heavy traffic on a Monday afternoon.</li><li>Everyone talks about Seven Mile Bridge (we clocked it at 6.8 miles) and have seen it in movies, and it <em>is</em> very cool, but what was more interesting to me were the sections of the highway before that, that run across the low-lying keys along the route of the old Overseas Railroad which I read about in <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2QzesjI\"><em>Last Train to Paradise</em></a> -- time and again we’d be driving across what was nothing more than just a bit of a road bed and a 100 or so feet of beach and vegetation. After that, it’s ocean.&nbsp;</li><li>The warnings were right -- the highway is not a fast drive. It squeezes down from four lanes to two lanes for a bit, and Monroe County sheriff cars are parked where the speed limit dips when you pass through towns. But speed isn’t really the point. Just like you don’t run through Big Sur at 70 mph on PCH, you don’t blow past people surf fishing for snapper, snook, and grouper, or not slow down and try to spot Key Deer on Big Pine Key. If you just want to get to Key West as fast as possible, spend $100 or so for a flight from FLL or MIA. Otherwise, throttle back and remember -- on this drive, it’s as much about the journey as the destination.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3><strong>Closing</strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #161</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_161.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #161 — New Crisis, Old Question; Driving Down to Key West','','inherit','closed','closed','','2680-revision-v1','','','2021-03-04 23:07:24','2021-03-05 04:07:24','',2680,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/04/2680-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3405,1,'2021-03-04 23:10:24','2021-03-05 04:10:24','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/IMG_0368-scaled.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2664 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/IMG_0368-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\n<figcaption>Is this the IMAX seatback screen?</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p>Trying to watch the Super Bowl while flying from Durango, CO to Chicago via Denver got me thinking about the fading away of seatback entertainment. We also talk about the continuing evolution of ride sharing. Uber and Lyft are looking more and more like the taxi companies they fought to replace. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_160.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #160: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. I finished my Phoenix travels at the end of January and made the last trip a “bleisure” trip -- business in Phoenix Monday thru Thursday afternoon, and then leisure Thursday evening thru Sunday with a ski weekend in Durango, CO, the first time I’ve been on the slopes in 7 years. I first thought about heading up to Salt Lake for the weekend, but when I saw that the Sundance Film Festival was the same weekend, I thought “Nope” and started Googling for other ideas. The ski slopes around Flagstaff were too small and I didn’t want to fight the traffic on I-70 to hit the areas near Denver. Durango, in the San Juan mountains in the southwest corner of the state -- near Four Corners -- looked like a good spot. It’s a quick and fairly inexpensive hour hop from Phoenix; it’s an actual town, not just a ski resort, so there’d be other things to do when the lifts closed; the lift tickets at Purgatory and Wolf Creek were reasonable -- 40-50% of the price at, say, Vail or Park City; I was able to book a whole tiny house on AirBnB for the price of a generic Fairfield Inn room; and, I’d never been there before. And, as I found out from my AirBnB host, it was the weekend of Durango’s Snowdown Festival -- the 42nd annual, with a parade down Main Street and everything. The snow was just OK, but the skiing was great -- beautiful weather, damn few lift lines, nice people -- a weird but fun combination of families -- mostly from Texas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico -- and the Colorado hippy-dippy ski bum crew. It was a nice ending to my 2 months of Phoenix trips.</li><li>The only downside was… I had to check a bag. Even though I rented all my equipment -- skis, boots, poles -- I still needed that extra bag for all the other paraphernalia -- helmet, ski pants, gloves, parka, …. I love skiing but it requires a lot of stuff. Not that it cost me anything -- even flying Basic Economy on American from Phoenix to Durango, I got free bags with my Platinum status. Though American’s website wasn’t very clear about that when they tried to upsell me off of Basic Economy -- imagine that. And while I got free bags, I couldn’t select my seat in advance. But given it was a small regional jet with no middle seats, I figured I’d risk it.&nbsp; I will say, though, that I was pretty happy with the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/37R0sHX\">teal green luggage tags</a> I bought before the trip. Made it very easy to spot my bags amidst the sea of black suitcases on the luggage belt. Probably <a href=\"https://amzn.to/37R0sHX\">the best $5 I’ve spent on Amazon</a>.&nbsp;</li><li>One detail I missed when planning my ski weekend is that my Sunday night flights from Durango to Denver to Chicago would be right in the middle of the Super Bowl. Though I’m not sure I’d have changed anything if I’d remembered it. I didn’t really have a dog in that hunt -- I’m not a big San Francisco or Kansas City fan and so was kinda like everyone else who wasn’t in the Bay Area, I was rooting more for Andy Reid than KC. I did end up catching <em>most</em> of the game, but it was a little choppy. I watched the kick-off and 1st quarter in the bar at Durango Airport. Durango Airport isn’t big -- just 4 gates if I remember correctly -- and the bar kinda sticks out into the gate seating area. I sat at the bar, had a beer, and watched the game on the TV hanging on the wall near Gate 2 -- or maybe 3. But then United called boarding, so I caught bits of the second quarter on the Fox TV iPhone app while waiting to take off for Denver. And then tracked the start of the 3rd quarter after touchdown and a really long taxi in DEN. I caught the rest of the 3rd quarter on multiple screens -- bars, CNN gate TVs -- while walking down the B Concourse to make my ORD connection. I got lucky, though, and was able to catch all of Kansas City’s phenomenal come-back uninterrupted in a Mexican restaurant with about a dozen other fixated passengers and restaurant workers. After KC’s final interception, I walked down and caught the final plays on the CNN TV at the gate. Every other night, I consciously avoid those CNN TVs -- the volumes always up on people yelling at each other. But this night, I was happy for that volume -- the one night when they weren’t to CNN. </li><li>Bridge Music --  <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/48915\">Like Music (cdk Mix</a>) by Analog By Nature (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/48915 Ft: Phasenwandler  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3><strong>Following Up</strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>The week after that last Phoenix trip, I wrote <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/02/07/my-food-and-beer-hangouts-in-downtown-phoenix-dtphx/\">a post</a> on the TravelCommons website listing my favorite food and beer hangouts in downtown Phoenix. When I started traveling to Phoenix in the mid-’90’s, there wasn’t much to downtown Phoenix other than a big Hyatt Regency hotel. Everything was in Scottsdale and Tempe. I’d usually stay in Tempe because, with Arizona State University there, there were restaurants and bars I could walk to. Fast forward to today, downtown Phoenix has a lot more going on. Stadiums for the Phoenix Suns and the Arizona Diamondbacks, and a new downtown campus for ASU’s law school bring in enough people to support a solid selection of restaurants, coffee shops, and bars. The blog post doesn’t cover everything -- just the places I found myself going back to again and again during my 2-month stay.</li><li>Most of my flights from the mid-90’s on went into PHX Sky Harbor’s Terminal 2 -- on United and on American, until they moved to the much better Terminal 4 after merging with US Air which had merged with America West, the original hub airline for PHX. Terminal 2 was PHX’s slum terminal. Built in 1962 and originally planned to shut down in 2000, they finally shut it down on Feb 4, 2020, the week after I finished my latest Phoenix gig. The last two airlines using it -- United and Alaska Air -- have moved to Terminal 3 with the rest of the non-hub carriers. PHX’s two major carriers -- American and Southwest -- split Terminal 4. Some of the newspaper articles said business travelers liked it because it was compact, easy to navigate. I’m not one of them. I thought it was a cramped low-ceilinged place, with small restrooms and lousy food and beer options when I had to wait out delays back to ORD.&nbsp; I think you can tell that I won’t miss it. The plans are to demo the terminal this year and replace it with European-style bus gates -- using buses to take passengers out to remotely parked aircraft instead of boarding through jetways. I’m gonna bet those bus gates won’t be popular in August when PHX’s tarmac temperatures hit 120 degrees.&nbsp;</li><li>Waiting for my American Eagle PHX-Durango flight, I was half-paying attention to the PA announcements, but then noticed that the gate agent wasn’t doing the boarding announcements. Instead they were using recorded announcements. That wasn’t what caught my attention, though. I’ve heard recorded gate announcements hundreds of times. But usually, they’re recordings of humans reading the announcements. Here at gate B19, it was one of those robotic text-to-speech synthesized voices -- something like &lt;insert Boarding Groups 1, 2, and 3&gt;. I mean, why? How much savings do you get by using text-to-speech over some gate agent standing in a closet and recording it, say, on their iPhone? Maybe more that I think now that American has, what, 7, 10, 123 boarding groups? I asked this question “Why the robot” out loud -- to Twitter. American came back “We heard back and the PHX gate staff actually does record the voices used in the announcements. They are real humans.” Kudos for American’s Twitter staff for following up, but unless they have an android with a bad vox box working for them, I think the gang at gate B19 is using text2speech.org.</li><li>I posted an article on the TravelCommons Facebook page about a guy who wore a plastic tent on a plane to avoid the coronavirus. Now, as it turns out, it was really more of a publicity stunt for the guy’s company. He makes personal tents to protect people from bad weather when sitting on the sidelines of their kids’ soccer games. Might cut down on the colds I catch when flying, but from the picture, it looks like it would be quite a pain when the person in the window seat wants to get out to use the toilet.</li><li>On January 6th, the first Monday of the new year, I <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1214167465627979776\">posted a picture on Twitter</a> of the “cannabis amnesty box” that was on the other side of security at ORD’s Terminal 1. Pot became legal in Illinois the first of the year, and the Chicago Dept of Aviation put out these boxes “so travelers have the opportunity to ensure compliance with federal law, as well as the local laws at their destination” according to the police department. If you look at the picture I posted, the box looks like something the maintenance guys knocked together in the wood shop during their break. So no surprise that 3 weeks later, someone broke into a similar box at Midway airport and helped themselves to some surrendered weed. Actually, I think the only real surprise is that it took as long as 3 weeks for this to happen. </li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/spinmeister/53428\">Somewhere</a> by spinmeister (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/spinmeister/53428 Ft: DJ Vadim  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3><strong>Seatback Screens Fading Away</strong> </h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>On my flight from Durango to Denver, half the guys on the plane were staring down at their phones during boarding and taxi, watching the second quarter until the plane rotated up off the runway. For folks flying United planes with DirectTV seatback screens -- the repainted Continental 737s -- no problems; just swipe your credit card and keep watching. But that’s a shrinking group. Seat back entertainment screens have been on the death watch list for 5 years now, but it seems to be on its way out -- at least on a lot of the domestic routes.&nbsp;</li><li>And I can’t really say that I miss them. The DirectTV controls on those United planes are in the armrest, so I’m always changing the channel or the volume or the screen brightness. On American 737s, screens bulging out of the seat backs into an already tight space thanks to American’s war against seat pitch; I have to recline my seat just to be able to get that screen in focus. And the power supplies for all these seat back units are under the seat, crowding out space for my backpack or my feet.&nbsp;</li><li>I’m happy with the BYOS -- bring your own screen -- approach. I watched the season finale of The Mandalorian Star Wars TV show on my 8-inch Samsung tablet. It wasn’t as good as watching it on the 65-inch LG 4K TV at home, but it was bigger than any domestic in-flight screen. On one of my Southwest flights home from PHX, I saw a guy hang his big iPhone Max from the tray on the seatback in front of him -- kind of a DIY seatback entertainment unit.&nbsp;</li><li>On long international flights, though, I can see the case for seatback screens. My wife and kids have perfected synchronized movie viewing. They’re sitting three abreast; they queue up the same movie and then count down -- 3, 2, 1, Press Play! The airplane version of watching a movie together in the living room. I’m not sure it would be the same if they were all looking down at their iPhones. This tends to work better on newer planes, like the 787, that have bigger screens. I remember Andrew trying to watch the movie Dunkirk - a big WW II action movie that was great on IMAX -- on a maybe 7-inch screen on a United 767. I don’t think he got the full experience of that movie.</li><li>Back in December, United <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1211759835181654018\">tweeted out the top 10 most watched in-flight movies in 2019</a> -- Bohemian Rhapsody, A Star is Born, and Crazy Rich Asians were 1, 2, and 3. Makes sense. In 9th place, though, was John Wick 3, the 3rd installment of the Keanu Reeves fists of fury action flick. Loved that movie, but I can’t see even the new 16-inch screens in United’s business class being big enough to handle that flick. </li><li> Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/scottaltham/20747\"> Hear Us Now (poptastic mix)</a> by Scott Altham (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/scottaltham/20747  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3><strong>Any Difference Left Between Ride-Share and Taxis?</strong> </h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I got an e-mail survey the other day asking for my thoughts, impressions about Uber and Lyft. One of the questions was how long I’d used each of them -- less than 1 year; 1-2 years, 2-3 years, more than 3 years. Which got <em>me</em> kinda wondering, so I pulled out my iPhone and fired up each app. My first Uber ride was in December 2013, from midtown Manhattan to LGA at 4pm. I signed up because it’s such a pain to find a regular cab to take you to LGA at rush hour, and I’d forgotten to book a ride with the black car service I would normally use. Interesting that I didn’t use Uber again for another 6 months, in June 2014, when again, I’d didn’t have a black car book for a ride from PHL to a client out in the suburbs along the Blue Route. I signed up with Lyft in December 2015 when I was in Las Vegas for a project. I’d be using Uber more frequently in 2015, but back then, only Lyft had permission to drop-off at LAS. We had used Uber a couple of times, but they’d have to drop us off at the rental car center so we could take the bus to the terminal. I did that exactly one time and then pivoted to Lyft. So, according to this e-mail survey -- which, at the end, revealed itself to be sponsored by Uber -- I’m a grizzled ride-sharing veteran -- as I’m sure are many of you.</li><li>And ride-sharing was what it was -- an app-driven version of the old ride-sharing bulletin boards -- “I’m driving from Chicago to Rockford; looking for someone to split the gas and tolls” -- except locally. I remember, at the start, that caused a bit of an etiquette challenge -- do I sit in the front or the back? And you were careful because it was their car -- and usually a nice one. Certainly much nicer and way less beat-up than the typical cab.&nbsp; And there were usually good stories from the drivers -- all but a couple were doing it part-time, to make some additional cash. Way back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/11/22/podcast-125-uber-driver-stories-overseas-for-the-election/\">episode #125</a>, in November 2016, early on in my Uber/Lyft days, I told some of those stories.</li><li>A year later, a driver in Charlottesville, VA told me he was driving full-time and wanted to expand, so he’d bought 3 used Toyota Corollas (even back then the preferred ride-share car) and was renting them out to “Hispanics”, his words, who were driving Uber and Lyft a couple hours north in the Washington, DC area. Interesting idea. A bit like the standard taxi cab model -- leasing licensed cabs to drivers for a shift -- but without the need to drop money on a taxi license, or a medallion in places like New York and Chicago. Interesting enough that there are now 6-7 companies, including Hertz, offering daily and weekly rentals if you don’t want to share rides in your personal car.</li><li>Back in December, landing in Chicago Midway on a Southwest flight from PHX, I did my usual drill, opened up Uber and Lyft as I got off the plane and checked prices and wait times for a ride home. The prices were about the same, but the wait time… 10 min for Uber, 2 for Lyft. Lyft it is! I hit the Request Ride button, but instead of searching for a driver, I immediately get a 4-digit PIN. I head downstairs and get into a queue that looks a lot like the cab line a few doors over, except this one is run by women in pink Lyft safety vests. But they’re doing the same thing the cab rank workers do -- wave down cars and then point passengers to them. I wait, I dunno, maybe 5 minutes to get into a car, show the guy the PIN on my Lyft app, he enters it into his, and off we go. A bit less hectic than the typical airport rideshare scrum, but again, how is this different than a taxi -- except that I don’t have to ask the driver if his credit card machine works.</li><li>Indeed, on most of my trips over the past year, arriving in PHX or CHO, there typically wouldn’t be a line for a cab, so I’d skip the 5-10 minute wait for Uber or Lyft. Or, returning from Durango with my extra bag of ski paraphernalia, I skipped the schlep up to to the ride-share pick-up zone; I just walked out the door to a waiting cab. And the price difference is shrinking --&nbsp; as we talked about in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/08/13/podcast-154-will-we-still-love-uber-when-the-prices-go-up/\">episode #154</a>, Uber and Lyft have been nudging their rates up to stem their losses.&nbsp;</li><li>This is not to say there aren’t important differences; places where Uber and Lyft bring real value. I was working in New Orleans before Uber set up shop. It was impossible to get a cab anywhere other than between the airport and the French Quarter. Trying to get to and from a restaurant in, say, Mid-City or Uptown was painful -- until Uber showed up.</li><li>It kinda feels like, after all the hype, the battles with regulators, the IPOs, that Uber and Lyft used billions of venture capital dollars to break the medallion monopolies and build some phenomenal taxi dispatch systems. As a traveler, it’s been great for me. For the investors though? Well, I’m glad I skipped those IPOs</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3><strong>Closing</strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #160</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_160.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #160 — Disappearing Seatback Screens; Shrinking Difference Between Ride-Share and Taxis','','inherit','closed','closed','','2661-revision-v1','','','2021-03-04 23:10:24','2021-03-05 04:10:24','',2661,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/04/2661-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3406,1,'2021-03-04 23:15:23','2021-03-05 04:15:23','<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/new2-640x641-1.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2641\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/new2-640x641-1-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a>I just wrapped up two months in downtown Phoenix and want to pass along my favorite hangouts for food and beer. When I started traveling to Phoenix in the mid-\'90\'s, there wasn\'t much to downtown Phoenix other than the Hyatt Regency hotel. Today, stadiums for the Phoenix Suns and the Arizona Diamondbacks, and a downtown campus for Arizona State University support a solid selection of restaurants, coffee shops, and bars. Below are the places that I found myself going back to again and again during my 2-month stay.\n\n<a href=\"https://mariscosplayahermosa.com\"><strong>Mariscos Playa Hermosa</strong></a> While not technically within the DTPHX boundary, this place has the best Mexican seafood I\'ve ever had -- and that includes my dinners in San Jose del Cabo over last Christmas Break. The <em>Pulpo y Callo Parrillada</em> (grilled octopus leg and scallops) and <em>Camarones Fantasia</em> (shrimp stuffed into mild chile and then wrapped in bacon) are my favorites, but it\'s all good. Worth the short Uber/Lyft ride. (1605 E Garfield St)\n\n<a href=\"http://harumisushiaz.com\"><strong>Harumi Sushi</strong></a> Sushi in the desert doesn\'t immediately jump to the top of my list of food must-do\'s, but Harumi hits all my sushi hot buttons -- nice pieces of sashimi served with fresh wasabi and an interesting selection of rolls. It\'s a small place that gets crowded, so check out the wait time on Yelp before you walk over. (114 W Adams St though the door is north of Adams on 1st St)\n\n<strong><a href=\"http://www.pizzeriabianco.com/\">Pizzeria Bianco</a></strong> Always on the lists of the top pizza places in the US. While I\'m not sure if deserves all those accolades, it\'s very good thin crust pizza. And Bar Bianco next door is a very cool space for pre- or post-dinner cocktails. (623 E Adams St in Heritage Square near the AZ Science Center)\n\n<strong><a href=\"http://thearrogantbutcher.com\">Arrogant Butcher</a> </strong> The place I\'d go when I wanted to eat at the bar and watch a ball game. I like the Butcher\'s Meatballs for a smaller meal and the Beef Short Rib Stew when a bit hungrier. It\'s kitty-corner from Talking Stick Arena, so it can get crowded before a Suns game. (2 E Jefferson St at S 1st St)\n\n<a href=\"http://thewhiningpig.com\"><strong>The Whining Pig</strong></a> A block north of Talking Stick Arena, The Whining Pig is a classic low-key/no-attitude craft beer bar -- a great draft selection, a huge can/bottle menu, knowledgable bartenders, and a solid selection of bar and card games. My go-to beer bar in DTPHX. (201 E Washington St, though the door is south of Washington on 2nd St)\n\n<a href=\"http://thetheodore.beer\"><strong>The Theodore</strong></a> Great craft beer bar at the west end of the hip Roosevelt Row district. Nice <a href=\"https://untappd.com/v/the-theodore/9474701\">draft menu</a>, color coded by style, and a cooler full of interesting cans and bottles for drinking there or back at your hotel. Good-sized place -- comfy couches inside and patio seating out front and on the side. (110 E Roosevelt St at N 1st St)\n\n<strong><a href=\"https://azwbeer.com/dtphx-beer-garden/\">Arizona Wilderness DTPHX</a></strong> A block-and-a-half down from The Theodore is Arizona Wilderness\'s downtown beer garden. Sit outside around the fire pit (during the winter months) or inside (during the summer months). They have a wide-ranging <a href=\"https://untappd.com/v/arizona-wilderness-dtphx/8695423\">beer menu</a>, many of which feature Arizona-sourced ingredients like honey, lemons, prickly pear, carrots, and sweet potato. (201 E Roosevelt St) .','My food and beer hangouts in Downtown Phoenix (#DTPHX)','','inherit','closed','closed','','2640-revision-v1','','','2021-03-04 23:15:23','2021-03-05 04:15:23','',2640,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/04/2640-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3408,1,'2021-03-04 23:17:53','2021-03-05 04:17:53','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/DSC_7106-scaled.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2633\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/DSC_7106-300x293.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"293\" /></a>\n<figcaption>Just put my dragon\'s den on Airbnb</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p>January is a big travel planning month; people thinking about about the places they want to visit, spending days on the Internet researching itineraries, and putting in their week\'s vacation requests. But what about a 9-week sabbatical you’ve worked 7 years for? In this episode, we talk about that kind of extreme travel planning. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_159.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #159: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois having finished 3 weeks of traveling down to Phoenix with one more to go. It’s been a mild winter -- for Chicago -- especially when compared to last winter, which means it’s been in the 20’s and 30’s as opposed to -23 as it was one morning last January. But even with a mild winter, I still appreciate the 70 degree days in Phoenix.</li><li> It’s a 4-hr flight between Chicago and Phoenix. I normally enjoy that amount of “unplugged” time to just read, listen to music, listen to podcasts. But a couple of weeks ago, I tweaked my back during a workout -- not a big thing, I’ve done it many times before. But this time, the pain didn’t go away, it’s hung around on my left side, moving from back to hip to thigh, making it very uncomfortable to sit for long periods of time -- like 4 hrs. Which has made me notice how long US carriers keep the “Fasten Seatbelt” sign on -- like, forever. By the time that seatbelt sign finally goes off, my back is screaming -- and the person next to me in the middle seat is pretty annoyed at my constant shifting. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/06/16/podcast-152-overwhelming-travel-new-old-restaurant-trends/\">episode #152</a>, I talked about Southwest flights between Chicago and Nashville keeping the seatbelt sign on the entire hour-and-20-minutes. It hasn’t been that bad, but it’s easily been 45 minutes. And it isn’t just Southwest; United is doing the same thing. Quite a difference from, say, when Andrew and I flew Air Baltic back in October. 10,000 ft and “bing” that seat belt sign would go off, and we’d still be climbing. It doesn’t need to turn off that fast, but there’s gotta be a happy medium there somewhere. </li><li>With the mild winter and a little bit of luck, my flights to and from Phoenix have been pretty dependable -- except for this week. On Monday, I started getting delay notices for my United 7:40pm flight right after lunch. United was doing their typical rolling delay exercise -- it’s a 30 minutes; no, really an hour; no, we’re leaving at 9pm; just kidding, it’s really 9:40. I was OK with the 30 and 60-minute delays, but then when I get two more delays in a 40-minute span -- now, something’s up. I call United. I get the Premier desk, which the guy tells me is in Chicago. I tell him the story -- rolling delays have now gotten to 2 hrs; I don’t trust that this flight is going off, and I need to get to PHX tonight. The guy says, “Yup, I got it. Makes sense.” He tries to find me routings through LAX and SFO, but the connections don’t work. So he cancels and refunds my ticket -- no hassle, no questions, no change fee. I love this guy. I pivot to Southwest and American, which both have 8:40 flights. I look at American’s seat map -- nothing but middle seats. That’s just not going to work with my back, so it’s over to Southwest. I’m A-List, so I know with their open seating I’ll get an aisle seat. (Exhale) Haven’t done that dance in a while, so was a bit out of shape. But with one more trip to PHX left, I’m not looking to get back into that shape.</li><li>Bridge Music --  <em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/hisboyelroy/430\" target=\"_blank\">Revolve</a> mix</em> by cinematrik (c) copyright 2005 Licensed under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hisboyelroy/430   </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3><strong>Following Up</strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Before writing a podcast, I go through all the interaction channels -- website comments, Facebook comments, Instagram comments, Twitter replies, e-mails, … and inevitably I miss something. Which I have done since October when Arnoud Heijnis and I traded Twitter direct messages about travel converters. In episode #155, I’d talked about having to rummage around for European plug adaptors before my Krakow and Budapest trip, and how I’m always leaving them behind. Arnoud wrote -<ul><li>Hi Mark, just caught up on your last two episodes. I also did the travel converter dance until someone recommended the Power Bagel. It\'s so small and comes in handy not only as a travel adapter but also in hotel rooms with not enough power plugs, conference tables with one outlet etc. Iit never leaves my bag so thought I\'d share.</li></ul></li><li>A very belated thanks, Arnoud! Clicking through the link that Arnoud sent, the Power Bagel is a compact circular power strip of universal plugs and a couple of USB ports. They say that the circular design keeps large power adapters, like a Macbook power supply, from blocking outlets like they do on straight power strips. And then in the center hole, they store a universal plug adapter so you can plug the Power Bagel in most international outlets. Cool design and Arnoud vouches for it. Clicking around the web site, the company MOGICS seems to be a 3-person design company based in Singapore. They got started a few years back on Kickstarter and are in the middle of a new campaign for an upgraded version of the Power Bagel, called, of course, the Super Bagel that upgrades the plug adapter and adds a on-trend USB-C port. Kickstarter says the campaign ends on Feb 25th. I’ll include a <a href=\"http://kck.st/354ozBx\">link</a> in the show notes for anyone interested.</li><li>Kickstarter seems to be the place for these things. I sent Arnoud a link to a travel adapter campaign that I joined. The Passport Go is a more traditional travel adapter -- a big cube that will plug into most international outlets and has 3 USB-A and 1 USB-C plugs and one universal plug receptacle. I used it on my Baltics trip. For personal travel, most of my power needs seem to now be driven by USB cords rather than plugs -- my iPhone did a rapid charge off the USB-C port, my tablet and headphones off the USB-A ports and since I don’t have enough hair to justify a blow dryer or curling iron, I never used the plug receptacle. Indeed, if I’d brought my Macbook Air, I could’ve powered that up off the USB-C port rather than bringing its power adapter. I’ll include a link to <a href=\"https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/zendure/passport-go-worlds-first-travel-adapter-w-gan-technology\"><em>their</em> Kickstarter page</a>.</li><li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/10/14/podcast-156-airport-satisfaction-escooters-smaller-luggage/\">episode #156,</a> I talked about how I really liked electric scooters, using them to run around in Chicago and Charlottesville and DC, and down here in Phoenix. Whereas Chicago wrapped up their e-scooter pilot in October -- which made sense; I don’t think those scooters would do well in the snow -- Phoenix seemed the perfect place with perfect weather -- no snow, not a lot of rain. And they seemed to have nailed one of the main problems with e-scooters -- people leaving them lying everywhere, especially in the middle of sidewalks. In downtown Phoenix, you have to park them in designated areas, typically near sidewalk corners, inside a painted box. So it surprised me when I started coming down here in December that I saw only 2 scooter companies -- Lime (which is partnered with Uber) and Spin (which is owned by the car company Ford). But then, a couple of weeks ago, Lime announced that they were pulling out -- that they couldn’t make money in Phoenix -- and a day or so later, all their scooters were gone. I don’t know what the right balance between scooter availability and public right-of-way is, but I hope Chicago and Phoenix and other cities can figure it out. This whole micro-mobility space -- bike shares, e-scooters -- is an important part of the urban transit mix. And, when the weather’s nice, they’re fun too!</li><li>In that <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/10/14/podcast-156-airport-satisfaction-escooters-smaller-luggage/\">same episode</a>, I talked about buying a smaller bag, a <a href=\"https://amzn.to/32lIURe\">TravelPro Maxlite 5 international carry-on size</a>, to meet the smaller carry-on size and weight requirements of AirBaltic, which Andrew and I would be using to hop between Riga, Tallinn, and Helsinki on our Baltics beer and sauna tour. I said back then that I didn’t want to spend a lot of money on it because I’d only be using it for this Baltics trip and maybe some short couple-of-day trips, that my big Victorinox 22-incher would remain my primary bag. But as it turns out, I’ve been using the smaller TravelPro for these 4-day/3-night trips to Phoenix. Now, with temperatures in 70’s, I’m not having to bring heavy, thick clothes with me, but still, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by what I can pack into that smaller TravelPro. But, I think I’ll be back to the Victorinox for next week’s trip -- I’m vectoring through Durango, CO for a ski weekend on the way home. Little colder, little more clothing; I think I’ll need all the space I can get. </li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music -- Velvet Green of Mystery (Instrumental) by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/48114 Ft: Kthugha, Jeris, Martijn de Boer  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3><strong> </strong> <strong>Planning the Trip of a Lifetime</strong> </h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>We’ve talked on past episodes about trip planning -- using guidebooks, social media, Google algorithms, shooting the gaps between bipolar TripAdvisor reviews, casting runes, consulting tarot cards,... And all that for a week’s vacation, maybe two. What about a 9-week vacation, a paid sabbatical that you’ve worked and waited 7 years for? Well, that’s the extreme travel planning that long-time TravelCommons listener and even longer time friend Allan Marko and his wife Chris Chufo faced last year. And with January being a big travel planning month, I asked Allan to talk to us about how he and Chris planned for a trip of a lifetime.</li><li>Interview with Allan Marko</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3><strong>Closing</strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #159</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2010/09/06/video-1-impressions-of-vietnam/\">Link to TravelCommons Vietnam video</a></li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_159.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #159 — Planning the Trip of a Lifetime in Southeast Asia','','inherit','closed','closed','','2626-revision-v1','','','2021-03-04 23:17:53','2021-03-05 04:17:53','',2626,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/04/2626-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3414,1,'2021-03-04 23:27:02','2021-03-05 04:27:02','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/189764_1571139330482_7074048_n.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-2607\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/189764_1571139330482_7074048_n-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a><figcaption>Good End to 2019</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>Skipping the Chicago winter with trips to Phoenix and Sedona, Arizona, and a Christmas morning flight to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. Talk about those trips, my good and bad Hertz experiences, and then gather up odds-‘n’-ends from my travel notebooks to see off 2019 in this New Year\'s Eve episode. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_158.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #158: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois, just back from a bone-thawing trip with the family to Cabo San Lucas, sorta the Land’s End of Mexico’s Baja California peninsula. We booked this trip back in May. Andrew has read on some budget traveler newsletter that Southwest was about to start service to Cabo. So the morning that the flights went on offer, we all went after Southwest’s website and snagged our flights for just over 30,000 points a person. We flew down early Christmas morning, connecting through HOU, and, thinking back to how empty ORD was last year at Thanksgiving, I was stunned that both of our flights were completely full. It seemed that half of our 6:45a flight out of MDW was also walking over to the Cabo gate. Guess that once the kids stop believing in Santa, Christmas morning travel is fair game.</li><li>Flying back out of Cabo last Sunday, I walk up to the gate and don’t see the usual Southwest boarding number pylons. It’s just a typical shared gate with the Southwest flight to Hobby at Gate 4A and a Delta flight to maybe Salt Lake at Gate 4B. And no plane, because there’s no jetway. It’s a bus. Southwest’s open seating works because everyone enters the plane in numerical order. Squeezing all the A group and half of the B group onto one bus… this’ll be interesting. It’s a 3-minute bus ride around the corner of the terminal. The doors open; we pour out. A ramp worker is trying to recreate the Southwest boarding process on the tarmac, asking everyone to line up in 3 lines -- pre-boards, A1-30, and A31-60. It kinda works, for the most part… until another ramp worker says “Hey, we’re boarding through the back door, too” just as the second bus opens its doors. Then it just devolves into a free-for-all. I imagine that first ramp worker looking like Kevin Bacon in “Animal House”, flattened by stampeding passengers. I was the first one through the rear door, so I was fine with it, but it does feel like Southwest needs to re-engineer how they board from shared gates.</li><li>I say “bone-thawing,” but it’s not like I was suffering too much from the Chicago December. I’ve been in Phoenix most of the month between Thanksgiving and Christmas, walking around in shirt sleeves in 65 degree weather, topping up my Vitamin D levels while kinda chuckling at the locals hurrying&nbsp; by in their puffy Patagonia parkas. I even extended my stay through one of the weekends -- doing some more of that “bleisure” travel, this time a hiking weekend in the <a href=\"https://www.fs.fed.us/wildflowers/regions/southwestern/RedRockCountry/index.shtml\">Red Rock Country</a> around Sedona, Arizona.&nbsp; An hour or so before picking up a car from Hertz for the weekend, I got an e-mail from the Hertz PHX station manager saying they’d upgraded me as an early birthday present. With equal parts anticipation and trepidation (I remember DFW Hertz “upgrading” me to a Ford F-150 pickup) Irene and I rolled up to spot 43 to find a Mercedes A220 sedan under a “Happy Birthday” sign. OK, now <em>this</em> is an exciting upgrade. Once we fought our way through the Phoenix traffic, the A220 made the 2-hour drive up I-17 a fun run, especially with a 75 mph speed limit. </li><li> Bridge Music -- Earth Soda by septahelix (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial Share-Alike  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/septahelix/34050  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3><strong>Following Up</strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I pushed a <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1206606966031675393/photo/1\">picture of the Hertz car under the Happy Birthday sign</a> to the TravelCommons Instagram Story roll. Steve Frick replied, saying that a friend of his had gotten a Hertz birthday upgrade too, to a Jag. Not to throw any shade, but I definitely think the PHX team did me a bit better with the Benz, but it’s nice of Hertz to give their customers a bit of a birthday surprise. With so many travel providers working hard to squeeze, to optimize, and then to charge for every little thing, getting a birthday present from one of them with a bit of luxury -- and in my case not an insignificant upgrade -- it’s a pleasant throwback to what travel was like when I started business travel coming on 35 years ago.&nbsp;</li><li>But all that love was blown away less than 2 weeks later when the Hertz team in Cabo put me through a 20-minute hard sell on insurance -- $85/day on a $50/day rental -- and then charged me $14/day for something called “Credit Card Care”, all for a beat-up VW Passat with 50,000 hard miles on it. Ugh.</li><li>Steve also hit the TravelCommons website to talk about mileage runs. In the last episode, I said that Mark Skinner’s DC-HKG up-and-back to carry a NASA cosmic ray detector on United’s over-the-pole route was one helluva mileage run. Steve said -<ul><li>I haven’t done a mileage run in years but came real close to losing my Southwest companion pass status for 2020. I had to change a few of my travel website profiles to use my Southwest card over my Hilton American Express card in order to hit it for 2020. It’s always a tough decision do I want 12 points per dollar at Hilton properties or free Southwest flights for my wife</li></ul></li><li>Thanks, Steve. I’ll tweak my travel credit cards now and then to hit some goals, but I hadn’t thought of it as an end-of-year mileage run. But it does make sense, especially with Southwest which counts credit card spend toward Companion Pass. I like that, a credit-card mileage run -- definitely more climate friendly.</li><li>I was talking about my flights to and from Phoenix a couple of weeks ago with one of the guys on the project team, a younger guy, and the look he gave me suggested that I’d hit peak travel nerdery -- at least in his eyes. I was telling him that I fly out to Phoenix on United from ORD because United has an 8am flight out, it’s easier to get a morning coffee at ORD than MDW, I get a free upgrade to Economy Plus which makes it easier to sleep, and because United uses PHX in Terminal 2, the older “slum” terminal that, because it’s separate from the main terminals, makes it easier to get an Uber or Lyft. But then I fly back to Chicago on Southwest because they have more flights back in the afternoon which gives me some flexibility with last-minute meetings, they don’t charge a change fee, they fly out of the newer Terminal 4 in PHX which gives me a much better selection of restaurants and bars than Terminal 2, and it puts me into Chicago-Midway where the wait for an Uber or Lyft is always shorter than at ORD. To me, it was a completely reasonable thought process -- optimizing each leg for the amenities I’d use. I turned to one of the other guys -- a guy who’s been traveling 20-some years -- “Yup, makes perfect sense to me,” he said. The younger guy was just shaking his head; probably muttering “OK Boomer” under his breath. But he’ll learn.</li><li>Back in November, during one of my semi-regular spelunks through Google Analytics, I noticed that <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/11/20/podcast-146-rental-demolition-derby-traveler-gift-guide/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #146 — Rental Demolition Derby; Traveler Gift Guide\">the November 2018 episode - #146: Rental Demolition Derby and Traveler Gift Guide</a> - was one of the top 5 pages on the TravelCommons website. I couldn’t figure how stories of rental car wrecks would get a lot of Google hits, so it must be the gift guide. Which suggested that maybe I should update it for 2019, but more as a blog post this time. I read through a half-dozen or so other gift guides, looking for some ideas I could steal, but they got pretty repetitious pretty quick -- pushing Away luggage, Huzi infinity pillows, and Aesop travel kits, which suggests to a cynical mind that these companies must’ve been splashing a lot of samples around the blog-o-sphere. And maybe didn’t age all that well after the Verge published an <a aria-label=\"exposé on Away’s toxic work culture (opens in a new tab)\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/5/20995453/away-luggage-ceo-steph-korey-toxic-work-environment-travel-inclusion\" target=\"_blank\">exposé on Away’s toxic work culture</a>. But anyway, I wanted something a bit different, and on one of my flights got thinking about a chat I’d had with a friend a while back. She was looking for gift ideas for her daughter who, a couple of years out of college, was starting a new job with a lot more business travel. Replaying that chat in my head, and thinking about the younger guy on my project team, I started going through my travel kit -- rummaging through my messenger bag and then cycling through my suitcase -- mentally, though; not enough space to physically pull it down from the overhead and open it up; and that would’ve looked a bit weird. I built <a aria-label=\"a list of the things I really use on my trips (opens in a new tab)\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/12/11/best-gift-ideas-for-a-new-traveler/\" target=\"_blank\">a list of the things I really use on my trips</a>, and that I miss when I forget to bring them along. Then I winnowed it down to 10 -- because “Top 10” is a key search term -- and there you have it. If you haven’t looked at it yet, give it a read and leave a comment with your suggestions.</li><li>Number 2 on <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/12/11/best-gift-ideas-for-a-new-traveler/\">my list of ideas</a>, after a 20-inch black roller bag, is picking up the application fee for TSA Global Entry for your new traveler. For $100, or for free with many airline and hotel reward credit cards, you can gift them with 5 years of hassle reduction with PreCheck for domestic travel and a fast path through Customs when they travel internationally. Coming back from Cabo, we connected again through Houston-Hobby and so had to clear Immigration and Customs there. It was my first time through Customs there, so it took me a minute to find the Global Entry kiosks. The interface was a bit different from the ORD ones. Instead of asking for my passport and prompting me for the fingerprint pad, it asked me to fit my face inside a red box before taking my picture. The camera didn’t look adjustable, so I squatted down ‘til my face was in the frame and then clicked the Take Photo button. A couple seconds later, the kiosk spit out my receipt and I was off to the exit -- no passport or fingerprint scans, no clicking through questions. Quick, but odd. Some Google searches when I got home told me that I’d hit the new generation of Global Entry kiosks -- Global Entry 2.0 -- that uses facial recognition to match the kiosk picture with my passport and Global Entry application pictures. Given how crappy the kiosk picture looked on the receipt -- and that I hadn’t taken my glasses off -- I’m either really impressed or really concerned about the accuracy of their facial recognition algorithm; I’m not quite sure which.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li> Bridge Music -- Absolutely Clear (ft Jeris &amp; Goldfish) by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/45578 Ft: Jeris, Goldfish  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3><strong> Travel Potpourri for $400, Alex </strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Here it is, the last episode of the year that I’m trying to get out before cracking the Vueve and trying to stay awake until midnight. With the clock ticking, instead of a proper topic, all I can do is gather up some odds-‘n’-ends from my travel notebooks into a Jeopardy-like topic “Travel Potpourri”</li><li>And writing in my travel notebooks is something I like to do. I have a couple: a small one -- a 3½x5½-in or A6 size that fits in my back pocket -- to jot down notes, bullet points; and a larger one that I use as a proper travel journal. For that, I was using a B6 Muji notebook that I picked up in Lisbon 3 years ago. After I filled that one up, I switched to a taller, thinner Japanese traveler-sized notebook because… that’s what I had laying around. I’ve been writing in travel notebooks since I’ve started the podcast -- gotta feed the beast -- usually in public places -- in bars, a lotta bars, while drinking beers, or on planes, a lotta&nbsp; planes, though turbulence can be a problem. And for some reason, I’ve found that this act of writing in public generates a bit of interest, and a chunk of questions. Back in October, on the Finnair flight back from our Baltics tour, I was catching up, writing up my thoughts on our couple of days in Helsinki when the guy a few seats over started asking me what I was writing. He was a younger Finnish guy. He and his girlfriend and a group of 5 or 6 others were connecting through Chicago to Miami for a cruise, and they started their cruise party the minute the drink carts rolled. But he wanted to know what I was writing and why. The what was easy; he wanted to know what I thought of Helsinki; where I’d been, how I liked it. He was intrigued by our Baltic Riga-Tallinn-Helsinki itinerary, in kind of a “that’s weird, but interesting” way. The why I’m not sure made it through translation. It’s not a pure travelogue -- not a “we did this, and then did that”. It’s more about impressions; what I found unique; what caught my eye. Writing it down makes me think about it, and when I go back and read those pages, some 2 or 10 or 20 years later, it reminds me of that place, that time, those experiences.&nbsp;</li><li>And when I talk about travel with folks, when I tell them how often I travel, I’ll often get a story -- in a bar, on a plane, or… while getting my hair cut. The girl who does my hair told me about her trip to Peru with a yoga group. Not the whole trip (I don’t have that much hair), but on their flight back, out of Lima, the plane took off, rotating up, while the flight attendants were still in the aisle doing the final check. It was a bit of mayhem, she said. That had to be one quick taxi out and take-off, I thought, because you’d think those flight attendants would be sprinting to their seats once that plane started rolling down the runway. Which I have seen before, especially when the captain gets a quick release from a ground hold and wants to get airborne before the tower changes their mind. But I’ve never seen them leave the ground with anyone still in the aisle.</li><li>Maybe the pilot was distracted -- a message from the tower, an animal on the runway, a sudden thought crossed his mind. I thought about pilot distraction when walking the <a href=\"https://thehikehouse.com/trails/airport-mesa-trail\">Airport Mesa trail</a> in Sedona earlier this month. The trail name says it all -- it’s a 3½-mile loop around the mesa where Sedona’s general aviation airport is. The hikers aren’t the potential distraction, though. It’s one of Sedona’s famous energy vortexes that’s right next to the airport. The Airport Vortex is, according to<a href=\"https://sedonaverdevalley.natgeotourism.com/content/airport-mesa-vortex/svvc7d222a849df1d7d6\"> one website</a>, “an Upflow area (also called Electric or Masculine) that helps your spirit soar for a higher perspective and/or greater oneness and serenity.” Watching a couple of private jets take off while on our hike, I wondered what would happen if the pilot suddenly achieved greater oneness and serenity while rotating off the top of that mesa. For someone as unenlightened and non-serene as me, that would be one helluva distraction.</li><li>I think for many, maybe close to most frequent travelers, Uber and Lyft have replaced taxis, at least in the US, when not renting a car. So it got my attention when I hit a weird Uber app failure at ORD at the end of October. Coming back from Charlottesville, I light up both Uber and Lyft while getting off the plane to compare wait times and fares (you’d think their surge pricing would be consistent, but it rarely is for me). Uber is a bit better, so I go to book a ride. Except that the Uber app wouldn’t pick up at the domestic terminals, just the separate international terminal, Terminal 5. I check Lyft again; yup, they’ll pick me up at Terminal 2, so I book with them instead. But it’s weird, so I keep checking Uber. I walk out the door to the rideshare pick-up area. There’s nothing but cars with pink Lyft lights; not an Uber decal in sight. An older couple walks up to me -- “Where does Uber pick up?” Normally here, I tell them, but they seem to have deleted it from their app today. It was a good night to be a Lyft driver. I wondered how long it took Uber to notice that they weren’t getting any pick-ups from one of the country’s busiest airports.</li><li>Tonight, though -- New Year’s Eve night -- I’ll be skipping Uber and their after-midnight price surges. I’ll be happy to hang out at home, to skip any travel, and just pop a bottle... or two of Vueve and wish all you TravelCommons’ listeners a Happy New Year and fun and safe travels in 2020.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3><strong>Closing</strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #158</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_158.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #158 — Travel Potpourri for $400, Alex','','inherit','closed','closed','','2609-revision-v1','','','2021-03-04 23:27:02','2021-03-05 04:27:02','',2609,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/04/2609-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3417,1,'2021-03-12 15:58:11','2021-03-12 20:58:11','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_1985\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/7BA016C0-B99C-45F6-8A96-A0B9CD67D159-1-e1615580828646.jpg\" \"=\"\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1985\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/7BA016C0-B99C-45F6-8A96-A0B9CD67D159-1-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"People Camping Out on Airport Cots\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a>Wait Here \'til Your COVID Test is Negative[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>As travel bookings beginning to rise with vaccination rates, we talk with Michael Giusti of <a href=\"http://insurancequotes.com\" title=\"insurancequotes.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">InsuranceQuotes.com</a> to find out what\'s changed over the last year. I make the rounds through all my frequent traveler programs to reset impending expiration dates. We also talk about yet another travel data breach, a favorite beer bar is a COVID casualty, and bankrupt Hertz is starting to let its cars get old. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_173.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #173: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>This Week</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois on what has been a nice week. Temps got into the 60’s at the beginning of the week, so I broke out the bike for a ride along the lake -- sunny in most parts, but a bit chillier in the shady parts, riding narrow paths cut through 5-ft ice and snow mounds, the remnants of what were really impressive pile-ups of shore ice during the February deep freeze.</li><li>No travel since the last episode, but heading out next week to hang out on the beach in San Diego, reloading from our January pivot away from California because of their lockdown. A couple of months on, COVID cases are down, the state’s order banning hotel and Airbnb hosts from renting to out-of-state’er is gone, outdoor dining has re-opened and, most importantly, the craft brewery taprooms are open again. I pointed my little Python Untappd script at San Diego and can see a lot of Brewery check-ins. In between those taproom visits, I think we’ll manage to squeeze in some biking and kayaking.&nbsp;</li><li>And like many folks, we’re building our travel calendar for the rest of the year. Nashville, New York City, Northern Michigan, and Maine written in pen through the first half of the year. We’re penciling in the UK for November, booking it now to lock in no-fee cancelations in case of another winter spike, or what might be more likely, lingering resistance to dropping international quarantine requirements. But I’m optimistic (hopeful?) that the US and UK will get enough people vaccinated by then.</li><li>I was on a Zoom call a couple of nights ago with a bunch of college friends. “Do you think we can all get together in person in September for Homecoming?” someone asked. “Absolutely,” I said, “we just need to lean into it.” And it feels like that’s what more people are doing -- leaning into visits to physically get together with family and friends they haven’t seen for a year now. It’s always dangerous drawing a straight trend line, but it feels like travel might come back quicker than expected.&nbsp;</li><li>Bridge Music -- Madrugada(rmx) by savoyard (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/savoyard/10743 Ft: Curve</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I finally pushed out the refreshed website last week. First change since 2006. Figured website aesthetics have changed a bit over the last 15 years and so changed things up a bit. Thanks to everyone who responded to my request on Facebook and Twitter to hit the new site for a bit of crowd-sourced end-user testing. A bit like the <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1224798425499213828\">meme</a> you’ll see posted in a lot of IT shops; a picture of Dos Equis “most interesting man in the world” with the line -- “I don’t always test my code, but when I do, I test it in Production.” There’s still some tweaks I need to make, but it seems pretty solid. Check it out if you get a chance -- travelcommons.com -- and drop me a line at <a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a> with your thoughts.</li><li>Following up on last episode’s rant about the guy living unnoticed in ORD for 3 months, I tweeted out an <a href=\"https://theconversation.com/how-some-people-can-end-up-living-at-airports-for-months-even-years-at-a-time-154336\">article</a> about people living years in airports. Written by a history prof from University of Dayton who researches the history of airports (hey, everyone’s gotta have their niche), the article talks about other airport residents, an Iranian refugee who lived in CDG for 18 years, and most recently, an Estonian guy who was transiting through Manila Int’l Airport last March as the shutdowns hit was stuck there for 100 days until the Estonian embassy could get him on a repatriation flight. That one is brutal. I spent 3 hours in that airport a few years back and even, with everything open, it felt 2½ hours too long. Check out the article -- there’s a link in the show notes and at the top of the Twitter and Facebook feeds. It’s a good read.</li><li>Jim McDonough hit the Facebook page, responding to last episode’s margarita instruction story with one of his own.<ul><li>I know how you feel about teaching the bartender how to make a margarita. We ended a week-long trip to Switzerland by staying our last night at a hotel by the Zurich airport. At dinner, we each asked for a Scotch and water. They brought out this big tray, with a bowl of ice cubes, a pitcher of water, a bottle of Scotch, and two glasses. A crowd of hotel employees gathered to watch. Evidently, they don\'t do Scotch and water in Zurich. When I filled the glasses with ice, they gasped. I explained that we live in a hot climate. I went ahead and added Scotch and topped off with a little water, and they winced when I took a sip. A cultural exchange, I guess.</li></ul></li><li>Jim, I love you, man, but I gotta tell you -- I’d probably be wincing with the hotel staff. My usual Scotch order is -- Scotch and glass. But you paid for it (and in Zurich, it’s not going to be a small amount), so even if they couldn’t quite figure out what you wanted, they at least gave you all the tools you needed.</li><li>One of my absolute favorite beer bars, <a href=\"https://brewpublic.com/beer-news/baileys-taproom-and-the-upper-lip-permanently-closes-its-doors/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bailey’s Taproom in Portland, Oregon</a>, has shut off their taps permanently. I started a project in downtown Portland in January 2013. Found Bailey’s the second night I was there and just settled in; my last beer there was my last night in Portland. The owner said “After reopening to limited seating (after the initial shutdown), it was clear that people were not interested in coming downtown. When the PPP money ran out, I decided to close the doors”&nbsp; Another reminder that we should try to be purposeful about where we spend our discretionary dollars, thinking about what businesses we would miss if they closed up and then go out of our way to buy something from them. In my case, it helps rationalize a rather full beer shelf in our pantry.</li><li>After Hertz declared bankruptcy at the end of last May, I predicted in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/06/09/podcast-164-first-post-lockdown-trips-travel-credit-cards/\">episode #164</a> that I’d be paying more attention to the mileage on the cars in the Five Star aisle because that’s the first place I see signs of financial distress — a lot less 500-mile cars and a lot more 24,000-mile cars. And while 24,000 miles on a car doesn’t seem like a lot, remember that rental car miles are kinda like dog years — you gotta multiply them by, like, 7 to get to regular car miles. And true to form, when picking up our Hertz car in PHX at the end of January, every car I looked at had over 24,000 miles, a few with a <strong>lot</strong> more. Will be interesting to see what’s on offer at SAN in a few weeks.&nbsp;</li><li>If you have any status on a Star Alliance or One World carrier, you probably got an email from your carrier about a <a href=\"https://skift.com/2021/03/05/data-breach-affects-more-than-2-million-frequent-flyers-across-airline-alliances/\">data breach at SITA</a>. I got them from United and American saying my name, account number, and status was potentially exposed and that I should change my password, which I did. And then thought about how this is yet another data leak from some unknown player in what is an incredibly fragmented travel tech tool chain. We talked about this back in November in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">episode #169</a> when an obscure Spanish company used by hotels to update information on on-line booking sites leaked 24 GB of names, emails, credit card data and reservation records. And in this case, if you’re not in the airline industry, you probably don’t know about <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SITA_(company)\">SITA</a>. It’s a industry consortium started back in 1949 by 11 European airlines to share infrastructure costs and has expanded to provide all sorts of travel technology including the exchange of passenger data between airlines -- in this case, the exchange of frequent flyer status so that, say, Lufthansa recognizes your elite status with United on your flight with them. It’s one thing when the breach is from a company that you did business with -- the <a href=\"https://www.cnet.com/news/marriott-discloses-new-data-breach-impacting-5-point-2-million-guests/\">Marriott hacks</a> in 2018 and 2020, the 2018 breaches at <a href=\"https://www.theregister.com/2018/09/11/british_airways_website_scripts/\">British Airways</a> and <a href=\"https://www.theregister.com/2018/10/25/cathay_pacific_hacked_up_to_94_million_passenger_deets_exposed/\">Cathay Pacific</a>. But it’s a whole other thing when you find out some unknown third party coughed up your data. But actually, when you get a look at the spaghetti that is travel technology, and see all the places your data is getting sent to -- often small companies that can’t afford state-of-the-art cybersecurity, it’s kinda surprising -- in a sad way -- that not more of this happens.</li><li>Type “plane mask” into the Google search box and one of the first 5 suggestions is “plane mask fight”. Click through and you get what seems to be an endless stream of news reports and cellphone videos of passengers fighting about having to wear a mask during a flight. What is getting a lot less coverage, though I’m hearing snatches of it here and there, are people getting chewed out by their row mates when taking their masks off to eat or drink something, getting something like “Hey, can you not drink during the flight? I’d rather not die for your convenience.”&nbsp; And I’m afraid this is going to get worse as more people start traveling again and aircraft load factors get back into the 80% range. But honestly, both sides are being idiots. You know the rules before you buy your ticket and you’re reminded of them by emails before you travel, and again by gate agents before you board the plane. If you can’t handle the rules -- all of them, not just the ones you agree with -- then don’t walk down the jetway. Drive; charter a jet. But don’t try to bend the rules to your own personal belief system and hassle the rest of us who are just trying to get from Point A to Point B on-time and with the minimum amount of heartache.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on our fab new web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge music -- Tools of the Trade by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial &nbsp;(3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/56512 Ft: Abstract Audio, Mr Yesterday, Martijn de Boer, Speck</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>What\'s New in Travel Insurance</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A little over a year ago, the first coronavirus lockdowns started, and the execution of them was, to be charitable, mostly a mess. Borders were quickly shut; planes grounded. People were stranded in foreign countries with no way home; we just talked about the Estonian guy stuck in Manila airport for 100 days. And all of a sudden, people started paying attention to travel insurance. What was once a check box at the bottom of a booking webpage that most of us clicked “no” on so we could finish our reservation quickly became very important. Last May in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/05/08/podcast-163-new-world-of-travel-insurance-getting-medical-help-on-the-road/\">episode #163</a>, as people were beginning to think about their first post-lockdown trips, we talked about the state of travel insurance. Now, with travel bookings beginning to rise as vaccination rates rise, I wanted to check back in and see what’s changed with travel insurance. So I asked Michael Giusti, senior writer at <a href=\"https://www.insurancequotes.com/\">InsuranceQuotes.com</a>, to come onto the podcast and give us an update:&nbsp;<ul><li>Mark: Michael, last May, Eric Josowitz of <a href=\"https://www.insurancequotes.com/\">InsuranceQuotes.com</a> was on the podcast. We were talking about travel insurance after the initial lockdown. Back then, in the midst of all that travel disruption, many travelers were finding:&nbsp; a) they didn\'t actually know what their insurance covered; they’d just checked the box at the end of their booking process, paid some additional amount moved on; and&nbsp; b) the insurance that they had bought had exclusions for communicable diseases, WHO-declared pandemics, cancellations in cases of fear. And then, after that, insurers stopped offering travel insurance. So, Michael, that was May. This is now the end of February. What\'s the current situation regarding travel insurance?</li><li>Michael: Not many people were thinking about pandemics back when this started. But the few people who were thinking about it were insurers. They saw the SARS epidemic and they started writing in pandemic exclusions from that point on. And then there\'s a second little provision in these insurance policies called the Known Events Provisions. So once the pandemic declared, even if there wasn\'t a specific exclusion, they can turn around and say, “Well, we\'re not going to cover because it\'s now a known event.” It would be like there\'s a hurricane that\'s bearing down on your city and you buy a plane ticket while the hurricane is there, and then you get mad because you can\'t fly. It’s a known event, and so they\'re not going to cover that. So that\'s where we came from. And then, you\'re right, they stopped and they said, “Well, we have no idea what\'s going on, so let’s regroup.”&nbsp; And now they\'ve regrouped, and it\'s really interesting because in a lot of the insurance industry, they\'ve stopped covering pandemics. But in travel insurance, they specifically started including Covid 19, saying “We will cover it under these conditions.”</li><li>Mark: Michael, travel requirements have been changing quickly; the restrictions have been going in and out. I mean, most recently, the need to provide a negative COVID test just to be able to get on a plane.&nbsp; If you look at what Canada did, they basically gave travelers one-week notice of the rule change at the end of 2020. But if you\'ve bought a travel insurance policy when you booked travel six weeks prior, what\'s the best way to cover these late breaking requirements that pop up a week or two before our trip?</li><li>Michael: Two main things... One is the policy language. You do need to say what’s specifically included, what’s specifically excluded? Because whether they\'re going to cover not having a negative test very much depends on the policy language. The other thing that it\'s going to come down to is whether it\'s out of your control. If it\'s something that you\'ve neglected to do, it\'s never going to be covered. The policies I\'ve reviewed, I haven\'t seen any that specifically kick in if you haven\'t got a negative test. So if you\'re worried about that, you really do need to ask the agent or really read that fine print. I do know that if you\'re delayed at security while you\'re being tested, that\'s not covered. So you do have to get there in time to make sure if they do rapid tests on the spot, that you\'re going to have time to get through security.</li><li>Mark: Okay, let me unpack that just a little bit, Michael. So I booked my flight, and I\'ve booked it a month ago. And now I go to take my test 72 hours before departure, and I come up positive. If I\'ve bought the right policy, would that typically cover delay or cover cancellation?</li><li>Michael: Delay is always the first preference. So if we can just push this trip back a week or whatever, that\'s going to be everyone\'s favorite outcome. But there are cancellation provisions where, say, you can\'t move it because the wedding is not going to be moved, in which case the cancellation provisions might kick in.</li><li>Mark: So now let\'s flip that. I\'ve taken my test, it\'s been negative, I get on the plane, I fly down to Costa Rica. And now a week on, I\'ve taken my test to get back into the US and now that test comes out positive. So now, potentially, I can\'t get back into the US. How does insurance help me there?</li><li>Michael: There\'s a couple places where this insurance is going to really beneficial in that situation. First and foremost, the medical provisions in most of these comprehensive policies are going to actually help you pay for your healthcare. Many of them are going to be secondary coverage, meaning they\'re going to want your primary health care to kick in first and then they\'ll jump in and cover anything that\'s not covered. Some of them are primary, especially with the overseas trips. So, that\'s a really nice benefits that are built into a lot of these policies. The other place that will help is, if you\'re delayed because you can\'t travel because of a restriction like that, and that\'s outside of your control, a lot of them will cover a hotel while you\'re waiting and meals while you\'re waiting, and they\'ll get you back home safely. So that\'s actually a really positive outcome that can happen with these policies.</li><li>Mark: Michael, how do I make sure that I\'ve actually got one of those policies? If we go back to the April/May timeframe, people were finding that they didn\'t actually know what they had. How do I make sure I\'ve actually bought that coverage?</li><li>Michael: Well, best case scenario would be if you found a human and you asked them in plain English.</li><li>Mark: Yeah, good luck with that, right?</li><li>Michael: I know, calling 1 800 numbers anymore – that’s not in the cards. What I would do if I was doing that, I’d click through the terms of service and see who\'s offering that policy. If it doesn\'t really go into much detail, or if it\'s really garbly legalese, I’d go through to the provider\'s website. Most of them have FAQ pages that specifically address COVID. So that\'s gonna be probably your best resource.</li><li>Mark: Michael, people are starting to think about big trips as vaccination rates start to step up. You know, the back half of the year, if I\'m thinking about booking, say, a week\'s biking tour in Tuscany or Provence in September/October, what kind of travel insurance should I be looking for? Should I pony up for a cancel- for-any-reason rider? Or are there some cheaper alternatives for more limited scenarios like, “Hey, the EU still isn\'t letting Americans in” but won\'t cover the more generic “Oh, I\'m afraid to travel” kind of reason.</li><li>Michael: The question of “if you\'re afraid to travel” is never going to be covered unless you do have that cancel-for-any-reason policy. But travel insurance is meant to cover things that are out of your control. So you know, if it\'s not laid out your policy, it\'s not gonna be covered. So that\'s kind of the most expensive option. You know, you\'re going to pay the most for a cancel-for-any-reason policy. That middle ground is the standard policy where you say “I\'m taking a little bit of the risk on myself. I\'m going to bravely travel wherever I\'m allowed.” The least expensive option is really kind of a DIY. And a lot of the destinations that I\'m seeing, they\'re waiving cancellation and change fees. And so you can kind of make your DIY travel insurance by only booking places that would let you change for no fee. That\'s kind of the cheapest “I\'m feeling brave” policy. “I\'m feeling skittish” policy Is that cancel-for-any-reason.</li><li>Mark: Super. Michael Giusti, senior writer at <a href=\"https://www.insurancequotes.com/\">InsuranceQuotes.com</a>, thank you very much for joining us. This was a great update.</li><li>Michael: Thank you so much.</li></ul></li><li>Bridge music -- Crazy Love-The Alex &amp; Lang mix by J.Lang (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djlang59/10579 Ft: FHC and Alex &amp; Bradsucks</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Keeping Ahead of Expiring Miles</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Like most road warriors of a certain tenure, I have cards in my desk of some 30-odd frequent traveler programs -- those that I know of -- and am probably a member of another dozen or so that I’ve forgotten about. Of those, I have meaningful balances -- enough for at least one free flight or a free hotel night -- at the Big 4 US carriers, a couple of European carriers, and two of the big hotel chains. Most of the rest are random programs like IcelandAir or AirBaltic or Omni Hotels that I used for a specific trip or project but had some spiff, like seat selection or free WiFi, that was reason enough to put in the effort to sign up.</li><li>When I was traveling every week or so, keeping those main programs active wasn’t a big effort. And if I hadn’t flown, say, BA for a while, I’d code maybe a short American commuter flight, something where my status was a bit meaningless, to my BA account to reset the expiration clock.</li><li>But now, hitting the first anniversary of the first travel lockdown and with business travel still mostly on hold, some of those expiration cliffs are starting to become visible</li><li>Last episode, I talked about getting emails from BA and Iberia warning me of pending Avios expirations, and so I transferred my Iberia points to my BA account. But I can’t tell from the BA website if that was enough activity to change the BA expiration. So I spelunked some more thru the website and found where they call out Airbnb bookings as “recognized activity” that’ll reset the 36-month clock. So, I booked our San Diego Airbnb through a link on BA’s site, just had to enter my BA account number before moving to the booking screen. It’ll be interesting to see if the activity flows seamlessly into my BA account or if I’ll have to chase it down through a manual credit claim. I’m betting on the latter, but am hoping to be pleasantly surprised.</li><li>But that got me cycling through my other accounts. I wasn’t worried about my US carrier accounts. The trend there has been to do away with expiration dates, first Southwest, then Delta, most recently United. American, not surprisingly, is the knuckle dragger, clinging to their stingy 18-month policy, but I flew them last fall to PHL, so I’m fine there.</li><li>But Flying Blue, the KLM/Air France program? I last flew KLM the fall of 2018, so that had to be coming up. I hit the website; those miles were also expiring at the end of this year. And, they, like BA and Iberia, have managed to make resetting that data way overly complex.&nbsp; First, there’s “overall extending activities” which are flights or purchases on their co-branded credit card; they extend <em>all</em> Flying Blue miles by 2 years. “Partial extending activities” extend miles earned through, say, hotel or car rental partners. Please note, says the website, \"‘Partial extending activities’ do not extend the validity of Miles earned from ‘Overall extending activities’\". OK, then. Looking at it this way, I only had 500 miles from that 2018 flight, but 38,000 miles from when I had to quickly stash points from a corporate Amex account before leaving a company. So, a “partial” activity should suffice. I set myself a reminder for Dec 1st to push the minimum 1,000 points from my personal Amex.</li><li>And the expiration periods are kinda all over the place. BA is 36 months; KLM, Marriott, and Hyatt are 2 years; American is 18 months; Hilton is 15 months (weird number); and IHG is the stingiest at 12.&nbsp;</li><li>Seems like there should be a technology solution to this, right? There are a few. If you use TripIt to consolidate your trip itineraries, the $49/year upgrade to the Pro version gives you program tracking. I had used it one year when they upgraded me for free; probably by mistake. AwardWallet is another popular tool, but there too, you need to upgrade to the paid version (a little cheaper at $30/year) to track expirations.</li><li>But beyond the cost, for these programs to work, you have to give them access to your accounts -- your account numbers and passwords. And cycling back to what I was saying at the top of the show, with the travel industry’s kinda poor track record on data protection, and just after having to reset passwords to United, American, Lufthansa, BA, and Iberia because of SITA’s leak, do I really want to put <em>all</em> my frequent traveler logins into one spot? I think a simple spreadsheet on the hard drive of the PC in my office can do the job just fine.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #173</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li>Nothing new on the tech front this month, but I should have the website freshened up by the next episode. I’ve had the current look since the beginning of 2006 courtesy of TravelCommons listener Hilary Baumann and her <a href=\"https://fascinationdesign.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Fascination Design</a> firm. The change is absolutely not a knock against Hilary’s work. It’s just that, after 15 years, I wanted to freshen things up a bit. So look for that by the end of February or beginning of March.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>, as well as asking Alexa, Siri, and Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_173.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #173 — What\'s New in Travel Insurance; Keeping Ahead of Expiring Miles','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-173-whats-new-in-travel-insurance-keeping-ahead-of-expiring-miles','','','2021-10-01 17:12:31','2021-10-01 22:12:31','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3417',0,'post','',0),
(3418,1,'2021-03-10 22:33:37','2021-03-11 03:33:37','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3037,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2776-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2776-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3037\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Escaped the Chicago winter for a week of hiking in the mountains around Tucson and searching for good Sonoran food. We also talk with Mike Kennedy, CEO and Co-Founder of <a href=\"http://www.go-koala.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Koala </a>about how he\'s making it easy to rent timeshares without buying into them. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_173.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go over to the <em>Subscribe</em> section on the right to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show Notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show Notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #173: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>This Week</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois on, depending where you are, Fat Tuesday or Shrove Tuesday or Pancake Tuesday. Here in Chicago, <a href=\"https://culture.pl/en/article/how-chicago-became-a-distinctly-polish-american-city\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">with a big Polish population</a>, it’s <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P%C4%85czki\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pączki</a> Day and I had mine for breakfast -- Polish-filled donuts; I went for a raspberry jam and a custard one. What had been one of the mildest winters on record started reverting to the mean in February. The last day the temperature cracked freezing was almost 2 weeks ago and it has snowed 13 of the past 17 days. We were all waiting for this, veterans of Midwest winters. It got me thinking that maybe Irene and I should’ve delayed our trip to Tucson from the third week of January when the temperatures here were hitting the mid-40’s, to last week or this week when we could’ve enjoyed 50-60° temperature differentials.</li><li>But even without the guilty pleasure of posting schadenfreude-trolling Instagram pictures of sunshine and temperature readings, we had a good week in Tucson. The flights out and back on Southwest were uneventful, <em>and</em> not full; the Airbnb was fine; the desert hikes were great, and we hit some good restaurants and taprooms, which, as I talked about in the last episode, was the main reason we pivoted from original destination, locked-down/shutdown San Diego to Tucson. Probably our only disappointment was not finding a great margarita -- which we fixed in the Amex Centurion Lounge in PHX while waiting for our flight home. I’ll talk more about Tucson later in the episode, but I also wrote up a blog post with all the details. If you go to the episode description in your podcast app, there’s a link that should be clickable to take you straight to the post.</li><li>Even though Southwest’s open middle seat pledge expired in December (<a href=\"https://news.delta.com/delta-only-us-airline-block-middle-seats-limit-onboard-capacity-through-march-30-2021\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Delta’s the last one standing</a>), no one landed in our middle seat on our MDW-PHX flight. That flight was a lot longer than I remember it being last year. I think it had something to do with the mask. Before getting on the plane, I switched from my standard EvolveTogether surgical style mask to a Korean version of the N-95 mask, decided to dial it up not knowing if I was going to be shoulder-to-shoulder with a stranger for 3+ hours. The KN-95 wasn’t too uncomfortable, as masks go, so I didn’t swap it out for my other mask when the middle seat stayed empty. My strategy with Southwest’s open seating was to go ¾’s of the way to the back of the plane, about halfway past the exit row. I figured this would mean fewer people walking past us but far enough away from the rear lavs to avoid the in-flight queues. And, since people still want to deplane quickly, if the last boarding groups, the C groups, were left with just middle seats, they’d take them in the front of the cabin. As it turned out, I probably over-thought that a bit; I didn’t see any occupied middle seat in the front or the back.</li><li>Then, a couple of days before our flight home, I got the dreaded e-mail from Southwest -- the flight “may not allow for an open middle seat next to you.” I waited until the night before to tell Irene. She’s a little more COVID risk-averse than me and didn’t want her stewing on it. But it turned out OK. She grabbed the 2-seat second exit row -- aisle and middle seat; no window seat. And looking behind us, I didn’t see any row with an occupied middle seat, so either people swapped their flights after receiving that email, or the flight was just a shade over ⅔’s full with any occupied middle seats in the front of the plane. And, those margaritas from the Centurion Lounge helped the flight home go by just a wee bit easier.</li><li>Bridge Music -- P.I.H.E. by Budapest BluesBoy (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hepepe/26362 Ft: Inna Barmash – Zhurbin</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I finally pushed out the refreshed website last week. First change since 2006. Figured website aesthetics have changed a bit over the last 15 years and so changed things up a bit. Thanks to everyone who responded to my request on Facebook and Twitter to hit the new site for a bit of crowd-sourced end-user testing. A bit like the <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1224798425499213828\">meme</a> you’ll see posted in a lot of IT shops; a picture of Dos Equis “most interesting man in the world” with the line -- “I don’t always test my code, but when I do, I test it in Production.” There’s still some tweaks I need to make, but it seems pretty solid. Check it out if you get a chance -- travelcommons.com -- and drop me a line at <a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a> with your thoughts.</li><li>Following up on last episode’s rant about the guy living unnoticed in ORD for 3 months, I tweeted out an <a href=\"https://theconversation.com/how-some-people-can-end-up-living-at-airports-for-months-even-years-at-a-time-154336\">article</a> about people living years in airports. Written by a history prof from University of Dayton who researches the history of airports (hey, everyone’s gotta have their niche), the article talks about other airport residents, an Iranian refugee who lived in CDG for 18 years, and most recently, an Estonian guy who was transiting through Manila Int’l Airport last March as the shutdowns hit was stuck there for 100 days until the Estonian embassy could get him on a repatriation flight. That one is brutal. I spent 3 hours in that airport a few years back and even, with everything open, it felt 2½ hours too long. Check out the article -- there’s a link in the show notes and at the top of the Twitter and Facebook feeds. It’s a good read.</li><li>Jim McDonough hit the Facebook page, responding to last episode’s margarita instruction story with one of his own.<ul><li>I know how you feel about teaching the bartender how to make a margarita. We ended a week-long trip to Switzerland by staying our last night at a hotel by the Zurich airport. At dinner, we each asked for a Scotch and water. They brought out this big tray, with a bowl of ice cubes, a pitcher of water, a bottle of Scotch, and two glasses. A crowd of hotel employees gathered to watch. Evidently, they don\'t do Scotch and water in Zurich. When I filled the glasses with ice, they gasped. I explained that we live in a hot climate. I went ahead and added Scotch and topped off with a little water, and they winced when I took a sip. A cultural exchange, I guess.</li></ul></li><li>Jim, I love you, man, but I gotta tell you -- I’d probably be wincing with the hotel staff. My usual Scotch order is -- Scotch and glass. But you paid for it (and in Zurich, it’s not going to be a small amount), so even if they couldn’t quite figure out what you wanted, they at least gave you all the tools you needed.</li><li>One of my absolute favorite beer bars, Bailey’s Taproom in Portland, Oregon, has shut off their taps permanently. I started a project in downtown Portland in January 2013. Found Bailey’s the second night I was there and just settled in; my last beer there was my last night in Portland. The owner said “After reopening to limited seating (after the initial shutdown), it was clear that people were not interested in coming downtown. When the PPP money ran out, I decided to close the doors”  Another reminder that we should try to be purposeful about where we spend our discretionary dollars, thinking about what businesses we would miss if they closed up and then go out of our way to buy something from them. In my case, it helps rationalize a rather full beer shelf in our pantry.</li><li>After Hertz declared bankruptcy at the end of last May, I predicted in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/06/09/podcast-164-first-post-lockdown-trips-travel-credit-cards/\">episode #164</a> that I’d be paying more attention to the mileage on the cars in the Five Star aisle because that’s the first place I see signs of financial distress — a lot less 500-mile cars and a lot more 24,000-mile cars. And while 24,000 miles on a car doesn’t seem like a lot, remember that rental car miles are kinda like dog years — you gotta multiply them by, like, 7 to get to regular car miles. And true to form, when picking up our Hertz car in PHX at the end of January, every car I looked at had over 24,000 miles, a few with a <strong>lot</strong> more. Will be interesting to see what’s on offer at SAN in a few weeks. </li><li>If you have any status on a Star Alliance or One World carrier, you probably got an email from your carrier about a <a href=\"https://skift.com/2021/03/05/data-breach-affects-more-than-2-million-frequent-flyers-across-airline-alliances/\">data breach at SITA</a>. I got them from United and American saying my name, account number, and status was potentially exposed and that I should change my password, which I did. And then thought about how this is yet another data leak from some unknown player in what is an incredibly fragmented travel tech tool chain. We talked about this back in November in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">episode #169</a> when an obscure Spanish company used by hotels to update information on on-line booking sites leaked 24 GB of names, emails, credit card data and reservation records. And in this case, if you’re not in the airline industry, you probably don’t know about <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SITA_(company)\">SITA</a>. It’s a industry consortium started back in 1949 by 11 European airlines to share infrastructure costs and has expanded to provide all sorts of travel technology including the exchange of passenger data between airlines -- in this case, the exchange of frequent flyer status so that, say, Lufthansa recognizes your elite status with United on your flight with them. It’s one thing when the breach is from a company that you did business with -- the <a href=\"https://www.cnet.com/news/marriott-discloses-new-data-breach-impacting-5-point-2-million-guests/\">Marriott hacks</a> in 2018 and 2020, the 2018 breaches at <a href=\"https://www.theregister.com/2018/09/11/british_airways_website_scripts/\">British Airways</a> and <a href=\"https://www.theregister.com/2018/10/25/cathay_pacific_hacked_up_to_94_million_passenger_deets_exposed/\">Cathay Pacific</a>. But it’s a whole other thing when you find out some unknown third party coughed up your data. But actually, when you get a look at the spaghetti that is travel technology, and see all the places your data is getting sent to -- often small companies that can’t afford state-of-the-art cybersecurity, it’s kinda surprising -- in a sad way -- that not more of this happens.</li><li>Type “plane mask” into the Google search box and one of the first 5 suggestions is “plane mask fight”. Click through and you get what seems to be an endless stream of news reports and cellphone videos of passengers fighting about having to wear a mask during a flight. What is getting a lot less coverage, though I’m hearing snatches of it here and there, are people getting chewed out by their row mates when taking their masks off to eat or drink something, getting something like “Hey, can you not drink during the flight? I’d rather not die for your convenience.”  And I’m afraid this is going to get worse as more people start traveling again and aircraft load factors get back into the 80% range. But honestly, both sides are being idiots. You know the rules before you buy your ticket and you’re reminded of them by emails before you travel, and again by gate agents before you board the plane. If you can’t handle the rules -- all of them, not just the ones you agree with -- then don’t walk down the jetway. Drive; charter a jet. But don’t try to bend the rules to your own personal belief system and hassle the rest of us who are just trying to get from Point A to Point B on-time and with the minimum amount of heartache.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on our fab new web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge music -- ~aether theories~ by Vidian (c) copyright 2018 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Vidian/57398 Ft: Gurdonark, White-throated Sparrow</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>What\'s New in Travel Insurance</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>For our Tucson trip, Irene ended up booking on Airbnb what turned out to be someone’s timeshare rental in a golf resort west of Tucson. It was a new one for us, and a little different than the typical Airbnb experience -- we had to put down a credit card for incidentals, and then had to check-out and check back in halfway thru the stay -- but it was a nice place and, better yet, we didn’t get trapped in a small room for an hour-long sales pitch.</li><li>And so when we got back home and I got a note from <a href=\"https://www.go-koala.com/about/team\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Mike Kennedy</a> introducing me to <a href=\"https://www.go-koala.com/\">Koala</a>, the timeshare rental search platform he co-founded and launched last August, I asked him to come onto the podcast to talk about timeshare rentals and how they fit into the travel eco-system:<ul><li>Mark: Mike, help us understand how timeshare rental fits into that spectrum of accommodations that travelers might be more familiar with. If I think about that spectrum, I could go from hotels to B &amp; Bs to vacation rentals to private home rentals. Where does timeshare rental fit?</li><li>Mike: That\'s a great question. There\'s kind of a natural bifurcation in options when you\'re selecting accommodations for vacations. You\'re either going down the route of an <a href=\"https://www.airbnb.com\">Airbnb</a> or a <a href=\"https://www.vrbo.com/\">VRBO</a>.&nbsp; You want to rent a home because you want some space, or you want to stay in something that is a hotel. But in those two scenarios, you typically have compromises, and the compromise with hotels is that, especially if you have a family, you\'re typically getting one hotel room in cramming your family in or getting adjoining hotel rooms. But you get the confidence that it’s managed by Mariott or Hilton, etc. Conversely, if you\'re getting a home rental, it\'s the opposite. You have the ability to rent a whole home. You don\'t have to leave three times a day for meals. However, you don\'t know who it\'s being cleaned by, or what protocols are being upheld. And in today\'s world, those things are really important. The timeshare product is the only natural hybrid product in the marketplace. You have all the benefits and features of your vacation rentals like the living rooms, the shared bedrooms, washer and dryer; all that space that you want from a vacation rental. But it\'s managed by a Marriott or Hilton, and it has resort amenities like swimming pools, check-in desks; things like that that give you the confidence again in today\'s world with that, people really want. Before us, the options to get one of these was to pay a lot of money on these OTAs, these online travel agencies through a rental, or to go and buy into one of these programs. And that\'s not really either affordable or even appealing to a lot of people.</li><li>Mark: What does Koala offer travelers that, say, Airbnb doesn\'t? I recently rented a Club Wyndham timeshare in Tucson from an owner on Airbnb. So how would that transaction be different/better/more optimized on Koala?</li><li>Mike: So, a couple things. One. You don\'t see a lot of timeshare inventory on Airbnb for the reasons I\'m about to discuss. And that is because it is not a platform that is built for that product.</li><li>Mark: What are some of the unique pieces that make Airbnb not optimized for timeshare rental?</li><li>Mike: If you own a home, you can open up a calendar for 365 and you can set different prices and different availability based off of that open calendar. If you own a timeshare, you typically own a seven-day interval.&nbsp; And how do you fit that into some place where it gets visibility for someone that may not be searching for those exact beginning and end dates? So, what ends up happening is that a lot of people show up to the resorts and the reservations are incorrect or wrong, or just not there at all. You know, it is a system because there\'s a little bit of a square peg in a round hole. Don’t get me wrong. It sounds like you had a fine experience, but they don\'t manage that in a way that is designed to be managed. There\'s a third party involved in this, the resort.&nbsp; When it\'s an Airbnb, it\'s a host and it\'s a traveler, and those two will figure out and arrange something. With a resort stay, there is a third party. There\'s a guest certificate transfer that happens on the back end to ensure that your name as a traveler gets switched to the reservation ledger in the system to ensure that the guest gets to walk into that check-in successfully. We do all that. There are extra steps involved that we ensure. And we handle all of that.</li><li>Mark: So it feels like you\'re acting as an OTA, an online travel agency like an Orbitz or an Expedia, to provide search, discovery and then booking.</li><li>Mike: Correct, yes</li><li>Mark: As you were working towards your August launch, what were some of the biggest challenges you faced in getting that inventory so that people could search and book?</li><li>Mike: That is the question, right? So, I know this from my time in Hilton Club that there was a problem in how people underutilize their timeshares but still had fees to pay. And that went from “I bought this thing; I don\'t understand it” all the way up to “I loved it for 10 years; I\'m just done with it and now what?” and everything in between. But at the end of the day, if you have a $2000 annual fee to pay, it becomes a problem. So, I knew that it was something that if we connected with these owners, we could help solve that problem for them. What we didn\'t understand was that, in many cases, these owners don\'t even know what they own. They don\'t know where to start. It\'s not like you have a vacation rental, and you\'re like “Oh, here\'s the house; I take some photos; I’m going to throw up a price and I’m going to rent a couple nights out, and I\'ll adjust the cost per night based off of rentals.” You have this thing that is either a fixed week or it\'s not; it\'s a specific resort or it\'s not. And in many cases, people don\'t really know what they bought. And in some cases, they bought something and then upgraded to something else. So that was by far the biggest problem was getting people to understand what they own. How do you create an asset out of that and leverage that asset in a way that could earn you some revenue? It\'s still a process that we\'re going through, like really making it very, very simple. You know, we\'re not really just tapping into this supply; we’re really empowering a whole group of people to understand this process.</li><li>Mark: Mike, last question. How did you get this idea? How\'d you get started on this down this path?</li><li>Mike: Yeah, good question. I was a musician when I was in my twenties, and I kind of meandered into residential real estate. And the real estate market in 2007 in New York, everywhere was just kind of flat. So, one of my good friends was like, “You should come check out this condo hotel; it\'s fractional real estate.” I ask “What the heck is fractional real estate?” “No, come check it out. It\'s Hilton.” “Alright.” I went in there. I\'m like, This is cool. There\'s a lot of hustle and bustle. My office is kind of dead; this office is moving. So, I joined the team. Three weeks into training, I ask “Is this a timeshare?”&nbsp; They\'re like “Yeah…”, but I was already hired in the job. It really started to resonate with me -- the more and more time I spent with people that I sold, after they\'re coming in over and over again, and we\'re trying to upgrade them into something else. It was cool, this product is great, but now people are looking for ways out, and I don\'t have answers for them. The solutions weren\'t there on the back end that I was hoping for. So, it really was a direct result of me being in touch with those situations that I felt like I could help. And yeah, I took the leap and I said, Look, this is where this is a problem we\'re solving. I think the industry is great. I think there\'s a lot of upside. I think it\'s got a bad rap, but I think if we mitigate some of that and amplify what people love about this industry, I think it will go a long way.</li><li>Mark: Fantastic. Mike Kennedy, CEO and Co-Founder of KOALA. Mike, thanks for joining us on the TravelCommons podcast</li><li>Mike: Thanks, Mark.</li></ul></li><li>Bridge music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/flatwound/14476\">The Long Goodbye</a>&nbsp;by John Pazdan (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/flatwound/14476</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Keeping Ahead of Expiring Miles</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>As I said at the top of the show, Irene and I had a good trip to Tucson at the end of January -- pretty much just hiking, eating, and drinking. I wrote it up in a blog post on the TravelCommons website -- <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Quick Notes on Our Trip to Tucson\">“Quick Notes on our Trip to Tucson”</a>, though at over 1,700 words, I’m not sure it necessarily qualified as “quick.” But there are some pictures, and links to all the parks, restaurants, and taprooms we enjoyed. Also a link to the Tucson Instagram story on the TravelCommons Instagram page if you want to see some more informal pictures.</li><li>We flew into PHX rather than TUS because the non-stop flights were cheaper and there were more of them. I was going to rent a car anyways, so the 100-mile drive straight down I-10 seemed a good trade-off for better flights. The only hitch in that plan was the bus between the terminal and the rental car center. They limited capacity to 15 people, which made sense. However, they didn’t add buses to make up that lost capacity. Wasn’t a problem when we got on the bus at the terminal, but the queue at the rental car center stretched the length of the center; hundreds of people trying to get back to make their flight. I saw some folks bailing out and calling Ubers. Made a note to add an extra 30 minutes to our return time. Turned out we didn’t need it; walked straight from the Hertz lot onto a bus. But that was OK. I used that time for my margarita lesson -- definitely a greater good.</li><li>Tucson sits kinda at the bottom of five sets of small-ish mountains; they’re an awkward size -- bigger than hills, but except for the Santa Catalinas, don’t feel big enough to be “mountains”. Which was OK because all we wanted to do was hike, well really walk, the trails. To be outside under blue skies in the high 60’s/low 70’s; that’s what we really wanted to do; to take a break from grey Chicago and to be far enough away from people that we could walk around without masks.&nbsp;</li><li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\">episode #168</a>, we talked about traveling for food, that food is one experience of a place that can’t be easily exported and bought on-line. In that episode, I talked about eating our way through South Philly and a pasty tour of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. In Tucson, it was the hunt for Sonoran food, a type of Mexican cuisine that you don’t see much outside of, well, the Sonoran desert -- Southern Arizona and the Mexican state of Sonora. It hasn’t “broken out” the way that, say, Tex-Mex and Baja and Oaxacan styles have. It’s all about beef, mostly <em>carne asada</em> grilled over mesquite and served in a thin flour tortilla that\'s more like the wrappers you get with Chinese Mandarin food than the thick flour tortillas you get with fajitas. Cross-referencing a couple of local food blogs, I had a list of places to try. And honestly, it was a bit of hit-and-miss; mostly misses the first couple of nights, but then we hit gold at the end of our stay. Looking back, I think we tried the nicer places on the list first. They weren’t <em>bad</em>; they were fine, but not places I’d go out of my way to recommend. And after that -- disappointment is too strong of a word, we kinda said, screw it. We found the Sonoran hot dog truck and ate a couple of $3 bacon-wrapped hot dogs topped with chopped tomatoes and onions, pinto beans, mayonnaise, mustard, and salsa verde off the hood of our rental car. And then drove over to a restaurant that’s website made it look very foody -- scrolling photos of nicely plated dishes -- but almost passed the building by; it looked like a repurposed Arby’s or Hardee’s with a vinyl sign pulled over the original one. But the food, especially the cabrito, the goat tacos, were phenomenal. Not all the dives were great; some disappointed, some were “meh”. But the ones that were great made it worth the “meh’s”.</li><li>But the absolute highlight of the trip? I was standing out on the back patio of our timeshare watching the sun set over the Tucson Mountains; it was beautiful; when I heard some rustling off to the right. What looked like a good-sized wild pig walked out from between two bushes and across the backyard. And then another one. They stopped, turned to look at me, and then kept walking. More kept coming – walking the same path across the backyard. They were <a href=\"https://www.azgfd.com/wildlife/livingwith/javelina/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">javelinas</a>, and <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peccary\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Wikipedia</a> told us that their groups are called \"squadrons\".&nbsp; Well, our squad looked comfortable here, like they were taking their usual end-of-day stroll back to wherever they bed down to stay safe from mountain lions. And the next morning, a couple came back sniffing around the patio door. I wondered if they smelled the egg and toast I made for breakfast. They reminded us to keep that patio door closed.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #173</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li>Nothing new on the tech front this month, but I should have the website freshened up by the next episode. I’ve had the current look since the beginning of 2006 courtesy of TravelCommons listener Hilary Baumann and her <a href=\"https://fascinationdesign.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Fascination Design</a> firm. The change is absolutely not a knock against Hilary’s work. It’s just that, after 15 years, I wanted to freshen things up a bit. So look for that by the end of February or beginning of March.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>, as well as asking Alexa, Siri, and Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_173.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #173 — What\'s New in Travel Insurance ; Keeping Ahead of Expiring Miles','','inherit','closed','closed','','3417-revision-v1','','','2021-03-10 22:33:37','2021-03-11 03:33:37','',3417,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/10/3417-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3419,1,'2021-03-10 22:38:32','2021-03-11 03:38:32','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3037,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2776-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2776-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3037\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Escaped the Chicago winter for a week of hiking in the mountains around Tucson and searching for good Sonoran food. We also talk with Mike Kennedy, CEO and Co-Founder of <a href=\"http://www.go-koala.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Koala </a>about how he\'s making it easy to rent timeshares without buying into them. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_173.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go over to the <em>Subscribe</em> section on the right to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show Notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show Notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #173: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>This Week</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois on, depending where you are, Fat Tuesday or Shrove Tuesday or Pancake Tuesday. Here in Chicago, <a href=\"https://culture.pl/en/article/how-chicago-became-a-distinctly-polish-american-city\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">with a big Polish population</a>, it’s <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P%C4%85czki\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pączki</a> Day and I had mine for breakfast -- Polish-filled donuts; I went for a raspberry jam and a custard one. What had been one of the mildest winters on record started reverting to the mean in February. The last day the temperature cracked freezing was almost 2 weeks ago and it has snowed 13 of the past 17 days. We were all waiting for this, veterans of Midwest winters. It got me thinking that maybe Irene and I should’ve delayed our trip to Tucson from the third week of January when the temperatures here were hitting the mid-40’s, to last week or this week when we could’ve enjoyed 50-60° temperature differentials.</li><li>But even without the guilty pleasure of posting schadenfreude-trolling Instagram pictures of sunshine and temperature readings, we had a good week in Tucson. The flights out and back on Southwest were uneventful, <em>and</em> not full; the Airbnb was fine; the desert hikes were great, and we hit some good restaurants and taprooms, which, as I talked about in the last episode, was the main reason we pivoted from original destination, locked-down/shutdown San Diego to Tucson. Probably our only disappointment was not finding a great margarita -- which we fixed in the Amex Centurion Lounge in PHX while waiting for our flight home. I’ll talk more about Tucson later in the episode, but I also wrote up a blog post with all the details. If you go to the episode description in your podcast app, there’s a link that should be clickable to take you straight to the post.</li><li>Even though Southwest’s open middle seat pledge expired in December (<a href=\"https://news.delta.com/delta-only-us-airline-block-middle-seats-limit-onboard-capacity-through-march-30-2021\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Delta’s the last one standing</a>), no one landed in our middle seat on our MDW-PHX flight. That flight was a lot longer than I remember it being last year. I think it had something to do with the mask. Before getting on the plane, I switched from my standard EvolveTogether surgical style mask to a Korean version of the N-95 mask, decided to dial it up not knowing if I was going to be shoulder-to-shoulder with a stranger for 3+ hours. The KN-95 wasn’t too uncomfortable, as masks go, so I didn’t swap it out for my other mask when the middle seat stayed empty. My strategy with Southwest’s open seating was to go ¾’s of the way to the back of the plane, about halfway past the exit row. I figured this would mean fewer people walking past us but far enough away from the rear lavs to avoid the in-flight queues. And, since people still want to deplane quickly, if the last boarding groups, the C groups, were left with just middle seats, they’d take them in the front of the cabin. As it turned out, I probably over-thought that a bit; I didn’t see any occupied middle seat in the front or the back.</li><li>Then, a couple of days before our flight home, I got the dreaded e-mail from Southwest -- the flight “may not allow for an open middle seat next to you.” I waited until the night before to tell Irene. She’s a little more COVID risk-averse than me and didn’t want her stewing on it. But it turned out OK. She grabbed the 2-seat second exit row -- aisle and middle seat; no window seat. And looking behind us, I didn’t see any row with an occupied middle seat, so either people swapped their flights after receiving that email, or the flight was just a shade over ⅔’s full with any occupied middle seats in the front of the plane. And, those margaritas from the Centurion Lounge helped the flight home go by just a wee bit easier.</li><li>Bridge Music -- P.I.H.E. by Budapest BluesBoy (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hepepe/26362 Ft: Inna Barmash – Zhurbin</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I finally pushed out the refreshed website last week. First change since 2006. Figured website aesthetics have changed a bit over the last 15 years and so changed things up a bit. Thanks to everyone who responded to my request on Facebook and Twitter to hit the new site for a bit of crowd-sourced end-user testing. A bit like the <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1224798425499213828\">meme</a> you’ll see posted in a lot of IT shops; a picture of Dos Equis “most interesting man in the world” with the line -- “I don’t always test my code, but when I do, I test it in Production.” There’s still some tweaks I need to make, but it seems pretty solid. Check it out if you get a chance -- travelcommons.com -- and drop me a line at <a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a> with your thoughts.</li><li>Following up on last episode’s rant about the guy living unnoticed in ORD for 3 months, I tweeted out an <a href=\"https://theconversation.com/how-some-people-can-end-up-living-at-airports-for-months-even-years-at-a-time-154336\">article</a> about people living years in airports. Written by a history prof from University of Dayton who researches the history of airports (hey, everyone’s gotta have their niche), the article talks about other airport residents, an Iranian refugee who lived in CDG for 18 years, and most recently, an Estonian guy who was transiting through Manila Int’l Airport last March as the shutdowns hit was stuck there for 100 days until the Estonian embassy could get him on a repatriation flight. That one is brutal. I spent 3 hours in that airport a few years back and even, with everything open, it felt 2½ hours too long. Check out the article -- there’s a link in the show notes and at the top of the Twitter and Facebook feeds. It’s a good read.</li><li>Jim McDonough hit the Facebook page, responding to last episode’s margarita instruction story with one of his own.<ul><li>I know how you feel about teaching the bartender how to make a margarita. We ended a week-long trip to Switzerland by staying our last night at a hotel by the Zurich airport. At dinner, we each asked for a Scotch and water. They brought out this big tray, with a bowl of ice cubes, a pitcher of water, a bottle of Scotch, and two glasses. A crowd of hotel employees gathered to watch. Evidently, they don\'t do Scotch and water in Zurich. When I filled the glasses with ice, they gasped. I explained that we live in a hot climate. I went ahead and added Scotch and topped off with a little water, and they winced when I took a sip. A cultural exchange, I guess.</li></ul></li><li>Jim, I love you, man, but I gotta tell you -- I’d probably be wincing with the hotel staff. My usual Scotch order is -- Scotch and glass. But you paid for it (and in Zurich, it’s not going to be a small amount), so even if they couldn’t quite figure out what you wanted, they at least gave you all the tools you needed.</li><li>One of my absolute favorite beer bars, <a href=\"https://brewpublic.com/beer-news/baileys-taproom-and-the-upper-lip-permanently-closes-its-doors/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bailey’s Taproom in Portland, Oregon</a>, has shut off their taps permanently. I started a project in downtown Portland in January 2013. Found Bailey’s the second night I was there and just settled in; my last beer there was my last night in Portland. The owner said “After reopening to limited seating (after the initial shutdown), it was clear that people were not interested in coming downtown. When the PPP money ran out, I decided to close the doors”  Another reminder that we should try to be purposeful about where we spend our discretionary dollars, thinking about what businesses we would miss if they closed up and then go out of our way to buy something from them. In my case, it helps rationalize a rather full beer shelf in our pantry.</li><li>After Hertz declared bankruptcy at the end of last May, I predicted in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/06/09/podcast-164-first-post-lockdown-trips-travel-credit-cards/\">episode #164</a> that I’d be paying more attention to the mileage on the cars in the Five Star aisle because that’s the first place I see signs of financial distress — a lot less 500-mile cars and a lot more 24,000-mile cars. And while 24,000 miles on a car doesn’t seem like a lot, remember that rental car miles are kinda like dog years — you gotta multiply them by, like, 7 to get to regular car miles. And true to form, when picking up our Hertz car in PHX at the end of January, every car I looked at had over 24,000 miles, a few with a <strong>lot</strong> more. Will be interesting to see what’s on offer at SAN in a few weeks. </li><li>If you have any status on a Star Alliance or One World carrier, you probably got an email from your carrier about a <a href=\"https://skift.com/2021/03/05/data-breach-affects-more-than-2-million-frequent-flyers-across-airline-alliances/\">data breach at SITA</a>. I got them from United and American saying my name, account number, and status was potentially exposed and that I should change my password, which I did. And then thought about how this is yet another data leak from some unknown player in what is an incredibly fragmented travel tech tool chain. We talked about this back in November in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">episode #169</a> when an obscure Spanish company used by hotels to update information on on-line booking sites leaked 24 GB of names, emails, credit card data and reservation records. And in this case, if you’re not in the airline industry, you probably don’t know about <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SITA_(company)\">SITA</a>. It’s a industry consortium started back in 1949 by 11 European airlines to share infrastructure costs and has expanded to provide all sorts of travel technology including the exchange of passenger data between airlines -- in this case, the exchange of frequent flyer status so that, say, Lufthansa recognizes your elite status with United on your flight with them. It’s one thing when the breach is from a company that you did business with -- the <a href=\"https://www.cnet.com/news/marriott-discloses-new-data-breach-impacting-5-point-2-million-guests/\">Marriott hacks</a> in 2018 and 2020, the 2018 breaches at <a href=\"https://www.theregister.com/2018/09/11/british_airways_website_scripts/\">British Airways</a> and <a href=\"https://www.theregister.com/2018/10/25/cathay_pacific_hacked_up_to_94_million_passenger_deets_exposed/\">Cathay Pacific</a>. But it’s a whole other thing when you find out some unknown third party coughed up your data. But actually, when you get a look at the spaghetti that is travel technology, and see all the places your data is getting sent to -- often small companies that can’t afford state-of-the-art cybersecurity, it’s kinda surprising -- in a sad way -- that not more of this happens.</li><li>Type “plane mask” into the Google search box and one of the first 5 suggestions is “plane mask fight”. Click through and you get what seems to be an endless stream of news reports and cellphone videos of passengers fighting about having to wear a mask during a flight. What is getting a lot less coverage, though I’m hearing snatches of it here and there, are people getting chewed out by their row mates when taking their masks off to eat or drink something, getting something like “Hey, can you not drink during the flight? I’d rather not die for your convenience.”  And I’m afraid this is going to get worse as more people start traveling again and aircraft load factors get back into the 80% range. But honestly, both sides are being idiots. You know the rules before you buy your ticket and you’re reminded of them by emails before you travel, and again by gate agents before you board the plane. If you can’t handle the rules -- all of them, not just the ones you agree with -- then don’t walk down the jetway. Drive; charter a jet. But don’t try to bend the rules to your own personal belief system and hassle the rest of us who are just trying to get from Point A to Point B on-time and with the minimum amount of heartache.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on our fab new web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge music -- ~aether theories~ by Vidian (c) copyright 2018 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Vidian/57398 Ft: Gurdonark, White-throated Sparrow</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>What\'s New in Travel Insurance</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A little over a year ago, the first coronavirus lockdowns started, and the execution of them was, to be charitable, mostly a mess. Borders were quickly shut; planes grounded. People were stranded in foreign countries with no way home; we just talked about the Estonian guy stuck in Manila airport for 100 days. And all of a sudden, people started paying attention to travel insurance. What was once a check box at the bottom of a booking webpage that most of us clicked “no” on so we could finish our reservation quickly became very important. Last May in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/05/08/podcast-163-new-world-of-travel-insurance-getting-medical-help-on-the-road/\">episode #163</a>, as people were beginning to think about their first post-lockdown trips, we talked about the state of travel insurance. Now, with travel bookings beginning to rise as vaccination rates rise, I wanted to check back in and see what’s changed with travel insurance. So I asked Michael Giusti, senior writer at <a href=\"https://www.insurancequotes.com/\">InsuranceQuotes.com</a>, to come onto the podcast and give us an update: <ul><li>Mark: Michael, last May, Eric Josowitz of <a href=\"https://www.insurancequotes.com/\">InsuranceQuotes.com</a> was on the podcast. We were talking about travel insurance after the initial lockdown. Back then, in the midst of all that travel disruption, many travelers were finding:  a) they didn\'t actually know what their insurance covered; they’d just checked the box at the end of their booking process, paid some additional amount moved on; and  b) the insurance that they had bought had exclusions for communicable diseases, WHO-declared pandemics, cancellations in cases of fear. And then, after that, insurers stopped offering travel insurance. So, Michael, that was May. This is now the end of February. What\'s the current situation regarding travel insurance?</li><li>Michael: Not many people were thinking about pandemics back when this started. But the few people who were thinking about it were insurers. They saw the SARS epidemic and they started writing in pandemic exclusions from that point on. And then there\'s a second little provision in these insurance policies called the Known Events Provisions. So once the pandemic declared, even if there wasn\'t a specific exclusion, they can turn around and say, “Well, we\'re not going to cover because it\'s now a known event.” It would be like there\'s a hurricane that\'s bearing down on your city and you buy a plane ticket while the hurricane is there, and then you get mad because you can\'t fly. It’s a known event, and so they\'re not going to cover that. So that\'s where we came from. And then, you\'re right, they stopped and they said, “Well, we have no idea what\'s going on, so let’s regroup.”  And now they\'ve regrouped, and it\'s really interesting because in a lot of the insurance industry, they\'ve stopped covering pandemics. But in travel insurance, they specifically started including Covid 19, saying “We will cover it under these conditions.”</li><li>Mark: Michael, travel requirements have been changing quickly; the restrictions have been going in and out. I mean, most recently, the need to provide a negative COVID test just to be able to get on a plane.  If you look at what Canada did, they basically gave travelers one-week notice of the rule change at the end of 2020. But if you\'ve bought a travel insurance policy when you booked travel six weeks prior, what\'s the best way to cover these late breaking requirements that pop up a week or two before our trip?</li><li>Michael: Two main things... One is the policy language. You do need to say what’s specifically included, what’s specifically excluded? Because whether they\'re going to cover not having a negative test very much depends on the policy language. The other thing that it\'s going to come down to is whether it\'s out of your control. If it\'s something that you\'ve neglected to do, it\'s never going to be covered. The policies I\'ve reviewed, I haven\'t seen any that specifically kick in if you haven\'t got a negative test. So if you\'re worried about that, you really do need to ask the agent or really read that fine print. I do know that if you\'re delayed at security while you\'re being tested, that\'s not covered. So you do have to get there in time to make sure if they do rapid tests on the spot, that you\'re going to have time to get through security.</li><li>Mark: Okay, let me unpack that just a little bit, Michael. So I booked my flight, and I\'ve booked it a month ago. And now I go to take my test 72 hours before departure, and I come up positive. If I\'ve bought the right policy, would that typically cover delay or cover cancellation?</li><li>Michael: Delay is always the first preference. So if we can just push this trip back a week or whatever, that\'s going to be everyone\'s favorite outcome. But there are cancellation provisions where, say, you can\'t move it because the wedding is not going to be moved, in which case the cancellation provisions might kick in.</li><li>Mark: So now let\'s flip that. I\'ve taken my test, it\'s been negative, I get on the plane, I fly down to Costa Rica. And now a week on, I\'ve taken my test to get back into the US and now that test comes out positive. So now, potentially, I can\'t get back into the US. How does insurance help me there?</li><li>Michael: There\'s a couple places where this insurance is going to really beneficial in that situation. First and foremost, the medical provisions in most of these comprehensive policies are going to actually help you pay for your healthcare. Many of them are going to be secondary coverage, meaning they\'re going to want your primary health care to kick in first and then they\'ll jump in and cover anything that\'s not covered. Some of them are primary, especially with the overseas trips. So, that\'s a really nice benefits that are built into a lot of these policies. The other place that will help is, if you\'re delayed because you can\'t travel because of a restriction like that, and that\'s outside of your control, a lot of them will cover a hotel while you\'re waiting and meals while you\'re waiting, and they\'ll get you back home safely. So that\'s actually a really positive outcome that can happen with these policies.</li><li>Mark: Michael, how do I make sure that I\'ve actually got one of those policies? If we go back to the April/May timeframe, people were finding that they didn\'t actually know what they had. How do I make sure I\'ve actually bought that coverage?</li><li>Michael: Well, best case scenario would be if you found a human and you asked them in plain English.</li><li>Mark: Yeah, good luck with that, right?</li><li>Michael: I know, calling 1 800 numbers anymore – that’s not in the cards. What I would do if I was doing that, I’d click through the terms of service and see who\'s offering that policy. If it doesn\'t really go into much detail, or if it\'s really garbly legalese, I’d go through to the provider\'s website. Most of them have FAQ pages that specifically address COVID. So that\'s gonna be probably your best resource.</li><li>Mark: Michael, people are starting to think about big trips as vaccination rates start to step up. You know, the back half of the year, if I\'m thinking about booking, say, a week\'s biking tour in Tuscany or Provence in September/October, what kind of travel insurance should I be looking for? Should I pony up for a cancel- for-any-reason rider? Or are there some cheaper alternatives for more limited scenarios like, “Hey, the EU still isn\'t letting Americans in” but won\'t cover the more generic “Oh, I\'m afraid to travel” kind of reason.</li><li>Michael: The question of “if you\'re afraid to travel” is never going to be covered unless you do have that cancel-for-any-reason policy. But travel insurance is meant to cover things that are out of your control. So you know, if it\'s not laid out your policy, it\'s not gonna be covered. So that\'s kind of the most expensive option. You know, you\'re going to pay the most for a cancel-for-any-reason policy. That middle ground is the standard policy where you say “I\'m taking a little bit of the risk on myself. I\'m going to bravely travel wherever I\'m allowed.” The least expensive option is really kind of a DIY. And a lot of the destinations that I\'m seeing, they\'re waiving cancellation and change fees. And so you can kind of make your DIY travel insurance by only booking places that would let you change for no fee. That\'s kind of the cheapest “I\'m feeling brave” policy. “I\'m feeling skittish” policy Is that cancel-for-any-reason.</li><li>Mark: Super. Michael Giusti, senior writer at <a href=\"https://www.insurancequotes.com/\">InsuranceQuotes.com</a>, thank you very much for joining us. This was a great update.</li><li>Michael: Thank you so much.</li></ul></li><li>Bridge music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/flatwound/14476\">The Long Goodbye</a> by John Pazdan (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/flatwound/14476</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Keeping Ahead of Expiring Miles</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Like most road warriors of a certain tenure, I have cards in my desk of some 30-odd frequent traveler programs -- those that I know of -- and am probably a member of another dozen or so that I’ve forgotten about. Of those, I have meaningful balances -- enough for at least one free flight or a free hotel night -- at the Big 4 US carriers, a couple of European carriers, and two of the big hotel chains. Most of the rest are random programs like IcelandAir or AirBaltic or Omni Hotels that I used for a specific trip or project but had some spiff, like seat selection or free WiFi, that was reason enough to put in the effort to sign up.</li><li>When I was traveling every week or so, keeping those main programs active wasn’t a big effort. And if I hadn’t flown, say, BA for a while, I’d code maybe a short American commuter flight, something where my status was a bit meaningless, to my BA account to reset the expiration clock.</li><li>But now, hitting the first anniversary of the first travel lockdown and with business travel still mostly on hold, some of those expiration cliffs are starting to become visible</li><li>Last episode, I talked about getting emails from BA and Iberia warning me of pending Avios expirations, and so I transferred my Iberia points to my BA account. But I can’t tell from the BA website if that was enough activity to change the BA expiration. So I spelunked some more thru the website and found where they call out Airbnb bookings as “recognized activity” that’ll reset the 36-month clock. So, I booked our San Diego Airbnb through a link on BA’s site, just had to enter my BA account number before moving to the booking screen. It’ll be interesting to see if the activity flows seamlessly into my BA account or if I’ll have to chase it down through a manual credit claim. I’m betting on the latter, but am hoping to be pleasantly surprised.</li><li>But that got me cycling through my other accounts. I wasn’t worried about my US carrier accounts. The trend there has been to do away with expiration dates, first Southwest, then Delta, most recently United. American, not surprisingly, is the knuckle dragger, clinging to their stingy 18-month policy, but I flew them last fall to PHL, so I’m fine there.</li><li>But Flying Blue, the KLM/Air France program? I last flew KLM the fall of 2018, so that had to be coming up. I hit the website; those miles were also expiring at the end of this year. And, they, like BA and Iberia, have managed to make resetting that data way overly complex.  First, there’s “overall extending activities” which are flights or purchases on their co-branded credit card; they extend <em>all</em> Flying Blue miles by 2 years. “Partial extending activities” extend miles earned through, say, hotel or car rental partners. Please note, says the website, \"‘Partial extending activities’ do not extend the validity of Miles earned from ‘Overall extending activities’\". OK, then. Looking at it this way, I only had 500 miles from that 2018 flight, but 38,000 miles from when I had to quickly stash points from a corporate Amex account before leaving a company. So, a “partial” activity should suffice. I set myself a reminder for Dec 1st to push the minimum 1,000 points from my personal Amex.</li><li>And the expiration periods are kinda all over the place. BA is 36 months; KLM, Marriott, and Hyatt are 2 years; American is 18 months; Hilton is 15 months (weird number); and IHG is the stingiest at 12. </li><li>Seems like there should be a technology solution to this, right? There are a few. If you use TripIt to consolidate your trip itineraries, the $49/year upgrade to the Pro version gives you program tracking. I had used it one year when they upgraded me for free; probably by mistake. AwardWallet is another popular tool, but there too, you need to upgrade to the paid version (a little cheaper at $30/year) to track expirations.</li><li>But beyond the cost, for these programs to work, you have to give them access to your accounts -- your account numbers and passwords. And cycling back to what I was saying at the top of the show, with the travel industry’s kinda poor track record on data protection, and just after having to reset passwords to United, American, Lufthansa, BA, and Iberia because of SITA’s leak, do I really want to put <em>all</em> my frequent traveler logins into one spot? I think a simple spreadsheet on the hard drive of the PC in my office can do the job just fine.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #173</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li>Nothing new on the tech front this month, but I should have the website freshened up by the next episode. I’ve had the current look since the beginning of 2006 courtesy of TravelCommons listener Hilary Baumann and her <a href=\"https://fascinationdesign.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Fascination Design</a> firm. The change is absolutely not a knock against Hilary’s work. It’s just that, after 15 years, I wanted to freshen things up a bit. So look for that by the end of February or beginning of March.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>, as well as asking Alexa, Siri, and Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_173.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #173 — What\'s New in Travel Insurance ; Keeping Ahead of Expiring Miles','','inherit','closed','closed','','3417-revision-v1','','','2021-03-10 22:38:32','2021-03-11 03:38:32','',3417,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/10/3417-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3421,1,'2021-03-10 22:49:40','2021-03-11 03:49:40','<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/IMG_1145.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1009\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/IMG_1145-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>Returning to the mic after 10 days of food, wine, wind, rain, and snow in the north of Spain. I talk about traveling in Spain, and with my guest Coleman Collins about how to make the best coffee in your hotel room.  All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_139.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n<!--more-->\n\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #139:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. Just got back Sunday night from 10 days in Spain -- about 4 days each in Madrid and San Sebastian, with a couple of days in the Rioja wine region in between. A friend on the East Coast sent me a note while I was in Spain -- “Good week to be out of town; we got whacked with yet another dump of snow.” Not quite. It’s been a cold Spring in Europe and Spain has been no different. Our first weekend in Madrid was in the upper 30’s/low 40’s with a mix of rain and wet snow. Which turned into just snow as we drove up to Rioja. Some of that drive reminded me of I-70 in the Colorado Rockies -- go into a tunnel with fine weather; come out of it to blowing snow. Having said that, it was nothing like the 7 or 9 or 14 inches that Winter Storm Toby dropped on the East Coast last week. And even with lousy weather, the food and the wine in Spain makes it hard to sustain any sort of cranky attitude, though it shorten up our pintxos crawl through Logroño.</li>\n 	<li>We flew Iberia to Madrid because: a) they have a non-stop flight from Chicago and b) as I mentioned <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">a few episodes ago</a>, I was finally able to burn off some of those Avios points that had been collecting cobwebs in my BA account. I decided to try Iberia’s Premium Economy service on the flight over. Most airlines are using this sorta “tweener” service to capture revenue from people willing to pay a bit more for some comfort, but aren’t willing to go the 2-300% Business Class uplift out of their own pocket. And it was truly a “tweener” service -- about 5 rows between the Business and regular Coach cabins, and coach seats with spacing and recline somewhere between domestic First Class and, say, United’s Economy Plus. The meal service was the same as Economy, but they served us first, and they gave us a little amenities kit with just the essentials -- earplugs, eye mask, socks, and a toothbrush. It was as-advertised -- Coach with a bit more space, which made for better napping on the 8-hour flight over. I’ve talked in past episodes that I really question the value-for-money with Business Class on Transatlantic flights, but this tweener class was a reasonable deal.</li>\n 	<li>The deeper recline of the Premium Economy seat also makes it easier for you to stay in your space when you sleep. On the way back, I was in regular Coach because -- well, I’m cheap and didn’t need to sleep. But the guy next to me did. He nodded off as soon as we left the ground, which meant he didn’t recline his seat, which meant that he started to list to port, toward my shoulder. This guy looked like he was the younger brother of Dos Equis’ “Most Interesting Man”. But there was no amount of interesting that was going to have him sleeping on my shoulder. Just as he was about to touch down on my shoulder, I gave our seat row a bit of a shake -- some single row turbulence. He startled awake, realized what he was doing, and immediately sat straight up. Stay upright, my friend.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">P.I.H.E. by Budapest BluesBoy (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hepepe/26362 Ft: Inna Barmash - Zhurbin</span></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Just a quick addendum to the luggage thread we’ve been running over the last couple of episodes. In the last episode Jerry Sarfati talked about downsizing from a 22 to a 20-inch carry-on bag because of the hassles he’d gotten from American Airlines gate agents. I mentioned then that I haven’t had any problems from American, and didn’t get pulled over on my Chicago-to-Madrid Iberia flight. Just goes to show you how much discretion gate agents have. I didn’t test it on the way back home -- 2 bottles bought in Rioja tasting rooms and a tin of olive oil tipped me way over the liquid limit.</li>\n 	<li>The EU’s no roaming rules also let me skip what had become our first day of European vacation ritual of burning a couple of hours in a phone store buying local SIM cards for our mobile phones. Instead, the week before we left, I fired up EE’s iPhone app and topped up our UK SIMs. Somewhere over the Bay of Biscay, after my breakfast tray was cleared, I swapped out my AT&amp;T SIM. Once on the ground, I turned on my phone and was good to go. And because the whole family has EE SIMs, it was easy to call each other when we got separated on our pintxos crawls. I know that everyone just messages nowadays, but I’m still one of those knuckledraggers who occasionally finds talking quicker than texting.</li>\n 	<li>While in Madrid, I also added to my subway “tap-n-go” card collection for €2.50 -- or about $3 at current exchange rates. The interesting twist on Madrid’s system is that you can tap up to 4 people through the turnstile with a single card, so I only had to buy one tap card for the whole family. I’d load it up with 10 rides -- which seemed to be the only option -- we’d line up behind one turnstile, then tap through and pass it back. Getting out, we just walked through the turnstile since the Madrid Metro fare system seems based on zones rather than start and ending stations. Just adding it to the growing stack...</li>\n 	<li>In past episodes, I’ve talked about how I’ve come to value the service I get from Hertz with President’s Club status. And so I rented a car from Hertz in Madrid for our drive up to Rioja for wine tasting and then over to San Sebastian and back. On Tuesday morning, we headed to Atocha train station, found the Hertz counter, and then I sent my family to get breakfast because I knew from past experience renting cars in Spain, that I was in for 30 minutes of hard upselling. It didn’t matter that I had already booked on-line at Hertz.com and selected the options I wanted, I was going to get sold. Mel, the Hertz agent, spoke excellent American English -- all the right terms, slang, colloquialisms. Telling me the rate I got was “crazy low” -- I’d used our corporate rate plus cashed in some Hertz points -- because I didn’t have any insurance. And then came the big push -- writing down big liability numbers, huge damage possibilities -- even though a lot of this was covered by our corporate rate and the credit card. After this, there was the upsell for the car -- did you know you booked a manual, can you drive a manual -- because, well, no Americans know how to work a clutch. I just smiled and nodded, and let Mel work through his spiel -- I had kinda hoped that my status would save me, but nope, there was no short-circuiting this. After he was done, I said “No” to everything. I finally got the keys just as my family finished breakfast, and then off we went. I would’ve been frustrated if I hadn’t expected it and budgeted time for it. Instead, I was just slightly weary. I’m glad my wife got me a coffee to-go.</li>\n 	<li>And in the seeming obligatory craft beer segment of TravelCommons, having the rental car let me hit the Basqueland Brewing Project taproom outside of San Sebastian. It had a very American feel to it -- winding through a light industrial area, finding the place by spotting the picnic tables in front of the open loading door, walking past the foosball table and shelves holding 20-kg sacks of malt, the fluorescent pink cord blocking access to the brewing area. And for good reason, the place is owned by 3 Americans. One of them was working the taps when we arrived. He quickly flipped from Spanish to English when we ordered. Originally from Baltimore, he came over 6 years ago when his wife wanted to move back home. Nice guy, good beer.</li>\n 	<li>Rob Cheshire, a TravelCommons listener and Untappd friend, hit the comments section on the last episode -- first, to egg me on about my comment in the last episode to do a One City, Five Taprooms layover video, and then about taprooms near Wrigley Field when he comes in to see the Reds play the Cubs. I managed to string together a 6-taproom crawl; he may need to break that up into a couple of rounds.</li>\n 	<li>And, to Rob’s first question, I actually will do a taproom layover video, but instead of basing it out of ORD like my last layover video, I’m going to do this one from MDW -- give those Southwest fliers some love. It’ll let me hit 4 taprooms that have opened in the past couple of years in what can only be described as the “post-industrial” landscape of Chicago’s near south side. It should be fun. Working on the scheduling now. Will shoot it in April. With the additional production time video requires, it might not get up until May, but I’ll keep everyone posted</li>\n 	<li>One last thing -- last week I tweeted out a link to a pretty rigorous study from the FlyHealthy Research Team out of Emory University in Atlanta about passenger movements on transcontinental flights and what it means for the spread of respiratory diseases. The team took 10 flights, logging passenger movements, taking air samples, and swabs of hard surfaces. I won’t go through the whole study -- I’ll put a <a href=\"http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/03/13/1711611115\">link</a> in the show notes for those who want to read it, which I encourage you to do; it’s very readable as scientific papers go -- but the main takeaways for me were: a) you really only have to be concerned about the people immediately in front, behind, and next to you -- a one-row radius; b) the people wiping down their trays, armrests, and seat belt buckles with Purell Wipes are wasting their time; and c) if you’re really worried, get a window seat in the front part of the plane and don’t leave it for the entire flight (which, as a side benefit, will also endear you to your row mates). As one who has called planes “flying petri dishes”, I was pleasantly surprised by the Emory team’s findings.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">~aether theories~ by Vidian (c) copyright 2018 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Vidian/57398 Ft: Gurdonark, White-throated Sparrow</span></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Brewing the Best Hotel Room Coffee</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Interview with Coleman Collins. His blog post on brewing hotel room coffee is <a href=\"https://roadwarrior.blog/hotel-room-coffee/\">here</a></li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Tools of the Trade by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/56512 Ft: Abstract Audio, Mr Yesterday, Martijn de Boer, Speck</span></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Notes from Spain</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>This was our 4th spring trip to Spain. Our first trip we hit Madrid and Barcelona, the usual suspects. The next trip, we headed south to Andalucia -- Córdoba, Granada, Ronda, Seville -- during Semana Santa, Holy Week, and saw penitential processions every day in every town and city we visited, culminating in Holy Thursday night outside of Seville Cathedral. The last trip, in 2016, we headed back down South, but even further, taking a boat across the Straits of Gibraltar to Tangier, Morocco. For this trip, we gave up warm weather for some new territory -- Rioja and the Basque Country.</li>\n 	<li>As I said at the top of the show, for me, Spain is about food and wine. There’s certainly culture -- the Semana Santa processions are phenomenal cultural events, standing in front of the huge canvas of Picasso’s Guernica in the Reina Sofia in Madrid, the Mezquita in Cordoba,... -- but it’s the food and wine that keep bringing us back.</li>\n 	<li>On our first trip to Granada, we were staying in a Marriott -- maybe one of their AC properties -- in the middle of town. A great building; it had been a convent at one time. There was an interior courtyard; we had a nightcap there one night. 4 glasses of wine at the hotel bar -- figuring $12-15/glass, I’m waiting for a 40 euro tab. It was 12 euros -- I love this country.</li>\n 	<li>The pintxos crawl was the food center of this trip north, first in Logroño and then in San Sebastian, walking from bar to bar -- a glass of wine and a bite at each. It was a good mix of food. In Logroño, we started at a couple of dive-ier, more local places that focused on just one pintxos -- sauteed mushrooms at one, ground lamb sandwich at the next, the meat seared on a flat grill behind the bar, and then served on a bun with a great tasting green sauce -- and serving local Rioja wines, pulling the bottles from a bucket at the end of the bar. We then swung into a distinctly higher end place, complete with a Michelin sticker on the front door; more variety of food -- seared red tuna, pickled white anchovies, grilled octopus -- and the next level up of Rioja wines. Later in the week, in San Sebastian, when the weather turned a bit better, we could see the crawl pick up volume in the pedestrian streets of the old town; people still bundled up a bit, but taking their wine outside, and willing to walk to the next place rather than hunkering down for a couple of courses in the warmth.</li>\n 	<li>Cider is big in the Basque Country, though it’s drier, not as sweet as you get in the US or the UK. And during cider season -- January through April -- the siderias, the cider houses in the hills outside of San Sebastian, open up to serve cider streamed directly from the tap of huge chestnut wood barrels into your glass, and then the glass of the person behind you,... and a traditional menu of salt-cod omelette, fresh cod fried with peppers and onions, and damn big grilled t-bones served either standing up or at communal tables. We ended up sharing a meal with a busload of folks from just over the border in France. A couple dozen of us lined up as a worker manned the tap -- letting a thin stream of cider out. We lined up our wide-mouthed plastic tumblers about three feet away to impart a bit of fizz to the three fingers of cider that we caught before moving out of the stream to let it hit the tumbler that someone was holding right below ours.</li>\n 	<li>For a great food country, the food at Madrid airport, though, is a bit pedestrian. So to extend our food extravaganza for one more meal, we skip the “meh” restaurants and buy a package of the top-end iberian ham -- the bellota, from the free range Iberian pigs fattening up on acorns. We can’t bring it into the US, but it’s an 8-hour flight from Madrid to Chicago. That package never makes it as far at US landfall.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #139</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_139.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #139 — Brewing Best Hotel Room Coffee; Notes from Spain','','inherit','closed','closed','','1961-revision-v1','','','2021-03-10 22:49:40','2021-03-11 03:49:40','',1961,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/10/1961-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3423,1,'2021-03-10 22:51:47','2021-03-11 03:51:47','<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/IMG_1145.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1009\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/IMG_1145-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>Returning to the mic after 10 days of food, wine, wind, rain, and snow in the north of Spain. I talk about traveling in Spain, and with my guest Coleman Collins about how to make the best coffee in your hotel room.  All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_139.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n<!--more-->\n\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #139:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. Just got back Sunday night from 10 days in Spain -- about 4 days each in Madrid and San Sebastian, with a couple of days in the Rioja wine region in between. A friend on the East Coast sent me a note while I was in Spain -- “Good week to be out of town; we got whacked with yet another dump of snow.” Not quite. It’s been a cold Spring in Europe and Spain has been no different. Our first weekend in Madrid was in the upper 30’s/low 40’s with a mix of rain and wet snow. Which turned into just snow as we drove up to Rioja. Some of that drive reminded me of I-70 in the Colorado Rockies -- go into a tunnel with fine weather; come out of it to blowing snow. Having said that, it was nothing like the 7 or 9 or 14 inches that Winter Storm Toby dropped on the East Coast last week. And even with lousy weather, the food and the wine in Spain makes it hard to sustain any sort of cranky attitude, though it shorten up our pintxos crawl through Logroño.</li>\n 	<li>We flew Iberia to Madrid because: a) they have a non-stop flight from Chicago and b) as I mentioned <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">a few episodes ago</a>, I was finally able to burn off some of those Avios points that had been collecting cobwebs in my BA account. I decided to try Iberia’s Premium Economy service on the flight over. Most airlines are using this sorta “tweener” service to capture revenue from people willing to pay a bit more for some comfort, but aren’t willing to go the 2-300% Business Class uplift out of their own pocket. And it was truly a “tweener” service -- about 5 rows between the Business and regular Coach cabins, and coach seats with spacing and recline somewhere between domestic First Class and, say, United’s Economy Plus. The meal service was the same as Economy, but they served us first, and they gave us a little amenities kit with just the essentials -- earplugs, eye mask, socks, and a toothbrush. It was as-advertised -- Coach with a bit more space, which made for better napping on the 8-hour flight over. I’ve talked in past episodes that I really question the value-for-money with Business Class on Transatlantic flights, but this tweener class was a reasonable deal.</li>\n 	<li>The deeper recline of the Premium Economy seat also makes it easier for you to stay in your space when you sleep. On the way back, I was in regular Coach because -- well, I’m cheap and didn’t need to sleep. But the guy next to me did. He nodded off as soon as we left the ground, which meant he didn’t recline his seat, which meant that he started to list to port, toward my shoulder. This guy looked like he was the younger brother of Dos Equis’ “Most Interesting Man”. But there was no amount of interesting that was going to have him sleeping on my shoulder. Just as he was about to touch down on my shoulder, I gave our seat row a bit of a shake -- some single row turbulence. He startled awake, realized what he was doing, and immediately sat straight up. Stay upright, my friend.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">P.I.H.E. by Budapest BluesBoy (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hepepe/26362 Ft: Inna Barmash - Zhurbin</span></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Just a quick addendum to the luggage thread we’ve been running over the last couple of episodes. In the last episode Jerry Sarfati talked about downsizing from a 22 to a 20-inch carry-on bag because of the hassles he’d gotten from American Airlines gate agents. I mentioned then that I haven’t had any problems from American, and didn’t get pulled over on my Chicago-to-Madrid Iberia flight. Just goes to show you how much discretion gate agents have. I didn’t test it on the way back home -- 2 bottles bought in Rioja tasting rooms and a tin of olive oil tipped me way over the liquid limit.</li>\n 	<li>The EU’s no roaming rules also let me skip what had become our first day of European vacation ritual of burning a couple of hours in a phone store buying local SIM cards for our mobile phones. Instead, the week before we left, I fired up EE’s iPhone app and topped up our UK SIMs. Somewhere over the Bay of Biscay, after my breakfast tray was cleared, I swapped out my AT&amp;T SIM. Once on the ground, I turned on my phone and was good to go. And because the whole family has EE SIMs, it was easy to call each other when we got separated on our pintxos crawls. I know that everyone just messages nowadays, but I’m still one of those knuckledraggers who occasionally finds talking quicker than texting.</li>\n 	<li>While in Madrid, I also added to my subway “tap-n-go” card collection for €2.50 -- or about $3 at current exchange rates. The interesting twist on Madrid’s system is that you can tap up to 4 people through the turnstile with a single card, so I only had to buy one tap card for the whole family. I’d load it up with 10 rides -- which seemed to be the only option -- we’d line up behind one turnstile, then tap through and pass it back. Getting out, we just walked through the turnstile since the Madrid Metro fare system seems based on zones rather than start and ending stations. Just adding it to the growing stack...</li>\n 	<li>In past episodes, I’ve talked about how I’ve come to value the service I get from Hertz with President’s Club status. And so I rented a car from Hertz in Madrid for our drive up to Rioja for wine tasting and then over to San Sebastian and back. On Tuesday morning, we headed to Atocha train station, found the Hertz counter, and then I sent my family to get breakfast because I knew from past experience renting cars in Spain, that I was in for 30 minutes of hard upselling. It didn’t matter that I had already booked on-line at Hertz.com and selected the options I wanted, I was going to get sold. Mel, the Hertz agent, spoke excellent American English -- all the right terms, slang, colloquialisms. Telling me the rate I got was “crazy low” -- I’d used our corporate rate plus cashed in some Hertz points -- because I didn’t have any insurance. And then came the big push -- writing down big liability numbers, huge damage possibilities -- even though a lot of this was covered by our corporate rate and the credit card. After this, there was the upsell for the car -- did you know you booked a manual, can you drive a manual -- because, well, no Americans know how to work a clutch. I just smiled and nodded, and let Mel work through his spiel -- I had kinda hoped that my status would save me, but nope, there was no short-circuiting this. After he was done, I said “No” to everything. I finally got the keys just as my family finished breakfast, and then off we went. I would’ve been frustrated if I hadn’t expected it and budgeted time for it. Instead, I was just slightly weary. I’m glad my wife got me a coffee to-go.</li>\n 	<li>And in the seeming obligatory craft beer segment of TravelCommons, having the rental car let me hit the Basqueland Brewing Project taproom outside of San Sebastian. It had a very American feel to it -- winding through a light industrial area, finding the place by spotting the picnic tables in front of the open loading door, walking past the foosball table and shelves holding 20-kg sacks of malt, the fluorescent pink cord blocking access to the brewing area. And for good reason, the place is owned by 3 Americans. One of them was working the taps when we arrived. He quickly flipped from Spanish to English when we ordered. Originally from Baltimore, he came over 6 years ago when his wife wanted to move back home. Nice guy, good beer.</li>\n 	<li>Rob Cheshire, a TravelCommons listener and Untappd friend, hit the comments section on the last episode -- first, to egg me on about my comment in the last episode to do a One City, Five Taprooms layover video, and then about taprooms near Wrigley Field when he comes in to see the Reds play the Cubs. I managed to string together a 6-taproom crawl; he may need to break that up into a couple of rounds.</li>\n 	<li>And, to Rob’s first question, I actually will do a taproom layover video, but instead of basing it out of ORD like my last layover video, I’m going to do this one from MDW -- give those Southwest fliers some love. It’ll let me hit 4 taprooms that have opened in the past couple of years in what can only be described as the “post-industrial” landscape of Chicago’s near south side. It should be fun. Working on the scheduling now. Will shoot it in April. With the additional production time video requires, it might not get up until May, but I’ll keep everyone posted</li>\n 	<li>One last thing -- last week I tweeted out a link to a pretty rigorous study from the FlyHealthy Research Team out of Emory University in Atlanta about passenger movements on transcontinental flights and what it means for the spread of respiratory diseases. The team took 10 flights, logging passenger movements, taking air samples, and swabs of hard surfaces. I won’t go through the whole study -- I’ll put a <a href=\"http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/03/13/1711611115\">link</a> in the show notes for those who want to read it, which I encourage you to do; it’s very readable as scientific papers go -- but the main takeaways for me were: a) you really only have to be concerned about the people immediately in front, behind, and next to you -- a one-row radius; b) the people wiping down their trays, armrests, and seat belt buckles with Purell Wipes are wasting their time; and c) if you’re really worried, get a window seat in the front part of the plane and don’t leave it for the entire flight (which, as a side benefit, will also endear you to your row mates). As one who has called planes “flying petri dishes”, I was pleasantly surprised by the Emory team’s findings.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">~aether theories~ by Vidian (c) copyright 2018 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Vidian/57398 Ft: Gurdonark, White-throated Sparrow</span></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Brewing the Best Hotel Room Coffee</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Interview with Coleman Collins. His blog post on brewing hotel room coffee is <a href=\"https://roadwarrior.blog/hotel-room-coffee/\">here</a></li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Tools of the Trade by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/56512 Ft: Abstract Audio, Mr Yesterday, Martijn de Boer, Speck</span></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Notes from Spain</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>This was our 4th spring trip to Spain. Our first trip we hit Madrid and Barcelona, the usual suspects. The next trip, we headed south to Andalucia -- Córdoba, Granada, Ronda, Seville -- during Semana Santa, Holy Week, and saw penitential processions every day in every town and city we visited, culminating in Holy Thursday night outside of Seville Cathedral. The last trip, in 2016, we headed back down South, but even further, taking a boat across the Straits of Gibraltar to Tangier, Morocco. For this trip, we gave up warm weather for some new territory -- Rioja and the Basque Country.</li>\n 	<li>As I said at the top of the show, for me, Spain is about food and wine. There’s certainly culture -- the Semana Santa processions are phenomenal cultural events, standing in front of the huge canvas of Picasso’s Guernica in the Reina Sofia in Madrid, the Mezquita in Cordoba,... -- but it’s the food and wine that keep bringing us back.</li>\n 	<li>On our first trip to Granada, we were staying in a Marriott -- maybe one of their AC properties -- in the middle of town. A great building; it had been a convent at one time. There was an interior courtyard; we had a nightcap there one night. 4 glasses of wine at the hotel bar -- figuring $12-15/glass, I’m waiting for a 40 euro tab. It was 12 euros -- I love this country.</li>\n 	<li>The pintxos crawl was the food center of this trip north, first in Logroño and then in San Sebastian, walking from bar to bar -- a glass of wine and a bite at each. It was a good mix of food. In Logroño, we started at a couple of dive-ier, more local places that focused on just one pintxos -- sauteed mushrooms at one, ground lamb sandwich at the next, the meat seared on a flat grill behind the bar, and then served on a bun with a great tasting green sauce -- and serving local Rioja wines, pulling the bottles from a bucket at the end of the bar. We then swung into a distinctly higher end place, complete with a Michelin sticker on the front door; more variety of food -- seared red tuna, pickled white anchovies, grilled octopus -- and the next level up of Rioja wines. Later in the week, in San Sebastian, when the weather turned a bit better, we could see the crawl pick up volume in the pedestrian streets of the old town; people still bundled up a bit, but taking their wine outside, and willing to walk to the next place rather than hunkering down for a couple of courses in the warmth.</li>\n 	<li>Cider is big in the Basque Country, though it’s drier, not as sweet as you get in the US or the UK. And during cider season -- January through April -- the siderias, the cider houses in the hills outside of San Sebastian, open up to serve cider streamed directly from the tap of huge chestnut wood barrels into your glass, and then the glass of the person behind you,... and a traditional menu of salt-cod omelette, fresh cod fried with peppers and onions, and damn big grilled t-bones served either standing up or at communal tables. We ended up sharing a meal with a busload of folks from just over the border in France. A couple dozen of us lined up as a worker manned the tap -- letting a thin stream of cider out. We lined up our wide-mouthed plastic tumblers about three feet away to impart a bit of fizz to the three fingers of cider that we caught before moving out of the stream to let it hit the tumbler that someone was holding right below ours.</li>\n 	<li>For a great food country, the food at Madrid airport, though, is a bit pedestrian. So to extend our food extravaganza for one more meal, we skip the “meh” restaurants and buy a package of the top-end iberian ham -- the bellota, from the free range Iberian pigs fattening up on acorns. We can’t bring it into the US, but it’s an 8-hour flight from Madrid to Chicago. That package never makes it as far at US landfall.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #139</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_139.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #139 — Brewing Best Hotel Room Coffee; Notes from Spain','Returning to the mic after 10 days of food, wine, wind, rain, and snow in the north of Spain. I talk about traveling in Spain, and with my guest Coleman Collins about how to make the best coffee in your hotel room','inherit','closed','closed','','1961-revision-v1','','','2021-03-10 22:51:47','2021-03-11 03:51:47','',1961,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/10/1961-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3425,1,'2021-03-10 23:10:27','2021-03-11 04:10:27','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3037,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2776-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2776-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3037\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Escaped the Chicago winter for a week of hiking in the mountains around Tucson and searching for good Sonoran food. We also talk with Mike Kennedy, CEO and Co-Founder of <a href=\"http://www.go-koala.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Koala </a>about how he\'s making it easy to rent timeshares without buying into them. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_173.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go over to the <em>Subscribe</em> section on the right to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show Notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show Notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #173: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>This Week</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois on, depending where you are, Fat Tuesday or Shrove Tuesday or Pancake Tuesday. Here in Chicago, <a href=\"https://culture.pl/en/article/how-chicago-became-a-distinctly-polish-american-city\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">with a big Polish population</a>, it’s <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P%C4%85czki\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pączki</a> Day and I had mine for breakfast -- Polish-filled donuts; I went for a raspberry jam and a custard one. What had been one of the mildest winters on record started reverting to the mean in February. The last day the temperature cracked freezing was almost 2 weeks ago and it has snowed 13 of the past 17 days. We were all waiting for this, veterans of Midwest winters. It got me thinking that maybe Irene and I should’ve delayed our trip to Tucson from the third week of January when the temperatures here were hitting the mid-40’s, to last week or this week when we could’ve enjoyed 50-60° temperature differentials.</li><li>But even without the guilty pleasure of posting schadenfreude-trolling Instagram pictures of sunshine and temperature readings, we had a good week in Tucson. The flights out and back on Southwest were uneventful, <em>and</em> not full; the Airbnb was fine; the desert hikes were great, and we hit some good restaurants and taprooms, which, as I talked about in the last episode, was the main reason we pivoted from original destination, locked-down/shutdown San Diego to Tucson. Probably our only disappointment was not finding a great margarita -- which we fixed in the Amex Centurion Lounge in PHX while waiting for our flight home. I’ll talk more about Tucson later in the episode, but I also wrote up a blog post with all the details. If you go to the episode description in your podcast app, there’s a link that should be clickable to take you straight to the post.</li><li>Even though Southwest’s open middle seat pledge expired in December (<a href=\"https://news.delta.com/delta-only-us-airline-block-middle-seats-limit-onboard-capacity-through-march-30-2021\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Delta’s the last one standing</a>), no one landed in our middle seat on our MDW-PHX flight. That flight was a lot longer than I remember it being last year. I think it had something to do with the mask. Before getting on the plane, I switched from my standard EvolveTogether surgical style mask to a Korean version of the N-95 mask, decided to dial it up not knowing if I was going to be shoulder-to-shoulder with a stranger for 3+ hours. The KN-95 wasn’t too uncomfortable, as masks go, so I didn’t swap it out for my other mask when the middle seat stayed empty. My strategy with Southwest’s open seating was to go ¾’s of the way to the back of the plane, about halfway past the exit row. I figured this would mean fewer people walking past us but far enough away from the rear lavs to avoid the in-flight queues. And, since people still want to deplane quickly, if the last boarding groups, the C groups, were left with just middle seats, they’d take them in the front of the cabin. As it turned out, I probably over-thought that a bit; I didn’t see any occupied middle seat in the front or the back.</li><li>Then, a couple of days before our flight home, I got the dreaded e-mail from Southwest -- the flight “may not allow for an open middle seat next to you.” I waited until the night before to tell Irene. She’s a little more COVID risk-averse than me and didn’t want her stewing on it. But it turned out OK. She grabbed the 2-seat second exit row -- aisle and middle seat; no window seat. And looking behind us, I didn’t see any row with an occupied middle seat, so either people swapped their flights after receiving that email, or the flight was just a shade over ⅔’s full with any occupied middle seats in the front of the plane. And, those margaritas from the Centurion Lounge helped the flight home go by just a wee bit easier.</li><li>Bridge Music -- Madrugada(rmx) by savoyard (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/savoyard/10743 Ft: Curve</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I finally pushed out the refreshed website last week. First change since 2006. Figured website aesthetics have changed a bit over the last 15 years and so changed things up a bit. Thanks to everyone who responded to my request on Facebook and Twitter to hit the new site for a bit of crowd-sourced end-user testing. A bit like the <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1224798425499213828\">meme</a> you’ll see posted in a lot of IT shops; a picture of Dos Equis “most interesting man in the world” with the line -- “I don’t always test my code, but when I do, I test it in Production.” There’s still some tweaks I need to make, but it seems pretty solid. Check it out if you get a chance -- travelcommons.com -- and drop me a line at <a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a> with your thoughts.</li><li>Following up on last episode’s rant about the guy living unnoticed in ORD for 3 months, I tweeted out an <a href=\"https://theconversation.com/how-some-people-can-end-up-living-at-airports-for-months-even-years-at-a-time-154336\">article</a> about people living years in airports. Written by a history prof from University of Dayton who researches the history of airports (hey, everyone’s gotta have their niche), the article talks about other airport residents, an Iranian refugee who lived in CDG for 18 years, and most recently, an Estonian guy who was transiting through Manila Int’l Airport last March as the shutdowns hit was stuck there for 100 days until the Estonian embassy could get him on a repatriation flight. That one is brutal. I spent 3 hours in that airport a few years back and even, with everything open, it felt 2½ hours too long. Check out the article -- there’s a link in the show notes and at the top of the Twitter and Facebook feeds. It’s a good read.</li><li>Jim McDonough hit the Facebook page, responding to last episode’s margarita instruction story with one of his own.<ul><li>I know how you feel about teaching the bartender how to make a margarita. We ended a week-long trip to Switzerland by staying our last night at a hotel by the Zurich airport. At dinner, we each asked for a Scotch and water. They brought out this big tray, with a bowl of ice cubes, a pitcher of water, a bottle of Scotch, and two glasses. A crowd of hotel employees gathered to watch. Evidently, they don\'t do Scotch and water in Zurich. When I filled the glasses with ice, they gasped. I explained that we live in a hot climate. I went ahead and added Scotch and topped off with a little water, and they winced when I took a sip. A cultural exchange, I guess.</li></ul></li><li>Jim, I love you, man, but I gotta tell you -- I’d probably be wincing with the hotel staff. My usual Scotch order is -- Scotch and glass. But you paid for it (and in Zurich, it’s not going to be a small amount), so even if they couldn’t quite figure out what you wanted, they at least gave you all the tools you needed.</li><li>One of my absolute favorite beer bars, <a href=\"https://brewpublic.com/beer-news/baileys-taproom-and-the-upper-lip-permanently-closes-its-doors/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bailey’s Taproom in Portland, Oregon</a>, has shut off their taps permanently. I started a project in downtown Portland in January 2013. Found Bailey’s the second night I was there and just settled in; my last beer there was my last night in Portland. The owner said “After reopening to limited seating (after the initial shutdown), it was clear that people were not interested in coming downtown. When the PPP money ran out, I decided to close the doors”  Another reminder that we should try to be purposeful about where we spend our discretionary dollars, thinking about what businesses we would miss if they closed up and then go out of our way to buy something from them. In my case, it helps rationalize a rather full beer shelf in our pantry.</li><li>After Hertz declared bankruptcy at the end of last May, I predicted in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/06/09/podcast-164-first-post-lockdown-trips-travel-credit-cards/\">episode #164</a> that I’d be paying more attention to the mileage on the cars in the Five Star aisle because that’s the first place I see signs of financial distress — a lot less 500-mile cars and a lot more 24,000-mile cars. And while 24,000 miles on a car doesn’t seem like a lot, remember that rental car miles are kinda like dog years — you gotta multiply them by, like, 7 to get to regular car miles. And true to form, when picking up our Hertz car in PHX at the end of January, every car I looked at had over 24,000 miles, a few with a <strong>lot</strong> more. Will be interesting to see what’s on offer at SAN in a few weeks. </li><li>If you have any status on a Star Alliance or One World carrier, you probably got an email from your carrier about a <a href=\"https://skift.com/2021/03/05/data-breach-affects-more-than-2-million-frequent-flyers-across-airline-alliances/\">data breach at SITA</a>. I got them from United and American saying my name, account number, and status was potentially exposed and that I should change my password, which I did. And then thought about how this is yet another data leak from some unknown player in what is an incredibly fragmented travel tech tool chain. We talked about this back in November in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">episode #169</a> when an obscure Spanish company used by hotels to update information on on-line booking sites leaked 24 GB of names, emails, credit card data and reservation records. And in this case, if you’re not in the airline industry, you probably don’t know about <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SITA_(company)\">SITA</a>. It’s a industry consortium started back in 1949 by 11 European airlines to share infrastructure costs and has expanded to provide all sorts of travel technology including the exchange of passenger data between airlines -- in this case, the exchange of frequent flyer status so that, say, Lufthansa recognizes your elite status with United on your flight with them. It’s one thing when the breach is from a company that you did business with -- the <a href=\"https://www.cnet.com/news/marriott-discloses-new-data-breach-impacting-5-point-2-million-guests/\">Marriott hacks</a> in 2018 and 2020, the 2018 breaches at <a href=\"https://www.theregister.com/2018/09/11/british_airways_website_scripts/\">British Airways</a> and <a href=\"https://www.theregister.com/2018/10/25/cathay_pacific_hacked_up_to_94_million_passenger_deets_exposed/\">Cathay Pacific</a>. But it’s a whole other thing when you find out some unknown third party coughed up your data. But actually, when you get a look at the spaghetti that is travel technology, and see all the places your data is getting sent to -- often small companies that can’t afford state-of-the-art cybersecurity, it’s kinda surprising -- in a sad way -- that not more of this happens.</li><li>Type “plane mask” into the Google search box and one of the first 5 suggestions is “plane mask fight”. Click through and you get what seems to be an endless stream of news reports and cellphone videos of passengers fighting about having to wear a mask during a flight. What is getting a lot less coverage, though I’m hearing snatches of it here and there, are people getting chewed out by their row mates when taking their masks off to eat or drink something, getting something like “Hey, can you not drink during the flight? I’d rather not die for your convenience.”  And I’m afraid this is going to get worse as more people start traveling again and aircraft load factors get back into the 80% range. But honestly, both sides are being idiots. You know the rules before you buy your ticket and you’re reminded of them by emails before you travel, and again by gate agents before you board the plane. If you can’t handle the rules -- all of them, not just the ones you agree with -- then don’t walk down the jetway. Drive; charter a jet. But don’t try to bend the rules to your own personal belief system and hassle the rest of us who are just trying to get from Point A to Point B on-time and with the minimum amount of heartache.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on our fab new web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge music -- Tools of the Trade by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/56512 Ft: Abstract Audio, Mr Yesterday, Martijn de Boer, Speck</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>What\'s New in Travel Insurance</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A little over a year ago, the first coronavirus lockdowns started, and the execution of them was, to be charitable, mostly a mess. Borders were quickly shut; planes grounded. People were stranded in foreign countries with no way home; we just talked about the Estonian guy stuck in Manila airport for 100 days. And all of a sudden, people started paying attention to travel insurance. What was once a check box at the bottom of a booking webpage that most of us clicked “no” on so we could finish our reservation quickly became very important. Last May in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/05/08/podcast-163-new-world-of-travel-insurance-getting-medical-help-on-the-road/\">episode #163</a>, as people were beginning to think about their first post-lockdown trips, we talked about the state of travel insurance. Now, with travel bookings beginning to rise as vaccination rates rise, I wanted to check back in and see what’s changed with travel insurance. So I asked Michael Giusti, senior writer at <a href=\"https://www.insurancequotes.com/\">InsuranceQuotes.com</a>, to come onto the podcast and give us an update: <ul><li>Mark: Michael, last May, Eric Josowitz of <a href=\"https://www.insurancequotes.com/\">InsuranceQuotes.com</a> was on the podcast. We were talking about travel insurance after the initial lockdown. Back then, in the midst of all that travel disruption, many travelers were finding:  a) they didn\'t actually know what their insurance covered; they’d just checked the box at the end of their booking process, paid some additional amount moved on; and  b) the insurance that they had bought had exclusions for communicable diseases, WHO-declared pandemics, cancellations in cases of fear. And then, after that, insurers stopped offering travel insurance. So, Michael, that was May. This is now the end of February. What\'s the current situation regarding travel insurance?</li><li>Michael: Not many people were thinking about pandemics back when this started. But the few people who were thinking about it were insurers. They saw the SARS epidemic and they started writing in pandemic exclusions from that point on. And then there\'s a second little provision in these insurance policies called the Known Events Provisions. So once the pandemic declared, even if there wasn\'t a specific exclusion, they can turn around and say, “Well, we\'re not going to cover because it\'s now a known event.” It would be like there\'s a hurricane that\'s bearing down on your city and you buy a plane ticket while the hurricane is there, and then you get mad because you can\'t fly. It’s a known event, and so they\'re not going to cover that. So that\'s where we came from. And then, you\'re right, they stopped and they said, “Well, we have no idea what\'s going on, so let’s regroup.”  And now they\'ve regrouped, and it\'s really interesting because in a lot of the insurance industry, they\'ve stopped covering pandemics. But in travel insurance, they specifically started including Covid 19, saying “We will cover it under these conditions.”</li><li>Mark: Michael, travel requirements have been changing quickly; the restrictions have been going in and out. I mean, most recently, the need to provide a negative COVID test just to be able to get on a plane.  If you look at what Canada did, they basically gave travelers one-week notice of the rule change at the end of 2020. But if you\'ve bought a travel insurance policy when you booked travel six weeks prior, what\'s the best way to cover these late breaking requirements that pop up a week or two before our trip?</li><li>Michael: Two main things... One is the policy language. You do need to say what’s specifically included, what’s specifically excluded? Because whether they\'re going to cover not having a negative test very much depends on the policy language. The other thing that it\'s going to come down to is whether it\'s out of your control. If it\'s something that you\'ve neglected to do, it\'s never going to be covered. The policies I\'ve reviewed, I haven\'t seen any that specifically kick in if you haven\'t got a negative test. So if you\'re worried about that, you really do need to ask the agent or really read that fine print. I do know that if you\'re delayed at security while you\'re being tested, that\'s not covered. So you do have to get there in time to make sure if they do rapid tests on the spot, that you\'re going to have time to get through security.</li><li>Mark: Okay, let me unpack that just a little bit, Michael. So I booked my flight, and I\'ve booked it a month ago. And now I go to take my test 72 hours before departure, and I come up positive. If I\'ve bought the right policy, would that typically cover delay or cover cancellation?</li><li>Michael: Delay is always the first preference. So if we can just push this trip back a week or whatever, that\'s going to be everyone\'s favorite outcome. But there are cancellation provisions where, say, you can\'t move it because the wedding is not going to be moved, in which case the cancellation provisions might kick in.</li><li>Mark: So now let\'s flip that. I\'ve taken my test, it\'s been negative, I get on the plane, I fly down to Costa Rica. And now a week on, I\'ve taken my test to get back into the US and now that test comes out positive. So now, potentially, I can\'t get back into the US. How does insurance help me there?</li><li>Michael: There\'s a couple places where this insurance is going to really beneficial in that situation. First and foremost, the medical provisions in most of these comprehensive policies are going to actually help you pay for your healthcare. Many of them are going to be secondary coverage, meaning they\'re going to want your primary health care to kick in first and then they\'ll jump in and cover anything that\'s not covered. Some of them are primary, especially with the overseas trips. So, that\'s a really nice benefits that are built into a lot of these policies. The other place that will help is, if you\'re delayed because you can\'t travel because of a restriction like that, and that\'s outside of your control, a lot of them will cover a hotel while you\'re waiting and meals while you\'re waiting, and they\'ll get you back home safely. So that\'s actually a really positive outcome that can happen with these policies.</li><li>Mark: Michael, how do I make sure that I\'ve actually got one of those policies? If we go back to the April/May timeframe, people were finding that they didn\'t actually know what they had. How do I make sure I\'ve actually bought that coverage?</li><li>Michael: Well, best case scenario would be if you found a human and you asked them in plain English.</li><li>Mark: Yeah, good luck with that, right?</li><li>Michael: I know, calling 1 800 numbers anymore – that’s not in the cards. What I would do if I was doing that, I’d click through the terms of service and see who\'s offering that policy. If it doesn\'t really go into much detail, or if it\'s really garbly legalese, I’d go through to the provider\'s website. Most of them have FAQ pages that specifically address COVID. So that\'s gonna be probably your best resource.</li><li>Mark: Michael, people are starting to think about big trips as vaccination rates start to step up. You know, the back half of the year, if I\'m thinking about booking, say, a week\'s biking tour in Tuscany or Provence in September/October, what kind of travel insurance should I be looking for? Should I pony up for a cancel- for-any-reason rider? Or are there some cheaper alternatives for more limited scenarios like, “Hey, the EU still isn\'t letting Americans in” but won\'t cover the more generic “Oh, I\'m afraid to travel” kind of reason.</li><li>Michael: The question of “if you\'re afraid to travel” is never going to be covered unless you do have that cancel-for-any-reason policy. But travel insurance is meant to cover things that are out of your control. So you know, if it\'s not laid out your policy, it\'s not gonna be covered. So that\'s kind of the most expensive option. You know, you\'re going to pay the most for a cancel-for-any-reason policy. That middle ground is the standard policy where you say “I\'m taking a little bit of the risk on myself. I\'m going to bravely travel wherever I\'m allowed.” The least expensive option is really kind of a DIY. And a lot of the destinations that I\'m seeing, they\'re waiving cancellation and change fees. And so you can kind of make your DIY travel insurance by only booking places that would let you change for no fee. That\'s kind of the cheapest “I\'m feeling brave” policy. “I\'m feeling skittish” policy Is that cancel-for-any-reason.</li><li>Mark: Super. Michael Giusti, senior writer at <a href=\"https://www.insurancequotes.com/\">InsuranceQuotes.com</a>, thank you very much for joining us. This was a great update.</li><li>Michael: Thank you so much.</li></ul></li><li>Bridge music -- Crazy Love-The Alex &amp; Lang mix by J.Lang (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djlang59/10579 Ft: FHC and Alex &amp; Bradsucks</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Keeping Ahead of Expiring Miles</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Like most road warriors of a certain tenure, I have cards in my desk of some 30-odd frequent traveler programs -- those that I know of -- and am probably a member of another dozen or so that I’ve forgotten about. Of those, I have meaningful balances -- enough for at least one free flight or a free hotel night -- at the Big 4 US carriers, a couple of European carriers, and two of the big hotel chains. Most of the rest are random programs like IcelandAir or AirBaltic or Omni Hotels that I used for a specific trip or project but had some spiff, like seat selection or free WiFi, that was reason enough to put in the effort to sign up.</li><li>When I was traveling every week or so, keeping those main programs active wasn’t a big effort. And if I hadn’t flown, say, BA for a while, I’d code maybe a short American commuter flight, something where my status was a bit meaningless, to my BA account to reset the expiration clock.</li><li>But now, hitting the first anniversary of the first travel lockdown and with business travel still mostly on hold, some of those expiration cliffs are starting to become visible</li><li>Last episode, I talked about getting emails from BA and Iberia warning me of pending Avios expirations, and so I transferred my Iberia points to my BA account. But I can’t tell from the BA website if that was enough activity to change the BA expiration. So I spelunked some more thru the website and found where they call out Airbnb bookings as “recognized activity” that’ll reset the 36-month clock. So, I booked our San Diego Airbnb through a link on BA’s site, just had to enter my BA account number before moving to the booking screen. It’ll be interesting to see if the activity flows seamlessly into my BA account or if I’ll have to chase it down through a manual credit claim. I’m betting on the latter, but am hoping to be pleasantly surprised.</li><li>But that got me cycling through my other accounts. I wasn’t worried about my US carrier accounts. The trend there has been to do away with expiration dates, first Southwest, then Delta, most recently United. American, not surprisingly, is the knuckle dragger, clinging to their stingy 18-month policy, but I flew them last fall to PHL, so I’m fine there.</li><li>But Flying Blue, the KLM/Air France program? I last flew KLM the fall of 2018, so that had to be coming up. I hit the website; those miles were also expiring at the end of this year. And, they, like BA and Iberia, have managed to make resetting that data way overly complex.  First, there’s “overall extending activities” which are flights or purchases on their co-branded credit card; they extend <em>all</em> Flying Blue miles by 2 years. “Partial extending activities” extend miles earned through, say, hotel or car rental partners. Please note, says the website, \"‘Partial extending activities’ do not extend the validity of Miles earned from ‘Overall extending activities’\". OK, then. Looking at it this way, I only had 500 miles from that 2018 flight, but 38,000 miles from when I had to quickly stash points from a corporate Amex account before leaving a company. So, a “partial” activity should suffice. I set myself a reminder for Dec 1st to push the minimum 1,000 points from my personal Amex.</li><li>And the expiration periods are kinda all over the place. BA is 36 months; KLM, Marriott, and Hyatt are 2 years; American is 18 months; Hilton is 15 months (weird number); and IHG is the stingiest at 12. </li><li>Seems like there should be a technology solution to this, right? There are a few. If you use TripIt to consolidate your trip itineraries, the $49/year upgrade to the Pro version gives you program tracking. I had used it one year when they upgraded me for free; probably by mistake. AwardWallet is another popular tool, but there too, you need to upgrade to the paid version (a little cheaper at $30/year) to track expirations.</li><li>But beyond the cost, for these programs to work, you have to give them access to your accounts -- your account numbers and passwords. And cycling back to what I was saying at the top of the show, with the travel industry’s kinda poor track record on data protection, and just after having to reset passwords to United, American, Lufthansa, BA, and Iberia because of SITA’s leak, do I really want to put <em>all</em> my frequent traveler logins into one spot? I think a simple spreadsheet on the hard drive of the PC in my office can do the job just fine.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #173</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li>Nothing new on the tech front this month, but I should have the website freshened up by the next episode. I’ve had the current look since the beginning of 2006 courtesy of TravelCommons listener Hilary Baumann and her <a href=\"https://fascinationdesign.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Fascination Design</a> firm. The change is absolutely not a knock against Hilary’s work. It’s just that, after 15 years, I wanted to freshen things up a bit. So look for that by the end of February or beginning of March.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>, as well as asking Alexa, Siri, and Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_173.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #173 — What\'s New in Travel Insurance; Keeping Ahead of Expiring Miles','','inherit','closed','closed','','3417-revision-v1','','','2021-03-10 23:10:27','2021-03-11 04:10:27','',3417,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/10/3417-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3426,1,'2021-03-10 23:12:09','2021-03-11 04:12:09','[caption id=\"attachment_1985\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/6AB2DE86-7AE4-4DAF-AD9F-DEFB51F737E0-01.jpeg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1985\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/6AB2DE86-7AE4-4DAF-AD9F-DEFB51F737E0-01-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> The Look of Augmented Reality?[/caption]\n\nBroke out the mobile unit to record this episode in the Buckhead neighborhood of Atlanta; much warmer than getting caught in a spring snow storm in Milwaukee. When much of the travel tech news is about the latest phone apps, we talk about physical travel technology that we can touch and carry. <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">And when flying during the past two weeks, flight attendants\' safety demonstrations have become a bit more strident. </span>All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_140.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n<!--more-->\n\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #140:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you from the Hyatt Place-Buckhead in Atlanta, GA missing what I hope is the long-delayed start of Spring finally showing up the Midwest. I have done damn little travel since the last episode -- a couple of drives to a client up north of Milwaukee, a quick trip to Minneapolis last week, and flight this morning down to Atlanta. I managed to avoid the foot of late April snow in Minnesota but got caught by 3-4 inches in Milwaukee. Luckily, I’d looked at the forecast before I left and, walking out to the garage, grabbed my LL Bean boots and threw them into the trunk of the car Which saved my dress shoes later that evening and the next morning on unshoveled walks and is is the good thing about driving; I didn’t have to worry about space constraints. I couldn’t have done the same thing flying to Minneapolis.</li>\n 	<li>I ended up flying Southwest to Minneapolis because: a) they were the cheapest flight out on Monday morning at short notice; and b) it let me meet an A-List challenge that Southwest had sent me at the beginning of the year -- fly 3 roundtrips by the end of April and get A-List for the rest of the year. Now, I don’t fly Southwest a whole lot, so I can’t completely justify what I pushed to do this challenge -- except just because it was a challenge, I guess. That, and it’ll make it easier for those times I end up on Southwest this year. I won’t have to pay the $12 for auto check-in or set an alarm to check in 24 hours before flight time -- both of which typically only get me in the second or “B” boarding group. Not an earth shattering perk, but anything that reduces travel hassles is a good thing.</li>\n 	<li>When I went Chicago Midway airport on last Monday to catch that flight, I ran into a new TSA trick -- funnel everyone through a single-file U-turn line to be sniffed a TSA agent and a dog, after people headed into either regular security or TSA PreCheck. Which, at 7am on a Monday morning, quickly pushed the security line back into the hallway toward the parking garage. So, after spending what looks like the $190 million a year the past couple of years on screening technology like those snazzy full-body scanners that people empty their pockets and line up for, the TSA is now having us line up for yet another a new screening technology -- but at least this technology is cute. And when was the last time you heard a traveler wanting to pet the body scanner.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/media/files/DJBLUE/11541\">Hear Me</a></em> by DJ Blue</li>\n</ul>\n<h3><strong>Following Up</strong></h3>\n<ul>\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">A couple of things for those not following my Twitter or the TravelCommons Facebook page…</span>\n<ul>\n 	<li>First, for those Amazon fans, Alexa will now play the latest episode of TravelCommons for you if you ask nicely. I got an Echo Spot in a schwag bag for a conference in January. I put it on the standing desk in my home office and started playing around with it. After listening to the WJS Minute Briefing as part of my Flash Briefing, I started thinking about how to get TravelCommons onto it. At first, I thought I was going to have to figure out how to build an Alexa skill, but digging a little deeper, I found out that the TuneIn app is sorta the default podcast player for Alexa. So after I got TravelCommons approved for TuneIn -- felt like they had an actual human check out my app -- it appeared on my Echo Spot. So if you say, “Alexa, play TravelCommons podcast”, she should play the latest episode for you. Check out the Facebook page or my Twitter feed for a quick video showing the magic happen</li>\n 	<li>Second, I took advantage of being in town and the crap April weather to do the filming for the Midway taproom tour layover video. As I mentioned in the last episode, the idea has been to feature an itinerary out of Chicago’s “other” airport -- what was Chicago’s original airport that morphed into the budget airline airport that morphed into Southwest Airlines’ biggest operation. We used Uber and Lyft to hit 4 taprooms in what can only be described as the “post-industrial” landscape of Chicago’s near south side. We started by driving past the Cook County prison en route to Lagunitas’ plant and taproom that’s built in an old steel mill. While New Belgium and Sierra Nevada landed their national expansions in the much more bucolic environs of the North Carolina Smoky Mountains, Lagunitas’ owner Tony Magee dropped his expansion in a dodgy part of Chicago. We then hit smaller scale, more local places that have repurposed old manufacturing plants in less-visited Chicago neighborhoods -- Lo Rez in Pilsen, Marz in what can charitably described as “lower” Bridgeport, and then ending up at Whiner Beer in the Back of the Yards neighborhood -- where the Chicago Stockyards used to be decades ago. I started working on production, but then looked at the calendar and knew that I only had time for either this episode or the video. And since I’ve worked hard on keeping a monthly cadence of podcast episodes, I kicked the video into next month. So watch Facebook, Twitter, and the web site for the post. Since it’s a bit more narrow scope, I don’t think I’ll put the video in the podcast feed; not sure the non-beer-drinking listeners will want some 100 meg video clogging up their internet.</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>While sitting in the backseat of one of those Lyft rides, I noticed something new on the pink Lyft light that many drivers have in the middle of their dash. You always see the front of it -- the pink Lyft logo -- from the outside, through the front windshield. Glancing at the back of it from inside of the car, I something flash by. Looking more closely, I saw a little message scroll by - “15 min eta”. I saw it again in the Lyft car I took to MSP on last Tuesday. I asked the driver about it. He told me that Lyft sent it to him after he did 300 rides -- “bit of a status thing” he said. I told him about the Uber dash light that I saw in New York, that let me adjust the color of the light from the app -- I talked about this in a prior episode. He thought that was pretty cool too, but he liked Lyft, the company, better than Uber, and he appreciated his messaging light.</li>\n 	<li>All sorts of press releases drop into the TravelCommons mailbox, but the one announcing April 24, last Tuesday, as the first National Business Traveler Day caught my eye. I guess because it’s new, it hasn’t made it onto the National Day Calendar, a list of these sorts of designations. It’s a good choice of date, though, because there is only one national day listed on the 24th -- National Pigs-In-A-Blanket Day -- which, I can imagine, some First or Business Class flight attendants might reasonably associate with some sleeping business travelers. National Business Traveler Day was announced (created?) by “Upside Business Travel, the first online travel service built just for the do-it-yourself (DIY) business traveler” in recognition of “the important contributions made by business travelers to America\'s economy.” I dunno, this could go in so many snarky directions -- with the pigs-in-a-blanket thing as just a starter. I have to say, though, I felt very unrecognized when I walked into MSP Terminal 2 the afternoon of National Business Travelers Day -- an obvious frequent business traveler: wearing a black blazer, head-down on the iPhone, speedwalking to the furthest security checkpoint because it’s the only one with PreCheck. Nobody was gave me a thank-you, a flower, a hug, but then again, the first person I had contact with was an old, overweight but jolly TSA screener. Nice guy, but not sure I would’ve wanted a hug from him.</li>\n 	<li>And it could’ve been that MSP’s Terminal 2 which I’ll add to my list of ghetto terminals, the land of misbegotten travelers, which also includes ORD’s T2, Detroit’s North Terminal, Madrid’s 4S satellite terminal, Munich’s T2 satellite terminal… I’ve talked about this before. In fortress hubs, like ORD, DTW, and MSP, the terminals the hub airlines use is clean, bright, has lots of restaurant and shopping choices. Delta’s terminal in Detroit has an airy 2 or 3-story ceiling with a monorail train running the length of the terminal up at the top. The North terminal that every other airline is dumped into is the old terminal that Delta -- or actually Northwest left behind, with a bit of a clean up and 3 restaurants. Delta’s terminal in Minneapolis is the same story -- lots of shops and restaurants, a big craft beer bar, all with a bit of that North Woods feel. Terminal 2 - generic airport sterility, a Subway sandwich joint, a bar where all the handles were removed from the beer taps. And there’s no inside-security connections between these terminals in MSP and DTW if you want to check out the better side -- it’s a 10-minute bus ride and another pass through security. At least in ORD, you can walk from T2 to the American or United terminals and hit Rick Bayless’ Torta Frontera for great Mexican food or Goose Island for a good beer. On Tuesday, I was stuck in the Humphrey Terminal with my Subway sandwich and a choice of Bud Light or Blue Moon -- which maybe was fitting on National Business Traveler Day.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/media/files/savoyard/10743\">Madrugada</a></em> by Savoyard</li>\n</ul>\n<h3><strong>Travel Tech Gets Physical</strong></h3>\n<ul>\n 	<li>In addition to press releases about National Business Travelers Day, I also get press releases announcing new funding rounds for travel startups. These things come in waves. Like the wave of companies building tour aggregation platforms. That investment thesis went -- because millennials are more into experiential travel, they’re more likely to spend money on something like a food tour or hang gliding; the market for travel experiences is fragmented making discovery and purchasing difficult; our platform will solve this problem by aggregating experience providers and providing world-class search and user experience. The latest wave seems to be about building platforms that “reduce the pain” of corporate business travel. In April, in addition to Upside’s National Business Traveler Day announcement, Rocketrip sent out a release about their $15 million funding round and TravelPerk, who sponsored our January episode, touted their $21 million round -- which sounds like, some 20+ years after Travelocity and Expedia hit the market, companies continue to spend millions of dollars trying to figure out how to replace travel agents.</li>\n 	<li>At times, it feels like much of the work on improving travel is virtual, about software -- new apps, new search platforms, better ways to spit out a single travel itinerary. But in spite of the venture capital mantra that “software is eating the world,” travel is inherently physical -- we want to move our bodies, our stuff from Point A to Point B, and most often back again. It seems like the ‘60’s were the golden age of this, when Boeing and Airbus’ predecessors and the Russians were designing and building supersonic planes. I really felt ancient the other day telling some Millennial staffers about, how way back when, Concorde would fly from JFK to LHR in less than 3 hrs. Now it seems that Boeing and Airbus are completely focused on cramming more people into subsonic flying buses. Logical, but not very aspirational. Now if all the work on hyperloops -- the test circuits, the design contests -- actually turns into something, and isn’t just high-tech hobbies for Elon Musk and Richard Branson -- we’ll be onto something.</li>\n 	<li>But in the meantime, in the space between now -- thinner, more uncomfortable plane seats and hotel keys that keep demagnetizing -- and the inspirational future -- us whizzing along in pods at 750 mph, doing LA to SF in 35 minutes without having to buy CO2 offsets to feel better about ourselves -- what are some of the physical things about to hit?</li>\n 	<li>One thing that seems to be finally hitting critical mass is real-time luggage tracking through RFID luggage tags. Logistics is another thing that’s hard, but it feels that airports and some airlines, Delta especially, have slogged through deploying enough RFID readers along the miles of luggage conveyor belts in the bowels of most of the airports they use, and then wiring it back in near real-time to their smartphone apps so that it’s useful. I’m hoping the combination of competitive pressure, falling equipment pricing, and government fines will push the rest of the airlines to follow suit. For me, real-time location tracking was the main use case for smart bags like BlueSmart. If I can get this through RFID tags, I’ll feel a lot less salty about the smart bag ban.</li>\n 	<li>Wearables also get a lot of buzz. Carnival Cruise Lines has been the latest, announcing their “Ocean Medallion” last year as a way to “personalize” your cruise experience -- and, of course, to make it easier to buy drinks on board. Nothing really new here. Disney’s been doing this forever; 20 years ago, I remember using a wristband at Northstar ski resort in Tahoe to track how many vertical feet we’d skied in a day, and to easily buy beers in the lodge. I’m wondering what happens here if the current noise about the use (and misuse) of personal data by Facebook and others resets people’s privacy vs. ease-of-use balance point rather than just blowing over. For me, it’s less about how the companies use the data (though I’m not completely unconcerned about this) and more about their inability to secure it. Seems like every couple of weeks, another travel company admits to some hack of, say, their point-of-sale system and the associated loss of millions of names and credit card numbers. Doesn’t incent me to let them track my movements and spending habits.</li>\n 	<li>AR/VR -- Augmented and virtual reality continues to buzz. I’ve talked about Google Translate’s AR feature -- point your camera at, say, a menu or washing machine, and it’ll display the translation over the original text in real-time. It’s not perfect -- the translations can rapidly change, sorta flicker between different interpretations, but it’s often “good enough”, and a whole lot quicker than banging in each menu entree. Google has tried to extend this real-time translation from visual to speech with their Pixel Bud headphones with much more Version 1.0 mixed results. I’m probably being way overly optimistic here, but if the Buds follow the same improvement trajectory, they could be pretty cool in 3 years’ time.</li>\n 	<li>It really gets buzzy when we move from AR to VR. A guy at a VR start-up talked to me about using VR in hotel rooms for what he called “social viewing”. Rather than watching, say Black Mirror on Netflix on your laptop or one of those Enseo TVs I’m seeing more and more of, you strap on a VR headset, as does your spouse or kids, and you’re all watching together in a virtual living room or virtual theater. And then there’s always the pitch -- why fly over to, say, Madrid to see Picasso’s Guernica in the Reina Sofia when you strap on a VR headset and “be” in the room instantly? Hey, remember how virtual reality turned out in The Matrix movies? Yeah, I think I’ll keep my travel physical.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/media/files/djlang59/10579\">Crazy Love</a></em> by DJ Lang</li>\n</ul>\n<h3><strong>You <em>Will</em> Pay Attention to the Safety Briefing</strong></h3>\n<ul>\n 	<li>The selfie of passengers on Southwest flight 1380 not wearing the oxygen masks correctly went viral in the days after the engine explosion, along with the stories -- the guy telling the woman next to him that she didn’t need to squeeze the airbag, and the guy who logged into WiFi and Facebook Live before putting on his mask. The flight attendant interviews that seemingly every news outlet did dripped with schadenfreude -- no one ever pays attention to the safety videos or demonstrations, and look what happened!</li>\n 	<li>Improving airline safety records have let people grow numb as to how unnatural air travel is -- flying over 600 mph at 35,000 ft. Flight 1380 was the first accident-related fatality on a US airliner since 2009, and the Southwest’s first ever -- since it was founded in 1971.</li>\n 	<li>I’ll admit that I don’t pay attention to every demo, especially when I do multiple flights in a single week. I do typically look around me for the nearest exits -- in front and behind me -- because those can change pretty often with different seat configurations. I will pay attention, as a refresher, if I haven’t flown for a couple of weeks -- like last week’s flight to MSP. Or if it’s a plane I haven’t flown in a while, I’ll look at the seat back card -- like I did today when noticing I was in a Boeing 717, a pretty rare event for me.</li>\n 	<li>I have noticed that the flight attendants’ requests/demands for attention have become a bit more strident since 1380. On my Southwest flight back home from MSP last week, the flight attendant chanted “Nose and mouth; nose and mouth!”, eliciting some nervous laughter.</li>\n 	<li>The attendant on my Delta flight this morning was a bit more direct, perhaps fatalistic this morning. “Please pay attention! We’re doing this for you. But if you don’t want to watch us, well, I guess it’s your life…”</li>\n</ul>\n<h3><strong>Closing</strong></h3>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #140</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a> and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_140.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #140 — Travel Tech Gets Physical; Pay Attention to the Safety Briefing','Physical travel technology rather than latest phone app; TSA K9 screening; dingy airport terminals, flight attendants\' safety demonstrations become strident. ','inherit','closed','closed','','1977-revision-v1','','','2021-03-10 23:12:09','2021-03-11 04:12:09','',1977,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/10/1977-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3428,1,'2021-03-11 14:08:29','2021-03-11 19:08:29','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3029,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain-e1615489487801.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3029\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I left my suitcase at the door of our West Tucson Airbnb and walked out onto the back patio to watch the sun slip behind the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tucson_Mountains\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tucson Mountains</a>. The shades of red and orange on the undersides of a couple of clouds stood out in the pale blue sky. This was exactly what we were looking for when we left a cold grey Chicago nine hours ago. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3051,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7789-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7789-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3051\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>But then I heard a rustling from the far edge of the patio. A good-sized boar, a wild pig, walked out from between two bushes and walked across the backyard. Then another one. They stopped, turned to look at me, and then kept walking. More kept coming – another six followed the leaders, walking the same path across the backyard, stopping to sniff at a little tree. A quick Google search told me they weren\'t wild pigs but <a href=\"https://www.azgfd.com/wildlife/livingwith/javelina/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">javelinas</a>, a New World relative of the pig. They range from southern Arizona all the way down to Argentina in social groups called \"squadrons\".  Our squad looked comfortable here, like they were taking their usual end-of-day stroll back to wherever they bed down to stay safe from mountain lions. A couple of them came back to check on us the next morning, reminding us to keep the patio door closed.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:quote {\"className\":\"is-style-default\"} -->\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-style-default\"><p>To see a video of the javelina visitation and more, check out my <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/s/aGlnaGxpZ2h0OjE3ODc3MTkxNjk2MTM2MTcx?igshid=18auew1hwvjvo&amp;story_media_id=2489441232116364521\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tucson Instagram Story</a> on the TravelCommons Instagram Page</p></blockquote>\n<!-- /wp:quote -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3,\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h3 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Hiking</strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>As I mentioned in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the last podcast</a>, our plans for this trip were all about outside activities so any last-minute COVID closures or restrictions didn\'t strand us in our Airbnb, aimlessly flipping through TV channels. Since Tucson is <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tucson,_Arizona#Geography\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">surrounded by five small-ish mountain ranges,</a> we focused on hiking.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saguaro_National_Park\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Saguaro National Park</a></strong> is split into two physically separate areas, the Tucson Mountain District (TMD) on the west side of town near where we were staying, and across town to the east, the Rincon Mountain District (RMD). Our drive to the west district wound through the northern part of Tucson Mountain Park; two lanes twisting through gaps between the hilltops. The forecast said it would be the best weather of our stay, the highest temperatures and the lowest chance of rain, so we went for our biggest hike, <a href=\"https://www.arizonahighways.com/explore/hiking/king-canyon-trail\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">an 8-mile loop</a> that would take us to the top of 4,687-foot Wasson Peak. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We planned to park at the <a href=\"https://goo.gl/maps/KPGPZhBw8hDt7aiJ6\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">King Canyon Trailhead</a>, but it was filled with construction equipment that had completely torn up the parking lot. We hung a quick U-turn and, ignoring the warning signs, parked across the street in the far corner of the Arizona-Sonoma Desert Museum. We cut through some brush, crossed the street, and found the start of the trail.  It was sand and larger stones that climbed up from a dry wash. The Park Service has done a nice job of marking the trail, carving out steps on the steeper parts, and putting up signs at the trail intersections. I was glad, though, that I\'d downloaded enough off-line Google Maps data so I could double-check the signs when my mobile connection dropped.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"center\",\"id\":3034,\"width\":512,\"height\":384,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"aligncenter size-large is-resized\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2763.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2763-1024x768.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3034\" width=\"512\" height=\"384\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We walked up through what seemed the cactus version of a forest. The hills were full of all sorts of cacti: tall saguaro, low-to-the ground prickly pear and barrel, and twisted, tangled cholla. The top of Wasson Peak gave a panoramic view of the rocky hills that jutted straight up from the desert floor, and of Tucson sitting at the bottom of them. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3037,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2776-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2776-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3037\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://webcms.pima.gov/cms/One.aspx?pageId=1539\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tucson Mountain Park</a></strong> is directly south of western part of Saguaro National Park. We walked 10 minutes from our Airbnb to the <a href=\"https://goo.gl/maps/jhUVr4RvBoptxDvZ8\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Starr Pass Trailhead</a>. This hike was a 5½-mile loop around the valley floor, not as long nor as scenic as yesterday\'s Saguaro hike, but more leisurely and certainly easier on the feet. We took a bit more time, looking up at the tall saguaro cactuses with all their different arm configurations, and then down at the barrel cactuses that were just beginning to show the light green shoots of new growth. There were more people using these trails; the level terrain made it popular with mountain bikers and runners. And here too, the trails were well-marked and well-maintained.  It was a good afternoon\'s hike.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://www.fs.usda.gov/recarea/coronado/recarea/?recid=80532\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Sabino Canyon Recreational Area</a></strong> was our last hiking spot. It\'s across town, on the northeast side of Tucson in the foothills of the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Catalina_Mountains\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Santa Catalina Mountains</a>.  It was much more crowded than Saguaro or Tucson Mountain, but I might not be making a fair comparison. At Sabino Canyon, we drove to the main visitors center to step off on our hike while our other hikes started at smaller, more remote trailheads. Here again, there was beautiful rugged desert scenery, looking up the mountains and down into the canyons. But the trails weren\'t as well-marked as the other parks. We would lose the trail coming up out of a wash and then wander through cactus and javelina tracks trying to pick it up again. It was a pretty hike, but frustrating.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3,\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h3 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Eating</strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>All the hiking freed up the caloric space we needed to get deep into <a href=\"https://thisistucson.com/eat/sonoran-food-is-having-a-moment-la-writer-gustavo-arellano-will-talk-burritos-and-mexican/article_e409de98-e53d-11e9-892b-73157f4df357.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Sonoran food</a>, a style of Mexican cuisine that hasn\'t yet broken out of its birthplace, <a href=\"https://rovingdecanter.com/2014/10/22/what-is-sonoran-style-mexican-food/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">in this case, Southern Arizona and the Mexican state of Sonora</a>, the way that Tex-Mex, Baja, and Oaxacan cuisines have.  Picking up the menus, I immediately saw some differences – it\'s a <em>burro</em>, not a burrito; a <em>caramelo</em>, not a quesadilla; and tacos are garnished with chopped cabbage instead of the chopped cilantro and raw white onion that is the standard in Chicago. Beef, especially <em>carne asada</em> grilled over mesquite, is the default filling and it\'s served in a thin flour tortilla that\'s more like Chinese moo shu or Peking Duck wrappers than the thick flour tortillas you get with fajitas. <a href=\"https://tucsonfoodie.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tucson Foodie</a> and Andi Berlin, food writer at <a href=\"https://thisistucson.com/eat/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">#ThisIsTucson</a>, were my main guides to Sonoran food.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3046,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7836-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7836-300x238.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3046\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><a href=\"https://www.yelp.com/biz/ruiz-hot-dogs-tucson\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>Ruiz Hot Dogs</strong></a> food truck was our first stop. I\'d read a lot about the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonoran_hot_dog\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Sonoran hot dog</a> and coming from Chicago, another town with its own <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago-style_hot_dog\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">unique twist on a hot dog</a>, I had to give it a try. The Sonoran dog is a bacon-wrapped hot dog topped with chopped tomatoes and onions, pinto beans, mayonnaise, mustard, and salsa verde, served in a slightly sweet split-top bun with a grilled yellow pepper on the side. We ate ours on the hood of our rental car. It was great and a bargain at $3. (1140 S 6th Ave at W 22nd St)</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://www.tacorustico.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">El Taco Rustico</a></strong> was next on our list for tacos – more specifically, quesabirras and cabrito (goat) tacos. We tried the quesabirras first. They\'re  crispy tacos filled with beef birra (juicy stewed beef) and melted cheese, served with a little styrofoam cup of broth, a sort of \"Mexican a jus,\" for dipping. The broth, with a deep roasted dried chile flavor, pulled everything together. What the quesabirras didn\'t soak up, we drank like a chaser from a styrofoam shot glass. Next were tacos. We had cabrito and pollo asado (grilled chicken) tacos, and they were a revelation. The taste of the meat, the mesquite smoke on the grilled chicken and the tang of the goat, punched through the condiments and the tortilla. That this made such an impression on us is a credit to Chef Juan Almanza but also a sad commentary on how the meat at too many taco joints is just an underseasoned carrier for the salsa and garnish. (2281 N Oracle Rd)</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3048,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2804-scaled.jpeg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2804-300x284.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3048\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://www.tacosapson.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tacos Apson</a></strong> was our last stop, down in South Tucson across the street from a high school, and the best stop. We smelled the mesquite coming off the grill when we opened the car door. We walked up to the window and ordered two burros, carne asada and haas, which is a mix of asada, cheese, and roasted green chiles. Then scanning the menu, I added a couple <em>costillas</em> tacos, grilled beef ribs.  Back at the Airbnb, I cut burros in half. The thin flour tortilla was wrapped around nothing but the meat; none of typical burrito fillings, no rice or beans or lettuce or crema. There was nothing to mask the mesquite on the carne asada or the beef ribs, and the cheese and green chile in the haas burro accentuated rather than overwhelmed the beef. (3501 S 12th Ave)</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3,\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h3 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Drinking</strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I can\'t hike and eat Mexican food without beer. Tucson isn\'t on anyone\'s <a href=\"https://beerandbrewing.com/best-in-beer-2020-readers-choice-your-favorite-beer-cities/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">list of top beer cities</a>, but I found a couple of solid microbreweries to recommend.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3063,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2789-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2789-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3063\"/></a><figcaption>1912 Brewing Menu Board</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://1912brewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">1912 Brewing Company</a></strong> is in a strip of nondescript light industrial buildings just west of I-10, a quick 5-minute drive from El Taco Rustico. They have 20 taps and turn out good beer over a wider variety of styles than most places – goses, saisons, and some German styles in addition to the usual IPAs. (2045 N Forbes Blvd, Ste 105) </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><a href=\"https://www.pueblovidabrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pueblo Vida Brewing Company</a></strong> is in downtown Tucson. After navigating one-way streets and dodging street car, we found parking and walked over to the taproom only to find that the taproom was still closed due to COVID restrictions. But they were selling cans from a walk-up window. We had a nice chat with the woman helping us and bought a mixed 4-pack to go with our Tacos Apson take-away – a Vietnamese-inspired rice lager, a couple of hazy IPAs made with local Sonoran white wheat, and what I was most excited for, a black IPA. They were the best beers of the trip. (115 E Broadway Blvd)</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3,\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h3 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Resources</strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Travel and Lodging</strong><ul><li>We flew Southwest Airline to Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport (PHX) from Chicago Midway (MDW). Prices and flight selection were much better than flying into Tucson (TUS).</li><li>We rented a car from Hertz at PHX and drove the 115 miles down I-10 to Tucson.  It was an easy drive that took us an hour and 40 minutes. PHX is on the south side of Phoenix right by I-10, so we didn\'t hit any Phoenix traffic on the drive.</li><li>Our Airbnb was a one-bedroom time-share suite at <a href=\"https://clubwyndham.wyndhamdestinations.com/us/en/resorts/wyndham-hotels-resorts/united-states-of-america/arizona/tucson/starr-pass-golf-suites\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Starr Pass Golf Suites</a>.   It was a nice resort though we didn\'t get around to using any of the amenities (pool, golf course, restaurant). We\'re glad we stayed out near the Tucson Mountains rather than a downtown hotel. Tucson isn\'t that big, so we weren\'t more than 25 minutes from anywhere we wanted to be.</li></ul></li><li><strong>Hiking</strong> <ul><li><a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saguaro_National_Park\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Saguaro National Park</a></li><li><a href=\"https://webcms.pima.gov/cms/One.aspx?pageId=1539\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tucson Mountain Park</a></li><li><a href=\"https://www.fs.usda.gov/recarea/coronado/recarea/?recid=80532\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Sabino Canyon Recreational Area</a></li></ul></li><li><strong>Sonoran Food</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.yelp.com/biz/ruiz-hot-dogs-tucson\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Ruiz Hot Dogs</a>, 1140 S 6th Ave at W 22nd St</li><li><a href=\"https://www.tacorustico.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">El Taco Rustico</a>, 2281 N Oracle Rd</li><li><a href=\"https://www.tacosapson.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tacos Apson</a>, 3501 S 12th Ave</li></ul></li><li><strong>Craft Beer</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://1912brewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">1912 Brewing Company</a>, 2045 N Forbes Blvd, Ste 105</li><li><a href=\"https://www.pueblovidabrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pueblo Vida Brewing Company</a>, 115 E Broadway Blvd</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Quick Notes on Our Trip to Tucson','','inherit','closed','closed','','3026-revision-v1','','','2021-03-11 14:08:29','2021-03-11 19:08:29','',3026,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/11/3026-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3430,1,'2021-03-12 15:10:17','2021-03-12 20:10:17','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Escaped the Chicago winter for a week of hiking in the mountains around Tucson and searching for good Sonoran food. We also talk with Mike Kennedy, CEO and Co-Founder of <a href=\"http://www.go-koala.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Koala </a>about how he\'s making it easy to rent timeshares without buying into them. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_173.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go over to the <em>Subscribe</em> section on the right to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show Notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show Notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #173: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>This Week</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois on, depending where you are, Fat Tuesday or Shrove Tuesday or Pancake Tuesday. Here in Chicago, <a href=\"https://culture.pl/en/article/how-chicago-became-a-distinctly-polish-american-city\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">with a big Polish population</a>, it’s <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P%C4%85czki\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pączki</a> Day and I had mine for breakfast -- Polish-filled donuts; I went for a raspberry jam and a custard one. What had been one of the mildest winters on record started reverting to the mean in February. The last day the temperature cracked freezing was almost 2 weeks ago and it has snowed 13 of the past 17 days. We were all waiting for this, veterans of Midwest winters. It got me thinking that maybe Irene and I should’ve delayed our trip to Tucson from the third week of January when the temperatures here were hitting the mid-40’s, to last week or this week when we could’ve enjoyed 50-60° temperature differentials.</li><li>But even without the guilty pleasure of posting schadenfreude-trolling Instagram pictures of sunshine and temperature readings, we had a good week in Tucson. The flights out and back on Southwest were uneventful, <em>and</em> not full; the Airbnb was fine; the desert hikes were great, and we hit some good restaurants and taprooms, which, as I talked about in the last episode, was the main reason we pivoted from original destination, locked-down/shutdown San Diego to Tucson. Probably our only disappointment was not finding a great margarita -- which we fixed in the Amex Centurion Lounge in PHX while waiting for our flight home. I’ll talk more about Tucson later in the episode, but I also wrote up a blog post with all the details. If you go to the episode description in your podcast app, there’s a link that should be clickable to take you straight to the post.</li><li>Even though Southwest’s open middle seat pledge expired in December (<a href=\"https://news.delta.com/delta-only-us-airline-block-middle-seats-limit-onboard-capacity-through-march-30-2021\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Delta’s the last one standing</a>), no one landed in our middle seat on our MDW-PHX flight. That flight was a lot longer than I remember it being last year. I think it had something to do with the mask. Before getting on the plane, I switched from my standard EvolveTogether surgical style mask to a Korean version of the N-95 mask, decided to dial it up not knowing if I was going to be shoulder-to-shoulder with a stranger for 3+ hours. The KN-95 wasn’t too uncomfortable, as masks go, so I didn’t swap it out for my other mask when the middle seat stayed empty. My strategy with Southwest’s open seating was to go ¾’s of the way to the back of the plane, about halfway past the exit row. I figured this would mean fewer people walking past us but far enough away from the rear lavs to avoid the in-flight queues. And, since people still want to deplane quickly, if the last boarding groups, the C groups, were left with just middle seats, they’d take them in the front of the cabin. As it turned out, I probably over-thought that a bit; I didn’t see any occupied middle seat in the front or the back.</li><li>Then, a couple of days before our flight home, I got the dreaded e-mail from Southwest -- the flight “may not allow for an open middle seat next to you.” I waited until the night before to tell Irene. She’s a little more COVID risk-averse than me and didn’t want her stewing on it. But it turned out OK. She grabbed the 2-seat second exit row -- aisle and middle seat; no window seat. And looking behind us, I didn’t see any row with an occupied middle seat, so either people swapped their flights after receiving that email, or the flight was just a shade over ⅔’s full with any occupied middle seats in the front of the plane. And, those margaritas from the Centurion Lounge helped the flight home go by just a wee bit easier.</li><li>Bridge Music -- Madrugada(rmx) by savoyard (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/savoyard/10743 Ft: Curve</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I finally pushed out the refreshed website last week. First change since 2006. Figured website aesthetics have changed a bit over the last 15 years and so changed things up a bit. Thanks to everyone who responded to my request on Facebook and Twitter to hit the new site for a bit of crowd-sourced end-user testing. A bit like the <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1224798425499213828\">meme</a> you’ll see posted in a lot of IT shops; a picture of Dos Equis “most interesting man in the world” with the line -- “I don’t always test my code, but when I do, I test it in Production.” There’s still some tweaks I need to make, but it seems pretty solid. Check it out if you get a chance -- travelcommons.com -- and drop me a line at <a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a> with your thoughts.</li><li>Following up on last episode’s rant about the guy living unnoticed in ORD for 3 months, I tweeted out an <a href=\"https://theconversation.com/how-some-people-can-end-up-living-at-airports-for-months-even-years-at-a-time-154336\">article</a> about people living years in airports. Written by a history prof from University of Dayton who researches the history of airports (hey, everyone’s gotta have their niche), the article talks about other airport residents, an Iranian refugee who lived in CDG for 18 years, and most recently, an Estonian guy who was transiting through Manila Int’l Airport last March as the shutdowns hit was stuck there for 100 days until the Estonian embassy could get him on a repatriation flight. That one is brutal. I spent 3 hours in that airport a few years back and even, with everything open, it felt 2½ hours too long. Check out the article -- there’s a link in the show notes and at the top of the Twitter and Facebook feeds. It’s a good read.</li><li>Jim McDonough hit the Facebook page, responding to last episode’s margarita instruction story with one of his own.<ul><li>I know how you feel about teaching the bartender how to make a margarita. We ended a week-long trip to Switzerland by staying our last night at a hotel by the Zurich airport. At dinner, we each asked for a Scotch and water. They brought out this big tray, with a bowl of ice cubes, a pitcher of water, a bottle of Scotch, and two glasses. A crowd of hotel employees gathered to watch. Evidently, they don\'t do Scotch and water in Zurich. When I filled the glasses with ice, they gasped. I explained that we live in a hot climate. I went ahead and added Scotch and topped off with a little water, and they winced when I took a sip. A cultural exchange, I guess.</li></ul></li><li>Jim, I love you, man, but I gotta tell you -- I’d probably be wincing with the hotel staff. My usual Scotch order is -- Scotch and glass. But you paid for it (and in Zurich, it’s not going to be a small amount), so even if they couldn’t quite figure out what you wanted, they at least gave you all the tools you needed.</li><li>One of my absolute favorite beer bars, <a href=\"https://brewpublic.com/beer-news/baileys-taproom-and-the-upper-lip-permanently-closes-its-doors/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bailey’s Taproom in Portland, Oregon</a>, has shut off their taps permanently. I started a project in downtown Portland in January 2013. Found Bailey’s the second night I was there and just settled in; my last beer there was my last night in Portland. The owner said “After reopening to limited seating (after the initial shutdown), it was clear that people were not interested in coming downtown. When the PPP money ran out, I decided to close the doors”&nbsp; Another reminder that we should try to be purposeful about where we spend our discretionary dollars, thinking about what businesses we would miss if they closed up and then go out of our way to buy something from them. In my case, it helps rationalize a rather full beer shelf in our pantry.</li><li>After Hertz declared bankruptcy at the end of last May, I predicted in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/06/09/podcast-164-first-post-lockdown-trips-travel-credit-cards/\">episode #164</a> that I’d be paying more attention to the mileage on the cars in the Five Star aisle because that’s the first place I see signs of financial distress — a lot less 500-mile cars and a lot more 24,000-mile cars. And while 24,000 miles on a car doesn’t seem like a lot, remember that rental car miles are kinda like dog years — you gotta multiply them by, like, 7 to get to regular car miles. And true to form, when picking up our Hertz car in PHX at the end of January, every car I looked at had over 24,000 miles, a few with a <strong>lot</strong> more. Will be interesting to see what’s on offer at SAN in a few weeks.&nbsp;</li><li>If you have any status on a Star Alliance or One World carrier, you probably got an email from your carrier about a <a href=\"https://skift.com/2021/03/05/data-breach-affects-more-than-2-million-frequent-flyers-across-airline-alliances/\">data breach at SITA</a>. I got them from United and American saying my name, account number, and status was potentially exposed and that I should change my password, which I did. And then thought about how this is yet another data leak from some unknown player in what is an incredibly fragmented travel tech tool chain. We talked about this back in November in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">episode #169</a> when an obscure Spanish company used by hotels to update information on on-line booking sites leaked 24 GB of names, emails, credit card data and reservation records. And in this case, if you’re not in the airline industry, you probably don’t know about <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SITA_(company)\">SITA</a>. It’s a industry consortium started back in 1949 by 11 European airlines to share infrastructure costs and has expanded to provide all sorts of travel technology including the exchange of passenger data between airlines -- in this case, the exchange of frequent flyer status so that, say, Lufthansa recognizes your elite status with United on your flight with them. It’s one thing when the breach is from a company that you did business with -- the <a href=\"https://www.cnet.com/news/marriott-discloses-new-data-breach-impacting-5-point-2-million-guests/\">Marriott hacks</a> in 2018 and 2020, the 2018 breaches at <a href=\"https://www.theregister.com/2018/09/11/british_airways_website_scripts/\">British Airways</a> and <a href=\"https://www.theregister.com/2018/10/25/cathay_pacific_hacked_up_to_94_million_passenger_deets_exposed/\">Cathay Pacific</a>. But it’s a whole other thing when you find out some unknown third party coughed up your data. But actually, when you get a look at the spaghetti that is travel technology, and see all the places your data is getting sent to -- often small companies that can’t afford state-of-the-art cybersecurity, it’s kinda surprising -- in a sad way -- that not more of this happens.</li><li>Type “plane mask” into the Google search box and one of the first 5 suggestions is “plane mask fight”. Click through and you get what seems to be an endless stream of news reports and cellphone videos of passengers fighting about having to wear a mask during a flight. What is getting a lot less coverage, though I’m hearing snatches of it here and there, are people getting chewed out by their row mates when taking their masks off to eat or drink something, getting something like “Hey, can you not drink during the flight? I’d rather not die for your convenience.”&nbsp; And I’m afraid this is going to get worse as more people start traveling again and aircraft load factors get back into the 80% range. But honestly, both sides are being idiots. You know the rules before you buy your ticket and you’re reminded of them by emails before you travel, and again by gate agents before you board the plane. If you can’t handle the rules -- all of them, not just the ones you agree with -- then don’t walk down the jetway. Drive; charter a jet. But don’t try to bend the rules to your own personal belief system and hassle the rest of us who are just trying to get from Point A to Point B on-time and with the minimum amount of heartache.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on our fab new web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge music -- Tools of the Trade by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial &nbsp;(3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/56512 Ft: Abstract Audio, Mr Yesterday, Martijn de Boer, Speck</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>What\'s New in Travel Insurance</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A little over a year ago, the first coronavirus lockdowns started, and the execution of them was, to be charitable, mostly a mess. Borders were quickly shut; planes grounded. People were stranded in foreign countries with no way home; we just talked about the Estonian guy stuck in Manila airport for 100 days. And all of a sudden, people started paying attention to travel insurance. What was once a check box at the bottom of a booking webpage that most of us clicked “no” on so we could finish our reservation quickly became very important. Last May in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/05/08/podcast-163-new-world-of-travel-insurance-getting-medical-help-on-the-road/\">episode #163</a>, as people were beginning to think about their first post-lockdown trips, we talked about the state of travel insurance. Now, with travel bookings beginning to rise as vaccination rates rise, I wanted to check back in and see what’s changed with travel insurance. So I asked Michael Giusti, senior writer at <a href=\"https://www.insurancequotes.com/\">InsuranceQuotes.com</a>, to come onto the podcast and give us an update:&nbsp;<ul><li>Mark: Michael, last May, Eric Josowitz of <a href=\"https://www.insurancequotes.com/\">InsuranceQuotes.com</a> was on the podcast. We were talking about travel insurance after the initial lockdown. Back then, in the midst of all that travel disruption, many travelers were finding:&nbsp; a) they didn\'t actually know what their insurance covered; they’d just checked the box at the end of their booking process, paid some additional amount moved on; and&nbsp; b) the insurance that they had bought had exclusions for communicable diseases, WHO-declared pandemics, cancellations in cases of fear. And then, after that, insurers stopped offering travel insurance. So, Michael, that was May. This is now the end of February. What\'s the current situation regarding travel insurance?</li><li>Michael: Not many people were thinking about pandemics back when this started. But the few people who were thinking about it were insurers. They saw the SARS epidemic and they started writing in pandemic exclusions from that point on. And then there\'s a second little provision in these insurance policies called the Known Events Provisions. So once the pandemic declared, even if there wasn\'t a specific exclusion, they can turn around and say, “Well, we\'re not going to cover because it\'s now a known event.” It would be like there\'s a hurricane that\'s bearing down on your city and you buy a plane ticket while the hurricane is there, and then you get mad because you can\'t fly. It’s a known event, and so they\'re not going to cover that. So that\'s where we came from. And then, you\'re right, they stopped and they said, “Well, we have no idea what\'s going on, so let’s regroup.”&nbsp; And now they\'ve regrouped, and it\'s really interesting because in a lot of the insurance industry, they\'ve stopped covering pandemics. But in travel insurance, they specifically started including Covid 19, saying “We will cover it under these conditions.”</li><li>Mark: Michael, travel requirements have been changing quickly; the restrictions have been going in and out. I mean, most recently, the need to provide a negative COVID test just to be able to get on a plane.&nbsp; If you look at what Canada did, they basically gave travelers one-week notice of the rule change at the end of 2020. But if you\'ve bought a travel insurance policy when you booked travel six weeks prior, what\'s the best way to cover these late breaking requirements that pop up a week or two before our trip?</li><li>Michael: Two main things... One is the policy language. You do need to say what’s specifically included, what’s specifically excluded? Because whether they\'re going to cover not having a negative test very much depends on the policy language. The other thing that it\'s going to come down to is whether it\'s out of your control. If it\'s something that you\'ve neglected to do, it\'s never going to be covered. The policies I\'ve reviewed, I haven\'t seen any that specifically kick in if you haven\'t got a negative test. So if you\'re worried about that, you really do need to ask the agent or really read that fine print. I do know that if you\'re delayed at security while you\'re being tested, that\'s not covered. So you do have to get there in time to make sure if they do rapid tests on the spot, that you\'re going to have time to get through security.</li><li>Mark: Okay, let me unpack that just a little bit, Michael. So I booked my flight, and I\'ve booked it a month ago. And now I go to take my test 72 hours before departure, and I come up positive. If I\'ve bought the right policy, would that typically cover delay or cover cancellation?</li><li>Michael: Delay is always the first preference. So if we can just push this trip back a week or whatever, that\'s going to be everyone\'s favorite outcome. But there are cancellation provisions where, say, you can\'t move it because the wedding is not going to be moved, in which case the cancellation provisions might kick in.</li><li>Mark: So now let\'s flip that. I\'ve taken my test, it\'s been negative, I get on the plane, I fly down to Costa Rica. And now a week on, I\'ve taken my test to get back into the US and now that test comes out positive. So now, potentially, I can\'t get back into the US. How does insurance help me there?</li><li>Michael: There\'s a couple places where this insurance is going to really beneficial in that situation. First and foremost, the medical provisions in most of these comprehensive policies are going to actually help you pay for your healthcare. Many of them are going to be secondary coverage, meaning they\'re going to want your primary health care to kick in first and then they\'ll jump in and cover anything that\'s not covered. Some of them are primary, especially with the overseas trips. So, that\'s a really nice benefits that are built into a lot of these policies. The other place that will help is, if you\'re delayed because you can\'t travel because of a restriction like that, and that\'s outside of your control, a lot of them will cover a hotel while you\'re waiting and meals while you\'re waiting, and they\'ll get you back home safely. So that\'s actually a really positive outcome that can happen with these policies.</li><li>Mark: Michael, how do I make sure that I\'ve actually got one of those policies? If we go back to the April/May timeframe, people were finding that they didn\'t actually know what they had. How do I make sure I\'ve actually bought that coverage?</li><li>Michael: Well, best case scenario would be if you found a human and you asked them in plain English.</li><li>Mark: Yeah, good luck with that, right?</li><li>Michael: I know, calling 1 800 numbers anymore – that’s not in the cards. What I would do if I was doing that, I’d click through the terms of service and see who\'s offering that policy. If it doesn\'t really go into much detail, or if it\'s really garbly legalese, I’d go through to the provider\'s website. Most of them have FAQ pages that specifically address COVID. So that\'s gonna be probably your best resource.</li><li>Mark: Michael, people are starting to think about big trips as vaccination rates start to step up. You know, the back half of the year, if I\'m thinking about booking, say, a week\'s biking tour in Tuscany or Provence in September/October, what kind of travel insurance should I be looking for? Should I pony up for a cancel- for-any-reason rider? Or are there some cheaper alternatives for more limited scenarios like, “Hey, the EU still isn\'t letting Americans in” but won\'t cover the more generic “Oh, I\'m afraid to travel” kind of reason.</li><li>Michael: The question of “if you\'re afraid to travel” is never going to be covered unless you do have that cancel-for-any-reason policy. But travel insurance is meant to cover things that are out of your control. So you know, if it\'s not laid out your policy, it\'s not gonna be covered. So that\'s kind of the most expensive option. You know, you\'re going to pay the most for a cancel-for-any-reason policy. That middle ground is the standard policy where you say “I\'m taking a little bit of the risk on myself. I\'m going to bravely travel wherever I\'m allowed.” The least expensive option is really kind of a DIY. And a lot of the destinations that I\'m seeing, they\'re waiving cancellation and change fees. And so you can kind of make your DIY travel insurance by only booking places that would let you change for no fee. That\'s kind of the cheapest “I\'m feeling brave” policy. “I\'m feeling skittish” policy Is that cancel-for-any-reason.</li><li>Mark: Super. Michael Giusti, senior writer at <a href=\"https://www.insurancequotes.com/\">InsuranceQuotes.com</a>, thank you very much for joining us. This was a great update.</li><li>Michael: Thank you so much.</li></ul></li><li>Bridge music -- Crazy Love-The Alex &amp; Lang mix by J.Lang (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djlang59/10579 Ft: FHC and Alex &amp; Bradsucks</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Keeping Ahead of Expiring Miles</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Like most road warriors of a certain tenure, I have cards in my desk of some 30-odd frequent traveler programs -- those that I know of -- and am probably a member of another dozen or so that I’ve forgotten about. Of those, I have meaningful balances -- enough for at least one free flight or a free hotel night -- at the Big 4 US carriers, a couple of European carriers, and two of the big hotel chains. Most of the rest are random programs like IcelandAir or AirBaltic or Omni Hotels that I used for a specific trip or project but had some spiff, like seat selection or free WiFi, that was reason enough to put in the effort to sign up.</li><li>When I was traveling every week or so, keeping those main programs active wasn’t a big effort. And if I hadn’t flown, say, BA for a while, I’d code maybe a short American commuter flight, something where my status was a bit meaningless, to my BA account to reset the expiration clock.</li><li>But now, hitting the first anniversary of the first travel lockdown and with business travel still mostly on hold, some of those expiration cliffs are starting to become visible</li><li>Last episode, I talked about getting emails from BA and Iberia warning me of pending Avios expirations, and so I transferred my Iberia points to my BA account. But I can’t tell from the BA website if that was enough activity to change the BA expiration. So I spelunked some more thru the website and found where they call out Airbnb bookings as “recognized activity” that’ll reset the 36-month clock. So, I booked our San Diego Airbnb through a link on BA’s site, just had to enter my BA account number before moving to the booking screen. It’ll be interesting to see if the activity flows seamlessly into my BA account or if I’ll have to chase it down through a manual credit claim. I’m betting on the latter, but am hoping to be pleasantly surprised.</li><li>But that got me cycling through my other accounts. I wasn’t worried about my US carrier accounts. The trend there has been to do away with expiration dates, first Southwest, then Delta, most recently United. American, not surprisingly, is the knuckle dragger, clinging to their stingy 18-month policy, but I flew them last fall to PHL, so I’m fine there.</li><li>But Flying Blue, the KLM/Air France program? I last flew KLM the fall of 2018, so that had to be coming up. I hit the website; those miles were also expiring at the end of this year. And, they, like BA and Iberia, have managed to make resetting that data way overly complex.&nbsp; First, there’s “overall extending activities” which are flights or purchases on their co-branded credit card; they extend <em>all</em> Flying Blue miles by 2 years. “Partial extending activities” extend miles earned through, say, hotel or car rental partners. Please note, says the website, \"‘Partial extending activities’ do not extend the validity of Miles earned from ‘Overall extending activities’\". OK, then. Looking at it this way, I only had 500 miles from that 2018 flight, but 38,000 miles from when I had to quickly stash points from a corporate Amex account before leaving a company. So, a “partial” activity should suffice. I set myself a reminder for Dec 1st to push the minimum 1,000 points from my personal Amex.</li><li>And the expiration periods are kinda all over the place. BA is 36 months; KLM, Marriott, and Hyatt are 2 years; American is 18 months; Hilton is 15 months (weird number); and IHG is the stingiest at 12.&nbsp;</li><li>Seems like there should be a technology solution to this, right? There are a few. If you use TripIt to consolidate your trip itineraries, the $49/year upgrade to the Pro version gives you program tracking. I had used it one year when they upgraded me for free; probably by mistake. AwardWallet is another popular tool, but there too, you need to upgrade to the paid version (a little cheaper at $30/year) to track expirations.</li><li>But beyond the cost, for these programs to work, you have to give them access to your accounts -- your account numbers and passwords. And cycling back to what I was saying at the top of the show, with the travel industry’s kinda poor track record on data protection, and just after having to reset passwords to United, American, Lufthansa, BA, and Iberia because of SITA’s leak, do I really want to put <em>all</em> my frequent traveler logins into one spot? I think a simple spreadsheet on the hard drive of the PC in my office can do the job just fine.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #173</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li>Nothing new on the tech front this month, but I should have the website freshened up by the next episode. I’ve had the current look since the beginning of 2006 courtesy of TravelCommons listener Hilary Baumann and her <a href=\"https://fascinationdesign.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Fascination Design</a> firm. The change is absolutely not a knock against Hilary’s work. It’s just that, after 15 years, I wanted to freshen things up a bit. So look for that by the end of February or beginning of March.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>, as well as asking Alexa, Siri, and Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_173.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #173 — What\'s New in Travel Insurance; Keeping Ahead of Expiring Miles','','inherit','closed','closed','','3417-revision-v1','','','2021-03-12 15:10:17','2021-03-12 20:10:17','',3417,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/12/3417-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3432,1,'2021-03-12 15:25:32','2021-03-12 20:25:32','','7BA016C0-B99C-45F6-8A96-A0B9CD67D159','Wait Here \'til Your COVID Test is Negative','inherit','open','closed','','7ba016c0-b99c-45f6-8a96-a0b9cd67d159-2','','','2021-03-12 15:26:49','2021-03-12 20:26:49','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/7BA016C0-B99C-45F6-8A96-A0B9CD67D159-1.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(3433,1,'2021-03-12 15:28:32','2021-03-12 20:28:32','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3432,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/7BA016C0-B99C-45F6-8A96-A0B9CD67D159-1-e1615580828646.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/7BA016C0-B99C-45F6-8A96-A0B9CD67D159-1-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"People Camping Out on Airport Cots\" class=\"wp-image-3432\"/></a><figcaption>Wait Here \'til Your COVID Test is Negative</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>As travel bookings beginning to rise with vaccination rates, we talk with Michael Giusti of <a href=\"http://insurancequotes.com\" title=\"insurancequotes.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">InsuranceQuotes.com</a> to find out what\'s changed over the last year. I make the rounds through all my frequent traveler programs to reset impending expiration dates. We also talk about yet another travel data breach, a favorite beer bar is a COVID casualty, and Hertz cars are starting to get old. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_173.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show Notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show Notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #173: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>This Week</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois on, depending where you are, Fat Tuesday or Shrove Tuesday or Pancake Tuesday. Here in Chicago, <a href=\"https://culture.pl/en/article/how-chicago-became-a-distinctly-polish-american-city\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">with a big Polish population</a>, it’s <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P%C4%85czki\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pączki</a> Day and I had mine for breakfast -- Polish-filled donuts; I went for a raspberry jam and a custard one. What had been one of the mildest winters on record started reverting to the mean in February. The last day the temperature cracked freezing was almost 2 weeks ago and it has snowed 13 of the past 17 days. We were all waiting for this, veterans of Midwest winters. It got me thinking that maybe Irene and I should’ve delayed our trip to Tucson from the third week of January when the temperatures here were hitting the mid-40’s, to last week or this week when we could’ve enjoyed 50-60° temperature differentials.</li><li>But even without the guilty pleasure of posting schadenfreude-trolling Instagram pictures of sunshine and temperature readings, we had a good week in Tucson. The flights out and back on Southwest were uneventful, <em>and</em> not full; the Airbnb was fine; the desert hikes were great, and we hit some good restaurants and taprooms, which, as I talked about in the last episode, was the main reason we pivoted from original destination, locked-down/shutdown San Diego to Tucson. Probably our only disappointment was not finding a great margarita -- which we fixed in the Amex Centurion Lounge in PHX while waiting for our flight home. I’ll talk more about Tucson later in the episode, but I also wrote up a blog post with all the details. If you go to the episode description in your podcast app, there’s a link that should be clickable to take you straight to the post.</li><li>Even though Southwest’s open middle seat pledge expired in December (<a href=\"https://news.delta.com/delta-only-us-airline-block-middle-seats-limit-onboard-capacity-through-march-30-2021\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Delta’s the last one standing</a>), no one landed in our middle seat on our MDW-PHX flight. That flight was a lot longer than I remember it being last year. I think it had something to do with the mask. Before getting on the plane, I switched from my standard EvolveTogether surgical style mask to a Korean version of the N-95 mask, decided to dial it up not knowing if I was going to be shoulder-to-shoulder with a stranger for 3+ hours. The KN-95 wasn’t too uncomfortable, as masks go, so I didn’t swap it out for my other mask when the middle seat stayed empty. My strategy with Southwest’s open seating was to go ¾’s of the way to the back of the plane, about halfway past the exit row. I figured this would mean fewer people walking past us but far enough away from the rear lavs to avoid the in-flight queues. And, since people still want to deplane quickly, if the last boarding groups, the C groups, were left with just middle seats, they’d take them in the front of the cabin. As it turned out, I probably over-thought that a bit; I didn’t see any occupied middle seat in the front or the back.</li><li>Then, a couple of days before our flight home, I got the dreaded e-mail from Southwest -- the flight “may not allow for an open middle seat next to you.” I waited until the night before to tell Irene. She’s a little more COVID risk-averse than me and didn’t want her stewing on it. But it turned out OK. She grabbed the 2-seat second exit row -- aisle and middle seat; no window seat. And looking behind us, I didn’t see any row with an occupied middle seat, so either people swapped their flights after receiving that email, or the flight was just a shade over ⅔’s full with any occupied middle seats in the front of the plane. And, those margaritas from the Centurion Lounge helped the flight home go by just a wee bit easier.</li><li>Bridge Music -- Madrugada(rmx) by savoyard (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/savoyard/10743 Ft: Curve</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I finally pushed out the refreshed website last week. First change since 2006. Figured website aesthetics have changed a bit over the last 15 years and so changed things up a bit. Thanks to everyone who responded to my request on Facebook and Twitter to hit the new site for a bit of crowd-sourced end-user testing. A bit like the <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1224798425499213828\">meme</a> you’ll see posted in a lot of IT shops; a picture of Dos Equis “most interesting man in the world” with the line -- “I don’t always test my code, but when I do, I test it in Production.” There’s still some tweaks I need to make, but it seems pretty solid. Check it out if you get a chance -- travelcommons.com -- and drop me a line at <a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a> with your thoughts.</li><li>Following up on last episode’s rant about the guy living unnoticed in ORD for 3 months, I tweeted out an <a href=\"https://theconversation.com/how-some-people-can-end-up-living-at-airports-for-months-even-years-at-a-time-154336\">article</a> about people living years in airports. Written by a history prof from University of Dayton who researches the history of airports (hey, everyone’s gotta have their niche), the article talks about other airport residents, an Iranian refugee who lived in CDG for 18 years, and most recently, an Estonian guy who was transiting through Manila Int’l Airport last March as the shutdowns hit was stuck there for 100 days until the Estonian embassy could get him on a repatriation flight. That one is brutal. I spent 3 hours in that airport a few years back and even, with everything open, it felt 2½ hours too long. Check out the article -- there’s a link in the show notes and at the top of the Twitter and Facebook feeds. It’s a good read.</li><li>Jim McDonough hit the Facebook page, responding to last episode’s margarita instruction story with one of his own.<ul><li>I know how you feel about teaching the bartender how to make a margarita. We ended a week-long trip to Switzerland by staying our last night at a hotel by the Zurich airport. At dinner, we each asked for a Scotch and water. They brought out this big tray, with a bowl of ice cubes, a pitcher of water, a bottle of Scotch, and two glasses. A crowd of hotel employees gathered to watch. Evidently, they don\'t do Scotch and water in Zurich. When I filled the glasses with ice, they gasped. I explained that we live in a hot climate. I went ahead and added Scotch and topped off with a little water, and they winced when I took a sip. A cultural exchange, I guess.</li></ul></li><li>Jim, I love you, man, but I gotta tell you -- I’d probably be wincing with the hotel staff. My usual Scotch order is -- Scotch and glass. But you paid for it (and in Zurich, it’s not going to be a small amount), so even if they couldn’t quite figure out what you wanted, they at least gave you all the tools you needed.</li><li>One of my absolute favorite beer bars, <a href=\"https://brewpublic.com/beer-news/baileys-taproom-and-the-upper-lip-permanently-closes-its-doors/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bailey’s Taproom in Portland, Oregon</a>, has shut off their taps permanently. I started a project in downtown Portland in January 2013. Found Bailey’s the second night I was there and just settled in; my last beer there was my last night in Portland. The owner said “After reopening to limited seating (after the initial shutdown), it was clear that people were not interested in coming downtown. When the PPP money ran out, I decided to close the doors”&nbsp; Another reminder that we should try to be purposeful about where we spend our discretionary dollars, thinking about what businesses we would miss if they closed up and then go out of our way to buy something from them. In my case, it helps rationalize a rather full beer shelf in our pantry.</li><li>After Hertz declared bankruptcy at the end of last May, I predicted in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/06/09/podcast-164-first-post-lockdown-trips-travel-credit-cards/\">episode #164</a> that I’d be paying more attention to the mileage on the cars in the Five Star aisle because that’s the first place I see signs of financial distress — a lot less 500-mile cars and a lot more 24,000-mile cars. And while 24,000 miles on a car doesn’t seem like a lot, remember that rental car miles are kinda like dog years — you gotta multiply them by, like, 7 to get to regular car miles. And true to form, when picking up our Hertz car in PHX at the end of January, every car I looked at had over 24,000 miles, a few with a <strong>lot</strong> more. Will be interesting to see what’s on offer at SAN in a few weeks.&nbsp;</li><li>If you have any status on a Star Alliance or One World carrier, you probably got an email from your carrier about a <a href=\"https://skift.com/2021/03/05/data-breach-affects-more-than-2-million-frequent-flyers-across-airline-alliances/\">data breach at SITA</a>. I got them from United and American saying my name, account number, and status was potentially exposed and that I should change my password, which I did. And then thought about how this is yet another data leak from some unknown player in what is an incredibly fragmented travel tech tool chain. We talked about this back in November in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">episode #169</a> when an obscure Spanish company used by hotels to update information on on-line booking sites leaked 24 GB of names, emails, credit card data and reservation records. And in this case, if you’re not in the airline industry, you probably don’t know about <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SITA_(company)\">SITA</a>. It’s a industry consortium started back in 1949 by 11 European airlines to share infrastructure costs and has expanded to provide all sorts of travel technology including the exchange of passenger data between airlines -- in this case, the exchange of frequent flyer status so that, say, Lufthansa recognizes your elite status with United on your flight with them. It’s one thing when the breach is from a company that you did business with -- the <a href=\"https://www.cnet.com/news/marriott-discloses-new-data-breach-impacting-5-point-2-million-guests/\">Marriott hacks</a> in 2018 and 2020, the 2018 breaches at <a href=\"https://www.theregister.com/2018/09/11/british_airways_website_scripts/\">British Airways</a> and <a href=\"https://www.theregister.com/2018/10/25/cathay_pacific_hacked_up_to_94_million_passenger_deets_exposed/\">Cathay Pacific</a>. But it’s a whole other thing when you find out some unknown third party coughed up your data. But actually, when you get a look at the spaghetti that is travel technology, and see all the places your data is getting sent to -- often small companies that can’t afford state-of-the-art cybersecurity, it’s kinda surprising -- in a sad way -- that not more of this happens.</li><li>Type “plane mask” into the Google search box and one of the first 5 suggestions is “plane mask fight”. Click through and you get what seems to be an endless stream of news reports and cellphone videos of passengers fighting about having to wear a mask during a flight. What is getting a lot less coverage, though I’m hearing snatches of it here and there, are people getting chewed out by their row mates when taking their masks off to eat or drink something, getting something like “Hey, can you not drink during the flight? I’d rather not die for your convenience.”&nbsp; And I’m afraid this is going to get worse as more people start traveling again and aircraft load factors get back into the 80% range. But honestly, both sides are being idiots. You know the rules before you buy your ticket and you’re reminded of them by emails before you travel, and again by gate agents before you board the plane. If you can’t handle the rules -- all of them, not just the ones you agree with -- then don’t walk down the jetway. Drive; charter a jet. But don’t try to bend the rules to your own personal belief system and hassle the rest of us who are just trying to get from Point A to Point B on-time and with the minimum amount of heartache.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on our fab new web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge music -- Tools of the Trade by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial &nbsp;(3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/56512 Ft: Abstract Audio, Mr Yesterday, Martijn de Boer, Speck</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>What\'s New in Travel Insurance</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A little over a year ago, the first coronavirus lockdowns started, and the execution of them was, to be charitable, mostly a mess. Borders were quickly shut; planes grounded. People were stranded in foreign countries with no way home; we just talked about the Estonian guy stuck in Manila airport for 100 days. And all of a sudden, people started paying attention to travel insurance. What was once a check box at the bottom of a booking webpage that most of us clicked “no” on so we could finish our reservation quickly became very important. Last May in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/05/08/podcast-163-new-world-of-travel-insurance-getting-medical-help-on-the-road/\">episode #163</a>, as people were beginning to think about their first post-lockdown trips, we talked about the state of travel insurance. Now, with travel bookings beginning to rise as vaccination rates rise, I wanted to check back in and see what’s changed with travel insurance. So I asked Michael Giusti, senior writer at <a href=\"https://www.insurancequotes.com/\">InsuranceQuotes.com</a>, to come onto the podcast and give us an update:&nbsp;<ul><li>Mark: Michael, last May, Eric Josowitz of <a href=\"https://www.insurancequotes.com/\">InsuranceQuotes.com</a> was on the podcast. We were talking about travel insurance after the initial lockdown. Back then, in the midst of all that travel disruption, many travelers were finding:&nbsp; a) they didn\'t actually know what their insurance covered; they’d just checked the box at the end of their booking process, paid some additional amount moved on; and&nbsp; b) the insurance that they had bought had exclusions for communicable diseases, WHO-declared pandemics, cancellations in cases of fear. And then, after that, insurers stopped offering travel insurance. So, Michael, that was May. This is now the end of February. What\'s the current situation regarding travel insurance?</li><li>Michael: Not many people were thinking about pandemics back when this started. But the few people who were thinking about it were insurers. They saw the SARS epidemic and they started writing in pandemic exclusions from that point on. And then there\'s a second little provision in these insurance policies called the Known Events Provisions. So once the pandemic declared, even if there wasn\'t a specific exclusion, they can turn around and say, “Well, we\'re not going to cover because it\'s now a known event.” It would be like there\'s a hurricane that\'s bearing down on your city and you buy a plane ticket while the hurricane is there, and then you get mad because you can\'t fly. It’s a known event, and so they\'re not going to cover that. So that\'s where we came from. And then, you\'re right, they stopped and they said, “Well, we have no idea what\'s going on, so let’s regroup.”&nbsp; And now they\'ve regrouped, and it\'s really interesting because in a lot of the insurance industry, they\'ve stopped covering pandemics. But in travel insurance, they specifically started including Covid 19, saying “We will cover it under these conditions.”</li><li>Mark: Michael, travel requirements have been changing quickly; the restrictions have been going in and out. I mean, most recently, the need to provide a negative COVID test just to be able to get on a plane.&nbsp; If you look at what Canada did, they basically gave travelers one-week notice of the rule change at the end of 2020. But if you\'ve bought a travel insurance policy when you booked travel six weeks prior, what\'s the best way to cover these late breaking requirements that pop up a week or two before our trip?</li><li>Michael: Two main things... One is the policy language. You do need to say what’s specifically included, what’s specifically excluded? Because whether they\'re going to cover not having a negative test very much depends on the policy language. The other thing that it\'s going to come down to is whether it\'s out of your control. If it\'s something that you\'ve neglected to do, it\'s never going to be covered. The policies I\'ve reviewed, I haven\'t seen any that specifically kick in if you haven\'t got a negative test. So if you\'re worried about that, you really do need to ask the agent or really read that fine print. I do know that if you\'re delayed at security while you\'re being tested, that\'s not covered. So you do have to get there in time to make sure if they do rapid tests on the spot, that you\'re going to have time to get through security.</li><li>Mark: Okay, let me unpack that just a little bit, Michael. So I booked my flight, and I\'ve booked it a month ago. And now I go to take my test 72 hours before departure, and I come up positive. If I\'ve bought the right policy, would that typically cover delay or cover cancellation?</li><li>Michael: Delay is always the first preference. So if we can just push this trip back a week or whatever, that\'s going to be everyone\'s favorite outcome. But there are cancellation provisions where, say, you can\'t move it because the wedding is not going to be moved, in which case the cancellation provisions might kick in.</li><li>Mark: So now let\'s flip that. I\'ve taken my test, it\'s been negative, I get on the plane, I fly down to Costa Rica. And now a week on, I\'ve taken my test to get back into the US and now that test comes out positive. So now, potentially, I can\'t get back into the US. How does insurance help me there?</li><li>Michael: There\'s a couple places where this insurance is going to really beneficial in that situation. First and foremost, the medical provisions in most of these comprehensive policies are going to actually help you pay for your healthcare. Many of them are going to be secondary coverage, meaning they\'re going to want your primary health care to kick in first and then they\'ll jump in and cover anything that\'s not covered. Some of them are primary, especially with the overseas trips. So, that\'s a really nice benefits that are built into a lot of these policies. The other place that will help is, if you\'re delayed because you can\'t travel because of a restriction like that, and that\'s outside of your control, a lot of them will cover a hotel while you\'re waiting and meals while you\'re waiting, and they\'ll get you back home safely. So that\'s actually a really positive outcome that can happen with these policies.</li><li>Mark: Michael, how do I make sure that I\'ve actually got one of those policies? If we go back to the April/May timeframe, people were finding that they didn\'t actually know what they had. How do I make sure I\'ve actually bought that coverage?</li><li>Michael: Well, best case scenario would be if you found a human and you asked them in plain English.</li><li>Mark: Yeah, good luck with that, right?</li><li>Michael: I know, calling 1 800 numbers anymore – that’s not in the cards. What I would do if I was doing that, I’d click through the terms of service and see who\'s offering that policy. If it doesn\'t really go into much detail, or if it\'s really garbly legalese, I’d go through to the provider\'s website. Most of them have FAQ pages that specifically address COVID. So that\'s gonna be probably your best resource.</li><li>Mark: Michael, people are starting to think about big trips as vaccination rates start to step up. You know, the back half of the year, if I\'m thinking about booking, say, a week\'s biking tour in Tuscany or Provence in September/October, what kind of travel insurance should I be looking for? Should I pony up for a cancel- for-any-reason rider? Or are there some cheaper alternatives for more limited scenarios like, “Hey, the EU still isn\'t letting Americans in” but won\'t cover the more generic “Oh, I\'m afraid to travel” kind of reason.</li><li>Michael: The question of “if you\'re afraid to travel” is never going to be covered unless you do have that cancel-for-any-reason policy. But travel insurance is meant to cover things that are out of your control. So you know, if it\'s not laid out your policy, it\'s not gonna be covered. So that\'s kind of the most expensive option. You know, you\'re going to pay the most for a cancel-for-any-reason policy. That middle ground is the standard policy where you say “I\'m taking a little bit of the risk on myself. I\'m going to bravely travel wherever I\'m allowed.” The least expensive option is really kind of a DIY. And a lot of the destinations that I\'m seeing, they\'re waiving cancellation and change fees. And so you can kind of make your DIY travel insurance by only booking places that would let you change for no fee. That\'s kind of the cheapest “I\'m feeling brave” policy. “I\'m feeling skittish” policy Is that cancel-for-any-reason.</li><li>Mark: Super. Michael Giusti, senior writer at <a href=\"https://www.insurancequotes.com/\">InsuranceQuotes.com</a>, thank you very much for joining us. This was a great update.</li><li>Michael: Thank you so much.</li></ul></li><li>Bridge music -- Crazy Love-The Alex &amp; Lang mix by J.Lang (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djlang59/10579 Ft: FHC and Alex &amp; Bradsucks</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Keeping Ahead of Expiring Miles</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Like most road warriors of a certain tenure, I have cards in my desk of some 30-odd frequent traveler programs -- those that I know of -- and am probably a member of another dozen or so that I’ve forgotten about. Of those, I have meaningful balances -- enough for at least one free flight or a free hotel night -- at the Big 4 US carriers, a couple of European carriers, and two of the big hotel chains. Most of the rest are random programs like IcelandAir or AirBaltic or Omni Hotels that I used for a specific trip or project but had some spiff, like seat selection or free WiFi, that was reason enough to put in the effort to sign up.</li><li>When I was traveling every week or so, keeping those main programs active wasn’t a big effort. And if I hadn’t flown, say, BA for a while, I’d code maybe a short American commuter flight, something where my status was a bit meaningless, to my BA account to reset the expiration clock.</li><li>But now, hitting the first anniversary of the first travel lockdown and with business travel still mostly on hold, some of those expiration cliffs are starting to become visible</li><li>Last episode, I talked about getting emails from BA and Iberia warning me of pending Avios expirations, and so I transferred my Iberia points to my BA account. But I can’t tell from the BA website if that was enough activity to change the BA expiration. So I spelunked some more thru the website and found where they call out Airbnb bookings as “recognized activity” that’ll reset the 36-month clock. So, I booked our San Diego Airbnb through a link on BA’s site, just had to enter my BA account number before moving to the booking screen. It’ll be interesting to see if the activity flows seamlessly into my BA account or if I’ll have to chase it down through a manual credit claim. I’m betting on the latter, but am hoping to be pleasantly surprised.</li><li>But that got me cycling through my other accounts. I wasn’t worried about my US carrier accounts. The trend there has been to do away with expiration dates, first Southwest, then Delta, most recently United. American, not surprisingly, is the knuckle dragger, clinging to their stingy 18-month policy, but I flew them last fall to PHL, so I’m fine there.</li><li>But Flying Blue, the KLM/Air France program? I last flew KLM the fall of 2018, so that had to be coming up. I hit the website; those miles were also expiring at the end of this year. And, they, like BA and Iberia, have managed to make resetting that data way overly complex.&nbsp; First, there’s “overall extending activities” which are flights or purchases on their co-branded credit card; they extend <em>all</em> Flying Blue miles by 2 years. “Partial extending activities” extend miles earned through, say, hotel or car rental partners. Please note, says the website, \"‘Partial extending activities’ do not extend the validity of Miles earned from ‘Overall extending activities’\". OK, then. Looking at it this way, I only had 500 miles from that 2018 flight, but 38,000 miles from when I had to quickly stash points from a corporate Amex account before leaving a company. So, a “partial” activity should suffice. I set myself a reminder for Dec 1st to push the minimum 1,000 points from my personal Amex.</li><li>And the expiration periods are kinda all over the place. BA is 36 months; KLM, Marriott, and Hyatt are 2 years; American is 18 months; Hilton is 15 months (weird number); and IHG is the stingiest at 12.&nbsp;</li><li>Seems like there should be a technology solution to this, right? There are a few. If you use TripIt to consolidate your trip itineraries, the $49/year upgrade to the Pro version gives you program tracking. I had used it one year when they upgraded me for free; probably by mistake. AwardWallet is another popular tool, but there too, you need to upgrade to the paid version (a little cheaper at $30/year) to track expirations.</li><li>But beyond the cost, for these programs to work, you have to give them access to your accounts -- your account numbers and passwords. And cycling back to what I was saying at the top of the show, with the travel industry’s kinda poor track record on data protection, and just after having to reset passwords to United, American, Lufthansa, BA, and Iberia because of SITA’s leak, do I really want to put <em>all</em> my frequent traveler logins into one spot? I think a simple spreadsheet on the hard drive of the PC in my office can do the job just fine.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #173</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li>Nothing new on the tech front this month, but I should have the website freshened up by the next episode. I’ve had the current look since the beginning of 2006 courtesy of TravelCommons listener Hilary Baumann and her <a href=\"https://fascinationdesign.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Fascination Design</a> firm. The change is absolutely not a knock against Hilary’s work. It’s just that, after 15 years, I wanted to freshen things up a bit. So look for that by the end of February or beginning of March.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>, as well as asking Alexa, Siri, and Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_173.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #173 — What\'s New in Travel Insurance; Keeping Ahead of Expiring Miles','','inherit','closed','closed','','3417-revision-v1','','','2021-03-12 15:28:32','2021-03-12 20:28:32','',3417,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/12/3417-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3434,1,'2021-03-12 15:37:28','2021-03-12 20:37:28','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_1985\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/7BA016C0-B99C-45F6-8A96-A0B9CD67D159-1-e1615580828646.jpg\" \"=\"\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1985\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/7BA016C0-B99C-45F6-8A96-A0B9CD67D159-1-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"People Camping Out on Airport Cots\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a>Wait Here \'til Your COVID Test is Negative[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>As travel bookings beginning to rise with vaccination rates, we talk with Michael Giusti of <a href=\"http://insurancequotes.com\" title=\"insurancequotes.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">InsuranceQuotes.com</a> to find out what\'s changed over the last year. I make the rounds through all my frequent traveler programs to reset impending expiration dates. We also talk about yet another travel data breach, a favorite beer bar is a COVID casualty, and Hertz cars are starting to get old. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_173.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show Notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show Notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #173: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>This Week</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois on, depending where you are, Fat Tuesday or Shrove Tuesday or Pancake Tuesday. Here in Chicago, <a href=\"https://culture.pl/en/article/how-chicago-became-a-distinctly-polish-american-city\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">with a big Polish population</a>, it’s <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P%C4%85czki\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pączki</a> Day and I had mine for breakfast -- Polish-filled donuts; I went for a raspberry jam and a custard one. What had been one of the mildest winters on record started reverting to the mean in February. The last day the temperature cracked freezing was almost 2 weeks ago and it has snowed 13 of the past 17 days. We were all waiting for this, veterans of Midwest winters. It got me thinking that maybe Irene and I should’ve delayed our trip to Tucson from the third week of January when the temperatures here were hitting the mid-40’s, to last week or this week when we could’ve enjoyed 50-60° temperature differentials.</li><li>But even without the guilty pleasure of posting schadenfreude-trolling Instagram pictures of sunshine and temperature readings, we had a good week in Tucson. The flights out and back on Southwest were uneventful, <em>and</em> not full; the Airbnb was fine; the desert hikes were great, and we hit some good restaurants and taprooms, which, as I talked about in the last episode, was the main reason we pivoted from original destination, locked-down/shutdown San Diego to Tucson. Probably our only disappointment was not finding a great margarita -- which we fixed in the Amex Centurion Lounge in PHX while waiting for our flight home. I’ll talk more about Tucson later in the episode, but I also wrote up a blog post with all the details. If you go to the episode description in your podcast app, there’s a link that should be clickable to take you straight to the post.</li><li>Even though Southwest’s open middle seat pledge expired in December (<a href=\"https://news.delta.com/delta-only-us-airline-block-middle-seats-limit-onboard-capacity-through-march-30-2021\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Delta’s the last one standing</a>), no one landed in our middle seat on our MDW-PHX flight. That flight was a lot longer than I remember it being last year. I think it had something to do with the mask. Before getting on the plane, I switched from my standard EvolveTogether surgical style mask to a Korean version of the N-95 mask, decided to dial it up not knowing if I was going to be shoulder-to-shoulder with a stranger for 3+ hours. The KN-95 wasn’t too uncomfortable, as masks go, so I didn’t swap it out for my other mask when the middle seat stayed empty. My strategy with Southwest’s open seating was to go ¾’s of the way to the back of the plane, about halfway past the exit row. I figured this would mean fewer people walking past us but far enough away from the rear lavs to avoid the in-flight queues. And, since people still want to deplane quickly, if the last boarding groups, the C groups, were left with just middle seats, they’d take them in the front of the cabin. As it turned out, I probably over-thought that a bit; I didn’t see any occupied middle seat in the front or the back.</li><li>Then, a couple of days before our flight home, I got the dreaded e-mail from Southwest -- the flight “may not allow for an open middle seat next to you.” I waited until the night before to tell Irene. She’s a little more COVID risk-averse than me and didn’t want her stewing on it. But it turned out OK. She grabbed the 2-seat second exit row -- aisle and middle seat; no window seat. And looking behind us, I didn’t see any row with an occupied middle seat, so either people swapped their flights after receiving that email, or the flight was just a shade over ⅔’s full with any occupied middle seats in the front of the plane. And, those margaritas from the Centurion Lounge helped the flight home go by just a wee bit easier.</li><li>Bridge Music -- Madrugada(rmx) by savoyard (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/savoyard/10743 Ft: Curve</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I finally pushed out the refreshed website last week. First change since 2006. Figured website aesthetics have changed a bit over the last 15 years and so changed things up a bit. Thanks to everyone who responded to my request on Facebook and Twitter to hit the new site for a bit of crowd-sourced end-user testing. A bit like the <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1224798425499213828\">meme</a> you’ll see posted in a lot of IT shops; a picture of Dos Equis “most interesting man in the world” with the line -- “I don’t always test my code, but when I do, I test it in Production.” There’s still some tweaks I need to make, but it seems pretty solid. Check it out if you get a chance -- travelcommons.com -- and drop me a line at <a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a> with your thoughts.</li><li>Following up on last episode’s rant about the guy living unnoticed in ORD for 3 months, I tweeted out an <a href=\"https://theconversation.com/how-some-people-can-end-up-living-at-airports-for-months-even-years-at-a-time-154336\">article</a> about people living years in airports. Written by a history prof from University of Dayton who researches the history of airports (hey, everyone’s gotta have their niche), the article talks about other airport residents, an Iranian refugee who lived in CDG for 18 years, and most recently, an Estonian guy who was transiting through Manila Int’l Airport last March as the shutdowns hit was stuck there for 100 days until the Estonian embassy could get him on a repatriation flight. That one is brutal. I spent 3 hours in that airport a few years back and even, with everything open, it felt 2½ hours too long. Check out the article -- there’s a link in the show notes and at the top of the Twitter and Facebook feeds. It’s a good read.</li><li>Jim McDonough hit the Facebook page, responding to last episode’s margarita instruction story with one of his own.<ul><li>I know how you feel about teaching the bartender how to make a margarita. We ended a week-long trip to Switzerland by staying our last night at a hotel by the Zurich airport. At dinner, we each asked for a Scotch and water. They brought out this big tray, with a bowl of ice cubes, a pitcher of water, a bottle of Scotch, and two glasses. A crowd of hotel employees gathered to watch. Evidently, they don\'t do Scotch and water in Zurich. When I filled the glasses with ice, they gasped. I explained that we live in a hot climate. I went ahead and added Scotch and topped off with a little water, and they winced when I took a sip. A cultural exchange, I guess.</li></ul></li><li>Jim, I love you, man, but I gotta tell you -- I’d probably be wincing with the hotel staff. My usual Scotch order is -- Scotch and glass. But you paid for it (and in Zurich, it’s not going to be a small amount), so even if they couldn’t quite figure out what you wanted, they at least gave you all the tools you needed.</li><li>One of my absolute favorite beer bars, <a href=\"https://brewpublic.com/beer-news/baileys-taproom-and-the-upper-lip-permanently-closes-its-doors/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bailey’s Taproom in Portland, Oregon</a>, has shut off their taps permanently. I started a project in downtown Portland in January 2013. Found Bailey’s the second night I was there and just settled in; my last beer there was my last night in Portland. The owner said “After reopening to limited seating (after the initial shutdown), it was clear that people were not interested in coming downtown. When the PPP money ran out, I decided to close the doors”&nbsp; Another reminder that we should try to be purposeful about where we spend our discretionary dollars, thinking about what businesses we would miss if they closed up and then go out of our way to buy something from them. In my case, it helps rationalize a rather full beer shelf in our pantry.</li><li>After Hertz declared bankruptcy at the end of last May, I predicted in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/06/09/podcast-164-first-post-lockdown-trips-travel-credit-cards/\">episode #164</a> that I’d be paying more attention to the mileage on the cars in the Five Star aisle because that’s the first place I see signs of financial distress — a lot less 500-mile cars and a lot more 24,000-mile cars. And while 24,000 miles on a car doesn’t seem like a lot, remember that rental car miles are kinda like dog years — you gotta multiply them by, like, 7 to get to regular car miles. And true to form, when picking up our Hertz car in PHX at the end of January, every car I looked at had over 24,000 miles, a few with a <strong>lot</strong> more. Will be interesting to see what’s on offer at SAN in a few weeks.&nbsp;</li><li>If you have any status on a Star Alliance or One World carrier, you probably got an email from your carrier about a <a href=\"https://skift.com/2021/03/05/data-breach-affects-more-than-2-million-frequent-flyers-across-airline-alliances/\">data breach at SITA</a>. I got them from United and American saying my name, account number, and status was potentially exposed and that I should change my password, which I did. And then thought about how this is yet another data leak from some unknown player in what is an incredibly fragmented travel tech tool chain. We talked about this back in November in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">episode #169</a> when an obscure Spanish company used by hotels to update information on on-line booking sites leaked 24 GB of names, emails, credit card data and reservation records. And in this case, if you’re not in the airline industry, you probably don’t know about <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SITA_(company)\">SITA</a>. It’s a industry consortium started back in 1949 by 11 European airlines to share infrastructure costs and has expanded to provide all sorts of travel technology including the exchange of passenger data between airlines -- in this case, the exchange of frequent flyer status so that, say, Lufthansa recognizes your elite status with United on your flight with them. It’s one thing when the breach is from a company that you did business with -- the <a href=\"https://www.cnet.com/news/marriott-discloses-new-data-breach-impacting-5-point-2-million-guests/\">Marriott hacks</a> in 2018 and 2020, the 2018 breaches at <a href=\"https://www.theregister.com/2018/09/11/british_airways_website_scripts/\">British Airways</a> and <a href=\"https://www.theregister.com/2018/10/25/cathay_pacific_hacked_up_to_94_million_passenger_deets_exposed/\">Cathay Pacific</a>. But it’s a whole other thing when you find out some unknown third party coughed up your data. But actually, when you get a look at the spaghetti that is travel technology, and see all the places your data is getting sent to -- often small companies that can’t afford state-of-the-art cybersecurity, it’s kinda surprising -- in a sad way -- that not more of this happens.</li><li>Type “plane mask” into the Google search box and one of the first 5 suggestions is “plane mask fight”. Click through and you get what seems to be an endless stream of news reports and cellphone videos of passengers fighting about having to wear a mask during a flight. What is getting a lot less coverage, though I’m hearing snatches of it here and there, are people getting chewed out by their row mates when taking their masks off to eat or drink something, getting something like “Hey, can you not drink during the flight? I’d rather not die for your convenience.”&nbsp; And I’m afraid this is going to get worse as more people start traveling again and aircraft load factors get back into the 80% range. But honestly, both sides are being idiots. You know the rules before you buy your ticket and you’re reminded of them by emails before you travel, and again by gate agents before you board the plane. If you can’t handle the rules -- all of them, not just the ones you agree with -- then don’t walk down the jetway. Drive; charter a jet. But don’t try to bend the rules to your own personal belief system and hassle the rest of us who are just trying to get from Point A to Point B on-time and with the minimum amount of heartache.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on our fab new web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge music -- Tools of the Trade by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial &nbsp;(3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/56512 Ft: Abstract Audio, Mr Yesterday, Martijn de Boer, Speck</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>What\'s New in Travel Insurance</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A little over a year ago, the first coronavirus lockdowns started, and the execution of them was, to be charitable, mostly a mess. Borders were quickly shut; planes grounded. People were stranded in foreign countries with no way home; we just talked about the Estonian guy stuck in Manila airport for 100 days. And all of a sudden, people started paying attention to travel insurance. What was once a check box at the bottom of a booking webpage that most of us clicked “no” on so we could finish our reservation quickly became very important. Last May in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/05/08/podcast-163-new-world-of-travel-insurance-getting-medical-help-on-the-road/\">episode #163</a>, as people were beginning to think about their first post-lockdown trips, we talked about the state of travel insurance. Now, with travel bookings beginning to rise as vaccination rates rise, I wanted to check back in and see what’s changed with travel insurance. So I asked Michael Giusti, senior writer at <a href=\"https://www.insurancequotes.com/\">InsuranceQuotes.com</a>, to come onto the podcast and give us an update:&nbsp;<ul><li>Mark: Michael, last May, Eric Josowitz of <a href=\"https://www.insurancequotes.com/\">InsuranceQuotes.com</a> was on the podcast. We were talking about travel insurance after the initial lockdown. Back then, in the midst of all that travel disruption, many travelers were finding:&nbsp; a) they didn\'t actually know what their insurance covered; they’d just checked the box at the end of their booking process, paid some additional amount moved on; and&nbsp; b) the insurance that they had bought had exclusions for communicable diseases, WHO-declared pandemics, cancellations in cases of fear. And then, after that, insurers stopped offering travel insurance. So, Michael, that was May. This is now the end of February. What\'s the current situation regarding travel insurance?</li><li>Michael: Not many people were thinking about pandemics back when this started. But the few people who were thinking about it were insurers. They saw the SARS epidemic and they started writing in pandemic exclusions from that point on. And then there\'s a second little provision in these insurance policies called the Known Events Provisions. So once the pandemic declared, even if there wasn\'t a specific exclusion, they can turn around and say, “Well, we\'re not going to cover because it\'s now a known event.” It would be like there\'s a hurricane that\'s bearing down on your city and you buy a plane ticket while the hurricane is there, and then you get mad because you can\'t fly. It’s a known event, and so they\'re not going to cover that. So that\'s where we came from. And then, you\'re right, they stopped and they said, “Well, we have no idea what\'s going on, so let’s regroup.”&nbsp; And now they\'ve regrouped, and it\'s really interesting because in a lot of the insurance industry, they\'ve stopped covering pandemics. But in travel insurance, they specifically started including Covid 19, saying “We will cover it under these conditions.”</li><li>Mark: Michael, travel requirements have been changing quickly; the restrictions have been going in and out. I mean, most recently, the need to provide a negative COVID test just to be able to get on a plane.&nbsp; If you look at what Canada did, they basically gave travelers one-week notice of the rule change at the end of 2020. But if you\'ve bought a travel insurance policy when you booked travel six weeks prior, what\'s the best way to cover these late breaking requirements that pop up a week or two before our trip?</li><li>Michael: Two main things... One is the policy language. You do need to say what’s specifically included, what’s specifically excluded? Because whether they\'re going to cover not having a negative test very much depends on the policy language. The other thing that it\'s going to come down to is whether it\'s out of your control. If it\'s something that you\'ve neglected to do, it\'s never going to be covered. The policies I\'ve reviewed, I haven\'t seen any that specifically kick in if you haven\'t got a negative test. So if you\'re worried about that, you really do need to ask the agent or really read that fine print. I do know that if you\'re delayed at security while you\'re being tested, that\'s not covered. So you do have to get there in time to make sure if they do rapid tests on the spot, that you\'re going to have time to get through security.</li><li>Mark: Okay, let me unpack that just a little bit, Michael. So I booked my flight, and I\'ve booked it a month ago. And now I go to take my test 72 hours before departure, and I come up positive. If I\'ve bought the right policy, would that typically cover delay or cover cancellation?</li><li>Michael: Delay is always the first preference. So if we can just push this trip back a week or whatever, that\'s going to be everyone\'s favorite outcome. But there are cancellation provisions where, say, you can\'t move it because the wedding is not going to be moved, in which case the cancellation provisions might kick in.</li><li>Mark: So now let\'s flip that. I\'ve taken my test, it\'s been negative, I get on the plane, I fly down to Costa Rica. And now a week on, I\'ve taken my test to get back into the US and now that test comes out positive. So now, potentially, I can\'t get back into the US. How does insurance help me there?</li><li>Michael: There\'s a couple places where this insurance is going to really beneficial in that situation. First and foremost, the medical provisions in most of these comprehensive policies are going to actually help you pay for your healthcare. Many of them are going to be secondary coverage, meaning they\'re going to want your primary health care to kick in first and then they\'ll jump in and cover anything that\'s not covered. Some of them are primary, especially with the overseas trips. So, that\'s a really nice benefits that are built into a lot of these policies. The other place that will help is, if you\'re delayed because you can\'t travel because of a restriction like that, and that\'s outside of your control, a lot of them will cover a hotel while you\'re waiting and meals while you\'re waiting, and they\'ll get you back home safely. So that\'s actually a really positive outcome that can happen with these policies.</li><li>Mark: Michael, how do I make sure that I\'ve actually got one of those policies? If we go back to the April/May timeframe, people were finding that they didn\'t actually know what they had. How do I make sure I\'ve actually bought that coverage?</li><li>Michael: Well, best case scenario would be if you found a human and you asked them in plain English.</li><li>Mark: Yeah, good luck with that, right?</li><li>Michael: I know, calling 1 800 numbers anymore – that’s not in the cards. What I would do if I was doing that, I’d click through the terms of service and see who\'s offering that policy. If it doesn\'t really go into much detail, or if it\'s really garbly legalese, I’d go through to the provider\'s website. Most of them have FAQ pages that specifically address COVID. So that\'s gonna be probably your best resource.</li><li>Mark: Michael, people are starting to think about big trips as vaccination rates start to step up. You know, the back half of the year, if I\'m thinking about booking, say, a week\'s biking tour in Tuscany or Provence in September/October, what kind of travel insurance should I be looking for? Should I pony up for a cancel- for-any-reason rider? Or are there some cheaper alternatives for more limited scenarios like, “Hey, the EU still isn\'t letting Americans in” but won\'t cover the more generic “Oh, I\'m afraid to travel” kind of reason.</li><li>Michael: The question of “if you\'re afraid to travel” is never going to be covered unless you do have that cancel-for-any-reason policy. But travel insurance is meant to cover things that are out of your control. So you know, if it\'s not laid out your policy, it\'s not gonna be covered. So that\'s kind of the most expensive option. You know, you\'re going to pay the most for a cancel-for-any-reason policy. That middle ground is the standard policy where you say “I\'m taking a little bit of the risk on myself. I\'m going to bravely travel wherever I\'m allowed.” The least expensive option is really kind of a DIY. And a lot of the destinations that I\'m seeing, they\'re waiving cancellation and change fees. And so you can kind of make your DIY travel insurance by only booking places that would let you change for no fee. That\'s kind of the cheapest “I\'m feeling brave” policy. “I\'m feeling skittish” policy Is that cancel-for-any-reason.</li><li>Mark: Super. Michael Giusti, senior writer at <a href=\"https://www.insurancequotes.com/\">InsuranceQuotes.com</a>, thank you very much for joining us. This was a great update.</li><li>Michael: Thank you so much.</li></ul></li><li>Bridge music -- Crazy Love-The Alex &amp; Lang mix by J.Lang (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djlang59/10579 Ft: FHC and Alex &amp; Bradsucks</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Keeping Ahead of Expiring Miles</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Like most road warriors of a certain tenure, I have cards in my desk of some 30-odd frequent traveler programs -- those that I know of -- and am probably a member of another dozen or so that I’ve forgotten about. Of those, I have meaningful balances -- enough for at least one free flight or a free hotel night -- at the Big 4 US carriers, a couple of European carriers, and two of the big hotel chains. Most of the rest are random programs like IcelandAir or AirBaltic or Omni Hotels that I used for a specific trip or project but had some spiff, like seat selection or free WiFi, that was reason enough to put in the effort to sign up.</li><li>When I was traveling every week or so, keeping those main programs active wasn’t a big effort. And if I hadn’t flown, say, BA for a while, I’d code maybe a short American commuter flight, something where my status was a bit meaningless, to my BA account to reset the expiration clock.</li><li>But now, hitting the first anniversary of the first travel lockdown and with business travel still mostly on hold, some of those expiration cliffs are starting to become visible</li><li>Last episode, I talked about getting emails from BA and Iberia warning me of pending Avios expirations, and so I transferred my Iberia points to my BA account. But I can’t tell from the BA website if that was enough activity to change the BA expiration. So I spelunked some more thru the website and found where they call out Airbnb bookings as “recognized activity” that’ll reset the 36-month clock. So, I booked our San Diego Airbnb through a link on BA’s site, just had to enter my BA account number before moving to the booking screen. It’ll be interesting to see if the activity flows seamlessly into my BA account or if I’ll have to chase it down through a manual credit claim. I’m betting on the latter, but am hoping to be pleasantly surprised.</li><li>But that got me cycling through my other accounts. I wasn’t worried about my US carrier accounts. The trend there has been to do away with expiration dates, first Southwest, then Delta, most recently United. American, not surprisingly, is the knuckle dragger, clinging to their stingy 18-month policy, but I flew them last fall to PHL, so I’m fine there.</li><li>But Flying Blue, the KLM/Air France program? I last flew KLM the fall of 2018, so that had to be coming up. I hit the website; those miles were also expiring at the end of this year. And, they, like BA and Iberia, have managed to make resetting that data way overly complex.&nbsp; First, there’s “overall extending activities” which are flights or purchases on their co-branded credit card; they extend <em>all</em> Flying Blue miles by 2 years. “Partial extending activities” extend miles earned through, say, hotel or car rental partners. Please note, says the website, \"‘Partial extending activities’ do not extend the validity of Miles earned from ‘Overall extending activities’\". OK, then. Looking at it this way, I only had 500 miles from that 2018 flight, but 38,000 miles from when I had to quickly stash points from a corporate Amex account before leaving a company. So, a “partial” activity should suffice. I set myself a reminder for Dec 1st to push the minimum 1,000 points from my personal Amex.</li><li>And the expiration periods are kinda all over the place. BA is 36 months; KLM, Marriott, and Hyatt are 2 years; American is 18 months; Hilton is 15 months (weird number); and IHG is the stingiest at 12.&nbsp;</li><li>Seems like there should be a technology solution to this, right? There are a few. If you use TripIt to consolidate your trip itineraries, the $49/year upgrade to the Pro version gives you program tracking. I had used it one year when they upgraded me for free; probably by mistake. AwardWallet is another popular tool, but there too, you need to upgrade to the paid version (a little cheaper at $30/year) to track expirations.</li><li>But beyond the cost, for these programs to work, you have to give them access to your accounts -- your account numbers and passwords. And cycling back to what I was saying at the top of the show, with the travel industry’s kinda poor track record on data protection, and just after having to reset passwords to United, American, Lufthansa, BA, and Iberia because of SITA’s leak, do I really want to put <em>all</em> my frequent traveler logins into one spot? I think a simple spreadsheet on the hard drive of the PC in my office can do the job just fine.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #173</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li>Nothing new on the tech front this month, but I should have the website freshened up by the next episode. I’ve had the current look since the beginning of 2006 courtesy of TravelCommons listener Hilary Baumann and her <a href=\"https://fascinationdesign.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Fascination Design</a> firm. The change is absolutely not a knock against Hilary’s work. It’s just that, after 15 years, I wanted to freshen things up a bit. So look for that by the end of February or beginning of March.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>, as well as asking Alexa, Siri, and Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_173.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #173 — What\'s New in Travel Insurance; Keeping Ahead of Expiring Miles','','inherit','closed','closed','','3417-revision-v1','','','2021-03-12 15:37:28','2021-03-12 20:37:28','',3417,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/12/3417-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0);
INSERT INTO `wp_posts` VALUES
(3435,1,'2021-03-12 15:43:34','2021-03-12 20:43:34','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_1985\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/7BA016C0-B99C-45F6-8A96-A0B9CD67D159-1-e1615580828646.jpg\" \"=\"\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1985\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/7BA016C0-B99C-45F6-8A96-A0B9CD67D159-1-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"People Camping Out on Airport Cots\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a>Wait Here \'til Your COVID Test is Negative[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>As travel bookings beginning to rise with vaccination rates, we talk with Michael Giusti of <a href=\"http://insurancequotes.com\" title=\"insurancequotes.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">InsuranceQuotes.com</a> to find out what\'s changed over the last year. I make the rounds through all my frequent traveler programs to reset impending expiration dates. We also talk about yet another travel data breach, a favorite beer bar is a COVID casualty, and Hertz cars are starting to get old. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_173.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show Notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show Notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #173: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>This Week</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois on what has been a nice week. Temps got into the 60’s at the beginning of the week, so I broke out the bike for a ride along the lake -- sunny in most parts, but a bit chillier in the shady parts, riding narrow paths cut through 5-ft ice and snow mounds, the remnants of what were really impressive pile-ups of shore ice during the February deep freeze.</li><li>No travel since the last episode, but heading out next week to hang out on the beach in San Diego, reloading from our January pivot away from California because of their lockdown. A couple of months on, COVID cases are down, the state’s order banning hotel and Airbnb hosts from renting to out-of-state’er is gone, outdoor dining has re-opened and, most importantly, the craft brewery taprooms are open again. I pointed my little Python Untappd script at San Diego and can see a lot of Brewery check-ins. In between those taproom visits, I think we’ll manage to squeeze in some biking and kayaking. </li><li>And like many folks, we’re building our travel calendar for the rest of the year. Nashville, New York City, Northern Michigan, and Maine written in pen through the first half of the year. We’re penciling in the UK for November, booking it now to lock in no-fee cancelations in case of another winter spike, or what might be more likely, lingering resistance to dropping international quarantine requirements. But I’m optimistic (hopeful?) that the US and UK will get enough people vaccinated by then.</li><li>I was on a Zoom call a couple of nights ago with a bunch of college friends. “Do you think we can all get together in person in September for Homecoming?” someone asked. “Absolutely,” I said, “we just need to lean into it.” And it feels like that’s what more people are doing -- leaning into visits to physically get together with family and friends they haven’t seen for a year now. It’s always dangerous drawing a straight trend line, but it feels like travel might come back quicker than expected. </li><li>Bridge Music -- Madrugada(rmx) by savoyard (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/savoyard/10743 Ft: Curve</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I finally pushed out the refreshed website last week. First change since 2006. Figured website aesthetics have changed a bit over the last 15 years and so changed things up a bit. Thanks to everyone who responded to my request on Facebook and Twitter to hit the new site for a bit of crowd-sourced end-user testing. A bit like the <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1224798425499213828\">meme</a> you’ll see posted in a lot of IT shops; a picture of Dos Equis “most interesting man in the world” with the line -- “I don’t always test my code, but when I do, I test it in Production.” There’s still some tweaks I need to make, but it seems pretty solid. Check it out if you get a chance -- travelcommons.com -- and drop me a line at <a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a> with your thoughts.</li><li>Following up on last episode’s rant about the guy living unnoticed in ORD for 3 months, I tweeted out an <a href=\"https://theconversation.com/how-some-people-can-end-up-living-at-airports-for-months-even-years-at-a-time-154336\">article</a> about people living years in airports. Written by a history prof from University of Dayton who researches the history of airports (hey, everyone’s gotta have their niche), the article talks about other airport residents, an Iranian refugee who lived in CDG for 18 years, and most recently, an Estonian guy who was transiting through Manila Int’l Airport last March as the shutdowns hit was stuck there for 100 days until the Estonian embassy could get him on a repatriation flight. That one is brutal. I spent 3 hours in that airport a few years back and even, with everything open, it felt 2½ hours too long. Check out the article -- there’s a link in the show notes and at the top of the Twitter and Facebook feeds. It’s a good read.</li><li>Jim McDonough hit the Facebook page, responding to last episode’s margarita instruction story with one of his own.<ul><li>I know how you feel about teaching the bartender how to make a margarita. We ended a week-long trip to Switzerland by staying our last night at a hotel by the Zurich airport. At dinner, we each asked for a Scotch and water. They brought out this big tray, with a bowl of ice cubes, a pitcher of water, a bottle of Scotch, and two glasses. A crowd of hotel employees gathered to watch. Evidently, they don\'t do Scotch and water in Zurich. When I filled the glasses with ice, they gasped. I explained that we live in a hot climate. I went ahead and added Scotch and topped off with a little water, and they winced when I took a sip. A cultural exchange, I guess.</li></ul></li><li>Jim, I love you, man, but I gotta tell you -- I’d probably be wincing with the hotel staff. My usual Scotch order is -- Scotch and glass. But you paid for it (and in Zurich, it’s not going to be a small amount), so even if they couldn’t quite figure out what you wanted, they at least gave you all the tools you needed.</li><li>One of my absolute favorite beer bars, <a href=\"https://brewpublic.com/beer-news/baileys-taproom-and-the-upper-lip-permanently-closes-its-doors/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bailey’s Taproom in Portland, Oregon</a>, has shut off their taps permanently. I started a project in downtown Portland in January 2013. Found Bailey’s the second night I was there and just settled in; my last beer there was my last night in Portland. The owner said “After reopening to limited seating (after the initial shutdown), it was clear that people were not interested in coming downtown. When the PPP money ran out, I decided to close the doors”&nbsp; Another reminder that we should try to be purposeful about where we spend our discretionary dollars, thinking about what businesses we would miss if they closed up and then go out of our way to buy something from them. In my case, it helps rationalize a rather full beer shelf in our pantry.</li><li>After Hertz declared bankruptcy at the end of last May, I predicted in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/06/09/podcast-164-first-post-lockdown-trips-travel-credit-cards/\">episode #164</a> that I’d be paying more attention to the mileage on the cars in the Five Star aisle because that’s the first place I see signs of financial distress — a lot less 500-mile cars and a lot more 24,000-mile cars. And while 24,000 miles on a car doesn’t seem like a lot, remember that rental car miles are kinda like dog years — you gotta multiply them by, like, 7 to get to regular car miles. And true to form, when picking up our Hertz car in PHX at the end of January, every car I looked at had over 24,000 miles, a few with a <strong>lot</strong> more. Will be interesting to see what’s on offer at SAN in a few weeks.&nbsp;</li><li>If you have any status on a Star Alliance or One World carrier, you probably got an email from your carrier about a <a href=\"https://skift.com/2021/03/05/data-breach-affects-more-than-2-million-frequent-flyers-across-airline-alliances/\">data breach at SITA</a>. I got them from United and American saying my name, account number, and status was potentially exposed and that I should change my password, which I did. And then thought about how this is yet another data leak from some unknown player in what is an incredibly fragmented travel tech tool chain. We talked about this back in November in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">episode #169</a> when an obscure Spanish company used by hotels to update information on on-line booking sites leaked 24 GB of names, emails, credit card data and reservation records. And in this case, if you’re not in the airline industry, you probably don’t know about <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SITA_(company)\">SITA</a>. It’s a industry consortium started back in 1949 by 11 European airlines to share infrastructure costs and has expanded to provide all sorts of travel technology including the exchange of passenger data between airlines -- in this case, the exchange of frequent flyer status so that, say, Lufthansa recognizes your elite status with United on your flight with them. It’s one thing when the breach is from a company that you did business with -- the <a href=\"https://www.cnet.com/news/marriott-discloses-new-data-breach-impacting-5-point-2-million-guests/\">Marriott hacks</a> in 2018 and 2020, the 2018 breaches at <a href=\"https://www.theregister.com/2018/09/11/british_airways_website_scripts/\">British Airways</a> and <a href=\"https://www.theregister.com/2018/10/25/cathay_pacific_hacked_up_to_94_million_passenger_deets_exposed/\">Cathay Pacific</a>. But it’s a whole other thing when you find out some unknown third party coughed up your data. But actually, when you get a look at the spaghetti that is travel technology, and see all the places your data is getting sent to -- often small companies that can’t afford state-of-the-art cybersecurity, it’s kinda surprising -- in a sad way -- that not more of this happens.</li><li>Type “plane mask” into the Google search box and one of the first 5 suggestions is “plane mask fight”. Click through and you get what seems to be an endless stream of news reports and cellphone videos of passengers fighting about having to wear a mask during a flight. What is getting a lot less coverage, though I’m hearing snatches of it here and there, are people getting chewed out by their row mates when taking their masks off to eat or drink something, getting something like “Hey, can you not drink during the flight? I’d rather not die for your convenience.”&nbsp; And I’m afraid this is going to get worse as more people start traveling again and aircraft load factors get back into the 80% range. But honestly, both sides are being idiots. You know the rules before you buy your ticket and you’re reminded of them by emails before you travel, and again by gate agents before you board the plane. If you can’t handle the rules -- all of them, not just the ones you agree with -- then don’t walk down the jetway. Drive; charter a jet. But don’t try to bend the rules to your own personal belief system and hassle the rest of us who are just trying to get from Point A to Point B on-time and with the minimum amount of heartache.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on our fab new web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge music -- Tools of the Trade by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial &nbsp;(3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/56512 Ft: Abstract Audio, Mr Yesterday, Martijn de Boer, Speck</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>What\'s New in Travel Insurance</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A little over a year ago, the first coronavirus lockdowns started, and the execution of them was, to be charitable, mostly a mess. Borders were quickly shut; planes grounded. People were stranded in foreign countries with no way home; we just talked about the Estonian guy stuck in Manila airport for 100 days. And all of a sudden, people started paying attention to travel insurance. What was once a check box at the bottom of a booking webpage that most of us clicked “no” on so we could finish our reservation quickly became very important. Last May in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/05/08/podcast-163-new-world-of-travel-insurance-getting-medical-help-on-the-road/\">episode #163</a>, as people were beginning to think about their first post-lockdown trips, we talked about the state of travel insurance. Now, with travel bookings beginning to rise as vaccination rates rise, I wanted to check back in and see what’s changed with travel insurance. So I asked Michael Giusti, senior writer at <a href=\"https://www.insurancequotes.com/\">InsuranceQuotes.com</a>, to come onto the podcast and give us an update:&nbsp;<ul><li>Mark: Michael, last May, Eric Josowitz of <a href=\"https://www.insurancequotes.com/\">InsuranceQuotes.com</a> was on the podcast. We were talking about travel insurance after the initial lockdown. Back then, in the midst of all that travel disruption, many travelers were finding:&nbsp; a) they didn\'t actually know what their insurance covered; they’d just checked the box at the end of their booking process, paid some additional amount moved on; and&nbsp; b) the insurance that they had bought had exclusions for communicable diseases, WHO-declared pandemics, cancellations in cases of fear. And then, after that, insurers stopped offering travel insurance. So, Michael, that was May. This is now the end of February. What\'s the current situation regarding travel insurance?</li><li>Michael: Not many people were thinking about pandemics back when this started. But the few people who were thinking about it were insurers. They saw the SARS epidemic and they started writing in pandemic exclusions from that point on. And then there\'s a second little provision in these insurance policies called the Known Events Provisions. So once the pandemic declared, even if there wasn\'t a specific exclusion, they can turn around and say, “Well, we\'re not going to cover because it\'s now a known event.” It would be like there\'s a hurricane that\'s bearing down on your city and you buy a plane ticket while the hurricane is there, and then you get mad because you can\'t fly. It’s a known event, and so they\'re not going to cover that. So that\'s where we came from. And then, you\'re right, they stopped and they said, “Well, we have no idea what\'s going on, so let’s regroup.”&nbsp; And now they\'ve regrouped, and it\'s really interesting because in a lot of the insurance industry, they\'ve stopped covering pandemics. But in travel insurance, they specifically started including Covid 19, saying “We will cover it under these conditions.”</li><li>Mark: Michael, travel requirements have been changing quickly; the restrictions have been going in and out. I mean, most recently, the need to provide a negative COVID test just to be able to get on a plane.&nbsp; If you look at what Canada did, they basically gave travelers one-week notice of the rule change at the end of 2020. But if you\'ve bought a travel insurance policy when you booked travel six weeks prior, what\'s the best way to cover these late breaking requirements that pop up a week or two before our trip?</li><li>Michael: Two main things... One is the policy language. You do need to say what’s specifically included, what’s specifically excluded? Because whether they\'re going to cover not having a negative test very much depends on the policy language. The other thing that it\'s going to come down to is whether it\'s out of your control. If it\'s something that you\'ve neglected to do, it\'s never going to be covered. The policies I\'ve reviewed, I haven\'t seen any that specifically kick in if you haven\'t got a negative test. So if you\'re worried about that, you really do need to ask the agent or really read that fine print. I do know that if you\'re delayed at security while you\'re being tested, that\'s not covered. So you do have to get there in time to make sure if they do rapid tests on the spot, that you\'re going to have time to get through security.</li><li>Mark: Okay, let me unpack that just a little bit, Michael. So I booked my flight, and I\'ve booked it a month ago. And now I go to take my test 72 hours before departure, and I come up positive. If I\'ve bought the right policy, would that typically cover delay or cover cancellation?</li><li>Michael: Delay is always the first preference. So if we can just push this trip back a week or whatever, that\'s going to be everyone\'s favorite outcome. But there are cancellation provisions where, say, you can\'t move it because the wedding is not going to be moved, in which case the cancellation provisions might kick in.</li><li>Mark: So now let\'s flip that. I\'ve taken my test, it\'s been negative, I get on the plane, I fly down to Costa Rica. And now a week on, I\'ve taken my test to get back into the US and now that test comes out positive. So now, potentially, I can\'t get back into the US. How does insurance help me there?</li><li>Michael: There\'s a couple places where this insurance is going to really beneficial in that situation. First and foremost, the medical provisions in most of these comprehensive policies are going to actually help you pay for your healthcare. Many of them are going to be secondary coverage, meaning they\'re going to want your primary health care to kick in first and then they\'ll jump in and cover anything that\'s not covered. Some of them are primary, especially with the overseas trips. So, that\'s a really nice benefits that are built into a lot of these policies. The other place that will help is, if you\'re delayed because you can\'t travel because of a restriction like that, and that\'s outside of your control, a lot of them will cover a hotel while you\'re waiting and meals while you\'re waiting, and they\'ll get you back home safely. So that\'s actually a really positive outcome that can happen with these policies.</li><li>Mark: Michael, how do I make sure that I\'ve actually got one of those policies? If we go back to the April/May timeframe, people were finding that they didn\'t actually know what they had. How do I make sure I\'ve actually bought that coverage?</li><li>Michael: Well, best case scenario would be if you found a human and you asked them in plain English.</li><li>Mark: Yeah, good luck with that, right?</li><li>Michael: I know, calling 1 800 numbers anymore – that’s not in the cards. What I would do if I was doing that, I’d click through the terms of service and see who\'s offering that policy. If it doesn\'t really go into much detail, or if it\'s really garbly legalese, I’d go through to the provider\'s website. Most of them have FAQ pages that specifically address COVID. So that\'s gonna be probably your best resource.</li><li>Mark: Michael, people are starting to think about big trips as vaccination rates start to step up. You know, the back half of the year, if I\'m thinking about booking, say, a week\'s biking tour in Tuscany or Provence in September/October, what kind of travel insurance should I be looking for? Should I pony up for a cancel- for-any-reason rider? Or are there some cheaper alternatives for more limited scenarios like, “Hey, the EU still isn\'t letting Americans in” but won\'t cover the more generic “Oh, I\'m afraid to travel” kind of reason.</li><li>Michael: The question of “if you\'re afraid to travel” is never going to be covered unless you do have that cancel-for-any-reason policy. But travel insurance is meant to cover things that are out of your control. So you know, if it\'s not laid out your policy, it\'s not gonna be covered. So that\'s kind of the most expensive option. You know, you\'re going to pay the most for a cancel-for-any-reason policy. That middle ground is the standard policy where you say “I\'m taking a little bit of the risk on myself. I\'m going to bravely travel wherever I\'m allowed.” The least expensive option is really kind of a DIY. And a lot of the destinations that I\'m seeing, they\'re waiving cancellation and change fees. And so you can kind of make your DIY travel insurance by only booking places that would let you change for no fee. That\'s kind of the cheapest “I\'m feeling brave” policy. “I\'m feeling skittish” policy Is that cancel-for-any-reason.</li><li>Mark: Super. Michael Giusti, senior writer at <a href=\"https://www.insurancequotes.com/\">InsuranceQuotes.com</a>, thank you very much for joining us. This was a great update.</li><li>Michael: Thank you so much.</li></ul></li><li>Bridge music -- Crazy Love-The Alex &amp; Lang mix by J.Lang (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djlang59/10579 Ft: FHC and Alex &amp; Bradsucks</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Keeping Ahead of Expiring Miles</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Like most road warriors of a certain tenure, I have cards in my desk of some 30-odd frequent traveler programs -- those that I know of -- and am probably a member of another dozen or so that I’ve forgotten about. Of those, I have meaningful balances -- enough for at least one free flight or a free hotel night -- at the Big 4 US carriers, a couple of European carriers, and two of the big hotel chains. Most of the rest are random programs like IcelandAir or AirBaltic or Omni Hotels that I used for a specific trip or project but had some spiff, like seat selection or free WiFi, that was reason enough to put in the effort to sign up.</li><li>When I was traveling every week or so, keeping those main programs active wasn’t a big effort. And if I hadn’t flown, say, BA for a while, I’d code maybe a short American commuter flight, something where my status was a bit meaningless, to my BA account to reset the expiration clock.</li><li>But now, hitting the first anniversary of the first travel lockdown and with business travel still mostly on hold, some of those expiration cliffs are starting to become visible</li><li>Last episode, I talked about getting emails from BA and Iberia warning me of pending Avios expirations, and so I transferred my Iberia points to my BA account. But I can’t tell from the BA website if that was enough activity to change the BA expiration. So I spelunked some more thru the website and found where they call out Airbnb bookings as “recognized activity” that’ll reset the 36-month clock. So, I booked our San Diego Airbnb through a link on BA’s site, just had to enter my BA account number before moving to the booking screen. It’ll be interesting to see if the activity flows seamlessly into my BA account or if I’ll have to chase it down through a manual credit claim. I’m betting on the latter, but am hoping to be pleasantly surprised.</li><li>But that got me cycling through my other accounts. I wasn’t worried about my US carrier accounts. The trend there has been to do away with expiration dates, first Southwest, then Delta, most recently United. American, not surprisingly, is the knuckle dragger, clinging to their stingy 18-month policy, but I flew them last fall to PHL, so I’m fine there.</li><li>But Flying Blue, the KLM/Air France program? I last flew KLM the fall of 2018, so that had to be coming up. I hit the website; those miles were also expiring at the end of this year. And, they, like BA and Iberia, have managed to make resetting that data way overly complex.&nbsp; First, there’s “overall extending activities” which are flights or purchases on their co-branded credit card; they extend <em>all</em> Flying Blue miles by 2 years. “Partial extending activities” extend miles earned through, say, hotel or car rental partners. Please note, says the website, \"‘Partial extending activities’ do not extend the validity of Miles earned from ‘Overall extending activities’\". OK, then. Looking at it this way, I only had 500 miles from that 2018 flight, but 38,000 miles from when I had to quickly stash points from a corporate Amex account before leaving a company. So, a “partial” activity should suffice. I set myself a reminder for Dec 1st to push the minimum 1,000 points from my personal Amex.</li><li>And the expiration periods are kinda all over the place. BA is 36 months; KLM, Marriott, and Hyatt are 2 years; American is 18 months; Hilton is 15 months (weird number); and IHG is the stingiest at 12.&nbsp;</li><li>Seems like there should be a technology solution to this, right? There are a few. If you use TripIt to consolidate your trip itineraries, the $49/year upgrade to the Pro version gives you program tracking. I had used it one year when they upgraded me for free; probably by mistake. AwardWallet is another popular tool, but there too, you need to upgrade to the paid version (a little cheaper at $30/year) to track expirations.</li><li>But beyond the cost, for these programs to work, you have to give them access to your accounts -- your account numbers and passwords. And cycling back to what I was saying at the top of the show, with the travel industry’s kinda poor track record on data protection, and just after having to reset passwords to United, American, Lufthansa, BA, and Iberia because of SITA’s leak, do I really want to put <em>all</em> my frequent traveler logins into one spot? I think a simple spreadsheet on the hard drive of the PC in my office can do the job just fine.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #173</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li>Nothing new on the tech front this month, but I should have the website freshened up by the next episode. I’ve had the current look since the beginning of 2006 courtesy of TravelCommons listener Hilary Baumann and her <a href=\"https://fascinationdesign.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Fascination Design</a> firm. The change is absolutely not a knock against Hilary’s work. It’s just that, after 15 years, I wanted to freshen things up a bit. So look for that by the end of February or beginning of March.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>, as well as asking Alexa, Siri, and Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_173.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #173 — What\'s New in Travel Insurance; Keeping Ahead of Expiring Miles','','inherit','closed','closed','','3417-revision-v1','','','2021-03-12 15:43:34','2021-03-12 20:43:34','',3417,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/12/3417-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3436,1,'2021-03-12 15:53:42','2021-03-12 20:53:42','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_1985\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/7BA016C0-B99C-45F6-8A96-A0B9CD67D159-1-e1615580828646.jpg\" \"=\"\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1985\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/7BA016C0-B99C-45F6-8A96-A0B9CD67D159-1-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"People Camping Out on Airport Cots\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a>Wait Here \'til Your COVID Test is Negative[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>As travel bookings beginning to rise with vaccination rates, we talk with Michael Giusti of <a href=\"http://insurancequotes.com\" title=\"insurancequotes.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">InsuranceQuotes.com</a> to find out what\'s changed over the last year. I make the rounds through all my frequent traveler programs to reset impending expiration dates. We also talk about yet another travel data breach, a favorite beer bar is a COVID casualty, and Hertz cars are starting to get old. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_173.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show Notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show Notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #173: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>This Week</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois on what has been a nice week. Temps got into the 60’s at the beginning of the week, so I broke out the bike for a ride along the lake -- sunny in most parts, but a bit chillier in the shady parts, riding narrow paths cut through 5-ft ice and snow mounds, the remnants of what were really impressive pile-ups of shore ice during the February deep freeze.</li><li>No travel since the last episode, but heading out next week to hang out on the beach in San Diego, reloading from our January pivot away from California because of their lockdown. A couple of months on, COVID cases are down, the state’s order banning hotel and Airbnb hosts from renting to out-of-state’er is gone, outdoor dining has re-opened and, most importantly, the craft brewery taprooms are open again. I pointed my little Python Untappd script at San Diego and can see a lot of Brewery check-ins. In between those taproom visits, I think we’ll manage to squeeze in some biking and kayaking.&nbsp;</li><li>And like many folks, we’re building our travel calendar for the rest of the year. Nashville, New York City, Northern Michigan, and Maine written in pen through the first half of the year. We’re penciling in the UK for November, booking it now to lock in no-fee cancelations in case of another winter spike, or what might be more likely, lingering resistance to dropping international quarantine requirements. But I’m optimistic (hopeful?) that the US and UK will get enough people vaccinated by then.</li><li>I was on a Zoom call a couple of nights ago with a bunch of college friends. “Do you think we can all get together in person in September for Homecoming?” someone asked. “Absolutely,” I said, “we just need to lean into it.” And it feels like that’s what more people are doing -- leaning into visits to physically get together with family and friends they haven’t seen for a year now. It’s always dangerous drawing a straight trend line, but it feels like travel might come back quicker than expected.&nbsp;</li><li>Bridge Music -- Madrugada(rmx) by savoyard (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/savoyard/10743 Ft: Curve</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I finally pushed out the refreshed website last week. First change since 2006. Figured website aesthetics have changed a bit over the last 15 years and so changed things up a bit. Thanks to everyone who responded to my request on Facebook and Twitter to hit the new site for a bit of crowd-sourced end-user testing. A bit like the <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1224798425499213828\">meme</a> you’ll see posted in a lot of IT shops; a picture of Dos Equis “most interesting man in the world” with the line -- “I don’t always test my code, but when I do, I test it in Production.” There’s still some tweaks I need to make, but it seems pretty solid. Check it out if you get a chance -- travelcommons.com -- and drop me a line at <a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a> with your thoughts.</li><li>Following up on last episode’s rant about the guy living unnoticed in ORD for 3 months, I tweeted out an <a href=\"https://theconversation.com/how-some-people-can-end-up-living-at-airports-for-months-even-years-at-a-time-154336\">article</a> about people living years in airports. Written by a history prof from University of Dayton who researches the history of airports (hey, everyone’s gotta have their niche), the article talks about other airport residents, an Iranian refugee who lived in CDG for 18 years, and most recently, an Estonian guy who was transiting through Manila Int’l Airport last March as the shutdowns hit was stuck there for 100 days until the Estonian embassy could get him on a repatriation flight. That one is brutal. I spent 3 hours in that airport a few years back and even, with everything open, it felt 2½ hours too long. Check out the article -- there’s a link in the show notes and at the top of the Twitter and Facebook feeds. It’s a good read.</li><li>Jim McDonough hit the Facebook page, responding to last episode’s margarita instruction story with one of his own.<ul><li>I know how you feel about teaching the bartender how to make a margarita. We ended a week-long trip to Switzerland by staying our last night at a hotel by the Zurich airport. At dinner, we each asked for a Scotch and water. They brought out this big tray, with a bowl of ice cubes, a pitcher of water, a bottle of Scotch, and two glasses. A crowd of hotel employees gathered to watch. Evidently, they don\'t do Scotch and water in Zurich. When I filled the glasses with ice, they gasped. I explained that we live in a hot climate. I went ahead and added Scotch and topped off with a little water, and they winced when I took a sip. A cultural exchange, I guess.</li></ul></li><li>Jim, I love you, man, but I gotta tell you -- I’d probably be wincing with the hotel staff. My usual Scotch order is -- Scotch and glass. But you paid for it (and in Zurich, it’s not going to be a small amount), so even if they couldn’t quite figure out what you wanted, they at least gave you all the tools you needed.</li><li>One of my absolute favorite beer bars, <a href=\"https://brewpublic.com/beer-news/baileys-taproom-and-the-upper-lip-permanently-closes-its-doors/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bailey’s Taproom in Portland, Oregon</a>, has shut off their taps permanently. I started a project in downtown Portland in January 2013. Found Bailey’s the second night I was there and just settled in; my last beer there was my last night in Portland. The owner said “After reopening to limited seating (after the initial shutdown), it was clear that people were not interested in coming downtown. When the PPP money ran out, I decided to close the doors”&nbsp; Another reminder that we should try to be purposeful about where we spend our discretionary dollars, thinking about what businesses we would miss if they closed up and then go out of our way to buy something from them. In my case, it helps rationalize a rather full beer shelf in our pantry.</li><li>After Hertz declared bankruptcy at the end of last May, I predicted in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/06/09/podcast-164-first-post-lockdown-trips-travel-credit-cards/\">episode #164</a> that I’d be paying more attention to the mileage on the cars in the Five Star aisle because that’s the first place I see signs of financial distress — a lot less 500-mile cars and a lot more 24,000-mile cars. And while 24,000 miles on a car doesn’t seem like a lot, remember that rental car miles are kinda like dog years — you gotta multiply them by, like, 7 to get to regular car miles. And true to form, when picking up our Hertz car in PHX at the end of January, every car I looked at had over 24,000 miles, a few with a <strong>lot</strong> more. Will be interesting to see what’s on offer at SAN in a few weeks.&nbsp;</li><li>If you have any status on a Star Alliance or One World carrier, you probably got an email from your carrier about a <a href=\"https://skift.com/2021/03/05/data-breach-affects-more-than-2-million-frequent-flyers-across-airline-alliances/\">data breach at SITA</a>. I got them from United and American saying my name, account number, and status was potentially exposed and that I should change my password, which I did. And then thought about how this is yet another data leak from some unknown player in what is an incredibly fragmented travel tech tool chain. We talked about this back in November in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">episode #169</a> when an obscure Spanish company used by hotels to update information on on-line booking sites leaked 24 GB of names, emails, credit card data and reservation records. And in this case, if you’re not in the airline industry, you probably don’t know about <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SITA_(company)\">SITA</a>. It’s a industry consortium started back in 1949 by 11 European airlines to share infrastructure costs and has expanded to provide all sorts of travel technology including the exchange of passenger data between airlines -- in this case, the exchange of frequent flyer status so that, say, Lufthansa recognizes your elite status with United on your flight with them. It’s one thing when the breach is from a company that you did business with -- the <a href=\"https://www.cnet.com/news/marriott-discloses-new-data-breach-impacting-5-point-2-million-guests/\">Marriott hacks</a> in 2018 and 2020, the 2018 breaches at <a href=\"https://www.theregister.com/2018/09/11/british_airways_website_scripts/\">British Airways</a> and <a href=\"https://www.theregister.com/2018/10/25/cathay_pacific_hacked_up_to_94_million_passenger_deets_exposed/\">Cathay Pacific</a>. But it’s a whole other thing when you find out some unknown third party coughed up your data. But actually, when you get a look at the spaghetti that is travel technology, and see all the places your data is getting sent to -- often small companies that can’t afford state-of-the-art cybersecurity, it’s kinda surprising -- in a sad way -- that not more of this happens.</li><li>Type “plane mask” into the Google search box and one of the first 5 suggestions is “plane mask fight”. Click through and you get what seems to be an endless stream of news reports and cellphone videos of passengers fighting about having to wear a mask during a flight. What is getting a lot less coverage, though I’m hearing snatches of it here and there, are people getting chewed out by their row mates when taking their masks off to eat or drink something, getting something like “Hey, can you not drink during the flight? I’d rather not die for your convenience.”&nbsp; And I’m afraid this is going to get worse as more people start traveling again and aircraft load factors get back into the 80% range. But honestly, both sides are being idiots. You know the rules before you buy your ticket and you’re reminded of them by emails before you travel, and again by gate agents before you board the plane. If you can’t handle the rules -- all of them, not just the ones you agree with -- then don’t walk down the jetway. Drive; charter a jet. But don’t try to bend the rules to your own personal belief system and hassle the rest of us who are just trying to get from Point A to Point B on-time and with the minimum amount of heartache.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on our fab new web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge music -- Tools of the Trade by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial &nbsp;(3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/56512 Ft: Abstract Audio, Mr Yesterday, Martijn de Boer, Speck</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>What\'s New in Travel Insurance</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A little over a year ago, the first coronavirus lockdowns started, and the execution of them was, to be charitable, mostly a mess. Borders were quickly shut; planes grounded. People were stranded in foreign countries with no way home; we just talked about the Estonian guy stuck in Manila airport for 100 days. And all of a sudden, people started paying attention to travel insurance. What was once a check box at the bottom of a booking webpage that most of us clicked “no” on so we could finish our reservation quickly became very important. Last May in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/05/08/podcast-163-new-world-of-travel-insurance-getting-medical-help-on-the-road/\">episode #163</a>, as people were beginning to think about their first post-lockdown trips, we talked about the state of travel insurance. Now, with travel bookings beginning to rise as vaccination rates rise, I wanted to check back in and see what’s changed with travel insurance. So I asked Michael Giusti, senior writer at <a href=\"https://www.insurancequotes.com/\">InsuranceQuotes.com</a>, to come onto the podcast and give us an update:&nbsp;<ul><li>Mark: Michael, last May, Eric Josowitz of <a href=\"https://www.insurancequotes.com/\">InsuranceQuotes.com</a> was on the podcast. We were talking about travel insurance after the initial lockdown. Back then, in the midst of all that travel disruption, many travelers were finding:&nbsp; a) they didn\'t actually know what their insurance covered; they’d just checked the box at the end of their booking process, paid some additional amount moved on; and&nbsp; b) the insurance that they had bought had exclusions for communicable diseases, WHO-declared pandemics, cancellations in cases of fear. And then, after that, insurers stopped offering travel insurance. So, Michael, that was May. This is now the end of February. What\'s the current situation regarding travel insurance?</li><li>Michael: Not many people were thinking about pandemics back when this started. But the few people who were thinking about it were insurers. They saw the SARS epidemic and they started writing in pandemic exclusions from that point on. And then there\'s a second little provision in these insurance policies called the Known Events Provisions. So once the pandemic declared, even if there wasn\'t a specific exclusion, they can turn around and say, “Well, we\'re not going to cover because it\'s now a known event.” It would be like there\'s a hurricane that\'s bearing down on your city and you buy a plane ticket while the hurricane is there, and then you get mad because you can\'t fly. It’s a known event, and so they\'re not going to cover that. So that\'s where we came from. And then, you\'re right, they stopped and they said, “Well, we have no idea what\'s going on, so let’s regroup.”&nbsp; And now they\'ve regrouped, and it\'s really interesting because in a lot of the insurance industry, they\'ve stopped covering pandemics. But in travel insurance, they specifically started including Covid 19, saying “We will cover it under these conditions.”</li><li>Mark: Michael, travel requirements have been changing quickly; the restrictions have been going in and out. I mean, most recently, the need to provide a negative COVID test just to be able to get on a plane.&nbsp; If you look at what Canada did, they basically gave travelers one-week notice of the rule change at the end of 2020. But if you\'ve bought a travel insurance policy when you booked travel six weeks prior, what\'s the best way to cover these late breaking requirements that pop up a week or two before our trip?</li><li>Michael: Two main things... One is the policy language. You do need to say what’s specifically included, what’s specifically excluded? Because whether they\'re going to cover not having a negative test very much depends on the policy language. The other thing that it\'s going to come down to is whether it\'s out of your control. If it\'s something that you\'ve neglected to do, it\'s never going to be covered. The policies I\'ve reviewed, I haven\'t seen any that specifically kick in if you haven\'t got a negative test. So if you\'re worried about that, you really do need to ask the agent or really read that fine print. I do know that if you\'re delayed at security while you\'re being tested, that\'s not covered. So you do have to get there in time to make sure if they do rapid tests on the spot, that you\'re going to have time to get through security.</li><li>Mark: Okay, let me unpack that just a little bit, Michael. So I booked my flight, and I\'ve booked it a month ago. And now I go to take my test 72 hours before departure, and I come up positive. If I\'ve bought the right policy, would that typically cover delay or cover cancellation?</li><li>Michael: Delay is always the first preference. So if we can just push this trip back a week or whatever, that\'s going to be everyone\'s favorite outcome. But there are cancellation provisions where, say, you can\'t move it because the wedding is not going to be moved, in which case the cancellation provisions might kick in.</li><li>Mark: So now let\'s flip that. I\'ve taken my test, it\'s been negative, I get on the plane, I fly down to Costa Rica. And now a week on, I\'ve taken my test to get back into the US and now that test comes out positive. So now, potentially, I can\'t get back into the US. How does insurance help me there?</li><li>Michael: There\'s a couple places where this insurance is going to really beneficial in that situation. First and foremost, the medical provisions in most of these comprehensive policies are going to actually help you pay for your healthcare. Many of them are going to be secondary coverage, meaning they\'re going to want your primary health care to kick in first and then they\'ll jump in and cover anything that\'s not covered. Some of them are primary, especially with the overseas trips. So, that\'s a really nice benefits that are built into a lot of these policies. The other place that will help is, if you\'re delayed because you can\'t travel because of a restriction like that, and that\'s outside of your control, a lot of them will cover a hotel while you\'re waiting and meals while you\'re waiting, and they\'ll get you back home safely. So that\'s actually a really positive outcome that can happen with these policies.</li><li>Mark: Michael, how do I make sure that I\'ve actually got one of those policies? If we go back to the April/May timeframe, people were finding that they didn\'t actually know what they had. How do I make sure I\'ve actually bought that coverage?</li><li>Michael: Well, best case scenario would be if you found a human and you asked them in plain English.</li><li>Mark: Yeah, good luck with that, right?</li><li>Michael: I know, calling 1 800 numbers anymore – that’s not in the cards. What I would do if I was doing that, I’d click through the terms of service and see who\'s offering that policy. If it doesn\'t really go into much detail, or if it\'s really garbly legalese, I’d go through to the provider\'s website. Most of them have FAQ pages that specifically address COVID. So that\'s gonna be probably your best resource.</li><li>Mark: Michael, people are starting to think about big trips as vaccination rates start to step up. You know, the back half of the year, if I\'m thinking about booking, say, a week\'s biking tour in Tuscany or Provence in September/October, what kind of travel insurance should I be looking for? Should I pony up for a cancel- for-any-reason rider? Or are there some cheaper alternatives for more limited scenarios like, “Hey, the EU still isn\'t letting Americans in” but won\'t cover the more generic “Oh, I\'m afraid to travel” kind of reason.</li><li>Michael: The question of “if you\'re afraid to travel” is never going to be covered unless you do have that cancel-for-any-reason policy. But travel insurance is meant to cover things that are out of your control. So you know, if it\'s not laid out your policy, it\'s not gonna be covered. So that\'s kind of the most expensive option. You know, you\'re going to pay the most for a cancel-for-any-reason policy. That middle ground is the standard policy where you say “I\'m taking a little bit of the risk on myself. I\'m going to bravely travel wherever I\'m allowed.” The least expensive option is really kind of a DIY. And a lot of the destinations that I\'m seeing, they\'re waiving cancellation and change fees. And so you can kind of make your DIY travel insurance by only booking places that would let you change for no fee. That\'s kind of the cheapest “I\'m feeling brave” policy. “I\'m feeling skittish” policy Is that cancel-for-any-reason.</li><li>Mark: Super. Michael Giusti, senior writer at <a href=\"https://www.insurancequotes.com/\">InsuranceQuotes.com</a>, thank you very much for joining us. This was a great update.</li><li>Michael: Thank you so much.</li></ul></li><li>Bridge music -- Crazy Love-The Alex &amp; Lang mix by J.Lang (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djlang59/10579 Ft: FHC and Alex &amp; Bradsucks</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Keeping Ahead of Expiring Miles</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Like most road warriors of a certain tenure, I have cards in my desk of some 30-odd frequent traveler programs -- those that I know of -- and am probably a member of another dozen or so that I’ve forgotten about. Of those, I have meaningful balances -- enough for at least one free flight or a free hotel night -- at the Big 4 US carriers, a couple of European carriers, and two of the big hotel chains. Most of the rest are random programs like IcelandAir or AirBaltic or Omni Hotels that I used for a specific trip or project but had some spiff, like seat selection or free WiFi, that was reason enough to put in the effort to sign up.</li><li>When I was traveling every week or so, keeping those main programs active wasn’t a big effort. And if I hadn’t flown, say, BA for a while, I’d code maybe a short American commuter flight, something where my status was a bit meaningless, to my BA account to reset the expiration clock.</li><li>But now, hitting the first anniversary of the first travel lockdown and with business travel still mostly on hold, some of those expiration cliffs are starting to become visible</li><li>Last episode, I talked about getting emails from BA and Iberia warning me of pending Avios expirations, and so I transferred my Iberia points to my BA account. But I can’t tell from the BA website if that was enough activity to change the BA expiration. So I spelunked some more thru the website and found where they call out Airbnb bookings as “recognized activity” that’ll reset the 36-month clock. So, I booked our San Diego Airbnb through a link on BA’s site, just had to enter my BA account number before moving to the booking screen. It’ll be interesting to see if the activity flows seamlessly into my BA account or if I’ll have to chase it down through a manual credit claim. I’m betting on the latter, but am hoping to be pleasantly surprised.</li><li>But that got me cycling through my other accounts. I wasn’t worried about my US carrier accounts. The trend there has been to do away with expiration dates, first Southwest, then Delta, most recently United. American, not surprisingly, is the knuckle dragger, clinging to their stingy 18-month policy, but I flew them last fall to PHL, so I’m fine there.</li><li>But Flying Blue, the KLM/Air France program? I last flew KLM the fall of 2018, so that had to be coming up. I hit the website; those miles were also expiring at the end of this year. And, they, like BA and Iberia, have managed to make resetting that data way overly complex.&nbsp; First, there’s “overall extending activities” which are flights or purchases on their co-branded credit card; they extend <em>all</em> Flying Blue miles by 2 years. “Partial extending activities” extend miles earned through, say, hotel or car rental partners. Please note, says the website, \"‘Partial extending activities’ do not extend the validity of Miles earned from ‘Overall extending activities’\". OK, then. Looking at it this way, I only had 500 miles from that 2018 flight, but 38,000 miles from when I had to quickly stash points from a corporate Amex account before leaving a company. So, a “partial” activity should suffice. I set myself a reminder for Dec 1st to push the minimum 1,000 points from my personal Amex.</li><li>And the expiration periods are kinda all over the place. BA is 36 months; KLM, Marriott, and Hyatt are 2 years; American is 18 months; Hilton is 15 months (weird number); and IHG is the stingiest at 12.&nbsp;</li><li>Seems like there should be a technology solution to this, right? There are a few. If you use TripIt to consolidate your trip itineraries, the $49/year upgrade to the Pro version gives you program tracking. I had used it one year when they upgraded me for free; probably by mistake. AwardWallet is another popular tool, but there too, you need to upgrade to the paid version (a little cheaper at $30/year) to track expirations.</li><li>But beyond the cost, for these programs to work, you have to give them access to your accounts -- your account numbers and passwords. And cycling back to what I was saying at the top of the show, with the travel industry’s kinda poor track record on data protection, and just after having to reset passwords to United, American, Lufthansa, BA, and Iberia because of SITA’s leak, do I really want to put <em>all</em> my frequent traveler logins into one spot? I think a simple spreadsheet on the hard drive of the PC in my office can do the job just fine.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #173</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li>Nothing new on the tech front this month, but I should have the website freshened up by the next episode. I’ve had the current look since the beginning of 2006 courtesy of TravelCommons listener Hilary Baumann and her <a href=\"https://fascinationdesign.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Fascination Design</a> firm. The change is absolutely not a knock against Hilary’s work. It’s just that, after 15 years, I wanted to freshen things up a bit. So look for that by the end of February or beginning of March.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>, as well as asking Alexa, Siri, and Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_173.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #173 — What\'s New in Travel Insurance; Keeping Ahead of Expiring Miles','','inherit','closed','closed','','3417-revision-v1','','','2021-03-12 15:53:42','2021-03-12 20:53:42','',3417,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/12/3417-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3437,1,'2021-03-12 16:06:32','2021-03-12 21:06:32','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_1985\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/7BA016C0-B99C-45F6-8A96-A0B9CD67D159-1-e1615580828646.jpg\" \"=\"\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1985\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/7BA016C0-B99C-45F6-8A96-A0B9CD67D159-1-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"People Camping Out on Airport Cots\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a>Wait Here \'til Your COVID Test is Negative[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>As travel bookings beginning to rise with vaccination rates, we talk with Michael Giusti of <a href=\"http://insurancequotes.com\" title=\"insurancequotes.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">InsuranceQuotes.com</a> to find out what\'s changed over the last year. I make the rounds through all my frequent traveler programs to reset impending expiration dates. We also talk about yet another travel data breach, a favorite beer bar is a COVID casualty, and bankrupt Hertz is starting to let its cars get old. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_173.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show Notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show Notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #173: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>This Week</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois on what has been a nice week. Temps got into the 60’s at the beginning of the week, so I broke out the bike for a ride along the lake -- sunny in most parts, but a bit chillier in the shady parts, riding narrow paths cut through 5-ft ice and snow mounds, the remnants of what were really impressive pile-ups of shore ice during the February deep freeze.</li><li>No travel since the last episode, but heading out next week to hang out on the beach in San Diego, reloading from our January pivot away from California because of their lockdown. A couple of months on, COVID cases are down, the state’s order banning hotel and Airbnb hosts from renting to out-of-state’er is gone, outdoor dining has re-opened and, most importantly, the craft brewery taprooms are open again. I pointed my little Python Untappd script at San Diego and can see a lot of Brewery check-ins. In between those taproom visits, I think we’ll manage to squeeze in some biking and kayaking.&nbsp;</li><li>And like many folks, we’re building our travel calendar for the rest of the year. Nashville, New York City, Northern Michigan, and Maine written in pen through the first half of the year. We’re penciling in the UK for November, booking it now to lock in no-fee cancelations in case of another winter spike, or what might be more likely, lingering resistance to dropping international quarantine requirements. But I’m optimistic (hopeful?) that the US and UK will get enough people vaccinated by then.</li><li>I was on a Zoom call a couple of nights ago with a bunch of college friends. “Do you think we can all get together in person in September for Homecoming?” someone asked. “Absolutely,” I said, “we just need to lean into it.” And it feels like that’s what more people are doing -- leaning into visits to physically get together with family and friends they haven’t seen for a year now. It’s always dangerous drawing a straight trend line, but it feels like travel might come back quicker than expected.&nbsp;</li><li>Bridge Music -- Madrugada(rmx) by savoyard (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/savoyard/10743 Ft: Curve</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I finally pushed out the refreshed website last week. First change since 2006. Figured website aesthetics have changed a bit over the last 15 years and so changed things up a bit. Thanks to everyone who responded to my request on Facebook and Twitter to hit the new site for a bit of crowd-sourced end-user testing. A bit like the <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1224798425499213828\">meme</a> you’ll see posted in a lot of IT shops; a picture of Dos Equis “most interesting man in the world” with the line -- “I don’t always test my code, but when I do, I test it in Production.” There’s still some tweaks I need to make, but it seems pretty solid. Check it out if you get a chance -- travelcommons.com -- and drop me a line at <a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a> with your thoughts.</li><li>Following up on last episode’s rant about the guy living unnoticed in ORD for 3 months, I tweeted out an <a href=\"https://theconversation.com/how-some-people-can-end-up-living-at-airports-for-months-even-years-at-a-time-154336\">article</a> about people living years in airports. Written by a history prof from University of Dayton who researches the history of airports (hey, everyone’s gotta have their niche), the article talks about other airport residents, an Iranian refugee who lived in CDG for 18 years, and most recently, an Estonian guy who was transiting through Manila Int’l Airport last March as the shutdowns hit was stuck there for 100 days until the Estonian embassy could get him on a repatriation flight. That one is brutal. I spent 3 hours in that airport a few years back and even, with everything open, it felt 2½ hours too long. Check out the article -- there’s a link in the show notes and at the top of the Twitter and Facebook feeds. It’s a good read.</li><li>Jim McDonough hit the Facebook page, responding to last episode’s margarita instruction story with one of his own.<ul><li>I know how you feel about teaching the bartender how to make a margarita. We ended a week-long trip to Switzerland by staying our last night at a hotel by the Zurich airport. At dinner, we each asked for a Scotch and water. They brought out this big tray, with a bowl of ice cubes, a pitcher of water, a bottle of Scotch, and two glasses. A crowd of hotel employees gathered to watch. Evidently, they don\'t do Scotch and water in Zurich. When I filled the glasses with ice, they gasped. I explained that we live in a hot climate. I went ahead and added Scotch and topped off with a little water, and they winced when I took a sip. A cultural exchange, I guess.</li></ul></li><li>Jim, I love you, man, but I gotta tell you -- I’d probably be wincing with the hotel staff. My usual Scotch order is -- Scotch and glass. But you paid for it (and in Zurich, it’s not going to be a small amount), so even if they couldn’t quite figure out what you wanted, they at least gave you all the tools you needed.</li><li>One of my absolute favorite beer bars, <a href=\"https://brewpublic.com/beer-news/baileys-taproom-and-the-upper-lip-permanently-closes-its-doors/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bailey’s Taproom in Portland, Oregon</a>, has shut off their taps permanently. I started a project in downtown Portland in January 2013. Found Bailey’s the second night I was there and just settled in; my last beer there was my last night in Portland. The owner said “After reopening to limited seating (after the initial shutdown), it was clear that people were not interested in coming downtown. When the PPP money ran out, I decided to close the doors”&nbsp; Another reminder that we should try to be purposeful about where we spend our discretionary dollars, thinking about what businesses we would miss if they closed up and then go out of our way to buy something from them. In my case, it helps rationalize a rather full beer shelf in our pantry.</li><li>After Hertz declared bankruptcy at the end of last May, I predicted in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/06/09/podcast-164-first-post-lockdown-trips-travel-credit-cards/\">episode #164</a> that I’d be paying more attention to the mileage on the cars in the Five Star aisle because that’s the first place I see signs of financial distress — a lot less 500-mile cars and a lot more 24,000-mile cars. And while 24,000 miles on a car doesn’t seem like a lot, remember that rental car miles are kinda like dog years — you gotta multiply them by, like, 7 to get to regular car miles. And true to form, when picking up our Hertz car in PHX at the end of January, every car I looked at had over 24,000 miles, a few with a <strong>lot</strong> more. Will be interesting to see what’s on offer at SAN in a few weeks.&nbsp;</li><li>If you have any status on a Star Alliance or One World carrier, you probably got an email from your carrier about a <a href=\"https://skift.com/2021/03/05/data-breach-affects-more-than-2-million-frequent-flyers-across-airline-alliances/\">data breach at SITA</a>. I got them from United and American saying my name, account number, and status was potentially exposed and that I should change my password, which I did. And then thought about how this is yet another data leak from some unknown player in what is an incredibly fragmented travel tech tool chain. We talked about this back in November in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">episode #169</a> when an obscure Spanish company used by hotels to update information on on-line booking sites leaked 24 GB of names, emails, credit card data and reservation records. And in this case, if you’re not in the airline industry, you probably don’t know about <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SITA_(company)\">SITA</a>. It’s a industry consortium started back in 1949 by 11 European airlines to share infrastructure costs and has expanded to provide all sorts of travel technology including the exchange of passenger data between airlines -- in this case, the exchange of frequent flyer status so that, say, Lufthansa recognizes your elite status with United on your flight with them. It’s one thing when the breach is from a company that you did business with -- the <a href=\"https://www.cnet.com/news/marriott-discloses-new-data-breach-impacting-5-point-2-million-guests/\">Marriott hacks</a> in 2018 and 2020, the 2018 breaches at <a href=\"https://www.theregister.com/2018/09/11/british_airways_website_scripts/\">British Airways</a> and <a href=\"https://www.theregister.com/2018/10/25/cathay_pacific_hacked_up_to_94_million_passenger_deets_exposed/\">Cathay Pacific</a>. But it’s a whole other thing when you find out some unknown third party coughed up your data. But actually, when you get a look at the spaghetti that is travel technology, and see all the places your data is getting sent to -- often small companies that can’t afford state-of-the-art cybersecurity, it’s kinda surprising -- in a sad way -- that not more of this happens.</li><li>Type “plane mask” into the Google search box and one of the first 5 suggestions is “plane mask fight”. Click through and you get what seems to be an endless stream of news reports and cellphone videos of passengers fighting about having to wear a mask during a flight. What is getting a lot less coverage, though I’m hearing snatches of it here and there, are people getting chewed out by their row mates when taking their masks off to eat or drink something, getting something like “Hey, can you not drink during the flight? I’d rather not die for your convenience.”&nbsp; And I’m afraid this is going to get worse as more people start traveling again and aircraft load factors get back into the 80% range. But honestly, both sides are being idiots. You know the rules before you buy your ticket and you’re reminded of them by emails before you travel, and again by gate agents before you board the plane. If you can’t handle the rules -- all of them, not just the ones you agree with -- then don’t walk down the jetway. Drive; charter a jet. But don’t try to bend the rules to your own personal belief system and hassle the rest of us who are just trying to get from Point A to Point B on-time and with the minimum amount of heartache.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on our fab new web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge music -- Tools of the Trade by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial &nbsp;(3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/56512 Ft: Abstract Audio, Mr Yesterday, Martijn de Boer, Speck</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>What\'s New in Travel Insurance</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A little over a year ago, the first coronavirus lockdowns started, and the execution of them was, to be charitable, mostly a mess. Borders were quickly shut; planes grounded. People were stranded in foreign countries with no way home; we just talked about the Estonian guy stuck in Manila airport for 100 days. And all of a sudden, people started paying attention to travel insurance. What was once a check box at the bottom of a booking webpage that most of us clicked “no” on so we could finish our reservation quickly became very important. Last May in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/05/08/podcast-163-new-world-of-travel-insurance-getting-medical-help-on-the-road/\">episode #163</a>, as people were beginning to think about their first post-lockdown trips, we talked about the state of travel insurance. Now, with travel bookings beginning to rise as vaccination rates rise, I wanted to check back in and see what’s changed with travel insurance. So I asked Michael Giusti, senior writer at <a href=\"https://www.insurancequotes.com/\">InsuranceQuotes.com</a>, to come onto the podcast and give us an update:&nbsp;<ul><li>Mark: Michael, last May, Eric Josowitz of <a href=\"https://www.insurancequotes.com/\">InsuranceQuotes.com</a> was on the podcast. We were talking about travel insurance after the initial lockdown. Back then, in the midst of all that travel disruption, many travelers were finding:&nbsp; a) they didn\'t actually know what their insurance covered; they’d just checked the box at the end of their booking process, paid some additional amount moved on; and&nbsp; b) the insurance that they had bought had exclusions for communicable diseases, WHO-declared pandemics, cancellations in cases of fear. And then, after that, insurers stopped offering travel insurance. So, Michael, that was May. This is now the end of February. What\'s the current situation regarding travel insurance?</li><li>Michael: Not many people were thinking about pandemics back when this started. But the few people who were thinking about it were insurers. They saw the SARS epidemic and they started writing in pandemic exclusions from that point on. And then there\'s a second little provision in these insurance policies called the Known Events Provisions. So once the pandemic declared, even if there wasn\'t a specific exclusion, they can turn around and say, “Well, we\'re not going to cover because it\'s now a known event.” It would be like there\'s a hurricane that\'s bearing down on your city and you buy a plane ticket while the hurricane is there, and then you get mad because you can\'t fly. It’s a known event, and so they\'re not going to cover that. So that\'s where we came from. And then, you\'re right, they stopped and they said, “Well, we have no idea what\'s going on, so let’s regroup.”&nbsp; And now they\'ve regrouped, and it\'s really interesting because in a lot of the insurance industry, they\'ve stopped covering pandemics. But in travel insurance, they specifically started including Covid 19, saying “We will cover it under these conditions.”</li><li>Mark: Michael, travel requirements have been changing quickly; the restrictions have been going in and out. I mean, most recently, the need to provide a negative COVID test just to be able to get on a plane.&nbsp; If you look at what Canada did, they basically gave travelers one-week notice of the rule change at the end of 2020. But if you\'ve bought a travel insurance policy when you booked travel six weeks prior, what\'s the best way to cover these late breaking requirements that pop up a week or two before our trip?</li><li>Michael: Two main things... One is the policy language. You do need to say what’s specifically included, what’s specifically excluded? Because whether they\'re going to cover not having a negative test very much depends on the policy language. The other thing that it\'s going to come down to is whether it\'s out of your control. If it\'s something that you\'ve neglected to do, it\'s never going to be covered. The policies I\'ve reviewed, I haven\'t seen any that specifically kick in if you haven\'t got a negative test. So if you\'re worried about that, you really do need to ask the agent or really read that fine print. I do know that if you\'re delayed at security while you\'re being tested, that\'s not covered. So you do have to get there in time to make sure if they do rapid tests on the spot, that you\'re going to have time to get through security.</li><li>Mark: Okay, let me unpack that just a little bit, Michael. So I booked my flight, and I\'ve booked it a month ago. And now I go to take my test 72 hours before departure, and I come up positive. If I\'ve bought the right policy, would that typically cover delay or cover cancellation?</li><li>Michael: Delay is always the first preference. So if we can just push this trip back a week or whatever, that\'s going to be everyone\'s favorite outcome. But there are cancellation provisions where, say, you can\'t move it because the wedding is not going to be moved, in which case the cancellation provisions might kick in.</li><li>Mark: So now let\'s flip that. I\'ve taken my test, it\'s been negative, I get on the plane, I fly down to Costa Rica. And now a week on, I\'ve taken my test to get back into the US and now that test comes out positive. So now, potentially, I can\'t get back into the US. How does insurance help me there?</li><li>Michael: There\'s a couple places where this insurance is going to really beneficial in that situation. First and foremost, the medical provisions in most of these comprehensive policies are going to actually help you pay for your healthcare. Many of them are going to be secondary coverage, meaning they\'re going to want your primary health care to kick in first and then they\'ll jump in and cover anything that\'s not covered. Some of them are primary, especially with the overseas trips. So, that\'s a really nice benefits that are built into a lot of these policies. The other place that will help is, if you\'re delayed because you can\'t travel because of a restriction like that, and that\'s outside of your control, a lot of them will cover a hotel while you\'re waiting and meals while you\'re waiting, and they\'ll get you back home safely. So that\'s actually a really positive outcome that can happen with these policies.</li><li>Mark: Michael, how do I make sure that I\'ve actually got one of those policies? If we go back to the April/May timeframe, people were finding that they didn\'t actually know what they had. How do I make sure I\'ve actually bought that coverage?</li><li>Michael: Well, best case scenario would be if you found a human and you asked them in plain English.</li><li>Mark: Yeah, good luck with that, right?</li><li>Michael: I know, calling 1 800 numbers anymore – that’s not in the cards. What I would do if I was doing that, I’d click through the terms of service and see who\'s offering that policy. If it doesn\'t really go into much detail, or if it\'s really garbly legalese, I’d go through to the provider\'s website. Most of them have FAQ pages that specifically address COVID. So that\'s gonna be probably your best resource.</li><li>Mark: Michael, people are starting to think about big trips as vaccination rates start to step up. You know, the back half of the year, if I\'m thinking about booking, say, a week\'s biking tour in Tuscany or Provence in September/October, what kind of travel insurance should I be looking for? Should I pony up for a cancel- for-any-reason rider? Or are there some cheaper alternatives for more limited scenarios like, “Hey, the EU still isn\'t letting Americans in” but won\'t cover the more generic “Oh, I\'m afraid to travel” kind of reason.</li><li>Michael: The question of “if you\'re afraid to travel” is never going to be covered unless you do have that cancel-for-any-reason policy. But travel insurance is meant to cover things that are out of your control. So you know, if it\'s not laid out your policy, it\'s not gonna be covered. So that\'s kind of the most expensive option. You know, you\'re going to pay the most for a cancel-for-any-reason policy. That middle ground is the standard policy where you say “I\'m taking a little bit of the risk on myself. I\'m going to bravely travel wherever I\'m allowed.” The least expensive option is really kind of a DIY. And a lot of the destinations that I\'m seeing, they\'re waiving cancellation and change fees. And so you can kind of make your DIY travel insurance by only booking places that would let you change for no fee. That\'s kind of the cheapest “I\'m feeling brave” policy. “I\'m feeling skittish” policy Is that cancel-for-any-reason.</li><li>Mark: Super. Michael Giusti, senior writer at <a href=\"https://www.insurancequotes.com/\">InsuranceQuotes.com</a>, thank you very much for joining us. This was a great update.</li><li>Michael: Thank you so much.</li></ul></li><li>Bridge music -- Crazy Love-The Alex &amp; Lang mix by J.Lang (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djlang59/10579 Ft: FHC and Alex &amp; Bradsucks</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Keeping Ahead of Expiring Miles</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Like most road warriors of a certain tenure, I have cards in my desk of some 30-odd frequent traveler programs -- those that I know of -- and am probably a member of another dozen or so that I’ve forgotten about. Of those, I have meaningful balances -- enough for at least one free flight or a free hotel night -- at the Big 4 US carriers, a couple of European carriers, and two of the big hotel chains. Most of the rest are random programs like IcelandAir or AirBaltic or Omni Hotels that I used for a specific trip or project but had some spiff, like seat selection or free WiFi, that was reason enough to put in the effort to sign up.</li><li>When I was traveling every week or so, keeping those main programs active wasn’t a big effort. And if I hadn’t flown, say, BA for a while, I’d code maybe a short American commuter flight, something where my status was a bit meaningless, to my BA account to reset the expiration clock.</li><li>But now, hitting the first anniversary of the first travel lockdown and with business travel still mostly on hold, some of those expiration cliffs are starting to become visible</li><li>Last episode, I talked about getting emails from BA and Iberia warning me of pending Avios expirations, and so I transferred my Iberia points to my BA account. But I can’t tell from the BA website if that was enough activity to change the BA expiration. So I spelunked some more thru the website and found where they call out Airbnb bookings as “recognized activity” that’ll reset the 36-month clock. So, I booked our San Diego Airbnb through a link on BA’s site, just had to enter my BA account number before moving to the booking screen. It’ll be interesting to see if the activity flows seamlessly into my BA account or if I’ll have to chase it down through a manual credit claim. I’m betting on the latter, but am hoping to be pleasantly surprised.</li><li>But that got me cycling through my other accounts. I wasn’t worried about my US carrier accounts. The trend there has been to do away with expiration dates, first Southwest, then Delta, most recently United. American, not surprisingly, is the knuckle dragger, clinging to their stingy 18-month policy, but I flew them last fall to PHL, so I’m fine there.</li><li>But Flying Blue, the KLM/Air France program? I last flew KLM the fall of 2018, so that had to be coming up. I hit the website; those miles were also expiring at the end of this year. And, they, like BA and Iberia, have managed to make resetting that data way overly complex.&nbsp; First, there’s “overall extending activities” which are flights or purchases on their co-branded credit card; they extend <em>all</em> Flying Blue miles by 2 years. “Partial extending activities” extend miles earned through, say, hotel or car rental partners. Please note, says the website, \"‘Partial extending activities’ do not extend the validity of Miles earned from ‘Overall extending activities’\". OK, then. Looking at it this way, I only had 500 miles from that 2018 flight, but 38,000 miles from when I had to quickly stash points from a corporate Amex account before leaving a company. So, a “partial” activity should suffice. I set myself a reminder for Dec 1st to push the minimum 1,000 points from my personal Amex.</li><li>And the expiration periods are kinda all over the place. BA is 36 months; KLM, Marriott, and Hyatt are 2 years; American is 18 months; Hilton is 15 months (weird number); and IHG is the stingiest at 12.&nbsp;</li><li>Seems like there should be a technology solution to this, right? There are a few. If you use TripIt to consolidate your trip itineraries, the $49/year upgrade to the Pro version gives you program tracking. I had used it one year when they upgraded me for free; probably by mistake. AwardWallet is another popular tool, but there too, you need to upgrade to the paid version (a little cheaper at $30/year) to track expirations.</li><li>But beyond the cost, for these programs to work, you have to give them access to your accounts -- your account numbers and passwords. And cycling back to what I was saying at the top of the show, with the travel industry’s kinda poor track record on data protection, and just after having to reset passwords to United, American, Lufthansa, BA, and Iberia because of SITA’s leak, do I really want to put <em>all</em> my frequent traveler logins into one spot? I think a simple spreadsheet on the hard drive of the PC in my office can do the job just fine.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #173</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li>Nothing new on the tech front this month, but I should have the website freshened up by the next episode. I’ve had the current look since the beginning of 2006 courtesy of TravelCommons listener Hilary Baumann and her <a href=\"https://fascinationdesign.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Fascination Design</a> firm. The change is absolutely not a knock against Hilary’s work. It’s just that, after 15 years, I wanted to freshen things up a bit. So look for that by the end of February or beginning of March.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>, as well as asking Alexa, Siri, and Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_173.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #173 — What\'s New in Travel Insurance; Keeping Ahead of Expiring Miles','','inherit','closed','closed','','3417-revision-v1','','','2021-03-12 16:06:32','2021-03-12 21:06:32','',3417,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/12/3417-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3439,1,'2021-03-14 13:42:44','2021-03-14 18:42:44','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\">\n<p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/2D576E07-6546-4D4B-9D64-0E593596FB0C.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2581 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/2D576E07-6546-4D4B-9D64-0E593596FB0C-268x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"268\" height=\"300\"></a></p><figcaption>Selfies with Friends in Tallinn</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>Wrapping up my time in Charlottesville, VA with some \"bleisure\" travel, as well as some pure leisure travel with a quick trip in the Baltics. And a listener talks about the reason for his out-and-back day trip from Washington, DC to Hong Kong. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_157.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #157: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago just off the shores of Lake Michigan toward the end of what has been a record-breaking cold November. The first half of the month here was the coldest in 148 years with an average temperature of 31 degrees, which compares to an average high for November of 50 degrees, and a <em>low</em> of 39. But what’s been worse has been the early snow -- 3½ inches of snow on Halloween (another record) and again on Veterans Day. And by some incredible strokes of luck (as opposed to any foresight on my part), I dodged both snows -- by flying home from Charlottesville, VA the day before Halloween, and scheduling a week off the road the week of November 11. It’s <em>always</em> better to be lucky than good.</li><li>Last week was my last week in Charlottesville, finishing up an 18-week project that started in July. A year ago, when I wrapped up a long run in Charlottesville and didn’t know if/when I’d be back, I took an afternoon to hit Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s home that was only a 10-15 minute drive from the client. It was one of those things I wanted to do, but kept putting off -- I’ll get to it -- and here I was, the last day, and so squoze it in between meetings and calls.</li><li>With that in mind, I did just a touch more planning this year, and on my <em>second-to-last </em>trip, the week between the Halloween and Veterans Day snow storms, I flew in a day early on Monday, but to IAD rather than <a href=\"http://charlottesville-airport.com/\" class=\"aioseop-link\">CHO</a>, instead renting a car, and driving the length of the 105-mile <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Skyline Drive (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.nps.gov/shen/planyourvisit/driving-skyline-drive.htm\" target=\"_blank\">Skyline Drive</a> down to Charlottesville along the tops of the Blue Ridge Mountains through Shenandoah National Park. I was probably a week late for peak leaf peeping, but it was still pretty, especially when looking west over the Shenandoah Valley.&nbsp; I don’t think I would’ve made a special trip to drive Skyline Drive, but since I was in the neighborhood, why not? And it turned out to be just a great drive -- clear blue skies, still some good leaf color, and on a Monday, not a lot of people on that 2-lane road.&nbsp;</li><li>And then last Thursday, flying out of <a href=\"http://charlottesville-airport.com/\" class=\"aioseop-link\">CHO</a> for the last time until I don’t know when, I had to order one last beer at the <a href=\"http://www.gocho.com/concessions/\" class=\"aioseop-link\">Tailwind</a>, the airport bar. For an airport with only 5 gates, the Tailwind always has a great rotation of local craft beers. And there’s a mini-Cheers effect -- maybe not everyone knows my name, but Lyn the bartender recognizes me from my 4-year off-and-on presence in her bar. When I showed back up in July after a 9-month absence, she recognized me right away. So I had to get one last beer from her. I looked at the blackboard and ordered the stout from Blue Mountain Brewery, which was not far from when I ended my trip down Skyline Drive. I was getting over a bit of a cold; the IPA would’ve been a bit rough on the back of my throat. That <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Dark Hollow Stout (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/16352/39417/\" target=\"_blank\">Dark Hollow Stout</a> went down smoother, but what I didn’t quite pick up on is that it’s a 10% alcohol beer. Bit of an eye opener at 11:30am. Made for a good nap on the flight home.</li><li>Bridge Music -- Dive Deep (Loveshadow remix) by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/50488 Ft: Loveshadow</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Mark Skinner sent a note to comments@travelcommons.com a few days ago<ul><li>Hi Mark, Long time listener. So your tag line \"It\'s more about the journey than the destination” hit home to me with what has to be my oddest business trip yet. Tomorrow, I’m flying Washington to Hong Kong, via EWR, arriving Monday afternoon, and then returning on Tuesday morning! I’m basically there for dinner…</li><li>No meetings in Hong Kong, it’s all about taking a cosmic ray detector for NASA on an over-the-pole flight; which the UA flights 179/180 do quite well, EWR-HKG-EWR. They want to understand the amount of radiation from space inside the aircraft cabin. I’ll be in the air longer than on the ground. I’m planning to stay on and to sleep at “normal” east coast times, which means while I’ll have a hotel room by HKG, I’ll be awake then (night in HK, but daytime hours for me).&nbsp; Happily my upgrades to Polaris Business both ways have been confirmed! Otherwise the 16 hr flight would seem even longer…</li></ul></li><li>Oh, my! There’s a nice end-of-year mileage run! I told Mark that his itinerary reminds me of one I did 12 years ago when I flew to London for a lunch meeting to wrap up a project. I flew ORD-LHR, showered in the arrivals lounge, took a car out to Reading, gave the final readout over lunch, hopped back in the car to LHR, and caught the afternoon flight to DEN. I always say that ORD-LHR-DEN run was the epitome of \"stupid\" travel, but Mark has a good reason for his out-&amp;-back.&nbsp; Given the amount of time I’ve spent at 35,000 ft over the past 35 years, I’m not sure I want to know the results of Mark’s measurements.</li><li>United Airlines sent out a link promoting a jet lag app, <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Timeshifter (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.timeshifter.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Timeshifter</a>. Though Mark won’t need one because he’s staying on Eastern Time during his quick jaunt to Hong Kong, I decided to give it a try for my trip to Latvia, Estonia, and Finland. Going east, from the US to Europe, has always been easier for me. My usual routine - I skip the seat-back entertainment for 4-6 hrs of shut-eye (I wouldn’t call it true sleep) on the flight over, eat breakfast when I arrive even if I’m not hungry, get outside as much as possible, take a 30-minute nap after check-in, push through until 11:30pm that first night, and then set an alarm for, say, 7am the next morning. That usually resets my body clock and I’m pretty much good-to-go for the rest of the trip. Timeshifter added two things to my routine: starting to shift to destination time a few days before leaving, moving bedtime and wake-up time an hour earlier each day - going to bed at 10 instead of 11 and getting up at 5 instead of 6 the next morning. The second thing was taking melatonin before going to bed, which I tried by I’m not sure that it really does anything for me. It’s also a well-designed app that notifies you about things like when to seek out direct sunlight and when to start and stop with caffeinated drinks. I used the free first plan. Not sure I’ll pay the $9.99 for another plan, though.</li><li>And speaking of caffeinated drinks, last week, staying at the Omni Hotel in Charlottesville, they gave me two door hangers -- one for each night -- that I could exchange for a drink delivered to my door in the morning, or a beer at the bar in the evening. The first night, since I’d already had a margarita at dinner, I skipped the bar for something in the morning. Looking at the door hanger, my choices were coffee, tea, and Red Bull. Wow. Guess they’re catering to all kinds of morning afters. It wasn’t a big margarita, so I went for the cup of tea.</li><li>Following up on last episode’s carry-on discussion, about buying a new bag to meet Finnair and AirBaltic’s size and weight limits, My new <a href=\"https://amzn.to/32lIURe\">TravelPro Maxlite bag</a> worked like a charm. I packed a week of clothes and didn’t tagged by any gate agents. It even fit in the overheads of the ATR prop jobs that hopscotched us around between Riga, Tallinn, and Helsinki. On one of our passes through Helsinki, I saw an AirBaltic luggage sizer and scale by an empty customer service desk, so I decided to check the bag out. It was a bit of a force fit into the sizer and it weighed in at 8½ kilos, just a bit over the limit. Glad I didn’t catch a gate agent’s eye.</li><li>And since we’ve been talking about carry-on luggage over the past couple of episodes, so I pulled together all those threads into a new <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/11/06/how-to-choose-the-best-carry-on-luggage/\">“how to choose a new carry-on” blog post</a>. It went up at the beginning of the month, updating the one from last February, just in time for the Christmas shopping season. If you or a frequent traveling loved one needs a new carry-on, check it out, complete with Amazon Affiliate links if you want to toss a buck TravelCommons’ way.</li><li>And speaking of prop jobs, I definitely misfired on my Finnair seat choices between Helsinki and Riga. I was more focused on choosing seats for the long flights between Chicago and Helsinki, and didn’t pay much attention to the 45-minute flight to and from Riga. So just picked one off the seat map where there would be with no one next to me - 5C both ways - which, as it turned out, was empty for a reason, because it was right next to the propeller. I had forgotten how loud those propellers get on take-off. I popped on my Bose Noise Cancelling headphones (which, I noticed, are starting to show a good bit of wear; so I might be doing a bit of Black Friday/Cyber Monday shopping) on taxi, but when the pilot revved up the propellers, the noise cancellation started to cut in and out. The headphones were having to generate huge “anti-waves” to cancel the prop noise and the battery was too low to support the load. Luckily, I always carry extra triple-AAA batteries in the case. But while I was swapping the battery, the noise, the oscillation pressure was killer. I couldn’t get those headphones back over my ears fast enough. If you go to the <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">TravelCommons’ Instagram page</a>, you can see <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/p/B37C8LVnRkd/\">a bit of video</a> out the window of my HEL-RIX flight complete with a slow-motion propeller.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music - Drops of H2O ( The Filtered Water Treatment ) by J.Lang (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djlang59/37792 Ft: Airtone</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Notes from the Baltics: Riga, Latvia and Tallinn, Estonia</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>At the end of October, right after pushing out <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/10/14/podcast-156-airport-satisfaction-escooters-smaller-luggage/\">the last episode</a>, my son Andrew and I flew east for a week hopscotching through the Baltics -- Riga, Latvia; Tallinn, Estonia; and Helsinki, Finland. Why the Baltics? I’m not really sure. I’m sure we had a good rationale when we first thought of the trip a few years ago, but now, it wasn’t much more than “here are a few kinda outta-the-way countries that might be cool to wander around.”&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>Andrew booked our flights -- Finnair from ORD to Riga with a connection in Helsinki. The Finnair service was fine, a pretty standard Airbus A330 but with lots of polka-dot Marimekko patterns on everything. I’d forgotten they were a Finnish company. I skipped using my UK passport one last time for a quick pass down the EU passport lane, deciding not to strand Andrew in the “everyone else” passport path, which led to an unexpected grilling from the Finnish border control cop about the details of my itinerary. Then he spent a good bit of time paging back and forth through my passport stamps. Can’t think of what he found interesting -- the Chinese visa, the two Indian visas, maybe the Moroccan stamps from that day trip to Tangiers 3 years ago? Eventually, he decided to put his Helsinki stamp right next to August’s Krakow stamp and then open the gate so I could walk through.&nbsp;</li><li>I’m not quite sure what I expected from Riga, but it turned out to be a nice, mid-sized city. Maybe it shouldn’t have, but I was surprised at how well-preserved the city center is, especially the buildings with the over-the-top Art Nouveau edifices with huge faces over the doorways and carved figures holding up window sills. It took some money, though. Down by the river, I saw two buildings side-by-side, the one on the right recently refinished and repainted; the one on the left was still waiting its turn, but time is running out. The Art Nouveau look was there, but muted under the grime and soot and flaking plaster; with some relief decorations on the window balcony worn away.</li><li>I was surprised, though, at how empty Riga’s old town was in the middle of a Tuesday. The streets were empty. Where was everyone? Maybe across the river where it looks like they’ve built new modern office towers. I was glad I didn’t book our hotel down here.</li><li>The <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riga_Central_Market\">Central Market</a> down river from the Old Town was much more lively, and also where Riga stopped looking so Scandi and started looking a bit more post-Soviet. The busses and streetcars orbiting the market looked left over from the early ‘90’s. But I liked it. Most of the people here seemed to be doing their own grocery shopping -- unlike food markets in places like Paris and Barcelona that seem to have more people taking pictures of fish than buying them. But the place is so big that I don’t see that it could survive just on food porn tourism. They repurposed a set of World War I zeppelin hangars -- one for fishmongers, one of butchers, one for greengrocers, and then part of one with some restaurants where Andrew and I made lunch from a round loaf of Uzbeki bread and some tortellini-looking dumplings filled with lamb and venison. It was pretty good.</li><li>Then it was time to go search out some beer taprooms which had us walking sorta northeast, on a straight line away from the river, away from Old Town, across the canal and parks and past the embassies that sorta ring Old Town, and back into a less renovated landscape of storefronts and converted factories, some places run down, others with the hipster-signaling strands of naked edison bulbs over wood tables. Wandering into a courtyard off a busy street, we found&nbsp; <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Labietis (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.labietis.lv/en\" target=\"_blank\">Labietis</a> that had wide and interesting mix of beers -- herb beers and fruit beers, as well as the usual batch of IPAs. The names were interesting, also. <a href=\"https://www.labietis.lv/en/our-beers/fog\">Migla</a>, which they translated as “Fog” had hemp and peppermint in a light pale ale. Not sure it was my top pick, but I gotta give them props for trying something different.</li><li>It was a 45-minute prop job flight from Riga to Tallinn on AirBaltic. I did have a bit of a travel snob realization, though -- when everyone is getting on the same bus for a plane, boarding status is kinda meaningless. Anyhow, AirBaltic was fine service -- no hassles with carryon luggage, no annoying on-board upsells, though with only 45 minutes, there’s not too much damage they could do. Heading for the cab rank at Tallinn, I saw the same warning signs they had at Riga airport - there’s no regulated taxi fees so be careful which taxi you get into. At Riga, we used one of the airport-approved cabs with a meter. At Tallinn, we used <a href=\"https://bolt.eu/en/\">Bolt</a>, a ride-sharing app that looks a lot like Lyft. I used earlier in Krakow and had good luck with it, and it worked fine in Tallinn too - €4 from the airport to Old Town seemed a pretty good deal.</li><li>I can see why Tallinn is popular for long weekends. The Old Town is just that -- winding cobblestone streets, lots of churches and restored old buildings, and lots of shops in those old buildings. It’s up on a hill, so lots of scenic overlook Instagram moments. You could easily spend a couple of days wandering the streets, popping in and out of churches and museums… and shops and bars.</li><li>But after a half-day, I was ready to breach the Old Town’s walls to see what else there was to Tallinn. The first stop was a market by the train station - <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Balti Jaama Turg (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.visitestonia.com/en/baltic-station-market\" target=\"_blank\">Balti Jaama Turg</a>. Nowhere near the size of Riga’s Central Market, we strolled around until, after the 4th or 5th fruit stand and butcher stall, our minds wandered to lunch. We bought a couple different kinds of Uzbeki breads from one stand and a couple of beers from another. The breads were stuffed with some sliced meat cooked in a warming, floral spice, maybe cinnamon. It was very good, though I never got the story of why all the Uzbeki food up here.</li><li>We walked out and around the train station, and through a collection of restaurants in small square buildings, old cargo containers and a couple of railcars. As much as I liked the Uzbeki breads, I wish I’d seen these places first. On the other side was something called <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Telliskivi Creative City. (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://telliskivi.cc/en/\" target=\"_blank\">Telliskivi Creative City.</a> It looked like an old office or administrative building had been converted to a kinda “makers” mall, where people were doing small-scale clothing or leather work in the back of their space and selling it out of the front. We took a quick pass through it though didn’t see anything we wanted to haul back to the US.</li><li>We walked kinda north-northeast, through the<a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\" Kalamaja neighborhood (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.visittallinn.ee/eng/visitor/discover/articles-guides/kalamaja\" target=\"_blank\"> Kalamaja neighborhood</a> toward the harbor. Kalamaja was the exact opposite of the Old Town - wood buildings vs. stone; straight paved streets vs. windy cobblestones; groups of flats vs. castles and government buildings. A few blocks off the harbor we hit the <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Põhjala Brewery &amp; Tap Room (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://pohjalabeer.com/taproom\" target=\"_blank\">Põhjala Brewery &amp; Tap Room</a>. It was in what looked like a very recently renovated stone building; workers were in the midst of renovating the building next to it. Where Labietis felt very native -- funky space tucked away behind some kinda decaying buildings -- Põhjala could’ve been any new taproom in the US -- big U-shaped bar, open kitchen, BBQ on the menu. The beer was very good; the BBQ maybe less successful, but having lived in Memphis and Dallas, I’m a bit of a BBQ snob. The smoked trout dish, though -- that was great.&nbsp;</li><li>We walked back towards town on a path that ran along the harbor. There were lots of new apartment buildings across the road -- 3-4 stories with floor-to-ceiling windows and enclosed balconies facing the harbor. There wasn’t a lot there… yet. But you could see it coming.</li><li>We stopped at the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/ubajahumal/\">Uba Ja Humal</a> beer store before heading back through the Old Town walls. We walked through the front store to the taproom in the back, complete with a DJ who was set up between the back coolers. Locals would pull a can out of a cooler, pay for it at the bar, get a glass, and sit down at a table with their friends. Tallinn had that kind of easy-going vibe.</li><li>Both cities have done a good job renovating and preserving their Old Towns, and now seem to be expanding past that, repurposing older, maybe Soviet-era buildings to something a bit hipper, edgier (?), less traditional. I came away liking Tallinn a bit more than Riga, but maybe it’s because they’re a little bit further down that hipper, less traditional path.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #157</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li> And if you check out the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> page, you can click thru to highlights from Riga and Tallinn.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_157.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #157 — Notes from the Baltics: Riga, Latvia and Tallinn, Estonia','','inherit','closed','closed','','2575-revision-v1','','','2021-03-14 13:42:44','2021-03-14 18:42:44','',2575,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/14/2575-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3441,1,'2021-03-14 13:46:40','2021-03-14 18:46:40','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\">\n<p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/IMG_0159.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1402\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/IMG_0159-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"225\" height=\"300\"></a></p><figcaption>This Won\'t Help Your Flier Sat Score</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>In this episode, we talk with Michael Taylor, author of <a href=\"https://www.jdpower.com/business/press-releases/2019-north-america-airport-satisfaction-study\">JD Power\'s 2019 Airport Satisfaction Survey</a>, about what keeps fliers happy. I also talk about what I like about eScooters, shopping for a smaller bag for upcoming flights on a Euro budget airline, and how Hertz\'s contract updates remind me to delete my Bluetooth pairings in rental cars. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_156.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #156: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago in the middle of what looks like a 6-week run of solid travel. Traveled to DC, Charlottesville, and Nashville, in that order, in the 3 weeks since the last episode. Heading back to Charlottesville this week, then a week hopscotching through the Baltics with my son Andrew -- Riga, Latvia; Talinn, Estonia; Helsinki, Finland -- and then back down to Charlottesville. </li><li> I flew Southwest on my non-Charlottesville flights -- into DC Reagan and Nashville -- and United again to Charlottesville. The Southwest flights went smoothly, except for trying to get to Chicago Midway for the DC flight. The Uber driver didn’t follow the app’s recommended route; instead, he pretended he was a cab driver and took the normal route down the Stevenson Expressway which was crawling due to an earlier accident. I wasn’t paying attention - first time I’ve had an Uber driver freelance on me - and didn’t notice he’d skipped the exit to the faster path until it was too late. We made our flight, but not without a bit of hustle through Midway. No tip, let alone a 5-star review for that guy.</li><li> Southwest flies into the old Terminal A at what I still call Washington National. I went to college in DC in the early ‘80’s, before it was named for President Reagan and when Terminal A was pretty much all that was there. I had forgotten what a long schlepp it is from that terminal to the Metro station. I remember way back then asking someone why they built the Metro station so far away. “Because they’re going to build new terminals right across from it.” Which they finally did, some 20 years after that Metro station was opened. Sometimes it seems that airport planning horizons are not in years, or even decades; feels more like they’re planning in lifetimes.</li><li> In between the Southwest flights, my United flight continued the string of disruptions trying to get into or out of Charlottesville. I checked that my flight was on-time before calling an Uber -- no weather delays at either end, United and FlightAware apps say the inbound plane is on-time…. Then, halfway to ORD, I get the text from United; a 2½-hour delay for crew arrival. What!? The next text “Because of crew scheduling disruptions this evening in Chicago, we’ve assigned your flight a new crew…. We know this delay wasn’t in your plans today, so we appreciate your patience.” No shit a 2½-hour delay wasn’t in my plans, especially when it’s because United stole our original crew because they screwed up their scheduling. And really United, you can’t find another pilot in ORD, your largest hub, that’s a little closer? I tell you what else isn’t in my plans, flying United to Charlottesville this week. </li><li> Bridge Music -- <em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/stefsax/7785\" target=\"_blank\">Awel</a> </em>by stefsax (c) copyright 2006 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/stefsax/7785 </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>That’s the sound of my new <a href=\"https://www.marriott.com/loyalty/member-benefits/titanium.mi\">Marriott Bonvoy Lifetime Titanium Elite</a> card hitting the kitchen counter. The mailer package was appropriately upscale, but the sheer weight of the thing stunned me. I put a quick video of it on the TravelCommons Facebook page. Cate Rose commented “Hope it scans into your Stocard app so you don’t actually have to carry it in your luggage allowance”. My thought exactly.</li><li> I got a note that Chicago’s electric scooter pilot ends tomorrow, which made me realize that I’ve seen them in just about every city I’ve been to this summer -- Budapest, Krakow, Charlottesville, Nashville, Washington, DC. I think the only places I didn’t see them were in Scotland and Ireland. They’re handy; because they’re dockless, I’ve found they have a wider distribution than, say, a traditional docked bike share and you can take them directly to your planned destination. And they’re a good fill-in between walking and an Uber or a Lyft. And, they’re fun! When I was in DC a couple of weeks ago, I was in the <a href=\"https://washington.org/visit-dc/neighborhoods/brookland\">Brookland</a> neighborhood in the Northeast part of town, and wanted to try out a new taproom there, <a href=\"http://www.rightproperbrewing.com/what-we-do\">Right Proper Brewing</a>. Now Brookland is not the nicest part of DC. It’s much better than when I went to school there, but there are still iffy parts. I wasn’t completely comfortable walking down to Right Proper from the Brookland Metro stop, but it seemed too short for an Uber ride and there was no bus that went down there. But, there was a scooter a couple of blocks from the Metro station. Running down 9th St at 10 mph felt a bit better than speedwalking at 4. And could leave it right in front of the taproom. It was exactly what I wanted. Two problems I’ve seen -- first, too many people riding them on the sidewalk, especially in DC. Maybe because I bike a lot in Chicago, I’m comfortable in bike lanes and navigating around cars on the street and keeping an eye out for potholes. I actually wouldn’t be comfortable riding a scooter on the sidewalk; I’d be afraid of popping a pedestrian who suddenly walked in front of me. To me, cars are much more predictable than pedestrians. The second thing, the need to have half-a-dozen scooter apps on your phone. In Chicago, there are 8 scooter companies, in addition to Uber and Lyft’s scooters. And you need to download their app to find and rent their scooter. Which meant that when I wanted to find a scooter near the Brookland Metro stop, I’d have to cycle thru 5 or 6 apps. Except I didn’t because I found an app called <a href=\"https://scootermap.com/\">Scooter Map</a> that shows all the scooter brands on one map. I think it’s targeted at folks who are making money recharging scooters (not quite sure how that works) but it worked fine for me. I fired it up and saw all the different scooters that were near me. One caveat -- I’ve only ridden these scooters on sunny days. I’m not sure how enthusiastic I’d be riding one in the rain or snow. </li><li> For the Baltics trip next week, we’re taking Finnair out and back from Chicago, an early morning ferry ride from Talinn to Helsinki, and then AirBaltic for everything else. Which then got me thinking about luggage sizes, because I bought my current bag, the <a href=\"https://www.swissarmy.com/us/en&amp;eoq=!t/Products/Travel-Gear/Werks-Traveler-5-0/collection/trg-collection/travelgear_collection_TRA-C2955\">Victorinox Werks</a> 22-incher, to use every last inch of US carry-on allowance. It even catches some side-eye from American and United where I have status. So I didn’t figure it’d fit into any European budget carrier’s luggage sizer. Looking up <a href=\"https://www.airbaltic.com/en/cabin-baggage\">AirBaltic’s carry-on allowance</a>, my Victorinox is a couple of inches too tall and an inch too deep. But what really got me shopping for a new bag for this trip is the weight. AirBaltic has an 8 kg/17½ lbs weight limit. In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/05/30/podcast-121-tsa-lines-my-luggage-is-where/\">episode #121</a>, I talked about the baggage strip tease exercise with Wow Air to make their 7 kg/15 lbs carry-on weight limit. I’d take my bag off the scale, pull some clothes out, zip it back up, and put it back on the scale. Still too heavy. Repeat 3 more times until the agent takes pity — or just gets tired of me — and gives me the approval tag to put on my bag. After which I walk about 10 feet, open my bag and put my armful of clothes back in. My Victorinox is a bit over 7 lbs, so not only is it too tall, the bag itself uses over 40% of the weight allowance. And even though I’ve talked before about how much I hate shopping for luggage, I searched for a smaller, lighter bag that wouldn’t cost a fortune, since my Victorinox will stay my primary bag. I landed on the the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/32lIURe\">TravelPro Maxlite 5</a>. I, or rather my daughter has a good history with TravelPro. It fit the AirBaltic dimensions and is one of the lighter bags I saw at 5.4 lbs which is down to 30% of the 8 kg weight allowance. It also meets three of the key suitcase criteria I laid down in the “how to shop for a suitcase” topic in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/01/25/podcast-137-new-years-travel-status-tips-how-to-shop-for-a-suitcase/\">episode #137</a> -- it’s black, it’s a 2-wheeler so no lost space on extended spinner wheels, and the inside is, for the most part, a wide open box without clothes hangers or a bunch of zip compartments. I’m taking it to Charlottesville tomorrow for a shakedown cruise.</li><li> Three years ago, back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/11/22/podcast-125-uber-driver-stories-overseas-for-the-election/\">episode #125</a>, in a Travel Security tip, I talked about the need to delete your phone’s Bluetooth pairing when you return a rental car. Usually when I go to pair my phone, I’ll first go through and delete 3-5 pairings before pairing my own. And they all have personalized names like “Timmy’s iPhone”. And most phones by default will download your contacts to the car when paired, so leave all of their contacts and phone numbers in their rental. That is just bad in so many ways. And now Hertz has gotten around to noticing it. In their newest rental terms and conditions, they specifically carve out any liability from you leaving a Bluetooth pairing behind. It’s a pain to remember, especially if you’re running for a flight, but as you’re taking that last scan around the car for your sunglasses and iPhone, remember not to leave your identity behind either.</li><li>Bridge Music -- Black Rainbow by Pitx (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Pitx/19513 Ft: ERH, acclivity</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Keeping Fliers Happy </strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A couple of weeks ago, JD Power released their 2019 North American Airport Satisfaction Study.&nbsp; The headline - “North American Airports Struggle to Keep Travelers Happy Amid Construction Delays and Surging Passenger Volumes” caught my eye, so I reached out to the study’s author, Michael Taylor, to dig into it a bit more. And so last Friday, we had a wide-ranging conversation. I was going to edit it down, but as I listened to it, I couldn’t think about what to cut. So here it is in its entirety…</li><li>Interview with <a href=\"https://www.jdpower.com/business/content/michael-taylor\">Michael Taylor</a>, Travel Intelligence Lead at J.D. Power</li><li>Thanks again to Michael for taking the time to talk to us. Here\'s the <a href=\"https://www.jdpower.com/business/press-releases/2019-north-america-airport-satisfaction-study\">link</a> to the study summary on the JD Power website.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #156</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li> And if you check out the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> page, you can click thru to highlights from my trips to Budapest and Ireland. And if you follow it, you can catch some pics from next week’s trip through the Baltics.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_156.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #156 — Airport Satisfaction; eScooters; Smaller Luggage','','inherit','closed','closed','','2543-revision-v1','','','2021-03-14 13:46:40','2021-03-14 18:46:40','',2543,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/14/2543-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3443,1,'2021-03-14 15:33:31','2021-03-14 20:33:31','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\">\n<p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/IMG_1038.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2529 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/IMG_1038-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a></p><figcaption>Polish health food</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>Didn\'t have any problems with the 787\'s flying 4,800 miles to Krakow or back from Budapest, but the 560-mile regional jet flights between Chicago and Charlottesville, VA have been causing me no end of hassles. We talk about this, revisit our discussions about iPhone dual SIM capability and American Airlines\' MD-80 retirement. And then go deep on my very non-keto-friendly dive into Krakow and Budapest street food.&nbsp; All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_155.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #155: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago on an off-travel week; taking a break this week after a couple of weeks of weather-induced hassles -- that in spite of completely avoiding Hurricane Dorian. Instead, it’s been a steady stream of morning thunderstorms hitting ORD and jacking it up for the rest of the day. That and flying regional jets, which we’ve said before, are often…. problematic. In the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/08/13/podcast-154-will-we-still-love-uber-when-the-prices-go-up/\">last episode</a>, I talked about having to shift my outbound evening flight from CHO to RIC because of morning thunderstorms at ORD. The last two weeks have been different variations on the theme. The Tuesday after Labor Day, I was on the bus to the L heading to ORD for an 8:30am flight (because the Uber and Lyft wait times were insane -- God, I miss my old Mongolian ex-taxi driver) when I got a text that my American Eagle flight was cancelled. Still on the bus, I called American’s Platinum line. They told me what I already knew -- no other American options until the end of the day. I told them that since I was coming home the next day (Weds), I needed to get to Charlottesville that morning. “What about the 9am United flight?” I asked her, “I’m already on my way to ORD.” “Let me call United to transfer the ticket,” she offered. I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised. Over the past few years, I’ve seen airlines more and more reluctant to lose \\ revenue by moving you to another carrier, but there was none of that coming from this American agent. Our call kept going as I got off the bus and walked down the stairs into the subway stop, but she got everything squared away. Now that United flight ended up being delayed an hour, but it eventually got me to Charlottesville.</li><li>Last Friday morning in Charlottesville, I woke up, and scrolling thru Twitter, saw <a href=\"https://twitter.com/NWSChicago\">NWS Chicago</a> -- Nat’l Weather Service -- tweeting about severe thunderstorms, so when I got the text from United at 9am delaying my 1pm flight 45 minutes, I wasn’t surprised. No big deal -- I’ll just get a second beer at the Radar Bar. But then, as these things tend to do it, it didn’t stop there. An hour later, another text from United -- the delay doubled to 90 minutes.  But then at noon, another text -- the delay is down to an hour -- shortly followed by another text -- it’s back up to 90 minutes. I pull up <a href=\"https://flightaware.com/\">FlightAware</a>; I’m not going to the airport until the inbound plane leaves the gate at ORD. Ten minutes later, I see it push back. OK, that should be the end of the delay cascade. I order an Uber and head to the airport. Halfway there, another text -- now my flight isn’t leaving until 3:30pm, 2½ hours late. Immediately followed by a text with a 3:57 departure time. I get out of the car and head to the gate agent. What’s going on? Has the plane left ORD yet? Unlike the American agent, the United agent -- or maybe she worked for Air Wisconsin, the United Express partner, is evasive -- don’t know what’s going on; no other options; everything else is oversold, even in Richmond. I back out of line and call United’s Premiere desk. Yes, there’s availability out of Richmond and DC. Richmond’s a little closer and has a helluva lot less of a rush hour, so I move over to the 5:30pm flight (the United agent said “I think you’re making the right decision”), book a one-way rental, and head out to the parking lot. There’s a mist starting to settle in over the airport. This can’t be good. It’s an uneventful 90-minute drive to Richmond. I sit at the Sam Adams Brewhouse bar and have a beer, and then another. This flight leaves on time -- it’s also a regional jet, but it’s been running up and down the East Coast, so today, it’s running on time -- getting me into ORD at 6:50pm, about 5 hours after my original flight was supposed to land. I fire up the United app and look up the status of that flight -- it still hasn’t left. It didn’t leave until 9pm and then only made it as far as Washington-Dulles -- 95 miles up the road.</li><li>Bridge Music —  &nbsp; I Will Writhe by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/26739 Ft: Soundprank </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>In contrast to my regional jet challenges, our trip at the end of August to Krakow and Budapest went much smoother. We flew LOT, the Polish airline, the whole way, including the last leg, BUD-ORD non-stop. I was kinda surprised by that leg -- a Transatlantic leg that didn’t go through Poland -- but there must be enough traffic on that route. A week before we left, American announced their own non-stop between ORD and BUD starting next year. Both airlines do/will use 787’s on the route. Perhaps it’s one of the “long, thin routes” that the 787 was designed to unlock. Anyways, all three flights on LOT -- 787’s on the long legs, and a Dash-8 prop job on the hop from Krakow to Budapest -- were reasonable. I thought the 787’s “morning wake-up” mode for breakfast -- where the cabin lights fade up while the darkened windows lighten -- was a pleasant change to usual “light on and PA announcement” approach. It was my first trip to Poland. Krakow Airport is nice -- new, compact, with train station into the city. It was a good trip.</li><li>I talked in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/08/13/podcast-154-will-we-still-love-uber-when-the-prices-go-up/\">last episode</a> about trying out my iPhone XS’s dual SIM capability in Hungary and Poland. I did the pre-work before I left -- working through a couple of chat sessions to move my US AT&amp;T number to the internal eSIM so I use the physical SIM slot for my UK EE pre-paid SIM. En route -- somewhere over the Faroe Islands I think -- I went into Settings and made my UK line the main voice and data line, leaving my US line open for phone calls and texts. It seemed to work as designed -- I replied to a couple of texts on my US line from my sister, but it looks like everything else went out over the UK line with the 3 GB for £10 plan. I’ll hold final judgement until I get this month’s bill from AT&amp;T, but from what I could see on their website, it looks like it worked. It was a nice change to only have one phone and not to have to remember to check my other phone every night. The new version of the iPhone operating system -- iOS 13 -- is supposed to have some improvements for dual SIM, but I was happy with it as it stands -- but check back with me after I get my AT&amp;T bill.</li><li>And, of course, I extend that 3 GB by hitting the WiFi in coffee shops and hotels, which is where we circle back to one of my top travel security tips -- use a VPN when on WiFi. I used to think that as long as I was hitting encrypted web sites I was OK -- it used to be that you’d see HTTPS in the address bar apparently Google and Apple think that’s too much for us to process; they’ve replaced it with a picture of a lock; Firefox still shows the full address, though. But it seems that more and more security breaches are taking advantage of obscure misconfigurations that get around basic security. And with major hotel chains regularly coughing up millions of credit card numbers, it seems a bit unreasonable to expect the staff at a small coffee shop or local hotel to be up-to-date on their router patching. So I have VPN clients on my iPhone, my Android tablet, and my MacBook Air. I usually forget to turn them on if I’m doing a quick check of Twitter or Google Maps while in line somewhere, but if I’m doing any sort of browsing session on public WiFi these days, I’ll fire it up.&nbsp;</li><li>Packing for this trip meant rummaging around for European plug adapters. Not voltage converters -- I don’t use them because all the electronics can handle 110 and 240 volt -- just the two blade-to-two round adapters. I’d rounded up my UK adapters for our June trip to Ireland and Scotland, but now I needed the European adapters -- the two round plug ones.&nbsp; I found the UK ones and a random South African one but I couldn’t find the European ones anywhere. Probably because I’d left them all behind in Brittany in March. So I got on Amazon (as one does when they need some random thing in a hurry) and ordered a box of 6. I only needed one, but given my history, 6 would keep me for a year or two. I ordered white adapters because that’s what popped up in Amazon. Which was OK in those hotels with black outlets, but not so great for white outlets. I took 2 and came home with 2, but only by sheer luck. At least twice, I was walking out of the room with my bag and only then noticed an adapter still plugged in, hiding in a recessed white outlet. I really need colored plug adapters. And not in tasteful colors; something gaudy, like a purple or pink or chartreuse. Maybe I’ll spray paint the ones I have before my next trip.&nbsp;</li><li>Leonard -- no last name -- commented on the last episode with a link to a Dallas TV station’s coverage of the last American Airlines MD-80 flight; appropriately flying from DFW to ORD, a route and a plane that contributed heavily to my Advantage Gold status -- when that was the highest level -- back in 1985. There’ve been a lot of stories covering the retirement; people waxing nostalgic -- though not too much since I haven’t heard of any big jump in Delta MD-80 bookings. They still fly almost 100 of them. I have seen a couple of quotes about not wanting to sit in the last rows because of the noise from the side-mounted engines. It’s true. Not even the Bose noise-cancelling headphones could handle all the engine and vibration noise. They were also bad seats because there were no windows; all you’d see would be the engine cowling and the window would make the noise even worse. And those times when I ended up in those seats -- usually last-minute bookings between ORD and DFW -- my mind would sometimes wander -- if the engine next to my head blows up, will the shrapnel blow out or blow into the cabin. I never heard of such a catastrophic failure on an MD-80 -- but that didn’t keep me from wondering.&nbsp;</li><li>Standing in the TSA PreCheck queue, watching the single screener who was checking boarding passes and IDs have to ping-pong between the regular and PreCheck lines, I wondered what was keeping US airports from installing the automated boarding pass-checking gates that I’ve passed thru at mid-sized European airports like Budapest and Krakow and Edinburgh. I got it -- they’re only checking for valid boarding passes; they’re not examining IDs -- but there’s got to be something there that can improve TSA efficiency <em>and</em> the traveler experience. Watching this poor woman, my mind fast-forwarded to October next year when the TSA starts enforcing the Real ID requirement, the time wasted arguing with people who travel maybe once a year and so didn’t go thru the additional hassle of getting a Real ID-compliant driver’s license. Note to self - don’t book any travel in October 2020. </li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com. </li><li>Bridge Music -- August (Reggae Rework) by el-B (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/elB/16075 Ft: Calendargirl </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Street Food in Poland and Hungary </strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Over-tourism is still a big topic in the tourism industry. Iceland seems to be cooling down after the Wow Air bankruptcy, but the photo from May of the queue to summit Mount Everest has become the new icon of the problem faced there and at places like Venice, Barcelona, and Machu Pichu. And it drives an interesting dichotomy -- travelers chasing the iconic Instagram picture -- sort of a virtual souvenir for this “pics or it didn’t happen” age -- while at the same time craving “authenticity” -- which is where, I think, the current glorification of street food is coming from. Wanting to experience something that you can only get in this place -- and, of course, post a picture of it.</li><li>Parking the cynicism for a sec -- if you’re queuing up (hopefully with some locals, not just tourists), doing the point-and-shoot ordering, and then eating it there on the street, it does create a very specific moment and memory. I vividly remember buying takoyaki, basically octopus croquettes, from a street vendor in Osaka; getting into the queue for a food stall in a Beijing hutong, the only non-Chinese guy, not knowing what for and getting this phenomenal crunchy scallion pancake; sending Andrew over to a vendor on a sidewalk in Hoi An, Vietnam for black sesame soup; folding up a slice of pizza in New York City in mid-bar crawl; and, as talked about a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/podcast-151-traveler-data-leaks-brittany-street-food/\">few episodes back</a>, slurping oysters on the Cancale sea wall on the Brittany coast.</li><li>So while we weren’t on a street food hunt in Poland and Hungary, our willingness, actually desire to eat pretty much whatever we came across without any filters -- no worries about keto or paleo or gluten-free diets -- led us to some good street food -- even though there were days I really felt the need to double down on the statins.</li><li>Probably the most memorable bit of street food came our first day in Krakow. We landed around 9am, took a taxi to the hotel, checked in, brushed our teeth, and walked up to the Old Square where I trawled through the vendor stalls. I came to a full stop at a small stand at the end of an aisle. An older couple had a huge pan over a wood fire. The pan had a metal divider down the middle; one half of the pan was frying onions; the other half, sliced kielbasa. I watched a couple people order and then stepped up. The man sliced a large, thick piece of bread off a round loaf, spread a thick smear of lard with cracklings, put down a layer of sliced kielbasa, finishing it off with fried onions. All for 13 złoty -- or about 3 and a half bucks. I don’t know what left more of an impression -- the size and heft of what he handed me or the staying power of the layer of pork fat it left on my lips. I’ll put a picture of it in the show notes.</li><li>We walked straight from there to a small square behind St Mary’s Basilica for the pierogi festival. There were 20-30 stands selling their selection of pierogis. Not sure if pierogis strictly qualify as a street food, but I queued up at the most popular ones and did point-&amp;-shoot ordering through most of their selection. I skipped the sweet pierogis -- the chocolate-banana and the blueberry ones just didn’t say “pierogi” to me -- but I still ended up with 5-6 from each stand -- from traditional onion and potato, to goose and duck and wild boar-filled ones. I tried to avoid pointing at one stand’s Mexican pierogi, but somehow it ended up on my plate. This was a pretty full-contact Day One. I needed a nap.</li><li>Chicago has a large Polish population -- somewhere in the range of 1-1.5 million Polish immigrants their descendants in the metro area, which, depending on who you read, is the largest Polish metropolitan area outside of Poland. So we get our share of Polish food and I wanted to try a few things I recognized. The first thing we hunted down was a pączki -- basically a Polish jelly doughnut. In Chicago, Pączki Day is Fat Tuesday and you see pączkis everywhere -- the grocery stores, bakeries. Asking around, Gorące Pączki -- “Hot Donuts” in English -- was the consensus recommendation in the Old Town. We rolled up there a couple of times and came away, I gotta say, disappointed. Even Chicago grocery store pączkis are better.</li><li>That weekend, we were staying with friends in the hills/mountains a couple of hours southwest of Krakow, down near the Czech and Slovakian borders. On Sunday, we went to a karczma for lunch, which as near as I could tell is a roadside pub/restaurant. But this one, the specialty was potato pancakes made in a wood-burning oven. One guy, the owner, was running the oven -- laying the pancake batter in the oven, shifting them around with a spatula, managing the fire, serving some pancakes flat while stuffing and folding others over like a potato pancake quesadilla. Watching this guy was like watching kitchen ballet. And the product -- like no potato pancake I’d ever had. Definitely beat out Chicago on this one.</li><li>We got into Budapest on St Stephen’s Day, Hungary’s biggest national holiday commemorating the founding of the Hungarian state; kinda like their version of the US Independence Day. After checking into our hotel, we walked over to the Buda side of the Danube where there was a huge food festival. The longest line was for the national cake. Apparently, they do a special cake each St Stephen’s Day. It was a really long line, but they were handing out free pieces of cake, so it was understandable. We skipped it though and went for the next longest line, for freshly fried lángos. Every culture seems to have some version of fried dough street food, and lángos is Hungary’s, though lángos is savory, not sweet. It was a hot day, but here was a booth full of women, hand stretching balls of dough into disks and dropping them into deep pans of hot oil for people waiting 15 minutes in the hot sun for them. The fully-dressed lángos was brushed with garlic and then topped with sour cream and shredded cheese. Still waddling from the weekend in Krakow, I went for the lite version -- just the garlic.&nbsp;</li><li>A couple of days later, Irene and I took a 40-minute train ride up along the Danube to Szentendre, a bit of an artist colony town. We hadn’t been up there in, I dunno, 20 years so we thought we’d check it out again. And top on our list of things to revisit was a little lángos shack tucked away halfway up a little stairway that goes from the town square up to the Catholic church on top of a hill. The last time we were in Szentendre, we tripped across this place walking up to the church - just a couple of people frying up lángos. It took us a bit to find the staircase this time -- it’s about a person-and-a-half wide archway next to a souvenir shop. The shack was still there, but it expanded, now with tables in a little courtyard, and it’s been found. We stood in a queue of tourists for 10-15 minutes watching 2 women crank out fried disks of dough. I cringed when I saw people putting ketchup on their lángos. We stayed pure with the garlic.</li><li>The <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/06/24/podcast-130-notes-from-hungary/\">last time</a> Irene and I were in Hungary, in 2017, we complained about not being able to find good, basic Hungarian food outside of the tourist traps. We saw lots of burger bars and pizza joint, especially in the Jewish Quarter, the party district where all the ruin bars are. But now, things seem to have diversified. Not far from Szimpla Kert, Ground Zero of the ruin bar circuit, there’s a place called Gettó Gulyás selling, well, gulyás and other Hungarian basics like chicken paprikas. And even better, it looks like there’s a bit of a chain called Langosh that’s open in the party district til 2 in the morning. Fried bread and beer -- not sure there’s any better definition of street food.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #155</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_155.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #155 — RJ Delays; Street Food in Poland and Hungary','','inherit','closed','closed','','2527-revision-v1','','','2021-03-14 15:33:31','2021-03-14 20:33:31','',2527,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/14/2527-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3444,1,'2021-03-14 15:35:03','2021-03-14 20:35:03','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\">\n<p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/IMG_1038.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2529 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/IMG_1038-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a></p><figcaption>Polish health food</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>Didn\'t have any problems with the 787\'s flying 4,800 miles to Krakow or back from Budapest, but the 560-mile regional jet flights between Chicago and Charlottesville, VA have been causing me no end of hassles. We talk about this, revisit our discussions about iPhone dual SIM capability and American Airlines\' MD-80 retirement. And then go deep on my very non-keto-friendly dive into Krakow and Budapest street food.&nbsp; All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_155.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #155: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago on an off-travel week; taking a break this week after a couple of weeks of weather-induced hassles -- that in spite of completely avoiding Hurricane Dorian. Instead, it’s been a steady stream of morning thunderstorms hitting ORD and jacking it up for the rest of the day. That and flying regional jets, which we’ve said before, are often…. problematic. In the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/08/13/podcast-154-will-we-still-love-uber-when-the-prices-go-up/\">last episode</a>, I talked about having to shift my outbound evening flight from CHO to RIC because of morning thunderstorms at ORD. The last two weeks have been different variations on the theme. The Tuesday after Labor Day, I was on the bus to the L heading to ORD for an 8:30am flight (because the Uber and Lyft wait times were insane -- God, I miss my old Mongolian ex-taxi driver) when I got a text that my American Eagle flight was cancelled. Still on the bus, I called American’s Platinum line. They told me what I already knew -- no other American options until the end of the day. I told them that since I was coming home the next day (Weds), I needed to get to Charlottesville that morning. “What about the 9am United flight?” I asked her, “I’m already on my way to ORD.” “Let me call United to transfer the ticket,” she offered. I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised. Over the past few years, I’ve seen airlines more and more reluctant to lose \\ revenue by moving you to another carrier, but there was none of that coming from this American agent. Our call kept going as I got off the bus and walked down the stairs into the subway stop, but she got everything squared away. Now that United flight ended up being delayed an hour, but it eventually got me to Charlottesville.</li><li>Last Friday morning in Charlottesville, I woke up, and scrolling thru Twitter, saw <a href=\"https://twitter.com/NWSChicago\">NWS Chicago</a> -- Nat’l Weather Service -- tweeting about severe thunderstorms, so when I got the text from United at 9am delaying my 1pm flight 45 minutes, I wasn’t surprised. No big deal -- I’ll just get a second beer at the Radar Bar. But then, as these things tend to do it, it didn’t stop there. An hour later, another text from United -- the delay doubled to 90 minutes.  But then at noon, another text -- the delay is down to an hour -- shortly followed by another text -- it’s back up to 90 minutes. I pull up <a href=\"https://flightaware.com/\">FlightAware</a>; I’m not going to the airport until the inbound plane leaves the gate at ORD. Ten minutes later, I see it push back. OK, that should be the end of the delay cascade. I order an Uber and head to the airport. Halfway there, another text -- now my flight isn’t leaving until 3:30pm, 2½ hours late. Immediately followed by a text with a 3:57 departure time. I get out of the car and head to the gate agent. What’s going on? Has the plane left ORD yet? Unlike the American agent, the United agent -- or maybe she worked for Air Wisconsin, the United Express partner, is evasive -- don’t know what’s going on; no other options; everything else is oversold, even in Richmond. I back out of line and call United’s Premiere desk. Yes, there’s availability out of Richmond and DC. Richmond’s a little closer and has a helluva lot less of a rush hour, so I move over to the 5:30pm flight (the United agent said “I think you’re making the right decision”), book a one-way rental, and head out to the parking lot. There’s a mist starting to settle in over the airport. This can’t be good. It’s an uneventful 90-minute drive to Richmond. I sit at the Sam Adams Brewhouse bar and have a beer, and then another. This flight leaves on time -- it’s also a regional jet, but it’s been running up and down the East Coast, so today, it’s running on time -- getting me into ORD at 6:50pm, about 5 hours after my original flight was supposed to land. I fire up the United app and look up the status of that flight -- it still hasn’t left. It didn’t leave until 9pm and then only made it as far as Washington-Dulles -- 95 miles up the road.</li><li>Bridge Music —  &nbsp; I Will Writhe by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/26739 Ft: Soundprank </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3><strong>Following Up</strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>In contrast to my regional jet challenges, our trip at the end of August to Krakow and Budapest went much smoother. We flew LOT, the Polish airline, the whole way, including the last leg, BUD-ORD non-stop. I was kinda surprised by that leg -- a Transatlantic leg that didn’t go through Poland -- but there must be enough traffic on that route. A week before we left, American announced their own non-stop between ORD and BUD starting next year. Both airlines do/will use 787’s on the route. Perhaps it’s one of the “long, thin routes” that the 787 was designed to unlock. Anyways, all three flights on LOT -- 787’s on the long legs, and a Dash-8 prop job on the hop from Krakow to Budapest -- were reasonable. I thought the 787’s “morning wake-up” mode for breakfast -- where the cabin lights fade up while the darkened windows lighten -- was a pleasant change to usual “light on and PA announcement” approach. It was my first trip to Poland. Krakow Airport is nice -- new, compact, with train station into the city. It was a good trip.</li><li>I talked in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/08/13/podcast-154-will-we-still-love-uber-when-the-prices-go-up/\">last episode</a> about trying out my iPhone XS’s dual SIM capability in Hungary and Poland. I did the pre-work before I left -- working through a couple of chat sessions to move my US AT&amp;T number to the internal eSIM so I use the physical SIM slot for my UK EE pre-paid SIM. En route -- somewhere over the Faroe Islands I think -- I went into Settings and made my UK line the main voice and data line, leaving my US line open for phone calls and texts. It seemed to work as designed -- I replied to a couple of texts on my US line from my sister, but it looks like everything else went out over the UK line with the 3 GB for £10 plan. I’ll hold final judgement until I get this month’s bill from AT&amp;T, but from what I could see on their website, it looks like it worked. It was a nice change to only have one phone and not to have to remember to check my other phone every night. The new version of the iPhone operating system -- iOS 13 -- is supposed to have some improvements for dual SIM, but I was happy with it as it stands -- but check back with me after I get my AT&amp;T bill.</li><li>And, of course, I extend that 3 GB by hitting the WiFi in coffee shops and hotels, which is where we circle back to one of my top travel security tips -- use a VPN when on WiFi. I used to think that as long as I was hitting encrypted web sites I was OK -- it used to be that you’d see HTTPS in the address bar apparently Google and Apple think that’s too much for us to process; they’ve replaced it with a picture of a lock; Firefox still shows the full address, though. But it seems that more and more security breaches are taking advantage of obscure misconfigurations that get around basic security. And with major hotel chains regularly coughing up millions of credit card numbers, it seems a bit unreasonable to expect the staff at a small coffee shop or local hotel to be up-to-date on their router patching. So I have VPN clients on my iPhone, my Android tablet, and my MacBook Air. I usually forget to turn them on if I’m doing a quick check of Twitter or Google Maps while in line somewhere, but if I’m doing any sort of browsing session on public WiFi these days, I’ll fire it up.&nbsp;</li><li>Packing for this trip meant rummaging around for European plug adapters. Not voltage converters -- I don’t use them because all the electronics can handle 110 and 240 volt -- just the two blade-to-two round adapters. I’d rounded up my UK adapters for our June trip to Ireland and Scotland, but now I needed the European adapters -- the two round plug ones.&nbsp; I found the UK ones and a random South African one but I couldn’t find the European ones anywhere. Probably because I’d left them all behind in Brittany in March. So I got on Amazon (as one does when they need some random thing in a hurry) and ordered a box of 6. I only needed one, but given my history, 6 would keep me for a year or two. I ordered white adapters because that’s what popped up in Amazon. Which was OK in those hotels with black outlets, but not so great for white outlets. I took 2 and came home with 2, but only by sheer luck. At least twice, I was walking out of the room with my bag and only then noticed an adapter still plugged in, hiding in a recessed white outlet. I really need colored plug adapters. And not in tasteful colors; something gaudy, like a purple or pink or chartreuse. Maybe I’ll spray paint the ones I have before my next trip.&nbsp;</li><li>Leonard -- no last name -- commented on the last episode with a link to a Dallas TV station’s coverage of the last American Airlines MD-80 flight; appropriately flying from DFW to ORD, a route and a plane that contributed heavily to my Advantage Gold status -- when that was the highest level -- back in 1985. There’ve been a lot of stories covering the retirement; people waxing nostalgic -- though not too much since I haven’t heard of any big jump in Delta MD-80 bookings. They still fly almost 100 of them. I have seen a couple of quotes about not wanting to sit in the last rows because of the noise from the side-mounted engines. It’s true. Not even the Bose noise-cancelling headphones could handle all the engine and vibration noise. They were also bad seats because there were no windows; all you’d see would be the engine cowling and the window would make the noise even worse. And those times when I ended up in those seats -- usually last-minute bookings between ORD and DFW -- my mind would sometimes wander -- if the engine next to my head blows up, will the shrapnel blow out or blow into the cabin. I never heard of such a catastrophic failure on an MD-80 -- but that didn’t keep me from wondering.&nbsp;</li><li>Standing in the TSA PreCheck queue, watching the single screener who was checking boarding passes and IDs have to ping-pong between the regular and PreCheck lines, I wondered what was keeping US airports from installing the automated boarding pass-checking gates that I’ve passed thru at mid-sized European airports like Budapest and Krakow and Edinburgh. I got it -- they’re only checking for valid boarding passes; they’re not examining IDs -- but there’s got to be something there that can improve TSA efficiency <em>and</em> the traveler experience. Watching this poor woman, my mind fast-forwarded to October next year when the TSA starts enforcing the Real ID requirement, the time wasted arguing with people who travel maybe once a year and so didn’t go thru the additional hassle of getting a Real ID-compliant driver’s license. Note to self - don’t book any travel in October 2020. </li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com. </li><li>Bridge Music -- August (Reggae Rework) by el-B (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/elB/16075 Ft: Calendargirl </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3><strong>Street Food in Poland and Hungary </strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Over-tourism is still a big topic in the tourism industry. Iceland seems to be cooling down after the Wow Air bankruptcy, but the photo from May of the queue to summit Mount Everest has become the new icon of the problem faced there and at places like Venice, Barcelona, and Machu Pichu. And it drives an interesting dichotomy -- travelers chasing the iconic Instagram picture -- sort of a virtual souvenir for this “pics or it didn’t happen” age -- while at the same time craving “authenticity” -- which is where, I think, the current glorification of street food is coming from. Wanting to experience something that you can only get in this place -- and, of course, post a picture of it.</li><li>Parking the cynicism for a sec -- if you’re queuing up (hopefully with some locals, not just tourists), doing the point-and-shoot ordering, and then eating it there on the street, it does create a very specific moment and memory. I vividly remember buying takoyaki, basically octopus croquettes, from a street vendor in Osaka; getting into the queue for a food stall in a Beijing hutong, the only non-Chinese guy, not knowing what for and getting this phenomenal crunchy scallion pancake; sending Andrew over to a vendor on a sidewalk in Hoi An, Vietnam for black sesame soup; folding up a slice of pizza in New York City in mid-bar crawl; and, as talked about a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/podcast-151-traveler-data-leaks-brittany-street-food/\">few episodes back</a>, slurping oysters on the Cancale sea wall on the Brittany coast.</li><li>So while we weren’t on a street food hunt in Poland and Hungary, our willingness, actually desire to eat pretty much whatever we came across without any filters -- no worries about keto or paleo or gluten-free diets -- led us to some good street food -- even though there were days I really felt the need to double down on the statins.</li><li>Probably the most memorable bit of street food came our first day in Krakow. We landed around 9am, took a taxi to the hotel, checked in, brushed our teeth, and walked up to the Old Square where I trawled through the vendor stalls. I came to a full stop at a small stand at the end of an aisle. An older couple had a huge pan over a wood fire. The pan had a metal divider down the middle; one half of the pan was frying onions; the other half, sliced kielbasa. I watched a couple people order and then stepped up. The man sliced a large, thick piece of bread off a round loaf, spread a thick smear of lard with cracklings, put down a layer of sliced kielbasa, finishing it off with fried onions. All for 13 złoty -- or about 3 and a half bucks. I don’t know what left more of an impression -- the size and heft of what he handed me or the staying power of the layer of pork fat it left on my lips. I’ll put a picture of it in the show notes.</li><li>We walked straight from there to a small square behind St Mary’s Basilica for the pierogi festival. There were 20-30 stands selling their selection of pierogis. Not sure if pierogis strictly qualify as a street food, but I queued up at the most popular ones and did point-&amp;-shoot ordering through most of their selection. I skipped the sweet pierogis -- the chocolate-banana and the blueberry ones just didn’t say “pierogi” to me -- but I still ended up with 5-6 from each stand -- from traditional onion and potato, to goose and duck and wild boar-filled ones. I tried to avoid pointing at one stand’s Mexican pierogi, but somehow it ended up on my plate. This was a pretty full-contact Day One. I needed a nap.</li><li>Chicago has a large Polish population -- somewhere in the range of 1-1.5 million Polish immigrants their descendants in the metro area, which, depending on who you read, is the largest Polish metropolitan area outside of Poland. So we get our share of Polish food and I wanted to try a few things I recognized. The first thing we hunted down was a pączki -- basically a Polish jelly doughnut. In Chicago, Pączki Day is Fat Tuesday and you see pączkis everywhere -- the grocery stores, bakeries. Asking around, Gorące Pączki -- “Hot Donuts” in English -- was the consensus recommendation in the Old Town. We rolled up there a couple of times and came away, I gotta say, disappointed. Even Chicago grocery store pączkis are better.</li><li>That weekend, we were staying with friends in the hills/mountains a couple of hours southwest of Krakow, down near the Czech and Slovakian borders. On Sunday, we went to a karczma for lunch, which as near as I could tell is a roadside pub/restaurant. But this one, the specialty was potato pancakes made in a wood-burning oven. One guy, the owner, was running the oven -- laying the pancake batter in the oven, shifting them around with a spatula, managing the fire, serving some pancakes flat while stuffing and folding others over like a potato pancake quesadilla. Watching this guy was like watching kitchen ballet. And the product -- like no potato pancake I’d ever had. Definitely beat out Chicago on this one.</li><li>We got into Budapest on St Stephen’s Day, Hungary’s biggest national holiday commemorating the founding of the Hungarian state; kinda like their version of the US Independence Day. After checking into our hotel, we walked over to the Buda side of the Danube where there was a huge food festival. The longest line was for the national cake. Apparently, they do a special cake each St Stephen’s Day. It was a really long line, but they were handing out free pieces of cake, so it was understandable. We skipped it though and went for the next longest line, for freshly fried lángos. Every culture seems to have some version of fried dough street food, and lángos is Hungary’s, though lángos is savory, not sweet. It was a hot day, but here was a booth full of women, hand stretching balls of dough into disks and dropping them into deep pans of hot oil for people waiting 15 minutes in the hot sun for them. The fully-dressed lángos was brushed with garlic and then topped with sour cream and shredded cheese. Still waddling from the weekend in Krakow, I went for the lite version -- just the garlic.&nbsp;</li><li>A couple of days later, Irene and I took a 40-minute train ride up along the Danube to Szentendre, a bit of an artist colony town. We hadn’t been up there in, I dunno, 20 years so we thought we’d check it out again. And top on our list of things to revisit was a little lángos shack tucked away halfway up a little stairway that goes from the town square up to the Catholic church on top of a hill. The last time we were in Szentendre, we tripped across this place walking up to the church - just a couple of people frying up lángos. It took us a bit to find the staircase this time -- it’s about a person-and-a-half wide archway next to a souvenir shop. The shack was still there, but it expanded, now with tables in a little courtyard, and it’s been found. We stood in a queue of tourists for 10-15 minutes watching 2 women crank out fried disks of dough. I cringed when I saw people putting ketchup on their lángos. We stayed pure with the garlic.</li><li>The <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/06/24/podcast-130-notes-from-hungary/\">last time</a> Irene and I were in Hungary, in 2017, we complained about not being able to find good, basic Hungarian food outside of the tourist traps. We saw lots of burger bars and pizza joint, especially in the Jewish Quarter, the party district where all the ruin bars are. But now, things seem to have diversified. Not far from Szimpla Kert, Ground Zero of the ruin bar circuit, there’s a place called Gettó Gulyás selling, well, gulyás and other Hungarian basics like chicken paprikas. And even better, it looks like there’s a bit of a chain called Langosh that’s open in the party district til 2 in the morning. Fried bread and beer -- not sure there’s any better definition of street food.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3><strong>Closing</strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #155</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_155.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #155 — RJ Delays; Street Food in Poland and Hungary','','inherit','closed','closed','','2527-revision-v1','','','2021-03-14 15:35:03','2021-03-14 20:35:03','',2527,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/14/2527-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3446,1,'2021-03-14 15:37:10','2021-03-14 20:37:10','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\">\n<p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/2D576E07-6546-4D4B-9D64-0E593596FB0C.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2581 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/2D576E07-6546-4D4B-9D64-0E593596FB0C-268x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"268\" height=\"300\"></a></p><figcaption>Selfies with Friends in Tallinn</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>Wrapping up my time in Charlottesville, VA with some \"bleisure\" travel, as well as some pure leisure travel with a quick trip in the Baltics. And a listener talks about the reason for his out-and-back day trip from Washington, DC to Hong Kong. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_157.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #157: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago just off the shores of Lake Michigan toward the end of what has been a record-breaking cold November. The first half of the month here was the coldest in 148 years with an average temperature of 31 degrees, which compares to an average high for November of 50 degrees, and a <em>low</em> of 39. But what’s been worse has been the early snow -- 3½ inches of snow on Halloween (another record) and again on Veterans Day. And by some incredible strokes of luck (as opposed to any foresight on my part), I dodged both snows -- by flying home from Charlottesville, VA the day before Halloween, and scheduling a week off the road the week of November 11. It’s <em>always</em> better to be lucky than good.</li><li>Last week was my last week in Charlottesville, finishing up an 18-week project that started in July. A year ago, when I wrapped up a long run in Charlottesville and didn’t know if/when I’d be back, I took an afternoon to hit Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s home that was only a 10-15 minute drive from the client. It was one of those things I wanted to do, but kept putting off -- I’ll get to it -- and here I was, the last day, and so squoze it in between meetings and calls.</li><li>With that in mind, I did just a touch more planning this year, and on my <em>second-to-last </em>trip, the week between the Halloween and Veterans Day snow storms, I flew in a day early on Monday, but to IAD rather than <a href=\"http://charlottesville-airport.com/\" class=\"aioseop-link\">CHO</a>, instead renting a car, and driving the length of the 105-mile <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Skyline Drive (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.nps.gov/shen/planyourvisit/driving-skyline-drive.htm\" target=\"_blank\">Skyline Drive</a> down to Charlottesville along the tops of the Blue Ridge Mountains through Shenandoah National Park. I was probably a week late for peak leaf peeping, but it was still pretty, especially when looking west over the Shenandoah Valley.&nbsp; I don’t think I would’ve made a special trip to drive Skyline Drive, but since I was in the neighborhood, why not? And it turned out to be just a great drive -- clear blue skies, still some good leaf color, and on a Monday, not a lot of people on that 2-lane road.&nbsp;</li><li>And then last Thursday, flying out of <a href=\"http://charlottesville-airport.com/\" class=\"aioseop-link\">CHO</a> for the last time until I don’t know when, I had to order one last beer at the <a href=\"http://www.gocho.com/concessions/\" class=\"aioseop-link\">Tailwind</a>, the airport bar. For an airport with only 5 gates, the Tailwind always has a great rotation of local craft beers. And there’s a mini-Cheers effect -- maybe not everyone knows my name, but Lyn the bartender recognizes me from my 4-year off-and-on presence in her bar. When I showed back up in July after a 9-month absence, she recognized me right away. So I had to get one last beer from her. I looked at the blackboard and ordered the stout from Blue Mountain Brewery, which was not far from when I ended my trip down Skyline Drive. I was getting over a bit of a cold; the IPA would’ve been a bit rough on the back of my throat. That <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Dark Hollow Stout (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/16352/39417/\" target=\"_blank\">Dark Hollow Stout</a> went down smoother, but what I didn’t quite pick up on is that it’s a 10% alcohol beer. Bit of an eye opener at 11:30am. Made for a good nap on the flight home.</li><li>Bridge Music -- Dive Deep (Loveshadow remix) by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/50488 Ft: Loveshadow</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3><strong>Following Up</strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Mark Skinner sent a note to comments@travelcommons.com a few days ago<ul><li>Hi Mark, Long time listener. So your tag line \"It\'s more about the journey than the destination” hit home to me with what has to be my oddest business trip yet. Tomorrow, I’m flying Washington to Hong Kong, via EWR, arriving Monday afternoon, and then returning on Tuesday morning! I’m basically there for dinner…</li><li>No meetings in Hong Kong, it’s all about taking a cosmic ray detector for NASA on an over-the-pole flight; which the UA flights 179/180 do quite well, EWR-HKG-EWR. They want to understand the amount of radiation from space inside the aircraft cabin. I’ll be in the air longer than on the ground. I’m planning to stay on and to sleep at “normal” east coast times, which means while I’ll have a hotel room by HKG, I’ll be awake then (night in HK, but daytime hours for me).&nbsp; Happily my upgrades to Polaris Business both ways have been confirmed! Otherwise the 16 hr flight would seem even longer…</li></ul></li><li>Oh, my! There’s a nice end-of-year mileage run! I told Mark that his itinerary reminds me of one I did 12 years ago when I flew to London for a lunch meeting to wrap up a project. I flew ORD-LHR, showered in the arrivals lounge, took a car out to Reading, gave the final readout over lunch, hopped back in the car to LHR, and caught the afternoon flight to DEN. I always say that ORD-LHR-DEN run was the epitome of \"stupid\" travel, but Mark has a good reason for his out-&amp;-back.&nbsp; Given the amount of time I’ve spent at 35,000 ft over the past 35 years, I’m not sure I want to know the results of Mark’s measurements.</li><li>United Airlines sent out a link promoting a jet lag app, <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Timeshifter (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.timeshifter.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Timeshifter</a>. Though Mark won’t need one because he’s staying on Eastern Time during his quick jaunt to Hong Kong, I decided to give it a try for my trip to Latvia, Estonia, and Finland. Going east, from the US to Europe, has always been easier for me. My usual routine - I skip the seat-back entertainment for 4-6 hrs of shut-eye (I wouldn’t call it true sleep) on the flight over, eat breakfast when I arrive even if I’m not hungry, get outside as much as possible, take a 30-minute nap after check-in, push through until 11:30pm that first night, and then set an alarm for, say, 7am the next morning. That usually resets my body clock and I’m pretty much good-to-go for the rest of the trip. Timeshifter added two things to my routine: starting to shift to destination time a few days before leaving, moving bedtime and wake-up time an hour earlier each day - going to bed at 10 instead of 11 and getting up at 5 instead of 6 the next morning. The second thing was taking melatonin before going to bed, which I tried by I’m not sure that it really does anything for me. It’s also a well-designed app that notifies you about things like when to seek out direct sunlight and when to start and stop with caffeinated drinks. I used the free first plan. Not sure I’ll pay the $9.99 for another plan, though.</li><li>And speaking of caffeinated drinks, last week, staying at the Omni Hotel in Charlottesville, they gave me two door hangers -- one for each night -- that I could exchange for a drink delivered to my door in the morning, or a beer at the bar in the evening. The first night, since I’d already had a margarita at dinner, I skipped the bar for something in the morning. Looking at the door hanger, my choices were coffee, tea, and Red Bull. Wow. Guess they’re catering to all kinds of morning afters. It wasn’t a big margarita, so I went for the cup of tea.</li><li>Following up on last episode’s carry-on discussion, about buying a new bag to meet Finnair and AirBaltic’s size and weight limits, My new <a href=\"https://amzn.to/32lIURe\">TravelPro Maxlite bag</a> worked like a charm. I packed a week of clothes and didn’t tagged by any gate agents. It even fit in the overheads of the ATR prop jobs that hopscotched us around between Riga, Tallinn, and Helsinki. On one of our passes through Helsinki, I saw an AirBaltic luggage sizer and scale by an empty customer service desk, so I decided to check the bag out. It was a bit of a force fit into the sizer and it weighed in at 8½ kilos, just a bit over the limit. Glad I didn’t catch a gate agent’s eye.</li><li>And since we’ve been talking about carry-on luggage over the past couple of episodes, so I pulled together all those threads into a new <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/11/06/how-to-choose-the-best-carry-on-luggage/\">“how to choose a new carry-on” blog post</a>. It went up at the beginning of the month, updating the one from last February, just in time for the Christmas shopping season. If you or a frequent traveling loved one needs a new carry-on, check it out, complete with Amazon Affiliate links if you want to toss a buck TravelCommons’ way.</li><li>And speaking of prop jobs, I definitely misfired on my Finnair seat choices between Helsinki and Riga. I was more focused on choosing seats for the long flights between Chicago and Helsinki, and didn’t pay much attention to the 45-minute flight to and from Riga. So just picked one off the seat map where there would be with no one next to me - 5C both ways - which, as it turned out, was empty for a reason, because it was right next to the propeller. I had forgotten how loud those propellers get on take-off. I popped on my Bose Noise Cancelling headphones (which, I noticed, are starting to show a good bit of wear; so I might be doing a bit of Black Friday/Cyber Monday shopping) on taxi, but when the pilot revved up the propellers, the noise cancellation started to cut in and out. The headphones were having to generate huge “anti-waves” to cancel the prop noise and the battery was too low to support the load. Luckily, I always carry extra triple-AAA batteries in the case. But while I was swapping the battery, the noise, the oscillation pressure was killer. I couldn’t get those headphones back over my ears fast enough. If you go to the <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">TravelCommons’ Instagram page</a>, you can see <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/p/B37C8LVnRkd/\">a bit of video</a> out the window of my HEL-RIX flight complete with a slow-motion propeller.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music - Drops of H2O ( The Filtered Water Treatment ) by J.Lang (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djlang59/37792 Ft: Airtone</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3><strong>Notes from the Baltics: Riga, Latvia and Tallinn, Estonia</strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>At the end of October, right after pushing out <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/10/14/podcast-156-airport-satisfaction-escooters-smaller-luggage/\">the last episode</a>, my son Andrew and I flew east for a week hopscotching through the Baltics -- Riga, Latvia; Tallinn, Estonia; and Helsinki, Finland. Why the Baltics? I’m not really sure. I’m sure we had a good rationale when we first thought of the trip a few years ago, but now, it wasn’t much more than “here are a few kinda outta-the-way countries that might be cool to wander around.”&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>Andrew booked our flights -- Finnair from ORD to Riga with a connection in Helsinki. The Finnair service was fine, a pretty standard Airbus A330 but with lots of polka-dot Marimekko patterns on everything. I’d forgotten they were a Finnish company. I skipped using my UK passport one last time for a quick pass down the EU passport lane, deciding not to strand Andrew in the “everyone else” passport path, which led to an unexpected grilling from the Finnish border control cop about the details of my itinerary. Then he spent a good bit of time paging back and forth through my passport stamps. Can’t think of what he found interesting -- the Chinese visa, the two Indian visas, maybe the Moroccan stamps from that day trip to Tangiers 3 years ago? Eventually, he decided to put his Helsinki stamp right next to August’s Krakow stamp and then open the gate so I could walk through.&nbsp;</li><li>I’m not quite sure what I expected from Riga, but it turned out to be a nice, mid-sized city. Maybe it shouldn’t have, but I was surprised at how well-preserved the city center is, especially the buildings with the over-the-top Art Nouveau edifices with huge faces over the doorways and carved figures holding up window sills. It took some money, though. Down by the river, I saw two buildings side-by-side, the one on the right recently refinished and repainted; the one on the left was still waiting its turn, but time is running out. The Art Nouveau look was there, but muted under the grime and soot and flaking plaster; with some relief decorations on the window balcony worn away.</li><li>I was surprised, though, at how empty Riga’s old town was in the middle of a Tuesday. The streets were empty. Where was everyone? Maybe across the river where it looks like they’ve built new modern office towers. I was glad I didn’t book our hotel down here.</li><li>The <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riga_Central_Market\">Central Market</a> down river from the Old Town was much more lively, and also where Riga stopped looking so Scandi and started looking a bit more post-Soviet. The busses and streetcars orbiting the market looked left over from the early ‘90’s. But I liked it. Most of the people here seemed to be doing their own grocery shopping -- unlike food markets in places like Paris and Barcelona that seem to have more people taking pictures of fish than buying them. But the place is so big that I don’t see that it could survive just on food porn tourism. They repurposed a set of World War I zeppelin hangars -- one for fishmongers, one of butchers, one for greengrocers, and then part of one with some restaurants where Andrew and I made lunch from a round loaf of Uzbeki bread and some tortellini-looking dumplings filled with lamb and venison. It was pretty good.</li><li>Then it was time to go search out some beer taprooms which had us walking sorta northeast, on a straight line away from the river, away from Old Town, across the canal and parks and past the embassies that sorta ring Old Town, and back into a less renovated landscape of storefronts and converted factories, some places run down, others with the hipster-signaling strands of naked edison bulbs over wood tables. Wandering into a courtyard off a busy street, we found&nbsp; <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Labietis (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.labietis.lv/en\" target=\"_blank\">Labietis</a> that had wide and interesting mix of beers -- herb beers and fruit beers, as well as the usual batch of IPAs. The names were interesting, also. <a href=\"https://www.labietis.lv/en/our-beers/fog\">Migla</a>, which they translated as “Fog” had hemp and peppermint in a light pale ale. Not sure it was my top pick, but I gotta give them props for trying something different.</li><li>It was a 45-minute prop job flight from Riga to Tallinn on AirBaltic. I did have a bit of a travel snob realization, though -- when everyone is getting on the same bus for a plane, boarding status is kinda meaningless. Anyhow, AirBaltic was fine service -- no hassles with carryon luggage, no annoying on-board upsells, though with only 45 minutes, there’s not too much damage they could do. Heading for the cab rank at Tallinn, I saw the same warning signs they had at Riga airport - there’s no regulated taxi fees so be careful which taxi you get into. At Riga, we used one of the airport-approved cabs with a meter. At Tallinn, we used <a href=\"https://bolt.eu/en/\">Bolt</a>, a ride-sharing app that looks a lot like Lyft. I used earlier in Krakow and had good luck with it, and it worked fine in Tallinn too - €4 from the airport to Old Town seemed a pretty good deal.</li><li>I can see why Tallinn is popular for long weekends. The Old Town is just that -- winding cobblestone streets, lots of churches and restored old buildings, and lots of shops in those old buildings. It’s up on a hill, so lots of scenic overlook Instagram moments. You could easily spend a couple of days wandering the streets, popping in and out of churches and museums… and shops and bars.</li><li>But after a half-day, I was ready to breach the Old Town’s walls to see what else there was to Tallinn. The first stop was a market by the train station - <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Balti Jaama Turg (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.visitestonia.com/en/baltic-station-market\" target=\"_blank\">Balti Jaama Turg</a>. Nowhere near the size of Riga’s Central Market, we strolled around until, after the 4th or 5th fruit stand and butcher stall, our minds wandered to lunch. We bought a couple different kinds of Uzbeki breads from one stand and a couple of beers from another. The breads were stuffed with some sliced meat cooked in a warming, floral spice, maybe cinnamon. It was very good, though I never got the story of why all the Uzbeki food up here.</li><li>We walked out and around the train station, and through a collection of restaurants in small square buildings, old cargo containers and a couple of railcars. As much as I liked the Uzbeki breads, I wish I’d seen these places first. On the other side was something called <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Telliskivi Creative City. (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://telliskivi.cc/en/\" target=\"_blank\">Telliskivi Creative City.</a> It looked like an old office or administrative building had been converted to a kinda “makers” mall, where people were doing small-scale clothing or leather work in the back of their space and selling it out of the front. We took a quick pass through it though didn’t see anything we wanted to haul back to the US.</li><li>We walked kinda north-northeast, through the<a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\" Kalamaja neighborhood (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.visittallinn.ee/eng/visitor/discover/articles-guides/kalamaja\" target=\"_blank\"> Kalamaja neighborhood</a> toward the harbor. Kalamaja was the exact opposite of the Old Town - wood buildings vs. stone; straight paved streets vs. windy cobblestones; groups of flats vs. castles and government buildings. A few blocks off the harbor we hit the <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Põhjala Brewery &amp; Tap Room (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://pohjalabeer.com/taproom\" target=\"_blank\">Põhjala Brewery &amp; Tap Room</a>. It was in what looked like a very recently renovated stone building; workers were in the midst of renovating the building next to it. Where Labietis felt very native -- funky space tucked away behind some kinda decaying buildings -- Põhjala could’ve been any new taproom in the US -- big U-shaped bar, open kitchen, BBQ on the menu. The beer was very good; the BBQ maybe less successful, but having lived in Memphis and Dallas, I’m a bit of a BBQ snob. The smoked trout dish, though -- that was great.&nbsp;</li><li>We walked back towards town on a path that ran along the harbor. There were lots of new apartment buildings across the road -- 3-4 stories with floor-to-ceiling windows and enclosed balconies facing the harbor. There wasn’t a lot there… yet. But you could see it coming.</li><li>We stopped at the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/ubajahumal/\">Uba Ja Humal</a> beer store before heading back through the Old Town walls. We walked through the front store to the taproom in the back, complete with a DJ who was set up between the back coolers. Locals would pull a can out of a cooler, pay for it at the bar, get a glass, and sit down at a table with their friends. Tallinn had that kind of easy-going vibe.</li><li>Both cities have done a good job renovating and preserving their Old Towns, and now seem to be expanding past that, repurposing older, maybe Soviet-era buildings to something a bit hipper, edgier (?), less traditional. I came away liking Tallinn a bit more than Riga, but maybe it’s because they’re a little bit further down that hipper, less traditional path.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3><strong>Closing</strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #157</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li> And if you check out the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> page, you can click thru to highlights from Riga and Tallinn.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_157.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #157 — Notes from the Baltics: Riga, Latvia and Tallinn, Estonia','','inherit','closed','closed','','2575-revision-v1','','','2021-03-14 15:37:10','2021-03-14 20:37:10','',2575,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/14/2575-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3448,1,'2021-03-14 15:38:59','2021-03-14 20:38:59','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\">\n<p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/IMG_0159.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1402\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/IMG_0159-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"225\" height=\"300\"></a></p><figcaption>This Won\'t Help Your Flier Sat Score</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>In this episode, we talk with Michael Taylor, author of <a href=\"https://www.jdpower.com/business/press-releases/2019-north-america-airport-satisfaction-study\">JD Power\'s 2019 Airport Satisfaction Survey</a>, about what keeps fliers happy. I also talk about what I like about eScooters, shopping for a smaller bag for upcoming flights on a Euro budget airline, and how Hertz\'s contract updates remind me to delete my Bluetooth pairings in rental cars. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_156.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #156: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago in the middle of what looks like a 6-week run of solid travel. Traveled to DC, Charlottesville, and Nashville, in that order, in the 3 weeks since the last episode. Heading back to Charlottesville this week, then a week hopscotching through the Baltics with my son Andrew -- Riga, Latvia; Talinn, Estonia; Helsinki, Finland -- and then back down to Charlottesville. </li><li>I flew Southwest on my non-Charlottesville flights -- into DC Reagan and Nashville -- and United again to Charlottesville. The Southwest flights went smoothly, except for trying to get to Chicago Midway for the DC flight. The Uber driver didn’t follow the app’s recommended route; instead, he pretended he was a cab driver and took the normal route down the Stevenson Expressway which was crawling due to an earlier accident. I wasn’t paying attention - first time I’ve had an Uber driver freelance on me - and didn’t notice he’d skipped the exit to the faster path until it was too late. We made our flight, but not without a bit of hustle through Midway. No tip, let alone a 5-star review for that guy.</li><li>Southwest flies into the old Terminal A at what I still call Washington National. I went to college in DC in the early ‘80’s, before it was named for President Reagan and when Terminal A was pretty much all that was there. I had forgotten what a long schlepp it is from that terminal to the Metro station. I remember way back then asking someone why they built the Metro station so far away. “Because they’re going to build new terminals right across from it.” Which they finally did, some 20 years after that Metro station was opened. Sometimes it seems that airport planning horizons are not in years, or even decades; feels more like they’re planning in lifetimes.</li><li>In between the Southwest flights, my United flight continued the string of disruptions trying to get into or out of Charlottesville. I checked that my flight was on-time before calling an Uber -- no weather delays at either end, United and FlightAware apps say the inbound plane is on-time…. Then, halfway to ORD, I get the text from United; a 2½-hour delay for crew arrival. What!? The next text “Because of crew scheduling disruptions this evening in Chicago, we’ve assigned your flight a new crew…. We know this delay wasn’t in your plans today, so we appreciate your patience.” No shit a 2½-hour delay wasn’t in my plans, especially when it’s because United stole our original crew because they screwed up their scheduling. And really United, you can’t find another pilot in ORD, your largest hub, that’s a little closer? I tell you what else isn’t in my plans, flying United to Charlottesville this week. </li><li>Bridge Music -- <em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/stefsax/7785\" target=\"_blank\">Awel</a> </em>by stefsax (c) copyright 2006 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/stefsax/7785 </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3><strong>Following Up</strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>That’s the sound of my new <a href=\"https://www.marriott.com/loyalty/member-benefits/titanium.mi\">Marriott Bonvoy Lifetime Titanium Elite</a> card hitting the kitchen counter. The mailer package was appropriately upscale, but the sheer weight of the thing stunned me. I put a quick video of it on the TravelCommons Facebook page. Cate Rose commented “Hope it scans into your Stocard app so you don’t actually have to carry it in your luggage allowance”. My thought exactly.</li><li>I got a note that Chicago’s electric scooter pilot ends tomorrow, which made me realize that I’ve seen them in just about every city I’ve been to this summer -- Budapest, Krakow, Charlottesville, Nashville, Washington, DC. I think the only places I didn’t see them were in Scotland and Ireland. They’re handy; because they’re dockless, I’ve found they have a wider distribution than, say, a traditional docked bike share and you can take them directly to your planned destination. And they’re a good fill-in between walking and an Uber or a Lyft. And, they’re fun! When I was in DC a couple of weeks ago, I was in the <a href=\"https://washington.org/visit-dc/neighborhoods/brookland\">Brookland</a> neighborhood in the Northeast part of town, and wanted to try out a new taproom there, <a href=\"http://www.rightproperbrewing.com/what-we-do\">Right Proper Brewing</a>. Now Brookland is not the nicest part of DC. It’s much better than when I went to school there, but there are still iffy parts. I wasn’t completely comfortable walking down to Right Proper from the Brookland Metro stop, but it seemed too short for an Uber ride and there was no bus that went down there. But, there was a scooter a couple of blocks from the Metro station. Running down 9th St at 10 mph felt a bit better than speedwalking at 4. And could leave it right in front of the taproom. It was exactly what I wanted. Two problems I’ve seen -- first, too many people riding them on the sidewalk, especially in DC. Maybe because I bike a lot in Chicago, I’m comfortable in bike lanes and navigating around cars on the street and keeping an eye out for potholes. I actually wouldn’t be comfortable riding a scooter on the sidewalk; I’d be afraid of popping a pedestrian who suddenly walked in front of me. To me, cars are much more predictable than pedestrians. The second thing, the need to have half-a-dozen scooter apps on your phone. In Chicago, there are 8 scooter companies, in addition to Uber and Lyft’s scooters. And you need to download their app to find and rent their scooter. Which meant that when I wanted to find a scooter near the Brookland Metro stop, I’d have to cycle thru 5 or 6 apps. Except I didn’t because I found an app called <a href=\"https://scootermap.com/\">Scooter Map</a> that shows all the scooter brands on one map. I think it’s targeted at folks who are making money recharging scooters (not quite sure how that works) but it worked fine for me. I fired it up and saw all the different scooters that were near me. One caveat -- I’ve only ridden these scooters on sunny days. I’m not sure how enthusiastic I’d be riding one in the rain or snow. </li><li>For the Baltics trip next week, we’re taking Finnair out and back from Chicago, an early morning ferry ride from Talinn to Helsinki, and then AirBaltic for everything else. Which then got me thinking about luggage sizes, because I bought my current bag, the <a href=\"https://www.swissarmy.com/us/en&amp;eoq=!t/Products/Travel-Gear/Werks-Traveler-5-0/collection/trg-collection/travelgear_collection_TRA-C2955\">Victorinox Werks</a> 22-incher, to use every last inch of US carry-on allowance. It even catches some side-eye from American and United where I have status. So I didn’t figure it’d fit into any European budget carrier’s luggage sizer. Looking up <a href=\"https://www.airbaltic.com/en/cabin-baggage\">AirBaltic’s carry-on allowance</a>, my Victorinox is a couple of inches too tall and an inch too deep. But what really got me shopping for a new bag for this trip is the weight. AirBaltic has an 8 kg/17½ lbs weight limit. In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/05/30/podcast-121-tsa-lines-my-luggage-is-where/\">episode #121</a>, I talked about the baggage strip tease exercise with Wow Air to make their 7 kg/15 lbs carry-on weight limit. I’d take my bag off the scale, pull some clothes out, zip it back up, and put it back on the scale. Still too heavy. Repeat 3 more times until the agent takes pity — or just gets tired of me — and gives me the approval tag to put on my bag. After which I walk about 10 feet, open my bag and put my armful of clothes back in. My Victorinox is a bit over 7 lbs, so not only is it too tall, the bag itself uses over 40% of the weight allowance. And even though I’ve talked before about how much I hate shopping for luggage, I searched for a smaller, lighter bag that wouldn’t cost a fortune, since my Victorinox will stay my primary bag. I landed on the the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/32lIURe\">TravelPro Maxlite 5</a>. I, or rather my daughter has a good history with TravelPro. It fit the AirBaltic dimensions and is one of the lighter bags I saw at 5.4 lbs which is down to 30% of the 8 kg weight allowance. It also meets three of the key suitcase criteria I laid down in the “how to shop for a suitcase” topic in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/01/25/podcast-137-new-years-travel-status-tips-how-to-shop-for-a-suitcase/\">episode #137</a> -- it’s black, it’s a 2-wheeler so no lost space on extended spinner wheels, and the inside is, for the most part, a wide open box without clothes hangers or a bunch of zip compartments. I’m taking it to Charlottesville tomorrow for a shakedown cruise.</li><li>Three years ago, back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/11/22/podcast-125-uber-driver-stories-overseas-for-the-election/\">episode #125</a>, in a Travel Security tip, I talked about the need to delete your phone’s Bluetooth pairing when you return a rental car. Usually when I go to pair my phone, I’ll first go through and delete 3-5 pairings before pairing my own. And they all have personalized names like “Timmy’s iPhone”. And most phones by default will download your contacts to the car when paired, so leave all of their contacts and phone numbers in their rental. That is just bad in so many ways. And now Hertz has gotten around to noticing it. In their newest rental terms and conditions, they specifically carve out any liability from you leaving a Bluetooth pairing behind. It’s a pain to remember, especially if you’re running for a flight, but as you’re taking that last scan around the car for your sunglasses and iPhone, remember not to leave your identity behind either.</li><li>Bridge Music -- Black Rainbow by Pitx (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Pitx/19513 Ft: ERH, acclivity</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3><strong>Keeping Fliers Happy </strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A couple of weeks ago, JD Power released their 2019 North American Airport Satisfaction Study.&nbsp; The headline - “North American Airports Struggle to Keep Travelers Happy Amid Construction Delays and Surging Passenger Volumes” caught my eye, so I reached out to the study’s author, Michael Taylor, to dig into it a bit more. And so last Friday, we had a wide-ranging conversation. I was going to edit it down, but as I listened to it, I couldn’t think about what to cut. So here it is in its entirety…</li><li>Interview with <a href=\"https://www.jdpower.com/business/content/michael-taylor\">Michael Taylor</a>, Travel Intelligence Lead at J.D. Power</li><li>Thanks again to Michael for taking the time to talk to us. Here\'s the <a href=\"https://www.jdpower.com/business/press-releases/2019-north-america-airport-satisfaction-study\">link</a> to the study summary on the JD Power website.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3><strong>Closing</strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #156</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li> And if you check out the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> page, you can click thru to highlights from my trips to Budapest and Ireland. And if you follow it, you can catch some pics from next week’s trip through the Baltics.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_156.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #156 — Airport Satisfaction; eScooters; Smaller Luggage','','inherit','closed','closed','','2543-revision-v1','','','2021-03-14 15:38:59','2021-03-14 20:38:59','',2543,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/14/2543-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3450,1,'2021-03-14 15:42:12','2021-03-14 20:42:12','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\">\n<p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/666C6507-4DEA-4808-9C1B-D3F828805BC8.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2521 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/666C6507-4DEA-4808-9C1B-D3F828805BC8-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a></p><figcaption>The moment of truth</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>Breaking out the mobile rig to record this episode in the Residence Inn in downtown Charlottesville, VA. Summer storms let me test Freebird\'s re-booking service, I wrestle with AT&amp;T so I can use my iPhone\'s dual SIM capability on my trip to Krakow and Budapest, booking more relaxed flight itineraries lets me call an audible when Uber and Lyft prices surge into the stratosphere, which gets me thinking -- will we still love those rideshare companies when they\'re no longer cheaper than taxis?&nbsp; All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_154.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #154: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the Residence Inn just off the Main St pedestrian mall in downtown Charlottesville, VA, leaving behind last episode’s multi-mic, big mixer board, sound-baffled podcast studio to go old-school, back to the TravelCommons roots with the mobile rig in a hotel room. I was thinking about going way back and recording it in the bathroom, but there’s a noisy exhaust fan that I can’t figure out how to turn off. There may be a bit of traffic noise in the background, and maybe even some thunder if the black clouds out my window live up to their potential. This episode will be one of the shorter ones. I’m trying to get it in before Irene and I head out to Krakow and Budapest Thursday night.</li><li>This is my fourth week back in Charlottesville in Chicago, IL. Not much has changed since my last commute back at the end of last year. American Eagle and United Express have a couple of direct regional jets a day from Chicago, and when weather knocks those flights out, Richmond is an hour-and-a-bit drive to the east, or Washington-Dulles is 2 hours north as a last resort. It’s still a 5-gate airport; the bar in the middle still has a surprisingly decent local craft beer selection. The bartender still recognizes me, though she still asks for my ID each time I sit at the bar. So not much has changed at CHO. </li><li>However, my approach to flying there has a bit. I’ve talked about this in prior episodes; I’ve always planned my travel to maximize my time at home, with my family. Given a choice between flying out the night before or taking a 7am flight out the day of, I’d take the latter. The trade-off, though, is travel plans that don’t deal well with travel delays -- a 2-hour flight delay the night before is annoying but won’t make me miss a meeting; that same delay the morning of my meeting may mean I won’t need to take that flight. And I’ve had all that happen with my flights to Charlottesville. So this time, with the kids graduated and moved out, and now that we’ve downsized from a house to a city apartment, my wife thinking I’m underfoot a bit too much, the need to maximize my time at home has… eased a bit. So I’m booking more... resilient itineraries -- flying out the night before, staying over an extra day so I can fly out after lunch, before the summer humidity spools up the afternoon thunderstorms…. Which was paid off last week when thunderstorms in <em>Chicago</em> had my evening flight to CHO posting a 3 hour delay by noon. I had more than enough time to swing my endpoint from CHO to RIC (all done pretty seamlessly thru the United app, which I found pretty impressive). My travel plans may not be as optimized as before… or maybe they are, but for different things, like cutting down on stress and my need to bitch tweet.</li><li>Bridge Music -- One for Me by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/21492 Ft: Haskel </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3><strong>Following Up</strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>We’ve had a thread over a couple of episodes about <a href=\"http://getfreebird.com/\">Freebird</a>, a flight rebooking service. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/podcast-151-traveler-data-leaks-brittany-street-food/\">episode 151</a>, TravelCommons listener Mika Pyyhkala sent in a note about his great experience with them, how they picked up a Southwest flight cancellation and rebooked him on Delta while he was still in the air on his first Southwest leg. Saved him a huge disruption; well worth, he said, the $19/leg fee. I mentioned in the last episode that Amex Travel has been offering free coverage for flights I book on their site with my Platinum card. So Freebird has been covering these last few trips to Charlottesville. I get a text the night before and the morning of my flights assuring me that Freebird is monitoring them. And when last week’s outbound 6pm flight started posting delays at noon, I got texts letting me know they were monitoring the delay, but it hadn’t yet tripped their 4-hour trigger.&nbsp; But knowing that there weren’t going to be many alternative flights to RIC or IAD later in the evening, I didn’t feel comfortable waiting for United to push over 4 hours -- and then cancel -- and so moved myself to their 6pm Richmond flight -- which was on-time -- getting me into my hotel around 10pm after an hour Uber ride. And then, indulging in a bit of travel schadenfreude, I kept tracking the ORD-CHO flight on <a href=\"https://flightaware.com/\">FlightAware</a>. It finally took off at 11pm Central – 5 hrs late -- arriving CHO at 2am Eastern. So it did eventually cross Freebird’s 4-hour threshold, but I’m not sure if it was in time to catch an alternative flight. So, I’m glad I switched it myself. I dunno, maybe tight connections rather than thinly traveled direct routes is the better use case for Freebird</li><li>Also back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/podcast-151-traveler-data-leaks-brittany-street-food/\">episode 151</a>, I talked about trying out the alpha version of augmented reality directions in Google Maps, where you hold up your phone and the display uses the camera to show the streetscape in front of you with the&nbsp; directions -- street names, arrows -- overlaid on the real-time image. I thought it was kinda cool; Irene and the kids were less than impressed. But you can judge for yourself because Google <a href=\"https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/08/google-launches-live-view-ar-walking-directions-for-google-maps/\">announced last week</a> that they’ve widened the feature to a public beta. Give it a try and let me know what you think</li><li>Fast forward one whole episode -- from <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/podcast-151-traveler-data-leaks-brittany-street-food/\">151</a> in May to <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/06/16/podcast-152-overwhelming-travel-new-old-restaurant-trends/\">152</a> in June -- which really was a big jump because, right after recording episode <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/podcast-151-traveler-data-leaks-brittany-street-food/\">151</a>, we moved from the big house in the suburbs to a 60% smaller high-rise apartment on the lakefront -- but in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/06/16/podcast-152-overwhelming-travel-new-old-restaurant-trends/\">episode 152</a>, I talked about having to recalibrate how I’d get to the airport. I had my guy who’d pick me up for a 30-minute ride to ORD or MDW… But no more. Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve started to get a feel for it -- 45-50 minutes to ORD, but figure an hour for weird traffic. And in the morning, figure a 10-minute wait for an Uber or Lyft, and a tab with tip around $40-$45. So this Monday at 5am, I fire up Lyft and Uber while drinking my morning cup of tea to see what’s going on -- $110 on Uber and $60 on Lyft. What the hell is going on? Well, maybe all the drivers are sleeping in, so I shower, get dressed, gather all my worldly belongings, and check again -- $120 on Uber; $57 on Lyft. I hit the Lyft button and wait -- and wait and wait. Then someone accepts the ride, and cancels. Guess he didn’t want to go to ORD. So I fire up <a href=\"https://transitapp.com/\">Transit</a>, my favorite mass transit app. It’s developed in Montreal and does mass transit routing in a huge number of cities in the US and Canada. And in Chicago, it also covers Divvy bike share and constructs Lyft-to-mass transit routing. I fired it up thinking that, if I couldn’t get a Lyft to ORD, then maybe I could get one to the nearest Blue Line L stop and take the subway the rest of the way. But even it couldn’t find a Lyft. But, it showed that, across the street from our flat, a bus will pick me up and, 18 stops later, drop me at the L stop. I got nothing else going -- actually, I did but it would involve waking Irene up at&nbsp; now 5:40am for a ride to ORD, truly a last resort. I wheel my luggage across the street. Four minutes later, the bus shows up. There’s me and another guy -- no problem putting my luggage on the seat next to me. And we make pretty good time -- not a lot of people waiting at bus stops at 6am, and the traffic is pretty clear too. All told, we stop maybe 6 times and have 8 people on the bus at its most crowded.  I had to wait another 5 minutes for the L and, at 6:40, it was more crowded; almost everyone had an ORD badge around their neck -- pilots, flight attendants, ground staff -- except for a few passenger-looking folk like me. All told, it took me about an hour -- maybe 10 minutes longer than Uber and Lyft were quoting. But at $2.50 vs. $60 or $120, it seemed like I made out on the deal.</li><li>Also in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/06/16/podcast-152-overwhelming-travel-new-old-restaurant-trends/\">episode 152</a>, I talked about “earning and burning” frequent traveler points rather than saving them because airlines and hotels keep playing with redemption levels and rules that reduce the value of the points. Jim McDonough tweeted me with a contra view -<ul><li>Regarding frequent flyer miles and how they don\'t appreciate over time - I still like to keep some around in case we need to travel for family emergency situations. The walk-up fare does not compete with the $25 charge to book a frequent flyer mile ticket last minute.</li></ul></li><li>Jim, that’s a good point, but I wonder if that strategy still works as more airlines move from fixed awards schedules to dynamic point pricing -- Southwest, Delta, and soon United -- where point price for a flight climes as remaining ticket prices do. Does it still make sense to pay with points?</li><li>As I said earlier, Irene and I are heading out Thursday night for a weekend in Krakow, Poland and then heading down to Budapest for a mix of touring and visits with Irene’s family. So, I thought this was as good a time as any to try out <a href=\"https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT209044\">my iPhone’s dual SIM capability.</a> Up to now, my usual procedure is to transfer my US AT&amp;T SIM to an old HTC One phone and then put my UK EE SIM in my iPhone Xs (usually sometime in flight in that panic drill between them clearing the breakfast tray and packing everything up for final descent) if I’m going to an EU country or when I pick one up after we land. I do this because local data is <em>hugely</em> cheaper than an AT&amp;T international plan - the EE pay-as-you-go plan I got is £10, or $12 with this week’s Brexit exchange rate discount, for 3 GB of data, 100 minutes of voice, and unlimited texts. But I still want my US number to ring thru in case someone back home needs to reach me and doesn’t know I’m out of the country. I don’t carry both phones with me, though. I have the iPhone with me during the day, using the local SIM to run Google Maps and the like. The HTC stays in the hotel room and I check it for messages when we get back at night.</li><li>But with its dual SIM capabilities, I should be able to do this with just my iPhone. However, the iPhone has only one physical SIM slot; the second is an internal eSIM, like the ones Apple uses in their cellular Apple Watch. So to make this work, I had to get AT&amp;T to transfer my US number from its physical SIM to the eSIM in the phone. My first stop was the local AT&amp;T store. I explained to the store guy what I wanted to do. He looked at me for a moment and said, “Uh, I’m new; I don’t know how to do that. But I can give you an eSIM card if you want.” OK, that’s a start. He riffled around his desk drawer. “I don’t have one here. I’ll have to go in the back. But I’m the only one here today, so you’ll have to go outside so I can lock up while I’m in the back.” Interesting. I walked down the street to grab a bite rather than idle outside the door. I came back. He handed me the card, “Here you go, but I don’t know if this will work…” I went home and hit the AT&amp;T web site. I spelunked around the site until I found the chat link and fired it up. The person on the other end knew what needed to be done. I gave her a few numbers off the card, then pointed the camera at the card’s QR code and it added to plan to my iPhone. Now, the chat agent said that they’ll have to do a bit of provisioning at the back end. She’d text me when it was done. Irene and I went out to dinner; no text and no activation. So the next morning, I hit chat again and this time stuck with the guy until the provisioning was complete. Then I pulled out the AT&amp;T SIM and put in the EE SIM, and immediately got a text from EE telling me their US roaming charges. I also got a whole new set of selections under the Cellular section under Settings. Which line did I want to use for voice, for data, for iMessage and FaceTime. I spent some time on Apple’s FAQ pages trying to figure out which scenario works for me. My guess is that it’ll take me a bit of trial and error -- and self-inflected AT&amp;T international charges -- to really figure this out.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com. </li><li>Bridge Music —  &nbsp; Fall to pieces - Silence by mika (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mika/24945 Ft: Colab      </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3><strong>Will We Still Love Uber When The Prices Go Up?</strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><a href=\"https://www.reuters.com/article/us-lyft-results/lyft-sees-ride-hailing-price-war-easing-sending-uber-and-lyft-shares-up-idUSKCN1UX2BQ\">Lyft’s chief financial officer Brian Roberts said, during last week’s earnings call, that pricing was becoming “more rational.”</a> “Rational pricing” is CFO-speak for “more predictably higher.” <a href=\"https://www.marketwatch.com/story/lyft-and-uber-are-giving-investors-what-they-want-which-is-bad-for-the-rest-of-us-2019-08-08\">Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, during his earnings call, said, “We and Lyft are big-time competitors here and have been for some period of time, but for now we’re seeing, generally, category positions that are stable. We are focused on improving profitability in this market.”</a>&nbsp; Which is CEO-speak for “we’re no longer going to slash prices to buy market share.”</li><li>We all knew this time would come -- at least the rational ones. Uber lost $5.2 billion in the second quarter while the smaller Lyft lost a mere $644 million last quarter. Investors are going to let you torch large piles of cash for only so long. Hence the topic question -- will we stay with Uber and Lyft even when they’re not a bargain anymore?</li><li>I’ve been talking about this with frequent travelers I know, or sit next to at bars, or bump into waiting for an Uber at O’Hare. One school of thought is that the Uber/Lyft experience is better than your typical cab, so even at the same price, you’d still order an Uber. You can order it on your phone rather than running into the street, trying to flag down a passing cab. Indeed, I’ve always said that, for me, Uber’s prime use case is getting a ride from midtown Manhattan to LGA at the end of the day a somewhat sane experience. Before Uber, I’d be practically dancing into 5th Ave, hiding my luggage behind a trash can because if a cabbie saw you wanted to go to LGA, they’d accelerate by you. I tried the cab company’s iPhone app last time I was in New York. It failed miserably.</li><li>Adding Uber and Lyft drivers to the transit mix means you can get a car ride from somewhere outside the usual downtown and tourist spots. I remember pre-Uber New Orleans, getting a cab anywhere other than between the airport and the French Quarter was near impossible. One night for dinner, we decided to go to a Mid-City restaurant, <a href=\"http://toupsmeatery.com/\">Toups Meatery</a>. Phenomenal place. The owner, Isaac Toups, later made it to the finals of the <em>Top Chef </em>cooking show. He didn’t win, but was voted “fan favorite”. And his food was our favorite too. The only problem -- getting a cab back to the Sheraton on Canal St from his Mid-City location. The hostess called 3 cab companies and we waited 20 minutes for a 15-minute ride. And that driver told us, “Yup, all most cab drivers want to do is make the easy money, driving between the airport and the hotels”</li><li>There’s also fare predictability -- you see the price to get from, say, downtown Chicago to O’Hare before committing to the ride. No more meter anxiety, watching the number run up in traffic. And the accompanying “Will I have enough cash to pay” or “Will this guy’s credit card machine work?” anxiety. With Uber and Lyft drivers following GPS apps, there’s no more “am I being taken the long way around to run up the meter” anxiety, or depending on your cab driver’s knowledge to take the fast way, or having them punt it to you with the “bridge or tunnel” question I often get from LGA cabs. The technology helps avoid a lot of the bad experiences we’ve had with taxi cab rides.</li><li>I used to say that Uber and Lyft cars are nicer, but their bar has slipped as they’re scrambling for drivers in a full-employment economy. An Uber I took last week was missing the door armrest; a Lyft that Irene took had the front right quarter-panel held on with duct tape. These are exceptions, though a bit more common that a couple of years ago. But they’re still a damn sight better than the beat-to-hell Baltimore cabs that would sit at the cab ranks in the Inner Harbor. I only did that once, because the cab rank was right outside the client’s building and I was late leaving for the airport. The back seat was full of old newspapers and other crap, and there was no air conditioning -- on a July afternoon. After that, I’d stand there, looking at the cabs, while waiting 5 minutes for an Uber to show up.</li><li>The place I most often take a cab rather than waiting for an Uber is the airport. And here, it’s not really about price, it’s convenience. The cab ranks are usually right at the terminal exit, while the rideshare pickup spot can be an Easter Egg hunt (Vegas), a 15-minute walk to the back 40 (Atlanta) or a confusing scrum of screaming traffic cops (Chicago Midway). Vegas and LGA especially -- catching a cab is so much easier than a rideshare. Here at CHO also -- it’s a flat rate into town that’s about the same as Uber and Lyft and the cabs are in decent shape, so if one’s there, there’s no reason to wait.</li><li>And I could be wrong, but it feels like the pricing discussion is mostly a US thing. <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/podcast-150-travel-interruptus/\">In Paris last Spring</a>, none of the Ubers were “rideshares”; they were all black car livery companies with professional drivers. Near as I could tell, Uber was just another dispatch system for them. In Lisbon a few years back, I couldn’t tell if they were true rideshares, but the pricing was the same as taxis, and there were more taxis so less wait. We took the path of least resistance and hailed cabs.</li><li>The rough consensus of my completely unrepresentative polling was - ride sharing got traction because it was cheaper, but now the technology gives such a better experience that I’d even pay a premium over a taxi -- but I wouldn’t want to tell Lyft or Uber that. But what they said on those earnings calls, I think they already know that.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3><strong>Closing</strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #154</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_154.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<p><!--EndFragment--></p>','Podcast #154 — Will We Still Love Uber When The Prices Go Up?','','inherit','closed','closed','','2508-revision-v1','','','2021-03-14 15:42:12','2021-03-14 20:42:12','',2508,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/14/2508-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3452,1,'2021-03-14 15:46:41','2021-03-14 20:46:41','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\">\n<p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Cracked-mirror-square.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2482 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Cracked-mirror-square-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a></p><figcaption>What\'s Behind Me Is Not Important</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>Going upscale, recording in the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/1871Chicago/photos/we-have-a-new-podcast-studio-big-thanks-to-1871-company-parkergale-capital-for-h/1116900888351884/\">podcast studio</a> at the <a href=\"https://1871.com/\">1871 tech incubator</a> in Chicago, I talk about my surprising smooth 2-week trip in Ireland and Scotland. We also note the retirement (finally!) of American Airlines\' MD-80 jet, a very interesting new social media app, talk about how algorithms are changing the way we travel, and the melancholy of leaving familiar places for the last time.&nbsp; All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_153.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #153: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the podcast studio in the 1871 tech incubator in Chicago, IL. I have to say that this is the most professional studio I’ve recorded in since my high-school radio days in Memphis. I mentor here once a month and so get to use this bang-up studio. This sound ought to be phenomenal. It’s a few weeks after our 2-week Celtic jaunt -- a week touring in Ireland and a week of graduation festivities at University of St Andrews in Scotland. I’ve talked a bit about the planning for this trip in the past couple of episodes -- wrestling through the Avios website to kludge together flights on Aer Lingus and burn off some of my Avios balance that’s been sitting around for, I dunno, 5-10 years; and trying to sift through the horror stories of Irish car rentals. There were a whole lot of places where this trip could’ve gone bad… but it didn’t. The flights on Aer Lingus were fine; nothing special, but they were serviceable. Our Budget Car rental experience was the same -- a basic Renault compact with 30,000 km on it, but no issues with the folks on either the pick-up or the drop-off in Dublin airport. All the places I booked in Ireland were fine -- the B&amp;Bs on the west coast were great; the hotel in Dublin was, again, serviceable. And, we didn’t really have any rain to speak of until our last day in Dublin.</li><li>The flights between Dublin and Edinburgh were on turboprop planes -- ATR-72-600s to be exact. I can’t remember the last time I was on a prop plane -- even the quick 30-min hops I’d do occasionally between IAD and CHO are on Embraer jets. But I remember way back in my early flying days, American Eagle used to fly a lot of these ATRs. Once those props started turning, I popped on my Bose noise-cancelling headphones. Those American Eagle ATRs were one of the main reasons I invested in my first pair of Bose.</li><li>But other than a bit of a rainy walk to and from that plane in DUB and EDI, they were fine flights. Indeed, if there was any hiccup, it was on arrival in DUB from ORD.&nbsp; We’d checked luggage, even though one of my regular top travel tips is to carry on. I knew the plane was full, and since Aer Lingus isn’t part of OneWorld or StarAlliance, neither my American nor my United status was going to get us pre-boarded. Rather than worrying about having to jockey for overhead space, we checked our bags - and anyways, it was free; it was included in the fare. So, low-hassle boarding. In DUB, I stood at the luggage carousel, watched it heave out a dozen or so bags, and then nothing. No worries; seen that before; the guys must be driving the tug back to the plane. And then the carousel stopped. Not too worried; seen that before too; just saving a little energy. And then the lights above us went out.&nbsp; OK, this is a new one. I have to say that I started to worry a bit -- until I saw our pilot also looking around for his luggage. After 20 minutes, the lights came on and the carousel started burping up bags again. And there was a simultaneous sigh of relief from all the chaperones accompanying the half-dozen student trips that had packed this flight.</li><li> Bridge Music -- <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/Loveshadow/26219\" target=\"_blank\"><em>SP*ANK Vox</em></a> by Loveshadow </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Biggest travel news -- at least to me -- since the last episode -- American announced the retirement (finally!) of the last of its MD-80s, the “Super 80s” or the “Mad Dog 80s” with the last revenue flight planned for Sept 4th from DFW to ORD. Which for me is very apropos because I spent a <em>lot</em> of time in the mid-80\'s flying MD-80\'s between those two AA hubs. I thought the 737 Max grounding might delay the final MD-80 flight, but it looks like American has scrounged up enough 737-800s to fill the gap. I posted American’s announcement on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page. Jim McDonough commented - “Flew the Mad Dog many, many times. My wife and I would select row 9 on the 2 seat side, flying, usually, DFW/SAN. She’s tiny, so I felt like I was in first class.” The left-hand 2-seat side was great for couples -- got a window and an aisle seat without having to guess if the center seat would be filled. But then you had to deal with the short overhead bins on that side where you could only fit your bag in sideways, and usually no power supply. The cigarette style power adapters were on the other side, the 3-seat side, but only in every <em>other</em> row. It was a unique plane...</li><li>Back in May, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/podcast-151-traveler-data-leaks-brittany-street-food/\">episode 151</a>, TravelCommons listener Mika Pyyhkala sent in a note about his great experience with a flight rebooking service, Freebird. This week, I was booking a trip to CHO on the Amex Travel site with my Platinum card. At the end of the booking, it offered me free Freebird coverage for the trip. I had to check a box to opt in, so I read the fine print closely to make sure it was really free, but it was. Seems Freebird and Amex are doing a free trial. Don’t know how long it lasts, but I’ll opt in -- with the hope that I don’t actually have to use it.</li><li>Some bits ‘n’ bobs observations from my Ireland-Scotland trip…</li><li>Like so many other folks, I’m carrying my own water bottle on flights. I started last fall. The big Amazon Web Services conference gave everyone a refillable water bottle, replacing barrels of iced single-use water bottles with refilling stations. Most airports now have refilling spigots next to regular water fountains. Irene has carried one forever. It came in handy when Aer Lingus wanted to charge her €3 for water on one of our flights. Now, I lost that original AWS water bottles a few months back -- matching my usual 6-month time-before-loss metric. No big deal; it was just a plastic bottle with a screw-on cap. But I wanted a new one. So for Fathers’ Day, Claire gave me a new souped-up 20 oz. water bottle with a push-button pop-up drinking spout and a carabiner loop -- very nice. I pulled it out during one of our Aer Lingus flights, skipping their €3 charge, hit the button for the spout and immediately get hit square between the eyes with a fat stream of water from my bottle-now-turned-water fountain. Apparently this new fancy water bottle seals airtight, meaning the water in the bottle stayed at ground pressure while our cabin was now lower, at something between 6 and 8,000 ft. I’m used to that with foil-sealed yogurts, but not my water bottle. A surprise not just for me, but also the Irish guy next to me who was napping before he caught some shrapnel from my portable water cannon.</li><li>One of the things I look forward to when staying at bed-&amp;-breakfasts in the UK and Ireland are… the breakfasts. And the breakfasts we had in Ireland were at least one order of magnitude better than the best concierge lounge fare at a Marriott -- which may be damning with faint praise, but I don’t mean to, we had great breakfasts. For most of our time on the west coast, we hubbed out of Galway, staying in the same place for 3 nights, or more importantly, 3 breakfasts. The first morning was easy; the full cooked breakfast -- eggs, bacon, sausage, black and white pudding, tomatoes, mushrooms, baked beans, and toast. We were doing a good bit of hiking that day and I wasn’t hungry until 3. Doing that two days in a row, though, felt like I was tempting fate -- or at least an arterial blockage. So the next morning, I went with the healthier choice -- oatmeal porridge. The presentation is pretty typical -- a big bowl of porridge with little cups of raisins, brown sugar, and cream. I mix in the raisins, a touch of the brown sugar, and a bit of the cream to loosen up the porridge. Except it doesn’t smell like cream. I taste it -- it’s Bailey\'s Irish Cream. I dump the rest of it in. I figure porridge with a Bailey’s topper is kinda the Irish version of a Bloody Mary.</li><li>One of the big differences for me between renting a car in the US and in Europe is the pre-car inspection. You get the keys, the rental agreement, and a form showing the condition of the car before you take if off the lot -- pre-existing dings and scratches. I always give this form to Irene -- she’s much pickier than I am. She walks around the car, making note of anything missing, while I figure out the rear-view mirrors and pairing my iPhone to the entertainment system. So I was kinda surprised to get an e-mail from Hertz before getting on our flight to EDI with a bunch of pictures of a Kia wagon. Here was our car; here was the documentation of its condition. We walked straight to the car, loaded up the luggage and drove off. No walkaround inspection. It makes sense. We had gotten to the point, on our last couple of rentals, where we were taking pictures of dings and scratches as well as marking them on the form. Now here, Hertz was doing it for us. Not sure if I got this because I have Hertz Gold, but it certainly was a big improvement in the rental experience -- though I still had to figure out how to pair my phone.</li><li>The timing on international connections in Europe always feels a little bit of a crap shoot because there doesn’t seem to be a consistent rule about having to pass thru security again. Amsterdam, no security. Frankfurt, no security for a European connection, but security if you’re flying to, say, India or the Middle East. London, security every time, maybe even a couple of additional passes just for kicks. Dublin, though, had a new twist. Go thru the usual drill -- pull out your electronics, take off your belt, push your bags thru the X-ray machine, but then -- where’s the metal detector? Just walk past the security guy and put my PC back in my bag. I looked back. There was a metal detector all the way at the end of the security hall, but only one. The rest of us were acting like we were walking thru a metal detector, except there wasn’t one. That was just odd.</li><li>We were in Scotland for Claire’s graduation from University of St Andrews. Hanging around, drinking beer with folks a couple of generations younger than you -- this group was right on the Millennial/Gen Z boundary -- is always an educational experience. But when the conversation turned to their new favorite app -- <a href=\"https://apps.apple.com/us/app/poop-map-pin-and-track/id1303269455\">Poop</a> <a href=\"https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.poopmap&amp;hl=en_US\">Map</a> -- I thought they were leading this old guy on. An app where you and your friends share the places you’ve pooped, complete with star ratings and comments, seemed too much like an Onion headline -- social media taken to the absurd extreme. Except is wasn’t satire; it was real. They all pulled out their phones, fired up the app, and showed me their check-ins. OK, then. But I think checking in beers on Untappd is as far as I want to go.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com. </li><li>Bridge Music —  &nbsp;<em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/trifonic/445\" target=\"_blank\">Bored on Your Backside</a></em> by Trifonic     </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Travel by Algorithm</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>On the rainy Monday we flew from DUB to EDI, I drove us downtown to meet some friends for the day. The rain was beginning to muck up traffic, so I was kinda glued to Google Maps to help route us around some of the traffic tie ups, which meant we weren’t on the usual route take in from the airport, which meant I was just about completely dependent on Google; completely trusting that algorithm. Which was kinda broken when I followed Google’s directions through a warning sign and onto a “Buses Only” road. Google directed me to keep driving down the road, but since I was only a single-decker Kia wagon, I didn’t think any attempt to masquerade as a bus was going to survive our first police encounter. So I took the first left (much easier when driving on the left side of the road) hoping the algorithm would produce a bit more legal routing.</li><li>Not overly shocking. There have been a steady stream of stories for years about GPSs leading people astray -- this was a topic way back in the early days of&nbsp; TravelCommons, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2006/05/04/podcast-38-the-accidental-vacation-trusting-travel-technology/\">episode #36</a> in 2006 to be exact, when they were called SatNavs, I told the story of making a dash to SFO after a sales meeting. I’m riding shotgun, tracking our progress on a one of those <em>paper</em> maps that Hertz used to put in every car. But we also had a Hertz NeverLost. It seemed about 10 seconds slow to me. I spotted our turn on I-580, but Hertz said nothing. “Turn,” I said. “No,” Brian said, “You need to trust the technology.” And so when Hertz said to turn 10 seconds later, he did -- right into a gas station. Not as bad as stories of people driving across closed bridges, into rivers, up unpaved mountain roads… But in the subsequent 13 years, with SatNav, now GPS, moving from our cars to our pockets, we’re lean on those algorithms more than ever. Now living in Chicago, I haven’t bothered to learn any of the public transit routes; I just use Google Maps or the Transit app to tell me what bus to catch when.</li><li>Sometimes I’ll use Hipmunk to look at flight options to a new city, or a place I haven’t been in a while. They promote their Agony sort, where their algorithm rates flight by a combination of price, duration, # of stops, and dependability. I’m heading back to CHO and since I haven’t been out there for 6 months, I hit Hipmunk to check out American’s and United’s current flight offerings, scrolled down from the non-stops thru the 1-stops. I thought it was interesting, though, that Hipmunk’s algorithm scored a 24-hr hour Amtrak ride with a 3-hr layover in DC’s Union Station as less agonizing than a 6-hr 2-stop trip on United Express with connections in Columbus and IAD. But given some of my United Express experiences, who am I to second-guess that algorithm?</li><li>One of the things I liked about the soon-to-be-turned-off Google Trips app, is how it would auto-magically generate itinerary recommendations for a city. It would pick out points of interest with high Google review scores, and then combine the hours each would be open from the business listing with the typical amount of time people would stay there, and location and traffic data from Google Maps to generate the best itinerary. This fascinated me. It sucked my into a click hole of academic papers presented at the International Conference on the Practice and Theory of Automated Timetabling and the International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining talking about how the “Tourist Trip Design Problem (TTDP) is a route-planning problem on multiple Points of Interest. TTDP can be considered as an extension of the classical problem of Team Orienteering Problem with Time Windows.” I want to use this to automatically generate microbrewery taproom crawls but the math made my eyes bleed.</li><li>But back to that rainy day in Edinburgh, Google Maps redeemed itself at the end of the day. There was so much rain that Monday, our usual path out of the city, the A90, was at a complete standstill because of flooded underpasses, and stalled cars that tried to make it thru the flooded underpasses. Google Maps guided us past a gridlocked traffic circle, winding us through some apartment complexes, bypassing the flooded parts, and putting us right onto the M90 so we could head out to St Andrews. Better travel through algorithms.</li><li>Bridge Music —   &nbsp; <em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/hepepe/21074\" target=\"_blank\">Bogi Beat Budapest</a> </em>by KarmaHacker  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Leaving Places Behind</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Driving out of St Andrews that last time was a bit melancholy. We’d spent the last 4 September there, saw things change -- restaurants open and close, Edinburgh airport get spiffier -- but also the familiar things stay the same -- <a href=\"http://keysbar.co.uk/\">The Keys</a>, my favorite dive whisky bar; <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"St Andrews Brewing Company (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.standrewsbrewingcompany.com/\" target=\"_blank\">St Andrews Brewing Company</a> or “Stabco” as my daughter would call it, always with a great beer selection from across the UK; and <a href=\"https://jahangirstandrews.co.uk/\">Jahangir</a>, an Indian restaurant we found our first year because they were the only place we could find a table that Friday night... and we kept going back because they had great food and we never couldn’t get a table</li><li>The melancholy was that we probably wouldn’t be back; at least not for a long time. It’s out-of-the-way -- which is part of its charm, but it’s why we probably won’t be back for a while.</li><li>I felt the same way when I finished a project in Portland, Oregon some years back. I was in Portland every week for 3-4 months and got to know it pretty well. I explored new places, but developed some favorite spots I’d hit every week -- <a href=\"https://www.clydecommon.com/\">Clyde Commons</a> for dinner at the bar, <a href=\"https://www.baileystaproom.com/\">Bailey’s Taproom</a> with a new beer selection every week. When that project ended, I knew I wouldn’t be back to Portland for a long time -- as opposed to New York or San Francisco. Wrapping up a project there, not really a big deal because there’s enough business to bring me back. New Orleans was kinda in the middle. I’d been there almost non-stop for 3-4 years, but while I didn’t think business would bring me down there again, it’s not out of the way, and I’d be down often for vacations or conventions -- which is how it’s turned out.</li><li>Some of that melancholy comes from regret -- from things you always meant to do but never made time for -- “I’ll do that next time,” you’d say to yourself, but never get to it. The last time I was in Charlottesville, VA, I was finishing up what had been another 3-4 year stream of work and wasn’t sure when I’d be back. For me, Charlottesville was a bit like St Andrews, an out-of-the-way college town (though only a 2-hr flight from Chicago rather than an 8-10 hour fly-and-drive) and wasn’t sure when -- if ever -- I’d get back. Over those years, I’d always plan to take a half-day and drive the 15 minutes from the client to <a href=\"https://www.monticello.org/\">Monticello</a>, Thomas Jefferson’s home, and take the tour. It’s always written up as a must-see, and I’m right here. But every time I was going to do it, something would come up, and I’d say “I’ll do that next time.” And so here I was, the last time -- I didn’t know when the next time would be. And I really didn’t have much time in my schedule, but after lunch one day, I walked out, taking calls all the way to the Monticello parking lot, and then turned off my phone and had a great tour. And flew out the next morning without that regret.&nbsp;</li><li>But now 6 months later, I’m heading back to Charlottesville. So maybe I’ll get back to St Andrews sooner than I thought. Maybe I should see if <a href=\"https://www.standrewsbrewingcompany.com/\">Stabco</a> needs an old-guy bartender.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #153</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_153.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #153 — Travel By Algorithm; Leaving Places Behind','','inherit','closed','closed','','2494-revision-v1','','','2021-03-14 15:46:41','2021-03-14 20:46:41','',2494,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/14/2494-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3453,1,'2021-03-14 15:48:44','2021-03-14 20:48:44','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\">\n<p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/666C6507-4DEA-4808-9C1B-D3F828805BC8.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2521 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/666C6507-4DEA-4808-9C1B-D3F828805BC8-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a></p><figcaption>The moment of truth</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>Breaking out the mobile rig to record this episode in the Residence Inn in downtown Charlottesville, VA. Summer storms let me test Freebird\'s re-booking service, I wrestle with AT&amp;T so I can use my iPhone\'s dual SIM capability on my trip to Krakow and Budapest, booking more relaxed flight itineraries lets me call an audible when Uber and Lyft prices surge into the stratosphere, which gets me thinking -- will we still love those rideshare companies when they\'re no longer cheaper than taxis?&nbsp; All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_154.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #154: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the Residence Inn just off the Main St pedestrian mall in downtown Charlottesville, VA, leaving behind last episode’s multi-mic, big mixer board, sound-baffled podcast studio to go old-school, back to the TravelCommons roots with the mobile rig in a hotel room. I was thinking about going way back and recording it in the bathroom, but there’s a noisy exhaust fan that I can’t figure out how to turn off. There may be a bit of traffic noise in the background, and maybe even some thunder if the black clouds out my window live up to their potential. This episode will be one of the shorter ones. I’m trying to get it in before Irene and I head out to Krakow and Budapest Thursday night.</li><li>This is my fourth week back in Charlottesville in Chicago, IL. Not much has changed since my last commute back at the end of last year. American Eagle and United Express have a couple of direct regional jets a day from Chicago, and when weather knocks those flights out, Richmond is an hour-and-a-bit drive to the east, or Washington-Dulles is 2 hours north as a last resort. It’s still a 5-gate airport; the bar in the middle still has a surprisingly decent local craft beer selection. The bartender still recognizes me, though she still asks for my ID each time I sit at the bar. So not much has changed at CHO.&nbsp;</li><li>However, my approach to flying there has a bit. I’ve talked about this in prior episodes; I’ve always planned my travel to maximize my time at home, with my family. Given a choice between flying out the night before or taking a 7am flight out the day of, I’d take the latter. The trade-off, though, is travel plans that don’t deal well with travel delays -- a 2-hour flight delay the night before is annoying but won’t make me miss a meeting; that same delay the morning of my meeting may mean I won’t need to take that flight. And I’ve had all that happen with my flights to Charlottesville. So this time, with the kids graduated and moved out, and now that we’ve downsized from a house to a city apartment, my wife thinking I’m underfoot a bit too much, the need to maximize my time at home has… eased a bit. So I’m booking more... resilient itineraries -- flying out the night before, staying over an extra day so I can fly out after lunch, before the summer humidity spools up the afternoon thunderstorms…. Which was paid off last week when thunderstorms in <em>Chicago</em> had my evening flight to CHO posting a 3 hour delay by noon. I had more than enough time to swing my endpoint from CHO to RIC (all done pretty seamlessly thru the United app, which I found pretty impressive). My travel plans may not be as optimized as before… or maybe they are, but for different things, like cutting down on stress and my need to bitch tweet.</li><li>Bridge Music -- One for Me by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/21492 Ft: Haskel </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>We’ve had a thread over a couple of episodes about <a href=\"http://getfreebird.com/\">Freebird</a>, a flight rebooking service. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/podcast-151-traveler-data-leaks-brittany-street-food/\">episode 151</a>, TravelCommons listener Mika Pyyhkala sent in a note about his great experience with them, how they picked up a Southwest flight cancellation and rebooked him on Delta while he was still in the air on his first Southwest leg. Saved him a huge disruption; well worth, he said, the $19/leg fee. I mentioned in the last episode that Amex Travel has been offering free coverage for flights I book on their site with my Platinum card. So Freebird has been covering these last few trips to Charlottesville. I get a text the night before and the morning of my flights assuring me that Freebird is monitoring them. And when last week’s outbound 6pm flight started posting delays at noon, I got texts letting me know they were monitoring the delay, but it hadn’t yet tripped their 4-hour trigger.&nbsp; But knowing that there weren’t going to be many alternative flights to RIC or IAD later in the evening, I didn’t feel comfortable waiting for United to push over 4 hours -- and then cancel -- and so moved myself to their 6pm Richmond flight -- which was on-time -- getting me into my hotel around 10pm after an hour Uber ride. And then, indulging in a bit of travel schadenfreude, I kept tracking the ORD-CHO flight on <a href=\"https://flightaware.com/\">FlightAware</a>. It finally took off at 11pm Central – 5 hrs late -- arriving CHO at 2am Eastern. So it did eventually cross Freebird’s 4-hour threshold, but I’m not sure if it was in time to catch an alternative flight. So, I’m glad I switched it myself. I dunno, maybe tight connections rather than thinly traveled direct routes is the better use case for Freebird</li><li>Also back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/podcast-151-traveler-data-leaks-brittany-street-food/\">episode 151</a>, I talked about trying out the alpha version of augmented reality directions in Google Maps, where you hold up your phone and the display uses the camera to show the streetscape in front of you with the&nbsp; directions -- street names, arrows -- overlaid on the real-time image. I thought it was kinda cool; Irene and the kids were less than impressed. But you can judge for yourself because Google <a href=\"https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/08/google-launches-live-view-ar-walking-directions-for-google-maps/\">announced last week</a> that they’ve widened the feature to a public beta. Give it a try and let me know what you think</li><li>Fast forward one whole episode -- from <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/podcast-151-traveler-data-leaks-brittany-street-food/\">151</a> in May to <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/06/16/podcast-152-overwhelming-travel-new-old-restaurant-trends/\">152</a> in June -- which really was a big jump because, right after recording episode <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/podcast-151-traveler-data-leaks-brittany-street-food/\">151</a>, we moved from the big house in the suburbs to a 60% smaller high-rise apartment on the lakefront -- but in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/06/16/podcast-152-overwhelming-travel-new-old-restaurant-trends/\">episode 152</a>, I talked about having to recalibrate how I’d get to the airport. I had my guy who’d pick me up for a 30-minute ride to ORD or MDW… But no more. Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve started to get a feel for it -- 45-50 minutes to ORD, but figure an hour for weird traffic. And in the morning, figure a 10-minute wait for an Uber or Lyft, and a tab with tip around $40-$45. So this Monday at 5am, I fire up Lyft and Uber while drinking my morning cup of tea to see what’s going on -- $110 on Uber and $60 on Lyft. What the hell is going on? Well, maybe all the drivers are sleeping in, so I shower, get dressed, gather all my worldly belongings, and check again -- $120 on Uber; $57 on Lyft. I hit the Lyft button and wait -- and wait and wait. Then someone accepts the ride, and cancels. Guess he didn’t want to go to ORD. So I fire up <a href=\"https://transitapp.com/\">Transit</a>, my favorite mass transit app. It’s developed in Montreal and does mass transit routing in a huge number of cities in the US and Canada. And in Chicago, it also covers Divvy bike share and constructs Lyft-to-mass transit routing. I fired it up thinking that, if I couldn’t get a Lyft to ORD, then maybe I could get one to the nearest Blue Line L stop and take the subway the rest of the way. But even it couldn’t find a Lyft. But, it showed that, across the street from our flat, a bus will pick me up and, 18 stops later, drop me at the L stop. I got nothing else going -- actually, I did but it would involve waking Irene up at&nbsp; now 5:40am for a ride to ORD, truly a last resort. I wheel my luggage across the street. Four minutes later, the bus shows up. There’s me and another guy -- no problem putting my luggage on the seat next to me. And we make pretty good time -- not a lot of people waiting at bus stops at 6am, and the traffic is pretty clear too. All told, we stop maybe 6 times and have 8 people on the bus at its most crowded.  I had to wait another 5 minutes for the L and, at 6:40, it was more crowded; almost everyone had an ORD badge around their neck -- pilots, flight attendants, ground staff -- except for a few passenger-looking folk like me. All told, it took me about an hour -- maybe 10 minutes longer than Uber and Lyft were quoting. But at $2.50 vs. $60 or $120, it seemed like I made out on the deal.</li><li>Also in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/06/16/podcast-152-overwhelming-travel-new-old-restaurant-trends/\">episode 152</a>, I talked about “earning and burning” frequent traveler points rather than saving them because airlines and hotels keep playing with redemption levels and rules that reduce the value of the points. Jim McDonough tweeted me with a contra view -<ul><li>Regarding frequent flyer miles and how they don\'t appreciate over time - I still like to keep some around in case we need to travel for family emergency situations. The walk-up fare does not compete with the $25 charge to book a frequent flyer mile ticket last minute.</li></ul></li><li>Jim, that’s a good point, but I wonder if that strategy still works as more airlines move from fixed awards schedules to dynamic point pricing -- Southwest, Delta, and soon United -- where point price for a flight climes as remaining ticket prices do. Does it still make sense to pay with points?</li><li>As I said earlier, Irene and I are heading out Thursday night for a weekend in Krakow, Poland and then heading down to Budapest for a mix of touring and visits with Irene’s family. So, I thought this was as good a time as any to try out <a href=\"https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT209044\">my iPhone’s dual SIM capability.</a> Up to now, my usual procedure is to transfer my US AT&amp;T SIM to an old HTC One phone and then put my UK EE SIM in my iPhone Xs (usually sometime in flight in that panic drill between them clearing the breakfast tray and packing everything up for final descent) if I’m going to an EU country or when I pick one up after we land. I do this because local data is <em>hugely</em> cheaper than an AT&amp;T international plan - the EE pay-as-you-go plan I got is £10, or $12 with this week’s Brexit exchange rate discount, for 3 GB of data, 100 minutes of voice, and unlimited texts. But I still want my US number to ring thru in case someone back home needs to reach me and doesn’t know I’m out of the country. I don’t carry both phones with me, though. I have the iPhone with me during the day, using the local SIM to run Google Maps and the like. The HTC stays in the hotel room and I check it for messages when we get back at night.</li><li>But with its dual SIM capabilities, I should be able to do this with just my iPhone. However, the iPhone has only one physical SIM slot; the second is an internal eSIM, like the ones Apple uses in their cellular Apple Watch. So to make this work, I had to get AT&amp;T to transfer my US number from its physical SIM to the eSIM in the phone. My first stop was the local AT&amp;T store. I explained to the store guy what I wanted to do. He looked at me for a moment and said, “Uh, I’m new; I don’t know how to do that. But I can give you an eSIM card if you want.” OK, that’s a start. He riffled around his desk drawer. “I don’t have one here. I’ll have to go in the back. But I’m the only one here today, so you’ll have to go outside so I can lock up while I’m in the back.” Interesting. I walked down the street to grab a bite rather than idle outside the door. I came back. He handed me the card, “Here you go, but I don’t know if this will work…” I went home and hit the AT&amp;T web site. I spelunked around the site until I found the chat link and fired it up. The person on the other end knew what needed to be done. I gave her a few numbers off the card, then pointed the camera at the card’s QR code and it added to plan to my iPhone. Now, the chat agent said that they’ll have to do a bit of provisioning at the back end. She’d text me when it was done. Irene and I went out to dinner; no text and no activation. So the next morning, I hit chat again and this time stuck with the guy until the provisioning was complete. Then I pulled out the AT&amp;T SIM and put in the EE SIM, and immediately got a text from EE telling me their US roaming charges. I also got a whole new set of selections under the Cellular section under Settings. Which line did I want to use for voice, for data, for iMessage and FaceTime. I spent some time on Apple’s FAQ pages trying to figure out which scenario works for me. My guess is that it’ll take me a bit of trial and error -- and self-inflected AT&amp;T international charges -- to really figure this out.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com. </li><li>Bridge Music —  &nbsp; Fall to pieces - Silence by mika (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mika/24945 Ft: Colab      </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Will We Still Love Uber When The Prices Go Up?</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><a href=\"https://www.reuters.com/article/us-lyft-results/lyft-sees-ride-hailing-price-war-easing-sending-uber-and-lyft-shares-up-idUSKCN1UX2BQ\">Lyft’s chief financial officer Brian Roberts said, during last week’s earnings call, that pricing was becoming “more rational.”</a> “Rational pricing” is CFO-speak for “more predictably higher.” <a href=\"https://www.marketwatch.com/story/lyft-and-uber-are-giving-investors-what-they-want-which-is-bad-for-the-rest-of-us-2019-08-08\">Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, during his earnings call, said, “We and Lyft are big-time competitors here and have been for some period of time, but for now we’re seeing, generally, category positions that are stable. We are focused on improving profitability in this market.”</a>&nbsp; Which is CEO-speak for “we’re no longer going to slash prices to buy market share.”</li><li>We all knew this time would come -- at least the rational ones. Uber lost $5.2 billion in the second quarter while the smaller Lyft lost a mere $644 million last quarter. Investors are going to let you torch large piles of cash for only so long. Hence the topic question -- will we stay with Uber and Lyft even when they’re not a bargain anymore?</li><li>I’ve been talking about this with frequent travelers I know, or sit next to at bars, or bump into waiting for an Uber at O’Hare. One school of thought is that the Uber/Lyft experience is better than your typical cab, so even at the same price, you’d still order an Uber. You can order it on your phone rather than running into the street, trying to flag down a passing cab. Indeed, I’ve always said that, for me, Uber’s prime use case is getting a ride from midtown Manhattan to LGA at the end of the day a somewhat sane experience. Before Uber, I’d be practically dancing into 5th Ave, hiding my luggage behind a trash can because if a cabbie saw you wanted to go to LGA, they’d accelerate by you. I tried the cab company’s iPhone app last time I was in New York. It failed miserably.</li><li>Adding Uber and Lyft drivers to the transit mix means you can get a car ride from somewhere outside the usual downtown and tourist spots. I remember pre-Uber New Orleans, getting a cab anywhere other than between the airport and the French Quarter was near impossible. One night for dinner, we decided to go to a Mid-City restaurant, <a href=\"http://toupsmeatery.com/\">Toups Meatery</a>. Phenomenal place. The owner, Isaac Toups, later made it to the finals of the <em>Top Chef </em>cooking show. He didn’t win, but was voted “fan favorite”. And his food was our favorite too. The only problem -- getting a cab back to the Sheraton on Canal St from his Mid-City location. The hostess called 3 cab companies and we waited 20 minutes for a 15-minute ride. And that driver told us, “Yup, all most cab drivers want to do is make the easy money, driving between the airport and the hotels”</li><li>There’s also fare predictability -- you see the price to get from, say, downtown Chicago to O’Hare before committing to the ride. No more meter anxiety, watching the number run up in traffic. And the accompanying “Will I have enough cash to pay” or “Will this guy’s credit card machine work?” anxiety. With Uber and Lyft drivers following GPS apps, there’s no more “am I being taken the long way around to run up the meter” anxiety, or depending on your cab driver’s knowledge to take the fast way, or having them punt it to you with the “bridge or tunnel” question I often get from LGA cabs. The technology helps avoid a lot of the bad experiences we’ve had with taxi cab rides.</li><li>I used to say that Uber and Lyft cars are nicer, but their bar has slipped as they’re scrambling for drivers in a full-employment economy. An Uber I took last week was missing the door armrest; a Lyft that Irene took had the front right quarter-panel held on with duct tape. These are exceptions, though a bit more common that a couple of years ago. But they’re still a damn sight better than the beat-to-hell Baltimore cabs that would sit at the cab ranks in the Inner Harbor. I only did that once, because the cab rank was right outside the client’s building and I was late leaving for the airport. The back seat was full of old newspapers and other crap, and there was no air conditioning -- on a July afternoon. After that, I’d stand there, looking at the cabs, while waiting 5 minutes for an Uber to show up.</li><li>The place I most often take a cab rather than waiting for an Uber is the airport. And here, it’s not really about price, it’s convenience. The cab ranks are usually right at the terminal exit, while the rideshare pickup spot can be an Easter Egg hunt (Vegas), a 15-minute walk to the back 40 (Atlanta) or a confusing scrum of screaming traffic cops (Chicago Midway). Vegas and LGA especially -- catching a cab is so much easier than a rideshare. Here at CHO also -- it’s a flat rate into town that’s about the same as Uber and Lyft and the cabs are in decent shape, so if one’s there, there’s no reason to wait.</li><li>And I could be wrong, but it feels like the pricing discussion is mostly a US thing. <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/podcast-150-travel-interruptus/\">In Paris last Spring</a>, none of the Ubers were “rideshares”; they were all black car livery companies with professional drivers. Near as I could tell, Uber was just another dispatch system for them. In Lisbon a few years back, I couldn’t tell if they were true rideshares, but the pricing was the same as taxis, and there were more taxis so less wait. We took the path of least resistance and hailed cabs.</li><li>The rough consensus of my completely unrepresentative polling was - ride sharing got traction because it was cheaper, but now the technology gives such a better experience that I’d even pay a premium over a taxi -- but I wouldn’t want to tell Lyft or Uber that. But what they said on those earnings calls, I think they already know that.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #154</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_154.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<p><!--EndFragment--></p>','Podcast #154 — Will We Still Love Uber When The Prices Go Up?','','inherit','closed','closed','','2508-revision-v1','','','2021-03-14 15:48:44','2021-03-14 20:48:44','',2508,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/14/2508-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3454,1,'2021-03-14 15:49:56','2021-03-14 20:49:56','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\">\n<p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/IMG_1038.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2529 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/IMG_1038-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a></p><figcaption>Polish health food</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>Didn\'t have any problems with the 787\'s flying 4,800 miles to Krakow or back from Budapest, but the 560-mile regional jet flights between Chicago and Charlottesville, VA have been causing me no end of hassles. We talk about this, revisit our discussions about iPhone dual SIM capability and American Airlines\' MD-80 retirement. And then go deep on my very non-keto-friendly dive into Krakow and Budapest street food.&nbsp; All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_155.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #155: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago on an off-travel week; taking a break this week after a couple of weeks of weather-induced hassles -- that in spite of completely avoiding Hurricane Dorian. Instead, it’s been a steady stream of morning thunderstorms hitting ORD and jacking it up for the rest of the day. That and flying regional jets, which we’ve said before, are often…. problematic. In the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/08/13/podcast-154-will-we-still-love-uber-when-the-prices-go-up/\">last episode</a>, I talked about having to shift my outbound evening flight from CHO to RIC because of morning thunderstorms at ORD. The last two weeks have been different variations on the theme. The Tuesday after Labor Day, I was on the bus to the L heading to ORD for an 8:30am flight (because the Uber and Lyft wait times were insane -- God, I miss my old Mongolian ex-taxi driver) when I got a text that my American Eagle flight was cancelled. Still on the bus, I called American’s Platinum line. They told me what I already knew -- no other American options until the end of the day. I told them that since I was coming home the next day (Weds), I needed to get to Charlottesville that morning. “What about the 9am United flight?” I asked her, “I’m already on my way to ORD.” “Let me call United to transfer the ticket,” she offered. I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised. Over the past few years, I’ve seen airlines more and more reluctant to lose \\ revenue by moving you to another carrier, but there was none of that coming from this American agent. Our call kept going as I got off the bus and walked down the stairs into the subway stop, but she got everything squared away. Now that United flight ended up being delayed an hour, but it eventually got me to Charlottesville.</li><li>Last Friday morning in Charlottesville, I woke up, and scrolling thru Twitter, saw <a href=\"https://twitter.com/NWSChicago\">NWS Chicago</a> -- Nat’l Weather Service -- tweeting about severe thunderstorms, so when I got the text from United at 9am delaying my 1pm flight 45 minutes, I wasn’t surprised. No big deal -- I’ll just get a second beer at the Radar Bar. But then, as these things tend to do it, it didn’t stop there. An hour later, another text from United -- the delay doubled to 90 minutes.  But then at noon, another text -- the delay is down to an hour -- shortly followed by another text -- it’s back up to 90 minutes. I pull up <a href=\"https://flightaware.com/\">FlightAware</a>; I’m not going to the airport until the inbound plane leaves the gate at ORD. Ten minutes later, I see it push back. OK, that should be the end of the delay cascade. I order an Uber and head to the airport. Halfway there, another text -- now my flight isn’t leaving until 3:30pm, 2½ hours late. Immediately followed by a text with a 3:57 departure time. I get out of the car and head to the gate agent. What’s going on? Has the plane left ORD yet? Unlike the American agent, the United agent -- or maybe she worked for Air Wisconsin, the United Express partner, is evasive -- don’t know what’s going on; no other options; everything else is oversold, even in Richmond. I back out of line and call United’s Premiere desk. Yes, there’s availability out of Richmond and DC. Richmond’s a little closer and has a helluva lot less of a rush hour, so I move over to the 5:30pm flight (the United agent said “I think you’re making the right decision”), book a one-way rental, and head out to the parking lot. There’s a mist starting to settle in over the airport. This can’t be good. It’s an uneventful 90-minute drive to Richmond. I sit at the Sam Adams Brewhouse bar and have a beer, and then another. This flight leaves on time -- it’s also a regional jet, but it’s been running up and down the East Coast, so today, it’s running on time -- getting me into ORD at 6:50pm, about 5 hours after my original flight was supposed to land. I fire up the United app and look up the status of that flight -- it still hasn’t left. It didn’t leave until 9pm and then only made it as far as Washington-Dulles -- 95 miles up the road.</li><li>Bridge Music —  &nbsp; I Will Writhe by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/26739 Ft: Soundprank </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>In contrast to my regional jet challenges, our trip at the end of August to Krakow and Budapest went much smoother. We flew LOT, the Polish airline, the whole way, including the last leg, BUD-ORD non-stop. I was kinda surprised by that leg -- a Transatlantic leg that didn’t go through Poland -- but there must be enough traffic on that route. A week before we left, American announced their own non-stop between ORD and BUD starting next year. Both airlines do/will use 787’s on the route. Perhaps it’s one of the “long, thin routes” that the 787 was designed to unlock. Anyways, all three flights on LOT -- 787’s on the long legs, and a Dash-8 prop job on the hop from Krakow to Budapest -- were reasonable. I thought the 787’s “morning wake-up” mode for breakfast -- where the cabin lights fade up while the darkened windows lighten -- was a pleasant change to usual “light on and PA announcement” approach. It was my first trip to Poland. Krakow Airport is nice -- new, compact, with train station into the city. It was a good trip.</li><li>I talked in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/08/13/podcast-154-will-we-still-love-uber-when-the-prices-go-up/\">last episode</a> about trying out my iPhone XS’s dual SIM capability in Hungary and Poland. I did the pre-work before I left -- working through a couple of chat sessions to move my US AT&amp;T number to the internal eSIM so I use the physical SIM slot for my UK EE pre-paid SIM. En route -- somewhere over the Faroe Islands I think -- I went into Settings and made my UK line the main voice and data line, leaving my US line open for phone calls and texts. It seemed to work as designed -- I replied to a couple of texts on my US line from my sister, but it looks like everything else went out over the UK line with the 3 GB for £10 plan. I’ll hold final judgement until I get this month’s bill from AT&amp;T, but from what I could see on their website, it looks like it worked. It was a nice change to only have one phone and not to have to remember to check my other phone every night. The new version of the iPhone operating system -- iOS 13 -- is supposed to have some improvements for dual SIM, but I was happy with it as it stands -- but check back with me after I get my AT&amp;T bill.</li><li>And, of course, I extend that 3 GB by hitting the WiFi in coffee shops and hotels, which is where we circle back to one of my top travel security tips -- use a VPN when on WiFi. I used to think that as long as I was hitting encrypted web sites I was OK -- it used to be that you’d see HTTPS in the address bar apparently Google and Apple think that’s too much for us to process; they’ve replaced it with a picture of a lock; Firefox still shows the full address, though. But it seems that more and more security breaches are taking advantage of obscure misconfigurations that get around basic security. And with major hotel chains regularly coughing up millions of credit card numbers, it seems a bit unreasonable to expect the staff at a small coffee shop or local hotel to be up-to-date on their router patching. So I have VPN clients on my iPhone, my Android tablet, and my MacBook Air. I usually forget to turn them on if I’m doing a quick check of Twitter or Google Maps while in line somewhere, but if I’m doing any sort of browsing session on public WiFi these days, I’ll fire it up.&nbsp;</li><li>Packing for this trip meant rummaging around for European plug adapters. Not voltage converters -- I don’t use them because all the electronics can handle 110 and 240 volt -- just the two blade-to-two round adapters. I’d rounded up my UK adapters for our June trip to Ireland and Scotland, but now I needed the European adapters -- the two round plug ones.&nbsp; I found the UK ones and a random South African one but I couldn’t find the European ones anywhere. Probably because I’d left them all behind in Brittany in March. So I got on Amazon (as one does when they need some random thing in a hurry) and ordered a box of 6. I only needed one, but given my history, 6 would keep me for a year or two. I ordered white adapters because that’s what popped up in Amazon. Which was OK in those hotels with black outlets, but not so great for white outlets. I took 2 and came home with 2, but only by sheer luck. At least twice, I was walking out of the room with my bag and only then noticed an adapter still plugged in, hiding in a recessed white outlet. I really need colored plug adapters. And not in tasteful colors; something gaudy, like a purple or pink or chartreuse. Maybe I’ll spray paint the ones I have before my next trip.&nbsp;</li><li>Leonard -- no last name -- commented on the last episode with a link to a Dallas TV station’s coverage of the last American Airlines MD-80 flight; appropriately flying from DFW to ORD, a route and a plane that contributed heavily to my Advantage Gold status -- when that was the highest level -- back in 1985. There’ve been a lot of stories covering the retirement; people waxing nostalgic -- though not too much since I haven’t heard of any big jump in Delta MD-80 bookings. They still fly almost 100 of them. I have seen a couple of quotes about not wanting to sit in the last rows because of the noise from the side-mounted engines. It’s true. Not even the Bose noise-cancelling headphones could handle all the engine and vibration noise. They were also bad seats because there were no windows; all you’d see would be the engine cowling and the window would make the noise even worse. And those times when I ended up in those seats -- usually last-minute bookings between ORD and DFW -- my mind would sometimes wander -- if the engine next to my head blows up, will the shrapnel blow out or blow into the cabin. I never heard of such a catastrophic failure on an MD-80 -- but that didn’t keep me from wondering.&nbsp;</li><li>Standing in the TSA PreCheck queue, watching the single screener who was checking boarding passes and IDs have to ping-pong between the regular and PreCheck lines, I wondered what was keeping US airports from installing the automated boarding pass-checking gates that I’ve passed thru at mid-sized European airports like Budapest and Krakow and Edinburgh. I got it -- they’re only checking for valid boarding passes; they’re not examining IDs -- but there’s got to be something there that can improve TSA efficiency <em>and</em> the traveler experience. Watching this poor woman, my mind fast-forwarded to October next year when the TSA starts enforcing the Real ID requirement, the time wasted arguing with people who travel maybe once a year and so didn’t go thru the additional hassle of getting a Real ID-compliant driver’s license. Note to self - don’t book any travel in October 2020. </li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com. </li><li>Bridge Music -- August (Reggae Rework) by el-B (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/elB/16075 Ft: Calendargirl </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Street Food in Poland and Hungary </strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Over-tourism is still a big topic in the tourism industry. Iceland seems to be cooling down after the Wow Air bankruptcy, but the photo from May of the queue to summit Mount Everest has become the new icon of the problem faced there and at places like Venice, Barcelona, and Machu Pichu. And it drives an interesting dichotomy -- travelers chasing the iconic Instagram picture -- sort of a virtual souvenir for this “pics or it didn’t happen” age -- while at the same time craving “authenticity” -- which is where, I think, the current glorification of street food is coming from. Wanting to experience something that you can only get in this place -- and, of course, post a picture of it.</li><li>Parking the cynicism for a sec -- if you’re queuing up (hopefully with some locals, not just tourists), doing the point-and-shoot ordering, and then eating it there on the street, it does create a very specific moment and memory. I vividly remember buying takoyaki, basically octopus croquettes, from a street vendor in Osaka; getting into the queue for a food stall in a Beijing hutong, the only non-Chinese guy, not knowing what for and getting this phenomenal crunchy scallion pancake; sending Andrew over to a vendor on a sidewalk in Hoi An, Vietnam for black sesame soup; folding up a slice of pizza in New York City in mid-bar crawl; and, as talked about a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/podcast-151-traveler-data-leaks-brittany-street-food/\">few episodes back</a>, slurping oysters on the Cancale sea wall on the Brittany coast.</li><li>So while we weren’t on a street food hunt in Poland and Hungary, our willingness, actually desire to eat pretty much whatever we came across without any filters -- no worries about keto or paleo or gluten-free diets -- led us to some good street food -- even though there were days I really felt the need to double down on the statins.</li><li>Probably the most memorable bit of street food came our first day in Krakow. We landed around 9am, took a taxi to the hotel, checked in, brushed our teeth, and walked up to the Old Square where I trawled through the vendor stalls. I came to a full stop at a small stand at the end of an aisle. An older couple had a huge pan over a wood fire. The pan had a metal divider down the middle; one half of the pan was frying onions; the other half, sliced kielbasa. I watched a couple people order and then stepped up. The man sliced a large, thick piece of bread off a round loaf, spread a thick smear of lard with cracklings, put down a layer of sliced kielbasa, finishing it off with fried onions. All for 13 złoty -- or about 3 and a half bucks. I don’t know what left more of an impression -- the size and heft of what he handed me or the staying power of the layer of pork fat it left on my lips. I’ll put a picture of it in the show notes.</li><li>We walked straight from there to a small square behind St Mary’s Basilica for the pierogi festival. There were 20-30 stands selling their selection of pierogis. Not sure if pierogis strictly qualify as a street food, but I queued up at the most popular ones and did point-&amp;-shoot ordering through most of their selection. I skipped the sweet pierogis -- the chocolate-banana and the blueberry ones just didn’t say “pierogi” to me -- but I still ended up with 5-6 from each stand -- from traditional onion and potato, to goose and duck and wild boar-filled ones. I tried to avoid pointing at one stand’s Mexican pierogi, but somehow it ended up on my plate. This was a pretty full-contact Day One. I needed a nap.</li><li>Chicago has a large Polish population -- somewhere in the range of 1-1.5 million Polish immigrants their descendants in the metro area, which, depending on who you read, is the largest Polish metropolitan area outside of Poland. So we get our share of Polish food and I wanted to try a few things I recognized. The first thing we hunted down was a pączki -- basically a Polish jelly doughnut. In Chicago, Pączki Day is Fat Tuesday and you see pączkis everywhere -- the grocery stores, bakeries. Asking around, Gorące Pączki -- “Hot Donuts” in English -- was the consensus recommendation in the Old Town. We rolled up there a couple of times and came away, I gotta say, disappointed. Even Chicago grocery store pączkis are better.</li><li>That weekend, we were staying with friends in the hills/mountains a couple of hours southwest of Krakow, down near the Czech and Slovakian borders. On Sunday, we went to a karczma for lunch, which as near as I could tell is a roadside pub/restaurant. But this one, the specialty was potato pancakes made in a wood-burning oven. One guy, the owner, was running the oven -- laying the pancake batter in the oven, shifting them around with a spatula, managing the fire, serving some pancakes flat while stuffing and folding others over like a potato pancake quesadilla. Watching this guy was like watching kitchen ballet. And the product -- like no potato pancake I’d ever had. Definitely beat out Chicago on this one.</li><li>We got into Budapest on St Stephen’s Day, Hungary’s biggest national holiday commemorating the founding of the Hungarian state; kinda like their version of the US Independence Day. After checking into our hotel, we walked over to the Buda side of the Danube where there was a huge food festival. The longest line was for the national cake. Apparently, they do a special cake each St Stephen’s Day. It was a really long line, but they were handing out free pieces of cake, so it was understandable. We skipped it though and went for the next longest line, for freshly fried lángos. Every culture seems to have some version of fried dough street food, and lángos is Hungary’s, though lángos is savory, not sweet. It was a hot day, but here was a booth full of women, hand stretching balls of dough into disks and dropping them into deep pans of hot oil for people waiting 15 minutes in the hot sun for them. The fully-dressed lángos was brushed with garlic and then topped with sour cream and shredded cheese. Still waddling from the weekend in Krakow, I went for the lite version -- just the garlic.&nbsp;</li><li>A couple of days later, Irene and I took a 40-minute train ride up along the Danube to Szentendre, a bit of an artist colony town. We hadn’t been up there in, I dunno, 20 years so we thought we’d check it out again. And top on our list of things to revisit was a little lángos shack tucked away halfway up a little stairway that goes from the town square up to the Catholic church on top of a hill. The last time we were in Szentendre, we tripped across this place walking up to the church - just a couple of people frying up lángos. It took us a bit to find the staircase this time -- it’s about a person-and-a-half wide archway next to a souvenir shop. The shack was still there, but it expanded, now with tables in a little courtyard, and it’s been found. We stood in a queue of tourists for 10-15 minutes watching 2 women crank out fried disks of dough. I cringed when I saw people putting ketchup on their lángos. We stayed pure with the garlic.</li><li>The <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/06/24/podcast-130-notes-from-hungary/\">last time</a> Irene and I were in Hungary, in 2017, we complained about not being able to find good, basic Hungarian food outside of the tourist traps. We saw lots of burger bars and pizza joint, especially in the Jewish Quarter, the party district where all the ruin bars are. But now, things seem to have diversified. Not far from Szimpla Kert, Ground Zero of the ruin bar circuit, there’s a place called Gettó Gulyás selling, well, gulyás and other Hungarian basics like chicken paprikas. And even better, it looks like there’s a bit of a chain called Langosh that’s open in the party district til 2 in the morning. Fried bread and beer -- not sure there’s any better definition of street food.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #155</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_155.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #155 — RJ Delays; Street Food in Poland and Hungary','','inherit','closed','closed','','2527-revision-v1','','','2021-03-14 15:49:56','2021-03-14 20:49:56','',2527,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/14/2527-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3455,1,'2021-03-14 15:50:55','2021-03-14 20:50:55','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\">\n<p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/IMG_0159.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1402\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/IMG_0159-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"225\" height=\"300\"></a></p><figcaption>This Won\'t Help Your Flier Sat Score</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>In this episode, we talk with Michael Taylor, author of <a href=\"https://www.jdpower.com/business/press-releases/2019-north-america-airport-satisfaction-study\">JD Power\'s 2019 Airport Satisfaction Survey</a>, about what keeps fliers happy. I also talk about what I like about eScooters, shopping for a smaller bag for upcoming flights on a Euro budget airline, and how Hertz\'s contract updates remind me to delete my Bluetooth pairings in rental cars. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_156.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #156: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago in the middle of what looks like a 6-week run of solid travel. Traveled to DC, Charlottesville, and Nashville, in that order, in the 3 weeks since the last episode. Heading back to Charlottesville this week, then a week hopscotching through the Baltics with my son Andrew -- Riga, Latvia; Talinn, Estonia; Helsinki, Finland -- and then back down to Charlottesville. </li><li>I flew Southwest on my non-Charlottesville flights -- into DC Reagan and Nashville -- and United again to Charlottesville. The Southwest flights went smoothly, except for trying to get to Chicago Midway for the DC flight. The Uber driver didn’t follow the app’s recommended route; instead, he pretended he was a cab driver and took the normal route down the Stevenson Expressway which was crawling due to an earlier accident. I wasn’t paying attention - first time I’ve had an Uber driver freelance on me - and didn’t notice he’d skipped the exit to the faster path until it was too late. We made our flight, but not without a bit of hustle through Midway. No tip, let alone a 5-star review for that guy.</li><li>Southwest flies into the old Terminal A at what I still call Washington National. I went to college in DC in the early ‘80’s, before it was named for President Reagan and when Terminal A was pretty much all that was there. I had forgotten what a long schlepp it is from that terminal to the Metro station. I remember way back then asking someone why they built the Metro station so far away. “Because they’re going to build new terminals right across from it.” Which they finally did, some 20 years after that Metro station was opened. Sometimes it seems that airport planning horizons are not in years, or even decades; feels more like they’re planning in lifetimes.</li><li>In between the Southwest flights, my United flight continued the string of disruptions trying to get into or out of Charlottesville. I checked that my flight was on-time before calling an Uber -- no weather delays at either end, United and FlightAware apps say the inbound plane is on-time…. Then, halfway to ORD, I get the text from United; a 2½-hour delay for crew arrival. What!? The next text “Because of crew scheduling disruptions this evening in Chicago, we’ve assigned your flight a new crew…. We know this delay wasn’t in your plans today, so we appreciate your patience.” No shit a 2½-hour delay wasn’t in my plans, especially when it’s because United stole our original crew because they screwed up their scheduling. And really United, you can’t find another pilot in ORD, your largest hub, that’s a little closer? I tell you what else isn’t in my plans, flying United to Charlottesville this week. </li><li>Bridge Music -- <em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/stefsax/7785\" target=\"_blank\">Awel</a> </em>by stefsax (c) copyright 2006 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/stefsax/7785 </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>That’s the sound of my new <a href=\"https://www.marriott.com/loyalty/member-benefits/titanium.mi\">Marriott Bonvoy Lifetime Titanium Elite</a> card hitting the kitchen counter. The mailer package was appropriately upscale, but the sheer weight of the thing stunned me. I put a quick video of it on the TravelCommons Facebook page. Cate Rose commented “Hope it scans into your Stocard app so you don’t actually have to carry it in your luggage allowance”. My thought exactly.</li><li>I got a note that Chicago’s electric scooter pilot ends tomorrow, which made me realize that I’ve seen them in just about every city I’ve been to this summer -- Budapest, Krakow, Charlottesville, Nashville, Washington, DC. I think the only places I didn’t see them were in Scotland and Ireland. They’re handy; because they’re dockless, I’ve found they have a wider distribution than, say, a traditional docked bike share and you can take them directly to your planned destination. And they’re a good fill-in between walking and an Uber or a Lyft. And, they’re fun! When I was in DC a couple of weeks ago, I was in the <a href=\"https://washington.org/visit-dc/neighborhoods/brookland\">Brookland</a> neighborhood in the Northeast part of town, and wanted to try out a new taproom there, <a href=\"http://www.rightproperbrewing.com/what-we-do\">Right Proper Brewing</a>. Now Brookland is not the nicest part of DC. It’s much better than when I went to school there, but there are still iffy parts. I wasn’t completely comfortable walking down to Right Proper from the Brookland Metro stop, but it seemed too short for an Uber ride and there was no bus that went down there. But, there was a scooter a couple of blocks from the Metro station. Running down 9th St at 10 mph felt a bit better than speedwalking at 4. And could leave it right in front of the taproom. It was exactly what I wanted. Two problems I’ve seen -- first, too many people riding them on the sidewalk, especially in DC. Maybe because I bike a lot in Chicago, I’m comfortable in bike lanes and navigating around cars on the street and keeping an eye out for potholes. I actually wouldn’t be comfortable riding a scooter on the sidewalk; I’d be afraid of popping a pedestrian who suddenly walked in front of me. To me, cars are much more predictable than pedestrians. The second thing, the need to have half-a-dozen scooter apps on your phone. In Chicago, there are 8 scooter companies, in addition to Uber and Lyft’s scooters. And you need to download their app to find and rent their scooter. Which meant that when I wanted to find a scooter near the Brookland Metro stop, I’d have to cycle thru 5 or 6 apps. Except I didn’t because I found an app called <a href=\"https://scootermap.com/\">Scooter Map</a> that shows all the scooter brands on one map. I think it’s targeted at folks who are making money recharging scooters (not quite sure how that works) but it worked fine for me. I fired it up and saw all the different scooters that were near me. One caveat -- I’ve only ridden these scooters on sunny days. I’m not sure how enthusiastic I’d be riding one in the rain or snow. </li><li>For the Baltics trip next week, we’re taking Finnair out and back from Chicago, an early morning ferry ride from Talinn to Helsinki, and then AirBaltic for everything else. Which then got me thinking about luggage sizes, because I bought my current bag, the <a href=\"https://www.swissarmy.com/us/en&amp;eoq=!t/Products/Travel-Gear/Werks-Traveler-5-0/collection/trg-collection/travelgear_collection_TRA-C2955\">Victorinox Werks</a> 22-incher, to use every last inch of US carry-on allowance. It even catches some side-eye from American and United where I have status. So I didn’t figure it’d fit into any European budget carrier’s luggage sizer. Looking up <a href=\"https://www.airbaltic.com/en/cabin-baggage\">AirBaltic’s carry-on allowance</a>, my Victorinox is a couple of inches too tall and an inch too deep. But what really got me shopping for a new bag for this trip is the weight. AirBaltic has an 8 kg/17½ lbs weight limit. In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/05/30/podcast-121-tsa-lines-my-luggage-is-where/\">episode #121</a>, I talked about the baggage strip tease exercise with Wow Air to make their 7 kg/15 lbs carry-on weight limit. I’d take my bag off the scale, pull some clothes out, zip it back up, and put it back on the scale. Still too heavy. Repeat 3 more times until the agent takes pity — or just gets tired of me — and gives me the approval tag to put on my bag. After which I walk about 10 feet, open my bag and put my armful of clothes back in. My Victorinox is a bit over 7 lbs, so not only is it too tall, the bag itself uses over 40% of the weight allowance. And even though I’ve talked before about how much I hate shopping for luggage, I searched for a smaller, lighter bag that wouldn’t cost a fortune, since my Victorinox will stay my primary bag. I landed on the the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/32lIURe\">TravelPro Maxlite 5</a>. I, or rather my daughter has a good history with TravelPro. It fit the AirBaltic dimensions and is one of the lighter bags I saw at 5.4 lbs which is down to 30% of the 8 kg weight allowance. It also meets three of the key suitcase criteria I laid down in the “how to shop for a suitcase” topic in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/01/25/podcast-137-new-years-travel-status-tips-how-to-shop-for-a-suitcase/\">episode #137</a> -- it’s black, it’s a 2-wheeler so no lost space on extended spinner wheels, and the inside is, for the most part, a wide open box without clothes hangers or a bunch of zip compartments. I’m taking it to Charlottesville tomorrow for a shakedown cruise.</li><li>Three years ago, back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/11/22/podcast-125-uber-driver-stories-overseas-for-the-election/\">episode #125</a>, in a Travel Security tip, I talked about the need to delete your phone’s Bluetooth pairing when you return a rental car. Usually when I go to pair my phone, I’ll first go through and delete 3-5 pairings before pairing my own. And they all have personalized names like “Timmy’s iPhone”. And most phones by default will download your contacts to the car when paired, so leave all of their contacts and phone numbers in their rental. That is just bad in so many ways. And now Hertz has gotten around to noticing it. In their newest rental terms and conditions, they specifically carve out any liability from you leaving a Bluetooth pairing behind. It’s a pain to remember, especially if you’re running for a flight, but as you’re taking that last scan around the car for your sunglasses and iPhone, remember not to leave your identity behind either.</li><li>Bridge Music -- Black Rainbow by Pitx (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Pitx/19513 Ft: ERH, acclivity</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Keeping Fliers Happy </strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A couple of weeks ago, JD Power released their 2019 North American Airport Satisfaction Study.&nbsp; The headline - “North American Airports Struggle to Keep Travelers Happy Amid Construction Delays and Surging Passenger Volumes” caught my eye, so I reached out to the study’s author, Michael Taylor, to dig into it a bit more. And so last Friday, we had a wide-ranging conversation. I was going to edit it down, but as I listened to it, I couldn’t think about what to cut. So here it is in its entirety…</li><li>Interview with <a href=\"https://www.jdpower.com/business/content/michael-taylor\">Michael Taylor</a>, Travel Intelligence Lead at J.D. Power</li><li>Thanks again to Michael for taking the time to talk to us. Here\'s the <a href=\"https://www.jdpower.com/business/press-releases/2019-north-america-airport-satisfaction-study\">link</a> to the study summary on the JD Power website.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #156</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li> And if you check out the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> page, you can click thru to highlights from my trips to Budapest and Ireland. And if you follow it, you can catch some pics from next week’s trip through the Baltics.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_156.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #156 — Airport Satisfaction; eScooters; Smaller Luggage','','inherit','closed','closed','','2543-revision-v1','','','2021-03-14 15:50:55','2021-03-14 20:50:55','',2543,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/14/2543-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3456,1,'2021-03-14 15:52:07','2021-03-14 20:52:07','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\">\n<p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/2D576E07-6546-4D4B-9D64-0E593596FB0C.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2581 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/2D576E07-6546-4D4B-9D64-0E593596FB0C-268x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"268\" height=\"300\"></a></p><figcaption>Selfies with Friends in Tallinn</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>Wrapping up my time in Charlottesville, VA with some \"bleisure\" travel, as well as some pure leisure travel with a quick trip in the Baltics. And a listener talks about the reason for his out-and-back day trip from Washington, DC to Hong Kong. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_157.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #157: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago just off the shores of Lake Michigan toward the end of what has been a record-breaking cold November. The first half of the month here was the coldest in 148 years with an average temperature of 31 degrees, which compares to an average high for November of 50 degrees, and a <em>low</em> of 39. But what’s been worse has been the early snow -- 3½ inches of snow on Halloween (another record) and again on Veterans Day. And by some incredible strokes of luck (as opposed to any foresight on my part), I dodged both snows -- by flying home from Charlottesville, VA the day before Halloween, and scheduling a week off the road the week of November 11. It’s <em>always</em> better to be lucky than good.</li><li>Last week was my last week in Charlottesville, finishing up an 18-week project that started in July. A year ago, when I wrapped up a long run in Charlottesville and didn’t know if/when I’d be back, I took an afternoon to hit Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s home that was only a 10-15 minute drive from the client. It was one of those things I wanted to do, but kept putting off -- I’ll get to it -- and here I was, the last day, and so squoze it in between meetings and calls.</li><li>With that in mind, I did just a touch more planning this year, and on my <em>second-to-last </em>trip, the week between the Halloween and Veterans Day snow storms, I flew in a day early on Monday, but to IAD rather than <a href=\"http://charlottesville-airport.com/\" class=\"aioseop-link\">CHO</a>, instead renting a car, and driving the length of the 105-mile <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Skyline Drive (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.nps.gov/shen/planyourvisit/driving-skyline-drive.htm\" target=\"_blank\">Skyline Drive</a> down to Charlottesville along the tops of the Blue Ridge Mountains through Shenandoah National Park. I was probably a week late for peak leaf peeping, but it was still pretty, especially when looking west over the Shenandoah Valley.&nbsp; I don’t think I would’ve made a special trip to drive Skyline Drive, but since I was in the neighborhood, why not? And it turned out to be just a great drive -- clear blue skies, still some good leaf color, and on a Monday, not a lot of people on that 2-lane road.&nbsp;</li><li>And then last Thursday, flying out of <a href=\"http://charlottesville-airport.com/\" class=\"aioseop-link\">CHO</a> for the last time until I don’t know when, I had to order one last beer at the <a href=\"http://www.gocho.com/concessions/\" class=\"aioseop-link\">Tailwind</a>, the airport bar. For an airport with only 5 gates, the Tailwind always has a great rotation of local craft beers. And there’s a mini-Cheers effect -- maybe not everyone knows my name, but Lyn the bartender recognizes me from my 4-year off-and-on presence in her bar. When I showed back up in July after a 9-month absence, she recognized me right away. So I had to get one last beer from her. I looked at the blackboard and ordered the stout from Blue Mountain Brewery, which was not far from when I ended my trip down Skyline Drive. I was getting over a bit of a cold; the IPA would’ve been a bit rough on the back of my throat. That <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Dark Hollow Stout (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/16352/39417/\" target=\"_blank\">Dark Hollow Stout</a> went down smoother, but what I didn’t quite pick up on is that it’s a 10% alcohol beer. Bit of an eye opener at 11:30am. Made for a good nap on the flight home.</li><li>Bridge Music -- Dive Deep (Loveshadow remix) by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/50488 Ft: Loveshadow</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Mark Skinner sent a note to comments@travelcommons.com a few days ago<ul><li>Hi Mark, Long time listener. So your tag line \"It\'s more about the journey than the destination” hit home to me with what has to be my oddest business trip yet. Tomorrow, I’m flying Washington to Hong Kong, via EWR, arriving Monday afternoon, and then returning on Tuesday morning! I’m basically there for dinner…</li><li>No meetings in Hong Kong, it’s all about taking a cosmic ray detector for NASA on an over-the-pole flight; which the UA flights 179/180 do quite well, EWR-HKG-EWR. They want to understand the amount of radiation from space inside the aircraft cabin. I’ll be in the air longer than on the ground. I’m planning to stay on and to sleep at “normal” east coast times, which means while I’ll have a hotel room by HKG, I’ll be awake then (night in HK, but daytime hours for me).&nbsp; Happily my upgrades to Polaris Business both ways have been confirmed! Otherwise the 16 hr flight would seem even longer…</li></ul></li><li>Oh, my! There’s a nice end-of-year mileage run! I told Mark that his itinerary reminds me of one I did 12 years ago when I flew to London for a lunch meeting to wrap up a project. I flew ORD-LHR, showered in the arrivals lounge, took a car out to Reading, gave the final readout over lunch, hopped back in the car to LHR, and caught the afternoon flight to DEN. I always say that ORD-LHR-DEN run was the epitome of \"stupid\" travel, but Mark has a good reason for his out-&amp;-back.&nbsp; Given the amount of time I’ve spent at 35,000 ft over the past 35 years, I’m not sure I want to know the results of Mark’s measurements.</li><li>United Airlines sent out a link promoting a jet lag app, <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Timeshifter (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.timeshifter.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Timeshifter</a>. Though Mark won’t need one because he’s staying on Eastern Time during his quick jaunt to Hong Kong, I decided to give it a try for my trip to Latvia, Estonia, and Finland. Going east, from the US to Europe, has always been easier for me. My usual routine - I skip the seat-back entertainment for 4-6 hrs of shut-eye (I wouldn’t call it true sleep) on the flight over, eat breakfast when I arrive even if I’m not hungry, get outside as much as possible, take a 30-minute nap after check-in, push through until 11:30pm that first night, and then set an alarm for, say, 7am the next morning. That usually resets my body clock and I’m pretty much good-to-go for the rest of the trip. Timeshifter added two things to my routine: starting to shift to destination time a few days before leaving, moving bedtime and wake-up time an hour earlier each day - going to bed at 10 instead of 11 and getting up at 5 instead of 6 the next morning. The second thing was taking melatonin before going to bed, which I tried by I’m not sure that it really does anything for me. It’s also a well-designed app that notifies you about things like when to seek out direct sunlight and when to start and stop with caffeinated drinks. I used the free first plan. Not sure I’ll pay the $9.99 for another plan, though.</li><li>And speaking of caffeinated drinks, last week, staying at the Omni Hotel in Charlottesville, they gave me two door hangers -- one for each night -- that I could exchange for a drink delivered to my door in the morning, or a beer at the bar in the evening. The first night, since I’d already had a margarita at dinner, I skipped the bar for something in the morning. Looking at the door hanger, my choices were coffee, tea, and Red Bull. Wow. Guess they’re catering to all kinds of morning afters. It wasn’t a big margarita, so I went for the cup of tea.</li><li>Following up on last episode’s carry-on discussion, about buying a new bag to meet Finnair and AirBaltic’s size and weight limits, My new <a href=\"https://amzn.to/32lIURe\">TravelPro Maxlite bag</a> worked like a charm. I packed a week of clothes and didn’t tagged by any gate agents. It even fit in the overheads of the ATR prop jobs that hopscotched us around between Riga, Tallinn, and Helsinki. On one of our passes through Helsinki, I saw an AirBaltic luggage sizer and scale by an empty customer service desk, so I decided to check the bag out. It was a bit of a force fit into the sizer and it weighed in at 8½ kilos, just a bit over the limit. Glad I didn’t catch a gate agent’s eye.</li><li>And since we’ve been talking about carry-on luggage over the past couple of episodes, so I pulled together all those threads into a new <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/11/06/how-to-choose-the-best-carry-on-luggage/\">“how to choose a new carry-on” blog post</a>. It went up at the beginning of the month, updating the one from last February, just in time for the Christmas shopping season. If you or a frequent traveling loved one needs a new carry-on, check it out, complete with Amazon Affiliate links if you want to toss a buck TravelCommons’ way.</li><li>And speaking of prop jobs, I definitely misfired on my Finnair seat choices between Helsinki and Riga. I was more focused on choosing seats for the long flights between Chicago and Helsinki, and didn’t pay much attention to the 45-minute flight to and from Riga. So just picked one off the seat map where there would be with no one next to me - 5C both ways - which, as it turned out, was empty for a reason, because it was right next to the propeller. I had forgotten how loud those propellers get on take-off. I popped on my Bose Noise Cancelling headphones (which, I noticed, are starting to show a good bit of wear; so I might be doing a bit of Black Friday/Cyber Monday shopping) on taxi, but when the pilot revved up the propellers, the noise cancellation started to cut in and out. The headphones were having to generate huge “anti-waves” to cancel the prop noise and the battery was too low to support the load. Luckily, I always carry extra triple-AAA batteries in the case. But while I was swapping the battery, the noise, the oscillation pressure was killer. I couldn’t get those headphones back over my ears fast enough. If you go to the <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">TravelCommons’ Instagram page</a>, you can see <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/p/B37C8LVnRkd/\">a bit of video</a> out the window of my HEL-RIX flight complete with a slow-motion propeller.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music - Drops of H2O ( The Filtered Water Treatment ) by J.Lang (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djlang59/37792 Ft: Airtone</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Notes from the Baltics: Riga, Latvia and Tallinn, Estonia</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>At the end of October, right after pushing out <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/10/14/podcast-156-airport-satisfaction-escooters-smaller-luggage/\">the last episode</a>, my son Andrew and I flew east for a week hopscotching through the Baltics -- Riga, Latvia; Tallinn, Estonia; and Helsinki, Finland. Why the Baltics? I’m not really sure. I’m sure we had a good rationale when we first thought of the trip a few years ago, but now, it wasn’t much more than “here are a few kinda outta-the-way countries that might be cool to wander around.”&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>Andrew booked our flights -- Finnair from ORD to Riga with a connection in Helsinki. The Finnair service was fine, a pretty standard Airbus A330 but with lots of polka-dot Marimekko patterns on everything. I’d forgotten they were a Finnish company. I skipped using my UK passport one last time for a quick pass down the EU passport lane, deciding not to strand Andrew in the “everyone else” passport path, which led to an unexpected grilling from the Finnish border control cop about the details of my itinerary. Then he spent a good bit of time paging back and forth through my passport stamps. Can’t think of what he found interesting -- the Chinese visa, the two Indian visas, maybe the Moroccan stamps from that day trip to Tangiers 3 years ago? Eventually, he decided to put his Helsinki stamp right next to August’s Krakow stamp and then open the gate so I could walk through.&nbsp;</li><li>I’m not quite sure what I expected from Riga, but it turned out to be a nice, mid-sized city. Maybe it shouldn’t have, but I was surprised at how well-preserved the city center is, especially the buildings with the over-the-top Art Nouveau edifices with huge faces over the doorways and carved figures holding up window sills. It took some money, though. Down by the river, I saw two buildings side-by-side, the one on the right recently refinished and repainted; the one on the left was still waiting its turn, but time is running out. The Art Nouveau look was there, but muted under the grime and soot and flaking plaster; with some relief decorations on the window balcony worn away.</li><li>I was surprised, though, at how empty Riga’s old town was in the middle of a Tuesday. The streets were empty. Where was everyone? Maybe across the river where it looks like they’ve built new modern office towers. I was glad I didn’t book our hotel down here.</li><li>The <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riga_Central_Market\">Central Market</a> down river from the Old Town was much more lively, and also where Riga stopped looking so Scandi and started looking a bit more post-Soviet. The busses and streetcars orbiting the market looked left over from the early ‘90’s. But I liked it. Most of the people here seemed to be doing their own grocery shopping -- unlike food markets in places like Paris and Barcelona that seem to have more people taking pictures of fish than buying them. But the place is so big that I don’t see that it could survive just on food porn tourism. They repurposed a set of World War I zeppelin hangars -- one for fishmongers, one of butchers, one for greengrocers, and then part of one with some restaurants where Andrew and I made lunch from a round loaf of Uzbeki bread and some tortellini-looking dumplings filled with lamb and venison. It was pretty good.</li><li>Then it was time to go search out some beer taprooms which had us walking sorta northeast, on a straight line away from the river, away from Old Town, across the canal and parks and past the embassies that sorta ring Old Town, and back into a less renovated landscape of storefronts and converted factories, some places run down, others with the hipster-signaling strands of naked edison bulbs over wood tables. Wandering into a courtyard off a busy street, we found&nbsp; <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Labietis (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.labietis.lv/en\" target=\"_blank\">Labietis</a> that had wide and interesting mix of beers -- herb beers and fruit beers, as well as the usual batch of IPAs. The names were interesting, also. <a href=\"https://www.labietis.lv/en/our-beers/fog\">Migla</a>, which they translated as “Fog” had hemp and peppermint in a light pale ale. Not sure it was my top pick, but I gotta give them props for trying something different.</li><li>It was a 45-minute prop job flight from Riga to Tallinn on AirBaltic. I did have a bit of a travel snob realization, though -- when everyone is getting on the same bus for a plane, boarding status is kinda meaningless. Anyhow, AirBaltic was fine service -- no hassles with carryon luggage, no annoying on-board upsells, though with only 45 minutes, there’s not too much damage they could do. Heading for the cab rank at Tallinn, I saw the same warning signs they had at Riga airport - there’s no regulated taxi fees so be careful which taxi you get into. At Riga, we used one of the airport-approved cabs with a meter. At Tallinn, we used <a href=\"https://bolt.eu/en/\">Bolt</a>, a ride-sharing app that looks a lot like Lyft. I used earlier in Krakow and had good luck with it, and it worked fine in Tallinn too - €4 from the airport to Old Town seemed a pretty good deal.</li><li>I can see why Tallinn is popular for long weekends. The Old Town is just that -- winding cobblestone streets, lots of churches and restored old buildings, and lots of shops in those old buildings. It’s up on a hill, so lots of scenic overlook Instagram moments. You could easily spend a couple of days wandering the streets, popping in and out of churches and museums… and shops and bars.</li><li>But after a half-day, I was ready to breach the Old Town’s walls to see what else there was to Tallinn. The first stop was a market by the train station - <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Balti Jaama Turg (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.visitestonia.com/en/baltic-station-market\" target=\"_blank\">Balti Jaama Turg</a>. Nowhere near the size of Riga’s Central Market, we strolled around until, after the 4th or 5th fruit stand and butcher stall, our minds wandered to lunch. We bought a couple different kinds of Uzbeki breads from one stand and a couple of beers from another. The breads were stuffed with some sliced meat cooked in a warming, floral spice, maybe cinnamon. It was very good, though I never got the story of why all the Uzbeki food up here.</li><li>We walked out and around the train station, and through a collection of restaurants in small square buildings, old cargo containers and a couple of railcars. As much as I liked the Uzbeki breads, I wish I’d seen these places first. On the other side was something called <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Telliskivi Creative City. (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://telliskivi.cc/en/\" target=\"_blank\">Telliskivi Creative City.</a> It looked like an old office or administrative building had been converted to a kinda “makers” mall, where people were doing small-scale clothing or leather work in the back of their space and selling it out of the front. We took a quick pass through it though didn’t see anything we wanted to haul back to the US.</li><li>We walked kinda north-northeast, through the<a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\" Kalamaja neighborhood (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.visittallinn.ee/eng/visitor/discover/articles-guides/kalamaja\" target=\"_blank\"> Kalamaja neighborhood</a> toward the harbor. Kalamaja was the exact opposite of the Old Town - wood buildings vs. stone; straight paved streets vs. windy cobblestones; groups of flats vs. castles and government buildings. A few blocks off the harbor we hit the <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Põhjala Brewery &amp; Tap Room (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://pohjalabeer.com/taproom\" target=\"_blank\">Põhjala Brewery &amp; Tap Room</a>. It was in what looked like a very recently renovated stone building; workers were in the midst of renovating the building next to it. Where Labietis felt very native -- funky space tucked away behind some kinda decaying buildings -- Põhjala could’ve been any new taproom in the US -- big U-shaped bar, open kitchen, BBQ on the menu. The beer was very good; the BBQ maybe less successful, but having lived in Memphis and Dallas, I’m a bit of a BBQ snob. The smoked trout dish, though -- that was great.&nbsp;</li><li>We walked back towards town on a path that ran along the harbor. There were lots of new apartment buildings across the road -- 3-4 stories with floor-to-ceiling windows and enclosed balconies facing the harbor. There wasn’t a lot there… yet. But you could see it coming.</li><li>We stopped at the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/ubajahumal/\">Uba Ja Humal</a> beer store before heading back through the Old Town walls. We walked through the front store to the taproom in the back, complete with a DJ who was set up between the back coolers. Locals would pull a can out of a cooler, pay for it at the bar, get a glass, and sit down at a table with their friends. Tallinn had that kind of easy-going vibe.</li><li>Both cities have done a good job renovating and preserving their Old Towns, and now seem to be expanding past that, repurposing older, maybe Soviet-era buildings to something a bit hipper, edgier (?), less traditional. I came away liking Tallinn a bit more than Riga, but maybe it’s because they’re a little bit further down that hipper, less traditional path.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #157</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li> And if you check out the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> page, you can click thru to highlights from Riga and Tallinn.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_157.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #157 — Notes from the Baltics: Riga, Latvia and Tallinn, Estonia','','inherit','closed','closed','','2575-revision-v1','','','2021-03-14 15:52:07','2021-03-14 20:52:07','',2575,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/14/2575-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3457,1,'2021-03-14 15:54:42','2021-03-14 20:54:42','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":2168,\"width\":300,\"height\":300,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large is-resized\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1-1024x1024.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2168\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"/></a><figcaption>Wait! I need to unpair my iPhone!</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Was all set to head to San Diego for a week\'s break from Chicago\'s grey January and then looked at the COVID restrictions... and then pivoted to Arizona. With people starting to think about 2021 travel, I pulled together my top 5 travel planning tips. Slow vaccine roll-out will probably keep us restricted for longer than we thought. Andrea Amico of <a href=\"https://www.privacy4cars.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Privacy4Cars</a> joins us to talk about the dangers of leaving our data behind in rental cars. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_171.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go over to the <em>Subscribe</em> section on the right to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #171: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>This Week</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. Stayed off the road over the entire holiday season which let me skip the TSA’s new post-lockdown checkpoint record of <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/coronavirus/passenger-throughput\">1.3 million on January 3rd</a>, the last Sunday of the holiday season -- though, to be fair,&nbsp; this is only just over half the 2.4 million passengers who flew on the same Sunday last year. And with every US airline except Delta now back to selling middle seats, it makes sense that load factors also ratcheted up over the holidays. I haven’t seen any industry-wide numbers yet, but <a href=\"https://www.ittn.ie/news/confidence-in-boeing-737-max-holding-firm/\">American’s COO did say that the load factor on their 737 Maxes over the last week of the holiday season was 90%</a>. Now, most of those Maxes are flying between LGA and MIA, always a busy holiday route, but I’ve seen reports of many other packed flights, as well as the much higher load . I was never a big fan of completely full flights pre-coronavirus and, as you can imagine, am even less so now pre-widespread vaccine distribution. So, I’m not too bothered that we didn’t try to get out of town over the holidays.</li><li>However, staying in town through the rest of January is a whole different thing because January is absolutely the worst part of Chicago’s winter. So, after&nbsp; Thanksgiving weekend, on what used to be called Cyber Monday when we actually shopped in physical stores, instead of trolling through Amazon, I was trolling through travel sites looking for cheap flights to someplace warm the 3rd wk of Jan. I figured that’d be long enough for any holiday COVID spike to work its way through the system.</li><li>I’d had some friends who’d gone down to Mexico, felt safe in the tourist zones, didn’t have any problems, came back healthy; but I don’t do well sitting on a beach for more than a day or two and I wanted to keep it a bit simpler, so we decided to stay in the US, which pretty quickly narrowed our search to Southern California, South Florida, and Arizona. Since we’d spent time last winter in both Arizona and Florida, we decided to do California and go as far down the coast as we could get, which was San Diego.&nbsp; And, as luck would have it, Southwest had cheap direct flights from Chicago Midway and I had Southwest travel credits from one of last spring’s flight cancellations burning a hole in my virtual pocket, so *boom* I booked it</li><li>On, what turned out to be, 3 days before the governor locked down most of California. But a friend hit the ground there a week before Christmas and said “Eh, it’s not a problem.” So, we stayed the course and didn’t really pay any attention to it until after New Years when we thought, you know, we should book a place to stay. And that’s when we started to pay attention. Bike and kayak rental places were open as “outdoor recreation” businesses. But vacation rental and hotel booking sites all pointed to the California Public Health Department statement -- “no hotel or lodging entity in California shall accept or honor out-of-state reservations for nonessential travel” which our January snowbird getaway definitely didn’t qualify as. Would things ease up in a couple of weeks? The trend lines on the state’s COVID website didn’t seem to be pointing in that direction.</li><li>So last Monday when I received another blast of airline sales emails, it seemed like the right time for a pivot. X-ing off California, we were back to Florida and Arizona. We talked to friends already down in Florida; they said the south beaches were already filling up with snowbirds, so we opted for drier sand and swung our Southwest flights over to Phoenix.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>But since we’d been in Phoenix last winter and continuing in the spirit of visiting not-quite-A-list places in the US we’ve never been while weaving around quarantines, we’re driving further south down I-10 to Tucson. We’re running the same travel planning play we did for our August trip to Michigan’s UP -- focus on outdoor activities like hiking and biking, have back-ups in case of last-minute closures, and above all, build a list of microbreweries with outdoor seating.</li><li>Bridge Music -- Say Their Names - Love and Remember by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2020 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/62230 Ft: DJ Lang</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Back at the beginning of December when the Pfizer vaccine approval was imminent and the Moderna approval wasn’t far behind, most travelers -- myself included -- got a bit giddy and started to think about the world opening up in the spring, the summer at the latest. Fast forward 30 days and, happy new year, that initial blast of vaccine optimism melted when it met the ugly realities of last-mile logistics. Spelunking through the stream of low-fare emails from American and Southwest and Delta and United and Iberia and British Airways filling my inbox, the consensus across airline demand forecasters seems to be that nothing’s going to change until the end of May. But even that doesn’t explain why, say, American, sends out an email pushing “Plan a European Vacation” that includes spring fares (March, April, May fares) to London, Manchester, and Madrid. I don’t know anyone who expects European vacation travel to open up in the next 3-4 months. Give credit to Delta for highlighting more achievable destinations -- Cancun, the Bahamas, Phoenix, and just about every airport in Florida with a runway long enough to handle a jet.&nbsp;</li><li>What will be as interesting is what the airlines and hotels do about elite status protection if travel continues to be slow through the summer. Remember that last spring, after it was clear that business travel was canceled for most of 2020, all the big travel companies grandfathered everyone into their status for this year. What you earned in 2019, you kept through this year, 2021. But now what? We talked about this a bit in t<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">he November episode (#169)</a> when the companies made their opening bid, knocking 20-30% off elite qualifying clip levels. Kinda like the low-fare sales -- it’ll be interesting to see what they offer come May.</li><li>We’ve talked in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\">prior episodes</a> about the challenges of planning a trip during COVID -- deciphering lockdown rules; parsing what can seem to be the almost theological differences between stay-at-home advisories vs. orders. And after all that, trying to keep up-to-date on last-minute changes. Things are changing so fast -- open, shut; outdoor seating vs just doing takeout -- that the normal crowdsourced tools we’d use -- things like Google Maps, Yelp -- can’t keep up because they don’t give a real-time view. The Foursquare app used to do it, but since they split <a href=\"https://www.swarmapp.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Swarm</a> from Foursquare, it seems that the real-time data is now sold just to business customers to target mobile ads. But, one app that I use does provide a real-time view into some traffic -- <a href=\"https://untappd.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Uptappd</a>. Yes, it’s just craft beer nerd traffic -- people checking in their beers at tap rooms and beer bars -- but that’s a kind of traffic that I’m pretty interested in.&nbsp; After our pivot to Tucson, I wanted to see what beer places were open for service, not just take-out. I could’ve spent time clicking around the app, but instead, I decided to put one of my lockdown self-improvement projects to use. Over the fall, I’d taken some on-line Python programming courses on Coursera, so I wrote a short program that pulled the most recent check-ins from the Tucson area and started making a list of places that are open. I probably could’ve made that list quicker by just plunking away on the app, but not with the same sense of achievement.</li><li>We talked about COVID-19 vaccination and test certification in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">last episode</a>. Over the last month, it seems that proof of negative test results rather than of vaccinations is the new hotness. Canada, the UK, and now the US are the latest countries requiring a negative COVID test for inbound passengers. It makes sense. The CDC released a paper in November -- in one of my favorite publications, the <a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/index.html\"><em>Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report</em></a> (I’ll link to it in the show notes) -- saying that <a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6945a4.htm\">temperature and symptom screening at airports is pretty worthless</a>; it only picked up 1 case for every 85,000 passengers screened. So not hard for the switch to pre-flight testing to be more effective. For Canada and the UK, though, they’ve layered the test requirements <em>on top of </em>their existing 14-day quarantine requirements, which just adds to the confusion -- especially since the Canadian government gave travelers one week’s notice of the new testing requirement. I haven’t seen the US regs yet, but the Canadian rules say you must have “proof in hand” of a negative test result, and that proof can be either electronic or paper. You gotta think that, pretty quick, that “proof in hand” has gotta default to “proof on phone” otherwise, forged paper results are going to be the new fake IDs from our teens. Last November, French cops <a href=\"https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2020/11/10/fake-tests-covid-flights/\">busted a ring selling fake test results at CDG</a>. The going rate was €150-300 which converts to something like $180-370. That compares to $125 for a <a href=\"https://fakeyourid.com/\">good fake driver’s license</a>.&nbsp; Since the last episode, the Caribbean country of <a href=\"https://skift.com/2020/12/18/airlines-still-waiting-on-governments-for-a-single-digital-health-passport-standard/\">Aruba was the first country</a> to standardize on one of the digital passport apps, <a href=\"https://commonpass.org/\">CommonPass</a>, the one backed by the World Economic Forum, the Davos gang, and, we mentioned, also used by United for their EWR-LHR flight. But then Sing Air picked its rival, <a href=\"https://www.iata.org/en/programs/passenger/travel-pass/\">Travel Pass</a> from IATA, to use on flights to/from Malaysia. So it still seems like, when it does go to “proof on phone”, we’re gonna need to set aside some memory screen space for a bunch of apps.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge music -- Staying Positive by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2019 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/59438 Ft: greg_baumont</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Leaving Data Behind in The Rental Car</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A couple of weeks back, I retweeted a news article - the third suspect charged in the fatal shooting of a retired Chicago fireman during a carjacking was caught because he’d synced his phone to the audio system of the stolen car.&nbsp; I dunno -- fleeing a murder but worrying about getting a ticket for not using hands free.&nbsp; I dunno. Good they caught the bad guy, but what about us law-abiding frequent travelers? When the Hertz or Avis person walks up to me at the car return lane, they always remind me not to leave anything behind; to remember to take my sunglasses and my mobile phone. But they never remind me to delete all the data I synced to the car.&nbsp;</li><li>And with more of our lives getting stored in our phones, I asked Andrea Amico, founder of the company <a href=\"https://www.privacy4cars.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Privacy4Cars</a>, to come onto the podcast to talk about the privacy problems at the intersection of cars and smartphones.<ul><li>Mark: Andrea, how did you get involved in this space?</li></ul><ul><li>Andrea: One of the companies that used to run was one of the largest used car inspection companies. We inspected a lot of vehicles that were ready to be sold. I just noticed that people were leaving their digital lives behind.</li><li>Mark: We first talked about the privacy/security issues around pairing your smartphone with your car rental about four years ago. Bluetooth-enabled entertainment systems were just becoming more common in rental car fleets as hands-free call laws became widespread. Even today, the first thing I do is to sync my iPhone. And I\'ve noticed more times than not, the sync slots are all full -- personalized names, Jan\'s iPhone, Timmy\'s iPhone. You end up having to delete at least one of them to make room for yours. And then, once paired, most phones by default, end up downloading all your contacts and your phone numbers and things like that. So, Jan and Timmy have left behind all of their contacts and all their phone numbers and that\'s just bad in so many ways.</li><li>Andrea: When you sync your phone through Bluetooth or you plug it into the USB port or now, in some newer cars, you just walk into the car and the car automatically sniffs your phone and start syncing to it, including those with Android Auto and Apple CarPlay. When that happens, you are creating a mini-clone of your phone inside the vehicle.</li><li>Mark: What other information are people leaving behind when they don\'t clear themselves out of a rental car?</li><li>Andrea: All sorts -- your phone book, your call logs, the text messages, including the body, meaning the actual text of the text messages; that stuff will be left behind. But also all sorts of meta data that allows criminals or law enforcement or just people who want to snoop on you to re-identify you, anything from the identifiers of your phones which are unique, your Bluetooth MAC address. Not to mention, of course, all your navigation data. I mean, you can reconstruct where people have been, just by data that has been stored in the infotainment system. And then you have, whether you are on Twitter and Facebook and what are the handles of those things, which are the last photos you have taken? What files have you synced, the emails, calendar entries. There\'s all sorts of stuff that people really don\'t understand that they\'re living behind.</li><li>Mark: But when people <em>do </em>delete pairings are they deleting all that information? Or is there some data still retained in that vehicle?</li><li>Andrea: &nbsp;By and large, deleting the data following the manufacturer\'s directions is helpful in preventing third parties to having access. And so if there is anything left behind, it requires a much deeper forensic type of analysis that is typically not accessible. But for most people, following the manufacturer\'s directions on how to remove the data, it is a very easy to do and very effective defense against getting their data being in the hands of somebody else.</li><li>Mark: That\'s where <a href=\"https://www.privacy4cars.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Privacy4Cars</a> comes in. That\'s where your app comes in -- helping people get that right?</li><li>Andrea: Yes, we have a free app that people can download, and you can just search for Privacy4Cars on the <a href=\"https://apps.apple.com/us/app/privacy4cars/id1370969499\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple App Store</a> or <a href=\"https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.privacy4cars\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Play</a>, depending what kind of phone you have, and download it for free.</li><li>Mark: The last time on the podcast we talked about this topic was a little over a year ago, October 2019. &nbsp;I\'d gotten a notice from Hertz that they had changed their terms and conditions. I noticed that Hertz had specifically carved out liability from me leaving information from a Bluetooth pairing. And now, on one hand, I could see that point. I\'ve actively and voluntarily synced my phone to the car and in doing so, caused my information to be downloaded. But at what point does that sort of digital maintenance, clearing personal identifiable information, after every rental become part of the rental company’s overall maintenance responsibility, like checking the oil levels and the tire pressure.</li><li>Andrea: I believe that the time has already passed, and it\'s been in the past for at least a year, right? At least, the passage of California Consumer Privacy Act. And probably you can go further back in the past because of other types of regulations. And there are some regulators who have actually spoken about this. So in the United States, you have the FTC that has issued already four guidances on the need to delete personal information. In Europe, they went as far as to give a guideline that mandates the removal of the personal information. Beyond rental, when people are traveling, sometimes they rent, sometimes they ride-share, and very often it happens to me that I in an Uber or Lyft and you have a very nice driver that tells you, “Hey, you need to fill up the tank on your battery? Here\'s a cable.” And the first thing I do is glance -- &nbsp;where does the cable end up? If it goes into the lighter, that\'s only power. So yes, I’ll recharge my phone. But if it goes straight &nbsp;into the USB port of the car, don\'t charge the phone unless you\'re really desperate, because as soon as your phone powers back up, it will start downloading all your information into a stranger\'s car. So you definitely don\'t want to do that.</li><li>Mark: Andrea Amico, founder of <a href=\"https://www.privacy4cars.com\">Privacy4Cars.com</a>, you can find his app on the <a href=\"https://apps.apple.com/us/app/privacy4cars/id1370969499\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple App store</a> and on <a href=\"https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.privacy4cars\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Play</a>. Andrea, thank you very much for taking the time to talk to us today.</li><li>Andrea: Thank you. Mark. I really enjoyed talking to you.</li></ul></li><li>Bridge music -- Latinium by Javolenus (c) copyright 2020 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Javolenus/62650 Ft: NiGiD</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>2021 Travel Planning Pro Tips</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I’ve been talking about travel planning in the time of COVID across maybe 6 months of episodes. And since January is always a big travel month, especially this year with some vouchers from last spring’s flight cancellations coming up on their 12-month expiration dates, combined with 10 months of pent-up demand and another 6, maybe 9 months to go, I thought I’d pull all my planning tips together here -- and probably in a blog post after I get back from Tucson.</li><li>First, book now. As I said earlier, there’s a steady stream of sales out there right now as airlines, hotels, and rental car companies are looking for cash to get through the start of the year. There are great domestic deals now, and if you can part with some cash now, good international deals for the second half of the year. Prices are only going to go up as vaccine rates improve, and that pent-up demand overwhelms any squeamishness about sitting next to a stranger. I’m eyeing that same American ORD-BCN 787 non-stop that I wasn’t able to take at the end of last September. The deals aren’t as smoking as they were last March when the travel world was in a freefall; the airlines have gotten a little smarter over the past year. But with cancellation fees still waived, there’s not much risk.&nbsp;</li><li>Second, check your destination’s health requirements -- and keep checking until you leave. Many of the airlines have built good web resources that summarize any restrictions by destination. Of the US majors, I think <a href=\"https://www.united.com/ual/en/us/fly/travel/restrictions-map.html\">United’s</a> is the easiest to use but I think American’s is the most complete. They actually link out to a Canadian company, <a href=\"https://apply.joinsherpa.com/travel-restrictions?affiliateId=americanairlines\">Sherpa</a>, that took my Arizona itinerary and noted that, while there’s no quarantine restrictions in Arizona, there are when I return to Chicago.&nbsp; <a href=\"https://www.delta.com/us/en/plan-your-next-trip/where-we-fly\">Delta’s</a> is pretty good too. I’ll put links to them in the show notes. But you can’t check once and be done. We talked at the top of the show about Canada putting in a new testing requirement with 7-days notice. And domestically, states are changing restrictions weekly. One trick I’ve talked about is to start following your destination’s local newspapers on Twitter to get any early warnings on anything new.&nbsp;</li><li>Third, read the cancellation rules a lot more closely. Being nimble and able to react to changes at your destination -- like Irene and I did with our pivot from San Diego to Tucson -- depends on being thoughtful about the cancellation risks you take. Right now, flights have the lowest cancellation risk; Airbnb and vacation rentals, the highest. Hotels are in-between. Our default strategy then is to book the flight as soon as we can, don’t do pre-paid hotel rooms or car rentals, and wait as long as we can before booking an Airbnb.</li><li>Fourth, overload your itinerary with outdoor activities like hiking and biking so last-minute closures or restrictions don’t leave you aimlessly flipping through the hotel TV channels. It was the big trend last summer -- airlines dialed down flights between big city airports like the ORD-LGA run and toward beaches and mountains. And it continues -- all the imagery in the airline and hotel “flash sale” emails over the past couple of weeks. But it does mean spending more time trolling the AccuWeather and Weather Channel web sites because an outside-heavy itinerary is more vulnerable to big storm fronts.</li><li>And finally, stay flexible, expect delays, and be patient. If there’s anything we learned from 2020, it’s that something will screw up your plans -- a positive COVID test will shut down the restaurant you really wanted to eat at, capacity restrictions will mean a line to get into something that was top of your list. Have back-up plans and give everyone you meet the benefit of the doubt. Like you, they’re just trying to get through this safe and sound.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #171</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li>In this episode’s tech notes, if you check out the show notes, you’ll find a full transcript of my interview with Andrea Amico courtesy of my free tier of Amazon Web Services which includes 60 minutes a month of their Transcribe service. I learned about it when watching a session during their virtual Re:Invent conference. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/12/17/podcast-147-holiday-travel-tips-notes-from-santa-fe/\">episode #147</a>, I talked about going to it in person in Las Vegas a couple of years ago -- me and 50,000 other attendees, mostly pudgy, pasty-faced guys power walking up and down the strip, backpacks strapped down tight, ignoring the showgirls on the corner so they wouldn’t be late to, say, the sold-out tutorial on best practices for ingesting streaming data from IoT devices into AWS’ time series database. Less stressful, though less entertaining this year. Anyhow, watching the session on Transcribe got me thinking about how I could use it for the interviews I’ve done over the past 12 months. I’ve started on the most current episodes, working my way back. So far I have three done --this interview with Andrea, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/09/19/podcast-167-6-months-on-why-keep-travel-cards/\">episode #167</a>’s interview with Matt Schulz about travel credit cards, and <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\">episode #166</a>’s interview with Emily Thomas about the meaning of travel. I’ll keep chipping away at the backlog as my 60 free minutes a month allows.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>, as well as asking Alexa, Siri, and Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_171.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips','Pivoting from San Diego to Tucson for COVID restrictions; planning tips for travel during COVID; CEO of Privacy4Cars talks about leaving data behind in rental cars','inherit','closed','closed','','2997-revision-v1','','','2021-03-14 15:54:42','2021-03-14 20:54:42','',2997,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/14/2997-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3459,1,'2021-03-14 15:56:15','2021-03-14 20:56:15','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":2960,\"width\":300,\"height\":300,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large is-resized\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2960\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"/><figcaption>How Do I Insert This Into My iPhone<br>(DoD photo by EJ Hersom)</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>No Thanksgiving travel, but looking at the travel volume for this, the busiest travel week of the year, shows just how far things have fallen. The Qantas CEO said \"No vax, no fly\", so we dig into the emerging world of digital vaccine passports. And then I trace my travel genealogy, wondering if road warrior-ism is hereditary. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_170.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go over to the <em>Subscribe</em> section on the right to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #170: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. And again, no travel since the last episode. Not too surprising given the way things are going right now. Back in April, I’d jumped on one of those smokin’ American Airlines’ promotions to book flights to London for Thanksgiving. Which then -- not surprisingly -- got cancelled at the beginning of September.&nbsp; So I was back to what has been my typical Thanksgiving travel pattern for the past 10-15 years -- staying at home to avoid the crowds on what is always the busiest travel week of the year. PK -- pre-kids -- Irene and I would always travel over the holidays, splitting Thanksgiving and Christmas between my family in Southern California and hers in Chicago. But post-kids -- which is also PK, so I guess it should be AK -- after kids -- we started staying at home. And I’d figure out how to “ground” myself from business travel also. I found that the challenge of holiday travel wasn’t necessarily the crowds; it’s the make-up of the crowds; what some road warriors might call “clueless” travelers. I think “amateur” is certainly a more charitable and probably more accurate term. Even more so this year with so many road warriors out of practice after being off the road since March. Lots of those folks definitely in danger of losing their “professional” traveler status.</li><li>I saw an interesting graph the other day comparing last year’s and this year’s day-by-day airport travel volumes over the Thanksgiving weekend. No surprises comparing the Wednesday travel volumes, what is traditionally the busiest travel day of the year. Last year’s Wednesday saw 2.6 million passengers, almost 2½ times busier than this year. I expected that. But what really caught my eye was that this year’s peak day -- <a href=\"https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/thanksgiving-travel-volume-2020-pandemic/index.html\">Sunday at about 1.2 million </a>-- was still a lot less than last year’s slowest day, Thanksgiving, at about 1.6 million. I didn’t travel last year at Thanksgiving, but did in 2018.&nbsp; Irene and I broke our no-travel rule and flew down to Santa Fe, NM on Thanksgiving Day. Back in episode <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/12/17/podcast-147-holiday-travel-tips-notes-from-santa-fe/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">#147</a>, I said that Thanksgiving Day flight was one of the least stressful travel experiences I’d ever had — no traffic on the drive to ORD, no lines. The TSA agents were hanging around just looking for people to screen. And that day, there were around 25% more people in airports than this year’s <em>busiest</em> day. I shouldn’t be surprised, but all the pictures I saw in the news coverage made it look like airports were a lot more crowded.&nbsp;</li><li>Our apartment is just south of one of the northern approaches to ORD. Flights from the east come in over the lake -- seats A, B, and C get a great view of the city skyline while seats D, E, and F get to look down into Wrigley Field -- then&nbsp; over the northwest side of the city, landing on one of the runways north of the terminal. I’ve always been impressed by the choreography of ORD. On a clear Friday afternoon, driving up the tollway that runs east of the airport, I’d see planes on parallel approaches landing simultaneously -- one to the north of the terminal and one to the south -- and looking up, see the lights of planes on approach behind them -- 2, 3, 4.... Back in April, during Chicago’s lockdown, I’d sit out on the rooftop deck -- because what else was I going to do? -- and maybe see one plane coming in over the lake on that approach. But now I’m seeing more planes -- sometimes 3, 4 in a row. Don’t know that they’re all carrying passengers -- some could be temporary cargo carriers taking some of that e-commerce money, with boxes instead of seats under the overhead bins. But I can feel travel starting to pick up. It could be a tough winter, but I’m trying to look out over the horizon a bit; trying to look forward to spring.</li><li>Bridge Music -- Leviathan by Kirkoid (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Kirkoid/31109</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>TravelCommons contributor Allan Marko commented on my little lockdown game with my Google Mini -- changing the voice to, say, an English accent and then asking about the weather in London.&nbsp; Allan wrote:<ul><li>I often change the Siri voice for a bit of variety. Currently “Australian Female” is providing my CarPlay directions. you can also ask Siri to “Play TravelCommons”…</li></ul></li><li>Which immediately got me digging into Siri’s settings, looking for the Voice options. I found I had a choice of American, Australian, British, Indian, Irish, and South African. Since I’d already used the first three with my Google Mini, it was between the last three. I chose Irish for now, but will probably switch to South African before the end of the month. Actually, Waze, the nav app, always impressed me with the number of voice and language options. Every once in a while, I switch Irene’s Waze over to Hungarian before she’s heading out somewhere. For some reason, I get more of a laugh out of it than she does.</li><li>TravelCommons listener Dan Grabon and I have been trading notes as we’ve each slogged through Thoreau’s <em>Walden</em>. We both started it back in April, in the height of the lockdown. Everybody was deciding that, with nothing much else to do, it was a good time to pick up that classic you’ve always been meaning to get to. Dan started out with <em>The Brothers Karamazov</em>, which I thought was damned impressive. I first reached for Whitman’s <em>Leaves of Grass</em>, but then thought I needed something a bit more down-to-earth, something that wouldn’t need quite that level of interpretation and abstract thinking. And <em>Walden</em>, about Thoreau’s self-isolation in the woods outside of Concord, MA, seemed a better fit with the lockdown. Dan finished last month, at the beginning of November. I was 50 pages behind, so I didn’t finish ‘til Thanksgiving -- it was tough cutting through the tryptophan fog, but I gutted it through. Dan said he was staying with Thoreau, moving onto <em>Civil Disobedience</em> before shelving the book. I pivoted to non-fiction, <em>Why We Sleep</em>, where a neuroscientist and sleep expert spends some 300+ pages saying “If you don’t sleep 8 hours, you’re killing yourself” which got me doing some mental math. Between jet lag from all the&nbsp; international flights and waking up at 4am to make 6am flights to LGA, I’ve probably dropped 5 years off my life. Though, given some dementia running through my family history, I might not have remembered those years anyways.</li><li>And I show up on the other side of the mic talking travel pro tips with Matt Wilson on his <a href=\"https://www.under30experiences.com/blog/travel-like-a-pro-with-mark-peacock-of-travelcommons\">Millennial Travel Podcast</a>.&nbsp; I’m trying to remember when we recorded this -- had to be pre-April 2019 because I was still in the suburban TravelCommons studio and Matt was hanging out down in Costa Rica. The connection fuzzes out now and again, but it was a fun conversation. I’ll put a link in the episode in the show notes but fair warning -- it’s mostly me rattling on for an hour. Listening back to it, I’m kinda embarrassed that I don’t give Matt much of a chance to get a word in edgewise.</li><li>In the last episode, I talked about the work-from-hotel offerings from Marriott, Hilton, and Hyatt. They all had their own twists, but Hyatt’s was the most unique in that their “Work from Hyatt” offer was resort-focused and had a 7-night minimum. I said it wasn’t so much a WeWork replacement as a digital nomad trial. Well, I’m guessing that they didn’t get much uptake on it because I just got another email from Hyatt with a new offering -- “Office for the Day” -- that pretty much matches Marriott’s Day Pass. Like I said last month, these offerings all feel a bit “toe in the water”, a bit opportunistic. And now that we’re starting to get better visibility into post-vaccine timelines, I wonder how long they’ll last -- will people still want to pay to work in a hotel room after all the Starbucks stores have reopened.</li><li>I’ve talked in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/12/podcast-120-where-do-guidebooks-fit-in-i-hate-shopping-for-suitcases\">past</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/09/28/podcast-124-craft-beer-hunting-i-hate-rick-steves\">episodes</a> about how I’m a bit of a knuckle-dragger regarding printed travel guides. I still find a physical book useful when traveling. But I’ve been wondering how quickly these physical guides will be able to push out post-COVID editions to reflect the closures of bars, restaurants, and independent shops they’ve recommended. I was running through my own Chicago recommendation list from 2019. A bunch of my favorite places have closed; it’s about an even split between “Closed forever, good-bye, we’ve taken down our sign” and “Closed until Spring… we hope.” The final proofs of the 2021 editions have to already be baked if not already at the printers. I dunno, maybe they’ll all post errata pages that you can download, print off, and then stick in your books.</li><li>In a massive intersection of all things social media, I posted a <a href=\"https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/tiktok-hotel-room-chef/index.html\">CNN article</a> on the TravelCommons Facebook page that a friend, a hotel company CIO, sent me on LinkedIn that showed TikTok videos of people cooking meals in hotel rooms using an iron for a griddle, a hot water kettle for a steamer, a pants presser as an oven, and the one that really wowed me -- a coffee maker as a sous vide water bath. I don’t know if I should be impressed by the ingenuity or looking to set up as a ghost kitchen/delivery service wherever they are because I’ve never seen anyone go to that extent to cook their own meal in a hotel room. Even guys I knew trying to squeeze the last pennies out of their per diems wouldn’t do much more than boil water for their Cup O’Noodles or work hard not to burn their microwave popcorn. I’ll also put a link in the show notes to the TikTok account of one of the guys, Jago Randles. His TikTok series,<a href=\"https://www.tiktok.com/@jagoscrandles\"> Isolation Kitchen</a>, has about 150,000 followers. He does some impressive stuff. But I will make sure, going forward, that I rinse out the coffee maker and wipe down the iron before using them.</li><li>For many frequent travelers, a key early milestone of the pandemic was when airlines and hotels gave them a year’s push on their status -- moving the expiration date from Jan 2021 to Jan 2022. Big sigh of relief. Then for Southwest fliers, another milestone -- drink coupon expiration dates all got pushed to the end of this year. Whew! All’s right in the traveling world. But a couple of days ago, I was rummaging around in my messenger bag and out tumbled 5 Southwest drink coupons -- one with a Sept expiration date; the rest, December 31. Look Southwest, I don’t want to seem greedy. I did get a year’s push on A-List and 6 months on Companion Pass. But I’d love you even more if you gave me another 6 months on those drink coupons. Nope, don’t say anything now; just think about it.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge music -- Ethereal (nop mix) by @nop (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Lancefield/34818</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Prove My Vax So I Can Fly</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Last month, I saw that quote from the Qantas CEO -- \"We will ask people to have a vaccination before they can get on the aircraft\'\' -- and thought, well it’s kinda the next logical step from Delta’s ATL-Rome and United’s EWR-LHR flights were you have to take COVID test and prove you’re negative before you can board.&nbsp;</li><li>I remember going to a travel clinic before my first flight to India; getting shot up with MMR, DTP, Hepatitis, and Typhoid vaccines and being given my <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carte_Jaune\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Yellow Card</a> -- officially my International Certificate of Vaccination or Prophylaxis -- listing all my shots. They told me to carry that with me to India, which I did and to Vietnam and Thailand and Singapore and China. No one ever asked to see it, not in an airport, an immigration line, a hotel,....&nbsp; It looks like the plans are that we’ll get a vaccination card from the CDC after receiving the first dose of COVID-19 vaccine. But that card isn’t meant as a validated proof of vaccination; it’s more of a reminder to go back in a couple of weeks for the second shot.&nbsp;</li><li>That handwritten piece of paper probably won’t pass muster at the Qantas boarding gate, and so that’s why we’re starting to see a bit of a vaccine passport app land grab going on. United has been testing the <a href=\"https://thecommonsproject.org/commonpass\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">CommonPass app</a> on their COVID-free EWR-LHR flight. You get your COVID test at the United Club near gate C93 and the results are uploaded into the app which then will display a QR code to the gate agent. CommonPass is being spun up with support from the World Economic Forum. Cathay Pacific, Lufthansa, SwissAir, and JetBlue also have plans to use it. Delta and Alitalia are trialing the <a href=\"https://www.aokpass.com/en/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">AOKPass </a>developed by the Int’l Chamber of Commerce on their COVID-free ATL-Rome flight. It uses blockchain for medical certificate storage, so bonus points to them in technology buzzword bingo. IATA, the Int’l Air Transport Association, an airline trade group, says they’re finishing up their app, <a href=\"https://www.iata.org/en/programs/passenger/travel-pass/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Travel Pass</a>, and will be piloting it with IAG, the parent of British Airways, Iberia, and Aer Lingus, in early 2021. And the World Health Organization says they’re looking at Estonia’s e-vaccination certificates as <a href=\"https://www.who.int/news-room/feature-stories/detail/estonia-and-who-to-jointly-develop-digital-vaccine-certificate-to-strengthen-covax#:~:text=WHO%20and%20Estonia%20recently%20agreed,access%20to%20COVID%2D19%20vaccines.\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the basis of a sort of “smart” Yellow Card app</a>.</li><li>I’m sure I’m missing a whole lot more; I just got tired of reading the same rehashed press release verbiage about secure and verifiable storage of health certifications. Going through this, it starts to feel like the health equivalent of those scooter apps, where I need half-a-dozen of them on my phone so I can rent the closest scooter to me. Unless someone blinks, it seems like I’ll need 3 or 4 of these vaccine passports to cover all my travel bases. But after reading through all the press releases and the infographics and the FAQs, none of these apps were real clear on how I get my physical CDC vaccine card into their digital storage vault. And I’m guessing that doctors and clinics are going to be more focused on taking care of patients and keeping their COVID vaccines cold, and not all that interested in entering my vaccination information into all those apps. Maybe Australia is further ahead with electronic health records, but I’m thinking, at least for the next year or so, that my CDC card is gonna be the best that Qantas and the gang are going to get.</li><li>Bridge music -- My Flaming Heart by Wired Ant (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial &nbsp;(3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Wired_Ant/36862 Ft: Javolenus</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Hereditary Road Warriors</strong> </h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I was reading some research, as one does during a lockdown advisory when one gets caught up running down a clickhole, about <a href=\"https://research.fb.com/blog/2016/03/do-jobs-run-in-families/\">jobs running in the family</a>. Some of the stats -- a son with a military father is 5 times more likely to enlist himself while if his mother is a lawyer, he’s 6.6 times more likely to follow her to the bar; a daughter with a scientist father is almost 4 times more likely to be a scientist. Indeed, when I was deciding my college major, I was leaning toward&nbsp; chemistry but chose chemical engineering mostly because my grandfather and father were both engineers.</li><li>Which got me thinking -- does traveling -- careers that require frequent traveling -- run in the family? Again, looking back on my family, my grandfather traveled a lot when he worked for Sears, checking out vendors for hard goods -- tools, small machinery -- and working with them on new products. My dad designed farm machinery -- things like hay balers and cotton pickers -- for International Harvester. He’d often be on the road for weeks at a time, testing prototypes at farms around the country, looking for different crop and field conditions, and then at plants helping to set up the manufacturing lines for the finished machine. And so I grew up seeing that rhythm of travel -- Dad at home, Dad packing, saying good-bye, and then getting on with our lives until he came back. This was back in the late ‘60’s and into the 70’s, so no cheap long-distance let alone messaging or email or video calls. He was gone, with the exception of a postcard or two, until he came back.</li><li>And then when I joined the workforce, the first day of my first real job out of school, I got on a plane and made the first of what’s been hundreds of flights between ORD and DFW.&nbsp; So many that, pretty soon, I got to know the women working the front desk at the DFW Admirals Club. One morning, one of them asks me if I’d maybe like to meet her daughter. Awkward. I asked her, “Would you want your daughter dating someone who’s out of town as much as I am?” She paused for a moment and then said, “No, not really”.&nbsp;</li><li>Also around this time, my dad had gotten promoted past the level of going out to the field and so was traveling a lot less. But my mother took a purchasing executive role and with that, the need for a lot of travel to vendors. So while travel was generational/ “hereditary” from my father to me, my mother and I started road warrior-ing at the same time, so we were more like travel “siblings” -- comparing hotel notes, competing on frequent flier status and perks.&nbsp;</li><li>Will traveling for a living continue to a 4th generation? Tough to tell right now; both kids measure their commute in feet rather than miles during the lockdown, and friends running consulting operations tell me the current state is great for staff productivity -- an hour sales call takes an hour, rather than a day’s worth of travel for that hour, and working remotely with clients saves the client money and consultants don’t get burnt out trying to balance work and home needs. As I said back in the March and July episodes, I don’t buy that 100% remote is the “new normal”, but I also don’t believe it will snap back to 2019 levels, not after what will have been a year’s-plus time working out the mechanics of virtual working. But will there be another generation of road warriors in my family? It’ll probably take a couple of years to figure that out.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #170</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li>I’ve made another little tweak to the RSS feed -- the file that all the podcast apps use to pull new episodes for your subscribed podcasts. This tweak affects the episode descriptions in the top podcast apps. For those apps that support it, there are now clickable links in the episode notes or descriptions. In last month’s episode, there were clickable links to the gift ideas blog post on the TravelCommons website as well as the episode show notes page. Going forward, there will always be a link to the episode’s show notes page. I’ve tested that this works on Apple Podcasts, Overcast (which is what I use), Stitcher, Pocket Casts, Podcast Addict, and Google Podcasts -- all of which make up 70-80% (depending on who’s doing the counting) of the TravelCommons downloads. So, if you get a chance, flip over to the episode description right now and check it out.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>, as well as asking Alexa, Siri, and Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_170.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors','','inherit','closed','closed','','2957-revision-v1','','','2021-03-14 15:56:15','2021-03-14 20:56:15','',2957,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/14/2957-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3461,1,'2021-03-14 15:57:39','2021-03-14 20:57:39','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":2935,\"width\":300,\"height\":300,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large is-resized\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714-1024x1024.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2935\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"/><figcaption>Locking Down The Christmas Tree</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>No travel since the last episode, so I had some time to think back through my post-lockdown travel and come up with my top 10 <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">gift ideas</a> for your pandemic travelers.  We look at the start of the year-end efforts by airlines, hotels, and credit card companies to keep their grounded travelers, unpack the work-from-hotel offerings from Marriott, Hilton, and Hyatt, and dissect the latest hotel reservation system data breach. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_169.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go over to the <em>Subscribe</em> section on the right to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #169: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. No travel, but a November week with temps in the 70’s felt like I was someplace other than Chicago. But the weather reverted to the mean yesterday, which chased me back indoors to finish this podcast.</li><li>Last week was a boon to Chicago’s bars and restaurants. The week before, the governor banned indoor service again as COVID cases began to rise. The bonus week of warm sunny weather gifted them with some needed outdoor dining revenue. Last Friday, a friend and I met for lunch at a neighborhood place that had been able to expand their outdoor seating by putting tables on the sidewalk in front of the shuttered retailer next door to them. We showed up at 11:30; the tables were full by 12.</li><li>One of the things we talked about was travel; how, over the past 8 months, we’d more or less adjusted to all of the COVID restrictions, the masks, the social distance, all of it -- except for travel. Yes, we’ve done the car trips and long weekends, but we miss the big trips -- I’d just cancelled our Thanksgiving trip to London and he’s trying to think through their annual Christmas trip to December. Now, I know this is definitely a “First World problem” for folks who’ve had families, friends, and even themselves hit with COVID, so I’m not trying to overplay this. But as the end of the year approaches, and I start hearing more public health experts reset expectation -- for the worse, saying <a href=\"https://www.smh.com.au/national/vaccine-is-imminent-but-virus-fight-has-long-way-to-go-fauci-20201028-p569h2.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">“Well, it’s probably more like the end of 2021 or maybe into the beginning of 2022 before things start feeling normal”</a> -- I dunno, for people who love travel, I don’t think they want to put it on hold for another year or two. You start hearing about people looking for openings -- Mexico, Costa Rica -- as they figure out their own personal risk profiles. Maybe <a href=\"https://hub.united.com/2020-10-29-united-airlines-launches-worlds-first-free-transatlantic-covid-19-testing-pilot-2648544789.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">United Airlines’ testing program</a> that they’re trialing on flights to Hawaii and London is part of the answer; certainly <a href=\"https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/11/heres-everything-to-know-about-pfizers-positive-vaccine-news/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pfizer’s release of preliminary vaccine results</a> on Monday got everybody hopeful again. I don’t think anyone expects -- or really wants -- an immediate snap-back to 2019. But the ability to stretch things a bit more would be greatly appreciated.</li><li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mactonite/29469\">Static</a>&nbsp;by Darkroom (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mactonite/29469</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>First, a quick program note. As I tweak things with the underlying TravelCommons infrastructure -- the audio file, the RSS feed, the website -- I’ll talk about the changes at the end of the podcast, so I don’t muck up the content that you come to listen to with the “inside baseball” sorta podcast stuff. If you’re not interested, you can skip to the end without missing anything. I will say, though, that I was pleasantly surprised when I looked at the Apple Podcast stats showing about 80% of you stay through the end of an episode. I’d fully expected to see at least 50% of folks hitting the “skip to next podcast” button when they heard the “Pictures of You” song clip. Thanks to everybody for sticking all the way through.</li><li>And congrats to Emily Thomas, our guest on the August episode, for winning the <a href=\"https://www.leverhulme.ac.uk/philip-leverhulme-prizes\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Leverhulme prize</a> last month. The prize recognizes the achievement of outstanding researchers across a broad range of disciplines whose work has already attracted international recognition and whose future career is exceptionally promising. I interviewed Emily about her book <em>The Meaning of Travel: Philosophers Abroad</em> and had a great time talking to her. A well-deserved award. I just may go back and listen to that interview again.</li><li>I got an email from Marriott last week announcing their work-from-hotel offerings. We\'ve talked about this trend in the past couple of episodes -- first as a way for downtown hotels to do something/anything about their low occupancy rates, and then in the last episode with the FBI\'s cyber security advisory to people moving from work-at-home to work-at-hotels. The Day Pass gives you a room from 6am to 6pm, wi-fi, bottled water, and lounge access if you’re a high-status Marriott Bonvoy member. They’re piloting it in Atlanta, Dallas, New York, and Phoenix. Scanning the pricing, the range looked to be in the $60-$90 range, though the Phoenician in Scottsdale did price out at $260. If you looked hard, you could probably get a day pass at a co-working place for cheaper, but if you can expense it, the Marriott offer is probably not a bad deal -- especially for those days that you have a big sales presentation or maybe a webinar, where you need that guaranteed alone time to focus on preparation and then delivery, and a video backdrop that’s not your closet door or a semi-made bed or random people walking past. Hilton and Hyatt are also offering work-from hotel plans, but with different spins. Hilton’s WorkSpaces will give you 10,000 Honors points for your first booking and, unlike Marriott, is across all of their properties, but it doesn’t feel as put together as Marriott’s. You have to ring up the property directly; looks like Hilton can’t figure out a way to shoehorn this day rate concept into their reservation system. Work from Hyatt, on the other hand, isn’t so much a WeWork replacement as a digital nomad trial package with its 7-night minimum stay requirement and a focus on resort locations like the Grand Hyatts in Kauai or Vail, CO. Kinda the complete opposite of spending 12 hours in a room at the Marriott by DFW. They all feel a bit “toe in the water”, a bit opportunistic in their own way.&nbsp;</li><li>At the beginning of this week, Candid Wueest, a cyber security researcher who joined us last year in episode #151 to talk about hotel websites that leaked traveler data, tweeted out a link to yet <a href=\"https://www.websiteplanet.com/blog/prestige-soft-breach-report/\">another hotel data breach</a>. This time it was channel management software, something that hotels use to automate the task of updating room availability and rates across all the on-line booking sites like Expedia and Booking.com and Hotels.com and on and on. Turns out this channel manager, Prestige Software, stored 24 GB of names and emails and credit card data and reservation records -- 10 million log files going back to 2013 -- in a misconfigured AWS S3 bucket -- storage space on Amazon’s cloud. The pandemic has massively accelerated companies moving from their own data centers to cloud services like Amazon and Microsoft. But sometimes it feels like the speed of that migration has overrun the skills of the teams supporting it.&nbsp; What can you do about it? In this case, not much. You would’ve booked your room on Expedia or Trivago and not known anything about something called a channel manager piping your data down to the hotel. We’ve talked about these breaches in so many past episodes. What I said then still stands: you need to be realistic -- it’s not <em>if</em> your personal data will get breached, it’s <em>when</em>. If you can, put your on-line purchases on a separate card and watch those transactions on the bank’s website or mobile app so you can quickly shut it down if you see something that doesn’t look right. I remember one time, years ago, seeing a Northwest Air flight from Tokyo to Beijing show up on my card. Struck me as odd because I was in Chicago with no plans to be in Asia. Immediately called the bank, disputed the charge, and they closed down the card. Interesting thing is that the crook had booked an economy class ticket. You’d think if you’re going to risk it, go big -- book the front of the plane -- business class if not first.&nbsp;</li><li>The quarantine theater we talked about in the last episode just keeps keeping on. Chicago now has 43 states on its list, 31 of which have <em>lower</em> COVID rates than Chicago. And, I guess in admission that no one’s paying attention, they’re moving from weekly updates to every other week. I guess ‘cause there’s not that many more states they can add. New York gave up on its quarantine list when COVID rates in neighboring Connecticut and New Jersey qualified them for the list. \"There will be no quarantine list, there will be no metrics,\" Governor Cuomo says. Everyone needs to test negative, except for people coming in from Connecticut, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania because, at some point, you just gotta be realistic. Especially in the face of this, what is it, a third wave? I’ve lost count.</li><li>And just to show how deeply all of this -- the quarantine, the lack of travel has gotten me, here’s a fun game I now play with my Google Mini.&nbsp;I dug around in the Google Home app and found where I can change the voice. I’ll switch to the British Racing Green voice to check the weather in London and then click over on Sydney Harbour Blue to check the weather there. Then I flip back to the default voice to get the weather at the Googleplex. And, of course, I ask it to play TravelCommons.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter message</a> to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> or our <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a> account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge music —&nbsp;<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Psykick/52938\">Another Way</a>&nbsp;by Psykick (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Psykick/52938</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Holiday Gift Guide for the Pandemic Traveler</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Like I mentioned at the top of the show, hearing public health officials saying things like “it will be easily by the end of 2021 and perhaps into the next year before we start having some semblance of normality” got my attention; got me thinking that this year’s travel gift guide needs to be a bit different. So I flipped through my 2020 travel journal, thought back through all of my post-lockdown travel to come up with my top shopping ideas for your pandemic travelers.</li><li>Check out this year\'s pandemic gift guide on the front page of the TravelCommons\' website or <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times\">here </a>at https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/2879\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Slinky Blues</a> by Admiral Bob (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/28792 Ft: unreal_dm</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>End of Year “Don’t Leave Me” Offers</strong> </h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Back in September, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/09/19/podcast-167-6-months-on-why-keep-travel-cards/\" title=\"Podcast #167 — 6 Months On; Why Keep Travel Cards?\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">episode #167</a>, we talked with <a href=\"https://www.lendingtree.com/writer/matt-schulz/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Matt Schulz, chief credit analyst at LendingTree</a>, about travel credit cards. Matt told us that their late summer surveys showed trends toward people canceling travel cards and cashing out points. But then earlier this week, <a href=\"https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-11-10/amex-says-its-cardholders-are-stockpiling-their-points-and-miles\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">American Express’ CFO said that their card customers <em>weren’t</em> cashing out points, and instead stocking them up to travel</a>.&nbsp; The two comments aren’t necessarily at odds. If you’re laid off, you can use those miles to buy groceries or clothes via gift cards or on Amazon. But if you don’t have to, the best value you’ll get for those points will be on travel. You’ll get less than a penny a point when cashing out Amex points on Amazon, but you can double that when you use them to book flights on, say, Singapore Air or KLM.&nbsp; So the hoarding makes sense -- if you can.</li><li>One of Matt’s points in our interview was that card companies will continue to tweak their rewards to keep people holding and using their cards because travelers are a valuable customer segment because, well, they typically spend chunks of money to travel. So as we come up on the end of the year, it’ll be interesting to see what those tweaks will be. Chase keeps extending the 5x grocery and gas bonus on their Southwest card while <a href=\"https://thepointsguy.com/news/amex-platinum-current-offer/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amex just announced a <em>10x</em> grocery and gas bonus as well as a 75K sign-up bonus for their Platinum card</a>.</li><li>Airlines and hotels are also rolling out their year-end offers. Back in the spring, all the majors gave existing status holders a push, extending elite expiration dates to Jan 2022 to keep them in the fold. So that settled everyone down for 2020. But now, with 2021 coming up and travel still in the hole, we’re starting to see new offers.<a href=\"http://news.aa.com/news/news-details/2020/Rewarding-AAdvantage-Members-With-More-Benefits-and-Flexibility-in-2021-AADV-10/default.aspx\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"> American opened the bidding last month</a>, knocking 20% off of 2021 status qualifying mileage clip levels (e.g., 40,000 instead of 50,000 to qualify for AAdvantage Platinum) and trying to get whatever they can for this year by counting October (last month), November, and December flights&nbsp; towards earning status in 2021, which is then good through Jan 2023. This afternoon, I got an email from <a href=\"https://hub.united.com/2020-11-12-united-airlines-makes-it-easier-to-earn-mileageplus-premier-status-for-2022-2648871852.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">United announcing their deal</a>. United’s status qualification methodology has gotten ridiculously complex over the past couple of years, but by at least one of their metrics, it looks like they’re dropping their status qualifying point (PQP -- don’t ask) clip levels by at least 30% <em>and</em> offering double points for flights taken in Q1 -- January, February, March -- next year. <a href=\"https://newsroom.hilton.com/hilton-honors/news/hilton-honors-adds-flexibility-value-for-members\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Hilton, though, made the simplest and deepest offer</a> -- knocking 50% off of all status qualifying measures -- stays, nights, points -- boom, mike drop.</li><li>It makes sense. Most statused travelers are business travelers and depending on which CEO is talking, business travel is down 85% (Delta), 90% (Southwest), and will be 3-4 years before it’s back to pre-pandemic levels (United). And those business travelers are the airlines’ and hotels’ most profitable customers. So expect to see Delta and Southwest and Marriott announcements soon, and maybe again this time next year if that “Well, it’s probably more like the end of 2021 or maybe into the beginning of 2022 before things start feeling normal” forecast turns out to be true.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #169</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li>As I mentioned at the end of the last episode, I restructured the RSS feed a bit so that I shouldn’t accidently trigger any more episode re-downloads. And I moved the episode number from the title to its own XML tag just to clean up how everything looks in your podcast app. Also, a few months ago, I tweaked the production workflow to add chapter markers in each episode. So, if your app supports them (Apple Podcasts and Overcast do), you can skip forward to the next section or, if you wanted to go back and listen to, say, the interview with Emily Thomas, you can go straight to it.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>, as well as asking Alexa and Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_169.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers','','inherit','closed','closed','','2936-revision-v1','','','2021-03-14 15:57:39','2021-03-14 20:57:39','',2936,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/14/2936-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3463,1,'2021-03-14 15:59:26','2021-03-14 20:59:26','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":2899,\"width\":300,\"height\":300,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large is-resized\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-1024x1024.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2899\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"/><figcaption>My mission is clear</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Trying to recover from a long weekend of eating and drinking through the neighborhoods of South Philly. Our movable feast reminded me that food may be the one experience of a place left that can’t be easily exported and bought on-line. We talk about the FBI\'s cybersecurity warning to work-from-home types using hotels for getaway offices, and are a bit amazed at how fast last year\'s \"flight shaming\" gave way to \"flights to nowhere.\" And we think about \"quarantine theater\" -- how cities and states are focusing on activities to signal they are serious about COVID, but that most folks know aren’t really effective. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_168.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>download</strong></a> the podcast file, go over to the <em>Subscribe</em> section on the right to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #168: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after a long weekend of eating and drinking and eating some more with friends in Philadelphia, a family we’ve traveled with before - South Africa, Singapore, Spain… and now, with COVID lockdowns, Philly. And while we’ll do a cultural thing or two, what we really like to do together is eat. It is the kind of group where comments like: “OK, we need to stop eating at 1:30 because we have 5:30 reservations” and “We’re only going to order the half-kilo of barbacoa because we’re eating again in 4 hours” are met with “Yeah, that’s a good point,” and “makes sense” rather than “I think we have a problem here.”&nbsp;</li><li>And Pennsylvania’s reopening regulation about needing to buy food when getting a beer didn’t help. After sneaking in a cheesesteak right before that 1:30 cutoff, we had to order some food with our afternoon beers -- the beer, of course, not subject to that 1:30 deadline because it’s liquid, so it’s not really food, so it doesn’t count. But we had to order some real, solid food with our beers. So we look at the menu -- ah, brussels sprouts, it’s a vegetable, that’s kinda healthy. Five minutes later, our beers arrive with a wire basket full of deep-fried brussels sprouts doused in a sweet chili sauce. So much for healthy.</li><li>But some of the bars, the smaller ones, the neighborhood ones, gamed it -- as these places are wont to do -- by putting a $1 food item on the menu -- 2 hard boiled eggs at one bar, a PB&amp;J at another. The best, though, was the Pop Tart we had with our last beer at Ray’s Happy Birthday Bar in South Philly. That one won the prize.</li><li>Which we found because we skipped the usual downtown/Center City/Society Hill hotels and grabbed an Airbnb in South Philly - kinda sandwiched between the older Italian neighborhoods and the newer Little Saigon area. We spent a lot of time outdoors, walking the neighborhoods -- and walking off our food -- and stopping in at neighborhood joints. One day, we’re picking up salamis and cheese from the Italian Market; another day, we’re buying banh mi’s from a Vietnamese bakery. I’ll write up a list of our favorite places for the TravelCommons website in a couple of weeks -- after my cholesterol level gets back to some semblance of normal.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/duckett/2333\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Another Girl (instrumental)</a> by duckett (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/duckett/23334 Ft: fourstones, miafas</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>First, a big “Thank You” to Gary Learned who goes by Denrael on social media for his review in Apple Podcasts. Gary is a long-time TravelCommons listener. Indeed, he’s pointed me to some great restaurants in places like Seattle and Memphis. Gary wrote a couple of weeks ago:<ul><li>“When people ask where I live, I usually just say airports and hilton. As someone who lives the life of the road warrior, I find this podcast strikes an all-to-familiar chord with my own experiences. A definite must-listen to understand the life of the traveller.</li><li>“I wrote the above a number of years ago and it is as true now as it was then, I look forward to Mark’s take on travel, it’s more about the journey, and cannot count the number of times when I’ve shook my head, laughed and said “yep, been there.”</li></ul></li><li>Gary, thanks for that. And thanks for staying with me this long.</li><li>The FBI pushed out a consumer alert last week to remind folks about the risks when using hotel wi-fi. We’ve talked about this many times and I think most frequent travelers know the drill when accessing any shared wi-fi, whether it be in a hotel or an airport or a bar or a Starbucks. Nothing new there, so why the FBI alert? Because the “FBI has observed a trend where individuals who were previously teleworking from home are beginning to telework from hotels. US hotels, predominantly in major cities, have begun to advertise daytime room reservations for guests seeking a quiet, distraction-free work environment.” So people who used to work in offices and have been working from home since March, are looking for a change of scenery, but either can’t or aren’t keen to go back to the group office setting. Enter downtown hotels, many of whom, we mentioned last month, are slouching towards bankruptcy because of low occupancy. Don’t want a bed for the night? How ‘bout a desk for the day? I just got an email from Omni Hotels pitching just that -- “Trade up your classroom for everything you need for a productive day of work plus downtown Los Angeles views.” I guess the FBI thinks these displaced office workers, used to working on secure corporate or home networks, might not be as careful. But even for frequent travelers, the alert is a good read:&nbsp; talking about the dangers of an “evil twin” attack, logging onto what looks like a hotel wi-fi but is actually a hacker’s network; logging into the actual hotel wi-fi which has been compromised through exploits in out-of-date or unpatched network hardware. The FBI’s top recommendations are ones we’ve <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/09/20/podcast-155-rj-delays-street-food-in-poland-and-hungary/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #155 — RJ Delays; Street Food in Poland and Hungary\">repeated</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/02/20/podcast-127-critiquing-my-top-10-travel-tips-reviewing-vpns/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #127 — Critiquing My Top 10 Travel Tips; Reviewing VPNs\">numerous</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/12/20/podcast-119-digital-security-on-the-road-us-airports-getting-better/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #119 — Digital Security On The Road; US Airports Getting Better?\">times</a> - use a VPN when you connect to public wi-fi, or avoid them altogether with a mobile hotspot. Even when I’ve had a corporate VPN, I’ve always used one of the top paid VPN providers - NordVPN, PIA or ExpressVPN - because their software is so much better. I’m using NordVPN now, and whenever I’m not on a private network, I fire up the Nord client and it handles everything -- connects to the best server, reconnects automatically when I open the lid to wake up my Mac again. I don’t have to think about it. Indeed, half the time I forget to shut it off at home, until I’m wondering why I can’t move a file to another PC. Also, only access secure websites; I used to say “look for https://” but I guess that was too geeky, so you need to look for lock icons instead. And, of course, enable 2-factor authentication whenever you can. Nothing new, but a good reminder nonetheless. I’ll put a <a href=\"https://www.ic3.gov/media/2020/201006.aspx\">link to the alert</a> in the show notes, but you can also find links on the TravelCommons Facebook page and Twitter account.</li><li>OK, I gotta ask “what happened to Greta Thunberg\'s ‘flygskam’ or ‘flight shaming’ -- the 2019 existential travel threat? Because the whole Asian thing of “flights to nowhere” -- EVA Air from Taiwan filling up its “Hello Kitty” plane, All Nippon doing a fake flight to Hawaii, and then Qantas selling out a 787 for a lap around Australia. Singapore Air scrapped their “flight to nowhere” at the last minute, instead turning one of their A380s into a pop-up restaurant. I have to tell you that, honestly, I just don’t get this. For me, the flight is a means to an end -- something I’ve got to bear to get where I want to go. Getting on that American 737 in ORD last week didn’t fill me with joy; it was just simple math -- 2 hrs in a plane vs. 11 hrs in a car. And all that I just said… goes double for the idea of voluntarily buying airplane meals to eat at home. Words fail me.</li><li>At the end of September, the CDC did an early release of an article slated for the November issue of their peer-reviewed journal <em>Emerging Infectious Diseases</em> (and I thought <em>Walden Pond</em> was a cure for insomnia). The article analyzed the in-flight transmission of coronavirus from one business class passenger to 14 other passengers and a crew member on a 10-hour Vietnam Air flight from London to Hanoi. Most of the reactions in the press and on Twitter were “Yikes! Single passenger infects 15 people!”. While noting the CDC’s disclaimer “Early release articles are not considered as final versions” (which I didn’t see mentioned in any of the press articles), I came away with a less-than- “Yikes” after reading the whole paper. The flight was on March 2nd, so while the world was still trying to figure this novel coronavirus thing out and way before mandatory in-flight masks. And the passenger was symptomatic with a cough and a sore throat. Of the 14 passengers infected, 12 were in the same business class cabin and of those, all but one were within a 2-seat radius. And the authors aren’t sure if the 2 economy class infections were from the business class index case or from a different source. My takeaways: 1) Don’t let symptomatic people on planes - even if temperature checks aren’t perfect, it might catch some folks and will certainly make people think about their condition before flying; 2) Because this appears to validate the risk of being kept in close proximity to an infected person over a prolonged period; 3) Which, to me, justifies the airlines’ no-excuses mask requirements; but 4) In spite of a symptomatic un-masked passenger coughing away in the front of the plane, no non-adjacent passengers got infected -- so maybe the airline execs’ confidence in HEPA filters kinda justified. I’ll put <a href=\"https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/11/20-3299_article\">a link to the CDC paper</a> in the show notes. It’s not that long. It’s interesting to read the source document rather than just a headline or a short USAToday blurb.</li><li>Having said all that, I’m in no way, shape, or form justifying the “hygiene theater” that the travel industry seems to be trying to use to bring folks back. I talked back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/07/17/podcast-165-first-post-lockdown-flight-when-does-business-travel-come-back/\">the July episode</a> about the “Hertz Gold Standard Clean” sticker Hertz is slapping across driver-side doors. And there are some hotels now scheduling cleaning during the day rather than overnight so guests can see it. And then, on my American flights between Chicago and Philly last week, the banner across the top of the American Way magazine cover in the seatback pocket - “This magazine has been treated with an antimicrobial process” -- which I guess means “Please, feel safe to open it up and look at the advertisements.” I dunno, it feels a bit like the “security theater” we all went through after 9/11 - it was less about actually making things safer and more about making us “feel” safer -- and so, more willing to get on a plane. But maybe if I’m an airline or hotel exec facing down the pain of laying off thousands or tens of thousands of people if travelers don’t come back, that distinction is meaningless; I’m just trying to survive.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/snowflake/56508\">Rise Up (Like the Sun)</a> by Snowflake (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: Bluemillenium, Sackjo22, Martin Luther King, Kara Square</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Quarantine Theater</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>While some folks in the hospitality industry are talking about “hygiene theater”, what about “quarantine theater”? Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #166 — What Is The Meaning of Travel?\">August episode</a>, I talked about the complexity local and state travel bans and quarantine measures are causing for people trying to plan some sort of travel.&nbsp;</li><li>My son Andrew and his significant other headed out to Portland, ME last month for work. The week before they left, the Marriott emailed him a form - “Please certify one of the following is true - I have received a negative COVID test performed no later than 72 hours prior to my arrival, or will quarantine for 14 days upon my arrival in Maine.” Since they were only going to be in Portland for 4 days, they trundled down to the nearest testing site for the quick test 2 days before they left -- where they got chewed out by one of the testers. “We’re running out of the quick tests. You should’ve planned better.” OK, how long to get results from the other test? “5 days” But that won’t meet Maine’s 3-day requirement. Tester just walks away. But they got their negative test results and got on their plane to Portland -- where no one in the airport or the hotel asked to see it.&nbsp; OK, not harm done other than the discomfort of a Q-tip probing their sinuses and a random bit of yelling, but waste scarce testing resources?</li><li>Chicago’s quarantine is also a bit of kabuki. Once a week the city’s health commission gets in front of the press to scold another state or two -- this week was Indiana and Wisconsin. There’s now 25 states and Puerto Rico that if you’re traveling from there to Chicago, you’re supposed to self-quarantine for 14 days or face fines up to $7,000. More interesting is that Chicago’s threshold for getting on the list is 15 new daily cases per 100,000 residents. On this week’s <a href=\"https://www.chicago.gov/city/en/sites/covid-19/home/emergency-travel-order.html\">tally,</a> Indiana is running in the 20-30 range, but so is the state of Illinois. You could call it hypocritical or pragmatic or keeping its powder dry for when the city needs another bucket of money from the state, but Chicago hasn’t put the rest of Illinois on its quarantine list.</li><li>Now, I’ve yet to hear of anyone who has actually self-quarantined and as of last week, <a href=\"https://chicago.cbslocal.com/2020/10/02/three-months-into-chicagos-emergency-travel-order-no-fines-issued-enforcement-focus-remains-on-education/\">no one has been rung up for not doing so</a>. But last month, a friend told me about how Chicago’s quarantine theater hit her last month. She finally got ‘round to taking some vacation at the end of the summer. She lives in Chicago, but is a big outdoors person; looking at airfares and tossing some darts at a map, she decided to go hit Bryce Canyon and Zion National Parks in Southern Utah. So she’s down there for a couple of days when her boss calls her. “They just announced that Utah is going on the city’s quarantine list. It’s not official until Friday, so I guess if you get out of there by Thursday, you won’t have to quarantine for 2 weeks before coming back to work.” And, it didn’t need to be said, those 2 weeks of self-quarantine wouldn’t be paid. My friend is unique in that she works for maybe the one company in Chicago that takes the city’s quarantine order seriously. So my friend fought through lousy cell coverage to see what she could salvage of the back half of her vacation. Luckily, she has friends in Oregon, which isn’t on the city’s list. So Thursday, she cut her hiking short, schlepped the 4½ hours back up to SLC and caught the last flight out to Portland -- which let her come back to work and make some money the next week.</li><li>Theater isn’t a new thing. If you’re, say, a <em>mature</em> traveler, you got to play a bit part in the security theater that premiered after 9/11 and the underwear bomber. While not a perfect analogy (and really, nothing ever is), we can see some similar theatrics -- government agencies (TSA then, health departments now) investing in activities that signal they are serious, but that most folks know aren’t really effective. For me and I think for most frequent travelers, the security theater ended with TSA PreCheck -- it seemed, again to most of us, as a reasonable balance between risk and getting on with our traveling lives. I don’t know what that looks like for quarantine theater, but I sure hope it doesn’t take the 10 years it took to figure out PreCheck.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/52154\">release.JOY.release</a> by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: essesq, Haskel (hej31)</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Traveling For Food</strong> </h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I talked at the start of the episode about eating my way through Philadelphia a couple of weeks back, and it was just that. We landed Thursday around 11:30a and were hitting our favs at Reading Terminal Market by 1:30p. I went straight for Tommy Dinic’s for the roast pork sandwich with sharp provolone and broccoli rabe while Irene and Claire made for the Mennonite pretzel place and Termini Brothers for fresh-filled cannolis. And then as we were leaving, I swung past one of the PA Dutch stands to buy a 1-lb block of <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrapple\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">scrapple</a> for breakfast the rest of the stay.</li><li>Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #166 — What Is The Meaning of Travel?\">August episode</a> in the interview with Emily Thomas about her book <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2IpLXnd\"><em>The Meaning of Travel</em></a><em>, </em>we talked about a chapter on global homogenization. One of the bits that I edited out was the observation that, back 10-20 year ago, it was fun to go shopping and bring something unique back home. But now, with globalized e-commerce, there’s not much that you can’t find easier (and often cheaper) on Amazon or Taobao or Rakuten. And so, for me, food is the one experience of a place that can’t be easily exported and bought on-line.</li><li>On our trip to the UP -- Michigan’s Upper Peninsula -- along with the biking, hiking, and kayaking, we were also on a bit of a <a href=\"https://thepastyguy.com/portfolio/the-pasty-trail-best-pasties-in-up/\">pasty tasting tour</a>. The UP is pretty well known -- in the Midwest at least -- for their <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pasty\">pasties</a>, brought over by Cornish miners working the copper mines. We had traditional pasties filled with steak, potatoes, onions, and rutabagas, and breakfast pasties. We worked our ways through the finer points of pasty critique -- picking out the pasties made from lard-based doughs, and fillings that held together so you could eat the pasty with your hand but weren’t just complete mush.</li><li>It’s funny how these comparison dishes can crop up on a vacation. On a trip to Phuket, Thailand, Andrew ordered pad thai everywhere we ate. On a trip to Hungary, Irene searched every menu for <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisherman\'s_soup\">halászlé</a> - a spicy fish soup - after having a great bowl of it at lunch with her cousin in some little town on the shores of <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Balaton\">Lake Balaton</a>. And again Irene, in Spain now, searched every city we visited for <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salmorejo\">salmorejo</a>, not quite soup, more of a tomato and bread and olive oil and garlic purée. These sorta horizontal tasting, some would be planned -- like our pasty tour -- and some would just come up, like Irene’s halászlé hunt. But it’d be fun, getting a feel for what the base of the dish is, what everyone agrees on, and what people put their own spin on, because usually for these core dishes -- dishes that everyone around has eaten all their lives -- everyone has an opinion about them. And that’s part of what makes the broad/horizontal tasting fun.</li><li>And also, these dishes don’t seem to be “industrialized.” While I’ve had mass produced pasties in the UK, grabbing something out from the West Cornish Pasty hut in Waterloo Station while running for a train, the pasties in the UP were much more -- not “artisanal” because I don’t think anyone making pasties in the UP would use that word, but “family made”. At Miners Pasties in Munising, which came out top in our pasty ranks, the woman helping us at the counter said the lard pastry recipe came from the owner’s grandmother and only 3 people know it -- the granddaughters and their niece. And only those three make the pastry each day.&nbsp; We sat back and enjoyed those pasties because we knew we wouldn’t be eating them again unless and until we found our way back to this bench again some day.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #168</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_168.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food','','inherit','closed','closed','','2896-revision-v1','','','2021-03-14 15:59:26','2021-03-14 20:59:26','',2896,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/14/2896-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3464,1,'2021-03-14 16:00:48','2021-03-14 21:00:48','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":2857,\"width\":300,\"height\":300,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large is-resized\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/F3E28DAE-0026-4E8A-957E-D6CE914F717C.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2857\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"/><figcaption>I seem to have put on a Quarantine 15</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Spent a week in <a href=\"https://www.uptravel.com/\">Michigan\'s Upper Peninsula</a> hiking, biking, kayaking, and running into a lot of other people getting away to do the same, which got me looking back six months to the start of the pandemic. I talk about a surprisingly good flight cancellation experience with American Airlines, and figuring out how to download 12 years of <a href=\"https://www.tripit.com/\">TripIt</a> data. We wrap up talking to <a href=\"https://www.lendingtree.com/writer/matt-schulz/\">Matt Schulz</a> of <a href=\"https://www.lendingtree.com/\">LendingTree</a>, asking him what are we doing with travel credit cards that are generating frequent traveler points we can’t use? All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_167.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>download</strong></a> the podcast file, subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #167: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after a week’s tour of the UP -- Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Did a counter-clockwise circle route around Lake Michigan. Headed out east on Friday morning; stopped at a brewery in Grand Rapids for lunch; drove the 5 miles across the Mackinac Bridge just before dusk; and had my first UP pasty (the first of many) and a local beer for dinner that night in Sault Ste Marie. Spent a couple of days in Soo; watched 700-ft lake freighters make their way through the locks that connect Lake Superior to Lake Huron; I’m still enough of an engineer to geek out on that kind of stuff. We then drove west to Marquette for 3 days and again west to Houghton for 2 days before heading home through Wisconsin down the west side of Lake Michigan. It was all outdoors stuff -- hiking, biking, kayaking; the things that last-minute COVID closures or restrictions won’t muck up.&nbsp; The UP has always been on my list of places to visit, but it’s always on sorta the B-list, and so plans to go someplace else -- Spain, Napa, Ireland -- would always push it down the list. But now, with most places blocked off with travel restrictions and quarantines, the UP -- drivable with lots of outdoor activities -- bubbled to the top of the list.</li><li>And I wasn’t the only one thinking that way. The guy renting rowboats at <a href=\"https://www2.dnr.state.mi.us/ParksandTrails/Details.aspx?id=428&amp;type=SPRK\">Tahquamenon Falls State Park</a> looked at our release forms and said “We’ve had a lot of people up here from Chicago. It’s been crazy busy. We can’t get enough people to handle it.” And biking around <a href=\"https://www.travelmarquette.com/things-to-do/attractions/presque-isle-park/\">Presque Isle Park</a> in Marquette, we got talking, in a socially distant way, to a biking couple up from St Louis. It was also their first time up. A bunch of their friends and family had been up earlier; they’d seen nothing but UP pictures in their Facebook feed for the past month.</li><li>The husband said that he had an underlying medical condition and so they were looking for places away from people; they’d rented a cabin in the little town of Au Train. Which got me thinking about the place we stayed in Soo -- the <a href=\"https://www.plazamotormotel.com/\">Plaza Motor Motel</a>. No lobby, no elevators, no hallways; no places to run into other guests; no need to have to remember to mask up when you leave your room. Just open your room door and there’s your car. Most frequent travelers would never think of voluntarily staying in a motor inn, a <em>mo</em>-tel. But with so many things changing in these unprecedented times, maybe COVID will have folks give motels another chance.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/11510\">Funkist</a> - cdk dub mix by cdk (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: teru</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>First, a big shout out to the folks in Hanoi, Vietnam listening to TravelCommons on Soundcloud. One of the fun things about the podcast is looking at where people are listening from. For the most part, the stats make sense -- most of the listeners are from the US, and then English-speaking countries -- the UK, Canada, Australia. But every once in a while, there’s a spike that I just can’t figure out. I’ll see it, go look at the episode notes to see if I’ve mentioned that country, but I usually can’t make sense of it. Last fall, it was Argentina., but over the past couple of months, it’s been folks from Hanoi, primarily listening to <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/04/11/podcast-162-post-corona-trip-planning-keeping-a-travel-journal/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #162 — Post-Corona Trip Planning; Keeping a Travel Journal\">April episode, #162</a>, about post-lockdown trip planning and keeping a travel journal. Not sure why, but if you’re in Hanoi and you’ve made it to this episode - Hi! And thanks for listening!</li><li>Dan Grabon sent me a note at the beginning of the month about my lockdown reading that I mentioned during <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #166 — What Is The Meaning of Travel?\">last month’s interview</a> with Dr Emily Thomas<ul><li>“Mark,&nbsp; I feel your pain. I started re-reading Walden back in April, and I just passed the halfway mark at the end of August. This was part of an overly ambitious effort to read one great book a month from a literary calendar that I bought. The Brothers Karamazov took up January through March, and even though COVID should have meant more time to read, it just hasn’t turned out that way.</li><li>“Writing this from a long overdue vacation near Lake George, where I saw the book Cabin Porn in a gift shop. Good timing.</li><li>“Thanks for keeping the podcast going— helps keep me going in this time of not going much of anywhere!”</li></ul></li><li>Dan, Thanks for the note. <em>The Brothers Karamazov</em> -- you are a better man than I.&nbsp; I swore off of Russian fiction after suffering through <em>Crime and Punishment</em> in high school. That and Charles Dickens, just can’t do ‘em. And I am still working my way through <em>Walden</em>. Just got through his half-dozen pages on hoeing his bean field. I find if I try to read more than a dozen pages in a sitting, I just start skimming -- or sleeping. Glad you were able to get away to the wilderness of Lake George. Feel like the perfect place to find that Cabin Porn book.</li><li>Jim McDonough hit the TravelCommons Facebook page, following up on my comment in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\" title=\"Podcast #166 — What Is The Meaning of Travel?\">last month’s episode</a> about my disappearing American flight from ORD to BCN. Jim writes...<ul><li>“We were going to Barcelona and Madrid with Rick Steves Europe in October, but of course Rick has canceled every tour for the rest of the year. Interestingly, AA says we are still booked on a BA 747 from SAN to LHR as part of this trip. BA has no more 747\'s and doesn\'t serve SAN any more.”</li></ul></li><li>I sometimes think any of the airline’s schedules more than one month out are more like aspirational projections than reflections of reality. Especially given how fast they’re shifting schedules to capture any sort of bump in passenger volume. Like United having <a href=\"https://airlineweekly.com/airlines-feeling-a-lift-from-rocky-mountain-hubs\">some transcontinental flights stop in DEN to pick up a bump in volume from people visiting national parks</a> -- there’s that outdoor activity trend again.</li><li>But back to that BCN trip, I should be getting things here in Chicago sorted before heading off for 2 weeks in Catalonia, but you’ve probably already guessed, that trip isn’t happening. Not a surprise. The EU still isn’t letting US travelers in and the case count in Spain’s second COVID wave has gotten worse in the last month. So at the beginning of the month, I gritted my teeth, called American and cancelled the flights. Actually, American had called me the prior week while we were in the UP, but I let it go to voicemail. We were in a taproom in Marquette and I didn’t feel ready to have that conversation. I wanted to have all our booking info in front of me and be clear minded (tough during a taproom session) and mentally girded for battle. So when I returned their call the next week, I was sitting in front of my laptop with all my itinerary documents up and was ready to go. It was a quick trip through the automated phone tree to a very nice woman in Dallas. No hassles with canceling. I was asking her about the logistics of the travel credit - how long will it be good for - when she said, “Since your flight was canceled and you were re-booked, you can get a refund if you like.” Wow. “Uh, yes,” I quickly said, not wanting her offer to disappear, “I think I’ll take the refund instead.” That was not what I expected from all the stories about American trying to keep as much cash as possible. It took her a couple of minutes to process the refunds during which we compared the weather between Chicago and Dallas. The refunds hit my credit card the following week, so full kudos to American on handling this. I’m hoping I don’t need to repeat in November for my Thanksgiving trip to London.</li><li>A couple of weeks back I was trading notes with TravelCommons contributor Allan Marko about <a href=\"https://www.sfgate.com/travel/article/United-bangalore-SFO-15551358.php\">United’s new SFO-Bangalore non-stop</a>. It’ll be their longest flight at 17½ hours. My immediate reaction was, of course, “that’s a helluva long time to wear a mask.” United is using a 787-9 with a special engine enhancement that makes the flight possible. Which got me thinking about what planes I’d flown into BLR. I’ve been using <a href=\"https://www.tripit.com/\">TripIt</a> since 2008 when it first broke out of the Silicon Valley venture cap bubble, so I logged in, clicked over to Past Trips and started clicking back through the pages -- and clicking and clicking because the last time I was in Bangalore was April 2014. I kept looking around the screen - there’s gotta be a way to export all my trip data; but I couldn’t find anything. So I sent a note to <a href=\"mailto:support@tripit.com\">support@tripit.com</a>. And, to my huge surprise, Andy from the Tripit Help Center replied in <em>15 minutes</em> saying “We currently do not offer customer driven travel data export capability. We have passed your suggestion on to the appropriate team for review.” Having run a software product team, I knew what that meant -- never. But, in the next paragraph, Andy offered a solution -- “You can check out a third party app Openflights. They have an API with TripIt that will allow you to import trips from your TripIt account to their site. From there you can create a list of all of your flights and download them to a csv file. Their basic account is free to use.” Sweet. I thanked Andy for his quick reply and hit <a href=\"https://openflights.org/\">Openflights</a>. I set up an account, hit the “Import” button and connected to my TripIt account. The import was a touch kludgy -- I had to go page by page, review each trip, and mark it to import. After 88 pages, I had imported 1006 flight segments, which they displayed on a world map. I clicked on BLR and a little card popped up. I clicked on the first option and it listed the 8 flights I’d taken to and from BLR. Turns out I’d mostly flown Airbus A320s, though I did once fly a 747-400 in from FRA. It has a couple of analysis buttons -- like my longest flight -- Joburg to IAD at 17:40 (ha! 10 minutes longer than the SFO-BLR flight); and my shortest -- IAD again, but this time a 44-minute flight to CHO. And of course, I was able to download all my trips into Excel so I can noodle around to my heart’s content. Openflights is free, but I’m going to <a href=\"https://openflights.org/donate\">donate</a> to help keep them going. <a href=\"https://openflights.org/\">Openflights.org</a> -- definitely recommended. I’ll put a link in the show notes.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/48705\">Jolanta Blues</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: Admiral Bob, Martijn de Boer</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>6 Months of Pandemic</strong> </h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Finally giving into reality and canceling my Barcelona flight 6 months after booking it got me thinking back on these -- you know what’s coming -- <em>unprecedented</em> times. Airlines canceled flights to China at the end of January, then to South Korea, Iran, and Italy in February, until, by the beginning of March, airline traffic joined the stock market in a free fall. But back then, we thought it was a one-off event, kinda like Sept 11th; a sharp, scary event that came out of nowhere with no warning but that would soon pass. So taking advantage of one of the many March fare sales to book a flight at the end of September didn’t seem that risky.</li><li>I was talking to one of my consulting friends a couple of weeks ago. His travel schedule was similar to mine - a week without seeing an airport was a rare exception. He hasn’t been on a plane since March and doesn’t know when he’ll get on one next. He just started a project with a manufacturer in Cincinnati. Most of the project will be virtual, but he’s pretty sure he ought to at least put eyes on their plant. He lives outside Detroit. In the past, he’d be flying down every week. Now, he fires up Google Maps -- it’s a 4½ drive down I-75. He’ll drive down once, stay a couple of days, and then head back home.&nbsp;</li><li>I can’t say that anyone I’ve talked to misses the act of business travel -- getting up at 0 dark 30 Monday morning to get to the airport, shuffle through the PreCheck line for 15-20 minutes, and then shoehorn into a full flight for an hour or 3.&nbsp; But we did it because that was part of the job. But now that it’s not, at least for now and what seems like (for now) through the end of the year, everybody is taking full advantage of sleeping in -- in their own beds.</li><li>Which explains why, of all the US airlines, Spirit Airlines, with its complete focus on low-cost leisure travelers, is the only one sounding even somewhat non-negative.&nbsp; And hotel chains like Choice, focused on what they call “drive-to” locations and extended stay properties getting occupancy rates over 50% while center city hotels like Chicago’s Hilton Palmer House are missing rent payments and slouching towards bankruptcy.</li><li>Irene and I were sitting outside at a microbrewery a couple of days ago, enjoying a sunny afternoon full in the knowledge that we have maybe 4 weeks of outdoor eating and drinking left in Chicago. We talked about what kind of travel we would do over the next 12 months, figuring travel restrictions and periodic lockdowns are going to be the norm for at least that long. No big plans; nothing that COVID could blow up but seeing some new places -- some skiing, maybe trying out Montana; some hiking, maybe checking out the Texas Hill Country. But next month, we’re trading Barcelona for Philadelphia; now that they’ve opened up the restaurants again, check out our old neighborhood and visit with some friends. It’ll be Irene’s first flight since February. It took a bit of talking, but I really think the threat of a total of 22 hrs in a car with me -- alone -- tipped her over.&nbsp;</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djiz/10514\">Nube - Djiz Rmx</a> by Kwame (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: SylviaO</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Do We Keep Travel Credit Cards?</strong> </h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Last week, <a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/14/delta-launches-6point5-billion-debt-deal-backed-by-its-frequent-flyer-program.html\">Delta used their SkyMiles program to back $6.5 billion in debt</a>, running the same play that United and American did in June. What caught my eye was some of the stats that came out with the debt filing -- that <a href=\"https://skift.com/2020/09/15/how-delta-looks-to-leverage-rewards-from-its-own-frequent-flyer-program/\">SkyMiles had about $6.1 billion in revenue in 2019, about two-thirds from American Express</a> which issues a co-branded Delta card, and that <a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/14/delta-launches-6point5-billion-debt-deal-backed-by-its-frequent-flyer-program.html\">total miles redeemed fell by 78% in the first half of this year.</a> The big carriers are leaning on their loyalty programs for cash, their biggest customers are credit card issuers, but those card users - us - are generating points that we’ve stopped using.&nbsp;</li><li>It’s against this background that I called up Matt Schulz, chief credit analyst at LendingTree, and to ask him -- do we want to keep travel credit cards?<ul><li>Mark: Matt, a lot of folks carry at least one travel credit card and I don’t think I’m going too far out on a limb guessing that damn close to every TravelCommons listeners carry them. We’re 6 months on from the COVID lockdowns and the resulting cratering of the travel industry. But with travel not recovering -- airline demand is still just a third of pre-pandemic levels and United Airlines’ CEO said last week it could be 3-4 years before it’s back to 2019 levels -- what are card holders doing with these cards generating frequent traveler points that they can’t or don’t want to use?</li><li>Matt: An awful lot of people are closing them simply because they may need to use those points that they had been planning to go on a trip to Paris or to Hawaii. But they need to use that money or those points to keep food on the table. Our survey that we just did found that about 30% of respondents with travel rewards card said that they had closed one and that number is even higher for Millennials. And that\'s got to be something that that scares the banks to death. It\'s not terribly surprising for all the reasons that you that you ticked off a minute ago, and I don\'t think that\'s going to slow down anytime soon either.</li><li>Mark: So, people are closing them out, so they\'re not taking those annual fees.</li><li>Matt: Our survey found that about half of those who had been laid off or furloughed had cashed out some of their points or miles. And again, it stands to reason because when you\'re trying to keep the lights on and keep food on the table, there are things more important than travel rewards. And I think that\'s a lot of what this comes down to -- if you are somebody who feels pretty stable in your job, has a decent emergency fund and generally feels kinda OK about things despite all of economic chaos, you\'re probably going to try and hold on to those miles</li><li>Mark: Back in March and April, it seemed the strategy for the big travel card issuers -- Chase, Citi, Amex -- seemed to be to sacrifice revenue to hold share -- statement credits for annual fees if you called them to cancel, new bonuses for stay-at-home purchases to keep wallet share -- seemed like 5x bonuses for grocery and gas was the most popular. Made sense when everyone was talking about 2-week shutdowns and a V-shaped recovery. But, as we said before, travel is gonna stay depressed for a while -- between state and country quarantines and many people not wanting to get in a plane -- how are travel card companies going to handle the next round of renewals? When I call Chase and Amex again, do I get more statement credits -- do they continue to fight for share? And if they don’t, what do I do with the balance of Ultimate or Membership Rewards points that I’ll lose if I don’t re-up and pay the fee?</li><li>Matt: I think what\'s gonna happen is that issuers are going to continue to tinker around the edges to see what people like and what is impactful. And the truth is that issuers desperately want to keep the customers on cards like Chase Sapphire Reserve, Amex Platinum -- all the high end and the next-step-down cards because those customers are so valuable from a lifetime value perspective. You may get a travel card when you\'re 25 and the bank will do what they can to keep you around to try and upsell you to other products that they might have. The issuers are going to try and do what they can to figure out how to make you stay. And right now, that may not look like giving a ton of travel rewards points.</li><li>Mark: Any recommendations for travel card holders as we\'re going forward to the end of the year and into the beginning of next year?</li><li>Matt: You really have to know your situation and understand it, and you also have to not feel guilty if you have to cash in your points that you had been saving up for that dream trip in order to help you extend your budget. Nobody gets a high-end travel card with a high annual fee hoping to eventually cash that in for groceries at Walmart, but sometimes these things have to happen. If you have the financial wherewithal and you can hold on to those points, I think it\'s worth doing because we are going to travel again. Nobody knows when. But we are going to travel again and assuming that your whole financial situation is generally OK, I think there is value in holding on to those points as something to look forward to in the future.</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #167</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and now, <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_167.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #167 — 6 Months On; Why Keep Travel Cards?','','inherit','closed','closed','','2856-revision-v1','','','2021-03-14 16:00:48','2021-03-14 21:00:48','',2856,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/14/2856-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3466,1,'2021-03-14 16:02:36','2021-03-14 21:02:36','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/IMG_0822-scaled.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2810 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/IMG_0822-300x278.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"278\"></a><figcaption>Reindeer are ruining my cabin porn</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>Trying to plan an August trip amidst dueling state quarantine lists and rapid lockdown changes while writing off my September plans for Barcelona. What\'s worse - hotels cutting back on housekeeping or breakfasts? And talking with <a href=\"https://emilythomaswrites.co.uk/about/\">Emily Thomas</a> about her new book <i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"https://amzn.to/2DO07fV\">The Meaning of Travel: Philosophers Abroad</a>. </span></i>All this and more, or listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below or by following this<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_166.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"> <strong>direct link</strong></a> to download the podcast file .</p>\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #166: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after managing to front-run the city’s quarantine order on Wisconsin. Went up to Milwaukee to meet up with some friends and do a bit of biking a couple of weekends before the Chicago Health Department added Wisconsin to their list of 22 states where you’re required to self-quarantine for 14 days after returning from a trip. Mind you, they’re not setting up roadblock checkpoints like New York City is -- at least not as of the time of this recording. Reasonable people can differ on this -- New York’s governor claimed similar efforts back in March by Rhode Island and Florida aimed at New Yorkers were “unconstitutional” but seems OK with it when it’s pointed the other way -- but it does make travel planning for law abiding citizens a bit more of a challenge. And making me wonder about our downsizing move into Chicago last year -- was missing the yard, the extra rooms, and the basement gym in the suburbs during the lockdown earlier in the year; now after Chicago’s quarantine rules, am missing freedom of travel.</li><li>All this adds a couple orders of magnitude of complexity to our efforts to plan a week out of the city in a couple of weeks. Not only do we need to check Chicago’s quarantine list, but also the quarantine plans of any potential destinations. While New York isn’t on Chicago’s quarantine list, Illinois is on New York’s. Mapping it all out, we take the “clean destination” intersection of that quarantine Venn diagram and then look at what restrictions are in those places; if nothing’s open, it’s not worth traveling there. I’ve eaten more meals in my hotel rooms over the past 3 months than I have in the last couple of years.&nbsp;</li><li>But things are changing so fast, that even after you figure out what’s open now, we then start following local papers on Twitter to get any early warnings on new restrictions. Which also means paying a lot more attention to hotel cancellation policies than I ever did. And then overloading our itinerary with outdoor activities like hiking and biking so last-minute closures or restrictions don’t leave us with nothing to do. Which means spending more time trolling the AccuWeather and Weather Channel web sites because an outside-heavy itinerary is more vulnerable to big storm fronts and hurricanes. And to think I used to bitch about having to navigate TripAdvisor ratings.</li><li>Bridge Music — funkyGarden by Jeris (c) copyright 2020 Licensed under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/VJ_Memes/61356 Ft: airtone, SackJo22, Analog By Nature</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>First, a couple of shout-outs to folks who are helping me spread the word about the podcast</li><li>Thanks to GHLGB, an apparently long-time TravelCommons listener, who gave us a 5-star iTunes review the day after the last month’s episode dropped, writing:<ul><li>“Mark does a great job of relating the world of the road warrior with a bit of branching out to those of us who are miles and points nutty. Always a calm and reasonable voice one that’s been in my ears for four years”</li><li>Thanks for that. I appreciate the words, and the effort of wading through the iTunes interface to leave them</li></ul></li><li>Also, in last month’s episode, I mentioned Kev Monteith, a TravelCommons listener and Amtrak travel blogger, but didn’t thank him for calling us out in his <a href=\"https://travelswithkev.com/kevs-favorite-podcasts/\"><em>2020 Favorite Podcast</em> list</a> on his <a href=\"https://travelswithkev.com/\"><em>Travels With Kev</em> website</a>. So, I’m fixing that right now. Thanks, Kev! Check out the show notes for links to his site.</li><li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/06/09/podcast-164-first-post-lockdown-trips-travel-credit-cards/\">episode #164</a>, we talked about how hotels are pulling back on housekeeping during stays -- the Hampton Inn in Spring Hill, TN said they’d be 3 days between room visits while the Residence Inn up the road in Franklin said 7 days, which seems a bit excessive; more like a COVID-washing a cost-cutting move. Replacing the breakfast buffet with a “grab-&amp;-go” breakfast bag makes all the sense in the world, but here again, hotels are grabbing the opportunity to trim costs. Most of what I’ve seen is a brown lunch bag with a bottle of water, a NutriGrain breakfast bar, and an apple -- a banana if I’m lucky. But the Residence Inn in Wauwatosa, WI, just outside of Milwaukee, was having none of that a couple of weeks back. You had 4 options for the main breakfast course in your bag -- a turkey and waffle sandwich, a peanut and strawberry sandwich, an egg and cheese quiche, or one of 13 kinds of cereal boxes, accompanied by your choice of chocolate milk, or orange or apple juice. I’m not passing judgement on the food choices, but I was awfully impressed by their ambition -- yeah, we can’t lay out a breakfast buffet spread, but we’re gonna try our damndest to give you a decent alternative. I just had to give the turkey &amp; waffle sandwich a go. I had visions of a <a href=\"https://twitter.com/trev4president/status/857776562615308288\">Fyre Festival-like trainwreck of a sandwich</a> -- a deli slice of turkey breast between two Eggo waffles. But it was a little more reasonable -- a small wrapped sandwich of turkey sausage between two small waffles, meant to be heated in the microwave. I grabbed it on the way out for a bike ride, so missed the microwave step, which, I think, was critical. But like I said, I give that RI team huge props for the effort.</li><li>But outside the Wauwatosa gang, if this stripped down hotel service stays the norm for the next 12-18 months, it’s probably going to drive some big changes in the year-end traveler gift guides -- shifting from Away luggage and Aesop travel kits, last year’s big recommendations, to sets of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3izWHMJ\">wine tumblers</a>, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2PIgihg\">collapsible bowls</a>, and <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3an6BhJ\">camping mess kits</a>. And, of course, all sorts of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/30NAqF2\">upscale sporks</a>.</li><li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/03/21/podcast-161-new-crisis-old-question-driving-down-to-key-west/\">episode #161</a>, at the end of March, still in a bit of shock from the COVID lockdown and trying to figure out how long it was going to last, I said “I’m nothing if not an optimist. In the midst of this week’s unraveling, I found a deal on a direct American Air flight from ORD to Barcelona — 8½ hr 787 flight — so I booked it — 2 weeks in Barcelona at the end of September.”&nbsp; But here we are five months later and as we all know, things haven’t “re-raveled”. At the beginning of July, American announced that <a href=\"https://liveandletsfly.com/american-airlines-international-reset/\">direct 787 ORD-BCN flight won’t restart until next summer.</a> I checked our reservation on the AA iPhone app after I read this. It still showed us on that direct flight -- until I clicked through, which then, I guess, forced the app to pull the latest information from Dallas, and now showed us flight BA through Heathrow. Not that it really matters. The EU isn’t letting Americans in any time in the near future, and, last time I checked, Barcelona is in a voluntary lockdown because of a new spike in COVID cases. News articles are showing <a href=\"https://time.com/5876132/europe-coronavirus-second-wave/\">shuttered-up stalls at the La Boqueria market</a>; like I said earlier, if nothing’s open, why go? It was a gamble, and really, not even a big one. There’s no change fee, so it’s a push. We won’t lose any money -- unless American goes belly-up, but that’d never happen -- would it?!</li><li>Last year, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/podcast-150-travel-interruptus/\">episode #150</a>, (these show notes are gonna be chock full of backlinks), I talked about switching my carryon bag -- from a Timbuk2 backpack to a <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3izS991\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Timbuk2 messenger bag</a>. I gave two reasons for the switch: I wanted to carry something a little smaller that would stand up under a plane seat; and I wanted a non-black interior, I kept losing things in my backpack -- <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3iDWIiu\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">my tablet</a>, my Bose headphone case. But also because the backpack was breaking down a bit - the seam on one of the side pockets had blown out and one of the strap clips had broken. I was going to pitch it during our last downsizing binge before moving into the city and a friend said “You know, <a href=\"https://www.timbuk2.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Timbuk2</a> bags have <a href=\"https://www.timbuk2.com/pages/warranty-repairs\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">lifetime warranties</a>.” Huh. So I hung onto it because I still like the bag. And about 14 months later, I finally got around to sending it back to them in San Francisco. I wasn’t sure if they’d re-opened their factory, so I was ready for it to take awhile for them to process the bag and repair it. Tracking the package, I could see they received it on a Friday. I got a note from them the following Monday saying they’d inspected it and yes, it was covered by the warranty, and had the bag back in my hands that Saturday. I have to tell you that I am pretty damned impressed. I won’t be switching back from my messenger bag, but I have found that the backpack can carry 4 four-packs of 16-oz cans, perfect when I’m biking a circuit of Chicago microbreweries using curbside no-contact pick-up to grab whatever’s their newest thing. Timbuk2 is definitely “TravelCommons Approved.”</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — Xena\'s Kiss / Medea\'s Kiss by mwic (c) copyright 2018 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mwic/58883</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>The Meaning of Travel</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>This seems to be <em>the</em> existential question for a lot of travelers -- why do we travel? -- now that can’t, or at least can’t as easily and, well thoughtlessly is too strong a word, but when we could travel without having to plan as much. It’s been a whipsaw -- from overtourism to <a href=\"https://skift.com/2020/06/05/travel-sector-remains-thorn-in-a-falling-u-s-unemployment-rate-defying-expectations/\">36% unemployment in the travel and hospitality sector in the the US</a> -- so a bit soul-searching/navel-gazing is to be expected, if not encouraged. So when I saw the new book, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2DO07fV\"><em>The Meaning of Travel: Philosophers Abroad</em></a> by <a href=\"https://www.dur.ac.uk/research/directory/staff/?id=15319\">Dr. Emily</a> <a href=\"https://emilythomaswrites.co.uk/\">Thomas</a>, associate professor in philosophy at Durham University in the UK, immediately bought it and read it -- and then thought that I needed to have her on the podcast. Lucky for me, she’s a very nice person and agreed to spend a bit of time talking about “the meaning of travel”. It was a fun conversation; I hope you enjoy it.<ul><li>Mark: I\'ve got to admit that, as an engineer and an IT guy, my philosophy knowledge pretty much starts and ends with buying a T shirt that said “I Drink Therefore I Am.” It was a fundraiser for the Philosophy club for my undergrad. Emily, the first chapter “Why Do Philosophers Care About Travel” got me because you get straight into a topic we\'ve discussed often on the TravelCommons podcast about how travelers build travel bubbles around themselves. They isolate themselves from the places that they traveled to. Oftentimes they do it in the name of efficiency, maybe to keep themselves safe from experiencing what you call the “otherness of travel.” What do philosophers say about that difference between everyday journeys and traveling?</li><li>Emily: So, I think the difference between these kinds of everyday journeys, like popping to the grocery store, visiting your grandmother and what we think of as travel lies in how much unfamiliarity or otherness we experience along the way. And it seems to me that when I popped to the grocery store, everything is super familiar. I know how things work; I know the roads; I know the products I\'m going to buy. If I were to go grocery shopping in an unfamiliar country, that experience is going to be really different. I don\'t know how the roads work anymore; I don\'t necessarily recognize the writing on the signs of the products; I may not understand the languages that I\'m overhearing. And so, an everyday experience becomes much more unfamiliar. And then seems to be much more about travel in the deeper sense. And several philosophers, including folks like <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9_Descartes\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">René Descartes</a> and <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_de_Montaigne\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Michel de Montagne</a>, have talked about how the benefits of travel lie in experiencing otherness, that this broadens your mind, that it forces you to think past the familiar everyday world of your experience and think about how things might be otherwise, how they could be in other places and they think that\'s a really good thing.Frequent travelers often build travel bubbles around themselves that isolates them from the places they travel to; doing it in the name of efficiency,  but also perhaps to keep themselves safe from experiencing what philosophers call “the otherness” of travel</li><li>Mark: I was thinking about this -- is there a spectrum of otherness? I\'ve got the complete travel bubble at one end; in the middle, curated sidebar experiences -- you find a local restaurant, or hunting down a microbrewery or a taproom in a not-great section of town that you would not normally go; and then at the other end, full immersion – I live here, I’ve got a flat.</li><li>Emily: I definitely think there\'s a spectrum. And you can imagine, in your bubble, it might not be the full-blown experience of taking all the same clothes with you and you using all familiar airports. But even if you have your laptop and your mobile phone with you, part of the way that you\'ll be connecting with the world is through these really familiar mediums. Maybe you\'re going there, and you\'re still using Trip Advisor to look for recommendations like you would back home or you\'re still using Google maps to navigate your way around the streets. And again, I think that\'s going to provide you with this kind of buffer between you and the unfamiliar.</li><li>Mark: Later on in the book, you riff on <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_David_Thoreau\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Henry David Thoreau</a> and<em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/33SYvw3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"> Walden</a></em> and <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3kEGjw6\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Cabin Porn</a> and Solitude. When the lock down started, I just decided I was going to dig into some early American literature that I had been threatened with in high school and college but never really got into. And so I kind of flipped a coin between Thoreau and Whitman\'s <em>Leaves of Grass</em> and, heads so it was Thoreau. I will admit I did this in the beginning of April, and I still have not finished <em>Walden</em> yet, and here we are in August. So it has been a bit of a slog, but I\'m still working it. But before I get into that, I gotta ask – “cabin porn.” That\'s a new one on me – the term, not so much the porn. But the term <em>cabin porn</em>, what is that?</li><li>Emily: And so despite what you might think (laughter), Cabin Porn refers to photography of beautiful, isolated cabins. So, picture wood-built cabins nestled in the woods with smoke curling from the chimney. Or maybe they are stone cottages perched on the edge of a cliff, looking out over a crevasse. And there’s this whole industry dedicated to people taking photographs of these gorgeous cabins. The idea is that they\'re kind of aspirational. If you stick these into Google images, you will find some of the most astounding dwellings; places that you can rent and live for a little. <em>Walden</em> seemingly kicked this whole thing off. So, Thoreau describes building a cabin in the woods by Walden Pond and while the book can be a little bit of a slog in places, there are beautiful bits of the book. When he\'s describing living in nature in this really kind of rustic way, lots of people credit their cabin aspirations to <em>Walden</em>.</li><li>Mark: What is the strain about solitude and travel and in the balance with “otherness”?</li><li>Emily: Solitude is often held up is one of the things we can get through travel that\'s hard to get home. Although it seems like you can go out into a crowded cafe or a bar and be alone there, it seems like it\'s much easier to do that by venturing out into wilderness, that you\'re not going to meet other human beings and you have objects in front of you – trees, plants, creatures – that you can connect with. So the idea is that you\'re not being solitary in the sense of just introspection, but you\'re also connecting with some part of the world around you. It might in turn cause you to reflect on that world, and then your own part in that wider network. And that\'s very much what Thoreau is all about. He thinks that being alone in wilderness allows you to better understand wilderness and your own part in the wider universe.</li><li>Mark: I often find when I\'m traveling, it is kinda easy to hold yourself at a distance, especially if, where you are, you don\'t speak that language. It\'s almost like white noise.</li><li>Emily: Yes, when you spend large chunks of time without hearing words that you understand is a strange experience. I think it allows you to focus on other things. I think then you end up paying more attention, maybe to like the sights and the smells, the things that you can understand. I quite enjoy it, actually, the experience of being somewhere and not understanding anything that\'s going on.</li><li>Mark: (laughter) The only challenge, though, is because you\'re so used to people saying things and you don\'t understand it that you just don\'t listen. And then when you actually come back to the UK or the US and people are talking to you and you\'re just so used to tuning them out, just like “Oh, wait, you said something to me?” There was another piece in the book that you talked about global homogenization. And I\'ve felt this, I would say over the past 10-15 years. I started traveling a lot in the mid-80’s, back in the Dark Ages. In that chapter you talk about that it\'s an old complaint. You talk about Rousseau bitching about it, and John Stuart Mills…. Are we just repeating the same thing?</li><li>Emily: So, people like Mills and Rousseau are writing a couple of hundred years ago, and they are bitching about how Paris and Rome “seemed to me to be the same city” and reading this now, it just seems so implausible! I am sure that a large part of this feeling has to do with context. I would imagine that these men are moving in intellectual circles and then they\'re going to be around people who speak the same kind of languages, and value the same kind of things that you would like to hope that if they had broken free of those circles that they might have found things that were more unfamiliar. I do suspect that the world has been becoming more the same now than it was before, and simply because of the rise of global companies – that was just not around before. And the idea that you can go into a city and find the same shops and restaurants that you do back home is really strange. I mean, that would not have been there back in the 17th and 18th centuries. That said, I do think what we were talking about before – using technology to find your way around – I think that\'s going to give you the impression that things are all the same because you\'re looking at them through the same medium. That is an illusion. The real world is not all the same. New York is very different than Paris. Something in the US that I personally am really fond of is investigating small towns that are not listed in guidebooks, in search of what Bill Bryson once described as Anywhere, USA. I really enjoy that. Seeing how these small towns do differ from each other, but also what they have in common. For me, there\'s a reall attraction in that, especially in the US.</li><li>Mark: Are there any that are top of the list for you?</li><li>Emily: Yes, <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silverton,_Colorado\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Silverton, Colorado</a>. I enjoyed that enormously. As a British tourist, so much of it is totally unfamiliar, even though I got the impression that, to the people who lived there and are from Colorado, this is all just par for the course. It’s regular looking houses, it’s regular looking shops that, as is a non-American trying the local bars, seeing the local kind of pancake breakfast, all of this was completely new and really stunningly beautiful.</li><li>Mark: Just to wrap up, if you look forward and you think about philosophy and travel, what are some of the new things that philosophers are thinking about on travel?</li><li>Emily: I think the big thing right now it is the ethics of climate change and how best to travel responsibly. I think that issue is going to dwarf everything else in the philosophy of travel for several decades to come. Whether or not we are partaking in carbon off-setting schemes is enough, whether or not we should be looking to educate ourselves more about the places that we travel, possibly even traveling less but aiming for higher quality experiences. I think that stuff is really going to dominate. However, there is other stuff going on too. Looking at the issues posed by space travel and space tourism, which I don\'t think is that far away, actually. I mean in the immediate decades, it\'s going to be the province of the super wealthy, but I think past that it will become more and more accessible and that\'s also going to pose some ethical issues like the cost of fuel to get people up out of the atmosphere is gonna be enormous. But also, that will prompt us to think about our place in the world. I obviously have not been up into space, but were I to go, I imagine it would cause me to reflect on how little the planet Earth is in the grand scheme of things. And I wonder whether that will lead us to reconsider our place in the world and how we\'re treating the planet that we live on. I think space travel is going to be really rife with opportunities for philosophical reflection.</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #166</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_166.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #166 — What Is The Meaning of Travel?','','inherit','closed','closed','','2807-revision-v1','','','2021-03-14 16:02:36','2021-03-14 21:02:36','',2807,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/14/2807-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3468,1,'2021-03-14 16:04:05','2021-03-14 21:04:05','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/IMG_2073.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2789 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/IMG_2073-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a><figcaption>The hop taste isn\'t coming through</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>My first post-lockdown flight was a 90-minute Southwest non-stop from Chicago to Nashville. It wasn\'t bad, but not as casually easy as my last pre-coronavirus flight in February. We talk about that experience as well as Hertz\'s new cleaning program, my latest pair of Bose noise-cancelling headphones, and then wonder when business travel will return. All this and more at the<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_165.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"> <strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #165: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after a couple of runs back down to Nashville for family stuff -- one in the air and the other on the ground. And with COVID cases spiking in vacation spots like California and south Florida, it seems like that’s the market segment -- folks traveling to see friends and family -- that the airline and hotel companies are banking on. And that’s most of what I saw when flying back from Nashville a few Thursdays ago -- lots of families with kids, groups of people meeting up on the other side of security for maybe some 4 day-weekend trips? The tip-off for me on the business vs. leisure traveler mix was the TSA lines -- solid lines for regular TSA, while I pretty much walked straight through PreCheck. Another tip-off used to be mid-day lines at the bars, but with most of the airport restaurants closed up, that’s not a valid indicator right now.</li><li>Traveling right now requires a bit of nimbleness. On my first post-lockdown trip in May, the workout room at the Spring Hill Hampton Inn was open and I used it every day. Back down in June, there was a piece of paper taped to the door -- “Closed by order of the Health Department”. The front desk agent told me it was a couple of days old -- which explained all the banging in the room above me; somebody must’ve been doing their HIIT workout in their room. I didn’t know if I should be annoyed or impressed at how long they went at it. So for this last trip, I called the hotel the night before I left, before I packed my gym clothes vs. a yoga mat. They told me that they’d just reopened the workout room the day before, so the yoga mat went back in the closet.&nbsp;</li><li>It’s kinda the same very fluid situation right now with bars and restaurants. A few days before we got to Nashville, the mayor closed down any establishment with less than 50% of their sales in food, so pretty much all the bars and taprooms. Makes sense, not arguing it; just forced us to quickly pivot some of our plans. It also forced us to go a bit “old school”, back to making actual phone calls, asking “are you open; dine-in or just take-away?” since places seem to be having trouble updating their websites and their Facebook/Yelp/Google/OpenTable listings fast enough to keep up with the changes.</li><li>It proved out our decision to book the Residence Inn rather than the mainline Marriott a few blocks away. The full-size fridge held a lot more beer, and that kitchenette came in handy when we found out that<a href=\"https://www.princeshotchicken.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"https://www.princeshotchicken.com/\"> Prince’s Hot Chicken</a> was only doing take-away -- I can’t imagine trying to eat an extra-hot half-chicken perched on a king-size bed.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/JeffSpeed68/54450\">Hula Hoop Party</a> by Stefan Kartenberg (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. &nbsp;Ft: Martijn de Boer, Blue Wave Theory</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Lots has been written about how the COVID pandemic has massively accelerated changes toward contactless transactions. Microsoft’s CEO famously said back in April “We’ve seen two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months”.&nbsp; Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #136 — Is Cash A Waning King; Don’t Make It Hard to Cash in on Loyalty\">episode #136</a>, I said I felt like the last generation of cash payers, that my younger colleagues rarely carried cash; they paid for everything with a card. Looking into my wallet, I had the same $200 worth of 20’s in June that I’d taken out of an ATM in March. Nobody wants to handle cash; they don’t even want to handle my card (Most extreme experience - A bartender at Asgard Brewing’s taproom in Columbia, TN sprayed my Visa card with diluted chlorine bleach before swiping it to pay my bill. Made my wallet smell like a swimming pool). As much as possible, places want us to pre-order and pre-pay, so we just pick up our purchases in a socially distant way and then head home. It’s also switched up some opinions on using facial recognition for flight check ins. Pre-coronavirus, the push was from governments as a better way to do security screenings and to improve immigration compliance, and this was getting big pushback on privacy concerns. Now, it’s pivoted. The push is from travel companies using facial recognition as a way of providing the touchless check-in experience that most travelers now want.&nbsp;</li><li>But facial recognition is stymied by face masks which we wear when we’re checking in at airports and hotel lobbies. As is Face ID when trying to unlock my iPhone to get to my boarding pass or digital room key. Until I can downgrade to an iPhone SE with that old-school Touch ID that unlocks using my thumb print, I think I’m going to have to shorten the PIN code on my iPhone 11 Pro. I lengthened it for better security but am banging it in more and more often. And I’ve noticed the iPhone is really slow about recognizing my number presses -- or it misses some when I go too fast (like when I’m trying to pull up a boarding pass in line) and errors out.&nbsp;</li><li>Walking down the Hertz Five Star aisle at Nashville Airport, I saw their version of paper rings that hotels used to put around toilet seats to “certify” they’d been cleaned. In Hertz’s case, they put a “<a href=\"http://ir.hertz.com/2020-05-15-Hertz-Introduces-Hertz-Gold-Standard-Clean-Sealed-and-Certified-Vehicles\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Hertz Gold Standard Clean</a>” sticker across the driver-side center pillar (the B pillar for all my gearhead listeners) so that you break it when you open the driver door to get it. Nice gesture, though it kept me from doing my usual walk down the aisle, opening the door of a bunch of cars to check their mileage. Seemed rude to break all those stickers, though I did notice more than a few broken ones when choosing my car. Way back in the old days of TravelCommons, we used to talk about the TSA doing “security theater” in the screening lines. This feels a bit like “sanitation theater”.&nbsp;</li><li>I finally broke down and bought a new set of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2BbOqyA\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bose noise cancelling headphones -- the new 700’s</a>. This is my third set of Bose cans. Bought my first pair in 2009. I was flying a lot of short flights at the time, and in those days before regional jets, I was on a lot of prop planes. And they’re noisy -- not just on take-off, but the entire flight. After a while, I started to notice fatigue when getting off those planes. Talking to a few folks, they said the noise heightens stress. A friend told me how much he liked his Bose cans, and so I burnt some Amex Membership Rewards points on Amazon for a pair of Quiet Comfort 2’s. It was a revelation; flick the switch and, whoosh, quiet. I took them on every flight, until 3 years later, I left them in a seatback pocket when rushing off a plane to make a tight connection. I immediately lit up some more Membership Rewards points for a new pair - <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3eF2iPk\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">QC-15’s</a>. Four years later, I replaced a worn out set of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2OwiIPF\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">ear cushions</a>. And though the non-replaceable headband cushion is looking pretty ratty, the now 8-year-old headphones still work great. What got me to replace them was the wire. I’d be sitting in my usual aisle seat, plugged into my iPhone (using one of those dongles that Apple no longer gives you with a new phone). At some point in the flight, the folks in the middle and window seats would want to get up and use the toilet and inevitably, I’d snag the wire on the arm of the seat, pull the headphones off my head, and/or launch my phone a row forward.&nbsp; I could’ve gotten a pair of the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3eFWLYJ\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">QC-35’s</a> -- same form factor without the wire -- but decided to go all next-generation with the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2BbOqyA\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">700’s</a>, which has meant some adjustment pains. Like there are buttons in places where they never were before. So when I grab the ear cups to slip the headphones off, I manage to hit a button that changes the noise reduction level or summons Siri. Also new is using the touch surface on the right ear cup to control things. You tap or swipe the right ear cup to accept or drop a call, pause a song, raise or lower the volume, or skip 30 seconds to fast-forward past a podcast ad. I’m learning to be a bit more precise in my motions; I’ve already dropped a couple of calls when I was just trying to turn down the call volume.&nbsp; One thing I really like -- more for working-at-home than in-flight usage -- is that the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2BbOqyA\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">700’s</a> can pair with two Bluetooth devices at the same time. So, for me, I have them paired with my MacBook Air and my iPhone and they switch seamlessly between the two. Nice when I’ve got Zoom calls on my Mac and then a phone call on my iPhone. And, call me shallow, but they look a bit cooler than my old <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3eF2iPk\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">QC-15’s</a>. I’ve had the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2BbOqyA\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">700’s</a> for about a month now and really like them. I guess you could say they’re “TravelCommons Approved.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/bridges/15563\">i knew</a> by bridges (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp;Ft: shannonsongs</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>First Post-Lockdown Flight</strong> </h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Way back at the beginning of the lockdown, the first Saturday of April, I was on a Zoom beer drinking call with Rob Cheshire, a long-time TravelCommons listener and now a podcaster -- he interviews UK craft brewers on his <em><a href=\"https://thisweekincraft.beer/podcast/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">This Week in Craft Beer</a></em>. It was a Saturday afternoon call, for Rob and the other guys in London; just past noon for me in Chicago, but hey…. And somewhere around our second or third beer, Rob asked me “When will you be comfortable getting on a plane again?” I really didn\'t have a good answer. It was early days; I wasn’t sure.</li><li>Fast forward to the back half of June. I needed to get down to Nashville again and didn’t have the time to burn 8 hrs for the drive down and another 8 on the way back. I had some travel funds sitting in my Southwest account from a couple of April trip cancellations, and Southwest flies 6 non-stop 737s between Chicago and Nashville while American and United only do smaller regional jets, and Southwest isn’t packing them full -- booking those bigger planes at ⅔’s capacity -- while American and United say they’ll let you know if your flight books solid. All told, a pretty easy decision to fly Southwest. One of the benefits of living in Chicago, a rare 3-hub town.</li><li>The day before my flight, when getting my boarding pass on the Southwest app (my usual process; I was contactless before it was a thing), I had to click through a certification that I wasn’t running a temperature and that I hadn’t been exposed to or tested positive for COVID-19. OK, click. Then I get a screen telling me that face masks are required to board. Makes sense, click. And now I get my boarding pass.</li><li>Monday morning, Irene drops me off at a pretty sedate departures curb at Midway. I mask up and walk in. It’s not empty, but it’s definitely not the normal Monday morning bustle. It feels more like a Wednesday early afternoon. There’s a bit of a line at regular security, but no line at PreCheck. The TSA agent asks me to drop my mask for a moment to check my ID and then waves me through. I noticed that TSA still has their October 2020 Real ID deadline warning signs on the podium. Hmm… I remember reading at the end of March that the TSA has <a href=\"https://www.dhs.gov/real-id\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">pushed the deadline a year to October 2021</a>. Guess they haven’t had a chance to issue updated signs. You’d think they’d just take the old ones down.</li><li>Most of the restaurants and stores were closed; a pretty common situation. Kev Monteith, a TravelCommons listener and <a href=\"https://travelswithkev.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amtrak travel blogger</a>, replied to one of my Twitter posts saying “I flew Southwest a few weeks ago. Layovers are rough because most places in the airports are closed. I was at STL and only found beer at Burger King and Dunkin Doughnuts.” I would’ve been happy for just a coffee. Down in the main Southwest concourse, some gates were closed off with curtains which I assume was to keep people from sitting there so they don’t have to clean it.</li><li>Looking around the terminal, it felt like mask usage was about 80%. Just about everyone was wearing them when walking around. I’d see some people not wearing them while sitting at the gate, though those folks were distancing themselves from everyone else. I’d see kids ripping their masks off as soon as they got off the jetway. I did notice, though, a sizable minority of mask wearers were just covering their mouths, leaving their noses uncovered -- pilots, cleaning crew, passengers, wheelchair people. Now I’m no epidemiologist, but that seems to defeat the purpose.</li><li>When the agent called boarding, she said “There’s 40 of you on a plane with 175 seats. So everyone gets their own row, and please, don’t everyone sit up front. We need a bit of weight distribution.” It was a quick boarding; we pushed back and took off early. These truly are unprecedented times.</li><li>Nashville was more crowded on Thursday morning when I headed back home. Mostly families as I said at the top of the show. The end of the concourse where the&nbsp; Southwest gates are was as crowded as usual. There were signs around saying that 3 seats between people equals 6 ft, but there were too many people waiting to make it practical; at least everyone is masked up. I walked back up the terminal to find a bit more space and there, tucked away behind some construction sheeting, I found an empty gate. I’m all alone, mega social distanced, so I take off my mask, log into the WiFi and do some work until the Southwest app on my phone bings, telling me that boarding has begun.&nbsp;</li><li>There were a lot more than 40 people on this flight. I found an empty row and slid all the way over to the window seat since it’s only a 90-minute flight. About 3 minutes later, a guy sat down in the aisle seat. Nobody in the middle seat. Everyone wearing masks and nobody’s head right next to mine, I was good to go. Maybe helped just a bit by the fact that, in those 3 minutes, I pointed all three air jets toward the empty middle seat and turned them on full blast, creating an air curtain between me and the aisle seat -- just in case.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/3lb3r3th/44072\">Misunderstood</a> by 3lb3r3th (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. &nbsp;Ft: Alchemistry</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>When Does Business Travel Come Back?</strong> </h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>My son Andrew and his girlfriend took the 6am flight to LGA earlier this week. I asked him “How full was the flight?” “Maybe 20 people; mostly families,” he said. Didn’t surprise me that a Thursday 6am LGA flight was only at 11% capacity. That’s normally a business travel run; people getting up at 0 dark 30 in Chicago to make 10am meetings in Manhattan. But there’s not many business travelers now.&nbsp; While business travelers only make up about 10% of passengers on major airlines, they provide between 55 and 75% of the profits. You might could think they’re subsidizing the budget fares those families are using.</li><li>Over the past month, I’ve been talking with Sales VPs at companies that deliver complex IT services. If anybody would be feeling the bite of not traveling, I thought it would be these guys. I’ve done a number of these deals, and they always involved locking all the right decision makers in a conference room to hash out all the contract details and ride herd over the transition. But I was completely wrong. They all said that work hasn’t slowed down during the lockdown. They’ve been able to do all that conference room work over Zoom. Indeed, they said being virtual has made it easier for them. Pre-lockdown, one of their biggest challenges was calendar wrangling -- being able to get all their execs and the client execs into that conference room at the same time. Now, they just click some buttons and everyone shows up in Zoom gallery mode -- no travel planning, no scrambling after cancelled or delayed flights. They all said they love the ease of virtual meetings and, at the end of the day, closing the lid on their laptops and having dinner with the family every night.</li><li>Kinda supports the narrative that business travel will never rebound; back to the Microsoft CEO’s quote: in 2 months, we’ve advanced 2 years in virtual work culture. But when I probed a bit, I found that Zoom hasn’t completely replaced an airplane ticket. While these guys have been able to virtually close deals they had in their sales funnel, virtual meetings don’t seem to be replacing these deals; getting new prospects into the top of the sales funnel. So while things are looking good now, they’re beginning to worry about 4-6 months from now.</li><li>This was the exact opposite of what I’d expected. I thought the give and take of negotiations, the sidebar conversations, the emotional content, wouldn’t translate into video calls. But it looks like I was wrong; that once a deal has some momentum and a structure to guide everyone, the in-person hammering out turns out to be a nice-to-have. And the reason new opportunities aren’t coming in is that they need more exploratory, abstract, wide-ranging conversations that lack that guiding structure and selling a team as much as a product -- at least for complex services -- and that’s tough to do over a pane of glass.</li><li>And so they all said that they’d probably start traveling again -- reluctantly -- by the end of this month. But I do think this, call it a 4-month exercise in figuring out virtual work methods and cultures will move the set point, everybody’s default decision toward virtual meetings. And so maybe a bit less focused on high-profit road warriors and more dependent on those cost-conscious families. Does this mean repointing the 6am LGA flights to Cancun? They’re going to have to seriously reengineer those drink carts.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #165</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_165.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #165 — First Post Lockdown Flight; When Do We Travel For Business Again?','','inherit','closed','closed','','2788-revision-v1','','','2021-03-14 16:04:05','2021-03-14 21:04:05','',2788,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/14/2788-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3470,1,'2021-03-14 16:05:26','2021-03-14 21:05:26','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/DSC_6306-edit.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2770 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/DSC_6306-edit-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a><figcaption>Can I leave my house now?</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>I broke Chicago\'s containment for my first post-lockdown trip, a fast drive down I-65. We talk about hotels swapping hospitality for sanitation, Hertz\'s bankruptcy, and tips for travel credit card usage from Brett Holzhauer, the travel card expert at <a title=\"valuepenguin.com\" href=\"http://valuepenguin.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">ValuePenguin.com.</a>&nbsp;All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_164.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #164: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois, as the lockdown here is starting to lift. What’s open and what’s not is still a bit spotty, though I’ve managed to hit a couple of microbreweries with outdoor patios. The opening in Chicago is not dissimilar to what I experienced down in Tennessee last month. I was down in Spring Hill, south of Nashville, two weeks after the non-urban lockdown lifted -- for every place other than the cities of Nashville, Memphis, Knoxville, and Chattanooga. It seemed that everyone was still trying to figure out what to do -- the bar/pizza joint next to my hotel was fully open, but the local bar-be-que joints and the Starbucks were still only doing take-away. Which makes sense; it’s not like there’s a standard playbook on how to re-open an economy. And throughout my consulting career, I’ve learned it’s always easier to shut things down than to start them up.</li><li>The drive south on I-65 from Chicago is one that, I’m not gonna say I can do with my eyes closed, but I’ve been doing it for almost 40 years, starting when I was in business school at the University of Chicago and my family was living in Louisville, KY. I mean, there’s a clump of trees in the median between West Lafayette and Crown Point that’s a milestone for me; I know I’m an hour from home. Which just goes to show you how boring the drive through northern Indiana is when trees in the median are a notable feature.</li><li>The drive between Chicago and Nashville, while not the most exciting, especially through Indiana, it does usually require a bit of timing to thread through Chicago, Indianapolis, Louisville, and Nashville to avoid rush hour in each. On this trip, not so much. I left Chicago after breakfast and was driving 80 mph most of the way, maybe dropping down to 70 through the cities. And I was still getting passed by guys going aggressively faster. And the only time I saw police or state troopers was in front of big road construction sites, cars running with all their lights flashing in front of big barriers, more as a warning to speeders than an attempt to get them. It was, hands down, the easiest drive down I-65 I’ve ever done.</li><li>That wide-open drive may be one of the few things I’ll actually appreciate about this lockdown. Well, that and the $2/gallon gas along the way...</li><li>Bridge Music — Brilliant Day by Hans Atom (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hansatom/47919 Ft: Lisa DeBenedictis</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>First up, thanks to the TravelCommons listener who goes by the handle Abe Froman, Ferris Bueller’s sausage king of Chicago, for dropping a 5-star review on <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">our iTunes page</a>. Abe writes:<ul><li>“I have been a fan of this podcast for many years. If you are a road warrior or a mileage runner, you will love the tips to make your travel easier.”</li><li>Abe, thanks a lot for this.&nbsp; I’m glad you’ve enjoyed the podcast</li></ul></li><li>Last year in episodes <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/07/26/podcast-153-travel-by-algorithm-leaving-places-behind/\" title=\"Podcast #153 — Travel By Algorithm; Leaving Places Behind\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">153</a> and <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/09/20/podcast-155-rj-delays-street-food-in-poland-and-hungary/\" title=\"Podcast #155 — RJ Delays; Street Food in Poland and Hungary\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">155</a>, we talked about American Airlines’ retirement of their MD-80’s, the “Mad Dog 80”, the plane on which I earned my first Advantage status -- Gold, and there wasn’t anything higher back then. Last week, <a href=\"https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/delta-air-lines-md-80-last-flight/index.html\">Delta finally retired their last Mad Dogs</a> -- MD-88’s and -90’s. They were supposed to run through the end of the year, but with late ‘80’s technology and fuel efficiency, they were among the first planes in the fleet to be grounded when the lockdown hit. Delta said that “at their peak, the planes accounted for 50% of Delta’s arrivals and departures from” their Atlanta hub.&nbsp; Which will be a relief to longtime TravelCommons listener Darren Mak, who tweeted at me back at the beginning of March, a picture out the window seat of a Delta MD-88 just in front of the engine cowl, thanking me for mentioning, in episode <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/09/20/podcast-155-rj-delays-street-food-in-poland-and-hungary/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #155 — RJ Delays; Street Food in Poland and Hungary\">155</a>, that whenever I would end up in that same seat, I would wonder — if that engine blows up, will the shrapnel blow out or blow into the cabin. Well Darren, no more worries. We both survived the Mad Dog’s back seat.</li><li>We’ve talked in the past couple of episodes about the first post-lockdown trips would be by car -- more schedule flexibility; no worries of a stranger in the middle seat exhaling 18 inches away from you.&nbsp; CNBC ran <a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/31/five-charts-that-track-the-us-economy-as-states-reopen.html\">a story</a> last week analyzing the change in the number of requests for directions on Apple Maps in 2020. Using January 13th as the baseline for their comparison, requests for driving and walking directions dropped by 50% in the first month of the lockdowns, but had recovered by May 29th -- the last day of the data series. Transit direction requests had dropped by 75% and were still more than 50% down by the end of May. Now, using January 13th as the baseline probably exaggerates the recovery -- you’d think the number of walking and driving direction requests on a normal Memorial Day weekend would be hugely higher than for the second Monday of January when it was in or below the 30’s for about ⅔’s of the country -- but I don’t want to kill a green shoot with too much skepticism.</li><li>American talked about their own green shoots last week, saying they would be operating 55% of last year’s schedule in July, up from 20% in April and May. Driven mostly by demand from states opening up -- Texas, Florida, and Arizona -- rather than cities like New York, Chicago, and San Francisco that are still under stricter lockdown orders. If I keep pulling on this trend line, I’m thinking by September all those voluntary capacity limits and empty middle seat promises will have faded away.</li><li>The absence of update emails from airline and hotel CEOs this week I think is another green shoot. If things are starting to look up, no need to send me an email extending a bonus award offer or cancellation fee waivers. This has cut into a new hobby of mine, though -- comparing the use of \"in these uncertain times,\" \"in these challenging times,\" and “in these unprecedented times” in these emails. I have a stroke count going. Right now, “unprecedented” is the runaway leader, with “challenging” second, and “uncertain” third.</li><li>I’ve been a Hertz customer on and off over my 35-year travel career -- mostly on. I started my business traveling when I was at IBM, and in the mid-80’s, they had negotiated a smoking rate with Hertz. In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/09/15/podcast-144-outside-airports-hospitality-mentality\">episode 144</a>, I talked about getting to know the woman working in the little Hertz hut at SJC back then, when SJC was still an outdoor airport; and before Hertz Gold, that’s all I needed to get an upgrade. And more recently, I’ve, on balance, had good experiences with Hertz. So I was bummed for a moment when I saw they filed for bankruptcy last month. It wasn’t surprising, though. Hertz was still carrying a big debt load courtesy of a 2005 PE leveraged buyout, and we’ve talked in past episodes about how Uber and Lyft have been eating away at its core airport rental market. So, when travel stopped in March and used car auction prices cratered in April, Hertz tipped over. By now though, we’re kinda used to big travel companies cleaning their debt problems in bankruptcy -- United and American Airlines the most recent examples. So I’m not too worried about losing the rest of my Gold points. In the short term, though, I will be paying more attention to the mileage on the Hertz cars in the Five Star aisle. That’s where I usually see signs of financial distress -- a lot less 500-mile cars and a lot more 25,000-mile cars. And while 25,000 miles on a car doesn’t seem like a lot, remember that rental car miles are kinda like dog years -- you gotta multiply them by, like, 7 to get to regular car miles.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook page</a> or our Instagram account at <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">travelcommons</a> -- or you can post comments on the web site at <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">TravelCommons.com</a>.</li><li>Bridge Music — &nbsp;<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Suenjo/11162\">Natchoongi (New Hope Remix)</a>&nbsp;by Suenjo (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>First Post-Lockdown Trips</strong> </h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>As we talked about a few minutes ago, travel is starting to pick up as the lockdowns ease and people want to see something other than the 4 walls that have surrounded them since mid-March.&nbsp;</li><li>TravelCommons listener Mark Skinner dropped me a line towards the end of May about his first lockdown trip. You may remember Mark from <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/11/30/podcast-157-notes-from-the-baltics-riga-latvia-and-tallinn-estonia/\" title=\"Podcast #157 — Notes from the Baltics: Riga, Latvia and Tallinn, Estonia\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">episode 157</a> back in November when he wrote in to tell us about his day trip from Washington, DC to Hong Kong -- flying out Monday afternoon, returning Tuesday morning -- to take a NASA cosmic ray detector on an over-the-pole flight.&nbsp; This time, Mark writes -<ul><li>So I had my first trip this past week, since the “before times”. On the way back, I was listening to your recent podcast. Yes, my first trip was via automobile, down to the outer banks of North Carolina. Dare County had recently opened up (the day before!) to allow visitors into the county.&nbsp;</li><li>Stayed at the Hilton Garden Inn. No servicing of the room, and after a few days at this hotel on the beach, things were looking a little dingy. Tropical Storm Arthur squashed any hopes of long walks on the beach. Departed a day early because the storm wasn’t letting up. I thought this was a good use of Hilton points… Take-out only that week, and hotel not helping out by lending any china, glass or utensils. Ending up getting a couple of sets at a dollar store… I contrast this to my last trip in the before time, to Maui, just as things were buttoning up. The Grand Wailea was happy to provide all sorts of stuff to enjoy one’s take-out on the lanai! That trip got cut short as well, due to flights evaporating.&nbsp;</li><li>A highlight of the trip was stopping for lunch in Virginia Beach, which had recently opened out-door seating at restaurants, and enjoyed lunch at a seafood restaurant at an outside table, by the ocean, and greatly enjoyed ordering food and having it brought to the table! The previous “normal” meal had been first evening on Maui, before they went take-out only.&nbsp;</li><li>Next trip that is getting kicked around is Hilton Head in June…. that would involve flying. Crossing fingers about a trip to Austria in August…</li></ul></li><li>Mark, thanks for sending that along. Your experience on the Outer Banks was similar to mine down in Spring Hill, TN. I went back and forth about staying in a hotel vs. an Airbnb. Airbnb -- not as many people passing through the property and some time buffer (24 hours, 72 hours) between guests in the same rooms, but a major hotel chain should have the corporate resources to build out and maybe test a more thorough cleaning program for its properties; maybe with access to stronger, more industrial cleaners. Procrastination ended up making my decision -- while I was going back and forth, the Airbnb property in Spring Hill I was looking at got booked for the front of that week, so I ended up in the Spring Hill Hampton Inn -- another Hilton brand.</li><li>That Monday morning, right before I left Chicago, I checked in on the Hilton app. It even let me pick out my room. This may be old news to Hilton Diamond listeners, but I haven’t stayed in a Hilton for at least a year, and so haven’t been tracking their app improvements. When I arrived at 5:30pm, the front doors were locked, but opening up the app showed me a digital key that opened the front door and my room door. I didn\'t have to physically check in at the front desk which only struck me odd later that night. Whenever I’ve checked in on a hotel’s app before, I’ve still had to go to the front desk so they could see my ID, which was why I’ve never paid much attention to app check-ins. But at this Hampton Inn with full check-in and digital keys, it worked the way I’d always thought it should.</li><li>My in-room experience was the same as Mark’s -- nobody servicing the room, though a guy did stop by the room every now and again asking if I needed extra towels; no morning coffee or breakfast buffet, and eating mostly take-out in the room with some cans of local craft beer bought from the liquor store a couple of doors down. I was pretty rigorous about dumping the food trash right after eating. Waking up to the smell of 8-hour-old bar-be-que rib and cole slaw remnants is never a good start to the day. Hotels are saying it’s all about cleaning and sanitation, but I can’t say that I saw any out-of-the-ordinary efforts while I was there. Maybe what I was experiencing was the cost reductions to fund that behind-the-scenes deep cleaning.</li><li>While Mark’s highlight was his lunch in Virginia Beach, mine was being able to walk into a little family-owned craft beer joint in a strip mall on Spring Hill\'s Main St, order a beer, and then sit down and drink it at the bar. I go into this place every time I\'m there to visit my mother. Seeing them open was a nice little bit of normality -- especially since Chicago didn’t start opening up until last week.</li><li>Don\'t know my next trip yet, but I\'m keeping my eye on Spain, hoping there\'s no second wave before our trip to Barcelona at the end of September.</li><li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/53277\">Fistful of Dub</a>&nbsp;(Feat. Snowflake and DJ Vadim) by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. &nbsp;Ft: snowflake and DJ Vadim</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Travel Credit Cards</strong> </h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>As we start traveling again, we’ll start pulling out those travel cards -- Hilton or Delta Amex, United or Southwest or Marriott Visas, American MasterCards -- and so I invited Brett Holzhauer, the travel card expert at <a href=\"http://ValuePenguin.com\" title=\"ValuePenguin.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">ValuePenguin.com</a>, a site that goes deep into these cards, to give us some of his advice as we “un-lockdown” ourselves. First up, he reads out the results of a recent survey on travel planning, and then talks about travel cards<ul><li>Mark: Brett, thanks for joining us on the TravelCommons podcast.</li><li>Brett: Thank you so much for having me. I\'m excited</li><li>Mark: Brett, I wanted to talk to you about a recent survey that ValuePenguin.com has done on travel planning. And we\'ve had sort of an arc through the past couple of episodes of the TravelCommons podcast around travel planning. As we think about post-lock-down/pre-vaccine where people are still concerned about coronavirus and Covid, but they gotta move on with their lives. So, in the survey that ValuePenguin did, where are people going?</li><li>Brett: One of the biggest notes was the amount of people going to Florida, and it\'s a couple of reasons: 1) good weather; 2) it\'s affordable; 3) there\'s a lot of the older generation that lives in Florida, so maybe people are itching to see their parents or grandparents or just older relatives. So, it\'s a mixture of all of those things leading to people wanting to travel to the beaches and get outside.</li><li>Mark: I think that kind of ties into some things we\'re seeing, which is more of a focus on outdoors with the theory that coronavirus transmission is less efficient outdoors than indoors. As a travel card expert, as people begin to travel again, what are some of the strategies as far as being able to maximize the value of the travel credit cards? Because really most frequent travelers already have got them in their wallets, at least one if not multiple award cards, but they\'ll tend to focus on maximizing award points.</li><li>Brett: So one of the biggest things that\'s gonna eventually happen is huge bonuses. These companies like Chase and American Express. They\'re gonna really incentivize people to get back on the road. So if you’re brand new into the Points and Miles game, this is a very good opportunity to start understanding how this whole thing works. So that way, when these big bonuses start coming out, you can find some really great bonuses to start your travels once again, maybe late 2020 or early 2021. So that\'s one thing, Number two, obviously, the uptick in in travel insurance. People can get travel insurance through credit cards.</li><li>Mark: Typically, what are the travel insurance capabilities?</li><li>Brett: A lot of credit cards beyond the big sign-up bonuses have travel insurance, and a lot of consumers either don\'t know that they have it, they forget, or they just don\'t really pay too much attention to it. I\'m going to use a personal example. My wife and I both have the American Express Platinum Card. It\'s a $550 annual fee, and your first thought is -- that\'s a lot of money to invest in a credit card. Is that really worth it? And beyond all of the perks and the sign-up bonuses, the travel insurance through that specific credit card is comprehensive. You get trip cancelation, trip interruption. Also, you get rental car insurance, and so it\'s it\'s important to know the difference between primary and secondary. If you do have a credit card that has primary car insurance, that will go first so your personal car insurance will not be affected.</li><li>Mark: I\'ve talked in a previous TravelCommons episode about my own personal experience with using the Chase Sapphire Visa that ended up covering an accident and St Andrews, Scotland. When I got back home, I filed with Chase. Took me a little bit, but I got full coverage on it.</li><li>Brett: There\'s also baggage insurance. Those are kind of the big ones. There\'s also emergency medical assistant. It\'s important to know that consumers have these protections. I just feel that a lot of times we have these cards in our wallets. We\'re overlooking the value proposition of what these cards can really do.</li><li>Mark: Let me pivot to your set up as a digital nomad. What are what are you up to?</li><li>Brett: My wife and I, we met in 2015. I knew on the first date that I was gonna marry her by some way, somehow and sure enough ended up happening.</li><li>Mark: Did she have that same sense, or was there some selling involved there?</li><li>Brett: No, we definitely sold each other. And we walked away from that first date knowing that what she sold me on was traveling. I had a traveler’s itch. She had the traveling bug. So really sold me on the idea of doing this full time travel. In July of 2019, we officially sold everything. We drove back to her parents house in Los Angeles. Then in August of 2019, we took a one way flight from LAX to Fiji. We bounced between 10 countries in 3.5 months. We returned home in December for the holidays from Japan back to Los Angeles. And we had the plan of leaving again in February, and everything unfortunately started to melt. So now we\'re stuck in Los Angeles just itching to get back on the road. But yeah, we love taking advantage of rewards. If it wasn\'t for credit card points of miles, we wouldn\'t be able to afford these types of travels.</li><li>Mark: So, when do you think you and your wife will head out next?</li><li>Brett: Yeah, so our plan was to go to Europe. Obviously, that\'s been immensely hit by Covid-19. So for us, luckily, so I\'m 26 years old, she\'s 24. We’re both very healthy, we’re of the mindset that life is a little bit risky, and you have to take those risks to get those rewards. So, we approach travel with that mentality that it is a risk. Everything in life is a risk -- walking across the street, driving your car So, there\'s always a risk to it. I think if I had to guess, probably August. But again, God forbid there\'s a second wind of coronavirus. We might be here for extended period of time, But, you know, we are very blessed and very privilege that we have parents that will take us in. And we have a free place to stay, which is nice to save up more money for travel and pay down on my student loan.</li><li>Mark: Brett Holzhauer, travel awards expert from ValuePenguin.com Thanks very much for taking the time to join us on the TravelCommons Podcast.</li><li>Brett: Thank you so much</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #164</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_164.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #164 — First-Post Lockdown Trips; Travel Credit Cards','','inherit','closed','closed','','2771-revision-v1','','','2021-03-14 16:05:26','2021-03-14 21:05:26','',2771,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/14/2771-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3471,1,'2021-03-14 16:06:39','2021-03-14 21:06:39','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/IMG_1615-1.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2732 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/IMG_1615-1-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a><figcaption>I think I put off finding a doc too long</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Though I\'m still locked down on the shores of Lake Michigan, data shows that people are starting to do short car trips. What will people need to feel comfortable to do more extensive travel -- spacing in aircraft, we talk with Erik Josowitz of <a href=\"https://insurancequotes.com\">insuranceQuotes.com</a> about trends in travel insurance, and a story about finding medical attention while traveling through Southeast Asia. </span>All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_163.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #163: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois, probably 10 lbs heavier, half of which is beer (my doing) and the other half baked goods courtesy of Irene. While the coronavirus restrictions are beginning to ease in some parts of the US and Europe, everything is still locked down here on the shores of Lake Michigan. So my travels since the last episode have mostly been between the kitchen and the couch, and occasionally out in search of carbohydrate comfort foods -- to grocery stores in an endless and fruitless search for King Arthur Bread Flour, and then running a circuit of Chicago microbreweries using curbside no-contact pick-up to collect 4-packs of whatever is new that week. A couple of breweries are even doing curbside sales of ⅙ barrel kegs -- tempting, but seems a bit of overkill for a 3-person flat, though Amazon claims they can get a kegerator to me next week. Must be on Amazon’s essential items list.&nbsp;</li><li>But with the lockdown easing in non-urban places like the exurbs of Nashville, I’m starting to prep for my first post-Corona trip that I talked about in the last episode, a drive down to Spring Hill, TN to see my mother. Got the oil and tires changed on the BMW to avoid any unplanned stops. Figure I’ll pack a lunch which’ll let me do the drive with just one gas stop. I also tuned up my Trek Madone road bike -- cleaned and lubed the gears, re-wrapped the handlebars -- to take that down with me. Haven’t been able to ride much after Chicago shut down the lake shore path, and so riding solo on small country roads would seem to be a pretty good match for “social distancing” criteria.</li><li>All this spare time has allowed me to be a bit more “planful” as one client used to say, one of those ugly adjective constructions meant to turn an activity “we need to do more planning” into a quality “we need to be more planful”. But anyhow, whether the lockdown allows me to be more planful about the podcast or to do a bit more planning, it has. Which, for this episode, means you’ll hear less of me, and more from informed people. First up is Erik Josowitz, an analyst at <a href=\"https://www.insurancequotes.com\" class=\"aioseop-link\">insuranceQuotes.com</a>. Erik and I did an old-school remote interview -- using Skype instead of Zoom -- talking about what travel insurance looks like in the post-Corona world. And then Allan Marko returns with his wife Chris, following up our conversation in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/01/25/podcast-159-planning-the-trip-of-a-lifetime-in-southeast-asia/\" class=\"aioseop-link\">January travel planning episode</a> with a story from their Southeast Asia sabbatical last year; how they tracked down a doctor in Thailand when his wife became ill; a topic that could weigh on us more when we venture out into the post-lockdown/ pre-corona vaccine world that we\'ll be in for the next 18-24 months.</li><li>But right now, for my Tennessee trip, I think I’m less concerned about finding a doctor, and a bit more concerned about reconnoitering open drive-thru Taco Bells along I-65.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/50485\">Sunset Boulevard</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Siobhan Dakay, unreal_dm</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Videoconferencing is having its moment during the pandemic. Maybe it’s because people are looking for more of a connection in their lockdown isolations, or because we know that everyone is sitting at home in front of a video-equipped laptop and has no excuse not to video, nothing like “Can only call in because I’ll be running through airport security then.” I haven’t done a straight conference call in forever. Doing interviews for this episode, I hit the videoconference trifecta&nbsp; - Skype with Erik, FaceTime with Allan and Chris,&nbsp;</li><li>and then Zoom to be on the other side of the microphone on Steve Frick’s <a href=\"https://anchor.fm/steve-frick/episodes/Travel-Commons---Stories-From-Home-Episode-83-edipo7\">Back &amp; Gone Again podcast</a>.&nbsp; This is the 15th year of TravelCommons; I started in May 2005, and here Steve and I talk about that first episode.</li><li>&nbsp;We had a lot of fun, telling travel stories and talking about our current life-off-the-road. Give it a listen. There’s a link in the show notes, on the TravelCommons Facebook page, and in the Twitter feed.</li><li>Cate Rose left a comment on the Facebook page on the April episode.<ul><li>“I don\'t travel nearly as much as you do Mark but I enjoy your podcasts. These are unprecedented times. We arrived home from a month long rail trip from Italy, up to Sweden at the end of January just as this whole thing was blowing up. And now people, including us, are locked down all over the world. Unbelievable. And here you are with plenty of time to write, but no place to go! We are on Week 4 of social isolation in Western Australia and the novelty is wearing off a little ;-) but it seems to be working so all for the greater good. Thanks for keeping up with the storytelling and letting a crack of life into home isolation! Stay safe.</li><li>Cate - thanks for that note. Sounds like you just got out of Italy in time. If I remember correctly, they started locking down Italy in mid-February. Glad you made it back home safely. And it sounds like Australia and New Zealand have done the best in crushing the Covid curve.</li></ul></li><li>In that same episode, when we talked about post-corona trip planning, I said I thought the first post-lockdown trip most people would take would be a car ride -- more flexibility; easier social distancing. Turns out I was right -- at least according to the company <a href=\"https://www.arrivalist.com/\">Arrivalist</a>, a “visitation intelligence company” that has started publishing a Daily Travel Index measuring consumer road trips of 50 miles or more using data drawn from GPS signals. Road trips on Friday, May 1 were almost back to the pre-pandemic levels of February, with the number of trips in the 100-250 mile range higher than February’s number for the first time since the lockdowns started. You can go to Arrivalist’s website and <a href=\"https://www.arrivalist.com/daily-travel-index/\">play with the data yourself</a> or read an <a href=\"https://www.phocuswire.com/arrivalist-road-trip-surge-data\">analysis by Phocuswright</a>, a travel research firm. Links are in the show notes and my Twitter feed.</li><li>I got yet another email survey, this time from United asking me what would make me comfortable to fly again, and to rank some of their plans. For me, it was pretty easy. I’m not excited about standing in a packed gate area, hearing the gate agent say “This is a completely full flight”, and then spend 2-3 hours shoulder-to-shoulder with a complete stranger, in effect letting that person into my family’s corona exposure space.</li><li>A couple of weeks later (not implying causation, only correlation), all the major US airlines announced that passengers and crew will have to wear masks, they’re moving to strict back-to-front boarding schemes to reduce the number of passengers passing one another, and that they’re blocking/not booking the middle seats, reducing capacity from what had been running over 80% at the beginning of the year down to the 60’s. It was then interesting to watch what happened after Frontier’s CEO did a round of TV interviews at the beginning of this week, saying that they too would block the middle seat -- if a passenger bought a More Room seat for at least $39. Today, after getting a blizzard of red challenge flags from Washington, Frontier reversed course. Just kidding - “It was never our intent” they said, “to profit… from safety”. “ We simply wanted to provide our customers with an option for more space.” Yup. Frontier continuing to position their brand as the Ryanair of the US.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Vidian/52190\">Memories (infiniti loop)</a> by Vidian (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license. Ft: TheDice</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>New World of Travel Insurance</strong> </h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Interview with Erik Josowitz, an analyst at <a class=\"aioseop-link\" href=\"http://www.insurancequotes.com/\">insuranceQuotes.com</a><ul><li>Mark: Eric, thanks for joining us on the TravelCommons Podcast. Could you just give us a little background on yourself?</li><li>Eric: My name is Eric Josowitz. I’m an insurance analyst at InsuranceQuotes. We publish in-depth studies, data and analysis related to auto, home, health, life, and small business insurance. And my role is to study the insurance industry and provide tips and advice and insights that are relevant to consumers and small business owners.</li><li>Mark: The reason I asked you to join us today is, in the past couple of episodes, we\'ve been talking about travel planning. If we continue this thread, what do travelers need to think about from an insurance standpoint in the upcoming post-lock down but pre-Coronavirus vaccine world, which depending on who you read, we\'re gonna be in for the next 18 to 24 months.</li><li>Eric: Travel insurance was kind of a nice to-have pre-pandemic, except in cases of very, very large and elaborate trips where the investment and potential loss was substantial. And I think coming out of this, travel insurance is much more important. There are really two things that travel insurance gets you. One is protection for cancelations that might occur before you actually take the trip, which with the level of uncertainty, that\'s pretty important. And the second thing, travel insurance provides benefits if things happen while you\'re on the trip, ranging from interruptions and delays to medical issues that may pop up while you\'re actually traveling.</li><li>Mark: When people are looking and thinking about travel insurance going forward, what are some of the key things that they need to look for and think about given in the past it was kind of a nice-to-have. It was a check box that showed up on the bottom of a website that three quarters of us ignored. And now we\'re gonna pay a lot more attention to that.</li><li>Eric: I think that\'s a great question. And I\'m glad you mentioned checking the box or not checking the box before. I think as this crisis started to build and spread from the rest of the world into the US, I talked to a lot of people that had travel insurance but didn\'t actually know what it covered because they had just checked the box. And so, I think one thing that that needs to happen moving forward is travelers need to actually look at the specific coverage and specific exclusions associated with travel insurance policy before they purchase it. And so those exclusions in many cases turned out to include communicable diseases; turned out to include cases where, for example, the US State Department has issued travel warnings or travel bans. Many people were also surprised to learn that if they decided to cancel a trip because they were afraid of traveling to an area that had higher risk, that their travel insurance didn\'t actually cover cancelation in cases of fear. And so, one thing I would encourage everyone to look into is what\'s called a cancel-for-any-reason rider or endorsement on their travel insurance policy. And what that in most cases will buy you is the ability to cancel for any reason, no questions asked. You know when you\'re traveling, what you wanna look at on the travel insurance policy is to make sure that any medical issues or interruptions or delays that could occur while you\'re traveling are covered, even though there\'s been a declaration that this is a pandemic by the World Health Organization, there have been these warnings by the US State Dept. Make sure that those things are not specifically excluded in terms of the coverage that you can receive</li><li>Mark: As people need to read the coverage more closely now, any tips on how they should click through or where they ought to look for guidance on those terms?</li><li>Eric: I\'ve had people say to me that they\'re not able to easily find the specific terms and conditions when they\'re using the click-thru form on, you know, a booking website. And so if they feel that they can\'t easily access those terms and conditions, I would encourage them to actually search separately for travel insurance policies. And there are major carriers that offer travel insurance coverage on a regular basis who have packages of policies available for different types of travel, and they do have good frequently asked questions pages on their websites. They do have clearly outlined terms and conditions</li><li>Mark: Searching using the control-F function on your browser for things like communicable diseases. Try saying that three times fast and cancelation for any reason, as you mentioned before is probably some good search terms. Are you seeing any trends in pricing and coverage and riders? Has the travel insurance market reacted to Covid-19 coronavirus yet or is that still a work in progress?</li><li>Eric: Well, many companies have stopped offering travel insurance temporarily. And so, one of the indications that it\'s perhaps safe to travel again is going to be the ability to actually purchase travel insurance coverage at that time. Now there are certain companies that are continuing to offer policies and many of those policies don\'t have exclusions in the case of communicable disease, but they are pretty explicit about what they do and don\'t cover right now. So that yes, the insurance companies are reacting to this crisis in near-real time.</li><li>Mark: Eric, thank you very much for joining us on the TravelCommons podcast. Great insights, good information, good suggestions. Again, thanks for joining us.</li><li>Eric: My pleasure, Mark. Have a great week.</li></ul></li><li>Bridge Music --<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/ramblinglibrarian/55007\">Dawn at the Top of the World ft. copperhead &amp; Robert Seikawitch</a> by Ivan Chew (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Getting Medical Help on the Road</strong> </h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Back in January, long-time TravelCommons listener Allan Marko talked about the planning he did for the 9-week SE Asia sabbatical he and his wife Chris took last year. Fast forward 4 months, and health care on the road will now become much more important when traveling in the post-lockdown/pre-vaccine world. So let’s continue our conversation with Allan, joined now by his wife Chris, to talk about how they thought about getting health care when they were half a world away from home.&nbsp; It started with the research before they left home…</li><li>Interview with Allan Marko and Chris Chufo</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #163</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_163.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #163 — New World of Travel Insurance; Getting Medical Help on the Road','','inherit','closed','closed','','2747-revision-v1','','','2021-03-14 16:06:39','2021-03-14 21:06:39','',2747,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/14/2747-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3472,1,'2021-03-14 16:07:54','2021-03-14 21:07:54','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/DSC00969.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2732 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/DSC00969-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a><figcaption>Early attempts at travel journaling</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Kinda tough to do a podcast that’s more about the journey than the destination if I’m not “journeying,” but I give it a go. We talk about cyberattacks on frequent flyer accounts now that we don\'t have a reason to check them, planning for my first post-pandemic trips, and how re-reading my travel journals is pinch-hitting right now. </span>All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_162.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #162: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you, as you might expect, from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois, going into what is either the 3rd or 4th week of Lockdown, depending on how one scores the executive orders. I usually kick off each episode talking about my travel since the last episode -- which is going to be a very short conversation since I recorded the last episode at the end of Lockdown Week 1. Does make it kinda tough to do a podcast that’s more about the journey if I’m not “journeying”. Indeed, longtime TravelCommons listener Steve Frick pinged me on Twitter - “How are you holding up being off the road?” I told him I was taking some long walks to relieve the itching on the soles of my feet, but I’m not sure it’s working.&nbsp;</li><li>I thought I could keep myself occupied by working out more; drop the winter weight a little earlier than usual; be in better biking shape for when the Midwest weather breaks. But I had to call an audible on that when the city closed all the gyms, and then the running and biking path along Lake Michigan. Now I’m trying out a lot of new in-room/no-weight workouts. There’s a lot of them out there, even the Wall Street Journal published “Five Home Workouts to Do During the Coronavirus Outbreak”. I’ve never been a big HIIT guy, high-intensity interval training, so things like squat jumps, burpees, and mountain climbers haven’t been in my repertoire. But I’m kinda liking it and thinking that, when I’m back traveling, this could be a great in-room workout for those days when the hotel gym is jammed, especially those Marriott Courtyard gyms, when all four of the ellipticals and treadmills are taken, and there’s a queue for the handful of dumbells. Of course, I might have to warm up with some furniture jenga -- stacking the chairs and magazine table out of the way, maybe with one of the end tables -- but most US hotel rooms should have enough open space, except maybe in Manhattan.</li><li>However, my other new workout -- stair intervals, sprinting up the stairs in our 20-floor apartment building -- might not translate as well to hotels, especially those 4-story Courtyards.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Javolenus/41932\">Ianiscus</a> by Javolenus (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/\">Attribution (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Wired_Ant</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>The waves of Covid-19 e-mails from travel companies have been interesting.&nbsp; The first wave was at the beginning of March. I tweeted out a screenshot of what I received from United, but all the travel companies seem to be working off similar scripts -- “We care about you; let me tell you about the great job that HEPA air filters do; we’re cleaning the planes a bit more every night; we’ll get back to you later on your elite status.” Then the second wave as travel started to crater a couple of weeks later -- “We really care about you, so if you book a flight/room/car with us and give us money this month, we won’t charge you to change your dates if things are still mucked up… but we’ll keep your money; oh, and we cleaning the planes/rooms/cars real hard now”. This wave did get my attention. I mentioned in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/03/21/podcast-161-new-crisis-old-question-driving-down-to-key-west/\">last episode</a> how the combination of change fee waiver and a smokin’ deal on American’s direct ORD-BCN flight got me to open up my wallet for an end-of-September trip. Friends of ours are saying we’re crazy, but I’m an optimist. And now, starting last week, I’m starting to get the third wave of e-mails wherein the dam finally broke -- “Honest, we care a whole lot about you, so we’ve extended that change fee waiver for the next couple of months -- so long as you give us money now -- and, since we’re all sorta throwing in the towel on 2020, we’re giving you elites a push on your status -- whatever you have now, you keep through next year -- and extending your club memberships by 6 months; oh, and we’re still spraying disinfectant everywhere.” For me, hotel brands were the first -- Hilton and Hyatt, and Marriott notable in its absence. Then, this week,&nbsp; some of the airlines finally dropped -- Delta, United, and Alaska, with American and Southwest notable in <em>their</em> absence. And then, in mid-week, Marriott finally gave it. It’ll be interesting to see how long American and Southwest feel they can hold out. The longer the travel shutdown, the more the pressure will build. Internationally, the trend for airlines seems to be a bit more of a hedge -- not extending status, but reducing qualification levels by 25-30%. BA, KLM, Emirates all seem to be trying this. It’ll be interesting to see how long they can hold out.</li><li>As if this wasn’t enough, Marriott announced at the end of March yet <a href=\"https://hospitalitytech.com/52m-guests-affected-new-marriott-data-breach\">another security breach</a> -- <a href=\"https://www.wired.com/story/marriott-hacked-yes-again-2020/\" class=\"aioseop-link\">the second one in 16 months</a>. This one was in a PMS, a property management system, used at some of the properties managed by Marriott. They estimate that 5.2 million guests are affected. We’ve said many times before, it’s gotten to the point with all these hacks that you gotta assume that you’ve been compromised. But the coronavirus lockdown adds a bit of a twist. A security firm, PerimeterX, says that, in the past month, they’ve <a href=\"https://www.perimeterx.com/resources/blog/2020/covid-19-part-2-data-tells-the-story/\">seen account takeover attacks surge</a> to as high as 80% of all login attempts on travel sites. Kinda makes sense -- if we’re not traveling, we’re not hitting airline or hotel sites to book trips, or to check our account balances or figure out where we are on a status match. As we drop off, the remaining traffic -- from the bad guys -- becomes a higher percentage. And there is some money to be had there. I’ve said in past episodes that I tend to use 2¢/mile as the breakeven point between buying a flight or using miles, though that number might have drifted down to 1.5¢ with recent award chart changes. Crack and drain an account with 100,000 miles -- not a high balance for a frequent traveler who’s getting elite bonuses and uses the airline’s credit card -- and that’s $1,500. Would be nice if these companies used two-factor authentication, but I haven’t seen that with any of my accounts. So I make sure each account has a strong and unique password, and run the circuit -- logging into each of them, or at least the ones with big balances -- every month.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/48914\">In Peace (Somewhere Else Mix)</a> by cdk (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/\">Attribution (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Snowflake</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Post-Corona Trip Planning</strong> </h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I took a survey from Conde Nast Traveler magazine, asking about my post-coronavirus travel plans. Good timing because, as I mentioned earlier, I’ve been thinking about just that topic, because this will be the longest stretch I’ve stayed home in I don’t know how long. And you can imagine that topic is hot across the travel industry -- with airlines, hotels, trip planning apps -- hence, probably the reason for the Conde Nast survey. But before you can plan, you have to know when the lockdown will be released and how. Nobody in Chicago or anywhere else in the US seems to want to talk about that quite yet, but some European countries are -- Austria, Denmark, the Czech Republic, even Italy -- and as you’d guess, it’s looking like it’ll be more of a gradual release than a big bang; and happen first in places less impacted by Covid-19 -- rural before urban, then smaller cities; New York probably the last in line.&nbsp;</li><li>If that plays out, then I’m thinking that leisure travel will be the first to come back. A lot of business travel is between cities, and when those lockdowns finally release, companies will first be figuring out who they want to bring back to their offices. And they’ll be looking to cut expenses going into the expected recession. So the weekend warriors may be on the move before the road warriors.</li><li>Pulling on that thread a bit more, I think it means that, for many folks, their first post-lockdown trip is going to be a car ride. With a car, you have more control than a plane or a train -- more flexibility, no waiting for airlines to un-furlough their crews and spin up their route systems, and no worries about who you’re sitting next to. Maybe a drive requires a bit more planning -- probably want to make sure the lockdown is lifted in all the places you have to drive through. But when I add low gas prices to this flexibility, driving is probably the way I’ll go.</li><li>OK, but to where? Probably not too far initially -- not more than, say, a 6-8 hour drive, a day -- so no “let’s re-trace Route 66” out to LA or beeline for the Florida beaches. Also, given some of the blowback around some of those pre-lockdown Spring Break antics, I gotta think that party places like Florida beaches and Nashville’s Lower Broadway are gonna be some of the last spots released from lockdown, and even when they are, they’ll be different places. Not every bar and restaurant will survive this lockdown. With still maybe a month to go, I’m already seeing places in Chicago give up and shut down for good.</li><li>But that doesn’t really impact my planning. The first trip I want to do after the lockdown wasn’t some bachelor party long weekend blow out. I think I want to go see some family first, not least because there’s still uncertainty about if and when future waves of Covid-19 might prompt future lockdowns. So I’m thinking, right now, that first drive will be down to Spring Hill, TN to see my mother. It’s an 8-hr drive, so about as far as I can get in a day. I’ll throw my bike on the back of the car; take some solo rides on the roads that thread through horse country, hoping to hit an open barbeque joint, and a taproom or two.&nbsp;</li><li>Then some business travel comes back. People can only get so much done through Zoom and Microsoft Teams. Though we’ve pushed it off for 6-8 weeks, at some point people need to get together -- physically -- to close deals, do projects, work with employees. The ramp up will depend on how deep of a recession we find ourselves in. Maybe it’ll start up by cashing in some of those vouchers from cancelled March and April trips that airlines have been loath to refund.</li><li>Which, hopefully, works Irene, Claire and I up some trans-Atlantic trips in the late fall -- Barcelona in late September and perhaps London over Thanksgiving. They’ll probably still be sedate -- still some social distancing; not sure if we’ll be able to catch La Liga or Premier League matches. That’s OK, though. I’d be happy to walk again through the Gothic District, check out Cat Bar Cat, my craft beer hangout the last time I was in Barcelona, and to shop and eat through Mercado de La Boqueria. And then to walk through London streets for the Christmas lights.&nbsp;</li><li>But if I’m going to do any of this, I’ll probably need to get a hair cut first.</li><li>Bridge Music --<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/35724\">Blue Like Venus</a> by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/\">Attribution (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Admiral Bob</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Keeping a Travel Journal</strong> </h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>One of the questions on the Conde Nast Traveler survey was “How are you getting your travel fix during the lockdown?” My initial response was curt “I’m not”. But I paused for a minute and then backspaced over that and typed “I’m paging through my old travel journals”.</li><li>Travel journaling is kinda at the core of the TravelCommons podcast or at least its creation myth. I had been writing a weekly business column for an alternative newspaper in Philadelphia. An editorial change dropped my column right about the same time my career change to consulting put me on the road just about every week. I picked up a small Moleskine notebook in SFO while waiting out yet another Northwest Airlines flight delay, found an empty bar stool, ordered an Anchor Steam, and killed time writing down some of the goofier travel stories that had happened to me or that other guys had told me. When I had just about filled it up, I thought about starting a travel blog. But right about then, the first wave of podcasting hit the mainstream. I’d been in radio during high school in Memphis, so thought I’d give it a go. And here we are, coming on 15 years later.</li><li>If I go back even further -- before Moleskines became a thing -- I might say I started travel journaling by way of postcards. If I was in a new or interesting place -- think Tuscany or Lake Tahoe, not Dover, OH or Southfield, MI -- I’d write postcards to my folks, my girlfriend-later-wife, the kids, usually while sitting at the bar having an end-of-the-day beer or wine. Irene saved some of those postcards. Flipping through them and my travel journals, I didn’t find diaries of my travel days -- I did this, went there, ate at these dishes at that restaurant -- but rather little vignettes of things that caught my eye, things like “the favorite pastime in Bologna appears to be trying on sunglasses at the corner stand and then checking out ‘the look’ in the side mirrors of parked cars” or “I was told by law, a Swiss office worker has to be within 50 ft of a window. Explains why all the buildings I see in Basel are thin or doughnuts” or “Roadside billboards in Detroit are different from anywhere else I’ve been. Rather than pitching hotels or consumer products, the billboards on I-94 in from the airport are all selling auto parts, punctuated by that massive Uniroyal tire”</li><li>I’ve pretty much stuck to an end-of-the-day routine; maybe that beer or glass of wine helps me reflect back on the day and ID the things that stood out; the things that taught me something, and then write it down. I don’t have a goal, trying to write X number of pages; I just let each day dictate. Sometimes it’s a bit prosaic, and sometimes it feeds TravelCommons. The journal pages from our <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/01/24/road-trip-lowbrow-santa-fe/\" class=\"aioseop-link\">Thanksgiving getaway to Santa Fe a couple of years ago turned into a 2,000-word blog post</a>; and what poured out of my pen in frustration in France a year ago was at the core of the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/podcast-150-travel-interruptus/\" class=\"aioseop-link\">Travel Interruptus</a> episode, what I called “A Greek tragedy where the travel gods toy with our anti-hero for fun and entertainment”.</li><li>But more than anything, right now when the lockdown is aggravating my wanderlust, reading the pages that I wrote some 2 or 10 or 20 years ago, reminds me of those places, those times, those experiences, and gives me the travel fix that I need right now in this lockdown.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #162</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_162.mp3\" class=\"aioseop-link\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #162 — Post-Corona Trip Planning; Keeping a Travel Journal','','inherit','closed','closed','','2725-revision-v1','','','2021-03-14 16:07:54','2021-03-14 21:07:54','',2725,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/14/2725-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3473,1,'2021-03-14 16:08:59','2021-03-14 21:08:59','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/738DE79A-D927-423E-A890-569A5F3A0AB1-scaled.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2682 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/738DE79A-D927-423E-A890-569A5F3A0AB1-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a><figcaption>You have reached your destination</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>Things started out well, skipping out on Chicago winter for a drive down to Key West. But then last week, coronavirus hit the US and everything unraveled. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_161.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #161: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you hunkered down in the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois, trying to figure out exactly what the governor’s “shelter-in-place” directive means. Not a lot of travel since the last episode, and that’s not just because of coronavirus. No business travel booked, so it was just one trip in the back half of February to visit some friends who are snowbirding in Key West, Florida. 80 degrees and sunny vs. 30 degrees and grey skies in Chicago -- tough duty. Our friends rented a nice house up a dead end street in the Historic District, just a couple of blocks off Duval Street. They had it for two months, Feb through the end of March, but left early, giving up their last 2 weeks of sunny weather to drive back to Chicago because they’re afraid hotels will be closing along their route home.&nbsp;</li><li>Hadn’t planned any travel in March, but watched our April plans dissolve as Covid-19 spread. First, a friend from Poland canceled his wedding in Sedona, AZ shortly after the US announced the 30-day travel ban for Europeans. While their wedding date was past the 30 days, they figured this was just the start -- which it was. Over the next 5 days, travel bans started popping up across Europe. We joked to ourselves, “Lucky timing -- first time in 4 years we’re not doing Spring Break in Europe”, opting instead for some wine tasting in Howell Mountain and Napa Valley. Until the next day when California locked everything down, closing everything including restaurants and wineries…</li><li>For some families, kids home from school and mom or dad off the road and working from home -- the forced family togetherness is adding to the stress. I was talking to a friend this week -- “I’m usually on the road 75% of the time, and the kids are in school or sports. After 2 days of this, my wife laid down the rules -- my son is in the basement, my wife and daughter are on the second floor, I’m on the third floor, and the first floor with the kitchen is neutral territory -- you can pass through, but you can’t claim table or counter space there.” Last time I checked in with him, everyone was still alive -- that is, they hadn’t killed each other yet.</li><li>But I’m nothing if not an optimist, so in the midst of this week’s unraveling, I found a deal on a direct American Air flight from ORD to Barcelona -- 8½ hr 787 flight -- so I booked it -- 2 weeks in Barcelona at the end of September. I don’t know what we’ll do yet or where we’ll stay, but I’m already looking forward to it.</li><li>Bridge Music --  <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/snowflake/46164\">A Foolish Game</a> by Snowflake (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/snowflake/46164 Ft: Admiral Bob  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Steve Frick, a longtime TravelCommons listener and Untappd buddy who also does a podcast, <a href=\"http://hypeamerica.com/back-and-gone-again\">Travel Stories from Back and Gone Again</a>, took some time to record and send in an audio comment on last month’s episode -<ul><li>Gotta love the text-to-speech robot voice. Steve, would’ve been great to see that selfie on your Twitter feed. Also, check out the show notes for a link to Steve’s podcast</li></ul></li><li>Darren Mak hit me up on Twitter<ul><li>“Hey Mark,&nbsp; just listened to Travel Commons <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/09/20/podcast-155-rj-delays-street-food-in-poland-and-hungary/\">episode 155</a> on my last flight... board my next one which is a Delta MD88. Look out the window and see this... thanks for putting that in my head buddy!”&nbsp;</li><li>From the picture on his tweet, you can see he’s sitting in the window seat of an MD-88 just in front of the engine cowl. In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/09/20/podcast-155-rj-delays-street-food-in-poland-and-hungary/\">episode 155</a>, we talked about American Airlines’ retirement of their MD-80’s. I mentioned that when I ended up in a seat like Darren’s, my mind would sometimes wander -- if the engine next to my head blows up, will the shrapnel blow out or blow into the cabin. I never heard of such a catastrophic failure on an MD-80 -- but that didn’t keep me from wondering. And now, Darren can’t keep from wondering. Sorry about that, Darren. You won’t be able to un-think that. I’m guessing, though, that those MD’s were the first planes Delta parked as air traffic cratered and will be the last to return -- if they ever do. Savor that pic...</li></ul></li><li>And for our UK subscribers, a shout out to another TravelCommons listener and Untappd friend Rob Cheshire who launched <a href=\"https://thisweekincraft.beer/\">This Week in Craft.Beer</a>, a weekly newsletter covering the UK craft beer scene. He’s four issues in and is on a good roll. We’re thinking about heading over to the UK for Thanksgiving and the taproom directory in Rob’s newsletter will be key to planning that trip. I also love that he’s using a .Beer domain name. Check out the show notes for a link.</li><li>I think I’ve mentioned in a past episode that I’ve switched my carryon from a Timbuk 2 backpack to a Timbuk 2 messenger bag. Digitizing means carrying less physical stuff; the backpack was feeling half empty, so I switched to the smaller messenger bag. I like it except for one thing -- it’ll only hold a short water bottle. The big 20oz’er my daughter gave me for Christmas? Fits great in the backpack side pocket, but is too tall for the messenger bag. I played around with a lot of water bottles, but the best one has turned out to be a 500 ml Evian bottle. Now I know that single use plastic is a bad thing, but I can get a week’s use out of one Evian bottle. Until I fill it up in the gym or the concierge lounge the morning before my flight home and forget about it -- until the TSA person pulls it out of my bag on the other side of security and asks me, a bit sarcastically, if I want to go back and check it in my luggage. Yeah, no -- just pitch it. Which is why I can’t have nice things -- like a $35 teakwood S’well bottle. Instead, I walk down the terminal and just spend $3.50 for another bottle of Evian.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>For my trip to Key West, I got back to an old habit of reading some non-guidebook books -- either fiction or non-fiction -- about my destination before going. Before driving down the Overseas Highway, I read <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2QzesjI\"><em>Last Train to Paradise</em></a> about the incredible effort that went into building a railroad line to Key West 100 years ago -- that was later repurposed for the first iteration of the highway, and then read Hemingway’s <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3a72oOv\"><em>To Have and Have Not</em></a> because, well,&nbsp; it’s Hemingway and it’s about Key West, and so you just have to. I used to do this a lot more. I started when I read Paul Theroux’s <a href=\"https://amzn.to/398SvhE\"><em>Kingdom by the Sea</em></a> before my first trip to the UK back in 1985. I read John Lukacs’ history <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2xNS9A7\"><em>Budapest 1900</em></a> before my first trip to Hungary in 1989, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3a7KDhX\"><em>Watermark</em></a> by Joseph Brodsky before a trip to Venice, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/394bji3\"><em>His Bloody Project</em></a> by Grahame Burnet before going to Scotland’s Western Highlands. As you’d guess, none of these were about what to do or see, but instead they gave some context about the place -- even the fiction books. Gives a bit of balance to the go-here/see-that stuff in guidebooks and web sites.&nbsp; Something new for this trip -- a Spotify playlist of Jimmy Buffet tunes from those 1970’s Key West albums -- <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2whAqRs\"><em>Living And Dying In ¾ Time</em></a>, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2vG6wG8\"><em>Havana Daydreamin\'</em></a> -- for some additional context for that 3 hour drive down through the Keys.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com. </li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/THE_CONCEPT_OF_ENERGY/55008\">ABANDONED BUTTERFLIES</a> by THE_CONCEPT_OF_ENERGY (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/THE_CONCEPT_OF_ENERGY/55008 Ft: Doxent Zsigmond, Snowflake</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>New Crisis, Old Question</strong> </h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I’m not gonna try to do any hot takes on what this whole coronavirus/Covid-19/ social distancing experience means because: a) I hate the whole “insta-punditry” that social media has spawned; and b) there are so many unknowns and things are changing so fast that any attempt at meaningful analysis right now won’t age very well. Indeed, I’ve had to re-write this episode 3 times now. I gotta get it recorded before things change and I have to re-do it again.</li><li>At first, it felt like the Black Monday crash of 1987 (which, I hate to admit, I’m old enough to have experienced) or Sept 11, 2001 were good comparison points -- significant, sharp, scary events that came out of nowhere with no warning, and when we were in it, felt like a free fall with no bottom in sight. But after a week or so, even though the stock market was still down or airports and airplanes were still empty, we could see a path to the other side -- maybe not turn-by-turn directions, but at least it felt like we could point ourselves in the general direction. But with this, we’re, what 2-3 weeks in?, and it still feels like we’re in that free fall; we don’t know where the bottom is, let alone the direction to get out.</li><li>I remember, after Sept 11th and the 2008 Great Recession, people saying “everything has changed” and wondering if travel would rebound, if people would get on planes again in the same numbers. And it did and then some -- though the growth has been driven more by leisure travelers than the road warriors. But the travel industry makes its money off the frequent business traveler, and that question pops up again -- will they come back? Because it’s a bit different this time. In 2001, remote work options were pretty much just AOL or Yahoo instant messaging. Video was limited to special rooms with ISDN lines; Skype didn’t launch for another 2 years. In 2008, things were a bit better, but we’re a few months after the second version of the iPhone is released (the iPhone 3G), WhatsApp doesn’t launch for another year, and Slack doesn’t show up for another 5. But now 12 years on, we have bandwidth, we have tools. Last fall, we had <em><a href=\"https://www.ft.com/content/5c635430-1dbc-11ea-97df-cc63de1d73f4\">flygskam</a></em>  -- flight shaming -- hit the mainstream, and now the Covid-19 pandemic that’s just about shut down international air travel. Were we ready to step back from business travel and the coronavirus is just the forcing function?</li><li>I’m coming up on the 35th anniversary of my first business flight, and in that time, I’ve known maybe a handful of guys (and they were all men) who went out of their way to do more business travel; when offered the choice between a conference call or a plane trip, they chose the plane trip. The vast majority got on the plane or the train or behind the wheel because that’s what they needed to do to get the job done -- to close a deal, to do a project, to work with an employee. As remote tools get better and get more ingrained in the culture, the ability to get tasks done remotely increases. But we are social animals. And for all the data and processes, most business is about relationships. And as long as that’s true, we’ll want to meet people face-to-face -- over a coffee or a beer or a meal -- once we finally touch bottom after this coronavirus free fall and can feel safe sitting next to each other again.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/49674\">H2O</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/49674  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Driving Down to Key West</strong> </h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Back to the pre-lock down days of February, it was the first time I’d been to Key West. We decided to drive down, run the whole <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overseas_Highway\">Overseas Highway</a>, the 113-mile stretch of US 1 from Homestead, south of Miami, to Key West. We flew into FLL because -- well, it’s a bit less of a zoo parade than MIA. We landed, walked straight out of the terminal, across the street and into the rental car center -- no shuttle bus ride to the back-40. RSW is the same on the Gulf side. There are damn few on-site rental sites left, and so I appreciate them when I can. Walking down the Hertz Five-Star aisle with Irene (I fell out of top-tier President’s Circle a few years back; too many in-city clients where Uber and Lyft were more convenient), I see a bunch of <a href=\"https://www.hyundaiusa.com/us/en/vehicles/kona/gallery\">Hyundai Konas</a> -- which is a new model for me, it’s a subcompact SUV -- a few Chevy Malibus and, as always, the requisite bunch of Nissan Altimas. I do my normal drill -- looking for non-beat up cars (so I don’t have to argue about damage when I return it) and low mileage (so it won’t break down during the rental). Irene, she’s looking for a cute color. Lucky for us, the car that was at the intersection of all those criteria was right in front of us -- a Surf Blue Hyundai Kona with 126 miles on the odometer. We threw our luggage in, dialed up Key West on Google Maps on Car Play, and pulled out -- into a 15-minute line to get out of the Hertz lot. Somehow that partnership with Clear doesn’t seem to be making much of a dent.</li><li>When we were planning this trip, everyone warned us off the drive -- “It’s slow”, “you’ll get caught behind a bunch of trucks”, “an accident will shut the whole road down” -- but I was as excited for the drive as I was the time in Key West. I think the Overseas Highway is one of the iconic drives in the US -- in my mind, it’s in the same league with Pacific Coast Highway between San Francisco and LA and Route 66 from Chicago to LA.&nbsp;</li><li>Even before we left the mainland, the drive was cool, with the Everglades on one side and the marinas and ocean inlets on the other. The drive through Key Largo was less interesting -- not much more than bait shops and boat parking. A bit further along, we crawled through Islamorada and Marathon in heavy traffic on a Monday afternoon.</li><li>Everyone talks about Seven Mile Bridge (we clocked it at 6.8 miles) and have seen it in movies, and it <em>is</em> very cool, but what was more interesting to me were the sections of the highway before that, that run across the low-lying keys along the route of the old Overseas Railroad which I read about in <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2QzesjI\"><em>Last Train to Paradise</em></a> -- time and again we’d be driving across what was nothing more than just a bit of a road bed and a 100 or so feet of beach and vegetation. After that, it’s ocean.&nbsp;</li><li>The warnings were right -- the highway is not a fast drive. It squeezes down from four lanes to two lanes for a bit, and Monroe County sheriff cars are parked where the speed limit dips when you pass through towns. But speed isn’t really the point. Just like you don’t run through Big Sur at 70 mph on PCH, you don’t blow past people surf fishing for snapper, snook, and grouper, or not slow down and try to spot Key Deer on Big Pine Key. If you just want to get to Key West as fast as possible, spend $100 or so for a flight from FLL or MIA. Otherwise, throttle back and remember -- on this drive, it’s as much about the journey as the destination.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #161</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_161.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #161 — New Crisis, Old Question; Driving Down to Key West','','inherit','closed','closed','','2680-revision-v1','','','2021-03-14 16:08:59','2021-03-14 21:08:59','',2680,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/14/2680-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3475,1,'2021-03-14 16:10:26','2021-03-14 21:10:26','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/IMG_0368-scaled.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2664 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/IMG_0368-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a><figcaption>Is this the IMAX seatback screen?</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>Trying to watch the Super Bowl while flying from Durango, CO to Chicago via Denver got me thinking about the fading away of seatback entertainment. We also talk about the continuing evolution of ride sharing. Uber and Lyft are looking more and more like the taxi companies they fought to replace. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_160.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #160: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. I finished my Phoenix travels at the end of January and made the last trip a “bleisure” trip -- business in Phoenix Monday thru Thursday afternoon, and then leisure Thursday evening thru Sunday with a ski weekend in Durango, CO, the first time I’ve been on the slopes in 7 years. I first thought about heading up to Salt Lake for the weekend, but when I saw that the Sundance Film Festival was the same weekend, I thought “Nope” and started Googling for other ideas. The ski slopes around Flagstaff were too small and I didn’t want to fight the traffic on I-70 to hit the areas near Denver. Durango, in the San Juan mountains in the southwest corner of the state -- near Four Corners -- looked like a good spot. It’s a quick and fairly inexpensive hour hop from Phoenix; it’s an actual town, not just a ski resort, so there’d be other things to do when the lifts closed; the lift tickets at Purgatory and Wolf Creek were reasonable -- 40-50% of the price at, say, Vail or Park City; I was able to book a whole tiny house on AirBnB for the price of a generic Fairfield Inn room; and, I’d never been there before. And, as I found out from my AirBnB host, it was the weekend of Durango’s Snowdown Festival -- the 42nd annual, with a parade down Main Street and everything. The snow was just OK, but the skiing was great -- beautiful weather, damn few lift lines, nice people -- a weird but fun combination of families -- mostly from Texas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico -- and the Colorado hippy-dippy ski bum crew. It was a nice ending to my 2 months of Phoenix trips.</li><li>The only downside was… I had to check a bag. Even though I rented all my equipment -- skis, boots, poles -- I still needed that extra bag for all the other paraphernalia -- helmet, ski pants, gloves, parka, …. I love skiing but it requires a lot of stuff. Not that it cost me anything -- even flying Basic Economy on American from Phoenix to Durango, I got free bags with my Platinum status. Though American’s website wasn’t very clear about that when they tried to upsell me off of Basic Economy -- imagine that. And while I got free bags, I couldn’t select my seat in advance. But given it was a small regional jet with no middle seats, I figured I’d risk it.&nbsp; I will say, though, that I was pretty happy with the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/37R0sHX\">teal green luggage tags</a> I bought before the trip. Made it very easy to spot my bags amidst the sea of black suitcases on the luggage belt. Probably <a href=\"https://amzn.to/37R0sHX\">the best $5 I’ve spent on Amazon</a>.&nbsp;</li><li>One detail I missed when planning my ski weekend is that my Sunday night flights from Durango to Denver to Chicago would be right in the middle of the Super Bowl. Though I’m not sure I’d have changed anything if I’d remembered it. I didn’t really have a dog in that hunt -- I’m not a big San Francisco or Kansas City fan and so was kinda like everyone else who wasn’t in the Bay Area, I was rooting more for Andy Reid than KC. I did end up catching <em>most</em> of the game, but it was a little choppy. I watched the kick-off and 1st quarter in the bar at Durango Airport. Durango Airport isn’t big -- just 4 gates if I remember correctly -- and the bar kinda sticks out into the gate seating area. I sat at the bar, had a beer, and watched the game on the TV hanging on the wall near Gate 2 -- or maybe 3. But then United called boarding, so I caught bits of the second quarter on the Fox TV iPhone app while waiting to take off for Denver. And then tracked the start of the 3rd quarter after touchdown and a really long taxi in DEN. I caught the rest of the 3rd quarter on multiple screens -- bars, CNN gate TVs -- while walking down the B Concourse to make my ORD connection. I got lucky, though, and was able to catch all of Kansas City’s phenomenal come-back uninterrupted in a Mexican restaurant with about a dozen other fixated passengers and restaurant workers. After KC’s final interception, I walked down and caught the final plays on the CNN TV at the gate. Every other night, I consciously avoid those CNN TVs -- the volumes always up on people yelling at each other. But this night, I was happy for that volume -- the one night when they weren’t to CNN. </li><li>Bridge Music --  <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/48915\">Like Music (cdk Mix</a>) by Analog By Nature (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/48915 Ft: Phasenwandler  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>The week after that last Phoenix trip, I wrote <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/02/07/my-food-and-beer-hangouts-in-downtown-phoenix-dtphx/\">a post</a> on the TravelCommons website listing my favorite food and beer hangouts in downtown Phoenix. When I started traveling to Phoenix in the mid-’90’s, there wasn’t much to downtown Phoenix other than a big Hyatt Regency hotel. Everything was in Scottsdale and Tempe. I’d usually stay in Tempe because, with Arizona State University there, there were restaurants and bars I could walk to. Fast forward to today, downtown Phoenix has a lot more going on. Stadiums for the Phoenix Suns and the Arizona Diamondbacks, and a new downtown campus for ASU’s law school bring in enough people to support a solid selection of restaurants, coffee shops, and bars. The blog post doesn’t cover everything -- just the places I found myself going back to again and again during my 2-month stay.</li><li>Most of my flights from the mid-90’s on went into PHX Sky Harbor’s Terminal 2 -- on United and on American, until they moved to the much better Terminal 4 after merging with US Air which had merged with America West, the original hub airline for PHX. Terminal 2 was PHX’s slum terminal. Built in 1962 and originally planned to shut down in 2000, they finally shut it down on Feb 4, 2020, the week after I finished my latest Phoenix gig. The last two airlines using it -- United and Alaska Air -- have moved to Terminal 3 with the rest of the non-hub carriers. PHX’s two major carriers -- American and Southwest -- split Terminal 4. Some of the newspaper articles said business travelers liked it because it was compact, easy to navigate. I’m not one of them. I thought it was a cramped low-ceilinged place, with small restrooms and lousy food and beer options when I had to wait out delays back to ORD.&nbsp; I think you can tell that I won’t miss it. The plans are to demo the terminal this year and replace it with European-style bus gates -- using buses to take passengers out to remotely parked aircraft instead of boarding through jetways. I’m gonna bet those bus gates won’t be popular in August when PHX’s tarmac temperatures hit 120 degrees.&nbsp;</li><li>Waiting for my American Eagle PHX-Durango flight, I was half-paying attention to the PA announcements, but then noticed that the gate agent wasn’t doing the boarding announcements. Instead they were using recorded announcements. That wasn’t what caught my attention, though. I’ve heard recorded gate announcements hundreds of times. But usually, they’re recordings of humans reading the announcements. Here at gate B19, it was one of those robotic text-to-speech synthesized voices -- something like &lt;insert Boarding Groups 1, 2, and 3&gt;. I mean, why? How much savings do you get by using text-to-speech over some gate agent standing in a closet and recording it, say, on their iPhone? Maybe more that I think now that American has, what, 7, 10, 123 boarding groups? I asked this question “Why the robot” out loud -- to Twitter. American came back “We heard back and the PHX gate staff actually does record the voices used in the announcements. They are real humans.” Kudos for American’s Twitter staff for following up, but unless they have an android with a bad vox box working for them, I think the gang at gate B19 is using text2speech.org.</li><li>I posted an article on the TravelCommons Facebook page about a guy who wore a plastic tent on a plane to avoid the coronavirus. Now, as it turns out, it was really more of a publicity stunt for the guy’s company. He makes personal tents to protect people from bad weather when sitting on the sidelines of their kids’ soccer games. Might cut down on the colds I catch when flying, but from the picture, it looks like it would be quite a pain when the person in the window seat wants to get out to use the toilet.</li><li>On January 6th, the first Monday of the new year, I <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1214167465627979776\">posted a picture on Twitter</a> of the “cannabis amnesty box” that was on the other side of security at ORD’s Terminal 1. Pot became legal in Illinois the first of the year, and the Chicago Dept of Aviation put out these boxes “so travelers have the opportunity to ensure compliance with federal law, as well as the local laws at their destination” according to the police department. If you look at the picture I posted, the box looks like something the maintenance guys knocked together in the wood shop during their break. So no surprise that 3 weeks later, someone broke into a similar box at Midway airport and helped themselves to some surrendered weed. Actually, I think the only real surprise is that it took as long as 3 weeks for this to happen. </li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/spinmeister/53428\">Somewhere</a> by spinmeister (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/spinmeister/53428 Ft: DJ Vadim  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Seatback Screens Fading Away</strong> </h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>On my flight from Durango to Denver, half the guys on the plane were staring down at their phones during boarding and taxi, watching the second quarter until the plane rotated up off the runway. For folks flying United planes with DirectTV seatback screens -- the repainted Continental 737s -- no problems; just swipe your credit card and keep watching. But that’s a shrinking group. Seat back entertainment screens have been on the death watch list for 5 years now, but it seems to be on its way out -- at least on a lot of the domestic routes.&nbsp;</li><li>And I can’t really say that I miss them. The DirectTV controls on those United planes are in the armrest, so I’m always changing the channel or the volume or the screen brightness. On American 737s, screens bulging out of the seat backs into an already tight space thanks to American’s war against seat pitch; I have to recline my seat just to be able to get that screen in focus. And the power supplies for all these seat back units are under the seat, crowding out space for my backpack or my feet.&nbsp;</li><li>I’m happy with the BYOS -- bring your own screen -- approach. I watched the season finale of The Mandalorian Star Wars TV show on my 8-inch Samsung tablet. It wasn’t as good as watching it on the 65-inch LG 4K TV at home, but it was bigger than any domestic in-flight screen. On one of my Southwest flights home from PHX, I saw a guy hang his big iPhone Max from the tray on the seatback in front of him -- kind of a DIY seatback entertainment unit.&nbsp;</li><li>On long international flights, though, I can see the case for seatback screens. My wife and kids have perfected synchronized movie viewing. They’re sitting three abreast; they queue up the same movie and then count down -- 3, 2, 1, Press Play! The airplane version of watching a movie together in the living room. I’m not sure it would be the same if they were all looking down at their iPhones. This tends to work better on newer planes, like the 787, that have bigger screens. I remember Andrew trying to watch the movie Dunkirk - a big WW II action movie that was great on IMAX -- on a maybe 7-inch screen on a United 767. I don’t think he got the full experience of that movie.</li><li>Back in December, United <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1211759835181654018\">tweeted out the top 10 most watched in-flight movies in 2019</a> -- Bohemian Rhapsody, A Star is Born, and Crazy Rich Asians were 1, 2, and 3. Makes sense. In 9th place, though, was John Wick 3, the 3rd installment of the Keanu Reeves fists of fury action flick. Loved that movie, but I can’t see even the new 16-inch screens in United’s business class being big enough to handle that flick. </li><li> Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/scottaltham/20747\"> Hear Us Now (poptastic mix)</a> by Scott Altham (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/scottaltham/20747  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Any Difference Left Between Ride-Share and Taxis?</strong> </h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I got an e-mail survey the other day asking for my thoughts, impressions about Uber and Lyft. One of the questions was how long I’d used each of them -- less than 1 year; 1-2 years, 2-3 years, more than 3 years. Which got <em>me</em> kinda wondering, so I pulled out my iPhone and fired up each app. My first Uber ride was in December 2013, from midtown Manhattan to LGA at 4pm. I signed up because it’s such a pain to find a regular cab to take you to LGA at rush hour, and I’d forgotten to book a ride with the black car service I would normally use. Interesting that I didn’t use Uber again for another 6 months, in June 2014, when again, I’d didn’t have a black car book for a ride from PHL to a client out in the suburbs along the Blue Route. I signed up with Lyft in December 2015 when I was in Las Vegas for a project. I’d be using Uber more frequently in 2015, but back then, only Lyft had permission to drop-off at LAS. We had used Uber a couple of times, but they’d have to drop us off at the rental car center so we could take the bus to the terminal. I did that exactly one time and then pivoted to Lyft. So, according to this e-mail survey -- which, at the end, revealed itself to be sponsored by Uber -- I’m a grizzled ride-sharing veteran -- as I’m sure are many of you.</li><li>And ride-sharing was what it was -- an app-driven version of the old ride-sharing bulletin boards -- “I’m driving from Chicago to Rockford; looking for someone to split the gas and tolls” -- except locally. I remember, at the start, that caused a bit of an etiquette challenge -- do I sit in the front or the back? And you were careful because it was their car -- and usually a nice one. Certainly much nicer and way less beat-up than the typical cab.&nbsp; And there were usually good stories from the drivers -- all but a couple were doing it part-time, to make some additional cash. Way back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/11/22/podcast-125-uber-driver-stories-overseas-for-the-election/\">episode #125</a>, in November 2016, early on in my Uber/Lyft days, I told some of those stories.</li><li>A year later, a driver in Charlottesville, VA told me he was driving full-time and wanted to expand, so he’d bought 3 used Toyota Corollas (even back then the preferred ride-share car) and was renting them out to “Hispanics”, his words, who were driving Uber and Lyft a couple hours north in the Washington, DC area. Interesting idea. A bit like the standard taxi cab model -- leasing licensed cabs to drivers for a shift -- but without the need to drop money on a taxi license, or a medallion in places like New York and Chicago. Interesting enough that there are now 6-7 companies, including Hertz, offering daily and weekly rentals if you don’t want to share rides in your personal car.</li><li>Back in December, landing in Chicago Midway on a Southwest flight from PHX, I did my usual drill, opened up Uber and Lyft as I got off the plane and checked prices and wait times for a ride home. The prices were about the same, but the wait time… 10 min for Uber, 2 for Lyft. Lyft it is! I hit the Request Ride button, but instead of searching for a driver, I immediately get a 4-digit PIN. I head downstairs and get into a queue that looks a lot like the cab line a few doors over, except this one is run by women in pink Lyft safety vests. But they’re doing the same thing the cab rank workers do -- wave down cars and then point passengers to them. I wait, I dunno, maybe 5 minutes to get into a car, show the guy the PIN on my Lyft app, he enters it into his, and off we go. A bit less hectic than the typical airport rideshare scrum, but again, how is this different than a taxi -- except that I don’t have to ask the driver if his credit card machine works.</li><li>Indeed, on most of my trips over the past year, arriving in PHX or CHO, there typically wouldn’t be a line for a cab, so I’d skip the 5-10 minute wait for Uber or Lyft. Or, returning from Durango with my extra bag of ski paraphernalia, I skipped the schlep up to to the ride-share pick-up zone; I just walked out the door to a waiting cab. And the price difference is shrinking --&nbsp; as we talked about in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/08/13/podcast-154-will-we-still-love-uber-when-the-prices-go-up/\">episode #154</a>, Uber and Lyft have been nudging their rates up to stem their losses.&nbsp;</li><li>This is not to say there aren’t important differences; places where Uber and Lyft bring real value. I was working in New Orleans before Uber set up shop. It was impossible to get a cab anywhere other than between the airport and the French Quarter. Trying to get to and from a restaurant in, say, Mid-City or Uptown was painful -- until Uber showed up.</li><li>It kinda feels like, after all the hype, the battles with regulators, the IPOs, that Uber and Lyft used billions of venture capital dollars to break the medallion monopolies and build some phenomenal taxi dispatch systems. As a traveler, it’s been great for me. For the investors though? Well, I’m glad I skipped those IPOs</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #160</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_160.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #160 — Disappearing Seatback Screens; Shrinking Difference Between Ride-Share and Taxis','','inherit','closed','closed','','2661-revision-v1','','','2021-03-14 16:10:26','2021-03-14 21:10:26','',2661,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/14/2661-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3477,1,'2021-03-14 16:11:47','2021-03-14 21:11:47','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/DSC_7106-scaled.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2633\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/DSC_7106-300x293.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"293\"></a><figcaption>Just put my dragon\'s den on Airbnb</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>January is a big travel planning month; people thinking about about the places they want to visit, spending days on the Internet researching itineraries, and putting in their week\'s vacation requests. But what about a 9-week sabbatical you’ve worked 7 years for? In this episode, we talk about that kind of extreme travel planning. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_159.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #159: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois having finished 3 weeks of traveling down to Phoenix with one more to go. It’s been a mild winter -- for Chicago -- especially when compared to last winter, which means it’s been in the 20’s and 30’s as opposed to -23 as it was one morning last January. But even with a mild winter, I still appreciate the 70 degree days in Phoenix.</li><li> It’s a 4-hr flight between Chicago and Phoenix. I normally enjoy that amount of “unplugged” time to just read, listen to music, listen to podcasts. But a couple of weeks ago, I tweaked my back during a workout -- not a big thing, I’ve done it many times before. But this time, the pain didn’t go away, it’s hung around on my left side, moving from back to hip to thigh, making it very uncomfortable to sit for long periods of time -- like 4 hrs. Which has made me notice how long US carriers keep the “Fasten Seatbelt” sign on -- like, forever. By the time that seatbelt sign finally goes off, my back is screaming -- and the person next to me in the middle seat is pretty annoyed at my constant shifting. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/06/16/podcast-152-overwhelming-travel-new-old-restaurant-trends/\">episode #152</a>, I talked about Southwest flights between Chicago and Nashville keeping the seatbelt sign on the entire hour-and-20-minutes. It hasn’t been that bad, but it’s easily been 45 minutes. And it isn’t just Southwest; United is doing the same thing. Quite a difference from, say, when Andrew and I flew Air Baltic back in October. 10,000 ft and “bing” that seat belt sign would go off, and we’d still be climbing. It doesn’t need to turn off that fast, but there’s gotta be a happy medium there somewhere. </li><li>With the mild winter and a little bit of luck, my flights to and from Phoenix have been pretty dependable -- except for this week. On Monday, I started getting delay notices for my United 7:40pm flight right after lunch. United was doing their typical rolling delay exercise -- it’s a 30 minutes; no, really an hour; no, we’re leaving at 9pm; just kidding, it’s really 9:40. I was OK with the 30 and 60-minute delays, but then when I get two more delays in a 40-minute span -- now, something’s up. I call United. I get the Premier desk, which the guy tells me is in Chicago. I tell him the story -- rolling delays have now gotten to 2 hrs; I don’t trust that this flight is going off, and I need to get to PHX tonight. The guy says, “Yup, I got it. Makes sense.” He tries to find me routings through LAX and SFO, but the connections don’t work. So he cancels and refunds my ticket -- no hassle, no questions, no change fee. I love this guy. I pivot to Southwest and American, which both have 8:40 flights. I look at American’s seat map -- nothing but middle seats. That’s just not going to work with my back, so it’s over to Southwest. I’m A-List, so I know with their open seating I’ll get an aisle seat. (Exhale) Haven’t done that dance in a while, so was a bit out of shape. But with one more trip to PHX left, I’m not looking to get back into that shape.</li><li>Bridge Music --  <em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/hisboyelroy/430\" target=\"_blank\">Revolve</a> mix</em> by cinematrik (c) copyright 2005 Licensed under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hisboyelroy/430   </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Before writing a podcast, I go through all the interaction channels -- website comments, Facebook comments, Instagram comments, Twitter replies, e-mails, … and inevitably I miss something. Which I have done since October when Arnoud Heijnis and I traded Twitter direct messages about travel converters. In episode #155, I’d talked about having to rummage around for European plug adaptors before my Krakow and Budapest trip, and how I’m always leaving them behind. Arnoud wrote -<ul><li>Hi Mark, just caught up on your last two episodes. I also did the travel converter dance until someone recommended the Power Bagel. It\'s so small and comes in handy not only as a travel adapter but also in hotel rooms with not enough power plugs, conference tables with one outlet etc. Iit never leaves my bag so thought I\'d share.</li></ul></li><li>A very belated thanks, Arnoud! Clicking through the link that Arnoud sent, the Power Bagel is a compact circular power strip of universal plugs and a couple of USB ports. They say that the circular design keeps large power adapters, like a Macbook power supply, from blocking outlets like they do on straight power strips. And then in the center hole, they store a universal plug adapter so you can plug the Power Bagel in most international outlets. Cool design and Arnoud vouches for it. Clicking around the web site, the company MOGICS seems to be a 3-person design company based in Singapore. They got started a few years back on Kickstarter and are in the middle of a new campaign for an upgraded version of the Power Bagel, called, of course, the Super Bagel that upgrades the plug adapter and adds a on-trend USB-C port. Kickstarter says the campaign ends on Feb 25th. I’ll include a <a href=\"http://kck.st/354ozBx\">link</a> in the show notes for anyone interested.</li><li>Kickstarter seems to be the place for these things. I sent Arnoud a link to a travel adapter campaign that I joined. The Passport Go is a more traditional travel adapter -- a big cube that will plug into most international outlets and has 3 USB-A and 1 USB-C plugs and one universal plug receptacle. I used it on my Baltics trip. For personal travel, most of my power needs seem to now be driven by USB cords rather than plugs -- my iPhone did a rapid charge off the USB-C port, my tablet and headphones off the USB-A ports and since I don’t have enough hair to justify a blow dryer or curling iron, I never used the plug receptacle. Indeed, if I’d brought my Macbook Air, I could’ve powered that up off the USB-C port rather than bringing its power adapter. I’ll include a link to <a href=\"https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/zendure/passport-go-worlds-first-travel-adapter-w-gan-technology\"><em>their</em> Kickstarter page</a>.</li><li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/10/14/podcast-156-airport-satisfaction-escooters-smaller-luggage/\">episode #156,</a> I talked about how I really liked electric scooters, using them to run around in Chicago and Charlottesville and DC, and down here in Phoenix. Whereas Chicago wrapped up their e-scooter pilot in October -- which made sense; I don’t think those scooters would do well in the snow -- Phoenix seemed the perfect place with perfect weather -- no snow, not a lot of rain. And they seemed to have nailed one of the main problems with e-scooters -- people leaving them lying everywhere, especially in the middle of sidewalks. In downtown Phoenix, you have to park them in designated areas, typically near sidewalk corners, inside a painted box. So it surprised me when I started coming down here in December that I saw only 2 scooter companies -- Lime (which is partnered with Uber) and Spin (which is owned by the car company Ford). But then, a couple of weeks ago, Lime announced that they were pulling out -- that they couldn’t make money in Phoenix -- and a day or so later, all their scooters were gone. I don’t know what the right balance between scooter availability and public right-of-way is, but I hope Chicago and Phoenix and other cities can figure it out. This whole micro-mobility space -- bike shares, e-scooters -- is an important part of the urban transit mix. And, when the weather’s nice, they’re fun too!</li><li>In that <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/10/14/podcast-156-airport-satisfaction-escooters-smaller-luggage/\">same episode</a>, I talked about buying a smaller bag, a <a href=\"https://amzn.to/32lIURe\">TravelPro Maxlite 5 international carry-on size</a>, to meet the smaller carry-on size and weight requirements of AirBaltic, which Andrew and I would be using to hop between Riga, Tallinn, and Helsinki on our Baltics beer and sauna tour. I said back then that I didn’t want to spend a lot of money on it because I’d only be using it for this Baltics trip and maybe some short couple-of-day trips, that my big Victorinox 22-incher would remain my primary bag. But as it turns out, I’ve been using the smaller TravelPro for these 4-day/3-night trips to Phoenix. Now, with temperatures in 70’s, I’m not having to bring heavy, thick clothes with me, but still, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by what I can pack into that smaller TravelPro. But, I think I’ll be back to the Victorinox for next week’s trip -- I’m vectoring through Durango, CO for a ski weekend on the way home. Little colder, little more clothing; I think I’ll need all the space I can get. </li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music -- Velvet Green of Mystery (Instrumental) by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/48114 Ft: Kthugha, Jeris, Martijn de Boer  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong> </strong> <strong>Planning the Trip of a Lifetime</strong> </h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>We’ve talked on past episodes about trip planning -- using guidebooks, social media, Google algorithms, shooting the gaps between bipolar TripAdvisor reviews, casting runes, consulting tarot cards,... And all that for a week’s vacation, maybe two. What about a 9-week vacation, a paid sabbatical that you’ve worked and waited 7 years for? Well, that’s the extreme travel planning that long-time TravelCommons listener and even longer time friend Allan Marko and his wife Chris Chufo faced last year. And with January being a big travel planning month, I asked Allan to talk to us about how he and Chris planned for a trip of a lifetime.</li><li>Interview with Allan Marko</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #159</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2010/09/06/video-1-impressions-of-vietnam/\">Link to TravelCommons Vietnam video</a></li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_159.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #159 — Planning the Trip of a Lifetime in Southeast Asia','','inherit','closed','closed','','2626-revision-v1','','','2021-03-14 16:11:47','2021-03-14 21:11:47','',2626,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/14/2626-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3479,1,'2021-03-14 16:13:09','2021-03-14 21:13:09','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/189764_1571139330482_7074048_n.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-2607\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/189764_1571139330482_7074048_n-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a><figcaption>Good End to 2019</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>Skipping the Chicago winter with trips to Phoenix and Sedona, Arizona, and a Christmas morning flight to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. Talk about those trips, my good and bad Hertz experiences, and then gather up odds-‘n’-ends from my travel notebooks to see off 2019 in this New Year\'s Eve episode. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_158.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #158: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois, just back from a bone-thawing trip with the family to Cabo San Lucas, sorta the Land’s End of Mexico’s Baja California peninsula. We booked this trip back in May. Andrew has read on some budget traveler newsletter that Southwest was about to start service to Cabo. So the morning that the flights went on offer, we all went after Southwest’s website and snagged our flights for just over 30,000 points a person. We flew down early Christmas morning, connecting through HOU, and, thinking back to how empty ORD was last year at Thanksgiving, I was stunned that both of our flights were completely full. It seemed that half of our 6:45a flight out of MDW was also walking over to the Cabo gate. Guess that once the kids stop believing in Santa, Christmas morning travel is fair game.</li><li>Flying back out of Cabo last Sunday, I walk up to the gate and don’t see the usual Southwest boarding number pylons. It’s just a typical shared gate with the Southwest flight to Hobby at Gate 4A and a Delta flight to maybe Salt Lake at Gate 4B. And no plane, because there’s no jetway. It’s a bus. Southwest’s open seating works because everyone enters the plane in numerical order. Squeezing all the A group and half of the B group onto one bus… this’ll be interesting. It’s a 3-minute bus ride around the corner of the terminal. The doors open; we pour out. A ramp worker is trying to recreate the Southwest boarding process on the tarmac, asking everyone to line up in 3 lines -- pre-boards, A1-30, and A31-60. It kinda works, for the most part… until another ramp worker says “Hey, we’re boarding through the back door, too” just as the second bus opens its doors. Then it just devolves into a free-for-all. I imagine that first ramp worker looking like Kevin Bacon in “Animal House”, flattened by stampeding passengers. I was the first one through the rear door, so I was fine with it, but it does feel like Southwest needs to re-engineer how they board from shared gates.</li><li>I say “bone-thawing,” but it’s not like I was suffering too much from the Chicago December. I’ve been in Phoenix most of the month between Thanksgiving and Christmas, walking around in shirt sleeves in 65 degree weather, topping up my Vitamin D levels while kinda chuckling at the locals hurrying&nbsp; by in their puffy Patagonia parkas. I even extended my stay through one of the weekends -- doing some more of that “bleisure” travel, this time a hiking weekend in the <a href=\"https://www.fs.fed.us/wildflowers/regions/southwestern/RedRockCountry/index.shtml\">Red Rock Country</a> around Sedona, Arizona.&nbsp; An hour or so before picking up a car from Hertz for the weekend, I got an e-mail from the Hertz PHX station manager saying they’d upgraded me as an early birthday present. With equal parts anticipation and trepidation (I remember DFW Hertz “upgrading” me to a Ford F-150 pickup) Irene and I rolled up to spot 43 to find a Mercedes A220 sedan under a “Happy Birthday” sign. OK, now <em>this</em> is an exciting upgrade. Once we fought our way through the Phoenix traffic, the A220 made the 2-hour drive up I-17 a fun run, especially with a 75 mph speed limit. </li><li> Bridge Music -- Earth Soda by septahelix (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial Share-Alike  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/septahelix/34050  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I pushed a <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1206606966031675393/photo/1\">picture of the Hertz car under the Happy Birthday sign</a> to the TravelCommons Instagram Story roll. Steve Frick replied, saying that a friend of his had gotten a Hertz birthday upgrade too, to a Jag. Not to throw any shade, but I definitely think the PHX team did me a bit better with the Benz, but it’s nice of Hertz to give their customers a bit of a birthday surprise. With so many travel providers working hard to squeeze, to optimize, and then to charge for every little thing, getting a birthday present from one of them with a bit of luxury -- and in my case not an insignificant upgrade -- it’s a pleasant throwback to what travel was like when I started business travel coming on 35 years ago.&nbsp;</li><li>But all that love was blown away less than 2 weeks later when the Hertz team in Cabo put me through a 20-minute hard sell on insurance -- $85/day on a $50/day rental -- and then charged me $14/day for something called “Credit Card Care”, all for a beat-up VW Passat with 50,000 hard miles on it. Ugh.</li><li>Steve also hit the TravelCommons website to talk about mileage runs. In the last episode, I said that Mark Skinner’s DC-HKG up-and-back to carry a NASA cosmic ray detector on United’s over-the-pole route was one helluva mileage run. Steve said -<ul><li>I haven’t done a mileage run in years but came real close to losing my Southwest companion pass status for 2020. I had to change a few of my travel website profiles to use my Southwest card over my Hilton American Express card in order to hit it for 2020. It’s always a tough decision do I want 12 points per dollar at Hilton properties or free Southwest flights for my wife</li></ul></li><li>Thanks, Steve. I’ll tweak my travel credit cards now and then to hit some goals, but I hadn’t thought of it as an end-of-year mileage run. But it does make sense, especially with Southwest which counts credit card spend toward Companion Pass. I like that, a credit-card mileage run -- definitely more climate friendly.</li><li>I was talking about my flights to and from Phoenix a couple of weeks ago with one of the guys on the project team, a younger guy, and the look he gave me suggested that I’d hit peak travel nerdery -- at least in his eyes. I was telling him that I fly out to Phoenix on United from ORD because United has an 8am flight out, it’s easier to get a morning coffee at ORD than MDW, I get a free upgrade to Economy Plus which makes it easier to sleep, and because United uses PHX in Terminal 2, the older “slum” terminal that, because it’s separate from the main terminals, makes it easier to get an Uber or Lyft. But then I fly back to Chicago on Southwest because they have more flights back in the afternoon which gives me some flexibility with last-minute meetings, they don’t charge a change fee, they fly out of the newer Terminal 4 in PHX which gives me a much better selection of restaurants and bars than Terminal 2, and it puts me into Chicago-Midway where the wait for an Uber or Lyft is always shorter than at ORD. To me, it was a completely reasonable thought process -- optimizing each leg for the amenities I’d use. I turned to one of the other guys -- a guy who’s been traveling 20-some years -- “Yup, makes perfect sense to me,” he said. The younger guy was just shaking his head; probably muttering “OK Boomer” under his breath. But he’ll learn.</li><li>Back in November, during one of my semi-regular spelunks through Google Analytics, I noticed that <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/11/20/podcast-146-rental-demolition-derby-traveler-gift-guide/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #146 — Rental Demolition Derby; Traveler Gift Guide\">the November 2018 episode - #146: Rental Demolition Derby and Traveler Gift Guide</a> - was one of the top 5 pages on the TravelCommons website. I couldn’t figure how stories of rental car wrecks would get a lot of Google hits, so it must be the gift guide. Which suggested that maybe I should update it for 2019, but more as a blog post this time. I read through a half-dozen or so other gift guides, looking for some ideas I could steal, but they got pretty repetitious pretty quick -- pushing Away luggage, Huzi infinity pillows, and Aesop travel kits, which suggests to a cynical mind that these companies must’ve been splashing a lot of samples around the blog-o-sphere. And maybe didn’t age all that well after the Verge published an <a aria-label=\"exposé on Away’s toxic work culture (opens in a new tab)\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/5/20995453/away-luggage-ceo-steph-korey-toxic-work-environment-travel-inclusion\" target=\"_blank\">exposé on Away’s toxic work culture</a>. But anyway, I wanted something a bit different, and on one of my flights got thinking about a chat I’d had with a friend a while back. She was looking for gift ideas for her daughter who, a couple of years out of college, was starting a new job with a lot more business travel. Replaying that chat in my head, and thinking about the younger guy on my project team, I started going through my travel kit -- rummaging through my messenger bag and then cycling through my suitcase -- mentally, though; not enough space to physically pull it down from the overhead and open it up; and that would’ve looked a bit weird. I built <a aria-label=\"a list of the things I really use on my trips (opens in a new tab)\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/12/11/best-gift-ideas-for-a-new-traveler/\" target=\"_blank\">a list of the things I really use on my trips</a>, and that I miss when I forget to bring them along. Then I winnowed it down to 10 -- because “Top 10” is a key search term -- and there you have it. If you haven’t looked at it yet, give it a read and leave a comment with your suggestions.</li><li>Number 2 on <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/12/11/best-gift-ideas-for-a-new-traveler/\">my list of ideas</a>, after a 20-inch black roller bag, is picking up the application fee for TSA Global Entry for your new traveler. For $100, or for free with many airline and hotel reward credit cards, you can gift them with 5 years of hassle reduction with PreCheck for domestic travel and a fast path through Customs when they travel internationally. Coming back from Cabo, we connected again through Houston-Hobby and so had to clear Immigration and Customs there. It was my first time through Customs there, so it took me a minute to find the Global Entry kiosks. The interface was a bit different from the ORD ones. Instead of asking for my passport and prompting me for the fingerprint pad, it asked me to fit my face inside a red box before taking my picture. The camera didn’t look adjustable, so I squatted down ‘til my face was in the frame and then clicked the Take Photo button. A couple seconds later, the kiosk spit out my receipt and I was off to the exit -- no passport or fingerprint scans, no clicking through questions. Quick, but odd. Some Google searches when I got home told me that I’d hit the new generation of Global Entry kiosks -- Global Entry 2.0 -- that uses facial recognition to match the kiosk picture with my passport and Global Entry application pictures. Given how crappy the kiosk picture looked on the receipt -- and that I hadn’t taken my glasses off -- I’m either really impressed or really concerned about the accuracy of their facial recognition algorithm; I’m not quite sure which.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li> Bridge Music -- Absolutely Clear (ft Jeris &amp; Goldfish) by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/45578 Ft: Jeris, Goldfish  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong> Travel Potpourri for $400, Alex </strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Here it is, the last episode of the year that I’m trying to get out before cracking the Vueve and trying to stay awake until midnight. With the clock ticking, instead of a proper topic, all I can do is gather up some odds-‘n’-ends from my travel notebooks into a Jeopardy-like topic “Travel Potpourri”</li><li>And writing in my travel notebooks is something I like to do. I have a couple: a small one -- a 3½x5½-in or A6 size that fits in my back pocket -- to jot down notes, bullet points; and a larger one that I use as a proper travel journal. For that, I was using a B6 Muji notebook that I picked up in Lisbon 3 years ago. After I filled that one up, I switched to a taller, thinner Japanese traveler-sized notebook because… that’s what I had laying around. I’ve been writing in travel notebooks since I’ve started the podcast -- gotta feed the beast -- usually in public places -- in bars, a lotta bars, while drinking beers, or on planes, a lotta&nbsp; planes, though turbulence can be a problem. And for some reason, I’ve found that this act of writing in public generates a bit of interest, and a chunk of questions. Back in October, on the Finnair flight back from our Baltics tour, I was catching up, writing up my thoughts on our couple of days in Helsinki when the guy a few seats over started asking me what I was writing. He was a younger Finnish guy. He and his girlfriend and a group of 5 or 6 others were connecting through Chicago to Miami for a cruise, and they started their cruise party the minute the drink carts rolled. But he wanted to know what I was writing and why. The what was easy; he wanted to know what I thought of Helsinki; where I’d been, how I liked it. He was intrigued by our Baltic Riga-Tallinn-Helsinki itinerary, in kind of a “that’s weird, but interesting” way. The why I’m not sure made it through translation. It’s not a pure travelogue -- not a “we did this, and then did that”. It’s more about impressions; what I found unique; what caught my eye. Writing it down makes me think about it, and when I go back and read those pages, some 2 or 10 or 20 years later, it reminds me of that place, that time, those experiences.&nbsp;</li><li>And when I talk about travel with folks, when I tell them how often I travel, I’ll often get a story -- in a bar, on a plane, or… while getting my hair cut. The girl who does my hair told me about her trip to Peru with a yoga group. Not the whole trip (I don’t have that much hair), but on their flight back, out of Lima, the plane took off, rotating up, while the flight attendants were still in the aisle doing the final check. It was a bit of mayhem, she said. That had to be one quick taxi out and take-off, I thought, because you’d think those flight attendants would be sprinting to their seats once that plane started rolling down the runway. Which I have seen before, especially when the captain gets a quick release from a ground hold and wants to get airborne before the tower changes their mind. But I’ve never seen them leave the ground with anyone still in the aisle.</li><li>Maybe the pilot was distracted -- a message from the tower, an animal on the runway, a sudden thought crossed his mind. I thought about pilot distraction when walking the <a href=\"https://thehikehouse.com/trails/airport-mesa-trail\">Airport Mesa trail</a> in Sedona earlier this month. The trail name says it all -- it’s a 3½-mile loop around the mesa where Sedona’s general aviation airport is. The hikers aren’t the potential distraction, though. It’s one of Sedona’s famous energy vortexes that’s right next to the airport. The Airport Vortex is, according to<a href=\"https://sedonaverdevalley.natgeotourism.com/content/airport-mesa-vortex/svvc7d222a849df1d7d6\"> one website</a>, “an Upflow area (also called Electric or Masculine) that helps your spirit soar for a higher perspective and/or greater oneness and serenity.” Watching a couple of private jets take off while on our hike, I wondered what would happen if the pilot suddenly achieved greater oneness and serenity while rotating off the top of that mesa. For someone as unenlightened and non-serene as me, that would be one helluva distraction.</li><li>I think for many, maybe close to most frequent travelers, Uber and Lyft have replaced taxis, at least in the US, when not renting a car. So it got my attention when I hit a weird Uber app failure at ORD at the end of October. Coming back from Charlottesville, I light up both Uber and Lyft while getting off the plane to compare wait times and fares (you’d think their surge pricing would be consistent, but it rarely is for me). Uber is a bit better, so I go to book a ride. Except that the Uber app wouldn’t pick up at the domestic terminals, just the separate international terminal, Terminal 5. I check Lyft again; yup, they’ll pick me up at Terminal 2, so I book with them instead. But it’s weird, so I keep checking Uber. I walk out the door to the rideshare pick-up area. There’s nothing but cars with pink Lyft lights; not an Uber decal in sight. An older couple walks up to me -- “Where does Uber pick up?” Normally here, I tell them, but they seem to have deleted it from their app today. It was a good night to be a Lyft driver. I wondered how long it took Uber to notice that they weren’t getting any pick-ups from one of the country’s busiest airports.</li><li>Tonight, though -- New Year’s Eve night -- I’ll be skipping Uber and their after-midnight price surges. I’ll be happy to hang out at home, to skip any travel, and just pop a bottle... or two of Vueve and wish all you TravelCommons’ listeners a Happy New Year and fun and safe travels in 2020.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #158</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_158.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #158 — Travel Potpourri for $400, Alex','','inherit','closed','closed','','2609-revision-v1','','','2021-03-14 16:13:09','2021-03-14 21:13:09','',2609,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/14/2609-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3481,1,'2021-03-15 14:08:21','2021-03-15 19:08:21','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\">\n<p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/IMG_0449.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2482 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/IMG_0449-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a></p><figcaption>Latest in Sustainable Food Delivery&nbsp;</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>Moving the TravelCommons studios kept me mostly off the road this month except for a quick trip to Nashville, but staying out of restaurants has helped me finally drop the last bit of Christmas weight. We talk about the \"earn and burn\" strategy for frequent travel awards; answer a listener\'s question on how to keep from being overwhelmed when arriving in a new city, and new restaurant trends from the floor of the National Restaurant Association\'s big show. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_152.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #152: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the new TravelCommons studios <em>in</em> Chicago, IL. The move went surprisingly smoothly -- nothing lost, nothing destroyed on the 20-mile trip in from the western suburbs. Have the production bay rebuilt and now trying out the new studio set-up, so we’ll see how this sounds. </li><li>Which also means I haven’t done much travel since the last episode; just a quick trip last week down to Nashville. But the move downtown meant I had to rethink some of my travel patterns -- not how to get to and from Nashville, but how to get to and from Chicago Midway airport. We’ve said before in many episodes, most (all?) frequent travelers are all about optimizing the standard parts of their journey -- what’s the most efficient way to get to the airport, when to leave -- optimizing the trade-off between sleep and getting to the gate when status pre-boarding is announced. In the old digs, I had a pretty predictable 25-30 minute drive to either O’Hare or Midway, and long-term relationship with a dependable driver. Which meant answering the “when do I need leave for the airport” question was a mindless exercise -- subtract 90 minutes from the departure time and send a text to my guy the night before. But now it’s a kinda predictable 60-minute public transit ride or a very unpredictable 35-60-minute Uber/Lyft ride with even more unpredictable wait times and surge pricing, especially when catching a morning flight. Actually, for this 3-day trip, I think it would’ve been cheaper to drive and park, even with the City of Chicago’s latest parking taxes.</li><li>The Southwest flights between Midway and Nashville were a bit odd because the pilots kept everyone in their seats for the entire flight due to “expected turbulence” - of which there was absolutely none. Though I thought it was interesting that the pilot on our return trip said “We may ask our flight attendants to remain seated so we can fly faster and pick up some time.” It’s an hour-and-20-minute flight, so not too long to stay seated as long as you didn’t drop a couple of beers at the bar right before boarding. But it also meant I didn’t get a chance to use some of the free drink coupons Southwest sent me last month. I should’ve followed the advice of a Nashville Airport billboard that was posted right above the Southwest gate -- “Before Wheels Up, Whiskey up.”</li><li>Bridge Music — &nbsp;<em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/content/Per/Per_-_DLDN_Instrumental.mp3\" target=\"_blank\">DLDN Instrumental</a></em>&nbsp;by St Paul</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Because the trip to Nashville was personal travel, I used award points where I could -- Hyatt for our hotel and Hertz for the rental car. The only reason I didn’t use Southwest points was because I was burning off a $100 customer satisfaction certificate Southwest sent me as comp for one of their 3 delayed flights I talked about in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/podcast-150-travel-interruptus/\">Travel Interruptus episode</a> a couple of months back. We’ve talked about how to use awards many times over the years. And while the tactics may change a bit, my overall strategy has been pretty consistent -- use them rather than save them, or “earn and burn” as some folks say. I know a lot of travelers who save them -- hoard them -- thinking of them as their travel savings account -- or perhaps a badge of honor -- “I have 2 million American Airline points” to which I think (and try not to say) “that are going to get you a lot less the longer you keep holding them”. Because &nbsp;rather than increasing in value by earning interest, they can suddenly decrease in value when United or BA or Marriott or, a couple of weeks ago, Hertz decide to redo their awards charts. And, for all the luvvy words in those announcements about “increasing the value” of their programs, I’ve never seen one of those changes <em>increase</em> the value of the points. At the end of May, Hertz published -- without any warning or announcement -- a new award chart that increased the point cost for daily and weekly rentals by 11-36 percent. Back in March, Marriott added a new top hotel category with a 42% higher per-night award cost -- 85,000 points a night for the properties that moved into the new Category 8 vs. 60,000 points when they were in 7. And most of the properties that got that 42% bump were resort properties -- the ones you’d most likely want to use your points on. In November, United will eliminate their award charts altogether, following Delta and Southwest in moving to dynamic pricing. Pick your slogan - “Earn and burn”; “Use ‘em or lose ‘em”. Though I think I like “you deserve a break today” better. Plan a vacation and burn your points before the companies do.</li><li>Even though &nbsp;I haven’t traveled much since <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/podcast-151-traveler-data-leaks-brittany-street-food/\">the last episode</a>, I’ve still been thinking a lot about travel - specifically, laying out our trip at the back half of this month -- a week in Ireland and then heading over to Scotland for Claire’s graduation from Univ of St Andrews. I talked in the last episode about wrestling with the Avios website to book our flights, but with that done, I got consumed by packing and moving and unpacking, and sorta lost track of the other reservations that we needed for our week in Ireland. That insight landed on me pretty hard the Tuesday after Memorial Day when I looked at my calendar and started seeing June dates. I got nothing -- no car, no places to sleep. And it’s not like the end of June is low season in Ireland. Back in March, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/19/podcast-149-dining-single-airlines-need-to-tell-us-more/\">episode 149</a>, I talked about how we dug deep when planning our spring break trip to Brittany -- buying guidebooks, scouring web sites, .... But we had never been there before. My planning for Ireland is a lot more impromptu because, back in the early ‘90’s, I spent a lot of time in Cork for business, and while the country has no doubt changed a lot in the past 20-some odd years, I had a sense of what I wanted to see and a bit of an itinerary in mind -- spend most of the week hubbing out of Galway, going south to County Clare and north to the Connemara, and then heading over to Dublin for the weekend before flying over to Edinburgh. I found myself spending most of my time spelunking through TripAdvisor. First, in the Ireland forum trying to figure out the right rental car strategy. My default strategy -- go with Hertz and leverage my US status if anything goes sideways -- wouldn’t work because Hertz has franchised its name in Ireland to another company. Also, rental car insurance seems to be a bit unique there; using your credit card to cover damages like on my last trip to St Andrews apparently requires a letter from your card issuer and is still a particular hassle at the counter. Then there was the sifting through the Manichean universe of TripAdvisor reviews -- a bipolar split between 5-star “everything is fantabulous” and 1-star “it’s a complete dump and I’m sure the maid spit in my water glass” write-ups. I tend to the more forgiving end of that spectrum. I don’t think you should slam a place for a problem if you didn’t tell them about it and give them a chance to fix it. I also try to have reasonable expectations; you’re not going to get psychic/transcendent levels of service for $100/night. It took me a solid day-and-a-half of screen time, but we now have a bed for each night and a set of wheels to get us there. </li><li>Being off the road for a month has helped me drop a nagging 7-8 lbs that I put on over Christmas and until now -- 5-6 months later -- haven’t been able to drop. We’ve talked in past episodes how easy it is to put weight on when traveling -- eating 3 meals a day in restaurants, or worse on the run in airports, makes portion control difficult, as well as eating more vegetables than fries. But even when you’ve chosen, say, the fish instead of the burger, you’re still someone else’s mercy for how it’s cooked. This light bulb lit for me while watching <em><a href=\"https://www.netflix.com/title/81028317\">The Chef Show</a></em><a href=\"https://www.netflix.com/title/81028317\"> on Netflix</a> over the weekend. It’s a great cooking show. It stars Jon Favreau, director of the Iron Man movies, and Roy Choi, who was one of the first gourmet food truck guys in LA; you’d track them down on Twitter for fantastic Korean-Mexican tacos. These guys worked together on Favreau’s <em>Chef </em>movie a few years back and then got back together for this Netflix series. In the second episode, they’re cooking in Atlanta with Ford Fry at his restaurant, The Optimist. They’re making a Shrimp Toast dish that easily uses over a stick of butter to cook and sauce 5 large shrimp. They joke about the amount of butter and salt restaurants use -- “When they say ‘no salt’...,” Favreau asks Choi, Choi responds “...we add twice as much”. And then they add another half-stick of butter to the shrimp pan. I’m sure it tastes great, but it was an “a-ha” moment -- how, even when you think you’re ordering healthy, the guys in the back are focused on taste, not counting calories for you.</li><li>After our move, I’ve cranked through most of the change of addresses, but haven’t yet done my drivers license. But that one will take a little more work because my current Illinois drivers license isn’t a Real ID license -- it doesn’t have the gold star in the upper right corner. It’s not a problem right now, but in 16 months from now, October 2020, when the TSA says it will fully enforce the 2005 Real ID act -- 15 years later, for real this time, no more extensions or waivers -- and so will no longer accept non-compliant IDs at airports. Getting a Real ID license requires more documentation -- proof of my Social Security Number and two documents with our new address -- like a utility bill or a bank statement, which could be a bit of a challenge now that we get most everything electronically. Now, I could just skip it and use my passport or Global Entry card (if I could find it) instead. But that would mean I’d have to remember to bring one more thing with me to the airport, which is never a best practice. Not critical -- I have 16 months to get around to it -- though probably not something to wait until the last minute on. The Illinois DMV isn’t the quickest, most nimble organization on its best days. I can only imagine what it’ll be like come, say August or September 2020, when it gets crushed with people without passports looking to swap their drivers licenses before the October 1 deadline.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com. </li><li>Bridge Music —  &nbsp;<em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/content/oldDog/oldDog_-_Goodbye_sooner_or_later.mp3\" target=\"_blank\">Goodbye Sooner or Later</a></em>&nbsp;by oldDog    </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Overwhelmed By Travel</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Cristine Danielson, a long-time friend and first time listener, asked me after listening to the last episode “I’d love to hear how you get acclimatized to a new city from the moment you leave the gate. I always feel overwhelmed” &nbsp;That pulled me up short. I had never really thought about it that way. I’ve been traveling heavily coming up on 35 years; I’ve been traveling longer than I haven’t. I started when I was too young and seemingly indestructible to know any better, and now, I have enough travel experience, routines, rhythms &nbsp;-- patterns I called them earlier -- and status that, even when gutting through <em><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/podcast-150-travel-interruptus/\">Travel Interruptus</a></em>, things seem more inconvenient than overwhelming.</li><li>One of the most important things for me is having enough money in my pocket to handle what could come my way. At the end of the last century -- the 1990’s to be exact -- I was doing a lot of bunny hop trips through Europe -- Sweden one day, Switzerland the next, then Germany, then the UK …. This was pre-ATMs, pre-Euro, pre-mobile phones, and for many places in Europe, pre-widespread acceptance of credit cards. Truly the travel dark ages. So, my routine would be to exit Customs, head straight to the Currency Exchange, and cash a $100 American Express travelers check so I would have enough local cash for, say a coffee and a cab. Having that cash in my pocket settled me a bit; maybe gave me a sense of some control, no matter how illusionary it might be. Today, I head straight for an ATM instead of the Currency Exchange and, as I said a few episodes back, make sure I have a “full house” of credit cards -- a Visa and MasterCard from different banks, and an Amex. And it’s not just when I’m out of the country. Even in the US, I’m a lot more comfortable traveling when I have 5 or 10 $20’s in my wallet.</li><li>After my wallet comes my phone. Modern travel is all about the smartphone app -- is my plane on time, where’s the hotel, what train line do I need? My whole <em><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/podcast-150-travel-interruptus/\">Travel Interruptus</a></em> tale would’ve been much worse than “inconvenient” without smartphone connectivity. I wouldn’t have been able to tweet at Southwest customer service, I wouldn’t have been able to find a decent hotel in Paris when the train delays made us miss our flight home, I wouldn’t have been able to book that God-awful expensive Uber that got us to CDG just in time to make our flight. Back in the last century, I would’ve searched for a pay phone, pulled out my phone card, and rung up the travel agency. Even today, if I’m ringing up a travel agency instead of doing it on my own, when was the last time you saw a working pay phone? </li><li>Those are the mechanics of travel, but what about fitting in to the place you’ve arrived? I talked about how business travelers especially tend to float above everything in a “<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2008/04/29/podcast-64-escaping-the-travel-bubble-marks-travel-tips/\">travel bubble</a>”. You walk out -- of the plane with enough status, otherwise baggage claim -- and find someone holding a sign with your name who’s job is to give you a bottle of water and whisk you past the things that might be disconcerting, overwhelming. When that bubble pops, unexpectedly, and drops you into the day-to-day reality of the place you are; that decompression can be overwhelming. </li><li>The closest I came to an overwhelming experience was not arriving in a place, but trying to leave. A colleague and I wrapped up our day in Pune, India and were flying home from Mumbai that night, but on different flights; his leaving a couple of hours earlier than mine. For some reason, the person arranging our trip had us taking cars from Pune to Mumbai instead of flying. Well, OK. It wasn’t a bad drive -- actually a bit scenic -- right until we hit Mumbai traffic. We get to the international terminal, we pull our bags from the trunk, and make our way thru the general chaos of people and push carts and food vendors to the entrance. &nbsp;We both have our itineraries out and ready for inspection. My colleague goes first -- the officer looks at it and waves him through. I hand over my itinerary and follow my colleague. Except I can’t. I can’t go into the terminal; I’m too early. I’m now back out in the chaos with nowhere to go -- our car is long gone, I have no idea where Mumbai Airport is in relation to anything -- is there a hotel nearby. I don’t have a working mobile phone to ring anyone. I’m just standing around, with hundreds of other people trying to get in, or saying good-bye to someone trying to get in, or waiting for someone to come out. I walked up and down the sidewalk in front of the terminal, looking for something -- a phone, a bench. I find a door. I look in -- it’s a lounge for people waiting for arriving passengers. There’s a big plexiglass wall separating baggage claim. But more importantly, it has seats, is air conditioned, and has a restroom. I walk in -- except I can’t. I need a ticket. Where do I get that? Back out and around the corner. I find the ticket window. It’s a couple hundred rupee -- $2-3. I reach into my pocket and pull out my last bit of cash -- a 500 rupee note. Things got a lot less overwhelming.</li><li>Bridge Music —   &nbsp;<em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/content/Zapac/Zapac_-_Test_Drive.mp3\" target=\"_blank\">Test Drive</a>&nbsp;</em>by Zapac </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>New and Old Restaurant Trends</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Last month, I hit the <a href=\"https://restaurant.org/Home\">National Restaurant Association</a>’s <a href=\"https://www.nationalrestaurantshow.com/\">annual show</a> in Chicago’s McCormick Place convention center. If you need reminding of how big the restaurant business is in the US, this show is <em>huge</em>. I was interested to see what’s new and what has stayed the same since the last time I went, 4 years ago. </li><li>What’s new - Walking the aisles, I was immediately struck by the number of booths showing delivery containers. They were everywhere. Talking to a couple of vendors, they said some hotels are seeing huge growth in Doordash and Grubhub deliveries eating into their restaurant and room service revenues (all puns intended). And since they’re seeing it being driven by the new generation of new travelers -- the Millennial and Gen-Z travelers -- they think it’s more of a trend than a blip, yet another revenue stream lost to traveler technology -- like when they lost long-distance phone calls to cell phones, and then pay TV revenue to PCs and iPads running Netflix and YouTube. So many hotels, especially the lower end ones, are dropping food service altogether. But this collides head on with sustainability concerns -- the growth in delivery means a growth in styrofoam containers and plastic bags. And so I’d walk past, say, two booths back-to-back -- the first selling traditional containers; the second pushing compostable paper and bioplastics. These new containers looked good; except when I tried to use a paper straw on a frozen margarita sample that someone pushed on me. That was a complete fail.</li><li>Also saw a number of established ethnic food companies trying to branch out into new/hotter ethnic spaces. Kronos, for example, is one of the main companies selling Greek gyros meat. In their booth, they were sampling gyros, but also new chicken al pastor and Korean barbeque products. Cultural appropriation or trying to stay in business by catering to those darn Millennials and Gen Z’ers. I dunno, but a Kronos guy told me that 90% of their business still comes from gyros. Which kinda rang true when I looked at which sample booths had the longest lines -- hot dogs from Vienna Beef and Nathan’s and grilled cheese sandwiches from Tillamook Cheddar. </li><li>That being said, there were a lot of vendors selling Asian products -- primarily Japanese and Korean -- continuing the trend I’ve seen at the show. Digital is still big, but the focus seemed to have shifted from smartphone apps to \\ interfacing with those delivery services -- updating menus and getting orders automatically into their point-of-sale systems -- and more efficiently managing social media. I saw a Yelp booth for the first time at the show. It was a good-sized booth -- nicely carpeted, with tables full of phones running their app. But it was pretty empty -- mostly populated by Yelp employees. Gave me a good idea of how the restaurateurs were rating Yelp’s booth.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #152</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_152.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<p><!--EndFragment--></p>','Podcast #152 — Overwhelming Travel; New & Old Restaurant Trends','','inherit','closed','closed','','2474-revision-v1','','','2021-03-15 14:08:21','2021-03-15 19:08:21','',2474,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/15/2474-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3483,1,'2021-03-15 14:16:43','2021-03-15 19:16:43','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\">\n[caption id=\"attachment_2439\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/oysters_and_evian_bottles.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-2439 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/oysters_and_evian_bottles-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Cancale Oysters with a nice Evian Sancerre[/caption]\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p>Squeezing in another episode before moving the TravelCommons studios, we talk with <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mylaocoon\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Candid Wueest</span></a> of Symantec about websites that leak traveler data and what we can do to protect ourselves. I talk about yet more frustration with the <a href=\"http://avios.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Avios</a> frequent flyer program, while a listener writes in about his great experience with <a href=\"https://www.getfreebird.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Freebird</a>, a new flight rebooking service. I wrap up talking about great street food we had while touring Brittany, France last month. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_151.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #151: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, for the last time…. Not the last time for TravelCommons, just the last time for the studios “outside of Chicago”. We’re picking up stakes and moving about 20 miles east-northeast to Chicago’s Lakeview neighborhood. Hence the reason for the short-cycle on this episode. We’ll be breaking down and packing up the studio and production bay next week and probably won’t have everything reassembled until the end of the month. The recording isn’t really the issue -- I could always go back to my roots and find a spare bathroom to record in. It’s more about the production. I’m not sure I want to shrink my workflow down from a beefy dual 22-inch monitor Windows 10 mini-tower rig to my 2014 vintage 11-inch MacBook Air.</li><li>Being consumed by the move logistics vortex also means I haven’t done any real travel in the 2 weeks since the last episode -- but, given my most recent travel experiences, as laid out in last episode’s <em>Travel Interruptus</em> epic, I’ve appreciated the break. Especially when yet another yet another April snowstorm that blew up 700 flights last weekend. Instead, I’ve been wrestling once again with Avios -- the British Airways, Iberia, and now Aer Lingus frequent flyer program -- trying to book a Chicago-Dublin-Edinburgh Aer Lingus itinerary for my daughter’s graduation from University of St Andrews next month. I’ve been pretty <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/08/26/podcast-116-traveling-thru-japan-luggage-trends/\">vocal</a> about my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">challenges</a> with Avios over the years. In this go-around, the first wackiness was just trying to use the Avios website. To search for flights, you need to log in with your BA, Iberia, or Aer Lingus credentials. I try with all three; and fail with all three. Seems that the passwords given out by BA and Iberia don’t meet Avios’ security rules, so they fail. I assumed the username for my Aer Lingus account was my email address and the password seemed strong enough, but that kept failing too. Finally, after digging around my Aer Lingus profile, I found a separate username, which I’d never seen or used before, and <em>that</em> worked. Finally through the gate and onto the second wackiness -- the difference between the value of an Avios point on the Aer Lingus and Avios web sites. The award offers on both sites were points + cash. Taking the “market rate” for the ticket (pulled from Expedia), subtracting out the required cash payment, and dividing by the number of required Avios points gives the value of the Avios point for that award offer. My rule of thumb is -- get at least 2 cents/point or pay cash. The Aer Lingus site valued an Avios point at 0.7 cents while the Avios site hit my 2-cent minimum. I couldn’t quite understand that 65% difference, but I booked our tickets on the wonkier Avios site before it went away. If I remember anything from my University of Chicago business school courses, it’s that markets are efficient; 65% price differences don’t last forever. Though in this case, that difference may linger because the Avios website makes it so damn hard to find. </li><li>Bridge Music — <em>Lakeside Jam</em> by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/55998 </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Veteran TravelCommons listener Mika Pyyhkala sent in a note this week talking about his great experience with a flight rebooking service, <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Freebird (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"http://getfreebird.com\" target=\"_blank\">Freebird</a>. Mika writes:<ul><li>I was flying with a companion from (Wichita) ICT-STL and STL-DTW. &nbsp;Just as the plane was descending to DTW, I received text messages from WN and Freebird that STL-DTW on WN had been cancelled. &nbsp;Freebird then manually advised that the only flight for that day was a DL STL-DTW, and they were going to book it in case I wanted it; if they waited longer there might not be enough time to issue the new ticket on Delta through their travel agent. &nbsp;They just asked me to confirm that I in fact wanted the Delta ticket.  </li><li>I confirmed we wanted the 2 Delta tickets, and by the time the door opened in STL we had a confirmation number to check in for the Delta flight leaving in 47 minutes. We got seats together on the Delta flight that were assigned by the Freebird process, and they even gave us free drinks!</li><li>I think we actually arrived in DTW a few minutes earlier than we were scheduled on the original flight, and it made for a great travel story and adventure! &nbsp;This was my first time using Freebird as well!</li><li>It costs $19 to protect a one way trip per traveler. &nbsp;It’s simple to work with them: unlike insurance, there are no claim forms, long waits, or papers to sign</li></ul></li><li>Mika, thanks for this. I hadn’t heard of Freebird before Mika’s note. Hitting their website, they’re selling their service to companies, travel agencies, and to individual travelers. Clicking through to a TechCrunch article about them, it says they’re also talking to Amex and Citibank about including Freebird as a credit card benefit. The article quotes the CEO, Ethan Bernstein - “It’s funny what happens when people deal with uncertainty; uncertainty is the worst. As soon you give people information, human support and technology to help them solve their problems, they experience the event so much differently.” &nbsp;Which is exactly right. Certainty lets you plan; uncertainty just leaves you to stew… and drink at the airport bar… and eat bad airport food… and bitch Tweet. Yup, uncertainty leads to lots of bad things</li><li>One more-fun-than-necessarily-good thing on last month’s trip was getting to try out an alpha version of a new augmented reality feature for Google Maps. I used it first in Stockholm; we got off the Arlanda Express at the Central Train station and wanted make our way over to the <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Östermalms Saluhall (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.ostermalmshallen.se/en/\" target=\"_blank\">Östermalms Saluhall</a> for lunch. When I chose “Walking” as our transport mode, a “Start AR” button showed up next to the usual button to start the directions. With AR, I’d hold my phone up, the display would use the camera to show the streetscape in front of me with the &nbsp;directions -- street names, arrows -- overlaid on the real-time image. I thought it was a nice add; reduced any ambiguity about where the next turn was. One interesting feature -- when I started walking, the screen dimmed and a message popped up telling me to stop looking at the phone and look straight ahead. All in all, it’s kinda fun. At least I thought so; Andrew and Irene seemed much less impressed. It worked very well for what was billed as an alpha product. It’ll be interesting to see how it develops, and how fast Google rolls it out.</li><li>But even without a broader AR roll-out, Google Maps seems on track to become the next “<a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"super app (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://skift.com/2019/04/16/google-maps-is-ready-to-transform-the-world-of-superapps-a-skift-deep-dive/\" target=\"_blank\">super app</a>” -- sorta the Western counterpart to China’s WeChat -- the first “super app”, a Swiss Army Knife-kind of “it does everything” app. Now Google Maps isn’t to that level -- yet -- but it is growing. It started as a mapping app, then added driving directions, then ride share -- showing Uber and Lyft prices, then public transit directions with real-time arrival times, replacing the core use case for apps like Transit. Then the “Explore Nearby” became more prominent -- which, for me, has supplanted Yelp when looking for a restaurant because it’s so much more convenient, and with deep links to OpenTable for reservations; and for nearby hotels, direct booking links to Expedia and Booking.com. I wasn’t surprised when I saw a stat that those “Near Me” searches grew 150 percent the last year. I’m not quite sure what I think about this -- loving a free service that keeps becoming more valuable vs. becoming more enslaved to the Google overlords. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/08/27/podcast-132-travel-apps-on-my-phone/\">episode #132</a>, I listed all the travel apps on my smartphone, and Google Maps was the most important -- “Indeed, it’s the only travel app with its own screen real estate rather than sharing space in the Travel folder,” I said. And it only keeps getting more indispensable.</li><li>Thinking back to our last day in Paris when both Ubers that we ordered were nice black Mercedes, I couldn’t help thinking how the quality of US Uber and Lyft vehicles has slipped. I remember when I started using Uber in 4-5 years ago, the cars were pristine. I remember working in Baltimore one summer; I was more than happy to wait 5 minutes for an Uber rather than take one of the cabs waiting at the stand right outside the building I was in. Those cabs were so beat up, so full of trash, and most of the time, without working air conditioning. Today, cabs haven’t gotten much cleaner, but Uber and Lyft seem to be lowering their standards. I dunno if it’s because of falling unemployment rates or trying to keep up with growth or squeezing driver pay to improve their post-IPO margins -- or all of the above -- but I’m seeing a real drop in quality.</li><li>Long-time TravelCommons listeners will recall that I’ve spent a lot of time in New Orleans airport and other than serving beer in go cups French Quarter-style so you can walk around the terminal with it, there’s not much good to say about it. Especially with regards to food and restaurants. For such a great food town to have such mediocre airport concessions has always been beyond me. But then again, the original terminal was built in 1959, and then expanded in the mid-70’s and mid-90’s. The new $1 billion replacement terminal was originally scheduled to open last year during New Orleans’ tricentennial, but that then slipped to February of this year, then to May, and now to a “to be determined” date sometime in the fall. The restaurant selection is supposed to be much better but I hope they don’t change that beer policy though. One time, waiting out yet another thunderstorm delay, I’d bought a beer and was standing by the gate drinking it because the bar was full. American called boarding and I walked up to the gate. The agent stopped me -- “You can drink that beer anywhere in the airport -- except on the jetway.” I looked down; I’d forgotten that I was still carrying that beer. I stepped to the side, chugged it, and then got on the plane. Felt like a very New Orleans thing to do.</li><li>And if you have any travel rants, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. &nbsp;The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Facebook page</a> or our Instagram account at <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Travelcommons</a> -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music —  <em>A Thousand And None</em> by Speck (c) copyright 2018 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/speck/57256 Ft: Mr_Yesterday</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Traveler Data Leaks</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Interview with <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mylaocoon\">Candid Wueest</a>, Principal Threat Researcher at Symantec and author of a blog post titled <a href=\"https://www.symantec.com/blogs/threat-intelligence/hotel-websites-leak-guest-data\"><em>Two in Three Hotel Websites Leak Guest Booking Details and Allow Access to Personal Data</em></a></li><li>Bridge Music —  <em>dazed </em>by Jeris (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/VJ_Memes/39456 Ft: airtone</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Brittany Street Food</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I’ll write a proper “Road Trip” post about our Brittany trip later this spring, after we get settled in the new digs, but after streaming a few episodes of Netflix’s “Street Food” series, I started thinking about some of the Breton street food we enjoyed while touring last month. If you’ve seen any of the Netflix series, you know that it’s more about the vendors than the food. But my French trails off after “oui,” “non,” “merci,” and “S\'il vous plaît” so I wasn’t able to get much of the vendor’s life stories. So this will be all about the food.</li><li>The first place we stayed was <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancale\">Cancale</a>, and we went there for one reason - oysters. Like people have been doing for 300-some odd years. When the tide is out, you can see miles of oyster beds with big farm tractors moving through the rows, hauling out trailers of oysters. Lining the ramp where the tractors drive up out of the beds is a little oyster market -- 8 stalls selling oysters fresh from the beds for €5-6/dozen. After adding another couple of euros for shucking, a half lemon and the use of a plastic platter, we’d have our afternoon snack -- sitting on the sea wall by the market, slurping through a couple dozen very briny oysters while watching the tractors work, and then pitching the empty shells back onto the beach for the seagulls to pick through. Our first afternoon, we only had a couple of cans of beer in our jacket pocket. The next couple of afternoons, we’d pour a nice white wine into some empty Evian bottles (Claire and I preferred a Sancerre) and make sure we had a good supply of wet wipes. We didn’t miss an afternoon on that sea wall while in Cancale.</li><li>Buckwheat is a big thing in Brittany. It’s been grown in Brittany for half a millennium or more, and for almost that long, it seems, has been turned into a <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galette\">galette</a>. a buckwheat crêpe. But a crêpe in form and shape only. Instead of a soft white wheat flour crêpe filled with jam or Nutella, the galette is crisper/firmer and savory. Fine on its own smeared with Breton butter, or with egg and cheese and ham inside. We got into Concarneau, on the southwest coast of Brittany about an hour before the weekly Friday outdoor market closed. &nbsp;I counted a half-dozen galette trucks. We walked up to the closest one. The cook was finishing up what looked like a weekend’s worth of galettes for the person in front of us -- flipping them, then pulling them off two hot metal disks, buttering them, and adding them to the stack. It was Friday in Lent, so I went for the egg, onion, and cheese galette. The creaminess of the cheese played nicely against the nutty graininess of the buckwheat.</li><li>The next day we drove to Rennes, our last stop in Brittany. We dropped the rental car at the train station and took the subway to Place des Lices for the huge Saturday market. We walked down from the subway station, through the fruit and vegetable stands lining the street -- beautiful stuff, but we’re leaving the next day, so we’re not doing a lot of green grocery shopping. There, between the two market halls, is a collection of food trucks; about 70% of them selling what we were looking for -- <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galette-saucisse\">galette-saucisse</a> -- the classic Breton street food that is pretty much what the straight translation from French to English suggests -- a sausage in a galette. Kinda like a Breton hot dog, it’s a cooked pork sausage wrapped in a cool galette, maybe with some grilled onions and dijon mustard added. There were lines tailing back from all the trucks serving these. A local guy pointed one truck out to Irene -- “They’re the best”, he said. She and Claire stood in queue while Andrew and I searched for drinks. Around the corner, we found a local cider maker; a couple of tables surrounded by crates of cider bottles. Through a mangled bit of Franglais, we bought a bottle of dry cider that had stayed cool in the shade and four cups, and got back to the food truck line just in time to be handed my galette-saucisse. After finishing the sausage and cider, I swung past the cider stand to give him the empty bottle -- kinda in-person recycling. There wasn’t much time to catch up on his life story, but it was a sunny Saturday and he had a full line; looked like he was having a good day.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #151</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_151.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<p><!--EndFragment--></p>\n<p></p>','Podcast #151 — Traveler Data Leaks; Brittany Street Food','','inherit','closed','closed','','2436-revision-v1','','','2021-03-15 14:16:43','2021-03-15 19:16:43','',2436,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/15/2436-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3485,1,'2021-03-15 14:20:41','2021-03-15 19:20:41','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":2404} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/CoeazhcUMAAhyQN-300x251.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2404\"/><figcaption>This guy looks familiar...</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It\'s been a tough month for travel. Not quite to Book of Job-level torment, but two of this month\'s three trips spiraled into head-shaking metaphysical “What the hell is going on here” questioning of my decision to get out of bed that morning. I walk through the travel gods\' fun and games, as well as some new data on regional jet delays and buying a new travel bag.  All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_150.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:more {\"customText\":\"Click Here To read the Detailed Show Notes\"} -->\n<!--more Click Here To read the Detailed Show Notes-->\n<!-- /wp:more -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #150: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, as the weather begins to stagger unsteadily toward Spring -- 74 degrees on Monday, 5.3 inches of snow (thundersnow!) on Sunday, then back up into the 70’s two days later. &nbsp;April 14 -- over 5 inches of snow, over 1,000 flights cancelled. A nasty surprise for folks who thought it would be safe to connect through ORD, but just validates a Chicago truism -- don’t put the snow gear away until after Tax Day. Yup, welcome to the Midwest.</li><li>Have done a <em>chunk</em> of travel -- there’s a unit of measure for you -- since the last episode. A 2-day trip that hit 4 airports in the first day -- Chicago-Midway, Las Vegas, Houston-Hobby, and Nashville. The next week, I squoze in a trip to a new airport - State College, PA -- before heading out on vacation to Brittany, France. The squeeze wasn’t too tight -- flew back from State College on Weds night and left on vacation Thursday night -- but I did scout out a couple of backups in case the United Express regional jet went AWOL; a hour or so drive down to Harrisburg, a couple hour drive over to Pittsburgh. Luckily, I didn’t need them. United Express was having a good day, and therefore, so did I.</li><li>The next day’s flight to Paris on SAS by way of Stockholm went fine. We got in on time, found the left luggage lockers, and then the express train into the city all without much hassle. Arlanda Airport is comfortably sized and has good signage. The only real problem was that we got into center city Stockholm too early -- around 8:30am -- and nothing was really open. So we coffee’d up at one place, had some cardamom pastries at another, and generally puttered around until things started opening up an hour or so later. It was a sunny, if brisk, day, so walking around the Gamla Stan and Sodermalm was nice. </li><li>I always chuckle a bit when going through De Gaulle Airport, passing through the tangle of flat escalator walkway tubes that bridge the levels and open center of Terminal 1. The walkways are a bit awkward with wheeled luggage -- going down and then up. An airport porter in front of us let a wheelchair go free on the downhill span -- took a moment for it to register that it was empty -- then it rolled back to him on the uphill. No knock against him; it was the end of the day.</li><li>The next day, we caught the train out to Brittany, to Saint Malo. We walked out of the train station and across the street to Europcar for what was one of the easiest rental car pick-ups I’ve ever had in Europe. No scare-tactic insurance upselling -- just a look at my driver’s license and a quick pointer to where I could find the car in the train station parking lot. Five minutes, max. And dropping off the car a week later at Rennes train station? Absolutely the easiest rental drop-off -- gave the guy the keys and a receipt showing I’d filled up the car and I was done. No waiting for him to go inspect the car, just a handshake and “Have a good day”. </li><li>The next day wasn’t near as carefree, but we’ll talk about that in a few minutes.</li><li> Bridge Music — <em>Countryside Summer Joyride</em> by Kara Square (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mindmapthat/56281 Ft: Javolenus</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I’ve been not-quite-hating on, but certainly have been down on regional jets for quite some time on this podcast. Given a choice, I recommend people avoid them -- not because of their size, but their schedule dependability. Because the regional airlines’ model is to bounce a plane from place to place rather than route through hubs, they never recover from weather or mechanical delays. Those delays just cascade through the rest of the day. Now there often aren’t alternatives. Hence my earlier comment about needing backup plans for my regional jet flight home from State College. My flight was at the end of the day, the most vulnerable time to delays. Given my personal experience, &nbsp;I wasn’t surprised to read that US Dept of Transportation data showed that regional flights were 2-4 times more likely to be cancelled than mainline flights. The Chicago Tribune dug into the DOT data and found flights operated by Delta’s regional partners were 4 times more likely to be canceled than flights operated by Delta, while American Eagle and United Express were 2-3 times more likely to cancel flights than their mainline partners. You can’t avoid regional jets when going to places like State College or Charlottesville, VA or Appleton, WI -- but you can when flying to LGA or DFW or MSY. And in those cases, unless those RJ flights have exactly the schedule I need, I’ll suffer a bit of inconvenience for a lot more dependability.</li><li>On our travels through Brittany earlier this month, I found that we were getting a large number of “card declined” messages when trying to use our Chase Sapphire Visa card -- at gas stations, stores, and in Paris when I tried to use my Uber app. Now this isn’t a new card -- we’ve had it for over 5 years -- and it’s not the first time we’ve used it on travels in Europe. But Chase fraud algorithm seems more sensitive, throwing more false positives, and no way to update things. On the way out of Brest, I pulled into a Total gas station to fill up on our way to the Crozon peninsula. We’d be there for a couple of days of hiking and I wasn’t sure many gas stations we’d see (turned out that I didn’t need to worry). I pull up to a pump, tap the Chase Visa, get a decline. Insert the card into the reader; get another decline. I do the same drill with my Citi MasterCard with the same result. However, I immediately get a fraud alert from Citi. I hit the big green “Yes” button on the e-mail -- as in, “Yes, I do recognize this charge” -- get an “all clear” response back, tap my Citi card again and fill up my tank. All this time, we get nothing from Chase. I open the Chase app on my phone; nothing there either. Same thing in Paris when I needed an Uber fast (more on that in a bit). Chase declined, but my Amex Platinum card went through. For me, it was just annoying; I always carry a full set of cards when traveling -- a Visa and a MasterCard from different banks, and an Amex -- because single points of failure when traveling are bad -- I don’t want to be left hanging if one bank or one card processor drops their network or loses a data center. Oh, and I also carry cash. But, as we’ve <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"talked (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/02/10/podcast-148-travel-potpourri-for-200-alex/\" target=\"_blank\">talked</a> <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"about (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/12/17/podcast-147-holiday-travel-tips-notes-from-santa-fe/\" target=\"_blank\">about</a> <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"before (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\" target=\"_blank\">before</a>, that’s ‘cause I’m old-school.</li><li>Brittany was a touring vacation, so we were moving every couple of days or so -- packing, unpacking, repacking. During one of those repacking sessions, maybe in Morgat on the Crozon peninsula -- I couldn’t find my Bose headphone case, which had my Bose headphones, in my backpack -- and I didn’t remember pulling out. Where the hell did they go, I asked myself. I pull everything out of my backpack and -- oh, there they are; they had slipped behind my camera bag in the bottom of my backpack. How did I lose my headphones in my backpack, you may ask -- and rightfully so because it really sounds stupid. Probably the same reason I lost a Google tablet in there a few years back -- too much black. The Bose case is black, the interior of Timbuk 2 backpack is black, my eyes aren’t as good as they used to be… I’d been toying around with getting a new bag, more of a messenger style -- that I could sling over one shoulder and with a bit better waterproofing. And, after this little panic drill, a non-black interior. I ended up getting a small Timbuk 2 Classic messenger bag from the Outlet section of REI.com for $50. It’s not too big -- holds my 11-inch MacBook Air, a couple of notebooks, an umbrella -- and has a bright yellow interior. I haven’t lost anything in it yet -- but I don’t trust myself. Maybe I need to get, like a white umbrella, and spray paint my Bose case red. I love black, but maybe I’ve taken that color palette a bit too far.</li><li>And if you have any travel rants, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. &nbsp;The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"mpeacock (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Facebook page (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Facebook page</a> or our Instagram account at <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\" (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Travelcommons</a> -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li> Bridge Music —  <em>Jester of the Golden Apocalypse</em> by Super_Sigil (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Super_Sigil/34750 </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Travel Interruptus</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A Greek tragedy in three acts where the travel gods toy with our anti-hero for fun and entertainment</li><li>OK, maybe not quite that bad, not quite Book of Job-level torment, but two out of the three trips I’ve taken in the past month spiraled into head-shaking metaphysical “What the hell is going on here” questioning of my decision to get out of bed that morning.</li><li><em>Act 1</em> - My Midway-Vegas-Nashville travel day. This trip didn’t start out to be stupid. It started as an easy day trip to downtown Nashville for a sales call. So many people are abandoning Chicago for Nashville, Southwest has non-stop flights every 90 minutes, so no problem with flight times. That works out fine -- until someone books a sales call the prior afternoon -- in Las Vegas. Hmmm, how do I get from Vegas after 4pm Pacific to Nashville in time for a meeting the next morning Central time? Southwest is about the only choice, connecting through either Denver or Houston. I go for the more direct routing through Denver -- my first mistake.</li><li>Because, as it turned out, the March “bomb cyclone” -- what the Weather Channel helpfully named “Winter Storm Ulmer” (who or what is an Ulmer?) -- was going to shut down DIA that day with 80 mph winds. I got an e-mail from Southwest the day before canceling my connection through Denver -- understandable -- but nothing else, no rebooking, just “We’re leaving you in Vegas” -- which I’ve found tends to be Southwest’s MO -- pleasantly unhelpful. Especially when the website errored out when I tried to find an alternate routing to Nashville, and the automated message answering their 800 number was estimating 80-some minute hold times. After about 45 minutes, between banging on the website, our corporate Concur app, and tweeting at their customer service, I managed to get re-routed through Houston, safely south of the bomb cyclone.</li><li>The next morning, I show up at the gate at Midway to find my 8am flight to Vegas delayed by 2 hours -- mechanical on the plane here meant they had to bring in a new plane and crew from somewhere else. Annoying, but not critical; I’d get into Vegas at noon for a 2pm meeting. I get another coffee, log into the Boingo hotspot and clear some emails. 9:40, we line up and board. And wait. Then the captain keys the mike, pauses (never a good sign) and then starts talking - he didn’t have time to do the walkaround before we boarded because they came in late. When they did, they noticed a problem with the front strut. Maintenance is looking at it, don’t know if they can fix it, but they need everyone off the plane. So we deplane for what is now my 2nd maintenance delay. We idle around the gate area. 10:30 and nothing. I start looking at my watch. If I’m don’t get into Vegas by 1pm, there won’t be enough time to get to my 2pm meeting, and so I shouldn’t get on the plane. Then they start to re-board us. What time will we get in? 12:20. OK, I’ll board. We all get back on -- and for the most part retaking the seats we had, in spite of Southwest’s open seating. We are creatures of habit. I’m surprised no one moo’d. We’re all on, and we wait. The mike keys. There’s a slight moan rather than a moo from the cabin. We’re waiting on the paperwork. It’s always paperwork. I’m looking at my watch. It’s past 11am Central and the door is still open. A 4-hour flight means we’re now coming up against that 1pm Pacific arrive time. Do I stay on the plane? A couple minutes more and my decision is made for me; they close the door. I lean back, put on my headphones and hope for no headwinds. We get to the gate at 1:02pm. Vegas is always a maze; there’s no straight walkways; they always want to vector you through a thicket of slot machines. I head to the cab rank -- shorter walk and no waiting -- and I get a guy with a heavy foot. I’m at the client 5 minutes before the meeting. That was a bit too close.</li><li>My return trip to the airport and the flight to Houston are uneventful, not even any turbulence as we skirt that bomb cyclone. We get into Hobby maybe even a bit early. I grab a beer and then head over to the gate. They call boarding - just half the A group -- 1-30 -- because that’s all there is on this late flight to Nashville. The gate agent scans the boarding passes, saying “You’re in Row 3, you’re in Row 4, you’re in Row 5….” &nbsp;We get all get in our separate rows, and then wait. The captain keys the mike, pauses, and then says “This plane had a bird strike on the nose on landing. There’s no damage, but Maintenance has to pull the nose cone off for a visual inspection. It’ll take about an hour, so you’re free to get off the plane.” But by now, everything in the airport was closed. “My 3rd maintenance delay of the day. Unbelievable!” I tweet out in frustrustration. Except that iPhone autocorrect turned “delay” into “deejay”. Hilary Baumann pointed it out with a nice emoji-laden tweet that gave me a good chuckle. I finally got to my Nashville hotel around 1:30 in the morning. I looked at the time, shook my head, and went to bed.</li><li> Bridge Music —  South Texas Cowboy Blues by texasradiofish (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/texasradiofish/52030 Ft: unreal_dm, ElRon XChile</li><li><em>Act 2</em> - A couple of weeks later, on Sunday in Rennes, France. We wheeled our luggage the 2 blocks from our AirBnB to Rennes train station for the TGV to CDG. We stood with everyone else, looking up at the departure board waiting for the track to be posted. Departure time came closer and still no track -- not a good sign. The crowd grew larger. There was an announcement in French and a scrolling message at the bottom of the departure screen. Irene banged it into Google Translate. The gist of it -- a bomb threat had been phoned into SCNF, the train company, and all the trains in and out of Paris were halted. Given France’s recent history with terrorism, it was a reasonable response, but still…. They finally start posting delay times -- 40 mins, then over an hour, but then it shrinks back. I pull up Google Maps. The drive to CDG is showing about the same time as the train, but we’d be in control of our own destiny. I walk down to the rental car offices. It’s Sunday morning; they’re all closed. They won’t open until the afternoon; too late for us to drive and make our flights. </li><li>Time continues to tick by, past the departure time for our flight. I call United -- any other options? I get a phenomenally helpful agent. I can hear the keystrokes. Nothing else today Sunday, nor tomorrow, Monday. I wasn’t surprised about nothing available today, but was about the next day -- until I got a text from Andrew. He was on this morning’s United flight to Chicago which just cancelled for a hydraulic problem and rebooked on tomorrow’s flight -- which explains the lack of seats for us. I took the Tuesday seats. Now would we get to CDG in time for Claire’s EasyJet flight to Edinburgh so she can make class the next day. The trains finally start moving. We head down and board our train. And then wait, and wait some &nbsp;more. And then the train starts moving. I look at my watch. I think Claire will be OK. </li><li>Until we come to a stop in the middle of a rail yard. I watch a couple of guys walk past our car -- maybe a visual inspection? After a bit, we start moving -- backwards. The conductor keys the mike, and makes an announcement in rapid French that we can’t pick up. I open Google Maps. I see we’re off to the east of Paris but can’t tell if we’re moving in the right direction. Until we pull into the next station -- it’s for EuroDisney. I find our train route on the SCNF website and see this is one of the stops en route to CDG, so we’re going in the right direction. We get to CDG by 3pm, which means Claire can make her flight. Andrew comes over from the Airport Hilton, where United is putting him up for the night, and we head down to Paris for another dinner together. There are, after all, worse cities to have to spend an extra day or two.</li><li> Bridge Music —  <em>Parisian </em>Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)<br> Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License<br> http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ </li><li><em>Act 3</em> - Tuesday morning, Paris. Our forced layover in Paris yesterday had been a beautiful day,&nbsp;sunny and warm. We walked through the Marais, south across Ile de la Cite, taking the obligatory selfie in front of Notre Dame that we pulled out at looked at two weeks later during the news coverage of the fire, and then rattled around the Latin Quarter looking for a place with outdoor seating and a nice rosé. This morning, though, not so beautiful. It was dumping rain. So rather than trundle our luggage 10 min to the Metro stop, I decide to order an Uber -- which takes a try or two when Chase declines my Visa again; and I switch over to Amex. A nice black Mercedes picks us up and heads for Les Halles -- or at least tries to. The traffic is a crawl at best. I watch our buffer time tick away and we’re not &nbsp;getting any closer. After sitting through a couple of traffic light cycles without clearing the intersection, we grab our bags and make for Les Halles on foot. We get there, a bit wet. We’re able to skip the ticket booth line; I have enough euros for the self-service machine, because it’s that or a chip-&amp;-pin card we don’t have. We get on the train. I look at my watch - we should have enough time to check our bags (bringing back some liquids), clear security, and get to the gate without too much more agita.</li><li>Until the train slows to a stop between stops. The conductor keys the mike, and makes an announcement in rapid French. I look at the other passengers. They don’t seem too agitated. I figure it’s some congestion on the track ahead. And, sure enough, we start moving after a couple of minutes. But at the next stop, the train doors stay open and a train employee come on, saying in French <em>and</em> English -- everyone has to get off, catch a bus outside the station to another station, then catch a different train to the airport. We head down the bus stop. There’s no one there to help; just a couple hundred people milling around.</li><li>Now I’m worried. We have no time to figure this out. The taxi stand is mobbed, I fire up Uber - 19-minute wait. Lyft? They’re not in Paris. I google to find taxi company but before I call, I try Uber one more time -- a 5-minute wait for a €60 fare. I hit the order button -- and then again after I swap over to Amex. €60 for a 15-minute ride to CDG is tough, but it’s cheaper than another night in a hotel. We get to the United desk 2 minutes before luggage check closes for our flight. The agent radioed down, checked in our bags, and then gave us the CDG version of Fast Track, so we could sidestep the long passport control and security lines. We board, sit down, but don’t really settle in until the plane leaves the ground. And when we’re finally at ORD, standing by the luggage carousel, our bags are the first ones to come out.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #150</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_150.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<p><!--EndFragment--></p>\n<p></p>','Podcast #150 — Travel Interruptus','','inherit','closed','closed','','2402-revision-v1','','','2021-03-15 14:20:41','2021-03-15 19:20:41','',2402,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/15/2402-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),
(3489,1,'2021-03-28 16:41:46','2021-03-28 21:41:46','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Started trying to edit down my 90-minute Zoom call with Rob Cheshire, long-time TravelCommons listener and host of the <a href=\"https://thisweekincraft.beer/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">This Week In Craft Beer</a> podcast, and decided to post the whole chat as an \"Uncut\" episode. Think of it as an AMSR video for beer nerds. For those without loads of spare time, the *much* edited version will be out in a week or two in the next podcast episode</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #174 Uncut — Taproom Tourism','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-174-uncut-taproom-tourism','','','2021-05-09 11:07:08','2021-05-09 16:07:08','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3489',0,'post','',0),
(3491,1,'2021-03-28 15:39:22','2021-03-28 20:39:22','<span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">With a bit of forethought, a 4-5 hour layover allows you to do a quick flyby of a new city’s highlights, or get deep into some part of a city. In this video, we’re laying over at Midway, Chicago’s older, less-known airport and one of Southwest’s busiest stations, skipping the usual tourist spots and instead for what can only be described as the “post-industrial” landscape of Chicago’s near South Side for a tour of 4 craft beer taprooms -- <a href=\"https://lagunitas.com/taproom/chicago\">Lagunitas Brewing</a>, <a href=\"http://lorezbrewing.com/\">Lo Rez Brewing</a>, <a href=\"http://marzbrewing.com/\">Marz Community Brewing</a>, and <a href=\"http://www.whinerbeer.com/\">Whiner Beer</a></span>\n\n<iframe src=\"https://www.youtube.com/embed/kfynoyZQ7ws\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"></iframe>','Video - Chicago MDW Layover Taproom Tour','','inherit','closed','closed','','2062-revision-v1','','','2021-03-28 15:39:22','2021-03-28 20:39:22','',2062,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3491',0,'revision','',0),
(3492,1,'2021-03-28 15:44:53','2021-03-28 20:44:53','','maxresdefault','','inherit','open','closed','','maxresdefault','','','2021-03-28 15:44:53','2021-03-28 20:44:53','',1758,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/maxresdefault.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(3493,1,'2021-03-28 15:45:16','2021-03-28 20:45:16','Pulled out the GoPro again for the recording of the latest episode. The GoPro is a bit too far from me for good audio, so I cut in the podcast audio from the Zoom recorder when it was available, hence the change in audio quality. I\'ll post the final audio on Saturday.\n\n<iframe width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"https://www.youtube.com/embed/et5b0N8xx9c\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"autoplay; encrypted-media\" allowfullscreen=\"\"></iframe>','Podcast #129 Uncut — The Video Version','','inherit','closed','closed','','1758-revision-v1','','','2021-03-28 15:45:16','2021-03-28 20:45:16','',1758,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3493',0,'revision','',0),
(3494,1,'2021-03-28 15:46:52','2021-03-28 20:46:52','','maxresdefault','','inherit','open','closed','','maxresdefault-2','','','2021-03-28 15:46:52','2021-03-28 20:46:52','',1435,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/maxresdefault.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(3495,1,'2021-03-28 15:47:16','2021-03-28 20:47:16','I finally found a way to produce a video version of the podcast without a huge amount of post-production work. I put my GoPro camera on top of my Zoom H4n recorder and hit Record.\n\n<iframe width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"https://www.youtube.com/embed/c0Puq669A5M\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"autoplay; encrypted-media\" allowfullscreen=\"\"></iframe>','Podcast #114 Uncut — The LoFi Video Version','','inherit','closed','closed','','1435-revision-v1','','','2021-03-28 15:47:16','2021-03-28 20:47:16','',1435,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3495',0,'revision','',0),
(3496,1,'2021-03-28 15:48:42','2021-03-28 20:48:42','','maxresdefault (1)','','inherit','open','closed','','maxresdefault-1','','','2021-03-28 15:48:42','2021-03-28 20:48:42','',1284,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/maxresdefault-1.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(3498,1,'2021-03-28 15:49:16','2021-03-28 20:49:16','Here\'s a 3-minute summary of what I liked best during my Spring 2013 visit to Madrid, Spain.\n\n<iframe width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"https://www.youtube.com/embed/49lo9vDLHjY\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"autoplay; encrypted-media\" allowfullscreen=\"\"></iframe>\n\nSome of the places mentioned include\n<ul>\n 	<li><a title=\"Reina Sofia Museum\" href=\"http://www.museoreinasofia.es/en\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Reina Sofia museum</a></li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plaza_Mayor,_Madrid\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Plaza Mayor</a></li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://www.mercadodesanmiguel.es/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Mercado de San Miguel</a></li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://www.mercadoantonmartin.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Mercado de Antón Martín</a></li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://viandasdesalamanca.es/home/web/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Viandas de Salamanca</a></li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malasa%C3%B1a\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Malasaña District</a></li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://fabricamaravillas.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Fábrica Maravillas</a></li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://madridfoodtour.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Madrid Food Tour</a></li>\n</ul>','Video - What to do in Madrid... in 180 Seconds','','inherit','closed','closed','','1284-revision-v1','','','2021-03-28 15:49:16','2021-03-28 20:49:16','',1284,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3498',0,'revision','',0),
(3499,1,'2021-03-28 15:51:53','2021-03-28 20:51:53','','maxresdefault (2)','','inherit','open','closed','','maxresdefault-2-2','','','2021-03-28 15:51:53','2021-03-28 20:51:53','',1095,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/maxresdefault-2.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(3500,1,'2021-03-28 15:52:21','2021-03-28 20:52:21','A long layover can be an impromptu vacation or a mind-numbing marathon of CNN Airport Network shows. Inspired by my own 5-hour layover <a title=\"Video #2 – One City, Five Hours: Frankfurt\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/05/01/video-2-one-city-five-hours-frankfurt/\">excursion</a> through Frankfurt, I grabbed my iPhone and shot what I\'d recommend you do and see on a long layover at O\'Hare Airport.\n\nUsing foot power and a one-day unlimited <a href=\"http://faremedia.chicago-card.com/store/main.aspx?DepartmentId=34\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">pass</a> on Chicago\'s<a href=\"http://www.transitchicago.com/riding_cta/airports.aspx\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> \'L\"</a> (subway/metro), this tour hits:\n<ul>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://chicago.cubs.mlb.com/chc/ballpark/index.jsp\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Wrigley Field</a></li>\n 	<li>Chicago hot dogs at the <a href=\"http://www.wienercircle.net/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Wieners Circle</a></li>\n 	<li>Lincoln Park, Old Town, and Wicker Park/Bucktown neighborhoods</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://explorechicago.org/city/en/millennium.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Millennium&nbsp;Park</a></li>\n 	<li>the Loop (Chicago\'s business district)</li>\n</ul>\n<div><iframe width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"https://www.youtube.com/embed/fAOsuSoV7b4\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"autoplay; encrypted-media\" allowfullscreen=\"\"></iframe></div>\nHere\'s a map highlighting each stop on the tour:\n\n<iframe src=\"https://maps.google.com/maps/ms?msa=0&amp;msid=212647958930931165546.0004ca28d6953e133cf86&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;t=m&amp;ll=41.908154,-87.677765&amp;spn=0.089427,0.145912&amp;z=12&amp;output=embed\" width=\"425\" height=\"350\" frameborder=\"0\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\"></iframe>\n<small>View <a style=\"color: #0000ff; text-align: left;\" href=\"https://maps.google.com/maps/ms?msa=0&amp;msid=212647958930931165546.0004ca28d6953e133cf86&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;t=m&amp;ll=41.908154,-87.677765&amp;spn=0.089427,0.145912&amp;z=12&amp;source=embed\">ORD Layover Excursion</a> in a larger map</small>\n\n&nbsp;\n\nSome ideas on how you can customize this tour...\n<ul>\n 	<li>If you\'re coming in from <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Chicago Midway International Airport\" href=\"http://www.flychicago.com/midway/MidwayHomepage.shtm\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"homepage noopener\">Midway Airport</a>, take the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Orange Line (Chicago Transit Authority)\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange_Line_%28Chicago_Transit_Authority%29\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"wikipedia noopener\">CTA Orange Line</a> to the Loop\'s <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Clark/Lake (CTA station)\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clark/Lake_%28CTA_station%29\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"wikipedia noopener\">Clark/Lake</a> Exit to pick up the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Brown Line (Chicago Transit Authority)\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_Line_%28Chicago_Transit_Authority%29\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"wikipedia noopener\">Brown Line</a> north. Midway is closer to the Loop, so you can shave 40-60 minutes off the itinerary</li>\n 	<li>You can save about 30 minutes by taking a taxi to Wrigley Field from O\'Hare. You can then pick up the itinerary heading south from the Addison \'L\' stop</li>\n 	<li>If you\'re interested in high-end shopping, take a left (east) at North Ave (instead of the suggested right), right (south) on State Pkwy, bear left at Rush St, and then turn left (east) on Oak St. Shop along here to Michigan Ave and head south (right). Get a beer/glass of wine at the <a href=\"http://www.signatureroom.com/Signature-Lounge/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">bar</a> on the 96th floor of the John Hancock building and enjoy the view. When you\'re finished, take a taxi to <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Richard J. Daley Center\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_J._Daley_Center\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"wikipedia noopener\">Daley Plaza</a> and pick up the itinerary there.</li>\n 	<li>If you want to go to the top of the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Willis Tower\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willis_Tower\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"wikipedia noopener\">Sears Tower</a> (no Chicagoan calls it the Willis Tower), keep heading across the Loop (west) on Adams after the Art Institute. Take a left (south) on Franklin one block to Jackson for the entrance to the SkyDeck.</li>\n</ul>\n<div>If you have any other suggestions or your experience doing this tour, please leave a comment here.</div>','Video  - ORD Layover Excursion: a 6-Hour Tour of Chicago','','inherit','closed','closed','','1095-revision-v1','','','2021-03-28 15:52:21','2021-03-28 20:52:21','',1095,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3500',0,'revision','',0),
(3502,1,'2021-03-28 15:53:59','2021-03-28 20:53:59','','hqdefault','','inherit','open','closed','','hqdefault','','','2021-03-28 15:53:59','2021-03-28 20:53:59','',605,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/hqdefault.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(3503,1,'2021-03-28 15:54:12','2021-03-28 20:54:12','I \"sprint toured\" <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Frankfurt-am-Main\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/germany/frankfurt-am-main\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\">Frankfurt</a> using Hemispheres Magazine\'s \"One City, Five Hours: Frankfurt\" <a href=\"http://old.hemimag.us/2010/03/01/one-city-five-hours-frankfurt/\">article</a> while on a 6-hour layover between Mumbai and Chicago. I shot this on my iPhone 4 and edited it in iMovie on my MacBook Air while flying from Frankfurt to Chicago.&nbsp;My iPhone video inexperience shows -- I shot the entire thing in portrait mode.\n\n<iframe src=\"https://www.youtube.com/embed/3s4aYmeoS2k\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"></iframe>','Video  – One City, Five Hours: Frankfurt','','inherit','closed','closed','','605-revision-v1','','','2021-03-28 15:54:12','2021-03-28 20:54:12','',605,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3503',0,'revision','',0),
(3504,1,'2021-03-28 15:57:53','2021-03-28 20:57:53','','maxresdefault (3)','','inherit','open','closed','','maxresdefault-3','','','2021-03-28 15:57:53','2021-03-28 20:57:53','',250,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/maxresdefault-3.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(3505,1,'2021-03-28 15:58:10','2021-03-28 20:58:10','After returning from a 10-day visit to Vietnam, friends and TravelCommons podcast listeners asked me a lot of questions about our trip. In this video, I answer the most common question -- \"How did they treat you when they found out you were American?\" -- and give my impressions of <a title=\"Ho Chi Minh City\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/vietnam/ho-chi-minh-city\">Ho Chi Minh City</a> (Saigon), <a title=\"Hoi An\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/vietnam/central-vietnam/hoi-an\">HoiAn</a>, Hanoi, and Halong Bay.\n\n<iframe width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"https://www.youtube.com/embed/NQj_v6qK10k\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"autoplay; encrypted-media\" allowfullscreen=\"\"></iframe>\n<!--more-->\n\n<hr>\n\nHere is the transcript from TravelCommons video #1:\n\n&nbsp;\n 	<li>Spent 10 days at the end of June on a family vacation in Vietnam</li>\n 	<li>Ran the entire length of the country – Ho Chi Minh City (otherwise known as Saigon), to Hue, to HoiAn, to Hanoi, to Halong Bay, and then back down to Ho Chi Minh City for our flight home.</li>\n 	<li>It’s a long country – about the length of California.  So this itinerary didn’t allow time to get deep; go in-depth in any one place, but we did get a good “overview” of Vietnam</li>\n 	<li>Returning to the US, I’ve had a lot of questions about the trip, but the one everyone asks is  – how did they treat you when they found out you were from America?</li>\n 	<li>The short answer is “Fine”.  We didn’t feel the need to hide our nationality – add an “ehh” on the back of every sentence to pass as Canadian.  When we handed over our passports to hotel clerks, or told car drivers that we were from the US, we never felt any animosity or change in demeanor.  Everyone was friendly.</li>\n 	<li>The only anti-Americanism we saw was where you’d most expect it – on displays at the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"War Remnants Museum\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/vietnam/ho-chi-minh-city/sights/museum/war-remnants-museum\">War Remnants Museum</a> in Ho Chi Minh City and in the introductory video for the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Cu Chi Tunnels\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/vietnam/around-ho-chi-minh-city/cu-chi-tunnels\">Cu Chi Tunnels</a>, a park that commemorates the Viet Cong guerilla efforts.</li>\n 	<li>But never from the people we ran into, or our tour guides or drivers.  At My Son, a sort of mini Angkor Wat in Central Vietnam, south of Da Nang, our guide mentioned the temples destroyed by B-52 bombs -- never in an accusing way, just a statement of fact about something that happened some 40 years ago.</li>\n 	<li>Indeed, the bigger disconnect seemed to be between the South Vietnamese who had served in the war and the rest of today’s Vietnam.  There seemed both a political and generational divide.  I had to wonder how our Saigon guide – a former South Vietnamese army officer – felt taking us through exhibits that insulted him and lionized his enemies.</li>\n 	<li>A couple of years ago, when we vacationed in Singapore and Phuket, Thailand, I joked with my family that we were only doing \"Asia Lite\". Starting in Ho Chi Minh City – still called Saigon by many – is full-contact Asia -- 9 million people, 10 million motorbikes, and where crossing the street has been elevated to an extreme sport.</li>\n 	<li>Starting here was jumping into the deep end.  It wasn\'t until we came back the second time -- a couple of days before leaving -- that we began to feel comfortable with Saigon.</li>\n 	<li>Unlike Dehli or Joburg or Rio, I didn\'t see the abject poverty and shanty towns in HCMC that I\'ve seen in those other cities, nor did I feel as unsafe.  While we mostly stayed in District 1 -- the main tourism area -- walking back to our hotel at night after dinner and some evening shopping wasn\'t a problem.</li>\n 	<li>HoiAn is kinda like a Vietnamese Williamsburg -- a preserved historic port town and a UNESCO World Heritage site with no war damage.  The old town is really for tourists.  The historic building now house tailor shops, art galleries, trinket shops, bars, and restaurants. Can\'t be too interesting for locals, but it\'s a sort of \"Vietnam-lite\" for tourists weary of the press of Ho Chi Minh City.</li>\n 	<li>I was pleasantly surprised with Hanoi.  I had heard that it was \"cold\" to Americans -- which would\'ve been understandable -- but didn\'t see anything like that.  At only 4 million people, Hanoi seemed less \"crazy\", easier to manage than Saigon. Motorbikes stop at traffic lights -- crossing the street didn\'t generate the same fight-or-flight response as it did in Saigon.</li>\n 	<li>After a half-day drive east of Hanoi, we cruised <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Halong Bay\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/vietnam/northeast-vietnam/halong-bay\">Ha Long Bay</a> for two days on a 10 passenger replica of a Chinese junk.  Weaving among the limestone islands or \"karsks\", visiting a floating fishing and oyster-farming village, the scenery and pace was stark difference from what been, to this point, a very urban vacation.</li>\n 	<li>We love Vietnamese food, so eating was a real highlight of the trip.  The variety was great -- we really didn\'t eat the same thing twice -- except for pho, the classic noodle soup, but that was by choice.  I ate pho for breakfast almost every day, and for dinner our last night in Saigon -- pho for 4, 2 Tiger Beers, 2 Cokes -- $10.  It was the perfect last meal</li>\n 	<li>I\'m glad we went to Vietnam when we did, because it\'s starting to get crowded with tourists -- Australians, French, and a growing number of Chinese.  The drive south from Da Nang to Hoi An along China Beach -- hotel after resort after time shares under construction -- will flood the place in 18-36 months.  It seems to be in a sweet spot -- enough business to support a good tourism industry, but not yet completely overrun, and so still happy to welcome new visitors -- even Americans.</li>\n<div class=\"zemanta-pixie\" style=\"margin-top: 10px; height: 15px;\"><img class=\"zemanta-pixie-img\" style=\"border: none; float: right;\" src=\"http://img.zemanta.com/pixy.gif?x-id=044a6880-a7ee-4a80-b4c8-3d6bdfbd2094\" alt=\"\"></div>','Video - Impressions of Vietnam','','inherit','closed','closed','','250-revision-v1','','','2021-03-28 15:58:10','2021-03-28 20:58:10','',250,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3505',0,'revision','',0),
(3506,1,'2021-03-28 16:41:46','2021-03-28 21:41:46','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Started trying to edit down my 90-minute Zoom call with Rob Cheshire, long-time TravelCommons listener and host of the <a href=\"https://thisweekincraft.beer/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">This Week In Craft Beer</a> podcast, and decided to post the whole chat as an \"Uncut\" episode. Think of it as an AMSR video for beer nerds. For those without loads of spare time, the *much* edited version will be out in a week or two in the next podcast episode</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #174 Uncut — Taproom Tourism','','inherit','closed','closed','','3489-revision-v1','','','2021-03-28 16:41:46','2021-03-28 21:41:46','',3489,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3506',0,'revision','',0),
(3507,1,'2021-03-28 16:43:08','2021-03-28 21:43:08','','hqdefault (1)','','inherit','open','closed','','hqdefault-1','','','2021-03-28 16:43:08','2021-03-28 21:43:08','',3489,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/hqdefault-1.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(3509,1,'2021-04-10 13:01:40','2021-04-10 18:01:40','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_1985\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/IMG_3006.jpeg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1985\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/IMG_3006-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"Bar at Modern Times\' Taproom\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> I wonder what they serve here[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Looking at the <em><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/beer/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Beer</a></em> section of this new website design, I saw I needed more content. So I got hold of Rob Cheshire of the <em><a href=\"https://thisweekincraft.beer/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">This Week in Craft Beer</a></em> podcast to talk about our approaches to taproom tourism and to trade taproom travel stories. I also talk about mask hassles on a couple of recent flights, Hertz\'s continuing downward service spiral, and Uber and Lyft driver shortages.  All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_174.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #174: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>This Week</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois as things here start to open up from winter and COVID shutdowns. Increasing temperatures and vaccination rates have people out and about. Irene and I got a jump start on the better weather by flying out to San Diego on St Patrick’s Day to hang out at an Airbnb in <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_Beach,_San_Diego\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Ocean Beach</a> a block off the ocean and a couple of blocks south of Newport Avenue, the main drag that surprised me with its kinda hippy/surfer vibe. Which I liked. It reminded me of Huntington Beach in the mid-80’s when my folks moved there, before they tarted it all up. I give Ocean Beach credit for resisting the face lift, even if I meant I had to avoid the homeless guy changing his pants on the sidewalk when walking back with the morning coffee and doughnuts.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>It was a low-key trip. Nothing scheduled, no real itinerary; mostly walking the coast during the day -- beaches or rocks -- and then at night, chipping away at the list of some 150 microbrewery taprooms in the San Diego area; a lost cause for sure, but one I willingly threw myself at. Indeed, the only time we looked closely at the time was Sunday afternoon to make sure I could get to all my “gotta go” taprooms before they closed since we were flying back Monday after lunch.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The bookends to the trip, the flights out and back on United, were a bit more stressful. The flights were just about completely full. And for some reason, United kept shoving me out of my aisle seat to the adjacent middle seat. But because I checked our seats after receiving United’s “We’re full; you can move to another flight for free” e-mail before each flight, there was enough time to rejigger our seats to adjacent aisles, which gave each of us a bit of room to lean away from a full middle seat. The bigger and, honestly, more surprising hassles were mask compliance. On the flight out of ORD, the guy in the row behind me had a loud, extended grumble session with his seatmate after the flight attendant told him to pull his mask up over his nose. I thought he was winding himself up for a protest, but he eventually calmed down. The flight back was worse for Irene. A young couple with an infant landed in the middle and window seats next to her. Both continually pulled their masks down below their chins; at some point, the husband fell asleep and started snoring with his down. And this is after the flight attendants made a number of very clear and pointed announcements on mask rules.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>This all really surprised me. All my prior flights -- to Nashville, Philly, Phoenix -- there wasn’t any of this. Now I’m no mask scold, but like I said in the last episode, everyone agrees to wear one before they can check-in. So if you have a personal objection or don’t think you can handle it for 4 hours, don’t get on the plane. And if you do, treat yourself to a new mask before the flight; one with new elastic so it says up over your nose.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Astral/44268\">Dreaming</a> by Astral (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Long-time TravelCommons listener Nick Gassman sent in a note about last episode’s travel insurance update and COVID-related coverage. Nick writes:<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“In the UK, a recent survey found that whilst insurers would give you emergency medical cover if you caught COVID when you were away, none would cover you if the government advised against travel because of COVID and you therefore could not travel. Some would give you cancellation cover if you are diagnosed with COVID before travel, and others would further give cancellation cover if you had to self-isolate even without a positive test.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As ever with insurance, the thing is to make sure you understand the small print and to compare policies.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Nick, thanks for that. I think the advice to \"read the small print\" is valid in life in general, and in travel insurance in particular. I think the pandemic and known event carve-outs lurking in the small print caught a lot of travel insurance holders back when the initial lockdowns hit. I wonder, a year on after all that, how many more people are clicking through the “Buy Travel Insurance” box at the bottom of their Expedia booking page to the full rider and doing a Control-F in their browser to search for the word “COVID”.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>In the last <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/12/podcast-173-whats-new-in-travel-insurance-keeping-ahead-of-expiring-miles/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #173 — What’s New in Travel Insurance; Keeping Ahead of Expiring Miles\">couple </a>of <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/16/podcast-172-timeshares-without-the-pitch-notes-on-tucson/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #172 — Timeshares Without the Pitch; Notes on Tucson\">episodes</a>, I’ve been talking about my efforts to decipher the activity rules for British Airways’ frequent flier program to stave off a year-end extinction event for my non-insignificant stash of Avios points. Since I’m not planning to fly BA anytime soon, I booked our Ocean Beach Airbnb through a link on BA’s site and, to my surprise, I saw 1,800 Avios points automagically hit my account a week later. I can’t seem to find the expiration date to see if it updated, but I’m pretty sure this reset the 36-month clock. And it was a nice find, the Airbnb-Avios link. It let me double-dip on Avios and Chase Ultimate points. Not sure when I’ll get to spend them, but it was a nice little get.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>In the last <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/12/podcast-173-whats-new-in-travel-insurance-keeping-ahead-of-expiring-miles/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #173 — What’s New in Travel Insurance; Keeping Ahead of Expiring Miles\">episode</a>, I talked about having to work through a lot of cars in the Hertz PHX lot to find one with less than 24,000 miles. In SAN, I had to work to find a car -- period. We walked to the Five Star aisle and it was empty. I tried to flag down a Hertz employee, but he just waved me off. After 5 minutes or so, a car showed up. I didn’t bother to look at the mileage; we just got in and drove off. I was late for a lunch date with a fish taco. Returning the car, I did my normal drill - top off the tank, get a receipt, and then when dropping it off, place the receipt under the keys on the dashboard so the check-in guy will see it. It usually works -- except this time. The receipt hits my e-mail as we’re trundling the perimeter of the airfield in the rental bus. I open it up and see a fuel charge! Really? The last time this happened was about 4 years ago in ATL. I hit Twitter and the Hertz team fixed it in a half-hour. This time, the <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1374073837923360768\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter team got back to me</a> pretty quick asking for the rental agreement details, but then… nothing. I pinged them the next day, nothing. And the next day, nothing. So I challenged it with Amex and got the fueling charge and associated taxes credited back in a couple of days and then moved on. Until earlier this week, two weeks later, Hertz popped up on my Twitter DMs asking for more information. It’s amazing how fast their service has cratered during this bankruptcy, which makes me wonder how long it’ll take them to recover. I gotta get some good discount codes for Avis.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>There was a <a href=\"https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/04/uber-and-lyft-struggle-with-driver-shortage-as-demand-soars/\">spate</a> <a href=\"https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/7/22371850/uber-lyft-driver-shortage-covid-bonus-stimulus\">of</a> <a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/video/2021/04/08/uber-lyft-pledge-millions-to-fight-driver-shortage.html\">articles</a> this week about Uber and Lyft driver shortages. We experienced it first hand trying to get a morning ride out to ORD for our San Diego flight. I swallowed hard and agreed to a good-sized surge, waited for a while, and still had the Uber driver cancel on us at the last minute. It shouldn’t be surprising, though. Drivers left the platforms when demand cratered at the start of the pandemic, when Uber said (and this was last May when everything was shutdown) that their volume was down by 80% vs. the prior May (May 2019). And in Chicago, the run of Uber drivers getting carjacked at the beginning of this year probably didn’t help either. But with stimulus checks in the bank and vaccine rates rising, demand has snapped back, a lot faster than driver supply. The headline of the <a href=\"https://www.ft.com/content/2b71e009-bb96-46ee-b024-4c574ef41988\">Financial Times article</a> reads “Uber and Lyft ‘throwing money’ at US drivers to ease shortage” and says that Uber is spending $250 million on a one-time “stimulus” package of driver incentives. But even with that, it takes time to on-board even returning drivers -- re-doing vehicle inspections, background checks. In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/02/29/podcast-160-disappearing-seatback-screens-shrinking-difference-between-ride-share-and-taxis/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #160 — Disappearing Seatback Screens; Shrinking Difference Between Ride-Share and Taxis\">episode #160</a>, my last pre-pandemic episode back in February 2020, I talked about the shrinking difference between Uber and Lyft, and how I found myself beginning to shift back to regular cabs. These recent experiences are only accelerating that. I’m thinking I may need to reload taxi dispatch numbers back into my iPhone.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on our fab new web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mghicks/18378\">Emily and the Djembe</a> by mghicks (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/nc-sampling+/1.0/\">Noncommercial Sampling Plus</a> license. Ft: Emily via Briareus</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Taproom Tourism</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Putting together the new website, I was thinking about what to put on the top menu. “Subscribe” and “Episodes” were given, but I also put “Food” and “Beer” because, well, I write and talk about them a lot. But then, when I clicked through the new “Beer” menu, it felt a bit sparse. I needed to add some content. And so in the craft beer tradition of collaboration beers, I pinged Rob Cheshire, a long time TravelCommons listener and now craft beer podcaster with his <a href=\"https://thisweekincraft.beer/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">This Week in Craft Beer</a> podcast, to talk about why we go out of our way to find brewery taprooms, and how he organizes his travels to hit the most taprooms he can on each visit.<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: So what are you drinking?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Rob: I\'ve got a Bio Machine Brew Co I had on the podcast about six weeks ago.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: I\'m doing a Springbock from Half Acre, about 6.8%. It\'s not a shy beer</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Rob: Good Lunchtime beer. Yeah.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Taproom Tourism. Why do we go and search out brewery tap rooms as opposed to the cool beer bar?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Rob: You want to be drinking at the source I think is the first point. So it\'s just in terms of freshness and, quite frankly, value for money, but also variety. And just everything\'s better without the middleman. If I can sit and chat to the brewer while I\'m drinking their beer, then so much the better. At least even the guy behind the bar is going to know a lot more about products and the nature of the business than our average barman. And, you know, as good as they might be, it\'s always better dealing direct, I think.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: As I was thinking about it, I had that same set of thoughts. First of all, there\'s more selection and especially if you want to go past the usual suspects. So if you want to go past the usual IPAs, maybe random stouts and stuff like that, and the light wheat that they\'ll put on to keep the non-beer drinkers happy. If you want to get past that and you want to see where that brewer is stretching their muscles a little bit, then you\'re right. You gotta go to the taproom because nobody else is going to take it. And to your point also, from a cost standpoint, you\'re going to be able to do flights or at least small pours, which means you\'re going to be more willing to try the wacky beer.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Rob: Yes, definitely. I want to taste every single beer in the taproom if I can. Another aspect, I just like the atmosphere in taprooms. Some of them are super slick and fabulously well fitted out. And others are literally some barrels to sit on or empty pallets. Complete extremes of decor, but they\'re always sort of charming in their own way. And there\'s something about being in a brewery that pleases me, even if I\'m not drinking.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: My undergraduate degree is in chemical engineering and I never practiced as a chemical engineer. But having said that, I really like to go and look at breweries. There was one time we were in Portland. The brewery was in the basement. I\'m kind of looking at going “How in the hell did they get these tanks down here?” Because there was no obvious way that you could get a massive steel tank down into this basement. And then we ended up sitting wedged in a table between three fermentation tanks. It wasn\'t like we were looking at the brewery; we were in the brewery.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Rob: You were actually in an integral part of it. I had a very similar experience, actually, one of the new local breweries that\'s opened up here in Reading that I\'ve become quite friendly with called Crafty Cats, and they are brewing in an impractical barn, terribly difficult to sanitize everything. It\'s a broken concrete floor. We went round this brewery, and we started actually with the finished beer and he said, Well, taste this and taste this and this and which we\'re getting right back to the last one we tasted. It was the first time I\'ve ever tasted what I can only describe as the overwhelming smell of brewer’s yeast you get in a brewery. That was what this liquid tasted like, and I\'ve never tasted anything quite like it before. It was a really interesting experience.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: How do you plan your taproom visits?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Rob: It\'s all driven through Google for me. I might have some idea based on previous reading about some big-name places that I want to visit in a particular city. But beyond that, I\'m just going to Google. First of all, I\'ll plot a Google map for the city. I\'ll end up with 50-60, maybe even 100 pins on the map. Pretty quickly, I\'ll go to Untappd and look at the average brewery rating. And this really makes brewers cross how much I rely on Untappd for this type of thing because I had this conversation a load of times on the podcast with them. But I do rely on brewery ratings on Untappd, and I find it very reliable, quite frankly. If a brewery has an average rating of anything close to 4, then, obviously it\'s a massive generalization to say whatever they brew, but most of their beers are gonna be great. If the brewery rating is anywhere close to 3.5, it\'s going to be very mediocre at best. And somewhere in between is where most people land. So 3.6, eh...;&nbsp; 3.8, it\'s a good brewery; 3.9 is a terrific brewery; 4 is a great brewery. And so I\'m looking for those 3.8 and 3.9 average brewery ratings. But what I\'m looking for, really, is that district where I can walk from one to another and really make an afternoon of it.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: But that\'s kind of the DIY spin. And I know, Rob, that you\'re doing with This Week In Craft Brewing, you guys are launching tours, the Good Lord willing and COVID don\'t rise…</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Rob: Yeah. I\'ve been lucky enough to travel pretty frequently to East Coast of the US for business trips, particularly the past 10 years. And so I\'ve always been comfortable with traveling in the US, And in the last few years, I\'ve been basing my travel around taproom visits quite frankly. And so I\'ve been doing business trips where I have some business meetings, but really, what I\'m doing is trying to plan my schedule so I\'m in the right place at the right time each evening to visit the tap room that I want to visit. And so, I\'ve become quite familiar with the tap rooms most of the way down the East Coast. Since then, I\'ve got my This Week In Craft Beer business (if you want to call it a business) off the ground. It\'s a fun side project. We publish a weekly newsletter and we do a weekly podcast doing a different interview with the UK Craft Brewery each week. And so, in conversation with the brewers, I started to float the idea with them, either before or afterwards, when we\'re wrapping up and finishing off the beer and whatever. I would say, “Well, I\'m thinking about putting together tours to the US. Does that sound like something you\'d be interested in?” And so, on the back of a few of those conversations, I started to figure out that what we could do is actually promote it with the brewer and basically sell it to the brewer’s customers and have the brewer come on the tour. So we\'ll put together a schedule where we\'re going to visit, hopefully, some amazing tap rooms. From what I know about how brewers react to being visited by other brewers, usually they get the red carpet out. Brewers are very hospitable. It\'s almost like a private members club. You know, one brewer visits another brewer, and they may be supremely welcome. So I\'m hoping that we can leverage that, and I think we can put together a pretty killer 5-day, 4-night tour where we visit 2 tap rooms a day and have a fantastic curated experience at each one.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You may be seeding a whole other series of collabs, of cross-Atlantic collabs.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Rob: That would be nice. Yeah, I hope so.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Here\'s the last thing I wanted to think about – best, worst, most unusual taproom experience. It got me thinking about the number of times that going to tap rooms, search them out, and then going out to them has taken me to parts of town that I would not normally go. I mean, it gets you out of it, busts you out of what I\'ve called in the travel bubble or the tourist route.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Rob: I’ve been to a few places where I probably shouldn\'t have been in search of tap rooms. You know, that\'s the thing. Isn\'t as well as you know. I think I remember once in Baltimore where I, you know, I ended up probably in a slightly down-on-its-luck neighborhood. Let\'s call it that for one of the better turn of phrase. And that\'s when you start to think “Well, maybe, you know, is there a taproom down here? And maybe I shouldn\'t perhaps be wandering this district.” I don\'t know, but I do. What I do know when I\'m in the US is I can always break out my British accent and that, you know, it doesn\'t matter how sort of threatening the bad guys look as soon as they hear I\'m from the UK, they immediately become unofficial tour guides. And, you know, they want to point me in the right direction and give me advice and make sure I\'m enjoying my visit to the city. And it is an extraordinary experience and this, you know, it\'s overwhelming that level of hospitality that we always get from Americans. And that\'s it\'s not an exaggeration to say that I don\'t think I could find myself in any part of any city where that didn\'t work, and it hasn\'t happened yet anyway. So probably once too many. I\'ll push that luck too far. It\'s worked so far anyway.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: And again, you talk about doing business trips? I was in mid Jersey, and I found this place Demented Brewing, and I found it on Untappd. And so we head out there, we find it. It\'s across the street from a glass repair shop and sort of kitty corner from a motorcycle repair shop. But no food, no food trucks or anything and said “Okay, well, we\'re gonna need to lay a base here.” And so, across the street was this little place with an El Salvadorian flag hanging out the front of it. And it\'s some little family restaurant/bodega thing, and we roll in there. They look at us like, “Who in the hell are you guys?” We go. We like the menu posted up on the wall. It\'s like pupusa is I don\'t know. We\'re like, give us all of them, right? Just like give us one of all; we\'re gonna do a flight of pupusas and then we went back across the street, but at that time in New Jersey, they had to give you a tour.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Rob: You have to do a tour. Yeah, yeah, yeah.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Okay, so you hit that too. You had to do a tour before you could do the sample.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Rob: I\'ve been to more places in Jersey than probably anywhere else, actually.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: It\'s the only place I\'ve had that happen has been in Jersey. Okay, “Well, you got to do a tour, then you can have beer at the tap room.” I was like, “Okay, fine. Cool.” It was a very abbreviated tour.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Rob: Yeah. I actually watched that policy evolve in 2018 from at the start of the year, where they were quite strict about saying yet we\'ve got to give you a bit of a tour, you know. And after a while, it got to the stage where they just had laminates printed where they have shown you the map of the brewery. If you\'d like us to come and show you any particular feature on this, please let us know. But just otherwise, you can just sit at the bar and look at it while you have your beer and say that obviously sort of figured out that that was sufficient to satisfy the local regulations.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Rob: Probably my best taproom experience in Asia was in Hanoi, Vietnam, and there\'s a bar there called the Standing Bar, which I think is by far the most celebrated craft beer bar in probably the whole of Vietnam. Actually, a great selection of beer. When we were there, they had a comedy night and they\'d flown in English- speaking comedy acts from a number of different Asian capitals. And it was fantastic. There\'s a big local beer scene in Vietnam. It\'s called Bia Hoi. It’s basically lager, 3.5-3.8% alcohol I think, but served almost ice cold in ice glasses. So it\'s drunk extremely cold, and it\'s very hot and humid there, of course, and these Bia Hoi bars are -- to say they\'re on every street is understating it. About every third shop front is a Bia Hoi bar, and they\'re mostly… they\'re not bars in the way that you would recognize that term. They\'re oftentimes just a little sort of plastic furniture, almost in, but the front room on the ground floor, you know, So you walk in there and you sit down and they\'re always really tiny because we\'re obviously taller than the Vietnamese. So you know, you sort of get your knees under your chin. It felt like going back to kindergarten, where you\'re going to the parents\' evening at school and you\'re sitting on the tiny chairs that are designed for five- and six-year-olds. It was exactly like that, these bia hoy bars. It was a good experience drinking bia hoi.  Crap beer, of course, but you know, it was just, you know, it\'s cold and very refreshing. You can drink lots of it because it\'s very weak. But the point is, bia hoi is like 20 cents a pint. Something like; that is super super cheap. And the beer in the Standing Bar was, quite frankly, Western European craft beer prices and then some. You know, you were paying probably $10 plus for a pint, maybe more than that. So this was a good beer, you know, They had some good Vietnamese beers. They had imported beers from around Asia. So it was a good choice of craft beer, as I would recognize that. But 20-30 times the price of the local beers, you know. And it was bringing it back to the comedy night. Several of the comedians were absolutely ripping into the crowd, saying, “You know what? Are you guys doing it? How on earth can you justify paying the price of the beer in this bullshit bar when you could be next door drinking pints of bia hoi with the locals for 20 cents a pint? You know, it\'s ridiculous. You should be ashamed of yourselves” and you are absolutely right. It was a good experience.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Thanks again to Rob Cheshire for that collab. I hope you could tell that it was a lot of fun. Indeed, the full session ran around an hour and a half and a bit more beer. If you want to hear more of our taproom stories, head over to Rob’s This Week in Craft Beer <a href=\"https://thisweekincraft.beer/podcast/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">podcast feed</a>, he posted a longer version as a bonus Easter episode, or check out the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/28/podcast-174-uncut-taproom-tourism/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">TravelCommons website</a>, <a href=\"https://fb.watch/4NAd-8Ai30/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook page</a> or <a href=\"https://youtu.be/6bz4EJn4-7U\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a> for the full video.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #174</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The new website makes it a lot easier to subscribe. There’s a drop down menu at the top of each page, a set of subscribe links at the bottom, and a big red “Subscribe” button in the middle of the home page. You can use all those buttons, links and menus or you can just search for us on <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Thanks to Nick Gassman, not only for the e-mails, but for <a href=\"https://nickgassman.com/recommended-podcasts/other-podcasts/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">calling out</a> TravelCommons in the Recommended Podcast section of his blog site.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_174.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #174 — How the Pros Plan Their Taproom Tourism','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-174-how-the-pros-plan-their-taproom-tourism','','\nhttps://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/28/podcast-174-uncut-taproom-tourism/','2024-01-24 17:41:56','2024-01-24 22:41:56','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3509',0,'post','',0),
(3511,1,'2021-04-10 11:12:51','2021-04-10 16:12:51','','IMG_3006','I wonder what they serve here','inherit','open','closed','','img_3006','','','2021-04-10 11:13:16','2021-04-10 16:13:16','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/IMG_3006.jpeg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(3512,1,'2021-04-10 11:22:39','2021-04-10 16:22:39','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_1985\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/IMG_3006.jpeg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1985\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/IMG_3006-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"Bar at Modern Times\' Taproom\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> I wonder what they serve here[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>As travel bookings beginning to rise with vaccination rates, we talk with Michael Giusti of <a href=\"http://insurancequotes.com\" title=\"insurancequotes.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">InsuranceQuotes.com</a> to find out what\'s changed over the last year. I make the rounds through all my frequent traveler programs to reset impending expiration dates. We also talk about yet another travel data breach, a favorite beer bar is a COVID casualty, and bankrupt Hertz is starting to let its cars get old. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_174.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #174: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>This Week</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois on what has been a nice week. Temps got into the 60’s at the beginning of the week, so I broke out the bike for a ride along the lake -- sunny in most parts, but a bit chillier in the shady parts, riding narrow paths cut through 5-ft ice and snow mounds, the remnants of what were really impressive pile-ups of shore ice during the February deep freeze.</li><li>No travel since the last episode, but heading out next week to hang out on the beach in San Diego, reloading from our January pivot away from California because of their lockdown. A couple of months on, COVID cases are down, the state’s order banning hotel and Airbnb hosts from renting to out-of-state’er is gone, outdoor dining has re-opened and, most importantly, the craft brewery taprooms are open again. I pointed my little Python Untappd script at San Diego and can see a lot of Brewery check-ins. In between those taproom visits, I think we’ll manage to squeeze in some biking and kayaking.&nbsp;</li><li>And like many folks, we’re building our travel calendar for the rest of the year. Nashville, New York City, Northern Michigan, and Maine written in pen through the first half of the year. We’re penciling in the UK for November, booking it now to lock in no-fee cancelations in case of another winter spike, or what might be more likely, lingering resistance to dropping international quarantine requirements. But I’m optimistic (hopeful?) that the US and UK will get enough people vaccinated by then.</li><li>I was on a Zoom call a couple of nights ago with a bunch of college friends. “Do you think we can all get together in person in September for Homecoming?” someone asked. “Absolutely,” I said, “we just need to lean into it.” And it feels like that’s what more people are doing -- leaning into visits to physically get together with family and friends they haven’t seen for a year now. It’s always dangerous drawing a straight trend line, but it feels like travel might come back quicker than expected.&nbsp;</li><li>Bridge Music -- Madrugada(rmx) by savoyard (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/savoyard/10743 Ft: Curve</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I finally pushed out the refreshed website last week. First change since 2006. Figured website aesthetics have changed a bit over the last 15 years and so changed things up a bit. Thanks to everyone who responded to my request on Facebook and Twitter to hit the new site for a bit of crowd-sourced end-user testing. A bit like the <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1224798425499213828\">meme</a> you’ll see posted in a lot of IT shops; a picture of Dos Equis “most interesting man in the world” with the line -- “I don’t always test my code, but when I do, I test it in Production.” There’s still some tweaks I need to make, but it seems pretty solid. Check it out if you get a chance -- travelcommons.com -- and drop me a line at <a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a> with your thoughts.</li><li>Following up on last episode’s rant about the guy living unnoticed in ORD for 3 months, I tweeted out an <a href=\"https://theconversation.com/how-some-people-can-end-up-living-at-airports-for-months-even-years-at-a-time-154336\">article</a> about people living years in airports. Written by a history prof from University of Dayton who researches the history of airports (hey, everyone’s gotta have their niche), the article talks about other airport residents, an Iranian refugee who lived in CDG for 18 years, and most recently, an Estonian guy who was transiting through Manila Int’l Airport last March as the shutdowns hit was stuck there for 100 days until the Estonian embassy could get him on a repatriation flight. That one is brutal. I spent 3 hours in that airport a few years back and even, with everything open, it felt 2½ hours too long. Check out the article -- there’s a link in the show notes and at the top of the Twitter and Facebook feeds. It’s a good read.</li><li>Jim McDonough hit the Facebook page, responding to last episode’s margarita instruction story with one of his own.<ul><li>I know how you feel about teaching the bartender how to make a margarita. We ended a week-long trip to Switzerland by staying our last night at a hotel by the Zurich airport. At dinner, we each asked for a Scotch and water. They brought out this big tray, with a bowl of ice cubes, a pitcher of water, a bottle of Scotch, and two glasses. A crowd of hotel employees gathered to watch. Evidently, they don\'t do Scotch and water in Zurich. When I filled the glasses with ice, they gasped. I explained that we live in a hot climate. I went ahead and added Scotch and topped off with a little water, and they winced when I took a sip. A cultural exchange, I guess.</li></ul></li><li>Jim, I love you, man, but I gotta tell you -- I’d probably be wincing with the hotel staff. My usual Scotch order is -- Scotch and glass. But you paid for it (and in Zurich, it’s not going to be a small amount), so even if they couldn’t quite figure out what you wanted, they at least gave you all the tools you needed.</li><li>One of my absolute favorite beer bars, <a href=\"https://brewpublic.com/beer-news/baileys-taproom-and-the-upper-lip-permanently-closes-its-doors/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bailey’s Taproom in Portland, Oregon</a>, has shut off their taps permanently. I started a project in downtown Portland in January 2013. Found Bailey’s the second night I was there and just settled in; my last beer there was my last night in Portland. The owner said “After reopening to limited seating (after the initial shutdown), it was clear that people were not interested in coming downtown. When the PPP money ran out, I decided to close the doors”&nbsp; Another reminder that we should try to be purposeful about where we spend our discretionary dollars, thinking about what businesses we would miss if they closed up and then go out of our way to buy something from them. In my case, it helps rationalize a rather full beer shelf in our pantry.</li><li>After Hertz declared bankruptcy at the end of last May, I predicted in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/06/09/podcast-164-first-post-lockdown-trips-travel-credit-cards/\">episode #164</a> that I’d be paying more attention to the mileage on the cars in the Five Star aisle because that’s the first place I see signs of financial distress — a lot less 500-mile cars and a lot more 24,000-mile cars. And while 24,000 miles on a car doesn’t seem like a lot, remember that rental car miles are kinda like dog years — you gotta multiply them by, like, 7 to get to regular car miles. And true to form, when picking up our Hertz car in PHX at the end of January, every car I looked at had over 24,000 miles, a few with a <strong>lot</strong> more. Will be interesting to see what’s on offer at SAN in a few weeks.&nbsp;</li><li>If you have any status on a Star Alliance or One World carrier, you probably got an email from your carrier about a <a href=\"https://skift.com/2021/03/05/data-breach-affects-more-than-2-million-frequent-flyers-across-airline-alliances/\">data breach at SITA</a>. I got them from United and American saying my name, account number, and status was potentially exposed and that I should change my password, which I did. And then thought about how this is yet another data leak from some unknown player in what is an incredibly fragmented travel tech tool chain. We talked about this back in November in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">episode #169</a> when an obscure Spanish company used by hotels to update information on on-line booking sites leaked 24 GB of names, emails, credit card data and reservation records. And in this case, if you’re not in the airline industry, you probably don’t know about <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SITA_(company)\">SITA</a>. It’s a industry consortium started back in 1949 by 11 European airlines to share infrastructure costs and has expanded to provide all sorts of travel technology including the exchange of passenger data between airlines -- in this case, the exchange of frequent flyer status so that, say, Lufthansa recognizes your elite status with United on your flight with them. It’s one thing when the breach is from a company that you did business with -- the <a href=\"https://www.cnet.com/news/marriott-discloses-new-data-breach-impacting-5-point-2-million-guests/\">Marriott hacks</a> in 2018 and 2020, the 2018 breaches at <a href=\"https://www.theregister.com/2018/09/11/british_airways_website_scripts/\">British Airways</a> and <a href=\"https://www.theregister.com/2018/10/25/cathay_pacific_hacked_up_to_94_million_passenger_deets_exposed/\">Cathay Pacific</a>. But it’s a whole other thing when you find out some unknown third party coughed up your data. But actually, when you get a look at the spaghetti that is travel technology, and see all the places your data is getting sent to -- often small companies that can’t afford state-of-the-art cybersecurity, it’s kinda surprising -- in a sad way -- that not more of this happens.</li><li>Type “plane mask” into the Google search box and one of the first 5 suggestions is “plane mask fight”. Click through and you get what seems to be an endless stream of news reports and cellphone videos of passengers fighting about having to wear a mask during a flight. What is getting a lot less coverage, though I’m hearing snatches of it here and there, are people getting chewed out by their row mates when taking their masks off to eat or drink something, getting something like “Hey, can you not drink during the flight? I’d rather not die for your convenience.”&nbsp; And I’m afraid this is going to get worse as more people start traveling again and aircraft load factors get back into the 80% range. But honestly, both sides are being idiots. You know the rules before you buy your ticket and you’re reminded of them by emails before you travel, and again by gate agents before you board the plane. If you can’t handle the rules -- all of them, not just the ones you agree with -- then don’t walk down the jetway. Drive; charter a jet. But don’t try to bend the rules to your own personal belief system and hassle the rest of us who are just trying to get from Point A to Point B on-time and with the minimum amount of heartache.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on our fab new web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge music -- Tools of the Trade by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial &nbsp;(3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/56512 Ft: Abstract Audio, Mr Yesterday, Martijn de Boer, Speck</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>What\'s New in Travel Insurance</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A little over a year ago, the first coronavirus lockdowns started, and the execution of them was, to be charitable, mostly a mess. Borders were quickly shut; planes grounded. People were stranded in foreign countries with no way home; we just talked about the Estonian guy stuck in Manila airport for 100 days. And all of a sudden, people started paying attention to travel insurance. What was once a check box at the bottom of a booking webpage that most of us clicked “no” on so we could finish our reservation quickly became very important. Last May in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/05/08/podcast-163-new-world-of-travel-insurance-getting-medical-help-on-the-road/\">episode #163</a>, as people were beginning to think about their first post-lockdown trips, we talked about the state of travel insurance. Now, with travel bookings beginning to rise as vaccination rates rise, I wanted to check back in and see what’s changed with travel insurance. So I asked Michael Giusti, senior writer at <a href=\"https://www.insurancequotes.com/\">InsuranceQuotes.com</a>, to come onto the podcast and give us an update:&nbsp;<ul><li>Mark: Michael, last May, Eric Josowitz of <a href=\"https://www.insurancequotes.com/\">InsuranceQuotes.com</a> was on the podcast. We were talking about travel insurance after the initial lockdown. Back then, in the midst of all that travel disruption, many travelers were finding:&nbsp; a) they didn\'t actually know what their insurance covered; they’d just checked the box at the end of their booking process, paid some additional amount moved on; and&nbsp; b) the insurance that they had bought had exclusions for communicable diseases, WHO-declared pandemics, cancellations in cases of fear. And then, after that, insurers stopped offering travel insurance. So, Michael, that was May. This is now the end of February. What\'s the current situation regarding travel insurance?</li><li>Michael: Not many people were thinking about pandemics back when this started. But the few people who were thinking about it were insurers. They saw the SARS epidemic and they started writing in pandemic exclusions from that point on. And then there\'s a second little provision in these insurance policies called the Known Events Provisions. So once the pandemic declared, even if there wasn\'t a specific exclusion, they can turn around and say, “Well, we\'re not going to cover because it\'s now a known event.” It would be like there\'s a hurricane that\'s bearing down on your city and you buy a plane ticket while the hurricane is there, and then you get mad because you can\'t fly. It’s a known event, and so they\'re not going to cover that. So that\'s where we came from. And then, you\'re right, they stopped and they said, “Well, we have no idea what\'s going on, so let’s regroup.”&nbsp; And now they\'ve regrouped, and it\'s really interesting because in a lot of the insurance industry, they\'ve stopped covering pandemics. But in travel insurance, they specifically started including Covid 19, saying “We will cover it under these conditions.”</li><li>Mark: Michael, travel requirements have been changing quickly; the restrictions have been going in and out. I mean, most recently, the need to provide a negative COVID test just to be able to get on a plane.&nbsp; If you look at what Canada did, they basically gave travelers one-week notice of the rule change at the end of 2020. But if you\'ve bought a travel insurance policy when you booked travel six weeks prior, what\'s the best way to cover these late breaking requirements that pop up a week or two before our trip?</li><li>Michael: Two main things... One is the policy language. You do need to say what’s specifically included, what’s specifically excluded? Because whether they\'re going to cover not having a negative test very much depends on the policy language. The other thing that it\'s going to come down to is whether it\'s out of your control. If it\'s something that you\'ve neglected to do, it\'s never going to be covered. The policies I\'ve reviewed, I haven\'t seen any that specifically kick in if you haven\'t got a negative test. So if you\'re worried about that, you really do need to ask the agent or really read that fine print. I do know that if you\'re delayed at security while you\'re being tested, that\'s not covered. So you do have to get there in time to make sure if they do rapid tests on the spot, that you\'re going to have time to get through security.</li><li>Mark: Okay, let me unpack that just a little bit, Michael. So I booked my flight, and I\'ve booked it a month ago. And now I go to take my test 72 hours before departure, and I come up positive. If I\'ve bought the right policy, would that typically cover delay or cover cancellation?</li><li>Michael: Delay is always the first preference. So if we can just push this trip back a week or whatever, that\'s going to be everyone\'s favorite outcome. But there are cancellation provisions where, say, you can\'t move it because the wedding is not going to be moved, in which case the cancellation provisions might kick in.</li><li>Mark: So now let\'s flip that. I\'ve taken my test, it\'s been negative, I get on the plane, I fly down to Costa Rica. And now a week on, I\'ve taken my test to get back into the US and now that test comes out positive. So now, potentially, I can\'t get back into the US. How does insurance help me there?</li><li>Michael: There\'s a couple places where this insurance is going to really beneficial in that situation. First and foremost, the medical provisions in most of these comprehensive policies are going to actually help you pay for your healthcare. Many of them are going to be secondary coverage, meaning they\'re going to want your primary health care to kick in first and then they\'ll jump in and cover anything that\'s not covered. Some of them are primary, especially with the overseas trips. So, that\'s a really nice benefits that are built into a lot of these policies. The other place that will help is, if you\'re delayed because you can\'t travel because of a restriction like that, and that\'s outside of your control, a lot of them will cover a hotel while you\'re waiting and meals while you\'re waiting, and they\'ll get you back home safely. So that\'s actually a really positive outcome that can happen with these policies.</li><li>Mark: Michael, how do I make sure that I\'ve actually got one of those policies? If we go back to the April/May timeframe, people were finding that they didn\'t actually know what they had. How do I make sure I\'ve actually bought that coverage?</li><li>Michael: Well, best case scenario would be if you found a human and you asked them in plain English.</li><li>Mark: Yeah, good luck with that, right?</li><li>Michael: I know, calling 1 800 numbers anymore – that’s not in the cards. What I would do if I was doing that, I’d click through the terms of service and see who\'s offering that policy. If it doesn\'t really go into much detail, or if it\'s really garbly legalese, I’d go through to the provider\'s website. Most of them have FAQ pages that specifically address COVID. So that\'s gonna be probably your best resource.</li><li>Mark: Michael, people are starting to think about big trips as vaccination rates start to step up. You know, the back half of the year, if I\'m thinking about booking, say, a week\'s biking tour in Tuscany or Provence in September/October, what kind of travel insurance should I be looking for? Should I pony up for a cancel- for-any-reason rider? Or are there some cheaper alternatives for more limited scenarios like, “Hey, the EU still isn\'t letting Americans in” but won\'t cover the more generic “Oh, I\'m afraid to travel” kind of reason.</li><li>Michael: The question of “if you\'re afraid to travel” is never going to be covered unless you do have that cancel-for-any-reason policy. But travel insurance is meant to cover things that are out of your control. So you know, if it\'s not laid out your policy, it\'s not gonna be covered. So that\'s kind of the most expensive option. You know, you\'re going to pay the most for a cancel-for-any-reason policy. That middle ground is the standard policy where you say “I\'m taking a little bit of the risk on myself. I\'m going to bravely travel wherever I\'m allowed.” The least expensive option is really kind of a DIY. And a lot of the destinations that I\'m seeing, they\'re waiving cancellation and change fees. And so you can kind of make your DIY travel insurance by only booking places that would let you change for no fee. That\'s kind of the cheapest “I\'m feeling brave” policy. “I\'m feeling skittish” policy Is that cancel-for-any-reason.</li><li>Mark: Super. Michael Giusti, senior writer at <a href=\"https://www.insurancequotes.com/\">InsuranceQuotes.com</a>, thank you very much for joining us. This was a great update.</li><li>Michael: Thank you so much.</li></ul></li><li>Bridge music -- Crazy Love-The Alex &amp; Lang mix by J.Lang (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djlang59/10579 Ft: FHC and Alex &amp; Bradsucks</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Keeping Ahead of Expiring Miles</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Like most road warriors of a certain tenure, I have cards in my desk of some 30-odd frequent traveler programs -- those that I know of -- and am probably a member of another dozen or so that I’ve forgotten about. Of those, I have meaningful balances -- enough for at least one free flight or a free hotel night -- at the Big 4 US carriers, a couple of European carriers, and two of the big hotel chains. Most of the rest are random programs like IcelandAir or AirBaltic or Omni Hotels that I used for a specific trip or project but had some spiff, like seat selection or free WiFi, that was reason enough to put in the effort to sign up.</li><li>When I was traveling every week or so, keeping those main programs active wasn’t a big effort. And if I hadn’t flown, say, BA for a while, I’d code maybe a short American commuter flight, something where my status was a bit meaningless, to my BA account to reset the expiration clock.</li><li>But now, hitting the first anniversary of the first travel lockdown and with business travel still mostly on hold, some of those expiration cliffs are starting to become visible</li><li>Last episode, I talked about getting emails from BA and Iberia warning me of pending Avios expirations, and so I transferred my Iberia points to my BA account. But I can’t tell from the BA website if that was enough activity to change the BA expiration. So I spelunked some more thru the website and found where they call out Airbnb bookings as “recognized activity” that’ll reset the 36-month clock. So, I booked our San Diego Airbnb through a link on BA’s site, just had to enter my BA account number before moving to the booking screen. It’ll be interesting to see if the activity flows seamlessly into my BA account or if I’ll have to chase it down through a manual credit claim. I’m betting on the latter, but am hoping to be pleasantly surprised.</li><li>But that got me cycling through my other accounts. I wasn’t worried about my US carrier accounts. The trend there has been to do away with expiration dates, first Southwest, then Delta, most recently United. American, not surprisingly, is the knuckle dragger, clinging to their stingy 18-month policy, but I flew them last fall to PHL, so I’m fine there.</li><li>But Flying Blue, the KLM/Air France program? I last flew KLM the fall of 2018, so that had to be coming up. I hit the website; those miles were also expiring at the end of this year. And, they, like BA and Iberia, have managed to make resetting that data way overly complex.&nbsp; First, there’s “overall extending activities” which are flights or purchases on their co-branded credit card; they extend <em>all</em> Flying Blue miles by 2 years. “Partial extending activities” extend miles earned through, say, hotel or car rental partners. Please note, says the website, \"‘Partial extending activities’ do not extend the validity of Miles earned from ‘Overall extending activities’\". OK, then. Looking at it this way, I only had 500 miles from that 2018 flight, but 38,000 miles from when I had to quickly stash points from a corporate Amex account before leaving a company. So, a “partial” activity should suffice. I set myself a reminder for Dec 1st to push the minimum 1,000 points from my personal Amex.</li><li>And the expiration periods are kinda all over the place. BA is 36 months; KLM, Marriott, and Hyatt are 2 years; American is 18 months; Hilton is 15 months (weird number); and IHG is the stingiest at 12.&nbsp;</li><li>Seems like there should be a technology solution to this, right? There are a few. If you use TripIt to consolidate your trip itineraries, the $49/year upgrade to the Pro version gives you program tracking. I had used it one year when they upgraded me for free; probably by mistake. AwardWallet is another popular tool, but there too, you need to upgrade to the paid version (a little cheaper at $30/year) to track expirations.</li><li>But beyond the cost, for these programs to work, you have to give them access to your accounts -- your account numbers and passwords. And cycling back to what I was saying at the top of the show, with the travel industry’s kinda poor track record on data protection, and just after having to reset passwords to United, American, Lufthansa, BA, and Iberia because of SITA’s leak, do I really want to put <em>all</em> my frequent traveler logins into one spot? I think a simple spreadsheet on the hard drive of the PC in my office can do the job just fine.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #173</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li>Nothing new on the tech front this month, but I should have the website freshened up by the next episode. I’ve had the current look since the beginning of 2006 courtesy of TravelCommons listener Hilary Baumann and her <a href=\"https://fascinationdesign.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Fascination Design</a> firm. The change is absolutely not a knock against Hilary’s work. It’s just that, after 15 years, I wanted to freshen things up a bit. So look for that by the end of February or beginning of March.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>, as well as asking Alexa, Siri, and Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_174.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #174 — Taproom Tourism','','inherit','closed','closed','','3509-revision-v1','','','2021-04-10 11:22:39','2021-04-10 16:22:39','',3509,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3512',0,'revision','',0),
(3513,1,'2021-04-10 11:24:23','2021-04-10 16:24:23','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_1985\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/IMG_3006.jpeg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1985\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/IMG_3006-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"Bar at Modern Times\' Taproom\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> I wonder what they serve here[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>As travel bookings beginning to rise with vaccination rates, we talk with Michael Giusti of <a href=\"http://insurancequotes.com\" title=\"insurancequotes.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">InsuranceQuotes.com</a> to find out what\'s changed over the last year. I make the rounds through all my frequent traveler programs to reset impending expiration dates. We also talk about yet another travel data breach, a favorite beer bar is a COVID casualty, and bankrupt Hertz is starting to let its cars get old. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_174.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #174: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>This Week</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois as things here start to open up from winter and COVID shutdowns. Increasing temperatures and vaccination rates have people out and about. Irene and I got a jump start on the better weather by flying out to San Diego on St Patrick’s Day to hang out at an Airbnb in Ocean Beach a block off the ocean and a couple of blocks south of Newport Avenue, the main drag that surprised me with its kinda hippy/surfer vibe. Which I liked. It reminded me of Huntington Beach in the mid-80’s when my folks moved there, before they tarted it all up. I give Ocean Beach credit for resisting the face lift, even if I meant I had to avoid the homeless guy changing his pants on the sidewalk when walking back with the morning coffee and doughnuts.</li><li>It was a low-key trip. Nothing scheduled, no real itinerary; mostly walking the coast during the day -- beaches or rocks -- and then at night, chipping away at the list of some 150 microbrewery taprooms in the San Diego area; a lost cause for sure, but one I willingly threw myself at. Indeed, the only time we looked closely at the time was Sunday afternoon to make sure I could get to all my “gotta go” taprooms before they closed since we were flying back Monday after lunch.</li><li>The bookends to the trip, the flights out and back on United, were a bit more stressful. The flights were just about completely full. And for some reason, United kept shoving me out of my aisle seat to the adjacent middle seat. But because I checked our seats after receiving United’s “We’re full; you can move to another flight for free” e-mail before each flight, there was enough time to rejigger our seats to adjacent aisles, which gave each of us a bit of room to lean away from a full middle seat. The bigger and, honestly, more surprising hassles were mask compliance. On the flight out of ORD, the guy in the row behind me had a loud, extended grumble session with his seatmate after the flight attendant told him to pull his mask up over his nose. I thought he was winding himself up for a protest, but he eventually calmed down. The flight back was worse for Irene. A young couple with an infant landed in the middle and window seats next to her. Both continually pulled their masks down below their chins; at some point, the husband fell asleep and started snoring with his down. And this is after the flight attendants made a number of very clear and pointed announcements on mask rules.</li><li>This all really surprised me. All my prior flights -- to Nashville, Philly, Phoenix -- there wasn’t any of this. Now I’m no mask scold, but like I said in the last episode, everyone agrees to wear one before they can check-in. So if you have a personal objection or don’t think you can handle it for 4 hours, don’t get on the plane. And if you do, treat yourself to a new mask before the flight; one with new elastic so it says up over your nose.</li><li>Bridge Music -- Madrugada(rmx) by savoyard (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/savoyard/10743 Ft: Curve</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois on what has been a nice week. Temps got into the 60’s at the beginning of the week, so I broke out the bike for a ride along the lake -- sunny in most parts, but a bit chillier in the shady parts, riding narrow paths cut through 5-ft ice and snow mounds, the remnants of what were really impressive pile-ups of shore ice during the February deep freeze.</li><li>No travel since the last episode, but heading out next week to hang out on the beach in San Diego, reloading from our January pivot away from California because of their lockdown. A couple of months on, COVID cases are down, the state’s order banning hotel and Airbnb hosts from renting to out-of-state’er is gone, outdoor dining has re-opened and, most importantly, the craft brewery taprooms are open again. I pointed my little Python Untappd script at San Diego and can see a lot of Brewery check-ins. In between those taproom visits, I think we’ll manage to squeeze in some biking and kayaking. </li><li>And like many folks, we’re building our travel calendar for the rest of the year. Nashville, New York City, Northern Michigan, and Maine written in pen through the first half of the year. We’re penciling in the UK for November, booking it now to lock in no-fee cancelations in case of another winter spike, or what might be more likely, lingering resistance to dropping international quarantine requirements. But I’m optimistic (hopeful?) that the US and UK will get enough people vaccinated by then.</li><li>I was on a Zoom call a couple of nights ago with a bunch of college friends. “Do you think we can all get together in person in September for Homecoming?” someone asked. “Absolutely,” I said, “we just need to lean into it.” And it feels like that’s what more people are doing -- leaning into visits to physically get together with family and friends they haven’t seen for a year now. It’s always dangerous drawing a straight trend line, but it feels like travel might come back quicker than expected. </li><li>Bridge Music -- Madrugada(rmx) by savoyard (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/savoyard/10743 Ft: Curve</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I finally pushed out the refreshed website last week. First change since 2006. Figured website aesthetics have changed a bit over the last 15 years and so changed things up a bit. Thanks to everyone who responded to my request on Facebook and Twitter to hit the new site for a bit of crowd-sourced end-user testing. A bit like the <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1224798425499213828\">meme</a> you’ll see posted in a lot of IT shops; a picture of Dos Equis “most interesting man in the world” with the line -- “I don’t always test my code, but when I do, I test it in Production.” There’s still some tweaks I need to make, but it seems pretty solid. Check it out if you get a chance -- travelcommons.com -- and drop me a line at <a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a> with your thoughts.</li><li>Following up on last episode’s rant about the guy living unnoticed in ORD for 3 months, I tweeted out an <a href=\"https://theconversation.com/how-some-people-can-end-up-living-at-airports-for-months-even-years-at-a-time-154336\">article</a> about people living years in airports. Written by a history prof from University of Dayton who researches the history of airports (hey, everyone’s gotta have their niche), the article talks about other airport residents, an Iranian refugee who lived in CDG for 18 years, and most recently, an Estonian guy who was transiting through Manila Int’l Airport last March as the shutdowns hit was stuck there for 100 days until the Estonian embassy could get him on a repatriation flight. That one is brutal. I spent 3 hours in that airport a few years back and even, with everything open, it felt 2½ hours too long. Check out the article -- there’s a link in the show notes and at the top of the Twitter and Facebook feeds. It’s a good read.</li><li>Jim McDonough hit the Facebook page, responding to last episode’s margarita instruction story with one of his own.<ul><li>I know how you feel about teaching the bartender how to make a margarita. We ended a week-long trip to Switzerland by staying our last night at a hotel by the Zurich airport. At dinner, we each asked for a Scotch and water. They brought out this big tray, with a bowl of ice cubes, a pitcher of water, a bottle of Scotch, and two glasses. A crowd of hotel employees gathered to watch. Evidently, they don\'t do Scotch and water in Zurich. When I filled the glasses with ice, they gasped. I explained that we live in a hot climate. I went ahead and added Scotch and topped off with a little water, and they winced when I took a sip. A cultural exchange, I guess.</li></ul></li><li>Jim, I love you, man, but I gotta tell you -- I’d probably be wincing with the hotel staff. My usual Scotch order is -- Scotch and glass. But you paid for it (and in Zurich, it’s not going to be a small amount), so even if they couldn’t quite figure out what you wanted, they at least gave you all the tools you needed.</li><li>One of my absolute favorite beer bars, <a href=\"https://brewpublic.com/beer-news/baileys-taproom-and-the-upper-lip-permanently-closes-its-doors/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bailey’s Taproom in Portland, Oregon</a>, has shut off their taps permanently. I started a project in downtown Portland in January 2013. Found Bailey’s the second night I was there and just settled in; my last beer there was my last night in Portland. The owner said “After reopening to limited seating (after the initial shutdown), it was clear that people were not interested in coming downtown. When the PPP money ran out, I decided to close the doors”&nbsp; Another reminder that we should try to be purposeful about where we spend our discretionary dollars, thinking about what businesses we would miss if they closed up and then go out of our way to buy something from them. In my case, it helps rationalize a rather full beer shelf in our pantry.</li><li>After Hertz declared bankruptcy at the end of last May, I predicted in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/06/09/podcast-164-first-post-lockdown-trips-travel-credit-cards/\">episode #164</a> that I’d be paying more attention to the mileage on the cars in the Five Star aisle because that’s the first place I see signs of financial distress — a lot less 500-mile cars and a lot more 24,000-mile cars. And while 24,000 miles on a car doesn’t seem like a lot, remember that rental car miles are kinda like dog years — you gotta multiply them by, like, 7 to get to regular car miles. And true to form, when picking up our Hertz car in PHX at the end of January, every car I looked at had over 24,000 miles, a few with a <strong>lot</strong> more. Will be interesting to see what’s on offer at SAN in a few weeks.&nbsp;</li><li>If you have any status on a Star Alliance or One World carrier, you probably got an email from your carrier about a <a href=\"https://skift.com/2021/03/05/data-breach-affects-more-than-2-million-frequent-flyers-across-airline-alliances/\">data breach at SITA</a>. I got them from United and American saying my name, account number, and status was potentially exposed and that I should change my password, which I did. And then thought about how this is yet another data leak from some unknown player in what is an incredibly fragmented travel tech tool chain. We talked about this back in November in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">episode #169</a> when an obscure Spanish company used by hotels to update information on on-line booking sites leaked 24 GB of names, emails, credit card data and reservation records. And in this case, if you’re not in the airline industry, you probably don’t know about <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SITA_(company)\">SITA</a>. It’s a industry consortium started back in 1949 by 11 European airlines to share infrastructure costs and has expanded to provide all sorts of travel technology including the exchange of passenger data between airlines -- in this case, the exchange of frequent flyer status so that, say, Lufthansa recognizes your elite status with United on your flight with them. It’s one thing when the breach is from a company that you did business with -- the <a href=\"https://www.cnet.com/news/marriott-discloses-new-data-breach-impacting-5-point-2-million-guests/\">Marriott hacks</a> in 2018 and 2020, the 2018 breaches at <a href=\"https://www.theregister.com/2018/09/11/british_airways_website_scripts/\">British Airways</a> and <a href=\"https://www.theregister.com/2018/10/25/cathay_pacific_hacked_up_to_94_million_passenger_deets_exposed/\">Cathay Pacific</a>. But it’s a whole other thing when you find out some unknown third party coughed up your data. But actually, when you get a look at the spaghetti that is travel technology, and see all the places your data is getting sent to -- often small companies that can’t afford state-of-the-art cybersecurity, it’s kinda surprising -- in a sad way -- that not more of this happens.</li><li>Type “plane mask” into the Google search box and one of the first 5 suggestions is “plane mask fight”. Click through and you get what seems to be an endless stream of news reports and cellphone videos of passengers fighting about having to wear a mask during a flight. What is getting a lot less coverage, though I’m hearing snatches of it here and there, are people getting chewed out by their row mates when taking their masks off to eat or drink something, getting something like “Hey, can you not drink during the flight? I’d rather not die for your convenience.”&nbsp; And I’m afraid this is going to get worse as more people start traveling again and aircraft load factors get back into the 80% range. But honestly, both sides are being idiots. You know the rules before you buy your ticket and you’re reminded of them by emails before you travel, and again by gate agents before you board the plane. If you can’t handle the rules -- all of them, not just the ones you agree with -- then don’t walk down the jetway. Drive; charter a jet. But don’t try to bend the rules to your own personal belief system and hassle the rest of us who are just trying to get from Point A to Point B on-time and with the minimum amount of heartache.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on our fab new web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge music -- Tools of the Trade by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial &nbsp;(3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/56512 Ft: Abstract Audio, Mr Yesterday, Martijn de Boer, Speck</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>What\'s New in Travel Insurance</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A little over a year ago, the first coronavirus lockdowns started, and the execution of them was, to be charitable, mostly a mess. Borders were quickly shut; planes grounded. People were stranded in foreign countries with no way home; we just talked about the Estonian guy stuck in Manila airport for 100 days. And all of a sudden, people started paying attention to travel insurance. What was once a check box at the bottom of a booking webpage that most of us clicked “no” on so we could finish our reservation quickly became very important. Last May in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/05/08/podcast-163-new-world-of-travel-insurance-getting-medical-help-on-the-road/\">episode #163</a>, as people were beginning to think about their first post-lockdown trips, we talked about the state of travel insurance. Now, with travel bookings beginning to rise as vaccination rates rise, I wanted to check back in and see what’s changed with travel insurance. So I asked Michael Giusti, senior writer at <a href=\"https://www.insurancequotes.com/\">InsuranceQuotes.com</a>, to come onto the podcast and give us an update:&nbsp;<ul><li>Mark: Michael, last May, Eric Josowitz of <a href=\"https://www.insurancequotes.com/\">InsuranceQuotes.com</a> was on the podcast. We were talking about travel insurance after the initial lockdown. Back then, in the midst of all that travel disruption, many travelers were finding:&nbsp; a) they didn\'t actually know what their insurance covered; they’d just checked the box at the end of their booking process, paid some additional amount moved on; and&nbsp; b) the insurance that they had bought had exclusions for communicable diseases, WHO-declared pandemics, cancellations in cases of fear. And then, after that, insurers stopped offering travel insurance. So, Michael, that was May. This is now the end of February. What\'s the current situation regarding travel insurance?</li><li>Michael: Not many people were thinking about pandemics back when this started. But the few people who were thinking about it were insurers. They saw the SARS epidemic and they started writing in pandemic exclusions from that point on. And then there\'s a second little provision in these insurance policies called the Known Events Provisions. So once the pandemic declared, even if there wasn\'t a specific exclusion, they can turn around and say, “Well, we\'re not going to cover because it\'s now a known event.” It would be like there\'s a hurricane that\'s bearing down on your city and you buy a plane ticket while the hurricane is there, and then you get mad because you can\'t fly. It’s a known event, and so they\'re not going to cover that. So that\'s where we came from. And then, you\'re right, they stopped and they said, “Well, we have no idea what\'s going on, so let’s regroup.”&nbsp; And now they\'ve regrouped, and it\'s really interesting because in a lot of the insurance industry, they\'ve stopped covering pandemics. But in travel insurance, they specifically started including Covid 19, saying “We will cover it under these conditions.”</li><li>Mark: Michael, travel requirements have been changing quickly; the restrictions have been going in and out. I mean, most recently, the need to provide a negative COVID test just to be able to get on a plane.&nbsp; If you look at what Canada did, they basically gave travelers one-week notice of the rule change at the end of 2020. But if you\'ve bought a travel insurance policy when you booked travel six weeks prior, what\'s the best way to cover these late breaking requirements that pop up a week or two before our trip?</li><li>Michael: Two main things... One is the policy language. You do need to say what’s specifically included, what’s specifically excluded? Because whether they\'re going to cover not having a negative test very much depends on the policy language. The other thing that it\'s going to come down to is whether it\'s out of your control. If it\'s something that you\'ve neglected to do, it\'s never going to be covered. The policies I\'ve reviewed, I haven\'t seen any that specifically kick in if you haven\'t got a negative test. So if you\'re worried about that, you really do need to ask the agent or really read that fine print. I do know that if you\'re delayed at security while you\'re being tested, that\'s not covered. So you do have to get there in time to make sure if they do rapid tests on the spot, that you\'re going to have time to get through security.</li><li>Mark: Okay, let me unpack that just a little bit, Michael. So I booked my flight, and I\'ve booked it a month ago. And now I go to take my test 72 hours before departure, and I come up positive. If I\'ve bought the right policy, would that typically cover delay or cover cancellation?</li><li>Michael: Delay is always the first preference. So if we can just push this trip back a week or whatever, that\'s going to be everyone\'s favorite outcome. But there are cancellation provisions where, say, you can\'t move it because the wedding is not going to be moved, in which case the cancellation provisions might kick in.</li><li>Mark: So now let\'s flip that. I\'ve taken my test, it\'s been negative, I get on the plane, I fly down to Costa Rica. And now a week on, I\'ve taken my test to get back into the US and now that test comes out positive. So now, potentially, I can\'t get back into the US. How does insurance help me there?</li><li>Michael: There\'s a couple places where this insurance is going to really beneficial in that situation. First and foremost, the medical provisions in most of these comprehensive policies are going to actually help you pay for your healthcare. Many of them are going to be secondary coverage, meaning they\'re going to want your primary health care to kick in first and then they\'ll jump in and cover anything that\'s not covered. Some of them are primary, especially with the overseas trips. So, that\'s a really nice benefits that are built into a lot of these policies. The other place that will help is, if you\'re delayed because you can\'t travel because of a restriction like that, and that\'s outside of your control, a lot of them will cover a hotel while you\'re waiting and meals while you\'re waiting, and they\'ll get you back home safely. So that\'s actually a really positive outcome that can happen with these policies.</li><li>Mark: Michael, how do I make sure that I\'ve actually got one of those policies? If we go back to the April/May timeframe, people were finding that they didn\'t actually know what they had. How do I make sure I\'ve actually bought that coverage?</li><li>Michael: Well, best case scenario would be if you found a human and you asked them in plain English.</li><li>Mark: Yeah, good luck with that, right?</li><li>Michael: I know, calling 1 800 numbers anymore – that’s not in the cards. What I would do if I was doing that, I’d click through the terms of service and see who\'s offering that policy. If it doesn\'t really go into much detail, or if it\'s really garbly legalese, I’d go through to the provider\'s website. Most of them have FAQ pages that specifically address COVID. So that\'s gonna be probably your best resource.</li><li>Mark: Michael, people are starting to think about big trips as vaccination rates start to step up. You know, the back half of the year, if I\'m thinking about booking, say, a week\'s biking tour in Tuscany or Provence in September/October, what kind of travel insurance should I be looking for? Should I pony up for a cancel- for-any-reason rider? Or are there some cheaper alternatives for more limited scenarios like, “Hey, the EU still isn\'t letting Americans in” but won\'t cover the more generic “Oh, I\'m afraid to travel” kind of reason.</li><li>Michael: The question of “if you\'re afraid to travel” is never going to be covered unless you do have that cancel-for-any-reason policy. But travel insurance is meant to cover things that are out of your control. So you know, if it\'s not laid out your policy, it\'s not gonna be covered. So that\'s kind of the most expensive option. You know, you\'re going to pay the most for a cancel-for-any-reason policy. That middle ground is the standard policy where you say “I\'m taking a little bit of the risk on myself. I\'m going to bravely travel wherever I\'m allowed.” The least expensive option is really kind of a DIY. And a lot of the destinations that I\'m seeing, they\'re waiving cancellation and change fees. And so you can kind of make your DIY travel insurance by only booking places that would let you change for no fee. That\'s kind of the cheapest “I\'m feeling brave” policy. “I\'m feeling skittish” policy Is that cancel-for-any-reason.</li><li>Mark: Super. Michael Giusti, senior writer at <a href=\"https://www.insurancequotes.com/\">InsuranceQuotes.com</a>, thank you very much for joining us. This was a great update.</li><li>Michael: Thank you so much.</li></ul></li><li>Bridge music -- Crazy Love-The Alex &amp; Lang mix by J.Lang (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djlang59/10579 Ft: FHC and Alex &amp; Bradsucks</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Keeping Ahead of Expiring Miles</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Like most road warriors of a certain tenure, I have cards in my desk of some 30-odd frequent traveler programs -- those that I know of -- and am probably a member of another dozen or so that I’ve forgotten about. Of those, I have meaningful balances -- enough for at least one free flight or a free hotel night -- at the Big 4 US carriers, a couple of European carriers, and two of the big hotel chains. Most of the rest are random programs like IcelandAir or AirBaltic or Omni Hotels that I used for a specific trip or project but had some spiff, like seat selection or free WiFi, that was reason enough to put in the effort to sign up.</li><li>When I was traveling every week or so, keeping those main programs active wasn’t a big effort. And if I hadn’t flown, say, BA for a while, I’d code maybe a short American commuter flight, something where my status was a bit meaningless, to my BA account to reset the expiration clock.</li><li>But now, hitting the first anniversary of the first travel lockdown and with business travel still mostly on hold, some of those expiration cliffs are starting to become visible</li><li>Last episode, I talked about getting emails from BA and Iberia warning me of pending Avios expirations, and so I transferred my Iberia points to my BA account. But I can’t tell from the BA website if that was enough activity to change the BA expiration. So I spelunked some more thru the website and found where they call out Airbnb bookings as “recognized activity” that’ll reset the 36-month clock. So, I booked our San Diego Airbnb through a link on BA’s site, just had to enter my BA account number before moving to the booking screen. It’ll be interesting to see if the activity flows seamlessly into my BA account or if I’ll have to chase it down through a manual credit claim. I’m betting on the latter, but am hoping to be pleasantly surprised.</li><li>But that got me cycling through my other accounts. I wasn’t worried about my US carrier accounts. The trend there has been to do away with expiration dates, first Southwest, then Delta, most recently United. American, not surprisingly, is the knuckle dragger, clinging to their stingy 18-month policy, but I flew them last fall to PHL, so I’m fine there.</li><li>But Flying Blue, the KLM/Air France program? I last flew KLM the fall of 2018, so that had to be coming up. I hit the website; those miles were also expiring at the end of this year. And, they, like BA and Iberia, have managed to make resetting that data way overly complex.&nbsp; First, there’s “overall extending activities” which are flights or purchases on their co-branded credit card; they extend <em>all</em> Flying Blue miles by 2 years. “Partial extending activities” extend miles earned through, say, hotel or car rental partners. Please note, says the website, \"‘Partial extending activities’ do not extend the validity of Miles earned from ‘Overall extending activities’\". OK, then. Looking at it this way, I only had 500 miles from that 2018 flight, but 38,000 miles from when I had to quickly stash points from a corporate Amex account before leaving a company. So, a “partial” activity should suffice. I set myself a reminder for Dec 1st to push the minimum 1,000 points from my personal Amex.</li><li>And the expiration periods are kinda all over the place. BA is 36 months; KLM, Marriott, and Hyatt are 2 years; American is 18 months; Hilton is 15 months (weird number); and IHG is the stingiest at 12.&nbsp;</li><li>Seems like there should be a technology solution to this, right? There are a few. If you use TripIt to consolidate your trip itineraries, the $49/year upgrade to the Pro version gives you program tracking. I had used it one year when they upgraded me for free; probably by mistake. AwardWallet is another popular tool, but there too, you need to upgrade to the paid version (a little cheaper at $30/year) to track expirations.</li><li>But beyond the cost, for these programs to work, you have to give them access to your accounts -- your account numbers and passwords. And cycling back to what I was saying at the top of the show, with the travel industry’s kinda poor track record on data protection, and just after having to reset passwords to United, American, Lufthansa, BA, and Iberia because of SITA’s leak, do I really want to put <em>all</em> my frequent traveler logins into one spot? I think a simple spreadsheet on the hard drive of the PC in my office can do the job just fine.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #173</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li>Nothing new on the tech front this month, but I should have the website freshened up by the next episode. I’ve had the current look since the beginning of 2006 courtesy of TravelCommons listener Hilary Baumann and her <a href=\"https://fascinationdesign.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Fascination Design</a> firm. The change is absolutely not a knock against Hilary’s work. It’s just that, after 15 years, I wanted to freshen things up a bit. So look for that by the end of February or beginning of March.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>, as well as asking Alexa, Siri, and Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_174.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #174 — Taproom Tourism','','inherit','closed','closed','','3509-revision-v1','','','2021-04-10 11:24:23','2021-04-10 16:24:23','',3509,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3513',0,'revision','',0),
(3514,1,'2021-04-10 11:37:03','2021-04-10 16:37:03','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_1985\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/IMG_3006.jpeg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1985\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/IMG_3006-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"Bar at Modern Times\' Taproom\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> I wonder what they serve here[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>As travel bookings beginning to rise with vaccination rates, we talk with Michael Giusti of <a href=\"http://insurancequotes.com\" title=\"insurancequotes.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">InsuranceQuotes.com</a> to find out what\'s changed over the last year. I make the rounds through all my frequent traveler programs to reset impending expiration dates. We also talk about yet another travel data breach, a favorite beer bar is a COVID casualty, and bankrupt Hertz is starting to let its cars get old. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_174.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #174: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>This Week</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois as things here start to open up from winter and COVID shutdowns. Increasing temperatures and vaccination rates have people out and about. Irene and I got a jump start on the better weather by flying out to San Diego on St Patrick’s Day to hang out at an Airbnb in Ocean Beach a block off the ocean and a couple of blocks south of Newport Avenue, the main drag that surprised me with its kinda hippy/surfer vibe. Which I liked. It reminded me of Huntington Beach in the mid-80’s when my folks moved there, before they tarted it all up. I give Ocean Beach credit for resisting the face lift, even if I meant I had to avoid the homeless guy changing his pants on the sidewalk when walking back with the morning coffee and doughnuts.</li><li>It was a low-key trip. Nothing scheduled, no real itinerary; mostly walking the coast during the day -- beaches or rocks -- and then at night, chipping away at the list of some 150 microbrewery taprooms in the San Diego area; a lost cause for sure, but one I willingly threw myself at. Indeed, the only time we looked closely at the time was Sunday afternoon to make sure I could get to all my “gotta go” taprooms before they closed since we were flying back Monday after lunch.</li><li>The bookends to the trip, the flights out and back on United, were a bit more stressful. The flights were just about completely full. And for some reason, United kept shoving me out of my aisle seat to the adjacent middle seat. But because I checked our seats after receiving United’s “We’re full; you can move to another flight for free” e-mail before each flight, there was enough time to rejigger our seats to adjacent aisles, which gave each of us a bit of room to lean away from a full middle seat. The bigger and, honestly, more surprising hassles were mask compliance. On the flight out of ORD, the guy in the row behind me had a loud, extended grumble session with his seatmate after the flight attendant told him to pull his mask up over his nose. I thought he was winding himself up for a protest, but he eventually calmed down. The flight back was worse for Irene. A young couple with an infant landed in the middle and window seats next to her. Both continually pulled their masks down below their chins; at some point, the husband fell asleep and started snoring with his down. And this is after the flight attendants made a number of very clear and pointed announcements on mask rules.</li><li>This all really surprised me. All my prior flights -- to Nashville, Philly, Phoenix -- there wasn’t any of this. Now I’m no mask scold, but like I said in the last episode, everyone agrees to wear one before they can check-in. So if you have a personal objection or don’t think you can handle it for 4 hours, don’t get on the plane. And if you do, treat yourself to a new mask before the flight; one with new elastic so it says up over your nose.</li><li>Bridge music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Astral/44268\">Dreaming</a> by Astral (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I finally pushed out the refreshed website last week. First change since 2006. Figured website aesthetics have changed a bit over the last 15 years and so changed things up a bit. Thanks to everyone who responded to my request on Facebook and Twitter to hit the new site for a bit of crowd-sourced end-user testing. A bit like the <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1224798425499213828\">meme</a> you’ll see posted in a lot of IT shops; a picture of Dos Equis “most interesting man in the world” with the line -- “I don’t always test my code, but when I do, I test it in Production.” There’s still some tweaks I need to make, but it seems pretty solid. Check it out if you get a chance -- travelcommons.com -- and drop me a line at <a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a> with your thoughts.</li><li>Following up on last episode’s rant about the guy living unnoticed in ORD for 3 months, I tweeted out an <a href=\"https://theconversation.com/how-some-people-can-end-up-living-at-airports-for-months-even-years-at-a-time-154336\">article</a> about people living years in airports. Written by a history prof from University of Dayton who researches the history of airports (hey, everyone’s gotta have their niche), the article talks about other airport residents, an Iranian refugee who lived in CDG for 18 years, and most recently, an Estonian guy who was transiting through Manila Int’l Airport last March as the shutdowns hit was stuck there for 100 days until the Estonian embassy could get him on a repatriation flight. That one is brutal. I spent 3 hours in that airport a few years back and even, with everything open, it felt 2½ hours too long. Check out the article -- there’s a link in the show notes and at the top of the Twitter and Facebook feeds. It’s a good read.</li><li>Jim McDonough hit the Facebook page, responding to last episode’s margarita instruction story with one of his own.<ul><li>I know how you feel about teaching the bartender how to make a margarita. We ended a week-long trip to Switzerland by staying our last night at a hotel by the Zurich airport. At dinner, we each asked for a Scotch and water. They brought out this big tray, with a bowl of ice cubes, a pitcher of water, a bottle of Scotch, and two glasses. A crowd of hotel employees gathered to watch. Evidently, they don\'t do Scotch and water in Zurich. When I filled the glasses with ice, they gasped. I explained that we live in a hot climate. I went ahead and added Scotch and topped off with a little water, and they winced when I took a sip. A cultural exchange, I guess.</li></ul></li><li>Jim, I love you, man, but I gotta tell you -- I’d probably be wincing with the hotel staff. My usual Scotch order is -- Scotch and glass. But you paid for it (and in Zurich, it’s not going to be a small amount), so even if they couldn’t quite figure out what you wanted, they at least gave you all the tools you needed.</li><li>One of my absolute favorite beer bars, <a href=\"https://brewpublic.com/beer-news/baileys-taproom-and-the-upper-lip-permanently-closes-its-doors/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bailey’s Taproom in Portland, Oregon</a>, has shut off their taps permanently. I started a project in downtown Portland in January 2013. Found Bailey’s the second night I was there and just settled in; my last beer there was my last night in Portland. The owner said “After reopening to limited seating (after the initial shutdown), it was clear that people were not interested in coming downtown. When the PPP money ran out, I decided to close the doors”  Another reminder that we should try to be purposeful about where we spend our discretionary dollars, thinking about what businesses we would miss if they closed up and then go out of our way to buy something from them. In my case, it helps rationalize a rather full beer shelf in our pantry.</li><li>After Hertz declared bankruptcy at the end of last May, I predicted in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/06/09/podcast-164-first-post-lockdown-trips-travel-credit-cards/\">episode #164</a> that I’d be paying more attention to the mileage on the cars in the Five Star aisle because that’s the first place I see signs of financial distress — a lot less 500-mile cars and a lot more 24,000-mile cars. And while 24,000 miles on a car doesn’t seem like a lot, remember that rental car miles are kinda like dog years — you gotta multiply them by, like, 7 to get to regular car miles. And true to form, when picking up our Hertz car in PHX at the end of January, every car I looked at had over 24,000 miles, a few with a <strong>lot</strong> more. Will be interesting to see what’s on offer at SAN in a few weeks. </li><li>If you have any status on a Star Alliance or One World carrier, you probably got an email from your carrier about a <a href=\"https://skift.com/2021/03/05/data-breach-affects-more-than-2-million-frequent-flyers-across-airline-alliances/\">data breach at SITA</a>. I got them from United and American saying my name, account number, and status was potentially exposed and that I should change my password, which I did. And then thought about how this is yet another data leak from some unknown player in what is an incredibly fragmented travel tech tool chain. We talked about this back in November in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">episode #169</a> when an obscure Spanish company used by hotels to update information on on-line booking sites leaked 24 GB of names, emails, credit card data and reservation records. And in this case, if you’re not in the airline industry, you probably don’t know about <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SITA_(company)\">SITA</a>. It’s a industry consortium started back in 1949 by 11 European airlines to share infrastructure costs and has expanded to provide all sorts of travel technology including the exchange of passenger data between airlines -- in this case, the exchange of frequent flyer status so that, say, Lufthansa recognizes your elite status with United on your flight with them. It’s one thing when the breach is from a company that you did business with -- the <a href=\"https://www.cnet.com/news/marriott-discloses-new-data-breach-impacting-5-point-2-million-guests/\">Marriott hacks</a> in 2018 and 2020, the 2018 breaches at <a href=\"https://www.theregister.com/2018/09/11/british_airways_website_scripts/\">British Airways</a> and <a href=\"https://www.theregister.com/2018/10/25/cathay_pacific_hacked_up_to_94_million_passenger_deets_exposed/\">Cathay Pacific</a>. But it’s a whole other thing when you find out some unknown third party coughed up your data. But actually, when you get a look at the spaghetti that is travel technology, and see all the places your data is getting sent to -- often small companies that can’t afford state-of-the-art cybersecurity, it’s kinda surprising -- in a sad way -- that not more of this happens.</li><li>Type “plane mask” into the Google search box and one of the first 5 suggestions is “plane mask fight”. Click through and you get what seems to be an endless stream of news reports and cellphone videos of passengers fighting about having to wear a mask during a flight. What is getting a lot less coverage, though I’m hearing snatches of it here and there, are people getting chewed out by their row mates when taking their masks off to eat or drink something, getting something like “Hey, can you not drink during the flight? I’d rather not die for your convenience.”  And I’m afraid this is going to get worse as more people start traveling again and aircraft load factors get back into the 80% range. But honestly, both sides are being idiots. You know the rules before you buy your ticket and you’re reminded of them by emails before you travel, and again by gate agents before you board the plane. If you can’t handle the rules -- all of them, not just the ones you agree with -- then don’t walk down the jetway. Drive; charter a jet. But don’t try to bend the rules to your own personal belief system and hassle the rest of us who are just trying to get from Point A to Point B on-time and with the minimum amount of heartache.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on our fab new web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mghicks/18378\">Emily and the Djembe</a> by mghicks (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/nc-sampling+/1.0/\">Noncommercial Sampling Plus</a> license. Ft: Emily via Briareus</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Taproom Tourism</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Like most road warriors of a certain tenure, I have cards in my desk of some 30-odd frequent traveler programs -- those that I know of -- and am probably a member of another dozen or so that I’ve forgotten about. Of those, I have meaningful balances -- enough for at least one free flight or a free hotel night -- at the Big 4 US carriers, a couple of European carriers, and two of the big hotel chains. Most of the rest are random programs like IcelandAir or AirBaltic or Omni Hotels that I used for a specific trip or project but had some spiff, like seat selection or free WiFi, that was reason enough to put in the effort to sign up.</li><li>When I was traveling every week or so, keeping those main programs active wasn’t a big effort. And if I hadn’t flown, say, BA for a while, I’d code maybe a short American commuter flight, something where my status was a bit meaningless, to my BA account to reset the expiration clock.</li><li>But now, hitting the first anniversary of the first travel lockdown and with business travel still mostly on hold, some of those expiration cliffs are starting to become visible</li><li>Last episode, I talked about getting emails from BA and Iberia warning me of pending Avios expirations, and so I transferred my Iberia points to my BA account. But I can’t tell from the BA website if that was enough activity to change the BA expiration. So I spelunked some more thru the website and found where they call out Airbnb bookings as “recognized activity” that’ll reset the 36-month clock. So, I booked our San Diego Airbnb through a link on BA’s site, just had to enter my BA account number before moving to the booking screen. It’ll be interesting to see if the activity flows seamlessly into my BA account or if I’ll have to chase it down through a manual credit claim. I’m betting on the latter, but am hoping to be pleasantly surprised.</li><li>But that got me cycling through my other accounts. I wasn’t worried about my US carrier accounts. The trend there has been to do away with expiration dates, first Southwest, then Delta, most recently United. American, not surprisingly, is the knuckle dragger, clinging to their stingy 18-month policy, but I flew them last fall to PHL, so I’m fine there.</li><li>But Flying Blue, the KLM/Air France program? I last flew KLM the fall of 2018, so that had to be coming up. I hit the website; those miles were also expiring at the end of this year. And, they, like BA and Iberia, have managed to make resetting that data way overly complex.&nbsp; First, there’s “overall extending activities” which are flights or purchases on their co-branded credit card; they extend <em>all</em> Flying Blue miles by 2 years. “Partial extending activities” extend miles earned through, say, hotel or car rental partners. Please note, says the website, \"‘Partial extending activities’ do not extend the validity of Miles earned from ‘Overall extending activities’\". OK, then. Looking at it this way, I only had 500 miles from that 2018 flight, but 38,000 miles from when I had to quickly stash points from a corporate Amex account before leaving a company. So, a “partial” activity should suffice. I set myself a reminder for Dec 1st to push the minimum 1,000 points from my personal Amex.</li><li>And the expiration periods are kinda all over the place. BA is 36 months; KLM, Marriott, and Hyatt are 2 years; American is 18 months; Hilton is 15 months (weird number); and IHG is the stingiest at 12.&nbsp;</li><li>Seems like there should be a technology solution to this, right? There are a few. If you use TripIt to consolidate your trip itineraries, the $49/year upgrade to the Pro version gives you program tracking. I had used it one year when they upgraded me for free; probably by mistake. AwardWallet is another popular tool, but there too, you need to upgrade to the paid version (a little cheaper at $30/year) to track expirations.</li><li>But beyond the cost, for these programs to work, you have to give them access to your accounts -- your account numbers and passwords. And cycling back to what I was saying at the top of the show, with the travel industry’s kinda poor track record on data protection, and just after having to reset passwords to United, American, Lufthansa, BA, and Iberia because of SITA’s leak, do I really want to put <em>all</em> my frequent traveler logins into one spot? I think a simple spreadsheet on the hard drive of the PC in my office can do the job just fine.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #173</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li>Nothing new on the tech front this month, but I should have the website freshened up by the next episode. I’ve had the current look since the beginning of 2006 courtesy of TravelCommons listener Hilary Baumann and her <a href=\"https://fascinationdesign.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Fascination Design</a> firm. The change is absolutely not a knock against Hilary’s work. It’s just that, after 15 years, I wanted to freshen things up a bit. So look for that by the end of February or beginning of March.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>, as well as asking Alexa, Siri, and Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_174.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #174 — How the Pros Plan Their Taproom Tourism','','inherit','closed','closed','','3509-revision-v1','','','2021-04-10 11:37:03','2021-04-10 16:37:03','',3509,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3514',0,'revision','',0),
(3515,1,'2021-04-10 11:59:40','2021-04-10 16:59:40','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_1985\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/IMG_3006.jpeg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1985\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/IMG_3006-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"Bar at Modern Times\' Taproom\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> I wonder what they serve here[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>As travel bookings beginning to rise with vaccination rates, we talk with Michael Giusti of <a href=\"http://insurancequotes.com\" title=\"insurancequotes.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">InsuranceQuotes.com</a> to find out what\'s changed over the last year. I make the rounds through all my frequent traveler programs to reset impending expiration dates. We also talk about yet another travel data breach, a favorite beer bar is a COVID casualty, and bankrupt Hertz is starting to let its cars get old. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_174.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #174: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>This Week</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois as things here start to open up from winter and COVID shutdowns. Increasing temperatures and vaccination rates have people out and about. Irene and I got a jump start on the better weather by flying out to San Diego on St Patrick’s Day to hang out at an Airbnb in <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_Beach,_San_Diego\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Ocean Beach</a> a block off the ocean and a couple of blocks south of Newport Avenue, the main drag that surprised me with its kinda hippy/surfer vibe. Which I liked. It reminded me of Huntington Beach in the mid-80’s when my folks moved there, before they tarted it all up. I give Ocean Beach credit for resisting the face lift, even if I meant I had to avoid the homeless guy changing his pants on the sidewalk when walking back with the morning coffee and doughnuts.</li><li>It was a low-key trip. Nothing scheduled, no real itinerary; mostly walking the coast during the day -- beaches or rocks -- and then at night, chipping away at the list of some 150 microbrewery taprooms in the San Diego area; a lost cause for sure, but one I willingly threw myself at. Indeed, the only time we looked closely at the time was Sunday afternoon to make sure I could get to all my “gotta go” taprooms before they closed since we were flying back Monday after lunch.</li><li>The bookends to the trip, the flights out and back on United, were a bit more stressful. The flights were just about completely full. And for some reason, United kept shoving me out of my aisle seat to the adjacent middle seat. But because I checked our seats after receiving United’s “We’re full; you can move to another flight for free” e-mail before each flight, there was enough time to rejigger our seats to adjacent aisles, which gave each of us a bit of room to lean away from a full middle seat. The bigger and, honestly, more surprising hassles were mask compliance. On the flight out of ORD, the guy in the row behind me had a loud, extended grumble session with his seatmate after the flight attendant told him to pull his mask up over his nose. I thought he was winding himself up for a protest, but he eventually calmed down. The flight back was worse for Irene. A young couple with an infant landed in the middle and window seats next to her. Both continually pulled their masks down below their chins; at some point, the husband fell asleep and started snoring with his down. And this is after the flight attendants made a number of very clear and pointed announcements on mask rules.</li><li>This all really surprised me. All my prior flights -- to Nashville, Philly, Phoenix -- there wasn’t any of this. Now I’m no mask scold, but like I said in the last episode, everyone agrees to wear one before they can check-in. So if you have a personal objection or don’t think you can handle it for 4 hours, don’t get on the plane. And if you do, treat yourself to a new mask before the flight; one with new elastic so it says up over your nose.</li><li>Bridge music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Astral/44268\">Dreaming</a> by Astral (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Long-time TravelCommons listener Nick Gassman sent in a note about last episode’s travel insurance update and COVID-related coverage. Nick writes:<ul><li>“In the UK, a recent survey found that whilst insurers would give you emergency medical cover if you caught COVID when you were away, none would cover you if the government advised against travel because of COVID and you therefore could not travel. Some would give you cancellation cover if you are diagnosed with COVID before travel, and others would further give cancellation cover if you had to self-isolate even without a positive test.</li><li>As ever with insurance, the thing is to make sure you understand the small print and to compare policies.</li></ul></li><li>Nick, thanks for that. I think the advice to \"read the small print\" is valid in life in general, and in travel insurance in particular. I think the pandemic and known event carve-outs lurking in the small print caught a lot of travel insurance holders back when the initial lockdowns hit. I wonder, a year on after all that, how many more people are clicking through the “Buy Travel Insurance” box at the bottom of their Expedia booking page to the full rider and doing a Control-F in their browser to search for the word “COVID”.</li><li>In the last <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/12/podcast-173-whats-new-in-travel-insurance-keeping-ahead-of-expiring-miles/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #173 — What’s New in Travel Insurance; Keeping Ahead of Expiring Miles\">couple </a>of <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/16/podcast-172-timeshares-without-the-pitch-notes-on-tucson/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #172 — Timeshares Without the Pitch; Notes on Tucson\">episodes</a>, I’ve been talking about my efforts to decipher the activity rules for British Airways’ frequent flier program to stave off a year-end extinction event for my non-insignificant stash of Avios points. Since I’m not planning to fly BA anytime soon, I booked our Ocean Beach Airbnb through a link on BA’s site and, to my surprise, I saw 1,800 Avios points automagically hit my account a week later. I can’t seem to find the expiration date to see if it updated, but I’m pretty sure this reset the 36-month clock. And it was a nice find, the Airbnb-Avios link. It let me double-dip on Avios and Chase Ultimate points. Not sure when I’ll get to spend them, but it was a nice little get.</li><li>In the last <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/12/podcast-173-whats-new-in-travel-insurance-keeping-ahead-of-expiring-miles/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #173 — What’s New in Travel Insurance; Keeping Ahead of Expiring Miles\">episode</a>, I talked about having to work through a lot of cars in the Hertz PHX lot to find one with less than 24,000 miles. In SAN, I had to work to find a car -- period. We walked to the Five Star aisle and it was empty. I tried to flag down a Hertz employee, but he just waved me off. After 5 minutes or so, a car showed up. I didn’t bother to look at the mileage; we just got in and drove off. I was late for a lunch date with a fish taco. Returning the car, I did my normal drill - top off the tank, get a receipt, and then when dropping it off, place the receipt under the keys on the dashboard so the check-in guy will see it. It usually works -- except this time. The receipt hits my e-mail as we’re trundling the perimeter of the airfield in the rental bus. I open it up and see a fuel charge! Really? The last time this happened was about 4 years ago in ATL. I hit Twitter and the Hertz team fixed it in a half-hour. This time, the <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1374073837923360768\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter team got back to me</a> pretty quick asking for the rental agreement details, but then… nothing. I pinged them the next day, nothing. And the next day, nothing. So I challenged it with Amex and got the fueling charge and associated taxes credited back in a couple of days and then moved on. Until earlier this week, two weeks later, Hertz popped up on my Twitter DMs asking for more information. It’s amazing how fast their service has cratered during this bankruptcy, which makes me wonder how long it’ll take them to recover. I gotta get some good discount codes for Avis.</li><li>There was a <a href=\"https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/04/uber-and-lyft-struggle-with-driver-shortage-as-demand-soars/\">spate</a> <a href=\"https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/7/22371850/uber-lyft-driver-shortage-covid-bonus-stimulus\">of</a> <a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/video/2021/04/08/uber-lyft-pledge-millions-to-fight-driver-shortage.html\">articles</a> this week about Uber and Lyft driver shortages. We experienced it first hand trying to get a morning ride out to ORD for our San Diego flight. I swallowed hard and agreed to a good-sized surge, waited for a while, and still had the Uber driver cancel on us at the last minute. It shouldn’t be surprising, though. Drivers left the platforms when demand cratered at the start of the pandemic, when Uber said (and this was last May when everything was shutdown) that their volume was down by 80% vs. the prior May (May 2019). And in Chicago, the run of Uber drivers getting carjacked at the beginning of this year probably didn’t help either. But with stimulus checks in the bank and vaccine rates rising, demand has snapped back, a lot faster than driver supply. The headline of the <a href=\"https://www.ft.com/content/2b71e009-bb96-46ee-b024-4c574ef41988\">Financial Times article</a> reads “Uber and Lyft ‘throwing money’ at US drivers to ease shortage” and says that Uber is spending $250 million on a one-time “stimulus” package of driver incentives. But even with that, it takes time to on-board even returning drivers -- re-doing vehicle inspections, background checks. In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/02/29/podcast-160-disappearing-seatback-screens-shrinking-difference-between-ride-share-and-taxis/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #160 — Disappearing Seatback Screens; Shrinking Difference Between Ride-Share and Taxis\">episode #160</a>, my last pre-pandemic episode back in February 2020, I talked about the shrinking difference between Uber and Lyft, and how I found myself beginning to shift back to regular cabs. These recent experiences are only accelerating that. I’m thinking I may need to reload taxi dispatch numbers back into my iPhone.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on our fab new web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mghicks/18378\">Emily and the Djembe</a> by mghicks (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/nc-sampling+/1.0/\">Noncommercial Sampling Plus</a> license. Ft: Emily via Briareus</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Taproom Tourism</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Putting together the new website, I was thinking about what to put on the top menu. “Subscribe” and “Episodes” were given, but I also put “Food” and “Beer” because, well, I write and talk about them a lot. But then, when I clicked through the new “Beer” menu, it felt a bit sparse. I needed to add some content. And so in the craft beer tradition of collaboration beers, I pinged Rob Cheshire, a long time TravelCommons listener and now craft beer podcaster with his <a href=\"https://thisweekincraft.beer/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">This Week in Craft Beer</a> podcast, to talk about why we go out of our way to find brewery taprooms, and how he organizes his travels to hit the most taprooms he can on each visit.</li><li>Taproom Tourism Discussion with Rob Cheshire</li><li>Thanks again to Rob Cheshire for that collab. I hope you could tell that it was a lot of fun. Indeed, the full session ran around an hour and a half and a bit more beer. If you want to hear more of our taproom stories, head over to Rob’s This Week in Craft Beer <a href=\"https://thisweekincraft.beer/podcast/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">podcast feed</a>, he posted a longer version as a bonus Easter episode, or check out the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/28/podcast-174-uncut-taproom-tourism/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">TravelCommons website</a>, <a href=\"https://fb.watch/4NAd-8Ai30/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook page</a> or <a href=\"https://youtu.be/6bz4EJn4-7U\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a> for the full video.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #174</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>The new website makes it a lot easier to subscribe. There’s a drop down menu at the top of each page, a set of subscribe links at the bottom, and a big red “Subscribe” button in the middle of the home page. You can use all those buttons, links and menus or you can just search for us on <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social  -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>Thanks to Nick Gassman, not only for the e-mails, but for <a href=\"https://nickgassman.com/recommended-podcasts/other-podcasts/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">calling out</a> TravelCommons in the Recommended Podcast section of his blog site.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_174.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #174 — How the Pros Plan Their Taproom Tourism','','inherit','closed','closed','','3509-revision-v1','','','2021-04-10 11:59:40','2021-04-10 16:59:40','',3509,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3515',0,'revision','',0),
(3516,1,'2021-04-10 12:07:02','2021-04-10 17:07:02','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_1985\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/IMG_3006.jpeg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1985\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/IMG_3006-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"Bar at Modern Times\' Taproom\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> I wonder what they serve here[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Looking at the <em><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/beer/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Beer</a></em> section of this new website design, I saw I needed more content. So I got hold of Rob Cheshire of the <em><a href=\"https://thisweekincraft.beer/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">This Week in Craft Beer</a></em> podcast to talk about his approach to taproom tourism and to trade taproom travel stories. I also talk about mask hassles on a couple of recent flights, Hertz\'s continuing downward service spiral, and Uber and Lyft driver shortages.  All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_174.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #174: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>This Week</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois as things here start to open up from winter and COVID shutdowns. Increasing temperatures and vaccination rates have people out and about. Irene and I got a jump start on the better weather by flying out to San Diego on St Patrick’s Day to hang out at an Airbnb in <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_Beach,_San_Diego\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Ocean Beach</a> a block off the ocean and a couple of blocks south of Newport Avenue, the main drag that surprised me with its kinda hippy/surfer vibe. Which I liked. It reminded me of Huntington Beach in the mid-80’s when my folks moved there, before they tarted it all up. I give Ocean Beach credit for resisting the face lift, even if I meant I had to avoid the homeless guy changing his pants on the sidewalk when walking back with the morning coffee and doughnuts.</li><li>It was a low-key trip. Nothing scheduled, no real itinerary; mostly walking the coast during the day -- beaches or rocks -- and then at night, chipping away at the list of some 150 microbrewery taprooms in the San Diego area; a lost cause for sure, but one I willingly threw myself at. Indeed, the only time we looked closely at the time was Sunday afternoon to make sure I could get to all my “gotta go” taprooms before they closed since we were flying back Monday after lunch.</li><li>The bookends to the trip, the flights out and back on United, were a bit more stressful. The flights were just about completely full. And for some reason, United kept shoving me out of my aisle seat to the adjacent middle seat. But because I checked our seats after receiving United’s “We’re full; you can move to another flight for free” e-mail before each flight, there was enough time to rejigger our seats to adjacent aisles, which gave each of us a bit of room to lean away from a full middle seat. The bigger and, honestly, more surprising hassles were mask compliance. On the flight out of ORD, the guy in the row behind me had a loud, extended grumble session with his seatmate after the flight attendant told him to pull his mask up over his nose. I thought he was winding himself up for a protest, but he eventually calmed down. The flight back was worse for Irene. A young couple with an infant landed in the middle and window seats next to her. Both continually pulled their masks down below their chins; at some point, the husband fell asleep and started snoring with his down. And this is after the flight attendants made a number of very clear and pointed announcements on mask rules.</li><li>This all really surprised me. All my prior flights -- to Nashville, Philly, Phoenix -- there wasn’t any of this. Now I’m no mask scold, but like I said in the last episode, everyone agrees to wear one before they can check-in. So if you have a personal objection or don’t think you can handle it for 4 hours, don’t get on the plane. And if you do, treat yourself to a new mask before the flight; one with new elastic so it says up over your nose.</li><li>Bridge music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Astral/44268\">Dreaming</a> by Astral (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Long-time TravelCommons listener Nick Gassman sent in a note about last episode’s travel insurance update and COVID-related coverage. Nick writes:<ul><li>“In the UK, a recent survey found that whilst insurers would give you emergency medical cover if you caught COVID when you were away, none would cover you if the government advised against travel because of COVID and you therefore could not travel. Some would give you cancellation cover if you are diagnosed with COVID before travel, and others would further give cancellation cover if you had to self-isolate even without a positive test.</li><li>As ever with insurance, the thing is to make sure you understand the small print and to compare policies.</li></ul></li><li>Nick, thanks for that. I think the advice to \"read the small print\" is valid in life in general, and in travel insurance in particular. I think the pandemic and known event carve-outs lurking in the small print caught a lot of travel insurance holders back when the initial lockdowns hit. I wonder, a year on after all that, how many more people are clicking through the “Buy Travel Insurance” box at the bottom of their Expedia booking page to the full rider and doing a Control-F in their browser to search for the word “COVID”.</li><li>In the last <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/12/podcast-173-whats-new-in-travel-insurance-keeping-ahead-of-expiring-miles/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #173 — What’s New in Travel Insurance; Keeping Ahead of Expiring Miles\">couple </a>of <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/16/podcast-172-timeshares-without-the-pitch-notes-on-tucson/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #172 — Timeshares Without the Pitch; Notes on Tucson\">episodes</a>, I’ve been talking about my efforts to decipher the activity rules for British Airways’ frequent flier program to stave off a year-end extinction event for my non-insignificant stash of Avios points. Since I’m not planning to fly BA anytime soon, I booked our Ocean Beach Airbnb through a link on BA’s site and, to my surprise, I saw 1,800 Avios points automagically hit my account a week later. I can’t seem to find the expiration date to see if it updated, but I’m pretty sure this reset the 36-month clock. And it was a nice find, the Airbnb-Avios link. It let me double-dip on Avios and Chase Ultimate points. Not sure when I’ll get to spend them, but it was a nice little get.</li><li>In the last <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/12/podcast-173-whats-new-in-travel-insurance-keeping-ahead-of-expiring-miles/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #173 — What’s New in Travel Insurance; Keeping Ahead of Expiring Miles\">episode</a>, I talked about having to work through a lot of cars in the Hertz PHX lot to find one with less than 24,000 miles. In SAN, I had to work to find a car -- period. We walked to the Five Star aisle and it was empty. I tried to flag down a Hertz employee, but he just waved me off. After 5 minutes or so, a car showed up. I didn’t bother to look at the mileage; we just got in and drove off. I was late for a lunch date with a fish taco. Returning the car, I did my normal drill - top off the tank, get a receipt, and then when dropping it off, place the receipt under the keys on the dashboard so the check-in guy will see it. It usually works -- except this time. The receipt hits my e-mail as we’re trundling the perimeter of the airfield in the rental bus. I open it up and see a fuel charge! Really? The last time this happened was about 4 years ago in ATL. I hit Twitter and the Hertz team fixed it in a half-hour. This time, the <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1374073837923360768\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter team got back to me</a> pretty quick asking for the rental agreement details, but then… nothing. I pinged them the next day, nothing. And the next day, nothing. So I challenged it with Amex and got the fueling charge and associated taxes credited back in a couple of days and then moved on. Until earlier this week, two weeks later, Hertz popped up on my Twitter DMs asking for more information. It’s amazing how fast their service has cratered during this bankruptcy, which makes me wonder how long it’ll take them to recover. I gotta get some good discount codes for Avis.</li><li>There was a <a href=\"https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/04/uber-and-lyft-struggle-with-driver-shortage-as-demand-soars/\">spate</a> <a href=\"https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/7/22371850/uber-lyft-driver-shortage-covid-bonus-stimulus\">of</a> <a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/video/2021/04/08/uber-lyft-pledge-millions-to-fight-driver-shortage.html\">articles</a> this week about Uber and Lyft driver shortages. We experienced it first hand trying to get a morning ride out to ORD for our San Diego flight. I swallowed hard and agreed to a good-sized surge, waited for a while, and still had the Uber driver cancel on us at the last minute. It shouldn’t be surprising, though. Drivers left the platforms when demand cratered at the start of the pandemic, when Uber said (and this was last May when everything was shutdown) that their volume was down by 80% vs. the prior May (May 2019). And in Chicago, the run of Uber drivers getting carjacked at the beginning of this year probably didn’t help either. But with stimulus checks in the bank and vaccine rates rising, demand has snapped back, a lot faster than driver supply. The headline of the <a href=\"https://www.ft.com/content/2b71e009-bb96-46ee-b024-4c574ef41988\">Financial Times article</a> reads “Uber and Lyft ‘throwing money’ at US drivers to ease shortage” and says that Uber is spending $250 million on a one-time “stimulus” package of driver incentives. But even with that, it takes time to on-board even returning drivers -- re-doing vehicle inspections, background checks. In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/02/29/podcast-160-disappearing-seatback-screens-shrinking-difference-between-ride-share-and-taxis/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #160 — Disappearing Seatback Screens; Shrinking Difference Between Ride-Share and Taxis\">episode #160</a>, my last pre-pandemic episode back in February 2020, I talked about the shrinking difference between Uber and Lyft, and how I found myself beginning to shift back to regular cabs. These recent experiences are only accelerating that. I’m thinking I may need to reload taxi dispatch numbers back into my iPhone.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on our fab new web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mghicks/18378\">Emily and the Djembe</a> by mghicks (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/nc-sampling+/1.0/\">Noncommercial Sampling Plus</a> license. Ft: Emily via Briareus</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Taproom Tourism</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Putting together the new website, I was thinking about what to put on the top menu. “Subscribe” and “Episodes” were given, but I also put “Food” and “Beer” because, well, I write and talk about them a lot. But then, when I clicked through the new “Beer” menu, it felt a bit sparse. I needed to add some content. And so in the craft beer tradition of collaboration beers, I pinged Rob Cheshire, a long time TravelCommons listener and now craft beer podcaster with his <a href=\"https://thisweekincraft.beer/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">This Week in Craft Beer</a> podcast, to talk about why we go out of our way to find brewery taprooms, and how he organizes his travels to hit the most taprooms he can on each visit.</li><li>Taproom Tourism Discussion with Rob Cheshire</li><li>Thanks again to Rob Cheshire for that collab. I hope you could tell that it was a lot of fun. Indeed, the full session ran around an hour and a half and a bit more beer. If you want to hear more of our taproom stories, head over to Rob’s This Week in Craft Beer <a href=\"https://thisweekincraft.beer/podcast/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">podcast feed</a>, he posted a longer version as a bonus Easter episode, or check out the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/28/podcast-174-uncut-taproom-tourism/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">TravelCommons website</a>, <a href=\"https://fb.watch/4NAd-8Ai30/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook page</a> or <a href=\"https://youtu.be/6bz4EJn4-7U\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a> for the full video.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #174</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>The new website makes it a lot easier to subscribe. There’s a drop down menu at the top of each page, a set of subscribe links at the bottom, and a big red “Subscribe” button in the middle of the home page. You can use all those buttons, links and menus or you can just search for us on <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social  -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>Thanks to Nick Gassman, not only for the e-mails, but for <a href=\"https://nickgassman.com/recommended-podcasts/other-podcasts/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">calling out</a> TravelCommons in the Recommended Podcast section of his blog site.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_174.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #174 — How the Pros Plan Their Taproom Tourism','','inherit','closed','closed','','3509-revision-v1','','','2021-04-10 12:07:02','2021-04-10 17:07:02','',3509,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3516',0,'revision','',0),
(3517,1,'2021-04-10 12:13:08','2021-04-10 17:13:08','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_1985\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/IMG_3006.jpeg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1985\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/IMG_3006-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"Bar at Modern Times\' Taproom\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> I wonder what they serve here[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Looking at the <em><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/beer/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Beer</a></em> section of this new website design, I saw I needed more content. So I got hold of Rob Cheshire of the <em><a href=\"https://thisweekincraft.beer/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">This Week in Craft Beer</a></em> podcast to talk about our approaches to taproom tourism and to trade taproom travel stories. I also talk about mask hassles on a couple of recent flights, Hertz\'s continuing downward service spiral, and Uber and Lyft driver shortages.  All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_174.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #174: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>This Week</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois as things here start to open up from winter and COVID shutdowns. Increasing temperatures and vaccination rates have people out and about. Irene and I got a jump start on the better weather by flying out to San Diego on St Patrick’s Day to hang out at an Airbnb in <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_Beach,_San_Diego\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Ocean Beach</a> a block off the ocean and a couple of blocks south of Newport Avenue, the main drag that surprised me with its kinda hippy/surfer vibe. Which I liked. It reminded me of Huntington Beach in the mid-80’s when my folks moved there, before they tarted it all up. I give Ocean Beach credit for resisting the face lift, even if I meant I had to avoid the homeless guy changing his pants on the sidewalk when walking back with the morning coffee and doughnuts.</li><li>It was a low-key trip. Nothing scheduled, no real itinerary; mostly walking the coast during the day -- beaches or rocks -- and then at night, chipping away at the list of some 150 microbrewery taprooms in the San Diego area; a lost cause for sure, but one I willingly threw myself at. Indeed, the only time we looked closely at the time was Sunday afternoon to make sure I could get to all my “gotta go” taprooms before they closed since we were flying back Monday after lunch.</li><li>The bookends to the trip, the flights out and back on United, were a bit more stressful. The flights were just about completely full. And for some reason, United kept shoving me out of my aisle seat to the adjacent middle seat. But because I checked our seats after receiving United’s “We’re full; you can move to another flight for free” e-mail before each flight, there was enough time to rejigger our seats to adjacent aisles, which gave each of us a bit of room to lean away from a full middle seat. The bigger and, honestly, more surprising hassles were mask compliance. On the flight out of ORD, the guy in the row behind me had a loud, extended grumble session with his seatmate after the flight attendant told him to pull his mask up over his nose. I thought he was winding himself up for a protest, but he eventually calmed down. The flight back was worse for Irene. A young couple with an infant landed in the middle and window seats next to her. Both continually pulled their masks down below their chins; at some point, the husband fell asleep and started snoring with his down. And this is after the flight attendants made a number of very clear and pointed announcements on mask rules.</li><li>This all really surprised me. All my prior flights -- to Nashville, Philly, Phoenix -- there wasn’t any of this. Now I’m no mask scold, but like I said in the last episode, everyone agrees to wear one before they can check-in. So if you have a personal objection or don’t think you can handle it for 4 hours, don’t get on the plane. And if you do, treat yourself to a new mask before the flight; one with new elastic so it says up over your nose.</li><li>Bridge music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Astral/44268\">Dreaming</a> by Astral (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Long-time TravelCommons listener Nick Gassman sent in a note about last episode’s travel insurance update and COVID-related coverage. Nick writes:<ul><li>“In the UK, a recent survey found that whilst insurers would give you emergency medical cover if you caught COVID when you were away, none would cover you if the government advised against travel because of COVID and you therefore could not travel. Some would give you cancellation cover if you are diagnosed with COVID before travel, and others would further give cancellation cover if you had to self-isolate even without a positive test.</li><li>As ever with insurance, the thing is to make sure you understand the small print and to compare policies.</li></ul></li><li>Nick, thanks for that. I think the advice to \"read the small print\" is valid in life in general, and in travel insurance in particular. I think the pandemic and known event carve-outs lurking in the small print caught a lot of travel insurance holders back when the initial lockdowns hit. I wonder, a year on after all that, how many more people are clicking through the “Buy Travel Insurance” box at the bottom of their Expedia booking page to the full rider and doing a Control-F in their browser to search for the word “COVID”.</li><li>In the last <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/12/podcast-173-whats-new-in-travel-insurance-keeping-ahead-of-expiring-miles/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #173 — What’s New in Travel Insurance; Keeping Ahead of Expiring Miles\">couple </a>of <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/16/podcast-172-timeshares-without-the-pitch-notes-on-tucson/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #172 — Timeshares Without the Pitch; Notes on Tucson\">episodes</a>, I’ve been talking about my efforts to decipher the activity rules for British Airways’ frequent flier program to stave off a year-end extinction event for my non-insignificant stash of Avios points. Since I’m not planning to fly BA anytime soon, I booked our Ocean Beach Airbnb through a link on BA’s site and, to my surprise, I saw 1,800 Avios points automagically hit my account a week later. I can’t seem to find the expiration date to see if it updated, but I’m pretty sure this reset the 36-month clock. And it was a nice find, the Airbnb-Avios link. It let me double-dip on Avios and Chase Ultimate points. Not sure when I’ll get to spend them, but it was a nice little get.</li><li>In the last <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/12/podcast-173-whats-new-in-travel-insurance-keeping-ahead-of-expiring-miles/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #173 — What’s New in Travel Insurance; Keeping Ahead of Expiring Miles\">episode</a>, I talked about having to work through a lot of cars in the Hertz PHX lot to find one with less than 24,000 miles. In SAN, I had to work to find a car -- period. We walked to the Five Star aisle and it was empty. I tried to flag down a Hertz employee, but he just waved me off. After 5 minutes or so, a car showed up. I didn’t bother to look at the mileage; we just got in and drove off. I was late for a lunch date with a fish taco. Returning the car, I did my normal drill - top off the tank, get a receipt, and then when dropping it off, place the receipt under the keys on the dashboard so the check-in guy will see it. It usually works -- except this time. The receipt hits my e-mail as we’re trundling the perimeter of the airfield in the rental bus. I open it up and see a fuel charge! Really? The last time this happened was about 4 years ago in ATL. I hit Twitter and the Hertz team fixed it in a half-hour. This time, the <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1374073837923360768\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter team got back to me</a> pretty quick asking for the rental agreement details, but then… nothing. I pinged them the next day, nothing. And the next day, nothing. So I challenged it with Amex and got the fueling charge and associated taxes credited back in a couple of days and then moved on. Until earlier this week, two weeks later, Hertz popped up on my Twitter DMs asking for more information. It’s amazing how fast their service has cratered during this bankruptcy, which makes me wonder how long it’ll take them to recover. I gotta get some good discount codes for Avis.</li><li>There was a <a href=\"https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/04/uber-and-lyft-struggle-with-driver-shortage-as-demand-soars/\">spate</a> <a href=\"https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/7/22371850/uber-lyft-driver-shortage-covid-bonus-stimulus\">of</a> <a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/video/2021/04/08/uber-lyft-pledge-millions-to-fight-driver-shortage.html\">articles</a> this week about Uber and Lyft driver shortages. We experienced it first hand trying to get a morning ride out to ORD for our San Diego flight. I swallowed hard and agreed to a good-sized surge, waited for a while, and still had the Uber driver cancel on us at the last minute. It shouldn’t be surprising, though. Drivers left the platforms when demand cratered at the start of the pandemic, when Uber said (and this was last May when everything was shutdown) that their volume was down by 80% vs. the prior May (May 2019). And in Chicago, the run of Uber drivers getting carjacked at the beginning of this year probably didn’t help either. But with stimulus checks in the bank and vaccine rates rising, demand has snapped back, a lot faster than driver supply. The headline of the <a href=\"https://www.ft.com/content/2b71e009-bb96-46ee-b024-4c574ef41988\">Financial Times article</a> reads “Uber and Lyft ‘throwing money’ at US drivers to ease shortage” and says that Uber is spending $250 million on a one-time “stimulus” package of driver incentives. But even with that, it takes time to on-board even returning drivers -- re-doing vehicle inspections, background checks. In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/02/29/podcast-160-disappearing-seatback-screens-shrinking-difference-between-ride-share-and-taxis/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #160 — Disappearing Seatback Screens; Shrinking Difference Between Ride-Share and Taxis\">episode #160</a>, my last pre-pandemic episode back in February 2020, I talked about the shrinking difference between Uber and Lyft, and how I found myself beginning to shift back to regular cabs. These recent experiences are only accelerating that. I’m thinking I may need to reload taxi dispatch numbers back into my iPhone.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on our fab new web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mghicks/18378\">Emily and the Djembe</a> by mghicks (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/nc-sampling+/1.0/\">Noncommercial Sampling Plus</a> license. Ft: Emily via Briareus</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Taproom Tourism</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Putting together the new website, I was thinking about what to put on the top menu. “Subscribe” and “Episodes” were given, but I also put “Food” and “Beer” because, well, I write and talk about them a lot. But then, when I clicked through the new “Beer” menu, it felt a bit sparse. I needed to add some content. And so in the craft beer tradition of collaboration beers, I pinged Rob Cheshire, a long time TravelCommons listener and now craft beer podcaster with his <a href=\"https://thisweekincraft.beer/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">This Week in Craft Beer</a> podcast, to talk about why we go out of our way to find brewery taprooms, and how he organizes his travels to hit the most taprooms he can on each visit.</li><li>Taproom Tourism Discussion with Rob Cheshire</li><li>Thanks again to Rob Cheshire for that collab. I hope you could tell that it was a lot of fun. Indeed, the full session ran around an hour and a half and a bit more beer. If you want to hear more of our taproom stories, head over to Rob’s This Week in Craft Beer <a href=\"https://thisweekincraft.beer/podcast/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">podcast feed</a>, he posted a longer version as a bonus Easter episode, or check out the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/28/podcast-174-uncut-taproom-tourism/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">TravelCommons website</a>, <a href=\"https://fb.watch/4NAd-8Ai30/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook page</a> or <a href=\"https://youtu.be/6bz4EJn4-7U\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a> for the full video.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #174</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>The new website makes it a lot easier to subscribe. There’s a drop down menu at the top of each page, a set of subscribe links at the bottom, and a big red “Subscribe” button in the middle of the home page. You can use all those buttons, links and menus or you can just search for us on <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social  -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>Thanks to Nick Gassman, not only for the e-mails, but for <a href=\"https://nickgassman.com/recommended-podcasts/other-podcasts/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">calling out</a> TravelCommons in the Recommended Podcast section of his blog site.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_174.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #174 — How the Pros Plan Their Taproom Tourism','','inherit','closed','closed','','3509-revision-v1','','','2021-04-10 12:13:08','2021-04-10 17:13:08','',3509,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3517',0,'revision','',0),
(3518,1,'2021-04-10 12:56:37','2021-04-10 17:56:37','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_1985\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/IMG_3006.jpeg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1985\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/IMG_3006-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"Bar at Modern Times\' Taproom\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> I wonder what they serve here[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Looking at the <em><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/beer/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Beer</a></em> section of this new website design, I saw I needed more content. So I got hold of Rob Cheshire of the <em><a href=\"https://thisweekincraft.beer/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">This Week in Craft Beer</a></em> podcast to talk about our approaches to taproom tourism and to trade taproom travel stories. I also talk about mask hassles on a couple of recent flights, Hertz\'s continuing downward service spiral, and Uber and Lyft driver shortages.  All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_174.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #174: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>This Week</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois as things here start to open up from winter and COVID shutdowns. Increasing temperatures and vaccination rates have people out and about. Irene and I got a jump start on the better weather by flying out to San Diego on St Patrick’s Day to hang out at an Airbnb in <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_Beach,_San_Diego\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Ocean Beach</a> a block off the ocean and a couple of blocks south of Newport Avenue, the main drag that surprised me with its kinda hippy/surfer vibe. Which I liked. It reminded me of Huntington Beach in the mid-80’s when my folks moved there, before they tarted it all up. I give Ocean Beach credit for resisting the face lift, even if I meant I had to avoid the homeless guy changing his pants on the sidewalk when walking back with the morning coffee and doughnuts.</li><li>It was a low-key trip. Nothing scheduled, no real itinerary; mostly walking the coast during the day -- beaches or rocks -- and then at night, chipping away at the list of some 150 microbrewery taprooms in the San Diego area; a lost cause for sure, but one I willingly threw myself at. Indeed, the only time we looked closely at the time was Sunday afternoon to make sure I could get to all my “gotta go” taprooms before they closed since we were flying back Monday after lunch.</li><li>The bookends to the trip, the flights out and back on United, were a bit more stressful. The flights were just about completely full. And for some reason, United kept shoving me out of my aisle seat to the adjacent middle seat. But because I checked our seats after receiving United’s “We’re full; you can move to another flight for free” e-mail before each flight, there was enough time to rejigger our seats to adjacent aisles, which gave each of us a bit of room to lean away from a full middle seat. The bigger and, honestly, more surprising hassles were mask compliance. On the flight out of ORD, the guy in the row behind me had a loud, extended grumble session with his seatmate after the flight attendant told him to pull his mask up over his nose. I thought he was winding himself up for a protest, but he eventually calmed down. The flight back was worse for Irene. A young couple with an infant landed in the middle and window seats next to her. Both continually pulled their masks down below their chins; at some point, the husband fell asleep and started snoring with his down. And this is after the flight attendants made a number of very clear and pointed announcements on mask rules.</li><li>This all really surprised me. All my prior flights -- to Nashville, Philly, Phoenix -- there wasn’t any of this. Now I’m no mask scold, but like I said in the last episode, everyone agrees to wear one before they can check-in. So if you have a personal objection or don’t think you can handle it for 4 hours, don’t get on the plane. And if you do, treat yourself to a new mask before the flight; one with new elastic so it says up over your nose.</li><li>Bridge music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Astral/44268\">Dreaming</a> by Astral (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Long-time TravelCommons listener Nick Gassman sent in a note about last episode’s travel insurance update and COVID-related coverage. Nick writes:<ul><li>“In the UK, a recent survey found that whilst insurers would give you emergency medical cover if you caught COVID when you were away, none would cover you if the government advised against travel because of COVID and you therefore could not travel. Some would give you cancellation cover if you are diagnosed with COVID before travel, and others would further give cancellation cover if you had to self-isolate even without a positive test.</li><li>As ever with insurance, the thing is to make sure you understand the small print and to compare policies.</li></ul></li><li>Nick, thanks for that. I think the advice to \"read the small print\" is valid in life in general, and in travel insurance in particular. I think the pandemic and known event carve-outs lurking in the small print caught a lot of travel insurance holders back when the initial lockdowns hit. I wonder, a year on after all that, how many more people are clicking through the “Buy Travel Insurance” box at the bottom of their Expedia booking page to the full rider and doing a Control-F in their browser to search for the word “COVID”.</li><li>In the last <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/12/podcast-173-whats-new-in-travel-insurance-keeping-ahead-of-expiring-miles/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #173 — What’s New in Travel Insurance; Keeping Ahead of Expiring Miles\">couple </a>of <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/16/podcast-172-timeshares-without-the-pitch-notes-on-tucson/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #172 — Timeshares Without the Pitch; Notes on Tucson\">episodes</a>, I’ve been talking about my efforts to decipher the activity rules for British Airways’ frequent flier program to stave off a year-end extinction event for my non-insignificant stash of Avios points. Since I’m not planning to fly BA anytime soon, I booked our Ocean Beach Airbnb through a link on BA’s site and, to my surprise, I saw 1,800 Avios points automagically hit my account a week later. I can’t seem to find the expiration date to see if it updated, but I’m pretty sure this reset the 36-month clock. And it was a nice find, the Airbnb-Avios link. It let me double-dip on Avios and Chase Ultimate points. Not sure when I’ll get to spend them, but it was a nice little get.</li><li>In the last <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/12/podcast-173-whats-new-in-travel-insurance-keeping-ahead-of-expiring-miles/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #173 — What’s New in Travel Insurance; Keeping Ahead of Expiring Miles\">episode</a>, I talked about having to work through a lot of cars in the Hertz PHX lot to find one with less than 24,000 miles. In SAN, I had to work to find a car -- period. We walked to the Five Star aisle and it was empty. I tried to flag down a Hertz employee, but he just waved me off. After 5 minutes or so, a car showed up. I didn’t bother to look at the mileage; we just got in and drove off. I was late for a lunch date with a fish taco. Returning the car, I did my normal drill - top off the tank, get a receipt, and then when dropping it off, place the receipt under the keys on the dashboard so the check-in guy will see it. It usually works -- except this time. The receipt hits my e-mail as we’re trundling the perimeter of the airfield in the rental bus. I open it up and see a fuel charge! Really? The last time this happened was about 4 years ago in ATL. I hit Twitter and the Hertz team fixed it in a half-hour. This time, the <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1374073837923360768\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter team got back to me</a> pretty quick asking for the rental agreement details, but then… nothing. I pinged them the next day, nothing. And the next day, nothing. So I challenged it with Amex and got the fueling charge and associated taxes credited back in a couple of days and then moved on. Until earlier this week, two weeks later, Hertz popped up on my Twitter DMs asking for more information. It’s amazing how fast their service has cratered during this bankruptcy, which makes me wonder how long it’ll take them to recover. I gotta get some good discount codes for Avis.</li><li>There was a <a href=\"https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/04/uber-and-lyft-struggle-with-driver-shortage-as-demand-soars/\">spate</a> <a href=\"https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/7/22371850/uber-lyft-driver-shortage-covid-bonus-stimulus\">of</a> <a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/video/2021/04/08/uber-lyft-pledge-millions-to-fight-driver-shortage.html\">articles</a> this week about Uber and Lyft driver shortages. We experienced it first hand trying to get a morning ride out to ORD for our San Diego flight. I swallowed hard and agreed to a good-sized surge, waited for a while, and still had the Uber driver cancel on us at the last minute. It shouldn’t be surprising, though. Drivers left the platforms when demand cratered at the start of the pandemic, when Uber said (and this was last May when everything was shutdown) that their volume was down by 80% vs. the prior May (May 2019). And in Chicago, the run of Uber drivers getting carjacked at the beginning of this year probably didn’t help either. But with stimulus checks in the bank and vaccine rates rising, demand has snapped back, a lot faster than driver supply. The headline of the <a href=\"https://www.ft.com/content/2b71e009-bb96-46ee-b024-4c574ef41988\">Financial Times article</a> reads “Uber and Lyft ‘throwing money’ at US drivers to ease shortage” and says that Uber is spending $250 million on a one-time “stimulus” package of driver incentives. But even with that, it takes time to on-board even returning drivers -- re-doing vehicle inspections, background checks. In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/02/29/podcast-160-disappearing-seatback-screens-shrinking-difference-between-ride-share-and-taxis/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #160 — Disappearing Seatback Screens; Shrinking Difference Between Ride-Share and Taxis\">episode #160</a>, my last pre-pandemic episode back in February 2020, I talked about the shrinking difference between Uber and Lyft, and how I found myself beginning to shift back to regular cabs. These recent experiences are only accelerating that. I’m thinking I may need to reload taxi dispatch numbers back into my iPhone.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on our fab new web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mghicks/18378\">Emily and the Djembe</a> by mghicks (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/nc-sampling+/1.0/\">Noncommercial Sampling Plus</a> license. Ft: Emily via Briareus</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Taproom Tourism</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Putting together the new website, I was thinking about what to put on the top menu. “Subscribe” and “Episodes” were given, but I also put “Food” and “Beer” because, well, I write and talk about them a lot. But then, when I clicked through the new “Beer” menu, it felt a bit sparse. I needed to add some content. And so in the craft beer tradition of collaboration beers, I pinged Rob Cheshire, a long time TravelCommons listener and now craft beer podcaster with his <a href=\"https://thisweekincraft.beer/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">This Week in Craft Beer</a> podcast, to talk about why we go out of our way to find brewery taprooms, and how he organizes his travels to hit the most taprooms he can on each visit.</li><li>Taproom Tourism Discussion with Rob Cheshire</li><li>Thanks again to Rob Cheshire for that collab. I hope you could tell that it was a lot of fun. Indeed, the full session ran around an hour and a half and a bit more beer. If you want to hear more of our taproom stories, head over to Rob’s This Week in Craft Beer <a href=\"https://thisweekincraft.beer/podcast/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">podcast feed</a>, he posted a longer version as a bonus Easter episode, or check out the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/28/podcast-174-uncut-taproom-tourism/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">TravelCommons website</a>, <a href=\"https://fb.watch/4NAd-8Ai30/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook page</a> or <a href=\"https://youtu.be/6bz4EJn4-7U\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a> for the full video.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #174</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>The new website makes it a lot easier to subscribe. There’s a drop down menu at the top of each page, a set of subscribe links at the bottom, and a big red “Subscribe” button in the middle of the home page. You can use all those buttons, links and menus or you can just search for us on <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>Thanks to Nick Gassman, not only for the e-mails, but for <a href=\"https://nickgassman.com/recommended-podcasts/other-podcasts/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">calling out</a> TravelCommons in the Recommended Podcast section of his blog site.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_174.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #174 — How the Pros Plan Their Taproom Tourism','','inherit','closed','closed','','3509-revision-v1','','','2021-04-10 12:56:37','2021-04-10 17:56:37','',3509,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3518',0,'revision','',0),
(3524,1,'2021-05-04 22:27:29','2021-05-05 03:27:29','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":2382,\"width\":300,\"height\":300} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright is-resized\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/DSC_5715-1024x1024.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2382\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"/><figcaption>Not Looking Friendly for a Solo Diner</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I dusted off the mobile rig to record this episode in Happy Valley, the home of Penn State. And I am kinda happy with some travel to Phoenix and Florida to thaw me out after Chicago\'s run in with the polar vortex. In this episode, I talk about budget airlines, stepping down in Hertz status, why I bought physical guidebooks for a trip to France, the challenges of being a solo diner, and then dig into the archives for a classic travel story. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_149.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #149:</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the Hyatt Place in State College, PA, feeling a bit more positive about life after a couple of warm weather getaways -- an afternoon meeting in Phoenix that I happily turned into a 3-day stay by flying in early for a “prep” session and staying late “in case our session ran long”; and then a long weekend with friends on the Gulf side of Florida. It was a nice break to walk outside without layering up coats, and scarves, and hats, and without taking an Arctic blast in the face. Not that it was toasty in Phoenix, but I was walking around downtown in a blazer, passing people -- natives, I’d guess -- in puffy down jackets. Not that they were wrong; it’s just that my reference point was that -22 degree polar vortex day. </li><li>Reminds me of a time many years ago when I was doing a project in J’burg South Africa in July -- our summer, their winter. We’re going to a restaurant for dinner. The inside is full, but the outside tables are available. The owner apologizes, offers to bring us blankets. My colleague from Detroit is wearing a polo shirt; I’m in dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up. “Thanks, but we’re fine,” we tell him. Halfway through the meal, he comes out, offering to move us inside now that a table has freed up. He’s wearing a parka. “No, really, we’re OK,” we tell him. Different reference points on what’s cold.</li><li>Both trips -- out to Phoenix and down to Ft Myers airport, were full of young families, also getting away from the cold, maybe to stay with parents/ grandparents who’d retired in more reasonable climes. I flew Southwest to Phoenix and United to Ft Myers, and I came to appreciate what, before this, was, to me, an undiscovered benefit of Southwest’s open seating. Because I was in the B boarding group, those families with young children boarded before me. Walking down the aisle, I could spot the crying babies -- there, and there, and there -- and could just keep walking, until I was behind them all. Sure, I was in the back of the plane, and it took me a while to deplane, but that was a very small price I was willing to pay for 3 hours of relative peace. </li><li> Bridge Music —&nbsp;<em>Paint the Sky</em>&nbsp;by Hans Atom (c) 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/hansatom/50718 Ft: Miss Judged </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>In past episodes, we talked about the bare bones budget airlines -- Spirit and Frontier in the US; Ryanair and EasyJet in Europe, and Wow Air and Norwegian as the second coming of Laker Airways, doing TransAtlantic budget flight. Of those, I’ve flown Frontier, EasyJet, and Wow Air which, as a group, seems like the less severe set of the budgets. Ryanair and Spirit always seem to have a harder edge about the “budget-ness.” And then there’s their impact on the mainline carriers -- United, American, and Delta’s basic economy fares. Usually, when I look at a mainline carrier’s basic economy fare, the difference vs. their regular economy fare isn’t big enough to make up extra hassles. But booking our trip down to Florida, the difference on United was over $100 a ticket. Irene and I figured we could put up with a few hassles for over $200. But as dug a bit further, we didn’t find as many hassles as we thought. Because we’re both United Gold, there was no limitation on carry-on bags and we boarded in the usual Group 1. The only downgrade was that we had to pay to reserve seats and we couldn’t book them in Economy Plus -- the aisles with the extra legroom. Even after paying for reserved seats, we still saved enough to pay for a couple of nice dinners of grilled grouper. </li><li>Our friends who joined us from Milwaukee flew down on American through DFW without a hassle. Their flight back -- a direct to Milwaukee on Frontier -- not so much. Their flight was supposed to leave at 7:45pm. Around lunch, they received a note that their flight was delayed by 5 hours. What? We checked that again. We pulled up the FlightAware app, searched for their flight, and then started walked its planned flight legs back, hitting the “Where’s My Plane?” button until we found it -- still on the ground in Milwaukee 6 hours after its scheduled departure time. The weather wasn’t that bad, so it had to be a maintenance problem, which is a huge problem when flying budget and regional airlines because their model is to bounce a plane from place to place rather than flying it out of a hub where they could swap out a busted plane if need be. So that 6 hour delay was going to cascade through that day’s schedule. Our friends finally left Ft Myers at 2:45am. Which is something I’ve noticed about Frontier -- I’ve never seen them cancel a flight no matter how late they leave. A regional airline would’ve cancelled that flight way earlier, but not Frontier. I don’t know how their crews don’t time out, but I kinda admire them for getting you home no matter what time. Would be way better <em>not </em>&nbsp;to take a 7-hr delay, but at least they get you home.</li><li>This year, I got dropped a status level on Hertz, from President’s Circle down to Five Star. I didn’t do 20 rentals last year, and I missed an offer back in December to pay some points to keep my status. But, I can’t say that I notice the downgrade too much. When I was in Phoenix, I snagged a great Chrysler 300 with custom black rims. In Ft Myers, I got a brand new GMC Terrain SUV that held 4 adults very comfortable… Though I have to say that the Terrain through me for a loop when I got in. I’ve rented all sort of different cars. I get in, pair my phone to the Bluetooh, adjust the mirrors, put it in Drive, and pull out. With the Terrain, I was good with all of that right up until the “put it in Drive” step. I look down at the console -- no gear shift, no gear dial (the Chrysler experience talking). Then grab the stalk on the right side of the steering column and turn on the windshield wipers. I’m looking all over -- “WTF? Where is the damn gear shift?” From the back seat, Kristin points under the climate control “It’s right there”. And then I see, a line of buttons -- P, R, N, D. I push the D button and off we go. The last time I saw a push button gear selector was when I was a kid, riding in somebody’s old Plymouth. I mean, come on GMC, do we really need <em>another</em> type of gear selection? Searching the Internet later for the Terrain’s gear buttons yields a whole slew of “Worst Shifter Design” article featuring these buttons. I don’t know which was worse -- the actual buttons or me, the alpha road warrior, getting back seat instructions on how to put a rental car in gear.</li><li>Another new thing I learned at Hertz Ft Myers -- besides where to find gear buttons -- is that, for Hertz Gold customers, there’s no additional driver fee for your spouse. I’ve been in Hertz Gold since it started, but I never connected to this benefit. It’s saves real money -- additional driver fees can run $10/day -- and hassle. Another reason to like the Hertz Gold program.</li><li>TravelCommons made our little local newspaper in an installment of their “Ask The Expert” series with the sub-headline “How can travel be more relaxing and fun?” &nbsp;When Sandy, the reporter, emailed me to schedule the interview, she wanted to talk about advice for successful spring break travel. So I started off talking about how those spring break families should avoid traveling during road warrior rush hours -- Monday mornings and Thursday evenings. “Boarding a plane filled with busy professionals can quickly rob you of that pre-vacation high,” Sandy wrote, “Peacock advise leisure travelers to avoid sharing a plane with these potential buzzkills.” Such as me. The last thing a family heading for Disney wants to encounter is people like me powering down the concourse. I also recounted some of the tips that you’ve seen in my Top Holiday Travel Tips posts -- fly early in the day, avoid regional jets, and no one-and-done outfits so you can get everything you need into a carry-on. And I talked about turning long layovers into mini-vacations with our upcoming Stockholm layover as an example. Of course, I didn’t mention that a lot of these layovers turn into taproom crawls, like in last year’s video of the Midway layover taproom tour, and potentially this Stockholm stop thanks to TravelCommons’ listener Rob Cheshire’s custom Google map. No, I figured than might be a bit much for our nice local paper. Sandy turned our 45-minute conversation into a nice article. I posted a picture of the article on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">TravelCommons Facebook page</a> since they don’t seem to put their issues on-line. </li><li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/12/podcast-120-where-do-guidebooks-fit-in-i-hate-shopping-for-suitcases/\">episode #120</a>, back in March 2016, I asked the question -- Where do physical guidebooks fit in the world of apps, review websites, social media, and podcasts? Back then, I was planning Andrew’s and my visit to Iceland. Now, getting ready to head over to Brittany, France for 10 days, I bought two physical guidebooks to take with us. Irene wanted DK’s Eyewitness Travel; it was her favorite out of the stack of guidebooks she checked out of the library. While I did a throwback, picked up our go-to book from our PK (pre-kids) days of travel, Michelin’s Green Guide. The DK book is definitely more visually punchy, but I figured Michelin, a French company, should have Brittany covered pretty well, and they published this new edition just last month. Maybe I’m getting lazy in my old age, but I’m kinda glad to have everything in one spot -- a bit of local history, touring maps, city guides -- rather than having to rummage through multiple PDFs in an Evernote folder. However, I took a pass on Amazon’s recommended add-on of Michelin’s Brittany Road and Tourist Map No. 512. I’ve topped up my local SIM for 2.5 GB of mobile data; I’m sticking with Google Maps. I maybe old school, but I’m not going back to the Dark Ages.</li><li>And if you have any travel rants, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. &nbsp;The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or  Instagram  at travelcommons -- or  post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com. </li><li> Bridge Music —&nbsp;<em>Perfect Stranger</em>&nbsp;by stellarartwars (c) 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/stellarartwars/45510 Ft: TheDice </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Dining Single</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Our daughter Claire is heading down to London for her first week of Spring Break and will then meet us in Paris for our Brittany trip. &nbsp;Planning it, we got talking about eating alone on the road. Years ago, it used to be more awkward - escorted to the small table off in the corner, a server a bit ticked off at the small check and therefore small tip. You’d read the newspaper or a book between courses to keep yourself occupied, wrap it up pretty quickly and head back to the hotel.</li><li>For guy travelers, the sports bar was (and still is) the exception to that rule. Fine, sit me in a booth alone as long as I have a clear view of walls of TV screens showing all ESPN all the time – ESPN, ESPN-2, ESPN-3, ESPN-U, ESPN News… No need for a book, especially over the next few weeks watching the opening rounds of the NCAA tournaments when I can watch a couple of games at once. Rush out? Hell no, give me another large Coors Light, we haven’t even hit half time.</li><li>Most restaurants now serve a full menu at the bar, complete with a full set up -- placemats, maybe a bread basket. Might be a touch cramped at happy hour, but it’s usually nice to be in the main flow of things rather than off in the corner. The trend toward shared plates , while getting a bit tired when dining with a group (“OK, what can we all agree on?”) works great for the single diner. If I want a bit of variety without overeating, I now have choices beyond sushi or tapas bars. Not that those are bad choices. I have no doubt that Claire will find her way to the bar at Barrafina in Soho.</li><li>Sitting at the bar also gave you a chance for a little social interaction, some serendipity; with the bartender, maybe with the guy sitting next to you. Some years ago, on my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/08/14/food-and-drink-highlights-from-my-drive-south/\">2,100-mile circle tour through the South</a>, a guy next to me at a Louisville bar told me to check out a restaurant in the not-yet-hip Bywater neighborhood in New Orleans; turned out to be a great recommendation. But I get less and less of that as people eat and just interact with their smartphones. Maybe Claire wouldn’t be keen on random bar conversations, but I kinda miss it.</li><li>Nowadays, where I do find that interaction is microbrewery taprooms. Sure, people still have their phones out to check their tasting flight into Untappd, but there’s an acceptance, almost an expectation, that people will “nerd out” about hops and malt and yeast esters with each other and with folks behind the bar. During one of my Dallas trips, I found my way to Grapevine Craft Brewing on a rainy Weds night. The brewmaster was pulling the taps, passing out some barrel samples, and we all spinning our beer nerd propellers real hard.</li><li> Bridge Music —&nbsp;<em>Foolish Game</em>&nbsp;by copperhead (c) 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/copperhead/46390 Ft: Snowflake,Sackjo22 </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><b>From The Travel Story Archives -- Airlines Need To Tell Us More</b></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Prepping for that interview with the local paper had me spelunking deep into the TravelCommons archives, fixing some broken links and listening to some of those early shows for the first time in a long time. A couple of things struck me -- the really poor sound quality I got from the little iRiver MP3 recorder that I was using, and how good some of those early travel stories were.</li><li> So here’s one from<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/09/24/podcast-15-begging-for-business-needing-to-know-at-35000-ft/\"> episode #15</a>, very long-time TC listener Allan Marko talking about wanting to know just a little bit more about what an airline maintenance guy is doing.  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #149</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_149.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #149 — Dining Single; Airlines Need To Tell Us More','','inherit','closed','closed','','2373-revision-v1','','','2021-05-04 22:27:29','2021-05-05 03:27:29','',2373,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3524',0,'revision','',0),
(3526,1,'2021-05-04 22:32:16','2021-05-05 03:32:16','[caption id=\"attachment_1291\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/2013-12-10-07.55.43.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1291\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/2013-12-10-07.55.43-300x225.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\"></a> Tough travel day when the deicing fluid freezes[/caption]\n\nFlying home into the teeth of the polar vortex that gave <a href=\"https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/01/31/frost-quakes-chicago-polar-vortex/2730412002/\">Chicago its coldest day since January 1985</a> took a bit of flight changing strategy and some incredibly dedicated United ramp workers. I get on-trend by \"<a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/kondo-ing-a-guru-of-organizing-becomes-a-verb-11547745648\">Kondo-ing</a>\" my old suitcases, worry about visiting Sweden as it rapidly goes cashless, and gather up some odds-‘n’-ends from travel notebook into a Jeopardy-like topic “Travel Potpourri”. All this and more at the&nbsp;<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_148.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #148:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, just trying to survive Nature’s mood swings -- 16 straight days of snow, the much publicized polar vortex cold last week followed by a four-day 73 degree temp rise -- from -22 on early Thursday morning (actual temperature; none of this wind chill guesstimating) to +51 degrees Monday afternoon, and then a 40-some degree drop back to the single digits by Friday. It’s climate change, alright. Just not all in the same direction. Last Wednesday was the second coldest day in Chicago history at -23 degrees. I was also here for the coldest day -- January 20, 1985 -- when it hit -27 degrees. I was just starting my last quarter at University of Chicago. It left an impression. After that, I didn’t interview with any Chicago companies. I took a job in Dallas and moved down in July -- to temperatures averaging in the 90’s. Brilliant</li>\n 	<li>I missed the wind-up to last week’s freeze fest. I flew out to New York on the Monday morning at the tail end of that 16-day snow fest. I had booked a Southwest flight from Chicago Midway to LaGuardia because Southwest now flies into the new renovated concourse in the otherwise Third World-ish Terminal B and, being that kind of travel geek, I wanted to check it out. Southwest had other plans though. Sunday late morning, about 18 hours before departure, Southwest emailed me that they were cancelling the flight. I was surprised at their proactivity, but it was a good thing, I guess, ‘cause it gave me time to move to United -- no new terminal experience, but a lot better flight frequency.</li>\n 	<li>Which turned out to be key on Wednesday, trying to fly home on that -23 degree day. Tuesday afternoon, I moved my flight home up from 3pm to 12 noon. I figured all the flights would be delayed and the later my flight, the worse the delay and the higher probability of cancellation. Looking at United’s flights, the 11am and 1pm flights were regional jets; the noon flight was a mainline Airbus. ORD was going to have to cut capacity on Weds -- the ground crews could only be outside for short stretches, especially the guys on the deicing trucks. I figured they’d cancel the smaller regional jets first, which meant they’d move the folks from the 11am and 1pm flights onto the noon flight, meaning that flight might be delayed, but United wouldn’t want to cancel it.</li>\n 	<li>And the next day, that’s pretty much how it played out. When I got to LaGuardia, those 11 and 1 flights were already cancelled. The noon flight still showed on-time, but checking the United and <a href=\"https://flightaware.com/\">FlightAware</a> apps, I could see that the Airbus was still in Chicago. That noon departure time was meaningless until that plane was in the air. I set up in the Amex Centurion Lounge, doing calls and emails, refreshing those apps every 10 minutes. The Airbus’ 8am departure time came and went, as did 9am, and 10am. It finally left around 10:40am Chicago time. I had lunch and a beer in the lounge -- the food in those Centurion lounges is good… and free -- and headed down for the gate. Walking down the concourse, I passed a Uniqlo vending machine selling “ultra light” down jackets for $70. (Amazing what they sell in airport vending machines) I thought for a moment about buying one to layer up when walking up the jet bridge in O’Hare. Given the extreme conditions, it was the most understandable 2½-hr delay I’ve ever had on United. I was incredibly grateful for the United ramp workers who were outside that day. I was happy to just get home that afternoon. Leaving the LGA Amex lounge for my gate, I ran into a Chicago colleague. He had 4 flights canceled on him already and, as I found out the next morning, didn’t get home until Thursday -- after going through Richmond. Good thing for him the Amex Lounge drinks are free too</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mghicks/18378\">Emily and the Djembe</a> by mghicks (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/nc-sampling+/1.0/\">Noncommercial Sampling Plus</a> license. Ft: Emily via Briareus</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>As promised, I expanded the Santa Fe topic in December’s episode to a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/01/24/road-trip-lowbrow-santa-fe/\">full 1,800-word post on the website</a> -- which might help explain why this episode slipped from the end of January to the beginning of February. The <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reader%27s_Digest_Condensed_Books\">Reader’s Digest condensed version</a> (my obligatory Baby Boomer cultural reference) goes something like this -- Friday: hike, drink beer, eat a green chile cheeseburger; Saturday: hike, drink beer, eat a green chile cheeseburger, then drink margaritas and eat local New Mexican dishes; Sunday: wake up a little later, walk rather than hike, eat tamales from a cart. I liked Steve Frick’s comment “When Road Warriors relax” on his retweet. I did try to write this a bit more like a travel article than a blog post -- more of a story than a sequential list of the places we went. But I did make sure to include links to all the good places we hit. If you haven’t already, give it a read and let me know your thoughts.</li>\n 	<li>When I was going through ORD in January, during the partial government shutdown, I thanked the TSA screeners for showing up even though they weren’t getting paid. If I’m reading the GSA salary band schedule correctly, the typical TSA screener makes between 29 and 44 grand a year. They could’ve called in sick to drive an Uber to make up for the missed paychecks, but they didn’t -- as opposed to Atlanta where I stood in some long PreCheck lines because of sick outs. Not that I blame the Atlanta TSA folks, but it made me appreciate the ORD TSA people even more.</li>\n 	<li>Right at about a year ago, I broke down and <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/01/25/podcast-137-new-years-travel-status-tips-how-to-shop-for-a-suitcase/\">bought a new Victorinox suitcase</a>. I had beat a grey Samsonite into submission after 2½ years of trundling across New Orleans sidewalks. My well-traveled Swiss Army roller became unusable when its retractable handle stuck in the extended position. And then my Bluesmart smart bag was banned from by airlines because its battery wouldn’t eject. A couple of weeks ago, my wife called me upstairs. “We’ve got to declutter this attic. You need to Kondo-ize your suitcases,” she said. Wha…? She pointed over to where I’d stashed the Samsonite, the Swiss Army roller, and the Bluesmart. “You should only keep the suitcases that spark joy,” she said. Again, wha…? How does a broken suitcase spark joy? “Exactly!” she said. I pulled the old luggage tags off and threw them in the garbage can before she forced me to binge watch that Netflix series.</li>\n 	<li>Over a year ago, way back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">episode #136</a> in December 2017, I talked about feeling like I’m the last generation of cash payers. My younger colleagues -- and my children -- not only do they pay for everything with a card, many of them don’t even carry cash. It’s <a href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/21/business/sweden-cashless-society.html\">happening even faster in Sweden</a>, where 95% of purchases by Millenials is electronic; to the point that half the country’s retailers think they’ll stop taking cash in 5-6 years. So I got a chuckle when long-time TravelCommons listener Allan Marko sent along this notice that he picked up while touring Laos last month -\n<ul>\n 	<li>“Please note that only new crisp notes are accepted in Laos. US$100 notes receiving a better exchange rate; US$ notes of the series number before 1996 as well as US$100 notes with the series number CB, dirty and/or damaged notes, or notes with any writing on it are not accepted in Laos. Please bring some small changes with you for your convenience.”</li>\n 	<li>Cash is king in Laos -- but only if it’s neat, tidy, and young</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Heading to LGA last Weds morning, traffic was bad in Manhattan and so the wait times for Uber and Lyft were a bit silly. So instead, I let the hotel doorman guide me over to a black car. I saw the driver tip him $10, but I didn’t care -- it was a nice clean car -- a Lexus hybrid -- and the driver knew the back ways to LGA, so we didn’t get jammed up on the highway. Everything was good -- until we parked outside of Terminal B. I had asked the doorman before getting in -- “Does he take a credit card?” “Oh yeah,” he said. And to give the driver credit, he tried to take my Amex, but for some reason his iPhone couldn’t get data at Terminal B Departures, which meant he couldn’t connect to Square, which meant he couldn’t take my card. After trying for 5 minutes, he went palms up. Lucky for him, I am a cash carrier and I had just enough to pay the fare. His tip? He’ll have to take that up with his mobile carrier.</li>\n 	<li>We were working on our Spring Break vacation a few weeks back -- we’re going to Brittany France at the end of March because, well, who needs sun and sand when you enjoy rain blowing in off the Atlantic? -- and the flights from Chicago to Paris were looking just ugly. So we started opening up the search filters a bit, looking at some extended layovers and overnight stays. If done right, it can be fun. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/06/24/podcast-130-notes-from-hungary/\">episode #130</a> (I seem to be digging deep into the archives on this episode), I talked about how my son Andrew and I skipped a reasonable 90-minute connection in Vienna airport for full-day 8-hr one; dropped our bags in held luggage and then hopped a cab to the city center for a beer-and-schnitzel crawl. On the way over to Paris, SAS showed an 8-hr layover in Stockholm. Hmmm… we hadn’t been there since 2006 when we went to Sweden to pick up my Saab convertible. But I remember Arlanda airport being a long haul from Stockholm. Would it take too long getting to and from Stockholm? Thankfully, no. It’s a 20-minute train ride, and the Arlanda Express runs every 15 minutes. So, we’re gearing up for this time for a beer-and-herring crawl thanks to a Stockholm Craft Beer Bar custom Google Map from TravelCommons listener and Untappd friend Rob Cheshire. Though this whole cashless Sweden thing has me a bit worried. I read that <a href=\"https://www.npr.org/2018/10/22/658808705/thousands-of-swedes-are-inserting-microchips-under-their-skin\">more than 4,000 Swedes have implanted microchips</a> in their hands to let them pay for things with just a wave. I’m hoping that I don’t have to have surgery to order a beer.</li>\n 	<li>On the way back, again, the direct flights, or even the 1-stops from Paris to the US were priced high, both in dollars and in points, and not having anything critical on the books for the Monday of our return, we looked at some overnight stays. We decided to skip London; our time in Brittany will span Brexit Day and so we thought, why risk it? The other overnight options that popped up were Frankfurt and... Vienna. I was in Frankfurt last summer, and while I’d done that Vienna layover 2 years ago, Irene hasn’t been in Vienna since 1992, and then, only in the train station making a connection to Budapest. So we bookend our Brittany vacation with a micro-vacations in Sweden and Austria, and save a little money in air fare -- which, to be honest, we’ll probably spend and then some in food and beer.</li>\n 	<li>Which would be better than taking up United on their offer to buy up from Premiere Gold to Premiere Platinum for $2,000. Not to say there aren’t some benefits from that jump -- jump one level up on the upgrade list, a little better bonus miles multiplier, though I don’t ever use my current 2-free-bag allotment, so bumping up to 3 doesn’t do me much. And now that Gold has been moved up to Boarding Group 1, it doesn’t give me a better shot at overhead space. I’ve said it before in previous episodes, I don’t think the incremental benefit from higher status is worth flying weird itineraries or inconvenient times. And it’s certainly not worth 2 grand.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our new Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Astral/44268\">Dreaming</a> by Astral (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Travel Potpourri for $200, Alex</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Doing a little start-of-the-year cleaning of my travel notebook. I always carry a 3½ x 5½ in notebook with me to jot down notes and thoughts. My current notebook is a stiff rather than a hard back so I don’t break it when I put it in the back pocket of my jeans, and has fountain-pen friendly Clairefontaine paper because, as I said in the last episode, it’s not like a lack for things to be fiddly about. This notebook has a couple of pages of letters and numbers written with different pens and inks, a few pages of Madrid beer bars with the ones we hit X’d, a half-dozen pages of really bad algebra when I was trying to help my daughter with a math test, and then the rest is bullet pointed blurbs, thoughts, observations that are the seed corn for the podcast.</li>\n 	<li>Sometimes, though, there’s just not enough in one of those thoughts to grow it into an episode topic, not enough to get it beyond the 10-20 words that are already there. So, for lack of coming up with anything better, here’s a bit of a ramble through those stunted seed corns. Yeah, I’m selling this pretty well. I can hear you all reaching for the Skip button already.</li>\n 	<li>Like, last fall when I was posing for my umpteenth identity badge at a new client, I thought I was given the camera a slight smile -- like a passport photo smile, not showing teeth but a pleasant look. The security guard turned the camera around -- it was deadpan neutral. If I hadn’t tried to smile, I would’ve been frowning. I reminded me to consciously make an effort to smile with folks like gate agents and TSA screeners because, as I get older, I must get more of a grumpy resting face. Which may explain some of the reaction I get from flight attendants.</li>\n 	<li>One thought that almost made it out of the notebook -- Hotels need to stop feeling the need to innovate in the bathroom. I remember writing this in the midst of a 4-day/3-hotel run where the taps and shower control in every hotel were different. I’m OK with innovating some parts of the room -- like dropping in some cool new coffee maker, or an interesting radio or TV, or even a weird chair -- but that’s gotta stop at the bathroom door. When I cross that threshold, I’m usually not completely awake, I’m often not wearing my glasses so can’t see real well if, indeed, I’ve actually turned on the light. And when I step in the shower, I’m definitely not wearing glasses, so small print instructions don’t go down well. I thought hotel showers had pretty much standardized on the single knob that turned on at Cold and got Hotter as you turned it clockwise, all the time delivering the same volume of water. But sometimes you move that knob back and forth to no effect, and you eventually figure out that you have to pull it to turn it on.&nbsp; The worst, though, are the controls that go in the wrong direction -- maybe counterclockwise, or push instead of pull. After I finally figure it out, I can understand what they were trying to do, and it might then make sense, but if it takes me more than 30 seconds to get my morning shower going, someone has failed -- and I don’t think it’s me.</li>\n 	<li>A year or so ago, when I was stuck for a half hour on a broken light rail train between the Atlanta terminals and the rental car center, I started wondering why the push for these trains; what’s the business case? ORD has shut down its train, the ATS, Airport Transit System, to modernize it and extend it to a new rental car center. The price? $800 million. PHX is spending $700 million to extend their SkyTrain to their rental car center. Tampa’s SkyConnect train that went in service last year cost over $400 million. And don’t get me started on Newark’s AirTrain. I mean, I get the need to cut down on diesel emissions from the rental buses, but it seems these airports could buy a whole lot of electric buses for less than that what their spending on a couple of miles of light rail. And when those trains break down, there’s no option but to wait -- no other train can pull up beside yours and take everyone onward. You’re stuck until they figure it out.</li>\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Well, we’ve cleaned out the Travel Potpourri category, Alex. Let\'s move on to Extreme Weather Delays for $200</span>.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #148</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and now on <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_148.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #148 — Travel Potpourri for $200, Alex','','inherit','closed','closed','','2237-revision-v1','','','2021-05-04 22:32:16','2021-05-05 03:32:16','',2237,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3526',0,'revision','',0),
(3527,1,'2021-05-04 22:34:04','2021-05-05 03:34:04','[caption id=\"attachment_2211\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/20181125_005916392_iOS.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2211\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/20181125_005916392_iOS-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> In Search of a Killer Margarita[/caption]\n\nWe stopped for a moment to catch our breath and figure out how much longer to the top of the <a href=\"https://www.hikingproject.com/trail/7003499/atalaya-mountain-trail-170\">Atalaya Mountain Trail</a>. Yesterday, before we flew out to Santa Fe, we were at 700 ft above sea level. After 90 minutes of walking, I guessed we were at 8,000 ft and had another 1,100 ft to get to the top. Between the altitude and the snow on the trail from the night before, this hike was taking longer than we’d planned. I looked at my watch and told Irene, “If you want to hit the Black Friday artisan market, we need to head back now.” She took another breath. “Nope, we’re heading to the top.”\n\nForty minutes later, we stood on a rocky ledge looking down over Santa Fe with a group of Argentinians who’d passed us 10 minutes before. We took the obligatory selfie and sat down on the rocks to take in the view. The breakfast cook/owner of our B&amp;B had sold us on this trail. We cursed him on the way up when we slid through the snow and struggled to find the trail markings. But now, looking out over Santa Fe National Forest to the horizon line of a cloudless blue sky, we took those words back.\n\nSanta Fe visits can go highbrow -- the <a href=\"https://www.okeeffemuseum.org/\">Georgia O’Keefe museum</a> and a run up Canyon Road through all the art galleries -- or lowbrow -- hiking up mountain trails and hunting the best green chile cheeseburger. This trip was all lowbrow. <!--more Click Here To Keep Reading \"Road Trip — Lowbrow Santa Fe\" -->\n\nAnd after 20 minutes of taking in the views at the top of Atalaya Mountain, we had just two things in mind -- green chile cheeseburgers and beer. The 1,800 foot descent only sharpened our appetites. Five-and-a half hours after we’d started, we were sitting at the bar at <a href=\"https://www.secondstreetbrewery.com/the-railyard\">Second Street Brewing’s restaurant in the Railyard District</a>, replacing whatever calories we’d burned off with green chile cheeseburgers and a side of green chile cheese fries. Double lashings of american cheese, which I know I shouldn’t like because it isn’t really cheese, but the creamy gooey-ness of it blended well with the chile bite. We chased it down with a pint of their <a href=\"https://untappd.com/b/second-street-brewery-boneshaker-bitter/675872\">Boneshaker Bitter</a>, one of the better American-made ESBs I’ve had.\n\n[caption id=\"attachment_2224\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"640\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/20181123_193305944_iOS.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-2224 size-large\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/20181123_193305944_iOS-1024x418.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"640\" height=\"261\"></a> Top of the Atalaya Mountain Trail[/caption]\n\nIt was the end of November and the temperature was dropping as we made our way back to our B&amp;B, the <a href=\"https://farolito.com/\">El Farolito</a>. We had our own little <a href=\"https://farolito.com/galisteo-room-1/\">casita</a> out front. Walking in, we saw that housekeeping had the kiva fireplace ready for us, loaded with a triangle of <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyon_pine\">piñon</a> logs over some kindling and a stack of yesterday’s newspaper off to the side. The fire caught with one match (gotta love well-seasoned wood). As the smoke rose up the chimney, I walked back outside and was immediately hit with the<a href=\"https://www.outsidemodern.com/pinon-wood-the-best-firewood-for-chimineas-pinion-pinyon/\"> piñon smell</a>, that unique pinewood smoke smell I only get in Santa Fe. I’ve been around a lot of pinewood fires in, say, Colorado and Arizona, but the piñon smoke billowing out of a kiva fireplace is a unique smell; one that I love. It was a cold hike up the trail this morning; here was a little payback.\n\nThe next morning, after tucking into another great breakfast, El Farolito’s cook/owner/travel guide recommended we head out to <a href=\"https://www.blm.gov/visit/kktr\">Tent Rocks</a> for our next hike. It would be a completely different environment, hiking through towering volcanic rock formations rather than a forest, and at 600 ft, it would only be a third of yesterday’s climb. However, Tent Rocks is a popular place that caps the number of people it lets in. The forecast was for a sunny Saturday, so we needed to get on our way or risk waiting in line to get in.\n\nThis was made much easier by our choice of rental car. When we hit the Hertz Presidents’ Club aisle at Albuquerque airport Thursday afternoon, it was pretty picked over; just a very odd selection of Dodge vehicles -- Dodge Challenger muscle cars or fully tricked out Ram Hemi king-cab pick-ups. I can’t say that I’ve ever faced quite that choice at Hertz before. The Challenger, with rear-wheel drive, wouldn’t be great if we got snow at elevation, but the Rams were just huge, trying to parallel park one in downtown Santa Fe would be an event. I stood between them, went back and forth for a couple of minutes. “Just pick one,” Irene said, “it’s a rental car, not a life choice!” I went for the white Challenger and hoped for clear skies.\n\nAnd on this Saturday morning, that’s what we had -- and a 75 mph speed limit on the southbound stretch of I-25 between us and Tent Rocks. I put my foot into the Challenger and kept it there as we exited the interstate and drove down and west across a flat plateau on Rt 16. I didn’t ease up until we hit the residential streets of the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochiti,_New_Mexico\">Cochiti Pueblo reservation</a>. It was around 10:30 am when we turned onto the access road, expecting to hit the line of waiting cars. We were hugely relieved when we drove straight up to the entrance booth, paid the $5 fee, and continued on to the trail head parking.\n\n[caption id=\"attachment_2221\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"640\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/20181124_180015173_iOS.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-2221 size-large\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/20181124_180015173_iOS-1024x768.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"640\" height=\"480\"></a> Looking Down onto the Tent Rocks[/caption]\n\nWalking sideways and single file through the narrowest parts of the slot canyon at the start of the Canyon Trail, we immediately understood and appreciated the capacity limit. Without it, the trail would’ve hit gridlock. And we didn’t mind the times when we had to wait for a downhill group to clear a tight squeeze. It gave us time to look up and appreciate the rough beauty left behind by 6-7 million years of erosion.\n\nComing out of the slot canyon, we hit the steep section. “Do you think it’s worth it,” a dad asked, struggling up the incline with his daughter and a load of snacks on his back. When we got to the flat mesa on top, the answer was there spread out for us when we looked down onto the 90-foot tent rocks (<a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoodoo_(geology)\">hoodoos</a>), and then out across the Rio Grande Valley and to the Sangre de Cristo mountains in the distance. The temperature hit 50°F. We shed a couple of layers of clothing, dangled our legs off a rock ledge, drained our water bottles, and looked out with nothing between us and the horizon. It was our second day of cloudless blue skies and hundred mile vistas.\n\n<span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">When we drove out around 1pm, we passed a line of cars waiting at the entrance booth to get it. The line ended between signs estimating the wait time to be 30 and 60 minutes. I patted the Challenger’s dashboard.</span>\n\n[caption id=\"attachment_2219\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/20181124_212142086_iOS.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2219\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/20181124_212142086_iOS-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> Tapwall at Rowley Farmhouse Ales[/caption]\n\nDriving back to Santa Fe, we got off of I-25 an exit early and drove up Rt 14 through what felt like the real life Santa Fe. No art dealers and kachina shops; instead, the typical string of auto dealers, gas stations, and shopping centers anchored by Targets and drive-thru Starbucks. We were headed to <a href=\"https://www.rowleyfarmhouse.com/\">Rowley Farmhouse Ales</a> for another post-hike green chile cheeseburger. The Rowley burger was a bit more upscale than yesterday’s -- the menu namechecks local purveyors of the beef, bacon, and cheese (but not the green chile!) on the burger -- but still a very solid burger. The beer list was one of the strongest we’d seen. Flights of tasters let us sample Rowley’s own beers -- a nice range of IPAs, saisons, and sours -- and some of the local guest beers they also had on tap.\n\nThat evening, we walked over to Guadalupe Street, which feels like the lowbrow counterpart to the plaza or Canyon Road. We stopped first at <a href=\"http://www.cowgirlsantafe.com/\">Cowgirl BBQ</a> for some margarita nostalgia. On our first trip to Santa Fe, I was on the hunt for a great everyday margarita recipe and after a weekend of margarita tasting, we picked Cowgirl’s. We worked our way through their current margarita menu, listening to a group of local guys at the end of the bar talk to the bartender about taking dancing lessons. “God, I missed you guys,” the bartender said.\n\nWe walked a couple of blocks further down Guadalupe Street to <a href=\"https://tomasitas.com/\">Tomasita’s</a> for dinner. The alcove was full of families and big parties. The hostess gave the party of 6 in front of us a 2-hour wait. For Irene and I, just an hour. We headed to the bar to try their margaritas. When we were seated (15 minutes early!), we searched the menu for something different. Most of it was the standard enchilada and taco combo plates, but with a little patience, we found some unique dishes. <a href=\"https://www.cooksillustrated.com/articles/697-real-carne-adovada\"><em>Carne adovada</em></a>, the classic New Mexico pork and red chile braise, had a deep earthy chile flavor that made me seriously question my green chile fixation. I saw that we could have <em>chicos</em> as our side. “What are chicos?” I asked the waitress. “Oh, you’ll love them.” More of a recommendation than an explanation, but I ordered them anyway. Turned out that Tomasita’s&nbsp;<a href=\"https://highlandsranchfoodie.com/2016/01/beans-and-chicos-2/\">chicos</a> are a New Mexico spin on a Native American staple, whole beans mixed with whole corn kernels that have been steamed over a fire. The texture of the whole beans and the smoky sweet taste of the corn kernels were such an improvement over the pasty blandness of refried beans, I wondered why chicos weren’t the standard side. And in place of the usual tortillas, we got a basket of fresh sopapillas with honey butter. Nothing fancy; it was homestyle New Mexico cuisine.\n\nSunday morning looked like another bright blue day -- from what we could make out through the frosted window. Our legs felt a bit heavy after two days of walking up steep inclines so we decided to go for some flatter terrain, a walk through town. We walked along the <a href=\"http://www.walkrideusa.com/states/new-mexico/individual-trails/santa-fe-river-trail-new-mexico\">Santa Fe River Park</a>, looking down at the frozen trickle of what we assumed was the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Fe_River_(New_Mexico)\">Santa Fe River</a>. We veered up Canyon Road. None of the galleries were open yet, but there was enough sculpture in the front and side yards to fill our lowbrow culture quotient.\n\nBy noon, we had walked off last night’s dinner, so we circled back around to Alameda Street and headed back into town toward the plaza to find some lunch. We read the menus of the restaurants ringing the plaza. Nothing really excited us until I spotted a couple of food carts on the west edge of the plaza, a Mexican guy on the southwest corner selling tamales and a Nigerian guy on the northwest corner selling goat stew. I bought two tamales, beef with red chile and chicken with green chile. We crossed the street, ducked out of the wind, and scarfed down what were excellent tamales. It seemed the perfect lunch to end our lowbrow Santa Fe weekend.','Road Trip — Lowbrow Santa Fe','','inherit','closed','closed','','2208-revision-v1','','','2021-05-04 22:34:04','2021-05-05 03:34:04','',2208,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3527',0,'revision','',0);
INSERT INTO `wp_posts` VALUES
(3529,1,'2021-05-05 19:34:32','2021-05-06 00:34:32','[caption id=\"attachment_1252\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"224\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/2013-03-27-18.38.36.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1252\" title=\"Stickers Covering a Restaurant Window in Barcelona\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/2013-03-27-18.38.36-224x300.jpg\" alt=\"Stickers Covering a Restaurant Window in Barcelona\" width=\"224\" height=\"300\"></a> Should we look it up in TripAdvisor or chance it and walk through the door?[/caption]\n\nBeen traveling non-stop since the last episode. One destination was a family Spring Break vacation split between Madrid and Barcelona. I talk about our experiences with booking a vacation rental and how I\'ve learned to give up complete spontaneity and enjoy a couple of guided tours. &nbsp;I also do a <em>mea culpa</em> for bitch-tweeting about flight delays, but don\'t think the airlines\' response to my tweets represents an effective social media strategy. Instead, I highly recommend the flight tracking website <a href=\"http://flightaware.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Flightaware</a>. And I end with some thoughts about the resurgence of the hotel lobby. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_105.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n<hr>\n\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #105:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you from TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago. No, I did not fall off the face of the earth, though I have felt like I’ve been clinging to the edge at times. I started writing this episode in April, and then work got in the way and it slipped to May.</li>\n 	<li>I’ve been on the road every week since the last episode, though that hasn’t been as bad as it sounds. Two days after I posted the last episode, I headed out to Spain with the family for Spring Break -- 10 days split between Madrid and Barcelona. The weather wasn’t great until the last couple of days -- it was mostly rainy and about 10 degrees colder than we’d packed for -- but it beat the occasional snow showers that were in Chicago then..</li>\n 	<li>Coming back, I headed back out to Portland to wrap things up out there and then started traveling to New Orleans weekly. I did have a day trip to Cleveland, which gave me a quick reminder that there are worse places to be traveling to than Portland and New Orleans. And though it may not seem so, the weather is pretty similar -- Portland is 58 degrees and rain; New Orleans is 78 degrees and rain. Though the New Orleans rain does seem to have a bit more “umph” behind it.</li>\n 	<li>But it hasn’t been Gulf storms that have delayed my two of my flights home by over two hours. The delay on my American flight was caused by rain -- Chicago was being pounded by 5-7 inches of rain that day, rivers and roads were flooding. My only complaint was that American showed on-time until an hour before departure. Given all the delays at ORD, you can’t tell me they didn’t know way earlier in the day that there was going to be a delay. Instead, I had to sit around MSY -- which is a surprisingly dumpy airport -- for another 2 ½ hours.</li>\n 	<li>The 2 ½ delay on United two weeks later had a much weaker excuse. The plane started the day in Denver where it was delayed by a spring snowstorm and the delays just cascaded through the day -- Denver, St Louis, Chicago, New Orleans, and back to Chicago. United couldn’t scrounge up a plane somewhere to stop the cascade? Well, perhaps United could, but United doesn’t run the Chicago-New Orleans service. It’s run by GoJet, a 8-9 year old regional jet company that subs for United and Delta. United has 706 jets, GoJet has 66. Kinda explains the day-long cascade.</li>\n 	<li>United started sending delay notices earlier in the day than American -- but they all came with the caveat that you still needed to be at the gate at the original time just in case. A 1 hr delay cascaded into 2. Felt a bit like Groundhog Day. The only consolation was that the food choices are much better in MSY Terminal D. I had a nice boudin blanc and a big Abita beer. My waitress told me that I could take my beer to the gate if I wanted to. I looked at the plastic cup -- of course, it’s New Orleans, why wouldn’t I get served in a go cup. She said most people did that; made them feel more comfortable that they wouldn’t miss their flight; but make sure you finish it before you get on the plane. Right about then I got another delay notice from United. The waitress was looking to close out. I packed up my kit and headed out to the gate with a fresh beer. You can never be too careful.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music --&nbsp;<em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/media/files/DJBLUE/11541\">Hear Me</a></em>&nbsp;by DJ Blue</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>I have to fess up to something that those of you who follow me on Twitter already know -- I’m one of those who bitch-tweets about flight delays. I get frustrated and instead of taking out on the gate agents -- which we all know is wrong -- I whine to the Twitter-sphere, which means I take it out on all my followers. I recognize that this too is wrong. People don’t follow me to get a whinge-stream, so I’m working hard to stop. I think I’ll need to carry a stress ball this summer.</li>\n 	<li>In my flight delay bitch-tweets, I typically “at name” the airline -- United and American in these past weeks -- which nowadays generates a tweet back within a couple of minutes. I guess this is nice, but it’s typically meaningless. &nbsp;The usual response asks me to direct message -- DM -- them with my confirmation number which I used to do, hoping that they could do something that the gate agent couldn’t -- though I’m not sure what that could be given that the gate agent is right in front of me and the Tweet wranglers are probably in Manila or Chennai. &nbsp;Maybe a bit more information or deeper insight into the cause of the delay, a better forecast of the actual departure time rather than the rolling 60 minute delay that never ends? Nope, none of that. Just multiple versions of “we’re really sorry”, which actually is more frustrating than if they didn’t respond. I know they’re trying, but I’m not sure that this is an effective social media strategy</li>\n 	<li>Trying to work my way through all these flight delays, I found the <a href=\"http://flightaware.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Flightaware</a> web site invaluable. It provides real-time flight tracking information, which is critical if you’re trying to figure out how real the posted flight delay is. Before I found Flightaware, my usual drill would be to work my way up to the gate agent, smile, and ask nicely if the inbound flight was in the air yet. If they had time (a growing rarity), they’d look it up -- “nope, still loading” which means the posted delay is going to grow -- they’re always too optimistic; they don’t want you pestering them to transfer your ticket to another carrier. Flightaware has all that information. Put in the flight number and it gives current status and scheduled arrival time. Hasn’t left yet? Hit the “inbound flight” link and now you get the information you used to have to beg the flight agent for -- is the inbound equipment in the air and when it’s scheduled to arrive. Keep hitting that inbound flight link and you can page back through the day to figure out when your schedule came off the rails. That’s how I found out that my United MSY-ORD flight delay started that morning in Denver. Highly recommended.</li>\n 	<li>A couple of weeks back, I walked up to American’s status security line in ORD for one of my flights down to MSY and noticed they’d completely reconfigured it. They quadrupled the amount of line space for PreCheck people. Basically, they just swapped the PreCheck and non-PreCheck line space. Tells you how many people are willing to trade privacy for convenience. And I’m enthusiastically one of them.</li>\n 	<li>Though you can get caught short when having to go back to a non-PreCheck airport. For a while, I was doing nothing but PreCheck airports -- ORD, PDX, CLE. &nbsp;On my first flight back from MSY, I completely booted it -- left my laptop in my backpack, left stuff in my pockets going through the full body scanner... I was a mess. Luckily, it was the middle of the day and hardly anybody going through the security line, so my cluelessness didn’t really hassle anyone. I apologized to the TSA screeners. I told them that this was my first non-PreCheck line in over a month. They got it. They said they were hoping that PreCheck shows up there soon. Even the TSA folks like PreCheck.</li>\n 	<li>The mail bag filled up nicely since the last episode, though given the gap between show, folks probably forgot they’d written in. Nick Gassman, a long time listener, listens to podcasts while he swims -- cuts the boredom he says -- and he recently caught up with the <a title=\"Podcast #103 — Hospitality is Personal; Tablets Everywhere\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2013/01/24/podcast-103-hospitality-is-personal-tablets-everywhere/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">episode 103</a>&nbsp;from January. Commenting on the segment about all the different sizes of tablets hitting the market, Nick writes:\n<ul>\n 	<li>“I don’t see the problem making calls on large phones or tablets. It\'s so easy and cheap to pair a bluetooth headset to make a call. You also see people at airports making facetime calls on iPads, and I Skype on the Nexus. The issue seems to be with holding it to your head, rather than using it for calls.”</li>\n 	<li>“I was interested in your reviews of apps. Do you use any airline apps? How about for checking in and boarding passes, and have you used Apple\'s Passbook at all.”</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Actually, I was all the airline apps -- United, American, Southwest, Delta -- mainly because, with a couple of design cycles behind them, it now seems easier/quicker to check in on the apps than the web site. And I do use Apple’s Passbook to store the boarding passes. I like the quick access from the iPhone lock screen -- one swipe and I’m laying my boarding pass on the TSA reader.</li>\n 	<li>Dan Gradwohl corrected my assumption in the<a title=\"Podcast #104 — Status Free Fall; TSA Knife Fight\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2013/03/19/podcast-104-status-free-fall-tsa-knife-fight/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> last episode</a>&nbsp;that a Delta MD-80 out of MSP was an old hushkitted Northwest DC-9 that I used to hate when I lived in the Detroit area. He writes:\n<ul>\n 	<li>“Northwest\'s MD80s were retired in 2000 and the DC9s fly out of ATL, there\'s none in MSP. &nbsp;So, I suspect that you were on a former Delta MD88 which are very reliable, I\'m on them all the time.”</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>And he adds:\n<ul>\n 	<li>“I totally agree with you on the TSA\'s new knife policy, just adopt it and don\'t make a big rollout with it. &nbsp;Nobody is going to take down a 767 with a pen knife!”</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Ken Okel wrote in to ask about any recent experiences with CATSA -- the Canadian version of the TSA. He’s heading up there -- probably around now -- to do some training. I think the last time I flew out of Canada was when my wife and I spent a long weekend in Toronto, and we woke up to the CBC talking about a second outbreak of SARS in Canada. I think that news crowded out any observations about airport security. But if any of you have some thoughts to pass along to Ken, I’ll put a link to<a href=\"www.kenokel.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> his web site</a> in the show notes.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any travel observations, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. &nbsp;The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music --&nbsp;<em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/media/files/savoyard/10743\">Madrugada</a></em>&nbsp;by Savoyard</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Traveling in Spain</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>At the end of March, my wife, daughter, and I met up with another family from the Chicago area for Spring Break in Madrid and Barcelona. The weather was slightly marginal -- we were carrying umbrellas as a defensive measure for all but the last day or so in Barcelona -- but we had a great time and are looking forward to going back again. Now I’m not going to tell you what to see -- I’ll leave that to my friend Chris Christensen and his <a href=\"http://amateurtraveler.com/tag/spain+audio-travel-podcast/\">Amateur Traveler Podcast</a>. Instead, I want to talk a bit about how we did it.</li>\n 	<li>It started way before we left when we started looking for accommodations. A few years ago, the search for a place to stay would’ve been very similar to the search for flights -- look at the awards points balances for each chain -- Marriott, Hilton, Starwood -- and start cycling through their websites. We still did a little of that -- our flight from Chicago to Madrid had us overnighting at Heathrow, so we burned through some frequent sleeper points at the Heathrow Marriott. But for the past few vacations, we moved from hotel rooms to vacation rentals.</li>\n 	<li>Once you move, as a family, from one to two hotel rooms, the economics for vacation rentals starts making sense, even without factoring in the savings from being able to make your own coffee or meals. And there’s the non-price benefits of things like having more than one room so you don’t have to spend all your time sitting on your bed.</li>\n 	<li>However, booking a vacation rental place still isn’t quite a seamless experience. We’d booked what looked to be a great place in the Gothic quarter of Barcelona, right next to the Picasso Museum. Once we arrived, we were to call this number and someone would meet us at the property with a key. Seemed easy enough, but you can probably tell by the tone of my voice that it didn’t quite work out that way. We get off the train from Madrid, ring the number. Oh no, we no long handle that property, &nbsp;you need to ring this number. OK, we ring that number. Do you have the confirmation number from our e-mail? No, that can’t be it, all of our confirmation numbers start with the letter Z. You get the drift. Took us 30 minutes, half a dozen phone calls, and me beginning to raise my voice before we finally got through to the owner who apologized profusely, saying that he’d told the vacation rental company 6 months ago that he’d dropped that property manager. Not a smooth “check-in” experience. 20 minutes later, he meets us at the apartment -- a great place that fit two families. But now one last hurdle -- to pay. We knew when confirming the rental that he wanted to be paid in cash. It\'s Spain, what can you say? So the past three days, the adults had been maxing out their ATM withdrawal limits to amass enough cash. Would’ve been a bit easier -- and safer -- if he’d taken a credit card, or at least PayPal.</li>\n 	<li>Before leaving we also decided to book a few “cornerstone” activities -- a market food tour in Madrid, a cooking class in Barcelona, a wine tour in Priorat. This is a big change for me. I used to run as far as possible from any sort of structure in my vacations. One of the best trips we took was driving through Tuscany without an itinerary or reservations, just a Michelin Red Guide (this was pre-Internet) which we pulled out to find a hotel in whichever town we decided to stay that afternoon. But when we went to Vietnam a few years back, I pre-booked the whole trip -- you needed to -- and include some private tours -- a drive through Saigon, some temple trips, a night on a junk on Halong Bay. I found that instead of feeling like I was choking off spontaneity, I felt like we got to see things we wouldn’t have found on our own. And that it also got us up the learning curve quicker -- having someone show us kinda the structure of a city rather than us piecing it together on our own.</li>\n 	<li>So along those lines, I booked a food tour of Madrid’s markets on our first evening in Madrid. It solved a few problems. It helped keep up awake that first night -- always a key to fighting jet lag. It had us walking through some of the neighborhoods of central Madrid, so we started to get our bearings. And it fed us, so we didn’t have to figure out a restaurant our first night. But if the vacation rental industry is a bit unstructured, the local tour operator business is a complete shot-in-the-dark. TripAdvisor can be some help in avoid bad operators, but I think it’s lousy for search and discovery. I ended up using the same method I used for finding people in Vietnam -- e-mails to everyone I knew who might know something about Spain. A former employee who now distributes Spanish wine in Chicago connected me with a wine tour outfit run by an American and a French woman. And Craig Martin of the Indie Travel Podcast pointed me in the direction of an American woman who lives in Madrid doing food tours. Lauren took us through two food markets, did a comparative tasting of Iberian hams, and got me drinking Spanish sweet vermouth which I would’ve never ordered on my own. A couple of days worth of experiences in what could\'ve been a wasted night. I’ll put a link to Craig’s<a href=\"http://indietravelpodcast.com/spain/eat-drink-madrid/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> interview</a> with Lauren in the shownotes, as well as links to the<a href=\"http://madridfoodtour.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> food tour</a> and <a href=\"http://www.nisowinetours.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">wine tour</a> web sites.</li>\n 	<li>All this coordination requires communication which, in this day and age, assumes a mobile phone. Which can get expensive fast if you’re roaming on your US plan. Just working my way through all the calls for the Barcelona rental would’ve been $100. Again, I did a bit of pre-work, which in this case involved getting AT&amp;T to unlock my old iPhone 4. Once on the ground in Madrid, my first stop was to a mobile phone store to buy a pre-paid SIM card. We were staying just off Puerto del Sol, a popular shopping locale that had just about every mobile carrier represented with a shop. I went to the <a href=\"http://en.orange.es/mobile-service-plans/pay-as-you-go-plans/delfin-2/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Orange</a> store -- the first one I hit and also carrier recommended by Craig Martin. For 15 euros, I got a card and a weekly plan that included 50 text messages and free data. And the Orange guy clipped down the full-sized SIM so it would fit in my iPhone.</li>\n 	<li>20 years ago, going over to Europe would mean a booking hotels via Telex, calling up friends for tour advice, and making sure we were in a decent-sized town by mid-morning so we could cash our travelers checks. Today doesn\'t feel too incredibly different.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music --&nbsp;<em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/media/files/djlang59/10579\">Crazy Love</a></em>&nbsp;by DJ Lang</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Return of the Hotel Lobby?</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>I remember, many years ago, being dropped off by a taxi at what purported to be The Royalton Hotel in New York. The Royalton was the latest hip, cool, and edgy hotel from Ian Schrager, and a colleague had insisted we stay there. I get out of the cab; it’s late and it’s raining. The place doesn’t look like a hotel -- I guess that was the point -- it wouldn’t have been hip, cool or edgy if it looked like an Embassy Suites. There’s a little plaque to the right of the door that says “Royalton”, so I trust the cabbie and trundle up the stairs. I walk in the door. It’s dark, there’s some bass-heavy house music thumping, and the couches in front of me are full of people drinking and general pre-hook up positioning. I check the address again. Nope, this should be the right place. I see a woman at a desk at the other end of the room. Perhaps the front desk? I trundle down. Nope, she’s the hostess. I had passed the front desk -- it was tucked into the wall halfway back to the door.</li>\n 	<li>The Royalton was kinda emblematic of the idea that the traditional hotel lobby was a waste of expensive floor space, a revenue dead zone. So you saw places like the Royalton convert their lobbies into nightclubs while budget chains downsized them to a couple of chairs across from the check-in desk.</li>\n 	<li>But soon after hotel were downsizing their lobbies, companies were downsizing their real estate. Companies like IBM kicked people out of their offices, told them to telecommute and saved millions in real estate cost. However, for all the advances in instant messaging and desktop video conferencing, people still want to meet face-to-face. But if you’re both working out of home, where do you do it?</li>\n 	<li>Starbucks was, and really still is the default answer for the casual/quick fly-by meeting. But as they’ve shut down underperforming stores and shrunk the footprint on others, Starbucks are becoming less ideal. And at some point, you get tired of shouting above the din of the steam milk frother.</li>\n 	<li>Which got me thinking again about hotel lobbies. In Portland, I was staying in the Hotel Monaco downtown and I really enjoyed their lobby. It isn’t an extension of their restaurant or of their front desk. It is its own space, with couches and chairs that aren’t bolted to the floor, so you can slide them around and have a conversation with someone. I like the lobby at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York for the same reason. The furniture is not all pointed outward to watch the passing parade of people; it’s arrayed so you can talk with someone face-to-face.</li>\n 	<li>Some of the newer Marriott Courtyards seem to be re-investing in lobbies, but with big screens showing the weather forecast and news headlines and a row of PCs, I’m not sure if they’re trying to provide a conversation place or a different take at a Kinko’s.</li>\n 	<li>But then again, the last Marriott Courtyard I was in had a Starbucks in the lobby, so perhaps we’ve just taken this whole meeting place search thing in one big circle.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917626811171154.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\"><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #105</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from&nbsp;<a href=\"http://ccmixter.org\">ccMixter</a></li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_105.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #105 — Traveling in Spain; Return of the Hotel Lobby?','','inherit','closed','closed','','1245-revision-v1','','','2021-05-05 19:34:32','2021-05-06 00:34:32','',1245,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3529',0,'revision','',0),
(3530,1,'2021-05-09 19:08:54','2021-05-10 00:08:54','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_1985\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/IMG_0205.jpeg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1985\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/IMG_0205-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"Groups of people on a frozen lake\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> I think that\'s our tour group up there[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I can feel travel beginning to come back. <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/coronavirus/passenger-throughput\">TSA checkpoint volumes</a> are hitting post-pandemic highs, business travelers are starting to come out from behind their Zoom sessions, and vaccination rates are prompting more people to make travel plans. So on this episode, we first talk to <a href=\"https://www.toursbylocals.com/TBL/WebObjects/ToursByLocals.woa/1/wo/y2c7lZDKnxUUHYGLem9YgM/0.41.1.1.50.3\">Paul Melhus</a>, CEO of <a href=\"https://www.toursbylocals.com/\">ToursByLocals</a> about the state of the local tour market and then about how frequent travelers are starting to stretch their atrophied travel muscles. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_175.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #175: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>This Week</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. Just one bit of travel since the last episode, a drive down to Nashville, Tennessee.&nbsp; Right at about a year ago, this drive was my first post-lockdown trip. I talked about it at the start of <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/06/09/podcast-164-first-post-lockdown-trips-travel-credit-cards/\" title=\"Podcast #164 — First-Post Lockdown Trips; Travel Credit Cards\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">episode #164</a> -- no one was on the road save for a few trucks and a few folks like me. It was a drag race down I-65, 80-85 mph the whole way, maybe dropping down to 70 going through Indianapolis and Louisville. You couldn’t be sure what restaurants had their drive-thrus open, so car snacks were key. But now, it’s back to the normal drive -- lots of trucks and having to jockey for position with them on the 2-lane stretches, slow-downs through construction zones, and having to think again about timing the drive so I thread through Chicago, Indianapolis, Louisville, and Nashville without hitting rush hours.</li><li>A year ago, the restaurants that were open were only doing take-out, so I ate in my hotel room every night, which led to me putting “bring-your-own dining sets” on my 2020 travelers gift guide 6 months later.</li><li>One thing that hasn’t changed is hotels not cleaning rooms during the stay.&nbsp; On this trip, I was in a Courtyard for 4 days and no one but me walked into that room. At what level of COVID cases or vaccination rates do they also have to get back to normal service because walking back into the smell of damp wet towels every day, or having to find a hall garbage can to throw out the takeaway Korean is getting a little old. I do give that Courtyard points, though, for bringing back the free lobby coffee.</li><li>I’m heading down to Miami next week for my first post-pandemic business trip. At the start of the year, everyone was talking about how business travel won’t be back until the end of 2022 or into 2023, and even then, it won’t come all the way back because Zoom and Teams will have replaced the need for 20-30% of business trips. But, I dunno, the TSA is <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/coronavirus/passenger-throughput\">regularly reporting</a> new highs in post-pandemic checkpoint traffic -- 1.63 million passengers the first Sunday of May and 1.64 million the first Thursday of May, averaging 8 times the traffic from the same weekday last year. And I don’t think it’s all leisure travel. I’m starting to see some 2019 behaviors coming back -- execs flying out to a plant to do a one-hour town hall in person; people coming together, physically, in an office conference room to get around some white boards and solve a problem. Is it Zoom fatigue or reversion to the mean -- at least for the vaccinated? I dunno, but I’m kinda looking forward to getting back in the saddle -- well, except for next week’s horse being a 7am Monday rush hour flight out of ORD.</li><li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<em>A Foolish Game</em>&nbsp;by Zep Hurme&nbsp;(c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license.&nbsp;http://ccmixter.org/files/zep_hurme/46448.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/04/10/podcast-174-how-the-pros-plan-their-taproom-tourism/\" title=\"Podcast #174 — How the Pros Plan Their Taproom Tourism\">the last episode</a>, I talked about the spike of publicity around the deterioration of Uber and Lyft’s service -- spiraling wait times that leads to big price surges that leads to driver cancellations as they work to maximize their pay. It’s not getting any better. I retweeted an Uber driver’s <a href=\"https://twitter.com/SpiderKeithLutz/status/1386487138728939521\">screenshots</a> showing no cars at ORD and MDW on a Sunday night -- prime time with people coming home from weekend trips, and it’s not a one-off event, especially at MDW. It’s also starting to make people rethink travel plans. A colleague on my Miami trip moved from a Hyatt to a Marriott closer to our meeting place, saying she couldn’t trust Uber to show up in time. And even for me, I’ll get up earlier than I need to so I can catch public transit to ORD in case Uber or Lyft fail and I can’t find a cab. It doesn’t feel like that $250 million “driver stimulus” Uber was touting last month has made much of an impact.</li><li>Empty Hertz lots has also been a multi-episode arc that doesn’t look like it’ll go away soon. Rental car companies dumped cars during a historically high used car market to generate cash that saved them at the start of the pandemic. <a href=\"https://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-biz-car-rental-shortage-turo-avail-20210507-enusm6m2ijbm5geeyefs6d6atu-story.html\">Hertz dropped almost 200,000 vehicles in the back half of 2020. While Avis’s fleet shrunk about 31%</a>. But now that travel has snapped back faster than expected, they can’t get more cars; the new car inventories are at historic lows because of chip shortages.&nbsp;</li><li>And the combination of these two is a helluva pincer movement on a lot of returning travelers because they’d ditched rental cars for the convenience of Uber. Now they have neither. I plan on doing a good bit of walking in Miami.</li><li>DMV managers across the country must’ve breathed a sigh of relief when they saw Homeland Security announcing yet another delay in Real ID enforcement for air travel, this time to May 2023. I remember in 2019, more than a year before the original October 2020 enforcement date, the warning signs went up at the TSA desks in airports and immediately there were predictions of mass chaos.&nbsp; I was one of them. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/09/20/podcast-155-rj-delays-street-food-in-poland-and-hungary/\" title=\"Podcast #155 — RJ Delays; Street Food in Poland and Hungary\">episode #155</a> in September 2019, I said “Note to self – don’t book any travel in October 2020.” But then, 6 months later in March 2020, as COVID shut down DMV offices along with the rest of the economy, DHS made the obvious call to kick the deadline down the road a year to October 2021. I remember my first post-lockdown flight in June, the TSA desks at MDW still had the old 2020 signs up. A few months back, some friends had to renew their driver’s licenses and so figured they’d get the Real ID version. After some 8 hrs of queuing at a just-reopened Illinois DMV, they had gold-starred IDs and were good to go for October travel. Last month, a little alarm bell went off in my head -- “You know, that deadline is 6 months away; you need to start thinking about this.” But just as I started to, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/DHSgov/status/1387111972773277700\">the news hit my Twitter feed</a> -- delayed not just a year, but to May 2023, 18 years after it was signed into law. At what point is Real ID past it’s “Best Used By” date -- if not already?</li><li>Many of us lost track of these peripheral travel bits during lockdown. We were driving our daughter Claire to ORD for a flight to Philadelphia last month. She pulled up her boarding pass on American’s mobile app -- “Hey, I don’t have PreCheck!” Huh, well maybe there’s something wonky with the app, I told her. Hit a kiosk if you have time and pull another boarding pass. Turns out, because of construction traffic, she didn’t have time but the regular TSA line was short, so it wasn’t a problem. But the same thing happened on her flight home -- on Southwest this time. OK, not a res system glitch. She logged into the TSA website. Her Global Entry, which includes PreCheck, had expired a few months back. Which prompted Irene to log in; she was expiring <em>that day</em> so she immediately hit the Renew button -- and then spent the next 30 minutes reconstructing our travel history for the last 5 years. Thank God for cell phone photo archives. I figured I should check mine too. Logging in was a little bit of a hassle -- I had to create a new account at login.gov, some federated government login that replaced TSA’s login. Once in, I saw my expiration date isn’t until the end of the year, so I’ll start thinking about it in June or July.&nbsp;</li><li><a href=\"https://twitter.com/CrainsChicago/status/1387055231905648643\">United Airlines CEO said searches for flights to Europe jumped 19 % </a>after the head of the European Union said vaccinated US travelers would be allowed into the EU this summer. And shortly after that, United put on new summer flights to Iceland, Croatia, and Greece - certainly not business travel destinations.</li><li>I had already placed my bet on the UK opening by Thanksgiving. Actually, I was repeating the same bet I placed about this time last year when cash and frequent flier prices went cratered. I booked ORD-LHR flights on American for 30,000 points each. When I had to cancel in September, the agent said “Wow! That was a great deal!. Yeah, I knew it. The price of this year’s bet was 50% higher. But with the US and UK vaccination rates, it’s feeling like a safer bet.</li><li>The riskier bet was plunking down a deposit on a bike trip in Italy in mid-October. There was a lot of “It’s non-refundable so buy our trip insurance” language in bold italic font. So I went back and re-listened to episodes <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/05/08/podcast-163-new-world-of-travel-insurance-getting-medical-help-on-the-road/\" title=\"Podcast #163 — New World of Travel Insurance; Getting Medical Help on the Road\">#163</a> and <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/12/podcast-173-whats-new-in-travel-insurance-keeping-ahead-of-expiring-miles/\" title=\"Podcast #173 — What’s New in Travel Insurance; Keeping Ahead of Expiring Miles\">#173</a> where we talked about travel insurance and then dug deep into the insurance rider for the tour provider’s insurance and the travel insurance I’d get for free if I charge it on my Amex or Chase Sapphire cards. One hour and a couple of three-column tables later, I first threw out the Amex insurance; it was sorely lacking. Then comparing the tour company with Chase, neither of them offered cancellation coverage if a, what is it, a fifth wave of COVID (I’ve lost count) causes Italy to close its borders again. Running through the rest of the comparison, the tour company offered a bit more, but not enough (at least to me) to justify the additional $760 cost for Irene and me. So I charged the deposit on the Sapphire card and am hoping for the best.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/media/files/DJBLUE/11541\">Hear Me</a></em>&nbsp;by DJ Blue &nbsp;(c) copyright 2007 Licensed under Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/\">Attribution Noncommercial Share-Alike</a> license http://ccmixter.org/media/files/DJBLUE/11541.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>How to Find Local Tour Guides</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>This is a topic where I need to, up front, state my priors -- I don’t do well with structure when I travel. Well, let me refine that a little -- I don’t do well with <em>other people</em> applying structure on me when I travel. I don’t cruise, I’ve always hated forced “team-building” outings during company sales meetings, and I cringe whenever I run across tour guides walking backwards, reciting factoids to trailing lines of people tethered to them through wireless headphones. To be honest, I look down on them -- I can do better, more authentically with my own research. </li><li>But that’s really more pride, and maybe a bit of cheapness, talking than real facts. I’ve had great experiences with small tours. Way back in episode #105 -- 8 years ago! It always amazes me how long I’ve done this; and amazes even more how long many of you have been listening -- I talked about a couple of private tours that completely readjusted my attitude -- a tour through Saigon with an ex-South Vietnamese army officer, a food market tour in Madrid, a wine tour in Priorat.  They were phenomenal, but they were all second-degree connections -- friends recommending other friends or acquaintances. So unless you have a lot of friends with connections to places you want to visit, that word-of-mouth model doesn’t scale.</li><li>Which leads me to this episode’s guest, <a href=\"https://www.toursbylocals.com/TBL/WebObjects/ToursByLocals.woa/1/wo/y2c7lZDKnxUUHYGLem9YgM/0.41.1.1.50.3\">Paul Melhus</a>, CEO &amp; Founder of <a href=\"https://www.toursbylocals.com/\">ToursByLocals</a>, a private tours marketplace. I talked with Paul about the local tour market, how he fared during the COVID travel meltdown, and what things look like from his vantage point as we’re coming out on the other side.<ul><li>Mark: Paul, help us understand your marketplace, how you help travelers search and book for local tours. This is a space that had a lot of startup activity, say five years ago. Everybody was a peer-to-peer tour marketers and the Uber of local tours. And now though, it seems that we\'ve got a mix of large companies, Airbnb Experiences, Viator, and then smaller folks, offering a broad range of tours like yourself and Get Your Guide, and then some specialized niches in things like food, Eat With. And then last episode, we talked with Rob Cheshire about what he\'s doing in <em><a href=\"http://thisweekincraft.beer\" title=\"thisweekincraft.beer\">This Week In Craft Beer</a></em>. So, help us understand the market space.</li><li>Paul: <a href=\"https://www.toursbylocals.com/\">ToursByLocals</a> is a platform, and our goal is to connect independent tour guides with independent travelers who want to have that kind of unique experience. I\'ve often wondered why it is that we seem to have been successful. We started in 2008; somehow we\'ve managed to thrive, and we always started right from the get-go to make sure that the guides that we\'re on our site were competent, qualified, able to do what they said they would do. So we feel like our network of, we’re at 4,750 guides right now, is a curated list.</li><li>Mark: So that curation, it\'s not so much the Uber for local tours, maybe the Angie\'s List for local tours.</li><li>Paul: Yeah, I guess, Yeah, that\'s a good idea because I think a lot of other companies, they just went out and tried to get a lot of guides and they didn\'t really worry too much about making sure that every one of them is going to be quality, responsive -- that\'s a big thing -- and then it\'s the consistency of everybody knows how it works. In some cases, especially if the tour is more high value, like we have some safaris in Africa, for example where the customer will pay $23,000 and the guide, in order to deliver that tour,  they can\'t fund all of that on their own account, so we advance them funds. But you know if things were to go south, well, we\'re here. And we have done that in the past, refund the traveler because who knows, maybe there was some weather-related event that caused the thing to get canceled and then, so we\'re out the $5-6,000, but the customer is made whole.</li><li>Mark: So there\'s really two things that you\'re offering above and beyond just the search and book. You\'re offering curation and you\'re offering escrow. So you\'re taking some of that uncertainty in both of those areas, uncertainty about the qualification and then uncertainty about performance, you guys are taking that on.  Paul, you talked about Covid. How has this curated network of tour guides held up through Covid?</li><li>Paul: Right now, our maximum number of tour guides listed on the site was just over 5,000 and that was February 2020. Now we\'re at 4,750. So, not huge and we have a status of tour guide called <em>on hold </em>-- for the time being, I don\'t want to be on the site, but I want to be able to come back once it\'s safe. For an example. We had a guide in Denmark, had an elderly mother and she just didn\'t want to be out there with people because she had to look after her parent. So we have a project right now to contact all of these people and see about getting them back on the site. But the other thing that offset the loss was, rather than laying all of our staff off, we repurposed them and tried to infill a lot of the smaller destinations, the Nashville\'s, Flagstaff Arizona. And of course, Yellowstone National Park where our sales are up 1,300% over 2019 levels, which was a good year.</li><li>Mark: That was the trend last fall, and I think going into the spring was everybody wanted to do outdoor stuff. Right?</li><li>Paul: Oh, it really is. Now that people have got their vaccines, they want to travel and the easiest place to travel is domestically. So, we\'re seeing a real boost in US travel.</li><li>Mark: What do you see around trends?  Do you see an uptick, and where is it?</li><li>Paul: A metric that we track very closely is the conversion rate of our tour guides. So, if we send them an inquiry from a traveler, what percentage of those inquiries turned into a booking? We\'ve noticed that the conversion rate is about half of what it was in 2019. Because normally a  good guide converts about 40% of the inquiries and now it\'s fallen down to about 20%. There\'s a lot of dreamers out there. That\'s what we\'re thinking.</li><li>Mark: There\'s a lot of people shopping, but they\'re not buying yet.</li><li>Paul: Not quite yet. Now basically there\'s the people that are booking are kind of falling into two buckets. Normally we would have kind of a nice smooth curve of not too many short notice bookings and then it would be a bulge and then tail off farther out. But what we\'re finding is that people are booking within a 2-week window, so short notice, or their booking into 2022. We recently extended our booking calendar out 26 months and that\'s driven some surprisingly long-term bookings. It\'s that middle that\'s missing and I think that\'s where they want to go. But until such time as you can actually get on a plane and happily go to London without having a 14-day quarantine when you show up, people are just not going to do it.</li><li>Mark: Super. Paul Melhus, CEO of <a href=\"http://toursbylocals.com\">ToursByLocals</a>. Thank you very much for taking the time to talk to us here at the TravelCommons.</li></ul></li><li>Bridge Music — <em>Gargantua</em> by Admiral Bob (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/46361 Ft: My Free Mickey, Martijn de Boer</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Rebuilding Travel Muscle</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Frequent travelers, road warriors, mostly sitting at home for the past 15 months, certainly not heading to the airport every week or two, our travel muscles have&nbsp; atrophied. That rhythm, that cadence, that confidence that separated us from all those regular travelers -- well, all that and premiere status lines and lounge access which also physically separated us. I noticed this loss of travel muscle tone a bit on my trips to Tucson and San Diego over the last couple of months. I had to think a lot harder about those trips -- what to pack, when to leave -- things that were second nature to me, say, 18 months ago when I was traveling every week to Charlottesville, VA or Phoenix. Even on personal travel -- to Poland, Hungary, Estonia, Finland -- I had everything down; on the road, I had my groove.</li><li>Pretty much all of my travelling friends breathed a sigh of relief during the first 6-8 months of lockdown -- first, happy to be home and safe; then settling in, enjoying the extended family time, picking up some new hobby (even frequent travelers weren’t immune from the sourdough craze). But toward the end of the year, I could hear a bit of ansty-ness, and now, vaccines in arms, I’m seeing people getting back out on the road, beginning to rebuild those travel muscles.</li><li>It’s been a pretty quick snapback. Remember, back in December, people like Bill Gates were saying to large virtual conferences that 50% of business travel would disappear and video conferencing was the new normal. I think the big ramp up in vaccination rates flipped this script. Again, back in December, the euphoria of vaccine approvals was quickly overwritten by the depressing logistics of manufacturing ramp-ups and cold-chain distribution. But now, five months later, people are again sitting across desks and conference tables from each other; initially masked, but then quickly running through their vaccination statuses and comfort levels so they feel safe dropping their masks and getting on with business. This “new normal” feels like it’s trending pretty quickly back to the old normal.&nbsp;</li><li>At least for one-on-one meetings. Larger meetings and public spaces can’t do those same negotiations. But that’s enough for a start. Those same friends of mine who were loving their cocoons and sour dough recipes last year are looking to break out now. Like me, they tend to have pretty short attention spans and travel gives them the change, the external stimulus they need -- new places with new people to see and new things to do.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>The seating chart for my flight down to Miami shows a full flight and is asking for volunteers to take a later flight. And this for a 7am Monday morning flight -- first flight out, the standard business traveler choice. A lot of folks are getting back into that rhythm.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #175</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>The new website makes it a lot easier to subscribe. There’s a drop down menu at the top of each page, a set of subscribe links at the bottom, and a big red “Subscribe” button in the middle of the home page. You can use all those buttons, links and menus or you can just search for us on <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; with everybody and their mother starting up a podcast, it’s really the only way to grow. </li><li>I\'m not doing Patreon or trying to figure out Apple’s new podcast paid subscription. So if you’d like this podcast and would like to support it, please recommend it to one or two of your friends; maybe folks who traveled a lot -- before COVID -- or wished they could travel a lot. I’d appreciate it.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_175.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #175 — How to Find Local Tour Guides; Rebuild Travel Muscles','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-175-how-to-find-local-tour-guides-rebuild-travel-muscles','','','2021-06-15 19:25:02','2021-06-16 00:25:02','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3530',0,'post','',0),
(3532,1,'2021-05-08 13:19:40','2021-05-08 18:19:40','[caption id=\"attachment_2004\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/IMG_0464.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2004\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/IMG_0464-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> Effects of Extended Exposure to TSA Scan[/caption]\n\nA last-minute trip to Pune, India provided more than enough material for this episode -- a visa dash, <em>very</em> hands-on airport security, worthless rupee notes, flight disruptions.... We also read the obits for a couple of smart bag companies and hear why MSP\'s T2 isn\'t so ghetto after all. All this and more at the&nbsp;<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_141.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #141:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. Not much travel since the last episode -- just driving up to Wisconsin -- until last week when I did a 5-day trip with a client to Pune, India. Left ORD Friday night, landed in Frankfurt late Saturday morning, heard the announce a flight to Pune before my flight to Delhi. Arrived in Delhi at 1am Monday morning. Overnighted at the airport Radisson Blu (not a bad hotel), and then caught an afternoon Jet Airways flight to Pune. Note to self: you don’t always have to fly the client’s itinerary. In spite of all those legs, those multiple points of potential failure, everything went relatively smoothly.</li>\n 	<li>Not so much on the way home. The itinerary was to take an Air India flight from Pune to Delhi at 7pm Thursday night, then the United flight to Newark, getting back to ORD around 9:30. We passed on a 5:30p Jet Airways flight fearing Pune rush hour traffic. And that’s where the itinerary fell apart. While waiting for the client team to check their luggage -- I decided to ignore Air India’s 8 kg carry-on weight limit -- I get an e-mail from Air India with a 2 hr delay due to “operational reasons” which usually means a broken plane. Great. What was a reasonable 2½ layover was suddenly an unrealistic 30-minute dash off the plane, through the standard Indian airport itinerary check, then passport control, full patdown security, weave through the terminal and to the gate. And the inbound Air India plane hasn’t left Delhi yet. I call our Amex travel number -- any room on that Jet Airways flight because it hasn’t left yet. Nope, sold out. I briefly think about 3-hr drive to Mumbai but decide to keep heading to Delhi. I bang “flights DEL ORD May 24” into Google. I filter the Google Flights results for one-way and shortest duration, and then call Amex back. When the agent stopped after listing the limited United options -- I guess because it’s less work for them to keep me on the same airline -- I asked her to check on the non-United options that Google Flights listed. There’s the direct Air India flight to ORD getting in around 7:30a or a Lufthansa connection back through Frankfurt arriving around 1pm. I have her book both, knowing that I can cancel one well within the 24-hr no-penalty window.</li>\n 	<li>Pune Airport is a dump. I’m trying to think of a worse airport I’ve been in and I’m drawing a complete blank. Weak air conditioning failing to fight the 95 degree day, 3-4 food stands against the wall, and no bar. With nothing better to do, I bang “Air India ORD DEL business class review” into Google. The results were not kind. But I still think - how bad could it really be? This seems like a bad karma travel day; skipping the FRA connection, avoiding another point of failure, seems to be good idea. But then I finally got on the Air India plane to Delhi. It was also a complete dump. It was a bad 2 hrs; I couldn’t do another 15 hrs with them. I decided to risk the Frankfurt connection. At first it went well; breakfast beer and pretzel in the lounge, on-time boarding. But after boarding, we sat and sat. The captain came on. The good news? The luggage was finally loaded and the cargo doors buttoned up. The bad news? Our pushback time is an hour from now. There was nothing I could do. I pulled out my iPhone and buried myself in the zen of Solitaire. As it turned out, we didn’t take the full hour delay and the pilot juiced the engines so we arrived only 15 minutes late. And after looking at in-flight pictures from the gang that took the Air India direct flight, that 15 minute delay was trampled by the arrival of full-on schadenfreude. I had definitely made the right decision</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<em>Gargantua</em> by Admiral Bob (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/46361 Ft: My Free Mickey, Martijn de Boer</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>The airlines’ smart bag ban claimed a couple of casualties this month. Bluesmart posted its blog obituary first -- “the banning of smart luggage with non-removable batteries put our company in an irreversibly difficult financial and business situation”. selling their IP, their intellectual property to TravelPro, one of the “legacy” suitcase brands they used to dismiss. A few weeks later, Raden posted a similar obit -- “We sincerely apologize to those who chose to travel with us, our intent was to add ease and simplicity to your travel experience and this unforeseen policy change has made this impossible.” Both companies said they’re no longer honoring warranties though Bluesmart says they’ll still provide some level of e-mail support. And the smartphone apps if you want to use your grounded bag on, say, a train or a bus. The bag maker Away is still in business, though, even developing a free kit that retrofits their first generation smart bag with an ejectable battery, making them compliant with the airlines’ rules.</li>\n 	<li>Gary Learned tweeted back a solid counter-argument on last episode’s rant on MSP’s Terminal 2. After waiting for a Southwest flight back to Chicago, I added it to my “ghetto terminal” list -- the terminals for non-hub airlines -- like O’Hare’s Terminal 2 and Detroit’s North Terminal. Gary has a different take, though. He writes -\n<ul>\n 	<li>I respectfully disagree on MSP T2. Surdyks has some great taps and wine as well as good small bites. Barrio is a nice little Mexican local restaurant. I can go from car to gate in 5 min. Now MDW on the other hand …</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Car to gate in 5 minutes -- that’s a selling point right there that you won’t pick up Uber-ing in and out of a place. That used to be Midway before it blew up -- little parking lot in front of the terminal and walk right in. I won’t defend Midway now -- it’s a bit of a cluster, though I’m hoping that the pending reconstruction of the security concourse sort of “un-clusters” at least that part of it. Gary, thanks for giving us the contra view of MSP T2. I’ll give Barrio a try the next time I’m there.</li>\n 	<li>And since we’re talking about ghetto terminals, when choosing among the client-selected itineraries to India, a connection thru Munich was one of the options -- which long-time listeners know I immediately skipped. Skytrax again named Munich the top European airport. God only knows why, though I know they certainly didn’t ask me. Instead, I connected through Frankfurt, which while not a “wow-sy” airport, is efficient, not a hassle, and gets me on my way. Normally, I’m flying over to FRA from ORD and connecting to some place in Europe, often in the Schengen zone so I don’t have to go through passport control. Connecting to India, though, was a different matter. According to my iPhone’s Health app (admittedly not the most accurate), I walked 1.6 miles that Saturday morning between my ORD and DEL flights. I drug my bag down long corridors empty except for some black plastic chairs fixed in a semi-reclined position surrounded by black cloth cots. FRA airport really missed the chance to strategically locate some little beer stube kiosks along the way. I would’ve stopped at least a couple of times on that trek for some breakfast beers.</li>\n 	<li>The India trip was a bit of a last-minute thing which necessitated a scramble for a new Indian visa. This would be my 3rd Indian visa. My first one was a 5-year visa that I lost when my passport was stolen in Brussels. My second one was only for 6 months; I can’t remember why it was so short. This time, I decided to avoid future scrambles and apply for a 10-year visa. Because there’s an Indian consulate in Chicago, I didn’t have to hassle with postage or third-party passport services. The day before, I sent notes to our US HR department and the admin manager in our Hyderabad office asking for the necessary letters of guarantee and invitation, and then did the application online, printed it out and signed it, and then booked an appointment the next morning. I didn’t actually go to the consulate. I’ve always gone to an outsourced visa processing company that handled the front end administrivia, with, near as I can tell, the consulate just approving and signing the visas. Each visa has been with a different processor. For my first visa in 2010, I dropped my forms and passport off at an office in the morning, and received a text at the end of the day that it was ready. In 2014, a different processor gave my wife a hard time -- trying to upsell her on expedited handling charges that weren’t needed. This time, Cox and Kings was a surprisingly painless experience. I went in Thursday after lunch; there was no wait, the people were pleasant. End of day Thursday, I received an e-mail and a text telling me that my application had been processed and was heading to the consulate. On Friday morning, I received and e-mail and text saying that my application had arrived at the consulate. Another message at lunch said that it was being processes, and a last message on Friday said that it was back at Cox and Kings. Monday morning, another message told me it was being packaged up, followed by a message with a UPS tracking number. Tuesday afternoon, my passport landed on my front porch with my 10-year visa. I was incredibly impressed… and feeling a bit spoiled comparing this level of customer service to what my non-US friends tell me they have to go through to get a US visa.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em>A Foolish Game</em> by Zep Hurme&nbsp;(c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license.&nbsp;http://ccmixter.org/files/zep_hurme/46448</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>When You Think the TSA is Bad...</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>A week of flying around India is always a good sanity check for me -- that no matter what crankiness I’m have about the TSA, airport security in the US is so much easier than in India. When I was talking at the start of the episode about how the delay of our Pune-Delhi flight blew up the rest of our itinerary home, the main reason we immediately starting working alternative flights was because how long we knew it would take to work our way through the different layers of security in Delhi. It started when trying to make our way from domestic flight arrivals into the international departures area so we could re-ticket our flights. We had to pass through the usual itinerary check. I show the army guy the boarding pass for United flight we’d missed -- it was all I had. But since that flight had already left, he wasn’t going to let me through. Luckily, one of the group I was flying with was United Global Services, and two customer service staff had met us as we got off the Air India flight. Even then, it took her a good bit of time to explain the situation to the army guy and convince him to let me through. But for that, I would’ve been idling around baggage claim on my own trying to figure out how to get to a ticket counter.</li>\n 	<li>Passport control was pretty efficient, but the security scans -- not so much. After you unpack all your electronics and push everything through the X-ray machine, you walk through the metal detector for your gender -- different scanners for “Gents” and “Ladies” because there’s a full wanding and patdown on the other side. Indeed, the “Ladies” go into a little curtained booth for their patdown. Not normally too much of a hassle, unless the “Ladies” patdown line backs up, and a back up of women’s luggage in the X-ray machine is blocking mine -- which happened that evening. None of the security people moved to clear things. Nothing to do but stand there and wait. Our flight from Pune landed at Delhi at 11pm. When looking at flight alternatives, I’d seen an Air Canada flight leaving at 12:10pm and passed right by it. I knew there was no way we’d make that flight.</li>\n 	<li>The security checks in Frankfurt, while much more efficient, were still more than you’d get in the US. On the way over to India, after passing everything through the X-ray machine, I was intercepted after collecting my bags, directed over to a cubicle where all of my bags were swabbed and checked for explosives residue. All done with a German sense of politeness, but I was glad I wasn’t in a rush. On the connection back home, it was a different security line, with a body scanner instead of the walkthru metal detector. No big deal, but just different enough to be awkward. Instead of the TSA’s hands up “don’t shoot” pose, it was an arms down-elbows out pose, kinda like you’re holding luggage. The guy working the scanner was visibly annoyed that he had to instruct me on the pose -- to hold me arms further away from my body. But then there was no luggage swiping on the other side.</li>\n 	<li>Picking up my bags, I maneuvered around three officers cradling automatic rifles; they were standing there chatting, but watching. No big deal now, but I remember when I first starting traveling through Europe -- London Heathrow and Frankfurt in the mid- to late-’80’s and being taken aback by the army guys walking around with unslung M-16s and the like. This was pre-TSA time in the US, when it would be out-of-place to see anything more than a rent-a-cop in an airport terminal and you could still turn up 30 minutes before departure time and make your flight. Back then, the difference was eye-opening for a twenty-something traveler. Of course, none of us knew that it was a preview of what flying would be like 20 years later.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<em>Melt Away</em>&nbsp;by Kara Square (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp;http://ccmixter.org/files/mindmapthat/46605</li>\n</ul>\n<b>Expired Money</b>\n<ul>\n 	<li>In last December’s episode, I talked about how I need to have some cash in my pocket when I travel. I know it’s a generational thing; many of my younger colleagues don’t carry any cash, but going “cash naked” just makes me nervous. Assuaging this anxiety on international travel means fills one of my desk drawers with random bits of currency. That’s not a big deal for countries that I or my family visit often. Before my daughter flew back to the UK for her spring semester at St Andrews, I rummaged through the desk and found a £20 note; it bought her breakfast when she landed in Edinburgh.</li>\n 	<li>But for countries I visit less often, the money just sits there. I have 350 Mexican pesos -- about $18 at today’s exchange rate; I can’t remember the last time I was in Mexico. I have 400 Chinese yuan -- over $60 -- left over from my last trip to Beijing 4 years ago. At the end of that trip, I thought I’d be going back within the year, so didn’t work hard to spend down those notes. But that next trip didn’t happen, and so there those yuan sit.</li>\n 	<li>Before the India trip, I hit the cash drawer and pulled out €12 in notes and coins from our trip to Spain last March, that was for my connections through Frankfurt, and 200 rupees -- about $30 -- left over from my 2014 trip to India. I didn’t spend any of the euros; I spent most of my time either walking through concourses or drinking beer in the Lufthansa lounge. But the rupees came in handy for tipping all the guys at the hotel who insisted on helping me with my carry-on bag. Here’s a 100 for you, and you, and you, and, oh, you too.</li>\n 	<li>One night in Pune, we were at the JW Marriott rooftop bar for hors d\'oeuvres and pre-dinner drinks. The catered bar on our side of the terrace has the usual Kingfisher beers. But then I saw someone on the other, the non-catered/public side of the terrace with a different, non-Kingfisher beer. It was a Bira 91 Blonde. I headed over to the main bar to get one. Now, because this was the main bar, not the catered one, I was going to have to pay for the Bira 91, but that wasn’t a problem because I had rupees in my pocket. Yes, they also would’ve taken my Amex card, but I had a 1,000 and a 500 rupee note that I needed to break for more luggage tips, so I laid the 1,000 note on the bar next to my check and then wandered over to the edge of the rooftop to look over the city. A couple minutes later, a guy taps me on the shoulder and gives me back my 1,000 rupees. The note was no good. And then I remembered. Back in Nov 2016, the Indian government made a snap announcement to replace the 500 and 1,000 rupee notes to fight counterfeiting. $20 of my rupees had expired while sitting in my desk drawer. Lots of apologizing, and I ended up pulling out my Amex card after all.</li>\n 	<li>When I got home, I took a deeper dive through my cash drawer. Luckily, I didn’t have any old £10 notes, the ones with Charles Darwin on them. He expired a couple of months ago in March, replaced by a new tenner with Jane Austen. I did find a 1,000 Italian lire note with Maria Montessori on the face, which must’ve been left over from, I dunno, maybe our 10th anniversary trip to Tuscany because lire notes were replaced with Euro notes in 2002. My 1,000 note was worth maybe half a euro, about 60 cents when it expired: not a big loss. But today, when I searched on eBay, I saw it selling for $2-3. That’s a 300-400% return. So maybe I’ll just stuff these rupee back in my drawer and check back in, oh, 2035 and make a killing.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #141</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a> and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_141.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #141 — When You Think the TSA is Bad...; Expired Money','','inherit','closed','closed','','1998-revision-v1','','','2021-05-08 13:19:40','2021-05-08 18:19:40','',1998,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3532',0,'revision','',0),
(3533,1,'2021-05-08 13:20:53','2021-05-08 18:20:53','[caption id=\"attachment_2004\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/IMG_0464.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2004\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/IMG_0464-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> Effects of Extended Exposure to TSA Scan[/caption]\n\nA last-minute trip to Pune, India provided more than enough material for this episode -- a visa dash, <em>very</em> hands-on airport security, worthless rupee notes, flight disruptions.... We also read the obits for a couple of smart bag companies and hear why MSP\'s T2 isn\'t so ghetto after all. All this and more at the&nbsp;<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_141.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.\n\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #141:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. Not much travel since the last episode -- just driving up to Wisconsin -- until last week when I did a 5-day trip with a client to Pune, India. Left ORD Friday night, landed in Frankfurt late Saturday morning, heard the announce a flight to Pune before my flight to Delhi. Arrived in Delhi at 1am Monday morning. Overnighted at the airport Radisson Blu (not a bad hotel), and then caught an afternoon Jet Airways flight to Pune. Note to self: you don’t always have to fly the client’s itinerary. In spite of all those legs, those multiple points of potential failure, everything went relatively smoothly.</li>\n 	<li>Not so much on the way home. The itinerary was to take an Air India flight from Pune to Delhi at 7pm Thursday night, then the United flight to Newark, getting back to ORD around 9:30. We passed on a 5:30p Jet Airways flight fearing Pune rush hour traffic. And that’s where the itinerary fell apart. While waiting for the client team to check their luggage -- I decided to ignore Air India’s 8 kg carry-on weight limit -- I get an e-mail from Air India with a 2 hr delay due to “operational reasons” which usually means a broken plane. Great. What was a reasonable 2½ layover was suddenly an unrealistic 30-minute dash off the plane, through the standard Indian airport itinerary check, then passport control, full patdown security, weave through the terminal and to the gate. And the inbound Air India plane hasn’t left Delhi yet. I call our Amex travel number -- any room on that Jet Airways flight because it hasn’t left yet. Nope, sold out. I briefly think about 3-hr drive to Mumbai but decide to keep heading to Delhi. I bang “flights DEL ORD May 24” into Google. I filter the Google Flights results for one-way and shortest duration, and then call Amex back. When the agent stopped after listing the limited United options -- I guess because it’s less work for them to keep me on the same airline -- I asked her to check on the non-United options that Google Flights listed. There’s the direct Air India flight to ORD getting in around 7:30a or a Lufthansa connection back through Frankfurt arriving around 1pm. I have her book both, knowing that I can cancel one well within the 24-hr no-penalty window.</li>\n 	<li>Pune Airport is a dump. I’m trying to think of a worse airport I’ve been in and I’m drawing a complete blank. Weak air conditioning failing to fight the 95 degree day, 3-4 food stands against the wall, and no bar. With nothing better to do, I bang “Air India ORD DEL business class review” into Google. The results were not kind. But I still think - how bad could it really be? This seems like a bad karma travel day; skipping the FRA connection, avoiding another point of failure, seems to be good idea. But then I finally got on the Air India plane to Delhi. It was also a complete dump. It was a bad 2 hrs; I couldn’t do another 15 hrs with them. I decided to risk the Frankfurt connection. At first it went well; breakfast beer and pretzel in the lounge, on-time boarding. But after boarding, we sat and sat. The captain came on. The good news? The luggage was finally loaded and the cargo doors buttoned up. The bad news? Our pushback time is an hour from now. There was nothing I could do. I pulled out my iPhone and buried myself in the zen of Solitaire. As it turned out, we didn’t take the full hour delay and the pilot juiced the engines so we arrived only 15 minutes late. And after looking at in-flight pictures from the gang that took the Air India direct flight, that 15 minute delay was trampled by the arrival of full-on schadenfreude. I had definitely made the right decision</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<em>Gargantua</em> by Admiral Bob (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/46361 Ft: My Free Mickey, Martijn de Boer</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>The airlines’ smart bag ban claimed a couple of casualties this month. Bluesmart posted its blog obituary first -- “the banning of smart luggage with non-removable batteries put our company in an irreversibly difficult financial and business situation”. selling their IP, their intellectual property to TravelPro, one of the “legacy” suitcase brands they used to dismiss. A few weeks later, Raden posted a similar obit -- “We sincerely apologize to those who chose to travel with us, our intent was to add ease and simplicity to your travel experience and this unforeseen policy change has made this impossible.” Both companies said they’re no longer honoring warranties though Bluesmart says they’ll still provide some level of e-mail support. And the smartphone apps if you want to use your grounded bag on, say, a train or a bus. The bag maker Away is still in business, though, even developing a free kit that retrofits their first generation smart bag with an ejectable battery, making them compliant with the airlines’ rules.</li>\n 	<li>Gary Learned tweeted back a solid counter-argument on last episode’s rant on MSP’s Terminal 2. After waiting for a Southwest flight back to Chicago, I added it to my “ghetto terminal” list -- the terminals for non-hub airlines -- like O’Hare’s Terminal 2 and Detroit’s North Terminal. Gary has a different take, though. He writes -\n<ul>\n 	<li>I respectfully disagree on MSP T2. Surdyks has some great taps and wine as well as good small bites. Barrio is a nice little Mexican local restaurant. I can go from car to gate in 5 min. Now MDW on the other hand …</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Car to gate in 5 minutes -- that’s a selling point right there that you won’t pick up Uber-ing in and out of a place. That used to be Midway before it blew up -- little parking lot in front of the terminal and walk right in. I won’t defend Midway now -- it’s a bit of a cluster, though I’m hoping that the pending reconstruction of the security concourse sort of “un-clusters” at least that part of it. Gary, thanks for giving us the contra view of MSP T2. I’ll give Barrio a try the next time I’m there.</li>\n 	<li>And since we’re talking about ghetto terminals, when choosing among the client-selected itineraries to India, a connection thru Munich was one of the options -- which long-time listeners know I immediately skipped. Skytrax again named Munich the top European airport. God only knows why, though I know they certainly didn’t ask me. Instead, I connected through Frankfurt, which while not a “wow-sy” airport, is efficient, not a hassle, and gets me on my way. Normally, I’m flying over to FRA from ORD and connecting to some place in Europe, often in the Schengen zone so I don’t have to go through passport control. Connecting to India, though, was a different matter. According to my iPhone’s Health app (admittedly not the most accurate), I walked 1.6 miles that Saturday morning between my ORD and DEL flights. I drug my bag down long corridors empty except for some black plastic chairs fixed in a semi-reclined position surrounded by black cloth cots. FRA airport really missed the chance to strategically locate some little beer stube kiosks along the way. I would’ve stopped at least a couple of times on that trek for some breakfast beers.</li>\n 	<li>The India trip was a bit of a last-minute thing which necessitated a scramble for a new Indian visa. This would be my 3rd Indian visa. My first one was a 5-year visa that I lost when my passport was stolen in Brussels. My second one was only for 6 months; I can’t remember why it was so short. This time, I decided to avoid future scrambles and apply for a 10-year visa. Because there’s an Indian consulate in Chicago, I didn’t have to hassle with postage or third-party passport services. The day before, I sent notes to our US HR department and the admin manager in our Hyderabad office asking for the necessary letters of guarantee and invitation, and then did the application online, printed it out and signed it, and then booked an appointment the next morning. I didn’t actually go to the consulate. I’ve always gone to an outsourced visa processing company that handled the front end administrivia, with, near as I can tell, the consulate just approving and signing the visas. Each visa has been with a different processor. For my first visa in 2010, I dropped my forms and passport off at an office in the morning, and received a text at the end of the day that it was ready. In 2014, a different processor gave my wife a hard time -- trying to upsell her on expedited handling charges that weren’t needed. This time, Cox and Kings was a surprisingly painless experience. I went in Thursday after lunch; there was no wait, the people were pleasant. End of day Thursday, I received an e-mail and a text telling me that my application had been processed and was heading to the consulate. On Friday morning, I received and e-mail and text saying that my application had arrived at the consulate. Another message at lunch said that it was being processes, and a last message on Friday said that it was back at Cox and Kings. Monday morning, another message told me it was being packaged up, followed by a message with a UPS tracking number. Tuesday afternoon, my passport landed on my front porch with my 10-year visa. I was incredibly impressed… and feeling a bit spoiled comparing this level of customer service to what my non-US friends tell me they have to go through to get a US visa.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em>A Foolish Game</em> by Zep Hurme&nbsp;(c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license.&nbsp;http://ccmixter.org/files/zep_hurme/46448</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>When You Think the TSA is Bad...</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>A week of flying around India is always a good sanity check for me -- that no matter what crankiness I’m have about the TSA, airport security in the US is so much easier than in India. When I was talking at the start of the episode about how the delay of our Pune-Delhi flight blew up the rest of our itinerary home, the main reason we immediately starting working alternative flights was because how long we knew it would take to work our way through the different layers of security in Delhi. It started when trying to make our way from domestic flight arrivals into the international departures area so we could re-ticket our flights. We had to pass through the usual itinerary check. I show the army guy the boarding pass for United flight we’d missed -- it was all I had. But since that flight had already left, he wasn’t going to let me through. Luckily, one of the group I was flying with was United Global Services, and two customer service staff had met us as we got off the Air India flight. Even then, it took her a good bit of time to explain the situation to the army guy and convince him to let me through. But for that, I would’ve been idling around baggage claim on my own trying to figure out how to get to a ticket counter.</li>\n 	<li>Passport control was pretty efficient, but the security scans -- not so much. After you unpack all your electronics and push everything through the X-ray machine, you walk through the metal detector for your gender -- different scanners for “Gents” and “Ladies” because there’s a full wanding and patdown on the other side. Indeed, the “Ladies” go into a little curtained booth for their patdown. Not normally too much of a hassle, unless the “Ladies” patdown line backs up, and a back up of women’s luggage in the X-ray machine is blocking mine -- which happened that evening. None of the security people moved to clear things. Nothing to do but stand there and wait. Our flight from Pune landed at Delhi at 11pm. When looking at flight alternatives, I’d seen an Air Canada flight leaving at 12:10pm and passed right by it. I knew there was no way we’d make that flight.</li>\n 	<li>The security checks in Frankfurt, while much more efficient, were still more than you’d get in the US. On the way over to India, after passing everything through the X-ray machine, I was intercepted after collecting my bags, directed over to a cubicle where all of my bags were swabbed and checked for explosives residue. All done with a German sense of politeness, but I was glad I wasn’t in a rush. On the connection back home, it was a different security line, with a body scanner instead of the walkthru metal detector. No big deal, but just different enough to be awkward. Instead of the TSA’s hands up “don’t shoot” pose, it was an arms down-elbows out pose, kinda like you’re holding luggage. The guy working the scanner was visibly annoyed that he had to instruct me on the pose -- to hold me arms further away from my body. But then there was no luggage swiping on the other side.</li>\n 	<li>Picking up my bags, I maneuvered around three officers cradling automatic rifles; they were standing there chatting, but watching. No big deal now, but I remember when I first starting traveling through Europe -- London Heathrow and Frankfurt in the mid- to late-’80’s and being taken aback by the army guys walking around with unslung M-16s and the like. This was pre-TSA time in the US, when it would be out-of-place to see anything more than a rent-a-cop in an airport terminal and you could still turn up 30 minutes before departure time and make your flight. Back then, the difference was eye-opening for a twenty-something traveler. Of course, none of us knew that it was a preview of what flying would be like 20 years later.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<em>Melt Away</em>&nbsp;by Kara Square (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp;http://ccmixter.org/files/mindmapthat/46605</li>\n</ul>\n<b>Expired Money</b>\n<ul>\n 	<li>In last December’s episode, I talked about how I need to have some cash in my pocket when I travel. I know it’s a generational thing; many of my younger colleagues don’t carry any cash, but going “cash naked” just makes me nervous. Assuaging this anxiety on international travel means fills one of my desk drawers with random bits of currency. That’s not a big deal for countries that I or my family visit often. Before my daughter flew back to the UK for her spring semester at St Andrews, I rummaged through the desk and found a £20 note; it bought her breakfast when she landed in Edinburgh.</li>\n 	<li>But for countries I visit less often, the money just sits there. I have 350 Mexican pesos -- about $18 at today’s exchange rate; I can’t remember the last time I was in Mexico. I have 400 Chinese yuan -- over $60 -- left over from my last trip to Beijing 4 years ago. At the end of that trip, I thought I’d be going back within the year, so didn’t work hard to spend down those notes. But that next trip didn’t happen, and so there those yuan sit.</li>\n 	<li>Before the India trip, I hit the cash drawer and pulled out €12 in notes and coins from our trip to Spain last March, that was for my connections through Frankfurt, and 200 rupees -- about $30 -- left over from my 2014 trip to India. I didn’t spend any of the euros; I spent most of my time either walking through concourses or drinking beer in the Lufthansa lounge. But the rupees came in handy for tipping all the guys at the hotel who insisted on helping me with my carry-on bag. Here’s a 100 for you, and you, and you, and, oh, you too.</li>\n 	<li>One night in Pune, we were at the JW Marriott rooftop bar for hors d\'oeuvres and pre-dinner drinks. The catered bar on our side of the terrace has the usual Kingfisher beers. But then I saw someone on the other, the non-catered/public side of the terrace with a different, non-Kingfisher beer. It was a Bira 91 Blonde. I headed over to the main bar to get one. Now, because this was the main bar, not the catered one, I was going to have to pay for the Bira 91, but that wasn’t a problem because I had rupees in my pocket. Yes, they also would’ve taken my Amex card, but I had a 1,000 and a 500 rupee note that I needed to break for more luggage tips, so I laid the 1,000 note on the bar next to my check and then wandered over to the edge of the rooftop to look over the city. A couple minutes later, a guy taps me on the shoulder and gives me back my 1,000 rupees. The note was no good. And then I remembered. Back in Nov 2016, the Indian government made a snap announcement to replace the 500 and 1,000 rupee notes to fight counterfeiting. $20 of my rupees had expired while sitting in my desk drawer. Lots of apologizing, and I ended up pulling out my Amex card after all.</li>\n 	<li>When I got home, I took a deeper dive through my cash drawer. Luckily, I didn’t have any old £10 notes, the ones with Charles Darwin on them. He expired a couple of months ago in March, replaced by a new tenner with Jane Austen. I did find a 1,000 Italian lire note with Maria Montessori on the face, which must’ve been left over from, I dunno, maybe our 10th anniversary trip to Tuscany because lire notes were replaced with Euro notes in 2002. My 1,000 note was worth maybe half a euro, about 60 cents when it expired: not a big loss. But today, when I searched on eBay, I saw it selling for $2-3. That’s a 300-400% return. So maybe I’ll just stuff these rupee back in my drawer and check back in, oh, 2035 and make a killing.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #141</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a> and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_141.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #141 — When You Think the TSA is Bad...; Expired Money','','inherit','closed','closed','','1998-revision-v1','','','2021-05-08 13:20:53','2021-05-08 18:20:53','',1998,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3533',0,'revision','',0),
(3534,1,'2021-05-08 13:23:14','2021-05-08 18:23:14','[caption id=\"attachment_1985\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/IMG_3006.jpeg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1985\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/IMG_3006-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"Bar at Modern Times\' Taproom\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> I wonder what they serve here[/caption]\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Looking at the <em><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/beer/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Beer</a></em> section of this new website design, I saw I needed more content. So I got hold of Rob Cheshire of the <em><a href=\"https://thisweekincraft.beer/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">This Week in Craft Beer</a></em> podcast to talk about our approaches to taproom tourism and to trade taproom travel stories. I also talk about mask hassles on a couple of recent flights, Hertz\'s continuing downward service spiral, and Uber and Lyft driver shortages.  All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_175.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #175: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>This Week</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. Just one bit of travel since the last episode, a drive down to Nashville, Tennessee.  Right at about a year ago, this drive was my first post-lockdown trip. I talked about it at the start of <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/06/09/podcast-164-first-post-lockdown-trips-travel-credit-cards/\" title=\"Podcast #164 — First-Post Lockdown Trips; Travel Credit Cards\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">episode #164</a> -- no one was on the road save for a few trucks and a few folks like me. It was a drag race down I-65, 80-85 mph the whole way, maybe dropping down to 70 going through Indianapolis and Louisville. You couldn’t be sure what restaurants had their drive-thrus open, so car snacks were key. But now, it’s back to the normal drive -- lots of trucks and having to jockey for position with them on the 2-lane stretches, slow-downs through construction zones, and having to think again about timing the drive so I thread through Chicago, Indianapolis, Louisville, and Nashville without hitting rush hours.</li><li>A year ago, the restaurants that were open were only doing take-out, so I ate in my hotel room every night, which led to me putting “bring-your-own dining sets” on my 2020 travelers gift guide 6 months later.</li><li>One thing that hasn’t changed is hotels not cleaning rooms during the stay.  On this trip, I was in a Courtyard for 4 days and no one but me walked into that room. At what level of COVID cases or vaccination rates do they also have to get back to normal service because walking back into the smell of damp wet towels every day, or having to find a hall garbage can to throw out the takeaway Korean is getting a little old. I do give that Courtyard points, though, for bringing back the free lobby coffee.</li><li>I’m heading down to Miami next week for my first post-pandemic business trip. At the start of the year, everyone was talking about how business travel won’t be back until the end of 2022 or into 2023, and even then, it won’t come all the way back because Zoom and Teams will have replaced the need for 20-30% of business trips. But, I dunno, the TSA is <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/coronavirus/passenger-throughput\">regularly reporting</a> new highs in post-pandemic checkpoint traffic -- 1.63 million passengers the first Sunday of May and 1.64 million the first Thursday of May, averaging 8 times the traffic from the same weekday last year. And I don’t think it’s all leisure travel. I’m starting to see some 2019 behaviors coming back -- execs flying out to a plant to do a one-hour town hall in person; people coming together, physically, in an office conference room to get around some white boards and solve a problem. Is it Zoom fatigue or reversion to the mean -- at least for the vaccinated? I dunno, but I’m kinda looking forward to getting back in the saddle -- well, except for next week’s horse being a 7am Monday rush hour flight out of ORD.</li><li>Bridge Music — <em>A Foolish Game</em> by Zep Hurme (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/zep_hurme/46448.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Long-time TravelCommons listener Nick Gassman sent in a note about last episode’s travel insurance update and COVID-related coverage. Nick writes:<ul><li>“In the UK, a recent survey found that whilst insurers would give you emergency medical cover if you caught COVID when you were away, none would cover you if the government advised against travel because of COVID and you therefore could not travel. Some would give you cancellation cover if you are diagnosed with COVID before travel, and others would further give cancellation cover if you had to self-isolate even without a positive test.</li><li>As ever with insurance, the thing is to make sure you understand the small print and to compare policies.</li></ul></li><li>Nick, thanks for that. I think the advice to \"read the small print\" is valid in life in general, and in travel insurance in particular. I think the pandemic and known event carve-outs lurking in the small print caught a lot of travel insurance holders back when the initial lockdowns hit. I wonder, a year on after all that, how many more people are clicking through the “Buy Travel Insurance” box at the bottom of their Expedia booking page to the full rider and doing a Control-F in their browser to search for the word “COVID”.</li><li>In the last <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/12/podcast-173-whats-new-in-travel-insurance-keeping-ahead-of-expiring-miles/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #173 — What’s New in Travel Insurance; Keeping Ahead of Expiring Miles\">couple </a>of <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/16/podcast-172-timeshares-without-the-pitch-notes-on-tucson/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #172 — Timeshares Without the Pitch; Notes on Tucson\">episodes</a>, I’ve been talking about my efforts to decipher the activity rules for British Airways’ frequent flier program to stave off a year-end extinction event for my non-insignificant stash of Avios points. Since I’m not planning to fly BA anytime soon, I booked our Ocean Beach Airbnb through a link on BA’s site and, to my surprise, I saw 1,800 Avios points automagically hit my account a week later. I can’t seem to find the expiration date to see if it updated, but I’m pretty sure this reset the 36-month clock. And it was a nice find, the Airbnb-Avios link. It let me double-dip on Avios and Chase Ultimate points. Not sure when I’ll get to spend them, but it was a nice little get.</li><li>In the last <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/12/podcast-173-whats-new-in-travel-insurance-keeping-ahead-of-expiring-miles/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #173 — What’s New in Travel Insurance; Keeping Ahead of Expiring Miles\">episode</a>, I talked about having to work through a lot of cars in the Hertz PHX lot to find one with less than 24,000 miles. In SAN, I had to work to find a car -- period. We walked to the Five Star aisle and it was empty. I tried to flag down a Hertz employee, but he just waved me off. After 5 minutes or so, a car showed up. I didn’t bother to look at the mileage; we just got in and drove off. I was late for a lunch date with a fish taco. Returning the car, I did my normal drill - top off the tank, get a receipt, and then when dropping it off, place the receipt under the keys on the dashboard so the check-in guy will see it. It usually works -- except this time. The receipt hits my e-mail as we’re trundling the perimeter of the airfield in the rental bus. I open it up and see a fuel charge! Really? The last time this happened was about 4 years ago in ATL. I hit Twitter and the Hertz team fixed it in a half-hour. This time, the <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1374073837923360768\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter team got back to me</a> pretty quick asking for the rental agreement details, but then… nothing. I pinged them the next day, nothing. And the next day, nothing. So I challenged it with Amex and got the fueling charge and associated taxes credited back in a couple of days and then moved on. Until earlier this week, two weeks later, Hertz popped up on my Twitter DMs asking for more information. It’s amazing how fast their service has cratered during this bankruptcy, which makes me wonder how long it’ll take them to recover. I gotta get some good discount codes for Avis.</li><li>There was a <a href=\"https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/04/uber-and-lyft-struggle-with-driver-shortage-as-demand-soars/\">spate</a> <a href=\"https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/7/22371850/uber-lyft-driver-shortage-covid-bonus-stimulus\">of</a> <a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/video/2021/04/08/uber-lyft-pledge-millions-to-fight-driver-shortage.html\">articles</a> this week about Uber and Lyft driver shortages. We experienced it first hand trying to get a morning ride out to ORD for our San Diego flight. I swallowed hard and agreed to a good-sized surge, waited for a while, and still had the Uber driver cancel on us at the last minute. It shouldn’t be surprising, though. Drivers left the platforms when demand cratered at the start of the pandemic, when Uber said (and this was last May when everything was shutdown) that their volume was down by 80% vs. the prior May (May 2019). And in Chicago, the run of Uber drivers getting carjacked at the beginning of this year probably didn’t help either. But with stimulus checks in the bank and vaccine rates rising, demand has snapped back, a lot faster than driver supply. The headline of the <a href=\"https://www.ft.com/content/2b71e009-bb96-46ee-b024-4c574ef41988\">Financial Times article</a> reads “Uber and Lyft ‘throwing money’ at US drivers to ease shortage” and says that Uber is spending $250 million on a one-time “stimulus” package of driver incentives. But even with that, it takes time to on-board even returning drivers -- re-doing vehicle inspections, background checks. In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/02/29/podcast-160-disappearing-seatback-screens-shrinking-difference-between-ride-share-and-taxis/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #160 — Disappearing Seatback Screens; Shrinking Difference Between Ride-Share and Taxis\">episode #160</a>, my last pre-pandemic episode back in February 2020, I talked about the shrinking difference between Uber and Lyft, and how I found myself beginning to shift back to regular cabs. These recent experiences are only accelerating that. I’m thinking I may need to reload taxi dispatch numbers back into my iPhone.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on our fab new web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mghicks/18378\">Emily and the Djembe</a> by mghicks (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/nc-sampling+/1.0/\">Noncommercial Sampling Plus</a> license. Ft: Emily via Briareus</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>How to Find Local Tour Guides</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Putting together the new website, I was thinking about what to put on the top menu. “Subscribe” and “Episodes” were given, but I also put “Food” and “Beer” because, well, I write and talk about them a lot. But then, when I clicked through the new “Beer” menu, it felt a bit sparse. I needed to add some content. And so in the craft beer tradition of collaboration beers, I pinged Rob Cheshire, a long time TravelCommons listener and now craft beer podcaster with his <a href=\"https://thisweekincraft.beer/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">This Week in Craft Beer</a> podcast, to talk about why we go out of our way to find brewery taprooms, and how he organizes his travels to hit the most taprooms he can on each visit.</li><li>Taproom Tourism Discussion with Rob Cheshire</li><li>Thanks again to Rob Cheshire for that collab. I hope you could tell that it was a lot of fun. Indeed, the full session ran around an hour and a half and a bit more beer. If you want to hear more of our taproom stories, head over to Rob’s This Week in Craft Beer <a href=\"https://thisweekincraft.beer/podcast/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">podcast feed</a>, he posted a longer version as a bonus Easter episode, or check out the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/28/podcast-174-uncut-taproom-tourism/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">TravelCommons website</a>, <a href=\"https://fb.watch/4NAd-8Ai30/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook page</a> or <a href=\"https://youtu.be/6bz4EJn4-7U\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a> for the full video.</li><li>Bridge Music — <em>Gargantua</em> by Admiral Bob (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/46361 Ft: My Free Mickey, Martijn de Boer</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Rebuilding Travel Muscle</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Putting together the new website, I was thinking about what to put on the top menu. “Subscribe” and “Episodes” were given, but I also put “Food” and “Beer” because, well, I write and talk about them a lot. But then, when I clicked through the new “Beer” menu, it felt a bit sparse. I needed to add some content. And so in the craft beer tradition of collaboration beers, I pinged Rob Cheshire, a long time TravelCommons listener and now craft beer podcaster with his <a href=\"https://thisweekincraft.beer/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">This Week in Craft Beer</a> podcast, to talk about why we go out of our way to find brewery taprooms, and how he organizes his travels to hit the most taprooms he can on each visit.</li><li>Taproom Tourism Discussion with Rob Cheshire</li><li>Thanks again to Rob Cheshire for that collab. I hope you could tell that it was a lot of fun. Indeed, the full session ran around an hour and a half and a bit more beer. If you want to hear more of our taproom stories, head over to Rob’s This Week in Craft Beer <a href=\"https://thisweekincraft.beer/podcast/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">podcast feed</a>, he posted a longer version as a bonus Easter episode, or check out the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/28/podcast-174-uncut-taproom-tourism/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">TravelCommons website</a>, <a href=\"https://fb.watch/4NAd-8Ai30/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook page</a> or <a href=\"https://youtu.be/6bz4EJn4-7U\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a> for the full video.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #174</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>The new website makes it a lot easier to subscribe. There’s a drop down menu at the top of each page, a set of subscribe links at the bottom, and a big red “Subscribe” button in the middle of the home page. You can use all those buttons, links and menus or you can just search for us on <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>Thanks to Nick Gassman, not only for the e-mails, but for <a href=\"https://nickgassman.com/recommended-podcasts/other-podcasts/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">calling out</a> TravelCommons in the Recommended Podcast section of his blog site.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_174.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #175 — How to Find Local Tour Guides; Rebuild Travel Muscles','','inherit','closed','closed','','3530-revision-v1','','','2021-05-08 13:23:14','2021-05-08 18:23:14','',3530,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3534',0,'revision','',0),
(3535,1,'2021-05-08 13:28:55','2021-05-08 18:28:55','[caption id=\"attachment_1985\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/IMG_3006.jpeg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1985\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/IMG_3006-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"Bar at Modern Times\' Taproom\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> I wonder what they serve here[/caption]\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Looking at the <em><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/beer/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Beer</a></em> section of this new website design, I saw I needed more content. So I got hold of Rob Cheshire of the <em><a href=\"https://thisweekincraft.beer/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">This Week in Craft Beer</a></em> podcast to talk about our approaches to taproom tourism and to trade taproom travel stories. I also talk about mask hassles on a couple of recent flights, Hertz\'s continuing downward service spiral, and Uber and Lyft driver shortages.  All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_175.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #175: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>This Week</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. Just one bit of travel since the last episode, a drive down to Nashville, Tennessee.  Right at about a year ago, this drive was my first post-lockdown trip. I talked about it at the start of <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/06/09/podcast-164-first-post-lockdown-trips-travel-credit-cards/\" title=\"Podcast #164 — First-Post Lockdown Trips; Travel Credit Cards\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">episode #164</a> -- no one was on the road save for a few trucks and a few folks like me. It was a drag race down I-65, 80-85 mph the whole way, maybe dropping down to 70 going through Indianapolis and Louisville. You couldn’t be sure what restaurants had their drive-thrus open, so car snacks were key. But now, it’s back to the normal drive -- lots of trucks and having to jockey for position with them on the 2-lane stretches, slow-downs through construction zones, and having to think again about timing the drive so I thread through Chicago, Indianapolis, Louisville, and Nashville without hitting rush hours.</li><li>A year ago, the restaurants that were open were only doing take-out, so I ate in my hotel room every night, which led to me putting “bring-your-own dining sets” on my 2020 travelers gift guide 6 months later.</li><li>One thing that hasn’t changed is hotels not cleaning rooms during the stay.  On this trip, I was in a Courtyard for 4 days and no one but me walked into that room. At what level of COVID cases or vaccination rates do they also have to get back to normal service because walking back into the smell of damp wet towels every day, or having to find a hall garbage can to throw out the takeaway Korean is getting a little old. I do give that Courtyard points, though, for bringing back the free lobby coffee.</li><li>I’m heading down to Miami next week for my first post-pandemic business trip. At the start of the year, everyone was talking about how business travel won’t be back until the end of 2022 or into 2023, and even then, it won’t come all the way back because Zoom and Teams will have replaced the need for 20-30% of business trips. But, I dunno, the TSA is <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/coronavirus/passenger-throughput\">regularly reporting</a> new highs in post-pandemic checkpoint traffic -- 1.63 million passengers the first Sunday of May and 1.64 million the first Thursday of May, averaging 8 times the traffic from the same weekday last year. And I don’t think it’s all leisure travel. I’m starting to see some 2019 behaviors coming back -- execs flying out to a plant to do a one-hour town hall in person; people coming together, physically, in an office conference room to get around some white boards and solve a problem. Is it Zoom fatigue or reversion to the mean -- at least for the vaccinated? I dunno, but I’m kinda looking forward to getting back in the saddle -- well, except for next week’s horse being a 7am Monday rush hour flight out of ORD.</li><li>Bridge Music — <em>A Foolish Game</em> by Zep Hurme (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/zep_hurme/46448.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Long-time TravelCommons listener Nick Gassman sent in a note about last episode’s travel insurance update and COVID-related coverage. Nick writes:<ul><li>“In the UK, a recent survey found that whilst insurers would give you emergency medical cover if you caught COVID when you were away, none would cover you if the government advised against travel because of COVID and you therefore could not travel. Some would give you cancellation cover if you are diagnosed with COVID before travel, and others would further give cancellation cover if you had to self-isolate even without a positive test.</li><li>As ever with insurance, the thing is to make sure you understand the small print and to compare policies.</li></ul></li><li>Nick, thanks for that. I think the advice to \"read the small print\" is valid in life in general, and in travel insurance in particular. I think the pandemic and known event carve-outs lurking in the small print caught a lot of travel insurance holders back when the initial lockdowns hit. I wonder, a year on after all that, how many more people are clicking through the “Buy Travel Insurance” box at the bottom of their Expedia booking page to the full rider and doing a Control-F in their browser to search for the word “COVID”.</li><li>In the last <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/12/podcast-173-whats-new-in-travel-insurance-keeping-ahead-of-expiring-miles/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #173 — What’s New in Travel Insurance; Keeping Ahead of Expiring Miles\">couple </a>of <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/16/podcast-172-timeshares-without-the-pitch-notes-on-tucson/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #172 — Timeshares Without the Pitch; Notes on Tucson\">episodes</a>, I’ve been talking about my efforts to decipher the activity rules for British Airways’ frequent flier program to stave off a year-end extinction event for my non-insignificant stash of Avios points. Since I’m not planning to fly BA anytime soon, I booked our Ocean Beach Airbnb through a link on BA’s site and, to my surprise, I saw 1,800 Avios points automagically hit my account a week later. I can’t seem to find the expiration date to see if it updated, but I’m pretty sure this reset the 36-month clock. And it was a nice find, the Airbnb-Avios link. It let me double-dip on Avios and Chase Ultimate points. Not sure when I’ll get to spend them, but it was a nice little get.</li><li>In the last <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/12/podcast-173-whats-new-in-travel-insurance-keeping-ahead-of-expiring-miles/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #173 — What’s New in Travel Insurance; Keeping Ahead of Expiring Miles\">episode</a>, I talked about having to work through a lot of cars in the Hertz PHX lot to find one with less than 24,000 miles. In SAN, I had to work to find a car -- period. We walked to the Five Star aisle and it was empty. I tried to flag down a Hertz employee, but he just waved me off. After 5 minutes or so, a car showed up. I didn’t bother to look at the mileage; we just got in and drove off. I was late for a lunch date with a fish taco. Returning the car, I did my normal drill - top off the tank, get a receipt, and then when dropping it off, place the receipt under the keys on the dashboard so the check-in guy will see it. It usually works -- except this time. The receipt hits my e-mail as we’re trundling the perimeter of the airfield in the rental bus. I open it up and see a fuel charge! Really? The last time this happened was about 4 years ago in ATL. I hit Twitter and the Hertz team fixed it in a half-hour. This time, the <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1374073837923360768\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter team got back to me</a> pretty quick asking for the rental agreement details, but then… nothing. I pinged them the next day, nothing. And the next day, nothing. So I challenged it with Amex and got the fueling charge and associated taxes credited back in a couple of days and then moved on. Until earlier this week, two weeks later, Hertz popped up on my Twitter DMs asking for more information. It’s amazing how fast their service has cratered during this bankruptcy, which makes me wonder how long it’ll take them to recover. I gotta get some good discount codes for Avis.</li><li>There was a <a href=\"https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/04/uber-and-lyft-struggle-with-driver-shortage-as-demand-soars/\">spate</a> <a href=\"https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/7/22371850/uber-lyft-driver-shortage-covid-bonus-stimulus\">of</a> <a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/video/2021/04/08/uber-lyft-pledge-millions-to-fight-driver-shortage.html\">articles</a> this week about Uber and Lyft driver shortages. We experienced it first hand trying to get a morning ride out to ORD for our San Diego flight. I swallowed hard and agreed to a good-sized surge, waited for a while, and still had the Uber driver cancel on us at the last minute. It shouldn’t be surprising, though. Drivers left the platforms when demand cratered at the start of the pandemic, when Uber said (and this was last May when everything was shutdown) that their volume was down by 80% vs. the prior May (May 2019). And in Chicago, the run of Uber drivers getting carjacked at the beginning of this year probably didn’t help either. But with stimulus checks in the bank and vaccine rates rising, demand has snapped back, a lot faster than driver supply. The headline of the <a href=\"https://www.ft.com/content/2b71e009-bb96-46ee-b024-4c574ef41988\">Financial Times article</a> reads “Uber and Lyft ‘throwing money’ at US drivers to ease shortage” and says that Uber is spending $250 million on a one-time “stimulus” package of driver incentives. But even with that, it takes time to on-board even returning drivers -- re-doing vehicle inspections, background checks. In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/02/29/podcast-160-disappearing-seatback-screens-shrinking-difference-between-ride-share-and-taxis/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #160 — Disappearing Seatback Screens; Shrinking Difference Between Ride-Share and Taxis\">episode #160</a>, my last pre-pandemic episode back in February 2020, I talked about the shrinking difference between Uber and Lyft, and how I found myself beginning to shift back to regular cabs. These recent experiences are only accelerating that. I’m thinking I may need to reload taxi dispatch numbers back into my iPhone.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on our fab new web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/media/files/DJBLUE/11541\">Hear Me</a></em> by DJ Blue  (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/\">Attribution Noncommercial Share-Alike</a> license http://ccmixter.org/media/files/DJBLUE/11541.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>How to Find Local Tour Guides</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Putting together the new website, I was thinking about what to put on the top menu. “Subscribe” and “Episodes” were given, but I also put “Food” and “Beer” because, well, I write and talk about them a lot. But then, when I clicked through the new “Beer” menu, it felt a bit sparse. I needed to add some content. And so in the craft beer tradition of collaboration beers, I pinged Rob Cheshire, a long time TravelCommons listener and now craft beer podcaster with his <a href=\"https://thisweekincraft.beer/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">This Week in Craft Beer</a> podcast, to talk about why we go out of our way to find brewery taprooms, and how he organizes his travels to hit the most taprooms he can on each visit.</li><li>Taproom Tourism Discussion with Rob Cheshire</li><li>Thanks again to Rob Cheshire for that collab. I hope you could tell that it was a lot of fun. Indeed, the full session ran around an hour and a half and a bit more beer. If you want to hear more of our taproom stories, head over to Rob’s This Week in Craft Beer <a href=\"https://thisweekincraft.beer/podcast/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">podcast feed</a>, he posted a longer version as a bonus Easter episode, or check out the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/28/podcast-174-uncut-taproom-tourism/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">TravelCommons website</a>, <a href=\"https://fb.watch/4NAd-8Ai30/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook page</a> or <a href=\"https://youtu.be/6bz4EJn4-7U\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a> for the full video.</li><li>Bridge Music — <em>Gargantua</em> by Admiral Bob (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/46361 Ft: My Free Mickey, Martijn de Boer</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Rebuilding Travel Muscle</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Putting together the new website, I was thinking about what to put on the top menu. “Subscribe” and “Episodes” were given, but I also put “Food” and “Beer” because, well, I write and talk about them a lot. But then, when I clicked through the new “Beer” menu, it felt a bit sparse. I needed to add some content. And so in the craft beer tradition of collaboration beers, I pinged Rob Cheshire, a long time TravelCommons listener and now craft beer podcaster with his <a href=\"https://thisweekincraft.beer/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">This Week in Craft Beer</a> podcast, to talk about why we go out of our way to find brewery taprooms, and how he organizes his travels to hit the most taprooms he can on each visit.</li><li>Taproom Tourism Discussion with Rob Cheshire</li><li>Thanks again to Rob Cheshire for that collab. I hope you could tell that it was a lot of fun. Indeed, the full session ran around an hour and a half and a bit more beer. If you want to hear more of our taproom stories, head over to Rob’s This Week in Craft Beer <a href=\"https://thisweekincraft.beer/podcast/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">podcast feed</a>, he posted a longer version as a bonus Easter episode, or check out the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/28/podcast-174-uncut-taproom-tourism/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">TravelCommons website</a>, <a href=\"https://fb.watch/4NAd-8Ai30/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook page</a> or <a href=\"https://youtu.be/6bz4EJn4-7U\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a> for the full video.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #174</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>The new website makes it a lot easier to subscribe. There’s a drop down menu at the top of each page, a set of subscribe links at the bottom, and a big red “Subscribe” button in the middle of the home page. You can use all those buttons, links and menus or you can just search for us on <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>Thanks to Nick Gassman, not only for the e-mails, but for <a href=\"https://nickgassman.com/recommended-podcasts/other-podcasts/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">calling out</a> TravelCommons in the Recommended Podcast section of his blog site.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_174.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #175 — How to Find Local Tour Guides; Rebuild Travel Muscles','','inherit','closed','closed','','3530-revision-v1','','','2021-05-08 13:28:55','2021-05-08 18:28:55','',3530,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3535',0,'revision','',0),
(3536,1,'2021-05-09 10:19:13','2021-05-09 15:19:13','[caption id=\"attachment_1985\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/IMG_3006.jpeg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1985\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/IMG_3006-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"Bar at Modern Times\' Taproom\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> I wonder what they serve here[/caption]\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Looking at the <em><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/beer/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Beer</a></em> section of this new website design, I saw I needed more content. So I got hold of Rob Cheshire of the <em><a href=\"https://thisweekincraft.beer/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">This Week in Craft Beer</a></em> podcast to talk about our approaches to taproom tourism and to trade taproom travel stories. I also talk about mask hassles on a couple of recent flights, Hertz\'s continuing downward service spiral, and Uber and Lyft driver shortages.  All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_175.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #175: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>This Week</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. Just one bit of travel since the last episode, a drive down to Nashville, Tennessee.  Right at about a year ago, this drive was my first post-lockdown trip. I talked about it at the start of <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/06/09/podcast-164-first-post-lockdown-trips-travel-credit-cards/\" title=\"Podcast #164 — First-Post Lockdown Trips; Travel Credit Cards\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">episode #164</a> -- no one was on the road save for a few trucks and a few folks like me. It was a drag race down I-65, 80-85 mph the whole way, maybe dropping down to 70 going through Indianapolis and Louisville. You couldn’t be sure what restaurants had their drive-thrus open, so car snacks were key. But now, it’s back to the normal drive -- lots of trucks and having to jockey for position with them on the 2-lane stretches, slow-downs through construction zones, and having to think again about timing the drive so I thread through Chicago, Indianapolis, Louisville, and Nashville without hitting rush hours.</li><li>A year ago, the restaurants that were open were only doing take-out, so I ate in my hotel room every night, which led to me putting “bring-your-own dining sets” on my 2020 travelers gift guide 6 months later.</li><li>One thing that hasn’t changed is hotels not cleaning rooms during the stay.  On this trip, I was in a Courtyard for 4 days and no one but me walked into that room. At what level of COVID cases or vaccination rates do they also have to get back to normal service because walking back into the smell of damp wet towels every day, or having to find a hall garbage can to throw out the takeaway Korean is getting a little old. I do give that Courtyard points, though, for bringing back the free lobby coffee.</li><li>I’m heading down to Miami next week for my first post-pandemic business trip. At the start of the year, everyone was talking about how business travel won’t be back until the end of 2022 or into 2023, and even then, it won’t come all the way back because Zoom and Teams will have replaced the need for 20-30% of business trips. But, I dunno, the TSA is <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/coronavirus/passenger-throughput\">regularly reporting</a> new highs in post-pandemic checkpoint traffic -- 1.63 million passengers the first Sunday of May and 1.64 million the first Thursday of May, averaging 8 times the traffic from the same weekday last year. And I don’t think it’s all leisure travel. I’m starting to see some 2019 behaviors coming back -- execs flying out to a plant to do a one-hour town hall in person; people coming together, physically, in an office conference room to get around some white boards and solve a problem. Is it Zoom fatigue or reversion to the mean -- at least for the vaccinated? I dunno, but I’m kinda looking forward to getting back in the saddle -- well, except for next week’s horse being a 7am Monday rush hour flight out of ORD.</li><li>Bridge Music — <em>A Foolish Game</em> by Zep Hurme (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/zep_hurme/46448.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/04/10/podcast-174-how-the-pros-plan-their-taproom-tourism/\" title=\"Podcast #174 — How the Pros Plan Their Taproom Tourism\">the last episode</a>, I talked about the spike of publicity around the deterioration of Uber and Lyft’s service -- spiraling wait times that leads to big price surges that leads to driver cancellations as they work to maximize their pay. It’s not getting any better. I retweeted an Uber driver’s <a href=\"https://twitter.com/SpiderKeithLutz/status/1386487138728939521\">screenshots</a> showing no cars at ORD and MDW on a Sunday night -- prime time with people coming home from weekend trips, and it’s not a one-off event, especially at MDW. It’s also starting to make people rethink travel plans. A colleague on my Miami trip moved from a Hyatt to a Marriott closer to our meeting place, saying she couldn’t trust Uber to show up in time. And even for me, I’ll get up earlier than I need to so I can catch public transit to ORD in case Uber or Lyft fail and I can’t find a cab. It doesn’t feel like that $250 million “driver stimulus” Uber was touting last month has made much of an impact.</li><li>Empty Hertz lots has also been a multi-episode arc that doesn’t look like it’ll go away soon. Rental car companies dumped cars during a historically high used car market to generate cash that saved them at the start of the pandemic. <a href=\"https://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-biz-car-rental-shortage-turo-avail-20210507-enusm6m2ijbm5geeyefs6d6atu-story.html\">Hertz dropped almost 200,000 vehicles in the back half of 2020. While Avis’s fleet shrunk about 31%</a>. But now that travel has snapped back faster than expected, they can’t get more cars; the new car inventories are at historic lows because of chip shortages. </li><li>And the combination of these two is a helluva pincer movement on a lot of returning travelers because they’d ditched rental cars for the convenience of Uber. Now they have neither. I plan on doing a good bit of walking in Miami.</li><li>DMV managers across the country must’ve breathed a sigh of relief when they saw Homeland Security announcing yet another delay in Real ID enforcement for air travel, this time to May 2023. I remember in 2019, more than a year before the original October 2020 enforcement date, the warning signs went up at the TSA desks in airports and immediately there were predictions of mass chaos.  I was one of them. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/09/20/podcast-155-rj-delays-street-food-in-poland-and-hungary/\" title=\"Podcast #155 — RJ Delays; Street Food in Poland and Hungary\">episode #155</a> in September 2019, I said “Note to self – don’t book any travel in October 2020.” But then, 6 months later in March 2020, as COVID shut down DMV offices along with the rest of the economy, DHS made the obvious call to kick the deadline down the road a year to October 2021. I remember my first post-lockdown flight in June, the TSA desks at MDW still had the old 2020 signs up. A few months back, some friends had to renew their driver’s licenses and so figured they’d get the Real ID version. After some 8 hrs of queuing at a just-reopened Illinois DMV, they had gold-starred IDs and were good to go for October travel. Last month, a little alarm bell went off in my head -- “You know, that deadline is 6 months away; you need to start thinking about this.” But just as I started to, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/DHSgov/status/1387111972773277700\">the news hit my Twitter feed</a> -- delayed not just a year, but to May 2023, 18 years after it was signed into law. At what point is Real ID past it’s “Best Used By” date -- if not already?</li><li>Many of us lost track of these peripheral travel bits during lockdown. We were driving our daughter Claire to ORD for a flight to Philadelphia last month. She pulled up her boarding pass on American’s mobile app -- “Hey, I don’t have PreCheck!” Huh, well maybe there’s something wonky with the app, I told her. Hit a kiosk if you have time and pull another boarding pass. Turns out, because of construction traffic, she didn’t have time but the regular TSA line was short, so it wasn’t a problem. But the same thing happened on her flight home -- on Southwest this time. OK, not a res system glitch. She logged into the TSA website. Her Global Entry, which includes PreCheck, had expired a few months back. Which prompted Irene to log in; she was expiring <em>that day</em> so she immediately hit the Renew button -- and then spent the next 30 minutes reconstructing our travel history for the last 5 years. Thank God for cell phone photo archives. I figured I should check mine too. Logging in was a little bit of a hassle -- I had to create a new account at login.gov, some federated government login that replaced TSA’s login. Once in, I saw my expiration date isn’t until the end of the year, so I’ll start thinking about it in June or July. </li><li><a href=\"https://twitter.com/CrainsChicago/status/1387055231905648643\">United Airlines CEO said searches for flights to Europe jumped 19 % </a>after the head of the European Union said vaccinated US travelers would be allowed into the EU this summer. And shortly after that, United put on new summer flights to Iceland, Croatia, and Greece - certainly not business travel destinations.</li><li>I had already placed my bet on the UK opening by Thanksgiving. Actually, I was repeating the same bet I placed about this time last year when cash and frequent flier prices went cratered. I booked ORD-LHR flights on American for 30,000 points each. When I had to cancel in September, the agent said “Wow! That was a great deal!. Yeah, I knew it. The price of this year’s bet was 50% higher. But with the US and UK vaccination rates, it’s feeling like a safer bet.</li><li>The riskier bet was plunking down a deposit on a bike trip in Italy in mid-October. There was a lot of “It’s non-refundable so buy our trip insurance” language in bold italic font. So I went back and re-listened to episodes <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/05/08/podcast-163-new-world-of-travel-insurance-getting-medical-help-on-the-road/\" title=\"Podcast #163 — New World of Travel Insurance; Getting Medical Help on the Road\">#163</a> and <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/12/podcast-173-whats-new-in-travel-insurance-keeping-ahead-of-expiring-miles/\" title=\"Podcast #173 — What’s New in Travel Insurance; Keeping Ahead of Expiring Miles\">#173</a> where we talked about travel insurance and then dug deep into the insurance rider for the tour provider’s insurance and the travel insurance I’d get for free if I charge it on my Amex or Chase Sapphire cards. One hour and a couple of three-column tables later, I first threw out the Amex insurance; it was sorely lacking. Then comparing the tour company with Chase, neither of them offered cancellation coverage if a, what is it, a fifth wave of COVID (I’ve lost count) causes Italy to close its borders again. Running through the rest of the comparison, the tour company offered a bit more, but not enough (at least to me) to justify the additional $760 cost for Irene and me. So I charged the deposit on the Sapphire card and am hoping for the best.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/media/files/DJBLUE/11541\">Hear Me</a></em> by DJ Blue  (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/\">Attribution Noncommercial Share-Alike</a> license http://ccmixter.org/media/files/DJBLUE/11541.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>How to Find Local Tour Guides</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>This is a topic where I need to, up front, state my priors -- I don’t do well with structure when I travel. Well, let me refine that a little -- I don’t do well with <em>other people</em> applying structure on me when I travel. I don’t cruise, I’ve always hated forced “team-building” outings during company sales meetings, and I cringe whenever I run across tour guides walking backwards, reciting factoids to trailing lines of people tethered to them through wireless headphones. To be honest, I look down on them -- I can do better, more authentically with my own research. </li><li>But that’s really more pride, and maybe a bit of cheapness, talking than real facts. I’ve had great experiences with small tours. Way back in episode #105 -- 8 years ago! It always amazes me how long I’ve done this; and amazes even more how long many of you have been listening -- I talked about a couple of private tours that completely readjusted my attitude -- a tour through Saigon with an ex-South Vietnamese army officer, a food market tour in Madrid, a wine tour in Priorat.  They were phenomenal, but they were all second-degree connections -- friends recommending other friends or acquaintances. So unless you have a lot of friends with connections to places you want to visit, that word-of-mouth model doesn’t scale.</li><li>Which leads me to this episode’s guest, <a href=\"https://www.toursbylocals.com/TBL/WebObjects/ToursByLocals.woa/1/wo/y2c7lZDKnxUUHYGLem9YgM/0.41.1.1.50.3\">Paul Melhus</a>, CEO &amp; Founder of <a href=\"https://www.toursbylocals.com/\">ToursByLocals</a>, a private tours marketplace. I talked with Paul about the local tour market, how he fared during the COVID travel meltdown, and what things look like from his vantage point as we’re coming out on the other side.</li><li>Bridge Music — <em>Gargantua</em> by Admiral Bob (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/46361 Ft: My Free Mickey, Martijn de Boer</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Rebuilding Travel Muscle</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Frequent travelers, road warriors, mostly sitting at home for the past 15 months, certainly not heading to the airport every week or two, our travel muscles have&nbsp; atrophied. That rhythm, that cadence, that confidence that separated us from all those regular travelers -- well, all that and premiere status lines and lounge access which also physically separated us. I noticed this loss of travel muscle tone a bit on my trips to Tucson and San Diego over the last couple of months. I had to think a lot harder about those trips -- what to pack, when to leave -- things that were second nature to me, say, 18 months ago when I was traveling every week to Charlottesville, VA or Phoenix. Even on personal travel -- to Poland, Hungary, Estonia, Finland -- I had everything down; on the road, I had my groove.</li><li>Pretty much all of my travelling friends breathed a sigh of relief during the first 6-8 months of lockdown -- first, happy to be home and safe; then settling in, enjoying the extended family time, picking up some new hobby (even frequent travelers weren’t immune from the sourdough craze). But toward the end of the year, I could hear a bit of ansty-ness, and now, vaccines in arms, I’m seeing people getting back out on the road, beginning to rebuild those travel muscles.</li><li>It’s been a pretty quick snapback. Remember, back in December, people like Bill Gates were saying to large virtual conferences that 50% of business travel would disappear and video conferencing was the new normal. I think the big ramp up in vaccination rates flipped this script. Again, back in December, the euphoria of vaccine approvals was quickly overwritten by the depressing logistics of manufacturing ramp-ups and cold-chain distribution. But now, five months later, people are again sitting across desks and conference tables from each other; initially masked, but then quickly running through their vaccination statuses and comfort levels so they feel safe dropping their masks and getting on with business. This “new normal” feels like it’s trending pretty quickly back to the old normal.&nbsp;</li><li>At least for one-on-one meetings. Larger meetings and public spaces can’t do those same negotiations. But that’s enough for a start. Those same friends of mine who were loving their cocoons and sour dough recipes last year are looking to break out now. Like me, they tend to have pretty short attention spans and travel gives them the change, the external stimulus they need -- new places with new people to see and new things to do.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>The seating chart for my flight down to Miami shows a full flight and is asking for volunteers to take a later flight. And this for a 7am Monday morning flight -- first flight out, the standard business traveler choice. A lot of folks are getting back into that rhythm.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #175</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>The new website makes it a lot easier to subscribe. There’s a drop down menu at the top of each page, a set of subscribe links at the bottom, and a big red “Subscribe” button in the middle of the home page. You can use all those buttons, links and menus or you can just search for us on <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social  -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; with everybody and their mother starting up a podcast, it’s really the only way to grow. </li><li>I\'m not doing Patreon or trying to figure out Apple’s new podcast paid subscription. So if you’d like this podcast and would like to support it, please recommend it to one or two of your friends; maybe folks who traveled a lot -- before COVID -- or wished they could travel a lot. I’d appreciate it.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_175.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #175 — How to Find Local Tour Guides; Rebuild Travel Muscles','','inherit','closed','closed','','3530-revision-v1','','','2021-05-09 10:19:13','2021-05-09 15:19:13','',3530,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3536',0,'revision','',0),
(3537,1,'2021-05-09 11:05:31','2021-05-09 16:05:31','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_1985\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/IMG_3006.jpeg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1985\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/IMG_3006-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"Bar at Modern Times\' Taproom\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> I wonder what they serve here[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Looking at the <em><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/beer/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Beer</a></em> section of this new website design, I saw I needed more content. So I got hold of Rob Cheshire of the <em><a href=\"https://thisweekincraft.beer/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">This Week in Craft Beer</a></em> podcast to talk about our approaches to taproom tourism and to trade taproom travel stories. I also talk about mask hassles on a couple of recent flights, Hertz\'s continuing downward service spiral, and Uber and Lyft driver shortages.  All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_175.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #175: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>This Week</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. Just one bit of travel since the last episode, a drive down to Nashville, Tennessee.&nbsp; Right at about a year ago, this drive was my first post-lockdown trip. I talked about it at the start of <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/06/09/podcast-164-first-post-lockdown-trips-travel-credit-cards/\" title=\"Podcast #164 — First-Post Lockdown Trips; Travel Credit Cards\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">episode #164</a> -- no one was on the road save for a few trucks and a few folks like me. It was a drag race down I-65, 80-85 mph the whole way, maybe dropping down to 70 going through Indianapolis and Louisville. You couldn’t be sure what restaurants had their drive-thrus open, so car snacks were key. But now, it’s back to the normal drive -- lots of trucks and having to jockey for position with them on the 2-lane stretches, slow-downs through construction zones, and having to think again about timing the drive so I thread through Chicago, Indianapolis, Louisville, and Nashville without hitting rush hours.</li><li>A year ago, the restaurants that were open were only doing take-out, so I ate in my hotel room every night, which led to me putting “bring-your-own dining sets” on my 2020 travelers gift guide 6 months later.</li><li>One thing that hasn’t changed is hotels not cleaning rooms during the stay.&nbsp; On this trip, I was in a Courtyard for 4 days and no one but me walked into that room. At what level of COVID cases or vaccination rates do they also have to get back to normal service because walking back into the smell of damp wet towels every day, or having to find a hall garbage can to throw out the takeaway Korean is getting a little old. I do give that Courtyard points, though, for bringing back the free lobby coffee.</li><li>I’m heading down to Miami next week for my first post-pandemic business trip. At the start of the year, everyone was talking about how business travel won’t be back until the end of 2022 or into 2023, and even then, it won’t come all the way back because Zoom and Teams will have replaced the need for 20-30% of business trips. But, I dunno, the TSA is <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/coronavirus/passenger-throughput\">regularly reporting</a> new highs in post-pandemic checkpoint traffic -- 1.63 million passengers the first Sunday of May and 1.64 million the first Thursday of May, averaging 8 times the traffic from the same weekday last year. And I don’t think it’s all leisure travel. I’m starting to see some 2019 behaviors coming back -- execs flying out to a plant to do a one-hour town hall in person; people coming together, physically, in an office conference room to get around some white boards and solve a problem. Is it Zoom fatigue or reversion to the mean -- at least for the vaccinated? I dunno, but I’m kinda looking forward to getting back in the saddle -- well, except for next week’s horse being a 7am Monday rush hour flight out of ORD.</li><li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<em>A Foolish Game</em>&nbsp;by Zep Hurme&nbsp;(c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license.&nbsp;http://ccmixter.org/files/zep_hurme/46448.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/04/10/podcast-174-how-the-pros-plan-their-taproom-tourism/\" title=\"Podcast #174 — How the Pros Plan Their Taproom Tourism\">the last episode</a>, I talked about the spike of publicity around the deterioration of Uber and Lyft’s service -- spiraling wait times that leads to big price surges that leads to driver cancellations as they work to maximize their pay. It’s not getting any better. I retweeted an Uber driver’s <a href=\"https://twitter.com/SpiderKeithLutz/status/1386487138728939521\">screenshots</a> showing no cars at ORD and MDW on a Sunday night -- prime time with people coming home from weekend trips, and it’s not a one-off event, especially at MDW. It’s also starting to make people rethink travel plans. A colleague on my Miami trip moved from a Hyatt to a Marriott closer to our meeting place, saying she couldn’t trust Uber to show up in time. And even for me, I’ll get up earlier than I need to so I can catch public transit to ORD in case Uber or Lyft fail and I can’t find a cab. It doesn’t feel like that $250 million “driver stimulus” Uber was touting last month has made much of an impact.</li><li>Empty Hertz lots has also been a multi-episode arc that doesn’t look like it’ll go away soon. Rental car companies dumped cars during a historically high used car market to generate cash that saved them at the start of the pandemic. <a href=\"https://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-biz-car-rental-shortage-turo-avail-20210507-enusm6m2ijbm5geeyefs6d6atu-story.html\">Hertz dropped almost 200,000 vehicles in the back half of 2020. While Avis’s fleet shrunk about 31%</a>. But now that travel has snapped back faster than expected, they can’t get more cars; the new car inventories are at historic lows because of chip shortages.&nbsp;</li><li>And the combination of these two is a helluva pincer movement on a lot of returning travelers because they’d ditched rental cars for the convenience of Uber. Now they have neither. I plan on doing a good bit of walking in Miami.</li><li>DMV managers across the country must’ve breathed a sigh of relief when they saw Homeland Security announcing yet another delay in Real ID enforcement for air travel, this time to May 2023. I remember in 2019, more than a year before the original October 2020 enforcement date, the warning signs went up at the TSA desks in airports and immediately there were predictions of mass chaos.&nbsp; I was one of them. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/09/20/podcast-155-rj-delays-street-food-in-poland-and-hungary/\" title=\"Podcast #155 — RJ Delays; Street Food in Poland and Hungary\">episode #155</a> in September 2019, I said “Note to self – don’t book any travel in October 2020.” But then, 6 months later in March 2020, as COVID shut down DMV offices along with the rest of the economy, DHS made the obvious call to kick the deadline down the road a year to October 2021. I remember my first post-lockdown flight in June, the TSA desks at MDW still had the old 2020 signs up. A few months back, some friends had to renew their driver’s licenses and so figured they’d get the Real ID version. After some 8 hrs of queuing at a just-reopened Illinois DMV, they had gold-starred IDs and were good to go for October travel. Last month, a little alarm bell went off in my head -- “You know, that deadline is 6 months away; you need to start thinking about this.” But just as I started to, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/DHSgov/status/1387111972773277700\">the news hit my Twitter feed</a> -- delayed not just a year, but to May 2023, 18 years after it was signed into law. At what point is Real ID past it’s “Best Used By” date -- if not already?</li><li>Many of us lost track of these peripheral travel bits during lockdown. We were driving our daughter Claire to ORD for a flight to Philadelphia last month. She pulled up her boarding pass on American’s mobile app -- “Hey, I don’t have PreCheck!” Huh, well maybe there’s something wonky with the app, I told her. Hit a kiosk if you have time and pull another boarding pass. Turns out, because of construction traffic, she didn’t have time but the regular TSA line was short, so it wasn’t a problem. But the same thing happened on her flight home -- on Southwest this time. OK, not a res system glitch. She logged into the TSA website. Her Global Entry, which includes PreCheck, had expired a few months back. Which prompted Irene to log in; she was expiring <em>that day</em> so she immediately hit the Renew button -- and then spent the next 30 minutes reconstructing our travel history for the last 5 years. Thank God for cell phone photo archives. I figured I should check mine too. Logging in was a little bit of a hassle -- I had to create a new account at login.gov, some federated government login that replaced TSA’s login. Once in, I saw my expiration date isn’t until the end of the year, so I’ll start thinking about it in June or July.&nbsp;</li><li><a href=\"https://twitter.com/CrainsChicago/status/1387055231905648643\">United Airlines CEO said searches for flights to Europe jumped 19 % </a>after the head of the European Union said vaccinated US travelers would be allowed into the EU this summer. And shortly after that, United put on new summer flights to Iceland, Croatia, and Greece - certainly not business travel destinations.</li><li>I had already placed my bet on the UK opening by Thanksgiving. Actually, I was repeating the same bet I placed about this time last year when cash and frequent flier prices went cratered. I booked ORD-LHR flights on American for 30,000 points each. When I had to cancel in September, the agent said “Wow! That was a great deal!. Yeah, I knew it. The price of this year’s bet was 50% higher. But with the US and UK vaccination rates, it’s feeling like a safer bet.</li><li>The riskier bet was plunking down a deposit on a bike trip in Italy in mid-October. There was a lot of “It’s non-refundable so buy our trip insurance” language in bold italic font. So I went back and re-listened to episodes <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/05/08/podcast-163-new-world-of-travel-insurance-getting-medical-help-on-the-road/\" title=\"Podcast #163 — New World of Travel Insurance; Getting Medical Help on the Road\">#163</a> and <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/12/podcast-173-whats-new-in-travel-insurance-keeping-ahead-of-expiring-miles/\" title=\"Podcast #173 — What’s New in Travel Insurance; Keeping Ahead of Expiring Miles\">#173</a> where we talked about travel insurance and then dug deep into the insurance rider for the tour provider’s insurance and the travel insurance I’d get for free if I charge it on my Amex or Chase Sapphire cards. One hour and a couple of three-column tables later, I first threw out the Amex insurance; it was sorely lacking. Then comparing the tour company with Chase, neither of them offered cancellation coverage if a, what is it, a fifth wave of COVID (I’ve lost count) causes Italy to close its borders again. Running through the rest of the comparison, the tour company offered a bit more, but not enough (at least to me) to justify the additional $760 cost for Irene and me. So I charged the deposit on the Sapphire card and am hoping for the best.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/media/files/DJBLUE/11541\">Hear Me</a></em>&nbsp;by DJ Blue &nbsp;(c) copyright 2007 Licensed under Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/\">Attribution Noncommercial Share-Alike</a> license http://ccmixter.org/media/files/DJBLUE/11541.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>How to Find Local Tour Guides</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>This is a topic where I need to, up front, state my priors -- I don’t do well with structure when I travel. Well, let me refine that a little -- I don’t do well with <em>other people</em> applying structure on me when I travel. I don’t cruise, I’ve always hated forced “team-building” outings during company sales meetings, and I cringe whenever I run across tour guides walking backwards, reciting factoids to trailing lines of people tethered to them through wireless headphones. To be honest, I look down on them -- I can do better, more authentically with my own research.&nbsp;</li><li>But that’s really more pride, and maybe a bit of cheapness, talking than real facts. I’ve had great experiences with small tours. Way back in episode #105 -- 8 years ago! It always amazes me how long I’ve done this; and amazes even more how long many of you have been listening -- I talked about a couple of private tours that completely readjusted my attitude -- a tour through Saigon with an ex-South Vietnamese army officer, a food market tour in Madrid, a wine tour in Priorat.&nbsp; They were phenomenal, but they were all second-degree connections -- friends recommending other friends or acquaintances. So unless you have a lot of friends with connections to places you want to visit, that word-of-mouth model doesn’t scale.</li><li>Which leads me to this episode’s guest, <a href=\"https://www.toursbylocals.com/TBL/WebObjects/ToursByLocals.woa/1/wo/y2c7lZDKnxUUHYGLem9YgM/0.41.1.1.50.3\">Paul Melhus</a>, CEO &amp; Founder of <a href=\"https://www.toursbylocals.com/\">ToursByLocals</a>, a private tours marketplace. I talked with Paul about the local tour market, how he fared during the COVID travel meltdown, and what things look like from his vantage point as we’re coming out on the other side.</li><li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<em>Gargantua</em>&nbsp;by Admiral Bob (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/46361 Ft: My Free Mickey, Martijn de Boer</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Rebuilding Travel Muscle</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Frequent travelers, road warriors, mostly sitting at home for the past 15 months, certainly not heading to the airport every week or two, our travel muscles have&nbsp; atrophied. That rhythm, that cadence, that confidence that separated us from all those regular travelers -- well, all that and premiere status lines and lounge access which also physically separated us. I noticed this loss of travel muscle tone a bit on my trips to Tucson and San Diego over the last couple of months. I had to think a lot harder about those trips -- what to pack, when to leave -- things that were second nature to me, say, 18 months ago when I was traveling every week to Charlottesville, VA or Phoenix. Even on personal travel -- to Poland, Hungary, Estonia, Finland -- I had everything down; on the road, I had my groove.</li><li>Pretty much all of my travelling friends breathed a sigh of relief during the first 6-8 months of lockdown -- first, happy to be home and safe; then settling in, enjoying the extended family time, picking up some new hobby (even frequent travelers weren’t immune from the sourdough craze). But toward the end of the year, I could hear a bit of ansty-ness, and now, vaccines in arms, I’m seeing people getting back out on the road, beginning to rebuild those travel muscles.</li><li>It’s been a pretty quick snapback. Remember, back in December, people like Bill Gates were saying to large virtual conferences that 50% of business travel would disappear and video conferencing was the new normal. I think the big ramp up in vaccination rates flipped this script. Again, back in December, the euphoria of vaccine approvals was quickly overwritten by the depressing logistics of manufacturing ramp-ups and cold-chain distribution. But now, five months later, people are again sitting across desks and conference tables from each other; initially masked, but then quickly running through their vaccination statuses and comfort levels so they feel safe dropping their masks and getting on with business. This “new normal” feels like it’s trending pretty quickly back to the old normal.&nbsp;</li><li>At least for one-on-one meetings. Larger meetings and public spaces can’t do those same negotiations. But that’s enough for a start. Those same friends of mine who were loving their cocoons and sour dough recipes last year are looking to break out now. Like me, they tend to have pretty short attention spans and travel gives them the change, the external stimulus they need -- new places with new people to see and new things to do.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>The seating chart for my flight down to Miami shows a full flight and is asking for volunteers to take a later flight. And this for a 7am Monday morning flight -- first flight out, the standard business traveler choice. A lot of folks are getting back into that rhythm.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #175</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>The new website makes it a lot easier to subscribe. There’s a drop down menu at the top of each page, a set of subscribe links at the bottom, and a big red “Subscribe” button in the middle of the home page. You can use all those buttons, links and menus or you can just search for us on <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; with everybody and their mother starting up a podcast, it’s really the only way to grow. </li><li>I\'m not doing Patreon or trying to figure out Apple’s new podcast paid subscription. So if you’d like this podcast and would like to support it, please recommend it to one or two of your friends; maybe folks who traveled a lot -- before COVID -- or wished they could travel a lot. I’d appreciate it.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_175.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #175 — How to Find Local Tour Guides; Rebuild Travel Muscles','','inherit','closed','closed','','3530-revision-v1','','','2021-05-09 11:05:31','2021-05-09 16:05:31','',3530,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3537',0,'revision','',0),
(3538,1,'2021-05-09 11:08:56','2021-05-09 16:08:56','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_1985\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/IMG_3006.jpeg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1985\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/IMG_3006-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"Bar at Modern Times\' Taproom\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> I wonder what they serve here[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Looking at the <em><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/beer/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Beer</a></em> section of this new website design, I saw I needed more content. So I got hold of Rob Cheshire of the <em><a href=\"https://thisweekincraft.beer/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">This Week in Craft Beer</a></em> podcast to talk about our approaches to taproom tourism and to trade taproom travel stories. I also talk about mask hassles on a couple of recent flights, Hertz\'s continuing downward service spiral, and Uber and Lyft driver shortages.  All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_175.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #175: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>This Week</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. Just one bit of travel since the last episode, a drive down to Nashville, Tennessee.&nbsp; Right at about a year ago, this drive was my first post-lockdown trip. I talked about it at the start of <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/06/09/podcast-164-first-post-lockdown-trips-travel-credit-cards/\" title=\"Podcast #164 — First-Post Lockdown Trips; Travel Credit Cards\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">episode #164</a> -- no one was on the road save for a few trucks and a few folks like me. It was a drag race down I-65, 80-85 mph the whole way, maybe dropping down to 70 going through Indianapolis and Louisville. You couldn’t be sure what restaurants had their drive-thrus open, so car snacks were key. But now, it’s back to the normal drive -- lots of trucks and having to jockey for position with them on the 2-lane stretches, slow-downs through construction zones, and having to think again about timing the drive so I thread through Chicago, Indianapolis, Louisville, and Nashville without hitting rush hours.</li><li>A year ago, the restaurants that were open were only doing take-out, so I ate in my hotel room every night, which led to me putting “bring-your-own dining sets” on my 2020 travelers gift guide 6 months later.</li><li>One thing that hasn’t changed is hotels not cleaning rooms during the stay.&nbsp; On this trip, I was in a Courtyard for 4 days and no one but me walked into that room. At what level of COVID cases or vaccination rates do they also have to get back to normal service because walking back into the smell of damp wet towels every day, or having to find a hall garbage can to throw out the takeaway Korean is getting a little old. I do give that Courtyard points, though, for bringing back the free lobby coffee.</li><li>I’m heading down to Miami next week for my first post-pandemic business trip. At the start of the year, everyone was talking about how business travel won’t be back until the end of 2022 or into 2023, and even then, it won’t come all the way back because Zoom and Teams will have replaced the need for 20-30% of business trips. But, I dunno, the TSA is <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/coronavirus/passenger-throughput\">regularly reporting</a> new highs in post-pandemic checkpoint traffic -- 1.63 million passengers the first Sunday of May and 1.64 million the first Thursday of May, averaging 8 times the traffic from the same weekday last year. And I don’t think it’s all leisure travel. I’m starting to see some 2019 behaviors coming back -- execs flying out to a plant to do a one-hour town hall in person; people coming together, physically, in an office conference room to get around some white boards and solve a problem. Is it Zoom fatigue or reversion to the mean -- at least for the vaccinated? I dunno, but I’m kinda looking forward to getting back in the saddle -- well, except for next week’s horse being a 7am Monday rush hour flight out of ORD.</li><li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<em>A Foolish Game</em>&nbsp;by Zep Hurme&nbsp;(c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license.&nbsp;http://ccmixter.org/files/zep_hurme/46448.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/04/10/podcast-174-how-the-pros-plan-their-taproom-tourism/\" title=\"Podcast #174 — How the Pros Plan Their Taproom Tourism\">the last episode</a>, I talked about the spike of publicity around the deterioration of Uber and Lyft’s service -- spiraling wait times that leads to big price surges that leads to driver cancellations as they work to maximize their pay. It’s not getting any better. I retweeted an Uber driver’s <a href=\"https://twitter.com/SpiderKeithLutz/status/1386487138728939521\">screenshots</a> showing no cars at ORD and MDW on a Sunday night -- prime time with people coming home from weekend trips, and it’s not a one-off event, especially at MDW. It’s also starting to make people rethink travel plans. A colleague on my Miami trip moved from a Hyatt to a Marriott closer to our meeting place, saying she couldn’t trust Uber to show up in time. And even for me, I’ll get up earlier than I need to so I can catch public transit to ORD in case Uber or Lyft fail and I can’t find a cab. It doesn’t feel like that $250 million “driver stimulus” Uber was touting last month has made much of an impact.</li><li>Empty Hertz lots has also been a multi-episode arc that doesn’t look like it’ll go away soon. Rental car companies dumped cars during a historically high used car market to generate cash that saved them at the start of the pandemic. <a href=\"https://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-biz-car-rental-shortage-turo-avail-20210507-enusm6m2ijbm5geeyefs6d6atu-story.html\">Hertz dropped almost 200,000 vehicles in the back half of 2020. While Avis’s fleet shrunk about 31%</a>. But now that travel has snapped back faster than expected, they can’t get more cars; the new car inventories are at historic lows because of chip shortages.&nbsp;</li><li>And the combination of these two is a helluva pincer movement on a lot of returning travelers because they’d ditched rental cars for the convenience of Uber. Now they have neither. I plan on doing a good bit of walking in Miami.</li><li>DMV managers across the country must’ve breathed a sigh of relief when they saw Homeland Security announcing yet another delay in Real ID enforcement for air travel, this time to May 2023. I remember in 2019, more than a year before the original October 2020 enforcement date, the warning signs went up at the TSA desks in airports and immediately there were predictions of mass chaos.&nbsp; I was one of them. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/09/20/podcast-155-rj-delays-street-food-in-poland-and-hungary/\" title=\"Podcast #155 — RJ Delays; Street Food in Poland and Hungary\">episode #155</a> in September 2019, I said “Note to self – don’t book any travel in October 2020.” But then, 6 months later in March 2020, as COVID shut down DMV offices along with the rest of the economy, DHS made the obvious call to kick the deadline down the road a year to October 2021. I remember my first post-lockdown flight in June, the TSA desks at MDW still had the old 2020 signs up. A few months back, some friends had to renew their driver’s licenses and so figured they’d get the Real ID version. After some 8 hrs of queuing at a just-reopened Illinois DMV, they had gold-starred IDs and were good to go for October travel. Last month, a little alarm bell went off in my head -- “You know, that deadline is 6 months away; you need to start thinking about this.” But just as I started to, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/DHSgov/status/1387111972773277700\">the news hit my Twitter feed</a> -- delayed not just a year, but to May 2023, 18 years after it was signed into law. At what point is Real ID past it’s “Best Used By” date -- if not already?</li><li>Many of us lost track of these peripheral travel bits during lockdown. We were driving our daughter Claire to ORD for a flight to Philadelphia last month. She pulled up her boarding pass on American’s mobile app -- “Hey, I don’t have PreCheck!” Huh, well maybe there’s something wonky with the app, I told her. Hit a kiosk if you have time and pull another boarding pass. Turns out, because of construction traffic, she didn’t have time but the regular TSA line was short, so it wasn’t a problem. But the same thing happened on her flight home -- on Southwest this time. OK, not a res system glitch. She logged into the TSA website. Her Global Entry, which includes PreCheck, had expired a few months back. Which prompted Irene to log in; she was expiring <em>that day</em> so she immediately hit the Renew button -- and then spent the next 30 minutes reconstructing our travel history for the last 5 years. Thank God for cell phone photo archives. I figured I should check mine too. Logging in was a little bit of a hassle -- I had to create a new account at login.gov, some federated government login that replaced TSA’s login. Once in, I saw my expiration date isn’t until the end of the year, so I’ll start thinking about it in June or July.&nbsp;</li><li><a href=\"https://twitter.com/CrainsChicago/status/1387055231905648643\">United Airlines CEO said searches for flights to Europe jumped 19 % </a>after the head of the European Union said vaccinated US travelers would be allowed into the EU this summer. And shortly after that, United put on new summer flights to Iceland, Croatia, and Greece - certainly not business travel destinations.</li><li>I had already placed my bet on the UK opening by Thanksgiving. Actually, I was repeating the same bet I placed about this time last year when cash and frequent flier prices went cratered. I booked ORD-LHR flights on American for 30,000 points each. When I had to cancel in September, the agent said “Wow! That was a great deal!. Yeah, I knew it. The price of this year’s bet was 50% higher. But with the US and UK vaccination rates, it’s feeling like a safer bet.</li><li>The riskier bet was plunking down a deposit on a bike trip in Italy in mid-October. There was a lot of “It’s non-refundable so buy our trip insurance” language in bold italic font. So I went back and re-listened to episodes <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/05/08/podcast-163-new-world-of-travel-insurance-getting-medical-help-on-the-road/\" title=\"Podcast #163 — New World of Travel Insurance; Getting Medical Help on the Road\">#163</a> and <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/12/podcast-173-whats-new-in-travel-insurance-keeping-ahead-of-expiring-miles/\" title=\"Podcast #173 — What’s New in Travel Insurance; Keeping Ahead of Expiring Miles\">#173</a> where we talked about travel insurance and then dug deep into the insurance rider for the tour provider’s insurance and the travel insurance I’d get for free if I charge it on my Amex or Chase Sapphire cards. One hour and a couple of three-column tables later, I first threw out the Amex insurance; it was sorely lacking. Then comparing the tour company with Chase, neither of them offered cancellation coverage if a, what is it, a fifth wave of COVID (I’ve lost count) causes Italy to close its borders again. Running through the rest of the comparison, the tour company offered a bit more, but not enough (at least to me) to justify the additional $760 cost for Irene and me. So I charged the deposit on the Sapphire card and am hoping for the best.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/media/files/DJBLUE/11541\">Hear Me</a></em>&nbsp;by DJ Blue &nbsp;(c) copyright 2007 Licensed under Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/\">Attribution Noncommercial Share-Alike</a> license http://ccmixter.org/media/files/DJBLUE/11541.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>How to Find Local Tour Guides</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>This is a topic where I need to, up front, state my priors -- I don’t do well with structure when I travel. Well, let me refine that a little -- I don’t do well with <em>other people</em> applying structure on me when I travel. I don’t cruise, I’ve always hated forced “team-building” outings during company sales meetings, and I cringe whenever I run across tour guides walking backwards, reciting factoids to trailing lines of people tethered to them through wireless headphones. To be honest, I look down on them -- I can do better, more authentically with my own research.&nbsp;</li><li>But that’s really more pride, and maybe a bit of cheapness, talking than real facts. I’ve had great experiences with small tours. Way back in episode #105 -- 8 years ago! It always amazes me how long I’ve done this; and amazes even more how long many of you have been listening -- I talked about a couple of private tours that completely readjusted my attitude -- a tour through Saigon with an ex-South Vietnamese army officer, a food market tour in Madrid, a wine tour in Priorat.&nbsp; They were phenomenal, but they were all second-degree connections -- friends recommending other friends or acquaintances. So unless you have a lot of friends with connections to places you want to visit, that word-of-mouth model doesn’t scale.</li><li>Which leads me to this episode’s guest, <a href=\"https://www.toursbylocals.com/TBL/WebObjects/ToursByLocals.woa/1/wo/y2c7lZDKnxUUHYGLem9YgM/0.41.1.1.50.3\">Paul Melhus</a>, CEO &amp; Founder of <a href=\"https://www.toursbylocals.com/\">ToursByLocals</a>, a private tours marketplace. I talked with Paul about the local tour market, how he fared during the COVID travel meltdown, and what things look like from his vantage point as we’re coming out on the other side.</li><li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<em>Gargantua</em>&nbsp;by Admiral Bob (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/46361 Ft: My Free Mickey, Martijn de Boer</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Rebuilding Travel Muscle</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Frequent travelers, road warriors, mostly sitting at home for the past 15 months, certainly not heading to the airport every week or two, our travel muscles have&nbsp; atrophied. That rhythm, that cadence, that confidence that separated us from all those regular travelers -- well, all that and premiere status lines and lounge access which also physically separated us. I noticed this loss of travel muscle tone a bit on my trips to Tucson and San Diego over the last couple of months. I had to think a lot harder about those trips -- what to pack, when to leave -- things that were second nature to me, say, 18 months ago when I was traveling every week to Charlottesville, VA or Phoenix. Even on personal travel -- to Poland, Hungary, Estonia, Finland -- I had everything down; on the road, I had my groove.</li><li>Pretty much all of my travelling friends breathed a sigh of relief during the first 6-8 months of lockdown -- first, happy to be home and safe; then settling in, enjoying the extended family time, picking up some new hobby (even frequent travelers weren’t immune from the sourdough craze). But toward the end of the year, I could hear a bit of ansty-ness, and now, vaccines in arms, I’m seeing people getting back out on the road, beginning to rebuild those travel muscles.</li><li>It’s been a pretty quick snapback. Remember, back in December, people like Bill Gates were saying to large virtual conferences that 50% of business travel would disappear and video conferencing was the new normal. I think the big ramp up in vaccination rates flipped this script. Again, back in December, the euphoria of vaccine approvals was quickly overwritten by the depressing logistics of manufacturing ramp-ups and cold-chain distribution. But now, five months later, people are again sitting across desks and conference tables from each other; initially masked, but then quickly running through their vaccination statuses and comfort levels so they feel safe dropping their masks and getting on with business. This “new normal” feels like it’s trending pretty quickly back to the old normal.&nbsp;</li><li>At least for one-on-one meetings. Larger meetings and public spaces can’t do those same negotiations. But that’s enough for a start. Those same friends of mine who were loving their cocoons and sour dough recipes last year are looking to break out now. Like me, they tend to have pretty short attention spans and travel gives them the change, the external stimulus they need -- new places with new people to see and new things to do.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>The seating chart for my flight down to Miami shows a full flight and is asking for volunteers to take a later flight. And this for a 7am Monday morning flight -- first flight out, the standard business traveler choice. A lot of folks are getting back into that rhythm.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #175</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>The new website makes it a lot easier to subscribe. There’s a drop down menu at the top of each page, a set of subscribe links at the bottom, and a big red “Subscribe” button in the middle of the home page. You can use all those buttons, links and menus or you can just search for us on <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; with everybody and their mother starting up a podcast, it’s really the only way to grow. </li><li>I\'m not doing Patreon or trying to figure out Apple’s new podcast paid subscription. So if you’d like this podcast and would like to support it, please recommend it to one or two of your friends; maybe folks who traveled a lot -- before COVID -- or wished they could travel a lot. I’d appreciate it.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_175.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #175 — How to Find Local Tour Guides; Rebuild Travel Muscles','','inherit','closed','closed','','3530-revision-v1','','','2021-05-09 11:08:56','2021-05-09 16:08:56','',3530,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3538',0,'revision','',0),
(3539,1,'2021-05-09 18:43:45','2021-05-09 23:43:45','','IMG_0205','','inherit','open','closed','','img_0205-2','','','2021-05-09 18:43:45','2021-05-09 23:43:45','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/IMG_0205.jpeg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(3540,1,'2021-05-09 18:48:41','2021-05-09 23:48:41','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_1985\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/IMG_0205.jpeg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1985\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/IMG_0205-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"Groups of people on a frozen lake\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> I think that\'s our tour group up there[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Looking at the <em><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/beer/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Beer</a></em> section of this new website design, I saw I needed more content. So I got hold of Rob Cheshire of the <em><a href=\"https://thisweekincraft.beer/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">This Week in Craft Beer</a></em> podcast to talk about our approaches to taproom tourism and to trade taproom travel stories. I also talk about mask hassles on a couple of recent flights, Hertz\'s continuing downward service spiral, and Uber and Lyft driver shortages.  All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_175.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #175: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>This Week</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. Just one bit of travel since the last episode, a drive down to Nashville, Tennessee.&nbsp; Right at about a year ago, this drive was my first post-lockdown trip. I talked about it at the start of <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/06/09/podcast-164-first-post-lockdown-trips-travel-credit-cards/\" title=\"Podcast #164 — First-Post Lockdown Trips; Travel Credit Cards\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">episode #164</a> -- no one was on the road save for a few trucks and a few folks like me. It was a drag race down I-65, 80-85 mph the whole way, maybe dropping down to 70 going through Indianapolis and Louisville. You couldn’t be sure what restaurants had their drive-thrus open, so car snacks were key. But now, it’s back to the normal drive -- lots of trucks and having to jockey for position with them on the 2-lane stretches, slow-downs through construction zones, and having to think again about timing the drive so I thread through Chicago, Indianapolis, Louisville, and Nashville without hitting rush hours.</li><li>A year ago, the restaurants that were open were only doing take-out, so I ate in my hotel room every night, which led to me putting “bring-your-own dining sets” on my 2020 travelers gift guide 6 months later.</li><li>One thing that hasn’t changed is hotels not cleaning rooms during the stay.&nbsp; On this trip, I was in a Courtyard for 4 days and no one but me walked into that room. At what level of COVID cases or vaccination rates do they also have to get back to normal service because walking back into the smell of damp wet towels every day, or having to find a hall garbage can to throw out the takeaway Korean is getting a little old. I do give that Courtyard points, though, for bringing back the free lobby coffee.</li><li>I’m heading down to Miami next week for my first post-pandemic business trip. At the start of the year, everyone was talking about how business travel won’t be back until the end of 2022 or into 2023, and even then, it won’t come all the way back because Zoom and Teams will have replaced the need for 20-30% of business trips. But, I dunno, the TSA is <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/coronavirus/passenger-throughput\">regularly reporting</a> new highs in post-pandemic checkpoint traffic -- 1.63 million passengers the first Sunday of May and 1.64 million the first Thursday of May, averaging 8 times the traffic from the same weekday last year. And I don’t think it’s all leisure travel. I’m starting to see some 2019 behaviors coming back -- execs flying out to a plant to do a one-hour town hall in person; people coming together, physically, in an office conference room to get around some white boards and solve a problem. Is it Zoom fatigue or reversion to the mean -- at least for the vaccinated? I dunno, but I’m kinda looking forward to getting back in the saddle -- well, except for next week’s horse being a 7am Monday rush hour flight out of ORD.</li><li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<em>A Foolish Game</em>&nbsp;by Zep Hurme&nbsp;(c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license.&nbsp;http://ccmixter.org/files/zep_hurme/46448.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/04/10/podcast-174-how-the-pros-plan-their-taproom-tourism/\" title=\"Podcast #174 — How the Pros Plan Their Taproom Tourism\">the last episode</a>, I talked about the spike of publicity around the deterioration of Uber and Lyft’s service -- spiraling wait times that leads to big price surges that leads to driver cancellations as they work to maximize their pay. It’s not getting any better. I retweeted an Uber driver’s <a href=\"https://twitter.com/SpiderKeithLutz/status/1386487138728939521\">screenshots</a> showing no cars at ORD and MDW on a Sunday night -- prime time with people coming home from weekend trips, and it’s not a one-off event, especially at MDW. It’s also starting to make people rethink travel plans. A colleague on my Miami trip moved from a Hyatt to a Marriott closer to our meeting place, saying she couldn’t trust Uber to show up in time. And even for me, I’ll get up earlier than I need to so I can catch public transit to ORD in case Uber or Lyft fail and I can’t find a cab. It doesn’t feel like that $250 million “driver stimulus” Uber was touting last month has made much of an impact.</li><li>Empty Hertz lots has also been a multi-episode arc that doesn’t look like it’ll go away soon. Rental car companies dumped cars during a historically high used car market to generate cash that saved them at the start of the pandemic. <a href=\"https://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-biz-car-rental-shortage-turo-avail-20210507-enusm6m2ijbm5geeyefs6d6atu-story.html\">Hertz dropped almost 200,000 vehicles in the back half of 2020. While Avis’s fleet shrunk about 31%</a>. But now that travel has snapped back faster than expected, they can’t get more cars; the new car inventories are at historic lows because of chip shortages.&nbsp;</li><li>And the combination of these two is a helluva pincer movement on a lot of returning travelers because they’d ditched rental cars for the convenience of Uber. Now they have neither. I plan on doing a good bit of walking in Miami.</li><li>DMV managers across the country must’ve breathed a sigh of relief when they saw Homeland Security announcing yet another delay in Real ID enforcement for air travel, this time to May 2023. I remember in 2019, more than a year before the original October 2020 enforcement date, the warning signs went up at the TSA desks in airports and immediately there were predictions of mass chaos.&nbsp; I was one of them. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/09/20/podcast-155-rj-delays-street-food-in-poland-and-hungary/\" title=\"Podcast #155 — RJ Delays; Street Food in Poland and Hungary\">episode #155</a> in September 2019, I said “Note to self – don’t book any travel in October 2020.” But then, 6 months later in March 2020, as COVID shut down DMV offices along with the rest of the economy, DHS made the obvious call to kick the deadline down the road a year to October 2021. I remember my first post-lockdown flight in June, the TSA desks at MDW still had the old 2020 signs up. A few months back, some friends had to renew their driver’s licenses and so figured they’d get the Real ID version. After some 8 hrs of queuing at a just-reopened Illinois DMV, they had gold-starred IDs and were good to go for October travel. Last month, a little alarm bell went off in my head -- “You know, that deadline is 6 months away; you need to start thinking about this.” But just as I started to, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/DHSgov/status/1387111972773277700\">the news hit my Twitter feed</a> -- delayed not just a year, but to May 2023, 18 years after it was signed into law. At what point is Real ID past it’s “Best Used By” date -- if not already?</li><li>Many of us lost track of these peripheral travel bits during lockdown. We were driving our daughter Claire to ORD for a flight to Philadelphia last month. She pulled up her boarding pass on American’s mobile app -- “Hey, I don’t have PreCheck!” Huh, well maybe there’s something wonky with the app, I told her. Hit a kiosk if you have time and pull another boarding pass. Turns out, because of construction traffic, she didn’t have time but the regular TSA line was short, so it wasn’t a problem. But the same thing happened on her flight home -- on Southwest this time. OK, not a res system glitch. She logged into the TSA website. Her Global Entry, which includes PreCheck, had expired a few months back. Which prompted Irene to log in; she was expiring <em>that day</em> so she immediately hit the Renew button -- and then spent the next 30 minutes reconstructing our travel history for the last 5 years. Thank God for cell phone photo archives. I figured I should check mine too. Logging in was a little bit of a hassle -- I had to create a new account at login.gov, some federated government login that replaced TSA’s login. Once in, I saw my expiration date isn’t until the end of the year, so I’ll start thinking about it in June or July.&nbsp;</li><li><a href=\"https://twitter.com/CrainsChicago/status/1387055231905648643\">United Airlines CEO said searches for flights to Europe jumped 19 % </a>after the head of the European Union said vaccinated US travelers would be allowed into the EU this summer. And shortly after that, United put on new summer flights to Iceland, Croatia, and Greece - certainly not business travel destinations.</li><li>I had already placed my bet on the UK opening by Thanksgiving. Actually, I was repeating the same bet I placed about this time last year when cash and frequent flier prices went cratered. I booked ORD-LHR flights on American for 30,000 points each. When I had to cancel in September, the agent said “Wow! That was a great deal!. Yeah, I knew it. The price of this year’s bet was 50% higher. But with the US and UK vaccination rates, it’s feeling like a safer bet.</li><li>The riskier bet was plunking down a deposit on a bike trip in Italy in mid-October. There was a lot of “It’s non-refundable so buy our trip insurance” language in bold italic font. So I went back and re-listened to episodes <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/05/08/podcast-163-new-world-of-travel-insurance-getting-medical-help-on-the-road/\" title=\"Podcast #163 — New World of Travel Insurance; Getting Medical Help on the Road\">#163</a> and <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/12/podcast-173-whats-new-in-travel-insurance-keeping-ahead-of-expiring-miles/\" title=\"Podcast #173 — What’s New in Travel Insurance; Keeping Ahead of Expiring Miles\">#173</a> where we talked about travel insurance and then dug deep into the insurance rider for the tour provider’s insurance and the travel insurance I’d get for free if I charge it on my Amex or Chase Sapphire cards. One hour and a couple of three-column tables later, I first threw out the Amex insurance; it was sorely lacking. Then comparing the tour company with Chase, neither of them offered cancellation coverage if a, what is it, a fifth wave of COVID (I’ve lost count) causes Italy to close its borders again. Running through the rest of the comparison, the tour company offered a bit more, but not enough (at least to me) to justify the additional $760 cost for Irene and me. So I charged the deposit on the Sapphire card and am hoping for the best.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/media/files/DJBLUE/11541\">Hear Me</a></em>&nbsp;by DJ Blue &nbsp;(c) copyright 2007 Licensed under Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/\">Attribution Noncommercial Share-Alike</a> license http://ccmixter.org/media/files/DJBLUE/11541.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>How to Find Local Tour Guides</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>This is a topic where I need to, up front, state my priors -- I don’t do well with structure when I travel. Well, let me refine that a little -- I don’t do well with <em>other people</em> applying structure on me when I travel. I don’t cruise, I’ve always hated forced “team-building” outings during company sales meetings, and I cringe whenever I run across tour guides walking backwards, reciting factoids to trailing lines of people tethered to them through wireless headphones. To be honest, I look down on them -- I can do better, more authentically with my own research.&nbsp;</li><li>But that’s really more pride, and maybe a bit of cheapness, talking than real facts. I’ve had great experiences with small tours. Way back in episode #105 -- 8 years ago! It always amazes me how long I’ve done this; and amazes even more how long many of you have been listening -- I talked about a couple of private tours that completely readjusted my attitude -- a tour through Saigon with an ex-South Vietnamese army officer, a food market tour in Madrid, a wine tour in Priorat.&nbsp; They were phenomenal, but they were all second-degree connections -- friends recommending other friends or acquaintances. So unless you have a lot of friends with connections to places you want to visit, that word-of-mouth model doesn’t scale.</li><li>Which leads me to this episode’s guest, <a href=\"https://www.toursbylocals.com/TBL/WebObjects/ToursByLocals.woa/1/wo/y2c7lZDKnxUUHYGLem9YgM/0.41.1.1.50.3\">Paul Melhus</a>, CEO &amp; Founder of <a href=\"https://www.toursbylocals.com/\">ToursByLocals</a>, a private tours marketplace. I talked with Paul about the local tour market, how he fared during the COVID travel meltdown, and what things look like from his vantage point as we’re coming out on the other side.</li><li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<em>Gargantua</em>&nbsp;by Admiral Bob (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/46361 Ft: My Free Mickey, Martijn de Boer</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Rebuilding Travel Muscle</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Frequent travelers, road warriors, mostly sitting at home for the past 15 months, certainly not heading to the airport every week or two, our travel muscles have&nbsp; atrophied. That rhythm, that cadence, that confidence that separated us from all those regular travelers -- well, all that and premiere status lines and lounge access which also physically separated us. I noticed this loss of travel muscle tone a bit on my trips to Tucson and San Diego over the last couple of months. I had to think a lot harder about those trips -- what to pack, when to leave -- things that were second nature to me, say, 18 months ago when I was traveling every week to Charlottesville, VA or Phoenix. Even on personal travel -- to Poland, Hungary, Estonia, Finland -- I had everything down; on the road, I had my groove.</li><li>Pretty much all of my travelling friends breathed a sigh of relief during the first 6-8 months of lockdown -- first, happy to be home and safe; then settling in, enjoying the extended family time, picking up some new hobby (even frequent travelers weren’t immune from the sourdough craze). But toward the end of the year, I could hear a bit of ansty-ness, and now, vaccines in arms, I’m seeing people getting back out on the road, beginning to rebuild those travel muscles.</li><li>It’s been a pretty quick snapback. Remember, back in December, people like Bill Gates were saying to large virtual conferences that 50% of business travel would disappear and video conferencing was the new normal. I think the big ramp up in vaccination rates flipped this script. Again, back in December, the euphoria of vaccine approvals was quickly overwritten by the depressing logistics of manufacturing ramp-ups and cold-chain distribution. But now, five months later, people are again sitting across desks and conference tables from each other; initially masked, but then quickly running through their vaccination statuses and comfort levels so they feel safe dropping their masks and getting on with business. This “new normal” feels like it’s trending pretty quickly back to the old normal.&nbsp;</li><li>At least for one-on-one meetings. Larger meetings and public spaces can’t do those same negotiations. But that’s enough for a start. Those same friends of mine who were loving their cocoons and sour dough recipes last year are looking to break out now. Like me, they tend to have pretty short attention spans and travel gives them the change, the external stimulus they need -- new places with new people to see and new things to do.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>The seating chart for my flight down to Miami shows a full flight and is asking for volunteers to take a later flight. And this for a 7am Monday morning flight -- first flight out, the standard business traveler choice. A lot of folks are getting back into that rhythm.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #175</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>The new website makes it a lot easier to subscribe. There’s a drop down menu at the top of each page, a set of subscribe links at the bottom, and a big red “Subscribe” button in the middle of the home page. You can use all those buttons, links and menus or you can just search for us on <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; with everybody and their mother starting up a podcast, it’s really the only way to grow. </li><li>I\'m not doing Patreon or trying to figure out Apple’s new podcast paid subscription. So if you’d like this podcast and would like to support it, please recommend it to one or two of your friends; maybe folks who traveled a lot -- before COVID -- or wished they could travel a lot. I’d appreciate it.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_175.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #175 — How to Find Local Tour Guides; Rebuild Travel Muscles','','inherit','closed','closed','','3530-revision-v1','','','2021-05-09 18:48:41','2021-05-09 23:48:41','',3530,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3540',0,'revision','',0),
(3541,1,'2021-05-09 18:49:09','2021-05-09 23:49:09','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_1985\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/IMG_0205.jpeg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1985\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/IMG_0205-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"Groups of people on a frozen lake\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> I think that\'s our tour group up there[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Looking at the <em><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/beer/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Beer</a></em> section of this new website design, I saw I needed more content. So I got hold of Rob Cheshire of the <em><a href=\"https://thisweekincraft.beer/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">This Week in Craft Beer</a></em> podcast to talk about our approaches to taproom tourism and to trade taproom travel stories. I also talk about mask hassles on a couple of recent flights, Hertz\'s continuing downward service spiral, and Uber and Lyft driver shortages.  All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_175.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #175: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>This Week</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. Just one bit of travel since the last episode, a drive down to Nashville, Tennessee.&nbsp; Right at about a year ago, this drive was my first post-lockdown trip. I talked about it at the start of <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/06/09/podcast-164-first-post-lockdown-trips-travel-credit-cards/\" title=\"Podcast #164 — First-Post Lockdown Trips; Travel Credit Cards\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">episode #164</a> -- no one was on the road save for a few trucks and a few folks like me. It was a drag race down I-65, 80-85 mph the whole way, maybe dropping down to 70 going through Indianapolis and Louisville. You couldn’t be sure what restaurants had their drive-thrus open, so car snacks were key. But now, it’s back to the normal drive -- lots of trucks and having to jockey for position with them on the 2-lane stretches, slow-downs through construction zones, and having to think again about timing the drive so I thread through Chicago, Indianapolis, Louisville, and Nashville without hitting rush hours.</li><li>A year ago, the restaurants that were open were only doing take-out, so I ate in my hotel room every night, which led to me putting “bring-your-own dining sets” on my 2020 travelers gift guide 6 months later.</li><li>One thing that hasn’t changed is hotels not cleaning rooms during the stay.&nbsp; On this trip, I was in a Courtyard for 4 days and no one but me walked into that room. At what level of COVID cases or vaccination rates do they also have to get back to normal service because walking back into the smell of damp wet towels every day, or having to find a hall garbage can to throw out the takeaway Korean is getting a little old. I do give that Courtyard points, though, for bringing back the free lobby coffee.</li><li>I’m heading down to Miami next week for my first post-pandemic business trip. At the start of the year, everyone was talking about how business travel won’t be back until the end of 2022 or into 2023, and even then, it won’t come all the way back because Zoom and Teams will have replaced the need for 20-30% of business trips. But, I dunno, the TSA is <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/coronavirus/passenger-throughput\">regularly reporting</a> new highs in post-pandemic checkpoint traffic -- 1.63 million passengers the first Sunday of May and 1.64 million the first Thursday of May, averaging 8 times the traffic from the same weekday last year. And I don’t think it’s all leisure travel. I’m starting to see some 2019 behaviors coming back -- execs flying out to a plant to do a one-hour town hall in person; people coming together, physically, in an office conference room to get around some white boards and solve a problem. Is it Zoom fatigue or reversion to the mean -- at least for the vaccinated? I dunno, but I’m kinda looking forward to getting back in the saddle -- well, except for next week’s horse being a 7am Monday rush hour flight out of ORD.</li><li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<em>A Foolish Game</em>&nbsp;by Zep Hurme&nbsp;(c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license.&nbsp;http://ccmixter.org/files/zep_hurme/46448.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/04/10/podcast-174-how-the-pros-plan-their-taproom-tourism/\" title=\"Podcast #174 — How the Pros Plan Their Taproom Tourism\">the last episode</a>, I talked about the spike of publicity around the deterioration of Uber and Lyft’s service -- spiraling wait times that leads to big price surges that leads to driver cancellations as they work to maximize their pay. It’s not getting any better. I retweeted an Uber driver’s <a href=\"https://twitter.com/SpiderKeithLutz/status/1386487138728939521\">screenshots</a> showing no cars at ORD and MDW on a Sunday night -- prime time with people coming home from weekend trips, and it’s not a one-off event, especially at MDW. It’s also starting to make people rethink travel plans. A colleague on my Miami trip moved from a Hyatt to a Marriott closer to our meeting place, saying she couldn’t trust Uber to show up in time. And even for me, I’ll get up earlier than I need to so I can catch public transit to ORD in case Uber or Lyft fail and I can’t find a cab. It doesn’t feel like that $250 million “driver stimulus” Uber was touting last month has made much of an impact.</li><li>Empty Hertz lots has also been a multi-episode arc that doesn’t look like it’ll go away soon. Rental car companies dumped cars during a historically high used car market to generate cash that saved them at the start of the pandemic. <a href=\"https://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-biz-car-rental-shortage-turo-avail-20210507-enusm6m2ijbm5geeyefs6d6atu-story.html\">Hertz dropped almost 200,000 vehicles in the back half of 2020. While Avis’s fleet shrunk about 31%</a>. But now that travel has snapped back faster than expected, they can’t get more cars; the new car inventories are at historic lows because of chip shortages.&nbsp;</li><li>And the combination of these two is a helluva pincer movement on a lot of returning travelers because they’d ditched rental cars for the convenience of Uber. Now they have neither. I plan on doing a good bit of walking in Miami.</li><li>DMV managers across the country must’ve breathed a sigh of relief when they saw Homeland Security announcing yet another delay in Real ID enforcement for air travel, this time to May 2023. I remember in 2019, more than a year before the original October 2020 enforcement date, the warning signs went up at the TSA desks in airports and immediately there were predictions of mass chaos.&nbsp; I was one of them. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/09/20/podcast-155-rj-delays-street-food-in-poland-and-hungary/\" title=\"Podcast #155 — RJ Delays; Street Food in Poland and Hungary\">episode #155</a> in September 2019, I said “Note to self – don’t book any travel in October 2020.” But then, 6 months later in March 2020, as COVID shut down DMV offices along with the rest of the economy, DHS made the obvious call to kick the deadline down the road a year to October 2021. I remember my first post-lockdown flight in June, the TSA desks at MDW still had the old 2020 signs up. A few months back, some friends had to renew their driver’s licenses and so figured they’d get the Real ID version. After some 8 hrs of queuing at a just-reopened Illinois DMV, they had gold-starred IDs and were good to go for October travel. Last month, a little alarm bell went off in my head -- “You know, that deadline is 6 months away; you need to start thinking about this.” But just as I started to, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/DHSgov/status/1387111972773277700\">the news hit my Twitter feed</a> -- delayed not just a year, but to May 2023, 18 years after it was signed into law. At what point is Real ID past it’s “Best Used By” date -- if not already?</li><li>Many of us lost track of these peripheral travel bits during lockdown. We were driving our daughter Claire to ORD for a flight to Philadelphia last month. She pulled up her boarding pass on American’s mobile app -- “Hey, I don’t have PreCheck!” Huh, well maybe there’s something wonky with the app, I told her. Hit a kiosk if you have time and pull another boarding pass. Turns out, because of construction traffic, she didn’t have time but the regular TSA line was short, so it wasn’t a problem. But the same thing happened on her flight home -- on Southwest this time. OK, not a res system glitch. She logged into the TSA website. Her Global Entry, which includes PreCheck, had expired a few months back. Which prompted Irene to log in; she was expiring <em>that day</em> so she immediately hit the Renew button -- and then spent the next 30 minutes reconstructing our travel history for the last 5 years. Thank God for cell phone photo archives. I figured I should check mine too. Logging in was a little bit of a hassle -- I had to create a new account at login.gov, some federated government login that replaced TSA’s login. Once in, I saw my expiration date isn’t until the end of the year, so I’ll start thinking about it in June or July.&nbsp;</li><li><a href=\"https://twitter.com/CrainsChicago/status/1387055231905648643\">United Airlines CEO said searches for flights to Europe jumped 19 % </a>after the head of the European Union said vaccinated US travelers would be allowed into the EU this summer. And shortly after that, United put on new summer flights to Iceland, Croatia, and Greece - certainly not business travel destinations.</li><li>I had already placed my bet on the UK opening by Thanksgiving. Actually, I was repeating the same bet I placed about this time last year when cash and frequent flier prices went cratered. I booked ORD-LHR flights on American for 30,000 points each. When I had to cancel in September, the agent said “Wow! That was a great deal!. Yeah, I knew it. The price of this year’s bet was 50% higher. But with the US and UK vaccination rates, it’s feeling like a safer bet.</li><li>The riskier bet was plunking down a deposit on a bike trip in Italy in mid-October. There was a lot of “It’s non-refundable so buy our trip insurance” language in bold italic font. So I went back and re-listened to episodes <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/05/08/podcast-163-new-world-of-travel-insurance-getting-medical-help-on-the-road/\" title=\"Podcast #163 — New World of Travel Insurance; Getting Medical Help on the Road\">#163</a> and <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/12/podcast-173-whats-new-in-travel-insurance-keeping-ahead-of-expiring-miles/\" title=\"Podcast #173 — What’s New in Travel Insurance; Keeping Ahead of Expiring Miles\">#173</a> where we talked about travel insurance and then dug deep into the insurance rider for the tour provider’s insurance and the travel insurance I’d get for free if I charge it on my Amex or Chase Sapphire cards. One hour and a couple of three-column tables later, I first threw out the Amex insurance; it was sorely lacking. Then comparing the tour company with Chase, neither of them offered cancellation coverage if a, what is it, a fifth wave of COVID (I’ve lost count) causes Italy to close its borders again. Running through the rest of the comparison, the tour company offered a bit more, but not enough (at least to me) to justify the additional $760 cost for Irene and me. So I charged the deposit on the Sapphire card and am hoping for the best.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/media/files/DJBLUE/11541\">Hear Me</a></em>&nbsp;by DJ Blue &nbsp;(c) copyright 2007 Licensed under Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/\">Attribution Noncommercial Share-Alike</a> license http://ccmixter.org/media/files/DJBLUE/11541.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>How to Find Local Tour Guides</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>This is a topic where I need to, up front, state my priors -- I don’t do well with structure when I travel. Well, let me refine that a little -- I don’t do well with <em>other people</em> applying structure on me when I travel. I don’t cruise, I’ve always hated forced “team-building” outings during company sales meetings, and I cringe whenever I run across tour guides walking backwards, reciting factoids to trailing lines of people tethered to them through wireless headphones. To be honest, I look down on them -- I can do better, more authentically with my own research. </li><li>But that’s really more pride, and maybe a bit of cheapness, talking than real facts. I’ve had great experiences with small tours. Way back in episode #105 -- 8 years ago! It always amazes me how long I’ve done this; and amazes even more how long many of you have been listening -- I talked about a couple of private tours that completely readjusted my attitude -- a tour through Saigon with an ex-South Vietnamese army officer, a food market tour in Madrid, a wine tour in Priorat.  They were phenomenal, but they were all second-degree connections -- friends recommending other friends or acquaintances. So unless you have a lot of friends with connections to places you want to visit, that word-of-mouth model doesn’t scale.</li><li>Which leads me to this episode’s guest, <a href=\"https://www.toursbylocals.com/TBL/WebObjects/ToursByLocals.woa/1/wo/y2c7lZDKnxUUHYGLem9YgM/0.41.1.1.50.3\">Paul Melhus</a>, CEO &amp; Founder of <a href=\"https://www.toursbylocals.com/\">ToursByLocals</a>, a private tours marketplace. I talked with Paul about the local tour market, how he fared during the COVID travel meltdown, and what things look like from his vantage point as we’re coming out on the other side.</li><li>&lt;Interview with Paul Melhus></li><li>Bridge Music — <em>Gargantua</em> by Admiral Bob (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/46361 Ft: My Free Mickey, Martijn de Boer</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Rebuilding Travel Muscle</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Frequent travelers, road warriors, mostly sitting at home for the past 15 months, certainly not heading to the airport every week or two, our travel muscles have&nbsp; atrophied. That rhythm, that cadence, that confidence that separated us from all those regular travelers -- well, all that and premiere status lines and lounge access which also physically separated us. I noticed this loss of travel muscle tone a bit on my trips to Tucson and San Diego over the last couple of months. I had to think a lot harder about those trips -- what to pack, when to leave -- things that were second nature to me, say, 18 months ago when I was traveling every week to Charlottesville, VA or Phoenix. Even on personal travel -- to Poland, Hungary, Estonia, Finland -- I had everything down; on the road, I had my groove.</li><li>Pretty much all of my travelling friends breathed a sigh of relief during the first 6-8 months of lockdown -- first, happy to be home and safe; then settling in, enjoying the extended family time, picking up some new hobby (even frequent travelers weren’t immune from the sourdough craze). But toward the end of the year, I could hear a bit of ansty-ness, and now, vaccines in arms, I’m seeing people getting back out on the road, beginning to rebuild those travel muscles.</li><li>It’s been a pretty quick snapback. Remember, back in December, people like Bill Gates were saying to large virtual conferences that 50% of business travel would disappear and video conferencing was the new normal. I think the big ramp up in vaccination rates flipped this script. Again, back in December, the euphoria of vaccine approvals was quickly overwritten by the depressing logistics of manufacturing ramp-ups and cold-chain distribution. But now, five months later, people are again sitting across desks and conference tables from each other; initially masked, but then quickly running through their vaccination statuses and comfort levels so they feel safe dropping their masks and getting on with business. This “new normal” feels like it’s trending pretty quickly back to the old normal.&nbsp;</li><li>At least for one-on-one meetings. Larger meetings and public spaces can’t do those same negotiations. But that’s enough for a start. Those same friends of mine who were loving their cocoons and sour dough recipes last year are looking to break out now. Like me, they tend to have pretty short attention spans and travel gives them the change, the external stimulus they need -- new places with new people to see and new things to do.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>The seating chart for my flight down to Miami shows a full flight and is asking for volunteers to take a later flight. And this for a 7am Monday morning flight -- first flight out, the standard business traveler choice. A lot of folks are getting back into that rhythm.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #175</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>The new website makes it a lot easier to subscribe. There’s a drop down menu at the top of each page, a set of subscribe links at the bottom, and a big red “Subscribe” button in the middle of the home page. You can use all those buttons, links and menus or you can just search for us on <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; with everybody and their mother starting up a podcast, it’s really the only way to grow. </li><li>I\'m not doing Patreon or trying to figure out Apple’s new podcast paid subscription. So if you’d like this podcast and would like to support it, please recommend it to one or two of your friends; maybe folks who traveled a lot -- before COVID -- or wished they could travel a lot. I’d appreciate it.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_175.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #175 — How to Find Local Tour Guides; Rebuild Travel Muscles','','inherit','closed','closed','','3530-revision-v1','','','2021-05-09 18:49:09','2021-05-09 23:49:09','',3530,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3541',0,'revision','',0),
(3542,1,'2021-05-09 19:08:54','2021-05-10 00:08:54','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_1985\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/IMG_0205.jpeg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1985\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/IMG_0205-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"Groups of people on a frozen lake\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> I think that\'s our tour group up there[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I can feel travel beginning to come back. <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/coronavirus/passenger-throughput\">TSA checkpoint volumes</a> are hitting post-pandemic highs, business travelers are starting to come out from behind their Zoom sessions, and vaccination rates are prompting more people to make travel plans. So on this episode, we first talk to <a href=\"https://www.toursbylocals.com/TBL/WebObjects/ToursByLocals.woa/1/wo/y2c7lZDKnxUUHYGLem9YgM/0.41.1.1.50.3\">Paul Melhus</a>, CEO of <a href=\"https://www.toursbylocals.com/\">ToursByLocals</a> about the state of the local tour market and then about how frequent travelers are starting to stretch their atrophied travel muscles. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_175.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #175: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>This Week</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. Just one bit of travel since the last episode, a drive down to Nashville, Tennessee.&nbsp; Right at about a year ago, this drive was my first post-lockdown trip. I talked about it at the start of <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/06/09/podcast-164-first-post-lockdown-trips-travel-credit-cards/\" title=\"Podcast #164 — First-Post Lockdown Trips; Travel Credit Cards\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">episode #164</a> -- no one was on the road save for a few trucks and a few folks like me. It was a drag race down I-65, 80-85 mph the whole way, maybe dropping down to 70 going through Indianapolis and Louisville. You couldn’t be sure what restaurants had their drive-thrus open, so car snacks were key. But now, it’s back to the normal drive -- lots of trucks and having to jockey for position with them on the 2-lane stretches, slow-downs through construction zones, and having to think again about timing the drive so I thread through Chicago, Indianapolis, Louisville, and Nashville without hitting rush hours.</li><li>A year ago, the restaurants that were open were only doing take-out, so I ate in my hotel room every night, which led to me putting “bring-your-own dining sets” on my 2020 travelers gift guide 6 months later.</li><li>One thing that hasn’t changed is hotels not cleaning rooms during the stay.&nbsp; On this trip, I was in a Courtyard for 4 days and no one but me walked into that room. At what level of COVID cases or vaccination rates do they also have to get back to normal service because walking back into the smell of damp wet towels every day, or having to find a hall garbage can to throw out the takeaway Korean is getting a little old. I do give that Courtyard points, though, for bringing back the free lobby coffee.</li><li>I’m heading down to Miami next week for my first post-pandemic business trip. At the start of the year, everyone was talking about how business travel won’t be back until the end of 2022 or into 2023, and even then, it won’t come all the way back because Zoom and Teams will have replaced the need for 20-30% of business trips. But, I dunno, the TSA is <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/coronavirus/passenger-throughput\">regularly reporting</a> new highs in post-pandemic checkpoint traffic -- 1.63 million passengers the first Sunday of May and 1.64 million the first Thursday of May, averaging 8 times the traffic from the same weekday last year. And I don’t think it’s all leisure travel. I’m starting to see some 2019 behaviors coming back -- execs flying out to a plant to do a one-hour town hall in person; people coming together, physically, in an office conference room to get around some white boards and solve a problem. Is it Zoom fatigue or reversion to the mean -- at least for the vaccinated? I dunno, but I’m kinda looking forward to getting back in the saddle -- well, except for next week’s horse being a 7am Monday rush hour flight out of ORD.</li><li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<em>A Foolish Game</em>&nbsp;by Zep Hurme&nbsp;(c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license.&nbsp;http://ccmixter.org/files/zep_hurme/46448.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/04/10/podcast-174-how-the-pros-plan-their-taproom-tourism/\" title=\"Podcast #174 — How the Pros Plan Their Taproom Tourism\">the last episode</a>, I talked about the spike of publicity around the deterioration of Uber and Lyft’s service -- spiraling wait times that leads to big price surges that leads to driver cancellations as they work to maximize their pay. It’s not getting any better. I retweeted an Uber driver’s <a href=\"https://twitter.com/SpiderKeithLutz/status/1386487138728939521\">screenshots</a> showing no cars at ORD and MDW on a Sunday night -- prime time with people coming home from weekend trips, and it’s not a one-off event, especially at MDW. It’s also starting to make people rethink travel plans. A colleague on my Miami trip moved from a Hyatt to a Marriott closer to our meeting place, saying she couldn’t trust Uber to show up in time. And even for me, I’ll get up earlier than I need to so I can catch public transit to ORD in case Uber or Lyft fail and I can’t find a cab. It doesn’t feel like that $250 million “driver stimulus” Uber was touting last month has made much of an impact.</li><li>Empty Hertz lots has also been a multi-episode arc that doesn’t look like it’ll go away soon. Rental car companies dumped cars during a historically high used car market to generate cash that saved them at the start of the pandemic. <a href=\"https://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-biz-car-rental-shortage-turo-avail-20210507-enusm6m2ijbm5geeyefs6d6atu-story.html\">Hertz dropped almost 200,000 vehicles in the back half of 2020. While Avis’s fleet shrunk about 31%</a>. But now that travel has snapped back faster than expected, they can’t get more cars; the new car inventories are at historic lows because of chip shortages.&nbsp;</li><li>And the combination of these two is a helluva pincer movement on a lot of returning travelers because they’d ditched rental cars for the convenience of Uber. Now they have neither. I plan on doing a good bit of walking in Miami.</li><li>DMV managers across the country must’ve breathed a sigh of relief when they saw Homeland Security announcing yet another delay in Real ID enforcement for air travel, this time to May 2023. I remember in 2019, more than a year before the original October 2020 enforcement date, the warning signs went up at the TSA desks in airports and immediately there were predictions of mass chaos.&nbsp; I was one of them. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/09/20/podcast-155-rj-delays-street-food-in-poland-and-hungary/\" title=\"Podcast #155 — RJ Delays; Street Food in Poland and Hungary\">episode #155</a> in September 2019, I said “Note to self – don’t book any travel in October 2020.” But then, 6 months later in March 2020, as COVID shut down DMV offices along with the rest of the economy, DHS made the obvious call to kick the deadline down the road a year to October 2021. I remember my first post-lockdown flight in June, the TSA desks at MDW still had the old 2020 signs up. A few months back, some friends had to renew their driver’s licenses and so figured they’d get the Real ID version. After some 8 hrs of queuing at a just-reopened Illinois DMV, they had gold-starred IDs and were good to go for October travel. Last month, a little alarm bell went off in my head -- “You know, that deadline is 6 months away; you need to start thinking about this.” But just as I started to, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/DHSgov/status/1387111972773277700\">the news hit my Twitter feed</a> -- delayed not just a year, but to May 2023, 18 years after it was signed into law. At what point is Real ID past it’s “Best Used By” date -- if not already?</li><li>Many of us lost track of these peripheral travel bits during lockdown. We were driving our daughter Claire to ORD for a flight to Philadelphia last month. She pulled up her boarding pass on American’s mobile app -- “Hey, I don’t have PreCheck!” Huh, well maybe there’s something wonky with the app, I told her. Hit a kiosk if you have time and pull another boarding pass. Turns out, because of construction traffic, she didn’t have time but the regular TSA line was short, so it wasn’t a problem. But the same thing happened on her flight home -- on Southwest this time. OK, not a res system glitch. She logged into the TSA website. Her Global Entry, which includes PreCheck, had expired a few months back. Which prompted Irene to log in; she was expiring <em>that day</em> so she immediately hit the Renew button -- and then spent the next 30 minutes reconstructing our travel history for the last 5 years. Thank God for cell phone photo archives. I figured I should check mine too. Logging in was a little bit of a hassle -- I had to create a new account at login.gov, some federated government login that replaced TSA’s login. Once in, I saw my expiration date isn’t until the end of the year, so I’ll start thinking about it in June or July.&nbsp;</li><li><a href=\"https://twitter.com/CrainsChicago/status/1387055231905648643\">United Airlines CEO said searches for flights to Europe jumped 19 % </a>after the head of the European Union said vaccinated US travelers would be allowed into the EU this summer. And shortly after that, United put on new summer flights to Iceland, Croatia, and Greece - certainly not business travel destinations.</li><li>I had already placed my bet on the UK opening by Thanksgiving. Actually, I was repeating the same bet I placed about this time last year when cash and frequent flier prices went cratered. I booked ORD-LHR flights on American for 30,000 points each. When I had to cancel in September, the agent said “Wow! That was a great deal!. Yeah, I knew it. The price of this year’s bet was 50% higher. But with the US and UK vaccination rates, it’s feeling like a safer bet.</li><li>The riskier bet was plunking down a deposit on a bike trip in Italy in mid-October. There was a lot of “It’s non-refundable so buy our trip insurance” language in bold italic font. So I went back and re-listened to episodes <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/05/08/podcast-163-new-world-of-travel-insurance-getting-medical-help-on-the-road/\" title=\"Podcast #163 — New World of Travel Insurance; Getting Medical Help on the Road\">#163</a> and <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/12/podcast-173-whats-new-in-travel-insurance-keeping-ahead-of-expiring-miles/\" title=\"Podcast #173 — What’s New in Travel Insurance; Keeping Ahead of Expiring Miles\">#173</a> where we talked about travel insurance and then dug deep into the insurance rider for the tour provider’s insurance and the travel insurance I’d get for free if I charge it on my Amex or Chase Sapphire cards. One hour and a couple of three-column tables later, I first threw out the Amex insurance; it was sorely lacking. Then comparing the tour company with Chase, neither of them offered cancellation coverage if a, what is it, a fifth wave of COVID (I’ve lost count) causes Italy to close its borders again. Running through the rest of the comparison, the tour company offered a bit more, but not enough (at least to me) to justify the additional $760 cost for Irene and me. So I charged the deposit on the Sapphire card and am hoping for the best.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/media/files/DJBLUE/11541\">Hear Me</a></em>&nbsp;by DJ Blue &nbsp;(c) copyright 2007 Licensed under Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/\">Attribution Noncommercial Share-Alike</a> license http://ccmixter.org/media/files/DJBLUE/11541.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>How to Find Local Tour Guides</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>This is a topic where I need to, up front, state my priors -- I don’t do well with structure when I travel. Well, let me refine that a little -- I don’t do well with <em>other people</em> applying structure on me when I travel. I don’t cruise, I’ve always hated forced “team-building” outings during company sales meetings, and I cringe whenever I run across tour guides walking backwards, reciting factoids to trailing lines of people tethered to them through wireless headphones. To be honest, I look down on them -- I can do better, more authentically with my own research. </li><li>But that’s really more pride, and maybe a bit of cheapness, talking than real facts. I’ve had great experiences with small tours. Way back in episode #105 -- 8 years ago! It always amazes me how long I’ve done this; and amazes even more how long many of you have been listening -- I talked about a couple of private tours that completely readjusted my attitude -- a tour through Saigon with an ex-South Vietnamese army officer, a food market tour in Madrid, a wine tour in Priorat.  They were phenomenal, but they were all second-degree connections -- friends recommending other friends or acquaintances. So unless you have a lot of friends with connections to places you want to visit, that word-of-mouth model doesn’t scale.</li><li>Which leads me to this episode’s guest, <a href=\"https://www.toursbylocals.com/TBL/WebObjects/ToursByLocals.woa/1/wo/y2c7lZDKnxUUHYGLem9YgM/0.41.1.1.50.3\">Paul Melhus</a>, CEO &amp; Founder of <a href=\"https://www.toursbylocals.com/\">ToursByLocals</a>, a private tours marketplace. I talked with Paul about the local tour market, how he fared during the COVID travel meltdown, and what things look like from his vantage point as we’re coming out on the other side.</li><li>&lt;Interview with Paul Melhus></li><li>Bridge Music — <em>Gargantua</em> by Admiral Bob (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/46361 Ft: My Free Mickey, Martijn de Boer</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Rebuilding Travel Muscle</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Frequent travelers, road warriors, mostly sitting at home for the past 15 months, certainly not heading to the airport every week or two, our travel muscles have&nbsp; atrophied. That rhythm, that cadence, that confidence that separated us from all those regular travelers -- well, all that and premiere status lines and lounge access which also physically separated us. I noticed this loss of travel muscle tone a bit on my trips to Tucson and San Diego over the last couple of months. I had to think a lot harder about those trips -- what to pack, when to leave -- things that were second nature to me, say, 18 months ago when I was traveling every week to Charlottesville, VA or Phoenix. Even on personal travel -- to Poland, Hungary, Estonia, Finland -- I had everything down; on the road, I had my groove.</li><li>Pretty much all of my travelling friends breathed a sigh of relief during the first 6-8 months of lockdown -- first, happy to be home and safe; then settling in, enjoying the extended family time, picking up some new hobby (even frequent travelers weren’t immune from the sourdough craze). But toward the end of the year, I could hear a bit of ansty-ness, and now, vaccines in arms, I’m seeing people getting back out on the road, beginning to rebuild those travel muscles.</li><li>It’s been a pretty quick snapback. Remember, back in December, people like Bill Gates were saying to large virtual conferences that 50% of business travel would disappear and video conferencing was the new normal. I think the big ramp up in vaccination rates flipped this script. Again, back in December, the euphoria of vaccine approvals was quickly overwritten by the depressing logistics of manufacturing ramp-ups and cold-chain distribution. But now, five months later, people are again sitting across desks and conference tables from each other; initially masked, but then quickly running through their vaccination statuses and comfort levels so they feel safe dropping their masks and getting on with business. This “new normal” feels like it’s trending pretty quickly back to the old normal.&nbsp;</li><li>At least for one-on-one meetings. Larger meetings and public spaces can’t do those same negotiations. But that’s enough for a start. Those same friends of mine who were loving their cocoons and sour dough recipes last year are looking to break out now. Like me, they tend to have pretty short attention spans and travel gives them the change, the external stimulus they need -- new places with new people to see and new things to do.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>The seating chart for my flight down to Miami shows a full flight and is asking for volunteers to take a later flight. And this for a 7am Monday morning flight -- first flight out, the standard business traveler choice. A lot of folks are getting back into that rhythm.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #175</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>The new website makes it a lot easier to subscribe. There’s a drop down menu at the top of each page, a set of subscribe links at the bottom, and a big red “Subscribe” button in the middle of the home page. You can use all those buttons, links and menus or you can just search for us on <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; with everybody and their mother starting up a podcast, it’s really the only way to grow. </li><li>I\'m not doing Patreon or trying to figure out Apple’s new podcast paid subscription. So if you’d like this podcast and would like to support it, please recommend it to one or two of your friends; maybe folks who traveled a lot -- before COVID -- or wished they could travel a lot. I’d appreciate it.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_175.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #175 — How to Find Local Tour Guides; Rebuild Travel Muscles','','inherit','closed','closed','','3530-revision-v1','','','2021-05-09 19:08:54','2021-05-10 00:08:54','',3530,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3542',0,'revision','',0),
(3548,1,'2021-05-31 17:32:16','2021-05-31 22:32:16','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_1985\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/IMG_0205.jpeg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1985\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/IMG_0205-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"Groups of people on a frozen lake\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> I think that\'s our tour group up there[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I can feel travel beginning to come back. <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/coronavirus/passenger-throughput\">TSA checkpoint volumes</a> are hitting post-pandemic highs, business travelers are starting to come out from behind their Zoom sessions, and vaccination rates are prompting more people to make travel plans. So on this episode, we first talk to <a href=\"https://www.toursbylocals.com/TBL/WebObjects/ToursByLocals.woa/1/wo/y2c7lZDKnxUUHYGLem9YgM/0.41.1.1.50.3\">Paul Melhus</a>, CEO of <a href=\"https://www.toursbylocals.com/\">ToursByLocals</a> about the state of the local tour market and then about how frequent travelers are starting to stretch their atrophied travel muscles. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_175.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #175: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>This Week</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. Just one bit of travel since the last episode, a drive down to Nashville, Tennessee.&nbsp; Right at about a year ago, this drive was my first post-lockdown trip. I talked about it at the start of <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/06/09/podcast-164-first-post-lockdown-trips-travel-credit-cards/\" title=\"Podcast #164 — First-Post Lockdown Trips; Travel Credit Cards\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">episode #164</a> -- no one was on the road save for a few trucks and a few folks like me. It was a drag race down I-65, 80-85 mph the whole way, maybe dropping down to 70 going through Indianapolis and Louisville. You couldn’t be sure what restaurants had their drive-thrus open, so car snacks were key. But now, it’s back to the normal drive -- lots of trucks and having to jockey for position with them on the 2-lane stretches, slow-downs through construction zones, and having to think again about timing the drive so I thread through Chicago, Indianapolis, Louisville, and Nashville without hitting rush hours.</li><li>A year ago, the restaurants that were open were only doing take-out, so I ate in my hotel room every night, which led to me putting “bring-your-own dining sets” on my 2020 travelers gift guide 6 months later.</li><li>One thing that hasn’t changed is hotels not cleaning rooms during the stay.&nbsp; On this trip, I was in a Courtyard for 4 days and no one but me walked into that room. At what level of COVID cases or vaccination rates do they also have to get back to normal service because walking back into the smell of damp wet towels every day, or having to find a hall garbage can to throw out the takeaway Korean is getting a little old. I do give that Courtyard points, though, for bringing back the free lobby coffee.</li><li>I’m heading down to Miami next week for my first post-pandemic business trip. At the start of the year, everyone was talking about how business travel won’t be back until the end of 2022 or into 2023, and even then, it won’t come all the way back because Zoom and Teams will have replaced the need for 20-30% of business trips. But, I dunno, the TSA is <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/coronavirus/passenger-throughput\">regularly reporting</a> new highs in post-pandemic checkpoint traffic -- 1.63 million passengers the first Sunday of May and 1.64 million the first Thursday of May, averaging 8 times the traffic from the same weekday last year. And I don’t think it’s all leisure travel. I’m starting to see some 2019 behaviors coming back -- execs flying out to a plant to do a one-hour town hall in person; people coming together, physically, in an office conference room to get around some white boards and solve a problem. Is it Zoom fatigue or reversion to the mean -- at least for the vaccinated? I dunno, but I’m kinda looking forward to getting back in the saddle -- well, except for next week’s horse being a 7am Monday rush hour flight out of ORD.</li><li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<em>A Foolish Game</em>&nbsp;by Zep Hurme&nbsp;(c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license.&nbsp;http://ccmixter.org/files/zep_hurme/46448.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/04/10/podcast-174-how-the-pros-plan-their-taproom-tourism/\" title=\"Podcast #174 — How the Pros Plan Their Taproom Tourism\">the last episode</a>, I talked about the spike of publicity around the deterioration of Uber and Lyft’s service -- spiraling wait times that leads to big price surges that leads to driver cancellations as they work to maximize their pay. It’s not getting any better. I retweeted an Uber driver’s <a href=\"https://twitter.com/SpiderKeithLutz/status/1386487138728939521\">screenshots</a> showing no cars at ORD and MDW on a Sunday night -- prime time with people coming home from weekend trips, and it’s not a one-off event, especially at MDW. It’s also starting to make people rethink travel plans. A colleague on my Miami trip moved from a Hyatt to a Marriott closer to our meeting place, saying she couldn’t trust Uber to show up in time. And even for me, I’ll get up earlier than I need to so I can catch public transit to ORD in case Uber or Lyft fail and I can’t find a cab. It doesn’t feel like that $250 million “driver stimulus” Uber was touting last month has made much of an impact.</li><li>Empty Hertz lots has also been a multi-episode arc that doesn’t look like it’ll go away soon. Rental car companies dumped cars during a historically high used car market to generate cash that saved them at the start of the pandemic. <a href=\"https://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-biz-car-rental-shortage-turo-avail-20210507-enusm6m2ijbm5geeyefs6d6atu-story.html\">Hertz dropped almost 200,000 vehicles in the back half of 2020. While Avis’s fleet shrunk about 31%</a>. But now that travel has snapped back faster than expected, they can’t get more cars; the new car inventories are at historic lows because of chip shortages.&nbsp;</li><li>And the combination of these two is a helluva pincer movement on a lot of returning travelers because they’d ditched rental cars for the convenience of Uber. Now they have neither. I plan on doing a good bit of walking in Miami.</li><li>DMV managers across the country must’ve breathed a sigh of relief when they saw Homeland Security announcing yet another delay in Real ID enforcement for air travel, this time to May 2023. I remember in 2019, more than a year before the original October 2020 enforcement date, the warning signs went up at the TSA desks in airports and immediately there were predictions of mass chaos.&nbsp; I was one of them. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/09/20/podcast-155-rj-delays-street-food-in-poland-and-hungary/\" title=\"Podcast #155 — RJ Delays; Street Food in Poland and Hungary\">episode #155</a> in September 2019, I said “Note to self – don’t book any travel in October 2020.” But then, 6 months later in March 2020, as COVID shut down DMV offices along with the rest of the economy, DHS made the obvious call to kick the deadline down the road a year to October 2021. I remember my first post-lockdown flight in June, the TSA desks at MDW still had the old 2020 signs up. A few months back, some friends had to renew their driver’s licenses and so figured they’d get the Real ID version. After some 8 hrs of queuing at a just-reopened Illinois DMV, they had gold-starred IDs and were good to go for October travel. Last month, a little alarm bell went off in my head -- “You know, that deadline is 6 months away; you need to start thinking about this.” But just as I started to, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/DHSgov/status/1387111972773277700\">the news hit my Twitter feed</a> -- delayed not just a year, but to May 2023, 18 years after it was signed into law. At what point is Real ID past it’s “Best Used By” date -- if not already?</li><li>Many of us lost track of these peripheral travel bits during lockdown. We were driving our daughter Claire to ORD for a flight to Philadelphia last month. She pulled up her boarding pass on American’s mobile app -- “Hey, I don’t have PreCheck!” Huh, well maybe there’s something wonky with the app, I told her. Hit a kiosk if you have time and pull another boarding pass. Turns out, because of construction traffic, she didn’t have time but the regular TSA line was short, so it wasn’t a problem. But the same thing happened on her flight home -- on Southwest this time. OK, not a res system glitch. She logged into the TSA website. Her Global Entry, which includes PreCheck, had expired a few months back. Which prompted Irene to log in; she was expiring <em>that day</em> so she immediately hit the Renew button -- and then spent the next 30 minutes reconstructing our travel history for the last 5 years. Thank God for cell phone photo archives. I figured I should check mine too. Logging in was a little bit of a hassle -- I had to create a new account at login.gov, some federated government login that replaced TSA’s login. Once in, I saw my expiration date isn’t until the end of the year, so I’ll start thinking about it in June or July.&nbsp;</li><li><a href=\"https://twitter.com/CrainsChicago/status/1387055231905648643\">United Airlines CEO said searches for flights to Europe jumped 19 % </a>after the head of the European Union said vaccinated US travelers would be allowed into the EU this summer. And shortly after that, United put on new summer flights to Iceland, Croatia, and Greece - certainly not business travel destinations.</li><li>I had already placed my bet on the UK opening by Thanksgiving. Actually, I was repeating the same bet I placed about this time last year when cash and frequent flier prices went cratered. I booked ORD-LHR flights on American for 30,000 points each. When I had to cancel in September, the agent said “Wow! That was a great deal!. Yeah, I knew it. The price of this year’s bet was 50% higher. But with the US and UK vaccination rates, it’s feeling like a safer bet.</li><li>The riskier bet was plunking down a deposit on a bike trip in Italy in mid-October. There was a lot of “It’s non-refundable so buy our trip insurance” language in bold italic font. So I went back and re-listened to episodes <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/05/08/podcast-163-new-world-of-travel-insurance-getting-medical-help-on-the-road/\" title=\"Podcast #163 — New World of Travel Insurance; Getting Medical Help on the Road\">#163</a> and <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/12/podcast-173-whats-new-in-travel-insurance-keeping-ahead-of-expiring-miles/\" title=\"Podcast #173 — What’s New in Travel Insurance; Keeping Ahead of Expiring Miles\">#173</a> where we talked about travel insurance and then dug deep into the insurance rider for the tour provider’s insurance and the travel insurance I’d get for free if I charge it on my Amex or Chase Sapphire cards. One hour and a couple of three-column tables later, I first threw out the Amex insurance; it was sorely lacking. Then comparing the tour company with Chase, neither of them offered cancellation coverage if a, what is it, a fifth wave of COVID (I’ve lost count) causes Italy to close its borders again. Running through the rest of the comparison, the tour company offered a bit more, but not enough (at least to me) to justify the additional $760 cost for Irene and me. So I charged the deposit on the Sapphire card and am hoping for the best.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/media/files/DJBLUE/11541\">Hear Me</a></em>&nbsp;by DJ Blue &nbsp;(c) copyright 2007 Licensed under Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/\">Attribution Noncommercial Share-Alike</a> license http://ccmixter.org/media/files/DJBLUE/11541.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>How to Find Local Tour Guides</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>This is a topic where I need to, up front, state my priors -- I don’t do well with structure when I travel. Well, let me refine that a little -- I don’t do well with <em>other people</em> applying structure on me when I travel. I don’t cruise, I’ve always hated forced “team-building” outings during company sales meetings, and I cringe whenever I run across tour guides walking backwards, reciting factoids to trailing lines of people tethered to them through wireless headphones. To be honest, I look down on them -- I can do better, more authentically with my own research. </li><li>But that’s really more pride, and maybe a bit of cheapness, talking than real facts. I’ve had great experiences with small tours. Way back in episode #105 -- 8 years ago! It always amazes me how long I’ve done this; and amazes even more how long many of you have been listening -- I talked about a couple of private tours that completely readjusted my attitude -- a tour through Saigon with an ex-South Vietnamese army officer, a food market tour in Madrid, a wine tour in Priorat.  They were phenomenal, but they were all second-degree connections -- friends recommending other friends or acquaintances. So unless you have a lot of friends with connections to places you want to visit, that word-of-mouth model doesn’t scale.</li><li>Which leads me to this episode’s guest, <a href=\"https://www.toursbylocals.com/TBL/WebObjects/ToursByLocals.woa/1/wo/y2c7lZDKnxUUHYGLem9YgM/0.41.1.1.50.3\">Paul Melhus</a>, CEO &amp; Founder of <a href=\"https://www.toursbylocals.com/\">ToursByLocals</a>, a private tours marketplace. I talked with Paul about the local tour market, how he fared during the COVID travel meltdown, and what things look like from his vantage point as we’re coming out on the other side.<ul><li>Mark: Paul, help us understand your marketplace, how you help travelers search and book for local tours. This is a space that had a lot of startup activity, say five years ago. Everybody was a peer-to-peer tour marketers and the Uber of local tours. And now though, it seems that we\'ve got a mix of large companies, Airbnb Experiences, Viator, and then smaller folks, offering a broad range of tours like yourself and Get Your Guide, and then some specialized niches in things like food, Eat With. And then last episode, we talked with Rob Cheshire about what he\'s doing in <em><a href=\"http://thisweekincraft.beer\" title=\"thisweekincraft.beer\">This Week In Craft Beer</a></em>. So, help us understand the market space.</li><li>Paul: <a href=\"https://www.toursbylocals.com/\">ToursByLocals</a> is a platform, and our goal is to connect independent tour guides with independent travelers who want to have that kind of unique experience. I\'ve often wondered why it is that we seem to have been successful. We started in 2008; somehow we\'ve managed to thrive, and we always started right from the get-go to make sure that the guides that we\'re on our site were competent, qualified, able to do what they said they would do. So we feel like our network of, we’re at 4,750 guides right now, is a curated list.</li><li>Mark: So that curation, it\'s not so much the Uber for local tours, maybe the Angie\'s List for local tours.</li><li>Paul: Yeah, I guess, Yeah, that\'s a good idea because I think a lot of other companies, they just went out and tried to get a lot of guides and they didn\'t really worry too much about making sure that every one of them is going to be quality, responsive -- that\'s a big thing -- and then it\'s the consistency of everybody knows how it works. In some cases, especially if the tour is more high value, like we have some safaris in Africa, for example where the customer will pay $23,000 and the guide, in order to deliver that tour,  they can\'t fund all of that on their own account, so we advance them funds. But you know if things were to go south, well, we\'re here. And we have done that in the past, refund the traveler because who knows, maybe there was some weather-related event that caused the thing to get canceled and then, so we\'re out the $5-6,000, but the customer is made whole.</li><li>Mark: So there\'s really two things that you\'re offering above and beyond just the search and book. You\'re offering curation and you\'re offering escrow. So you\'re taking some of that uncertainty in both of those areas, uncertainty about the qualification and then uncertainty about performance, you guys are taking that on.  Paul, you talked about Covid. How has this curated network of tour guides held up through Covid?</li><li>Paul: Right now, our maximum number of tour guides listed on the site was just over 5,000 and that was February 2020. Now we\'re at 4,750. So, not huge and we have a status of tour guide called <em>on hold </em>-- for the time being, I don\'t want to be on the site, but I want to be able to come back once it\'s safe. For an example. We had a guide in Denmark, had an elderly mother and she just didn\'t want to be out there with people because she had to look after her parent. So we have a project right now to contact all of these people and see about getting them back on the site. But the other thing that offset the loss was, rather than laying all of our staff off, we repurposed them and tried to infill a lot of the smaller destinations, the Nashville\'s, Flagstaff Arizona. And of course, Yellowstone National Park where our sales are up 1,300% over 2019 levels, which was a good year.</li><li>Mark: That was the trend last fall, and I think going into the spring was everybody wanted to do outdoor stuff. Right?</li><li>Paul: Oh, it really is. Now that people have got their vaccines, they want to travel and the easiest place to travel is domestically. So, we\'re seeing a real boost in US travel.</li><li>Mark: What do you see around trends?  Do you see an uptick, and where is it?</li><li>Paul: A metric that we track very closely is the conversion rate of our tour guides. So, if we send them an inquiry from a traveler, what percentage of those inquiries turned into a booking? We\'ve noticed that the conversion rate is about half of what it was in 2019. Because normally a  good guide converts about 40% of the inquiries and now it\'s fallen down to about 20%. There\'s a lot of dreamers out there. That\'s what we\'re thinking.</li><li>Mark: There\'s a lot of people shopping, but they\'re not buying yet.</li><li>Paul: Not quite yet. Now basically there\'s the people that are booking are kind of falling into two buckets. Normally we would have kind of a nice smooth curve of not too many short notice bookings and then it would be a bulge and then tail off farther out. But what we\'re finding is that people are booking within a 2-week window, so short notice, or their booking into 2022. We recently extended our booking calendar out 26 months and that\'s driven some surprisingly long-term bookings. It\'s that middle that\'s missing and I think that\'s where they want to go. But until such time as you can actually get on a plane and happily go to London without having a 14-day quarantine when you show up, people are just not going to do it.</li><li>Mark: Super. Paul Melhus, CEO of <a href=\"http://toursbylocals.com\">ToursByLocals</a>. Thank you very much for taking the time to talk to us here at the TravelCommons.</li></ul></li><li>Bridge Music — <em>Gargantua</em> by Admiral Bob (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/46361 Ft: My Free Mickey, Martijn de Boer</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Rebuilding Travel Muscle</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Frequent travelers, road warriors, mostly sitting at home for the past 15 months, certainly not heading to the airport every week or two, our travel muscles have&nbsp; atrophied. That rhythm, that cadence, that confidence that separated us from all those regular travelers -- well, all that and premiere status lines and lounge access which also physically separated us. I noticed this loss of travel muscle tone a bit on my trips to Tucson and San Diego over the last couple of months. I had to think a lot harder about those trips -- what to pack, when to leave -- things that were second nature to me, say, 18 months ago when I was traveling every week to Charlottesville, VA or Phoenix. Even on personal travel -- to Poland, Hungary, Estonia, Finland -- I had everything down; on the road, I had my groove.</li><li>Pretty much all of my travelling friends breathed a sigh of relief during the first 6-8 months of lockdown -- first, happy to be home and safe; then settling in, enjoying the extended family time, picking up some new hobby (even frequent travelers weren’t immune from the sourdough craze). But toward the end of the year, I could hear a bit of ansty-ness, and now, vaccines in arms, I’m seeing people getting back out on the road, beginning to rebuild those travel muscles.</li><li>It’s been a pretty quick snapback. Remember, back in December, people like Bill Gates were saying to large virtual conferences that 50% of business travel would disappear and video conferencing was the new normal. I think the big ramp up in vaccination rates flipped this script. Again, back in December, the euphoria of vaccine approvals was quickly overwritten by the depressing logistics of manufacturing ramp-ups and cold-chain distribution. But now, five months later, people are again sitting across desks and conference tables from each other; initially masked, but then quickly running through their vaccination statuses and comfort levels so they feel safe dropping their masks and getting on with business. This “new normal” feels like it’s trending pretty quickly back to the old normal.&nbsp;</li><li>At least for one-on-one meetings. Larger meetings and public spaces can’t do those same negotiations. But that’s enough for a start. Those same friends of mine who were loving their cocoons and sour dough recipes last year are looking to break out now. Like me, they tend to have pretty short attention spans and travel gives them the change, the external stimulus they need -- new places with new people to see and new things to do.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>The seating chart for my flight down to Miami shows a full flight and is asking for volunteers to take a later flight. And this for a 7am Monday morning flight -- first flight out, the standard business traveler choice. A lot of folks are getting back into that rhythm.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #175</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>The new website makes it a lot easier to subscribe. There’s a drop down menu at the top of each page, a set of subscribe links at the bottom, and a big red “Subscribe” button in the middle of the home page. You can use all those buttons, links and menus or you can just search for us on <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; with everybody and their mother starting up a podcast, it’s really the only way to grow. </li><li>I\'m not doing Patreon or trying to figure out Apple’s new podcast paid subscription. So if you’d like this podcast and would like to support it, please recommend it to one or two of your friends; maybe folks who traveled a lot -- before COVID -- or wished they could travel a lot. I’d appreciate it.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_175.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #175 — How to Find Local Tour Guides; Rebuild Travel Muscles','','inherit','closed','closed','','3530-revision-v1','','','2021-05-31 17:32:16','2021-05-31 22:32:16','',3530,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3548',0,'revision','',0),
(3550,1,'2021-06-15 20:45:29','2021-06-16 01:45:29','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_1985\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Airfields_IL_Chicago_C_htm_m252791c8-e1623802785342.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1985\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Airfields_IL_Chicago_C_htm_m252791c8-e1623802785342-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Old cars and planes on a runway\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> Where\'d the Racetrack Go?[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Business travelers are getting itchy. They know Zoom calls can\'t replace a face-to-face meeting, but they can\'t meet with people who aren\'t in their offices yet. We also talk about how surprisingly great the LaGuardia Terminal B renovation is, and then talk about airport history with <a href=\"https://udayton.edu/directory/artssciences/history/bednarek_janet.php\">Professor Janet Bednarek</a>, professor of history at University of Dayton.  All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_176.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #176: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>This Week</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studio as Chicago and the state of Illinois completely reopen for business -- no more capacity limits, no more socially distanced sitting -- just in time for the summer music festival season. No capacity limits, but you have to show proof of vaccination or a negative COVID test to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with 100,000 other music fans. Irene and I did that one year, check -- don’t need to do it again. I think I aged out of that demographic -- back in the ‘90’s.&nbsp;</li><li>Since the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/05/09/podcast-175-how-to-find-local-tour-guides-rebuild-travel-muscles/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #175 — How to Find Local Tour Guides; Rebuild Travel Muscles\">last episode</a>, I first flew down to Miami on business, and then over to New York City for a long weekend. Miami is always an interesting business destination; it’s got its own unique vibe. It starts at the airport; officially bilingual -- Spanish and English, in that order -- but it seems half the time when they make PA announcements, they just skip the English version. The client’s office was in the Wynwood Art District. It was my first time in this neighborhood; it had a kinda typical newly gentrified vibe -- lots of first generation food places: an upscale doughnut shop, a poké lunch joint, a couple of microbrewery taprooms (always key for me). What wasn’t typical was the amount of wall art; not graffiti as much as very cool murals and street art, giving the neighborhood a bright, colorful vibe while probably painting over some otherwise dire looking buildings.</li><li>I stayed a few miles south in the Marriott on Biscayne Bay where some combination of my status and patience with a front desk trainee trying to solo on the property management system for the first time earned me a top floor bayside room looking out over the Port of Miami cruise terminal with 4 big cruise ships tied up, waiting for the CDC to drop their cruise ban.</li><li>One morning, when it felt the humidity had dipped below 80%, I decided to skip Uber and ride a Lyft scooter up to the Art District. I’ve talked, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/10/14/podcast-156-airport-satisfaction-escooters-smaller-luggage/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #156 — Airport Satisfaction; eScooters; Smaller Luggage\">past</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/01/25/podcast-159-planning-the-trip-of-a-lifetime-in-southeast-asia/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #159 — Planning the Trip of a Lifetime in Southeast Asia\">episodes</a>, how much I like riding scooters. I’ve ridden scooters in Chicago, Phoenix, DC -- everywhere I could find them. But last year, I didn’t ride them even though they were all around Chicago. There’s a fun, frivolous vibe about riding a scooter, but 2020 was anything but fun or frivolous and so I didn’t feel like riding them. But on this morning, with just a touch of humidity in the air and not much traffic on the streets, having a little fun riding a scooter to the office felt, once more, like the right thing to do.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Zapac/25046\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><em>You are (funky mix)</em></a>&nbsp;by Zapac.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Talking in the last episode about needing to rebuild atrophied travel muscles after the long lockdown layoff generated a few comments. Chris Christensen of the Amateur Traveler Podcast dropped me a note saying:<ul><li>I can relate. We just got back from our first post vaccine trip to the Galapagos. First time on a plane since 2019.</li></ul></li><li>First trip back and you go to the Galapagos! No warm-ups? Hope you didn’t sprain any of those travel muscles.</li><li>Jim McDonough’s first trip back wasn’t simple either. He wrote on the TravelCommons Facebook page<ul><li>Last month, we made our first trip since January, 2020 to Kodiak, Alaska of all places, attending the decommissioning of a ship I helped the Coast Guard put into commission in 1971. San Diego to Alaska is a long way. Alaska Airlines is really nice. But I noticed my travel skills had atrophied.&nbsp; Approaching TSA, I realized that the red mesh bag I usually have for holding metal objects wasn’t in my bag. Then I sat for a while at a gate in Anchorage until remembering that Admiral\'s Club members can use Alaska\'s lounge. I\'m ready to go again, but probably not to Kodiak!</li></ul></li><li>Kudos to both of you guys for jumping straight into the deep-end. But you gotta be careful -- weak travel muscles can make you vulnerable. A few days ago, I <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1399783958066442247\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">re-tweeted a thread about a phishing attack</a> -- a very well-formatted “make sure your TSA Precheck doesn’t expire -- click here” e-mail with a link that, as you can imagine, didn’t take you to tsa.gov; though Aaron Woodin did tweet back the question “If you click on the link, does it confiscate your water?” It’s a well-timed phish, especially as more business travelers are gearing up to get back on the road.&nbsp;</li><li>And in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/05/09/podcast-175-how-to-find-local-tour-guides-rebuild-travel-muscles/\" title=\"Podcast #175 — How to Find Local Tour Guides; Rebuild Travel Muscles\">last episode</a>, I talked about Irene and Claire losing track of their Global Entry expiration dates -- Claire’s expired and Irene hit the “renew” button on the last day. Now you may think -- Global Entry? Big deal, who’s traveling internationally right now anyhow? But remember, for $100 for 5 years, Global Entry gives you the express lane thru immigration <em>plus</em> TSA PreCheck, vs. $85 for PreCheck alone. Hence I always tell people to spend the extra $15 for Global Entry. So anyhow, Irene and Claire fill out the on-line renewal form, pay the $100 (which Irene immediately got back because she used my Amex Platinum card), and then nothing. Silence. Crickets. Which is odd, because when I renewed my Global Entry, I had to go to ORD for an interview and an updated photo. But for them, nothing. Our flight to New York, to LaGuardia is coming up. The night before we leave, Irene gets an e-mail -- no link, mind you, just a message -- “Congrats! Your Global Entry has been renewed.” Yay! Except that when she checked into Southwest, there’s no little blue PreCheck checkmark on her boarding pass. Claire got her Congrats! e-mail the next day, but again, no check on the boarding pass. Ugh. The prior week when I was in Miami, the non-PreCheck lines tailed back the length of the terminal. But, as it turned out, it wasn’t a huge hassle. We left a little earlier for MDW and no horror lines. Three days later when they checked in for our flight home, they both got the blue check on their boarding passes. So spinning my IT propeller, it would seem that the airlines aren’t pinging that PreCheck database more than once every couple of days.</li><li>This trip was the first time since January 2019 I’d flown into LGA in almost 28 months; that’s 2⅓ years. That shocked me; I had to go back and check my calendars and my math again, because it seemed like I was always in New York. But it’s right. Second shock -- flying into the new rebuilt Terminal B, bright, airy, spacious, <em>clean</em>; everything the old Terminal B I flew into 2+ years ago was not. It was the low-ceilinged rat maze that, 7 years ago, then-Vice President Joe Biden said was like a third-world country -- which I actually think was less of an insult to LGA and more of an insult to many developing country airports. Walking down that old concourse to catch an American or United flight, it was not unusual to have to dodge a big plastic garbage can placed right in the middle, that had a hose coming down from the bottom of a make-shift funnel made out of plastic tarp, hanging from some ceiling tiles, collecting rainwater from roof leak. No one would ever look at that and think “What the hell?” because you’d see it like once a month. But now, it’s phenomenal; they’ve done a great job. I used to say that SFO’s new Terminal 2 was my favorite terminal -- where American and, back then, Virgin America flew out of. But now, it’s LGA’s Terminal B. There’s still construction going on, and getting a cab to the city is still a hassle, and a necessary one because there’s still no subway link, but once you’re inside, it’s great! Give yourself a little extra time to see the water fountain light show. And having a little downtime in Terminal B is no longer the purgatory it used to be, because there are now places that you actually sit down and eat and grab a beer; no more standing around having to juggle your bag and an Auntie Anne’s pretzel. I rarely have anything good to say about the Port Authority, but they’ve done a good job here.</li><li>And the TSA, another government organization I don’t often have good things to say about, does a nice job <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/coronavirus/passenger-throughput\">publishing the daily volumes of air passengers</a> passing through security checkpoints. Just scanning it you can see the growth kicking up in the February/March timeframe. Though if you’ve flown anytime over the past couple of months, you don’t need to look at the numbers; you’ve felt it in fuller planes and longer checkpoint lines. The Friday of Memorial Day weekend, the end of May, checkpoint volume was up 599% over the same Friday last year, and then this past Friday, June 11, checkpoint volume broke 2 million for the first time since the March lockdowns. The numbers are still 25-30% below 2019’s, but the gap is closing.&nbsp;</li><li>And then the keynote from Apple’s WorldWide Developers Conference gave me something else good to say about the TSA; working with Apple to let you use a digital version of your driver’s license at security checkpoints. I’ve already noticed that, at a few airports, you no longer have to show your boarding pass -- they just pop your driver’s license into a scanning machine and you’re on your way. No fumbling to pull up your boarding pass and scanning it. But now, no fumbling for my wallet if I can pull up my license on my phone. Actually, better than my drivers license would be my Global Entry card because it’s Real ID while my Illinois license is not. Could save me an extra trip to the DMV if and when the TSA decides to get serious about Real ID again -- which I hope is never.&nbsp;</li><li>Continuing on our now 3-episode arc on Uber and Lyft service, the long wait times, the huge price surges. Heading out for my flight down to Miami, the 17-mile trip Monday morning Uber ride to ORD, at $74 with a 2x surge, cost almost as much as the 1,100-mile flight on American down to MIA at $100 one way. There is no rational way to explain this, so I’ll leave it here as a meditation exercise for microeconomic pricing theorists and move on. Except, ‘cause I guess I can’t just <em>can’t</em> leave it here, to note that I had no problem with Uber or Lyft service in Miami. And except for that one joyful morning riding a scooter, the South Florida heat and humidity had me lighting up the Uber app multiple times a day. So I’m guessing those Uber carjackings in Chicago a few months back are having some residual impact on their driver recruitment efforts.</li><li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<em>Two Guitars</em> by Admiral Bob (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/35879 Ft: Haskel</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Why Business Travel Will Come Back</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Last Friday, the first day of Chicago’s full reopening and the same day the TSA’s checkpoint volume broke the 2 million passenger mark for the first time post-lockdown, a business colleague and I met for some happy hour beers and oysters in a bar in Wrigleyville. We were sitting at a second floor table against an open window, looking over at Wrigley Field as fans poured out of the Clark-&amp;-Addison main gate and into nearby bars to celebrate the Cubs’ victory over the St Louis Cardinals in what was the first full-capacity game since September 2019. Mike’s in consulting too; he’d been talking about how he was itching to get back out on the road to see his clients, on how he’s working to convince the firm’s management to lift, or at least bend their travel ban so he can see the clients again -- at least the ones who also want to start meeting people face-to-face again. Zoom and Teams calls are <em>OK</em>, they can suffice for some things, but there are so many things you miss when you’re not there in person.&nbsp;</li><li>In an outta-left-field sorta way, the masses of Cubs fans blocking traffic on Addison St helped prove Mike’s point. Official attendance was 35,112, not quite a sell-out, but having butts in 84% of the seats for a 1:20p Friday game isn’t bad. But similar to the “why travel to a meeting when you can video conference?” question, why go to a baseball game in person when you can watch it on TV where it’s covered by not just one crappy laptop camera, but 5-8 HD cameras with clean lenses and run by professionals? I know, it’s a stupid strawman question that we all know the answer to -- it’s not just the game, it’s the whole experience. And it’s not an either/or -- many times watching the game on TV is fine, and more convenient; but sometimes, you gotta get off the couch and go see the game live, in person, with a bunch of friends.</li><li>A couple of recent interactions(?) over the last couple of weeks drove this home. I’ve had multiple video calls with a programmer over the past month, probably 3-4 hour worth, going through some system re-architecting. After all that, I thought I had it pretty much down. Now the guy has started coming back to the office -- he said working from home for 14 months was being under house arrest -- so I pulled him into a conference room and started sketching stuff on a whiteboard. We stood there shoulder-to-shoulder and passed the blue marker back and forth, and in 20 minutes realized that there were 3 key facts about the existing systems that never came across in those hours of video calls and that completely changed the new architecture. But they did in that in-person 20 minutes. And afterwards, the guy said to me “Hey, that was fun. Let’s do some more of that” -- a reaction I’ve never heard about a video conference… ever. And at the same time, I had the exact opposite experience -- trying to explain a concept on a week’s worth of video calls that I know we could’ve handled in an hour if we could’ve been in the same room together, but we can’t because he’s overseas and can’t get through the US travel lockdown. So we trudged through the calls… and the frustration.</li><li>Which was pretty much the point that Mike was trying to make over honking buses and shouts of “Go Cubs Go”. “Yeah, I can have a meeting on Zoom, but I can’t have the pre-meeting ‘how are things going’ chats as we’re walking into the room, or the post-meeting ‘Can I ask you what you really meant in there’ sidebar, or pick up the non-verbal glances people will shoot at each other. The meeting’s important, but so’s the choreography that surrounds the meeting -- maybe even more so -- and that’s what I can’t get now. That and I’ve worked with a lot of these clients for 10, 15 years, so they’re friends too. And I miss that too.”</li><li>Airlines are saying that business travel is still down 70% from pre-lockdown levels, but that almost all of their top corporate accounts are telling them they plan to re-start travel later this year -- but first they gotta figure out how to get people out of their sweats and back into the office.</li><li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<em>Garden Of The Forking </em>by J.Lang (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djlang59/22228 Ft: Neurowaxx</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Learning the History of Airports</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Back at the beginning of the year, back in episodes #<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/16/podcast-172-timeshares-without-the-pitch-notes-on-tucson/\" title=\"Podcast #172 — Timeshares Without the Pitch; Notes on Tucson\">172</a> and #<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/12/podcast-173-whats-new-in-travel-insurance-keeping-ahead-of-expiring-miles/\" title=\"Podcast #173 — What’s New in Travel Insurance; Keeping Ahead of Expiring Miles\">173</a>, I talked about a guy who lived on the secure side of ORD from October ‘til January because he was too afraid to fly. In researching this -- what turned out to be not unique -- situation, I came across an article written by <a href=\"https://udayton.edu/directory/artssciences/history/bednarek_janet.php\">Professor Janet Bednarek</a>, Professor of History at <a href=\"https://udayton.edu/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">University of Dayton</a>. Her area of focus is on the history of airports in the US, which I thought would be a perfect topic for the TravelCommons podcast. So I sent her a Zoom invite, as one does these days, and had a great conversation about the history of airports.<ul><li>Mark: Janet, the history of airports. How did you get into that? As a professor of history, you think -- what am I going to focus on, the American Revolution, the Civil War, airports? Yes, airports! Perfect!</li><li>Janet: I originally trained as an urban historian focusing on city planning. But my first paid job was as a historian with the United States Air Force. And so I had to pick up aviation history, especially military aviation history. Then in 1992, my husband and I were moving to the Dayton area; my husband was an air force officer. This job came up at the University of Dayton if somebody could teach urban and aviation history. I began to think -- where do those two things intersect? They intersect at the airport. And it was clear to me that not a lot of people had written about airports. And so I thought -- wide open field, here we go. When they first talked about building airport, the planners talked a lot about how do we integrate them within the city. They were literally talking about the downtowns. And so if you go back to the 1920s, for example, You will see these fantastical schemes for building airports on top of bridges, on top of a ring of skyscrapers. Even in the 1930s, <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Bel_Geddes\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Norman Bel Geddes</a> came up with an idea of an airport that was floating out in New York Harbor on an island.</li><li>Mark: Boris Johnson was trying to do that for London when he was the mayor there</li><li>Janet: On one case, you want to be as close in as possible, but there is the noise, there\'s the danger. The other side of it is when airports actually started being built in the 1920’s and 1930’s, they’re being built largely by local interests and they\'re interested in the cost, and the further you go out from the center, the lower the land costs are, but they would often try to find it on transportation lines that were already there. The Dayton Airport, for example, is not far from an intersection between what was the National Road Route 40 and the Dixie Highway. But the airport is not far from there and businessmen from Dayton knew to get there because there was a trap shooting club that operated literally right at the edge of the airport until a couple of decades ago. So they knew how to get there and where it was.</li><li>Mark: That\'s interesting. I\'ve got a gun range on a flight path of stuff coming in. Okay.</li><li>Janet: Yes. The Atlanta airport and several other places were where racetracks had been. You could drive there because, obviously, we had to drive there to race your cars around. So it was areas where there was already some accessibility but the land was cheap. Atlanta and I think Minneapolis-St Paul airports -- there were race tracks there originally.</li><li>Mark: So if we pivot, what do we think about looking forward out in the future?</li><li>Janet: In the United States, building new airports is still extraordinarily difficult and finding the places for them would be very very difficult because, well, let\'s think about <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denver_International_Airporthttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denver_International_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Denver</a>. They went out and they bought 50 square miles out in the middle of nowhere. Noise complaints went up after DIA opened up.</li><li>Mark: So you’ve got to wonder, I remember taking some of the first flights into DIA and you went over nothing other than a herd of buffalo. So were the buffalo complaining?</li><li>Janet: Yes, but it was people who had moved out to that area expecting peace and quiet and now airplanes were coming in there. There\'s literally nowhere you could build an airport where there aren’t going to be some complaints about it.</li><li>Mark: Yes, in that way probably explains the multibillion dollar upgrade to LaGuardia and what they\'re going to start at O\'Hare, and what they did down in Atlanta with the runway extension.</li><li>Janet: Yes. Right, expanding and improving the airports that we have I think is what\'s going to happen into the future. I mean, if you think about it in the United States, we built very few airports since the 1950s. Most commercial airports that exist in the United States were in place in one way or the other either as a private field or military field by World War II</li><li>Mark: That makes sense</li><li>Janet: Completely greenfield airports are relatively rare after World War II</li><li>Mark: I thought that LaGuardia in that new terminal had gotten security right. When you looked at the whole setup, that was really nice.</li><li>Janet: After 9 /11, airports had to wedge security in there. A lot of what airports have done since then has been trying to redesign themselves so that the security becomes a more convenient and seamless experience because right after 9/11, it was all improvised and it was wherever you could put it. And no one knew how long those security protocols we\'re going to last. So who wants to spend millions of dollars redesigning? But now that it\'s fairly clear that these security protocols are going to be forever now, within the last five or 10 years, I would say airports have begun to spend the real money to redesign so that the security fits.</li><li>Mark: It becomes integral as opposed to a bolt-on. And I think people are saying to themselves, look, it\'s been 20 years, it\'s about time security stops being an afterthought. Let\'s face it, It\'s an integral part of the experience.</li><li>Janet: Yes, Let\'s start applying some lessons learned here.</li><li>Mark: Yes, because there are a lot of them. Thanks to Dr Janet Bednarek, Professor of History at the University of Dayton. Janet, thanks very much for taking the time to talk with us on the TravelCommons podcast.</li><li>Janet: My pleasure. Thank you for inviting me.</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #176</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_176.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #176 — Why Business Travel Is Coming Back; Learning Airport History','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-176-why-business-travel-is-coming-back-learning-airport-history','','','2021-07-28 10:14:46','2021-07-28 15:14:46','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3550',0,'post','',0),
(3551,1,'2021-06-15 11:53:31','2021-06-15 16:53:31','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_1985\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/IMG_0205.jpeg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1985\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/IMG_0205-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"Groups of people on a frozen lake\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> I think that\'s our tour group up there[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I can feel travel beginning to come back. <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/coronavirus/passenger-throughput\">TSA checkpoint volumes</a> are hitting post-pandemic highs, business travelers are starting to come out from behind their Zoom sessions, and vaccination rates are prompting more people to make travel plans. So on this episode, we first talk to , CEO of <a href=\"https://www.toursbylocals.com/\">ToursByLocals</a> about the state of the local tour market and then about how frequent travelers are starting to stretch their atrophied travel muscles. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_176.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #176: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>This Week</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. Just one bit of travel since the last episode, a drive down to Nashville, Tennessee.&nbsp; Right at about a year ago, this drive was my first post-lockdown trip. I talked about it at the start of <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/06/09/podcast-164-first-post-lockdown-trips-travel-credit-cards/\" title=\"Podcast #164 — First-Post Lockdown Trips; Travel Credit Cards\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">episode #164</a> -- no one was on the road save for a few trucks and a few folks like me. It was a drag race down I-65, 80-85 mph the whole way, maybe dropping down to 70 going through Indianapolis and Louisville. You couldn’t be sure what restaurants had their drive-thrus open, so car snacks were key. But now, it’s back to the normal drive -- lots of trucks and having to jockey for position with them on the 2-lane stretches, slow-downs through construction zones, and having to think again about timing the drive so I thread through Chicago, Indianapolis, Louisville, and Nashville without hitting rush hours.</li><li>A year ago, the restaurants that were open were only doing take-out, so I ate in my hotel room every night, which led to me putting “bring-your-own dining sets” on my 2020 travelers gift guide 6 months later.</li><li>One thing that hasn’t changed is hotels not cleaning rooms during the stay.&nbsp; On this trip, I was in a Courtyard for 4 days and no one but me walked into that room. At what level of COVID cases or vaccination rates do they also have to get back to normal service because walking back into the smell of damp wet towels every day, or having to find a hall garbage can to throw out the takeaway Korean is getting a little old. I do give that Courtyard points, though, for bringing back the free lobby coffee.</li><li>I’m heading down to Miami next week for my first post-pandemic business trip. At the start of the year, everyone was talking about how business travel won’t be back until the end of 2022 or into 2023, and even then, it won’t come all the way back because Zoom and Teams will have replaced the need for 20-30% of business trips. But, I dunno, the TSA is <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/coronavirus/passenger-throughput\">regularly reporting</a> new highs in post-pandemic checkpoint traffic -- 1.63 million passengers the first Sunday of May and 1.64 million the first Thursday of May, averaging 8 times the traffic from the same weekday last year. And I don’t think it’s all leisure travel. I’m starting to see some 2019 behaviors coming back -- execs flying out to a plant to do a one-hour town hall in person; people coming together, physically, in an office conference room to get around some white boards and solve a problem. Is it Zoom fatigue or reversion to the mean -- at least for the vaccinated? I dunno, but I’m kinda looking forward to getting back in the saddle -- well, except for next week’s horse being a 7am Monday rush hour flight out of ORD.</li><li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<em>A Foolish Game</em>&nbsp;by Zep Hurme&nbsp;(c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license.&nbsp;http://ccmixter.org/files/zep_hurme/46448.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/04/10/podcast-174-how-the-pros-plan-their-taproom-tourism/\" title=\"Podcast #174 — How the Pros Plan Their Taproom Tourism\">the last episode</a>, I talked about the spike of publicity around the deterioration of Uber and Lyft’s service -- spiraling wait times that leads to big price surges that leads to driver cancellations as they work to maximize their pay. It’s not getting any better. I retweeted an Uber driver’s <a href=\"https://twitter.com/SpiderKeithLutz/status/1386487138728939521\">screenshots</a> showing no cars at ORD and MDW on a Sunday night -- prime time with people coming home from weekend trips, and it’s not a one-off event, especially at MDW. It’s also starting to make people rethink travel plans. A colleague on my Miami trip moved from a Hyatt to a Marriott closer to our meeting place, saying she couldn’t trust Uber to show up in time. And even for me, I’ll get up earlier than I need to so I can catch public transit to ORD in case Uber or Lyft fail and I can’t find a cab. It doesn’t feel like that $250 million “driver stimulus” Uber was touting last month has made much of an impact.</li><li>Empty Hertz lots has also been a multi-episode arc that doesn’t look like it’ll go away soon. Rental car companies dumped cars during a historically high used car market to generate cash that saved them at the start of the pandemic. <a href=\"https://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-biz-car-rental-shortage-turo-avail-20210507-enusm6m2ijbm5geeyefs6d6atu-story.html\">Hertz dropped almost 200,000 vehicles in the back half of 2020. While Avis’s fleet shrunk about 31%</a>. But now that travel has snapped back faster than expected, they can’t get more cars; the new car inventories are at historic lows because of chip shortages.&nbsp;</li><li>And the combination of these two is a helluva pincer movement on a lot of returning travelers because they’d ditched rental cars for the convenience of Uber. Now they have neither. I plan on doing a good bit of walking in Miami.</li><li>DMV managers across the country must’ve breathed a sigh of relief when they saw Homeland Security announcing yet another delay in Real ID enforcement for air travel, this time to May 2023. I remember in 2019, more than a year before the original October 2020 enforcement date, the warning signs went up at the TSA desks in airports and immediately there were predictions of mass chaos.&nbsp; I was one of them. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/09/20/podcast-155-rj-delays-street-food-in-poland-and-hungary/\" title=\"Podcast #155 — RJ Delays; Street Food in Poland and Hungary\">episode #155</a> in September 2019, I said “Note to self – don’t book any travel in October 2020.” But then, 6 months later in March 2020, as COVID shut down DMV offices along with the rest of the economy, DHS made the obvious call to kick the deadline down the road a year to October 2021. I remember my first post-lockdown flight in June, the TSA desks at MDW still had the old 2020 signs up. A few months back, some friends had to renew their driver’s licenses and so figured they’d get the Real ID version. After some 8 hrs of queuing at a just-reopened Illinois DMV, they had gold-starred IDs and were good to go for October travel. Last month, a little alarm bell went off in my head -- “You know, that deadline is 6 months away; you need to start thinking about this.” But just as I started to, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/DHSgov/status/1387111972773277700\">the news hit my Twitter feed</a> -- delayed not just a year, but to May 2023, 18 years after it was signed into law. At what point is Real ID past it’s “Best Used By” date -- if not already?</li><li>Many of us lost track of these peripheral travel bits during lockdown. We were driving our daughter Claire to ORD for a flight to Philadelphia last month. She pulled up her boarding pass on American’s mobile app -- “Hey, I don’t have PreCheck!” Huh, well maybe there’s something wonky with the app, I told her. Hit a kiosk if you have time and pull another boarding pass. Turns out, because of construction traffic, she didn’t have time but the regular TSA line was short, so it wasn’t a problem. But the same thing happened on her flight home -- on Southwest this time. OK, not a res system glitch. She logged into the TSA website. Her Global Entry, which includes PreCheck, had expired a few months back. Which prompted Irene to log in; she was expiring <em>that day</em> so she immediately hit the Renew button -- and then spent the next 30 minutes reconstructing our travel history for the last 5 years. Thank God for cell phone photo archives. I figured I should check mine too. Logging in was a little bit of a hassle -- I had to create a new account at login.gov, some federated government login that replaced TSA’s login. Once in, I saw my expiration date isn’t until the end of the year, so I’ll start thinking about it in June or July.&nbsp;</li><li><a href=\"https://twitter.com/CrainsChicago/status/1387055231905648643\">United Airlines CEO said searches for flights to Europe jumped 19 % </a>after the head of the European Union said vaccinated US travelers would be allowed into the EU this summer. And shortly after that, United put on new summer flights to Iceland, Croatia, and Greece - certainly not business travel destinations.</li><li>I had already placed my bet on the UK opening by Thanksgiving. Actually, I was repeating the same bet I placed about this time last year when cash and frequent flier prices went cratered. I booked ORD-LHR flights on American for 30,000 points each. When I had to cancel in September, the agent said “Wow! That was a great deal!. Yeah, I knew it. The price of this year’s bet was 50% higher. But with the US and UK vaccination rates, it’s feeling like a safer bet.</li><li>The riskier bet was plunking down a deposit on a bike trip in Italy in mid-October. There was a lot of “It’s non-refundable so buy our trip insurance” language in bold italic font. So I went back and re-listened to episodes <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/05/08/podcast-163-new-world-of-travel-insurance-getting-medical-help-on-the-road/\" title=\"Podcast #163 — New World of Travel Insurance; Getting Medical Help on the Road\">#163</a> and <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/12/podcast-173-whats-new-in-travel-insurance-keeping-ahead-of-expiring-miles/\" title=\"Podcast #173 — What’s New in Travel Insurance; Keeping Ahead of Expiring Miles\">#173</a> where we talked about travel insurance and then dug deep into the insurance rider for the tour provider’s insurance and the travel insurance I’d get for free if I charge it on my Amex or Chase Sapphire cards. One hour and a couple of three-column tables later, I first threw out the Amex insurance; it was sorely lacking. Then comparing the tour company with Chase, neither of them offered cancellation coverage if a, what is it, a fifth wave of COVID (I’ve lost count) causes Italy to close its borders again. Running through the rest of the comparison, the tour company offered a bit more, but not enough (at least to me) to justify the additional $760 cost for Irene and me. So I charged the deposit on the Sapphire card and am hoping for the best.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/media/files/DJBLUE/11541\">Hear Me</a></em>&nbsp;by DJ Blue &nbsp;(c) copyright 2007 Licensed under Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/\">Attribution Noncommercial Share-Alike</a> license http://ccmixter.org/media/files/DJBLUE/11541.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>How to Find Local Tour Guides</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>This is a topic where I need to, up front, state my priors -- I don’t do well with structure when I travel. Well, let me refine that a little -- I don’t do well with <em>other people</em> applying structure on me when I travel. I don’t cruise, I’ve always hated forced “team-building” outings during company sales meetings, and I cringe whenever I run across tour guides walking backwards, reciting factoids to trailing lines of people tethered to them through wireless headphones. To be honest, I look down on them -- I can do better, more authentically with my own research.&nbsp;</li><li>But that’s really more pride, and maybe a bit of cheapness, talking than real facts. I’ve had great experiences with small tours. Way back in episode #105 -- 8 years ago! It always amazes me how long I’ve done this; and amazes even more how long many of you have been listening -- I talked about a couple of private tours that completely readjusted my attitude -- a tour through Saigon with an ex-South Vietnamese army officer, a food market tour in Madrid, a wine tour in Priorat.&nbsp; They were phenomenal, but they were all second-degree connections -- friends recommending other friends or acquaintances. So unless you have a lot of friends with connections to places you want to visit, that word-of-mouth model doesn’t scale.</li><li>Which leads me to this episode’s guest, <a href=\"https://www.toursbylocals.com/TBL/WebObjects/ToursByLocals.woa/1/wo/y2c7lZDKnxUUHYGLem9YgM/0.41.1.1.50.3\">Paul Melhus</a>, CEO &amp; Founder of <a href=\"https://www.toursbylocals.com/\">ToursByLocals</a>, a private tours marketplace. I talked with Paul about the local tour market, how he fared during the COVID travel meltdown, and what things look like from his vantage point as we’re coming out on the other side.<ul><li>Mark: Paul, help us understand your marketplace, how you help travelers search and book for local tours. This is a space that had a lot of startup activity, say five years ago. Everybody was a peer-to-peer tour marketers and the Uber of local tours. And now though, it seems that we\'ve got a mix of large companies, Airbnb Experiences, Viator, and then smaller folks, offering a broad range of tours like yourself and Get Your Guide, and then some specialized niches in things like food, Eat With. And then last episode, we talked with Rob Cheshire about what he\'s doing in <em><a href=\"http://thisweekincraft.beer\" title=\"thisweekincraft.beer\">This Week In Craft Beer</a></em>. So, help us understand the market space.</li><li>Paul: <a href=\"https://www.toursbylocals.com/\">ToursByLocals</a> is a platform, and our goal is to connect independent tour guides with independent travelers who want to have that kind of unique experience. I\'ve often wondered why it is that we seem to have been successful. We started in 2008; somehow we\'ve managed to thrive, and we always started right from the get-go to make sure that the guides that we\'re on our site were competent, qualified, able to do what they said they would do. So we feel like our network of, we’re at 4,750 guides right now, is a curated list.</li><li>Mark: So that curation, it\'s not so much the Uber for local tours, maybe the Angie\'s List for local tours.</li><li>Paul: Yeah, I guess, Yeah, that\'s a good idea because I think a lot of other companies, they just went out and tried to get a lot of guides and they didn\'t really worry too much about making sure that every one of them is going to be quality, responsive -- that\'s a big thing -- and then it\'s the consistency of everybody knows how it works. In some cases, especially if the tour is more high value, like we have some safaris in Africa, for example where the customer will pay $23,000 and the guide, in order to deliver that tour, &nbsp;they can\'t fund all of that on their own account, so we advance them funds. But you know if things were to go south, well, we\'re here. And we have done that in the past, refund the traveler because who knows, maybe there was some weather-related event that caused the thing to get canceled and then, so we\'re out the $5-6,000, but the customer is made whole.</li><li>Mark: So there\'s really two things that you\'re offering above and beyond just the search and book. You\'re offering curation and you\'re offering escrow. So you\'re taking some of that uncertainty in both of those areas, uncertainty about the qualification and then uncertainty about performance, you guys are taking that on.  Paul, you talked about Covid. How has this curated network of tour guides held up through Covid?</li><li>Paul: Right now, our maximum number of tour guides listed on the site was just over 5,000 and that was February 2020. Now we\'re at 4,750. So, not huge and we have a status of tour guide called <em>on hold </em>-- for the time being, I don\'t want to be on the site, but I want to be able to come back once it\'s safe. For an example. We had a guide in Denmark, had an elderly mother and she just didn\'t want to be out there with people because she had to look after her parent. So we have a project right now to contact all of these people and see about getting them back on the site. But the other thing that offset the loss was, rather than laying all of our staff off, we repurposed them and tried to infill a lot of the smaller destinations, the Nashville\'s, Flagstaff Arizona. And of course, Yellowstone National Park where our sales are up 1,300% over 2019 levels, which was a good year.</li><li>Mark: That was the trend last fall, and I think going into the spring was everybody wanted to do outdoor stuff. Right?</li><li>Paul: Oh, it really is. Now that people have got their vaccines, they want to travel and the easiest place to travel is domestically. So, we\'re seeing a real boost in US travel.</li><li>Mark: What do you see around trends? &nbsp;Do you see an uptick, and where is it?</li><li>Paul: A metric that we track very closely is the conversion rate of our tour guides. So, if we send them an inquiry from a traveler, what percentage of those inquiries turned into a booking? We\'ve noticed that the conversion rate is about half of what it was in 2019. Because normally a &nbsp;good guide converts about 40% of the inquiries and now it\'s fallen down to about 20%. There\'s a lot of dreamers out there. That\'s what we\'re thinking.</li><li>Mark: There\'s a lot of people shopping, but they\'re not buying yet.</li><li>Paul: Not quite yet. Now basically there\'s the people that are booking are kind of falling into two buckets. Normally we would have kind of a nice smooth curve of not too many short notice bookings and then it would be a bulge and then tail off farther out. But what we\'re finding is that people are booking within a 2-week window, so short notice, or their booking into 2022. We recently extended our booking calendar out 26 months and that\'s driven some surprisingly long-term bookings. It\'s that middle that\'s missing and I think that\'s where they want to go. But until such time as you can actually get on a plane and happily go to London without having a 14-day quarantine when you show up, people are just not going to do it.</li><li>Mark: Super. Paul Melhus, CEO of <a href=\"http://toursbylocals.com\">ToursByLocals</a>. Thank you very much for taking the time to talk to us here at the TravelCommons.</li></ul></li><li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<em>Gargantua</em>&nbsp;by Admiral Bob (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/46361 Ft: My Free Mickey, Martijn de Boer</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Rebuilding Travel Muscle</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Frequent travelers, road warriors, mostly sitting at home for the past 15 months, certainly not heading to the airport every week or two, our travel muscles have&nbsp; atrophied. That rhythm, that cadence, that confidence that separated us from all those regular travelers -- well, all that and premiere status lines and lounge access which also physically separated us. I noticed this loss of travel muscle tone a bit on my trips to Tucson and San Diego over the last couple of months. I had to think a lot harder about those trips -- what to pack, when to leave -- things that were second nature to me, say, 18 months ago when I was traveling every week to Charlottesville, VA or Phoenix. Even on personal travel -- to Poland, Hungary, Estonia, Finland -- I had everything down; on the road, I had my groove.</li><li>Pretty much all of my travelling friends breathed a sigh of relief during the first 6-8 months of lockdown -- first, happy to be home and safe; then settling in, enjoying the extended family time, picking up some new hobby (even frequent travelers weren’t immune from the sourdough craze). But toward the end of the year, I could hear a bit of ansty-ness, and now, vaccines in arms, I’m seeing people getting back out on the road, beginning to rebuild those travel muscles.</li><li>It’s been a pretty quick snapback. Remember, back in December, people like Bill Gates were saying to large virtual conferences that 50% of business travel would disappear and video conferencing was the new normal. I think the big ramp up in vaccination rates flipped this script. Again, back in December, the euphoria of vaccine approvals was quickly overwritten by the depressing logistics of manufacturing ramp-ups and cold-chain distribution. But now, five months later, people are again sitting across desks and conference tables from each other; initially masked, but then quickly running through their vaccination statuses and comfort levels so they feel safe dropping their masks and getting on with business. This “new normal” feels like it’s trending pretty quickly back to the old normal.&nbsp;</li><li>At least for one-on-one meetings. Larger meetings and public spaces can’t do those same negotiations. But that’s enough for a start. Those same friends of mine who were loving their cocoons and sour dough recipes last year are looking to break out now. Like me, they tend to have pretty short attention spans and travel gives them the change, the external stimulus they need -- new places with new people to see and new things to do.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>The seating chart for my flight down to Miami shows a full flight and is asking for volunteers to take a later flight. And this for a 7am Monday morning flight -- first flight out, the standard business traveler choice. A lot of folks are getting back into that rhythm.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #175</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>The new website makes it a lot easier to subscribe. There’s a drop down menu at the top of each page, a set of subscribe links at the bottom, and a big red “Subscribe” button in the middle of the home page. You can use all those buttons, links and menus or you can just search for us on <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; with everybody and their mother starting up a podcast, it’s really the only way to grow. </li><li>I\'m not doing Patreon or trying to figure out Apple’s new podcast paid subscription. So if you’d like this podcast and would like to support it, please recommend it to one or two of your friends; maybe folks who traveled a lot -- before COVID -- or wished they could travel a lot. I’d appreciate it.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_176.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #176 — Why Business Travel Will Come Back; Learning History of Airports','','inherit','closed','closed','','3550-revision-v1','','','2021-06-15 11:53:31','2021-06-15 16:53:31','',3550,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3551',0,'revision','',0),
(3552,1,'2021-06-15 12:05:12','2021-06-15 17:05:12','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_1985\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/IMG_0205.jpeg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1985\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/IMG_0205-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"Groups of people on a frozen lake\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> I think that\'s our tour group up there[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I can feel travel beginning to come back. <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/coronavirus/passenger-throughput\">TSA checkpoint volumes</a> are hitting post-pandemic highs, business travelers are starting to come out from behind their Zoom sessions, and vaccination rates are prompting more people to make travel plans. So on this episode, we first talk to , CEO of <a href=\"https://www.toursbylocals.com/\">ToursByLocals</a> about the state of the local tour market and then about how frequent travelers are starting to stretch their atrophied travel muscles. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_176.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #176: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>This Week</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studio as Chicago and the state of Illinois completely reopen for business -- no more capacity limits, no more socially distanced sitting -- just in time for the summer music festival season. No capacity limits, but you have to show proof of vaccination or a negative COVID test to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with 100,000 other music fans. Irene and I did that one year, check -- don’t need to do it again. I think I aged out of that demographic -- back in the ‘90’s. </li><li>Since the last episode, I first flew down to Miami on business, and then over to New York City for a long weekend. Miami is always an interesting business destination; it’s got its own unique vibe. It starts at the airport; officially bilingual -- Spanish and English, in that order -- but it seems half the time when they make PA announcements, they just skip the English version. The client’s office was in the Wynwood Art District. It was my first time in this neighborhood; it had a kinda typical newly gentrified vibe -- lots of first generation food places: an upscale doughnut shop, a poké lunch joint, a couple of microbrewery taprooms (always key for me). What wasn’t typical was the amount of wall art; not graffiti as much as very cool murals and street art, giving the neighborhood a bright, colorful vibe while probably painting over some otherwise dire looking buildings.</li><li>I stayed a few mile south in the Marriott on Biscayne Bay where some combination of my status and patience with a front desk trainee trying to solo on the property management system for the first time earned me a top floor bayside room looking out over the Port of Miami cruise terminal with 4 big cruise ships tied up, waiting for the CDC to drop their cruise ban.</li><li>One morning, when it felt the humidity had dipped below 80%, I decided to skip Uber and ride a Lyft scooter up to the Art District. I’ve talked, in past episodes, how much I like riding scooters. I’ve ridden scooters in Chicago, Phoenix, DC -- everywhere I could find them. But last year, I didn’t ride them even though they were all around Chicago. There’s a fun, frivolous vibe about riding a scooter, but 2020 was anything but fun or frivolous and so I didn’t feel like riding them. But on this morning, with just a touch of humidity in the air and not much traffic on the streets, having a little fun riding a scooter to the office felt, once more, like the right thing to do.</li><li>Bridge Music — <em>A Foolish Game</em> by Zep Hurme (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/zep_hurme/46448.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Talking in the last episode about needing to rebuild atrophied travel muscles after the long lockdown layoff generated a few comments. Chris Christensen of the Amateur Traveler Podcast dropped me a note saying:<ul><li>I can relate. We just got back from our first post vaccine trip to the Galapagos. First time on a plane since 2019.</li></ul></li><li>First trip back and you go to the Galapagos! No warm-ups? Hope you didn’t sprain any of those travel muscles.</li><li>Jim McDonough’s first trip back wasn’t simple either. He wrote on the TravelCommons Facebook page<ul><li>Last month, we made our first trip since January, 2020 to Kodiak, Alaska of all places, attending the decommissioning of a ship I helped the Coast Guard put into commission in 1971. San Diego to Alaska is a long way. Alaska Airlines is really nice. But I noticed my travel skills had atrophied.  Approaching TSA, I realized that the red mesh bag I usually have for holding metal objects wasn’t in my bag. Then I sat for a while at a gate in Anchorage until remembering that Admiral\'s Club members can use Alaska\'s lounge. I\'m ready to go again, but probably not to Kodiak!</li></ul></li><li>Kudos to both of you guys for jumping straight into the deep-end. But you gotta be careful -- weak travel muscles can make you vulnerable. A few days ago, I re-tweeted a thread about a phishing attack -- a very well-formatted “make sure your TSA Precheck doesn’t expire -- click here” e-mail with a link that, as you can imagine, didn’t take you to tsa.gov; though Aaron Woodin did tweet back the question “If you click on the link, does it confiscate your water?” It’s a well-timed phish, especially as more business travelers are gearing up to get back on the road. </li><li>And in the last episode, I talked about Irene and Claire losing track of their Global Entry expiration dates -- Claire’s expired and Irene hit the “renew” button on the last day. Now you may think -- Global Entry? Big deal, who’s traveling internationally right now anyhow? But remember, for $100 for 5 years, Global Entry gives you the express lane thru immigration <em>plus</em> TSA PreCheck, vs. $85 for PreCheck alone. Hence I always tell people to spend the extra $15 for Global Entry. So anyhow, Irene and Claire fill out the on-line renewal form, pay the $100 (which Irene immediately got back because she used my Amex Platinum card), and then nothing. Silence. Crickets. Which is odd, because when I renewed my Global Entry, I had to go to ORD for an interview and an updated photo. But for them, nothing. Our flight to New York, to LaGuardia is coming up. The night before we leave, Irene gets an e-mail -- no link, mind you, just a message -- “Congrats! Your Global Entry has been renewed.” Yay! Except that when she checked into Southwest, there’s no little blue PreCheck checkmark on her boarding pass. Claire got her Congrats! e-mail the next day, but again, no check on the boarding pass. Ugh. The prior week when I was in Miami, the non-PreCheck lines tailed back the length of the terminal. But, as it turned out, it wasn’t a huge hassle. We left a little earlier for MDW and no horror lines. Three days later when they checked in for our flight home, they both got the blue check on their boarding passes. So spinning my IT propeller, it would seem that the airlines aren’t pinging that PreCheck database more than once every couple of days.</li><li>This trip was the first time since January 2019 I’d flown into LGA in almost 28 months; that’s 2⅓ years. That shocked me; I had to go back and check my calendars and my math again, because it seemed like I was always in New York. But it’s right. Second shock -- flying into the new rebuilt Terminal B, bright, airy, spacious, <em>clean</em>; everything the old Terminal B I flew into 2+ years ago was not. It was the low-ceilinged rat maze that, 7 years ago, then-Vice President Joe Biden said was like a third-world country -- which I actually think was less of an insult to LGA and more of an insult to many developing country airports. Walking down that old concourse to catch an American or United flight, it was not unusual to have to dodge a big plastic garbage can placed right in the middle, that had a hose coming down from the bottom of a make-shift funnel made out of plastic tarp, hanging from some ceiling tiles, collecting rainwater from roof leak. No one would ever look at that and think “What the hell?” because you’d see it like once a month. But now, it’s phenomenal; they’ve done a great job. I used to say that SFO’s new Terminal 2 was my favorite terminal -- where American and, back then, Virgin America flew out of. But now, it’s LGA’s Terminal B. There’s still construction going on, and getting a cab to the city is still a hassle, and a necessary one because there’s still no subway link, but once you’re inside, it’s great! Give yourself a little extra time to see the water fountain light show. And having a little downtime in Terminal B is no longer the purgatory it used to be, because there are now places that you actually sit down and eat and grab a beer; no more standing around having to juggle your bag and an Auntie Anne’s pretzel. I rarely have anything good to say about the Port Authority, but they’ve done a good job here.</li><li>And the TSA, another government organization I don’t often have good things to say about, does a nice job <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/coronavirus/passenger-throughput\">publishing the daily volumes of air passengers</a> passing through security checkpoints. Just scanning it you can see the growth kicking up in the February/March timeframe. Though if you’ve flown anytime over the past couple of months, you don’t need to look at the numbers; you’ve felt it in fuller planes and longer checkpoint lines. The Friday of Memorial Day weekend, the end of May, checkpoint volume was up 599% over the same Friday last year, and then this past Friday, June 11, checkpoint volume broke 2 million for the first time since the March lockdowns. The numbers are still 25-30% below 2019’s, but the gap is closing. </li><li>And then the keynote from Apple’s WorldWide Developers Conference gave me something else good to say about the TSA; working with Apple to let you use a digital version of your driver’s license at security checkpoints. I’ve already noticed that, at a few airports, you no longer have to show your boarding pass -- they just pop your driver’s license into a scanning machine and you’re on your way. No fumbling to pull up your boarding pass and scanning it. But now, no fumbling for my wallet if I can pull up my license on my phone. Actually, better than my drivers license would be my Global Entry card because it’s Real ID while my Illinois license is not. Could save me an extra trip to the DMV if and when the TSA decides to get serious about Real ID again -- which I hope is never. </li><li>Continuing on our now 3-episode arc on Uber and Lyft service, the long wait times, the huge price surges. Heading out for my flight down to Miami, the 17-mile trip Monday morning Uber ride to ORD, at $74 with a 2x surge, cost almost as much as the 1,100-mile flight on American down to MIA at $100 one way. There is no rational way to explain this, so I’ll leave it here as a meditation exercise for microeconomic pricing theorists and move on. Except, ‘cause I guess I can’t just <em>can’t</em> leave it here, to note that I had no problem with Uber or Lyft service in Miami. And except for that one joyful morning riding a scooter, the South Florida heat and humidity had me lighting up the Uber app multiple times a day. So I’m guessing those Uber carjackings in Chicago a few months back are having some residual impact on their driver recruitment efforts.</li><li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/media/files/DJBLUE/11541\">Hear Me</a></em> by DJ Blue  (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/\">Attribution Noncommercial Share-Alike</a> license http://ccmixter.org/media/files/DJBLUE/11541.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Why Business Travel Will Come Back</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Last Friday, the first day of Chicago’s full reopening and the same day the TSA’s checkpoint volume broke the 2 million passenger mark for the first time post-lockdown, a business colleague and I met for some happy hour beers and oysters in a bar in Wrigleyville. We were sitting at a second floor table against an open window, looking over at Wrigley Field as fans poured out of the Clark-&amp;-Addison main gate and into nearby bars to celebrate the Cubs’ victory over the St Louis Cardinals in what was the first full-capacity game since September 2019. Mike’s in consulting too; he’d been talking about how he was itching to get back out on the road to see his clients, on how he’s working to convince the firm’s management to lift, or at least bend their travel ban so he can see the clients again -- at least the ones who also want to start meeting people face-to-face again. Zoom and Teams calls are <em>OK</em>, they can suffice for some things, but there are so many things you miss when you’re not there in person. </li><li>In an outta-left-field sorta way, the masses of Cubs fans blocking traffic on Addison St helped prove Mike’s point. Official attendance was 35,112, not quite a sell-out, but having butts in 84% of the seats for a 1:20p Friday game isn’t bad. But similar to the “why travel to a meeting when you can video conference?” question, why go to a baseball game in person when you can watch it on TV where it’s covered by not just one crappy laptop camera, but 5-8 HD cameras with clean lenses and run by professionals? I know, it’s a stupid strawman question that we all know the answer to -- it’s not just the game, it’s the whole experience. And it’s not an either/or -- many times watching the game on TV is fine, and more convenient; but sometimes, you gotta get off the couch and go see the game live, in person, with a bunch of friends.</li><li>A couple of recent interactions(?) over the last couple of weeks drove this home. I’ve had multiple video calls with a programmer over the past month, probably 3-4 hour worth, going through some system re-architecting. After all that, I thought I had it pretty much down. Now the guy has started coming back to the office -- he said working from home for 14 months was being under house arrest -- so I pulled him into a conference room and started sketching stuff on a whiteboard. We stood there shoulder-to-shoulder and passed the blue marker back and forth, and in 20 minutes realized that there were 3 key facts about the existing systems that never came across in those hours of video calls and that completely changed the new architecture. But they did in that in-person 20 minutes. And afterwards, the guy said to me “Hey, that was fun. Let’s do some more of that” -- a reaction I’ve never heard about a video conference… ever. And at the same time, I had the exact opposite experience -- trying to explain a concept on a week’s worth of video calls that I know we could’ve handled in an hour if we could’ve been in the same room together, but we can’t because he’s overseas and can’t get through the US travel lockdown. So we trudged through the calls… and the frustration.</li><li>Which was pretty much the point that Mike was trying to make over honking buses and shouts of “Go Cubs Go”. “Yeah, I can have a meeting on Zoom, but I can’t have the pre-meeting ‘how are things going’ chats as we’re walking into the room, or the post-meeting ‘Can I ask you what you really meant in there’ sidebar, or pick up the non-verbal glances people will shoot at each other. The meeting’s important, but so’s the choreography that surrounds the meeting -- maybe even more so -- and that’s what I can’t get now. That and I’ve worked with a lot of these clients for 10, 15 years, so they’re friends too. And I miss that too.”</li><li>Airlines are saying that business travel is still down 70% from pre-lockdown levels, but that almost all of their top corporate accounts are telling them they plan to re-start travel later this year -- but first they gotta figure out how to get people out of their sweats and back into the office.</li><li>Bridge Music — <em>Gargantua</em> by Admiral Bob (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/46361 Ft: My Free Mickey, Martijn de Boer</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Learning the History of Airports</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Frequent travelers, road warriors, mostly sitting at home for the past 15 months, certainly not heading to the airport every week or two, our travel muscles have&nbsp; atrophied. That rhythm, that cadence, that confidence that separated us from all those regular travelers -- well, all that and premiere status lines and lounge access which also physically separated us. I noticed this loss of travel muscle tone a bit on my trips to Tucson and San Diego over the last couple of months. I had to think a lot harder about those trips -- what to pack, when to leave -- things that were second nature to me, say, 18 months ago when I was traveling every week to Charlottesville, VA or Phoenix. Even on personal travel -- to Poland, Hungary, Estonia, Finland -- I had everything down; on the road, I had my groove.</li><li>Pretty much all of my travelling friends breathed a sigh of relief during the first 6-8 months of lockdown -- first, happy to be home and safe; then settling in, enjoying the extended family time, picking up some new hobby (even frequent travelers weren’t immune from the sourdough craze). But toward the end of the year, I could hear a bit of ansty-ness, and now, vaccines in arms, I’m seeing people getting back out on the road, beginning to rebuild those travel muscles.</li><li>It’s been a pretty quick snapback. Remember, back in December, people like Bill Gates were saying to large virtual conferences that 50% of business travel would disappear and video conferencing was the new normal. I think the big ramp up in vaccination rates flipped this script. Again, back in December, the euphoria of vaccine approvals was quickly overwritten by the depressing logistics of manufacturing ramp-ups and cold-chain distribution. But now, five months later, people are again sitting across desks and conference tables from each other; initially masked, but then quickly running through their vaccination statuses and comfort levels so they feel safe dropping their masks and getting on with business. This “new normal” feels like it’s trending pretty quickly back to the old normal.&nbsp;</li><li>At least for one-on-one meetings. Larger meetings and public spaces can’t do those same negotiations. But that’s enough for a start. Those same friends of mine who were loving their cocoons and sour dough recipes last year are looking to break out now. Like me, they tend to have pretty short attention spans and travel gives them the change, the external stimulus they need -- new places with new people to see and new things to do.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>The seating chart for my flight down to Miami shows a full flight and is asking for volunteers to take a later flight. And this for a 7am Monday morning flight -- first flight out, the standard business traveler choice. A lot of folks are getting back into that rhythm.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #175</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>The new website makes it a lot easier to subscribe. There’s a drop down menu at the top of each page, a set of subscribe links at the bottom, and a big red “Subscribe” button in the middle of the home page. You can use all those buttons, links and menus or you can just search for us on <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; with everybody and their mother starting up a podcast, it’s really the only way to grow. </li><li>I\'m not doing Patreon or trying to figure out Apple’s new podcast paid subscription. So if you’d like this podcast and would like to support it, please recommend it to one or two of your friends; maybe folks who traveled a lot -- before COVID -- or wished they could travel a lot. I’d appreciate it.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_176.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #176 — Why Business Travel Will Come Back; Learning History of Airports','','inherit','closed','closed','','3550-revision-v1','','','2021-06-15 12:05:12','2021-06-15 17:05:12','',3550,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3552',0,'revision','',0),
(3554,1,'2021-06-15 16:30:58','2021-06-15 21:30:58','[caption id=\"attachment_2128\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/IMG_0419.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2128\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/IMG_0419-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Greetings...[/caption]\n\nBack in front of the mic after 12 days of skipping across northern Europe -- Copenhagen, Brussels, and Scotland. In this episode, we get nostalgic about outside airports in California, talk about how a hospitality mentality is pervasive in hotels but not in restaurants, missing customer service responses from <a href=\"http://united.com\">United Airlines</a> and <a href=\"http://marriott.com\">Marriott</a>, and European perspectives about Chicago.  All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_144.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show Notes -->\n\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #144:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL after 12 days bunny hopping through Northern Europe -- first Copenhagen, then Brussels, and finally St Andrews, Scotland to drop my daughter off for her 4th and final year at University of St Andrews. Prior to that, I had a couple of US trips -- back to Charlottesville, VA -- always a nice place to visit -- and a day trip to Omaha. And while all my European flights last week were fine -- including the 40-min connection in Amsterdam that included a trip through passport control -- late August summer storms forced to call audibles on both trips. As opposed to last month, when my CVG-ORD flight was jacked up by storms in Miami, these flights were cratered by rain that I could see outside the window -- the terminal window or the airplane window.</li>\n 	<li>They both left me less than impressed by United’s notification service. The Monday of my Charlottesville flight, it had been steadily raining in Chicago -- heavily at times. I kept checking the status of the flight -- on-time, on-time on-time. Finally, I headed to ORD, got through security, and then checked again - 3 hour delay? Really, you only just figured that out an hour before departure time? Looking out the window, the rain wasn’t letting up. I could see where this was going. I grabbed dinner and then settled in at the gate to do some work. Every once in a while, I’d check the flight status in the United app -- 3-hr delay, 3-hr delay, 3-hr delay, then wait for it -- cancelled. I wasn’t surprised at the cancellation, but the lack of push notification. Normally, I’d get a message and an e-mail from Amex Travel. Nothing this time. Like I said, though, I wasn’t surprised, and I didn’t have a critical meeting the next morning in Charlottesville. United had “helpfully” booked the same flight out the next night, but a) I couldn’t lose a whole day at the client; and b) I felt United had lost the right to my money for this flight. So, I booked the next morning’s flight on American, caught a cab back home and slept that night in my own bed. Annoying, but, hey, I got over it.</li>\n 	<li>Next week’s trip to Omaha was on yet another rainy day. It was just a day trip, so I drove to ORD and saw the dark grey line of weather coming toward me. I mentally settled in for delay. This one, though, would be more problematic because I was flying into Omaha for a workshop, and flying out to Copenhagen the next evening. That dark grey line hit ORD as we were boarding, so I walked into that workshop about 30 minutes late. We walked outside at noon to grab lunch from a food truck. I could see an even darker grey line of weather. Back in the conference room, I’d check the United app every 30 minutes or so -- on-time, on-time, on-time, cancelled. What?! Again, no notice if I hadn’t been checking. And this was a bit more problematic than last week. I found earlier SW and American flights that weren’t cancelled. I gambled on the AA flight which left a bit later but would save me the crosstown MDW-ORD Uber ride to collect my car. I excused myself early from the workshop and headed back to the airport. Arriving late; leaving early. Not sure that’s the way to make a good first impression</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Zapac/25046\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><i>You are (funky mix)</i></a> by Zapac</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul class=\"\">\n 	<li>Steve Frick, a long time TravelCommons listener, left a note on the website about <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/08/09/podcast-143-how-bad-is-business-travel-for-your-health-make-layovers-fun/\">the last episode</a>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Lots of content as well as comments on this episode. Thoroughly enjoyed the Chicago Midway Layover Southside Taproom Tour video tour, when it comes to travel and Midway, though, all I can think about is delays.</li>\n 	<li>Chicago, I recently sent all the members of my tribe there sans, myself (Someone had to watch the dog, or vice-versa). When my wife travels she always checks baggage..... we\'ve only been married 8 years. Upon arrival, I grabbed her bag off the belt and it was unusually heavy. The reason it contained 2 six-packs of Revolution Brewery beer, God bless this woman.</li>\n 	<li>Travel and health, this one hit home. Somehow I\'ve managed to \"keep it tight\"... somewhat. I hired someone about three years ago, and while he doesn\'t drink he managed to partake in every meal that he was invited to. So much so that the rest of us had an over/under on how fast he could gain 30lbs (Yes, we\'re that cruel &amp; shallow). After two broken pants buttons, he managed to get control.</li>\n 	<li>Sorry for the long comment, but keep up the great work!</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Steve, thanks for that; no apologies needed. And you guys are not the only cruel and shallow ones. I may have told this story before, but I had a project in Memphis and one of the team members had kind of a similar problem as your new hire, except his weakness was barbecue ribs. The team would go out one night a week for ribs -- Corky’s, Central, Germantown Commissary, but then this guy would also do a take-out slab another night. The weight gain was obvious -- our over/under was when he topped 300 on his cholesterol reading.</li>\n 	<li>I was 1 for 2 last month on TravelCommons Chicago meet-ups. I wasn’t able to connect with Keith Love and his son when they were in town early in August, but I did meet up with Rob Cheshire and his UK crew for a bit of a taproom crawl on Chicago’s Near West Side on a Friday night at the end of the month. I even got Rob to relax his anti-AB InBev stance and spend an hour in the Goose Island taproom, complete with a round of Bourbon County Stout. At 14%, it’s a bit larger beer than you’d typically see in a UK pub.</li>\n 	<li>More telling, though, was the discussion I had with Drew, Rob’s friend on his first visit to the US. “Where are the dangerous parts of the city, where all the shootings are?” he asked. Fair question. Three weekends before, 66 people were shot in Chicago; 12 people died. “You’re fine here,” I told him, “but I wouldn’t want to go another mile west.” The next Thursday, I was sitting in a Copenhagen bar waiting out the rain -- my wife and daughter were waiting out the rain clothes shopping; to each their own -- and got talking to the bartender, a young woman who had never been to the US. “Where are you from?” she asked. “Chicago” “I read somewhere that’s the most dangerous city in the world.” I told her my experiences -- my family and I haven’t been impacted, but we also don’t hang out on the South or West sides where all the gang bullets are flying. But given the press about the August shootings, she asked a fair question. Both conversations got my attention; I’ve gotten a bit numb to all the gun violence reporting, which is not a good thing. Travel is all about getting different perspectives, even if they’re about your own home.</li>\n 	<li>In the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/08/09/podcast-143-how-bad-is-business-travel-for-your-health-make-layovers-fun/\">last episode</a>, I relayed Keith Love’s questions about good airport apps, ones that, he said, “actually guide you through airports and their amenities/services.” Chris Christensen of the Amateur Traveler Podcast dropped a lin e saying that he uses GateGuru, run by the same team that does SeatGuru. I haven’t tried it yet, but will download it and give it a go. Narita Airport in Tokyo is taking a different angle. Their free Wi-Fi service comes with a chatbot -- Bebot -- to help travelers. The press release didn’t give any chat samples -- “Bebot, where can I find a non-Asahi beer in this terminal?” “I’m sorry, there is none” -- but it could be useful -- or at least entertaining.</li>\n 	<li>Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/07/03/podcast-142-sleeping-in-business-class-changes-from-chinese-tourists/\">July episode</a>, I mentioned how tight the United Polaris business class seats were on the Triple 7’s that I took between ORD and Frankfurt. Last Monday, Irene and I flew a new American 787 back from London, and it didn’t seem any roomier. We flew back on miles, so were in the Main Cabin Extra section, but walking through Business Class to get there, I almost had to turn my body a bit to get down the aisle, and I’m not that big of a guy. When I got to my seat, the leg room was fine, even with the seat in front of me reclined. But the seats were narrow. The couple in the window and middle seats next to me were larger folks, and I could see it was a less-than-comfortable 8 hours for them.</li>\n 	<li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/08/09/podcast-143-how-bad-is-business-travel-for-your-health-make-layovers-fun/\">the last episode</a>, while not thrilled with American’s on-time performance between ORD and CVG, I was impressed by the customer service I got from their Twitter crew. Indeed, the next day, I added a final note to my tweet stream -- “BTW, while it was an operational failure last night, the Twitter customer service was not. I appreciated the delay explanation and backing me up on the next flight”. And any more, I typically get solid, timely service from Twitter customer service. Indeed, one constant on my Top 10 Travel Tips list is “Use Twitter as a Concierge Service”. So I was surprised when a colleague said to me “I gotta get some more followers so companies pay attention to me on Twitter”. He said he never gets any replies. Anybody else have this problem?</li>\n 	<li>Now while I get good quick responses from the airlines, my recent experience with Marriott was very different. I was trying to get the receipt/the folio from a stay in Colorado Springs. The e-mailed bill never came. Then I went to the website but the download link didn’t work. I submitted a folio request on the website and hit Marriott on Twitter. Twitter was faster, though it took them a full day to respond, which was better than the 12 days it took them to respond to my website query. Neither of which actually resulted in me getting a copy of my bill. I only got that when I gave up on all the digital channels and called the Colo Springs front desk. Now, I knew that would be the fastest way -- and it was; I got an e-mail from them in about 5 minutes. But I’m always interested in seeing how all the new channels work… or don’t. Maybe Marriott needs a chatbot...</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> or our new <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a> at travelcommons -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/35879\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><i>Two Guitars</i></a> by Admiral Bob</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>California Outside Airports</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>A college friend of mine posted a status on Facebook, saying that he was flying home to Boston from Long Beach Airport in Southern California. His comment -- “New favorite airport - outdoor terminals and boarding!!” It was an immediate shot of travel nostalgia for me. My first job out of school, in the mid-80’s, had me regularly traveling from Dallas to San Jose. My folks lived in Huntington Beach, CA and American had direct flights from DFW to Long Beach. So whenever I had to be in San Jose, I’d triangulate through Long Beach for the weekend -- fly in Friday afternoon, hang out on the beach for the weekend, and then catch a 7am Monday morning Alaskan Air flight out of Orange County to San Jose.</li>\n 	<li>I loved that triangle of airports -- LGB, SNA, and SJC. Compared to LAX or SFO, they were compact -- maybe even cozy, if you can apply that adjective to an airport and keep a straight face -- uncrowded, and all of them took advantage of the California climate to be outdoor airports. No jetways, and in LGB’s case, even the baggage carousel was outside. I remember the first time walking out to pick up my luggage at LGB, waiting by a palm tree for my bag to show up. This was right after surviving 2 of the coldest winters in Chicago while going to business school. LGB instantly became my favorite airport.</li>\n 	<li>When you arrived at SJC, the gate agent would meet you at the bottom of the steps and guide you under a covered walkway into the terminal -- almost like a Japanese tour guide, holding her clipboard up. I’d walk through the terminal to the car rental lot, to the little Hertz hut in the middle. I got to know the woman working in the hut, and in those days before Hertz Gold and President’s Circle, that’s all I needed to get an upgrade. Later trips through Palm Springs Airport -- pleasure rather than business -- and I loved that airport too, walking outdoors past the palm trees between terminals. Hard to imagine after 9/11 forced airports to harden their perimeters.</li>\n 	<li>SNA and SJC are no longer outside airports. Big renovations in the ‘90’s replaced the covered walkways with jetways, doing away with that one thing that made them a little special. The renovation of LGB’s terminal 6 years ago installed fire pits and outdoor dining, but no jetways. It’s still an outside airport, as is Palm Springs.</li>\n 	<li>Not that outdoor airports are California-only things. Charlottesville airport, which I’ve been frequenting over the past couple of years, is sort of a quarter to a half outdoors. There’s 4 gates -- 1 or 2 of them have jetways, the rest are outdoor boarding and baggage claim for gate-checked bags. And there’s a nice 2nd-floor outdoor terrace that I do phone calls from when it’s not too hot, or raining.</li>\n 	<li>One of the things I like about outdoor airports is there’s no waiting for gates. The plane lands, parks, they wheel up the stairs -- maybe even two; front and back if you’re lucky -- and off you go. No ORD treatment -- landing and then waiting 20 minutes for your gate to open up. However, the last time I flew into CHO, we landed and stopped short of the usual parking spot. The pilot keyed the mic -- “Our gate is full; we’ll have to wait a couple of minutes.” All us passengers looked at each other -- gate, what gate? Turns out he meant some fancy new ramp thing; instead of stairs, they pushed over some huge covered ramp, complete with a switchback so the descent wasn’t too steep. I dunno, call me old-school (or just old) but in my book, you have to have a proper set of stairs to be a true outdoor airport. Palm trees are optional, but highly recommended.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djlang59/22228\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><em>Garden Of The Forking</em></a><em> </em>by J.Lang</li>\n</ul>\n<b>Hospitality Mentality</b>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Nowadays, it seems that most hotels have got their front desk training pretty well down. I can’t remember the last time I hit an indifferent front desk person when checking in. And given the number of different hotels I stay in, it leads me to the conclusion that this, what I call, a hospitality mentality is a key part of their training, because, based on every other retail experience I have, I know I wouldn’t naturally run into this many nice people in a row. Not that I have a problem with this. It’s nice whenever I’m dragging myself into a hotel late because of flight delays or whatever, that the person checking me in is pleasant, wants to take care of me, walks out from behind the desk give me my key and to point me to the elevators, and seems genuinely concerned about my well-being. Even in hotels that otherwise are a bit “meh”, I find that my standard TripAdvisor review says “But the service was great.”</li>\n 	<li>Which is a huge contrast with the typical service I get at a restaurant where I would expect a hospitality mentality, but am surprised when I get it. Last Sunday night, Irene and I were overnighting in London on our way back from St Andrews, and walked to an Indian restaurant, <a href=\"http://www.dishoom.com/kings-cross/\">Dishoom</a>, up behind King’s Cross station. There was a queue outside the restaurant, typical for a popular place. A guy came out with an iPad, took our name, and told us it would be about a 30 minute wait. That was fine, we wanted a drink before dinner anyhow. They give us a pager -- again, typical stuff -- but now it gets a bit different. Instead of pointing us to a scrum around a bar, someone escorts us to two open seats, asks if the seats are OK for us, and right behind her was a waitress to take our order. Right at about 30 minutes, as we’re finishing our drinks, the pager goes off. We’re collecting our stuff to head back to the hostess stand when a guy walks over to us -- the same guy who took our name in line -- took our glasses and walked us to our table, chatting along the way -- where are you from, Oh I have friends in Chicago, how long are you in London…. We get to the table, but before we sit down, he asks us “Is this table OK for you?”</li>\n 	<li>I can’t remember the last time a busy restaurant asked me if I was happy with the table. Normally, the hostess expects you to be happy she actually seated you. The food was good, but what really impressed me about Dishoom that here was a big, mass-service restaurant with a hospitality mentality. Easy to do at a small place, or a Michelin-starred restaurant (though don’t get me started about French Laundry), but here, in London, a place not necessarily known for great customer service, they had it nailed. Oh, and the chicken curry -- they nailed that too.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #144</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a> and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_144.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #144 — Outside Airports; Hospitality Mentality','','inherit','closed','closed','','2126-revision-v1','','','2021-06-15 16:30:58','2021-06-15 21:30:58','',2126,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3554',0,'revision','',0),
(3555,1,'2021-06-15 19:12:03','2021-06-16 00:12:03','','Airfields_IL_Chicago_C_htm_m252791c8','','inherit','open','closed','','airfields_il_chicago_c_htm_m252791c8','','','2021-06-15 19:12:03','2021-06-16 00:12:03','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Airfields_IL_Chicago_C_htm_m252791c8.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(3556,1,'2021-06-15 19:12:24','2021-06-16 00:12:24','','IMAG0359','','inherit','open','closed','','imag0359','','','2021-06-15 19:12:24','2021-06-16 00:12:24','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/IMAG0359.jpeg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(3557,1,'2021-06-15 19:15:14','2021-06-16 00:15:14','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_1985\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/IMG_0205.jpeg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1985\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/IMG_0205-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"Groups of people on a frozen lake\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> I think that\'s our tour group up there[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I can feel travel beginning to come back. <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/coronavirus/passenger-throughput\">TSA checkpoint volumes</a> are hitting post-pandemic highs, business travelers are starting to come out from behind their Zoom sessions, and vaccination rates are prompting more people to make travel plans. So on this episode, we first talk to , CEO of <a href=\"https://www.toursbylocals.com/\">ToursByLocals</a> about the state of the local tour market and then about how frequent travelers are starting to stretch their atrophied travel muscles. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_176.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #176: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>This Week</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studio as Chicago and the state of Illinois completely reopen for business -- no more capacity limits, no more socially distanced sitting -- just in time for the summer music festival season. No capacity limits, but you have to show proof of vaccination or a negative COVID test to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with 100,000 other music fans. Irene and I did that one year, check -- don’t need to do it again. I think I aged out of that demographic -- back in the ‘90’s. </li><li>Since the last episode, I first flew down to Miami on business, and then over to New York City for a long weekend. Miami is always an interesting business destination; it’s got its own unique vibe. It starts at the airport; officially bilingual -- Spanish and English, in that order -- but it seems half the time when they make PA announcements, they just skip the English version. The client’s office was in the Wynwood Art District. It was my first time in this neighborhood; it had a kinda typical newly gentrified vibe -- lots of first generation food places: an upscale doughnut shop, a poké lunch joint, a couple of microbrewery taprooms (always key for me). What wasn’t typical was the amount of wall art; not graffiti as much as very cool murals and street art, giving the neighborhood a bright, colorful vibe while probably painting over some otherwise dire looking buildings.</li><li>I stayed a few mile south in the Marriott on Biscayne Bay where some combination of my status and patience with a front desk trainee trying to solo on the property management system for the first time earned me a top floor bayside room looking out over the Port of Miami cruise terminal with 4 big cruise ships tied up, waiting for the CDC to drop their cruise ban.</li><li>One morning, when it felt the humidity had dipped below 80%, I decided to skip Uber and ride a Lyft scooter up to the Art District. I’ve talked, in past episodes, how much I like riding scooters. I’ve ridden scooters in Chicago, Phoenix, DC -- everywhere I could find them. But last year, I didn’t ride them even though they were all around Chicago. There’s a fun, frivolous vibe about riding a scooter, but 2020 was anything but fun or frivolous and so I didn’t feel like riding them. But on this morning, with just a touch of humidity in the air and not much traffic on the streets, having a little fun riding a scooter to the office felt, once more, like the right thing to do.</li><li>Bridge Music — <em>A Foolish Game</em> by Zep Hurme (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/zep_hurme/46448.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Talking in the last episode about needing to rebuild atrophied travel muscles after the long lockdown layoff generated a few comments. Chris Christensen of the Amateur Traveler Podcast dropped me a note saying:<ul><li>I can relate. We just got back from our first post vaccine trip to the Galapagos. First time on a plane since 2019.</li></ul></li><li>First trip back and you go to the Galapagos! No warm-ups? Hope you didn’t sprain any of those travel muscles.</li><li>Jim McDonough’s first trip back wasn’t simple either. He wrote on the TravelCommons Facebook page<ul><li>Last month, we made our first trip since January, 2020 to Kodiak, Alaska of all places, attending the decommissioning of a ship I helped the Coast Guard put into commission in 1971. San Diego to Alaska is a long way. Alaska Airlines is really nice. But I noticed my travel skills had atrophied.  Approaching TSA, I realized that the red mesh bag I usually have for holding metal objects wasn’t in my bag. Then I sat for a while at a gate in Anchorage until remembering that Admiral\'s Club members can use Alaska\'s lounge. I\'m ready to go again, but probably not to Kodiak!</li></ul></li><li>Kudos to both of you guys for jumping straight into the deep-end. But you gotta be careful -- weak travel muscles can make you vulnerable. A few days ago, I re-tweeted a thread about a phishing attack -- a very well-formatted “make sure your TSA Precheck doesn’t expire -- click here” e-mail with a link that, as you can imagine, didn’t take you to tsa.gov; though Aaron Woodin did tweet back the question “If you click on the link, does it confiscate your water?” It’s a well-timed phish, especially as more business travelers are gearing up to get back on the road. </li><li>And in the last episode, I talked about Irene and Claire losing track of their Global Entry expiration dates -- Claire’s expired and Irene hit the “renew” button on the last day. Now you may think -- Global Entry? Big deal, who’s traveling internationally right now anyhow? But remember, for $100 for 5 years, Global Entry gives you the express lane thru immigration <em>plus</em> TSA PreCheck, vs. $85 for PreCheck alone. Hence I always tell people to spend the extra $15 for Global Entry. So anyhow, Irene and Claire fill out the on-line renewal form, pay the $100 (which Irene immediately got back because she used my Amex Platinum card), and then nothing. Silence. Crickets. Which is odd, because when I renewed my Global Entry, I had to go to ORD for an interview and an updated photo. But for them, nothing. Our flight to New York, to LaGuardia is coming up. The night before we leave, Irene gets an e-mail -- no link, mind you, just a message -- “Congrats! Your Global Entry has been renewed.” Yay! Except that when she checked into Southwest, there’s no little blue PreCheck checkmark on her boarding pass. Claire got her Congrats! e-mail the next day, but again, no check on the boarding pass. Ugh. The prior week when I was in Miami, the non-PreCheck lines tailed back the length of the terminal. But, as it turned out, it wasn’t a huge hassle. We left a little earlier for MDW and no horror lines. Three days later when they checked in for our flight home, they both got the blue check on their boarding passes. So spinning my IT propeller, it would seem that the airlines aren’t pinging that PreCheck database more than once every couple of days.</li><li>This trip was the first time since January 2019 I’d flown into LGA in almost 28 months; that’s 2⅓ years. That shocked me; I had to go back and check my calendars and my math again, because it seemed like I was always in New York. But it’s right. Second shock -- flying into the new rebuilt Terminal B, bright, airy, spacious, <em>clean</em>; everything the old Terminal B I flew into 2+ years ago was not. It was the low-ceilinged rat maze that, 7 years ago, then-Vice President Joe Biden said was like a third-world country -- which I actually think was less of an insult to LGA and more of an insult to many developing country airports. Walking down that old concourse to catch an American or United flight, it was not unusual to have to dodge a big plastic garbage can placed right in the middle, that had a hose coming down from the bottom of a make-shift funnel made out of plastic tarp, hanging from some ceiling tiles, collecting rainwater from roof leak. No one would ever look at that and think “What the hell?” because you’d see it like once a month. But now, it’s phenomenal; they’ve done a great job. I used to say that SFO’s new Terminal 2 was my favorite terminal -- where American and, back then, Virgin America flew out of. But now, it’s LGA’s Terminal B. There’s still construction going on, and getting a cab to the city is still a hassle, and a necessary one because there’s still no subway link, but once you’re inside, it’s great! Give yourself a little extra time to see the water fountain light show. And having a little downtime in Terminal B is no longer the purgatory it used to be, because there are now places that you actually sit down and eat and grab a beer; no more standing around having to juggle your bag and an Auntie Anne’s pretzel. I rarely have anything good to say about the Port Authority, but they’ve done a good job here.</li><li>And the TSA, another government organization I don’t often have good things to say about, does a nice job <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/coronavirus/passenger-throughput\">publishing the daily volumes of air passengers</a> passing through security checkpoints. Just scanning it you can see the growth kicking up in the February/March timeframe. Though if you’ve flown anytime over the past couple of months, you don’t need to look at the numbers; you’ve felt it in fuller planes and longer checkpoint lines. The Friday of Memorial Day weekend, the end of May, checkpoint volume was up 599% over the same Friday last year, and then this past Friday, June 11, checkpoint volume broke 2 million for the first time since the March lockdowns. The numbers are still 25-30% below 2019’s, but the gap is closing. </li><li>And then the keynote from Apple’s WorldWide Developers Conference gave me something else good to say about the TSA; working with Apple to let you use a digital version of your driver’s license at security checkpoints. I’ve already noticed that, at a few airports, you no longer have to show your boarding pass -- they just pop your driver’s license into a scanning machine and you’re on your way. No fumbling to pull up your boarding pass and scanning it. But now, no fumbling for my wallet if I can pull up my license on my phone. Actually, better than my drivers license would be my Global Entry card because it’s Real ID while my Illinois license is not. Could save me an extra trip to the DMV if and when the TSA decides to get serious about Real ID again -- which I hope is never. </li><li>Continuing on our now 3-episode arc on Uber and Lyft service, the long wait times, the huge price surges. Heading out for my flight down to Miami, the 17-mile trip Monday morning Uber ride to ORD, at $74 with a 2x surge, cost almost as much as the 1,100-mile flight on American down to MIA at $100 one way. There is no rational way to explain this, so I’ll leave it here as a meditation exercise for microeconomic pricing theorists and move on. Except, ‘cause I guess I can’t just <em>can’t</em> leave it here, to note that I had no problem with Uber or Lyft service in Miami. And except for that one joyful morning riding a scooter, the South Florida heat and humidity had me lighting up the Uber app multiple times a day. So I’m guessing those Uber carjackings in Chicago a few months back are having some residual impact on their driver recruitment efforts.</li><li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/media/files/DJBLUE/11541\">Hear Me</a></em> by DJ Blue  (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/\">Attribution Noncommercial Share-Alike</a> license http://ccmixter.org/media/files/DJBLUE/11541.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Why Business Travel Will Come Back</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Last Friday, the first day of Chicago’s full reopening and the same day the TSA’s checkpoint volume broke the 2 million passenger mark for the first time post-lockdown, a business colleague and I met for some happy hour beers and oysters in a bar in Wrigleyville. We were sitting at a second floor table against an open window, looking over at Wrigley Field as fans poured out of the Clark-&amp;-Addison main gate and into nearby bars to celebrate the Cubs’ victory over the St Louis Cardinals in what was the first full-capacity game since September 2019. Mike’s in consulting too; he’d been talking about how he was itching to get back out on the road to see his clients, on how he’s working to convince the firm’s management to lift, or at least bend their travel ban so he can see the clients again -- at least the ones who also want to start meeting people face-to-face again. Zoom and Teams calls are <em>OK</em>, they can suffice for some things, but there are so many things you miss when you’re not there in person. </li><li>In an outta-left-field sorta way, the masses of Cubs fans blocking traffic on Addison St helped prove Mike’s point. Official attendance was 35,112, not quite a sell-out, but having butts in 84% of the seats for a 1:20p Friday game isn’t bad. But similar to the “why travel to a meeting when you can video conference?” question, why go to a baseball game in person when you can watch it on TV where it’s covered by not just one crappy laptop camera, but 5-8 HD cameras with clean lenses and run by professionals? I know, it’s a stupid strawman question that we all know the answer to -- it’s not just the game, it’s the whole experience. And it’s not an either/or -- many times watching the game on TV is fine, and more convenient; but sometimes, you gotta get off the couch and go see the game live, in person, with a bunch of friends.</li><li>A couple of recent interactions(?) over the last couple of weeks drove this home. I’ve had multiple video calls with a programmer over the past month, probably 3-4 hour worth, going through some system re-architecting. After all that, I thought I had it pretty much down. Now the guy has started coming back to the office -- he said working from home for 14 months was being under house arrest -- so I pulled him into a conference room and started sketching stuff on a whiteboard. We stood there shoulder-to-shoulder and passed the blue marker back and forth, and in 20 minutes realized that there were 3 key facts about the existing systems that never came across in those hours of video calls and that completely changed the new architecture. But they did in that in-person 20 minutes. And afterwards, the guy said to me “Hey, that was fun. Let’s do some more of that” -- a reaction I’ve never heard about a video conference… ever. And at the same time, I had the exact opposite experience -- trying to explain a concept on a week’s worth of video calls that I know we could’ve handled in an hour if we could’ve been in the same room together, but we can’t because he’s overseas and can’t get through the US travel lockdown. So we trudged through the calls… and the frustration.</li><li>Which was pretty much the point that Mike was trying to make over honking buses and shouts of “Go Cubs Go”. “Yeah, I can have a meeting on Zoom, but I can’t have the pre-meeting ‘how are things going’ chats as we’re walking into the room, or the post-meeting ‘Can I ask you what you really meant in there’ sidebar, or pick up the non-verbal glances people will shoot at each other. The meeting’s important, but so’s the choreography that surrounds the meeting -- maybe even more so -- and that’s what I can’t get now. That and I’ve worked with a lot of these clients for 10, 15 years, so they’re friends too. And I miss that too.”</li><li>Airlines are saying that business travel is still down 70% from pre-lockdown levels, but that almost all of their top corporate accounts are telling them they plan to re-start travel later this year -- but first they gotta figure out how to get people out of their sweats and back into the office.</li><li>Bridge Music — <em>Gargantua</em> by Admiral Bob (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/46361 Ft: My Free Mickey, Martijn de Boer</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Learning the History of Airports</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Back at the beginning of the year, back in episodes #172 and #173, I talked about a guy who lived on the secure side of ORD from October ‘til January because he was too afraid to fly. In researching this -- what turned out to be not unique -- situation, I came across an article written by Professor Janet Bednarek, professor of history at University of Dayton. Her area of focus is on the history of airports in the US, which I thought would be a perfect topic for the TravelCommons podcast. So I sent her a Zoom invite, as one does these days, and had a great conversation about the history of airports.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #176</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social  -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_176.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #176 — Why Business Travel Will Come Back; Learning History of Airports','','inherit','closed','closed','','3550-revision-v1','','','2021-06-15 19:15:14','2021-06-16 00:15:14','',3550,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3557',0,'revision','',0),
(3558,1,'2021-06-15 19:23:21','2021-06-16 00:23:21','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_1985\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Airfields_IL_Chicago_C_htm_m252791c8-e1623802785342.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1985\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Airfields_IL_Chicago_C_htm_m252791c8-e1623802785342-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Old cars and planes on a runway\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> Where\'d the Racetrack Go?[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I can feel travel beginning to come back. <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/coronavirus/passenger-throughput\">TSA checkpoint volumes</a> are hitting post-pandemic highs, business travelers are starting to come out from behind their Zoom sessions, and vaccination rates are prompting more people to make travel plans. So on this episode, we first talk to , CEO of <a href=\"https://www.toursbylocals.com/\">ToursByLocals</a> about the state of the local tour market and then about how frequent travelers are starting to stretch their atrophied travel muscles. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_176.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #176: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>This Week</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studio as Chicago and the state of Illinois completely reopen for business -- no more capacity limits, no more socially distanced sitting -- just in time for the summer music festival season. No capacity limits, but you have to show proof of vaccination or a negative COVID test to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with 100,000 other music fans. Irene and I did that one year, check -- don’t need to do it again. I think I aged out of that demographic -- back in the ‘90’s.&nbsp;</li><li>Since the last episode, I first flew down to Miami on business, and then over to New York City for a long weekend. Miami is always an interesting business destination; it’s got its own unique vibe. It starts at the airport; officially bilingual -- Spanish and English, in that order -- but it seems half the time when they make PA announcements, they just skip the English version. The client’s office was in the Wynwood Art District. It was my first time in this neighborhood; it had a kinda typical newly gentrified vibe -- lots of first generation food places: an upscale doughnut shop, a poké lunch joint, a couple of microbrewery taprooms (always key for me). What wasn’t typical was the amount of wall art; not graffiti as much as very cool murals and street art, giving the neighborhood a bright, colorful vibe while probably painting over some otherwise dire looking buildings.</li><li>I stayed a few mile south in the Marriott on Biscayne Bay where some combination of my status and patience with a front desk trainee trying to solo on the property management system for the first time earned me a top floor bayside room looking out over the Port of Miami cruise terminal with 4 big cruise ships tied up, waiting for the CDC to drop their cruise ban.</li><li>One morning, when it felt the humidity had dipped below 80%, I decided to skip Uber and ride a Lyft scooter up to the Art District. I’ve talked, in past episodes, how much I like riding scooters. I’ve ridden scooters in Chicago, Phoenix, DC -- everywhere I could find them. But last year, I didn’t ride them even though they were all around Chicago. There’s a fun, frivolous vibe about riding a scooter, but 2020 was anything but fun or frivolous and so I didn’t feel like riding them. But on this morning, with just a touch of humidity in the air and not much traffic on the streets, having a little fun riding a scooter to the office felt, once more, like the right thing to do.</li><li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<em>A Foolish Game</em>&nbsp;by Zep Hurme&nbsp;(c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license.&nbsp;http://ccmixter.org/files/zep_hurme/46448.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Talking in the last episode about needing to rebuild atrophied travel muscles after the long lockdown layoff generated a few comments. Chris Christensen of the Amateur Traveler Podcast dropped me a note saying:<ul><li>I can relate. We just got back from our first post vaccine trip to the Galapagos. First time on a plane since 2019.</li></ul></li><li>First trip back and you go to the Galapagos! No warm-ups? Hope you didn’t sprain any of those travel muscles.</li><li>Jim McDonough’s first trip back wasn’t simple either. He wrote on the TravelCommons Facebook page<ul><li>Last month, we made our first trip since January, 2020 to Kodiak, Alaska of all places, attending the decommissioning of a ship I helped the Coast Guard put into commission in 1971. San Diego to Alaska is a long way. Alaska Airlines is really nice. But I noticed my travel skills had atrophied.&nbsp; Approaching TSA, I realized that the red mesh bag I usually have for holding metal objects wasn’t in my bag. Then I sat for a while at a gate in Anchorage until remembering that Admiral\'s Club members can use Alaska\'s lounge. I\'m ready to go again, but probably not to Kodiak!</li></ul></li><li>Kudos to both of you guys for jumping straight into the deep-end. But you gotta be careful -- weak travel muscles can make you vulnerable. A few days ago, I re-tweeted a thread about a phishing attack -- a very well-formatted “make sure your TSA Precheck doesn’t expire -- click here” e-mail with a link that, as you can imagine, didn’t take you to tsa.gov; though Aaron Woodin did tweet back the question “If you click on the link, does it confiscate your water?” It’s a well-timed phish, especially as more business travelers are gearing up to get back on the road.&nbsp;</li><li>And in the last episode, I talked about Irene and Claire losing track of their Global Entry expiration dates -- Claire’s expired and Irene hit the “renew” button on the last day. Now you may think -- Global Entry? Big deal, who’s traveling internationally right now anyhow? But remember, for $100 for 5 years, Global Entry gives you the express lane thru immigration <em>plus</em> TSA PreCheck, vs. $85 for PreCheck alone. Hence I always tell people to spend the extra $15 for Global Entry. So anyhow, Irene and Claire fill out the on-line renewal form, pay the $100 (which Irene immediately got back because she used my Amex Platinum card), and then nothing. Silence. Crickets. Which is odd, because when I renewed my Global Entry, I had to go to ORD for an interview and an updated photo. But for them, nothing. Our flight to New York, to LaGuardia is coming up. The night before we leave, Irene gets an e-mail -- no link, mind you, just a message -- “Congrats! Your Global Entry has been renewed.” Yay! Except that when she checked into Southwest, there’s no little blue PreCheck checkmark on her boarding pass. Claire got her Congrats! e-mail the next day, but again, no check on the boarding pass. Ugh. The prior week when I was in Miami, the non-PreCheck lines tailed back the length of the terminal. But, as it turned out, it wasn’t a huge hassle. We left a little earlier for MDW and no horror lines. Three days later when they checked in for our flight home, they both got the blue check on their boarding passes. So spinning my IT propeller, it would seem that the airlines aren’t pinging that PreCheck database more than once every couple of days.</li><li>This trip was the first time since January 2019 I’d flown into LGA in almost 28 months; that’s 2⅓ years. That shocked me; I had to go back and check my calendars and my math again, because it seemed like I was always in New York. But it’s right. Second shock -- flying into the new rebuilt Terminal B, bright, airy, spacious, <em>clean</em>; everything the old Terminal B I flew into 2+ years ago was not. It was the low-ceilinged rat maze that, 7 years ago, then-Vice President Joe Biden said was like a third-world country -- which I actually think was less of an insult to LGA and more of an insult to many developing country airports. Walking down that old concourse to catch an American or United flight, it was not unusual to have to dodge a big plastic garbage can placed right in the middle, that had a hose coming down from the bottom of a make-shift funnel made out of plastic tarp, hanging from some ceiling tiles, collecting rainwater from roof leak. No one would ever look at that and think “What the hell?” because you’d see it like once a month. But now, it’s phenomenal; they’ve done a great job. I used to say that SFO’s new Terminal 2 was my favorite terminal -- where American and, back then, Virgin America flew out of. But now, it’s LGA’s Terminal B. There’s still construction going on, and getting a cab to the city is still a hassle, and a necessary one because there’s still no subway link, but once you’re inside, it’s great! Give yourself a little extra time to see the water fountain light show. And having a little downtime in Terminal B is no longer the purgatory it used to be, because there are now places that you actually sit down and eat and grab a beer; no more standing around having to juggle your bag and an Auntie Anne’s pretzel. I rarely have anything good to say about the Port Authority, but they’ve done a good job here.</li><li>And the TSA, another government organization I don’t often have good things to say about, does a nice job <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/coronavirus/passenger-throughput\">publishing the daily volumes of air passengers</a> passing through security checkpoints. Just scanning it you can see the growth kicking up in the February/March timeframe. Though if you’ve flown anytime over the past couple of months, you don’t need to look at the numbers; you’ve felt it in fuller planes and longer checkpoint lines. The Friday of Memorial Day weekend, the end of May, checkpoint volume was up 599% over the same Friday last year, and then this past Friday, June 11, checkpoint volume broke 2 million for the first time since the March lockdowns. The numbers are still 25-30% below 2019’s, but the gap is closing.&nbsp;</li><li>And then the keynote from Apple’s WorldWide Developers Conference gave me something else good to say about the TSA; working with Apple to let you use a digital version of your driver’s license at security checkpoints. I’ve already noticed that, at a few airports, you no longer have to show your boarding pass -- they just pop your driver’s license into a scanning machine and you’re on your way. No fumbling to pull up your boarding pass and scanning it. But now, no fumbling for my wallet if I can pull up my license on my phone. Actually, better than my drivers license would be my Global Entry card because it’s Real ID while my Illinois license is not. Could save me an extra trip to the DMV if and when the TSA decides to get serious about Real ID again -- which I hope is never.&nbsp;</li><li>Continuing on our now 3-episode arc on Uber and Lyft service, the long wait times, the huge price surges. Heading out for my flight down to Miami, the 17-mile trip Monday morning Uber ride to ORD, at $74 with a 2x surge, cost almost as much as the 1,100-mile flight on American down to MIA at $100 one way. There is no rational way to explain this, so I’ll leave it here as a meditation exercise for microeconomic pricing theorists and move on. Except, ‘cause I guess I can’t just <em>can’t</em> leave it here, to note that I had no problem with Uber or Lyft service in Miami. And except for that one joyful morning riding a scooter, the South Florida heat and humidity had me lighting up the Uber app multiple times a day. So I’m guessing those Uber carjackings in Chicago a few months back are having some residual impact on their driver recruitment efforts.</li><li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/media/files/DJBLUE/11541\">Hear Me</a></em>&nbsp;by DJ Blue &nbsp;(c) copyright 2007 Licensed under Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/\">Attribution Noncommercial Share-Alike</a> license http://ccmixter.org/media/files/DJBLUE/11541.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Why Business Travel Will Come Back</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Last Friday, the first day of Chicago’s full reopening and the same day the TSA’s checkpoint volume broke the 2 million passenger mark for the first time post-lockdown, a business colleague and I met for some happy hour beers and oysters in a bar in Wrigleyville. We were sitting at a second floor table against an open window, looking over at Wrigley Field as fans poured out of the Clark-&amp;-Addison main gate and into nearby bars to celebrate the Cubs’ victory over the St Louis Cardinals in what was the first full-capacity game since September 2019. Mike’s in consulting too; he’d been talking about how he was itching to get back out on the road to see his clients, on how he’s working to convince the firm’s management to lift, or at least bend their travel ban so he can see the clients again -- at least the ones who also want to start meeting people face-to-face again. Zoom and Teams calls are <em>OK</em>, they can suffice for some things, but there are so many things you miss when you’re not there in person.&nbsp;</li><li>In an outta-left-field sorta way, the masses of Cubs fans blocking traffic on Addison St helped prove Mike’s point. Official attendance was 35,112, not quite a sell-out, but having butts in 84% of the seats for a 1:20p Friday game isn’t bad. But similar to the “why travel to a meeting when you can video conference?” question, why go to a baseball game in person when you can watch it on TV where it’s covered by not just one crappy laptop camera, but 5-8 HD cameras with clean lenses and run by professionals? I know, it’s a stupid strawman question that we all know the answer to -- it’s not just the game, it’s the whole experience. And it’s not an either/or -- many times watching the game on TV is fine, and more convenient; but sometimes, you gotta get off the couch and go see the game live, in person, with a bunch of friends.</li><li>A couple of recent interactions(?) over the last couple of weeks drove this home. I’ve had multiple video calls with a programmer over the past month, probably 3-4 hour worth, going through some system re-architecting. After all that, I thought I had it pretty much down. Now the guy has started coming back to the office -- he said working from home for 14 months was being under house arrest -- so I pulled him into a conference room and started sketching stuff on a whiteboard. We stood there shoulder-to-shoulder and passed the blue marker back and forth, and in 20 minutes realized that there were 3 key facts about the existing systems that never came across in those hours of video calls and that completely changed the new architecture. But they did in that in-person 20 minutes. And afterwards, the guy said to me “Hey, that was fun. Let’s do some more of that” -- a reaction I’ve never heard about a video conference… ever. And at the same time, I had the exact opposite experience -- trying to explain a concept on a week’s worth of video calls that I know we could’ve handled in an hour if we could’ve been in the same room together, but we can’t because he’s overseas and can’t get through the US travel lockdown. So we trudged through the calls… and the frustration.</li><li>Which was pretty much the point that Mike was trying to make over honking buses and shouts of “Go Cubs Go”. “Yeah, I can have a meeting on Zoom, but I can’t have the pre-meeting ‘how are things going’ chats as we’re walking into the room, or the post-meeting ‘Can I ask you what you really meant in there’ sidebar, or pick up the non-verbal glances people will shoot at each other. The meeting’s important, but so’s the choreography that surrounds the meeting -- maybe even more so -- and that’s what I can’t get now. That and I’ve worked with a lot of these clients for 10, 15 years, so they’re friends too. And I miss that too.”</li><li>Airlines are saying that business travel is still down 70% from pre-lockdown levels, but that almost all of their top corporate accounts are telling them they plan to re-start travel later this year -- but first they gotta figure out how to get people out of their sweats and back into the office.</li><li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<em>Gargantua</em>&nbsp;by Admiral Bob (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/46361 Ft: My Free Mickey, Martijn de Boer</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Learning the History of Airports</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Back at the beginning of the year, back in episodes #172 and #173, I talked about a guy who lived on the secure side of ORD from October ‘til January because he was too afraid to fly. In researching this -- what turned out to be not unique -- situation, I came across an article written by Professor Janet Bednarek, professor of history at University of Dayton. Her area of focus is on the history of airports in the US, which I thought would be a perfect topic for the TravelCommons podcast. So I sent her a Zoom invite, as one does these days, and had a great conversation about the history of airports.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #176</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_176.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #176 — Why Business Travel Will Come Back; Learning History of Airports','','inherit','closed','closed','','3550-revision-v1','','','2021-06-15 19:23:21','2021-06-16 00:23:21','',3550,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3558',0,'revision','',0),
(3559,1,'2021-06-15 19:37:41','2021-06-16 00:37:41','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_1985\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Airfields_IL_Chicago_C_htm_m252791c8-e1623802785342.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1985\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Airfields_IL_Chicago_C_htm_m252791c8-e1623802785342-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Old cars and planes on a runway\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> Where\'d the Racetrack Go?[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I can feel travel beginning to come back. <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/coronavirus/passenger-throughput\">TSA checkpoint volumes</a> are hitting post-pandemic highs, business travelers are starting to come out from behind their Zoom sessions, and vaccination rates are prompting more people to make travel plans. So on this episode, we first talk to , CEO of <a href=\"https://www.toursbylocals.com/\">ToursByLocals</a> about the state of the local tour market and then about how frequent travelers are starting to stretch their atrophied travel muscles. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_176.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #176: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>This Week</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studio as Chicago and the state of Illinois completely reopen for business -- no more capacity limits, no more socially distanced sitting -- just in time for the summer music festival season. No capacity limits, but you have to show proof of vaccination or a negative COVID test to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with 100,000 other music fans. Irene and I did that one year, check -- don’t need to do it again. I think I aged out of that demographic -- back in the ‘90’s. </li><li>Since the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/05/09/podcast-175-how-to-find-local-tour-guides-rebuild-travel-muscles/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #175 — How to Find Local Tour Guides; Rebuild Travel Muscles\">last episode</a>, I first flew down to Miami on business, and then over to New York City for a long weekend. Miami is always an interesting business destination; it’s got its own unique vibe. It starts at the airport; officially bilingual -- Spanish and English, in that order -- but it seems half the time when they make PA announcements, they just skip the English version. The client’s office was in the Wynwood Art District. It was my first time in this neighborhood; it had a kinda typical newly gentrified vibe -- lots of first generation food places: an upscale doughnut shop, a poké lunch joint, a couple of microbrewery taprooms (always key for me). What wasn’t typical was the amount of wall art; not graffiti as much as very cool murals and street art, giving the neighborhood a bright, colorful vibe while probably painting over some otherwise dire looking buildings.</li><li>I stayed a few miles south in the Marriott on Biscayne Bay where some combination of my status and patience with a front desk trainee trying to solo on the property management system for the first time earned me a top floor bayside room looking out over the Port of Miami cruise terminal with 4 big cruise ships tied up, waiting for the CDC to drop their cruise ban.</li><li>One morning, when it felt the humidity had dipped below 80%, I decided to skip Uber and ride a Lyft scooter up to the Art District. I’ve talked, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/10/14/podcast-156-airport-satisfaction-escooters-smaller-luggage/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #156 — Airport Satisfaction; eScooters; Smaller Luggage\">past</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/01/25/podcast-159-planning-the-trip-of-a-lifetime-in-southeast-asia/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #159 — Planning the Trip of a Lifetime in Southeast Asia\">episodes</a>, how much I like riding scooters. I’ve ridden scooters in Chicago, Phoenix, DC -- everywhere I could find them. But last year, I didn’t ride them even though they were all around Chicago. There’s a fun, frivolous vibe about riding a scooter, but 2020 was anything but fun or frivolous and so I didn’t feel like riding them. But on this morning, with just a touch of humidity in the air and not much traffic on the streets, having a little fun riding a scooter to the office felt, once more, like the right thing to do.</li><li>Bridge Music — <em>A Foolish Game</em> by Zep Hurme (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/zep_hurme/46448.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Talking in the last episode about needing to rebuild atrophied travel muscles after the long lockdown layoff generated a few comments. Chris Christensen of the Amateur Traveler Podcast dropped me a note saying:<ul><li>I can relate. We just got back from our first post vaccine trip to the Galapagos. First time on a plane since 2019.</li></ul></li><li>First trip back and you go to the Galapagos! No warm-ups? Hope you didn’t sprain any of those travel muscles.</li><li>Jim McDonough’s first trip back wasn’t simple either. He wrote on the TravelCommons Facebook page<ul><li>Last month, we made our first trip since January, 2020 to Kodiak, Alaska of all places, attending the decommissioning of a ship I helped the Coast Guard put into commission in 1971. San Diego to Alaska is a long way. Alaska Airlines is really nice. But I noticed my travel skills had atrophied.  Approaching TSA, I realized that the red mesh bag I usually have for holding metal objects wasn’t in my bag. Then I sat for a while at a gate in Anchorage until remembering that Admiral\'s Club members can use Alaska\'s lounge. I\'m ready to go again, but probably not to Kodiak!</li></ul></li><li>Kudos to both of you guys for jumping straight into the deep-end. But you gotta be careful -- weak travel muscles can make you vulnerable. A few days ago, I <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1399783958066442247\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">re-tweeted a thread about a phishing attack</a> -- a very well-formatted “make sure your TSA Precheck doesn’t expire -- click here” e-mail with a link that, as you can imagine, didn’t take you to tsa.gov; though Aaron Woodin did tweet back the question “If you click on the link, does it confiscate your water?” It’s a well-timed phish, especially as more business travelers are gearing up to get back on the road. </li><li>And in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/05/09/podcast-175-how-to-find-local-tour-guides-rebuild-travel-muscles/\" title=\"Podcast #175 — How to Find Local Tour Guides; Rebuild Travel Muscles\">last episode</a>, I talked about Irene and Claire losing track of their Global Entry expiration dates -- Claire’s expired and Irene hit the “renew” button on the last day. Now you may think -- Global Entry? Big deal, who’s traveling internationally right now anyhow? But remember, for $100 for 5 years, Global Entry gives you the express lane thru immigration <em>plus</em> TSA PreCheck, vs. $85 for PreCheck alone. Hence I always tell people to spend the extra $15 for Global Entry. So anyhow, Irene and Claire fill out the on-line renewal form, pay the $100 (which Irene immediately got back because she used my Amex Platinum card), and then nothing. Silence. Crickets. Which is odd, because when I renewed my Global Entry, I had to go to ORD for an interview and an updated photo. But for them, nothing. Our flight to New York, to LaGuardia is coming up. The night before we leave, Irene gets an e-mail -- no link, mind you, just a message -- “Congrats! Your Global Entry has been renewed.” Yay! Except that when she checked into Southwest, there’s no little blue PreCheck checkmark on her boarding pass. Claire got her Congrats! e-mail the next day, but again, no check on the boarding pass. Ugh. The prior week when I was in Miami, the non-PreCheck lines tailed back the length of the terminal. But, as it turned out, it wasn’t a huge hassle. We left a little earlier for MDW and no horror lines. Three days later when they checked in for our flight home, they both got the blue check on their boarding passes. So spinning my IT propeller, it would seem that the airlines aren’t pinging that PreCheck database more than once every couple of days.</li><li>This trip was the first time since January 2019 I’d flown into LGA in almost 28 months; that’s 2⅓ years. That shocked me; I had to go back and check my calendars and my math again, because it seemed like I was always in New York. But it’s right. Second shock -- flying into the new rebuilt Terminal B, bright, airy, spacious, <em>clean</em>; everything the old Terminal B I flew into 2+ years ago was not. It was the low-ceilinged rat maze that, 7 years ago, then-Vice President Joe Biden said was like a third-world country -- which I actually think was less of an insult to LGA and more of an insult to many developing country airports. Walking down that old concourse to catch an American or United flight, it was not unusual to have to dodge a big plastic garbage can placed right in the middle, that had a hose coming down from the bottom of a make-shift funnel made out of plastic tarp, hanging from some ceiling tiles, collecting rainwater from roof leak. No one would ever look at that and think “What the hell?” because you’d see it like once a month. But now, it’s phenomenal; they’ve done a great job. I used to say that SFO’s new Terminal 2 was my favorite terminal -- where American and, back then, Virgin America flew out of. But now, it’s LGA’s Terminal B. There’s still construction going on, and getting a cab to the city is still a hassle, and a necessary one because there’s still no subway link, but once you’re inside, it’s great! Give yourself a little extra time to see the water fountain light show. And having a little downtime in Terminal B is no longer the purgatory it used to be, because there are now places that you actually sit down and eat and grab a beer; no more standing around having to juggle your bag and an Auntie Anne’s pretzel. I rarely have anything good to say about the Port Authority, but they’ve done a good job here.</li><li>And the TSA, another government organization I don’t often have good things to say about, does a nice job <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/coronavirus/passenger-throughput\">publishing the daily volumes of air passengers</a> passing through security checkpoints. Just scanning it you can see the growth kicking up in the February/March timeframe. Though if you’ve flown anytime over the past couple of months, you don’t need to look at the numbers; you’ve felt it in fuller planes and longer checkpoint lines. The Friday of Memorial Day weekend, the end of May, checkpoint volume was up 599% over the same Friday last year, and then this past Friday, June 11, checkpoint volume broke 2 million for the first time since the March lockdowns. The numbers are still 25-30% below 2019’s, but the gap is closing. </li><li>And then the keynote from Apple’s WorldWide Developers Conference gave me something else good to say about the TSA; working with Apple to let you use a digital version of your driver’s license at security checkpoints. I’ve already noticed that, at a few airports, you no longer have to show your boarding pass -- they just pop your driver’s license into a scanning machine and you’re on your way. No fumbling to pull up your boarding pass and scanning it. But now, no fumbling for my wallet if I can pull up my license on my phone. Actually, better than my drivers license would be my Global Entry card because it’s Real ID while my Illinois license is not. Could save me an extra trip to the DMV if and when the TSA decides to get serious about Real ID again -- which I hope is never. </li><li>Continuing on our now 3-episode arc on Uber and Lyft service, the long wait times, the huge price surges. Heading out for my flight down to Miami, the 17-mile trip Monday morning Uber ride to ORD, at $74 with a 2x surge, cost almost as much as the 1,100-mile flight on American down to MIA at $100 one way. There is no rational way to explain this, so I’ll leave it here as a meditation exercise for microeconomic pricing theorists and move on. Except, ‘cause I guess I can’t just <em>can’t</em> leave it here, to note that I had no problem with Uber or Lyft service in Miami. And except for that one joyful morning riding a scooter, the South Florida heat and humidity had me lighting up the Uber app multiple times a day. So I’m guessing those Uber carjackings in Chicago a few months back are having some residual impact on their driver recruitment efforts.</li><li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/media/files/DJBLUE/11541\">Hear Me</a></em> by DJ Blue  (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/\">Attribution Noncommercial Share-Alike</a> license http://ccmixter.org/media/files/DJBLUE/11541.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Why Business Travel Will Come Back</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Last Friday, the first day of Chicago’s full reopening and the same day the TSA’s checkpoint volume broke the 2 million passenger mark for the first time post-lockdown, a business colleague and I met for some happy hour beers and oysters in a bar in Wrigleyville. We were sitting at a second floor table against an open window, looking over at Wrigley Field as fans poured out of the Clark-&amp;-Addison main gate and into nearby bars to celebrate the Cubs’ victory over the St Louis Cardinals in what was the first full-capacity game since September 2019. Mike’s in consulting too; he’d been talking about how he was itching to get back out on the road to see his clients, on how he’s working to convince the firm’s management to lift, or at least bend their travel ban so he can see the clients again -- at least the ones who also want to start meeting people face-to-face again. Zoom and Teams calls are <em>OK</em>, they can suffice for some things, but there are so many things you miss when you’re not there in person.&nbsp;</li><li>In an outta-left-field sorta way, the masses of Cubs fans blocking traffic on Addison St helped prove Mike’s point. Official attendance was 35,112, not quite a sell-out, but having butts in 84% of the seats for a 1:20p Friday game isn’t bad. But similar to the “why travel to a meeting when you can video conference?” question, why go to a baseball game in person when you can watch it on TV where it’s covered by not just one crappy laptop camera, but 5-8 HD cameras with clean lenses and run by professionals? I know, it’s a stupid strawman question that we all know the answer to -- it’s not just the game, it’s the whole experience. And it’s not an either/or -- many times watching the game on TV is fine, and more convenient; but sometimes, you gotta get off the couch and go see the game live, in person, with a bunch of friends.</li><li>A couple of recent interactions(?) over the last couple of weeks drove this home. I’ve had multiple video calls with a programmer over the past month, probably 3-4 hour worth, going through some system re-architecting. After all that, I thought I had it pretty much down. Now the guy has started coming back to the office -- he said working from home for 14 months was being under house arrest -- so I pulled him into a conference room and started sketching stuff on a whiteboard. We stood there shoulder-to-shoulder and passed the blue marker back and forth, and in 20 minutes realized that there were 3 key facts about the existing systems that never came across in those hours of video calls and that completely changed the new architecture. But they did in that in-person 20 minutes. And afterwards, the guy said to me “Hey, that was fun. Let’s do some more of that” -- a reaction I’ve never heard about a video conference… ever. And at the same time, I had the exact opposite experience -- trying to explain a concept on a week’s worth of video calls that I know we could’ve handled in an hour if we could’ve been in the same room together, but we can’t because he’s overseas and can’t get through the US travel lockdown. So we trudged through the calls… and the frustration.</li><li>Which was pretty much the point that Mike was trying to make over honking buses and shouts of “Go Cubs Go”. “Yeah, I can have a meeting on Zoom, but I can’t have the pre-meeting ‘how are things going’ chats as we’re walking into the room, or the post-meeting ‘Can I ask you what you really meant in there’ sidebar, or pick up the non-verbal glances people will shoot at each other. The meeting’s important, but so’s the choreography that surrounds the meeting -- maybe even more so -- and that’s what I can’t get now. That and I’ve worked with a lot of these clients for 10, 15 years, so they’re friends too. And I miss that too.”</li><li>Airlines are saying that business travel is still down 70% from pre-lockdown levels, but that almost all of their top corporate accounts are telling them they plan to re-start travel later this year -- but first they gotta figure out how to get people out of their sweats and back into the office.</li><li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<em>Gargantua</em>&nbsp;by Admiral Bob (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/46361 Ft: My Free Mickey, Martijn de Boer</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Learning the History of Airports</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Back at the beginning of the year, back in episodes #<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/16/podcast-172-timeshares-without-the-pitch-notes-on-tucson/\" title=\"Podcast #172 — Timeshares Without the Pitch; Notes on Tucson\">172</a> and #<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/12/podcast-173-whats-new-in-travel-insurance-keeping-ahead-of-expiring-miles/\" title=\"Podcast #173 — What’s New in Travel Insurance; Keeping Ahead of Expiring Miles\">173</a>, I talked about a guy who lived on the secure side of ORD from October ‘til January because he was too afraid to fly. In researching this -- what turned out to be not unique -- situation, I came across an article written by <a href=\"https://udayton.edu/directory/artssciences/history/bednarek_janet.php\">Professor Janet Bednarek</a>, professor of history at University of Dayton. Her area of focus is on the history of airports in the US, which I thought would be a perfect topic for the TravelCommons podcast. So I sent her a Zoom invite, as one does these days, and had a great conversation about the history of airports.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #176</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_176.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #176 — Why Business Travel Will Come Back; Learning History of Airports','','inherit','closed','closed','','3550-revision-v1','','','2021-06-15 19:37:41','2021-06-16 00:37:41','',3550,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3559',0,'revision','',0),
(3560,1,'2021-06-15 20:15:03','2021-06-16 01:15:03','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_1985\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Airfields_IL_Chicago_C_htm_m252791c8-e1623802785342.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1985\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Airfields_IL_Chicago_C_htm_m252791c8-e1623802785342-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Old cars and planes on a runway\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> Where\'d the Racetrack Go?[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I can feel travel beginning to come back. <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/coronavirus/passenger-throughput\">TSA checkpoint volumes</a> are hitting post-pandemic highs, business travelers are starting to come out from behind their Zoom sessions, and vaccination rates are prompting more people to make travel plans. So on this episode, we first talk to , CEO of <a href=\"https://www.toursbylocals.com/\">ToursByLocals</a> about the state of the local tour market and then about how frequent travelers are starting to stretch their atrophied travel muscles. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_176.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #176: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>This Week</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studio as Chicago and the state of Illinois completely reopen for business -- no more capacity limits, no more socially distanced sitting -- just in time for the summer music festival season. No capacity limits, but you have to show proof of vaccination or a negative COVID test to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with 100,000 other music fans. Irene and I did that one year, check -- don’t need to do it again. I think I aged out of that demographic -- back in the ‘90’s.&nbsp;</li><li>Since the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/05/09/podcast-175-how-to-find-local-tour-guides-rebuild-travel-muscles/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #175 — How to Find Local Tour Guides; Rebuild Travel Muscles\">last episode</a>, I first flew down to Miami on business, and then over to New York City for a long weekend. Miami is always an interesting business destination; it’s got its own unique vibe. It starts at the airport; officially bilingual -- Spanish and English, in that order -- but it seems half the time when they make PA announcements, they just skip the English version. The client’s office was in the Wynwood Art District. It was my first time in this neighborhood; it had a kinda typical newly gentrified vibe -- lots of first generation food places: an upscale doughnut shop, a poké lunch joint, a couple of microbrewery taprooms (always key for me). What wasn’t typical was the amount of wall art; not graffiti as much as very cool murals and street art, giving the neighborhood a bright, colorful vibe while probably painting over some otherwise dire looking buildings.</li><li>I stayed a few miles south in the Marriott on Biscayne Bay where some combination of my status and patience with a front desk trainee trying to solo on the property management system for the first time earned me a top floor bayside room looking out over the Port of Miami cruise terminal with 4 big cruise ships tied up, waiting for the CDC to drop their cruise ban.</li><li>One morning, when it felt the humidity had dipped below 80%, I decided to skip Uber and ride a Lyft scooter up to the Art District. I’ve talked, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/10/14/podcast-156-airport-satisfaction-escooters-smaller-luggage/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #156 — Airport Satisfaction; eScooters; Smaller Luggage\">past</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/01/25/podcast-159-planning-the-trip-of-a-lifetime-in-southeast-asia/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #159 — Planning the Trip of a Lifetime in Southeast Asia\">episodes</a>, how much I like riding scooters. I’ve ridden scooters in Chicago, Phoenix, DC -- everywhere I could find them. But last year, I didn’t ride them even though they were all around Chicago. There’s a fun, frivolous vibe about riding a scooter, but 2020 was anything but fun or frivolous and so I didn’t feel like riding them. But on this morning, with just a touch of humidity in the air and not much traffic on the streets, having a little fun riding a scooter to the office felt, once more, like the right thing to do.</li><li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<em>A Foolish Game</em>&nbsp;by Zep Hurme&nbsp;(c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license.&nbsp;http://ccmixter.org/files/zep_hurme/46448.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Talking in the last episode about needing to rebuild atrophied travel muscles after the long lockdown layoff generated a few comments. Chris Christensen of the Amateur Traveler Podcast dropped me a note saying:<ul><li>I can relate. We just got back from our first post vaccine trip to the Galapagos. First time on a plane since 2019.</li></ul></li><li>First trip back and you go to the Galapagos! No warm-ups? Hope you didn’t sprain any of those travel muscles.</li><li>Jim McDonough’s first trip back wasn’t simple either. He wrote on the TravelCommons Facebook page<ul><li>Last month, we made our first trip since January, 2020 to Kodiak, Alaska of all places, attending the decommissioning of a ship I helped the Coast Guard put into commission in 1971. San Diego to Alaska is a long way. Alaska Airlines is really nice. But I noticed my travel skills had atrophied.&nbsp; Approaching TSA, I realized that the red mesh bag I usually have for holding metal objects wasn’t in my bag. Then I sat for a while at a gate in Anchorage until remembering that Admiral\'s Club members can use Alaska\'s lounge. I\'m ready to go again, but probably not to Kodiak!</li></ul></li><li>Kudos to both of you guys for jumping straight into the deep-end. But you gotta be careful -- weak travel muscles can make you vulnerable. A few days ago, I <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1399783958066442247\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">re-tweeted a thread about a phishing attack</a> -- a very well-formatted “make sure your TSA Precheck doesn’t expire -- click here” e-mail with a link that, as you can imagine, didn’t take you to tsa.gov; though Aaron Woodin did tweet back the question “If you click on the link, does it confiscate your water?” It’s a well-timed phish, especially as more business travelers are gearing up to get back on the road.&nbsp;</li><li>And in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/05/09/podcast-175-how-to-find-local-tour-guides-rebuild-travel-muscles/\" title=\"Podcast #175 — How to Find Local Tour Guides; Rebuild Travel Muscles\">last episode</a>, I talked about Irene and Claire losing track of their Global Entry expiration dates -- Claire’s expired and Irene hit the “renew” button on the last day. Now you may think -- Global Entry? Big deal, who’s traveling internationally right now anyhow? But remember, for $100 for 5 years, Global Entry gives you the express lane thru immigration <em>plus</em> TSA PreCheck, vs. $85 for PreCheck alone. Hence I always tell people to spend the extra $15 for Global Entry. So anyhow, Irene and Claire fill out the on-line renewal form, pay the $100 (which Irene immediately got back because she used my Amex Platinum card), and then nothing. Silence. Crickets. Which is odd, because when I renewed my Global Entry, I had to go to ORD for an interview and an updated photo. But for them, nothing. Our flight to New York, to LaGuardia is coming up. The night before we leave, Irene gets an e-mail -- no link, mind you, just a message -- “Congrats! Your Global Entry has been renewed.” Yay! Except that when she checked into Southwest, there’s no little blue PreCheck checkmark on her boarding pass. Claire got her Congrats! e-mail the next day, but again, no check on the boarding pass. Ugh. The prior week when I was in Miami, the non-PreCheck lines tailed back the length of the terminal. But, as it turned out, it wasn’t a huge hassle. We left a little earlier for MDW and no horror lines. Three days later when they checked in for our flight home, they both got the blue check on their boarding passes. So spinning my IT propeller, it would seem that the airlines aren’t pinging that PreCheck database more than once every couple of days.</li><li>This trip was the first time since January 2019 I’d flown into LGA in almost 28 months; that’s 2⅓ years. That shocked me; I had to go back and check my calendars and my math again, because it seemed like I was always in New York. But it’s right. Second shock -- flying into the new rebuilt Terminal B, bright, airy, spacious, <em>clean</em>; everything the old Terminal B I flew into 2+ years ago was not. It was the low-ceilinged rat maze that, 7 years ago, then-Vice President Joe Biden said was like a third-world country -- which I actually think was less of an insult to LGA and more of an insult to many developing country airports. Walking down that old concourse to catch an American or United flight, it was not unusual to have to dodge a big plastic garbage can placed right in the middle, that had a hose coming down from the bottom of a make-shift funnel made out of plastic tarp, hanging from some ceiling tiles, collecting rainwater from roof leak. No one would ever look at that and think “What the hell?” because you’d see it like once a month. But now, it’s phenomenal; they’ve done a great job. I used to say that SFO’s new Terminal 2 was my favorite terminal -- where American and, back then, Virgin America flew out of. But now, it’s LGA’s Terminal B. There’s still construction going on, and getting a cab to the city is still a hassle, and a necessary one because there’s still no subway link, but once you’re inside, it’s great! Give yourself a little extra time to see the water fountain light show. And having a little downtime in Terminal B is no longer the purgatory it used to be, because there are now places that you actually sit down and eat and grab a beer; no more standing around having to juggle your bag and an Auntie Anne’s pretzel. I rarely have anything good to say about the Port Authority, but they’ve done a good job here.</li><li>And the TSA, another government organization I don’t often have good things to say about, does a nice job <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/coronavirus/passenger-throughput\">publishing the daily volumes of air passengers</a> passing through security checkpoints. Just scanning it you can see the growth kicking up in the February/March timeframe. Though if you’ve flown anytime over the past couple of months, you don’t need to look at the numbers; you’ve felt it in fuller planes and longer checkpoint lines. The Friday of Memorial Day weekend, the end of May, checkpoint volume was up 599% over the same Friday last year, and then this past Friday, June 11, checkpoint volume broke 2 million for the first time since the March lockdowns. The numbers are still 25-30% below 2019’s, but the gap is closing.&nbsp;</li><li>And then the keynote from Apple’s WorldWide Developers Conference gave me something else good to say about the TSA; working with Apple to let you use a digital version of your driver’s license at security checkpoints. I’ve already noticed that, at a few airports, you no longer have to show your boarding pass -- they just pop your driver’s license into a scanning machine and you’re on your way. No fumbling to pull up your boarding pass and scanning it. But now, no fumbling for my wallet if I can pull up my license on my phone. Actually, better than my drivers license would be my Global Entry card because it’s Real ID while my Illinois license is not. Could save me an extra trip to the DMV if and when the TSA decides to get serious about Real ID again -- which I hope is never.&nbsp;</li><li>Continuing on our now 3-episode arc on Uber and Lyft service, the long wait times, the huge price surges. Heading out for my flight down to Miami, the 17-mile trip Monday morning Uber ride to ORD, at $74 with a 2x surge, cost almost as much as the 1,100-mile flight on American down to MIA at $100 one way. There is no rational way to explain this, so I’ll leave it here as a meditation exercise for microeconomic pricing theorists and move on. Except, ‘cause I guess I can’t just <em>can’t</em> leave it here, to note that I had no problem with Uber or Lyft service in Miami. And except for that one joyful morning riding a scooter, the South Florida heat and humidity had me lighting up the Uber app multiple times a day. So I’m guessing those Uber carjackings in Chicago a few months back are having some residual impact on their driver recruitment efforts.</li><li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/media/files/DJBLUE/11541\">Hear Me</a></em>&nbsp;by DJ Blue &nbsp;(c) copyright 2007 Licensed under Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/\">Attribution Noncommercial Share-Alike</a> license http://ccmixter.org/media/files/DJBLUE/11541.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Why Business Travel Will Come Back</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Last Friday, the first day of Chicago’s full reopening and the same day the TSA’s checkpoint volume broke the 2 million passenger mark for the first time post-lockdown, a business colleague and I met for some happy hour beers and oysters in a bar in Wrigleyville. We were sitting at a second floor table against an open window, looking over at Wrigley Field as fans poured out of the Clark-&amp;-Addison main gate and into nearby bars to celebrate the Cubs’ victory over the St Louis Cardinals in what was the first full-capacity game since September 2019. Mike’s in consulting too; he’d been talking about how he was itching to get back out on the road to see his clients, on how he’s working to convince the firm’s management to lift, or at least bend their travel ban so he can see the clients again -- at least the ones who also want to start meeting people face-to-face again. Zoom and Teams calls are <em>OK</em>, they can suffice for some things, but there are so many things you miss when you’re not there in person.&nbsp;</li><li>In an outta-left-field sorta way, the masses of Cubs fans blocking traffic on Addison St helped prove Mike’s point. Official attendance was 35,112, not quite a sell-out, but having butts in 84% of the seats for a 1:20p Friday game isn’t bad. But similar to the “why travel to a meeting when you can video conference?” question, why go to a baseball game in person when you can watch it on TV where it’s covered by not just one crappy laptop camera, but 5-8 HD cameras with clean lenses and run by professionals? I know, it’s a stupid strawman question that we all know the answer to -- it’s not just the game, it’s the whole experience. And it’s not an either/or -- many times watching the game on TV is fine, and more convenient; but sometimes, you gotta get off the couch and go see the game live, in person, with a bunch of friends.</li><li>A couple of recent interactions(?) over the last couple of weeks drove this home. I’ve had multiple video calls with a programmer over the past month, probably 3-4 hour worth, going through some system re-architecting. After all that, I thought I had it pretty much down. Now the guy has started coming back to the office -- he said working from home for 14 months was being under house arrest -- so I pulled him into a conference room and started sketching stuff on a whiteboard. We stood there shoulder-to-shoulder and passed the blue marker back and forth, and in 20 minutes realized that there were 3 key facts about the existing systems that never came across in those hours of video calls and that completely changed the new architecture. But they did in that in-person 20 minutes. And afterwards, the guy said to me “Hey, that was fun. Let’s do some more of that” -- a reaction I’ve never heard about a video conference… ever. And at the same time, I had the exact opposite experience -- trying to explain a concept on a week’s worth of video calls that I know we could’ve handled in an hour if we could’ve been in the same room together, but we can’t because he’s overseas and can’t get through the US travel lockdown. So we trudged through the calls… and the frustration.</li><li>Which was pretty much the point that Mike was trying to make over honking buses and shouts of “Go Cubs Go”. “Yeah, I can have a meeting on Zoom, but I can’t have the pre-meeting ‘how are things going’ chats as we’re walking into the room, or the post-meeting ‘Can I ask you what you really meant in there’ sidebar, or pick up the non-verbal glances people will shoot at each other. The meeting’s important, but so’s the choreography that surrounds the meeting -- maybe even more so -- and that’s what I can’t get now. That and I’ve worked with a lot of these clients for 10, 15 years, so they’re friends too. And I miss that too.”</li><li>Airlines are saying that business travel is still down 70% from pre-lockdown levels, but that almost all of their top corporate accounts are telling them they plan to re-start travel later this year -- but first they gotta figure out how to get people out of their sweats and back into the office.</li><li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<em>Gargantua</em>&nbsp;by Admiral Bob (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/46361 Ft: My Free Mickey, Martijn de Boer</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Learning the History of Airports</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Back at the beginning of the year, back in episodes #<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/16/podcast-172-timeshares-without-the-pitch-notes-on-tucson/\" title=\"Podcast #172 — Timeshares Without the Pitch; Notes on Tucson\">172</a> and #<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/12/podcast-173-whats-new-in-travel-insurance-keeping-ahead-of-expiring-miles/\" title=\"Podcast #173 — What’s New in Travel Insurance; Keeping Ahead of Expiring Miles\">173</a>, I talked about a guy who lived on the secure side of ORD from October ‘til January because he was too afraid to fly. In researching this -- what turned out to be not unique -- situation, I came across an article written by <a href=\"https://udayton.edu/directory/artssciences/history/bednarek_janet.php\">Professor Janet Bednarek</a>, professor of history at University of Dayton. Her area of focus is on the history of airports in the US, which I thought would be a perfect topic for the TravelCommons podcast. So I sent her a Zoom invite, as one does these days, and had a great conversation about the history of airports.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #176</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_176.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #176 — Why Business Travel Will Come Back; Learning History of Airports','','inherit','closed','closed','','3550-revision-v1','','','2021-06-15 20:15:03','2021-06-16 01:15:03','',3550,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3560',0,'revision','',0),
(3561,1,'2021-06-15 20:24:26','2021-06-16 01:24:26','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_1985\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Airfields_IL_Chicago_C_htm_m252791c8-e1623802785342.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1985\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Airfields_IL_Chicago_C_htm_m252791c8-e1623802785342-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Old cars and planes on a runway\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> Where\'d the Racetrack Go?[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I can feel travel beginning to come back. <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/coronavirus/passenger-throughput\">TSA checkpoint volumes</a> are hitting post-pandemic highs, business travelers are starting to come out from behind their Zoom sessions, and vaccination rates are prompting more people to make travel plans. So on this episode, we first talk to , CEO of <a href=\"https://www.toursbylocals.com/\">ToursByLocals</a> about the state of the local tour market and then about how frequent travelers are starting to stretch their atrophied travel muscles. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_176.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #176: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>This Week</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studio as Chicago and the state of Illinois completely reopen for business -- no more capacity limits, no more socially distanced sitting -- just in time for the summer music festival season. No capacity limits, but you have to show proof of vaccination or a negative COVID test to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with 100,000 other music fans. Irene and I did that one year, check -- don’t need to do it again. I think I aged out of that demographic -- back in the ‘90’s.&nbsp;</li><li>Since the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/05/09/podcast-175-how-to-find-local-tour-guides-rebuild-travel-muscles/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #175 — How to Find Local Tour Guides; Rebuild Travel Muscles\">last episode</a>, I first flew down to Miami on business, and then over to New York City for a long weekend. Miami is always an interesting business destination; it’s got its own unique vibe. It starts at the airport; officially bilingual -- Spanish and English, in that order -- but it seems half the time when they make PA announcements, they just skip the English version. The client’s office was in the Wynwood Art District. It was my first time in this neighborhood; it had a kinda typical newly gentrified vibe -- lots of first generation food places: an upscale doughnut shop, a poké lunch joint, a couple of microbrewery taprooms (always key for me). What wasn’t typical was the amount of wall art; not graffiti as much as very cool murals and street art, giving the neighborhood a bright, colorful vibe while probably painting over some otherwise dire looking buildings.</li><li>I stayed a few miles south in the Marriott on Biscayne Bay where some combination of my status and patience with a front desk trainee trying to solo on the property management system for the first time earned me a top floor bayside room looking out over the Port of Miami cruise terminal with 4 big cruise ships tied up, waiting for the CDC to drop their cruise ban.</li><li>One morning, when it felt the humidity had dipped below 80%, I decided to skip Uber and ride a Lyft scooter up to the Art District. I’ve talked, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/10/14/podcast-156-airport-satisfaction-escooters-smaller-luggage/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #156 — Airport Satisfaction; eScooters; Smaller Luggage\">past</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/01/25/podcast-159-planning-the-trip-of-a-lifetime-in-southeast-asia/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #159 — Planning the Trip of a Lifetime in Southeast Asia\">episodes</a>, how much I like riding scooters. I’ve ridden scooters in Chicago, Phoenix, DC -- everywhere I could find them. But last year, I didn’t ride them even though they were all around Chicago. There’s a fun, frivolous vibe about riding a scooter, but 2020 was anything but fun or frivolous and so I didn’t feel like riding them. But on this morning, with just a touch of humidity in the air and not much traffic on the streets, having a little fun riding a scooter to the office felt, once more, like the right thing to do.</li><li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<em>A Foolish Game</em>&nbsp;by Zep Hurme&nbsp;(c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license.&nbsp;http://ccmixter.org/files/zep_hurme/46448.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Talking in the last episode about needing to rebuild atrophied travel muscles after the long lockdown layoff generated a few comments. Chris Christensen of the Amateur Traveler Podcast dropped me a note saying:<ul><li>I can relate. We just got back from our first post vaccine trip to the Galapagos. First time on a plane since 2019.</li></ul></li><li>First trip back and you go to the Galapagos! No warm-ups? Hope you didn’t sprain any of those travel muscles.</li><li>Jim McDonough’s first trip back wasn’t simple either. He wrote on the TravelCommons Facebook page<ul><li>Last month, we made our first trip since January, 2020 to Kodiak, Alaska of all places, attending the decommissioning of a ship I helped the Coast Guard put into commission in 1971. San Diego to Alaska is a long way. Alaska Airlines is really nice. But I noticed my travel skills had atrophied.&nbsp; Approaching TSA, I realized that the red mesh bag I usually have for holding metal objects wasn’t in my bag. Then I sat for a while at a gate in Anchorage until remembering that Admiral\'s Club members can use Alaska\'s lounge. I\'m ready to go again, but probably not to Kodiak!</li></ul></li><li>Kudos to both of you guys for jumping straight into the deep-end. But you gotta be careful -- weak travel muscles can make you vulnerable. A few days ago, I <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1399783958066442247\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">re-tweeted a thread about a phishing attack</a> -- a very well-formatted “make sure your TSA Precheck doesn’t expire -- click here” e-mail with a link that, as you can imagine, didn’t take you to tsa.gov; though Aaron Woodin did tweet back the question “If you click on the link, does it confiscate your water?” It’s a well-timed phish, especially as more business travelers are gearing up to get back on the road.&nbsp;</li><li>And in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/05/09/podcast-175-how-to-find-local-tour-guides-rebuild-travel-muscles/\" title=\"Podcast #175 — How to Find Local Tour Guides; Rebuild Travel Muscles\">last episode</a>, I talked about Irene and Claire losing track of their Global Entry expiration dates -- Claire’s expired and Irene hit the “renew” button on the last day. Now you may think -- Global Entry? Big deal, who’s traveling internationally right now anyhow? But remember, for $100 for 5 years, Global Entry gives you the express lane thru immigration <em>plus</em> TSA PreCheck, vs. $85 for PreCheck alone. Hence I always tell people to spend the extra $15 for Global Entry. So anyhow, Irene and Claire fill out the on-line renewal form, pay the $100 (which Irene immediately got back because she used my Amex Platinum card), and then nothing. Silence. Crickets. Which is odd, because when I renewed my Global Entry, I had to go to ORD for an interview and an updated photo. But for them, nothing. Our flight to New York, to LaGuardia is coming up. The night before we leave, Irene gets an e-mail -- no link, mind you, just a message -- “Congrats! Your Global Entry has been renewed.” Yay! Except that when she checked into Southwest, there’s no little blue PreCheck checkmark on her boarding pass. Claire got her Congrats! e-mail the next day, but again, no check on the boarding pass. Ugh. The prior week when I was in Miami, the non-PreCheck lines tailed back the length of the terminal. But, as it turned out, it wasn’t a huge hassle. We left a little earlier for MDW and no horror lines. Three days later when they checked in for our flight home, they both got the blue check on their boarding passes. So spinning my IT propeller, it would seem that the airlines aren’t pinging that PreCheck database more than once every couple of days.</li><li>This trip was the first time since January 2019 I’d flown into LGA in almost 28 months; that’s 2⅓ years. That shocked me; I had to go back and check my calendars and my math again, because it seemed like I was always in New York. But it’s right. Second shock -- flying into the new rebuilt Terminal B, bright, airy, spacious, <em>clean</em>; everything the old Terminal B I flew into 2+ years ago was not. It was the low-ceilinged rat maze that, 7 years ago, then-Vice President Joe Biden said was like a third-world country -- which I actually think was less of an insult to LGA and more of an insult to many developing country airports. Walking down that old concourse to catch an American or United flight, it was not unusual to have to dodge a big plastic garbage can placed right in the middle, that had a hose coming down from the bottom of a make-shift funnel made out of plastic tarp, hanging from some ceiling tiles, collecting rainwater from roof leak. No one would ever look at that and think “What the hell?” because you’d see it like once a month. But now, it’s phenomenal; they’ve done a great job. I used to say that SFO’s new Terminal 2 was my favorite terminal -- where American and, back then, Virgin America flew out of. But now, it’s LGA’s Terminal B. There’s still construction going on, and getting a cab to the city is still a hassle, and a necessary one because there’s still no subway link, but once you’re inside, it’s great! Give yourself a little extra time to see the water fountain light show. And having a little downtime in Terminal B is no longer the purgatory it used to be, because there are now places that you actually sit down and eat and grab a beer; no more standing around having to juggle your bag and an Auntie Anne’s pretzel. I rarely have anything good to say about the Port Authority, but they’ve done a good job here.</li><li>And the TSA, another government organization I don’t often have good things to say about, does a nice job <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/coronavirus/passenger-throughput\">publishing the daily volumes of air passengers</a> passing through security checkpoints. Just scanning it you can see the growth kicking up in the February/March timeframe. Though if you’ve flown anytime over the past couple of months, you don’t need to look at the numbers; you’ve felt it in fuller planes and longer checkpoint lines. The Friday of Memorial Day weekend, the end of May, checkpoint volume was up 599% over the same Friday last year, and then this past Friday, June 11, checkpoint volume broke 2 million for the first time since the March lockdowns. The numbers are still 25-30% below 2019’s, but the gap is closing.&nbsp;</li><li>And then the keynote from Apple’s WorldWide Developers Conference gave me something else good to say about the TSA; working with Apple to let you use a digital version of your driver’s license at security checkpoints. I’ve already noticed that, at a few airports, you no longer have to show your boarding pass -- they just pop your driver’s license into a scanning machine and you’re on your way. No fumbling to pull up your boarding pass and scanning it. But now, no fumbling for my wallet if I can pull up my license on my phone. Actually, better than my drivers license would be my Global Entry card because it’s Real ID while my Illinois license is not. Could save me an extra trip to the DMV if and when the TSA decides to get serious about Real ID again -- which I hope is never.&nbsp;</li><li>Continuing on our now 3-episode arc on Uber and Lyft service, the long wait times, the huge price surges. Heading out for my flight down to Miami, the 17-mile trip Monday morning Uber ride to ORD, at $74 with a 2x surge, cost almost as much as the 1,100-mile flight on American down to MIA at $100 one way. There is no rational way to explain this, so I’ll leave it here as a meditation exercise for microeconomic pricing theorists and move on. Except, ‘cause I guess I can’t just <em>can’t</em> leave it here, to note that I had no problem with Uber or Lyft service in Miami. And except for that one joyful morning riding a scooter, the South Florida heat and humidity had me lighting up the Uber app multiple times a day. So I’m guessing those Uber carjackings in Chicago a few months back are having some residual impact on their driver recruitment efforts.</li><li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/media/files/DJBLUE/11541\">Hear Me</a></em>&nbsp;by DJ Blue &nbsp;(c) copyright 2007 Licensed under Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/\">Attribution Noncommercial Share-Alike</a> license http://ccmixter.org/media/files/DJBLUE/11541.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Why Business Travel Will Come Back</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Last Friday, the first day of Chicago’s full reopening and the same day the TSA’s checkpoint volume broke the 2 million passenger mark for the first time post-lockdown, a business colleague and I met for some happy hour beers and oysters in a bar in Wrigleyville. We were sitting at a second floor table against an open window, looking over at Wrigley Field as fans poured out of the Clark-&amp;-Addison main gate and into nearby bars to celebrate the Cubs’ victory over the St Louis Cardinals in what was the first full-capacity game since September 2019. Mike’s in consulting too; he’d been talking about how he was itching to get back out on the road to see his clients, on how he’s working to convince the firm’s management to lift, or at least bend their travel ban so he can see the clients again -- at least the ones who also want to start meeting people face-to-face again. Zoom and Teams calls are <em>OK</em>, they can suffice for some things, but there are so many things you miss when you’re not there in person.&nbsp;</li><li>In an outta-left-field sorta way, the masses of Cubs fans blocking traffic on Addison St helped prove Mike’s point. Official attendance was 35,112, not quite a sell-out, but having butts in 84% of the seats for a 1:20p Friday game isn’t bad. But similar to the “why travel to a meeting when you can video conference?” question, why go to a baseball game in person when you can watch it on TV where it’s covered by not just one crappy laptop camera, but 5-8 HD cameras with clean lenses and run by professionals? I know, it’s a stupid strawman question that we all know the answer to -- it’s not just the game, it’s the whole experience. And it’s not an either/or -- many times watching the game on TV is fine, and more convenient; but sometimes, you gotta get off the couch and go see the game live, in person, with a bunch of friends.</li><li>A couple of recent interactions(?) over the last couple of weeks drove this home. I’ve had multiple video calls with a programmer over the past month, probably 3-4 hour worth, going through some system re-architecting. After all that, I thought I had it pretty much down. Now the guy has started coming back to the office -- he said working from home for 14 months was being under house arrest -- so I pulled him into a conference room and started sketching stuff on a whiteboard. We stood there shoulder-to-shoulder and passed the blue marker back and forth, and in 20 minutes realized that there were 3 key facts about the existing systems that never came across in those hours of video calls and that completely changed the new architecture. But they did in that in-person 20 minutes. And afterwards, the guy said to me “Hey, that was fun. Let’s do some more of that” -- a reaction I’ve never heard about a video conference… ever. And at the same time, I had the exact opposite experience -- trying to explain a concept on a week’s worth of video calls that I know we could’ve handled in an hour if we could’ve been in the same room together, but we can’t because he’s overseas and can’t get through the US travel lockdown. So we trudged through the calls… and the frustration.</li><li>Which was pretty much the point that Mike was trying to make over honking buses and shouts of “Go Cubs Go”. “Yeah, I can have a meeting on Zoom, but I can’t have the pre-meeting ‘how are things going’ chats as we’re walking into the room, or the post-meeting ‘Can I ask you what you really meant in there’ sidebar, or pick up the non-verbal glances people will shoot at each other. The meeting’s important, but so’s the choreography that surrounds the meeting -- maybe even more so -- and that’s what I can’t get now. That and I’ve worked with a lot of these clients for 10, 15 years, so they’re friends too. And I miss that too.”</li><li>Airlines are saying that business travel is still down 70% from pre-lockdown levels, but that almost all of their top corporate accounts are telling them they plan to re-start travel later this year -- but first they gotta figure out how to get people out of their sweats and back into the office.</li><li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<em>Gargantua</em>&nbsp;by Admiral Bob (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/46361 Ft: My Free Mickey, Martijn de Boer</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Learning the History of Airports</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Back at the beginning of the year, back in episodes #<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/16/podcast-172-timeshares-without-the-pitch-notes-on-tucson/\" title=\"Podcast #172 — Timeshares Without the Pitch; Notes on Tucson\">172</a> and #<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/12/podcast-173-whats-new-in-travel-insurance-keeping-ahead-of-expiring-miles/\" title=\"Podcast #173 — What’s New in Travel Insurance; Keeping Ahead of Expiring Miles\">173</a>, I talked about a guy who lived on the secure side of ORD from October ‘til January because he was too afraid to fly. In researching this -- what turned out to be not unique -- situation, I came across an article written by <a href=\"https://udayton.edu/directory/artssciences/history/bednarek_janet.php\">Professor Janet Bednarek</a>, professor of history at University of Dayton. Her area of focus is on the history of airports in the US, which I thought would be a perfect topic for the TravelCommons podcast. So I sent her a Zoom invite, as one does these days, and had a great conversation about the history of airports.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #176</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_176.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #176 — Why Business Travel Is Coming Back; Learning Airport History','','inherit','closed','closed','','3550-revision-v1','','','2021-06-15 20:24:26','2021-06-16 01:24:26','',3550,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3561',0,'revision','',0),
(3562,1,'2021-06-15 20:34:03','2021-06-16 01:34:03','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_1985\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Airfields_IL_Chicago_C_htm_m252791c8-e1623802785342.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1985\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Airfields_IL_Chicago_C_htm_m252791c8-e1623802785342-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Old cars and planes on a runway\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> Where\'d the Racetrack Go?[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Business travelers are getting itchy. They know Zoom calls can\'t replace a face-to-face meeting, but they can\'t meet with people who aren\'t in their offices yet. We also talk about how surprisingly great the LaGuardia Terminal B renovation is, and then talk about airport history with <a href=\"https://udayton.edu/directory/artssciences/history/bednarek_janet.php\">Professor Janet Bednarek</a>, professor of history at University of Dayton.  All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_176.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #176: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>This Week</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studio as Chicago and the state of Illinois completely reopen for business -- no more capacity limits, no more socially distanced sitting -- just in time for the summer music festival season. No capacity limits, but you have to show proof of vaccination or a negative COVID test to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with 100,000 other music fans. Irene and I did that one year, check -- don’t need to do it again. I think I aged out of that demographic -- back in the ‘90’s.&nbsp;</li><li>Since the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/05/09/podcast-175-how-to-find-local-tour-guides-rebuild-travel-muscles/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #175 — How to Find Local Tour Guides; Rebuild Travel Muscles\">last episode</a>, I first flew down to Miami on business, and then over to New York City for a long weekend. Miami is always an interesting business destination; it’s got its own unique vibe. It starts at the airport; officially bilingual -- Spanish and English, in that order -- but it seems half the time when they make PA announcements, they just skip the English version. The client’s office was in the Wynwood Art District. It was my first time in this neighborhood; it had a kinda typical newly gentrified vibe -- lots of first generation food places: an upscale doughnut shop, a poké lunch joint, a couple of microbrewery taprooms (always key for me). What wasn’t typical was the amount of wall art; not graffiti as much as very cool murals and street art, giving the neighborhood a bright, colorful vibe while probably painting over some otherwise dire looking buildings.</li><li>I stayed a few miles south in the Marriott on Biscayne Bay where some combination of my status and patience with a front desk trainee trying to solo on the property management system for the first time earned me a top floor bayside room looking out over the Port of Miami cruise terminal with 4 big cruise ships tied up, waiting for the CDC to drop their cruise ban.</li><li>One morning, when it felt the humidity had dipped below 80%, I decided to skip Uber and ride a Lyft scooter up to the Art District. I’ve talked, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/10/14/podcast-156-airport-satisfaction-escooters-smaller-luggage/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #156 — Airport Satisfaction; eScooters; Smaller Luggage\">past</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/01/25/podcast-159-planning-the-trip-of-a-lifetime-in-southeast-asia/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #159 — Planning the Trip of a Lifetime in Southeast Asia\">episodes</a>, how much I like riding scooters. I’ve ridden scooters in Chicago, Phoenix, DC -- everywhere I could find them. But last year, I didn’t ride them even though they were all around Chicago. There’s a fun, frivolous vibe about riding a scooter, but 2020 was anything but fun or frivolous and so I didn’t feel like riding them. But on this morning, with just a touch of humidity in the air and not much traffic on the streets, having a little fun riding a scooter to the office felt, once more, like the right thing to do.</li><li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<em>A Foolish Game</em>&nbsp;by Zep Hurme&nbsp;(c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license.&nbsp;http://ccmixter.org/files/zep_hurme/46448.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Talking in the last episode about needing to rebuild atrophied travel muscles after the long lockdown layoff generated a few comments. Chris Christensen of the Amateur Traveler Podcast dropped me a note saying:<ul><li>I can relate. We just got back from our first post vaccine trip to the Galapagos. First time on a plane since 2019.</li></ul></li><li>First trip back and you go to the Galapagos! No warm-ups? Hope you didn’t sprain any of those travel muscles.</li><li>Jim McDonough’s first trip back wasn’t simple either. He wrote on the TravelCommons Facebook page<ul><li>Last month, we made our first trip since January, 2020 to Kodiak, Alaska of all places, attending the decommissioning of a ship I helped the Coast Guard put into commission in 1971. San Diego to Alaska is a long way. Alaska Airlines is really nice. But I noticed my travel skills had atrophied.&nbsp; Approaching TSA, I realized that the red mesh bag I usually have for holding metal objects wasn’t in my bag. Then I sat for a while at a gate in Anchorage until remembering that Admiral\'s Club members can use Alaska\'s lounge. I\'m ready to go again, but probably not to Kodiak!</li></ul></li><li>Kudos to both of you guys for jumping straight into the deep-end. But you gotta be careful -- weak travel muscles can make you vulnerable. A few days ago, I <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1399783958066442247\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">re-tweeted a thread about a phishing attack</a> -- a very well-formatted “make sure your TSA Precheck doesn’t expire -- click here” e-mail with a link that, as you can imagine, didn’t take you to tsa.gov; though Aaron Woodin did tweet back the question “If you click on the link, does it confiscate your water?” It’s a well-timed phish, especially as more business travelers are gearing up to get back on the road.&nbsp;</li><li>And in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/05/09/podcast-175-how-to-find-local-tour-guides-rebuild-travel-muscles/\" title=\"Podcast #175 — How to Find Local Tour Guides; Rebuild Travel Muscles\">last episode</a>, I talked about Irene and Claire losing track of their Global Entry expiration dates -- Claire’s expired and Irene hit the “renew” button on the last day. Now you may think -- Global Entry? Big deal, who’s traveling internationally right now anyhow? But remember, for $100 for 5 years, Global Entry gives you the express lane thru immigration <em>plus</em> TSA PreCheck, vs. $85 for PreCheck alone. Hence I always tell people to spend the extra $15 for Global Entry. So anyhow, Irene and Claire fill out the on-line renewal form, pay the $100 (which Irene immediately got back because she used my Amex Platinum card), and then nothing. Silence. Crickets. Which is odd, because when I renewed my Global Entry, I had to go to ORD for an interview and an updated photo. But for them, nothing. Our flight to New York, to LaGuardia is coming up. The night before we leave, Irene gets an e-mail -- no link, mind you, just a message -- “Congrats! Your Global Entry has been renewed.” Yay! Except that when she checked into Southwest, there’s no little blue PreCheck checkmark on her boarding pass. Claire got her Congrats! e-mail the next day, but again, no check on the boarding pass. Ugh. The prior week when I was in Miami, the non-PreCheck lines tailed back the length of the terminal. But, as it turned out, it wasn’t a huge hassle. We left a little earlier for MDW and no horror lines. Three days later when they checked in for our flight home, they both got the blue check on their boarding passes. So spinning my IT propeller, it would seem that the airlines aren’t pinging that PreCheck database more than once every couple of days.</li><li>This trip was the first time since January 2019 I’d flown into LGA in almost 28 months; that’s 2⅓ years. That shocked me; I had to go back and check my calendars and my math again, because it seemed like I was always in New York. But it’s right. Second shock -- flying into the new rebuilt Terminal B, bright, airy, spacious, <em>clean</em>; everything the old Terminal B I flew into 2+ years ago was not. It was the low-ceilinged rat maze that, 7 years ago, then-Vice President Joe Biden said was like a third-world country -- which I actually think was less of an insult to LGA and more of an insult to many developing country airports. Walking down that old concourse to catch an American or United flight, it was not unusual to have to dodge a big plastic garbage can placed right in the middle, that had a hose coming down from the bottom of a make-shift funnel made out of plastic tarp, hanging from some ceiling tiles, collecting rainwater from roof leak. No one would ever look at that and think “What the hell?” because you’d see it like once a month. But now, it’s phenomenal; they’ve done a great job. I used to say that SFO’s new Terminal 2 was my favorite terminal -- where American and, back then, Virgin America flew out of. But now, it’s LGA’s Terminal B. There’s still construction going on, and getting a cab to the city is still a hassle, and a necessary one because there’s still no subway link, but once you’re inside, it’s great! Give yourself a little extra time to see the water fountain light show. And having a little downtime in Terminal B is no longer the purgatory it used to be, because there are now places that you actually sit down and eat and grab a beer; no more standing around having to juggle your bag and an Auntie Anne’s pretzel. I rarely have anything good to say about the Port Authority, but they’ve done a good job here.</li><li>And the TSA, another government organization I don’t often have good things to say about, does a nice job <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/coronavirus/passenger-throughput\">publishing the daily volumes of air passengers</a> passing through security checkpoints. Just scanning it you can see the growth kicking up in the February/March timeframe. Though if you’ve flown anytime over the past couple of months, you don’t need to look at the numbers; you’ve felt it in fuller planes and longer checkpoint lines. The Friday of Memorial Day weekend, the end of May, checkpoint volume was up 599% over the same Friday last year, and then this past Friday, June 11, checkpoint volume broke 2 million for the first time since the March lockdowns. The numbers are still 25-30% below 2019’s, but the gap is closing.&nbsp;</li><li>And then the keynote from Apple’s WorldWide Developers Conference gave me something else good to say about the TSA; working with Apple to let you use a digital version of your driver’s license at security checkpoints. I’ve already noticed that, at a few airports, you no longer have to show your boarding pass -- they just pop your driver’s license into a scanning machine and you’re on your way. No fumbling to pull up your boarding pass and scanning it. But now, no fumbling for my wallet if I can pull up my license on my phone. Actually, better than my drivers license would be my Global Entry card because it’s Real ID while my Illinois license is not. Could save me an extra trip to the DMV if and when the TSA decides to get serious about Real ID again -- which I hope is never.&nbsp;</li><li>Continuing on our now 3-episode arc on Uber and Lyft service, the long wait times, the huge price surges. Heading out for my flight down to Miami, the 17-mile trip Monday morning Uber ride to ORD, at $74 with a 2x surge, cost almost as much as the 1,100-mile flight on American down to MIA at $100 one way. There is no rational way to explain this, so I’ll leave it here as a meditation exercise for microeconomic pricing theorists and move on. Except, ‘cause I guess I can’t just <em>can’t</em> leave it here, to note that I had no problem with Uber or Lyft service in Miami. And except for that one joyful morning riding a scooter, the South Florida heat and humidity had me lighting up the Uber app multiple times a day. So I’m guessing those Uber carjackings in Chicago a few months back are having some residual impact on their driver recruitment efforts.</li><li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/media/files/DJBLUE/11541\">Hear Me</a></em>&nbsp;by DJ Blue &nbsp;(c) copyright 2007 Licensed under Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/\">Attribution Noncommercial Share-Alike</a> license http://ccmixter.org/media/files/DJBLUE/11541.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Why Business Travel Will Come Back</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Last Friday, the first day of Chicago’s full reopening and the same day the TSA’s checkpoint volume broke the 2 million passenger mark for the first time post-lockdown, a business colleague and I met for some happy hour beers and oysters in a bar in Wrigleyville. We were sitting at a second floor table against an open window, looking over at Wrigley Field as fans poured out of the Clark-&amp;-Addison main gate and into nearby bars to celebrate the Cubs’ victory over the St Louis Cardinals in what was the first full-capacity game since September 2019. Mike’s in consulting too; he’d been talking about how he was itching to get back out on the road to see his clients, on how he’s working to convince the firm’s management to lift, or at least bend their travel ban so he can see the clients again -- at least the ones who also want to start meeting people face-to-face again. Zoom and Teams calls are <em>OK</em>, they can suffice for some things, but there are so many things you miss when you’re not there in person.&nbsp;</li><li>In an outta-left-field sorta way, the masses of Cubs fans blocking traffic on Addison St helped prove Mike’s point. Official attendance was 35,112, not quite a sell-out, but having butts in 84% of the seats for a 1:20p Friday game isn’t bad. But similar to the “why travel to a meeting when you can video conference?” question, why go to a baseball game in person when you can watch it on TV where it’s covered by not just one crappy laptop camera, but 5-8 HD cameras with clean lenses and run by professionals? I know, it’s a stupid strawman question that we all know the answer to -- it’s not just the game, it’s the whole experience. And it’s not an either/or -- many times watching the game on TV is fine, and more convenient; but sometimes, you gotta get off the couch and go see the game live, in person, with a bunch of friends.</li><li>A couple of recent interactions(?) over the last couple of weeks drove this home. I’ve had multiple video calls with a programmer over the past month, probably 3-4 hour worth, going through some system re-architecting. After all that, I thought I had it pretty much down. Now the guy has started coming back to the office -- he said working from home for 14 months was being under house arrest -- so I pulled him into a conference room and started sketching stuff on a whiteboard. We stood there shoulder-to-shoulder and passed the blue marker back and forth, and in 20 minutes realized that there were 3 key facts about the existing systems that never came across in those hours of video calls and that completely changed the new architecture. But they did in that in-person 20 minutes. And afterwards, the guy said to me “Hey, that was fun. Let’s do some more of that” -- a reaction I’ve never heard about a video conference… ever. And at the same time, I had the exact opposite experience -- trying to explain a concept on a week’s worth of video calls that I know we could’ve handled in an hour if we could’ve been in the same room together, but we can’t because he’s overseas and can’t get through the US travel lockdown. So we trudged through the calls… and the frustration.</li><li>Which was pretty much the point that Mike was trying to make over honking buses and shouts of “Go Cubs Go”. “Yeah, I can have a meeting on Zoom, but I can’t have the pre-meeting ‘how are things going’ chats as we’re walking into the room, or the post-meeting ‘Can I ask you what you really meant in there’ sidebar, or pick up the non-verbal glances people will shoot at each other. The meeting’s important, but so’s the choreography that surrounds the meeting -- maybe even more so -- and that’s what I can’t get now. That and I’ve worked with a lot of these clients for 10, 15 years, so they’re friends too. And I miss that too.”</li><li>Airlines are saying that business travel is still down 70% from pre-lockdown levels, but that almost all of their top corporate accounts are telling them they plan to re-start travel later this year -- but first they gotta figure out how to get people out of their sweats and back into the office.</li><li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<em>Gargantua</em>&nbsp;by Admiral Bob (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/46361 Ft: My Free Mickey, Martijn de Boer</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Learning the History of Airports</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Back at the beginning of the year, back in episodes #<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/16/podcast-172-timeshares-without-the-pitch-notes-on-tucson/\" title=\"Podcast #172 — Timeshares Without the Pitch; Notes on Tucson\">172</a> and #<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/12/podcast-173-whats-new-in-travel-insurance-keeping-ahead-of-expiring-miles/\" title=\"Podcast #173 — What’s New in Travel Insurance; Keeping Ahead of Expiring Miles\">173</a>, I talked about a guy who lived on the secure side of ORD from October ‘til January because he was too afraid to fly. In researching this -- what turned out to be not unique -- situation, I came across an article written by <a href=\"https://udayton.edu/directory/artssciences/history/bednarek_janet.php\">Professor Janet Bednarek</a>, professor of history at University of Dayton. Her area of focus is on the history of airports in the US, which I thought would be a perfect topic for the TravelCommons podcast. So I sent her a Zoom invite, as one does these days, and had a great conversation about the history of airports.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #176</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_176.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #176 — Why Business Travel Is Coming Back; Learning Airport History','','inherit','closed','closed','','3550-revision-v1','','','2021-06-15 20:34:03','2021-06-16 01:34:03','',3550,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3562',0,'revision','',0),
(3563,1,'2021-06-15 20:41:40','2021-06-16 01:41:40','[caption id=\"attachment_1402\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"225\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/IMG_0159.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1402\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/IMG_0159-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"That\'s Gonna Make for a Long Walk\" width=\"225\" height=\"300\"></a> Need More Taxes To Fix This[/caption]\n\nHere\'s a new episode to keep you occupied&nbsp;if you’re stuck in a line somewhere while traveling Thanksgiving week. There are tips for the non-frequent traveler on how to avoid major airport faux pas and a review of how travel taxes will soak you when you get to your destination. We also talk about a high-tech suitcase that\'s blown through its Indiegogo funding campaign, hackers emptying out Hilton Honors accounts, and an overseas WiFi session that emptied out someone\'s wallet. &nbsp;You can listen to all this and more using the&nbsp;<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_112.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.&nbsp;[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_112.mp3\"]\n\n<!--more-->\n\n<hr>\n\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #112:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside Chicago, IL. Giving you something new to listen to if you’re stuck in a line somewhere while traveling Thanksgiving week. Don’t look for me, though. I got home Weds night and won’t be traveling again until the crowds clear out.</li>\n 	<li>I was going to open up this episode with kind of a joke sponsorship, something like -- “Brought to you by People Express, thanking Spirit Airlines for making people nostalgic for us and Newark’s North Terminal”. For anyone old enough to have flown People Express in the early ‘80’s, I thought it would be a bit of a chuckle.</li>\n 	<li>But last week, walking through New Orleans airport, I saw a People Express counter. Wait, what? Turns out that some group picked up the name for a new <a href=\"https://www.flypex.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">airline</a> hubbing out of Newport News airport in southern Virginia. Service started this summer only to stop three months later after a ground truck hit one of their two planes. They were supposed to relaunch last month, but that didn’t happen. And then last month, Newport News airport <a href=\"http://wtkr.com/2014/11/18/whats-next-for-peoplexpress/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">evicted</a> them for failure to turn over the Passenger Facility Charge that People Express collected on ticket sales over the summer.</li>\n 	<li>So maybe my fake promo should go the other way, with Spirit thanking the new People Express for letting Spirit say to their passengers “Hey, you could do worse…”</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Zapac/25046\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><i>You are (funky mix)</i></a>&nbsp;by Zapac</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>A couple of comments from the last episode…</li>\n 	<li>On the TravelCommons’ Facebook <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">page</a>, Steve Frick said “Listened to your latest episode last week flying into Atlanta. As walked down Concourse A, I saw TAP, &nbsp;the craft beer bar you mentioned...it looked like an aquarium full of smokers”. I rummaged around the file folders of my mobile phone and found a picture of that bar which I posted on Facebook under Steve’s post. He nailed it. I couldn’t have come up with a better description.</li>\n 	<li>Following up on the description of my first MARTA ride from ATL up north, Dan Gradwohl sent a note pointing to the website <a href=\"http://toandfromtheairport.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">toandfromtheairport.com</a>. He just returned from 5 weeks in the Balkans and said used the website for all those trips, and has used it to plan upcoming trips to Panama City (the one in Panama, not on the Redneck Riviera) and Santiago, Chile. I’d used it a couple of years ago when looking at rapid transit from Beijing airport into the city (I ended up punting and taking a cab, an adventure in its own right that I describe in episode #109). It’s a great resource, but, as you can imagine, tough to keep updated. Looking at the page for ORD, the train section doesn’t reflect the recent surcharge for L rides originating at ORD, and the taxi section doesn’t describe the logistical differences between getting a cab into the city (just get into the cab rank) vs. one to the suburbs -- which involves calling one of the cab companies, getting an assigned number, and then waiting one lane over, unless you want to pay meter-&amp;-a-half to one of the city cabs -- Welcome to Chicago. &nbsp;I sent a note a week ago to the site owner, Steve Pells, with these updates but haven’t seen them reflected yet on the site.</li>\n 	<li>Turning to my <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Twitter</a> notifications, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/chris2x\">Chris Christensen</a> of the Amateur Traveler podcast sent a quick Twitter message on last episode’s seat recline rant -- “I agree with your assessment of the knee defender story, I am 6\' 3\" and can work on a laptop in <a href=\"https://twitter.com/united\">United</a>\'s Economy Plus seats”</li>\n 	<li>Last month, Arnoud Heijnis pointed me to the <a href=\"http://design-milk.com/bluesmart-smart-carry-luggage/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Bluesmart carry-on bag</a>, the roller board with its own app, allowing you to track it, lock it, and getting notifications when it moves out of range from you. It rocketed past its $50,000 Indiegogo fundraising goal. The last time I checked, they had $1.1M in pledges. The crowdfunding closes Mon, Nov 24. Their Indiegogo <a href=\"https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/bluesmart-world-s-first-smart-connected-carry-on\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">page</a> is really good -- nice video, good description of the product, timeline laying out the steps between now and their July shipping date. They definitely hit that sweet spot of travel technology lust. Arnoud and I traded tweets on whether or not to pull the trigger. Arnoud makes a good point about wanted to see how the inside is laid out -- there’s no picture of that on the Indiegogo page. I’m in the market for a new suitcase anyways. But can I wait until July? I’ll probably pull the trigger this weekend before it closes.</li>\n 	<li>As I continue to prattle on about the wonders and benefits of TSA PreCheck, I came up with a new one early Monday morning -- since I don’t have to take my shoes off, I don’t have to risk waking my wife up by turning on the light to make sure I don’t pick a pair of socks with a hole in it. Yeah, it’s a nit, but it’s one less little thing to spike my morning. And I do have to give the TSA credit for adapting to its popularity. Monday morning in ORD’s Terminal 1 -- the United terminal -- definitely rush hour with all the consultants flying out to their client sites -- they had 4 lanes of PreCheck, shuttling the non-PreCheck Premiere fliers to another line nearby. It could’ve been ugly, but I was through in 5 minutes. I’ve bashed the TSA enough; I also want to give credit where credit is due.</li>\n 	<li>Don’t know if you caught the <a href=\"http://www.tnooz.com/article/ongoing-hiltons-loyalty-program-hackers-continue-selling-account-access/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">news</a> at the beginning of the month that the Hilton HHonors program was hit by hackers. After getting replacement credit cards sent to me after the Target and then the Home Depot breaches, I gotta say that I’ve become a bit complacent about these announcements. Hilton had weak security, allowing the use of a 4-digit PIN instead of a strong password, allowing is suspected to be a brute force attack -- not a problem with just 4 numbers. Once in, the hackers drained the accounts, most of them swapping points for gift cards, or selling the points on hacker forums for pennies on the equivalent dollar, though there were a couple of cases of thieves redeeming the points for nights -- one victim found that 250,000 of his points had been used to buy $1200 worth of nights at low-end Hilton brands along the East Coast. Hilton hasn’t said how many points they’ve had to reimburse. &nbsp;Many people treat their award points accounts like savings accounts for travel -- banking miles or frequent sleeper points for a summer vacation. But until recently, airlines and hotels haven’t secured them with anything close to bank-like security. Hilton and Delta allowed 4-digit PINs (Delta is switching over to strong passwords), United still allows 6-character passwords. But it’s changing. Before Delta’s switch, I noticed American and Marriott forcing the use of slightly stronger 8-character passwords. And Hilton has now added a captcha to slow down brute force attacks. It’s certainly not banking-style 2-factor authentication, but it’s a start. Another good start would be to change all my travel site passwords to something other than ABC123.</li>\n 	<li>There was another <a href=\"http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/11/18/passenger-stuck-with-1171-wi-fi-bill-on-singapore-airlines-flight/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">story</a> I tweeted out this week involving in-flight WiFi. Some guy racked up an almost $1,200 bill checking e-mail and downloading PPT files on his LHR-SIN flight -- $29 for the initial 30 MB and over $1,100 in overage fees. The guy gets the e-mail receipt and is probably stunned. Then, this being the age of social media, he appears to have immediately created a little picture with his receipt and an Sing Air plane and posted it on Twitter with the first word in all caps -- Gouged! And then put together a blog post. The guy, Jeremy Gutsche, bills himself as Innovation Expert, Author, Keynote Speaker &amp; Chief Trend Hunter (CEO) at TrendHunter.com. If he’s that hip to trends, you’d expect him to know how expensive in-flight overseas internet connectivity is. The WiFi provider, OnAir, says he has to pay the bill saying that the process for purchasing its services is “entirely transparent.” Passengers can choose to end their sessions when they reach a certain price limit, a graphic shows data consumption at all times and users can disconnect whenever they want. Gutsche said he only sent some e-mail, uploaded a 4 MB PPT file and looked at 155 web pages. OnAir said “To consume several hundred megabytes during one flight takes much more than basic email viewing, for example downloading heavy attachments, cloud access and using Skype”. I think the cloud access might be the culprit. While I love having all my documents sync’d to the cloud -- to get at them from any device and for backup -- I’ve found that it can quickly chew up bandwidth. When I first got my Verizon WiFi hot spot, I found myself easily chewing through 6-10 GB and just couldn’t figure it out. Until I remembered that I had my 2 GB Outlook archive pst file set to sync to Microsoft’s OneDrive. Now, when I switch over to the hot spot, I kill off the OneDrive sync app. No more nagging e-mails from Verizon. Would’ve been a much more expensive lesson at 35,000 ft.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any travel experiences -- technology or otherwise, or just general observations, thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. &nbsp;The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/35879\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><i>Two Guitars</i></a>&nbsp;by Admiral Bob</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Holiday Airport Etiquette Refresher</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Unless you’ve been catatonic for the last week, you know that we’re creeping up to the busiest travel day of the year -- Travelgeddon as one local TV reporter called it, causing me to do an Elvis and throw something large at the hotel TV set (luckily today’s flat screens are much more resilient than tubes of Elvis’ day). Yes, the Wednesday before Thanksgiving is nigh.</li>\n 	<li>I also know this because, right around this time the TravelCommons mailbox gets filled with helpful story ideas from PR firms along the lines of this one from Energy Water -- “The day before Thanksgiving is the busiest travel day of the year—between the kids, pets and luggage holiday travel can be a hassle. These 6 travel must-haves take the stress out of traveling to see family and loved ones.”</li>\n 	<li>Top on the list, Energy Water, of course --which seems to be another twist on caffeinated water. Go ahead, give it to the kids and see how popular you are with your seat mates in the back of a Spirit Airlines plane. #2 -- noise cancelling headphones. Always a popular item, especially when surrounded by kids hyped up on Energy Water. #3 -- Therapeutic eye mask. Hmmm, I don’t see too many of those on my flight. #4 -- Portable power charger. One of those batteries-in-a-box things with a couple of USB ports at the end. I’d move this above the eye mask. Very handy, especially around holiday time when families will be huddling around airport electrical outlets the same way the forefathers would huddle around a fire while out on the hunt. #5 Packing cubes. Nah, never used them. They take up space that could be used for other clothes. #6 -- Portable UV germ sanitizer. Probably a bit more popular in these Ebola-paranoid times. Instead of swabbing everything down with hand sanitizer (which I’ve seen people do on airplanes), you just wave the UV wand over it. I dunno seems a bit too easy. I think I’d want to see some efficacy data before putting money down.</li>\n 	<li>So while there are tons of &nbsp;“bring this” lists running around, I haven’t seen an advice list of what’s really the problem during holiday travel -- airport etiquette. It’s not just the crowds; it’s the crowds of, well what some might call “clueless” travelers. I think “amateur” is certainly a nicer and probably more accurate term. So for those amateur travelers, or folks who’ve been off the road for a bit and need a refresher, here’s a list of key etiquette tips, that from my recent travel observations, need to be said...</li>\n 	<li>Let’s start at the front of the airport -- the security line. The TSA is pushing PreCheck so you may get lucky and find it on your boarding pass. Or, a TSA person may randomly pull you out of the regular line and send you over to PreCheck. It’s your lucky day! Don’t spoil it, though, by not knowing the PreCheck rules. Put your phone away and read the signs -- don’t take off your shoes, don’t pull your liquids out, keep your jacket on, …. Read the signs and don’t slow it down for everyone else.</li>\n 	<li>If getting to your gate involves a moving platform or an escalator, stand to the right because people are walking -- usually quickly -- on the left. Traveling with others, you’ll naturally want to stand abreast, but then you’re blocking everyone else. Don’t do it unless you want to get run over.</li>\n 	<li>When you hit the airport Starbucks for your pre-flight coffee, remember that this isn’t your neighborhood Starbucks run by friendly Starbucks-trained baristas. It’s run by Sodexo Marriott that don’t care quite so much about coffee training. And they’re not quite as efficient. And there are usually a lot of people behind you in line. Keep your order to 3 adjectives or less. Tall skim latte is good. The half-decaf 3-pump no-foam vente vanilla latte -- not so much.</li>\n 	<li>Queuing up at the gate, don’t try to cheat on the boarding. Everyone’s looking at each others boarding passes, and airlines are telling their agents to get more strict. On almost every flight, I’ve seen the boarding agent direct someone over to the wall of shame to wait for their boarding group to be called. Don’t embarrass your family. Wait your turn.</li>\n 	<li>And if you’re using an electronic boarding pass on your smartphone, turn off auto-rotate. If you don’t, odds are that your screen will start oscillating between portrait and landscape while you’re trying to get it on the reader. Those readers are picky enough; you’ll delay the boarding line and quickly earn the enmity of your seatmates -- even before you sit shoulder-to-shoulder with them for 2-4 hours.</li>\n 	<li>And finally, and this is a big one, don’t put your small bag in the overhead. I don’t care if you checked a bag, don’t be that person who puts a purse or a briefcase in the overhead. Show a little holiday spirit -- put ‘em under the seat in front of you and leave space for one more roller board for the poor urchins in Groups 3, 4 or 5. When that person’s bag doesn’t get dropped on a tight connection through DFW, and they’re able to sit down to Thanksgiving dinner in something other than day-old sweats, they’ll thank you.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djlang59/22228\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Garden Of The Forking</em></a><em>&nbsp;</em>by J.Lang</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Travel Tax Pile-Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>I ought to title this episode “Mark’s Rant” ‘cause I’m rolling right from “Hey you, once-a-year traveler, get outta my airport” to “Hey you, politician, get outta my wallet.”</li>\n 	<li>Looking at my last couple of hotel bills in New Orleans -- room tax state, room tax city, occupancy tax, convention and visitors bureau assessment -- it adds 15% to my room rate; just a bit more than the regular New Orleans sales tax rate of 9%.</li>\n 	<li>Last year, a trade association -- the Global Business Travel Association -- put out a list of the top 10 worst cities for what they called “discriminatory travel taxes” -- those specifically on travel services (hotels, rental cars) above and beyond general sales taxes. New Orleans didn’t make the cut. Top on the list -- Portland, OR at $23/day in extra travel taxes. Boston is second at $19/day, with those welcoming Midwest cities of Indianapolis, Minneapolis, and Chicago rounding out the top 5.</li>\n 	<li>We all know why this happens -- ‘cause travelers don’t vote, at least in the places where they get charged these travel taxes. So for local politicians, raising the hotel or rental car tax generates much less blowback than a property tax bump. For example, of the 150 largest US cities, 120 of them have some sort of dedicated tax on hotel rooms. And there’s real money there -- $487 million of travel taxes in 2012 for New York City; $240 million for San Francisco. For hotel taxes, St Louis, surprisingly, has the highest rate -- 22%, with the average being about 13.5%. SFO has the highest rental car tax rate -- 24%; the average is 12.8%</li>\n 	<li>Of course, on top of these taxes, they stack additional line items. New Orleans’ hotel tax is 13%, just below the average. But then they tack on a dollar for city occupancy tax and another $2.50 to fund the convention and visitors bureau, which bumps up an average 13% tax rate to that 15% rate. I gotta say, though, that these add-ons pale in comparison to the 14% tourism tax that I got pegged with the last time I was up in Napa.</li>\n 	<li>Rental cars, though, are the worst. In one of my rare TravelCommons blog <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2009/10/25/skipping-the-rental-car/#more-176\">posts</a>, I looked at a string of 4 rental car receipts and saw taxes and state surcharges and airport facility charges increased my final bill by 27-51%!</li>\n 	<li>What do you do about it? Well, with rental cars, I work my damndest to skip them. In New Orleans, I pick hotels that let me walk to and from my client’s office -- skip the rental car fees <i>and</i> get exercise. A two-fer, ‘cause given the food in New Orleans, I need all the exercise I can get. Hotels -- it’s a bit tougher. You might think about using Airbnb, but that loophole is getting closed. Starting last month, Airbnb is collecting San Francisco’s 14% hotel tax and is getting squeezed by most other cities. And Couchsurfing, at least for business trips, is, for me, not worth the hassle.</li>\n 	<li>So whenever I pass the tourist kiosk in New Orleans airport, I always make sure I take something, even if I don’t really need it -- because I’m gonna be paying for it whether I take it or not.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917626811171154.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\"><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #112</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_112.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #112 — Holiday Airport Etiquette; Travel Tax Pile-Up','','inherit','closed','closed','','1398-revision-v1','','','2021-06-15 20:41:40','2021-06-16 01:41:40','',1398,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3563',0,'revision','',0),
(3564,1,'2021-06-15 20:45:29','2021-06-16 01:45:29','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_1985\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Airfields_IL_Chicago_C_htm_m252791c8-e1623802785342.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1985\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Airfields_IL_Chicago_C_htm_m252791c8-e1623802785342-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Old cars and planes on a runway\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> Where\'d the Racetrack Go?[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Business travelers are getting itchy. They know Zoom calls can\'t replace a face-to-face meeting, but they can\'t meet with people who aren\'t in their offices yet. We also talk about how surprisingly great the LaGuardia Terminal B renovation is, and then talk about airport history with <a href=\"https://udayton.edu/directory/artssciences/history/bednarek_janet.php\">Professor Janet Bednarek</a>, professor of history at University of Dayton.  All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_176.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #176: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>This Week</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studio as Chicago and the state of Illinois completely reopen for business -- no more capacity limits, no more socially distanced sitting -- just in time for the summer music festival season. No capacity limits, but you have to show proof of vaccination or a negative COVID test to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with 100,000 other music fans. Irene and I did that one year, check -- don’t need to do it again. I think I aged out of that demographic -- back in the ‘90’s. </li><li>Since the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/05/09/podcast-175-how-to-find-local-tour-guides-rebuild-travel-muscles/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #175 — How to Find Local Tour Guides; Rebuild Travel Muscles\">last episode</a>, I first flew down to Miami on business, and then over to New York City for a long weekend. Miami is always an interesting business destination; it’s got its own unique vibe. It starts at the airport; officially bilingual -- Spanish and English, in that order -- but it seems half the time when they make PA announcements, they just skip the English version. The client’s office was in the Wynwood Art District. It was my first time in this neighborhood; it had a kinda typical newly gentrified vibe -- lots of first generation food places: an upscale doughnut shop, a poké lunch joint, a couple of microbrewery taprooms (always key for me). What wasn’t typical was the amount of wall art; not graffiti as much as very cool murals and street art, giving the neighborhood a bright, colorful vibe while probably painting over some otherwise dire looking buildings.</li><li>I stayed a few miles south in the Marriott on Biscayne Bay where some combination of my status and patience with a front desk trainee trying to solo on the property management system for the first time earned me a top floor bayside room looking out over the Port of Miami cruise terminal with 4 big cruise ships tied up, waiting for the CDC to drop their cruise ban.</li><li>One morning, when it felt the humidity had dipped below 80%, I decided to skip Uber and ride a Lyft scooter up to the Art District. I’ve talked, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/10/14/podcast-156-airport-satisfaction-escooters-smaller-luggage/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #156 — Airport Satisfaction; eScooters; Smaller Luggage\">past</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/01/25/podcast-159-planning-the-trip-of-a-lifetime-in-southeast-asia/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #159 — Planning the Trip of a Lifetime in Southeast Asia\">episodes</a>, how much I like riding scooters. I’ve ridden scooters in Chicago, Phoenix, DC -- everywhere I could find them. But last year, I didn’t ride them even though they were all around Chicago. There’s a fun, frivolous vibe about riding a scooter, but 2020 was anything but fun or frivolous and so I didn’t feel like riding them. But on this morning, with just a touch of humidity in the air and not much traffic on the streets, having a little fun riding a scooter to the office felt, once more, like the right thing to do.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Zapac/25046\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><em>You are (funky mix)</em></a> by Zapac.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Talking in the last episode about needing to rebuild atrophied travel muscles after the long lockdown layoff generated a few comments. Chris Christensen of the Amateur Traveler Podcast dropped me a note saying:<ul><li>I can relate. We just got back from our first post vaccine trip to the Galapagos. First time on a plane since 2019.</li></ul></li><li>First trip back and you go to the Galapagos! No warm-ups? Hope you didn’t sprain any of those travel muscles.</li><li>Jim McDonough’s first trip back wasn’t simple either. He wrote on the TravelCommons Facebook page<ul><li>Last month, we made our first trip since January, 2020 to Kodiak, Alaska of all places, attending the decommissioning of a ship I helped the Coast Guard put into commission in 1971. San Diego to Alaska is a long way. Alaska Airlines is really nice. But I noticed my travel skills had atrophied.  Approaching TSA, I realized that the red mesh bag I usually have for holding metal objects wasn’t in my bag. Then I sat for a while at a gate in Anchorage until remembering that Admiral\'s Club members can use Alaska\'s lounge. I\'m ready to go again, but probably not to Kodiak!</li></ul></li><li>Kudos to both of you guys for jumping straight into the deep-end. But you gotta be careful -- weak travel muscles can make you vulnerable. A few days ago, I <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1399783958066442247\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">re-tweeted a thread about a phishing attack</a> -- a very well-formatted “make sure your TSA Precheck doesn’t expire -- click here” e-mail with a link that, as you can imagine, didn’t take you to tsa.gov; though Aaron Woodin did tweet back the question “If you click on the link, does it confiscate your water?” It’s a well-timed phish, especially as more business travelers are gearing up to get back on the road. </li><li>And in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/05/09/podcast-175-how-to-find-local-tour-guides-rebuild-travel-muscles/\" title=\"Podcast #175 — How to Find Local Tour Guides; Rebuild Travel Muscles\">last episode</a>, I talked about Irene and Claire losing track of their Global Entry expiration dates -- Claire’s expired and Irene hit the “renew” button on the last day. Now you may think -- Global Entry? Big deal, who’s traveling internationally right now anyhow? But remember, for $100 for 5 years, Global Entry gives you the express lane thru immigration <em>plus</em> TSA PreCheck, vs. $85 for PreCheck alone. Hence I always tell people to spend the extra $15 for Global Entry. So anyhow, Irene and Claire fill out the on-line renewal form, pay the $100 (which Irene immediately got back because she used my Amex Platinum card), and then nothing. Silence. Crickets. Which is odd, because when I renewed my Global Entry, I had to go to ORD for an interview and an updated photo. But for them, nothing. Our flight to New York, to LaGuardia is coming up. The night before we leave, Irene gets an e-mail -- no link, mind you, just a message -- “Congrats! Your Global Entry has been renewed.” Yay! Except that when she checked into Southwest, there’s no little blue PreCheck checkmark on her boarding pass. Claire got her Congrats! e-mail the next day, but again, no check on the boarding pass. Ugh. The prior week when I was in Miami, the non-PreCheck lines tailed back the length of the terminal. But, as it turned out, it wasn’t a huge hassle. We left a little earlier for MDW and no horror lines. Three days later when they checked in for our flight home, they both got the blue check on their boarding passes. So spinning my IT propeller, it would seem that the airlines aren’t pinging that PreCheck database more than once every couple of days.</li><li>This trip was the first time since January 2019 I’d flown into LGA in almost 28 months; that’s 2⅓ years. That shocked me; I had to go back and check my calendars and my math again, because it seemed like I was always in New York. But it’s right. Second shock -- flying into the new rebuilt Terminal B, bright, airy, spacious, <em>clean</em>; everything the old Terminal B I flew into 2+ years ago was not. It was the low-ceilinged rat maze that, 7 years ago, then-Vice President Joe Biden said was like a third-world country -- which I actually think was less of an insult to LGA and more of an insult to many developing country airports. Walking down that old concourse to catch an American or United flight, it was not unusual to have to dodge a big plastic garbage can placed right in the middle, that had a hose coming down from the bottom of a make-shift funnel made out of plastic tarp, hanging from some ceiling tiles, collecting rainwater from roof leak. No one would ever look at that and think “What the hell?” because you’d see it like once a month. But now, it’s phenomenal; they’ve done a great job. I used to say that SFO’s new Terminal 2 was my favorite terminal -- where American and, back then, Virgin America flew out of. But now, it’s LGA’s Terminal B. There’s still construction going on, and getting a cab to the city is still a hassle, and a necessary one because there’s still no subway link, but once you’re inside, it’s great! Give yourself a little extra time to see the water fountain light show. And having a little downtime in Terminal B is no longer the purgatory it used to be, because there are now places that you actually sit down and eat and grab a beer; no more standing around having to juggle your bag and an Auntie Anne’s pretzel. I rarely have anything good to say about the Port Authority, but they’ve done a good job here.</li><li>And the TSA, another government organization I don’t often have good things to say about, does a nice job <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/coronavirus/passenger-throughput\">publishing the daily volumes of air passengers</a> passing through security checkpoints. Just scanning it you can see the growth kicking up in the February/March timeframe. Though if you’ve flown anytime over the past couple of months, you don’t need to look at the numbers; you’ve felt it in fuller planes and longer checkpoint lines. The Friday of Memorial Day weekend, the end of May, checkpoint volume was up 599% over the same Friday last year, and then this past Friday, June 11, checkpoint volume broke 2 million for the first time since the March lockdowns. The numbers are still 25-30% below 2019’s, but the gap is closing. </li><li>And then the keynote from Apple’s WorldWide Developers Conference gave me something else good to say about the TSA; working with Apple to let you use a digital version of your driver’s license at security checkpoints. I’ve already noticed that, at a few airports, you no longer have to show your boarding pass -- they just pop your driver’s license into a scanning machine and you’re on your way. No fumbling to pull up your boarding pass and scanning it. But now, no fumbling for my wallet if I can pull up my license on my phone. Actually, better than my drivers license would be my Global Entry card because it’s Real ID while my Illinois license is not. Could save me an extra trip to the DMV if and when the TSA decides to get serious about Real ID again -- which I hope is never. </li><li>Continuing on our now 3-episode arc on Uber and Lyft service, the long wait times, the huge price surges. Heading out for my flight down to Miami, the 17-mile trip Monday morning Uber ride to ORD, at $74 with a 2x surge, cost almost as much as the 1,100-mile flight on American down to MIA at $100 one way. There is no rational way to explain this, so I’ll leave it here as a meditation exercise for microeconomic pricing theorists and move on. Except, ‘cause I guess I can’t just <em>can’t</em> leave it here, to note that I had no problem with Uber or Lyft service in Miami. And except for that one joyful morning riding a scooter, the South Florida heat and humidity had me lighting up the Uber app multiple times a day. So I’m guessing those Uber carjackings in Chicago a few months back are having some residual impact on their driver recruitment efforts.</li><li>Bridge Music — <em>Two Guitars</em> by Admiral Bob (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/35879 Ft: Haskel</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Why Business Travel Will Come Back</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Last Friday, the first day of Chicago’s full reopening and the same day the TSA’s checkpoint volume broke the 2 million passenger mark for the first time post-lockdown, a business colleague and I met for some happy hour beers and oysters in a bar in Wrigleyville. We were sitting at a second floor table against an open window, looking over at Wrigley Field as fans poured out of the Clark-&amp;-Addison main gate and into nearby bars to celebrate the Cubs’ victory over the St Louis Cardinals in what was the first full-capacity game since September 2019. Mike’s in consulting too; he’d been talking about how he was itching to get back out on the road to see his clients, on how he’s working to convince the firm’s management to lift, or at least bend their travel ban so he can see the clients again -- at least the ones who also want to start meeting people face-to-face again. Zoom and Teams calls are <em>OK</em>, they can suffice for some things, but there are so many things you miss when you’re not there in person. </li><li>In an outta-left-field sorta way, the masses of Cubs fans blocking traffic on Addison St helped prove Mike’s point. Official attendance was 35,112, not quite a sell-out, but having butts in 84% of the seats for a 1:20p Friday game isn’t bad. But similar to the “why travel to a meeting when you can video conference?” question, why go to a baseball game in person when you can watch it on TV where it’s covered by not just one crappy laptop camera, but 5-8 HD cameras with clean lenses and run by professionals? I know, it’s a stupid strawman question that we all know the answer to -- it’s not just the game, it’s the whole experience. And it’s not an either/or -- many times watching the game on TV is fine, and more convenient; but sometimes, you gotta get off the couch and go see the game live, in person, with a bunch of friends.</li><li>A couple of recent interactions(?) over the last couple of weeks drove this home. I’ve had multiple video calls with a programmer over the past month, probably 3-4 hour worth, going through some system re-architecting. After all that, I thought I had it pretty much down. Now the guy has started coming back to the office -- he said working from home for 14 months was being under house arrest -- so I pulled him into a conference room and started sketching stuff on a whiteboard. We stood there shoulder-to-shoulder and passed the blue marker back and forth, and in 20 minutes realized that there were 3 key facts about the existing systems that never came across in those hours of video calls and that completely changed the new architecture. But they did in that in-person 20 minutes. And afterwards, the guy said to me “Hey, that was fun. Let’s do some more of that” -- a reaction I’ve never heard about a video conference… ever. And at the same time, I had the exact opposite experience -- trying to explain a concept on a week’s worth of video calls that I know we could’ve handled in an hour if we could’ve been in the same room together, but we can’t because he’s overseas and can’t get through the US travel lockdown. So we trudged through the calls… and the frustration.</li><li>Which was pretty much the point that Mike was trying to make over honking buses and shouts of “Go Cubs Go”. “Yeah, I can have a meeting on Zoom, but I can’t have the pre-meeting ‘how are things going’ chats as we’re walking into the room, or the post-meeting ‘Can I ask you what you really meant in there’ sidebar, or pick up the non-verbal glances people will shoot at each other. The meeting’s important, but so’s the choreography that surrounds the meeting -- maybe even more so -- and that’s what I can’t get now. That and I’ve worked with a lot of these clients for 10, 15 years, so they’re friends too. And I miss that too.”</li><li>Airlines are saying that business travel is still down 70% from pre-lockdown levels, but that almost all of their top corporate accounts are telling them they plan to re-start travel later this year -- but first they gotta figure out how to get people out of their sweats and back into the office.</li><li>Bridge Music — <em>Garden Of The Forking </em>by J.Lang (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djlang59/22228 Ft: Neurowaxx</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Learning the History of Airports</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Back at the beginning of the year, back in episodes #<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/16/podcast-172-timeshares-without-the-pitch-notes-on-tucson/\" title=\"Podcast #172 — Timeshares Without the Pitch; Notes on Tucson\">172</a> and #<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/12/podcast-173-whats-new-in-travel-insurance-keeping-ahead-of-expiring-miles/\" title=\"Podcast #173 — What’s New in Travel Insurance; Keeping Ahead of Expiring Miles\">173</a>, I talked about a guy who lived on the secure side of ORD from October ‘til January because he was too afraid to fly. In researching this -- what turned out to be not unique -- situation, I came across an article written by <a href=\"https://udayton.edu/directory/artssciences/history/bednarek_janet.php\">Professor Janet Bednarek</a>, professor of history at University of Dayton. Her area of focus is on the history of airports in the US, which I thought would be a perfect topic for the TravelCommons podcast. So I sent her a Zoom invite, as one does these days, and had a great conversation about the history of airports.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #176</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_176.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #176 — Why Business Travel Is Coming Back; Learning Airport History','','inherit','closed','closed','','3550-revision-v1','','','2021-06-15 20:45:29','2021-06-16 01:45:29','',3550,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3564',0,'revision','',0),
(3566,1,'2021-06-15 21:03:02','2021-06-16 02:03:02','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_1985\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Airfields_IL_Chicago_C_htm_m252791c8-e1623802785342.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1985\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Airfields_IL_Chicago_C_htm_m252791c8-e1623802785342-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Old cars and planes on a runway\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> Where\'d the Racetrack Go?[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Business travelers are getting itchy. They know Zoom calls can\'t replace a face-to-face meeting, but they can\'t meet with people who aren\'t in their offices yet. We also talk about how surprisingly great the LaGuardia Terminal B renovation is, and then talk about airport history with <a href=\"https://udayton.edu/directory/artssciences/history/bednarek_janet.php\">Professor Janet Bednarek</a>, professor of history at University of Dayton.  All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_176.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #176: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>This Week</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studio as Chicago and the state of Illinois completely reopen for business -- no more capacity limits, no more socially distanced sitting -- just in time for the summer music festival season. No capacity limits, but you have to show proof of vaccination or a negative COVID test to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with 100,000 other music fans. Irene and I did that one year, check -- don’t need to do it again. I think I aged out of that demographic -- back in the ‘90’s.&nbsp;</li><li>Since the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/05/09/podcast-175-how-to-find-local-tour-guides-rebuild-travel-muscles/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #175 — How to Find Local Tour Guides; Rebuild Travel Muscles\">last episode</a>, I first flew down to Miami on business, and then over to New York City for a long weekend. Miami is always an interesting business destination; it’s got its own unique vibe. It starts at the airport; officially bilingual -- Spanish and English, in that order -- but it seems half the time when they make PA announcements, they just skip the English version. The client’s office was in the Wynwood Art District. It was my first time in this neighborhood; it had a kinda typical newly gentrified vibe -- lots of first generation food places: an upscale doughnut shop, a poké lunch joint, a couple of microbrewery taprooms (always key for me). What wasn’t typical was the amount of wall art; not graffiti as much as very cool murals and street art, giving the neighborhood a bright, colorful vibe while probably painting over some otherwise dire looking buildings.</li><li>I stayed a few miles south in the Marriott on Biscayne Bay where some combination of my status and patience with a front desk trainee trying to solo on the property management system for the first time earned me a top floor bayside room looking out over the Port of Miami cruise terminal with 4 big cruise ships tied up, waiting for the CDC to drop their cruise ban.</li><li>One morning, when it felt the humidity had dipped below 80%, I decided to skip Uber and ride a Lyft scooter up to the Art District. I’ve talked, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/10/14/podcast-156-airport-satisfaction-escooters-smaller-luggage/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #156 — Airport Satisfaction; eScooters; Smaller Luggage\">past</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/01/25/podcast-159-planning-the-trip-of-a-lifetime-in-southeast-asia/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #159 — Planning the Trip of a Lifetime in Southeast Asia\">episodes</a>, how much I like riding scooters. I’ve ridden scooters in Chicago, Phoenix, DC -- everywhere I could find them. But last year, I didn’t ride them even though they were all around Chicago. There’s a fun, frivolous vibe about riding a scooter, but 2020 was anything but fun or frivolous and so I didn’t feel like riding them. But on this morning, with just a touch of humidity in the air and not much traffic on the streets, having a little fun riding a scooter to the office felt, once more, like the right thing to do.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Zapac/25046\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><em>You are (funky mix)</em></a>&nbsp;by Zapac.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Talking in the last episode about needing to rebuild atrophied travel muscles after the long lockdown layoff generated a few comments. Chris Christensen of the Amateur Traveler Podcast dropped me a note saying:<ul><li>I can relate. We just got back from our first post vaccine trip to the Galapagos. First time on a plane since 2019.</li></ul></li><li>First trip back and you go to the Galapagos! No warm-ups? Hope you didn’t sprain any of those travel muscles.</li><li>Jim McDonough’s first trip back wasn’t simple either. He wrote on the TravelCommons Facebook page<ul><li>Last month, we made our first trip since January, 2020 to Kodiak, Alaska of all places, attending the decommissioning of a ship I helped the Coast Guard put into commission in 1971. San Diego to Alaska is a long way. Alaska Airlines is really nice. But I noticed my travel skills had atrophied.&nbsp; Approaching TSA, I realized that the red mesh bag I usually have for holding metal objects wasn’t in my bag. Then I sat for a while at a gate in Anchorage until remembering that Admiral\'s Club members can use Alaska\'s lounge. I\'m ready to go again, but probably not to Kodiak!</li></ul></li><li>Kudos to both of you guys for jumping straight into the deep-end. But you gotta be careful -- weak travel muscles can make you vulnerable. A few days ago, I <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1399783958066442247\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">re-tweeted a thread about a phishing attack</a> -- a very well-formatted “make sure your TSA Precheck doesn’t expire -- click here” e-mail with a link that, as you can imagine, didn’t take you to tsa.gov; though Aaron Woodin did tweet back the question “If you click on the link, does it confiscate your water?” It’s a well-timed phish, especially as more business travelers are gearing up to get back on the road.&nbsp;</li><li>And in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/05/09/podcast-175-how-to-find-local-tour-guides-rebuild-travel-muscles/\" title=\"Podcast #175 — How to Find Local Tour Guides; Rebuild Travel Muscles\">last episode</a>, I talked about Irene and Claire losing track of their Global Entry expiration dates -- Claire’s expired and Irene hit the “renew” button on the last day. Now you may think -- Global Entry? Big deal, who’s traveling internationally right now anyhow? But remember, for $100 for 5 years, Global Entry gives you the express lane thru immigration <em>plus</em> TSA PreCheck, vs. $85 for PreCheck alone. Hence I always tell people to spend the extra $15 for Global Entry. So anyhow, Irene and Claire fill out the on-line renewal form, pay the $100 (which Irene immediately got back because she used my Amex Platinum card), and then nothing. Silence. Crickets. Which is odd, because when I renewed my Global Entry, I had to go to ORD for an interview and an updated photo. But for them, nothing. Our flight to New York, to LaGuardia is coming up. The night before we leave, Irene gets an e-mail -- no link, mind you, just a message -- “Congrats! Your Global Entry has been renewed.” Yay! Except that when she checked into Southwest, there’s no little blue PreCheck checkmark on her boarding pass. Claire got her Congrats! e-mail the next day, but again, no check on the boarding pass. Ugh. The prior week when I was in Miami, the non-PreCheck lines tailed back the length of the terminal. But, as it turned out, it wasn’t a huge hassle. We left a little earlier for MDW and no horror lines. Three days later when they checked in for our flight home, they both got the blue check on their boarding passes. So spinning my IT propeller, it would seem that the airlines aren’t pinging that PreCheck database more than once every couple of days.</li><li>This trip was the first time since January 2019 I’d flown into LGA in almost 28 months; that’s 2⅓ years. That shocked me; I had to go back and check my calendars and my math again, because it seemed like I was always in New York. But it’s right. Second shock -- flying into the new rebuilt Terminal B, bright, airy, spacious, <em>clean</em>; everything the old Terminal B I flew into 2+ years ago was not. It was the low-ceilinged rat maze that, 7 years ago, then-Vice President Joe Biden said was like a third-world country -- which I actually think was less of an insult to LGA and more of an insult to many developing country airports. Walking down that old concourse to catch an American or United flight, it was not unusual to have to dodge a big plastic garbage can placed right in the middle, that had a hose coming down from the bottom of a make-shift funnel made out of plastic tarp, hanging from some ceiling tiles, collecting rainwater from roof leak. No one would ever look at that and think “What the hell?” because you’d see it like once a month. But now, it’s phenomenal; they’ve done a great job. I used to say that SFO’s new Terminal 2 was my favorite terminal -- where American and, back then, Virgin America flew out of. But now, it’s LGA’s Terminal B. There’s still construction going on, and getting a cab to the city is still a hassle, and a necessary one because there’s still no subway link, but once you’re inside, it’s great! Give yourself a little extra time to see the water fountain light show. And having a little downtime in Terminal B is no longer the purgatory it used to be, because there are now places that you actually sit down and eat and grab a beer; no more standing around having to juggle your bag and an Auntie Anne’s pretzel. I rarely have anything good to say about the Port Authority, but they’ve done a good job here.</li><li>And the TSA, another government organization I don’t often have good things to say about, does a nice job <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/coronavirus/passenger-throughput\">publishing the daily volumes of air passengers</a> passing through security checkpoints. Just scanning it you can see the growth kicking up in the February/March timeframe. Though if you’ve flown anytime over the past couple of months, you don’t need to look at the numbers; you’ve felt it in fuller planes and longer checkpoint lines. The Friday of Memorial Day weekend, the end of May, checkpoint volume was up 599% over the same Friday last year, and then this past Friday, June 11, checkpoint volume broke 2 million for the first time since the March lockdowns. The numbers are still 25-30% below 2019’s, but the gap is closing.&nbsp;</li><li>And then the keynote from Apple’s WorldWide Developers Conference gave me something else good to say about the TSA; working with Apple to let you use a digital version of your driver’s license at security checkpoints. I’ve already noticed that, at a few airports, you no longer have to show your boarding pass -- they just pop your driver’s license into a scanning machine and you’re on your way. No fumbling to pull up your boarding pass and scanning it. But now, no fumbling for my wallet if I can pull up my license on my phone. Actually, better than my drivers license would be my Global Entry card because it’s Real ID while my Illinois license is not. Could save me an extra trip to the DMV if and when the TSA decides to get serious about Real ID again -- which I hope is never.&nbsp;</li><li>Continuing on our now 3-episode arc on Uber and Lyft service, the long wait times, the huge price surges. Heading out for my flight down to Miami, the 17-mile trip Monday morning Uber ride to ORD, at $74 with a 2x surge, cost almost as much as the 1,100-mile flight on American down to MIA at $100 one way. There is no rational way to explain this, so I’ll leave it here as a meditation exercise for microeconomic pricing theorists and move on. Except, ‘cause I guess I can’t just <em>can’t</em> leave it here, to note that I had no problem with Uber or Lyft service in Miami. And except for that one joyful morning riding a scooter, the South Florida heat and humidity had me lighting up the Uber app multiple times a day. So I’m guessing those Uber carjackings in Chicago a few months back are having some residual impact on their driver recruitment efforts.</li><li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<em>Two Guitars</em> by Admiral Bob (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/35879 Ft: Haskel</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Why Business Travel Will Come Back</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Last Friday, the first day of Chicago’s full reopening and the same day the TSA’s checkpoint volume broke the 2 million passenger mark for the first time post-lockdown, a business colleague and I met for some happy hour beers and oysters in a bar in Wrigleyville. We were sitting at a second floor table against an open window, looking over at Wrigley Field as fans poured out of the Clark-&amp;-Addison main gate and into nearby bars to celebrate the Cubs’ victory over the St Louis Cardinals in what was the first full-capacity game since September 2019. Mike’s in consulting too; he’d been talking about how he was itching to get back out on the road to see his clients, on how he’s working to convince the firm’s management to lift, or at least bend their travel ban so he can see the clients again -- at least the ones who also want to start meeting people face-to-face again. Zoom and Teams calls are <em>OK</em>, they can suffice for some things, but there are so many things you miss when you’re not there in person.&nbsp;</li><li>In an outta-left-field sorta way, the masses of Cubs fans blocking traffic on Addison St helped prove Mike’s point. Official attendance was 35,112, not quite a sell-out, but having butts in 84% of the seats for a 1:20p Friday game isn’t bad. But similar to the “why travel to a meeting when you can video conference?” question, why go to a baseball game in person when you can watch it on TV where it’s covered by not just one crappy laptop camera, but 5-8 HD cameras with clean lenses and run by professionals? I know, it’s a stupid strawman question that we all know the answer to -- it’s not just the game, it’s the whole experience. And it’s not an either/or -- many times watching the game on TV is fine, and more convenient; but sometimes, you gotta get off the couch and go see the game live, in person, with a bunch of friends.</li><li>A couple of recent interactions(?) over the last couple of weeks drove this home. I’ve had multiple video calls with a programmer over the past month, probably 3-4 hour worth, going through some system re-architecting. After all that, I thought I had it pretty much down. Now the guy has started coming back to the office -- he said working from home for 14 months was being under house arrest -- so I pulled him into a conference room and started sketching stuff on a whiteboard. We stood there shoulder-to-shoulder and passed the blue marker back and forth, and in 20 minutes realized that there were 3 key facts about the existing systems that never came across in those hours of video calls and that completely changed the new architecture. But they did in that in-person 20 minutes. And afterwards, the guy said to me “Hey, that was fun. Let’s do some more of that” -- a reaction I’ve never heard about a video conference… ever. And at the same time, I had the exact opposite experience -- trying to explain a concept on a week’s worth of video calls that I know we could’ve handled in an hour if we could’ve been in the same room together, but we can’t because he’s overseas and can’t get through the US travel lockdown. So we trudged through the calls… and the frustration.</li><li>Which was pretty much the point that Mike was trying to make over honking buses and shouts of “Go Cubs Go”. “Yeah, I can have a meeting on Zoom, but I can’t have the pre-meeting ‘how are things going’ chats as we’re walking into the room, or the post-meeting ‘Can I ask you what you really meant in there’ sidebar, or pick up the non-verbal glances people will shoot at each other. The meeting’s important, but so’s the choreography that surrounds the meeting -- maybe even more so -- and that’s what I can’t get now. That and I’ve worked with a lot of these clients for 10, 15 years, so they’re friends too. And I miss that too.”</li><li>Airlines are saying that business travel is still down 70% from pre-lockdown levels, but that almost all of their top corporate accounts are telling them they plan to re-start travel later this year -- but first they gotta figure out how to get people out of their sweats and back into the office.</li><li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<em>Garden Of The Forking </em>by J.Lang (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djlang59/22228 Ft: Neurowaxx</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Learning the History of Airports</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Back at the beginning of the year, back in episodes #<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/16/podcast-172-timeshares-without-the-pitch-notes-on-tucson/\" title=\"Podcast #172 — Timeshares Without the Pitch; Notes on Tucson\">172</a> and #<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/12/podcast-173-whats-new-in-travel-insurance-keeping-ahead-of-expiring-miles/\" title=\"Podcast #173 — What’s New in Travel Insurance; Keeping Ahead of Expiring Miles\">173</a>, I talked about a guy who lived on the secure side of ORD from October ‘til January because he was too afraid to fly. In researching this -- what turned out to be not unique -- situation, I came across an article written by <a href=\"https://udayton.edu/directory/artssciences/history/bednarek_janet.php\">Professor Janet Bednarek</a>, professor of history at University of Dayton. Her area of focus is on the history of airports in the US, which I thought would be a perfect topic for the TravelCommons podcast. So I sent her a Zoom invite, as one does these days, and had a great conversation about the history of airports.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #176</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_176.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #176 — Why Business Travel Is Coming Back; Learning Airport History','','inherit','closed','closed','','3550-revision-v1','','','2021-06-15 21:03:02','2021-06-16 02:03:02','',3550,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3566',0,'revision','',0),
(3570,1,'2021-07-05 19:38:07','2021-07-06 00:38:07','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_1985\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Airfields_IL_Chicago_C_htm_m252791c8-e1623802785342.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1985\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Airfields_IL_Chicago_C_htm_m252791c8-e1623802785342-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Old cars and planes on a runway\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> Where\'d the Racetrack Go?[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Business travelers are getting itchy. They know Zoom calls can\'t replace a face-to-face meeting, but they can\'t meet with people who aren\'t in their offices yet. We also talk about how surprisingly great the LaGuardia Terminal B renovation is, and then talk about airport history with <a href=\"https://udayton.edu/directory/artssciences/history/bednarek_janet.php\">Professor Janet Bednarek</a>, professor of history at University of Dayton.  All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_176.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #176: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>This Week</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studio as Chicago and the state of Illinois completely reopen for business -- no more capacity limits, no more socially distanced sitting -- just in time for the summer music festival season. No capacity limits, but you have to show proof of vaccination or a negative COVID test to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with 100,000 other music fans. Irene and I did that one year, check -- don’t need to do it again. I think I aged out of that demographic -- back in the ‘90’s.&nbsp;</li><li>Since the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/05/09/podcast-175-how-to-find-local-tour-guides-rebuild-travel-muscles/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #175 — How to Find Local Tour Guides; Rebuild Travel Muscles\">last episode</a>, I first flew down to Miami on business, and then over to New York City for a long weekend. Miami is always an interesting business destination; it’s got its own unique vibe. It starts at the airport; officially bilingual -- Spanish and English, in that order -- but it seems half the time when they make PA announcements, they just skip the English version. The client’s office was in the Wynwood Art District. It was my first time in this neighborhood; it had a kinda typical newly gentrified vibe -- lots of first generation food places: an upscale doughnut shop, a poké lunch joint, a couple of microbrewery taprooms (always key for me). What wasn’t typical was the amount of wall art; not graffiti as much as very cool murals and street art, giving the neighborhood a bright, colorful vibe while probably painting over some otherwise dire looking buildings.</li><li>I stayed a few miles south in the Marriott on Biscayne Bay where some combination of my status and patience with a front desk trainee trying to solo on the property management system for the first time earned me a top floor bayside room looking out over the Port of Miami cruise terminal with 4 big cruise ships tied up, waiting for the CDC to drop their cruise ban.</li><li>One morning, when it felt the humidity had dipped below 80%, I decided to skip Uber and ride a Lyft scooter up to the Art District. I’ve talked, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/10/14/podcast-156-airport-satisfaction-escooters-smaller-luggage/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #156 — Airport Satisfaction; eScooters; Smaller Luggage\">past</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/01/25/podcast-159-planning-the-trip-of-a-lifetime-in-southeast-asia/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #159 — Planning the Trip of a Lifetime in Southeast Asia\">episodes</a>, how much I like riding scooters. I’ve ridden scooters in Chicago, Phoenix, DC -- everywhere I could find them. But last year, I didn’t ride them even though they were all around Chicago. There’s a fun, frivolous vibe about riding a scooter, but 2020 was anything but fun or frivolous and so I didn’t feel like riding them. But on this morning, with just a touch of humidity in the air and not much traffic on the streets, having a little fun riding a scooter to the office felt, once more, like the right thing to do.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Zapac/25046\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><em>You are (funky mix)</em></a>&nbsp;by Zapac.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Talking in the last episode about needing to rebuild atrophied travel muscles after the long lockdown layoff generated a few comments. Chris Christensen of the Amateur Traveler Podcast dropped me a note saying:<ul><li>I can relate. We just got back from our first post vaccine trip to the Galapagos. First time on a plane since 2019.</li></ul></li><li>First trip back and you go to the Galapagos! No warm-ups? Hope you didn’t sprain any of those travel muscles.</li><li>Jim McDonough’s first trip back wasn’t simple either. He wrote on the TravelCommons Facebook page<ul><li>Last month, we made our first trip since January, 2020 to Kodiak, Alaska of all places, attending the decommissioning of a ship I helped the Coast Guard put into commission in 1971. San Diego to Alaska is a long way. Alaska Airlines is really nice. But I noticed my travel skills had atrophied.&nbsp; Approaching TSA, I realized that the red mesh bag I usually have for holding metal objects wasn’t in my bag. Then I sat for a while at a gate in Anchorage until remembering that Admiral\'s Club members can use Alaska\'s lounge. I\'m ready to go again, but probably not to Kodiak!</li></ul></li><li>Kudos to both of you guys for jumping straight into the deep-end. But you gotta be careful -- weak travel muscles can make you vulnerable. A few days ago, I <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1399783958066442247\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">re-tweeted a thread about a phishing attack</a> -- a very well-formatted “make sure your TSA Precheck doesn’t expire -- click here” e-mail with a link that, as you can imagine, didn’t take you to tsa.gov; though Aaron Woodin did tweet back the question “If you click on the link, does it confiscate your water?” It’s a well-timed phish, especially as more business travelers are gearing up to get back on the road.&nbsp;</li><li>And in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/05/09/podcast-175-how-to-find-local-tour-guides-rebuild-travel-muscles/\" title=\"Podcast #175 — How to Find Local Tour Guides; Rebuild Travel Muscles\">last episode</a>, I talked about Irene and Claire losing track of their Global Entry expiration dates -- Claire’s expired and Irene hit the “renew” button on the last day. Now you may think -- Global Entry? Big deal, who’s traveling internationally right now anyhow? But remember, for $100 for 5 years, Global Entry gives you the express lane thru immigration <em>plus</em> TSA PreCheck, vs. $85 for PreCheck alone. Hence I always tell people to spend the extra $15 for Global Entry. So anyhow, Irene and Claire fill out the on-line renewal form, pay the $100 (which Irene immediately got back because she used my Amex Platinum card), and then nothing. Silence. Crickets. Which is odd, because when I renewed my Global Entry, I had to go to ORD for an interview and an updated photo. But for them, nothing. Our flight to New York, to LaGuardia is coming up. The night before we leave, Irene gets an e-mail -- no link, mind you, just a message -- “Congrats! Your Global Entry has been renewed.” Yay! Except that when she checked into Southwest, there’s no little blue PreCheck checkmark on her boarding pass. Claire got her Congrats! e-mail the next day, but again, no check on the boarding pass. Ugh. The prior week when I was in Miami, the non-PreCheck lines tailed back the length of the terminal. But, as it turned out, it wasn’t a huge hassle. We left a little earlier for MDW and no horror lines. Three days later when they checked in for our flight home, they both got the blue check on their boarding passes. So spinning my IT propeller, it would seem that the airlines aren’t pinging that PreCheck database more than once every couple of days.</li><li>This trip was the first time since January 2019 I’d flown into LGA in almost 28 months; that’s 2⅓ years. That shocked me; I had to go back and check my calendars and my math again, because it seemed like I was always in New York. But it’s right. Second shock -- flying into the new rebuilt Terminal B, bright, airy, spacious, <em>clean</em>; everything the old Terminal B I flew into 2+ years ago was not. It was the low-ceilinged rat maze that, 7 years ago, then-Vice President Joe Biden said was like a third-world country -- which I actually think was less of an insult to LGA and more of an insult to many developing country airports. Walking down that old concourse to catch an American or United flight, it was not unusual to have to dodge a big plastic garbage can placed right in the middle, that had a hose coming down from the bottom of a make-shift funnel made out of plastic tarp, hanging from some ceiling tiles, collecting rainwater from roof leak. No one would ever look at that and think “What the hell?” because you’d see it like once a month. But now, it’s phenomenal; they’ve done a great job. I used to say that SFO’s new Terminal 2 was my favorite terminal -- where American and, back then, Virgin America flew out of. But now, it’s LGA’s Terminal B. There’s still construction going on, and getting a cab to the city is still a hassle, and a necessary one because there’s still no subway link, but once you’re inside, it’s great! Give yourself a little extra time to see the water fountain light show. And having a little downtime in Terminal B is no longer the purgatory it used to be, because there are now places that you actually sit down and eat and grab a beer; no more standing around having to juggle your bag and an Auntie Anne’s pretzel. I rarely have anything good to say about the Port Authority, but they’ve done a good job here.</li><li>And the TSA, another government organization I don’t often have good things to say about, does a nice job <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/coronavirus/passenger-throughput\">publishing the daily volumes of air passengers</a> passing through security checkpoints. Just scanning it you can see the growth kicking up in the February/March timeframe. Though if you’ve flown anytime over the past couple of months, you don’t need to look at the numbers; you’ve felt it in fuller planes and longer checkpoint lines. The Friday of Memorial Day weekend, the end of May, checkpoint volume was up 599% over the same Friday last year, and then this past Friday, June 11, checkpoint volume broke 2 million for the first time since the March lockdowns. The numbers are still 25-30% below 2019’s, but the gap is closing.&nbsp;</li><li>And then the keynote from Apple’s WorldWide Developers Conference gave me something else good to say about the TSA; working with Apple to let you use a digital version of your driver’s license at security checkpoints. I’ve already noticed that, at a few airports, you no longer have to show your boarding pass -- they just pop your driver’s license into a scanning machine and you’re on your way. No fumbling to pull up your boarding pass and scanning it. But now, no fumbling for my wallet if I can pull up my license on my phone. Actually, better than my drivers license would be my Global Entry card because it’s Real ID while my Illinois license is not. Could save me an extra trip to the DMV if and when the TSA decides to get serious about Real ID again -- which I hope is never.&nbsp;</li><li>Continuing on our now 3-episode arc on Uber and Lyft service, the long wait times, the huge price surges. Heading out for my flight down to Miami, the 17-mile trip Monday morning Uber ride to ORD, at $74 with a 2x surge, cost almost as much as the 1,100-mile flight on American down to MIA at $100 one way. There is no rational way to explain this, so I’ll leave it here as a meditation exercise for microeconomic pricing theorists and move on. Except, ‘cause I guess I can’t just <em>can’t</em> leave it here, to note that I had no problem with Uber or Lyft service in Miami. And except for that one joyful morning riding a scooter, the South Florida heat and humidity had me lighting up the Uber app multiple times a day. So I’m guessing those Uber carjackings in Chicago a few months back are having some residual impact on their driver recruitment efforts.</li><li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<em>Two Guitars</em> by Admiral Bob (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/35879 Ft: Haskel</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Why Business Travel Will Come Back</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Last Friday, the first day of Chicago’s full reopening and the same day the TSA’s checkpoint volume broke the 2 million passenger mark for the first time post-lockdown, a business colleague and I met for some happy hour beers and oysters in a bar in Wrigleyville. We were sitting at a second floor table against an open window, looking over at Wrigley Field as fans poured out of the Clark-&amp;-Addison main gate and into nearby bars to celebrate the Cubs’ victory over the St Louis Cardinals in what was the first full-capacity game since September 2019. Mike’s in consulting too; he’d been talking about how he was itching to get back out on the road to see his clients, on how he’s working to convince the firm’s management to lift, or at least bend their travel ban so he can see the clients again -- at least the ones who also want to start meeting people face-to-face again. Zoom and Teams calls are <em>OK</em>, they can suffice for some things, but there are so many things you miss when you’re not there in person.&nbsp;</li><li>In an outta-left-field sorta way, the masses of Cubs fans blocking traffic on Addison St helped prove Mike’s point. Official attendance was 35,112, not quite a sell-out, but having butts in 84% of the seats for a 1:20p Friday game isn’t bad. But similar to the “why travel to a meeting when you can video conference?” question, why go to a baseball game in person when you can watch it on TV where it’s covered by not just one crappy laptop camera, but 5-8 HD cameras with clean lenses and run by professionals? I know, it’s a stupid strawman question that we all know the answer to -- it’s not just the game, it’s the whole experience. And it’s not an either/or -- many times watching the game on TV is fine, and more convenient; but sometimes, you gotta get off the couch and go see the game live, in person, with a bunch of friends.</li><li>A couple of recent interactions(?) over the last couple of weeks drove this home. I’ve had multiple video calls with a programmer over the past month, probably 3-4 hour worth, going through some system re-architecting. After all that, I thought I had it pretty much down. Now the guy has started coming back to the office -- he said working from home for 14 months was being under house arrest -- so I pulled him into a conference room and started sketching stuff on a whiteboard. We stood there shoulder-to-shoulder and passed the blue marker back and forth, and in 20 minutes realized that there were 3 key facts about the existing systems that never came across in those hours of video calls and that completely changed the new architecture. But they did in that in-person 20 minutes. And afterwards, the guy said to me “Hey, that was fun. Let’s do some more of that” -- a reaction I’ve never heard about a video conference… ever. And at the same time, I had the exact opposite experience -- trying to explain a concept on a week’s worth of video calls that I know we could’ve handled in an hour if we could’ve been in the same room together, but we can’t because he’s overseas and can’t get through the US travel lockdown. So we trudged through the calls… and the frustration.</li><li>Which was pretty much the point that Mike was trying to make over honking buses and shouts of “Go Cubs Go”. “Yeah, I can have a meeting on Zoom, but I can’t have the pre-meeting ‘how are things going’ chats as we’re walking into the room, or the post-meeting ‘Can I ask you what you really meant in there’ sidebar, or pick up the non-verbal glances people will shoot at each other. The meeting’s important, but so’s the choreography that surrounds the meeting -- maybe even more so -- and that’s what I can’t get now. That and I’ve worked with a lot of these clients for 10, 15 years, so they’re friends too. And I miss that too.”</li><li>Airlines are saying that business travel is still down 70% from pre-lockdown levels, but that almost all of their top corporate accounts are telling them they plan to re-start travel later this year -- but first they gotta figure out how to get people out of their sweats and back into the office.</li><li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<em>Garden Of The Forking </em>by J.Lang (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djlang59/22228 Ft: Neurowaxx</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Learning the History of Airports</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Back at the beginning of the year, back in episodes #<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/16/podcast-172-timeshares-without-the-pitch-notes-on-tucson/\" title=\"Podcast #172 — Timeshares Without the Pitch; Notes on Tucson\">172</a> and #<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/12/podcast-173-whats-new-in-travel-insurance-keeping-ahead-of-expiring-miles/\" title=\"Podcast #173 — What’s New in Travel Insurance; Keeping Ahead of Expiring Miles\">173</a>, I talked about a guy who lived on the secure side of ORD from October ‘til January because he was too afraid to fly. In researching this -- what turned out to be not unique -- situation, I came across an article written by <a href=\"https://udayton.edu/directory/artssciences/history/bednarek_janet.php\">Professor Janet Bednarek</a>, Professor of History at <a href=\"https://udayton.edu/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">University of Dayton</a>. Her area of focus is on the history of airports in the US, which I thought would be a perfect topic for the TravelCommons podcast. So I sent her a Zoom invite, as one does these days, and had a great conversation about the history of airports.<ul><li>Mark: Janet, the history of airports. How did you get into that? As a professor of history, you think -- what am I going to focus on, the American Revolution, the Civil War, airports? Yes, airports! Perfect!</li><li>Janet: I originally trained as an urban historian focusing on city planning. But my first paid job was as a historian with the United States Air Force. And so I had to pick up aviation history, especially military aviation history. Then in 1992, my husband and I were moving to the Dayton area; my husband was an air force officer. This job came up at the University of Dayton if somebody could teach urban and aviation history. I began to think -- where do those two things intersect? They intersect at the airport. And it was clear to me that not a lot of people had written about airports. And so I thought -- wide open field, here we go. When they first talked about building airport, the planners talked a lot about how do we integrate them within the city. They were literally talking about the downtowns. And so if you go back to the 1920s, for example, You will see these fantastical schemes for building airports on top of bridges, on top of a ring of skyscrapers. Even in the 1930s, <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Bel_Geddes\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Norman Bel Geddes</a> came up with an idea of an airport that was floating out in New York Harbor on an island.</li><li>Mark: Boris Johnson was trying to do that for London when he was the mayor there</li><li>Janet: On one case, you want to be as close in as possible, but there is the noise, there\'s the danger. The other side of it is when airports actually started being built in the 1920’s and 1930’s, they’re being built largely by local interests and they\'re interested in the cost, and the further you go out from the center, the lower the land costs are, but they would often try to find it on transportation lines that were already there. The Dayton Airport, for example, is not far from an intersection between what was the National Road Route 40 and the Dixie Highway. But the airport is not far from there and businessmen from Dayton knew to get there because there was a trap shooting club that operated literally right at the edge of the airport until a couple of decades ago. So they knew how to get there and where it was.</li><li>Mark: That\'s interesting. I\'ve got a gun range on a flight path of stuff coming in. Okay.</li><li>Janet: Yes. The Atlanta airport and several other places were where racetracks had been. You could drive there because, obviously, we had to drive there to race your cars around. So it was areas where there was already some accessibility but the land was cheap. Atlanta and I think Minneapolis-St Paul airports -- there were race tracks there originally.</li><li>Mark: So if we pivot, what do we think about looking forward out in the future?</li><li>Janet: In the United States, building new airports is still extraordinarily difficult and finding the places for them would be very very difficult because, well, let\'s think about <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denver_International_Airporthttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denver_International_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Denver</a>. They went out and they bought 50 square miles out in the middle of nowhere. Noise complaints went up after DIA opened up.</li><li>Mark: So you’ve got to wonder, I remember taking some of the first flights into DIA and you went over nothing other than a herd of buffalo. So were the buffalo complaining?</li><li>Janet: Yes, but it was people who had moved out to that area expecting peace and quiet and now airplanes were coming in there. There\'s literally nowhere you could build an airport where there aren’t going to be some complaints about it.</li><li>Mark: Yes, in that way probably explains the multibillion dollar upgrade to LaGuardia and what they\'re going to start at O\'Hare, and what they did down in Atlanta with the runway extension.</li><li>Janet: Yes. Right, expanding and improving the airports that we have I think is what\'s going to happen into the future. I mean, if you think about it in the United States, we built very few airports since the 1950s. Most commercial airports that exist in the United States were in place in one way or the other either as a private field or military field by World War II</li><li>Mark: That makes sense</li><li>Janet: Completely greenfield airports are relatively rare after World War II</li><li>Mark: I thought that LaGuardia in that new terminal had gotten security right. When you looked at the whole setup, that was really nice.</li><li>Janet: After 9 /11, airports had to wedge security in there. A lot of what airports have done since then has been trying to redesign themselves so that the security becomes a more convenient and seamless experience because right after 9/11, it was all improvised and it was wherever you could put it. And no one knew how long those security protocols we\'re going to last. So who wants to spend millions of dollars redesigning? But now that it\'s fairly clear that these security protocols are going to be forever now, within the last five or 10 years, I would say airports have begun to spend the real money to redesign so that the security fits.</li><li>Mark: It becomes integral as opposed to a bolt-on. And I think people are saying to themselves, look, it\'s been 20 years, it\'s about time security stops being an afterthought. Let\'s face it, It\'s an integral part of the experience.</li><li>Janet: Yes, Let\'s start applying some lessons learned here.</li><li>Mark: Yes, because there are a lot of them. Thanks to Dr Janet Bednarek, Professor of History at the University of Dayton. Janet, thanks very much for taking the time to talk with us on the TravelCommons podcast.</li><li>Janet: My pleasure. Thank you for inviting me.</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #176</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_176.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #176 — Why Business Travel Is Coming Back; Learning Airport History','','inherit','closed','closed','','3550-revision-v1','','','2021-07-05 19:38:07','2021-07-06 00:38:07','',3550,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3570',0,'revision','',0),
(3573,1,'2021-07-25 10:48:21','2021-07-25 15:48:21','Recorded in the Courtyard <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/boston/sights/square/copley-square\">Copley Square</a> in Boston, this special edition pulls the best of the first year of TravelCommons.  Starting with the \"bathroom medley\" -- the roll call of all the hotel bathrooms that have served as TravelCommons\' recording studios, we move on to excerpts from stories on topics such as the TSA, unusual activities in airport departure lounges, scary hotel rooms, and ranting cab drivers.  Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_40.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<!--more-->\n\n<hr>\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #40:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded at the Copley Place Courtyard in <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/boston\">Boston, MA</a></li>\n 	<li>Spent a few flights listening through the past 13 hours of TravelCommons episodes to select the \"greatest hits\" from the first year</li>\n 	<li>from T/C #1 - Why listen to this podcast?</li>\n 	<li>from T/C #33 - Listener feedback says that TravelCommons covers both the fun and the dreary bits of travel</li>\n 	<li>Medley of TravelCommons hotel bathroom studios</li>\n 	<li>from T/C #15 - Bad night at the Oakland Coliseum Days Inn</li>\n 	<li>from T/C #13 - Listener story about nighttime noises in a Korean hotel room</li>\n 	<li>from T/C #8 - Nervous night at the Golden Eagle Motel in <a href=\"http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=41.8302777778,-86.2508333333&amp;spn=0.1,0.1&amp;q=41.8302777778,-86.2508333333 (Niles%2C%20Michigan)&amp;t=h\">Niles, Michigan</a></li>\n 	<li>Medley of TSA rants</li>\n 	<li>from T/C #37 - Episode of <em>Fame</em> breaks out in O\'Hare</li>\n 	<li>from T/C #20 - Allan Marko tells a story about rapid airplane repair</li>\n 	<li>from T/C #18 - Pants problems</li>\n 	<li>from T/C #16 - A chatty seat mate</li>\n 	<li>from T/C #15 - <em>Skymall</em> magazine as a last resort</li>\n 	<li>from T/C #7 - Air sickness without the bag</li>\n 	<li>from T/C #34 - Behind shuffling snowbirds in Tampa</li>\n 	<li>from T/C #14 - Raging parking generalissimo at LAX</li>\n 	<li>from T/C #16 - Tactics for dealing with raging cab drivers</li>\n 	<li>from T/C #24 - Fun with rental cars</li>\n 	<li>from T/C #19 - Midnight car talk at the <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taco_Bell\">Taco Bell</a> drive-thru</li>\n 	<li>from T/C #9 - Downshifting to leisure travel</li>\n 	<li>from T/C #17 - My kids\' view of travel</li>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_40.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #40 - Looking Back Over The First Year','','inherit','closed','closed','','42-revision-v1','','','2021-07-25 10:48:21','2021-07-25 15:48:21','',42,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3573',0,'revision','',0),
(3575,1,'2021-07-25 10:51:22','2021-07-25 15:51:22','Sorry for the delay in posting a new podcast, but I caught a nasty cold en route to San Francisco this week.  This week, a couple of friends and long-time podcast listeners let me buy them beers at the Shearton Fisherman\'s Wharf in exchange for their Classic Travel stories.  I also talk the change in attitude at United Airlines and, as airlines continue to \"de-content\" their cabins, there are two things left I really care about.  Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_15.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<!--more-->\n\n<hr>\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #15:\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recording was a bit delayed by the cold I picked up on my flight out to SFO</li>\n 	<li>Oracle World forces some bad hotel choices</li>\n 	<li>A high school friend from Mobile, AL writes in with some first-hand observations on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina</li>\n 	<li>Links to a podcast that points to TravelCommons -- <a href=\"http://teamtna.libsyn.com\"> The Team TnA Show</a></li>\n 	<li>Begging for business -- United Airlines employees providing great service</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB112717780464345669,00.html?mod=travel%5Fleft%5Fcolumn%5Fhs\"><em>Wall Street Journal</em> article</a> (registration required) on the latest moves by legacy airlines to pull content out of their airplane cabins</li>\n 	<li>There are two things I care about -- in-seat power supplies and in-flight magazines</li>\n 	<li>Recorded in the bar of the Shearton-Fisherman\'s Wharf in SF, two friends tell their Classic Travel Stories about wanting the straight scoop about lightning</li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_15.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>','Podcast #15 - Begging for Business; Needing to Know at 35,000 ft','','inherit','closed','closed','','18-revision-v1','','','2021-07-25 10:51:22','2021-07-25 15:51:22','',18,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3575',0,'revision','',0),
(3576,1,'2021-07-26 07:45:25','2021-07-26 12:45:25','Enjoying a couple of weeks at home, in this episode we talk about the load level records being set by US airlines and its effects on travel courtesy.  Also, the challenge of finding the one thing you \"gotta do\" when you visit a new place.  Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_41.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<!--more-->\n\n<hr>\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #41:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in the suburban Chicago studios</li>\n 	<li>Been in town for 2 weeks now, triangulating between home, rural Illinois, and my downtown Chicago office</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Wanna luv you</em> by <a href=\"http://www.henta.co.uk/\">Henta Ellis</a></li>\n 	<li>Listener feedback on T/C #40, the first-year anniversary episode</li>\n 	<li>Some surprising <a href=\"http://multichannelmerchant.com/mag/sale_skymall_soar_01012006/\">facts</a> about the SkyMall catalog</li>\n 	<li>Geoff Slater talks about his good experience with American Airlines\' AAdvantage agents</li>\n 	<li>Ed Vawter of the <a href=\"http://http://www.qdinformation.com/searching/\">Searching The Internet</a> podcast gives an audio review of Yahoo\'s Farechase travel meta-search site</li>\n 	<li>T/C #2 discussed the love-hate relationship the travel industry has with these meta-search sites.  T/C #2 can be found in the archives under May 2005.  The meta-search topic is 10:50 minutes into the show</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Snub-Nosed Aardvark</em>  by <a href=\"http://podcast.penmachine.com/\">Derek K. Miller</a></li>\n 	<li>The planes are full and are expected to be getting <a href=\"http://www.airlines.org/news/d.aspx?nid=10026\">fuller</a></li>\n 	<li>Everybody who to Sociology 101 in college knows that crowding increases stress</li>\n 	<li>Travel courtesies seem to be breaking down regarding overhead bin space</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Baja Taxi</em> by <a href=\"http://www.brain-buckit.com/\">Brain Buckit</a></li>\n 	<li>When visiting some place new, always want to know \"What\'s the one thing I should do or see?\"</li>\n 	<li>United Airlines\' <em>Hemispheres</em> magazine has a good feature -- <em><a href=\"http://www.hemispheresmagazine.com/3pd/three/default.htm\">Three Days in...</a></em> -- for finding those \"gotta do\'s\"</li>\n 	<li>Listened to two Swedish podcasts to prepare for my vacation to Sweden -- the <a href=\"http://www.polarbearpodcast.com/\">Polarbear Podcast</a> and Radio Sweden\'s <a href=\"http://radiosweden.blogspot.com/\">news podcast</a>, but didn\'t find any \"gotta do\'s\"</li>\n 	<li>Used my old standby <a href=\"http://chowhound.com\">Chowhound.com</a> to find some \"don\'t miss\" restaurants in Stockholm</li>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"http://ad.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/show?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;bids=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\" alt=\"icon\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\"><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from the <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/\">Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_41.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #41 - Full to the Brim, What’s the One Thing…?','','inherit','closed','closed','','43-revision-v1','','','2021-07-26 07:45:25','2021-07-26 12:45:25','',43,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3576',0,'revision','',0),
(3578,1,'2021-07-26 15:27:19','2021-07-26 20:27:19','Back in the San Francisco Marriott after my Swedish vacation, we play an ode to SkyMall magazine, talk about the amazing number of lines in Heathrow airport that were between us and the start of our vacation, and how with all these new boarding schemes, airlines are paying attention to the wrong things. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_42.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<!--more-->\n\n<hr>\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #42:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in the SFO Marriott</li>\n 	<li>Back from the car-pick up vacation in Sweden and back on the road between Chicago and San Francisco</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>SkyMall</em> by <a href=\"http://www.jonathancoulton.com/2006/07/07/thing-a-week-40-skymall/\">Jonathan Coulton</a></li>\n 	<li>Listener talks about using the usually dreaded \"SSSS\" on his boarding pass as a ticket to the security express lane</li>\n 	<li>Ed Vawter of the <a href=\"http://http://www.qdinformation.com/searching/\">Searching The Internet</a> podcast talks about how moving overhead luggage pushes passengers to the edge</li>\n 	<li>Allan Marko points out Hilton Hotel\'s announcement about new clock radios that allow MP3 players to be plugged directly into them</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Car Crash</em> by <a href=\"http://www.smalltownsleeper.com/\">Small Town Sleeper</a></li>\n 	<li>My wife\'s observation -- \"This was a perfect vacation -- except for the flights at the beginning and the end\"</li>\n 	<li>An amazing number of lines at Heathrow airport stood between us and the start of our vacation in Sweden</li>\n 	<li>Only the last delay didn\'t bother me because it let me order another pint</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Hide and Seek</em> by <a href=\"http://www.lorenamire.com/\"> Lorena Mire</a></li>\n 	<li>8 out of 8 US airlines have reported <a href=\"http://blogs.usatoday.com/sky/2006/07/big_airlines_no.html\">profitable second quarters</a></li>\n 	<li>But much of the recent mail to TravelCommons has been about changes to airline boarding procedures</li>\n 	<li>America West airlines started it off by using some mathematical models from Arizona State University to <a href=\"http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,70689-0.html\">design</a> their new approach</li>\n 	<li>But Northwest Airlines has gone the other way, allow everyone to <a href=\"http://www.usatoday.com/travel/flights/2006-06-19-northwest-boarding_x.htm\">board at once</a></li>\n 	<li>They both claim the same results -- saving 3-5 minutes in boarding time.  With so little benefit, perhaps they should be spending their time improving the flying experience instead, say by adding another flight attendant to busy flights or another ticket agent to cut down check-in lines.</li>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids99176.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\"><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from the <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/\">Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_42.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #42 - Waiting For A Good Time, Paying Attention to Boarding','','inherit','closed','closed','','44-revision-v1','','','2021-07-26 15:27:19','2021-07-26 20:27:19','',44,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3578',0,'revision','',0),
(3579,1,'2021-07-28 09:40:10','2021-07-28 14:40:10','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_1985\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/IMG_1758-scaled.jpeg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-3581 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/IMG_1758-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"Microphone and a Beer Can\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a>Now I\'m Ready For the Interview[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>After a 2-week, 2,500-mile and $120 in tolls driving expedition through the Northeast, I didn\'t have much time left to write a new episode. So, I mined the audio files of recent TravelCommons interviews for some good stories that got left on the cutting room floor. We also talk about planning for a bike trip in Italy, a couple of things that might make the 2021 traveler gift guide, and we mourn the demise of American Airlines\' in-flight magazine. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_177.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #177: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, trying to get this July episode in under the wire, a bit delayed due to a 2-week, 2,500-mile and $120 in tolls driving expedition through the Northeast that started with a 12-hr drive from Chicago to Manhattan on the Friday of the 4th of July weekend with as much of our daughter and as much of her worldly belongings as would fit in a BMW X3, helping her move into a 5th-floor walkup in Midtown. I was very pleasantly surprised to hit only two backups on what was forecasted to be the first really big post-lockdown travel day; a detour around an accident in the Poconos on I-80 and then, at the end of our drive, the completely predictable back-up at the mouth of the Lincoln Tunnel. A completely and happily uneventful drive. I then spent the rest of the week finding a different spot every morning for my standard Manhattan breakfast -- egg &amp; cheese on a toasted everything bagel and making sure they don’t slip some milk into my black coffee order -- before spending the day in front of my laptop on a not-very-big desk in our not-very-big hotel room while Irene helped Claire get her flat all set up.&nbsp;</li><li>The next Friday, we left Manhattan for a week’s vacation in Maine with an intermediate stop in New Haven, CT’s Little Italy neighborhood for the classic white clam pizza at Frank Pepe’s. It was a bit of a wait -- a 20-minute queue on the sidewalk and then another 45 minutes after ordering -- but it was worth it. I’ve had many tries at white clam pizza before, but this one was, by far, the best -- a generous helping of clams, garlic, and oregano on a cracker-crisp crust . We walked past other pizza places on Wooster St, but only had time to hit one, and so it had to be the ur-pizza joint, the classic, Frank Pepe’s. And luckily for us, it didn’t disappoint; the line along the sidewalk is well-earned.&nbsp; You know, the Michelin Guide says a one-star restaurant is ‘High quality cooking, worth a stop!’, a two-star is ‘Excellent cooking, worth a detour!’, and describes a three-star as ‘Exceptional cuisine, worth a special journey!’ I’m not saying that Frank Pepe’s is a two-star place, but I will say that it was damn good pizza that was definitely worth our detour.</li><li>We then headed up to Scarborough, ME, just south of Portland, for a beach vacation with friends.&nbsp; The traffic on the drive north was a steady stream of RV’s and pick-up tracks and cars with “roof bags” tied down on top and bikes lashed to the back that continued to thicken from I-91 to I-84 to I-90 to I-495 until it finally ground to a halt trying to merge onto I-95, which was itself filled with the same thick sludge of vehicles trying to make it north for the weekend. And then the weather wasn’t great -- rainy, foggy, misty (now I know where Steven King got all his inspiration) so our time devolved into an week-long seafood fest -- a bivalve-palooza of local mussels, oysters, and clams; intensive longitudinal lobster roll research; and, ignoring the current UK debate about crustacean sentience, multiple boiled lobster dinners -- and taproom tour, hitting the big names like Allagash, Maine Beer Company, and Oxbow as well as some (many) other little guys. And then, finally, on the last day, sunshine.</li><li>After a week of this, the rain started up again as we turned around and headed back home, getting on I-90 in Albany and not getting off until we hit Chicago. It too was an uneventful drive, but not in a great way. By the end of that day, we’d developed a deep, deep hatred of those miserable strips of boring asphalt and the hellhole rest stops that make up the Ohio and Indiana Tollways. I hope Claire loves her new life, ‘cause I really don’t want to have to drive that way again.</li><li>Bridge Music -- One for Me by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/21492 Ft: Haskel</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I have to say that the most important piece of travel kit on this trip was my USB-C to HDMI cable that let me mirror my MacBook Air display on the hotel and beach house TVs so that I could sit back with a beer and comfortably watch YouTube highlights of the Euro 2020 soccer tournament and the Tour de France on 40-60” flat screens instead of hunching over my 13” MacBook Air. I had a version of this in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/12/11/best-gift-ideas-for-a-new-traveler/\">my 2019 traveler gift guide</a>, but it got bumped off t<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">he 2020 version</a> to make room for bring-your-own dining sets. But with restaurants and bars open and so not having to eat every meal in my hotel room, I think I’ll reverse that change and put this cable back on the 2021 guide.</li><li>I don’t know if masks will stay on the 2021 guide -- that depends on transportation agency rules -- but I bought another batch of the evolvetogther masks that I called out in the 2020 guide because, even after in-flight mask mandates get dropped, I might still wear a mask on a crowded flight during the cold and flu season because, for the first time in forever, I didn’t get my usual killer cold last year. Without a mandate, I probably wouldn’t wear a mask in the airport and probably not in a fairly open plane, but I think so when it’s a full flight, when there’s someone next to me in the center seat. I think about it -- they’re exhaling maybe 14-16 inches away from where I’m inhaling. No airplane HEPA filter is going to be able to get in between that exchange. I say that now, but I’ll have to re-visit it after in-flight mandates go away and I’m boarding an 8-hour flight to London; that’ll be the real stress test.</li><li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/05/09/podcast-175-how-to-find-local-tour-guides-rebuild-travel-muscles/\">episode #175</a> back in May, I talked about making some Q4 bets on international travel -- a Backroads bike tour in southern Italy in October and the UK in November. Back in the spring, vaccine roll-outs were choppy, especially in the EU, but I thought that everything would sort itself out over the summer making booking travel in the fall not such a risk. Now this was pre-delta variant, but while in Maine, we got an e-mail from Backroads with the subject line “Your Trip Is A Go!” followed shortly thereafter by an alert from Chase of a very large charge dropped on our Sapphire Visa card. Now we need to start tracking travel requirements. Back in May, the best bet for US travelers was to take a “COVID-free” flight on Delta or American to avoid the 2-week quarantine. Then, a month later in June, Italy significantly eased those requirements. Now, you fill out a pretty extensive on-line passenger locator form with all your trip information and your COVID vaccination card and you’re good to go… into Italy. Getting home, the US is still requiring a negative COVID test no matter what your vaccination status is. But, back in May, the CDC said Abbott’s at-home test can be used. It’s not quite as easy as a home pregnancy test -- the <a href=\"https://www.emed.com/airline-travel\">Abbott test</a> requires you to download an app and enough bandwidth for a video chat with a doctor to visually confirm your identity and the test results -- but it beats having to hunt down at a testing place in a new city.</li><li>In the last episode, I did a bit of “fun with numbers,” pulling daily air passenger numbers from the <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/coronavirus/passenger-throughput\">TSA’s website</a> to look at Memorial Day weekend numbers and then a couple of weeks after that when, on June 11, passenger counts broke 2 million for the first time since the March 2020 lockdowns. Extending that analysis -- from mid-June to now, the last week in July, checkpoint volume growth has plateaued -- the TSA volume numbers averaging just over 2 million/day since the last episode. That’s more than 3 times the 623,000 daily average for the same time last year, but still 21% below 2019’s number. But to a lot of fliers, it doesn’t feel that way. It’s back to full planes, long lines, and tight schedules that can’t recover from inevitable summer thunderstorm delays. Airlines are minimizing schedule slack, trying to claw back some of their 2020 losses, but also because of labor shortages -- from crews to ground-support staff, the people who drive the fuel trucks and cater the planes. Some of that is common to other industries -- people slow to reenter the workforce or took jobs elsewhere when furloughed -- but there’s also something unique to the airlines, staff in the wrong places because travel patterns have shifted. We’ve talked about this before, but with leisure travel snapping back much faster than business travel, the usual big travel destinations -- LGA, ORD, DFW -- are giving way to mid-sized airports. <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/summer-travel-seasons-dont-get-weirder-than-this-one-11626872401?st=7c5z6njyusv2mjg\">The fifth-busiest airport in the world is now in Charlotte, N.C., according to flight data</a>. Charlotte had more flights in June than LAX. Made it tough to be able to spend any time in one of their famous white rocking chairs.</li><li>Last month, American Airlines pulled the plug on <em>American Way</em>, their in-flight magazine. Not surprising. Delta, Southwest, and Alaska all pulled theirs out of their seatback pockets in March 2020 and, most famously, 5 year before COVID in 2015, Skymall disappeared into a Chapter 11 puff of smoke. I, for one, will miss <em>American Way</em>. I’ve always read in-flight magazines and liked that <em>American Way</em> came out twice a month, so it didn’t get as stale as the other ones. Way back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/09/24/podcast-15-begging-for-business-needing-to-know-at-35000-ft/\">episode #15</a>, <em>waay</em> back in 2005, I called them “reading safety stock” because if I was stuck on the runway waiting out a weather ground stop or sitting in&nbsp; Detroit\'s “penalty box” for a couple hours waiting for a landing slot, I’d quickly chew through my own stack of reading material, because, back then, all electronics had to be turned off on the ground and below 10,000 ft to keep a “sterile cabin” for takeoff and landings, and most flight attendants were pretty particular about enforcing it. But all is not lost. United Airlines restarted the physical <em>Hemispheres</em> magazine in June after going all-digital in March 2020.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — &nbsp; Fall to pieces - Silence by mika (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mika/24945 Ft: Colab</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>B-Sides and Rarities - Interview Outtakes</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>After the travel world was shut down in March 2020, I began wondering if TravelCommons would join the furlough ranks for lack of content. It’s tough to do a podcast that’s “more about the journey than the destination” if you’re not journeying. Grounded, locked down, I needed a different way to generate content, so I’ve been doing more interviews. Interviews aren’t <em>less</em> work; it’s just different. Instead of spending time writing, I spend it editing. The typical interview session is 20-30 minutes over Zoom (of course) which I edit down to a 6-8 minute segment which you hopefully find tight, focused and insightful.</li><li>But doing some quick math, that leaves two-thirds of the interview on the cutting floor. Not all of that is insightful -- there’s, say, pronunciation guidance… that I still manage to screw up. But there’s still good stuff that, for whatever reason, doesn’t make it into the edited segment. So for this episode, I’ve pulled out the full interview files and pulled out some stories, some conversational threads that I left behind the first go-around. They’re pretty much unedited, save for snipping out a cough or two --&nbsp; so you’re hearing the actual conversation.</li><li>The first “b-side” is from my conversation in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\">episode #166</a> with <a href=\"https://www.dur.ac.uk/research/directory/staff/?id=15319\">Dr. Emily Thomas</a>, associate professor in philosophy at Durham University in the UK about her book<em> </em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/2DO07fV\"><em>The Meaning of Travel: Philosophers Abroad</em></a>. I reached out to Emily after reading a review of her book in the <em>Wall Street Journal</em>. It was one of my favorite interviews; one that I couldn’t cut down to just 6-8 minutes. But even with the extended play, this thread about different travel styles -- going deep vs. checking off a place’s “greatest hits” -- didn’t make it.</li><li>Next up are a couple of stories from <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/05/09/podcast-175-how-to-find-local-tour-guides-rebuild-travel-muscles/\">episode #175</a> where I talked to <a href=\"https://www.toursbylocals.com/TBL/WebObjects/ToursByLocals.woa/1/wo/y2c7lZDKnxUUHYGLem9YgM/0.41.1.1.50.3\">Paul Melhus</a>, CEO of <a href=\"https://www.toursbylocals.com/\">ToursByLocals</a>, about the local tour market. Paul first told me about the vagaries of selling shore excursion tours to cruise ship passengers and a story about the business challenges he faced in the first days of the COVID lockdown</li><li>The episode before that, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/04/10/podcast-174-how-the-pros-plan-their-taproom-tourism/\">#174</a> if I’m doing my math correctly, was another extended play segment -- 12 minutes -- about taproom tourism, but that was cut down from an hour-and-a-half Zoom beer drinking session with Rob Cheshire host of the UK’s <a href=\"https://thisweekincraft.beer/\">This Week In Craft Beer</a> podcast. Here’s one of the many taproom stories that didn’t make the podcast.  You can catch the full uncut session on the website or the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\">YouTube channel</a>.&nbsp;</li><li>Now it’s not that I didn’t do interviews before the pandemic. Back in January 2020 in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/01/25/podcast-159-planning-the-trip-of-a-lifetime-in-southeast-asia/\">episode #159</a>, I had Allan Marko on talking about trip planning, how he and his wife planned their 9-week sabbatical around Southeast Asia. I thought this was perfect timing -- January is always a big travel planning time. Two months later, most of those plans got blown to bits. But, back in those happier times, here’s a story about the dangers of losing a bag while on a different city-each-day trip</li><li>Editing <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/06/15/podcast-176-why-business-travel-is-coming-back-learning-airport-history/\">last month’s interview</a> with <a href=\"https://udayton.edu/directory/artssciences/history/bednarek_janet.php\">Dr Janet Bednarek</a>, Professor of History at University of Dayton about the history of airports, I had to leave out this thread about who owns US airports. </li><li>And finally, something that’s not really a B-side. Back in<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/05/08/podcast-163-new-world-of-travel-insurance-getting-medical-help-on-the-road/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #163 — New World of Travel Insurance; Getting Medical Help on the Road\"> episode #163</a>, I used a piece of Steve Frick’s <a href=\"https://anchor.fm/steve-frick/\">Travel Stories</a> podcast where we talked about the first TravelCommons episode. Here’s another piece of our conversation where we talk about where our travel paths overlapped.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #177</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_177.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #177 — B-Sides and Rarities... Interview Outtakes','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-177-b-sides-and-rarities','','','2021-08-24 19:39:28','2021-08-25 00:39:28','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3579',0,'post','',0),
(3580,1,'2021-07-27 17:51:43','2021-07-27 22:51:43','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_1985\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Airfields_IL_Chicago_C_htm_m252791c8-e1623802785342.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1985\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Airfields_IL_Chicago_C_htm_m252791c8-e1623802785342-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Old cars and planes on a runway\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> Where\'d the Racetrack Go?[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Business travelers are getting itchy. They know Zoom calls can\'t replace a face-to-face meeting, but they can\'t meet with people who aren\'t in their offices yet. We also talk about how surprisingly great the LaGuardia Terminal B renovation is, and then talk about airport history with <a href=\"https://udayton.edu/directory/artssciences/history/bednarek_janet.php\">Professor Janet Bednarek</a>, professor of history at University of Dayton.  All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_176.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #177: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>This Week</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, trying to get this July episode in under the wire, a bit delayed due to a 2-week, 2,500-mile and $120 in tolls driving expedition in the Northeast that with a 12-hr drive from Chicago to Manhattan on the Friday of the 4th of July weekend with as much of our daughter and as much of her worldly belongings as would fit in a BMW X3, helping her move into a 5th-floor walkup in Midtown. I was very pleasantly surprised to hit only two backups on what was forecasted to be the first really big post-lockdown travel day; a detour around an accident in the Poconos on I-80 and then, at the end of our drive, the completely predictable back-up at the mouth of the Lincoln Tunnel. A completely and happily uneventful drive. I then spent the rest of the week finding a different spot every morning for my standard Manhattan breakfast -- egg &amp; cheese on a toasted everything bagel and making sure they don’t slip some milk into my black coffee order -- before spending the day in front of my laptop on a not-very-big desk in our not-very-big hotel room while Irene helped Claire get her flat all set up. </li><li>The next Friday, we left Manhattan for a week’s vacation in Maine with an intermediate stop in New Haven, CT’s Little Italy neighborhood for the classic white clam pizza at Frank Pepe’s. It was a bit of a wait -- a 20-minute queue on the sidewalk and then another 45 minutes after ordering -- but it was worth it. I’ve had many tries at white clam pizza before, but this one was, by far, the best -- a generous helping of clams, garlic, and oregano on a cracker-crisp crust . We walked past other pizza places on Wooster St, but only had time to hit one, and so it had to be the ur-pizza joint, the classic, Frank Pepe’s. And luckily for us, it didn’t disappoint; the line along the sidewalk is well-earned.  You know, the Michelin Guide says a one-star restaurant is ‘High quality cooking, worth a stop!’, a two-star is ‘Excellent cooking, worth a detour!’, and describes a three-star as ‘Exceptional cuisine, worth a special journey!’ I’m not saying that Frank Pepe’s is a two-star place, but I will say that it was damn good pizza that was definitely worth our detour.</li><li>We then headed up to Scarborough, ME, just south of Portland, for a beach vacation with friends.  The traffic on the drive north was a steady stream of RV’s and pick-up tracks and cars with “roof bags” tied down on top and bikes lashed to the back that continued to thicken from I-91 to I-84 to I-90 to I-495 until it finally ground to a halt trying to merge onto I-95, which was itself filled with the same thick sludge of vehicles trying to make it north for the weekend. And then the weather wasn’t great -- rainy, foggy, misty (now I know where Steven King got all his inspiration) so our time devolved into an week-long seafood fest -- a bivalve-palooza of local mussels, oysters, and clams; intensive longitudinal lobster roll research; and, ignoring the current UK debate about crustacean sentience, multiple boiled lobster dinners -- and taproom tour, hitting the big names like Allagash, Maine Beer Company, and Oxbow as well as some (many) other little guys. And then, finally, on the last day, sunshine.</li><li>After a week of this, the rain started up again as we turned around and headed back home, getting on I-90 in Albany and not getting off until we hit Chicago. It too was an uneventful drive, but not in a great way. By the end of that day, we’d developed a deep, deep hatred of those miserable strips of boring asphalt and the hellhole rest stops that make up the Ohio and Indiana Tollways. I hope Claire loves her new life, ‘cause I really don’t want to have to drive that way again.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Zapac/25046\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><em>You are (funky mix)</em></a> by Zapac.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I have to say that the most important piece of travel kit on this trip was my USB-C to HDMI cable that let me mirror my MacBook Air display on the hotel and beach house TVs so that I could sit back with a beer and comfortably watch YouTube highlights of the Euro 2020 soccer tournament and the Tour de France on 40-60” flat screens instead of hunching over my 13” MacBook Air. I had a version of this in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/12/11/best-gift-ideas-for-a-new-traveler/\">my 2019 traveler gift guide</a>, but it got bumped off t<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">he 2020 version</a> to make room for bring-your-own dining sets. But with restaurants and bars open and so not having to eat every meal in my hotel room, I think I’ll reverse that change and put this cable back on the 2021 guide.</li><li>I don’t know if masks will stay on the 2021 guide -- that depends on transportation agency rules -- but I bought another batch of the evolvetogther masks that I called out in the 2020 guide because, even after in-flight mask mandates get dropped, I might still wear a mask on a crowded flight during the cold and flu season because, for the first time in forever, I didn’t get my usual killer cold last year. Without a mandate, I probably wouldn’t wear a mask in the airport and probably not in a fairly open plane, but I think so when it’s a full flight, when there’s someone next to me in the center seat. I think about it -- they’re exhaling maybe 14-16 inches away from where I’m inhaling. No airplane HEPA filter is going to be able to get in between that exchange. I say that now, but I’ll have to re-visit it after in-flight mandates go away and I’m boarding an 8-hour flight to London; that’ll be the real stress test.</li><li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/05/09/podcast-175-how-to-find-local-tour-guides-rebuild-travel-muscles/\">episode #175</a> back in May, I talked about making some Q4 bets on international travel -- a Backroads bike tour in southern Italy in October and the UK in November. Back in the spring, vaccine roll-outs were choppy, especially in the EU, but I thought that everything would sort itself out over the summer making booking travel in the fall not such a risk. Now this was pre-delta variant, but while in Maine, we got an e-mail from Backroads with the subject line “Your Trip Is A Go!” followed shortly thereafter by an alert from Chase of a very large charge dropped on our Sapphire Visa card. Now we need to start tracking travel requirements. Back in May, the best bet for US travelers was to take a “COVID-free” flight on Delta or American to avoid the 2-week quarantine. Then, a month later in June, Italy significantly eased those requirements. Now, you fill out a pretty extensive on-line passenger locator form with all your trip information and your COVID vaccination card and you’re good to go… into Italy. Getting home, the US is still requiring a negative COVID test no matter what your vaccination status is. But, back in May, the CDC said Abbott’s at-home test can be used. It’s not quite as easy as a home pregnancy test -- the <a href=\"https://www.emed.com/airline-travel\">Abbott test</a> requires you to download an app and enough bandwidth for a video chat with a doctor to visually confirm your identity and the test results -- but it beats having to hunt down at a testing place in a new city.</li><li>In the last episode, I did a bit of “fun with numbers,” pulling daily air passenger numbers from the <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/coronavirus/passenger-throughput\">TSA’s website</a> to look at Memorial Day weekend numbers and then a couple of weeks after that when, on June 11, passenger counts broke 2 million for the first time since the March 2020 lockdowns. Extending that analysis -- from mid-June to now, the last week in July, checkpoint volume growth has plateaued -- the TSA volume numbers averaging just over 2 million/day since the last episode. That’s more than 3 times the 623,000 daily average for the same time last year, but still 21% below 2019’s number. But to a lot of fliers, it doesn’t feel that way. It’s back to full planes, long lines, and tight schedules that can’t recover from inevitable summer thunderstorm delays. Airlines are minimizing schedule slack, trying to claw back some of their 2020 losses, but also because of labor shortages -- from crews to ground-support staff, the people who drive the fuel trucks and cater the planes. Some of that is common to other industries -- people slow to reenter the workforce or took jobs elsewhere when furloughed -- but there’s also something unique to the airlines, staff in the wrong places because travel patterns have shifted. We’ve talked about this before, but with leisure travel snapping back much faster than business travel, the usual big travel destinations -- LGA, ORD, DFW -- are giving way to mid-sized airports. <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/summer-travel-seasons-dont-get-weirder-than-this-one-11626872401?st=7c5z6njyusv2mjg\">The fifth-busiest airport in the world is now in Charlotte, N.C., according to flight data</a>. Charlotte had more flights in June than LAX. Made it tough to be able to spend any time in one of their famous white rocking chairs.</li><li>Last month, American Airlines pulled the plug on <em>American Way</em>, their in-flight magazine. Not surprising. Delta, Southwest, and Alaska all pulled theirs out of their seatback pockets in March 2020 and, most famously, 5 year before COVID in 2015, Skymall disappeared into a Chapter 11 puff of smoke. I, for one, will miss <em>American Way</em>. I’ve always read in-flight magazines and liked that <em>American Way</em> came out twice a month, so it didn’t get as stale as the other ones. Way back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/09/24/podcast-15-begging-for-business-needing-to-know-at-35000-ft/\">episode #15</a>, <em>waay</em> back in 2005, I called them “reading safety stock” because if I was stuck on the runway waiting out a weather ground stop or sitting in  Detroit\'s “penalty box” for a couple hours waiting for a landing slot, I’d quickly chew through my own stack of reading material, because, back then, all electronics had to be turned off on the ground and below 10,000 ft to keep a “sterile cabin” for takeoff and landings, and most flight attendants were pretty particular about enforcing it. But all is not lost. United Airlines restarted the physical <em>Hemispheres</em> magazine in June after going all-digital in March 2020.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — <em>Two Guitars</em> by Admiral Bob (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/35879 Ft: Haskel</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>B-Sides and Rarities - Interview Outtakes</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Last Friday, the first day of Chicago’s full reopening and the same day the TSA’s checkpoint volume broke the 2 million passenger mark for the first time post-lockdown, a business colleague and I met for some happy hour beers and oysters in a bar in Wrigleyville. We were sitting at a second floor table against an open window, looking over at Wrigley Field as fans poured out of the Clark-&amp;-Addison main gate and into nearby bars to celebrate the Cubs’ victory over the St Louis Cardinals in what was the first full-capacity game since September 2019. Mike’s in consulting too; he’d been talking about how he was itching to get back out on the road to see his clients, on how he’s working to convince the firm’s management to lift, or at least bend their travel ban so he can see the clients again -- at least the ones who also want to start meeting people face-to-face again. Zoom and Teams calls are <em>OK</em>, they can suffice for some things, but there are so many things you miss when you’re not there in person.&nbsp;</li><li>In an outta-left-field sorta way, the masses of Cubs fans blocking traffic on Addison St helped prove Mike’s point. Official attendance was 35,112, not quite a sell-out, but having butts in 84% of the seats for a 1:20p Friday game isn’t bad. But similar to the “why travel to a meeting when you can video conference?” question, why go to a baseball game in person when you can watch it on TV where it’s covered by not just one crappy laptop camera, but 5-8 HD cameras with clean lenses and run by professionals? I know, it’s a stupid strawman question that we all know the answer to -- it’s not just the game, it’s the whole experience. And it’s not an either/or -- many times watching the game on TV is fine, and more convenient; but sometimes, you gotta get off the couch and go see the game live, in person, with a bunch of friends.</li><li>A couple of recent interactions(?) over the last couple of weeks drove this home. I’ve had multiple video calls with a programmer over the past month, probably 3-4 hour worth, going through some system re-architecting. After all that, I thought I had it pretty much down. Now the guy has started coming back to the office -- he said working from home for 14 months was being under house arrest -- so I pulled him into a conference room and started sketching stuff on a whiteboard. We stood there shoulder-to-shoulder and passed the blue marker back and forth, and in 20 minutes realized that there were 3 key facts about the existing systems that never came across in those hours of video calls and that completely changed the new architecture. But they did in that in-person 20 minutes. And afterwards, the guy said to me “Hey, that was fun. Let’s do some more of that” -- a reaction I’ve never heard about a video conference… ever. And at the same time, I had the exact opposite experience -- trying to explain a concept on a week’s worth of video calls that I know we could’ve handled in an hour if we could’ve been in the same room together, but we can’t because he’s overseas and can’t get through the US travel lockdown. So we trudged through the calls… and the frustration.</li><li>Which was pretty much the point that Mike was trying to make over honking buses and shouts of “Go Cubs Go”. “Yeah, I can have a meeting on Zoom, but I can’t have the pre-meeting ‘how are things going’ chats as we’re walking into the room, or the post-meeting ‘Can I ask you what you really meant in there’ sidebar, or pick up the non-verbal glances people will shoot at each other. The meeting’s important, but so’s the choreography that surrounds the meeting -- maybe even more so -- and that’s what I can’t get now. That and I’ve worked with a lot of these clients for 10, 15 years, so they’re friends too. And I miss that too.”</li><li>Airlines are saying that business travel is still down 70% from pre-lockdown levels, but that almost all of their top corporate accounts are telling them they plan to re-start travel later this year -- but first they gotta figure out how to get people out of their sweats and back into the office.</li><li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<em>Garden Of The Forking </em>by J.Lang (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djlang59/22228 Ft: Neurowaxx</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Learning the History of Airports</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Back at the beginning of the year, back in episodes #<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/16/podcast-172-timeshares-without-the-pitch-notes-on-tucson/\" title=\"Podcast #172 — Timeshares Without the Pitch; Notes on Tucson\">172</a> and #<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/12/podcast-173-whats-new-in-travel-insurance-keeping-ahead-of-expiring-miles/\" title=\"Podcast #173 — What’s New in Travel Insurance; Keeping Ahead of Expiring Miles\">173</a>, I talked about a guy who lived on the secure side of ORD from October ‘til January because he was too afraid to fly. In researching this -- what turned out to be not unique -- situation, I came across an article written by <a href=\"https://udayton.edu/directory/artssciences/history/bednarek_janet.php\">Professor Janet Bednarek</a>, Professor of History at <a href=\"https://udayton.edu/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">University of Dayton</a>. Her area of focus is on the history of airports in the US, which I thought would be a perfect topic for the TravelCommons podcast. So I sent her a Zoom invite, as one does these days, and had a great conversation about the history of airports.<ul><li>Mark: Janet, the history of airports. How did you get into that? As a professor of history, you think -- what am I going to focus on, the American Revolution, the Civil War, airports? Yes, airports! Perfect!</li><li>Janet: I originally trained as an urban historian focusing on city planning. But my first paid job was as a historian with the United States Air Force. And so I had to pick up aviation history, especially military aviation history. Then in 1992, my husband and I were moving to the Dayton area; my husband was an air force officer. This job came up at the University of Dayton if somebody could teach urban and aviation history. I began to think -- where do those two things intersect? They intersect at the airport. And it was clear to me that not a lot of people had written about airports. And so I thought -- wide open field, here we go. When they first talked about building airport, the planners talked a lot about how do we integrate them within the city. They were literally talking about the downtowns. And so if you go back to the 1920s, for example, You will see these fantastical schemes for building airports on top of bridges, on top of a ring of skyscrapers. Even in the 1930s, <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Bel_Geddes\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Norman Bel Geddes</a> came up with an idea of an airport that was floating out in New York Harbor on an island.</li><li>Mark: Boris Johnson was trying to do that for London when he was the mayor there</li><li>Janet: On one case, you want to be as close in as possible, but there is the noise, there\'s the danger. The other side of it is when airports actually started being built in the 1920’s and 1930’s, they’re being built largely by local interests and they\'re interested in the cost, and the further you go out from the center, the lower the land costs are, but they would often try to find it on transportation lines that were already there. The Dayton Airport, for example, is not far from an intersection between what was the National Road Route 40 and the Dixie Highway. But the airport is not far from there and businessmen from Dayton knew to get there because there was a trap shooting club that operated literally right at the edge of the airport until a couple of decades ago. So they knew how to get there and where it was.</li><li>Mark: That\'s interesting. I\'ve got a gun range on a flight path of stuff coming in. Okay.</li><li>Janet: Yes. The Atlanta airport and several other places were where racetracks had been. You could drive there because, obviously, we had to drive there to race your cars around. So it was areas where there was already some accessibility but the land was cheap. Atlanta and I think Minneapolis-St Paul airports -- there were race tracks there originally.</li><li>Mark: So if we pivot, what do we think about looking forward out in the future?</li><li>Janet: In the United States, building new airports is still extraordinarily difficult and finding the places for them would be very very difficult because, well, let\'s think about <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denver_International_Airporthttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denver_International_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Denver</a>. They went out and they bought 50 square miles out in the middle of nowhere. Noise complaints went up after DIA opened up.</li><li>Mark: So you’ve got to wonder, I remember taking some of the first flights into DIA and you went over nothing other than a herd of buffalo. So were the buffalo complaining?</li><li>Janet: Yes, but it was people who had moved out to that area expecting peace and quiet and now airplanes were coming in there. There\'s literally nowhere you could build an airport where there aren’t going to be some complaints about it.</li><li>Mark: Yes, in that way probably explains the multibillion dollar upgrade to LaGuardia and what they\'re going to start at O\'Hare, and what they did down in Atlanta with the runway extension.</li><li>Janet: Yes. Right, expanding and improving the airports that we have I think is what\'s going to happen into the future. I mean, if you think about it in the United States, we built very few airports since the 1950s. Most commercial airports that exist in the United States were in place in one way or the other either as a private field or military field by World War II</li><li>Mark: That makes sense</li><li>Janet: Completely greenfield airports are relatively rare after World War II</li><li>Mark: I thought that LaGuardia in that new terminal had gotten security right. When you looked at the whole setup, that was really nice.</li><li>Janet: After 9 /11, airports had to wedge security in there. A lot of what airports have done since then has been trying to redesign themselves so that the security becomes a more convenient and seamless experience because right after 9/11, it was all improvised and it was wherever you could put it. And no one knew how long those security protocols we\'re going to last. So who wants to spend millions of dollars redesigning? But now that it\'s fairly clear that these security protocols are going to be forever now, within the last five or 10 years, I would say airports have begun to spend the real money to redesign so that the security fits.</li><li>Mark: It becomes integral as opposed to a bolt-on. And I think people are saying to themselves, look, it\'s been 20 years, it\'s about time security stops being an afterthought. Let\'s face it, It\'s an integral part of the experience.</li><li>Janet: Yes, Let\'s start applying some lessons learned here.</li><li>Mark: Yes, because there are a lot of them. Thanks to Dr Janet Bednarek, Professor of History at the University of Dayton. Janet, thanks very much for taking the time to talk with us on the TravelCommons podcast.</li><li>Janet: My pleasure. Thank you for inviting me.</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #177</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social  -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_176.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #177 — B-Sides and Rarities','','inherit','closed','closed','','3579-revision-v1','','','2021-07-27 17:51:43','2021-07-27 22:51:43','',3579,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3580',0,'revision','',0),
(3581,1,'2021-07-27 17:57:15','2021-07-27 22:57:15','','IMG_1758','','inherit','open','closed','','img_1758','','','2021-07-27 17:57:37','2021-07-27 22:57:37','',3579,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/IMG_1758.jpeg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(3583,1,'2021-07-27 18:00:31','2021-07-27 23:00:31','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_1985\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/IMG_1758-scaled.jpeg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-3581 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/IMG_1758-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"Microphone and a Beer Can\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a>Now I\'m Ready For the Interview[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Business travelers are getting itchy. They know Zoom calls can\'t replace a face-to-face meeting, but they can\'t meet with people who aren\'t in their offices yet. We also talk about how surprisingly great the LaGuardia Terminal B renovation is, and then talk about airport history with <a href=\"https://udayton.edu/directory/artssciences/history/bednarek_janet.php\">Professor Janet Bednarek</a>, professor of history at University of Dayton.  All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_177.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #177: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>This Week</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, trying to get this July episode in under the wire, a bit delayed due to a 2-week, 2,500-mile and $120 in tolls driving expedition in the Northeast that with a 12-hr drive from Chicago to Manhattan on the Friday of the 4th of July weekend with as much of our daughter and as much of her worldly belongings as would fit in a BMW X3, helping her move into a 5th-floor walkup in Midtown. I was very pleasantly surprised to hit only two backups on what was forecasted to be the first really big post-lockdown travel day; a detour around an accident in the Poconos on I-80 and then, at the end of our drive, the completely predictable back-up at the mouth of the Lincoln Tunnel. A completely and happily uneventful drive. I then spent the rest of the week finding a different spot every morning for my standard Manhattan breakfast -- egg &amp; cheese on a toasted everything bagel and making sure they don’t slip some milk into my black coffee order -- before spending the day in front of my laptop on a not-very-big desk in our not-very-big hotel room while Irene helped Claire get her flat all set up.&nbsp;</li><li>The next Friday, we left Manhattan for a week’s vacation in Maine with an intermediate stop in New Haven, CT’s Little Italy neighborhood for the classic white clam pizza at Frank Pepe’s. It was a bit of a wait -- a 20-minute queue on the sidewalk and then another 45 minutes after ordering -- but it was worth it. I’ve had many tries at white clam pizza before, but this one was, by far, the best -- a generous helping of clams, garlic, and oregano on a cracker-crisp crust . We walked past other pizza places on Wooster St, but only had time to hit one, and so it had to be the ur-pizza joint, the classic, Frank Pepe’s. And luckily for us, it didn’t disappoint; the line along the sidewalk is well-earned.&nbsp; You know, the Michelin Guide says a one-star restaurant is ‘High quality cooking, worth a stop!’, a two-star is ‘Excellent cooking, worth a detour!’, and describes a three-star as ‘Exceptional cuisine, worth a special journey!’ I’m not saying that Frank Pepe’s is a two-star place, but I will say that it was damn good pizza that was definitely worth our detour.</li><li>We then headed up to Scarborough, ME, just south of Portland, for a beach vacation with friends.&nbsp; The traffic on the drive north was a steady stream of RV’s and pick-up tracks and cars with “roof bags” tied down on top and bikes lashed to the back that continued to thicken from I-91 to I-84 to I-90 to I-495 until it finally ground to a halt trying to merge onto I-95, which was itself filled with the same thick sludge of vehicles trying to make it north for the weekend. And then the weather wasn’t great -- rainy, foggy, misty (now I know where Steven King got all his inspiration) so our time devolved into an week-long seafood fest -- a bivalve-palooza of local mussels, oysters, and clams; intensive longitudinal lobster roll research; and, ignoring the current UK debate about crustacean sentience, multiple boiled lobster dinners -- and taproom tour, hitting the big names like Allagash, Maine Beer Company, and Oxbow as well as some (many) other little guys. And then, finally, on the last day, sunshine.</li><li>After a week of this, the rain started up again as we turned around and headed back home, getting on I-90 in Albany and not getting off until we hit Chicago. It too was an uneventful drive, but not in a great way. By the end of that day, we’d developed a deep, deep hatred of those miserable strips of boring asphalt and the hellhole rest stops that make up the Ohio and Indiana Tollways. I hope Claire loves her new life, ‘cause I really don’t want to have to drive that way again.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Zapac/25046\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><em>You are (funky mix)</em></a>&nbsp;by Zapac.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I have to say that the most important piece of travel kit on this trip was my USB-C to HDMI cable that let me mirror my MacBook Air display on the hotel and beach house TVs so that I could sit back with a beer and comfortably watch YouTube highlights of the Euro 2020 soccer tournament and the Tour de France on 40-60” flat screens instead of hunching over my 13” MacBook Air. I had a version of this in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/12/11/best-gift-ideas-for-a-new-traveler/\">my 2019 traveler gift guide</a>, but it got bumped off t<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">he 2020 version</a> to make room for bring-your-own dining sets. But with restaurants and bars open and so not having to eat every meal in my hotel room, I think I’ll reverse that change and put this cable back on the 2021 guide.</li><li>I don’t know if masks will stay on the 2021 guide -- that depends on transportation agency rules -- but I bought another batch of the evolvetogther masks that I called out in the 2020 guide because, even after in-flight mask mandates get dropped, I might still wear a mask on a crowded flight during the cold and flu season because, for the first time in forever, I didn’t get my usual killer cold last year. Without a mandate, I probably wouldn’t wear a mask in the airport and probably not in a fairly open plane, but I think so when it’s a full flight, when there’s someone next to me in the center seat. I think about it -- they’re exhaling maybe 14-16 inches away from where I’m inhaling. No airplane HEPA filter is going to be able to get in between that exchange. I say that now, but I’ll have to re-visit it after in-flight mandates go away and I’m boarding an 8-hour flight to London; that’ll be the real stress test.</li><li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/05/09/podcast-175-how-to-find-local-tour-guides-rebuild-travel-muscles/\">episode #175</a> back in May, I talked about making some Q4 bets on international travel -- a Backroads bike tour in southern Italy in October and the UK in November. Back in the spring, vaccine roll-outs were choppy, especially in the EU, but I thought that everything would sort itself out over the summer making booking travel in the fall not such a risk. Now this was pre-delta variant, but while in Maine, we got an e-mail from Backroads with the subject line “Your Trip Is A Go!” followed shortly thereafter by an alert from Chase of a very large charge dropped on our Sapphire Visa card. Now we need to start tracking travel requirements. Back in May, the best bet for US travelers was to take a “COVID-free” flight on Delta or American to avoid the 2-week quarantine. Then, a month later in June, Italy significantly eased those requirements. Now, you fill out a pretty extensive on-line passenger locator form with all your trip information and your COVID vaccination card and you’re good to go… into Italy. Getting home, the US is still requiring a negative COVID test no matter what your vaccination status is. But, back in May, the CDC said Abbott’s at-home test can be used. It’s not quite as easy as a home pregnancy test -- the <a href=\"https://www.emed.com/airline-travel\">Abbott test</a> requires you to download an app and enough bandwidth for a video chat with a doctor to visually confirm your identity and the test results -- but it beats having to hunt down at a testing place in a new city.</li><li>In the last episode, I did a bit of “fun with numbers,” pulling daily air passenger numbers from the <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/coronavirus/passenger-throughput\">TSA’s website</a> to look at Memorial Day weekend numbers and then a couple of weeks after that when, on June 11, passenger counts broke 2 million for the first time since the March 2020 lockdowns. Extending that analysis -- from mid-June to now, the last week in July, checkpoint volume growth has plateaued -- the TSA volume numbers averaging just over 2 million/day since the last episode. That’s more than 3 times the 623,000 daily average for the same time last year, but still 21% below 2019’s number. But to a lot of fliers, it doesn’t feel that way. It’s back to full planes, long lines, and tight schedules that can’t recover from inevitable summer thunderstorm delays. Airlines are minimizing schedule slack, trying to claw back some of their 2020 losses, but also because of labor shortages -- from crews to ground-support staff, the people who drive the fuel trucks and cater the planes. Some of that is common to other industries -- people slow to reenter the workforce or took jobs elsewhere when furloughed -- but there’s also something unique to the airlines, staff in the wrong places because travel patterns have shifted. We’ve talked about this before, but with leisure travel snapping back much faster than business travel, the usual big travel destinations -- LGA, ORD, DFW -- are giving way to mid-sized airports. <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/summer-travel-seasons-dont-get-weirder-than-this-one-11626872401?st=7c5z6njyusv2mjg\">The fifth-busiest airport in the world is now in Charlotte, N.C., according to flight data</a>. Charlotte had more flights in June than LAX. Made it tough to be able to spend any time in one of their famous white rocking chairs.</li><li>Last month, American Airlines pulled the plug on <em>American Way</em>, their in-flight magazine. Not surprising. Delta, Southwest, and Alaska all pulled theirs out of their seatback pockets in March 2020 and, most famously, 5 year before COVID in 2015, Skymall disappeared into a Chapter 11 puff of smoke. I, for one, will miss <em>American Way</em>. I’ve always read in-flight magazines and liked that <em>American Way</em> came out twice a month, so it didn’t get as stale as the other ones. Way back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/09/24/podcast-15-begging-for-business-needing-to-know-at-35000-ft/\">episode #15</a>, <em>waay</em> back in 2005, I called them “reading safety stock” because if I was stuck on the runway waiting out a weather ground stop or sitting in&nbsp; Detroit\'s “penalty box” for a couple hours waiting for a landing slot, I’d quickly chew through my own stack of reading material, because, back then, all electronics had to be turned off on the ground and below 10,000 ft to keep a “sterile cabin” for takeoff and landings, and most flight attendants were pretty particular about enforcing it. But all is not lost. United Airlines restarted the physical <em>Hemispheres</em> magazine in June after going all-digital in March 2020.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<em>Two Guitars</em> by Admiral Bob (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/35879 Ft: Haskel</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>B-Sides and Rarities - Interview Outtakes</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>After the travel world was shut down in March 2020, I began wondering if TravelCommons would join the furlough ranks for lack of content. It’s tough to do a podcast that’s “more about the journey than the destination” if you’re not journeying. Grounded, locked down, I needed a different way to generate content, so I’ve been doing more interviews. Interviews aren’t <em>less</em> work; it’s just different. Instead of spending time writing, I spend it editing. The typical interview session is 20-30 minutes over Zoom (of course) which I edit down to a 6-8 minute segment which you hopefully find tight, focused and insightful.</li><li>But doing some quick math, that leaves two-thirds of the interview on the cutting floor. Not all of that is insightful -- there’s, say, pronunciation guidance… that I still manage to screw up. But there’s still good stuff that, for whatever reason, doesn’t make it into the edited segment. So for this episode, I’ve pulled out the full interview files and pulled out some stories, some conversational threads that I left behind the first go-around. They’re pretty much unedited, save for snipping out a cough or two --&nbsp; so you’re hearing the actual conversation.</li><li>The first “b-side” is from my conversation in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\">episode #166</a> with <a href=\"https://www.dur.ac.uk/research/directory/staff/?id=15319\">Dr. Emily Thomas</a>, associate professor in philosophy at Durham University in the UK about her book<em> </em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/2DO07fV\"><em>The Meaning of Travel: Philosophers Abroad</em></a>. I reached out to Emily after reading a review of her book in the <em>Wall Street Journal</em>. It was one of my favorite interviews; one that I couldn’t cut down to just 6-8 minutes. But even with the extended play, this thread about different travel styles -- going deep vs. checking off a place’s “greatest hits” -- didn’t make it.</li><li>Next up are a couple of stories from <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/05/09/podcast-175-how-to-find-local-tour-guides-rebuild-travel-muscles/\">episode #175</a> where I talked to <a href=\"https://www.toursbylocals.com/TBL/WebObjects/ToursByLocals.woa/1/wo/y2c7lZDKnxUUHYGLem9YgM/0.41.1.1.50.3\">Paul Melhus</a>, CEO of <a href=\"https://www.toursbylocals.com/\">ToursByLocals</a>, about the local tour market. Paul first told me about the vagaries of selling shore excursion tours to cruise ship passengers and a story about the business challenges he faced in the first days of the COVID lockdown</li><li>The episode before that, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/04/10/podcast-174-how-the-pros-plan-their-taproom-tourism/\">#174</a> if I’m doing my math correctly, was another extended play segment -- 12 minutes -- about taproom tourism, but that was cut down from an hour-and-a-half Zoom beer drinking session with Rob Cheshire host of the UK’s <a href=\"https://thisweekincraft.beer/\">This Week In Craft Beer</a> podcast. Here’s one of the many taproom stories that didn’t make the podcast.  You can catch the full uncut session on the website or the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\">YouTube channel</a>.&nbsp;</li><li>Now it’s not that I didn’t do interviews before the pandemic. Back in January 2020 in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/01/25/podcast-159-planning-the-trip-of-a-lifetime-in-southeast-asia/\">episode #159</a>, I had Allan Marko on talking about trip planning, how he and his wife planned their 9-week sabbatical around Southeast Asia. I thought this was perfect timing -- January is always a big travel planning time. Two months later, most of those plans got blown to bits. But, back in those happier times, here’s a story about the dangers of losing a bag while on a different city-each-day trip</li><li>Editing <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/06/15/podcast-176-why-business-travel-is-coming-back-learning-airport-history/\">last month’s interview</a> with <a href=\"https://udayton.edu/directory/artssciences/history/bednarek_janet.php\">Dr Janet Bednarek</a>, Professor of History at University of Dayton about the history of airports, I had to leave out this thread about who owns US airports. </li><li>And finally, something that’s not really a B-side. Back in<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/05/08/podcast-163-new-world-of-travel-insurance-getting-medical-help-on-the-road/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #163 — New World of Travel Insurance; Getting Medical Help on the Road\"> episode #163</a>, I used a piece of Steve Frick’s <a href=\"https://anchor.fm/steve-frick/\">Travel Stories</a> podcast where we talked about the first TravelCommons episode. Here’s another piece of our conversation where we talk about where our travel paths overlapped.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #177</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_177.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #177 — B-Sides and Rarities','','inherit','closed','closed','','3579-revision-v1','','','2021-07-27 18:00:31','2021-07-27 23:00:31','',3579,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3583',0,'revision','',0),
(3584,1,'2021-07-27 18:08:01','2021-07-27 23:08:01','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_1985\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/IMG_1758-scaled.jpeg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-3581 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/IMG_1758-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"Microphone and a Beer Can\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a>Now I\'m Ready For the Interview[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>After a 2-week, 2,500-mile and $120 in tolls driving expedition through the Northeast, I didn\'t have much left to write a new episode, so I mined the audio files of recent TravelCommons interviews for some good stories that got left on the cutting room floor. We also talk about planning for a bike trip in Italy and mourn the demise of American Airlines\' in-flight magazine. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_177.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #177: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>This Week</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, trying to get this July episode in under the wire, a bit delayed due to a 2-week, 2,500-mile and $120 in tolls driving expedition through the Northeast that started with a 12-hr drive from Chicago to Manhattan on the Friday of the 4th of July weekend with as much of our daughter and as much of her worldly belongings as would fit in a BMW X3, helping her move into a 5th-floor walkup in Midtown. I was very pleasantly surprised to hit only two backups on what was forecasted to be the first really big post-lockdown travel day; a detour around an accident in the Poconos on I-80 and then, at the end of our drive, the completely predictable back-up at the mouth of the Lincoln Tunnel. A completely and happily uneventful drive. I then spent the rest of the week finding a different spot every morning for my standard Manhattan breakfast -- egg &amp; cheese on a toasted everything bagel and making sure they don’t slip some milk into my black coffee order -- before spending the day in front of my laptop on a not-very-big desk in our not-very-big hotel room while Irene helped Claire get her flat all set up. </li><li>The next Friday, we left Manhattan for a week’s vacation in Maine with an intermediate stop in New Haven, CT’s Little Italy neighborhood for the classic white clam pizza at Frank Pepe’s. It was a bit of a wait -- a 20-minute queue on the sidewalk and then another 45 minutes after ordering -- but it was worth it. I’ve had many tries at white clam pizza before, but this one was, by far, the best -- a generous helping of clams, garlic, and oregano on a cracker-crisp crust . We walked past other pizza places on Wooster St, but only had time to hit one, and so it had to be the ur-pizza joint, the classic, Frank Pepe’s. And luckily for us, it didn’t disappoint; the line along the sidewalk is well-earned.  You know, the Michelin Guide says a one-star restaurant is ‘High quality cooking, worth a stop!’, a two-star is ‘Excellent cooking, worth a detour!’, and describes a three-star as ‘Exceptional cuisine, worth a special journey!’ I’m not saying that Frank Pepe’s is a two-star place, but I will say that it was damn good pizza that was definitely worth our detour.</li><li>We then headed up to Scarborough, ME, just south of Portland, for a beach vacation with friends.  The traffic on the drive north was a steady stream of RV’s and pick-up tracks and cars with “roof bags” tied down on top and bikes lashed to the back that continued to thicken from I-91 to I-84 to I-90 to I-495 until it finally ground to a halt trying to merge onto I-95, which was itself filled with the same thick sludge of vehicles trying to make it north for the weekend. And then the weather wasn’t great -- rainy, foggy, misty (now I know where Steven King got all his inspiration) so our time devolved into an week-long seafood fest -- a bivalve-palooza of local mussels, oysters, and clams; intensive longitudinal lobster roll research; and, ignoring the current UK debate about crustacean sentience, multiple boiled lobster dinners -- and taproom tour, hitting the big names like Allagash, Maine Beer Company, and Oxbow as well as some (many) other little guys. And then, finally, on the last day, sunshine.</li><li>After a week of this, the rain started up again as we turned around and headed back home, getting on I-90 in Albany and not getting off until we hit Chicago. It too was an uneventful drive, but not in a great way. By the end of that day, we’d developed a deep, deep hatred of those miserable strips of boring asphalt and the hellhole rest stops that make up the Ohio and Indiana Tollways. I hope Claire loves her new life, ‘cause I really don’t want to have to drive that way again.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Zapac/25046\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><em>You are (funky mix)</em></a> by Zapac.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I have to say that the most important piece of travel kit on this trip was my USB-C to HDMI cable that let me mirror my MacBook Air display on the hotel and beach house TVs so that I could sit back with a beer and comfortably watch YouTube highlights of the Euro 2020 soccer tournament and the Tour de France on 40-60” flat screens instead of hunching over my 13” MacBook Air. I had a version of this in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/12/11/best-gift-ideas-for-a-new-traveler/\">my 2019 traveler gift guide</a>, but it got bumped off t<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">he 2020 version</a> to make room for bring-your-own dining sets. But with restaurants and bars open and so not having to eat every meal in my hotel room, I think I’ll reverse that change and put this cable back on the 2021 guide.</li><li>I don’t know if masks will stay on the 2021 guide -- that depends on transportation agency rules -- but I bought another batch of the evolvetogther masks that I called out in the 2020 guide because, even after in-flight mask mandates get dropped, I might still wear a mask on a crowded flight during the cold and flu season because, for the first time in forever, I didn’t get my usual killer cold last year. Without a mandate, I probably wouldn’t wear a mask in the airport and probably not in a fairly open plane, but I think so when it’s a full flight, when there’s someone next to me in the center seat. I think about it -- they’re exhaling maybe 14-16 inches away from where I’m inhaling. No airplane HEPA filter is going to be able to get in between that exchange. I say that now, but I’ll have to re-visit it after in-flight mandates go away and I’m boarding an 8-hour flight to London; that’ll be the real stress test.</li><li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/05/09/podcast-175-how-to-find-local-tour-guides-rebuild-travel-muscles/\">episode #175</a> back in May, I talked about making some Q4 bets on international travel -- a Backroads bike tour in southern Italy in October and the UK in November. Back in the spring, vaccine roll-outs were choppy, especially in the EU, but I thought that everything would sort itself out over the summer making booking travel in the fall not such a risk. Now this was pre-delta variant, but while in Maine, we got an e-mail from Backroads with the subject line “Your Trip Is A Go!” followed shortly thereafter by an alert from Chase of a very large charge dropped on our Sapphire Visa card. Now we need to start tracking travel requirements. Back in May, the best bet for US travelers was to take a “COVID-free” flight on Delta or American to avoid the 2-week quarantine. Then, a month later in June, Italy significantly eased those requirements. Now, you fill out a pretty extensive on-line passenger locator form with all your trip information and your COVID vaccination card and you’re good to go… into Italy. Getting home, the US is still requiring a negative COVID test no matter what your vaccination status is. But, back in May, the CDC said Abbott’s at-home test can be used. It’s not quite as easy as a home pregnancy test -- the <a href=\"https://www.emed.com/airline-travel\">Abbott test</a> requires you to download an app and enough bandwidth for a video chat with a doctor to visually confirm your identity and the test results -- but it beats having to hunt down at a testing place in a new city.</li><li>In the last episode, I did a bit of “fun with numbers,” pulling daily air passenger numbers from the <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/coronavirus/passenger-throughput\">TSA’s website</a> to look at Memorial Day weekend numbers and then a couple of weeks after that when, on June 11, passenger counts broke 2 million for the first time since the March 2020 lockdowns. Extending that analysis -- from mid-June to now, the last week in July, checkpoint volume growth has plateaued -- the TSA volume numbers averaging just over 2 million/day since the last episode. That’s more than 3 times the 623,000 daily average for the same time last year, but still 21% below 2019’s number. But to a lot of fliers, it doesn’t feel that way. It’s back to full planes, long lines, and tight schedules that can’t recover from inevitable summer thunderstorm delays. Airlines are minimizing schedule slack, trying to claw back some of their 2020 losses, but also because of labor shortages -- from crews to ground-support staff, the people who drive the fuel trucks and cater the planes. Some of that is common to other industries -- people slow to reenter the workforce or took jobs elsewhere when furloughed -- but there’s also something unique to the airlines, staff in the wrong places because travel patterns have shifted. We’ve talked about this before, but with leisure travel snapping back much faster than business travel, the usual big travel destinations -- LGA, ORD, DFW -- are giving way to mid-sized airports. <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/summer-travel-seasons-dont-get-weirder-than-this-one-11626872401?st=7c5z6njyusv2mjg\">The fifth-busiest airport in the world is now in Charlotte, N.C., according to flight data</a>. Charlotte had more flights in June than LAX. Made it tough to be able to spend any time in one of their famous white rocking chairs.</li><li>Last month, American Airlines pulled the plug on <em>American Way</em>, their in-flight magazine. Not surprising. Delta, Southwest, and Alaska all pulled theirs out of their seatback pockets in March 2020 and, most famously, 5 year before COVID in 2015, Skymall disappeared into a Chapter 11 puff of smoke. I, for one, will miss <em>American Way</em>. I’ve always read in-flight magazines and liked that <em>American Way</em> came out twice a month, so it didn’t get as stale as the other ones. Way back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/09/24/podcast-15-begging-for-business-needing-to-know-at-35000-ft/\">episode #15</a>, <em>waay</em> back in 2005, I called them “reading safety stock” because if I was stuck on the runway waiting out a weather ground stop or sitting in&nbsp; Detroit\'s “penalty box” for a couple hours waiting for a landing slot, I’d quickly chew through my own stack of reading material, because, back then, all electronics had to be turned off on the ground and below 10,000 ft to keep a “sterile cabin” for takeoff and landings, and most flight attendants were pretty particular about enforcing it. But all is not lost. United Airlines restarted the physical <em>Hemispheres</em> magazine in June after going all-digital in March 2020.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<em>Two Guitars</em> by Admiral Bob (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/35879 Ft: Haskel</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>B-Sides and Rarities - Interview Outtakes</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>After the travel world was shut down in March 2020, I began wondering if TravelCommons would join the furlough ranks for lack of content. It’s tough to do a podcast that’s “more about the journey than the destination” if you’re not journeying. Grounded, locked down, I needed a different way to generate content, so I’ve been doing more interviews. Interviews aren’t <em>less</em> work; it’s just different. Instead of spending time writing, I spend it editing. The typical interview session is 20-30 minutes over Zoom (of course) which I edit down to a 6-8 minute segment which you hopefully find tight, focused and insightful.</li><li>But doing some quick math, that leaves two-thirds of the interview on the cutting floor. Not all of that is insightful -- there’s, say, pronunciation guidance… that I still manage to screw up. But there’s still good stuff that, for whatever reason, doesn’t make it into the edited segment. So for this episode, I’ve pulled out the full interview files and pulled out some stories, some conversational threads that I left behind the first go-around. They’re pretty much unedited, save for snipping out a cough or two --&nbsp; so you’re hearing the actual conversation.</li><li>The first “b-side” is from my conversation in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\">episode #166</a> with <a href=\"https://www.dur.ac.uk/research/directory/staff/?id=15319\">Dr. Emily Thomas</a>, associate professor in philosophy at Durham University in the UK about her book<em> </em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/2DO07fV\"><em>The Meaning of Travel: Philosophers Abroad</em></a>. I reached out to Emily after reading a review of her book in the <em>Wall Street Journal</em>. It was one of my favorite interviews; one that I couldn’t cut down to just 6-8 minutes. But even with the extended play, this thread about different travel styles -- going deep vs. checking off a place’s “greatest hits” -- didn’t make it.</li><li>Next up are a couple of stories from <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/05/09/podcast-175-how-to-find-local-tour-guides-rebuild-travel-muscles/\">episode #175</a> where I talked to <a href=\"https://www.toursbylocals.com/TBL/WebObjects/ToursByLocals.woa/1/wo/y2c7lZDKnxUUHYGLem9YgM/0.41.1.1.50.3\">Paul Melhus</a>, CEO of <a href=\"https://www.toursbylocals.com/\">ToursByLocals</a>, about the local tour market. Paul first told me about the vagaries of selling shore excursion tours to cruise ship passengers and a story about the business challenges he faced in the first days of the COVID lockdown</li><li>The episode before that, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/04/10/podcast-174-how-the-pros-plan-their-taproom-tourism/\">#174</a> if I’m doing my math correctly, was another extended play segment -- 12 minutes -- about taproom tourism, but that was cut down from an hour-and-a-half Zoom beer drinking session with Rob Cheshire host of the UK’s <a href=\"https://thisweekincraft.beer/\">This Week In Craft Beer</a> podcast. Here’s one of the many taproom stories that didn’t make the podcast.  You can catch the full uncut session on the website or the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\">YouTube channel</a>.&nbsp;</li><li>Now it’s not that I didn’t do interviews before the pandemic. Back in January 2020 in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/01/25/podcast-159-planning-the-trip-of-a-lifetime-in-southeast-asia/\">episode #159</a>, I had Allan Marko on talking about trip planning, how he and his wife planned their 9-week sabbatical around Southeast Asia. I thought this was perfect timing -- January is always a big travel planning time. Two months later, most of those plans got blown to bits. But, back in those happier times, here’s a story about the dangers of losing a bag while on a different city-each-day trip</li><li>Editing <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/06/15/podcast-176-why-business-travel-is-coming-back-learning-airport-history/\">last month’s interview</a> with <a href=\"https://udayton.edu/directory/artssciences/history/bednarek_janet.php\">Dr Janet Bednarek</a>, Professor of History at University of Dayton about the history of airports, I had to leave out this thread about who owns US airports. </li><li>And finally, something that’s not really a B-side. Back in<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/05/08/podcast-163-new-world-of-travel-insurance-getting-medical-help-on-the-road/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #163 — New World of Travel Insurance; Getting Medical Help on the Road\"> episode #163</a>, I used a piece of Steve Frick’s <a href=\"https://anchor.fm/steve-frick/\">Travel Stories</a> podcast where we talked about the first TravelCommons episode. Here’s another piece of our conversation where we talk about where our travel paths overlapped.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #177</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_177.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #177 — B-Sides and Rarities','','inherit','closed','closed','','3579-revision-v1','','','2021-07-27 18:08:01','2021-07-27 23:08:01','',3579,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3584',0,'revision','',0),
(3585,1,'2021-07-27 18:12:21','2021-07-27 23:12:21','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_1985\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/IMG_1758-scaled.jpeg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-3581 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/IMG_1758-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"Microphone and a Beer Can\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a>Now I\'m Ready For the Interview[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>After a 2-week, 2,500-mile and $120 in tolls driving expedition through the Northeast, I didn\'t have much left to write a new episode, so I mined the audio files of recent TravelCommons interviews for some good stories that got left on the cutting room floor. We also talk about planning for a bike trip in Italy, a couple of things that might make the 2021 traveler gift guide, and we mourn the demise of American Airlines\' in-flight magazine. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_177.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #177: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>This Week</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, trying to get this July episode in under the wire, a bit delayed due to a 2-week, 2,500-mile and $120 in tolls driving expedition through the Northeast that started with a 12-hr drive from Chicago to Manhattan on the Friday of the 4th of July weekend with as much of our daughter and as much of her worldly belongings as would fit in a BMW X3, helping her move into a 5th-floor walkup in Midtown. I was very pleasantly surprised to hit only two backups on what was forecasted to be the first really big post-lockdown travel day; a detour around an accident in the Poconos on I-80 and then, at the end of our drive, the completely predictable back-up at the mouth of the Lincoln Tunnel. A completely and happily uneventful drive. I then spent the rest of the week finding a different spot every morning for my standard Manhattan breakfast -- egg &amp; cheese on a toasted everything bagel and making sure they don’t slip some milk into my black coffee order -- before spending the day in front of my laptop on a not-very-big desk in our not-very-big hotel room while Irene helped Claire get her flat all set up. </li><li>The next Friday, we left Manhattan for a week’s vacation in Maine with an intermediate stop in New Haven, CT’s Little Italy neighborhood for the classic white clam pizza at Frank Pepe’s. It was a bit of a wait -- a 20-minute queue on the sidewalk and then another 45 minutes after ordering -- but it was worth it. I’ve had many tries at white clam pizza before, but this one was, by far, the best -- a generous helping of clams, garlic, and oregano on a cracker-crisp crust . We walked past other pizza places on Wooster St, but only had time to hit one, and so it had to be the ur-pizza joint, the classic, Frank Pepe’s. And luckily for us, it didn’t disappoint; the line along the sidewalk is well-earned.  You know, the Michelin Guide says a one-star restaurant is ‘High quality cooking, worth a stop!’, a two-star is ‘Excellent cooking, worth a detour!’, and describes a three-star as ‘Exceptional cuisine, worth a special journey!’ I’m not saying that Frank Pepe’s is a two-star place, but I will say that it was damn good pizza that was definitely worth our detour.</li><li>We then headed up to Scarborough, ME, just south of Portland, for a beach vacation with friends.  The traffic on the drive north was a steady stream of RV’s and pick-up tracks and cars with “roof bags” tied down on top and bikes lashed to the back that continued to thicken from I-91 to I-84 to I-90 to I-495 until it finally ground to a halt trying to merge onto I-95, which was itself filled with the same thick sludge of vehicles trying to make it north for the weekend. And then the weather wasn’t great -- rainy, foggy, misty (now I know where Steven King got all his inspiration) so our time devolved into an week-long seafood fest -- a bivalve-palooza of local mussels, oysters, and clams; intensive longitudinal lobster roll research; and, ignoring the current UK debate about crustacean sentience, multiple boiled lobster dinners -- and taproom tour, hitting the big names like Allagash, Maine Beer Company, and Oxbow as well as some (many) other little guys. And then, finally, on the last day, sunshine.</li><li>After a week of this, the rain started up again as we turned around and headed back home, getting on I-90 in Albany and not getting off until we hit Chicago. It too was an uneventful drive, but not in a great way. By the end of that day, we’d developed a deep, deep hatred of those miserable strips of boring asphalt and the hellhole rest stops that make up the Ohio and Indiana Tollways. I hope Claire loves her new life, ‘cause I really don’t want to have to drive that way again.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Zapac/25046\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><em>You are (funky mix)</em></a> by Zapac.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I have to say that the most important piece of travel kit on this trip was my USB-C to HDMI cable that let me mirror my MacBook Air display on the hotel and beach house TVs so that I could sit back with a beer and comfortably watch YouTube highlights of the Euro 2020 soccer tournament and the Tour de France on 40-60” flat screens instead of hunching over my 13” MacBook Air. I had a version of this in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/12/11/best-gift-ideas-for-a-new-traveler/\">my 2019 traveler gift guide</a>, but it got bumped off t<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">he 2020 version</a> to make room for bring-your-own dining sets. But with restaurants and bars open and so not having to eat every meal in my hotel room, I think I’ll reverse that change and put this cable back on the 2021 guide.</li><li>I don’t know if masks will stay on the 2021 guide -- that depends on transportation agency rules -- but I bought another batch of the evolvetogther masks that I called out in the 2020 guide because, even after in-flight mask mandates get dropped, I might still wear a mask on a crowded flight during the cold and flu season because, for the first time in forever, I didn’t get my usual killer cold last year. Without a mandate, I probably wouldn’t wear a mask in the airport and probably not in a fairly open plane, but I think so when it’s a full flight, when there’s someone next to me in the center seat. I think about it -- they’re exhaling maybe 14-16 inches away from where I’m inhaling. No airplane HEPA filter is going to be able to get in between that exchange. I say that now, but I’ll have to re-visit it after in-flight mandates go away and I’m boarding an 8-hour flight to London; that’ll be the real stress test.</li><li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/05/09/podcast-175-how-to-find-local-tour-guides-rebuild-travel-muscles/\">episode #175</a> back in May, I talked about making some Q4 bets on international travel -- a Backroads bike tour in southern Italy in October and the UK in November. Back in the spring, vaccine roll-outs were choppy, especially in the EU, but I thought that everything would sort itself out over the summer making booking travel in the fall not such a risk. Now this was pre-delta variant, but while in Maine, we got an e-mail from Backroads with the subject line “Your Trip Is A Go!” followed shortly thereafter by an alert from Chase of a very large charge dropped on our Sapphire Visa card. Now we need to start tracking travel requirements. Back in May, the best bet for US travelers was to take a “COVID-free” flight on Delta or American to avoid the 2-week quarantine. Then, a month later in June, Italy significantly eased those requirements. Now, you fill out a pretty extensive on-line passenger locator form with all your trip information and your COVID vaccination card and you’re good to go… into Italy. Getting home, the US is still requiring a negative COVID test no matter what your vaccination status is. But, back in May, the CDC said Abbott’s at-home test can be used. It’s not quite as easy as a home pregnancy test -- the <a href=\"https://www.emed.com/airline-travel\">Abbott test</a> requires you to download an app and enough bandwidth for a video chat with a doctor to visually confirm your identity and the test results -- but it beats having to hunt down at a testing place in a new city.</li><li>In the last episode, I did a bit of “fun with numbers,” pulling daily air passenger numbers from the <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/coronavirus/passenger-throughput\">TSA’s website</a> to look at Memorial Day weekend numbers and then a couple of weeks after that when, on June 11, passenger counts broke 2 million for the first time since the March 2020 lockdowns. Extending that analysis -- from mid-June to now, the last week in July, checkpoint volume growth has plateaued -- the TSA volume numbers averaging just over 2 million/day since the last episode. That’s more than 3 times the 623,000 daily average for the same time last year, but still 21% below 2019’s number. But to a lot of fliers, it doesn’t feel that way. It’s back to full planes, long lines, and tight schedules that can’t recover from inevitable summer thunderstorm delays. Airlines are minimizing schedule slack, trying to claw back some of their 2020 losses, but also because of labor shortages -- from crews to ground-support staff, the people who drive the fuel trucks and cater the planes. Some of that is common to other industries -- people slow to reenter the workforce or took jobs elsewhere when furloughed -- but there’s also something unique to the airlines, staff in the wrong places because travel patterns have shifted. We’ve talked about this before, but with leisure travel snapping back much faster than business travel, the usual big travel destinations -- LGA, ORD, DFW -- are giving way to mid-sized airports. <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/summer-travel-seasons-dont-get-weirder-than-this-one-11626872401?st=7c5z6njyusv2mjg\">The fifth-busiest airport in the world is now in Charlotte, N.C., according to flight data</a>. Charlotte had more flights in June than LAX. Made it tough to be able to spend any time in one of their famous white rocking chairs.</li><li>Last month, American Airlines pulled the plug on <em>American Way</em>, their in-flight magazine. Not surprising. Delta, Southwest, and Alaska all pulled theirs out of their seatback pockets in March 2020 and, most famously, 5 year before COVID in 2015, Skymall disappeared into a Chapter 11 puff of smoke. I, for one, will miss <em>American Way</em>. I’ve always read in-flight magazines and liked that <em>American Way</em> came out twice a month, so it didn’t get as stale as the other ones. Way back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/09/24/podcast-15-begging-for-business-needing-to-know-at-35000-ft/\">episode #15</a>, <em>waay</em> back in 2005, I called them “reading safety stock” because if I was stuck on the runway waiting out a weather ground stop or sitting in&nbsp; Detroit\'s “penalty box” for a couple hours waiting for a landing slot, I’d quickly chew through my own stack of reading material, because, back then, all electronics had to be turned off on the ground and below 10,000 ft to keep a “sterile cabin” for takeoff and landings, and most flight attendants were pretty particular about enforcing it. But all is not lost. United Airlines restarted the physical <em>Hemispheres</em> magazine in June after going all-digital in March 2020.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<em>Two Guitars</em> by Admiral Bob (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/35879 Ft: Haskel</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>B-Sides and Rarities - Interview Outtakes</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>After the travel world was shut down in March 2020, I began wondering if TravelCommons would join the furlough ranks for lack of content. It’s tough to do a podcast that’s “more about the journey than the destination” if you’re not journeying. Grounded, locked down, I needed a different way to generate content, so I’ve been doing more interviews. Interviews aren’t <em>less</em> work; it’s just different. Instead of spending time writing, I spend it editing. The typical interview session is 20-30 minutes over Zoom (of course) which I edit down to a 6-8 minute segment which you hopefully find tight, focused and insightful.</li><li>But doing some quick math, that leaves two-thirds of the interview on the cutting floor. Not all of that is insightful -- there’s, say, pronunciation guidance… that I still manage to screw up. But there’s still good stuff that, for whatever reason, doesn’t make it into the edited segment. So for this episode, I’ve pulled out the full interview files and pulled out some stories, some conversational threads that I left behind the first go-around. They’re pretty much unedited, save for snipping out a cough or two --&nbsp; so you’re hearing the actual conversation.</li><li>The first “b-side” is from my conversation in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\">episode #166</a> with <a href=\"https://www.dur.ac.uk/research/directory/staff/?id=15319\">Dr. Emily Thomas</a>, associate professor in philosophy at Durham University in the UK about her book<em> </em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/2DO07fV\"><em>The Meaning of Travel: Philosophers Abroad</em></a>. I reached out to Emily after reading a review of her book in the <em>Wall Street Journal</em>. It was one of my favorite interviews; one that I couldn’t cut down to just 6-8 minutes. But even with the extended play, this thread about different travel styles -- going deep vs. checking off a place’s “greatest hits” -- didn’t make it.</li><li>Next up are a couple of stories from <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/05/09/podcast-175-how-to-find-local-tour-guides-rebuild-travel-muscles/\">episode #175</a> where I talked to <a href=\"https://www.toursbylocals.com/TBL/WebObjects/ToursByLocals.woa/1/wo/y2c7lZDKnxUUHYGLem9YgM/0.41.1.1.50.3\">Paul Melhus</a>, CEO of <a href=\"https://www.toursbylocals.com/\">ToursByLocals</a>, about the local tour market. Paul first told me about the vagaries of selling shore excursion tours to cruise ship passengers and a story about the business challenges he faced in the first days of the COVID lockdown</li><li>The episode before that, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/04/10/podcast-174-how-the-pros-plan-their-taproom-tourism/\">#174</a> if I’m doing my math correctly, was another extended play segment -- 12 minutes -- about taproom tourism, but that was cut down from an hour-and-a-half Zoom beer drinking session with Rob Cheshire host of the UK’s <a href=\"https://thisweekincraft.beer/\">This Week In Craft Beer</a> podcast. Here’s one of the many taproom stories that didn’t make the podcast.  You can catch the full uncut session on the website or the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\">YouTube channel</a>.&nbsp;</li><li>Now it’s not that I didn’t do interviews before the pandemic. Back in January 2020 in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/01/25/podcast-159-planning-the-trip-of-a-lifetime-in-southeast-asia/\">episode #159</a>, I had Allan Marko on talking about trip planning, how he and his wife planned their 9-week sabbatical around Southeast Asia. I thought this was perfect timing -- January is always a big travel planning time. Two months later, most of those plans got blown to bits. But, back in those happier times, here’s a story about the dangers of losing a bag while on a different city-each-day trip</li><li>Editing <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/06/15/podcast-176-why-business-travel-is-coming-back-learning-airport-history/\">last month’s interview</a> with <a href=\"https://udayton.edu/directory/artssciences/history/bednarek_janet.php\">Dr Janet Bednarek</a>, Professor of History at University of Dayton about the history of airports, I had to leave out this thread about who owns US airports. </li><li>And finally, something that’s not really a B-side. Back in<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/05/08/podcast-163-new-world-of-travel-insurance-getting-medical-help-on-the-road/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #163 — New World of Travel Insurance; Getting Medical Help on the Road\"> episode #163</a>, I used a piece of Steve Frick’s <a href=\"https://anchor.fm/steve-frick/\">Travel Stories</a> podcast where we talked about the first TravelCommons episode. Here’s another piece of our conversation where we talk about where our travel paths overlapped.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #177</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_177.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #177 — B-Sides and Rarities','','inherit','closed','closed','','3579-revision-v1','','','2021-07-27 18:12:21','2021-07-27 23:12:21','',3579,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3585',0,'revision','',0),
(3586,1,'2021-07-27 18:24:29','2021-07-27 23:24:29','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_1985\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/IMG_1758-scaled.jpeg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-3581 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/IMG_1758-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"Microphone and a Beer Can\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a>Now I\'m Ready For the Interview[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>After a 2-week, 2,500-mile and $120 in tolls driving expedition through the Northeast, I didn\'t have much left to write a new episode, so I mined the audio files of recent TravelCommons interviews for some good stories that got left on the cutting room floor. We also talk about planning for a bike trip in Italy, a couple of things that might make the 2021 traveler gift guide, and we mourn the demise of American Airlines\' in-flight magazine. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_177.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #177: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>This Week</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, trying to get this July episode in under the wire, a bit delayed due to a 2-week, 2,500-mile and $120 in tolls driving expedition through the Northeast that started with a 12-hr drive from Chicago to Manhattan on the Friday of the 4th of July weekend with as much of our daughter and as much of her worldly belongings as would fit in a BMW X3, helping her move into a 5th-floor walkup in Midtown. I was very pleasantly surprised to hit only two backups on what was forecasted to be the first really big post-lockdown travel day; a detour around an accident in the Poconos on I-80 and then, at the end of our drive, the completely predictable back-up at the mouth of the Lincoln Tunnel. A completely and happily uneventful drive. I then spent the rest of the week finding a different spot every morning for my standard Manhattan breakfast -- egg &amp; cheese on a toasted everything bagel and making sure they don’t slip some milk into my black coffee order -- before spending the day in front of my laptop on a not-very-big desk in our not-very-big hotel room while Irene helped Claire get her flat all set up. </li><li>The next Friday, we left Manhattan for a week’s vacation in Maine with an intermediate stop in New Haven, CT’s Little Italy neighborhood for the classic white clam pizza at Frank Pepe’s. It was a bit of a wait -- a 20-minute queue on the sidewalk and then another 45 minutes after ordering -- but it was worth it. I’ve had many tries at white clam pizza before, but this one was, by far, the best -- a generous helping of clams, garlic, and oregano on a cracker-crisp crust . We walked past other pizza places on Wooster St, but only had time to hit one, and so it had to be the ur-pizza joint, the classic, Frank Pepe’s. And luckily for us, it didn’t disappoint; the line along the sidewalk is well-earned.  You know, the Michelin Guide says a one-star restaurant is ‘High quality cooking, worth a stop!’, a two-star is ‘Excellent cooking, worth a detour!’, and describes a three-star as ‘Exceptional cuisine, worth a special journey!’ I’m not saying that Frank Pepe’s is a two-star place, but I will say that it was damn good pizza that was definitely worth our detour.</li><li>We then headed up to Scarborough, ME, just south of Portland, for a beach vacation with friends.  The traffic on the drive north was a steady stream of RV’s and pick-up tracks and cars with “roof bags” tied down on top and bikes lashed to the back that continued to thicken from I-91 to I-84 to I-90 to I-495 until it finally ground to a halt trying to merge onto I-95, which was itself filled with the same thick sludge of vehicles trying to make it north for the weekend. And then the weather wasn’t great -- rainy, foggy, misty (now I know where Steven King got all his inspiration) so our time devolved into an week-long seafood fest -- a bivalve-palooza of local mussels, oysters, and clams; intensive longitudinal lobster roll research; and, ignoring the current UK debate about crustacean sentience, multiple boiled lobster dinners -- and taproom tour, hitting the big names like Allagash, Maine Beer Company, and Oxbow as well as some (many) other little guys. And then, finally, on the last day, sunshine.</li><li>After a week of this, the rain started up again as we turned around and headed back home, getting on I-90 in Albany and not getting off until we hit Chicago. It too was an uneventful drive, but not in a great way. By the end of that day, we’d developed a deep, deep hatred of those miserable strips of boring asphalt and the hellhole rest stops that make up the Ohio and Indiana Tollways. I hope Claire loves her new life, ‘cause I really don’t want to have to drive that way again.</li><li>Bridge Music -- One for Me by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/21492 Ft: Haskel</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I have to say that the most important piece of travel kit on this trip was my USB-C to HDMI cable that let me mirror my MacBook Air display on the hotel and beach house TVs so that I could sit back with a beer and comfortably watch YouTube highlights of the Euro 2020 soccer tournament and the Tour de France on 40-60” flat screens instead of hunching over my 13” MacBook Air. I had a version of this in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/12/11/best-gift-ideas-for-a-new-traveler/\">my 2019 traveler gift guide</a>, but it got bumped off t<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">he 2020 version</a> to make room for bring-your-own dining sets. But with restaurants and bars open and so not having to eat every meal in my hotel room, I think I’ll reverse that change and put this cable back on the 2021 guide.</li><li>I don’t know if masks will stay on the 2021 guide -- that depends on transportation agency rules -- but I bought another batch of the evolvetogther masks that I called out in the 2020 guide because, even after in-flight mask mandates get dropped, I might still wear a mask on a crowded flight during the cold and flu season because, for the first time in forever, I didn’t get my usual killer cold last year. Without a mandate, I probably wouldn’t wear a mask in the airport and probably not in a fairly open plane, but I think so when it’s a full flight, when there’s someone next to me in the center seat. I think about it -- they’re exhaling maybe 14-16 inches away from where I’m inhaling. No airplane HEPA filter is going to be able to get in between that exchange. I say that now, but I’ll have to re-visit it after in-flight mandates go away and I’m boarding an 8-hour flight to London; that’ll be the real stress test.</li><li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/05/09/podcast-175-how-to-find-local-tour-guides-rebuild-travel-muscles/\">episode #175</a> back in May, I talked about making some Q4 bets on international travel -- a Backroads bike tour in southern Italy in October and the UK in November. Back in the spring, vaccine roll-outs were choppy, especially in the EU, but I thought that everything would sort itself out over the summer making booking travel in the fall not such a risk. Now this was pre-delta variant, but while in Maine, we got an e-mail from Backroads with the subject line “Your Trip Is A Go!” followed shortly thereafter by an alert from Chase of a very large charge dropped on our Sapphire Visa card. Now we need to start tracking travel requirements. Back in May, the best bet for US travelers was to take a “COVID-free” flight on Delta or American to avoid the 2-week quarantine. Then, a month later in June, Italy significantly eased those requirements. Now, you fill out a pretty extensive on-line passenger locator form with all your trip information and your COVID vaccination card and you’re good to go… into Italy. Getting home, the US is still requiring a negative COVID test no matter what your vaccination status is. But, back in May, the CDC said Abbott’s at-home test can be used. It’s not quite as easy as a home pregnancy test -- the <a href=\"https://www.emed.com/airline-travel\">Abbott test</a> requires you to download an app and enough bandwidth for a video chat with a doctor to visually confirm your identity and the test results -- but it beats having to hunt down at a testing place in a new city.</li><li>In the last episode, I did a bit of “fun with numbers,” pulling daily air passenger numbers from the <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/coronavirus/passenger-throughput\">TSA’s website</a> to look at Memorial Day weekend numbers and then a couple of weeks after that when, on June 11, passenger counts broke 2 million for the first time since the March 2020 lockdowns. Extending that analysis -- from mid-June to now, the last week in July, checkpoint volume growth has plateaued -- the TSA volume numbers averaging just over 2 million/day since the last episode. That’s more than 3 times the 623,000 daily average for the same time last year, but still 21% below 2019’s number. But to a lot of fliers, it doesn’t feel that way. It’s back to full planes, long lines, and tight schedules that can’t recover from inevitable summer thunderstorm delays. Airlines are minimizing schedule slack, trying to claw back some of their 2020 losses, but also because of labor shortages -- from crews to ground-support staff, the people who drive the fuel trucks and cater the planes. Some of that is common to other industries -- people slow to reenter the workforce or took jobs elsewhere when furloughed -- but there’s also something unique to the airlines, staff in the wrong places because travel patterns have shifted. We’ve talked about this before, but with leisure travel snapping back much faster than business travel, the usual big travel destinations -- LGA, ORD, DFW -- are giving way to mid-sized airports. <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/summer-travel-seasons-dont-get-weirder-than-this-one-11626872401?st=7c5z6njyusv2mjg\">The fifth-busiest airport in the world is now in Charlotte, N.C., according to flight data</a>. Charlotte had more flights in June than LAX. Made it tough to be able to spend any time in one of their famous white rocking chairs.</li><li>Last month, American Airlines pulled the plug on <em>American Way</em>, their in-flight magazine. Not surprising. Delta, Southwest, and Alaska all pulled theirs out of their seatback pockets in March 2020 and, most famously, 5 year before COVID in 2015, Skymall disappeared into a Chapter 11 puff of smoke. I, for one, will miss <em>American Way</em>. I’ve always read in-flight magazines and liked that <em>American Way</em> came out twice a month, so it didn’t get as stale as the other ones. Way back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/09/24/podcast-15-begging-for-business-needing-to-know-at-35000-ft/\">episode #15</a>, <em>waay</em> back in 2005, I called them “reading safety stock” because if I was stuck on the runway waiting out a weather ground stop or sitting in  Detroit\'s “penalty box” for a couple hours waiting for a landing slot, I’d quickly chew through my own stack of reading material, because, back then, all electronics had to be turned off on the ground and below 10,000 ft to keep a “sterile cabin” for takeoff and landings, and most flight attendants were pretty particular about enforcing it. But all is not lost. United Airlines restarted the physical <em>Hemispheres</em> magazine in June after going all-digital in March 2020.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music —   Fall to pieces - Silence by mika (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mika/24945 Ft: Colab</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>B-Sides and Rarities - Interview Outtakes</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>After the travel world was shut down in March 2020, I began wondering if TravelCommons would join the furlough ranks for lack of content. It’s tough to do a podcast that’s “more about the journey than the destination” if you’re not journeying. Grounded, locked down, I needed a different way to generate content, so I’ve been doing more interviews. Interviews aren’t <em>less</em> work; it’s just different. Instead of spending time writing, I spend it editing. The typical interview session is 20-30 minutes over Zoom (of course) which I edit down to a 6-8 minute segment which you hopefully find tight, focused and insightful.</li><li>But doing some quick math, that leaves two-thirds of the interview on the cutting floor. Not all of that is insightful -- there’s, say, pronunciation guidance… that I still manage to screw up. But there’s still good stuff that, for whatever reason, doesn’t make it into the edited segment. So for this episode, I’ve pulled out the full interview files and pulled out some stories, some conversational threads that I left behind the first go-around. They’re pretty much unedited, save for snipping out a cough or two --&nbsp; so you’re hearing the actual conversation.</li><li>The first “b-side” is from my conversation in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\">episode #166</a> with <a href=\"https://www.dur.ac.uk/research/directory/staff/?id=15319\">Dr. Emily Thomas</a>, associate professor in philosophy at Durham University in the UK about her book<em> </em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/2DO07fV\"><em>The Meaning of Travel: Philosophers Abroad</em></a>. I reached out to Emily after reading a review of her book in the <em>Wall Street Journal</em>. It was one of my favorite interviews; one that I couldn’t cut down to just 6-8 minutes. But even with the extended play, this thread about different travel styles -- going deep vs. checking off a place’s “greatest hits” -- didn’t make it.</li><li>Next up are a couple of stories from <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/05/09/podcast-175-how-to-find-local-tour-guides-rebuild-travel-muscles/\">episode #175</a> where I talked to <a href=\"https://www.toursbylocals.com/TBL/WebObjects/ToursByLocals.woa/1/wo/y2c7lZDKnxUUHYGLem9YgM/0.41.1.1.50.3\">Paul Melhus</a>, CEO of <a href=\"https://www.toursbylocals.com/\">ToursByLocals</a>, about the local tour market. Paul first told me about the vagaries of selling shore excursion tours to cruise ship passengers and a story about the business challenges he faced in the first days of the COVID lockdown</li><li>The episode before that, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/04/10/podcast-174-how-the-pros-plan-their-taproom-tourism/\">#174</a> if I’m doing my math correctly, was another extended play segment -- 12 minutes -- about taproom tourism, but that was cut down from an hour-and-a-half Zoom beer drinking session with Rob Cheshire host of the UK’s <a href=\"https://thisweekincraft.beer/\">This Week In Craft Beer</a> podcast. Here’s one of the many taproom stories that didn’t make the podcast.  You can catch the full uncut session on the website or the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\">YouTube channel</a>.&nbsp;</li><li>Now it’s not that I didn’t do interviews before the pandemic. Back in January 2020 in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/01/25/podcast-159-planning-the-trip-of-a-lifetime-in-southeast-asia/\">episode #159</a>, I had Allan Marko on talking about trip planning, how he and his wife planned their 9-week sabbatical around Southeast Asia. I thought this was perfect timing -- January is always a big travel planning time. Two months later, most of those plans got blown to bits. But, back in those happier times, here’s a story about the dangers of losing a bag while on a different city-each-day trip</li><li>Editing <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/06/15/podcast-176-why-business-travel-is-coming-back-learning-airport-history/\">last month’s interview</a> with <a href=\"https://udayton.edu/directory/artssciences/history/bednarek_janet.php\">Dr Janet Bednarek</a>, Professor of History at University of Dayton about the history of airports, I had to leave out this thread about who owns US airports. </li><li>And finally, something that’s not really a B-side. Back in<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/05/08/podcast-163-new-world-of-travel-insurance-getting-medical-help-on-the-road/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #163 — New World of Travel Insurance; Getting Medical Help on the Road\"> episode #163</a>, I used a piece of Steve Frick’s <a href=\"https://anchor.fm/steve-frick/\">Travel Stories</a> podcast where we talked about the first TravelCommons episode. Here’s another piece of our conversation where we talk about where our travel paths overlapped.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #177</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_177.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #177 — B-Sides and Rarities','','inherit','closed','closed','','3579-revision-v1','','','2021-07-27 18:24:29','2021-07-27 23:24:29','',3579,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3586',0,'revision','',0),
(3587,1,'2021-07-27 22:20:43','2021-07-28 03:20:43','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_1985\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/IMG_1758-scaled.jpeg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-3581 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/IMG_1758-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"Microphone and a Beer Can\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a>Now I\'m Ready For the Interview[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>After a 2-week, 2,500-mile and $120 in tolls driving expedition through the Northeast, I didn\'t have much left to write a new episode, so I mined the audio files of recent TravelCommons interviews for some good stories that got left on the cutting room floor. We also talk about planning for a bike trip in Italy, a couple of things that might make the 2021 traveler gift guide, and we mourn the demise of American Airlines\' in-flight magazine. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_177.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #177: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>This Week</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, trying to get this July episode in under the wire, a bit delayed due to a 2-week, 2,500-mile and $120 in tolls driving expedition through the Northeast that started with a 12-hr drive from Chicago to Manhattan on the Friday of the 4th of July weekend with as much of our daughter and as much of her worldly belongings as would fit in a BMW X3, helping her move into a 5th-floor walkup in Midtown. I was very pleasantly surprised to hit only two backups on what was forecasted to be the first really big post-lockdown travel day; a detour around an accident in the Poconos on I-80 and then, at the end of our drive, the completely predictable back-up at the mouth of the Lincoln Tunnel. A completely and happily uneventful drive. I then spent the rest of the week finding a different spot every morning for my standard Manhattan breakfast -- egg &amp; cheese on a toasted everything bagel and making sure they don’t slip some milk into my black coffee order -- before spending the day in front of my laptop on a not-very-big desk in our not-very-big hotel room while Irene helped Claire get her flat all set up.&nbsp;</li><li>The next Friday, we left Manhattan for a week’s vacation in Maine with an intermediate stop in New Haven, CT’s Little Italy neighborhood for the classic white clam pizza at Frank Pepe’s. It was a bit of a wait -- a 20-minute queue on the sidewalk and then another 45 minutes after ordering -- but it was worth it. I’ve had many tries at white clam pizza before, but this one was, by far, the best -- a generous helping of clams, garlic, and oregano on a cracker-crisp crust . We walked past other pizza places on Wooster St, but only had time to hit one, and so it had to be the ur-pizza joint, the classic, Frank Pepe’s. And luckily for us, it didn’t disappoint; the line along the sidewalk is well-earned.&nbsp; You know, the Michelin Guide says a one-star restaurant is ‘High quality cooking, worth a stop!’, a two-star is ‘Excellent cooking, worth a detour!’, and describes a three-star as ‘Exceptional cuisine, worth a special journey!’ I’m not saying that Frank Pepe’s is a two-star place, but I will say that it was damn good pizza that was definitely worth our detour.</li><li>We then headed up to Scarborough, ME, just south of Portland, for a beach vacation with friends.&nbsp; The traffic on the drive north was a steady stream of RV’s and pick-up tracks and cars with “roof bags” tied down on top and bikes lashed to the back that continued to thicken from I-91 to I-84 to I-90 to I-495 until it finally ground to a halt trying to merge onto I-95, which was itself filled with the same thick sludge of vehicles trying to make it north for the weekend. And then the weather wasn’t great -- rainy, foggy, misty (now I know where Steven King got all his inspiration) so our time devolved into an week-long seafood fest -- a bivalve-palooza of local mussels, oysters, and clams; intensive longitudinal lobster roll research; and, ignoring the current UK debate about crustacean sentience, multiple boiled lobster dinners -- and taproom tour, hitting the big names like Allagash, Maine Beer Company, and Oxbow as well as some (many) other little guys. And then, finally, on the last day, sunshine.</li><li>After a week of this, the rain started up again as we turned around and headed back home, getting on I-90 in Albany and not getting off until we hit Chicago. It too was an uneventful drive, but not in a great way. By the end of that day, we’d developed a deep, deep hatred of those miserable strips of boring asphalt and the hellhole rest stops that make up the Ohio and Indiana Tollways. I hope Claire loves her new life, ‘cause I really don’t want to have to drive that way again.</li><li>Bridge Music -- One for Me by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/21492 Ft: Haskel</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I have to say that the most important piece of travel kit on this trip was my USB-C to HDMI cable that let me mirror my MacBook Air display on the hotel and beach house TVs so that I could sit back with a beer and comfortably watch YouTube highlights of the Euro 2020 soccer tournament and the Tour de France on 40-60” flat screens instead of hunching over my 13” MacBook Air. I had a version of this in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/12/11/best-gift-ideas-for-a-new-traveler/\">my 2019 traveler gift guide</a>, but it got bumped off t<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">he 2020 version</a> to make room for bring-your-own dining sets. But with restaurants and bars open and so not having to eat every meal in my hotel room, I think I’ll reverse that change and put this cable back on the 2021 guide.</li><li>I don’t know if masks will stay on the 2021 guide -- that depends on transportation agency rules -- but I bought another batch of the evolvetogther masks that I called out in the 2020 guide because, even after in-flight mask mandates get dropped, I might still wear a mask on a crowded flight during the cold and flu season because, for the first time in forever, I didn’t get my usual killer cold last year. Without a mandate, I probably wouldn’t wear a mask in the airport and probably not in a fairly open plane, but I think so when it’s a full flight, when there’s someone next to me in the center seat. I think about it -- they’re exhaling maybe 14-16 inches away from where I’m inhaling. No airplane HEPA filter is going to be able to get in between that exchange. I say that now, but I’ll have to re-visit it after in-flight mandates go away and I’m boarding an 8-hour flight to London; that’ll be the real stress test.</li><li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/05/09/podcast-175-how-to-find-local-tour-guides-rebuild-travel-muscles/\">episode #175</a> back in May, I talked about making some Q4 bets on international travel -- a Backroads bike tour in southern Italy in October and the UK in November. Back in the spring, vaccine roll-outs were choppy, especially in the EU, but I thought that everything would sort itself out over the summer making booking travel in the fall not such a risk. Now this was pre-delta variant, but while in Maine, we got an e-mail from Backroads with the subject line “Your Trip Is A Go!” followed shortly thereafter by an alert from Chase of a very large charge dropped on our Sapphire Visa card. Now we need to start tracking travel requirements. Back in May, the best bet for US travelers was to take a “COVID-free” flight on Delta or American to avoid the 2-week quarantine. Then, a month later in June, Italy significantly eased those requirements. Now, you fill out a pretty extensive on-line passenger locator form with all your trip information and your COVID vaccination card and you’re good to go… into Italy. Getting home, the US is still requiring a negative COVID test no matter what your vaccination status is. But, back in May, the CDC said Abbott’s at-home test can be used. It’s not quite as easy as a home pregnancy test -- the <a href=\"https://www.emed.com/airline-travel\">Abbott test</a> requires you to download an app and enough bandwidth for a video chat with a doctor to visually confirm your identity and the test results -- but it beats having to hunt down at a testing place in a new city.</li><li>In the last episode, I did a bit of “fun with numbers,” pulling daily air passenger numbers from the <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/coronavirus/passenger-throughput\">TSA’s website</a> to look at Memorial Day weekend numbers and then a couple of weeks after that when, on June 11, passenger counts broke 2 million for the first time since the March 2020 lockdowns. Extending that analysis -- from mid-June to now, the last week in July, checkpoint volume growth has plateaued -- the TSA volume numbers averaging just over 2 million/day since the last episode. That’s more than 3 times the 623,000 daily average for the same time last year, but still 21% below 2019’s number. But to a lot of fliers, it doesn’t feel that way. It’s back to full planes, long lines, and tight schedules that can’t recover from inevitable summer thunderstorm delays. Airlines are minimizing schedule slack, trying to claw back some of their 2020 losses, but also because of labor shortages -- from crews to ground-support staff, the people who drive the fuel trucks and cater the planes. Some of that is common to other industries -- people slow to reenter the workforce or took jobs elsewhere when furloughed -- but there’s also something unique to the airlines, staff in the wrong places because travel patterns have shifted. We’ve talked about this before, but with leisure travel snapping back much faster than business travel, the usual big travel destinations -- LGA, ORD, DFW -- are giving way to mid-sized airports. <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/summer-travel-seasons-dont-get-weirder-than-this-one-11626872401?st=7c5z6njyusv2mjg\">The fifth-busiest airport in the world is now in Charlotte, N.C., according to flight data</a>. Charlotte had more flights in June than LAX. Made it tough to be able to spend any time in one of their famous white rocking chairs.</li><li>Last month, American Airlines pulled the plug on <em>American Way</em>, their in-flight magazine. Not surprising. Delta, Southwest, and Alaska all pulled theirs out of their seatback pockets in March 2020 and, most famously, 5 year before COVID in 2015, Skymall disappeared into a Chapter 11 puff of smoke. I, for one, will miss <em>American Way</em>. I’ve always read in-flight magazines and liked that <em>American Way</em> came out twice a month, so it didn’t get as stale as the other ones. Way back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/09/24/podcast-15-begging-for-business-needing-to-know-at-35000-ft/\">episode #15</a>, <em>waay</em> back in 2005, I called them “reading safety stock” because if I was stuck on the runway waiting out a weather ground stop or sitting in&nbsp; Detroit\'s “penalty box” for a couple hours waiting for a landing slot, I’d quickly chew through my own stack of reading material, because, back then, all electronics had to be turned off on the ground and below 10,000 ft to keep a “sterile cabin” for takeoff and landings, and most flight attendants were pretty particular about enforcing it. But all is not lost. United Airlines restarted the physical <em>Hemispheres</em> magazine in June after going all-digital in March 2020.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — &nbsp; Fall to pieces - Silence by mika (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mika/24945 Ft: Colab</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>B-Sides and Rarities - Interview Outtakes</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>After the travel world was shut down in March 2020, I began wondering if TravelCommons would join the furlough ranks for lack of content. It’s tough to do a podcast that’s “more about the journey than the destination” if you’re not journeying. Grounded, locked down, I needed a different way to generate content, so I’ve been doing more interviews. Interviews aren’t <em>less</em> work; it’s just different. Instead of spending time writing, I spend it editing. The typical interview session is 20-30 minutes over Zoom (of course) which I edit down to a 6-8 minute segment which you hopefully find tight, focused and insightful.</li><li>But doing some quick math, that leaves two-thirds of the interview on the cutting floor. Not all of that is insightful -- there’s, say, pronunciation guidance… that I still manage to screw up. But there’s still good stuff that, for whatever reason, doesn’t make it into the edited segment. So for this episode, I’ve pulled out the full interview files and pulled out some stories, some conversational threads that I left behind the first go-around. They’re pretty much unedited, save for snipping out a cough or two --&nbsp; so you’re hearing the actual conversation.</li><li>The first “b-side” is from my conversation in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\">episode #166</a> with <a href=\"https://www.dur.ac.uk/research/directory/staff/?id=15319\">Dr. Emily Thomas</a>, associate professor in philosophy at Durham University in the UK about her book<em> </em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/2DO07fV\"><em>The Meaning of Travel: Philosophers Abroad</em></a>. I reached out to Emily after reading a review of her book in the <em>Wall Street Journal</em>. It was one of my favorite interviews; one that I couldn’t cut down to just 6-8 minutes. But even with the extended play, this thread about different travel styles -- going deep vs. checking off a place’s “greatest hits” -- didn’t make it.</li><li>Next up are a couple of stories from <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/05/09/podcast-175-how-to-find-local-tour-guides-rebuild-travel-muscles/\">episode #175</a> where I talked to <a href=\"https://www.toursbylocals.com/TBL/WebObjects/ToursByLocals.woa/1/wo/y2c7lZDKnxUUHYGLem9YgM/0.41.1.1.50.3\">Paul Melhus</a>, CEO of <a href=\"https://www.toursbylocals.com/\">ToursByLocals</a>, about the local tour market. Paul first told me about the vagaries of selling shore excursion tours to cruise ship passengers and a story about the business challenges he faced in the first days of the COVID lockdown</li><li>The episode before that, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/04/10/podcast-174-how-the-pros-plan-their-taproom-tourism/\">#174</a> if I’m doing my math correctly, was another extended play segment -- 12 minutes -- about taproom tourism, but that was cut down from an hour-and-a-half Zoom beer drinking session with Rob Cheshire host of the UK’s <a href=\"https://thisweekincraft.beer/\">This Week In Craft Beer</a> podcast. Here’s one of the many taproom stories that didn’t make the podcast.  You can catch the full uncut session on the website or the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\">YouTube channel</a>.&nbsp;</li><li>Now it’s not that I didn’t do interviews before the pandemic. Back in January 2020 in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/01/25/podcast-159-planning-the-trip-of-a-lifetime-in-southeast-asia/\">episode #159</a>, I had Allan Marko on talking about trip planning, how he and his wife planned their 9-week sabbatical around Southeast Asia. I thought this was perfect timing -- January is always a big travel planning time. Two months later, most of those plans got blown to bits. But, back in those happier times, here’s a story about the dangers of losing a bag while on a different city-each-day trip</li><li>Editing <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/06/15/podcast-176-why-business-travel-is-coming-back-learning-airport-history/\">last month’s interview</a> with <a href=\"https://udayton.edu/directory/artssciences/history/bednarek_janet.php\">Dr Janet Bednarek</a>, Professor of History at University of Dayton about the history of airports, I had to leave out this thread about who owns US airports. </li><li>And finally, something that’s not really a B-side. Back in<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/05/08/podcast-163-new-world-of-travel-insurance-getting-medical-help-on-the-road/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #163 — New World of Travel Insurance; Getting Medical Help on the Road\"> episode #163</a>, I used a piece of Steve Frick’s <a href=\"https://anchor.fm/steve-frick/\">Travel Stories</a> podcast where we talked about the first TravelCommons episode. Here’s another piece of our conversation where we talk about where our travel paths overlapped.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #177</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_177.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #177 — B-Sides and Rarities','','inherit','closed','closed','','3579-revision-v1','','','2021-07-27 22:20:43','2021-07-28 03:20:43','',3579,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3587',0,'revision','',0),
(3588,1,'2021-07-28 09:40:10','2021-07-28 14:40:10','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_1985\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/IMG_1758-scaled.jpeg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-3581 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/IMG_1758-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"Microphone and a Beer Can\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a>Now I\'m Ready For the Interview[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>After a 2-week, 2,500-mile and $120 in tolls driving expedition through the Northeast, I didn\'t have much left to write a new episode, so I mined the audio files of recent TravelCommons interviews for some good stories that got left on the cutting room floor. We also talk about planning for a bike trip in Italy, a couple of things that might make the 2021 traveler gift guide, and we mourn the demise of American Airlines\' in-flight magazine. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_177.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #177: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>This Week</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, trying to get this July episode in under the wire, a bit delayed due to a 2-week, 2,500-mile and $120 in tolls driving expedition through the Northeast that started with a 12-hr drive from Chicago to Manhattan on the Friday of the 4th of July weekend with as much of our daughter and as much of her worldly belongings as would fit in a BMW X3, helping her move into a 5th-floor walkup in Midtown. I was very pleasantly surprised to hit only two backups on what was forecasted to be the first really big post-lockdown travel day; a detour around an accident in the Poconos on I-80 and then, at the end of our drive, the completely predictable back-up at the mouth of the Lincoln Tunnel. A completely and happily uneventful drive. I then spent the rest of the week finding a different spot every morning for my standard Manhattan breakfast -- egg &amp; cheese on a toasted everything bagel and making sure they don’t slip some milk into my black coffee order -- before spending the day in front of my laptop on a not-very-big desk in our not-very-big hotel room while Irene helped Claire get her flat all set up.&nbsp;</li><li>The next Friday, we left Manhattan for a week’s vacation in Maine with an intermediate stop in New Haven, CT’s Little Italy neighborhood for the classic white clam pizza at Frank Pepe’s. It was a bit of a wait -- a 20-minute queue on the sidewalk and then another 45 minutes after ordering -- but it was worth it. I’ve had many tries at white clam pizza before, but this one was, by far, the best -- a generous helping of clams, garlic, and oregano on a cracker-crisp crust . We walked past other pizza places on Wooster St, but only had time to hit one, and so it had to be the ur-pizza joint, the classic, Frank Pepe’s. And luckily for us, it didn’t disappoint; the line along the sidewalk is well-earned.&nbsp; You know, the Michelin Guide says a one-star restaurant is ‘High quality cooking, worth a stop!’, a two-star is ‘Excellent cooking, worth a detour!’, and describes a three-star as ‘Exceptional cuisine, worth a special journey!’ I’m not saying that Frank Pepe’s is a two-star place, but I will say that it was damn good pizza that was definitely worth our detour.</li><li>We then headed up to Scarborough, ME, just south of Portland, for a beach vacation with friends.&nbsp; The traffic on the drive north was a steady stream of RV’s and pick-up tracks and cars with “roof bags” tied down on top and bikes lashed to the back that continued to thicken from I-91 to I-84 to I-90 to I-495 until it finally ground to a halt trying to merge onto I-95, which was itself filled with the same thick sludge of vehicles trying to make it north for the weekend. And then the weather wasn’t great -- rainy, foggy, misty (now I know where Steven King got all his inspiration) so our time devolved into an week-long seafood fest -- a bivalve-palooza of local mussels, oysters, and clams; intensive longitudinal lobster roll research; and, ignoring the current UK debate about crustacean sentience, multiple boiled lobster dinners -- and taproom tour, hitting the big names like Allagash, Maine Beer Company, and Oxbow as well as some (many) other little guys. And then, finally, on the last day, sunshine.</li><li>After a week of this, the rain started up again as we turned around and headed back home, getting on I-90 in Albany and not getting off until we hit Chicago. It too was an uneventful drive, but not in a great way. By the end of that day, we’d developed a deep, deep hatred of those miserable strips of boring asphalt and the hellhole rest stops that make up the Ohio and Indiana Tollways. I hope Claire loves her new life, ‘cause I really don’t want to have to drive that way again.</li><li>Bridge Music -- One for Me by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/21492 Ft: Haskel</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I have to say that the most important piece of travel kit on this trip was my USB-C to HDMI cable that let me mirror my MacBook Air display on the hotel and beach house TVs so that I could sit back with a beer and comfortably watch YouTube highlights of the Euro 2020 soccer tournament and the Tour de France on 40-60” flat screens instead of hunching over my 13” MacBook Air. I had a version of this in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/12/11/best-gift-ideas-for-a-new-traveler/\">my 2019 traveler gift guide</a>, but it got bumped off t<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">he 2020 version</a> to make room for bring-your-own dining sets. But with restaurants and bars open and so not having to eat every meal in my hotel room, I think I’ll reverse that change and put this cable back on the 2021 guide.</li><li>I don’t know if masks will stay on the 2021 guide -- that depends on transportation agency rules -- but I bought another batch of the evolvetogther masks that I called out in the 2020 guide because, even after in-flight mask mandates get dropped, I might still wear a mask on a crowded flight during the cold and flu season because, for the first time in forever, I didn’t get my usual killer cold last year. Without a mandate, I probably wouldn’t wear a mask in the airport and probably not in a fairly open plane, but I think so when it’s a full flight, when there’s someone next to me in the center seat. I think about it -- they’re exhaling maybe 14-16 inches away from where I’m inhaling. No airplane HEPA filter is going to be able to get in between that exchange. I say that now, but I’ll have to re-visit it after in-flight mandates go away and I’m boarding an 8-hour flight to London; that’ll be the real stress test.</li><li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/05/09/podcast-175-how-to-find-local-tour-guides-rebuild-travel-muscles/\">episode #175</a> back in May, I talked about making some Q4 bets on international travel -- a Backroads bike tour in southern Italy in October and the UK in November. Back in the spring, vaccine roll-outs were choppy, especially in the EU, but I thought that everything would sort itself out over the summer making booking travel in the fall not such a risk. Now this was pre-delta variant, but while in Maine, we got an e-mail from Backroads with the subject line “Your Trip Is A Go!” followed shortly thereafter by an alert from Chase of a very large charge dropped on our Sapphire Visa card. Now we need to start tracking travel requirements. Back in May, the best bet for US travelers was to take a “COVID-free” flight on Delta or American to avoid the 2-week quarantine. Then, a month later in June, Italy significantly eased those requirements. Now, you fill out a pretty extensive on-line passenger locator form with all your trip information and your COVID vaccination card and you’re good to go… into Italy. Getting home, the US is still requiring a negative COVID test no matter what your vaccination status is. But, back in May, the CDC said Abbott’s at-home test can be used. It’s not quite as easy as a home pregnancy test -- the <a href=\"https://www.emed.com/airline-travel\">Abbott test</a> requires you to download an app and enough bandwidth for a video chat with a doctor to visually confirm your identity and the test results -- but it beats having to hunt down at a testing place in a new city.</li><li>In the last episode, I did a bit of “fun with numbers,” pulling daily air passenger numbers from the <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/coronavirus/passenger-throughput\">TSA’s website</a> to look at Memorial Day weekend numbers and then a couple of weeks after that when, on June 11, passenger counts broke 2 million for the first time since the March 2020 lockdowns. Extending that analysis -- from mid-June to now, the last week in July, checkpoint volume growth has plateaued -- the TSA volume numbers averaging just over 2 million/day since the last episode. That’s more than 3 times the 623,000 daily average for the same time last year, but still 21% below 2019’s number. But to a lot of fliers, it doesn’t feel that way. It’s back to full planes, long lines, and tight schedules that can’t recover from inevitable summer thunderstorm delays. Airlines are minimizing schedule slack, trying to claw back some of their 2020 losses, but also because of labor shortages -- from crews to ground-support staff, the people who drive the fuel trucks and cater the planes. Some of that is common to other industries -- people slow to reenter the workforce or took jobs elsewhere when furloughed -- but there’s also something unique to the airlines, staff in the wrong places because travel patterns have shifted. We’ve talked about this before, but with leisure travel snapping back much faster than business travel, the usual big travel destinations -- LGA, ORD, DFW -- are giving way to mid-sized airports. <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/summer-travel-seasons-dont-get-weirder-than-this-one-11626872401?st=7c5z6njyusv2mjg\">The fifth-busiest airport in the world is now in Charlotte, N.C., according to flight data</a>. Charlotte had more flights in June than LAX. Made it tough to be able to spend any time in one of their famous white rocking chairs.</li><li>Last month, American Airlines pulled the plug on <em>American Way</em>, their in-flight magazine. Not surprising. Delta, Southwest, and Alaska all pulled theirs out of their seatback pockets in March 2020 and, most famously, 5 year before COVID in 2015, Skymall disappeared into a Chapter 11 puff of smoke. I, for one, will miss <em>American Way</em>. I’ve always read in-flight magazines and liked that <em>American Way</em> came out twice a month, so it didn’t get as stale as the other ones. Way back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/09/24/podcast-15-begging-for-business-needing-to-know-at-35000-ft/\">episode #15</a>, <em>waay</em> back in 2005, I called them “reading safety stock” because if I was stuck on the runway waiting out a weather ground stop or sitting in&nbsp; Detroit\'s “penalty box” for a couple hours waiting for a landing slot, I’d quickly chew through my own stack of reading material, because, back then, all electronics had to be turned off on the ground and below 10,000 ft to keep a “sterile cabin” for takeoff and landings, and most flight attendants were pretty particular about enforcing it. But all is not lost. United Airlines restarted the physical <em>Hemispheres</em> magazine in June after going all-digital in March 2020.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — &nbsp; Fall to pieces - Silence by mika (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mika/24945 Ft: Colab</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>B-Sides and Rarities - Interview Outtakes</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>After the travel world was shut down in March 2020, I began wondering if TravelCommons would join the furlough ranks for lack of content. It’s tough to do a podcast that’s “more about the journey than the destination” if you’re not journeying. Grounded, locked down, I needed a different way to generate content, so I’ve been doing more interviews. Interviews aren’t <em>less</em> work; it’s just different. Instead of spending time writing, I spend it editing. The typical interview session is 20-30 minutes over Zoom (of course) which I edit down to a 6-8 minute segment which you hopefully find tight, focused and insightful.</li><li>But doing some quick math, that leaves two-thirds of the interview on the cutting floor. Not all of that is insightful -- there’s, say, pronunciation guidance… that I still manage to screw up. But there’s still good stuff that, for whatever reason, doesn’t make it into the edited segment. So for this episode, I’ve pulled out the full interview files and pulled out some stories, some conversational threads that I left behind the first go-around. They’re pretty much unedited, save for snipping out a cough or two --&nbsp; so you’re hearing the actual conversation.</li><li>The first “b-side” is from my conversation in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\">episode #166</a> with <a href=\"https://www.dur.ac.uk/research/directory/staff/?id=15319\">Dr. Emily Thomas</a>, associate professor in philosophy at Durham University in the UK about her book<em> </em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/2DO07fV\"><em>The Meaning of Travel: Philosophers Abroad</em></a>. I reached out to Emily after reading a review of her book in the <em>Wall Street Journal</em>. It was one of my favorite interviews; one that I couldn’t cut down to just 6-8 minutes. But even with the extended play, this thread about different travel styles -- going deep vs. checking off a place’s “greatest hits” -- didn’t make it.</li><li>Next up are a couple of stories from <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/05/09/podcast-175-how-to-find-local-tour-guides-rebuild-travel-muscles/\">episode #175</a> where I talked to <a href=\"https://www.toursbylocals.com/TBL/WebObjects/ToursByLocals.woa/1/wo/y2c7lZDKnxUUHYGLem9YgM/0.41.1.1.50.3\">Paul Melhus</a>, CEO of <a href=\"https://www.toursbylocals.com/\">ToursByLocals</a>, about the local tour market. Paul first told me about the vagaries of selling shore excursion tours to cruise ship passengers and a story about the business challenges he faced in the first days of the COVID lockdown</li><li>The episode before that, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/04/10/podcast-174-how-the-pros-plan-their-taproom-tourism/\">#174</a> if I’m doing my math correctly, was another extended play segment -- 12 minutes -- about taproom tourism, but that was cut down from an hour-and-a-half Zoom beer drinking session with Rob Cheshire host of the UK’s <a href=\"https://thisweekincraft.beer/\">This Week In Craft Beer</a> podcast. Here’s one of the many taproom stories that didn’t make the podcast.  You can catch the full uncut session on the website or the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\">YouTube channel</a>.&nbsp;</li><li>Now it’s not that I didn’t do interviews before the pandemic. Back in January 2020 in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/01/25/podcast-159-planning-the-trip-of-a-lifetime-in-southeast-asia/\">episode #159</a>, I had Allan Marko on talking about trip planning, how he and his wife planned their 9-week sabbatical around Southeast Asia. I thought this was perfect timing -- January is always a big travel planning time. Two months later, most of those plans got blown to bits. But, back in those happier times, here’s a story about the dangers of losing a bag while on a different city-each-day trip</li><li>Editing <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/06/15/podcast-176-why-business-travel-is-coming-back-learning-airport-history/\">last month’s interview</a> with <a href=\"https://udayton.edu/directory/artssciences/history/bednarek_janet.php\">Dr Janet Bednarek</a>, Professor of History at University of Dayton about the history of airports, I had to leave out this thread about who owns US airports. </li><li>And finally, something that’s not really a B-side. Back in<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/05/08/podcast-163-new-world-of-travel-insurance-getting-medical-help-on-the-road/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #163 — New World of Travel Insurance; Getting Medical Help on the Road\"> episode #163</a>, I used a piece of Steve Frick’s <a href=\"https://anchor.fm/steve-frick/\">Travel Stories</a> podcast where we talked about the first TravelCommons episode. Here’s another piece of our conversation where we talk about where our travel paths overlapped.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #177</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_177.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #177 — B-Sides and Rarities','','inherit','closed','closed','','3579-revision-v1','','','2021-07-28 09:40:10','2021-07-28 14:40:10','',3579,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3588',0,'revision','',0),
(3589,1,'2021-07-28 09:40:52','2021-07-28 14:40:52','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_1985\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/IMG_1758-scaled.jpeg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-3581 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/IMG_1758-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"Microphone and a Beer Can\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a>Now I\'m Ready For the Interview[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>After a 2-week, 2,500-mile and $120 in tolls driving expedition through the Northeast, I didn\'t have much time left to write a new episode. So, I mined the audio files of recent TravelCommons interviews for some good stories that got left on the cutting room floor. We also talk about planning for a bike trip in Italy, a couple of things that might make the 2021 traveler gift guide, and we mourn the demise of American Airlines\' in-flight magazine. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_177.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #177: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>This Week</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, trying to get this July episode in under the wire, a bit delayed due to a 2-week, 2,500-mile and $120 in tolls driving expedition through the Northeast that started with a 12-hr drive from Chicago to Manhattan on the Friday of the 4th of July weekend with as much of our daughter and as much of her worldly belongings as would fit in a BMW X3, helping her move into a 5th-floor walkup in Midtown. I was very pleasantly surprised to hit only two backups on what was forecasted to be the first really big post-lockdown travel day; a detour around an accident in the Poconos on I-80 and then, at the end of our drive, the completely predictable back-up at the mouth of the Lincoln Tunnel. A completely and happily uneventful drive. I then spent the rest of the week finding a different spot every morning for my standard Manhattan breakfast -- egg &amp; cheese on a toasted everything bagel and making sure they don’t slip some milk into my black coffee order -- before spending the day in front of my laptop on a not-very-big desk in our not-very-big hotel room while Irene helped Claire get her flat all set up.&nbsp;</li><li>The next Friday, we left Manhattan for a week’s vacation in Maine with an intermediate stop in New Haven, CT’s Little Italy neighborhood for the classic white clam pizza at Frank Pepe’s. It was a bit of a wait -- a 20-minute queue on the sidewalk and then another 45 minutes after ordering -- but it was worth it. I’ve had many tries at white clam pizza before, but this one was, by far, the best -- a generous helping of clams, garlic, and oregano on a cracker-crisp crust . We walked past other pizza places on Wooster St, but only had time to hit one, and so it had to be the ur-pizza joint, the classic, Frank Pepe’s. And luckily for us, it didn’t disappoint; the line along the sidewalk is well-earned.&nbsp; You know, the Michelin Guide says a one-star restaurant is ‘High quality cooking, worth a stop!’, a two-star is ‘Excellent cooking, worth a detour!’, and describes a three-star as ‘Exceptional cuisine, worth a special journey!’ I’m not saying that Frank Pepe’s is a two-star place, but I will say that it was damn good pizza that was definitely worth our detour.</li><li>We then headed up to Scarborough, ME, just south of Portland, for a beach vacation with friends.&nbsp; The traffic on the drive north was a steady stream of RV’s and pick-up tracks and cars with “roof bags” tied down on top and bikes lashed to the back that continued to thicken from I-91 to I-84 to I-90 to I-495 until it finally ground to a halt trying to merge onto I-95, which was itself filled with the same thick sludge of vehicles trying to make it north for the weekend. And then the weather wasn’t great -- rainy, foggy, misty (now I know where Steven King got all his inspiration) so our time devolved into an week-long seafood fest -- a bivalve-palooza of local mussels, oysters, and clams; intensive longitudinal lobster roll research; and, ignoring the current UK debate about crustacean sentience, multiple boiled lobster dinners -- and taproom tour, hitting the big names like Allagash, Maine Beer Company, and Oxbow as well as some (many) other little guys. And then, finally, on the last day, sunshine.</li><li>After a week of this, the rain started up again as we turned around and headed back home, getting on I-90 in Albany and not getting off until we hit Chicago. It too was an uneventful drive, but not in a great way. By the end of that day, we’d developed a deep, deep hatred of those miserable strips of boring asphalt and the hellhole rest stops that make up the Ohio and Indiana Tollways. I hope Claire loves her new life, ‘cause I really don’t want to have to drive that way again.</li><li>Bridge Music -- One for Me by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/21492 Ft: Haskel</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I have to say that the most important piece of travel kit on this trip was my USB-C to HDMI cable that let me mirror my MacBook Air display on the hotel and beach house TVs so that I could sit back with a beer and comfortably watch YouTube highlights of the Euro 2020 soccer tournament and the Tour de France on 40-60” flat screens instead of hunching over my 13” MacBook Air. I had a version of this in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/12/11/best-gift-ideas-for-a-new-traveler/\">my 2019 traveler gift guide</a>, but it got bumped off t<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">he 2020 version</a> to make room for bring-your-own dining sets. But with restaurants and bars open and so not having to eat every meal in my hotel room, I think I’ll reverse that change and put this cable back on the 2021 guide.</li><li>I don’t know if masks will stay on the 2021 guide -- that depends on transportation agency rules -- but I bought another batch of the evolvetogther masks that I called out in the 2020 guide because, even after in-flight mask mandates get dropped, I might still wear a mask on a crowded flight during the cold and flu season because, for the first time in forever, I didn’t get my usual killer cold last year. Without a mandate, I probably wouldn’t wear a mask in the airport and probably not in a fairly open plane, but I think so when it’s a full flight, when there’s someone next to me in the center seat. I think about it -- they’re exhaling maybe 14-16 inches away from where I’m inhaling. No airplane HEPA filter is going to be able to get in between that exchange. I say that now, but I’ll have to re-visit it after in-flight mandates go away and I’m boarding an 8-hour flight to London; that’ll be the real stress test.</li><li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/05/09/podcast-175-how-to-find-local-tour-guides-rebuild-travel-muscles/\">episode #175</a> back in May, I talked about making some Q4 bets on international travel -- a Backroads bike tour in southern Italy in October and the UK in November. Back in the spring, vaccine roll-outs were choppy, especially in the EU, but I thought that everything would sort itself out over the summer making booking travel in the fall not such a risk. Now this was pre-delta variant, but while in Maine, we got an e-mail from Backroads with the subject line “Your Trip Is A Go!” followed shortly thereafter by an alert from Chase of a very large charge dropped on our Sapphire Visa card. Now we need to start tracking travel requirements. Back in May, the best bet for US travelers was to take a “COVID-free” flight on Delta or American to avoid the 2-week quarantine. Then, a month later in June, Italy significantly eased those requirements. Now, you fill out a pretty extensive on-line passenger locator form with all your trip information and your COVID vaccination card and you’re good to go… into Italy. Getting home, the US is still requiring a negative COVID test no matter what your vaccination status is. But, back in May, the CDC said Abbott’s at-home test can be used. It’s not quite as easy as a home pregnancy test -- the <a href=\"https://www.emed.com/airline-travel\">Abbott test</a> requires you to download an app and enough bandwidth for a video chat with a doctor to visually confirm your identity and the test results -- but it beats having to hunt down at a testing place in a new city.</li><li>In the last episode, I did a bit of “fun with numbers,” pulling daily air passenger numbers from the <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/coronavirus/passenger-throughput\">TSA’s website</a> to look at Memorial Day weekend numbers and then a couple of weeks after that when, on June 11, passenger counts broke 2 million for the first time since the March 2020 lockdowns. Extending that analysis -- from mid-June to now, the last week in July, checkpoint volume growth has plateaued -- the TSA volume numbers averaging just over 2 million/day since the last episode. That’s more than 3 times the 623,000 daily average for the same time last year, but still 21% below 2019’s number. But to a lot of fliers, it doesn’t feel that way. It’s back to full planes, long lines, and tight schedules that can’t recover from inevitable summer thunderstorm delays. Airlines are minimizing schedule slack, trying to claw back some of their 2020 losses, but also because of labor shortages -- from crews to ground-support staff, the people who drive the fuel trucks and cater the planes. Some of that is common to other industries -- people slow to reenter the workforce or took jobs elsewhere when furloughed -- but there’s also something unique to the airlines, staff in the wrong places because travel patterns have shifted. We’ve talked about this before, but with leisure travel snapping back much faster than business travel, the usual big travel destinations -- LGA, ORD, DFW -- are giving way to mid-sized airports. <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/summer-travel-seasons-dont-get-weirder-than-this-one-11626872401?st=7c5z6njyusv2mjg\">The fifth-busiest airport in the world is now in Charlotte, N.C., according to flight data</a>. Charlotte had more flights in June than LAX. Made it tough to be able to spend any time in one of their famous white rocking chairs.</li><li>Last month, American Airlines pulled the plug on <em>American Way</em>, their in-flight magazine. Not surprising. Delta, Southwest, and Alaska all pulled theirs out of their seatback pockets in March 2020 and, most famously, 5 year before COVID in 2015, Skymall disappeared into a Chapter 11 puff of smoke. I, for one, will miss <em>American Way</em>. I’ve always read in-flight magazines and liked that <em>American Way</em> came out twice a month, so it didn’t get as stale as the other ones. Way back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/09/24/podcast-15-begging-for-business-needing-to-know-at-35000-ft/\">episode #15</a>, <em>waay</em> back in 2005, I called them “reading safety stock” because if I was stuck on the runway waiting out a weather ground stop or sitting in&nbsp; Detroit\'s “penalty box” for a couple hours waiting for a landing slot, I’d quickly chew through my own stack of reading material, because, back then, all electronics had to be turned off on the ground and below 10,000 ft to keep a “sterile cabin” for takeoff and landings, and most flight attendants were pretty particular about enforcing it. But all is not lost. United Airlines restarted the physical <em>Hemispheres</em> magazine in June after going all-digital in March 2020.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — &nbsp; Fall to pieces - Silence by mika (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mika/24945 Ft: Colab</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>B-Sides and Rarities - Interview Outtakes</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>After the travel world was shut down in March 2020, I began wondering if TravelCommons would join the furlough ranks for lack of content. It’s tough to do a podcast that’s “more about the journey than the destination” if you’re not journeying. Grounded, locked down, I needed a different way to generate content, so I’ve been doing more interviews. Interviews aren’t <em>less</em> work; it’s just different. Instead of spending time writing, I spend it editing. The typical interview session is 20-30 minutes over Zoom (of course) which I edit down to a 6-8 minute segment which you hopefully find tight, focused and insightful.</li><li>But doing some quick math, that leaves two-thirds of the interview on the cutting floor. Not all of that is insightful -- there’s, say, pronunciation guidance… that I still manage to screw up. But there’s still good stuff that, for whatever reason, doesn’t make it into the edited segment. So for this episode, I’ve pulled out the full interview files and pulled out some stories, some conversational threads that I left behind the first go-around. They’re pretty much unedited, save for snipping out a cough or two --&nbsp; so you’re hearing the actual conversation.</li><li>The first “b-side” is from my conversation in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\">episode #166</a> with <a href=\"https://www.dur.ac.uk/research/directory/staff/?id=15319\">Dr. Emily Thomas</a>, associate professor in philosophy at Durham University in the UK about her book<em> </em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/2DO07fV\"><em>The Meaning of Travel: Philosophers Abroad</em></a>. I reached out to Emily after reading a review of her book in the <em>Wall Street Journal</em>. It was one of my favorite interviews; one that I couldn’t cut down to just 6-8 minutes. But even with the extended play, this thread about different travel styles -- going deep vs. checking off a place’s “greatest hits” -- didn’t make it.</li><li>Next up are a couple of stories from <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/05/09/podcast-175-how-to-find-local-tour-guides-rebuild-travel-muscles/\">episode #175</a> where I talked to <a href=\"https://www.toursbylocals.com/TBL/WebObjects/ToursByLocals.woa/1/wo/y2c7lZDKnxUUHYGLem9YgM/0.41.1.1.50.3\">Paul Melhus</a>, CEO of <a href=\"https://www.toursbylocals.com/\">ToursByLocals</a>, about the local tour market. Paul first told me about the vagaries of selling shore excursion tours to cruise ship passengers and a story about the business challenges he faced in the first days of the COVID lockdown</li><li>The episode before that, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/04/10/podcast-174-how-the-pros-plan-their-taproom-tourism/\">#174</a> if I’m doing my math correctly, was another extended play segment -- 12 minutes -- about taproom tourism, but that was cut down from an hour-and-a-half Zoom beer drinking session with Rob Cheshire host of the UK’s <a href=\"https://thisweekincraft.beer/\">This Week In Craft Beer</a> podcast. Here’s one of the many taproom stories that didn’t make the podcast.  You can catch the full uncut session on the website or the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\">YouTube channel</a>.&nbsp;</li><li>Now it’s not that I didn’t do interviews before the pandemic. Back in January 2020 in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/01/25/podcast-159-planning-the-trip-of-a-lifetime-in-southeast-asia/\">episode #159</a>, I had Allan Marko on talking about trip planning, how he and his wife planned their 9-week sabbatical around Southeast Asia. I thought this was perfect timing -- January is always a big travel planning time. Two months later, most of those plans got blown to bits. But, back in those happier times, here’s a story about the dangers of losing a bag while on a different city-each-day trip</li><li>Editing <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/06/15/podcast-176-why-business-travel-is-coming-back-learning-airport-history/\">last month’s interview</a> with <a href=\"https://udayton.edu/directory/artssciences/history/bednarek_janet.php\">Dr Janet Bednarek</a>, Professor of History at University of Dayton about the history of airports, I had to leave out this thread about who owns US airports. </li><li>And finally, something that’s not really a B-side. Back in<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/05/08/podcast-163-new-world-of-travel-insurance-getting-medical-help-on-the-road/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #163 — New World of Travel Insurance; Getting Medical Help on the Road\"> episode #163</a>, I used a piece of Steve Frick’s <a href=\"https://anchor.fm/steve-frick/\">Travel Stories</a> podcast where we talked about the first TravelCommons episode. Here’s another piece of our conversation where we talk about where our travel paths overlapped.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #177</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_177.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #177 — B-Sides and Rarities','','inherit','closed','closed','','3579-revision-v1','','','2021-07-28 09:40:52','2021-07-28 14:40:52','',3579,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3589',0,'revision','',0),
(3592,1,'2021-07-28 15:56:43','2021-07-28 20:56:43','Here\'s the first TravelCommons podcast. Recorded in the Wardman Park Marriott in Washington, DC, I talk about Hungarian prostitutes, \"Puff the Magic Dragon\" security portals, and the 5 Boro Bike Ride in New York. Here\'s the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons-2005-05-14.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the file.\n\nHere are the shownotes from first TravelCommons podcast:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <em>Warmth</em> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>A podcast about the first-hand travel experiences of a road warrior</li>\n 	<li>Recording in the bathroom of the Wardman Park Marriott in Northwest DC</li>\n 	<li>Bad but typical experiences flying from O\'Hare to LaGuardia and then LaGuardia to Reagan National</li>\n 	<li>Hungarian roadside prostitutes</li>\n 	<li>New airport security \"sniffer\" screening machines</li>\n 	<li>New York City\'s 5 Boro Bike Ride</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/21561359@N00/103092939/\"><strong>Direct Link</strong></a> to a cameraphone picture of the ride\'s start</li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons-2005-05-14.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','First TravelCommons Podcast','','inherit','closed','closed','','263-revision-v1','','','2021-07-28 15:56:43','2021-07-28 20:56:43','',263,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3592',0,'revision','',0),
(3595,1,'2021-08-06 14:13:03','2021-08-06 19:13:03','<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2><strong>About Mark Peacock</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:image -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignleft size-large is-resized\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/IMG_9711.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/IMG_9711.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3354\" width=\"167\" height=\"250\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Mark Peacock has been a near-constant business traveler for over 35 years. Beginning with his first flight on his first day of work (an American Airline MD-80 from ORD to DFW), Mark has traveled extensively for high-tech companies and management consultancies.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><p>Mark has lived in Chicago, Memphis, Louisville, Washington DC, the Bay Area, Dallas, Philadelphia, and Detroit. He is back in Chicago for the third time, where he lives with his wife and two children.</p>\n<br><br><br></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2><strong>Contact Us</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>EMAIL – comments@travelcommons.com</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2><strong>About the TravelCommons Podcast</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Click <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/TravelCommonsMediaKit.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"mediakit\">here</a> to download a media kit</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','About Us','','inherit','closed','closed','','85-revision-v1','','','2021-08-06 14:13:03','2021-08-06 19:13:03','',85,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3595',0,'revision','',0),
(3596,1,'2021-12-31 12:09:00','2021-12-31 17:09:00','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It\'ll take travel guide books a while to catch up with <a href=\"https://www.nrn.com/fast-casual/datassential-more-10-us-restaurants-have-closed-permanently\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">all</a> <a href=\"https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-07/over-110-000-restaurants-have-closed-with-sector-in-free-fall\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the</a> restaurants and bars closures caused by the COVID lockdowns. To help fill that gap, here are the best places I\'ve ate and drank at during my 2021 travels. I\'ll update this after each trip, so keep it bookmarked.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Chicago</strong><ul><li><a href=\"http://www.noodlebird.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"NoodleBird at Fat Rice\">NoodleBird at Fat Rice</a>, 2957 W Diversey Ave (at N Sacramento), Logan Square -- The lower price-point, post-pandemic reincarnation of Fat Rice, a perennial recommendation of mine. Like Fat Rice, NoodleBird\'s starting point is the Chinese-Portuguese fusion cuisine of Macau and then extends to other Asian regions</li><li><a href=\"http://www.galitrestaurant.com/menu-1\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Galit\">Galit</a>, 2429 N Lincoln Ave (just north of Fullerton), Lincoln Park -- Great Israeli/Middle Eastern restaurant with a nice 4-course menu that let\'s your table try a lot of dishes</li><li><a href=\"http://highfiveramen.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"High Five Ramen\">High Five Ramen</a>, 112 N Green St, West Loop -- Small, hip basement ramen joint. Expect a wait, but have a beer and a Texas BBQ appetizer upstairs at <a href=\"http://greenstreetmeats.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Green Street Smoked Meats\">Green Street Smoked Meats</a> while you wait</li><li><a href=\"https://www.minghincuisine.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"MingHin Cuisine\">MingHin Cuisine</a>, 2168 S Archer Ave, Chinatown -- It\'s our favorite dim sum place. And they take reservations!</li><li><a href=\"http://www.birrieriazaragoza.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Birrieria Zaragoza\">Birrieria Zaragoza</a>, 4852 S Pulaski Rd, Archer Heights (near Midway Airport) -- Small, family-owned place with a small menu focused on <em>birria</em> (stewed goat) from Jalisco. Warm service and phenomenal food.&nbsp;</li><li><a href=\"https://bitterpops.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Bitter Pops\">Bitter Pops</a>, 3357 N Lincoln Ave (at Roscoe), Roscoe Village -- a renovated slashie (bar + packaged goods) that has a great selection of Chicago craft beer</li><li><a href=\"http://www.revbrew.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Revolution Brewing - Brewery &amp; Taproom\">Revolution Brewing - Brewery &amp; Taproom</a>, 3340 N Kedzie Ave, Avondale -- Great beers; wide range of styles; bring your own food</li><li><a href=\"http://maplewoodbrew.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Maplewood Brewery\">Maplewood Brewery &amp; Distillery</a>, 2717 N Maplewood Ave (South of Diversey), east of Logan Square -- Small, neighborhood bar tucked up against the Kennedy Expressway</li><li>For more taproom ideas, check out this <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/07/15/video-chicago-mdw-layover-taproom-tour/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"pre-pandemic TravelCommons taproom tour.\">pre-pandemic TravelCommons taproom tour.</a> Three of the four taprooms featured are still open -- Marz, Whiner, and Lo-Rez. Only Lagunitas Brewing is still closed</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3046,\"width\":225,\"height\":179,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium is-resized\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7836-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7836-300x238.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3046\" width=\"225\" height=\"179\"/></a><figcaption><em>Sonoran Hot Dog</em></figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tuscon</a></strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.yelp.com/biz/ruiz-hot-dogs-tucson\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Ruiz Hot Dogs</a> food truck 1140 S 6th Ave at W 22nd St -- It\'s all about the&nbsp;<a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonoran_hot_dog\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Sonoran hot dog</a></li><li><a href=\"https://www.tacorustico.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">El Taco Rustico</a>, 2281 N Oracle Rd -- Quesabirras and cabrito (goat) tacos.</li></ul><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.tacosapson.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tacos Apson</a>, 3501 S 12th Ave -- Mesquite-grilled beef rib tacos and a hass burro</li><li><a href=\"https://1912brewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">1912 Brewing Company</a>, 2045 N Forbes Blvd, Ste 105 -- 20 taps with a wide variety of styles</li><li><a href=\"https://www.pueblovidabrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pueblo Vida Brewing Company</a>, 115 E Broadway Blvd -- Best beers of the trip!</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Phoenix</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.pizzeriabianco.com/pizzeria-bianco-heritage-square\">Pizzeria Bianco</a>, 623 E Adams St -- Thin crust pizza a short drive from the airport</li><li><a href=\"https://www.pizzeriabianco.com/pane-bianco\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pane Bianco</a>, 4404 N Central Ave -- Great sandwich place by the same group further north</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3605,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/IMG_2942.jpeg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/IMG_2942-225x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3605\"/></a><figcaption><em>Eppiq Brewing</em></figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>San Diego</strong><ul><li><a href=\"http://www.mikestacoclub.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Mike\'s Taco Club</a>, 5060 Newport Ave Ocean Beach -- Big fish tacos two blocks off the ocean beneath a tattoo parlor</li><li><a href=\"https://iloveazucar.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Azúcar</a>&nbsp;Patisserie, 4820 Newport Ave Ocean Beach -- Cuban-inspired pastries </li><li><a href=\"http://www.eppigbrewing.com/waterfront-biergarten\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Eppig Brewing Waterfront Biergarten</a>, 2817 Dickens St -- Good beers sitting by the marina</li><li><a href=\"https://www.purebrewing.org/location/balboa-park/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pure Project Brewing Balboa Park Biergarten</a>, 2865 Fifth Ave -- Re-hydrate after walking through Balboa Park</li><li><a href=\"http://www.moderntimesbeer.com/tasting-room/point-loma\">Modern Times Lomaland Fermentorium</a>, 3725 Greenwood St -- 32 taps of great beer 10 minutes from the airport</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Nashville</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.biscuitlove.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Biscuit Love Gulch</a>, 316 11th Ave S -- Fun toppings on great buttermilk biscuits for breakfast</li><li><a href=\"https://barsovereign.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bar Sovereign</a>, 514 Rep. John Lewis Way S -- Fun speakeasy-ish bar south of the Broadway strip</li><li><a href=\"https://blackdynastyramen.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Black Dynasty Secret Ramen House</a>, Pop-up that is moving from the back of Bar Sovereign to Bearded Iris\' new taproom</li><li><a href=\"https://hattieb.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Hattie B\'s Hot Chicken - Melrose</a>, 2222 8th Ave S -- Good hot chicken without a wait near Belmont University</li><li><a href=\"https://beardedirisbrewing.com/location/germantown/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bearded Iris Brewing</a>, 101 Van Buren St -- Original taproom with pool tables and a big patio</li><li><a href=\"https://www.variousartistsbrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Various Artists Brewing</a>, 1011 Elm Hill Pike -- Wide variety of beer styles; big patio; guest chefs working a big grill</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>New York City</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.thehummuskitchen.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Hummus Kitchen</a>, 444 3rd Ave (at 31st St), Murray Hill --  Well-executed Middle-Eastern food</li><li><a href=\"http://www.hernameishan.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Her Name is Han</a>, 17 E 31st St (at Madison Ave), Koreatown -- Home-style Korean food</li><li><a href=\"https://www.craftandcarry.beer/murray-hill\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Craft + Carry - Murray Hill</a>, 440 3rd St (at 30th St) -- Excellent selection of NY craft beers on draft and in cans to-go</li><li><a href=\"https://www.tedscornertavern.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Ted\'s Corner Tavern</a>, 523 3rd Ave (at 35th St), Murray Hill -- Comfortable neighborhood bar with a great beer selection</li><li><a href=\"http://theponybar.com/\" title=\"The Pony Bar\">The Pony Bar</a>,  1444 1st Ave (at E 75th St), Upper East Side -- Casual bar with a great beer selection. Been going there for 10 years</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3621,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/0C76568F-F5B5-4831-B8F5-CA16FCF8C829.jpeg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/0C76568F-F5B5-4831-B8F5-CA16FCF8C829-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3621\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Portland, Maine</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://bobsclamhut.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bob\'s Clam Hut</a>, 315 Route 1, Kittery -- Best fried clams I\'ve ever had</li><li><a href=\"https://portland.islandcreekoysters.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">The Shop by Island Creek Oysters</a>, 123 Washington Ave, Portland -- Excellent (and inexpensive) selection of Maine oysters</li><li><a href=\"https://oxbowbeer.com/location/portland/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Oxbow Blending &amp; Bottling</a>, 49 Washington Ave, Portland -- Great selection of farmhouse ales with an outpost of <a href=\"http://www.duckfatfriteshack.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Duckfat</a> serving up fries on the patio</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>London</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.behindrestaurant.co.uk/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Behind Restaurant\">Behind Restaurant</a>, 20 Sidworth St E8 3SD, Hackney -- Focused on seafood and modern British flavors. The whole restaurant is a kitchen table experience, watching chefs prepare the dishes and then serve them to you. One of the best Michelin 1-star restaurants I\'ve visited.</li><li><a href=\"http://www.thegingerpig.co.uk/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"The Ginger Pig\">The Ginger Pig</a>, Corner of Stoney St and Park St, Borough Market -- Bought the best sausage rolls I\'ve ever had from their walk-up display. Want to go back and try their meat pies.</li><li><a href=\"https://ottolenghi.co.uk/restaurants/nopi\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"NOPI\">NOPI</a>, 21-22 Warwick St W1B 5NE, Soho -- Fun Mediterranean/Middle Eastern fusion restaurant from star chef Yotam Ottolenghi. Sat at the bar and had a great late lunch.</li><li>Al Masar, 214, 216 Borough High St SE1 1JX -- Strategically located near the Borough tube stop. Solid Lebanese wraps; exactly what I needed after a long taproom crawl down the Bermondsey Beer Mile.</li><li><a href=\"https://www.londonxlondon.com/bermondsey-beer-mile/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Bermondsey Beer Mile\">Bermondsey Beer Mile</a>, a mile of craft brewery taprooms that have set up shop in adjacent railway arches under a huge brick bridge carrying commuter trains in and out of London Bridge train station. Rob Cheshire, long-time TravelCommons listener and <a href=\"https://thisweekincraft.beer/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"UK craft beer podcaster\">UK craft beer podcaster</a> laid out a taproom crawl that started at <a href=\"http://www.thekernelbrewery.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"The Kernel\">The Kernel</a>, the first brewery in on the Mile, and continued through <a href=\"http://www.thebarrelproject.co.uk/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"The Barrel Proje\">The Barrel Project</a>, <a href=\"https://cloudwaterbrew.co/location-enid-st/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Cloudwater\">Cloudwater</a>, and <a href=\"http://bbno.co/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Brew By Numbers\">Brew By Numbers</a>.</li><li><a href=\"http://www.oldfountain.co.uk/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Old Fountain\">Old Fountain</a>, 3 Baldwin St (at City Rd) EC1V 9NU, Shoreditch -- Tucked into a little side street, it\'s a comfortable pub with a great UK craft beer selection. </li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','My Best Restaurants, Bars and Taprooms of 2021','','publish','closed','closed','','my-best-restaurants-and-bars-of-2021','','','2022-08-18 20:18:49','2022-08-19 01:18:49','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3596',0,'post','',0),
(3597,1,'2021-08-12 15:59:53','2021-08-12 20:59:53','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It\'ll take travel guide books a while to catch up with <a href=\"https://www.nrn.com/fast-casual/datassential-more-10-us-restaurants-have-closed-permanently\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">all</a> <a href=\"https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-07/over-110-000-restaurants-have-closed-with-sector-in-free-fall\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the</a> restaurants and bars closures caused by the COVID lockdowns. To help fill that gap, here\'s a list of the best places I\'ve ate and drank at during my 2021 travels. I\'ll update this after each trip, so keep it bookmarked.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tuscon</a></strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.yelp.com/biz/ruiz-hot-dogs-tucson\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Ruiz Hot Dogs</a> food truck 1140 S 6th Ave at W 22nd St -- It\'s all about the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonoran_hot_dog\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Sonoran hot dog</a></li><li><a href=\"https://www.tacorustico.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">El Taco Rustico</a>, 2281 N Oracle Rd -- Quesabirras and cabrito (goat) tacos.</li><li><a href=\"https://www.tacosapson.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tacos Apson</a>, 3501 S 12th Ave -- Mesquite-grilled beef rib tacos and a hass burro</li><li><a href=\"https://1912brewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">1912 Brewing Company</a>, 2045 N Forbes Blvd, Ste 105 -- 20 taps with a wide variety of styles</li><li><a href=\"https://www.pueblovidabrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pueblo Vida Brewing Company</a>, 115 E Broadway Blvd -- Best beers of the trip!</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Phoenix</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.pizzeriabianco.com/pizzeria-bianco-heritage-square\">Pizzeria Bianco</a>, 623 E Adams St -- Thin crust pizza a short drive from the airport</li><li><a href=\"https://www.pizzeriabianco.com/pane-bianco\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pane Bianco</a>, 4404 N Central Ave -- Great sandwich place by the same group further north</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>San Diego</strong><ul><li><a href=\"http://www.mikestacoclub.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Mike\'s Taco Club</a>, 5060 Newport Ave Ocean Beach -- Big fish tacos two blocks off the ocean beneath a tattoo parlor</li><li><a href=\"https://iloveazucar.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Azúcar</a> Patisserie, 4820 Newport Ave Ocean Beach -- Cuban-inspired pastries </li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Best Restaurants and Bars of 2021... So Far','','inherit','closed','closed','','3596-revision-v1','','','2021-08-12 15:59:53','2021-08-12 20:59:53','',3596,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3597',0,'revision','',0),
(3598,1,'2021-08-12 16:45:15','2021-08-12 21:45:15','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It\'ll take travel guide books a while to catch up with <a href=\"https://www.nrn.com/fast-casual/datassential-more-10-us-restaurants-have-closed-permanently\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">all</a> <a href=\"https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-07/over-110-000-restaurants-have-closed-with-sector-in-free-fall\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the</a> restaurants and bars closures caused by the COVID lockdowns. To help fill that gap, here\'s a list of the best places I\'ve ate and drank at during my 2021 travels. I\'ll update this after each trip, so keep it bookmarked.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tuscon</a></strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.yelp.com/biz/ruiz-hot-dogs-tucson\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Ruiz Hot Dogs</a> food truck 1140 S 6th Ave at W 22nd St -- It\'s all about the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonoran_hot_dog\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Sonoran hot dog</a></li><li><a href=\"https://www.tacorustico.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">El Taco Rustico</a>, 2281 N Oracle Rd -- Quesabirras and cabrito (goat) tacos.</li><li><a href=\"https://www.tacosapson.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tacos Apson</a>, 3501 S 12th Ave -- Mesquite-grilled beef rib tacos and a hass burro</li><li><a href=\"https://1912brewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">1912 Brewing Company</a>, 2045 N Forbes Blvd, Ste 105 -- 20 taps with a wide variety of styles</li><li><a href=\"https://www.pueblovidabrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pueblo Vida Brewing Company</a>, 115 E Broadway Blvd -- Best beers of the trip!</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Phoenix</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.pizzeriabianco.com/pizzeria-bianco-heritage-square\">Pizzeria Bianco</a>, 623 E Adams St -- Thin crust pizza a short drive from the airport</li><li><a href=\"https://www.pizzeriabianco.com/pane-bianco\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pane Bianco</a>, 4404 N Central Ave -- Great sandwich place by the same group further north</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>San Diego</strong><ul><li><a href=\"http://www.mikestacoclub.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Mike\'s Taco Club</a>, 5060 Newport Ave Ocean Beach -- Big fish tacos two blocks off the ocean beneath a tattoo parlor</li><li><a href=\"https://iloveazucar.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Azúcar</a> Patisserie, 4820 Newport Ave Ocean Beach -- Cuban-inspired pastries </li><li><a href=\"http://www.eppigbrewing.com/waterfront-biergarten\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Eppig Brewing Waterfront Biergarten</a>, 2817 Dickens St -- Good beers sitting by the marina</li><li><a href=\"https://www.purebrewing.org/location/balboa-park/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pure Project Brewing Balboa Park Biergarten</a>, 2865 Fifth Ave -- Re-hydrate after walking through Balboa Park</li><li><a href=\"http://www.moderntimesbeer.com/tasting-room/point-loma\">Modern Times Lomaland Fermentorium</a>, 3725 Greenwood St -- 32 taps of great beer 10 minutes from the airport</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Nashville</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.biscuitlove.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Biscuit Love Gulch</a>, 316 11th Ave S -- Fun toppings on great buttermilk biscuits for breakfast</li><li><a href=\"https://barsovereign.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bar Sovereign</a>, 514 Rep. John Lewis Way S -- Fun speakeasy-ish bar south of the Broadway strip</li><li><a href=\"https://blackdynastyramen.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Black Dynasty Secret Ramen House</a>, pop-up that is moving from the back of Bar Sovereign to Bearded Iris\' new taproom</li><li><a href=\"https://hattieb.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Hattie B\'s Hot Chicken</a> - Melrose, 2222 8th Ave S -- Good hot chicken without a wait near Belmont University</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Best Restaurants and Bars of 2021... So Far','','inherit','closed','closed','','3596-revision-v1','','','2021-08-12 16:45:15','2021-08-12 21:45:15','',3596,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3598',0,'revision','',0),
(3599,1,'2021-08-12 17:00:04','2021-08-12 22:00:04','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It\'ll take travel guide books a while to catch up with <a href=\"https://www.nrn.com/fast-casual/datassential-more-10-us-restaurants-have-closed-permanently\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">all</a> <a href=\"https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-07/over-110-000-restaurants-have-closed-with-sector-in-free-fall\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the</a> restaurants and bars closures caused by the COVID lockdowns. To help fill that gap, here\'s a list of the best places I\'ve ate and drank at during my 2021 travels. I\'ll update this after each trip, so keep it bookmarked.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tuscon</a></strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.yelp.com/biz/ruiz-hot-dogs-tucson\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Ruiz Hot Dogs</a> food truck 1140 S 6th Ave at W 22nd St -- It\'s all about the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonoran_hot_dog\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Sonoran hot dog</a></li><li><a href=\"https://www.tacorustico.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">El Taco Rustico</a>, 2281 N Oracle Rd -- Quesabirras and cabrito (goat) tacos.</li><li><a href=\"https://www.tacosapson.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tacos Apson</a>, 3501 S 12th Ave -- Mesquite-grilled beef rib tacos and a hass burro</li><li><a href=\"https://1912brewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">1912 Brewing Company</a>, 2045 N Forbes Blvd, Ste 105 -- 20 taps with a wide variety of styles</li><li><a href=\"https://www.pueblovidabrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pueblo Vida Brewing Company</a>, 115 E Broadway Blvd -- Best beers of the trip!</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Phoenix</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.pizzeriabianco.com/pizzeria-bianco-heritage-square\">Pizzeria Bianco</a>, 623 E Adams St -- Thin crust pizza a short drive from the airport</li><li><a href=\"https://www.pizzeriabianco.com/pane-bianco\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pane Bianco</a>, 4404 N Central Ave -- Great sandwich place by the same group further north</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>San Diego</strong><ul><li><a href=\"http://www.mikestacoclub.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Mike\'s Taco Club</a>, 5060 Newport Ave Ocean Beach -- Big fish tacos two blocks off the ocean beneath a tattoo parlor</li><li><a href=\"https://iloveazucar.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Azúcar</a> Patisserie, 4820 Newport Ave Ocean Beach -- Cuban-inspired pastries </li><li><a href=\"http://www.eppigbrewing.com/waterfront-biergarten\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Eppig Brewing Waterfront Biergarten</a>, 2817 Dickens St -- Good beers sitting by the marina</li><li><a href=\"https://www.purebrewing.org/location/balboa-park/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pure Project Brewing Balboa Park Biergarten</a>, 2865 Fifth Ave -- Re-hydrate after walking through Balboa Park</li><li><a href=\"http://www.moderntimesbeer.com/tasting-room/point-loma\">Modern Times Lomaland Fermentorium</a>, 3725 Greenwood St -- 32 taps of great beer 10 minutes from the airport</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Nashville</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.biscuitlove.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Biscuit Love Gulch</a>, 316 11th Ave S -- Fun toppings on great buttermilk biscuits for breakfast</li><li><a href=\"https://barsovereign.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bar Sovereign</a>, 514 Rep. John Lewis Way S -- Fun speakeasy-ish bar south of the Broadway strip</li><li><a href=\"https://blackdynastyramen.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Black Dynasty Secret Ramen House</a>, pop-up that is moving from the back of Bar Sovereign to Bearded Iris\' new taproom</li><li><a href=\"https://hattieb.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Hattie B\'s Hot Chicken</a> - Melrose, 2222 8th Ave S -- Good hot chicken without a wait near Belmont University</li><li><a href=\"https://beardedirisbrewing.com/location/germantown/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bearded Iris Brewing</a>, 101 Van Buren St -- Original taproom with pool tables and a big patio</li><li><a href=\"https://www.variousartistsbrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Various Artists Brewing</a>, 1011 Elm Hill Pike -- Wide variety of beer styles; big patio; guest chefs working a big grill</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Best Restaurants and Bars of 2021... So Far','','inherit','closed','closed','','3596-revision-v1','','','2021-08-12 17:00:04','2021-08-12 22:00:04','',3596,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3599',0,'revision','',0),
(3600,1,'2021-08-12 17:00:32','2021-08-12 22:00:32','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It\'ll take travel guide books a while to catch up with <a href=\"https://www.nrn.com/fast-casual/datassential-more-10-us-restaurants-have-closed-permanently\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">all</a> <a href=\"https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-07/over-110-000-restaurants-have-closed-with-sector-in-free-fall\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the</a> restaurants and bars closures caused by the COVID lockdowns. To help fill that gap, here\'s a list of the best places I\'ve ate and drank at during my 2021 travels. I\'ll update this after each trip, so keep it bookmarked.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tuscon</a></strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.yelp.com/biz/ruiz-hot-dogs-tucson\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Ruiz Hot Dogs</a> food truck 1140 S 6th Ave at W 22nd St -- It\'s all about the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonoran_hot_dog\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Sonoran hot dog</a></li><li><a href=\"https://www.tacorustico.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">El Taco Rustico</a>, 2281 N Oracle Rd -- Quesabirras and cabrito (goat) tacos.</li><li><a href=\"https://www.tacosapson.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tacos Apson</a>, 3501 S 12th Ave -- Mesquite-grilled beef rib tacos and a hass burro</li><li><a href=\"https://1912brewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">1912 Brewing Company</a>, 2045 N Forbes Blvd, Ste 105 -- 20 taps with a wide variety of styles</li><li><a href=\"https://www.pueblovidabrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pueblo Vida Brewing Company</a>, 115 E Broadway Blvd -- Best beers of the trip!</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Phoenix</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.pizzeriabianco.com/pizzeria-bianco-heritage-square\">Pizzeria Bianco</a>, 623 E Adams St -- Thin crust pizza a short drive from the airport</li><li><a href=\"https://www.pizzeriabianco.com/pane-bianco\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pane Bianco</a>, 4404 N Central Ave -- Great sandwich place by the same group further north</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>San Diego</strong><ul><li><a href=\"http://www.mikestacoclub.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Mike\'s Taco Club</a>, 5060 Newport Ave Ocean Beach -- Big fish tacos two blocks off the ocean beneath a tattoo parlor</li><li><a href=\"https://iloveazucar.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Azúcar</a> Patisserie, 4820 Newport Ave Ocean Beach -- Cuban-inspired pastries </li><li><a href=\"http://www.eppigbrewing.com/waterfront-biergarten\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Eppig Brewing Waterfront Biergarten</a>, 2817 Dickens St -- Good beers sitting by the marina</li><li><a href=\"https://www.purebrewing.org/location/balboa-park/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pure Project Brewing Balboa Park Biergarten</a>, 2865 Fifth Ave -- Re-hydrate after walking through Balboa Park</li><li><a href=\"http://www.moderntimesbeer.com/tasting-room/point-loma\">Modern Times Lomaland Fermentorium</a>, 3725 Greenwood St -- 32 taps of great beer 10 minutes from the airport</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Nashville</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.biscuitlove.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Biscuit Love Gulch</a>, 316 11th Ave S -- Fun toppings on great buttermilk biscuits for breakfast</li><li><a href=\"https://barsovereign.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bar Sovereign</a>, 514 Rep. John Lewis Way S -- Fun speakeasy-ish bar south of the Broadway strip</li><li><a href=\"https://blackdynastyramen.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Black Dynasty Secret Ramen House</a>, pop-up that is moving from the back of Bar Sovereign to Bearded Iris\' new taproom</li><li><a href=\"https://hattieb.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Hattie B\'s Hot Chicken - Melrose</a>, 2222 8th Ave S -- Good hot chicken without a wait near Belmont University</li><li><a href=\"https://beardedirisbrewing.com/location/germantown/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bearded Iris Brewing</a>, 101 Van Buren St -- Original taproom with pool tables and a big patio</li><li><a href=\"https://www.variousartistsbrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Various Artists Brewing</a>, 1011 Elm Hill Pike -- Wide variety of beer styles; big patio; guest chefs working a big grill</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Best Restaurants and Bars of 2021... So Far','','inherit','closed','closed','','3596-revision-v1','','','2021-08-12 17:00:32','2021-08-12 22:00:32','',3596,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3600',0,'revision','',0),
(3601,1,'2021-08-12 17:02:21','2021-08-12 22:02:21','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It\'ll take travel guide books a while to catch up with <a href=\"https://www.nrn.com/fast-casual/datassential-more-10-us-restaurants-have-closed-permanently\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">all</a> <a href=\"https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-07/over-110-000-restaurants-have-closed-with-sector-in-free-fall\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the</a> restaurants and bars closures caused by the COVID lockdowns. To help fill that gap, here\'s a list of the best places I\'ve ate and drank at during my 2021 travels. I\'ll update this after each trip, so keep it bookmarked.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tuscon</a></strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.yelp.com/biz/ruiz-hot-dogs-tucson\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Ruiz Hot Dogs</a> food truck 1140 S 6th Ave at W 22nd St -- It\'s all about the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonoran_hot_dog\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Sonoran hot dog</a></li><li><a href=\"https://www.tacorustico.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">El Taco Rustico</a>, 2281 N Oracle Rd -- Quesabirras and cabrito (goat) tacos.</li><li><a href=\"https://www.tacosapson.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tacos Apson</a>, 3501 S 12th Ave -- Mesquite-grilled beef rib tacos and a hass burro</li><li><a href=\"https://1912brewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">1912 Brewing Company</a>, 2045 N Forbes Blvd, Ste 105 -- 20 taps with a wide variety of styles</li><li><a href=\"https://www.pueblovidabrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pueblo Vida Brewing Company</a>, 115 E Broadway Blvd -- Best beers of the trip!</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Phoenix</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.pizzeriabianco.com/pizzeria-bianco-heritage-square\">Pizzeria Bianco</a>, 623 E Adams St -- Thin crust pizza a short drive from the airport</li><li><a href=\"https://www.pizzeriabianco.com/pane-bianco\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pane Bianco</a>, 4404 N Central Ave -- Great sandwich place by the same group further north</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>San Diego</strong><ul><li><a href=\"http://www.mikestacoclub.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Mike\'s Taco Club</a>, 5060 Newport Ave Ocean Beach -- Big fish tacos two blocks off the ocean beneath a tattoo parlor</li><li><a href=\"https://iloveazucar.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Azúcar</a> Patisserie, 4820 Newport Ave Ocean Beach -- Cuban-inspired pastries </li><li><a href=\"http://www.eppigbrewing.com/waterfront-biergarten\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Eppig Brewing Waterfront Biergarten</a>, 2817 Dickens St -- Good beers sitting by the marina</li><li><a href=\"https://www.purebrewing.org/location/balboa-park/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pure Project Brewing Balboa Park Biergarten</a>, 2865 Fifth Ave -- Re-hydrate after walking through Balboa Park</li><li><a href=\"http://www.moderntimesbeer.com/tasting-room/point-loma\">Modern Times Lomaland Fermentorium</a>, 3725 Greenwood St -- 32 taps of great beer 10 minutes from the airport</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Nashville</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.biscuitlove.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Biscuit Love Gulch</a>, 316 11th Ave S -- Fun toppings on great buttermilk biscuits for breakfast</li><li><a href=\"https://barsovereign.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bar Sovereign</a>, 514 Rep. John Lewis Way S -- Fun speakeasy-ish bar south of the Broadway strip</li><li><a href=\"https://blackdynastyramen.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Black Dynasty Secret Ramen House</a>, pop-up that is moving from the back of Bar Sovereign to Bearded Iris\' new taproom</li><li><a href=\"https://hattieb.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Hattie B\'s Hot Chicken - Melrose</a>, 2222 8th Ave S -- Good hot chicken without a wait near Belmont University</li><li><a href=\"https://beardedirisbrewing.com/location/germantown/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bearded Iris Brewing</a>, 101 Van Buren St -- Original taproom with pool tables and a big patio</li><li><a href=\"https://www.variousartistsbrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Various Artists Brewing</a>, 1011 Elm Hill Pike -- Wide variety of beer styles; big patio; guest chefs working a big grill</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>New York City</strong><ul><li>Ted\'s</li><li>Craft &amp; Carry</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Southern Maine</strong><ul><li>ljl;j;j</li><li>ljljkljljk</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Best Restaurants and Bars of 2021... So Far','','inherit','closed','closed','','3596-revision-v1','','','2021-08-12 17:02:21','2021-08-12 22:02:21','',3596,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3601',0,'revision','',0),
(3602,1,'2021-08-12 17:06:33','2021-08-12 22:06:33','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It\'ll take travel guide books a while to catch up with <a href=\"https://www.nrn.com/fast-casual/datassential-more-10-us-restaurants-have-closed-permanently\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">all</a> <a href=\"https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-07/over-110-000-restaurants-have-closed-with-sector-in-free-fall\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the</a> restaurants and bars closures caused by the COVID lockdowns. To help fill that gap, here\'s a list of the best places I\'ve ate and drank at during my 2021 travels. I\'ll update this after each trip, so keep it bookmarked.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3046,\"width\":150,\"height\":119,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium is-resized\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7836-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7836-300x238.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3046\" width=\"150\" height=\"119\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tuscon</a></strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.yelp.com/biz/ruiz-hot-dogs-tucson\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Ruiz Hot Dogs</a> food truck 1140 S 6th Ave at W 22nd St -- It\'s all about the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonoran_hot_dog\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Sonoran hot dog</a></li><li><a href=\"https://www.tacorustico.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">El Taco Rustico</a>, 2281 N Oracle Rd -- Quesabirras and cabrito (goat) tacos.</li><li><a href=\"https://www.tacosapson.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tacos Apson</a>, 3501 S 12th Ave -- Mesquite-grilled beef rib tacos and a hass burro</li><li><a href=\"https://1912brewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">1912 Brewing Company</a>, 2045 N Forbes Blvd, Ste 105 -- 20 taps with a wide variety of styles</li><li><a href=\"https://www.pueblovidabrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pueblo Vida Brewing Company</a>, 115 E Broadway Blvd -- Best beers of the trip!</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Phoenix</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.pizzeriabianco.com/pizzeria-bianco-heritage-square\">Pizzeria Bianco</a>, 623 E Adams St -- Thin crust pizza a short drive from the airport</li><li><a href=\"https://www.pizzeriabianco.com/pane-bianco\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pane Bianco</a>, 4404 N Central Ave -- Great sandwich place by the same group further north</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>San Diego</strong><ul><li><a href=\"http://www.mikestacoclub.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Mike\'s Taco Club</a>, 5060 Newport Ave Ocean Beach -- Big fish tacos two blocks off the ocean beneath a tattoo parlor</li><li><a href=\"https://iloveazucar.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Azúcar</a> Patisserie, 4820 Newport Ave Ocean Beach -- Cuban-inspired pastries </li><li><a href=\"http://www.eppigbrewing.com/waterfront-biergarten\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Eppig Brewing Waterfront Biergarten</a>, 2817 Dickens St -- Good beers sitting by the marina</li><li><a href=\"https://www.purebrewing.org/location/balboa-park/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pure Project Brewing Balboa Park Biergarten</a>, 2865 Fifth Ave -- Re-hydrate after walking through Balboa Park</li><li><a href=\"http://www.moderntimesbeer.com/tasting-room/point-loma\">Modern Times Lomaland Fermentorium</a>, 3725 Greenwood St -- 32 taps of great beer 10 minutes from the airport</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Nashville</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.biscuitlove.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Biscuit Love Gulch</a>, 316 11th Ave S -- Fun toppings on great buttermilk biscuits for breakfast</li><li><a href=\"https://barsovereign.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bar Sovereign</a>, 514 Rep. John Lewis Way S -- Fun speakeasy-ish bar south of the Broadway strip</li><li><a href=\"https://blackdynastyramen.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Black Dynasty Secret Ramen House</a>, pop-up that is moving from the back of Bar Sovereign to Bearded Iris\' new taproom</li><li><a href=\"https://hattieb.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Hattie B\'s Hot Chicken - Melrose</a>, 2222 8th Ave S -- Good hot chicken without a wait near Belmont University</li><li><a href=\"https://beardedirisbrewing.com/location/germantown/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bearded Iris Brewing</a>, 101 Van Buren St -- Original taproom with pool tables and a big patio</li><li><a href=\"https://www.variousartistsbrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Various Artists Brewing</a>, 1011 Elm Hill Pike -- Wide variety of beer styles; big patio; guest chefs working a big grill</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>New York City</strong><ul><li>Ted\'s</li><li>Craft &amp; Carry</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Southern Maine</strong><ul><li>ljl;j;j</li><li>ljljkljljk</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Best Restaurants and Bars of 2021... So Far','','inherit','closed','closed','','3596-revision-v1','','','2021-08-12 17:06:33','2021-08-12 22:06:33','',3596,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3602',0,'revision','',0),
(3603,1,'2021-08-12 17:07:08','2021-08-12 22:07:08','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It\'ll take travel guide books a while to catch up with <a href=\"https://www.nrn.com/fast-casual/datassential-more-10-us-restaurants-have-closed-permanently\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">all</a> <a href=\"https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-07/over-110-000-restaurants-have-closed-with-sector-in-free-fall\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the</a> restaurants and bars closures caused by the COVID lockdowns. To help fill that gap, here\'s a list of the best places I\'ve ate and drank at during my 2021 travels. I\'ll update this after each trip, so keep it bookmarked.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3046,\"width\":225,\"height\":179,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium is-resized\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7836-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7836-300x238.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3046\" width=\"225\" height=\"179\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tuscon</a></strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.yelp.com/biz/ruiz-hot-dogs-tucson\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Ruiz Hot Dogs</a> food truck 1140 S 6th Ave at W 22nd St -- It\'s all about the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonoran_hot_dog\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Sonoran hot dog</a></li><li><a href=\"https://www.tacorustico.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">El Taco Rustico</a>, 2281 N Oracle Rd -- Quesabirras and cabrito (goat) tacos.</li><li><a href=\"https://www.tacosapson.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tacos Apson</a>, 3501 S 12th Ave -- Mesquite-grilled beef rib tacos and a hass burro</li><li><a href=\"https://1912brewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">1912 Brewing Company</a>, 2045 N Forbes Blvd, Ste 105 -- 20 taps with a wide variety of styles</li><li><a href=\"https://www.pueblovidabrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pueblo Vida Brewing Company</a>, 115 E Broadway Blvd -- Best beers of the trip!</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Phoenix</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.pizzeriabianco.com/pizzeria-bianco-heritage-square\">Pizzeria Bianco</a>, 623 E Adams St -- Thin crust pizza a short drive from the airport</li><li><a href=\"https://www.pizzeriabianco.com/pane-bianco\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pane Bianco</a>, 4404 N Central Ave -- Great sandwich place by the same group further north</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>San Diego</strong><ul><li><a href=\"http://www.mikestacoclub.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Mike\'s Taco Club</a>, 5060 Newport Ave Ocean Beach -- Big fish tacos two blocks off the ocean beneath a tattoo parlor</li><li><a href=\"https://iloveazucar.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Azúcar</a> Patisserie, 4820 Newport Ave Ocean Beach -- Cuban-inspired pastries </li><li><a href=\"http://www.eppigbrewing.com/waterfront-biergarten\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Eppig Brewing Waterfront Biergarten</a>, 2817 Dickens St -- Good beers sitting by the marina</li><li><a href=\"https://www.purebrewing.org/location/balboa-park/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pure Project Brewing Balboa Park Biergarten</a>, 2865 Fifth Ave -- Re-hydrate after walking through Balboa Park</li><li><a href=\"http://www.moderntimesbeer.com/tasting-room/point-loma\">Modern Times Lomaland Fermentorium</a>, 3725 Greenwood St -- 32 taps of great beer 10 minutes from the airport</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Nashville</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.biscuitlove.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Biscuit Love Gulch</a>, 316 11th Ave S -- Fun toppings on great buttermilk biscuits for breakfast</li><li><a href=\"https://barsovereign.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bar Sovereign</a>, 514 Rep. John Lewis Way S -- Fun speakeasy-ish bar south of the Broadway strip</li><li><a href=\"https://blackdynastyramen.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Black Dynasty Secret Ramen House</a>, pop-up that is moving from the back of Bar Sovereign to Bearded Iris\' new taproom</li><li><a href=\"https://hattieb.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Hattie B\'s Hot Chicken - Melrose</a>, 2222 8th Ave S -- Good hot chicken without a wait near Belmont University</li><li><a href=\"https://beardedirisbrewing.com/location/germantown/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bearded Iris Brewing</a>, 101 Van Buren St -- Original taproom with pool tables and a big patio</li><li><a href=\"https://www.variousartistsbrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Various Artists Brewing</a>, 1011 Elm Hill Pike -- Wide variety of beer styles; big patio; guest chefs working a big grill</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>New York City</strong><ul><li>Ted\'s</li><li>Craft &amp; Carry</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Southern Maine</strong><ul><li>ljl;j;j</li><li>ljljkljljk</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Best Restaurants and Bars of 2021... So Far','','inherit','closed','closed','','3596-revision-v1','','','2021-08-12 17:07:08','2021-08-12 22:07:08','',3596,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3603',0,'revision','',0),
(3604,1,'2021-08-12 17:07:36','2021-08-12 22:07:36','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It\'ll take travel guide books a while to catch up with <a href=\"https://www.nrn.com/fast-casual/datassential-more-10-us-restaurants-have-closed-permanently\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">all</a> <a href=\"https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-07/over-110-000-restaurants-have-closed-with-sector-in-free-fall\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the</a> restaurants and bars closures caused by the COVID lockdowns. To help fill that gap, here\'s a list of the best places I\'ve ate and drank at during my 2021 travels. I\'ll update this after each trip, so keep it bookmarked.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3046,\"width\":225,\"height\":179,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium is-resized\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7836-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7836-300x238.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3046\" width=\"225\" height=\"179\"/></a><figcaption>Sonoran Hot Dog</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tuscon</a></strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.yelp.com/biz/ruiz-hot-dogs-tucson\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Ruiz Hot Dogs</a> food truck 1140 S 6th Ave at W 22nd St -- It\'s all about the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonoran_hot_dog\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Sonoran hot dog</a></li><li><a href=\"https://www.tacorustico.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">El Taco Rustico</a>, 2281 N Oracle Rd -- Quesabirras and cabrito (goat) tacos.</li><li><a href=\"https://www.tacosapson.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tacos Apson</a>, 3501 S 12th Ave -- Mesquite-grilled beef rib tacos and a hass burro</li><li><a href=\"https://1912brewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">1912 Brewing Company</a>, 2045 N Forbes Blvd, Ste 105 -- 20 taps with a wide variety of styles</li><li><a href=\"https://www.pueblovidabrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pueblo Vida Brewing Company</a>, 115 E Broadway Blvd -- Best beers of the trip!</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Phoenix</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.pizzeriabianco.com/pizzeria-bianco-heritage-square\">Pizzeria Bianco</a>, 623 E Adams St -- Thin crust pizza a short drive from the airport</li><li><a href=\"https://www.pizzeriabianco.com/pane-bianco\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pane Bianco</a>, 4404 N Central Ave -- Great sandwich place by the same group further north</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>San Diego</strong><ul><li><a href=\"http://www.mikestacoclub.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Mike\'s Taco Club</a>, 5060 Newport Ave Ocean Beach -- Big fish tacos two blocks off the ocean beneath a tattoo parlor</li><li><a href=\"https://iloveazucar.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Azúcar</a> Patisserie, 4820 Newport Ave Ocean Beach -- Cuban-inspired pastries </li><li><a href=\"http://www.eppigbrewing.com/waterfront-biergarten\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Eppig Brewing Waterfront Biergarten</a>, 2817 Dickens St -- Good beers sitting by the marina</li><li><a href=\"https://www.purebrewing.org/location/balboa-park/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pure Project Brewing Balboa Park Biergarten</a>, 2865 Fifth Ave -- Re-hydrate after walking through Balboa Park</li><li><a href=\"http://www.moderntimesbeer.com/tasting-room/point-loma\">Modern Times Lomaland Fermentorium</a>, 3725 Greenwood St -- 32 taps of great beer 10 minutes from the airport</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Nashville</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.biscuitlove.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Biscuit Love Gulch</a>, 316 11th Ave S -- Fun toppings on great buttermilk biscuits for breakfast</li><li><a href=\"https://barsovereign.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bar Sovereign</a>, 514 Rep. John Lewis Way S -- Fun speakeasy-ish bar south of the Broadway strip</li><li><a href=\"https://blackdynastyramen.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Black Dynasty Secret Ramen House</a>, pop-up that is moving from the back of Bar Sovereign to Bearded Iris\' new taproom</li><li><a href=\"https://hattieb.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Hattie B\'s Hot Chicken - Melrose</a>, 2222 8th Ave S -- Good hot chicken without a wait near Belmont University</li><li><a href=\"https://beardedirisbrewing.com/location/germantown/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bearded Iris Brewing</a>, 101 Van Buren St -- Original taproom with pool tables and a big patio</li><li><a href=\"https://www.variousartistsbrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Various Artists Brewing</a>, 1011 Elm Hill Pike -- Wide variety of beer styles; big patio; guest chefs working a big grill</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>New York City</strong><ul><li>Ted\'s</li><li>Craft &amp; Carry</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Southern Maine</strong><ul><li>ljl;j;j</li><li>ljljkljljk</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Best Restaurants and Bars of 2021... So Far','','inherit','closed','closed','','3596-revision-v1','','','2021-08-12 17:07:36','2021-08-12 22:07:36','',3596,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3604',0,'revision','',0),
(3605,1,'2021-08-12 17:12:38','2021-08-12 22:12:38','','IMG_2942','','inherit','open','closed','','img_2942','','','2021-08-12 17:12:38','2021-08-12 22:12:38','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/IMG_2942.jpeg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(3607,1,'2021-08-14 09:05:17','2021-08-14 14:05:17','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It\'ll take travel guide books a while to catch up with <a href=\"https://www.nrn.com/fast-casual/datassential-more-10-us-restaurants-have-closed-permanently\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">all</a> <a href=\"https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-07/over-110-000-restaurants-have-closed-with-sector-in-free-fall\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the</a> restaurants and bars closures caused by the COVID lockdowns. To help fill that gap, here\'s a list of the best places I\'ve ate and drank at during my 2021 travels. I\'ll update this after each trip, so keep it bookmarked.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3046,\"width\":225,\"height\":179,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium is-resized\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7836-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7836-300x238.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3046\" width=\"225\" height=\"179\"/></a><figcaption>Sonoran Hot Dog</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tuscon</a></strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.yelp.com/biz/ruiz-hot-dogs-tucson\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Ruiz Hot Dogs</a> food truck 1140 S 6th Ave at W 22nd St -- It\'s all about the&nbsp;<a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonoran_hot_dog\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Sonoran hot dog</a></li><li><a href=\"https://www.tacorustico.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">El Taco Rustico</a>, 2281 N Oracle Rd -- Quesabirras and cabrito (goat) tacos.</li><li><a href=\"https://www.tacosapson.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tacos Apson</a>, 3501 S 12th Ave -- Mesquite-grilled beef rib tacos and a hass burro</li><li><a href=\"https://1912brewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">1912 Brewing Company</a>, 2045 N Forbes Blvd, Ste 105 -- 20 taps with a wide variety of styles</li><li><a href=\"https://www.pueblovidabrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pueblo Vida Brewing Company</a>, 115 E Broadway Blvd -- Best beers of the trip!</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Phoenix</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.pizzeriabianco.com/pizzeria-bianco-heritage-square\">Pizzeria Bianco</a>, 623 E Adams St -- Thin crust pizza a short drive from the airport</li><li><a href=\"https://www.pizzeriabianco.com/pane-bianco\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pane Bianco</a>, 4404 N Central Ave -- Great sandwich place by the same group further north</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3605,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/IMG_2942.jpeg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/IMG_2942-225x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3605\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>San Diego</strong><ul><li><a href=\"http://www.mikestacoclub.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Mike\'s Taco Club</a>, 5060 Newport Ave Ocean Beach -- Big fish tacos two blocks off the ocean beneath a tattoo parlor</li><li><a href=\"https://iloveazucar.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Azúcar</a>&nbsp;Patisserie, 4820 Newport Ave Ocean Beach -- Cuban-inspired pastries </li><li><a href=\"http://www.eppigbrewing.com/waterfront-biergarten\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Eppig Brewing Waterfront Biergarten</a>, 2817 Dickens St -- Good beers sitting by the marina</li><li><a href=\"https://www.purebrewing.org/location/balboa-park/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pure Project Brewing Balboa Park Biergarten</a>, 2865 Fifth Ave -- Re-hydrate after walking through Balboa Park</li><li><a href=\"http://www.moderntimesbeer.com/tasting-room/point-loma\">Modern Times Lomaland Fermentorium</a>, 3725 Greenwood St -- 32 taps of great beer 10 minutes from the airport</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Nashville</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.biscuitlove.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Biscuit Love Gulch</a>, 316 11th Ave S -- Fun toppings on great buttermilk biscuits for breakfast</li><li><a href=\"https://barsovereign.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bar Sovereign</a>, 514 Rep. John Lewis Way S -- Fun speakeasy-ish bar south of the Broadway strip</li><li><a href=\"https://blackdynastyramen.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Black Dynasty Secret Ramen House</a>, pop-up that is moving from the back of Bar Sovereign to Bearded Iris\' new taproom</li><li><a href=\"https://hattieb.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Hattie B\'s Hot Chicken - Melrose</a>, 2222 8th Ave S -- Good hot chicken without a wait near Belmont University</li><li><a href=\"https://beardedirisbrewing.com/location/germantown/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bearded Iris Brewing</a>, 101 Van Buren St -- Original taproom with pool tables and a big patio</li><li><a href=\"https://www.variousartistsbrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Various Artists Brewing</a>, 1011 Elm Hill Pike -- Wide variety of beer styles; big patio; guest chefs working a big grill</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>New York City</strong><ul><li>Ted\'s</li><li>Craft &amp; Carry</li><li>Dumpling place</li><li>Bagel place</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Southern Maine</strong><ul><li>ljl;j;j</li><li>ljljkljljk</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Best Restaurants and Bars of 2021... So Far','','inherit','closed','closed','','3596-revision-v1','','','2021-08-14 09:05:17','2021-08-14 14:05:17','',3596,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3607',0,'revision','',0),
(3608,1,'2021-08-14 09:09:54','2021-08-14 14:09:54','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It\'ll take travel guide books a while to catch up with <a href=\"https://www.nrn.com/fast-casual/datassential-more-10-us-restaurants-have-closed-permanently\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">all</a> <a href=\"https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-07/over-110-000-restaurants-have-closed-with-sector-in-free-fall\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the</a> restaurants and bars closures caused by the COVID lockdowns. To help fill that gap, here\'s a list of the best places I\'ve ate and drank at during my 2021 travels. I\'ll update this after each trip, so keep it bookmarked.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3046,\"width\":225,\"height\":179,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium is-resized\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7836-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7836-300x238.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3046\" width=\"225\" height=\"179\"/></a><figcaption>Sonoran Hot Dog</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tuscon</a></strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.yelp.com/biz/ruiz-hot-dogs-tucson\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Ruiz Hot Dogs</a> food truck 1140 S 6th Ave at W 22nd St -- It\'s all about the&nbsp;<a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonoran_hot_dog\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Sonoran hot dog</a></li><li><a href=\"https://www.tacorustico.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">El Taco Rustico</a>, 2281 N Oracle Rd -- Quesabirras and cabrito (goat) tacos.</li><li><a href=\"https://www.tacosapson.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tacos Apson</a>, 3501 S 12th Ave -- Mesquite-grilled beef rib tacos and a hass burro</li><li><a href=\"https://1912brewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">1912 Brewing Company</a>, 2045 N Forbes Blvd, Ste 105 -- 20 taps with a wide variety of styles</li><li><a href=\"https://www.pueblovidabrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pueblo Vida Brewing Company</a>, 115 E Broadway Blvd -- Best beers of the trip!</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Phoenix</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.pizzeriabianco.com/pizzeria-bianco-heritage-square\">Pizzeria Bianco</a>, 623 E Adams St -- Thin crust pizza a short drive from the airport</li><li><a href=\"https://www.pizzeriabianco.com/pane-bianco\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pane Bianco</a>, 4404 N Central Ave -- Great sandwich place by the same group further north</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3605,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/IMG_2942.jpeg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/IMG_2942-225x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3605\"/></a><figcaption><em>Harbor Side at Eppiq Brewing</em></figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>San Diego</strong><ul><li><a href=\"http://www.mikestacoclub.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Mike\'s Taco Club</a>, 5060 Newport Ave Ocean Beach -- Big fish tacos two blocks off the ocean beneath a tattoo parlor</li><li><a href=\"https://iloveazucar.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Azúcar</a>&nbsp;Patisserie, 4820 Newport Ave Ocean Beach -- Cuban-inspired pastries </li><li><a href=\"http://www.eppigbrewing.com/waterfront-biergarten\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Eppig Brewing Waterfront Biergarten</a>, 2817 Dickens St -- Good beers sitting by the marina</li><li><a href=\"https://www.purebrewing.org/location/balboa-park/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pure Project Brewing Balboa Park Biergarten</a>, 2865 Fifth Ave -- Re-hydrate after walking through Balboa Park</li><li><a href=\"http://www.moderntimesbeer.com/tasting-room/point-loma\">Modern Times Lomaland Fermentorium</a>, 3725 Greenwood St -- 32 taps of great beer 10 minutes from the airport</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Nashville</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.biscuitlove.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Biscuit Love Gulch</a>, 316 11th Ave S -- Fun toppings on great buttermilk biscuits for breakfast</li><li><a href=\"https://barsovereign.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bar Sovereign</a>, 514 Rep. John Lewis Way S -- Fun speakeasy-ish bar south of the Broadway strip</li><li><a href=\"https://blackdynastyramen.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Black Dynasty Secret Ramen House</a>, pop-up that is moving from the back of Bar Sovereign to Bearded Iris\' new taproom</li><li><a href=\"https://hattieb.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Hattie B\'s Hot Chicken - Melrose</a>, 2222 8th Ave S -- Good hot chicken without a wait near Belmont University</li><li><a href=\"https://beardedirisbrewing.com/location/germantown/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bearded Iris Brewing</a>, 101 Van Buren St -- Original taproom with pool tables and a big patio</li><li><a href=\"https://www.variousartistsbrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Various Artists Brewing</a>, 1011 Elm Hill Pike -- Wide variety of beer styles; big patio; guest chefs working a big grill</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>New York City</strong><ul><li>Ted\'s</li><li>Craft &amp; Carry</li><li>Dumpling place</li><li>Bagel place</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Southern Maine</strong><ul><li>ljl;j;j</li><li>ljljkljljk</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Best Restaurants and Bars of 2021... So Far','','inherit','closed','closed','','3596-revision-v1','','','2021-08-14 09:09:54','2021-08-14 14:09:54','',3596,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3608',0,'revision','',0),
(3609,1,'2021-08-14 09:10:35','2021-08-14 14:10:35','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It\'ll take travel guide books a while to catch up with <a href=\"https://www.nrn.com/fast-casual/datassential-more-10-us-restaurants-have-closed-permanently\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">all</a> <a href=\"https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-07/over-110-000-restaurants-have-closed-with-sector-in-free-fall\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the</a> restaurants and bars closures caused by the COVID lockdowns. To help fill that gap, here\'s a list of the best places I\'ve ate and drank at during my 2021 travels. I\'ll update this after each trip, so keep it bookmarked.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3046,\"width\":225,\"height\":179,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium is-resized\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7836-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7836-300x238.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3046\" width=\"225\" height=\"179\"/></a><figcaption><em>Sonoran Hot Dog</em></figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tuscon</a></strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.yelp.com/biz/ruiz-hot-dogs-tucson\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Ruiz Hot Dogs</a> food truck 1140 S 6th Ave at W 22nd St -- It\'s all about the&nbsp;<a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonoran_hot_dog\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Sonoran hot dog</a></li><li><a href=\"https://www.tacorustico.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">El Taco Rustico</a>, 2281 N Oracle Rd -- Quesabirras and cabrito (goat) tacos.</li><li><a href=\"https://www.tacosapson.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tacos Apson</a>, 3501 S 12th Ave -- Mesquite-grilled beef rib tacos and a hass burro</li><li><a href=\"https://1912brewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">1912 Brewing Company</a>, 2045 N Forbes Blvd, Ste 105 -- 20 taps with a wide variety of styles</li><li><a href=\"https://www.pueblovidabrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pueblo Vida Brewing Company</a>, 115 E Broadway Blvd -- Best beers of the trip!</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Phoenix</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.pizzeriabianco.com/pizzeria-bianco-heritage-square\">Pizzeria Bianco</a>, 623 E Adams St -- Thin crust pizza a short drive from the airport</li><li><a href=\"https://www.pizzeriabianco.com/pane-bianco\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pane Bianco</a>, 4404 N Central Ave -- Great sandwich place by the same group further north</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3605,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/IMG_2942.jpeg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/IMG_2942-225x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3605\"/></a><figcaption><em>Eppiq Brewing</em></figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>San Diego</strong><ul><li><a href=\"http://www.mikestacoclub.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Mike\'s Taco Club</a>, 5060 Newport Ave Ocean Beach -- Big fish tacos two blocks off the ocean beneath a tattoo parlor</li><li><a href=\"https://iloveazucar.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Azúcar</a>&nbsp;Patisserie, 4820 Newport Ave Ocean Beach -- Cuban-inspired pastries </li><li><a href=\"http://www.eppigbrewing.com/waterfront-biergarten\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Eppig Brewing Waterfront Biergarten</a>, 2817 Dickens St -- Good beers sitting by the marina</li><li><a href=\"https://www.purebrewing.org/location/balboa-park/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pure Project Brewing Balboa Park Biergarten</a>, 2865 Fifth Ave -- Re-hydrate after walking through Balboa Park</li><li><a href=\"http://www.moderntimesbeer.com/tasting-room/point-loma\">Modern Times Lomaland Fermentorium</a>, 3725 Greenwood St -- 32 taps of great beer 10 minutes from the airport</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Nashville</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.biscuitlove.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Biscuit Love Gulch</a>, 316 11th Ave S -- Fun toppings on great buttermilk biscuits for breakfast</li><li><a href=\"https://barsovereign.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bar Sovereign</a>, 514 Rep. John Lewis Way S -- Fun speakeasy-ish bar south of the Broadway strip</li><li><a href=\"https://blackdynastyramen.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Black Dynasty Secret Ramen House</a>, pop-up that is moving from the back of Bar Sovereign to Bearded Iris\' new taproom</li><li><a href=\"https://hattieb.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Hattie B\'s Hot Chicken - Melrose</a>, 2222 8th Ave S -- Good hot chicken without a wait near Belmont University</li><li><a href=\"https://beardedirisbrewing.com/location/germantown/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bearded Iris Brewing</a>, 101 Van Buren St -- Original taproom with pool tables and a big patio</li><li><a href=\"https://www.variousartistsbrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Various Artists Brewing</a>, 1011 Elm Hill Pike -- Wide variety of beer styles; big patio; guest chefs working a big grill</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>New York City</strong><ul><li>Ted\'s</li><li>Craft &amp; Carry</li><li>Dumpling place</li><li>Bagel place</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Southern Maine</strong><ul><li>ljl;j;j</li><li>ljljkljljk</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Best Restaurants and Bars of 2021... So Far','','inherit','closed','closed','','3596-revision-v1','','','2021-08-14 09:10:35','2021-08-14 14:10:35','',3596,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3609',0,'revision','',0),
(3611,1,'2021-08-14 09:15:58','2021-08-14 14:15:58','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It\'ll take travel guide books a while to catch up with <a href=\"https://www.nrn.com/fast-casual/datassential-more-10-us-restaurants-have-closed-permanently\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">all</a> <a href=\"https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-07/over-110-000-restaurants-have-closed-with-sector-in-free-fall\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the</a> restaurants and bars closures caused by the COVID lockdowns. To help fill that gap, here\'s a list of the best places I\'ve ate and drank at during my 2021 travels. I\'ll update this after each trip, so keep it bookmarked.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3046,\"width\":225,\"height\":179,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium is-resized\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7836-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7836-300x238.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3046\" width=\"225\" height=\"179\"/></a><figcaption><em>Sonoran Hot Dog</em></figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tuscon</a></strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.yelp.com/biz/ruiz-hot-dogs-tucson\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Ruiz Hot Dogs</a> food truck 1140 S 6th Ave at W 22nd St -- It\'s all about the&nbsp;<a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonoran_hot_dog\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Sonoran hot dog</a></li><li><a href=\"https://www.tacorustico.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">El Taco Rustico</a>, 2281 N Oracle Rd -- Quesabirras and cabrito (goat) tacos.</li><li><a href=\"https://www.tacosapson.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tacos Apson</a>, 3501 S 12th Ave -- Mesquite-grilled beef rib tacos and a hass burro</li><li><a href=\"https://1912brewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">1912 Brewing Company</a>, 2045 N Forbes Blvd, Ste 105 -- 20 taps with a wide variety of styles</li><li><a href=\"https://www.pueblovidabrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pueblo Vida Brewing Company</a>, 115 E Broadway Blvd -- Best beers of the trip!</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Phoenix</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.pizzeriabianco.com/pizzeria-bianco-heritage-square\">Pizzeria Bianco</a>, 623 E Adams St -- Thin crust pizza a short drive from the airport</li><li><a href=\"https://www.pizzeriabianco.com/pane-bianco\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pane Bianco</a>, 4404 N Central Ave -- Great sandwich place by the same group further north</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3605,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/IMG_2942.jpeg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/IMG_2942-225x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3605\"/></a><figcaption><em>Eppiq Brewing</em></figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>San Diego</strong><ul><li><a href=\"http://www.mikestacoclub.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Mike\'s Taco Club</a>, 5060 Newport Ave Ocean Beach -- Big fish tacos two blocks off the ocean beneath a tattoo parlor</li><li><a href=\"https://iloveazucar.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Azúcar</a>&nbsp;Patisserie, 4820 Newport Ave Ocean Beach -- Cuban-inspired pastries </li><li><a href=\"http://www.eppigbrewing.com/waterfront-biergarten\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Eppig Brewing Waterfront Biergarten</a>, 2817 Dickens St -- Good beers sitting by the marina</li><li><a href=\"https://www.purebrewing.org/location/balboa-park/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pure Project Brewing Balboa Park Biergarten</a>, 2865 Fifth Ave -- Re-hydrate after walking through Balboa Park</li><li><a href=\"http://www.moderntimesbeer.com/tasting-room/point-loma\">Modern Times Lomaland Fermentorium</a>, 3725 Greenwood St -- 32 taps of great beer 10 minutes from the airport</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3610,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/IMG_3081.jpeg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/IMG_3081-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3610\"/></a><figcaption><em>Bearded Iris Brewing</em></figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Nashville</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.biscuitlove.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Biscuit Love Gulch</a>, 316 11th Ave S -- Fun toppings on great buttermilk biscuits for breakfast</li><li><a href=\"https://barsovereign.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bar Sovereign</a>, 514 Rep. John Lewis Way S -- Fun speakeasy-ish bar south of the Broadway strip</li><li><a href=\"https://blackdynastyramen.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Black Dynasty Secret Ramen House</a>, pop-up that is moving from the back of Bar Sovereign to Bearded Iris\' new taproom</li><li><a href=\"https://hattieb.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Hattie B\'s Hot Chicken - Melrose</a>, 2222 8th Ave S -- Good hot chicken without a wait near Belmont University</li><li><a href=\"https://beardedirisbrewing.com/location/germantown/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bearded Iris Brewing</a>, 101 Van Buren St -- Original taproom with pool tables and a big patio</li><li><a href=\"https://www.variousartistsbrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Various Artists Brewing</a>, 1011 Elm Hill Pike -- Wide variety of beer styles; big patio; guest chefs working a big grill</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>New York City</strong><ul><li>Ted\'s</li><li>Craft &amp; Carry</li><li>Dumpling place</li><li>Bagel place</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Southern Maine</strong><ul><li>ljl;j;j</li><li>ljljkljljk</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Best Restaurants and Bars of 2021... So Far','','inherit','closed','closed','','3596-revision-v1','','','2021-08-14 09:15:58','2021-08-14 14:15:58','',3596,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3611',0,'revision','',0),
(3612,1,'2021-08-14 09:17:20','2021-08-14 14:17:20','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It\'ll take travel guide books a while to catch up with <a href=\"https://www.nrn.com/fast-casual/datassential-more-10-us-restaurants-have-closed-permanently\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">all</a> <a href=\"https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-07/over-110-000-restaurants-have-closed-with-sector-in-free-fall\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the</a> restaurants and bars closures caused by the COVID lockdowns. To help fill that gap, here\'s a list of the best places I\'ve ate and drank at during my 2021 travels. I\'ll update this after each trip, so keep it bookmarked.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3046,\"width\":225,\"height\":179,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium is-resized\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7836-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7836-300x238.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3046\" width=\"225\" height=\"179\"/></a><figcaption><em>Sonoran Hot Dog</em></figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tuscon</a></strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.yelp.com/biz/ruiz-hot-dogs-tucson\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Ruiz Hot Dogs</a> food truck 1140 S 6th Ave at W 22nd St -- It\'s all about the&nbsp;<a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonoran_hot_dog\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Sonoran hot dog</a></li><li><a href=\"https://www.tacorustico.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">El Taco Rustico</a>, 2281 N Oracle Rd -- Quesabirras and cabrito (goat) tacos.</li><li><a href=\"https://www.tacosapson.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tacos Apson</a>, 3501 S 12th Ave -- Mesquite-grilled beef rib tacos and a hass burro</li><li><a href=\"https://1912brewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">1912 Brewing Company</a>, 2045 N Forbes Blvd, Ste 105 -- 20 taps with a wide variety of styles</li><li><a href=\"https://www.pueblovidabrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pueblo Vida Brewing Company</a>, 115 E Broadway Blvd -- Best beers of the trip!</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Phoenix</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.pizzeriabianco.com/pizzeria-bianco-heritage-square\">Pizzeria Bianco</a>, 623 E Adams St -- Thin crust pizza a short drive from the airport</li><li><a href=\"https://www.pizzeriabianco.com/pane-bianco\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pane Bianco</a>, 4404 N Central Ave -- Great sandwich place by the same group further north</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3605,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/IMG_2942.jpeg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/IMG_2942-225x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3605\"/></a><figcaption><em>Eppiq Brewing</em></figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>San Diego</strong><ul><li><a href=\"http://www.mikestacoclub.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Mike\'s Taco Club</a>, 5060 Newport Ave Ocean Beach -- Big fish tacos two blocks off the ocean beneath a tattoo parlor</li><li><a href=\"https://iloveazucar.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Azúcar</a>&nbsp;Patisserie, 4820 Newport Ave Ocean Beach -- Cuban-inspired pastries </li><li><a href=\"http://www.eppigbrewing.com/waterfront-biergarten\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Eppig Brewing Waterfront Biergarten</a>, 2817 Dickens St -- Good beers sitting by the marina</li><li><a href=\"https://www.purebrewing.org/location/balboa-park/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pure Project Brewing Balboa Park Biergarten</a>, 2865 Fifth Ave -- Re-hydrate after walking through Balboa Park</li><li><a href=\"http://www.moderntimesbeer.com/tasting-room/point-loma\">Modern Times Lomaland Fermentorium</a>, 3725 Greenwood St -- 32 taps of great beer 10 minutes from the airport</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3610,\"width\":249,\"height\":249,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium is-resized\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/IMG_3081.jpeg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/IMG_3081-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3610\" width=\"249\" height=\"249\"/></a><figcaption><em>Bearded Iris Brewing</em></figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Nashville</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.biscuitlove.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Biscuit Love Gulch</a>, 316 11th Ave S -- Fun toppings on great buttermilk biscuits for breakfast</li><li><a href=\"https://barsovereign.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bar Sovereign</a>, 514 Rep. John Lewis Way S -- Fun speakeasy-ish bar south of the Broadway strip</li><li><a href=\"https://blackdynastyramen.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Black Dynasty Secret Ramen House</a>, pop-up that is moving from the back of Bar Sovereign to Bearded Iris\' new taproom</li><li><a href=\"https://hattieb.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Hattie B\'s Hot Chicken - Melrose</a>, 2222 8th Ave S -- Good hot chicken without a wait near Belmont University</li><li><a href=\"https://beardedirisbrewing.com/location/germantown/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bearded Iris Brewing</a>, 101 Van Buren St -- Original taproom with pool tables and a big patio</li><li><a href=\"https://www.variousartistsbrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Various Artists Brewing</a>, 1011 Elm Hill Pike -- Wide variety of beer styles; big patio; guest chefs working a big grill</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>New York City</strong><ul><li>Ted\'s</li><li>Craft &amp; Carry</li><li>Dumpling place</li><li>Bagel place</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Southern Maine</strong><ul><li>ljl;j;j</li><li>ljljkljljk</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Best Restaurants and Bars of 2021... So Far','','inherit','closed','closed','','3596-revision-v1','','','2021-08-14 09:17:20','2021-08-14 14:17:20','',3596,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3612',0,'revision','',0),
(3613,1,'2021-08-14 09:20:15','2021-08-14 14:20:15','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It\'ll take travel guide books a while to catch up with <a href=\"https://www.nrn.com/fast-casual/datassential-more-10-us-restaurants-have-closed-permanently\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">all</a> <a href=\"https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-07/over-110-000-restaurants-have-closed-with-sector-in-free-fall\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the</a> restaurants and bars closures caused by the COVID lockdowns. To help fill that gap, here\'s a list of the best places I\'ve ate and drank at during my 2021 travels. I\'ll update this after each trip, so keep it bookmarked.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3046,\"width\":225,\"height\":179,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium is-resized\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7836-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7836-300x238.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3046\" width=\"225\" height=\"179\"/></a><figcaption><em>Sonoran Hot Dog</em></figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tuscon</a></strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.yelp.com/biz/ruiz-hot-dogs-tucson\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Ruiz Hot Dogs</a> food truck 1140 S 6th Ave at W 22nd St -- It\'s all about the&nbsp;<a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonoran_hot_dog\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Sonoran hot dog</a></li><li><a href=\"https://www.tacorustico.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">El Taco Rustico</a>, 2281 N Oracle Rd -- Quesabirras and cabrito (goat) tacos.</li><li><a href=\"https://www.tacosapson.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tacos Apson</a>, 3501 S 12th Ave -- Mesquite-grilled beef rib tacos and a hass burro</li><li><a href=\"https://1912brewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">1912 Brewing Company</a>, 2045 N Forbes Blvd, Ste 105 -- 20 taps with a wide variety of styles</li><li><a href=\"https://www.pueblovidabrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pueblo Vida Brewing Company</a>, 115 E Broadway Blvd -- Best beers of the trip!</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Phoenix</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.pizzeriabianco.com/pizzeria-bianco-heritage-square\">Pizzeria Bianco</a>, 623 E Adams St -- Thin crust pizza a short drive from the airport</li><li><a href=\"https://www.pizzeriabianco.com/pane-bianco\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pane Bianco</a>, 4404 N Central Ave -- Great sandwich place by the same group further north</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3605,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/IMG_2942.jpeg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/IMG_2942-225x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3605\"/></a><figcaption><em>Eppiq Brewing</em></figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>San Diego</strong><ul><li><a href=\"http://www.mikestacoclub.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Mike\'s Taco Club</a>, 5060 Newport Ave Ocean Beach -- Big fish tacos two blocks off the ocean beneath a tattoo parlor</li><li><a href=\"https://iloveazucar.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Azúcar</a>&nbsp;Patisserie, 4820 Newport Ave Ocean Beach -- Cuban-inspired pastries </li><li><a href=\"http://www.eppigbrewing.com/waterfront-biergarten\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Eppig Brewing Waterfront Biergarten</a>, 2817 Dickens St -- Good beers sitting by the marina</li><li><a href=\"https://www.purebrewing.org/location/balboa-park/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pure Project Brewing Balboa Park Biergarten</a>, 2865 Fifth Ave -- Re-hydrate after walking through Balboa Park</li><li><a href=\"http://www.moderntimesbeer.com/tasting-room/point-loma\">Modern Times Lomaland Fermentorium</a>, 3725 Greenwood St -- 32 taps of great beer 10 minutes from the airport</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Nashville</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.biscuitlove.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Biscuit Love Gulch</a>, 316 11th Ave S -- Fun toppings on great buttermilk biscuits for breakfast</li><li><a href=\"https://barsovereign.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bar Sovereign</a>, 514 Rep. John Lewis Way S -- Fun speakeasy-ish bar south of the Broadway strip</li><li><a href=\"https://blackdynastyramen.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Black Dynasty Secret Ramen House</a>, pop-up that is moving from the back of Bar Sovereign to Bearded Iris\' new taproom</li><li><a href=\"https://hattieb.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Hattie B\'s Hot Chicken - Melrose</a>, 2222 8th Ave S -- Good hot chicken without a wait near Belmont University</li><li><a href=\"https://beardedirisbrewing.com/location/germantown/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bearded Iris Brewing</a>, 101 Van Buren St -- Original taproom with pool tables and a big patio</li><li><a href=\"https://www.variousartistsbrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Various Artists Brewing</a>, 1011 Elm Hill Pike -- Wide variety of beer styles; big patio; guest chefs working a big grill</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>New York City</strong><ul><li>Ted\'s</li><li>Craft &amp; Carry</li><li>Dumpling place</li><li>Bagel place</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Southern Maine</strong><ul><li>ljl;j;j</li><li>ljljkljljk</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Best Restaurants and Bars of 2021... So Far','','inherit','closed','closed','','3596-revision-v1','','','2021-08-14 09:20:15','2021-08-14 14:20:15','',3596,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3613',0,'revision','',0),
(3614,1,'2021-08-14 09:28:54','2021-08-14 14:28:54','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It\'ll take travel guide books a while to catch up with <a href=\"https://www.nrn.com/fast-casual/datassential-more-10-us-restaurants-have-closed-permanently\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">all</a> <a href=\"https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-07/over-110-000-restaurants-have-closed-with-sector-in-free-fall\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the</a> restaurants and bars closures caused by the COVID lockdowns. To help fill that gap, here\'s a list of the best places I\'ve ate and drank at during my 2021 travels. I\'ll update this after each trip, so keep it bookmarked.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3046,\"width\":225,\"height\":179,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium is-resized\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7836-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7836-300x238.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3046\" width=\"225\" height=\"179\"/></a><figcaption><em>Sonoran Hot Dog</em></figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tuscon</a></strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.yelp.com/biz/ruiz-hot-dogs-tucson\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Ruiz Hot Dogs</a> food truck 1140 S 6th Ave at W 22nd St -- It\'s all about the&nbsp;<a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonoran_hot_dog\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Sonoran hot dog</a></li><li><a href=\"https://www.tacorustico.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">El Taco Rustico</a>, 2281 N Oracle Rd -- Quesabirras and cabrito (goat) tacos.</li><li><a href=\"https://www.tacosapson.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tacos Apson</a>, 3501 S 12th Ave -- Mesquite-grilled beef rib tacos and a hass burro</li><li><a href=\"https://1912brewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">1912 Brewing Company</a>, 2045 N Forbes Blvd, Ste 105 -- 20 taps with a wide variety of styles</li><li><a href=\"https://www.pueblovidabrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pueblo Vida Brewing Company</a>, 115 E Broadway Blvd -- Best beers of the trip!</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Phoenix</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.pizzeriabianco.com/pizzeria-bianco-heritage-square\">Pizzeria Bianco</a>, 623 E Adams St -- Thin crust pizza a short drive from the airport</li><li><a href=\"https://www.pizzeriabianco.com/pane-bianco\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pane Bianco</a>, 4404 N Central Ave -- Great sandwich place by the same group further north</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3605,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/IMG_2942.jpeg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/IMG_2942-225x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3605\"/></a><figcaption><em>Eppiq Brewing</em></figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>San Diego</strong><ul><li><a href=\"http://www.mikestacoclub.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Mike\'s Taco Club</a>, 5060 Newport Ave Ocean Beach -- Big fish tacos two blocks off the ocean beneath a tattoo parlor</li><li><a href=\"https://iloveazucar.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Azúcar</a>&nbsp;Patisserie, 4820 Newport Ave Ocean Beach -- Cuban-inspired pastries </li><li><a href=\"http://www.eppigbrewing.com/waterfront-biergarten\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Eppig Brewing Waterfront Biergarten</a>, 2817 Dickens St -- Good beers sitting by the marina</li><li><a href=\"https://www.purebrewing.org/location/balboa-park/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pure Project Brewing Balboa Park Biergarten</a>, 2865 Fifth Ave -- Re-hydrate after walking through Balboa Park</li><li><a href=\"http://www.moderntimesbeer.com/tasting-room/point-loma\">Modern Times Lomaland Fermentorium</a>, 3725 Greenwood St -- 32 taps of great beer 10 minutes from the airport</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Nashville</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.biscuitlove.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Biscuit Love Gulch</a>, 316 11th Ave S -- Fun toppings on great buttermilk biscuits for breakfast</li><li><a href=\"https://barsovereign.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bar Sovereign</a>, 514 Rep. John Lewis Way S -- Fun speakeasy-ish bar south of the Broadway strip</li><li><a href=\"https://blackdynastyramen.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Black Dynasty Secret Ramen House</a>, pop-up that is moving from the back of Bar Sovereign to Bearded Iris\' new taproom</li><li><a href=\"https://hattieb.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Hattie B\'s Hot Chicken - Melrose</a>, 2222 8th Ave S -- Good hot chicken without a wait near Belmont University</li><li><a href=\"https://beardedirisbrewing.com/location/germantown/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bearded Iris Brewing</a>, 101 Van Buren St -- Original taproom with pool tables and a big patio</li><li><a href=\"https://www.variousartistsbrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Various Artists Brewing</a>, 1011 Elm Hill Pike -- Wide variety of beer styles; big patio; guest chefs working a big grill</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>New York City</strong><ul><li>Ted\'s</li><li>Craft &amp; Carry</li><li>Dumpling place</li><li>Bagel place</li><li>Peep show ramen</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Southern Maine</strong><ul><li>Bob\'s Clam Hut</li><li>The Shop</li><li>Oxbow</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Best Restaurants and Bars of 2021... So Far','','inherit','closed','closed','','3596-revision-v1','','','2021-08-14 09:28:54','2021-08-14 14:28:54','',3596,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3614',0,'revision','',0),
(3615,1,'2021-08-14 09:45:26','2021-08-14 14:45:26','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It\'ll take travel guide books a while to catch up with <a href=\"https://www.nrn.com/fast-casual/datassential-more-10-us-restaurants-have-closed-permanently\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">all</a> <a href=\"https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-07/over-110-000-restaurants-have-closed-with-sector-in-free-fall\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the</a> restaurants and bars closures caused by the COVID lockdowns. To help fill that gap, here\'s a list of the best places I\'ve ate and drank at during my 2021 travels. I\'ll update this after each trip, so keep it bookmarked.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3046,\"width\":225,\"height\":179,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium is-resized\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7836-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7836-300x238.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3046\" width=\"225\" height=\"179\"/></a><figcaption><em>Sonoran Hot Dog</em></figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tuscon</a></strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.yelp.com/biz/ruiz-hot-dogs-tucson\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Ruiz Hot Dogs</a> food truck 1140 S 6th Ave at W 22nd St -- It\'s all about the&nbsp;<a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonoran_hot_dog\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Sonoran hot dog</a></li><li><a href=\"https://www.tacorustico.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">El Taco Rustico</a>, 2281 N Oracle Rd -- Quesabirras and cabrito (goat) tacos.</li><li><a href=\"https://www.tacosapson.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tacos Apson</a>, 3501 S 12th Ave -- Mesquite-grilled beef rib tacos and a hass burro</li><li><a href=\"https://1912brewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">1912 Brewing Company</a>, 2045 N Forbes Blvd, Ste 105 -- 20 taps with a wide variety of styles</li><li><a href=\"https://www.pueblovidabrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pueblo Vida Brewing Company</a>, 115 E Broadway Blvd -- Best beers of the trip!</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Phoenix</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.pizzeriabianco.com/pizzeria-bianco-heritage-square\">Pizzeria Bianco</a>, 623 E Adams St -- Thin crust pizza a short drive from the airport</li><li><a href=\"https://www.pizzeriabianco.com/pane-bianco\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pane Bianco</a>, 4404 N Central Ave -- Great sandwich place by the same group further north</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3605,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/IMG_2942.jpeg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/IMG_2942-225x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3605\"/></a><figcaption><em>Eppiq Brewing</em></figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>San Diego</strong><ul><li><a href=\"http://www.mikestacoclub.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Mike\'s Taco Club</a>, 5060 Newport Ave Ocean Beach -- Big fish tacos two blocks off the ocean beneath a tattoo parlor</li><li><a href=\"https://iloveazucar.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Azúcar</a>&nbsp;Patisserie, 4820 Newport Ave Ocean Beach -- Cuban-inspired pastries </li><li><a href=\"http://www.eppigbrewing.com/waterfront-biergarten\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Eppig Brewing Waterfront Biergarten</a>, 2817 Dickens St -- Good beers sitting by the marina</li><li><a href=\"https://www.purebrewing.org/location/balboa-park/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pure Project Brewing Balboa Park Biergarten</a>, 2865 Fifth Ave -- Re-hydrate after walking through Balboa Park</li><li><a href=\"http://www.moderntimesbeer.com/tasting-room/point-loma\">Modern Times Lomaland Fermentorium</a>, 3725 Greenwood St -- 32 taps of great beer 10 minutes from the airport</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Nashville</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.biscuitlove.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Biscuit Love Gulch</a>, 316 11th Ave S -- Fun toppings on great buttermilk biscuits for breakfast</li><li><a href=\"https://barsovereign.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bar Sovereign</a>, 514 Rep. John Lewis Way S -- Fun speakeasy-ish bar south of the Broadway strip</li><li><a href=\"https://blackdynastyramen.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Black Dynasty Secret Ramen House</a>, pop-up that is moving from the back of Bar Sovereign to Bearded Iris\' new taproom</li><li><a href=\"https://hattieb.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Hattie B\'s Hot Chicken - Melrose</a>, 2222 8th Ave S -- Good hot chicken without a wait near Belmont University</li><li><a href=\"https://beardedirisbrewing.com/location/germantown/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bearded Iris Brewing</a>, 101 Van Buren St -- Original taproom with pool tables and a big patio</li><li><a href=\"https://www.variousartistsbrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Various Artists Brewing</a>, 1011 Elm Hill Pike -- Wide variety of beer styles; big patio; guest chefs working a big grill</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>New York City</strong><ul><li><a href=\"http://www.shujiaofuzhou.com/\">Shu Jiao Fu Zhou</a>, 118 Eldridge St, Chinatown -- Phenomenal dumplings in a dumpy looking corner joint</li><li></li><li>Ted\'s</li><li>Craft &amp; Carry</li><li>Dumpling place</li><li>Bagel place</li><li>Peep show ramen</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Southern Maine</strong><ul><li>Bob\'s Clam Hut</li><li>The Shop</li><li>Oxbow</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Best Restaurants and Bars of 2021... So Far','','inherit','closed','closed','','3596-revision-v1','','','2021-08-14 09:45:26','2021-08-14 14:45:26','',3596,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3615',0,'revision','',0),
(3616,1,'2021-08-14 09:58:33','2021-08-14 14:58:33','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It\'ll take travel guide books a while to catch up with <a href=\"https://www.nrn.com/fast-casual/datassential-more-10-us-restaurants-have-closed-permanently\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">all</a> <a href=\"https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-07/over-110-000-restaurants-have-closed-with-sector-in-free-fall\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the</a> restaurants and bars closures caused by the COVID lockdowns. To help fill that gap, here\'s a list of the best places I\'ve ate and drank at during my 2021 travels. I\'ll update this after each trip, so keep it bookmarked.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3046,\"width\":225,\"height\":179,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium is-resized\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7836-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7836-300x238.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3046\" width=\"225\" height=\"179\"/></a><figcaption><em>Sonoran Hot Dog</em></figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tuscon</a></strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.yelp.com/biz/ruiz-hot-dogs-tucson\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Ruiz Hot Dogs</a> food truck 1140 S 6th Ave at W 22nd St -- It\'s all about the&nbsp;<a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonoran_hot_dog\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Sonoran hot dog</a></li><li><a href=\"https://www.tacorustico.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">El Taco Rustico</a>, 2281 N Oracle Rd -- Quesabirras and cabrito (goat) tacos.</li><li><a href=\"https://www.tacosapson.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tacos Apson</a>, 3501 S 12th Ave -- Mesquite-grilled beef rib tacos and a hass burro</li><li><a href=\"https://1912brewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">1912 Brewing Company</a>, 2045 N Forbes Blvd, Ste 105 -- 20 taps with a wide variety of styles</li><li><a href=\"https://www.pueblovidabrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pueblo Vida Brewing Company</a>, 115 E Broadway Blvd -- Best beers of the trip!</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Phoenix</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.pizzeriabianco.com/pizzeria-bianco-heritage-square\">Pizzeria Bianco</a>, 623 E Adams St -- Thin crust pizza a short drive from the airport</li><li><a href=\"https://www.pizzeriabianco.com/pane-bianco\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pane Bianco</a>, 4404 N Central Ave -- Great sandwich place by the same group further north</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3605,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/IMG_2942.jpeg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/IMG_2942-225x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3605\"/></a><figcaption><em>Eppiq Brewing</em></figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>San Diego</strong><ul><li><a href=\"http://www.mikestacoclub.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Mike\'s Taco Club</a>, 5060 Newport Ave Ocean Beach -- Big fish tacos two blocks off the ocean beneath a tattoo parlor</li><li><a href=\"https://iloveazucar.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Azúcar</a>&nbsp;Patisserie, 4820 Newport Ave Ocean Beach -- Cuban-inspired pastries </li><li><a href=\"http://www.eppigbrewing.com/waterfront-biergarten\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Eppig Brewing Waterfront Biergarten</a>, 2817 Dickens St -- Good beers sitting by the marina</li><li><a href=\"https://www.purebrewing.org/location/balboa-park/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pure Project Brewing Balboa Park Biergarten</a>, 2865 Fifth Ave -- Re-hydrate after walking through Balboa Park</li><li><a href=\"http://www.moderntimesbeer.com/tasting-room/point-loma\">Modern Times Lomaland Fermentorium</a>, 3725 Greenwood St -- 32 taps of great beer 10 minutes from the airport</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Nashville</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.biscuitlove.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Biscuit Love Gulch</a>, 316 11th Ave S -- Fun toppings on great buttermilk biscuits for breakfast</li><li><a href=\"https://barsovereign.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bar Sovereign</a>, 514 Rep. John Lewis Way S -- Fun speakeasy-ish bar south of the Broadway strip</li><li><a href=\"https://blackdynastyramen.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Black Dynasty Secret Ramen House</a>, pop-up that is moving from the back of Bar Sovereign to Bearded Iris\' new taproom</li><li><a href=\"https://hattieb.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Hattie B\'s Hot Chicken - Melrose</a>, 2222 8th Ave S -- Good hot chicken without a wait near Belmont University</li><li><a href=\"https://beardedirisbrewing.com/location/germantown/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bearded Iris Brewing</a>, 101 Van Buren St -- Original taproom with pool tables and a big patio</li><li><a href=\"https://www.variousartistsbrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Various Artists Brewing</a>, 1011 Elm Hill Pike -- Wide variety of beer styles; big patio; guest chefs working a big grill</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>New York City</strong><ul><li><a href=\"http://www.shujiaofuzhou.com/\">Shu Jiao Fu Zhou</a>, 118 Eldridge St, Chinatown -- Phenomenal dumplings in a dumpy looking corner joint</li><li>Ichiran, 132 W 31st St, </li><li>Ted\'s Corner Tavern, 523 3rd Ave (at 35th St), Murray Hill</li><li>Craft &amp; Carry</li></ul><ul><li>Peep show ramen</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Southern Maine</strong><ul><li>Bob\'s Clam Hut</li><li>The Shop</li><li>Oxbow</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Best Restaurants and Bars of 2021... So Far','','inherit','closed','closed','','3596-revision-v1','','','2021-08-14 09:58:33','2021-08-14 14:58:33','',3596,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3616',0,'revision','',0),
(3617,1,'2021-08-14 10:07:46','2021-08-14 15:07:46','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It\'ll take travel guide books a while to catch up with <a href=\"https://www.nrn.com/fast-casual/datassential-more-10-us-restaurants-have-closed-permanently\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">all</a> <a href=\"https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-07/over-110-000-restaurants-have-closed-with-sector-in-free-fall\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the</a> restaurants and bars closures caused by the COVID lockdowns. To help fill that gap, here\'s a list of the best places I\'ve ate and drank at during my 2021 travels. I\'ll update this after each trip, so keep it bookmarked.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3046,\"width\":225,\"height\":179,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium is-resized\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7836-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7836-300x238.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3046\" width=\"225\" height=\"179\"/></a><figcaption><em>Sonoran Hot Dog</em></figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tuscon</a></strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.yelp.com/biz/ruiz-hot-dogs-tucson\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Ruiz Hot Dogs</a> food truck 1140 S 6th Ave at W 22nd St -- It\'s all about the&nbsp;<a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonoran_hot_dog\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Sonoran hot dog</a></li><li><a href=\"https://www.tacorustico.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">El Taco Rustico</a>, 2281 N Oracle Rd -- Quesabirras and cabrito (goat) tacos.</li><li><a href=\"https://www.tacosapson.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tacos Apson</a>, 3501 S 12th Ave -- Mesquite-grilled beef rib tacos and a hass burro</li><li><a href=\"https://1912brewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">1912 Brewing Company</a>, 2045 N Forbes Blvd, Ste 105 -- 20 taps with a wide variety of styles</li><li><a href=\"https://www.pueblovidabrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pueblo Vida Brewing Company</a>, 115 E Broadway Blvd -- Best beers of the trip!</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Phoenix</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.pizzeriabianco.com/pizzeria-bianco-heritage-square\">Pizzeria Bianco</a>, 623 E Adams St -- Thin crust pizza a short drive from the airport</li><li><a href=\"https://www.pizzeriabianco.com/pane-bianco\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pane Bianco</a>, 4404 N Central Ave -- Great sandwich place by the same group further north</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3605,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/IMG_2942.jpeg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/IMG_2942-225x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3605\"/></a><figcaption><em>Eppiq Brewing</em></figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>San Diego</strong><ul><li><a href=\"http://www.mikestacoclub.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Mike\'s Taco Club</a>, 5060 Newport Ave Ocean Beach -- Big fish tacos two blocks off the ocean beneath a tattoo parlor</li><li><a href=\"https://iloveazucar.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Azúcar</a>&nbsp;Patisserie, 4820 Newport Ave Ocean Beach -- Cuban-inspired pastries </li><li><a href=\"http://www.eppigbrewing.com/waterfront-biergarten\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Eppig Brewing Waterfront Biergarten</a>, 2817 Dickens St -- Good beers sitting by the marina</li><li><a href=\"https://www.purebrewing.org/location/balboa-park/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pure Project Brewing Balboa Park Biergarten</a>, 2865 Fifth Ave -- Re-hydrate after walking through Balboa Park</li><li><a href=\"http://www.moderntimesbeer.com/tasting-room/point-loma\">Modern Times Lomaland Fermentorium</a>, 3725 Greenwood St -- 32 taps of great beer 10 minutes from the airport</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Nashville</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.biscuitlove.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Biscuit Love Gulch</a>, 316 11th Ave S -- Fun toppings on great buttermilk biscuits for breakfast</li><li><a href=\"https://barsovereign.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bar Sovereign</a>, 514 Rep. John Lewis Way S -- Fun speakeasy-ish bar south of the Broadway strip</li><li><a href=\"https://blackdynastyramen.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Black Dynasty Secret Ramen House</a>, pop-up that is moving from the back of Bar Sovereign to Bearded Iris\' new taproom</li><li><a href=\"https://hattieb.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Hattie B\'s Hot Chicken - Melrose</a>, 2222 8th Ave S -- Good hot chicken without a wait near Belmont University</li><li><a href=\"https://beardedirisbrewing.com/location/germantown/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bearded Iris Brewing</a>, 101 Van Buren St -- Original taproom with pool tables and a big patio</li><li><a href=\"https://www.variousartistsbrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Various Artists Brewing</a>, 1011 Elm Hill Pike -- Wide variety of beer styles; big patio; guest chefs working a big grill</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>New York City</strong><ul><li><a href=\"http://www.shujiaofuzhou.com/\">Shu Jiao Fu Zhou</a>, 118 Eldridge St, Chinatown -- Phenomenal dumplings in a dumpy looking corner joint</li><li><a href=\"https://www.thehummuskitchen.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Hummus Kitchen</a>, 444 3rd Ave (at 31st St), Murray Hill --  Well-executed Middle-Eastern food</li><li><a href=\"https://www.craftandcarry.beer/murray-hill\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Craft + Carry - Murray Hill</a>, 440 3rd St (at 30th St) -- Excellent selection of NY craft beers on draft and in cans to-go</li><li><a href=\"https://www.tedscornertavern.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Ted\'s Corner Tavern</a>, 523 3rd Ave (at 35th St), Murray Hill</li><li> </li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Southern Maine</strong><ul><li>Bob\'s Clam Hut</li><li>The Shop</li><li>Oxbow</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Best Restaurants and Bars of 2021... So Far','','inherit','closed','closed','','3596-revision-v1','','','2021-08-14 10:07:46','2021-08-14 15:07:46','',3596,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3617',0,'revision','',0),
(3618,1,'2021-08-14 10:10:28','2021-08-14 15:10:28','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It\'ll take travel guide books a while to catch up with <a href=\"https://www.nrn.com/fast-casual/datassential-more-10-us-restaurants-have-closed-permanently\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">all</a> <a href=\"https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-07/over-110-000-restaurants-have-closed-with-sector-in-free-fall\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the</a> restaurants and bars closures caused by the COVID lockdowns. To help fill that gap, here\'s a list of the best places I\'ve ate and drank at during my 2021 travels. I\'ll update this after each trip, so keep it bookmarked.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3046,\"width\":225,\"height\":179,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium is-resized\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7836-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7836-300x238.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3046\" width=\"225\" height=\"179\"/></a><figcaption><em>Sonoran Hot Dog</em></figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tuscon</a></strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.yelp.com/biz/ruiz-hot-dogs-tucson\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Ruiz Hot Dogs</a> food truck 1140 S 6th Ave at W 22nd St -- It\'s all about the&nbsp;<a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonoran_hot_dog\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Sonoran hot dog</a></li><li><a href=\"https://www.tacorustico.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">El Taco Rustico</a>, 2281 N Oracle Rd -- Quesabirras and cabrito (goat) tacos.</li><li><a href=\"https://www.tacosapson.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tacos Apson</a>, 3501 S 12th Ave -- Mesquite-grilled beef rib tacos and a hass burro</li><li><a href=\"https://1912brewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">1912 Brewing Company</a>, 2045 N Forbes Blvd, Ste 105 -- 20 taps with a wide variety of styles</li><li><a href=\"https://www.pueblovidabrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pueblo Vida Brewing Company</a>, 115 E Broadway Blvd -- Best beers of the trip!</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Phoenix</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.pizzeriabianco.com/pizzeria-bianco-heritage-square\">Pizzeria Bianco</a>, 623 E Adams St -- Thin crust pizza a short drive from the airport</li><li><a href=\"https://www.pizzeriabianco.com/pane-bianco\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pane Bianco</a>, 4404 N Central Ave -- Great sandwich place by the same group further north</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3605,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/IMG_2942.jpeg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/IMG_2942-225x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3605\"/></a><figcaption><em>Eppiq Brewing</em></figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>San Diego</strong><ul><li><a href=\"http://www.mikestacoclub.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Mike\'s Taco Club</a>, 5060 Newport Ave Ocean Beach -- Big fish tacos two blocks off the ocean beneath a tattoo parlor</li><li><a href=\"https://iloveazucar.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Azúcar</a>&nbsp;Patisserie, 4820 Newport Ave Ocean Beach -- Cuban-inspired pastries </li><li><a href=\"http://www.eppigbrewing.com/waterfront-biergarten\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Eppig Brewing Waterfront Biergarten</a>, 2817 Dickens St -- Good beers sitting by the marina</li><li><a href=\"https://www.purebrewing.org/location/balboa-park/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pure Project Brewing Balboa Park Biergarten</a>, 2865 Fifth Ave -- Re-hydrate after walking through Balboa Park</li><li><a href=\"http://www.moderntimesbeer.com/tasting-room/point-loma\">Modern Times Lomaland Fermentorium</a>, 3725 Greenwood St -- 32 taps of great beer 10 minutes from the airport</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Nashville</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.biscuitlove.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Biscuit Love Gulch</a>, 316 11th Ave S -- Fun toppings on great buttermilk biscuits for breakfast</li><li><a href=\"https://barsovereign.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bar Sovereign</a>, 514 Rep. John Lewis Way S -- Fun speakeasy-ish bar south of the Broadway strip</li><li><a href=\"https://blackdynastyramen.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Black Dynasty Secret Ramen House</a>, Pop-up that is moving from the back of Bar Sovereign to Bearded Iris\' new taproom</li><li><a href=\"https://hattieb.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Hattie B\'s Hot Chicken - Melrose</a>, 2222 8th Ave S -- Good hot chicken without a wait near Belmont University</li><li><a href=\"https://beardedirisbrewing.com/location/germantown/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bearded Iris Brewing</a>, 101 Van Buren St -- Original taproom with pool tables and a big patio</li><li><a href=\"https://www.variousartistsbrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Various Artists Brewing</a>, 1011 Elm Hill Pike -- Wide variety of beer styles; big patio; guest chefs working a big grill</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>New York City</strong><ul><li><a href=\"http://www.shujiaofuzhou.com/\">Shu Jiao Fu Zhou</a>, 118 Eldridge St, Chinatown -- Phenomenal dumplings in a non-descript corner joint</li><li><a href=\"https://www.thehummuskitchen.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Hummus Kitchen</a>, 444 3rd Ave (at 31st St), Murray Hill --  Well-executed Middle-Eastern food</li><li><a href=\"https://www.craftandcarry.beer/murray-hill\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Craft + Carry - Murray Hill</a>, 440 3rd St (at 30th St) -- Excellent selection of NY craft beers on draft and in cans to-go</li><li><a href=\"https://www.tedscornertavern.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Ted\'s Corner Tavern</a>, 523 3rd Ave (at 35th St), Murray Hill -- Comfortable neighborhood bar with a great beer selection</li><li> </li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Southern Maine</strong><ul><li>Bob\'s Clam Hut</li><li>The Shop</li><li>Oxbow</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Best Restaurants and Bars of 2021... So Far','','inherit','closed','closed','','3596-revision-v1','','','2021-08-14 10:10:28','2021-08-14 15:10:28','',3596,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3618',0,'revision','',0),
(3619,1,'2021-08-14 10:36:23','2021-08-14 15:36:23','','IMG_3409','','inherit','open','closed','','img_3409','','','2021-12-10 10:28:51','2021-12-10 15:28:51','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/IMG_3409.jpeg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(3620,1,'2021-08-14 10:37:25','2021-08-14 15:37:25','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It\'ll take travel guide books a while to catch up with <a href=\"https://www.nrn.com/fast-casual/datassential-more-10-us-restaurants-have-closed-permanently\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">all</a> <a href=\"https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-07/over-110-000-restaurants-have-closed-with-sector-in-free-fall\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the</a> restaurants and bars closures caused by the COVID lockdowns. To help fill that gap, here\'s a list of the best places I\'ve ate and drank at during my 2021 travels. I\'ll update this after each trip, so keep it bookmarked.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3046,\"width\":225,\"height\":179,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium is-resized\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7836-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7836-300x238.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3046\" width=\"225\" height=\"179\"/></a><figcaption><em>Sonoran Hot Dog</em></figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tuscon</a></strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.yelp.com/biz/ruiz-hot-dogs-tucson\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Ruiz Hot Dogs</a> food truck 1140 S 6th Ave at W 22nd St -- It\'s all about the&nbsp;<a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonoran_hot_dog\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Sonoran hot dog</a></li><li><a href=\"https://www.tacorustico.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">El Taco Rustico</a>, 2281 N Oracle Rd -- Quesabirras and cabrito (goat) tacos.</li><li><a href=\"https://www.tacosapson.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tacos Apson</a>, 3501 S 12th Ave -- Mesquite-grilled beef rib tacos and a hass burro</li><li><a href=\"https://1912brewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">1912 Brewing Company</a>, 2045 N Forbes Blvd, Ste 105 -- 20 taps with a wide variety of styles</li><li><a href=\"https://www.pueblovidabrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pueblo Vida Brewing Company</a>, 115 E Broadway Blvd -- Best beers of the trip!</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Phoenix</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.pizzeriabianco.com/pizzeria-bianco-heritage-square\">Pizzeria Bianco</a>, 623 E Adams St -- Thin crust pizza a short drive from the airport</li><li><a href=\"https://www.pizzeriabianco.com/pane-bianco\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pane Bianco</a>, 4404 N Central Ave -- Great sandwich place by the same group further north</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3605,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/IMG_2942.jpeg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/IMG_2942-225x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3605\"/></a><figcaption><em>Eppiq Brewing</em></figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>San Diego</strong><ul><li><a href=\"http://www.mikestacoclub.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Mike\'s Taco Club</a>, 5060 Newport Ave Ocean Beach -- Big fish tacos two blocks off the ocean beneath a tattoo parlor</li><li><a href=\"https://iloveazucar.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Azúcar</a>&nbsp;Patisserie, 4820 Newport Ave Ocean Beach -- Cuban-inspired pastries </li><li><a href=\"http://www.eppigbrewing.com/waterfront-biergarten\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Eppig Brewing Waterfront Biergarten</a>, 2817 Dickens St -- Good beers sitting by the marina</li><li><a href=\"https://www.purebrewing.org/location/balboa-park/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pure Project Brewing Balboa Park Biergarten</a>, 2865 Fifth Ave -- Re-hydrate after walking through Balboa Park</li><li><a href=\"http://www.moderntimesbeer.com/tasting-room/point-loma\">Modern Times Lomaland Fermentorium</a>, 3725 Greenwood St -- 32 taps of great beer 10 minutes from the airport</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Nashville</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.biscuitlove.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Biscuit Love Gulch</a>, 316 11th Ave S -- Fun toppings on great buttermilk biscuits for breakfast</li><li><a href=\"https://barsovereign.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bar Sovereign</a>, 514 Rep. John Lewis Way S -- Fun speakeasy-ish bar south of the Broadway strip</li><li><a href=\"https://blackdynastyramen.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Black Dynasty Secret Ramen House</a>, Pop-up that is moving from the back of Bar Sovereign to Bearded Iris\' new taproom</li><li><a href=\"https://hattieb.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Hattie B\'s Hot Chicken - Melrose</a>, 2222 8th Ave S -- Good hot chicken without a wait near Belmont University</li><li><a href=\"https://beardedirisbrewing.com/location/germantown/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bearded Iris Brewing</a>, 101 Van Buren St -- Original taproom with pool tables and a big patio</li><li><a href=\"https://www.variousartistsbrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Various Artists Brewing</a>, 1011 Elm Hill Pike -- Wide variety of beer styles; big patio; guest chefs working a big grill</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>New York City</strong><ul><li><a href=\"http://www.shujiaofuzhou.com/\">Shu Jiao Fu Zhou</a>, 118 Eldridge St, Chinatown -- Phenomenal dumplings in a non-descript corner joint</li><li><a href=\"https://www.thehummuskitchen.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Hummus Kitchen</a>, 444 3rd Ave (at 31st St), Murray Hill --  Well-executed Middle-Eastern food</li><li><a href=\"http://www.hernameishan.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Her Name is Han</a>, 17 E 31st St (at Madison Ave), Koreatown -- Home-style Korean food</li><li><a href=\"https://www.craftandcarry.beer/murray-hill\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Craft + Carry - Murray Hill</a>, 440 3rd St (at 30th St) -- Excellent selection of NY craft beers on draft and in cans to-go</li><li><a href=\"https://www.tedscornertavern.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Ted\'s Corner Tavern</a>, 523 3rd Ave (at 35th St), Murray Hill -- Comfortable neighborhood bar with a great beer selection </li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3619,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/IMG_3409-scaled.jpeg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/IMG_3409-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3619\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Southern Maine</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://bobsclamhut.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bob\'s Clam Hut</a>, 315 Route 1, Kittery -- Best fried clams I\'ve ever had</li><li>The Shop</li><li>Oxbow</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Best Restaurants and Bars of 2021... So Far','','inherit','closed','closed','','3596-revision-v1','','','2021-08-14 10:37:25','2021-08-14 15:37:25','',3596,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3620',0,'revision','',0),
(3621,1,'2021-08-14 10:39:37','2021-08-14 15:39:37','','0C76568F-F5B5-4831-B8F5-CA16FCF8C829','','inherit','open','closed','','0c76568f-f5b5-4831-b8f5-ca16fcf8c829','','','2021-12-10 10:28:37','2021-12-10 15:28:37','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/0C76568F-F5B5-4831-B8F5-CA16FCF8C829.jpeg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(3622,1,'2021-08-14 10:40:17','2021-08-14 15:40:17','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It\'ll take travel guide books a while to catch up with <a href=\"https://www.nrn.com/fast-casual/datassential-more-10-us-restaurants-have-closed-permanently\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">all</a> <a href=\"https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-07/over-110-000-restaurants-have-closed-with-sector-in-free-fall\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the</a> restaurants and bars closures caused by the COVID lockdowns. To help fill that gap, here\'s a list of the best places I\'ve ate and drank at during my 2021 travels. I\'ll update this after each trip, so keep it bookmarked.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3046,\"width\":225,\"height\":179,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium is-resized\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7836-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7836-300x238.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3046\" width=\"225\" height=\"179\"/></a><figcaption><em>Sonoran Hot Dog</em></figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tuscon</a></strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.yelp.com/biz/ruiz-hot-dogs-tucson\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Ruiz Hot Dogs</a> food truck 1140 S 6th Ave at W 22nd St -- It\'s all about the&nbsp;<a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonoran_hot_dog\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Sonoran hot dog</a></li><li><a href=\"https://www.tacorustico.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">El Taco Rustico</a>, 2281 N Oracle Rd -- Quesabirras and cabrito (goat) tacos.</li><li><a href=\"https://www.tacosapson.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tacos Apson</a>, 3501 S 12th Ave -- Mesquite-grilled beef rib tacos and a hass burro</li><li><a href=\"https://1912brewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">1912 Brewing Company</a>, 2045 N Forbes Blvd, Ste 105 -- 20 taps with a wide variety of styles</li><li><a href=\"https://www.pueblovidabrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pueblo Vida Brewing Company</a>, 115 E Broadway Blvd -- Best beers of the trip!</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Phoenix</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.pizzeriabianco.com/pizzeria-bianco-heritage-square\">Pizzeria Bianco</a>, 623 E Adams St -- Thin crust pizza a short drive from the airport</li><li><a href=\"https://www.pizzeriabianco.com/pane-bianco\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pane Bianco</a>, 4404 N Central Ave -- Great sandwich place by the same group further north</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3605,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/IMG_2942.jpeg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/IMG_2942-225x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3605\"/></a><figcaption><em>Eppiq Brewing</em></figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>San Diego</strong><ul><li><a href=\"http://www.mikestacoclub.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Mike\'s Taco Club</a>, 5060 Newport Ave Ocean Beach -- Big fish tacos two blocks off the ocean beneath a tattoo parlor</li><li><a href=\"https://iloveazucar.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Azúcar</a>&nbsp;Patisserie, 4820 Newport Ave Ocean Beach -- Cuban-inspired pastries </li><li><a href=\"http://www.eppigbrewing.com/waterfront-biergarten\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Eppig Brewing Waterfront Biergarten</a>, 2817 Dickens St -- Good beers sitting by the marina</li><li><a href=\"https://www.purebrewing.org/location/balboa-park/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pure Project Brewing Balboa Park Biergarten</a>, 2865 Fifth Ave -- Re-hydrate after walking through Balboa Park</li><li><a href=\"http://www.moderntimesbeer.com/tasting-room/point-loma\">Modern Times Lomaland Fermentorium</a>, 3725 Greenwood St -- 32 taps of great beer 10 minutes from the airport</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Nashville</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.biscuitlove.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Biscuit Love Gulch</a>, 316 11th Ave S -- Fun toppings on great buttermilk biscuits for breakfast</li><li><a href=\"https://barsovereign.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bar Sovereign</a>, 514 Rep. John Lewis Way S -- Fun speakeasy-ish bar south of the Broadway strip</li><li><a href=\"https://blackdynastyramen.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Black Dynasty Secret Ramen House</a>, Pop-up that is moving from the back of Bar Sovereign to Bearded Iris\' new taproom</li><li><a href=\"https://hattieb.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Hattie B\'s Hot Chicken - Melrose</a>, 2222 8th Ave S -- Good hot chicken without a wait near Belmont University</li><li><a href=\"https://beardedirisbrewing.com/location/germantown/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bearded Iris Brewing</a>, 101 Van Buren St -- Original taproom with pool tables and a big patio</li><li><a href=\"https://www.variousartistsbrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Various Artists Brewing</a>, 1011 Elm Hill Pike -- Wide variety of beer styles; big patio; guest chefs working a big grill</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>New York City</strong><ul><li><a href=\"http://www.shujiaofuzhou.com/\">Shu Jiao Fu Zhou</a>, 118 Eldridge St, Chinatown -- Phenomenal dumplings in a non-descript corner joint</li><li><a href=\"https://www.thehummuskitchen.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Hummus Kitchen</a>, 444 3rd Ave (at 31st St), Murray Hill --  Well-executed Middle-Eastern food</li><li><a href=\"http://www.hernameishan.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Her Name is Han</a>, 17 E 31st St (at Madison Ave), Koreatown -- Home-style Korean food</li><li><a href=\"https://www.craftandcarry.beer/murray-hill\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Craft + Carry - Murray Hill</a>, 440 3rd St (at 30th St) -- Excellent selection of NY craft beers on draft and in cans to-go</li><li><a href=\"https://www.tedscornertavern.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Ted\'s Corner Tavern</a>, 523 3rd Ave (at 35th St), Murray Hill -- Comfortable neighborhood bar with a great beer selection </li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3621,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/0C76568F-F5B5-4831-B8F5-CA16FCF8C829.jpeg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/0C76568F-F5B5-4831-B8F5-CA16FCF8C829-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3621\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Southern Maine</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://bobsclamhut.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bob\'s Clam Hut</a>, 315 Route 1, Kittery -- Best fried clams I\'ve ever had</li><li>The Shop</li><li>Oxbow</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Best Restaurants and Bars of 2021... So Far','','inherit','closed','closed','','3596-revision-v1','','','2021-08-14 10:40:17','2021-08-14 15:40:17','',3596,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3622',0,'revision','',0),
(3624,1,'2021-08-14 10:44:34','2021-08-14 15:44:34','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It\'ll take travel guide books a while to catch up with <a href=\"https://www.nrn.com/fast-casual/datassential-more-10-us-restaurants-have-closed-permanently\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">all</a> <a href=\"https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-07/over-110-000-restaurants-have-closed-with-sector-in-free-fall\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the</a> restaurants and bars closures caused by the COVID lockdowns. To help fill that gap, here\'s a list of the best places I\'ve ate and drank at during my 2021 travels. I\'ll update this after each trip, so keep it bookmarked.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3046,\"width\":225,\"height\":179,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium is-resized\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7836-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7836-300x238.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3046\" width=\"225\" height=\"179\"/></a><figcaption><em>Sonoran Hot Dog</em></figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tuscon</a></strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.yelp.com/biz/ruiz-hot-dogs-tucson\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Ruiz Hot Dogs</a> food truck 1140 S 6th Ave at W 22nd St -- It\'s all about the&nbsp;<a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonoran_hot_dog\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Sonoran hot dog</a></li><li><a href=\"https://www.tacorustico.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">El Taco Rustico</a>, 2281 N Oracle Rd -- Quesabirras and cabrito (goat) tacos.</li><li><a href=\"https://www.tacosapson.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tacos Apson</a>, 3501 S 12th Ave -- Mesquite-grilled beef rib tacos and a hass burro</li><li><a href=\"https://1912brewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">1912 Brewing Company</a>, 2045 N Forbes Blvd, Ste 105 -- 20 taps with a wide variety of styles</li><li><a href=\"https://www.pueblovidabrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pueblo Vida Brewing Company</a>, 115 E Broadway Blvd -- Best beers of the trip!</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Phoenix</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.pizzeriabianco.com/pizzeria-bianco-heritage-square\">Pizzeria Bianco</a>, 623 E Adams St -- Thin crust pizza a short drive from the airport</li><li><a href=\"https://www.pizzeriabianco.com/pane-bianco\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pane Bianco</a>, 4404 N Central Ave -- Great sandwich place by the same group further north</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3605,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/IMG_2942.jpeg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/IMG_2942-225x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3605\"/></a><figcaption><em>Eppiq Brewing</em></figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>San Diego</strong><ul><li><a href=\"http://www.mikestacoclub.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Mike\'s Taco Club</a>, 5060 Newport Ave Ocean Beach -- Big fish tacos two blocks off the ocean beneath a tattoo parlor</li><li><a href=\"https://iloveazucar.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Azúcar</a>&nbsp;Patisserie, 4820 Newport Ave Ocean Beach -- Cuban-inspired pastries </li><li><a href=\"http://www.eppigbrewing.com/waterfront-biergarten\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Eppig Brewing Waterfront Biergarten</a>, 2817 Dickens St -- Good beers sitting by the marina</li><li><a href=\"https://www.purebrewing.org/location/balboa-park/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pure Project Brewing Balboa Park Biergarten</a>, 2865 Fifth Ave -- Re-hydrate after walking through Balboa Park</li><li><a href=\"http://www.moderntimesbeer.com/tasting-room/point-loma\">Modern Times Lomaland Fermentorium</a>, 3725 Greenwood St -- 32 taps of great beer 10 minutes from the airport</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3623,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/IMG_3081.jpeg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/IMG_3081-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3623\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Nashville</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.biscuitlove.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Biscuit Love Gulch</a>, 316 11th Ave S -- Fun toppings on great buttermilk biscuits for breakfast</li><li><a href=\"https://barsovereign.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bar Sovereign</a>, 514 Rep. John Lewis Way S -- Fun speakeasy-ish bar south of the Broadway strip</li><li><a href=\"https://blackdynastyramen.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Black Dynasty Secret Ramen House</a>, Pop-up that is moving from the back of Bar Sovereign to Bearded Iris\' new taproom</li><li><a href=\"https://hattieb.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Hattie B\'s Hot Chicken - Melrose</a>, 2222 8th Ave S -- Good hot chicken without a wait near Belmont University</li><li><a href=\"https://beardedirisbrewing.com/location/germantown/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bearded Iris Brewing</a>, 101 Van Buren St -- Original taproom with pool tables and a big patio</li><li><a href=\"https://www.variousartistsbrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Various Artists Brewing</a>, 1011 Elm Hill Pike -- Wide variety of beer styles; big patio; guest chefs working a big grill</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>New York City</strong><ul><li><a href=\"http://www.shujiaofuzhou.com/\">Shu Jiao Fu Zhou</a>, 118 Eldridge St, Chinatown -- Phenomenal dumplings in a non-descript corner joint</li><li><a href=\"https://www.thehummuskitchen.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Hummus Kitchen</a>, 444 3rd Ave (at 31st St), Murray Hill --  Well-executed Middle-Eastern food</li><li><a href=\"http://www.hernameishan.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Her Name is Han</a>, 17 E 31st St (at Madison Ave), Koreatown -- Home-style Korean food</li><li><a href=\"https://www.craftandcarry.beer/murray-hill\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Craft + Carry - Murray Hill</a>, 440 3rd St (at 30th St) -- Excellent selection of NY craft beers on draft and in cans to-go</li><li><a href=\"https://www.tedscornertavern.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Ted\'s Corner Tavern</a>, 523 3rd Ave (at 35th St), Murray Hill -- Comfortable neighborhood bar with a great beer selection </li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3621,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/0C76568F-F5B5-4831-B8F5-CA16FCF8C829.jpeg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/0C76568F-F5B5-4831-B8F5-CA16FCF8C829-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3621\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Southern Maine</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://bobsclamhut.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bob\'s Clam Hut</a>, 315 Route 1, Kittery -- Best fried clams I\'ve ever had</li><li>The Shop</li><li>Oxbow</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Best Restaurants and Bars of 2021... So Far','','inherit','closed','closed','','3596-revision-v1','','','2021-08-14 10:44:34','2021-08-14 15:44:34','',3596,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3624',0,'revision','',0),
(3625,1,'2021-08-14 10:45:13','2021-08-14 15:45:13','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It\'ll take travel guide books a while to catch up with <a href=\"https://www.nrn.com/fast-casual/datassential-more-10-us-restaurants-have-closed-permanently\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">all</a> <a href=\"https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-07/over-110-000-restaurants-have-closed-with-sector-in-free-fall\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the</a> restaurants and bars closures caused by the COVID lockdowns. To help fill that gap, here\'s a list of the best places I\'ve ate and drank at during my 2021 travels. I\'ll update this after each trip, so keep it bookmarked.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3046,\"width\":225,\"height\":179,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium is-resized\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7836-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7836-300x238.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3046\" width=\"225\" height=\"179\"/></a><figcaption><em>Sonoran Hot Dog</em></figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tuscon</a></strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.yelp.com/biz/ruiz-hot-dogs-tucson\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Ruiz Hot Dogs</a> food truck 1140 S 6th Ave at W 22nd St -- It\'s all about the&nbsp;<a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonoran_hot_dog\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Sonoran hot dog</a></li><li><a href=\"https://www.tacorustico.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">El Taco Rustico</a>, 2281 N Oracle Rd -- Quesabirras and cabrito (goat) tacos.</li><li><a href=\"https://www.tacosapson.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tacos Apson</a>, 3501 S 12th Ave -- Mesquite-grilled beef rib tacos and a hass burro</li><li><a href=\"https://1912brewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">1912 Brewing Company</a>, 2045 N Forbes Blvd, Ste 105 -- 20 taps with a wide variety of styles</li><li><a href=\"https://www.pueblovidabrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pueblo Vida Brewing Company</a>, 115 E Broadway Blvd -- Best beers of the trip!</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Phoenix</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.pizzeriabianco.com/pizzeria-bianco-heritage-square\">Pizzeria Bianco</a>, 623 E Adams St -- Thin crust pizza a short drive from the airport</li><li><a href=\"https://www.pizzeriabianco.com/pane-bianco\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pane Bianco</a>, 4404 N Central Ave -- Great sandwich place by the same group further north</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3605,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/IMG_2942.jpeg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/IMG_2942-225x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3605\"/></a><figcaption><em>Eppiq Brewing</em></figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>San Diego</strong><ul><li><a href=\"http://www.mikestacoclub.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Mike\'s Taco Club</a>, 5060 Newport Ave Ocean Beach -- Big fish tacos two blocks off the ocean beneath a tattoo parlor</li><li><a href=\"https://iloveazucar.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Azúcar</a>&nbsp;Patisserie, 4820 Newport Ave Ocean Beach -- Cuban-inspired pastries </li><li><a href=\"http://www.eppigbrewing.com/waterfront-biergarten\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Eppig Brewing Waterfront Biergarten</a>, 2817 Dickens St -- Good beers sitting by the marina</li><li><a href=\"https://www.purebrewing.org/location/balboa-park/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pure Project Brewing Balboa Park Biergarten</a>, 2865 Fifth Ave -- Re-hydrate after walking through Balboa Park</li><li><a href=\"http://www.moderntimesbeer.com/tasting-room/point-loma\">Modern Times Lomaland Fermentorium</a>, 3725 Greenwood St -- 32 taps of great beer 10 minutes from the airport</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Nashville</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.biscuitlove.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Biscuit Love Gulch</a>, 316 11th Ave S -- Fun toppings on great buttermilk biscuits for breakfast</li><li><a href=\"https://barsovereign.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bar Sovereign</a>, 514 Rep. John Lewis Way S -- Fun speakeasy-ish bar south of the Broadway strip</li><li><a href=\"https://blackdynastyramen.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Black Dynasty Secret Ramen House</a>, Pop-up that is moving from the back of Bar Sovereign to Bearded Iris\' new taproom</li><li><a href=\"https://hattieb.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Hattie B\'s Hot Chicken - Melrose</a>, 2222 8th Ave S -- Good hot chicken without a wait near Belmont University</li><li><a href=\"https://beardedirisbrewing.com/location/germantown/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bearded Iris Brewing</a>, 101 Van Buren St -- Original taproom with pool tables and a big patio</li><li><a href=\"https://www.variousartistsbrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Various Artists Brewing</a>, 1011 Elm Hill Pike -- Wide variety of beer styles; big patio; guest chefs working a big grill</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3623,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/IMG_3081.jpeg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/IMG_3081-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3623\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>New York City</strong><ul><li><a href=\"http://www.shujiaofuzhou.com/\">Shu Jiao Fu Zhou</a>, 118 Eldridge St, Chinatown -- Phenomenal dumplings in a non-descript corner joint</li><li><a href=\"https://www.thehummuskitchen.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Hummus Kitchen</a>, 444 3rd Ave (at 31st St), Murray Hill --  Well-executed Middle-Eastern food</li><li><a href=\"http://www.hernameishan.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Her Name is Han</a>, 17 E 31st St (at Madison Ave), Koreatown -- Home-style Korean food</li><li><a href=\"https://www.craftandcarry.beer/murray-hill\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Craft + Carry - Murray Hill</a>, 440 3rd St (at 30th St) -- Excellent selection of NY craft beers on draft and in cans to-go</li><li><a href=\"https://www.tedscornertavern.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Ted\'s Corner Tavern</a>, 523 3rd Ave (at 35th St), Murray Hill -- Comfortable neighborhood bar with a great beer selection </li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3621,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/0C76568F-F5B5-4831-B8F5-CA16FCF8C829.jpeg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/0C76568F-F5B5-4831-B8F5-CA16FCF8C829-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3621\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Southern Maine</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://bobsclamhut.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bob\'s Clam Hut</a>, 315 Route 1, Kittery -- Best fried clams I\'ve ever had</li><li>The Shop</li><li>Oxbow</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Best Restaurants and Bars of 2021... So Far','','inherit','closed','closed','','3596-revision-v1','','','2021-08-14 10:45:13','2021-08-14 15:45:13','',3596,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3625',0,'revision','',0),
(3626,1,'2021-08-14 10:45:46','2021-08-14 15:45:46','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It\'ll take travel guide books a while to catch up with <a href=\"https://www.nrn.com/fast-casual/datassential-more-10-us-restaurants-have-closed-permanently\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">all</a> <a href=\"https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-07/over-110-000-restaurants-have-closed-with-sector-in-free-fall\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the</a> restaurants and bars closures caused by the COVID lockdowns. To help fill that gap, here\'s a list of the best places I\'ve ate and drank at during my 2021 travels. I\'ll update this after each trip, so keep it bookmarked.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3046,\"width\":225,\"height\":179,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium is-resized\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7836-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7836-300x238.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3046\" width=\"225\" height=\"179\"/></a><figcaption><em>Sonoran Hot Dog</em></figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tuscon</a></strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.yelp.com/biz/ruiz-hot-dogs-tucson\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Ruiz Hot Dogs</a> food truck 1140 S 6th Ave at W 22nd St -- It\'s all about the&nbsp;<a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonoran_hot_dog\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Sonoran hot dog</a></li><li><a href=\"https://www.tacorustico.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">El Taco Rustico</a>, 2281 N Oracle Rd -- Quesabirras and cabrito (goat) tacos.</li><li><a href=\"https://www.tacosapson.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tacos Apson</a>, 3501 S 12th Ave -- Mesquite-grilled beef rib tacos and a hass burro</li><li><a href=\"https://1912brewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">1912 Brewing Company</a>, 2045 N Forbes Blvd, Ste 105 -- 20 taps with a wide variety of styles</li><li><a href=\"https://www.pueblovidabrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pueblo Vida Brewing Company</a>, 115 E Broadway Blvd -- Best beers of the trip!</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Phoenix</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.pizzeriabianco.com/pizzeria-bianco-heritage-square\">Pizzeria Bianco</a>, 623 E Adams St -- Thin crust pizza a short drive from the airport</li><li><a href=\"https://www.pizzeriabianco.com/pane-bianco\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pane Bianco</a>, 4404 N Central Ave -- Great sandwich place by the same group further north</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3605,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/IMG_2942.jpeg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/IMG_2942-225x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3605\"/></a><figcaption><em>Eppiq Brewing</em></figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>San Diego</strong><ul><li><a href=\"http://www.mikestacoclub.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Mike\'s Taco Club</a>, 5060 Newport Ave Ocean Beach -- Big fish tacos two blocks off the ocean beneath a tattoo parlor</li><li><a href=\"https://iloveazucar.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Azúcar</a>&nbsp;Patisserie, 4820 Newport Ave Ocean Beach -- Cuban-inspired pastries </li><li><a href=\"http://www.eppigbrewing.com/waterfront-biergarten\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Eppig Brewing Waterfront Biergarten</a>, 2817 Dickens St -- Good beers sitting by the marina</li><li><a href=\"https://www.purebrewing.org/location/balboa-park/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pure Project Brewing Balboa Park Biergarten</a>, 2865 Fifth Ave -- Re-hydrate after walking through Balboa Park</li><li><a href=\"http://www.moderntimesbeer.com/tasting-room/point-loma\">Modern Times Lomaland Fermentorium</a>, 3725 Greenwood St -- 32 taps of great beer 10 minutes from the airport</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Nashville</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.biscuitlove.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Biscuit Love Gulch</a>, 316 11th Ave S -- Fun toppings on great buttermilk biscuits for breakfast</li><li><a href=\"https://barsovereign.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bar Sovereign</a>, 514 Rep. John Lewis Way S -- Fun speakeasy-ish bar south of the Broadway strip</li><li><a href=\"https://blackdynastyramen.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Black Dynasty Secret Ramen House</a>, Pop-up that is moving from the back of Bar Sovereign to Bearded Iris\' new taproom</li><li><a href=\"https://hattieb.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Hattie B\'s Hot Chicken - Melrose</a>, 2222 8th Ave S -- Good hot chicken without a wait near Belmont University</li><li><a href=\"https://beardedirisbrewing.com/location/germantown/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bearded Iris Brewing</a>, 101 Van Buren St -- Original taproom with pool tables and a big patio</li><li><a href=\"https://www.variousartistsbrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Various Artists Brewing</a>, 1011 Elm Hill Pike -- Wide variety of beer styles; big patio; guest chefs working a big grill</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>New York City</strong><ul><li><a href=\"http://www.shujiaofuzhou.com/\">Shu Jiao Fu Zhou</a>, 118 Eldridge St, Chinatown -- Phenomenal dumplings in a non-descript corner joint</li><li><a href=\"https://www.thehummuskitchen.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Hummus Kitchen</a>, 444 3rd Ave (at 31st St), Murray Hill --  Well-executed Middle-Eastern food</li><li><a href=\"http://www.hernameishan.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Her Name is Han</a>, 17 E 31st St (at Madison Ave), Koreatown -- Home-style Korean food</li><li><a href=\"https://www.craftandcarry.beer/murray-hill\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Craft + Carry - Murray Hill</a>, 440 3rd St (at 30th St) -- Excellent selection of NY craft beers on draft and in cans to-go</li><li><a href=\"https://www.tedscornertavern.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Ted\'s Corner Tavern</a>, 523 3rd Ave (at 35th St), Murray Hill -- Comfortable neighborhood bar with a great beer selection </li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3621,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/0C76568F-F5B5-4831-B8F5-CA16FCF8C829.jpeg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/0C76568F-F5B5-4831-B8F5-CA16FCF8C829-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3621\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Southern Maine</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://bobsclamhut.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bob\'s Clam Hut</a>, 315 Route 1, Kittery -- Best fried clams I\'ve ever had</li><li>The Shop</li><li>Oxbow</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Best Restaurants and Bars of 2021... So Far','','inherit','closed','closed','','3596-revision-v1','','','2021-08-14 10:45:46','2021-08-14 15:45:46','',3596,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3626',0,'revision','',0),
(3627,1,'2021-08-14 10:48:10','2021-08-14 15:48:10','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It\'ll take travel guide books a while to catch up with <a href=\"https://www.nrn.com/fast-casual/datassential-more-10-us-restaurants-have-closed-permanently\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">all</a> <a href=\"https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-07/over-110-000-restaurants-have-closed-with-sector-in-free-fall\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the</a> restaurants and bars closures caused by the COVID lockdowns. To help fill that gap, here\'s a list of the best places I\'ve ate and drank at during my 2021 travels. I\'ll update this after each trip, so keep it bookmarked.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3046,\"width\":225,\"height\":179,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium is-resized\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7836-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7836-300x238.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3046\" width=\"225\" height=\"179\"/></a><figcaption><em>Sonoran Hot Dog</em></figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tuscon</a></strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.yelp.com/biz/ruiz-hot-dogs-tucson\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Ruiz Hot Dogs</a> food truck 1140 S 6th Ave at W 22nd St -- It\'s all about the&nbsp;<a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonoran_hot_dog\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Sonoran hot dog</a></li><li><a href=\"https://www.tacorustico.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">El Taco Rustico</a>, 2281 N Oracle Rd -- Quesabirras and cabrito (goat) tacos.</li><li><a href=\"https://www.tacosapson.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tacos Apson</a>, 3501 S 12th Ave -- Mesquite-grilled beef rib tacos and a hass burro</li><li><a href=\"https://1912brewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">1912 Brewing Company</a>, 2045 N Forbes Blvd, Ste 105 -- 20 taps with a wide variety of styles</li><li><a href=\"https://www.pueblovidabrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pueblo Vida Brewing Company</a>, 115 E Broadway Blvd -- Best beers of the trip!</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Phoenix</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.pizzeriabianco.com/pizzeria-bianco-heritage-square\">Pizzeria Bianco</a>, 623 E Adams St -- Thin crust pizza a short drive from the airport</li><li><a href=\"https://www.pizzeriabianco.com/pane-bianco\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pane Bianco</a>, 4404 N Central Ave -- Great sandwich place by the same group further north</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3605,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/IMG_2942.jpeg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/IMG_2942-225x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3605\"/></a><figcaption><em>Eppiq Brewing</em></figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>San Diego</strong><ul><li><a href=\"http://www.mikestacoclub.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Mike\'s Taco Club</a>, 5060 Newport Ave Ocean Beach -- Big fish tacos two blocks off the ocean beneath a tattoo parlor</li><li><a href=\"https://iloveazucar.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Azúcar</a>&nbsp;Patisserie, 4820 Newport Ave Ocean Beach -- Cuban-inspired pastries </li><li><a href=\"http://www.eppigbrewing.com/waterfront-biergarten\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Eppig Brewing Waterfront Biergarten</a>, 2817 Dickens St -- Good beers sitting by the marina</li><li><a href=\"https://www.purebrewing.org/location/balboa-park/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pure Project Brewing Balboa Park Biergarten</a>, 2865 Fifth Ave -- Re-hydrate after walking through Balboa Park</li><li><a href=\"http://www.moderntimesbeer.com/tasting-room/point-loma\">Modern Times Lomaland Fermentorium</a>, 3725 Greenwood St -- 32 taps of great beer 10 minutes from the airport</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Nashville</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.biscuitlove.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Biscuit Love Gulch</a>, 316 11th Ave S -- Fun toppings on great buttermilk biscuits for breakfast</li><li><a href=\"https://barsovereign.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bar Sovereign</a>, 514 Rep. John Lewis Way S -- Fun speakeasy-ish bar south of the Broadway strip</li><li><a href=\"https://blackdynastyramen.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Black Dynasty Secret Ramen House</a>, Pop-up that is moving from the back of Bar Sovereign to Bearded Iris\' new taproom</li><li><a href=\"https://hattieb.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Hattie B\'s Hot Chicken - Melrose</a>, 2222 8th Ave S -- Good hot chicken without a wait near Belmont University</li><li><a href=\"https://beardedirisbrewing.com/location/germantown/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bearded Iris Brewing</a>, 101 Van Buren St -- Original taproom with pool tables and a big patio</li><li><a href=\"https://www.variousartistsbrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Various Artists Brewing</a>, 1011 Elm Hill Pike -- Wide variety of beer styles; big patio; guest chefs working a big grill</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>New York City</strong><ul><li><a href=\"http://www.shujiaofuzhou.com/\">Shu Jiao Fu Zhou</a>, 118 Eldridge St, Chinatown -- Phenomenal dumplings in a non-descript corner joint</li><li><a href=\"https://www.thehummuskitchen.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Hummus Kitchen</a>, 444 3rd Ave (at 31st St), Murray Hill --  Well-executed Middle-Eastern food</li><li><a href=\"http://www.hernameishan.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Her Name is Han</a>, 17 E 31st St (at Madison Ave), Koreatown -- Home-style Korean food</li><li><a href=\"https://www.craftandcarry.beer/murray-hill\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Craft + Carry - Murray Hill</a>, 440 3rd St (at 30th St) -- Excellent selection of NY craft beers on draft and in cans to-go</li><li><a href=\"https://www.tedscornertavern.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Ted\'s Corner Tavern</a>, 523 3rd Ave (at 35th St), Murray Hill -- Comfortable neighborhood bar with a great beer selection </li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3621,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/0C76568F-F5B5-4831-B8F5-CA16FCF8C829.jpeg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/0C76568F-F5B5-4831-B8F5-CA16FCF8C829-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3621\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Southern Maine</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://bobsclamhut.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bob\'s Clam Hut</a>, 315 Route 1, Kittery -- Best fried clams I\'ve ever had</li><li><a href=\"https://portland.islandcreekoysters.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">The Shop by Island Creek Oysters</a>, 123 Washington Ave, Portland -- Excellent (and inexpensive) selection of Maine oysters</li><li>Oxbow</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Best Restaurants and Bars of 2021... So Far','','inherit','closed','closed','','3596-revision-v1','','','2021-08-14 10:48:10','2021-08-14 15:48:10','',3596,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3627',0,'revision','',0);
INSERT INTO `wp_posts` VALUES
(3628,1,'2021-08-14 10:52:10','2021-08-14 15:52:10','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It\'ll take travel guide books a while to catch up with <a href=\"https://www.nrn.com/fast-casual/datassential-more-10-us-restaurants-have-closed-permanently\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">all</a> <a href=\"https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-07/over-110-000-restaurants-have-closed-with-sector-in-free-fall\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the</a> restaurants and bars closures caused by the COVID lockdowns. To help fill that gap, here\'s a list of the best places I\'ve ate and drank at during my 2021 travels. I\'ll update this after each trip, so keep it bookmarked.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3046,\"width\":225,\"height\":179,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium is-resized\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7836-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7836-300x238.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3046\" width=\"225\" height=\"179\"/></a><figcaption><em>Sonoran Hot Dog</em></figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tuscon</a></strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.yelp.com/biz/ruiz-hot-dogs-tucson\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Ruiz Hot Dogs</a> food truck 1140 S 6th Ave at W 22nd St -- It\'s all about the&nbsp;<a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonoran_hot_dog\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Sonoran hot dog</a></li><li><a href=\"https://www.tacorustico.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">El Taco Rustico</a>, 2281 N Oracle Rd -- Quesabirras and cabrito (goat) tacos.</li><li><a href=\"https://www.tacosapson.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tacos Apson</a>, 3501 S 12th Ave -- Mesquite-grilled beef rib tacos and a hass burro</li><li><a href=\"https://1912brewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">1912 Brewing Company</a>, 2045 N Forbes Blvd, Ste 105 -- 20 taps with a wide variety of styles</li><li><a href=\"https://www.pueblovidabrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pueblo Vida Brewing Company</a>, 115 E Broadway Blvd -- Best beers of the trip!</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Phoenix</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.pizzeriabianco.com/pizzeria-bianco-heritage-square\">Pizzeria Bianco</a>, 623 E Adams St -- Thin crust pizza a short drive from the airport</li><li><a href=\"https://www.pizzeriabianco.com/pane-bianco\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pane Bianco</a>, 4404 N Central Ave -- Great sandwich place by the same group further north</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3605,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/IMG_2942.jpeg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/IMG_2942-225x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3605\"/></a><figcaption><em>Eppiq Brewing</em></figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>San Diego</strong><ul><li><a href=\"http://www.mikestacoclub.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Mike\'s Taco Club</a>, 5060 Newport Ave Ocean Beach -- Big fish tacos two blocks off the ocean beneath a tattoo parlor</li><li><a href=\"https://iloveazucar.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Azúcar</a>&nbsp;Patisserie, 4820 Newport Ave Ocean Beach -- Cuban-inspired pastries </li><li><a href=\"http://www.eppigbrewing.com/waterfront-biergarten\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Eppig Brewing Waterfront Biergarten</a>, 2817 Dickens St -- Good beers sitting by the marina</li><li><a href=\"https://www.purebrewing.org/location/balboa-park/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pure Project Brewing Balboa Park Biergarten</a>, 2865 Fifth Ave -- Re-hydrate after walking through Balboa Park</li><li><a href=\"http://www.moderntimesbeer.com/tasting-room/point-loma\">Modern Times Lomaland Fermentorium</a>, 3725 Greenwood St -- 32 taps of great beer 10 minutes from the airport</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Nashville</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.biscuitlove.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Biscuit Love Gulch</a>, 316 11th Ave S -- Fun toppings on great buttermilk biscuits for breakfast</li><li><a href=\"https://barsovereign.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bar Sovereign</a>, 514 Rep. John Lewis Way S -- Fun speakeasy-ish bar south of the Broadway strip</li><li><a href=\"https://blackdynastyramen.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Black Dynasty Secret Ramen House</a>, Pop-up that is moving from the back of Bar Sovereign to Bearded Iris\' new taproom</li><li><a href=\"https://hattieb.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Hattie B\'s Hot Chicken - Melrose</a>, 2222 8th Ave S -- Good hot chicken without a wait near Belmont University</li><li><a href=\"https://beardedirisbrewing.com/location/germantown/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bearded Iris Brewing</a>, 101 Van Buren St -- Original taproom with pool tables and a big patio</li><li><a href=\"https://www.variousartistsbrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Various Artists Brewing</a>, 1011 Elm Hill Pike -- Wide variety of beer styles; big patio; guest chefs working a big grill</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>New York City</strong><ul><li><a href=\"http://www.shujiaofuzhou.com/\">Shu Jiao Fu Zhou</a>, 118 Eldridge St, Chinatown -- Phenomenal dumplings in a non-descript corner joint</li><li><a href=\"https://www.thehummuskitchen.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Hummus Kitchen</a>, 444 3rd Ave (at 31st St), Murray Hill --  Well-executed Middle-Eastern food</li><li><a href=\"http://www.hernameishan.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Her Name is Han</a>, 17 E 31st St (at Madison Ave), Koreatown -- Home-style Korean food</li><li><a href=\"https://www.craftandcarry.beer/murray-hill\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Craft + Carry - Murray Hill</a>, 440 3rd St (at 30th St) -- Excellent selection of NY craft beers on draft and in cans to-go</li><li><a href=\"https://www.tedscornertavern.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Ted\'s Corner Tavern</a>, 523 3rd Ave (at 35th St), Murray Hill -- Comfortable neighborhood bar with a great beer selection </li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3621,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/0C76568F-F5B5-4831-B8F5-CA16FCF8C829.jpeg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/0C76568F-F5B5-4831-B8F5-CA16FCF8C829-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3621\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Southern Maine</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://bobsclamhut.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bob\'s Clam Hut</a>, 315 Route 1, Kittery -- Best fried clams I\'ve ever had</li><li><a href=\"https://portland.islandcreekoysters.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">The Shop by Island Creek Oysters</a>, 123 Washington Ave, Portland -- Excellent (and inexpensive) selection of Maine oysters</li><li><a href=\"https://oxbowbeer.com/location/portland/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Oxbow Blending &amp; Bottling</a>, 49 Washington Ave, Portland -- Great selection of farmhouse ales with an outpost of <a href=\"http://www.duckfatfriteshack.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Duckfat</a> serving up fries on the patio</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Best Restaurants and Bars of 2021... So Far','','inherit','closed','closed','','3596-revision-v1','','','2021-08-14 10:52:10','2021-08-14 15:52:10','',3596,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3628',0,'revision','',0),
(3629,1,'2021-08-14 11:59:03','2021-08-14 16:59:03','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It\'ll take travel guide books a while to catch up with <a href=\"https://www.nrn.com/fast-casual/datassential-more-10-us-restaurants-have-closed-permanently\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">all</a> <a href=\"https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-07/over-110-000-restaurants-have-closed-with-sector-in-free-fall\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the</a> restaurants and bars closures caused by the COVID lockdowns. To help fill that gap, here\'s a list of the best places I\'ve ate and drank at during my 2021 travels. I\'ll update this after each trip, so keep it bookmarked.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3046,\"width\":225,\"height\":179,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium is-resized\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7836-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7836-300x238.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3046\" width=\"225\" height=\"179\"/></a><figcaption><em>Sonoran Hot Dog</em></figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tuscon</a></strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.yelp.com/biz/ruiz-hot-dogs-tucson\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Ruiz Hot Dogs</a> food truck 1140 S 6th Ave at W 22nd St -- It\'s all about the&nbsp;<a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonoran_hot_dog\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Sonoran hot dog</a></li><li><a href=\"https://www.tacorustico.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">El Taco Rustico</a>, 2281 N Oracle Rd -- Quesabirras and cabrito (goat) tacos.</li><li><a href=\"https://www.tacosapson.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tacos Apson</a>, 3501 S 12th Ave -- Mesquite-grilled beef rib tacos and a hass burro</li><li><a href=\"https://1912brewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">1912 Brewing Company</a>, 2045 N Forbes Blvd, Ste 105 -- 20 taps with a wide variety of styles</li><li><a href=\"https://www.pueblovidabrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pueblo Vida Brewing Company</a>, 115 E Broadway Blvd -- Best beers of the trip!</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Phoenix</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.pizzeriabianco.com/pizzeria-bianco-heritage-square\">Pizzeria Bianco</a>, 623 E Adams St -- Thin crust pizza a short drive from the airport</li><li><a href=\"https://www.pizzeriabianco.com/pane-bianco\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pane Bianco</a>, 4404 N Central Ave -- Great sandwich place by the same group further north</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3605,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/IMG_2942.jpeg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/IMG_2942-225x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3605\"/></a><figcaption><em>Eppiq Brewing</em></figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>San Diego</strong><ul><li><a href=\"http://www.mikestacoclub.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Mike\'s Taco Club</a>, 5060 Newport Ave Ocean Beach -- Big fish tacos two blocks off the ocean beneath a tattoo parlor</li><li><a href=\"https://iloveazucar.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Azúcar</a>&nbsp;Patisserie, 4820 Newport Ave Ocean Beach -- Cuban-inspired pastries </li><li><a href=\"http://www.eppigbrewing.com/waterfront-biergarten\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Eppig Brewing Waterfront Biergarten</a>, 2817 Dickens St -- Good beers sitting by the marina</li><li><a href=\"https://www.purebrewing.org/location/balboa-park/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pure Project Brewing Balboa Park Biergarten</a>, 2865 Fifth Ave -- Re-hydrate after walking through Balboa Park</li><li><a href=\"http://www.moderntimesbeer.com/tasting-room/point-loma\">Modern Times Lomaland Fermentorium</a>, 3725 Greenwood St -- 32 taps of great beer 10 minutes from the airport</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Nashville</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.biscuitlove.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Biscuit Love Gulch</a>, 316 11th Ave S -- Fun toppings on great buttermilk biscuits for breakfast</li><li><a href=\"https://barsovereign.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bar Sovereign</a>, 514 Rep. John Lewis Way S -- Fun speakeasy-ish bar south of the Broadway strip</li><li><a href=\"https://blackdynastyramen.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Black Dynasty Secret Ramen House</a>, Pop-up that is moving from the back of Bar Sovereign to Bearded Iris\' new taproom</li><li><a href=\"https://hattieb.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Hattie B\'s Hot Chicken - Melrose</a>, 2222 8th Ave S -- Good hot chicken without a wait near Belmont University</li><li><a href=\"https://beardedirisbrewing.com/location/germantown/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bearded Iris Brewing</a>, 101 Van Buren St -- Original taproom with pool tables and a big patio</li><li><a href=\"https://www.variousartistsbrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Various Artists Brewing</a>, 1011 Elm Hill Pike -- Wide variety of beer styles; big patio; guest chefs working a big grill</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>New York City</strong><ul><li><a href=\"http://www.shujiaofuzhou.com/\">Shu Jiao Fu Zhou</a>, 118 Eldridge St, Chinatown -- Phenomenal dumplings in a non-descript corner joint</li><li><a href=\"https://www.thehummuskitchen.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Hummus Kitchen</a>, 444 3rd Ave (at 31st St), Murray Hill --  Well-executed Middle-Eastern food</li><li><a href=\"http://www.hernameishan.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Her Name is Han</a>, 17 E 31st St (at Madison Ave), Koreatown -- Home-style Korean food</li><li><a href=\"https://www.craftandcarry.beer/murray-hill\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Craft + Carry - Murray Hill</a>, 440 3rd St (at 30th St) -- Excellent selection of NY craft beers on draft and in cans to-go</li><li><a href=\"https://www.tedscornertavern.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Ted\'s Corner Tavern</a>, 523 3rd Ave (at 35th St), Murray Hill -- Comfortable neighborhood bar with a great beer selection </li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3621,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/0C76568F-F5B5-4831-B8F5-CA16FCF8C829.jpeg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/0C76568F-F5B5-4831-B8F5-CA16FCF8C829-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3621\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Southern Maine</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://bobsclamhut.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bob\'s Clam Hut</a>, 315 Route 1, Kittery -- Best fried clams I\'ve ever had</li><li><a href=\"https://portland.islandcreekoysters.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">The Shop by Island Creek Oysters</a>, 123 Washington Ave, Portland -- Excellent (and inexpensive) selection of Maine oysters</li><li><a href=\"https://oxbowbeer.com/location/portland/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Oxbow Blending &amp; Bottling</a>, 49 Washington Ave, Portland -- Great selection of farmhouse ales with an outpost of <a href=\"http://www.duckfatfriteshack.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Duckfat</a> serving up fries on the patio</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','My Best Restaurants and Bars of 2021','','inherit','closed','closed','','3596-revision-v1','','','2021-08-14 11:59:03','2021-08-14 16:59:03','',3596,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3629',0,'revision','',0),
(3630,1,'2021-08-14 12:08:11','2021-08-14 17:08:11','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It\'ll take travel guide books a while to catch up with <a href=\"https://www.nrn.com/fast-casual/datassential-more-10-us-restaurants-have-closed-permanently\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">all</a> <a href=\"https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-07/over-110-000-restaurants-have-closed-with-sector-in-free-fall\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the</a> restaurants and bars closures caused by the COVID lockdowns. To help fill that gap, here are the best places I\'ve ate and drank at during my 2021 travels. I\'ll update this after each trip, so keep it bookmarked.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3046,\"width\":225,\"height\":179,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium is-resized\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7836-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7836-300x238.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3046\" width=\"225\" height=\"179\"/></a><figcaption><em>Sonoran Hot Dog</em></figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tuscon</a></strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.yelp.com/biz/ruiz-hot-dogs-tucson\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Ruiz Hot Dogs</a> food truck 1140 S 6th Ave at W 22nd St -- It\'s all about the&nbsp;<a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonoran_hot_dog\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Sonoran hot dog</a></li><li><a href=\"https://www.tacorustico.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">El Taco Rustico</a>, 2281 N Oracle Rd -- Quesabirras and cabrito (goat) tacos.</li><li><a href=\"https://www.tacosapson.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tacos Apson</a>, 3501 S 12th Ave -- Mesquite-grilled beef rib tacos and a hass burro</li><li><a href=\"https://1912brewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">1912 Brewing Company</a>, 2045 N Forbes Blvd, Ste 105 -- 20 taps with a wide variety of styles</li><li><a href=\"https://www.pueblovidabrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pueblo Vida Brewing Company</a>, 115 E Broadway Blvd -- Best beers of the trip!</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Phoenix</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.pizzeriabianco.com/pizzeria-bianco-heritage-square\">Pizzeria Bianco</a>, 623 E Adams St -- Thin crust pizza a short drive from the airport</li><li><a href=\"https://www.pizzeriabianco.com/pane-bianco\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pane Bianco</a>, 4404 N Central Ave -- Great sandwich place by the same group further north</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3605,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/IMG_2942.jpeg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/IMG_2942-225x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3605\"/></a><figcaption><em>Eppiq Brewing</em></figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>San Diego</strong><ul><li><a href=\"http://www.mikestacoclub.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Mike\'s Taco Club</a>, 5060 Newport Ave Ocean Beach -- Big fish tacos two blocks off the ocean beneath a tattoo parlor</li><li><a href=\"https://iloveazucar.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Azúcar</a>&nbsp;Patisserie, 4820 Newport Ave Ocean Beach -- Cuban-inspired pastries </li><li><a href=\"http://www.eppigbrewing.com/waterfront-biergarten\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Eppig Brewing Waterfront Biergarten</a>, 2817 Dickens St -- Good beers sitting by the marina</li><li><a href=\"https://www.purebrewing.org/location/balboa-park/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pure Project Brewing Balboa Park Biergarten</a>, 2865 Fifth Ave -- Re-hydrate after walking through Balboa Park</li><li><a href=\"http://www.moderntimesbeer.com/tasting-room/point-loma\">Modern Times Lomaland Fermentorium</a>, 3725 Greenwood St -- 32 taps of great beer 10 minutes from the airport</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Nashville</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.biscuitlove.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Biscuit Love Gulch</a>, 316 11th Ave S -- Fun toppings on great buttermilk biscuits for breakfast</li><li><a href=\"https://barsovereign.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bar Sovereign</a>, 514 Rep. John Lewis Way S -- Fun speakeasy-ish bar south of the Broadway strip</li><li><a href=\"https://blackdynastyramen.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Black Dynasty Secret Ramen House</a>, Pop-up that is moving from the back of Bar Sovereign to Bearded Iris\' new taproom</li><li><a href=\"https://hattieb.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Hattie B\'s Hot Chicken - Melrose</a>, 2222 8th Ave S -- Good hot chicken without a wait near Belmont University</li><li><a href=\"https://beardedirisbrewing.com/location/germantown/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bearded Iris Brewing</a>, 101 Van Buren St -- Original taproom with pool tables and a big patio</li><li><a href=\"https://www.variousartistsbrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Various Artists Brewing</a>, 1011 Elm Hill Pike -- Wide variety of beer styles; big patio; guest chefs working a big grill</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>New York City</strong><ul><li><a href=\"http://www.shujiaofuzhou.com/\">Shu Jiao Fu Zhou</a>, 118 Eldridge St, Chinatown -- Phenomenal dumplings in a non-descript corner joint</li><li><a href=\"https://www.thehummuskitchen.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Hummus Kitchen</a>, 444 3rd Ave (at 31st St), Murray Hill --  Well-executed Middle-Eastern food</li><li><a href=\"http://www.hernameishan.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Her Name is Han</a>, 17 E 31st St (at Madison Ave), Koreatown -- Home-style Korean food</li><li><a href=\"https://www.craftandcarry.beer/murray-hill\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Craft + Carry - Murray Hill</a>, 440 3rd St (at 30th St) -- Excellent selection of NY craft beers on draft and in cans to-go</li><li><a href=\"https://www.tedscornertavern.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Ted\'s Corner Tavern</a>, 523 3rd Ave (at 35th St), Murray Hill -- Comfortable neighborhood bar with a great beer selection </li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3621,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/0C76568F-F5B5-4831-B8F5-CA16FCF8C829.jpeg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/0C76568F-F5B5-4831-B8F5-CA16FCF8C829-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3621\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Southern Maine</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://bobsclamhut.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bob\'s Clam Hut</a>, 315 Route 1, Kittery -- Best fried clams I\'ve ever had</li><li><a href=\"https://portland.islandcreekoysters.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">The Shop by Island Creek Oysters</a>, 123 Washington Ave, Portland -- Excellent (and inexpensive) selection of Maine oysters</li><li><a href=\"https://oxbowbeer.com/location/portland/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Oxbow Blending &amp; Bottling</a>, 49 Washington Ave, Portland -- Great selection of farmhouse ales with an outpost of <a href=\"http://www.duckfatfriteshack.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Duckfat</a> serving up fries on the patio</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','My Best Restaurants and Bars of 2021','','inherit','closed','closed','','3596-revision-v1','','','2021-08-14 12:08:11','2021-08-14 17:08:11','',3596,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3630',0,'revision','',0),
(3631,1,'2021-08-17 20:08:59','2021-08-18 01:08:59','[caption id=\"attachment_1603\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/IMG_0266-01.jpeg\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-1603\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1603\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/IMG_0266-01-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"Just a Few Guidebooks....\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Just a Few Guidebooks....[/caption]\n\nWhere do guidebooks fit in the world of apps, review websites, social media, and podcasts? Planning for a trip to Iceland got me thinking about how to make sense of the explosion of travel tips. And then, after giving my thoughts about my new <a href=\"http://bluesmart.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Bluesmart </a>\"smart connected suitcase\", I talk about how idiosyncratic frequent travelers are about packing strategies and their choice of suitcases. There\'s also follow-up about foreign exchange apps, and listener comments about digital travel security and Spirit Airlines\' growth. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_120.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_120.mp3\"]\n\n<!--more-->\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #120:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, after a much longer-than-intended break. Looking back at the Google Docs revision history for this episode, I started it on Feb 2, so I had the best of intentions. But I’ve been traveling almost non-stop since then. At which point you might reasonably say “But you have all that time in airports and hotels to write” -- which should be the case, but I find that I have to remove all possible distractions before I can write. Hence my lack of a journalism career.</li>\n 	<li>So instead, I keep jotting down ideas in Evernote, feeling like I’m making progress, but not ever buckling down to actually write an episode. Until last Weds, when Dan Gradwohl sent me an e-mail with the subject line “Mark, where’s the next TravelCommons?”, asking in a very nice way -- when are you getting off your duff? I snarled back at Dan a bit -- more at frustration with myself than anything he wrote. But it got the intended result. So, I dedicate this episode to Dan.</li>\n 	<li>The travel that got in the way wasn’t anything exotic -- just the usual bouncing around -- New Orleans, Vegas, Atlanta, Boston, New Jersey. But it was the tail end of 7 weeks of straight travel -- which is right about the time I hit my fun quotient. My patience dives and my bitch tweeting climbs. Of course, the fact that my American Airlines flights were hitting a 50% on-time rate didn’t help. I think I finally tipped over when I found my EWR-ORD flight was an ancient AA MD-80. Trying to wedge my bag long ways into the short overhead bin on the AB side was a complete throwback to when I first started traveling for business -- in 1985, on American Airlines, out of DFW, on MD-80s. 30 years later, I find myself on the same plane -- with less legroom and no peanuts.</li>\n 	<li>I am gearing up for some fun travel in March, though. Trying out Iceland Air’s new Chicago-to-Reykjavik service with my son, and then trying out Iceland’s budget carrier Wow Air to meet up with my wife and daughter in Spain. I’m hoping it all works fine, but I’m preparing myself to having to call a couple of audibles.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/seldon-circles/\"><em>Making Circles</em></a> by the Seldon Plan</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Peter Zurich sent a great note, adding onto the digital security topic in<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/12/20/podcast-119-digital-security-on-the-road-us-airports-getting-better/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> the last episode</a>\n<ul>\n 	<li>“Your suggestion to switch to cellular network as opposed to airport wifi is okay but it is becoming easy to obtain technology to set up a rogue cell site that will silently capture traffic -- your data will be caught and you will be none the wiser.</li>\n 	<li>“Thus, in my opinion, it is still very important to only use HTPS encrypted web sites and I would still add on the VPN if you have one available. Bottom line when using any website where you need your password to access sensitive information, make sure the computer is trusted (no public access/borrowed/loaner computers) and make sure the website is HTTPS. If using Outlook or other applications than the web browser you should be on your company\'s VPN.</li>\n 	<li>“Second thing, people should be aware that tearing a 2-D barcode in half doesn\'t necessarily render it undecipherable. 2D barcodes have a configurable level of redundancy built-in so that even if part (or possibly most) of the barcode is missing/unreadable it can still be decoded. My personal policy is once we have confirmed our FF miles have posted, the BP\'s go in the shredder.”</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Peter, thanks for these. Last week’s <a href=\"http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/columnist/2016/02/24/got-hacked-my-mac-while-writing-story/80844720/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">story </a>about the USA Today columnist whose e-mail was hacked while he used Gogo’s WiFi service on an American Airlines flight demonstrates again the potential dangers of using public WiFi. It takes a bit of spelunking through the columnist’s Twitter feed to figure out how that happened -- he was using an Earthlink e-mail service that didn’t encrypt traffic back to the mail server. Technical listeners would be right in saying “Well, there you go. What did you expect doing plain-text comms over public WiFi?” Indeed, when we talked about this in the last episode, I specifically called out the need to encrypt e-mail protocols -- POP, IMAP, SMTP -- over SSL. But that’s not the default configuration for many e-mail clients, including Outlook and, the last time I checked, the iPhone mail client. You have to go poking around in the settings, changing ports. I know how to do it -- but it’s nothing my wife would. Building on Peter’s suggestion, probably the easiest thing to do is use a web e-mail client like GMail over https -- when the green lock shows in the browser address bar. Next easiest is to set up your e-mail client to encrypt its traffic. Most e-mail providers have instructions on their sites. Perhaps the fiddliest, but the most secure is to install and use a VPN. If your company device comes with one already installed, then it’s easy -- though remember VPN web traffic is usually tracked just like it is in your office. If it’s your own device, then you’re probably going to want to buy a service. They’re not overly expensive -- $3-8/month. I use ExpressVPN, which is on the pricer side, but their VPN client is easy to install and use. And it has the side benefit of letting me watch NCAA March Madness video streams when I’m overseas. In March, I’ll be trying out a hardware-based VPN solution -- <a href=\"http://www.homingsystems.com/alwayshome-duo\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">AlwaysHome</a>, which sets up a VPN with matching USB dongles. Could be an easier solution. I’ll report back in the next episode.</li>\n 	<li>Dan Gradwohl, before he poked me into action, had a “Hmm…” reaction to a comment in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/12/20/podcast-119-digital-security-on-the-road-us-airports-getting-better/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">the last episode</a> about Spirit Airlines passing Delta as the 3rd largest at Chicago O’Hare. Looking at January schedules, he found Spirit had 29 daily departures to Delta’s 52. Would seem like Delta is still larger. However, the Crain’s Chicago article said Spirit carried more passengers than Delta -- which could be since some of Delta’s 52 departures were co-branded smaller regional jets. This is not a new thing. For a long time, O’Hare continued to claim the title of World’s Busiest Airport based on <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_world%27s_busiest_airports_by_aircraft_movements#2014_statistics\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">number of takeoffs/landings</a> (which it reclaimed in 2014) after Atlanta Hartsfield passed it on total passengers handled. Using that <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_world%27s_busiest_airports_by_passenger_traffic#2015_statistics\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">stat</a>, ORD is the 4th largest after ATL, Beijing, and Dubai. All that being said, Spirit is ramping up hard in the Chicago market, hiring new flight attendants ahead of plane deliveries, and pushing the city for more gate space. And Delta and American are rolling out new Economy Basic fares to fight them. Might not be too long before Spirit passes Delta on both measures.</li>\n 	<li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/10/11/podcast-117-random-thoughts-about-eggs-scotland-car-rentals/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Episode #117</a>, I talked -- raved, actually -- about a FinTech company called <a href=\"https://revolut.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Revolut</a>. It offered a convenient and low-cost way to exchange, transfer, and access money internationally. I started using it last September when my daughter started up at University of St Andrews. I used it to convert and push money to her UK bank account, and used the Revolut chip-&amp;-pin debit card to avoid the hassle of US chip-&amp;-signature credit cards. Last week, though, the low-cost component of their value prop disappeared -- at least for US customers, when they added a 3% fee when you added money/”topped up” your Revolut account with a US debit card. They said they were passing through the fees they were being charged, a claim I don’t doubt. However, it started me looking for cheaper foreign exchange options. Which lead me down quite the rabbit hole -- sorting through the differences in transaction costs and exchange rates quickly led to an Excel modelling session, which is just how I want to spend a Saturday morning. If you look at <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">my Twitter feed</a>, there’s a string of tweets walking through my analysis, but for my case, TransferWise, another UK FinTech startup, and Xoom, owned by PayPal, were much cheaper than Revolut after considering their new 3% fee. I expect that I’ll still use the Revolut card a bit when in Europe -- at self-service check-outs or gas pumps -- but nowhere near the volume I was using it before last week. But, I’m glad to have options and do a bit of math so avoid a $50 bank wire fee or Western Union’s 7% premium from market exchange rates.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/eliyahu-wind/\">Oh Yeah</a></em> by Eliyahu Sills</li>\n</ul>\n<b>Where Do Guidebooks Fit In?</b>\n<ul>\n 	<li>As I mentioned in the opening, my son and I are hitting Iceland in a couple of weeks for a 4-day weekend. We’ve never been before, so I needed to figure out what to do and where to stay. Right about then, someone from what I used to know as Dorling Kindersley -- now shortened to DK -- pinged me about the February relaunch of <a href=\"http://www.dk.com/us/travel/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">DK’s Eyewitness Travel Top 10 Guides</a> -- one of the first 10 is for Iceland. It started me thinking about where guidebooks fit in these days of in the world of apps (Yelp, Foursquare, Untappd), podcasts (Amateur Traveler, Indie Travel Podcast), websites (TripAdvisor), newspaper articles (NYTimes’ <a href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/22/travel/36-hours-in-reykjavik.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">36 Hours in Reykjavik</a>) and friends’ social media posts on Facebook and Instagram.</li>\n 	<li>When I want to torture my kids, I do the “when I was young…” thing. But going back to our honeymoon 25 years ago (this November -- need to get on that planning!), I cashed in a slug of British Airways miles to fly us first class to Pisa for a touring holiday in Tuscany. The only plans I had made were to rent a car (a Fiat Panda) and book our first night’s room (via Telex) in Lucca. We ran the rest of the vacation off of a set of Michelin guides -- the red one to find hotels and restaurants and the green one to figure out what to see. Between those and reading “A Room With A View”, we were set. We exchanged American Express travelers checks at the bank for lira, took pictures on Kodak and Fuji film, navigated using a paper maps… Whoops, got off track a bit there. I think my kids are somewhere screaming “Stop!”</li>\n 	<li>I think like everybody, I start with a Google search -- “What to do in Iceland in March”, limit the results to the last 2 years and start clicking. Lots of articles from UK papers (I think because of Wow Air, the Icelandic version of Spirit or EasyJet, flying into London Gatwick) which I clip over to Evernote using their nifty little Chrome extension. Then I narrow the search down to specific interests -- like “Iceland craft beer” and a few more article get sync’d to Evernote. I stack up a bunch of facts -- a sort of <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointillism\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">pointillist </a>view of what to do in Iceland.</li>\n 	<li>Every survey about how people go about travel planning will tell you that personal recommendations are the far and away the most important source of travel planning information. Which makes sense -- you know the person, how their interests, ways of travel align with yours. We have good friends that we’ll take restaurant recommendations from, but not hotels. We share the same tastes in interesting food, but they like to stay in hotels with nice pools. We’re tend to stay a bit more “closer to ground” -- choosing vacation rentals over the Westin resort.</li>\n 	<li>And once people find that you travel a lot and to different/interesting places, you get hit up -- a lot -- for recommendations. Friend and long-time T/C listener Allan Marko curates a set of notes for his favorite European cities, places like Paris, that he regularly e-mails out. After a couple of visits to Spain, I’ve taken it to the next level of geekdom -- embedding my recommendations on a Google Map page and sending out the URL. For this trip, a friend from work sent me the itinerary she and her family did last summer. Not sure that she and her husband would be search out craft beer bars with 2 young kids in tow, but I did take her recommendation for the Hotel Geysir at the top of the Golden Circle route, and hitting the Blue Lagoon on the way back to the airport.</li>\n 	<li>I like The NY Times’ 36 Hours and United Airlines’ 3 Perfect Days series. They’re focused on the long weekend getaway -- if you have a limited amount of time, here’s what to do. These are the sorts of articles we used to rip out of the Sunday travel section of the local newspaper or a travel magazine and stash in a travel folder. The Internet has shifted that behavior just a bit -- we now search for them when we right when we need them. Perhaps more for travel planning than for inspiration, but they serve the same purpose as the green Michelin guide did for our honeymoon -- a curated list of things you ought to see.</li>\n 	<li>The DK Top 10 Iceland guide seems to fit into this “hit the highlights” mode -- top 10 highlights by region and by thing (top 10 churches, waterfalls, volcanoes, bars, cheap restaurants…), 2-day and 7-day itineraries, which is nice because the 36 Hours in Reykjavik article I pulled up was from 2013, maybe on the ragged edge of up-to-dateness. And the DK guide has everything nicely packaged, which I remember from the Dorling Kindersley books of old -- all the lists in one place wrapped in a sturdy cover that has fold-out maps in the front (Iceland) and the back (downtown Reykjavik) -- which is handy if you didn’t plan ahead and cache Google Maps data before leaving the hotel wi-fi bubble.</li>\n 	<li>There’s another kind of guidebook that I’ll use, though I couldn’t find one for Iceland. They’re less about lists and more about stories -- think Bill Bryson’s <em>Notes from a Small Island</em> about the UK, or more recently, <em><a href=\"http://roadsandkingdoms.com/store/rice-noodle-fish-book/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Rice Noodle Fish</a></em> an Anthony Bourdain book by Matt Goulding (whatever that means) about Japan. I read those more before I travel than packing them in my bag. They’re about context/texture -- kinda like what “Room With A View” was for us about Florence 25 years ago -- that prepare rather than guide you, and maybe give you a bit more appreciation when you’re running through those Top 10 Highlights lists.</li>\n 	<li>Maybe it comes down to the kind of reader you are -- are you someone that likes things more tangible than electronic. Do you like to flip pages rather than screens? The Kindle cannibalized a good-sized chunk of the demand for physical books, but didn’t replace it. Just like overall book market, recent numbers show the demand for physical guide books has stabilized albeit at a lower level. I sorta split the difference. I like paging through my Evernote virtual travel folder when I’m back at the room, but like to have a physical map and list when I’m out walking during the day. Maybe that physicality keeps me more engaged with where I am. Or at least looking up and forward, which should help keep me avoid that new travelers’ epidemic -- Death by GPS.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music --<em> <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/liquid-seventythree/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Is That Called Love</a> </em></em>by Liquid Zen</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>I Hate Shopping for Suitcases</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>I’ve been traveling for a few months now with the <a href=\"http://bluesmart.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Bluesmart </a>suitcase. I’ve mentioned it in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/08/26/podcast-116-traveling-thru-japan-luggage-trends/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">a past episode</a> when I pre-ordered it through their Indiegogo campaign. And now that they’re shipping, they’re making a lot of Top Traveler Gadget lists.</li>\n 	<li>It claims to be the first piece of “smart” luggage to hit the market. It pairs with my iPhone through Bluetooth. It automatically locks when I step away from it and then unlocks itself when I return. It has a built-in battery to power itself and charge personal electronics through a couple of USB ports. It also periodically sends out its location when I can then check through the iPhone app. And it has a cool front light that glows blue when it’s paired with my phone.</li>\n 	<li>Aside from all the electronics, it’s a hard-shell wheelie bag with nice-sized wheels that roll easily -- sometimes too easily. It fits perfectly into American’s and United’s luggage sizers -- at least the ones in Boston Logan airport. (Some blogger who reviewed the bag raised a bit of a ruckus saying that the bag dimensions on the website were too big for carry-on. I guess he doesn’t travel enough to go an airport and check it out himself). The iPhone app is getting better -- Bluesmart is doing a nice job of reving the app frequently to stomp bugs, though the location alerts -- “You’re leaving me behind” are still a bit wonky.</li>\n 	<li>All in all, it’s a nice enough bag. I had been thinking about getting something a bit smaller for 1-2 night trips and this fits the bill. I’m kinda “meh” on all the electronics. The large battery is fine, but I already carry a recharger in my backpack that will top up my iPhone or tablet a couple of times -- good enough and more accessible in-flight. The location functionality seems to work only when I press the button to “wake up” the bag -- which means I’m right beside my bag and know its location. And since it’s the perfect carry-on size, it’s usually right above me in the plane cabin. So it’s a nice enough hard-shell wheelie bag with a couple of bells and whistles that don’t necessarily wow me.</li>\n 	<li>Which shouldn’t be interpreted as a knock against Bluesmart. I’m sure there are a number of travelers who love every one of those bells and whistles. It’s not so much a criticism about Bluesmart as it is how personal and idiosyncratic frequent travelers are about suitcases. It’s gotta fit your packing strategies, which are also very idiosyncratic. Some people love compartments to help them structure their packing. Me? I’m all about the flexibility of a single open space -- I build my own structure with shoes and different kinds of clothes depending on the trip. And even though I see more and more hard-shell bags -- and now own one, I’m not completely sold on it. I still like the ability to bulge when I need to. And the two- vs. four-wheel thing. Pushing a 4-wheel through the airport seems easier on my wrist, but sometimes they roll too easily and won’t stay put. It’s the reason I’ve been walking around with a ripped backpack for 4 months -- I really hate shopping for travel bags. And am very happy that leather wallets last a really long time.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #120</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/\">Podshow Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_120.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #120 — Where Do Guidebooks Fit In? I Hate Shopping for Suitcases','','inherit','closed','closed','','1598-revision-v1','','','2021-08-17 20:08:59','2021-08-18 01:08:59','',1598,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3631',0,'revision','',0),
(3632,1,'2021-08-17 20:11:24','2021-08-18 01:11:24','[caption id=\"attachment_1603\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/IMG_0266-01.jpeg\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-1603\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1603\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/IMG_0266-01-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"Just a Few Guidebooks....\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Just a Few Guidebooks....[/caption]\n\nWhere do guidebooks fit in the world of apps, review websites, social media, and podcasts? Planning for a trip to Iceland got me thinking about how to make sense of the explosion of travel tips. And then, after giving my thoughts about my new <a href=\"http://bluesmart.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Bluesmart </a>\"smart connected suitcase\", I talk about how idiosyncratic frequent travelers are about packing strategies and their choice of suitcases. There\'s also follow-up about foreign exchange apps, and listener comments about digital travel security and Spirit Airlines\' growth. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_120.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n<!--more-->\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #120:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, after a much longer-than-intended break. Looking back at the Google Docs revision history for this episode, I started it on Feb 2, so I had the best of intentions. But I’ve been traveling almost non-stop since then. At which point you might reasonably say “But you have all that time in airports and hotels to write” -- which should be the case, but I find that I have to remove all possible distractions before I can write. Hence my lack of a journalism career.</li>\n 	<li>So instead, I keep jotting down ideas in Evernote, feeling like I’m making progress, but not ever buckling down to actually write an episode. Until last Weds, when Dan Gradwohl sent me an e-mail with the subject line “Mark, where’s the next TravelCommons?”, asking in a very nice way -- when are you getting off your duff? I snarled back at Dan a bit -- more at frustration with myself than anything he wrote. But it got the intended result. So, I dedicate this episode to Dan.</li>\n 	<li>The travel that got in the way wasn’t anything exotic -- just the usual bouncing around -- New Orleans, Vegas, Atlanta, Boston, New Jersey. But it was the tail end of 7 weeks of straight travel -- which is right about the time I hit my fun quotient. My patience dives and my bitch tweeting climbs. Of course, the fact that my American Airlines flights were hitting a 50% on-time rate didn’t help. I think I finally tipped over when I found my EWR-ORD flight was an ancient AA MD-80. Trying to wedge my bag long ways into the short overhead bin on the AB side was a complete throwback to when I first started traveling for business -- in 1985, on American Airlines, out of DFW, on MD-80s. 30 years later, I find myself on the same plane -- with less legroom and no peanuts.</li>\n 	<li>I am gearing up for some fun travel in March, though. Trying out Iceland Air’s new Chicago-to-Reykjavik service with my son, and then trying out Iceland’s budget carrier Wow Air to meet up with my wife and daughter in Spain. I’m hoping it all works fine, but I’m preparing myself to having to call a couple of audibles.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/seldon-circles/\"><em>Making Circles</em></a> by the Seldon Plan</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Peter Zurich sent a great note, adding onto the digital security topic in<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/12/20/podcast-119-digital-security-on-the-road-us-airports-getting-better/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> the last episode</a>\n<ul>\n 	<li>“Your suggestion to switch to cellular network as opposed to airport wifi is okay but it is becoming easy to obtain technology to set up a rogue cell site that will silently capture traffic -- your data will be caught and you will be none the wiser.</li>\n 	<li>“Thus, in my opinion, it is still very important to only use HTPS encrypted web sites and I would still add on the VPN if you have one available. Bottom line when using any website where you need your password to access sensitive information, make sure the computer is trusted (no public access/borrowed/loaner computers) and make sure the website is HTTPS. If using Outlook or other applications than the web browser you should be on your company\'s VPN.</li>\n 	<li>“Second thing, people should be aware that tearing a 2-D barcode in half doesn\'t necessarily render it undecipherable. 2D barcodes have a configurable level of redundancy built-in so that even if part (or possibly most) of the barcode is missing/unreadable it can still be decoded. My personal policy is once we have confirmed our FF miles have posted, the BP\'s go in the shredder.”</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Peter, thanks for these. Last week’s <a href=\"http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/columnist/2016/02/24/got-hacked-my-mac-while-writing-story/80844720/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">story </a>about the USA Today columnist whose e-mail was hacked while he used Gogo’s WiFi service on an American Airlines flight demonstrates again the potential dangers of using public WiFi. It takes a bit of spelunking through the columnist’s Twitter feed to figure out how that happened -- he was using an Earthlink e-mail service that didn’t encrypt traffic back to the mail server. Technical listeners would be right in saying “Well, there you go. What did you expect doing plain-text comms over public WiFi?” Indeed, when we talked about this in the last episode, I specifically called out the need to encrypt e-mail protocols -- POP, IMAP, SMTP -- over SSL. But that’s not the default configuration for many e-mail clients, including Outlook and, the last time I checked, the iPhone mail client. You have to go poking around in the settings, changing ports. I know how to do it -- but it’s nothing my wife would. Building on Peter’s suggestion, probably the easiest thing to do is use a web e-mail client like GMail over https -- when the green lock shows in the browser address bar. Next easiest is to set up your e-mail client to encrypt its traffic. Most e-mail providers have instructions on their sites. Perhaps the fiddliest, but the most secure is to install and use a VPN. If your company device comes with one already installed, then it’s easy -- though remember VPN web traffic is usually tracked just like it is in your office. If it’s your own device, then you’re probably going to want to buy a service. They’re not overly expensive -- $3-8/month. I use ExpressVPN, which is on the pricer side, but their VPN client is easy to install and use. And it has the side benefit of letting me watch NCAA March Madness video streams when I’m overseas. In March, I’ll be trying out a hardware-based VPN solution -- <a href=\"http://www.homingsystems.com/alwayshome-duo\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">AlwaysHome</a>, which sets up a VPN with matching USB dongles. Could be an easier solution. I’ll report back in the next episode.</li>\n 	<li>Dan Gradwohl, before he poked me into action, had a “Hmm…” reaction to a comment in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/12/20/podcast-119-digital-security-on-the-road-us-airports-getting-better/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">the last episode</a> about Spirit Airlines passing Delta as the 3rd largest at Chicago O’Hare. Looking at January schedules, he found Spirit had 29 daily departures to Delta’s 52. Would seem like Delta is still larger. However, the Crain’s Chicago article said Spirit carried more passengers than Delta -- which could be since some of Delta’s 52 departures were co-branded smaller regional jets. This is not a new thing. For a long time, O’Hare continued to claim the title of World’s Busiest Airport based on <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_world%27s_busiest_airports_by_aircraft_movements#2014_statistics\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">number of takeoffs/landings</a> (which it reclaimed in 2014) after Atlanta Hartsfield passed it on total passengers handled. Using that <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_world%27s_busiest_airports_by_passenger_traffic#2015_statistics\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">stat</a>, ORD is the 4th largest after ATL, Beijing, and Dubai. All that being said, Spirit is ramping up hard in the Chicago market, hiring new flight attendants ahead of plane deliveries, and pushing the city for more gate space. And Delta and American are rolling out new Economy Basic fares to fight them. Might not be too long before Spirit passes Delta on both measures.</li>\n 	<li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/10/11/podcast-117-random-thoughts-about-eggs-scotland-car-rentals/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Episode #117</a>, I talked -- raved, actually -- about a FinTech company called <a href=\"https://revolut.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Revolut</a>. It offered a convenient and low-cost way to exchange, transfer, and access money internationally. I started using it last September when my daughter started up at University of St Andrews. I used it to convert and push money to her UK bank account, and used the Revolut chip-&amp;-pin debit card to avoid the hassle of US chip-&amp;-signature credit cards. Last week, though, the low-cost component of their value prop disappeared -- at least for US customers, when they added a 3% fee when you added money/”topped up” your Revolut account with a US debit card. They said they were passing through the fees they were being charged, a claim I don’t doubt. However, it started me looking for cheaper foreign exchange options. Which lead me down quite the rabbit hole -- sorting through the differences in transaction costs and exchange rates quickly led to an Excel modelling session, which is just how I want to spend a Saturday morning. If you look at <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">my Twitter feed</a>, there’s a string of tweets walking through my analysis, but for my case, TransferWise, another UK FinTech startup, and Xoom, owned by PayPal, were much cheaper than Revolut after considering their new 3% fee. I expect that I’ll still use the Revolut card a bit when in Europe -- at self-service check-outs or gas pumps -- but nowhere near the volume I was using it before last week. But, I’m glad to have options and do a bit of math so avoid a $50 bank wire fee or Western Union’s 7% premium from market exchange rates.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/eliyahu-wind/\">Oh Yeah</a></em> by Eliyahu Sills</li>\n</ul>\n<b>Where Do Guidebooks Fit In?</b>\n<ul>\n 	<li>As I mentioned in the opening, my son and I are hitting Iceland in a couple of weeks for a 4-day weekend. We’ve never been before, so I needed to figure out what to do and where to stay. Right about then, someone from what I used to know as Dorling Kindersley -- now shortened to DK -- pinged me about the February relaunch of <a href=\"http://www.dk.com/us/travel/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">DK’s Eyewitness Travel Top 10 Guides</a> -- one of the first 10 is for Iceland. It started me thinking about where guidebooks fit in these days of in the world of apps (Yelp, Foursquare, Untappd), podcasts (Amateur Traveler, Indie Travel Podcast), websites (TripAdvisor), newspaper articles (NYTimes’ <a href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/22/travel/36-hours-in-reykjavik.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">36 Hours in Reykjavik</a>) and friends’ social media posts on Facebook and Instagram.</li>\n 	<li>When I want to torture my kids, I do the “when I was young…” thing. But going back to our honeymoon 25 years ago (this November -- need to get on that planning!), I cashed in a slug of British Airways miles to fly us first class to Pisa for a touring holiday in Tuscany. The only plans I had made were to rent a car (a Fiat Panda) and book our first night’s room (via Telex) in Lucca. We ran the rest of the vacation off of a set of Michelin guides -- the red one to find hotels and restaurants and the green one to figure out what to see. Between those and reading “A Room With A View”, we were set. We exchanged American Express travelers checks at the bank for lira, took pictures on Kodak and Fuji film, navigated using a paper maps… Whoops, got off track a bit there. I think my kids are somewhere screaming “Stop!”</li>\n 	<li>I think like everybody, I start with a Google search -- “What to do in Iceland in March”, limit the results to the last 2 years and start clicking. Lots of articles from UK papers (I think because of Wow Air, the Icelandic version of Spirit or EasyJet, flying into London Gatwick) which I clip over to Evernote using their nifty little Chrome extension. Then I narrow the search down to specific interests -- like “Iceland craft beer” and a few more article get sync’d to Evernote. I stack up a bunch of facts -- a sort of <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointillism\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">pointillist </a>view of what to do in Iceland.</li>\n 	<li>Every survey about how people go about travel planning will tell you that personal recommendations are the far and away the most important source of travel planning information. Which makes sense -- you know the person, how their interests, ways of travel align with yours. We have good friends that we’ll take restaurant recommendations from, but not hotels. We share the same tastes in interesting food, but they like to stay in hotels with nice pools. We’re tend to stay a bit more “closer to ground” -- choosing vacation rentals over the Westin resort.</li>\n 	<li>And once people find that you travel a lot and to different/interesting places, you get hit up -- a lot -- for recommendations. Friend and long-time T/C listener Allan Marko curates a set of notes for his favorite European cities, places like Paris, that he regularly e-mails out. After a couple of visits to Spain, I’ve taken it to the next level of geekdom -- embedding my recommendations on a Google Map page and sending out the URL. For this trip, a friend from work sent me the itinerary she and her family did last summer. Not sure that she and her husband would be search out craft beer bars with 2 young kids in tow, but I did take her recommendation for the Hotel Geysir at the top of the Golden Circle route, and hitting the Blue Lagoon on the way back to the airport.</li>\n 	<li>I like The NY Times’ 36 Hours and United Airlines’ 3 Perfect Days series. They’re focused on the long weekend getaway -- if you have a limited amount of time, here’s what to do. These are the sorts of articles we used to rip out of the Sunday travel section of the local newspaper or a travel magazine and stash in a travel folder. The Internet has shifted that behavior just a bit -- we now search for them when we right when we need them. Perhaps more for travel planning than for inspiration, but they serve the same purpose as the green Michelin guide did for our honeymoon -- a curated list of things you ought to see.</li>\n 	<li>The DK Top 10 Iceland guide seems to fit into this “hit the highlights” mode -- top 10 highlights by region and by thing (top 10 churches, waterfalls, volcanoes, bars, cheap restaurants…), 2-day and 7-day itineraries, which is nice because the 36 Hours in Reykjavik article I pulled up was from 2013, maybe on the ragged edge of up-to-dateness. And the DK guide has everything nicely packaged, which I remember from the Dorling Kindersley books of old -- all the lists in one place wrapped in a sturdy cover that has fold-out maps in the front (Iceland) and the back (downtown Reykjavik) -- which is handy if you didn’t plan ahead and cache Google Maps data before leaving the hotel wi-fi bubble.</li>\n 	<li>There’s another kind of guidebook that I’ll use, though I couldn’t find one for Iceland. They’re less about lists and more about stories -- think Bill Bryson’s <em>Notes from a Small Island</em> about the UK, or more recently, <em><a href=\"http://roadsandkingdoms.com/store/rice-noodle-fish-book/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Rice Noodle Fish</a></em> an Anthony Bourdain book by Matt Goulding (whatever that means) about Japan. I read those more before I travel than packing them in my bag. They’re about context/texture -- kinda like what “Room With A View” was for us about Florence 25 years ago -- that prepare rather than guide you, and maybe give you a bit more appreciation when you’re running through those Top 10 Highlights lists.</li>\n 	<li>Maybe it comes down to the kind of reader you are -- are you someone that likes things more tangible than electronic. Do you like to flip pages rather than screens? The Kindle cannibalized a good-sized chunk of the demand for physical books, but didn’t replace it. Just like overall book market, recent numbers show the demand for physical guide books has stabilized albeit at a lower level. I sorta split the difference. I like paging through my Evernote virtual travel folder when I’m back at the room, but like to have a physical map and list when I’m out walking during the day. Maybe that physicality keeps me more engaged with where I am. Or at least looking up and forward, which should help keep me avoid that new travelers’ epidemic -- Death by GPS.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music --<em> <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/liquid-seventythree/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Is That Called Love</a> </em></em>by Liquid Zen</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>I Hate Shopping for Suitcases</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>I’ve been traveling for a few months now with the <a href=\"http://bluesmart.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Bluesmart </a>suitcase. I’ve mentioned it in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/08/26/podcast-116-traveling-thru-japan-luggage-trends/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">a past episode</a> when I pre-ordered it through their Indiegogo campaign. And now that they’re shipping, they’re making a lot of Top Traveler Gadget lists.</li>\n 	<li>It claims to be the first piece of “smart” luggage to hit the market. It pairs with my iPhone through Bluetooth. It automatically locks when I step away from it and then unlocks itself when I return. It has a built-in battery to power itself and charge personal electronics through a couple of USB ports. It also periodically sends out its location when I can then check through the iPhone app. And it has a cool front light that glows blue when it’s paired with my phone.</li>\n 	<li>Aside from all the electronics, it’s a hard-shell wheelie bag with nice-sized wheels that roll easily -- sometimes too easily. It fits perfectly into American’s and United’s luggage sizers -- at least the ones in Boston Logan airport. (Some blogger who reviewed the bag raised a bit of a ruckus saying that the bag dimensions on the website were too big for carry-on. I guess he doesn’t travel enough to go an airport and check it out himself). The iPhone app is getting better -- Bluesmart is doing a nice job of reving the app frequently to stomp bugs, though the location alerts -- “You’re leaving me behind” are still a bit wonky.</li>\n 	<li>All in all, it’s a nice enough bag. I had been thinking about getting something a bit smaller for 1-2 night trips and this fits the bill. I’m kinda “meh” on all the electronics. The large battery is fine, but I already carry a recharger in my backpack that will top up my iPhone or tablet a couple of times -- good enough and more accessible in-flight. The location functionality seems to work only when I press the button to “wake up” the bag -- which means I’m right beside my bag and know its location. And since it’s the perfect carry-on size, it’s usually right above me in the plane cabin. So it’s a nice enough hard-shell wheelie bag with a couple of bells and whistles that don’t necessarily wow me.</li>\n 	<li>Which shouldn’t be interpreted as a knock against Bluesmart. I’m sure there are a number of travelers who love every one of those bells and whistles. It’s not so much a criticism about Bluesmart as it is how personal and idiosyncratic frequent travelers are about suitcases. It’s gotta fit your packing strategies, which are also very idiosyncratic. Some people love compartments to help them structure their packing. Me? I’m all about the flexibility of a single open space -- I build my own structure with shoes and different kinds of clothes depending on the trip. And even though I see more and more hard-shell bags -- and now own one, I’m not completely sold on it. I still like the ability to bulge when I need to. And the two- vs. four-wheel thing. Pushing a 4-wheel through the airport seems easier on my wrist, but sometimes they roll too easily and won’t stay put. It’s the reason I’ve been walking around with a ripped backpack for 4 months -- I really hate shopping for travel bags. And am very happy that leather wallets last a really long time.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #120</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/\">Podshow Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_120.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #120 — Where Do Guidebooks Fit In? I Hate Shopping for Suitcases','','inherit','closed','closed','','1598-revision-v1','','','2021-08-17 20:11:24','2021-08-18 01:11:24','',1598,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3632',0,'revision','',0),
(3633,1,'2021-08-17 20:12:38','2021-08-18 01:12:38','[caption id=\"attachment_1603\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/IMG_0266-01.jpeg\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-1603\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1603\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/IMG_0266-01-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"Just a Few Guidebooks....\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> Just a Few Guidebooks....[/caption]\n\nWhere do guidebooks fit in the world of apps, review websites, social media, and podcasts? Planning for a trip to Iceland got me thinking about how to make sense of the explosion of travel tips. And then, after giving&nbsp;my thoughts about&nbsp;my new <a href=\"http://bluesmart.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Bluesmart </a>\"smart connected suitcase\", I talk about how idiosyncratic frequent travelers are about packing strategies and their choice of suitcases. There\'s also follow-up about foreign exchange apps, and listener comments about&nbsp;digital travel security and&nbsp;Spirit Airlines\' growth. All this and more at the&nbsp;<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_120.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n<!--more-->\n\n<hr>\n\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #120:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, after a much longer-than-intended break. Looking back at the Google Docs revision history for this episode, I started it on Feb 2, so I had the best of intentions. But I’ve been traveling almost non-stop since then. At which point you might reasonably say “But you have all that time in airports and hotels to write” -- which should be the case, but I find that I have to remove all possible distractions before I can write. Hence my lack of a journalism career.</li>\n 	<li>So instead, I keep jotting down ideas in Evernote, feeling like I’m making progress, but not ever buckling down to actually write an episode. Until last Weds, when Dan Gradwohl sent me an e-mail with the subject line “Mark, where’s the next TravelCommons?”, asking in a very nice way -- when are you getting off your duff? I snarled back at Dan a bit -- more at frustration with myself than anything he wrote. But it got the intended result. So, I dedicate this episode to Dan.</li>\n 	<li>The travel that got in the way wasn’t anything exotic -- just the usual bouncing around -- New Orleans, Vegas, Atlanta, Boston, New Jersey. But it was the tail end of 7 weeks of straight travel -- which is right about the time I hit my fun quotient. My patience dives and my bitch tweeting climbs. Of course, the fact that my American Airlines flights were hitting a 50% on-time rate didn’t help. I think I finally tipped over when I found my EWR-ORD flight was an ancient AA MD-80. Trying to wedge my bag long ways into the short overhead bin on the AB side was a complete throwback to when I first started traveling for business -- in 1985, on American Airlines, out of DFW, on MD-80s. 30 years later, I find myself on the same plane -- with less legroom and no peanuts.</li>\n 	<li>I am gearing up for some fun travel in March, though. Trying out Iceland Air’s new Chicago-to-Reykjavik service with my son, and then trying out Iceland’s budget carrier Wow Air to meet up with my wife and daughter in Spain. I’m hoping it all works fine, but I’m preparing myself to having to call a couple of audibles.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music --&nbsp;<a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/seldon-circles/\"><em>Making Circles</em></a> by the Seldon Plan</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Peter Zurich sent a great note, adding onto the digital security topic in<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/12/20/podcast-119-digital-security-on-the-road-us-airports-getting-better/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> the last episode</a>\n<ul>\n 	<li>“Your suggestion to switch to cellular network as opposed to airport wifi is okay but it is becoming easy to obtain technology to set up a rogue cell site that will silently capture traffic -- your data will be caught and you will be none the wiser.</li>\n 	<li>“Thus, in my opinion, it is still very important to only use HTPS encrypted web sites and I would still add on the VPN if you have one available. Bottom line when using any website where you need your password to access sensitive information, make sure the computer is trusted (no public access/borrowed/loaner computers) and make sure the website is HTTPS. If using Outlook or other applications than the web browser you should be on your company\'s VPN.</li>\n 	<li>“Second thing, people should be aware that tearing a 2-D barcode in half doesn\'t necessarily render it undecipherable. 2D barcodes have a configurable level of redundancy built-in so that even if part (or possibly most) of the barcode is missing/unreadable it can still be decoded. My personal policy is once we have confirmed our FF miles have posted, the BP\'s go in the shredder.”</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Peter, thanks for these. Last week’s <a href=\"http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/columnist/2016/02/24/got-hacked-my-mac-while-writing-story/80844720/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">story </a>about the USA Today columnist whose e-mail was hacked while he used Gogo’s WiFi service on an American Airlines flight demonstrates again the potential dangers of using public WiFi. It takes a bit of spelunking through the columnist’s Twitter feed to figure out how that happened -- he was using an Earthlink e-mail service that didn’t encrypt traffic back to the mail server. Technical listeners would be right in saying “Well, there you go. What did you expect doing plain-text comms over public WiFi?” Indeed, when we talked about this in the last episode, I specifically called out the need to encrypt e-mail protocols -- POP, IMAP, SMTP -- over SSL. But that’s not the default configuration for many e-mail clients, including Outlook and, the last time I checked, the iPhone mail client. You have to go poking around in the settings, changing ports. I know how to do it -- but it’s nothing my wife would. Building on Peter’s suggestion, probably the easiest thing to do is use a web e-mail client like GMail over https -- when the green lock shows in the browser address bar. Next easiest is to set up your e-mail client to encrypt its traffic. Most e-mail providers have instructions on their sites. Perhaps the fiddliest, but the most secure is to install and use a VPN. If your company device comes with one already installed, then it’s easy -- though remember VPN web traffic is usually tracked just like it is in your office. If it’s your own device, then you’re probably going to want to buy a service. They’re not overly expensive -- $3-8/month. I use ExpressVPN, which is on the pricer side, but their VPN client is easy to install and use. And it has the side benefit of letting me watch NCAA March Madness video streams when I’m overseas. In March, I’ll be trying out a hardware-based VPN solution -- <a href=\"http://www.homingsystems.com/alwayshome-duo\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">AlwaysHome</a>, which sets up a VPN with matching USB dongles. Could be an easier solution. I’ll report back in the next episode.</li>\n 	<li>Dan Gradwohl, before he poked me into action, had a “Hmm…” reaction to a comment in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/12/20/podcast-119-digital-security-on-the-road-us-airports-getting-better/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">the last episode</a> about Spirit Airlines passing Delta as the 3rd largest at Chicago O’Hare. Looking at January schedules, he found Spirit had 29 daily departures to Delta’s 52. Would seem like Delta is still larger. However, the Crain’s Chicago article said Spirit carried more passengers than Delta -- which could be since some of Delta’s 52 departures were co-branded smaller regional jets. This is not a new thing. For a long time, O’Hare continued to claim the title of World’s Busiest Airport based on <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_world%27s_busiest_airports_by_aircraft_movements#2014_statistics\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">number of takeoffs/landings</a> (which it reclaimed in 2014) after Atlanta Hartsfield passed it on total passengers handled. Using that <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_world%27s_busiest_airports_by_passenger_traffic#2015_statistics\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">stat</a>, ORD is the 4th largest after ATL, Beijing, and Dubai. All that being said, Spirit is ramping up hard in the Chicago market, hiring new flight attendants ahead of plane deliveries, and pushing the city for more gate space. And Delta and American are rolling out new Economy Basic fares to fight them. Might not be too long before Spirit passes Delta on both measures.</li>\n 	<li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/10/11/podcast-117-random-thoughts-about-eggs-scotland-car-rentals/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Episode #117</a>, I talked -- raved, actually -- about a FinTech company called <a href=\"https://revolut.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Revolut</a>. It offered a convenient and low-cost way to exchange, transfer, and access money internationally. I started using it last September when my daughter started up at University of St Andrews. I used it to convert and push money to her UK bank account, and used the Revolut chip-&amp;-pin debit card to avoid the hassle of US chip-&amp;-signature credit cards. Last week, though, the low-cost component of their value prop disappeared -- at least for US customers, when they added a 3% fee when you added money/”topped up” your Revolut account with a US debit card. They said they were passing through the fees they were being charged, a claim I don’t doubt. However, it started me looking for cheaper foreign exchange options. Which lead me down quite the rabbit hole -- sorting through the differences in transaction costs and exchange rates quickly led to an Excel modelling session, which is just how I want to spend a Saturday morning. If you look at <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">my Twitter feed</a>, there’s a string of tweets walking through my analysis, but for my case, TransferWise, another UK FinTech startup, and Xoom, owned by PayPal, were much cheaper than Revolut after considering their new 3% fee. I expect that I’ll still use the Revolut card a bit when in Europe -- at self-service check-outs or gas pumps -- but nowhere near the volume I was using it before last week. But, I’m glad to have options and do a bit of math so avoid a $50 bank wire fee or Western Union’s 7% premium from market exchange rates.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music --&nbsp;<em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/eliyahu-wind/\">Oh Yeah</a></em> by Eliyahu Sills</li>\n</ul>\n<b>Where Do Guidebooks Fit In?</b>\n<ul>\n 	<li>As I mentioned in the opening, my son and I are hitting Iceland in a couple of weeks for a 4-day weekend. We’ve never been before, so I needed to figure out what to do and where to stay. Right about then, someone from what I used to know as Dorling Kindersley -- now shortened to DK -- pinged me about the February relaunch of <a href=\"http://www.dk.com/us/travel/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">DK’s Eyewitness Travel Top 10 Guides</a> -- one of the first 10 is for Iceland. It started me thinking about where guidebooks fit in these days of in the world of apps (Yelp, Foursquare, Untappd), podcasts (Amateur Traveler, Indie Travel Podcast), websites (TripAdvisor), newspaper articles (NYTimes’ <a href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/22/travel/36-hours-in-reykjavik.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">36 Hours in Reykjavik</a>) and friends’ social media posts on Facebook and Instagram.</li>\n 	<li>When I want to torture my kids, I do the “when I was young…” thing. But going back to our honeymoon 25 years ago (this November -- need to get on that planning!), I cashed in a slug of British Airways miles to fly us first class to Pisa for a touring holiday in Tuscany. The only plans I had made were to rent a car (a Fiat Panda) and book our first night’s room (via Telex) in Lucca. We ran the rest of the vacation off of a set of Michelin guides -- the red one to find hotels and restaurants and the green one to figure out what to see. Between those and reading “A Room With A View”, we were set. We exchanged American Express travelers checks at the bank for lira, took pictures on Kodak and Fuji film, navigated using a paper maps… Whoops, got off track a bit there. I think my kids are somewhere screaming “Stop!”</li>\n 	<li>I think like everybody, I start with a Google search -- “What to do in Iceland in March”, limit the results to the last 2 years and start clicking. Lots of articles from UK papers (I think because of Wow Air, the Icelandic version of Spirit or EasyJet, flying into London Gatwick) which I clip over to Evernote using their nifty little Chrome extension. Then I narrow the search down to specific interests -- like “Iceland craft beer” and a few more article get sync’d to Evernote. I stack up a bunch of facts -- a sort of <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointillism\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">pointillist </a>view of what to do in Iceland.</li>\n 	<li>Every survey about how people go about travel planning will tell you that personal recommendations are the far and away the most important source of travel planning information. Which makes sense -- you know the person, how their interests, ways of travel align with yours. We have good friends that we’ll take restaurant recommendations from, but not hotels. We share the same tastes in interesting food, but they like to stay in hotels with nice pools. We’re tend to stay a bit more “closer to ground” -- choosing vacation rentals over the Westin resort.</li>\n 	<li>And once people find that you travel a lot and to different/interesting places, you get hit up -- a lot -- for recommendations. Friend and long-time T/C listener Allan Marko curates a set of notes for his favorite European cities, places like Paris, that he regularly e-mails out. After a couple of visits to Spain, I’ve taken it to the next level of geekdom -- embedding my recommendations on a Google Map page and sending out the URL. For this trip, a friend from work sent me the itinerary she and her family did last summer. Not sure that she and her husband would be search out craft beer bars with 2 young kids in tow, but I did take her recommendation for the Hotel Geysir at the top of the Golden Circle route, and hitting the Blue Lagoon on the way back to the airport.</li>\n 	<li>I like The NY Times’ 36 Hours and United Airlines’ 3 Perfect Days series. They’re focused on the long weekend getaway -- if you have a limited amount of time, here’s what to do. These are the sorts of articles we used to rip out of the Sunday travel section of the local newspaper or a travel magazine and stash in a travel folder. The Internet has shifted that behavior just a bit -- we now search for them when we right when we need them. Perhaps more for travel planning than for inspiration, but they serve the same purpose as the green Michelin guide did for our honeymoon -- a curated list of things you ought to see.</li>\n 	<li>The DK Top 10 Iceland guide seems to fit into this “hit the highlights” mode -- top 10 highlights by region and by thing (top 10 churches, waterfalls, volcanoes, bars, cheap restaurants…), 2-day and 7-day itineraries, which is nice because the 36 Hours in Reykjavik article I pulled up was from 2013, maybe on the ragged edge of up-to-dateness. And the DK guide has everything nicely packaged, which I remember from the Dorling Kindersley books of old -- all the lists in one place wrapped in a sturdy cover that has fold-out maps in the front (Iceland) and the back (downtown Reykjavik) -- which is handy if you didn’t plan ahead and cache Google Maps data before leaving the hotel wi-fi bubble.</li>\n 	<li>There’s another kind of guidebook that I’ll use, though I couldn’t find one for Iceland. They’re less about lists and more about stories -- think Bill Bryson’s <em>Notes from a Small Island</em>&nbsp;about the UK, or more recently, <em><a href=\"http://roadsandkingdoms.com/store/rice-noodle-fish-book/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Rice Noodle Fish</a></em>&nbsp;an Anthony Bourdain book by Matt Goulding (whatever that means) about Japan. I read those more before I travel than packing them in my bag. They’re about context/texture -- kinda like what “Room With A View” was for us about Florence 25 years ago -- that prepare rather than guide you, and maybe give you a bit more appreciation when you’re running through those Top 10 Highlights lists.</li>\n 	<li>Maybe it comes down to the kind of reader you are -- are you someone that likes things more tangible than electronic. Do you like to flip pages rather than screens? The Kindle cannibalized a good-sized chunk of the demand for physical books, but didn’t replace it. Just like overall book market, recent numbers show the demand for physical guide books has stabilized albeit at a lower level. I sorta split the difference. I like paging through my Evernote virtual travel folder when I’m back at the room, but like to have a physical map and list when I’m out walking during the day. Maybe that physicality keeps me more engaged with where I am. Or at least looking up and forward, which should help keep me avoid that new travelers’ epidemic -- Death by GPS.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music --<em> <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/liquid-seventythree/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Is That Called Love</a> </em></em>by Liquid Zen</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>I Hate Shopping for Suitcases</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>I’ve been traveling for a few months now with the <a href=\"http://bluesmart.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Bluesmart </a>suitcase. I’ve mentioned it in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/08/26/podcast-116-traveling-thru-japan-luggage-trends/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">a past episode</a> when I pre-ordered it through their Indiegogo campaign. And now that they’re shipping, they’re making a lot of Top Traveler Gadget lists.</li>\n 	<li>It claims to be the first piece of “smart” luggage to hit the market. It pairs with my iPhone through Bluetooth. It automatically locks when I step away from it and then unlocks itself when I return. It has a built-in battery to power itself and charge personal electronics through a couple of USB ports. It also periodically sends out its location when I can then check through the iPhone app. And it has a cool front light that glows blue when it’s paired with my phone.</li>\n 	<li>Aside from all the electronics, it’s a hard-shell wheelie bag with nice-sized wheels that roll easily -- sometimes too easily. It fits perfectly into American’s and United’s luggage sizers -- at least the ones in Boston Logan airport. (Some blogger who reviewed the bag raised a bit of a ruckus saying that the bag dimensions on the website were too big for carry-on. I guess he doesn’t travel enough to go an airport and check it out himself). The iPhone app is getting better -- Bluesmart is doing a nice job of reving the app frequently to stomp bugs, though the location alerts -- “You’re leaving me behind” are still a bit wonky.</li>\n 	<li>All in all, it’s a nice enough bag. I had been thinking about getting something a bit smaller for 1-2 night trips and this fits the bill. I’m kinda “meh” on all the electronics. The large battery is fine, but I already carry a recharger in my backpack that will top up my iPhone or tablet a couple of times -- good enough and more accessible in-flight. The location functionality seems to work only when I press the button to “wake up” the bag -- which means I’m right beside my bag and know its location. And since it’s the perfect carry-on size, it’s usually right above me in the plane cabin. So it’s a nice enough hard-shell wheelie bag with a couple of bells and whistles that don’t necessarily wow me.</li>\n 	<li>Which shouldn’t be interpreted as a knock against Bluesmart. I’m sure there are a number of travelers who love every one of those bells and whistles. It’s not so much a criticism about Bluesmart as it is how personal and idiosyncratic frequent travelers are about suitcases. It’s gotta fit your packing strategies, which are also very idiosyncratic. Some people love compartments to help them structure their packing. Me? I’m all about the flexibility of a single open space -- I build my own structure with shoes and different kinds of clothes depending on the trip. And even though I see more and more hard-shell bags -- and now own one, I’m not completely sold on it. I still like the ability to bulge when I need to. And the two- vs. four-wheel thing. Pushing a 4-wheel through the airport seems easier on my wrist, but sometimes they roll too easily and won’t stay put. It’s the reason I’ve been walking around with a ripped backpack for 4 months -- I really hate shopping for travel bags. And am very happy that leather wallets last a really long time.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #120</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/\">Podshow Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_120.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #120 — Where Do Guidebooks Fit In? I Hate Shopping for Suitcases','','inherit','closed','closed','','1598-revision-v1','','','2021-08-17 20:12:38','2021-08-18 01:12:38','',1598,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3633',0,'revision','',0),
(3634,1,'2021-08-17 20:14:51','2021-08-18 01:14:51','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":2931,\"width\":300,\"height\":300,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large is-resized\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-1024x1024.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2931\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"/><figcaption>Social distancing the reindeer will be tough</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>With public health officials saying things like <a href=\"https://www.smh.com.au/national/vaccine-is-imminent-but-virus-fight-has-long-way-to-go-fauci-20201028-p569h2.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">\"it will be easily by the end of 2021 and perhaps into the next year before we start having some semblance of normality,\"</a> I figured this year\'s travel gift guide would need to be a bit different. Here are my top shopping ideas for your pandemic traveler.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list {\"ordered\":true} -->\n<ol><li><strong>Comfortable Masks —</strong> If your traveler is a bandana/buff wearer, they\'re going to need a more conventional mask to get on an airplane. And since they\'ll be wearing it for 2 or 3 or 4 hours straight, they\'ll want something a bit more breathable than the bargain-basement masks the gate agent give away for free. I\'m a big fan of the <a href=\"https://evolvetogether.com/collections/adult-masks/products/black-milan-coordinates-30-face-masks\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">evolvetogether masks in basic black</a>. They\'re breathable, they come with a pocket carrier for spares, and at $1.20/mask, they hit the right cost/quality balance point.</li><li><strong>Battery Packs</strong> <strong>—</strong> With more things going contactless -- electronic boarding passes, digital hotel door locks, order-ahead food and beer -- a dead phone is more than just a bit of an inconvenience, and having that second or third charge immediately available is a lot more important. I carry a mix of sizes. The <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2E6HMri\" target=\"_blank\">Anker PowerCore+ Mini</a> lipstick charger is light enough (under 3 oz) for my pocket while the heavier/higher-capacity <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://amzn.to/34fcbON\" target=\"_blank\">Zendure Power Bank Supermini</a> waits for me in my computer bag.</li><li><strong>TSA Pre-Check or Global Entry —</strong> A perennial on the gift guide, but even more important when we want to limit time spent in security lines because no one is really staying 6 feet away from each other. It\'s $85 for 5 years of <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/precheck\" target=\"_blank\">Pre-Check</a> or, if you\'re feeling optimistic about international travel opening soon, <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.cbp.gov/travel/trusted-traveler-programs/global-entry\" target=\"_blank\">$100 for both Global Entry and Pre-Check.</a> You might be able to use a high-end travel card like an <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.americanexpress.com/us/expedite-your-travel.html\" target=\"_blank\">Amex Platinum</a> to pay for your traveler\'s application and get the TSA fee back as a statement credit.</li><li><strong>Car Phone Mount —</strong> If your traveler isn\'t buying <a href=\"https://youtu.be/4ZvIoVfqbw0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the airlines\' \"HEPA filters are great!\" pitch</a>, they\'ll be doing more road trips -- and so could probably could use a phone mount upgrade. I like the simplicity and low profile of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/34VrMX4\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">air vent mounts</a>. If your traveler just upgraded to a new iPhone 12, you could go all-in for a matching <a href=\"https://www.belkin.com/us/p/P-WIC002/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">MagSafe vent mount</a>.</li><li><strong>VPN Subscription</strong> <strong>—</strong> Another suggestion that\'s on every one of my gift guides. When you travel away from home or the office, you spend most of your time on public WiFi networks. In the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">last podcast episode</a>, we talked about an <a href=\"https://www.ic3.gov/Media/Y2020/PSA201006\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" target=\"_blank\">FBI consumer alert</a> reminding folks about the risks of these networks. Help your traveler surf safe with a VPN subscription. I’ve always used one of the top paid VPN providers:  <a href=\"http://nordvpn.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">NordVPN</a>, ExpressVPN, or <a href=\"https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/\">PIA</a>. A single subscription, usually in the $35-$85 range, will cover their laptop, phone, and tablet. VPN providers always have some promotion going on so it pays to shop around.</li><li><strong>Bring-Your-Own Dining Sets —</strong> Trying to navigate all the restaurant lockdowns and indoor dining limits, I\'ve eaten more take-away meals in my hotel room in the past 6 month than I have in the prior 6 years.  Rather than struggling with plastic knives on styrofoam plates, upgrade your traveler\'s dining experience with their own non-breakable <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3izWHMJ\">wine tumblers</a>, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/364UTXc\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">IPA glasses</a>, and <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3an6BhJ\">camping mess kit</a>. And don\'t forget the non-plastic <a href=\"https://amzn.to/30NAqF2\">upscale sporks</a>.</li><li><strong>In-Room Coffee Brewing Kit —</strong> In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/03/29/podcast-139-brewing-best-hotel-room-coffee-notes-from-spain/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #139 — Brewing Best Hotel Room Coffee; Notes from Spain\">episode #139</a>, I interviewed Coleman Collins about <a href=\"https://roadwarrior.blog/hotel-room-coffee/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">brewing the best hotel room coffee</a>.  Back then, it was only a thing for coffee geeks (snobs?) because just about every hotel lobby offered free coffee. But now, those coffee pots are locked up with the rest of the free breakfast gear, and most hotels aren\'t restocking the in-room coffee makers. So keep your traveler caffeinated with their own coffee brewing kit. I like keeping things simple with a <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3864wYy\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">plastic Hario V60 cone</a> over a coffee mug, but you could go all-barista with an <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2I7RsqR\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Aeropress Go travel press</a> and <a href=\"https://amzn.to/362FQ0u\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Hario mini-mill coffee grinder</a>.</li><li><strong>Portable Bluetooth Speaker —</strong> Last-minute restrictions and closures could have your traveler spending more time than planned in their hotel room or Airbnb, and needing a way to keep themselves entertained. Wearing headphones is OK for a day or two if you\'re by yourself, but when I’m with the family, I want something a bit more social. I\'m a Bose fan, so I like their <a href=\"https://amzn.to/328yhUP\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundLink Micro</a>, but there\'s a broad selection of makers, form factors, and price points to choose from.</li><li><strong>Smartphone Tripod —</strong> It\'s tough to get everyone into an arms-length selfie <em>and</em> maintain social distance. A tabletop tripod with a smartphone clamp like the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/34Vk5QS\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Manfrotto PIXI</a> can help your traveler get those group shots as well as taking some night shots and maybe a cool timelapse video.</li><li><strong>Travel Notebook</strong> <strong>—</strong> Nothing fancy, no leather embossed cover, just something to jot down thoughts, ideas, observations, or to do lists while traveling in this time of COVID. My first travel notebooks were <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://amzn.to/36mN8dZ\" target=\"_blank\">Moleskine pocket notebooks</a> but I\'ve switched over similar-sized <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2LMAOM9\" target=\"_blank\">Clairefontaine A6 notebooks</a>. Their soft cover fits better in the back pocket of my Levis and the paper is more fountain-pen friendly. Or you could go a bit more whimsical and get <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://amzn.to/36pK68D\" target=\"_blank\">a pack of Field Notes</a>.</li></ol>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:block {\"ref\":2601} /-->','10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times','','inherit','closed','closed','','2917-revision-v1','','','2021-08-17 20:14:51','2021-08-18 01:14:51','',2917,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3634',0,'revision','',0),
(3636,1,'2021-08-22 10:42:44','2021-08-22 15:42:44','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It\'ll take travel guide books a while to catch up with <a href=\"https://www.nrn.com/fast-casual/datassential-more-10-us-restaurants-have-closed-permanently\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">all</a> <a href=\"https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-07/over-110-000-restaurants-have-closed-with-sector-in-free-fall\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the</a> restaurants and bars closures caused by the COVID lockdowns. To help fill that gap, here are the best places I\'ve ate and drank at during my 2021 travels. I\'ll update this after each trip, so keep it bookmarked.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3046,\"width\":225,\"height\":179,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium is-resized\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7836-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7836-300x238.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3046\" width=\"225\" height=\"179\"/></a><figcaption><em>Sonoran Hot Dog</em></figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tuscon</a></strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.yelp.com/biz/ruiz-hot-dogs-tucson\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Ruiz Hot Dogs</a> food truck 1140 S 6th Ave at W 22nd St -- It\'s all about the&nbsp;<a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonoran_hot_dog\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Sonoran hot dog</a></li><li><a href=\"https://www.tacorustico.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">El Taco Rustico</a>, 2281 N Oracle Rd -- Quesabirras and cabrito (goat) tacos.</li><li><a href=\"https://www.tacosapson.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tacos Apson</a>, 3501 S 12th Ave -- Mesquite-grilled beef rib tacos and a hass burro</li><li><a href=\"https://1912brewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">1912 Brewing Company</a>, 2045 N Forbes Blvd, Ste 105 -- 20 taps with a wide variety of styles</li><li><a href=\"https://www.pueblovidabrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pueblo Vida Brewing Company</a>, 115 E Broadway Blvd -- Best beers of the trip!</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Phoenix</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.pizzeriabianco.com/pizzeria-bianco-heritage-square\">Pizzeria Bianco</a>, 623 E Adams St -- Thin crust pizza a short drive from the airport</li><li><a href=\"https://www.pizzeriabianco.com/pane-bianco\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pane Bianco</a>, 4404 N Central Ave -- Great sandwich place by the same group further north</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3605,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/IMG_2942.jpeg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/IMG_2942-225x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3605\"/></a><figcaption><em>Eppiq Brewing</em></figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>San Diego</strong><ul><li><a href=\"http://www.mikestacoclub.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Mike\'s Taco Club</a>, 5060 Newport Ave Ocean Beach -- Big fish tacos two blocks off the ocean beneath a tattoo parlor</li><li><a href=\"https://iloveazucar.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Azúcar</a>&nbsp;Patisserie, 4820 Newport Ave Ocean Beach -- Cuban-inspired pastries </li><li><a href=\"http://www.eppigbrewing.com/waterfront-biergarten\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Eppig Brewing Waterfront Biergarten</a>, 2817 Dickens St -- Good beers sitting by the marina</li><li><a href=\"https://www.purebrewing.org/location/balboa-park/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pure Project Brewing Balboa Park Biergarten</a>, 2865 Fifth Ave -- Re-hydrate after walking through Balboa Park</li><li><a href=\"http://www.moderntimesbeer.com/tasting-room/point-loma\">Modern Times Lomaland Fermentorium</a>, 3725 Greenwood St -- 32 taps of great beer 10 minutes from the airport</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Nashville</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.biscuitlove.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Biscuit Love Gulch</a>, 316 11th Ave S -- Fun toppings on great buttermilk biscuits for breakfast</li><li><a href=\"https://barsovereign.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bar Sovereign</a>, 514 Rep. John Lewis Way S -- Fun speakeasy-ish bar south of the Broadway strip</li><li><a href=\"https://blackdynastyramen.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Black Dynasty Secret Ramen House</a>, Pop-up that is moving from the back of Bar Sovereign to Bearded Iris\' new taproom</li><li><a href=\"https://hattieb.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Hattie B\'s Hot Chicken - Melrose</a>, 2222 8th Ave S -- Good hot chicken without a wait near Belmont University</li><li><a href=\"https://beardedirisbrewing.com/location/germantown/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bearded Iris Brewing</a>, 101 Van Buren St -- Original taproom with pool tables and a big patio</li><li><a href=\"https://www.variousartistsbrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Various Artists Brewing</a>, 1011 Elm Hill Pike -- Wide variety of beer styles; big patio; guest chefs working a big grill</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>New York City</strong><ul><li><a href=\"http://www.shujiaofuzhou.com/\">Shu Jiao Fu Zhou</a>, 118 Eldridge St, Chinatown -- Phenomenal dumplings in a non-descript corner joint</li><li><a href=\"https://www.thehummuskitchen.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Hummus Kitchen</a>, 444 3rd Ave (at 31st St), Murray Hill --  Well-executed Middle-Eastern food</li><li><a href=\"http://www.hernameishan.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Her Name is Han</a>, 17 E 31st St (at Madison Ave), Koreatown -- Home-style Korean food</li><li><a href=\"https://www.craftandcarry.beer/murray-hill\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Craft + Carry - Murray Hill</a>, 440 3rd St (at 30th St) -- Excellent selection of NY craft beers on draft and in cans to-go</li><li><a href=\"https://www.tedscornertavern.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Ted\'s Corner Tavern</a>, 523 3rd Ave (at 35th St), Murray Hill -- Comfortable neighborhood bar with a great beer selection </li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3621,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/0C76568F-F5B5-4831-B8F5-CA16FCF8C829.jpeg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/0C76568F-F5B5-4831-B8F5-CA16FCF8C829-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3621\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Portland, Maine</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://bobsclamhut.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bob\'s Clam Hut</a>, 315 Route 1, Kittery -- Best fried clams I\'ve ever had</li><li><a href=\"https://portland.islandcreekoysters.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">The Shop by Island Creek Oysters</a>, 123 Washington Ave, Portland -- Excellent (and inexpensive) selection of Maine oysters</li><li><a href=\"https://oxbowbeer.com/location/portland/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Oxbow Blending &amp; Bottling</a>, 49 Washington Ave, Portland -- Great selection of farmhouse ales with an outpost of <a href=\"http://www.duckfatfriteshack.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Duckfat</a> serving up fries on the patio</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','My Best Restaurants and Bars of 2021','','inherit','closed','closed','','3596-revision-v1','','','2021-08-22 10:42:44','2021-08-22 15:42:44','',3596,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3636',0,'revision','',0),
(3638,1,'2021-08-23 18:23:56','2021-08-23 23:23:56','[caption id=\"attachment_1418\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/IMG_2430.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1418\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/IMG_2430-300x214.jpg\" alt=\"Authentically lacking seating\" width=\"300\" height=\"214\" /></a> Authentically lacking seating...[/caption]\n\nCan frequent travelers just write off 2014? We all knew we were abused by the airlines with high prices and lousy service. I guess it\'s somewhat comforting to know that <a href=\"http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-best-and-worst-airlines-1421254623\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">analysis</a> of 2014\'s data proves us right. I\'m not sure there\'s much more we can do than enjoy the little things and hope 2015 is better. Once we get to where we\'re going, the restaurant food has gotten a lot better and with trends toward local sourcing and flavors, a lot more interesting.  We also talk about a couple pieces of hotel industry news -- hoping that IHG\'s acquisition of Kimpton doesn\'t screw up the \"anti-chain\", and continued puzzlement as to why Marriott wanted to <a href=\"http://www.wsj.com/articles/fcc-warns-hotels-others-not-to-block-personal-wi-fi-1422406537\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">block</a> your WiFi hot spots. You can listen to all this and more using the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_113.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking below.[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_113.mp3\"]\n\n<!--more-->\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #113:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you from the San Antonio Northwest Marriott in San Antonio, TX.  Doing a quick down-and-back after the flight cancellations caused by the New York snopocalypse that wasn’t blew up my travel plans for the beginning of this week.</li>\n 	<li>I tried to get a podcast done over the Christmas holiday, but the eating and drinking and then the sleeping got in the way. Funny how that works. But after my traditional 2 week hiatus from travel, my first trip of the new year -- on Monday the 5th -- started about right -- with an hour departure delay out of ORD. I couldn’t complain too much, though. The plane was there; the crew was there. We were just waiting on the fuel truck which the morning’s sub-zero temperature had slowed down a bit. Frustrating, but understandable. Walking down the jetway, the cold just took my breath away -- even in a heavy coat. I can imagine the guys running the fuel trucks needed more than a few warming breaks.</li>\n 	<li>I was heading down to New Orleans, though were the temps were about 50 degrees higher than Chicago’s single digits</li>\n 	<li>It is that time of year that you think a bit more <i>strategically</i> about your travel choices -- if you can. A bit more interested in making sales calls in Phoenix or San Antonio rather than, say, Minneapolis; preferring United’s Houston hub over Denver for transcontinental connections.</li>\n 	<li>Or vectoring through airports with good places to pass the time in case of delays. I’ve been connecting through Nashville recently on Southwest and stumbled across an outpost of Tootsie’s, the well-known downtown music joint, as I was walking through Concourse C -- complete with live music. And then in the middle of Concourse C -- near the walk-by Yazoo City Brewery stand -- is another stage with live music.</li>\n 	<li>Of course, you can have too much of a good thing. Like back in mid-November, United had a piano player in ORD at gate C17 playing Christmas tunes -- a 5-tune repertoire that got old real quick during a 45-min flight delay...</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/rompaey-eastern2/\"><em>Indian Blossom</em></a> by Ruben van Rompaey</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Spelunking through my Twitter feed…</li>\n 	<li>A couple of weeks before Christmas, I had to swing through New York on a last minute trip and, being near the holidays, the rates were absurd. It was a struggle to get a decent room for less than $300/night. It just amazes me, because I had paid less than $100/night earlier that week in New Orleans. Anyhow, I ended up at a Kimpton Hotel -- 70 Park Avenue -- in the Murray Hill neighborhood of Manhattan. I’ve been a big fan of the Kimpton chain since I set up camp for 3 months in the Hotel Monaco in downtown Portland a couple of years ago. Kimpton’s schtick is to be sort of an “anti-chain” -- embracing the quirks of each locale, each building rather than trying to replicate a standard brand experience; what Marriott has done with the refreshed Courtyards -- same furniture, same lobby, same footprint in each property. Kimpton makes a big point of being pet-friendly. In Portland, just about every morning I was there, the elevator would open and a dog would walk in (with their owner). Most were reasonably sized, but there were a couple of times some sort of bull mastiff walked in and made for tight quarters. Not a normal experience at your typical Starwood property. Another notable Kimpton quirk is their leopard print bathrobes. Again, a bit different from the typical white terry numbers you get elsewhere. Walking into my room at 70 Park, it was laid out on the bed. I posted a picture to Twitter -- and it drew quite the set of comments. They also have some fun loyalty perks, like “Raid the Minibar”. I got into New York late, so the $30 credit 70 Park gave me came in very handy -- especially since it was one of the better stocked mini-bars I’ve seen in a while. My only beef is that Kimpton isn’t in many of the place I’ve been going -- New Orleans, Memphis,.... I’m lifetime platinum on Marriott and platinum on Starwood, but I always look to stay at a Kimpton property when there’s one available.</li>\n 	<li>So I was very concerned the next week when I saw the <a href=\"http://travelcodex.com/2014/12/ihg-acquires-kimpton-hopefully-wont-screw/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">announcement</a> that IHG -- the Holiday Inn people -- bought Kimpton. One of the blandest hotel chains in existence buys one of the quirkiest. I think the last Crowne Plaza I stayed in was 6 years ago in Joburg, SA.  IHG’s last attempt to be hip was the Indigo chain. How many of you have stayed there? I’m gonna be keeping my eyes on this deal. I hope they don’t screw up Kimpton.</li>\n 	<li>I’m glad Marriott is<a href=\"http://www.wsj.com/articles/fcc-warns-hotels-others-not-to-block-personal-wi-fi-1422406537\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> giving up</a> their misguided attempt to get FCC approval to block individual WiFi hotspots. It’s kinda weird. I can’t figure out why they want to so obviously poke their customers. And it can’t be that much of a revenue thing because they’re giving away WiFi to just about everyone -- I’ve been getting it free for a while as an upper tier Rewards member as have everyone at the lower end brands like Residence Inn and Courtyard, and as of the middle of this month, so do all Marriott Rewards members at their Marriott brand. Which seems to be a trend. Kimpton does the same thing. Indeed, if you hit the Kimpton WiFi log on screen and aren’t a member of their Karma program, you’re taken to an enrollment screen.</li>\n 	<li>Which is important because hotel loyalty programs seem to be losing their grip. In a recent Google study, an increasing number of business travelers say that hotel loyalty programs have <i>less </i>impact on the travel planning this year than last year. The same study also found that most business travelers would switch programs for better perks. Given that free WiFi is one of the most popular perks with frequent travelers, what Kimpton is doing makes sense -- and what Marriott tried to do just doesn’t.</li>\n 	<li>Now, Marriott’s stated reason -- it’s all about security, wanted to protect their guests from rogue WiFi hotspots. Very buzzword-compliant -- cybersecurity is hot right now. And of course, travelers do need to be careful about which WiFi access points they connect to. Sweden’s Pirate Party pulled a <a href=\"http://www.thelocal.se/20150114/young-pirate-hacks-into-top-security-conference\">cute prank</a> earlier this month highlighting this. They set up an access point named “Open Guest” at a Swedish conference and over 100 delegates -- government officials, journalists, security experts -- connected to it, using it for e-mail, web browsing, Skype, eBay, …. just about everything. The Pirate Party logged all the traffic. Are people that gullible -- or cheap -- or both? Even more of a reason to use your own hotspot.</li>\n 	<li>The Monday before Christmas, I wrote up the <a title=\"Travel Tips — Holiday Airport Etiquette\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/12/22/travel-tips-holiday-airport-etiquette/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">holiday airport etiquette tips</a> from the last episode as a stand-alone blog post. It seemed like a timely post going into the holiday travel season. It was a pretty popular post. Rob, a long time TravelCommons listener and Untappd friend, gave it a nice re-tweet -- “A bit brusque, but the best travel tips I\'ve read this year”. And he was right. I didn’t sugar coat it a lot -- just venting a bit from what I typically see -- gumming up the PreCheck line, the Starbucks line, the concourse hallways. Probably not the best holiday spirit.</li>\n 	<li>But what I thought was in the holiday spirit was a sign I saw on the bell stand of the Minneapolis Marriott -- “Br-r-r-r!! It’s cold out! We have warm coats to lend you, available upon request. Please see your friendly bell staff person. Thank you, and stay warm!” I asked one of the bell men how often people take them up on their offer. “Oh, a lot,” he said. Really? What part of “You’re coming to Minnesota in December so dress warmly” do people not get? He just shrugged and gave me that “Minnesota nice” smile.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any travel experiences -- technology or otherwise, or just general observations, thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://www.magnatune.com/artists/albums/williams-long/\"><em>Afternoon in the Sun</em></a> by John Williams</li>\n</ul>\n<b>2014 Was A Bad Year To Fly</b>\n<ul>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/PJ-BZ531_MIDSEA_16U_20150114114822.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-1421 size-large\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/PJ-BZ531_MIDSEA_16U_20150114114822-1024x448.jpg\" alt=\"PJ-BZ531_MIDSEA_16U_20150114114822\" width=\"640\" height=\"280\" /></a>A couple of weeks ago, the Wall Street Journal <a href=\"http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-best-and-worst-airlines-1421254623\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">posted</a> its 2014 airline scorecard. Now, every travel columnist seems to do one of these, but I liked the Journal’s. I apologize to my international listeners, but this scorecard is just focused on the US. And indeed, just the US majors -- Spirit and Hawaiian aren’t in the mix, though Frontier, Alaska, and Virgin America are. I posted the scorecard graphic on the TravelCommons Facebook page when it came out; I’ll also put it in the show notes. It scores the carriers across 7 operational measures -- on-time arrivals, cancelled flights, extreme delays, 2-hr tarmac delays, mishandled baggage, involuntary bumping, complaints -- and then generates an overall rank. The top 3 were Alaska, Virgin America, and Delta. The variability across the 7 operational measures for these top performers was interesting. Alaska, the top overall, had the best scores for on-time arrivals, extreme delays, and complaints, but were 5th out of 8 in mishandled baggage. United, on the other hand, was more consistently the worst airline -- ranking last (8th) in 4 measures and 7th in the other 3.</li>\n 	<li>Which kinda doesn’t surprise me because their customer service just kept getting worse in a sort of cavalierly indifferent sort of way. I get to LaGuardia early one afternoon and want to move up to an earlier flight that’s wide open. That’ll cost you $75 -- to move from a full flight to an empty flight. Or the guy who plopped down next to me in the middle seat one day. He originally had aisle seat. Then United upgraded him to First Class. But then, oops, the First Class passenger showed up, so the guy had to go back to coach -- except they’d already given away his aisle seat and all that was left was this middle seat. So there he was stuck -- with nothing but some shrugged shoulders and a mumbled “Sorry”. You’d think they could’ve given him a couple hundred frequent flyer points, or a drink coupon. Even the most basic restaurant will comp you a dessert if things aren’t right.</li>\n 	<li>It was entertaining, then, in a twisted sort of way, when I got an e-mail from United the following week offering to upgrade me from Premiere Gold to Platinum for $2,600. With these sorts of scores, you think they’d be paying me -- or at least making it something closer to an impulse purchase. But then again, they’re probably looking at my other choices in Chicago -- American with an overall score of 7 or Southwest, scoring 5 out of 8. Chicago hub airlines are kinda like Chicago football and baseball teams -- fighting it out for the cellar -- except without the silver lining of high draft picks.</li>\n 	<li>If you really think about it, 2014 was an awful year to fly. The airlines finally got market discipline; through acquisitions -- Delta buying Northwest, United buying Continental, American buying US Airways (or was that the other way around) -- they got the oligopoly working which pushed up prices and utilization -- high fares and crowded planes. Add to that the consistent ratcheting down for the base level of services -- unbundling -- charging an increasing amount for bags, change fees, pets, children traveling alone, decent seats.</li>\n 	<li>All this while the actual experience got worse. The Wall Street Journal article gives data to prove what we already knew -- we’re paying more for less. US airlines cancelled 66,000 more flights in 2014 than in 2013 and lost or delayed 2.1 million bags, a 17% increase. Which explains the 26% increase in complaints filed with the US Dept of Transportation. Not surprising, then, that American’s CEO <a href=\"http://skift.com/2015/01/27/american-airlines-ceo-awkwardly-explains-why-fares-arent-going-down/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">told</a> financial analysts and press during Tues’ Q4 earnings call “We are not asking our customers to be happy with anything.”</li>\n 	<li>We can always hope that 2014 will turn out to be the bottom. That the newer planes the major carriers are buying will mean fewer mechanical delays and fewer cancellations. That more profitable airlines will stop demanding givebacks from their employees, which would mean much more pleasant flight attendants and pilots, and more enthusiastically productive mechanics and baggage handlers.</li>\n 	<li>Until then, I’ll be try to be happy with the little things -- the unexpected first-class upgrade on my United flight down to San Antonio. The nearly empty mid-day flight from New Orleans to Chicago. The flight attendant told us we could change seats when we wanted, but nobody moved. We each had our own rows. The early arrival into Nashville that changed a tight connection into a leisurely stroll with time to catch a beer between gates. I’ll enjoy these little things, hoping that the bigger things get better in 2015.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/westexit-modern/\"><em>Arsenal</em></a> is by The West Exit</li>\n</ul>\n<b>Restaurant Trends Go Local</b>\n<ul>\n 	<li>So while the trip to where you’re going has gotten more miserable, odds are the food is a lot better once you get there. Every year I go to the National Restaurant Show looking at dining trends because frequent travelers have to eat and it’s typically in a restaurant.</li>\n 	<li>One of the interesting trends, though, is the expansion of what a restaurant is. At the most recent NRA show -- that’s National Restaurant, not Rifle, Association -- there was a good-sized section devoted to food trucks. And depending on where you’re traveling, you’ll see more and more of them in the wild. Of course, food trucks are old hat in places like Manhattan and Center City Philadelphia. And in Portland, I’m not sure you can really call them food trucks -- the ones set up in downtown parking lots don’t look like they’ve moved in years. But elsewhere, they’ll touch down outside of office building or universities around lunch time and offer up some very cool/innovative and often locally-unique food that’s provides some nice variety.</li>\n 	<li>Which ties into another big trend -- the shift to local -- locally-sourced fish, meat , vegetables; locally-made beer or spirits, house-made pickles and charcuterie, …. Which is kind of a throwback. If you think about the 70’s and the 80’s, big franchise chains expanded in the US and then globally, pushing out standard menus with the same dishes everywhere. Now the good side of this was it took the guess work and the risk out of picking a place to eat. No surprises -- which is both good and bad. If you stopped at a Kentucky Fried Chicken along the road or took a client out to a Morton’s Steak House, you knew what you were going to get and you could reasonably expect a certain level of quality. But you weren’t going to discover anything new; get anything unique to where you were visiting. That’s OK when food is fuel -- I want to stop being hungry. It isn’t when food becomes something more -- an experience, an expression of place, which it is now with these hyper-local trends. Yes, when overdone, it can feel like you’ve somehow slipped into a bad <i>Portlandia</i> episode, but when done right, it can make you happy you gutted out the lousy flight to get there.</li>\n 	<li>One trend I keep hearing about, but I don’t really see much in travels, is using tablets and smartphones to replace menus and servers and checks. Every year at the NRA show, there are rows and rows of vendors showing iPad menus and smartphone apps that allow diners to order, split the tab, and pay without seeing a waiter or a bartender. I’ve seen these in the wild exactly twice -- an iPad wine list at Restaurant Revolution in New Orleans. And it was actually kind of intrusive -- lighting up the face of the reader in an otherwise lower lit dining room. And at a restaurant/bar in MSP where the bartender reached over to do the ordering for me. Now this is different from alternative payment methods -- touch-and-pay with Apple Pay or using a bar code on the Starbucks app. Those are just different ways to end the transaction. What I don’t see, in spite of 2-3 years of trend hype, is a move in a restaurant to self-service ordering or paying.</li>\n 	<li>Indeed, if anything, I see a move to <i>more</i> interaction with service staff with seemingly more folks taking full meals at the bar -- your server, the bartender, is never further than 6 ft from you and, on a slower night, is good for a little conversation. I guess if I’m coming to a place for local cuisine made from local produce, I’m not sure why I’d want to skip talking to the local people.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917626811171154.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #113</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a title=\"Magnatune\" href=\"http://magnatune.com/\">Magnatune</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_113.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #113 — 2014 was a Bad Year to Fly; Restaurant Trends Go Local','','inherit','closed','closed','','1416-revision-v1','','','2021-08-23 18:23:56','2021-08-23 23:23:56','',1416,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3638',0,'revision','',0),
(3639,1,'2021-08-23 19:05:29','2021-08-24 00:05:29','[caption id=\"attachment_1418\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/IMG_2430.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1418\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/IMG_2430-300x214.jpg\" alt=\"Authentically lacking seating\" width=\"300\" height=\"214\"></a> Authentically lacking seating...[/caption]\n\nCan frequent travelers just write off 2014? We all knew we were abused by the airlines with high prices and lousy service. I guess it\'s somewhat comforting to know that <a href=\"http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-best-and-worst-airlines-1421254623\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">analysis</a> of 2014\'s data proves us right. I\'m not sure there\'s much more we can do than enjoy the little things and hope 2015 is better. Once we get to where we\'re going, the restaurant food has gotten a lot better and with trends toward local sourcing and flavors, a lot more interesting. &nbsp;We also talk about a couple pieces of hotel industry news -- hoping that IHG\'s acquisition of Kimpton doesn\'t screw up the \"anti-chain\", and continued puzzlement as to why Marriott wanted to <a href=\"http://www.wsj.com/articles/fcc-warns-hotels-others-not-to-block-personal-wi-fi-1422406537\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">block</a> your WiFi hot spots. You can listen to all this and more using the&nbsp;<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_113.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking below.[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_113.mp3\"]\n\n<!--more-->\n\n<hr>\n\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #113:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you from the San Antonio Northwest Marriott in San Antonio, TX. &nbsp;Doing a quick down-and-back after the flight cancellations caused by the New York snopocalypse that wasn’t blew up my travel plans for the beginning of this week.</li>\n 	<li>I tried to get a podcast done over the Christmas holiday, but the eating and drinking and then the sleeping got in the way. Funny how that works. But after my traditional 2 week hiatus from travel, my first trip of the new year -- on Monday the 5th -- started about right -- with an hour departure delay out of ORD. I couldn’t complain too much, though. The plane was there; the crew was there. We were just waiting on the fuel truck which the morning’s sub-zero temperature had slowed down a bit. Frustrating, but understandable. Walking down the jetway, the cold just took my breath away -- even in a heavy coat. I can imagine the guys running the fuel trucks needed more than a few warming breaks.</li>\n 	<li>I was heading down to New Orleans, though were the temps were about 50 degrees higher than Chicago’s single digits</li>\n 	<li>It is that time of year that you think a bit more <i>strategically</i> about your travel choices -- if you can. A bit more interested in making sales calls in Phoenix or San Antonio rather than, say, Minneapolis; preferring United’s Houston hub over Denver for transcontinental connections.</li>\n 	<li>Or vectoring through airports with good places to pass the time in case of delays. I’ve been connecting through Nashville recently on Southwest and stumbled across an outpost of Tootsie’s, the well-known downtown music joint, as I was walking through Concourse C -- complete with live music. And then in the middle of Concourse C -- near the walk-by Yazoo City Brewery stand -- is another stage with live music.</li>\n 	<li>Of course, you can have too much of a good thing. Like back in mid-November, United had a piano player in ORD at gate C17 playing Christmas tunes -- a 5-tune repertoire that got old real quick during a 45-min flight delay...</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/rompaey-eastern2/\"><em>Indian Blossom</em></a> by Ruben van Rompaey</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Spelunking through my Twitter feed…</li>\n 	<li>A couple of weeks before Christmas, I had to swing through New York on a last minute trip and, being near the holidays, the rates were absurd. It was a struggle to get a decent room for less than $300/night. It just amazes me, because I had paid less than $100/night earlier that week in New Orleans. Anyhow, I ended up at a Kimpton Hotel -- 70 Park Avenue -- in the Murray Hill neighborhood of Manhattan. I’ve been a big fan of the Kimpton chain since I set up camp for 3 months in the Hotel Monaco in downtown Portland a couple of years ago. Kimpton’s schtick is to be sort of an “anti-chain” -- embracing the quirks of each locale, each building rather than trying to replicate a standard brand experience; what Marriott has done with the refreshed Courtyards -- same furniture, same lobby, same footprint in each property. Kimpton makes a big point of being pet-friendly. In Portland, just about every morning I was there, the elevator would open and a dog would walk in (with their owner). Most were reasonably sized, but there were a couple of times some sort of bull mastiff walked in and made for tight quarters. Not a normal experience at your typical Starwood property. Another notable Kimpton quirk is their leopard print bathrobes. Again, a bit different from the typical white terry numbers you get elsewhere. Walking into my room at 70 Park, it was laid out on the bed. I posted a picture to Twitter -- and it drew quite the set of comments. They also have some fun loyalty perks, like “Raid the Minibar”. I got into New York late, so the $30 credit 70 Park gave me came in very handy -- especially since it was one of the better stocked mini-bars I’ve seen in a while. My only beef is that Kimpton isn’t in many of the place I’ve been going -- New Orleans, Memphis,.... I’m lifetime platinum on Marriott and platinum on Starwood, but I always look to stay at a Kimpton property when there’s one available.</li>\n 	<li>So I was very concerned the next week when I saw the <a href=\"http://travelcodex.com/2014/12/ihg-acquires-kimpton-hopefully-wont-screw/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">announcement</a> that IHG -- the Holiday Inn people -- bought Kimpton. One of the blandest hotel chains in existence buys one of the quirkiest. I think the last Crowne Plaza I stayed in was 6 years ago in Joburg, SA. &nbsp;IHG’s last attempt to be hip was the Indigo chain. How many of you have stayed there? I’m gonna be keeping my eyes on this deal. I hope they don’t screw up Kimpton.</li>\n 	<li>I’m glad Marriott is<a href=\"http://www.wsj.com/articles/fcc-warns-hotels-others-not-to-block-personal-wi-fi-1422406537\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> giving up</a> their misguided attempt to get FCC approval to block individual WiFi hotspots. It’s kinda weird. I can’t figure out why they want to so obviously poke their customers. And it can’t be that much of a revenue thing because they’re giving away WiFi to just about everyone -- I’ve been getting it free for a while as an upper tier Rewards member as have everyone at the lower end brands like Residence Inn and Courtyard, and as of the middle of this month, so do all Marriott Rewards members at their Marriott brand. Which seems to be a trend. Kimpton does the same thing. Indeed, if you hit the Kimpton WiFi log on screen and aren’t a member of their Karma program, you’re taken to an enrollment screen.</li>\n 	<li>Which is important because hotel loyalty programs seem to be losing their grip. In a recent Google study, an increasing number of business travelers say that hotel loyalty programs have <i>less </i>impact on the travel planning this year than last year. The same study also found that most business travelers would switch programs for better perks. Given that free WiFi is one of the most popular perks with frequent travelers, what Kimpton is doing makes sense -- and what Marriott tried to do just doesn’t.</li>\n 	<li>Now, Marriott’s stated reason -- it’s all about security, wanted to protect their guests from rogue WiFi hotspots. Very buzzword-compliant -- cybersecurity is hot right now. And of course, travelers do need to be careful about which WiFi access points they connect to. Sweden’s Pirate Party pulled a <a href=\"http://www.thelocal.se/20150114/young-pirate-hacks-into-top-security-conference\">cute prank</a> earlier this month highlighting this. They set up an access point named “Open Guest” at a Swedish conference and over 100 delegates -- government officials, journalists, security experts -- connected to it, using it for e-mail, web browsing, Skype, eBay, …. just about everything. The Pirate Party logged all the traffic. Are people that gullible -- or cheap -- or both? Even more of a reason to use your own hotspot.</li>\n 	<li>The Monday before Christmas, I wrote up the <a title=\"Travel Tips — Holiday Airport Etiquette\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/12/22/travel-tips-holiday-airport-etiquette/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">holiday airport etiquette tips</a> from the last episode as a stand-alone blog post. It seemed like a timely post going into the holiday travel season. It was a pretty popular post. Rob, a long time TravelCommons listener and Untappd friend, gave it a nice re-tweet -- “A bit brusque, but the best travel tips I\'ve read this year”. And he was right. I didn’t sugar coat it a lot -- just venting a bit from what I typically see -- gumming up the PreCheck line, the Starbucks line, the concourse hallways. Probably not the best holiday spirit.</li>\n 	<li>But what I thought was in the holiday spirit was a sign I saw on the bell stand of the Minneapolis Marriott -- “Br-r-r-r!! It’s cold out! We have warm coats to lend you, available upon request. Please see your friendly bell staff person. Thank you, and stay warm!” I asked one of the bell men how often people take them up on their offer. “Oh, a lot,” he said. Really? What part of “You’re coming to Minnesota in December so dress warmly” do people not get? He just shrugged and gave me that “Minnesota nice” smile.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any travel experiences -- technology or otherwise, or just general observations, thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. &nbsp;The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://www.magnatune.com/artists/albums/williams-long/\"><em>Afternoon in the Sun</em></a> by John Williams</li>\n</ul>\n<b>2014 Was A Bad Year To Fly</b>\n<ul>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/PJ-BZ531_MIDSEA_16U_20150114114822.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-1421 size-large\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/PJ-BZ531_MIDSEA_16U_20150114114822-1024x448.jpg\" alt=\"PJ-BZ531_MIDSEA_16U_20150114114822\" width=\"640\" height=\"280\"></a>A couple of weeks ago, the Wall Street Journal <a href=\"http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-best-and-worst-airlines-1421254623\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">posted</a> its 2014 airline scorecard. Now, every travel columnist seems to do one of these, but I liked the Journal’s. I apologize to my international listeners, but this scorecard is just focused on the US. And indeed, just the US majors -- Spirit and Hawaiian aren’t in the mix, though Frontier, Alaska, and Virgin America are. I posted the scorecard graphic on the TravelCommons Facebook page when it came out; I’ll also put it in the show notes. It scores the carriers across 7 operational measures -- on-time arrivals, cancelled flights, extreme delays, 2-hr tarmac delays, mishandled baggage, involuntary bumping, complaints -- and then generates an overall rank. The top 3 were Alaska, Virgin America, and Delta. The variability across the 7 operational measures for these top performers was interesting. Alaska, the top overall, had the best scores for on-time arrivals, extreme delays, and complaints, but were 5th out of 8 in mishandled baggage. United, on the other hand, was more consistently the worst airline -- ranking last (8th) in 4 measures and 7th in the other 3.</li>\n 	<li>Which kinda doesn’t surprise me because their customer service just kept getting worse in a sort of cavalierly indifferent sort of way. I get to LaGuardia early one afternoon and want to move up to an earlier flight that’s wide open. That’ll cost you $75 -- to move from a full flight to an empty flight. Or the guy who plopped down next to me in the middle seat one day. He originally had aisle seat. Then United upgraded him to First Class. But then, oops, the First Class passenger showed up, so the guy had to go back to coach -- except they’d already given away his aisle seat and all that was left was this middle seat. So there he was stuck -- with nothing but some shrugged shoulders and a mumbled “Sorry”. You’d think they could’ve given him a couple hundred frequent flyer points, or a drink coupon. Even the most basic restaurant will comp you a dessert if things aren’t right.</li>\n 	<li>It was entertaining, then, in a twisted sort of way, when I got an e-mail from United the following week offering to upgrade me from Premiere Gold to Platinum for $2,600. With these sorts of scores, you think they’d be paying me -- or at least making it something closer to an impulse purchase. But then again, they’re probably looking at my other choices in Chicago -- American with an overall score of 7 or Southwest, scoring 5 out of 8. Chicago hub airlines are kinda like Chicago football and baseball teams -- fighting it out for the cellar -- except without the silver lining of high draft picks.</li>\n 	<li>If you really think about it, 2014 was an awful year to fly. The airlines finally got market discipline; through acquisitions -- Delta buying Northwest, United buying Continental, American buying US Airways (or was that the other way around) -- they got the oligopoly working which pushed up prices and utilization -- high fares and crowded planes. Add to that the consistent ratcheting down for the base level of services -- unbundling -- charging an increasing amount for bags, change fees, pets, children traveling alone, decent seats.</li>\n 	<li>All this while the actual experience got worse. The Wall Street Journal article gives data to prove what we already knew -- we’re paying more for less. US airlines cancelled 66,000 more flights in 2014 than in 2013 and lost or delayed 2.1 million bags, a 17% increase. Which explains the 26% increase in complaints filed with the US Dept of Transportation. Not surprising, then, that American’s CEO <a href=\"http://skift.com/2015/01/27/american-airlines-ceo-awkwardly-explains-why-fares-arent-going-down/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">told</a> financial analysts and press during Tues’ Q4 earnings call “We are not asking our customers to be happy with anything.”</li>\n 	<li>We can always hope that 2014 will turn out to be the bottom. That the newer planes the major carriers are buying will mean fewer mechanical delays and fewer cancellations. That more profitable airlines will stop demanding givebacks from their employees, which would mean much more pleasant flight attendants and pilots, and more enthusiastically productive mechanics and baggage handlers.</li>\n 	<li>Until then, I’ll be try to be happy with the little things -- the unexpected first-class upgrade on my United flight down to San Antonio. The nearly empty mid-day flight from New Orleans to Chicago. The flight attendant told us we could change seats when we wanted, but nobody moved. We each had our own rows. The early arrival into Nashville that changed a tight connection into a leisurely stroll with time to catch a beer between gates. I’ll enjoy these little things, hoping that the bigger things get better in 2015.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/westexit-modern/\"><em>Arsenal</em></a> is by The West Exit</li>\n</ul>\n<b>Restaurant Trends Go Local</b>\n<ul>\n 	<li>So while the trip to where you’re going has gotten more miserable, odds are the food is a lot better once you get there. Every year I go to the National Restaurant Show looking at dining trends because frequent travelers have to eat and it’s typically in a restaurant.</li>\n 	<li>One of the interesting trends, though, is the expansion of what a restaurant is. At the most recent NRA show -- that’s National Restaurant, not Rifle, Association -- there was a good-sized section devoted to food trucks. And depending on where you’re traveling, you’ll see more and more of them in the wild. Of course, food trucks are old hat in places like Manhattan and Center City Philadelphia. And in Portland, I’m not sure you can really call them food trucks -- the ones set up in downtown parking lots don’t look like they’ve moved in years. But elsewhere, they’ll touch down outside of office building or universities around lunch time and offer up some very cool/innovative and often locally-unique food that’s provides some nice variety.</li>\n 	<li>Which ties into another big trend -- the shift to local -- locally-sourced fish, meat , vegetables; locally-made beer or spirits, house-made pickles and charcuterie, …. Which is kind of a throwback. If you think about the 70’s and the 80’s, big franchise chains expanded in the US and then globally, pushing out standard menus with the same dishes everywhere. Now the good side of this was it took the guess work and the risk out of picking a place to eat. No surprises -- which is both good and bad. If you stopped at a Kentucky Fried Chicken along the road or took a client out to a Morton’s Steak House, you knew what you were going to get and you could reasonably expect a certain level of quality. But you weren’t going to discover anything new; get anything unique to where you were visiting. That’s OK when food is fuel -- I want to stop being hungry. It isn’t when food becomes something more -- an experience, an expression of place, which it is now with these hyper-local trends. Yes, when overdone, it can feel like you’ve somehow slipped into a bad <i>Portlandia</i> episode, but when done right, it can make you happy you gutted out the lousy flight to get there.</li>\n 	<li>One trend I keep hearing about, but I don’t really see much in travels, is using tablets and smartphones to replace menus and servers and checks. Every year at the NRA show, there are rows and rows of vendors showing iPad menus and smartphone apps that allow diners to order, split the tab, and pay without seeing a waiter or a bartender. I’ve seen these in the wild exactly twice -- an iPad wine list at Restaurant Revolution in New Orleans. And it was actually kind of intrusive -- lighting up the face of the reader in an otherwise lower lit dining room. And at a restaurant/bar in MSP where the bartender reached over to do the ordering for me. Now this is different from alternative payment methods -- touch-and-pay with Apple Pay or using a bar code on the Starbucks app. Those are just different ways to end the transaction. What I don’t see, in spite of 2-3 years of trend hype, is a move in a restaurant to self-service ordering or paying.</li>\n 	<li>Indeed, if anything, I see a move to <i>more</i> interaction with service staff with seemingly more folks taking full meals at the bar -- your server, the bartender, is never further than 6 ft from you and, on a slower night, is good for a little conversation. I guess if I’m coming to a place for local cuisine made from local produce, I’m not sure why I’d want to skip talking to the local people.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917626811171154.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\"><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #113</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a title=\"Magnatune\" href=\"http://magnatune.com/\">Magnatune</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_113.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #113 — 2014 was a Bad Year to Fly; Restaurant Trends Go Local','','inherit','closed','closed','','1416-revision-v1','','','2021-08-23 19:05:29','2021-08-24 00:05:29','',1416,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3639',0,'revision','',0),
(3640,1,'2021-08-23 19:07:00','2021-08-24 00:07:00','[caption id=\"attachment_1418\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/IMG_2430.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1418\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/IMG_2430-300x214.jpg\" alt=\"Authentically lacking seating\" width=\"300\" height=\"214\"></a> Authentically lacking seating...[/caption]\n\nCan frequent travelers just write off 2014? We all knew we were abused by the airlines with high prices and lousy service. I guess it\'s somewhat comforting to know that <a href=\"http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-best-and-worst-airlines-1421254623\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">analysis</a> of 2014\'s data proves us right. I\'m not sure there\'s much more we can do than enjoy the little things and hope 2015 is better. Once we get to where we\'re going, the restaurant food has gotten a lot better and with trends toward local sourcing and flavors, a lot more interesting. &nbsp;We also talk about a couple pieces of hotel industry news -- hoping that IHG\'s acquisition of Kimpton doesn\'t screw up the \"anti-chain\", and continued puzzlement as to why Marriott wanted to <a href=\"http://www.wsj.com/articles/fcc-warns-hotels-others-not-to-block-personal-wi-fi-1422406537\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">block</a> your WiFi hot spots. You can listen to all this and more using the&nbsp;<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_113.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking below.[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_113.mp3\"]\n\n<!--more-->\n\n<hr>\n\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #113:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you from the San Antonio Northwest Marriott in San Antonio, TX. &nbsp;Doing a quick down-and-back after the flight cancellations caused by the New York snopocalypse that wasn’t blew up my travel plans for the beginning of this week.</li>\n 	<li>I tried to get a podcast done over the Christmas holiday, but the eating and drinking and then the sleeping got in the way. Funny how that works. But after my traditional 2 week hiatus from travel, my first trip of the new year -- on Monday the 5th -- started about right -- with an hour departure delay out of ORD. I couldn’t complain too much, though. The plane was there; the crew was there. We were just waiting on the fuel truck which the morning’s sub-zero temperature had slowed down a bit. Frustrating, but understandable. Walking down the jetway, the cold just took my breath away -- even in a heavy coat. I can imagine the guys running the fuel trucks needed more than a few warming breaks.</li>\n 	<li>I was heading down to New Orleans, though were the temps were about 50 degrees higher than Chicago’s single digits</li>\n 	<li>It is that time of year that you think a bit more <i>strategically</i> about your travel choices -- if you can. A bit more interested in making sales calls in Phoenix or San Antonio rather than, say, Minneapolis; preferring United’s Houston hub over Denver for transcontinental connections.</li>\n 	<li>Or vectoring through airports with good places to pass the time in case of delays. I’ve been connecting through Nashville recently on Southwest and stumbled across an outpost of Tootsie’s, the well-known downtown music joint, as I was walking through Concourse C -- complete with live music. And then in the middle of Concourse C -- near the walk-by Yazoo City Brewery stand -- is another stage with live music.</li>\n 	<li>Of course, you can have too much of a good thing. Like back in mid-November, United had a piano player in ORD at gate C17 playing Christmas tunes -- a 5-tune repertoire that got old real quick during a 45-min flight delay...</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/rompaey-eastern2/\"><em>Indian Blossom</em></a> by Ruben van Rompaey</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Spelunking through my Twitter feed…</li>\n 	<li>A couple of weeks before Christmas, I had to swing through New York on a last minute trip and, being near the holidays, the rates were absurd. It was a struggle to get a decent room for less than $300/night. It just amazes me, because I had paid less than $100/night earlier that week in New Orleans. Anyhow, I ended up at a Kimpton Hotel -- 70 Park Avenue -- in the Murray Hill neighborhood of Manhattan. I’ve been a big fan of the Kimpton chain since I set up camp for 3 months in the Hotel Monaco in downtown Portland a couple of years ago. Kimpton’s schtick is to be sort of an “anti-chain” -- embracing the quirks of each locale, each building rather than trying to replicate a standard brand experience; what Marriott has done with the refreshed Courtyards -- same furniture, same lobby, same footprint in each property. Kimpton makes a big point of being pet-friendly. In Portland, just about every morning I was there, the elevator would open and a dog would walk in (with their owner). Most were reasonably sized, but there were a couple of times some sort of bull mastiff walked in and made for tight quarters. Not a normal experience at your typical Starwood property. Another notable Kimpton quirk is their leopard print bathrobes. Again, a bit different from the typical white terry numbers you get elsewhere. Walking into my room at 70 Park, it was laid out on the bed. I posted a picture to Twitter -- and it drew quite the set of comments. They also have some fun loyalty perks, like “Raid the Minibar”. I got into New York late, so the $30 credit 70 Park gave me came in very handy -- especially since it was one of the better stocked mini-bars I’ve seen in a while. My only beef is that Kimpton isn’t in many of the place I’ve been going -- New Orleans, Memphis,.... I’m lifetime platinum on Marriott and platinum on Starwood, but I always look to stay at a Kimpton property when there’s one available.</li>\n 	<li>So I was very concerned the next week when I saw the <a href=\"http://travelcodex.com/2014/12/ihg-acquires-kimpton-hopefully-wont-screw/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">announcement</a> that IHG -- the Holiday Inn people -- bought Kimpton. One of the blandest hotel chains in existence buys one of the quirkiest. I think the last Crowne Plaza I stayed in was 6 years ago in Joburg, SA. &nbsp;IHG’s last attempt to be hip was the Indigo chain. How many of you have stayed there? I’m gonna be keeping my eyes on this deal. I hope they don’t screw up Kimpton.</li>\n 	<li>I’m glad Marriott is<a href=\"http://www.wsj.com/articles/fcc-warns-hotels-others-not-to-block-personal-wi-fi-1422406537\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> giving up</a> their misguided attempt to get FCC approval to block individual WiFi hotspots. It’s kinda weird. I can’t figure out why they want to so obviously poke their customers. And it can’t be that much of a revenue thing because they’re giving away WiFi to just about everyone -- I’ve been getting it free for a while as an upper tier Rewards member as have everyone at the lower end brands like Residence Inn and Courtyard, and as of the middle of this month, so do all Marriott Rewards members at their Marriott brand. Which seems to be a trend. Kimpton does the same thing. Indeed, if you hit the Kimpton WiFi log on screen and aren’t a member of their Karma program, you’re taken to an enrollment screen.</li>\n 	<li>Which is important because hotel loyalty programs seem to be losing their grip. In a recent Google study, an increasing number of business travelers say that hotel loyalty programs have <i>less </i>impact on the travel planning this year than last year. The same study also found that most business travelers would switch programs for better perks. Given that free WiFi is one of the most popular perks with frequent travelers, what Kimpton is doing makes sense -- and what Marriott tried to do just doesn’t.</li>\n 	<li>Now, Marriott’s stated reason -- it’s all about security, wanted to protect their guests from rogue WiFi hotspots. Very buzzword-compliant -- cybersecurity is hot right now. And of course, travelers do need to be careful about which WiFi access points they connect to. Sweden’s Pirate Party pulled a <a href=\"http://www.thelocal.se/20150114/young-pirate-hacks-into-top-security-conference\">cute prank</a> earlier this month highlighting this. They set up an access point named “Open Guest” at a Swedish conference and over 100 delegates -- government officials, journalists, security experts -- connected to it, using it for e-mail, web browsing, Skype, eBay, …. just about everything. The Pirate Party logged all the traffic. Are people that gullible -- or cheap -- or both? Even more of a reason to use your own hotspot.</li>\n 	<li>The Monday before Christmas, I wrote up the <a title=\"Travel Tips — Holiday Airport Etiquette\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/12/22/travel-tips-holiday-airport-etiquette/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">holiday airport etiquette tips</a> from the last episode as a stand-alone blog post. It seemed like a timely post going into the holiday travel season. It was a pretty popular post. Rob, a long time TravelCommons listener and Untappd friend, gave it a nice re-tweet -- “A bit brusque, but the best travel tips I\'ve read this year”. And he was right. I didn’t sugar coat it a lot -- just venting a bit from what I typically see -- gumming up the PreCheck line, the Starbucks line, the concourse hallways. Probably not the best holiday spirit.</li>\n 	<li>But what I thought was in the holiday spirit was a sign I saw on the bell stand of the Minneapolis Marriott -- “Br-r-r-r!! It’s cold out! We have warm coats to lend you, available upon request. Please see your friendly bell staff person. Thank you, and stay warm!” I asked one of the bell men how often people take them up on their offer. “Oh, a lot,” he said. Really? What part of “You’re coming to Minnesota in December so dress warmly” do people not get? He just shrugged and gave me that “Minnesota nice” smile.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any travel experiences -- technology or otherwise, or just general observations, thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. &nbsp;The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://www.magnatune.com/artists/albums/williams-long/\"><em>Afternoon in the Sun</em></a> by John Williams</li>\n</ul>\n<b>2014 Was A Bad Year To Fly</b>\n<ul>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/PJ-BZ531_MIDSEA_16U_20150114114822.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-1421 size-large\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/PJ-BZ531_MIDSEA_16U_20150114114822-1024x448.jpg\" alt=\"PJ-BZ531_MIDSEA_16U_20150114114822\" width=\"640\" height=\"280\"></a>A couple of weeks ago, the Wall Street Journal <a href=\"http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-best-and-worst-airlines-1421254623\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">posted</a> its 2014 airline scorecard. Now, every travel columnist seems to do one of these, but I liked the Journal’s. I apologize to my international listeners, but this scorecard is just focused on the US. And indeed, just the US majors -- Spirit and Hawaiian aren’t in the mix, though Frontier, Alaska, and Virgin America are. I posted the scorecard graphic on the TravelCommons Facebook page when it came out; I’ll also put it in the show notes. It scores the carriers across 7 operational measures -- on-time arrivals, cancelled flights, extreme delays, 2-hr tarmac delays, mishandled baggage, involuntary bumping, complaints -- and then generates an overall rank. The top 3 were Alaska, Virgin America, and Delta. The variability across the 7 operational measures for these top performers was interesting. Alaska, the top overall, had the best scores for on-time arrivals, extreme delays, and complaints, but were 5th out of 8 in mishandled baggage. United, on the other hand, was more consistently the worst airline -- ranking last (8th) in 4 measures and 7th in the other 3.</li>\n 	<li>Which kinda doesn’t surprise me because their customer service just kept getting worse in a sort of cavalierly indifferent sort of way. I get to LaGuardia early one afternoon and want to move up to an earlier flight that’s wide open. That’ll cost you $75 -- to move from a full flight to an empty flight. Or the guy who plopped down next to me in the middle seat one day. He originally had aisle seat. Then United upgraded him to First Class. But then, oops, the First Class passenger showed up, so the guy had to go back to coach -- except they’d already given away his aisle seat and all that was left was this middle seat. So there he was stuck -- with nothing but some shrugged shoulders and a mumbled “Sorry”. You’d think they could’ve given him a couple hundred frequent flyer points, or a drink coupon. Even the most basic restaurant will comp you a dessert if things aren’t right.</li>\n 	<li>It was entertaining, then, in a twisted sort of way, when I got an e-mail from United the following week offering to upgrade me from Premiere Gold to Platinum for $2,600. With these sorts of scores, you think they’d be paying me -- or at least making it something closer to an impulse purchase. But then again, they’re probably looking at my other choices in Chicago -- American with an overall score of 7 or Southwest, scoring 5 out of 8. Chicago hub airlines are kinda like Chicago football and baseball teams -- fighting it out for the cellar -- except without the silver lining of high draft picks.</li>\n 	<li>If you really think about it, 2014 was an awful year to fly. The airlines finally got market discipline; through acquisitions -- Delta buying Northwest, United buying Continental, American buying US Airways (or was that the other way around) -- they got the oligopoly working which pushed up prices and utilization -- high fares and crowded planes. Add to that the consistent ratcheting down for the base level of services -- unbundling -- charging an increasing amount for bags, change fees, pets, children traveling alone, decent seats.</li>\n 	<li>All this while the actual experience got worse. The Wall Street Journal article gives data to prove what we already knew -- we’re paying more for less. US airlines cancelled 66,000 more flights in 2014 than in 2013 and lost or delayed 2.1 million bags, a 17% increase. Which explains the 26% increase in complaints filed with the US Dept of Transportation. Not surprising, then, that American’s CEO <a href=\"http://skift.com/2015/01/27/american-airlines-ceo-awkwardly-explains-why-fares-arent-going-down/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">told</a> financial analysts and press during Tues’ Q4 earnings call “We are not asking our customers to be happy with anything.”</li>\n 	<li>We can always hope that 2014 will turn out to be the bottom. That the newer planes the major carriers are buying will mean fewer mechanical delays and fewer cancellations. That more profitable airlines will stop demanding givebacks from their employees, which would mean much more pleasant flight attendants and pilots, and more enthusiastically productive mechanics and baggage handlers.</li>\n 	<li>Until then, I’ll be try to be happy with the little things -- the unexpected first-class upgrade on my United flight down to San Antonio. The nearly empty mid-day flight from New Orleans to Chicago. The flight attendant told us we could change seats when we wanted, but nobody moved. We each had our own rows. The early arrival into Nashville that changed a tight connection into a leisurely stroll with time to catch a beer between gates. I’ll enjoy these little things, hoping that the bigger things get better in 2015.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/westexit-modern/\"><em>Arsenal</em></a> is by The West Exit</li>\n</ul>\n<b>Restaurant Trends Go Local</b>\n<ul>\n 	<li>So while the trip to where you’re going has gotten more miserable, odds are the food is a lot better once you get there. Every year I go to the National Restaurant Show looking at dining trends because frequent travelers have to eat and it’s typically in a restaurant.</li>\n 	<li>One of the interesting trends, though, is the expansion of what a restaurant is. At the most recent NRA show -- that’s National Restaurant, not Rifle, Association -- there was a good-sized section devoted to food trucks. And depending on where you’re traveling, you’ll see more and more of them in the wild. Of course, food trucks are old hat in places like Manhattan and Center City Philadelphia. And in Portland, I’m not sure you can really call them food trucks -- the ones set up in downtown parking lots don’t look like they’ve moved in years. But elsewhere, they’ll touch down outside of office building or universities around lunch time and offer up some very cool/innovative and often locally-unique food that’s provides some nice variety.</li>\n 	<li>Which ties into another big trend -- the shift to local -- locally-sourced fish, meat , vegetables; locally-made beer or spirits, house-made pickles and charcuterie, …. Which is kind of a throwback. If you think about the 70’s and the 80’s, big franchise chains expanded in the US and then globally, pushing out standard menus with the same dishes everywhere. Now the good side of this was it took the guess work and the risk out of picking a place to eat. No surprises -- which is both good and bad. If you stopped at a Kentucky Fried Chicken along the road or took a client out to a Morton’s Steak House, you knew what you were going to get and you could reasonably expect a certain level of quality. But you weren’t going to discover anything new; get anything unique to where you were visiting. That’s OK when food is fuel -- I want to stop being hungry. It isn’t when food becomes something more -- an experience, an expression of place, which it is now with these hyper-local trends. Yes, when overdone, it can feel like you’ve somehow slipped into a bad <i>Portlandia</i> episode, but when done right, it can make you happy you gutted out the lousy flight to get there.</li>\n 	<li>One trend I keep hearing about, but I don’t really see much in travels, is using tablets and smartphones to replace menus and servers and checks. Every year at the NRA show, there are rows and rows of vendors showing iPad menus and smartphone apps that allow diners to order, split the tab, and pay without seeing a waiter or a bartender. I’ve seen these in the wild exactly twice -- an iPad wine list at Restaurant Revolution in New Orleans. And it was actually kind of intrusive -- lighting up the face of the reader in an otherwise lower lit dining room. And at a restaurant/bar in MSP where the bartender reached over to do the ordering for me. Now this is different from alternative payment methods -- touch-and-pay with Apple Pay or using a bar code on the Starbucks app. Those are just different ways to end the transaction. What I don’t see, in spite of 2-3 years of trend hype, is a move in a restaurant to self-service ordering or paying.</li>\n 	<li>Indeed, if anything, I see a move to <i>more</i> interaction with service staff with seemingly more folks taking full meals at the bar -- your server, the bartender, is never further than 6 ft from you and, on a slower night, is good for a little conversation. I guess if I’m coming to a place for local cuisine made from local produce, I’m not sure why I’d want to skip talking to the local people.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917626811171154.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\"><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #113</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a title=\"Magnatune\" href=\"http://magnatune.com/\">Magnatune</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_113.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #113 — 2014 was a Bad Year to Fly; Restaurants Go Local','','inherit','closed','closed','','1416-revision-v1','','','2021-08-23 19:07:00','2021-08-24 00:07:00','',1416,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3640',0,'revision','',0),
(3641,1,'2021-08-23 19:07:27','2021-08-24 00:07:27','[caption id=\"attachment_1418\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/IMG_2430.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1418\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/IMG_2430-300x214.jpg\" alt=\"Authentically lacking seating\" width=\"300\" height=\"214\"></a> Authentically lacking seating...[/caption]\n\nCan frequent travelers just write off 2014? We all knew we were abused by the airlines with high prices and lousy service. I guess it\'s somewhat comforting to know that <a href=\"http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-best-and-worst-airlines-1421254623\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">analysis</a> of 2014\'s data proves us right. I\'m not sure there\'s much more we can do than enjoy the little things and hope 2015 is better. Once we get to where we\'re going, the restaurant food has gotten a lot better and with trends toward local sourcing and flavors, a lot more interesting. &nbsp;We also talk about a couple pieces of hotel industry news -- hoping that IHG\'s acquisition of Kimpton doesn\'t screw up the \"anti-chain\", and continued puzzlement as to why Marriott wanted to <a href=\"http://www.wsj.com/articles/fcc-warns-hotels-others-not-to-block-personal-wi-fi-1422406537\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">block</a> your WiFi hot spots. You can listen to all this and more using the&nbsp;<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_113.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking below.\n\n<hr>\n\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #113:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you from the San Antonio Northwest Marriott in San Antonio, TX. &nbsp;Doing a quick down-and-back after the flight cancellations caused by the New York snopocalypse that wasn’t blew up my travel plans for the beginning of this week.</li>\n 	<li>I tried to get a podcast done over the Christmas holiday, but the eating and drinking and then the sleeping got in the way. Funny how that works. But after my traditional 2 week hiatus from travel, my first trip of the new year -- on Monday the 5th -- started about right -- with an hour departure delay out of ORD. I couldn’t complain too much, though. The plane was there; the crew was there. We were just waiting on the fuel truck which the morning’s sub-zero temperature had slowed down a bit. Frustrating, but understandable. Walking down the jetway, the cold just took my breath away -- even in a heavy coat. I can imagine the guys running the fuel trucks needed more than a few warming breaks.</li>\n 	<li>I was heading down to New Orleans, though were the temps were about 50 degrees higher than Chicago’s single digits</li>\n 	<li>It is that time of year that you think a bit more <i>strategically</i> about your travel choices -- if you can. A bit more interested in making sales calls in Phoenix or San Antonio rather than, say, Minneapolis; preferring United’s Houston hub over Denver for transcontinental connections.</li>\n 	<li>Or vectoring through airports with good places to pass the time in case of delays. I’ve been connecting through Nashville recently on Southwest and stumbled across an outpost of Tootsie’s, the well-known downtown music joint, as I was walking through Concourse C -- complete with live music. And then in the middle of Concourse C -- near the walk-by Yazoo City Brewery stand -- is another stage with live music.</li>\n 	<li>Of course, you can have too much of a good thing. Like back in mid-November, United had a piano player in ORD at gate C17 playing Christmas tunes -- a 5-tune repertoire that got old real quick during a 45-min flight delay...</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/rompaey-eastern2/\"><em>Indian Blossom</em></a> by Ruben van Rompaey</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Spelunking through my Twitter feed…</li>\n 	<li>A couple of weeks before Christmas, I had to swing through New York on a last minute trip and, being near the holidays, the rates were absurd. It was a struggle to get a decent room for less than $300/night. It just amazes me, because I had paid less than $100/night earlier that week in New Orleans. Anyhow, I ended up at a Kimpton Hotel -- 70 Park Avenue -- in the Murray Hill neighborhood of Manhattan. I’ve been a big fan of the Kimpton chain since I set up camp for 3 months in the Hotel Monaco in downtown Portland a couple of years ago. Kimpton’s schtick is to be sort of an “anti-chain” -- embracing the quirks of each locale, each building rather than trying to replicate a standard brand experience; what Marriott has done with the refreshed Courtyards -- same furniture, same lobby, same footprint in each property. Kimpton makes a big point of being pet-friendly. In Portland, just about every morning I was there, the elevator would open and a dog would walk in (with their owner). Most were reasonably sized, but there were a couple of times some sort of bull mastiff walked in and made for tight quarters. Not a normal experience at your typical Starwood property. Another notable Kimpton quirk is their leopard print bathrobes. Again, a bit different from the typical white terry numbers you get elsewhere. Walking into my room at 70 Park, it was laid out on the bed. I posted a picture to Twitter -- and it drew quite the set of comments. They also have some fun loyalty perks, like “Raid the Minibar”. I got into New York late, so the $30 credit 70 Park gave me came in very handy -- especially since it was one of the better stocked mini-bars I’ve seen in a while. My only beef is that Kimpton isn’t in many of the place I’ve been going -- New Orleans, Memphis,.... I’m lifetime platinum on Marriott and platinum on Starwood, but I always look to stay at a Kimpton property when there’s one available.</li>\n 	<li>So I was very concerned the next week when I saw the <a href=\"http://travelcodex.com/2014/12/ihg-acquires-kimpton-hopefully-wont-screw/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">announcement</a> that IHG -- the Holiday Inn people -- bought Kimpton. One of the blandest hotel chains in existence buys one of the quirkiest. I think the last Crowne Plaza I stayed in was 6 years ago in Joburg, SA. &nbsp;IHG’s last attempt to be hip was the Indigo chain. How many of you have stayed there? I’m gonna be keeping my eyes on this deal. I hope they don’t screw up Kimpton.</li>\n 	<li>I’m glad Marriott is<a href=\"http://www.wsj.com/articles/fcc-warns-hotels-others-not-to-block-personal-wi-fi-1422406537\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> giving up</a> their misguided attempt to get FCC approval to block individual WiFi hotspots. It’s kinda weird. I can’t figure out why they want to so obviously poke their customers. And it can’t be that much of a revenue thing because they’re giving away WiFi to just about everyone -- I’ve been getting it free for a while as an upper tier Rewards member as have everyone at the lower end brands like Residence Inn and Courtyard, and as of the middle of this month, so do all Marriott Rewards members at their Marriott brand. Which seems to be a trend. Kimpton does the same thing. Indeed, if you hit the Kimpton WiFi log on screen and aren’t a member of their Karma program, you’re taken to an enrollment screen.</li>\n 	<li>Which is important because hotel loyalty programs seem to be losing their grip. In a recent Google study, an increasing number of business travelers say that hotel loyalty programs have <i>less </i>impact on the travel planning this year than last year. The same study also found that most business travelers would switch programs for better perks. Given that free WiFi is one of the most popular perks with frequent travelers, what Kimpton is doing makes sense -- and what Marriott tried to do just doesn’t.</li>\n 	<li>Now, Marriott’s stated reason -- it’s all about security, wanted to protect their guests from rogue WiFi hotspots. Very buzzword-compliant -- cybersecurity is hot right now. And of course, travelers do need to be careful about which WiFi access points they connect to. Sweden’s Pirate Party pulled a <a href=\"http://www.thelocal.se/20150114/young-pirate-hacks-into-top-security-conference\">cute prank</a> earlier this month highlighting this. They set up an access point named “Open Guest” at a Swedish conference and over 100 delegates -- government officials, journalists, security experts -- connected to it, using it for e-mail, web browsing, Skype, eBay, …. just about everything. The Pirate Party logged all the traffic. Are people that gullible -- or cheap -- or both? Even more of a reason to use your own hotspot.</li>\n 	<li>The Monday before Christmas, I wrote up the <a title=\"Travel Tips — Holiday Airport Etiquette\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/12/22/travel-tips-holiday-airport-etiquette/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">holiday airport etiquette tips</a> from the last episode as a stand-alone blog post. It seemed like a timely post going into the holiday travel season. It was a pretty popular post. Rob, a long time TravelCommons listener and Untappd friend, gave it a nice re-tweet -- “A bit brusque, but the best travel tips I\'ve read this year”. And he was right. I didn’t sugar coat it a lot -- just venting a bit from what I typically see -- gumming up the PreCheck line, the Starbucks line, the concourse hallways. Probably not the best holiday spirit.</li>\n 	<li>But what I thought was in the holiday spirit was a sign I saw on the bell stand of the Minneapolis Marriott -- “Br-r-r-r!! It’s cold out! We have warm coats to lend you, available upon request. Please see your friendly bell staff person. Thank you, and stay warm!” I asked one of the bell men how often people take them up on their offer. “Oh, a lot,” he said. Really? What part of “You’re coming to Minnesota in December so dress warmly” do people not get? He just shrugged and gave me that “Minnesota nice” smile.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any travel experiences -- technology or otherwise, or just general observations, thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. &nbsp;The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://www.magnatune.com/artists/albums/williams-long/\"><em>Afternoon in the Sun</em></a> by John Williams</li>\n</ul>\n<b>2014 Was A Bad Year To Fly</b>\n<ul>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/PJ-BZ531_MIDSEA_16U_20150114114822.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-1421 size-large\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/PJ-BZ531_MIDSEA_16U_20150114114822-1024x448.jpg\" alt=\"PJ-BZ531_MIDSEA_16U_20150114114822\" width=\"640\" height=\"280\"></a>A couple of weeks ago, the Wall Street Journal <a href=\"http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-best-and-worst-airlines-1421254623\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">posted</a> its 2014 airline scorecard. Now, every travel columnist seems to do one of these, but I liked the Journal’s. I apologize to my international listeners, but this scorecard is just focused on the US. And indeed, just the US majors -- Spirit and Hawaiian aren’t in the mix, though Frontier, Alaska, and Virgin America are. I posted the scorecard graphic on the TravelCommons Facebook page when it came out; I’ll also put it in the show notes. It scores the carriers across 7 operational measures -- on-time arrivals, cancelled flights, extreme delays, 2-hr tarmac delays, mishandled baggage, involuntary bumping, complaints -- and then generates an overall rank. The top 3 were Alaska, Virgin America, and Delta. The variability across the 7 operational measures for these top performers was interesting. Alaska, the top overall, had the best scores for on-time arrivals, extreme delays, and complaints, but were 5th out of 8 in mishandled baggage. United, on the other hand, was more consistently the worst airline -- ranking last (8th) in 4 measures and 7th in the other 3.</li>\n 	<li>Which kinda doesn’t surprise me because their customer service just kept getting worse in a sort of cavalierly indifferent sort of way. I get to LaGuardia early one afternoon and want to move up to an earlier flight that’s wide open. That’ll cost you $75 -- to move from a full flight to an empty flight. Or the guy who plopped down next to me in the middle seat one day. He originally had aisle seat. Then United upgraded him to First Class. But then, oops, the First Class passenger showed up, so the guy had to go back to coach -- except they’d already given away his aisle seat and all that was left was this middle seat. So there he was stuck -- with nothing but some shrugged shoulders and a mumbled “Sorry”. You’d think they could’ve given him a couple hundred frequent flyer points, or a drink coupon. Even the most basic restaurant will comp you a dessert if things aren’t right.</li>\n 	<li>It was entertaining, then, in a twisted sort of way, when I got an e-mail from United the following week offering to upgrade me from Premiere Gold to Platinum for $2,600. With these sorts of scores, you think they’d be paying me -- or at least making it something closer to an impulse purchase. But then again, they’re probably looking at my other choices in Chicago -- American with an overall score of 7 or Southwest, scoring 5 out of 8. Chicago hub airlines are kinda like Chicago football and baseball teams -- fighting it out for the cellar -- except without the silver lining of high draft picks.</li>\n 	<li>If you really think about it, 2014 was an awful year to fly. The airlines finally got market discipline; through acquisitions -- Delta buying Northwest, United buying Continental, American buying US Airways (or was that the other way around) -- they got the oligopoly working which pushed up prices and utilization -- high fares and crowded planes. Add to that the consistent ratcheting down for the base level of services -- unbundling -- charging an increasing amount for bags, change fees, pets, children traveling alone, decent seats.</li>\n 	<li>All this while the actual experience got worse. The Wall Street Journal article gives data to prove what we already knew -- we’re paying more for less. US airlines cancelled 66,000 more flights in 2014 than in 2013 and lost or delayed 2.1 million bags, a 17% increase. Which explains the 26% increase in complaints filed with the US Dept of Transportation. Not surprising, then, that American’s CEO <a href=\"http://skift.com/2015/01/27/american-airlines-ceo-awkwardly-explains-why-fares-arent-going-down/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">told</a> financial analysts and press during Tues’ Q4 earnings call “We are not asking our customers to be happy with anything.”</li>\n 	<li>We can always hope that 2014 will turn out to be the bottom. That the newer planes the major carriers are buying will mean fewer mechanical delays and fewer cancellations. That more profitable airlines will stop demanding givebacks from their employees, which would mean much more pleasant flight attendants and pilots, and more enthusiastically productive mechanics and baggage handlers.</li>\n 	<li>Until then, I’ll be try to be happy with the little things -- the unexpected first-class upgrade on my United flight down to San Antonio. The nearly empty mid-day flight from New Orleans to Chicago. The flight attendant told us we could change seats when we wanted, but nobody moved. We each had our own rows. The early arrival into Nashville that changed a tight connection into a leisurely stroll with time to catch a beer between gates. I’ll enjoy these little things, hoping that the bigger things get better in 2015.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/westexit-modern/\"><em>Arsenal</em></a> is by The West Exit</li>\n</ul>\n<b>Restaurant Trends Go Local</b>\n<ul>\n 	<li>So while the trip to where you’re going has gotten more miserable, odds are the food is a lot better once you get there. Every year I go to the National Restaurant Show looking at dining trends because frequent travelers have to eat and it’s typically in a restaurant.</li>\n 	<li>One of the interesting trends, though, is the expansion of what a restaurant is. At the most recent NRA show -- that’s National Restaurant, not Rifle, Association -- there was a good-sized section devoted to food trucks. And depending on where you’re traveling, you’ll see more and more of them in the wild. Of course, food trucks are old hat in places like Manhattan and Center City Philadelphia. And in Portland, I’m not sure you can really call them food trucks -- the ones set up in downtown parking lots don’t look like they’ve moved in years. But elsewhere, they’ll touch down outside of office building or universities around lunch time and offer up some very cool/innovative and often locally-unique food that’s provides some nice variety.</li>\n 	<li>Which ties into another big trend -- the shift to local -- locally-sourced fish, meat , vegetables; locally-made beer or spirits, house-made pickles and charcuterie, …. Which is kind of a throwback. If you think about the 70’s and the 80’s, big franchise chains expanded in the US and then globally, pushing out standard menus with the same dishes everywhere. Now the good side of this was it took the guess work and the risk out of picking a place to eat. No surprises -- which is both good and bad. If you stopped at a Kentucky Fried Chicken along the road or took a client out to a Morton’s Steak House, you knew what you were going to get and you could reasonably expect a certain level of quality. But you weren’t going to discover anything new; get anything unique to where you were visiting. That’s OK when food is fuel -- I want to stop being hungry. It isn’t when food becomes something more -- an experience, an expression of place, which it is now with these hyper-local trends. Yes, when overdone, it can feel like you’ve somehow slipped into a bad <i>Portlandia</i> episode, but when done right, it can make you happy you gutted out the lousy flight to get there.</li>\n 	<li>One trend I keep hearing about, but I don’t really see much in travels, is using tablets and smartphones to replace menus and servers and checks. Every year at the NRA show, there are rows and rows of vendors showing iPad menus and smartphone apps that allow diners to order, split the tab, and pay without seeing a waiter or a bartender. I’ve seen these in the wild exactly twice -- an iPad wine list at Restaurant Revolution in New Orleans. And it was actually kind of intrusive -- lighting up the face of the reader in an otherwise lower lit dining room. And at a restaurant/bar in MSP where the bartender reached over to do the ordering for me. Now this is different from alternative payment methods -- touch-and-pay with Apple Pay or using a bar code on the Starbucks app. Those are just different ways to end the transaction. What I don’t see, in spite of 2-3 years of trend hype, is a move in a restaurant to self-service ordering or paying.</li>\n 	<li>Indeed, if anything, I see a move to <i>more</i> interaction with service staff with seemingly more folks taking full meals at the bar -- your server, the bartender, is never further than 6 ft from you and, on a slower night, is good for a little conversation. I guess if I’m coming to a place for local cuisine made from local produce, I’m not sure why I’d want to skip talking to the local people.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917626811171154.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\"><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #113</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a title=\"Magnatune\" href=\"http://magnatune.com/\">Magnatune</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_113.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #113 — 2014 was a Bad Year to Fly; Restaurants Go Local','','inherit','closed','closed','','1416-revision-v1','','','2021-08-23 19:07:27','2021-08-24 00:07:27','',1416,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3641',0,'revision','',0),
(3642,1,'2021-08-24 17:55:33','2021-08-24 22:55:33','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_1985\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/IMG_1758-scaled.jpeg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-3581 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/IMG_2173-300x300.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a>I Feel Safer Already[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Last month\'s travel got me wondering what travel changes are going to stick after the COVID pandemic begins to recede. With all the restaurant and bar closures caused by COVID lockdowns, I\'m updating my recommendations list based on recent travels. And I\'m <em>way </em>overthinking our first post-lockdown international trip.  All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_178.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #178: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after a much lighter travel schedule than before the last episode. The day after posting the July episode, Irene and I got back in the car (because those 12-hour drives to and from the East Coast just weren’t enough for me), but this time heading north, as I mentioned at the end of the last episode, to Traverse City, MI to do Paddle for Pints with some friends; it’s a taproom crawl, but in kayaks instead of on streets. It’s a lot of fun. There’s something about physical exertion while drinking that seems to justify the next beer.&nbsp;</li><li>Now, anyone who’s driven any distance through the Midwest knows there’s only two seasons here -- winter and construction season -- and we didn’t get too far outside of Chicago on I-90 before a merge down to single lane traffic ground traffic to a crawl and I started refreshing Waze and Google Maps looking for alternatives. I’ve said in past episodes that, even though Google owns both, my experience is they can recommend different routes, especially in high-traffic, fast-changing situations. To me, Waze feels a little “twitchier”; it’ll twist you down a half-dozen random side streets to save 30 seconds while Google Maps guesses you’re willing to suck it up for a couple more minutes in exchange for a simpler route. And that’s exactly what happened to us in northwest Indiana which leaves me trying to figure out which route to take. I tweeted out later (actually while on a snack break in a taproom in Grand Rapids) “ I really hate it when Google Maps and Waze fight” to which the Waze social media crew replied “We like to think of it more as a disagreement”. Nicely done. And then Jim McDonough, a long-time TravelCommons listener, added “Apple Maps breaks the tie?”&nbsp; Good idea, but I was having enough fun swiping between two maps; adding a third would’ve put me in the ditch for sure. I mostly used Waze, but skipped the recommended routing through side streets in Gary, Indiana. The risk-reward trade-off on that just didn’t feel worth it.</li><li>I was supposed to head out to the Bay Area last week on business, going to a plant on the east side of the Bay for a big team meeting. But it got re-vectored at the last minute from California back to Chicago because that Bay Area country had reinstated indoor mask mandates. Nobody questioned the move. With everyone on the team fully vaccinated months ago, we’d all happily gotten used to meeting with each other like it’s 2019 again and really didn’t want to go back to 8 hours of masks, muffled voices, and trying to read non-verbal cues from the nose up. As it was, we just made it under the wire -- our meeting was Wednesday and Thursday, and then on Friday, Chicago’s indoor mask mandate went into effect. It’s sorta peak Chicago that the city collected the revenue off of 385,000 mostly maskless Lollapalooza attendees before dropping the boom on those of us who actually live in the city.</li><li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;Astral Travel by Astral (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Astral/44282</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>One of the reasons it takes me so long to do an episode is I lack the discipline to bail out when I get caught in a click spiral. This time it was about the <a href=\"https://www.pennlive.com/nation-world/2021/07/teen-airdrops-photo-of-an-airsoft-gun-forcing-the-evacuation-of-a-united-airlines-flight.html\">United Airlines flight that was evacuated because a teenager decided to troll fellow passengers by AirDropping them a picture of an Airsoft gun</a>. For the non-iPhone users out there, AirDrop lets iPhones and Macs easily share stuff -- pictures, videos, web links -- wirelessly with others nearby. It’s been around for about 10 years and pretty quickly people figured out they could drop random/<em>interesting</em> pictures onto nearby strangers who had set their phones wide-open. I’ve seen this happen and it can be pretty funny, watching someone suddenly start looking around in a bar or a train, wondering who’d AirDropped them a picture. But what’s funny or, at worst, annoying in a bar is easily interpreted as a safety threat 10 years on from 9/11. They pulled everyone off for rescreening, searched the plane, and then left three hours later, leaving the teen behind in SFO. Understandable, I thought, if maybe a slight overreaction -- until I got to maybe the 5th page of Google search results where I clicked through to not-yet- another rehash of the United incident, but something different -- a <a href=\"https://www.fox5atlanta.com/news/panic-on-planes-after-images-are-airdropped\">story</a> about an AirDropped message on a Delta flight. It said “A plane-jacking will happen soon, 2 hours and 37 minutes it will start in the front on aisle 6.” That flight too was evacuated, but this time they didn’t find the sender. Maybe airlines’ safety demos need to show iPhone users how to set their AirDrop to “Receiving Off”.</li><li>Irene and I continue to push on with plans for our first post-lockdown international trip, to Italy for a bike tour through Puglia. The whole Delta variant thing adds to the uncertainty. I talked in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/05/09/podcast-175-how-to-find-local-tour-guides-rebuild-travel-muscles/\">episode #175</a> about sorting through trip insurance and figuring out what credit card to use for the tour. Now booking hotels before and after the tour, we’re choosing to pay 10-15 euros more a night for cancellable rates, kind of a DIY trip insurance. Booking our flights into Bari, where the tour starts, I’ve also felt the need to be a bit more thoughtful. Airline schedules seem to be a bit more <em>variable</em> than usual. Last week, American sent me a note to let me know our November LHR-ORD flight has moved up 5:15pm to 10:35am. I understand that; air traffic is <em>not</em> following predictable patterns and they’re trying to keep up. For that direct flight home from London, it’s not a problem. But when we’re having to make a connection to a city with not-frequent service, it’s a different matter. The first thing I did was X out anything with more than 1 stop; it’ll be hard enough keeping 2 flights aligned let alone 3. Then I focused on the big European hubs -- Heathrow, Frankfurt, DeGaulle -- skipping connections at smaller places like Munich, Zurich. Finally, I look for connection times around 3 hours; what I thought would be a “Goldilocks” connection -- not too short that any hiccup on the inbound flight would cause a problem, but not too long that we’d be having to sit in the airport all day wearing a mask or would have to track COVID protocols in yet another country because of an overnight connection. All that being said, we’re booked on Air France with a 2 hr, 50 minute connection in DeGaulle. But I don’t have any SkyTeam status, which causes me a bit of a worry -- maybe we get caught in a long non-status security line. So I did some DIY trip insurance on the flight, burning an extra bit of my pile of American Express Membership miles for a ride in business class (cancellable, of course) to make up for my non-status status. You could say I’ve gone <em>way</em> down a rabbit hole overthinking this one and I wouldn’t really argue with you. But then again, it’s the first international trip in 2 years that I’ve been able to plan. So it’s kinda like an only child, getting way too much their parent’s attention. </li><li>I was digging through my travel card wallet for my Global Entry card to find my Known Traveler number to put on the Air France reservation and came across a handful of Southwest drink coupons that are about to hit their expiration date. <a href=\"https://community.southwest.com/t5/Knowledge-Base/Expired-2020-Drink-Coupons/ta-p/114294\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Southwest says expiring drink coupons are good through the end of this year</a>. But Southwest suspended alcohol sales a few months back, and rightly so after a passenger assaulted a flight attendant, saying the booze won’t return until the federal mask mandate ends. But the TSA just extended that until January, past the coupons’ extended expiration date. And really, I don’t see the TSA letting up on in-flight masks anytime soon, so is Southwest going to be the first dry airline?</li><li>I mentor start-up founders at <a href=\"https://1871.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">a tech incubator in Chicago</a>. A few months ago, one of my sessions was with a bionic implant start-up. Implant the chip and the back of your hand becomes a contactless card; get into your office or pay at Starbucks with the tap of your hand. Another reminder, if a bit, say, unsettling (icky?), of the move to a cashless society. I talked about it back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\" title=\"Podcast #136 — Is Cash A Waning King; Don’t Make It Hard to Cash in on Loyalty\">episode #136</a> in 2017, about being maybe the last generation of cash payers, that my younger traveling colleagues rarely carried cash; they paid for everything with a card. And then, the pandemic massively accelerated it. Everything went contactless; nobody wanted to handle your cash. Last year, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/07/17/podcast-165-first-post-lockdown-flight-when-does-business-travel-come-back/\" title=\"Podcast #165 — First Post Lockdown Flight; When Do We Travel For Business Again?\">episode #165</a>, I noticed I had the same $200 of 20’s in my wallet in June that I’d taken out of an ATM right before the March lockdown. Last month in New York, the coffee joint across from our hotel was card-only and the same for the ice cream shop around the corner from our place in Chicago. Restaurants that use the Toast point-of-sale system print out a QR code at the bottom of your receipt, letting you pay and walk away. The country of Sweden thinks they’ll be completely cashless in 2 years. But I’m seeing a little reversion to the mean post-lockdown. I stopped off at a bar during a Saturday bike ride for a rehydration break. I asked the bartender if she took cash. “Yup,” she said, “Never stopped. It spends just like everything else.” It felt good to put a 20 on the bar, order beers, and see her take cash from the pile just like in 2019. It’s also that inflation is making it tougher for small places to eat the 2.5-3% card fees. The little Mexican place across the street from work where I’ll grab carne asada tacos for lunch now tacks on that fee for card users. They’re happy when I pull out cash, though last week I got 80 cents back in nickels. I guess the cashless thing has now caused a shortage of quarters. </li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — Emma by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/50905 Ft: Martijn de Boer</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>What Will Remain from These Pandemic Times?</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>In past episodes, I’ve been pretty skeptical about forecasts of permanent changes to the travel industry, or society in general, from&nbsp; the pandemic. I have enough grey hair to remember commentators using the same “everything has changed” and “this is the new normal” language 13 years ago after the 2008 Great Recession, yet somehow we ended up back to maybe within 90% of&nbsp; 2007, the pre-recession starting point. Reversion to the mean is a strong force.</li><li>Unless it’s countered by a stronger force -- like saving money -- which is why I think the odds-on favorites for <a href=\"https://onemileatatime.com/hilton-hotel-service-cuts-permanent/\">pandemic changes made permanent</a> are what we’ve seen at hotels and restaurants. Checking into the Hilton in Midtown Manhattan last month, the front desk guy told us that they weren’t doing daily housekeeping; we could either schedule housekeeping now or call them when we wanted it. Pre-pandemic, Starwood and then Marriott would offer you points for skipping housekeeping -- Go Green they called it. They pitched it as eco-friendly, but it really was all about saving labor costs. But the Hilton didn’t offer me any points. The week before,<a href=\"https://onemileatatime.com/news/hilton-housekeeping-on-demand/\"> Hilton announced their new policy of on-request housekeeping</a> across all of their brands; the first major chain to cement what had been an <em>ad hoc</em> pandemic response into a new chain-wide policy. The press release talked about “guest comfort”, but behind the PR flacks, it’s all about cost savings. I expect to see Marriott and others follow soon. I do have to give props to the housekeeping staff at that Hilton, though. When, after 3 days, I did call for a room cleaning, they were there in 5 minutes.&nbsp;</li><li>A bigger loss for me is the breakfast buffet. My usual pre-pandemic routine was to work out and then take a quick pass through the concierge lounge for breakfast. Hotels must’ve found their <em>ad hoc</em> grab-n-go breakfast sacks cheaper because that too feels like it’s going to be the new normal. Way back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/01/27/podcast-113-2014-was-a-bad-year-to-fly-restaurant-trends-go-local/\">episode #113</a>, in January 2015, I scoffed at a bartender in MSP who reached over to punch my food order into the iPad mounted in front of me. Now, we aim our own smartphones at QR codes and order our own meals -- without any help -- again, saving labor costs.&nbsp;</li><li>Airlines started reverting to the mean at the end of last year when they dropped capacity restrictions and put butts in the middle seats again -- just as traffic began to recover. If you haven’t been on a flight this year, you’d think nothing happened -- well, except everyone wearing masks and the missing Bloody Mary eye openers on the morning Southwest flights to Vegas. Some folks are predicting the death of cancellation fees, but I don’t buy it. <a href=\"https://thepointsguy.com/news/will-american-delta-eliminate-change-fees/\">In 2019, United made $625 million in change and cancellation fees; ten of the largest U.S. carriers made $2.84 billion</a>. That’s too big of a hole to leave unfilled. And they’re already creeping back in. Most Basic Economy seats are back to non-changeable/non-refundable. Maybe not this year, but if traffic holds up, I’d expect to see some airlines quietly <em>not</em> extend their fee waiver deadlines.</li><li>Private company behaviors are pretty straight-forward to forecast -- just follow the money. It’s the government regs that are uncertain -- how long do the mask mandates and COVID testing international entry rules stay around? Government rules only seem to ratchet up -- it’s been 15 years since the TSA had us take our shoes off and dump our water bottles at security checkpoints and other than letting people bring on larger bottles of hand sanitizer, no one thinks the TSA is going to change those rules anytime soon. There’s no incentive.</li><li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<em>Melt Away</em>&nbsp;by Kara Square (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp;http://ccmixter.org/files/mindmapthat/46605</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>The Best Places I’ve Ate and Drank At In 2021… So Far</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I talk <em>a lot</em> about food and beer in this podcast -- as proven by the direct links to those categories in the top menu on the TravelCommons website. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\">episode #168</a> last fall, I said that, for me, food is one of the last hold-outs to global e-commerce and social media. 10-20 year ago, it was fun to go shopping and bring something unique back home. But now, there’s not much that you can’t find easier (and often cheaper) on Amazon or Taobao or Rakuten. And don’t even get me started on Instagram -- if people aren’t in <a href=\"https://www.npr.org/2021/07/09/1014208160/national-parks-crowds-litter\">a 100-person queue to get their own personal shot of the Delicate Arch in Moab, UT</a> then they’re queuing for made-for-Instagram-selfie murals like the <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/explore/tags/whatliftsyou/\">WhatLiftsYou</a> wings in Nashville’s Gulch neighborhood.&nbsp; But food -- you can post all the pictures you want of it, but you can’t post that sense memory of eating a dozen fresh oysters on a breakwater in Brittany, having a bowl of pho for breakfast in Saigon, or a 1am fresh-off-the-grill char polish that’s been dragged through the garden at a Chicago hot dog stand.&nbsp;</li><li>And so, over the years, I’ve talked about restaurants, bars, taprooms that I’ve enjoyed and posted links to them on the website in show notes or in blog posts. But reading articles about the number of places that’ve closed since March 2020 -- some say <a href=\"https://www.nrn.com/fast-casual/datassential-more-10-us-restaurants-have-closed-permanently\">10% of all restaurants in the US</a>, <a href=\"https://www.chicagobusiness.com/restaurants/heres-how-many-chicago-restaurants-have-closed-pandemic\">almost 20% in Chicago</a> -- I figure it’ll take travel guide books and blogs a while to catch up with all the changes. It kinda hit me when a college friend pinged our group text for Nashville recommendations. I’ve been going there a couple of times a year for the past 5 years, but when I started going through my list of places, it struck me how many of them had closed. I had to re-curate my recommendations. I figured a good start on that would be to post <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/08/14/my-best-restaurants-and-bars-of-2021/\">a list of the best places I’ve ate and drank at during my 2021 travels</a> on the TravelCommons website.</li><li>Now, fair warning, this is a <em>very</em> idiosyncratic list; it’s the best places <em>I</em> ate and drank at in, say, New York City in May and July. The New York list is pretty Midtown/Murray Hill-centric because that’s where we were staying and that’s where Claire was looking for flats. I walked into <a href=\"https://www.tedscornertavern.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Ted’s Corner Tavern</a> because it’s around the corner from Claire’s new place; it made the list because it’s what I think a great neighborhood bar should be -- good-sized bar with friendly bartenders who aren’t too busy to chat with you, the right volume level (lively, but not so loud that you have to shout across the table), and, of course, 30 taps and a well-curated beer list.</li><li>I’ve tried to make my list a well-curated one.&nbsp; I don’t mention restaurants or taprooms that I thought were fine -- the 3 or 3½-star places. It’s a list of places that stuck out in my mind for one reason or another, and would make me go out of my way to recommend them to, say, a college friend. This played out in a funny way on my Portland, Maine recommendations. I recommend <a href=\"https://bobsclamhut.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bob’s Clam Hut</a> in Kittery for fried clams and <a href=\"https://portland.islandcreekoysters.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Island Creek Oyster\'s place</a> in the East End/Munjoy Hill neighborhood for local oysters, but have no specific recommendation for a lobster roll place. It’s not for lack of trying; we had a lobster roll whenever we saw it on a menu, which wasn’t a cheap exercise since they were about $25 a pop. They were all good -- we didn’t have a bad lobster roll anywhere. But after all that, there’s no one place I could point to and say “Go <em>there</em> for a lobster roll.”&nbsp; I just say “Order one if you see it. It’ll probably be good no matter where you are”.&nbsp;</li><li>Another oddity of the list -- no Chicago places. Irene and I talked about this a bit. Between favorite places closing and cooking at home a lot more during the lockdowns and the strict mask mandate (which in Chicago was worded kinda like the airplane mandate -- wear your mask at all times unless you were actively eating or drinking), we haven’t been anywhere that’s really stuck out. Well, except maybe for the<a href=\"https://goo.gl/maps/XzUBYcWTn8nmc42E8\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"> Nancy’s Pizza</a> a couple of blocks from the TravelCommons studios. They do a great pepperoni, spinach, and fresh tomato pan pizza. That’ll definitely make the list.</li><li>Because the list is a work-in-progress; I posted the first edition on the website last week with sections on Tucson, San Diego, Nashville, New York, and Portland. You’ll find a link in the episode description in your podcast app -- if it supports HTML descriptions. I’ll be adding places through the rest of the year. There <em>will</em> be at least a couple of Chicago places (in addition to Nancy’s) on the list. I’m sure we’ll find some places in Puglia to add; and I’m positive I’ll find some UK taprooms that’ll make the cut since Rob Cheshire of This Week in Craft Beer has offered me a personal tour of his favorites.</li><li>When I’ve added a new section or think there’s enough new stuff to justify people taking a fresh look, I’ll put a new date on it so it goes back to the top of the Food and the Beer sections of the website, and I’ll post it on Facebook and Twitter. And if you end up hitting one of these places, shoot me a note and let me know if I got it right.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #178</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_178.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #178 — What Remains from Pandemic Times; Best Restaurant and Bars','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-178-what-remains-from-pandemic-times-best-restaurant-and-bars','','\nhttps://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/08/14/my-best-restaurants-and-bars-of-2021/','2021-12-07 15:59:12','2021-12-07 20:59:12','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3642',0,'post','',0),
(3644,1,'2021-08-24 08:09:28','2021-08-24 13:09:28','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_1985\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/IMG_1758-scaled.jpeg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-3581 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/IMG_1758-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"Microphone and a Beer Can\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a>Now I\'m Ready For the Interview[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>After a 2-week, 2,500-mile and $120 in tolls driving expedition through the Northeast, I didn\'t have much time left to write a new episode. So, I mined the audio files of recent TravelCommons interviews for some good stories that got left on the cutting room floor. We also talk about planning for a bike trip in Italy, a couple of things that might make the 2021 traveler gift guide, and we mourn the demise of American Airlines\' in-flight magazine. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_178.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #178: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after a much lighter travel schedule than before the last episode. The day after posting the July episode, Irene and I got back in the car (because those 12-hour drives to and from the East Coast just weren’t enough for me), but this time heading north, as I mentioned at the end of the last episode, to Traverse City, MI to do Paddle for Pints with some friends; it’s a taproom crawl, but in kayaks instead of on streets. It’s a lot of fun. There’s something about physical exertion while drinking that seems to justify the next beer. </li><li>Now, anyone who’s driven any distance through the Midwest knows there’s only two seasons here -- winter and construction season -- and we didn’t get too far outside of Chicago on I-90 before a merge down to single lane traffic ground traffic to a crawl and I started refreshing Waze and Google Maps looking for alternatives. I’ve said in past episodes that, even though Google owns both, my experience is they can recommend different routes, especially in high-traffic, fast-changing situations. To me, Waze feels a little “twitchier”; it’ll twist you down a half-dozen random side streets to save 30 seconds while Google Maps guesses you’re willing to suck it up for a couple more minutes in exchange for a simpler route. And that’s exactly what happened to us in northwest Indiana which leaves me trying to figure out which route to take. I tweeted out later (actually while on a snack break in a taproom in Grand Rapids) “ I really hate it when Google Maps and Waze fight” to which the Waze social media crew replied “We like to think of it more as a disagreement”. Nicely done. And then Jim McDonough, a long-time TravelCommons listener, added “Apple Maps breaks the tie?”  Good idea, but I was having enough fun swiping between two maps; adding a third would’ve put me in the ditch for sure. I mostly used Waze, but skipped the recommended routing through side streets in Gary, Indiana. The risk-reward trade-off on that just didn’t feel worth it.</li><li>I was supposed to head out to the Bay Area last week on business, going to a plant on the east side of the Bay for a big team meeting. But it got re-vectored at the last minute from California back to Chicago because that Bay Area country had reinstated indoor mask mandates. Nobody questioned the move. With everyone on the team fully vaccinated months ago, we’d all happily gotten used to meeting with each other like it’s 2019 again and really didn’t want to go back to 8 hours of masks, muffled voices, and trying to read non-verbal cues from the nose up. As it was, we just made it under the wire -- our meeting was Wednesday and Thursday, and then on Friday, Chicago’s indoor mask mandate went into effect. It’s sorta peak Chicago that the city collected the revenue off of 385,000 mostly maskless Lollapalooza attendees before dropping the boom on those of us who actually live in the city.</li><li>Bridge Music -- One for Me by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/21492 Ft: Haskel</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>One of the reasons it takes me so long to do an episode is I lack the discipline to bail out when I get caught in a click spiral. This time it was about the <a href=\"https://www.pennlive.com/nation-world/2021/07/teen-airdrops-photo-of-an-airsoft-gun-forcing-the-evacuation-of-a-united-airlines-flight.html\">United Airlines flight that was evacuated because a teenager decided to troll fellow passengers by AirDropping them a picture of an Airsoft gun</a>. For the non-iPhone users out there, AirDrop lets iPhones and Macs easily share stuff -- pictures, videos, web links -- wirelessly with others nearby. It’s been around for about 10 years and pretty quickly people figured out they could drop random/<em>interesting</em> pictures onto nearby strangers who had set their phones wide-open. I’ve seen this happen and it can be pretty funny, watching someone suddenly start looking around in a bar or a train, wondering who’d AirDropped them a picture. But what’s funny or, at worst, annoying in a bar is easily interpreted as a safety threat 10 years on from 9/11. They pulled everyone off for rescreening, searched the plane, and then left three hours later, leaving the teen behind in SFO. Understandable, I thought, if maybe a slight overreaction -- until I got to maybe the 5th page of Google search results where I clicked through to not-yet- another rehash of the United incident, but something different -- a <a href=\"https://www.fox5atlanta.com/news/panic-on-planes-after-images-are-airdropped\">story</a> about an AirDropped message on a Delta flight. It said “A plane-jacking will happen soon, 2 hours and 37 minutes it will start in the front on aisle 6.” That flight too was evacuated, but this time they didn’t find the sender. Maybe airlines’ safety demos need to show iPhone users how to set their AirDrop to “Receiving Off”.</li><li>Irene and I continue to push on with plans for our first post-lockdown international trip, to Italy for a bike tour through Puglia. The whole Delta variant thing adds to the uncertainty. I talked in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/05/09/podcast-175-how-to-find-local-tour-guides-rebuild-travel-muscles/\">episode #175</a> about sorting through trip insurance and figuring out what credit card to use for the tour. Now booking hotels before and after the tour, we’re choosing to pay 10-15 euros more a night for cancellable rates, kind of a DIY trip insurance. Booking our flights into Bari, where the tour starts, I’ve also felt the need to be a bit more thoughtful. Airline schedules seem to be a bit more <em>variable</em> than usual. Last week, American sent me a note to let me know our November LHR-ORD flight has moved up 5:15pm to 10:35am. I understand that; air traffic is <em>not</em> following predictable patterns and they’re trying to keep up. For that direct flight home from London, it’s not a problem. But when we’re having to make a connection to a city with not-frequent service, it’s a different matter. The first thing I did was X out anything with more than 1 stop; it’ll be hard enough keeping 2 flights aligned let alone 3. Then I focused on the big European hubs -- Heathrow, Frankfurt, DeGaulle -- skipping connections at smaller places like Munich, Zurich. Finally, I look for connection times around 3 hours; what I thought would be a “Goldilocks” connection -- not too short that any hiccup on the inbound flight would cause a problem, but not too long that we’d be having to sit in the airport all day wearing a mask or would have to track COVID protocols in yet another country because of an overnight connection. All that being said, we’re booked on Air France with a 2 hr, 50 minute connection in DeGaulle. But I don’t have any SkyTeam status, which causes me a bit of a worry -- maybe we get caught in a long non-status security line. So I did some DIY trip insurance on the flight, burning an extra bit of my pile of American Express Membership miles for a ride in business class (cancellable, of course) to make up for my non-status status. You could say I’ve gone <em>way</em> down a rabbit hole overthinking this one and I wouldn’t really argue with you. But then again, it’s the first international trip in 2 years that I’ve been able to plan. So it’s kinda like an only child, getting way too much their parent’s attention. </li><li>I was digging through my travel card wallet for my Global Entry card to find my Known Traveler number to put on the Air France reservation and came across a handful of Southwest drink coupons that are about to hit their expiration date. <a href=\"https://community.southwest.com/t5/Knowledge-Base/Expired-2020-Drink-Coupons/ta-p/114294\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Southwest says expiring drink coupons are good through the end of this year</a>. But Southwest suspended alcohol sales a few months back, and rightly so after a passenger assaulted a flight attendant, saying the booze won’t return until the federal mask mandate ends. But the TSA just extended that until January, past the coupons’ extended expiration date. And really, I don’t see the TSA letting up on in-flight masks anytime soon, so is Southwest going to be the first dry airline?</li><li>I mentor start-up founders at <a href=\"https://1871.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">a tech incubator in Chicago</a>. A few months ago, one of my sessions was with a bionic implant start-up. Implant the chip and the back of your hand becomes a contactless card; get into your office or pay at Starbucks with the tap of your hand. Another reminder, if a bit, say, unsettling (icky?), of the move to a cashless society. I talked about it back in episode #136 in 2017, about being maybe the last generation of cash payers, that my younger traveling colleagues rarely carried cash; they paid for everything with a card. And then, the pandemic massively accelerated it. Everything went contactless; nobody wanted to handle your cash. Last year, in episode #165, I noticed I had the same $200 of 20’s in my wallet in June that I’d taken out of an ATM right before the March lockdown. Last month in New York, the coffee joint across from our hotel was card-only and the same for the ice cream shop around the corner from our place in Chicago. Restaurants that use the Toast point-of-sale system print out a QR code at the bottom of your receipt, letting you pay and walk away. The country of Sweden thinks they’ll be completely cashless in 2 years. But I’m seeing a little reversion to the mean post-lockdown. I stopped off at a bar during a Saturday bike ride for a rehydration break. I asked the bartender if she took cash. “Yup,” she said, “Never stopped. It spends just like everything else.” It felt good to put a 20 on the bar, order beers, and see her take cash from the pile just like in 2019. It’s also that inflation is making it tougher for small places to eat the 2.5-3% card fees. The little Mexican place across the street from work where I’ll grab carne asada tacos for lunch now tacks on that fee for card users. They’re happy when I pull out cash, though last week I got 80 cents back in nickels. I guess the cashless thing has now caused a shortage of quarters. </li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music —   Fall to pieces - Silence by mika (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mika/24945 Ft: Colab</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>B-Sides and Rarities - Interview Outtakes</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>After the travel world was shut down in March 2020, I began wondering if TravelCommons would join the furlough ranks for lack of content. It’s tough to do a podcast that’s “more about the journey than the destination” if you’re not journeying. Grounded, locked down, I needed a different way to generate content, so I’ve been doing more interviews. Interviews aren’t <em>less</em> work; it’s just different. Instead of spending time writing, I spend it editing. The typical interview session is 20-30 minutes over Zoom (of course) which I edit down to a 6-8 minute segment which you hopefully find tight, focused and insightful.</li><li>But doing some quick math, that leaves two-thirds of the interview on the cutting floor. Not all of that is insightful -- there’s, say, pronunciation guidance… that I still manage to screw up. But there’s still good stuff that, for whatever reason, doesn’t make it into the edited segment. So for this episode, I’ve pulled out the full interview files and pulled out some stories, some conversational threads that I left behind the first go-around. They’re pretty much unedited, save for snipping out a cough or two --&nbsp; so you’re hearing the actual conversation.</li><li>The first “b-side” is from my conversation in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\">episode #166</a> with <a href=\"https://www.dur.ac.uk/research/directory/staff/?id=15319\">Dr. Emily Thomas</a>, associate professor in philosophy at Durham University in the UK about her book<em> </em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/2DO07fV\"><em>The Meaning of Travel: Philosophers Abroad</em></a>. I reached out to Emily after reading a review of her book in the <em>Wall Street Journal</em>. It was one of my favorite interviews; one that I couldn’t cut down to just 6-8 minutes. But even with the extended play, this thread about different travel styles -- going deep vs. checking off a place’s “greatest hits” -- didn’t make it.</li><li>Next up are a couple of stories from <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/05/09/podcast-175-how-to-find-local-tour-guides-rebuild-travel-muscles/\">episode #175</a> where I talked to <a href=\"https://www.toursbylocals.com/TBL/WebObjects/ToursByLocals.woa/1/wo/y2c7lZDKnxUUHYGLem9YgM/0.41.1.1.50.3\">Paul Melhus</a>, CEO of <a href=\"https://www.toursbylocals.com/\">ToursByLocals</a>, about the local tour market. Paul first told me about the vagaries of selling shore excursion tours to cruise ship passengers and a story about the business challenges he faced in the first days of the COVID lockdown</li><li>The episode before that, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/04/10/podcast-174-how-the-pros-plan-their-taproom-tourism/\">#174</a> if I’m doing my math correctly, was another extended play segment -- 12 minutes -- about taproom tourism, but that was cut down from an hour-and-a-half Zoom beer drinking session with Rob Cheshire host of the UK’s <a href=\"https://thisweekincraft.beer/\">This Week In Craft Beer</a> podcast. Here’s one of the many taproom stories that didn’t make the podcast.  You can catch the full uncut session on the website or the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\">YouTube channel</a>.&nbsp;</li><li>Now it’s not that I didn’t do interviews before the pandemic. Back in January 2020 in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/01/25/podcast-159-planning-the-trip-of-a-lifetime-in-southeast-asia/\">episode #159</a>, I had Allan Marko on talking about trip planning, how he and his wife planned their 9-week sabbatical around Southeast Asia. I thought this was perfect timing -- January is always a big travel planning time. Two months later, most of those plans got blown to bits. But, back in those happier times, here’s a story about the dangers of losing a bag while on a different city-each-day trip</li><li>Editing <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/06/15/podcast-176-why-business-travel-is-coming-back-learning-airport-history/\">last month’s interview</a> with <a href=\"https://udayton.edu/directory/artssciences/history/bednarek_janet.php\">Dr Janet Bednarek</a>, Professor of History at University of Dayton about the history of airports, I had to leave out this thread about who owns US airports. </li><li>And finally, something that’s not really a B-side. Back in<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/05/08/podcast-163-new-world-of-travel-insurance-getting-medical-help-on-the-road/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #163 — New World of Travel Insurance; Getting Medical Help on the Road\"> episode #163</a>, I used a piece of Steve Frick’s <a href=\"https://anchor.fm/steve-frick/\">Travel Stories</a> podcast where we talked about the first TravelCommons episode. Here’s another piece of our conversation where we talk about where our travel paths overlapped.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #177</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_177.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #178 — What Remains from Pandemic Times; Best Restaurant and Bars','','inherit','closed','closed','','3642-revision-v1','','','2021-08-24 08:09:28','2021-08-24 13:09:28','',3642,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3644',0,'revision','',0),
(3645,1,'2021-08-24 08:49:39','2021-08-24 13:49:39','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_1985\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/IMG_1758-scaled.jpeg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-3581 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/IMG_1758-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"Microphone and a Beer Can\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a>Now I\'m Ready For the Interview[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>After a 2-week, 2,500-mile and $120 in tolls driving expedition through the Northeast, I didn\'t have much time left to write a new episode. So, I mined the audio files of recent TravelCommons interviews for some good stories that got left on the cutting room floor. We also talk about planning for a bike trip in Italy, a couple of things that might make the 2021 traveler gift guide, and we mourn the demise of American Airlines\' in-flight magazine. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_178.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #178: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after a much lighter travel schedule than before the last episode. The day after posting the July episode, Irene and I got back in the car (because those 12-hour drives to and from the East Coast just weren’t enough for me), but this time heading north, as I mentioned at the end of the last episode, to Traverse City, MI to do Paddle for Pints with some friends; it’s a taproom crawl, but in kayaks instead of on streets. It’s a lot of fun. There’s something about physical exertion while drinking that seems to justify the next beer.&nbsp;</li><li>Now, anyone who’s driven any distance through the Midwest knows there’s only two seasons here -- winter and construction season -- and we didn’t get too far outside of Chicago on I-90 before a merge down to single lane traffic ground traffic to a crawl and I started refreshing Waze and Google Maps looking for alternatives. I’ve said in past episodes that, even though Google owns both, my experience is they can recommend different routes, especially in high-traffic, fast-changing situations. To me, Waze feels a little “twitchier”; it’ll twist you down a half-dozen random side streets to save 30 seconds while Google Maps guesses you’re willing to suck it up for a couple more minutes in exchange for a simpler route. And that’s exactly what happened to us in northwest Indiana which leaves me trying to figure out which route to take. I tweeted out later (actually while on a snack break in a taproom in Grand Rapids) “ I really hate it when Google Maps and Waze fight” to which the Waze social media crew replied “We like to think of it more as a disagreement”. Nicely done. And then Jim McDonough, a long-time TravelCommons listener, added “Apple Maps breaks the tie?”&nbsp; Good idea, but I was having enough fun swiping between two maps; adding a third would’ve put me in the ditch for sure. I mostly used Waze, but skipped the recommended routing through side streets in Gary, Indiana. The risk-reward trade-off on that just didn’t feel worth it.</li><li>I was supposed to head out to the Bay Area last week on business, going to a plant on the east side of the Bay for a big team meeting. But it got re-vectored at the last minute from California back to Chicago because that Bay Area country had reinstated indoor mask mandates. Nobody questioned the move. With everyone on the team fully vaccinated months ago, we’d all happily gotten used to meeting with each other like it’s 2019 again and really didn’t want to go back to 8 hours of masks, muffled voices, and trying to read non-verbal cues from the nose up. As it was, we just made it under the wire -- our meeting was Wednesday and Thursday, and then on Friday, Chicago’s indoor mask mandate went into effect. It’s sorta peak Chicago that the city collected the revenue off of 385,000 mostly maskless Lollapalooza attendees before dropping the boom on those of us who actually live in the city.</li><li>Bridge Music -- One for Me by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/21492 Ft: Haskel</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>One of the reasons it takes me so long to do an episode is I lack the discipline to bail out when I get caught in a click spiral. This time it was about the <a href=\"https://www.pennlive.com/nation-world/2021/07/teen-airdrops-photo-of-an-airsoft-gun-forcing-the-evacuation-of-a-united-airlines-flight.html\">United Airlines flight that was evacuated because a teenager decided to troll fellow passengers by AirDropping them a picture of an Airsoft gun</a>. For the non-iPhone users out there, AirDrop lets iPhones and Macs easily share stuff -- pictures, videos, web links -- wirelessly with others nearby. It’s been around for about 10 years and pretty quickly people figured out they could drop random/<em>interesting</em> pictures onto nearby strangers who had set their phones wide-open. I’ve seen this happen and it can be pretty funny, watching someone suddenly start looking around in a bar or a train, wondering who’d AirDropped them a picture. But what’s funny or, at worst, annoying in a bar is easily interpreted as a safety threat 10 years on from 9/11. They pulled everyone off for rescreening, searched the plane, and then left three hours later, leaving the teen behind in SFO. Understandable, I thought, if maybe a slight overreaction -- until I got to maybe the 5th page of Google search results where I clicked through to not-yet- another rehash of the United incident, but something different -- a <a href=\"https://www.fox5atlanta.com/news/panic-on-planes-after-images-are-airdropped\">story</a> about an AirDropped message on a Delta flight. It said “A plane-jacking will happen soon, 2 hours and 37 minutes it will start in the front on aisle 6.” That flight too was evacuated, but this time they didn’t find the sender. Maybe airlines’ safety demos need to show iPhone users how to set their AirDrop to “Receiving Off”.</li><li>Irene and I continue to push on with plans for our first post-lockdown international trip, to Italy for a bike tour through Puglia. The whole Delta variant thing adds to the uncertainty. I talked in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/05/09/podcast-175-how-to-find-local-tour-guides-rebuild-travel-muscles/\">episode #175</a> about sorting through trip insurance and figuring out what credit card to use for the tour. Now booking hotels before and after the tour, we’re choosing to pay 10-15 euros more a night for cancellable rates, kind of a DIY trip insurance. Booking our flights into Bari, where the tour starts, I’ve also felt the need to be a bit more thoughtful. Airline schedules seem to be a bit more <em>variable</em> than usual. Last week, American sent me a note to let me know our November LHR-ORD flight has moved up 5:15pm to 10:35am. I understand that; air traffic is <em>not</em> following predictable patterns and they’re trying to keep up. For that direct flight home from London, it’s not a problem. But when we’re having to make a connection to a city with not-frequent service, it’s a different matter. The first thing I did was X out anything with more than 1 stop; it’ll be hard enough keeping 2 flights aligned let alone 3. Then I focused on the big European hubs -- Heathrow, Frankfurt, DeGaulle -- skipping connections at smaller places like Munich, Zurich. Finally, I look for connection times around 3 hours; what I thought would be a “Goldilocks” connection -- not too short that any hiccup on the inbound flight would cause a problem, but not too long that we’d be having to sit in the airport all day wearing a mask or would have to track COVID protocols in yet another country because of an overnight connection. All that being said, we’re booked on Air France with a 2 hr, 50 minute connection in DeGaulle. But I don’t have any SkyTeam status, which causes me a bit of a worry -- maybe we get caught in a long non-status security line. So I did some DIY trip insurance on the flight, burning an extra bit of my pile of American Express Membership miles for a ride in business class (cancellable, of course) to make up for my non-status status. You could say I’ve gone <em>way</em> down a rabbit hole overthinking this one and I wouldn’t really argue with you. But then again, it’s the first international trip in 2 years that I’ve been able to plan. So it’s kinda like an only child, getting way too much their parent’s attention.&nbsp;</li><li>I was digging through my travel card wallet for my Global Entry card to find my Known Traveler number to put on the Air France reservation and came across a handful of Southwest drink coupons that are about to hit their expiration date. <a href=\"https://community.southwest.com/t5/Knowledge-Base/Expired-2020-Drink-Coupons/ta-p/114294\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Southwest says expiring drink coupons are good through the end of this year</a>. But Southwest suspended alcohol sales a few months back, and rightly so after a passenger assaulted a flight attendant, saying the booze won’t return until the federal mask mandate ends. But the TSA just extended that until January, past the coupons’ extended expiration date. And really, I don’t see the TSA letting up on in-flight masks anytime soon, so is Southwest going to be the first dry airline?</li><li>I mentor start-up founders at <a href=\"https://1871.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">a tech incubator in Chicago</a>. A few months ago, one of my sessions was with a bionic implant start-up. Implant the chip and the back of your hand becomes a contactless card; get into your office or pay at Starbucks with the tap of your hand. Another reminder, if a bit, say, unsettling (icky?), of the move to a cashless society. I talked about it back in episode #136 in 2017, about being maybe the last generation of cash payers, that my younger traveling colleagues rarely carried cash; they paid for everything with a card. And then, the pandemic massively accelerated it. Everything went contactless; nobody wanted to handle your cash. Last year, in episode #165, I noticed I had the same $200 of 20’s in my wallet in June that I’d taken out of an ATM right before the March lockdown. Last month in New York, the coffee joint across from our hotel was card-only and the same for the ice cream shop around the corner from our place in Chicago. Restaurants that use the Toast point-of-sale system print out a QR code at the bottom of your receipt, letting you pay and walk away. The country of Sweden thinks they’ll be completely cashless in 2 years. But I’m seeing a little reversion to the mean post-lockdown. I stopped off at a bar during a Saturday bike ride for a rehydration break. I asked the bartender if she took cash. “Yup,” she said, “Never stopped. It spends just like everything else.” It felt good to put a 20 on the bar, order beers, and see her take cash from the pile just like in 2019. It’s also that inflation is making it tougher for small places to eat the 2.5-3% card fees. The little Mexican place across the street from work where I’ll grab carne asada tacos for lunch now tacks on that fee for card users. They’re happy when I pull out cash, though last week I got 80 cents back in nickels. I guess the cashless thing has now caused a shortage of quarters.&nbsp;</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — &nbsp; Fall to pieces - Silence by mika (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mika/24945 Ft: Colab</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>What Will Remain from These Pandemic Times?</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>In past episodes, I’ve been pretty skeptical about forecasts of permanent changes to the travel industry, or society in general, from&nbsp; the pandemic. I have enough grey hair to remember commentators using the same “everything has changed” and “this is the new normal” language 13 years ago after the 2008 Great Recession, yet somehow we ended up back to maybe within 90% of&nbsp; 2007, the pre-recession starting point. Reversion to the mean is a strong force.</li><li>Unless it’s countered by a stronger force -- like saving money -- which is why I think the odds-on favorites for <a href=\"https://onemileatatime.com/hilton-hotel-service-cuts-permanent/\">pandemic changes made permanent</a> are what we’ve seen at hotels and restaurants. Checking into the Hilton in Midtown Manhattan last month, the front desk guy told us that they weren’t doing daily housekeeping; we could either schedule housekeeping now or call them when we wanted it. Pre-pandemic, Starwood and then Marriott would offer you points for skipping housekeeping -- Go Green they called it. They pitched it as eco-friendly, but it really was all about saving labor costs. But the Hilton didn’t offer me any points. The week before,<a href=\"https://onemileatatime.com/news/hilton-housekeeping-on-demand/\"> Hilton announced their new policy of on-request housekeeping</a> across all of their brands; the first major chain to cement what had been an <em>ad hoc</em> pandemic response into a new chain-wide policy. The press release talked about “guest comfort”, but behind the PR flacks, it’s all about cost savings. I expect to see Marriott and others follow soon. I do have to give props to the housekeeping staff at that Hilton, though. When, after 3 days, I did call for a room cleaning, they were there in 5 minutes.&nbsp;</li><li>A bigger loss for me is the breakfast buffet. My usual pre-pandemic routine was to work out and then take a quick pass through the concierge lounge for breakfast. Hotels must’ve found their <em>ad hoc</em> grab-n-go breakfast sacks cheaper because that too feels like it’s going to be the new normal. Way back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/01/27/podcast-113-2014-was-a-bad-year-to-fly-restaurant-trends-go-local/\">episode #113</a>, in January 2015, I scoffed at a bartender in MSP who reached over to punch my food order into the iPad mounted in front of me. Now, we aim our own smartphones at QR codes and order our own meals -- without any help -- again, saving labor costs.&nbsp;</li><li>Airlines started reverting to the mean at the end of last year when they dropped capacity restrictions and put butts in the middle seats again -- just as traffic began to recover. If you haven’t been on a flight this year, you’d think nothing happened -- well, except everyone wearing masks and the missing Bloody Mary eye openers on the morning Southwest flights to Vegas. Some folks are predicting the death of cancellation fees, but I don’t buy it. <a href=\"https://thepointsguy.com/news/will-american-delta-eliminate-change-fees/\">In 2019, United made $625 million in change and cancellation fees; ten of the largest U.S. carriers made $2.84 billion</a>. That’s too big of a hole to leave unfilled. And they’re already creeping back in. Most Basic Economy seats are back to non-changeable/non-refundable. Maybe not this year, but if traffic holds up, I’d expect to see some airlines quietly <em>not</em> extend their fee waiver deadlines.</li><li>Private company behaviors are pretty straight-forward to forecast -- just follow the money. It’s the government regs that are uncertain -- how long do the mask mandates and COVID testing international entry rules stay around? Government rules only seem to ratchet up -- it’s been 15 years since the TSA had us take our shoes off and dump our water bottles at security checkpoints and other than letting people bring on larger bottles of hand sanitizer, no one thinks the TSA is going to change those rules anytime soon. There’s no incentive.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>The Best Places I’ve Ate and Drank At… So Far</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I talk <em>a lot</em> about food and beer in this podcast -- as proven by the direct links to those categories in the top menu on the TravelCommons website. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\">episode #168</a> last fall, I said that, for me, food is one of the last hold-outs to global e-commerce and social media. 10-20 year ago, it was fun to go shopping and bring something unique back home. But now, there’s not much that you can’t find easier (and often cheaper) on Amazon or Taobao or Rakuten. And don’t even get me started on Instagram -- if people aren’t in <a href=\"https://www.npr.org/2021/07/09/1014208160/national-parks-crowds-litter\">a 100-person queue to get their own personal shot of the Delicate Arch in Moab, UT</a> then they’re queuing for made-for-Instagram-selfie murals like the <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/explore/tags/whatliftsyou/\">WhatLiftsYou</a> wings in Nashville’s Gulch neighborhood.  But food -- you can post all the pictures you want of it, but you can’t post that sense memory of eating a dozen fresh oysters on a breakwater in Brittany, having a bowl of pho for breakfast in Saigon, or a 1am fresh-off-the-grill char polish that’s been dragged through the garden at a Chicago hot dog stand. </li><li>And so, over the years, I’ve talked about restaurants, bars, taprooms that I’ve enjoyed and posted links to them on the website in show notes or in blog posts. But reading articles about the number of places that’ve closed since March 2020 -- some say <a href=\"https://www.nrn.com/fast-casual/datassential-more-10-us-restaurants-have-closed-permanently\">10% of all restaurants in the US</a>, <a href=\"https://www.chicagobusiness.com/restaurants/heres-how-many-chicago-restaurants-have-closed-pandemic\">almost 20% in Chicago</a> -- I figure it’ll take travel guide books and blogs a while to catch up with all the changes. It kinda hit me when a college friend pinged our group text for Nashville recommendations. I’ve been going there a couple of times a year for the past 5 years, but when I started going through my list of places, it struck me how many of them had closed. I had to re-curate my recommendations. I figured a good start on that would be to post <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/08/14/my-best-restaurants-and-bars-of-2021/\">a list of the best places I’ve ate and drank at during my 2021 travels</a> on the TravelCommons website.</li><li>Now, fair warning, this is a <em>very</em> idiosyncratic list; it’s the best places <em>I</em> ate and drank at in, say, New York City in May and July. The New York list is pretty Midtown/Murray Hill-centric because that’s where we were staying and that’s where Claire was looking for flats. I walked into <a href=\"https://www.tedscornertavern.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Ted’s Corner Tavern</a> because it’s around the corner from Claire’s new place; it made the list because it’s what I think a great neighborhood bar should be -- good-sized bar with friendly bartenders who aren’t too busy to chat with you, the right volume level (lively, but not so loud that you have to shout across the table), and, of course, 30 taps and a well-curated beer list.</li><li>I’ve tried to make my list a well-curated one.  I don’t mention restaurants or taprooms that I thought were fine -- the 3 or 3½-star places. It’s a list of places that stuck out in my mind for one reason or another, and would make me go out of my way to recommend them to, say, a college friend. This played out in a funny way on my Portland, Maine recommendations. I recommend <a href=\"https://bobsclamhut.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bob’s Clam Hut</a> in Kittery for fried clams and <a href=\"https://portland.islandcreekoysters.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Island Creek Oyster\'s place</a> in the East End/Munjoy Hill neighborhood for local oysters, but have no specific recommendation for a lobster roll place. It’s not for lack of trying; we had a lobster roll whenever we saw it on a menu, which wasn’t a cheap exercise since they were about $25 a pop. They were all good -- we didn’t have a bad lobster roll anywhere. But after all that, there’s no one place I could point to and say “Go <em>there</em> for a lobster roll.”  I just say “Order one if you see it. It’ll probably be good no matter where you are”. </li><li>Another oddity of the list -- no Chicago places. Irene and I talked about this a bit. Between favorite places closing and cooking at home a lot more during the lockdowns and the strict mask mandate (which in Chicago was worded kinda like the airplane mandate -- wear your mask at all times unless you were actively eating or drinking), we haven’t been anywhere that’s really stuck out. Well, except maybe for the<a href=\"https://goo.gl/maps/XzUBYcWTn8nmc42E8\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"> Nancy’s Pizza</a> a couple of blocks from the TravelCommons studios. They do a great pepperoni, spinach, and fresh tomato pan pizza. That’ll definitely make the list.</li><li>Because the list is a work-in-progress; I posted the first edition on the website last week with sections on Tucson, San Diego, Nashville, New York, and Portland. You’ll find a link in the episode description in your podcast app -- if it supports HTML descriptions. I’ll be adding places through the rest of the year. There <em>will</em> be at least a couple of Chicago places (in addition to Nancy’s) on the list. I’m sure we’ll find some places in Puglia to add; and I’m positive I’ll find some UK taprooms that’ll make the cut since Rob Cheshire of This Week in Craft Beer has offered me a personal tour of his favorites.</li><li>When I’ve added a new section or think there’s enough new stuff to justify people taking a fresh look, I’ll put a new date on it so it goes back to the top of the Food and the Beer sections of the website, and I’ll post it on Facebook and Twitter. And if you end up hitting one of these places, shoot me a note and let me know if I got it right.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #178</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social  -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_178.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #178 — What Remains from Pandemic Times; Best Restaurant and Bars','','inherit','closed','closed','','3642-revision-v1','','','2021-08-24 08:49:39','2021-08-24 13:49:39','',3642,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3645',0,'revision','',0),
(3646,1,'2021-08-24 09:01:33','2021-08-24 14:01:33','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_1985\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/IMG_1758-scaled.jpeg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-3581 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/IMG_1758-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"Microphone and a Beer Can\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a>Now I\'m Ready For the Interview[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>After a 2-week, 2,500-mile and $120 in tolls driving expedition through the Northeast, I didn\'t have much time left to write a new episode. So, I mined the audio files of recent TravelCommons interviews for some good stories that got left on the cutting room floor. We also talk about planning for a bike trip in Italy, a couple of things that might make the 2021 traveler gift guide, and we mourn the demise of American Airlines\' in-flight magazine. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_177.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #177: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, trying to get this July episode in under the wire, a bit delayed due to a 2-week, 2,500-mile and $120 in tolls driving expedition through the Northeast that started with a 12-hr drive from Chicago to Manhattan on the Friday of the 4th of July weekend with as much of our daughter and as much of her worldly belongings as would fit in a BMW X3, helping her move into a 5th-floor walkup in Midtown. I was very pleasantly surprised to hit only two backups on what was forecasted to be the first really big post-lockdown travel day; a detour around an accident in the Poconos on I-80 and then, at the end of our drive, the completely predictable back-up at the mouth of the Lincoln Tunnel. A completely and happily uneventful drive. I then spent the rest of the week finding a different spot every morning for my standard Manhattan breakfast -- egg &amp; cheese on a toasted everything bagel and making sure they don’t slip some milk into my black coffee order -- before spending the day in front of my laptop on a not-very-big desk in our not-very-big hotel room while Irene helped Claire get her flat all set up.&nbsp;</li><li>The next Friday, we left Manhattan for a week’s vacation in Maine with an intermediate stop in New Haven, CT’s Little Italy neighborhood for the classic white clam pizza at Frank Pepe’s. It was a bit of a wait -- a 20-minute queue on the sidewalk and then another 45 minutes after ordering -- but it was worth it. I’ve had many tries at white clam pizza before, but this one was, by far, the best -- a generous helping of clams, garlic, and oregano on a cracker-crisp crust . We walked past other pizza places on Wooster St, but only had time to hit one, and so it had to be the ur-pizza joint, the classic, Frank Pepe’s. And luckily for us, it didn’t disappoint; the line along the sidewalk is well-earned.&nbsp; You know, the Michelin Guide says a one-star restaurant is ‘High quality cooking, worth a stop!’, a two-star is ‘Excellent cooking, worth a detour!’, and describes a three-star as ‘Exceptional cuisine, worth a special journey!’ I’m not saying that Frank Pepe’s is a two-star place, but I will say that it was damn good pizza that was definitely worth our detour.</li><li>We then headed up to Scarborough, ME, just south of Portland, for a beach vacation with friends.&nbsp; The traffic on the drive north was a steady stream of RV’s and pick-up tracks and cars with “roof bags” tied down on top and bikes lashed to the back that continued to thicken from I-91 to I-84 to I-90 to I-495 until it finally ground to a halt trying to merge onto I-95, which was itself filled with the same thick sludge of vehicles trying to make it north for the weekend. And then the weather wasn’t great -- rainy, foggy, misty (now I know where Steven King got all his inspiration) so our time devolved into an week-long seafood fest -- a bivalve-palooza of local mussels, oysters, and clams; intensive longitudinal lobster roll research; and, ignoring the current UK debate about crustacean sentience, multiple boiled lobster dinners -- and taproom tour, hitting the big names like Allagash, Maine Beer Company, and Oxbow as well as some (many) other little guys. And then, finally, on the last day, sunshine.</li><li>After a week of this, the rain started up again as we turned around and headed back home, getting on I-90 in Albany and not getting off until we hit Chicago. It too was an uneventful drive, but not in a great way. By the end of that day, we’d developed a deep, deep hatred of those miserable strips of boring asphalt and the hellhole rest stops that make up the Ohio and Indiana Tollways. I hope Claire loves her new life, ‘cause I really don’t want to have to drive that way again.</li><li>Bridge Music -- One for Me by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/21492 Ft: Haskel</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I have to say that the most important piece of travel kit on this trip was my USB-C to HDMI cable that let me mirror my MacBook Air display on the hotel and beach house TVs so that I could sit back with a beer and comfortably watch YouTube highlights of the Euro 2020 soccer tournament and the Tour de France on 40-60” flat screens instead of hunching over my 13” MacBook Air. I had a version of this in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/12/11/best-gift-ideas-for-a-new-traveler/\">my 2019 traveler gift guide</a>, but it got bumped off t<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">he 2020 version</a> to make room for bring-your-own dining sets. But with restaurants and bars open and so not having to eat every meal in my hotel room, I think I’ll reverse that change and put this cable back on the 2021 guide.</li><li>I don’t know if masks will stay on the 2021 guide -- that depends on transportation agency rules -- but I bought another batch of the evolvetogther masks that I called out in the 2020 guide because, even after in-flight mask mandates get dropped, I might still wear a mask on a crowded flight during the cold and flu season because, for the first time in forever, I didn’t get my usual killer cold last year. Without a mandate, I probably wouldn’t wear a mask in the airport and probably not in a fairly open plane, but I think so when it’s a full flight, when there’s someone next to me in the center seat. I think about it -- they’re exhaling maybe 14-16 inches away from where I’m inhaling. No airplane HEPA filter is going to be able to get in between that exchange. I say that now, but I’ll have to re-visit it after in-flight mandates go away and I’m boarding an 8-hour flight to London; that’ll be the real stress test.</li><li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/05/09/podcast-175-how-to-find-local-tour-guides-rebuild-travel-muscles/\">episode #175</a> back in May, I talked about making some Q4 bets on international travel -- a Backroads bike tour in southern Italy in October and the UK in November. Back in the spring, vaccine roll-outs were choppy, especially in the EU, but I thought that everything would sort itself out over the summer making booking travel in the fall not such a risk. Now this was pre-delta variant, but while in Maine, we got an e-mail from Backroads with the subject line “Your Trip Is A Go!” followed shortly thereafter by an alert from Chase of a very large charge dropped on our Sapphire Visa card. Now we need to start tracking travel requirements. Back in May, the best bet for US travelers was to take a “COVID-free” flight on Delta or American to avoid the 2-week quarantine. Then, a month later in June, Italy significantly eased those requirements. Now, you fill out a pretty extensive on-line passenger locator form with all your trip information and your COVID vaccination card and you’re good to go… into Italy. Getting home, the US is still requiring a negative COVID test no matter what your vaccination status is. But, back in May, the CDC said Abbott’s at-home test can be used. It’s not quite as easy as a home pregnancy test -- the <a href=\"https://www.emed.com/airline-travel\">Abbott test</a> requires you to download an app and enough bandwidth for a video chat with a doctor to visually confirm your identity and the test results -- but it beats having to hunt down at a testing place in a new city.</li><li>In the last episode, I did a bit of “fun with numbers,” pulling daily air passenger numbers from the <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/coronavirus/passenger-throughput\">TSA’s website</a> to look at Memorial Day weekend numbers and then a couple of weeks after that when, on June 11, passenger counts broke 2 million for the first time since the March 2020 lockdowns. Extending that analysis -- from mid-June to now, the last week in July, checkpoint volume growth has plateaued -- the TSA volume numbers averaging just over 2 million/day since the last episode. That’s more than 3 times the 623,000 daily average for the same time last year, but still 21% below 2019’s number. But to a lot of fliers, it doesn’t feel that way. It’s back to full planes, long lines, and tight schedules that can’t recover from inevitable summer thunderstorm delays. Airlines are minimizing schedule slack, trying to claw back some of their 2020 losses, but also because of labor shortages -- from crews to ground-support staff, the people who drive the fuel trucks and cater the planes. Some of that is common to other industries -- people slow to reenter the workforce or took jobs elsewhere when furloughed -- but there’s also something unique to the airlines, staff in the wrong places because travel patterns have shifted. We’ve talked about this before, but with leisure travel snapping back much faster than business travel, the usual big travel destinations -- LGA, ORD, DFW -- are giving way to mid-sized airports. <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/summer-travel-seasons-dont-get-weirder-than-this-one-11626872401?st=7c5z6njyusv2mjg\">The fifth-busiest airport in the world is now in Charlotte, N.C., according to flight data</a>. Charlotte had more flights in June than LAX. Made it tough to be able to spend any time in one of their famous white rocking chairs.</li><li>Last month, American Airlines pulled the plug on <em>American Way</em>, their in-flight magazine. Not surprising. Delta, Southwest, and Alaska all pulled theirs out of their seatback pockets in March 2020 and, most famously, 5 year before COVID in 2015, Skymall disappeared into a Chapter 11 puff of smoke. I, for one, will miss <em>American Way</em>. I’ve always read in-flight magazines and liked that <em>American Way</em> came out twice a month, so it didn’t get as stale as the other ones. Way back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/09/24/podcast-15-begging-for-business-needing-to-know-at-35000-ft/\">episode #15</a>, <em>waay</em> back in 2005, I called them “reading safety stock” because if I was stuck on the runway waiting out a weather ground stop or sitting in&nbsp; Detroit\'s “penalty box” for a couple hours waiting for a landing slot, I’d quickly chew through my own stack of reading material, because, back then, all electronics had to be turned off on the ground and below 10,000 ft to keep a “sterile cabin” for takeoff and landings, and most flight attendants were pretty particular about enforcing it. But all is not lost. United Airlines restarted the physical <em>Hemispheres</em> magazine in June after going all-digital in March 2020.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — &nbsp; Fall to pieces - Silence by mika (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mika/24945 Ft: Colab</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>B-Sides and Rarities - Interview Outtakes</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>After the travel world was shut down in March 2020, I began wondering if TravelCommons would join the furlough ranks for lack of content. It’s tough to do a podcast that’s “more about the journey than the destination” if you’re not journeying. Grounded, locked down, I needed a different way to generate content, so I’ve been doing more interviews. Interviews aren’t <em>less</em> work; it’s just different. Instead of spending time writing, I spend it editing. The typical interview session is 20-30 minutes over Zoom (of course) which I edit down to a 6-8 minute segment which you hopefully find tight, focused and insightful.</li><li>But doing some quick math, that leaves two-thirds of the interview on the cutting floor. Not all of that is insightful -- there’s, say, pronunciation guidance… that I still manage to screw up. But there’s still good stuff that, for whatever reason, doesn’t make it into the edited segment. So for this episode, I’ve pulled out the full interview files and pulled out some stories, some conversational threads that I left behind the first go-around. They’re pretty much unedited, save for snipping out a cough or two --&nbsp; so you’re hearing the actual conversation.</li><li>The first “b-side” is from my conversation in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\">episode #166</a> with <a href=\"https://www.dur.ac.uk/research/directory/staff/?id=15319\">Dr. Emily Thomas</a>, associate professor in philosophy at Durham University in the UK about her book<em> </em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/2DO07fV\"><em>The Meaning of Travel: Philosophers Abroad</em></a>. I reached out to Emily after reading a review of her book in the <em>Wall Street Journal</em>. It was one of my favorite interviews; one that I couldn’t cut down to just 6-8 minutes. But even with the extended play, this thread about different travel styles -- going deep vs. checking off a place’s “greatest hits” -- didn’t make it.</li><li>Next up are a couple of stories from <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/05/09/podcast-175-how-to-find-local-tour-guides-rebuild-travel-muscles/\">episode #175</a> where I talked to <a href=\"https://www.toursbylocals.com/TBL/WebObjects/ToursByLocals.woa/1/wo/y2c7lZDKnxUUHYGLem9YgM/0.41.1.1.50.3\">Paul Melhus</a>, CEO of <a href=\"https://www.toursbylocals.com/\">ToursByLocals</a>, about the local tour market. Paul first told me about the vagaries of selling shore excursion tours to cruise ship passengers and a story about the business challenges he faced in the first days of the COVID lockdown</li><li>The episode before that, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/04/10/podcast-174-how-the-pros-plan-their-taproom-tourism/\">#174</a> if I’m doing my math correctly, was another extended play segment -- 12 minutes -- about taproom tourism, but that was cut down from an hour-and-a-half Zoom beer drinking session with Rob Cheshire host of the UK’s <a href=\"https://thisweekincraft.beer/\">This Week In Craft Beer</a> podcast. Here’s one of the many taproom stories that didn’t make the podcast.  You can catch the full uncut session on the website or the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\">YouTube channel</a>.&nbsp;</li><li>Now it’s not that I didn’t do interviews before the pandemic. Back in January 2020 in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/01/25/podcast-159-planning-the-trip-of-a-lifetime-in-southeast-asia/\">episode #159</a>, I had Allan Marko on talking about trip planning, how he and his wife planned their 9-week sabbatical around Southeast Asia. I thought this was perfect timing -- January is always a big travel planning time. Two months later, most of those plans got blown to bits. But, back in those happier times, here’s a story about the dangers of losing a bag while on a different city-each-day trip</li><li>Editing <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/06/15/podcast-176-why-business-travel-is-coming-back-learning-airport-history/\">last month’s interview</a> with <a href=\"https://udayton.edu/directory/artssciences/history/bednarek_janet.php\">Dr Janet Bednarek</a>, Professor of History at University of Dayton about the history of airports, I had to leave out this thread about who owns US airports. </li><li>And finally, something that’s not really a B-side. Back in<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/05/08/podcast-163-new-world-of-travel-insurance-getting-medical-help-on-the-road/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #163 — New World of Travel Insurance; Getting Medical Help on the Road\"> episode #163</a>, I used a piece of Steve Frick’s <a href=\"https://anchor.fm/steve-frick/\">Travel Stories</a> podcast where we talked about the first TravelCommons episode. Here’s another piece of our conversation where we talk about where our travel paths overlapped.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #177</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_177.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #177 — B-Sides and Rarities','','inherit','closed','closed','','3579-revision-v1','','','2021-08-24 09:01:33','2021-08-24 14:01:33','',3579,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3646',0,'revision','',0),
(3647,1,'2021-08-24 13:26:38','2021-08-24 18:26:38','','IMG_2173','','inherit','open','closed','','img_2173','','','2021-12-10 10:28:22','2021-12-10 15:28:22','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/IMG_2173.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(3648,1,'2021-08-24 13:29:30','2021-08-24 18:29:30','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_1985\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/IMG_1758-scaled.jpeg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-3581 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/IMG_2173-300x300.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a>Now I\'m I Feel Safer Already[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>After a 2-week, 2,500-mile and $120 in tolls driving expedition through the Northeast, I didn\'t have much time left to write a new episode. So, I mined the audio files of recent TravelCommons interviews for some good stories that got left on the cutting room floor. We also talk about planning for a bike trip in Italy, a couple of things that might make the 2021 traveler gift guide, and we mourn the demise of American Airlines\' in-flight magazine. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_178.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #178: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after a much lighter travel schedule than before the last episode. The day after posting the July episode, Irene and I got back in the car (because those 12-hour drives to and from the East Coast just weren’t enough for me), but this time heading north, as I mentioned at the end of the last episode, to Traverse City, MI to do Paddle for Pints with some friends; it’s a taproom crawl, but in kayaks instead of on streets. It’s a lot of fun. There’s something about physical exertion while drinking that seems to justify the next beer.&nbsp;</li><li>Now, anyone who’s driven any distance through the Midwest knows there’s only two seasons here -- winter and construction season -- and we didn’t get too far outside of Chicago on I-90 before a merge down to single lane traffic ground traffic to a crawl and I started refreshing Waze and Google Maps looking for alternatives. I’ve said in past episodes that, even though Google owns both, my experience is they can recommend different routes, especially in high-traffic, fast-changing situations. To me, Waze feels a little “twitchier”; it’ll twist you down a half-dozen random side streets to save 30 seconds while Google Maps guesses you’re willing to suck it up for a couple more minutes in exchange for a simpler route. And that’s exactly what happened to us in northwest Indiana which leaves me trying to figure out which route to take. I tweeted out later (actually while on a snack break in a taproom in Grand Rapids) “ I really hate it when Google Maps and Waze fight” to which the Waze social media crew replied “We like to think of it more as a disagreement”. Nicely done. And then Jim McDonough, a long-time TravelCommons listener, added “Apple Maps breaks the tie?”&nbsp; Good idea, but I was having enough fun swiping between two maps; adding a third would’ve put me in the ditch for sure. I mostly used Waze, but skipped the recommended routing through side streets in Gary, Indiana. The risk-reward trade-off on that just didn’t feel worth it.</li><li>I was supposed to head out to the Bay Area last week on business, going to a plant on the east side of the Bay for a big team meeting. But it got re-vectored at the last minute from California back to Chicago because that Bay Area country had reinstated indoor mask mandates. Nobody questioned the move. With everyone on the team fully vaccinated months ago, we’d all happily gotten used to meeting with each other like it’s 2019 again and really didn’t want to go back to 8 hours of masks, muffled voices, and trying to read non-verbal cues from the nose up. As it was, we just made it under the wire -- our meeting was Wednesday and Thursday, and then on Friday, Chicago’s indoor mask mandate went into effect. It’s sorta peak Chicago that the city collected the revenue off of 385,000 mostly maskless Lollapalooza attendees before dropping the boom on those of us who actually live in the city.</li><li>Bridge Music -- One for Me by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/21492 Ft: Haskel</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>One of the reasons it takes me so long to do an episode is I lack the discipline to bail out when I get caught in a click spiral. This time it was about the <a href=\"https://www.pennlive.com/nation-world/2021/07/teen-airdrops-photo-of-an-airsoft-gun-forcing-the-evacuation-of-a-united-airlines-flight.html\">United Airlines flight that was evacuated because a teenager decided to troll fellow passengers by AirDropping them a picture of an Airsoft gun</a>. For the non-iPhone users out there, AirDrop lets iPhones and Macs easily share stuff -- pictures, videos, web links -- wirelessly with others nearby. It’s been around for about 10 years and pretty quickly people figured out they could drop random/<em>interesting</em> pictures onto nearby strangers who had set their phones wide-open. I’ve seen this happen and it can be pretty funny, watching someone suddenly start looking around in a bar or a train, wondering who’d AirDropped them a picture. But what’s funny or, at worst, annoying in a bar is easily interpreted as a safety threat 10 years on from 9/11. They pulled everyone off for rescreening, searched the plane, and then left three hours later, leaving the teen behind in SFO. Understandable, I thought, if maybe a slight overreaction -- until I got to maybe the 5th page of Google search results where I clicked through to not-yet- another rehash of the United incident, but something different -- a <a href=\"https://www.fox5atlanta.com/news/panic-on-planes-after-images-are-airdropped\">story</a> about an AirDropped message on a Delta flight. It said “A plane-jacking will happen soon, 2 hours and 37 minutes it will start in the front on aisle 6.” That flight too was evacuated, but this time they didn’t find the sender. Maybe airlines’ safety demos need to show iPhone users how to set their AirDrop to “Receiving Off”.</li><li>Irene and I continue to push on with plans for our first post-lockdown international trip, to Italy for a bike tour through Puglia. The whole Delta variant thing adds to the uncertainty. I talked in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/05/09/podcast-175-how-to-find-local-tour-guides-rebuild-travel-muscles/\">episode #175</a> about sorting through trip insurance and figuring out what credit card to use for the tour. Now booking hotels before and after the tour, we’re choosing to pay 10-15 euros more a night for cancellable rates, kind of a DIY trip insurance. Booking our flights into Bari, where the tour starts, I’ve also felt the need to be a bit more thoughtful. Airline schedules seem to be a bit more <em>variable</em> than usual. Last week, American sent me a note to let me know our November LHR-ORD flight has moved up 5:15pm to 10:35am. I understand that; air traffic is <em>not</em> following predictable patterns and they’re trying to keep up. For that direct flight home from London, it’s not a problem. But when we’re having to make a connection to a city with not-frequent service, it’s a different matter. The first thing I did was X out anything with more than 1 stop; it’ll be hard enough keeping 2 flights aligned let alone 3. Then I focused on the big European hubs -- Heathrow, Frankfurt, DeGaulle -- skipping connections at smaller places like Munich, Zurich. Finally, I look for connection times around 3 hours; what I thought would be a “Goldilocks” connection -- not too short that any hiccup on the inbound flight would cause a problem, but not too long that we’d be having to sit in the airport all day wearing a mask or would have to track COVID protocols in yet another country because of an overnight connection. All that being said, we’re booked on Air France with a 2 hr, 50 minute connection in DeGaulle. But I don’t have any SkyTeam status, which causes me a bit of a worry -- maybe we get caught in a long non-status security line. So I did some DIY trip insurance on the flight, burning an extra bit of my pile of American Express Membership miles for a ride in business class (cancellable, of course) to make up for my non-status status. You could say I’ve gone <em>way</em> down a rabbit hole overthinking this one and I wouldn’t really argue with you. But then again, it’s the first international trip in 2 years that I’ve been able to plan. So it’s kinda like an only child, getting way too much their parent’s attention.&nbsp;</li><li>I was digging through my travel card wallet for my Global Entry card to find my Known Traveler number to put on the Air France reservation and came across a handful of Southwest drink coupons that are about to hit their expiration date. <a href=\"https://community.southwest.com/t5/Knowledge-Base/Expired-2020-Drink-Coupons/ta-p/114294\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Southwest says expiring drink coupons are good through the end of this year</a>. But Southwest suspended alcohol sales a few months back, and rightly so after a passenger assaulted a flight attendant, saying the booze won’t return until the federal mask mandate ends. But the TSA just extended that until January, past the coupons’ extended expiration date. And really, I don’t see the TSA letting up on in-flight masks anytime soon, so is Southwest going to be the first dry airline?</li><li>I mentor start-up founders at <a href=\"https://1871.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">a tech incubator in Chicago</a>. A few months ago, one of my sessions was with a bionic implant start-up. Implant the chip and the back of your hand becomes a contactless card; get into your office or pay at Starbucks with the tap of your hand. Another reminder, if a bit, say, unsettling (icky?), of the move to a cashless society. I talked about it back in episode #136 in 2017, about being maybe the last generation of cash payers, that my younger traveling colleagues rarely carried cash; they paid for everything with a card. And then, the pandemic massively accelerated it. Everything went contactless; nobody wanted to handle your cash. Last year, in episode #165, I noticed I had the same $200 of 20’s in my wallet in June that I’d taken out of an ATM right before the March lockdown. Last month in New York, the coffee joint across from our hotel was card-only and the same for the ice cream shop around the corner from our place in Chicago. Restaurants that use the Toast point-of-sale system print out a QR code at the bottom of your receipt, letting you pay and walk away. The country of Sweden thinks they’ll be completely cashless in 2 years. But I’m seeing a little reversion to the mean post-lockdown. I stopped off at a bar during a Saturday bike ride for a rehydration break. I asked the bartender if she took cash. “Yup,” she said, “Never stopped. It spends just like everything else.” It felt good to put a 20 on the bar, order beers, and see her take cash from the pile just like in 2019. It’s also that inflation is making it tougher for small places to eat the 2.5-3% card fees. The little Mexican place across the street from work where I’ll grab carne asada tacos for lunch now tacks on that fee for card users. They’re happy when I pull out cash, though last week I got 80 cents back in nickels. I guess the cashless thing has now caused a shortage of quarters.&nbsp;</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — &nbsp; Fall to pieces - Silence by mika (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mika/24945 Ft: Colab</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>What Will Remain from These Pandemic Times?</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>In past episodes, I’ve been pretty skeptical about forecasts of permanent changes to the travel industry, or society in general, from&nbsp; the pandemic. I have enough grey hair to remember commentators using the same “everything has changed” and “this is the new normal” language 13 years ago after the 2008 Great Recession, yet somehow we ended up back to maybe within 90% of&nbsp; 2007, the pre-recession starting point. Reversion to the mean is a strong force.</li><li>Unless it’s countered by a stronger force -- like saving money -- which is why I think the odds-on favorites for <a href=\"https://onemileatatime.com/hilton-hotel-service-cuts-permanent/\">pandemic changes made permanent</a> are what we’ve seen at hotels and restaurants. Checking into the Hilton in Midtown Manhattan last month, the front desk guy told us that they weren’t doing daily housekeeping; we could either schedule housekeeping now or call them when we wanted it. Pre-pandemic, Starwood and then Marriott would offer you points for skipping housekeeping -- Go Green they called it. They pitched it as eco-friendly, but it really was all about saving labor costs. But the Hilton didn’t offer me any points. The week before,<a href=\"https://onemileatatime.com/news/hilton-housekeeping-on-demand/\"> Hilton announced their new policy of on-request housekeeping</a> across all of their brands; the first major chain to cement what had been an <em>ad hoc</em> pandemic response into a new chain-wide policy. The press release talked about “guest comfort”, but behind the PR flacks, it’s all about cost savings. I expect to see Marriott and others follow soon. I do have to give props to the housekeeping staff at that Hilton, though. When, after 3 days, I did call for a room cleaning, they were there in 5 minutes.&nbsp;</li><li>A bigger loss for me is the breakfast buffet. My usual pre-pandemic routine was to work out and then take a quick pass through the concierge lounge for breakfast. Hotels must’ve found their <em>ad hoc</em> grab-n-go breakfast sacks cheaper because that too feels like it’s going to be the new normal. Way back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/01/27/podcast-113-2014-was-a-bad-year-to-fly-restaurant-trends-go-local/\">episode #113</a>, in January 2015, I scoffed at a bartender in MSP who reached over to punch my food order into the iPad mounted in front of me. Now, we aim our own smartphones at QR codes and order our own meals -- without any help -- again, saving labor costs.&nbsp;</li><li>Airlines started reverting to the mean at the end of last year when they dropped capacity restrictions and put butts in the middle seats again -- just as traffic began to recover. If you haven’t been on a flight this year, you’d think nothing happened -- well, except everyone wearing masks and the missing Bloody Mary eye openers on the morning Southwest flights to Vegas. Some folks are predicting the death of cancellation fees, but I don’t buy it. <a href=\"https://thepointsguy.com/news/will-american-delta-eliminate-change-fees/\">In 2019, United made $625 million in change and cancellation fees; ten of the largest U.S. carriers made $2.84 billion</a>. That’s too big of a hole to leave unfilled. And they’re already creeping back in. Most Basic Economy seats are back to non-changeable/non-refundable. Maybe not this year, but if traffic holds up, I’d expect to see some airlines quietly <em>not</em> extend their fee waiver deadlines.</li><li>Private company behaviors are pretty straight-forward to forecast -- just follow the money. It’s the government regs that are uncertain -- how long do the mask mandates and COVID testing international entry rules stay around? Government rules only seem to ratchet up -- it’s been 15 years since the TSA had us take our shoes off and dump our water bottles at security checkpoints and other than letting people bring on larger bottles of hand sanitizer, no one thinks the TSA is going to change those rules anytime soon. There’s no incentive.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>The Best Places I’ve Ate and Drank At In 2021… So Far</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I talk <em>a lot</em> about food and beer in this podcast -- as proven by the direct links to those categories in the top menu on the TravelCommons website. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\">episode #168</a> last fall, I said that, for me, food is one of the last hold-outs to global e-commerce and social media. 10-20 year ago, it was fun to go shopping and bring something unique back home. But now, there’s not much that you can’t find easier (and often cheaper) on Amazon or Taobao or Rakuten. And don’t even get me started on Instagram -- if people aren’t in <a href=\"https://www.npr.org/2021/07/09/1014208160/national-parks-crowds-litter\">a 100-person queue to get their own personal shot of the Delicate Arch in Moab, UT</a> then they’re queuing for made-for-Instagram-selfie murals like the <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/explore/tags/whatliftsyou/\">WhatLiftsYou</a> wings in Nashville’s Gulch neighborhood.&nbsp; But food -- you can post all the pictures you want of it, but you can’t post that sense memory of eating a dozen fresh oysters on a breakwater in Brittany, having a bowl of pho for breakfast in Saigon, or a 1am fresh-off-the-grill char polish that’s been dragged through the garden at a Chicago hot dog stand.&nbsp;</li><li>And so, over the years, I’ve talked about restaurants, bars, taprooms that I’ve enjoyed and posted links to them on the website in show notes or in blog posts. But reading articles about the number of places that’ve closed since March 2020 -- some say <a href=\"https://www.nrn.com/fast-casual/datassential-more-10-us-restaurants-have-closed-permanently\">10% of all restaurants in the US</a>, <a href=\"https://www.chicagobusiness.com/restaurants/heres-how-many-chicago-restaurants-have-closed-pandemic\">almost 20% in Chicago</a> -- I figure it’ll take travel guide books and blogs a while to catch up with all the changes. It kinda hit me when a college friend pinged our group text for Nashville recommendations. I’ve been going there a couple of times a year for the past 5 years, but when I started going through my list of places, it struck me how many of them had closed. I had to re-curate my recommendations. I figured a good start on that would be to post <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/08/14/my-best-restaurants-and-bars-of-2021/\">a list of the best places I’ve ate and drank at during my 2021 travels</a> on the TravelCommons website.</li><li>Now, fair warning, this is a <em>very</em> idiosyncratic list; it’s the best places <em>I</em> ate and drank at in, say, New York City in May and July. The New York list is pretty Midtown/Murray Hill-centric because that’s where we were staying and that’s where Claire was looking for flats. I walked into <a href=\"https://www.tedscornertavern.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Ted’s Corner Tavern</a> because it’s around the corner from Claire’s new place; it made the list because it’s what I think a great neighborhood bar should be -- good-sized bar with friendly bartenders who aren’t too busy to chat with you, the right volume level (lively, but not so loud that you have to shout across the table), and, of course, 30 taps and a well-curated beer list.</li><li>I’ve tried to make my list a well-curated one.&nbsp; I don’t mention restaurants or taprooms that I thought were fine -- the 3 or 3½-star places. It’s a list of places that stuck out in my mind for one reason or another, and would make me go out of my way to recommend them to, say, a college friend. This played out in a funny way on my Portland, Maine recommendations. I recommend <a href=\"https://bobsclamhut.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bob’s Clam Hut</a> in Kittery for fried clams and <a href=\"https://portland.islandcreekoysters.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Island Creek Oyster\'s place</a> in the East End/Munjoy Hill neighborhood for local oysters, but have no specific recommendation for a lobster roll place. It’s not for lack of trying; we had a lobster roll whenever we saw it on a menu, which wasn’t a cheap exercise since they were about $25 a pop. They were all good -- we didn’t have a bad lobster roll anywhere. But after all that, there’s no one place I could point to and say “Go <em>there</em> for a lobster roll.”&nbsp; I just say “Order one if you see it. It’ll probably be good no matter where you are”.&nbsp;</li><li>Another oddity of the list -- no Chicago places. Irene and I talked about this a bit. Between favorite places closing and cooking at home a lot more during the lockdowns and the strict mask mandate (which in Chicago was worded kinda like the airplane mandate -- wear your mask at all times unless you were actively eating or drinking), we haven’t been anywhere that’s really stuck out. Well, except maybe for the<a href=\"https://goo.gl/maps/XzUBYcWTn8nmc42E8\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"> Nancy’s Pizza</a> a couple of blocks from the TravelCommons studios. They do a great pepperoni, spinach, and fresh tomato pan pizza. That’ll definitely make the list.</li><li>Because the list is a work-in-progress; I posted the first edition on the website last week with sections on Tucson, San Diego, Nashville, New York, and Portland. You’ll find a link in the episode description in your podcast app -- if it supports HTML descriptions. I’ll be adding places through the rest of the year. There <em>will</em> be at least a couple of Chicago places (in addition to Nancy’s) on the list. I’m sure we’ll find some places in Puglia to add; and I’m positive I’ll find some UK taprooms that’ll make the cut since Rob Cheshire of This Week in Craft Beer has offered me a personal tour of his favorites.</li><li>When I’ve added a new section or think there’s enough new stuff to justify people taking a fresh look, I’ll put a new date on it so it goes back to the top of the Food and the Beer sections of the website, and I’ll post it on Facebook and Twitter. And if you end up hitting one of these places, shoot me a note and let me know if I got it right.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #178</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_178.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #178 — What Remains from Pandemic Times; Best Restaurant and Bars','','inherit','closed','closed','','3642-revision-v1','','','2021-08-24 13:29:30','2021-08-24 18:29:30','',3642,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3648',0,'revision','',0),
(3649,1,'2021-08-24 13:31:19','2021-08-24 18:31:19','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_1985\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/IMG_1758-scaled.jpeg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-3581 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/IMG_2173-300x300.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a>I Feel Safer Already[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>After a 2-week, 2,500-mile and $120 in tolls driving expedition through the Northeast, I didn\'t have much time left to write a new episode. So, I mined the audio files of recent TravelCommons interviews for some good stories that got left on the cutting room floor. We also talk about planning for a bike trip in Italy, a couple of things that might make the 2021 traveler gift guide, and we mourn the demise of American Airlines\' in-flight magazine. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_178.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #178: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after a much lighter travel schedule than before the last episode. The day after posting the July episode, Irene and I got back in the car (because those 12-hour drives to and from the East Coast just weren’t enough for me), but this time heading north, as I mentioned at the end of the last episode, to Traverse City, MI to do Paddle for Pints with some friends; it’s a taproom crawl, but in kayaks instead of on streets. It’s a lot of fun. There’s something about physical exertion while drinking that seems to justify the next beer.&nbsp;</li><li>Now, anyone who’s driven any distance through the Midwest knows there’s only two seasons here -- winter and construction season -- and we didn’t get too far outside of Chicago on I-90 before a merge down to single lane traffic ground traffic to a crawl and I started refreshing Waze and Google Maps looking for alternatives. I’ve said in past episodes that, even though Google owns both, my experience is they can recommend different routes, especially in high-traffic, fast-changing situations. To me, Waze feels a little “twitchier”; it’ll twist you down a half-dozen random side streets to save 30 seconds while Google Maps guesses you’re willing to suck it up for a couple more minutes in exchange for a simpler route. And that’s exactly what happened to us in northwest Indiana which leaves me trying to figure out which route to take. I tweeted out later (actually while on a snack break in a taproom in Grand Rapids) “ I really hate it when Google Maps and Waze fight” to which the Waze social media crew replied “We like to think of it more as a disagreement”. Nicely done. And then Jim McDonough, a long-time TravelCommons listener, added “Apple Maps breaks the tie?”&nbsp; Good idea, but I was having enough fun swiping between two maps; adding a third would’ve put me in the ditch for sure. I mostly used Waze, but skipped the recommended routing through side streets in Gary, Indiana. The risk-reward trade-off on that just didn’t feel worth it.</li><li>I was supposed to head out to the Bay Area last week on business, going to a plant on the east side of the Bay for a big team meeting. But it got re-vectored at the last minute from California back to Chicago because that Bay Area country had reinstated indoor mask mandates. Nobody questioned the move. With everyone on the team fully vaccinated months ago, we’d all happily gotten used to meeting with each other like it’s 2019 again and really didn’t want to go back to 8 hours of masks, muffled voices, and trying to read non-verbal cues from the nose up. As it was, we just made it under the wire -- our meeting was Wednesday and Thursday, and then on Friday, Chicago’s indoor mask mandate went into effect. It’s sorta peak Chicago that the city collected the revenue off of 385,000 mostly maskless Lollapalooza attendees before dropping the boom on those of us who actually live in the city.</li><li>Bridge Music -- One for Me by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/21492 Ft: Haskel</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>One of the reasons it takes me so long to do an episode is I lack the discipline to bail out when I get caught in a click spiral. This time it was about the <a href=\"https://www.pennlive.com/nation-world/2021/07/teen-airdrops-photo-of-an-airsoft-gun-forcing-the-evacuation-of-a-united-airlines-flight.html\">United Airlines flight that was evacuated because a teenager decided to troll fellow passengers by AirDropping them a picture of an Airsoft gun</a>. For the non-iPhone users out there, AirDrop lets iPhones and Macs easily share stuff -- pictures, videos, web links -- wirelessly with others nearby. It’s been around for about 10 years and pretty quickly people figured out they could drop random/<em>interesting</em> pictures onto nearby strangers who had set their phones wide-open. I’ve seen this happen and it can be pretty funny, watching someone suddenly start looking around in a bar or a train, wondering who’d AirDropped them a picture. But what’s funny or, at worst, annoying in a bar is easily interpreted as a safety threat 10 years on from 9/11. They pulled everyone off for rescreening, searched the plane, and then left three hours later, leaving the teen behind in SFO. Understandable, I thought, if maybe a slight overreaction -- until I got to maybe the 5th page of Google search results where I clicked through to not-yet- another rehash of the United incident, but something different -- a <a href=\"https://www.fox5atlanta.com/news/panic-on-planes-after-images-are-airdropped\">story</a> about an AirDropped message on a Delta flight. It said “A plane-jacking will happen soon, 2 hours and 37 minutes it will start in the front on aisle 6.” That flight too was evacuated, but this time they didn’t find the sender. Maybe airlines’ safety demos need to show iPhone users how to set their AirDrop to “Receiving Off”.</li><li>Irene and I continue to push on with plans for our first post-lockdown international trip, to Italy for a bike tour through Puglia. The whole Delta variant thing adds to the uncertainty. I talked in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/05/09/podcast-175-how-to-find-local-tour-guides-rebuild-travel-muscles/\">episode #175</a> about sorting through trip insurance and figuring out what credit card to use for the tour. Now booking hotels before and after the tour, we’re choosing to pay 10-15 euros more a night for cancellable rates, kind of a DIY trip insurance. Booking our flights into Bari, where the tour starts, I’ve also felt the need to be a bit more thoughtful. Airline schedules seem to be a bit more <em>variable</em> than usual. Last week, American sent me a note to let me know our November LHR-ORD flight has moved up 5:15pm to 10:35am. I understand that; air traffic is <em>not</em> following predictable patterns and they’re trying to keep up. For that direct flight home from London, it’s not a problem. But when we’re having to make a connection to a city with not-frequent service, it’s a different matter. The first thing I did was X out anything with more than 1 stop; it’ll be hard enough keeping 2 flights aligned let alone 3. Then I focused on the big European hubs -- Heathrow, Frankfurt, DeGaulle -- skipping connections at smaller places like Munich, Zurich. Finally, I look for connection times around 3 hours; what I thought would be a “Goldilocks” connection -- not too short that any hiccup on the inbound flight would cause a problem, but not too long that we’d be having to sit in the airport all day wearing a mask or would have to track COVID protocols in yet another country because of an overnight connection. All that being said, we’re booked on Air France with a 2 hr, 50 minute connection in DeGaulle. But I don’t have any SkyTeam status, which causes me a bit of a worry -- maybe we get caught in a long non-status security line. So I did some DIY trip insurance on the flight, burning an extra bit of my pile of American Express Membership miles for a ride in business class (cancellable, of course) to make up for my non-status status. You could say I’ve gone <em>way</em> down a rabbit hole overthinking this one and I wouldn’t really argue with you. But then again, it’s the first international trip in 2 years that I’ve been able to plan. So it’s kinda like an only child, getting way too much their parent’s attention.&nbsp;</li><li>I was digging through my travel card wallet for my Global Entry card to find my Known Traveler number to put on the Air France reservation and came across a handful of Southwest drink coupons that are about to hit their expiration date. <a href=\"https://community.southwest.com/t5/Knowledge-Base/Expired-2020-Drink-Coupons/ta-p/114294\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Southwest says expiring drink coupons are good through the end of this year</a>. But Southwest suspended alcohol sales a few months back, and rightly so after a passenger assaulted a flight attendant, saying the booze won’t return until the federal mask mandate ends. But the TSA just extended that until January, past the coupons’ extended expiration date. And really, I don’t see the TSA letting up on in-flight masks anytime soon, so is Southwest going to be the first dry airline?</li><li>I mentor start-up founders at <a href=\"https://1871.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">a tech incubator in Chicago</a>. A few months ago, one of my sessions was with a bionic implant start-up. Implant the chip and the back of your hand becomes a contactless card; get into your office or pay at Starbucks with the tap of your hand. Another reminder, if a bit, say, unsettling (icky?), of the move to a cashless society. I talked about it back in episode #136 in 2017, about being maybe the last generation of cash payers, that my younger traveling colleagues rarely carried cash; they paid for everything with a card. And then, the pandemic massively accelerated it. Everything went contactless; nobody wanted to handle your cash. Last year, in episode #165, I noticed I had the same $200 of 20’s in my wallet in June that I’d taken out of an ATM right before the March lockdown. Last month in New York, the coffee joint across from our hotel was card-only and the same for the ice cream shop around the corner from our place in Chicago. Restaurants that use the Toast point-of-sale system print out a QR code at the bottom of your receipt, letting you pay and walk away. The country of Sweden thinks they’ll be completely cashless in 2 years. But I’m seeing a little reversion to the mean post-lockdown. I stopped off at a bar during a Saturday bike ride for a rehydration break. I asked the bartender if she took cash. “Yup,” she said, “Never stopped. It spends just like everything else.” It felt good to put a 20 on the bar, order beers, and see her take cash from the pile just like in 2019. It’s also that inflation is making it tougher for small places to eat the 2.5-3% card fees. The little Mexican place across the street from work where I’ll grab carne asada tacos for lunch now tacks on that fee for card users. They’re happy when I pull out cash, though last week I got 80 cents back in nickels. I guess the cashless thing has now caused a shortage of quarters.&nbsp;</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — &nbsp; Fall to pieces - Silence by mika (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mika/24945 Ft: Colab</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>What Will Remain from These Pandemic Times?</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>In past episodes, I’ve been pretty skeptical about forecasts of permanent changes to the travel industry, or society in general, from&nbsp; the pandemic. I have enough grey hair to remember commentators using the same “everything has changed” and “this is the new normal” language 13 years ago after the 2008 Great Recession, yet somehow we ended up back to maybe within 90% of&nbsp; 2007, the pre-recession starting point. Reversion to the mean is a strong force.</li><li>Unless it’s countered by a stronger force -- like saving money -- which is why I think the odds-on favorites for <a href=\"https://onemileatatime.com/hilton-hotel-service-cuts-permanent/\">pandemic changes made permanent</a> are what we’ve seen at hotels and restaurants. Checking into the Hilton in Midtown Manhattan last month, the front desk guy told us that they weren’t doing daily housekeeping; we could either schedule housekeeping now or call them when we wanted it. Pre-pandemic, Starwood and then Marriott would offer you points for skipping housekeeping -- Go Green they called it. They pitched it as eco-friendly, but it really was all about saving labor costs. But the Hilton didn’t offer me any points. The week before,<a href=\"https://onemileatatime.com/news/hilton-housekeeping-on-demand/\"> Hilton announced their new policy of on-request housekeeping</a> across all of their brands; the first major chain to cement what had been an <em>ad hoc</em> pandemic response into a new chain-wide policy. The press release talked about “guest comfort”, but behind the PR flacks, it’s all about cost savings. I expect to see Marriott and others follow soon. I do have to give props to the housekeeping staff at that Hilton, though. When, after 3 days, I did call for a room cleaning, they were there in 5 minutes.&nbsp;</li><li>A bigger loss for me is the breakfast buffet. My usual pre-pandemic routine was to work out and then take a quick pass through the concierge lounge for breakfast. Hotels must’ve found their <em>ad hoc</em> grab-n-go breakfast sacks cheaper because that too feels like it’s going to be the new normal. Way back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/01/27/podcast-113-2014-was-a-bad-year-to-fly-restaurant-trends-go-local/\">episode #113</a>, in January 2015, I scoffed at a bartender in MSP who reached over to punch my food order into the iPad mounted in front of me. Now, we aim our own smartphones at QR codes and order our own meals -- without any help -- again, saving labor costs.&nbsp;</li><li>Airlines started reverting to the mean at the end of last year when they dropped capacity restrictions and put butts in the middle seats again -- just as traffic began to recover. If you haven’t been on a flight this year, you’d think nothing happened -- well, except everyone wearing masks and the missing Bloody Mary eye openers on the morning Southwest flights to Vegas. Some folks are predicting the death of cancellation fees, but I don’t buy it. <a href=\"https://thepointsguy.com/news/will-american-delta-eliminate-change-fees/\">In 2019, United made $625 million in change and cancellation fees; ten of the largest U.S. carriers made $2.84 billion</a>. That’s too big of a hole to leave unfilled. And they’re already creeping back in. Most Basic Economy seats are back to non-changeable/non-refundable. Maybe not this year, but if traffic holds up, I’d expect to see some airlines quietly <em>not</em> extend their fee waiver deadlines.</li><li>Private company behaviors are pretty straight-forward to forecast -- just follow the money. It’s the government regs that are uncertain -- how long do the mask mandates and COVID testing international entry rules stay around? Government rules only seem to ratchet up -- it’s been 15 years since the TSA had us take our shoes off and dump our water bottles at security checkpoints and other than letting people bring on larger bottles of hand sanitizer, no one thinks the TSA is going to change those rules anytime soon. There’s no incentive.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>The Best Places I’ve Ate and Drank At In 2021… So Far</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I talk <em>a lot</em> about food and beer in this podcast -- as proven by the direct links to those categories in the top menu on the TravelCommons website. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\">episode #168</a> last fall, I said that, for me, food is one of the last hold-outs to global e-commerce and social media. 10-20 year ago, it was fun to go shopping and bring something unique back home. But now, there’s not much that you can’t find easier (and often cheaper) on Amazon or Taobao or Rakuten. And don’t even get me started on Instagram -- if people aren’t in <a href=\"https://www.npr.org/2021/07/09/1014208160/national-parks-crowds-litter\">a 100-person queue to get their own personal shot of the Delicate Arch in Moab, UT</a> then they’re queuing for made-for-Instagram-selfie murals like the <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/explore/tags/whatliftsyou/\">WhatLiftsYou</a> wings in Nashville’s Gulch neighborhood.&nbsp; But food -- you can post all the pictures you want of it, but you can’t post that sense memory of eating a dozen fresh oysters on a breakwater in Brittany, having a bowl of pho for breakfast in Saigon, or a 1am fresh-off-the-grill char polish that’s been dragged through the garden at a Chicago hot dog stand.&nbsp;</li><li>And so, over the years, I’ve talked about restaurants, bars, taprooms that I’ve enjoyed and posted links to them on the website in show notes or in blog posts. But reading articles about the number of places that’ve closed since March 2020 -- some say <a href=\"https://www.nrn.com/fast-casual/datassential-more-10-us-restaurants-have-closed-permanently\">10% of all restaurants in the US</a>, <a href=\"https://www.chicagobusiness.com/restaurants/heres-how-many-chicago-restaurants-have-closed-pandemic\">almost 20% in Chicago</a> -- I figure it’ll take travel guide books and blogs a while to catch up with all the changes. It kinda hit me when a college friend pinged our group text for Nashville recommendations. I’ve been going there a couple of times a year for the past 5 years, but when I started going through my list of places, it struck me how many of them had closed. I had to re-curate my recommendations. I figured a good start on that would be to post <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/08/14/my-best-restaurants-and-bars-of-2021/\">a list of the best places I’ve ate and drank at during my 2021 travels</a> on the TravelCommons website.</li><li>Now, fair warning, this is a <em>very</em> idiosyncratic list; it’s the best places <em>I</em> ate and drank at in, say, New York City in May and July. The New York list is pretty Midtown/Murray Hill-centric because that’s where we were staying and that’s where Claire was looking for flats. I walked into <a href=\"https://www.tedscornertavern.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Ted’s Corner Tavern</a> because it’s around the corner from Claire’s new place; it made the list because it’s what I think a great neighborhood bar should be -- good-sized bar with friendly bartenders who aren’t too busy to chat with you, the right volume level (lively, but not so loud that you have to shout across the table), and, of course, 30 taps and a well-curated beer list.</li><li>I’ve tried to make my list a well-curated one.&nbsp; I don’t mention restaurants or taprooms that I thought were fine -- the 3 or 3½-star places. It’s a list of places that stuck out in my mind for one reason or another, and would make me go out of my way to recommend them to, say, a college friend. This played out in a funny way on my Portland, Maine recommendations. I recommend <a href=\"https://bobsclamhut.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bob’s Clam Hut</a> in Kittery for fried clams and <a href=\"https://portland.islandcreekoysters.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Island Creek Oyster\'s place</a> in the East End/Munjoy Hill neighborhood for local oysters, but have no specific recommendation for a lobster roll place. It’s not for lack of trying; we had a lobster roll whenever we saw it on a menu, which wasn’t a cheap exercise since they were about $25 a pop. They were all good -- we didn’t have a bad lobster roll anywhere. But after all that, there’s no one place I could point to and say “Go <em>there</em> for a lobster roll.”&nbsp; I just say “Order one if you see it. It’ll probably be good no matter where you are”.&nbsp;</li><li>Another oddity of the list -- no Chicago places. Irene and I talked about this a bit. Between favorite places closing and cooking at home a lot more during the lockdowns and the strict mask mandate (which in Chicago was worded kinda like the airplane mandate -- wear your mask at all times unless you were actively eating or drinking), we haven’t been anywhere that’s really stuck out. Well, except maybe for the<a href=\"https://goo.gl/maps/XzUBYcWTn8nmc42E8\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"> Nancy’s Pizza</a> a couple of blocks from the TravelCommons studios. They do a great pepperoni, spinach, and fresh tomato pan pizza. That’ll definitely make the list.</li><li>Because the list is a work-in-progress; I posted the first edition on the website last week with sections on Tucson, San Diego, Nashville, New York, and Portland. You’ll find a link in the episode description in your podcast app -- if it supports HTML descriptions. I’ll be adding places through the rest of the year. There <em>will</em> be at least a couple of Chicago places (in addition to Nancy’s) on the list. I’m sure we’ll find some places in Puglia to add; and I’m positive I’ll find some UK taprooms that’ll make the cut since Rob Cheshire of This Week in Craft Beer has offered me a personal tour of his favorites.</li><li>When I’ve added a new section or think there’s enough new stuff to justify people taking a fresh look, I’ll put a new date on it so it goes back to the top of the Food and the Beer sections of the website, and I’ll post it on Facebook and Twitter. And if you end up hitting one of these places, shoot me a note and let me know if I got it right.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #178</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_178.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #178 — What Remains from Pandemic Times; Best Restaurant and Bars','','inherit','closed','closed','','3642-revision-v1','','','2021-08-24 13:31:19','2021-08-24 18:31:19','',3642,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3649',0,'revision','',0),
(3651,1,'2021-08-24 13:44:57','2021-08-24 18:44:57','[caption id=\"attachment_2141\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/IMG_0031.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2141\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/IMG_0031-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> How Much Extra For A Plate?[/caption]\n\nJust regular domestic business travel since the last podcast, trying to dodge Hurricane Florence to get back to Charlottesville.  Thinking back to last month\'s European travels, we talk about a tight connection through Amsterdam and some odd concierge lounge rules, which gets me thinking about hotel breakfasts. And a listener request for restaurant recommendations gets me thinking about the balance of visiting good and not-so-good restaurant towns. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_145.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_145.mp3\"]\n\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show Notes -->\n\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #145:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL after 3 weeks of “normal” travel -- no vacation, no international travel, just a couple of trips to Charlottesville, VA on sandwiching a quick shot down to Dallas. And no delays. And empty seats beside me. Indeed, I even scored an upgrade on the late United flight from IAD to ORD, the long leg of one of my flights home from Charlottesville. Feels like we’re at the start of maybe a 6-week travel lull between the final end of summer vacations and the early starts of Thanksgiving travel.</li>\n 	<li>There was a bit of drama around the Charlottesville trip in the middle of September. I had to fly out Sunday night -- the weekend that Hurricane Florence hit the Carolina coast. The storm track forecast had Florence plowing west through the Carolinas and then taking a right hand turn at the Appalachians and heading north over Virginia. The question for me -- when would it make the turn; would my Sunday flight make it through before or after the turn or would Florence be in my way on Sunday? Thursday night and Friday, I spent a bit of time hitting the Refresh button on the <a href=\"https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/\">Nat’l Hurricane Center’s website</a>. By Friday, Florence had dropped a couple of category levels and slowed down, and by Saturday, I could see that my Sunday flight would beat Florence to Charlottesville. It was a smooth flight that Sunday, though Monday was a bit wet.</li>\n 	<li>Going through TSA Pre-Check in ORD that Sunday night, I watched a guy use the electronic boarding pass on his Apple Watch. It looked a bit awkward, and if you think about it, it’s understandable. Boarding pass readers face up; you put your boarding pass or phone face down on them to read. But a watch is on face up on the top of your wrist. So the guy ends up standing on his toes and twisting his arm around to get his Apple Watch face down on the reader. You’d think he would’ve shifted to his phone after that, but I saw him twist himself up again about 30 minutes later when boarding his flight. Seems like it would’ve been easier to spin the watch on his wrist so it was facing down -- at least until Apple fires up the old Steve Jobs distortion field to convince airports to reorient all their readers for the convenience of Apple Watch users.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- Dub the Uke by Kara Square (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mindmapthat/53340 Ft: DJ Vadim</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul class=\"\">\n 	<li>Allan Marko, a long-time listener and even longer-time friend, sent me an <a href=\"http://www.patentlyapple.com/patently-apple/2018/09/apple-salesforce-are-working-marriott-international-to-bring-homepods-to-hotel-rooms-to-assist-guests-with-services.html\">article</a> that dove into an interesting part of Apple’s new partnership with Salesforce. The two of them are working with Marriott to put Siri in hotel rooms. You could ask Siri to turn up the heat, order room service, or get an Uber through an Apple HomePod in the room. That’s the Apple piece of it. The Salesforce piece lets Siri remember what you asked her, say your room temperature, at the next Marriott. Useful or creepy? And how do you make sure you wipe Siri’s memory before the next guest checks into the room so you can’t ask her things like “Hey Siri, tell me all about the last guest that was here...” or “Order me the same sandwich the last guy ordered”. I dunno. I don’t even like using these new Enseo TVs to log into my own Netflix account, let alone having Marriott listening to me through a HomePod and remembering everything I mutter. Some guys are making a nice living selling shutters that you can stick over your laptop webcam. Are earplugs for hotel HomePods the next thing?</li>\n 	<li>In the<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/09/15/podcast-144-outside-airports-hospitality-mentality/\"> last episode</a>, I mentioned flying SAS from Chicago to Copenhagen. It was an odd schedule -- leaving Chicago around 10pm, arriving Copenhagen after 1 in the afternoon. Leaving that late and having a long taxi, I fell asleep before we left the ground, and before putting my phone in Airplane mode. I woke up, I dunno, an hour or so later, looked at my phone for the time, and noticed some new e-mails. Huh? That’s weird. And then I noticed that my phone didn’t say “No Service”; it was connected to some cellular service, which turned out to be SAS’s in-flight cellular service. And as opposed to in-flight WiFi which you usually have to log into, my iPhone automatically started roaming on the SAS cellular service, that then continued to check/pull e-mail for a couple of hours until I flipped it to airplane mode. I got my AT&amp;T mobile bill a couple of weeks back and ended up with a $25 roaming charge for those half-dozen meaningless e-mails. A pain, but not too painful. Unlike the guy four years ago who <a href=\"https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/11/18/that-1200-in-flight-wifi-bill-was-terrifyingly-real/\">rang up a $1,200 WiFi bill</a> on Singapore Air when he fell asleep with his data still connected.</li>\n 	<li>On the third leg of that trip, going from BRU to EDI, our best option was KLM through AMS. I’ve been in and out and through Schiphol a number of times over the past 20-some odd years and have always liked it. Nothing flashy, but it works -- not too big, reasonable facilities. Booking this BRU-EDI trip on the KLM website, I had two options -- a tight 40-min connection or a 2-hr one. While I don’t mind Schiphol, I wasn’t looking to make an afternoon of it. So I broke one of my cardinal travel rules -- never book a connection shorter than an hour -- and booked the 40-min connection, knowing that we had a back-up if it didn’t work out. One factor I didn’t completely think through was that we’d have to cross the Schengen border during those 40 minutes too. The first leg -- Brussels to Amsterdam -- was within Schengen so it was just like an domestic US flight -- no passport control, no customs. But in Schiphol, we had switch concourses and go through passport control because the UK is outside of Schengen. We made it through, though, with time to spare because - we walked real fast; like I said before, Schiphol isn’t that big, so switching concourses wasn’t a long walk; but most importantly, my wife spotted the “short connection” line at passport control. We had gotten in the regular line, but then we saw on a display screen that our EDI flight was classified a “short connection”, so we switched to the much shorter line -- I earned a “Hey” from a security guard when I ducked under the tape -- and quickly passed through what was a well-staffed and brisk passport control line (Munich Airport, you could take some lessons here). We get to the gate with more than enough time -- boarding hasn’t been called yet. So while we made the 40-minute connection, the question now was -- would the checked luggage make it? As we were queuing to board, I looked out the terminal window. There’s our plane, and there, next to the baggage loader, was Irene’s and Claire’s luggage -- stationary, not rolling along like in that YouTube video. A very good sign, but there wasn’t anybody loading luggage. As I walk up to board, I tap one of the KLM guys standing around. Pointing out the window, I say “See those bags on the tarmac? Those are ours. It would be great if they made it onto this plane.” He laughed -- him a bit more than me. I was happy to see them appear on the EDI baggage carousel.</li>\n 	<li>I’m thinking that I need another carry-on bag; something between my maximum legal size 22-incher and my leather duffel overnighter. On that BRU-EDI trip, I carried my 22-incher on, but not without agents at Brussels and Amsterdam challenging me, even after showing them it fit in their baggage sizer. A few weeks after that trip, KLM added an <a href=\"https://news.klm.com/klms-augmented-reality-hand-baggage-check-now-available-in-messenger/\">augmented reality baggage sizer</a> to their iPhone app. You fire up the app, point your iPhone camera at your bag and the app overlays a properly sized rectangle over your bag. If your bag is within the rectangle, you’re good to go. Would’ve been easier -- and much cooler -- than slamming my bag into those metal sizers, but somehow, with those gate agents, I don’t think the outcome would’ve been any different.</li>\n 	<li>OK, one last thing from that trip. The concierge lounges in both the Copenhagen Marriott and the London St Pancras Renaissance had prominent “rules” signs at their entrances, and one of those rules was a ban on “fitness clothes”. Now, this wasn’t a big deal on this trip because I was on vacation, and wasn’t toting work-out gear. My normal program when I’m on business travel is to get up before 6, work out, go straight to the lounge in my “fitness gear” for some breakfast while cooling down, then head back to my room to shower, change, and head out. Having to separate the cool down from breakfast would add 15-20 minutes to what is an already tight morning routine. So I hope that rule doesn’t spread to the US lounges. The rest of the rules seemed pretty reasonable, though one -- no wearing a bathrobe in the lounge -- seemed a bit superfluous. I’ve never seen someone walk into a concierge lounge in a bathrobe… until in Copenhagen at 3 in the afternoon with it not looking like there was anything on under the robe. So, OK, I’m now completely on-board with the no robe rule.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> or our new <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a> at travelcommons -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music — Emma by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/50905 Ft: Martijn de Boer</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Restaurant Karma</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Casey Milch sent me a note a few weeks back -- “Greetings. Love the podcast. I know you mention frequent trips to Charlottesville and I’m finding myself there every six weeks for work myself now. Any restaurant suggestions?”</li>\n 	<li>One of the compensations for getting on an airplane just about every week is that you get to try a lot of restaurants. Now, in the last episode, we talked about the downside of that -- rapid waistline expansion -- but if you’re thoughtful about it, and you like trying different food (I hate the word “foodie”), business travel has its benefits. I sent Casey a few recommendations -- Fitzroy, a meat place -- burger, double pork chop, fried chicken -- on the Main Street pedestrian mall; Lampo, a small Neapolitan pizza place with a big wood oven that is -- I forgot to tell Casey this -- a 5-minute walk from Champion Brewing Company’s taproom; and The Alley Light, a speakeasy in an small alcove (a bit too short to be a proper alley) with no sign though there is a light over the door, that took 3 tries to find the first time in the pouring rain, which led to the question “How many consultants does it take to work Google Maps”. Putting the list together for Casey reminded me that we hadn’t been to Alley Light in a while, so we ate there last Tuesday night -- found it on the first try this time -- and had roasted bone marrow, pork rillette, duck confit -- oh, and some carrots. So much for thoughtfulness.</li>\n 	<li>Charlottesville punches above its weight for good restaurants, maybe because of University of Virginia. The 2 ½ years I spent in New Orleans was one of definitely one of my food high points, especially when crawfish were in season. 3 months in Portland, OR was fun with the food truck scene, and of course, it is ground-zero for the craft beer explosion. Stays in Manhattan, San Francisco, and London were that much more enjoyable with someone else picking up the dinner tab. Indeed, in San Francisco, I used to stay in different hotels so I could try different neighborhood joints.</li>\n 	<li>But karma always seeks balance, and for all these great food locations, there have been other, let’s say, less-than-stunning places. Dover, OH -- about 30 miles south of Canton -- had, when I was doing a project there -- two places to eat -- an Arby’s and the lunch counter of the Walmart knock-off. And the Walmart knock-off was the better of the two. Oldsmar, FL was a bit too far outside of Tampa for us to head in for dinner every night, so the near-by Buffalo Wild Wings - B-Dubs - and Applebee’s were our best shots. And downtown Detroit in the early 2000’s, working, eating, and sleeping in the urban fortress that is the Renaissance Center was brutally monotonous.</li>\n 	<li>But even when in London and New York, we weren’t splurging on big meals every night. We have reasonable expense budgets that we have to live within. So again, we find balance -- one night we’re underspending at a dive (but good) pizza-by-the-slice joint, so that the next night, we eat at nice place. Some guys will extend balancing act to travel -- sucking up the inconvenience of a cheaper connecting flight to pay for better meals. One colleague told me -- “I’ll happily travel cheap to eat great food”</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music — Astral Travel by Astral (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Astral/44282</li>\n</ul>\n<b>Hotel Breakfasts</b>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Growing up, those of us of a certain age heard that breakfast is the most important meal of the day -- usually from a cereal commercial. I mentioned a bit early earlier my morning hotel pattern -- work out, hit the concierge lounge for breakfast and then get on with my day. Most lounge breakfasts are pretty industrial -- chafing dishes of stiff scrambled pasteurized eggs, thin slices of oven-baked bacon, vat of oatmeal, a few cartons of yogurt, and a bowl of fruit. It gets the day started. I may be judging it a bit harshly though. My daughter Claire loves those scrambled eggs. Go a little more upscale and you’ll see maybe a platter of smoked salmon, some sliced meats and cheeses, bran muffins…</li>\n 	<li>So when I see something different, it gets my attention. Like roasted green chiles in New Mexico, Albuquerque and Santa Fe, to season those scrambled eggs, or the King Cake at the Canal St Sheraton in New Orleans during Mardi Gras season. Now, it’s not the best king cake I’ve had - and my wife has dragged me through a king cake tasting crawl there, so I speak with some knowledge -- but I look forward to it whenever I’m there in the spring. I remember one morning I walked in -- no king cake! I found one of the staff -- “you guys stop doing king cake?!” “No! I didn’t know we were out.” And they immediately brought out a new one. Crisis averted!</li>\n 	<li>It doesn’t even have to be anything big. The Copenhagen Marriott lounge had rhubarb juice. As a kid, my mother made pies from rhubarb growing in our backyard, that I think her mother had planted. So something different and nostalgic all in one. Was it life-changing? Not necessarily, but I’d never seen it before.</li>\n 	<li>A little more life-changing was the bowl of bun bo hue that we got for breakfast when staying at a local, non-chain, hotel in Hue in central Vietnam. Kind of a spicier, funkier version of the pho you see in the US, and tougher to find here. Not like any hotel breakfast I’d had, and I immediately switched my breakfast choice over to it or pho for the rest of the trip.\nBack in May, when I was in Pune, we stayed at a Marriott Courtyard, a chain which, as I’ve complained about before in prior episodes, doesn’t have a concierge lounge but they had a nice breakfast buffet with what I guess is a typical two-track system -- one side with the usual Western breakfast foods, and the other side with Indian food. The waiter pointed me to the omelette station. I was about ready to order when I noticed another station to my right with what looked like a super-sized crepe griddle. “What’s that?” I asked. “Oh, that’s to make dosas.” “Cool, I have one of those.” “Do you know what a dosa is?” “Nope, but I’ll take one, however it normally comes.” I watched him make this foot-wide diameter stiff crepe, rolled it up and put it, sticking up out of a cup of some sort of stew or curry. I walk back to the table. Everyone else has eggs, bacon, toast, arranged horizontally on their plate. I’m the only one with a vertical breakfast. But I liked that. Kinda flying the flag for something different at breakfast .</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #145</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and now on <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_145.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #145 — Restaurant Karma; Hotel Breakfasts','','inherit','closed','closed','','2138-revision-v1','','','2021-08-24 13:44:57','2021-08-24 18:44:57','',2138,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3651',0,'revision','',0),
(3652,1,'2021-08-24 13:45:46','2021-08-24 18:45:46','[caption id=\"attachment_2141\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/IMG_0031.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2141\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/IMG_0031-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> How Much Extra For A Plate?[/caption]\n\nJust regular domestic business travel since the last podcast, trying to dodge Hurricane Florence to get back to Charlottesville.  Thinking back to last month\'s European travels, we talk about a tight connection through Amsterdam and some odd concierge lounge rules, which gets me thinking about hotel breakfasts. And a listener request for restaurant recommendations gets me thinking about the balance of visiting good and not-so-good restaurant towns. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_145.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n<!--more Click Here To Read The Detailed Show Notes -->\n\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #145:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL after 3 weeks of “normal” travel -- no vacation, no international travel, just a couple of trips to Charlottesville, VA on sandwiching a quick shot down to Dallas. And no delays. And empty seats beside me. Indeed, I even scored an upgrade on the late United flight from IAD to ORD, the long leg of one of my flights home from Charlottesville. Feels like we’re at the start of maybe a 6-week travel lull between the final end of summer vacations and the early starts of Thanksgiving travel.</li>\n 	<li>There was a bit of drama around the Charlottesville trip in the middle of September. I had to fly out Sunday night -- the weekend that Hurricane Florence hit the Carolina coast. The storm track forecast had Florence plowing west through the Carolinas and then taking a right hand turn at the Appalachians and heading north over Virginia. The question for me -- when would it make the turn; would my Sunday flight make it through before or after the turn or would Florence be in my way on Sunday? Thursday night and Friday, I spent a bit of time hitting the Refresh button on the <a href=\"https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/\">Nat’l Hurricane Center’s website</a>. By Friday, Florence had dropped a couple of category levels and slowed down, and by Saturday, I could see that my Sunday flight would beat Florence to Charlottesville. It was a smooth flight that Sunday, though Monday was a bit wet.</li>\n 	<li>Going through TSA Pre-Check in ORD that Sunday night, I watched a guy use the electronic boarding pass on his Apple Watch. It looked a bit awkward, and if you think about it, it’s understandable. Boarding pass readers face up; you put your boarding pass or phone face down on them to read. But a watch is on face up on the top of your wrist. So the guy ends up standing on his toes and twisting his arm around to get his Apple Watch face down on the reader. You’d think he would’ve shifted to his phone after that, but I saw him twist himself up again about 30 minutes later when boarding his flight. Seems like it would’ve been easier to spin the watch on his wrist so it was facing down -- at least until Apple fires up the old Steve Jobs distortion field to convince airports to reorient all their readers for the convenience of Apple Watch users.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- Dub the Uke by Kara Square (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mindmapthat/53340 Ft: DJ Vadim</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul class=\"\">\n 	<li>Allan Marko, a long-time listener and even longer-time friend, sent me an <a href=\"http://www.patentlyapple.com/patently-apple/2018/09/apple-salesforce-are-working-marriott-international-to-bring-homepods-to-hotel-rooms-to-assist-guests-with-services.html\">article</a> that dove into an interesting part of Apple’s new partnership with Salesforce. The two of them are working with Marriott to put Siri in hotel rooms. You could ask Siri to turn up the heat, order room service, or get an Uber through an Apple HomePod in the room. That’s the Apple piece of it. The Salesforce piece lets Siri remember what you asked her, say your room temperature, at the next Marriott. Useful or creepy? And how do you make sure you wipe Siri’s memory before the next guest checks into the room so you can’t ask her things like “Hey Siri, tell me all about the last guest that was here...” or “Order me the same sandwich the last guy ordered”. I dunno. I don’t even like using these new Enseo TVs to log into my own Netflix account, let alone having Marriott listening to me through a HomePod and remembering everything I mutter. Some guys are making a nice living selling shutters that you can stick over your laptop webcam. Are earplugs for hotel HomePods the next thing?</li>\n 	<li>In the<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/09/15/podcast-144-outside-airports-hospitality-mentality/\"> last episode</a>, I mentioned flying SAS from Chicago to Copenhagen. It was an odd schedule -- leaving Chicago around 10pm, arriving Copenhagen after 1 in the afternoon. Leaving that late and having a long taxi, I fell asleep before we left the ground, and before putting my phone in Airplane mode. I woke up, I dunno, an hour or so later, looked at my phone for the time, and noticed some new e-mails. Huh? That’s weird. And then I noticed that my phone didn’t say “No Service”; it was connected to some cellular service, which turned out to be SAS’s in-flight cellular service. And as opposed to in-flight WiFi which you usually have to log into, my iPhone automatically started roaming on the SAS cellular service, that then continued to check/pull e-mail for a couple of hours until I flipped it to airplane mode. I got my AT&amp;T mobile bill a couple of weeks back and ended up with a $25 roaming charge for those half-dozen meaningless e-mails. A pain, but not too painful. Unlike the guy four years ago who <a href=\"https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/11/18/that-1200-in-flight-wifi-bill-was-terrifyingly-real/\">rang up a $1,200 WiFi bill</a> on Singapore Air when he fell asleep with his data still connected.</li>\n 	<li>On the third leg of that trip, going from BRU to EDI, our best option was KLM through AMS. I’ve been in and out and through Schiphol a number of times over the past 20-some odd years and have always liked it. Nothing flashy, but it works -- not too big, reasonable facilities. Booking this BRU-EDI trip on the KLM website, I had two options -- a tight 40-min connection or a 2-hr one. While I don’t mind Schiphol, I wasn’t looking to make an afternoon of it. So I broke one of my cardinal travel rules -- never book a connection shorter than an hour -- and booked the 40-min connection, knowing that we had a back-up if it didn’t work out. One factor I didn’t completely think through was that we’d have to cross the Schengen border during those 40 minutes too. The first leg -- Brussels to Amsterdam -- was within Schengen so it was just like an domestic US flight -- no passport control, no customs. But in Schiphol, we had switch concourses and go through passport control because the UK is outside of Schengen. We made it through, though, with time to spare because - we walked real fast; like I said before, Schiphol isn’t that big, so switching concourses wasn’t a long walk; but most importantly, my wife spotted the “short connection” line at passport control. We had gotten in the regular line, but then we saw on a display screen that our EDI flight was classified a “short connection”, so we switched to the much shorter line -- I earned a “Hey” from a security guard when I ducked under the tape -- and quickly passed through what was a well-staffed and brisk passport control line (Munich Airport, you could take some lessons here). We get to the gate with more than enough time -- boarding hasn’t been called yet. So while we made the 40-minute connection, the question now was -- would the checked luggage make it? As we were queuing to board, I looked out the terminal window. There’s our plane, and there, next to the baggage loader, was Irene’s and Claire’s luggage -- stationary, not rolling along like in that YouTube video. A very good sign, but there wasn’t anybody loading luggage. As I walk up to board, I tap one of the KLM guys standing around. Pointing out the window, I say “See those bags on the tarmac? Those are ours. It would be great if they made it onto this plane.” He laughed -- him a bit more than me. I was happy to see them appear on the EDI baggage carousel.</li>\n 	<li>I’m thinking that I need another carry-on bag; something between my maximum legal size 22-incher and my leather duffel overnighter. On that BRU-EDI trip, I carried my 22-incher on, but not without agents at Brussels and Amsterdam challenging me, even after showing them it fit in their baggage sizer. A few weeks after that trip, KLM added an <a href=\"https://news.klm.com/klms-augmented-reality-hand-baggage-check-now-available-in-messenger/\">augmented reality baggage sizer</a> to their iPhone app. You fire up the app, point your iPhone camera at your bag and the app overlays a properly sized rectangle over your bag. If your bag is within the rectangle, you’re good to go. Would’ve been easier -- and much cooler -- than slamming my bag into those metal sizers, but somehow, with those gate agents, I don’t think the outcome would’ve been any different.</li>\n 	<li>OK, one last thing from that trip. The concierge lounges in both the Copenhagen Marriott and the London St Pancras Renaissance had prominent “rules” signs at their entrances, and one of those rules was a ban on “fitness clothes”. Now, this wasn’t a big deal on this trip because I was on vacation, and wasn’t toting work-out gear. My normal program when I’m on business travel is to get up before 6, work out, go straight to the lounge in my “fitness gear” for some breakfast while cooling down, then head back to my room to shower, change, and head out. Having to separate the cool down from breakfast would add 15-20 minutes to what is an already tight morning routine. So I hope that rule doesn’t spread to the US lounges. The rest of the rules seemed pretty reasonable, though one -- no wearing a bathrobe in the lounge -- seemed a bit superfluous. I’ve never seen someone walk into a concierge lounge in a bathrobe… until in Copenhagen at 3 in the afternoon with it not looking like there was anything on under the robe. So, OK, I’m now completely on-board with the no robe rule.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> or our new <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a> at travelcommons -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music — Emma by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/50905 Ft: Martijn de Boer</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Restaurant Karma</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Casey Milch sent me a note a few weeks back -- “Greetings. Love the podcast. I know you mention frequent trips to Charlottesville and I’m finding myself there every six weeks for work myself now. Any restaurant suggestions?”</li>\n 	<li>One of the compensations for getting on an airplane just about every week is that you get to try a lot of restaurants. Now, in the last episode, we talked about the downside of that -- rapid waistline expansion -- but if you’re thoughtful about it, and you like trying different food (I hate the word “foodie”), business travel has its benefits. I sent Casey a few recommendations -- Fitzroy, a meat place -- burger, double pork chop, fried chicken -- on the Main Street pedestrian mall; Lampo, a small Neapolitan pizza place with a big wood oven that is -- I forgot to tell Casey this -- a 5-minute walk from Champion Brewing Company’s taproom; and The Alley Light, a speakeasy in an small alcove (a bit too short to be a proper alley) with no sign though there is a light over the door, that took 3 tries to find the first time in the pouring rain, which led to the question “How many consultants does it take to work Google Maps”. Putting the list together for Casey reminded me that we hadn’t been to Alley Light in a while, so we ate there last Tuesday night -- found it on the first try this time -- and had roasted bone marrow, pork rillette, duck confit -- oh, and some carrots. So much for thoughtfulness.</li>\n 	<li>Charlottesville punches above its weight for good restaurants, maybe because of University of Virginia. The 2 ½ years I spent in New Orleans was one of definitely one of my food high points, especially when crawfish were in season. 3 months in Portland, OR was fun with the food truck scene, and of course, it is ground-zero for the craft beer explosion. Stays in Manhattan, San Francisco, and London were that much more enjoyable with someone else picking up the dinner tab. Indeed, in San Francisco, I used to stay in different hotels so I could try different neighborhood joints.</li>\n 	<li>But karma always seeks balance, and for all these great food locations, there have been other, let’s say, less-than-stunning places. Dover, OH -- about 30 miles south of Canton -- had, when I was doing a project there -- two places to eat -- an Arby’s and the lunch counter of the Walmart knock-off. And the Walmart knock-off was the better of the two. Oldsmar, FL was a bit too far outside of Tampa for us to head in for dinner every night, so the near-by Buffalo Wild Wings - B-Dubs - and Applebee’s were our best shots. And downtown Detroit in the early 2000’s, working, eating, and sleeping in the urban fortress that is the Renaissance Center was brutally monotonous.</li>\n 	<li>But even when in London and New York, we weren’t splurging on big meals every night. We have reasonable expense budgets that we have to live within. So again, we find balance -- one night we’re underspending at a dive (but good) pizza-by-the-slice joint, so that the next night, we eat at nice place. Some guys will extend balancing act to travel -- sucking up the inconvenience of a cheaper connecting flight to pay for better meals. One colleague told me -- “I’ll happily travel cheap to eat great food”</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music — Astral Travel by Astral (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Astral/44282</li>\n</ul>\n<b>Hotel Breakfasts</b>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Growing up, those of us of a certain age heard that breakfast is the most important meal of the day -- usually from a cereal commercial. I mentioned a bit early earlier my morning hotel pattern -- work out, hit the concierge lounge for breakfast and then get on with my day. Most lounge breakfasts are pretty industrial -- chafing dishes of stiff scrambled pasteurized eggs, thin slices of oven-baked bacon, vat of oatmeal, a few cartons of yogurt, and a bowl of fruit. It gets the day started. I may be judging it a bit harshly though. My daughter Claire loves those scrambled eggs. Go a little more upscale and you’ll see maybe a platter of smoked salmon, some sliced meats and cheeses, bran muffins…</li>\n 	<li>So when I see something different, it gets my attention. Like roasted green chiles in New Mexico, Albuquerque and Santa Fe, to season those scrambled eggs, or the King Cake at the Canal St Sheraton in New Orleans during Mardi Gras season. Now, it’s not the best king cake I’ve had - and my wife has dragged me through a king cake tasting crawl there, so I speak with some knowledge -- but I look forward to it whenever I’m there in the spring. I remember one morning I walked in -- no king cake! I found one of the staff -- “you guys stop doing king cake?!” “No! I didn’t know we were out.” And they immediately brought out a new one. Crisis averted!</li>\n 	<li>It doesn’t even have to be anything big. The Copenhagen Marriott lounge had rhubarb juice. As a kid, my mother made pies from rhubarb growing in our backyard, that I think her mother had planted. So something different and nostalgic all in one. Was it life-changing? Not necessarily, but I’d never seen it before.</li>\n 	<li>A little more life-changing was the bowl of bun bo hue that we got for breakfast when staying at a local, non-chain, hotel in Hue in central Vietnam. Kind of a spicier, funkier version of the pho you see in the US, and tougher to find here. Not like any hotel breakfast I’d had, and I immediately switched my breakfast choice over to it or pho for the rest of the trip.\nBack in May, when I was in Pune, we stayed at a Marriott Courtyard, a chain which, as I’ve complained about before in prior episodes, doesn’t have a concierge lounge but they had a nice breakfast buffet with what I guess is a typical two-track system -- one side with the usual Western breakfast foods, and the other side with Indian food. The waiter pointed me to the omelette station. I was about ready to order when I noticed another station to my right with what looked like a super-sized crepe griddle. “What’s that?” I asked. “Oh, that’s to make dosas.” “Cool, I have one of those.” “Do you know what a dosa is?” “Nope, but I’ll take one, however it normally comes.” I watched him make this foot-wide diameter stiff crepe, rolled it up and put it, sticking up out of a cup of some sort of stew or curry. I walk back to the table. Everyone else has eggs, bacon, toast, arranged horizontally on their plate. I’m the only one with a vertical breakfast. But I liked that. Kinda flying the flag for something different at breakfast .</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #145</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and now on <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_145.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #145 — Restaurant Karma; Hotel Breakfasts','','inherit','closed','closed','','2138-revision-v1','','','2021-08-24 13:45:46','2021-08-24 18:45:46','',2138,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3652',0,'revision','',0),
(3653,1,'2021-08-24 13:47:04','2021-08-24 18:47:04','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_1985\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/IMG_1758-scaled.jpeg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-3581 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/IMG_2173-300x300.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a>I Feel Safer Already[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>After a 2-week, 2,500-mile and $120 in tolls driving expedition through the Northeast, I didn\'t have much time left to write a new episode. So, I mined the audio files of recent TravelCommons interviews for some good stories that got left on the cutting room floor. We also talk about planning for a bike trip in Italy, a couple of things that might make the 2021 traveler gift guide, and we mourn the demise of American Airlines\' in-flight magazine. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_178.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #178: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after a much lighter travel schedule than before the last episode. The day after posting the July episode, Irene and I got back in the car (because those 12-hour drives to and from the East Coast just weren’t enough for me), but this time heading north, as I mentioned at the end of the last episode, to Traverse City, MI to do Paddle for Pints with some friends; it’s a taproom crawl, but in kayaks instead of on streets. It’s a lot of fun. There’s something about physical exertion while drinking that seems to justify the next beer. </li><li>Now, anyone who’s driven any distance through the Midwest knows there’s only two seasons here -- winter and construction season -- and we didn’t get too far outside of Chicago on I-90 before a merge down to single lane traffic ground traffic to a crawl and I started refreshing Waze and Google Maps looking for alternatives. I’ve said in past episodes that, even though Google owns both, my experience is they can recommend different routes, especially in high-traffic, fast-changing situations. To me, Waze feels a little “twitchier”; it’ll twist you down a half-dozen random side streets to save 30 seconds while Google Maps guesses you’re willing to suck it up for a couple more minutes in exchange for a simpler route. And that’s exactly what happened to us in northwest Indiana which leaves me trying to figure out which route to take. I tweeted out later (actually while on a snack break in a taproom in Grand Rapids) “ I really hate it when Google Maps and Waze fight” to which the Waze social media crew replied “We like to think of it more as a disagreement”. Nicely done. And then Jim McDonough, a long-time TravelCommons listener, added “Apple Maps breaks the tie?”  Good idea, but I was having enough fun swiping between two maps; adding a third would’ve put me in the ditch for sure. I mostly used Waze, but skipped the recommended routing through side streets in Gary, Indiana. The risk-reward trade-off on that just didn’t feel worth it.</li><li>I was supposed to head out to the Bay Area last week on business, going to a plant on the east side of the Bay for a big team meeting. But it got re-vectored at the last minute from California back to Chicago because that Bay Area country had reinstated indoor mask mandates. Nobody questioned the move. With everyone on the team fully vaccinated months ago, we’d all happily gotten used to meeting with each other like it’s 2019 again and really didn’t want to go back to 8 hours of masks, muffled voices, and trying to read non-verbal cues from the nose up. As it was, we just made it under the wire -- our meeting was Wednesday and Thursday, and then on Friday, Chicago’s indoor mask mandate went into effect. It’s sorta peak Chicago that the city collected the revenue off of 385,000 mostly maskless Lollapalooza attendees before dropping the boom on those of us who actually live in the city.</li><li>Bridge Music — Astral Travel by Astral (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Astral/44282</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>One of the reasons it takes me so long to do an episode is I lack the discipline to bail out when I get caught in a click spiral. This time it was about the <a href=\"https://www.pennlive.com/nation-world/2021/07/teen-airdrops-photo-of-an-airsoft-gun-forcing-the-evacuation-of-a-united-airlines-flight.html\">United Airlines flight that was evacuated because a teenager decided to troll fellow passengers by AirDropping them a picture of an Airsoft gun</a>. For the non-iPhone users out there, AirDrop lets iPhones and Macs easily share stuff -- pictures, videos, web links -- wirelessly with others nearby. It’s been around for about 10 years and pretty quickly people figured out they could drop random/<em>interesting</em> pictures onto nearby strangers who had set their phones wide-open. I’ve seen this happen and it can be pretty funny, watching someone suddenly start looking around in a bar or a train, wondering who’d AirDropped them a picture. But what’s funny or, at worst, annoying in a bar is easily interpreted as a safety threat 10 years on from 9/11. They pulled everyone off for rescreening, searched the plane, and then left three hours later, leaving the teen behind in SFO. Understandable, I thought, if maybe a slight overreaction -- until I got to maybe the 5th page of Google search results where I clicked through to not-yet- another rehash of the United incident, but something different -- a <a href=\"https://www.fox5atlanta.com/news/panic-on-planes-after-images-are-airdropped\">story</a> about an AirDropped message on a Delta flight. It said “A plane-jacking will happen soon, 2 hours and 37 minutes it will start in the front on aisle 6.” That flight too was evacuated, but this time they didn’t find the sender. Maybe airlines’ safety demos need to show iPhone users how to set their AirDrop to “Receiving Off”.</li><li>Irene and I continue to push on with plans for our first post-lockdown international trip, to Italy for a bike tour through Puglia. The whole Delta variant thing adds to the uncertainty. I talked in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/05/09/podcast-175-how-to-find-local-tour-guides-rebuild-travel-muscles/\">episode #175</a> about sorting through trip insurance and figuring out what credit card to use for the tour. Now booking hotels before and after the tour, we’re choosing to pay 10-15 euros more a night for cancellable rates, kind of a DIY trip insurance. Booking our flights into Bari, where the tour starts, I’ve also felt the need to be a bit more thoughtful. Airline schedules seem to be a bit more <em>variable</em> than usual. Last week, American sent me a note to let me know our November LHR-ORD flight has moved up 5:15pm to 10:35am. I understand that; air traffic is <em>not</em> following predictable patterns and they’re trying to keep up. For that direct flight home from London, it’s not a problem. But when we’re having to make a connection to a city with not-frequent service, it’s a different matter. The first thing I did was X out anything with more than 1 stop; it’ll be hard enough keeping 2 flights aligned let alone 3. Then I focused on the big European hubs -- Heathrow, Frankfurt, DeGaulle -- skipping connections at smaller places like Munich, Zurich. Finally, I look for connection times around 3 hours; what I thought would be a “Goldilocks” connection -- not too short that any hiccup on the inbound flight would cause a problem, but not too long that we’d be having to sit in the airport all day wearing a mask or would have to track COVID protocols in yet another country because of an overnight connection. All that being said, we’re booked on Air France with a 2 hr, 50 minute connection in DeGaulle. But I don’t have any SkyTeam status, which causes me a bit of a worry -- maybe we get caught in a long non-status security line. So I did some DIY trip insurance on the flight, burning an extra bit of my pile of American Express Membership miles for a ride in business class (cancellable, of course) to make up for my non-status status. You could say I’ve gone <em>way</em> down a rabbit hole overthinking this one and I wouldn’t really argue with you. But then again, it’s the first international trip in 2 years that I’ve been able to plan. So it’s kinda like an only child, getting way too much their parent’s attention. </li><li>I was digging through my travel card wallet for my Global Entry card to find my Known Traveler number to put on the Air France reservation and came across a handful of Southwest drink coupons that are about to hit their expiration date. <a href=\"https://community.southwest.com/t5/Knowledge-Base/Expired-2020-Drink-Coupons/ta-p/114294\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Southwest says expiring drink coupons are good through the end of this year</a>. But Southwest suspended alcohol sales a few months back, and rightly so after a passenger assaulted a flight attendant, saying the booze won’t return until the federal mask mandate ends. But the TSA just extended that until January, past the coupons’ extended expiration date. And really, I don’t see the TSA letting up on in-flight masks anytime soon, so is Southwest going to be the first dry airline?</li><li>I mentor start-up founders at <a href=\"https://1871.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">a tech incubator in Chicago</a>. A few months ago, one of my sessions was with a bionic implant start-up. Implant the chip and the back of your hand becomes a contactless card; get into your office or pay at Starbucks with the tap of your hand. Another reminder, if a bit, say, unsettling (icky?), of the move to a cashless society. I talked about it back in episode #136 in 2017, about being maybe the last generation of cash payers, that my younger traveling colleagues rarely carried cash; they paid for everything with a card. And then, the pandemic massively accelerated it. Everything went contactless; nobody wanted to handle your cash. Last year, in episode #165, I noticed I had the same $200 of 20’s in my wallet in June that I’d taken out of an ATM right before the March lockdown. Last month in New York, the coffee joint across from our hotel was card-only and the same for the ice cream shop around the corner from our place in Chicago. Restaurants that use the Toast point-of-sale system print out a QR code at the bottom of your receipt, letting you pay and walk away. The country of Sweden thinks they’ll be completely cashless in 2 years. But I’m seeing a little reversion to the mean post-lockdown. I stopped off at a bar during a Saturday bike ride for a rehydration break. I asked the bartender if she took cash. “Yup,” she said, “Never stopped. It spends just like everything else.” It felt good to put a 20 on the bar, order beers, and see her take cash from the pile just like in 2019. It’s also that inflation is making it tougher for small places to eat the 2.5-3% card fees. The little Mexican place across the street from work where I’ll grab carne asada tacos for lunch now tacks on that fee for card users. They’re happy when I pull out cash, though last week I got 80 cents back in nickels. I guess the cashless thing has now caused a shortage of quarters. </li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — Emma by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/50905 Ft: Martijn de Boer</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>What Will Remain from These Pandemic Times?</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>In past episodes, I’ve been pretty skeptical about forecasts of permanent changes to the travel industry, or society in general, from  the pandemic. I have enough grey hair to remember commentators using the same “everything has changed” and “this is the new normal” language 13 years ago after the 2008 Great Recession, yet somehow we ended up back to maybe within 90% of  2007, the pre-recession starting point. Reversion to the mean is a strong force.</li><li>Unless it’s countered by a stronger force -- like saving money -- which is why I think the odds-on favorites for <a href=\"https://onemileatatime.com/hilton-hotel-service-cuts-permanent/\">pandemic changes made permanent</a> are what we’ve seen at hotels and restaurants. Checking into the Hilton in Midtown Manhattan last month, the front desk guy told us that they weren’t doing daily housekeeping; we could either schedule housekeeping now or call them when we wanted it. Pre-pandemic, Starwood and then Marriott would offer you points for skipping housekeeping -- Go Green they called it. They pitched it as eco-friendly, but it really was all about saving labor costs. But the Hilton didn’t offer me any points. The week before,<a href=\"https://onemileatatime.com/news/hilton-housekeeping-on-demand/\"> Hilton announced their new policy of on-request housekeeping</a> across all of their brands; the first major chain to cement what had been an <em>ad hoc</em> pandemic response into a new chain-wide policy. The press release talked about “guest comfort”, but behind the PR flacks, it’s all about cost savings. I expect to see Marriott and others follow soon. I do have to give props to the housekeeping staff at that Hilton, though. When, after 3 days, I did call for a room cleaning, they were there in 5 minutes. </li><li>A bigger loss for me is the breakfast buffet. My usual pre-pandemic routine was to work out and then take a quick pass through the concierge lounge for breakfast. Hotels must’ve found their <em>ad hoc</em> grab-n-go breakfast sacks cheaper because that too feels like it’s going to be the new normal. Way back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/01/27/podcast-113-2014-was-a-bad-year-to-fly-restaurant-trends-go-local/\">episode #113</a>, in January 2015, I scoffed at a bartender in MSP who reached over to punch my food order into the iPad mounted in front of me. Now, we aim our own smartphones at QR codes and order our own meals -- without any help -- again, saving labor costs. </li><li>Airlines started reverting to the mean at the end of last year when they dropped capacity restrictions and put butts in the middle seats again -- just as traffic began to recover. If you haven’t been on a flight this year, you’d think nothing happened -- well, except everyone wearing masks and the missing Bloody Mary eye openers on the morning Southwest flights to Vegas. Some folks are predicting the death of cancellation fees, but I don’t buy it. <a href=\"https://thepointsguy.com/news/will-american-delta-eliminate-change-fees/\">In 2019, United made $625 million in change and cancellation fees; ten of the largest U.S. carriers made $2.84 billion</a>. That’s too big of a hole to leave unfilled. And they’re already creeping back in. Most Basic Economy seats are back to non-changeable/non-refundable. Maybe not this year, but if traffic holds up, I’d expect to see some airlines quietly <em>not</em> extend their fee waiver deadlines.</li><li>Private company behaviors are pretty straight-forward to forecast -- just follow the money. It’s the government regs that are uncertain -- how long do the mask mandates and COVID testing international entry rules stay around? Government rules only seem to ratchet up -- it’s been 15 years since the TSA had us take our shoes off and dump our water bottles at security checkpoints and other than letting people bring on larger bottles of hand sanitizer, no one thinks the TSA is going to change those rules anytime soon. There’s no incentive.</li><li>Bridge Music — <em>Melt Away</em> by Kara Square (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/mindmapthat/46605</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>The Best Places I’ve Ate and Drank At In 2021… So Far</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I talk <em>a lot</em> about food and beer in this podcast -- as proven by the direct links to those categories in the top menu on the TravelCommons website. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\">episode #168</a> last fall, I said that, for me, food is one of the last hold-outs to global e-commerce and social media. 10-20 year ago, it was fun to go shopping and bring something unique back home. But now, there’s not much that you can’t find easier (and often cheaper) on Amazon or Taobao or Rakuten. And don’t even get me started on Instagram -- if people aren’t in <a href=\"https://www.npr.org/2021/07/09/1014208160/national-parks-crowds-litter\">a 100-person queue to get their own personal shot of the Delicate Arch in Moab, UT</a> then they’re queuing for made-for-Instagram-selfie murals like the <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/explore/tags/whatliftsyou/\">WhatLiftsYou</a> wings in Nashville’s Gulch neighborhood.&nbsp; But food -- you can post all the pictures you want of it, but you can’t post that sense memory of eating a dozen fresh oysters on a breakwater in Brittany, having a bowl of pho for breakfast in Saigon, or a 1am fresh-off-the-grill char polish that’s been dragged through the garden at a Chicago hot dog stand.&nbsp;</li><li>And so, over the years, I’ve talked about restaurants, bars, taprooms that I’ve enjoyed and posted links to them on the website in show notes or in blog posts. But reading articles about the number of places that’ve closed since March 2020 -- some say <a href=\"https://www.nrn.com/fast-casual/datassential-more-10-us-restaurants-have-closed-permanently\">10% of all restaurants in the US</a>, <a href=\"https://www.chicagobusiness.com/restaurants/heres-how-many-chicago-restaurants-have-closed-pandemic\">almost 20% in Chicago</a> -- I figure it’ll take travel guide books and blogs a while to catch up with all the changes. It kinda hit me when a college friend pinged our group text for Nashville recommendations. I’ve been going there a couple of times a year for the past 5 years, but when I started going through my list of places, it struck me how many of them had closed. I had to re-curate my recommendations. I figured a good start on that would be to post <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/08/14/my-best-restaurants-and-bars-of-2021/\">a list of the best places I’ve ate and drank at during my 2021 travels</a> on the TravelCommons website.</li><li>Now, fair warning, this is a <em>very</em> idiosyncratic list; it’s the best places <em>I</em> ate and drank at in, say, New York City in May and July. The New York list is pretty Midtown/Murray Hill-centric because that’s where we were staying and that’s where Claire was looking for flats. I walked into <a href=\"https://www.tedscornertavern.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Ted’s Corner Tavern</a> because it’s around the corner from Claire’s new place; it made the list because it’s what I think a great neighborhood bar should be -- good-sized bar with friendly bartenders who aren’t too busy to chat with you, the right volume level (lively, but not so loud that you have to shout across the table), and, of course, 30 taps and a well-curated beer list.</li><li>I’ve tried to make my list a well-curated one.&nbsp; I don’t mention restaurants or taprooms that I thought were fine -- the 3 or 3½-star places. It’s a list of places that stuck out in my mind for one reason or another, and would make me go out of my way to recommend them to, say, a college friend. This played out in a funny way on my Portland, Maine recommendations. I recommend <a href=\"https://bobsclamhut.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bob’s Clam Hut</a> in Kittery for fried clams and <a href=\"https://portland.islandcreekoysters.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Island Creek Oyster\'s place</a> in the East End/Munjoy Hill neighborhood for local oysters, but have no specific recommendation for a lobster roll place. It’s not for lack of trying; we had a lobster roll whenever we saw it on a menu, which wasn’t a cheap exercise since they were about $25 a pop. They were all good -- we didn’t have a bad lobster roll anywhere. But after all that, there’s no one place I could point to and say “Go <em>there</em> for a lobster roll.”&nbsp; I just say “Order one if you see it. It’ll probably be good no matter where you are”.&nbsp;</li><li>Another oddity of the list -- no Chicago places. Irene and I talked about this a bit. Between favorite places closing and cooking at home a lot more during the lockdowns and the strict mask mandate (which in Chicago was worded kinda like the airplane mandate -- wear your mask at all times unless you were actively eating or drinking), we haven’t been anywhere that’s really stuck out. Well, except maybe for the<a href=\"https://goo.gl/maps/XzUBYcWTn8nmc42E8\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"> Nancy’s Pizza</a> a couple of blocks from the TravelCommons studios. They do a great pepperoni, spinach, and fresh tomato pan pizza. That’ll definitely make the list.</li><li>Because the list is a work-in-progress; I posted the first edition on the website last week with sections on Tucson, San Diego, Nashville, New York, and Portland. You’ll find a link in the episode description in your podcast app -- if it supports HTML descriptions. I’ll be adding places through the rest of the year. There <em>will</em> be at least a couple of Chicago places (in addition to Nancy’s) on the list. I’m sure we’ll find some places in Puglia to add; and I’m positive I’ll find some UK taprooms that’ll make the cut since Rob Cheshire of This Week in Craft Beer has offered me a personal tour of his favorites.</li><li>When I’ve added a new section or think there’s enough new stuff to justify people taking a fresh look, I’ll put a new date on it so it goes back to the top of the Food and the Beer sections of the website, and I’ll post it on Facebook and Twitter. And if you end up hitting one of these places, shoot me a note and let me know if I got it right.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #178</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_178.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #178 — What Remains from Pandemic Times; Best Restaurant and Bars','','inherit','closed','closed','','3642-revision-v1','','','2021-08-24 13:47:04','2021-08-24 18:47:04','',3642,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3653',0,'revision','',0),
(3654,1,'2021-08-24 17:55:33','2021-08-24 22:55:33','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_1985\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/IMG_1758-scaled.jpeg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-3581 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/IMG_2173-300x300.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a>I Feel Safer Already[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Last month\'s travel got me wondering what travel changes are going to stick after the COVID pandemic begins to recede. With all the restaurant and bar closures caused by COVID lockdowns, I\'m updating my recommendations list based on recent travels. And, I\'m <em>way </em>overthinking our first post-lockdown international trip.  All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_178.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #178: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after a much lighter travel schedule than before the last episode. The day after posting the July episode, Irene and I got back in the car (because those 12-hour drives to and from the East Coast just weren’t enough for me), but this time heading north, as I mentioned at the end of the last episode, to Traverse City, MI to do Paddle for Pints with some friends; it’s a taproom crawl, but in kayaks instead of on streets. It’s a lot of fun. There’s something about physical exertion while drinking that seems to justify the next beer. </li><li>Now, anyone who’s driven any distance through the Midwest knows there’s only two seasons here -- winter and construction season -- and we didn’t get too far outside of Chicago on I-90 before a merge down to single lane traffic ground traffic to a crawl and I started refreshing Waze and Google Maps looking for alternatives. I’ve said in past episodes that, even though Google owns both, my experience is they can recommend different routes, especially in high-traffic, fast-changing situations. To me, Waze feels a little “twitchier”; it’ll twist you down a half-dozen random side streets to save 30 seconds while Google Maps guesses you’re willing to suck it up for a couple more minutes in exchange for a simpler route. And that’s exactly what happened to us in northwest Indiana which leaves me trying to figure out which route to take. I tweeted out later (actually while on a snack break in a taproom in Grand Rapids) “ I really hate it when Google Maps and Waze fight” to which the Waze social media crew replied “We like to think of it more as a disagreement”. Nicely done. And then Jim McDonough, a long-time TravelCommons listener, added “Apple Maps breaks the tie?”  Good idea, but I was having enough fun swiping between two maps; adding a third would’ve put me in the ditch for sure. I mostly used Waze, but skipped the recommended routing through side streets in Gary, Indiana. The risk-reward trade-off on that just didn’t feel worth it.</li><li>I was supposed to head out to the Bay Area last week on business, going to a plant on the east side of the Bay for a big team meeting. But it got re-vectored at the last minute from California back to Chicago because that Bay Area country had reinstated indoor mask mandates. Nobody questioned the move. With everyone on the team fully vaccinated months ago, we’d all happily gotten used to meeting with each other like it’s 2019 again and really didn’t want to go back to 8 hours of masks, muffled voices, and trying to read non-verbal cues from the nose up. As it was, we just made it under the wire -- our meeting was Wednesday and Thursday, and then on Friday, Chicago’s indoor mask mandate went into effect. It’s sorta peak Chicago that the city collected the revenue off of 385,000 mostly maskless Lollapalooza attendees before dropping the boom on those of us who actually live in the city.</li><li>Bridge Music — Astral Travel by Astral (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Astral/44282</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>One of the reasons it takes me so long to do an episode is I lack the discipline to bail out when I get caught in a click spiral. This time it was about the <a href=\"https://www.pennlive.com/nation-world/2021/07/teen-airdrops-photo-of-an-airsoft-gun-forcing-the-evacuation-of-a-united-airlines-flight.html\">United Airlines flight that was evacuated because a teenager decided to troll fellow passengers by AirDropping them a picture of an Airsoft gun</a>. For the non-iPhone users out there, AirDrop lets iPhones and Macs easily share stuff -- pictures, videos, web links -- wirelessly with others nearby. It’s been around for about 10 years and pretty quickly people figured out they could drop random/<em>interesting</em> pictures onto nearby strangers who had set their phones wide-open. I’ve seen this happen and it can be pretty funny, watching someone suddenly start looking around in a bar or a train, wondering who’d AirDropped them a picture. But what’s funny or, at worst, annoying in a bar is easily interpreted as a safety threat 10 years on from 9/11. They pulled everyone off for rescreening, searched the plane, and then left three hours later, leaving the teen behind in SFO. Understandable, I thought, if maybe a slight overreaction -- until I got to maybe the 5th page of Google search results where I clicked through to not-yet- another rehash of the United incident, but something different -- a <a href=\"https://www.fox5atlanta.com/news/panic-on-planes-after-images-are-airdropped\">story</a> about an AirDropped message on a Delta flight. It said “A plane-jacking will happen soon, 2 hours and 37 minutes it will start in the front on aisle 6.” That flight too was evacuated, but this time they didn’t find the sender. Maybe airlines’ safety demos need to show iPhone users how to set their AirDrop to “Receiving Off”.</li><li>Irene and I continue to push on with plans for our first post-lockdown international trip, to Italy for a bike tour through Puglia. The whole Delta variant thing adds to the uncertainty. I talked in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/05/09/podcast-175-how-to-find-local-tour-guides-rebuild-travel-muscles/\">episode #175</a> about sorting through trip insurance and figuring out what credit card to use for the tour. Now booking hotels before and after the tour, we’re choosing to pay 10-15 euros more a night for cancellable rates, kind of a DIY trip insurance. Booking our flights into Bari, where the tour starts, I’ve also felt the need to be a bit more thoughtful. Airline schedules seem to be a bit more <em>variable</em> than usual. Last week, American sent me a note to let me know our November LHR-ORD flight has moved up 5:15pm to 10:35am. I understand that; air traffic is <em>not</em> following predictable patterns and they’re trying to keep up. For that direct flight home from London, it’s not a problem. But when we’re having to make a connection to a city with not-frequent service, it’s a different matter. The first thing I did was X out anything with more than 1 stop; it’ll be hard enough keeping 2 flights aligned let alone 3. Then I focused on the big European hubs -- Heathrow, Frankfurt, DeGaulle -- skipping connections at smaller places like Munich, Zurich. Finally, I look for connection times around 3 hours; what I thought would be a “Goldilocks” connection -- not too short that any hiccup on the inbound flight would cause a problem, but not too long that we’d be having to sit in the airport all day wearing a mask or would have to track COVID protocols in yet another country because of an overnight connection. All that being said, we’re booked on Air France with a 2 hr, 50 minute connection in DeGaulle. But I don’t have any SkyTeam status, which causes me a bit of a worry -- maybe we get caught in a long non-status security line. So I did some DIY trip insurance on the flight, burning an extra bit of my pile of American Express Membership miles for a ride in business class (cancellable, of course) to make up for my non-status status. You could say I’ve gone <em>way</em> down a rabbit hole overthinking this one and I wouldn’t really argue with you. But then again, it’s the first international trip in 2 years that I’ve been able to plan. So it’s kinda like an only child, getting way too much their parent’s attention. </li><li>I was digging through my travel card wallet for my Global Entry card to find my Known Traveler number to put on the Air France reservation and came across a handful of Southwest drink coupons that are about to hit their expiration date. <a href=\"https://community.southwest.com/t5/Knowledge-Base/Expired-2020-Drink-Coupons/ta-p/114294\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Southwest says expiring drink coupons are good through the end of this year</a>. But Southwest suspended alcohol sales a few months back, and rightly so after a passenger assaulted a flight attendant, saying the booze won’t return until the federal mask mandate ends. But the TSA just extended that until January, past the coupons’ extended expiration date. And really, I don’t see the TSA letting up on in-flight masks anytime soon, so is Southwest going to be the first dry airline?</li><li>I mentor start-up founders at <a href=\"https://1871.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">a tech incubator in Chicago</a>. A few months ago, one of my sessions was with a bionic implant start-up. Implant the chip and the back of your hand becomes a contactless card; get into your office or pay at Starbucks with the tap of your hand. Another reminder, if a bit, say, unsettling (icky?), of the move to a cashless society. I talked about it back in episode #136 in 2017, about being maybe the last generation of cash payers, that my younger traveling colleagues rarely carried cash; they paid for everything with a card. And then, the pandemic massively accelerated it. Everything went contactless; nobody wanted to handle your cash. Last year, in episode #165, I noticed I had the same $200 of 20’s in my wallet in June that I’d taken out of an ATM right before the March lockdown. Last month in New York, the coffee joint across from our hotel was card-only and the same for the ice cream shop around the corner from our place in Chicago. Restaurants that use the Toast point-of-sale system print out a QR code at the bottom of your receipt, letting you pay and walk away. The country of Sweden thinks they’ll be completely cashless in 2 years. But I’m seeing a little reversion to the mean post-lockdown. I stopped off at a bar during a Saturday bike ride for a rehydration break. I asked the bartender if she took cash. “Yup,” she said, “Never stopped. It spends just like everything else.” It felt good to put a 20 on the bar, order beers, and see her take cash from the pile just like in 2019. It’s also that inflation is making it tougher for small places to eat the 2.5-3% card fees. The little Mexican place across the street from work where I’ll grab carne asada tacos for lunch now tacks on that fee for card users. They’re happy when I pull out cash, though last week I got 80 cents back in nickels. I guess the cashless thing has now caused a shortage of quarters. </li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — Emma by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/50905 Ft: Martijn de Boer</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>What Will Remain from These Pandemic Times?</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>In past episodes, I’ve been pretty skeptical about forecasts of permanent changes to the travel industry, or society in general, from  the pandemic. I have enough grey hair to remember commentators using the same “everything has changed” and “this is the new normal” language 13 years ago after the 2008 Great Recession, yet somehow we ended up back to maybe within 90% of  2007, the pre-recession starting point. Reversion to the mean is a strong force.</li><li>Unless it’s countered by a stronger force -- like saving money -- which is why I think the odds-on favorites for <a href=\"https://onemileatatime.com/hilton-hotel-service-cuts-permanent/\">pandemic changes made permanent</a> are what we’ve seen at hotels and restaurants. Checking into the Hilton in Midtown Manhattan last month, the front desk guy told us that they weren’t doing daily housekeeping; we could either schedule housekeeping now or call them when we wanted it. Pre-pandemic, Starwood and then Marriott would offer you points for skipping housekeeping -- Go Green they called it. They pitched it as eco-friendly, but it really was all about saving labor costs. But the Hilton didn’t offer me any points. The week before,<a href=\"https://onemileatatime.com/news/hilton-housekeeping-on-demand/\"> Hilton announced their new policy of on-request housekeeping</a> across all of their brands; the first major chain to cement what had been an <em>ad hoc</em> pandemic response into a new chain-wide policy. The press release talked about “guest comfort”, but behind the PR flacks, it’s all about cost savings. I expect to see Marriott and others follow soon. I do have to give props to the housekeeping staff at that Hilton, though. When, after 3 days, I did call for a room cleaning, they were there in 5 minutes. </li><li>A bigger loss for me is the breakfast buffet. My usual pre-pandemic routine was to work out and then take a quick pass through the concierge lounge for breakfast. Hotels must’ve found their <em>ad hoc</em> grab-n-go breakfast sacks cheaper because that too feels like it’s going to be the new normal. Way back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/01/27/podcast-113-2014-was-a-bad-year-to-fly-restaurant-trends-go-local/\">episode #113</a>, in January 2015, I scoffed at a bartender in MSP who reached over to punch my food order into the iPad mounted in front of me. Now, we aim our own smartphones at QR codes and order our own meals -- without any help -- again, saving labor costs. </li><li>Airlines started reverting to the mean at the end of last year when they dropped capacity restrictions and put butts in the middle seats again -- just as traffic began to recover. If you haven’t been on a flight this year, you’d think nothing happened -- well, except everyone wearing masks and the missing Bloody Mary eye openers on the morning Southwest flights to Vegas. Some folks are predicting the death of cancellation fees, but I don’t buy it. <a href=\"https://thepointsguy.com/news/will-american-delta-eliminate-change-fees/\">In 2019, United made $625 million in change and cancellation fees; ten of the largest U.S. carriers made $2.84 billion</a>. That’s too big of a hole to leave unfilled. And they’re already creeping back in. Most Basic Economy seats are back to non-changeable/non-refundable. Maybe not this year, but if traffic holds up, I’d expect to see some airlines quietly <em>not</em> extend their fee waiver deadlines.</li><li>Private company behaviors are pretty straight-forward to forecast -- just follow the money. It’s the government regs that are uncertain -- how long do the mask mandates and COVID testing international entry rules stay around? Government rules only seem to ratchet up -- it’s been 15 years since the TSA had us take our shoes off and dump our water bottles at security checkpoints and other than letting people bring on larger bottles of hand sanitizer, no one thinks the TSA is going to change those rules anytime soon. There’s no incentive.</li><li>Bridge Music — <em>Melt Away</em> by Kara Square (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/mindmapthat/46605</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>The Best Places I’ve Ate and Drank At In 2021… So Far</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I talk <em>a lot</em> about food and beer in this podcast -- as proven by the direct links to those categories in the top menu on the TravelCommons website. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\">episode #168</a> last fall, I said that, for me, food is one of the last hold-outs to global e-commerce and social media. 10-20 year ago, it was fun to go shopping and bring something unique back home. But now, there’s not much that you can’t find easier (and often cheaper) on Amazon or Taobao or Rakuten. And don’t even get me started on Instagram -- if people aren’t in <a href=\"https://www.npr.org/2021/07/09/1014208160/national-parks-crowds-litter\">a 100-person queue to get their own personal shot of the Delicate Arch in Moab, UT</a> then they’re queuing for made-for-Instagram-selfie murals like the <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/explore/tags/whatliftsyou/\">WhatLiftsYou</a> wings in Nashville’s Gulch neighborhood.&nbsp; But food -- you can post all the pictures you want of it, but you can’t post that sense memory of eating a dozen fresh oysters on a breakwater in Brittany, having a bowl of pho for breakfast in Saigon, or a 1am fresh-off-the-grill char polish that’s been dragged through the garden at a Chicago hot dog stand.&nbsp;</li><li>And so, over the years, I’ve talked about restaurants, bars, taprooms that I’ve enjoyed and posted links to them on the website in show notes or in blog posts. But reading articles about the number of places that’ve closed since March 2020 -- some say <a href=\"https://www.nrn.com/fast-casual/datassential-more-10-us-restaurants-have-closed-permanently\">10% of all restaurants in the US</a>, <a href=\"https://www.chicagobusiness.com/restaurants/heres-how-many-chicago-restaurants-have-closed-pandemic\">almost 20% in Chicago</a> -- I figure it’ll take travel guide books and blogs a while to catch up with all the changes. It kinda hit me when a college friend pinged our group text for Nashville recommendations. I’ve been going there a couple of times a year for the past 5 years, but when I started going through my list of places, it struck me how many of them had closed. I had to re-curate my recommendations. I figured a good start on that would be to post <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/08/14/my-best-restaurants-and-bars-of-2021/\">a list of the best places I’ve ate and drank at during my 2021 travels</a> on the TravelCommons website.</li><li>Now, fair warning, this is a <em>very</em> idiosyncratic list; it’s the best places <em>I</em> ate and drank at in, say, New York City in May and July. The New York list is pretty Midtown/Murray Hill-centric because that’s where we were staying and that’s where Claire was looking for flats. I walked into <a href=\"https://www.tedscornertavern.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Ted’s Corner Tavern</a> because it’s around the corner from Claire’s new place; it made the list because it’s what I think a great neighborhood bar should be -- good-sized bar with friendly bartenders who aren’t too busy to chat with you, the right volume level (lively, but not so loud that you have to shout across the table), and, of course, 30 taps and a well-curated beer list.</li><li>I’ve tried to make my list a well-curated one.&nbsp; I don’t mention restaurants or taprooms that I thought were fine -- the 3 or 3½-star places. It’s a list of places that stuck out in my mind for one reason or another, and would make me go out of my way to recommend them to, say, a college friend. This played out in a funny way on my Portland, Maine recommendations. I recommend <a href=\"https://bobsclamhut.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bob’s Clam Hut</a> in Kittery for fried clams and <a href=\"https://portland.islandcreekoysters.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Island Creek Oyster\'s place</a> in the East End/Munjoy Hill neighborhood for local oysters, but have no specific recommendation for a lobster roll place. It’s not for lack of trying; we had a lobster roll whenever we saw it on a menu, which wasn’t a cheap exercise since they were about $25 a pop. They were all good -- we didn’t have a bad lobster roll anywhere. But after all that, there’s no one place I could point to and say “Go <em>there</em> for a lobster roll.”&nbsp; I just say “Order one if you see it. It’ll probably be good no matter where you are”.&nbsp;</li><li>Another oddity of the list -- no Chicago places. Irene and I talked about this a bit. Between favorite places closing and cooking at home a lot more during the lockdowns and the strict mask mandate (which in Chicago was worded kinda like the airplane mandate -- wear your mask at all times unless you were actively eating or drinking), we haven’t been anywhere that’s really stuck out. Well, except maybe for the<a href=\"https://goo.gl/maps/XzUBYcWTn8nmc42E8\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"> Nancy’s Pizza</a> a couple of blocks from the TravelCommons studios. They do a great pepperoni, spinach, and fresh tomato pan pizza. That’ll definitely make the list.</li><li>Because the list is a work-in-progress; I posted the first edition on the website last week with sections on Tucson, San Diego, Nashville, New York, and Portland. You’ll find a link in the episode description in your podcast app -- if it supports HTML descriptions. I’ll be adding places through the rest of the year. There <em>will</em> be at least a couple of Chicago places (in addition to Nancy’s) on the list. I’m sure we’ll find some places in Puglia to add; and I’m positive I’ll find some UK taprooms that’ll make the cut since Rob Cheshire of This Week in Craft Beer has offered me a personal tour of his favorites.</li><li>When I’ve added a new section or think there’s enough new stuff to justify people taking a fresh look, I’ll put a new date on it so it goes back to the top of the Food and the Beer sections of the website, and I’ll post it on Facebook and Twitter. And if you end up hitting one of these places, shoot me a note and let me know if I got it right.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #178</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_178.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #178 — What Remains from Pandemic Times; Best Restaurant and Bars','','inherit','closed','closed','','3642-revision-v1','','','2021-08-24 17:55:33','2021-08-24 22:55:33','',3642,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3654',0,'revision','',0),
(3656,1,'2021-08-24 19:32:21','2021-08-25 00:32:21','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_1985\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/IMG_1758-scaled.jpeg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-3581 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/IMG_2173-300x300.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a>I Feel Safer Already[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Last month\'s travel got me wondering what travel changes are going to stick after the COVID pandemic begins to recede. With all the restaurant and bar closures caused by COVID lockdowns, I\'m updating my recommendations list based on recent travels. And I\'m <em>way </em>overthinking our first post-lockdown international trip.  All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_178.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #178: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after a much lighter travel schedule than before the last episode. The day after posting the July episode, Irene and I got back in the car (because those 12-hour drives to and from the East Coast just weren’t enough for me), but this time heading north, as I mentioned at the end of the last episode, to Traverse City, MI to do Paddle for Pints with some friends; it’s a taproom crawl, but in kayaks instead of on streets. It’s a lot of fun. There’s something about physical exertion while drinking that seems to justify the next beer.&nbsp;</li><li>Now, anyone who’s driven any distance through the Midwest knows there’s only two seasons here -- winter and construction season -- and we didn’t get too far outside of Chicago on I-90 before a merge down to single lane traffic ground traffic to a crawl and I started refreshing Waze and Google Maps looking for alternatives. I’ve said in past episodes that, even though Google owns both, my experience is they can recommend different routes, especially in high-traffic, fast-changing situations. To me, Waze feels a little “twitchier”; it’ll twist you down a half-dozen random side streets to save 30 seconds while Google Maps guesses you’re willing to suck it up for a couple more minutes in exchange for a simpler route. And that’s exactly what happened to us in northwest Indiana which leaves me trying to figure out which route to take. I tweeted out later (actually while on a snack break in a taproom in Grand Rapids) “ I really hate it when Google Maps and Waze fight” to which the Waze social media crew replied “We like to think of it more as a disagreement”. Nicely done. And then Jim McDonough, a long-time TravelCommons listener, added “Apple Maps breaks the tie?”&nbsp; Good idea, but I was having enough fun swiping between two maps; adding a third would’ve put me in the ditch for sure. I mostly used Waze, but skipped the recommended routing through side streets in Gary, Indiana. The risk-reward trade-off on that just didn’t feel worth it.</li><li>I was supposed to head out to the Bay Area last week on business, going to a plant on the east side of the Bay for a big team meeting. But it got re-vectored at the last minute from California back to Chicago because that Bay Area country had reinstated indoor mask mandates. Nobody questioned the move. With everyone on the team fully vaccinated months ago, we’d all happily gotten used to meeting with each other like it’s 2019 again and really didn’t want to go back to 8 hours of masks, muffled voices, and trying to read non-verbal cues from the nose up. As it was, we just made it under the wire -- our meeting was Wednesday and Thursday, and then on Friday, Chicago’s indoor mask mandate went into effect. It’s sorta peak Chicago that the city collected the revenue off of 385,000 mostly maskless Lollapalooza attendees before dropping the boom on those of us who actually live in the city.</li><li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;Astral Travel by Astral (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Astral/44282</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>One of the reasons it takes me so long to do an episode is I lack the discipline to bail out when I get caught in a click spiral. This time it was about the <a href=\"https://www.pennlive.com/nation-world/2021/07/teen-airdrops-photo-of-an-airsoft-gun-forcing-the-evacuation-of-a-united-airlines-flight.html\">United Airlines flight that was evacuated because a teenager decided to troll fellow passengers by AirDropping them a picture of an Airsoft gun</a>. For the non-iPhone users out there, AirDrop lets iPhones and Macs easily share stuff -- pictures, videos, web links -- wirelessly with others nearby. It’s been around for about 10 years and pretty quickly people figured out they could drop random/<em>interesting</em> pictures onto nearby strangers who had set their phones wide-open. I’ve seen this happen and it can be pretty funny, watching someone suddenly start looking around in a bar or a train, wondering who’d AirDropped them a picture. But what’s funny or, at worst, annoying in a bar is easily interpreted as a safety threat 10 years on from 9/11. They pulled everyone off for rescreening, searched the plane, and then left three hours later, leaving the teen behind in SFO. Understandable, I thought, if maybe a slight overreaction -- until I got to maybe the 5th page of Google search results where I clicked through to not-yet- another rehash of the United incident, but something different -- a <a href=\"https://www.fox5atlanta.com/news/panic-on-planes-after-images-are-airdropped\">story</a> about an AirDropped message on a Delta flight. It said “A plane-jacking will happen soon, 2 hours and 37 minutes it will start in the front on aisle 6.” That flight too was evacuated, but this time they didn’t find the sender. Maybe airlines’ safety demos need to show iPhone users how to set their AirDrop to “Receiving Off”.</li><li>Irene and I continue to push on with plans for our first post-lockdown international trip, to Italy for a bike tour through Puglia. The whole Delta variant thing adds to the uncertainty. I talked in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/05/09/podcast-175-how-to-find-local-tour-guides-rebuild-travel-muscles/\">episode #175</a> about sorting through trip insurance and figuring out what credit card to use for the tour. Now booking hotels before and after the tour, we’re choosing to pay 10-15 euros more a night for cancellable rates, kind of a DIY trip insurance. Booking our flights into Bari, where the tour starts, I’ve also felt the need to be a bit more thoughtful. Airline schedules seem to be a bit more <em>variable</em> than usual. Last week, American sent me a note to let me know our November LHR-ORD flight has moved up 5:15pm to 10:35am. I understand that; air traffic is <em>not</em> following predictable patterns and they’re trying to keep up. For that direct flight home from London, it’s not a problem. But when we’re having to make a connection to a city with not-frequent service, it’s a different matter. The first thing I did was X out anything with more than 1 stop; it’ll be hard enough keeping 2 flights aligned let alone 3. Then I focused on the big European hubs -- Heathrow, Frankfurt, DeGaulle -- skipping connections at smaller places like Munich, Zurich. Finally, I look for connection times around 3 hours; what I thought would be a “Goldilocks” connection -- not too short that any hiccup on the inbound flight would cause a problem, but not too long that we’d be having to sit in the airport all day wearing a mask or would have to track COVID protocols in yet another country because of an overnight connection. All that being said, we’re booked on Air France with a 2 hr, 50 minute connection in DeGaulle. But I don’t have any SkyTeam status, which causes me a bit of a worry -- maybe we get caught in a long non-status security line. So I did some DIY trip insurance on the flight, burning an extra bit of my pile of American Express Membership miles for a ride in business class (cancellable, of course) to make up for my non-status status. You could say I’ve gone <em>way</em> down a rabbit hole overthinking this one and I wouldn’t really argue with you. But then again, it’s the first international trip in 2 years that I’ve been able to plan. So it’s kinda like an only child, getting way too much their parent’s attention.&nbsp;</li><li>I was digging through my travel card wallet for my Global Entry card to find my Known Traveler number to put on the Air France reservation and came across a handful of Southwest drink coupons that are about to hit their expiration date. <a href=\"https://community.southwest.com/t5/Knowledge-Base/Expired-2020-Drink-Coupons/ta-p/114294\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Southwest says expiring drink coupons are good through the end of this year</a>. But Southwest suspended alcohol sales a few months back, and rightly so after a passenger assaulted a flight attendant, saying the booze won’t return until the federal mask mandate ends. But the TSA just extended that until January, past the coupons’ extended expiration date. And really, I don’t see the TSA letting up on in-flight masks anytime soon, so is Southwest going to be the first dry airline?</li><li>I mentor start-up founders at <a href=\"https://1871.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">a tech incubator in Chicago</a>. A few months ago, one of my sessions was with a bionic implant start-up. Implant the chip and the back of your hand becomes a contactless card; get into your office or pay at Starbucks with the tap of your hand. Another reminder, if a bit, say, unsettling (icky?), of the move to a cashless society. I talked about it back in episode #136 in 2017, about being maybe the last generation of cash payers, that my younger traveling colleagues rarely carried cash; they paid for everything with a card. And then, the pandemic massively accelerated it. Everything went contactless; nobody wanted to handle your cash. Last year, in episode #165, I noticed I had the same $200 of 20’s in my wallet in June that I’d taken out of an ATM right before the March lockdown. Last month in New York, the coffee joint across from our hotel was card-only and the same for the ice cream shop around the corner from our place in Chicago. Restaurants that use the Toast point-of-sale system print out a QR code at the bottom of your receipt, letting you pay and walk away. The country of Sweden thinks they’ll be completely cashless in 2 years. But I’m seeing a little reversion to the mean post-lockdown. I stopped off at a bar during a Saturday bike ride for a rehydration break. I asked the bartender if she took cash. “Yup,” she said, “Never stopped. It spends just like everything else.” It felt good to put a 20 on the bar, order beers, and see her take cash from the pile just like in 2019. It’s also that inflation is making it tougher for small places to eat the 2.5-3% card fees. The little Mexican place across the street from work where I’ll grab carne asada tacos for lunch now tacks on that fee for card users. They’re happy when I pull out cash, though last week I got 80 cents back in nickels. I guess the cashless thing has now caused a shortage of quarters.&nbsp;</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;Emma by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/50905 Ft: Martijn de Boer</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>What Will Remain from These Pandemic Times?</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>In past episodes, I’ve been pretty skeptical about forecasts of permanent changes to the travel industry, or society in general, from&nbsp; the pandemic. I have enough grey hair to remember commentators using the same “everything has changed” and “this is the new normal” language 13 years ago after the 2008 Great Recession, yet somehow we ended up back to maybe within 90% of&nbsp; 2007, the pre-recession starting point. Reversion to the mean is a strong force.</li><li>Unless it’s countered by a stronger force -- like saving money -- which is why I think the odds-on favorites for <a href=\"https://onemileatatime.com/hilton-hotel-service-cuts-permanent/\">pandemic changes made permanent</a> are what we’ve seen at hotels and restaurants. Checking into the Hilton in Midtown Manhattan last month, the front desk guy told us that they weren’t doing daily housekeeping; we could either schedule housekeeping now or call them when we wanted it. Pre-pandemic, Starwood and then Marriott would offer you points for skipping housekeeping -- Go Green they called it. They pitched it as eco-friendly, but it really was all about saving labor costs. But the Hilton didn’t offer me any points. The week before,<a href=\"https://onemileatatime.com/news/hilton-housekeeping-on-demand/\"> Hilton announced their new policy of on-request housekeeping</a> across all of their brands; the first major chain to cement what had been an <em>ad hoc</em> pandemic response into a new chain-wide policy. The press release talked about “guest comfort”, but behind the PR flacks, it’s all about cost savings. I expect to see Marriott and others follow soon. I do have to give props to the housekeeping staff at that Hilton, though. When, after 3 days, I did call for a room cleaning, they were there in 5 minutes.&nbsp;</li><li>A bigger loss for me is the breakfast buffet. My usual pre-pandemic routine was to work out and then take a quick pass through the concierge lounge for breakfast. Hotels must’ve found their <em>ad hoc</em> grab-n-go breakfast sacks cheaper because that too feels like it’s going to be the new normal. Way back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/01/27/podcast-113-2014-was-a-bad-year-to-fly-restaurant-trends-go-local/\">episode #113</a>, in January 2015, I scoffed at a bartender in MSP who reached over to punch my food order into the iPad mounted in front of me. Now, we aim our own smartphones at QR codes and order our own meals -- without any help -- again, saving labor costs.&nbsp;</li><li>Airlines started reverting to the mean at the end of last year when they dropped capacity restrictions and put butts in the middle seats again -- just as traffic began to recover. If you haven’t been on a flight this year, you’d think nothing happened -- well, except everyone wearing masks and the missing Bloody Mary eye openers on the morning Southwest flights to Vegas. Some folks are predicting the death of cancellation fees, but I don’t buy it. <a href=\"https://thepointsguy.com/news/will-american-delta-eliminate-change-fees/\">In 2019, United made $625 million in change and cancellation fees; ten of the largest U.S. carriers made $2.84 billion</a>. That’s too big of a hole to leave unfilled. And they’re already creeping back in. Most Basic Economy seats are back to non-changeable/non-refundable. Maybe not this year, but if traffic holds up, I’d expect to see some airlines quietly <em>not</em> extend their fee waiver deadlines.</li><li>Private company behaviors are pretty straight-forward to forecast -- just follow the money. It’s the government regs that are uncertain -- how long do the mask mandates and COVID testing international entry rules stay around? Government rules only seem to ratchet up -- it’s been 15 years since the TSA had us take our shoes off and dump our water bottles at security checkpoints and other than letting people bring on larger bottles of hand sanitizer, no one thinks the TSA is going to change those rules anytime soon. There’s no incentive.</li><li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<em>Melt Away</em>&nbsp;by Kara Square (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp;http://ccmixter.org/files/mindmapthat/46605</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>The Best Places I’ve Ate and Drank At In 2021… So Far</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I talk <em>a lot</em> about food and beer in this podcast -- as proven by the direct links to those categories in the top menu on the TravelCommons website. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\">episode #168</a> last fall, I said that, for me, food is one of the last hold-outs to global e-commerce and social media. 10-20 year ago, it was fun to go shopping and bring something unique back home. But now, there’s not much that you can’t find easier (and often cheaper) on Amazon or Taobao or Rakuten. And don’t even get me started on Instagram -- if people aren’t in <a href=\"https://www.npr.org/2021/07/09/1014208160/national-parks-crowds-litter\">a 100-person queue to get their own personal shot of the Delicate Arch in Moab, UT</a> then they’re queuing for made-for-Instagram-selfie murals like the <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/explore/tags/whatliftsyou/\">WhatLiftsYou</a> wings in Nashville’s Gulch neighborhood.&nbsp; But food -- you can post all the pictures you want of it, but you can’t post that sense memory of eating a dozen fresh oysters on a breakwater in Brittany, having a bowl of pho for breakfast in Saigon, or a 1am fresh-off-the-grill char polish that’s been dragged through the garden at a Chicago hot dog stand.&nbsp;</li><li>And so, over the years, I’ve talked about restaurants, bars, taprooms that I’ve enjoyed and posted links to them on the website in show notes or in blog posts. But reading articles about the number of places that’ve closed since March 2020 -- some say <a href=\"https://www.nrn.com/fast-casual/datassential-more-10-us-restaurants-have-closed-permanently\">10% of all restaurants in the US</a>, <a href=\"https://www.chicagobusiness.com/restaurants/heres-how-many-chicago-restaurants-have-closed-pandemic\">almost 20% in Chicago</a> -- I figure it’ll take travel guide books and blogs a while to catch up with all the changes. It kinda hit me when a college friend pinged our group text for Nashville recommendations. I’ve been going there a couple of times a year for the past 5 years, but when I started going through my list of places, it struck me how many of them had closed. I had to re-curate my recommendations. I figured a good start on that would be to post <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/08/14/my-best-restaurants-and-bars-of-2021/\">a list of the best places I’ve ate and drank at during my 2021 travels</a> on the TravelCommons website.</li><li>Now, fair warning, this is a <em>very</em> idiosyncratic list; it’s the best places <em>I</em> ate and drank at in, say, New York City in May and July. The New York list is pretty Midtown/Murray Hill-centric because that’s where we were staying and that’s where Claire was looking for flats. I walked into <a href=\"https://www.tedscornertavern.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Ted’s Corner Tavern</a> because it’s around the corner from Claire’s new place; it made the list because it’s what I think a great neighborhood bar should be -- good-sized bar with friendly bartenders who aren’t too busy to chat with you, the right volume level (lively, but not so loud that you have to shout across the table), and, of course, 30 taps and a well-curated beer list.</li><li>I’ve tried to make my list a well-curated one.&nbsp; I don’t mention restaurants or taprooms that I thought were fine -- the 3 or 3½-star places. It’s a list of places that stuck out in my mind for one reason or another, and would make me go out of my way to recommend them to, say, a college friend. This played out in a funny way on my Portland, Maine recommendations. I recommend <a href=\"https://bobsclamhut.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bob’s Clam Hut</a> in Kittery for fried clams and <a href=\"https://portland.islandcreekoysters.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Island Creek Oyster\'s place</a> in the East End/Munjoy Hill neighborhood for local oysters, but have no specific recommendation for a lobster roll place. It’s not for lack of trying; we had a lobster roll whenever we saw it on a menu, which wasn’t a cheap exercise since they were about $25 a pop. They were all good -- we didn’t have a bad lobster roll anywhere. But after all that, there’s no one place I could point to and say “Go <em>there</em> for a lobster roll.”&nbsp; I just say “Order one if you see it. It’ll probably be good no matter where you are”.&nbsp;</li><li>Another oddity of the list -- no Chicago places. Irene and I talked about this a bit. Between favorite places closing and cooking at home a lot more during the lockdowns and the strict mask mandate (which in Chicago was worded kinda like the airplane mandate -- wear your mask at all times unless you were actively eating or drinking), we haven’t been anywhere that’s really stuck out. Well, except maybe for the<a href=\"https://goo.gl/maps/XzUBYcWTn8nmc42E8\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"> Nancy’s Pizza</a> a couple of blocks from the TravelCommons studios. They do a great pepperoni, spinach, and fresh tomato pan pizza. That’ll definitely make the list.</li><li>Because the list is a work-in-progress; I posted the first edition on the website last week with sections on Tucson, San Diego, Nashville, New York, and Portland. You’ll find a link in the episode description in your podcast app -- if it supports HTML descriptions. I’ll be adding places through the rest of the year. There <em>will</em> be at least a couple of Chicago places (in addition to Nancy’s) on the list. I’m sure we’ll find some places in Puglia to add; and I’m positive I’ll find some UK taprooms that’ll make the cut since Rob Cheshire of This Week in Craft Beer has offered me a personal tour of his favorites.</li><li>When I’ve added a new section or think there’s enough new stuff to justify people taking a fresh look, I’ll put a new date on it so it goes back to the top of the Food and the Beer sections of the website, and I’ll post it on Facebook and Twitter. And if you end up hitting one of these places, shoot me a note and let me know if I got it right.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #178</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_178.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #178 — What Remains from Pandemic Times; Best Restaurant and Bars','','inherit','closed','closed','','3642-revision-v1','','','2021-08-24 19:32:21','2021-08-25 00:32:21','',3642,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3656',0,'revision','',0),
(3657,1,'2021-08-24 19:39:28','2021-08-25 00:39:28','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_1985\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/IMG_1758-scaled.jpeg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-3581 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/IMG_1758-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"Microphone and a Beer Can\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a>Now I\'m Ready For the Interview[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>After a 2-week, 2,500-mile and $120 in tolls driving expedition through the Northeast, I didn\'t have much time left to write a new episode. So, I mined the audio files of recent TravelCommons interviews for some good stories that got left on the cutting room floor. We also talk about planning for a bike trip in Italy, a couple of things that might make the 2021 traveler gift guide, and we mourn the demise of American Airlines\' in-flight magazine. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_177.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #177: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, trying to get this July episode in under the wire, a bit delayed due to a 2-week, 2,500-mile and $120 in tolls driving expedition through the Northeast that started with a 12-hr drive from Chicago to Manhattan on the Friday of the 4th of July weekend with as much of our daughter and as much of her worldly belongings as would fit in a BMW X3, helping her move into a 5th-floor walkup in Midtown. I was very pleasantly surprised to hit only two backups on what was forecasted to be the first really big post-lockdown travel day; a detour around an accident in the Poconos on I-80 and then, at the end of our drive, the completely predictable back-up at the mouth of the Lincoln Tunnel. A completely and happily uneventful drive. I then spent the rest of the week finding a different spot every morning for my standard Manhattan breakfast -- egg &amp; cheese on a toasted everything bagel and making sure they don’t slip some milk into my black coffee order -- before spending the day in front of my laptop on a not-very-big desk in our not-very-big hotel room while Irene helped Claire get her flat all set up.&nbsp;</li><li>The next Friday, we left Manhattan for a week’s vacation in Maine with an intermediate stop in New Haven, CT’s Little Italy neighborhood for the classic white clam pizza at Frank Pepe’s. It was a bit of a wait -- a 20-minute queue on the sidewalk and then another 45 minutes after ordering -- but it was worth it. I’ve had many tries at white clam pizza before, but this one was, by far, the best -- a generous helping of clams, garlic, and oregano on a cracker-crisp crust . We walked past other pizza places on Wooster St, but only had time to hit one, and so it had to be the ur-pizza joint, the classic, Frank Pepe’s. And luckily for us, it didn’t disappoint; the line along the sidewalk is well-earned.&nbsp; You know, the Michelin Guide says a one-star restaurant is ‘High quality cooking, worth a stop!’, a two-star is ‘Excellent cooking, worth a detour!’, and describes a three-star as ‘Exceptional cuisine, worth a special journey!’ I’m not saying that Frank Pepe’s is a two-star place, but I will say that it was damn good pizza that was definitely worth our detour.</li><li>We then headed up to Scarborough, ME, just south of Portland, for a beach vacation with friends.&nbsp; The traffic on the drive north was a steady stream of RV’s and pick-up tracks and cars with “roof bags” tied down on top and bikes lashed to the back that continued to thicken from I-91 to I-84 to I-90 to I-495 until it finally ground to a halt trying to merge onto I-95, which was itself filled with the same thick sludge of vehicles trying to make it north for the weekend. And then the weather wasn’t great -- rainy, foggy, misty (now I know where Steven King got all his inspiration) so our time devolved into an week-long seafood fest -- a bivalve-palooza of local mussels, oysters, and clams; intensive longitudinal lobster roll research; and, ignoring the current UK debate about crustacean sentience, multiple boiled lobster dinners -- and taproom tour, hitting the big names like Allagash, Maine Beer Company, and Oxbow as well as some (many) other little guys. And then, finally, on the last day, sunshine.</li><li>After a week of this, the rain started up again as we turned around and headed back home, getting on I-90 in Albany and not getting off until we hit Chicago. It too was an uneventful drive, but not in a great way. By the end of that day, we’d developed a deep, deep hatred of those miserable strips of boring asphalt and the hellhole rest stops that make up the Ohio and Indiana Tollways. I hope Claire loves her new life, ‘cause I really don’t want to have to drive that way again.</li><li>Bridge Music -- One for Me by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/21492 Ft: Haskel</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I have to say that the most important piece of travel kit on this trip was my USB-C to HDMI cable that let me mirror my MacBook Air display on the hotel and beach house TVs so that I could sit back with a beer and comfortably watch YouTube highlights of the Euro 2020 soccer tournament and the Tour de France on 40-60” flat screens instead of hunching over my 13” MacBook Air. I had a version of this in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/12/11/best-gift-ideas-for-a-new-traveler/\">my 2019 traveler gift guide</a>, but it got bumped off t<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">he 2020 version</a> to make room for bring-your-own dining sets. But with restaurants and bars open and so not having to eat every meal in my hotel room, I think I’ll reverse that change and put this cable back on the 2021 guide.</li><li>I don’t know if masks will stay on the 2021 guide -- that depends on transportation agency rules -- but I bought another batch of the evolvetogther masks that I called out in the 2020 guide because, even after in-flight mask mandates get dropped, I might still wear a mask on a crowded flight during the cold and flu season because, for the first time in forever, I didn’t get my usual killer cold last year. Without a mandate, I probably wouldn’t wear a mask in the airport and probably not in a fairly open plane, but I think so when it’s a full flight, when there’s someone next to me in the center seat. I think about it -- they’re exhaling maybe 14-16 inches away from where I’m inhaling. No airplane HEPA filter is going to be able to get in between that exchange. I say that now, but I’ll have to re-visit it after in-flight mandates go away and I’m boarding an 8-hour flight to London; that’ll be the real stress test.</li><li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/05/09/podcast-175-how-to-find-local-tour-guides-rebuild-travel-muscles/\">episode #175</a> back in May, I talked about making some Q4 bets on international travel -- a Backroads bike tour in southern Italy in October and the UK in November. Back in the spring, vaccine roll-outs were choppy, especially in the EU, but I thought that everything would sort itself out over the summer making booking travel in the fall not such a risk. Now this was pre-delta variant, but while in Maine, we got an e-mail from Backroads with the subject line “Your Trip Is A Go!” followed shortly thereafter by an alert from Chase of a very large charge dropped on our Sapphire Visa card. Now we need to start tracking travel requirements. Back in May, the best bet for US travelers was to take a “COVID-free” flight on Delta or American to avoid the 2-week quarantine. Then, a month later in June, Italy significantly eased those requirements. Now, you fill out a pretty extensive on-line passenger locator form with all your trip information and your COVID vaccination card and you’re good to go… into Italy. Getting home, the US is still requiring a negative COVID test no matter what your vaccination status is. But, back in May, the CDC said Abbott’s at-home test can be used. It’s not quite as easy as a home pregnancy test -- the <a href=\"https://www.emed.com/airline-travel\">Abbott test</a> requires you to download an app and enough bandwidth for a video chat with a doctor to visually confirm your identity and the test results -- but it beats having to hunt down at a testing place in a new city.</li><li>In the last episode, I did a bit of “fun with numbers,” pulling daily air passenger numbers from the <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/coronavirus/passenger-throughput\">TSA’s website</a> to look at Memorial Day weekend numbers and then a couple of weeks after that when, on June 11, passenger counts broke 2 million for the first time since the March 2020 lockdowns. Extending that analysis -- from mid-June to now, the last week in July, checkpoint volume growth has plateaued -- the TSA volume numbers averaging just over 2 million/day since the last episode. That’s more than 3 times the 623,000 daily average for the same time last year, but still 21% below 2019’s number. But to a lot of fliers, it doesn’t feel that way. It’s back to full planes, long lines, and tight schedules that can’t recover from inevitable summer thunderstorm delays. Airlines are minimizing schedule slack, trying to claw back some of their 2020 losses, but also because of labor shortages -- from crews to ground-support staff, the people who drive the fuel trucks and cater the planes. Some of that is common to other industries -- people slow to reenter the workforce or took jobs elsewhere when furloughed -- but there’s also something unique to the airlines, staff in the wrong places because travel patterns have shifted. We’ve talked about this before, but with leisure travel snapping back much faster than business travel, the usual big travel destinations -- LGA, ORD, DFW -- are giving way to mid-sized airports. <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/summer-travel-seasons-dont-get-weirder-than-this-one-11626872401?st=7c5z6njyusv2mjg\">The fifth-busiest airport in the world is now in Charlotte, N.C., according to flight data</a>. Charlotte had more flights in June than LAX. Made it tough to be able to spend any time in one of their famous white rocking chairs.</li><li>Last month, American Airlines pulled the plug on <em>American Way</em>, their in-flight magazine. Not surprising. Delta, Southwest, and Alaska all pulled theirs out of their seatback pockets in March 2020 and, most famously, 5 year before COVID in 2015, Skymall disappeared into a Chapter 11 puff of smoke. I, for one, will miss <em>American Way</em>. I’ve always read in-flight magazines and liked that <em>American Way</em> came out twice a month, so it didn’t get as stale as the other ones. Way back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/09/24/podcast-15-begging-for-business-needing-to-know-at-35000-ft/\">episode #15</a>, <em>waay</em> back in 2005, I called them “reading safety stock” because if I was stuck on the runway waiting out a weather ground stop or sitting in&nbsp; Detroit\'s “penalty box” for a couple hours waiting for a landing slot, I’d quickly chew through my own stack of reading material, because, back then, all electronics had to be turned off on the ground and below 10,000 ft to keep a “sterile cabin” for takeoff and landings, and most flight attendants were pretty particular about enforcing it. But all is not lost. United Airlines restarted the physical <em>Hemispheres</em> magazine in June after going all-digital in March 2020.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — &nbsp; Fall to pieces - Silence by mika (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mika/24945 Ft: Colab</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>B-Sides and Rarities - Interview Outtakes</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>After the travel world was shut down in March 2020, I began wondering if TravelCommons would join the furlough ranks for lack of content. It’s tough to do a podcast that’s “more about the journey than the destination” if you’re not journeying. Grounded, locked down, I needed a different way to generate content, so I’ve been doing more interviews. Interviews aren’t <em>less</em> work; it’s just different. Instead of spending time writing, I spend it editing. The typical interview session is 20-30 minutes over Zoom (of course) which I edit down to a 6-8 minute segment which you hopefully find tight, focused and insightful.</li><li>But doing some quick math, that leaves two-thirds of the interview on the cutting floor. Not all of that is insightful -- there’s, say, pronunciation guidance… that I still manage to screw up. But there’s still good stuff that, for whatever reason, doesn’t make it into the edited segment. So for this episode, I’ve pulled out the full interview files and pulled out some stories, some conversational threads that I left behind the first go-around. They’re pretty much unedited, save for snipping out a cough or two --&nbsp; so you’re hearing the actual conversation.</li><li>The first “b-side” is from my conversation in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\">episode #166</a> with <a href=\"https://www.dur.ac.uk/research/directory/staff/?id=15319\">Dr. Emily Thomas</a>, associate professor in philosophy at Durham University in the UK about her book<em> </em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/2DO07fV\"><em>The Meaning of Travel: Philosophers Abroad</em></a>. I reached out to Emily after reading a review of her book in the <em>Wall Street Journal</em>. It was one of my favorite interviews; one that I couldn’t cut down to just 6-8 minutes. But even with the extended play, this thread about different travel styles -- going deep vs. checking off a place’s “greatest hits” -- didn’t make it.</li><li>Next up are a couple of stories from <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/05/09/podcast-175-how-to-find-local-tour-guides-rebuild-travel-muscles/\">episode #175</a> where I talked to <a href=\"https://www.toursbylocals.com/TBL/WebObjects/ToursByLocals.woa/1/wo/y2c7lZDKnxUUHYGLem9YgM/0.41.1.1.50.3\">Paul Melhus</a>, CEO of <a href=\"https://www.toursbylocals.com/\">ToursByLocals</a>, about the local tour market. Paul first told me about the vagaries of selling shore excursion tours to cruise ship passengers and a story about the business challenges he faced in the first days of the COVID lockdown</li><li>The episode before that, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/04/10/podcast-174-how-the-pros-plan-their-taproom-tourism/\">#174</a> if I’m doing my math correctly, was another extended play segment -- 12 minutes -- about taproom tourism, but that was cut down from an hour-and-a-half Zoom beer drinking session with Rob Cheshire host of the UK’s <a href=\"https://thisweekincraft.beer/\">This Week In Craft Beer</a> podcast. Here’s one of the many taproom stories that didn’t make the podcast.  You can catch the full uncut session on the website or the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\">YouTube channel</a>.&nbsp;</li><li>Now it’s not that I didn’t do interviews before the pandemic. Back in January 2020 in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/01/25/podcast-159-planning-the-trip-of-a-lifetime-in-southeast-asia/\">episode #159</a>, I had Allan Marko on talking about trip planning, how he and his wife planned their 9-week sabbatical around Southeast Asia. I thought this was perfect timing -- January is always a big travel planning time. Two months later, most of those plans got blown to bits. But, back in those happier times, here’s a story about the dangers of losing a bag while on a different city-each-day trip</li><li>Editing <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/06/15/podcast-176-why-business-travel-is-coming-back-learning-airport-history/\">last month’s interview</a> with <a href=\"https://udayton.edu/directory/artssciences/history/bednarek_janet.php\">Dr Janet Bednarek</a>, Professor of History at University of Dayton about the history of airports, I had to leave out this thread about who owns US airports. </li><li>And finally, something that’s not really a B-side. Back in<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/05/08/podcast-163-new-world-of-travel-insurance-getting-medical-help-on-the-road/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #163 — New World of Travel Insurance; Getting Medical Help on the Road\"> episode #163</a>, I used a piece of Steve Frick’s <a href=\"https://anchor.fm/steve-frick/\">Travel Stories</a> podcast where we talked about the first TravelCommons episode. Here’s another piece of our conversation where we talk about where our travel paths overlapped.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #177</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_177.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #177 — B-Sides and Rarities... Interview Outtakes','','inherit','closed','closed','','3579-revision-v1','','','2021-08-24 19:39:28','2021-08-25 00:39:28','',3579,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3657',0,'revision','',0),
(3659,1,'2021-08-29 16:05:00','2021-08-29 21:05:00','[caption id=\"attachment_1820\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/IMG_0548.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1820\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/IMG_0548-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> One Way to Reduce Packing Needs by 50%[/caption]\n<p>Fitting 10 days of clothes for rain, hiking, and Michelin restaurants into a 22-inch carry-on forced me to pack ruthlessly, and to distill my packing thoughts into 5 packing pro tips. Flying to Hungary right after a cycling accident reminded me of the hassles of traveling on the injured reserve list. All this and listener comments on EU mobile regulations, travel apps on smartphones, and the need for Atlanta baggage X-ray ninja skills at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_133.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.<br /><!--more--><br />Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #133:</p>\n<ul>\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL after what has been a light month of travel, just 10 days in Scotland on vacation, and then a quick overnight to Atlanta a couple of days after I returned. Other than that, I’ve been in Chicago trying to get back my body clock back to local time. Conventional wisdom says that your body will adjust at the rate of 1-2 time zones a day. So, for the 6 hours between Chicago and the UK, it should take me 3-5 days to adjust. I dunno, it’s felt longer than that. The older I get, the longer it seems to get.</li>\n<li>It’s also harder for me coming west than going east. When I go to Europe, I can set an alarm to wake up at the right time and will myself out of bed and into the shower. Back in the US, I can’t quite “will” myself back to sleep when I wake up at 2 or 3 in the morning. I did find, though, on this trip that I needed to be careful how long I stayed up the first couple of nights. My usual routine is to take a 30-minute nap the first afternoon I’m there -- say around 4:30 -- which then lets me push through to, say 10 or 11 that night. I’m then tired enough to get to sleep at what my body might still think is 5 or 6pm. This trip, I found that if I stayed up past midnight -- maybe because I got to reading something after getting back from dinner -- my body sorta tipped over that inflection point, caught a second, or is it a third wind, and would be happy to push through to 2 or 3 in the morning, which would make the morning’s alarm much tougher to handle.</li>\n<li>The United flight to and from Edinburgh was direct -- always nice -- but on an old 757 that had definitely seen better days, and many of them. Eight hours on any narrow body is tough, but on a 757 -- the narrowest of the narrow bodies -- it’s a bit tougher. And it was completely full -- nothing out-of-the-ordinary nowadays. Our flight from ORD landed shortly after the United direct from EWR landed, and so there was quite a queue for the non-EU passport line. Indeed, as we were coming off the jet bridge, an airport worker turned off the escalator and blocked it off. The end of the passport queue was beginning to block it on the floor below. So I reached into my backpack and pulled out my UK passport and was waved over to a set of four unmanned automated gates with no lines. I put my passport in, took my glasses off for the camera, and walked through when the gates opened up. It was pretty slick.</li>\n<li>I still had to wait for my wife and kids to work their way through the non-EU line, but I made some good use of the time -- I helped a mother and daughter from the EWR flight wrestle some amazing large bags onto a luggage cart, and had collected all of our luggage. If they had a Starbucks there in baggage claim like they do at ORD, it would’ve been damn close to a perfect morning.</li>\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/bridges/15563\">i knew</a> by bridges (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. Ft: shannonsongs</li>\n</ul>\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<ul>\n<li>Received some good comments on the last episode</li>\n<li>Nick -- no last name on the e-mail -- helped answer the question I had about arbitraging different European phone SIMs now that the EU had banned roaming charges. Nick writes -\n<ul>\n<li>You mentioned having 3 EU SIMs to choose from in Dublin, and working out the best value of the three.<br />I live in the UK and have a UK SIM. If I go to Spain, and call a UK number (even if that number belongs to the person next to me) then I just pay a local rate call - or nothing if I have an unlimited calls account. However, if I call a Spanish number, then it counts as an overseas call, as if I were in the UK - even though I\'m in Spain. So which is the best SIM to use will to an extent depend on the actual call rates, but also which country it is registered in, and which country you are calling, independently of where you are.<br />I hope that makes sense, and it\'s useful</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n<li>Nick, thanks for that. It makes a lot of sense when I recall that the EU wanted to eliminate roaming charges, so a mobile call from the UK is the same as one from Spain. For us, though, we’re rarely making a phone call. Indeed, I’m usually the only one making phone calls and that’s typically into a conference bridge. During our 10 days in Scotland, I used 11 of the 300 minutes in my 30 day plan. My wife’s 7 day plan ran out and she never noticed, because her 1 GB of data didn’t. And I think that’s where the arbitrage still could work, on using the cheapest data plan. That will, though, take a good bit of wading through really bad websites with confusing plan descriptions that are only partially in English. I think I’ll probably default to using my UK SIM just out of sheer laziness.</li>\n<li>Steve Frick left a comment on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page about the new parallel loading baggage X-ray machines I’ve encountered in the ATL PreCheck line. Steve writes -\n<ul>\n<li>I agree with you that people are hesitant to jump the queue in front of others..... and you do need mad ninja skills if you\'re in the first slot trying to grab one of those oversized bins</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n<li>Steve linked to his blog post where he has video and a more detailed description of the situation. Check out the show notes for a <a href=\"http://www.hypeorlando.com/back-and-gone-again/2017/05/01/atlanta-hartsfield-has-automated-the-tsa-process/\">link to his blog</a></li>\n<li>I have to give the ATL TSA crew props for noticing the problem with breaking into the stream of bins if you’re in one of the front loading stations. When I was going through ATL a few weeks back, there was a TSA person at the parallel loading line choreographing each bin push, having everyone hold up until all the previous bins had cleared, and then having everyone push their bins onto the conveyor at once. I haven’t seen this problem with parallel loaders in, say, Edinburgh or Heathrow or Madrid. I wonder what’s different that requires this manual intervention.</li>\n<li>And there were a couple of comments on the travel apps people use on their smartphones. Dan Brener left this Facebook\n<ul>\n<li>Great episode! Here\'s the apps I use the most: Air Canada and United, TripIt (although it\'s not as good as it could/should be), I used to use FlightTrack and really miss it, FlightAware since the AC app doesn\'t tell me where planes are coming from, Uber and Lyft, Packing (it\'s a list app to make sure I don\'t forget something obvious!), SPG, Yelp, Google Maps and Waze. There\'s a few others, but those are the main ones.</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n<li>Dan, thanks for that list. I had forgotten to mention Yelp in the last episode. I have some colleagues who are heavy Yelp users; they’ll build lists of restaurants and bars before starting a project in a new city. I tend to use Yelp and the “Explore food &amp; drinks near you” feature in Google Maps for restaurant suggestions interchangeably when I’m in a new place. I’m always surprised at how different the recommendations often are.</li>\n<li>Gary Learned sent in on Twitter -\n<ul>\n<li>What I love about Lyft over Uber is their ability to produce a consolidated receipt of all my rides on a trip</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n<li>Thanks Gary. I’ve noticed that functionality in the Lyft app, but it’s not hugely useful for me since we use Concur for our T&amp;E reporting, and it picks up the individual Amex charges rather than a feed from Lyft. Would be handy if Concur would pull a single consolidated charge from Lyft.</li>\n<li>And finally, a couple of weeks later on Twitter, Eddie Antar, who is always a chuckle, said\n<ul>\n<li>Binge listening to TC bc I had to let an AA voucher expire.? OTOH I\'m not being groped or dragged down the aisle screaming, so.</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n<li>I dunno, listening to my is better than being groped or dragged down the plane aisle. Feels a bit like being damned with very faint praise...</li>\n<li>And one last Tweet, this one from the Craig and Linda Martin of the Indie Travel Podcast…\n<ul>\n<li>Highlight of the week? meeting fellow travel podcaster @mpeacock for lunch &amp; craft beer in Edinburgh. 10 or so years of podcast friendship</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n<li>Honestly, I think Linda and I had been trading e-mails for most of this year, seeing if we could physically meet up after so many years of knowing each other in the travel podcast universe. One of us would hear the other mention travel plans in a podcast that might overlap with the other’s. It finally came together at the end of our Scotland vacation and the beginning of theirs. They flew into EDI Sunday night; we were leaving from EDI Tuesday morning, so Monday lunch was the call. I drove over from St Andrews to a new neighborhood for me; kinda hip. Linda picked a nice pub with a great beer list that we all enjoyed. It is one of the great things about travel -- getting to meet up with friends; and in this case, for the first time.</li>\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/11510\">Funkist</a> - cdk dub mix by cdk (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: teru.</li>\n</ul>\n<p><strong>Packing Pro Tips</strong></p>\n<ul>\n<li>Getting everything I needed for our 10 days in Scotland into a carry-on bag pushed my packing skills just a bit. The trip was mostly hiking and hill walks with a couple of 1-star Michelin restaurants thrown into the mix. And the forecast was for rain just about every day. We were on a direct flight to EDI and my daughter had to check a bag with stuff she was taking back to university, so the carry-on limitation wasn’t because of lost luggage or being able to power past the baggage carousel -- a non-starter given the long non-EU immigration line at EDI. It was more about trunk space in the rental car. As it was, I was doing luggage jenga just about every morning trying to puzzle everything into the back of our Nissan X-Terra.</li>\n<li>I easily spent an hour -- 2-3 times longer than usual -- trying to figure out how to get hiking shoes, rain gear, dress shirts, and everything else into that 22-inch bag. It made me pack ruthlessly -- everything had to earn its space in the bag. And though I’ve casually mentioned some of these ideas in prior episodes, this latest packing experience really crystallized this pro tip list.</li>\n<li>First and foremost, pick a single color family for your clothes, and make it black. Three main reasons -- Black makes everyone look thinner, it spans casual to smart dress codes, and black doesn’t show stains. OK, the thinner thing is a nice-to-have, but hiding stains is key. I packed two pair of slacks and wore a third on the plane. I couldn’t be one-and-done because I took incoming from a fork-handling mishap.</li>\n<li>Second, no one-and-done outfits. Every piece of clothes has to serve multiple purposes so it can be worn multiple times -- every shirt has to work under multiple sweaters and has to go with more than one pair of pants. Versatility is key. And yet another reason to pack black.</li>\n<li>Third, think \"additively\"; pack layers. This was key in my last packing challenge too -- last year’s Spring Break trip to Iceland and Southern Spain that I talked about in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/05/30/podcast-121-tsa-lines-my-luggage-is-where/\">episode #121</a>. Pack multiple thin layers that you can pile on when it’s cold and wear separately when it’s not. Black sweaters and a black fleece vest are my layering go-to’s.</li>\n<li>Fourth, wear your bulkiest clothes on the flight. I packed the hiking rain shell and flew in the blazer I needed for the 1-stars because the shell is infinitely more crushable. My only caveat to this is shoes. I packed the hiking shoes, even though they were bulkier than the dressily casual walking shoes I was also bringing, because I didn’t want to set off the metal detector in the Pre-Check line or get pulled out because the soles are too thick. If you’re not doing Pre-Check, you’re already taking your shoes off, so wear your biggest ones.</li>\n<li>And my fifth and final pro tip, use a non-descript black rolling bag. Black not only makes you look thinner, it makes your bag look thinner to gate agents scanning for bag-sizer bait. My daughter had a baby blue roller bag for the longest time. She loved that color, and it was easy to spot on the luggage carousel, which is a good thing; it ended up there a lot because gate agents were always pulling my daughter out of line to gate check that bag. Her current bag is a dark eggplant purple. It’s not black, but it’s close. If you’re flying a budget airline that’s a stickler on size, use a hard-shell bag. It’ll keep its dimensions better when overstuffed, and the polycarbonate shell will slide past the metal bars of the sizer easier than the ballistic nylon of a soft-sided bag.</li>\n<li>There you go, my five packing pro tips. If you’ve got some of your own to share, send them along through the usual channels and we’ll have them on the next episode.</li>\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/48705\">Jolanta Blues</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license.  Ft: Admiral Bob, Martijn de Boer</li>\n</ul>\n<p><strong>Traveling Injured</strong></p>\n<ul>\n<li>In a couple of <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/02/06/podcast-87-sick-on-the-road-whats-in-my-briefcase/\">past</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/03/13/podcast-88-new-travel-goodies-losing-status/\">episodes</a>, we’ve talked about how miserable it is to be sick on the road. Traveling injured is a bit similar, but not quite the same. While you’re not, say, shivering under hotel blankets after you’ve cranked the thermostat as high as it’ll go, you’re not powering through your day at 100%.</li>\n<li>The most recent stint on travel injured reserve was our May trip to Hungary. My wife had left the week before to visit her aunt and cousins, leaving me alone with the cat. I was working from home one nice day and decided to take a break for a bike ride. Figured I should take every opportunity to burn some calories now since Hungarian food isn’t known as spa cuisine. I did my normal 17-mile circuit for the 50th or 60th time. Coming towards the last mile, I’m looking ahead to line up a turn and boom -- I hit some huge divot in the pavement that I’ve never seen before. My hands fly off the handle bar, I see the front wheel turned 90 degrees, and down I go, skidding across the asphalt. I come to a stop just short of the curb, pick myself up, rinse the visible road rash with the last bits of water in my bottle, and limp my bike and myself home.</li>\n<li>I immediately hit the shower, scrubbed out the road rash (with, as you might imagine, a bit of loud vocal commentary), and surveyed the damage. Good sized abrasions on my right elbow and forearm, my right butt cheek, both knees, and a line on my left chest where I must’ve popped the handle bar. I lost a bunch of skin, but felt lucky I didn’t break a collarbone or something worse.</li>\n<li>The Friday night flight to Vienna was not a comfortable one. No knock on Austrian Airlines; as I mentioned in an <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/06/24/podcast-130-notes-from-hungary/\">earlier podcast</a>, I was happy with their service. It was primarily the seat -- a standard coach seat, so not overly spacious -- pressing up against that large bit of road rash on my right, uhh, hip. Indeed, that abrasion was still -- I think “weeping” is the technical term. And so halfway through the flight, I was in the toilet with my tube of neosporin, my gauze pads and my surgical tape re-dressing it. It was either that or change pants. And following my packing pro tips, I couldn’t do a one-and-done on these pants. Luckily, I was in that quiet time between the after-dinner and the just-before-landing toilet rushes, so no banging on the door to hurry up.</li>\n<li>Every day was like that -- 30 minutes of removing and reapplying dressings, at first 3 times a day, then 2, and then when things finally scabbed up a bit, just in the morning, and really by then as much for cosmetic purposes -- so that people wouldn’t ask me about it -- as much as anything. I had to skip the family trip to a Budapest thermal bath -- I didn’t want some bath guard calling me out of the pool in front of a couple of thousand Hungarians, and I honestly wasn’t sure how aggressively they were chlorinating that water.</li>\n<li>That wasn’t my most awkward stint on the travel injured reserve list. Last year, I squeezed in a dermatologist appt for a mole scan before a flight out that afternoon. The doc said “This one looks a bit suspect”, putting his finger on a mole right in the middle of my back. He numbed it up, shaved it off, sent it off to the lab and bandaged me up. “Change that dressing every day,” he said as I raced out to head to ORD. The next morning, in a hotel bathroom, by myself, looking in the mirror at the gauze dressing between my shoulder blades that I couldn’t reach, I wondered how I could change that dressing -- call the front desk, ask a colleague? That seemed way too much to ask. And, it wasn’t that big of a mole. That dressing could wait ‘til Friday.</li>\n</ul>\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<ul>\n<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #133</li>\n<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\n<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_133.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #133 — Packing Pro Tips; Traveling Injured','','inherit','closed','closed','','1819-revision-v1','','','2021-08-29 16:05:00','2021-08-29 21:05:00','',1819,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3659',0,'revision','',0),
(3660,1,'2021-08-29 16:07:29','2021-08-29 21:07:29','[caption id=\"attachment_1803\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/DSC_5935a.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1803\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/DSC_5935a-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> How Are Their Yelp Reviews?[/caption]\n\nIt\'s a listener request podcast. A fellow Peacock, this one named Jack, asked \"What travel apps do you have on your iPhone?\" Paging back through the TravelCommons archives, I’ve covered different categories of travel apps,  -- in the most recent iteration of my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/12/12/top-10-holiday-travel-tips-2/\">Top 10 Travel Tips</a> I recommended some flight tracking apps and way before that, did a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/11/29/podcast-102-trip-management-app-comparison-tsa-scanner-shuffle/\">bake-off of trip management apps</a> -- but never covered walked through what’s in the travel folder on the home screen of my iPhone. I\'ve now remedied that oversight. We also continue talking about overseas phone SIMs; the impact of the new EU ban on roaming charges. Also, my first encounter with some new TSA scanning equipment.  All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_132.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n<!--more-->\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #132:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you, as always it seems, from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. Seems that I’ve swapped the romance of hotel bathrooms for the sound quality of the studio here. Seems like yesterday when I was <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2009/04/15/podcast-73-eating-alone-on-the-road-more-things-you-never-want-to-hear/\">recording the intro</a> in the business class toilet of a South African Airways A340 on the way down to J’burg</li>\n 	<li>My travel since <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/07/30/podcast-131-twitter-concierge-customer-service-london-tube-story/\">the last episode</a> hasn’t been anything quite as exciting. Trips to Richmond, Baltimore and New York City. Indeed, if I tried recording in the toilet of one of those American or United A321s, I don’t think I’d get too far past “Hello, this is Mark Peacock…” before someone started banging on the door.</li>\n 	<li>Richmond airport continued to be a problem for me -- not the airport itself, just the carriers flying into it. I get up on a Tuesday morning -- sidestepping the Monday morning road warrior crush -- iPhone notifications from American, TripIt, and Google all say my flight is on-time. Pulling up to the terminal -- everything still looks OK. I walk through the doors and my phone explodes -- my 8:20 am flight is now leaving at 4 something pm! The next note is from American telling me they’ve booked me on the 11:45am flight, so instead of getting to RIC at 11:20am, I’m now due in at 2:40pm -- over 3 hrs late. A quick call to Amex Travel tells me that the early morning United flight has already left, so this is my best option. Since, as I talked about in the last episode, I’ve given up depending on airlines being able to meet their schedules, I hadn’t booked any early afternoon meetings, so I just parked myself in the Admirals Club and got some work done. Nothing lost but a bit of sleep.</li>\n 	<li>With this in mind, I was gritting my teeth when I had to head back to ORD the next week for my flight to LGA. I haven’t had to fly to New York much recently, and when I have, I’ve flown into EWR to avoid the nightmare-ish delays being reported from LGA because of the construction. There’d been stories of people abandoning their cabs on the Grand Central Parkway to walk into LGA. And then there’s just flying between two of the US’s most congested airports. I’ve always said that anything less than a 30-minute delay between LGA and ORD is on-time. So I booked my flights to avoid rush hours -- leaving ORD at 4pm, arriving LGA at 7:30, and my return flight leaving LGA at 3:30 the next afternoon. I land in LGA on-time. There’s no taxi queue, and I’m into the Sheraton Times Square by a little after 8 -- no flight delays, no traffic. I quietly offer up my first beer at The Three Monkeys to the travel gods in thanksgiving.</li>\n 	<li>The next day, we finish up our meeting in midtown an hour early, I walk out of the building to find all sorts of cabs. The first cab doesn’t have the time to take me to LGA, but the second guy is happy to. We make good time across town to the tunnel and there’s no traffic on the Grand Central. I tip the guy well, walk up to an American kiosk and see that I can standby on the 1:30pm flight -- which will be boarding in about 5 minutes. I hit the TSA PreCheck line -- about 5 people in front of me, but the TSA folks are in good humor and moving things along. I hear the gate agent call my name as I walk up to the gate. The flight takes off on time and lands early. Hey, American made up 2 of the 3 hr-delay from last week! And on an LGA-ORD flight. I offered up a bigger beer when I got home.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/JeffSpeed68/54450\">Hula Hoop Party</a> by Stefan Kartenberg (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: Martijn de Boer, Blue Wave Theory</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Mike Skinner took a couple of minutes to stop by the TravelCommons web site and leave a comment about the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/07/30/podcast-131-twitter-concierge-customer-service-london-tube-story/\">last episode</a>. Mike writes\n<ul>\n 	<li>“Long time listener, really enjoy the show.“Your comments on the Dreamliner were very interesting to me. I\'ve flown one long-haul on several occasions, and yes, the windows are fun to play with. But you didn\'t have any comments on what I think is the most important attribute. The 787 isn\'t just another \"metal tube\"..... It is constructed from carbon fiber, and can be pressurized to a higher level than most normal passenger jets. The environment inside is at higher air pressure (like being at 6,000\' rather than 10000\' elevation), with a higher level of humidity (air not so dry), and more refreshes. I found it a great plane to fly on a long red-eye! Or any 5+ hour flight.\n“I\'m looking forward to this fall, when I\'m flying one r/t LAX-SYD in UA\'s BF cabin (14 hour flight)”</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Mike, thanks for the comment. You’re absolutely right about the 787’s carbon fiber build allowing it to be pressurized at a lower level -- I’m not sure if that’s because of an increase in strength from the carbon fiber or because it’s less impervious to the higher moisture content of the denser air. But I didn’t notice a difference between my flight out to on an A330 and my flight back on the 787. Of course, it might be that I wasn’t paying enough attention to the negative -- less dry eye; less “cotton mouth” -- or that that the LHR-ORD flight wasn’t a red-eye; and so I was able to keep myself hydrated more than I would on a red-eye. Maybe I would’ve noticed the difference on those 17-hr SAA flights to Joburg those years ago. Whatever the reason, anything that makes those long-haul flights more bearable is a great thing. Safe travels on your upcoming flight to Sydney.</li>\n 	<li>That A330 flight didn’t go direct to London. I was late booking my ticket and so instead flew Aer Lingus to Gatwick via Dublin. It was the first time in at least 25 years that I’ve been through Dublin airport. It was a nice enough airport, but crowded for an early Monday morning. I was glad I didn’t have to go through security again, because when I looked past the scanners, it looked to be a bit of zoo parade. But, adding again to the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/01/16/podcast-126-beating-the-traffic-rethinking-carry-on-luggage/\">multi</a>-<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/02/20/podcast-127-critiquing-my-top-10-travel-tips-reviewing-vpns/\">episode</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/03/31/podcast-128-hunt-for-experiences-pop-up-entertainment/\">thread </a>about buying and using local phone SIMs during international travel, I saw the first benefits of the EU’s ban against mobile roaming charges. On the flight over, I’d swapped my US SIM for my UK SIM. Coming out of airplane mode in Dublin, I get what look like the typical welcome texts, but instead of giving me the roaming charges, they tell me that my UK plan is good in Ireland. Might seem kind of a minor thing, but at least for traveling within Europe, there are some real benefits. First is not having to burn through an hour or two at the beginning of a vacation finding a phone store and then going through the hassle of buying a pay-as-you-go SIM. In Paris, I had to go to 3 phone stores to find the SIM I wanted. In Hungary, T-Mobile wouldn’t sell my wife a SIM without a Hungarian citizenship or registration card -- which, of course, she didn’t have. Luckily, my wife’s cousin was with her and she was able to buy SIMs for all of us. If I don’t need to buy a new French or Hungarian SIM to avoid roaming charges, this kind of hassle goes away. I wonder also if there’s a bit of an arbitrage opportunity. Now that I have a UK, French, and Hungarian SIM, do I figure out which one has the cheapest rate and then use that one for all of my trips? I need to read the new regs on that one.</li>\n 	<li>On my last couple of trips through ATL, it seems that the lines for PreCheck are configured differently every time. Not quite sure why that is. Every other airport, it’s pretty static -- go to this set of lanes, but ATL, for some reason, wants to change the entrance to the maze each time. They also have put new parallel loading baggage X-ray machines in the ATL PreCheck line. These are pretty common in Europe but just now dribbling into US airports. Rather than queuing up and waiting for each person to put their stuff on the belt, there are 4 loading stations where a group of people each reach below, grab a bin, put it in front of you, put your stuff in it, and then push it onto the conveyor. Since there are 4 people loading at the same time, there’s no “performance anxiety” to make sure you have your belt-loading choreography flawless, and there’s no eye-rolling and foot-tapping while waiting for those who don’t. There are a couple of hassles, though. First, since it’s new, most people are still in serial mode; they don’t know that it’s OK to break queue and step around to an empty loading station. At many European airports, they have someone telling you which loading station to go to (usually with numbered stickers on the floor -- “You, station 1; you, station 6). The TSA hasn’t quite got with this program. Second, if you’re in one of the front loading stations, it takes a little, uh, muscle to break the stream of bins, to shove your bin onto the conveyor. Too polite and you’ll just stand there watching a stream of bins go by. All in all, it’s a definite improvement, but needs a bit of, say, process optimization.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/49674\">H2O</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Travel Apps on My Phone</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>A few weeks ago, Jack Peacock from northern Florida -- kinda near where the panhandle connects to the peninsula -- pinged me on the TravelCommons website with a couple of questions. First was a genealogy question. Peacock isn’t a common last name in the US and so when we meet, “where’s the last name from” is a common icebreaker. Peacock is probably more common down South where Jack and other southern Peacocks will trace their roots back to a Samuel Peacock born 1671 probably in Colonial VA. My line is from more recent immigrant stock, though. My dad grew up in Southport, on the northwest coast of the UK, between Liverpool and Blackpool, and came over to the US in 1956.</li>\n 	<li>That out of the way, Jack said that he and his wife are retired, have put their home and vehicles up for sale, and are getting ready to Airbnb the globe. “Geriatric gap year” as Jack put it. I am officially jealous. Which leads to his second question -- what travel apps do I have on my phone? A very timely question since Carlson Wagonlit Travel just <a href=\"http://www.carlsonwagonlit.com/content/cwt/global/en/news/news-releases/20170824-Business-travelers-find-they-are-very-productive-due-to-more-technology-options.html\">released a survey</a> where 80% of business travelers said their smartphone was the “travel tool they can’t live without”, and 45% used airline and hotel apps as their main travel technology.</li>\n 	<li>Paging back through the TravelCommons archives, I see that I’ve touched on some categories of travel apps -- in the most recent iteration of my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/12/12/top-10-holiday-travel-tips-2/\">Top 10 Travel Tips</a> I recommended some flight tracking apps and way before that, did a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/11/29/podcast-102-trip-management-app-comparison-tsa-scanner-shuffle/\">bake-off of trip management apps</a> -- but never walked through what’s in the travel folder on the home screen of my iPhone.</li>\n 	<li>As long time listeners know -- and have suffered through -- I can’t just go through a laundry list. In other words, I can’t just quickly answer Jack’s question. First, I need to build (and drag you all through) some kind of framework that provides some structure to my laundry list. It’s my own little piece of OCD. One way to start is to split between apps with broad general use -- say like Google Maps -- and those more specific to a situation -- the apps of the airlines you use the most, or, say, mass transit apps for a city you’ll be visiting.</li>\n 	<li>Let’s dig down to the next layer of the specific category. I have apps for the airlines I use for 90% of my travel -- American, United, Southwest, and Delta -- in that order -- because living in Chicago, American and United have hubs at ORD and Southwest owns MDW. I have Delta for the odd flight between, say, Atlanta and New York. The mix will change based on what you fly -- in Boston, you may have JetBlue, in London you certainly have BA. I mostly use these apps for two reasons -- electronic boarding passes and flight status. I talked in the last episode about how I used the “Where is my plane now” feature of United’s app to track back to the source of a RIC flight delay to GRR. Helped give me a sense of whether that delay could shrink or grow. Also, these apps are getting much quicker about pushing flight status and gate change notifications. Indeed, these apps have gotten good enough that the independent/more general flight tracking apps on my phone -- FlightAware, FlightView, and FlightStats -- are on the bubble. I’ll probably delete two of them and keep one -- either FlightAware or FlightView because of how they show the projected flight path on a weather map. You can find this in the United app, but you have to dig a bit. FlightAware and FlightView have it as their primary app view. It’s another good piece of information for when you’re thinking through flight delays.</li>\n 	<li>I didn’t load up the Aer Lingus app for my flight to London last month (if they even have one). It’s not worth it for a single flight. Same reason I’ve never loaded Alaska Air’s app even though I seem to end up on them at least once a year. It’s not worth the phone real estate. Which is the same reason I’ve deleted hotel apps from my phone. I’ve never found any value in the Marriott or Starwood apps. Same with the Hertz and Avis apps. However, if I was Airbnb’ing around the world like Jack is planning, I would probably load up their app.</li>\n 	<li>Another specific app I have is My EE -- the app for the UK mobile carrier who’s pay-as-you-go SIM I use. The last iteration of this app made it easier than EE’s website to do a SIM top-up, so it’s now in my Travel folder.</li>\n 	<li>A bit more general is the Priority Pass app which gets me access to international airport lounges through my Amex Platinum card. It regularly updates its list of available lounges and has airport maps to help you find them. This came in real handy in Dublin where the lounge was tucked away on a second floor with very minimal signage.</li>\n 	<li>Another kinda general app is the companion app to my Bluesmart roller bag. It connects to my bag via Bluetooth, automatically locks it when it’s out of range of my phone, and displays the bag’s location when I have to check it. The auto lock is probably the most useful thing. It’s consistently on the bubble.</li>\n 	<li>I have both Uber and Lyft in my Travel folder. I’ll typically light both of those apps up when looking for a ride somewhere, comparing price and wait time. As I mentioned during a broader discussion of ride sharing <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/11/22/podcast-125-uber-driver-stories-overseas-for-the-election/\">a few episodes back</a>, all things being equal, I’ll choose Lyft, but I use both of them regularly.</li>\n 	<li>Five years ago, I <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/11/29/podcast-102-trip-management-app-comparison-tsa-scanner-shuffle/\">reviewed</a> the 3 main trip management apps -- Tripit, TripCase, and Worldmate -- that recreated the old company travel agent’s printed trip itinerary by integrating separate airline, hotel, and rental car reservations for free, and real-time flight updates for a fee. I liked Worldmate the best, with TripCase a solid second. Today, I use Tripit. Carlson Wagonlit closed up Worldmate at the beginning of the year, and Sabre’s TripCase is hot mess of advertising. Tripit has continued to improve their app. The ability to share a piece of an itinerary (a flight, a hotel) through iPhone’s iMessage is surprisingly handy. But the $50/yr Tripit Pro is also on the bubble because of the airline apps’ improved notifications.</li>\n 	<li>Google Translate has grown into a critical travel app. I’ve talked in a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/06/24/podcast-130-notes-from-hungary/\">previous episode</a> about how, with real-time translation through the camera, it’s becoming pretty close to magic.\nTransit is another app that continues to solidify its hold on screen real estate. Transit covers mass transit across North America and major cities in Europe. Google Maps suggests mass transit routings, but Transit goes much deeper -- with things like real-time bus and subway data and bike share locations for cities like Chicago and New York.</li>\n 	<li>And then, of course, there is Google Maps. I use it to plan trips, find hotels, check out neighborhoods, figure out where I am, share locations -- as well as getting me from Point A to Point B. It is probably the most indispensable travel app on my phone. Indeed, it’s the only travel app with its own screen real estate rather than sharing space in the Travel folder</li>\n 	<li>What are your suggestions?</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #132</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_132.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #132 — Travel Apps on My Phone','','inherit','closed','closed','','1798-revision-v1','','','2021-08-29 16:07:29','2021-08-29 21:07:29','',1798,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3660',0,'revision','',0),
(3662,1,'2021-08-29 16:10:57','2021-08-29 21:10:57','[caption id=\"attachment_1749\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/IMG_0033.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1749\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/IMG_0033-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> One of the Four Major Food Groups[/caption]\n\nIt\'s a very Paris-centric episode; I\'m still trying to drop the weight I picked up on our 10-day stay. I talk about hunts for beer and pastry took us out of the usual Notre Dame-to-Eiffel Tower-to-Louvre tourist triangle, some of the interesting buskers we saw along the way, and my surprise at Munich Airport receiving an airport award. I also continue our on-going discussions about buying international SIM cards and ride-sharing. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_128.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.<!--more-->\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #128:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, after a full month of travel. I’m not complaining though, because -- first, I had been home, off the road, for 4 weeks straight and was beginning to make the place look untidy; and then more than a week of this travel spurt was in Paris, on vacation with the family. Tough to complain about travel with your mouth full of great food and wine. And mine certainly was. I’m not even looking at a scale for another 2 weeks.</li>\n 	<li>In what’s become our usual pattern for European trips, we flew out on a Thursday night. This works out well because typically Friday is a catch-up day at work -- more about internal conference calls than client work -- so it’s easier to skip out, and then landing on a Friday, more places are open -- like rental agency offices, phone stores -- if you need them. My wife and I flew into Paris and had a 3-star Michelin lunch to chase away jet lag, while the kids met up in Edinburgh for the weekend and lived off of beer and haggis. They then hopped one of the budget carriers to CDG Sunday night and managed to figure out the train well enough to land at the doorstep of our vacation rental on Rue de Rivoli, a bridge and a couple of blocks straight up from Notre Dame. My wife has this whole vacation rental thing down to a near science. I think I need to nag her into writing it up in a post for the TravelCommons web site.</li>\n 	<li>In the travel build-up to the Paris trip, another usual pattern; this one involves a bit more stupid travel -- bouncing across multiple clients and cities, to give everyone face-time before I disappear for a week; I found myself in Miami for a couple of days. I flew American back home to Chicago Friday night, and I guess because I was going between two of their hubs, I ended up on one of American’s international 767’s. Now, I typically despise 767’s because the overhead bins are way undersized. But, it was one of the best domestic upgrades I’ve scored. First, because between First and Business class, there’s a whole lot more seat for an upgrade. And then, this 767’s business class had been upgraded, so I had my own “pod” with a lie-flat seat and a 20-something inch screen -- much bigger than the screen smaller than my hand that I tweeted from the United 767 I took from ORD to CDG. Made for a very comfortable 3-hr flight.</li>\n 	<li>But back to Paris, the trip went without a hitch -- the strong dollar made an expensive a city a little less so, the weather was great for March -- sunny, a bit brisk. I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to get around with just English. I know I’m a language sloth, and while I didn’t expect it, I was happy not to have to struggle through with my minimal French. Indeed, the only smirch on trip was at the very end. We landed at ORD after 7pm, after half of Immigration shut down. The resulting lines were insane; Security was walking planeloads of people from the other side of the international terminal to our side and to the back of our line. They were shouting for all US citizens to get stand to the left of the hallway. After about 10 minutes of this, I asked a security person about Global Entry. “Oh, go this way,” she said and pointed down an empty line. We bolted, and were out after another 5 minutes. Customs should’ve had a guy walking that line taking Global Entry applications. They would’ve made a killing.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://www.magnatune.com/artists/albums/rompaey-mozaic/\">Bubbly</a></em> by Ruben van Rompaey</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>First up, a belated Thank You to iTunes user <em>California flying</em> for the 5-star review back in January:\n<ul>\n 	<li>“As a project manager with lots of travel thrown in, I really enjoy hearing Mark’s travel tales and can very much relate to his insight and observations. It’s an easy and fun listen. Just wish it was more frequent!”</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Thanks for taking the time to write that review. I’m glad you enjoy the podcast. I am trying on the frequency. This will be 3 straight months of episodes, so we’re starting 2017 in the right way.</li>\n 	<li>In the last episode, after deconstructing my own Top 10 travel tips list, I asked for listener contributions. Dan wrote this on the TravelCommons web site\n<ul>\n 	<li>“My biggest travel tip right now to my friends is get Nexus! Not only is it great when coming or going to the US (we live in Canada), but it gets you TSA Precheck while in the US which is great to have.”</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Good tip, Dan. As a US citizen, I’m still a bit confused on the Global Entry vs. Nexus choice. But anything that lets you skip Immigration lines and keep from having to disrobe in the security line is a good thing.</li>\n 	<li>Dan Brener and Max Flight both hit the TravelCommons’ Facebook page to say they found the VPN comparison in the last episode useful. Dan said that he also uses PIA and has found that, sometimes, Netflix will let it connect -- which I mentioned is kinda the acid test for location shifting. Dan says it is a bit hit-&amp;-miss though.</li>\n 	<li>Continuing the thread from the past couple of episodes on buying pay-as-you-go-SIMs when overseas, my Paris experiences were a mixed bag. On that first Friday, between picking up the apartment keys and heading to the George V for lunch, I wanted to pick up at least one SIM so we’d have some connectivity. I walked to nearest Orange store -- about 3 blocks down Rue de Rivoli. They didn’t have any regular prepaid SIMs in stock; only the special Holiday SIM which had inter-EU calling which I didn’t need and, at 40 euros, was more than I needed to pay. This became a common refrain. Every company-owned Orange and SFR store I visited was out of prepaid SIMs. Only what appeared to be a franchised Orange store in the bottom of the big underground shopping mall at Les Halles had them, and also very friendly service. That got us through the weekend. On Monday, after another string of Orange stiff arms, we walked up to the main Free store -- which I think sells TV as well as mobile service. We walked up to a vending machine in the lobby and pretty quickly had two more SIMs; a much better buying experience except for the fact that the store was inconveniently tucked away down a bland business street north of the Champs Elysee. I’ll be glad when the eSIM gets market traction.</li>\n 	<li>And continuing another thread, this one on Uber, while I regularly use Uber and Lyft in the US, I rarely -- if ever -- use them while traveling in Europe. I got to thinking about this while in Paris when, on Saturday when heading to the airport, we chose to roll the luggage to a taxi rank rather than use Uber. It’s a couple of reasons. First, there doesn’t seem to be that much of a price difference between Uber and taxis. I first noticed this in Lisbon last spring and then again in Paris. Second, most taxis in Europe are not the beaters that many US cabs are. In the US, even at the same rate, I’ll often take Uber because the cars are in so much better shape. The cabs in Baltimore last summer were the most egregious case. There was a cab stand right outside the building I was in, but I’d still wait 5 minutes for an Uber. And third, and maybe the most nebulous (squishy?), I’m maybe a bit less comfortable getting into a ride-share in a country where I don’t know the language and am not confident that I’m solid on the customs and protocols. In the US, I know what’s right and what’s not. Even in the UK, I’m comfortable enough and don’t worry about communicating effectively with the driver. I know zero Portuguese and little more French. So I’m a bit more willing to search out a taxi stand.</li>\n 	<li>I was flipping through the online version of the UK’s Telegraph newspaper earlier this month and got clickbaited into a Top 10 Airport listicle from the 2017 Skytrax World Airport Awards. They had all the usual suspects at the top of the list -- Singapore, Seoul, Hong Kong -- but at #4, they had Munich! I was stunned because my last two experiences connecting through Munich -- last Nov en route to Pisa and this month on my way back from Paris -- were not great as my Twitter followers already know. Probably the worst thing are the lines, and how brutally slow they move. Back in episode #125, I described the security crawl when trying to connect to our Pisa flight mid-morning on a Friday. I was stunned how slow the security staff was moving. No sense of urgency as a dozen lines tailed back through the terminal. I thought a union had called for some job action. But then in March, it was a huge tailback off of passport control. I’m used to Frankfurt where you walk up, answer a question, boom-boom they stamp your passport and through you go. Not in Munich. It was that same meandering pace. Like the place was in slow motion. The same thing at the one restaurant we found in the satellite portion of Terminal 2. Four people were behind the counter. The line trying to ordering tailed back, but only one of the four was helping customers. The other three were having some conversation and doing some paperwork. So why did Skytrax rate Munich #4? Apparently, it has its own brewery, a mini-golf course, and in the winter, a Christmas market and an ice skating rink -- none of which I experienced while struggling through lines trying to make a connection. And maybe that’s the problem -- Munich is focused on being a shopping mall/entertainment center rather than being an airport. Planning a flight to Budapest in May, I was offered two connection choices -- Munich or Vienna. I didn’t even pause to think about it. choosing Vienna, even though it’s nowhere in that Skytrax list. I’m hoping they’ll work harder on getting me through the airport than grooming a mini-golf course.</li>\n 	<li>And finally, congrats to Frank Mohnhaupt for winning a year\'s subscription to NordVPN. Frank’s entry in the Rafflecopter drawing was subscribing to the TravelCommons’ SoundCloud feed. And thanks again to NordVPN for providing the giveaway prize.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/kokoon-berlin/\">How Do I Work This</a></em> by The Kokoon</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>The Hunt for Experiences</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>In Paris, that first weekend when it was just my wife and I -- the kids were hunting haggis in Edinburgh -- was spent a good chunk of the time on what I call “hunts”. We got up and out early on Saturday -- always a good way to fight jet lag -- hunting for a pastry. Not just any pastry, because in Paris, that would in no way qualify as a hunt. No, it was a specific kind of pastry -- a kugelhopf, a kind of a hat-shaped pastry. And not just any kugelhopf. We were tracking down Vandermeersch, which, according to an article my wife read in Saveur magazine, makes the best kugelhopf in Paris and usually sells out shortly after opening -- hence the early morning alarm. So off we go, using Google Maps to tell us the right combination of Metros to get us to the correct outer bit of Paris. We get there shortly after opening and had the full selection of kugelhopfs -- small, medium, large. The couple of nice middle-aged women running what was a small shop helped us to by 2 smalls -- one to eat right away; the second for Sunday morning -- and a medium for Monday morning for breakfast with the kids. We ate that small one fresh, on the street. I don’t know if it was the best kugelhopf because my sample size was (and still is) one, but it was a pretty damn good pastry and worth forgoing the snooze button the early alarm.</li>\n 	<li>Saturday afternoon, we went on my hunt -- for a microbrewery, in an even further out bit of Paris, that’s only open Saturday afternoons. And where our morning visit to Vandermeersch landed us in a seemingly upscale neighborhood where people were up early for the morning runs along the grass boulevard dividers, that afternoon, we walked up the Metro steps on the main street of a heavily North African neighborhood; definitely outside the tourist bubble. Walking across the park here -- no grass, just dirt.</li>\n 	<li>But walking into the microbrewery, off kind of a dodgy street, put us in the midst of what seemed to be the standard afternoon outing for Parisian hipster families. Mostly while families with little kids; lots of bikes and beers; everyone eating sandwiches sold by an artisanal baker who looked to be friends of the brewers (his t-shirt read (in English) “More Bakers, Less Bankers”). Nice people; great beer. But an interesting contrast with the surrounding neighborhood. Inside the brewery, I could’ve been in Brooklyn or Portland. Outside, on the main street, maybe Algiers.</li>\n 	<li>Good pastry, good beer, but the hunt -- searching out these experiences -- is as much it’s own reward. It gave us a reason, a goal, to get out of the travel bubble, off the well-trod Notre Dame-to-Eiffel Tower-to-Louvre tourist triangle. Not that we didn’t do that too -- we did -- but if that’s all we did, it would have been a bit disappointing. And that we did it on our own, rather than as part of some “Hipster Paris” tour, gives an added touch of accomplishment.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music --<em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/weigl-proof/\">Piano Circus</a></em> by Philipp Weigl</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Pop-Up Entertainment</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Toward the end of our week in Paris, heading out again from the normal tourist zone -- in search of a brew pub with my son this time; my wife and daughter were hunting Longchamps bags -- we get on the Metro to find a busker on our subway car, a tuba busker. He was an older guy wearing a slightly Tyrolean looking hat with a waist-high battery-powered speaker in front of him taped to a luggage wheelie type of cart and an orange donations can taped to the handle. The speaker played the backing track while he played the main melody on the tuba. After one song (which I can’t say that I recognized), he left the backing track playing while walking the car with his hand out for tips. I think he was on the car for 3 stops.</li>\n 	<li>On the way back, during one of the 18 stops back, another busker walked onto our car, a younger guy who turned out to be a rapping busker. He had the same speaker rig and the same cadence as the tuba player -- last guy in, stood in front of the door, powered up the back beat on the speakers, rapped out a song between stops, solicited money between the next stops, and then left the train.</li>\n 	<li>I also saw what I consider the more typical subway buskers -- playing guitar, or a double-bass in the connecting tunnels, taking advantage of the tile acoustics. A little less typical was a couple ating out an opera scene in a wider area where 2 or 3 tunnels came together. Not only were they singing opera (with tile-driven acoustics), they were acting out the scene -- the woman fleeing toward one tunnel only to have the man catch her and pull her back. It took just a moment to connect the singing to the action; to realize that this wasn’t an actual assault. It drew a bit of a crowd. I don’t know if this was real busking or just advertising an opera show, but it certainly got my attention.</li>\n 	<li>Later on, my son and I were walking in front of Notre Dame and heard another woman singing opera. It took us a minute to locate her. She had her back to a building on the north side of the plaza. It was another good acoustic location -- the echo off the building seem to amplify and project her voice across the open space in front of the cathedral. The police seem to keep a heavy presence here. We’d seen them earlier descend on a woman who was panhandling the folks standing in line to get into the cathedral. But this time, they let the woman finish up her aria before moving her along. Quite a change from Chicago’s bucket boys.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #128</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Magnatune</a></li>\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_128.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #128 — Hunt for Experiences; Pop-Up Entertainment','','inherit','closed','closed','','1747-revision-v1','','','2021-08-29 16:10:57','2021-08-29 21:10:57','',1747,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3662',0,'revision','',0),
(3663,1,'2021-08-29 16:12:48','2021-08-29 21:12:48','[caption id=\"attachment_1722\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/IMG_0215a.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1722\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/IMG_0215a-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Last generation digital security[/caption]\n\nIn this episode, I talk again about digital security on the road, especially the use of a VPN. I review three VPN products, including <a href=\"http://nordvpn.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">NordVPN</a> which is giving away a year\'s subscription to a TravelCommons listener. I dig into the process of generating the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/12/12/top-10-holiday-travel-tips-2/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Top 10 Holiday Travel Tips</a> listicle I do every couple of year, and follow up on stories from Uber and Lyft drivers. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_127.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.<!--more-->\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #127:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, in the midst of my third straight week at home. It is yet another sign of the impending apocalypse. All just can’t be right with the world - the office manager is nervous that I’m in the office for days in a row, my friends are shocked that I’m available during the week for a beer, my wife is tired of cooking dinner for me, and the cat is visibly pissed (in his own kitty way) that I’m taking up space on the couch. But, I am getting current on my doctor and dentist appointments, and I was able to get a haircut in a timely manner. Though these may seem little things, they can be a pain to get done when you’re traveling every week, and weekend appointments are a scarce commodity. Convenient, if not a bit boring.</li>\n 	<li>It also means I’ve missed 1 Delta and 2 United system outages and the associated ground-stops and cancellations, as well as getting stranded in last weekend’s East Coast winter storm. Those of you who follow me on Twitter have got to be happy about the lull in bitch tweeting.</li>\n 	<li>And I’ve also been around to provide real-time advice and counsel to my wife as she’s been planning our family spring break trip -- this year we’re skipping the Iberian Peninsula and going to Paris. I’m not sure how much she really appreciates my immediate reactions, but…. The house is awash with guidebooks -- except, of course, for Rick Steves. I pulled out the 2016 review copy of <a href=\"https://www.dk.com/us/9781465440839-top-10-paris/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">DK’s Top 10 Paris</a>, the credenza looks like my wife cleared out the local library, and we have print outs of a bunch of web pages. I dunno,I guess I’m a visual and tactile person. When I’m trying to wrap my head around a bunch of disparate data sources, I still have to go physical -- print it out and spread it out. Or maybe this is just a fancy way to say I’m old.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Javolenus/41932\">Ianiscus</a> by Javolenus (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/\">Attribution (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Wired_Ant</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Just a heads up, I’ll be announcing a new giveaway later on in this episode. And since I can’t figure out how to create MP3 chapter marks in Adobe Audition, you’ll have listen all the way through.</li>\n 	<li>Rummaging through the mailbag…\n<ul>\n 	<li>Dan Gradwohl dropped me a line agreeing with my complaint in the last episode about the small print size on most hotel shampoo and conditioner bottles. And, like me, he like Hyatt Place’s solution -- print a big “1” on the shampoo, a big “2” on the conditioner, and a big “3” on the shower gel. No need then to wear your reading glasses in the shower then. Dan also said that he “really liked” the music in the last episode. I can’t take credit for that. I outsourced the music search to my daughter Claire who was home for Winter Break. Since she received what may be the first positive comment about the music in 12 years, I asked her to to help me with this episode too.</li>\n 	<li>Long-time listener Robert Fenerty hit the TravelCommons website to comment on my pay-as-you-go SIM travails -- “Not many people are courageous enough to admit what a time sink it can be to find, purchase and setup a local SIM card. Sometimes it’s easy, the many Heathrow SIM vending machines being a great example. And Austria is a breeze. But outside of western countries, I’ve had to hand over my passport, stand in long lines, and try to explain “no, I need the one with data” to clerks whose language I don’t speak. Once I found out after leaving the store that my SIM was not properly initialized. Please go back to square one. The Verizon Travelpass is a great alternative for those 2-3 day trips. It’s often less expensive than the local SIM and it’s about as painless to enable/disable as you can imagine. Please keep up the good work, the beer tips, and the warm sentiments from the road. Your podcast has become an old friend that I have over for dinner every once in awhile.”</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Robert, thanks for that post. What a nice way of putting it -- the podcast becoming an old friend. I haven’t heard it put that way before, but it’s a huge compliment.</li>\n 	<li>Looking at SIMs for our Paris trip next month, the new upstart network provider sells their SIMs through vending machines, so I think I’ll skip the Orange phone store and give the new guys a try. I’m not a Verizon phone customer, but many of my Verizon-using friend swear by Travelpass as being dead-simple. AT&amp;T finally matched that offer last month with their International Day Pass -- $10/day and it looks about as simple. An AT&amp;T-using friend who’ll be on an Asian cruise next month plans to use it. And that seems to be a perfect use case -- he’ll be in a different country every day.</li>\n 	<li>One of things we’ll be working on before the Paris trip is not to forget anything critical when we leave for the airport. Many years ago, we get out of the cab at ORD’s International Terminal for a family trip to London. I’m pulling the bags out of the trunk ...and there’s one missing. I send my family through to check-in and boarding while I hop back into the cab to run back home. I open the front door, and there’s the forgotten bag in the middle of the hallway. We only live a 25-min drive from ORD and luckily there was no traffic, and I had status on Virgin Atlantic at the time. I made it to the gate just before boarding was called. That memory seared in our brains, we never make that mistake again… until Sept when we were heading over to Scotland. We’re in the cab and my wife asks me “Do you have my passport?” Nope, thought you had it. At least we figured this out before we hit the airport. The driver makes an illegal U-turn across the tollway media and we sprint back home to find the passport sitting on my desk. It was only a 15-min backtrack this time, so we still got to ORD in time to get a sandwich at Tortas Frontera. But it was a wake-up call -- never be complacent about stupidity.</li>\n 	<li>We were in San Francisco a few weekends back. Always an interesting time, especially with 80,000 people marching through the center of town on Saturday. We stayed at the Westin St Francis on Union Square -- decided to go old-school for the weekend. It rained most of the weekend, which emptied out the cab rank outside the St Francis, which meant we did more ride-shares and less walking. I have both Uber and Lyft on my phone, so I’d pop them both open and compare wait times and pricing. Even with the rain, the wait times rarely topped 3 min -- which is almost instantaneous in the traffic around Union Square. I was amazed at the number of animated cars swarming the area. Continuing my research from a couple of episodes ago, I’d talk with each driver about how their gig was going. I was surprised at the overwhelming preference for Lyft over Uber. Lyft pays more than Uber, they said. Many said they only take Uber rides when they think they can hit Uber’s incentive bonuses. If not, they tend to Lyft. And they said the Lyft riders tended to be nicer, more considerate. Since I was using both apps, I didn’t quite know what to make of that. Our Sunday morning driver told us he drives solely for Lyft; he quit after Uber trialed driverless cars in San Francisco. He said it was just another proof point that Uber doesn’t care about its drivers. We ended up taking mostly Lyft that weekend.</li>\n 	<li>This echoed what I’d heard from an Uber and Lyft driver in Charlottesville, VA last month. This guy was a super driver -- he’d done 85,000 miles last year. He also preferred Lyft because they paid more, but said that he gets more rides from Uber. He lives in Charlottesville, but heads over to Richmond to drive when UVa is on break. He was planning to head up to DC for inauguration weekend, figuring the surge pricing would make it worth his while. I’ve never talked to anyone who is working the system as hard as this guy.</li>\n 	<li>Back home, telling our son Andrew about all this, he came down firmly on Uber’s side, because Uber can’t cancel a ride. He’s had too many Chicago Lyft drivers cancel on him. He deleted the<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/2017-02-20-08.37.43.png\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1729\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/2017-02-20-08.37.43-169x300.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"169\" height=\"300\" /></a> Lyft app off his phone and is exclusively Uber.</li>\n 	<li>Last month, I was back flying one of my usual routes from the ‘90’s -- ORD-DTW -- complete with the original aircraft -- an AA MD-80. That 2-3 cabin configuration and the what-now-seem-like half-height overhead bins. At least it was an original American MD-80, not one of TWA ones they held onto after that merger. The AA ones are actually not a bad plane if you’re toward the front, away from the engines in the back. They seem to have more rows of extra leg room Main Cabin Extra seats than the newer A319s and 320s. At some point during the flight, my row mate looks down at my phone and asks “How are you charging your phone? There aren’t any plugs here”. She was kinda right -- no regular two-prong AC plugs. But I knew from years of flying these planes (I first started flying American in 1985 -- when these MD-80s were in their prime), that down between the seats, I’d find an old cigarette lighter outlet. And I still carry a lighter power adapter for that 10% of the time Hertz sticks me with a beater rental that doesn’t have a USB plug -- or for times like this when I’m flying AA’s beater plane.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/48914\">In Peace (Somewhere Else Mix)</a> by cdk (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/\">Attribution (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Snowflake</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Critiquing my Top 10 Travel Tips</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Every couple of years, I bow to the search engine gods at Google and create a listicle -- an awful mashup word of list and article. They’re kinda click-baity. You see them on places like Mashable -- “Top 10 Ways to Hack Your Morning Routine” or “The 10 most cringeworthy advertising fails of 2015” (I didn’t make these up). But they exist because people search for them. So in December when my last listicle has rolled off the front page of TravelCommons, I create another one titled just like the last one -- “Top 10 Holiday Travel Tips”. And how do they score? When I searched just now for “Top 10 Holiday Travel Tips”, a Google+ posting for my 2013 edition made the first page of results -- albeit the last entry -- and last December’s, the most recent, made the top of the second page. Not too bad…</li>\n 	<li>When I write each new edition, I do try to think about what are today’s top 10 rather than just blindly copy-pasting the last post, although there is a good chunk of repetition -- “Fly Non-Stop” and “Skip the Tight Connection” are as valid today as they were 12 years ago when I started this podcast.\nThough they might also seem a bit obvious to even a slightly seasoned traveler. So I also have tried to weave in a few, if not Pro Tips, then at least a next level of insight. In 2013, I suggested buying status for the lead adult in the travel party. The rationale went like this -- for $20, you can take your whole family through the status security line and early boarding because I’ve never seen a security screener or gate agent split up a family.<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/2017-02-20-08.37.58.png\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1728\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/2017-02-20-08.37.58-169x300.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"169\" height=\"300\" /></a></li>\n 	<li>I’ve also consistently recommended that people use Twitter as an alternate way into customer service, “at addressing” an airline or hotel as a way to jump what might be a long queue in front of a gate agent or front-desk clerk. I don’t think a lot of folks realize the sophistication and focus that many companies put on monitoring social media. My tweet about that American MD-80 generated a quick reply from American -- “We\'re currently working on updating our fleet, Mark…” And while not exactly travel-related, AT&amp;T has now followed up with me twice over Twitter about a cellular service problem I was having last week. I gave this advice to a friend who called me from ORD on Christmas Day. Korean Air wouldn’t let him and his family board their flight to Hanoi because they didn’t have Vietnamese visas -- a new requirement that had just hit a couple of days earlier. They couldn’t find anyone to help them. Between the “at” Tweeting and sheer persistence, they finally found a way to get on the plane.</li>\n 	<li>I used to have “bring a portable battery pack” -- like a lipstick charger -- or a small power strip on my list because of the dearth of electrical outlets in airports. One listener recommended stalking cleaning crews to find hidden outlets. But now -- finally -- with long overdue gate area refreshes, airlines are adding accessible outlets -- either in new work areas or power “pylons” sponsored by Samsung or Verizon. So while I still carry a battery pack and often find it useful, it’s fallen out of the Top 10.</li>\n 	<li>Back in 2014, I did break it up a bit. Instead of a classic “Top 10” listicle, I offered Airport Etiquette tips -- things like “when traveling with your family, don’t stroll 4 abreast down the concourse” and “the airport Starbucks isn’t like your neighborhood one; keep your coffee order to 3 adjectives or less”. That article is nowhere to be found on the Google search page.</li>\n 	<li>What is the top travel pro tip that you’re handing out to your friends? Sending one in will be part of the giveaway I’ll announce in the next topic.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music --<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/35724\">Blue Like Venus</a> by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/\">Attribution (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Admiral Bob</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Reviewing VPNs</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/12/20/podcast-119-digital-security-on-the-road-us-airports-getting-better/\">episode #119</a>, I talked about digital security on the road, and the topic has turned into a persistent thread across episodes, which makes sense given the Chinese water torture-type steady drip, drip, drip of cyber breach announcements. Frequent travelers could be considered a high risk group because, being away from their homes and offices, heavily rely on public networks -- airports, hotels, Starbucks -- to work (and play) in today’s digitized -- what, economy, society, street corner?</li>\n 	<li>VPNs -- virtual private networks -- have two main use cases for the frequent traveler -- privacy on public networks and location shifting. VPNs accomplish these by altering the routing of the network traffic in and out of your PC, tablet or smartphone. What you’re putting out onto the Internet is encrypted so eavesdroppers -- like the guy wearing the hoodie in the dark corner of the Starbucks (to truck in stereotypes) running a packet sniffer -- can’t read what you’re browsing or e-mailing. And then the VPN routes your encrypted traffic to that it looks like you’re using the Internet from a different location -- what’s called the VPN “endpoint”</li>\n 	<li>So how much privacy do you really need, and is it worth the additional hassle of using a VPN? Like everything, it depends. Being a consultant, you’ll forgive me for giving into my reflex of distilling it down to a 2x2 matrix -- on what you’re doing, and how paranoid you are. In the low paranoid/high privacy need box I put things like on-line banking and filling out your Global Entry app. Lots of personal information there that you don’t want Mr Hoodie to hoover up and post on some dark web hacking site. In the low privacy need/high paranoid box, I’d put reading Mashable listicles or browsing porn site -- embarrassing if someone posted that info on your Facebook page, but they couldn’t drain your bank account.</li>\n 	<li>The location shifting use case -- I’m in Beijing but the Internet thinks I’m in Chicago -- only really comes into play for international travelers. Like when I’m in Madrid but wanting to stream the NCAA basketball tournament, or when my daughter in Scotland wants to watch “Friends” reruns (don’t ask me why) which is only on US Netflix. I also use VPNs whenever I’m in Beijing to hit Facebook and Twitter which are blocked by the “Great Firewall of China”.</li>\n 	<li>I looked at two highly rated software VPNs -- <a href=\"https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Private Internet Access</a> (PIA) and <a href=\"https://nordvpn.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">NordVPN</a> -- and a Kickstarter hardware-based VPN, <a href=\"http://www.homingsystems.com/alwayshome-duo\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">AlwaysHome</a>, that I reviewed last fall in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/09/28/podcast-124-craft-beer-hunting-i-hate-rick-steves/\">episode #124</a>.</li>\n 	<li>PIA and NordVPN are quick to set up -- go to their website, buy a subscription (promotions change all the time, but when I’m writing this, PIA has discounted their annual subscription to $40 while NordVPN’s is at $79), download, install and run their software (VPN client), pick a VPN endpoint (which country do you want the Internet to think you’re coming from), and off you go. And the next time you access the Internet, you need to remember to start the client and pick an endpoint, unless you set the client to start automatically each time you log in.</li>\n 	<li>AlwaysHome, the hardware VPN, takes a bit more planning. You need to buy a pair of USB dongles and a service subscription (right now $180 for the dongles and a year’s service), plug one into your home router, and then take the second with you in your laptop bag.</li>\n 	<li>I tested the software VPNs on three platforms -- a Windows 10 PC hardwired into a network, a Samsung tablet running Android 6.0.1 (Marshmallow) on WiFi, and an iPhone 7 running iOS 10.2 on WiFi and AT&amp;T LTE mobile data.</li>\n 	<li>I first looked at performance -- how much speed was I giving up for the additional encryption and routing that gives me privacy? The Windows PC had the lowest penalty -- both VPNs cut upload and download speeds by about 6%. They also the same on the iPhone on WiFi, though the download penalty increased to 11%. Don’t know if this is an iOS limitation or something else. On the Samsung Android tablet on WiFi, NordVPNs download was on par with Windows PC -- about 6% on downloads -- while PIA was 25% slower on downloads. This one has to be marked down to PIA’s Android client.</li>\n 	<li>The really interesting result was on the iPhone on AT&amp;T’s LTE service. The download penalty on LTE was around 83% for both NordVPN and PIA. Must have something to do with AT&amp;T’s LTE service. And while interesting, it probably has the least practical value. Other than triple-paranoid people, I’m not sure why someone would tack a VPN onto their cellular connection.</li>\n 	<li>Accessing US Netflix from abroad is kinda the acid test for location shifting. Netflix, prompted by their content suppliers, has been the most aggressive service in blocking VPN endpoints; blocking people from outside the US streaming content that Netflix has only licenses in the US. I asked my daughter Claire, who’s at University of St Andrews in the UK, to test each VPN with her Netflix “Friends” test. PIA failed; Netflix served up its “blocked” screen. NordVPN let her log into US Netflix, though she said the connection was slow; probably the result of the lousy BT service coming into her flat over a chip shop. AlwaysHome did the best -- no Netflix blocking because it looks like she’s logging in from our house, and the best connection over the BT service because the AlwaysHome hardware lets it do accelerate network traffic in a way that the software VPNs can’t.</li>\n 	<li>I also asked Claire for her thoughts on the NordVPN and PIA software clients. She liked the NordVPN client better -- more graphic, easier to understand. The PIA client is a bit more stripped down. But she also liked that, with the AlwaysHome VPN, she didn’t have to install any software -- just connect to its WiFi.</li>\n 	<li>Sorting it all out, it you want an easy VPN solution that allows you to use Netflix when you’re overseas, go with NordVPN. If you want the cheapest solution that’s a bit more stripped down and you’re not running Android, then go with PIA. If you want the best Netflix experience from, say, a vacation rental that doesn’t require you to navigate WiFi login pages and you can plan a couple of weeks ahead, try AlwaysHome.</li>\n 	<li><em>NordVPN provided me a free month of their VPN service for testing purposes. I purchased a PIA subscription with my own money. Homing Systems sent me a AlwaysHome Duo free of charge for me to review. I was not paid for this review. The opinions expressed in this episode are my own. </em></li>\n 	<li>Now, for the giveaway. NordVPN has given me a year’s subscription to give away to one lucky TravelCommons listener. Go to the TravelCommons website and check out the top post to enter the raffle. It’ll be open for 10 days from the posting of this episode -- which, if I have my calendar math right, is March 2. Come by the website and enter for a shot to be more cyber-secure for a year. And thanks to the folks at NordVPN for this giveaway.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #127</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/\">ccMixter.org</a></li>\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_127.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #127 — Critiquing My Top 10 Travel Tips; Reviewing VPNs','','inherit','closed','closed','','1723-revision-v1','','','2021-08-29 16:12:48','2021-08-29 21:12:48','',1723,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3663',0,'revision','',0),
(3664,1,'2021-08-29 16:14:34','2021-08-29 21:14:34','[caption id=\"attachment_1703\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/File_000.jpeg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1703\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/File_000-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Car trunks need carry-on luggage limits too[/caption]\n\nSeems like I\'ve been doing as much driving as flying since the last episode, so I\'ve switched from apps that track flight delays to those that help me dodge traffic backups. I talk, yet again, about buying pay-as-you-go SIMs while traveling, but the need to do that may be ending. And I\'ve reshuffled my carry-on luggage as the airlines have changed their rules. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_126.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n<!--more-->\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #126:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, hoping that everyone had a Merry Christmas -- or Happy Christmas if you’re on the other side of the Atlantic -- Happy Hanukkah, and a Happy New Year. I’m personally in trying a combo Dry-ish and Sugar-Free January in an attempt to drop 10 lbs of holiday weight that managed to sneak on-board -- the downside, I guess, from staying off the road for the back half of December.</li>\n 	<li>I eased back into travel mode with my usual Charlottesville trip the first workday of the New Year. I didn’t mind it too much since Charlottesville was about 20 degrees warmer than Chicago. It was nice to walk outside with just a scarf and a tweed jacket.</li>\n 	<li>Between <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/11/22/podcast-125-uber-driver-stories-overseas-for-the-election/\">the last episode</a> and my Christmas travel break, I did almost as much driving as I did flying. I drove down to Nashville the Friday after Thanksgiving to see my mother. That drive wasn’t so bad, The Sunday drive back to Chicago, though was a whole ‘nother matter. Then that next week, I had meetings in Richmond, VA, Baltimore, and Charlottesville. I didn’t even bother to look at flight schedules. I knew nonstop RIC-BWI and a BWI-CHO flights were non-existent and the 2-2.5 hour drive time was within my fly-or-drive tipping point. Neither drives were bad. The only hassle was the Hertz rental car. Since it was a one-way rental -- I was picking up in RIC and dropping off in CHO -- they gave me a beater car, an older Jeep Patriot that I think was the only car on their lot without Bluetooth, which made listening to podcasts or doing phone calls a bit less convenient.</li>\n 	<li>It did give me a chance to explore Baltimore and Charlottesville a bit more than usual, though. On my past visits, I wouldn’t bother with a rental; would just taxi in from the airport, and then walk or Uber to places. But with the beater Jeep, I could wander with a bit more range. In Baltimore, I drove around the Fells Point neighborhood, ending up in the <a href=\"http://www.thamesstreetoysterhouse.com/\">Thames St Oyster House</a>, then threading through some waterfront areas that I had been a bit hesitant to walk through. In Charlottesville, I wandered through the countryside until I found <a href=\"http://starrhill.com/\">Starr Hill Brewery</a>. Kinda empty on a rainy Weds night, which meant the bartender had time to take me through a flight of her favorite beers. Maybe I’ve found the source of a few of those holiday pounds.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/THE_CONCEPT_OF_ENERGY/55008\">ABANDONED BUTTERFLIES</a> by THE_CONCEPT_OF_ENERGY (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/\">Attribution</a> license. Ft: Doxent Zsigmond, Snowflake</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>I’ve talked a couple of times in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/09/28/podcast-124-craft-beer-hunting-i-hate-rick-steves/\">past episodes</a> about the benefits of buying a pay-as-you-go SIM when traveling internationally -- $20 for a GB of data vs. AT&amp;T’s $60 for 300 MB is easy math. The only hassle is buying the SIM. First, you have to find the phone store, which can be a bit of an Easter Egg hunt. Back in November, our first day in Italy was in Pisa. We land, get the car, and head to the city center to find the phone store. However, the easiest one to get to was closed -- at 1 in the afternoon. Luckily, the next closest one was only a 10-minute walk and it was open. This time, I’d done my research before we left, purchased the SIMs online, and had printed out vouchers with bar codes, and instructions in English and Italian. I was ready for a quick and easy transaction. And yet again, I was wrong. The clerk knew nothing about the vouchers, didn’t know how to process them, and had to call around to other shops to figure it out. And then, each of the SIMs had to be registered and activated. Over an hour later, we’re sprinting out of the shop so we can make our time slot to get into the Leaning Tower -- which we’d also pre-paid. And this was a pretty typical experience. Which was why I was really excited a telecoms industry consultant told me that the virtual SIM, or the e-SIM was getting close to launch. Apple took the first crack at this back in 2014, but it’s been a slow ramp up. The iPhone 7 I picked up back in Sept still has the classic SIM. But this guy was telling me that going SIM-less is just about possible. He said it’ll be like signing into a WiFi hotspot. The next time I land in Italy and turn on my phone, I’ll be presented with a sign-in screen where I’ll be able to select my carrier and plan, and charge it to my credit card. Now given how wonky some WiFi gateways are, I’m not sure that this is the best comparison to sell me on the service, but if it saves me a couple of hours of frustration when I’m at my most jet lagged, I’ll figure it out.</li>\n 	<li>My age odometer clicked over again last month -- which I guess is a good thing, because if it didn’t click over, I be… dead. So, unless I find that Dorian Grey portrait at a garage sale, getting older is better than the alternative. I try not to let it bother me -- with varying levels of success. One thing, though, this does frustrate me is the need to bring my glasses into hotel bathrooms with me. Because it seems just as my reading vision is deteriorating, hotels are reducing the type size on their shampoo and conditioner bottles. As they try to go upscale with their toiletries, the bottle designers are taking the regular sized fancy labels into Photoshop and shrinking them down to fit on the front of a much smaller bottle, resulting is minuscule type that I might’ve been challenged to read in my 20’s let alone now. So my drill is to wear my glasses into the bathroom, figure out which bottle is shampoo, which is conditioner, and which is soap (or shower gel as they call it), and then line them up in order on the soap dish in the shower. Then take my glasses off, turn on the water, and hope that my lined up bottles don’t fall. The Hyatt Place that I stay at in Charlottesville is one of the few that doesn’t require this drill. They have a big “1” printed on the shampoo -- it runs about ¾’s the length of the bottle -- and a big “2” printed on the conditioner. And they’re in different colors. No need for glasses there. I love that hotel.</li>\n 	<li>It’s accepted wisdom that the most disgusting place on an airplane is the seat back pocket, and it just keeps getting worse. As airlines try to tighten up their ground turns -- how long a plane is on the ground before it takes off again -- the amount of time the cabin clean-up crew has to do its job continues to shrink. I was reminded of this by a Chicago Tribune article right before Thanksgiving when many airport workers -- cabin cleaners, baggage handlers, wheelchair attendants -- threatened to strike during that busiest travel week. The reporter interviewed a cabin cleaner who recently moved to Chicago from San Juan, PR. She said her crew of four are given 7 minutes to clean the cabin; no where near enough time to clean up all the crumbs, spilled drinks, and wrappers ground into the carpet, let alone time to clear the junk people leave in the seat back pocket. \"I don\'t know what is wrong with passengers nowadays,” she said. I won’t even pull out the safety card when I’m sitting in the exit row. A buddy told me a story about flying Tunisair from Brussels to Tunis many years ago. After the meal service, when people were done eating, they just shoved their trays into the seat back pocket. I’m not sure it’s all that different today.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/snowflake/46164\">A Foolish Game</a> by snowflake (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/\">Attribution (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Admiral Bob</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Beating The Traffic</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>As I mentioned earlier, I’ve done a bunch of travel by car lately. I talked in the last episode about driving through Tuscany. I was pleasantly surprised when Hertz upgraded us to an Alfa Romeo sports car, but when we had to drive through the rutted dirt back roads outside of Greve in Chianti, I was left wanting for something with a bit more ground clearance.</li>\n 	<li>The Thanksgiving drive down to Nashville was a lot smoother. They finally finished the years of construction expanding the I-80/94 constriction point around Lake Michigan in Northwest Indiana, and the traffic from there to I-65 south flowed smoothly. We made good enough time to make a couple of beer stops -- in Columbus, IN at a new Upland Brewing restaurant, and in downtown Louisville at Against The Grain Brewing.</li>\n 	<li>The drive back would be a whole other matter -- and I knew it and dreaded it. We drove down on that Friday, sailing through downtown Indy, Louisville, and Nashville because everyone was on vacation or shopping. Driving back Sunday though, we were right in the thick of the busiest travel day in the US. And while I always avoid flying on this day, I had managed to put myself on one of the US’s main north-south interstates. It would’ve only been worse if we’d been on the East Coast driving I-95 or the Jersey Turnpike. And it was the beat-down that I’d expected. The start of the drive out of Nashville was fine, and a bit pretty, going through rolling hills up to Louisville. The traffic was steady, but flowing. But we kept picking up more traffic as we headed north. We took a break in Indy this time, stopping off at Sun King Brewing right off the interstate, and then coffee-d up at a nearby Starbucks. North of Indy was when it really hit -- more and more cars and trucks heading up to Chicago, but still just 2 lanes. And so when the inevitable accident happened -- as it did many times that Sunday -- closing down one of those lanes, cutting the already clogged road by 50%, Waze became, if not a life saver, a time saver. I was running 3 nav systems, Waze, Google Maps, and the in-dash BMW nav. All had real-time traffic, but Waze seemed to be the quickest in sensing the need for a reroute. A couple of times that Sunday, it would direct us to take the next exit after traffic had stopped, and would vector us around the bottleneck and back onto the interstate, saving us 15-20 minutes of crawling and at least 70 points of increased blood pressure. I did skip the recommended diversion through the south side of Chicago, though. Given the record number of shootings in Chicago, stop-and-go traffic didn’t seem quite the burden that it did in rural Indiana.</li>\n 	<li>The next week’s triangulation across Richmond, Baltimore, and Charlottesville found me on I-95 having to make 2 passes around Washington, DC on the Capital Beltway, always a brutal 8-lane chokepoint. Heading up from Richmond Tuesday night, Google Maps told me to take the clockwise/west route around DC while Waze told me to go east. Odd since Google owns both. A friend said that he researched this a bit and found some articles claiming that Waze’s algorithm weighs current information more than historical trends; Google Maps tips the scales the other way. I don’t know if this is true -- I haven’t been able to find anything that says this -- but I often see different rush hour recommendations. Since Waze served me well on Thanksgiving Sunday, I went east and took the counterclockwise path around. It was a rainy night, but traffic flowed better than I expected and I made it to Baltimore in time for an oyster dinner.</li>\n 	<li>In spite of juggling nav apps, I found that I was more productive driving from Richmond to Baltimore to Charlottesville than I would’ve flying. You’d think it would be the other way around, but lack of direct flights would’ve mean going up and down, connecting through Washington Dulles. And on those few minutes I might be able to work, full planes and tight seats make it seem almost anti-social to try to open a laptop. On my 3-hour drive from Baltimore to Charlottesville, though, I was able to hammer through 2 conference calls and an unhurried, wide-ranging conversation with my boss. He called me. I told him that I was having a nice drive through Virginia horse country. “Good,” he said, “I have you captive.”</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/49674\">H2O</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Having to Think about Carry-on Luggage</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>I don’t usually think a lot about packing or luggage. And sometimes I think that puts me in the minority of frequent travelers. I know guys who obsess over their Tumi bags and specific packing systems. I used a grey Samsonite roller until the New Orleans sidewalks beat the wheels out to a 30 degree splay, and then I went back to my old black Victorinox with customs stickers from Thailand and Vietnam.</li>\n 	<li>However, a few things in 2016 got me thinking about carry-ons -- my carry-on experience with Wow Air in Iceland that I talked about in an earlier episode where I had to pull out half my clothes to meet the weight restrictions; my daughter’s light blue carry-on catching the eye of seemingly every gate agent she tried to pass, being forced to check it, and then having it lost 75% of her flights in 2016; and most recently, enduring long and often cold waits on a jet bridge waiting for my “valet checked” carry-on bag when flying regional jets</li>\n 	<li>Starting from last to first, this regional jet thing kills me. It used to be that gate checking for a commuter flight wasn’t a big thing -- the bag would be waiting for you on the jet bridge before you got off the plane. Now, as regional jets have gotten larger, they put the gate checked luggage in the same hold with the regular checked luggage, the only differentiating factor being the tag they put on at the gate. I’m typically waiting around 10 minutes with 40-50 other passengers, lined up on one side of an unheated jet bridge leaning over to see if my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/File_000.png\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1708\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/File_000-169x300.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"169\" height=\"300\" /></a>bag has come up yet. It’s gotten bad. On some of the larger Embraer jets flown by JetBlue, the overhead bins are large enough for regular bags, but on most of the regionals, you’re standing in that jet bridge line. After a while, this got real old, so I scrounged around through the old luggage in the attic to find a smaller duffel for 1-2 night trips that would fit in the overhead. I found a black nylon duffel from a 2007 National Retail Foundation tech conference that was an attendee giveaway. It had all the sponsors names stenciled across it -- Oracle, Infosys. I kinda felt like a Nascar racer. But it did the job. I could squish it into the small overheads of the regional jets and so walk past the line of folks waiting for the “valets” to bring their luggage. But it still looked cheesy. So when I was in Italy in November, I kept my eye out for a nice leather bag. One rainy day in Florence - not unique on that trip -- we dove into a covered outdoor market. Wandering through the stalls, I found a beautiful leather bag for 100 euros. My wife pointed to a bag the next size up -- “Don’t you want this bigger one? It’s only 20 euros more.” Nope, that would defeat the whole purpose. I posted a picture of that bag on Twitter. Every time I walk up the ORD jet bridge when returning home from Charlottesville, I love that bag even more.</li>\n 	<li>I remember when I first started traveling, you’d never see a hard-sided carry-on. Now it seems at least 30% of the carry-ons are hard-sided. I think a lot of it is fashion -- they come in much cooler designs and colors, but there is some functionality to them. If you’re flying an airline that’s aggressively using a baggage sizer, it’s much easier to stay legal with a hard-sided bag. You can’t overstuff them to bulging like you can a soft-sided bag, and the polycarbonate shell slips much easier in and out of the metal baggage sizer. This is why I suggested to my daughter that she start using a hard-sided bag. And in a bit more muted color -- something that wouldn’t grab the gate agent’s eye.</li>\n 	<li>But if you’re working against weight limits as well as dimensions, like I was with Wow Air, you want the lightest, most stripped down bag possible. I haven’t experienced a carry-on weight limit in the US. Some US carriers post a 35 or 40 lb limit -- even Spirit is at 40 lbs -- but I’ve never seen a gate agent weigh a carry-on. The international carriers are where this comes in. Wow Air’s carry-on size dimensions are about the same as US carriers, but their weight limit is much less -- 10 kg or 22 lbs -- which seems like the consensus number for non-US carriers. In this case, you don’t want the extra weight of the hard siding. You probably don’t even want very sturdy wheels; just the lightest covering around your clothes that you can get. I know guys who’ll brag that they can fit everything they own into 2 suitcases. These guys are obviously aren’t doing carry-on.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #126</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/\">ccMixter.org</a></li>\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_126.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #126 — Beating the Traffic; Rethinking Carry-On Luggage','','inherit','closed','closed','','1697-revision-v1','','','2021-08-29 16:14:34','2021-08-29 21:14:34','',1697,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3664',0,'revision','',0),
(3666,1,'2021-08-29 16:16:14','2021-08-29 21:16:14','[caption id=\"attachment_1554\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/2015-09-03-15.12.36.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1554\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/2015-09-03-15.12.36-300x200.jpg\" alt=\"Did The Pope Have This Problem?\" width=\"300\" height=\"200\" /></a> Did The Pope Have This Problem?[/caption]\n\nApologies in advance because this is pretty much a stream-of-consciousness episode, with semi-strung together thoughts about eggs, car rentals, seeing the Pope, travel food, and stuff from my September trip to Scotland.  I talk about how handy I found the new <a href=\"https://revolut.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Revolut</a> service for spending and sending money in Europe; recent good and bad experiences with <a href=\"https://www.hertz.com/rentacar/emember/join/overview.do?learnMore=presidentsCircle\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Hertz </a>and other car rentals; most bad experience with <a href=\"http://britishairways.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">British Airways</a>; and how true-to-life the <a href=\"https://youtu.be/2JqRXLQYF9o\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Doritos Super Bowl commercial</a> portrays the Southwest boarding experience.  All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_117.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n<!--more-->\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #117:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you from TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. I was trying to do this from the Bally’s Casino in Las Vegas where I was earlier in the week, but it just didn’t work out. I was there for business, not pleasure, but I always feel that I should stay in a casino hotel when in Vegas. I dunno, staying in a Westin or Marriott up by the convention center just doesn’t feel Vegas. When I was here last year for a business convention I stayed in the MGM Grand. Years ago, though, when I’d do regular booth duty at technology shows, I would always stay at Mandalay Bay, which I really liked.</li>\n 	<li>The more I know about hotels, the more I’m impressed by Vegas hotel operations. Caesars, the MGM Grand, Mandalay Bay -- they’re huge mini-cities -- orders of magnitude bigger than couple-hundred room hotels I’d stay at in Denver or New Orleans. And yet the service, the execution is almost always way better than those smaller hotels. If you’re any sort of an operations nerd, you gotta give ‘em a nod. Though on the other hand, when you head to the gym at 6am and pass by the old guy dragging on a cigarette playing the quarter slots, it kinda makes you wish they were a little less good...</li>\n 	<li>As I mentioned in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/08/26/podcast-116-traveling-thru-japan-luggage-trends/\">the last episode</a>, the big travel for me was at the beginning of September when we were in Scotland for 2 weeks getting my daughter situated at Univ of St Andrews. Now while I say “getting my daughter situated,” there were equal parts getting my wife situated with the idea of her youngest child being an ocean away -- a big difference from when my son was 90 minutes up the road in Milwaukee.</li>\n 	<li>The following week’s travel had a nice difficulty factor. Weds morning, I flew from Chicago to DC for the papal Mass on the campus of my alma mater, Catholic University of America, and then back to Detroit that evening for meetings first thing Thursday morning. The difficulty factor was my luggage. No back packs, no selfie sticks, so certainly no roller bags were getting through the security checkpoints. Finding a checked luggage place is a real challenge anymore. I thought about checking my bag into my DCA-DTW flight, but I was too early -- 8 hours prior to flight time max. There is a checked baggage place at Union Station -- DC’s train station -- which is conveniently located a couple of stops south of Catholic on the Metro Red Line.</li>\n 	<li>Freed of my baggage, I emerged from the Brookland Metro Stop to an unbelievable combination of people and fencing. Incredibly long lines of people corralled in by what had to be miles of fences. I was lucky; I somehow got into a quick security line -- only 45 minutes. After finding my seating section, the gates were closed and we were sealed in our sections until the Pope arrived and did a couple of laps around campus in the Popemobile. After Mass started, they opened up the gates again. Which was great, because while the music and the liturgy were top notch, I wasn’t queuing up for communion with 25,000 other folks. After the homily, I was one of the trickle of folks making an early exit to beat the rush. I had a flight to catch. I’m sure the Pope understood.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>One Day</em> by <a href=\"http://www.hollowhorse.co.uk/\">Hollow Horse</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>OK, just as a warning, this section is going to ramble on for a while. I have a random walk of comments/opinions that I just can’t seem to synthesize into  coherent topics. So here it goes...</li>\n 	<li>First stop in the mail bag, I was pleasantly surprised to receive this audio comment from Linda Martin of the Indie Travel Podcast\n<ul>\n 	<li>Linda, thanks for that. The thing with eggs -- you can tell I’ve thought about this way too much -- it’s a trade-off between good eggs and time. It takes time for a cooked-to-order egg, but in the morning, I don’t often have that time. Usually, I’ve worked out; I’m cooling down during breakfast, then hitting the shower and off to work. When I stayed in one of the Renaissance Hotels in New Orleans, they didn’t have a separate executive lounge. Breakfast was served in the restaurant. They had the typical lounge buffet set up, but you could also order off the menu, which I think I did once in a dozen stays. It was a nice egg, but it took an extra 10 min that usually wasn’t in my morning schedule. Definitely a 1st World problem</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Lisa Walls wrote on the TravelCommons Facebook Wall\n<ul>\n 	<li>“Hey Mark, I love your podcast, especially the comments on food and craft beers. Other than the Altoids, do you carry any food in your briefcase, such as protein bars? I am always looking for something that is shelf stable that tastes good and travels well.”</li>\n 	<li>Lisa, thanks for the note. I usually keep 1-2 KIND bars in the bottom of my bag. The fruit-&amp;-nut ones seem to hold up to weeks of getting crushed by my PC power supply. They’re also not too sweet the way some other granola and power bars are.</li>\n 	<li>I know I’m about to lose any foodie cred I may have built up over the years, but I gotta say that, for me, the McDonald\'s grilled chicken Snack Wraps are just about the right amount of food to cover a 2-hour flight. They’re quick to buy, and compact to bring on board and eat. I find it tough to manage a salad while sitting in a center seat.</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>I’m not sure if I mentioned this last episode, but I’m flying Southwest on this week’s Vegas-Denver-Chicago trip to click over A-list status. It kinda crept up on me -- I don’t typically fly SW enough to make status, but apparently I have this year. As near as I can tell, this means I won’t have to pay the $12.50 Early Bird fee or be staring at my Southwest app exactly 24 hours before flight time in order to get a decent boarding position. Which, as we all know, is critical on Southwest since there’s no assigned seating. An A or early B boarding group number is necessary for an aisle seat. On my Vegas flight, hitting the “Check In” button maybe 2 seconds after the 24-hour window got me B 7, so I got an aisle seat in the back half of the plane. It was a full flight, so after that, I was living last year’s Super Bowl Doritos commercial -- looking down, trying to avoid eye contact with potentially bad seat mates while looking friendly to attract good ones. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://youtu.be/2JqRXLQYF9o\">link</a> to the commercial. It’s spot on.</li>\n 	<li>In the last episode, I talked about travel amateurs clogging up the PreCheck lanes. These would be people getting PreCheck as part of the TSA’s “Managed Inclusion” program, where they randomly shunt travelers over to PreCheck to balance screening line loads. This to the utter frustration of travelers who paid $85 for PreCheck screening or $100 for Global Entry. You might recall long-time listener Rich Fraser saying he was getting PreCheck about 75% of the time so why should he pay? But now the TSA says they’re throttling back on “Managed Inclusion”, driven at least in part by the publicity generated by auditors finding that travelers on various watch lists were being given PreCheck. I’ve certainly noticed the length of PreCheck lines dropping.</li>\n 	<li>Also in the last episode, I talked about luggage trends. One trend that sorta hit the cutting room floor is the move to fully rotating twirly wheels. Certainly handy in getting your luggage down a tight airplane aisle, but to my eye, most of them look a bit tinier, a bit flimsier than the standard roller-blade style wheel partially embedded in the back of the suitcase. The twirly wheels don’t seem rugged enough to survive getting pulled down Manhattan sidewalks or some of the ruts in New Orleans. And to allow full rotation, the wheels stick out of the bottom of the suitcase making the bag longer. This tripped up my wife on our flight from EDI to LHR. The BA gate agent asked my wife to put her bag in the luggage sizer. It would’ve fit -- except for the twirly wheels. Now we have to gate check it -- which means standing off to the side of the gate pulling some stuff out, transferring it into her shoulder bag. Understandable -- until we get on the plane and see it’s a half-full 767 and there are fully empty luggage bins. Really? So as is my wont, I vented my frustration on Twitter rather than any BA employees. BA’s social media department responded pretty quickly saying they needed to check all luggage to be fair to all passengers. But how would allowing a bag that was, at most, an inch over-long because of its twirly wheels on a half-full flight with empty overheads cheat any other passengers? It’s an over-officiousness that just doesn’t make sense. And it’s the reason I avoid BA now whenever possible. Which is a real shame, because back in the early ‘90’s when I was doing a lot of travel to Europe, I prefered BA. But that was 20 years ago and, it seems, a different BA.</li>\n 	<li>There is another reason I avoid BA -- officiousness <i>and</i> Heathrow. Again, another thing I loved in the ‘90’s, I now avoid whenever possible. Heathrow is a complete nightmare. You land, you trundle along through corridors, down escalators, into a bus, get a tour of the Heathrow back alleys, stop at another terminal, fight through security again, and then end up in the midst of a packed retail space where you wander through the shops because there’s no place to sit. It’s gotten to the point that I’ll fly the extra hour to connect through Frankfurt or Amsterdam just to avoid Heathrow. We were doing this St Andrews trip on AA miles. We were fine on the way out -- ORD-JFK-EDI all on AA. But coming back, it was EDI-LHR-ORD with the first leg on BA. Just ugh! I still keep thinking about how to get something out of my 300K BA Avios miles. Maybe I’ll make my daughter fly BA.</li>\n 	<li>On a brighter note, I tried a new financial service during this trip and it worked really well. It’s called Revolut -- as in Revolution cut a bit short. It’s a FinTech start up based in the UK that gives you a virtual and real debit card with really great exchange rates. As with all the cool start-ups nowadays, everything is done through a smartphone app -- which, to stow the snark for a second, makes a lot of sense for any travel app. I opened an account before I left and funded it with $200 from my regular ATM/debit card. I could then convert my dollars to pounds or euros at what appeared to be just about the market rate -- there didn’t seem to be a lot of margin taken on the buy or sell sides. I also instantly had a virtual debit card with which I could use those new pounds or euros to buy things on the web -- like train tickets or top up a phone card. I then requested a physical version of my card, which took about a week to show up from the UK. Now I had a proper European chip-&amp;-pin card that I could use at an ATM or, say, the self-serve checkout line at Tesco’s without waiting for a clerk to take my signed receipt. It only hiccuped one at the Costa coffee shop in St Andrews; I still don’t know why. Poking around a bit more, I found that I could send pounds to my daughter’s RBS account with a day or so lag. Now, none of this functionality is necessarily new, though being able to do it all through a slick smartphone app is very handy. The real innovation is the cost. Funding my Revolut account from my debit card cost me less than 1% -- less than $2 for the $200 transfer, which is cheaper than most non-network ATM fees. After that, no transaction fees to move money between currencies or to withdraw. Compare that to hitting a foreign ATM with your US card. My personal bank is very reasonable, only charging me Visa’s 1% transaction fee, but many big banks will hit you with a $5 non-network fee on top of any transaction fees. And then transferring money to my daughter’s account -- wire transfers can cost $25-30. Revolut has well-packaged functionality delivered at the lowest costs I’ve seen. I don’t know how long they’ll keep this price point, but right now, it’s the best deal I’ve seen for money needed for international travel. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://revolut.com/\">link</a> to the Revolut web site.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Clear My Head</em> by <a href=\"http://www.thefiasco.net/\">FIASCO</a></li>\n</ul>\n<b>Random Thoughts about Car Rentals</b>\n<ul>\n 	<li>I guess I could’ve cut two or three comments out of the last segment and labeled them “Random Comments about My Scotland Trip” but that just seems entire too gratuitous. But I have been collecting car rental experiences in my TravelCommons Evernote drop file and I think I now have enough for make up a topic -- or at least what might marginally pass for a topic</li>\n 	<li>As I’ve mentioned in past episodes, I really don’t like to rent cars. I much prefer to use rail or a cab in from the airport and then walk to where ever I need to go. That works well in New York or Chicago or San Francisco, not so much in Denver or Detroit. So I’ve been renting a lot of cars over the past 6 months.</li>\n 	<li>So many in fact that Hertz bumped my status up to President\'s Circle. Not quite sure that gets me, but it sounds status-y. Though right after my congratulatory e-mail, I found a dumpy Toyota Corolla in my Hertz Gold spot, so maybe it’s not anything special.</li>\n 	<li>But in times like those -- when I get assigned the 45,000-mile Toyota with crumbs still in the driver seat, or a Ford F-150 king cab pick up truck in Boston (?) -- I’ve come to love Hertz Gold Choice. If you rent a mid-size or above -- and for our corporate rate, the price of a compact and mid-size are the same -- you can go to the Choice aisle and take one of those cars instead. I left the dumpy Toyota and took a new Nissan instead.</li>\n 	<li>I have started to make note of differences in service <i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">and</span></i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> attitude across locations. I never rent from Hertz at Detroit airport anymore. I’ve yet to get a non-dumpy car there and the attitude is not great. Though I think Hertz’s Newark station is the worst. A recent example -- a colleague was driving his car toward the lot exit when a low tire pressure alarm lit up. So he asked the guy at the exit gate where he could get some air to top off the tire. “Try a gas station,” the attendant told him. That was helpful.</span></li>\n 	<li>I’ve had challenges with car rental web sites -- Hertz, Avis -- when my pick-up or drop off time didn’t match the hours of the office I selected. I get the error notice and then when I go back to try another site or time, these websites will randomly select another date or location. I had this happen to me in Edinburgh on the second car we rented. We were training from Lockerbie back to Edinburgh where we’d done 4 days of biking while our daughter was going through freshman orientation. I’d booked a car on Hertz’s web site to pick up at the train station and drop off at EDI 5 days later. It took me 5 tries to get it right -- each time I re-started, it reset the pick-up location from Waverly Station to EDI. And each time I’d correct it. Except, it seems, the last time. When we arrived in Waverly, there was no car. I looked at the res -- pick up at EDI. Ugh. Not the end of the world -- we could’ve taken the new light rail out to EDI, but it was aggravating. I searched through the Hertz.co.uk website for a phone number -- that itself being a little extra helping of aggravation -- and called the res center. The woman on the other end was inordinately calm and helpful. 3 minutes later, she’d moved my pick-up to Waverly. I thanked her -- a lot. I should’ve booked with her instead of the website.</li>\n 	<li>We rented our first car in Edinburgh from Enterprise. It was a great car -- a Fiat 500 L. All the bags fit easily in the hatchback. Nice nav, nice sound system, clean....  Drove to a near-by shopping mall -- grabbed a coffee at Starbucks and phone SIMs at the ee store. Next stop, IKEA to buy things we didn’t pack -- like towels and hangers. Coming off the motorway, through a traffic circle, the clutch crapped out. I’d put it in gear, let out the clutch pedal, nothing. 3 hours later after Enterprise, the auto club and Fiat scrummed about who was supposed to pick up the car, the tow truck dropped us back off at EDI where the Enterprise folks apologized profusely and gave us an even nicer Nissan. A couple of weeks, I noticed the Pope used a Fiat 500L to drive from Andrews Airforce Base to the Vatican Embassy. The next day, though, he was in a Jeep Popemobile. I could sympathize.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a title=\"MP3 Download\" href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/download_track.php?id=0E74C6FEB7390D18D02B4B399668093172F6C8CC66DDC09D90A3BF7DDA436823CFAC859AE2B2C73E46A278A4950E1030\">Lonely Dog Blues</a></em> by <a title=\"Tobin James\' Web Site\" href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/label.php?id=2A3449F03E7B8462FF74407B60F0C4B0A30A0CBE880C61DE37E3B342387F0643\">Tobin James</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917626811171154.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #117</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/\">Podshow Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_117.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #117 — Random Thoughts About Eggs, Scotland & Car Rentals','','inherit','closed','closed','','1542-revision-v1','','','2021-08-29 16:16:14','2021-08-29 21:16:14','',1542,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3666',0,'revision','',0),
(3668,1,'2021-08-29 16:17:57','2021-08-29 21:17:57','[caption id=\"attachment_1532\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/DSC_5744.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1532\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/DSC_5744-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Lost Without Translation\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Lost Without Translation[/caption]\n\nBack behind the microphone after an extended summer break highlighted by a two-week family vacation in Japan. We talk about traveling in Japan. It was a fantastic time, though we were lost without translation at times. But with the US dollar buying 124 yen, it was the right time to go. We also talk about frustration in using frequent flier miles, trends toward prettier and higher tech luggage, and a connoisseur of scrambled eggs. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_116.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n<!--more-->\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #116:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, after a <i>long </i>absence. Let’s call it summer vacation. And there was a nice bit of vacation there -- 2 weeks in Japan with the family. People would ask me “Have you been to Japan before?” Never outside of Narita. Which I translated to an answer of “Mostly no” before my trip, and updated to a plain “No” after my trip. But more on that later.</li>\n 	<li>Over the years, I’ve gotten into the habit of leaving the country if I want a real vacation. I find the disconnection process works much better I’m more than 5  time zones removed from home. Europe is 6 or 7 hours ahead -- pretty good. But the 14 hour difference between Chicago and Tokyo -- that’s real separation.</li>\n 	<li>You can’t unplug for 2 weeks for free, though. It takes a bit of planning, and in my case, a good bit of travel -- both before and after the trip.</li>\n 	<li>The 6 business days before my flight to Tokyo had me in Nashville, Detroit, Dallas, and the day before I left, Denver. I flew out Sunday night, flew home Monday night, and then left for Japan Tuesday noon. Coming back, we hit ORD 3:30 Sunday afternoon only to find myself back there 15 hours later for the first flight back out to Denver Monday morning. I was just happy that it was a short week for the 4th of July holiday.</li>\n 	<li>Since then, I’ve been keeping up the Denver-Dallas triangulation with the occasional random jump to somewhere like Detroit. I’ll probably keep it up through August since the beginning of September will have me out of the country again -- to Edinburgh, helping my daughter settle in at <a href=\"http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/\">University of St Andrews</a>. After that, I may just sleep until October.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://ghosts.nin.com/main/home\"><em>3 Ghosts I</em></a> by <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Nine Inch Nails\" href=\"http://www.nin.com/\" rel=\"homepage\">Nine Inch Nails</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>So that was the start of the <a href=\"https://blog.stackexchange.com/2015/06/stack-exchange-podcast-65-the-word-has-two-meanings-you-see/\">Stack Exchange Podcast</a> where Joel Spolsky goes pretty much non-linear over his attempt to use frequent flier miles.</li>\n 	<li>Any attempt to use frequent flier miles will be a frustrating exercise. My recent attempts to do <i>anything</i>with the 300,000 BA Avios miles is own personal exercise in masochism. But, to be honest, I’ve had pretty good luck this year, getting 2 flights down to New Orleans on Southwest, 4 direct flights from and from Tokyo with UA Mileage Plus and 3 flights between ORD and Edinburgh on American. Now, it wasn’t a complete cakewalk -- on SW, my wife and daughter took a 6am flight back on Monday, on UA, we had to come home a couple of days earlier than we had originally planned while on AA it’s a day later. But flexibility has always been a requirement to use frequent flyer miles. And those minor shifts are a whole lot better than my exercise with BA which only offered me one day in the entire month of September that I could use Avios miles to get to Edinburgh. I’m not sure there’s a more useless awards program.</li>\n 	<li>When I first started looking for Chicago to Edinburgh flights, I went straight to Hipmunk.com. It has been my go-to flight search tool for a while now. It’s easy -- it defaults to flight search, unlike Expedia’s push for bundled deals or Orbitz pushing hotels. And graphical display -- bars for each flight showing flight duration spread across the day -- makes it very easy to focus on the flights you’re most interested in. But when searching for Edinburgh flights, I spotted something new -- right under the red Virgin Atlantic bar was a purple one labeled “Mystery”. Kinda like Priceline’s unnamed hotels you bid for. But I’d never seen what the travel industry calls “opaque pricing” on Hipmunk before. Of course, it wasn’t really that opaque. Clicking on the bar revealed the flight details -- a 4:40pm departure with an hour connection in Madrid. Hmmm, let’s see. Only Iberia flies from ORD to MAD. Doing a quick search, I found the times did indeed match Iberia flight number 345 -- which Hipmunk only slightly masked as Mystery Airline #345. Must’ve been an experiment, because I haven’t seen it since, but I did get a good chuckle out of it.</li>\n 	<li>A colleague who I met up with on one of my Detroit trips flew Spirit Airline for the first time and <i>didn’t</i> get much of a chuckle. It was a last-minute meeting. He was flying in from Kansas City and, following the rules by using the mandated American Express Travel website to book his flight, he saw a Spirit flight that was significantly less than other carriers. Being a good corporate citizen, he booked it. He showed up at the ticket counter to get his boarding pass. “You gonna carry that one?” the Spirit agent asked him, pointing to his suitcase. “Of course,” he said. “That’ll cost you $55. And that briefcase doesn’t look like it’ll fit under the seat, so that’s another $55.” Pretty quickly, the price difference that led him to book Spirit disappeared in the smoke of carryon charges. Some might say it’s his fault for not knowing Spirit’s uniquely aggressive add-on fee structure -- what Spirit calls “bundling”. But I’d say it’s Amex’s fault -- for displaying Spirit’s base fare (without carryon fees) in the same ways as they display Delta’s or Southwest’s. And then marking those higher, but more inclusive, fares as being “out of policy” because they’re higher, and requiring additional steps to justify booking them. More power to Spirit to differentiate themselves with a unique fee structure, but Amex and the like need to do their job and let business travelers know what they’re in for when they book those low fares.</li>\n 	<li>Rich Fraser did saw my PreCheck frustration spill over to Twitter.\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" lang=\"en\">\n<p dir=\"ltr\" lang=\"en\">Folks, it\'s a *metal* detector! Large chunks of metal in your pocket - cell phones, car keys, $5 worth of quarters - *will* set it off</p>\n— Mark Peacock (@mpeacock) <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/623113695426670592\">July 20, 2015</a></blockquote>\n<script src=\"//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js\" async=\"\" charset=\"utf-8\"></script>I don’t know if it’s summer travel amateurs hitting the PreCheck lottery, but I’ve been stunned at the number of people who look amazed when the metal detector alarms when they try to walk through with a slug of metal in their pockets. Mobile phone, big electronic key fobs, two fistfuls of change… I mean, what part of “metal detector” do they not get? It’s doing it’s job! But people will stand there, dumbfounded, they can’t stroll through wearing the quarter-pound of metal and electronics that is an iPhone. I hate to be a snob, but I beginning to think they need to split PreCheck between the veterans who paid for it and the occasional random selectees. To which Rich mentioned that it’s not so occasional for him -- he’s gotten Pre on 3 of his last 4 trips. So, he says, why pay for it? Hey, as long as he remembers to take his mobile phone and car keys out of his pocket, I say, more power to him.</li>\n 	<li>I’ve probably mentioned this before, but I think one of the absolute best airport restaurants is Rick Bayless’ <a href=\"http://www.rickbayless.com/restaurants/tortas-frontera/\">Torta Frontera</a> in the American, United and International terminals at ORD. The tortas, the Mexican sandwiches, are fantastic -- great local ingredients and made-to-order. Being made-to-order is key to the great taste and texture, but it’s 10 minutes from the time you order and at ORD rush hour, you can stand in line for 10 minutes before you get to the counter. Great restaurant -- and popular. So I was cautiously excited last week when I saw they had a new ordering app. I was catching an evening flight to DTW and decided to check out the app. I downloaded and set up the app after parking in the deck -- created an account and loaded a credit card. Then, while in the PreCheck line, I scrolled through the menu and loaded the shopping cart with a Cubana, my favorite torta. I was going to hit the Order Now button, but the TSA guys were a little too efficient, waving 3 of us forward at once. So, I hit Order a couple of minutes later on the other side of the X-Ray machine. I quickly received an e-mail “Thanks for your order, we’ll let you know when it’s ready”. That’s it. No ETA, no typical wait time. Hmmm… I walk down to the T3 Tortas -- longest line I’ve seen. Hmmm…  Just then, I get a second e-mail -- 7 minutes after the first -- “You order will be ready at 5:43pm” -- 10 minutes from now. OK, not bad given this line. I walk to the rest room, browse the bookstore across the hall, and put myself in front of the order pick-up station at 5:43pm. About a minute later, the woman calls out “Anybody order on-line?” Two of us step up. “Mark?” I reach out and take my bag. The pre-order worked well, though next time, I’ll let the TSA guy wait for a minute while I hit the Order button a bit sooner.</li>\n 	<li>All the way back in April 2012, I wrote a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/04/21/best-hotel-amenity-free-breakfast/\">blog post</a> about free breakfast being the best hotel amenity.  (I had to do a good bit of scrolling on the TravelCommons website to find it -- I’ll save you that with a link in the show notes). It’s still true, even though, it’s, as I wrote back then, it’s more about convenience than food quality -- especially when you’re grabbing that breakfast in the concierge lounge of a Marriott or Sheraton or Westin. And it kinda turns you into a connoisseur of scrambled eggs. A buddy and I got into this conversation a few weeks back -- comparing the quality of scrambled eggs across hotels we’ve stayed at.  We concluded that the most typical consistency was firm, almost quiche like. We liked them with a bit of cheese mixed in to give them a bit of flavor (neither of us are vegan). Every once in a great while, you get great scrambled eggs -- soft curds, slightly moist. But you definitely don’t want them runny -- there’s nothing more disgusting at 6am than tilting back that warming tray clamshell lid and seeing scrambled eggs sitting in a pool of yellowish liquid. We’ll go for hard dry over swimming in yellow eggs every morning. But hard dry bacon, now that’s just wrong</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/buy_album.php?id=08E508A6096F11910641E13331B70EED6DFA5BB929282F731E19BBAFA8F08FFD686BD99DD86BA0D5E844DD5536E1AEFB\" rel=\"nofollow\"><em>Ghost Hardware</em></a> by Burial</li>\n</ul>\n<b>Traveling Thru Japan</b>\n<ul>\n 	<li>The family and I have done a fair bit of travel in Asia -- Thailand, Singapore, Vietnam, Hong Kong, China -- which left two big holes -- Japan and Korea. We filled one of them this summer when we spent two weeks visiting Tokyo, Kyoto, and Osaka. Japan had always been on our list to visit, but its reputation for high prices always gave us an excuse to put it off and go some place where we could stretch our dollars further. But with the dollar buying ¥124 and then scoring 4 direct ORD-NRT tickets on United Mileage Plus awards, this seemed the time.</li>\n 	<li>Now as long time listeners know, this won’t be a travelog, a list of things to see in Tokyo or Kyoto -- I leave that to friends like Chris Christensen of the <a href=\"http://asia.amateurtraveler.com/tag/japan/\">Amateur Travelers podcast</a>. Since I always say that this podcast is more about the journey than the destination, let’s talk about travel in Japan.</li>\n 	<li>As my family and I tend to do on our trips, our only trips to the airport were coming and going to the US. Everything else was on train. Which in Japan works very well. My wife bought us 2-week Japan Rail (JR) passes before we left. It wasn’t a small number for the 4 of us, but they paid off over our trip -- allowing us unlimited use of the high-speed bullet trains, even to reserve seats for a bit more relaxed boarding.</li>\n 	<li>We broke the passes in on the Narita Express, the hour ride from the airport to Tokyo Station. I’m not sure they could’ve put Narita any further out. Given the distance, everyone takes the train or a bus. The train was fine, kinda like the Heathrow Express but without the TV screens. It worked with a minimum amount of fuss -- which was a good thing after a 12-hour flight.</li>\n 	<li>We really hammered the JR passes to train among Tokyo, Kyoto, and Osaka, all less than 3-hour trips. Some of the stations were huge and there were times when we had to lean in to thread through the crowds of commuters. But the signage was pretty good and the trains absolutely met their reputation for timeliness (if only airlines in the US were half as timely…). And while JR would roll a food cart while on the rails, we got a bit more into the Japanese train culture and stocked up at the train station food courts before we left -- bento boxes, rice cakes, and of course, train beers -- Kirin tall boys usually. And if we didn’t have time to hit the food court, we could always grab something from the vending machines -- which were positioned about every 20 feet on the train platform. The vending machine thing in Japan is intense -- but convenient.</li>\n 	<li>We didn’t just train point-to-point between the major stations. A lot of times it was a smaller train to the main station, then the high-speed train, then connecting to again to a smaller train. The HyperDia smartphone app came highly recommended and the free version was great when planning out these connecting journeys -- both inter-city and within Tokyo where a trip across town might span a couple of rail companies, say Tokyo Metro to a JR train. It also displays the fare, which is very handy, avoiding the need to try and decipher the rate table while in front of the fare machine with a queue building behind you. The public transit tab on Google Maps also worked surprisingly well.</li>\n 	<li>Being able to use these apps when you really need them requires mobile data for your phone. You don’t want to be trying to search for an open WiFi access point before figuring out which train you’re connecting to. Which, in Japan, like so many things, isn’t exactly straightforward. As a tourist, you can only buy data SIMs; no voice capabilities. One of my go-to websites -- the aptly, but somewhat awkwardly named <a href=\"http://prepaid-data-sim-card.wikia.com/wiki/Japan\">Prepaid Data SIM Card Wiki</a> -- came through again. Before we left, I ordered a b-mobile SIM to be delivered to our first hotel -- the Marriott Courtyard in the Ginza District -- and then I bought another -- Japan Travel SIM -- from the Tourist Information Center at Tokyo Station. The lack of local voice wasn’t a huge inconvenience for us -- we were communicating via e-mail with hotels and apartment rentals -- but it still seemed a little weird.</li>\n 	<li>The one thing that pulled me up short was the limited amount of signage in the Latin alphabet. I’m OK with the Japanese names when phonetically rendered in Latin characters, but I’m not so hot on reading kanji or kana. We wrestled with this our first morning in Tokyo at the Tsukiji Fish Market. My wife had a list of sushi restaurant recommendations -- all of which were Japanese names in Latin script; all the restaurant signs were in kanji. And then at a Kyoto ramen restaurant, where you buy tickets for your food from a machine and then hand them across the counter to the cook, having only kanji on the machine buttons without pictures, made ordering a bit of a challenge. It got me thinking back to my trip last year to Beijing -- I didn’t recall having the same level of challenge there.</li>\n 	<li>What made this all work is that just about all of the Japanese people we ran into were the nicest, the most welcoming people. I was constantly struck at how many people would strike up a conversation -- asking where we’re from, helping us with Ramen machines, shouting “Welcome to Japan” while riding by on a bike, volunteering to walk us across train stations to help us with connections. I’m not sure I’ve experienced that consistent level of engagement from random strangers anywhere else. Of course, some of it could get a slightly embarrassing, like the group of middle school kids who wanted a picture with me. Or my daughter who regularly would get tagged by Japanese girls for pictures. We had that experience often in Beijing, but there, when we were often the lone white people, it was understandable. Having that same thing happen in Japan -- more Westernized, more white people wandering around -- that surprised us. In Arashiyama, a pretty touristy area on the west side of Kyoto, we were flagged down by 3 middle school teachers who video’d us answering their question about why we chose to visit this town. They told us that they taught English and wanted to show their classes native English speakers. OK, makes sense, but with all videos on YouTube, I wasn’t quite sure why they wanted a video of us.</li>\n 	<li>But that being said, except for the signage, Japan was one of the easier countries we’ve traveled in. And maybe, with a couple more revs of Google Translate, even that barrier will get smoothed away.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a title=\"MP3 Download\" href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/download_track.php?id=0E74C6FEB7390D18D02B4B399668093172F6C8CC66DDC09D90A3BF7DDA436823CFAC859AE2B2C73E46A278A4950E1030\">Lonely Dog Blues</a></em> by <a title=\"Tobin James\' Web Site\" href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/label.php?id=2A3449F03E7B8462FF74407B60F0C4B0A30A0CBE880C61DE37E3B342387F0643\">Tobin James</a></li>\n</ul>\n<b>Luggage Trends</b>\n<ul>\n 	<li>I think it was when I was grabbing our luggage off the carousel in ORD, returning from Spain with our luggage full of wine and olive oil. I picked up my wife’s red bag and was struck at how tatty the fabric had become. I set it down in front of her and said “That’s become embarrassing. I’m not sure I can travel with that bag again”</li>\n 	<li>Now it’s not that I have a styling bag. It’s stock Swiss Army black roller still bearing Vietnamese customs stickers from 2008. I had retired it in favor of a grey Samsonite bag, but had to pull it back out when the Samsonite’s wheels got wonky -- the rubber wore off and the wheels splayed out after 2.5 years of pulling it across New Orleans sidewalks.</li>\n 	<li>I’m seeing more hardshell rollers in non-black colors -- burgundy, yellow, floral prints, Disney characters…. They look nice; but that just may be because they look different -- they catch my eye because of what they’re not -- not a black ballistic nylon roller bag. My recently deceased Samsonite was non-black -- grey rather than floral, but still non-black. And after 3-4 months of my travel schedule, it started to look less non-black. Smudges from grease on overhead bin hinges, muck from taxi trunks, muddy water from New Orleans gutters, spilled coffee... That’s why I can’t have nice luggage.</li>\n 	<li>We’ve talked about the impending trend of “smart luggage” in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/11/22/podcast-112-holiday-airport-etiquette-travel-tax-pile-up/\">past</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/05/14/podcast-115-a-decade-of-travelcommons/\">episodes</a>. Bluesmart has been the poster child for this. They crushed their Indiegogo campaign last year, and 2 weeks ago announced they’re in volume production, targeting initial deliveries in late September. “Control your suitcase from the app” is one of their tag lines. Digital lock, digital scale, battery charger, location tracking, proximity alerts. It spoke to my inner travel propeller head, so I did the Indiegogo thing. When it shows up, I’ll be sure to tell you all about it.</li>\n 	<li>Bluesmart is at the top of the Google searches for “smart luggage”, but there are a growing list of followers with similar feature lists. Location tracking is an interesting one. I can count the number of times my luggage has been lost on one hand and have change left over, but when it happens, it can be catastrophic. I remember BA lost a bag on my way over to a 2-week “city-a-day” trip -- today London, tomorrow Stockholm, Friday in Zurich. My bag was always one stop behind me. So I get the importance of location tracking. At the high end, Bluesmart and others are equipping their bags with GPS and cellular modems to enable “global tracking”. At a much simpler level, travelers like long-time TC listener Mika Pyyhkala are using Bluetooth key fobs like the Pally Smartfinder to check if their bag made it onto their plane.</li>\n 	<li>I can see it being useful at the other end. Look at the app -- bag’s not off the plane yet. I have time to stop off at the restroom -- or better yet, the bar.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917626811171154.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #116</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://iodapromonet.com/index.php\">IODA Promonet</a></li>\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_116.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #116 — Traveling Thru Japan; Luggage Trends','','inherit','closed','closed','','1531-revision-v1','','','2021-08-29 16:17:57','2021-08-29 21:17:57','',1531,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3668',0,'revision','',0),
(3670,1,'2021-08-29 16:21:56','2021-08-29 21:21:56','[caption id=\"attachment_1233\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"299\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/images.jpg\"><img class=\"size-full wp-image-1233\" title=\"Felix Baumgartner Losing United 1K Status (Redbull via YouTube)\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/images.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"299\" height=\"168\" /></a> Felix Baumgartner Losing United 1K Status (Redbull via YouTube)[/caption]\n\nTravel has been a bit less glamorous since I\'ve fallen from the top tier status, especially when I\'m doing \"stupid\" travel -- up-&amp;-backs across the continent in 48 hours. One of my recent flights was on a new United 737-900; the interior is a significant step up. Prepping for a vacation in Spain, I find it\'s easier and cheaper to get an unlocked phone to use with a local <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Subscriber identity module\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subscriber_identity_module\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"wikipedia noopener noreferrer\">SIM card</a>. And it wouldn\'t be a proper TravelCommons episode without a TSA story -- the fight over the new knife rules misses the point. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_104.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.<!--more-->\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #104:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago. I was trying to get this written in time to do the show from the bathroom of the Vintage Plaza hotel in downtown Portland, or perhaps from the hottub that I found on the balcony of my room, but that just didn\'t come to pass.</li>\n 	<li>I’ve been on the road more than not since the last episode -- a couple of days in New York, 18 hours in Detroit, but mostly in Portland, OR. 4 trips since the last episode. So I\'ve experienced the full range of Portland weather -- 38 degrees and drizzle all the way to 58 degrees and drizzle. But I’m nowhere near close to tasting the full range of Oregon beers, no matter how hard I try. And the listeners who are friends on Untappd have seen how hard I\'ve been trying. My face has scrolled across the top of the digital menu at Bailey’s Taproom a few too many times.</li>\n 	<li>And though I joke about the weather (and who doesn\'t -- even the natives apologize) I enjoy flying in Portland, taking the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"MAX Light Rail\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAX_Light_Rail\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"wikipedia noopener noreferrer\">Max light rail</a> into the city center, and having a 10 min morning walk from the hotel to the office. No rental car, no traffic. There is the occasional street person, but they\'re much more polite than, say, the SF or Phila homeless.</li>\n 	<li>One of those Portland trips was in the midst of what I call “stupid” travel -- when I get committed to back-to-back meetings thousands of miles apart. I think I told the story a couple of years back when I did Chicago to London to Denver in two days. That was probably the stupidest trip I\'ve done. This one wasn\'t as bad -- Chicago to Portland to Detroit and then back to Chicago in two days.</li>\n 	<li>It went OK, as well as can be expected, right up until the last day. I had a breakfast meeting in lovely scenic <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Livonia, Michigan\" href=\"http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=42.4011111111,-83.3711111111&amp;spn=0.1,0.1&amp;q=42.4011111111,-83.3711111111 (Livonia%2C%20Michigan)&amp;t=h\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"geolocation noopener noreferrer\">Livonia, Michigan</a> -- a western suburb of Detroit -- that has the redeeming value of not being very far from the airport. Good thing because it started dumping snow that morning. Not a big problem. I called Amex Travel -- there’s an earlier flight to Chicago with seats available. I book it to the airport. Once there, I go up to the kiosk to change my flight, but it tells me that there’s no flight available. Hmmm... I walk up and down the concourse trying to find the right line to change my ticket. I have no status on Delta, so I can’t get into any of the Medallion lines. I’m not flying first class or internationally so I don’t qualify for those lines. I finally walk through an empty line that is for self-service baggage drop. Can you help me? She points to the kiosk -- you can make all your changes there. But I can’t. She shrugs and turns away. I’m trying to play nice and follow the rules, which has gotten me into a black hole bounded by poorly programmed kiosks and indifferent employees. Luckily, the baggage claim woman’s shrug is not shared by all of her co-workers. On another lap of the terminal, looking perplexed and annoyed, a couple of red-jacketed Delta employees stop me. I tell them my story and they take me directly to the front of a Medallion line and I’m taken care of. I thank them all multiple times and head to the gate.</li>\n 	<li>The flight is delayed 30 minutes because the inbound plane is late. Not surprising given the snow. No big deal. We finally board the plane. And wait. Now I know that deicing at Detroit Metro isn\'t done at the gate -- it’s done mid-field -- so I know we’re not waiting for the goop truck. Hmm... 30 minutes later, a maintenance guy shows up with a screwdriver to replace the latch on an overhead bin in first class that was stuck shut. Then we wait 20 minutes for the paperwork to clear, and then we head to deicing. I eventually got home 30 minutes earlier than if I had just stayed on my original flight. That’s the definition of stupid travel.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://ghosts.nin.com/main/home\"><em>7 Ghosts I</em></a> by <a title=\"Nine Inch Nails\" href=\"http://www.nin.com/\" rel=\"homepage\">Nine Inch Nails</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>A couple of Sundays ago, Chris Christensen of the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Amateur Traveler\" href=\"http://amateurtraveler.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"homepage noopener noreferrer\">Amateur Traveler</a> podcast pinged me on Google Talk. “What to be a guest on <a href=\"http://thisweekintravel.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">This Week in Travel</a> with Jen Leo and me?” “Sure, when?” “Now” And then an invite to a Google Hangout popped up. Oh, video! I had just finished working out. I grabbed a baseball cap before I clicked into the Hangout. It was a lot of fun -- Chris, Jen and another guest -- Corey Taratuta of the <a href=\"http://www.irishfireside.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Irish Fireside</a> podcast. After about an hour, we wrapped it up, but then when Chris went to save the Hangout, he couldn\'t find the button. He looked all over the console. Turns out he had set up the Hangout as private instead of public. So no recording and probably the smallest audience of This Week in Travel ever. The next night, Chris pinged me again -- Are you free? I have it set up correctly this time. And so we all popped back in. We started with a rundown of the week’s travel news headlines. Corey then talked about <a href=\"http://www.thegatheringireland.com/\">The Gathering</a>, which is not the latest teen vampire book, but instead is this year’s big tourist program in Ireland. Which reminded me of my favorite Ireland travel moment — running low on clean clothes during a post-graduate tour of Ireland, I found a laundromat next door to a pub in <a href=\"http://www.corkcity.ie/\">Cork</a>. And it was run by two very nice Irish women who took pity on me. They took care of my laundry while I had a couple of pints of Murphy’s stout. And yes, I did tip them. It’s a good fun. I have a <a title=\"Once More With Feeling…\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2013/03/06/once-more-with-feeling/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">link</a> to the YouTube video on the TravelCommons site. I’ll also put a link to the <a href=\"https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/134-that-feeling-deja-vu-corey/id327760888?i=135011815&amp;mt=2\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">audio podcast</a> in the show notes.</li>\n 	<li>In the<a title=\"Podcast #103 — Hospitality is Personal; Tablets Everywhere\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2013/01/24/podcast-103-hospitality-is-personal-tablets-everywhere/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"> last episode</a>, I talked about a post in a FlyerTalk thread that said “The content of the Travel Commons podcast is interesting, but the guy\'s voice is monotone and metronomically slow”. I said that it was probably from a former listener. Well, not true. The person, who asked me not to use their name, dropped me a note last week saying\n<ul>\n 	<li>“I’m still very much a regular listener and enjoy your podcasts! I’m Irish but living in China.</li>\n 	<li>“It’s tough for a single podcaster to inject variety and drama into his voice. By definition it ends being an unspontaneous scripted monologue. That’s why it’s always easier to listen to an ‘interview’ format or a ‘two friends chatting’ format”</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>This is spot-on and the point was driven home to me again being one of four voices in “This Week in Travel”. And being part of four folks chatting, you’re not responsible for all the content. Trying to write 20-some odd minutes of interesting content is the main reason for the longish gaps between episodes. But, thanks for the note and I’m glad to hear that I’ve kept it interesting enough to keep you subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>I’m heading out to Madrid and Barcelona at the end of this week for Spring Break with my wife and daughter. We have some tours set up -- a market tour in Madrid suggested by Craig Martin from the <a href=\"http://indietravelpodcast.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Indie Travel</a> podcast and a wine tour in Priorat (my favorite Spanish wines) -- so I figured it would be handy to have a local Spanish phone number. I’ll often do this when we’re somewhere for more than a week -- bring an unlocked phone and buy a local SIM card. When we visited Cape Town, the pre-paid SIMs were sold at the checkout line next to the register -- gum, breath mints, SIM cards -- just another impulse buy. There were two or three brands. I was flipping through them trying to figure out which one to buy when the guy behind me in line tapped me on the shoulder -- “You looking to buy a SIM card?” Uh, yeah. “Don’t buy any of these. None of the numbers are good. I have better ones in my car.” Uh, OK.... So we bought our groceries and I followed the guy out to the parking lot. He opened his trunk and had about 50 SIM card packages. He started thumbing through them “Nah..., Nah..., Ah! Here’s a good number.” I honestly couldn\'t tell the difference between this one and the one I was looking at in the grocery store, but whatever. I gave him some rand, put the SIM into the <a href=\"http://www.motorola.com/mdirect/demos/how2_v551/V551G.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Motorola V551</a> that for some reason Cingular had shipped unlocked, and booked a table for dinner down the road. Very handy.</li>\n 	<li>I still have that V551 in a plastic bin, buried under a bunch of other semi-obsolete electronics that I keep thinking I’ll have use for, but no, it’s time has passed. When we’re in Spain, I’ll perhaps want to make a couple of calls, but will be more likely to be sending texts or getting directions or looking at a map or posting pictures -- not something that 7-8 year phone is going to handle. Looking around a unlocked smartphones, the market is getting a lot better. Google’s Nexus 4; BLU Products just announced a new Life series that looks good. Tempting, but I pulled out my old iPhone 4 outta my desk drawer and filled out AT&amp;T’s on-line unlock request. They spun on it a couple of days and then sent me an e-mail saying that I’d been approved. But then I needed to find a non-AT&amp;T microSIM to finish the unlock. I tried to cut down the Simple SIM that I’d used to unlock my iPhone 3G, but I must of clipped a contact because it didn\'t work. Then I saw a T-Mobile offer -- $1 dollar to have a microSIM shipped to my house. Done. It showed up a couple of days later. I dropped it into the 4, synced it to iTunes and it told me I was unlocked. I’ll buy a local SIM when I hit the ground in Madrid. However, unlike Cape Town, I understand that I need to register with my passport to buy one. Doesn\'t sound like I’ll be riffling through some guy’s trunk.</li>\n 	<li>And finally, we\'ve talked in the past about old planes. I talked about how I avoid flying American’s MD-80s. I ended up on Delta’s version on one leg of my Portland-Detroit flight. Must\'ve been an old Northwest plane because the interior looked like one of their renovated DC-9s, the predecessor to the MD-80. Quite a change when I walked onto a brand new United 737-900 on Monday for a flight back out to Portland. I think it still had a bit of that new plane smell. It had mood lighting and regular electrical plugs a la Virgin America; the push-up/sloping-up overhead bins a la 777. The air vents were some goofy leaf-like construct that took me a minute to figure out. But what caught my eye was what was missing -- there were no video screens anywhere. Was this a new trend -- was United cutting weight and maintenance costs, acknowledging the trend of passengers bringing their own entertainment devices? Uh, no. As we were pushing back, the flight attendant apologized for the lack of video. She said that the plane was so new, it hadn\'t yet had a chance to be retrofitted for in-flight entertainment yet. So much for trend spotting.</li>\n 	<li>But hey, If you spot a trend, or have a question, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- use the Voice Memo app on your iPhone or something like Easy Voice Recorder on your Android phone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">@mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em>Stupid Now</em> by <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/music/listeners/artistdetails.php?BandHash=be2a489f478e6d5335652fc8925eee03\">Bob Mould</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Status Free Fall</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>A couple of episodes ago, I talked about how my summer travel sabbatical was going to significantly impact frequent traveler statuses. I was reminded of that on Sunday, St Patrick’s Day, when I was playing <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pogues\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">The Pogues</a> and the song “If I should Fall from Grace with God”. For a couple of years, I was Global Services on United -- the top of the top of the Mileage Plus heap. It was rare I didn\'t get an upgrade. And when I consciously chose to sit in coach -- like when I was flying with my family -- flight attendants would come back, ask me why I was in the back, and then bring me free drinks from first class, which would generate quite a hairball of emotions with my wife -- some tangled mess of amusement and disgust.</li>\n 	<li>When I fell out of that rarefied air to just plain 1K, it was a bit of an adjustment -- where did all the kissing up go? But this year’s fall was going to be steeper -- from 1K to Premiere Silver, the lowest level of status. I was close to keeping Gold -- I probably should\'ve done a mileage run to the West Coast -- but the holidays crept up on me faster than I thought. United graciously offered a couple of times to sell me the 3 or 4 segments I needed for $650. I passed. And so I dropped to Silver on Feb 1. Just in time for me to start these Chicago-Portland hauls where United has the only convenient direct flights available. I get dropped down one boarding group -- from 1 to 2 -- which hasn\'t been a big deal. I haven’t had a problem finding overhead space. The bigger pain is not being able to pre-book Economy Plus seats for free. For all of United’s faults, the extra legroom of Economy Plus has always kept me coming back. But as Silver, I can’t book Economy Plus from free like I could as 1K. Now I either pay for it, or wait 24 hours before flight time when I can book it for free. I haven’t had a problem yet, but the ORD-PDX flights don’t seem to be the highest volume legs. Not a huge issue -- more of a discomfort than anything -- but when you’re spending 8-9 hours a week -- or more -- in a plane seat, a couple of extra inches starts to matter.</li>\n 	<li>It’s interesting, though, to compare United’s approach to the approach taken by hotel brands. I’d been Marriott top tier -- Platinum -- for many years -- earning it the hard way by spending 75 nights in the Ren Cen Marriott in downtown Detroit, a property legendary in its awfulness. When I changed jobs three years ago, Hilton properties were much more convenient to my offices and so I switched. That first year I made Hilton’s top tier -- Diamond -- and certainly didn\'t re-qualify for Marriott Platinum. But Marriott didn\'t drop me. They soft landed me, dropping me one status level a year. I appreciated that, and it kept me staying with them, even if not as frequently. And this year, Hilton kept me at Diamond even though I didn\'t meet their thresholds. I’m sure they’ll start to drop me next year, but they too will keep some business.</li>\n 	<li>And these programs are businesses. What started out as a way keep passengers loyalty in the early scary days of airline deregulation has turned into a cash-generating business in its own right. In 2010, it was estimated that Citibank paid American more than $1 billion for miles it distributed to AAdvantage credit card holders. Makes sense then that one of the first things American did when it filed for Chapter 11 was to tell everyone that their miles were safe. Employee pensions may take a haircut, but not AAdvantage balances.</li>\n 	<li>Now it’s one thing to be “de-statused” because I didn\'t thresholds, but it’s a whole other thing to get crammed down a peg because they make a new level above you. Now, this has been going on for a while. At the beginning of American’s AAdvantage program -- the original frequent flyer program -- there was only one status level -- Gold. And then they added a new level, Platinum. And then Executive Platinum as ways to further differentiate level of frequent fliers, and give them a new “brass ring” to chase. Kinda the original “gamification” play, but with early boarding instead of badges as the reward. Of course, if you’re just hitting the top of the old structure, you’re now down a peg when the new level gets created.</li>\n 	<li>Which you can understand for the annual award levels, but what about if it’s associated with a lifetime status award. United Million Mile fliers used to receive lifetime Premier Executive status -- the middle status akin to American’s Platinum level. Both these levels would earn 100% mileage bonuses -- earn 2 miles for each mile flown. American is still that way, but when United merged with Continental, Premier Exec became Premier Gold, the mileage bonus was reduced to 50% and a new level, Premier Platinum was inserted above it. If you’d invested dollars and time hitting a million miles on United, the return on that investment just got cut in half. And, of course, someone sued. And last month, the judge <a href=\"http://skift.com/2013/02/01/million-milers-frequent-flier-lawsuit-against-united-to-continue/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">rejected</a> United’s bid to throw the case out, saying “the court finds it plausible that defendant (United) had a contract with Million Miler members which differed from the contract they had with other Mileage Plus members.”</li>\n 	<li>So I guess if you\'ve been around long enough, even the airlines have to bring you in for a soft landing.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music --<em>When Irish Eyes are Burning</em> by <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/music/listeners/artistdetails.php?BandHash=a45aaee36685b61a392acf793155e127\">the Ike Reilly Assassination</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>TSA Knife Fight</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>The TSA’s announcement that they’ll allow small non-locking knives and various pieces of sports equipment past airport security checkpoints seemed to be executed with the agency’s typical obliviousness. They didn’t warn or try to pre-sell the idea to folks that have a stake in the decision -- airlines, flight attendants, even air marshals. Instead, they just dropped an announcement and expected everyone to just go along. Are they surprised that everyone is questioning their judgement? Remember, this is the one federal agency that’s more despised than the IRS.</li>\n 	<li>Even if the TSA’s threat analysis is correct, what good does it do to announce this change? I can’t remember the last time I was in a TSA line and heard someone say “Dammit, I should be allowed to take my pen knife (or hockey stick) on a plane!” People complain about taking their shoes off, they complain about having to dump their water out, but no one complains about having to leave their knife behind. And yet this is the issue the TSA decides to make a stand on. Sheer brilliance</li>\n 	<li>The sports equipment change -- that doesn’t make any sense to me. But the pen knife thing -- the better approach would’ve been to change the policy and not announce it. Anybody who’s observant has noticed that the TSA has eased up on semi-liquid toiletries. While you still can’t bring a full-sized bottle of shampoo onto a flight (and really, who needs to? Hotels provide an unlimited amount of toiletries and if you’re staying in a vacation rental, you’re going to the grocery store once you arrive, so buy it there), I haven’t had a screener pull out my hair stuff or a travel-sized toothpaste in years. They’re still technically forbidden and the screeners can still see them, but they’re rightly focused on more dangerous things. A more practical TSA would let their screeners ignore pen knives and leave it at that.</li>\n 	<li>The September 11th attacks changed many things -- including how passengers react to a terrorist attack. Before September 11th, the counsel to passengers was always to be passive, not to put yourselves in harms way. You’re just a bargaining chip. Let the professionals negotiate with the terrorists -- give them money, safe passage -- and odds were, you’ll get out OK. The attempted attacks after September 11th -- the shoe bomber, the underwear bomber -- were all subdued by the passengers around them. Nowadays, even unruly drunks get jumped and zip-tied by their fellow passengers. In this environment, I just don’t see someone taking down a 767 with the knife on a corkscrew.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids9917626811171154.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #104</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://nin.com/\">Nine Inch Nails</a> and the <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/\">Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_104.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #104 — Status Free Fall; TSA Knife Fight','','inherit','closed','closed','','1227-revision-v1','','','2021-08-29 16:21:56','2021-08-29 21:21:56','',1227,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3670',0,'revision','',0),
(3674,1,'2021-09-22 12:47:11','2021-09-22 17:47:11','[caption id=\"attachment_1632\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/IMG_0324.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1632\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/IMG_0324-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Spring Break in Iceland\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Spring Break in Iceland[/caption]\n\nWatching Iceland makes its Cinderella run in the Euro 2016 soccer tourney got me thinking back to my March trip there. It is one of the hot travel destinations -- maybe too hot? Could be, but the descriptor I keep coming back to is \"dramatic.\" And it seems that on every trip I make out of the country, I get surprised by the amount of data my iPhone consumes -- in spite of flipping every Settings switch I can find. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_122.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n<!--more-->\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #122:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you once again from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, on a week off of the road. I hate to say “a rare week”, but looking at my calendar, it is. For the first half of the year -- 26 weeks -- I didn’t get in an airplane during 2 of them. This week, the first of the second half of the year, is my 3rd non-travel week. Now absolutely some of them are self-inflicted -- 2 to be exact -- one week in Spain and one in Portugal. That’s an intense travel schedule, even for me. I usually find a way to take a break at least once every 6 weeks, but it just hasn’t worked out that way this year so far. Sometimes you control your schedule, while other times it controls you. I’m definitely been on the wrong end of the leash since January.</li>\n 	<li>Since the last episode, I’ve been traveling pretty much exclusively between Chicago and Charlottesville, VA. Now Charlottesville is a nice town, but it’s a pain to get to every week. The first direct flight from Chicago leaves around 11:30am, landing around 2pm -- not exactly convenient for the business traveler. Other earlier options are to fly into Washington-Dulles and drive for 2 hrs, or fly into Richmond and drive an hour and a half. What I’ve found myself doing for the past couple of weeks is flying in Sunday night -- which I absolutely hate -- on direct flight that leaves Chicago around 9:45pm, lands in Charlottesville around half past midnight and puts me into my hotel around 1am. There just doesn’t seem to be an easy way around this one.</li>\n 	<li>At least the flights back home are convenient -- 3:15 and 6:30pm. And it’s not a crowded airport. I think last week was the longest TSA line I hit -- 3 people were in front of me.</li>\n 	<li>And as I start to think about a September trip to Scotland to take our daughter back to University, I’m taking advantage of the post-Brexit exchange rate to stock my Revolut account with some much cheaper pounds. Though it’ll be another week on the road, I’ll be significantly upgrading my Scotch choices.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/hisboyelroy/430\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Revolve</a> mix</em> by His Boy Elroy</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Last week’s attack at Istanbul’s Ataturk airport begs the same question as March’s Brussels bombings -- does more airport security actually make us safer or just move the target around? I said in the<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/05/30/podcast-121-tsa-lines-my-luggage-is-where/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"> last episode</a> that the long TSA lines on the land side of security caused by stricter TSA inspections weren’t making the traveler any safer. Instead, they were make us less safe/more vulnerable to a Brussels or Istanbul-style attack. And while the TSA has fixed (at least for now) some of the worst lines, the issue is going to pop up again. And someone is going to suggest -- again -- that they move the security perimeter back -- say, checking itineraries and IDs at the terminal door like they do in India? The justification will be that a little bit more inconvenience is more than worth the price of safety. But, if they don’t staff it right (which was and will alway be the core problem), all you’ve done is just move the target -- the line of passengers -- out by another 1,000 feet. It’s less about location and more about execution. And given the TSA’s track record of execution over the past 15 years, I’m not optimistic that they’ll get to the right answer.</li>\n 	<li>I got a e-mail a few weeks ago that my 5-year Global Entry membership expires on my birthday this December. I don’t know exactly when Customs and Border Patrol started Global Entry, but 5 years ago, I was one of the early adopters. Back then, there weren’t that many interview centers. I was lucky that Chicago had one, but I had colleagues in Phoenix who had to fly up to Las Vegas for interviews. The renew process was pretty easy. I logged into GOES -- Global Online Enrollment Systems -- clicked the blue Renew Membership button and then cycled through all the profile screens -- but this time the screens were pre-populated so I only had to make updates. In my case, it was updating my job history for my current job and, the toughest part, entering all the countries I’d visited in the past 5 years. Normally, this would be pretty simple -- thumb through your passport pages and write down the country stamps. However, back in 2012, my backpack with my passport was stolen while on the train from Brussels city center to the airport -- a fun time I recount in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/05/20/podcast-98-stolen-luggage-restaurants-want-your-smartphone/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">episode 98</a>. Luckily, I do a decent job of cataloging travel pics. Flipping through 2011 reminded me that we’d visited Venice that year and that I’d traveled there by train from Paris after a couple of days of customer meeting. The renewal cost is $100 -- $20/year is worth the price. Even more so when it’s free -- I charged it on my Amex Platinum card and immediately saw a $100 statement credit. Now I’m checking GOES every couple of days to see if Customs just waves my renewal through or if I have to talk again to the nice people in the bowels of ORD Terminal 5. I’m hoping that with the crush of new PreCheck applications, they’ll take the easy route.</li>\n 	<li>And as we’ve talked about before, I’m not really sure why anyone would sign up for PreCheck instead of Global Entry. Global Entry is just $15 more -- $100 instead of $85 -- the price of a beer at ORD.</li>\n 	<li>But if you’re not up for the $100 passport check line cut, Arnoud Heijnis, a long time TravelCommons listener, pinged me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> about another option -- the Mobile Passport app from US Customs and Border Patrol. I haven’t used it because I have Global Entry. My wife tried to get my son to download it before his return flight from Reykjavik, but he never got ‘round to it, and he said the early evening lines at ORD weren’t that bad. So while I don’t have any first- or second-hand experience with it, one of the tech writers at WSJ wrote up a <a href=\"http://www.wsj.com/articles/get-through-airport-customs-faster-with-this-free-app-1467221118\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">glowing review</a> of the app a few weeks back. Check out the show notes for a link to the article. And if you’ve tried the Mobile Passport, shoot me a note with your thoughts.</li>\n 	<li>During my flight back home last Weds, we were coming in on approach, you could feel the gradual descent -- slowing, descending, slowing, descending -- and then, all of a sudden, I’m pressed against the back of my seat as the plane rotates in the wrong direction -- up, that is -- and the engines roar with thrust. The experienced travelers know that the pilot had to abort the landing, but those who haven’t gone through this drill before are looking around, wondering “what the hell…?”. After about 5 minutes, the pilot came on “The plane in front of us hit a bird. They have to physically inspect the runway before another plane can land, so we had to fly around. We’ll be down in 10 minutes”. That was a nice announcement. I learned something new -- I didn’t know they had to inspect a runway after a bird strike, though it makes a lot of sense. Too often pilots or gate agents don’t take the time to explain the cause of a delay or a fly around, or don’t want to deal with the follow-up questions that may come -- and so I appreciate those that do. I remember a Southwest flight out of New Orleans. The plane lands -- it was a bit late -- but we’re not boarding right away. You could feel the impatience building in the gate area. The agent got on the PA -- “Sorry for the delay in boarding, but the plane was struck by lightning on its descent. The pilots have to do a physical inspection before we can board”. OK, that makes sense -- and just as you could feel the impatience build, it immediately drained away with that announcement. Maybe it’s because these delays weren’t the airline’s fault -- no negligence or bad judgement on American’s part for a bird strike or Southwest’s for lightning. Bit tougher to suck up when it’s the third delay in a row caused by maintenance issues -- spend some of those record profits on preventative maintenance -- or a missing crew -- maybe you should put a bit more slack in your scheduling. But as always, more transparency is better than vagueness -- even if it’s not the best story for you.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/septahelix/34050\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Earth Soda</a></em> by septahelix</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Data-Hungry Phones</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>I met up with a friend at <a href=\"http://www.empiricalbrewery.com/\">Empirical Brewing</a>, one of 3 microbreweries along Ravenswood Blvd in that Chicago northwest side neighborhood. I hadn’t seen him since he had gotten back from a trip he and his son did to Helsinki, St Petersburg, and Moscow. Among other things, he had problems getting his son’s AT&amp;T iPhone to work in Helsinki. That’s odd, I said. I’ve never had a problem with AT&amp;T’s GSM iPhones in Europe. AT&amp;T told him to reset it, which he did, after which it promptly downloaded a gig and a half of apps and data over the cellular data network. As you might guess, he’s disputing that couple of hundred dollar bill.</li>\n 	<li>I am always surprised at how much data my phone uses when I travel outside of the country. Now I’m sure that one reason for this is that it’s about the only time I look at my data usage since I’m grandfathered into one of the old AT&amp;T unlimited data plans. I don’t know how much I use, and don’t make a big effort to limit it. So when I travel overseas, I get to see my kids live their mobile lives trying to stay under a 300 MB data cap.</li>\n 	<li>International mobile data has gotten a bit cheaper. T-Mobile offers a reasonable unlimited international data plan if you can live with slower 2G-style speeds. I’m not that patient, so I tend to get the AT&amp;T 300 MB package for $60 because it also comes with free access to a decent set of wi-fi hotspots.</li>\n 	<li>Living on a data budget means thinking which apps really need mobile data -- which is not that many. So while I’m sitting on the plane waiting for everyone to board, I pull out my iPhone, go over to Settings | Cellular and start turning off cellular data access for most of my apps. I’m not quite sure why the healthcare flexible spending app or the app that came with my sous vide immersion heater ever need cellular data -- in the US or internationally. Anyhow, I spool through the last, turning most of them off and certainly that damn “Wi-Fi Assist” and then, after I’ve sent my last Snapchat, I hit “Reset Statistics” so I’ll have a clean view of how I’m burning through that 300 MB and then click over to Airplane mode.</li>\n 	<li>And then, when I land, I come out of Airplane mode, go back into Settings | Cellular and turn Roaming On, and catch up on the overnight e-mail while waiting to get off the plane. At some point that morning, I’ll look at the Current Period data usage and see that I’ve burned through, say, 75 MB of my 300 MB -- 25% of my total package -- in the first morning. Holy crap! I immediately dive back into Settings | Cellular and turn off Roaming. What happened?</li>\n 	<li>This is where, on the iPhone, you begin having to spelunk through the mess that the Settings app has become. You scroll down past all the apps you shut off from cellular access and look at the last entry -- “System Services” -- and see that it’s consumed at least half of that 75 MB. What the hell? You click through. Why has this phone used that much data on “Time &amp; Location” or “General” or “iTunes Accounts” (huh? I thought I shut off iTunes in the last screen). This is when you start to dig deep -- Settings | Privacy | Location Service and you find another list of apps -- kinda like the one you used to turn off cellular data, but this one is for accessing your location. Look, as much as I love the Tortas Frontera restaurants in ORD, I’m not sure why their app needs to pull my location information. And then you go to Settings | General | Background App Refresh for yet another list of apps where you shut off their permission to update themselves in the background. And then you go over to Settings | Mail and turn Fetch New Data to Off to keep your iPhone from constantly pinging your Exchange server.</li>\n 	<li>It’s kinda like whack-a-mole, and you’ll be sure to miss something because these phones and the apps we load on them are, for the most part, built on the assumption of ubiquitous unlimited data access. So changing that behavior, those assumptions -- to severely limit the data the phone inhales and exhales -- takes work. Which is why, if we’re going to be somewhere for more than 4-5 days, I’ll invest the hour it takes to find a phone store and $25 per phone to buy a local SIM with a gig or two of data. When I was in Iceland for 4 days in March, it didn’t seem necessary. But when then I flew down to Spain for 8 days, my first stop was the Orange store because I knew my phone couldn’t hold its breath for that long.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music --<em> <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/scottaltham/20747\">Hear Us Now</a></em> by scottaltham</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Dramatic Iceland</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Watching Iceland makes its Cinderella run in the Euro 2016 soccer tourney -- right up until the time they faceplanted into France last weekend -- reminded me of the trip my son and I took in March. Some reaction shots ESPN did from Reykjavik were places we had been -- saw a coffee shop we hit trying to stay awake on our first day, and a square that one of our hotels was on. Not that surprising since downtown Reykjavik isn’t that big. If I’d paid more attention to the people sitting next to me in the bars off that square, I’d have probably recognized some people in those shots too.</li>\n 	<li>Iceland is a hot tourist destination -- especially for people looking for something a bit different. And if I didn’t know already, when the Dorling Kindersley folks sent me review copies of their relaunched <a href=\"http://www.dk.com/us/travel/\">Eyewitness Travel Top 10 Guides</a>, in among the usual suspects -- New York, London, Paris, Barcelona -- was Iceland. In 2015, there were <a href=\"http://www.ferdamalastofa.is/static/files/ferdamalastofa/Frettamyndir/2016/juni/tourism_-in_iceland_in_figures_may2016.pdf\">1.3 million foreign tourists</a> in Iceland -- almost 4 times the population of 329,000 -- and a 29% increase over 2014. It’s a hot destination and getting hotter -- perhaps even to the point of overheating?</li>\n 	<li>Especially with Wow Air, a kinder and quirkier Spirit or Ryan Air, expanding the number of North American gateway cities. We ran into lots of folks who had seen ads for cheap Wow air fares and flew over for a 3 or 4 day weekend on a whim, without really thinking about what to do. We’d see folks walking up and down the downtown shopping and entertainment district in Reykjavik, and then figuring out some day trip bus rides out to the Golden Circle hot spots. And this was in March, not exactly the garden time in Iceland. But there were a lot of folks there. And so in that way, Iceland felt small.</li>\n 	<li>On our second day, we picked up a rental SUV -- a Dacia Duster, a great vehicle -- and headed out of town. Once we got out of Reykjavik’s catchment area, Iceland opened up quickly. The drama of the scenery, the spaces carved out by volcanos and glaciers -- “Land of Fire and Ice” it likes to bill itself -- make it feel much bigger. Of course, you could see this same space from the seat of a tour bus, but I was glad we rented a car. We got off the well-worn paths. Not too far, but when driving across a plain on a 2-lane highway with no traffic to speak of, the vistas did open up in front of us, which made me glad I was able to look forward and enjoy them through the expanse of the front windshield instead of looking off to the side through a motor coach window. And when we did some of the typical stops -- Þingvellir park, Gullfoss waterfall -- we could ride out the ebb and flow of the tour bus traffic, and have these spots pretty much to ourselves, even for just a little while. Or the time when we were driving toward the south coast, running through a series of rain bands -- in and out; in and out. I was starting to get annoyed until I looked out the rear view mirror and saw a huge double rainbow. I immediately pulled into a gas station and got out of the car. The landscape was wide open; we could see that rainbow from end to end. It was a phenomenal sight. And the smoked lamb sandwich we bought afterwards in the gas station wasn’t bad either.</li>\n 	<li>I struggle sometimes when asked about Iceland. Would I recommend it? Reykjavik is nice enough, but it’s a small town. I’m not a museum guy, so there was probably a day-and-a half of stuff for me to do. And Iceland is expensive. I had good fish and lamb, but it wasn’t cheap. And hotel rooms were tight in March, so I gotta figure the country is completely sold out in July and August.</li>\n 	<li>But the scenery outside of Reykjavik, I keep coming back to that word “dramatic”. I’m not sure it does it justice, but it’s all I got. If you get a car, then the trip starts to make sense.</li>\n 	<li>Well, that and the fermented shark chased with shots of brennivín -- Icelandic schnapps -- because, I dunno, how can you not?</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #122</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from the <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">ccMixter</a> site</li>\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_122.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #122 — Data-Hungry Phones; Dramatic Iceland','','inherit','closed','closed','','1629-revision-v1','','','2021-09-22 12:47:11','2021-09-22 17:47:11','',1629,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3674',0,'revision','',0),
(3675,1,'2021-09-22 12:47:47','2021-09-22 17:47:47','[caption id=\"attachment_1632\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/IMG_0324.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1632\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/IMG_0324-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Spring Break in Iceland\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> Spring Break in Iceland[/caption]\n\nWatching Iceland makes its Cinderella run in the Euro 2016 soccer tourney got me thinking back to my March trip there. It is one of the hot travel destinations -- maybe too hot? Could be, but the descriptor I keep coming back to is \"dramatic.\" And it seems that on every trip I make out of the country, I get surprised by the amount of data my iPhone consumes -- in spite of flipping every Settings switch I can find. All this and more at the&nbsp;<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_122.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n<hr>\n\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #122:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you once again from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, on a week off of the road. I hate to say “a rare week”, but looking at my calendar, it is. For the first half of the year -- 26 weeks -- I didn’t get in an airplane during 2 of them. This week, the first of the second half of the year, is my 3rd non-travel week. Now absolutely some of them are self-inflicted -- 2 to be exact -- one week in Spain and one in Portugal. That’s an intense travel schedule, even for me. I usually find a way to take a break at least once every 6 weeks, but it just hasn’t worked out that way this year so far. Sometimes you control your schedule, while other times it controls you. I’m definitely been on the wrong end of the leash since January.</li>\n 	<li>Since the last episode, I’ve been traveling pretty much exclusively between Chicago and Charlottesville, VA. Now Charlottesville is a nice town, but it’s a pain to get to every week. The first direct flight from Chicago leaves around 11:30am, landing around 2pm -- not exactly convenient for the business traveler. Other earlier options are to fly into Washington-Dulles and drive for 2 hrs, or fly into Richmond and drive an hour and a half. What I’ve found myself doing for the past couple of weeks is flying in Sunday night -- which I absolutely hate -- on direct flight that leaves Chicago around 9:45pm, lands in Charlottesville around half past midnight and puts me into my hotel around 1am. There just doesn’t seem to be an easy way around this one.</li>\n 	<li>At least the flights back home are convenient -- 3:15 and 6:30pm. And it’s not a crowded airport. I think last week was the longest TSA line I hit -- 3 people were in front of me.</li>\n 	<li>And as I start to think about a September trip to Scotland to take our daughter back to University, I’m taking advantage of the post-Brexit exchange rate to stock my Revolut account with some much cheaper pounds. Though it’ll be another week on the road, I’ll be significantly upgrading my Scotch choices.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/hisboyelroy/430\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Revolve</a> mix</em> by His Boy Elroy</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Last week’s attack at Istanbul’s Ataturk airport begs the same question as March’s Brussels bombings -- does more airport security actually make us safer or just move the target around? I said in the<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/05/30/podcast-121-tsa-lines-my-luggage-is-where/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"> last episode</a> that the long TSA lines on the land side of security caused by stricter TSA inspections weren’t making the traveler any safer. Instead, they were make us less safe/more vulnerable to a Brussels or Istanbul-style attack. And while the TSA has fixed (at least for now) some of the worst lines, the issue is going to pop up again. And someone is going to suggest -- again -- that they move the security perimeter back -- say, checking itineraries and IDs at the terminal door like they do in India? The justification will be that a little bit more inconvenience is more than worth the price of safety. But, if they don’t staff it right (which was and will alway be the core problem), all you’ve done is just move the target -- the line of passengers -- out by another 1,000 feet. It’s less about location and more about execution. And given the TSA’s track record of execution over the past 15 years, I’m not optimistic that they’ll get to the right answer.</li>\n 	<li>I got a e-mail a few weeks ago that my 5-year Global Entry membership expires on my birthday this December. I don’t know exactly when Customs and Border Patrol started Global Entry, but 5 years ago, I was one of the early adopters. Back then, there weren’t that many interview centers. I was lucky that Chicago had one, but I had colleagues in Phoenix who had to fly up to Las Vegas for interviews. The renew process was pretty easy. I logged into GOES -- Global Online Enrollment Systems -- clicked the blue Renew Membership button and then cycled through all the profile screens -- but this time the screens were pre-populated so I only had to make updates. In my case, it was updating my job history for my current job and, the toughest part, entering all the countries I’d visited in the past 5 years. Normally, this would be pretty simple -- thumb through your passport pages and write down the country stamps. However, back in 2012, my backpack with my passport was stolen while on the train from Brussels city center to the airport -- a fun time I recount in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/05/20/podcast-98-stolen-luggage-restaurants-want-your-smartphone/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">episode 98</a>. Luckily, I do a decent job of cataloging travel pics. Flipping through 2011 reminded me that we’d visited Venice that year and that I’d traveled there by train from Paris after a couple of days of customer meeting. The renewal cost is $100 -- $20/year is worth the price. Even more so when it’s free -- I charged it on my Amex Platinum card and immediately saw a $100 statement credit. Now I’m checking GOES every couple of days to see if Customs just waves my renewal through or if I have to talk again to the nice people in the bowels of ORD Terminal 5. I’m hoping that with the crush of new PreCheck applications, they’ll take the easy route.</li>\n 	<li>And as we’ve talked about before, I’m not really sure why anyone would sign up for PreCheck instead of Global Entry. Global Entry is just $15 more -- $100 instead of $85 -- the price of a beer at ORD.</li>\n 	<li>But if you’re not up for the $100 passport check line cut, Arnoud Heijnis, a long time TravelCommons listener, pinged me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> about another option -- the Mobile Passport app from US Customs and Border Patrol. I haven’t used it because I have Global Entry. My wife tried to get my son to download it before his return flight from Reykjavik, but he never got ‘round to it, and he said the early evening lines at ORD weren’t that bad. So while I don’t have any first- or second-hand experience with it, one of the tech writers at WSJ wrote up a <a href=\"http://www.wsj.com/articles/get-through-airport-customs-faster-with-this-free-app-1467221118\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">glowing review</a> of the app a few weeks back. Check out the show notes for a link to the article. And if you’ve tried the Mobile Passport, shoot me a note with your thoughts.</li>\n 	<li>During my flight back home last Weds, we were coming in on approach, you could feel the gradual descent -- slowing, descending, slowing, descending -- and then, all of a sudden, I’m pressed against the back of my seat as the plane rotates in the wrong direction -- up, that is -- and the engines roar with thrust. The experienced travelers know that the pilot had to abort the landing, but those who haven’t gone through this drill before are looking around, wondering “what the hell…?”. After about 5 minutes, the pilot came on “The plane in front of us hit a bird. They have to physically inspect the runway before another plane can land, so we had to fly around. We’ll be down in 10 minutes”. That was a nice announcement. I learned something new -- I didn’t know they had to inspect a runway after a bird strike, though it makes a lot of sense. Too often pilots or gate agents don’t take the time to explain the cause of a delay or a fly around, or don’t want to deal with the follow-up questions that may come -- and so I appreciate those that do. I remember a Southwest flight out of New Orleans. The plane lands -- it was a bit late -- but we’re not boarding right away. You could feel the impatience building in the gate area. The agent got on the PA -- “Sorry for the delay in boarding, but the plane was struck by lightning on its descent. The pilots have to do a physical inspection before we can board”. OK, that makes sense -- and just as you could feel the impatience build, it immediately drained away with that announcement. Maybe it’s because these delays weren’t the airline’s fault -- no negligence or bad judgement on American’s part for a bird strike or Southwest’s for lightning. Bit tougher to suck up when it’s the third delay in a row caused by maintenance issues -- spend some of those record profits on preventative maintenance -- or a missing crew -- maybe you should put a bit more slack in your scheduling. But as always, more transparency is better than vagueness -- even if it’s not the best story for you.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/septahelix/34050\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Earth Soda</a></em> by septahelix</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Data-Hungry Phones</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>I met up with a friend at <a href=\"http://www.empiricalbrewery.com/\">Empirical Brewing</a>, one of 3 microbreweries along Ravenswood Blvd in that Chicago northwest side neighborhood. I hadn’t seen him since he had gotten back from a trip he and his son did to Helsinki, St Petersburg, and Moscow. Among other things, he had problems getting his son’s AT&amp;T iPhone to work in Helsinki. That’s odd, I said. I’ve never had a problem with AT&amp;T’s GSM iPhones in Europe. AT&amp;T told him to reset it, which he did, after which it promptly downloaded a gig and a half of apps and data over the cellular data network. As you might guess, he’s disputing that couple of hundred dollar bill.</li>\n 	<li>I am always surprised at how much data my phone uses when I travel outside of the country. Now I’m sure that one reason for this is that it’s about the only time I look at my data usage since I’m grandfathered into one of the old AT&amp;T unlimited data plans. I don’t know how much I use, and don’t make a big effort to limit it. So when I travel overseas, I get to see my kids live their mobile lives trying to stay under a 300 MB data cap.</li>\n 	<li>International mobile data has gotten a bit cheaper. T-Mobile offers a reasonable unlimited international data plan if you can live with slower 2G-style speeds. I’m not that patient, so I tend to get the AT&amp;T 300 MB package for $60 because it also comes with free access to a decent set of wi-fi hotspots.</li>\n 	<li>Living on a data budget means thinking which apps really need mobile data -- which is not that many. So while I’m sitting on the plane waiting for everyone to board, I pull out my iPhone, go over to Settings | Cellular and start turning off cellular data access for most of my apps. I’m not quite sure why the healthcare flexible spending app or the app that came with my sous vide immersion heater ever need cellular data -- in the US or internationally. Anyhow, I spool through the last, turning most of them off and certainly that damn “Wi-Fi Assist” and then, after I’ve sent my last Snapchat, I hit “Reset Statistics” so I’ll have a clean view of how I’m burning through that 300 MB and then click over to Airplane mode.</li>\n 	<li>And then, when I land, I come out of Airplane mode, go back into Settings | Cellular and turn Roaming On, and catch up on the overnight e-mail while waiting to get off the plane. At some point that morning, I’ll look at the Current Period data usage and see that I’ve burned through, say, 75 MB of my 300 MB -- 25% of my total package -- in the first morning. Holy crap! I immediately dive back into Settings | Cellular and turn off Roaming. What happened?</li>\n 	<li>This is where, on the iPhone, you begin having to spelunk through the mess that the Settings app has become. You scroll down past all the apps you shut off from cellular access and look at the last entry -- “System Services” -- and see that it’s consumed at least half of that 75 MB. What the hell? You click through. Why has this phone used that much data on “Time &amp; Location” or “General” or “iTunes Accounts” (huh? I thought I shut off iTunes in the last screen). This is when you start to dig deep -- Settings | Privacy | Location Service and you find another list of apps -- kinda like the one you used to turn off cellular data, but this one is for accessing your location. Look, as much as I love the Tortas Frontera restaurants in ORD, I’m not sure why their app needs to pull my location information. And then you go to Settings | General | Background App Refresh for yet another list of apps where you shut off their permission to update themselves in the background. And then you go over to Settings | Mail and turn Fetch New Data to Off to keep your iPhone from constantly pinging your Exchange server.</li>\n 	<li>It’s kinda like whack-a-mole, and you’ll be sure to miss something because these phones and the apps we load on them are, for the most part, built on the assumption of ubiquitous unlimited data access. So changing that behavior, those assumptions -- to severely limit the data the phone inhales and exhales -- takes work. Which is why, if we’re going to be somewhere for more than 4-5 days, I’ll invest the hour it takes to find a phone store and $25 per phone to buy a local SIM with a gig or two of data. When I was in Iceland for 4 days in March, it didn’t seem necessary. But when then I flew down to Spain for 8 days, my first stop was the Orange store because I knew my phone couldn’t hold its breath for that long.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music --<em> <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/scottaltham/20747\">Hear Us Now</a></em> by&nbsp;scottaltham</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Dramatic Iceland</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Watching Iceland makes its Cinderella run in the Euro 2016 soccer tourney -- right up until the time they faceplanted into France last weekend -- reminded me of the trip my son and I took in March. Some reaction shots ESPN did from Reykjavik were places we had been -- saw a coffee shop we hit trying to stay awake on our first day, and a square that one of our hotels was on. Not that surprising since downtown Reykjavik isn’t that big. If I’d paid more attention to the people sitting next to me in the bars off that square, I’d have probably recognized some people in those shots too.</li>\n 	<li>Iceland is a hot tourist destination -- especially for people looking for something a bit different. And if I didn’t know already, when the Dorling Kindersley folks sent me review copies of their relaunched <a href=\"http://www.dk.com/us/travel/\">Eyewitness Travel Top 10 Guides</a>, in among the usual suspects -- New York, London, Paris, Barcelona -- was Iceland. In 2015, there were <a href=\"http://www.ferdamalastofa.is/static/files/ferdamalastofa/Frettamyndir/2016/juni/tourism_-in_iceland_in_figures_may2016.pdf\">1.3 million foreign tourists</a> in Iceland -- almost 4 times the population of 329,000 -- and a 29% increase over 2014. It’s a hot destination and getting hotter -- perhaps even to the point of overheating?</li>\n 	<li>Especially with Wow Air, a kinder and quirkier Spirit or Ryan Air, expanding the number of North American gateway cities. We ran into lots of folks who had seen ads for cheap Wow air fares and flew over for a 3 or 4 day weekend on a whim, without really thinking about what to do. We’d see folks walking up and down the downtown shopping and entertainment district in Reykjavik, and then figuring out some day trip bus rides out to the Golden Circle hot spots. And this was in March, not exactly the garden time in Iceland. But there were a lot of folks there. And so in that way, Iceland felt small.</li>\n 	<li>On our second day, we picked up a rental SUV -- a Dacia Duster, a great vehicle -- and headed out of town. Once we got out of Reykjavik’s catchment area, Iceland opened up quickly. The drama of the scenery, the spaces carved out by volcanos and glaciers -- “Land of Fire and Ice” it likes to bill itself -- make it feel much bigger. Of course, you could see this same space from the seat of a tour bus, but I was glad we rented a car. We got off the well-worn paths. Not too far, but when driving across a plain on a 2-lane highway with no traffic to speak of, the vistas did open up in front of us, which made me glad I was able to look forward and enjoy them through the expanse of the front windshield instead of looking off to the side through a motor coach window. And when we did some of the typical stops -- Þingvellir park, Gullfoss waterfall -- we could ride out the ebb and flow of the tour bus traffic, and have these spots pretty much to ourselves, even for just a little while. Or the time when we were driving toward the south coast, running through a series of rain bands -- in and out; in and out. I was starting to get annoyed until I looked out the rear view mirror and saw a huge double rainbow. I immediately pulled into a gas station and got out of the car. The landscape was wide open; we could see that rainbow from end to end. It was a phenomenal sight. And the smoked lamb sandwich we bought afterwards in the gas station wasn’t bad either.</li>\n 	<li>I struggle sometimes when asked about Iceland. Would I recommend it? Reykjavik is nice enough, but it’s a small town. I’m not a museum guy, so there was probably a day-and-a half of stuff for me to do. And Iceland is expensive. I had good fish and lamb, but it wasn’t cheap. And hotel rooms were tight in March, so I gotta figure the country is completely sold out in July and August.</li>\n 	<li>But the scenery outside of Reykjavik, I keep coming back to that word “dramatic”. I’m not sure it does it justice, but it’s all I got. If you get a car, then the trip starts to make sense.</li>\n 	<li>Well, that and the fermented shark chased with shots of brennivín -- Icelandic schnapps -- because, I dunno, how can you not?</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #122</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from the <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">ccMixter</a> site</li>\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_122.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #122 — Data-Hungry Phones; Dramatic Iceland','','inherit','closed','closed','','1629-revision-v1','','','2021-09-22 12:47:47','2021-09-22 17:47:47','',1629,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3675',0,'revision','',0),
(3677,1,'2021-09-22 12:51:49','2021-09-22 17:51:49','[caption id=\"attachment_1616\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"225\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/IMAG0569_1.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1616\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/IMAG0569_1-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"This should be interesting...\" width=\"225\" height=\"300\"></a> This should be interesting...[/caption]\n\nAfter two vacations to Europe and some full-contact business travel in-between, I found my way back into the TravelCommons studios. I talk about these recent trips -- the awful timeliness of an <a href=\"http://aa.com\">American Airlines</a>\' regional jet partner, an incredible string of lost luggage, a meaningless baggage strip tease with <a href=\"http://wowair.us\">Wow Air</a>, and being surprised to still find some quirks when using ATMs and credit cards in Europe. And it wouldn\'t be a travel podcast if I didn\'t weigh in on the TSA\'s \"line-mageddon\" -- their <a href=\"http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-tsa-airport-security-lines-met-0517-20160516-story.html\">meltdown at O\'Hare</a>. All this and more at the&nbsp;<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_121.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_121.mp3\"]\n\n<!--more-->\n\n<hr>\n\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #121:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you once again from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, after rewriting an episode I’d hoped to get done 3 weeks ago. I’d even posted on the TravelCommons Facebook wall on May 1st about having a new episode next weekend -- a post I’ve since deleted. Seems to be a trend with me. I get started on a new episode, but then it gets elbowed aside by other things -- like work. Maybe if I could just figure out a way to monetize this thing…</li>\n 	<li>I had hoped to record this episode halfway between two European trips. As I mentioned in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/12/podcast-120-where-do-guidebooks-fit-in-i-hate-shopping-for-suitcases/\">the last episode</a>, I had a weird Spring Break itinerary in April right before Easter -- Chicago to Reykjavik, Iceland for a 4-day long weekend with my son, and then, as he headed back to Chicago, I flew down to Spain to meet my wife and daughter and some friends for a week in Andalucia. As you can imagine, packing for that trip in a 22-inch carry on required equal amounts of editing and physical force. And then in mid-May, we all headed over to Portugal for a week. The excuse being that we needed to shove all my daughter’s belongings into storage after her first year at university in Scotland, but decided that Portugal would have better food and wine than Scotland. So we headed to Lisbon as a family, and then my wife and daughter are flew back up to St Andrews to do all the packing stuff. I think I came out of this pretty good.</li>\n 	<li>Where this episode got shoved off the rails was the week before I left for Portugal. We all know that vacations aren’t free -- that we pay for them the week before we leave and the week after. I was blissfully in denial of this immutable law, thinking that I could write, record, produce, and post this episode then. Cramming two weeks of business travel into 4 days (we were leaving for Lisbon Friday afternoon), that week’s travel itinerary was New Jersey on Monday, Boston on Tuesday, New Orleans on Wednesday, and Atlanta on Thursday. Across four airlines -- United ORD-EWR-BOS, JetBlue BOS-MSY, Southwest MSY-ATL, and American ATL-ORD -- I racked up about 2:30 hrs in flight delays with JetBlue being the only carrier without a black mark.</li>\n 	<li>Over April and May, what’s been particularly awful has been my run on one of American Airline’s regional jet partners Skywest. One Monday in April, Skywest lost voice and data connectivity at its Dallas dispatch center causing a ground stop of its planes. After two hours of hanging around the Admirals Club, watching my Newark departure time get pushed out every 30 minutes, I called Amex to get switched over to a real American plane flying into LGA. It added about 45 minutes to my drive after I landed, but at least I got there, especially since Skywest ended up canceling my original Newark flight. The next Monday, I ended up on another Skywest American flight; this time to Charlottesville, VA. Again, another 1+ hr delay. This time it was plane maintenance. Then that Friday, I get a text after lunch -- my flight home was delayed over 2 hours. That was it. Three Skywest flights in a row that couldn’t get close to on-schedule. I called Amex again. Got on a United flight out of Richmond. After an hour-and-a-half drag race down I-64, I landed at ORD, drove home, ate dinner with my wife, and had a couple of glasses of wine before my original Skywest plane finally made it to Chicago.</li>\n 	<li>Now I’m not a airline ops expert, but when the women behind the desks in the Admirals Club tell you about SkyWest “They’re not our favorite”, you might think about finding a new partner.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://cyberset.cc/artists2.php?tr_release_id=104\"><em>Heaven</em></a> by <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=A951998E6011FA9B2D22387EB3CAC0B5EB05A36360E7FDA122C8D7A5C140F8DC\" rel=\"nofollow\">Electric Skychurch</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Steve Frick asked in a comment on the TravelCommons website about how I use Evernote. In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/12/podcast-120-where-do-guidebooks-fit-in-i-hate-shopping-for-suitcases/\">the last episode</a>, I talked about how I use it to in my vacation travel planning. I used to store all sorts of things in Evernote — scanned receipts, recipes, etc. Now I mostly just use it to store on-line travel articles using its Web Clipper Chrome extension which I really like. A couple of days ago, I was reading a 36 Hours in Philadelphia article in the NYTimes. I clicked the little elephant head on the Chrome bar and now I have it saved, and synced across all my devices. I know a bunch of folks who are big OneNote users. I’ve been thinking of looking at it, but it’s pretty low on the priority list since I’m good in Evernote’s free tier.</li>\n 	<li>Peter Zurich sent in <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEyFH-a-XoQ\">a link</a> to an Onion YouTube video about the Franz Kafka Airport in Prague. Now, the Onion is talented/notorious for writing absurd articles in a straight voice that’s just close enough to the truth to make people accept that it is true. This video is well done. Anyone who read Kafka in high school or college will get a kick out of it, and remind you how close to Kafka-esque absurdity the modern travel experience gets. And it did make me look up the Prague airport -- did they really name it after Kafka? As great as that would be, the airport has been called Václav Havel Airport Prague since 2012 in honor of the Czech’s former president and leader of the Velvet Revolution.</li>\n 	<li>Dan Gradwohl dropped me a note regarding the “I Hate Shopping for a Suitcase” topic in the last episode where I talked about my difficulties in replacing my worn backpack.\n<ul>\n 	<li>As for the backpack search, Sara feels your pain as she searched long and hard for a new backpack before settling on a Gregory for her upcoming trip on The Camino in northern Spain. Of course, her backpack needs differ from yours! For baggage, she uses the REI Tech Beast and loves it. She\'s had it for 8 years, still going strong with 100,000+ miles per year easily on it. She has not found an overhead bin it does not fit in, from a CR9/170 to an A380/744.</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Dan, thanks for that. I just got a couple of REI coupons in the mail. I’ll have to go check out the Tech Beast</li>\n 	<li>In that same segment, I talked about my “smart” luggage bag from<a href=\"http://bluesmart.com/\"> Bluesmart</a>. I think I summarized my review as “meh” -- nice enough bag, but all the electronics felt more like a gimmick than something I needed. I’m going to backtrack a bit on that -- specifically with regards to its location finder capability. The bag has a GPS and global SIM card and through a deal with Telefonica transmits its location periodically which you can see on the smartphone app. As I mentioned in the last episode, the Bluesmart is the perfect carry-on size, it’s usually right above me in the plane cabin, so the location finder isn’t that valuable. Except recently, I’ve been flying regional jets a lot where I’ve had to gate check (“valet”) my bag. Normally I don’t worry about this -- I’ve never had an airline lose my bag in the couple of hundred feet between the jetway and the plane. But one on of these recent Skywest flights, it was taking my bag a long time to show up at the gate after arriving. Hmmm, I pulled out my iPhone, hit the Location button on the Bluesmart app, and it showed me that my bag had updated its location a couple of minutes prior and was indeed here. A few minutes later, it showed up in the last tranche of bags heaved up into the jet bridge. Not critical functionality, but it moves up from “meh” to “kinda handy”.</li>\n 	<li>Which I guess would’ve been handy but not necessarily useful in the string of bad luggage karma that my daughter and her friends have experienced over the past couple of month. My daughter’s luggage has been lost on 3 out of 4 trips -- Air Brussels lost it between EDI and MAD through BRU, KLM lost it on her return through AMS, and then AirFrance lost it between LIS and EDI through DeGaulle. And a friend of her had Ibera lose a bag between Seville and MAD. How does that happen? You have to really work hard to lose anything in an airport the size of Seville. And it’s not that my daughter wanted to check her bag. She wanted to carry on, But she has this short light blue roller bag that seems to pull gate agent eyes toward it. I gotta get her something more nondescript, like a black hardshell roller.</li>\n 	<li>But the thing that will catch you in Europe is that carry-on bags often have a weight limit as well as a size limit. Checking in for my <a href=\"http://wowair.us/\">Wow Air</a> flight from Reykjavik to London, I arrived 2 hrs before check in to see what appeared to be a stationary check in line of a couple of hundred people. Reykjavik is Wow’s hub and, near as I could see, they have 4 agents checking people in with luggage. I hadn’t wanted to check my luggage since I had a weird connection in London en route to Madrid -- no interlining between Wow and Ibera, so I would have to claim luggage in Gatwick, pass through Customs, and then recheck the bag with Iberia. And checking in with carry on was a separate and much shorter line. My bag fit -- snuggly -- in the sizer, so I figured I was good to go. No so fast. Wow also has a 7kg/15 lbs weight limit for carryons! Not even Spirit Airlines pulls that stunt. So I take my bag off the scale, pull some clothes out, zip it back up, and put it back on the scale. Not enough, the agent says. I do this 3 or 4 more times. The agent finally takes pity -- or gets tired of me -- and gives me the approval tag to put on my bag (saying “You shall pass” -- Wow Air definitely pushes the “we’re quirky” image). I walk about 10 feet with my tagged bag and armful of clothes, open my bag and put my clothes back in. When I got on the plane, a brand new Airbus A321, my carry on fit perfectly in the overhead bin, just like it does for every other Airbus A321, A320, and A319 I fly in the US and Europe. So I’m not quite sure what the Wow agent and I accomplished with that baggage strip tease, but I got what I wanted -- my bag right above me rather than trundling around Keflavik airport for the next couple of days.</li>\n 	<li>In the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/12/20/podcast-119-digital-security-on-the-road-us-airports-getting-better/\">last</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/12/podcast-120-where-do-guidebooks-fit-in-i-hate-shopping-for-suitcases/\">couple </a>of episodes, I’ve talked about the <a href=\"https://revolut.com/\">Revolut</a> card which is a Mastercard pre-paid debit card with some very nice foreign exchange functionality. I loved this card when it first came out -- first when I was traveling in the UK and then cheaply transfer money to my daughter studying in Scotland. Then I went very cold when they blew up the “cheaply” component , when they added a 3% fee when you added money/”topped up” your Revolut account using a US debit card. This episode, I’ve warmed up a bit. First, I discovered a way to bypass that 3% debit charge --I topped up my account in Euros with my US debit card. This avoids the 3% charge from Revolut, though the app does note that you’re not using the right currency with your card and asks you if you really mean to do this. My bank charges me less than 1% for the conversion, and though the exchange rate isn’t as good as Revolut’s, it’s not bad enough to cost-justify the 3% charge that USD top-ups attract. So, we’re back to a reasonably priced conversion -- in a roundabout way.</li>\n 	<li>Which is good because, for some reason, my US ATM card never worked the whole time I was in Iceland. And I could never figure out why. I traded notes with my bank. They weren’t denying anything; they weren’t ever seeing the transaction show up at their end. I dunno, maybe it’s some residual wonkiness left over from their banking meltdown. I can’t remember the last time I had problems like that. Which, before I left for Iceland, made me wonder if I still needed to carry a wad of backup USD with me on this trip -- given how ubiquitous and seamless ATMs are nowadays. I still didn’t need the Jacksons though because my Revolut card had no problem pulling krona from any ATM. In Portugal, I did hit a couple of different quirks. First, the train and Lisbon subway ticket machines don’t accept pre-paid debit cards which left me scrambling for exact change a surprising number of times. Second, a number of shops only accepted Visa cards, which blocked out Revolut’s MasterCard-based card. I used to see this more often in the past -- shops only accepted cards on one network -- Visa or MasterCard, and often didn’t take American Express -- which has led me to always carry one of each card, but I thought the need for that backup had also faded. So I guess I’ll keep carrying a fist full of credit cards and USD for at least a couple more years.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Rocky Road</em> by <a href=\"http://www.kcentricity.com/\">KCentric</a></li>\n</ul>\n<b>TSA Lines</b>\n<ul>\n 	<li>For much of March and April, I’d been traveling in and out of Newark pretty much every week which, I have to say, if you’re using Terminal A, is the worst airport in the country. Now, I know that Terminal B in LaGuardia gives it a good run with the ceiling tarps drained by garden hoses into trash cans in the middle of the terminal, but the TSA security set up in Newark Terminal A beats that. They’ve split the corridor, the hallway down to gates in two -- the right side has the TSA stations, the left side the line for passengers waiting to be screened and the walkway for exiting passengers. The screening line is usually a bit of a cluster -- you can never quite tell which screening station you’re waiting for -- maybe #3 or should I scoot around to get in the line for #4. The really special feature of this configuration -- what wins it the prize -- is that you often have to wait in line to leave the terminal. Yup, more than a few times there’s a TSA agent holding up a line of departing passengers because of some confusion in the screening lines. It’s just awful.</li>\n 	<li>I just missed the TSA’s line-mageddon in O’Hare (I flew out the Friday before) where 450 American Airlines passengers got to experience Camp O’Hare cots after missing their flights because of 2-3 hour long TSA screening lines. But you could see it coming. My wife had spend 45 minutes in line in March, and the Monday morning rush hour had become a jumble of lines extending the length of the concourse. With summer travel volumes starting to build, it was a matter of when, not if, the whole thing imploded. And if I could tell this from my weekly flight out of ORD, you know the TSA folks on the ground knew it and were dreading it. So why didn’t they get in front of this instead of waiting until after the meltdown and the screaming headlines to replace management and add staff.</li>\n 	<li>Wading through recriminations about incompetence, baggage fees, gross misforecasting of PreCheck sign-ups, and the general <a href=\"http://www.travelandleisure.com/travel-tips/travel-warnings/tsa-blames-passengers\">cluelessness of infrequent fliers</a>, I think a couple of economists get to the real answer in an <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/737290917220995075\">article</a> in Sunday’s New York Times -- “the TSA has been acting as if there were no cost to tying people up for hours in security lines. In effect, all that time on line is “free” to the T.S.A.” “This glaring omission creates perverse incentives for government agencies. Cutting staff improves an agency’s bottom line, while wasting citizens’ time has little material consequence for it aside from expressions of annoyance and outrage in tweets and (newspaper) articles”</li>\n 	<li>I think that pretty much nails it. I retweeted a <a href=\"http://qz.com/659461/tsa-is-our-no-1-problem-right-now-long-security-lines-are-frustrating-us-airlines-too/\">link </a>to a Quartz article with a pretty self-explanatory graph. Air traveller volume has increased more than 10% over the past 12 months while the number of TSA screeners has decreased by more than that. Everyone knew this train wreck was coming, but there was no incentive to fix it -- until the wreck happened and the volume of complaints and outrage became impossible to ignore.</li>\n 	<li>In the immediate term, the spectacle of those 450 filled cots at ORD spurred some good action -- Congress let the TSA move some money around to hire more personnel, the TSA head of security got sacked, lines at ORD have shrunk, and a lot more people are ponying up the $85 for PreCheck (which is causing a whole other set of lines that I’m not going into).\nIn the short to medium term, maybe some new technology will help -- automating checkpoints like they do in London Heathrow, posting real-time wait times so travelers can “self-balance” security lines.</li>\n 	<li>But not until the TSA explicitly considers the value of travelers time will we get to some semblance of realistic balance between the cost and risk of travel.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #121</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_121.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #121 — TSA Lines, My Luggage is Where?','','inherit','closed','closed','','1615-revision-v1','','','2021-09-22 12:51:49','2021-09-22 17:51:49','',1615,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3677',0,'revision','',0),
(3678,1,'2021-09-22 12:52:26','2021-09-22 17:52:26','[caption id=\"attachment_1616\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"225\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/IMAG0569_1.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1616\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/IMAG0569_1-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"This should be interesting...\" width=\"225\" height=\"300\"></a> This should be interesting...[/caption]\n\nAfter two vacations to Europe and some full-contact business travel in-between, I found my way back into the TravelCommons studios. I talk about these recent trips -- the awful timeliness of an <a href=\"http://aa.com\">American Airlines</a>\' regional jet partner, an incredible string of lost luggage, a meaningless baggage strip tease with <a href=\"http://wowair.us\">Wow Air</a>, and being surprised to still find some quirks when using ATMs and credit cards in Europe. And it wouldn\'t be a travel podcast if I didn\'t weigh in on the TSA\'s \"line-mageddon\" -- their <a href=\"http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-tsa-airport-security-lines-met-0517-20160516-story.html\">meltdown at O\'Hare</a>. All this and more at the&nbsp;<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_121.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n<hr>\n\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #121:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you once again from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, after rewriting an episode I’d hoped to get done 3 weeks ago. I’d even posted on the TravelCommons Facebook wall on May 1st about having a new episode next weekend -- a post I’ve since deleted. Seems to be a trend with me. I get started on a new episode, but then it gets elbowed aside by other things -- like work. Maybe if I could just figure out a way to monetize this thing…</li>\n 	<li>I had hoped to record this episode halfway between two European trips. As I mentioned in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/12/podcast-120-where-do-guidebooks-fit-in-i-hate-shopping-for-suitcases/\">the last episode</a>, I had a weird Spring Break itinerary in April right before Easter -- Chicago to Reykjavik, Iceland for a 4-day long weekend with my son, and then, as he headed back to Chicago, I flew down to Spain to meet my wife and daughter and some friends for a week in Andalucia. As you can imagine, packing for that trip in a 22-inch carry on required equal amounts of editing and physical force. And then in mid-May, we all headed over to Portugal for a week. The excuse being that we needed to shove all my daughter’s belongings into storage after her first year at university in Scotland, but decided that Portugal would have better food and wine than Scotland. So we headed to Lisbon as a family, and then my wife and daughter are flew back up to St Andrews to do all the packing stuff. I think I came out of this pretty good.</li>\n 	<li>Where this episode got shoved off the rails was the week before I left for Portugal. We all know that vacations aren’t free -- that we pay for them the week before we leave and the week after. I was blissfully in denial of this immutable law, thinking that I could write, record, produce, and post this episode then. Cramming two weeks of business travel into 4 days (we were leaving for Lisbon Friday afternoon), that week’s travel itinerary was New Jersey on Monday, Boston on Tuesday, New Orleans on Wednesday, and Atlanta on Thursday. Across four airlines -- United ORD-EWR-BOS, JetBlue BOS-MSY, Southwest MSY-ATL, and American ATL-ORD -- I racked up about 2:30 hrs in flight delays with JetBlue being the only carrier without a black mark.</li>\n 	<li>Over April and May, what’s been particularly awful has been my run on one of American Airline’s regional jet partners Skywest. One Monday in April, Skywest lost voice and data connectivity at its Dallas dispatch center causing a ground stop of its planes. After two hours of hanging around the Admirals Club, watching my Newark departure time get pushed out every 30 minutes, I called Amex to get switched over to a real American plane flying into LGA. It added about 45 minutes to my drive after I landed, but at least I got there, especially since Skywest ended up canceling my original Newark flight. The next Monday, I ended up on another Skywest American flight; this time to Charlottesville, VA. Again, another 1+ hr delay. This time it was plane maintenance. Then that Friday, I get a text after lunch -- my flight home was delayed over 2 hours. That was it. Three Skywest flights in a row that couldn’t get close to on-schedule. I called Amex again. Got on a United flight out of Richmond. After an hour-and-a-half drag race down I-64, I landed at ORD, drove home, ate dinner with my wife, and had a couple of glasses of wine before my original Skywest plane finally made it to Chicago.</li>\n 	<li>Now I’m not a airline ops expert, but when the women behind the desks in the Admirals Club tell you about SkyWest “They’re not our favorite”, you might think about finding a new partner.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://cyberset.cc/artists2.php?tr_release_id=104\"><em>Heaven</em></a> by <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=A951998E6011FA9B2D22387EB3CAC0B5EB05A36360E7FDA122C8D7A5C140F8DC\" rel=\"nofollow\">Electric Skychurch</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Steve Frick asked in a comment on the TravelCommons website about how I use Evernote. In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/12/podcast-120-where-do-guidebooks-fit-in-i-hate-shopping-for-suitcases/\">the last episode</a>, I talked about how I use it to in my vacation travel planning. I used to store all sorts of things in Evernote — scanned receipts, recipes, etc. Now I mostly just use it to store on-line travel articles using its Web Clipper Chrome extension which I really like. A couple of days ago, I was reading a 36 Hours in Philadelphia article in the NYTimes. I clicked the little elephant head on the Chrome bar and now I have it saved, and synced across all my devices. I know a bunch of folks who are big OneNote users. I’ve been thinking of looking at it, but it’s pretty low on the priority list since I’m good in Evernote’s free tier.</li>\n 	<li>Peter Zurich sent in <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEyFH-a-XoQ\">a link</a> to an Onion YouTube video about the Franz Kafka Airport in Prague. Now, the Onion is talented/notorious for writing absurd articles in a straight voice that’s just close enough to the truth to make people accept that it is true. This video is well done. Anyone who read Kafka in high school or college will get a kick out of it, and remind you how close to Kafka-esque absurdity the modern travel experience gets. And it did make me look up the Prague airport -- did they really name it after Kafka? As great as that would be, the airport has been called Václav Havel Airport Prague since 2012 in honor of the Czech’s former president and leader of the Velvet Revolution.</li>\n 	<li>Dan Gradwohl dropped me a note regarding the “I Hate Shopping for a Suitcase” topic in the last episode where I talked about my difficulties in replacing my worn backpack.\n<ul>\n 	<li>As for the backpack search, Sara feels your pain as she searched long and hard for a new backpack before settling on a Gregory for her upcoming trip on The Camino in northern Spain. Of course, her backpack needs differ from yours! For baggage, she uses the REI Tech Beast and loves it. She\'s had it for 8 years, still going strong with 100,000+ miles per year easily on it. She has not found an overhead bin it does not fit in, from a CR9/170 to an A380/744.</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Dan, thanks for that. I just got a couple of REI coupons in the mail. I’ll have to go check out the Tech Beast</li>\n 	<li>In that same segment, I talked about my “smart” luggage bag from<a href=\"http://bluesmart.com/\"> Bluesmart</a>. I think I summarized my review as “meh” -- nice enough bag, but all the electronics felt more like a gimmick than something I needed. I’m going to backtrack a bit on that -- specifically with regards to its location finder capability. The bag has a GPS and global SIM card and through a deal with Telefonica transmits its location periodically which you can see on the smartphone app. As I mentioned in the last episode, the Bluesmart is the perfect carry-on size, it’s usually right above me in the plane cabin, so the location finder isn’t that valuable. Except recently, I’ve been flying regional jets a lot where I’ve had to gate check (“valet”) my bag. Normally I don’t worry about this -- I’ve never had an airline lose my bag in the couple of hundred feet between the jetway and the plane. But one on of these recent Skywest flights, it was taking my bag a long time to show up at the gate after arriving. Hmmm, I pulled out my iPhone, hit the Location button on the Bluesmart app, and it showed me that my bag had updated its location a couple of minutes prior and was indeed here. A few minutes later, it showed up in the last tranche of bags heaved up into the jet bridge. Not critical functionality, but it moves up from “meh” to “kinda handy”.</li>\n 	<li>Which I guess would’ve been handy but not necessarily useful in the string of bad luggage karma that my daughter and her friends have experienced over the past couple of month. My daughter’s luggage has been lost on 3 out of 4 trips -- Air Brussels lost it between EDI and MAD through BRU, KLM lost it on her return through AMS, and then AirFrance lost it between LIS and EDI through DeGaulle. And a friend of her had Ibera lose a bag between Seville and MAD. How does that happen? You have to really work hard to lose anything in an airport the size of Seville. And it’s not that my daughter wanted to check her bag. She wanted to carry on, But she has this short light blue roller bag that seems to pull gate agent eyes toward it. I gotta get her something more nondescript, like a black hardshell roller.</li>\n 	<li>But the thing that will catch you in Europe is that carry-on bags often have a weight limit as well as a size limit. Checking in for my <a href=\"http://wowair.us/\">Wow Air</a> flight from Reykjavik to London, I arrived 2 hrs before check in to see what appeared to be a stationary check in line of a couple of hundred people. Reykjavik is Wow’s hub and, near as I could see, they have 4 agents checking people in with luggage. I hadn’t wanted to check my luggage since I had a weird connection in London en route to Madrid -- no interlining between Wow and Ibera, so I would have to claim luggage in Gatwick, pass through Customs, and then recheck the bag with Iberia. And checking in with carry on was a separate and much shorter line. My bag fit -- snuggly -- in the sizer, so I figured I was good to go. No so fast. Wow also has a 7kg/15 lbs weight limit for carryons! Not even Spirit Airlines pulls that stunt. So I take my bag off the scale, pull some clothes out, zip it back up, and put it back on the scale. Not enough, the agent says. I do this 3 or 4 more times. The agent finally takes pity -- or gets tired of me -- and gives me the approval tag to put on my bag (saying “You shall pass” -- Wow Air definitely pushes the “we’re quirky” image). I walk about 10 feet with my tagged bag and armful of clothes, open my bag and put my clothes back in. When I got on the plane, a brand new Airbus A321, my carry on fit perfectly in the overhead bin, just like it does for every other Airbus A321, A320, and A319 I fly in the US and Europe. So I’m not quite sure what the Wow agent and I accomplished with that baggage strip tease, but I got what I wanted -- my bag right above me rather than trundling around Keflavik airport for the next couple of days.</li>\n 	<li>In the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/12/20/podcast-119-digital-security-on-the-road-us-airports-getting-better/\">last</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/12/podcast-120-where-do-guidebooks-fit-in-i-hate-shopping-for-suitcases/\">couple </a>of episodes, I’ve talked about the <a href=\"https://revolut.com/\">Revolut</a> card which is a Mastercard pre-paid debit card with some very nice foreign exchange functionality. I loved this card when it first came out -- first when I was traveling in the UK and then cheaply transfer money to my daughter studying in Scotland. Then I went very cold when they blew up the “cheaply” component , when they added a 3% fee when you added money/”topped up” your Revolut account using a US debit card. This episode, I’ve warmed up a bit. First, I discovered a way to bypass that 3% debit charge --I topped up my account in Euros with my US debit card. This avoids the 3% charge from Revolut, though the app does note that you’re not using the right currency with your card and asks you if you really mean to do this. My bank charges me less than 1% for the conversion, and though the exchange rate isn’t as good as Revolut’s, it’s not bad enough to cost-justify the 3% charge that USD top-ups attract. So, we’re back to a reasonably priced conversion -- in a roundabout way.</li>\n 	<li>Which is good because, for some reason, my US ATM card never worked the whole time I was in Iceland. And I could never figure out why. I traded notes with my bank. They weren’t denying anything; they weren’t ever seeing the transaction show up at their end. I dunno, maybe it’s some residual wonkiness left over from their banking meltdown. I can’t remember the last time I had problems like that. Which, before I left for Iceland, made me wonder if I still needed to carry a wad of backup USD with me on this trip -- given how ubiquitous and seamless ATMs are nowadays. I still didn’t need the Jacksons though because my Revolut card had no problem pulling krona from any ATM. In Portugal, I did hit a couple of different quirks. First, the train and Lisbon subway ticket machines don’t accept pre-paid debit cards which left me scrambling for exact change a surprising number of times. Second, a number of shops only accepted Visa cards, which blocked out Revolut’s MasterCard-based card. I used to see this more often in the past -- shops only accepted cards on one network -- Visa or MasterCard, and often didn’t take American Express -- which has led me to always carry one of each card, but I thought the need for that backup had also faded. So I guess I’ll keep carrying a fist full of credit cards and USD for at least a couple more years.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Rocky Road</em> by <a href=\"http://www.kcentricity.com/\">KCentric</a></li>\n</ul>\n<b>TSA Lines</b>\n<ul>\n 	<li>For much of March and April, I’d been traveling in and out of Newark pretty much every week which, I have to say, if you’re using Terminal A, is the worst airport in the country. Now, I know that Terminal B in LaGuardia gives it a good run with the ceiling tarps drained by garden hoses into trash cans in the middle of the terminal, but the TSA security set up in Newark Terminal A beats that. They’ve split the corridor, the hallway down to gates in two -- the right side has the TSA stations, the left side the line for passengers waiting to be screened and the walkway for exiting passengers. The screening line is usually a bit of a cluster -- you can never quite tell which screening station you’re waiting for -- maybe #3 or should I scoot around to get in the line for #4. The really special feature of this configuration -- what wins it the prize -- is that you often have to wait in line to leave the terminal. Yup, more than a few times there’s a TSA agent holding up a line of departing passengers because of some confusion in the screening lines. It’s just awful.</li>\n 	<li>I just missed the TSA’s line-mageddon in O’Hare (I flew out the Friday before) where 450 American Airlines passengers got to experience Camp O’Hare cots after missing their flights because of 2-3 hour long TSA screening lines. But you could see it coming. My wife had spend 45 minutes in line in March, and the Monday morning rush hour had become a jumble of lines extending the length of the concourse. With summer travel volumes starting to build, it was a matter of when, not if, the whole thing imploded. And if I could tell this from my weekly flight out of ORD, you know the TSA folks on the ground knew it and were dreading it. So why didn’t they get in front of this instead of waiting until after the meltdown and the screaming headlines to replace management and add staff.</li>\n 	<li>Wading through recriminations about incompetence, baggage fees, gross misforecasting of PreCheck sign-ups, and the general <a href=\"http://www.travelandleisure.com/travel-tips/travel-warnings/tsa-blames-passengers\">cluelessness of infrequent fliers</a>, I think a couple of economists get to the real answer in an <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/737290917220995075\">article</a> in Sunday’s New York Times -- “the TSA has been acting as if there were no cost to tying people up for hours in security lines. In effect, all that time on line is “free” to the T.S.A.” “This glaring omission creates perverse incentives for government agencies. Cutting staff improves an agency’s bottom line, while wasting citizens’ time has little material consequence for it aside from expressions of annoyance and outrage in tweets and (newspaper) articles”</li>\n 	<li>I think that pretty much nails it. I retweeted a <a href=\"http://qz.com/659461/tsa-is-our-no-1-problem-right-now-long-security-lines-are-frustrating-us-airlines-too/\">link </a>to a Quartz article with a pretty self-explanatory graph. Air traveller volume has increased more than 10% over the past 12 months while the number of TSA screeners has decreased by more than that. Everyone knew this train wreck was coming, but there was no incentive to fix it -- until the wreck happened and the volume of complaints and outrage became impossible to ignore.</li>\n 	<li>In the immediate term, the spectacle of those 450 filled cots at ORD spurred some good action -- Congress let the TSA move some money around to hire more personnel, the TSA head of security got sacked, lines at ORD have shrunk, and a lot more people are ponying up the $85 for PreCheck (which is causing a whole other set of lines that I’m not going into).\nIn the short to medium term, maybe some new technology will help -- automating checkpoints like they do in London Heathrow, posting real-time wait times so travelers can “self-balance” security lines.</li>\n 	<li>But not until the TSA explicitly considers the value of travelers time will we get to some semblance of realistic balance between the cost and risk of travel.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #121</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_121.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #121 — TSA Lines, My Luggage is Where?','','inherit','closed','closed','','1615-revision-v1','','','2021-09-22 12:52:26','2021-09-22 17:52:26','',1615,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3678',0,'revision','',0),
(3680,1,'2021-09-22 12:57:37','2021-09-22 17:57:37','[caption id=\"attachment_1616\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"225\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/IMAG0569_1.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1616\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/IMAG0569_1-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"This should be interesting...\" width=\"225\" height=\"300\" /></a> This should be interesting...[/caption]\n\nAfter two vacations to Europe and some full-contact business travel in-between, I found my way back into the TravelCommons studios. I talk about these recent trips -- the awful timeliness of an <a href=\"http://aa.com\">American Airlines</a>\' regional jet partner, an incredible string of lost luggage, a meaningless baggage strip tease with <a href=\"http://wowair.us\">Wow Air</a>, and being surprised to still find some quirks when using ATMs and credit cards in Europe. And it wouldn\'t be a travel podcast if I didn\'t weigh in on the TSA\'s \"line-mageddon\" -- their <a href=\"http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-tsa-airport-security-lines-met-0517-20160516-story.html\">meltdown at O\'Hare</a>. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_121.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #121:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you once again from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, after rewriting an episode I’d hoped to get done 3 weeks ago. I’d even posted on the TravelCommons Facebook wall on May 1st about having a new episode next weekend -- a post I’ve since deleted. Seems to be a trend with me. I get started on a new episode, but then it gets elbowed aside by other things -- like work. Maybe if I could just figure out a way to monetize this thing…</li>\n 	<li>I had hoped to record this episode halfway between two European trips. As I mentioned in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/12/podcast-120-where-do-guidebooks-fit-in-i-hate-shopping-for-suitcases/\">the last episode</a>, I had a weird Spring Break itinerary in April right before Easter -- Chicago to Reykjavik, Iceland for a 4-day long weekend with my son, and then, as he headed back to Chicago, I flew down to Spain to meet my wife and daughter and some friends for a week in Andalucia. As you can imagine, packing for that trip in a 22-inch carry on required equal amounts of editing and physical force. And then in mid-May, we all headed over to Portugal for a week. The excuse being that we needed to shove all my daughter’s belongings into storage after her first year at university in Scotland, but decided that Portugal would have better food and wine than Scotland. So we headed to Lisbon as a family, and then my wife and daughter flew back up to St Andrews to do all the packing stuff. I think I came out of this pretty good.</li>\n 	<li>Where this episode got shoved off the rails was the week before I left for Portugal. We all know that vacations aren’t free -- that we pay for them the week before we leave and the week after. I was blissfully in denial of this immutable law, thinking that I could write, record, produce, and post this episode then. Cramming two weeks of business travel into 4 days (we were leaving for Lisbon Friday afternoon), that week’s travel itinerary was New Jersey on Monday, Boston on Tuesday, New Orleans on Wednesday, and Atlanta on Thursday. Across four airlines -- United ORD-EWR-BOS, JetBlue BOS-MSY, Southwest MSY-ATL, and American ATL-ORD -- I racked up about 2:30 hrs in flight delays with JetBlue being the only carrier without a black mark.</li>\n 	<li>Over April and May, what’s been particularly awful has been my run on one of American Airline’s regional jet partners Skywest. One Monday in April, Skywest lost voice and data connectivity at its Dallas dispatch center causing a ground stop of its planes. After two hours of hanging around the Admirals Club, watching my Newark departure time get pushed out every 30 minutes, I called Amex to get switched over to a real American plane flying into LGA. It added about 45 minutes to my drive after I landed, but at least I got there, especially since Skywest ended up canceling my original Newark flight. The next Monday, I ended up on another Skywest American flight; this time to Charlottesville, VA. Again, another 1+ hr delay. This time it was plane maintenance. Then that Friday, I get a text after lunch -- my flight home was delayed over 2 hours. That was it. Three Skywest flights in a row that couldn’t get close to on-schedule. I called Amex again. Got on a United flight out of Richmond. After an hour-and-a-half drag race down I-64, I landed at ORD, drove home, ate dinner with my wife, and had a couple of glasses of wine before my original Skywest plane finally made it to Chicago.</li>\n 	<li>Now I’m not an airline ops expert, but when the women behind the desks in the Admirals Club tell you about SkyWest “They’re not our favorite”, you might think about finding a new partner.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://cyberset.cc/artists2.php?tr_release_id=104\"><em>Heaven</em></a> by <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=A951998E6011FA9B2D22387EB3CAC0B5EB05A36360E7FDA122C8D7A5C140F8DC\" rel=\"nofollow\">Electric Skychurch</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Steve Frick asked in a comment on the TravelCommons website about how I use Evernote. In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/12/podcast-120-where-do-guidebooks-fit-in-i-hate-shopping-for-suitcases/\">the last episode</a>, I talked about how I use it to in my vacation travel planning. I used to store all sorts of things in Evernote — scanned receipts, recipes, etc. Now I mostly just use it to store on-line travel articles using its Web Clipper Chrome extension which I really like. A couple of days ago, I was reading a 36 Hours in Philadelphia article in the NYTimes. I clicked the little elephant head on the Chrome bar and now I have it saved, and synced across all my devices. I know a bunch of folks who are big OneNote users. I’ve been thinking of looking at it, but it’s pretty low on the priority list since I’m good in Evernote’s free tier.</li>\n 	<li>Peter Zurich sent in <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEyFH-a-XoQ\">a link</a> to an Onion YouTube video about the Franz Kafka Airport in Prague. Now, the Onion is talented/notorious for writing absurd articles in a straight voice that’s just close enough to the truth to make people accept that it is true. This video is well done. Anyone who read Kafka in high school or college will get a kick out of it, and remind you how close to Kafka-esque absurdity the modern travel experience gets. And it did make me look up the Prague airport -- did they really name it after Kafka? As great as that would be, the airport has been called Václav Havel Airport Prague since 2012 in honor of the Czech’s former president and leader of the Velvet Revolution.</li>\n 	<li>Dan Gradwohl dropped me a note regarding the “I Hate Shopping for a Suitcase” topic in the last episode where I talked about my difficulties in replacing my worn backpack.\n<ul>\n 	<li>As for the backpack search, Sara feels your pain as she searched long and hard for a new backpack before settling on a Gregory for her upcoming trip on The Camino in northern Spain. Of course, her backpack needs differ from yours! For baggage, she uses the REI Tech Beast and loves it. She\'s had it for 8 years, still going strong with 100,000+ miles per year easily on it. She has not found an overhead bin it does not fit in, from a CR9/170 to an A380/744.</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Dan, thanks for that. I just got a couple of REI coupons in the mail. I’ll have to go check out the Tech Beast</li>\n 	<li>In that same segment, I talked about my “smart” luggage bag from<a href=\"http://bluesmart.com/\"> Bluesmart</a>. I think I summarized my review as “meh” -- nice enough bag, but all the electronics felt more like a gimmick than something I needed. I’m going to backtrack a bit on that -- specifically with regards to its location finder capability. The bag has a GPS and global SIM card and through a deal with Telefonica transmits its location periodically which you can see on the smartphone app. As I mentioned in the last episode, the Bluesmart is the perfect carry-on size, it’s usually right above me in the plane cabin, so the location finder isn’t that valuable. Except recently, I’ve been flying regional jets a lot where I’ve had to gate check (“valet”) my bag. Normally I don’t worry about this -- I’ve never had an airline lose my bag in the couple of hundred feet between the jetway and the plane. But one on of these recent Skywest flights, it was taking my bag a long time to show up at the gate after arriving. Hmmm, I pulled out my iPhone, hit the Location button on the Bluesmart app, and it showed me that my bag had updated its location a couple of minutes prior and was indeed here. A few minutes later, it showed up in the last tranche of bags heaved up into the jet bridge. Not critical functionality, but it moves up from “meh” to “kinda handy”.</li>\n 	<li>Which I guess would’ve been handy but not necessarily useful in the string of bad luggage karma that my daughter and her friends have experienced over the past couple of month. My daughter’s luggage has been lost on 3 out of 4 trips -- Air Brussels lost it between EDI and MAD through BRU, KLM lost it on her return through AMS, and then AirFrance lost it between LIS and EDI through DeGaulle. And a friend of her had Ibera lose a bag between Seville and MAD. How does that happen? You have to really work hard to lose anything in an airport the size of Seville. And it’s not that my daughter wanted to check her bag. She wanted to carry on, But she has this short light blue roller bag that seems to pull gate agent eyes toward it. I gotta get her something more nondescript, like a black hardshell roller.</li>\n 	<li>But the thing that will catch you in Europe is that carry-on bags often have a weight limit as well as a size limit. Checking in for my <a href=\"http://wowair.us/\">Wow Air</a> flight from Reykjavik to London, I arrived 2 hrs before check in to see what appeared to be a stationary check in line of a couple of hundred people. Reykjavik is Wow’s hub and, near as I could see, they have 4 agents checking people in with luggage. I hadn’t wanted to check my luggage since I had a weird connection in London en route to Madrid -- no interlining between Wow and Ibera, so I would have to claim luggage in Gatwick, pass through Customs, and then recheck the bag with Iberia. And checking in with carry on was a separate and much shorter line. My bag fit -- snuggly -- in the sizer, so I figured I was good to go. No so fast. Wow also has a 7kg/15 lbs weight limit for carryons! Not even Spirit Airlines pulls that stunt. So I take my bag off the scale, pull some clothes out, zip it back up, and put it back on the scale. Not enough, the agent says. I do this 3 or 4 more times. The agent finally takes pity -- or gets tired of me -- and gives me the approval tag to put on my bag (saying “You shall pass” -- Wow Air definitely pushes the “we’re quirky” image). I walk about 10 feet with my tagged bag and armful of clothes, open my bag and put my clothes back in. When I got on the plane, a brand new Airbus A321, my carry on fit perfectly in the overhead bin, just like it does for every other Airbus A321, A320, and A319 I fly in the US and Europe. So I’m not quite sure what the Wow agent and I accomplished with that baggage strip tease, but I got what I wanted -- my bag right above me rather than trundling around Keflavik airport for the next couple of days.</li>\n 	<li>In the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/12/20/podcast-119-digital-security-on-the-road-us-airports-getting-better/\">last</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/12/podcast-120-where-do-guidebooks-fit-in-i-hate-shopping-for-suitcases/\">couple </a>of episodes, I’ve talked about the <a href=\"https://revolut.com/\">Revolut</a> card which is a Mastercard pre-paid debit card with some very nice foreign exchange functionality. I loved this card when it first came out -- first when I was traveling in the UK and then cheaply transfer money to my daughter studying in Scotland. Then I went very cold when they blew up the “cheaply” component , when they added a 3% fee when you added money/”topped up” your Revolut account using a US debit card. This episode, I’ve warmed up a bit. First, I discovered a way to bypass that 3% debit charge --I topped up my account in Euros with my US debit card. This avoids the 3% charge from Revolut, though the app does note that you’re not using the right currency with your card and asks you if you really mean to do this. My bank charges me less than 1% for the conversion, and though the exchange rate isn’t as good as Revolut’s, it’s not bad enough to cost-justify the 3% charge that USD top-ups attract. So, we’re back to a reasonably priced conversion -- in a roundabout way.</li>\n 	<li>Which is good because, for some reason, my US ATM card never worked the whole time I was in Iceland. And I could never figure out why. I traded notes with my bank. They weren’t denying anything; they weren’t ever seeing the transaction show up at their end. I dunno, maybe it’s some residual wonkiness left over from their banking meltdown. I can’t remember the last time I had problems like that. Which, before I left for Iceland, made me wonder if I still needed to carry a wad of backup USD with me on this trip -- given how ubiquitous and seamless ATMs are nowadays. I still didn’t need the Jacksons though because my Revolut card had no problem pulling krona from any ATM. In Portugal, I did hit a couple of different quirks. First, the train and Lisbon subway ticket machines don’t accept pre-paid debit cards which left me scrambling for exact change a surprising number of times. Second, a number of shops only accepted Visa cards, which blocked out Revolut’s MasterCard-based card. I used to see this more often in the past -- shops only accepted cards on one network -- Visa or MasterCard, and often didn’t take American Express -- which has led me to always carry one of each card, but I thought the need for that backup had also faded. So I guess I’ll keep carrying a fist full of credit cards and USD for at least a couple more years.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Rocky Road</em> by <a href=\"http://www.kcentricity.com/\">KCentric</a></li>\n</ul>\n<b>TSA Lines</b>\n<ul>\n 	<li>For much of March and April, I’d been traveling in and out of Newark pretty much every week which, I have to say, if you’re using Terminal A, is the worst airport in the country. Now, I know that Terminal B in LaGuardia gives it a good run with the ceiling tarps drained by garden hoses into trash cans in the middle of the terminal, but the TSA security set up in Newark Terminal A beats that. They’ve split the corridor, the hallway down to gates in two -- the right side has the TSA stations, the left side the line for passengers waiting to be screened and the walkway for exiting passengers. The screening line is usually a bit of a cluster -- you can never quite tell which screening station you’re waiting for -- maybe #3 or should I scoot around to get in the line for #4. The really special feature of this configuration -- what wins it the prize -- is that you often have to wait in line to leave the terminal. Yup, more than a few times there’s a TSA agent holding up a line of departing passengers because of some confusion in the screening lines. It’s just awful.</li>\n 	<li>I just missed the TSA’s line-mageddon in O’Hare (I flew out the Friday before) where 450 American Airlines passengers got to experience Camp O’Hare cots after missing their flights because of 2-3 hour long TSA screening lines. But you could see it coming. My wife had spend 45 minutes in line in March, and the Monday morning rush hour had become a jumble of lines extending the length of the concourse. With summer travel volumes starting to build, it was a matter of when, not if, the whole thing imploded. And if I could tell this from my weekly flight out of ORD, you know the TSA folks on the ground knew it and were dreading it. So why didn’t they get in front of this instead of waiting until after the meltdown and the screaming headlines to replace management and add staff.</li>\n 	<li>Wading through recriminations about incompetence, baggage fees, gross misforecasting of PreCheck sign-ups, and the general <a href=\"http://www.travelandleisure.com/travel-tips/travel-warnings/tsa-blames-passengers\">cluelessness of infrequent fliers</a>, I think a couple of economists get to the real answer in an <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/737290917220995075\">article</a> in Sunday’s New York Times -- “the TSA has been acting as if there were no cost to tying people up for hours in security lines. In effect, all that time on line is “free” to the T.S.A.” “This glaring omission creates perverse incentives for government agencies. Cutting staff improves an agency’s bottom line, while wasting citizens’ time has little material consequence for it aside from expressions of annoyance and outrage in tweets and (newspaper) articles”</li>\n 	<li>I think that pretty much nails it. I retweeted a <a href=\"http://qz.com/659461/tsa-is-our-no-1-problem-right-now-long-security-lines-are-frustrating-us-airlines-too/\">link </a>to a Quartz article with a pretty self-explanatory graph. Air traveller volume has increased more than 10% over the past 12 months while the number of TSA screeners has decreased by more than that. Everyone knew this train wreck was coming, but there was no incentive to fix it -- until the wreck happened and the volume of complaints and outrage became impossible to ignore.</li>\n 	<li>In the immediate term, the spectacle of those 450 filled cots at ORD spurred some good action -- Congress let the TSA move some money around to hire more personnel, the TSA head of security got sacked, lines at ORD have shrunk, and a lot more people are ponying up the $85 for PreCheck (which is causing a whole other set of lines that I’m not going into).\nIn the short to medium term, maybe some new technology will help -- automating checkpoints like they do in London Heathrow, posting real-time wait times so travelers can “self-balance” security lines.</li>\n 	<li>But not until the TSA explicitly considers the value of travelers time will we get to some semblance of realistic balance between the cost and risk of travel.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #121</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_121.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #121 — TSA Lines, My Luggage is Where?','','inherit','closed','closed','','1615-revision-v1','','','2021-09-22 12:57:37','2021-09-22 17:57:37','',1615,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3680',0,'revision','',0),
(3682,1,'2021-09-22 13:01:51','2021-09-22 18:01:51','[caption id=\"attachment_1585\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/calvin_PC.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1585\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/calvin_PC-300x172.jpg\" alt=\"Cat-based cyber-security solution\" width=\"300\" height=\"172\"></a> Cat-based cyber-security solution[/caption]\n\nHere\'s a little something to keep you entertained while you navigate the holiday airport lines. We talk about digital security on the road -- what\'s the right balance between hassle and hack? We also dig into JD Power\'s latest <a href=\"http://www.jdpower.com/press-releases/2015-north-america-airport-satisfaction-study\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">airport satisfaction survey</a>. They report a tick up in traveler experience and, for the most part, I think they have it right. We also cover Spirit Airlines\' growth and the planned expansion of US immigration pre-clearance. All this and more at the&nbsp;<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_119.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n<hr>\n\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #119:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, cranking out one last episode to keep you occupied while you navigate the holiday security lines while trying to get to -- or away from family. Myself, I’m settling for the Christmas break after doing a day trip yesterday to Philadelphia. I’m taking a break from O’Hare until January.</li>\n 	<li>No really remarkable travel since the last episode, just trips to Cleveland, Vegas, and Boston. When I was flying out of Vegas last week, I hit the <a href=\"http://thecenturionlounge.com/location/LAS\">Amex Centurion Lounge</a> for a couple of conference calls before boarding. It’s free entry with a Platinum Card, and so far and beyond any Admirals Club or Sky Club or United Club. It’s not quite as hip/a bit more button-down than Virgin Atlantic’s Upper Lounge in Heathrow, but the comfort, the free buffet and open bar just are just as good. Highly recommended. I just wish there were more of them.</li>\n 	<li>When I’m flying into Boston, I’m actually heading out 45 minutes west, close to Worcester. Now that’s a 45 minute drive out I-90 when I land at 9 or 10 in the morning. When I land at 5 in the evening, it’s a whole different story. I touch down at Logan, flip out of airplane mode and immediately open Waze. How bad is the traffic? How about <i>an hour</i> and 45 minute drive? Not looking forward to that parking lot, so I threaded my way over to Chelsea. Found a great little microbrewery complete with real live Boston Irish patrons and sample 1, 2, 4 of their beers. Then I walked up a couple of blocks to a Central American joint underneath a highway overpass. Had a great plate of food for less than $10. &nbsp;I’ve spent a few dinner times wandering around nearby neighborhoods -- Charlestown, the Seaport District as well as Chelsea -- waiting for Waze to tell me when I-90’s traffic tantrum had subsided.</li>\n 	<li>Probably the biggest travel event this week wasn’t mine but my daughter’s. It’s her first solo flight -- returning from her first semester at Univ of St Andrews, flying Aer Lingus from Edinburgh to Chicago by way of Dublin. It’s a big adjustment in a couple of ways. First, of course, she has to figure out a new airport by herself. She’s never been through Dublin before, but I thought a smaller airport would be a better first solo than trying to navigate the start of holiday traffic at Heathrow. But she does now have to pay attention to what’s going on rather than just following in my slipstream. The second adjustment is a bit more of a First World problem -- flying as as plain old passenger, a villager, rather than tagging along with me through the Gold or Platinum baggage check lines and pre-boarding. It’s a tough come-down, but I did soften the blow a little bit. I paid her Global Entry fee as a going away gift.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- Dive Deep (Loveshadow remix) by spinningmerkaba (c) 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial &nbsp;(3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/50488 Ft: Loveshadow</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Not really any commentary on the last episode, though Ian Morgan swung by the Facebook page with adding to the support about British Airways’ stricter carry-on policy\n<ul>\n 	<li>“Just listened to your October episode! Picked up your post about BA hand luggage. They have just changed their policy on this to clamp down. I agree it is frustrating especially on lightly loaded widebody aircraft. However, as a regular BA traveller I have lost count of the number of times BA flights have been delayed whilst cabin crew offload hand luggage, especially since BA introduced \"hand baggage only\" fares. Before the change, I never saw BA using the size gauges - these days they use them much more frequently. It\'s part of the steady decline of BA from a full service airline to a low cost carriers. Just be grateful that you got a 767 instead of an A321 with new \'spacesaver\' seats with a 29\" seat pitch!!</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Ian, I think you’ve nailed it -- the descent of full-service carriers into the low-cost, low-service ring of travel hell created by Ryan Air and Spirit Airlines. &nbsp;I’ve talked about this before -- a frequent traveler can’t fathom why someone would subject themselves to the hassles that Ryan and Spirit travelers endure. A recent <a href=\"http://www.chicagobusiness.com/article/20151205/ISSUE01/312059993/can-you-guess-whats-the-third-biggest-airline-at-ohare\">Crain’s Chicago article</a> about Spirit said just over half -- 58 % -- of their flights into ORD arrived on time in the first 9 months of this year. I fly at least 3 weeks out of 4. American Airlines’ 79% on-time percentage into ORD is only just acceptable; I’d go postal at 58%. But yet Spirit is now the 3rd largest airline at ORD after United and American. Working out of just two shared gates, it’s bigger than Delta. But then I remembered <a href=\"http://qz.com/533501/half-of-american-airlines-revenue-came-from-13-of-its-customers/\">some comments</a> made by the president of American Airlines during an analysts call right around the time American was doing the final merger of res systems with US Air. He said that half of American’s revenue last year came from the 87% of its customers that only flew them once. 50% of American’s revenue came from passengers that see air travel as a commodity and are looking for the lowest cost carriage between two points. And so for 50% of their revenue, American isn’t competing against United or Delta, they’re competing with Spirit. &nbsp;It explains Delta’s Spirit-like Basic Economy offering, and the expectation that American and United will follow in 2016. And, I assume BA’s “hand baggage” fees that Ian mentions. The challenge, though, is how do you compete for the 87% of your passengers buying a commodity while also serving the remaining 13% of your passengers, who contribute the other 50% of your revenue, and value the little things like a seat that reclines a bit and a flight that arrives on time -- all in the same plane? Spirit doesn’t have that problem because they’ll never get that 13%. American, BA, Delta have the tougher problem.</li>\n 	<li>Connecting through Dublin airport, my daughter cleared US immigration and customs in there in Ireland and then just popped out at the one domestic baggage claim in ORD’s Terminal 5 -- the International Terminal. Kinda similar to what they’ve been doing at Toronto’s Pearson Airport since forever -- or at least the 90’s when I was flying through there weekly. But there, American’s YYZ-ORD flight would land in Terminal 3, just like a flight from, say, Buffalo, and you’d make your connection or just walk out to the cab line. Handy for the regular traveler, but if you’ve dropped the $100 Global Entry fee, immigration lines at, say, ORD, aren’t any worse than they are in Toronto or Dublin. Indeed, my daughter was bummed that she went through US Preclearance so soon, because food and shopping choices on the US side of Preclearance were a lot thinner than on the Irish side. And I think that’ll be the problem if the TSA follows through on their announced expansion of Preclearance -- from what is mostly Canadian, Irish, and Caribbean airports to 10 much larger airports, including Tokyo, Amsterdam, Madrid, London Heathrow. If you’re flying US carriers out of European airports, you’re already being put into a de facto American ghetto -- typically flying out of the most remote gates, with the longest walks from security and airport lounges, and the fewest food and shopping amenities. Walling it off to create the secured facilities to support Preclearance just formalizes it. &nbsp;The DHS secretary calls it a “win-win” for travelers. I think it’s just squeezing the balloon -- making wait time go down in the US, but go up in places like Narita and Heathrow. It’s one thing to miss a connection in ORD due to immigration delays. Odds are there’s another flight you can catch within a couple of hours. It’s a whole other thing if you miss that once a day flight home from, say, Amsterdam.</li>\n 	<li>Thanks to El Niño, it’s been a warm start to the winter -- at least in North America. But soon enough, the temps will drop and the winter coats will start competing with carry-ons for overhead bin space. Last winter, while de-planing (what a weird verb construction!), someone handed me my black overcoat -- it was wedged in front of their suitcase. I threw it over my arm as I stepped out into the aisle, grabbed my carry-on, and hoofed it out of the plane, power-walking toward the cab line. It wasn’t until I stepped outside that I stopped to put my coat on and… it wasn’t my coat. I should’ve checked when it was handed to me, but I didn’t want to be that guy who stops <i>in the aisle</i> to put his jacket on. I went to Lost &amp; Found. The clerk called the gate, where the guy with my coat was standing, trying to find his coat. We got lucky. It took us about 10 minutes to sort everything out. He came down to Lost &amp; Found to swap coats. If it had been warmer out, like this week, I might not have put my coat on at all and gotten home for noticing the switch. Black bags, black coats. Love that black hides a lot of sins -- scuffs, dirt, extra pounds. Don’t love its ubiquity on an airplane. Keep your eyes on your stuff in these holiday crowds. Don’t want “Lost” to be the new black.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. &nbsp;The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- Absolutely Clear (ft Jeris &amp; Goldfish) by SackJo22 (c) 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/45578 Ft: Jeris, Goldfish</li>\n</ul>\n<b>Digital Security On The Road</b>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Digital security, cyber security. I don’t know about you, but I’ve kinda hit security breach fatigue. On Thursday, yet another company announced a credit card breach. <a href=\"http://krebsonsecurity.com/2015/12/banks-card-breach-at-landrys-restaurants/\">This time</a> it’s Landry’s who runs Bubba Gumps and Morton’s Steakhouse and another 15 or so restaurant brands. I don’t frequent Landry’s brands that much, so I’m hoping that this breach doesn’t mean I have to replace one of my credit cards and again have to go through the goat rodeo of changing account numbers for all my autobills. But it still does reinforce that feeling the cyber security is not a matter of “if” but “when”</li>\n 	<li>But even if it’s a matter of “when”, I’d still like to postpone the “when” as long as possible. And traveling -- certainly during the holidays -- there’s a lot of opportunity to bring on the “when” if you’re not just a bit thoughtful. There’s also a balance between inconvenience -- the cost of being more digitally secure -- and the probability of being “breached” (can I say that without having to flag this as “explicit” in iTunes?).</li>\n 	<li>You could always go “old school” -- like 10 years ago when there was damn little public WiFi, no iPhones -- nothing to keep us entertained as we shuffled through the TSA lines other than trading snarky remarks with other line sufferers. Or you could go the “burner” route -- using disposable phones and a temporary PC, which is what many business travelers to China still do -- doing a complete wipe of their phones and PCs before and after each visit because they just expect to get hacked no matter what anti-virus and other safety precautions they take. But if all you’re doing is going from, say, San Francisco to Boston to see your family, these seem a bit “overkill” -- definitely not balancing the cost-benefit trade-off. I’m fairly lazy about this stuff, but there are a few precautions I do take.</li>\n 	<li>First, I never do any financial stuff over public WiFi -- no checking my bank account or credit card activity over an airport or Starbucks WiFi, or a hotel network at all -- whether WiFi or jacked into an Ethernet port. Even if the URL is showing https -- a encrypted web connection -- there’s just too many ways those networks or web sites can be misconfigured. Some folks will tell you to use a VPN. I used one in China, but it seems a bit too much in the US. If I have to do some banking, I’ll use my iPhone over the mobile carrier network -- AT&amp;T in the US, Orange when I was in Spain, .... I know it’s not perfect, but, as the cyber security guys like to say, it “reduces the attack surface” at what is considered one of the most vulnerable points.</li>\n 	<li>I rarely use hotel PCs -- the ones set up in lobbies or the concierge lounges. I mean, if I have a smartphone, a tablet, and a PC, why do I need to use a public PC that’s open to anyone loading up a key-logger that’ll capture anything you type -- including logins and passwords. If I do, for some odd reason, need to use one, I never log into anything. Maybe just search for a restaurant, but that’s about it.</li>\n 	<li>I always make sure that I’ve configured my phone and PC e-mail clients to use encrypted communications between servers -- using IMAP and SMTP over SSL (<i>&gt;now</i> we’re talking security because we used more acronyms than words in that last sentence) for my own mail servers; GMail does it automatically for you. But I don’t encrypt the message itself -- no PGP or signed MIME. There’s nothing in my e-mails that is <i>that</i> confidential to go through that hassle.</li>\n 	<li>I have recently, though, turned on two-factor authentication for every service that offers it -- GMail, some of my financial accounts, Dropbox, …. I resisted it for a long time -- again, thought it was more hassle than it was worth. But then I started getting some odd password reset e-mail requests -- that I didn’t request.</li>\n 	<li>I go back and forth on using smartphone or printed boarding passes. Smartphone boarding passes are quicker -- you can get it while in the cab to the airport rather than queueing up for a kiosk -- but I’ve had more than a few times when my boarding pass disappeared from the app during an extended flight delay. Printed boarding passes are easier to scan at the gate -- especially when juggling a backpack, a hot coffee, and a winter coat -- but there’s recently been a <a href=\"http://www.economist.com/blogs/gulliver/2015/10/security-check\">bit</a> of a <a href=\"http://krebsonsecurity.com/2015/10/whats-in-a-boarding-pass-barcode-a-lot/#more-31317\">stir</a> about the amount of personal information someone could pull out of the bar codes. Maybe I’m not paranoid enough, but that one feels a bit of a stretch. I do whatever’s the most convenient -- usually the smartphone route. But when I do print out a boarding pass, I keep it in my jacket pocket -- just to be sure.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- Drops of H2O ( The Filtered Water Treatment ) by J.Lang (c) 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/djlang59/37792 Ft: Airtone</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>US Airports Getting Better?</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>While I poked at London Heathrow a couple of <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/10/11/podcast-117-random-thoughts-about-eggs-scotland-car-rentals/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">episodes</a> back, it’s an article of faith among international travelers that North American airports pale in comparison to airports in Asia/Pac -- anyone flying from Beijing or Singapore to LAX needs a light sedative to cushion the shock -- and pretty much trail behind most European airports too. But JD Power, in their <a href=\"http://www.jdpower.com/press-releases/2015-north-america-airport-satisfaction-study\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">airport satisfaction survey</a> released last week, said that things are getting better. Not hugely better -- a 5-8% increase in their satisfaction score, but any improvement is good news.</li>\n 	<li>Power <a href=\"http://www.jdpower.com/ratings/study/North-America-Airport-Satisfaction-Study/763ENG/Large-Airports/1617\">rated</a> large- and medium-sized North American airports -- 60 US airports and Toronto Pearson, Calgary, Montreal, and Vancouver. They surveyed travelers around 6 attributes of their airport experience. In order of importance, they are: the state of the airport facilities themselves, how easy it is to get to the airport, security, baggage claim, the check-in experience, and available food and shopping. A frequent traveler might re-shuffle the order -- maybe drop baggage claim and the check-in experience to the bottom because we rarely check a bag -- but I think it’s a good list.</li>\n 	<li>And I think some of Power’s conclusions line up with things I’m seeing on the road. Like improvements in terminal facilities. In the last episode, I gave United a shout-out for the upgrade of their gate space in Boston Logan. I also think San Francisco’s complete rebuild of Terminal 2 is excellent and stands up to any airport in Asia or Europe.</li>\n 	<li>Power found what is a pretty logical connection between satisfaction and the time you spend in lines. As I said earlier, I rarely deal with check-in lines, but I think the TSA’s rollout of Precheck has provided a quantum level improvement in the security experience -- though at times, it feels like its popularity is on the verge of overwhelming it and sliding back. But even for those in the regular lines, I’ve seen TSA folks working hard to re-balance lines -- especially at ORD.</li>\n 	<li>Power split their ratings between large and medium airports. Their winning large airport is Portland, Oregon. I’ve done a bit of flying into PDX and while I wouldn’t have, unprompted, chosen it as the top large airport, I don’t argue with their conclusion. It’s a nice facility; easy mass transit (a TravelCommons’ fixation) via the MAX light rail; I disagree with its top marks for security check, but in how many other airports can I buy a growler of craft beer to go? The bottom four -- those I could’ve ticked off with missing a beat -- LaGuardia, Newark, LAX, and O’Hare. Old terminals, awkward layouts, leaking roofs, lousy food. Interesting they’re also the major airports for the US’s largest cities.</li>\n 	<li>The medium airport winner was a tie between Dallas’ downtown Love Field and Fort Myers’ Southwest Florida. This one, I dunno. I’ve used both of these airports a lot. Love has gone through a good sized facelift and I haven’t been through it since they finished, so I may be working off out-of-date impressions, but even though it’s close to downtown, it’s a pain to get to. Now Fort Myers is easy to get to -- and I love the short walk to the rental car facility -- but security screening can back way up and the food choice isn’t great. From my personal experience, I’d give top marks to Nashville. I mean, how can you go wrong with live music -- good live music -- as you’re walking down the terminal.</li>\n 	<li>Power’s most obvious finding is that dissatisfied customers are very vocal. Those who rate overall satisfaction 1 (on a 10-point scale) make an average of 13 negative comments about their experience. Anyone who follows me on Twitter knows how true that is.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #119</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_119.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #119 — Digital Security On The Road; US Airports Getting Better?','','inherit','closed','closed','','1579-revision-v1','','','2021-09-22 13:01:51','2021-09-22 18:01:51','',1579,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3682',0,'revision','',0),
(3683,1,'2021-09-22 13:18:44','2021-09-22 18:18:44','Here\'s the second TravelCommons podcast. This week, I talk about the evolution of the Southwest Airlines customer, the growth of travel meta-search sites such as Kayak and Sidestep, and how Mexicans vacation in Cabo San Lucas.  There\'s also a clip from fellow travel podcaster Curt Taylor of emptyseat.net.  Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_2.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr>\n\nHere are the shownotes from the second TravelCommons podcast:\n 	<li>Intro music -- <em>Warmth</em> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>In town all week, but getting ready for killer travel next week -- 7 flights and 4 cities in 5 days</li>\n 	<li>Interesting travel statistic from Curt Taylor at <a href=\"http://www.emptyseat.net/emptyseatblog/\">emptyseat.net</a></li>\n 	<li>Changes to the typical passenger on Southwest Airlines</li>\n 	<li>Growth of Travel Meta-Search Sites, such as Kayak, Sidestep, and Mobissimo</li>\n 	<li>Differences between American and Mexican vacationers in Cabo San Lucas</li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_2.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>','TravelCommons Podcast #2','','inherit','closed','closed','','264-revision-v1','','','2021-09-22 13:18:44','2021-09-22 18:18:44','',264,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3683',0,'revision','',0),
(3684,1,'2021-09-22 13:20:22','2021-09-22 18:20:22','Here\'s the third TravelCommons podcast, each segment recorded in a different place. This week, after 7 flights in 5 days, I seem to be on quite a tear on the TSA. I talk about bad TSA experiences at Chicago Midway and good ones at O\'Hare, Tampa, and Columbus, OH. Also, I talk about using the iPod to reduce travel stress and the first Classic Travel Story-- about Cleveland travelers eager to get to Chicago. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_3.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr>\n\nHere are the shownotes from the third TravelCommons podcast:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <em>Warmth</em> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Tough travel week -- 7 flights and 4 cities in 5 days</li>\n 	<li>Recording from the bathroom of the Camelback Inn in Scottsdale, AZ</li>\n 	<li>Hot weather and turndown philosophy cards at the Camelback Inn</li>\n</ul>\n<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/phx_temp.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-3083 size-medium aligncenter\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/phx_temp-300x217.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"217\"></a>\n<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/phx_philo.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-3082 aligncenter\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/phx_philo-300x289.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"289\"></a>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Rant on TSA screeners at Chicago Midway airport; compliments to the TSA screeners at Tampa and Columbus, OH</li>\n 	<li>Using my iPod to reduce travel stress</li>\n 	<li>First of a recurring feature -- Classic Travel Stories</li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_3.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','TravelCommons Podcast #3','','inherit','closed','closed','','6-revision-v1','','','2021-09-22 13:20:22','2021-09-22 18:20:22','',6,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3684',0,'revision','',0),
(3685,1,'2021-09-22 13:21:50','2021-09-22 18:21:50','This week\'s TravelCommons podcast focuses on the good things about travel. Last week\'s podcast seemed a bit negative, so I try to bring a bit of balance this week. Recorded in the LAX Westin, I stow the laptop for a night and walk the Manhattan Beach, CA pier, reflect on a rare window seat ride on a flight out of Phoenix, and read from a friend\'s letter as he starts a new life in Sao Paulo. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_4.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr>\n\nHere are the shownotes from the TravelCommons podcast #4:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <em>Warmth</em> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recording from the bathroom of the LAX Westin in Los Angeles</li>\n 	<li>Made changes to the travelcommons.com website to allow everyone to leave comments about the podcasts</li>\n 	<li>Sounds from a walk down the Manhattan Beach, CA pier and the Manhattan Beach Brewing Company</li>\n</ul>\n<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/brew_pub_map.jpg\"><img class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-3092\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/brew_pub_map-184x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"184\" height=\"300\"></a><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/brew_pub_menu.jpg\"><img class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-3093\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/brew_pub_menu-282x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"282\" height=\"300\"></a>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Looking out the window of a night flight from Phoenix to Chicago</li>\n 	<li>Somebody types \"Cabo San Lucas prostitutes\" into Yahoo and ends up at the travelcommons.com website!</li>\n 	<li>Business travel to Brazil causes a friend to chuck it all and move south</li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_4.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #4 - The Good Things About Travel','','inherit','closed','closed','','7-revision-v1','','','2021-09-22 13:21:50','2021-09-22 18:21:50','',7,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3685',0,'revision','',0),
(3686,1,'2021-09-22 13:22:46','2021-09-22 18:22:46','This week\'s TravelCommons podcast comes from the East Coast -- recorded in the Mystic Marriott in Groton, CT. This week, I talk about recent experiences with rental cars, airport celebrity sightings, and my efforts to get out of my travel ruts. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_5.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr>\n\nHere are the shownotes from the TravelCommons podcast #5:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <em>Warmth</em> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recording from the bathroom of the Mystic Marriott Resort &amp; Spa in Groton, CT</li>\n 	<li>Thanks for the person who compared me to Bob Newhart in a comment on Podcast Alley</li>\n 	<li>The right rental car can make all the difference on a trip</li>\n 	<li>Airport celebrity sightings -- Vin Diesel, Sean Penn, and Wynton Marsalis</li>\n 	<li>Recognizing and trying to break out of my travel ruts</li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_5.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #5 - Celebrities in Airports; The Right Car Rental','','inherit','closed','closed','','8-revision-v1','','','2021-09-22 13:22:46','2021-09-22 18:22:46','',8,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3686',0,'revision','',0),
(3687,1,'2021-09-22 13:23:57','2021-09-22 18:23:57','This week\'s TravelCommons podcast is an \"odds-\'n\'-ends\" podcast, following up on items from previous podcasts and answering questions from web boards and e-mails.  I follow-up on last week\'s Sean Penn sighting and read the reply I received from the TSA in response to my complaint about Chicago Midway airport.  Responding to a topic request on the Podcast Alley comment board, I give my thoughts about frequent flier programs.  Answering some e-mail questions, I describe my convoluted podcast recording workflow.  Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_6.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr>\n\nHere are the shownotes for TravelCommons podcast #6:\n 	<li>Intro music -- <em>Warmth</em> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recording in my living room in suburban Chicago</li>\n 	<li>Follow-up on my Sean Penn SFO sighting</li>\n 	<li>Received a response from the TSA to my Chicago Midway complaint</li>\n 	<li>TSA screeners laughing it up after seeing Roberta Flack</li>\n 	<li>Responding to a topic request on the Podcast Alley comment board regarding frequent flier programs</li>\n 	<li>Answering e-mail questions on how I record my podcast</li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_6.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>','Podcast #6 - The TSA Talks Back','','inherit','closed','closed','','9-revision-v1','','','2021-09-22 13:23:57','2021-09-22 18:23:57','',9,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3687',0,'revision','',0),
(3688,1,'2021-09-22 13:24:59','2021-09-22 18:24:59','The TravelCommons podcast is back on the East Coast in Boston.  Recorded in the bathroom of the Residence Inn in Charlestown, I talk about the tight summer travel market, strategies for eating alone without looking like a loser, and more Classic Travel Stories -- fun on Air Canada.  Also, e-mail and audio comments from listeners.  Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_7.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr>\n\nHere are the shownotes for TravelCommons podcast #7:\n 	<li>Intro music -- <em>Warmth</em> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recording in the bathroom of the Residence Inn in Charlestown, Mass</li>\n 	<li>A great dinner in Boston\'s North End at Mamma Maria (<em><a href=\"http://www.mammamaria.com\">www.mammamaria.com</a></em>)</li>\n 	<li>Any hotel suggestions for my vacation in Geneva, Switzerland or Albertville, France?</li>\n 	<li>The first day of the new podcasting functionality in iTunes  is sending lots of new subscribers</li>\n 	<li>The summer travel season is upon us and it\'s going to be a crowded one</li>\n 	<li>Audio comment from Steve Frick of <a href=\"http://fricksworld.blogspot.com\">Frick\'s World</a></li>\n 	<li>Strategies for dining alone on the road</li>\n 	<li>Classic Travel Stories -- a trio of stories from Air Canada plane rides</li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_7.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>','Podcast #7 - Eating Alone; Classic Travel Stories','','inherit','closed','closed','','10-revision-v1','','','2021-09-22 13:24:59','2021-09-22 18:24:59','',10,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3688',0,'revision','',0),
(3689,1,'2021-09-22 13:25:58','2021-09-22 18:25:58','This TravelCommons podcast comes to you from my first day on vacation, recorded in the bathroom of the Novotel in Geneva, Switz.  I walk through the Internet technologies that I used to book a small non-chain hotel in the French Alps, talk about the sort of \"travel insurance\" that people believe they get from chosing well-known travel brands, and then reflect on the pleasures of unplanned wanderings -- trying to stay awake in Geneva and spending an afternoon at the World Beach <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tchoukball\">Tchoukball</a> Championship.  Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_8.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr>\n\nSorry for the delay in posting the show notes, but my Internet connectivity was a bit spotty at time, and I am, after all, on vacation:\n 	<li>Intro music -- <em>Warmth</em> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in the bathroom of the Novotel in Geneva, Switz</li>\n 	<li>On a 2½-week vacation in Europe</li>\n 	<li>Take the <em>Worst Airport</em> poll in the left column of this web site</li>\n 	<li>Using all kinds of technology to book vacation hotels in France</li>\n 	<li><em>Update</em> -- The Hotel Altiport was a great place in a beautiful setting above <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%A9ribel\">Meribel</a> and had a great staff</li>\n 	<li><strong><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/travelcommons/103657248/\">Direct Link</a></strong> to a picture of the Hotel Altiport</li>\n 	<li>Comfort in brands -- where to take risks and where to play it safe while traveling</li>\n 	<li>Serendipity -- finding an unexpected prize when traveling</li>\n 	<li><strong><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/travelcommons/103286072/\">Direct Link</a></strong> to a picture of the women\'s Beach Tchoukball finals</li>\n 	<li>For those interested in tchoukball -- <a href=\"http://www.tchoukball.org/\">www.tchoukball.org</a></li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_8.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>','Podcast #8 - TravelCommons on Vacation','','inherit','closed','closed','','11-revision-v1','','','2021-09-22 13:25:58','2021-09-22 18:25:58','',11,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3689',0,'revision','',0),
(3690,1,'2021-09-22 13:26:53','2021-09-22 18:26:53','Finishing my vacation with a podcast from the bathroom of the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Budapest\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/hungary/budapest\">Budapest (Hungary)</a> Marriott, high above the <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danube\">Danube</a>.  The second vacation podcast focuses on differences between business and leisure travel -- how to \"downshift\" from business to leisure travel, balancing cost with risk when chosing a travel brand, and a Budapest traffic accident illustrates what business travelers take for granted.  Also, listener comments from podcast #8, and music/sounds from Budapest street festivals.  Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_9.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr>\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #9:\n\n&nbsp;\n 	<li>Intro music -- <em>Warmth</em> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in the bathroom of <a href=\"http://hotels.lonelyplanet.com/hungary/budapest-r2097989/budapest-marriott-hotel-q1192767/\">Budapest Marriott</a></li>\n 	<li>Finishing up a 2½-week vacation in Europe</li>\n 	<li>The transition music in this podcast are iRiver recordings of Budapest street festival sounds</li>\n 	<li>Listener comments about podcast #8</li>\n 	<li>What does it take to \"downshift\" from the efficient cadence of a business traveler; how to enjoy the act of traveling?</li>\n 	<li>Following up on the <em>Comfort in brands</em> topic from podcast #8</li>\n 	<li>Two great experiences with non-brands -- the <a href=\"http://www.altiporthotel.com\">Hotel Altiport</a> in Meribel, France, and <a href=\"http://www.fox-autorent.com\">Fox Auto-Rent</a> in Budapest</li>\n 	<li>Discount airlines taking over Budapest airport</li>\n 	<li>A traffic accident points out some of the things that business travelers take for granted</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/travelcommons/103646966/\"><strong>Direct Link</strong></a> to a picture of the wrecked car</li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_9.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>','Podcast #9 - Wrapping Up the Vacation','','inherit','closed','closed','','12-revision-v1','','','2021-09-22 13:26:53','2021-09-22 18:26:53','',12,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3690',0,'revision','',0),
(3692,1,'2021-09-22 13:27:53','2021-09-22 18:27:53','Finishing my vacation with a podcast from the bathroom of the <a title=\"Budapest\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/hungary/budapest\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\">Budapest (Hungary)</a> Marriott, high above the <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danube\">Danube</a>. The second vacation podcast focuses on differences between business and leisure travel -- how to \"downshift\" from business to leisure travel, balancing cost with risk when choosing a travel brand, and a Budapest traffic accident illustrates what business travelers take for granted. Also, listener comments from podcast #8, and music/sounds from Budapest street festivals. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_9.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #9:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <em>Warmth</em> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in the bathroom of <a href=\"http://hotels.lonelyplanet.com/hungary/budapest-r2097989/budapest-marriott-hotel-q1192767/\">Budapest Marriott</a></li>\n 	<li>Finishing up a 2½-week vacation in Europe</li>\n 	<li>The transition music in this podcast are iRiver recordings of Budapest street festival sounds</li>\n 	<li>Listener comments about podcast #8</li>\n 	<li>What does it take to \"downshift\" from the efficient cadence of a business traveler; how to enjoy the act of traveling?</li>\n 	<li>Following up on the <em>Comfort in brands</em> topic from podcast #8</li>\n 	<li>Two great experiences with non-brands -- the <a href=\"http://www.altiporthotel.com\">Hotel Altiport</a> in Meribel, France, and <a href=\"http://www.fox-autorent.com\">Fox Auto-Rent</a> in Budapest</li>\n 	<li>Discount airlines taking over Budapest airport</li>\n 	<li>A traffic accident points out some of the things that business travelers take for granted</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/travelcommons/103646966/\"><strong>Direct Link</strong></a> to a picture of the wrecked car</li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_9.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #9 - Wrapping Up the Vacation','','inherit','closed','closed','','12-revision-v1','','','2021-09-22 13:27:53','2021-09-22 18:27:53','',12,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3692',0,'revision','',0),
(3693,1,'2021-09-22 13:28:47','2021-09-22 18:28:47','I\'m back in the US and back on the road -- ths time, though, on wheels, not in the air.  Recorded in the TravelCommons \"mobile studio\"  (a \'95 Chevy Blazer), this podcast talks about security risks of hotel Internet access, the hassle of replacing forgotten things while on the road, and, in the latest edition of Classic Travel Stories, fun times in <em>really</em> small towns.  Also, a response to a listener\'s question regarding in-flight mobile phone usage and Internet services.  Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_10.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr>\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #10:\n 	<li>Intro music -- <em>Warmth</em> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in the TravelCommons \"mobile studio\" on a rather warm summer day</li>\n 	<li>Back on the road; lots of flight delays due to summer weather</li>\n 	<li>Listener question about in-flight mobile phone usage and Internet services</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://www.jdpa.com/studies_jdpower/pressrelease3.asp?ID=2005097\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the JD Power 2005 North American Hotel Guest Satisfaction survey</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,68370,00.html\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the <em>Wired News</em> article on hotel TV hacking</li>\n 	<li>One of the worst feelings on the road -- opening your suitcase to discover you\'ve forgotten something</li>\n 	<li>Classic Travel Stories -- Finding creature comforts in <em>really</em> small towns</li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_10.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>','Podcast #10 - Hacking Hotel Rooms; Fun in Really Small Towns','','inherit','closed','closed','','13-revision-v1','','','2021-09-22 13:28:47','2021-09-22 18:28:47','',13,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3693',0,'revision','',0),
(3694,1,'2021-09-22 13:29:48','2021-09-22 18:29:48','Swinging through the West Coast, I recorded this podcast in the bathroom of the Orchard Hotel a block or two from the summit of Nob Hill in San Francisco. In this podcast, we talk about how the post-9/11 reduction in carry-ons has made packing for different business dress codes a real hassle. Is there an end to the \"shoe carnival\"? Recent news articles and a discussion with a TSA supervisor in Tampa suggest that a small bit of common sense may have infiltrated the TSA. And finally, a \"potpourri\" category -- collected odds-\'n\'-ends from discussion topics on the web site. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_11.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr>\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #11:\n\n&nbsp;\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <em>Warmth</em> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in the bathroom of the <a href=\"http://www.theorchardhotel.com\">Orchard Hotel</a> in San Francisco on a cold August night</li>\n 	<li>Being featured in Adam Curry\'s <em>Podfinder</em> podcast doubled the number of TravelCommons subscribers in a week</li>\n 	<li>Having to dress in business formal <em>and</em> business casual in the same trip is a real hassle</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/12/AR2005081201557.html\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to a <em>Washington Post </em>article says that the new TSA director is thinking about changing the current shoe screening policy</li>\n 	<li>Good discussion with a reasonable TSA supervisor in Tampa</li>\n 	<li>More follow-up on in-flight internet service</li>\n 	<li><strong><a href=\"http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB112345285640807000,00.html?mod=technology_main_promo_right\">Direct link</a></strong> to a <em>Wall Street Journal</em> journal article (registration required) on a demo flight for Boeing\'s Connexion in-flight internet service</li>\n 	<li>Following up on \"Hacking the Hotel Room\" from podcast #10, the new class of pocket wifi routers can provide a more secure hotel internet connection</li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"htp://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_11.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #11 - Business Dress Codes; Kinder, Gentler TSA?','','inherit','closed','closed','','14-revision-v1','','','2021-09-22 13:29:48','2021-09-22 18:29:48','',14,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3694',0,'revision','',0),
(3696,1,'2021-09-22 13:31:14','2021-09-22 18:31:14','Down in Florida this week, picking up a bit of the local heat and humidity. Recorded in the bathroom of the Marriott Courtyard in Oldsmar, FL, somewhere between Tampa and Clearwater, we talk about how travel skills are passed from parents to children, spotting some famous people in ORD and LAX, rare emotions in the Frequent Traveler screening line, and a review of travel podcasts. Also, the final results of our Worst US Airport poll. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_12.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file\n\n<hr>\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #12:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <em>Warmth</em> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in the bathroom of the Oldsmar, FL Marriott Courtyard</li>\n 	<li>Denver Int\'l Airport wins the <em>Worst US Airport</em> poll by one vote over LAX</li>\n 	<li>Stories of how parents pass down business travel skills to their kids</li>\n 	<li>Airport celebrity sightings -- Steve Case, Julie Delpy</li>\n 	<li>Intense emotions in the Frequent Traveler screening line</li>\n 	<li>A 2x2 matrix classifying travel podcasts</li>\n</ul>\n<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/matrix.jpg\"><img class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-3078\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/matrix.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"295\"></a>\n<ul>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://www.emptyseat.net/emptyseatblog/\">The Emptyseat podcast</a></li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://www.connectedtraveler.com/blog/index.html\">The Connected Traveler</a></li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_12.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #12 - Emotions in the Screening Line; Other Travel Podcasts','','inherit','closed','closed','','15-revision-v1','','','2021-09-22 13:31:14','2021-09-22 18:31:14','',15,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3696',0,'revision','',0),
(3697,1,'2021-09-22 13:32:28','2021-09-22 18:32:28','A hurricane came between me and my meetings in Tampa, so I stayed home for an entire week. This week\'s podcast has a bit of local flavor and sound, talking about how to spend rare time off the road, what we\'ll do for sleep, and introducing a new poll -- what\'s your favorite US airline? Also, some pointers to people who are linking to the TravelCommons website. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_13.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr>\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #13:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <em>Warmth</em> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago</li>\n 	<li>Thoughts going out to the folks in southern Mississippi who received the full force of Hurricane Katrina</li>\n 	<li>Lots of feedback on last week\'s \"Generations of Travelers\" topic</li>\n 	<li>Links to bloggers who point to TravelCommons -- <a href=\"http://www.mikebladon.com/blog/\">Mike Bladon</a> and <a href=\"http://hilary.fascinationdesign.com/\">Hilary Baumann</a></li>\n 	<li>Catching up with the local flavors at home</li>\n</ul>\n<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/chicago_dog.jpg\"><img class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-3073\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/chicago_dog.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a>\n<ul>\n 	<li>The hunt for sleep</li>\n 	<li>Revised final results of the Worst US Airport poll -- a tie between LAX and Denver</li>\n 	<li>A new poll -- Your Favorite US Airline?</li>\n 	<li>What makes you like an airline?</li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_13.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #13 - Enjoying Home; The Battle for Sleep','','inherit','closed','closed','','16-revision-v1','','','2021-09-22 13:32:28','2021-09-22 18:32:28','',16,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3697',0,'revision','',0),
(3699,1,'2021-09-22 13:34:42','2021-09-22 18:34:42','Traveling through the southeast US, I stopped long enough to record a podcast in the bathroom of the Durham, NC Marriott.  This week\'s podcast talks about two very different travel experiences at the opposite ends of Interstate 40; a special edition of Classic Travel Stories -- recollections from September 11, 2001 -- and the Scottish Band <a href=\"http://www.evangeline.org.uk/\"><em>Evangeline</em></a> talks about writing a great travel song.  Here\'s a <a href=\"travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_14.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr>\n\nSorry for the delay in posting the show notes .  My home ISP, Comcast, has for some unknown decided to block the IP address to this site.  I\'ve filed a trouble ticket, but I think I can probably change providers faster than I can get Comcast to fix their internal routing screw-ups:\n 	<li>Intro music -- <em>Warmth</em> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in the bathroom of Durham, NC Marriott</li>\n 	<li>Hoping to get out of the Carolinas before Hurricane Ophelia decides to come ashore</li>\n 	<li>Following up on T/C #12\'s review of other travel podcasts, Ed Vawter points to the <a href=\"http://joepodcaster.libsyn.com/\"><em>Fly With Me</em></a> podcast as one of his favorites</li>\n 	<li>Completely different airport experiences at the ends of I-40</li>\n 	<li>Classic Travel Stories -- Recollections from the week of September 11, 2001</li>\n 	<li>First edition of Great Travel Songs -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by the Scottish Band <a href=\"http://www.evangeline.org.uk/\"><strong>Evangeline</strong></a></li>\n 	<li>I found Evangeline on the <a href=\"http://tartanpodcast.com/\">Tartanpodcast</a></li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_14.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>','Podcast #14 - September 11th Travel Stories; Writing a Great Travel Song','','inherit','closed','closed','','17-revision-v1','','','2021-09-22 13:34:42','2021-09-22 18:34:42','',17,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3699',0,'revision','',0),
(3701,1,'2021-09-22 13:36:40','2021-09-22 18:36:40','Bouncing around this week, I recorded this podcast in the bathroom of the Stamford, CT Marriott. Visiting St Louis\'s Gateway Arch, we talk about wedging a bit of personal tourism into a packed business itinerary, how people keep mistaking physical closeness with personal closeness, and recounting some stories about mistakes even before the trip starts. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_16.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #16:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in the bathroom of the Stamford, CT Marriott</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewArtist?artistId=75387518&amp;forceArtistPage=1\"><strong>Direct Link</strong></a> to iTunes page for the Scottish Band Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>Pocket tourism -- fitting a bit of personal tourism into the usual packed business travel itinerary</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://www.travelandleisure.com/invoke.cfm?ObjectID=93F3A055-3C2C-42BF-89C54855C05C0056\"><strong>Direct Link</strong></a> to the Travel + Leisure editorial</li>\n 	<li>Touring the Gateway Arch in St Louis</li>\n</ul>\n<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/arch.jpg\"><img class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-3090\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/arch.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\" /></a>\n<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/arch_ticket.jpg\"><img class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-3091\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/arch_ticket.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"151\" /></a>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Too much personal information sharing in confined physical spaces</li>\n 	<li>Two stories about mistaken trips to the airport</li>\n 	<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/modules.php?op=modload&amp;name=News&amp;file=article&amp;sid=24&amp;mode=nested&amp;order=0&amp;thold=0\">Direct Link</a></strong> to the comments posted under Podcast #14</li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_16.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #16 - Squeezing in Tourism; Can We Stop Sharing?','','inherit','closed','closed','','19-revision-v1','','','2021-09-22 13:36:40','2021-09-22 18:36:40','',19,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3701',0,'revision','',0),
(3702,1,'2021-09-22 13:37:53','2021-09-22 18:37:53','Returning from a quick trip to <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/austin\">Austin, TX</a>, this week\'s podcast talks about the 15-part Airworld series in <em>AdAge</em>, the behind-the-scenes view of why every airport looks the same. A recent business trip to Detroit breaks through the state tourism propaganda and gets into the city\'s true nature. Ignoring WC Fields\' advice, my kids make an appearance, giving their views of my travels. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_17.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr>\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #17:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Tried to record this in the bathroom of the Austin Courtyard Marriott, but the exhaust fan wouldn\'t turn off</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Moonshiner</em> by Uncle Tupelo</li>\n 	<li>John Birkhead of the <a href=\"http://desertcast.libsyn.com\"><strong>Desertcast</strong></a> podcast sends in his description of the new event for the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"2012 Summer Olympics\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Summer_Olympics\" rel=\"wikipedia\">2012 London Olympics</a> -- the Gatwick to Heathrow dash</li>\n 	<li>Airworld -- our own little ecosystem</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>The Same Old Story</em> by <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Billie Holiday\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billie_Holiday\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Billie Holiday</a></li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://adage.com/news.cms?newsId=46093\"><strong>Direct Link</strong></a> to the Airworld series in AdAge <em>(registration required)</em></li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Lincoln Town</em> by John Hiatt</li>\n 	<li>Business travel helps you \"break through\" to what\'s really happening in a place</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Walking in Your Footsteps</em> by the Police</li>\n 	<li>My kids offer their opinions on my travel</li>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Ramblin\' Man</em> by the Allman Brothers Band</li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_17.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #17 - Generic Airworld; Kids’ View of Dad’s Travels','','inherit','closed','closed','','20-revision-v1','','','2021-09-22 13:37:53','2021-09-22 18:37:53','',20,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3702',0,'revision','',0),
(3704,1,'2021-09-22 13:39:11','2021-09-22 18:39:11','Emptying out my notebook with an odds-\'n-ends podcast. Traveling between <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/southwest/phoenix\">Phoenix</a>, <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/rocky-mountains/denver\">Denver</a> and <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/chicago\">Chicago</a> this week, I manage a 50-degree temperature drop and have the <a href=\"http://www.tsa.gov\">TSA</a> reject a checked chain saw. However, I haven\'t had to take my shoes off for two weeks -- are we seeing the end of the shoe carnival? We also talk about the fourth quarter tactics around re-up\'ing frequent traveler status, clothing problems, and update the results of our Best US Airline poll. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_18.mp3\"> <strong>link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr>\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #18:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Triangulating through Phoenix and Denver -- crossing from sand to snow in an a day</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"www.tsa.gov/interweb/assetlibrary/Permitted_Prohibited_9_6_2005.pdf\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the TSA\'s Permitted and Prohibited list</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em>Soul Traveling</em> by the Australian band <a href=\"http://www.stingrayonline.com\">Stingray</a> from the <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com\">Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://www.mytravelreviews.blogspot.com/\">Direct link</a> to Gary Bembridge\'s <em>My Travel Reviews</em> podcast</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Hotel California\" href=\"http://www.amazon.com/Hotel-California-Eagles/dp/B000002GVO%3FSubscriptionId%3D0G81C5DAZ03ZR9WH9X82%26tag%3Dzemanta-20%26linkCode%3Dxm2%26camp%3D2025%26creative%3D165953%26creativeASIN%3DB000002GVO\" rel=\"amazon\">Hotel California</a></em> by the Eagles</li>\n 	<li>Requalifying for frequent flier and frequent sleeper programs</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Flyin\' Shoes</em> by Lyle Lovett</li>\n 	<li>End of the TSA shoe carnival?</li>\n 	<li>How do you test for \"travelability\" when buying clothes?</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Good is Good</em> by Sheryl Crow</li>\n 	<li>An update on our Best US Airline pol</li>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Ramblin\' Man</em> by the Allman Brothers Band</li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li>Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_18.mp3\"> <strong>link</strong></a> to the podcast file</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #18 - Trouble with Chain Saws; Sprint for Status','','inherit','closed','closed','','21-revision-v1','','','2021-09-22 13:39:11','2021-09-22 18:39:11','',21,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3704',0,'revision','',0),
(3706,1,'2021-09-22 13:40:44','2021-09-22 18:40:44','This week\'s <a href=\"http://technorati.com/blogs/podcast\">podcast</a> is recorded in the bathroom of the Marriott Courtyard in East Memphis. I talk about the autumn tree colors coming visible from airports up North and worry about catching avian flu while breathing the same air as 150 other travelers. I talk a bit about some changes in Memphis since my high school days and talk about how it remains a Southern city. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_19.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #19:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in the bathroom of the Marriott Courtyard in <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/memphis\">Memphis, TN</a></li>\n 	<li>Jinxed myself by declaring \"End of the TSA Carnival\" in last week\'s podcast</li>\n 	<li>Listener explanation on why they voted for Midwest Airlines in the Favorite Airline poll</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em>When the Leaves Come Falling Down</em> by Van Morrison</li>\n 	<li>Autumn is a great time of the year to fly in and out of airports like Chicago-O\'Hare, Detroit and White Plains, NY, all of which have approaches that go over wooded areas</li>\n 	<li>Interesting comparison of the thread colors in US and Italian sewing kits</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>I\'m Like a Bird</em> by Nelly Furtado</li>\n 	<li>The bad cold I caught on my ORD-SFO flight (mentioned in podcast #15) has me worrying about catching bird flu</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/Bring-Family-John-Hiatt/dp/B000002GHH%3FSubscriptionId%3D0G81C5DAZ03ZR9WH9X82%26tag%3Dzemanta-20%26linkCode%3Dxm2%26camp%3D2025%26creative%3D165953%26creativeASIN%3DB000002GHH\">Memphis in the Meantime</a></em> by John Hiatt</li>\n 	<li>Spent time hitting the big non-Elvis tourist spots in Memphis -- eating dry-rub ribs at <a href=\"http://www.hogsfly.com\">the Rendezvous</a> and walked down an amazingly renovated <a href=\"http://www.bealestreet.com/home.html\">Beale Street</a>.</li>\n 	<li>A story about friendly Memphians at the end of a long night</li>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Ramblin\' Man</em> by the Allman Brothers Band</li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_19.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #19 - Colors in Travel; Visit to a Southern City','','inherit','closed','closed','','22-revision-v1','','','2021-09-22 13:40:44','2021-09-22 18:40:44','',22,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3706',0,'revision','',0),
(3708,1,'2021-09-22 13:42:18','2021-09-22 18:42:18','Recorded in the bathroom of Doubletree Club in <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Ana%2C_California\">Santa Ana, CA</a>, this week we focus on what\'s going on with the airlines. A listener story about the trials of getting from Wisconsin to Pittsburgh shows the importance of person-to-person interactions to the <a href=\"http://technorati.com/blogs/travel\">travel</a> experience. Does Northwest\'s latest cost cutting effort foreshadow the rise of the virtual airline? Also, how to define boundaries of personal space at 35,000 feet. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_20.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #20:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in the bathroom of the Doubletree Club Hotel in Santa Ana, CA</li>\n 	<li>The Chicago White Sox and the World Series have made for some late nights this week</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://udayan71.blogspot.com/\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to Udayan Tripathi\'s <em>Life in London</em> podcast</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://hotelcoffee.blogspot.com/\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to Dan O\'Leary\'s <em>HotelCoffee</em> podcast</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music --  <em>Before They Make Me Run</em> by The Rolling Stones</li>\n 	<li>Listener\'s story about difficulties with United Airlines on a trip from Tokyo to Wisconsin to Pittsburgh to Philadelphia and back to Tokyo.</li>\n 	<li>Cost cutting efforts that replace people with technology makes the remaining person-to-person interactions only that much more important</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Even Better Than the Real Thing</em> by U2</li>\n 	<li>Northwest Airlines talks about outsourcing flight attendants</li>\n 	<li>Is this a move toward a \"virtual\" airline?</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Whipping Post</em> by The Allman Brothers Band</li>\n 	<li>How to define my personal space inside an airplane</li>\n 	<li>A \"seat gripper\" invades my personal space</li>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Ramblin\' Man</em> by the Allman Brothers Band</li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_20.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #20 - Travel is a People Business; Personal Space at 35,000 Ft','','inherit','closed','closed','','23-revision-v1','','','2021-09-22 13:42:18','2021-09-22 18:42:18','',23,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3708',0,'revision','',0),
(3709,1,'2021-09-22 13:43:46','2021-09-22 18:43:46','After a down-and-back trip to Tampa, this week\'s topics include thoughts on the recently announced changes to America West\'s and United\'s boarding schemes -- are they focusing on the right thing? Also, the need to stay home sometimes, and how <a href=\"http://research.microsoft.com/\">Microsoft Research</a>\'s personal black box project might change the way we think about travel pictures. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_21.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from Travelcommons podcast #21:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Flew down to Tampa for a Monday morning meeting</li>\n 	<li>Haven\'t written anything in my <a href=\"http://www.moleskinerie.com/\">Moleskine</a> travel journal -- this podcast seems to be monopolizing my creative time</li>\n 	<li>Thanks to all the listeners who are using the \"Recommend Us\" link on refer their friends to the podcast</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://clothingcult.com/?p=32\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to Hilary Baumann\'s Pant Rant on her <em>ClothingCult.com</em> blog</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music --  <em>I\'m Standing in Line</em> by John Lee Hooker</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://online.wsj.com/article/SB113089422321485853-search.html?KEYWORDS=airline+seating&amp;COLLECTION=wsjie/archive\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the <em>Wall Street Journal</em> article (subscription required) on America West\'s new \"reverse pyramid\" seating scheme</li>\n 	<li>Shouldn\'t they be spending their time on improving baggage handling?</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Wall of Death</em> by Richard &amp; Linda Thompson</li>\n 	<li>A friend and I are surprised to find ourselves both in town on a Wednesday</li>\n 	<li>I seem to hit the wall every 4-6 weeks and have to come off the road</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music --  <em>Pictures of You</em> by The Cure</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail451.html\"><em>IT Conversations</em> podcast</a> about Microsoft Research\'s <a href=\"http://research.microsoft.com/sendev/project_sensecam.aspx\">SenseCam research project</a></li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://www.itconversations.com//clip.php?showid=451&amp;start=2:21&amp;stop=4:21\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to a excerpt of the <em>IT Conversations</em> podcast</li>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Ramblin\' Man</em> by the Allman Brothers Band</li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_21.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #21 - Science of Airline Boarding; New Ways for Travel Pictures','','inherit','closed','closed','','24-revision-v1','','','2021-09-22 13:43:46','2021-09-22 18:43:46','',24,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3709',0,'revision','',0),
(3711,1,'2021-09-22 13:45:06','2021-09-22 18:45:06','Another visit down to <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/memphis\">Memphis</a> prompts a confession about my obsession with pork barbecue and thoughts on how to find the best food in a new city. Other topics include \"voice of the travel company\" -- a letter from a British Airways manager gives his thoughts on the travel experiences of some TravelCommons listeners, and more Classic Travel Stories -- after-dinner stories about interrupted train trips in Eastern Europe. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_22.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons Podcast #22:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Down in Memphis again at the beginning of the week</li>\n 	<li>Picture of the re-wrapped chain saw that caused problems in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/modules.php?op=modload&amp;name=News&amp;file=article&amp;sid=30&amp;mode=nested&amp;order=0&amp;thold=0\">Podcast #18</a></li>\n</ul>\n<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/tsa_chain_saw.jpg\"><img class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-3088\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/tsa_chain_saw.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"200\" /></a>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em>Damn Shame (Memphis Mix)</em> by <a href=\"http://jayfarrar.net/\">Jay Farrar</a></li>\n 	<li>A British Airways manager provides his perspectives on the \"voice of the traveler\" stories in Podcasts #17 and #20</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://www.garageband.com/song?|pe1|S8LTM0LdsaSgZle_ZA\"><strong>GarageBand link</strong></a> to <em>Get Out of Memphis</em> by Chicago Kingsnakes</li>\n 	<li>Traveling to Memphis reveals an obsession</li>\n 	<li>Here\'s a picture of the Corky\'s pork barbecue plate in Memphis\'s airport<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/mem_bbq_plate.jpg\"><img class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-3079\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/mem_bbq_plate.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\" /></a></li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://www.chowhound.com/main.html\"><strong>Direct Link</strong></a> to the Chowhound.com website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>People Get Ready</em> by <a href=\"http://www.jeffbeck.com\">Jeff Beck</a> and <a href=\"http://www.rodstewart.com/\">Rod Stewart</a></li>\n 	<li>Classic Travel Stories -- Interrupted train trips in Slovakia and Hungary</li>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Ramblin\' Man</em> by the Allman Brothers Band</li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_22.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #22 - Other Side of the Ticket Counter; Finding Local Food','','inherit','closed','closed','','25-revision-v1','','','2021-09-22 13:45:06','2021-09-22 18:45:06','',25,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3711',0,'revision','',0),
(3712,1,'2021-09-22 13:46:11','2021-09-22 18:46:11','This week\'s podcast is recorded in the bathroom of the Memphis Marriott. A day trip down to Indianapolis begs the question -- how do you make the decision between flying and driving? Then down in Memphis, a nightcap at the Marriott bar provides some entertaining scenes. Also, we discuss the right and wrong ways that companies use to control travel costs. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_23.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #23:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in the bathroom of the Memphis Marriott</li>\n 	<li>Traveled to Indy and Memphis this week</li>\n 	<li>Please click through to the Listener Survey on the left side of the screen</li>\n 	<li>Listener comments on the \"voice from the other side of the ticket counter\" from Podcast #22</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em>Delivery</em> by <a href=\"http://www.jenniferhelane.com/\">Jennifer Helane</a> from the <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com\">Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\n 	<li>How to make the decision between flying and driving to Indianapolis</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Under Pressure</em> by David Bowie &amp; Queen</li>\n 	<li>Increasing travel prices are prodding some companies to look at \"strategic sourcing\" their travel needs</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Noise -- Random sounds from the Blue Shoes bar in the Memphis Marriott</li>\n 	<li>Regressing after spending too much time at hotel bars</li>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Ramblin\' Man</em> by the Allman Brothers Band</li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_23.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #23 - Fly or Drive; Scenes from The Hotel Bar','','inherit','closed','closed','','26-revision-v1','','','2021-09-22 13:46:11','2021-09-22 18:46:11','',26,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3712',0,'revision','',0),
(3714,1,'2021-09-23 12:56:53','2021-09-23 17:56:53','Finally recorded in the <a href=\"http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=40.6247222222,-73.9522222222&amp;spn=0.1,0.1&amp;q=40.6247222222,-73.9522222222 (Brooklyn)&amp;t=h\">Brooklyn</a> Marriott in <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/new-york-city\">New York</a> after hauling my recording gear across the Atlantic to <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/the-netherlands/amsterdam\">Amsterdam</a>, over to Minneapolis, and finally to New York. In this episode, a number of listeners comment on airport security, we talk about breaking out of the \"travel bubble\" that insulates so many frequent travelers from the cities they visit, and I answer some listener questions on mileage credit cards and how to get the most out of frequent flier status. Also, at the end of the episode, we announce our 3rd Anniversary concert. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_64.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #64:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in the Brooklyn Marriott after trying to find time to record it in Minneapolis and Haarlem, the Netherlands</li>\n 	<li>A medley of earlier TravelCommons hotel room introductions</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://ghosts.nin.com/main/home\"><em>7 Ghosts I</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.nin.com/\">Nine Inch Nails</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Leo Vegoda inventories the security screening inconsistencies he\'s faced in China, the US, and Europe</li>\n 	<li>Enrolling in the <a href=\"http://www.flyclear.com/\">Clear</a> registered traveler program, I gave up images of my driver\'s license, passport, irises, and fingerprints</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://blog.transparentsociety.com/\">Lori Humm</a> and <a href=\"http://budacast.hu\">Drew Leifheit</a> agree that the nipple ring removal incident typifies the TSA\'s disregard for travelers</li>\n 	<li>I hate how far away the BWI and CLE rental car facilities are from the terminals. Makes me choose DCA over BWI</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>When Irish Eyes are Burning</em> by <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/music/listeners/artistdetails.php?BandHash=a45aaee36685b61a392acf793155e127\">the Ike Reilly Assassination</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Breaking the Travel Bubble</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Sometimes I get tired of traveling within the travel bubble that frequent travelers often construct for themselves</li>\n 	<li>Staying in the Brooklyn Marriott, taking the subway from the Borough Hall stop in Brooklyn to the 32nd St stop on Park Ave certainly gets me up close and personal with a lot of NYC residents</li>\n 	<li>Taking the commuter train from Amsterdam to Utrecht, I was engulfed in a swarm of bicyclists – the commuters got off their train, hopped on their bicycles in the dark, drizzly, 40 degree January night, and rode home</li>\n 	<li>Some travelers like to stay in the same hotel every time they visit a city – the \"Cheers\" syndrome – you wanna go where everybody knows your name</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Stupid Now</em> by <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/music/listeners/artistdetails.php?BandHash=be2a489f478e6d5335652fc8925eee03\">Bob Mould</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Mark’s Travel Tips</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Joy in Denver asked me if I use mileage credit cards. I primarily use <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Diners Club International\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diners_Club_International\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Diners Club</a> because it doesn\'t lock you into a single mileage program. I\'ve used it to \"top off\" other accounts, where I needed some extra mileage to meet an award level.</li>\n 	<li>I also have a Starbucks Duetto Visa card that I also use occasionally for business expenses</li>\n 	<li>Brian from <a href=\"http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=41.7480555556,-88.1655555556&amp;spn=0.1,0.1&amp;q=41.7480555556,-88.1655555556 (Naperville%2C%20Illinois)&amp;t=h\">Naperville, IL</a> recently earned Gold status on American and is wondering the best way to maximize the benefit</li>\n 	<li>Key benefits of this first status level are separate security lines and priority boarding</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing\n</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://nin.com/\">Nine Inch Nails</a> and the <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/\">Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments@travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_64.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #64 - Escaping the Travel Bubble; Mark\'s Travel Tips','','inherit','closed','closed','','99-revision-v1','','','2021-09-23 12:56:53','2021-09-23 17:56:53','',99,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3714',0,'revision','',0),
(3715,1,'2021-09-23 13:03:11','2021-09-23 18:03:11','Finally recorded in the <a href=\"http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=40.6247222222,-73.9522222222&amp;spn=0.1,0.1&amp;q=40.6247222222,-73.9522222222 (Brooklyn)&amp;t=h\">Brooklyn</a> Marriott in <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/new-york-city\">New York</a> after hauling my recording gear across the Atlantic to <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/the-netherlands/amsterdam\">Amsterdam</a>, over to Minneapolis, and finally to New York. In this episode, a number of listeners comment on airport security, we talk about breaking out of the \"travel bubble\" that insulates so many frequent travelers from the cities they visit, and I answer some listener questions on mileage credit cards and how to get the most out of frequent flier status. Also, at the end of the episode, we announce our 3rd Anniversary concert. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_64.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr>\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #64:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in the Brooklyn Marriott after trying to find time to record it in Minneapolis and Haarlem, the Netherlands</li>\n 	<li>A medley of earlier TravelCommons hotel room introductions</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://ghosts.nin.com/main/home\"><em>7 Ghosts I</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.nin.com/\">Nine Inch Nails</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Leo Vegoda inventories the security screening inconsistencies he\'s faced in China, the US, and Europe</li>\n 	<li>Enrolling in the <a href=\"http://www.flyclear.com/\">Clear</a> registered traveler program, I gave up images of my driver\'s license, passport, irises, and fingerprints</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://blog.transparentsociety.com/\">Lori Humm</a> and <a href=\"http://budacast.hu\">Drew Leifheit</a> agree that the nipple ring removal incident typifies the TSA\'s disregard for travelers</li>\n 	<li>I hate how far away the BWI and CLE rental car facilities are from the terminals. Makes me choose DCA over BWI</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>When Irish Eyes are Burning</em> by <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/music/listeners/artistdetails.php?BandHash=a45aaee36685b61a392acf793155e127\">the Ike Reilly Assassination</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Breaking the Travel Bubble</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Sometimes I get tired of traveling within the travel bubble that frequent travelers often construct for themselves</li>\n 	<li>Staying in the Brooklyn Marriott, taking the subway from the Borough Hall stop in Brooklyn to the 32nd St stop on Park Ave certainly gets me up close and personal with a lot of NYC residents</li>\n 	<li>Taking the commuter train from Amsterdam to Utrecht, I was engulfed in a swarm of bicyclists – the commuters got off their train, hopped on their bicycles in the dark, drizzly, 40 degree January night, and rode home</li>\n 	<li>Some travelers like to stay in the same hotel every time they visit a city – the \"Cheers\" syndrome – you wanna go where everybody knows your name</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Stupid Now</em> by <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/music/listeners/artistdetails.php?BandHash=be2a489f478e6d5335652fc8925eee03\">Bob Mould</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Mark’s Travel Tips</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Joy in Denver asked me if I use mileage credit cards. I primarily use <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Diners Club International\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diners_Club_International\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Diners Club</a> because it doesn\'t lock you into a single mileage program. I\'ve used it to \"top off\" other accounts, where I needed some extra mileage to meet an award level.</li>\n 	<li>I also have a Starbucks Duetto Visa card that I also use occasionally for business expenses</li>\n 	<li>Brian from <a href=\"http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=41.7480555556,-88.1655555556&amp;spn=0.1,0.1&amp;q=41.7480555556,-88.1655555556 (Naperville%2C%20Illinois)&amp;t=h\">Naperville, IL</a> recently earned Gold status on American and is wondering the best way to maximize the benefit</li>\n 	<li>Key benefits of this first status level are separate security lines and priority boarding</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing\n</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://nin.com/\">Nine Inch Nails</a> and the <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/\">Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments@travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_64.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #64 - Escaping the Travel Bubble; Mark\'s Travel Tips','','inherit','closed','closed','','99-revision-v1','','','2021-09-23 13:03:11','2021-09-23 18:03:11','',99,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3715',0,'revision','',0),
(3717,1,'2021-09-23 14:05:44','2021-09-23 19:05:44','I\'ve had first hand experience with a couple of the TSA\'s recent attempts to provide an \"overall increase in throughput\" -- the <a title=\"TSA Registered Traveler Program\" href=\"http://www.tsa.gov/approach/rt/index.shtm\">Registered Traveler</a> program and the <a title=\"TSA Expands Diamond-Lane Program\" href=\"http://www.tsa.gov/press/releases/2008/0502b.shtm\">Diamond Lane Self-Select</a> program. To save you the suspense, neither is going to create a sudden outpouring of love for the TSA.\n\n<!--more-->\n\nAs I mentioned in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2008/04/29/podcast-64-escaping-the-travel-bubble-marks-travel-tips/\">episode #64</a>, <a title=\"Clear Registered Traveler Program\" href=\"http://www.flyclear.com/index.html\">Clear</a>, one of the registered traveler programs, is offering a free first-year membership to top-tier status members of Hyatt\'s and Marriott\'s frequent sleeper programs. I applied on-line in April and then stopped by the “Clear Enrollment Station” in San Francisco airport to have images of my passport, driver’s license, irises and fingerprints captured. Flying through San Francisco (SFO) last Friday was my first chance to try out the program.\n\nThe Clear line was easy to find -- there was a nice bright blue-and-white Clear sign on top of a pole. I walked past the nearly empty 1st-class/premium status security line, past the mostly full regular security line, to the completely empty Clear line. I presented my driver\'s license and my Clear card to the TSA screener who then handed them to the Clear employee right next to him who then handed them back to the screener. I followed the screener to the Clear machine three steps away, inserted my Clear card, and was directed by the machine to put my right index finger on the small reader pad.\n\nMy first two attempts with the fingerprint reader failed. The TSA screener just shrugged and pressed the \"Try Again\" icon on the touch screen. It seemed a common occurrence. On my second try, I noticed a small window on the machine\'s screen that displayed my fingerprint. I could see that, because of the angle of the reader pad, it was only picking up half of my fingerprint. On my third attempt, I watched the little window, adjusting my finger until it picked up a full fingerprint. Bingo! It immediately approved me. The screener then escorted me to a regular screening station, holding off a couple of other travelers so that I could go directly to the metal table and start putting my things into the grey bins.\n\nOn that Friday morning in SFO, the $100/year Clear line saved me nothing over the free premium line. Indeed, with the card shuffle between the Clear employee and the TSA screener, and the three tries at the fingerprint reader, the Clear line probably took me four times longer than having someone glance at my driver\'s license in the premium line. The real value for programs like Clear are at those airports without 1st-class/premium status security lines -- Oakland (OAK), Reno-Tahoe (RNO), San Jose (SJC), and Orlando (MCO). Now, if Clear could sign up Las Vegas McCarran Airport (LAS) -- brutally long lines and no premium lanes -- then they\'d have a real value proposition.\n\nToday was my second experience with the ski resort-inspired Diamond Lane Self-Select program at Chicago Midway (MDW) airport. The right-most security lane has a black diamond sign, designating it for \"Expert\" fliers -- defined by the TSA as \"the business traveler who flies several times a month\". The next two lines have a blue square sign and are for \"Casual\" fliers, those who \"who travel less frequently, but are familiar with the security process\". The remaining three lines have a green circle and are for families and special assistance passengers. The program was initially piloted in Salt Lake City and Denver. The TSA claims that the \"pilots have resulted in an overall increase in throughput and greatly increased customer satisfaction\" and that both airports have \"experienced a reduction in wait times for expert travelers in the black diamond lanes\".\n\nMy experience was a bit different. The program started at MDW on Thursday, May 8. My first experience was the following Monday, May 12. Catching the first Southwest flight to Cleveland, I headed straight to the Expert line. So did a lot of other people, not all of which looked like business travelers who fly several times a month. It quickly became clear that the folks in front of me weren\'t expert fliers. They didn\'t have their IDs out and ready; they didn\'t know to take their shoes off; they tried to take a bottle of water through, and they had to make multiple passes through the metal detector because of jewelry and spare change.\n\nTwo weeks later, I\'m back at MDW catching the same flight to Cleveland. This time, though, I drop into one of the Casual lines. The Expert line is longer and, once again, about 50% of its inhabitants don\'t look like frequent business fliers -- the flip-flops are dead giveaways. I match my progress against an easy-to-spot marker in the Expert line -- a tall guy wearing a suit. The Casual line moves twice as fast as the Expert line -- even with our share of flip-flop wearers. I don\'t know what the TSA did differently in their Salt Lake City or Denver pilots, but I haven\'t seen any lower wait times for expert travelers and, at least this morning, the guys in the Expert line certainly didn\'t look like their satisfaction was greatly increased.','Jumping the Line - Using Clear Registered Traveler and Diamond Lane Self-Select','','inherit','closed','closed','','100-revision-v1','','','2021-09-23 14:05:44','2021-09-23 19:05:44','',100,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3717',0,'revision','',0),
(3719,1,'2021-09-23 14:08:26','2021-09-23 19:08:26','Back on the road after the Thanksgiving holiday, this week\'s podcast is recorded in the bathroom of the Durham, NC Marriott and edited in the RDU Admirals Club. A listener asks \"What do you miss when you travel?\" Also, some ideas on staying connected with the family -- replacing those random bits of conversation while on the road, and some careless moments with rental cars. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommon_24.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #24:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in the bathroom of the Durham, NC Marriott</li>\n 	<li>Paying for last week\'s holiday with a rough triangulation trip across Tampa, Memphis, and <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/the-south/the-triangle\">Raleigh-Durham</a></li>\n 	<li>Audio clip of an Atlanta-Hartsfield emergency alarm</li>\n 	<li>Here\'s the ClustrMap image showing web site traffic for the month of November<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/clustermap.jpg\"><img class=\"aligncenter wp-image-3074 size-full\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/clustermap.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"215\" /></a></li>\n 	<li>Please click through to the Listener Survey on the left side of the screen</li>\n 	<li>Another listener experience with <a href=\"http://www.ba.com\">British Airways</a> -- a positive one</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>A listener asks \"What do I miss when I travel?\"</li>\n 	<li>Recreating my morning routine in hotels</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Miss You</em> by the Rolling Stones</li>\n 	<li>The regular rhythms of conversation get disrupted when one party is on travel</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Fast Car</em> by Tracy Chapman</li>\n 	<li>A couple of stories about abusing rental cars</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/21561359@N00/103066097/\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to a picture of the Mustang speedometer in Phoenix</li>\n 	<li>Closing music --  <em>Ramblin\' Man</em> by the Allman Brothers Band</li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_24.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #24 - What Do You Miss When You Travel; Fun with Rental Cars','','inherit','closed','closed','','27-revision-v1','','','2021-09-23 14:08:26','2021-09-23 19:08:26','',27,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3719',0,'revision','',0),
(3721,1,'2021-09-23 14:10:04','2021-09-23 19:10:04','This week\'s podcast is recorded in the bathroom of the <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldsmar%2C_Florida\">Oldsmar, FL</a> Marriott. In the midst of a bunch of work and a tough travel itinerary, why am I surprised that I just can\'t get into the holiday spirit? A huge snowstorm blowing through <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/chicago\">Chicago</a> threatens to strand me in <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/memphis\">Memphis</a> -- until another traveler suggests driving the 550 miles home. And a Classic Travel Story from a former road warrior about finding love in a hotel bar. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_25.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #25:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in the bathroom of the Oldsmar, FL Courtyard</li>\n 	<li>Another tough travel week -- sleep deprivation from early morning flights, severe winter travel problems, and a whole lot of work</li>\n 	<li>Starting a 5-week sponsorship from <a href=\"http://expertflyer.com/travelcommons\">ExpertFlyer.com</a></li>\n 	<li>Steve Frick from <a href=\"http://fricksworld.blogspot.com/\">Frick\'s World</a> posts a great rental car comment on podcast #24</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music --  <em>I\'ll Be Home by Christmas</em> by <a href=\"http://elvis.com\">Elvis Presley</a></li>\n 	<li>I\'m having a tough time getting into the holiday spirit</li>\n 	<li>Maybe I\'ll have an \"espresso\" Christmas -- a concentrated, more intense holiday experience</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Run Run Rudolph</em> by <a href=\"http://www.dwightyoakam.com/\">Dwight Yoakam</a></li>\n 	<li>A winter storm in Chicago cancels flights and forces a decision -- wait \'til the morning or drive home tonight</li>\n</ul>\n<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/ord-mem.jpg\"><img class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-3081\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/ord-mem.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"287\" height=\"300\" /></a>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Every Picture Tells a Story</em> by <a href=\"http://www.rodstewart.com/\">Rod Stewart</a></li>\n 	<li>Classic Travel Story -- Meeting a husband in a hotel bar</li>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Ramblin\' Man</em> by the Allman Brothers Band</li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommon_25.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #25 - Long Drive Home; Meeting Your Future in a Hotel Bar','','inherit','closed','closed','','28-revision-v1','','','2021-09-23 14:10:04','2021-09-23 19:10:04','',28,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3721',0,'revision','',0),
(3723,1,'2021-09-23 14:11:36','2021-09-23 19:11:36','Recorded in the bathroom of the <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/pennsylvania/philadelphia\">Philadelphia</a> Marriott, this week\'s podcast comes at the end of my last flight of the year -- a triangulation across <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/boston\">Boston</a>, <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/new-england/providence\">Providence, RI</a>, and Philadelphia. A light schedule let me catch a good lunch and dinner in Philadelphia. A weekend ski trip to <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/rocky-mountains/denver\">Denver</a> prompts thoughts on the disconnect between business travelers and resort hotels, and the increased number of non-frequent elite status travelers. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_26.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #26:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in the bathroom of the Philadelphia Marriott</li>\n 	<li>Quick 3-day triangulation through the northeast -- Boston, Providence, and Philadelphia -- before settling in back home for the Christmas holidays</li>\n 	<li>Get a great Hertz rental car -- an <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infiniti_G\">Infiniti G35</a> -- and smoke the drive from Boston to Providence</li>\n 	<li>Had time for a couple of great solo meals in Philadelphia -- lunch at a counter in <a href=\"http://www.readingterminalmarket.org/\"> the Reading Terminal Market</a> and dinner at the sushi bar in<a href=\"http://www.morimotorestaurant.com\"> Morimoto</a></li>\n 	<li><strong><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/travelcommons/103281516/\">Direct Link</a></strong> to a picture of Tommy Dinic\'s lunch counter at the Reading Terminal Market</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/Changes-Latitudes-Attitudes-Jimmy-Buffett/dp/B000002PBN%3FSubscriptionId%3D0G81C5DAZ03ZR9WH9X82%26tag%3Dzemanta-20%26linkCode%3Dxm2%26camp%3D2025%26creative%3D165953%26creativeASIN%3DB000002PBN\">Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes</a></em> by <a href=\"http://margaritaville.com\">Jimmy Buffett</a></li>\n 	<li>The challenges of staying in a resort location while on business travel</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Brass in Pocket</em> by The Pretenders</li>\n 	<li>Predictions of growth in the numbers of elite status travelers</li>\n 	<li>Many of these new elites are qualifying through non-flying programs</li>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Ramblin\' Man</em> by the Allman Brothers Band</li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_26.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #26 - Business Travel Among Vacationers; Explosion of Elites','','inherit','closed','closed','','29-revision-v1','','','2021-09-23 14:11:36','2021-09-23 19:11:36','',29,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3723',0,'revision','',0),
(3725,1,'2021-09-23 14:14:07','2021-09-23 19:14:07','Coming to you this week once again from the Oldsmar, FL Courtyard, I\'m back on the road in the first week of the new year. A listener asks about selecting a carry-on bag that meets the conflicting restrictions of airlines. We also talk about the hassle of forgetting things and have a couple of Classic Travel Stories about airplane mechanical difficulties. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_28.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #28:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in the bathroom of the Oldsmar, FL Courtyard, near Tampa</li>\n 	<li>Quick down-and-back trip to start the new year</li>\n 	<li>Still more leisure travelers than business travelers a couple of days after the holidays</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail764.html\"><strong>Direct Link</strong></a> to the Ze Frank podcast on airline seatback emergency cards at IT Conversations</li>\n 	<li>TSA seems to be back on the shoe warpath, now that they can\'t strip search people for lethal fingernail clippers</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Those Shoes</em> by The Eagles</li>\n 	<li>A listener writes that the airline carry-on restrictions are all over the place</li>\n 	<li>European airlines seem to focus on weight, while US airlines only care if the bag will fit in the overhead bin</li>\n 	<li>More important than anything else, pick a black bag</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Don\'t You (Forget About Me)</em> by Simple Minds</li>\n 	<li>Just can\'t get into the travel groove</li>\n 	<li>Forgot my toiletries kit and had to re-trace my grooming steps in the middle of the Oldsmar CVS so I could remember what I needed</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Every Picture Tells A Story</em> by Rod Steward</li>\n 	<li>Classic Travel Stories -- Just a couple of mechanical difficulties</li>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Ramblin\' Man</em> by the Allman Brothers Band</li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_28.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #28 - Controversy of Carry-On; Put Your Head Between Your Knees…','','inherit','closed','closed','','31-revision-v1','','','2021-09-23 14:14:07','2021-09-23 19:14:07','',31,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3725',0,'revision','',0),
(3727,1,'2021-09-23 14:15:42','2021-09-23 19:15:42','Recorded in the bathroom of the Bellagio in Las Vegas, this special \"Listeners\' Feedback\" edition is 100% listener content from e-mails and website comments. I tell listener stories about carry-on luggage and troubled airplane landings, while two listeners take the mic to talk about the technology they use in their travels. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_29-96.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #29:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in the bathroom of the Bellagio in Las Vegas</li>\n 	<li>Two trips this week -- a quick trip to Memphis, and then out to Las Vegas through the end of the week</li>\n 	<li>Highly recommend riding the Hertz bus in Memphis when Marvin is driving</li>\n 	<li>I\'m not a big fan of business meetings in Vegas -- it\'s too geared for leisure travelers</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Carry On Regardless</em> by Van Morrison</li>\n 	<li>Rich Wisco shares his luggage strategy. <a href=\"http://richmanwisco.blogspot.com\"><strong>His blog</strong></a> has some good travel pictures</li>\n 	<li>Chris from Tulsa describes an interesting carry-on weight test administered by Southwest</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>I Don\'t Like to Travel</em> by Byther Smith from the <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com\">Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\n 	<li>Chris from Tulsa talks about harrowing approach into PHX</li>\n 	<li>Allan Marko talks about getting his head between his knees on an approach to SNA</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>Travel Tech -- a new semi-regular topic about the technology that travelers use</li>\n 	<li>I found the <a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/whatsinmybag/interesting/\"><em>whatsinmybag</em></a> Flickr collection on the <a href=\"http://fricksworld.blogspot.com/\">Frick\'s World blog</a> <a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/fricksworld/6408911/in/set-160005/\">(here\'s the picture of his bag)</a></li>\n 	<li>Ed Vawter raves about the iGo power supply</li>\n 	<li>Dan O\'Leary of the <a href=\"http://hotelcoffee.blogspot.com/\">HotelCoffee podcast</a> talks about his travel technology bundle</li>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Ramblin\' Man</em> by the Allman Brothers Band</li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_29-96.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #29 - Special Listeners’ Feedback Show','','inherit','closed','closed','','32-revision-v1','','','2021-09-23 14:15:42','2021-09-23 19:15:42','',32,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3727',0,'revision','',0),
(3729,1,'2021-09-23 14:17:23','2021-09-23 19:17:23','Spent all week at home and ended up catching a cold from my son. This week\'s topics are spurred by listener e-mails and web postings. We talk about bad experiences with rude TSA screeners, some thoughts about travel toiletries, and the cost of broadband on the road. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_31.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #31:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in the TravelCommons studio in suburban Chicago</li>\n 	<li>No travel this week, but making up for it next week with travel to Memphis, Phoenix, and LA</li>\n 	<li>Go through the listener demographics from the Podtrac listener survey</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>State Trooper</em> by Bruce Springsteen</li>\n 	<li><strong><a href=\"http://mfile.akamai.com/11649/wmv/pepsicoinc.download.akamai.com//11649/mm/sierra_mist/tv_ads/video/wand_100k.wmv\">Direct Link</a></strong> to the Sierra Mist Super Bowl commercial poking fun at TSA screeners</li>\n 	<li>A listener tells about getting yelled at by a BWI TSA screener for attempting to take a pencil sharpener on a flight</li>\n 	<li><strong><a href=\"http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4438273.stm\">Direct Link</a></strong> to a BBC web site article quoting a former TSA official about problems being caused by overzealous officers</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>A bad Gillette Super Bowl commercial for a 5-blade razor reminds me of the old Saturday Night Live sketch about how silly a 3-blade razor would be</li>\n 	<li>A listener talks about how shopping for toiletries forces him to explore new cities</li>\n 	<li>My advice is to keep it simple -- take only what you really need and leave the battery-powered stuff at home</li>\n 	<li>No room for Metrosexuals in the Road Warrior ranks</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>The Shadowlands</em> by Ryan Adams</li>\n 	<li>A listener thinks that hotel broadband charges are the latest in a growing trend of nickel-&amp;-dime charges</li>\n 	<li>Many travelers are setting up free Wi-Fi \"bubbles\" with their travel wireless routers</li>\n 	<li>Use the free program <a href=\"http://www.netstumbler.com\">NetStumbler</a> to find free \"bubbles\" before paying the hotel fees</li>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Ramblin\' Man</em> by the Allman Brothers Band</li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_31.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #31 - TSA Rage, Woes of WiFi','','inherit','closed','closed','','33-revision-v1','','','2021-09-23 14:17:23','2021-09-23 19:17:23','',33,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3729',0,'revision','',0),
(3731,1,'2021-09-23 14:20:39','2021-09-23 19:20:39','Recorded in the Marriott Courtyard in Irvine, CA, this week\'s visits to old haunts in Memphis and Huntington Beach prompts thoughts on how traveling back home is different. Also, we talk about experiences in searching for free WiFi hotspots, and a bit of puzzlement about the TSA\'s \'Registered Traveler\' program. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_32.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #32:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in the Marriott Courtyard Hotel in Irvine, CA</li>\n 	<li>Finally received a bit of notice from American Airlines after hitting the 2 million mile mark in January</li>\n 	<li>A listener writes in about his public transit experiences in Boston, London, and Geneva</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Fly, Fly, Fly</em> by Adrina Thorpe</li>\n 	<li>\"Medley\" of past TravelCommons bathroom intros</li>\n 	<li>Driving through Memphis checking out old houses and neighborhoods</li>\n 	<li>Walking down Main Street and the pier in Huntington Beach, CA</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Beggarstown</em> by Hollow Horse</li>\n 	<li>Two resources for free WiFi hot spots -- <a href=\"http://wififreespot.com\">wififreespot.com</a> and <a href=\"http://metrofreefi.com\">metrofreefi.com</a></li>\n 	<li>Use the free program <a href=\"http://www.netstumbler.com\">NetStumbler</a> to search for hot spots</li>\n 	<li>Mid-tier hotels are racing each other to light up their lobbies with free WiFi</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Homemade Hurricane</em> by amplifico</li>\n 	<li>TSA\'a much delayed \"Registered Traveler\" program is in the spotlight again</li>\n 	<li>Benefits you get for $80 fee and a background check is unclear</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com\">Podshow Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_32.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #32 - Traveling Home, Trolling for Free WiFi','','inherit','closed','closed','','34-revision-v1','','','2021-09-23 14:20:39','2021-09-23 19:20:39','',34,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3731',0,'revision','',0),
(3733,1,'2021-09-23 14:22:14','2021-09-23 19:22:14','Two trips but no hotels means this episode is recorded in the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago. Rummaging through the virtual mailbag, I comment on listener e-mails and web site postings. I also talk about finding some free WiFi in Houston\'s Bush International Airport and give a guided tour of my briefcase. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_33.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #33:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in the TravelCommons studios outside Chicago</li>\n 	<li>Had a couple of down-&amp;-back day trips to Houston and Boston</li>\n 	<li>Bad times in \"slum\" terminals</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Love Survives</em> by Lovespirals</li>\n 	<li>A listener is interested in podcasts about travel, not tourism -- doesn\'t have time for touring</li>\n 	<li>Another listener talks about begin subject to \"TSA Rage\" in Saipan</li>\n 	<li>Chris Christensen of the <a href=\"http://amateurtraveler.com/\">Amateur Traveler Podcast</a> talks about his train-to-plane experiences</li>\n 	<li>Peter Rukavina\'s <a href=\"http://www.ruk.ca\">ruk.ca</a> blog corrects my Canadian Maritimes geography</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Turn Around and Say Goodbye </em> by C.J. Chenier</li>\n 	<li>Hanging outside or underneath Continential Airlines\' Presidents\' Club is a good spot to leech WiFi</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Shine </em> by Hungry Lucy</li>\n 	<li>An audio tour of my briefcase</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/21561359@N00/102434287/\"><strong>Direct Link</strong></a> to annotated Flickr picture of what\'s in my briefcase</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com\">Podshow Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_33.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #33 - Listener Mailbag, What’s in My Briefcase?','','inherit','closed','closed','','35-revision-v1','','','2021-09-23 14:22:14','2021-09-23 19:22:14','',35,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3733',0,'revision','',0),
(3735,1,'2021-09-23 14:26:18','2021-09-23 19:26:18','Back in front of the microphone after a week off, it\'s been a light travel week. A quick down-&amp;-back to Tampa offers the opportunity to take a 20-minute vacation on the Gulf of Mexico. A flight attendant on my flight back from Houston last week gives a smooth performance in passenger care, and a couple of listeners contribute to the latest installment of Travel Tech. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_34.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr>\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #34:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Back in the TravelCommons studios outside Chicago after a week off</li>\n 	<li>Had a down-&amp;-back day trip to Tampa</li>\n 	<li>Spending the rest of the week booking \"frequent driver\" points in the Chicago exurbs</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>10p Mix</em> by amplifico</li>\n 	<li>My last trip to Tampa and I decided I needed to see the ocean -- at least once</li>\n 	<li>Drove west from Oldsmar \'til I hit Dunedin</li>\n</ul>\n<img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/images/pix/Oldsmar_map.jpg\" alt=\"Google Map of the Oldsmar area\">\n<ul>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/travelcommons/107616114/\"><strong>Direct Link</strong></a> to a Flickr picture from the beach</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Emily C</em> by Fiasco</li>\n 	<li>A flight attendant does a smooth job of handling a disgruntled passenger</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Keep Your Motor Running</em> by Dave Hole</li>\n 	<li>Ed Vawter sent in audio comments about useful features on the United Airlines website and SeatGuru.com</li>\n 	<li>Leo Vegoda finds his new Bose headphones very useful on his flight from London to Perth</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com\">Podshow Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_34.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #34 - 20-Minute Vacation, Making It Look Easy','','inherit','closed','closed','','36-revision-v1','','','2021-09-23 14:26:18','2021-09-23 19:26:18','',36,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3735',0,'revision','',0),
(3737,1,'2021-09-23 14:28:23','2021-09-23 19:28:23','Back after a longer-than-planned absence, this episode is recorded at the Laguna Cliffs Marriott in <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dana_Point%2C_California\">Dana Point, CA</a>. We talk about the <a href=\"http://www.tsa.gov\">TSA</a>\'s return to a hard line on shoes, the thing I miss most when I\'m off the road, and the latest way for airlines to raise cash from their frequent flyer programs. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_35.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #35:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded at the Laguna Cliffs Marriott, overlooking the Pacific Ocean in Southern California</li>\n 	<li><strong><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/travelcommons/118543711/\">Direct Link</a></strong> to a Flickr picture looking out my hotel room window to the ocean</li>\n 	<li>Apologize for the longer-than-intended absence -- caused by moving houses and then a crushing load of work</li>\n 	<li>A stay in the <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_International_Airport\">SFO</a> Marriott gave me a sample of Marriott\'s new \"Revive\" bed -- nice but no threat to Westin\'s \"Heavenly Bed\"</li>\n 	<li>Leo Vegoda talks about great flights on Quantas and a bad time in <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurt_Airport\">Frankfurt airport</a></li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Waking Hour</em> by <a href=\"http://www.lorenamire.com/\">Lorena Mire</a></li>\n 	<li>The TSA seems to be going back to the bad old days of shoe fetish</li>\n 	<li>In some airports, though, the abbreviated secondary search is quicker than putting your shoes back on</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>One Day</em> by <a href=\"http://www.hollowhorse.co.uk/\">Hollow Horse</a></li>\n 	<li>Talked with two guys within two hours who both told me they were changing jobs to reduce their travel</li>\n 	<li>I couldn\'t <em>not</em> travel -- I would miss the different things I see</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Clear My Head</em> by <a href=\"http://www.thefiasco.net/\">FIASCO</a></li>\n 	<li>Chris Chufo sent in note about United\'s offer to sell Mileage Plus status through pre-paid airfare</li>\n 	<li>There have always been ways to accelerate your path to status, but travel companies seem to now be publicizing them</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com\">Podshow Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_35.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #35 - What I Miss About Travel, Milking the Status Seekers','','inherit','closed','closed','','37-revision-v1','','','2021-09-23 14:28:23','2021-09-23 19:28:23','',37,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3737',0,'revision','',0),
(3739,1,'2021-09-23 14:29:43','2021-09-23 19:29:43','Recorded in the Orlando Downtown Marriott, I talk about a real rarity -- a planeful of happy people. Also, the results of a recent study confirm that hotels are increasing their use of add-on fees and surcharges, and listener feedback about the timeliness of long-haul vs. commuter flights. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_36.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #36:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded at the Orlando Downtown Marriott</li>\n 	<li>Took a pass at staying in a Disney resort -- great for family vacations but not for business</li>\n 	<li>A listener tells a story about a good experience traveling from <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/new-zealand\">New Zealand</a> to the UK</li>\n 	<li>Another listener talks about clearing security in -40°C weather</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Carolina</em> by <a href=\"http:/http://www.jeremyhopkins.com//\">Jeremy Hopkins</a></li>\n 	<li>Had a happy flight down to Mouse Land with a plane full of international travelers</li>\n 	<li>A Japanese woman throws the flight attendant a curve by ordering an iced coffee</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Black Cup of Coffee</em> by <a href=\"http://myspace.com/askmewhen/\">Ask Me When</a></li>\n 	<li>Parking fees at hotels are starting to get under my skin</li>\n 	<li><strong><a href=\"http://www.hotelexecutive.com/newswire/pub/_12690.asp\">Direct Link</a></strong> -- PwC forecasts that hotel fees and surcharges will keep increasing in 2006</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by <a href=\"http://www.evangeline.org.uk\">Evangeline</a></li>\n 	<li>Leo Vegoda sent in an audio comment about his recent experience on a commuter flight from <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/the-netherlands/amsterdam\">Amsterdam</a> to London</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com\">Podshow Music Network</a></li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_36.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #36 - Happiest Flight, Long and Short of It','','inherit','closed','closed','','38-revision-v1','','','2021-09-23 14:29:43','2021-09-23 19:29:43','',38,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3739',0,'revision','',0),
(3740,1,'2021-09-23 14:30:05','2021-09-23 19:30:05','Recorded in the Orlando Downtown Marriott, I talk about a real rarity -- a plane full of happy people. Also, the results of a recent study confirm that hotels are increasing their use of add-on fees and surcharges, and listener feedback about the timeliness of long-haul vs. commuter flights. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_36.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #36:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded at the Orlando Downtown Marriott</li>\n 	<li>Took a pass at staying in a Disney resort -- great for family vacations but not for business</li>\n 	<li>A listener tells a story about a good experience traveling from <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/new-zealand\">New Zealand</a> to the UK</li>\n 	<li>Another listener talks about clearing security in -40°C weather</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Carolina</em> by <a href=\"http:/http://www.jeremyhopkins.com//\">Jeremy Hopkins</a></li>\n 	<li>Had a happy flight down to Mouse Land with a plane full of international travelers</li>\n 	<li>A Japanese woman throws the flight attendant a curve by ordering an iced coffee</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Black Cup of Coffee</em> by <a href=\"http://myspace.com/askmewhen/\">Ask Me When</a></li>\n 	<li>Parking fees at hotels are starting to get under my skin</li>\n 	<li><strong><a href=\"http://www.hotelexecutive.com/newswire/pub/_12690.asp\">Direct Link</a></strong> -- PwC forecasts that hotel fees and surcharges will keep increasing in 2006</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by <a href=\"http://www.evangeline.org.uk\">Evangeline</a></li>\n 	<li>Leo Vegoda sent in an audio comment about his recent experience on a commuter flight from <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/the-netherlands/amsterdam\">Amsterdam</a> to London</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com\">Podshow Music Network</a></li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_36.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #36 - Happiest Flight, Long and Short of It','','inherit','closed','closed','','38-revision-v1','','','2021-09-23 14:30:05','2021-09-23 19:30:05','',38,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3740',0,'revision','',0),
(3741,1,'2021-09-23 14:31:24','2021-09-23 19:31:24','Recorded in the <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Mateo%2C_California\">San Mateo, CA</a> Marriott, we work through a bunch of listener feedback and follow-up items, talk about what seems to be a general increase in the crankiness of frequent travelers -- for good cause or the whining of spoiled brats? -- and stumbling across what seemed to be the spontaneous break-out of a \"Fame\" episode in O\'Hare. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_37.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_37.mp3\"]\n<!--more-->\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #37:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded at the San Mateo, CA Marriott</li>\n 	<li>Lots of flying over the past two weeks -- triangulating across SF and Atlanta last week; just SF this week</li>\n 	<li>Ate dinner at <a href=\"http://www.mistraldining.com/lev1_restaurant.html\">Mistral Restaurant</a> in <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redwood_City%2C_California\">Redwood City, CA</a> -- the heart of Oracle land</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/download_track.php?id=CE7F00E4A147D957EAF4B39D80B3D884BF6DC2714AC89817905F6D823C3C58AA2D2BC4C1337AE3571166DB55DC19CD47\" rel=\"nofollow\">A Rose Among Ruins (Guli Dar Wairaanahaa)</a></em> by <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=47006A4B4EB5D7804F4A3D1F2E26A25623ED5CBC6275EDCD211CEE7D57B96215\" rel=\"nofollow\">The Afghan Music Project</a></li>\n 	<li>Chris Christensen of the <a href=\"http://amateurtraveler.com/\">Amateur Traveler Podcast</a> comments on the Canadian traveler story in episode #36 -- -40° is the same in the in both the Fahrenheit and <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celsius\">Celsius</a> scales</li>\n 	<li>Dan O\'Leary of the <a href=\"http://hotelcoffee.blogspot.com/\">HotelCoffee</a> podcast gives his thoughts on <a href=\"http://www.united.com\">United Airlines</a>\' Ted strategy</li>\n 	<li>Allan Marko relates his recent experience with a business conference at <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/florida/orlando/sights/entertainment/walt-disney-world\">DisneyWorld</a>\'s Swan and Dolphin hotel</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/download_track.php?id=8C49C1D87D4423CD6B5680C66970A634CCD72C687652ECF3EB567A09D45DD6EE2D2BC4C1337AE3571166DB55DC19CD47\" rel=\"nofollow\">The Point of Purchase</a></em> by <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=17CD797AF2C9A2E56269DAD9433E440623ED5CBC6275EDCD211CEE7D57B96215\" rel=\"nofollow\">Harry Manx</a></li>\n 	<li>Frequent travelers seem to be breaking out of the \"cone of silence\" to sound off on poor service</li>\n 	<li>Lots of niggling problems during my stay at the San Mateo Marriott probably means I won\'t stay here again</li>\n 	<li>United Airlines has <a href=\"http://ir.united.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=83680&amp;p=irol-newsArticle&amp;ID=844066&amp;highlight=\">named</a> a new VP of Customer Experience to improve how it interacts with travelers</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/download_track.php?id=CE7726A0F99EB44095D5130567DEDDB7F90A9BD8352B78EB3E13EB82943ACAEA2D2BC4C1337AE3571166DB55DC19CD47\" rel=\"nofollow\"><em>Daddy Was A Preacher But Mama Was A Go-Go Girl</em></a> by Southern Culture On The Skids</li>\n 	<li>Curt Taylor of the <a href=\"http://www.emptyseat.net/emptyseatblog/\">Empty Seat blog</a> pointed to the Office Whisper <a href=\"http://www.officewhisper.com/blogs/businessdevolution/archive/2006/02/14/16.aspx\">article</a> about \"Slight-Status Travelers\"</li>\n 	<li>A San Jose high school dance band launches into a spontaneous dance routine while waiting to board their flight home</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/travelcommons/134857554/\"><strong>Direct Link</strong></a> to a Flickr picture of the performance</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/images/pix/airport_dance.3gp\"><strong>Direct Link</strong></a> to a mobile phone video of the performance (in 3gp format; should be viewable with QuickTime)</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://promonet.iodalliance.com/\">IODA PROMONET</a></li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_37.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #37 - The Cranky Traveler, Spontaneous Entertainment','','inherit','closed','closed','','39-autosave-v1','','','2021-09-23 14:31:24','2021-09-23 19:31:24','',39,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3741',0,'revision','',0),
(3742,1,'2021-09-23 14:31:48','2021-09-23 19:31:48','Recorded in the <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Mateo%2C_California\">San Mateo, CA</a> Marriott, we work through a bunch of listener feedback and follow-up items, talk about what seems to be a general increase in the crankiness of frequent travelers -- for good cause or the whining of spoiled brats? -- and stumbling across what seemed to be the spontaneous break-out of a \"Fame\" episode in O\'Hare. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_37.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #37:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded at the San Mateo, CA Marriott</li>\n 	<li>Lots of flying over the past two weeks -- triangulating across SF and Atlanta last week; just SF this week</li>\n 	<li>Ate dinner at <a href=\"http://www.mistraldining.com/lev1_restaurant.html\">Mistral Restaurant</a> in <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redwood_City%2C_California\">Redwood City, CA</a> -- the heart of Oracle land</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/download_track.php?id=CE7F00E4A147D957EAF4B39D80B3D884BF6DC2714AC89817905F6D823C3C58AA2D2BC4C1337AE3571166DB55DC19CD47\" rel=\"nofollow\">A Rose Among Ruins (Guli Dar Wairaanahaa)</a></em> by <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=47006A4B4EB5D7804F4A3D1F2E26A25623ED5CBC6275EDCD211CEE7D57B96215\" rel=\"nofollow\">The Afghan Music Project</a></li>\n 	<li>Chris Christensen of the <a href=\"http://amateurtraveler.com/\">Amateur Traveler Podcast</a> comments on the Canadian traveler story in episode #36 -- -40° is the same in the in both the Fahrenheit and <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celsius\">Celsius</a> scales</li>\n 	<li>Dan O\'Leary of the <a href=\"http://hotelcoffee.blogspot.com/\">HotelCoffee</a> podcast gives his thoughts on <a href=\"http://www.united.com\">United Airlines</a>\' Ted strategy</li>\n 	<li>Allan Marko relates his recent experience with a business conference at <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/florida/orlando/sights/entertainment/walt-disney-world\">DisneyWorld</a>\'s Swan and Dolphin hotel</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/download_track.php?id=8C49C1D87D4423CD6B5680C66970A634CCD72C687652ECF3EB567A09D45DD6EE2D2BC4C1337AE3571166DB55DC19CD47\" rel=\"nofollow\">The Point of Purchase</a></em> by <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=17CD797AF2C9A2E56269DAD9433E440623ED5CBC6275EDCD211CEE7D57B96215\" rel=\"nofollow\">Harry Manx</a></li>\n 	<li>Frequent travelers seem to be breaking out of the \"cone of silence\" to sound off on poor service</li>\n 	<li>Lots of niggling problems during my stay at the San Mateo Marriott probably means I won\'t stay here again</li>\n 	<li>United Airlines has <a href=\"http://ir.united.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=83680&amp;p=irol-newsArticle&amp;ID=844066&amp;highlight=\">named</a> a new VP of Customer Experience to improve how it interacts with travelers</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/download_track.php?id=CE7726A0F99EB44095D5130567DEDDB7F90A9BD8352B78EB3E13EB82943ACAEA2D2BC4C1337AE3571166DB55DC19CD47\" rel=\"nofollow\"><em>Daddy Was A Preacher But Mama Was A Go-Go Girl</em></a> by Southern Culture On The Skids</li>\n 	<li>Curt Taylor of the <a href=\"http://www.emptyseat.net/emptyseatblog/\">Empty Seat blog</a> pointed to the Office Whisper <a href=\"http://www.officewhisper.com/blogs/businessdevolution/archive/2006/02/14/16.aspx\">article</a> about \"Slight-Status Travelers\"</li>\n 	<li>A San Jose high school dance band launches into a spontaneous dance routine while waiting to board their flight home</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/travelcommons/134857554/\"><strong>Direct Link</strong></a> to a Flickr picture of the performance</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/images/pix/airport_dance.3gp\"><strong>Direct Link</strong></a> to a mobile phone video of the performance (in 3gp format; should be viewable with QuickTime)</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://promonet.iodalliance.com/\">IODA PROMONET</a></li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_37.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #37 - The Cranky Traveler, Spontaneous Entertainment','','inherit','closed','closed','','39-revision-v1','','','2021-09-23 14:31:48','2021-09-23 19:31:48','',39,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3742',0,'revision','',0),
(3744,1,'2021-09-23 14:33:38','2021-09-23 19:33:38','Recorded in the <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huntington_Beach%2C_California\">Huntington Beach, CA</a> Hilton Resort, I\'m once again triangulating across northern and southern California. My decision to buy a new Saab convertible now has me planning an impromptu vacation to <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/sweden\">Sweden</a>, a place that has never been on the top of my vacation spots list. Also, some travel stories about people who trust their GPS SatNavs a bit too much. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_38.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #38:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded at the Huntington Beach, CA Hilton Resort</li>\n 	<li>Triangulating between SF and LA for the second week</li>\n 	<li>The 3-hour delay on my United LAX-ORD flight last week has me flying American this week</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Get Together</em> by <a href=\"http://tamaranile.com/\">T. Nile</a></li>\n 	<li>David Chapman writes in to correct earlier comments regarding <a href=\"http://www.airnewzealand.co.nz\">Air New Zealand</a>\'s London-Auckland run via LAX. The Air New Zealand press release can be found <a href=\"http://airnz.co.uk/aboutus/mediacentre/pressreleases/air_nz_announces_second_london_service_via_asia.htm\">here</a></li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Bored Out of My Mind</em> by <a href=\"http://hansyork.com/\">Hans York</a></li>\n 	<li>Have decided to buy a <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saab_9-3\">Saab 9-3</a> Aero Convertible</li>\n 	<li>Taking advantage of Saab\'s <a href=\"http://www.saabusa.com/saabjsp/europeandelivery/\"> European Delivery Option</a> means an unplanned vacation to Sweden</li>\n 	<li>American Airlines did a great job of stitching together a last-minute itinerary with AAdvantage miles</li>\n 	<li>Any suggestions on places to which I should drive in my new Saab while in Sweden? Please send me suggestions at comments[at]travelcommons.com</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Sacred Place</em> by Gene Loveland</li>\n 	<li>Some people seem to trust their GPS SatNav devices more than their own eyes</li>\n 	<li>An out-of-sync Hertz NeverLost device caused some delays in Berkeley</li>\n 	<li>Udayan Tripathi\'s latest <a href=\"http://www.udayantripathi.com/2006/04/life-in-london-42-25-april-2006.html\">Life In London </a> podcast talks about UK drivers heading into rivers at the direction of their SatNavs</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from the <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/\">Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\n 	<li>Please pass along any suggestions for our 1-year anniversary show</li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_38.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #38 - The Accidental Vacation, Trusting Travel Technology','','inherit','closed','closed','','40-revision-v1','','','2021-09-23 14:33:38','2021-09-23 19:33:38','',40,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3744',0,'revision','',0),
(3746,1,'2021-09-23 14:35:32','2021-09-23 19:35:32','Once again coming to you from the West Coast, this time the Newport Beach, CA Marriott. After a week off the road, I\'m bouncing again between San Francisco and Orange County. Listener feedback from a hotel chain accountant on the hotel add-on charges and from an ex-Northwest Airlines loyalist. We have a travel story about the unique view from the front of the airplane and a suggestion about how to load your iPod with new music. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_39.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #39:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded at the Newport Beach, CA Marriott</li>\n 	<li>Triangulating again (still?) between SF and LA</li>\n 	<li>High airline occupancy leads to some digging to find the right flight to the Bay Area</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/download_track.php?id=A1F44F3B330BFBBD5C7863108B61B09977CADC67705C23C5AECA03FC6F2C0320A93C8CF03BBFAC71CD59B5710E25327F\" rel=\"nofollow\">La Tra (basephunk mix)</a></em> by <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/label.php?id=3AF558B2D658A22FFF10B13F9D87237D276517530C9606BA2CB20418C6A8B4CB\" rel=\"nofollow\">Omar Sosa</a></li>\n 	<li>Doug give the hotel\'s view of increasing number of add-on charges discussed in T/C #36</li>\n 	<li>A long loyal Northwest Airlines customer begins the defection to Sun Country</li>\n 	<li>Thanks to <a href=\"http://rmfoto.blogspot.com/\">Ray Medina</a> for setting up the TravelCommons Frappr group</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/download_track.php?id=6E494292C6B4E14E784F04400EB2C54CE135E29730530171C5F931345CAA3733A93C8CF03BBFAC71CD59B5710E25327F\" rel=\"nofollow\">All Around</a></em> by <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=AEF14840F87CD6C39BE8918AF693E89C276517530C9606BA2CB20418C6A8B4CB\" rel=\"nofollow\">Jel</a></li>\n 	<li>Looking out the window while landing in Ireland is always a visual treat -- the bright green against the grey grabs your eyes</li>\n 	<li>Mis-tagged passenger luggage leads to a long delay on a BA flight from Shannon to London-Heathrow</li>\n 	<li>I end up in the cockpit telling the luggage\'s sad tale while we descend into Heathrow</li>\n 	<li>The view from the front of the plane is such a completely different visual experience, I have a hard time getting through the story</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/download_track.php?id=39762D033AA7D415DE1BB614BC25CC248FFC9C2C87F5F8F94BFEABA4A2563317A93C8CF03BBFAC71CD59B5710E25327F\" rel=\"nofollow\">Various Stages</a></em> by <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=8913BD6C7DFA8B495260ABCCE092D7DCDA0387BCF4D6B4C03D24C64234934084\" rel=\"nofollow\">Great Lake Swimmers</a></li>\n 	<li>Traveling involves a lot of time staring and waiting</li>\n 	<li>I often use the time to sift through the massive music downloads from the South By Southwest (SXSW) Festival in Austin, TX</li>\n 	<li><strong><a href=\"http://2006.sxsw.com/toolbox/schedules/ipod/\">Direct Link</a></strong> to the 2006 SXSW page with links to the BitTorrent files with the music and a short primer on using BitTorrent</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from the <a href=\"http://promonet.iodalliance.com/\">IODA Promonet</a></li>\n 	<li>Please pass along any suggestions for our 1-year anniversary show</li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_39.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #39 - Looking Out The Front Window, Scoring New Music','','inherit','closed','closed','','41-revision-v1','','','2021-09-23 14:35:32','2021-09-23 19:35:32','',41,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3746',0,'revision','',0),
(3747,1,'2021-09-23 14:37:17','2021-09-23 19:37:17','Back in the San Francisco Marriott after my Swedish vacation, we play an ode to SkyMall magazine, talk about the amazing number of lines in Heathrow airport that were between us and the start of our vacation, and how with all these new boarding schemes, airlines are paying attention to the wrong things. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_42.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #42:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in the SFO Marriott</li>\n 	<li>Back from the car-pick up vacation in Sweden and back on the road between Chicago and San Francisco</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>SkyMall</em> by <a href=\"http://www.jonathancoulton.com/2006/07/07/thing-a-week-40-skymall/\">Jonathan Coulton</a></li>\n 	<li>Listener talks about using the usually dreaded \"SSSS\" on his boarding pass as a ticket to the security express lane</li>\n 	<li>Ed Vawter of the <a href=\"http://http://www.qdinformation.com/searching/\">Searching The Internet</a> podcast talks about how moving overhead luggage pushes passengers to the edge</li>\n 	<li>Allan Marko points out Hilton Hotel\'s announcement about new clock radios that allow MP3 players to be plugged directly into them</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Car Crash</em> by <a href=\"http://www.smalltownsleeper.com/\">Small Town Sleeper</a></li>\n 	<li>My wife\'s observation -- \"This was a perfect vacation -- except for the flights at the beginning and the end\"</li>\n 	<li>An amazing number of lines at Heathrow airport stood between us and the start of our vacation in Sweden</li>\n 	<li>Only the last delay didn\'t bother me because it let me order another pint</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Hide and Seek</em> by <a href=\"http://www.lorenamire.com/\"> Lorena Mire</a></li>\n 	<li>8 out of 8 US airlines have reported <a href=\"http://blogs.usatoday.com/sky/2006/07/big_airlines_no.html\">profitable second quarters</a></li>\n 	<li>But much of the recent mail to TravelCommons has been about changes to airline boarding procedures</li>\n 	<li>America West airlines started it off by using some mathematical models from Arizona State University to <a href=\"http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,70689-0.html\">design</a> their new approach</li>\n 	<li>But Northwest Airlines has gone the other way, allow everyone to <a href=\"http://www.usatoday.com/travel/flights/2006-06-19-northwest-boarding_x.htm\">board at once</a></li>\n 	<li>They both claim the same results -- saving 3-5 minutes in boarding time. With so little benefit, perhaps they should be spending their time improving the flying experience instead, say by adding another flight attendant to busy flights or another ticket agent to cut down check-in lines.</li>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids99176.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from the <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/\">Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_42.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #42 - Waiting For A Good Time, Paying Attention to Boarding','','inherit','closed','closed','','44-revision-v1','','','2021-09-23 14:37:17','2021-09-23 19:37:17','',44,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3747',0,'revision','',0),
(3748,1,'2021-09-23 14:38:43','2021-09-23 19:38:43','Recorded in the TravelCommons studios, I look back on my trip through SFO as I try to navigate the new TSA rules on the first full day of the new regime and gird myself for 4 trips through the gauntlet this week. A listener tops my Heathrow lines (queues?) story, and we compare and contrast European and US travel experiences. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_43.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #43:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in the TravelCommons studio outside of Chicago</li>\n 	<li>Delayed recording this podcast so I could give you my personal experiences with the new TSA travel rules</li>\n 	<li>Thursday morning\'s news is a mix of elation -- <em>glad they busted the plot</em> -- and dread -- <em>the flight home from SFO is going to be brutal</em></li>\n 	<li>Some mundane concerns -- try to figure out how to salvage my nearly-new container of anti-perspirant gel</li>\n 	<li>All for naught when a contractor decides that all wheeled bags need to be checked</li>\n 	<li>The growing tediousness of travel wears on the frequent traveler -- no recovery time</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Persephone</em> by <a href=\"http://www.myspace.com/etherealvox\">Ethereal</a></li>\n 	<li>Instead of recording my own podcast Thursday night, I was a guest on Chris Christensen\'s <em>Amateur Traveler</em> podcast talking about Chicago. Here\'s a <a href=\"http://amateurtraveler.com/?p=841\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the episode\'s show notes.</li>\n 	<li>Peter Rukavina sends in his own story of epic lines at Heathrow</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Ghost</em> by <a href=\"www.hollowhorse.co.uk\">Hollow Horse</a></li>\n 	<li>Some contrasting impressions of travel in Europe and the US</li>\n 	<li>Security screening is much less of a hassle in Europe</li>\n 	<li>Although there are a number of exceptions, I think that, on the whole, US airports are nicer than European airports</li>\n 	<li>US airlines\' \"no meals\" cost cutting has turned their planes into picnic grounds</li>\n 	<li>Europeans dress nicer on planes, but Americans seem to dress nicer on trains</li>\n 	<li>Just can\'t figure out why Europeans would travel thousands of miles in a bus</li>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/showidwCWrQCJPoPIampbids991766.467861474amptype10ampsubid\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from the <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/\">Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\n 	<li>Flying down to Houston and hoping to get through security with my toiletry kit intact -- replaced all my gels and pastes with powders</li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_43.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #43 - Here We Go Again, Old World vs. New','','inherit','closed','closed','','47-revision-v1','','','2021-09-23 14:38:43','2021-09-23 19:38:43','',47,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3748',0,'revision','',0),
(3750,1,'2021-09-23 14:40:16','2021-09-23 19:40:16','Recorded in the Courtyard in Northwest Houston, we look at the decisions forced on travelers by the TSA\'s restrictions around carry-on liquids and gels. Is it a trade-off between safety and vanity? Are frequent travelers really that shallow? Also, I talk about how \"luggage economics\" made me trim my technology load when packing for my recent vacation in Sweden. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_44.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #44:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in the Courtyard in Northwest Houston</li>\n 	<li>Back in Houston again this week. Started last week in Houston and then went out to San Francisco where I was joined by my wife</li>\n 	<li>Stayed at three Renaissance Hotels while in the Bay Area; my wife rated the sheets at the Renaissance Stanford Court on Nob Hill the best</li>\n 	<li>TSA carry-on regulations are impacting the carry-out trade at Napa and Sonoma wineries -- <strong><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/travelcommons/228222015/\">direct link</a></strong> to a Flickr picture of a sign on the front door of <a href=\"http://www.arrowoodwinery.com/tastings.html\">Arrowood Winery</a></li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>That Ming Thing</em> by <a href=\"http://www.cageyhouse.com/\">Cagey House</a></li>\n 	<li>The blog entries between episodes is generating some great comments and discussions, and seem to be a good complement to the podcasts</li>\n 	<li>A listener tells the story of making top-tier status on Delta on an Atlanta-Omaha commuter jet run</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Break In</em> by <a href=\"http://www.podsafeaudio.com/jamroom/bands/1356/\">Mark Jungers</a></li>\n 	<li>The TSA restrictions on carry-on liquids and gels forces travelers to choose between lost time and lost looks</li>\n 	<li>The choice between checking luggage or leaving behind toiletries has much more impact on frequent travelers than on leisure travelers</li>\n 	<li>Recapping the <em><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=51\">Debating States of Matter With The TSA</a></em> blog post</li>\n 	<li>Listeners urge me to give Eco-Dent tooth powder another chance</li>\n 	<li>The ban is much harder on women than men -- Hilary Baumann of the <em>Clothing Cult</em> blog totals up the cost of banned make-up</li>\n 	<li>Commentators cast it as a safety vs. vanity choice, but no one feels that the TSA\'s new regime is making them any safer</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>When You Hide</em> by <a href=\"http://www.likewater.net/\"> Likewater</a></li>\n 	<li>I lightened my technology load on my recent vacation in Sweden -- I left my laptop home</li>\n 	<li>On last year\'s vacation to Switzerland, France and Hungary, I used it to store digital pictures, check e-mail, and produce TravelCommons episodes #8 and #9</li>\n 	<li>Skipped making a vacation podcast and survived just fine with only my BlackBerry and my Motorola V551 mobile phone -- they \"just worked\"</li>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from the <a href=\"http://www.podsafeaudio.com/\">Podsafe Audio</a></li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_44.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #44 - Dump Bucket of the Vanities, Leaving Behind the PC','','inherit','closed','closed','','51-revision-v1','','','2021-09-23 14:40:16','2021-09-23 19:40:16','',51,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3750',0,'revision','',0),
(3751,1,'2021-09-23 14:41:29','2021-09-23 19:41:29','Recorded in the <a href=\"http://hotels.lonelyplanet.com/usa/seattle-r2103717/renaissance-seattle-a-marriott-family-hotel-p1058600/\">Renaissance Madison Hotel</a> in downtown Seattle, we have some good stories about missing luggage. I have some problems with Orbitz\'s live customer service, as well as an over-zealous TSA screener. I recalculate my fly-vs.-drive threshold given the added hassles and airport time caused by the TSA\'s no-liquids security rules. Looking back at all this, I work hard to remind myself that there <em>are</em> some good things about travel. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_45.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #45:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in the Renaissance Madison Hotel in downtown Seattle</li>\n 	<li>On a big 3-day triangulation -- Chicago-Houston-Seattle</li>\n 	<li>Dreaded the Monday Continental flights, until I found that my complimentary Northwest Airlines Silver Elite status gave me status on Continental</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Trees</em> by <a href=\"http://tamaranile.com/\">Tamara Nile</a></li>\n 	<li>Orbitz\'s fare matrix on the web is best-in-class, but their live customer service is at the bottom of the heap</li>\n 	<li>Monday morning\'s TSA screener dove into my toiletry kit, only to be disappointed in her zeal to keep airplanes free of toothpaste</li>\n 	<li>Check out Hilary Baumann\'s <a href=\"http://clothingcult.com/\"><em>ClothingCult</em> blog</a> for a <a href=\"http://clothingcult.com/?p=96\">list</a> of solid toiletry replacements so that you too can play \"Fool the Screener\"</li>\n 	<li>Updated the fly-vs.-drive break-even point from T/C #23, taking into account the added hassles of the TSA no-liquids rules</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Can You Hear Me?</em> by <a href=\"http://www.thestirring.com/\">The Stirring</a></li>\n 	<li>Looks like Congress and the Dept of Homeland Security want to keep the no-liquids ban in place for some time</li>\n 	<li>These rules force more people to check luggage, pushing the system to its breaking point and causing <a href=\"http://www.usatoday.com/travel/news/2006-09-19-baggage-screening_x.htm\">security problems</a> of its own</li>\n 	<li>Expect to wait at least 45 minutes for your luggage to appear at the end of your flight</li>\n 	<li>Stories of lost luggage from Hilary Baumann and Chris Christensen of the <a href=\"http://amateurtraveler.com/\">Amateur Traveler</a> podcast</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Railroad Car</em> by <a href=\"http://www.sarashansky.com/\"> Sara Shansky</a></li>\n 	<li>Scanning my blog posts over the past 30 days and you get the sense that the travel experience has taken a turn for the worse -- it\'s just a grind, a trial to be endured</li>\n 	<li>Enjoyed finding the <a href=\"http://baytrail.abag.ca.gov/vtour/map2/access/Btsm2mb/Btsm2mb.htm\">Bay Trail</a> running along the back of the SFO Marriott</li>\n 	<li><strong><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/travelcommons/248365281/\">Direct link</a></strong> to a Flickr picture of the City of Burlingame Shorebird Sanctuary</li>\n 	<li>Last month\'s NPR Music podcast carried a <a href=\"http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5711563\">story</a> about <a href=\"http://www.petermulvey.com\">Peter Mulvey</a>, a \"modern-day troubadour\", in which he talks about loving travel</li>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from the <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/\">Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_45.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #45 - Waiting for Luggage, Enjoying Travel','','inherit','closed','closed','','55-revision-v1','','','2021-09-23 14:41:29','2021-09-23 19:41:29','',55,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3751',0,'revision','',0),
(3753,1,'2021-09-23 14:42:53','2021-09-23 19:42:53','Recorded in the TravelCommons studios after a 3-day Chicago-San Francisco-Boston triangulation, I left behind some torrential rains in Chicago, which flooded our basement, causing me a good bit of long-distance guilt as my wife was left cleaning up the mess solo. We continue the thread on solid toiletries -- even with the recent relaxation of the TSA\'s no-liquids rule, it\'s less hassle to travel solid, though that tooth powder keeps fooling some screeners. We then wrap up with some things I\'ve recently overheard in bars. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_46.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #46:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago</li>\n 	<li>Had yet another big 3-day triangulation -- Chicago-San Francisco-Boston</li>\n 	<li>Heading out to London with my mother and daughter for a quick 4-day vacation</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://cyberset.cc/artists2.php?tr_release_id=104\"><em>Heaven</em></a> by <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=A951998E6011FA9B2D22387EB3CAC0B5EB05A36360E7FDA122C8D7A5C140F8DC\" rel=\"nofollow\">Electric Skychurch</a></li>\n 	<li>Orbitz\'s fare matrix on the web is best-in-class, but their live customer service is at the bottom of the heap</li>\n 	<li>The Eco-Dent tooth powder keeps fooling TSA screeners</li>\n 	<li>Staying with solid toiletries avoids the hassle of having to pull out yet another thing out of my bag for special screening</li>\n 	<li><strong><a href=\"http://www.theonion.com/content/node/53594\">Direct Link</a></strong> to <em>The Onion</em> satire on George Bush missing his Air Force One flight</li>\n 	<li>Stopped off at the <a href=\"http://www.portablemediaexpo.com/\">Podcast Expo</a> last week in Ontario, California. Got to meet up with T/C contributors <a href=\"http://www.qdinformation.com/searching/\">Ed Vawter</a> and <a href=\"http://amateurtraveler.com/\">Chris Christensen</a>, and Alan Lew of the <a href=\"http://travelgeography.blogspot.com/\"><em>Geography for Travelers</em></a> podcast.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/buy_album.php?id=DD892705BB88E6806EA6A2A4A4D1E7D699277BD6CE86C10FDC39095666B5D6CF\" rel=\"nofollow\"><em>One Foot Down</em></a> by <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=E67629501441F8BAAFB2B0D46F36C071EB05A36360E7FDA122C8D7A5C140F8DC\" rel=\"nofollow\">Peter Bradley Adams</a></li>\n 	<li>Torrential rains started in Chicago right after I left for San Francisco</li>\n 	<li>Hit the ground and was greeted by two voice messages from my wife about our flooding basement</li>\n 	<li>While some might call it \"lucky\", it\'s actually frustrating not to be able to help solve the problems at home that always seem to come up when you\'re on the road</li>\n 	<li>Trying to deal with the frustration and guilt over a phone line is fraught with danger</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/buy_album.php?id=39CE51194FB95B63577FBFD7E2EC168C99277BD6CE86C10FDC39095666B5D6CF\"><em>Heaven</em></a> by <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=BB22CBFF24501120EEC6ABA18AB0A15FEB05A36360E7FDA122C8D7A5C140F8DC\" rel=\"nofollow\">Los Lonely Boys</a></li>\n 	<li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=19\">T/C #23</a>, I did a topic \"Scenes from a hotel bar\" about what was going on at 10:30 on a Wednesday night in the Memphis Marriott\'s Blue Shoes bar.</li>\n 	<li>Overhead some classic California-speak in the <a href=\"http://www.plumpjack.com/falstaff1.html\">Jack Falstaff</a> restaurant in San Francisco</li>\n 	<li>Got a lesson in the pervasiveness of American culture at the <a href=\"http://www.tanumstrand.se/\">Tanumstrand Resort</a> on the west coast of Sweden</li>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://promonet.iodalliance.com\">IODA Promonet</a></li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_46.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #46 - Long-Distance Guilt; Overheard in Bars','','inherit','closed','closed','','57-revision-v1','','','2021-09-23 14:42:53','2021-09-23 19:42:53','',57,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3753',0,'revision','',0),
(3755,1,'2021-09-23 14:45:45','2021-09-23 19:45:45','Recorded in the TravelCommons studios after a quick Chicago-San Francisco up-&amp;-back and a 4-day getaway to London with my mother and daughter. We talk about the adjustment from BA Club World to AA domestic coach, the increased security precautions in London, and my continuing travails with tooth powder. Then, we devote the rest of the podcast to listener travel stories -- one listener has to crawl into a DFW chute to free his luggage, another listener gets some extra beach time in Miami, I interject a story about the dangers of seat-back pockets, and another listener sends along suggestions for new travel words. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_47.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #47:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago</li>\n 	<li>Back in the saddle after a quick vacation to London</li>\n 	<li>Tough transition from BA Club World to AA domestic coach</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://www.podsafeaudio.com/jamroom/play.php?band_id=1258&amp;song_id=4378&amp;mode=song_hifi\"><em>Shadows</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.podsafeaudio.com/jamroom/bands/1258/\">Antardhyan</a></li>\n 	<li>ORD TSA screeners are <em>still</em> flummoxed by my Eco-Dent tooth powder, but the SFO screeners don\'t seem to have the same problem</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://www.udayantripathi.com/wordpress\">Udayan Tripathi</a> sent a <a href=\"http://www.boingboing.net/2006/09/27/tsa_calling_kip_hawl.html\">civic lesson</a> about how the TSA overrides the First Amendment</li>\n 	<li>Saw a significant increase in security while in London last week</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://www.podsafeaudio.com/jamroom/play.php?band_id=1435&amp;song_id=5090&amp;mode=song_hifi\"><em>The Distance</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.podsafeaudio.com/jamroom/bands/1435/\">Scotland Barr and the Slow Drags</a></li>\n 	<li>Listener story about delays in O\'Hare on the way to Tokyo and stuck luggage on the way back through Dallas-Ft Worth</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://fricksworld.blogspot.com/\">Steve Frick</a> discovers a bike trail behind the <a href=\"http://hamptoninn.hilton.com/en/hp/hotels/index.jhtml;jsessionid=VCTSM3FF2IYSACSGBIX222QKIYFCXUUC?ctyhocn=CAENWHX\" rel=\"nofollow\">Hampton Inn in Columbia, SC</a></li>\n 	<li>Listener request that airlines space out the delivery of the $5 lunch boxes</li>\n 	<li>Story about a unique use for seat-back pockets on Air Tunisia</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://clothingcult.com/\">Hilary Baumann</a> sent along a <a href=\"http://dailycandy.com/article.jsp?ArticleId=27789&amp;city=15\">Daily Candy mailing</a> of their best made-up travel words</li>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://podsafeaudio.com/\">PodSafe Audio</a></li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_47.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #47 - Listener Travel Stories','','inherit','closed','closed','','58-revision-v1','','','2021-09-23 14:45:45','2021-09-23 19:45:45','',58,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3755',0,'revision','',0),
(3757,1,'2021-09-23 14:47:03','2021-09-23 19:47:03','Recorded in the Rancho Las Palmas Resort &amp; Spa near <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/california/palm-springs-and-coachella-valley\">Palm Springs, CA</a>, we talk about a surprise at the rental car lot and some good and bad TSA experiences. My search for frequent flyer seats to South Africa leads to a discussion about how diversifying or concentrating your \"deposits\" into frequent travel programs yield different results. The Travel Tech segment reappears with two topics -- measuring differences in hotel bandwidth and some travelers\' love affairs with Bose noise-canceling headsets. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_48.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #48:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in the Rancho Las Palmas Resort &amp; Spa in <a href=\"http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=33.7691666667,-116.421111111&amp;spn=0.1,0.1&amp;q=33.7691666667,-116.421111111 (Rancho%20Mirage%2C%20California)&amp;t=h\">Rancho Mirage, CA</a> near Palm Springs</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm_Springs_International_Airport\">Palm Springs Airport</a> reminds me of San Jose and Santa Ana airports before their big renovations</li>\n 	<li>A Hertz mistake gave me a convertible Mustang instead of a Buick Lacrosse</li>\n 	<li><strong><a href=\"http://www.qdinformation.com/searching/2006/10/28/searching-the-internet-episode-012-voter-and-election-information/\">Direct Link</a></strong> to Ed Vawter\'s special election edition of <em>Searching the Internet</em> podcast</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/myles-marginal/\"><em>Gold and rose</em></a> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/myles_cochran\">Myles Cochran</a></li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://online.wsj.com/article/SB116226062497308455.html?mod=Middle-Seat-Mailbox\">Monday\'s \"Middle Seat\" travel column</a> in <em><a href=\"http://www.wsj.com/\">The Wall Street Journal</a></em> (subscription required) airs complaints from travelers who have had their toiletries discarded by overly strict TSA screeners</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://clothingcult.com/\">Hilary Baumann</a> tells of her recent TSA experience at <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/the-south/lexington\">Lexington, KY</a>\'s <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Grass_Airport\">Blue Grass Airport</a></li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/falik-dreams/\"><em>Ika</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.magnatune.com/artists/falik\">Falik</a></li>\n 	<li>Waited a bit long to score some frequent flyer tickets to <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/south-africa/cape-town\">Cape Town, South Africa</a> for next March</li>\n 	<li>Started with American Airlines but they didn\'t have the inventory. Ended up with United Airlines, which is in the Star Alliance with South Africa Airways</li>\n 	<li>United first offered a \"back door\" itinerary through <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/china/hong-kong\">Hong Kong</a> and Singapore, but I chose the shorter route through Europe</li>\n 	<li>Having diversified my mileage across carriers let me make this switch</li>\n 	<li>I give up top tier status on one airline for this diversification strategy</li>\n 	<li>Depends on what you want -- flexibility to use miles or a better chance at first-class upgrades</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/cargo-alchemy/\"><em>Entry</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.magnatune.com/artists/cargo_cult\">Cargo Cult</a></li>\n 	<li>Been testing the speed of hotel broadband using the <a href=\"http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest/\">Speakeasy Speed Test</a> because it tests both upload and download speeds</li>\n 	<li>Upload speed is probably more important to business users e-mailing out big files than it is for residential users</li>\n 	<li>The afternoon downloads at the Downtown Houston Courtyard were 10 times faster than those in the evening</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/jag-cypress/\"><em>Homebound</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.magnatune.com/artists/jag\">Jag</a></li>\n 	<li>Lots of love in the airplanes for the <a href=\"http://www.bose.com/controller?event=VIEW_PRODUCT_PAGE_EVENT&amp;product=qc2_headphones_index\">Bose noise-cancelling headphones</a></li>\n 	<li>In the trade-off between comfort and compactness, I choose the Bose, but others go for in-ear \'phones like the <a href=\"http://www.shure.com/ProAudio/Products/PersonalMonitorSystems/us_pro_E3_content\">Shure E3</a></li>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\">Magnatune</a></li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_48.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #48 - Frequent Flyer Strategies, Measuring Hotel Bandwidth','','inherit','closed','closed','','59-revision-v1','','','2021-09-23 14:47:03','2021-09-23 19:47:03','',59,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3757',0,'revision','',0),
(3758,1,'2021-09-23 14:48:17','2021-09-23 19:48:17','Recorded in the TravelCommons studio after a week in the Bay Area and a tough struggle to get back home in the teeth of the first winter storm of the season. A listener passes along the story of a trip as an inadvertent stowaway. I walk through the timelime of my efforts to get home to Chicago and, in the Travel Tech segment, talk about two wireless applications I use every day. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_49.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #49:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in the TravelCommons studios outside Chicago</li>\n 	<li>Back in the Bay Area and had a real struggle getting home in the face of the \"thunder snow\" storms that blew across the US this week</li>\n 	<li>Had good hearty German food with a couple of TravelCommons contributors at San Francisco\'s <a href=\"http://www.suppenkuche.com/welcome.html\">Suppenküche</a> restaurant</li>\n 	<li>Having some very good Hertz karma</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://www.saurabbhargava.com/downloads/04%20The%20Void.mp3\"><em>The Void</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.saurabbhargava.com/\">Saurab Bhargava</a></li>\n 	<li>Tested the free WiFi at the <a href=\"http://www.monaco-chicago.com\">Hotel Monaco</a> in Chicago using the <a href=\"http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest/\">Speakeasy Speed Test</a> and found it a bit slow</li>\n 	<li>Received my new Nikon D-80 digital SLR, which made me check out the travel pictures on <a href=\"http://richmanwisco.blogspot.com/\"><em>This Blog Title for Sale</em></a> and <a href=\"http://fricksworld.blogspot.com/\"><em>Frick\'s World</em></a></li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/travelcommons/330509240/\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the <em>View from Here</em> out the window of the SFO Marriott</li>\n 	<li>The FBI <a href=\"http://www.theindychannel.com/news/10419665/detail.html\">dropped its case</a> against the researcher who created a web site that printed valid-looking boarding passes</li>\n 	<li>A listener sends in a story about flying to Chicago without a ticket</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://www.saurabbhargava.com/downloads/03%20Aware.mp3\"><em>Aware</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.saurabbhargava.com/\">Saurab Bhargava</a></li>\n 	<li>Bad weather threatening Chicago made me try to get home early, but the airlines were already canceling flights</li>\n 	<li>A timeline of my efforts to get home to Chicago amid cancellations and delays</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://www.saurabbhargava.com/downloads/08%20Conversations.mp3\"><em>Conversations</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.saurabbhargava.com/\">Saurab Bhargava</a></li>\n 	<li>On my struggle to get home, I used my BlackBerry to check <a href=\"http://aa2go.com\">American Airlines\' mobile flight status site</a> at least 50 times</li>\n 	<li>Yahoo! Mobile has a good <a href=\"http://mobile.yahoo.com/resource_center/wapdir/Travel_and_Transportation/Flight_Information/Airlines/\">listing</a> of other airline status sites</li>\n 	<li>To download Google Maps, point the browser on your mobile device to <a href=\"http://www.google.com/gmm\">http://www.google.com/gmm</a></li>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://www.saurabbhargava.com/\">Saurab Bhargava</a></li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_49.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #49 - Working Hard to Get Home, Wireless Apps That Help','','inherit','closed','closed','','61-revision-v1','','','2021-09-23 14:48:17','2021-09-23 19:48:17','',61,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3758',0,'revision','',0),
(3760,1,'2021-09-23 14:49:50','2021-09-23 19:49:50','Recorded in the TravelCommons studio after hanging around home for the holidays. I talk about yet another tough struggle to get home when a pre-Christmas blizzard shuts down Denver, a couple of listeners share their trials of sitting next to travelers with killer bad breath, and we talk about new class distinctions among frequent fliers with the emergence of the Super Elites. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_50.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #50:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in the TravelCommons studios outside Chicago</li>\n 	<li>Did a good bit of flying right before the holidays -- Memphis, New York, and SF twice in two-and-a-half weeks</li>\n 	<li>Heading back out west this week after two weeks of doing nothing</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Flight</em> by <a href=\"http://www.freshmusic.co.za/\">Ga\'inja</a></li>\n 	<li>Drew Leifheit of the <a href=\"http://budacast.hu/\">Budacast</a> podcast talks about killer bad breath when seated between two German brothers</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Rocky Road</em> by <a href=\"http://www.kcentricity.com/\">KCentric</a></li>\n 	<li>My travel plans get derailed yet again by the second big winter storm of the season</li>\n 	<li>The problem is not with Chicago this time, but with Denver</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Wilderness Dance</em> by <a href=\"http://www.snarkyavenger.com/\">DJ Squirrel King</a></li>\n 	<li>In past podcasts, we\'ve talked about an \"explosion of elites\" devaluing of frequent flier status</li>\n 	<li>Have started to see the airlines put more separation between their top-tier and mid-tier status levels</li>\n 	<li>A <a href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/21/business/21warrior.html?ex=1321765200&amp;en=a67090fae4265899&amp;ei=5090&amp;partner=rssuserland&amp;emc=rss\">New York Times article</a> describes new levels of benefits for extreme frequent fliers</li>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from the <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/\">Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_50.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #50 - Yet Another Winter Storm, Travel Super Elites','','inherit','closed','closed','','64-revision-v1','','','2021-09-23 14:49:50','2021-09-23 19:49:50','',64,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3760',0,'revision','',0),
(3763,1,'2021-09-25 08:48:50','2021-09-25 13:48:50','Recorded in the SFO Marriott at the start of a trans-continental travel week, we talk about the need to \"re-balance\" your frequent traveler elite status at the beginning of the year -- should you re-up with your current airline or hotel, or move elsewhere? I\'ve upgraded a good bit of my travel technology over the last couple of weeks. I talk about my new toys and the reason travelers invest so much time personalizing these bits of circuitry. One listener describes the inner workings of United Airline\'s standby queue, while another listener tells some stories of traveling in the Far North. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_51.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #51:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in the San Francisco Airport Marriott</li>\n 	<li>Been traveling pretty much non-stop since January 3rd</li>\n 	<li>Stayed in the San Francisco W Hotel a few weeks ago -- not the same place it was during the Internet \"Bubble\" years</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/williams-dusty/\">Steam Train</a></em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/john_williams\">John Williams</a></li>\n 	<li>A listener describes the inner workings of United Airline\'s standby queue</li>\n 	<li>Another listener talks about his travel experiences on Innu Mikun airlines in Canada\'s isolated northern regions</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/babylon-knives/\">Roots Fi Cool</a></em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/burning_babylon\">Burning Babylon</a></li>\n 	<li>A listener talks about a recent flight from Newark to Chicago that was 90% elite fliers</li>\n 	<li>At the beginning of the year, the elite status counters are re-set to zero -- you should think about where you want to \"invest\" your flight segments and hotel stays for the year</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/kokoon-berlin/\">It\'s Time Know</a></em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/kokoon\">the Kokoon</a></li>\n 	<li>Passed my Motorola Razr down to my son and bought a Samsung A707 -- I like it as a phone, but haven\'t found much use for the 3G features</li>\n 	<li>The hard drive on my 2-year-old U2 iPod died, so I upgraded to a new 5th-gen black iPod. I like it, but what\'s with Apple\'s quality problems</li>\n 	<li>Frequent travelers\' phone, PC, and iPod are the furniture of their virtual office, and so they tend to spend more time personalizing them than they do their real office</li>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\">Magnatune</a></li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_51.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #51 - Change Out Status; Upgrading Travel Technology','','inherit','closed','closed','','68-revision-v1','','','2021-09-25 08:48:50','2021-09-25 13:48:50','',68,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3763',0,'revision','',0),
(3765,1,'2021-09-25 08:50:22','2021-09-25 13:50:22','Recorded in the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, we talk through some of the problems that have made <a href=\"http://www.united.com\">United Airlines</a>\' skies less friendly than their ads would like you to believe. This has definitely been the winter of United fliers\' discontent. I also follow up on last episode\'s travel technology upgrade topic. I\'ve now found a use for the <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3G\">3G technology</a> in my new Samsung phone, though not sure that Cingular would completely agree with it. A group of listeners have good things to say about Amsterdam\'s <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amsterdam_Airport_Schiphol\">Schiphol airport</a>; another listener ponders the impact if the 2001 shoe bomber had tried to ignite some other piece of his wardrobe. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_52.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #52:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in the TravelCommons studios</li>\n 	<li>Been running between the coasts for the past couple of weeks -- San Francisco to Orlando, and then San Francisco to New York</li>\n 	<li>Was able to get out of a 4-day up-&amp;-back to <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/china/hong-kong\">Hong Kong</a> and am pretty happy about it</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/yongen-yello/\">Give You Up</a></em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/yongen\">Yongen</a></li>\n 	<li>Drew Leifheit of the <a href=\"http://budacast.hu\">Budacast podcast</a> started a thread of commentary on Amsterdam\'s Schiphol airport</li>\n 	<li>Thanks to Drew for the link from his interview with the Hungarian newspaper <a href=\"http://www.nol.hu/kultura/cikk/434237/\">Napszabadsag</a>. TravelCommons is the example for (travel) podcasts</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/anamar-transfado/\">Going on a River</a></em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/anamar\">Anamar</a></li>\n 	<li>According to <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fado\">Wikipedia</a>, Fado is \"s a music genre ... characterized by mournful tunes and lyrics, often about the sea or the life of the poor.\"</li>\n 	<li>This has been the winter of United Airlines\' fliers\' discontent</li>\n 	<li>A front page <a href=\"http://www.usatoday.com/money/biztravel/2007-02-19-cheyenne-cover-usat_x.htm\">USAToday</a> story tells how United abandoned two planes of passengers in Cheyenne, Wyoming</li>\n 	<li>A <a href=\"http://www.chicagotribune.com/travel/chi-070301bad-flight,1,5898109.story?ctrack=1&amp;cset=true\">Chicago Tribune</a> story gives the time line of a United ORD-SFO flight that sat on the runway for 8 hours before finally being cancelled</li>\n 	<li>Leo Vegoda talks about a United passport snafu</li>\n 	<li>JetBlue\'s CEO <a href=\"http://www.jetblue.com/about/ourcompany/flightlog/\">blogs</a> a complete <em>mea culpa</em> after their service meltdown; United\'s CEO is no where to be found</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/vla-stuff/\">Look Around</a></em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/vla\">Very Large Array</a></li>\n 	<li>In T/C #51, I talked about how I upgraded most of my travel technology kit -- my laptop, my <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod\">iPod</a>, and my mobile phone</li>\n 	<li>I hadn\'t found a use for my new phone\'s big selling point from Cingular -- fast data access on their new 3G network</li>\n 	<li>A couple of weeks ago, I was at a financial services client with a completely locked-down computer network and cobbled together a 3G data connection using a copy of Samsung\'s PC Studio and an old Bluetooth USB dongle</li>\n 	<li>This <a href=\"http://www.cbs.com/classics/macgyver/video/\">McGyver</a> rig gave me 328 kbps down and 234 kbps up according to the <a href=\"http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest/links.php\">Speakeasy test</a> -- faster than some hotel WiFi spots I tested</li>\n 	<li>What about using something like this to replace the ubiquitous $10/night Internet charge at Marriotts and Sheratons?</li>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\">Magnatune</a></li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_52.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #52 - Flying Friendless Skies; Latest Speed for the Road','','inherit','closed','closed','','69-revision-v1','','','2021-09-25 08:50:22','2021-09-25 13:50:22','',69,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3765',0,'revision','',0),
(3767,1,'2021-09-25 08:55:18','2021-09-25 13:55:18','Recorded in the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago after I\'ve finished up my <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_travel\">business travel</a> for the year. Since a number of listeners aren\'t frequent travelers, we provide some tips on how to blend in, look like a pro, and generally reduce a little of the hassle of holiday travel. Also, GPS devices are hot for the holidays this year. We talk about their good points and a few gotchas. Listener comments include suggestions on public transit to Denver airport, another happy <a href=\"http://www.jetblue.com/\">JetBlue</a> customer, and a call for help dealing with tight UK carry-on limits. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_60.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #60:\n<ul>\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\">\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in the TravelCommon studios outside <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/chicago\">Chicago, IL</a></li>\n 	<li>December is a funny time to travel -- light traffic the beginning of the month, crushing traffic at the end.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/magnacomp-christmas/\"><em>Angels we have heard on high</em></a> performed by James Edwards</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\">\n<ul>\n 	<li>A listener from Denver suggests <a href=\"http://www.rtd-denver.com/skyRide/\">skyRide</a> bus service as a cheap and comfortable way to get to <a href=\"http://www.flydenver.com/\">Denver International Airport</a></li>\n 	<li>A recent visitor to San Francisco agrees with episode #59\'s assessment of the BART system cloth seats -- they\'re gross.</li>\n 	<li>A listener from Richmond, Virginia raves about the new JetBlue service into RIC</li>\n 	<li>A listener from London mentions the <a href=\"http://www.bia.homeoffice.gov.uk/managingborders/technology/eborders/iris/\">Iris scan</a> speeds up immigration, but is looking for suggestions on how to handle the UK\'s restrictive one carry-on bag rule.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/magnacomp-christmas/\"><em>The First Noel</em></a> performed by Ralph Rousseau Meulenbroeks</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Tips for Holiday Travel\n</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\">\n<ul>\n 	<li>The most telling difference between an experienced and an amateur traveler is what the military calls “situational awareness”</li>\n 	<li>The place where experience shows the most is in the security line</li>\n 	<li>Tip #1 – Use the line to get prepared</li>\n 	<li>Tip #2 – Never let the x-ray machine go hungry</li>\n 	<li>Tip #3 – if you aren’t prepared, step aside until you are</li>\n 	<li>These three tips all have one key similarity – consideration for others.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/shira-castle/\"><em>Christmas Day in the Morning</em></a> is by Shira Kammen</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>GPS as the Hot Travel Gift</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\">\n<ul>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://adage.com/article?article_id=122751\">AdAge</a> magazine declared GPS as “hot for the holidays” with unit sales up 488% over last year.</li>\n 	<li>Bought a refurbed <a href=\"http://www.tomtom.com\">TomTom</a> One from <a href=\"http://www.buy.com/prod/tomtom-one-portable-gps-preloaded-map-of-us-canada-on-sd-card/q/loc/111/205833413.html\">Buy.com</a> for $160 a few months ago and it’s been great</li>\n 	<li>Advantage over built-in units and rental car units is the ability to upload information.</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://www.tomtomforums.com/forumdisplay.php?f=14\">tomtomforums.com</a> and <a href=\"http://poiplaza.com\">poiplaza.com</a> have custom point-of-interest files for download. I\'ve found the Starbucks file very useful.</li>\n 	<li>However, GPS units will get it wrong on occasion.</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing\n</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\">Magnatune</a></li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments@travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_60.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #60 - Tips for Holiday Travel; GPS as the Hot Travel Gift','','inherit','closed','closed','','89-revision-v1','','','2021-09-25 08:55:18','2021-09-25 13:55:18','',89,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3767',0,'revision','',0),
(3769,1,'2021-09-25 08:56:42','2021-09-25 13:56:42','Recorded in the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago in the middle of the one week a year I refuse to travel -- <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thanksgiving\">Thanksgiving Day</a> week. With environmental and economic reasons to reduce unneeded car trips, how easy is it to take a train to and from the airport? The answer is mixed and it doesn\'t look to get any better any time soon. We also talk about the deteriorating state of the rental car fleet -- which is making public transit look more attractive. A listener sends in a comment on airport power station etiquette, and we talk about a collection of airline food menus from the past. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_59.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #59:\n<ul>\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\">\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in the TravelCommon studios outside <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/chicago\">Chicago, IL</a></li>\n 	<li>No travel this week -- leaving the airports to the \"less experienced\" travelers</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/swivel-deep/\"><em>Arlos Auto Parts and Salvation</em></a> by Swivel Neck Jones</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\">\n<ul>\n 	<li>Received an e-mail from United the morning after a LAX-ORD flight that was delayed 3 hours. The e-mail gave a nice apology and 5,000 miles for my troubles.</li>\n 	<li>A listener talks about his travails in finding working power outlets in airports and on airplanes</li>\n 	<li>Northwestern University Library launched <a href=\"http://www.library.northwestern.edu/transportation/digital-collections/menus/index.html\">web access</a> to its collection of past airline menus. Talked about a 1969 United Airlines <a href=\"http://digital.library.northwestern.edu/inu-tmenu/tmenu-UA005.html\">menu</a> and a 1962 <a href=\"http://digital.library.northwestern.edu/inu-tmenu/tmenu-EAA001.html\">menu</a> from East Africa Airways.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/fuzz-messy/\"><em>Smiling Perspective</em></a> by General Fuzz</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Trains to Planes</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\">\n<ul>\n 	<li>What\'s the best way from Newark Airport to Manhattan? It depends how much time and money you have, and it\'s an inverse relationship.</li>\n 	<li>With lots of time, you can save money by taking the monorail over the marshes to a train station served by Amtrak and NJ Transit trains</li>\n 	<li>It’s a pretty handy set up, but as with many – too many – plane-train connections, not intuitively obvious, not very user-friendly, at least for first time users</li>\n 	<li>The \"gold standard\" of airport rail links remains the <a href=\"http://www.heathrowexpress.com/index.asp\">Heathrow Express</a> -- expensive, but convenient</li>\n 	<li>Subway systems in <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/washington-dc\">Washington DC</a>, Chicago and Atlanta inexpensively deliver you directly to the terminal</li>\n 	<li>Public pressure to locate new airports far away from population centers doesn\'t bode well for easy public transit links. Denver\'s new airport may get a <a href=\"http://www.rtd-fastracks.com/ec_1\">rail link</a> by 2015.</li>\n 	<li>Wikipedia has what looks like a good <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airport_rail_link\">listing</a> of global airport rail links.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/atek-phoenix/\"><em>Goa Life</em></a> by Ambient Teknology</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Renting a Rambling Wreck</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\">\n<ul>\n 	<li>I’ve received more 20,000+ mile cars from Hertz this year than ever before, and this is with some level of status in Hertz’s Gold Club.</li>\n 	<li>A <em>Wall Street Journal</em> <a href=\"http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119137170889247162.html\">article</a> said that rental car companies are letting their fleets age an additional 2,000 miles</li>\n 	<li>Another <em>WSJ</em> <a href=\"http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119500412182192191.html?mod=pj_main_hs_coll\">article</a> says that the drop in rental car customer satisfaction reported in the latest JD Powers <a href=\"http://www.jdpower.com/travel/ratings/rental-car-ratings\">survey</a> is linked to the aging fleet.</li>\n 	<li>I switched to Avis until they tried to stick me with the repair cost of a previously damaged tail light</li>\n 	<li>It\'s driving me to use cabs, limos, and public transit more often, even when more expensive and less convenient</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\">Magnatune</a></li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments@travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_59.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #59 - Trains to Planes; Renting a Rambling Wreck','','inherit','closed','closed','','87-revision-v1','','','2021-09-25 08:56:42','2021-09-25 13:56:42','',87,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3769',0,'revision','',0),
(3771,1,'2021-09-25 08:58:14','2021-09-25 13:58:14','Recorded in the <a href=\"http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=39.1319444444,-77.2263888889&amp;spn=0.1,0.1&amp;q=39.1319444444,-77.2263888889 (Gaithersburg%2C%20Maryland)&amp;t=h\">Gaithersburg, MD</a> Marriott outside <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/washington-dc\">Washington, DC</a> at the end of an intense week of travel that had me flying from the East Coast to the West Coast and then back east again... on four different airlines. With many airlines\' plummeting customer satisfaction scores, we ask the question \"Who raves about their airline?\" Recent trips allow me to do a \"seat-to-seat\" comparison of two high-buzz airlines -- <a href=\"http://www.jetblue.com/\">JetBlue</a> and Virgin America. Our recurring <em>Travel Tech</em> topic talks about replacing a laptop with the latest evolution of Nokia\'s Internet tablet, and hunting down power outlets in airports. Also, a listener suggestion on local food in DC\'s <a href=\"http://www.mwaa.com/national/\">Reagan National Airport</a> leads to frustration at missing a great burger. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_58.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #58:\n<ul>\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\">\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in the Gaithersburg, MD Marriott outside Washington, DC</li>\n 	<li>Had an extensive tour of East and West Coast airports over the past three weeks -- EWR, DCA, IAD, FLL, RDU, SNA, OAK, and SFO</li>\n 	<li>Flying to the Northeast is much more painful than flying to the West Coast, even though the ORD-SFO flight is twice as long</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/junoon-infiniti/\">Nachoon Gi</a></em> by Junoon</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\">\n<ul>\n 	<li>Dave of the <a href=\"http://sandandtsunamis.blogspot.com\">Sand and Tsunamis blog</a> talked about hitting the <a href=\"http://www.fiveguys.com/\">Five Guys Famous Burger</a> stand in DC\'s Reagan National Airport. I wanted to try it out on my DC trip last week. Unfortunately, Five Guys is buried behind security in the <a href=\"http://www.usairways.com\">USAir</a> concourse and I was flying United</li>\n 	<li>Chris Christensen of the <a href=\"http://AmateurTraveler.com\">Amateur Traveler</a> podcast sent along a review of TravelCommons from Acura Style magazine</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/lucas-divine/\">Old Mexico</a></em> by Jeffery Luck Lucas</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Who Raves about Their Airline?</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\">\n<ul>\n 	<li>Most of the airline customer satisfaction problems are with what used to be called \"legacy\" carriers, now called \"network\" carriers -- USAir, Northwest, Delta, American, United</li>\n 	<li>Many elite fliers living in hub cities of network carriers (e.g., Philadelphia for USAir, Detroit for Northwest) complain about being \"trapped\"</li>\n 	<li>A stark comparison to the ringing endorsement of JetBlue offered by Business Week\'s executive editor in this <a href=\"http://www.businessweek.com/mediacenter/podcasts/cover_stories/covercast_02_22_07.htm\">podcast</a></li>\n 	<li>Virgin America still feels like they\'re in \"beta\" mode</li>\n 	<li>JetBlue offers a great in-flight experience -- good leg room, choice of snacks, free <a href=\"http://www.directv.com\">DirecTV</a> in seatback screens -- but the ground experience in JFK is a hassle</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://udayantripathi.com\">Udayan Tripathi</a> describes his flight across the US on Frontier Airlines</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://www.brunomisonne.com/aviation%20music_003.htm\">Johannesburg airport tower party</a></em> by <a href=\"http://www.brunomisonne.com\">Bruno Misonne</a></li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Travel Tech Potpourri</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://marcloehrwald.com/\">Marc Löhrwald</a> is very satisfied with the <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N800\">Nokia N800</a> as a PC replacement, and doesn\'t have to take it out of his briefcase when passing through security. He is, though, going to upgrade to the new N810</li>\n 	<li>Finding power outlets in airports can be a bit of an Easter Egg hunt</li>\n 	<li>O\'Hare\'s Terminal 1 has put in a number of free workstations with plenty of plugs at eye level</li>\n 	<li>Other airports push their pay-to-charge vending machines</li>\n 	<li>Here\'s a <a href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/travelcommons/1736936801/\">picture</a> of the Medusa-like cell phone and PDA charger in <a href=\"http://www.rdu.com\">Raleigh-Durham airport</a></li>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\">Magnatune</a> and <a href=\"http://www.brunomisonne.com\">Bruno Misonne</a></li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments@travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_58.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #58 - Who Raves About Their Airline; Powering Up in Airports','','inherit','closed','closed','','82-revision-v1','','','2021-09-25 08:58:14','2021-09-25 13:58:14','',82,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3771',0,'revision','',0),
(3773,1,'2021-09-25 08:59:50','2021-09-25 13:59:50','Recorded in the TravelCommons studio outside Chicago, I\'ve been bi-coastal since the last episode, bouncing between New York and San Francisco. A side trip down to <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/pennsylvania/philadelphia\">Philadelphia</a> yields a great street-food breakfast when I take the time to walk outside my hotel. Delays in my flights between O\'Hare and <a href=\"http://www.laguardiaairport.com\">LaGuardia airports</a> cause me to dig for the FAA\'s latest airport capacity report and gnash my teeth against the <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NIMBY\">NIMBYs</a> standing in the way of reasonable fixes. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_57.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #57:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in TravelCommons studio outside of Chicago, hopefully the <a href=\"http://www.chicago2016.org/\">home of the 2016 Summer Olympics</a></li>\n 	<li>Continue to bounce between the East and West coasts</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/media/files/DJBLUE/11541\">Hear Me</a></em> by DJ Blue</li>\n 	<li>Made United\'s top-tier status level in August. Get to walk on the red carpet all the time now, though it feels a bit dangerous cutting in front of other passengers</li>\n 	<li>Not flying American that much anymore, so dropping my Admirals Club membership after 10 years</li>\n 	<li>Leo Vegoda received a \"close\" patdown similar to the one I received in Schipol last month</li>\n 	<li>Craig Martin of the <em><a href=\"http://www.indietravelpodcast.com\">Indie Travel Podcast</a></em> gives a suggestion on Bluetooth keyboards</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/media/files/savoyard/10743\">Madrugada</a></em> by Savoyard</li>\n 	<li>After my morning workout in the Philadelphia Westin, I went for a walk looking for a breakfast place</li>\n 	<li>Bought a real Philadelphia breakfast -- an egg, cheese, and <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrapple\">scrapple</a> sandwich from a lunch truck</li>\n 	<li>Takes time to find real local fare</li>\n 	<li>A <a href=\"http://www.usatoday.com/travel/flights/2007-08-27-local-food_N.htm\">USAToday article</a> says local restaurants make up 20% to 40% of all eateries at most big U.S. airports</li>\n 	<li>On the same day, enjoyed a <a href=\"http://www.lancasterbrewing.com/HopHogIPA.html\">beer</a> in Philadelphia Airport from Lancaster County and an espresso in <a href=\"http://www.mwaa.com/dulles/dulles.htm\">Washington Dulles airport</a> from a <a href=\"http://www.mayorgacoffee.com/index.php\">Maryland coffee roaster</a></li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/media/files/djlang59/10579\">Crazy Love</a></em> by DJ Lang</li>\n 	<li>A trip from Chicago to New York gave me 2 hour delays each way, doubling the scheduled length of each flight</li>\n 	<li>On my outbound flight, the United pilot sent back personal apologizes to top-tier status fliers, similar to his colleague who made the <a href=\"http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118826634834410559.html\">front page</a> of the <em>Wall Street Journal</em></li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20724859/\"><em>BusinessWeek</em> cover story</a> from earlier this month says the <a href=\"http://www.faa.gov/\">Federal Aviation Administration</a> predicts there will be 1 billion people a year flying by 2015, a 36% increase from today</li>\n 	<li>FAA\'s <a href=\"http://www.faa.gov/airports_airtraffic/airports/resources/publications/reports/media/fact_2.pdf\">FACT 2 study</a> predicts 18 airports will need additional capacity, and 7 metro areas will need additional capacity by 2015</li>\n 	<li>The most important expansion -- the <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O\'Hare_International_Airport#Modernization_plan\">O\'Hare Modernization Program</a> -- is being held up by a <a href=\"http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-cemeterysuit_web_14sep14,0,2656304.story\">suit over moving a cemetery</a></li>\n 	<li>NIMBY-ism is responsible for much of today\'s travel hassles</li>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org\">ccMixter</a></li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_57.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #57 - Making Time for Local Fare; What’s Standing in the Way of Fixing Our Airports','','inherit','closed','closed','','80-revision-v1','','','2021-09-25 08:59:50','2021-09-25 13:59:50','',80,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3773',0,'revision','',0),
(3774,1,'2021-09-25 09:01:10','2021-09-25 14:01:10','Recorded in the <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_International_Airport\">San Francisco Airport</a> Marriott, a recent city-a-day business trip through Europe allowed me to do a first-hand comparison of the European air travel experience to the much maligned state of US air travel. We also update our thoughts on the state of mobile computing devices. Is it possible to travel \"PC-less\" yet, or are we still one release away from leaving the laptop at home? Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_56.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #56:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in SFO Marriott</li>\n 	<li>July and August have been heavy travel months</li>\n 	<li>Did Chicago\'s <a href=\"http://www.lateride.org/\">overnight bike ride</a> right before climbing on a plane for a city-a-day tour through Europe</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/download_track.php?id=CA84300ED431C297088FF88D72A178B3D5A6B8ADCC7B952E1A4A1E350BD450FA5840BD211C5180D7202C34D61CFFBC4F\" rel=\"nofollow\">Moving Forward</a></em> by <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=648F3E2C7F183297592F9B075C410E264C51054653F2D7CB016C2A94677CF9DF\" rel=\"nofollow\">Bitter:Sweet</a></li>\n 	<li>Alan Lew of the <a href=\"http://www.TravelGeography.info\">Geography for Travelers podcast</a> recounts sightings of TSA agents in <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/china/hong-kong\">Hong Kong</a></li>\n 	<li>Alan added pictures out his hotel room windows in Kuala Lumpur and <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/china/guangdong/guangzhou\">Guangzhou, China</a> to Flickr\'s <a href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/tags/viewfromhere/\">View From Here</a> photo stream. I added pictures out the windows of the Hilton Mainz and Paris Renaissance</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/download_track.php?id=B8FFD43EC56896775929CB3DCD2B1F2E5F6B3B0BE67F3AC30ED9588E915A88C55840BD211C5180D7202C34D61CFFBC4F\" rel=\"nofollow\">Scratch To Win</a></em> by <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=A540ACB4AF73C6EBAFA90EADEE4601D809748717F2419A98FB85DC7BD8639229\" rel=\"nofollow\">Ticklah</a></li>\n 	<li>The poor state of the US air travel experience is the travel topic <em>de jure</em> this summer</li>\n 	<li>My city-a-day business trip through Europe last month gave me a first-hand comparison of between the European and US air travel experiences</li>\n 	<li>Spent more time in lines in European airports but had much fewer flight delays once on the plane</li>\n 	<li>European gate agents and security screeners less polite than in the US, but airplanes were in better shape and the in-flight service much nicer</li>\n 	<li>All in all, the European experience was better, but not by the margin I had expected</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/download_track.php?id=CA84300ED431C297088FF88D72A178B3D5A6B8ADCC7B952E1A4A1E350BD450FA5840BD211C5180D7202C34D61CFFBC4F\" rel=\"nofollow\">Une Rose Noire</a></em> by <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=39CD9773095D43710560ACD6950AC8F009748717F2419A98FB85DC7BD8639229\" rel=\"nofollow\">Paul Cargnello</a></li>\n 	<li>Ed Vawter\'s latest episode of the <a href=\"http://www.qdinformation.com/searching/2007/07/09/searching-the-internet-episode-017-mobile-searching/\"><em>Searching the Internet</em> podcast</a> focuses on mobile search sites</li>\n 	<li>My T-Mobile GSM Blackberry allows me to go PC-less if I only need to track e-mail</li>\n 	<li>The Google Maps application for the Blackberry was very handy for finding a Paris restaurant recommended by a friend</li>\n 	<li>Apple\'s iPhone can almost, but not quite, replace a PC</li>\n 	<li>The high probability of a long flight delay means you want to bring along a device on which you can do real work -- a PC</li>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://promonet.iodalliance.com\">IODA Promonet</a></li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_56.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #56 - Lines Around the World; Shedding Some Electronic Weight','','inherit','closed','closed','','78-revision-v1','','','2021-09-25 09:01:10','2021-09-25 14:01:10','',78,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3774',0,'revision','',0),
(3776,1,'2021-09-25 09:02:44','2021-09-25 14:02:44','Recorded in the Marriott Courtyard in <a href=\"http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=35.9288888889,-79.0394444444&amp;spn=0.1,0.1&amp;q=35.9288888889,-79.0394444444 (Chapel%20Hill%2C%20North%20Carolina)&amp;t=h\">Chapel Hill, North Carolina</a>, the current \"blogstorm\" about United Airlines\' poor customer service provides the data to calculate the true cost of connecting flights. A recent combined business and family trip to <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/new-york-city\">New York City</a> makes me realize that my family isn\'t a burden in my travels, but instead an eyeopener. Listeners comment on my recent blog posts; one uses Twitter to report his hotel broadband speed test results. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_55.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #55:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in Marriott Courtyard in Chapel Hill, NC</li>\n 	<li>Been on a weekly commute to San Francisco, though did get in a combo business/family trip to New York the week before last</li>\n 	<li>Have had very few problems flying to the Bay Area, but this last flight back from <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaGuardia_Airport\">LaGuardia</a> had us sitting on the runway for 3 hours</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Did We Make It</em> by <a href=\"http://www.caseydesmond.com/\">Casey Desmond</a></li>\n 	<li>Drew Leifheit of the <a href=\"http://budacast.hu/\">Budacast</a> podcast recounts a fond childhood memory of eating pecan pie while flying Delta with his grandmother</li>\n 	<li>John F corrects Barbara Higgins\' (United Airlines\' VP of customer experience) confusion between proactive and reactive customer service</li>\n 	<li>Daniel Perez of the <a href=\"http://www.highmoonmedia.com/tgt/\">Gamer Traveler</a> Podcast is surprised to see US TSA agents in Amsterdam\'s <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amsterdam_Airport_Schiphol\">Schipol Airport</a></li>\n 	<li>Mika Pyyhkala has been twittering his Speakeasy <a href=\"http://speakeasy.net/speedtest/\">broadband speed tests</a></li>\n 	<li>Steve Frick of the Frick\'s World blog has inspired me to take pictures out my hotel room window and add them to Flickr\'s <a href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/tags/viewfromhere/\">View From Here</a> collection</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Throwing up on the plane</em> by <a href=\"http://www.myspace.com/electromagneticimpulses2\">Electromagnetic Impulses</a></li>\n 	<li>Recent TravelCommons blog posts on United Airlines customer service got looped into the <a href=\"http://www.professorbainbridge.com/2007/06/united_customer.html\">edge</a> of a growing \"blogstorm\"</li>\n 	<li>Articles in the <a href=\"http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/chi-sun_jammed_0610jun10,1,5280955.story\">Chicago Tribune</a> and <a href=\"http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/travel/2007-06-18-ual-service-usat_N.htm\">USAToday</a> have fueled the storm</li>\n 	<li>The May 14th <a href=\"http://randomaccessbabble.blogspot.com/2007/05/dear-united-airlines-customer-service.html\">entry</a> in the Briana\'s Random Access Babble blog gives a detailed account of her efforts to fly from New York to Las Vegas to visit her family for the weekend; also a detailed accounting of her out-of-pocket costs caused by missed flight connections in Denver</li>\n 	<li>We use Briana\'s cash outlay figures to calculate the true cost of a connecting flight</li>\n 	<li>Leo Vegoda\'s recent missed connection experience in Washington\'s Dulles airport validates the findings reported in an International Herald Tribune <a href=\"http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/07/05/business/05late-web.php\">article</a> that says FAA flight delay statistics grossly understate the actual passenger delays</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Ghost</em> by <a href=\"http://www.hollowhorse.co.uk\">Hollow Horse</a></li>\n 	<li>I don\'t seem to have to \"downshift\" as much anymore when traveling with my family</li>\n 	<li>Traveling with my daughter has bumped me out of my usual rut</li>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from the <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com\">Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_55.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #55 - True Cost of Connecting; See More With The Family','','inherit','closed','closed','','77-revision-v1','','','2021-09-25 09:02:44','2021-09-25 14:02:44','',77,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3776',0,'revision','',0),
(3777,1,'2021-09-25 09:03:26','2021-09-25 14:03:26','Sitting in <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Philadelphia International Airport\" rel=\"homepage\" href=\"http://www.phl.org/index.html\">Philadelphia Airport</a> drinking a pint of <a href=\"http://www.lancasterbrewing.com/HopHogIPA.html\">Hop Hog IPA</a> beer from the <a href=\"http://www.lancasterbrewing.com/home.html\">Lancaster Brewing Company</a> in nearby <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Lancaster, Pennsylvania\" rel=\"wikipedia\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancaster%2C_Pennsylvania\">Lancaster, PA</a> reminded me of a recent <a href=\"http://www.usatoday.com/travel/flights/2007-08-27-local-food_N.htm\">USA Today article</a> about the growth of local food fare in airports.  According to the article:\n<blockquote>\"There was a trend toward national brands in the 1990s, but now there\'s a desire for more balance with local brands,\" says Pat Banducci, senior vice president of HMS Host, a concessionaire at 102 airports worldwide, including 73 in North America.  Local restaurants make up 20% to 40% of all eateries at most big U.S. airports, Banducci says. He expects that to grow to 50% within five years.</blockquote>\nWe\'ve talked about this trend in earlier TravelCommons podcasts.  My travels through Memphis  last year were each punctuated with meals at either the <a href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/travelcommons/103278496/\">Corky\'s</a> or Interstate BBQ stands in the airport, and my single memory of Austin airport was lunch at Salt Lick BBQ.  However, beer seems to be the most popular local fare.  The Independence Brew Pub here in Philadelphia Airport, the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Anchor Brewing Company\" rel=\"homepage\" href=\"http://www.anchorbrewing.com\">Anchor Steam</a> bar in <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"San Francisco International Airport\" rel=\"homepage\" href=\"http://flysfo.com/\">San Francisco Airport</a>, the Gordon Biersch Brew Pub in <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"San Jose Airport (Mindoro)\" rel=\"wikipedia\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Jose_Airport_%28Mindoro%29\">San Jose Airport</a>...  Though my own personal sampling could be biased.\n\nThe USA Today article suggests that \"the shift to local restaurants began largely after 9/11. People are spending more time in airports, checking in hours before flights to meet security requirements.\"  It\'s not just additional security requirements, though, that are giving people additional \"dwell\" time in airports.  Through June, 27.1% of flights were at least 15 minutes late or canceled, a record for the period, according to the U.S. <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Bureau of Transportation Statistics\" rel=\"homepage\" href=\"http://www.bts.gov\">Bureau of Transportation Statistics</a>.  With 2-3 extra hours to kill in airports, getting a taste of local fare helps people get a little something out of a bad situation.\n\nAs good as this trend is, though, it\'s just not the same as getting out and about in the city you\'re visiting.  Somehow I don\'t think I\'d find the egg, cheese, and <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrapple\">scrapple</a> sandwich I bought from a streetcart this morning on 18th Street anywhere in this airport.\n<div class=\"zemanta-pixie\" style=\"margin-top: 10px; height: 15px;\"><img class=\"zemanta-pixie-img\" style=\"border: none; float: right;\" src=\"http://img.zemanta.com/pixy.gif?x-id=a04a3bac-f2a7-44ab-b0a6-e957ecea7b2b\" alt=\"\"></div>','Local Fare Eases Delays Just A Bit','','inherit','closed','closed','','79-revision-v1','','','2021-09-25 09:03:26','2021-09-25 14:03:26','',79,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3777',0,'revision','',0),
(3779,1,'2021-09-25 09:05:19','2021-09-25 14:05:19','Recorded in the Grand Geneva Resort and Spa, the former <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Playboy_Club\">Playboy Club</a>, in <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Geneva%2C_Wisconsin\">Lake Geneva, Wisconsin</a>, I talk about the travails of \"playing injured\" -- traveling while sick. A listener comment makes me wonder if I\'m exaggerating the state of the US travel experience. We get a good suggestion on how to wrestle with charging all those electronic devices we carry, and some detailed \"behind-the-scenes\" explanations of how air crews are treated by the TSA. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_54.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #54:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in Grand Geneva Resort and Spa in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin</li>\n 	<li>Been on the road every week since my last podcast, mostly here in San Francisco</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/headroom-jetuton/\">Hejm</a></em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/headroom_project\">The Headroom Project</a></li>\n 	<li>Thanks to everyone who told me that the podcast had been gone too long</li>\n 	<li>Craig Martin of the <a href=\"http://indietravelpodcast.com/\">Indie Travel Podcast</a> sends along an audio comment with a great suggestion on how to avoid the \"outlet congestion\" I mentioned in TC #53</li>\n 	<li>I\'ve found that for most electrical devices, you don\'t even need the power converter, just the plug adapter</li>\n 	<li>Received two good answers to my question in TC#53 as to why an Oakland TSA screener allowed a Southwest flight attendant to keep her shoes going through the metal detector</li>\n 	<li>This <a href=\"http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2007-06-04-workers_N.htm?csp=34\">USAToday article</a> suggests that airline and airport employees will face greater security measures as a result of the foiled JFK plot</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/falik-elvolution/\">Electric Butterfly</a></em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/falik\">Falik</a></li>\n 	<li>All travel inconveniences pale when compared to getting sick or injured while traveling</li>\n 	<li>Two weeks ago, I injured my back the morning before a flight to San Francisco</li>\n 	<li>Worse was the experience of getting food poisoning in Lyon, France and still having to carry on with business the next day</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/seismic-afterburner/\">Snake Eyes</a></em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/seismic_anamoly\">Seismic Anomaly</a></li>\n 	<li>An e-mail exchange with Udayan Tripathi got me to wondering if I exaggerate the problems with US domestic travel</li>\n 	<li>The TSA isn\'t the most charming group, but they\'re no worse than the screeners in London\'s Heathrow airport</li>\n 	<li>A <a href=\"http://www.usatoday.com/travel/flights/2007-06-04-airline-delays_N.htm\">USAToday article</a> this week reported that the number of passenger complaints to <a href=\"http://www.dot.gov\">US Dept of Transportation</a> in April about bad airline service had doubled from the year before</li>\n 	<li>The service from US legacy carriers is worse than in other parts of the world, but the new US carriers (e.g., <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JetBlue_Airways\">JetBlue</a>) offer better service than legacy or budget carriers elsewhere</li>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\">Magnatune</a></li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_54.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #54 - Traveling Injured; How Bad Is Travel Experience Really?','','inherit','closed','closed','','74-revision-v1','','','2021-09-25 09:05:19','2021-09-25 14:05:19','',74,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3779',0,'revision','',0),
(3781,1,'2021-09-25 09:07:09','2021-09-25 14:07:09','Recorded in Marriott Courtyard in <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/san-francisco\">San Francisco</a>\'s SoMa district, I confess to some base emotions -- my inner child has been throwing tantrums now that American and United Airlines have taken away some of the special treatment they used to give their mid-tier status fliers. I also had a bit of an awakening while on vacation with my family in <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/south-africa\">South Africa</a> -- the number of electronic devices they carry has mushroomed and they suffer from bad Internet withdrawal. We have a few stories about how diapers make for some \"smelly skies\", a listener finds great free bandwidth in Denver, and we feature some listener music. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_53.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #53:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in Marriott Courtyard in San Francisco\'s SoMa district</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Jazz Suite for Saxophone Quartet #1</em> by <a href=\"http://saxophonequartet.com/\">Vierung</a></li>\n 	<li>Ed Vawter wrote in with about a young couple in the row behind him who stuffed their baby\'s dirty diaper in the seat-back pocket on a flight from Chicago to Portland</li>\n 	<li>My breakfast on a South Africa Airways flight to <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/south-africa/cape-town\">Cape Town</a> was spoiled by a young couple changing their baby\'s dirty diaper in the row in front of me</li>\n 	<li>A listener staying at the Adam\'s Mark Hotel in Denver found their Internet service scored a smokin\' 4800 kbps down and 4100 kbps up on the <a href=\"http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest/links.php\">Speakeasy.net</a> bandwidth test</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Solen</em> by <a href=\"http://marcloehrwald.com/\">Marc Löhrwald</a></li>\n 	<li>In past episodes, we\'ve talked about how many airlines are devaluing their mid-tier status levels</li>\n 	<li>United has literally put out a red carpet for first class, and the top tier fliers – 1K and Global Services – and left the plain old tile line for everyone else</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail1749.html\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to IT Conversations podcast on <em>Creating Customer Loyalty</em></li>\n 	<li>What started as a nice gesture from the manager of the JFK Courtyard backfired when they didn\'t live up to the expectations they created</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Hola Cape Town</em> by the Sivukile Marimba Band. Here\'s a <a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/travelcommons/495032813/\">picture</a> I took of the band right before my daughter bought their CD</li>\n 	<li>Most frequent travelers have a pretty finely tuned travel routine and are, for the most part, solitary figures, sort of throwbacks to the hunter-gatherers of pre-history</li>\n 	<li>Traveling with their family requires some significant attitude adjustment</li>\n 	<li>During our vacation to South Africa, I was completely taken aback by the number of electronic devices my family carried that needed recharging</li>\n 	<li>The other think that struck me was my family coming almost unglued when deprived of their Internet access</li>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_53.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #53 - Wanting the Red Carpet; Family Travel Technology','','inherit','closed','closed','','70-revision-v1','','','2021-09-25 09:07:09','2021-09-25 14:07:09','',70,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3781',0,'revision','',0);
INSERT INTO `wp_posts` VALUES
(3782,1,'2021-09-25 09:09:02','2021-09-25 14:09:02','Recorded in the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago on a rare full week in town after trips to <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/the-netherlands/amsterdam\">Amsterdam</a> and <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/great-plains/kansas-city\">Kansas City</a>. In this episode, an unusual flight delay makes us think about embracing the delay rather than fighting it, and snatching a couple hour vacation in Amsterdam allows us to explore some high and low culture. Listener comments include suggestions on easy-to-pack workout shoes and a question on how to make air travel greener. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_61.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #61:\n<ul>\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\">\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in the TravelCommons studios outside <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/chicago\">Chicago, IL</a></li>\n 	<li>Talking about January travel means talking about the weather; everybody’s been clobbered by the weather this month</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/buy_album.php?id=28EF83EE66BC30F7A29060F2EE7D5A63853661EE921AD0B5F46646F31FC53762518D71671346229B61068D83046F9760\"><em>Nu Love</em></a> by <a href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=59ADD660576A8DD437473F3662DA2A64FF449762E1BA4F7793D9221B486E5F31\" rel=\"nofollow\">The Bex</a></li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\">\n<ul>\n 	<li>Good response to last episode\'s request for suggestions on compact gym shoes</li>\n 	<li>Dan Grabon suggests racing flats</li>\n 	<li><a title=\"Frick\'s World\" href=\"http://fricksworld.blogspot.com/\">Steve Frick</a> suggests flaming <a title=\"Zappos.com\" href=\"http://www.zappos.com/n/p/dp/1633204.html\">Converse Chuck Taylor high tops</a></li>\n 	<li>Urgency around the question lessened this month when the UK DoT relaxed its restrictions and now allows 2 pieces of carry-on</li>\n 	<li><a title=\"Peter Rukavina\'s blog\" href=\"http://ruk.ca/\">Peter Rukavina</a> asks what frequent travelers think about the environmental impact of their traveling</li>\n 	<li><a title=\"Virgin Atlantic Carbon Offset Article\" href=\"http://www.aboutmyplanet.com/climate-change/virgin-airlines-launch/\">Virgin Atlantic</a>, SAS, and <a title=\"FAQ on Continental\'s offset scheme\" href=\"http://www.continental.com/web/en-US/content/company/profile/environment_faq.aspx\">Continental</a> have announced carbon offset schemes</li>\n 	<li>Some <a title=\"BusinessWeek article on TerraPass\" href=\"http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_13/b4027057.htm\">controversy</a> about the efficacy of carbon offset schemes</li>\n 	<li>UK government’s Stern Report says that <a title=\"Stern Report\'s analysis of aviation impact on global warming\" href=\"http://www.sbac.co.uk/community/cms/content/preview/news_item_view.asp?i=14736&amp;t=0\">aviation CO<sub>2</sub> emissions</a> account for about 1.6% of global greenhouse gas emissions</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/buy_album.php?id=C28E7E6E86AA68440FF495227937622F853661EE921AD0B5F46646F31FC53762518D71671346229B61068D83046F9760\"><em>M4 (Part II)</em></a> by <a href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=1372C88AEC26DADFE416E71A587BFA89F55397894BB80F5E74747143A2524C8F\" rel=\"nofollow\">Faunts</a></li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n</ul>\n<strong><a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen\">Zen</a> of Delays\n</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\">\n<ul>\n 	<li>Listener pointed to a Conde Nast’s Portfolio.com <a title=\"What I Learned on the Road This Year\" href=\"http://www.portfolio.com/business-travel/seat-2B/2007/12/18/Best-Business-Travel-Lessons/comments\">article</a> titled “What I Learned on the Road This Year -- Traveling for business is a Zen practice: Keep your head down and take good notes”</li>\n 	<li>Don’t know if it’s Zen, with its emphasis on mindful acceptance of the present moment, or ju jitsu, with its training on using your attacker’s energy against him – the sort of “bend like a willow, don’t break like the oak” thinking</li>\n 	<li>This is, of course, completely antithetical to the concept of a “road warrior” – one who controls every aspect of their travel experience</li>\n 	<li>My Amsterdam flight was delayed for 3 hours by a United baggage handler trying to take a shortcut <a title=\"TravelCommons blog article describing the incident\" href=\"http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2008/01/21/what-was-he-thinking/\"><em>underneath</em></a> our 767</li>\n 	<li>Beer makes the Zen thing a whole lot easier</li>\n 	<li>Flowing around the evening’s obstacles I ended up in a more comfortable place</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/buy_album.php?id=C760A5AF2DBCB13FBF16916A7E363799853661EE921AD0B5F46646F31FC53762518D71671346229B61068D83046F9760\"><em>Central Calm</em></a> is by <a href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=CC53C7D4D44C3D89C4F8289D6CF77E78FF449762E1BA4F7793D9221B486E5F31\" rel=\"nofollow\">Skywards</a></li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Sneaking in a Vacation</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\">\n<ul>\n 	<li>Past T/C episodes -- <a title=\"Podcast #16 - Squeezing in Tourism; Can We Stop Sharing?\" href=\"http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2005/10/01/podcast-16-squeezing-in-tourism-can-we-stop-sharing/\">#16</a> and <a title=\"Podcast #34 - 20-Minute Vacation, Making It Look Easy\" href=\"http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2006/03/04/podcast-34-20-minute-vacation-making-it-look-easy/\">#34</a> -- have talked about the importance to take advantage of travel to take a little time to yourself</li>\n 	<li>Had a free afternoon in Amsterdam, so decided to walk around a bit</li>\n 	<li>Focused on seeing just two things -- <a title=\"Van Gogh Museum\" href=\"http://www3.vangoghmuseum.nl/vgm/index.jsp\">Van Gogh Museum</a> and the <a title=\"Red Light District overview\" href=\"http://www.amsterdam.info/red-light-district/\">Red Light District</a></li>\n 	<li>Thought about sampling the wares of one of the <a title=\"Amsterdam coffee houses\" href=\"http://www.amsterdam.info/coffeeshops/\">\"coffee houses\"</a> but then thought better of it</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing\n</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://iodapromonet.com/index.php\">IODA Promonet</a></li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments@travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_61.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #61 - Zen of Delays; Sneaking in a Vacation','','inherit','closed','closed','','93-revision-v1','','','2021-09-25 09:09:02','2021-09-25 14:09:02','',93,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3782',0,'revision','',0),
(3783,1,'2021-09-25 09:10:19','2021-09-25 14:10:19','Recorded in the Newark Liberty Airport Marriott in scenic Newark, NJ. We cover a lot of ground in this episode -- why business travel and Disney resorts don\'t mix, some choices that can make our personal air travel a bit greener, my experience with Southwest Airline\'s new Business Select program, and the reason I\'ve finally given up on Hertz. We also talk about the atrophying of wired connections -- the modem is gone; is Ethernet next? -- and the importance of Starbucks to the frequent traveler\'s work day. And finally, is bad airline service bringing back the need for traditional travel agents? Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_62.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_62.mp3\"]\n<!--more-->\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #62:\n<ul>\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\">\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in room 959 of the Newark Liberty Airport Marriott</li>\n 	<li>A 2-day conference in Disney World reminds me that it\'s a great place for a family vacation, but a lousy place for business. No early check-in, no quiet place for a conference call -- I definitely didn\'t have a \"magical day\".</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/rompaey-eastern2/\"><em>Indian Blossom</em></a> by Ruben van Rompaey</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\">\n<ul>\n 	<li>Revisiting <a title=\"Peter Rukavina\'s blog\" href=\"http://ruk.ca/\">Peter Rukavina\'s</a> question from T/C #61 on how to reduce the environmental impact of air travel</li>\n 	<li>Virgin Atlantic\'s <a href=\"http://www.usatoday.com/travel/flights/2008-02-24-biofueljet_N.htm?csp=34\">biofuel test flight</a> from London to Amsterdam received a lot of press -- as it was meant to do -- but biofuels are more about sustainability than reducing the carbon footprint of a plane flight.</li>\n 	<li>Air France-KLM\'s <a href=\"http://developpement-durable.airfrance.com/FR/en/common/pdf/Rapport%20DD%202005-06_en.pdf\">2005-2006 Sustainable Development Report</a> provides statistics on the reduction of hydrocarbon and carbon monoxide emissions as a result of its fleet modernization program.</li>\n 	<li>Three things an individual can do to reduce their in-flight carbon footprint -- choose the flight with the most efficient plane, take a direct flight, and fly into a less-congested secondary airport</li>\n 	<li>I liked my recent experience with Southwest Airline\'s <a href=\"http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/southwest-airlines-introduces-business-fares/story.aspx?guid=%7B655C87D9-A7A1-47A8-9C1F-7657BE5306AD%7D\">Business Select program</a>. For last minute travel, it gets me a better seat than I can usually get on airlines with reserved seats.</li>\n 	<li>Had yet another beat-up high-mileage car from Hertz -- this time in Orlando. When compared to the brand new Lincoln Mountaineer I received from Avis in Nashville, I\'ve decided to ditch Hertz for Avis.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://www.magnatune.com/artists/albums/williams-long/\"><em>Afternoon in the Sun</em></a> by John Williams</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Evolution of Connectivity</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\">\n<ul>\n 	<li>After mistaking the modem port on my ThinkPad for the Ethernet port, I couldn\'t remember the last time I used my modem</li>\n 	<li>Apple\'s new MacBook Air lacks an Ethernet port, depending completely on Wi-Fi. Is Ethernet going the way of the modem -- at least on laptops?</li>\n 	<li>For me, the big travel news wasn\'t the Delta-Northwest or United-Continental merger dances, but the <a href=\"http://wifinetnews.com/archives/008175.html\">announcement</a> that Starbucks is switching from its Wi-Fi partnership from T-Mobile to AT&amp;T.</li>\n 	<li>Starbucks has become a watering hole, some new millennium oasis for the web Bedouins -- those of us working out of our “mobile offices”</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/westexit-modern/\"><em>Arsenal</em></a> is by The West Exit</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Return of the Travel Agents?</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\">\n<ul>\n 	<li>In the Web 1.0 days, the travel agent was the classic example of an industry being “disintermediated” by the web</li>\n 	<li>However, when dealing with delayed or canceled flights, it usually takes talking to a person to get you home or to get you a refund.</li>\n 	<li>If you’re on a single-carrier ticket – especially a carrier where you have status – you’re usually OK going direct. However, multi-carrier tickets are best worked through a travel agent</li>\n 	<li>I used to use Orbitz or Travelocity for these tickets, but trying to get hold anyone there live to sort through a problem was near impossible</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a title=\"Magnatune\" href=\"http://magnatune.com/\">Magnatune</a></li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments@travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_62.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #62 - Flying Green; Evolution of Connectivity; Return of the Travel Agent?','','inherit','closed','closed','','95-autosave-v1','','','2021-09-25 09:10:19','2021-09-25 14:10:19','',95,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3783',0,'revision','',0),
(3784,1,'2021-09-25 09:10:34','2021-09-25 14:10:34','Recorded in the Newark Liberty Airport Marriott in scenic Newark, NJ. We cover a lot of ground in this episode -- why business travel and Disney resorts don\'t mix, some choices that can make our personal air travel a bit greener, my experience with Southwest Airline\'s new Business Select program, and the reason I\'ve finally given up on Hertz. We also talk about the atrophying of wired connections -- the modem is gone; is Ethernet next? -- and the importance of Starbucks to the frequent traveler\'s work day. And finally, is bad airline service bringing back the need for traditional travel agents? Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_62.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #62:\n<ul>\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\">\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in room 959 of the Newark Liberty Airport Marriott</li>\n 	<li>A 2-day conference in Disney World reminds me that it\'s a great place for a family vacation, but a lousy place for business. No early check-in, no quiet place for a conference call -- I definitely didn\'t have a \"magical day\".</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/rompaey-eastern2/\"><em>Indian Blossom</em></a> by Ruben van Rompaey</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\">\n<ul>\n 	<li>Revisiting <a title=\"Peter Rukavina\'s blog\" href=\"http://ruk.ca/\">Peter Rukavina\'s</a> question from T/C #61 on how to reduce the environmental impact of air travel</li>\n 	<li>Virgin Atlantic\'s <a href=\"http://www.usatoday.com/travel/flights/2008-02-24-biofueljet_N.htm?csp=34\">biofuel test flight</a> from London to Amsterdam received a lot of press -- as it was meant to do -- but biofuels are more about sustainability than reducing the carbon footprint of a plane flight.</li>\n 	<li>Air France-KLM\'s <a href=\"http://developpement-durable.airfrance.com/FR/en/common/pdf/Rapport%20DD%202005-06_en.pdf\">2005-2006 Sustainable Development Report</a> provides statistics on the reduction of hydrocarbon and carbon monoxide emissions as a result of its fleet modernization program.</li>\n 	<li>Three things an individual can do to reduce their in-flight carbon footprint -- choose the flight with the most efficient plane, take a direct flight, and fly into a less-congested secondary airport</li>\n 	<li>I liked my recent experience with Southwest Airline\'s <a href=\"http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/southwest-airlines-introduces-business-fares/story.aspx?guid=%7B655C87D9-A7A1-47A8-9C1F-7657BE5306AD%7D\">Business Select program</a>. For last minute travel, it gets me a better seat than I can usually get on airlines with reserved seats.</li>\n 	<li>Had yet another beat-up high-mileage car from Hertz -- this time in Orlando. When compared to the brand new Lincoln Mountaineer I received from Avis in Nashville, I\'ve decided to ditch Hertz for Avis.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://www.magnatune.com/artists/albums/williams-long/\"><em>Afternoon in the Sun</em></a> by John Williams</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Evolution of Connectivity</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\">\n<ul>\n 	<li>After mistaking the modem port on my ThinkPad for the Ethernet port, I couldn\'t remember the last time I used my modem</li>\n 	<li>Apple\'s new MacBook Air lacks an Ethernet port, depending completely on Wi-Fi. Is Ethernet going the way of the modem -- at least on laptops?</li>\n 	<li>For me, the big travel news wasn\'t the Delta-Northwest or United-Continental merger dances, but the <a href=\"http://wifinetnews.com/archives/008175.html\">announcement</a> that Starbucks is switching from its Wi-Fi partnership from T-Mobile to AT&amp;T.</li>\n 	<li>Starbucks has become a watering hole, some new millennium oasis for the web Bedouins -- those of us working out of our “mobile offices”</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/westexit-modern/\"><em>Arsenal</em></a> is by The West Exit</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Return of the Travel Agents?</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\">\n<ul>\n 	<li>In the Web 1.0 days, the travel agent was the classic example of an industry being “disintermediated” by the web</li>\n 	<li>However, when dealing with delayed or canceled flights, it usually takes talking to a person to get you home or to get you a refund.</li>\n 	<li>If you’re on a single-carrier ticket – especially a carrier where you have status – you’re usually OK going direct. However, multi-carrier tickets are best worked through a travel agent</li>\n 	<li>I used to use Orbitz or Travelocity for these tickets, but trying to get hold anyone there live to sort through a problem was near impossible</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a title=\"Magnatune\" href=\"http://magnatune.com/\">Magnatune</a></li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments@travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_62.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #62 - Flying Green; Evolution of Connectivity; Return of the Travel Agent?','','inherit','closed','closed','','95-revision-v1','','','2021-09-25 09:10:34','2021-09-25 14:10:34','',95,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3784',0,'revision','',0),
(3786,1,'2021-09-25 09:12:03','2021-09-25 14:12:03','Recorded in the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago after a week of skiing in Colorado. In this episode, we talk about some of the difficulties faced by today\'s frequent travelers. A listener gives a blow-by-blow account of the myriad of lines he faced trying to get home from Newark. Another listener relates about the challenges of attending a business conference in a hotel full of 50+ year-old women. We talk about how lengthy delays on the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"New York City\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/new-york-city\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\">New York</a>-to-Chicago route are giving regular travelers a dazed look that might be called the \"733-Mile Stare\". And I have to comment on a couple of recent <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Transportation Security Administration\" href=\"http://www.tsa.gov\" rel=\"homepage\">TSA</a> incidents. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_63.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #63:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in the TravelCommons studios outside <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Chicago\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/chicago\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\">Chicago, IL</a></li>\n 	<li>Just got back from a week\'s skiing in Breckenridge and A-Basin in Colorado</li>\n 	<li>Wanted to check out the TSA\'s new Diamond Lane program that its <a href=\"http://www.tsa.gov/blog/2008/03/diamonds-are-passengers-best-friend.html\">blog claims</a> is a huge success. However, the security line with the old system was much shorter.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://ghosts.nin.com/main/home\"><em>3 Ghosts I</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.nin.com/\">Nine Inch Nails</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li><a title=\"Evan Sparks\' blog on the 5-passenger AA ORD-LHR flight\" href=\"http://evansparks.wordpress.com/2008/03/05/and-emissions-trading-would-have-helped-here-how/\">Evan Sparks’ Aviation Policy Blog</a> picked up the <a title=\"Daily Telegraph story on the AA ORD-LHR flight\" href=\"http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?view=DETAILS&amp;grid=&amp;xml=/news/2008/03/05/nplane105.xml\">story</a> of a Feb 9th <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"American Airlines\" href=\"http://www.aa.com/\" rel=\"homepage\">American Airlines</a> flight from Chicago to London that carried only 5 passengers and the resulting ruckus raised by environmental groups.</li>\n 	<li><a title=\"Gary Learned\'s blog\" href=\"http://seat6d.tumblr.com/\">Gary Learned</a> tells about attending a business conference in the <a href=\"http://hotels.lonelyplanet.com/usa/nashville-r2102050/gaylord-opryland-resort-and-spa-p1045418/\">Gaylord Opryland</a> at the same time as 5,000 <a title=\"The Red Hat Society Website\" href=\"http://www.redhatsociety.com/\">Red Hats</a></li>\n 	<li><a title=\"Saurab Bhargava\'s web site\" href=\"http://www.saurabbhargava.com/\">Saurab Bhargava</a> sends along his account of a particularly bad day in Newark</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/buy_album.php?id=08E508A6096F11910641E13331B70EED6DFA5BB929282F731E19BBAFA8F08FFD686BD99DD86BA0D5E844DD5536E1AEFB\" rel=\"nofollow\"><em>Ghost Hardware</em></a> by Burial</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>The 733-Mile Stare\n</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>During the <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War\">Vietnam War</a>, the “thousand-yard stare” described the dazed look, the unfocused straight-ahead gaze of the front-line soldier</li>\n 	<li>Regular travelers on the Chicago-to-New York run are starting to develop their own dazed look as they try to fight through delays, and cancellations to get home or get to an important meeting</li>\n 	<li>Call it the \"733-mile stare\" – the flight mileage between ORD and LGA</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://www.usatoday.com/\">USA Today</a> <a title=\"10 Busiest Round Trip Routes\" href=\"http://www.usatoday.com/travel/flights/2008-03-25-air-routes_N.htm\">article</a> said that, based on 2007 passenger counts, the ORD-LGA route was the 3rd busiest in the country</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a title=\"MP3 Download\" href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/download_track.php?id=0E74C6FEB7390D18D02B4B399668093172F6C8CC66DDC09D90A3BF7DDA436823CFAC859AE2B2C73E46A278A4950E1030\">Lonely Dog Blues</a></em> by <a title=\"Tobin James\' Web Site\" href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/label.php?id=2A3449F03E7B8462FF74407B60F0C4B0A30A0CBE880C61DE37E3B342387F0643\">Tobin James</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>TSA Can\'t Help Themselves</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>USA Today <a title=\"Flier angry after TSA makes her remove nipple ring\" href=\"http://www.usatoday.com/travel/flights/2008-03-28-tsa-nipple-ring_N.htm\">article</a> on TSA forcing a woman to remove nipple rings</li>\n 	<li>TSA posted a statement on their <a title=\"TSA Press Release Justifying Nipple Ring Removal\" href=\"http://www.tsa.gov/press/happenings/lubbock.shtm\">website</a> and <a title=\"TSA Blog Post Justifying Nipple Ring Removal\" href=\"http://www.tsa.gov/blog/2008/03/tsa-and-piercings.html\">blog</a> saying that the screeners “properly followed procedures” and that they were “acting to protect the passengers and crews of the flights departing Lubbock that day.”</li>\n 	<li>Watched a TSA officer in Chicago-O\'Hare help a confused Chinese couple find their connecting flight.</li>\n 	<li>Why can\'t the TSA act more like the ORD officer and spend less time justifying stupid decisions like those in Lubbock?</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing\n</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://iodapromonet.com/index.php\">IODA Promonet</a></li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments@travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_63.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #63 - The 733-Mile Stare; TSA Can\'t Help Themselves','','inherit','closed','closed','','97-revision-v1','','','2021-09-25 09:12:03','2021-09-25 14:12:03','',97,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3786',0,'revision','',0),
(3787,1,'2021-09-25 09:13:42','2021-09-25 14:13:42','Recorded in the TravelCommons studios outside of <a href=\"http://www.chicago2016.org/News/Pages/home.aspx\">Chicago</a> after taking a month\'s break. We see if there\'s anything to the TSA\'s recent attempts to reduce security line waits -- the Clear <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Registered_Traveler\">Registered Traveler</a> and the Diamond Lane Self-Select programs. We also take a look at Southwest\'s attempts to attract more business travelers. A listener story on traveling injured causes us to look into the cost trade-offs of air ambulance services, while another listener points us to the perfect song for the summer travel season. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_65.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #65:\n<ul>\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\">\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in the TravelCommons studios outside of <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/chicago\">Chicago, Illinois</a></li>\n 	<li>Other family \"creative\" obligations forced me to take a month off of the podcast</li>\n 	<li>Playing around with the <a href=\"http://www.dopplr.com\">Dopplr</a> travel website -- it\'s not bad, but hasn\'t yet provided a serendipitous meet-up with other friends on the road</li>\n 	<li>However, Dopplr helpfully totes up the <a href=\"http://blog.dopplr.com/2008/04/22/calculate-the-carbon-impact-of-your-travels-with-dopplr/\">carbon footprint for my travels</a></li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dl.nin.com/theslip/signup\"><em>Discipline</em></a> by Nine Inch Nails</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\">\n<ul>\n 	<li>Thanks to <a href=\"http://budacast.hu\">Drew Leifheit</a> for mentioning TravelCommons in his travel podcasting article <a href=\"http://www.vagabondish.com/travelcasting-travel-audio-guide/\"><em>Travelcasting: Lighten Your Backpack, Load Up Your iPod</em></a> on the <a href=\"http://www.vagabondish.com\">Vagabondish</a> website</li>\n 	<li>A listener shares his own \"traveling while injured\" story after listening to <a href=\"http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2007/06/08/podcast-54-traveling-injured-how-bad-is-travel-experience-really/\">episode #54</a></li>\n 	<li>Air ambulance service like <a title=\"AirMed Service Programs\" href=\"http://www.airmed.com/our-services/plans.cfm\">AirMed </a>and <a title=\"MedJetAssist Service Plans\" href=\"http://medjetassistance.com/plans/regular.aspx\">MetJetAssist</a> offer insurance-like programs starting at $225/year</li>\n 	<li>A listener points out a great <a title=\"TSA Theme Song\" href=\"http://www.crainium.net/jdjArchives/2005/04/tsa_theme_song.html\">song </a>for the summer travel season by the <a href=\"http://www.barandgrillsingers.com/\">Bar &amp; Grille Singers</a></li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>One</em> by <a title=\"Cargo Cult\'s Alchemy Album\" href=\"http://www.magnatune.com/artists/albums/cargo-alchemy/hifi_play\">Cargo Cult</a></li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>New Ways to the Front of the Line\n</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\">\n<ul>\n 	<li>Recently had first hand experience with the <a title=\"TSA Registered Traveler Program\" href=\"http://www.tsa.gov/approach/rt/index.shtm\">Registered Traveler</a> program and the <a title=\"TSA Expands Diamond-Lane Program\" href=\"http://www.tsa.gov/press/releases/2008/0502b.shtm\">Diamond Lane Self-Select</a> program</li>\n 	<li>The Clear security line in <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_International_Airport\">San Francisco airport</a> (SFO) was empty, but the biometric checks made it take longer the regular 1st-Class/Premium Frequent Flier line</li>\n 	<li>The Diamond Self-Select Program in <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Midway_International_Airport\">Chicago Midway airport</a> (MDW) doesn\'t live up to its promise -- too many \"non-experts\" self-select into the black diamond line</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Magnified</em> by <a title=\"Very Large Array\'s Stuff Album\" href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/vla-stuff/hifi_play\">Very Large Array</a></li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Southwest Skips the Nickels &amp; Dimes </strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\">\n<ul>\n 	<li>Southwest Airline\'s <em>Fees Don\'t Fly With Us</em> <a title=\"Dallas Morning News story on Southwest\'s new ad campaign\" href=\"http://dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/bus/stories/053108dnbusairnickel.3633d88.html\">ad campaign</a> goes straight at the legacy carriers\' new-found love of add-on fees</li>\n 	<li>Southwest is becoming more attractive to frequent business travelers</li>\n 	<li>Their <a href=\"http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/southwest-airlines-introduces-business-fares/story.aspx?guid=%7B655C87D9-A7A1-47A8-9C1F-7657BE5306AD%7D\">Business Select program</a> removes the \"cattle-car\" boarding queue that everyone hated</li>\n 	<li>Southwest\'s gate areas in Midway (MDW), Cleveland (CLE), and Balimore-Washington Int\'l (BWI) are impressive -- comfortable seats and lots of easy-to-find electrical outlets</li>\n 	<li>But Southwest still can\'t match the value of the frequent flier awards I receive from United Airlines</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing\n</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://nin.com/\">Nine Inch Nails</a> and <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\">Magnatune</a></li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments@travelcommons.com or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_65.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #65 - New Ways to the Front of the Line; Southwest Skips Nickel & Dimes','','inherit','closed','closed','','101-revision-v1','','','2021-09-25 09:13:42','2021-09-25 14:13:42','',101,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3787',0,'revision','',0),
(3788,1,'2021-09-25 09:14:33','2021-09-25 14:14:33','Recorded in the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago after a couple of weeks in <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/thailand\">Thailand</a> and <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/singapore\">Singapore</a>.  In this episode, I talk about some of my experiences in <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/asia\">Asia</a>, including a few travel (mis)adventures. We also talk about losing laptops in airports -- comments on a study claiming that 12,000 laptops are lost in airports every week, and thought on one particular lost laptop belonging to the Clear registered traveler program.  And a listener gives his in-flight impressions of Singapore Air\'s new A380. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_66.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #66:\n<ul>\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\">\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in the TravelCommons studios outside of <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/chicago\">Chicago, Illinois</a></li>\n 	<li>Business and personal travel has taken me all over -- Denver, Thailand, Singapore, <a href=\"http://www.townofboston.com/\">Boston, New York</a>, the Delaware Shore, and Philadelphia</li>\n 	<li>United Airlines\' troubles and ORD weather make the flight back from Singapore even longer</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Planetenstaaten</em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/weigl-landwater/\">Philipp Weigl</a></li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\">\n<ul>\n 	<li>A listener shares his recent experience flying to Tokyo in a <a title=\"Singapore Airlines A380\" href=\"http://www.businesstraveller.com/archive/2008/may-2008/tried-and-tested/flight-check-singapore-airlines-a380\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Singapore Air Airbus A380</a></li>\n 	<li>Lots of comments on the <a title=\"TravelCommons post on Ponemon Institute study\" href=\"http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2008/07/06/12000-laptops-lost-in-airports-every-week-hmmm/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">post</a> about the <a title=\"Dell-Ponemon Institute Study on Lost Laptops\" href=\"http://www.dell.com/downloads/global/services/dell_lost_laptop_study.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">study</a> claiming that 12,000 laptops are lost in airports every week</li>\n 	<li>Blogger Sean O\'Neill\'s follow-up <a href=\"http://current.newsweek.com/budgettravel/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">research</a> on this study supports my initial skepticism</li>\n 	<li><a title=\"Frick\'s World blog\" href=\"http://fricksworld.blogspot.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Steve Frick</a> wonders how someone doesn\'t notice that their bag is suddenly 7 lbs lighter</li>\n 	<li>The Clear registered traveler program loses, and then finds, a laptop with applicants\' personal data</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>The Collider</em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/clayne-vi/\">C. Layne</a></li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Impressions of 1st Trip to Asia\n</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\">\n<ul>\n 	<li>My family\'s first trip to Asia, so we did \"Asia Lite\" -- <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/thailand/phuket-province\">Phuket, Thailand</a> and Singapore</li>\n 	<li>If Southwest has \"cattle car\" boarding, then <a href=\"http://www.airasia.com/\">Air Asia</a> uses a stampede</li>\n 	<li>Driving in Thailand would be difficult because I can\'t read the <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thai_alphabet\">Thai alphabet</a></li>\n 	<li>Surprised to have a deep discussion of the US presidential race with a Thai cab driver</li>\n 	<li>The experience of eating <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Durian\">durian</a> in Singapore is seared into my senses</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing\n</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\">Magnatune</a></li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments@travelcommons.com or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_66.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #66 - Travel in Asia; Losing Laptops in Airports','','inherit','closed','closed','','105-revision-v1','','','2021-09-25 09:14:33','2021-09-25 14:14:33','',105,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3788',0,'revision','',0),
(3789,1,'2021-09-25 09:14:56','2021-09-25 14:14:56','The <a title=\"Ponemon Institute\" href=\"http://www.ponemon.org\">Ponemon Institute</a> claims that over 12,000 laptops are lost every week in US airports, two-thirds of which are never recovered.  In <a title=\"Ponemon Institute Laptop Study\" href=\"http://www.dell.com/downloads/global/services/dell_lost_laptop_study.pdf\">research</a> sponsored by Dell Computer, which used the study\'s findings as a key selling point for their new laptop tracking and recovery <a title=\"Dell Computer ProSupport Mobility\" href=\"http://www.dell.com/content/topics/global.aspx/services/prosupport/en/us/get_connected?c=us&amp;l=en&amp;s=gen\">service</a>, Ponemon surveyed airport officials at 106 major airports to come up with this headline-producing number.  LAX tops the list with 1,200 misplaced laptops a week; Miami is second with 1,000.  Extrapolating the study\'s findings (12,255 laptops lost/week * 67% never recovered * 52 weeks/year) says that over 425,000 laptops are lost in US airports every year.  With these numbers, you\'d think that someone would\'ve noticed the growing stack of laptops a bit sooner.\n\nThe second phase of the study surveyed 864 business travelers in \"the airport environment\".   Only 1% of these travelers had ever lost a laptop.  You\'d think with 425,000 of them lost every year, the surveyors would have a better hit rate.  I\'ve never lost a laptop and I don\'t know anyone who has lost one in an airport.  I know people who\'ve had them stolen out of rental cars, who\'ve left them in a plane\'s overhead bin, but no one who has lost one in an airport.\n\nOne thing I have seen is people picking up the wrong laptop.  At the back end of security screening, it can be a race to grab your PC before it gets pushed off the conveyor and onto the floor by the constant stream of gray bins burping out the TSA\'s x-ray machine.  More than a few times, I\'ve seen someone grab a ThinkPad that doesn\'t belong to them.  Personalizing that black matte finish with a business card or a sticker or even a large gouge can help prevent a mistaken adoption.  Of course, not having to pull your laptop out of your briefcase would be an even easier solution.  Of the 864 business traveler surveyed, only 12% of them agreed that \"checking my laptop or notebook computer separately from other carry-on tems increases passenger safety and security\".','12,000 Laptops Lost In Airports Every Week?  Hmmm...','','inherit','closed','closed','','104-revision-v1','','','2021-09-25 09:14:56','2021-09-25 14:14:56','',104,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3789',0,'revision','',0),
(3791,1,'2021-09-25 09:16:09','2021-09-25 14:16:09','Recorded in the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago after a month of travel to and from the East Coast. In this episode, a spur-of-the-moment train trip bypasses a huge air traffic control problem.  A listener story gets us talking about theft after you entrust your luggage to the folks behind the curtain. I have fun saying the word <em>schadenfreude</em> -- German for \"taking pleasure in other\'s misfortunes\" -- while talking about the need to use <a href=\"http://www.apple.com/iphone\">iPhones</a> and <a href=\"http://www.blackberry.com\">BlackBerrys</a> to check the status of delayed flights.  I also give my thoughts on the iPhone after traveling with it for a month.  Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_67.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #67:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in the TravelCommons studios outside of <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/chicago\">Chicago, Illinois</a></li>\n 	<li>No exotic travel this month -- just New York and <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/washington-dc\">Washington, DC</a></li>\n 	<li>Last minute decision to take Amtrak\'s <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acela_Express\">Acela Express</a> from NYC to DC meant I missed the delays caused by the <a href=\"http://www.eweek.com/c/a/IT-Infrastructure/Corrupt-File-Brought-Down-FAAs-Antiquated-IT-System/?kc=EWKNLNAV08282008STR4\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">crash</a> of the FAA\'s traffic tracking system</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- Bend and Not Break by <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/music/listeners/artistdetails.php?BandHash=bcd26803274d04274d5d253b2a9f7fff\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Dashboard Confessional</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>A <a href=\"http://www.transparentsociety.com/wordpress/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">listener</a> tells the story about her laptop bag being stolen after gate-checking it on a Delta commuter flight out of Richmond</li>\n 	<li>I relate the <a href=\"http://www.queensda.org/newpressreleases/2008/september/riviello_acevedo_09_02_2008.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">story</a> of 2 American Airlines JFK baggage handlers with stealing 925 pieces of jewelry worth $280,000 from the checked suitcase of a jewelry dealer bound for LA.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Hollywood Homicide</em> by <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/music/listeners/artistdetails.php?BandHash=e09e260d6030c8da53cef085ca11edd2\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">The Frantic</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Electronic Schadenfreude\n</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schadenfreude\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Schadenfreude</a> -- German word for \"the pleasure taken from the misfortune of someone else</li>\n 	<li>Side effect of wanted to make the right decision in changing a flight</li>\n 	<li>4 weeks of delayed United flights in August had me jumping flights at the first sign of a delay</li>\n 	<li>Electronic schadenfreude -- checking your iPhone or Blackberry the minute you hit the ground to see if your original flight is still on the ground</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Rings and Fences</em> by <a href=\"http://www.moochacha.net/blog/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Donna Maciocia</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Month With an iPhone\n</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Picked up a 16 GB 3G iPhone in August from the Apple store in <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Stamford, Connecticut\" href=\"http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=41.0966666667,-73.5522222222&amp;spn=0.1,0.1&amp;q=41.0966666667,-73.5522222222 (Stamford%2C%20Connecticut)&amp;t=h\" rel=\"geolocation\">Stamford, CT</a></li>\n 	<li>Skipped the 1st generation 2G/Edge iPhone -- way too slow for the portable Internet access I wanted</li>\n 	<li>Hasn\'t replaced my <a href=\"http://www.tomtom.com\">TomTom</a> One, but checking real-time traffic conditions is great</li>\n 	<li>iPhone Apps Store has some good stuff for a traveler -- <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=288429040&amp;mt=8\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">LinkedIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=287350070&amp;mt=8\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Airport Status</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=284967867&amp;mt=8\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Twinkle</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=287197884&amp;mt=8\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Sol Free Solitaire</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=289894882&amp;mt=8\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">White Noise</a></li>\n 	<li>The only downside is battery life</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing\n</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>Some bridge music from <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments@travelcommons.com or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_67.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #67 - Stolen Luggage; Month With an iPhone','','inherit','closed','closed','','107-revision-v1','','','2021-09-25 09:16:09','2021-09-25 14:16:09','',107,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3791',0,'revision','',0),
(3793,1,'2021-09-25 09:17:33','2021-09-25 14:17:33','Recorded in the Philadelphia Marriott after a hectic travel month with two trips to Europe and a bunch of travel up and down the US East Coast.  In this episode, I talk about a bit of multi-modal travel -- some planes, trains, and automobile trips.  We have a trio of stories about playing \"travel roulette\" to avoid flight delays, and some listeners offer their favorite iPhone apps.  I then share some non-obvious, intermediate-skill travel tips -- a sort of Road Warrior 201-level class and close with some thoughts about enjoying the fall colors from up above. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_68.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #68:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in the <a href=\"https://www.marriott.com/hotels/travel/phldt-philadelphia-marriott-downtown/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Philadelphia, PA Marriott</a></li>\n 	<li>Lots of multi-modal travel this month -- a National Express bus from Heathrow to Woking, lots of Amtrak Acelas up and down the East Coast</li>\n 	<li>One of those \"<a title=\"IMDb Entry for \" href=\"http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093748/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Planes, Trains &amp; Automobiles</a>\" days had delays on every leg and every mode of transportation except walking</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/indidginus-seismic/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Superstring</a></em> by Indidginus</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>In Heathrow, many signs plastered on the screening machines said that I didn\'t need to take my laptop out of my briefcase for screening.  What do they know that the TSA doesn\'t?</li>\n 	<li>Two travelers tell their \"travel roulette\" stories trying to avoid flight delays</li>\n 	<li>Chris Truelove of <a href=\"http://www.globalbagtag.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Global Bag Tags</a> is happy with an external iPhone battery he bought on eBay. Listen to the <a href=\"http://www.indietravelpodcast.com/podcast/076-global-bag-tag-review/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Indie Travel Podcast</a> interview where Chris tells the story of lost luggage that led to the founding of his company</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/yoria-suerte/\"><em>Suerte Mijo</em></a> by Arthur Yoria</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Road Warrior 201 </strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>TravelCommons has always been about travel stories, hence I haven\'t done many \"travel tips\" segments</li>\n 	<li>I\'m going to skip the usual travel tips and give you some advance tips -- tips I haven\'t seen/heard anywhere else</li>\n 	<li>Tip #1 -- Know your flight, hotel and/or rental car reservation numbers and keep them immediately accessible on your BlackBerry or iPhone</li>\n 	<li>Tip #2 -- When you can\'t get through to a customer service agent on the phone, choose the unpopular path on the phone tree -- Spanish language or International Travel</li>\n 	<li>Tip #3 -- When shopping for flights, factor in the potential cost of missing a connection when choosing between direct and connecting flights</li>\n 	<li>Tip #4 -- If you\'re flying one of those chisling airlines that charge $10 extra for an exit row seat, it\'s worth gritting your teeth and paying it for a flight over 90 minutes</li>\n 	<li>Tip #5 -- When walking out of your hotel room for your morning workout, make your doorknob look unique in case you forget your room number</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/artemis-gravity/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Inception</a></em> by Artemis</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Leaf Peeping from Above </strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Beautiful colors on approach into Newark over the <a href=\"http://www.nps.gov/DEWA/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Delaware Water Gap</a> on a clear sunny day</li>\n 	<li>Reminded me of \"<a title=\"Definition of pointillism\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointillism\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">pointillism</a>\" and <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Seurat\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Seurat</a>\'s \"<a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunday_Afternoon_on_the_Island_of_La_Grande_Jatte\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte</a>\"</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing\n</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Magnatune</a></li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments@travelcommons.com or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_68.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #68 - Advanced Travel Tips; Colors of Autumn','','inherit','closed','closed','','111-revision-v1','','','2021-09-25 09:17:33','2021-09-25 14:17:33','',111,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3793',0,'revision','',0),
(3794,1,'2021-09-25 09:18:36','2021-09-25 14:18:36','Recorded in the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago at the end of yet another busy travel month – Philadelphia, <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/pacific-northwest/portland\">Portland</a>, Denver, Northern Virginia – but am home this week, keeping to one of my cardinal rules of travel – stay out of any airport Thanksgiving week. In this episode, I talk about a successful experiment of going PC-less on a trip to Portland and give the conclusion to last episode\'s story about my mother-in-law being stranded by <a href=\"http://www.lot.com\">LOT Airlines</a>. We have listener stories on accelerated boarding on international Delta flights and some tidbits of <a href=\"http://www.ba.com\">British Airways</a> gossip on the cause of the 777 crash last January and the havoc around the Heathrow Terminal 5 opening. I then give my review of <a href=\"http://tripchill.com/main/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">TripChill</a>, one of the new wave of web-based personal travel assistants, and share some travel tips sent in by listeners. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_69.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #69:\n<ul>\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\">\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded at the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago</li>\n 	<li>Lots of travel, but staying out of airports over the Thanksgiving week</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/twilightarchive-ritual/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Flow of Know</em></a> by Twilight Archive</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\">\n<ul>\n 	<li>Booked a long weekend in Portland, Ore entirely on frequent traveler points -- somewhat at odds with the spate of media stories claiming that points are practically useless</li>\n 	<li>Went PC-less on the Portland vacation -- operated only on my <a href=\"http://www.apple.com/iphone\">iPhone</a> and BlackBerry</li>\n 	<li>Apple has to fix the iPhone Safari browser -- it crashes all the time</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://www.kenokel.com/\" target=\"_self\" rel=\"noopener\">Ken Okel</a> provides an audio comment on his boarding experience on a recent international Delta flight</li>\n 	<li>A listener provides some juicy tidbits of British Airways gossip picked up in a bar in <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/switzerland/geneva\">Geneva, Switzerland</a></li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/uniontrade-everyday/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Violent and Beautiful</em></a> by the Union Trade</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Travel Assistant in Your Pocket </strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\">\n<ul>\n 	<li>There’s been some sort of mini-explosion of new web sites offering to be “your personal travel assistant\"; sites like <a href=\"http://tripchill.com/main/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">TripChill</a>, <a href=\"http://tripit.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Tripit</a> and <a href=\"http://yapta.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Yapta</a></li>\n 	<li>Been trying out TripChill’s service off and on since their launch last August. Wasn\'t impressed at first, but has gotten better</li>\n 	<li>TripChill does a better job than any other site I\'ve seen in displaying flight alternatives</li>\n 	<li>TripChill and its competitor Tripit have well-designed mobile web sites that quickly display your trip itinerary on a BlackBerry or iPhone</li>\n 	<li>These travel assistant sites don’t seem to offer much new functionality, but they do offer convenience</li>\n 	<li>Wo;; probably keep using TripChill, but as an addition to my travel tool box, not a replacement for something I already use</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/lizzi-love/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Me</em></a> by Lizzi</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Listener Travel Tips </strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\">\n<ul>\n 	<li>One listener suggests a \"divide-&amp;-conquer\" strategy to packing</li>\n 	<li>Another listener sings the praises of hotel sewing kits</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Morgan\">Ian Morgan</a> offers a solution to my problem of forgetting my hotel room number when I go work out -- dial it into my mobile phone</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing\n</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Magnatune</a></li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments@travelcommons.com or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_69.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #69 - Pocket Travel Assistant; More Travel Tips','','inherit','closed','closed','','112-revision-v1','','','2021-09-25 09:18:36','2021-09-25 14:18:36','',112,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3794',0,'revision','',0),
(3796,1,'2021-09-25 09:20:28','2021-09-25 14:20:28','Recorded in the TravelCommons studios outside of <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/chicago\">Chicago</a> after finishing up my travel for the year. But there was a good bit of travel before the year-end, including one of the craziest/stupidest(?) itineraries I\'ve done in a long time -- Chicago-London-Denver in a little more than a day. Many of the subsequent Twitter comments I received asked that perpetual question -- Why travel when you can <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videoconferencing\">video conference</a>? Traveling to a business-formal office for the first time in 10 years causes me to investigate different methods in packing a suit. And the December storms that have snarled air traffic across the upper two-thirds of the US have me singing the praises of <a href=\"http://flightstats.com\">Flightstats</a>. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_70.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #70:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded at the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, done for travel for the year</li>\n 	<li>Not before a completely stupid itinerary -- Chicago to London to Denver in a day-&amp;-a-half</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Greensleeves</em> by <a href=\"http://www.georgefletcher.com/\">Tequila Mockingbirds</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Difficult \"travel roulette\" story from Ian Morgan about trying to get from <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/china/hong-kong\">Hong Kong</a> to Sydney</li>\n 	<li>Linda Martin of the <a href=\"http://indietravelpodcast.com/\">Indie Travel Podcast</a> reflects back on her college psych studies and concludes that the hustling around involved in \"travel roulette\" is actually better for you than sitting helpless on a delayed flight</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://ruk.ca/\">Peter Rukavina</a> agrees that there\'s still value in frequent flier programs after scoring a last-minute direct flight from Charlottetown (PEI) to Boston on Thanksgiving weekend using the minimum amount of <a href=\"http://www.aeroplan.com/landing/process.do?lang=E\">Aeroplan</a> miles</li>\n 	<li>Experiencing a lot of pushback from taxi drivers when trying to charge my fare on a credit card. Are others seeing the same thing?</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Please Come Home for Christmas </em> by <a href=\"http://oppenheimermusic.co.uk/\">Oppenheimer</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Packing a Suit</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Always see more suits on flights headed east from Chicago than on flights heading west</li>\n 	<li>Have managed to avoid having to wear a suit -- much easier to wear a blazer and pack a couple of pair of pants in my rolling bag</li>\n 	<li>New client in Philadelphia requires me to suit up -- need to learn to fold a suit so I can keep using my rolling bag</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://www.google.com/search?q=packing+a+suit&amp;hl=en\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Google search</a> reveals a consensus around two different ways</li>\n 	<li>One <a href=\"http://www.menswearhouse.com/aboutus/fashion/articles.jsp?articleID=1408474395561309&amp;browsePage=3&amp;FOLDER%3C%3Efolder_id=1408474395564053&amp;ASSORTMENT%3C%3East_id=94653&amp;bmUID=1197642683816\">approach</a> is to turn the jacket inside out and fold it in half</li>\n 	<li>The second <a href=\"http://www.essortment.com/travel/travelfoldsuit_trgk.htm\">approach</a> – I can’t figure out exactly how they’re doing it – but it seems like some sort of suit coat origami</li>\n 	<li>I\'ve ended it up with my own simple method – fold the jacket in half along the back seam, accordion-fold it in thirds, putting clothes in the folds – boxed shirts from the cleaners work the best</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Merry Christmas Baby</em> by <a href=\"http://topcatrecords.com/\">Calvin Owens</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Why travel when you can videoconference? </strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>When I “twittered” or “tweeted” – pick your Web 2.0 verb – about traveling to London for a 2-hr meeting, the @ replies asked why I didn\'t use videoconferencing or <a href=\"http://webex.com/\">webex</a>?</li>\n 	<li>Had done all the prior meetings by teleconference</li>\n 	<li>But this was the final meeting and we were delivering some tough messages. And call me “old school”, but bad news is best delivered personally, face-to-face</li>\n 	<li>Gartner\'s latest “Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies” <a href=\"http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/mgmt/2D07F8BED99F6D70CC2574A60004AD10\">report</a> says “video telepresence”, their <a href=\"http://blog.gartner.com/blog/index.php?itemid=1969&amp;catid=51\">term</a> for a sort of high-def, IMAX-like videoconferencing set-up that supports “virtual meetings”, as “being on the brink of widespread adoption</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>I’ll Be Home for Christmas</em> by <a href=\"http://www.katimac.com/\">Kati Mac</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Outsmarting winter flight delays</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Winter travel -- usually not a question of <em>are</em> you going to be delayed, but by how much? Or worse, are you going to get canceled?</li>\n 	<li>I use <a href=\"http://flightstats.com\">Flightstats.com</a>\'s Track Flight Status by Route travel tool to predict problems</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from the <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com\">Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments@travelcommons.com or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_70.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #70 - Packing a Suit, Videoconference over Travel, Watching Winter Flight Delays','','inherit','closed','closed','','113-revision-v1','','','2021-09-25 09:20:28','2021-09-25 14:20:28','',113,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3796',0,'revision','',0),
(3797,1,'2021-09-25 09:38:16','2021-09-25 14:38:16','Recorded in the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, back doing my thing to support the travel industry with lots of travel in January. We talk about some recent TSA observations, good and bad; my latest spin of the \"travel roulette\" wheel, trading the plane for a train in an East Coast snow storm; a look back at last year\'s travel courtesy of Dopplr\'s Personal Annual Report; and being saved by duct tape while flying the tatty skies of United. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_71.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #71:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded at the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago</li>\n 	<li>Back doing my thing to support the travel industry, visiting Washington DC, Denver, Phoenix, San Francisco, Stamford, CT, and Jackson, MI</li>\n 	<li>Noticing a lot more passengers paying attention to the pre-flight safety demo since the US Air Hudson River splashdown</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Beneath the Skin</em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/birdy-alter/\">Jerry Berlongieri</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Belated shout-out to Tim Grubb of <a href=\"http://www.sizeoflife.com/blog/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">The Size of Life blog</a> -- \"lifestyle news and reviews for the big and tall man\"</li>\n 	<li>Tim is doing a series of articles on \"Flying the (Big &amp; Tall) Friendly Skies\". The <a href=\"http://seatguru.com\" target=\"_self\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">SeatGuru</a> map he uses as an illustration points out the best coach seat for a big &amp; tall man -- the window seat on the second exit row of a United Airbus 319</li>\n 	<li>The new security checkpoint for <a href=\"https://phl-airport.com/\">Philadelphia Airport</a>\'s Terminal\'s D and E replace a near-medieval set-up with a much better experience</li>\n 	<li>Watched the TSA do a full body patdown on <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_George\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Cardinal Francis George</a>, the 72-yr-old Catholic Archbishop of Chicago.  Couldn\'t that screener\'s time been used more productively checking out someone who could <em>actually</em> be a threat?</li>\n 	<li>Lost a recent game of \"travel roulette\". Moved from the Shuttle to Amtrak\'s Acela Express to avoid delays from an East Coast snow storm. The train ended up 2½ hours late because of equipment problems caused by the snow.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Hurt Me So I Can Walk Away </em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/joy-float/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Michael Joy</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Looking Back at Last Year\'s Travel\n</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Dopplr sent me a 2008 Personal Annual Report on my travel last year</li>\n 	<li>Has some interesting factoids, such as my \"personal velocity\" in 2008 was the same as that of a squirrel</li>\n 	<li>And that my 2008 carbon footprint was equivalent to 2.3 Hummers</li>\n</ul>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/hummer.jpg\"><img class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-3077\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/hummer.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"194\" height=\"139\" /></a></p>\n\n<ul>\n 	<li>Of course, they could have used, say a Mercedes Benz S-600 sedan, which gets worse mileage than a Hummer H3, but I guess chest-pounding about big gas-guzzling American SUVs is easier self-awareness about big gas-guzzling Euro sedans – especially when your company is based in Helsinki.</li>\n 	<li>The factoid that grabbed my attention was this one – “In 2008, you spent 214 days at home; 152 days traveling”</li>\n</ul>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/days_home.jpg\"><img class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-3075\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/days_home.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"149\" height=\"65\" /></a></p>\n\n<ul>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Bulletproof</em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/musicinside-forces/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Music Inside</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Flying the Tatty Skies of United </strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>My ORD-PHX flight was almost scuttled by a broken luggage bin door.</li>\n 	<li>Those of us who spend a good bit of time flying United know that duct tape is not an uncommon sight. United is fraying around the edges.</li>\n 	<li>United is the only major US airline to not have any current orders placed with any aircraft manufacturer</li>\n 	<li>And the service has gotten a bit frayed around the edges. The 2008 American Customer Satisfaction Index has United ahead of only US Airways</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://crankyflier.com/2008/11/20/united-gets-beaten-down-over-phocuswright-presentation-on-customer-experience\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Brett Snyder</a> was at a travel industry conference last November where a United executive gave a talk titled <em>Customer Experience and Flying: Not an Oxymoron</em> and admitted that United would be \"overstretching\" if they tried to be as good as Singapore Air or Virgin Atlantic</li>\n 	<li>Was refused entry to United\'s London-Heathrow business class arrivals lounge because I was flying on an upgraded coach ticket, not a full-fare business class ticket</li>\n 	<li>United\'s employees continue to hold together their frayed company by reaching out to passengers</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img style=\"display: none !important;\" src=\"http://ad.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/show?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;bids=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Magnatune</a></li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments@travelcommons.com or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_71.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #71 - Winter Travel, Last Year\'s Travel, Tatty United','','inherit','closed','closed','','115-revision-v1','','','2021-09-25 09:38:16','2021-09-25 14:38:16','',115,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3797',0,'revision','',0),
(3799,1,'2021-09-25 09:39:51','2021-09-25 14:39:51','Recorded in the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago at the end of a full week home, decompressing after 6 weeks of straight travel. We talk about some \"travel rules\" violators -- the woman whose airport meltdown is a YouTube hit and an Amazing Race couple whose violation got them eliminated. A listener suggests a topic -- what is the one thing you never want to hear on a flight? And we close with a couple of suggestions on how to avoid the growing cacophony of flat screen TVs shouting out the depressing state of the world. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_72.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #72:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded at the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago</li>\n 	<li>Enjoying a week off from O\'Hare after 6 weeks on the road</li>\n 	<li>The Monday morning \"rush hour\" security lines are much easier to handle now that I\'ve fully embraced the \"line cut\" United Airlines provides the <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_airlines#Mileage_Plus\">Global Services</a> customers in ORD</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Santa Rosa Shuffle</em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/seismic_anamoly\">Seismic Anamoly</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Blog posting on the <a href=\"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i57IwNGu_qQ\">video</a> of a woman melting down after being denied boarding on a Cathay Pacific Hong Kong-to-San Francisco flight generated the most comments</li>\n 	<li>Most comments expressed amazement. One of the cardinal travel rules – don’t take out your frustrations with the airlines on its employees</li>\n 	<li>Watching a recent <a href=\"http://www.cbs.com/primetime/amazing_race/recaps/1403/?season=14\">episode</a> of the TV show <em>Amazing Race</em>, saw a <a href=\"http://www.cbs.com/primetime/amazing_race/bio/brad_and_victoria_14/bio.php?season=14\">team</a> eliminated by breaking one of the top travel rules -- always take the direct flight</li>\n 	<li>Was happy to see some economic stimulus money directed to high-speed rail, though not sure what we\'ll get by the time the $8 billion is spread across the 11 gov’t-designated <a href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2009/02/20/us/20rail-map.html\">high-speed rail corridors</a></li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Sproing-A-Dub</em> by <a href=\"http://www.magnatune.com/artists/albums/babylon-beat/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Burning Babylon</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Things You Never Want To Hear\n</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>A listener suggests asking people \"What is the one thing you never want to hear on a flight?\"</li>\n 	<li>There are the two classes of “things you never want to hear” – those coming over the loud speaker and those coming from the passengers around you</li>\n 	<li>Flying severely compresses our personal space creating two almost completely opposite reactions -- a sense of instant intimacy with complete strangers, or total obliviousness to the 5-10 complete strangers who can hear every word of a personal cell phone call</li>\n 	<li>Probably the one thing I don’t want to hear from a fellow passenger is – “I gotta get outta here” when I\'m still in the air</li>\n 	<li>If you do manage to “get outta here” at 25-35,000 ft, where do you go?</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Shinigami</em> by <a href=\"http://www.myspace.com/studiobebopmusic\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Studio BeBop</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Can’t Find a Piece of Quiet</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Tough to avoid the depressing state of the world with TV screens blaring at you everywhere</li>\n 	<li>CNN Airport News screens seem to be at every gate and an epidemic of flat screen TVs have covered the walls in bars, restaurants, airport clubs, and hotel lounges.</li>\n 	<li>Mini-trend of putting rocking chairs in airports is some help.</li>\n 	<li>Other fliers search out airport chapels -- no flat screens or PA announcements there</li>\n 	<li>I cram my noise blocking earphones tightly in my ear and dial up the Amazon rain forest on the <a href=\"http://www.tmsoft.com/iphone-whitenoise.html\">White Noise</a> iPhone app</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"http://ad.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/show?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;bids=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Magnatune</a></li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments@travelcommons.com or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_72.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #72 - Breaking Travel Rules, What You Never Want to Hear','','inherit','closed','closed','','119-revision-v1','','','2021-09-25 09:39:51','2021-09-25 14:39:51','',119,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3799',0,'revision','',0),
(3801,1,'2021-09-25 09:41:19','2021-09-25 14:41:19','Recorded somewhere over the Atlantic in the business class toilet of a South African Airways A340 and the <a href=\"http://www.proteahotels.com/the-rosebank.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Rosebank Hotel</a> in Johannesburg at the start of a week\'s stay in South Africa. We talk about inconsistent rules for mobile devices on planes, the value of renewing my CLEAR registered traveler membership, the three things that make a restaurant a great place to eat solo, and listener suggestions on the one thing you never want to hear on a flight. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_73.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #73:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in the business class toilet of a South African Airways A340 and the <a href=\"http://www.proteahotels.com/the-rosebank.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Rosebank Hotel</a> in Johannesburg</li>\n 	<li>En route to a week\'s business trip in South Africa</li>\n 	<li>Trips earlier this month saw very empty airports -- right up to Spring Break time, when they filled up with families and strollers</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Stinky Dog</em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/musicinside-forces/\">Music Inside</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://seat6d.com/\">Denrael</a> commented on Twitter that there are at least 5 iPhone apps available to keep track of your hotel room number -- free ones like <a href=\"http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=304561585&amp;mt=8\">Room</a> and paid ones like <a href=\"http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=309106848&amp;mt=8\">Zimmer</a></li>\n 	<li>Reached new heights of electronics inconsistency on my JFK-JNB SAA flight. After the stop in Dakar, Senegal, the purser announced that all smart phones – and he specifically named iPhones, Nokia E-series, Blackberries – were not allowed to be used in flight – even when put in Airplane mode</li>\n 	<li>Returning from SFO, one passenger decided that he was the electronics “hall monitor” and started yelling across the cabin at another passenger to turn off his “crackberry” as we were approaching ORD</li>\n 	<li>My <a href=\"http://flyclear.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">CLEAR</a> registered traveler card came in handy when in JFK\'s Terminal 4, but still haven\'t used it enough to justify the $179/yr fee</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Locovenido</em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/falik-dreams/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Falik</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Eating on the Road\n</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Eating a great dinner by myself at the bar of <a href=\"http://www.tintorestaurant.com/\">Tinto</a> in Philadelphia got me thinking about what makes for a good place to eat solo while on the road</li>\n 	<li>The sports bar might as well have been created just for solo guy travelers</li>\n 	<li>Outside the sports bar genre, what makes for a good place for a solo traveler? Taking “good food” and “cleanliness” as table stakes, there are 3 things -- availability, small plates, and bar seating</li>\n 	<li>Two nice-to-haves -- ability to make a reservation on <a href=\"http://opentable.com\">Open Table</a> and a web site built with something other than Flash so I can read the menu on my iPhone</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Just Don’t</em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/liebig-severed/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Lie Big</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>More Things You Never Want To Hear</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>In last month’s episode, we featured a listener\'s question – “What is the one thing you never want to hear on a flight?” and asked for your input</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://thehappyheadlines.com/\">Dawn Owens</a> offered “God, I should NOT have eaten that!”</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://fricksworld.blogspot.com/\">Steve Frick</a> said “I don\'t ever want to hear the pilot say ‘I\'m so tired I could just crash’”</li>\n 	<li>Greg B said the “one thing that I never want to hear at any stage of the flight ... ‘BRACE FOR IMPACT’”</li>\n 	<li>Steve F gave two suggestions – \"The smoke in the cabin is nothing to be concerned about\" and \"We have an FAA inspection team riding along with us, so we will doing everything by the book\"</li>\n 	<li>Michael Golden offers a non verbal thing you don\'t want to hear – shutting down an engine while taxiing out</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"http://ad.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/show?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;bids=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Magnatune</a></li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments@travelcommons.com or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_73.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #73 - Eating Alone on The Road, More Things You Never Want to Hear','','inherit','closed','closed','','122-revision-v1','','','2021-09-25 09:41:19','2021-09-25 14:41:19','',122,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3801',0,'revision','',0),
(3802,1,'2021-09-25 09:42:15','2021-09-25 14:42:15','Recorded in the Seattle Marriott Waterfront, this special 4th-year anniversary edition collates the best bits from four years of TravelCommons podcasts. Starting with the \"hotel medley\" -- the roll call of all the hotels that have served as TravelCommons\' recording studios, we move on to excerpts from stories about the TSA, Bose headphones, memories of better airplane food, the hassles of travel, and some of the most entertaining sights I\'ve seen in the last four years. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_74.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.','Podcast #74 - Looking Back Over Four Years of TravelCommons','','inherit','closed','closed','','124-revision-v1','','','2021-09-25 09:42:15','2021-09-25 14:42:15','',124,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3802',0,'revision','',0),
(3803,1,'2021-09-25 09:43:32','2021-09-25 14:43:32','Recorded in the St Louis Airport Marriott courtesy of a blown connection by Southwest. We clean out the TravelCommons mail bag, going through listener comments on disabling in-flight electronics, eating alone, and finding good non-chain food on the road. We talk about the sudden collapse of the CLEAR registered traveler program and if in-flight WiFi will <em>really</em> improve frequent traveler productivity. I also give a little personal history about how I came to travel so much. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_75.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #75:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in the St Louis Airport Marriott due to a missed connection courtesy of Southwest Airlines</li>\n 	<li>This is a pretty big miss by Southwest. It’ll be a while before they see me at Midway again</li>\n 	<li>Haven’t been doing quite as much travel as usual. Passenger traffic in May was <a href=\"http://blogs.wsj.com/middleseat/2009/06/05/thanks-in-part-to-swine-flu-air-passenger-traffic-plunged-in-may/\">down over 9%</a> , and I personally contributed to that trend</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Ice Hotel</em> by <a href=\"http://www.paristocuba.com\">Mario Grigorov</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Thanks to everyone for the best wishes tweets, e-mails and website comments on last month’s 4th anniversary show</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://mikkelsen.tv/simon/\">Simon Mikkelsen</a> provided a nice fact-based response to my rant about the mess of in-flight electronics regulations</li>\n 	<li>The CLEAR registered traveler program replaced its <a href=\"http://www.flyclear.com/\">web site</a> with a single white page announced its immediate shutdown. Guess I made the right decision not renewing my membership</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Giving In</em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/senne-aerial/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Brad Senne</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Can’t I Fly Unplugged?\n</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Joint American Airlines/HP <a href=\"http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press/2009/090522a.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">survey</a> says most \" tech-savvy frequent flyers\" think WiFi is more important than food.</li>\n 	<li>A not-so-surprising coincidence given AA\'s<a href=\"http://www.aa.com/aa/i18nForward.do?p=/urls/gogo.jsp\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> recent announcement</a> of their roll-out of the <a href=\"http://www.gogoinflight.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Gogo</a> inflight Internet service.</li>\n 	<li>I rate airport food availability much higher than WiFi — especially if I’m getting on a flight heading to or from the West Coast.</li>\n 	<li>I think my productivity increases without inflight WiFi, but that\'s because I use a full-featured laptop</li>\n 	<li>However, the emerging class of netbooks, with their corollary assumption of constant Internet connectivity – the model of a low-powered client leveraging the power and storage of the cloud -- would need in-flight WiFi to be productive</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Traveling Light </em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/fielding-distant/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Adam Fielding</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>How I Got Here</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Simon Mikkelsen wrote “I’ve had a question for a long time. What is your job? We’ve heard a bit from time to time, but what requires so much travel?”</li>\n 	<li>Have tended not put too much of my personal background into TravelCommons. Kind of a corollary tag line – it’s more about the journey than the presenter. But after so many of you have stuck it out through 4 years and now 75 episodes, I thought I owed you a bit of background.</li>\n 	<li>I\'m in consulting now, but traveled a lot even when I had real jobs</li>\n 	<li>When I joined <a href=\"http://deloitte.com\">Deloitte Consulting</a> in Detroit, the real travel began. I made it to Northwest’s top tier in 9 months and had 750,000 miles in 4 years</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"http://ad.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/show?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;bids=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Magnatune</a></li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments@travelcommons.com or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_75.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #75 – Can\'t I Fly Unplugged, How I Got Here','','inherit','closed','closed','','138-revision-v1','','','2021-09-25 09:43:32','2021-09-25 14:43:32','',138,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3803',0,'revision','',0),
(3804,1,'2021-09-25 09:44:30','2021-09-25 14:44:30','Recorded in the Washington, DC Marriott as I wrap up a week of business travel before heading out for a week\'s vacation. My recent trip back down to Johannesburg, South Africa provides a good bit of content -- on-plane security in Dakar, South Africa Airways\' unique <a href=\"http://www.moneyweb.co.za/mw/view/mw/en/page292671?oid=225852&amp;sn=2009%20Detail\">ban</a> on in-flight use of iPhones and Blackberries, and good luck with Skype. Experiences on the flight back home illustrate the benefits of being a \"super elite\" flier, which might be easier to attain with Delta\'s recent <a href=\"http://crankyflier.com/2009/07/27/delta-introduces-rollover-miles/\">changes</a> to their SkyMiles program. We wrap up with a couple of stories about how frequent travelers squeeze in \"instant\" vacations in the midst of business travel. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_76.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #76:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in the Washington Marriott in downtown Washington, DC</li>\n 	<li>Have been doing some easy travel – Tulsa, New York, St Louis, and now DC – but the month since the last podcast was dominated by a 2-week trip back down to Joburg, SA</li>\n 	<li>Will move from South Africa Airways to Delta for my next flight because of SAA\'s <a href=\"http://www.moneyweb.co.za/mw/view/mw/en/page292671?oid=225852&amp;sn=2009%20Detail\">ban</a> on in-flight use of iPhones and Blackberries, even when in \"flight\" or \"airplane\" mode</li>\n 	<li>Also not thrilled with being <a href=\"http://ashsd.afacwa.org/docs/pestdest.pdf\">sprayed with insecticides</a> after the stopover in Dakar, Senegal</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://www.magnatune.com/artists/albums/rompaey-mozaic/\">Bubbly</a></em> by Ruben van Rompaey</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>GoGo Inflight WiFi is offering 50% off their service through 8/31/09 using the coupon code 158FLF7365</li>\n 	<li>Have become a big Skype user with my travels to South Africa. Had good luck with the Skype iPhone app also</li>\n 	<li>A new hurdle in Joburg airport -- had to take off my glasses for an optical body temperature scan before going through passport control</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/travelcommons/3763764793/\">Link</a> to the picture of the taxi sticker warning of a \"$200 clean up fee\" for anyone vomiting in the cab.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/kokoon-berlin/\">How Do I Work This</a></em> by The Kokoon</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Real Benefits to Being Super Elite\n</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Delta stirred up the frequent flier world by becoming <a href=\"http://crankyflier.com/2009/07/27/delta-introduces-rollover-miles/\">“the AT&amp;T of the airline industry,”</a> allowing the rollover of elite qualifying miles.</li>\n 	<li>My IAD-JNB flight put me over 100,000 elite qualifying miles on United, the earliest I\'ve ever requalified for United 1K status</li>\n 	<li>Rolling over elite qualifying miles would give me a reason to keep racking up miles on United rather than flipping to another airline to earn elite status</li>\n 	<li>Special treatment provided to super elites is worth the qualifying effort. United\'s Global Services desk helped me avoid a 4-hour mechanical delay on my way home from Washington, DC</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/weigl-proof/\">Piano Circus</a></em> by Philipp Weigl</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Instant Vacation</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Flight attendants on my IAD-ORD flight had bid on a trip with a 29-hour layover in Portland to give themselves a bit of an instant vacation -- time that you enjoy in the midst of a business trip</li>\n 	<li>In the winter, I break up transcontinental flights with a ski day in Denver</li>\n 	<li>Spoke with people from <a href=\"http://www.snow.com/Default.aspx\">Vail Resorts</a> who said that this was the kind of behavior they hoped to see when they introduced the <a href=\"http://www.snow.com/epicpass/home.aspx\">Epic Pass</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"http://ad.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/show?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;bids=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Magnatune</a></li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments@travelcommons.com or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_76.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #76 – Real Benefits of Being Super Elite, Instant Vacations','','inherit','closed','closed','','144-revision-v1','','','2021-09-25 09:44:30','2021-09-25 14:44:30','',144,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3804',0,'revision','',0),
(3805,1,'2021-09-25 09:45:45','2021-09-25 14:45:45','Again in Washington, DC, I\'m back on the road after two weeks at home. As my Twitter followers know, this trip didn\'t get off to the best start -- a 2 hour delay caused by yet another broken United Airlines plane. Listener comments continue the threads on in-flight bans on smartphones and falling prices of in-flight Wi-Fi. The collapse of the Clear Registered Traveler program makes me nervous about who has my fingerprints and iris scans. And, after my plane finally got into the air, I thought about what I miss when I\'m off the road. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_77.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #77:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in the Convention Center Courtyard in downtown Washington, DC</li>\n 	<li>On a bit of an Amtrak bunny hop up the US East Coast -- DC to Phila to NYC</li>\n 	<li>Most of my travel in August has been personal -- Aspen, CO and Door County, WI</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/music/listeners/artistdetails.php?BandHash=00168e9762768c8f9a16a59343f973d0\">People Go A Lotta Nerve</a></em> by Neko Case</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Timo from Tampere, Finland wrote in about Ryanair not allowing any use of smartphones -- even in flight or airplane mode -- on a flight from Tampere, Finland to \"the misleadingly named Frankfurt Hahn airport\"</li>\n 	<li>Ryanair -- what a mess with all their add-on charges and anti-customer service</li>\n 	<li>Interesting that Ryanair severely limits the use of smartphones while simultaneously trying to launch an in-flight mobile phone call service</li>\n 	<li>South African Airways plans to <a href=\"http://www.itweb.co.za/sections/telecoms/2008/0808281033.asp\">petition</a> the SA Civil Aviation Authority to allow smart phones to be used in “flight” mode</li>\n 	<li>Recent WSJ.com <a href=\"http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203706604574374571364228440.html\">article</a> discusses the results of Alaska Air Wi-Fi pricing tests. In-flight wi-fi is very price-sensitive. Will carriers get the return they need on their investment in fleet-wide wi-fi rollouts?</li>\n 	<li>New celebrity sightings -- <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> followers know that I recently ate a couple of tables away from Lance Armstrong and shared a 1st Class row with LeAnne Rimes on a flight to LAX</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/music/listeners/artistdetails.php?BandHash=747b6ccf16c7202fd38068d510c11fd2\">Give It Up</a></em> by Jimmy Mancus</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>My, What Pretty Eyes You Have!</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Federal judge <a href=\"http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/08/defunct-airport-fast-pass-company-banned-from-selling-customer-biometrics/\">ruled</a> Clear Registered Traveler can’t sell its former customers’ biometric data – the fingerprints and iris scans that were used to identify travelers at checkpoint machines at airports across the country.</li>\n 	<li>What’s the best way to destroy my Clear card? My biometric data was stored on the card\'s smart chip</li>\n 	<li>But what about the biometric data stored with Clear and the TSA? I just want my data destroyed, but two US Congressmen want it <a href=\"http://fcw.com/articles/2009/08/21/lawmakers-urge-tsa-not-to-destroy-registered-traveler-data.aspx?sc_lang=en\">kept</a> around.</li>\n 	<li>I\'ve learned a lesson -- I\'ll never give the government this kind of data again.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/music/listeners/artistdetails.php?BandHash=155e0ac479805586bd2cbef2e5c44ddd\">Orange Blossoms</a></em> by JJ Grey and Mofro</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>What I Miss When I’m Off The Road</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Not much this evening -- first flight in two weeks and it’s delayed for 2½ hours because of a broken nose gear steering mechanism.</li>\n 	<li>Will <em>somebody</em> explain the United Airlines the benefits of preventative maintenance? What good is being super top-tier elite on an airline that can’t get their planes in the air? It’s getting so bad, I don’t know why they bother setting a departure and arrival time. Just put an AM or PM on the board and shoot for the best.</li>\n 	<li>What I miss most when not traveling is the variety -- seeing and experiencing different things each day. While I loved sleeping in my own bed and not having to do the TSA shuffle, two weeks of the same train ride into the same office, seeing the same skyline (though I love the Chicago skyline), eating at the same lunch places started the soles of my feet itching.</li>\n 	<li>You also get a better understanding of other people when you spend time with them face-to-face. While you can do a lot over a voice or video conference, there’s nothing like being there in person to get an appreciation for the differences, the challenges, and the personalities.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"http://ad.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/show?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;bids=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from the <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com\">Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments@travelcommons.com or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_77.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #77 – Keeping Traveler Data Private, What I Miss When Off The Road','','inherit','closed','closed','','161-revision-v1','','','2021-09-25 09:45:45','2021-09-25 14:45:45','',161,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3805',0,'revision','',0),
(3806,1,'2021-09-25 09:46:43','2021-09-25 14:46:43','Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, Illinois at the start of what\'s looking like 6 weeks of straight travel. In this episode, we talk about the need to have a place to blow off steam after a frustrating day of travel, and how the distractions of cell phone calls have caused me to leave a trail of personal belongings behind in hotel and airplanes across the country. Finally, while getting a knowing chuckle out of  the trailer for the upcoming movie <a href=\"http://www.theupintheairmovie.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Up In The Air</em></a> where George Clooney plays an uber-frequent traveler, the movie\'s theme about using travel to run away from relationships isn\'t all that fictional.\n\nHere\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_78.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the transcript from TravelCommons podcast #78:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, Illinois. It was a light travel week for me this week – just out to Philadelphia for Tuesday, Weds, and Thurs and then back to Chicago, but a heavy work week, which unfortunately pushed this episode of TC out from my intended recording date of Weds, Sept 30th to today.</li>\n 	<li>Looking at my calendar, I find myself in the midst of one of my 6-week-straight sets of travel. It started 2 weeks ago when I had to be in LA and DC the same week – I just hate doing the transcon thing in the middle of the week. Last week was Philadelphia and NYC – not too bad. Next week, DC and Boston, then another week in Philadelphia, and then another LA and DC week. The way it’s looking, I’m going to be traveling every week until Thanksgiving.</li>\n 	<li>Which is, of course, the perfect time for my suitcase to break. I think I mentioned a couple episodes ago that the bearing on one of the wheels is shot, giving me a nice “Squeak, Squeak” soundtrack as I walk down the airport concourse or go trundling through a prospect’s office space as I did last week in NYC. It was embarrassing – lots of “prairie dogging” – heads popping up from the cube field, looking to see who’s making that annoying sound. There’s a sure-fire sales technique for you.</li>\n 	<li>But now one of the handle supports has broken, making the suitcase twist every time I pull it onto a plane or cross a street, and making it just about impossible to attach my computer bag to it. So I’m going to have to suck it up and buy a new suitcase.</li>\n 	<li>It’s not like I haven’t gotten a lot of mileage out of this bag – 6 years at, say, 100,000 miles a year. Or that it cost me a lot – maybe $200 at a TJ Maxx. And it’s held up better than a colleague’s $700 Tumi – his is only 4 yrs old and last week dropped an entire wheel sub-assembly – the wheel and all the surrounding bits that keep it in the bag – while he was sprinting for a flight in LGA.</li>\n 	<li>No, it’s just the hassle. And how excited can you get shopping for my umpteenth black 22-inch rolling bag. Maybe I’ll go for a new color – something that will stand out in the overhead bin, something that will express some individuality – something like, I dunno, navy blue!</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/seldon-circles/\"><em>Making Circles</em></a> by the Seldon Plan</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Sometimes when you’re traveling and things start to go sideways, you want to vent – just blow off your frustration – but to whom? Certainly not to any airline personnel – at best, you’ll be ignored; at worst, you’ll be kicked off the plane and/or arrested. If you’re traveling with a colleague, you can kvetch a bit, but too much and you look like a whiner – not a reputation that will propel you far up the career ladder.</li>\n 	<li>For me, Twitter has become a little bolt hole into which I can scream my frustrations – from broken United planes to the conga line of frustrations that is Washington’s Dulles airport, I package my woes up in 140 characters and shove them into the Twitter-verse. Has probably made a few of you guys “un-follow” me, but that’s OK. It’s a small price to avoid getting busted by those gentle and caring guys who populate the Chicago police force.</li>\n 	<li>For Lori Humm, a longtime TravelCommons listener, the TravelCommons comments section can provide a needed outlet. Reacting to the latest addition to the TSA’s security play-acting, Lori writes...</li>\n</ul>\n<blockquote>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\">Mark - I\'m about to lose my mind. Apparently, my airport, Richmond, is about to be the test bed for ANOTHER level of security. We already have the body scanning machines and now this – screening of powders.</p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\">I\'d love to hear your thoughts on the addition of powders to security, especially given your pride (and constant defense of) your tooth powder! I moved to using all powder cosmetics to avoid carrying any liquids at all, and am starting to resign myself to being make-up free if that\'s what it take to avoid being sidelined for additional screening.</p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\">By the way - still doing the Richmond-to-Baton Rouge weekly haul - this makes my 15th month. If that doesn\'t make someone lose their mind, this additional screening certainly will.</p>\n</blockquote>\n<ul>\n 	<li>You know the TSA just doesn’t get it when they announced the powder screening as <a href=\"http://www.tsa.gov/press/releases/2009/0908.shtm\"><em>Implementing New Enhanced Threat Detection Capability</em></a> . In the TSA’s blog, Blogger Bob, as defensive and oblivious as usual, <a href=\"http://www.tsa.gov/blog/2009/09/new-procedures-for-traveling-with.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">says</a> “We haven’t received any specific threats that led us to this new procedure” , but we thought it made sense to put in place some new annoyances for travelers and get some practice in before the holidays. Just kidding – about the last bit. Blogger Bob did actually write that, unlike the liquid ban, there’s nothing specific that caused them to launch this powder parade accompaniment to the shoe carnival. I’m not so sure that my snarky annoyance comment is too far from the truth.</li>\n 	<li>But, having said that, I’ve yet to see anybody get flagged over for a powder check. I have seen a bit of an increase in random wipe-&amp;-tests – the guy behind me Tuesday at Midway had his shoes wiped and I had my computer bag wiped at ORD last month, but that’s not a big thing. No unpacking and re-packing bags, no rustling through your toiletries kit – just a couple wipes on the outside surface with a test pad and they run it through what I guess is some sort of spectrograph. Takes 1 minute – they’re usually done before I get my shoes re-tied.</li>\n 	<li>I gotta say, though, that the tougher part of that note is the 15 straight months of flying between Richmond and Baton Rouge. I may complain a bit about flying from LA to DC, but 15 months of connecting through Atlanta, think about it – Hartsfield twice a week – I’m not sure anybody should be hassling Lori about anything.</li>\n 	<li>And the final follow-up, we’ve have an ongoing thread through it seems like most of this year’s episodes about in-flight electronics. Flying out here to Philadelphia on Southwest Tuesday morning – OK, I know that I said that I wouldn’t fly SW again for a long time after they left me hanging in Little Rock, but they’ve got a double credit promo going right how and I have 12 flight credits in the bank, so with this trip, I’ll get the 4 more credits I need for a free ticket, which I’ll then give to my mother for a spring trip to visit us, so, in the vein of “don’t cut your nose off to spite your face”, suck it up if you’re close to a free ticket.</li>\n 	<li>So, anyhow, in the back of SW’s in-flight magazine, they had the best layout of allowed in-flight electronics of any airline. Whereas the South Africa Airlines rules about no in-flight smartphones was buried halfway into a paragraph full of rules, Southwest has a nice graphic layout that has 3 sections – Always Allowed, Allowed Above 10,000 ft, and Never Allowed – really nice. Nothing really controversial – Smart phones in Airline or Game mode are in the Allowed Above 10,000 ft section. However, I was surprised to see Noise-Cancelling Headphones in the Always Allowed section. Given that these have “on-off” switches, most by-the-book flight attendants see the red light on my Bose cans and tell me to switch them off. But on SW, I guess, they’re good through the entire flight. But still, one more example of the lack of consistency in rules – which I’ll say is one of the main drivers of traveler frustration.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a question, a story, a comment – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com, you can send me a Twitter message at @mpeacock, or you can post them on the web site at T/C.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/eliyahu-wind/\">Oh Yeah</a></em> by Eliyahu Sills</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Lost in Distraction</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>We’ve talked in a number of episodes about things being left behind by travelers – the study about the number of laptops left behind in airports, people walking away from TSA checkpoints without their shoes, the overflowing box of power adaptors that just about every hotel can pull out when you ask to borrow one.</li>\n 	<li>A couple of weeks ago, when unpacking from my last New York trip, I discovered that I’d left a pair of olive slacks in my hotel room. It was one of those “head smacking” moments – how could I be so stupid?</li>\n 	<li>Sometimes I feel like I’m leaving a little trail of belongings behind me as I travel.</li>\n 	<li>Most are small – pens, books, magazines, enough toiletries to make up a couple of complete kits.</li>\n 	<li>But some are big – the olive slacks, my original pair of Bose headphones, an entire suitcase in the trunk of a cab.</li>\n 	<li>OK, I’m not sweating the books or the tooth brush, but, come on – an entire suitcase? Other than creeping senility, what’s my problem?</li>\n 	<li>At least for me, it’s answering my cell phone. Every time I’ve forgotten something big, it’s been because of a phone call.</li>\n 	<li>The Bose headphones? My flight had landed in SFO, I was standing up, pulling my suitcase out of the overhead and the phone rings. Of course I answer it, and now I’m juggling my phone, my jacket, my suitcase, my briefcase while trying to slide out into the aisle. Distracted, I completely forget about the headphones in the seatback pocket. I don’t remember them until the next day when they’re long gone, a birthday present for the son or daughter of one of the cleaning crew.</li>\n 	<li>My olive slacks? One of those days when I just couldn’t get out of my hotel room because of serial phone calls. The phone rings, I answer it, 15-minute conversation, I hang up, re-start my packing, only to have the phone ring again. Another 15-minute conversation, then another call comes in on call waiting. I look at my watch – damn, I gotta get out of this hotel room if I’m going to make my flight home. I didn’t do my usual room scan and walked out light one of my favorite pair of pants.</li>\n 	<li>When I’m not distracted, I’m usually pretty methodical about leaving hotels or planes. I think my wife thinks that my hotel routine is border-line obsessive-compulsive. I empty the bathroom out, pack up my toiletries, then go back in, check around, turn off the light and close the door. Then, over to the bed, I throw all the pillows on the floor (which, sometimes is 8 or 9 pillows), snap the bedspread to send any hidden socks flying.</li>\n 	<li>Then, clear all the flat surfaces – it either goes with me or, like the room service menu, goes into a drawer. This is how I didn’t leave behind my iPhone charger this past week. I was clearing off the desk, which ends up being a tangle of hotel modem wires, lamp cords, promotional material, and my own tangle of electronics. I thought I had everything packed, but was making one more scan – cleaning off the flat surfaces so I could give the room one last scan. And there, as I was clearing off the desk, I found I had forgotten to pack my iPhone charger. I had missed seeing it in the midst of the Ethernet cord coming out of the hotel modem.</li>\n 	<li>Coming off a plane, I tick through a mental inventory, even patting myself down to make sure I have my wallet and iPhone. I look, but don’t put my hands into the seat back pocket – it can be ugly in there.</li>\n 	<li>But all this takes some concentration – avoid getting lost in distraction.</li>\n 	<li>I was thinking about this the other day when one of those iPhone commercials came on. There’s an app for this; there’s an app for that. I thought “if there’s an app for everything, there’s gotta be one to keep from getting distracted.” Then I realized there is one – kinda – and it’s built right in. It’s the Off button.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/liquid-seventythree/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Is That Called Love</a> </em> by Liquid Zen</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>A Movie About Us</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>&lt;1st audio clip from trailer&gt;</li>\n 	<li>I love that line – “I fly 350,000 miles a year; it’s 250,000 miles to the moon.” From the latest trailer for “Up in the Air”, a movie with George Clooney starring as a consultant who fires people. He’s good at his job, which keeps him on the road over 300 days a year. He lives – thrives -- in “Airworld”, the travel bubble we’ve talked about on prior episodes where frequent travelers seem to float over the places they visit, insulated by airline clubs and hotel concierge lounges and special lines that whoosh the statused elite along to their next destination.</li>\n 	<li>I’ll post a <a href=\"www.theupintheairmovie.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">link</a> to the movie’s web site. It’s just starting the fall film festival cycle, building word-of-mouth for its release during the Christmas season.</li>\n 	<li>The trailer has some good lines, like this advice on security line strategy that Clooney’s seasoned traveler gives to a newly-minted Ivy League grad</li>\n 	<li>&lt;2nd audio clip from trailer&gt;</li>\n 	<li>Going through both trailers on the movie’s website, you can see the premise is a bit deeper. The George Clooney character is using his frequent flying lifestyle to avoid relationships – nothing too heavy</li>\n 	<li>&lt;3rd audio clip from trailer&gt;</li>\n 	<li>While fictional, there’s more than a bit of truth to this. I’ve know a number of guys – and not the gender-neutral Midwest “guys”; they’re all men – over my career who used the need to leave Sunday night for LA or to stay over the weekend in Europe as ways to avoid problems at home – or, once divorced – which all of these guys eventually were – used the same excuses to avoid the barren new apartments.</li>\n 	<li>Oftentimes when talking to new consultants, giving them some thoughts, some advice about the traveling lifestyle that is part and parcel of consulting, I talk less about who to avoid in the security lines and more about the need to manage their personal lives with at least the same amount of effort as they do their frequent flyer statuses. I know I shouldn’t be, but I’m always surprised by the number of guys who don’t.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"http://ad.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/show?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;bids=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #78</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>The bridge music is from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Magnatune</a>, the <em>we are not evil</em> label . Making Circles by the Seldon Plan, Oh Yeah by Eliyahu Sills, and Is That Called Love by Liquid Zen. You can find these and more at <a href=\"http://magnatune.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">magnatunes.com</a>.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or MP3 file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to @mpeacock on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_78.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #78 – Lost in Distraction, Movie About Us','','inherit','closed','closed','','168-revision-v1','','','2021-09-25 09:46:43','2021-09-25 14:46:43','',168,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3806',0,'revision','',0),
(3807,1,'2021-09-25 09:47:36','2021-09-25 14:47:36','Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, Illinois at the end of one of those travel weeks where I lost control of my schedule – DC to Dallas to Houston to LA. In this episode, we talk about the problems with LAX security, my choices for <em>white noise</em> when I\'m trying to sleep on an airplane, and the reasons why I\'m skipping rental cars. I also talk with <a href=\"http://www.boingo.com/\">Boingo</a> WiFi about the choices frequent travelers are making in going wireless. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_79.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the transcript from TravelCommons podcast #79:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, Illinois, at the end of one of those travel weeks where I lost control of my schedule – the 6am flight to DC on Monday, the 6:30am flight to Houston on Tuesday by way of Dallas, the 6:30pm flight to LA, and then, refusing to take the red-eye, returning home Friday afternoon. Makes next week’s 4 days in Washington seem like a cake walk.</li>\n 	<li>Seems like I’m getting more of those.Two weeks ago, my travel week was Monday in Stamford, CT; Tuesday in Providence, RI; Wednesday in Philadelphia; Thursday back in Chicago, and then Friday in San Diego, returning at 6:30am Saturday courtesy of the red eye. I used to be able to sleep on red eyes, but not so much anymore. And with a flight time between LAX and ORD of less than 4 hrs, there’s not a lot of time for sleep – even after scoring a first class upgrade. I was pretty worthless on Saturday – I went straight to bed after getting home and then took a nap later in the afternoon. The red-eye is false economy – I’m not saving time; just snowplowing the problem into the next day. Hence, my lack of enthusiasm for another red-eye this week.</li>\n 	<li>I will say this, though. With winter coming in Chicago, I’m starting to look around for <em>strategically</em> located clients – Miami, Phoenix, LA. There are times when travel does have its rewards.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/clayne-potemkin/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>You Are The Reason</em></a> by C. Layne</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Robert Fenerty dropped us a line giving his point-of-view on many of the things covered in the last TravelCommons episode:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Mark, aboard a flight to Prague, and with 5 weeks of international travel ahead of me, I\'m also peering ahead to Thanksgiving. On the other hand, I\'ll soon have United 1k status and am looking forward to seeing Versailles, Madrid, and the Dominican Republic. As for keeping touch with my family, I really enjoy giving people a \"Skype tour\" of my hotel room. I find that the wet running clothes or the ironing board next to the TV provide an easy segue to the events of the day. I\'m lucky enough to have a client that pays for resort hotels, so there\'s usually something interesting to see and talk about. That could be a dinner plate-sized showerhead or a view of a golf course.</li>\n 	<li>As for losing things and making mistakes, my weakness is at the moments of transition. As I leave the car to enter the shuttle, my mind is racing ahead to claim check, the coupon, the passport, and the luggage in the trunk. But not the headlights, which I\'ve left on. Perhaps the answer is to pause, consider the requirements of the moment, and not the future. Incidentally, the parking attendant who jumped my car told me about a Prius that idled on and off in their parking lot for a week before running out of gas.</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Bob, thanks for the note. Reading your itinerary -- Versailles, Madrid, and the Dominican Republic – I get a bit jealous. But then I recall times when I had trip itineraries of Paris, London, Dublin, Zurich and other folks would say “Oh, that’s so glamorous”, but the reality was that I was spending my days in Paris, London, Dublin, and Zurich in conference rooms that looked very much like conference rooms in Cleveland, Nashville, Indianapolis, and Atlanta – except with different brands of bottled water and no air-conditioning. Of course, I’m hoping Robert is doing a much better job of work-life balance than I did.</li>\n 	<li>Leo Vegoda “@-signed” me on a Tweet from Seoul’s Inchon airport. Leo wrote – “Check in &amp; security at ICN a breeze. Noodles and beancurd delicious. LAX are you listening?”</li>\n 	<li>I was thinking about this when I walked into LAX Friday morning for my flight back to Chicago. The lines in Terminal 7 were a zoo at all the screening stations. It looked like a number of Japanese and Mexican tourists weren’t completely clear on the TSA’s 3-1-1 liquid carry-on limits. I saw 1 TSA screener fill an entire gray bin with liquids – toothpaste, shampoo, water bottle, sour cream (?) – from one family. Another woman kept unlocking and relocking her pink rolling bag to pull things out – first, her PC, then a bottle of water, then a jar of honey (?). It was not pretty.</li>\n 	<li>Of course, a big part of this is LAX with all its little terminals hanging off the access road, and none of them with enough real estate to house a proper screening set up.</li>\n 	<li>Walking into this, I took a deep breath – I wasn’t tight on time, but shuffling through security lines wasn’t the way I wanted to start the day. Sometimes when the main floor of Terminal 7 is bad, I’ll go up to the screening station on the bridge over from the parking garage. I went to ask Airserv women – the contractors at the start of the line checking boarding passes – if that line was any shorter and she spotted the Global Services mark on my United boarding pass and said “But you’re Global Services so you don’t have to worry about that.” She took my boarding pass and driver’s license, walked me past all the lines, dropped the line tape, gave my boarding pass to the TSA guy and escorted me right to an X-ray machine. It was the ultimate – and very timely – line cut. No noodles and beancurd like Leo had (a bit too early for that), but it did give me time to grab a cappuccino before getting on my flight home. And reinforced, once again, the value of being “super elite”</li>\n 	<li>I’ve talked in past podcasts about using white noise applications to drown out the cabin noise that my Bose noise-canceling headphones don’t cover. I use a couple of applications on my iPhone – <a href=\"http://www.tmsoft.com/iphone-whitenoise.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">White Noise</a> and <a href=\"http://www.naturespace.com/iphone.php\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Naturespace</a>. White Noise was the first one I used – I liked their Amazon rain forest.</li>\n 	<li>But then I flipped over to Naturespace because I thought the stereo quality, “aural spacing” of the sound in the headphones was a good bit better. But now I’m back to White Noise after the latest upgrade because I really like one of the new sounds – the Tibetan Singing Bowl.</li>\n 	<li>Maybe it’s just me, but this is the perfect white noise for me. Others I’ve played it for thought it sounded like a huge swarm of mosquitoes, but it’s come in very handy on the string of 6am Monday morning flights I recently had.</li>\n 	<li>And just a quick note, for those of you who check out the show notes, I’ve switched over from summary bullet points to more of a transcript. It’s a lot more words, but actually a good bit easier for me. Since the show is usually just me talking – as opposed to many other shows that are interviews or conversations among multiple hosts – I script out a good bit of my show. That may be disappointing to those who thought I was naturally this glib, but it saves me a <em>lot</em> of post-production time – editing out ums, ahs, and narrative dead-ends. Since I have the script, I figured that copy-pasting it is easier than trying to summarize it – sort of the show notes version of Mark Twain’s “I’d have written a shorter letter if I had the time”. So anyhow, starting with TravelCommons #78, you can wade through the gory details of each show by clicking through the “Read the rest of this entry” to the show notes page.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a question, a story, a comment – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com, you can send me a Twitter message at @mpeacock, or you can post them on the web site at travelcommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/seldon-lost/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Fire In The Day\'s Field</em></a> by the Seldon Plan</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Skipping the Rental Car\n</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Two weeks ago, I had to get from downtown Washington DC to a Northern Virginia suburb for a client dinner. I looked at the <a href=\"http://www.wmata.com/rail/maps/map.cfm\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Metro map</a>, rang up some car services, but finally gritted my teeth and rented a car. That’s pretty much my attitude toward car rentals these days — the choice of last resort. It wasn’t always this way. But with cost and fee increases, shrinking fleets, and more inconvenient locations, I work hard to skip the rental car counter.</li>\n 	<li>The biggest issue is cost. Rental car prices have <a href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/28/travel/28prac.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">soared</a> — increasing an average of 60-70% over last year. But prices are just part of the story. Additional fees and taxes can add another 50% to the number that finally hits your credit card. The concession recovery fee that airports and train stations charge is usually one of the bigger charges. Avis hit me with 11.11% concession recovery fees on recent trips through Seattle-Tacoma and LAX airports, and a 10% fee for renting at Philadelphia’s 30th Street train station. Picking up the car in town doesn’t always dodge this fee. Hertz leveled a 13% concession recovery fee on a rental from the San Francisco Marriott hotel. On top of that, the rental companies add on a customer facility charge, a vehicle licensing fee, and an energy recovery fee. And then the state and local governments’ turn. My Sea-Tac rental receipt shows a 9.5% sales tax plus a 9.7% rental tax. California adds 3.5% tourism assessment fee. My Philadelphia rental had 4% passenger car rental tax (split between the state and the city) plus a $2/day state surcharge. Just across these four examples, fees and taxes added 27-51% to the final cost of my rental.</li>\n 	<li>Another problem is being able to get a car. The easiest way for rental car companies to make more money is to increase each car’s utilization — the number of days it’s rented. Makes sense, but when demand for cars increases just a bit, the pickings start to get slim. Last month, I flew from LAX to Washington-Dulles and planned to rent a car because it would be a bit cheaper than the round-trip cost of a cab to/from DC. I landed at Dulles around midnight. Wheeling my bag across the empty Avis Preferred parking spaces, I saw a huge Ford F150 4×4 King Cab pick-up truck. ”They can’t be serious,” I thought. Oh yes, they were — that was their idea of the intermediate size car I had requested. This wasn’t going to fit in a parking garage in downtown DC. I walked back to the rental bus and asked the driver to take me to the taxi line.</li>\n 	<li>Of course, the drive back to the airport taxi line wasn’t a short one because airport authorities have been aggressively relocating rental car companies to “improved” consolidated facilities that are a 15-20 minute drive from the airport. Frequent travelers work hard to reduce the time spent getting from one point to another — maintaining airline status so they can use the short security line, carrying on their bags so they don’t have to wait by the luggage carousel. Renting a car used to be a quick transaction — walk off the plane, across to the parking lot, and into your rental car. It’s still that way at smaller airports like Nashville and Little Rock, but at airports like Cleveland, Baltimore-Washington, and Phoenix, you need to pack a lunch.</li>\n 	<li>I used to enjoy renting cars. Now, I avoid it. Hikes in prices and fees have made taxis and private car services more competitive, and moves to push rental lots way off property have made the alternatives a lot more convenient. Last year, at the tipping point where the cost of rental car was the same or maybe even a bit more than the cost of a taxi, I’d take the rental car. I enjoyed the flexibility of having a car, and even looked forward to finding a fun car in the Avis lot or under the Hertz Gold canopy. Now, I’ll pay extra to avoid them. While I work every year to make sure I keep my Marriott Platinum status, I fell out of Hertz’s President’s Circle without a care.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/fernwood-sangita/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">White Oak</a> </em> by Fernwood</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>The Best Way to Drop Wires\n</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Working in airplanes, airports, hotels, Starbucks, and the back seats of taxis, frequent travelers are always trying to figure out the best way to work wirelessly.</li>\n 	<li>This week, <a href=\"http://www.boingo.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Boingo</a> introduced an <a href=\"http://mobile.boingo.com/download/client.php?client=blackberry\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">app</a> on the BlackBerry platform for its WiFi service. At first, I didn’t think much of it, but then I got thinking – why would I want WiFi if I have 3G? I see more and more 3G modems hanging off of laptops. Is WiFi fading out?</li>\n 	<li>I spoke with <a href=\"http://www.linkedin.com/in/christiangunning\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Christian Gunning</a> of Boingo and asked him just this question as I was sitting in Houston-Hobby airport waiting for my flight to LA</li>\n 	<li>“It’s not an either/or,” he said, “the two technologies are complimentary.” In high-traffic/high-“loiter” areas like airports, 3G cells get maxed out by people entertaining themselves with streaming multimedia. While one cell can handle 600 voice calls, data quickly consumes those slots, pushing the capacity down to 50-80 calls. Moving that streaming data over to a Boingo WiFi hot spot gives much better throughput.</li>\n 	<li>Makes sense, but what about the cost? I can get a 3G mobile plan from AT&amp;T or Verizon for $60/month. I can get close to that in a couple of days with WiFi – paying $10 for a day pass in the airport, another $10 at Starbucks, and then another $10 in the hotel at night.</li>\n 	<li>Christian pointed out that Boingo’s monthly WiFi plan costs $10 for unlimited bandwidth – as compared to the 5GB caps typical for 3G modems –covers 58 airports, Starbucks, McDonald’s, and many hotels. Their smartphone plan – for iPhones and Blackberries – is 2 bucks cheaper. And as they continue to sign reciprocal agreements with other network companies, their coverage expands.</li>\n 	<li>He makes a compelling case for the continued relevance of WiFi – it’s built into every recent laptop, its higher bandwidth is better for multimedia, and the performance isn’t as variable as 3G.</li>\n 	<li>My cut at it is – unfortunately, a frequent traveler needs both. WiFi is great when you’re sitting in an airport or in a Starbucks; it’s no good when you’re inside the airplane waiting to take off or in long cab ride – because you’ve sworn off rental cars – or in a hotel with lousy broadband, because it’s not just 3G cells that can get flooded with streaming videos of , uh, artistic content.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"http://ad.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/show?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;bids=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #79</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>The bridge music is from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Magnatune</a>, the <em>we are not evil</em> label. <em>You Are the Reason</em> by C Layne, <em>Fire in the Day’s Field</em> by the Seldon Plan, and <em>White Oak</em> by Fernwood. You can find these and more at <a href=\"http://magnatune.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">magnatunes.com</a>.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or MP3 file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to @mpeacock on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_79.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #79 – Skipping Rental Cars, WiFi or 3G?','','inherit','closed','closed','','191-revision-v1','','','2021-09-25 09:47:36','2021-09-25 14:47:36','',191,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3807',0,'revision','',0),
(3808,1,'2021-09-25 09:48:36','2021-09-25 14:48:36','Coming to you today from the Courtyard Hotel just across from Philadelphia\'s City Hall in the midst of a last quick trip before leaving the airports to the Thanksgiving traveling crush. In this episode, we talk about ways of keeping track of travel receipts and an airport theft ring that targeted black luggage bags. I update last year\'s \"Road Warrior 201\" tips for this holiday travel season, and have an interview with the creator of <em><a href=\"http://vimeo.com/7167640\">Frequent Flyer</a></em>, a new documentary about mileage junkies. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_80.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the transcript from TravelCommons podcast #80:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you today from the Courtyard in Downtown Philadelphia – just kitty corner from the amazing piece of architecture that is Philadelphia’s City Hall. Whether you think it’s impressive or impressively kitsch, there are few city halls that are so “in the center of things” as Philadelphia’s.</li>\n 	<li>The Thanksgiving travel season just seems to keep getting longer – more smeared out. Walking to my car in ORD last Friday afternoon after three incessantly rainy days in Seattle, I could see the holiday traffic already starting to build – lots of families, small kids pulling junior-sized rolling bags. I dunno, if you’re going to have your kid play business traveler, why not go all the way, get them a black or charcoal grey half-sized Tumi and let them feel the power the way that the primary colors of the Dora the Explorer bag will never let them experience.</li>\n 	<li>Me, I just want to feel the power of that tryptophan high from Thanksgiving Day turkey, maybe extending it with leftovers through the weekend, just being a couch slug until next Monday, when I have to fight with the tail end of the smeared-out holiday travel traffic and head back west again.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/beyond7-revelations/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Miss America</em></a> by Beyond 7</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Just to continue on my rental car rant from the last episode, I booked a car a couple of weeks ago in LAX -- $19 daily rate, but with an additional $15 in taxes &amp; surcharges. 44% of the total cost was taxes &amp; surcharges. Go figure.</li>\n 	<li>Arnoud Heijnis, a long time T/C listener, sent me a note earlier this month with the subject line – Expense Mayhem:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Work has forced me in to being a frequent traveller and although I’ve got most basics down and start to enjoy the efficiency I have made my own. However there is one thing that I still need to master. It may sound simple and you might think “what’s the deal” but I have a challenge doing and keeping track of my expenses.</li>\n 	<li>I know most people carry one of those transparent filing sleeves, as do I, however I continuously get caught off guard, especially when going from trip in to trip, which my company wants to see split. I have tried many things, apps for the iPhone, apps for the BlackBerry, different filing folders etc. But haven’t gotten to a system which is really satisfactory to me.</li>\n 	<li>My challenge is that I have receipts coming in from events in the evening when I don’t have my laptop bag at hand, at the airport, hotels, different settings etc. When I finally hit my desk for the two days of doing expenses I try to decipher the mayhem of receipts, hotel bills, car rental printouts etc. I’m usually pretty successful however feel that I’m not as efficient as I could be.</li>\n 	<li>I was wondering if you could enlighten me with some tips and tricks from a seasoned traveller</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Arnoud, thanks for the question. Keeping track of your travel expenses, and then getting them accurately into whatever system your company uses for reimbursement is a question close to the hearts and wallets of every frequent traveler. I average $5-10,000/month in travel expenses, so it’s real money to me. And there’s more than once where I missed filing a couple hundred dollar receipt, which then reinforces that uncertainty – am I getting paid back for everything I buy?</li>\n 	<li>I’m probably at the low-tech end of the scale. I use the transparent sleeves that Arnoud mentions, as well as a specific sleeve in my wallet that’s reserved for receipts I collect when I don’t have my briefcase with me – for taxi receipts, parking receipts, restaurant receipts. I also keep a business card in there (because it’s a nice fit) where I jot down cash expenditures – these are the ones I forget the most.</li>\n 	<li>I’ve known a couple of folks who’ve tried <a href=\"http://www.evernote.com/\">Evernote</a> on their iPhones – taking a picture of a receipt and then tagging it with the right project or account. I dunno – I keep thinking about trying it, but it never gets above the B level on my to-do list, which means it doesn’t get done.</li>\n 	<li>The method of capture, though, isn’t near as important as the discipline of doing data entry every day, or every other day max. You can re-create your day, even yesterday in your mind. But wait ‘til the weekend, and, unless you’re an elephant, you’re hosed. I get into trouble when I wait ‘til the end of the week to bang in my expenses. Every other day over an end-of-the–day beer is a best practice for me.</li>\n 	<li>If any other listeners have suggestions for Arnoud, please send them in or post them as comments to the website.</li>\n 	<li>Leo Vegoda sent me a <a href=\"http://www.abc15.com/content/news/phoenixmetro/central/story/Valley-couple-officially-charged-for-stealing/dKpV4Yry1EOFWqDe80dDrg.cspx\">link</a> to a story from the beginning of November about a Phoenix couple that’ve been stealing luggage from SkyHarbor airport since <em>2005</em>! The couple is accused of stealing nearly 1,000 items. After searching the couple’s 14-room home, a Phoenix detective said “there were suitcases everywhere. Floor to ceiling. Everywhere”.</li>\n 	<li>In his note, Leo pointed out an interesting fact in the story – “Most of the luggage is reportedly black and similar looking” – referring to my riff on replacing my squeaky wheeled bag – “not sure if going for black sounds like a good idea”</li>\n 	<li>It definitely wasn’t a good idea for a new colleague. Vishal was traveling to every week to DC for a project – the usual consulting grind – take the 6am American flight from O’Hare to Reagan National, catch the Metro to the client, crank all day, check into the hotel around 7, go out to dinner, and then hit the sack. So it was probably around 9:30 or 10pm when Vishal finally discovered that he’d pulled someone else’s black roller bag – same color, same model -- out of the overhead bin of the morning flight – some 12-13 hours ago.</li>\n 	<li>Sometime the next day, Vishal got reconnected with his black bag. He found the owner’s business card in one of the front pockets (an important travel tip for you new road warriors out there) and connected with him at lunch. Over the past two podcasts, we’ve talked about forgetting things in that moment of transition – when you’re leaving the plane or the rental car. Facing an overhead bin full of black bags after getting up at 3:30am to make the 6am flight… That afternoon, Vishal walked down to a tourist store in DC, bought himself a little red &amp; blue Obama bandana and tied it around the handle of his bag. Not a political statement. In this case, I think the “Change” on the bandana refers to fresh underwear.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a question, a story, a comment – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com, you can send me a Twitter message at @mpeacock, or you can post them on the web site at travelcommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/westexit-extra/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>On Condition of Anonymity</em></a> by the West Exit</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Holiday Travel Tips\n</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>A little over a year ago – episode #68 to be precise – I did a piece that I called “Road Warrior 201” where I skipped the usual tips – don’t check luggage unless you absolutely have to, wear loafers or slip-on shoes make security screening easier – and gave some of my intermediate level, I guess non-obvious tips. Listening to the holiday travel tips in the most recent <a href=\"http://indietravelpodcast.com/podcast/winter-vacation-holiday-travel-guide/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">episode</a> of Craig and Linda Martin’s Indie Travel Podcast – where they gave the TravelCommons podcast a nice shout-out – made me think about re-visiting the topic in time for the holiday travel season.</li>\n 	<li>Over my last couple of trips – returning from Seattle and this flight out to Phila – I paid attention to the families, the ones getting a jump on the Thanksgiving holiday. The families that made it through the terminal and through security were the ones who were paying attention. The parents took advantage of the time in the security lines and prepped their kids. They had the Nintendos already put away in the backpacks, their coats off and their shoe laces undone. They got their kids’ attention – putting away the Nintendos is probably a good help – told them what they needed to do, so that when the kids got to the screening station, they weren’t wandering around -- they were loading up their bins and ready to walk through the metal detector. Even the most hardened business traveler will give a family with young kids a break if they look like they’re trying. So the tip – make good use of the long security lines – get prepared.</li>\n 	<li>One of the “201” tips from last year’s podcast was to factor in the potential costs of a missed connection due to weather – when you’re responsible for room and board – when choosing between a connecting or a direct flight. If you tried, but you’re stuck with a connection, as we come into the winter season – at least in the Northern Hemisphere – give that connection a bit of space. In hubs like Denver or Dallas, airlines will offer connection times of as little as 45 minutes. Don’t take it! Think about it – that means you have 15 minutes to get off your plane packed with once-a-year holiday travelers, weave through the terminal packed with families wandering along four-a-breast, and find your gate before your flight begins to board. Any sort of traffic or weather delay and that 15 minutes is gone. Give yourself a holiday break and save the stress -- go for the 90-minute connection. Worst case, you have an extra 45 minutes to read a book or grab a beer. Cheap insurance against sleeping on the airport floor.</li>\n 	<li>Another stress reliever – if you’re on a direct flight or on the final leg to your designation, don’t sweat about getting your carry-on into the cabin. On winter holiday flights, if you’re seating area 3 or higher – odds are, between winter coats and packed flights – there’s no overhead bin space for you. Let the agent gate-check the bag for you. You won’t have to pay a checked bag fee and it’s very unlikely that they’ll lose your bag – it’s only traveling a couple hundred feet from the jet bridge to the luggage bay. Yes, it’ll add 30-45 minutes at the end of your trip waiting at the luggage carousel, but popping a vein in frustration will shorten your life at lot more than that.</li>\n 	<li>Another “201” tip from last year -- if you have to call an airline or hotel and you don’t have a special status 1K or Platinum number, choose the unpopular path on the phone tree. Travel companies don’t staff their customer service centers for peak loads – like the day when a Chicago blizzard cancels 400 flights. It’s too expensive. So on those days, you’ll wait forever for an agent if you’ve followed the typical path down the phone tree. On those days, choose the “Spanish” or “Int’l Travel” option because most everyone else is choosing English and domestic travel. Once you connect with someone, they’ll take care of you. They all work on the same systems in the same service centers.</li>\n 	<li>But, above all, be realistic – it’s going to be crowded. Steel yourself for it, get your inner karma tuned for it, and give yourself extra time. Figure out how much time it’ll take and add another 50%. At worst, you’ll have some extra time to watch the planes take off. But it’ll allow you to breathe a bit easier when the snow begins to fall</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/solace-medusa/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Subtle Vice</a> </em> by Solace</li>\n</ul>\n<strong><em>Frequent Flyer</em> -- The Documentary\n</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>In episode #78, we talked about the upcoming movie <em><a href=\"http://www.theupintheairmovie.com/\">Up In The Air</a></em>, where George Clooney stars as an extreme frequent flyer. Dave of the <a href=\"http://www.sandandtsunamis.com/\">Sand and Tsunamis</a> blog left a comment on the TravelCommons website pointing to a 20-minute documentary about “mileage junkies” called, fittingly enough, Frequent Flyer. I caught up with the creator, Gabriel Leigh, over Skype and talked to him about his film.</li>\n 	<li><em>Interview with Gabriel Leigh</em></li>\n 	<li>Gabriel’s documentary <em>Frequent Flyer</em> can be <a href=\"http://vimeo.com/7167640\">found</a> on the Vimeo video site. And on Weds, Nov 25th, a 13-minute <a href=\"http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/rough/2009/11/30000_feet_freq.html\">version</a> of the film will be on the PBS FrontLine site. Watch it – I think you’ll enjoy it.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"http://ad.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/show?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;bids=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #80</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>The bridge music is from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Magnatune</a>, the <em>we are not evil</em> label. <em>Miss America</em> by Beyond 7, <em>On Condition of Anonymity</em> by the West End, and <em>Subtle Vice</em> by Solace. You can find these and more at <a href=\"http://magnatune.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">magnatunes.com</a>.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or MP3 file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to @mpeacock on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_80.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #80 – Holiday Travel Tips; Frequent Flyer Documentary','','inherit','closed','closed','','198-revision-v1','','','2021-09-25 09:48:36','2021-09-25 14:48:36','',198,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3808',0,'revision','',0),
(3809,1,'2021-09-26 11:24:08','2021-09-26 16:24:08','Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago. In this episode, listeners add to our list of \"Road Warrior 201\" tips for this holiday travel season, I give my impressions of the new George Clooney movie <em>Up in the Air</em>,and gather up some stories about airport security into a Jeopardy-like topic I call \"Security Potpourri\". Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_81.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_81.mp3\"]\n<!--more-->\n\n<hr>\n\nHere are the transcript from TravelCommons podcast #81:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, Illinois, back in town after a quick trip to a very snowy Philadelphia. My wife was a bit iffy about this trip – “It would be very bad if you got trapped in Phila.” But while it was a miserable weekend for travelers coming out of the East Coast, watching the stream of Twitter updates from United Airlines on Sunday, I could see them bringing the airports back on line on Sunday. Come Monday, I think there was more snow on the sidewalks of Center City Phila than on the runways at the airport. Phila was lousy at snow removal when I lived there during the late ‘80’s and it didn’t look like they’d improved much since then.</li>\n 	<li>This week continues my string of flight weeks. I’ve been flying to somewhere every week since Labor Day week – the first week of September. Since the November episode, I’ve been bouncing across the country -- Phoenix, New York, LA and multiple visits to Philadelphia. I haven’t looked at my calendar, but I think at 4 months, this is the longest streak of flight weeks that I’ve had.</li>\n 	<li>In past TravelCommons episodes at this time of the year, I’d be saying that I was done traveling for the year and looking forward to lying around the house for 2 weeks. But this year is different. I won’t get a chance to break the streak – but at least it won’t be for work</li>\n 	<li>We’re going to burn off some frequent flier and frequent sleeper points the week after Christmas – heading to Honolulu and then to Kauai.</li>\n 	<li>We hadn’t really planned it. Then United launched a weird little “stealth” promotion. I got an e-mail saying that they had reserved a number of seats for mileage awards on the morning flight from Chicago to Honolulu on the 26th (Boxing Day for those in the Commonwealth) and on the afternoon flight returning on the 2nd. They were opening a special web portal at 9am on a certain day to take seat requests – 1st come, 1st serve. Then, 2 days later, they’d send you an e-mail letting you know how many seats you got, after which you had two days to call a special number and book the seats or lose them. Weird, but getting prime-time seats to Hawaii at 40,000 miles a seat – it seemed a good deal.</li>\n 	<li>And as it so happened, on the appointed day and the appointed hour when the portal opened, I was not traveling, but instead, sitting in a project room in front of my PC with a solid network connection. I put my request in for 4 seats and got ‘em. So, after Christmas, instead of scraping ice, we’ll be eating it – shaved ice, that is.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>I\'ll Be Home by Christmas</em> by <a href=\"http://www.katimac.com/kati_home.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Kati Mac</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Skye Ho, a long time T/C listener, pointed me to a <a href=\"http://www.theonion.com/content/news/united_airlines_exploring\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">story</a> in the Onion that I think is very apropos for the holiday travel season – “In its ongoing effort to cut transportation costs and boost profits, United Airlines announced Tuesday that it was exploring the feasibility of herding passengers into planes and stacking them like cordwood from floor to ceiling.”</li>\n 	<li>\"Research shows that we lose millions of dollars each month by having them all sit upright in individual seats for the duration of the flight,\" said CEO Glenn F. Tilton, speaking to reporters at United Airlines\' corporate headquarters. \"However, if we were to remove these seats, we could just sort of stack them all in there, one by one, as they file into the plane.\" My flight home last week from LAX and my flight out to PHL Monday morning felt like pilot tests for this concept.</li>\n 	<li>On the website, Ray Medina responded to Arnoud Heijnis’ request for help in managing expense receipts. Ray writes –\n<ul>\n 	<li>My company uses SAP for our expenses. I carry an envelope to every trip with the name of the customer. Throughout the day, I place the receipts in my wallet. Then, every night I enter the information into SAP and move the receipts from my wallet to the envelope so the wallet is cleared for the next day. When I return from my trip, I scan the receipts to submit to my company along with the SAP expense summary. After I submit everything, I put the envelope in my filling cabinet.</li>\n 	<li>It takes time to get the routine down, but once you have it, you have it!</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Thanks Ray. That’s pretty much my system, except that my company uses Oracle and I’m lucky enough to have a secretary who makes copies of the receipts for me. Other than that, my workflow is pretty much the same.</li>\n 	<li>Since the last episode, I’ve been trying <a href=\"http://www.evernote.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Evernote</a> on my iPhone – taking a picture of the receipt and tagging it with a couple of words. Actually, I think I lasted only about 3 days. Getting out of a cab, calculating a tip, getting my bags, checking to make sure that I didn’t forget anything (remember the thread we had going for a couple of episodes about forgetting stuff in these transitions)… taking a picture of the cab receipt was just about the last thing on my mind. I found it easier to just be disciplined about recording receipts every day or so.</li>\n 	<li>Building on last episode’s holiday travel tips, a number of listeners posted some good “201” tips – the next level up from Travel Tips 101</li>\n 	<li>Lori Humm writes\n<ul>\n 	<li>Don\'t just pick your seat when you book your ticket; pay attention to the size of the airplane. Most of the regional jets can\'t even fit a rollerbag briefcase. Every week I watch people shake their heads in disbelief as they board the plane and realize that there really is no room. And no, there\'s also no room under the seat. Carry the laptop separate in a padded sleeve and be willing to surrender the bag to gate check. (Full disclosure: I\'m the one that got my laptop stolen last year because I didn\'t grab it out of my bag at gate check.)</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Leo Vegoda writes\n<ul>\n 	<li>If you cannot get a direct flight but have a choice of transit airports then choose carefully. For instance, while in past years there might not have been much difference between changing at ORD or a New York area airport on a West coast to East coast flight, ORD is definitely the best choice this year. Fewer flights and a new runway mean its on-time rankings have risen quite a bit.</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Ian Morgan writes\n<ul>\n 	<li>I agree wholeheartedly with your point about allowing a bit of extra time at this time of the year. It still amazes me how many of my colleagues try to do a 40 minute connection in Frankfurt in December!!</li>\n 	<li>The simple thing that I always do is to Google the place I am going to see what\'s on. Not only can it be interesting to experience different local festivities if you have a bit of downtime, it can also make the difference between missing a flight or meeting or making it on time. If there is a large festival on in the city centre, or a demonstration planned, you are going to need to allow more time to get to/from your meeting/hotel etc. Indeed, when in Athens last January, I was aware that there were almost daily clashes with police in the city centre: I changed my hotel to a downtown location. At least this way it means that you aren\'t sat watching a cab meter clock up whatever local currency is in use, and you don\'t have to endure the cab driver\'s personal take on the situation after getting off a longhaul flight!</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Thanks to Lori, Leo and Ian for those tips –definitely 201-level “been there, done that so you don’t have to” –type advice. Good stuff.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a question, a story, a comment – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com, you can send me a Twitter message at @mpeacock, or you can post them on the web site at travelcommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://www.musicalley.com/music/listeners/artistdetails.php?BandHash=b962a3af0d6bd40bee9dfd260e23f37b\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Blue Christmas</em></a> by Tom Keiffer</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Up In the Airworld\n</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>In episode #78, we talked about the upcoming movie Up In The Air, where George Clooney stars as an extreme frequent flyer.</li>\n 	<li>Ever since the preview trailers hit the Web, people have been asking me — “Is this what your life is like?” So, a couple of Fridays ago, my wife and I found the one theater in Chicago showing Up in the Air (it’s in very limited release until Christmas).</li>\n 	<li>Watching the opening sequence — a montage of Ryan Bingham, the character played by George Clooney, going through his well-practiced drill of packing, checking in, and getting through security – grabbed me immediately. Pack up, zip zip zip, walk with purpose through the terminal, hit the premium check-in kiosk (which was a bit of an off-note, because any self-respecting road warrior prints their boarding pass at home so they can go directly to the security line), let the overcoat and blazer drop off your shoulders in one motion… It was like watching a replay of my Monday mornings -- but with a much more attractive version of me.</li>\n 	<li>As the movie continued, I started to pick up some niggling reality problems — international business class lie-flat seats on an MD-80, an underground tram in O’Hare, Bingham doesn’t forget his hotel room number, but every time we see him going into a hotel room (usually in the company of his love interest Alex, played by Vera Farmiga) we see him juggling a half-dozen room keys – you’d think he’d pitch them during check out like the rest of us. But, except for the fact that none of Bingham’s flights seem to be delayed, the film does a good job of capturing the highs and lows of frequent business travelers.</li>\n 	<li>Bingham’s lifestyle — 322 days on the road, leaving him “43 miserable days at home” in Omaha — is a common one for young road warriors. Bingham’s empty apartment in Omaha looks almost exactly like my first apartment in Dallas, except that Bingham’s has more stuff – I had a futon and a stereo in the living room, and a mattress and box spring on the floor.</li>\n 	<li>Most young frequent travelers enjoy this freedom for 3-5 years — I’ve had staff flying to, say, Amsterdam for the weekend instead going back to an empty apartment in Chicago, or, when on a project in Europe, use their home leave allowance to visit Morocco rather than their belongings in Cleveland. But eventually, they settle into relationships and a more settled way of life.</li>\n 	<li>I do know a number of guys, though, (and they are all men) who never make that transition. They continue to live their lives in the air, using business dinners and client meetings as stand-ins for more meaningful relationships; motion – a meeting in Orlando, a dinner in Tampa, another meeting in New York, a dinner in Philadelphia – as a reason for being – as Bingham says “we’re sharks, not swans.” Their biggest fear is the same as Bingham’s — that one day the music will stop, the travel will end, and that they’ll be in stuck in an empty apartment with no way out.</li>\n 	<li>In one of Bingham’s motivational talks, he says “Relationships are the heaviest components of your life”, counseling his audience to avoid them because they slow you down. You can’t live a life in the air when you’re weighed down by relationships.</li>\n 	<li>If the front half of the movie snaps with the efficiency of a frequent traveler, the back half shows the dark side. Millions of frequent flier miles later, Bingham is dragging himself through airports with a little less crispness, weighed down by disappointment and loneliness. The melancholy air that pervades the movie is real. It is the same sense of melancholy that rules airports late on a Friday night -- when the real-world Binghams are walking off their planes, looking forward to nothing more than their Monday morning flights out.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Walk A Thousand Miles </em> by <a href=\"http://www.matthewebel.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Matthew Ebel</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Security Potpourri\n</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>It’s the last episode of the year or maybe I’m getting a bit of an early jump on the “hang loose” ethos of Hawaii, but I had some bits-and -pieces of recent experiences with airport security that I can’t get “grow up” into a stand-alone topic, so instead, here’s a bit of a Jeopardy-like “potpourri” topic.</li>\n 	<li>Last year – July of 2008 to be exact – the Ponemon Institute – any relation to Pokemon? – issued a research report that claimed 12,000 laptops are lost every week in US airports. I wrote a <a href=\"http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2008/07/06/12000-laptops-lost-in-airports-every-week-hmmm/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">post</a> that was a bit skeptical of the numbers – “I’ve never lost a laptop,” I wrote, “and I don’t know anyone who has lost one in an airport. I know people who’ve had them stolen out of rental cars, who’ve left them in a plane’s overhead bin, but no one who has lost one in an airport.”</li>\n 	<li>That is, until one of my recent trips out of ORD when I watched an older gentleman in front of me in security put on his shoes and walk off to his gate. Repacking my briefcase, I saw his PC sitting there – lost and forlorn – in a grey bin.</li>\n 	<li>I know how it happened. He had unpacked everything on the X-ray belt and headed over to the metal detector, but was sent back because he still had his shoes on. I saw a yellow Lufthansa boarding pass in his hand and guessed that he was European – used to taking his belt off, but not his shoes. I had already started feeding my bags into the X-ray, so we slotted his shoes between my bins. On the other side of security, he must’ve been distracted by trying to find his shoes and forgot about his laptop.</li>\n 	<li>I flagged down a TSA screener, pointed out the forgotten PC and the gentleman walking away down the terminal. She ran after the man and brought him back. He looked at the PC, then opened his briefcase – nice PC sleeve, but it was missing a key component. The TSA screener looked at me and said, “Thank you soo much”. I sensed that I saved her the hassle of filling out a lot of paper work.</li>\n 	<li>I recently paid $30 to avoid my own TSA hassles. My Illinois driver’s license was up for renewal and, because I hadn’t run into anything in that past 4 years, all I had to do was send in a form and they’d mail me back a 4-year renewal sticker to put on the back of my license. Nice, convenient service – except that the last time I did that, I spent the next 4 years telling TSA screeners and rental car booth bodies that – no, my license hasn’t expired, flip it over and you’ll see the renewal. It’s not really their fault – they’re just reacting to an expiry date on the face of the license. But avoiding that explanation every week for the next 4 years… it seemed worth it to make the extra visit to the DMV. The only downside – other than the $30 – a really bad driver’s license picture that will stick with me for the next 4 years.</li>\n 	<li>And then, on one of my recent trips to LAX, I was standing outside Terminal 7 waiting for the Avis bus, and an airport cop tells me to “move down a bit”. There’s a suspicious package sitting on the bench nearby. Suspicious? How far down did I need to move? The cops didn’t look too worried – they were standing right by it. Their dog didn’t look like he was reacting to anything. So I slid down half the island behind a big concrete truss – far enough, I figured, to miss the major force of any blast, but not so far that I’d miss the rental bus.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"http://ad.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/show?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;bids=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\"><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #81</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>The bridge music is from <a href=\"http://music.mevio.com\">Mevio’s Music Alley</a></li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or MP3 file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to @mpeacock on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_81.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #81 – More Travel Tips; Up in The Air; Security Stories','','inherit','closed','closed','','219-autosave-v1','','','2021-09-26 11:24:08','2021-09-26 16:24:08','',219,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3809',0,'revision','',0),
(3810,1,'2021-09-26 11:24:57','2021-09-26 16:24:57','Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago. In this episode, listeners add to our list of \"Road Warrior 201\" tips for this holiday travel season, I give my impressions of the new George Clooney movie <em>Up in the Air</em>, and gather up some stories about airport security into a Jeopardy-like topic I call \"Security Potpourri\". Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_81.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.<!--more-->\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the transcript from TravelCommons podcast #81:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, Illinois, back in town after a quick trip to a very snowy Philadelphia. My wife was a bit iffy about this trip – “It would be very bad if you got trapped in Phila.” But while it was a miserable weekend for travelers coming out of the East Coast, watching the stream of Twitter updates from United Airlines on Sunday, I could see them bringing the airports back on line on Sunday. Come Monday, I think there was more snow on the sidewalks of Center City Phila than on the runways at the airport. Phila was lousy at snow removal when I lived there during the late ‘80’s and it didn’t look like they’d improved much since then.</li>\n 	<li>This week continues my string of flight weeks. I’ve been flying to somewhere every week since Labor Day week – the first week of September. Since the November episode, I’ve been bouncing across the country -- Phoenix, New York, LA and multiple visits to Philadelphia. I haven’t looked at my calendar, but I think at 4 months, this is the longest streak of flight weeks that I’ve had.</li>\n 	<li>In past TravelCommons episodes at this time of the year, I’d be saying that I was done traveling for the year and looking forward to lying around the house for 2 weeks. But this year is different. I won’t get a chance to break the streak – but at least it won’t be for work</li>\n 	<li>We’re going to burn off some frequent flier and frequent sleeper points the week after Christmas – heading to Honolulu and then to Kauai.</li>\n 	<li>We hadn’t really planned it. Then United launched a weird little “stealth” promotion. I got an e-mail saying that they had reserved a number of seats for mileage awards on the morning flight from Chicago to Honolulu on the 26th (Boxing Day for those in the Commonwealth) and on the afternoon flight returning on the 2nd. They were opening a special web portal at 9am on a certain day to take seat requests – 1st come, 1st serve. Then, 2 days later, they’d send you an e-mail letting you know how many seats you got, after which you had two days to call a special number and book the seats or lose them. Weird, but getting prime-time seats to Hawaii at 40,000 miles a seat – it seemed a good deal.</li>\n 	<li>And as it so happened, on the appointed day and the appointed hour when the portal opened, I was not traveling, but instead, sitting in a project room in front of my PC with a solid network connection. I put my request in for 4 seats and got ‘em. So, after Christmas, instead of scraping ice, we’ll be eating it – shaved ice, that is.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>I\'ll Be Home by Christmas</em> by <a href=\"http://www.katimac.com/kati_home.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Kati Mac</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Skye Ho, a long time T/C listener, pointed me to a <a href=\"http://www.theonion.com/content/news/united_airlines_exploring\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">story</a> in the Onion that I think is very apropos for the holiday travel season – “In its ongoing effort to cut transportation costs and boost profits, United Airlines announced Tuesday that it was exploring the feasibility of herding passengers into planes and stacking them like cordwood from floor to ceiling.”</li>\n 	<li>\"Research shows that we lose millions of dollars each month by having them all sit upright in individual seats for the duration of the flight,\" said CEO Glenn F. Tilton, speaking to reporters at United Airlines\' corporate headquarters. \"However, if we were to remove these seats, we could just sort of stack them all in there, one by one, as they file into the plane.\" My flight home last week from LAX and my flight out to PHL Monday morning felt like pilot tests for this concept.</li>\n 	<li>On the website, Ray Medina responded to Arnoud Heijnis’ request for help in managing expense receipts. Ray writes –\n<ul>\n 	<li>My company uses SAP for our expenses. I carry an envelope to every trip with the name of the customer. Throughout the day, I place the receipts in my wallet. Then, every night I enter the information into SAP and move the receipts from my wallet to the envelope so the wallet is cleared for the next day. When I return from my trip, I scan the receipts to submit to my company along with the SAP expense summary. After I submit everything, I put the envelope in my filling cabinet.</li>\n 	<li>It takes time to get the routine down, but once you have it, you have it!</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Thanks Ray. That’s pretty much my system, except that my company uses Oracle and I’m lucky enough to have a secretary who makes copies of the receipts for me. Other than that, my workflow is pretty much the same.</li>\n 	<li>Since the last episode, I’ve been trying <a href=\"http://www.evernote.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Evernote</a> on my iPhone – taking a picture of the receipt and tagging it with a couple of words. Actually, I think I lasted only about 3 days. Getting out of a cab, calculating a tip, getting my bags, checking to make sure that I didn’t forget anything (remember the thread we had going for a couple of episodes about forgetting stuff in these transitions)… taking a picture of the cab receipt was just about the last thing on my mind. I found it easier to just be disciplined about recording receipts every day or so.</li>\n 	<li>Building on last episode’s holiday travel tips, a number of listeners posted some good “201” tips – the next level up from Travel Tips 101</li>\n 	<li>Lori Humm writes\n<ul>\n 	<li>Don\'t just pick your seat when you book your ticket; pay attention to the size of the airplane. Most of the regional jets can\'t even fit a rollerbag briefcase. Every week I watch people shake their heads in disbelief as they board the plane and realize that there really is no room. And no, there\'s also no room under the seat. Carry the laptop separate in a padded sleeve and be willing to surrender the bag to gate check. (Full disclosure: I\'m the one that got my laptop stolen last year because I didn\'t grab it out of my bag at gate check.)</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Leo Vegoda writes\n<ul>\n 	<li>If you cannot get a direct flight but have a choice of transit airports then choose carefully. For instance, while in past years there might not have been much difference between changing at ORD or a New York area airport on a West coast to East coast flight, ORD is definitely the best choice this year. Fewer flights and a new runway mean its on-time rankings have risen quite a bit.</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Ian Morgan writes\n<ul>\n 	<li>I agree wholeheartedly with your point about allowing a bit of extra time at this time of the year. It still amazes me how many of my colleagues try to do a 40 minute connection in Frankfurt in December!!</li>\n 	<li>The simple thing that I always do is to Google the place I am going to see what\'s on. Not only can it be interesting to experience different local festivities if you have a bit of downtime, it can also make the difference between missing a flight or meeting or making it on time. If there is a large festival on in the city centre, or a demonstration planned, you are going to need to allow more time to get to/from your meeting/hotel etc. Indeed, when in Athens last January, I was aware that there were almost daily clashes with police in the city centre: I changed my hotel to a downtown location. At least this way it means that you aren\'t sat watching a cab meter clock up whatever local currency is in use, and you don\'t have to endure the cab driver\'s personal take on the situation after getting off a longhaul flight!</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Thanks to Lori, Leo and Ian for those tips –definitely 201-level “been there, done that so you don’t have to” –type advice. Good stuff.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a question, a story, a comment – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com, you can send me a Twitter message at @mpeacock, or you can post them on the web site at travelcommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://www.musicalley.com/music/listeners/artistdetails.php?BandHash=b962a3af0d6bd40bee9dfd260e23f37b\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Blue Christmas</em></a> by Tom Keiffer</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Up In the Airworld\n</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>In episode #78, we talked about the upcoming movie Up In The Air, where George Clooney stars as an extreme frequent flyer.</li>\n 	<li>Ever since the preview trailers hit the Web, people have been asking me — “Is this what your life is like?” So, a couple of Fridays ago, my wife and I found the one theater in Chicago showing Up in the Air (it’s in very limited release until Christmas).</li>\n 	<li>Watching the opening sequence — a montage of Ryan Bingham, the character played by George Clooney, going through his well-practiced drill of packing, checking in, and getting through security – grabbed me immediately. Pack up, zip zip zip, walk with purpose through the terminal, hit the premium check-in kiosk (which was a bit of an off-note, because any self-respecting road warrior prints their boarding pass at home so they can go directly to the security line), let the overcoat and blazer drop off your shoulders in one motion… It was like watching a replay of my Monday mornings -- but with a much more attractive version of me.</li>\n 	<li>As the movie continued, I started to pick up some niggling reality problems — international business class lie-flat seats on an MD-80, an underground tram in O’Hare, Bingham doesn’t forget his hotel room number, but every time we see him going into a hotel room (usually in the company of his love interest Alex, played by Vera Farmiga) we see him juggling a half-dozen room keys – you’d think he’d pitch them during check out like the rest of us. But, except for the fact that none of Bingham’s flights seem to be delayed, the film does a good job of capturing the highs and lows of frequent business travelers.</li>\n 	<li>Bingham’s lifestyle — 322 days on the road, leaving him “43 miserable days at home” in Omaha — is a common one for young road warriors. Bingham’s empty apartment in Omaha looks almost exactly like my first apartment in Dallas, except that Bingham’s has more stuff – I had a futon and a stereo in the living room, and a mattress and box spring on the floor.</li>\n 	<li>Most young frequent travelers enjoy this freedom for 3-5 years — I’ve had staff flying to, say, Amsterdam for the weekend instead going back to an empty apartment in Chicago, or, when on a project in Europe, use their home leave allowance to visit Morocco rather than their belongings in Cleveland. But eventually, they settle into relationships and a more settled way of life.</li>\n 	<li>I do know a number of guys, though, (and they are all men) who never make that transition. They continue to live their lives in the air, using business dinners and client meetings as stand-ins for more meaningful relationships; motion – a meeting in Orlando, a dinner in Tampa, another meeting in New York, a dinner in Philadelphia – as a reason for being – as Bingham says “we’re sharks, not swans.” Their biggest fear is the same as Bingham’s — that one day the music will stop, the travel will end, and that they’ll be in stuck in an empty apartment with no way out.</li>\n 	<li>In one of Bingham’s motivational talks, he says “Relationships are the heaviest components of your life”, counseling his audience to avoid them because they slow you down. You can’t live a life in the air when you’re weighed down by relationships.</li>\n 	<li>If the front half of the movie snaps with the efficiency of a frequent traveler, the back half shows the dark side. Millions of frequent flier miles later, Bingham is dragging himself through airports with a little less crispness, weighed down by disappointment and loneliness. The melancholy air that pervades the movie is real. It is the same sense of melancholy that rules airports late on a Friday night -- when the real-world Binghams are walking off their planes, looking forward to nothing more than their Monday morning flights out.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Walk A Thousand Miles </em> by <a href=\"http://www.matthewebel.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Matthew Ebel</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Security Potpourri\n</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>It’s the last episode of the year or maybe I’m getting a bit of an early jump on the “hang loose” ethos of Hawaii, but I had some bits-and -pieces of recent experiences with airport security that I can’t get “grow up” into a stand-alone topic, so instead, here’s a bit of a Jeopardy-like “potpourri” topic.</li>\n 	<li>Last year – July of 2008 to be exact – the Ponemon Institute – any relation to Pokemon? – issued a research report that claimed 12,000 laptops are lost every week in US airports. I wrote a <a href=\"http://boardingarea.com/blogs/travelcommons/2008/07/06/12000-laptops-lost-in-airports-every-week-hmmm/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">post</a> that was a bit skeptical of the numbers – “I’ve never lost a laptop,” I wrote, “and I don’t know anyone who has lost one in an airport. I know people who’ve had them stolen out of rental cars, who’ve left them in a plane’s overhead bin, but no one who has lost one in an airport.”</li>\n 	<li>That is, until one of my recent trips out of ORD when I watched an older gentleman in front of me in security put on his shoes and walk off to his gate. Repacking my briefcase, I saw his PC sitting there – lost and forlorn – in a grey bin.</li>\n 	<li>I know how it happened. He had unpacked everything on the X-ray belt and headed over to the metal detector, but was sent back because he still had his shoes on. I saw a yellow Lufthansa boarding pass in his hand and guessed that he was European – used to taking his belt off, but not his shoes. I had already started feeding my bags into the X-ray, so we slotted his shoes between my bins. On the other side of security, he must’ve been distracted by trying to find his shoes and forgot about his laptop.</li>\n 	<li>I flagged down a TSA screener, pointed out the forgotten PC and the gentleman walking away down the terminal. She ran after the man and brought him back. He looked at the PC, then opened his briefcase – nice PC sleeve, but it was missing a key component. The TSA screener looked at me and said, “Thank you soo much”. I sensed that I saved her the hassle of filling out a lot of paper work.</li>\n 	<li>I recently paid $30 to avoid my own TSA hassles. My Illinois driver’s license was up for renewal and, because I hadn’t run into anything in that past 4 years, all I had to do was send in a form and they’d mail me back a 4-year renewal sticker to put on the back of my license. Nice, convenient service – except that the last time I did that, I spent the next 4 years telling TSA screeners and rental car booth bodies that – no, my license hasn’t expired, flip it over and you’ll see the renewal. It’s not really their fault – they’re just reacting to an expiry date on the face of the license. But avoiding that explanation every week for the next 4 years… it seemed worth it to make the extra visit to the DMV. The only downside – other than the $30 – a really bad driver’s license picture that will stick with me for the next 4 years.</li>\n 	<li>And then, on one of my recent trips to LAX, I was standing outside Terminal 7 waiting for the Avis bus, and an airport cop tells me to “move down a bit”. There’s a suspicious package sitting on the bench nearby. Suspicious? How far down did I need to move? The cops didn’t look too worried – they were standing right by it. Their dog didn’t look like he was reacting to anything. So I slid down half the island behind a big concrete truss – far enough, I figured, to miss the major force of any blast, but not so far that I’d miss the rental bus.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <img src=\"http://ad.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/show?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;bids=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\" alt=\"icon\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" /><em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #81</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>The bridge music is from <a href=\"http://music.mevio.com\">Mevio’s Music Alley</a></li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or MP3 file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to @mpeacock on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_81.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #81 – More Travel Tips; Up in The Air; Security Stories','','inherit','closed','closed','','219-revision-v1','','','2021-09-26 11:24:57','2021-09-26 16:24:57','',219,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3810',0,'revision','',0),
(3812,1,'2021-09-26 11:28:06','2021-09-26 16:28:06','The way I travel has changed significantly with my New Year\'s career change. Moving from consulting to the corporate world, I no longer bounce across the country. Instead, I spend a week in one of my company\'s three offices. This has required a bit of an attitude adjustment with regards to travel. The new job also drove me to reexamine my airline and hotel loyalties. Looks like my air mileage and hotel nights will be landing someplace new. In this episode, we also continue the thread on the best ways to track travel expenses, and a listener writes about how easy it is to do business with Southwest. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_82.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the transcript from TravelCommons podcast #82:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, Illinois. Sorry for the long delay between episodes, but I started a new job at the beginning of the year – after 17 years of consulting, I got a real job as a CIO – and I’m just beginning to dry off after drinking through a firehose for the past 6 weeks. I’m also in my 6th month of straight travel – I’ve gotten on a plane every week since Labor Day, but next week I’ll take a break, skip ORD for a week after 6 months. Now I will say that one week of that was self-inflicted – I mentioned in the last episode that I cashed in some frequent flier and frequent sleeper points to take the family to Hawaii for a week. Turned out to be a great decision – it was 75 degrees in Kauai, 7 degrees in Chicago. Since the beginning of the year, though, I’ve been back in full travel mode -- Philadelphia, DC, and multiple visits to Phoenix , Dallas, and South Florida.</li>\n 	<li>In January, I almost got trapped in Phoenix due to the huge rain storms that swept in from California. I was sitting in a Scottsdale Starbucks when an automated voice from United rang me up to tell me that my 3:30pm flight to ORD was cancelled. I called up the Global Services desk and got rebooked onto the earlier flight – the 1:20pm – and managed to keep my 1st class upgrade. A bit of an annoyance – I had to shuffle my afternoon calendar – but it was manageable.</li>\n 	<li>I get to the airport and ask gate agent -- why the cancellation? The 1:20 was now the last flight out. They’re forecasting 40 mph sustained winds and 70 mph gusts to hit town at 2pm. The agents tell us we need to board quickly so that we can get out before the weather hits. But then, nothing. We sit and sit. No boarding, no announcements. Oh, wouldn’t this be great. A January flight from PHX to ORD is cancelled for weather – in PHX! Finally, we board.</li>\n 	<li>But then, at the last minute, another delay. The caterer didn’t load enough lunches for everyone in 1st class. The sky is getting darker. A half-dozen of us volunteer to skip the rubber chicken – just get this flight off the ground. Finally the door closes and, as near as I can tell, we were the last flight off the ground before they closed the airport. Downgrading to the Thai chicken wrap from the back of the plane was a small price to pay for making it home that night.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/unkai-unkai/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Bahar-Un</a></em> by Un-Kai</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>We’ve had a bit of a thread over the past few episodes on methods to track travel expenses and manage the receipts. Around Heijnis started it with an e-mail wondering if there’s anything better than a set of envelopes or colored folders. Up to now, no one has come up with anything better.”</li>\n 	<li>However, I just started using on online travel &amp; expense tool called Concur Solutions which has moved me away from folders. Now, I don’t think it’s a single person solution – I think your whole company has to be on it – but if you’re on it, it seems to be pretty good. First, you use it to book your travel – airline, hotel, and car – which allows the system to create an expense report from your itinerary – automatically putting in your airline ticket, and place holders for your hotel and rental car. They also have can pull in the e-receipts that most hotel chains now set up, which is a huge timesaver if you work for one of those obsessive-compulsive companies that wants you to separately itemize room charges and tax across each night of your stay. Concur does that automatically when it sucks in the hotel receipt. It also pulls in electronic Amex receipts which you can drag and drop into the expense report.</li>\n 	<li>They also have an iPhone app that allows you to immediately record an expenditure and upload it -- complete with a picture of the receipt from the iPhone camera if you want – so that you can drag and drop it into your expense report. I don’t know what it costs our company, but it’s a pretty sweet system.</li>\n 	<li>I was thinking about this when I saw a review for another one of those travel scanners on Gadling. There were all sorts of comments about how great it is to be able to immediately scan your receipts so you don’t lose them… But I dunno, given that most of us are carrying around multi-mega pixel cameras in our pockets – embedded in our cell phones – I just don’t get the rationale for schlepping around another hundred dollar piece of hardware. If the multi-colored folder system doesn’t do it for you – and it didn’t seem to for the many Gadling commenters who extolled the praises of scanning receipts – then take a picture of it –shoot it on a white sheet of paper if the aesthetics of, say, a wood bar bother you -- and sync it back to your PC or do it across the network with any number of iPhone or Blackberry apps. I’m personally amazed that people are still buying those travel scanners.</li>\n 	<li>Mika Pyyhkala sent me a note singing the praises of Southwest. First, he loves how easy it is to gift someone with a Southwest award\n<ul>\n 	<li>I just had the best experience. I booked the flight I thought my friend wanted from PHX to IAD, and sent him the PNR locator. He could then log in himself under Travel Tools on the WN web site, and either view or change the itinerary to times that were more convenient. Imagine what the process would be on say UA, US, CO, or DL.</li>\n 	<li>While the media harps on bag fees, change/cancel fees are ****exponentially*** more money and more important to me. I probably check a bag 3 times a year, but often need to change my tickets. The media does not give Southwest credit for their consumer friendly change/cancellation rules, or point out how unfriendly the legacy carriers’ rules are in regards to that.</li>\n 	<li>I travel at least twice a month from BOS to Washington. I’ve taken 20 flights since Southwest launched the service and had only one incident where a gate agent was rude to me. I sent in a complaint and they gave me a voucher for the entire value of the ticket. And they didn’t just send a form letter -- it sounded like they actually investigated the issue I raised.</li>\n 	<li>I am knocking on wood that writing this does not now bring me bad luck.</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Mika, I have to agree with you on Southwest’s treatment. Having suffered through dealing with the crankiest set of AA gate agents and flight attendants that I’ve had in a while, it makes me appreciate the spirit and pleasantness of just about every Southwest employee I’ve encountered. My mother is a big fan of theirs too. Living in Denver, she was a loyal Frontier flyer until I gave her a Southwest award of mine that was about to expire. She came off that trip singing their praises and immediately switched her loyalties to Southwest. For Southwest, not a bad return on an free trip.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a question, a story, a comment – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com, you can send me a Twitter message at @mpeacock, or you can post them on the web site at travelcommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/solace-opium/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Opium Head</em></a> by Solace</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Changing the Way I Travel\n</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Moving from consulting to a corporate job is a significant change in so many ways -- I’m not even going to try and list them all here – but the way I travel is one of the biggest changes. My new company has offices in Phoenix, AZ, Dallas, and Naples, FL – but because of personal reasons – my son is finishing up high school, trying to sell a house in this market – we agreed that I wouldn’t move from Chicago right away. As the CEO said to me, “Mark, you travel all the time as it is, why change things?”</li>\n 	<li>So while I keep traveling, the way I travel is very different. As a partner in a consulting firm, I managed multiple project teams and sold new business. This meant usually travelled to multiple places a week. At the front of each episode, I give a quick rundown of the places I’ve been since the last episode, sometimes highlighting an especially whacky itinerary – like the time I flew from Chicago to London for a day meeting – flew to Heathrow overnight, took a lunch meeting, and then hopped the afternoon flight back to Chicago – and then continued on to Denver where I drove through a blizzard to facilitate a two-day workshop. And there have been more than a handful of weeks where I spent the front half of it on the East Coast and the back half on the West Coast.</li>\n 	<li>But now, I’m traveling to one place – one of our offices – for 3-4 days at a time. You’d think that this would be less stressful – and I guess it is in some ways – not as much packing &amp; unpacking of my bag, not as many TSA lines to grit my teeth through, not as many flight delays… But the act of travel – going to and from airports, flying, navigating to new places – fills the time.</li>\n 	<li>Without that, returning to the same hotel every night, there is empty time to fill. Work fills some of it. And you can only watch so much TV. Indeed, the travel is more like a commute, but without your family at the back end. The one saving grace of travel – experiencing new places, seeing new things – goes away.</li>\n 	<li>But talking to others about this, I appear to be one of the few people who likes to change things up on business travel. At a dinner this week, one guy talked about a recent stint of commuting between Dallas and Hong Kong 3 weeks out of 4. “Every trip, I flew the same flight, sat in the same seat, stayed at the same hotel and tried to get the same room.” Wow! We’ve talked about travelers who get in ruts before, but this guy had dug his deep and furnished it!</li>\n 	<li>But he had his reason – “After a while, the flight attendants, the hotel clerks got to know me. They’d greet me by name – ‘Hi Mr Jenkins’ – invite me to board early, upgrade my room, give me a free drink. It was nice.” In other words, he’d assembled a bit of a replacement family – some familiar faces to greet him at the end of his commute. Kinda the “Cheers” syndrome – you wanna be where everyone knows your name.</li>\n 	<li>It’s a common desire. One colleague had stayed for over a year straight at the Trumbull, CT Marriott, working on a call center project at a nearby corporation. She got the full “Cheers” treatment – greetings, upgrades, leaving laundry over the weekend, Christmas cards from the front desk staff. She was still getting cards two years later – “Come back; we miss you”. Heartfelt or kinda stalker creepy? You judge.</li>\n 	<li>I dunno – maybe I’m a bit of a misanthrope, but I’m happy with the family I’ve got. I use Skype videochat when the phone isn’t cutting it. And if I’m not getting to see new places, I’ll dig a little deeper into these places I’ll see again and again. In Phoenix, it’s been local sports – saw my first Fiesta Bowl and caught a local hockey game – which was interesting because there were more fans for the Buffalo Sabers than the home town Coyotes. Baseball spring training opens next week, so maybe I’ll get to catch a Cubs or White Sox game.</li>\n 	<li>In Florida, I make it a point to drive to a beach at least one evening. I take my shoes off and walk through the sand a bit. Haven’t gotten in the water yet, but I will soon.</li>\n 	<li>o So while the litany of destinations at the beginning of the show will get a bit more repetitive, I’ll guess I’ll have to work a bit harder to keep my travel from getting dull. If a hotel clerk greets me by name before looking up my reservation, I know it’s time to move on down the road.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Spaces</em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/fuzz-sunset/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">General Fuzz</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>New Year, New Programs\n</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>At the start of each New Year, I take a look at my airline mileage and hotel “frequent sleeper” programs and, because all the elite “counters” for miles and nights have reset to zero, decide where I’m going to invest my time. Because for frequent travelers, it is an investment -- the elite status is just as important – if not more so – than the actual points or miles.</li>\n 	<li>Most of the time, I let things ride – enjoy the status I have while building for the next year. Probably the last big change I made was swinging from American to United after I hit 2 million miles on AA. Up to that point, I had always split my miles between American and United, maintaining mid-tier status on each – Platinum on AA and Premiere Exec on UA. But hitting 2 million miles on AA meant lifetime Platinum status. Since there was nothing to lose on AA, I doubled down on UA – made 1K my first couple of years and then made Global Services in 2009.</li>\n 	<li>But now with my new job comes new destinations. I’m no longer regularly traveling to LGA, DCA, and SFO. Instead, I’m heading to DFW, Ft Myers, and PHX. ORD to DFW is AA’s trunk line – they practically have flights every hour between their two big hubs. No surprise there. But looking at Ft Myers, the only non-stops from Chicago are AA from ORD and SWA from MDW. I was surprised that there aren’t any UA non-stops. Hmmmm… Even AA’s ORD-PHX schedule is better than UA’s. I didn’t notice it when I was flying the big city routes, but it looks like UA got more aggressive than AA about taking out flight capacity. So since the New Year, I’ve swung my mileage over to AA and am working on Executive Platinum. Of course, UA made the decision a bit easier when they didn’t renew my GS status, even after I flew over 180,000 actual miles – or as the pros call it – BIS – butt-in-seat miles.</li>\n 	<li>The new job is even affecting my hotel choices. The hotels most convenient to my offices – the closest and the ones where we have the best rates – are in the Hilton chain – Hilton Suites and Doubletrees. By the end of January I had already hit Hilton Honors Silver and am on a fast track to Gold. I’ve been Marriott Platinum for 7 or 8 years, but it looks like that too will be changing.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #82</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>The bridge music is from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com\">Magnatune</a></li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or MP3 file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to @mpeacock on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_82.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #82 - Changing My Travel; New Mileage Programs in a New Year','','inherit','closed','closed','','228-revision-v1','','','2021-09-26 11:28:06','2021-09-26 16:28:06','',228,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3812',0,'revision','',0),
(3813,1,'2021-09-26 11:29:19','2021-09-26 16:29:19','Returning from a week in India, I started recording this podcast in the business class toilet of an AA flight from Delhi to Chicago. For the sake of listeners\' ears and the bladders of fellow passengers, I finished it in the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago. We talk about how Twitter has led me to some great meals while on the road, a poor experience with GoGo in-flight Wi-Fi, and how ATMs revolutionized business travel. I talk about my experiences inside the \"travel bubble\" while traveling in India, and compare my HP netbook to my Apple iPad. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_83.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n[sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_83.mp3\"]\n<!--more-->\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the transcript from TravelCommons podcast #83:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you today from Business class toilet on an American Airlines 777 flying somewhere north of the Iceland volcano, flying back from my first trip to India. After spending 2 days each in Guragon, Pune, and Bangalore, I got on this non-stop flight back to Chicago – left Dehli at quarter past midnight Thursday night and some 14 hours later, get into ORD at around 4:30 am Friday morning. I’ll talk more about my India trip in the first topic, but now, I’m going to get out of the john before someone thinks I’m doing something strange in here – not that recording a podcast in the bathroom is normal for any except me.</li>\n 	<li>OK, I’m back in the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago – landed safely and am now spending the day trying to get my body clock reset. The first time I flew home from Asia, I arrived before I took off – left Tokyo around 5pm and got into SFO around noon. Made my brain hurt a little bit trying to figure it out. Now, I just roll with it. Flying to Europe, I make a point to get on the destination time right when I sit in the airplane seat. Flying to Asia, that takes too much work. I just sleep when I want and eat when I want and leave it to my iPhone alarm to help me power through the consequences.</li>\n 	<li>One more quick India note – I was standing in line to board my return flight – we had to run the gauntlet in the jetway of repeated security questions (“Has your carry-on been out of your possession at any time”) and another wanding and pat-down -- and now waiting to board when I heard a guy describing the scene to someone on the phone. It took about 20 seconds for it to hit me – Hey, I recognize that voice. I turned around and about a half-dozen people back was a guy I had worked with 6 years ago. Now I’m used to running into friends and former colleagues at ORD and LGA, but DEL? It’s either a really small world, or I know way too many people who fly.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/curl-complex/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">We Are Complex</a></em> by Curl</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>We’ve talked in past episodes about ways to find good restaurants on the road. I’ve mentioned Chowhound.com – a popular foodie forum – as one of my main tools. But Twitter has also become very useful. The last time I was in LA, I couldn’t figure out what I wanted to do for dinner. I tweeted – “What should I eat – sushi or In ‘n Out Burger?” – really thinking out loud to my family than anyone else, and then one follower replied “Try <a href=\"http://kogibbq.com/\">Kogi BBQ truck</a>”. What a great idea! I had read about these guys a few months prior – some guys running 3 taco trucks doing Korean-Mexican fusion food – like kim chi quesadillas – and tweet every day the locations of their trucks. I hit Twitter, found the closest truck – a 30-minute drive – and headed out. I found it and queued up with about two dozen other Angelenos past an Arco gas station, ordered up some tacos, and ate them on the hood of my car. It was great – and I wouldn’t have thought about it without someone responding to my tweet.</li>\n 	<li>The best meal on my last trip to Seattle was courtesy of Twitter – <a href=\"http://seat6d.com/\">Denrael</a> saw where I was and suggested the <a href=\"http://www.steelheaddiner.com/\">Steelhead Diner</a> and I ended up with another great meal. I think this is how the whole social media thing is supposed to work.</li>\n 	<li>Another thing that’s worked for me this year is hand-washing. When all the panic about H1N1 virus started up, I ignored most of it – except for the talk about the benefits of extended hand-washing. 20 seconds with soap and water, they said, was more effective than those little bottles of Purell. OK, I decided to give it a go – investing a bit more time under the faucet. One day, at the beginning of April, as Chicago began to warm up, it came to me – I haven’t had a cold this season. For the first time in as long as I can remember, in spite of doing the same amount of cohabitating metal tubes with sick people, inhaling their recycled exhales, I didn’t get sick. I guess those airplane HEPA filters work after all.</li>\n 	<li>I broke down and tried GoGo’s in-flight WiFi a few months ago. I’d like to say that I did it purely from an investigative standpoint – so that I could report on it to you, my podcast listeners. But actually, I had a half day in Phoenix, was racing to make the flight, and still had a bunch of e-mail that I wanted to get out before the end of the day, so rather than queueing up 25 e-mails and then blasting them out when I hit ORD, I ponied up for GoGo. So here’s my bottom line -- Gogo inflight wi-fi is a pig, a slow one. And it’s not so much the bandwidth to the ground, but just the response time from the web server in the plane – airborne.gogoinflight.com. Maybe because it was a full plane with lots of laptop-toting professionals needing to get on-line in the middle of the day, but still, come on. When I first connected to the Buy page, the price was $10 for the flight. But that in-plane server timed out, so I had to start again from the start – great user experience. Even better -- the second time I got to the Buy page, it was $13. I haven’t used GoGo since.</li>\n 	<li>Maybe it was a goofy day, though. On that same flight, the guy next to me tried to buy a cheese-&amp;-cracker snack with cash. And then was – should I say it? No, I shouldn’t… but I will – he was “cheesed off” that American no longer takes cash. I was amazed -- when was the last time this guy flew?</li>\n 	<li>And finally, listening this week to <a href=\"http://www.theworld.org/2010/05/25/tech-podcast-saving-our-bits-in-the-swiss-fort-knox/\">The World’s Technology Podcast</a> , I heard about the death of John Shepherd-Barron, the inventor of the ATM – the automated banking machine. For the business traveler, the ATM revolutionized our lives, as much, if not more than mobile phones. I remember traveling before ATMs were ubiquitous. You’d pay American Express a chunk of change for a wad of $100 traveler’s checks, and then spend a good bit of your trip getting ripped off by currency exchanges in the airports, and cutting out of meetings in mid-day Fridays to hunt down a bank before it closed so you would have some cash for the weekend. It took a lot of planning ahead. Contrast that with this last weekend. On Sunday, I woke up in Guragon, wandered over to the mall next door, found a Citibank ATM a couple hundred feet from the front door, punched a few keys and out popped 10 crisp 500 rupee notes. And without taking much note, I now had a bit of cash with which I could buy a cup of masala tea. Thanks, John.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a question, a story, a comment – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com, you can send me a Twitter message at @mpeacock, or you can post them on the web site at travelcommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/quist-lucidity/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Crazy</em></a> by Beth Quist</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Business Travel in India\n</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Long-time listener <a href=\"http://mlw.me\">Marc Loehrwald</a> came back to me in the midst of my Tweet stream from India asking “Are you collecting some stories for a new Travelcommons episode?” Even without trying, I came back with some.</li>\n 	<li>Deplaning at Indira Gandhi Int’l airport – IRI to the locals – was pretty uneventful, though the Immigration officer did comment that I looked much younger in my passport picture. After a 15-hour flight, I’d have been surprised if it was any other way. I told him “it’s not the years; it’s the mileage”, but I think he was a bit young to catch the Indiana Jones reference.</li>\n 	<li>Getting out at our hotel, I had the first of many security screenings during my stay. At every hotel and major building, I walked through a metal detector, was wanded down, and had my briefcase X-rayed. The whole exercise took 90 seconds and the employees were exceedingly polite (because they worked for the hotel, not an overblown government agency), but given what happened in Mumbai a year and a half ago, the security was understandable.</li>\n 	<li>Sunday afternoon, I was back at IRI, but this time at the domestic terminal for a flight on Kingfisher Airlines – yes, owned by the same person as Kingfisher Beer, but no, it’s not served on board; all domestic flights are non-alcoholic – to Pune. I walk up to the door and am stopped by a security guard – polite, but not as nice as the hotel guys – asking to see an itinerary. I have an e-ticket, I say, so I don’t have an itinerary. No paper, no entry. He points down the terminal to the Kingfisher ticketing desk and says they can print it out for me. 10 minutes and some aggressive line jockeying and was back with the necessary piece of paper – a printout of my flight itinerary. Now I can go in.</li>\n 	<li>And face more security. Going through security screening, everyone kept on their shoes and belt, but then everyone was wanded and patted down after passing through the metal detector. Every carryon had to have a tag, which was stamped after X-raying. These tags were then checked by a security guard as you boarded the plane. No stamp and back you went to security.</li>\n 	<li>Leo Vegoda, another T/C listener, responding to my security line Tweet – “Is the line still 2 hours long?” No, even with all this extra security, the lines weren’t long – there seemed to be enough staff to handle it. I don’t know – perhaps I was traveling at non-peak times; or perhaps their staffing algorithm is better than the TSA’s.</li>\n 	<li>What struck me most by the middle of the week was how isolated my travels were. In past T/C episodes, we’ve talked about the “travel bubble” that business travelers inhabit – seeming to float above the day-to-day activities of a given city – kinda like Glenda the Good Witch in “Wicked” (I’m just full of pop references today…).</li>\n 	<li>In India, I was in an extreme travel bubble – eating breakfast in the hotel, taking a private car to my meetings, then driven to dinner (usually in a hotel restaurant), and finally dropped off at my hotel around 9 or 10 pm. But unlike everywhere else, I wasn’t trying to escape it. I don’t think it was the poverty or a concern about security – I’ve dealt with that in places like Joburg and Rio. No, it was something else, but I didn’t know what it was.</li>\n 	<li>Finally, looking out the car window one day, on one of my many rides, I realized that it was the crowds – everywhere I was, everywhere I looked, there were always huge numbers of people moving to and fro – much more than I’d seen before, and never letting up. Maybe all the extra security got to me subconsciously. I’m sure that, in time, I would’ve gotten comfortable with the crowds, but the pace of the trip – 3 cities, 7 days, 15 hours a day in meetings and then another 3 hours back in the room catching up on things back home – I never got situated, never got comfortable with where I was.</li>\n 	<li>I finally fell out of my travel bubble transiting between the domestic and international terminals in Delhi. It’s a 30-minute bus ride, but security wouldn’t let me on because I forgot to print my American Airlines itinerary. I had to go outside and catch a cab – not a car, not a minibus, a regular street cab. Careening through the streets, I remembered the story one of my hosts told me a few days past, about how he had taken a cab between the two terminals – the cab went off to a side street and only continued onto the international terminal after he gave them $100. I watched the street signs – why wasn’t he taking the exit for the airport? Down and around the support pillars of the expressway, past a strip of hotels with neon signs, driving in a sea of motorscooters, we emerged in front of the access road to the international terminal. A couple of more jigs and jags to avoid construction and we were unloading my bags in front of the terminal. I tipped the driver 200 rupees on a 250-rupee fare and slipped back inside my travel bubble.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Blues for a Rainy Day</em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/markcook-highway/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Mark Cook</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>iPad vs. Netbook\n</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>At the beginning of the month, I swapped my standard corporate-issue Dell Latitude E6400 laptop for an HP Mini 5102 netbook running Windows 7 and an Apple Wi-Fi + 3G iPad. After trips to Scottsdale and India with my lighter (by 1.4 lbs) briefcase, I found myself liking both devices, but for very different reasons.</li>\n 	<li>The main reason I was willing to dump the 14-in Dell screen for a 10-in netbook display is that most of my computer time is now spent running e-mail. Back when I was developing code or creating PowerPoint decks, I was willing to lug some extra pounds to get extra pixels. Now that my life revolves around Outlook, screen size isn’t as important. But a good keyboard is, and the HP’s traditional keyboard is much more usable for a touch typist than the iPad’s onscreen keyboard. You can’t rest your fingers on the iPad’s virtual keys, and eliminating the semi-colon key causes some real problems for touch typists. Also, being able to work in the actual Outlook client on the HP – looking at other people’s schedules when setting up meetings, browsing shared Exchange folders -- is a huge advantage over iPad’s mail client. HP is the clear winner with e-mail.</li>\n 	<li>Even though the HP’s screen specs out larger than the iPad (10.1-in diagonal vs. 9.7-in diagonal), the iPad’s screen looks bigger and brighter. Perhaps it’s the 132 pixels per inch, but it probably because the iPad’s tablet form factor frees it from the desktop (or your lap) and makes it seem natural to bring it closer to your eyes. And if you’re browsing rather than typing, touching the web site is a more direct interaction than connecting your finger to the cursor through the touchpad. Unless, that is, your browsing involves web sites like Hulu, which lands you directly in the cross fire of Steve Jobs’ Flash jihad. But for non-Flash web browsing, the iPad is the clear winner.</li>\n 	<li>When I’m writing, the best keyboard wins out. While I’m getting better on the iPad virtual keyboard after a couple of weeks’ practice, I switched over to the HP’s physical keyboard to write this episode. A number of folks have suggested that I use a BlueTooth keyboard with my iPad, but one of my travel principles is to travel with the least number of electronic things as possible. Having lots of electronic bits show up on the X-ray screen makes any TSA screener twitchy – it significantly increases the probability of a hand search – something any frequent traveler wants to avoid.</li>\n 	<li>It’s also easier to get files on and off the HP. The iron sandbox that Apple has erected around the iPhone and now the iPad may improve its security, but makes it difficult to use as something other than an isolated machine. When I’m creating a document more than a few lines, I find myself switching to the HP.</li>\n 	<li>Now, moving from the Dell’s 2.26 GHz Core 2 Duo processor to the HP’s 1.66 GHz Atom chip, you’d expect to wait a few more seconds for applications to start up. And you do. But if you’re just doing e-mail, web browsing, and some light Word/Excel/PowerPoint work, the Atom keeps up. But there are no such compromises with the iPad’s custom A4 chip. Video is smooth, screens snap, and there’s none of the stutter-step scrolling that has become so frustrating on my 3G iPhone. From a user experience standpoint, the iPad’s performance smokes the HP.</li>\n 	<li>Probably the biggest disappointment with the HP is the battery life. The 4-cell battery specs out at 4½ hours, but it was dying after my 3½ hour flight from Chicago to Phoenix. It could be that I don’t have Windows 7 configured correctly, but I couldn’t get much more battery life even after some deep Power Option tweaking. My experience with the iPad’s custom battery is the complete opposite. I have yet to see the battery gauge turn red, even after pretty constant use on my 15-hour flights to and from India — a pleasant change indeed from the usual iPhone experience.</li>\n 	<li>Now, doing a straight feature/cost comparison is tough — these are two very different machines. Comparing the two machines in my briefcase — the HP 5102 Mini netbook with 2 GB memory and 160 GB hard drive lists for $535 on HP’s web site while my 64 GB Wi-Fi + 3G iPad goes for $829 on apple.com — HP looks the winner. But if you factor in the delta between the price of a typical cellular data plan for the HP and the iPad’s lower cost 3G plan from AT&amp;T, and can drop down to the 32 GB Wi-Fi + 3G iPad, you get pretty close to breakeven after 12 months. Is it a fair comparison, I don’t know — but it’s a data point.</li>\n 	<li>What’s the bottom line? It’s not clear. I really like both machines, but for very different reasons. The HP is a solid little machine — great keyboard, reasonable performance, and a compact size that doesn’t get crushed when the guy in front of me pushes his seat back in an American Airlines MD-80. The iPad provides a much better way to browse web sites (non-Flash, of course) and watch videos. I’d love to drop one of them, but since the TSA doesn’t make me take out my iPad before X-raying, I’m not in too big of a hurry.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #83</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>The bridge music is from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com\">Magnatune</a></li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or MP3 file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to @mpeacock on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_83.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #83 - Business Travel in India; iPad vs. Netbook','','inherit','closed','closed','','246-autosave-v1','','','2021-09-26 11:29:19','2021-09-26 16:29:19','',246,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3813',0,'revision','',0),
(3814,1,'2021-09-26 11:29:41','2021-09-26 16:29:41','Returning from a week in India, I started recording this podcast in the business class toilet of an AA flight from Delhi to Chicago. For the sake of listeners\' ears and the bladders of fellow passengers, I finished it in the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago. We talk about how Twitter has led me to some great meals while on the road, a poor experience with GoGo in-flight Wi-Fi, and how ATMs revolutionized business travel. I talk about my experiences inside the \"travel bubble\" while traveling in India, and compare my HP netbook to my Apple iPad. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_83.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the transcript from TravelCommons podcast #83:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you today from Business class toilet on an American Airlines 777 flying somewhere north of the Iceland volcano, flying back from my first trip to India. After spending 2 days each in Guragon, Pune, and Bangalore, I got on this non-stop flight back to Chicago – left Dehli at quarter past midnight Thursday night and some 14 hours later, get into ORD at around 4:30 am Friday morning. I’ll talk more about my India trip in the first topic, but now, I’m going to get out of the john before someone thinks I’m doing something strange in here – not that recording a podcast in the bathroom is normal for any except me.</li>\n 	<li>OK, I’m back in the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago – landed safely and am now spending the day trying to get my body clock reset. The first time I flew home from Asia, I arrived before I took off – left Tokyo around 5pm and got into SFO around noon. Made my brain hurt a little bit trying to figure it out. Now, I just roll with it. Flying to Europe, I make a point to get on the destination time right when I sit in the airplane seat. Flying to Asia, that takes too much work. I just sleep when I want and eat when I want and leave it to my iPhone alarm to help me power through the consequences.</li>\n 	<li>One more quick India note – I was standing in line to board my return flight – we had to run the gauntlet in the jetway of repeated security questions (“Has your carry-on been out of your possession at any time”) and another wanding and pat-down -- and now waiting to board when I heard a guy describing the scene to someone on the phone. It took about 20 seconds for it to hit me – Hey, I recognize that voice. I turned around and about a half-dozen people back was a guy I had worked with 6 years ago. Now I’m used to running into friends and former colleagues at ORD and LGA, but DEL? It’s either a really small world, or I know way too many people who fly.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/curl-complex/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">We Are Complex</a></em> by Curl</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>We’ve talked in past episodes about ways to find good restaurants on the road. I’ve mentioned Chowhound.com – a popular foodie forum – as one of my main tools. But Twitter has also become very useful. The last time I was in LA, I couldn’t figure out what I wanted to do for dinner. I tweeted – “What should I eat – sushi or In ‘n Out Burger?” – really thinking out loud to my family than anyone else, and then one follower replied “Try <a href=\"http://kogibbq.com/\">Kogi BBQ truck</a>”. What a great idea! I had read about these guys a few months prior – some guys running 3 taco trucks doing Korean-Mexican fusion food – like kim chi quesadillas – and tweet every day the locations of their trucks. I hit Twitter, found the closest truck – a 30-minute drive – and headed out. I found it and queued up with about two dozen other Angelenos past an Arco gas station, ordered up some tacos, and ate them on the hood of my car. It was great – and I wouldn’t have thought about it without someone responding to my tweet.</li>\n 	<li>The best meal on my last trip to Seattle was courtesy of Twitter – <a href=\"http://seat6d.com/\">Denrael</a> saw where I was and suggested the <a href=\"http://www.steelheaddiner.com/\">Steelhead Diner</a> and I ended up with another great meal. I think this is how the whole social media thing is supposed to work.</li>\n 	<li>Another thing that’s worked for me this year is hand-washing. When all the panic about H1N1 virus started up, I ignored most of it – except for the talk about the benefits of extended hand-washing. 20 seconds with soap and water, they said, was more effective than those little bottles of Purell. OK, I decided to give it a go – investing a bit more time under the faucet. One day, at the beginning of April, as Chicago began to warm up, it came to me – I haven’t had a cold this season. For the first time in as long as I can remember, in spite of doing the same amount of cohabitating metal tubes with sick people, inhaling their recycled exhales, I didn’t get sick. I guess those airplane HEPA filters work after all.</li>\n 	<li>I broke down and tried GoGo’s in-flight WiFi a few months ago. I’d like to say that I did it purely from an investigative standpoint – so that I could report on it to you, my podcast listeners. But actually, I had a half day in Phoenix, was racing to make the flight, and still had a bunch of e-mail that I wanted to get out before the end of the day, so rather than queueing up 25 e-mails and then blasting them out when I hit ORD, I ponied up for GoGo. So here’s my bottom line -- Gogo inflight wi-fi is a pig, a slow one. And it’s not so much the bandwidth to the ground, but just the response time from the web server in the plane – airborne.gogoinflight.com. Maybe because it was a full plane with lots of laptop-toting professionals needing to get on-line in the middle of the day, but still, come on. When I first connected to the Buy page, the price was $10 for the flight. But that in-plane server timed out, so I had to start again from the start – great user experience. Even better -- the second time I got to the Buy page, it was $13. I haven’t used GoGo since.</li>\n 	<li>Maybe it was a goofy day, though. On that same flight, the guy next to me tried to buy a cheese-&amp;-cracker snack with cash. And then was – should I say it? No, I shouldn’t… but I will – he was “cheesed off” that American no longer takes cash. I was amazed -- when was the last time this guy flew?</li>\n 	<li>And finally, listening this week to <a href=\"http://www.theworld.org/2010/05/25/tech-podcast-saving-our-bits-in-the-swiss-fort-knox/\">The World’s Technology Podcast</a> , I heard about the death of John Shepherd-Barron, the inventor of the ATM – the automated banking machine. For the business traveler, the ATM revolutionized our lives, as much, if not more than mobile phones. I remember traveling before ATMs were ubiquitous. You’d pay American Express a chunk of change for a wad of $100 traveler’s checks, and then spend a good bit of your trip getting ripped off by currency exchanges in the airports, and cutting out of meetings in mid-day Fridays to hunt down a bank before it closed so you would have some cash for the weekend. It took a lot of planning ahead. Contrast that with this last weekend. On Sunday, I woke up in Guragon, wandered over to the mall next door, found a Citibank ATM a couple hundred feet from the front door, punched a few keys and out popped 10 crisp 500 rupee notes. And without taking much note, I now had a bit of cash with which I could buy a cup of masala tea. Thanks, John.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a question, a story, a comment – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com, you can send me a Twitter message at @mpeacock, or you can post them on the web site at travelcommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/quist-lucidity/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Crazy</em></a> by Beth Quist</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Business Travel in India\n</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Long-time listener <a href=\"http://mlw.me\">Marc Loehrwald</a> came back to me in the midst of my Tweet stream from India asking “Are you collecting some stories for a new Travelcommons episode?” Even without trying, I came back with some.</li>\n 	<li>Deplaning at Indira Gandhi Int’l airport – IRI to the locals – was pretty uneventful, though the Immigration officer did comment that I looked much younger in my passport picture. After a 15-hour flight, I’d have been surprised if it was any other way. I told him “it’s not the years; it’s the mileage”, but I think he was a bit young to catch the Indiana Jones reference.</li>\n 	<li>Getting out at our hotel, I had the first of many security screenings during my stay. At every hotel and major building, I walked through a metal detector, was wanded down, and had my briefcase X-rayed. The whole exercise took 90 seconds and the employees were exceedingly polite (because they worked for the hotel, not an overblown government agency), but given what happened in Mumbai a year and a half ago, the security was understandable.</li>\n 	<li>Sunday afternoon, I was back at IRI, but this time at the domestic terminal for a flight on Kingfisher Airlines – yes, owned by the same person as Kingfisher Beer, but no, it’s not served on board; all domestic flights are non-alcoholic – to Pune. I walk up to the door and am stopped by a security guard – polite, but not as nice as the hotel guys – asking to see an itinerary. I have an e-ticket, I say, so I don’t have an itinerary. No paper, no entry. He points down the terminal to the Kingfisher ticketing desk and says they can print it out for me. 10 minutes and some aggressive line jockeying and was back with the necessary piece of paper – a printout of my flight itinerary. Now I can go in.</li>\n 	<li>And face more security. Going through security screening, everyone kept on their shoes and belt, but then everyone was wanded and patted down after passing through the metal detector. Every carryon had to have a tag, which was stamped after X-raying. These tags were then checked by a security guard as you boarded the plane. No stamp and back you went to security.</li>\n 	<li>Leo Vegoda, another T/C listener, responding to my security line Tweet – “Is the line still 2 hours long?” No, even with all this extra security, the lines weren’t long – there seemed to be enough staff to handle it. I don’t know – perhaps I was traveling at non-peak times; or perhaps their staffing algorithm is better than the TSA’s.</li>\n 	<li>What struck me most by the middle of the week was how isolated my travels were. In past T/C episodes, we’ve talked about the “travel bubble” that business travelers inhabit – seeming to float above the day-to-day activities of a given city – kinda like Glenda the Good Witch in “Wicked” (I’m just full of pop references today…).</li>\n 	<li>In India, I was in an extreme travel bubble – eating breakfast in the hotel, taking a private car to my meetings, then driven to dinner (usually in a hotel restaurant), and finally dropped off at my hotel around 9 or 10 pm. But unlike everywhere else, I wasn’t trying to escape it. I don’t think it was the poverty or a concern about security – I’ve dealt with that in places like Joburg and Rio. No, it was something else, but I didn’t know what it was.</li>\n 	<li>Finally, looking out the car window one day, on one of my many rides, I realized that it was the crowds – everywhere I was, everywhere I looked, there were always huge numbers of people moving to and fro – much more than I’d seen before, and never letting up. Maybe all the extra security got to me subconsciously. I’m sure that, in time, I would’ve gotten comfortable with the crowds, but the pace of the trip – 3 cities, 7 days, 15 hours a day in meetings and then another 3 hours back in the room catching up on things back home – I never got situated, never got comfortable with where I was.</li>\n 	<li>I finally fell out of my travel bubble transiting between the domestic and international terminals in Delhi. It’s a 30-minute bus ride, but security wouldn’t let me on because I forgot to print my American Airlines itinerary. I had to go outside and catch a cab – not a car, not a minibus, a regular street cab. Careening through the streets, I remembered the story one of my hosts told me a few days past, about how he had taken a cab between the two terminals – the cab went off to a side street and only continued onto the international terminal after he gave them $100. I watched the street signs – why wasn’t he taking the exit for the airport? Down and around the support pillars of the expressway, past a strip of hotels with neon signs, driving in a sea of motorscooters, we emerged in front of the access road to the international terminal. A couple of more jigs and jags to avoid construction and we were unloading my bags in front of the terminal. I tipped the driver 200 rupees on a 250-rupee fare and slipped back inside my travel bubble.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Blues for a Rainy Day</em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/markcook-highway/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Mark Cook</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>iPad vs. Netbook\n</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>At the beginning of the month, I swapped my standard corporate-issue Dell Latitude E6400 laptop for an HP Mini 5102 netbook running Windows 7 and an Apple Wi-Fi + 3G iPad. After trips to Scottsdale and India with my lighter (by 1.4 lbs) briefcase, I found myself liking both devices, but for very different reasons.</li>\n 	<li>The main reason I was willing to dump the 14-in Dell screen for a 10-in netbook display is that most of my computer time is now spent running e-mail. Back when I was developing code or creating PowerPoint decks, I was willing to lug some extra pounds to get extra pixels. Now that my life revolves around Outlook, screen size isn’t as important. But a good keyboard is, and the HP’s traditional keyboard is much more usable for a touch typist than the iPad’s onscreen keyboard. You can’t rest your fingers on the iPad’s virtual keys, and eliminating the semi-colon key causes some real problems for touch typists. Also, being able to work in the actual Outlook client on the HP – looking at other people’s schedules when setting up meetings, browsing shared Exchange folders -- is a huge advantage over iPad’s mail client. HP is the clear winner with e-mail.</li>\n 	<li>Even though the HP’s screen specs out larger than the iPad (10.1-in diagonal vs. 9.7-in diagonal), the iPad’s screen looks bigger and brighter. Perhaps it’s the 132 pixels per inch, but it probably because the iPad’s tablet form factor frees it from the desktop (or your lap) and makes it seem natural to bring it closer to your eyes. And if you’re browsing rather than typing, touching the web site is a more direct interaction than connecting your finger to the cursor through the touchpad. Unless, that is, your browsing involves web sites like Hulu, which lands you directly in the cross fire of Steve Jobs’ Flash jihad. But for non-Flash web browsing, the iPad is the clear winner.</li>\n 	<li>When I’m writing, the best keyboard wins out. While I’m getting better on the iPad virtual keyboard after a couple of weeks’ practice, I switched over to the HP’s physical keyboard to write this episode. A number of folks have suggested that I use a BlueTooth keyboard with my iPad, but one of my travel principles is to travel with the least number of electronic things as possible. Having lots of electronic bits show up on the X-ray screen makes any TSA screener twitchy – it significantly increases the probability of a hand search – something any frequent traveler wants to avoid.</li>\n 	<li>It’s also easier to get files on and off the HP. The iron sandbox that Apple has erected around the iPhone and now the iPad may improve its security, but makes it difficult to use as something other than an isolated machine. When I’m creating a document more than a few lines, I find myself switching to the HP.</li>\n 	<li>Now, moving from the Dell’s 2.26 GHz Core 2 Duo processor to the HP’s 1.66 GHz Atom chip, you’d expect to wait a few more seconds for applications to start up. And you do. But if you’re just doing e-mail, web browsing, and some light Word/Excel/PowerPoint work, the Atom keeps up. But there are no such compromises with the iPad’s custom A4 chip. Video is smooth, screens snap, and there’s none of the stutter-step scrolling that has become so frustrating on my 3G iPhone. From a user experience standpoint, the iPad’s performance smokes the HP.</li>\n 	<li>Probably the biggest disappointment with the HP is the battery life. The 4-cell battery specs out at 4½ hours, but it was dying after my 3½ hour flight from Chicago to Phoenix. It could be that I don’t have Windows 7 configured correctly, but I couldn’t get much more battery life even after some deep Power Option tweaking. My experience with the iPad’s custom battery is the complete opposite. I have yet to see the battery gauge turn red, even after pretty constant use on my 15-hour flights to and from India — a pleasant change indeed from the usual iPhone experience.</li>\n 	<li>Now, doing a straight feature/cost comparison is tough — these are two very different machines. Comparing the two machines in my briefcase — the HP 5102 Mini netbook with 2 GB memory and 160 GB hard drive lists for $535 on HP’s web site while my 64 GB Wi-Fi + 3G iPad goes for $829 on apple.com — HP looks the winner. But if you factor in the delta between the price of a typical cellular data plan for the HP and the iPad’s lower cost 3G plan from AT&amp;T, and can drop down to the 32 GB Wi-Fi + 3G iPad, you get pretty close to breakeven after 12 months. Is it a fair comparison, I don’t know — but it’s a data point.</li>\n 	<li>What’s the bottom line? It’s not clear. I really like both machines, but for very different reasons. The HP is a solid little machine — great keyboard, reasonable performance, and a compact size that doesn’t get crushed when the guy in front of me pushes his seat back in an American Airlines MD-80. The iPad provides a much better way to browse web sites (non-Flash, of course) and watch videos. I’d love to drop one of them, but since the TSA doesn’t make me take out my iPad before X-raying, I’m not in too big of a hurry.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #83</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>The bridge music is from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com\">Magnatune</a></li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or MP3 file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to @mpeacock on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_83.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #83 - Business Travel in India; iPad vs. Netbook','','inherit','closed','closed','','246-revision-v1','','','2021-09-26 11:29:41','2021-09-26 16:29:41','',246,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3814',0,'revision','',0),
(3815,1,'2021-09-26 11:31:07','2021-09-26 16:31:07','Walking into the TravelCommons studios for this episode felt like walking into a confessional -- \"Bless me Father for I have sinned; it\'s been 6 months since my last podcast...\"  I talk about the new TravelCommons web site and the new Facebook<a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/153475331351358\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> fan page</a>. I talk about some recent WiFi experiences -- at 35,000 ft and while on vacation in <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Vietnam\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Vietnam</a> -- and a bad dining experience in <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Scottsdale, Arizona\" href=\"http://www.scottsdaleaz.gov/\" rel=\"homepage\">Scottsdale, AZ</a>. I tumbled the numbers on my mileage and frequent sleeper points and, applying some complex division with the help of my iPhone calculator, redirected this year\'s remaining travel to maximize my frequent flyer and frequent sleeper status levels.  Finally, after the TSA\'s announcement of their \"enhanced\" <a href=\"http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39889732/ns/travel-news/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">pat-down procedures</a>, I give up and let loose with a full-throated rant.  Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_84.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the transcript from TravelCommons podcast #84:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Chicago\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Chicago, Illinois</a>.  Picking up to the mic, I kinda felt like I was walking into a confessional – “Bless me Father for I have sinned, it’s been 6 months since my last podcast…”  As I mentioned in the last episode, back in May, I wanted to take the summer off to focus on the new job – which I did.  I also wanted to do something with some video, which I did – a 6-minute summary of our summer trip to Vietnam, which is up on the site complete with a bit of an Easter egg at the end.  John Stalvern picked it up – he posted a question on the TravelCommons site – “is that an actual shot of the never-before-identified Mark Peacock at the end?”  Yup, complete with my new-found Vietnamese friend.</li>\n 	<li>I also rebuilt the TravelCommons site on my own hosting service, pulling away from the BoardingArea site after they stopped paying me.  Not that I blame them – it’s a tough economy and their model is to sell banner ads for blogs.  I don’t think they ever figured out how to monetize a podcast.  So, I got a dump of my content and rebuilt my own TravelCommons site.  Because it’s my own site, I also have complete control.  So, my son built me a new look-&amp;-feel for the site, I loaded a better Twitter feed badge and will put up some additional stuff like polls when I get around to it.</li>\n 	<li>I also set up a TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/153475331351358?v=wall\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook.  I don’t know exactly what I’ll do with it yet – right now it’s a mix of some web site content and expanded Twitter posts.  Come by – there’s a “badge” on the web site – “like” it and leave comments/suggestions on the wall.  Help me figure out what to do with it.</li>\n 	<li>I’ve also been doing a bit of travel.  For those of you who watched the Vietnam video, you saw our itinerary – we toured Vietnam for 12 days and then stopped off in <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Hong Kong\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Kong\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Hong Kong</a> for three days on the way home.  My domestic travel has been a bit boring – mostly to our offices in Scottsdale, Dallas, and <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Naples, Florida\" href=\"http://www.naplesgov.com\" rel=\"homepage\">Naples, FL</a>, though I have hit Boston and San Diego recently, and have a conference in Orlando coming up.</li>\n 	<li>Thinking back on my travel last year, in 2009, I miss the trips to <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"New York City\" href=\"http://www.nyc.gov/\" rel=\"homepage\">New York</a> and San Francisco.  But as we officially hit Autumn and can see December in Chicago quickly approaching – places like Scottsdale and Naples are sounding pretty good again.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/Loveshadow/26219\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>SP*ANK Vox</em></a> by Loveshadow</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>OK, where to start, it’s been so long.  Maybe at the most recent and work my way back.</li>\n 	<li>In-flight WiFi – I’ve said in past episodes that I’m not a big fan.  35,000 ft is my last refuge of non-connectedness.  It’s when I read, or listen to music, or listen to podcasts, or really crank on my e-mail in-box – cleaning out the backlog of “I’ll read that when I get some time” e-mails…  On my last flight down to Ft Myers, though, I broke down 30 minutes into the flight and bought a WiFi session from GoGo.  The price was $9.95 for my iPad or my netbook; $7.95 for my iPhone or Motorola Droid2.  I ponied up the extra $2 to use a full keyboard.  While I cringed when signing on, it was useful not going dark for 2.5 hours.  Right then, I was in the middle of a number of customer issues.  Being able to run e-mail saved me a 20-minute e-mail session sitting outside the airport Starbucks clearing 25+ e-mail messages.</li>\n 	<li>The rise and now near-ubiquity of on-line storage/collaboration tools like Microsoft <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Microsoft SharePoint\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_SharePoint\" rel=\"wikipedia\">SharePoint</a> has also made me push the GoGo in-flight purchase button.  I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve clicked on an e-mail message to start reviewing a document and found nothing but a SharePoint link.  It reminds me yet again of the mental gulf between office dwellers and road warriors.  “Whaa… you’re not on the network?” is the refrain whenever I ask someone to send me the actual file.  I hate SharePoint…</li>\n 	<li>Since I’m on a bit of a rant, I got rudely surprised a couple months back while eating dinner at a restaurant in Scottsdale, AZ.  We’ve talked across many episodes about dining solo in restaurants.  It’s gotten much easier over the past 3-4 years.  It’s a rare restaurant that won’t serve you off the full menu at the bar.  I been to some places where even they have a little tray that evens out the slant of the bar so that your plate won’t slip into your lap.</li>\n 	<li>So, anyhow, I go to this restaurant – the Zinc Bistro – in the middle of one of the many shopping centers in Scottsdale.  I was supposed to meet a friend for dinner, but he had to bail at the last minute, so when I walked in, I asked if I could eat at the bar.  “Of course,” the hostess said.  I sat down – there was one other guy at the bar – ordered a glass of wine, a frisée salad, and a large order of charcuterie – it was a French place.  I ordered a second glass of wine, pulled out my iPad, and started flipping through the Financial Times app.  A couple of minutes later, an older guy introduced himself to me as the owner and then said, in a nice way, that computers weren’t allowed in the restaurant after sun down because it “spoiled the romantic atmosphere.”</li>\n 	<li>Really? At first, I thought he was joking.  I looked around – the place was empty.  It was a Wednesday night, in summer, in Arizona.  Not exactly the height of tourist season. I counted less than 10 people in the place, none of which looked to be interested in a romantic atmosphere.  But the guy was serious.  I paid my bill – no tip – and told him I wouldn’t be back.  I always say – You can have an attitude, or you can have my money, but you can’t have both.  This guy chose the attitude.</li>\n 	<li>OK, two negative rants – need to balance them out with something positive.  One of the biggest surprises of my Vietnam trip was the near ubiquity of free high quality WiFi.  Preparing for the trip, I didn’t plan to use my iPhone much because of the high cost of roaming for cellular data and voice.  I’d keep the phone with me in case of emergency calls and also figured I might download some podcasts off WiFi when in hotels.  When I got there, though, I found WiFi everywhere – almost every restaurant and bar seemed to have WiFi, most of which were open. I’d stand on a street corner waiting for my wife to finish shopping, and I’d have strong signals from 2 or 3 different places.</li>\n 	<li>Some restaurants did have their Wi-Fi locked with WPA or WEP encryption.  But it was still free – you just had to ask your server for the password.  Unlike in the US where the WiFi is unencrypted but you hit a portal of some sort where you log in, in these restaurants in Saigon or HoiAn, the session was encrypted, so once I put the password into my iPhone, all the over-the-air transmissions were encrypted.  Which, given the emergence of things like <a href=\"http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/24/firesheep-in-wolves-clothing-app-lets-you-hack-into-twitter-facebook-accounts-easily/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Firesheep</a> which lets someone hijack people\'s Twitter and Facebook accounts over unencrypted WiFi, seems like a pretty good approach.</li>\n 	<li>Well, once we figured out the program, the kids and I would be whipping out our devices whenever I’d stop for a beer – which given the heat and humidity in June was pretty often – and we’d ask for the WiFi key while placing our drink orders.  Usually, they’d point to a sign on the wall or bring us a small slip of paper.  However, at one restaurant, the waiter pointed to the little plastic stand-up menu holder.  We looked at it and then looked back at him? Huh? He pointed at the base of the menu holder where it said “Cisco. This is the power of the network”.  All that is the key?  Yup, he nodded.  That was one damn secure key.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a question, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a></span>, you can send me a Twitter message at mpeacock, or you can post them on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/trifonic/445\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Bored on Your Backside</a></em> by Trifonic</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>End-of-Year Status Calculus\n</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Last week, USAToday had an <a href=\"http://www.usatoday.com/travel/deals/inside/2010-10-21-airline-elite-status-miles_N.htm\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">article</a> about the importance of status to frequent travelers.  A timely article because October is the time every year that frequent travelers take stock of where they are in their various awards programs and figure out how they’re going to distribute their remaining travel to maximize their status.</li>\n 	<li>Status has become more important in the past few years.  As airlines have become more aggressive with add-on fees, the silver, gold, platinum, premiere cards that exempt their holders from things like baggage fees or added charges for good seats have real monetary value.  Checking a bag and getting an aisle seat in the front of the plane can easily cost $50-$75 a trip without status.  The calculus can be even better stronger with hotels.  Precious metal cards can get you free breakfast and free wireless (for those places that still charge) – saving you, say, $120 over a week’s stay.  You can build a solid business case pretty quick if you need a one more trip to earn status.</li>\n 	<li>But how to spread that status – is it better to spread it around – be mid-tier status with a couple of airlines and hotels – or should you double-down with just one and go for top tier?</li>\n 	<li>It depends on what you want and how you travel.  If upgrades are important – flying first class, getting bumped to a suite – then you need to go for top tier status.  As airline seat utilization goes up – the latest figures are over 80% -- there are fewer first class seats available.  My United flight down to PHX this week was completely full and a Premiere guy standing next to me – United’s lowest level of status – said he was number 52 on the upgrade list.  With 24 first class seats on that 757 – which is a big first class nowadays – he knew he wasn’t getting out of seat 13E.  But at least his status got him into Economy Plus for free – otherwise that 5 extra inches of legroom would’ve cost him $25-50.</li>\n 	<li>If you like to use your miles like I do --  my Chicago-to-Saigon flights were on miles and I just booked Chicago-to-Venice flights for next spring -- the answer isn\'t quite as straight-forward</li>\n 	<li>As airline load factors and hotel occupancy levels improve, award availability is the first thing to go. Award trips dropped over 10% between 2008 and 2009.  If you\'ve doubled-down and have all your miles/points with one airline and one hotel, your ability to use your miles/points when and where you want can be tough.</li>\n 	<li>My spring trip to Venice is a perfect example. The dates -- based on my daughter\'s spring break -- were inflexible. As was the location -- my daughter has always wanted to visit Venice and Verona. I knew this was going to be tough. I gritted my teeth, mixed myself a big cocktail, and started dialing awards desks. American could get me over the Atlantic, but couldn\'t get me back. BA couldn\'t get me to Heathrow, but could get me to Venice. Eventually, United could get me over on Lufthansa via Frankfurt and back on a double hop via Munich and Heathrow. If I had focused my miles solely on American, I would\'ve been $3,000 lighter</li>\n 	<li>OK, nice bit of theory, but what did I <em>do</em> ?  A little of both, really.  Starting the year, taking a new job, my destinations changed, and United and Marriott -- where I had top tier status -  were no longer the most convenient choices for where I needed to go.  So I switched to American and Hilton because, for me, planes and hotels are a means to an end rather than the end itself.</li>\n 	<li>Being in Chicago, with ORD\'s dual hub, I still put some miles on United based on schedule, but put most miles on American. Until this month. Tumbling the numbers, I didn\'t think I\'d hit Executive Platinum, so I pivoted most of my trips over to United to lock in at least Premiere status.</li>\n 	<li>On hotels, though, I went deep on Hilton because they were everywhere I needed to be. I hit Gold early on, which gave me free breakfast and WiFi, and will make top-tier Diamond by year end.</li>\n 	<li>So while strategizing to get early boarding and a free scoop of scrambled eggs may seem a bit pathetic to the occasional traveler, think about the efforts you expend to get a close-in parking space or a good subway seat. At least my scrambled eggs come with a free trip to Venice</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/hepepe/21074\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Bogi Beat Budapest</a> </em>by KarmaHacker</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>TSA Porn </strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Let’s start off by stipulating a well-known fact – I’m not a big fan of the TSA.  Nothing earth-shattering there.  I’ve been pretty frank over the prior 83 episodes of this podcast and in many blog posts.</li>\n 	<li>And I don’t think that I’m alone.  While there will always be some once-a-year flier who’ll pop up in front of a reporter’s microphone saying “I don’t care how long I wait; I just want to be safe”, I don’t know of any frequent flier who defends the TSA.  We see too much of them.  And while we see the occasional good deed – the Ft Myers’ TSA screener who was helpfully prompting older passengers to pull their toiletries out of their carry-on <em>before</em> they pushed their bags into the X-ray machine – it’s much more common to see them berating fliers at the other end.  Or to see a half-dozen of them standing around a closed screening machine chatting it up while we fliers stew in a 15-minute line.</li>\n 	<li>But the most frustrating thing is, 9 years after the September 11<sup>th</sup> attacks that caused the TSA to be created, every new thing the TSA does seems to make things worse – more inconvenient, and more and more intrusive</li>\n 	<li>The roll-out of full body scanners is an example of both.  Take shoes and everything metal off – belts, watches, jewelry – stand in the machine with your hands above your head holding your wallet for 5 seconds, then wait another 5-10 seconds for the all-clear, and then go collect your belongings.  And to think that, 5 years ago, I used to rail on this podcast about the inconvenience of taking my shoes off before walking through the metal detector.</li>\n 	<li>And invasive?  Look, I’m not a prude, but when a TSA screener <a href=\"http://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/stupid/airport-security-size-matters\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">beats</a> a co-worker because, after a training session with a full body scanner, of jokes about his small “manhood”, I’m not buying the TSA’s line about privacy filters.</li>\n 	<li>And they’re not using much discretion – there have been articles about screeners <a href=\"http://consumerist.com/2010/09/pregnant-traveler-tsa-screeners-bullied-me-into-full-body-scan.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">coercing</a> a pregnant woman into accepting a scan, or pulling a <a href=\"http://www.tampabay.com/news/transportation/airport-body-scanners-reveal-all-but-what-about-when-its-your-kid/1109659\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">12-year-old girl</a> out of line for a full scan – and this after the UK government has forbidden the use of scanners on anyone under 18 because the pictures can violate child pornography laws.</li>\n 	<li>And now, this week, it just gets better.  The TSA <a href=\"http://www.tsa.gov/press/happenings/102810_patdown.shtm\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">announced</a> on its web site that it’s “implementing new pat-down procedures.” OK, pretty innocuous.  What it doesn’t say is that these “enhanced” procedures will involve the screener running their hand up <a href=\"http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39889732/ns/travel-news/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">the inside of your leg</a>. OK, not as invasive as the patdown I got in Amsterdam a few years back when the screener “cupped” my “manhood”, but it’s close – and will be a lot more frequent.</li>\n 	<li>It does make me wonder why, after 9 years and hundreds of millions of dollars, all the TSA can say, if they’re really honest with themselves – in the quiet of the scanner picture viewing room -- is that all they’ve accomplished is to make the lives of their main constituents – the travelers – more miserable with each “improvement” they claim</li>\n 	<li>Well, I shouldn’t go that far.  They have improved the lives of one group of people – IRS employees.  They’re no longer the most reviled group of government employees.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #84</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>The bridge music is from <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">ccMixter</a></li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or MP3 file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to @mpeacock on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/153475331351358\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_84.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #84 - End of Year Status Calculus; TSA Porn','','inherit','closed','closed','','319-revision-v1','','','2021-09-26 11:31:07','2021-09-26 16:31:07','',319,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3815',0,'revision','',0),
(3817,1,'2021-09-26 11:32:46','2021-09-26 16:32:46','Safely hunkered down in the TravelCommons studios during the busiest US travel week of the year, I don\'t know how I can call this a travel podcast if we don\'t talk about the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Transportation Security Administration\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_Security_Administration\" rel=\"wikipedia\">TSA</a>\'s \"junk touching\" <a href=\"http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/11/29/second-city-takes-you-ins_n_789315.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">patdowns</a>.  The general traveling public is finally catching up with the frequent traveler set.  The TSA\'s claim that it\'s groping vs. safety is a false choice -- their security theater doesn\'t make us any safer.  The increased hassles associated with air travel have increased the fly-vs.-drive breakeven point -- almost tripled it according to some.  A new <a href=\"http://www.amadeus.com/hotelit/beyond-segmentation.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">study</a> on the future of hotels neglects one of the most important features of any hotel stay -- the bathroom.  And we wrap up talking about mileage tracking websites with the CEO of <a href=\"http://gomiles.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">GoMiles.com</a>.  Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_85.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the transcript from TravelCommons podcast #85:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you once again from the TravelCommons studios outside of <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Chicago\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Chicago, Illinois</a> during the one week a year I make a determined effort to stay <em>off </em>the road.  I wasn’t successful last year – a client scheduled a meeting in Philadelphia the Monday before Thanksgiving, so I did an 18-hour up &amp; back – last flight out Sunday night, returned Monday afternoon – to avoid the building crowds.  But this year, I have a bit more control over my travel schedule.  And that means I actually put my roller bag away – not just leave it lying around empty in the bedroom.</li>\n 	<li>I hate to sound elitist, but this week is always amateur week at the airports – families, infrequent fliers.  They’re going to be the ones trying to take a water bottle through the security checkpoint, taking 2-3 shots at the metal detector before getting all their jewelry off; then walking slow, 4 or 5 abreast down the concourse, placing 5-adjective orders at Starbucks, crowding the jetway door trying to board with the handful of elites who couldn’t stay off the road, ….  Why should I torture both of us?  So I stay home and keep myself calm with a weekend long low-grade tryptophan-induced stupor supplemented by a steady diet of football and good-quality beer.</li>\n 	<li>Watching the TSA patdown controversy from this distance was entertaining rather than frustrating -- even though it cost me the opportunity to earn the special “Don’t Touch my Junk” <a href=\"http://mashable.com/2010/11/23/foursquare-tsa/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">badge</a> on <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Foursquare Solutions\" href=\"http://foursquare.com/\" rel=\"homepage\">FourSquare</a> . Coming during “amateur week”, there were more than enough infrequent travelers willing to put themselves in front of a reporter’s microphone and say “I don’t care how long I wait or how they need to touch me; I just want to be safe”. They’re always there when the TSA turns the screw a bit tighter. But this time, there were an equal number of people saying, “Wait a minute”. I thought the woman who walked through LAX screening in a <a href=\"http://www.examiner.com/airlines-airport-in-national/woman-bikini-avoids-tsa-frisk-at-lax\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">black bikini</a> made the point</li>\n 	<li>Though not many people voluntarily chose the full body groping during <a href=\"http://www.optoutday.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">National Opt-Out Day </a>, the organizers did get an impressive amount of attention focused on the TSA’s screening procedures. By Wednesday, <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"John S. Pistole\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_S._Pistole\" rel=\"wikipedia\">John Pistole</a>, the TSA administrator, must have gotten tired of getting wired up for the umpteenth remote interview with a news show..</li>\n 	<li>The pile-up of interviews and media investigations made the point that frequent fliers figured out long ago – the TSA’s justification – the scanning and the gropings are a necessary evil for secure flight – is a false choice. Most frequent fliers don’t think the TSA and their security theater makes us more secure – they’re just one more hassle we have to deal with before we can get to our destination. Last week’s hoopla just drove the point home to everyone else.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/content/Per/Per_-_DLDN_Instrumental.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">DLDN Instrumental</a></em> by St Paul</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>First of all, here’s a nice audio comment from Linda Martin of the <a href=\"http://indietravelpodcast.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Indie Travel Podcast</a>…</li>\n 	<li>Linda, thanks for taking the time out from yours and Craig’s jealousy-inspiring tour through <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Southeast Asia\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southeast_Asia\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Southeast Asia</a> to drop us that line…</li>\n 	<li>Thanks also to the folks who “liked” the TravelCommons fan page on Facebook.  And to the folks who follow me on <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Twitter\" href=\"http://twitter.com\" rel=\"homepage\">Twitter</a>.  I try to use both services to keep in touch with listeners between episodes – especially with the “expanded spacing” between episodes.  I was scanning the archives the other day looking for the 1<sup>st</sup> –year recap show to put in the iTunes feed, and I realized that almost half of the TravelCommons episodes – 45% to be exact – were done in that first year.  Of course I had a lot of content to mine – years of travel notebooks – so it was easy to do a weekly show at first.  Now that I’m doing well to keep to a monthly schedule, the Facebook and Twitter “short-burst” messages make it easy for me to talk with everyone – or those who are interested – between episodes.</li>\n 	<li>One such item I posted on the Facebook page was a link to an <a href=\"http://www.economist.com/node/21013202\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">article</a> by Gulliver, the Economist’s business travel blog, which itself linked to an <a href=\"http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2010/11/dear-airline-im-leaving-you/66750/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">article</a> in the Atlantic about the breakeven point between flying vs. driving. Back in one of my 1st year episodes (<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/11/20/podcast-23-fly-or-drive-scenes-from-the-hotel-bar/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">#23</a> to be exact), I calculated the breakeven point to be at the 3 hour/180 mile mark – the distance between Chicago and Indianapolis.</li>\n 	<li>Including <em>all</em> the time involved with catching the hour-long flight to Indy -- ½ hr drive to ORD, 45 minutes between check-in, security, and boarding, 1-hour flight time, ½ hr for deplaning and getting the rental car, and another ½ hr to drive to the meeting site – got me to 3hrs 15 minutes.</li>\n 	<li>But that calculus is 5 years old.  In light of reduced flight availabilities and increased TSA hassles,<a href=\"http://www.economist.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> the Economist</a> and <a href=\"http://www.theatlantic.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Atlantic</a> writers declared the new fly-vs.-drive breakeven point to be 8 hours or 500 miles – almost triple my number!  “If it\'s under 500 miles, I\'ll do anything rather than hop on a plane,” says the Atlantic’s Megan McArdle.  “And if it\'s over 500 miles, it had better be way over . . . or I\'d better be carrying a cooler with a still-beating heart in it.”</li>\n 	<li>Anecdotally, I know a number of families who used to fly to places like South Carolina and Florida for Thanksgiving, opted instead for the 10-12-hr drive.  If I’m an airline exec, these numbers tell me that I’m in a no-growth industry; that my one remaining value proposition – we get you there faster than if you can on your own – is being negated by the hassles – both my own and the government’s – that surround me.  And that I should be afraid.</li>\n 	<li>Speaking of afraid, I’m sure that everyone will recall the uptick in surgical masks on planes last year during the <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influenza_A_virus_subtype_H1N1\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">H1N1</a> “pandemic”.  After that whole thing died under its own hype, it’s been pretty much back to business as usual – with the exception of the occasional Asian mask wearer.  So I was interested – no, enthralled – when the guy next to me on an ORD-LAX flight whipped out a box of disinfectant wipes and cleaned all the surfaces around him – the seat, the armrests, the headrest, the headrest in front of him, and the tray table.  Even at the height of the H1N1 scare, I’d never seen quite such a swab down.  After he finished, I wished for a big sneeze, but couldn’t muster up much more than a cough.</li>\n 	<li>As I mentioned on Twitter at the beginning of the month, I switched over from my little HP netbook to an 11-inch MacBook Air. Yes it’s light, yes it’s cool looking, but when I left it in my backpack going through security at both ORD and Orlando and came away unberated by the X-ray screener, that cinched it – it’s the best Travel PC out there. I posted a full <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2010/11/15/two-weeks-with-a-macbook-air/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">review</a> on the TravelCommon’s website with my impressions after 2 weeks on the road with it. A full month and my thoughts haven’t changed. It can still be a hassle integrating it into my company’s Windows infrastructure, but I can live with it. It’s a great machine.</li>\n 	<li>And finally, following up on last episode’s riff on in-flight WiFi, Google\'s Christmas <a href=\"http://www.freeholidaywifi.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">present</a> this year to travelers is free Gogo in-flight WiFi on Delta, AirTran, and Virgin America airlines for the holidays – it’s started the weekend before Thanksgiving and runs through Jan 2nd. I don’t think I’ll get to use it – the rest of my travel this year will be on American – but I hope some of you guys get a chance.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a question, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a></span>, you can send me a Twitter message at mpeacock, or you can post them on the Facebook page or the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/content/Zapac/Zapac_-_Test_Drive.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Test Drive</a> </em>by Zapac</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Importance of Hotel Bathrooms </strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Yes, the TravelCommons podcast has long had a close relationship with hotels bathrooms.  Being born in the bathroom of the Wardman Park Marriott in Northwest DC, I think the penultimate bathroom recording was in the shower stall of the Camelback Resort.  The echo was so bad I had to re-record the whole thing.</li>\n 	<li>So I was disappointed – to say the least – when reading through <em><a href=\"http://www.amadeus.com/hotelit/beyond-segmentation.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Hotels 2020</a></em>, a future-of-hotels study from <a href=\"http://www.amadeus.com/us/us.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Amadeus</a>, a European travel technology company, there was no mention of the importance of the hotel bathroom – or toilette or WC – on the guest experience.</li>\n 	<li>Let’s be honest.  When we walk into a new hotel room, we look at the bed first – mostly because, being the biggest thing in the middle of the room, it’s hard not to catch the eye – and then look at the bathroom.</li>\n 	<li>It kinda makes sense – unless you have a suite, those are the <em>only</em> two rooms you have, so of course you’re going to check them out.  And, if you think about where you spend your time when in a hotel – you probably spend most of your time in your bed, with the bathroom in second place.  How close a second place – there’s way too many personal issues there for me to sort out in a 5-minute segment.</li>\n 	<li>So where did the <em>Hotel 2020</em> study focus?  The usual suspects – the replacement of the fortress-like front check-in desk with self-service kiosks and live people roaming around with iPads (so we’re replacing front-desk lines with mobbing a wandering clerk?  And that’s progress how?); packing the rooms with even more technology – 3D TVs (so they replace the revenue lost on WiFi with rentals on the 3D glasses), plug-in jacks so we can more easily display the content we’re hauling around on our laptops and iPads and Droid phones; figuring out yet more ways to sell us “ancillary services” – tee times, massages, spa treatments – more ways to make more money from us while we’re at the hotel.</li>\n 	<li>But no mention of the bathroom, which I think is a critical mistake.  The hotel bathroom probably the most underestimated, under-recognized cause for guest satisfaction – and dissatisfaction.</li>\n 	<li>Think about it –when you look into that bathroom and see a big shower stall, a fluffy robe, and some cook toiletries – a smile comes to your face.  OK, you think, maybe I’ll take an extra long shower – something I don’t get to do at home – try this loofa thing, does the shower gel go on it or on me before it….  Who knows, but it’s fun trying something new.</li>\n 	<li>Compare that with the alternative – small bathroom, water-stained tub with a small chest-high showerhead, and nothing more than a small bar of soap.  Not only are you <em>not </em>thinking of purchasing any “ancillary services”, you’re trying to figure out how to get out and book a room down the road.</li>\n 	<li>And it makes sense -- we all know that our basic physiological needs must be met before we can self-actualize.  And it doesn’t get more basically physiological than the bathroom.  If a hotel can’t deliver a quality bathroom experience, why would I trust it to align my chakras with a hot stone massage?  Give me cut-rate toiletries and I figure you’re cutting corners on the scented oil rub down too?</li>\n 	<li>So all you hoteliers, before you get too wrapped around the axle with the latest flat screens and electronic room service ordering and personalized e-mails and electronic concierges.  Make sure you’ve got a great showerhead and toilet that doesn’t run.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/content/oldDog/oldDog_-_Goodbye_sooner_or_later.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Goodbye Sooner or Later</a></em> by oldDog</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Maximize Your Mile – Interview with Founder of GoMiles.com</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Miles, points – the one thing that helps make frequent travel bearable is the idea that, through the hassles, you’re earning a free trip to some place you actually <em>want</em> to go.  This year, I used United miles to fly my family of four from Chicago to Vietnam, and used Marriott points to cover the hotel in Hong Kong on our way back.  I also used Hilton points for an anniversary weekend in Chicago – left the kids behind with their grandmother – and will use more United miles for spring break trip to Venice for my wife, my daughter, and me.  Doing the math just on this year’s redemptions – the dollar value of these points adds up.</li>\n 	<li>Of course, where there’s value, there’s a business opportunity.  A number of web sites for tracking miles and points have popped up over the past few years.  One of these sites is <a href=\"http://gomiles.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">GoMiles.com</a> – a free service that aggregates points across airline, hotel, and car rental programs and displays them on a single easy-to-read page.  I caught up with the founder and CEO Michael Komarnitsky for a Skype chat on why people use GoMiles…</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #85</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>The bridge music is from <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">ccMixter</a></li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or MP3 file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to @mpeacock on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/153475331351358\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_85.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>\n<div class=\"zemanta-pixie\" style=\"margin-top: 10px; height: 15px;\"><img class=\"zemanta-pixie-img\" style=\"border: none; float: right;\" src=\"http://img.zemanta.com/pixy.gif?x-id=9e618155-0c32-44bb-9572-c4107cad83cd\" alt=\"\" /></div>','Podcast #85 -- Importance of Hotel Bathrooms; Maximizing Miles','','inherit','closed','closed','','407-revision-v1','','','2021-09-26 11:32:46','2021-09-26 16:32:46','',407,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3817',0,'revision','',0),
(3819,1,'2021-09-26 11:34:11','2021-09-26 16:34:11','[caption id=\"attachment_528\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/5314961468_c424e091a81.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-528 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/5314961468_c424e091a81-300x224.jpg\" alt=\"View from my new office atop Squaw Peak\" width=\"300\" height=\"224\" /></a> View from my new office atop Squaw Peak[/caption]\n\nFinishing up the year in front of a warm fire in the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago after a couple of warm-up trips to <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Phoenix, Arizona\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix%2C_Arizona\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Phoenix</a>.  I carved myself out an mini-vacation during one of the trips and worked at the summit of <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Squaw Peak\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squaw_Peak\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Squaw Peak</a> for part of an afternoon. My <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"MacBook Air\" href=\"http://www.apple.com/macbookair\" rel=\"homepage\">MacBook Air</a> -- my perfect travel PC -- turned itself into a good-looking brushed metal brick on my last day in Phoenix, forcing an unplanned stop at the Scottsdale <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Apple Store\" href=\"http://www.apple.com/retail\" rel=\"homepage\">Apple Store</a> before my flight home.  Trying to get some work done while I waited reminded me of the difficulty of finding a quiet spot for a phone call while living on the road.  Missed connections caused by recent snow storms reminded me of ways you can have a little fun when stranded -- if you embrace the adventure of it.  Responding to a couple of listener questions on the closing song (<a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><em>Pictures of You</em></a> by Evangeline), I replay the song\'s back story as related by the band\'s manager.  Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_86.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the transcript from TravelCommons podcast #86:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you once again from the TravelCommons studios, wrapping up the year in the white icebox that is Chicago this winter.  And it’s a cold one.  Not as bad as what they’re getting in Minneapolis-St Paul – watching the video of the Metrodome’s ceiling collapse was pretty amazing – nor what New York is getting tonight, but I think I read that this has been something like the 7<sup>th</sup> coldest December on record.  So I can tell you that I wasn’t too upset when my travel plans had me in Phoenix two out of the last three weeks.</li>\n 	<li>Packing for my last trip, I promised myself that, somewhere in the 4 days that I was in Phoenix, I’d find a couple of hours to get out of the office and go hike up <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Camelback Mountain\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camelback_Mountain\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Camelback Mountain</a>.  It was 12 degrees in Chicago when I was packing and the forecast for Phoenix was 70’s and 80’s all week.  I’ve always said that if you don’t take at least a little something for yourself from even business travel, you’ll hate your life.</li>\n 	<li>So I start looking for my opening.  Monday, nope – inbound travel days are usually jam packed and American Airlines just added to it – making it like an overstuffed carryon – with a 2-hr maintenance delay, complete with swapping out planes.  Makes me misty for the days when preventative maintenance meant more than…</li>\n 	<li>Tuesday goes by, Wednesday morning I think – ah, I’ll do it on Thursday before I fly home – but I stop myself.  My Weds afternoon isn’t that full.  I push some stuff around and, presto, there’s my couple of hours.  I race back to the hotel, change, look at the map – hmmm, Camelback might be a bit too far of a drive, especially if I hit traffic.  But Squaw Peak looks doable.  And so off I raced. After 1.2 miles, 1,200 vertical feet, and 19 ounces of Propel sports drink, I was at the top.  It’s a pretty view – with the hills to the north and the city to the south.  I sat for a bit, caught my breath, and then looked at my <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"iPhone\" href=\"http://www.apple.com/iphone\" rel=\"homepage\">iPhone</a>.  Hmm, full bars.  Started running e-mail and turned the summit into my office for the next 30 minutes – reading a couple of documents, cranking out some quick notes while watching the planes and birds fly by.  I took a photo at the summit, which I <em>later</em> posted to the TravelCommons Facebook page and Twitter feed if you’d like to take a look at my new office.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/swivel-deep/\"><em>Arlos Auto Parts and Salvation</em></a> by Swivel Neck Jones</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>In the last <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2010/11/30/podcast-85-importance-of-hotel-bathrooms-maximizing-miles/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">episode</a> and in a prior TravelCommons <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2010/11/15/two-weeks-with-a-macbook-air/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">post</a> I sang the praises of my 11-inch MacBook Air as the perfect travel PC.  Which, of course, meant I had tempted the technology gods who, in response last week, reached out from their Valhalla data center and smote the little unibody of brushed metal – bricking it on my last day in Scottsdale.  I opened the lid – no instant on.  I pressed the power button, no instant on.  I held the power button for 5 seconds, 15 seconds, 5 minutes, nothing but a dead screen.</li>\n 	<li>If this happened on any other laptop, my first course of action would’ve been to drop the battery to try and reset the power management.  But, that ain’t happening with a MacBook Air, so after stabbing the Power button another half-dozen times, I gave up and headed over to the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Genius Bar\" href=\"http://apple.com/retail/geniusbar\" rel=\"homepage\">Genius Bar</a> at the Scottsdale Apple Store.</li>\n 	<li>Since our company allows Macs but doesn’t provide help desk support – the Development teams use Macs and stooping to call a Help Desk would be the furthest thing from their minds – the Genius Bar is the defacto help desk.  Since it was near lunch time, I stopped off at <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Smashburger\" href=\"http://www.smashburger.com\" rel=\"homepage\">Smashburger</a>.  A TravelCommons listener – I forget who – had replied to one of my <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"In-N-Out Burger\" href=\"http://www.in-n-out.com/\" rel=\"homepage\">In-N-Out Burger</a> tweets, asking if I’d tried Smashburger.  It was a god burger – not quite the mystique or ambiance of In-N-Out – but a good burger.</li>\n 	<li>One thing that I should’ve done while waiting for my Smashburger was book a time at the Genius Bar. Walking into the Apple Store, the hipster with an iPhone told me it’d be a 30-minute wait.  I checked my watch – I had enough time before my flight back home.  Right at the 30-minute mark, a guy walked over to me, opened my Mac, punched the power button a couple of times to no avail and said “Wow” and took it into the back room.  OK, it’s a bit better than having some guy in India tell me to restart my PC a half-dozen times, but still… I look at my watch again.  How long before I have to fetch this guy and dash to the airport?</li>\n 	<li>Not long as it turns out.  5 minutes later, the guy comes back with my now-working Mac.  My initial diagnosis was right – it was the battery, or the PMU – power management unit?  Since you can’t drop the battery, there’s a multi-finger key sequence – hold down the shift, control, option, and command keys with your left hand and then hit the power key with your right.  I wrote it down so I could “self-serve” next time.  Not sure if the whole experience was any better than hanging on hold for a help desk.  I am paying more attention, though, to the location of Apple stores.</li>\n 	<li>Now, the 30-minute wait wasn’t a complete loss.  Though my Mac was dead, my iPad and iPhone were fine.  So while I was waiting for my Genius to arrive, I was running e-mail and reading documents on my iPad.  Not a complete loss, but it wouldn’t have worked if I had needed to talk to someone, if I’ve had a conference call.</li>\n 	<li>And that is a big problem with the “digital nomad” work style – no office, working out of Starbucks and airport clubs and the like – there’s no good place to take a conference call.  You can IM, e-mail, and text all you want, but once you need to open that voice channel, it’s a very different story.  Nobody wants to be the guy flooding the conference bridge with overhead Muzak or the signature sound of a barista steaming a pitcher of milk.  Airports are no better.  If they don’t have an Admirals or Red Carpet Club – or if I’m flying Southwest – then the hunt is on for a spot not under a PA speaker and away from the aisles with the beeping carts.  And you think the hunt for a working electrical outlet is tough.  I’m forever trolling through the new issues of Skymall magazine looking for a real-life “cone of silence” like they had in <em>Get Smart</em>.  I wonder if the Brookstone in ORD T3 has one?</li>\n 	<li>In the last episode, we talked about the bathroom being one of the most important rooms in a hotel.  For me, the workout room is another important place. I stayed in the <a href=\"http://www.theashtonhotel.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Ashton Hotel</a> in downtown Fort Worth earlier this month.  Nice place – a boutique hotel in a historical building right near Sundance Square and a great beer bar – the Flying Saucer.  But would I recommend it to friends?  Hmmm… I don’t think so, because the workout room is so limited?  Or lame.  A small room in the basement with a couple of treadmills and an elliptical – with a stand up fan pointed at them.</li>\n 	<li>That might be good for a 1-night stay, but I was there for 3.  I, like many frequent travelers, depend upon hotel fitness rooms to stay in some semblance of shape.  A couple of treadmills stuffed in a closet just doesn’t cut it anymore.</li>\n 	<li>And finally, I just want to remind everyone that Google’s Christmas <a href=\"http://www.freeholidaywifi.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">present</a> of free Gogo in-flight WiFi on Delta, AirTran, and Virgin America airlines is still on. It runs through Jan 2.  Perfect way to post your family Christmas pics on the flight how.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a question, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a></span>, you can send me a <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Twitter message</a> at mpeacock, or you can post them on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/153475331351358\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Facebook page</a> or the web site at travelcommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/fuzz-messy/\"><em>Smiling Perspective</em></a> by General Fuzz</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Fun With Layovers</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>One of the most sacred frequent traveler rules is <em>Fly Direct</em>.  Be it winter with snow or summer with thunderstorms, adding that intermediate stop adds one more point of failure, one more opportunity for the airlines to screw up.</li>\n 	<li>And while many connecting flights are cheaper than direct ones, for a true comparison, you have to factor in the potential costs of a delay – hotel room (because the airlines won’t pay for weather delays), meals, replacement clothes and toiletries for misrouted luggage…  In an episode last year, I calculated the cost – the breakeven premium between a direct and connecting flight -- to be $100-150.</li>\n 	<li>But, with the right frame of mind – an “adventuring” frame of mind as one person put it – you can actually manufacture something good out of a connection.</li>\n 	<li>The first requirement is to step away from the 1-hour connection.  Yes, we usually want to get to our destination in the shortest possible time, but accepting a connection of 1 hour or less…. Think about it – a 15-minute delay on your inbound flight – which is as good as on-time for most airlines – and you’re sprinting through the terminal (remember when we used to call it “OJ-ing” it – that was a long time ago) and probably having to check your carry-one.  A 1-hr connection is just asking for a stress attack and/or an overnight stay at the airport branch of the Bates Motel.</li>\n 	<li>The second requirement is to connect through some place you might want to visit.  On those rare occasions where I’m forced to take a connection, I look at the flight choices and think – where would I not mind being stuck?</li>\n 	<li>OK, sounds a bit odd, but think about it.  I’m flying from Phoenix to Ft Myers, FL – zero direct flight – no surprise there.  So where do I want to connect through – Miami, Dallas, Houston, O’Hare, Atlanta?  The total flight duration for any of these connections is within 90 minutes of each other.  For me, it’s an easy choice – I go through Chicago.  If I get stranded, I sleep in my own bed.  If I get delayed, I call up my wife and we grab dinner.</li>\n 	<li>Traveling with my family to Cape Town, South Africa, I chose the connection through Frankfurt because I knew the airport wasn’t too far out of town.  We landed after the overnight flight from Chicago, passed through Customs and headed straight for a cab that took us to downtown to Romer Square.  We had lunch, I had a beer, and then we walked around downtown for 4 hours – a quick sightseeing excursion between our overnight flights.</li>\n 	<li>Some years back, my parents flew from Denver to Paducah, KY to visit my aunt and grandmother.  Again, no direct flights so they connected through ORD.  And, as you can guess, on the way home, their commuter flight was late out of Paducah and they missed a tight connection.  My dad called me from the airport.  It was New Year’s Eve night and we were having 3 or 4 couples over.  “Get your luggage and book the flight out tomorrow,” I told him, “you can help me cook dinner.” Completely unplanned.  I picked them up, brought them home, threw an apron at my dad, and we had a great time.</li>\n 	<li>Planning ahead for these possibilities is key, though.  Last week, friends and longtime TravelCommons listeners Allan Marko and Chris Chufo got caught at ORD when a snow storm caused the crew for their flight to JAX to time out.  That was a bad night – some 1,500 flights were cancelled between ORD and MDW.  The United customer service line stretched all the way down Concourse C.  A frequent traveler, Allan immediately rang United’s Premiere Exec line and got seats on the next day’s flight to JAX, then found a room at a nearby Hilton Garden Inn and stepped out of line to go to bed.</li>\n 	<li>But without luggage.  United didn’t even try to give it back.  And because they had to check one bag anyhow with presents, they decided not to carry on – avoid the battle for carry-on space on full planes because they had time – no need to power directly from the flight to a meeting.  But now, though they had a hotel room, they had no change of clothes and just the toiletries they could scrounge from the Hilton.</li>\n 	<li>A small inconvenience, though.  Since their flight didn’t leave ‘til 7:30 the next night, I shuffled my calendar around, picked them at the Hilton and took them into Chicago for lunch.  We ate at <a href=\"http://longmanandeagle.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Longman &amp; Eagle</a>, a Logan Square gastro-pub that picked up a Michelin star last month – Chris and I had wild boar sloppy joes while Allan had the pork belly BLT, and then ran down a couple of blocks to a brew pub, <a href=\"http://revbrew.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Revolution Brewery</a>, where they picked up some fresh t-shirts and I refilled a growler with a <a href=\"http://beeradvocate.com/beer/style/140\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">double India Pale Ale</a> – though we thought hard about it, we just couldn’t figure out a way they could get a 64 oz jug of beer through security.  By 5, they were back at ORD, fed, beered up, and ready to try again.</li>\n 	<li>It’s all about attitude. Do you lean into it – figure out how to get everything you can out of it – or do you back away? On her extended journey to JAX, Chris Chufo kept chanting a mantra -- “It’s an adventure” – and came out smiling at the end</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/atek-phoenix/\"><em>Goa Life</em></a> by Ambient Teknology</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>From the Archives – Story Behind The Closing Song</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>I’ve received a couple of requests over the past months for information on the closing song – the tune that wraps each episode of TravelCommons.</li>\n 	<li>Earlier this month, Becky Boyd wrote – “I can\'t find the name of the song you use at the end of the show by lyrics.  It is so appropriate to me and my husband.  We relocated from California to South Carolina, then purchased a vacation home back in California.  We often find ourselves on different coasts from each other.”</li>\n 	<li>The song is <em>Pictures of You,</em> done by a now-defunct country band from Glasgow, Scotland called Evangeline – which is now confused on the Internet with a defunct country band from New Orleans called Evangeline.  Probably explains why Becky couldn’t find the song through its lyrics.</li>\n 	<li>Back in 2005, though, the Scottish Evangeline was playing festivals in the UK.  I found them through the Tartan Podcast which, as the name kinda hints at, covered the Scottish music scene.  It too is defunct.  This story is starting to get a bit lonely.</li>\n 	<li>Anyhow, after hearing the song, I sent a note to the band’s manager Willie Evans asking for a couple of words – a bit of back story on the song.  Here’s his response.</li>\n 	<li>Five years on, I still think it’s a great song about life on the road.  If you like it, <a href=\"http://itunes.apple.com/us/album/hard-way/id75388292\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">iTunes</a> or <a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/Hard-Way/dp/B000QQW5D8/ref=sr_1_cc_2?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1293560032&amp;sr=1-2-catcorr\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Amazon</a> are probably the best places to pick to it up.  Given the on-line confusion between the bands, I’ll post links in the show notes at travelcommons.com and on the TravelCommons Facebook page.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #86</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\">Magnatune</a></li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or MP3 file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to @mpeacock on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/153475331351358\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_86.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #86 -- Fun with Layovers; Story Behind the Closing Tune','','inherit','closed','closed','','435-revision-v1','','','2021-09-26 11:34:11','2021-09-26 16:34:11','',435,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3819',0,'revision','',0),
(3821,1,'2021-09-26 11:35:42','2021-09-26 16:35:42','[caption id=\"attachment_543\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/taxi-sign1.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-543\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/taxi-sign1-300x210.jpg\" alt=\"Warning in a St Louis Taxi\" width=\"300\" height=\"210\" /></a> Warning in a St Louis Taxi[/caption]\n\nI skipped the Midwest\'s \"snow-pocalypse\" by flying to <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Phoenix, Arizona\" href=\"http://www.phoenix.gov/\" rel=\"homepage\">Phoenix</a> where it was unseasonably cold -- in the 20\'s and 30\'s F -- but without snow. It\'s been a cold winter and I came down with some nasty bug while visiting <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Dallas\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dallas\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Dallas</a>, which reminded me how miserable it is to be sick while traveling. Before my whining, though, I give a quick status on my New Year\'s travel resolutions, my observations on the status of the TSA\'s full body scanning program, and my struggles trying to use Avatron\'s Air Display app to turn my <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"iPad\" href=\"http://www.apple.com/ipad/\" rel=\"homepage\">iPad</a> into a second display for my MacBook Air.  Gary Learned suggests a headset that can defeat overhead PA announcements at airports, and I go through my briefcase -- how I\'ve changed what I carry for business travel over the past 5 years. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_87.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the transcript from TravelCommons podcast #87:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Chicago\" href=\"http://www.cityofchicago.org/\" rel=\"homepage\">Chicago, IL</a>.  I managed to skip this week’s “snopocalypse” -- the 20+ inches of snow that fell here Tuesday and Wednesday.  Instead, I flew down to Phoenix on Tuesday morning – though not without a couple of glitches courtesy of American Airlines – and came back Friday evening.  And yes, I did feel a bit guilty skipping out on the shoveling in the wind and cold, but that’s what kids are for.</li>\n 	<li>It has been a cold winter so far.  I was in Dallas a couple of weeks ago where it was rainy, in the low 30’s and the wind was blowing a steady 20 mph – OK, no snow, but not any better than Chicago.  And then even this week in Phoenix – the temperatures were in the 30’s, getting into the 20’s at night.  Yes it was colder in Chicago and elsewhere, but still – where’s that global warming when you really need it.</li>\n 	<li>Earlier in January, Phoenix was much nicer – sunny and in the 60’s.  The first couple of days I was there, I was running on autopilot a bit – for lunch, I’d dash out of the office, hop in my rental car and drive the quarter-mile north to the shopping area with the sandwich shops and a Whole Foods.  Driving back the second day, I thought, “What the hell am I doing?  It’s 20 degrees back home!”  The next day, I took an hour for lunch, walked to the Whole Foods, bought myself a cup of soup, sat outside in the sun and ate it, and then walked back to the office.</li>\n 	<li>Which kind of reminds me of the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/01/01/new-years-travel-resolutions/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">New Years resolutions</a> I posted on the TravelCommons site on the first of the year.  #3 was “Take More Quick Breaks” – along the lines of “take advantage of the travel because it sure takes advantage of you…” In the post, I mentioned the afternoons I took to hike up Squaw Peak in Phoenix or walk along the beach in <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Naples, Florida\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naples%2C_Florida\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Naples, FL</a>.  Walking along a road to lunch seems a bit of a pathetic reach, but the spirit is there – if you’re traveling from snow to sun for work, don’t forget to grab a couple of rays for yourself.</li>\n 	<li>Actually, I did a bit better than that – I went to the BCS college football championship game while in Phoenix, and to a Mavs-Lakers basketball game while in Dallas – something for each week.</li>\n 	<li>As for my other resolutions?  “Plan Further Ahead” because airline load factors/seat utilization is moving up again?  I’m doing OK with that – I’m booking out 2-3 weeks in advance, which is a huge improvement for me.</li>\n 	<li>“Repack My Briefcase?” – check out the “What’s in my bag” segment a bit later.</li>\n 	<li>“Take More Pictures?” – just a marginal improvement – I don’t count taking pictures with my <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"iPhone\" href=\"http://www.apple.com/iphone\" rel=\"homepage\">iPhone</a> of bullet points on whiteboards</li>\n 	<li>And the toughest one – “Be nicer to TSA agents?”  I was doing better because, at least over the past few trips, they’ve been nicer to me.  I hadn’t been groped or irradiated on my first couple of trips, which will tend to have a positive impact on anyone’s disposition.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/music/listeners/artistdetails.php?BandHash=f81ac4222ffce06bc8c3c7c3ae01a7fd\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Shine</a></em> by Hungry Lucy</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>The TSA full body scan controversy that was white-hot during the Thanksgiving weekend seems to have cooled quite a bit.  The TSA will <a href=\"http://www.politicsdaily.com/2010/11/22/poll-public-backs-full-body-scans-but-split-on-pat-downs/\" target=\"_self\" rel=\"noopener\">say</a> that this is proof the American public supports its program of full body scans or AIT – Advanced Imaging Technology – as they like to call it, and the “enhanced pat-down” as the TSA likes to call it, or the full body grope as the rest of us experience it.</li>\n 	<li>I think instead it’s that the TSA has pulled way back on their use of these invasive techniques.  I hadn’t been hit with a full-body scanner or a grope-down from the beginning of December until last week.  When the TSA dropped the scanners into ORD in July, they had <em>everyone</em> go through them, which doubled the screening time – at least.  Then through the Christmas travel season, it seemed that the machines were off more than they were on, and even when they were on, they weren’t not on every security lane, so it was pretty easy to avoid them unless you’re going thru a small security checkpoint – which is how they last caught me in DFW.</li>\n 	<li>They also seem to be have slowed the rollout.  I haven’t seen them crop up in any new places.  Terminal 2 in PHX, for example, is still a TSA porn-free zone.  Not that I’m complaining.  Nice to be able to just move through security without having to hold my hands above my head.  And remember when we used to complain about taking our shoes off…</li>\n 	<li>However, on my last two trips out of ORD, I was fully irradiated.  Again, it was going through a small checkpoint – the status-only checkpoint in Terminal 3, where American lives.</li>\n 	<li>Though the TSA will say that the full-body scan doesn’t take much longer than the metal detector, they’re just flat wrong.  The actual scan – the amount of time you have your arms above your head – is only a few seconds longer than walking through the metal detector, the entire screening process takes much longer.</li>\n 	<li>I’m beginning to consider the locations of these full-body scanners when I book flights.  In ORD, it seems easier to avoid them in Terminal 1 than Terminal 3, so my next flight down to Florida I’ve switched over to United. Not completely driven by full-body scanners, but it’s definitely a factor.</li>\n 	<li>And continuing my thread about my MacBook Air.  You’ll remember that one of the reasons I chose the 11-inch model was the TSA said it could stay in your briefcase – kinda like a bit iPad.  However, when you briefcase – or backpack – stacks your iPad on top of your MacBook Air, be prepared to pull one of them out.  Talking to a very pleasant TSA X-ray machine operator in ORD, he told me that when they stack up, they get too thick to properly scan.  Makes sense.  I’ve since moved my iPad to a difference section in my backpack – put some papers and magazines between the iPad and the MBA to provide a bit more separation and haven’t had a problem since.</li>\n 	<li>A number of folks have asked me why I carry both the iPad and a laptop – and I haven’t been able to come up with a real compelling reason.  As I’ve said before, I like reading on an iPad and writing on a laptop, but does that justify the extra weight and re-packing hassle of the iPad?  I was wishy-washy on that right up to last week when I thought I’d found my killer app for the iPad – Avatron’s <a href=\"http://avatron.com/apps/air-display\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Air Display</a>, which turns the iPad into a secondary display for the MacBook when they’re on the same WiFi network.</li>\n 	<li>Now here’s a reason.  While I can work on the smaller screen of my 11-inch MBA (or the 10.6-inch HP netbook before that), having a second display certainly makes it easier to “spread out”.  I have two 22-inch monitors on my Windows desktop box at home and love it.  I eagerly dropped the $10 for the Air Display app and fired it up…</li>\n 	<li>And was disappointed.  It didn’t work in the office.  OK, our network guys must have it locked down.  Not surprised.  I get back to the Hilton and fire it up – again, no luck.  At home, doesn’t work when associated with my Apple Airport Express, but does – just once – when associated with the access point that’s built into the big AT&amp;T U-verse modem/router thing in the basement.  The only access point I can get Air Display to regularly work on is when I use my Verizon Droid 2 as a 3G hot spot.  That’s a bit of a kludge.</li>\n 	<li>When it does work, it’s great – the few times that’s happened.  I’ve been hanging around Avatron’s support forums for about a week now, but haven’t found a solution yet.  Great concept; real spotty execution.  If they can get this to work, my iPad is no longer a heavy Kindle – it’s a real productivity tool.</li>\n 	<li>And following up on my thoughts in the last episode about some of the hassles of the “digital nomad” work style when it comes to finding a quiet place for a conference call, Gary Learned sent in some thoughts…</li>\n 	<li>Gary Learned audio clip</li>\n 	<li>Gary, thanks for that suggestion.  I’m hitting Amazon looking for that earpiece right now,</li>\n 	<li>And finally, the Gogo in-flight wireless guys have got a new giveaway as they continue to push awareness of their product.  For February, Gogo is adding Facebook to their set of free sites. After the plane gets above 10,000 ft, fire up your laptop or smartphone and associate with the “gogoinflight” wireless network.  Open your browser and you’ll get the GoGo sign-on page.  On the bottom of the page, you’ll see a set of free web sites – typically the dot com site for the airline you’re flying, a weather site, ….  And now, Facebook.  Nice to know that you can stay socially connected at 35,000 feet.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a question, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is <a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a> -- use the Voice Memo app on your iPhone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the Facebook page with GoGo’s free service -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at T/C.com</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Beggarstown</em> by Hollow Horse</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Sick on the Road</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>No, that’s not sick <em>of</em> the road – though that happens at times too.</li>\n 	<li>As I mentioned earlier, I was in Dallas a couple weeks ago – when it was just cold and windy; no snow or ice – and scored an invite to a vendor’s suite at the Mavs-Lakers basketball game.  Definitely a premiere game.  I went with a couple of guys from the office.</li>\n 	<li>It was a good game – Mavs were down at halftime but came back to beat the Lakers by 10.  During the second half, though, I started to feel a tickle in the back of my throat.  I couldn’t stop coughing – couldn’t seem to “finish up” a cough – and the beer and salsa were beginning to feel a little rough going down.</li>\n 	<li>Back in the hotel room, I just couldn’t get warm.  I went to bed, but soon started shivering. The thermostat was just above my head.  I kept pushing the Up button until I heard the heater kick in.  After a while, I finally got warm enough to sleep comfortably.  The next morning I looked at the temperature setting – it was at 78°.</li>\n 	<li>It didn’t get much better the rest of the day.  I drug myself through a full day of meetings and got on a United Express regional jet for my flight home that night.  Again, I couldn’t get warm.  Since United Express seems to have followed American in pulling blankets and pillows from its planes, I swaddled myself in my tweed jacket and overcoat, and tried not to cough on the person in the window seat.</li>\n 	<li>Now, as being sick on the road goes, this wasn’t that bad.  I’ve gotten food poisoning a couple of times, severely pulled muscles, flown with sinus infections that made my head feel like it was going to split in two during descent…</li>\n 	<li>But it did remind me how miserable it is to be sick on the road.  For the most part, you’re alone.  Though you may have co-workers who will try to help you a bit, when they go home to their families, you’re going home to an empty hotel room and are going to have to fend for yourself.</li>\n 	<li>And it’s not just that you’re lacking a spouse or child to help you out – bring you a blanket or a cup of tea.  You need to find a pharmacy, perhaps a doctor.  But even then, it can still be a struggle. When I was last in Paris, I tweaked my knee pretty bad and needed some ibuprofen for the pain and swelling.  The hotel concierge pointed me in the direction of a pharmacy a couple of blocks away.  Walking/limping in, I knew I couldn’t ask for Advil or Motrin – those US name brands don’t exist in France.  So I asked for ibuprofen – the generic name of the active ingredient.  Ibuprofen is ibuprofen, I thought.</li>\n 	<li>“Ibuprofen, s’il vous plaît” I asked.  The pharmacist cocked an eyebrow and looked at me.  “Ibuprofen, s’il vous plaît”, I said again.  Now the other eyebrow arched.  I fought the urge to say it again, only louder.  What was I missing?  Perhaps my throbbing knee was effecting my pronunciation.  I looked around on the counter; grabbed a pen and flipped over some advertising flyer.  I-b-u-p-r-o-f-e-n, I wrote.</li>\n 	<li>“Oh, EE-bu-pro-fen” the pharmacist said, and gave me the container of tablets I had needed since I got up that morning.  Flipping French, I thought, and limped back to my hotel.</li>\n 	<li>So what do you do?  Certainly “not getting sick” is the best approach – get enough sleep on the road – often tough to do in strange beds and with full schedules.  I find that the old saw – wash your hands for a full 20 seconds and do it often – has significantly reduced the number of colds I pick up, even when I’m flying a lot.</li>\n 	<li>Packing a well-stocked medicine cabinet helps a bit – allergy medicine, cold tablets, throat lozenges, ee-buprofen tablets, ….  For domestic travel, at least, you’re not trying to cure the sickness; just stave off the symptoms long enough so that you can get home and into the hands of your regular care-givers.</li>\n 	<li>International travel is a bit dicier.  I know some travelers who have medical jet/air ambulance insurance so that they have a quick way to get back home if something catastrophic happens.</li>\n 	<li>While I haven’t done that yet, I am looking for a medical phrase book before my next trip to Europe, complete with pronunciation guides for common drugs.  Ibuprofen, ee-buprofen – geez…</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music --<a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/music/listeners/artistdetails.php?BandHash=a3aaebb5e412ef546d1bddd6c9b4b4ed\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> <em>Love Survives</em></a> by Lovespirals</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>What\'s in My Bag?</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>One of the<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/01/01/new-years-travel-resolutions/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> New Year’s Travel Resolutions</a> that I posted on the TravelCommons site on Jan 1<sup>st</sup> was to “unpack and repack my briefcase”.</li>\n 	<li>Steve Frick, a long time TravelCommons listener, wrote the next day “did that this weekend. 3 pairs of headphones, approx 2 lbs of loose change, 50+ business cards and at least 15 hotel room keys. No wonder my laptop bag was so heavy.”</li>\n 	<li>Five years ago – February 2006 – in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2006/02/18/podcast-33-listener-mailbag-whats-in-my-briefcase/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">episode #33</a>, I did a bit of an audio tour through my briefcase</li>\n 	<li>&lt;audio clip&gt;</li>\n 	<li>The <a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/travelcommons/102434287/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">picture</a> of this de-constructed travel kit is the first picture of the TravelCommons Flickr photostream</li>\n 	<li>Five years later, some (and surprisingly only some) of the contents have changed, but the goal is the same – optimizing the trade-off between weight and having everything I need.  There’s always that desire to have everything you could possibly need – to make your briefcase into the road warrior version of Batman’s utility belt, letting you amaze your traveling companions by pulling out just the right thing to solve any travel problem.</li>\n 	<li>So you’re always prepared, but you’re always trailing up the rear – either because you’ve got the heaviest bag or because the TSA is always pulling your bag for secondary screening because all that stuff makes them suspicious.</li>\n 	<li>And so back to that balancing act – what do I need all the time (and so would be a pain to be without) vs. what can I buy or borrow for the one or two times I need it?</li>\n 	<li>The technology has changed quite a bit, as you would guess, in 5 years.  It’s kinda fun looking back.  I’ve traded an IBM ThinkPad for a MacBook Air; a Motorola flip phone and U2-themed iPod Classic replaced by an iPhone; and an Aliph Jawbone 2 Bluetooth headset bumping the Motorola H710.  No need for the Microsoft travel mouse or Bluetooth dongle with the MacBook. Also, my vendor-supplied thumb drives have been upgraded – from 512 MB to 4 GB.</li>\n 	<li>I replaced the Swiss Army briefcase – I called it a “poor man’s Tumi” in the podcast – with a backpack. And, of course, the TSA’s liquid ban stopped me from carrying on little bottles of hand lotion. I now grab them from every hotel and leave them scattered around conference rooms and rental cars</li>\n 	<li>What’s stayed the same?  The Moleskine notebook, the selection of pens, the pink semi-transparent folder for expense receipts, a bottle with ibuprofen and zyrtec tablets, the iRiver MP3 player and recorder that I use to record these podcasts, and, most importantly, a tin of wintergreen Altoids to counter dry mouth when I fall asleep in flight – a pretty common occurrence.</li>\n 	<li>What’s new?  An iPad, an extra battery for my iPhone, an AT&amp;T USB cellular modem which lets me skip paying for slow hotel WiFi, a set of Motorola Bluetooth stereo headphones that I use when I work out, a couple of Tazo green tea bags because in-flight coffee is just horrid, an inhaler to make it easier to breathe when I catch a cold (good advice from a “doc in the box” in San Mateo after being laid low in the SFO Marriott by bronchitis), and a Verizon Droid 2 for the too many times that AT&amp;T’s coverage sucks.</li>\n 	<li>The iPad let me ditch the printed reports I used to carry – I hated reading them on a computer screen, but don’t mind it on the iPad.  The iBooks and Kindle apps also let me leave physical books at home.  I also tossed the 3 business card holders I’d accumulated – my backpack has a pocket just for business cards.  And do we really need business cards anymore?  Unless you’re regularly meeting with Asian businessmen, business card exchanges are getting rarer and rarer.</li>\n 	<li>So I <em>think</em> I’m traveling lighter.  But it might be a push – what I’ve dropped in paper I think I’ve made up in device chargers.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #87</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://musicalley.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Music Alley</a></li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or MP3 file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to @mpeacock on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/153475331351358\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_87.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #87 -- Sick on the Road; What\'s in My Briefcase?','','inherit','closed','closed','','531-revision-v1','','','2021-09-26 11:35:42','2021-09-26 16:35:42','',531,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3821',0,'revision','',0),
(3822,1,'2021-09-26 11:37:00','2021-09-26 16:37:00','[caption id=\"attachment_528\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/5314961468_c424e091a81.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-528 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/5314961468_c424e091a81-300x224.jpg\" alt=\"View from my new office atop Squaw Peak\" width=\"300\" height=\"224\"></a> View from my new office atop Squaw Peak[/caption]\n\nFinishing up the year in front of a warm fire in the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago after a couple of warm-up trips to <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Phoenix, Arizona\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix%2C_Arizona\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Phoenix</a>. &nbsp;I carved myself out an mini-vacation during one of the trips and worked at the summit of <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Squaw Peak\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squaw_Peak\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Squaw Peak</a> for part of an afternoon. My <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"MacBook Air\" href=\"http://www.apple.com/macbookair\" rel=\"homepage\">MacBook Air</a> -- my perfect travel PC -- turned itself into a good-looking brushed metal brick on my last day in Phoenix, forcing an unplanned stop at the Scottsdale <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Apple Store\" href=\"http://www.apple.com/retail\" rel=\"homepage\">Apple Store</a> before my flight home. &nbsp;Trying to get some work done while I waited reminded me of the difficulty of finding a quiet spot for a phone call while living on the road. &nbsp;Missed connections caused by recent snow storms reminded me of ways you can have a little fun when stranded -- if you embrace the adventure of it. &nbsp;Responding to a couple of listener questions on the closing song (<a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><em>Pictures of You</em></a> by Evangeline), I replay the song\'s back story as related by the band\'s manager. &nbsp;Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_86.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n<hr>\n\nHere are the transcript from TravelCommons podcast #86:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you once again from the TravelCommons studios, wrapping up the year in the white icebox that is Chicago this winter.&nbsp; And it’s a cold one.&nbsp; Not as bad as what they’re getting in Minneapolis-St Paul – watching the video of the Metrodome’s ceiling collapse was pretty amazing – nor what New York is getting tonight, but I think I read that this has been something like the 7<sup>th</sup> coldest December on record.&nbsp; So I can tell you that I wasn’t too upset when my travel plans had me in Phoenix two out of the last three weeks.</li>\n 	<li>Packing for my last trip, I promised myself that, somewhere in the 4 days that I was in Phoenix, I’d find a couple of hours to get out of the office and go hike up <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Camelback Mountain\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camelback_Mountain\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Camelback Mountain</a>.&nbsp; It was 12 degrees in Chicago when I was packing and the forecast for Phoenix was 70’s and 80’s all week.&nbsp; I’ve always said that if you don’t take at least a little something for yourself from even business travel, you’ll hate your life.</li>\n 	<li>So I start looking for my opening.&nbsp; Monday, nope – inbound travel days are usually jam packed and American Airlines just added to it – making it like an overstuffed carryon – with a 2-hr maintenance delay, complete with swapping out planes.&nbsp; Makes me misty for the days when preventative maintenance meant more than…</li>\n 	<li>Tuesday goes by, Wednesday morning I think – ah, I’ll do it on Thursday before I fly home – but I stop myself.&nbsp; My Weds afternoon isn’t that full.&nbsp; I push some stuff around and, presto, there’s my couple of hours.&nbsp; I race back to the hotel, change, look at the map – hmmm, Camelback might be a bit too far of a drive, especially if I hit traffic.&nbsp; But Squaw Peak looks doable.&nbsp; And so off I raced. After 1.2 miles, 1,200 vertical feet, and 19 ounces of Propel sports drink, I was at the top.&nbsp; It’s a pretty view – with the hills to the north and the city to the south.&nbsp; I sat for a bit, caught my breath, and then looked at my <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"iPhone\" href=\"http://www.apple.com/iphone\" rel=\"homepage\">iPhone</a>.&nbsp; Hmm, full bars.&nbsp; Started running e-mail and turned the summit into my office for the next 30 minutes – reading a couple of documents, cranking out some quick notes while watching the planes and birds fly by.&nbsp; I took a photo at the summit, which I <em>later</em> posted to the TravelCommons Facebook page and Twitter feed if you’d like to take a look at my new office.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/swivel-deep/\"><em>Arlos Auto Parts and Salvation</em></a> by Swivel Neck Jones</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>In the last <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2010/11/30/podcast-85-importance-of-hotel-bathrooms-maximizing-miles/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">episode</a> and in a prior TravelCommons <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2010/11/15/two-weeks-with-a-macbook-air/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">post</a> I sang the praises of my 11-inch MacBook Air as the perfect travel PC.&nbsp; Which, of course, meant I had tempted the technology gods who, in response last week, reached out from their Valhalla data center and smote the little unibody of brushed metal – bricking it on my last day in Scottsdale.&nbsp; I opened the lid – no instant on.&nbsp; I pressed the power button, no instant on.&nbsp; I held the power button for 5 seconds, 15 seconds, 5 minutes, nothing but a dead screen.</li>\n 	<li>If this happened on any other laptop, my first course of action would’ve been to drop the battery to try and reset the power management.&nbsp; But, that ain’t happening with a MacBook Air, so after stabbing the Power button another half-dozen times, I gave up and headed over to the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Genius Bar\" href=\"http://apple.com/retail/geniusbar\" rel=\"homepage\">Genius Bar</a> at the Scottsdale Apple Store.</li>\n 	<li>Since our company allows Macs but doesn’t provide help desk support – the Development teams use Macs and stooping to call a Help Desk would be the furthest thing from their minds – the Genius Bar is the defacto help desk.&nbsp; Since it was near lunch time, I stopped off at <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Smashburger\" href=\"http://www.smashburger.com\" rel=\"homepage\">Smashburger</a>.&nbsp; A TravelCommons listener – I forget who – had replied to one of my <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"In-N-Out Burger\" href=\"http://www.in-n-out.com/\" rel=\"homepage\">In-N-Out Burger</a> tweets, asking if I’d tried Smashburger.&nbsp; It was a god burger – not quite the mystique or ambiance of In-N-Out – but a good burger.</li>\n 	<li>One thing that I should’ve done while waiting for my Smashburger was book a time at the Genius Bar. Walking into the Apple Store, the hipster with an iPhone told me it’d be a 30-minute wait.&nbsp; I checked my watch – I had enough time before my flight back home.&nbsp; Right at the 30-minute mark, a guy walked over to me, opened my Mac, punched the power button a couple of times to no avail and said “Wow” and took it into the back room.&nbsp; OK, it’s a bit better than having some guy in India tell me to restart my PC a half-dozen times, but still… I look at my watch again.&nbsp; How long before I have to fetch this guy and dash to the airport?</li>\n 	<li>Not long as it turns out.&nbsp; 5 minutes later, the guy comes back with my now-working Mac.&nbsp; My initial diagnosis was right – it was the battery, or the PMU – power management unit? &nbsp;Since you can’t drop the battery, there’s a multi-finger key sequence – hold down the shift, control, option, and command keys with your left hand and then hit the power key with your right.&nbsp; I wrote it down so I could “self-serve” next time.&nbsp; Not sure if the whole experience was any better than hanging on hold for a help desk.&nbsp; I am paying more attention, though, to the location of Apple stores.</li>\n 	<li>Now, the 30-minute wait wasn’t a complete loss.&nbsp; Though my Mac was dead, my iPad and iPhone were fine.&nbsp; So while I was waiting for my Genius to arrive, I was running e-mail and reading documents on my iPad.&nbsp; Not a complete loss, but it wouldn’t have worked if I had needed to talk to someone, if I’ve had a conference call.</li>\n 	<li>And that is a big problem with the “digital nomad” work style – no office, working out of Starbucks and airport clubs and the like – there’s no good place to take a conference call.&nbsp; You can IM, e-mail, and text all you want, but once you need to open that voice channel, it’s a very different story.&nbsp; Nobody wants to be the guy flooding the conference bridge with overhead Muzak or the signature sound of a barista steaming a pitcher of milk.&nbsp; Airports are no better.&nbsp; If they don’t have an Admirals or Red Carpet Club – or if I’m flying Southwest – then the hunt is on for a spot not under a PA speaker and away from the aisles with the beeping carts.&nbsp; And you think the hunt for a working electrical outlet is tough.&nbsp; I’m forever trolling through the new issues of Skymall magazine looking for a real-life “cone of silence” like they had in <em>Get Smart</em>.&nbsp; I wonder if the Brookstone in ORD T3 has one?</li>\n 	<li>In the last episode, we talked about the bathroom being one of the most important rooms in a hotel.&nbsp; For me, the workout room is another important place. I stayed in the <a href=\"http://www.theashtonhotel.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Ashton Hotel</a> in downtown Fort Worth earlier this month.&nbsp; Nice place – a boutique hotel in a historical building right near Sundance Square and a great beer bar – the Flying Saucer.&nbsp; But would I recommend it to friends?&nbsp; Hmmm… I don’t think so, because the workout room is so limited?&nbsp; Or lame.&nbsp; A small room in the basement with a couple of treadmills and an elliptical – with a stand up fan pointed at them.</li>\n 	<li>That might be good for a 1-night stay, but I was there for 3.&nbsp; I, like many frequent travelers, depend upon hotel fitness rooms to stay in some semblance of shape.&nbsp; A couple of treadmills stuffed in a closet just doesn’t cut it anymore.</li>\n 	<li>And finally, I just want to remind everyone that Google’s Christmas <a href=\"http://www.freeholidaywifi.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">present</a> of free Gogo in-flight WiFi on Delta, AirTran, and Virgin&nbsp;America airlines is still on. It runs through Jan 2.&nbsp; Perfect way to post your family Christmas pics on the flight how.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a question, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.&nbsp; The e-mail address is <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a></span>, you can send me a <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Twitter message</a> at mpeacock, or you can post them on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/153475331351358\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Facebook page</a> or the web site at travelcommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/fuzz-messy/\"><em>Smiling Perspective</em></a> by General Fuzz</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Fun With Layovers</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>One of the most sacred frequent traveler rules is <em>Fly Direct</em>.&nbsp; Be it winter with snow or summer with thunderstorms, adding that intermediate stop adds one more point of failure, one more opportunity for the airlines to screw up.</li>\n 	<li>And while many connecting flights are cheaper than direct ones, for a true comparison, you have to factor in the potential costs of a delay – hotel room (because the airlines won’t pay for weather delays), meals, replacement clothes and toiletries for misrouted luggage…&nbsp; In an episode last year, I calculated the cost – the breakeven premium between a direct and connecting flight -- to be $100-150.</li>\n 	<li>But, with the right frame of mind – an “adventuring” frame of mind as one person put it – you can actually manufacture something good out of a connection.</li>\n 	<li>The first requirement is to step away from the 1-hour connection.&nbsp; Yes, we usually want to get to our destination in the shortest possible time, but accepting a connection of 1 hour or less…. Think about it – a 15-minute delay on your inbound flight – which is as good as on-time for most airlines – and you’re sprinting through the terminal (remember when we used to call it “OJ-ing” it – that was a long time ago) and probably having to check your carry-one.&nbsp; A 1-hr connection is just asking for a stress attack and/or an overnight stay at the airport branch of the Bates Motel.</li>\n 	<li>The second requirement is to connect through some place you might want to visit.&nbsp; On those rare occasions where I’m forced to take a connection, I look at the flight choices and think – where would I not mind being stuck?</li>\n 	<li>OK, sounds a bit odd, but think about it.&nbsp; I’m flying from Phoenix to Ft Myers, FL – zero direct flight – no surprise there.&nbsp; So where do I want to connect through – Miami, Dallas, Houston, O’Hare, Atlanta?&nbsp; The total flight duration for any of these connections is within 90 minutes of each other.&nbsp; For me, it’s an easy choice – I go through Chicago.&nbsp; If I get stranded, I sleep in my own bed.&nbsp; If I get delayed, I call up my wife and we grab dinner.</li>\n 	<li>Traveling with my family to Cape Town, South Africa, I chose the connection through Frankfurt because I knew the airport wasn’t too far out of town.&nbsp; We landed after the overnight flight from Chicago, passed through Customs and headed straight for a cab that took us to downtown to Romer Square.&nbsp; We had lunch, I had a beer, and then we walked around downtown for 4 hours – a quick sightseeing excursion between our overnight flights.</li>\n 	<li>Some years back, my parents flew from Denver to Paducah, KY to visit my aunt and grandmother.&nbsp; Again, no direct flights so they connected through ORD.&nbsp; And, as you can guess, on the way home, their commuter flight was late out of Paducah and they missed a tight connection.&nbsp; My dad called me from the airport.&nbsp; It was New Year’s Eve night and we were having 3 or 4 couples over. &nbsp;“Get your luggage and book the flight out tomorrow,” I told him, “you can help me cook dinner.” Completely unplanned.&nbsp; I picked them up, brought them home, threw an apron at my dad, and we had a great time.</li>\n 	<li>Planning ahead for these possibilities is key, though.&nbsp; Last week, friends and longtime TravelCommons listeners Allan Marko and Chris Chufo got caught at ORD when a snow storm caused the crew for their flight to JAX to time out.&nbsp; That was a bad night – some 1,500 flights were cancelled between ORD and MDW.&nbsp; The United customer service line stretched all the way down Concourse C.&nbsp; A frequent traveler, Allan immediately rang United’s Premiere Exec line and got seats on the next day’s flight to JAX, then found a room at a nearby Hilton Garden Inn and stepped out of line to go to bed.</li>\n 	<li>But without luggage.&nbsp; United didn’t even try to give it back.&nbsp; And because they had to check one bag anyhow with presents, they decided not to carry on – avoid the battle for carry-on space on full planes because they had time – no need to power directly from the flight to a meeting.&nbsp; But now, though they had a hotel room, they had no change of clothes and just the toiletries they could scrounge from the Hilton.</li>\n 	<li>A small inconvenience, though.&nbsp; Since their flight didn’t leave ‘til 7:30 the next night, I shuffled my calendar around, picked them at the Hilton and took them into Chicago for lunch.&nbsp; We ate at <a href=\"http://longmanandeagle.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Longman &amp; Eagle</a>, a Logan Square gastro-pub that picked up a Michelin star last month – Chris and I had wild boar sloppy joes while Allan had the pork belly BLT, and then ran down a couple of blocks to a brew pub, <a href=\"http://revbrew.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Revolution Brewery</a>, where they picked up some fresh t-shirts and I refilled a growler with a <a href=\"http://beeradvocate.com/beer/style/140\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">double India Pale Ale</a> – though we thought hard about it, we just couldn’t figure out a way they could get a 64 oz jug of beer through security.&nbsp; By 5, they were back at ORD, fed, beered up, and ready to try again.</li>\n 	<li>It’s all about attitude. Do you lean into it – figure out how to get everything you can out of it – or do you back away? On her extended journey to JAX, Chris Chufo kept chanting a mantra -- “It’s an adventure” – and came out smiling at the end</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/atek-phoenix/\"><em>Goa Life</em></a> by Ambient Teknology</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>From the Archives – Story Behind The Closing Song</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>I’ve received a couple of requests over the past months for information on the closing song – the tune that wraps each episode of TravelCommons.</li>\n 	<li>Earlier this month, Becky Boyd wrote – “I can\'t find the name of the song you use at the end of the show by lyrics.&nbsp; It is so appropriate to me and my husband.&nbsp; We relocated from California to South Carolina, then purchased a vacation home back in California.&nbsp; We often find ourselves on different coasts from each other.”</li>\n 	<li>The song is <em>Pictures of You,</em> done by a now-defunct country band from Glasgow, Scotland called Evangeline – which is now confused on the Internet with a defunct country band from New Orleans called Evangeline.&nbsp; Probably explains why Becky couldn’t find the song through its lyrics.</li>\n 	<li>Back in 2005, though, the Scottish Evangeline was playing festivals in the UK.&nbsp; I found them through the Tartan Podcast which, as the name kinda hints at, covered the Scottish music scene.&nbsp; It too is defunct.&nbsp; This story is starting to get a bit lonely.</li>\n 	<li>Anyhow, after hearing the song, I sent a note to the band’s manager Willie Evans asking for a couple of words – a bit of back story on the song.&nbsp; Here’s his response.</li>\n 	<li>Five years on, I still think it’s a great song about life on the road.&nbsp; If you like it, <a href=\"http://itunes.apple.com/us/album/hard-way/id75388292\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">iTunes</a> or <a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/Hard-Way/dp/B000QQW5D8/ref=sr_1_cc_2?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1293560032&amp;sr=1-2-catcorr\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Amazon</a> are probably the best places to pick to it up.&nbsp; Given the on-line confusion between the bands, I’ll post links in the show notes at travelcommons.com and on the TravelCommons Facebook page.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #86</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\">Magnatune</a></li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or MP3 file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to @mpeacock on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/153475331351358\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_86.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #86 -- Fun with Layovers; Story Behind the Closing Tune','','inherit','closed','closed','','435-revision-v1','','','2021-09-26 11:37:00','2021-09-26 16:37:00','',435,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3822',0,'revision','',0),
(3823,1,'2021-09-26 11:38:25','2021-09-26 16:38:25','[caption id=\"attachment_543\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/taxi-sign1.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-543\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/taxi-sign1-300x210.jpg\" alt=\"Warning in a St Louis Taxi\" width=\"300\" height=\"210\"></a> Warning in a St Louis Taxi[/caption]\n\nI skipped the Midwest\'s \"snow-pocalypse\" by flying to <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Phoenix, Arizona\" href=\"http://www.phoenix.gov/\" rel=\"homepage\">Phoenix</a> where it was unseasonably cold -- in the 20\'s and 30\'s F -- but without snow. It\'s been a cold winter and I came down with some nasty bug while visiting <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Dallas\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dallas\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Dallas</a>, which reminded me how miserable it is to be sick while traveling. Before my whining, though, I give a quick status on my New Year\'s travel resolutions, my observations on the status of the TSA\'s full body scanning program, and my struggles trying to use Avatron\'s Air Display app to turn my <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"iPad\" href=\"http://www.apple.com/ipad/\" rel=\"homepage\">iPad</a> into a second display for my MacBook Air. &nbsp;Gary Learned suggests a headset that can defeat overhead PA&nbsp;announcements&nbsp;at airports, and I go through my briefcase -- how I\'ve changed what I carry for business travel over the past 5 years. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_87.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n<hr>\n\nHere are the transcript from TravelCommons podcast #87:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Chicago\" href=\"http://www.cityofchicago.org/\" rel=\"homepage\">Chicago, IL</a>.&nbsp; I managed to skip this week’s “snopocalypse” -- the 20+ inches of snow that fell here Tuesday and Wednesday.&nbsp; Instead, I flew down to Phoenix on Tuesday morning – though not without a couple of glitches courtesy of American Airlines – and came back Friday evening.&nbsp; And yes, I did feel a bit guilty skipping out on the shoveling in the wind and cold, but that’s what kids are for.</li>\n 	<li>It has been a cold winter so far.&nbsp; I was in Dallas a couple of weeks ago where it was rainy, in the low 30’s and the wind was blowing a steady 20 mph – OK, no snow, but not any better than Chicago.&nbsp; And then even this week in Phoenix – the temperatures were in the 30’s, getting into the 20’s at night.&nbsp; Yes it was colder in Chicago and elsewhere, but still – where’s that global warming when you really need it.</li>\n 	<li>Earlier in January, Phoenix was much nicer – sunny and in the 60’s.&nbsp; The first couple of days I was there, I was running on autopilot a bit – for lunch, I’d dash out of the office, hop in my rental car and drive the quarter-mile north to the shopping area with the sandwich shops and a Whole Foods.&nbsp; Driving back the second day, I thought, “What the hell am I doing?&nbsp; It’s 20 degrees back home!”&nbsp; The next day, I took an hour for lunch, walked to the Whole Foods, bought myself a cup of soup, sat outside in the sun and ate it, and then walked back to the office.</li>\n 	<li>Which kind of reminds me of the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/01/01/new-years-travel-resolutions/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">New Years resolutions</a> I posted on the TravelCommons site on the first of the year.&nbsp; #3 was “Take More Quick Breaks” – along the lines of “take advantage of the travel because it sure takes advantage of you…” In the post, I mentioned the afternoons I took to hike up Squaw Peak in Phoenix or walk along the beach in <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Naples, Florida\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naples%2C_Florida\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Naples, FL</a>.&nbsp; Walking along a road to lunch seems a bit of a pathetic reach, but the spirit is there – if you’re traveling from snow to sun for work, don’t forget to grab a couple of rays for yourself.</li>\n 	<li>Actually, I did a bit better than that – I went to the BCS college football championship game while in Phoenix, and to a Mavs-Lakers basketball game while in Dallas – something for each week.</li>\n 	<li>As for my other resolutions?&nbsp; “Plan Further Ahead” because airline load factors/seat utilization is moving up again?&nbsp; I’m doing OK with that – I’m booking out 2-3 weeks in advance, which is a huge improvement for me.</li>\n 	<li>“Repack My Briefcase?” – check out the “What’s in my bag” segment a bit later.</li>\n 	<li>“Take More Pictures?” – just a marginal improvement – I don’t count taking pictures with my <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"iPhone\" href=\"http://www.apple.com/iphone\" rel=\"homepage\">iPhone</a> of bullet points on whiteboards</li>\n 	<li>And the toughest one – “Be nicer to TSA agents?”&nbsp; I was doing better because, at least over the past few trips, they’ve been nicer to me.&nbsp; I hadn’t been groped or irradiated on my first couple of trips, which will tend to have a positive impact on anyone’s disposition.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/music/listeners/artistdetails.php?BandHash=f81ac4222ffce06bc8c3c7c3ae01a7fd\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Shine</a></em> by Hungry Lucy</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>The TSA full body scan controversy that was white-hot during the Thanksgiving weekend seems to have cooled quite a bit.&nbsp; The TSA will <a href=\"http://www.politicsdaily.com/2010/11/22/poll-public-backs-full-body-scans-but-split-on-pat-downs/\" target=\"_self\" rel=\"noopener\">say</a> that this is proof the American public supports its program of full body scans or AIT – Advanced Imaging Technology – as they like to call it, and the “enhanced pat-down” as the TSA likes to call it, or the full body grope as the rest of us experience it.</li>\n 	<li>I think instead it’s that the TSA has pulled way back on their use of these invasive techniques.&nbsp; I hadn’t been hit with a full-body scanner or a grope-down from the beginning of December until last week.&nbsp; When the TSA dropped the scanners into ORD in July, they had <em>everyone</em> go through them, which doubled the screening time – at least.&nbsp; Then through the Christmas travel season, it seemed that the machines were off more than they were on, and even when they were on, they weren’t not on every security lane, so it was pretty easy to avoid them unless you’re going thru a small security checkpoint – which is how they last caught me in DFW.</li>\n 	<li>They also seem to be have slowed the rollout.&nbsp; I haven’t seen them crop up in any new places.&nbsp; Terminal 2 in PHX, for example, is still a TSA porn-free zone.&nbsp; Not that I’m complaining.&nbsp; Nice to be able to just move through security without having to hold my hands above my head.&nbsp; And remember when we used to complain about taking our shoes off…</li>\n 	<li>However, on my last two trips out of ORD, I was fully irradiated.&nbsp; Again, it was going through a small checkpoint – the status-only checkpoint in Terminal 3, where American lives.</li>\n 	<li>Though the TSA will say that the full-body scan doesn’t take much longer than the metal detector, they’re just flat wrong.&nbsp; The actual scan – the amount of time you have your arms above your head – is only a few seconds longer than walking through the metal detector, the entire screening process takes much longer.</li>\n 	<li>I’m beginning to consider the locations of these full-body scanners when I book flights.&nbsp; In ORD, it seems easier to avoid them in Terminal 1 than Terminal 3, so my next flight down to Florida I’ve switched over to United. Not completely driven by full-body scanners, but it’s definitely a factor.</li>\n 	<li>And continuing my thread about my MacBook Air.&nbsp; You’ll remember that one of the reasons I chose the 11-inch model was the TSA said it could stay in your briefcase – kinda like a bit iPad.&nbsp; However, when you briefcase – or backpack – stacks your iPad on top of your MacBook Air, be prepared to pull one of them out.&nbsp; Talking to a very pleasant TSA X-ray machine operator in ORD, he told me that when they stack up, they get too thick to properly scan.&nbsp; Makes sense.&nbsp; I’ve since moved my iPad to a difference section in my backpack – put some papers and magazines between the iPad and the MBA to provide a bit more separation and haven’t had a problem since.</li>\n 	<li>A number of folks have asked me why I carry both the iPad and a laptop – and I haven’t been able to come up with a real compelling reason.&nbsp; As I’ve said before, I like reading on an iPad and writing on a laptop, but does that justify the extra weight and re-packing hassle of the iPad?&nbsp; I was wishy-washy on that right up to last week when I thought I’d found my killer app for the iPad – Avatron’s <a href=\"http://avatron.com/apps/air-display\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Air Display</a>, which turns the iPad into a secondary display for the MacBook when they’re on the same WiFi network.</li>\n 	<li>Now here’s a reason.&nbsp; While I can work on the smaller screen of my 11-inch MBA (or the 10.6-inch HP netbook before that), having a second display certainly makes it easier to “spread out”.&nbsp; I have two 22-inch monitors on my Windows desktop box at home and love it.&nbsp; I eagerly dropped the $10 for the Air Display app and fired it up…</li>\n 	<li>And was disappointed.&nbsp; It didn’t work in the office.&nbsp; OK, our network guys must have it locked down.&nbsp; Not surprised.&nbsp; I get back to the Hilton and fire it up – again, no luck.&nbsp; At home, doesn’t work when associated with my Apple Airport Express, but does – just once – when associated with the access point that’s built into the big AT&amp;T U-verse modem/router thing in the basement.&nbsp; The only access point I can get Air Display to regularly work on is when I use my Verizon Droid 2 as a 3G hot spot.&nbsp; That’s a bit of a kludge.</li>\n 	<li>When it does work, it’s great – the few times that’s happened.&nbsp; I’ve been hanging around Avatron’s support forums for about a week now, but haven’t found a solution yet.&nbsp; Great concept; real spotty execution.&nbsp; If they can get this to work, my iPad is no longer a heavy Kindle – it’s a real productivity tool.</li>\n 	<li>And following up on my thoughts in the last episode about some of the hassles of the “digital nomad” work style when it comes to finding a quiet place for a conference call, Gary Learned sent in some thoughts…</li>\n 	<li>Gary Learned audio clip</li>\n 	<li>Gary, thanks for that suggestion.&nbsp; I’m hitting Amazon looking for that earpiece right now,</li>\n 	<li>And finally, the Gogo in-flight wireless guys have got a new giveaway as they continue to push awareness of their product.&nbsp; For February, Gogo is adding Facebook to their set of free sites. After the plane gets above 10,000 ft, fire up your laptop or smartphone and associate with the “gogoinflight” wireless network.&nbsp; Open your browser and you’ll get the GoGo sign-on page.&nbsp; On the bottom of the page, you’ll see a set of free web sites – typically the dot com site for the airline you’re flying, a weather site, ….&nbsp; And now, Facebook.&nbsp; Nice to know that you can stay socially connected at 35,000 feet.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a question, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.&nbsp; The e-mail address is <a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a> -- use the Voice Memo app on your iPhone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the Facebook page with GoGo’s free service -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at T/C.com</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Beggarstown</em> by Hollow Horse</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Sick on the Road</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>No, that’s not sick <em>of</em> the road – though that happens at times too.</li>\n 	<li>As I mentioned earlier, I was in Dallas a couple weeks ago – when it was just cold and windy; no snow or ice – and scored an invite to a vendor’s suite at the Mavs-Lakers basketball game.&nbsp; Definitely a premiere game.&nbsp; I went with a couple of guys from the office.</li>\n 	<li>It was a good game – Mavs were down at halftime but came back to beat the Lakers by 10.&nbsp; During the second half, though, I started to feel a tickle in the back of my throat.&nbsp; I couldn’t stop coughing – couldn’t seem to “finish up” a cough – and the beer and salsa were beginning to feel a little rough going down.</li>\n 	<li>Back in the hotel room, I just couldn’t get warm.&nbsp; I went to bed, but soon started shivering. The thermostat was just above my head.&nbsp; I kept pushing the Up button until I heard the heater kick in.&nbsp; After a while, I finally got warm enough to sleep comfortably.&nbsp; The next morning I looked at the temperature setting – it was at 78°.</li>\n 	<li>It didn’t get much better the rest of the day.&nbsp; I drug myself through a full day of meetings and got on a United Express regional jet for my flight home that night.&nbsp; Again, I couldn’t get warm.&nbsp; Since United Express seems to have followed American in pulling blankets and pillows from its planes, I swaddled myself in my tweed jacket and overcoat, and tried not to cough on the person in the window seat.</li>\n 	<li>Now, as being sick on the road goes, this wasn’t that bad.&nbsp; I’ve gotten food poisoning a couple of times, severely pulled muscles, flown with sinus infections that made my head feel like it was going to split in two during descent…</li>\n 	<li>But it did remind me how miserable it is to be sick on the road.&nbsp; For the most part, you’re alone.&nbsp; Though you may have co-workers who will try to help you a bit, when they go home to their families, you’re going home to an empty hotel room and are going to have to fend for yourself.</li>\n 	<li>And it’s not just that you’re lacking a spouse or child to help you out – bring you a blanket or a cup of tea.&nbsp; You need to find a pharmacy, perhaps a doctor.&nbsp; But even then, it can still be a struggle. When I was last in Paris, I tweaked my knee pretty bad and needed some ibuprofen for the pain and swelling.&nbsp; The hotel concierge pointed me in the direction of a pharmacy a couple of blocks away.&nbsp; Walking/limping in, I knew I couldn’t ask for Advil or Motrin – those US name brands don’t exist in France.&nbsp; So I asked for ibuprofen – the generic name of the active ingredient.&nbsp; Ibuprofen is ibuprofen, I thought.</li>\n 	<li>“Ibuprofen, s’il vous plaît” I asked.&nbsp; The pharmacist cocked an eyebrow and looked at me.&nbsp; “Ibuprofen, s’il vous plaît”, I said again.&nbsp; Now the other eyebrow arched.&nbsp; I fought the urge to say it again, only louder.&nbsp; What was I missing?&nbsp; Perhaps my throbbing knee was effecting my pronunciation.&nbsp; I looked around on the counter; grabbed a pen and flipped over some advertising flyer.&nbsp; I-b-u-p-r-o-f-e-n, I wrote.</li>\n 	<li>“Oh, EE-bu-pro-fen” the pharmacist said, and gave me the container of tablets I had needed since I got up that morning.&nbsp; Flipping French, I thought, and limped back to my hotel.</li>\n 	<li>So what do you do?&nbsp; Certainly “not getting sick” is the best approach – get enough sleep on the road – often tough to do in strange beds and with full schedules.&nbsp; I find that the old saw – wash your hands for a full 20 seconds and do it often – has significantly reduced the number of colds I pick up, even when I’m flying a lot.</li>\n 	<li>Packing a well-stocked medicine cabinet helps a bit – allergy medicine, cold tablets, throat lozenges, ee-buprofen tablets, ….&nbsp; For domestic travel, at least, you’re not trying to cure the sickness; just stave off the symptoms long enough so that you can get home and into the hands of your regular care-givers.</li>\n 	<li>International travel is a bit dicier.&nbsp; I know some travelers who have medical jet/air ambulance insurance so that they have a quick way to get back home if something catastrophic happens.</li>\n 	<li>While I haven’t done that yet, I am looking for a medical phrase book before my next trip to Europe, complete with pronunciation guides for common drugs. &nbsp;Ibuprofen, ee-buprofen – geez…</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music --<a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/music/listeners/artistdetails.php?BandHash=a3aaebb5e412ef546d1bddd6c9b4b4ed\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> <em>Love Survives</em></a> by Lovespirals</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>What\'s in My Bag?</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>One of the<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/01/01/new-years-travel-resolutions/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> New Year’s Travel Resolutions</a> that I posted on the TravelCommons site on Jan 1<sup>st</sup> was to “unpack and repack my briefcase”.</li>\n 	<li>Steve Frick, a long time TravelCommons listener, wrote the next day “did that this weekend. 3 pairs of headphones, approx 2 lbs of loose change, 50+ business cards and at least 15 hotel room keys. No wonder my laptop bag was so heavy.”</li>\n 	<li>Five years ago – February 2006 – in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2006/02/18/podcast-33-listener-mailbag-whats-in-my-briefcase/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">episode #33</a>, I did a bit of an audio tour through my briefcase</li>\n 	<li>&lt;audio clip&gt;</li>\n 	<li>The <a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/travelcommons/102434287/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">picture</a> of this de-constructed travel kit is the first picture of the TravelCommons Flickr photostream</li>\n 	<li>Five years later, some (and surprisingly only some) of the contents have changed, but the goal is the same – optimizing the trade-off between weight and having everything I need.&nbsp; There’s always that desire to have everything you could possibly need – to make your briefcase into the road warrior version of Batman’s utility belt, letting you amaze your traveling companions by pulling out just the right thing to solve any travel problem.</li>\n 	<li>So you’re always prepared, but you’re always trailing up the rear – either because you’ve got the heaviest bag or because the TSA is always pulling your bag for secondary screening because all that stuff makes them suspicious.</li>\n 	<li>And so back to that balancing act – what do I need all the time (and so would be a pain to be without) vs. what can I buy or borrow for the one or two times I need it?</li>\n 	<li>The technology has changed quite a bit, as you would guess, in 5 years.&nbsp; It’s kinda fun looking back.&nbsp; I’ve traded an IBM ThinkPad for a MacBook Air; a Motorola flip phone and U2-themed iPod Classic replaced by an iPhone; and an Aliph Jawbone 2 Bluetooth headset bumping the Motorola H710.&nbsp; No need for the Microsoft travel mouse or Bluetooth dongle with the MacBook. Also, my vendor-supplied thumb drives have been upgraded – from 512 MB to 4 GB.</li>\n 	<li>I replaced the Swiss Army briefcase – I called it a “poor man’s Tumi” in the podcast – with a backpack. And, of course, the TSA’s liquid ban stopped me from carrying on little bottles of hand lotion. I now grab them from every hotel and leave them scattered around conference rooms and rental cars</li>\n 	<li>What’s stayed the same?&nbsp; The Moleskine notebook, the selection of pens, the pink semi-transparent folder for expense receipts, a bottle with ibuprofen and zyrtec tablets, the iRiver MP3 player and recorder that I use to record these podcasts, and, most importantly, a tin of wintergreen Altoids to counter dry mouth when I fall asleep in flight – a pretty common occurrence.</li>\n 	<li>What’s new?&nbsp; An iPad, an extra battery for my iPhone, an AT&amp;T USB cellular modem which lets me skip paying for slow hotel WiFi, a set of Motorola Bluetooth stereo headphones that I use when I work out, a couple of Tazo green tea bags because in-flight coffee is just horrid, an inhaler to make it easier to breathe when I catch a cold (good advice from a “doc in the box” in San Mateo after being laid low in the SFO Marriott by bronchitis), and a Verizon Droid 2 for the too many times that AT&amp;T’s coverage sucks.</li>\n 	<li>The iPad let me ditch the printed reports I used to carry – I hated reading them on a computer screen, but don’t mind it on the iPad.&nbsp; The iBooks and Kindle apps also let me leave physical books at home.&nbsp; I also tossed the 3 business card holders I’d accumulated – my backpack has a pocket just for business cards.&nbsp; And do we really need business cards anymore?&nbsp; Unless you’re regularly meeting with Asian businessmen, business card exchanges are getting rarer and rarer.</li>\n 	<li>So I <em>think</em> I’m traveling lighter.&nbsp; But it might be a push – what I’ve dropped in paper I think I’ve made up in device chargers.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #87</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://musicalley.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Music Alley</a></li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or MP3 file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to @mpeacock on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/153475331351358\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_87.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #87 -- Sick on the Road; What\'s in My Briefcase?','','inherit','closed','closed','','531-revision-v1','','','2021-09-26 11:38:25','2021-09-26 16:38:25','',531,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3823',0,'revision','',0),
(3825,1,'2021-09-26 11:40:04','2021-09-26 16:40:04','[caption id=\"attachment_565\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"215\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/Frequent-Flyer-Cards1.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-565 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/Frequent-Flyer-Cards1-215x300.jpg\" alt=\"Full House, Platinum over 1K\" width=\"215\" height=\"300\" /></a> Full House, Platinum over 1K[/caption]\n\nI\'m getting ready for a stint of international travel -- a couple trips to the UK, a vacation to Venice, and then bouncing around southern India. I visited the <a href=\"http://www.travel-goods.org/the-travel-goods-show/\">2011 Travel Goods show</a> in Chicago for a preview of the new travel goodies I\'d be seeing in the shops this spring.  Wading through a front room stacked with luggage, I hit the gadget room with the interesting stuff and interviewed some of the company owners. I also talk about the growing number of wireless <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Wi-Fi\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi-Fi\" rel=\"wikipedia\">WiFi</a> hotspots I\'m seeing in hotels, and about the different ways Marriott and United Airlines dropped my frequent flier/frequent sleeper status after my traveling patterns changed.  Also, a listener tells us about a good <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Air France\" href=\"http://www.airfrance.com\" rel=\"homepage\">Air France</a> experience re-routing around an East Coast snow storm, and an audio comment about being sick on the road. Listen through to the end of the podcast for how to enter the latest TravelCommons contest. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_88.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the transcript from TravelCommons podcast #88:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you yet again from the TravelCommons studios. I just can’t seem to get my act together enough to have everything written in time to record from a hotel room, though if there’s going to be an April episode, I’ll need to.  The beginning of April finds me in Venice, wrapping up the Spring Break I discussed in an earlier episode.  I then get a week at home with some family coming in, then down to Florida for a week, then to the UK, and then, the last week of April in India, bouncing across the usual suspects – Bangalore, Pune, and Chennai – with a weekend in the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Kerala backwaters\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerala_backwaters\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Kerala backwaters</a>.</li>\n 	<li>Not that March has been quiet.  I’m just back from a trip to New York earlier this week and then head down to Phoenix next week. I’m hoping to catch a Spring Training ball game while I’m down there.  I\'ve been working off and on in Phoenix since the mid-‘90’s and have never been to a Spring Training game.  Every year I say I’m going to carve out time, and every year something comes up.  This year, though.  This will be the year.  Again working on that New Year’s travel resolution about taking more quick breaks.  The fact that I’m still thinking about a New Year’s resolution has to be breaking some sort of rule.</li>\n 	<li>Stay with me ‘til the end of this episode – either the preferred way by listening or the ADD way by scrubbing – for a quick TravelCommons contest.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Keep Your Motor Running</em> by Dave Hole</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>OK, let’s see what bits and bobs I have been keeping track of on Evernote, and Twitter, and Facebook…</li>\n 	<li>For everyone who watched all the way to the end of the <a title=\"Video #1 – Impressions of Vietnam\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2010/09/06/video-1-impressions-of-vietnam/\">Vietnam video</a> back in September – and for those of you who haven’t, it’s still available on the web site, on the iTunes feed, and on the TravelCommons Facebook page – there’s a picture, a head shot of me, with a boa – the large snake, not the feathered thing -- draped around my neck.  You can plainly see the receding graying hair. So it caught me up short when a United gate agent looked at my boarding pass, and then at me, and said “You look too young to have a <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"United Airlines\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Mileage Plus</a> number this low.”  It worked – I gave her one of those customer service “attaboys’ they always send to their status fliers.  It reminded me of my last trip to India when the immigration agent looked at me a couple of times and said that I looked much younger than my passport photo.  Either I’ve unknowingly picked up the ability to cloud men’s minds or that picture of Dorian Grey I picked up at a garage sale actually works.</li>\n 	<li>We’ve talked in past episodes about how for frequent travelers, the cost of wireless data plans can quickly pay for themselves in avoided hotel WiFi charges – 3-4 nights in a month -- if you tend to stay in hotels that still charge for wireless or don’t have precious metal status at chains like Hilton or Marriott.  Anyhow, I’ve seen over the past few months a growing number of wireless hotspots when I pop open my laptop in my hotel room.  I see in the network browser at least 2-3 Verizon hotspots, a Sprint, and every once in a while, a Virgin hotspot.  I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised – most Android phones have 3G hotspot capabilities built in.  I guess it’s the power I’m more surprised about.  If I’m seeing 5 or 6 of these, they’re broadcasting farther than just the adjacent room.  And while most have security enabled, there’s always 1 or 2 running naked.  And this will only increase after AT&amp;T iPhones get hotspot capability with iOS 4.3.  With only 11 channels in the US implementation of WiFi, there’s gonna be some congestion in the air soon.</li>\n 	<li>Some good comments also came into the web site, the e-mail box and Twitter since the last episode…</li>\n 	<li>Andre – who describes himself as a “long-time listener from Germany” – left this comment on the Winter Travel Tips post\n<ul>\n 	<li>Wanted to share a positive experience with an airline call center when I was travelling to the US in January. I flew Air France on the international legs – Stuttgart to Paris-DeGaulle to JFK and back, and used United miles for the domestic portion to Florida – JFK to Washington-Dulles to Miami.</li>\n 	<li>As my departure approached, so did a massive snowstorm. Just as I finished packing my luggage the night before departure, Air France e-mailed me that my flight out of Kennedy was canceled.  Indeed, AF kept all 4 of their JFK flights in Paris to keep their schedule from getting screwed up. I called the AF call center. I said that I\'m currently in Miami and asked if there was flight to Paris out of here or DC. After waiting on hold for a while the agent transferred me to a special Delta help desk, warning me that I might have to pay extra to fly out of MIA. Next agent told me the same, but she had to talk to AF in Paris anyways.</li>\n 	<li>After another wait, she came back, totally astonished that AF, not only accepted the re-routing, but also did that free of charge. I guess they were just happy to have one less passenger standing around in New York.</li>\n 	<li>So, there are still moments where you think that you are a valued customer and they care about you.</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Andre, thanks for that story.  This was a tough winter in the US.  I have a friend from Detroit who was in Boston one week and supposed to be in New York the next.  One of those storms blew through, cancelled his flight, and his next available flight home was the following Monday, when he was supposed to be flying back to New York.  He just hung around Boston for the weekend, bought some new underwear, and then caught Amtrak down to New York Monday morning – much less stressful.</li>\n 	<li>Peter Zurich sent in a note about the running thread on the TSA’s full body scanners, specifically about my observation in the last episode about the partial roll out of the scanners.  What good was it to scan 100% of the passengers in ORD’s Terminal 1 last Monday morning – pushing security lines down the concourse, and yet have no scanners at all in alternative airports like Ft Myers, FL.  In this same vein, Peter writes\n<ul>\n 	<li>I am all onboard for security, but what we have now is security theatre that is just another meaningless escalation from x-ray to liquid ban to shoes off.  We joked about what a good thing it was that Richard Reid, the shoe bomber, didn’t have it in his underwear, and of course, that’s the next thing that happens, and we get the naked scanners.  On and on it goes…</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Yes, Peter, and so it does.  One thing the housing market meltdown has done is make people less mobile – they can’t easily get out of their houses to move to another city for a new job.  The number of people flying every week to their jobs is growing.  Making this work requires smooth predictable travel – something the TSA seems to have no interest in facilitating.</li>\n 	<li>And finally, yet another audio comment – I love these – this time from Lori Humm, another long-time TravelCommons listener, about a time when she was sick while on the road</li>\n 	<li>Lori Humm audio clip</li>\n 	<li>Lori, thanks for that story.  Makes me feel a bit of a whiner -- Type A flu definitely tops my cold I whined about in the last episode.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a question, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is <a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a> -- use the Voice Memo app on your iPhone or something like Virtual Recorder on your Android phone to record and send in an audio comment like Lori or Gary in last month’s episode; send a <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Twitter</a> message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/153475331351358\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Facebook</a> page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Baja Taxi</em> by Brian Buckit</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>New Travel Goodies</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Chris Truelove, another long time TravelCommons listener from the UK, dropped me a line a couple of weeks back, saying that he would be in Chicago for the 2011 Travel Goods show to launch the latest version of his luggage locator tag business. I had mentioned his globalbagtag.com business some episodes ago, and now he’s launching a new line – back2you.com.</li>\n 	<li>Always looking for some podcast content – as well as the opportunity to meet a listener – I headed down on Sunday afternoon.</li>\n 	<li>McCormick Center in Chicago is one of the world’s largest exhibition spaces, so finding the show took a little bit.  Walking in, it was luggage as far as I could see.  There were lots of colors on display.  Everybody – well, except for Tumi – was looking to make a break from black.  I couldn’t discern a clear alternative, though – was red the new black or was beige.  I did see a surprising number of hardshell rolling bags and in all sorts of wild prints.  Perhaps those are more targeted at the recreational market – can’t say I saw a lot of cheetah-print hardshell bags being put in the overhead on my morning flight to New York last week.</li>\n 	<li>In spite of all the colors, my eyes began to glaze over – you can only look at so many suitcases before sleep – or boredom – begins to wash over you.  Then I walked into the back room and things got much more interesting.  Rather than 2-story luggage displays, in here were smaller booths filled with all sorts of travel gadgets.  Even the bags back here had interesting twists. Powerbag showed backpacks and briefcases with built-in batteries, complete with built-in iPhone and USB cords to keep your phones and iPods topped off while walking down the concourse.  And a company called Runnur (<a href=\"http://gorunnur.com/\">http://gorunnur.com/</a>) was selling a fanny pack reengineered into something like a bandolier, slinging everything across one shoulder instead of resting on your back-side.</li>\n 	<li>It was here that I found Chris and so, using the Voice Memo app on my iPhone, I asked him to tell me about Back2You (<a href=\"http://back2you.com/\">http://back2you.com/</a>)</li>\n 	<li>Back2You interview\n\n[caption id=\"attachment_577\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"150\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/DSC_7791-copy11.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-577 size-thumbnail\" title=\"Back2You Tag\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/DSC_7791-copy1-150x150.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"150\" height=\"150\" /></a> Back2You Bag Tag[/caption]</li>\n 	<li>Thanks Chris.  Those tags could come in handy on my upcoming trips to Italy, the UK, and India where I won’t be in any single place more than a couple of days.</li>\n 	<li>Walking around the back room, I found some other interesting products</li>\n 	<li>TuGo interview</li>\n 	<li>I’ll post a picture in the show notes.  I tried TuGo (<a href=\"http://goodtugo.com/\">http://goodtugo.com/</a>)  out last Monday morning in ORD.  It got it on my bag in less than a minute, put my coffee in there, then put my backpack on top of my bag and it worked like a charm.  Not sure if the problem it’s solving is worth the space it takes up in my bag, but it definitely works.</li>\n 	<li>One of the themes in the back room seemed to be comfort – as the seat pitch – the distance between rows – shrink and planes get more crowded, people are looking to buy a little something to make the journey more bearable.</li>\n 	<li>Kuhi Comfort interview\n\n[caption id=\"attachment_576\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"150\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/DSC_7788-copy11.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-576 size-thumbnail\" title=\"TuGo Cupholder\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/DSC_7788-copy1-150x150.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"150\" height=\"150\" /></a> TuGo Cupholder[/caption]</li>\n 	<li>I tried the Kuhi Comfort (<a href=\"http://www.kuhicomfort.com/\">http://www.kuhicomfort.com/</a>).  It was more comfortable than the typical neck pillow. I’m not sure about the pouch for aromatherapy. I like a little lavender oil as much as the next person, but in coach, where you’re less than a foot from the other passenger’s head – one person’s relaxing aromatherapy is the next person’s eye watering stench…</li>\n 	<li>The other theme I picked up was hygiene.  There were a handful of booths selling bed bug powders and plastic barriers.  The booth across from Chris Truelove’s --Shelves to Go (<a href=\"http://www.shelvestogo.net\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">http://www.shelvestogo.net</a>) was selling a packable shelving system – lifts straight out of your bag and hangs on the closet rod – avoiding, as the brochure says, “the risk of possible exposure to dirt and insect infestation” from putting your close in the hotel dresser  -- I’ll put a picture in the show notes.</li>\n 	<li>And then there was this new twist on the lowly wipe</li>\n 	<li>Paper Shower (<a href=\"http://papershower.com/\">http://papershower.com/</a>) interview</li>\n 	<li>So there you go, no end of stuff to make your travel life a bit easier, and your bag a bit heavier.\n\n[caption id=\"attachment_579\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"150\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/DSC_7790-copy11.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-579 size-thumbnail\" title=\"Shelves to Go\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/DSC_7790-copy1-150x150.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"150\" height=\"150\" /></a> Shelves to Go[/caption]</li>\n 	<li>I’ll put URLs and any pictures I have of these products in the show notes.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Emily C</em> by Fiasco</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Losing Status</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Back in <a title=\"Podcast #82 – Changing My Travel; New Mileage Programs in a New Year\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2010/02/20/podcast-82-changing-my-travel-new-mileage-programs-in-a-new-year/\">episode 82</a>, I talked about how my job switch – moving from consulting to being the CIO of a technology company – was changing the way I travel, and how the new destinations were shaking up my frequent traveler program status.</li>\n 	<li>It all sorted out in mid-January.  Because of our office locations, I switched from Marriott – where I’d been top-tier Platinum status for at least 7 years – to Hilton for no other reason than sheer convenience.  I hit top tier Hilton – Diamond; gem stones rather than precious metals for Hilton – in December.  And, oddly enough, still haven’t received a new card or welcome packet.  Every other program – you hit a major tier and there are all sorts of thank you letters and program brochures showing up on your doorstep.  Hilton – nothing.</li>\n 	<li>As interesting, though was Marriott’s reaction.  I don’t think I stayed enough nights to qualify for any status, but they “soft landed” me.  They dropped me one level down – to Gold, which still gets you free WiFi and free breakfast in the concierge lounge – and an offer to let me buy back my Platinum status for 40,000 points.  Nice approach.  If I thought I’d be staying at more Marriotts this year, I’d have considered the buy back, but I appreciated the soft landing and have stayed at a couple of Marriott since them.</li>\n 	<li>United Airlines – not as nice.  No soft landing here.  I dropped two tiers – from 1K to Premiere, which is the status level I’d qualified for by the end of the year.  As I mentioned in<a title=\"Podcast #84 – End of Year Status Calculus; TSA Porn\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2010/10/30/podcast-84-end-of-year-status-calculus-tsa-porn/\"> episode 84</a>, when I saw in October that I would miss American’s Exec Platinum by about 10,000 miles, I flipped over to United to preserve a minimum level of status.  Which is exactly what I received.  Like Marriott, though, I received an offer to buy back my 1K status, but the price was a bit steeper -- $999 plus flying 35,000 qualifying miles in the first quarter 0f 2011.  Neither of those made any sense.</li>\n 	<li>I’ll probably go back to my old ways – splitting my mileage between United and American and keeping mid-tier status – Premiere Exec -- on United because, with monthly flights to Dallas and Fort Myers, FL where United has little to none non-stop service, there’s no way I’ll make 1K.</li>\n 	<li>Friends who left consulting used to joke that first January was one of their most conflicted times – down because they lost status and were now traveling with the peons; but happy with what it represented – that they were spending a lot more time with their families.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #88</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://musicalley.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Music Alley</a></li>\n 	<li>And now for the contest.  In the past, I\'ve run some quick contests to drive iTunes reviews.  This time, I – like every podcaster – am looking to drive Facebook “likes” – there’s got to be a better noun than that – “followers” on Twitter may be a bit creepy, but at least it’s not pathetic.  But, that’s the lingo, so I’ll have to go with it.  Go to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/153475331351358\">Facebook</a> page – there’s link in the shownotes and a badge above the fold on the first page of the web site – “like” it, and leave a comment.  The best comment, funniest or most insightful as judged by me, wins 2 drink coupons on United Airlines.  I look forward to some good stuff</li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or MP3 file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n</ul>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/153475331351358\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_88.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #88 -- New Travel Goodies; Losing Elite Status','','inherit','closed','closed','','554-revision-v1','','','2021-09-26 11:40:04','2021-09-26 16:40:04','',554,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3825',0,'revision','',0),
(3827,1,'2021-09-26 11:42:26','2021-09-26 16:42:26','[caption id=\"attachment_594\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/3717874334_4b20cc0037_o1.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-594\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/3717874334_4b20cc0037_o1-300x225.jpg\" alt=\"Danish Train © Hunter Desportes\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\" /></a> Danish Train © Hunter Desportes[/caption]\n\nMy business-vacation combo trip to <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"London\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/england/london\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\">London</a>, <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Paris\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/france/paris\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\">Paris</a>, and <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Venice\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/italy/venice\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\">Venice</a> provides the source for most of this episode\'s content. Wanting to pack light, I had to figure out how to pack for 10 days, 3 cities, two business meetings and a week\'s vacation in a single carry-on bag. After landing in London, I skipped the airports and used trains for all my intra-European travel, not boarding another flight until we were heading home from Venice -- though not before having to wrestle through a randomly rebooting kiosk. I also talk about toothpaste tablets -- another way to avoid liquid in your carry-on, and a great restaurant in O\'Hare\'s Terminal 1. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_89.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the transcript from TravelCommons podcast #89:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you yet again from the TravelCommons studios. I know, I’m getting a bit bored with it too.  I tried to record this last week in the Doubletree Suites in <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Naples\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/florida/naples\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\">Naples, FL</a>, but couldn’t get everything written in time. I even downloaded Garageband for my <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"iPad\" href=\"http://www.apple.com/ipad/\" rel=\"homepage\">iPad 2</a>, but found that it has a time limit on its recordings – too short for the podcast, unless I wanted to be doing a lot more editing and stitching.</li>\n 	<li>I’ve racked up a bit of mileage since the last episode – doing my usual runs to Phoenix – where I did catch my first spring training baseball game, the White Sox and the Giants sitting on the lawn on a beautiful afternoon -- and to Naples, FL.  There were also some new runs to London, Paris, and then to Milan on my way to a vacation rendezvous with the family in Venice.</li>\n 	<li>It was kinda fun to meet up with my wife and daughter in a new city.  I’d taken the train over from Milan and got to our hotel first, so I was sitting on the patio drinking a cappuccino when they pulled up in their water taxi. I saw them coming down the canal and waved to them, but they didn’t see me until they were right at the hotel.  Indeed, my daughter took a picture of the hotel as they were coming up to it, and if you look closely, you can see me in the corner, waving from my table.  It’s pretty funny.</li>\n 	<li>It doesn’t slow down going forward.  I’m off to the UK, and then, the last week of April in India, bouncing across the usual suspects – Bangalore, Pune, and Chennai – with a weekend in the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Kerala Backwaters\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/india/sights/river/kerala-backwaters\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\">Kerala backwaters</a>.  I get back, take a week to adjust to Central Time, and then head out to San Francisco for the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Google I/O\" href=\"http://code.google.com/events/io/2010/\" rel=\"homepage\">Google I/O conference</a>.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Planetenstaaten </em>by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/weigl-landwater/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Phillip Weigl</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\">\n<ul>\n 	<li>Nobody sent in an audio comment this month, so you’re stuck with the sound of my voice all the way through.</li>\n 	<li>So let’s get the obligatory <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Transportation Security Administration\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_Security_Administration\" rel=\"wikipedia\">TSA</a> rant out of the way.  When I saw the <a href=\"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3sH1GaO_nw&amp;feature=player_embedded\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">video</a> of the TSA doing a “grope-down” of a 6-yr old girl in <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"New Orleans Airport\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Orleans_Airport\" rel=\"wikipedia\">New Orleans airport</a> I wasn’t shocked, I wasn’t outraged – I just shook my head at the mindless stupidity of it, numb to yet another of the endless stream of senseless TSA acts. When the screener is executing the grope-down while being filmed by the parent and, off-camera, the supervisor agrees with the action, and then in a follow-up statement, the TSA says “Yup, the screener did the right thing” -- this incident is a proof point that it’s not stupid acts of individual screeners.  The TSA as an organization is fundamentally broken; it’s developed a culture that can’t use common sense. The only successful thing the TSA has done is replaced the IRS as the most reviled part of the federal government.</li>\n 	<li>OK, glad to get that out of the way.  Let talk about something more fun.  In the <a title=\"Podcast #88 — New Travel Goodies; Losing Elite Status\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/03/13/podcast-88-new-travel-goodies-losing-status/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">last episode</a>, I talked about stuff that caught my eye at last month’s Travel Goods show.  One thing I forgot to mention was <a href=\"http://www.archtekinc.com/product_info.php?products_id=52&amp;osCsid=eb7322cb97f95ed64391f31ae19e1297\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Archtek Toothpaste Tablets</a>. Now I’ve talked in the past about switching from toothpaste to toothpowder some years ago to avoid the liquid ban, and then keeping it to avoid having to pull out a baggie full of toiletries at the screening point.  Archtek has a different spin.  You put one tablet in your mouth, chew it up, and then start brushing. I was a little skeptical at first.  Indeed, I had to remind myself not to swallow – it felt like a chewable vitamin.  But once I started brushing, it foamed up way more than any tooth powder I’ve used.  If you can find Archtek Toothpaste Tablets, buy ‘em.  Definitely recommended.</li>\n 	<li>Also in the <a title=\"Podcast #88 — New Travel Goodies; Losing Elite Status\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/03/13/podcast-88-new-travel-goodies-losing-status/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">last episode</a>, I talked about dropping status, specifically how United didn’t soft-land me from 1K status – they dropped me all the way from 1K to Premiere.  This had a big impact on accruing mileage – 1K’s get a 100% mileage bonus while Premieres only get 25%.  Another big impact is who you get routed to within United’s customer service network.  1K’s talk to United employees in corporate headquarters near O’Hare.  They’re the most experienced and best trained customer service agents.  The Premiere desk – when I had to change an award ticket to accommodate my London trip, I found out it’s in Cebu City in the Philippines.  It wasn’t a major problem – the agents were pleasant, spoke understandable English, and were able to make the changes that I needed.  But again, it was a bit of a jarring experience and reminded me once again of the little niceties status brings.</li>\n 	<li>A point that was brought home to my 17-yr old son when he traveled without me on his German Club trip to Germany, Switzerland, and Austria – while the rest of us were in Venice.  Picking him up at the airport, he said, “I hate traveling without you, Dad.  I treated just like a peon.”  I’ll take that.  As any parent will tell you, it’s nice to wanted by your teenager – even if it’s just for pre-boarding and access to airport clubs.</li>\n 	<li>So, in three groups -- my son, my wife and daughter, and me -- left for Europe out of O’Hare’s Terminal 1.  And all of us made time to stop off in Rick Bayless’ new Mexican tortas -- sandwich -- place <a href=\"http://www.rickbayless.com/news/view?articleID=171\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Frontera Tortas</a> in the front concourse, Concourse B.  Bayless is one of the most famous chefs in Chicago – he won the first season of Bravo TV’s <em>Top Chef Masters</em> contest and runs Barack and Michelle Obama’s favorite date-night restaurant Topolobampo. I’ve eaten at his Frontera Grill since it opened in the mid-80’s and have yet to have a bad meal. So when he opened Frontera Torta, I had to try it.  The lines can be long, but the food is great.  I had the cochinita pibil torta – pulled pork and pickled red onions with a habanero salsa on the side.  Good thing – that salsa was the spiciest thing I’ve ever had in an airport anywhere.  They did warn me, though.  Anyhow, great food – good place to kill a United Airlines delay in ORD.</li>\n 	<li>When I was flying out to London on United, I found it easier to check in with the self-service kiosks even though I was flying business class.  The line for business class check-in was at least 5 deep, but there were a half-dozen open kiosks.  I fired one up, put my passport on the scanner, and within a couple of minutes, was on my way to the security line.</li>\n 	<li>It was not that easy, though, on the flight back.  We were flying Lufthansa back by way of Munich. After catching a water taxi from our hotel – much cooler, and much longer than the water taxis to and from Logan Airport in Boston – I queued up for the kiosk. It was taking the people in front of my much longer than a couple of minutes.   But, they looked like tourists.  Finally, I worked my way to the front of the line – not exactly a linear process in Italy.  I started checking in.  The workflow wasn’t as straight forward/as well-designed as the United kiosk, but that wasn’t the problem.  It was that the kiosk kept re-starting/re-booting halfway through the check-in and the passport scanner was very fiddly.  It took me at least 15 minutes to get my wife, daughter, and me checked in.  There wasn’t another alternative.  There were only 2 desk agents but they were just checking luggage for those who had checked in with the kiosk – and they had no interest in coming out from behind their desk to figure out the rebooting kiosks. I don’t mind self service – when it works.</li>\n 	<li>And finally, going all the way back to <a title=\"Podcast #86 — Fun with Layovers; Story Behind the Closing Tune\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2010/12/26/podcast-86-fun-with-layovers-story-behind-closing-tune/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">episode 86</a>, from last December… Prompted by a question from a listener, Betty Boyd, about the podcast’s closing song, <em>Pictures of You</em> by the Scottish band Evangeline, I dipped into the archives and played an interview with the band’s manager that gave some back story on the song.  A couple of days ago, the song’s writer dropped this comment on the TravelCommons website:</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n</ul>\n\"Hi Mark. I’m John Naismith songwriter with the former band Evangeline, I’m so glad you enjoy the song <em>Pictures of You</em>, it’s also good to know that people like Becky from Carolina can identify with the song because that was the intent when writing it, life on the road is hard and leaving your family behind is hard! Anyway, a million thanks to you for using this song for so long I wish you and your show all the best for the future.Love and friendship from Scotland.\"\n<ul>\n 	<li>John, thanks for stopping by the site and leaving the comment.  And also, thanks for letting me use your song. It has always been, in my mind, the perfect song for the frequent traveler.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a question, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is <a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a> -- use the Voice Memo app on your iPhone or something like Virtual Recorder on your Android phone to record and send in an audio comment like Lori or Gary in last month’s episode; send a <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Twitter</a> message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/153475331351358\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Facebook</a> page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/yoria-suerte/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Suerte Mijo</a> </em>by Arthur Yoria</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Trains Instead of Planes</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>My Spring Break vacation plans for Venice, Italy got munged up a bit when a customer in London demanded my presence the Wednesday afternoon before we were to fly out from Chicago.  Doing a one-day up-and back to London didn’t make any sense – though, as long-time listeners will recall from <a title=\"Podcast #70 – Packing a Suit, Videoconference over Travel, Watching Winter Flight Delays\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2008/12/23/podcast-70-packing-a-suit-videoconference-over-travel-watching-winter-flight-delays/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">episode #70</a>, that hasn’t stopped in the past.  So instead, I visited staff in our Kew office on Thursday, a customer in Paris on Friday, and then vectored through Milan on Saturday to meet up with my family in Venice Sunday morning.</li>\n 	<li>Since I wasn’t on a tight schedule, I decided to skip the airports and do all these legs on the train.  No lines, no grope-downs – just glide from center city to center city.  In past episodes, I’ve talked about my preference for Amtrak’s Acela when traveling the northeast corridor from New York to Washington, so I decided to try the same thing in Europe.</li>\n 	<li>Last month, I tweeted a link to a <a href=\"http://www.tnooz.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/silverrail1.jpg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">graph </a>showing that, in Europe, rail is becoming the preferred method of transport when trip time drops below 3 hours.  Indeed, before digging the Chunnel – the Channel Tunnel, London to Paris was one of the world’s busiest air routes.  But now, air travel has dropped to <a href=\"http://www.tnooz.com/2011/03/21/news/how-rail-is-evolving-and-why-travel-websites-need-to-be-ready/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">less than 20%</a>. Since I needed to get from London to Paris on Thursday afternoon, I decided to start my train journey with the Eurostar.</li>\n 	<li>It wasn’t cheap – premium economy was $250.  I couldn’t in my mind justify the $400 business class ticket.  Rolling my bag through St Pancras station in London felt a bit like an airport experience – queue up, waive your boarding pass in front of a reader, put your bags through the X-ray machine, walk through the metal detector, go through passport control (you go through French immigration in London, kinda like going through US immigration in Toronto airport)… but it was definitely a bit more laid-back -- nothing like the full-on insanity that is Heathrow.</li>\n 	<li>It was at boarding time that I really felt the difference.  No calling out groups, no jockeying around the jet bridge door – we just walked up the ramp and found our car.  And pulling out, no PA announcements scolding us to immediately take our seats, no flight attendants giving us the once over to make sure we’d turned off our cell phones – people were still wandering around, and I was cranking on a document when I noticed out of the corner of my eye the platform slipping away.</li>\n 	<li>The journey under the English Channel – I guess I was surprised at how uneventful it was.  Indeed, I was in the toilet when we entered the Chunnel.  No announcement, no ear-popping from going down – just a 15-20 minute journey though a dark tunnel and  “pop” you’re up in France.  I don’t know what I was expecting, but I guess I thought there’d be a bit more to it.</li>\n 	<li>Saturday’s ride on the TGV – France’s high-speed train -- from Paris to Milan was a good bit different. The price was good bit lower -- $150 for business class. The ride was longer – 7 hrs instead of 2.  But the scenery was much better – up over the Alps instead of a tunnel under the ocean.</li>\n 	<li>Being a Saturday, it was more families, less business – kinda like my Southwest flight this week back from Ft Myers, FL.  In some ways, it was worse.  Once the kids were seated on the Southwest flight, they stayed there, buckled in.  On the TGV, the entire car became the playground for this one toddler – he kept racing down the aisle from one end of the car to the other.  This went on for hours because the train ride was more than twice as long as the Ft Myers flight.</li>\n 	<li>All that being said, I enjoyed this train ride too – it was an easy cab ride from my hotel to Gard du Nord, there was no security on boarding, it was able to get up and buy a beer whenever I wanted – provided I could dodge the running kid. I was really glad I brought an extra battery for the Bose headphones and had something to look at out the window.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/uniontrade-everyday/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Violent and Beautiful</em> </a>by the Union Trade</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Travel Challenge -- Fitting Two Weeks into One Carry-On</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>The night before I left on my European trip, I tweeted and posted on the TravelCommons Facebook page – “Today\'s travel challenge -- How to pack for 10 days, 3 cities, two business meetings and a week\'s vacation in a single carry-on bag.”</li>\n 	<li>Lori Humm wrote “My number one travel rule: pack light and buy what you need when you get there” while Allan Marko commented “Depends on how often you want to do laundry on vacation”.  Chris Webb tweeted back asking to know how it all came out.</li>\n 	<li>Actually, it wasn’t as tough as I thought it might be.  The challenge was packing for business and for tourism without looking out of place in either.  Lucky for me I was only covering one climate – European spring, and I’d be vacationing among Italians – probably the best dressers in Europe.</li>\n 	<li>My packing strategy always starts with a single color family, and usually that’s black.  Black jacket, olive and tan slacks, an assortment of shirts, a red pattern tie if absolutely necessary and I’m good for a week.</li>\n 	<li>But what about the second week.  When I would do two-week stretches in South Africa, I would pack a week’s worth of clothes, send my shirts to the cleaners on the weekend, and stomp on my understuff and socks while I was in the shower.</li>\n 	<li>For this trip, though, I took a different tack.  I kept the color wheel on black, but left my workout gear at home.  I figured we’d be walking all over Venice, so that would give me enough exercise.  Gym shoes take up a huge amount of space, which I filled with a couple of sweaters and another week of socks and understuff.  With a week’s worth of shirts, but two weeks of undershirts, I figured I could get two days out of each shirt – I didn’t think I’d be sweating too much in London and Paris in March. And most of the extra undershirts and socks were on their last legs.  I left a trail of Jockey t-shirts from London to Paris to Milan, making room for some souvenir Carnivale masks for next year’s Mardi Gras party.</li>\n 	<li>It ended up working well for me.  I didn’t return with one clean piece of clothing, but didn’t have to do any laundry for the two weeks.  I’m not sure I can use the same strategy for next week’s trip to India though.  With a forecast of 90 degrees and 90% humidity, that “no sweat” assumption just doesn’t seem realistic.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #89</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Magnatune</a></li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or MP3 file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/153475331351358\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_89.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #89 -- Trains Over Planes; Fit 2 Weeks in 1 Carry-On','','inherit','closed','closed','','590-revision-v1','','','2021-09-26 11:42:26','2021-09-26 16:42:26','',590,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3827',0,'revision','',0),
(3829,1,'2021-09-26 11:44:26','2021-09-26 16:44:26','[caption id=\"attachment_760\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"225\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/IMG_01371-e13062031715791.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-760\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/IMG_01371-e13062031715791-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"Security Sign\" width=\"225\" height=\"300\" /></a> A Polite Intrusion © Mark Peacock[/caption]\n\nLots of business travel this month -- UK, India, Germany, Phoenix, <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"San Francisco\" href=\"http://www.sfgov.org/\" rel=\"homepage\">San Francisco</a>, and Madrid -- so there\'s a lot to talk about. The international travel lets me compare business class seats -- there\'s a wide range of experiences even within the same airline. While in India, a listener asks my advice on adjusting for jetlag on Asian flights. I was surprised at the amount of data my <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"iPhone\" href=\"http://www.apple.com/iphone\" rel=\"homepage\">iPhone</a> consumed while I was in Europe but I finally found the culprit. I found myself much more comfortable traveling in India the second time around. And, walking away from the Google IO conference with a new Samsung Android \"Honeycomb\" tablet, my <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"iPad\" href=\"http://www.apple.com/ipad/\" rel=\"homepage\">iPad</a> fixation starts to loosen. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_90.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the transcript from TravelCommons podcast #90:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>It’s been another full-contact month of travel.  I was out for a 2-week stint through the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"United Kingdom\" href=\"http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=51.5,-0.116666666667&amp;spn=10.0,10.0&amp;q=51.5,-0.116666666667 (United%20Kingdom)&amp;t=h\" rel=\"geolocation\">UK</a>, <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"India\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/India\" rel=\"wikipedia\">India</a>, Germany, then a quick jog out to Phoenix, a week to San Francisco for the big <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Google I/O\" href=\"http://code.google.com/events/io/\" rel=\"homepage\">Google IO conference</a>, and now, just returned from a 3-day trip to <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Madrid\" href=\"http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=40.3833333333,-3.71666666667&amp;spn=0.1,0.1&amp;q=40.3833333333,-3.71666666667 (Madrid)&amp;t=h\" rel=\"geolocation\">Madrid</a></li>\n 	<li>I got lots of comments about the Madrid trip – “Ooh, you so lucky”, “I’d love to go to Spain” – most of these coming from my wife.  Unfortunately, my Madrid trip was just another business trip sandwiched between two 8-hour plane flights.  Left at 4:30pm Tuesday, arrived 6:30am Weds, cabbed to the hotel, showered, changed, caught up on e-mail, met the rest of the team in the lobby, spent the afternoon in a customer conference room, went back to the hotel room to catch up on e-mail and conference calls, went out to dinner with the customer, back to the hotel room for more e-mail and calls, sleep 5 hours, back in the conference room for a full day of meetings, dinner, e-mail, conference calls, 4 hours of sleep, cab back to the airport Friday morning to catch a 9:30am flight home.</li>\n 	<li>Most of my time in Madrid was spent in a conference room without windows – so it could’ve been anywhere, really. The one bit of Madrid that I had was on our last night where, instead of going to a restaurant for dinner, we did a bit of a bar crawl on the street behind our hotel – a glass of rioja, some tapas, then onto the next bar.  It was good fun, but I was out and about more in San Francisco the week before.</li>\n 	<li>I had kinda the opposite in <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Mumbai\" href=\"http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=18.975,72.8258333333&amp;spn=0.1,0.1&amp;q=18.975,72.8258333333 (Mumbai)&amp;t=h\" rel=\"geolocation\">Mumbai</a>, where I experienced perhaps more of the local culture than I wanted. My last day was in <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Pune\" href=\"http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=18.4736111111,73.7977777778&amp;spn=0.1,0.1&amp;q=18.4736111111,73.7977777778 (Pune)&amp;t=h\" rel=\"geolocation\">Pune</a> and then I was to be driven to <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chhatrapati_Shivaji_International_Airport\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Mumbai Airport</a> – a 3-4 hour drive depending on Pune and Mumbai traffic. No one told me the length of the drive until after I was India and couldn’t change my flight. My colleague’s flight left at 10pm, mine left at 2:45am. I figured I hop the same car and just hang out and nap at the airport.  The drive between Pune and Mumbai was great – cruised down a 6 lane divided toll road across some mountain range.</li>\n 	<li>Walking into the terminal, the security guard stopped me, saying that I couldn’t get in until 4 hours before departure time.  So what to do – the cab driver is gone, and I’d purposely left myself with only a handful of rupees. I wandered around in front of the terminals, watching travelers pay their taxis, say “good-bye” and “I’m back” to their families. I played a bit of coliform roulette grabbing a bite from a food stall. Then, in my wanderings, I found the waiting area.  For 60 rupees – about a buck and a half – I could sit in air conditioning, ride the airport’s free WiFi, and use a men’s room – a bargain at twice the price.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Flight</em> by <a href=\"http://www.freshmusic.co.za/\">Ga\'inja</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Tony White dropped me a very germane question while I was in India\n<ul>\n 	<li>“I enjoy listening to your show every month and I put the knowledge to good use.  I have a question regarding jetlag and long flights to Asia and or Australia from the US.  I am traveling on my first business trip to Asia and Australia in July.  I have never traveled to Asia for business only for pleasure.  How do I prepare for traveling to Asia regarding the jetlag and time change?  My first meeting will be in less than 24 hours of arriving to Asia.  Do you have a routine to prepare for those long trips?  Do you sleep on the flight or do you stay awake to try to adjust to the time change?</li>\n 	<li>“Thank you for the podcast and taking the time to ask these questions.”</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>I\'ve always time zone adjustments to Europe and Asia differently.  Going to Europe, I set my watch on European time the minute I sit down on the plane and then force myself onto that schedule -- eating quickly and then putting on the eye shades and <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Bose headphones\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bose_headphones\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Bose headphones</a> for sleep.</li>\n 	<li>Asia, though, is a whole different matter.  With the long flight times (14-15 hrs between ORD and India or China) and 10-12 hr time differences, I honestly don\'t even try to figure out what the destination time is.  I just go with the flow -- eat, sleep, read, repeat until landing.  I find that the flights are long enough to get enough sleep that I\'m rested enough when I hit the ground to work right away.  On this last trip to India, I hit Bangalore at midnight and was fine for an 8am breakfast meeting the next morning.</li>\n 	<li>Everyone reacts differently.  I find that it\'s easy for me to push through -- perhaps taking a 1-hr nap before I go out to dinner the first day.  I do usually sleep poorly for the first 3 nights, but then am fine afterwards.  Everybody’s body clock is different, though. If there’s one thing I’ve learned over years of travel – you can only push your body just so far. Sleep is probably the most underrated and willingly ignored health tonic in existence.</li>\n 	<li>And speaking of sleeping in flight, my recent travels have given me experience a number of business class seats over the past few months. Haven’t done any of the top carriers – like Singapore Air – so it haven’t had a life changing experience…  It’s been more for a search for 5 hours of sleep before the next meeting. The difference, though, has been surprising. The best seat on a United flight to London – 22-inch flat screen, complete lay-flat seat,….  The United flight to Frankfurt was a big step down – little 5-inch screen, almost flat seat.  Though it may not seem much, there’s a big difference between 170-degree and 180-degree seat recline. Your bed is 180.  At 170, you have your knees locked trying not to slip down in the seat. Not the ideal sleeping position.</li>\n 	<li>The USAir seat from Charlotte to Madrid is probably at the bottom.  A narrow seat, no screen – instead they had some metal prongs that held a 7-inch Archos table that the flight attendant said was always wonky – volume magically went up and down, music would play while watching a movie, no real-time flight map to show position or ETA….  And the food and wine were marginal at best. Yes, it was still better than coach but that comparison isn’t going to get me on another USAir overseas flight.</li>\n 	<li>While in the UK, I was amazed at the amount of cellular data my iPhone consumed.  I had remembered to add the 100 MB international data option to my AT&amp;T plan before I left.  I then reset the usage counters before I hit Birmingham so I didn’t overshoot. I was OK in Birmingham, but in London, I say I was consuming 20 MB in a day!  I wasn’t downloading any music or podcasts over 3G – I saved that for the hotel WiFi.  I started paying a bit more attention to my usage.</li>\n 	<li>The difference between Birmingham and London was that I was walking to all my London appointments and was using Google Maps to find my way around town. Resetting the usage counters again, I’d see 5 MB every time I started up Maps. I needed to find some paper maps or figure out another way to work this. I “tuned” my usage a bit – opening up Google Maps in the morning while on the hotel WiFi and then scrolling to all the places I’d visit that day, trying to load up as much of the map data as I could in memory.  I worked pretty well and kept me from blowing past the 100 MB line.  But at $200 for the 100 MB of data, I think before my summer vacation driving through Scotland and the Lake District, I’ll blow the $50 on a GPS app that comes complete with its own maps – pre-downloaded.</li>\n 	<li>I do like the way that all my electronics charge up at warp speed when I’m overseas. Most electronics chargers will handle 110 and 220 volts – the only exception I’ve found is my kids’ Nintendo DS charger – so I don’t bring a voltage converter when I travel, just a plug adapter.  I carry a small power strip, use one plug adapter, and then plug my array of charging devices into the strip. And plugged into a 220v socket, it’s a quick charge.</li>\n 	<li>In<a title=\"Podcast #88 — New Travel Goodies; Losing Elite Status\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/03/13/podcast-88-new-travel-goodies-losing-status/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> episode #88</a>, I interviewed Chris Truelove at the 2011 Travel Goods show about his company Back2You.com, which helps travelers retrieve lost items.  Hopping in a taxi on the way to London Docklands airport, the driver gave me an AT&amp;T phone that an earlier fare had left behind.  He was trying to figure out how to find the owner’s information so he could return it. I wasn’t familiar with the model, but it wasn’t locked, so I started poking around. Calling the phone wouldn’t help – it would only ring in my hand – so I flipped through the contact list.  No ICE entry – “in case of emergency” – but I did find Mom’s Cell and Dad’s Cell, so I tried to call them – international calls were blocked; not surprised. Then tried to text them – those bounced too. I played around for 20 minutes, but no luck. Now, if it had one of Chris’s bag tags, I would’ve been able to send a quick text and his company would’ve sent a text to the owner. Glad I have one of his stickers on my iPhone and cameras.</li>\n 	<li>It was my first time flying out of London Docklands – so much more convenient than Heathrow.  I was staying near Tower Bridge and flying off to Frankfurt.  It was a 20-minute cab ride – as opposed to at least double that to Heathrow, or taking a cab to Paddington Station to then catch the Heathrow Express.  No check-in line, short security line, free WiFi, and generally just a more relaxed atmosphere than the Heathrow insanity.  It is a small airport, though. I was on a Lufthansa A319, which looked like the biggest plane they were flying out of there.  Felt like the pilot has us backed up to the end of the runway, then he locked the brakes, revved the engines ‘til the plane started to shake, popped the brake release, and off we roared like one of the Bonneville Salt Flats rocket cars.  He rotated up right at the last moment, it seemed, going nose up just as the Thames appeared beneath us.  Definitely woke me up. Recommended over Heathrow if you’re hopping over to the continent.</li>\n 	<li>And finally, if you haven’t seen it already, head over to the TravelCommons website or the FaceBook page and look for <a title=\"Video #2 – One City, Five Hours: Frankfurt\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/05/01/video-2-%e2%80%93-one-city-five-hours-frankfurt/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Video #2</a> – One City, Five Hours: Frankfurt. I had a 6-hr layover in Frankfurt on my way home from India. Rather than sit in the Lufthansa club all day, I ran through the 5-hour tourist sprint <a href=\"http://www.hemispheresmagazine.com/2010/03/01/one-city-five-hours-frankfurt/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">itinerary</a> from United Airlines\' Hemispheres in-flight magazine. The prior weekend – in Kerala on the southwest coast of India – one of my hosts showed us how he was taking and editing videos all on his iPhone 4. Which led me to videoing the Frankfurt sprint on my iPhone 4. I then pulled over to my MacBook Air and edited on the flight to ORD. It’s no where near as polished as my Vietnam video, but it’s a fun piece all the same.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a question, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is <a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a> -- use the Voice Memo app on your iPhone or something like Virtual Recorder on your Android phone to record and send in an audio comment – or iMovie if you want to send in some video; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at travelcommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Rocky Road</em> by <a href=\"http://www.kcentricity.com/\">KCentric</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>More Comfortable Traveling in India</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>At the end of April, I did my second annual trip to India.  I changed some things up – rather than doing the 15-hour non-stop from ORD to Delhi, I stopped off in Europe – for meeting in the UK on the way over; for the extended layover that I videoed on the way back.  This meant that I could skip Delhi and stay in the southern part of India – Bangalore, Chennai, Kerala. That made things a bit more temperate – 80’s instead of the 100’s in Delhi that I got to experience my last trip.</li>\n 	<li>And I found myself a bit more comfortable with India. Until my last day, driving through Mumbai to the airport, I didn’t see the abject poverty that I saw last year in Delhi.  I didn’t feel the need to cling to my “travel bubble” quite as tightly as I did on my first visit, which I talked about in <a title=\"Podcast #83 – Business Travel in India; iPad vs. Netbook\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2010/05/28/podcast-83-business-travel-in-india-ipad-vs-netbook/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">episode #83</a>.</li>\n 	<li>It started with some of the planning – choosing and booking my own hotels in Bangalore, arranging many of my internal flights. Seems petty, but on my first visit, my vendors organized everything.  I just arrived and was taken from place to place.  Now, planning, doing some research, and then making sure I had ways to get from Point A to Point B made me a more active participant in this trip – not just a passenger.</li>\n 	<li>I was also ready for some of the uniquely Indian travel rituals.  Like the <a href=\"http://www.indiatravelite.com/feature/indiancustoms.htm\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">welcoming ceremony</a> at each hotel – usually a combination of arati – an oil candle circled in front of you followed by a tilak – the red thumb mark applied between your eyebrows.</li>\n 	<li>And like Indian security at airports. At Cochin airport in Kerala, we started counting the security checks.  The first one was just to get into the airport – either a printed itinerary or a printed boarding pass (I never saw anyone use a boarding pass on a smart phone) and ID. Learning my lesson from last year, I printed out all my itineraries <em>before</em> I left for India. Now through the front door, we walked 200 ft and hit another security check – looking at the same papers – before we could get to the check-in desk. We then took an immediate left and put our bags on the X-ray machine.  After coming out the other end, a guy taped the suitcase’s zipper tabs together and sent us off another couple hundred feet to the check-in desk.</li>\n 	<li>Checked in, we head over to the security line. Our boarding passes are checked going into the queue.  We head to the Men’s security line.  The Ladies’ line is off to the side with a curtained pat-down area.  We put our carry-on bags through the X-ray machine, but get to keep our shoes on.  We queue up in front of the metal detector.  We walk through and then onto a wooden step where a security guard wands and pats us down. It’s the same whether you set off the metal detector or not. I’m not quite sure why they have the metal detector there other than to help form the line.</li>\n 	<li>After the patdown, the guard stamps my boarding pass, proving that I’ve been patted down. I pick up my carry-on. It too has been stamped – on a blank address tag – to prove that it’s been x-rayed.</li>\n 	<li>At boarding, the gate agent scans our boarding pass while another security guard looks for the security stamps on the boarding passes and the carry-on luggage tag.  No stamps and back you go.  We get on a bus that travels all of 500 ft and drops us at our plane. Another security guard checks our boarding pass and then we’re allowed to climb the steps and enter the plane – after 7 separate security checks. I had 5 flights in 7 days I was in India. I got pretty comfortable with the drill.</li>\n 	<li>But this trip, I was a lot more comfortable just walking down the street. Maybe because in Cochin in Kerala, there are enough European tourists that I’m not the only white guy. But then, walking through a huge crowd after a IPL cricket match on Monday night in Chennai, I wasn’t uncomfortable – or any more so than walking through the crowd after, say, a University of Michigan football game.</li>\n 	<li>A little more familiar, a little less alien.  I wasn’t clinging to my travel bubble quite so hard.  And so when I hit Mumbai airport and couldn’t get inside for 4 hours, it didn’t make me uncomfortable.  Annoyed, yes, but not uncomfortable.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Wilderness Dance</em> by <a href=\"http://www.snarkyavenger.com/\">DJ Squirrel King</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Travel Tech -- Tipping Towards Android?</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Me and 5,000 other Google IO attendees walked out of Moscone West in SF with some great schwag, specifically a pre-release version of Samsung’s 10.1-inch Galaxy Android tablet.  It’s a nice piece of work – slightly longer, slightly narrower, and slightly lighter than the iPad2.  No neat Smart Cover, but the screen is nice. The setup was easy – just logged in with my Gmail ID and it automatically loaded all the apps I have on my Droid2.  I was carrying it around with me all conference – as was everyone else – and found that I really liked it.</li>\n 	<li>There are definitely a few rough edges that you’d expect with a pre-release model – like plugging in the power cord makes it think you’re trying to sync it with your PC and so doesn’t appear to let you use it and charge it at the same time – but the tablet version of Android – version 3.0 or “Honeycomb” if you’re into Google’s dessert naming scheme – is pretty stable.  The Android browser locked up and crashed a couple of times on me – but then again, so does my iPad Safari browser.  And the Android browser runs Flash so I can use it on all the restaurant web sites that won’t display on the iPad.  By the way, I agree that they should all swap out Flash for HTML 5, but until then, I would still like to be able to read their menus.  Can’t do it on the iPad.</li>\n 	<li>But it makes no sense to carry around two tablets. Indeed, people keep asking me why I carry a MacBook Air <em>and</em> an iPad.  So right now, I’m traveling with the iPad2 – more out of habit than anything else – but find myself using the Samsung Android tablet around the house more and more.</li>\n 	<li>The bonus prize from the conference – I’d call it the <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagniappe\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">lagniappe</a> if Google IO was held in New Orleans – was the Samsung Verizon 4G hot spot they tossed in because the Samsungs they gave us are WiFi only tablets.  I had been playing around with it in SF, but not so much because the city is blanketed in WiFi. However, sitting on the plane this week in Charlotte, waiting to head out to Madrid – long story about why I took this connection, or actually short, it saved me $3,000.  Anyhow, sitting on kind of a beat-up US Air 767 trying to pull the last bit of e-mail onto my iPad before take off and I was getting nothing, in spite of seeing a full house of 3G bars.  On a whim, I pulled out the Samsung hot spot out of my bag, fired it up and it connected immediately.  On another whim, I fired up the Speedtest.net app.  I got 13 Mbps download and 5 Mbps upload speeds – phenomenal.  Trying it in just now in the TravelCommons studios outside Chicago, I got 7.4 down and 7 up – compared to 2.7 down and 0.9 up on AT&amp;T 3G.</li>\n 	<li>Not to pile onto AT&amp;T – ‘cause that’s a bit of a fish-in-a-barrel shooting exercise – but if the next iPhone iteration doesn’t have 4G, now that might be enough to push me to hug the little green guy.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #90</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from the <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/\">Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_90.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #90 -- More Comfortable Traveling in India; Tipping Towards Android?','','inherit','closed','closed','','755-revision-v1','','','2021-09-26 11:44:26','2021-09-26 16:44:26','',755,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3829',0,'revision','',0),
(3830,1,'2021-09-27 10:23:02','2021-09-27 15:23:02','Recorded in the TravelCommons studios outside of <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/chicago\">Chicago</a> after finishing up my travel for the year. But there was a good bit of travel before the year-end, including one of the craziest/stupidest(?) itineraries I\'ve done in a long time -- Chicago-London-Denver in a little more than a day. Many of the subsequent Twitter comments I received asked that perpetual question -- Why travel when you can <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videoconferencing\">video conference</a>? Traveling to a business-formal office for the first time in 10 years causes me to investigate different methods in packing a suit. And the December storms that have snarled air traffic across the upper two-thirds of the US have me singing the praises of <a href=\"http://flightstats.com\">Flightstats</a>. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_70.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr>\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #70:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded at the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, done for travel for the year</li>\n 	<li>Not before a completely stupid itinerary -- Chicago to London to Denver in a day-&amp;-a-half</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Greensleeves</em> by <a href=\"http://www.georgefletcher.com/\">Tequila Mockingbirds</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Difficult \"travel roulette\" story from Ian Morgan about trying to get from <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/china/hong-kong\">Hong Kong</a> to Sydney</li>\n 	<li>Linda Martin of the <a href=\"http://indietravelpodcast.com/\">Indie Travel Podcast</a> reflects back on her college psych studies and concludes that the hustling around involved in \"travel roulette\" is actually better for you than sitting helpless on a delayed flight</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://ruk.ca/\">Peter Rukavina</a> agrees that there\'s still value in frequent flier programs after scoring a last-minute direct flight from Charlottetown (PEI) to Boston on Thanksgiving weekend using the minimum amount of <a href=\"http://www.aeroplan.com/landing/process.do?lang=E\">Aeroplan</a> miles</li>\n 	<li>Experiencing a lot of pushback from taxi drivers when trying to charge my fare on a credit card. Are others seeing the same thing?</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Please Come Home for Christmas </em> by <a href=\"http://oppenheimermusic.co.uk/\">Oppenheimer</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Packing a Suit</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Always see more suits on flights headed east from Chicago than on flights heading west</li>\n 	<li>Have managed to avoid having to wear a suit -- much easier to wear a blazer and pack a couple of pair of pants in my rolling bag</li>\n 	<li>New client in Philadelphia requires me to suit up -- need to learn to fold a suit so I can keep using my rolling bag</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://www.google.com/search?q=packing+a+suit&amp;hl=en\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Google search</a> reveals a consensus around two different ways</li>\n 	<li>One <a href=\"http://www.menswearhouse.com/aboutus/fashion/articles.jsp?articleID=1408474395561309&amp;browsePage=3&amp;FOLDER%3C%3Efolder_id=1408474395564053&amp;ASSORTMENT%3C%3East_id=94653&amp;bmUID=1197642683816\">approach</a> is to turn the jacket inside out and fold it in half</li>\n 	<li>The second <a href=\"http://www.essortment.com/travel/travelfoldsuit_trgk.htm\">approach</a> – I can’t figure out exactly how they’re doing it – but it seems like some sort of suit coat origami</li>\n 	<li>I\'ve ended it up with my own simple method – fold the jacket in half along the back seam, accordion-fold it in thirds, putting clothes in the folds – boxed shirts from the cleaners work the best</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Merry Christmas Baby</em> by <a href=\"http://topcatrecords.com/\">Calvin Owens</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Why travel when you can videoconference? </strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>When I “twittered” or “tweeted” – pick your Web 2.0 verb – about traveling to London for a 2-hr meeting, the @ replies asked why I didn\'t use videoconferencing or <a href=\"http://webex.com/\">webex</a>?</li>\n 	<li>Had done all the prior meetings by teleconference</li>\n 	<li>But this was the final meeting and we were delivering some tough messages. And call me “old school”, but bad news is best delivered personally, face-to-face</li>\n 	<li>Gartner\'s latest “Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies” <a href=\"http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/mgmt/2D07F8BED99F6D70CC2574A60004AD10\">report</a> says “video telepresence”, their <a href=\"http://blog.gartner.com/blog/index.php?itemid=1969&amp;catid=51\">term</a> for a sort of high-def, IMAX-like videoconferencing set-up that supports “virtual meetings”, as “being on the brink of widespread adoption</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>I’ll Be Home for Christmas</em> by <a href=\"http://www.katimac.com/\">Kati Mac</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Outsmarting winter flight delays</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Winter travel -- usually not a question of <em>are</em> you going to be delayed, but by how much? Or worse, are you going to get canceled?</li>\n 	<li>I use <a href=\"http://flightstats.com\">Flightstats.com</a>\'s Track Flight Status by Route travel tool to predict problems</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from the <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com\">Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments@travelcommons.com or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_70.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #70 - Packing a Suit, Videoconference over Travel, Watching Winter Flight Delays','','inherit','closed','closed','','113-revision-v1','','','2021-09-27 10:23:02','2021-09-27 15:23:02','',113,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3830',0,'revision','',0),
(3831,1,'2021-09-27 21:17:42','2021-09-28 02:17:42','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_1985\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/708473504_18da6d5b07_z1.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-3581 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/708473504_18da6d5b07_z1-300x225.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\"></a> Standing in Line! © Lance Smith/Flickr[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Not much travel, but a lot of travel planning for our first post-lockdown international trip to Italy. Trying to thread our way through changing COVID rules and Alitalia\'s bankruptcy throes. I\'m getting inundated with discount offers for <a href=\"https://www.clearme.com/\">Clear\'s fast-pass service</a>. I\'ve resisted them so far, because I remember back to when the first incarnation of Clear wanted to <a href=\"https://www.wired.com/2009/08/defunct-airport-fast-pass-company-banned-from-selling-customer-biometrics/\">sell its members\' biometric data</a>.  We then talk to <a href=\"https://www.xovis.com/en/home/\">Xovis Technology</a>\'s Cody Shulman about how airports are better managing all sorts of lines in airports. Finally, air passenger traffic is dropping again because business travelers are still missing-in-action (MIA). All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_179.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #179: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois; no travel since the last episode, just a lot of travel planning. I’ve talked over the past couple of episodes about pushing forward with our first post-lockdown international trip; a bike tour through the bootheel of Italy. We booked the trip in the spring and then last month -- I talked about in the last episode -- we booked our hotels pre- and post- the ride and the flight over. But not the flight back, because -- what else do we want to do while we’re here? I just wrapped up an interim CIO gig last week, so there’s no huge rush to get back -- and it’s been 5 years since our last time in Italy, so… As we were thinking about this, a friend, a former colleague pinged me “ Hey there - Just saw your tweet about your upcoming international trip. Sitting here waiting for our pierogies (he now lives in Southern Poland). Where’re you going?” Turns out he and his wife will be in Syracuse, Sicily in October. So there was our answer -- after our bike tour ends in Lecce, we catch a flight to Catania and hang out on the beach for the next week. And I can’t remember the last time I said this, but “Thanks, Twitter” for that.</li><li>So, next step, fire up Google Flights and look for one-way flights from whatever airport is near Lecce to Catania. Which turns out to be Brindisi Airport in Salento -- 24 miles, an €8/30-min train ride from Lecce, so pretty convenient, except that the best flight to Catania is an Air Dolomiti-Lufthansa connection with a 13-hour layover in Munich. Yeah, no. So next I look at Bari, where we’re flying into. 90 miles away; less convenient, but doable. The flight options are not much better -- a 6am Ryanair flight (which I kinda think of as Spirit Airlines without the charm), a 5pm flight with Volotea (whom I’ve never heard of, but Google and Wikipedia say they’re a budget airline based in Barcelona), and those same insane Air Dolomiti connections through Munich. This makes no sense. What gives? A little more Googling tells the rest of the story. Alitalia has been winding through bankruptcy since 2017 and now 4 years later, after 75 years as Italy’s national carrier, it’s finally closing down-- the day before I’m trying to book our flight to Sicily. Timing; it’s a beautiful thing.</li><li>A little more Googling says there’s a new Italian carrier coming, ITA, but it’s still working through negotiating for Alitalia’s landing slots and equipment and labor contracts, so it’s not taking bookings yet. OK, then. Getting out of Lecce is starting to pick up a little “escape room” vibe. It’s a 7-hr drive, a 14-hr train; so if we’re going, we’re flying. I book the most basic seats on the Volotea flight -- €17 for two seats -- just to have something and let the whole Alitalia/ITA thing play out a bit more; I can always add the luggage fees and reserved seats later if need be. I book it on Weds, Sept 1; 5pm flight out of Bari, gives us time to have breakfast, pack, and train up to the airport with enough time to deal with the craziness of budget airlines, which is key. My last budget airline experience was flying Wow Air from Reykjavik to London. I arrived 2 hrs before check in to see what appeared to be a stationary check in line of a couple of hundred people. Three days later, on Saturday, I wake up to an email from Volotea saying “We regret to inform you that given the current context of uncertainty about the evolution of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have been forced to reschedule your flight.” to 12:30 -- 4½ hrs earlier. I look at the train schedule -- there goes the leisurely breakfast and a bit of the budget airline safety margin, but it’s doable. The next Saturday, the 11th, I wake up to yet another Volotea e-mail (you’d think these guys would knock off early on Friday). Same wind-up -- “given the current context of uncertainty about the evolution of the COVID-19 pandemic” -- but worse punch -- “we have been forced to cancel your flight”. Ugh, guess that door out of the Lecce escape room was a dead end. I fire up Google Flights again and now see Alitalia flights out of Brindisi. Seems their replacement, ITA, has figured out how to take bookings. But following the link from Google Flights takes me to the Alitalia website with a banner still saying they’re shutting down. Another escape room fake exit? I flip over to Amex Travel; I can book the flights there. No direct flight, so I take the afternoon flight with a 2-hr connection in Rome. I put it on the Platinum card; figure I’ll need all the status I can get if I have to file for a refund. And then this week, I <a href=\"https://apnews.com/article/europe-business-airlines-rome-italy-36d45a33150c638063946e9b151e2aa0\">read</a> about Alitalia telling passengers to bring just a single piece of hand luggage because of strikes and growing labor protests. My friend sends me a text “You still tracking for Sicily?” “Kinda” I replied.</li><li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/yongen-yello/\">Give You Up</a></em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/yongen\">Yongen</a> (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons&nbsp;<a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/1.0/\">by-nc-sa v1.0</a>&nbsp;license</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Jim McDonough stopped by the TravelCommons Facebook page to leave a comment on the post pointing to my list of the best bars and restaurants I’ve visited in 2021. I said that I think it’ll take guidebooks a while to catch up with all the closures caused by the COVID lockdowns. Jim agreed, saying<ul><li>“I heard Rick Steves talking about the topic. All of his guidebooks are out of date. It will take him all of 2022 to get them repaired - assuming Delta, etc don\'t clobber 2022”</li></ul></li><li>As predicted in the last episode, Southwest Airlines extended their in-flight alcohol bans to January 18, 2022, staying aligned with the new expiration of the federal in-flight mask mandate. American also extended their economy-class ban, but continue to serve alcohol in their first and business class cabins. That alignment offers them a good explanation for the ban <em>right now</em>, but it’s going to make it tougher to reinstate in-flight drink service because I don’t see the feds ending the in-flight mask mandate anytime in the near future. Although, I dunno, maybe as the US’s only Prohibition airline, Southwest is looking to reposition their “Wanna Get Away?” slogan as “Wanna Get Away from Drunk Mask Fights on Spirit and United?”</li><li>Back in the Spring, I talked about Irene and Claire missing their Global Entry/PreCheck expiration notices and then in June, about a fake email “make sure your PreCheck doesn’t expire” phishing campaign that scammed a bunch of benched frequent fliers. So last week when I got an email starting “Your Trusted Traveler membership will be expiring soon”, I was a little wary. I was expecting it; after Irene and Claire missed their renewals, I logged in and saw that mine expired in December. But still, I examined the entire email -- message headers, mail server authentications. It looked legit, but even then, I typed the web address ttp.dhs.gov into the browser rather than clicking through the link in the email. It was legit, so I buckled in, selected Global Entry (which I always recommend since for only $15 more, you get <em>both</em> PreCheck and the fast path through US passport control), and cranked through the application. It wasn’t bad; the only part that required any real thinking was the 5-year look back on international travel. I had my passport in front of me, but if you’ve country-hopped within the EU’s Schengen Zone, you only get stamped going in and out of the zone, but not when crossing borders within the zone. In kind of a sad commentary on my traveling style, one of the things that helped me fill in those blanks was a spreadsheet of my downloaded Untappd check-ins. I opened it up in Excel, filtered out check-ins before 2016 and venues in the US and Mexico (turns out I haven’t been to Canada in the last 5 years), and then wrote down the countries that were left. Very easy, and an incentive to always have at least one beer in each country I visit -- like I needed any more encouragement.<br><br>After I paid the $100 fee and was dropped back to the front page, I saw two interesting notes. The first --“Please remember to revisit our website for your application status updates. Notification of when you may schedule an interview appointment (if one is needed) will only be posted here.” So I guess don’t trust any emails about interviews. The second was more interesting - “Due to a significant increase in application volume, we are extending the grace period from 18 months to 24 months for any submitted renewal application. This means you will continue to receive full benefits for 24 months while U.S. Customs and Border Protection is finalizing your renewal application.” Which was interesting because the email I got from them said “6 months to 1 year”. Whichever it is, my guess is that I’m not getting that interview scheduled anytime soon.&nbsp;</li><li>I’ve gotten a bunch of discount offers recently for a CLEAR membership -- $100 off with United, full statement credit from Amex. I’m not sure why the sudden push, but I’m holding out. I enrolled in CLEAR’s first iteration, back in April 2008, 13 years ago -- I talked about it in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2008/04/29/podcast-64-escaping-the-travel-bubble-marks-travel-tips/\">episode #64</a> (but not before I slandered the Dutch by saying their language sounded a bit like a competitive throat-clearing exercise). A couple months later, I wrote a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2008/05/27/jumping-the-line-using-clear-registered-traveler-and-diamond-lane-self-select/\">blog post</a> about my experiences -- it was OK, but I couldn’t see much value over, what was to me, free premium status lines. And today, I’m still not sold on its value over PreCheck. But what really keeps me from picking up one of those free membership offers is that the first iteration of CLEAR abruptly closed down the next year and had to be sued to stop it from selling its customers’ biometric data -- fingerprints and iris scans -- before it went bankrupt. The current iteration of CLEAR says “We never sell or rent personal information about you”, but I dunno. They reserve the right to update their privacy policy periodically. What keeps them from updating that “We’ll never sell” sentence when money gets a little tight.</li><li>Bridge Music — <em><em>Flight</em> </em>by Ga\'inja  (c) copyright 1999 Licensed under a Creative Commons&nbsp;<a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/1.0/\">by-nc-sa v1.0</a>&nbsp;license</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>High-Tech Airport Line Avoidance</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Frequent travelers are an obsessive lot -- they/we obsess over things like packing efficiency (utilizing every cubic inch of our carry-ons) and gaming frequent flier programs. But top of the list is avoiding airport lines. For years after 9/11, line avoidance was more an art (or luck) than a science -- through trial and error you\'d get a sense of which lines would be shorter during Monday morning rush hour in ORD, or maybe some good-hearted airport worker would shout \"There\'s no line at Checkpoint D\" and then jump out of the way of the stampede of roller-boards.&nbsp; And then, we jumped at the chance to give iris scans to CLEAR or allow the TSA to do background checks in exchange for a shorter line, brushing off any questions about the trade-off of privacy for convenience.</li><li>But what about the airports -- what are they doing to help us out? To dig into this side, I talked to Cody Shulman, managing director, Americas at Xovis Technology about how they help airports track and report on the airport lines we’re trying to avoid.<ul><li>Mark:  Cody, a number of big US hubs have installed Xovis’ technology, DFW, Minneapolis- St Paul, San Francisco, Atlanta. How does your technology help travelers in these busy airports?</li><li>Cody:  Let\'s take DFW for example. Let\'s first take back-end efficiency. We\'re kind of behind the scenes. That\'s where DFW terminal operations and their customer experience teams are working together to use the system. They\'ll make key staffing changes where passenger traffic is the busiest and do it in the moment. And at the same time, they\'ve taken the approach to give access to the local TSA leadership. So, there is no longer a disagreement when there is an issue. Problem solved rather than just finger pointing -- it was bad, there was a line, there was a queue over here; no, there wasn\'t -- because we\'ve visualized it all for them, it\'s facts. And then on the public side, the passenger facing side, you have all the same information at your fingertips that the airport has. So, before arrival you can use the DFW airport app to see all 15 checkpoints and their current wait times by queue down to the two-minute interval.</li><li>Mark:  Cody. I\'ve noticed that, in more and more airports you go to, the airport websites aren\'t great, they\'re not optimized for mobile, which you think would be a key use case, and sometimes they\'re not well publicized. But if you drill in and you find them, you actually can find those sorts of wait time stats and those are critical. So, at DFW, is that your technology driving those stats?</li><li>Cody:  Yes, exactly. And I think you\'re also spot on in saying that they\'re underpublicized and underutilized. DFW, before they instituted and implemented that into their app, had pretty low utilization. In the world of FlightAware and Flight Tracker, people have these agnostic airport apps that can do everything with tracking of your departure and what not. But then when DFW added this, it’s really useful for DFW because you can use any single checkpoint among those 15 and reach your gate and, on top of it, when the situation, even if it\'s somehow dramatically changed when you got there, the signage right in front of you at the airport still shows for every terminal where there are three checkpoints, the wait time at the adjacent terminals and the walk time. So you can self calculate and figure it out yourself</li><li>Mark:  Yes, absolutely. I\'ve seen that more and more lately and it seems to be like a good add on.</li><li>Cody:  There\'s a trust element even to it as well. So, when this first started to launch with the airport, they were doing it with very vague statements: under 15 minutes, over 15 minutes. Then they went to between five and 10 minutes/10 and 15 minutes, and gradually they trusted the accuracy of the system down to two minutes. Any more than that they decided would just be kind of wonky for the customer. I remember when they first put up those signs. I can still remember the woman: she came up to me in front of the television screen and said, “Excuse me, do you work at the airport?” I kind of shrug my shoulder and go with you can probably answer your question rather you know, why not? So, she goes “That thing up there, is it right. Do you trust it?” And in my head, I\'m going “Oh, you\'ve asked the wrong guy.” Like I could, I could go on for minutes and minutes here.</li><li>Mark:  Yeah. How do I say no to that? But Cody, what makes it accurate? What makes you confident that you\'ve got something down to a two-minute interval?</li><li>Cody:  The system works with two key components. We have software, which is dashboards that are our live visualizations and historical ones for users. And we have hardware. We have sensors. Those sensors are designed for airports. They\'re made by Xovis ourselves, and they’re optimized around queuing, and queuing in a complex environment like security, or especially check in which is super unstructured. We\'re measuring a very specific thing, and that\'s people and it\'s their height. You end up under a sensor. It\'s not a camera. And we\'re taking a measurement of your head height and your shoulder height. And with the difference between those two we’re sure that it\'s you as in a human; not mark, not anything else that\'s personally identifying but that\'s it’s you. That\'s step one. That\'s a person. There are lots of people around in a queue. We want to make sure that we capture people exhibiting what we call queue-like behavior. So that\'s moving in a sequence close enough to other people understanding that some people travel in groups and then there are some independent, and we balance that out algorithmically, so that we know that it\'s a person and they\'re in the queue.</li><li>Mark:  How do you guys manage traveler privacy?</li><li>Cody:  It\'s a super relevant and honestly, for me, a pretty easy question; we\'re not detecting faces. Nor are we detecting heat or mobile devices or anything else sort of personally invasive or inconsistently available across every person. It\'s just those heights. And again that height differential. So, when we transmit data off our devices, our sensors were not transferring images. It\'s just coordinates. It\'s X and Y; there\'s nothing personally identifiable.</li><li>Mark:  Cody, looking out what\'s in the development around adding more convenience to help future travelers. If we look out 2-5 years, what\'s next on the horizon for travelers?</li><li>Cody:  To me, the most noteworthy thing for the passenger side is a connected and a predictive experience. Take Seattle. Our services are present on all the checkpoints in Seattle and we\'ve taken it a step further and integrated with Delta in their FlyDelta app. There\'s a feed to the user in the app to know what wait time to expect when you\'re a departing passenger from Seattle. Let\'s take that one step further and for that particular elite or frequent flyer in their office. It\'s a weekday afternoon. They have to catch an evening flight. What if all the things talk to each other and said, “Hey, this is the time you should probably leave.” Okay, you\'ve set up auto enable your Lyft to come at this time. It\'s going to drop you at the security checkpoint that, in this moment, we know is the best one because you can reach your gate from any of the five. Then you\'re through security. You have time for that extra beer which, not only do you want to have, but the airport wants you to have, because that\'s where the real money is. You’ve your beer; you\'re happy; you\'re relaxed. They\'re getting revenue. Happy, relaxed people spend more and then you’re “Wait! I have to grab…” I had a beer, but I grab a water before my flight. So, you walk over to Hudson news and there\'s a line. Again, you don\'t know that there\'s another Hudson news, which there probably is, 3 doors over. Maybe that doesn\'t have a line which is better for your wait time, or in COVID times, maybe a more comfortable experience. It\'s not as crowded. Or restroom. You get off a plane, you want to know how crowded it is when it was last cleaned. And then flip it to  the operational side: stop cleaning in a circle. Clean when that wide body plane came in with 400 people who all went to the first restroom and that thing’s trashed now.</li><li>Mark: I\'ve seen that, I\'ve experienced that before.</li><li>Cody:  Just having a smart airport experience and even in public US airports, which are strapped for cash. There\'s a changing tide and I expect to see that coming forward and making a customer better experience for everybody.</li><li>Mark:  Fantastic. Cody Shulman, managing Director Americas, <a href=\"http://xovis.com\" title=\"xovis\">Xovis Technology</a>. Cody, thanks for taking the time with us</li><li>Cody:  Mark, thank you. It\'s been a pleasure.</li></ul></li><li>Bridge Music —<a href=\"http://www.saurabbhargava.com/downloads/04%20The%20Void.mp3\"><em>The Void</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.saurabbhargava.com/\">Saurab Bhargava</a>  (c) copyright 2006 Saurab Bhargava</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Business Travel Still MIA</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Listening to airline and hotel CEOs <a href=\"https://skift.com/2021/09/07/what-travel-ceos-are-predicting-about-the-permanent-return-of-business-travel/\">let the air out of their revenue forecasts</a> <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-19-resurgence-clouds-business-travel-rebound-11630920600?st=m7iegfjwreygxoi&amp;reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink\">for the rest of the year</a>, I went back to the TSA’s <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/coronavirus/passenger-throughput\">web page</a> that gives the daily numbers of passengers going through airport security checkpoints. Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/06/15/podcast-176-why-business-travel-is-coming-back-learning-airport-history/\">June episode</a>, the first time I had fun with those numbers, checkpoint volume had passed 2 million for the first time since the lockdowns and the numbers were going up. Looking at a 7-day moving average to smooth things out a bit, it grew through June until it hit 2 million the first week of July. But after a month, in the first week of August, it turned, dropping back below 2 million and now, running in the 1.7 million range, about 20% down from its peak. Over the same period in 2019, the peak number was 2.6 million and it never dropped below 2 million.</li><li>It kinda makes sense. This summer’s peak was driven by leisure travel -- people, families getting out of the house and going to see places and other people. But as that travel faded, as it always does, when kids go back to school, this time there isn’t enough business travel to replace it.</li><li>As I mentioned at the top of the episode, I just finished up a 6-month interim CIO gig. It’s had the <em>least</em> amount of business travel of any job I’ve had -- by a long shot. Regular listeners to TravelCommons will recall that there have been times when I’ve traveled every week for 3-4 months straight, and a year or two when there was maybe 6 weeks in those years that I <em>didn’t</em> travel. So this last gig, where I had only one business trip, down to Miami in May, was a huge change in my standard operating procedure.&nbsp;</li><li>I’ve talked in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/07/17/podcast-165-first-post-lockdown-flight-when-does-business-travel-come-back/\">past</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/06/15/podcast-176-why-business-travel-is-coming-back-learning-airport-history/\">episodes</a> about this, skeptical of predictions like Bill Gates’ that <a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/17/coronavirus-bill-gates-says-more-than-50percent-of-business-travel-will-disappear-long-term.html\">50% of business travel will go away</a>. I was going through the TravelCommons archives, cleaning up show notes and the like, and found an <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2008/12/23/podcast-70-packing-a-suit-videoconference-over-travel-watching-winter-flight-delays/\">episode from December 2008</a> where I was answering listener questions about why I travel for in-person meetings instead of video conference; when tech analysts were saying it was “on the brink of widespread adoption.” I’m nothing if not consistent.</li><li>Of course, it’s difficult to do in-person meetings when people are still working from home; it would be a bit awkward doing a sales call around someone’s kitchen table, having to project the PowerPoint deck on their white tile backsplash. I gotta think you’d lose a bullet point or two in the grout lines.</li><li>But by fits and starts, slowed by the Delta variant, people are heading back into their offices and international travel barriers are dropping. At this CIO gig, one colleague, the global head of operations, lived in the UK and so couldn’t get into the US to meet with his staff at some newly acquired plants. He was doing daily video calls, but after a couple of months, he’d made all the progress he could and needed to physically meet with these people. So when Canada dropped their travel ban, he flew from London to Toronto, holed up in a hotel room, worked through Canada’s 14-day quarantine, and then drove across the US border at Buffalo and caught a domestic flight to Chicago. It’s just one data point, but I’m grabbing on and holding tight, hoping to tell Bill Gates “Told you so!”</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #179</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_179.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #179 — High-Tech Airport Lines; Business Travel Still Missing','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-179-high-tech-airport-lines-business-travel-still-missing','','','2021-10-28 17:27:38','2021-10-28 22:27:38','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3831',0,'post','',0),
(3832,1,'2021-09-27 19:30:42','2021-09-28 00:30:42','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_1985\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/708473504_18da6d5b07_z1.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-3581 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/708473504_18da6d5b07_z1-300x225.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\"></a> Standing in Line! © Lance Smith/Flickr[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Last month\'s travel got me wondering what travel changes are going to stick after the COVID pandemic begins to recede. With all the restaurant and bar closures caused by COVID lockdowns, I\'m updating my recommendations list based on recent travels. And I\'m <em>way </em>overthinking our first post-lockdown international trip.  All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_179.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #179: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois; no travel since the last episode, just a lot of travel planning. I’ve talked over the past couple of episodes about pushing forward with our first post-lockdown international trip; a bike tour through the bootheel of Italy. We booked the trip in the spring and then last month -- I talked about in the last episode -- we booked our hotels pre- and post- the ride and the flight over. But not the flight back, because -- what else do we want to do while we’re here? I just wrapped up an interim CIO gig last week, so there’s no huge rush to get back -- and it’s been 5 years since our last time in Italy, so… As we were thinking about this, a friend, a former colleague pinged me “ Hey there - Just saw your tweet about your upcoming international trip. Sitting here waiting for our pierogies (he now lives in Southern Poland). Where’re you going?” Turns out he and his wife will be in Syracuse, Sicily in October. So there was our answer -- after our bike tour ends in Lecce, we catch a flight to Catania and hang out on the beach for the next week. And I can’t remember the last time I said this, but “Thanks, Twitter” for that.</li><li>So, next step, fire up Google Flights and look for one-way flights from whatever airport is near Lecce to Catania. Which turns out to be Brindisi Airport in Salento -- 24 miles, an €8/30-min train ride from Lecce, so pretty convenient, except that the best flight to Catania is an Air Dolomiti-Lufthansa connection with a 13-hour layover in Munich. Yeah, no. So next I look at Bari, where we’re flying into. 90 miles away; less convenient, but doable. The flight options are not much better -- a 6am Ryanair flight (which I kinda think of as Spirit Airlines without the charm), a 5pm flight with Volotea (whom I’ve never heard of, but Google and Wikipedia say they’re a budget airline based in Barcelona), and those same insane Air Dolomiti connections through Munich. This makes no sense. What gives? A little more Googling tells the rest of the story. Alitalia has been winding through bankruptcy since 2017 and now 4 years later, after 75 years as Italy’s national carrier, it’s finally closing down-- the day before I’m trying to book our flight to Sicily. Timing; it’s a beautiful thing.</li><li>A little more Googling says there’s a new Italian carrier coming, ITA, but it’s still working through negotiating for Alitalia’s landing slots and equipment and labor contracts, so it’s not taking bookings yet. OK, then. Getting out of Lecce is starting to pick up a little “escape room” vibe. It’s a 7-hr drive, a 14-hr train; so if we’re going, we’re flying. I book the most basic seats on the Volotea flight -- €17 for two seats -- just to have something and let the whole Alitalia/ITA thing play out a bit more; I can always add the luggage fees and reserved seats later if need be. I book it on Weds, Sept 1; 5pm flight out of Bari, gives us time to have breakfast, pack, and train up to the airport with enough time to deal with the craziness of budget airlines, which is key. My last budget airline experience was flying Wow Air from Reykjavik to London. I arrived 2 hrs before check in to see what appeared to be a stationary check in line of a couple of hundred people. Three days later, on Saturday, I wake up to an email from Volotea saying “We regret to inform you that given the current context of uncertainty about the evolution of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have been forced to reschedule your flight.” to 12:30 -- 4½ hrs earlier. I look at the train schedule -- there goes the leisurely breakfast and a bit of the budget airline safety margin, but it’s doable. The next Saturday, the 11th, I wake up to yet another Volotea e-mail (you’d think these guys would knock off early on Friday). Same wind-up -- “given the current context of uncertainty about the evolution of the COVID-19 pandemic” -- but worse punch -- “we have been forced to cancel your flight”. Ugh, guess that door out of the Lecce escape room was a dead end. I fire up Google Flights again and now see Alitalia flights out of Brindisi. Seems their replacement, ITA, has figured out how to take bookings. But following the link from Google Flights takes me to the Alitalia website with a banner still saying they’re shutting down. Another escape room fake exit? I flip over to Amex Travel; I can book the flights there. No direct flight, so I take the afternoon flight with a 2-hr connection in Rome. I put it on the Platinum card; figure I’ll need all the status I can get if I have to file for a refund. And then this week, I <a href=\"https://apnews.com/article/europe-business-airlines-rome-italy-36d45a33150c638063946e9b151e2aa0\">read</a> about Alitalia telling passengers to bring just a single piece of hand luggage because of strikes and growing labor protests. My friend sends me a text “You still tracking for Sicily?” “Kinda” I replied.</li><li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/yongen-yello/\">Give You Up</a></em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/yongen\">Yongen</a> (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/1.0/\">by-nc-sa v1.0</a> license</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Jim McDonough stopped by the TravelCommons Facebook page to leave a comment on the post pointing to my list of the best bars and restaurants I’ve visited in 2021. I said that I think it’ll take guidebooks a while to catch up with all the closures caused by the COVID lockdowns. Jim agreed, saying<ul><li>“I heard Rick Steves talking about the topic. All of his guidebooks are out of date. It will take him all of 2022 to get them repaired - assuming Delta, etc don\'t clobber 2022”</li></ul></li><li>As predicted in the last episode, Southwest Airlines extended their in-flight alcohol bans to January 18, 2022, staying aligned with the new expiration of the federal in-flight mask mandate. American also extended their economy-class ban, but continue to serve alcohol in their first and business class cabins. That alignment offers them a good explanation for the ban <em>right now</em>, but it’s going to make it tougher to reinstate in-flight drink service because I don’t see the feds ending the in-flight mask mandate anytime in the near future. Although, I dunno, maybe as the US’s only Prohibition airline, Southwest is looking to reposition their “Wanna Get Away?” slogan as “Wanna Get Away from Drunk Mask Fights on Spirit and United?”</li><li>Back in the Spring, I talked about Irene and Claire missing their Global Entry/PreCheck expiration notices and then in June, about a fake email “make sure your PreCheck doesn’t expire” phishing campaign that scammed a bunch of benched frequent fliers. So last week when I got an email starting “Your Trusted Traveler membership will be expiring soon”, I was a little wary. I was expecting it; after Irene and Claire missed their renewals, I logged in and saw that mine expired in December. But still, I examined the entire email -- message headers, mail server authentications. It looked legit, but even then, I typed the web address ttp.dhs.gov into the browser rather than clicking through the link in the email. It was legit, so I buckled in, selected Global Entry (which I always recommend since for only $15 more, you get <em>both</em> PreCheck and the fast path through US passport control), and cranked through the application. It wasn’t bad; the only part that required any real thinking was the 5-year look back on international travel. I had my passport in front of me, but if you’ve country-hopped within the EU’s Schengen Zone, you only get stamped going in and out of the zone, but not when crossing borders within the zone. In kind of a sad commentary on my traveling style, one of the things that helped me fill in those blanks was a spreadsheet of my downloaded Untappd check-ins. I opened it up in Excel, filtered out check-ins before 2016 and venues in the US and Mexico (turns out I haven’t been to Canada in the last 5 years), and then wrote down the countries that were left. Very easy, and an incentive to always have at least one beer in each country I visit -- like I needed any more encouragement.<br><br>After I paid the $100 fee and was dropped back to the front page, I saw two interesting notes. The first --“Please remember to revisit our website for your application status updates. Notification of when you may schedule an interview appointment (if one is needed) will only be posted here.” So I guess don’t trust any emails about interviews. The second was more interesting - “Due to a significant increase in application volume, we are extending the grace period from 18 months to 24 months for any submitted renewal application. This means you will continue to receive full benefits for 24 months while U.S. Customs and Border Protection is finalizing your renewal application.” Which was interesting because the email I got from them said “6 months to 1 year”. Whichever it is, my guess is that I’m not getting that interview scheduled anytime soon. </li><li>I’ve gotten a bunch of discount offers recently for a CLEAR membership -- $100 off with United, full statement credit from Amex. I’m not sure why the sudden push, but I’m holding out. I enrolled in CLEAR’s first iteration, back in April 2008, 13 years ago -- I talked about it in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2008/04/29/podcast-64-escaping-the-travel-bubble-marks-travel-tips/\">episode #64</a> (but not before I slandered the Dutch by saying their language sounded a bit like a competitive throat-clearing exercise). A couple months later, I wrote a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2008/05/27/jumping-the-line-using-clear-registered-traveler-and-diamond-lane-self-select/\">blog post</a> about my experiences -- it was OK, but I couldn’t see much value over, what was to me, free premium status lines. And today, I’m still not sold on its value over PreCheck. But what really keeps me from picking up one of those free membership offers is that the first iteration of CLEAR abruptly closed down the next year and had to be sued to stop it from selling its customers’ biometric data -- fingerprints and iris scans -- before it went bankrupt. The current iteration of CLEAR says “We never sell or rent personal information about you”, but I dunno. They reserve the right to update their privacy policy periodically. What keeps them from updating that “We’ll never sell” sentence when money gets a little tight.</li><li>Bridge Music — <em><em>Flight</em> </em>by Ga\'inja  (c) copyright 1999 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/1.0/\">by-nc-sa v1.0</a> license</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>High-Tech Airport Line Avoidance</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Frequent travelers are an obsessive lot -- they/we obsess over things like packing efficiency (utilizing every cubic inch of our carry-ons) and gaming frequent flier programs. But top of the list is avoiding airport lines. For years after 9/11, line avoidance was more an art (or luck) than a science -- through trial and error you\'d get a sense of which lines would be shorter during Monday morning rush hour in ORD, or maybe some good-hearted airport worker would shout \"There\'s no line at Checkpoint D\" and then jump out of the way of the stampede of roller-boards.  And then, we jumped at the chance to give iris scans to CLEAR or allow the TSA to do background checks in exchange for a shorter line, brushing off any questions about the trade-off of privacy for convenience.</li><li>But what about the airports -- what are they doing to help us out? To dig into this side, I talked to Cody Shulman, managing director, Americas at Xovis Technology about how they help airports track and report on the airport lines we’re trying to avoid.<ul><li>Mark:  Cody, a number of big US hubs have installed Xovis’ technology, DFW, Minneapolis- St Paul, San Francisco, Atlanta. How does your technology help travelers in these busy airports?</li><li>Cody:  Let\'s let\'s take DFW for example. Let\'s first take back-end efficiency. We\'re kind of behind the scenes. That\'s where DFW terminal operations and their customer experience teams are working together to use the system. They\'ll make key staffing changes where passenger traffic is the busiest and do it in the moment. And at the same time, they\'ve taken the approach to give access to the local TSA leadership. So, there is no longer a disagreement when there is an issue. Problem solved rather than just finger pointing -- it was bad, there was a line, there was a queue over here; no, there wasn\'t -- because we\'ve visualized it all for them, it\'s facts. And then on the public side, the passenger facing side, you have all the same information at your fingertips that the airport has. So, before arrival you can use the DFW airport app to see all 15 checkpoints and their current wait times by queue down to the two-minute interval.</li><li>Mark:  Cody. I\'ve I\'ve noticed that, in more and more airports you go to, the airport websites aren\'t great, they\'re not optimized for mobile, which you think would be a key use case, and sometimes they\'re not well publicized. But if you drill in and you find them, you actually can find those sorts of wait time stats and those are critical. So, at DFW, is that your technology driving those stats?</li><li>Cody:  Yes, exactly. And I think you\'re also spot on in saying that they\'re underpublicized and underutilized. DFW, before they instituted and implemented that into their app, had pretty low utilization. In the world of FlightAware and Flight Tracker, people have these agnostic airport apps that can do everything with tracking of your departure and what not. But then when DFW added this, it’s really useful for DFW because you can use any single checkpoint among those 15 and reach your gate and, on top of it, when the situation, even if it\'s somehow dramatically changed when you got there, the signage right in front of you at the airport still shows for every terminal where there are three checkpoints, the wait time at the adjacent terminals and the walk time. So you can self calculate and figure it out yourself</li><li>Mark:  Yes, absolutely. I\'ve seen that more and more lately and it seems to be like a good add on.</li><li>Cody:  There\'s a trust element even to it as well. So, when this first started to launch with the airport, they were doing it with very vague statements: under 15 minutes, over 15 minutes. Then they went to between five and 10 minutes/10 and 15 minutes, and gradually they trusted the accuracy of the system down to two minutes. Any more than that they decided would just be kind of wonky for the customer. I remember when they first put up those signs. I can still remember the woman: she came up to me in front of the television screen and said, “Excuse me, do you work at the airport?” I kind of shrug my shoulder and go with you can probably answer your question rather you know, why not? So, she goes “That thing up there, is it right. Do you trust it?” And in my head, I\'m going “Oh, you\'ve asked the wrong guy.” Like I could, I could go on for minutes and minutes here.</li><li>Mark:  Yeah. How do I say no to that? But Cody, what makes it accurate? What makes you confident that you\'ve got something down to a two-minute interval?</li><li>Cody:  The system works with two key components. We have software, which is dashboards that are our live visualizations and historical ones for users. And we have hardware. We have sensors. Those sensors are designed for airports. They\'re made by Xovis ourselves, and they’re optimized around queuing, and queuing in a complex environment like security, or especially check in which is super unstructured. We\'re measuring a very specific thing, and that\'s people and it\'s their height. You end up under a sensor. It\'s not a camera. And we\'re taking a measurement of your head height and your shoulder height. And with the difference between those two we’re sure that it\'s you as in a human; not mark, not anything else that\'s personally identifying but that\'s it’s you. That\'s step one. That\'s a person. There are lots of people around in a queue. We want to make sure that we capture people exhibiting what we call queue-like behavior. So that\'s moving in a sequence close enough to other people understanding that some people travel in groups and then there are some independent, and we balance that out algorithmically, so that we know that it\'s a person and they\'re in the queue.</li><li>Mark:  How do you guys manage traveler privacy?</li><li>Cody:  It\'s a super relevant and honestly, for me, a pretty easy question; we\'re not detecting faces. Nor are we detecting heat or mobile devices or anything else sort of personally invasive or inconsistently available across every person. It\'s just those heights. And again that height differential. So, when we transmit data off our devices, our sensors were not transferring images. It\'s just coordinates. Its X and Y; there\'s nothing personally identifiable.</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>The Best Places I’ve Ate and Drank At In 2021… So Far</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I talk <em>a lot</em> about food and beer in this podcast -- as proven by the direct links to those categories in the top menu on the TravelCommons website. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\">episode #168</a> last fall, I said that, for me, food is one of the last hold-outs to global e-commerce and social media. 10-20 year ago, it was fun to go shopping and bring something unique back home. But now, there’s not much that you can’t find easier (and often cheaper) on Amazon or Taobao or Rakuten. And don’t even get me started on Instagram -- if people aren’t in <a href=\"https://www.npr.org/2021/07/09/1014208160/national-parks-crowds-litter\">a 100-person queue to get their own personal shot of the Delicate Arch in Moab, UT</a> then they’re queuing for made-for-Instagram-selfie murals like the <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/explore/tags/whatliftsyou/\">WhatLiftsYou</a> wings in Nashville’s Gulch neighborhood.&nbsp; But food -- you can post all the pictures you want of it, but you can’t post that sense memory of eating a dozen fresh oysters on a breakwater in Brittany, having a bowl of pho for breakfast in Saigon, or a 1am fresh-off-the-grill char polish that’s been dragged through the garden at a Chicago hot dog stand.&nbsp;</li><li>And so, over the years, I’ve talked about restaurants, bars, taprooms that I’ve enjoyed and posted links to them on the website in show notes or in blog posts. But reading articles about the number of places that’ve closed since March 2020 -- some say <a href=\"https://www.nrn.com/fast-casual/datassential-more-10-us-restaurants-have-closed-permanently\">10% of all restaurants in the US</a>, <a href=\"https://www.chicagobusiness.com/restaurants/heres-how-many-chicago-restaurants-have-closed-pandemic\">almost 20% in Chicago</a> -- I figure it’ll take travel guide books and blogs a while to catch up with all the changes. It kinda hit me when a college friend pinged our group text for Nashville recommendations. I’ve been going there a couple of times a year for the past 5 years, but when I started going through my list of places, it struck me how many of them had closed. I had to re-curate my recommendations. I figured a good start on that would be to post <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/08/14/my-best-restaurants-and-bars-of-2021/\">a list of the best places I’ve ate and drank at during my 2021 travels</a> on the TravelCommons website.</li><li>Now, fair warning, this is a <em>very</em> idiosyncratic list; it’s the best places <em>I</em> ate and drank at in, say, New York City in May and July. The New York list is pretty Midtown/Murray Hill-centric because that’s where we were staying and that’s where Claire was looking for flats. I walked into <a href=\"https://www.tedscornertavern.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Ted’s Corner Tavern</a> because it’s around the corner from Claire’s new place; it made the list because it’s what I think a great neighborhood bar should be -- good-sized bar with friendly bartenders who aren’t too busy to chat with you, the right volume level (lively, but not so loud that you have to shout across the table), and, of course, 30 taps and a well-curated beer list.</li><li>I’ve tried to make my list a well-curated one.&nbsp; I don’t mention restaurants or taprooms that I thought were fine -- the 3 or 3½-star places. It’s a list of places that stuck out in my mind for one reason or another, and would make me go out of my way to recommend them to, say, a college friend. This played out in a funny way on my Portland, Maine recommendations. I recommend <a href=\"https://bobsclamhut.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bob’s Clam Hut</a> in Kittery for fried clams and <a href=\"https://portland.islandcreekoysters.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Island Creek Oyster\'s place</a> in the East End/Munjoy Hill neighborhood for local oysters, but have no specific recommendation for a lobster roll place. It’s not for lack of trying; we had a lobster roll whenever we saw it on a menu, which wasn’t a cheap exercise since they were about $25 a pop. They were all good -- we didn’t have a bad lobster roll anywhere. But after all that, there’s no one place I could point to and say “Go <em>there</em> for a lobster roll.”&nbsp; I just say “Order one if you see it. It’ll probably be good no matter where you are”.&nbsp;</li><li>Another oddity of the list -- no Chicago places. Irene and I talked about this a bit. Between favorite places closing and cooking at home a lot more during the lockdowns and the strict mask mandate (which in Chicago was worded kinda like the airplane mandate -- wear your mask at all times unless you were actively eating or drinking), we haven’t been anywhere that’s really stuck out. Well, except maybe for the<a href=\"https://goo.gl/maps/XzUBYcWTn8nmc42E8\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"> Nancy’s Pizza</a> a couple of blocks from the TravelCommons studios. They do a great pepperoni, spinach, and fresh tomato pan pizza. That’ll definitely make the list.</li><li>Because the list is a work-in-progress; I posted the first edition on the website last week with sections on Tucson, San Diego, Nashville, New York, and Portland. You’ll find a link in the episode description in your podcast app -- if it supports HTML descriptions. I’ll be adding places through the rest of the year. There <em>will</em> be at least a couple of Chicago places (in addition to Nancy’s) on the list. I’m sure we’ll find some places in Puglia to add; and I’m positive I’ll find some UK taprooms that’ll make the cut since Rob Cheshire of This Week in Craft Beer has offered me a personal tour of his favorites.</li><li>When I’ve added a new section or think there’s enough new stuff to justify people taking a fresh look, I’ll put a new date on it so it goes back to the top of the Food and the Beer sections of the website, and I’ll post it on Facebook and Twitter. And if you end up hitting one of these places, shoot me a note and let me know if I got it right.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #178</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_178.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #179 — High-Tech Airport Lines; Business Travelers Still MIA','','inherit','closed','closed','','3831-revision-v1','','','2021-09-27 19:30:42','2021-09-28 00:30:42','',3831,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3832',0,'revision','',0),
(3835,1,'2021-09-27 19:42:19','2021-09-28 00:42:19','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_1985\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/708473504_18da6d5b07_z1.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-3581 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/708473504_18da6d5b07_z1-300x225.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\"></a> Standing in Line! © Lance Smith/Flickr[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Last month\'s travel got me wondering what travel changes are going to stick after the COVID pandemic begins to recede. With all the restaurant and bar closures caused by COVID lockdowns, I\'m updating my recommendations list based on recent travels. And I\'m <em>way </em>overthinking our first post-lockdown international trip.  All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_179.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #179: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois; no travel since the last episode, just a lot of travel planning. I’ve talked over the past couple of episodes about pushing forward with our first post-lockdown international trip; a bike tour through the bootheel of Italy. We booked the trip in the spring and then last month -- I talked about in the last episode -- we booked our hotels pre- and post- the ride and the flight over. But not the flight back, because -- what else do we want to do while we’re here? I just wrapped up an interim CIO gig last week, so there’s no huge rush to get back -- and it’s been 5 years since our last time in Italy, so… As we were thinking about this, a friend, a former colleague pinged me “ Hey there - Just saw your tweet about your upcoming international trip. Sitting here waiting for our pierogies (he now lives in Southern Poland). Where’re you going?” Turns out he and his wife will be in Syracuse, Sicily in October. So there was our answer -- after our bike tour ends in Lecce, we catch a flight to Catania and hang out on the beach for the next week. And I can’t remember the last time I said this, but “Thanks, Twitter” for that.</li><li>So, next step, fire up Google Flights and look for one-way flights from whatever airport is near Lecce to Catania. Which turns out to be Brindisi Airport in Salento -- 24 miles, an €8/30-min train ride from Lecce, so pretty convenient, except that the best flight to Catania is an Air Dolomiti-Lufthansa connection with a 13-hour layover in Munich. Yeah, no. So next I look at Bari, where we’re flying into. 90 miles away; less convenient, but doable. The flight options are not much better -- a 6am Ryanair flight (which I kinda think of as Spirit Airlines without the charm), a 5pm flight with Volotea (whom I’ve never heard of, but Google and Wikipedia say they’re a budget airline based in Barcelona), and those same insane Air Dolomiti connections through Munich. This makes no sense. What gives? A little more Googling tells the rest of the story. Alitalia has been winding through bankruptcy since 2017 and now 4 years later, after 75 years as Italy’s national carrier, it’s finally closing down-- the day before I’m trying to book our flight to Sicily. Timing; it’s a beautiful thing.</li><li>A little more Googling says there’s a new Italian carrier coming, ITA, but it’s still working through negotiating for Alitalia’s landing slots and equipment and labor contracts, so it’s not taking bookings yet. OK, then. Getting out of Lecce is starting to pick up a little “escape room” vibe. It’s a 7-hr drive, a 14-hr train; so if we’re going, we’re flying. I book the most basic seats on the Volotea flight -- €17 for two seats -- just to have something and let the whole Alitalia/ITA thing play out a bit more; I can always add the luggage fees and reserved seats later if need be. I book it on Weds, Sept 1; 5pm flight out of Bari, gives us time to have breakfast, pack, and train up to the airport with enough time to deal with the craziness of budget airlines, which is key. My last budget airline experience was flying Wow Air from Reykjavik to London. I arrived 2 hrs before check in to see what appeared to be a stationary check in line of a couple of hundred people. Three days later, on Saturday, I wake up to an email from Volotea saying “We regret to inform you that given the current context of uncertainty about the evolution of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have been forced to reschedule your flight.” to 12:30 -- 4½ hrs earlier. I look at the train schedule -- there goes the leisurely breakfast and a bit of the budget airline safety margin, but it’s doable. The next Saturday, the 11th, I wake up to yet another Volotea e-mail (you’d think these guys would knock off early on Friday). Same wind-up -- “given the current context of uncertainty about the evolution of the COVID-19 pandemic” -- but worse punch -- “we have been forced to cancel your flight”. Ugh, guess that door out of the Lecce escape room was a dead end. I fire up Google Flights again and now see Alitalia flights out of Brindisi. Seems their replacement, ITA, has figured out how to take bookings. But following the link from Google Flights takes me to the Alitalia website with a banner still saying they’re shutting down. Another escape room fake exit? I flip over to Amex Travel; I can book the flights there. No direct flight, so I take the afternoon flight with a 2-hr connection in Rome. I put it on the Platinum card; figure I’ll need all the status I can get if I have to file for a refund. And then this week, I <a href=\"https://apnews.com/article/europe-business-airlines-rome-italy-36d45a33150c638063946e9b151e2aa0\">read</a> about Alitalia telling passengers to bring just a single piece of hand luggage because of strikes and growing labor protests. My friend sends me a text “You still tracking for Sicily?” “Kinda” I replied.</li><li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/yongen-yello/\">Give You Up</a></em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/yongen\">Yongen</a> (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/1.0/\">by-nc-sa v1.0</a> license</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Jim McDonough stopped by the TravelCommons Facebook page to leave a comment on the post pointing to my list of the best bars and restaurants I’ve visited in 2021. I said that I think it’ll take guidebooks a while to catch up with all the closures caused by the COVID lockdowns. Jim agreed, saying<ul><li>“I heard Rick Steves talking about the topic. All of his guidebooks are out of date. It will take him all of 2022 to get them repaired - assuming Delta, etc don\'t clobber 2022”</li></ul></li><li>As predicted in the last episode, Southwest Airlines extended their in-flight alcohol bans to January 18, 2022, staying aligned with the new expiration of the federal in-flight mask mandate. American also extended their economy-class ban, but continue to serve alcohol in their first and business class cabins. That alignment offers them a good explanation for the ban <em>right now</em>, but it’s going to make it tougher to reinstate in-flight drink service because I don’t see the feds ending the in-flight mask mandate anytime in the near future. Although, I dunno, maybe as the US’s only Prohibition airline, Southwest is looking to reposition their “Wanna Get Away?” slogan as “Wanna Get Away from Drunk Mask Fights on Spirit and United?”</li><li>Back in the Spring, I talked about Irene and Claire missing their Global Entry/PreCheck expiration notices and then in June, about a fake email “make sure your PreCheck doesn’t expire” phishing campaign that scammed a bunch of benched frequent fliers. So last week when I got an email starting “Your Trusted Traveler membership will be expiring soon”, I was a little wary. I was expecting it; after Irene and Claire missed their renewals, I logged in and saw that mine expired in December. But still, I examined the entire email -- message headers, mail server authentications. It looked legit, but even then, I typed the web address ttp.dhs.gov into the browser rather than clicking through the link in the email. It was legit, so I buckled in, selected Global Entry (which I always recommend since for only $15 more, you get <em>both</em> PreCheck and the fast path through US passport control), and cranked through the application. It wasn’t bad; the only part that required any real thinking was the 5-year look back on international travel. I had my passport in front of me, but if you’ve country-hopped within the EU’s Schengen Zone, you only get stamped going in and out of the zone, but not when crossing borders within the zone. In kind of a sad commentary on my traveling style, one of the things that helped me fill in those blanks was a spreadsheet of my downloaded Untappd check-ins. I opened it up in Excel, filtered out check-ins before 2016 and venues in the US and Mexico (turns out I haven’t been to Canada in the last 5 years), and then wrote down the countries that were left. Very easy, and an incentive to always have at least one beer in each country I visit -- like I needed any more encouragement.<br><br>After I paid the $100 fee and was dropped back to the front page, I saw two interesting notes. The first --“Please remember to revisit our website for your application status updates. Notification of when you may schedule an interview appointment (if one is needed) will only be posted here.” So I guess don’t trust any emails about interviews. The second was more interesting - “Due to a significant increase in application volume, we are extending the grace period from 18 months to 24 months for any submitted renewal application. This means you will continue to receive full benefits for 24 months while U.S. Customs and Border Protection is finalizing your renewal application.” Which was interesting because the email I got from them said “6 months to 1 year”. Whichever it is, my guess is that I’m not getting that interview scheduled anytime soon. </li><li>I’ve gotten a bunch of discount offers recently for a CLEAR membership -- $100 off with United, full statement credit from Amex. I’m not sure why the sudden push, but I’m holding out. I enrolled in CLEAR’s first iteration, back in April 2008, 13 years ago -- I talked about it in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2008/04/29/podcast-64-escaping-the-travel-bubble-marks-travel-tips/\">episode #64</a> (but not before I slandered the Dutch by saying their language sounded a bit like a competitive throat-clearing exercise). A couple months later, I wrote a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2008/05/27/jumping-the-line-using-clear-registered-traveler-and-diamond-lane-self-select/\">blog post</a> about my experiences -- it was OK, but I couldn’t see much value over, what was to me, free premium status lines. And today, I’m still not sold on its value over PreCheck. But what really keeps me from picking up one of those free membership offers is that the first iteration of CLEAR abruptly closed down the next year and had to be sued to stop it from selling its customers’ biometric data -- fingerprints and iris scans -- before it went bankrupt. The current iteration of CLEAR says “We never sell or rent personal information about you”, but I dunno. They reserve the right to update their privacy policy periodically. What keeps them from updating that “We’ll never sell” sentence when money gets a little tight.</li><li>Bridge Music — <em><em>Flight</em> </em>by Ga\'inja  (c) copyright 1999 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/1.0/\">by-nc-sa v1.0</a> license</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>High-Tech Airport Line Avoidance</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Frequent travelers are an obsessive lot -- they/we obsess over things like packing efficiency (utilizing every cubic inch of our carry-ons) and gaming frequent flier programs. But top of the list is avoiding airport lines. For years after 9/11, line avoidance was more an art (or luck) than a science -- through trial and error you\'d get a sense of which lines would be shorter during Monday morning rush hour in ORD, or maybe some good-hearted airport worker would shout \"There\'s no line at Checkpoint D\" and then jump out of the way of the stampede of roller-boards.  And then, we jumped at the chance to give iris scans to CLEAR or allow the TSA to do background checks in exchange for a shorter line, brushing off any questions about the trade-off of privacy for convenience.</li><li>But what about the airports -- what are they doing to help us out? To dig into this side, I talked to Cody Shulman, managing director, Americas at Xovis Technology about how they help airports track and report on the airport lines we’re trying to avoid.<ul><li>Mark:  Cody, a number of big US hubs have installed Xovis’ technology, DFW, Minneapolis- St Paul, San Francisco, Atlanta. How does your technology help travelers in these busy airports?</li><li>Cody:  Let\'s let\'s take DFW for example. Let\'s first take back-end efficiency. We\'re kind of behind the scenes. That\'s where DFW terminal operations and their customer experience teams are working together to use the system. They\'ll make key staffing changes where passenger traffic is the busiest and do it in the moment. And at the same time, they\'ve taken the approach to give access to the local TSA leadership. So, there is no longer a disagreement when there is an issue. Problem solved rather than just finger pointing -- it was bad, there was a line, there was a queue over here; no, there wasn\'t -- because we\'ve visualized it all for them, it\'s facts. And then on the public side, the passenger facing side, you have all the same information at your fingertips that the airport has. So, before arrival you can use the DFW airport app to see all 15 checkpoints and their current wait times by queue down to the two-minute interval.</li><li>Mark:  Cody. I\'ve I\'ve noticed that, in more and more airports you go to, the airport websites aren\'t great, they\'re not optimized for mobile, which you think would be a key use case, and sometimes they\'re not well publicized. But if you drill in and you find them, you actually can find those sorts of wait time stats and those are critical. So, at DFW, is that your technology driving those stats?</li><li>Cody:  Yes, exactly. And I think you\'re also spot on in saying that they\'re underpublicized and underutilized. DFW, before they instituted and implemented that into their app, had pretty low utilization. In the world of FlightAware and Flight Tracker, people have these agnostic airport apps that can do everything with tracking of your departure and what not. But then when DFW added this, it’s really useful for DFW because you can use any single checkpoint among those 15 and reach your gate and, on top of it, when the situation, even if it\'s somehow dramatically changed when you got there, the signage right in front of you at the airport still shows for every terminal where there are three checkpoints, the wait time at the adjacent terminals and the walk time. So you can self calculate and figure it out yourself</li><li>Mark:  Yes, absolutely. I\'ve seen that more and more lately and it seems to be like a good add on.</li><li>Cody:  There\'s a trust element even to it as well. So, when this first started to launch with the airport, they were doing it with very vague statements: under 15 minutes, over 15 minutes. Then they went to between five and 10 minutes/10 and 15 minutes, and gradually they trusted the accuracy of the system down to two minutes. Any more than that they decided would just be kind of wonky for the customer. I remember when they first put up those signs. I can still remember the woman: she came up to me in front of the television screen and said, “Excuse me, do you work at the airport?” I kind of shrug my shoulder and go with you can probably answer your question rather you know, why not? So, she goes “That thing up there, is it right. Do you trust it?” And in my head, I\'m going “Oh, you\'ve asked the wrong guy.” Like I could, I could go on for minutes and minutes here.</li><li>Mark:  Yeah. How do I say no to that? But Cody, what makes it accurate? What makes you confident that you\'ve got something down to a two-minute interval?</li><li>Cody:  The system works with two key components. We have software, which is dashboards that are our live visualizations and historical ones for users. And we have hardware. We have sensors. Those sensors are designed for airports. They\'re made by Xovis ourselves, and they’re optimized around queuing, and queuing in a complex environment like security, or especially check in which is super unstructured. We\'re measuring a very specific thing, and that\'s people and it\'s their height. You end up under a sensor. It\'s not a camera. And we\'re taking a measurement of your head height and your shoulder height. And with the difference between those two we’re sure that it\'s you as in a human; not mark, not anything else that\'s personally identifying but that\'s it’s you. That\'s step one. That\'s a person. There are lots of people around in a queue. We want to make sure that we capture people exhibiting what we call queue-like behavior. So that\'s moving in a sequence close enough to other people understanding that some people travel in groups and then there are some independent, and we balance that out algorithmically, so that we know that it\'s a person and they\'re in the queue.</li><li>Mark:  How do you guys manage traveler privacy?</li><li>Cody:  It\'s a super relevant and honestly, for me, a pretty easy question; we\'re not detecting faces. Nor are we detecting heat or mobile devices or anything else sort of personally invasive or inconsistently available across every person. It\'s just those heights. And again that height differential. So, when we transmit data off our devices, our sensors were not transferring images. It\'s just coordinates. Its X and Y; there\'s nothing personally identifiable.</li></ul></li><li>Bridge Music —<a href=\"http://www.saurabbhargava.com/downloads/04%20The%20Void.mp3\"><em>The Void</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.saurabbhargava.com/\">Saurab Bhargava</a>  (c) copyright 2006 Saurab Bhargava</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Business Travel Still MIA</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Listening to airline and hotel CEOs <a href=\"https://skift.com/2021/09/07/what-travel-ceos-are-predicting-about-the-permanent-return-of-business-travel/\">let the air out of their revenue forecasts</a> <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-19-resurgence-clouds-business-travel-rebound-11630920600?st=m7iegfjwreygxoi&amp;reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink\">for the rest of the year</a>, I went back to the TSA’s <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/coronavirus/passenger-throughput\">web page</a> that gives the daily numbers of passengers going through airport security checkpoints. Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/06/15/podcast-176-why-business-travel-is-coming-back-learning-airport-history/\">June episode</a>, the first time I had fun with those numbers, checkpoint volume had passed 2 million for the first time since the lockdowns and the numbers were going up. Looking at a 7-day moving average to smooth things out a bit, it grew through June until it hit 2 million the first week of July. But after a month, in the first week of August, it turned, dropping back below 2 million and now, running in the 1.7 million range, about 20% down from its peak. Over the same period in 2019, the peak number was 2.6 million and it never dropped below 2 million.</li><li>It kinda makes sense. This summer’s peak was driven by leisure travel -- people, families getting out of the house and going to see places and other people. But as that travel faded, as it always does, when kids go back to school, this time there isn’t enough business travel to replace it.</li><li>As I mentioned at the top of the episode, I just finished up a 6-month interim CIO gig. It’s had the <em>least</em> amount of business travel of any job I’ve had -- by a long shot. Regular listeners to TravelCommons will recall that there have been times when I’ve traveled every week for 3-4 months straight, and a year or two when there was maybe 6 weeks in those years that I <em>didn’t</em> travel. So this last gig, where I had only one business trip, down to Miami in May, was a huge change in my standard operating procedure. </li><li>I’ve talked in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/07/17/podcast-165-first-post-lockdown-flight-when-does-business-travel-come-back/\">past</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/06/15/podcast-176-why-business-travel-is-coming-back-learning-airport-history/\">episodes</a> about this, skeptical of predictions like Bill Gates’ that <a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/17/coronavirus-bill-gates-says-more-than-50percent-of-business-travel-will-disappear-long-term.html\">50% of business travel will go away</a>. I was going through the TravelCommons archives, cleaning up show notes and the like, and found an <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2008/12/23/podcast-70-packing-a-suit-videoconference-over-travel-watching-winter-flight-delays/\">episode from December 2008</a> where I was answering listener questions about why I travel for in-person meetings instead of video conference; when tech analysts were saying it was “on the brink of widespread adoption.” I’m nothing if not consistent.</li><li>Of course, it’s difficult to do in-person meetings when people are still working from home; it would be a bit awkward doing a sales call around someone’s kitchen table, having to project the PowerPoint deck on their white tile backsplash. I gotta think you’d lose a bullet point or two in the grout lines.</li><li>But by fits and starts, slowed by the Delta variant, people are heading back into their offices and international travel barriers are dropping. At this CIO gig, one colleague, the global head of operations, lived in the UK and so couldn’t get into the US to meet with his staff at some newly acquired plants. He was doing daily video calls, but after a couple of months, he’d made all the progress he could and needed to physically meet with these people. So when Canada dropped their travel ban, he flew from London to Toronto, holed up in a hotel room, worked through Canada’s 14-day quarantine, and then drove across the US border at Buffalo and caught a domestic flight to Chicago. It’s just one data point, but I’m grabbing on and holding tight, hoping to tell Bill Gates “Told you so!”</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #179</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social  -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_179.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #179 — High-Tech Airport Lines; Business Travel Still Missing','','inherit','closed','closed','','3831-revision-v1','','','2021-09-27 19:42:19','2021-09-28 00:42:19','',3831,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3835',0,'revision','',0),
(3836,1,'2021-09-27 21:10:29','2021-09-28 02:10:29','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_1985\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/708473504_18da6d5b07_z1.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-3581 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/708473504_18da6d5b07_z1-300x225.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\"></a> Standing in Line! © Lance Smith/Flickr[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Not much travel, but a lot of travel planning for our first post-lockdown international trip to Italy. Trying to thread our way through changing COVID rules and Alitalia\'s bankruptcy throes. I\'m getting inundated with discount offers for <a href=\"https://www.clearme.com/\">Clear\'s fast-pass service</a>. I\'ve resisted them so far, because I remember back to when the first incarnation of Clear wanted to <a href=\"https://www.wired.com/2009/08/defunct-airport-fast-pass-company-banned-from-selling-customer-biometrics/\">sell its members\' biometric data</a>.  We then talk to Xovis Technology\'s Cody Shulman about how airports are better managing all sorts of lines in airports. Finally, air passenger traffic is dropping again because business travelers are still missing-in-action (MIA). All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_179.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #179: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois; no travel since the last episode, just a lot of travel planning. I’ve talked over the past couple of episodes about pushing forward with our first post-lockdown international trip; a bike tour through the bootheel of Italy. We booked the trip in the spring and then last month -- I talked about in the last episode -- we booked our hotels pre- and post- the ride and the flight over. But not the flight back, because -- what else do we want to do while we’re here? I just wrapped up an interim CIO gig last week, so there’s no huge rush to get back -- and it’s been 5 years since our last time in Italy, so… As we were thinking about this, a friend, a former colleague pinged me “ Hey there - Just saw your tweet about your upcoming international trip. Sitting here waiting for our pierogies (he now lives in Southern Poland). Where’re you going?” Turns out he and his wife will be in Syracuse, Sicily in October. So there was our answer -- after our bike tour ends in Lecce, we catch a flight to Catania and hang out on the beach for the next week. And I can’t remember the last time I said this, but “Thanks, Twitter” for that.</li><li>So, next step, fire up Google Flights and look for one-way flights from whatever airport is near Lecce to Catania. Which turns out to be Brindisi Airport in Salento -- 24 miles, an €8/30-min train ride from Lecce, so pretty convenient, except that the best flight to Catania is an Air Dolomiti-Lufthansa connection with a 13-hour layover in Munich. Yeah, no. So next I look at Bari, where we’re flying into. 90 miles away; less convenient, but doable. The flight options are not much better -- a 6am Ryanair flight (which I kinda think of as Spirit Airlines without the charm), a 5pm flight with Volotea (whom I’ve never heard of, but Google and Wikipedia say they’re a budget airline based in Barcelona), and those same insane Air Dolomiti connections through Munich. This makes no sense. What gives? A little more Googling tells the rest of the story. Alitalia has been winding through bankruptcy since 2017 and now 4 years later, after 75 years as Italy’s national carrier, it’s finally closing down-- the day before I’m trying to book our flight to Sicily. Timing; it’s a beautiful thing.</li><li>A little more Googling says there’s a new Italian carrier coming, ITA, but it’s still working through negotiating for Alitalia’s landing slots and equipment and labor contracts, so it’s not taking bookings yet. OK, then. Getting out of Lecce is starting to pick up a little “escape room” vibe. It’s a 7-hr drive, a 14-hr train; so if we’re going, we’re flying. I book the most basic seats on the Volotea flight -- €17 for two seats -- just to have something and let the whole Alitalia/ITA thing play out a bit more; I can always add the luggage fees and reserved seats later if need be. I book it on Weds, Sept 1; 5pm flight out of Bari, gives us time to have breakfast, pack, and train up to the airport with enough time to deal with the craziness of budget airlines, which is key. My last budget airline experience was flying Wow Air from Reykjavik to London. I arrived 2 hrs before check in to see what appeared to be a stationary check in line of a couple of hundred people. Three days later, on Saturday, I wake up to an email from Volotea saying “We regret to inform you that given the current context of uncertainty about the evolution of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have been forced to reschedule your flight.” to 12:30 -- 4½ hrs earlier. I look at the train schedule -- there goes the leisurely breakfast and a bit of the budget airline safety margin, but it’s doable. The next Saturday, the 11th, I wake up to yet another Volotea e-mail (you’d think these guys would knock off early on Friday). Same wind-up -- “given the current context of uncertainty about the evolution of the COVID-19 pandemic” -- but worse punch -- “we have been forced to cancel your flight”. Ugh, guess that door out of the Lecce escape room was a dead end. I fire up Google Flights again and now see Alitalia flights out of Brindisi. Seems their replacement, ITA, has figured out how to take bookings. But following the link from Google Flights takes me to the Alitalia website with a banner still saying they’re shutting down. Another escape room fake exit? I flip over to Amex Travel; I can book the flights there. No direct flight, so I take the afternoon flight with a 2-hr connection in Rome. I put it on the Platinum card; figure I’ll need all the status I can get if I have to file for a refund. And then this week, I <a href=\"https://apnews.com/article/europe-business-airlines-rome-italy-36d45a33150c638063946e9b151e2aa0\">read</a> about Alitalia telling passengers to bring just a single piece of hand luggage because of strikes and growing labor protests. My friend sends me a text “You still tracking for Sicily?” “Kinda” I replied.</li><li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/yongen-yello/\">Give You Up</a></em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/yongen\">Yongen</a> (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/1.0/\">by-nc-sa v1.0</a> license</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Jim McDonough stopped by the TravelCommons Facebook page to leave a comment on the post pointing to my list of the best bars and restaurants I’ve visited in 2021. I said that I think it’ll take guidebooks a while to catch up with all the closures caused by the COVID lockdowns. Jim agreed, saying<ul><li>“I heard Rick Steves talking about the topic. All of his guidebooks are out of date. It will take him all of 2022 to get them repaired - assuming Delta, etc don\'t clobber 2022”</li></ul></li><li>As predicted in the last episode, Southwest Airlines extended their in-flight alcohol bans to January 18, 2022, staying aligned with the new expiration of the federal in-flight mask mandate. American also extended their economy-class ban, but continue to serve alcohol in their first and business class cabins. That alignment offers them a good explanation for the ban <em>right now</em>, but it’s going to make it tougher to reinstate in-flight drink service because I don’t see the feds ending the in-flight mask mandate anytime in the near future. Although, I dunno, maybe as the US’s only Prohibition airline, Southwest is looking to reposition their “Wanna Get Away?” slogan as “Wanna Get Away from Drunk Mask Fights on Spirit and United?”</li><li>Back in the Spring, I talked about Irene and Claire missing their Global Entry/PreCheck expiration notices and then in June, about a fake email “make sure your PreCheck doesn’t expire” phishing campaign that scammed a bunch of benched frequent fliers. So last week when I got an email starting “Your Trusted Traveler membership will be expiring soon”, I was a little wary. I was expecting it; after Irene and Claire missed their renewals, I logged in and saw that mine expired in December. But still, I examined the entire email -- message headers, mail server authentications. It looked legit, but even then, I typed the web address ttp.dhs.gov into the browser rather than clicking through the link in the email. It was legit, so I buckled in, selected Global Entry (which I always recommend since for only $15 more, you get <em>both</em> PreCheck and the fast path through US passport control), and cranked through the application. It wasn’t bad; the only part that required any real thinking was the 5-year look back on international travel. I had my passport in front of me, but if you’ve country-hopped within the EU’s Schengen Zone, you only get stamped going in and out of the zone, but not when crossing borders within the zone. In kind of a sad commentary on my traveling style, one of the things that helped me fill in those blanks was a spreadsheet of my downloaded Untappd check-ins. I opened it up in Excel, filtered out check-ins before 2016 and venues in the US and Mexico (turns out I haven’t been to Canada in the last 5 years), and then wrote down the countries that were left. Very easy, and an incentive to always have at least one beer in each country I visit -- like I needed any more encouragement.<br><br>After I paid the $100 fee and was dropped back to the front page, I saw two interesting notes. The first --“Please remember to revisit our website for your application status updates. Notification of when you may schedule an interview appointment (if one is needed) will only be posted here.” So I guess don’t trust any emails about interviews. The second was more interesting - “Due to a significant increase in application volume, we are extending the grace period from 18 months to 24 months for any submitted renewal application. This means you will continue to receive full benefits for 24 months while U.S. Customs and Border Protection is finalizing your renewal application.” Which was interesting because the email I got from them said “6 months to 1 year”. Whichever it is, my guess is that I’m not getting that interview scheduled anytime soon. </li><li>I’ve gotten a bunch of discount offers recently for a CLEAR membership -- $100 off with United, full statement credit from Amex. I’m not sure why the sudden push, but I’m holding out. I enrolled in CLEAR’s first iteration, back in April 2008, 13 years ago -- I talked about it in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2008/04/29/podcast-64-escaping-the-travel-bubble-marks-travel-tips/\">episode #64</a> (but not before I slandered the Dutch by saying their language sounded a bit like a competitive throat-clearing exercise). A couple months later, I wrote a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2008/05/27/jumping-the-line-using-clear-registered-traveler-and-diamond-lane-self-select/\">blog post</a> about my experiences -- it was OK, but I couldn’t see much value over, what was to me, free premium status lines. And today, I’m still not sold on its value over PreCheck. But what really keeps me from picking up one of those free membership offers is that the first iteration of CLEAR abruptly closed down the next year and had to be sued to stop it from selling its customers’ biometric data -- fingerprints and iris scans -- before it went bankrupt. The current iteration of CLEAR says “We never sell or rent personal information about you”, but I dunno. They reserve the right to update their privacy policy periodically. What keeps them from updating that “We’ll never sell” sentence when money gets a little tight.</li><li>Bridge Music — <em><em>Flight</em> </em>by Ga\'inja  (c) copyright 1999 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/1.0/\">by-nc-sa v1.0</a> license</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>High-Tech Airport Line Avoidance</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Frequent travelers are an obsessive lot -- they/we obsess over things like packing efficiency (utilizing every cubic inch of our carry-ons) and gaming frequent flier programs. But top of the list is avoiding airport lines. For years after 9/11, line avoidance was more an art (or luck) than a science -- through trial and error you\'d get a sense of which lines would be shorter during Monday morning rush hour in ORD, or maybe some good-hearted airport worker would shout \"There\'s no line at Checkpoint D\" and then jump out of the way of the stampede of roller-boards.  And then, we jumped at the chance to give iris scans to CLEAR or allow the TSA to do background checks in exchange for a shorter line, brushing off any questions about the trade-off of privacy for convenience.</li><li>But what about the airports -- what are they doing to help us out? To dig into this side, I talked to Cody Shulman, managing director, Americas at Xovis Technology about how they help airports track and report on the airport lines we’re trying to avoid.<ul><li>Mark:  Cody, a number of big US hubs have installed Xovis’ technology, DFW, Minneapolis- St Paul, San Francisco, Atlanta. How does your technology help travelers in these busy airports?</li><li>Cody:  Let\'s let\'s take DFW for example. Let\'s first take back-end efficiency. We\'re kind of behind the scenes. That\'s where DFW terminal operations and their customer experience teams are working together to use the system. They\'ll make key staffing changes where passenger traffic is the busiest and do it in the moment. And at the same time, they\'ve taken the approach to give access to the local TSA leadership. So, there is no longer a disagreement when there is an issue. Problem solved rather than just finger pointing -- it was bad, there was a line, there was a queue over here; no, there wasn\'t -- because we\'ve visualized it all for them, it\'s facts. And then on the public side, the passenger facing side, you have all the same information at your fingertips that the airport has. So, before arrival you can use the DFW airport app to see all 15 checkpoints and their current wait times by queue down to the two-minute interval.</li><li>Mark:  Cody. I\'ve I\'ve noticed that, in more and more airports you go to, the airport websites aren\'t great, they\'re not optimized for mobile, which you think would be a key use case, and sometimes they\'re not well publicized. But if you drill in and you find them, you actually can find those sorts of wait time stats and those are critical. So, at DFW, is that your technology driving those stats?</li><li>Cody:  Yes, exactly. And I think you\'re also spot on in saying that they\'re underpublicized and underutilized. DFW, before they instituted and implemented that into their app, had pretty low utilization. In the world of FlightAware and Flight Tracker, people have these agnostic airport apps that can do everything with tracking of your departure and what not. But then when DFW added this, it’s really useful for DFW because you can use any single checkpoint among those 15 and reach your gate and, on top of it, when the situation, even if it\'s somehow dramatically changed when you got there, the signage right in front of you at the airport still shows for every terminal where there are three checkpoints, the wait time at the adjacent terminals and the walk time. So you can self calculate and figure it out yourself</li><li>Mark:  Yes, absolutely. I\'ve seen that more and more lately and it seems to be like a good add on.</li><li>Cody:  There\'s a trust element even to it as well. So, when this first started to launch with the airport, they were doing it with very vague statements: under 15 minutes, over 15 minutes. Then they went to between five and 10 minutes/10 and 15 minutes, and gradually they trusted the accuracy of the system down to two minutes. Any more than that they decided would just be kind of wonky for the customer. I remember when they first put up those signs. I can still remember the woman: she came up to me in front of the television screen and said, “Excuse me, do you work at the airport?” I kind of shrug my shoulder and go with you can probably answer your question rather you know, why not? So, she goes “That thing up there, is it right. Do you trust it?” And in my head, I\'m going “Oh, you\'ve asked the wrong guy.” Like I could, I could go on for minutes and minutes here.</li><li>Mark:  Yeah. How do I say no to that? But Cody, what makes it accurate? What makes you confident that you\'ve got something down to a two-minute interval?</li><li>Cody:  The system works with two key components. We have software, which is dashboards that are our live visualizations and historical ones for users. And we have hardware. We have sensors. Those sensors are designed for airports. They\'re made by Xovis ourselves, and they’re optimized around queuing, and queuing in a complex environment like security, or especially check in which is super unstructured. We\'re measuring a very specific thing, and that\'s people and it\'s their height. You end up under a sensor. It\'s not a camera. And we\'re taking a measurement of your head height and your shoulder height. And with the difference between those two we’re sure that it\'s you as in a human; not mark, not anything else that\'s personally identifying but that\'s it’s you. That\'s step one. That\'s a person. There are lots of people around in a queue. We want to make sure that we capture people exhibiting what we call queue-like behavior. So that\'s moving in a sequence close enough to other people understanding that some people travel in groups and then there are some independent, and we balance that out algorithmically, so that we know that it\'s a person and they\'re in the queue.</li><li>Mark:  How do you guys manage traveler privacy?</li><li>Cody:  It\'s a super relevant and honestly, for me, a pretty easy question; we\'re not detecting faces. Nor are we detecting heat or mobile devices or anything else sort of personally invasive or inconsistently available across every person. It\'s just those heights. And again that height differential. So, when we transmit data off our devices, our sensors were not transferring images. It\'s just coordinates. Its X and Y; there\'s nothing personally identifiable.</li></ul></li><li>Bridge Music —<a href=\"http://www.saurabbhargava.com/downloads/04%20The%20Void.mp3\"><em>The Void</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.saurabbhargava.com/\">Saurab Bhargava</a>  (c) copyright 2006 Saurab Bhargava</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Business Travel Still MIA</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Listening to airline and hotel CEOs <a href=\"https://skift.com/2021/09/07/what-travel-ceos-are-predicting-about-the-permanent-return-of-business-travel/\">let the air out of their revenue forecasts</a> <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-19-resurgence-clouds-business-travel-rebound-11630920600?st=m7iegfjwreygxoi&amp;reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink\">for the rest of the year</a>, I went back to the TSA’s <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/coronavirus/passenger-throughput\">web page</a> that gives the daily numbers of passengers going through airport security checkpoints. Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/06/15/podcast-176-why-business-travel-is-coming-back-learning-airport-history/\">June episode</a>, the first time I had fun with those numbers, checkpoint volume had passed 2 million for the first time since the lockdowns and the numbers were going up. Looking at a 7-day moving average to smooth things out a bit, it grew through June until it hit 2 million the first week of July. But after a month, in the first week of August, it turned, dropping back below 2 million and now, running in the 1.7 million range, about 20% down from its peak. Over the same period in 2019, the peak number was 2.6 million and it never dropped below 2 million.</li><li>It kinda makes sense. This summer’s peak was driven by leisure travel -- people, families getting out of the house and going to see places and other people. But as that travel faded, as it always does, when kids go back to school, this time there isn’t enough business travel to replace it.</li><li>As I mentioned at the top of the episode, I just finished up a 6-month interim CIO gig. It’s had the <em>least</em> amount of business travel of any job I’ve had -- by a long shot. Regular listeners to TravelCommons will recall that there have been times when I’ve traveled every week for 3-4 months straight, and a year or two when there was maybe 6 weeks in those years that I <em>didn’t</em> travel. So this last gig, where I had only one business trip, down to Miami in May, was a huge change in my standard operating procedure. </li><li>I’ve talked in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/07/17/podcast-165-first-post-lockdown-flight-when-does-business-travel-come-back/\">past</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/06/15/podcast-176-why-business-travel-is-coming-back-learning-airport-history/\">episodes</a> about this, skeptical of predictions like Bill Gates’ that <a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/17/coronavirus-bill-gates-says-more-than-50percent-of-business-travel-will-disappear-long-term.html\">50% of business travel will go away</a>. I was going through the TravelCommons archives, cleaning up show notes and the like, and found an <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2008/12/23/podcast-70-packing-a-suit-videoconference-over-travel-watching-winter-flight-delays/\">episode from December 2008</a> where I was answering listener questions about why I travel for in-person meetings instead of video conference; when tech analysts were saying it was “on the brink of widespread adoption.” I’m nothing if not consistent.</li><li>Of course, it’s difficult to do in-person meetings when people are still working from home; it would be a bit awkward doing a sales call around someone’s kitchen table, having to project the PowerPoint deck on their white tile backsplash. I gotta think you’d lose a bullet point or two in the grout lines.</li><li>But by fits and starts, slowed by the Delta variant, people are heading back into their offices and international travel barriers are dropping. At this CIO gig, one colleague, the global head of operations, lived in the UK and so couldn’t get into the US to meet with his staff at some newly acquired plants. He was doing daily video calls, but after a couple of months, he’d made all the progress he could and needed to physically meet with these people. So when Canada dropped their travel ban, he flew from London to Toronto, holed up in a hotel room, worked through Canada’s 14-day quarantine, and then drove across the US border at Buffalo and caught a domestic flight to Chicago. It’s just one data point, but I’m grabbing on and holding tight, hoping to tell Bill Gates “Told you so!”</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #179</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social  -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_179.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #179 — High-Tech Airport Lines; Business Travel Still Missing','','inherit','closed','closed','','3831-revision-v1','','','2021-09-27 21:10:29','2021-09-28 02:10:29','',3831,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3836',0,'revision','',0),
(3837,1,'2021-09-27 21:25:46','2021-09-28 02:25:46','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_1985\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/708473504_18da6d5b07_z1.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-3581 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/708473504_18da6d5b07_z1-300x225.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\"></a> Standing in Line! © Lance Smith/Flickr[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Not much travel, but a lot of travel planning for our first post-lockdown international trip to Italy. Trying to thread our way through changing COVID rules and Alitalia\'s bankruptcy throes. I\'m getting inundated with discount offers for <a href=\"https://www.clearme.com/\">Clear\'s fast-pass service</a>. I\'ve resisted them so far, because I remember back to when the first incarnation of Clear wanted to <a href=\"https://www.wired.com/2009/08/defunct-airport-fast-pass-company-banned-from-selling-customer-biometrics/\">sell its members\' biometric data</a>.  We then talk to <a href=\"https://www.xovis.com/en/home/\">Xovis Technology</a>\'s Cody Shulman about how airports are better managing all sorts of lines in airports. Finally, air passenger traffic is dropping again because business travelers are still missing-in-action (MIA). All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_179.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #179: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois; no travel since the last episode, just a lot of travel planning. I’ve talked over the past couple of episodes about pushing forward with our first post-lockdown international trip; a bike tour through the bootheel of Italy. We booked the trip in the spring and then last month -- I talked about in the last episode -- we booked our hotels pre- and post- the ride and the flight over. But not the flight back, because -- what else do we want to do while we’re here? I just wrapped up an interim CIO gig last week, so there’s no huge rush to get back -- and it’s been 5 years since our last time in Italy, so… As we were thinking about this, a friend, a former colleague pinged me “ Hey there - Just saw your tweet about your upcoming international trip. Sitting here waiting for our pierogies (he now lives in Southern Poland). Where’re you going?” Turns out he and his wife will be in Syracuse, Sicily in October. So there was our answer -- after our bike tour ends in Lecce, we catch a flight to Catania and hang out on the beach for the next week. And I can’t remember the last time I said this, but “Thanks, Twitter” for that.</li><li>So, next step, fire up Google Flights and look for one-way flights from whatever airport is near Lecce to Catania. Which turns out to be Brindisi Airport in Salento -- 24 miles, an €8/30-min train ride from Lecce, so pretty convenient, except that the best flight to Catania is an Air Dolomiti-Lufthansa connection with a 13-hour layover in Munich. Yeah, no. So next I look at Bari, where we’re flying into. 90 miles away; less convenient, but doable. The flight options are not much better -- a 6am Ryanair flight (which I kinda think of as Spirit Airlines without the charm), a 5pm flight with Volotea (whom I’ve never heard of, but Google and Wikipedia say they’re a budget airline based in Barcelona), and those same insane Air Dolomiti connections through Munich. This makes no sense. What gives? A little more Googling tells the rest of the story. Alitalia has been winding through bankruptcy since 2017 and now 4 years later, after 75 years as Italy’s national carrier, it’s finally closing down-- the day before I’m trying to book our flight to Sicily. Timing; it’s a beautiful thing.</li><li>A little more Googling says there’s a new Italian carrier coming, ITA, but it’s still working through negotiating for Alitalia’s landing slots and equipment and labor contracts, so it’s not taking bookings yet. OK, then. Getting out of Lecce is starting to pick up a little “escape room” vibe. It’s a 7-hr drive, a 14-hr train; so if we’re going, we’re flying. I book the most basic seats on the Volotea flight -- €17 for two seats -- just to have something and let the whole Alitalia/ITA thing play out a bit more; I can always add the luggage fees and reserved seats later if need be. I book it on Weds, Sept 1; 5pm flight out of Bari, gives us time to have breakfast, pack, and train up to the airport with enough time to deal with the craziness of budget airlines, which is key. My last budget airline experience was flying Wow Air from Reykjavik to London. I arrived 2 hrs before check in to see what appeared to be a stationary check in line of a couple of hundred people. Three days later, on Saturday, I wake up to an email from Volotea saying “We regret to inform you that given the current context of uncertainty about the evolution of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have been forced to reschedule your flight.” to 12:30 -- 4½ hrs earlier. I look at the train schedule -- there goes the leisurely breakfast and a bit of the budget airline safety margin, but it’s doable. The next Saturday, the 11th, I wake up to yet another Volotea e-mail (you’d think these guys would knock off early on Friday). Same wind-up -- “given the current context of uncertainty about the evolution of the COVID-19 pandemic” -- but worse punch -- “we have been forced to cancel your flight”. Ugh, guess that door out of the Lecce escape room was a dead end. I fire up Google Flights again and now see Alitalia flights out of Brindisi. Seems their replacement, ITA, has figured out how to take bookings. But following the link from Google Flights takes me to the Alitalia website with a banner still saying they’re shutting down. Another escape room fake exit? I flip over to Amex Travel; I can book the flights there. No direct flight, so I take the afternoon flight with a 2-hr connection in Rome. I put it on the Platinum card; figure I’ll need all the status I can get if I have to file for a refund. And then this week, I <a href=\"https://apnews.com/article/europe-business-airlines-rome-italy-36d45a33150c638063946e9b151e2aa0\">read</a> about Alitalia telling passengers to bring just a single piece of hand luggage because of strikes and growing labor protests. My friend sends me a text “You still tracking for Sicily?” “Kinda” I replied.</li><li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/yongen-yello/\">Give You Up</a></em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/yongen\">Yongen</a> (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons&nbsp;<a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/1.0/\">by-nc-sa v1.0</a>&nbsp;license</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Jim McDonough stopped by the TravelCommons Facebook page to leave a comment on the post pointing to my list of the best bars and restaurants I’ve visited in 2021. I said that I think it’ll take guidebooks a while to catch up with all the closures caused by the COVID lockdowns. Jim agreed, saying<ul><li>“I heard Rick Steves talking about the topic. All of his guidebooks are out of date. It will take him all of 2022 to get them repaired - assuming Delta, etc don\'t clobber 2022”</li></ul></li><li>As predicted in the last episode, Southwest Airlines extended their in-flight alcohol bans to January 18, 2022, staying aligned with the new expiration of the federal in-flight mask mandate. American also extended their economy-class ban, but continue to serve alcohol in their first and business class cabins. That alignment offers them a good explanation for the ban <em>right now</em>, but it’s going to make it tougher to reinstate in-flight drink service because I don’t see the feds ending the in-flight mask mandate anytime in the near future. Although, I dunno, maybe as the US’s only Prohibition airline, Southwest is looking to reposition their “Wanna Get Away?” slogan as “Wanna Get Away from Drunk Mask Fights on Spirit and United?”</li><li>Back in the Spring, I talked about Irene and Claire missing their Global Entry/PreCheck expiration notices and then in June, about a fake email “make sure your PreCheck doesn’t expire” phishing campaign that scammed a bunch of benched frequent fliers. So last week when I got an email starting “Your Trusted Traveler membership will be expiring soon”, I was a little wary. I was expecting it; after Irene and Claire missed their renewals, I logged in and saw that mine expired in December. But still, I examined the entire email -- message headers, mail server authentications. It looked legit, but even then, I typed the web address ttp.dhs.gov into the browser rather than clicking through the link in the email. It was legit, so I buckled in, selected Global Entry (which I always recommend since for only $15 more, you get <em>both</em> PreCheck and the fast path through US passport control), and cranked through the application. It wasn’t bad; the only part that required any real thinking was the 5-year look back on international travel. I had my passport in front of me, but if you’ve country-hopped within the EU’s Schengen Zone, you only get stamped going in and out of the zone, but not when crossing borders within the zone. In kind of a sad commentary on my traveling style, one of the things that helped me fill in those blanks was a spreadsheet of my downloaded Untappd check-ins. I opened it up in Excel, filtered out check-ins before 2016 and venues in the US and Mexico (turns out I haven’t been to Canada in the last 5 years), and then wrote down the countries that were left. Very easy, and an incentive to always have at least one beer in each country I visit -- like I needed any more encouragement.<br><br>After I paid the $100 fee and was dropped back to the front page, I saw two interesting notes. The first --“Please remember to revisit our website for your application status updates. Notification of when you may schedule an interview appointment (if one is needed) will only be posted here.” So I guess don’t trust any emails about interviews. The second was more interesting - “Due to a significant increase in application volume, we are extending the grace period from 18 months to 24 months for any submitted renewal application. This means you will continue to receive full benefits for 24 months while U.S. Customs and Border Protection is finalizing your renewal application.” Which was interesting because the email I got from them said “6 months to 1 year”. Whichever it is, my guess is that I’m not getting that interview scheduled anytime soon.&nbsp;</li><li>I’ve gotten a bunch of discount offers recently for a CLEAR membership -- $100 off with United, full statement credit from Amex. I’m not sure why the sudden push, but I’m holding out. I enrolled in CLEAR’s first iteration, back in April 2008, 13 years ago -- I talked about it in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2008/04/29/podcast-64-escaping-the-travel-bubble-marks-travel-tips/\">episode #64</a> (but not before I slandered the Dutch by saying their language sounded a bit like a competitive throat-clearing exercise). A couple months later, I wrote a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2008/05/27/jumping-the-line-using-clear-registered-traveler-and-diamond-lane-self-select/\">blog post</a> about my experiences -- it was OK, but I couldn’t see much value over, what was to me, free premium status lines. And today, I’m still not sold on its value over PreCheck. But what really keeps me from picking up one of those free membership offers is that the first iteration of CLEAR abruptly closed down the next year and had to be sued to stop it from selling its customers’ biometric data -- fingerprints and iris scans -- before it went bankrupt. The current iteration of CLEAR says “We never sell or rent personal information about you”, but I dunno. They reserve the right to update their privacy policy periodically. What keeps them from updating that “We’ll never sell” sentence when money gets a little tight.</li><li>Bridge Music — <em><em>Flight</em> </em>by Ga\'inja  (c) copyright 1999 Licensed under a Creative Commons&nbsp;<a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/1.0/\">by-nc-sa v1.0</a>&nbsp;license</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>High-Tech Airport Line Avoidance</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Frequent travelers are an obsessive lot -- they/we obsess over things like packing efficiency (utilizing every cubic inch of our carry-ons) and gaming frequent flier programs. But top of the list is avoiding airport lines. For years after 9/11, line avoidance was more an art (or luck) than a science -- through trial and error you\'d get a sense of which lines would be shorter during Monday morning rush hour in ORD, or maybe some good-hearted airport worker would shout \"There\'s no line at Checkpoint D\" and then jump out of the way of the stampede of roller-boards.&nbsp; And then, we jumped at the chance to give iris scans to CLEAR or allow the TSA to do background checks in exchange for a shorter line, brushing off any questions about the trade-off of privacy for convenience.</li><li>But what about the airports -- what are they doing to help us out? To dig into this side, I talked to Cody Shulman, managing director, Americas at Xovis Technology about how they help airports track and report on the airport lines we’re trying to avoid.<ul><li>Mark:  Cody, a number of big US hubs have installed Xovis’ technology, DFW, Minneapolis- St Paul, San Francisco, Atlanta. How does your technology help travelers in these busy airports?</li><li>Cody:  Let\'s let\'s take DFW for example. Let\'s first take back-end efficiency. We\'re kind of behind the scenes. That\'s where DFW terminal operations and their customer experience teams are working together to use the system. They\'ll make key staffing changes where passenger traffic is the busiest and do it in the moment. And at the same time, they\'ve taken the approach to give access to the local TSA leadership. So, there is no longer a disagreement when there is an issue. Problem solved rather than just finger pointing -- it was bad, there was a line, there was a queue over here; no, there wasn\'t -- because we\'ve visualized it all for them, it\'s facts. And then on the public side, the passenger facing side, you have all the same information at your fingertips that the airport has. So, before arrival you can use the DFW airport app to see all 15 checkpoints and their current wait times by queue down to the two-minute interval.</li><li>Mark:  Cody. I\'ve I\'ve noticed that, in more and more airports you go to, the airport websites aren\'t great, they\'re not optimized for mobile, which you think would be a key use case, and sometimes they\'re not well publicized. But if you drill in and you find them, you actually can find those sorts of wait time stats and those are critical. So, at DFW, is that your technology driving those stats?</li><li>Cody:  Yes, exactly. And I think you\'re also spot on in saying that they\'re underpublicized and underutilized. DFW, before they instituted and implemented that into their app, had pretty low utilization. In the world of FlightAware and Flight Tracker, people have these agnostic airport apps that can do everything with tracking of your departure and what not. But then when DFW added this, it’s really useful for DFW because you can use any single checkpoint among those 15 and reach your gate and, on top of it, when the situation, even if it\'s somehow dramatically changed when you got there, the signage right in front of you at the airport still shows for every terminal where there are three checkpoints, the wait time at the adjacent terminals and the walk time. So you can self calculate and figure it out yourself</li><li>Mark:  Yes, absolutely. I\'ve seen that more and more lately and it seems to be like a good add on.</li><li>Cody:  There\'s a trust element even to it as well. So, when this first started to launch with the airport, they were doing it with very vague statements: under 15 minutes, over 15 minutes. Then they went to between five and 10 minutes/10 and 15 minutes, and gradually they trusted the accuracy of the system down to two minutes. Any more than that they decided would just be kind of wonky for the customer. I remember when they first put up those signs. I can still remember the woman: she came up to me in front of the television screen and said, “Excuse me, do you work at the airport?” I kind of shrug my shoulder and go with you can probably answer your question rather you know, why not? So, she goes “That thing up there, is it right. Do you trust it?” And in my head, I\'m going “Oh, you\'ve asked the wrong guy.” Like I could, I could go on for minutes and minutes here.</li><li>Mark:  Yeah. How do I say no to that? But Cody, what makes it accurate? What makes you confident that you\'ve got something down to a two-minute interval?</li><li>Cody:  The system works with two key components. We have software, which is dashboards that are our live visualizations and historical ones for users. And we have hardware. We have sensors. Those sensors are designed for airports. They\'re made by Xovis ourselves, and they’re optimized around queuing, and queuing in a complex environment like security, or especially check in which is super unstructured. We\'re measuring a very specific thing, and that\'s people and it\'s their height. You end up under a sensor. It\'s not a camera. And we\'re taking a measurement of your head height and your shoulder height. And with the difference between those two we’re sure that it\'s you as in a human; not mark, not anything else that\'s personally identifying but that\'s it’s you. That\'s step one. That\'s a person. There are lots of people around in a queue. We want to make sure that we capture people exhibiting what we call queue-like behavior. So that\'s moving in a sequence close enough to other people understanding that some people travel in groups and then there are some independent, and we balance that out algorithmically, so that we know that it\'s a person and they\'re in the queue.</li><li>Mark:  How do you guys manage traveler privacy?</li><li>Cody:  It\'s a super relevant and honestly, for me, a pretty easy question; we\'re not detecting faces. Nor are we detecting heat or mobile devices or anything else sort of personally invasive or inconsistently available across every person. It\'s just those heights. And again that height differential. So, when we transmit data off our devices, our sensors were not transferring images. It\'s just coordinates. Its X and Y; there\'s nothing personally identifiable.</li></ul></li><li>Bridge Music —<a href=\"http://www.saurabbhargava.com/downloads/04%20The%20Void.mp3\"><em>The Void</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.saurabbhargava.com/\">Saurab Bhargava</a>  (c) copyright 2006 Saurab Bhargava</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Business Travel Still MIA</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Listening to airline and hotel CEOs <a href=\"https://skift.com/2021/09/07/what-travel-ceos-are-predicting-about-the-permanent-return-of-business-travel/\">let the air out of their revenue forecasts</a> <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-19-resurgence-clouds-business-travel-rebound-11630920600?st=m7iegfjwreygxoi&amp;reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink\">for the rest of the year</a>, I went back to the TSA’s <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/coronavirus/passenger-throughput\">web page</a> that gives the daily numbers of passengers going through airport security checkpoints. Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/06/15/podcast-176-why-business-travel-is-coming-back-learning-airport-history/\">June episode</a>, the first time I had fun with those numbers, checkpoint volume had passed 2 million for the first time since the lockdowns and the numbers were going up. Looking at a 7-day moving average to smooth things out a bit, it grew through June until it hit 2 million the first week of July. But after a month, in the first week of August, it turned, dropping back below 2 million and now, running in the 1.7 million range, about 20% down from its peak. Over the same period in 2019, the peak number was 2.6 million and it never dropped below 2 million.</li><li>It kinda makes sense. This summer’s peak was driven by leisure travel -- people, families getting out of the house and going to see places and other people. But as that travel faded, as it always does, when kids go back to school, this time there isn’t enough business travel to replace it.</li><li>As I mentioned at the top of the episode, I just finished up a 6-month interim CIO gig. It’s had the <em>least</em> amount of business travel of any job I’ve had -- by a long shot. Regular listeners to TravelCommons will recall that there have been times when I’ve traveled every week for 3-4 months straight, and a year or two when there was maybe 6 weeks in those years that I <em>didn’t</em> travel. So this last gig, where I had only one business trip, down to Miami in May, was a huge change in my standard operating procedure.&nbsp;</li><li>I’ve talked in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/07/17/podcast-165-first-post-lockdown-flight-when-does-business-travel-come-back/\">past</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/06/15/podcast-176-why-business-travel-is-coming-back-learning-airport-history/\">episodes</a> about this, skeptical of predictions like Bill Gates’ that <a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/17/coronavirus-bill-gates-says-more-than-50percent-of-business-travel-will-disappear-long-term.html\">50% of business travel will go away</a>. I was going through the TravelCommons archives, cleaning up show notes and the like, and found an <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2008/12/23/podcast-70-packing-a-suit-videoconference-over-travel-watching-winter-flight-delays/\">episode from December 2008</a> where I was answering listener questions about why I travel for in-person meetings instead of video conference; when tech analysts were saying it was “on the brink of widespread adoption.” I’m nothing if not consistent.</li><li>Of course, it’s difficult to do in-person meetings when people are still working from home; it would be a bit awkward doing a sales call around someone’s kitchen table, having to project the PowerPoint deck on their white tile backsplash. I gotta think you’d lose a bullet point or two in the grout lines.</li><li>But by fits and starts, slowed by the Delta variant, people are heading back into their offices and international travel barriers are dropping. At this CIO gig, one colleague, the global head of operations, lived in the UK and so couldn’t get into the US to meet with his staff at some newly acquired plants. He was doing daily video calls, but after a couple of months, he’d made all the progress he could and needed to physically meet with these people. So when Canada dropped their travel ban, he flew from London to Toronto, holed up in a hotel room, worked through Canada’s 14-day quarantine, and then drove across the US border at Buffalo and caught a domestic flight to Chicago. It’s just one data point, but I’m grabbing on and holding tight, hoping to tell Bill Gates “Told you so!”</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #179</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_179.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #179 — High-Tech Airport Lines; Business Travel Still Missing','','inherit','closed','closed','','3831-revision-v1','','','2021-09-27 21:25:46','2021-09-28 02:25:46','',3831,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3837',0,'revision','',0),
(3838,1,'2021-09-28 07:07:25','2021-09-28 12:07:25','[caption id=\"attachment_789\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"250\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/3300827223_3bea6ba1ff1.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-789 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/3300827223_3bea6ba1ff1-250x300.jpg\" alt=\"Train Crash at Montparnasse 1895\" width=\"250\" height=\"300\"></a> Train Crash at Montparnasse 1895[/caption]\n\nInto the summer travel rhythm with a mix of vacation and business travel. Using an Apple iPad 2 and Samsung\'s new Galaxy Tab 10.1 Android tablet during this mix gave me enough real world experience to make some recommendations. A couple of recent web links describe this podcast as \"not as upbeat as others\" which is true, but because it focuses on traveling, not destinations. Perhaps this non-chipper attitude is partially explained by a recent study placing 4 US airline companies in the top 8 most hated companies in America. And a listener suggests ways to reduce roaming voice and data costs. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_92.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n<hr>\n\nHere are the transcript from TravelCommons podcast #92:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Travel since the last podcast has been pretty evenly split between personal and business travel.&nbsp; First couple of weeks was summer vacation in the UK -- the <a title=\"Lake District\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_District\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Lake District</a>, Scotland, and a couple of days in London.&nbsp; Had phenomenal weather the whole time we were there -- one afternoon of rain, and the rest of the time was warm and sunny.&nbsp; Almost too warm for the clothes we packed. And everyone was amazed.&nbsp; All the bed &amp; breakfast owners were marveling at the weather. “It’s luvly,” said our landlady in Edinburgh, “Last week it was hailing”. Lucky us because we certainly didn’t pack for that.</li>\n 	<li>Just to make sure I didn\'t forget we were on vacation, we stayed at bed &amp; breakfasts the whole time -- until we hit London, when I made the reservations. Actually, when I think about it, it’s not <em>all</em> that different from the service I get in the concierge lounges at big hotels. Breakfast comes with the room -- though the full cooked breakfast, complete with black puddling in England and haggis in Scotland, was a bit heartier than the continental breakfasts I normally get in concierge lounges.&nbsp; And there’s a bit of nice chit-chat when we walk in, though the B&amp;B owners are typically a bit older/more <em>seasoned</em> that the typical lounge staff.&nbsp; The main differences -- most hotels I stay in don’t have dogs living there, and they prefer credit cards over cash.</li>\n 	<li>Of course, back in the US, the weather’s been sweltering.&nbsp; I was in South Florida a couple weeks ago and it was <em>cooler</em> there than Chicago.&nbsp; But that wasn’t good enough, so last week, I was down in Phoenix, where it was hitting 105-107 degrees during the day and wasn’t getting below 100 any time while I was awake.</li>\n 	<li>Tough weather to take advantage of the convertible red Mustang that Avis was nice enough to upgrade me to.</li>\n 	<li>Wednesday night after dinner, though, I decided I just <em>had</em> to drop the top.&nbsp; The dashboard said the external temperature was 102 -- and it felt it when I dropped that top.&nbsp; Soon, though, I found that the key to driving top-down in 102 degrees is the pretty much the same as driving top-down in 55 degree weather. Set the fan to High and remember to have the knob set to A/C.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em>Crazy Love-The Alex &amp; Lang mix</em> by <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/djlang59/10579\">J.Lang</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Let’s take a run through the comment bag.</li>\n 	<li>Sarah, who’s been a listener since 2006, posted a comment on the website on <a title=\"Podcast #85 — Importance of Hotel Bathrooms; Maximizing Miles\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2010/11/30/podcast-85-importance-of-hotel-bathrooms-maximizing-miles/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">episode #85</a> (!) -- she says “I was playing catch up after all my driving trips this past two months.” In that episode, I talked about how the hotel industry seems to be focused on spiffing up their lobbies and putting whizzy new technology in the rooms, and that they were making a mistake ignoring what I think is critical to the hotel experience -- the bathroom.&nbsp; Sarah says “I say ‘heck yeah’ to the bathroom being one of the most important parts of a stay.&nbsp; I ended in a bed and breakfast in the middle of nowhere, with no wifi.&nbsp; And the bathroom made me want to tell everyone about it. It had a hot tub and a beautifully large bathroom. But even though I knew no one who was going to the area, I wanted to tell everyone about it. It\'s the <a href=\"http://www.innatnewberlin.com/\">Inn in New Berlin, PA</a> (in case you care).”</li>\n 	<li>Sarah, thanks for the note -- and thanks for the pointer to the Inn in New Berlin.&nbsp; I do think we look for luxurious touches in hotels. And it doesn’t have to be anything big.&nbsp; The first thing my wife looks for in a hotel room is to see if there are robes in the bathroom.&nbsp; It’s a helluva lot cheaper than a tricked-out media panel, and it makes a much bigger impression.</li>\n 	<li>Sarah’s comment about wanting to tell everyone about her find reminded me of some stats I saw a few days ago.&nbsp; It said on average 24% of a hotel guests first heard about it from a friend or family member; 16% from a review site like <a href=\"http://www.tripadvisor.com\" rel=\"homepage\">TripAdvisor</a>. I would guess that if anyone could calculate the cost of creating an enthusiastic recommender like Sarah -- it would turn out to be a lot cheaper to do it with a great bathroom than a posh new lobby.</li>\n 	<li>Fast forwarding to <a title=\"Podcast #90 — More Comfortable Traveling in India; Tipping Towards Android?\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/05/22/podcast-90-more-comfortable-traveling-in-india-tipping-towards-android/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">episode #90</a>, Andrew Gill left a comment on the TravelCommons Facebook wall\n<ul>\n 	<li>Thanks for podcast #90, it\'s great to hear how 170 degrees isn\'t as comfortable as fully flat when my company has a different approach to travel. UK to Australia in Economy has to be tried</li>\n 	<li>You talked about using large chunks of roaming data in a recent trip and I\'ve a couple of hints to share.</li>\n 	<li>Google Maps is great but try <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/offlinemaps\">City Maps 2Go</a>. I\'ve been using it for over a year having tried other off-line mapping products. It uses the built in compass so I don\'t have to walk a block either way to figure out if I\'m going in the right direction.</li>\n 	<li>I\'ve also become a real convert to local SIM cards. Now this may not be perfect for a business trip, but I had two weeks in Chile in January and my iPhone bill was $500, compare this to two weeks in Australia using the AU$2 a day plan from Optus and my bill was $22. In Australia I didn\'t worry about when I used my phone or finding the next hotspot, because I had unlimited calls, SMS and internet usage all for AU$2 a day.</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Thanks Andrew.&nbsp; Sorry about the whinging on 10 degrees of seat recline. I paid for it on my flight over to Manchester last month -- 8 hrs of suffering in coach in a packed American Airlines 757. Even United gives you free beer in coach, but not American.</li>\n 	<li>Thanks for the tip on City Maps 2 Go.&nbsp; I looked at it for our UK vacation and since we were spending most of our time in the hinterlands -- the Lake District, the Isle of Arran, around Loch Lomond, it wasn’t going to give us enough coverage.&nbsp; I found, though, a great app from Phil Endecott called “UK Map”.&nbsp; For $11 you get all the Ordnance Survey maps, 2D and 3D views, combined with OpenStreetMap.org info downloaded so you can use it off line.&nbsp; It’s a universal app so I have it on my iPhone and iPad.&nbsp; If you’re touring the UK, I highly recommend it.&nbsp; I may end up back in Madrid in a couple of months.&nbsp; If I do, I’ll be downloading its map from City Maps 2 Go.</li>\n 	<li>I did find an unexpected but valuable benefit from my Starbucks obsession. I have a couple of Starbucks gift cards that I’ve registered.&nbsp; I kinda did it on a whim.&nbsp; They send me a card for a free drink after every 15 coffees I buy.&nbsp; I don’t use them -- it would be wasted on a tall coffee or cappuccino.&nbsp; I give ‘em to my kids who use them for venti frappuccinos.&nbsp; But anyways, while in London, I found that my US <a href=\"https://www.starbucks.com/card\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Starbucks Rewards</a> credentials gave me free WiFi in UK Starbucks. Since I was limiting my mobile data usage and there’s a Starbucks about every 200 ft in London, it was very handy.</li>\n 	<li>\n\n[caption id=\"attachment_1502\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"263\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/web0118-starbuckstrenta12.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1502\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/web0118-starbuckstrenta12-263x300.jpg\" alt=\"How big, exactly, is Starbucks’ new ‘Trenta’ size?\" width=\"263\" height=\"300\"></a> How big, exactly, is Starbucks’ new ‘Trenta’ size?[/caption]\n\nSpeaking of Starbucks, when I was flying out of ORD last week, one of the Starbucks in Terminal 3 advertised “trenta is here” -- Starbucks’ new “BigGulp” serving size. I thought about this while waiting in line to order my tall bold coffee.&nbsp; Should they really be selling the trenta in airports?&nbsp; I mean, does it make sense to sell someone 31 fluid ounces of a beverage right before they will be strapped into a seat for the next 2-4 hours?&nbsp; And odds are that the person ordering a trenta will be in the window seat.&nbsp; Meaning that he/she’s rousting two people at least twice during the flight to drain that trenta.</li>\n 	<li>And then, reacting to my comments about Ryanair in the <a title=\"Podcast #91 — Can’t Patch Planes Forever; Saving Customers With A Personal Touch\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/06/18/podcast-91-cant-patch-planes-forever-saving-customers-with-a-personal-touch/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">last episode</a>, Leo Vegoda wrote\n<ul>\n 	<li>What you say about Ryanair reminds me of how Irish comedian Andrew Maxwell described them: ‘Ryanair is what flying would be like if it was illegal’. I think that says it all.”</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>That is perfect -- and I think perfectly describes Ryanair and Spirit and all that ilk.</li>\n 	<li>And it&nbsp;shouldn\'t&nbsp;be too surprising then that 4 of the top 8 most hated companies in America are airlines.&nbsp; The latest <a href=\"http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/07/the-19-most-hated-companies-in-america/241344/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">American Customer Satisfaction Index</a> has American Airlines at #8, United at #7, US Airways at #6, Delta Airlines at #2(!), beat out by just 2 points for #1 by&nbsp;Potomac&nbsp;Electric utility.&nbsp; Impressive results all around.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a question, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.&nbsp; The e-mail address is&nbsp;<a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">comments@travelcommons.com</a> -- use the Voice Memo app on your iPhone or something like Virtual Recorder on your Android phone to record and send in an audio comment – or iMovie if you want to send in some video; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at travelcommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em>August (Reggae Rework)</em> by <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/elB/16075\">el-B</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>The Not-So-Upbeat Traveler</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>This podcast is a hobby, not a business, for me -- as if you couldn’t tell that from my haphazard posting schedule. So, I don’t obsess over podcast or website statistics, how many downloads, how many page views, all the stuff that real web business live and breathe and monitor on a real-time basis. I do, though, check in every couple of days to make sure everything’s running, clean the spam bin, and to look at site stats to see if anyone is coming by.</li>\n 	<li>I didn’t do any of this while on vacation, but when I got back and checked in, I saw that I’d gotten flooded with visits the first week in July.&nbsp; Following the source links, I found most of the traffic came in from StumbleUpon, while another bit came from a recent post by Chris Christensen on his <em><a href=\"http://amateurtraveler.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Amateur Traveler</a></em> blog.</li>\n 	<li>The StumbleUpon pointer was from “sher1lock,” a “woman from Ontario”.&nbsp; She recommended episode #88, where I reported from the floor of the Travel Goods show and talked about losing elite status. Her comment -- “A neat travel site. Not as upbeat as some.”</li>\n 	<li>Which actually lined up very nicely with Chris’ <a href=\"http://amateurtraveler.com/2011/06/30/where-is-the-darker-side-of-travel/\">post</a>.&nbsp; Titled “Where is the Darker Side of Travel?”, Chris was responding to a listener’s letter that suggested his Amateur Traveler Podcast sugar-coats the travel experience a bit; the listener challenged Chris to “bring attention to the darker side of travel”. Chris gave a good, straight up response that boiled down to -- “Guilty as charged; I’m an optimistic guy” and “If you want a podcast about travel from the point of view of how bad can be, listen to Mark Peacock’s <em>Travel Commons</em>. Mark is a friend and fellow podcaster but I describe his show as the anti-Amateur Traveler.”</li>\n 	<li>OK, so I’m not always the cheeriest guy about travel, but I&nbsp;didn\'t&nbsp;think I was a complete “Debbie Downer”.&nbsp; But, because I talk about more about the journey -- the act of transiting, travel as a verb -- rather than being a tourist -- what you are when you get to your destination, my travel stories are going to naturally follow what we all think is the dramatic decline in the travel experience -- airplanes as flying cattle cars, beat-up high-mileage rental cars, ....&nbsp; Any podcast whose major characters are <a href=\"http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/07/the-19-most-hated-companies-in-america/241344/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">4 of the top 8 most hated companies in America</a> just&nbsp;isn\'t&nbsp;going to be “as upbeat as some.”</li>\n 	<li>I have varying degrees of success in being cheery about my travels.&nbsp; It’s always easier to be chipper when there’s something new in the mix -- new destination, new air carrier, new plane,...&nbsp; <a title=\"Podcast #90 — More Comfortable Traveling in India; Tipping Towards Android?\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/05/22/podcast-90-more-comfortable-traveling-in-india-tipping-towards-android/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">A couple podcasts ago</a>, when I talked about flying to Madrid on USAir -- the USAir service was definitely a 9-hour drag, but it couldn’t dull the excitement of a new destination. But this last trip to Phoenix? Going to the same place for the umpteenth time, on American, on old MD-80’s (one of which -- with a 1983&nbsp;birth date&nbsp;-- treated me to yet another 2 hour delay), to temperatures in the 100’s every day.&nbsp; I had to drag myself to the airport. The best thing about the trip -- a toss-up between&nbsp; the convertible Mustang from Avis and the Tempe In-n-Out Burger where I killed some of that 2-hour delay.</li>\n 	<li>But then again, who really enjoys their commute to work?&nbsp; Most of the times, that’s what my travel is -- a commute to work.&nbsp; Some people drive 45 minutes to work; I fly 3 hours.&nbsp; And just like you should avoid road rage, I try to avoid travel rage. Specifically, when my commute goes wrong, I try to limit the collateral damage.</li>\n 	<li>First off, I try not to call anybody. There’s just nothing to be gained from talking to family or colleagues live.\n<ul>\n 	<li>“I’m going to be late coming home/getting to the office.&nbsp; American/United/Southwest/Joe’s Cattle Car decided to skip preventative maintenance this month in order to make payroll and so I’m waiting out a maintenance decision.&nbsp; The delay’s going to be either 30 minutes or 3 hours -- depends on whether duct tape can fix the problem.”</li>\n 	<li>“Oh, that’s too bad.&nbsp; I’m sorry to hear that”</li>\n 	<li>“Not half as sorry as I am to be living it”</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>See?&nbsp; That’s just not a good exchange for anyone. I’m not feeling any better, and worse yet, I’ve passed along my frustration, my lousy day to a completely innocent bystander.&nbsp; Best to rely on e-mail or text messages. Just make sure you immediately delete the inevitable frowny face emoticon from your significant other. Leaving it fester in your inbox will just lead to bad things.</li>\n 	<li>Same goes with airline gate agents and hotel clerks. They&nbsp;didn\'t&nbsp;overbook the hotel or break the plane.&nbsp; On a good day, these folks are just barely breaking minimum wage.&nbsp; They’re just trying to get on the other side of 8 hours.&nbsp; Unless they’re pre-emptively snotty to me -- they take an attitude before I even open my mouth -- I give them a pass.</li>\n 	<li>So&nbsp;we\'ve&nbsp;identified a lot of people who&nbsp;<em>aren\'t</em> responsible for botching up my commute.&nbsp; Who is, then? Who can I dump this rage on? Well, that’s the challenge.&nbsp; When you’re driving down the freeway and a guy cuts you off, you see the culprit. You can yell, you glare, you can flip him off.&nbsp; You vent and, if you’re a normal person, you move on.</li>\n 	<li>Airlines, hotels, car rentals -- you’ll never see the person that made your morning miserable. You can’t find them to flip them off; they don’t even know you exist. They’re sitting inside some operations center combining the output of some linear revenue optimization programs with the weather forecast and sending out e-mails that will complete jack up my day.&nbsp; Nothing personal -- I’m just collateral damage.</li>\n 	<li>Without that outlet, though; that ability to vent directly to the culprit, the frustration festers. The&nbsp;undisciplined&nbsp;take it out on innocent workers. The introverts mutter to themselves under their breaths.&nbsp; The majority of us, though, inhale, exhale and then make for closest repository of the three cure-alls for travel frustration -- fat, salt, and beer.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music --<em> I Will Writhe</em> by <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/26739\">SackJo22</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Tablet Wars: Apple iPad 2 vs. Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Regular listeners know that, over the past couple of years, I’ve migrated to an all Apple technology kit -- the 11-in MacBook Air, an iPhone 4, and an iPad 2. This isn’t a religious sort of fanboy thing -- the desktop unit that I create this podcast on is a custom-built dual monitor Windows 7 64-bit rig with 3 hard drives and a Blu-Ray DVD burner.</li>\n 	<li>Attending <a href=\"http://www.google.com/events/io/2011/index-live.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Google I/O</a> earlier this summer, I received a <a href=\"http://www.samsung.com/global/microsite/galaxytab/10.1/index.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1</a> with the <a href=\"http://www.engadget.com/2011/01/06/googles-android-3-0-honeycomb-for-tablets-a-guided-tour-of-the/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Honeycomb </a>tablet version of Android -- I think Honeycomb translates to version number 3.1 for non-Google-ites -- and a <a href=\"http://www.samsung.com/us/computer/chromebook\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Samsung Chromebook</a>. During the summer I’ve been traveling with both the Google and Apple kit -- a significant increase in carry-on weight, but the only way I know to truly compare equipment is live in the field.&nbsp; I’ll compare the tablets this episode and talk about my Chromebook experiences next time.</li>\n 	<li>Not only did I carry both tablets for business over the past couple of months, I also took them both with me on vacation to the UK, leaving my laptop at home -- a real pressure test.</li>\n 	<li>To cut to the chase -- which do I like better? -- it’s a real toss-up.&nbsp; Both tablets are nice pieces of hardware -- the screen sizes are a bit different (the Galaxy has a bit more of an HD aspect ratio while the iPad’s dimensions are more like a sheet of paper) and the Samsung is a few ounces lighter than the iPad, but in the real world -- it’s a push.&nbsp; They feels the same, both screens are beautiful, and their response times are great.</li>\n 	<li>As you would expect, the iPad has a better selection of apps -- the Android tablet just launched this summer while the iPad has been out for over a year.&nbsp; However, for apps that I use, the delta isn’t as huge as the raw number of apps -- iPad vs. Honeycomb -- would suggest.&nbsp; Apps that I use regularly -- Evernote, Kindle, Pandora, Dropbox, Skype, Concur expense reporting, Angry Birds -- are all available for Android.&nbsp; The Evernote app is the only tablet-specific one -- and it’s really nice -- but the others work fine.&nbsp; The only MIA apps that have any real impact on me are WebEx and GoTo Meeting. I think the tablet form is the best way to watch an on-line presentation and so I do miss those apps.</li>\n 	<li>The operating system -- Apple’s iOS vs. Google’s Android and the accompanying apps -- the comparison seems to be less of a “better-worse” and more a difference in philosophies.&nbsp; The Apple experience is pretty much locked down -- there’s only one place to get apps, the screen layout not very customizable, there’s no independent access to the file system. Now that’s not necessarily bad -- most people never change the default settings on their technology and there’s a lot to be said for not letting users screw things up beyond recovery. It’s Apple’s point of view. It’s a valid one, but it does have some impact.</li>\n 	<li>When we were in the UK with only the two tablets, I wanted to replace my Facebook profile picture with one taken that afternoon in the <a href=\"http://www.glengoyne.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Glengoyne Distillery</a> near Loch Lomond.&nbsp; My daughter had taken the picture with my iPhone. Plunking around the Facebook app, I couldn’t find a way to change my profile. So I e-mailed the photo from my iPhone to my Gmail account.&nbsp; Logging onto the Facebook site on the iPad Safari browser, I couldn’t save the picture from the Mail app to a place where the browser could access it -- for security reasons, all the apps seem to exist within their own sandboxes.&nbsp; Opening up Gmail on the Samsung tablet, I could save the picture to the folder of my choice, and then upload the picture from that folder to the Facebook site through the Android browser.</li>\n 	<li>It’s a little thing, but it illustrates why I found working solely with the Android system -- being without my PC -- easier than the iPad. The Android design philosophy is to give the users much greater control over their experience.&nbsp; Which means I can spelunk around the file system, tweak the technical operations, create truly horrid screen designs, and view Flash-based web sites to my heart’s content</li>\n 	<li>I also found it interesting that my daughter who’s starting high school this year, tends to pick up the Samsung tablet over the iPad. A lot of it probably has to do with the fact that she has an Android phone, but she seemed to prefer the Google experience.</li>\n 	<li>So as I said at the top, it’s a toss-up.&nbsp; I think the iPad is a more polished experience.&nbsp; It feels 1-2 releases ahead of the Android tablet -- which it is.&nbsp; The Samsung tablet, though, keeps right up with Apple in hardware and fit-and-finish, and Android lets the advanced user customize it better to his/her specific needs.&nbsp; Final recommendation -- at the same price, I’d recommend the casual/non-technical user go with the iPad, but if you like to pop the hood on your technology, you won’t go wrong with the Samsung.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #92</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from the <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">ccMixter</a> site</li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_92.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #92 — Not-So-Upbeat Traveler; iPad 2 vs. Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1','','inherit','closed','closed','','785-revision-v1','','','2021-09-28 07:07:25','2021-09-28 12:07:25','',785,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3838',0,'revision','',0),
(3839,1,'2021-09-28 07:08:58','2021-09-28 12:08:58','[caption id=\"attachment_821\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/ipad-galaxy1.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-821\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/ipad-galaxy1-300x225.jpg\" alt=\"Apple iPad 2 and Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\"></a> Tablet Wars[/caption]\n\nI walked out of the <a title=\"Google I/O 2011\" href=\"http://www.google.com/events/io/2011/index-live.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Google I/O</a> developers conference in May with a pre-release version of <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Samsung Group\" href=\"http://www.samsung.com/\" rel=\"homepage\">Samsung</a>\'s challenger to the iPad -- the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Samsung Galaxy Tab\" href=\"http://galaxytab.samsungmobile.com/\" rel=\"homepage\">Galaxy Tab</a> 10.1. &nbsp;Rather than put it up for sale on eBay like many attendees, I decided to take it on the road with me. &nbsp;I\'ve been traveling the last two months with both the Galaxy and an <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"iPad\" href=\"http://www.apple.com/ipad/\" rel=\"homepage\">iPad 2</a>, including a real pressure test -- two weeks in the UK without a&nbsp;laptop. Before Apple <a title=\"Apple yet again pushes for EU ban of Samsung Galaxy tablets, phones\" href=\"http://venturebeat.com/2011/08/19/apple-yet-again-pushes-for-eu-ban-of-samsung-galaxy-tablets-phones/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">blocks</a> Galaxy sales in any more countries, here are my hands-on impressions.\n\nBoth tablets are nice pieces of hardware. &nbsp;A Google search will provide no end of detailed comparisons of the hardware specs. &nbsp; But in the real world, it\'s a push. &nbsp;The screen sizes are a bit different (the Galaxy has a bit more of an HD aspect ratio while the iPad’s dimensions are more like a sheet of paper), the Samsung is a few ounces lighter than the iPad, and the buttons are in different places. &nbsp;There\'s no real difference -- they feel the same, both screens are beautiful, and their response times are great.\n\n<!--more-->\n\nAs you would expect, the iPad has a better selection of apps; the tablet version of Android (code named \"Honeycomb\") just launched while the iPad has been out for over a year.&nbsp; However, for apps that I use, the difference&nbsp;isn\'t&nbsp;as significant as the raw iPad-vs.-Honeycomb numbers suggest. &nbsp;Most of the apps that I use regularly -- Evernote, Kindle, USAToday, Pandora, Dropbox, Skype, Concur expense reporting, Angry Birds -- are all available for Android.\n\nEvernote and USAToday are the only Android tablet-specific ones (and are nicely done), but the others work fine. &nbsp;The holes seem to be slowly filling in, but the coverage is uneven. &nbsp;WebEx just released an Android app that runs on phones and tablets. &nbsp;The Financial Times app looks great on the Samsung, but the apps from the Wall Street Journal and the Economist only run on the phone versions of Android (2.2 and 2.3, or \"Froyo\" and \"Gingerbread\" in Google\'s dessert-themed code names) and won\'t install on Honeycomb. Understandable for a 2½-month-old product, but still a problem for real-world users.\n\nComparing&nbsp;Apple’s <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"IOS (Apple)\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOS_%28Apple%29\" rel=\"wikipedia\">iOS</a> vs. Google’s <a title=\"Wikipedia entry on Android OS\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(operating_system)\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Android</a> and each system\'s built-in applications (e.g., browser, e-mail) seems to be less of a “better-worse” judgement and more a debate between two design philosophies.&nbsp; The Apple experience is a locked-down one -- there’s only one place to get apps, the screen layout not very customizable, there’s no independent access to the file system, and it\'s tethered to iTunes (though this is expected to go away with the next release of iOS). This isn\'t necessarily bad -- it\'s a much more secure approach, most people never change the default settings on their technology and there’s a lot to be said for not letting users screw things up beyond recovery. It’s Apple’s point of view. It’s a valid one, but it does have some impact.\n\nWhile in the UK with just the iPad and Galaxy Tab, I wanted to replace my Facebook profile picture with one taken that afternoon in the Glengoyne Distillery. My daughter had taken the picture with my iPhone. Plunking around the Facebook iPhone app, I couldn’t find a way to change my profile. So I e-mailed the photo from my iPhone to my Gmail account.&nbsp; Logging onto the Facebook site from the iPad Safari browser, I couldn’t save the picture from the Mail app to a place where the browser could access it. Opening up Gmail on the Samsung tablet, I could save the picture to the folder of my choice and then upload the picture from that folder to the Facebook site through the Android browser. Perhaps less safe, but I got done what I wanted.\n\nIt’s a little thing, but it illustrates why I found relying solely with the Android system -- being without my <a title=\"MacBook Air\" href=\"http://www.apple.com/macbookair/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">MacBook Air</a>-- easier than the iPad. The Android design philosophy is to give the users much greater control over their experience.&nbsp; Which means I can spelunk around the file system, tweak the technical operations, create truly horrid screen designs, and view Flash-based web sites to my heart’s content.\n\nI like Android\'s widgets -- the ability to look at the screen and see new e-mails, Tweets, the temperature without having to open an app. But for enterprise users, the iPad does a much better job of sync\'ing mail, contacts, and calendars with the corporate-standard Microsoft Exchange infrastructure.&nbsp;It\'s interesting that my daughter who’s starting high school this year tends to pick up the Samsung tablet more than the iPad. It probably has to do with the fact that she has an <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Android (operating system)\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_%28operating_system%29\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Android phone</a>, but she seems to prefer the Google experience.\n\nThe iPad 2 is definitely a more polished experience.&nbsp; It feels 1-2 releases ahead of the Android tablet -- which it is.&nbsp; The Samsung tablet, though, keeps right up with Apple in hardware and fit-and-finish, and Android gives the advanced user the ability to customize it to his/her specific needs.&nbsp; Final recommendation -- at the same price, I recommend casual/non-technical users to buy the iPad 2; there are no sharp edges on which they could cut a finger. But if you like to pop the hood on your technology, you won’t go wrong with the Samsung.\n<div class=\"zemanta-pixie\" style=\"margin-top: 10px; height: 15px;\"><img class=\"zemanta-pixie-img\" style=\"border: none; float: right;\" src=\"http://img.zemanta.com/pixy.gif?x-id=a6fa3e5a-f086-4119-b970-8dd36cc1d883\" alt=\"\"></div>','iPad 2 vs. Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 -- Hands-On Impressions','','inherit','closed','closed','','811-revision-v1','','','2021-09-28 07:08:58','2021-09-28 12:08:58','',811,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3839',0,'revision','',0),
(3841,1,'2021-09-28 07:11:09','2021-09-28 12:11:09','[caption id=\"attachment_827\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/071.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-827 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/071-300x202.jpg\" alt=\"Downtown Brooklyn. People return to Brooklyn over the Manhattan Bridge still in shock, after fleeing from the attack on the World Trade Center. © Joseph Rodríguez\" width=\"300\" height=\"202\" /></a> Downtown Brooklyn. People return to Brooklyn over the Manhattan Bridge still in shock, after fleeing from the attack on the World Trade Center. © Joseph Rodríguez[/caption]\n\nComing up to the 10th anniversary of the September 11th terrorist attacks, I repeat a segment from the September 2005 <a title=\"Podcast #14 – September 11th Travel Stories; Writing a Great Travel Song\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/09/14/podcast-14-september-11th-travel-stories-writing-a-great-travel-song/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">episode</a> that tells the stories of travelers trying to get back home when all planes were grounded and all US borders were closed after the attacks. Also, we finish up the two-part review of new Google technology with observations after taking a Samsung Chromebook on the road for a month this summer. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_93.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.','Podcast #93 — Travel Stories from September 11th; Traveling with a Google Chromebook','','inherit','closed','closed','','825-revision-v1','','','2021-09-28 07:11:09','2021-09-28 12:11:09','',825,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3841',0,'revision','',0),
(3843,1,'2021-09-28 07:26:41','2021-09-28 12:26:41','[caption id=\"attachment_840\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"146\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/4275897174_f7c83887ab_z11.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-840\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/4275897174_f7c83887ab_z11-146x300.jpg\" alt=\"Chuck the Flight Attendant © hello jenny / Flickr\" width=\"146\" height=\"300\" /></a> Chuck the Flight Attendant © hello jenny / Flickr[/caption]\n\nIt\'s been a while since the last podcast. Contrary to what you might have thought, I haven\'t <a href=\"http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=podfade\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">podfaded </a>-- at least, not quite yet.  A flight out of Grand Junction, CO gave me a throw-back moment -- a flight in a prop plane. Sitting next to a huge guy on a very small plane got me thinking about how to deal with row mates -- row mates \"of size\" and row mates who like to chat. I talk about how the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Global Entry\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Entry\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Global Entry</a> program saved me from a huge line at ORD and comment on the now-infamous TSA exhortation to \"Get Your Freak On Girl\". We close with an economics lesson -- what\'s happened to all the hot flight attendants. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_94.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the transcript from TravelCommons podcast #94:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Looking at the calendar, it has been a while since my last podcast. I\'ve kept meaning to do a new episode, but then something – usually work – gets in my way. Also, I am absolutely the least efficient/most distractable writer I know. Probably contributes to the problem.</li>\n 	<li>Anyway, I\'ve been bouncing around a bit since the last episode – London, Dallas, Milwaukee, Orlando, Phoenix a couple of times, and a biking trip in <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Moab, Utah\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moab%2C_Utah\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Moab, Utah</a>.</li>\n 	<li>The biking trip did challenge my packing skills – how to pack for a 4-day biking trip followed by 3 days of work in Phoenix, all in a carry-on roller bag.  Luckily, biking gear isn\'t that bulky – except for the shoes. And in Moab, a non-faded pair of jeans is considered high fashion, so the after-hours clothing count was pretty low also.</li>\n 	<li>To get to Moab, I flew in and out of <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Grand Junction, Colorado\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Junction%2C_Colorado\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Grand Junction, CO</a> on the first prop planes – a Mesaba <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Bombardier Dash 8\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombardier_Dash_8\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Dash 8</a> – that I’ve flown in a long time.  I thought regional jets had replaced all of these things years ago.  Knowing that I’d be flying down to Phoenix on a commuter plane made my post-bike packing a bit easier. I could expand my rollerboard a bit because I wouldn’t have to fit it in an overhead; I’d be gatechecking it at plane side.</li>\n 	<li>So I was a bit surprised when the gate agent was encouraging people to carry on.  Really?  When was the last time you heard that?  Usually the gate agents are prowling the boarding area looking for oversized carryons to gate check. Indeed, with sold-out planes being the norm, more gate agents are announcing that everyone in the last boarding group will have to gate check their carryons – not even letting them get on the plane to try. I wonder if it’s a marketing ploy for the new airline credit cards that offer advanced boarding along with a mile for every dollar spent.</li>\n 	<li>Well, expanded out, my bag wasn\'t going to fit in a normal sized carryon bin, let alone the shrunken vestigial one on a Dash 8, so I grabbed a gate check tag and left it plane side like I always do.  I did, though, ask the woman there about what I thought was an odd request – why ask people to carry on? “’Cause we’re weight-restricted” she said, “and carryons don’t count.” So a 20-lb bag counts against the weight restriction when it’s in the cargo hold below the passengers’ feet, but not when it’s shoved above the passengers’ heads?  She just shrugged and pointed me toward the stairs.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/hisboyelroy/430\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Revolve</a> mix</em> by His Boy Elroy</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>We\'ve talked in past episodes about row mates; seat neighbors.</li>\n 	<li>Well, once I got on board that Dash 8 in Grand Junction, I found that my row mate was <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Larry the Cable Guy\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_the_Cable_Guy\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Larry The Cable Guy</a>’s overweight twin – or perhaps the more appropriate way would be to say “a passenger of size”.  Whatever way you want put it, there was no way I was getting the armrest down between Larry and me.  Hell, I couldn\'t even see the armrest. I didn’t make a big deal out of it – I had the aisle I could lean into to, and Larry kept his arms forward to try to minimize the spill over. But it still was an uncomfortable 2 hours. Pressing up against Larry for that entire time, I could feel (literally) the justification for making “passengers of size” buy two seats if they can’t fit into one.</li>\n 	<li>But then there was this huge guy on my DFW-ORD flight. Standing in the aisle for 5 min stashing his stuff, holding up the entire boarding process. |Not that he could\'ve stepped out of the aisle – he was too big for that. But then he got offended when people tried to squeeze around him as the flight attendants started banging on about the need for everyone to get seated so we could leave on time.</li>\n 	<li>I’m not a tiny guy myself. But, in spite of what the spokesperson for the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance\" href=\"http://www.naafa.org\" rel=\"homepage\">National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance</a> says, it’s not about rights.  It’s about being polite and living with the choice you\'ve made – or purchased. For a given price, you’ve bought a seat of known dimensions in smallish metal tube that you’ll share with 50-200 other people all trying to get in and out of said tube in as short a time period as possible. If you can’t sit comfortably with the armrest down, then buy the seat next to you, or buy a first class seat (or at least an upgrade) on planes that offer it (certainly wasn\'t an option provided Larry on that Dash-8).  If you don’t want to be rushed during boarding, check your bags and wait ‘til last call – or charter your own jet.  But don’t get huffy at the rest of us.</li>\n 	<li>While I was waiting to start my trip to Moab, I had a bit of dwell time in ORD so I did a little test.  I fired up my Verizon 4G Hot Spot and ran the Speed Test Chrome app on my MacBook Air – a smokin’12.3 megabits per sec down, 15 Mbps up. I then fired up the Speed Test app on my AT&amp;T iPhone 4 – 0.3 Mbps down, 0.05 Mbps up. I don’t know what’s wrong with the AT&amp;T data service in ORD, but it’s just pathetic.</li>\n 	<li>A year ago – in<a title=\"Podcast #85 — Importance of Hotel Bathrooms; Maximizing Miles\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2010/11/30/podcast-85-importance-of-hotel-bathrooms-maximizing-miles/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> episode 85</a> to be exact – I interviewed <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Michael Komarnitsky\" href=\"http://www.crunchbase.com/person/michael-komarnitsky\" rel=\"crunchbase\">Michael Komarnitsky</a>, founder and chief executive of <a href=\"http://gomiles.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">GoMiles</a>, a mileage tracking and management website.  Earlier this month, AA and SWA went gunning for Michael and other mileage-management sites, serving them “cease-&amp;-desist” letters claiming security and terms of use violations.  What it’s really about, I think, is not wanting travelers to have tools to be “more efficient” in how they cash in miles or frequent sleeper points. Miles are a big money-maker for airlines – they pull in millions selling them to credit card companies and the like.  They’re even more profitable when they expire unused.  Sites like <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"GoMiles\" href=\"http://www.crunchbase.com/company/gomiles\" rel=\"crunchbase\">GoMiles</a> make it easier to keep track of your miles, including expiration dates. I’ll put links to our <a title=\"Podcast #85 — Importance of Hotel Bathrooms; Maximizing Miles\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2010/11/30/podcast-85-importance-of-hotel-bathrooms-maximizing-miles/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">interview </a>with Michael and a <a href=\"http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204774604576627142338884936.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">WSJ article</a> in the show notes.</li>\n 	<li>In the<a title=\"Podcast #93 — Travel Stories from September 11th; Traveling with a Google Chromebook\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/09/09/podcast-93-%e2%80%94-travel-stories-from-september-11th-traveling-with-a-google-chromebook/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> last episode</a>, I was getting ready to head over to London, and was looking forward to testing out the Global Entry lane, seeing if it cut my re-entry time at passport control.  Coming back into ORD, it was a huge time/frustration saver. The US citizen line at passport control was longer than I\'ve ever seen it – all the cattle-pen switchback lanes were full and then the line stretched out another 50-75 yards into the terminal walkway. I walked up, showed the line marshal the “CPB” Global Entry sticker on the back of my passport and was waved through to a row of 6 Global Entry kiosks.</li>\n 	<li>It took me two tries to get a valid 4-fingerprint reading, but I was through in 5 minutes. Was definitely worth the couple of hours I invested back in July.</li>\n 	<li>Robby Smith wrote this on the TravelCommons Facebook wall –\n<ul>\n 	<li>I now have 3 data points for Global Entry in the last 3 months.  My average time in Immigration is about 20 seconds. Customs just takes receipt from the GE kiosk and say Welcome Home. IAH has a separate Customs arrival lane for GE only.  I know the GE program is only about 18 months old or so but I should have done this the day it came out. At $100 for 5 years, it would be ridiculous for me not to have it. Finally a Gov program that works and makes life better.</li>\n 	<li>BTW; United Mileage Plus 1K and GSM now get this as a free benefit of status.</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Robby, thanks for that.  I agree that it’s a great program – the one thing the Dept of Homeland Security has done to make travel a little easier.  And more programs are picking up the $100 fee.  It’s now a benefit of Amex’s Platinum card.</li>\n 	<li>And of course, the podcast wouldn’t be complete without a TSA item.  Every once in a while, on those rare occasions that I check luggage, I’ll find a card from the TSA politely letting me know they’ve opened my luggage and searched through it. Sometimes they re-pack things nicely, other times they leave a wadded up mess.  For one woman earlier this month, they left her a more personal note, printing “Get Your Freak On Girl” along the margin of the standard TSA card.  Prompted, she guessed, by the screener’s discovery of what she described in a tweet was a “personal” item – battery powered.  She was stunned, but kept a sense of humor about it. Given recent arrests of TSA agents stealing from screened luggage, she’s lucky the screener just left the note.  There’s a link to an<a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.forbes.com%2Fsites%2Fkashmirhill%2F2011%2F10%2F24%2Ftsa-officer-advises-passenger-to-get-her-freak-on%2F&amp;h=iAQHCGNplAQHy0Sz1-fzFBuZQC14G7hsgZZIeEhj3mbR1jQ\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> article</a> on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">TravelCommons Facebook wall</a>, and I’ll also put it in the show notes.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a question, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is <a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a> -- use the Voice Memo app on your iPhone or something like Virtual Recorder on your Android phone to record and send in an audio comment – or iMovie if you want to send in some video; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/#!/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at travelcommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/septahelix/34050\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Earth Soda</a></em> by septahelix</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Plane Conversation Etiquette or The Risks of Talking to Your Seatmate</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Humans love/need to put order to the randomness around them, and one of the most common ways to do it is the “There are two kinds of people in the world” construct – Those who like durian or mushrooms or Brussels sprouts or ferrets and those who don’t.  In travel, the classic split is between fliers who want to talk to their row mates and those who want to be left alone.</li>\n 	<li>You can see it when you walk on the plane – the people who sit down and immediately power up the Bose noise-canceling headsets and those who are looking all around</li>\n 	<li>I saw the ultimate example of a talker on the same DFW-ORD flight (yes, it was one of those flights…). The guy in the row in front of me talked for 45 min straight, seemingly without taking a breath – he must’ve been an amateur didgeridoo player trained in circular breathing. He started before takeoff.  Sitting in the center seat, he swiveled his head like an oscillating fan, equally torturing both row mates. I was half expecting him to swivel his head all the way around “Exorcist-style” and include me in his life story.</li>\n 	<li>Four of us in the two rows behind him traded glances as we watched him in a mix of amazement (equal parts how long he could talk and how clueless he was of what he was doing), horror (at the mental anguish he was inflicting on his row mates) and relief (glad we weren’t sitting in that row). We started a little pool – 5 bucks a piece – would he stop or be told to shut up, and when would that happen. I figured he’d eventually run out of gas – if his row mates hadn’t plugged in their iPods by now, they were going to let him go.  The guy across the aisle from me won the pot, though, because I underestimated how long this guy would talk.</li>\n 	<li>As you might have guessed, I’m not generally a talker. If you end up next to me on a plane, it’s pretty certain that the only conversation we’ll have is when you ask me to get up from my aisle seat to let you go to the toilet.</li>\n 	<li>I use plane flights as my alone time – I mostly nap, then read, maybe do a bit of e-mail or play solitaire on my iPhone while listening to podcasts. As I’ve mentioned in past episodes, I rarely use in-flight Wi-Fi.  I enjoy that little bit of unwired isolation.</li>\n 	<li>I do think I miss out on things, though.  On a flight down to Phoenix, USAir screwed up my reservation, lost my advance seat assignment, which dropped me in a center seat.  I was sitting in my seat, not looking forward to the next 3.5 hours. Getting up to let in the older woman who had the window seat, she said to me “I really don’t care for window seats.” “I’ll slide over if you want this center seat instead,” I offered.  She gladly took it.  I got into my usual position – plugged in, eyes closed, waiting for takeoff – my own little world. Only after I was walking down the terminal in PHX did I think – that’s a bit odd about not wanting the window; I should’ve asked her for the back story.</li>\n 	<li>I’m not like I’m a complete social hermit. Eating at the bar in a restaurant while on the road, I’ll strike up a conversation with the bartender or the guy sitting next to me. At dinner last night at a restaurant with communal tables, I got the thumbnail life story of the couple sitting next to me, even traded splashes of pinot noir for an impromptu wine tasting.</li>\n 	<li>So what’s different?  Well, in that bar or in that restaurant, if things get a little weird, a little uncomfortable, or a little boring, I can always excuse myself and walk away.  Not easily done in a metal tube 35,000 ft in the air. While I might be kinda curious about a person, I’m not <em>that</em> curious to risk being pinned against the wall of a plane for three hours…</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music --<em> <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/scottaltham/20747\">Hear Us Now</a></em> by scottaltham</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Decline of Hot Flight Attendants</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://www.theatlantic.com/megan-mcardle/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Megan McArdle</a> of the <a href=\"http://www.theatlantic.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Atlantic</a> magazine has become one of my favorite bloggers. I’m sympatico with her call-it “wet libertarianism”. Could be because we both graduated from University of Chicago’s business school where a sort of cold-blooded economic theory pervades everything.</li>\n 	<li>Anyhow, a recent article of hers caught my eye – “<a href=\"http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/10/the-declining-hotness-of-flight-attendants/246610/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">The Declining Hotness of Flight Attendants</a>”. The TV show <em>Pan Am</em> – set in the ‘60’s, a Mad Men in the air knock-off, has let to a string of “then vs. now” articles, comparing the “Clipper Class” era to today “Greyhound Bus” level of service.  Another blogger, Glen Whitman, had written a <em>Pan Am</em>-inspired post on the “<a href=\"http://agoraphilia.blogspot.com/2011/10/pan-am-and-economics-of-hot-flight.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Economics of Hot Flight Attendants</a>”. His thesis – prior to deregulation, with the Civil Aeronautics Board setting prices for flight routes, airlines could only compete on service. Since in the ‘60’s and ‘70’s, most fliers were male salarymen, airlines would pay more for attractive flight attendants to differentiate their service.  After 1978, airlines found competing on price overwhelmed differences in service and so out went any rationale for the hot flight attendant salary premium.</li>\n 	<li>McArdle’s response – “As a libertarianish economics blogger, I would love if this story were true.  But I\'m skeptical.”  And then she goes outlines a more plausible scenario – the combination of union representation, anti-discrimination laws and, as she puts it, “feminist shaming”, allowed the flight attendant population to age, resulting in “a workforce composed mostly of older and not particularly attractive people.  Mirroring the larger American workforce”</li>\n 	<li>Reminded me of when Virgin Atlantic started flight into Chicago. I was running a dot-com consultancy at the time (like 75% of the working population, or so it seemed) and was flying to London twice a month. I quickly became a Virgin Atlantic regular. The flights were much better than United or American or BA. The planes were new, the food was good, and yes, they had hot flight attendants.  On a flight back to Chicago, one of the flight attendants asked me for suggestions on things to do on her layover. She told me that she was bidding on different runs every month so that she could “see the world” since she, like other the other flight attendants, was on a 36-month non-renewable contract.  No danger of declining hotness at Virgin.</li>\n 	<li>Now, all that being said, it’s wasn’t the “hotness” of the Virgin flight attendants that mattered (though in and of itself, it wasn’t a bad thing), it was their attitude – lack of cynicism, sarcasm, surliness.  This was still new and exciting to them – unlike the 25-year veteran flight attendants at United or American. The Virgin flight attendants would be serving passengers throughout the flight, rather than racing the meal carts through the aisles and then hiding in the galleys. When asked to describe meal choices, I would receive a polite explanation, rather than the “Does this look like a restaurant” reply I received from a Northwest flight attendant.</li>\n 	<li>We won’t ever get back to the Pan Am Clipper Class days, what’s called the “Golden Age” of travel.  I’m OK with that.  I’d be happy for just some pleasant attitudes in today’s flying buses.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #94</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from the <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">ccMixter</a> site</li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_94.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #94 — Plane Conversation Etiquette; Decline of Hot Flight Attendants','','inherit','closed','closed','','832-revision-v1','','','2021-09-28 07:26:41','2021-09-28 12:26:41','',832,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3843',0,'revision','',0),
(3845,1,'2021-09-28 07:28:59','2021-09-28 12:28:59','[caption id=\"attachment_862\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/708473504_18da6d5b07_z1.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-862\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/708473504_18da6d5b07_z1-300x225.jpg\" alt=\"Standing in Line! © Lance Smith / Flickr\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\" /></a> Standing in Line! © Lance Smith / Flickr[/caption]\n\nOnce again skipping the mayhem of the busiest travel week of the year, though it\'s getting more difficult as the Thanksgiving travel crush seems to start earlier each year. Good listener comments about last episode\'s story of a rare prop plane flight sitting next to a \"passenger of size\"; then my own thoughts on <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"US Airways\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_Airways\" rel=\"wikipedia\">USAir</a>\'s completely inadequate <a href=\"http://overheadbin.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/11/23/8980390-flier-displaced-by-obese-seatmate-forced-to-stand\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">response</a> to the passenger forced to stand on a 7-hour flight because a \"passenger of size\" overflowed into his seat.  I update my holiday travel tips -- drive or train for trips less than 350 miles, pay extra to fly direct, catch the first flight out, and bone up on your geography so you know all the alternative airports. Watching news reports of the hassles of Black Friday shopping make me wonder why people would go through the hassles to fly airlines like Spirit Air. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_95.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the transcript from TravelCommons podcast #95:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Looking back over the past 5 years of Thanksgiving week episodes, I always say the same thing -- Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studio outside of <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Chicago\" href=\"http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=41.8819444444,-87.6277777778&amp;spn=0.1,0.1&amp;q=41.8819444444,-87.6277777778 (Chicago)&amp;t=h\" rel=\"geolocation\">Chicago, Illinois</a> during the one week a year I refuse to travel… But it’s true.  Let the families have the airports for this week. It doesn’t make sense for anyone to travel on business Thanksgiving week anyways.  At best, you get 2 days of business – Monday and Tuesday – because Wednesday is a complete waste – and even then, nobody’s head is really in the game.</li>\n 	<li>Indeed, Thanksgiving week has become even more worthless for business over the past few years. With more school districts throwing in the towel and closing down for the entire week, what was a four-day extended weekend has now become a full 9-day extravaganza.</li>\n 	<li>Which then pushes back the travel crush even further.  An <a href=\"http://www.chicagotribune.com/classified/automotive/traffic/ct-met-getting-around-1121-20111121,0,2606142.column\">article</a> in the Chicago Tribune earlier this week said that Air Transport Association forecasted that the Friday before Thanksgiving would replace the Wednesday before as the busiest outbound travel day.  Made me glad that I’d returned from Dallas a day early – the Thursday before – missing the crush.</li>\n 	<li>Over the last 5 years, there’s only one year – <a title=\"Podcast #80 – Holiday Travel Tips; Frequent Flyer Documentary\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2009/11/23/podcast-80-holiday-travel-tips-frequent-flyer-documentary/\">2009</a> – that I traveled on Thanksgiving week.  A client called a meeting in Philadelphia on the Monday before Thanksgiving. Really? Really. It’s called a power play.</li>\n 	<li>I had them schedule the meeting first thing Monday morning.  I flew in on the last flight Sunday night, took the meeting on an intravenous coffee drip, and then flew back home after lunch.  It was a 16-hour up-&amp;-back, getting me through security in Philadelphia airport just as the tide of strollers and Hello Kitty roller boards was starting to build…</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/seldon-circles/\"><em>Making Circles</em></a> by the Seldon Plan</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Rich Fraser posted this on the TravelCommons website, commenting on my lack of appreciation for the smaller things of travel…\n<ul>\n 	<li>Mark, you gotta get to more airports.  As a domestic road warrior, I\'ve flown into some of the smallest airports with commercial service on a wide variety of turboprop planes.  Whether it\'s Mesaba (Delta) with their <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Saab 340\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saab_340\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Saab 340s</a> or Horizon (Alaska) with their Q800s, just about every regional carrier has turboprops in their fleet.  Up until their demise 3 years ago, <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Midwest Connect\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midwest_Connect\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Midwest Connect</a> was using the Beech B1900D, a 19 seat flying minivan that did not require a flight attendant.  It remains the only plane that I could guarantee I could fall asleep in.</li>\n 	<li>You big time international guys may look down and scoff at the small birds, but as a private pilot myself, I rather enjoy flying in a type that is closer to what I pilot.  It feeds the fantasy that I could possibly jump into the cockpit and take over just in case the crew had the fish for dinner.</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Rich has me pegged.  I self-select out of smaller airports.  I’d rather drive 2 hrs from a major airport with more service than fly into a thinly-served smaller one. A few years back, I had a client in <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Huntsville, Alabama\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huntsville%2C_Alabama\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Huntsville, Alabama</a>.  Every visit, I flew Southwest from Chicago to Nashville and then drove the 120 miles down I-65 to Huntsville.  I liked the control it gave me – much more than depending on the one Delta flight a day between O’Hare and Huntsville.</li>\n 	<li>But as Rich will certainly remind me, you don’t always have that luxury.  I was doing some work in <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Sioux City, Iowa\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sioux_City%2C_Iowa\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Sioux City, IA</a> – which, of course, is most memorable for its three-letter airport code SUX.  I ended up on a 25-seat <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"United Express\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Express\" rel=\"wikipedia\">United Express</a> prop plane that had an intermediate stop in <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Waterloo, Iowa\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterloo%2C_Iowa\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Waterloo, IA</a>.  After half the passengers deplaned in Waterloo, the flight attendant came on, looked at everyone left and said, “you, you, and you – you need move to a seat behind the wing”.  We got up and shifted back, but I can tell you that we weren’t completely comfortable with the eyeball method of weight distribution.</li>\n 	<li>And continuing that thought about weight distribution, Linda Martin of the <a href=\"http://indietravelpodcast.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Indie Travel Podcast</a> sent this in a few days ago, commenting on my experience sitting next to a “person of size” on my 2-hr prop plane flight from <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Grand Junction, Colorado\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Junction%2C_Colorado\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Grand Junction, CO</a> to Phoenix…\n<ul>\n 	<li>Your comments on people of size got me thinking about <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Air New Zealand\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_New_Zealand\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Air New Zealand</a>\'s trans-Tasman and Pacific system, which was introduced a year or so ago; I think to compete against the budget carriers.</li>\n 	<li>There are four levels of ticket: 1. \"Seat\" which is just a seat, no checked bag, no food, 2. \"Seat + bag\": a checked bag but no food, 3. \"The Works\": a checked bag, a meal and extra entertainment, 4. \"Works Deluxe\": all of the above, an extra checked bag and priority boarding, and a guaranteed empty seat beside you. Since the planes are single-aisle with three seats on either side, this means that you\'ll be on the aisle or the window with the centre seat empty.</li>\n 	<li>I think it\'s a great system because it gives the consumer the choice to have a full-service or more-budget flight. But it\'s also great for larger passengers, because in buying the most expensive ticket (which is still cheap) they can get a seat-and-a-half for a lot less than the cost of two seats, meaning everyone is more comfortable. Plus it\'s a regular option off the seat menu, so there\'s no stigma attached to choosing it.</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Linda, thanks for sending that in.  I agree that the Air New Zealand approach is a smart one if they can get the price points to work. Study after study has shown that, far away, the main driver of flyer satisfaction is an empty middle seat. Think about it – every time the middle seat occupant shows up, he/she apologize to their seatmates – “Sorry but I’m in the middle”.  No one wants the seat, and no one wants it filled next to them. If Air New Zealand can make enough money off the “Works Deluxe” tickets, they’re in the bonus round – more revenue, satisfied customers, and not just those “of size”</li>\n 	<li>Because this size thing just keeps being an issue.  The latest story surfaced earlier this week when a USAir passenger Arthur Berkowitz told the <a href=\"http://www.elliott.org/blog/forced-to-stand-for-a-seven-hour-flight/\">story</a> of his experience on a July flight from Anchorage, AK to Philadelphia to Chris Elliott, a traveler advocate blogger. It was a full flight except for one middle seat, into which a 400-lb passenger tried to fit himself. He apologized, but with his size, he took up his seat and half the seats on each side of him. Not only could Berkowitz not put his armrest down, he couldn’t fasten his seatbelt. He ended up standing most of the 7-hr flight.</li>\n 	<li>Berkowitz rightfully complained to USAir, not only about the discomfort of having to stand for 7 hours, but also about the safety issues – the inability to use his seatbelt.  USAir offered him a $200 voucher to compensate – on an $800 ticket.  Berkowitz said, and I think rightly, that’s not enough. Their <a href=\"http://overheadbin.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/11/23/8980390-flier-displaced-by-obese-seatmate-forced-to-stand\">response</a> -- \"We have attempted to address this customer’s service concerns.  The way to ensure you have space available next to you — whether you are a person of size, or you would simply like to ensure you have more personal space to relax on a long flight — is to purchase that additional seat, or First Class, in advance.”  So to make sure I can put my armrest down, to make sure I can use my seatbelt, to make sure I’m not crowded out of the seat I paid for, I should buy an additional seat or upgrade to First Class?  When I first read this, I was dumbfounded.  But then I reminded myself – it’s USAir. Then it all made sense.</li>\n 	<li>And to wrap on a more attractive note, commenting on last episode’s Hot Flight Attendant segment, Sak writes\n<ul>\n 	<li>I recently flew Copa Airlines Colombia between Medellin (MDE) and Panama City (PTY) and flight attendants were still young and hot. Of course, different country and labor laws and in Colombia is normal to discriminate by age.</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>There you go, hot flight attendant <em>and</em> Star Alliance miles.  Who could ask for more?</li>\n 	<li>If you have a question, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is <a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a> -- use the Voice Memo app on your iPhone or something like Virtual Recorder on your Android phone to record and send in an audio comment – or iMovie if you want to send in some video; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/eliyahu-wind/\">Oh Yeah</a></em> by Eliyahu Sills</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Holiday Travel Tips</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Looking back over those past 5 years of Thanksgiving episodes and then listening to Craig and Linda Martin’s recent holiday travel tips <a href=\"http://indietravelpodcast.com/usa/holiday-travel/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">episode</a> on their Indie Travel Podcast reminded me that it’s been a couple of years since I’ve done my own holiday <a title=\"Winter Travel Tips — Things to Remember When The Snow Starts Flying\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/01/16/winter-travel-tips-things-to-remember-when-the-snow-starts-flying/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">travel</a> <a title=\"Podcast #80 – Holiday Travel Tips; Frequent Flyer Documentary\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2009/11/23/podcast-80-holiday-travel-tips-frequent-flyer-documentary/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">tips</a>, so here’s my updated Road Warrior 201 tips for traveling between now and the New Year.</li>\n 	<li>Holiday travel generates a real miasma of emotions for frequent travelers.  You’re traveling because (theoretically) you want to – you <em>want</em> to visit those in-laws, don’t you? – not because have to to stay employed. You’re out of your comfort zone, out of your travel groove because you’re not solo-ing; you’re traveling with your family.  You gotta move slower through the airport; can’t react as easily to flight interruptions (are you <em>really</em> going to try stand-by with your wife and two young children?). It’s like Superman dragging along kryptonite – other than early boarding privileges, you’re just another traveler slugging it out with the rest of the teeming mass of travelers.</li>\n 	<li>Add to this that airplane load factors – how full they’re packing the planes – have been at historic heights for at least 6 months and that, at least in the Northern Hemisphere, it’s winter, making weather disruptions a near certainty…</li>\n 	<li>Well now, <em>that</em> paints an attractive picture.  So how do you survive this?</li>\n 	<li>The first question might be – do you really need to fly?  We’ve talked about the fly-vs.-drive breakeven point in a <a title=\"Podcast #45 – Waiting for Luggage, Enjoying Travel\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2006/09/20/podcast-45-waiting-for-luggage-enjoying-travel/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">couple </a>of <a title=\"Podcast #23 – Fly or Drive; Scenes from The Hotel Bar\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/11/20/podcast-23-fly-or-drive-scenes-from-the-hotel-bar/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">past</a> <a title=\"Podcast #85 — Importance of Hotel Bathrooms; Maximizing Miles\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2010/11/30/podcast-85-importance-of-hotel-bathrooms-maximizing-miles/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">episodes</a>.  Now driving in the winter isn’t all sweetness and light either – especially across stretches of I-70 through Kansas or up the Jersey Turnpike, but depending on how you value your time and the state of repair of your car, I think the breakeven point has got to be at least 350 miles.  And if you’re in certain parts of the US – the East Coast, between Chicago and New Orleans, along some bits of the West Coast – take the train. Amtrak’s on-time record is never a thing of beauty either, but it’s always going to be better than Newark or LaGuardia in December.</li>\n 	<li>That’s all well and good, but you’re going from Philly to San Francisco.  You’ve got to grit your teeth and fly.  First, fly direct.  I know I say this every time, but it’s a foundational strategy – limit the points of failure in an overloaded system.  Expecting airlines already operating at capacity to ferry even more passengers between airports operating at or over capacity during marginal weather – and to do this all on schedule? Suck it up, pay the extra $100 and have a fighting chance of getting to your family on time with your sanity and your luggage in hand.</li>\n 	<li>Next, catch the earliest flight you can.  Again, it’s about avoiding congestion. Delays stack up as the day wears on.  As your airplane goes from airport to airport, the probability of it getting stuck increases.  If it gets stuck too long, the probability of it getting canceled increases. Overnight, airlines have a chance to recover – late planes finally get their destinations and operations groups can reassign planes.  So while the last flight out can be a crap shoot, I’ve rarely hit a delay on the first flight out.</li>\n 	<li>And the final tip, bone up on your geography – know your alternative airports. A couple of weeks ago, I got stuck in a rolling delay due to fog in LaGuardia. After two hours, I finally gave up my 1<sup>st</sup> Class upgrade for a middle coach seat to Newark – no matter how nice the seat, it has to get me where I’m going.  If LGA is jacked up, EWR – no matter how much I hate that airport – is the next best thing.</li>\n 	<li>Knowing your alternatives – and their dominant carriers – is a key piece of knowledge when trying to pivot away from a delay or cancelled flight. Now, the LGA-EWR pivot is easy, but others aren’t so obvious.  Everyone knows that Chicago has two airports – ORD and MDW.  But Milwaukee is only 80 miles north, but not an alternative that it top of mind to everyone.  If PHL is in trouble, how many folks think about Harrisburg or BWI?  Or SAC as an alternative to SFO?  I tend to think about alternatives in two rings – within 60 miles – SNA and LGB for LAX; and then within 100-120 miles, which now picks up Palm Springs and San Diego for LAX.  Someone will drive a couple of hours to pick you up if it means getting you to Christmas dinner on time.</li>\n 	<li>But, above all, be realistic – it’s going to be a zoo. Give yourself extra time. Figure out how much time it’ll take and add another 50%. At worst, you’ll have some extra time to watch the planes take off. But it’ll allow you to breathe a bit easier when the snow begins to fall.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music --<em> <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/liquid-seventythree/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Is That Called Love</a> </em></em>by Liquid Zen</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Bad Spirit In The Air</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>My undergraduate <a href=\"http://www.cua.edu\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">degree</a> is in chemical engineering, which means I had to take too many math courses to allow time for course like psychology or sociology.  Every once in a while, I feel this gap.  Like a few months ago when I walked past a huge line tailing out of a small shop in downtown Chicago. “What’s this for?” I asked.  “Waiting for a free cupcake,” a couple of line standers answered. 20 minutes in line for a $2 cupcake says your time is worth $6/hour.  Minimum wage is $7.25/hr. Huh?</li>\n 	<li>I kinda have the same feeling about Black Friday – is your time worth so little that you’re willing to camp out in front of a WalMart for a half-price Wii game?  There’s something more emotional than rational about getting a “deal”</li>\n 	<li>Which must be the reason that <a href=\"http://www.spirit.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Spirit Airlines</a> is still in business.  They advertise “low low prices”, but don’t tell you about all the add-on <a href=\"http://www.spirit.com/OptionalFees.aspx\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fees </a>– like the $34 fee for the convenience of booking the flight on-line rather than going down to the airport and queuing up for a ticket agent, but then you will be charged $5 to have that ticket agent print out a boarding pass for you. The Dept of Transportation fined them earlier this week $50,000 neglecting to reveal this full bill of fare.</li>\n 	<li>And it doesn’t stop there.  Want to reserve a seat? It’ll cost you, depending on the seat, betwee $1 and $50. Want to fly with luggage?  It’ll cost you $18-$38 for a checked bag or $20-$45 for a carryon bag.  Don’t worry, though.  They assure you that you won’t be charged for carrying on “reading material”.</li>\n 	<li>Once you’re on board, Spirit sports the<a href=\"http://www.seatguru.com/airlines/Spirit_Airlines/Spirit_Airlines_Airbus_A320.php\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> least amount</a> of seat space of any US domestic airline – 28” seat pitch with non-reclining seats.  Like everyone else, Spirit charges for meals, but <strong><em>unlike</em></strong> everyone else, Spirit will charge you $3 for a glass of water.</li>\n 	<li>So at what point does one’s self-respect kick in and say “enough” -- my time, my comfort, is worth more than this. Certainly for me it happened a long time ago. Spirit flies some of my regular routes – Chicago to LGA or to Ft Myers, FL – but I never consider them.  Indeed, they just annoy me – their fares which are artificially low because they don’t disclose/include all their fees crowd out the fares of other carriers, making me work to get to a true low cost fare.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #95</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from the <a href=\"http://magnatune.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Magnatune </a>site</li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_95.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #95 — Holiday Travel Tips; Bad Spirit In The Air','','inherit','closed','closed','','851-revision-v1','','','2021-09-28 07:28:59','2021-09-28 12:28:59','',851,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3845',0,'revision','',0),
(3846,1,'2021-09-28 07:31:21','2021-09-28 12:31:21','[caption id=\"attachment_879\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"207\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/DSC_85711.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-879\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/DSC_85711-207x300.jpg\" alt=\"On Tap in Edinburgh © Mark Peacock\" width=\"207\" height=\"300\" /></a> On Tap in Edinburgh © Mark Peacock[/caption]\n<p>Finishing up my annual 2-week travel sabbatical in an unseasonably warm <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Chicago\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Chicago</a>. In this episode, a listener asks about if and when to use travel <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Compression stockings\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compression_stockings\" rel=\"wikipedia\">compression socks</a>, we discern the popularity of in-flight Wi-Fi service from Gogo\'s <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Initial public offering\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initial_public_offering\" rel=\"wikipedia\">IPO</a> filing, and dissect a recent article on the best airports for tech users.  We look at the new wave of social media dining apps such as <a href=\"http://untappd.com\">Untappd</a> which helps you drink beer socially, how they\'re taking advantage of smartphone cameras and location services. We wrap up with a look at how airline alliances are changing the frequent flier\'s experience. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_96.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<p> </p>\n<hr />\n<p>Here are the transcript from TravelCommons podcast #96:</p>\n<ul>\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n<li>Happy New Year to everyone! Returning to work after my 2-week sabbatical from travel in unseasonably warm Chicagoland.  I was out in Phoenix for the first two weeks of December, where it was only 10-15 degrees warmer than Chicago.  Then I did a quick up-and-back to DC and was home for good by the evening of the 16<sup>th</sup>.  Though we didn’t have a white Christmas, I did have an amazing run of on-time and even early arrivals at ORD – a pleasant change from past December travel odysseys.</li>\n<li>Indeed, my trips at the beginning of December were some of the easiest, most pleasant I’ve had in a while – combination of mild weather and light crowds made travel a breeze – short security lines, non-cranky TSA screeners, plenty of overhead space, and the reappearance of that rarities of rarities – an empty middle seat.</li>\n<li>It feels like from the Tues or Weds after Thanksgiving to the week before Christmas is a bit of tourist dead zone and so the only ones traveling are the professional road warriors trying to close those last few deals, tie up those remaining loose ends before everyone and everything shuts down for the holidays.</li>\n<li>Or it’s frequent fliers doing one last <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Frequent-flyer program\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequent-flyer_program\" rel=\"wikipedia\">mileage run</a> to get them to the next status level.  I didn’t need to make any mileage runs per se, but I did need those last two Phoenix trips to re-up my Hilton Diamond status and to get me back on United’s red carpet with 1K status.</li>\n<li>Making 1K -- or more importantly, getting the systemwide upgrades that come with United’s top status was very timely.  I’m heading over to <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Beijing\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beijing\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Beijing</a> in January and being able to confirm an upgrade on United’s 14-hr Chicago-to-Beijing flight – which was one of the best Christmas presents I received…</li>\n<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://www.nimbitmusic.com/saurabbhargava\">Exit</a></em> by Saurab Bhargava</li>\n</ul>\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<ul>\n<li>All the bridge music on this episode from Saurab Bhargava’s new album Chromatique.  Saurab is a friend and long time TravelCommons listener. I’m happy to feature his music. That cut is Exit, which interestingly enough is the first cut on the album.  Here\'s a <a href=\"http://www.nimbitmusic.com/saurabbhargava/#music/chromatique\">link</a> to where you can buy them.</li>\n<li>Tony White wrote in to ask about travel compression socks…\n<ul>\n<li>I am not sure if you covered this topic or not.  Do you have a preference of a minimum amount of hours of travel you choose to wear travel socks?</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n<li>Tony, thanks for the question. No, I haven\'t covered this topic before -- because I’ve never used travel socks.  <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Compression stockings\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compression_stockings\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Compression socks</a> squeeze the feet and calves – to improve circulation, which helps fight feet swelling and <a href=\"http://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/health/health-topics/topics/dvt/\">deep vein thrombosis</a> – blood clots in the lower legs.  When I’ve flown business class on long flights, I haven’t felt much swelling – even on the 16-17 hour NYC to J’burg flight.  I think the lie-flat or near-flat seats reduce the distance between head and feet and so minimize the blood pooling in the lower legs.  Even in coach, I haven\'t felt the need for them on an 8-hour flight to London or Honolulu. However, on a flight back from Hong Kong last year, I wasn\'t able to score an upgrade.  During the 15 hours in coach I definitely felt swelling in my calves.  It was a full flight, so I couldn\'t lift my legs up for any length of time. Indeed, I saw a couple of guys lying on the floor in front of the exit row with their legs in the air.  On my upcoming trip to Beijing, I mentioned that I scored an upgrade to business class on the way out, but my upgrade for the flight back is still waitlisted.  If that second upgrade doesn’t come through this week, I think I\'ll be doing some After Christmas shopping for compression socks.</li>\n<li>Two days before Christmas, <a href=\"http://gogoair.com/\">Gogo</a>, the dominant in-flight <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Wi-Fi\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi-Fi\" rel=\"wikipedia\">Wi-Fi</a> provider, <a href=\"http://venturebeat.com/2011/12/23/gogo-ipo/\">filed paperwork</a> with the SEC for a $100 million IPO.  The filing provided some interesting stats.  Gogo sells Wi-Fi on 4,000 flights a day on 9 out of the 10 North American airlines that offer Wi-Fi, though Delta represents 45% and bankrupt American 18% of their volume.  Gogo is available on over 1,100 planes, which they say is 85 percent of all Wi-Fi-enabled planes in North America, and they’re signed up to add another 525 soon. Impressive on the face of it, but if you start <a href=\"http://www.splatf.com/2011/12/gogo-ipo-filing/\">tumbling the numbers</a>, you quickly find that only 3-4% of passengers are buying – which syncs up with my experience.  We’ve talked about this in past episodes – while in-flight Wi-Fi has good use cases, especially when you don’t want to go radio-silent for 3-4 hours in the middle of the day, it’s a niche offering.  I’ve used it maybe half-a-dozen times in 2011.  From my anecdotal observations – looking over people’s shoulders walking to and from the aft toilets – most people are enjoying the unconnected time to watch a movie, read an e-book, or play Angry Birds (amazing how long that streak has been going).  Doesn’t seem that most folks are willing to pay $10-12 a flight to update their Facebook status.</li>\n<li>A <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"PC World (magazine)\" href=\"http://www.pcworld.com\" rel=\"homepage\">PCWorld</a> article on the <a href=\"http://www.pcworld.com/article/246001/20_best_us_airports_for_tech_travelers.html\">best airports for tech users</a> ranks the 40busiest US airports on outlet availability, speed of Wi-Fi service (either free or paid), and strength of cellular signal – a good set of <a href=\"http://www.pcworld.com/article/246181/best_airports_for_tech_users_how_the_40_busiest_us_airports_stack_up.html\">basic tech criteria</a>.  DFW ranks #1 – it wasn’t #1 on any single category, but earned above average marks across the board.  ORD, my usual hangout, ranked #34 out of 40, which I think is about right.  Finding an available outlet at a gate is like a grown-up Easter Egg hunt – complete with crawling around and looking under chairs. Everyone wants to board with a full battery pack, especially iPhone users. Apple still hasn’t gotten iOS 5 battery life back to where it needs to be.  And for me, cellular signal is much more important than Wi-Fi service because I tend to use my iDevices much more than my laptop in airports.  At ORD, the AT&amp;T 3G service is unbelievably bad.  I’ll have 4 or 5 bars on my iPhone but can’t pull anything – e-mail, web pages, nothing!  Which is the reason I travel with a Verizon 4G hotspot.  After I’ve gotten tired of watching the “Checking for Mail” circle impotently spin, I fire up the hotspot and – Bam! – I’ve got mail.</li>\n<li>But I dunno, hitting #1 for having visible electrical outlets and decent data signal seems damning with faint praise.  To really be a top tech airport, I think you need to have something like Qantas’s <a href=\"http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204296804577123004175940104.html\">set up</a> at Sydney airport – using RFID technology to make check-in, bag check, and plane boarding 5-second events.  I posted a link to the <a href=\"http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204296804577123004175940104.html\">WSJ article</a> on the TravelCommons Facebook page and Lisa Besso commented, saying that it’s a great system.  I’d be willing to suffer through ORD’s lousy AT&amp;T service is United did something like this.</li>\n<li>Early in December, when my family was trying to get their Christmas shopping done, they started bugging me for gift ideas. Sitting in my room in the Scottsdale Hilton Garden Inn (which, by the way, isn’t a bad place), paging through the <a href=\"http://usatoday.com\">USAToday</a>, listening to a podcast on my wireless Motorola headset, I thought a wireless speaker would be nice.  Now I realize that a lot of alarm clocks in hotel rooms have plugs that let you play your iDevice through their speakers, but the quality is marginal at best (except for those few hotels that stock iHome alarm clocks) and you’re stuck in the bedroom – not great if you’re in something like an Embassy or Doubletree Suites.  I asked the Twitter-verse for suggestions and ended up with a Jawbone <a href=\"http://jawbone.com/charitywater\">Jambox</a> under the tree.  My wife said she bought the special edition yellow one so that I wouldn’t miss it when packing up, though the fact that Jawbone donates $50 from each purchase to <a href=\"http://www.charitywater.org/\">charity:water</a> didn’t hurt.  The Jambox isn’t cheap, but it puts out a lot of sound from a small package and has the easiest Bluetooth pairing I’ve seen.  Again, not cheap, but I recommend it.</li>\n<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://www.nimbitmusic.com/saurabbhargava\">Yours in Mine</a> </em>by Saurab Bhargava</li>\n</ul>\n<p><strong>Dining With Social Media</strong></p>\n<ul>\n<li>Finding interesting places to eat is always a challenge for frequent travelers. When you’re traveling to the same place a lot – like I do to Scottsdale – it’s easy to fall into a rut, going to the same places near the office or the hotel every trip.</li>\n<li>When I started traveling, way before Al Gore invented the Internet, you’d rely on recommendations – from folks in the local office, the front desk clerk, a cab driver, a bartender, whomever you ran into.  Or maybe you pulled a top restaurant list out of the local paper or a guidebook.  I remember one project in SF in the early ‘90’s.  The project partner had a list of the top 100 restaurants in SF.  Don’t know where he got it, but it was a Bible to him.  We started at #1 for the project kick-off dinner and started working our way through the list.</li>\n<li>And so here we are, 20 years and billions of dollars of venture capital investment later, and we still rely on personal recommendations.  But on steroids.  The first wave of food social media was powered by the multiplier effect -- you weren’t limited to people you physically meet; you could tap the expertise and passion of a broad group of diners and foodies for broad set of recommendations. <a href=\"http://chowhound.chow.com/boards\">Chowhound</a>, a food discussion board I’ve mentioned in <a title=\"Podcast #22 – Other Side of the Ticket Counter; Finding Local Food\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/11/13/podcast-22-other-side-of-the-ticket-counter-finding-local-food/\">past</a> <a title=\"Podcast #41 – Full to the Brim, What’s the One Thing…?\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2006/06/30/podcast-41-full-to-the-brim-whats-the-one-thing/\">episodes</a>, is a perfect example of that.  I’m still a heavy user.  On my second trip to Phoenix last month, I was on my own for dinner every night.  Around 5 every night, I’ve hit the Phoenix board on Chowhound and start paging through the entries until I found a restaurant that hit my tastebuds.  One night I ended up eating a green chile pork stew in a post Scottsdale place; the next night I had a bowl of pho at a Vietnamese strip mall in Mesa.</li>\n<li>But if the first wave was discussion board-based, the current wave is smartphone-based, using the GPS and camera to build on the personal recommendations</li>\n<li>Those of you following my Twitter feed may notice the occasional tweet that I’ve earned a badge from Untappd. Untappd is a social media app for beer drinkers, or should I say people who enjoy drinking good beer.  Instead of checking in locations on FourSquare, I check in my beer on <a href=\"http://untappd.com/\">Untappd</a>.  It keeps track of the beers I drink and where I’m drinking them, allows friends to see what I’m drinking, and awards badges for “achievements” like checking in 200 unique beers or drinking a stout on Nov 3<sup>rd</sup>, what someone designated <a href=\"http://www.stoutday.com/\">International Stout Day</a>.</li>\n<li>The whole check-in thing gets me out of my hotel room to search out local beers wherever I’m traveling.  On that same trip to Phoenix, I found Papago Brewery in a Scottsdale strip mall and tried their El Robusto Porter. It wasn’t the best beer I’ve had, but it was something different.</li>\n<li>But when I’m on the road, the best use of Untappd for me is discovering bars with interesting beer selections. One night in New York a couple months back, I was wandering around Midtown looking for a good beer bar.  Standing in some ersatz Irish bar, I fired up Untappd; it used the iPhone GPS to display nearby check-ins.  Paging down, I saw interesting beers being checked in at place called the <a href=\"http://www.rattlenhumbarnyc.com/\">Rattle and Hum</a>. A couple of clicks and I have it on the Maps app –it’s about a 10 block walk.  It was a pretty nondescript place.  Indeed, I walked right past it the first time.  I go inside – it’s jammed and has a great beer selection.  A great find courtesy of a dozen people I’ve never met, and through GPS I quickly found it.</li>\n<li>Another app I use is <a href=\"http://foodspotting.com/\">Foodspotting</a>.  It also uses the iPhone GPS.  But rather than just showing a list of near-by restaurants, it cycles through pictures of dishes from those restaurants uploaded by diners.  Reading recommendations and menus are helpful in choosing a restaurant. Actually seeing the dishes takes a whole lot of the guesswork out.  My favorite use case is to park my car in a restaurant-rich neighborhood – I’ve done this in old town Scottsdale and in downtown Bethesda, MD – fire up Foodspotting and start cycling through the pictures.  Pretty quick, I get a sense of what place near-by is best matching my hunger pangs, and then map it with a couple of clicks – or screen presses, I guess.</li>\n<li>I’d like to personally thank all the venture capital firms that have invested billions of dollars over the years in all of this to help me quickly vector in on the perfect cheeseburger.</li>\n<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://www.nimbitmusic.com/saurabbhargava\">Through The Line</a> </em>by Saurab Bhargava</li>\n</ul>\n<p><strong>Frequent Flier Alliances</strong></p>\n<ul>\n<li>I mentioned earlier that I’d returned to 1K status on United; returning to the red boarding carpet at the United gates.  I also keep the 100% mileage matching – getting a bonus mile for each mile flown.  The 2012 changes to United’s awards program appear to reduce the bonus match for the mid-tier Premiere Exec’s –down to 50 or 70% depending on which of the new mid-tiers you hit.</li>\n<li>The interesting thing is – I didn’t fly that much on United last year – less than a dozen flights.  Just enough status miles to make Premiere – United’s entry-level status tier, which you can get the same benefits – free luggage, early boarding – free for a year by signing up for United’s Visa card.</li>\n<li>I earned most of the 100,000 qualifying miles on US Air and Lufthansa.  So I really didn’t earn 1K on United as much as I earned it on the Star Alliance.  Not that this is anything new – some chunk of my 2.5 million lifetime American Advantage miles are from British Airways.  However, with airlines rationalizing/reducing their number of seats; more tightly coordinating flight schedules and code sharing with their alliance partners, these partnerships – Star Alliance, OneWorld, and SkyTeam – become more of a way of life for frequent travelers, especially in those critical areas of status recognition, mileage credit, and mileage redemption.</li>\n<li>It’s not a simple situation.  There are core alliance members – United, Lufthansa, US Air in Star Alliance; Delta and AirFrance in SkyTeam; American and BA in OneWorld.  And then there are the “other” partners, and these can move around.  Aer Lingus, for example, was part of the OneWorld alliance with American, but left in 2007 to go independent, and is now matched up with JetBlue and United (but not Continental), while Virgin Atlantic is matched up with Continental, but not United.  There are promiscuous partners – Hawaiian Airlines and Jet Airways seem to be on everyone’s list – while others like Southwest remain single or assemble their own little group like Emirates.</li>\n<li>International travelers been stringing these beads for 20+ years to assemble their itineraries, but to have to do this domestically is a newer thing.  Because United and US Air are both Star Alliance partners, United has cut back their Chicago-Phoenix service, relying instead on code-sharing with US Air. I book the flight directly with US Air instead – one less step to traverse when something goes wrong – but give them my United Mileage Plus number instead of a Dividend Miles number (do I have one of those?). I still get to pre-board and, most importantly, concentrate my miles to maximize my status level.</li>\n<li>The downside? US Air doesn’t take the free drink coupons United sends out to its 1K members.  If they could get that redemption thing integrated, then it would truly be a seamless partnership</li>\n</ul>\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<ul>\n<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #96</li>\n<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n<li>As I mentioned earlier, all the bridge music on this episode from Saurab Bhargava’s new album Chromatique.  The tracks were <em>Exit</em>, <em>Yours In Mine</em>, and <em>Through The Line</em>.  Here\'s a <a href=\"http://www.nimbitmusic.com/saurabbhargava/#music/chromatique\">link</a> where you can buy the songs or the entire album.</li>\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_96.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #96 — Eating and Drinking with Social Media; Frequent Flier Alliances','','inherit','closed','closed','','880-revision-v1','','','2021-09-28 07:31:21','2021-09-28 12:31:21','',880,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3846',0,'revision','',0),
(3848,1,'2021-09-28 07:34:48','2021-09-28 12:34:48','[caption id=\"attachment_925\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"225\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/image1.jpeg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-925\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/image1-225x300.jpeg\" alt=\"Tiny White Fish in Chinese Soup\" width=\"225\" height=\"300\" /></a> Here\'s Looking At You © Mark Peacock[/caption]\n\nLots of travel has kept me away from the mic -- <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Beijing\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beijing\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener wikipedia\">Beijing</a>, London, <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Vienna\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vienna\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener wikipedia\">Vienna</a>, Phoenix, New York, and New Orleans. Big difference in airline load factor between international and domestic flights. The international flights were at 30-50% capacity while the domestic flights were booked solid. These trips allowed me to compare the different treatment US airlines get in international airports. This was my first trip to China; it made quite an impression. This string of travel has formed a strong opinion that the thermostat is the most important piece of hotel technology. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_97.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #97:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Bless me listeners for I have sinned.  It’s been 8 weeks since my last podcast.  What would be the appropriate penance?  Two Our Fathers, three Hail Marys, sitting next to a mother and lap child on next Tuesday’s 3-1/2 hr flight to Phoenix, and giving up snarky TSA tweets for Lent?  That would be harsh – especially the TSA thing.</li>\n 	<li>I have been doing quite a bit of travel since the last episode.  10 days in Beijing, 3 days in London, 2 days in Vienna, a week in Phoenix, and then the back end of last week in <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"New York City\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener wikipedia\">New York.</a> I hung around Chicago last week, and then was down in New Orleans this week.  March has me in back Phoenix, then Brussels, back in New York, and then down to <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"San Juan, Puerto Rico\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Juan%2C_Puerto_Rico\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener wikipedia\">San Juan, PR</a> for spring break.  In the first quarter of the year – I will have traveled 11 out of the 13 weeks.  That’s probably my most intense run since 3-4 years ago when I traveled every week from the beginning of September – Labor Day – until Christmas week.</li>\n 	<li>The domestic flights have been jampacked while the International flights have been relatively open.  My flight over to Beijing last month, business class was about half full and coach was less than that.  I had the two-side – window and aisle seat – of a United Triple 7 to myself.  It was an upgraded one – with lie-flat seats and big 22-inch monitors. I had both monitors displaying the flight map at different levels of zoom as we went straight north from Chicago. I saw a lot of frozen Ontario.</li>\n 	<li>The flight back from Vienna, by way of London, I didn’t upgrade to Business.  I didn’t need to sleep; I had my iPad fully charged and loaded with content, so Coach was fine.  Business was full anyhow, but Coach was two-thirds empty. I ended up with more room than I would’ve had in Business.  People were sacked out across the middle rows.  I had a two-side to myself, so spread out, did a little work, and then mucked around on my iPad.</li>\n 	<li>It was a rude crash to Earth, though, on my flights in and out of LGA.  I’m 1K on United, but was 15<sup>th</sup> in line for the one remaining upgrade. I felt lucky to get an exit row middle seat. I think even the lap kids had status.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Wanna luv you</em> by <a href=\"http://www.henta.co.uk/\">Henta Ellis</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>In the<a title=\"Podcast #96 — Eating and Drinking with Social Media; Frequent Flier Alliances\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/01/05/podcast-96-dining-with-social-media-frequent-flier-alliances/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> last episode</a>, I talked about the Jawbone Jambox wireless speaker I got for Christmas.  It got a good bit of use in my Beijing hotel room. I was there for 8 days. It only had 2 English-language TV stations – CNN and <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"BBC World News\" href=\"http://www.bbcworldnews.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"homepage noopener\">BBC World News</a>.  You can only watch the 30-minute news rolls just so many times.  I powered through most of my podcast backlog, a few new albums, and a couple of documentaries I’d loaded up before heading over.  Good quality sound and much less awkward than sitting around wearing my Bose headphones.</li>\n 	<li>In <a title=\"Podcast #33 – Listener Mailbag, What’s in My Briefcase?\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2006/02/18/podcast-33-listener-mailbag-whats-in-my-briefcase/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">past episodes</a>, I’ve talked about the “slum” terminals in big airports – the terminal where the non-hub airlines have their couple of gates.  At ORD, United has Terminal 1, American Terminal 3, separated by Terminal 2, the “slum” terminal where US Air, Delta, JetBlue.  In PHX, USAir and Southwest split the renovated shopping mall-like Terminal 4, while everyone else slums it in Terminals 2 and 3.</li>\n 	<li>When I fly home from Europe on US carriers, I feel a bit of the same “slum” treatment.  For what I’m sure are security reasons, the US carrier gates are all seem to be inconveniently located at the end of the longest concourse where there are no services – no restaurants, no shops, no bars.  It’s often a hunt for a restroom.  At <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"London Heathrow Airport\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Heathrow_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener wikipedia\">Heathrow Terminal 2</a>, they tell you it’s a 20-minute walk from security to these gates. No dawdling in duty free.</li>\n 	<li>In Beijing, though, it was a very different story.  The United flights to ORD, SFO, and IAD all left from gates conveniently located in the center of the concourse – a 5-minute walk at most from the restaurants and shops.  Nor was there the extra security screening at the gate that you typically go through in European airports.  I just walked out of the bar and right onto the plane.</li>\n 	<li>In Vienna, I was experienced a different twist.  I was flying to Heathrow on BMI, but somehow ended up in seemed to be a slum satellite terminal entirely devoted to Russian flights.  It was, once again, at the end of the terminal, and down a set of stairs, complete with a smoking room the size of 4 phone booths, in which at one point I counted 7 guys.  It was the only smoking room I saw in the Vienna airport – which may be the reason it and its Russian clientele got stuffed in the slum terminal.  But that still doesn’t explain why my LHR flight ended up there – unless BMI got a smokin’ deal on gate fees…</li>\n 	<li>We’ve had kind of a discussion thread across a few episodes on the TSA’s Global Entry program – pay $100 (which many travel companies like Amex are reimbursing for top tier customers), give the TSA your life story and a set of finger prints, and you skip the US immigration lines for a set of kiosks over in the corner.  It’s been a huge time saver for me and a number of TravelCommons listeners.</li>\n 	<li>So imagine my surprise – returning to Chicago from Vienna by way of Heathrow – I see 5-10 people queued for the Global Entry kiosks and no waiting for a live immigration agent.  I had filled out the customs card on the flight, so I walked up to an agent.  He processed me, saw the GE sticker on my passport and asked why I didn’t use a kiosk.  I pointed over to the line.  “Yup,” he said, “you knew that was going to happen eventually”</li>\n 	<li>Bob Fennerty commented on Facebook\n<ul>\n 	<li>Maybe the model will flip someday: Global Entry will be free and instead of paying to use a kiosk you\'ll pay to be processed by an agent. I always fill out the customs card on the plane so that I can choose to use GE or not. I probably skip the kiosks every fifth or sixth arrival.</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>And if I can slip one last TSA comment in before I try to give it up for Lent, what’s with the incredible waste of machinery at most TSA checkpoints?  On my last trip out of PHX, the TSA lines was 15 minutes – while 4 of 6 lanes of screening equipment sat idle.  Same thing in ORD a week ago – a 15-minute wait in the status line while 4 lanes of adjacent equipment was unmanned.  The problem?  The full body scanners.  Not only does the full body scanner take longer – instead of the second it takes to walk through the metal detector, you have to stand with your arms raised for 5-7 seconds, then wait another 5-10 seconds for the remote screener to radio the “OK” to the gate keeper who then opens the gate to let you out. 10-20 seconds per person instead of the 1-2 seconds it takes for a walk-through metal detector – that math isn’t difficult.</li>\n 	<li>And then add to that the additional staff the body scanner requires – the remote screener, the gate keeper, the one at the front keeping everyone queued… and you see the double effect – not only does the body scanner slow down the two lanes running through it, it also consumes staff that might be manning 1 or 2 of those idle lanes.  I don’t think a little more efficiency and a little less line time is too much to ask from an agency that spent over $8 billion last year.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a question, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is <a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a> -- use the Voice Memo app on your iPhone or something like Virtual Recorder on your Android phone to record and send in an audio comment – or iMovie if you want to send in some video; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em>Snub-Nosed Aardvark</em> by <a href=\"http://podcast.penmachine.com/\">Derek K. Miller</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>First Trip to Beijing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>My first trip in 2012 was a big one from Chicago to Beijing – just short of 14 hours each way on United’s direct Chicago-Beijing flight.  The timing on the flight over was a bit goofy – I left at noon on Tuesday and landed in Beijing around 4:30 Weds afternoon.  I had a hard time figuring out when I was supposed to sleep.  As I mentioned at the start of the show, the flight was a polar route – straight north from Chicago, over Ontario, Alaska, and then down over Siberia.  I did manage to take an afternoon nap, but pretty much putzed around for 14 hours.  I looked out the window a lot after we crossed the Arctic Circle looking to see some Northern Lights – no luck.  Did some work, listened to podcasts, watched a couple of episodes of a BBC documentary on the history of Beijing that I’d ripped down to my iPad.</li>\n 	<li>After 14 hours in a dry metal tube, it was refreshing to walk out into a spacious, modern, clean airport.  As you would expect since the international terminal – Terminal 3 – opened right before the 2008 Summer Olympics.  And it’s big – with more space than all 5 of London Heathrow’s terminals combined.</li>\n 	<li>This was kind of an underlying observation during the whole trip – with more than 1.3 billion people – a lot of things just <em>have</em> to be big in China. While I knew this intellectually before the trip, it didn’t really hit me until I was there.  20 million people in Beijing, and it’s smaller than Shanghai. A local guy I was working with said that he was from a small town about an hour west of Beijing.  “And how many people live in your town?” I asked.  “About a million,” he answered.  And he said this with a straight face.\n\n[caption id=\"attachment_927\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"225\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/photo-1-e13307957324511.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-927\" title=\"Beijing Morning\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/photo-1-e13307957324511-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"225\" height=\"300\" /></a> On A Clear Day You Can See Across the Street © Mark Peacock[/caption]</li>\n 	<li>The other thing I thought I was prepared for, but really wasn’t, was the pollution.  We all remember the warnings before the Summer Olympics – about how the pollution was going to bring the marathoners to their knees.  And then nothing really happened. Well, the day after we arrived, the first day of business, we walked out of the office building and down the block to a restaurant for lunch.  Halfway down the block, I could feel the itching in the back of my throat.  Then my eyes started burning.  By the end of the day, I had a low-grade headache.  And this was just the first day.</li>\n 	<li>Not that it got any better.  We started joking that on a clear day, you could see across the street.  Looking up at the sky, we had no problem looking directly into the sun; one guy got a nice photo with his iPhone.  I was running a pollution headache about every other day. I started looking forward to my flight home</li>\n 	<li>The food was very good – if you like Chinese food, which I do.  We ate at a lot of different restaurants, all of it good.  But at just about every meal, there was one dish that made you go “Hmmm….”</li>\n 	<li>The first night we ate at the hotel.  We had just arrived a couple of hours earlier; were a bit out of it from the time change and the long flight; and so were just looking for a beer and a bit of food – more to keep us awake to try and adjust to the time more than actual hunger. The wait staff didn’t speak much English, but they had a picture menu, so we that helped us do “point &amp; shoot” ordering.  We’ll take one of those and those and those and those – and 4 beers.  The waiter went away, and then came back with a colleague – who could speak a bit of English. “I’m sorry,” she said, “ but we’re out of the pickled donkey meat appetizer you chose, but we can substitute the specially spiced donkey meat instead.”  And then she walked off.  And brought back the specially spiced donkey meat.  In the next couple of days, we learned that donkey meat is a Beijing specialty.  Shanghai? No donkey meat.  But Beijing, you can get donkey meat. Guess we lucked out on our first meal.</li>\n 	<li>It was always something. Like when they split the head of the Peking duck and served it on a plate so you could pick at the brains. Or gave me a cup the fish soup with slimy water lily stems and small albino fish staring up at me. Or at the hot pot restaurant where what I though was brown tofu was actually some sort of pressed loaf of duck blood.  And, at just about every meal, there was a plate of jellyfish.</li>\n 	<li>But when I wanted to share pictures of this food with friends on Facebook, I ran smack up against the Great Firewall of China. Logged into the hotel’s Wi-Fi, I could Skype back home, run e-mail, do most everything – except access Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.  All blocked, but not with a big “Do Not Go Here/Turn Back” error page. It’s like those sites don’t exist – you get a blank web page and you watch it churn and churn and churn, waiting for a reply, until either you give up and move on, or the browser times out.</li>\n 	<li>For me, it wasn’t that tough to get around.  I just fired up our corporate Cisco VPN client, nailed up a secure connection to our Scottsdale data center, and bingo, I had a nice tunnel through the Great Firewall. I updated my Facebook and Twitter statuses. Posted a picture of the albino fish soup to Facebook; I was social again. I was also able to download content in iTunes that had been unavailable before – I guess for copyright reasons – things like podcasts from the BBC. Coming onto the Internet from our Arizona data center with a US IP address, everything was back to normal.</li>\n 	<li>Before I left, I had been pleasantly surprised to find that AT&amp;T’s international data plan included China.  With this trip and a European trip 2 weeks after, I had bought a 125 MB “bucket of data” for $50 just in case.  On the ground in Beijing, trying to find my way around, 3G connectivity was no problem. But what really surprised me was that I was able to connect to Facebook and Twitter with my iPhone.  For some reason, the Great Firewall had missed mobile data.</li>\n 	<li>But even with my social networks reestablished, after 8 days in Beijing, I was out of eyedrops and ibuprofen; I was kinda tired of jellyfish. And with all the Beijingers heading back to their “small towns” for the Lunar New Year festivities, it was also time for me to head home</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em>Baja Taxi</em> by <a href=\"http://www.brain-buckit.com/\">Brain Buckit</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Most Important Hotel Technology</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>On my Beijing trip, I spent just short of 28 hours on United Triple 7s – a little more than a day.  I spent 8 days in my hotel though, so no matter how good or bad the United flights were, it’s the hotel that would make or break the trip.</li>\n 	<li>I stayed in a nice hotel – it was in the north part of the city, right by the Olympic Village.  I could see the Bird’s Nest stadium lit up orange every night. I upgraded my room for an extra $10-15/night so I had a nice sitting area – a couch, chair, a little coffee table – or I guess in China, it would be a tea table.  Some extra space so I wouldn’t have to sit on my bed the whole time.</li>\n 	<li>We’ve talked in a <a title=\"Podcast #85 — Importance of Hotel Bathrooms; Maximizing Miles\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2010/11/30/podcast-85-importance-of-hotel-bathrooms-maximizing-miles/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">past episode</a> about how the importance of the hotel bathroom is often overlooked.  Not in this room – it was modern, clean, spacious, and the shower had good water pressure.</li>\n 	<li>But as we’ve talked, a lot of the talk has been about new hotel technology. La Quinta, a US bargain chain, is making noise about their rollout of flat screen HDTVs that let you plug your gaming or iDevices into them. Higher-end hotels are loaning out iPads during your stay.</li>\n 	<li>After my 8 days in Beijing, though, I decided that the single most important technology in my hotel room is neither the flat screen TV nor my Jawbone Jambox speaker – it was the thermostat.  For the first 5 days, everything worked fine – my room was a comfortable 21 degrees C or 70 degrees F.  Then one night, my thermostat decided I was too cold.  After a lousy night’s sleep, I woke up to 25 degrees C or 77 degrees F.  I pushed every button on that thermostat, turned it off and on, even downloaded the manual from the Internet and actually read it, but no luck. And, of course, the hotel front desk and engineering staff was of no use.  They came up and pushed the same buttons I did – and got the same results.</li>\n 	<li>Their suggestion – open a window.  Which would’ve been a reasonable one if the Beijing air wasn’t so polluted.  As it was, with the thermostat turned off, the outside air began to leak into the room. I could taste the pollution in my mouth when I walked into my room.</li>\n 	<li>Maybe I’m a wimp, but after 3 days of this, I would’ve happily traded the flat screen TV and its 2 English-language channels for a working thermostat.</li>\n 	<li>It’s pretty common sense – first and foremost I want my hotel room to be comfortable. It kinda goes back to Maslow’s hierarchy – you have to meet my basic physiological needs – the right room temperature, a good night’s sleep, a decent shower – before I can begin to think about the self-actualizing potential of half-a-dozen channels of high-def sports programming.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #97</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from the <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/\">Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_97.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #97 — 1st Trip to Beijing; Most Important Hotel Technology','','inherit','closed','closed','','913-revision-v1','','','2021-09-28 07:34:48','2021-09-28 12:34:48','',913,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3848',0,'revision','',0),
(3849,1,'2021-09-28 07:35:35','2021-09-28 12:35:35','[caption id=\"attachment_941\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\" caption=\"Any Way for Breakfast © Mark Peacock\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/IMG_1159.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-941\" title=\"IMG_1159\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/IMG_1159-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a>[/caption]\n\nRecent surveys by<a href=\"http://www.gadling.com/2012/02/02/tripadvisor-survey-reveals-wifi-is-a-travelers-top-amenity/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> TripAdvisor</a> and <a href=\"http://travel.usatoday.com/hotels/post/2012/04/survey-reveals-hotels-guests-want-wifi-over-everything-else/666250/1\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Hotels.com</a> report that the most popular hotel amenity is free WiFi. If they both didn\'t misplace a decimal point, then they surveyed the wrong travelers. &nbsp;Experienced travelers know that the most important amenity is the free hotel breakfast.\n\nNow I\'m not denying that the growth of mobile devices -- smartphones, tablets, laptops -- has made network access vital. And with everyone posting experiences and photos on <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"http://twitter.com/#!/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Twitter</a>, Foursquare, Instagram, <a href=\"http://www.tripadvisor.com/members/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">TripAdvisor</a>,... network access is important to every guest -- business travelers <em>and</em> vacationing families. But frequent travelers have learned that free hotel WiFi is a tease -- reasonably fast at 1pm when no one is in the hotel; an exercise in frustration at 9pm when you\'re trying to Skype with your kids or download tomorrow\'s presentation. &nbsp;Most of us long ago ponied up the extra $40-50/month to tether our laptops to our smartphones or bought a separate mobile WiFI hotspot (preferably from someone other than our smartphone carrier). So free WiFi as the most important hotel amenity? Not so much. For me, a good breakfast is much more important.\n\nGrowing up, we all heard that breakfast is the most important meal of the day, but it\'s also is the easiest to skip when you\'re on the road. A 2011 <a href=\"http://articles.nydailynews.com/2011-10-17/entertainment/30311618_1_important-meal-breakfast-skipping-time-or-appetite\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">survey</a> estmated that 31 million Americans skipped breakfast while two university studies found that eating breakfast reduced overeating throughout the day and subsequent weight gain.\n\nWhich is all well and good, but for me the free hotel breakfast is about convenience. Unless you\'re in a dense urban area like Manhattan or the Chicago Loop or Central London, your hotel is likely centered in a large parking lot off a busy intersection. &nbsp;Running around the corner for a quick breakfast sandwich probably isn\'t an option. And I\'m not interested in dropping $20 on the breakfast buffet, not for a 10-minute bite. &nbsp;I typically just want an egg, a couple of slices of bacon and a cup of coffee while I cool down from 30 minutes on the elliptical trainer. Grabbing that in the hotel makes it easy; saves one stop on the drive into the office. And it let\'s me brush my teeth <em>after</em>&nbsp;breakfast for a fresh start to the day.','Best Hotel Amenity? Free Breakfast','','inherit','closed','closed','','931-revision-v1','','','2021-09-28 07:35:35','2021-09-28 12:35:35','',931,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3849',0,'revision','',0),
(3850,1,'2021-09-28 07:36:28','2021-09-28 12:36:28','[caption id=\"attachment_952\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"200\" caption=\"Tweeting Apologies © Mark Peacock\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/photo.png\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-952\" title=\"AA Tweets &quot;I\'m Sorry&quot;\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/photo-200x300.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"200\" height=\"300\"></a>[/caption]\n\n<a href=\"http://aa.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">American Airlines</a> has been a bit more forward over the past month in letting me know they care about me.&nbsp; A phone conversation, replies to my Tweets – I haven’t had this level of attention from AA in the prior 27 years and 2.4 million miles that I’ve flown them.&nbsp; However, I’m not sure this new effort is having its intended effect.\n\nThe reason for the change is obvious.&nbsp; American is going through Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings and trying to fend off an <a href=\"http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304811304577365744001720940.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">end-around acquisition</a> by US Airways.&nbsp; In the midst of all this turmoil, they need to secure their most important assets, including their high-volume customers.\n\nA few weeks back, a guy called saying he was from American’s executive office. He wanted to talk to me about my recent flight experiences. “How are we treating you?” he asked. &nbsp;Poor guy. &nbsp;A week earlier, I was on an AA flight returning from spring break in Puerto Rico.&nbsp; Checking in at the kiosk, I found that AA had moved my family and me from row 14 to row 31, the last row on the plane, where we spent 3 hours enjoying the pleasant smell of the lavatories.\n\n“Did anyone offer to help you with re-seating?” he asked. No, I checked in at the self-service kiosk and could see that the flight was full. &nbsp;And I didn’t feel like queuing for 30 minutes so that one of the three gate agents could tell me there’s nothing they can do.&nbsp; The guy was quiet for a moment. “Sorry about that,” he said and offered me some 500-mile upgrades to make up for it.\n\nI’d actually forgotten about that flight experience until the guy called.&nbsp; It wasn’t out of the ordinary, and isn’t unique to American.&nbsp; It happens all the time when equipment is swapped in these days of packed airplanes -- though perhaps a bit more often with American given the age of their <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"McDonnell Douglas MD-80\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_MD-80\" rel=\"wikipedia noopener\" target=\"_blank\">MD-80s</a>.&nbsp; But instead of making me think “How nice of American to ask”, the discussion reminded me of just how lousy that flight home was, and how it ended a great vacation on a down note.\n\nI applaud AA’s willingness to reach out, but I’m not sure that “Sorry about that” is the most effective theme for a customer retention campaign.','American Airlines Reaches Out to Apologize... Again and Again','','inherit','closed','closed','','949-revision-v1','','','2021-09-28 07:36:28','2021-09-28 12:36:28','',949,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3850',0,'revision','',0),
(3852,1,'2021-09-28 07:39:18','2021-09-28 12:39:18','<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/tumblr_lxpxhjKkrS1qgelrio1_500.jpeg\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-969\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/tumblr_lxpxhjKkrS1qgelrio1_500-300x176.jpeg\" alt=\"The Great Train Robbery Movie Poster\" width=\"300\" height=\"176\" /></a>\nA backpack stolen from the train to the airport -- or more specifically, passports inside the stolen backpack -- unexpectedly extends a beer-tasting weekend in Brussels.  During my recent international trips, I find that Apple\'s FaceTime and iMessage aren\'t working reliably -- could be because of hotel WiFi bandwidth constraints.  TSA\'s PreCheck expedited security screening feels like you\'ve passed through a time warp and landed back in 1999. Walking the floor of the National Restaurant Association\'s annual trade show, it looks like restaurants are banking on their customers carrying smartphones and want to use them for wait list paging, bar tabs, and payments. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_98.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #98:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>It was 7 years ago this month that I recorded the<a title=\"First TravelCommons Podcast\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/05/15/first-travelcommons-podcast/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> first TravelCommons podcast</a> in the bathroom of the Wardman Park Marriott in Northwest Washington DC on May 15, 2005. If I were just a little bit better at right-to-left planning I would’ve had this be episode 100.</li>\n 	<li>I was in DC a couple of weeks ago, staying in Chevy Chase this time, a couple of stops further up the <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Line_(Washington_Metro)\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Red Line</a>, because the Wardman Park was sold out. But getting off at the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Woodley Park, Washington, D.C.\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodley_Park%2C_Washington%2C_D.C.\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener wikipedia\">Woodley Park</a> Metro stop to walk over to <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Adams Morgan\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adams_Morgan\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener wikipedia\">Adams Morgan</a> reminded me of how long I’ve been doing this. Long time listeners will remember when this was a weekly and then a biweekly podcast.  In that first year, I did 39 episodes. Quite a difference to this year when I’m working to get them out bimonthly</li>\n 	<li>Not for lack of travel, though – or maybe because of it.  I got some personal travel in – a long weekend in Brussels to drink some beer – OK, a lot of beer – with my son, and then a week in Puerto Rico with my wife, daughter, and some friends.  And business travel to Phoenix, Florida, New York, DC (which I mentioned), San Francisco, and a couple trips to Dallas.  So less international travel than before the last episode; instead flying domestically during the huge smear of Spring Break family vacations that the month of March has become.</li>\n 	<li>Other than jam-full planes, though, I don’t remember being too annoyed with the families. Except perhaps in<a href=\"http://www.flylcpa.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> Ft Myers, FL</a> where Spring Break families plus full body scanners plus no status line made for a long wait.</li>\n 	<li>I don’t know if the parents are more vigilant or I’m more self-absorbed, but, other than Ft Myers, it felt less painful than past Spring Breaks. Perhaps the spate of airlines booting off families with unruly kids has led to some throwback parenting – a quick nip of brandy at the gate before pre-boarding. Just a nip, though, ‘cause it couldn’t be more than a 3 oz bottle to make it past security.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/duckett/23334\"><em>Another Girl</em></a> by duckett</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Speaking of throwbacks, on one of my flights down to Dallas, I had what could only be called a throwback security experience in the TSA <a href=\"http://www.tsa.gov/what_we_do/escreening.shtm\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">PreCheck</a> line. I walked up to the status-only line in ORD Terminal 3. There’s usually someone at the entry point looking at boarding passes, checking for status. But this time, she had a desk and a barcode reader like the TSA use at the ID check. She scanned my boarding pass and waved me over to the left. I walked past a PreCheck sign, but it really didn’t register – for morning flights, I don’t get my first cup of coffee until I’m on the other side of security.  The line moved quickly. As I started to run my drill – take off the shoes, drop the jacket from my shoulders, pull out the laptop and iPad – the TSA person told me – and every other person in the PreCheck line – to stop. Put your bags through the Xray, leave your shoes and jacket on, walk through the metal detector and move along.  It was <a href=\"https://twitter.com/#!/mpeacock/status/194393555677097984\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">too easy</a>.  I felt like I was back in 1999/2000 – the turn of the century; a nostalgia moment.</li>\n</ul>\n[caption id=\"attachment_968\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"225\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/IMG_1119.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-968\" title=\"TSA-Safe Hot Sauce\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/IMG_1119-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"225\" height=\"300\" /></a> TSA-Safe Hot Sauce © Mark Peacock[/caption]\n<ul>\n 	<li>Walking through <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Old San Juan, Puerto Rico\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_San_Juan%2C_Puerto_Rico\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener wikipedia\">Old San Juan</a>, I walked through one of those gourmet condiment shops – the kind that sells hot sauces and mustard and the like. This one was called “Spicy Caribbee”. What caught my eye, though, was the package of three bottles in a one-quart plastic bag.  The shelf tag had a picture of a plane and said “Onboard friendly. Meets TSA 3 oz size limit”. Just brilliant. I can’t tell you how many times I pass up buying things like that because I’m doing carry-on.  As we were doing in Puerto Rico. But my wife bought the 3-pack as a gift for her brother. The TSA guy at San Juan airport gave it a second look as it came out of the X-ray machine, but let it pass. If you didn’t see the picture on Twitter or Facebook, I’ll post it in the show notes.</li>\n 	<li>Apple has been launching a new data service with each iPhone release – <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"FaceTime\" href=\"http://www.apple.com/iphone/features/facetime.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"homepage noopener\">FaceTime</a> video calling with iOS 4; iMessage, a replacement for SMS in <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"IOS\" href=\"http://www.apple.com/ios\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"homepage noopener\">iOS 5</a>. They work pretty well in the US, but they really don’t add that much value here – I have an unlimited family texting plan and am usually not gone long enough to have a burning need for video calling. When I’m overseas – in Europe or Asia – that’s when I really need these products to work – shifting calls and texts from expensive roaming to less expensive data – hotel or office WiFi, or even AT&amp;T’s reasonably priced buckets of international data. But I’m not finding it that reliable – Beiing, Vienna, London,…  I dunno. These Apple data services just don’t feel completely baked in the middle.</li>\n 	<li>Trolling through the Apple support sites, the consensus seems to be that FaceTime requires 100-150 kbps of network bandwidth up <em>and</em> down to work. For most hotel WiFi that I’ve seen – and measured using <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Speedtest.net\" href=\"http://www.speedtest.net/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"homepage noopener\">Speedtest</a>.net – getting the 100-150 kbps download speed shouldn’t be a big problem, but getting that on the upload site – could be a bit dicey. Most broadband is designed to be asymmetrical – it assumes that you’ll be downloading a lot more than you’ll upload. But video chat services like FaceTime and Skype don\'t fit that assumption – you’re sending as much as you’re receiving.</li>\n 	<li>With this in mind, I paid extra for the high bandwidth WiFi at the Brussels Marriott when I was there in March with my son. I figured we’d be FaceTiming or Skype-ing back to my wife and daughter in the US, so I ponied up the extra 4 euro for the 1 Mbps service. But it Skype was still lagging and stuttering when we’d use it in the evening. Firing up Speedtest, I quickly saw why – we were only getting 256 kbps – the basic service, not the upgrade I’d paid for. Calling down to the front desk, I got the typical runaround – oh, we’re sorry we don’t know anything about the Internet service. Here’s the number of the vendor help desk….  I’ve been down this 3-hr rat hole before. I skipped it, went out for another beer, and skipped the meaningless upgrade the next day.</li>\n 	<li>One of the things I did like about the Brussels Marriott’s WiFi service was that my payment covered three simultaneous connections -- in my case, my iPad, my iPhone, and my son’s iPhone. It was, from my experience, a rare acknowledgement to today’s reality – that just about every traveler has a bunch of devices that all need Internet access to completely do their jobs.  The Best Western in Brussels wanted 10 euro a day for each device.</li>\n 	<li>And with everyone posting experiences and photos on <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Twitter</a>, Foursquare, Instagram, TripAdvisor,… you could say that multi-device network access is more important to vacationing families than business travelers.  In the US, this isn’t a problem for me because I travel with a Verizon 4G mobile hotspot. Plug it in (because the battery life is just this side of miserable) and 5 devices are on-line. And, more often than not, at much faster speeds than hotel WiFi, free or not.</li>\n 	<li>Traveling internationally, the Verizon hotspot is a nice paperweight. Some folks I know carry their own mini wireless access point to extend their room’s wired Ethernet.  Apple’s AirPort has been a popular one.  Rather than carry an extra piece of equipment, I use my MacBook Air for the same purpose. Most Windows 7 PCs will do it to.  It takes a couple of steps – enabling Internet sharing and the like – as is well-documented on the web.  You are, however, back to being dependent on the hotel’s bandwidth.</li>\n 	<li>When I was in China, where I used this trick, I could see the hotel network speed crash at around 6:30 every morning. I don’t know if it was all the guests waking up and checking e-mail or the hotel was sending their overnight financials back to the home office, but Skype calls home would pixelate, lag, and then just give up. Luckily, I never really got onto local Beijing time and was up at 4:30, 5:00 every morning. Sometimes it good to have a bit of jet lag.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a question, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is <a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a> -- use the Voice Memo app on your iPhone or something like Virtual Recorder on your Android phone to record and send in an audio comment – or iMovie if you want to send in some video; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/flatwound/14476\"><em>The Long Goodbye</em></a> by John Pazden</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Airport Train Robbery</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>I have to be honest with you. I have been putting off writing this segment for over a month. I’ve written blog posts on the web site about <a title=\"Best Hotel Amenity? Free Breakfast\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/04/21/best-hotel-amenity-free-breakfast/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">free hotel breakfasts</a> and how American Airlines is suddenly<a title=\"American Airlines Reaches Out to Apologize… Again and Again\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/05/01/american-airlines-reaches-out-to-apologize-again-and-again/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> increasing their customer outreach</a>, posted more stuff on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">TravelCommons Facebook page</a>… Just procrastinating because I really don’t want to write this segment, but I know I need to.</li>\n 	<li>Let’s start out with stipulating something – I was stupid. Now that’s not the hard thing to write.  I own up to do doing stupid things on a regularly scheduled basis.  The procrastination comes from how deeply embarrassed I am by my stupid act. Here I am – supposedly an experienced world traveler, seen/done most things many times over, gives advice to others – making the rookie-est of rookie mistakes.  The shame and anger and more shame that burbled up every time I started <em>thinking</em> about writing this made me push it away</li>\n 	<li>Early Sunday morning in Brussels.  My son and I finish our coffee in the Starbucks in the train station, unplug our variety of mobile devices, and head down the stairs to catch the train to the airport for our flight back to Chicago. We’d been in Belgium for 3 days eating and drinking beer.  Mostly drinking beer.  The train is a little late, but that’s OK because this is an earlier train than we’d intended to take. We’ll get to the airport in plenty of time.</li>\n 	<li>My son and I each have a rolling suitcase and a backpack – no need to check luggage for a 3-day beer drinking expedition.  I put his suitcase on the rack overhead.  The car got crowded as the train made more stops.  I put my backpack in the rack also. I was reading the Sports section of the USAToday on my iPad, catching up on the first two rounds of the NCAA basketball tournament, trying to figure out how badly my bracket had been blown up by some of the upsets.</li>\n 	<li>The train pulls into the airport station. I reach up to pull our bags out of the rack. I see my son’s suitcase. I don’t see my backpack.  Instant shot of panic. I look down – was I mistaken, did I not put it up there? I look around – did someone pull it down by mistake?  I walk over the seats to scan the people queued in the aisle – can I catch the thief?  I try to ask the train conductors. I run off the train, scanning passengers as they stream off the platform.</li>\n 	<li>No luck. My backpack is gone. And so is my Nikon camera, my Jawbone Jambox speaker, my Bose headphones, my United Airlines drink coupons, my Moleskine travel journal with notes from vacations over the last 6 years, and our passports.</li>\n 	<li>So let’s recap the key elements of my stupidity in some sort of time order… putting our passports in the backpack instead of my coat pocket; putting the more easily grabbed piece of luggage in the overhead rack; having my nose stuck in my iPad instead of paying attention to my surroundings.  All things I knew then and have diligently avoided before.</li>\n 	<li>I eventually go upstairs to the United ticket desk and confirm what I already knew – we can’t get back into the US without passports, so we weren’t going home today. The ticket agent was as helpful as she could be – pointed me to the police station in the airport so I could file a report and rebooked us without any hassle even though we were on rewards tickets.</li>\n 	<li>We walked down the terminal to the police station. We only waited a couple of minutes.  The officer was a great guy.  Took my statement, quickly created the report – it was a painless 15 minutes. “We get 10-12 of these a day,” he said. Guess I’m not alone in my stupidity.</li>\n 	<li>While he was typing up the report, I called the embassy and got through to a live person. Not quite sure where this live person was, but she put me through to the on-call duty officer who, again, was very helpful.  Police report – good that I was getting it; it would be necessary for the replacement passport.  He would have our names on the embassy admissions list for tomorrow morning, and told me where we could get passport pictures taken on a Sunday afternoon.</li>\n 	<li>I hit Booking.com site on my iPhone and booked the Best Western right by the train station and not far from the US Embassy.  With all that done, there was nothing left to do at the airport.  We headed back down to the train station and went back to Brussels.</li>\n 	<li>Monday morning we packed again, hoping that we’d be able to get our passports in time to catch the 11am flight to Chicago or the 11:30 to DC. We got to the embassy 20 minutes before it opened and were the first in line by 3 minutes. A pleasant security guard had us queue a couple hundred yards away from the door until opening time. People in line were either replacing stolen passports (again, not alone in my stupidity) or applying for visas. We walked to the security gatehouse at 8am. Good thing the duty officer had put our names on the “admit” list. They screened us one family at a time – everything X-rayed, but no full body scanners.  Backpacks, briefcases, luggage all stayed outside as did all electronics – no mobile phones, iPads, laptops. Luckily, I had printed everything out at the hotel.  They seemed to call the numbers quickly, though the folks for visas seemed to move through quicker. We watched the clock. We had to leave no later than 10:30 to have a shot at the 11:30 flight.</li>\n 	<li>Our number was called. We went into a small room – my son and I on one side of bullet proof glass, the consular officer on the other.  He was a good guy. He asked us what happened; walked through our replacement application – he was nicely probing, checking that our facts aligned. He gently jammed me (rightfully so) about taking better care of the replacement passports and told us he’d have us out shortly. I looked at the clock – we had a shot to make the flight to DC.</li>\n 	<li>We went back to the main room and waited. And waited. And waited.  Watching the clock, I saw our chance to get home slowly dissolve. We waited an hour for our replacement passports. We walked in at 8am and walked out at 11am. Not bad turnaround time, but not good enough to get us home that day.</li>\n 	<li>It could’ve been much worse. Everyone I dealt with was very pleasant and helpful. My son and I took advantage of our extra time to sample just a few more Belgian beers. I had a very nice cassoulet for lunch on Monday that took a bit of the sting out of not making the DC flight.</li>\n 	<li>But added up, my rookie mistake – paying more attention to the USAToday than my backpack -- cost me about $2,000 in stolen goods, 2 days additional room and board, and expedited passport fees.  As my dad always said, in life, there are no cheap lessons.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/28792\"><em>Slinky Blues</em></a> by Admiral Bob</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Restaurants Want Your Smartphone</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Earlier this month, I spent a Sunday afternoon walking the floor of the National Restaurant Association’s <a href=\"http://www.restaurant.org/show/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">annual show</a> in Chicago’s McCormick Place convention center. If you need reminding of how big the restaurant business is in the US, this show is <em>huge</em>.  There’s everything from a shrimp purveyor from the Mississippi Gulf Coast handing out samples to a commercial pot and pan seller with one of the <em>Top Chef</em> contestants looking lonely in their booth.</li>\n 	<li>I went with a vague idea of checking out new breakfast food trends, perhaps for a follow-up to my blog post about free breakfast being the best hotel amenity.  But as I started wandering (and sampling) around, I found myself in the technology corner of the show. It felt a little like the nerd ghetto, stuffed in the most remote corner of the smallest show floor.</li>\n 	<li>The most obvious trend was iPad menu – replacing the simple, cheap printed menu that can be tossed, dropped, and used as a coaster with a $400 piece of computer hardware. This trend had an accompanying trend – a slew of vendors selling all shapes of metal to lock down these now very expensive menus.</li>\n 	<li>What was more interesting to me were the offerings that replaced pagers, punch cards, bar tabs, and credit cards with smartphones.</li>\n 	<li>The pager one has always seemed a no-brainer to me – replacing those light-up, vibrating pagers that tell you your table is ready with a text message.  Systems with 15 pagers can run $1-2,000 and replacements for the pagers that walk off run around $100 apiece. Replace that with text messages sent from a low-end smartphone at the hostess station – the cost savings are obvious. The offerings I saw weren’t quite so DIY – they combined waiting lists, wait time tracking, and text messaging into a single iPad app (of course).</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://tabbedout.com/\">TabbedOut</a> is an interesting app, basically extending the restaurant or bar’s order and cash register system to your smartphone. Download the app, load it with your credit cards and you pay your bar tab from your phone – with the de rigour integration to Facebook, Foursquare and Twitter.</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://www.thelevelup.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">LevelUp</a> is another smartphone payment app. It’s kinda like the Starbucks app – link the app to a card – the Starbucks app links to one or more of your Starbucks cards; LevelUp to a credit card – when you’re ready to pay, the app generates a bar code or QR code for the cashier to scan and you’re good to go. I use Starbucks app all the time to buy a coffee after I work out – don’t have to carry cash or a Starbucks card. LevelUp looks to be as convenient, but they don’t have the coverage yet – I’ve only seen them at a couple of food trucks.</li>\n 	<li>This push, moving pagers, bar tabs, credit cards – the assortment of physical bits and pieces that restaurants handle – into the virtual realm makes sense as more people carry smartphones.  It assumes, though, that everyone can grab enough bandwidth for these transactions to happen. Which may explain another trend I saw on the floor – lots of booths peddling low maintenance ways for restaurants to offer WiFi to their customers</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #98</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from the <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">ccMixter</a></li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_98.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #98 — Stolen Luggage & Passports; Restaurants Want Your Smartphone','','inherit','closed','closed','','961-revision-v1','','','2021-09-28 07:39:18','2021-09-28 12:39:18','',961,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3852',0,'revision','',0),
(3853,1,'2021-09-28 07:39:58','2021-09-28 12:39:58','[caption id=\"attachment_984\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"188\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/tipping.png\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-984\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/tipping-188x300.png\" alt=\"Tipping Guide from Hospitality Management Schools webstie\" width=\"188\" height=\"300\"></a> Tipping Guide from Hospitality Management Schools webstie[/caption]\n\nFor a simple calculation that can be performed on a four-function calculator with buttons to spare, determining the right tip seems mystify a large portion of the traveling public. &nbsp; Searching Apple\'s App Store for \"tip calculator\" returns almost 600 apps for the iPhone. &nbsp;The Hospitality Management Schools\' web site just published a comprehensive tipping <a href=\"http://www.hospitalitymanagementschools.org/tipping\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">guide</a>, providing a nice range of standard tip amounts that should help folks avoid some awkward moments.\n\nThere is a surprising amount of emotion wrapped up in determining a tip. You want to appropriately acknowledge the service someone has just given you, but that then gets combined with the image you want to portray. &nbsp;The waiter was really rude to me, but I don\'t want to seem mean, but I can\'t feel like I\'ve let him get away with being rude, but I don\'t want a confrontation.... &nbsp;It\'s an internal dialogue that gets replayed again and again as the pen hovers over the blank \"Tip\" line on the credit card receipt.\n\nI think I\'m a decent tipper -- I roughly calculate 15% of the post-tax check amount in my head and then round it up a dollar or two. &nbsp;I tip more generously to people who spend more time with me. &nbsp;I eat a lot of meals alone at restaurant bars and so appreciate a bit of conversation. &nbsp;If a bartender takes time to chat with me while cleaning his glasses, gives me a reason not to shovel down my food or stare vacantly at the always-present ESPN SportCenter behind the bar, the tip calculation starts at 20%.\n\nI do a lousy job of tipping hotel maids -- lousy meaning I usually don\'t. &nbsp;I think it\'s because I never see them. &nbsp;I\'m usually in and out of my room in single night -- used one towel, shed some briefcase papers in the garbage can, and have checked out before the maid cart hits the floor. &nbsp;I\'m thinking more about finding the nearest Starbucks than&nbsp;about&nbsp;leaving a couple of bucks behind on the dresser. &nbsp;The times I do tip maids is when I\'ve been working all day in my room -- and have to move out of the way so they can do their job. &nbsp;Seeing them make the bed, straighten my toiletries, empty my garbage reminds me that they\'re doing just as much as the considerate bartender to make me feel at home. &nbsp;It\'s the personal interaction that drives the desire to tip -- and the embarrassment of not tipping.','How Much Do You Want to Tip?','','inherit','closed','closed','','983-revision-v1','','','2021-09-28 07:39:58','2021-09-28 12:39:58','',983,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3853',0,'revision','',0),
(3855,1,'2021-09-28 18:29:56','2021-09-28 23:29:56','[caption id=\"attachment_1002\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/4373298709_b408072134_b.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1002\" title=\"Thanks for flying with us\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/4373298709_b408072134_b-300x225.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\" /></a> Thanks for flying with us © Chris Freeland / Flickr[/caption]\n\nUnited Airlines\' CFO garnered some less-than-desired attention last month when he said that \"certain groups\" in the Mileage Plus program were \"over-entitled\".  United is the most recent airline to work on \"realigning benefits\" -- downgrading their elite fliers, especially those in the lower status tiers. We talk about how that impacts frequent flier strategies. We also talk about adjustments needed when frequent travelers come off the road -- how to find time to yourself. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_99.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #99:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Been off the road more than I’ve been on it since the <a title=\"Podcast #98 — Stolen Luggage &amp; Passports; Restaurants Want Your Smartphone\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/05/20/podcast-98-stolen-luggage-restaurants-want-your-smartphone/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">last episode</a>.  Just another trip to Dallas allowing me to take advantage again of the TSA’s <a href=\"http://www.tsa.gov/what_we_do/escreening.shtm\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">PreCheck</a> line. Getting envious and puzzled looks from other American Airlines elite fliers, getting waved through the special gate, tossing my bags on the X-Ray conveyer belt, sauntering through the metal detector, and then on my way to the gate. A 45-second exercise while they’re taking off their jackets, shoes, belts; emptying their pockets of coins, gum wrappers, business cards; pulling out their laptops, iPads, Kindles, 1-quart baggie of liquid toiletries; holding their arms up in the full-body scanner, waiting behind the tape until someone radios the “OK”; then reassembling their bags and getting re-dressed – belt, shoes, jacket, making sure nothing’s left behind before heading to the gate.</li>\n 	<li>And this is in the status line.  I’m seriously thinking of limiting my travels to only those places with TSA PreCheck lines…</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/Kirkoid/31109\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><em>Leviathan</em></a> by Kirkoid</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>While my podcasting cadence has slowed, I’ve written a few more blog posts of late.  In one, I disagreed with some surveys that called free WiFi the most important hotel amenity.  I <a title=\"Best Hotel Amenity? Free Breakfast\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/04/21/best-hotel-amenity-free-breakfast/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">made the case</a> for free breakfast.  First, it’s a great convenience.  Unless you’re staying downtown in a city, like in London or New York or San Francisco, getting breakfast outside of the hotel means involves a car ride.  Which usually then translates into Starbucks – and I’m a big fan of the spinach feta cheese wrap – or McDonald’s – where I’ll fall back to <strong>1 </strong>breakfast burrito no matter how many times they try to sell me two – or Dunkin Donuts where they inevitably give me a hard time about walking in with a cup of Starbucks coffee.  And, as Rich Fraser puts it, a great way to stretch your per diem dollars…\n<ul>\n 	<li>“Can’t beat it on value, although you have to get quite creative when it comes to those reconstituted eggs. Various combinations of cheese, ham, and hot sauce make them much more palatable. That, some yogurt, a cup of oatmeal and a piece of fruit, and I’m good until lunch without snacking. Just have to avoid the biscuits and gravy at all costs!”</li>\n</ul>\n[caption id=\"attachment_1009\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/IMG_1145.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1009\" title=\"Free Hotel Coffee\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/IMG_1145-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Free Hotel Coffee[/caption]</li>\n 	<li>Leo Vegoda, however is suspicious of the whole “free” thing\n<ul>\n 	<li>I would prefer to have good Internet access that I pay for or a good breakfast that I pay for than something free, which will inevitably be of lower quality. After all, on a business trip, sustenance and network access are reasonable business expenses. That being said, I think the best “amenity” I want at a hotel is a fantastic concierge. A superb concierge is much better than a quick search on yelp.com and will help make your stay in a city far more fulfilling.</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Thanks to both Rich and Leo for leaving their comments on the TravelCommons web site.</li>\n 	<li>Scott Drake pinged me on Twitter – “Just heard the first 2 minutes of <a title=\"Podcast #97 — 1st Trip to Beijing; Most Important Hotel Technology\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/03/03/podcast-97-first-trip-to-beijing-most-important-hotel-technology/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">episode #97</a>”, he wrote, which was about my first trip to Beijing in January. “You could taste the pollution.  Yes!  People look at me like I\'m crazy when I say that!  Glad I\'m not alone.” Oh no, you’re not alone.  The other 3 guys with me on that trip thought the same thing – you could taste it when you breathed in and when you coughed it back out. Don’t know which I enjoyed more on our Saturday trip out to the Great Wall – the breathtaking views or the fact that you could take a breath without coughing…</li>\n 	<li>In the <a title=\"Podcast #98 — Stolen Luggage &amp; Passports; Restaurants Want Your Smartphone\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/05/20/podcast-98-stolen-luggage-restaurants-want-your-smartphone/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">last episode</a>, I talked about restaurants pushing their own sort of BYOD – bring your own device – agenda on customers; taking advantage of customers’ smartphones to do things that restaurant-provided devices like pagers or credit card machines used to.  Not that it’s a bad thing; it actually makes a lot of sense.  I tried LevelUp, one of the mobile payment apps I mentioned, last week at a food truck – Duck n’ Roll – in downtown Chicago. I’m not sure the truck took cash.  The owner had an iPhone with a Square credit card reader and also accepted LevelUp.  I started the app on my iPhone – I had already run through the set-up routine, linking it to one of my credit cards.  It displayed a QR code that the truck owner read with the camera on her iPhone.  She pressed a couple of buttons and, boom, we were done.  While she got me my miso short rib bahn mi sandwich, the receipt showed up in my e-mail.  Much easier that paying with a credit card – or even cash.</li>\n 	<li>\n\n[caption id=\"attachment_1011\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"224\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/x2_6bbbfa1.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1011\" title=\"Setting up the cots at Camp O\'Hare...\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/x2_6bbbfa1-224x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"224\" height=\"300\" /></a> Setting up the cots at Camp O\'Hare...[/caption]\n\nAs we get into summer, we get into thunderstorm season, and in the middle of the US, tornado season.  Which reminds me of an incident about this time last year in O’Hare.  I was connecting through O’Hare on my way from a customer meeting in London to a conference in Austin, TX.  No direct flights there. My theory is – if I have to connect through a US airport, I might as well do it through O’Hare. I live 25 minutes from the airport. If things go bad, I can always sleep in my own bed.  It doesn’t work for everyone – check the shownotes for a picture of someone setting themselves up in “Camp O’Hare” for the night – but it does for me.</li>\n 	<li>Anyhow, I arrive from Heathrow early, breeze through Immigration, no problems getting through the TSA in Terminal 3, board my American flight to Austin…  The pilot says that a front is moving in and he’s going to try and get us out before it hits.  Hmmm, I’ve never seen anyone sprint out of O’Hare before – it’s just too big and too crowded.</li>\n 	<li>And it didn’t happen this day.  The front came hit and started rocking that MD-80 like nothing I’ve ever experienced.  We evacuated the plane.  People in the back of the plane began to panic.  “Get moving,” they yelled – or a cleaned-up version of what they yelled.</li>\n 	<li>Sprinting out of the shaking jet bridge back into Terminal 3, we were told “ah, you guys should stay away from the windows” which is a tough order in a concourse with windows on each side. People congregated around the McDonalds and a couple of bars – only windows on one side – and waited for the front to blow through.</li>\n 	<li>Over in Terminal 1 – the United terminal – they moved everyone down into the tunnel between the two concourses.  Much safer and, for those who’ve connected on United through O’Hare, you know it’s much more entertaining with the ceiling neon lights chasing themselves down the tunnel. Though I would guess the soothing New Age music would get on your nerves after a while.</li>\n 	<li>Of course, after all this entertainment, I still needed to get to Austin.  After the front blew through, they reopened the runways and started to untangle the delays – flights trying to get in so they could unload and leave again. After two hours of hemming and hawing, American admitted that our MD-80 was damaged by the jet bridge banging on the rockin’-and-rollin’ airplane during the worst of the winds. No surprise there.</li>\n 	<li>And there were no other flights left to take us to Austin because American had waited so long to cancel. No problem there – I just caught a cab home and slept in my own bed. I was surprised that the first available flight the next day was at 3 in the afternoon. Given I was due to fly back the following morning, that would’ve given me about 12 hours in Austin – 6 of which I would’ve been asleep. I decided to skip it.  But here’s the kicker – American charged me a $150 change fee to cancel my ticket and use it later.  Really?  Weather, they said. No, it was a damaged airplane because your gate agent didn’t pull back the jet bridge.  Weather, they said.  I didn’t fly American for another 6 months.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a question, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is <a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a> -- use the Voice Memo app on your iPhone or something like Virtual Recorder on your Android phone to record and send in an audio comment – or iMovie if you want to send in some video; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/Wired_Ant/36862\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">My Flaming Heart</a> </em>by Wired Ant</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Downgrading Elite Fliers</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Last month, United’s CFO <a href=\"http://travel.usatoday.com/alliance/flights/boardingarea/post/2012/05/Frequently-Flying---United-CFO-Certain-elites-were-over-entitled/697189/1\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">said this</a> about their Mileage Plus program\n<ul>\n 	<li>We had certain groups in this program that were over-entitled if you will. And now we’ve re-aligned the benefits of that program with what the customers and program participants are actually providing to the program, it’s a good change going forward.</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Let’s parse that statement.  The first sentence – certain groups, which I assume means elite Mileage Plus members, were “over-entitled”.  Even if it’s true, you’d think the CFO would be smart enough to follow one of the golden rules of sales – “If it feels good, don’t say it.”  Coming off the industry-worst performance in on-time arrivals and baggage complaints, who would think it’s a good idea to insult a loyal subset of customers – those who bore the brunt of your lousy performance?</li>\n 	<li>The second sentence – we’ve “re-aligned the benefits” with what those customer are providing.  In other words, we were giving those customers too much value for the revenue they were providing us – so we’ve taken away some of what we were giving them so as to balance things out.</li>\n 	<li>In other words, downgrading elite fliers.  United is just the most recent – and probably the most egregious example of late.  Using the Continental merger as cover, United took away probably the most valuable perk from the lowest status level – free advanced booking of Economy Plus seats, seats with extended legroom.  And <a href=\"http://www.flyerguide.com/wiki/index.php/Elite_Levels_(UA)\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">added a new status level</a> – Platinum – at the 75,000-mile level – effectively devaluing their mid-tier status -- Platinum Exec – now “Gold”.  There were other tweaks – none of them positive – but that’s to be expected from an industry that continues to nickel-and-dime its customers for every last bit of revenue it can.</li>\n 	<li>And it’s not just United.  <a href=\"http://www.flyerguide.com/wiki/index.php/SkyMiles_Elite_Levels\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Delta</a> recently reduced the number of free bags its lowest status level fliers can check – from two to one. One more sign that the 25,000-mile status fliers don’t mean that much to the airlines – they really don’t get much more recognition than the guys paying $95/year for an airline credit card.</li>\n 	<li>Which makes sense if you look at the numbers.  When American Airlines started the Advantage program in 1981, it was a loyalty rewards program meant to give frequent fliers a reason to stick with American as deregulation commoditized the industry -- increasing flight choices and lower fares from new competitors.</li>\n 	<li>Today, it’s a major revenue source – a line of business is <a href=\"http://travel.nytimes.com/2012/06/10/travel/have-elite-fliers-been-downgraded.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">estimated to have added $7 billion</a> to the top line of North American carriers last year</li>\n 	<li>For a frequent traveler, these downgrades drive a change in strategy. It used to be that you would always want to concentrate as much of your travel as you could on a single airline in order to hit some level of status because even the bottom tier – the 25,000-mile level, American’s Advantage Gold, United’s Premiere, Delta’s Silver Medallion -- had value.  Today, since you can pretty much buy the bottom tier privileges for a $95 credit card fee (and even there, you can usually get the first year free), it only makes sense to concentrate if you think you can hit the 50,000-mile tier – American’s Advantage Platinum or Delta’s Gold Medallion.  The reduced rewards for bottom-tier status aren’t worth the hassles of twisting your schedule – or paying $50 extra – to fly a single airline.</li>\n 	<li>And the airlines are probably OK with this. The act of flying passengers is probably the least profitable part of an airline nowadays, while selling frequent flier miles to credit card companies is the most profitable. Airlines are shifting from rewarding their most loyal customers to the most profitable.  United’s top-top tier – Global Services – has always been for their highest-spending customers, not their highest-mileage ones.  In some ways, this makes life a bit easier.  Instead of working to earn special treatment, now you can just buy it.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/mika/24945\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Fall to pieces - Silence</a> </em>by mika</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Finding Time When Off The Road</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>I’ve been off the road for 3 weeks now.  Not out of the ordinary for most people. But for me, this is the longest stretch I’ve been home in over a year.  And as always, there’s a bit of an adjustment.</li>\n 	<li>And that’s not to imply that adjustment is negative. I’ve increased the mileage I’ve put on my bike by an order of magnitude. Rather than getting 1, maybe 2 rides a week if I really push it – get up early on a Sunday – I’m getting 3 or 4 a week -- and more mileage because I don’t feel pressure to get off the road so I can do other things.</li>\n 	<li>Indeed, that’s probably the biggest change – the release from the pressure to pack a week’s worth of errands, to do’s, and family time into a 2-3 day window.</li>\n 	<li>Which kinda dovetails into another adjustment – finding alone time. When you travel, there’s plenty of alone time – even when you’re surrounded by people – in TSA queues, in boarding lines, in a center seat on a full plane.  And eating dinner solo at a bar and channel surfing in your hotel room at night.  These are certainly not the highlights of travel, but they do offer you time alone – to think, to listen to music (and podcasts), to read, or just to stare off into space.</li>\n 	<li>Coming off the road, you’re still geared to maximize family or friend or significant other time – even if it means watching lousy TV shows or playing Scrabble.  It’s takes some adjustment to figure out how and where you’ll grab/recreate that alone time – figuring out which lousy TV show you don’t have to watch, where you go off to read or listen to music.</li>\n 	<li>Sunday nights are a good time for me.  When I’m traveling, Sunday night after dinner is pretty much lost.  I lose that last bit of the weekend to getting ready for my Monday morning flight out of ORD – ordering a cab, checking into the flight, packing, checking/topping off the charges on the myriad of electronic devices I seem to now require for travel….  Since my family is used to me disappearing into my home office after Sunday dinner, I’ve kept it up – but I’m reading or writing instead of packing.  It’s that little bit of alone time.</li>\n 	<li>Of course the real adjustment is having to pay for my morning Starbucks stop.  It’s then that you really appreciate the power of the expense report…</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #99</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from the <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">ccMixter</a></li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_99.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #99 — Downgrading Elite Fliers; Finding Time Off the Road','','inherit','closed','closed','','995-revision-v1','','','2021-09-28 18:29:56','2021-09-28 23:29:56','',995,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3855',0,'revision','',0),
(3856,1,'2021-09-28 18:32:58','2021-09-28 23:32:58','[caption id=\"attachment_1023\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"217\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Drive-South-Google-Maps-1.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1023\" title=\"Drive South - Google Maps\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Drive-South-Google-Maps-1-217x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"217\" height=\"300\"></a> A Drive South[/caption]\n\nI\'ve been planning a solo road trip to see some old friends. Driving south on I-65 from Chicago to Louisville, Nashville, and Mobile, and then across Alabama and Mississippi Gulf coasts -- the western half of the Redneck Riviera – then up I-55 to Memphis, and then back home to Chicago. It\'s a 2,000-mile loop of humidity and&nbsp;barbecue.\n\nI &nbsp;decided to try some of the new social trip planning web services. &nbsp;My trip itinerary is very loose -- no hotel reservations; any time commitments of the am/pm type, as in \"I\'ll be in Mobile sometime Saturday night\". &nbsp;I\'ve had good <a title=\"Podcast #96 — Eating and Drinking with Social Media; Frequent Flier Alliances\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/01/05/podcast-96-dining-with-social-media-frequent-flier-alliances/\">experiences</a> using social media apps like <a href=\"http://untappd.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Untappd</a> and <a href=\"http://www.foodspotting.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Foodspotting</a>&nbsp;to find good restaurants or beer bars in new cities, but have never used them to plan a whole trip.\n\nThe first service I tried was&nbsp;<a href=\"http://tripl.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Tripl</a>, but quickly found out it wasn\'t a front-end planning tool. &nbsp;It seems more of a back-end trip recap service. Tripl aggregates Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, and Tripit posts into a \"travel story\" infograph. It\'s an interesting way to keep track of your social network\'s travels, but wasn\'t what I needed.\n\nI next tried <a href=\"http://trippy.com\">Trippy</a>. &nbsp;It bills itself as the \"place for you to collect and share travel ideas\" and to \"get a \'friend-sourced\' itinerary\". Seemed like the perfect tool. &nbsp;I struggled with it though, perhaps because it tries to use too many social media concepts. &nbsp;You can follow travel personalities (Anthony Bourdain) or semi-celebrities (Jason Mraz) a la <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Twitter</a>. You can browse picture tiles of locations and pin them to a board a la <a href=\"http://pinterest.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Pinterest</a>. Or you can create a trip and search for hotels/restaurants/activities to add to your itinerary. Since I\'m not a Pinterest user, the whole board thing confused me; I think in trip itineraries. Once I found the trip planning function, I was good to go.\n\nHowever, the functionality&nbsp;I really wanted to try -- \"friend-sourced\" itineraries, or at least ideas -- was what I quickly turned off because Trippy seemed to post&nbsp;<em>every</em> click to my Facebook feed. As I was clicking away trying to figure out Trippy, my wife yelled from the other room \"Who are all these people and places you\'re liking?\". &nbsp;I popped over to my Facebook News Feed page. &nbsp;Nothing from Trippy. &nbsp;I scrolled down and clicked on the \"Activity Log\" link. &nbsp;There was a couple of pages of posts that Trippy had spewed across my feed. &nbsp;I quickly flipped over to \"App Settings\" and deleted Trippy. &nbsp;Looking at the Trippy account settings, it had checked \"Allow trippy to post to my Facebook timeline\" by default, but there was nowhere that it described just how chatty it would be.\n\nAfter this, I decided to go old school. &nbsp;I hit Google with the \"Top things to do in...\" search phrase, and searched the travel section archives of the <a href=\"http://travel.nytimes.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">New York Times</a> and <a href=\"http://www.chicagotribune.com/travel/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Chicago Tribune</a>. When I found something interesting, I hit the \"Clip to Evernote\" <a href=\"http://evernote.com/webclipper/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">button</a> at the top of my Chrome browser and saved the article into my Drive South notebook in <a href=\"http://evernote.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Evernote</a>. &nbsp;I didn\'t abandon social media completely. &nbsp;I asked for suggestions on Twitter and received back some good suggestion. And my \"Top things\" searches pointed me to TripAdvisor\'s <a href=\"http://www.tripadvisor.com/Attractions-g30709-Activities-Mobile_Alabama.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">suggestions</a>.\n\nMaybe after a couple more iterations, these apps will be useful. &nbsp;But until then, I\'m still clipping articles from newspapers and magazines. &nbsp;The only thing that seems to have changed in two generations of travel planning is replacing my mother\'s physical scissors for Evernote\'s virtual ones.','Social Trip Planning Not Quite Ready...','','inherit','closed','closed','','1021-revision-v1','','','2021-09-28 18:32:58','2021-09-28 23:32:58','',1021,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3856',0,'revision','',0),
(3858,1,'2021-09-28 18:34:39','2021-09-28 23:34:39','[caption id=\"attachment_1039\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/399422_3361993820725_821625873_n.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1039\" title=\"Stax Museum Marquee-Memphis\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/399422_3361993820725_821625873_n-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> One of the stops on my Drive South...[/caption]\n\nBack in the TravelCommons studios after a 2,100-mile drive through the Mid-South. We genuflect quickly to the milestone episode number and then move onto the topics at hand -- best piece of hardware schwag from Google I/O 2012, a slightly icky subway ride from downtown San Francisco to SFO, a grab bag of observations from my southern road trip, and why I find myself breaking up with American Airlines after almost 30 years of travel. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_100.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #100:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Well, here we are at a milestone episode number -- number 100 -- 7 years and a couple of months after I started. It took me 1½ years to do 50 podcasts... and then another 5½ to do 50 more.  Looks like my podcast productivity is exponentially decaying...</li>\n 	<li>But you people still keep hanging around! I do appreciate the kind words that you’ve sent along via FaceBook and Twitter. I am glad that so many of you find this podcast interesting/entertaining. It’s that more than anything else that keeps me plugging away.</li>\n 	<li>Changes on the job front have kept me off the road for business travel, but I’ve managed to fill a couple of the weeks since the last episode with some personal travel.</li>\n 	<li>At the end of June, the family and I headed off to San Francisco.  My son scored an academic ticket to the big geek-a-palooza Google I/O. I think this year’s event sold out in 20 minutes and there were a very limited number of discounted academic tickets, so getting one was a bit like getting one of the golden tickets in <em><a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Willy Wonka &amp; the Chocolate Factory\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willy_Wonka_%26_the_Chocolate_Factory\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"wikipedia noopener noreferrer\">Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory</a></em>.  So while my son watched videos of guys skydiving with Google virtual reality glasses, and dove into the intricacies of Google Maps APIs and the latest whizzy things that Chrome does, my wife, daughter and I did San Francisco tourist stuff -- rode bikes across the Golden Gate Bridge, rode cable cars, hang out in hipster coffee joints -- the sort of stuff that I’ve never quite found time to do in the 10-15 years that I’ve been going to SF for business.</li>\n 	<li>\n\n[caption id=\"attachment_1042\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/564585_3384869592605_665394828_n.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1042\" title=\"I-65 Between Louisville and Nashville\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/564585_3384869592605_665394828_n-300x225.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\" /></a> I-65 From Louisville to Nashville[/caption]\n\nAnd then last week, I decided to do a little trip on my own -- a 2,100-mile loop through the South.  I ran I-65 from top to bottom -- from its start in northern Indiana down to Louisville, Nashville, and <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Mobile, Alabama\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile%2C_Alabama\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"wikipedia noopener noreferrer\">Mobile, AL</a>; across the Mississippi Gulf Coast on US-90 to New Orleans, up I-55 to Memphis, up US-51 to Dyersburg, then across I-155 to <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Sikeston, Missouri\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sikeston%2C_Missouri\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"wikipedia noopener noreferrer\">Sikeston, MO</a>, and then finally up I-57 back to Chicago.  But more about that later in the show.</li>\n 	<li>I have noticed though that whenever I travel for leisure, I don’t travel quite as sharp -- I don’t feel as tightly wrapped, as “in the zone” as I do when I travel for business. On my flight out to SFO, I hit a new level of bad planning, of “non-preparedness.”  I had to reach for the SkyMall catalog before the plane even left the taxiway...</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/stefsax/7785\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Awel</a> </em>by Stefsax</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>I wrote a <a title=\"How Much Do You Want to Tip?\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/06/16/how-much-do-you-want-to-tip/\">blog post</a> last month about tipping. I received a link to a nice infographic from somebody from Hospitalitymangementschools.org -- a web site that I still can’t quite figure out what it is. It seems like a legit web site with information about the hospitality management industry, but there’s no contact information -- just a web submissions form, and the domain name is held in proxy by GoDaddy.  I dunno -- it feels just a little fishy.</li>\n 	<li>Anyhow, the tipping guide infographic was good, if a little wonky on the iPhone, and seemed to offer reasonable advice.  There is a surprising amount of emotion wrapped up in figuring out a tip amount. You want to appropriately acknowledge the service someone has just given you, and that then gets combined with the image you want to portray -- am I a nice generous person, am I a sharp you-won’t-get-anything-by-me person?</li>\n 	<li>Looking at on my own tipping, I think I do well when dealing with a service person face-to-face -- a waiter, a car valet, a hotel bellhop -- but not so well with tipping people I don’t see -- like a hotel maid.</li>\n 	<li>Rich Fraser is in the same place -- both about not tipping cleaning staff and feeling slightly “off” about that\n<ul>\n 	<li>I agree with your take on tipping the housekeeping staff. I’m probably totally off base, but I always considered housekeeping to be a service inherent to my stay. I get that service whether I ask for it or not, as opposed to the bellhop, bartender or concierge, which are optional services.</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>And that’s just dealing with the US. Don’t get me started about international tipping -- which countries it’s an insult to tip, it’s an insult not to tip, which countries you just round the tab up....</li>\n 	<li>One of the highlights of our SF trip was, at the end of each day, seeing what schwag my son hauled back from<a href=\"http://www.techradar.com/news/computing/google-io-2012-top-moments-1086645\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"> Google I/O</a>. These developer sessions have become quite the giveaway spree as companies try to recruit independent developers to their platforms. Microsoft gave away Windows 8 tablets at its last conference, but Google is the one that goes the deepest. Over two days, my son got an unlocked Samsung Galaxy Nexus phone, a Chromebox, the Google Nexus Q media streaming device slash bocce ball stand-in, and a Nexus 7 tablet.  $1,200 of hardware for a $300 academic ticket.  No wonder it sold out in 20 minutes.</li>\n 	<li>The <a href=\"https://play.google.com/store/devices/details?id=nexus_7_8gb\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Nexus 7 tablet</a> was the highlight of the schwag bag.  $200 for the 8 GB model, it directly competes with the Kindle Fire and blows it out of the water. It runs the latest Android version-- 4.1 or Jelly Bean as the droid-heads call it -- while the Fire sits at a custom version of 2.3 or Gingerbread. In those intervening versions, Google has smoothed off a lot of Android’s sharp edges and has significantly improved performance. For the first time, I could see an Android tablet being a real competitor to the iPad.</li>\n 	<li>I also like the 7-inch form factor. Steve Jobs is famous for dismissing anything less than the iPad’s piece-of-paper size. I was surprised, though, how much easier I found reading and web-browsing on this much lighter device. And since most of what I use a tablet for is media consumption -- rather than as an executive laptop replacement -- I’m thinking I may downsize my next tablet. I’ll see if the rumored iPad “mini” appears and then, if not, I may head down the Google route too.</li>\n 	<li>\n\n[caption id=\"attachment_1048\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/IMG_1311.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1048\" title=\"Powell St BART Station\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/IMG_1311-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Can\'t See the Dirt if Everything is Blurry[/caption]\n\nAnd continuing on my periodic trains-to-airports thread, when leaving San Francisco, I took BART -- Bay Area Rapid Transit -- from downtown -- we were staying at the St Francis in Union Square -- to SFO for my flight home. It was a Sunday -- the last Sunday in June -- and a nice sunny, warm day -- a rare event in SF -- which brought out in full force the standard SF mix of street performers, cup rattlers, and tourists.  Getting through this melange with my rolling bag was my first challenge.  Once I got down to the station and in front of the fare machine, I got a bit of sticker shock -- it was $8.25 to get to the airport. Sure, you pay a lot more for London’s Heathrow Express, but it’s a private train company with just one stope.  The BART fare is one of the bigger numbers I’ve hit for a subway system -- Chicago is a flat-rate $2.25 from the Loop to O’Hare; Washington’s Metro is $3 from downtown to Reagan National. Sure, $8.25 is cheaper than a $40 cab ride, but still...</li>\n 	<li>And that sticker shock only sinks in deeper when you get on the train and see how beat-to-hell they are.  They’re the same style trains as the Metro, but they’re in much worse shape. Who thought it was a good idea to put cloth seats on a public transit train?  I wished I had a plastic sheet to sit on.  And I made a bee line to a restroom once I hit SFO to I could wash my hands -- it was just that disgusting.  I’m back to taxis when next in SF.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a question, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- use the Voice Memo app on your iPhone or something like Virtual Recorder on your Android phone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/williams-dusty/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Steam Train</a> </em>by John Williams</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Drive South -- A Southern Road Trip</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>\n\n[caption id=\"attachment_1040\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"226\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/311522_3384921793910_1477911803_n.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1040\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/311522_3384921793910_1477911803_n-226x300.jpg\" alt=\"My &quot;Great Circle&quot; Route Through the Mid-South\" width=\"226\" height=\"300\" /></a> My \"Great Circle\" Route Through the Mid-South[/caption]\n\nAs I mentioned at the top of the show, I did a “great circle” road trip of the Mid-South earlier this month -- me, a full-up old 30 GB click-wheel iPod, a list of restaurants and bars, and a suitcase of nothing more than shorts and polo shirts all loaded up into my Saab convertible.  I started off by running I-65 from top to bottom -- from the Indiana Toll Road to Mobile, AL, with stops in Louisville, Nashville, and Birmingham.  I jogged over to the state line to Florida, passing the huge rebuilt version of the Florabama Bar &amp; Grill, for a weekend on the Gulf at Perdido Key.</li>\n 	<li>I then drove across the Mississippi Gulf Coast, past the re-built casinos in Biloxi, and then past the not-so-rebuilt towns of Gulfport and Pass Christian.  Here we are 7 years after the eye of Hurricane Katrina made landfall at Bay St Louis, MS and the vacant lots along the coastal road - US-90 -- far outnumber the rebuilt homes.  Indeed, the For Sale signs on vacant lots -- many of them hand-made with “Make me an offer” scrawled across the front” -- outnumber the rebuilt homes.</li>\n 	<li>I eventually ended up on I-10 and drove into New Orleans for dinner, reloaded on beignets and chicory coffee the next morning, and headed up I-55 with a lunch stop in Jackson, MS before landing in Memphis for a couple of days.  The final leg was Memphis to Sikeston, MO and then up I-57 back home to Chicago.  A 2,100-mile loop through what many people consider “fly-over” country.</li>\n 	<li>The first reaction that most folks have to this itinerary is -- Why? It’s certainly not on anyone’s top 10 scenic drives list. But it’s always been on my list of trips to-do -- to stop off on “drive thru” cities and spend a little time exploring, even if only for a couple of hours. And to do a bit of a nostalgia tour -- visit places I lived 25-30 years ago.  And to catch up with old friends -- physically rather than just over Facebook. But while I’ve been thinking about it for a while, it’s always been on the “B” list -- always getting bumped by something else.  Well, as I hinted at the start of the show, my professional situation has changed, providing me a bit of a summer sabbatical.  With a suddenly open schedule and nothing else planned, it’s the perfect time to work into that next tier of things to do.</li>\n 	<li>I took a week to do this great circle route -- not too fast, but not dawdling either. I had a great time. And came away with a few observations...</li>\n 	<li>First, that drive is not as boring as you might fear.  Now, I don’t want to sugar-coat it -- I-65 through northern Indiana and I-57 through Illinois are brutally mind-numbing -- flat unending fields of corn and soybeans, the monotony of which is occasionally broken by a unending rows of wind generators (they’re just too huge to be called windmills).  But past that, the landscape does have character.  The low-lying clouds tight against the hills, resting in the valleys in Southern Kentucky.  Driving long causeways over the marshes and bayous heading south into Mobile on I-65 or coming north out of New Orleans on I-55.  The red clay of any turned over ground in Alabama.  The forests of Southern Mississippi.  It’s certainly not the Big Sur Coastal drive, but it’s not (except for Illinois and Indiana) hundreds of miles of sameness.</li>\n 	<li>Second, with all that windshield time, I finally found a good use case for Apple’s Siri. I’ve seen the Samuel L Jackson and Zooey Deschanel commercials, but have never gotten Siri to be more than an annoyance -- I can always find something faster myself than repeating my question 3 times.  But with both hands on the wheel and my eyes on the road, Siri was very good at reading and replying to the daily flow of text messages.  The results of “Read new message” was unintelligible only once, and given my sister’s tendency for random punctuation and abbreviations, it was understandable.  Siri’s still not the virtual assistant Apple keeps pitching her as, but she does have her uses on a long drive.</li>\n 	<li>\n\n[caption id=\"attachment_1041\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"225\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/382380_3350829861633_1849689155_n.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1041\" title=\"The Ham Bar Menu\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/382380_3350829861633_1849689155_n-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"225\" height=\"300\" /></a> Today\'s Selections at the Ham Bar[/caption]\n\nThird, there’s good local food and beer everywhere.  Call it the “Brooklyn-ization” of America, but every decent sized city I visited had its own hipster neighborhoods with restaurants serving local artisan foods and local craft beers.  Louisville has its unfortunately named <a href=\"http://www.chicagotribune.com/travel/sc-trav-0327-louisville-kentucky-20120327,0,6168490.story\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">NuLu</a> neighborhood, Memphis the better-named <a href=\"http://cooperyoung.biz/night-out/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Cooper Young</a> at the intersection of Cooper St and Young Ave, and New Orleans has the Bywater district a good bit away from the French Quarter.</li>\n 	<li>You expect good food in New Orleans, but I had very good food and beer in every other place I stopped.  An example of that Southern local focus is restaurants using country ham in place of prosciutto -- which makes sense if you think of proscuitto as just another kind of air-dried ham -- but from Italy instead of Virginia.  At the<a href=\"http://www.garageonmarket.com\"> Garage Bar</a> in Louisville, they had a ham bar with a choice of f country hams from farms in Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee.  At the <a href=\"http://thebeautyshoprestaurant.anotherroadsideattractioncatering.com/\">Beauty Shop</a> in Memphis -- a great Twitter recommendation from @denrael -- country ham, cantaloupe, and an arugula salad made a great appetizer on a hot day.  I also hit on a string of locally sour brown ales at breweries in <a href=\"http://www.atgbrewery.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Louisville</a> and <a href=\"http://www.avondalebrewing.com/taproom.php\">Birmingham</a>. Definitely not lawnmower beers and as good as any I had in Brussels last spring. Finding these restaurants and breweries had the side benefit of taking me out of the normal tourist spots -- leaving behind the French Quarter and Beale Street.  Just look for art galleries, record stores, tattoo parlors, and people in skinny pants riding bicycles without helmets.</li>\n 	<li>Another observation -- waiting for the last minute to book a hotel room with Priceline’s Negotiator app works -- sometimes.  I’ve never used Priceline’s “opaque” pricing before -- naming my price for an unnamed hotel room. If I’m traveling on business or with my family, I typically want things nailed down a bit tighter. I have a much lower appetite for risk; am willing to pay more money to insure a good experience. But on this trip, I’m by myself and am only looking for a clean bed and decent water pressure for the morning’s shower.  Seemed like the right time to give Bill Shatner a try.</li>\n 	<li>My first try was Friday night around 7pm in Louisville.  Sitting in the Garage Bar after my serving of Kentucky country ham, I fired up the iPhone, got a sense of that the going rate at reasonable hotels was in the $75-110 range, and then bid $50 for a 3-star place near the airport. “Whoa, that’s a low bid” said a pop-up screen on the Priceline app.  Yup, that’s the idea.  After working through a few screens, I had a great room at a very nice Holiday Inn.  I ran the same play Sunday night driving into New Orleans and got a room at the Marriott on Canal St for $60.</li>\n 	<li>\n\n[caption id=\"attachment_1044\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"225\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/IMG_1368-e1343753854622.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1044\" title=\"Monday Special at Chimneyville Smokehouse, Jackson, MS\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/IMG_1368-e1343753854622-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"225\" height=\"300\" /></a> Hoping Vegetables Cut The Pork Fat[/caption]\n\nBut during the week while in Memphis, no luck. No one bit on my lowball bids and I ended up in a very substandard Hampton Inn and not so clean Comfort Inn.  Apparently there was some Little League tournament in town.  Don’t know others’ experiences, but the risk-reward trade-off with Priceline bidding is real. Which confirmed my initial instinct -- useful tool when traveling by myself with no rigid itinerary, but not so much for family or business travel.</li>\n 	<li>And finally, if I do this trip again, I’m packing some statins, some Mevacor.  After my fourth straight day of barbecue, I could feel the pork fat thicken my blood.  Not that that kept me from ordering one last slab of ribs on the drive home...</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music --<a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/rompaey-mozaic/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"> <em>Bubbly</em></a> by Ruben van Rompaey</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Breaking Up with American Airlines</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>My relationship with American Airlines began June 1985 when I flew from Chicago to Dallas to start my first job out of school.  And now here I am, 27 years and about 2.5 million miles later and I’m feeling just done with them.</li>\n 	<li>I wasn’t always like that. It’s easy enough to fly American out of DFW -- indeed, it damn close to impossible not to.  But I went out of my way to fly American after I left Dallas -- first back in Chicago, and then in Philadelphia.  Not too tough in Chicago; ORD is another AA hub. But sticking with them while flying out of US Air’s Philly fortress hub -- that took some commitment.</li>\n</ul>\n[caption id=\"attachment_952\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"200\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/photo.png\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-952\" title=\"AA Tweets &quot;I\'m Sorry&quot;\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/photo-200x300.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"200\" height=\"300\" /></a> Tweeting Apologies[/caption]\n<ul>\n 	<li>Over the past, say, 5 years, though, things have changed.  American’s competitors declared bankruptcy, cleaned up their balance sheets and bought new planes.  Lousy if you’re an investor with stock, an executive with options, or a creditor taking a haircut on loans, but for a customer it works out. American seemed proud of not going bankrupt, but as their planes got older and dingier, and fuel prices got higher, something had to give.</li>\n 	<li>And give it has, not just renegotiating plane leases. At a time you’d think American would want to take extra care of customers, their service taken a dive. And they’ve gotten more aggressive with add-on luggage and seating fees.  And now combining older frequent flyer miles that had no expiration date with those that expire in 18 months. For me, it’s not a big number; it’s the change in attitude; the final break in what I thought I could expect from American.</li>\n 	<li>Will I stop flying American? No, unless they go completely under. Or worse, merge with USAir. They’ll keep a big hub out of ORD and I have lifetime Platinum status with them -- unless that too becomes a casualty of their new “take away” mentality.  What will stop, though, is giving American the benefit of the doubt, of having them be my “default” choice.  After 27 years, they’re just another uncomfortable plane seat.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #100</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from the <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">ccMixter</a> web site and from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Magnatune</a></li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_100.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #100 — Southern Road Trip; Breaking Up with American Airlines','','inherit','closed','closed','','1034-revision-v1','','','2021-09-28 18:34:39','2021-09-28 23:34:39','',1034,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3858',0,'revision','',0),
(3859,1,'2021-09-28 18:35:41','2021-09-28 23:35:41','[caption id=\"attachment_1069\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/IMG_1380.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1069\" title=\"Elvis Statue in Memphis\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/IMG_1380-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> Young Elvis Before Too Many Peanut Butter &amp; Banana Sandwiches[/caption]\n\nOn my <a title=\"Podcast #100 — Southern Road Trip; Breaking Up with American Airlines\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/07/31/podcast-100-southern-road-trip-breaking-up-with-american-airlines/\">Drive South</a>, I ate and drank my way down I-65 and back up I-55. I had excellent meals throughout my trip -- something you expect in New Orleans, but might find a bit more surprising in Louisville or Nashville if you haven\'t been paying attention. &nbsp;Every city I visited had neighborhoods with restaurants serving local artisan food and local craft beers. (Here\'s a Flickr <a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/travelcommons/sets/72157631067493698/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">photo set</a> of some of my better pictures).\n\nThe chefs, bartenders, and owners with whom I talked were all on top of the latest food trends in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and London. Indeed, many had worked in the top restaurants in those cities for 5-10 years and were bringing those experiences and ways of thinking about food back home with them. &nbsp;But rather than just recreating Chicago dishes, they\'re twisting them to fit their new homes -- replacing&nbsp;prosciutto&nbsp;with country ham, topping a bit crispy chicken skin with dots of Wonder Bread purée, and aging sour brown ales in bourbon casks. &nbsp;If you\'re heading south, here are the places I recommend you search out:\n\n<strong>Nashville</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://thecatbirdseatrestaurant.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Catbird Seat</a> - In most restaurants, the chef\'s table is a 6-top in the corner of the kitchen were the diners watch their food being prepared and, if they\'re lucky, get to exchange a couple of words with the chef. At Catbird Seat, the entire restaurant is a chef\'s table -- a bar that wraps around the cooking stations. There are no waiters -- the food is served and explained by the chefs. And, as should be expected from chefs who worked at places like <a href=\"http://www.theworlds50best.com/awards/1-50-winners/alinea/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Alinea</a> and <a href=\"http://frenchlaundry.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">French Laundry</a>, an explanation from the chef of all the flavors on the plate&nbsp;helps your appreciation of what\'s been set before you. At $100 for 9 courses and $40 for the (recommended) wine pairing, it\'s not a cheap meal, but it\'s every bit on par with the best restaurants in New York (here\'s a recent NY Times <a href=\"http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/13/now-dining-the-catbird-seat-in-nashville/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">write-up</a>), Chicago, and San Francisco. &nbsp;If you like imaginative fine cuisine, don\'t miss it. &nbsp;Show up early enough to have a cocktail in <a href=\"http://www.cntraveler.com/daily-traveler/2011/12/If-You-Have-One-Drink-in-Nashville\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Patterson House</a>, the speakeasy looking bar that\'s in the same building.</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://yazoobrew.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Yazoo Brewing Company</a> - Tucked away at the edge of the <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gulch_(Nashville)\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Gulch</a> neighborhood, Yazoo Brewing has a good-sized taproom serving a nice variety of craft beers. I can be a bit of a hop-head, so I like their <a href=\"http://yazoobrew.com/our-beers/hopproject.php\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Hop Project</a>, but their <a href=\"http://yazoobrew.com/our-beers/dos-perros.php\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Dos Perros</a>&nbsp;surprised me as did the Rye Saison they were serving in the taproom.\n\n[caption id=\"attachment_1041\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"150\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/382380_3350829861633_1849689155_n.jpg\"><img class=\"size-thumbnail wp-image-1041\" title=\"The Ham Bar Menu\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/382380_3350829861633_1849689155_n-150x150.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"150\" height=\"150\"></a> Today\'s Selections at the Ham Bar[/caption]</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Louisville</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://www.garageonmarket.com/site/\">Garage Bar</a> - The people and tables spill out of this re-purposed gas station into the unfortunately named <a href=\"http://eastmarketdistrict.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">NuLu</a> neighborhood in a way that pulls you off the sidewalk into the melee. &nbsp;The night I was there, a band was playing under what used to be the gas pump awning while on the other side of the patio, a bunch of people jumped out of seats to take their picture with the neighborhood tortoise that was (slowly) moving through. The ham bar offered a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/382380_3350829861633_1849689155_n.jpg\">selection</a> of country ham from Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee (a good-sized portion for $5), good craft beer and, because you\'re in Kentucky, craft bourbons.</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://www.atgbrewery.com/\">Against The Grain</a> - It\'s a brewpub attached to Louisville\'s minor league baseball park on the Ohio River, about a 10 minute walk from the NuLu area. They have a great beer selection, but when they described the sour brown ale, I was sold. &nbsp;My time in Belgium has given me a soft spot for sour beers. &nbsp;The bartender couldn\'t understand my excitement. \"That\'s the only beer we make that I have to spit out\".</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://holygralelouisville.com/\">Holy Grale</a>- Housed in a former Unitarian Church in the Highlands\' neighborhood, Holy Grale is a cozy (tight?) gastropub with a great selection of local and Belgian beers and the right kind of bar food (brats, pork belly, poutine) to soak it up.\n\n[caption id=\"attachment_1079\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"150\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/IMG_1345.jpg\"><img class=\"size-thumbnail wp-image-1079\" title=\"IMG_1345\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/IMG_1345-150x150.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"150\" height=\"150\"></a> Nice Set of Tanks at Avondale Brewing Company[/caption]</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Birmingham, Alabama</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://www.avondalebrewing.com/index-full.php\">Avondale Brewing Company</a> - Finding this place took me off the beaten path to Birmingham\'s Avondale neighborhood. The neighborhood looks like it\'s trying to gentrify with a few hip storefronts, but Avondale Brewing seems to attract most of the crowds. The taproom was full early Saturday afternoon, but the beer was worth waiting my turn -- another sour brown ale...</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>New Orleans</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://maurepasfoods.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Maurepas Foods</a> - &nbsp;I didn\'t plan on visiting New Orleans. I\'d intended to stay on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, but as they still try to rebuild after Katrina\'s direct hit, there isn\'t much other than the casinos in Biloxi. &nbsp;Remembering a conversation two nights prior with the guy sitting next to me at Holy Grale in Louisville, I skipped my usual haunts in the Arts/Warehouse District and headed over to the <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bywater,_New_Orleans\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Bywater</a> neighborhood. I parked near Maurepas Foods, looked at the menu, and walked in. It\'s a neighborhood place, but not a dive. The bartender offered me the Sunday night tasting menu complete with paired cocktails, but I wasn\'t that hungry. I had a sausage and squid sandwich -- sounds awful but tasted great. &nbsp;They have a good cocktail and craft beer selection that matches up well with their menu. It\'s a nice break from the usual French Quarter drill.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Memphis</strong>\n\n[caption id=\"attachment_1083\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"150\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/IMG_1381-e1344996846435.jpg\"><img class=\"size-thumbnail wp-image-1083\" title=\"2 Piece Dark Meat Plate At Gus\'s\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/IMG_1381-e1344996846435-150x150.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"150\" height=\"150\"></a> 2 Piece Dark Meat Plate At Gus\'s[/caption]\n<ul>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://thebeautyshoprestaurant.anotherroadsideattractioncatering.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Beauty Shop</a> - In an old beauty shop in the midtown Cooper Young neighborhood, Beauty Shop is run by a Memphis art student who went to New York, learned to cook, and then brought her training home. Has a hip vibe and menu.</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://www.southofbeale.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">South of Beale</a> - A good downtown gastropub in the <a href=\"http://southmainmemphis.net/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">South Main</a> district -- walking distance from Beale Street but a nice place to get away from the noise and crowds. A duck patty melt and rabbit sausage sandwich are on the menu that\'s a step up from typical pub grub, and there\'s a good selection of Southern craft beers and whiskey.</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://travel.usatoday.com/destinations/great-american-bites/story/2011/07/Great-American-Bites-Guss-World-Famous-Fried-Chicken-in-Memphis/49517608/1\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Gus\'s World Famous Fried Chicken</a> - Not every meal on my trip was at posh hipster places. Gus\'s is about as unhip as you can get, but they\'ve perfected fried chicken. Crispy (but not overly) outside, moist inside -- if it\'s not \"world famous\", it deserves to be. The sides are serviceable, but no one cares because it\'s all about the chicken. Gus\'s is a small place on a marginal block, so pick your time -- don\'t go during lunch rush, but don\'t wait until the sun goes down. But do go...</li>\n</ul>','Food and Drink Highlights from My Drive South','','inherit','closed','closed','','1068-revision-v1','','','2021-09-28 18:35:41','2021-09-28 23:35:41','',1068,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3859',0,'revision','',0),
(3862,1,'2021-09-28 18:39:43','2021-09-28 23:39:43','[caption id=\"attachment_1128\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"225\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/2012-08-03-21.17.30.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1128\" title=\"Bolton\'s Spicy Chicken, Nashville\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/2012-08-03-21.17.30-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"225\" height=\"300\" /></a> Search for Nashville Hot Chicken Led to Interesting Neighborhoods[/caption]\n\nBack in the TravelCommons studios after a couple months of summer break. We open up with thoughts about skipping rental cars, sharing listener comments on the Chicago Layover Excursion <a title=\"Video #3 – ORD Layover Excursion: a 6-Hour Tour of Chicago\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/09/24/video-3-ord-layover-excursion-a-6-hour-tour-of-chicago/\">video</a>, and the current state of American Airlines -- great new airplanes, deteriorating on-time stats. <a href=\"http://www.crunchbase.com/person/michael-komarnitsky\">Michael Komarnitsky</a>, the founder and CEO of GoMiles, talks about why he sold his company to <a href=\"https://traxo.com/\">Traxo</a> and where he sees the mileage tracking industry going. We wrap with my thoughts about how I break through the frequent traveler \"travel bubble\" by looking for local artisanal food and craft beers. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_101.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #101:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago. Back after a couple of month hiatus. The Episode 100 celebrations ran a little long...</li>\n 	<li>Last week, Jeremy Phillips tweeted “Listening to Travel Commons by <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> episode 100 while en route ATL -&gt; SEA. I kind of miss the bathroom acoustics but love the podcast.” Jeremy, I was thinking of recording at least the intro to this episode in one of the studio bathrooms, but thought that would be a bit too contrived. I will see, though, if I can get my act together enough for the next episode to do a bit of throw-back recording from a hotel bathroom.</li>\n 	<li>Not a lot of travel since the last episode -- two flights to San Francisco and a day trip to Atlanta -- though my arrivals in each place had some interesting twists. For all these trips, I had car service arranged to pick me up from the airport and to take me back. The cost and hassles of car rental seem to be on an upward spiral. We’ve talked in past episodes about costs -- not so much the rental cost itself, but all the add-on fees, surcharges, and taxes. In an Oct 2009 <a title=\"Skipping the Rental Car\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2009/10/25/skipping-the-rental-car/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">blog post</a> about skipping rental cars, I looked at my receipts from rentals in LA, SF, Seattle, and Philadelphia and found that add-on charges increased my final bill 27-51%. I don’t think those percentages have gone down in the intervening 3 years.</li>\n 	<li>The hassles of car rental are just as off-putting -- airports are reclaiming close-in car rental sites to expand parking, pushing the rental companies further out. I’ve timed trips at Phoenix and BWI -- 30 minutes to get from the terminal to the rental cars.</li>\n 	<li>So, with all that, I have little problem justifying the cost of a car to haul me between the airport and my locations. But even hire cars are not without their hassles. In ATL, it took me three phone calls -- to the driver and the car service -- to figure out where to meet the car. Unlike, say , ORD or LGA, there are different places you can “surface” from the gates and terminals. Apparently I followed the wrong “Ground Transportation” signs and ended up at the wrong end of the airport. No big problem -- maybe a 10-minute delay.</li>\n 	<li>My last trip to SF was a bit more problematic. I text the driver “I’m here” and “Here’s the door I’m at” -- not a big opportunity for location confusion at SFO Terminal 3. I’m standing there -- a couple of cars pull up, a guy gets in one, a woman in another. 5 minutes go by, where’s the car that said he was a minute away. Turns out that the guy who got into one of those cars got into mine. He told the driver his name which, to the non-native English speaking driver, sounded like Peacock and off they went. Except when I’m still texting him -- confusing when he thinks I’m in the back seat. Somewhere on the 101 South, the driver and the passenger figure out the mix-up. The car comes back to SFO, picks me up, leaving my doppelganger -- whose last name sounds nothing like Peacock -- wandering aimless on the sidewalk looking for his long-gone car.</li>\n 	<li>All reinforcing the feeling that there’s just nothing about travel nowadays that “just works”...</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://www.musicalley.com/music/listeners/artistdetails.php?BandHash=5176b75737dbc595f7509067fbe080ad\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Science vs. Romance</a> </em>by Rilo Kiley</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>For those not following the various TravelCommons sites -- <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Facebook</a>, the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">web site</a> (I don’t do Pinterest because, well, I’m a guy, and I don’t do Tumblr because I’m over 25 years old) -- a couple of pointers to some content that didn’t make it into the iTunes feed.</li>\n 	<li>First, I did follow through on the threat/promise I made at the end of the last episode -- to do my own <a title=\"Video #3 – ORD Layover Excursion: a 6-Hour Tour of Chicago\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/09/24/video-3-ord-layover-excursion-a-6-hour-tour-of-chicago/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Chicago version</a> of the One City, Five Hours sprint tours that United used to do in their Hemispheres magazine. Last year, I did the Frankfurt tour while on a long layover between Mumbai and Chicago.  I video’d my results; it’s on the TravelCommons site as “<a title=\"Video #2 – One City, Five Hours: Frankfurt\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/05/01/video-2-one-city-five-hours-frankfurt/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Video #2</a>”. I had such a great time following that tour -- seeing new areas of Frankfurt rather than flipping through my iPad in the United lounge -- that I wanted to offer up a similar tour of Chicago to people with long layovers -- whether planned or not.</li>\n 	<li>While the Frankfurt video was a one-day affair -- shot on my iPhone and edited in iMovie on the flight home, the Chicago video turned out to be a lot more work. Of course I had to create the tour rather than following someone else’s. And the constraints of the format -- start and end at ORD, 5 hours long (which I failed; mine clocked in just over 6),  using in only public transit, and trying to show something other than the usual photo op sites -- made for some tough choices.</li>\n 	<li>Also, I wanted to provide detailed transit and walking directions -- showing street signs at crossings, building a detailed Google trip map for the show notes -- because that was my one frustration with United’s Frankfurt <a href=\"http://www.hemispheresmagazine.com/2010/03/01/one-city-five-hours-frankfurt/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">article</a> -- I kept getting lost which cut into my already limited time budget.</li>\n 	<li>I posted on the TravelCommons site and Facebook page about a month ago. I didn’t push it through the iTunes feed because I thought it would be too big of a download and wouldn’t be of interest to everyone.</li>\n 	<li>The TravelCommons Facebook community had some good things to say. Lisa Besso’s comment voiced a common theme --\n<ul>\n 	<li>“Wouldn\'t it be great to have these for all major hubs where we all spend too much time?”</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>I got to thinking about this... If you think through the top 10 US hubs -- ATL, ORD, DFW, DEN, PHX, MSP, IAH, DTW, EWR, SFO -- how many of these could you do a 5-hour city/neighborhood tour without needing a rental car.\n<ul>\n 	<li>San Francisco is an obvious one</li>\n 	<li>Newark - take the PATH train to downtown Manhattan and walk up thru TriBeCa and Greenwich Village</li>\n 	<li>Atlanta - Downtown and Buckhead via Marta?</li>\n 	<li>Denver - You’ve landed in the middle of a buffalo herd. Maybe catch a bus to LoDo?</li>\n 	<li>And after that, my voice trails off. Anybody else have any ideas?</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Bob Fenerty and Robby Smith also left comments -- both compared the ORD video to Anthony Bourdain’s “Layover” series. Bob said\n<ul>\n 	<li>“Very fun; like watching an amateur version of ‘The Layover’”</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Robby liked it because you could knock it off in an afternoon, unlike Bourdain’s 2-3 day layover.</li>\n 	<li>If you haven’t seen it already, go to the TravelCommons web site or Facebook page, check it out and leave some comments. I created a new “Video” category on the site -- you can find it on the right-hand nav bar if you want to quickly find last year’s Frankfurt video. And send along your thoughts on other layover tours if you have them.</li>\n 	<li>Another <a title=\"Food and Drink Highlights from My Drive South\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/08/14/food-and-drink-highlights-from-my-drive-south/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">blog post</a> follows up on the topic in the last episode about my “great circle” through the Mid South -- I-65 from Chicago to the Gulf Coast, across US-90 and then back up I-55 and 57. Listeners who follow my social media natterings on Twitter and Untappd had seen my food and beer comments along the tour and asked for a summary, which I posted on the site in August -- a city-by-city listing of the restaurants and bars I thought were the best -- along with a link to a Flickr <a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/travelcommons/sets/72157631067493698/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">photo set</a>, pulling together some of my better shots, though probably a bit overdone with Instagram filters. If you’re visiting Nashville, Louisville, Memphis soon, check that out.</li>\n 	<li>And finally, a follow-up on episode 100’s other topic -- breaking up with American Airline, I dunno, it’s 1 step forward and 2 steps back. One of my biggest complaints in that rant was the age of AA’s fleet -- the MD-80’s that have been around for 25-30 years -- they’re small, dingy, uncomfortable, and in my experience, more and more prone to maintenance delays. Last month, I flew on a new American 737-800 -- what a great plane! Huge luggage bins, some styling cues from the 787 Dreamliner, and regular electrical outlets in coach. Such a huge upgrade from the MD-80s -- especially the ones picked up with the TWA merger -- those are the worst. So, good forward movement with the planes -- which then gets completely offset (and more) by seats on their old planes coming loose and disgruntled pilots causing flight delays through a work-to-rule campaign. New planes are great, but I have to be able to depend upon them. So I’m completely off American until they get all of this cleared up.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a question, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- use the Voice Memo app on your iPhone or something like Virtual Recorder on your Android phone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://www.musicalley.com/music/listeners/artistdetails.php?BandHash=0e46bba4178825d4602555f523958a28\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Voodoo Dub</a> </em>by Cyrusfx</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Future of Mileage Tracking Tools</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Two years ago, in episode 85, I talked to Michael Komarnitsky, the founder and CEO of GoMiles, about his year-old mileage/awards points tracking service. Last month, Michael sold GoMiles to Traxo, a trip aggregation/travel management site. I caught up with him last week to get his thoughts on where the mileage/awards tracking market is going. I first asked him to remind us what GoMiles did for the traveler...</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music --<a href=\"http://www.nimbitmusic.com/saurabbhargava\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><em>Not Enough (Inside You, Part 2)</em></a> by Saurab Bhargava</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Bursting the Travel Bubble with Local Food and Craft Beer</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>As I mentioned earlier, those who follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"http://untappd.com/user/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Untappd</a> (a sort of FourSquare for beer nerds), see a lot of posts and pictures of food and beer. Though I guess it shouldn’t be surprising -- I think travel, food, and alcohol (beer, wine, scotch,...) naturally go together; if you’re interested in one, you’re interested in them all. It’s all about being interested in exploring cultures. One of the main reasons we travel (voluntarily, that is) is to experience other people, other cultures. And if you want to get deeper into a culture, it’s much easier to eat and drink with them than to marry them.  Not to say marrying is a bad thing, just a bit more permanent -- or perhaps that’s the old-school Catholic in me talking...</li>\n 	<li>In <a title=\"Podcast #90 — More Comfortable Traveling in India; Tipping Towards Android?\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/05/22/podcast-90-more-comfortable-traveling-in-india-tipping-towards-android/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">past</a> <a title=\"Podcast #83 – Business Travel in India; iPad vs. Netbook\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2010/05/28/podcast-83-business-travel-in-india-ipad-vs-netbook/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">episodes</a>, we’ve talked about how frequent travelers often <a title=\"Up in the Air — Captures Life in the “Travel Bubble”\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2009/12/15/up-in-the-air-captures-life-in-the-travel-bubble/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">float</a> above the day-to-day activities, the reality of the cities their visiting in a “travel bubble” -- kinda like Glenda the Good Witch in “Wicked”. In <a title=\"Podcast #64 – Escaping the Travel Bubble; Mark’s Travel Tips\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2008/04/29/podcast-64-escaping-the-travel-bubble-marks-travel-tips/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">one</a> of those episodes, I talked about how I like using public transportation, skipping the airport limos or private car services as a way to pop that bubble.</li>\n 	<li>But in my trips this summer to SF and through the Mid-South, the search for local food and beer popped the travel bubble, and it was a helluva lot more fun than wrestling with a fare card machine in Brooklyn\n\n[caption id=\"attachment_1124\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/IMG_1281.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1124\" title=\"San Francisco Farmers\' Market\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/IMG_1281-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> San Francisco Farmers\' Market Near UN Plaza[/caption]</li>\n 	<li>Now this is more than just skipping restaurant chains for local joints. Searching out a SF farmers market took me through the Tenderloin district and had me dodging cup-shaking panhandlers much further up Market St than I’d been before. Searching for Nashville hot chicken took me way off the usual Broadway tourist drag, to Bolton’s, a squat cinder block building in what felt like a bit of a sketch section of East Nashville for some very good and very spicy fried chicken. We ate under a wheezing air conditioner as a steady stream of neighborhood folk banged the screen door, ordering the Friday hot chicken and catching up with the owner.</li>\n 	<li>Hunting down local beers has been just as rewarding. Walking from SF’s Union Square to the edge of the SoMa neighborhood to find the <a href=\"http://www.citybeerstore.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">City Beer Store</a> took me a good bit out of the tourist zone. I ended up drinking local Magnolia beer, talking with a group of guys who were stopping off for one on their way to the bus stop. Following Google Maps off I-65 in Birmingham, AL, I found myself parking in what looked like a neighborhood trying hard to re-develop so I could try a beer at <a href=\"http://www.avondalebrewing.com/index-full.php\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Avondale Brewing</a>.</li>\n 	<li>I keep a running list of web clippings in Evernote of the restaurants, beer/wine bars, breweries I want to visit. I have folders for the cities I visit often or plan to visit soon. I also use social media -- in <a title=\"Podcast #96 — Eating and Drinking with Social Media; Frequent Flier Alliances\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/01/05/podcast-96-dining-with-social-media-frequent-flier-alliances/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">episode #96</a>, I talked about how I use Untappd, <a href=\"http://www.foodspotting.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Foodspotting</a> and Chowhound -- as well as asking the Twitter-verse for ideas.\n\n[caption id=\"attachment_1125\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/2012-07-14-14.08.12.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1125\" title=\"Mash Tanks at Avondale Brewing\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/2012-07-14-14.08.12-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Mash Tanks at Avondale Brewing, Birmingham, AL[/caption]</li>\n 	<li>But that’s just so I have a starting point for my searches. Searching new places forces me to break that travel bubble wall between visitor (me) and residents. In Louisville, I headed over to the Louisville Beer Store in the downtown NuLu district. Drinking a couple of beers and talking to the owner, he said I had to visit his other place, the <a href=\"http://holygralelouisville.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Holy Grale</a>, an old church converted to a beer bar. While there, talking to some folks at the bar, a guy told me I had to visit New Orleans’<a href=\"http://http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bywater,_New_Orleans\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"> Bywater</a> District if I wanted to latest in good local non-tourist food there. Three days later, I was driving into New Orleans. Have been there many times, but never heard of the Bywater District. A little web searching on the iPhone and I found my way there, ending up having dinner at the bar of <a href=\"http://maurepasfoods.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Maurepas Foods</a>, a very local place with very good food.</li>\n 	<li>Frequent travelers tend toward a rhythm, a pattern that allows them to quickly and efficiently navigate the hassles of today’s travel experience. There’s a thin line, though, between, efficiency and a rut, and the travel bubble straddles that line. It takes some effort to pop that bubble; good food and beer can help...</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #101</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://music.mevio.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Mevio’s Music Alley</a> and from <a href=\"http://www.saurabbhargava.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Saurab Bhargava</a>’s album <em>Chromatique</em></li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_101.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #101 — Future of Mileage Tracking Tools; Searching for Local Food and Craft Beer','','inherit','closed','closed','','1119-revision-v1','','','2021-09-28 18:39:43','2021-09-28 23:39:43','',1119,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3862',0,'revision','',0),
(3864,1,'2021-09-28 18:41:27','2021-09-28 23:41:27','[caption id=\"attachment_1153\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/2012-11-07-17.29.10.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1153\" title=\"Nor\'easter Snow in NYC\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/2012-11-07-17.29.10-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> What Better Way to Test Travel Management Apps than a Nor\'easter in New York?[/caption]\n\nTraveling to New York earlier this month, I missed Hurricane Sandy but took the full brunt of the follow-up nor\'easter that the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"The Weather Channel\" href=\"http://www.weather.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"homepage noopener noreferrer\">Weather Channel</a> helpfully named Athena. The travel havoc wreaked by the wind and snow was a perfect setting for a side-by-side comparison of the free versions of the leading trip management apps -- <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"TripIt\" href=\"http://www.tripit.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"homepage noopener noreferrer\">TripIt</a>, <a href=\"http://tripcase.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">TripCase</a>, <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"WorldMate\" href=\"http://www.worldmate.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"homepage noopener noreferrer\">WorldMate</a>, and<a href=\"http://kayak.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"> Kayak</a>. Looking at three use cases, pulling together travel plans into a single itinerary, sharing that itinerary with others, and flight tracking when bad weather hits, TripCase came out on top. I also talk about the TSA\'s latest scanner debacle and the changes since I took listeners on a tour of my briefcase in <a title=\"Podcast #33 – Listener Mailbag, What’s in My Briefcase?\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2006/02/18/podcast-33-listener-mailbag-whats-in-my-briefcase/\">Episode 33</a> back in 2006. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_102.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #102:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago after an uneventful Thanksgiving Day weekend. Uneventful for me at least because I was able to hold fast to my rule of no travel during the Thanksgiving holiday. I woke up last Weds, the day before Thanksgiving, to see nothing but grey out my windows. <a href=\"http://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/flights/2012/11/21/dense-fog-snarls-chicago-flights-ahead-of-thanksgiving/1719885/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Heavy fog</a> hit Chicago. Not a normal event. But, with a nod to Murphy, if it was going to happen, why not on the busiest travel day of the year? About 1,500 flights were delayed or cancelled. Ugh...</li>\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">Earlier in the month, though, I did get slightly winged by the weather gods. I traveled to New York the week after, what is it Hurricane or Superstorm Sandy? I thought it was a Category 1 <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Sandy\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">hurricane</a> when it hit New Jersey. What’s with all the superstorm stuff? What is a <a href=\"http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/576b3276-21bc-11e2-b5d2-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2DZrTfhqW\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">superstorm</a>? Anyways, I land at <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"LaGuardia Airport\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaGuardia_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"wikipedia noopener noreferrer\">LaGuardia</a> the following Tuesday morning. I’m expecting a real hassle getting into midtown, but no, to my very pleasant surprise, there were loads of cabs and no queues. Talking to a colleague later in the day, he’d flown into Newark the night before and waited two hours for a car. Timing with these travel things is everything -- often better to be lucky than smart.</li>\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">And pretty soon I thought I’d used mine up in the cab line because, while I’d dodged Superstorm Sandy, I had just landed 18 hours in front of the follow-up nor’easter that the Weather Channel decided to name Winter Storm <a href=\"http://www.weather.com/news/winter/storms/2012/athena\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Athena</a>. OK, now we have hurricanes, superstorms, and winter storms all with names. Go figure. All I know is that I land in perfect weather on Tuesday morning and by Weds afternoon, I’m watching snow blow sideways on Central Park South.</li>\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">Of course, in this age of airlines maxing out seat occupancy, they start pre-emptively cancelling flights the day before Athena hits. Tues night, American and United were already canceling flights from Weds afternoon to Thurs morning -- United a bit more cautiously starting their cancellations at Weds noon while American, perhaps trying to squeeze out a bit more revenue, waited until 2.</li>\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">Actually, my luck was holding. I wasn’t scheduled to fly back until Thurs at 3. So, if this nor’easter hits when it’s supposed to, and moves through as fast as it’s supposed to, I could come out of this OK. On Weds, I kept looking out the windows of the conference hotel. About 3 -- a bit ahead of schedule -- I started to see snow fly. And by 5 when I walked out of the conference to meet a friend for a beer, it was a full-on blizzard. It was a sloppy walk back to my hotel -- seems that nobody in Manhattan owns a snow shovel. But looking out the hotel window Thurs morning, it was clear sidewalks and sunny skies. My flight out of LGA was delayed 40 minutes, which even on a good day qualifies as on time for a LGA-ORD flight. Lucky, ‘cause I couldn’t have planned it better if I’d tried...</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Mo Shang</em> by Soli</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">Got some good comments on the <a title=\"Video #3 – ORD Layover Excursion: a 6-Hour Tour of Chicago\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/09/24/video-3-ord-layover-excursion-a-6-hour-tour-of-chicago/\">ORD layover video</a>. Jeanette Irwin left a comment on the website asking\n<ul>\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">“I\'ve often wanted to take advantage of long layovers by making a quick trip into the city the airport in, but have never been able to figure out what to do with my luggage (if I can help it, I don\'t check my bag, but bring it on the plane with me). Do you have this issues as well, Mark? If so, what do you do about it?”</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">Jeanette, I think any experienced traveler is going to have this issue because we all pretty much break out in hives and a cold sweat at the idea of checking a bag. However, with increased airport security post-9/11, short-term luggage checks are scarce if not extinct in the US and increasingly expensive in places like Heathrow. I’ll grit my teeth and check my bag if I know I’m doing a layover tour (I did this for my <a title=\"Video #2 – One City, Five Hours: Frankfurt\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/05/01/video-2-one-city-five-hours-frankfurt/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Frankfurt sprint</a>). If it’s a more spontaneous excursion, I’ll try to check my bag at an airport hotel or a hotel near my first stop. I’m usually successful. I just tell them I’m checking in later and my room isn’t ready, but I also generously tip at the front end -- to the guy taking my luggage -- to help grease the skids.</li>\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">Gary Learned and Steve Frick gave answers to the question I posed in the last episode -- how many of  the top 10 US hubs -- ATL, ORD, DFW, DEN, PHX, MSP, IAH, DTW, EWR, SFO -- could you do a 5-hour city/neighborhood tour through without needing a rental car? After checking off the easy ones -- ORD, EWR (New York) and SFO -- I asked for thoughts on the rest.</li>\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\"><a href=\"http://twitter.com/Denrael\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Gary Learned</a>weighed in on MSP via Twitter --\n<ul>\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">You can take the light rail into downtown Minneapolis or over to Mall of America</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">And then once you get to downtown Minneapolis, you never have to come outside -- you just wander building to building through the 8 miles of human habitrails called the Skyway. Some people go <a href=\"http://www.vita.mn/116353724.html?page=all\">weeks</a> in the winter without venturing outside.</li>\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">Steve Frick said\n<ul>\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">“You could Marta up to downtown Atlanta, there\'s plenty to do in a 5 hour time span”</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">Steve must’ve followed the link to the TravelCommons Flickr page in last episode’s show notes because he also commented\n<ul>\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">“I was looking at your Flickr pictures, take a look back at your My Briefcase picture from 2006 technology certainly has evolved in the last 7 years”\n\n[caption id=\"attachment_1155\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"320\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/102434287_e1770f7622_n.jpg\"><img class=\"size-full wp-image-1155\" title=\"My Briefcase circa 2006\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/102434287_e1770f7622_n.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"320\" height=\"212\" /></a> My Briefcase circa 2006[/caption]</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">I did go back and look at that <a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/travelcommons/102434287/in/photostream/\">picture</a>. It’s the first picture in the TravelCommons’ Flickr photostream -- from February 2006. It accompanies an audio tour through my briefcase that was in <a title=\"Podcast #33 – Listener Mailbag, What’s in My Briefcase?\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2006/02/18/podcast-33-listener-mailbag-whats-in-my-briefcase/\">Episode #33</a></li>\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">Yes, using a Bluetooth dongle to push photos from my Motorola clamshell phone to my ThinkPad. That was cutting edge pre-smartphone stuff. The U2 clickwheel iPod also has a bit of a vintage feel, though when I heard “Vertigo” on the radio the other day, it didn’t seem that old. Some things haven’t changed though. I still record my podcasts on that little iRiver -- much to my chagrin. I still use Pilot G2 gel pens, and I still carry a tin of wintergreen Altoids to get rid of that plane nap taste in my mouth. I think about half the stuff in my briefcase has stayed the same since 2006.</li>\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">One of the things that has changed since ‘06 is the creation of a whole new class of travel electronics -- the tablet. The iPad and the Kindle are the two defining devices in that category. Just before Thanksgiving, I picked up a Google Nexus 7 tablet -- the competitor to the Kindle Fire and iPad Mini. The WiFi-only version has been out since the summer, but I waited to buy until they released a version with cellular data and I’d seen Apple’s 7-inch offering. I’ll do a full review in a later episode -- after I’ve had a chance to travel with the Nexus 7 for a bit, but after a week-and-a-half of use, I really like it. The hardware is nicely put together, the price is right -- about $260 cheaper than a similarly kitted-out iPad Mini, and the latest version of Android -- 4.2 or “Jelly Bean” -- is hugely better than the first tablet version of Android -- 3.0 or “Honeycomb”. Very positive first impression.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a question, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- use the Voice Memo app on your iPhone or something like Easy Voice Recorder on your Android phone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em>You’re the Big Sky</em> by Derek K. Miller</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Trip Management App Comparison</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">Back in the golden age of travel, when everyone dressed up to fly (or at least showered and shaved), flight attendants still had their pensions and so were more pleasant, first class food was served on china with real silverware, and there was leg room in coach, frequent travelers used travel agencies to book their travel. Before you left on your trip, they’d send you actual physical plane tickets and a printed itinerary that consolidated your flight, hotel, and car rental reservations onto a single page. They usually gave you 3 copies of the itinerary -- one for your admin, one for your spouse, and one for you.</li>\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">In today’s DIY (do it yourself) age of travel, where people are searching and booking their own travel a la carte -- using Hipmunk for flights, Orbitz for hotels, and booking a car directly with Avis -- and then want to share these plans with 450 of their geographically distributed “friends”, there is a need to update those paper itineraries with something a bit more interactive -- that leverages the billions of dollars of mobile stuff we’ve bought over the past few years -- certainly since I took that picture of my briefcase in 2006.</li>\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">I’ve used a number of these travel management applications -- <a href=\"http://tripit.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">TripIt</a>, <a href=\"http://tripcase.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">TripCase</a>, <a href=\"http://worldmate.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">WorldMate</a> -- since I got my first iPhone, but had never really compared them to one another. I eventually settled on TripIt for no other reason than the travel management software my company used, Concur Solutions, bought them and integrated them into their offering. It’s been awhile, so I thought it a good time to give them all another spin.</li>\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">I used my Winter Storm Athena New York trip on United and an upcoming SLC ski trip on Southwest as test beds. I loaded the free versions of TripIt, TripCase, WorldMate and <a href=\"http://kayak.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Kayak</a> apps on my iPhone 5 and Samsung Galaxy tablet running the most recent version of Android -- Jelly Bean. Kayak wasn’t in my initial pass of apps -- I think of them more as meta search than travel management, but Gary Learned pointed me to them via Twitter and I added them to the mix. Adding to the fun, I ran the Flight Track Pro and United Airline apps on my iPhone and used the Passbook app new to iOS 6 to hold my United boarding passes. I was fully apped-up and ready to go.</li>\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">All the apps hit the base use case of aggregating trip information and effectively displaying it on the screen of a smartphone or tablet. Everyone correctly parsed the United and Southwest confirmation e-mails and noted the Vegas stopover on the return leg of the Southwest trip with TripIt, WorldMate and Kayak expliciting calling out its 40-min length.</li>\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">Most apps also have some ways of automatically ingesting your travel plans. If your business uses Concur, you can have it send all your itineraries to TripIt. TripCase, owned by the Sabre travel system, can automatically pick up trips made by a travel agent in Sabre. I assume WorldMate will soon have something similar with Carlson Wagonlit. And though I didn’t try it, I’d guess that Kayak automatically loads trips you make through them. You can also authorize TripIt to scan your GMail account several times a day for confirmation e-mails.</li>\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">If aggregation is the first use case, sharing itineraries is the second. Now, in this day and age, people immediately translate that into social media posting -- Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn -- but there are different levels of sharing needed. I might want to post to Facebook and LinkedIn that I’m planning a New York trip, trolling for some serendipitous beer drinking, but not so sure I want to widely broadcast flight and hotel details. However, someone scheduling my meetings or meeting me at the airport (not to mention my wife), not only do they need all those details, they could probably use delay/reschedule updates also.</li>\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">Everyone handles what I’d call the base social media sharing -- publishing to Facebook and LinkedIn, though it didn’t appear that WorldMate pushed to Facebook automatically. I like TripIt’s two pushes -- “I’m planning a trip” when I book the trip and then “I’m leaving” the day before departure. Kayak’s pushes bothered me -- they were URL links to the itinerary, which makes way too much information available. TripCase and Kayak could push to Twitter; TripIt couldn’t, but could push to enterprise apps like Salesforce Chatter and Yammer.</li>\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">TripIt, TripCase, and Kayak all published web calendar feeds you can pull into Outlook or Google Calendar, which would allow your spouse or assistant to get regular updates of your detailed travel plans. WorldMate calendar sync isn’t available in their free product.</li>\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">Which is a nice-to-have, but basic gut-level e-mailing of itineraries is key. And I gotta tell you that I was a little surprised at the results. You’d think this would be easy. And for WorldMate and TripCase it was -- click on the Share button and they quickly shot out a one-page e-mail with all the trip details in a nice table. I was surprised, though, that TripCase was the only one where I could, as a global default, set up an e-mail address (my wife’s in my case) to automatically receive all my trip updates. However, to do so, she had to become a TripCase user. Not quite what I had in mind.</li>\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">Kayak and TripIt sent out e-mails with web links to the information. Clicking through Kayak’s got to a nice clean display of the itinerary. TripIt, though, made you sign-up as a TripIt user before you could see the travel details. Way too much work if I need to quickly share my travel plans with a colleague.</li>\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">So far, everyone was able to aggregate travel plans, with some apps having a convenience edge if you book through their partners -- Concur for TripIt, Sabre for TripCase, Kayak for... Kayak. TripIt and TripCase do the best with social media publishing, though TripIt wins if you’re a Yammer or Chatter user. TripCase and WorldMate win itinerary e-mailing, which TripIt epicly failed.</li>\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">So that’s mostly pre-trip stuff. The final use case is while you’re on the trip and something happens -- what airlines euphemistically call “irregular ops”. The sorts of things that happen when you’re traveling through LGA in the midst of, say, a winter nor’easter big enough to get it’s own name from the Weather Channel.  Flights are delayed, gates change...</li>\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">Since I was only using the free versions, TripIt and WorldMate didn’t help. You have to upgrade to their paid versions for updates and flight status. Having said that, WorldMate Gold is $10/yr while TripIt Pro is $49. Not huge numbers, especially WorldMate’s. Somewhere along the line, I’d bought Flight Track Pro for my iPhone. It’s a $10 app, but I gotta think it was cheaper when I bought it. Anyhow, it syncs with TripIt, so I was kinda getting updates from TripIt that way. In the same way, WorldMate’s free app provides a nice deep link into Flightstats.com from the trip page -- two clicks, no typing, and you get real time flight info for your flight. Not as good as a push notification, but it’s something.</li>\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">From free services, I got the best notifications from TripCase and Kayak -- TripCase through iPhone notifications, Kayak via e-mail. And both of them were faster than the airline -- United, in this case. I couldn’t even get gate information updated on my United boarding pass in Passbook, and trying to get push notifications from their app is a random walk through a bunch of screens. Though it’s a paid app, Flight Track Pro did a great job of pushing gate change and delay notifications to my iPhone, and the app does a nice job of displaying current weather, which can give you a sense of how much trouble you’re in.</li>\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">TripCase wins the the notification use case with timely gate change and departure time push notifications. Kayak does a good job with their e-mails, but I think a native smartphone app should be able to push notifications to the screen.</li>\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">Sorting this all down, TripCase wins as the best free smartphone app.  It was at the tops of all three use cases -- itinerary building and sharing, and real-time flight status updates. However, it doesn’t have a tablet-specific app -- it just scales up the smartphone app.  Which looks awful on my 10-in Samsung Galaxy Tab. WorldMate, Kayak and TripIt have good iPad apps, but only TripIt and Kayak have apps specifically for Android tablets. I like the TripIt screen widget better than Kayak’s, so I’ll give the Android tablet win to TripIt.</li>\n 	<li>This was a good exercise. As a long-time TripIt user, this kinda surprised me. But after Angry Birds, travel management is probably the most important app a frequent traveler uses. Let me know your thoughts -- Twitter, Facebook, E-mail, Web Site Comments, Carrier Pigeon -- all the usual comms channels are open...</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music --<em>Sliding into Slumber Land</em> by Little Stevie and the Fatratz</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>TSA Scanner Shuffle</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">And just when you thought I’d make it through a podcast without a TSA item, here it is -- my favorite topic, full-body scanners. We’ve talked many, many times about the full-body scanners used in US airports. For the sake of long-time listeners, I won’t summarize my rants. Suffice it to say, I’m not a big fan.\n\n[caption id=\"attachment_1156\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"251\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/tsascannerpic.png\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1156\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/tsascannerpic-251x300.png\" alt=\"TSA Backscatter Scanner Sample Images\" width=\"251\" height=\"300\" /></a> TSA Backscatter Scanner Sample Images[/caption]</li>\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">Now, there are two kinds of full body scanners -- backscatter that use X-rays to produce the near naked images we’ve seen in newspaper articles and millimeter wave machines that produce more generic stick figures. A few months ago, the TSA started swapping backscatter for millimeter wave machines at high-volume airports like Logan, LAX, and ORD to speed up security lines. Though you still have to pull everything out of your pockets, the processing time for millimeter wave machines -- from scan to “all-clear” -- is, in my experience, at least half that of backscatter. The slower backscatter machines were said to be redeployed to smaller, lower-volume airports.</li>\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">However, just before officials testified before Congress two weeks ago, the TSA announced that these 91 backscatter machines worth $14 million were actually <a href=\"http://homeland.house.gov/sites/homeland.house.gov/files/11-15-12%20Rogers%20Open_0.pdf\">bound</a> for a Texas storage warehouse. Space constraints in the smaller airports and <a href=\"http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/11/rapiscan-fraudulent-tests/\">suspicions</a> of manipulated test results by the backscatter manufacturer around new privacy software are to blame. Of course, this is the second multi-million dollar mistake the TSA has made with passenger screening technology. If you traveled through SFO in the mid-2000’s, you might have walked through a Puffer machine. It worked well in the lab, but completely failed when it faced the muck that floats around a real-world airport. The TSA spent <a href=\"http://www.homelandsecuritynewswire.com/tsa-puffer-machines-pulled-service\">$30 million</a> on 94 Puffers, deployed less than half of them, and pulled the last ones out of airports in 2010.</li>\n 	<li>No wonder the Congressional subcommittee chairman said during the hearing that he is “<a href=\"http://youtu.be/8fWPVYV_N9k\">really aggravated</a>” by the situation, saying that the country is “really struggling with some tough budgetary decisions and it’s … really hard to understand how this happens.” It doesn’t matter if you’re a Republican or a Democrat. You just have to be disgusted with the waste. It reinforces the sense that the TSA has never been much more than a real expensive piece of security theater. As the US shambles toward the brink of a fiscal cliff and has to make hard decisions about raising taxes and cutting entitlements, we can no longer afford to let the TSA take another $14 or 30 million away from schools or Medicare or out of taxpayers pockets. It’s a money pit we need to walk away from. And now I’ll tuck my soapbox away... until the next episode.</li>\n 	<li>Frequent travelers tend toward a rhythm, a pattern that allows them to quickly and efficiently navigate the hassles of today’s travel experience. There’s a thin line, though, between, efficiency and a rut, and the travel bubble straddles that line. It takes some effort to pop that bubble; good food and beer can help...</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #102</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://music.mevio.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Mevio’s Music Alley</a></li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_102.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #102 — Trip Management App Comparison; TSA Scanner Shuffle','','inherit','closed','closed','','1151-revision-v1','','','2021-09-28 18:41:27','2021-09-28 23:41:27','',1151,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3864',0,'revision','',0),
(3865,1,'2021-09-28 18:42:52','2021-09-28 23:42:52','[caption id=\"attachment_1170\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/Logos.png\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1170\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/Logos-300x150.png\" alt=\"Trip Management App Logos\" width=\"300\" height=\"150\"></a> The Usual Suspects[/caption]\n\nIn the last <a title=\"Podcast #102 — Trip Management App Comparison; TSA Scanner Shuffle\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/11/29/podcast-102-trip-management-app-comparison-tsa-scanner-shuffle/\">podcast</a>, I did a side-by-side comparison of the free versions of the leading trip management apps. In an <a href=\"http://www.tnooz.com/2012/12/11/tcritic/managing-travel-itineraries-easier-said-then-done-even-with-digital-tools/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">article</a> on the <a href=\"http://www.tnooz.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Tnooz</a> website, I dug deeper, expanding my comparison to the free and paid versions of <a href=\"http://tripit.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">TripIt</a>, <a href=\"http://tripcase.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">TripCase</a>, and <a href=\"http://worldmate.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">WorldMate</a>. My conclusions didn\'t change much.\n<blockquote><strong>THE TCRITIC TAKE: TripCase for smartphone only; WorldMate Gold for iPhone + iPad</strong>\n\nIf you only use a smartphone, the free TripCase app is the best choice. It was in the top of all three scenarios: itinerary building and sharing, and real-time flight status updates. However, it doesn’t have a tablet-specific app, just scaled up the smartphone app. iPad users should pay the $9.90/year for WorldMate Gold’s universal (iPhone + iPad) app. There’s nothing in TripIt Pro that justifies it’s $49/year price tag. The handful of Android tablet users should just accept the scaled-up TripCase app and hope for better treatment in 2013</blockquote>\nClick <a href=\"http://www.tnooz.com/2012/12/11/tcritic/managing-travel-itineraries-easier-said-then-done-even-with-digital-tools/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">here</a> to read the full article.','Managing travel itineraries -- Digging Deeper into Trip Management Apps','','inherit','closed','closed','','1169-revision-v1','','','2021-09-28 18:42:52','2021-09-28 23:42:52','',1169,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3865',0,'revision','',0),
(3866,1,'2021-09-28 18:43:48','2021-09-28 23:43:48','[caption id=\"attachment_1178\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"200\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/cn_image.size_.heads-in-beds-jacob-tomsky-cover.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1178\" title=\"Heads in Beds Cover\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/cn_image.size_.heads-in-beds-jacob-tomsky-cover-200x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"200\" height=\"300\"></a> Heads in Beds by Jacob Tomsky[/caption]\n\nI read Jacob Tomsky\'s&nbsp;<em><a href=\"http://jacobtomsky.com/\">Heads in Beds: A Reckless Memoir of Hotels, Hustles, and So-Called Hospitality</a></em> during my Christmas ski vacation in <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Park City, Utah\" href=\"http://www.parkcity.org/\" rel=\"homepage noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Park City, UT</a>. It\'s a fun, easy read. Just looking at the cover, you can tell that Tomsky wants to give us the hotel version of <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Anthony Bourdain\" href=\"http://www.anthonybourdain.com/\" rel=\"homepage noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Anthony Bourdain</a>\'s&nbsp;<em><a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Kitchen Confidential\" href=\"http://www.amazon.com/Kitchen-Confidential-Anthony-Bourdain/dp/0747590117%3FSubscriptionId%3D0G81C5DAZ03ZR9WH9X82%26tag%3Dzemanta-20%26linkCode%3Dxm2%26camp%3D2025%26creative%3D165953%26creativeASIN%3D0747590117\" rel=\"amazon noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Kitchen Confidential</a></em> -- the flawed insider with a heart of gold giving us a snarky behind-the-scenes tour.\n\nTomsky\'s story has two very distinct parts. The first third of the book tells us how Tomsky fell into the hospitality industry and began to make it a career. A degree in philosophy in <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"New Orleans\" href=\"http://www.nola.gov\" rel=\"homepage noopener\" target=\"_blank\">New Orleans</a> wasn\'t generating any meaningful employment, so he took a job as a parking valet. Working hard and being earnest (he cleans up well, doesn\'t try to kill his co-workers), he gets promoted to front desk agent and then into management at a new luxury hotel. The second part of the book is set in a gone-to-seed Manhattan hotel where Tomsky reluctantly lands, broke after 9 months touring through Europe and 3 months searching for a publishing job in New York.\n\nThe New Orleans story is certainly the sunnier of the two parts; a young man finding his niche in the world and working his way up. It also gives a more interesting behind-the-scenes view if you\'re interested in how big hotels really work. &nbsp;Tomsky does a great job of describing the amount of planning and effort it takes for a Ritz Carlton or Four Seasons to provide their levels of hospitality. I wished this part lasted longer.\n\nThe Manhattan story seems less about the hotel business and more about Tomsky abandoning, bit by bit, the Ritz level of service he was so proud of, becoming more focused on hustling tips than helping guests. As he slides down that slippery slope, the snark level increases... as does a sense of self-loathing. The big confrontation scene with the evil manager is less of a climax and more of a&nbsp;denouement.\n\nMuch of the press coverage of <em>Heads in Beds</em> has focused on the insider advice Tomsky dishes in the book\'s&nbsp;appendices --&nbsp;“Things a Guest Should Never Say,” “Things a Guest Should Never Do,” “Things Every Guest Must Know\".&nbsp;&nbsp;It\'s all pretty common-sense, distilling down to: 1) Don\'t be a jerk to the staff; 2) Tip everyone well; 3) Staff can and will screw you over if you don\'t follow the first two points.\n\n<em>Heads in Beds</em> is no <em>Kitchen Confidential</em>, but it\'s a fun read and a good story told with heart. Recommended.','\"Heads In Beds\" Review -- The Story Behind The Front Desk','','inherit','closed','closed','','1177-revision-v1','','','2021-09-28 18:43:48','2021-09-28 23:43:48','',1177,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3866',0,'revision','',0),
(3868,1,'2021-09-28 18:45:21','2021-09-28 23:45:21','[caption id=\"attachment_1195\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"245\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/DSC00565.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1195\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/DSC00565-245x300.jpg\" alt=\"Twin or King-Size Lily Pad?\" width=\"245\" height=\"300\" /></a> Twin or King-Size Lily Pad?[/caption]\n\nDoing a bit more travel since the last episode, so have more to talk about. First business trip of the year started out great, but quickly deteriorated as weather delays forced me to make quick changes. I update my trip management app recommendations after TripCase released the latest rev of their app, and talk about good mass transit experiences in <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Portland, Oregon\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portland%2C_Oregon\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener wikipedia\">Portland, OR</a> and <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Park City, Utah\" href=\"http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=40.6594444444,-111.499722222&amp;spn=0.1,0.1&amp;q=40.6594444444,-111.499722222 (Park%20City%2C%20Utah)&amp;t=h\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"geolocation noopener\">Park City, UT</a>. A new behind-the-scenes book on the hotel industry shows how important people are to the travel experience. And the explosion of tablet form factors makes me re-think why I carry a tablet -- comparing Apple\'s <a href=\"http://www.apple.com/ipad-mini/overview/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">iPad Mini</a> to Google\'s <a href=\"http://www.google.com/nexus/7/\">Nexus 7</a>.  Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_103.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #103:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>\n\n[caption id=\"attachment_1200\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/2013-01-21-21.06.25.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1200\" title=\"2013-01-21 21.06.25\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/2013-01-21-21.06.25-300x225.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\" /></a> Great Welcome Basket at Hotel Monaco[/caption]\n\nComing to you from the Hotel Monaco in downtown Portland, OR. It’s been a long time since I’ve broken out the mobile recording kit. And for Jeremy Philips, who back in October, tweeted “I kind of miss the bathroom acoustics...”...</li>\n 	<li>I am back on the road again with a mix of business and leisure. Flew into SLC on Southwest for a week-and-a-half Christmas ski vacation in Park City. First time I’ve skied Utah. It was nice, but cold. I’d say the last 5 years of skiing has been over Spring Break in Colorado. I’d forgotten how cold Christmas skiing is. It’d be 8 or 9 degrees when we hit the slopes, rising to maybe 15 in the afternoon.</li>\n 	<li>My first business trip of the year was last week to <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Hartford, Connecticut\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hartford%2C_Connecticut\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener wikipedia\">Hartford, CT</a>. I used to fly through there a lot 10-12 years ago. The airport was a dump back then. I was hoping that they’d freshened it up a bit -- at least replaced the carpet. The day started great -- United upgraded me to first class (milking the last month of 1K status for all it’s worth) and I got waved into the TSA PreCheck line. I felt so lucky, as the <a href=\"http://youtu.be/QgWzIl57bow\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">old Mary Chapin Carpenter tune</a> goes, I bought a couple of lottery tickets at the first kiosk I saw.</li>\n 	<li> An hour later though, it all started to break up -- go pear-shaped as my friends in the UK would say. As airlines have taken seats/capacity out of the system, secondary airports like Hartford have been the ones to lose service. For me, booking this flight at the last minute, there were no direct flights available, so I had to connect. Big risk; breaking my cardinal rule of flying. But I didn’t have another choice. So what do you do? I picked a smaller airport -- CLE -- to connect thru in hopes of avoiding air traffic control delays. My connection time was over an hour, just in case my first flight was delayed. And I scheduled myself to arrive almost 3 hours before my meeting, building in buffer for delays coming out of CLE.</li>\n 	<li>My first two strategies worked -- CLE was clear, no delays; and my inbound flight from ORD arrived 15 minutes early. When I turned my phone on after touching down in CLE, <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"TripIt\" href=\"http://www.tripit.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"homepage noopener\">TripIt</a> and <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"WorldMate\" href=\"http://www.worldmate.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"homepage noopener\">WorldMate</a> both told me my <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Bradley International Airport\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bradley_International_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener wikipedia\">BDL</a> flight was 40 minutes delayed. Annoying but not fatal because of all the backend buffer I’d allowed.</li>\n 	<li>I went straight to the gate to get the story -- why the delay? The plane was 2 hrs late leaving CLE because of fog in <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Philadelphia International Airport\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philadelphia_International_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener wikipedia\">PHL</a>, and is so now is late getting back to CLE for the BDL flight. Hmmm, this is starting to feel uncomfortable. I lived in PHL for 4 years and I know what a nightmare that airport is. Is the plane on its way back yet? No, it hasn’t landed at PHL yet.  Double hmmm... The departure time has slipped 10 minutes since I touched down. Not a good sign, but still not fatal. I sit down and run some e-mail.</li>\n 	<li>Departure time slips another 15 minutes. I talk to the gate agent again. Has the flight left PHL? No, but it looks like it has pushed back. I start checking other options. Nothing else to BDL. I reach back for those 8th grade map skills -- what about Providence, Boston, Albany, White Plains?</li>\n 	<li>There’s a flight out to PVD. I pull up Google Maps -- 90 mile drive from there to my meeting. I look at the arrival time, 45 minutes for taxi, getting off the plane, walking down the terminal, and getting to the car rental place. Would get me to my meeting with 30 minutes to spare. I draw a line in the sand -- if the plane for the BDL flight isn’t in the air 5 minutes before the PVD flight starts boarding, I’m switching. The United gate agents were very helpful. They called ahead to the PVD gate, they gave me updates what was going on in PHL... But when I hit my decision time, the plane was still on the ground in PHL and speed-walked to the PVD flight.</li>\n 	<li>And as you might have guessed, I didn’t match a single number on my lottery tickets...</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Beneath the Skin</em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/birdy-alter/\">Jerry Berlongieri</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>OK, we’ll leave the tile reverb behind for the rest of the podcast. Listening back to some of the old episodes, a little of that goes a long way...</li>\n 	<li>At the beginning of December, I expanded last episode’s trip management app bake-off into an <a href=\"http://www.tnooz.com/2012/12/11/tcritic/managing-travel-itineraries-easier-said-then-done-even-with-digital-tools/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">article</a> for Tnooz, a travel industry website focused on travel technology. In<a title=\"Podcast #102 — Trip Management App Comparison; TSA Scanner Shuffle\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/11/29/podcast-102-trip-management-app-comparison-tsa-scanner-shuffle/\"> episode #102</a>, I compared the free versions of TripIt, TripCase, WorldMate, and Kayak. The Tnooz article has the same use cases, but drops Kayak for the paid versions of TripIt and WorldMate. The recommendations didn’t change that much -- use the free version of TripCase, but for $10, the WorldMate app is not a bad deal either.</li>\n 	<li>\n\n[caption id=\"attachment_1170\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/Logos.png\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1170\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/Logos-300x150.png\" alt=\"Trip Management App Logos\" width=\"300\" height=\"150\" /></a> The Usual Suspects[/caption]\n\nAnd then, just to show that no good deed goes unpunished, TripCase launched a completely revised version of their app and website a week after my Tnooz review. Using it during my SLC and BDL (or should I say PVD) trip, I’m revising my opinion southward. The new interface is fine. I’m not sure that it’s better as much as it’s just different -- I picked up the new navigation pretty quickly. But I noticed that I wasn’t getting the normal iPhone notifications -- I was getting e-mails instead, which you’ll remember from my evaluation in the last episode is definitely inferior to native iOS or Android notifications. And I can’t find in the app or the website how to re-enable them. The paid version of WorldMate does a good job of native notifications. TripCase also seems to have hidden where to manage social media notifications -- where to turn on/off trip postings to Facebook and LinkedIn. I have to say that, after this redesign, my recommended solution is a bit muddier. I’d say it’s a combination of the free version of TripIt to push Facebook and LinkedIn notifications, and the $10 <a href=\"http://worldmate.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">WorldMate</a> Gold for managing the day of travel.</li>\n 	<li>I had a chuckle a couple of weeks back. I was doing my weekly check-up on the TravelCommons site -- going thru the comments caught up in the Spam filter (you wouldn’t believe some of that stuff) and looking at some of the traffic stats like inbound links. I saw a new link, or at least one I didn’t recognize, from FlyerTalk, the frequent flyer forum. Following it back, it was a <a href=\"http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/travel-technology/544219-your-favourite-podcasts-7.html\">topic</a> that was started in April 2006 asking for travel podcast suggestions. I was very pleasantly surprised to see TravelCommons listed in the first response. We get bumped in 2007 and again in 2009 with listeners recommending the podcast. Then, what I would guess to be a former listener commented “The content of the Travel Commons podcast is interesting, but the guy\'s voice is monotone and metronomically slow.” OK, I’ll take that as a half vote. But then Bob Fenerty jumped in with “I can see that perspective, but I find Mark\'s voice soothing and reassuring”. Thanks for the help, Bob. I think the stint in the ‘70’s I did in contemporary Christian radio in Memphis -- “You’re listening to the Voice of 1590” -- has permanently crippled my ability to be vocally exciting...</li>\n 	<li>As longtime listeners like Bob will recall, one of my more nerdy travel hobbies is taking mass transit to the airport. I don’t know why -- maybe it’s some weird twist on trainspotting. But even after getting my passport stolen on the train back to Brussels airport last year, I still like to try these things out. I have three criteria for good mass transit to the airport -- it\'s gotta be clean, frequent, and cheap. Washington\'s Metro hits all three while SF\'s BART misses on all of them</li>\n 	<li>Portland\'s <a href=\"http://trimet.org/schedules/maxredline.htm\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">MAX Red Line</a> from the airport also hits all three. Clean, reasonably modern trains, though they\'re more like light rail trams, so not the fastest things. They run every 15 minutes, so good frequency. And at $2.50 for a ride downtown, they\'re an order of magnitude cheaper than a cab. Unless you don\'t buy a ticket. Halfway into my ride Monday night, three fare checkers step into my car checking tickets. I had mine, but the woman next to me didn\'t. She said that she skipped the fare machine to run to make the train. The fare checker didn\'t have much sympathy. She ended up with a ticket and a court date. He told her that if she had a clean record, she\'d probably get away with a $60 fine and a day of community service. Wow! All that to save 15 minutes...</li>\n 	<li>I also had a good experience with the free bus system in Park City UT during our ski holiday there. We took a cab to and from SLC, but once in Park City, we relied on the bus system to get everywhere -- to/from the ski areas (Park City and The Canyons), town center for dinners on the very cold nights.... Clean buses, extensive routes, good frequency, and free. I’m told it’s funded by a piece of the local sales tax. It was certainly a money saver -- no rental car, gas or parking costs -- and very convenient.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a question, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- use the Voice Memo app on your iPhone or something like Easy Voice Recorder on your Android phone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em>Bulletproof</em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/musicinside-forces/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Music Inside</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Hospitality Is Personal</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>I read Jacob Tomsky’s <a href=\"http://jacobtomsky.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Heads in Beds: A Reckless Memoir of Hotels, Hustles, and So-Called Hospitality</em></a> while in Park City. It’s a fun, easy read. Just looking at the cover, you can tell that Tomsky wants to give us the hotel version of Anthony Bourdain‘s <em>Kitchen Confidential</em>— the flawed insider with a heart of gold giving us a snarky behind-the-scenes tour.\n\n[caption id=\"attachment_1178\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"200\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/cn_image.size_.heads-in-beds-jacob-tomsky-cover.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1178\" title=\"Heads in Beds Cover\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/cn_image.size_.heads-in-beds-jacob-tomsky-cover-200x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"200\" height=\"300\" /></a> Heads in Beds by Jacob Tomsky[/caption]</li>\n 	<li>This tour has two very distinct parts. The first third of the book tells us how Tomsky fell into the hospitality industry and began to make it a career. He finds that having a philosophy degree in New Orleans isn\'t an easy way to get a job, and so he takes a job as a parking valet at a new luxury hotel. Working hard and being earnest (which in his case means that he cleans up well and doesn’t try to kill his co-workers), he gets promoted to front desk agent and then into management. The second part of the book is set in a gone-to-seed Manhattan hotel where Tomsky lands, very reluctantly, broke after 9 months touring through Europe and 3 months searching for a publishing job in New York.</li>\n 	<li>The New Orleans story is certainly the sunnier of the two; a young man finding his niche in the world and working his way up. Tomsky does a great job of describing the amount of planning and effort it takes for a Ritz Carlton or Four Seasons to provide their levels of hospitality. And the biggest target for that effort doesn\'t seem to be the guests, but instead the front line employees. Tomsky talks again and again about how amazed the valets and maids are when they\'re treated to a pre-opening reception with an open bar, that  the general manager knows each of their names.... Little things, but things that translate into self-respect, pride in their jobs, pride in their hotel, which then translates into a drive to give the best service possible to each guest.</li>\n 	<li>If the New Orleans story is about a man on his way up, the Manhattan story is about Tomsky abandoning, bit by bit, the Ritz level of service he was so proud of, becoming more focused on hustling tips than helping guests. As he slides down that slippery slope, the snark level increases… as does a sense of self-loathing. Everyone in the hotel is out for themselves -- the managers, the bellmen, the front desk clerks -- running their hustles not to serve their guests, but to maximize their tips. Which certainly leads to great service for <em>some</em> guests -- but only those liberally spreading $20 bills around the lobby. And again, the tone is set at the top, but in this case, the general manager isn\'t trying to deliver the best service; he\'s trying to deliver the most money into his and the owner\'s till as quickly and easily as possible.  An example that prompts each worker to do the same.</li>\n 	<li>I\'m not sure if Tomsky meant to show this, but his tale clearly illustrates something we talk about often on TravelCommons -- that, in spite of all the technology being injected into the travel experience, the most important bit of the experience is still delivered by people -- hospitality is personal. And the two parts of Tomsky\'s story show how hard it is to build a team that prides itself on delivering great hospitality, and how easy it is to build a cynical team that\'s doesn\'t care.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music --<em>Hurt Me So I Can Walk Away </em>by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/joy-float/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Michael Joy</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Tablets, Phablets, and Other Devices</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>One of the most popular pieces of technology being carried by travelers nowadays is a tablet. Walk down the aisle of a plane or a train and you\'ll half to two-thirds of the passengers looking intently into one of these flat pieces of glass.</li>\n 	<li>It started with people carrying Kindles, and then you saw iPads propped up against seat backs, but now it\'s all kinds. I saw my first Microsoft Surface table in the wild (i.e., not in a Microsoft store) a few weeks ago walking through a food court in LGA. It was sorta royalish baby blue, complete with the snapon keyboard. An older guy sitting next to me on the plane on Monday was working on a Samsung Galaxy Note. The 5-1/4 inch screen looked huge compared to my iPhone 5. He had it a couple of weeks and really likes it. The key for him is having enough screen size to run e-mail in a large font so he doesn\'t have to pull out his reading glasses, but it\'s small enough to fit in his suit coat pocket. The only thing that feels a bit funny, he said, is using it to make a phone call. That big slab of glass feels like it\'s covering half his face.</li>\n 	<li>I\'ve been running a Google Nexus 7 for 3-4 months now. The 7-in screen size puts it between the pocket-sized Galaxy Note and a full-sized iPad. I had run iPads since they first came out -- the 1, the 2, the next one after that (the iPad without a number). Like everyone, I thought they were phenomenal devices. But as I traveled with it, I had more trouble trying to figure out how the iPad uniquely justified it weight in my travel kit. I had colleagues who tried using them in place of laptops and as electronic notebooks. It worked just OK for them -- the iPad\'s e-mail client and calendar app just don\'t have the same power as Outlook, and the notes they took with a stylus looked like a kindergartener\'s scrawl with a black crayon. Some guys carried bluetooth keyboards, but that seemed like more hassle than it was worth. And then, I found myself getting frustrated with the iPad\'s \"sandboxing\" -- certain files are opened with certain apps; you can\'t get to the file system like you can on a PC if you need to do something more than an app will let you. It\'s a great model that works for 80% of population, but was way too constraining for me. For what I do, an iPad isn\'t going to replace a laptop.</li>\n 	<li>As a \"media consumption device\"? iPads are great for watching movies but most of my \"media consumption\" is reading and I found the full-sized iPad too heavy -- both in my hand and in my bag -- to be a good e-reader.</li>\n 	<li>The laptop/iPad combo had too much overlap, so I started looking at 7-in tablets. I skipped the Kindle -- I wanted to do more than just e-read; I don\'t have a big investment in the Amazon eco-system, and didn\'t want to get locked in further. So I looked at the iPad Mini and the Google Nexus 7. I gravitated toward the Mini -- I have a bunch of iPad apps, <em>am</em> deeply invested in the iTunes eco-system... But pricing out equivalent Minis and Nexus 7s, the Mini was almost twice as expensive and, try as I might, I couldn\'t justify that delta.</li>\n 	<li>The Nexus 7 works fine for what I want -- a lot of reading -- with the WSJ and USA Today apps, work documents that I cloud-sync from my laptop with DropBox, -- watch the occasional movie or video podcast, run Android photo editing apps like Instagram and Snapseed,.... I\'ve even done some Google Hangouts on it.</li>\n 	<li>One thing I haven\'t done is try to make a phone call on it. that\'s a lot of glass to lay across my cheek.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #103</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Magnatune</a></li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_103.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #103 — Hospitality is Personal; Tablets Everywhere','','inherit','closed','closed','','1191-revision-v1','','','2021-09-28 18:45:21','2021-09-28 23:45:21','',1191,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3868',0,'revision','',0),
(3870,1,'2021-09-28 18:47:38','2021-09-28 23:47:38','<a href=\"http://thisweekintravel.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">This Week in Travel</a> hosts Jen Leo and Chris Christensen invited me to this week\'s <a href=\"http://amateurtraveler.com/corey-taratuta-and-mark-peacock-travel-news-podcast/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">episode</a> along with Corey Taratuta of the <a href=\"http://irishfireside.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Irish Fireside podcast</a>. Though it took us a second time to get all the Google Hangout technology to work, we had a good time. We start with a rundown of this week\'s travel news headlines. Corey then talks about <a href=\"http://www.thegatheringireland.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">The Gathering</a>, this year\'s big tourist program in Ireland, which reminds me of my favorite Ireland travel moment -- finding a laundromat next door to a pub in <a href=\"http://www.corkcity.ie/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Cork</a>. I also talk about the explosion of tablet sizes and form factors, a topic also covered in <a title=\"Podcast #103 — Hospitality is Personal; Tablets Everywhere\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2013/01/24/podcast-103-hospitality-is-personal-tablets-everywhere/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">TravelCommons #103</a>. And just to be clear, I did <em>not</em> choose the thumbnail for the YouTube preview.\n\n[youtube]http://youtu.be/aeeJpUpk7v8[/youtube]','Once More With Feeling...','','inherit','closed','closed','','1214-revision-v1','','','2021-09-28 18:47:38','2021-09-28 23:47:38','',1214,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3870',0,'revision','',0),
(3872,1,'2021-09-28 18:50:29','2021-09-28 23:50:29','[caption id=\"attachment_1273\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/IMG_2455.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-1273 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/IMG_2455-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Morning-Prince Canal, Jordaan\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Quiet Sunday Morning Before the Tour Boats Invade the Prinsengracht[/caption]\n\nBack in front of the mic after summer vacation, I\'ve continued the heavy travel schedule -- New Orleans mostly with a week in Amsterdam for a family vacation. I talk about the exposure of staying in a houseboat on an Amsterdam canal and run through my personal \"Best of\" list. Flying out of the Gulf Coast in the summer with its afternoon thunderstorms has forced me to become a weather geek. I run through the weather apps I religiously use. Bad weather also caught up with me in Europe, but Lufthansa did a great job of taking care of us. I\'m still in love with TSA\'s PreCheck. I may make Southwest\'s A-List once PreCheck comes to <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Chicago Midway International Airport\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Midway_International_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener wikipedia noreferrer\">Chicago-Midway airport</a>. And we wrap with restaurant trends seen at this year\'s National Restaurant Association show. All this and more  at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_106.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #106:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Back in the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago. I sorta took the summer off -- working, biking, reading, drinking beer. Nothing really exciting, which meant, I guess, that I didn\'t have anything new to podcast about.</li>\n 	<li>Which doesn\'t mean I haven\'t been traveling. I\'ve been in the air almost every week since the last episode -- New Orleans mostly, with a few trips to Houston, and a week in Amsterdam for a family vacation.</li>\n 	<li>The New Orleans trips have taught me a key life lesson -- don’t try to fly out of the Gulf Coast after 4:30pm in the summer. New Orleans in the summer is 91 degrees and 91% humidity. And so you sit in the airport terminal and watch the line of thunderstorms cross the runway at about 4pm -- just bucketing down rain with lightning strikes that keep the ground crews inside. That’s about the time you walk over and get another beer ‘cause you’re going to be there for a while.</li>\n 	<li>Of course, it could be worse. You could be on one of the planes that managed to land right before the squall line hit. You’re sitting on a plane that’s pulled up to the gate, but you can get off because there’s no one to pull the jet bridge up because of the lighting. You get the same wait, but no beer.</li>\n 	<li>So if you don’t want to torture yourself, you don’t fly out late afternoon, but the other problem is that, after 7pm, MSY is a ghost town. The last flight that will get me to Chicago -- even with a connection, leaves at 6:30. Save for the odd SW hop to Houston, there’s nothing going.</li>\n 	<li>So, if I have a late afternoon meeting, I have to stay overnight. And then head over to the French Quarter, or the Garden District, or the Bywater district for a cocktail and some fresh oysters, maybe a bit of gumbo or cochon… OK, so maybe the lack of late night flights home isn\'t so bad after all.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/djlang59/37792\">Drops of H2O (The Filtered Water Treatment)</a></em> by J Lang</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>So all this dodging summer Gulf storms has made weather apps join airline and trip mgmt apps in the critical travel apps folder on my <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"iPhone\" href=\"http://www.apple.com/iphone\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"homepage noopener noreferrer\">iPhone</a> and Nexus 7. Actually, it starts on my laptop where I have <a href=\"http://weatherspark.com/#!dashboard;a=USA/LA/New_Orleans\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">WeatherSpark </a>on an open tab at all times. In one browser window, I get radar, temperature and precipitation forecasts. On my iPhone, it’s <a href=\"http://forecast.io/#/f/40.7142,-74.0064\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Forecast</a> and the rebuilt Yahoo Weather apps which really represent two ends of the design spectrum. Forecast has very minimal aesthetic -- lot of white space; focused quickly giving you what it thinks most people want to know -- what’s the forecast for the next hour; and the next 24 hours. Tapping and reveals current weather conditions -- humidity, pressure, wind; another tap the 7 day forecast; tap one of those days drills down to its hourly temperature and precip forecast. Yahoo Weather is less tappy -- you start with current conditions and a big picture from Flickr and then scroll down for forecasts and a radar map. On my Nexus 7, <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Skymotion\" href=\"http://skymotion.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"homepage noopener noreferrer\">SkyMotion</a> is focused on short-term forecasting -- it gives me current conditions and a forecast as far ahead as it can see (No Rain for the next 115 min) and then counts down the next forecast -- I have mine set to update every 5 minutes. I tend to triangulate across all of them for sort of a consensus forecast, but that’s because, in trying to get home at a reasonable time every week, I\'ve become a bit obsessive about the weather.</li>\n 	<li>Maps, of course, are the critical travel app. And I don\'t know about you guys, but for me Apple Maps is still lousy. I hadn\'t used Apple Maps ever since Google launched their IOS Maps app, but a few weeks back, landing at ORD, I was in a rush to get directions and travel time to a meeting. The address was in the appt so I just clicked on it and it popped up Apple Maps. A couple of clicks and I had directions, or so I thought. As I skimmed the turns, I thought \"This can\'t be right\". I looked at the address in the pin -- it was Michigan Ave in <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Evanston, Illinois\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evanston%2C_Illinois\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener wikipedia noreferrer\">Evanston, IL</a> not Chicago -- even though the address on the appointment included Chicago. So I manually edited the address, specifically typing in Chicago and hit Return. But Apple still wanted to send me to Evanston. I re-opened the appointment, copied the address, pasted it into Google Maps and I headed to Chicago.</li>\n 	<li>Playing around later that day, I found that Apple Maps just isn\'t as smart as Google Maps about my location. Standing in the Loop, I put a street address into Google Maps -- 525 Monroe -- and Google assumes that, since I\'m in standing in downtown Chicago, I want to find 525 W Monroe in Chicago. Apple Maps will tell me \"Address not found\" if I don\'t specify Chicago. Remember when this whole debacle started -- Tim Cook said Maps would get better the more people used it. I haven\'t seen it, but thanks to Google, I\'m not too worried.</li>\n 	<li>In the last <a title=\"Podcast #105 — Traveling in Spain; Return of the Hotel Lobby?\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2013/05/30/podcast-105-traveling-in-spain-return-of-the-hotel-lobby/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">two</a> <a title=\"Podcast #104 — Status Free Fall; TSA Knife Fight\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2013/03/19/podcast-104-status-free-fall-tsa-knife-fight/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">episodes</a>, I talked about, when traveling internationally, buying a SIM card in country to save on voice and data roaming charges. In Amsterdam, the story was no different. After landing in <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amsterdam_Airport_Schiphol\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Schiphol</a>, I searched out the <a href=\"http://www.lebara.nl/?isoCode=en_GB\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Lebara Mobile</a> booth in the shadow of the Burger King. It wasn\'t the biggest booth, so it took me a bit. But once I found it, it took the guy all of 5 minutes to get my unlocked AT&amp;T iPhone 4 registered on the KPN network. For €20 (about $26) I got 1 GB of data, unlimited texts, and enough voice minutes to make a half-dozen restaurant reservations. Compare that to $30 for 120 MB of international data.  The web site <a href=\"http://prepaidwithdata.wikia.com/\">http://prepaidwithdata.wikia.com</a> is a great site to prepaid plan comparisons. Should be a top bookmark for any international traveler.</li>\n 	<li>The Saturday we flew back from Amsterdam was the one day of bad weather -- rain and low clouds. I’d booked our flights using United miles, so while the flight over from Chicago was a non-stop United flight, the flight back was on Lufthansa with a connection through Frankfurt. We got to Schiphol a bit early, and seeing delays, we tried to get on an earlier flight to Frankfurt. We weren\'t the only ones with idea; the flight was full. “No worries,” said the counter agent, “your flight is only delayed 20 minutes. You’ll still have an hour to make your connection.” 45 minutes later, the delay is now an hour. “No worries,” the gate agent said, “you’ll still have 20 minutes to make your connection.” I study her face for signs of irony or sarcasm, but I don’t detect any. Boarding time comes and goes and we’re still in the gate area. The fuel truck is MIA and we can’t board while the plane is being fueled. I’d already talked to United. The connection we will now miss is the last flight to the US from Frankfurt and there’s no room on any nearby United flights to the US until Monday. I figure there’s a better chance of us getting to the US from Frankfurt, Lufthansa’s main hub, than Schiphol. We board the flight knowing we’ll be overnighting in Frankfurt.</li>\n 	<li>On approach to Frankfurt, the flight attendant reads off all the connecting flights -- the gates for the connections that are still make-able, and the rebookings for those that weren\'t -- more information than I typically hear on a delayed flight into ORD. According to this, we were rebooked on the next morning’s flight to ORD, which was great news because United said it was booked up. We head over to Lufthansa’s customer service desk. Not much of a line. The agent quickly finds us in the system, looks at me, my wife and my two kids and says, “So you’ll need two or four rooms this evening?” “Two will be fine,” I tell him. He gives us vouchers for two rooms at an airport hotel, which includes €20 a piece for dinner, and also includes breakfast. All on Lufthansa. And remember, we were flying on award miles. Now think about this for a minute. If this was the US, we would’ve been told “It’s weather. Not our fault. You’re on your own.” And re-booking on award miles? I think we would’ve ranked lower than non-revenue employees. All of this, plus the really nice service in coach on the way back to Chicago has my wife telling me -- the next time we book flights with United miles, avoid them; book all the legs on Lufthansa.</li>\n 	<li>One thing United does do right, though, is TSA PreCheck. As I’ve said in previous podcasts, PreCheck is wonderful thing -- keep your shoes and belt on, keep your liquids and PC in your bag, stroll through the metal detector; no full body irradiation, everybody -- the passengers and the TSA agents -- are happy and smiling, there’s a rainbow over the exit of the X-ray machine, and a sparkly unicorn happily gives you your bags at the end. OK, I exaggerate -- but just a bit. Anyhow, TSA PreCheck is a wonderful thing and United does a good job of it in ORD and IAH. American, though, seems to have its challenges. Their PreCheck line at ORD can get very long -- not quite sure why -- and now somehow, they’ve screwed up my PreCheck status because on my last 3 flights to New Orleans, I’ve been shunted over to the regular status line. Missing the unicorns and rainbows, I called up American. Yes, I know that PreCheck is not guaranteed and that randomly I’ll have to go through the regular line -- it’s happened before, but not three trips in a row. I got shunted between Customer Service and the Platinum Desk -- don’t understand it; everything looks fine. A Twitter conversation with American earlier this week asked that I compare the name on my AAdvantage account with my Global Entry account. I also looked at my United account. Both Global Entry and United have my middle name spelled out; my American account just has my middle initial. I updated my American account -- we’ll see if this solves the problem.</li>\n 	<li>On a recent flight down to New Orleans, I took Southwest out of MDW. No PreCheck there. And with all the families and leisure travelers who use MDW, and the way security is configured -- everyone funnels into a single massive multi-lane security checkpoint -- I avoid MDW at all costs. So during this rare flight through, I asked a TSA guy when they’d be getting PreCheck. “End of the year,” he said. “They’ve been reconfiguring a bunch of lanes on the right hand side to handle it.” Well, now. I had just spent 20 minutes getting through security vs. what is usually 5 minutes in United’s ORD PreCheck line. I might be a lot more accepting of a Southwest flight with PreCheck.  Provided that Southwest doesn’t do PreCheck just for its A List members.</li>\n 	<li>And finally, I had a nice social media serendipity moment last month. I was at the Oak Park Microbrew and Food Review. I think this was the 6th year was on, but the first time I’d gone. It was a spur of the moment thing, so I was by myself. I was checking in my first couple of beers on Untappd, which is something like beer geek Foursquare. And up pops a comment on one of my check-ins -- “Come find me, I’m in a Red Hat Linux hat”. Another <a href=\"http://www.untappd.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Untappd </a>friend, and long time podcast listener Rob Auch was there too. It wasn’t too crowded yet, so we managed to find each other fairly quickly, and then hung out for an hour or so tasting beer together. It’s kinda fun when the virtual world intersects the real world.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any travel observations, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/Zapac/26047\">Test Drive</a></em> by Zapac</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Summer Vacation in Amsterdam</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>I\'ve been burning through the award miles recently -- I drained the American bank for a spring break trip to Spain, so it was United’s turn for summer vacation. Since my daughter got to choose the spring break location, my son got the choice for summer. We could only carve out a week, so Asia was out which nixed his usual choice of Japan. Let’s look at Europe “but”, I said as he was opening his mouth, “not Russia. I might be interested in St Petersburg as part of a Baltic thing, but for the rest of Russia, no thanks. You can do that on your own dime.” “Fine,” he said, “then Amsterdam”.</li>\n 	<li>Really? Why? “I dunno; just a place I want to go.” OK. Actually, as I thought about it, I got more interested in it. I’ve done a good bit of work around Amsterdam -- in Haarlem, Utrecht. I’ve flown in and out of Schiphol a bunch of times, but save for one windy afternoon, never really spent any time in the city itself. This could be fun.</li>\n 	<li>As I mentioned in the <a title=\"Podcast #105 — Traveling in Spain; Return of the Hotel Lobby?\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2013/05/30/podcast-105-traveling-in-spain-return-of-the-hotel-lobby/\">last episode</a>, we’ve pretty much converted from hotel rooms to vacation rentals for our family vacations. For about the same price as two hotel rooms, we get that and more -- a kitchen, living room -- places to sit and hang out other than beds and concierge lounges. We also like to shop in local markets. And with a kitchen, this is a lot more fun. We get to buy and try things rather than just doing grocery tourism.</li>\n 	<li>Normally, this works out very well. But the end of July was warmer than normal in Europe. We had expected weather in the mid-70’s -- we got high 80’s during the day and maybe dipping into the mid-70’s at night. Wouldn’t be bad if we were staying at a hotel with air conditioning, but we had decided to do something a bit more local -- we rented a houseboat on the Prince’s Canal. Which didn’t come with air conditioning -- nor great cross-ventilation since you’re kinda down below street -- and breeze level in the canals.</li>\n 	<li>The first morning in the houseboat, I woke up and headed to the kitchen to figure out the Nespresso coffee machine. I opened the canal side door and windows to let in the morning breeze and started rummaging around for the coffee capsules. I heard a noise behind me; I turned and saw one of those big canal tour boats passing within a couple feet of our houseboat; full of tourists, wielding cameras, many pointed through our open door, looking straight at me in my boxers. I waved -- really, what else could I do? -- pressed the Brew button on the Nespresso, and headed back to the bedroom for a t-shirt and a pair of shorts. A bit of a shock at first, it became a game for us the rest of the trip. Now purposely walking around in the most colorful boxers my son and I could find; pointing our cameras back at the tour boats. The tour boat traffic on the Canal was heavy -- I posted a Vine video on my Twitter feed of passing tour boats  -- but that was part of the fun. We would hang out on the little porch at the end of the day, eating some cheese, drinking a beer. It felt like we were part of the Amsterdam vibe, not just observing it.</li>\n 	<li>One of the best days of the week, though, was spent turning the tables -- piloting ourselves through the canals and peeping into the other houseboats. Social media serendipity hit again, this time through Twitter -- by way of Untappd, again. Arnoud Heijnis, a long-time TravelCommons listener, follows me on Twitter. Untappd pushes beer drinking badges to Twitter. Arnoud sees the Weiss beer badge I earned from a check-in at some canal-side bar and shoots me a great e-mail with a fantastic list of suggestions. The one that immediately catches my eye is renting a boat for your own canal tour. I get on line, book a boat, hit the grocery store from some snacks and walk to the rental place in Westerpark. We hop in an aluminum boat with an electric outboard motor, lay on the bottom of the boat to clear what we’re told is the lowest canal bridge in Amsterdam, and then go out for a 3-hr cruise. Bopping around the canals, dodging the big tour boats -- it was a great time.</li>\n 	<li>We also spent a couple of days being part of the bicycling culture in Amsterdam. I think it’s impossible to say you’ve truly visited Amsterdam without renting a bike and spending the day cycling around. I’ve spent time in Portland, OR, Seattle, and Boulder, CO -- three of the top US biking cities in US -- and they pale compared to Amsterdam. Until you get in the midst of it, you can’t really appreciate that bicycles are on the top of the Amsterdam transit pyramid -- cyclists, then motorists, then pedestrians.The bicycle lanes near the Central Station are the craziest -- a mosh pit of cyclists and foreign pedestrians coming out of the train station sprinting for their lives across car and bike lines, chased by honking horns and ringing bells. But get outside town a bit, as we did biking up to Marken Island, and it settles down a lot. And it’s pretty easy cycling -- except for bridges, the country is pancake flat.</li>\n 	<li>Other tips?\n<ul>\n 	<li>I already mentioned hitting the Lebara stand in Schiphol for the “€20 for a gig of mobile data” plan</li>\n 	<li>The train into Amsterdam from Schiphol is dead simple -- take it if you’re staying in the city, but be ready -- it’s so dead simple that it gets crowded.</li>\n 	<li>The family and I loved the Van Gogh Museum -- it’s rare to be able to trace an artist’s development in such detail. But understand that a lot of other people love it too. Go on-line and book a specific date and time for your visit. It’s a lot shorter wait.</li>\n 	<li>Skip the new “Heineken Experience”. It’s just not worth the money. Hit <a href=\"http://www.brouwerijhetij.nl/homepage/zomerblond-6/\">Brouwerij \'t IJ</a> on one of your bike rides. Drink better beer outside under a windmill. Or hit <a href=\"http://www.arendsnest.nl/\">Proeflokaal Arendsnest</a> in the Jordaan district for their selection of Dutch microbrews</li>\n 	<li>We stayed in the Jordaan district and definitely recommend it. We hit the <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noordermarkt\">Noordermarkt</a> farmers’ market on Saturday to stock the houseboat kitchen, shopped down <a href=\"http://www.iamsterdam.com/en-GB/experience/about-amsterdam/areas/featured-areas/haarlemmerstraat-haarlemmerdijk\">Haarlemmerstraat </a>, stopped in at the neighborhood restaurants and bars. We found it the right mix of happening but not too raucous -- which, from walking down the Damrak or around the Red Light district, seem to put us in the minority.</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/Pitx/19513\">Black Rainbow</a></em> by Pitx</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Restaurant Trends</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>This week’s trip to Atlanta will make it 9 straight weeks that I’ve been on travel. So not only do I get to know airports, and airplanes, and hotels, but also restaurants. And for the past couple of years, I’ve attended the<a href=\"http://www.restaurant.org/Home\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"> National Restaurant Association</a>\'s’ <a href=\"http://show.restaurant.org/Home\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">annual show</a> in Chicago to walk the floor and see what trends we can expect to see when we’re eating on the road.</li>\n 	<li>In <a title=\"Podcast #98 — Stolen Luggage &amp; Passports; Restaurants Want Your Smartphone\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/05/20/podcast-98-stolen-luggage-restaurants-want-your-smartphone/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">episode #98</a>, I talked about last year’s show, where technology seemed to be the trend -- mobile apps to let you pay your tab, iPad digital menus, smartphones replacing pagers for queued-up guests,.... This year there was still a technology bent -- yet more permutations on digital menus (though this time featuring cheaper Android tablets as well as iPads) and a whole lot of social apps -- seems everyone wants me to check-in, upload pictures, and leave comments (good ones, I assume) on their site. I gotta tell you, though, I sorta full up with social networks. Personally, I have zero interest in donating free content to yet another social network.  Twitter, Facebook, Untappd, Foodspotting, TripAdvisor, and now a friend just talked me into Yelp. That’s it -- I’m over-socialed.</li>\n 	<li>Luckily this year’s NRA floor -- remember, I said Restaurant, not Rifle Association -- had, well maybe not new food trends, but some clearer, perhaps more consensus trends. Two that jumped out at me were Mediterranean and Japanese foods. Now, I know, how new is Mediterranean? But if in years past, Mediterranean was a label used to push more expensive Italian food, I felt like I saw more of the Mediterranean this year -- specifically, more of the Eastern Mediterranean -- Greek, Turkish, Lebanese. Different, interesting flavors -- sumac, pomegranate, tahini; less basil, more oregano; less pork, more lamb. Nothing against Italian -- I love it -- but anything that brings more flavor choices, I’m all for.</li>\n 	<li>Japanese flavors also had a big presence this year. But not sushi -- although someone was demoing a very cool automatic sushi maker. Instead, it was about the broader spectrum of Japanese flavors -- noodles, green teas, and umami -- the newest basic taste -- sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and now umami -- sort of a meaty, savory taste that is at the core of many Japanese flavors. Japanese noodles seem to be all the rage now -- ramen, udon, soba, …. On the floor of the show, a Japanese company had an entire automated noodle making assembly line running. Watching those big fat udon noodle roll off made me hungry.</li>\n 	<li>Anything that adds variety is a great thing. I remember some years back traveling every week to <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_John,_New_Brunswick\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">St John, NB</a>. I won’t bore you with the hassles of getting there from Chicago -- suffice it to say that, with no customs in St John airport, it wasn’t a simple trip. St John is a nice town, but the choices were a bit limited. Monday night, we’d have salmon -- very fresh, very good. Tuesday, we’d have mussels -- over from nearby Prince Edward’s Island, again very fresh, very good. Wednesday, we’d have a hamburger -- less fresh, but washed down with fresh Moosehead beer from next door Nova Scotia. Thursday -- well, it was back to the salmon -- still fresh, perhaps a little less good.</li>\n 	<li>I’m certainly not having that problem on my weekly commutes to New Orleans, but for those travelers heading to less culinarily interesting destinations, I hope the variety I saw on the floor of the Restaurant show reaches you real soon.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #106</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org\">ccMixter</a></li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_106.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #106 — Summer Vacation in Amsterdam; Restaurant Trends','','inherit','closed','closed','','1265-revision-v1','','','2021-09-28 18:50:29','2021-09-28 23:50:29','',1265,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3872',0,'revision','',0),
(3873,1,'2021-09-28 18:51:10','2021-09-28 23:51:10','[caption id=\"attachment_1291\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/2013-12-10-07.55.43.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1291\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/2013-12-10-07.55.43-300x225.jpg\" alt=\"Tough travel day when the deicing fluid freezes\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\"></a> Tough travel day when the deicing fluid freezes[/caption]\n\nSnow, ice, and cold temperatures have hit North America a lot earlier this year. With the crush of Christmas/New Years travel starting this weekend, here\'s the TravelCommons\' top holiday travel tips...\n<ol>\n 	<li><strong style=\"line-height: 1.5em;\">Fly Direct</strong><span style=\"line-height: 1.5em;\"> -- This is the top tip every time I put this list together. Holiday travel stacks up problems -- &nbsp;high passenger load factors combined with winter weather disruptions almost guarantees late arrivals and missed connections. Pay the extra $100 for a direct flight.</span></li>\n 	<li><strong>Skip the Tight Connection</strong> -- If you can\'t fly direct, give yourself enough time to survive a late inbound flight. Take the 90- or 120-minute connection. Worst case is you get to try some great <a href=\"http://www.rickbayless.com/restaurants/tortas.html\">Mexican food</a> in O\'Hare or <a href=\"http://ilovememphisblog.com/2012/04/eat-airport-barbecue/\">barbecue</a> in Memphis.</li>\n 	<li><strong>Catch the Early Flight&nbsp;</strong>--&nbsp;Delays stack up as the day wears on.&nbsp; As your airplane goes from airport to airport, the probability of it getting stuck increases. &nbsp;Overnight, airlines have a chance to recover – late planes finally get their destinations and operations groups can reassign planes.&nbsp; So while the last flight out can be a crap shoot, I\'ve rarely hit a delay on the first flight out.</li>\n 	<li><strong>Use Multiple Flight Tracking Apps</strong> -- Use your smartphone to keep track of gate changes and flight delays. Sign up for text notifications from your airline when you book your ticket. However, &nbsp;I\'ve often experienced long delays with the airlines\' services or changes that were never sent out. So I also use <a href=\"http://tripit.com\">TripIt</a>, <a href=\"http://worldmate.com\">WorldMate</a>, and <a href=\"http://flightaware.com\">FlightAware</a>. It means multiple notices, but it also means I don\'t miss anything.</li>\n 	<li><strong>Use Twitter as a Concierge Service</strong> -- Most airlines have social media teams monitoring Twitter. Before you leave, find and follow your airline\'s Twitter customer service account. \"At naming\" them in a Tweet (e.g., \"<a dir=\"ltr\" href=\"https://twitter.com/united\">@united</a> what\'s happening with UA 4286 MSY-ORD that it\'s 1:45 hr delayed?\") usually gets a response in a couple of minutes. Following them allows you to exchange personal information such as record locator numbers via direct message (DM). It\'s usually faster than queuing up for a frazzled gate agent and the results can be better.</li>\n 	<li><strong>Carry On your Luggage</strong> -- Unless you\'re heading to the slopes for Christmas, everyone in your travel party should be able to fit into a carry-on sized bag. You can save $25/bag and increase the probability of having clean clothes at your destination. If you’re seating area 3 or higher, odds are there’s no overhead bin space for you. Let the agent gate-check the bag for you. You won’t have to pay a checked bag fee and it’s very unlikely that they’ll lose your bag – it’s only traveling a couple hundred feet from the jet bridge to the luggage hold.</li>\n 	<li><strong>Spread Clothes Across All Bags</strong> -- If you have to check your bags, split everyone\'s clothes across all the bags. It\'s rare for an airline to lose&nbsp;<em>all</em> of your checked bags.</li>\n 	<li><strong>Buy Status for 1 Person</strong> -- Airlines will sell you anything, including one-off access to the special security lines and early boarding calls normally earned by flying 25,000 miles. The airlines will tell you that everyone in your travel party needs to pony up for status. In practice though, if the lead adult\'s boarding pass shows priority/premiere access, the overworked minimum-wage airport staffers guarding the status security lanes will let the family tag along. And at the gate, I\'ve never seen a family split up across boarding groups.</li>\n 	<li><strong>Know Your Geography&nbsp;</strong>-- Knowing alternatives to your destination airport gives you more flexibility dealing with cancelled flights or missed connections. In New York, the&nbsp;LaGuardia&nbsp;to Newark pivot is&nbsp;easy, but others aren\'t so obvious.&nbsp; Everyone knows that Chicago has two airports – O\'Hare and Midway.&nbsp; But what about Milwaukee\'s Mitchell Field 80 miles north? &nbsp;If PHL is in trouble, how many folks think about Harrisburg or BWI?&nbsp; Or Sacramento as an alternative to SFO?&nbsp; I think about alternatives in two rings – within 60 miles – SNA and LGB for LAX; and then within 100-120 miles, which now picks up Palm Springs and San Diego for LAX.&nbsp; Someone will drive a couple of hours to pick you up if it means getting you to Christmas dinner on time.</li>\n 	<li><strong>But above all, be realistic&nbsp;</strong> -- It\'s gonna be a zoo.&nbsp;Steel yourself; get your inner karma tuned for it. Pack a snack and a book, and practice deep cleansing breaths.</li>\n</ol>','Top 10 Holiday Travel Tips','','inherit','closed','closed','','1289-revision-v1','','','2021-09-28 18:51:10','2021-09-28 23:51:10','',1289,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3873',0,'revision','',0),
(3875,1,'2021-09-28 18:52:40','2021-09-28 23:52:40','[caption id=\"attachment_1309\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/2013-11-04-07.32.55-2.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1309\" title=\"Another Monday, another plane...\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/2013-11-04-07.32.55-2-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Another Monday, another plane...[/caption]\n\nBrushing aside the cobwebs to make my way back into the TravelCommons studios, we talk about the growing importance of TripAdvisor hotel reviews and the checklist I walk through when writing a review. I also continue to gush about the TSA\'s PreCheck program, even if this autumn\'s rapid expansion seems a bit rough-&amp;-ready at times. A listener lists out the critical travel apps on his Android smartphone and I talk about being stalked by an airline on Twitter.  All this and more  at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_107.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #107:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Brushing aside the cobwebs to make my way back into the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago. It’s been a while -- September -- since the last episode. But I didn’t completely abandoned TravelCommons. In November, I put together a quick video with recommendations from my spring trip to Madrid, and last month updated my list of <a title=\"Top 10 Holiday Travel Tips\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2013/12/19/top-10-holiday-travel-tips/\">holiday travel tips</a>, a post I do every other year.</li>\n 	<li>The video -- <a title=\"Video – What to do in Madrid… in 180 Seconds\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2013/11/12/video-what-to-do-in-madrid-in-180-seconds/\">What to do in Madrid… in 180 Seconds</a>, yes, the title bows to the gods of Search Engine Optimization -- is a quick rundown -- 3 minutes for the math-challenged -- of what I enjoyed most in Madrid. Seeing Guernica, walking through the markets, finding a microbrewery run by a Michigan ex-pat, and eating in restaurants. It’s a bit different from the podcast -- about a destination (Madrid) rather than the journey -- and video rather than audio which are the reasons I didn’t push it out on the RSS/iTunes feed. I’ll probably do another one for New Orleans sometime soon. I figure I ought to have something to say since I’ve been traveling there since last April.</li>\n 	<li>Doing the Madrid video reminded me, though, why I don’t do more videos. They take a <em>huge</em> amount of time. It easily took me 90 minutes of production time for each minute of video. And that doesn’t count the original content creation -- taking the pictures, thinking through the content, writing the voiceover. My wife gave me a GoPro Hero camera for Christmas. Maybe I’ll clamp that onto the handlebars of a rental bike and pedal through New Orleans. Maybe that’ll make things go a bit faster. Or be a bit more exciting if I ride into some of the more interesting parts of town</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Planetenstaaten</em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/weigl-landwater/\">Philipp Weigl</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>A couple of good comments from the TravelCommons website I’ve been saving up since October. In the <a title=\"Podcast #106 — Summer Vacation in Amsterdam; Restaurant Trends\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2013/09/06/podcast-106-summer-vacation-in-amsterdam-restaurant-trends/\">last podcast</a>, I walked through the current load of weather and mapping tools I’m using on my iPhone and Google Tablet. Rich Fraser had the following comment:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Thing that struck me during the episode (and you’ve mentioned before) is how our tools have evolved over the years. Here is what I am using on my Android smartphone.</li>\n 	<li>For maps, it’s Google Maps, although their latest release hasn’t been the most user friendly compared to the replaced version. Nice thing about it is that it leverages your other Google searches in other devices. For example, the Map that I created on my laptop is now accessible on my smart phone.</li>\n 	<li>For flight information, it’s FlightAware all the way. I have learned of flight delays on FlightAware before the airline posted them. In most cases you can find out where your connecting equipment is coming from, so that even if the flight you’re on is running behind, you can also find out if the connection will be delayed. That is huge peace of mind. That said, all of the airlines’ mobile apps have gotten much better at relaying flight information than even a year ago.</li>\n 	<li>For weather, it’s largely a matter of taste. I am a pilot myself, and there is an app called Aviation Weather that gives me the plain text Terminal Area Forecast for airports I am flying to. It’s a good way of predicting delays at places like Newark or O’Hare.</li>\n 	<li>For traveling as long as I (we) have, you have to admit that with all the information at one’s fingertips has removed most of the stress from traveling.</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Thanks, Rich. I was bouncing between FlightAware and FlightStats, but have settled on FlightAware just because of that connecting equipment information. When I have a flight that posts a delay, my first question is always “Is the inbound plane in the air?” because until it is, the estimated departure they post isn’t much better than a finger in the air. Once it’s on the way, though, I’ve found the departure estimate might slip another 15-20 minutes, but it’s usually pretty good. United’s iPhone app does this also. And given United’s recent on-time performance, it’s one of the more useful part of the app.</li>\n 	<li>The reason I was talking about those apps in the last episode was because trying to fly out of the Gulf Coast during summer makes you a weather geek just out of self-defense. Lori Humm, another long time TravelCommons listener who travels in and out of the Southeast had these thoughts:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Hi Mark! I’m still doing the gulf coast run, moving between Baton Rouge, LA and Jackson, MS so I concur with your summertime travel warning. However, as I also want to get home on Thursday night and staying over would get me home Friday noon, I have just learned to be patient and where possible work the Delta Diamond line for my backup flights. The one drawback is in Jackson, the Delta side of the terminal (they have two security access points; the airport is one long building) has no restaurant or bar! I often remark to TSA about the cruel joke that is putting a Starbucks right at the entry to security</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Back in September, I waited out an 5½ hr delay on my United flight from New Orleans to Chicago. The only saving grace was that United sent me a delay notice before I left for the airport. The e-mail said my flight was delayed 2¾ hours but that I still needed to be at the gate for the original departure time. Doesn’t that kinda defeat the purpose of the delay notice? Having spent more than my fair share of time in the MSY bars, I stayed in town, walked down to the Hyatt next to the Superdome. The ground floor restaurant <a href=\"http://www.borgnerestaurant.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Borgne </a>is part of the John Besh empire -- the guy must have a dozen restaurants in New Orleans and I think I’ve eaten at damn close to all of them. I sat at the bar and worked my way through the $5 tapas menu -- crispy turkey necks, duck liver crostini -- and good beer. I wasn’t leaving until the inbound flight left the ground at ORD. The topper of it all was -- when I finally hit the ground in Chicago and turned on my phone, the first e-mail I received was from United, asking me to “Tell us about your trip.” Now that was a survey I couldn’t wait to fill out.</li>\n 	<li>We’ve talked in <a title=\"Podcast #105 — Traveling in Spain; Return of the Hotel Lobby?\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2013/05/30/podcast-105-traveling-in-spain-return-of-the-hotel-lobby/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">past episodes</a> about how airlines have really amped up their social media presence especially on Twitter. In my <a title=\"Top 10 Holiday Travel Tips\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2013/12/19/top-10-holiday-travel-tips/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Top Holiday Travel Tips</a> post last month, Tip #5 is “Use Twitter as a Concierge Service”. “At naming” an airline in a tweet -- something like “@united what’s happening with UA 4286 MSY-ORD that it’s 1:45 hr delayed?” usually gets a response in a couple of minutes. Not always helpful, but there’ve been times when I’ve gotten information that the gate agent didn’t. It can get a little creepy though. At one point during that epic 5½ hr delay, I tweeted out “Burning off a 4-hr @united delay in @chefjohnbesh \'s Borgne restaurant. Much better than MSY food” and included a picture of the tapas menu I was working my way through. A couple of minutes later, United comes back with “@mpeacock We know delays aren\'t fun, but it looks like you found a great place to grab a bite and relax from your picture.” There’s no place to hide with social media.</li>\n 	<li>Way back in April of 2012, I wrote a TravelCommons <a title=\"Best Hotel Amenity? Free Breakfast\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/04/21/best-hotel-amenity-free-breakfast/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">post</a> disagreeing with surveys from TripAdvisor and Hotels.com saying the most popular hotel amenity is free WiFi. In my mind, it is a free breakfast. It’s a great convenience -- swinging by the concierge lounge to quickly grab an egg, a couple of slices of bacon and a cup of coffee while I cool down from 30 minutes on the elliptical. So I haven’t been thrilled when the Renaissance Hotels -- where I usually stay when I’m in New Orleans -- closed their lounges and moved the free breakfast to their main restaurants. I understand it from an operational point-of-view -- it’s more efficient to serve statused guests off the regular buffet than to have to schlep pans of eggs and bacon up to some lounge at the top of the hotel. But while my eggs and bacon are probably fresher, it’s not as convenient. I can’t just swing through the lounge, grab my breakfast and bolt. A hostess now needs to seat me, I wait for a server to bring coffee, and then I wait again to sign a zero dollar check. It’s more efficient for the hotel, but not for me. Kinda feels like the hospitality concept kinda got lost in translation.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any travel observations, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/yoria-suerte/\"><em>Suerte Mijo</em></a> by Arthur Yoria</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Getting Serious About Hotel Reviews</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>It’s no secret that reviews are a big thing in travel. Scads of studies show on-line reviews are usually second or third in importance, ranking right behind personal recommendations from a friend.</li>\n 	<li>TripAdvisor remains the biggest player, accounting for 32% of hotel reviews in North America according to a <a href=\"http://www.trustyou.com/2013-global-year-in-review-annual-reports-show-trends-in-hotel-reviews-2-10348.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">study</a> released this week. Other OTAs (online travel agents) -- Priceline, Expedia, Booking.com -- have added reviews with varying degrees of success.</li>\n 	<li>It’s easy to see this behavior first-hand. Many of my colleagues will scan TripAdvisor before booking a new hotel. And my wife scours it before booking our vacation rentals. If you think about it, TripAdvisor replaced the other side of a travel agent that the OTAs missed. Expedia, Orbitz automated price searching and booking, but couldn’t replace the advice a good travel agent could give, the information she collected when she followed up with her customers -- “So how was that Marriott?”, “What did you like best in Madrid?”</li>\n 	<li>I have a TripAdvisor account and occasionally contribute reviews -- mostly hotels, though I have done a couple of restaurants in resort locations and some activities (like the Madrid food tour that I mentioned in a past episode). My first couple of reviews were typical -- I talked about how nice the desk staff was, or got overly indignant about some incident; the kind of reviews I filter out when I’m scanning a property’s page.</li>\n 	<li>C’mon, I can do better than this. I mean, I’ve been in consulting for 22 year; I’ve been doing a travel podcast for almost 9 year. So over a couple of beers one night I got to thinking about what’s important to me when I stay at a hotel. Since we’ve moved pretty much to rental properties for vacations, my hotel stays are just me, solo, on business. Taking safety and general cleanliness as table stakes (though there have been those times when they were sadly missing), the things I tick through when thinking about how many stars to award are:\n<ul>\n 	<li>The bathroom -- We talked about this in an earlier episode. It might be the most important part of the hotel room. I look for good water pressure and enough counter space for my toiletries -- I really hate having to put my toiletries on the toilet lid like I did last week at the Sheraton in New Orleans.</li>\n 	<li>Room size -- Is there enough room for a chair -- other than the desk chair? A comfortable chair where I can read or watch TV so I don’t have to sit on the bed all the time</li>\n 	<li>Workout room -- Here’s where I see a lot of variation -- from a couple of treadmills stuff in a dank room to a full blown fitness center.</li>\n 	<li>Location -- Am I within walking distance of restaurants, good bars, interesting things to see?</li>\n 	<li>Service quality -- Not just a welcoming front desk -- though that’s important, most places are training for that and have it down. How about the service quality in the restaurant, or if they keep the workout room stocked with water and towels?</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>That’s a bit better. Or at least I think so. Though when I decide I’m going to review a hotel, my visit is a bit different. I’m not cruising through the lobby on auto-pilot. I’ve got my list; I’m a bit more aware. Is that a lipstick stain on my water glass? Do the hallway carpets look a bit more beat-up than usual? It changes things. I have a responsibility to observe. And it probably affects my satisfaction with that hotel, paying attention to things I might normally let slide by.</li>\n 	<li>And I don’t seem to be alone in this, at least according to the <a href=\"http://www.trustyou.com/2013-global-year-in-review-annual-reports-show-trends-in-hotel-reviews-2-10348.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">TrustYou survey</a>. They found that hotels got fewer five-star reviews than a year ago. Their hypothesis -- As travelers read and use reviews more, their expectations of hotel service change -- toward what they’re reading in the reviews. They become more discerning consumers of hospitality services.</li>\n 	<li>Which isn’t so bad, until it goes too far -- like it has with the explosion of food bloggers. If I see some guy setting up a tripod to photograph a particularly clever lobby check-in kiosk… that’s the day I delete my TripAdvisor account..</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>One</em> by <a title=\"Cargo Cult\'s Alchemy Album\" href=\"http://www.magnatune.com/artists/albums/cargo-alchemy/hifi_play\">Cargo Cult</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>TSA Gets Something Right!</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>OK, I know that I’ve been fixated on PreCheck over the past couple of episodes, but I really think it’s one of the best things the very maligned agency has ever done. A year or so ago, a survey found it had the worst public perception of any part of the federal government -- lower even than the IRS, which is pretty amazing if you think about it. Expanding the PreCheck program could help pull the TSA out of the cellar.</li>\n 	<li>Going through the PreCheck lane is like traveling in pre-9/11 days -- no shouting, no pulling everything out of your bag, no emptying your pockets, no taking off your shoes, no full body scanner…. Indeed, just about everything you hate about the TSA goes away. The screening is quick, the TSA staff is nice -- it’s like flying in the last millenium, in the 1990’s.</li>\n 	<li>Of course, the reason you get to saunter through the checkpoints unmolested is that you’ve given up $100 and a chunk of privacy. I was in the first batch of TSA PreCheck people because I’d already gone through the Global Entry program. Global Entry is the US Customs and Border Patrol’s program to reduce the hassles of US immigration lines. In return for a background check, an hour-long interview, and fingerprints, you get to use a kiosk rather than queuing up for an immigration agent when returning to the US from international travel. In an encouraging display of common sense, I guess the TSA figured that, since their Border Patrol brethren had already screened, interviewed and approved me for a light once-over at the border, I’m probably low-risk for blowing up an airplane.</li>\n 	<li>Since the fall, the TSA has been rapidly expanding PreCheck -- adding lanes at existing airports like ORD and DFW and expanding to it to airports, targeting for 100 in total. I was pretty thrilled when they showed up at places like PDX and MSY. I’m happy to say that I can’t remember the last domestic airport I flew through that didn’t have PreCheck. The expansion has looked a bit rough-&amp;-ready in some places though. Lori Humm wrote about PreCheck in Jackson, MS:\n<ul>\n 	<li>In Jackson, they don’t have a body scanner – they still have the metal detector – and if you are pre-check, they hand you a plastic card that allows you to to bypass the procedures, even though you are in the same line as everyone. This process is laughable as it just serves to confuse the large number of leisure travelers in line. It also holds up the line because the TSA agent is explaining the process every single time.</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>I had a similar experience in New Orleans last week. In the New Orleans airport, none of the three concourses are connected -- kinda like LaGuardia in that way. Concourse B which has Southwest and Concourse D which has United and Delta have multiple TSA lanes and separate PreCheck lines. In Concourse C which has American, I’ve only ever seen one security lane running (though they have equipment for more) and there’s no PreCheck. So last Weds, I was ready for the full stripdown. But then the guy checking my license and boarding pass gave me a manila square of paper -- actually, it looked like they’d cut up a manila folder -- with “Pre” and a checkmark handwritten on it with a Sharpie. I got in line and showed it to the guy running the body scanner. I had to pull out my laptop, but got to leave my shoes and belt on and walk through the metal detector. Everyone else had to strip down for the body scanner. It felt very ad hoc, but I was happy not to have to pull everything off and out.</li>\n 	<li>If the additional lanes feels a bit loose at times, the expansion to non-Global Entry flyers is interesting also. When my wife and I checked in for a November flight from PDX to ORD, both boarding passes had TSA PreCheck printed on them. My wife had never gotten that before. She hadn’t applied for anything. It just showed up. We were wondering if there was some mistake. We both walked into the PreCheck lane. The screener put her boarding pass on the electronic reader and there it was, the three beeps that say PreCheck Approved. Off she went through the PreCheck lane.</li>\n 	<li>The TSA has said it’s randomly selecting regular passengers who, as a TSA spokesperson described it, “show up clean.” “The more information you give us about yourself, the more likely you will be selected,” she said. Again, that privacy/convenience trade-off. This might give some people pause But since the Edward Snowden affair has showed us we’ve already given up most of our privacy to another federal SA agency -- the NSA, we might as well get something back for it from the TSA.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #106</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Magnatune</a></li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_107.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #107 — Serious About Hotel Reviews; TSA Gets Something Right!','','inherit','closed','closed','','1305-revision-v1','','','2021-09-28 18:52:40','2021-09-28 23:52:40','',1305,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3875',0,'revision','',0),
(3877,1,'2021-09-28 18:54:15','2021-09-28 23:54:15','[caption id=\"attachment_1324\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"198\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/2014-04-06-12.11.37.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1324\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/2014-04-06-12.11.37-198x300.jpg\" alt=\"Please, make it stop!\" width=\"198\" height=\"300\" /></a> Please, make it stop![/caption]\n\nWe look back on a brutal travel winter with stories about how driving instead of flying probably wasn\'t the best idea, and a completely awful United flight that ended up with a drive -- but not by choice. I also talk about my recent trip to Beijing, China and my plans for a round-the-world-in-8-days itinerary to India and Manila.  All this and more  at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_108.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #108:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommon studios outside of Chicago where, just as I’ve gotten my body reset onto Central Daylight Time after a week-&amp;-a-half in Beijing, I’m getting geared up to flip am for pm again, heading over to India and the Philippines at the end of the month. This one will be quicker though -- 2 days in transit, 3 days in India, another day in transit, a day in Manila, and then traveling home. So, I’m guessing that my body clock won’t completely make the 12-hour flip. I dunno, maybe I’ll only make it as far as the <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawaii%E2%80%93Aleutian_Time_Zone\">Hawaiian-Aleutian Time Zone</a> before I head back home.</li>\n 	<li>We were in Beijing at the beginning of the month. My son is in Beijing for a semester abroad, so my wife, daughter and I headed over during my daughter’s Spring Break. 14-hour direct flight over from O’Hare and a quick 11.5-hour flight back thanks to some favorable winds. It’s a 13-hour time difference, we left around 8 Thurs night and touched down around 11 Fri night. We picked up the day we lost on the way back though. We left Beijing at 10am and touched down at 9:30am -- the same day.  Got home, looked at my watch, and saw that I’d been up for 18 hours and it wasn’t even noon yet. It made for a very long day.</li>\n 	<li>\n\n[caption id=\"attachment_1328\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/2014-04-07-10.12.09crop.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1328\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/2014-04-07-10.12.09crop-300x221.jpg\" alt=\"ObaMao messenger bag bought at Silk Market\" width=\"300\" height=\"221\" /></a> ObaMao messenger bag bought at Silk Market[/caption]\n\nIf you follow me on Twitter --<a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> -- you saw a few things -- a Vine video of my street food lunch, a microbrewery I found deep in the hutongs, and my prize purchase, a messenger bag with a picture of “<a href=\"http://www.chinahush.com/2009/11/15/china-bans-obamao-t-shirt-during-obamas-presidential-visit/\">ObaMao</a>” -- Barack Obama in a Red Guards’ cap and uniform. I heard these were swept off the streets during <a href=\"http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2014/03/23/obamao-souvenirs-difficult-to-find-during-first-ladys-visit/\">Michele Obama’s trip</a> in March, but they were back out in full force when we were shopping. Check out the show notes for a pic of my bag.</li>\n 	<li><span style=\"line-height: 1.5em;\">The China trip broke what has been a pretty regular commute to New Orleans. I’ve made 10 trips down this year. A bit monotonous, but I keep reminding myself that there are worse places to spend time -- especially when we were sitting outside last week at some little seafood joint working our way through a 6-pack of Abita Amber and 7-8 lbs of boiled crawfish. Beats working in places where Buffalo Wild Wings qualifies as haute cuisine. And it’s in the same time zone as Chicago. Though sometimes it doesn’t feel like it. Like when I’m staying in one of the Canal St hotels, and folks come rolling in from the French Quarter at 2 or 3 or 4 in the morning. Maybe they’ve ended up in the Hawaiian-Aleutian Time Zone too.</span></li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/seldon-circles/\"><em>Making Circles</em></a> by the Seldon Plan</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Received some great listener comments since the last episode. After so many episodes of asking people to “Send a text or audio file”, I received an audio comment from long-time TravelCommons listener Lori Humm. Lori sent this to me back in February, using some windshield time during her drive between Baton Rouge and Jackson, MS to tell us about how she tried to ju-jitsu winter flight delays by driving...</li>\n 	<li>If you remember back, February was a tough weather month in what has been a very tough winter -- at least for those of us who live east of the Rocky Mountains in North America. I can imagine a lot of travelers had to make that decision. I did a bit later in Feb while on a trip to Lexington, KY. I was doing a day trip -- flying down-and-back -- from Chicago. It was a rare warm day, a nice break from the Polar Vortex. However, we all know there’s no free lunch. And on this day, with the mild temperatures came some howling winds. While I was in my afternoon meeting, I felt my phone vibrating in my jacket pocket. It kept going off -- message after message. I looked at the clock -- 2 hours before my flight home. I didn’t want to be rude and pull my phone out, but looking out the window at the trees flailing, I guessed it wasn’t United being overenthusiastic about wishing me a good flight. When I finished the meeting, I saw that I was right. United had cancelled my flight -- the last flight out of Lexington -- and rebooked me on the first flight out the next morning. I didn’t have clothes or toiletries for an overnight stay, but I did have a rental car. I popped open Google Maps -- 6 hrs from the parking lot I was standing in to my house. That felt right on the edge. I looked at the weather forecast -- they were predicting high winds into tomorrow. Could they get the plane in for that early morning flight? Screw it, I decided to drive. The drive started out nice through Kentucky and into southern Ohio. I was pretty. I even found a Dairy Queen on a gas stop. Things started to deteriorate as I headed north, though. Rain was bucketing down in Indy; like someone was on the roof pouring a bucket of water onto my windshield. The wipers couldn’t keep up. People were  pulling off under overpasses. I kept going. North of Indy on I-65, the huge winds were spinning up tornados. My wife would call me “Are you OK? Looking over at the southbound side, I saw a huge wreck -- probably some wind gust blew a semi into someone else. Traffic was stopped -- I counted a 7-mile back up. There but for the grace of God go I. Uhh, not so fast. 30 minutes later, traffic in front of me stops. I pull up Google Maps and Waze. I don’t see anything on Google, but Waze shows a line of red. Somebody tipped over on this side of the median. While looking at Waze trying to figure out what was happening, a box popped up recommending a reroute. What the hell, I followed it. It took me off on the next exit, ran me down a few 2-line roads, and after 10 minutes put me back on a clear I-65 on the other side of the wreck. Critical piece of travel technology. I eventually got home around 12:30/1am, a bit ragged but happy to be home. The next morning, I couldn’t help myself. I had to look at that early morning flight. Was it delayed? Did I make the right decision? Pulling up the United app, it did indeed go off -- on-time, landing at ORD 5 minutes early</li>\n 	<li>Steve Frick, another long-time listener, left a comment on the website adding to a couple of conversations we’ve been having over the past couple of episodes --\n<ul>\n 	<li>As far as travel apps I still like TripIt just for the fact that it organizes and places everything in my Google calendar. I have also been using Google Now when I arrive it lets me know what’s going on locally. I’ve been an UrbanSpoon contributor for years and have just this past week starting adding reviews to Yelp, we’ll see how it goes.</li>\n 	<li>As far “What’s Important When I Stay At A Hotel” we just recently had this discussion around the office. Breakfast is very important, I spent two mornings this week eating powdered eggs at a Fairfield Inn, not a great way to start my day. A decent workout area is something I also look for, I get really aggravated with treadmill belts that slip and causes me to wrench my back. I also use the <a href=\"http://fitdeck.com/\">FitDeck app</a> for working out in my room; <a href=\"http://runkeeper.com/\">Runkeeper</a> is another great app for tracking. Finally, I want the desk to have a clear view of the TV, yes nerdy, but it’s important.</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>I’m also a big Google Now fan. I replicate my company Outlook calendar to my Google calendar. I like how it’ll recognize that I’m flying out of, say, MSY, and then through Google Maps look at traffic on the best routing and suggest when I should leave. OK, a little creepy, but still handy.</li>\n 	<li>Jeffrey Brown left a message on the TravelCommons’ FaceBook page --\n<ul>\n 	<li>Hi Mark. I\'m a longtime listener and this is my first message to you. I know you do everything possible to avoid carrying a TSA baggie. So I looked at my own, and I\'m really catering only 3 things that I must have on my trips - toothpaste, deodorant, and shaving cream.</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Jeff, There are some easy ways to avoid liquids. At the start of the liquid ban, I switched from toothpaste to toothpowder. You can typically find it in the patchouli/crunchy granola aisles of Whole Foods.  I don\'t use shaving cream. Instead, I carry a shaving brush and lather up using the bar of soap that\'s usually provided in the bathroom. I typically use a solid stick deodorant. When the liquid ban first started, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2006/08/15/debating-states-of-matter-with-the-tsa/\">some TSA screeners</a> were very strict about any sort of semi-solid like a stick deodorant. I recounted one such encounter in an earlier episode. Nowadays, they seem to have loosened up. I never get any hassle about my stick. And with PreCheck, the whole baggie thing goes away because you don’t have to pull anything out of your bag when you go through the PreCheck lanes.</li>\n 	<li>I mentioned a bit earlier that if you follow me on Twitter, you saw some pictures from my trip to China. But since the Great Firewall <a href=\"http://whatblocked.com/\">blocks</a> Twitter access -- as well as a number of other more critical sites (at least to me) like Dropbox and Evernote, I investigated VPN services before I left. VPNs -- Virtual Private Networks -- tunnel through the Great Firewall by wrapping your Internet traffic in encryption and then popping out onto the public Internet from servers outside of China -- like in Hong Kong or LA. There are a bunch of them out there. I used ExpressVPN. It was $12 for a month. And not only did it allow me to Tweet, when I popped out via a US server, to the Internet, it looked like I was in the US, which allowed me to watch NCAA March Madness games that CBS was streaming. Hitting the CBS site without the VPN gave me a “Video not available in your region” error. Flip on the VPN and I was waking up early or staying up late way too many days. Some of the other tech I noticed in China:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Walking around and riding the subways, I noticed a lot of people using the Samsung Galaxy Notes -- the big 6-inch “phablet” -- kind of a tweener phone/tablet. A lot more than I’ve seen in the US. Which, perhaps, explains the rumors of a phablet-sized iPhone.</li>\n 	<li>There’s a lot of available WiFi in bars and restaurants. Most of it was password-protected -- like how you should be configured at home --  and then the password is posted on the wall somewhere. The only portal style protections -- what you see more of in the US -- were in big chain hotels and in Starbucks.</li>\n 	<li>And one of my best purchases was a 3-in-one USB phone charge dongle. It has a 30-pin iPod/iPhone 4 connector; an iPhone 5 Lightning connector; and a mini-USB for pretty much everything else. No more fishing around for the right cable. And it’ll charge 2 or 3 devices at once. I love it. I also love how much faster electronics charge overseas when plugged straight into the 220v socket without a voltage converter. Now back home, I’m trying to figure out how I can piggyback a powerstrip off my clothes dryer outlet.</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">And if you have any travel observations, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/eliyahu-wind/\">Oh Yeah</a></em> by Eliyahu Sills</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>My Worst Travel Experiences</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>So let me just spool out this story. Back in February, on one of my weekly trips down to New Orleans, I caught the last United flight out Sunday night because of a Monday morning meeting. As typical, it was a United Express flight -- a regional jet. And because the pilot was late arriving, it was about 30 minutes late leaving which is becoming as close to on-time as you’re going to get from United Express.</li>\n 	<li>I’m catnapping a bit. I’m kinda of aware of some commotion in the back of the plane. I hear the flight attendant ask if there’s a doctor on-board. A bit later, around midnight, the captain keys his mic and says we have a medical emergency and will be landing in Jackson, MS. Great. My first thought -- couldn’t we have hung on for 30 more minutes and made it to New Orleans? Quickly followed by -- Don’t want anyone to die just so I’m not inconvenienced. Just make it quick, OK?</li>\n 	<li>The plane lands. The airport is closed so it takes them a bit to rustle up (a) some stairs; (b) security guards to make sure no other passenger escapes into the secure area of the airport. About 30 minutes later, the paramedics come on and escort the sick passenger off the plane. She can walk but looked like she was have breathing problems at altitude. The pilot comes on again, apologizes for the inconvenience, says that he’s working with his ops center to figure out how much fuel they need to take on for the flight to New Orleans.</li>\n 	<li>I nap a little more. The pilot is speaking again. It’s 1:30am. Uh, we’ve figured out how much fuel we need but because we don’t normally fly to this airport, we don’t have a relationship with the fuel provider, so we’re trying to figure out how to pay.</li>\n 	<li>2am -- still figuring out how to pay. 3am -- we’ve found hotels for you tonight and will fly you to New Orleans tomorrow morning. Now just trying to find buses to get you to the hotel. We trundle out of the plane, through the deserted terminal and into baggage claim to collect our luggage. And wait for the bus. 4am -- no bus yet, but they’ve decided to bus us down to New Orleans -- a 3-hr ride. 4:30am -- Bus finally arrives. It’s a nice motor coach. I figure out how to recline my seat a bit so I can nap a bit. 6am -- I wake up feeling the bus decelerate. I look at my watch. Huh? We’re not there yet. The driver keys his mic. It’s time for his break. After just 90 minutes of driving?. 8am -- I’m finally at New Orleans airport.</li>\n 	<li>Well, that was fun. And as I told that story to friends, family, and colleagues over the next few days, I said “This was one of my worst travel experiences.” “<em>One of the worst?</em>” was the common reply. “What could be worse?” I couldn’t think of any right then, but I wasn’t sure there wasn’t.</li>\n 	<li>And as I thought more about it, short of surviving a plane crash or being on that Carnival “poop cruise” stranded in the Caribbean, can there really be a worst travel experience? This trip was probably the worst in-transit experience, though there was that flight from Cleveland to O’Hare that I’ve talked about on a <a title=\"TravelCommons Podcast #3\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/05/29/travelcommons-podcast-3/\">previous episode</a>, where a drunk guy fought with the flight attendant to open the rear door while we were at 20,000 ft, and then sat down behind me, talking to me, and all the time I was waiting for him to puke over my shoulder. While a shorter experience, it was a bit more worrisome at the time.</li>\n 	<li>Probably as frustrating was a Detroit to San Francisco trip I took a number of years ago. The outbound flight was delayed and delayed. I kept looking at my watch. This was the morning flight out so I could make an afternoon meeting. I was flying right back to Detroit that evening so I could make some other commitments. Finally, the flight was so delayed, I wouldn’t be able to make the meeting. I stood up to get off the plane. Nope, we can’t let you off; we’re about to push back. We pushed back. And now waited on the tarmac. And I steamed. We landed in SFO just before boarding was called for my return flight. I got off the plane, walked down two gates, and boarded my flight home.</li>\n 	<li>Or the trip to Brussels where the backpack with our passports was stolen from the train luggage rack right above me. Another bad trip I talked about on an <a title=\"Podcast #98 — Stolen Luggage &amp; Passports; Restaurants Want Your Smartphone\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/05/20/podcast-98-stolen-luggage-restaurants-want-your-smartphone/\">earlier episode</a>. That one also left me hugely frustrated, cursing my own stupidity the next two days we spent in Brussels waiting for replacement passports.</li>\n 	<li>Which one was the worst? I’m not really sure. But since none of them has left me physically or emotionally scarred (at least not that I can tell), I’m not sure I have to figure it out. Nor do I think I want do, because then I’d have the answer to my mother’s saying, “If this is the worst thing that’s ever happened to you…”</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #108</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Magnatune</a></li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_108.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #108 — Worst Travel Experiences Ever','','inherit','closed','closed','','1323-revision-v1','','','2021-09-28 18:54:15','2021-09-28 23:54:15','',1323,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3877',0,'revision','',0),
(3879,1,'2021-09-28 18:57:05','2021-09-28 23:57:05','[caption id=\"attachment_1342\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"225\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/2014-05-02-17.52.56.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1342\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/2014-05-02-17.52.56-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"I confess... I\'m carrying a concealed Totes\" width=\"225\" height=\"300\" /></a> Yes, I\'m carrying a concealed Totes[/caption]\n\nJust when I\'d reset my body clock after a trip to Beijing, I headed off for an 8-day around-the-world itinerary. It was 44 hours of flight time, setting a new personal record for stupid travel. I learned a few new things along the way -- Singapore Air flight attendants get grumpy when you don\'t let them serve you, and Manila Airport considers a Totes umbrella as lethal as a box cutter.  We also talk about the reason Beijing has scored second to last in taxi service, the difference between United and Delta Twitter service, the secret to buying Bose headphones, and my switch from an iPhone to Android. All this and more  at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_109.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #109:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago. I’m back at my normal commute -- Chicago to New Orleans with the odd stop in Memphis --  after a couple of big Asian trips in April and May. I talked a bit about my Beijing trip in the last episode, and then at the beginning of this month, I flew around the world in 8 days -- some flash travel for meetings in Bangalore and Manila.</li>\n 	<li>As you can imagine, it took me a couple of weeks to recover from that trip. That amount of airtime -- I added up 44 hours in the air -- was a push, even for me, and I’ll regularly do up-and-backs between Chicago and San Francisco, and you may remember a while back when I talked about doing an up-and-back to London -- leaving Chicago on the overnight flight to Heathrow, showering and changing in the airline club, taking a car out to Reading for a lunch meeting, then heading back to Heathrow in time for the afternoon flight to Denver. That trip had been my most stupid piece of travel -- until this one.  This one, I think aged me in dog years.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em>Stinky Dog</em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/musicinside-forces/\">Music Inside</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Back in December, in my Top 10 Travel Tips article, I talked about using Twitter as a concierge service. I suggested “at naming” them in a tweet, which I found tends to generate a response in a couple of minutes. However, in the 5 months since I made that recommendation, I’ve seen the quality and usefulness of that response degrade almost exponentially. “At naming” United almost inevitably results in some cut-and-pasted pre-approved apology -- “Sorry, we hate delays as much as you do” or “Our apologies for the delay in your travel. Safety is our utmost  priority”, My frustrated response  -- “Oh stop! If you were concerned about safety, you\'d spend more on preventative maintenance to avoid these delays in the first place” -- generated nothing but silence.</li>\n 	<li>Delta’s Twitter account, on the other hand, did quickly solve a problem that I couldn’t figure out elsewhere. I mentioned in an earlier episode that I hated having to fly Delta because I couldn’t get Pre-Check. Facing another Delta flight out of New Orleans, I thought I try one more time to fix it. I found what I thought was the right Delta Twitter handle -- @DeltaAssist -- and tweeted them the message “How do I get my Global Traveler # associated with my Delta profile so I can get PreCheck for my MSY-DTW flight tomorrow?” A couple of minutes later, I got a reply “Please DM me your info and I’ll proceed”. Within 10 minutes, it was done. When I checked in 30 minutes later on the Delta app, there was the Pre- Check symbol on the boarding pass. So perhaps the usefulness decay is airline-specific, perhaps with some direct connection with United’s low score on the latest JD Powers’ customer satisfaction survey. Perhaps.</li>\n 	<li>As I have mentioned many times on this podcast, Bose noise-canceling headphones are the mark of a true road warrior. Sure, you seem some new Gen Y analyst types sporting Beats or maybe some audiophile wearing some big Sennheiser cans. But still, by and far, Bose is still number 1. But they’re expensive -- $300 and never on sale, not even in the Bose outlet stores. And so, about once every six months, I have this conversation with a seatmate -- “Do you like your Bose?” “Yup, I think they’re great” “Yeah, I’d love to get a pair, but they’re so damn expensive” -- also most word-for-word, every 6 months, right down to the “damn” in front of “expensive”. And here’s what I tell them -- No one ever buys Bose headphones with cash. Nobody. That\'s what Membership Miles are for. If you’re traveling for business, odds are you have a corporate Amex card on which you’re racking up Membership Miles for plane tickets and hotel bills, and you never quite know what to do with them. What you do is splurge on travel luxuries for yourself like Bose headphones. They\'re for your miles; you suffered to earn them. Go on, get a little something that will make that middle seat a bit more bearable. But whatever you do, don’t tell your spouse about them. They’ll want to buy something sensible for the house. First, buy the Bose. After than, maybe one of those road warrior Tumi carryons...</li>\n 	<li>And one last travel technology bit...finally, as I’ve threatened for many episodes, I ditched my iPhone 5 for an HTC One Android phone. I just got completely fed up with the lousy, unpredictable battery life on the iPhone 5 after upgrading to iOS 7. Maybe iOS 8 Apple announced this week will fix things, but I waited as long as I could. I got tired of being psychotic about battery life -- about making sure I topped off my battery before boarding a plane, watching the battery meter drop 10% in the time it took to taxi from the runway to the gate -- just not being able to be away from a charging cable for more than 2 hours.</li>\n 	<li>And one last travel technology bit...finally, as I’ve threatened for many episodes, I ditched my iPhone 5 for an HTC One Android phone. I just got completely fed up with the lousy, unpredictable battery life on the iPhone 5 after upgrading to iOS 7. Maybe iOS 8 Apple announced this week will fix things, but I waited as long as I could. I got tired of being psychotic about battery life -- about making sure I topped off my battery before boarding a plane, watching the battery meter drop 10% in the time it took to taxi from the runway to the gate -- just not being able to be away from a charging cable for more than 2 hours.</li>\n 	<li>Now I’m not a stranger to Android. I’ve used a Google Nexus 7 for a couple of years and a Samsung tablet before that, so I’m comfortable with Android. Indeed, I’ve said on past episodes that I prefer Android tablets to iPads because I can do more with them -- get to the directory structure, attach files to e-mails. For me, Android tablets are closer to a PC replacement than iPads. But phones are different -- using it to talk and text is more important than editing a document. I had been on iOS since the iPhone 3G, so this is a bit change -- Android hides settings in different places than iOS, so it’s been a learning experience. The same with the mail and calendar apps, though with Android, there’s more of a choice. I have 4 mail apps on my phone now, figuring out which one I like the best, and then I’ll blow away the other three. I gotta say though that I\'m very happy to be rid of that lousy iPhone podcasting app.</li>\n 	<li>But the most important thing is battery life. I’m no longer waiting ‘til the last minute to board my plane, trying to push that iPhone battery meter up one last percentage point. And with the bigger screen -- 5-inches vs. 4 on the iPhone 5 -- I find myself reading more stuff on my phone and leaving my tablet in my backpack more often. I’m still tweaking things, but am very satisfied with the change.</li>\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">And if you have any travel observations, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li dir=\"ltr\">Bridge Music — <em>Locovenido</em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/falik-dreams/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Falik</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong> \'Round the World in 8 Days</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>I think it’s a given that your mind is more of a barrier to doing something than your body. I always surprise myself when, once I’ve pushed through what I thought was a major barrier, how normal or ordinary it seems on the other side. I do that with road biking all the time -- thinking a 50-mile ride, or a 100-km or 100-mile ride is a big deal… until I do it.</li>\n 	<li>Flight times are that way too. Early in my career, I remember thinking that the 3-4 hours from Chicago to California was huge, and that the 14 hrs it would take to fly to Tokyo was inconceivable. But then I flew 7 hrs to London; 10 hrs from Europe to South Africa. Then a big jump, 17 hours from New York to Joburg every 6 weeks for a project. With that experience under my belt, that 14 hr flight time to Tokyo -- or to India or China -- was no longer unthinkable, just long.</li>\n 	<li>So when project requirements and the May Day holiday forced me to compress trips to India and Manila into a single week, I gulped but thought “What the hell?”  Cutting HG Wells’ time by an order of magnitude, my itinerary took me around the world in 8 days -- Chicago to Newark to Delhi to Bangalore to Singapore to Manila to Tokyo to Chicago. 44 hrs of flight time -- that’s in-the-air time. Doesn’t count wait time or layover time. That 44 hrs at 39,000 ft in a week.</li>\n 	<li>I left Chicago Saturday afternoon; touched down in Delhi Sunday night. I was fine on Monday and Tuesday. There wasn’t much down time -- we meeting people pretty much straight through from 7am breakfast to dinners ending at 11 at night. I think people would’ve followed me into the toilet if I didn’t give them a stern look. Wednesday, we hit the wall but because of the impending May Day holiday shutdown, we couldn’t stop. So we doubled down on caffeine consumption and pushed through.</li>\n 	<li>Because we had a break on Thursday, May 1. While everyone was celebrating the workers’ holiday, we hopped Singapore Air to Manila. SingAir is always at the top of any list of the best business class cabins. Unfortunately, I can’t opine on that, because I think I slept all but 45 minutes of the 7-8 hours I spent there. Which I think really frustrated the flight attendants. They kept trying to give me food and drinks whenever I opened my eyes. I would just ask for more water and then go back to sleep.</li>\n 	<li>All my Manila to Chicago flight options connected through Tokyo. I could’ve flown United, but I’m on a bit of a United strike right now -- I’m just not happy with how many delays and cancellations I’ve taken from them -- so I decided to try a new airline and flew ANA -- All Nippon Airways. I’d never flown a Japanese airline before, so it would be something new. And since they were one of the first airlines to buy a 787 Dreamliner, I was hoping to one of those would show up on my route. No luck on that, it was Triple 7’s on both legs. But what was fun was mealtime. The menu has two sides -- a Japanese menu and “International” menu -- American and European food. I figured I should go Japanese -- eat as local as possible at 39,000 ft -- and so was a little disconcerted when I saw most of the Japanese passengers ordering the International menu, but hey….  It turned out fine for me, though. Half the value of airplane meals, especially on long-haul flights, is the distraction; the entertainment value. A good business class meal service should keep you occupied for at least an hour -- between perusing the menu, choosing a wine, have the meal coursed out, then the dessert trolley, then the liquor trolley. The Japanese meal was the best ever at that. Every tray they put down in front of me had at 6-8 different little cups or boxes of food on it, none of which I recognized, and I eat Japanese food pretty regularly on the road. So they’d put the tray down, I’d look at it, then I’d look through the menu and try to match each line on the menu with a box or cup in front of me. And not all of them were easy -- “oh, <i>that’s</i> the custard with the snow crab…”. Which was great, because the menu matching kept me even more occupied than normal. Lotsa fun. And the food was pretty good too.</li>\n 	<li>Of course, when you travel to a new country, there’s always something that can trip you up. I’ve traveled to India a number of times over the past 3-4 years, so I know some of its eccentricities, like needing a physical print out of your itinerary to even get into an airport terminal, and the separate men and women’s security lines because every passenger gets wanded and patted down after walking through the metal detector. It makes TSA PreCheck seem like a morning walk that’s been momentarily interrupted by a couple of nice mall cops.</li>\n 	<li>But the Philippines were new. We landed in Manila at 11pm Thursday night. Immigration was a bit of a goat rodeo, and the ride to the hotel felt like we were passing through some just-this-side-of-dodgy parts of LA. Much more “normal” than our first night in Delhi. The way out was where the bumps showed up. First is the exit tax -- they like to call it an “airport fee” but you can’t leave until you pay it, so it feels like an exit tax. It was 500 pesos -- about $14 -- in cash. Not a big thing -- if you know about it ahead of time. Which I almost didn’t. We were having some beers before dinner Friday night and somebody asked a question about the Manila airport. I don’t remember the question, but none of us knew the answer, so, of course, we all whipped out our smartphones and revved up Google. Somewhere on one of the web pages I was scanning, I saw a comment about the exit tax. Whoa! We ran over to the concierge. Yup, it’s true. I have 750 pesos on me from an earlier trip to the ATM, so I was good. The other guys had no Filipino currency, but got the front desk clerk to give them cash and charge the 500 pesos to their room. Crisis averted.</li>\n 	<li>The thing that <i>did</i> catch me, though, was the sign at the check-in desk Saturday morning saying portable umbrellas were prohibited in carry-ons. Wait, what? I’ve carried this bag on three-quarters of the way around the world and now I have to check it because I have a 10-in Totes umbrella in the front pocket? Did these guys watch too much Batman when they were kids and now are having flashbacks to when the Penguin used a machine gun umbrella? And this in a country where it dumps rain every afternoon, so you really need an umbrella! But from the look on the agent’s face, I could tell -- Yes, it’s for real, and No, I don’t agree with it either. So, I reluctantly checked my bag and headed off to security… Where none of the security screeners seem to be paying much attention to any other security signage. In spite of signs to the contrary, I’m waved off from taking my PC out or taking my blazer off. Could I have sneaked my lethal Totes through? Probably. But I just wanted to get on the plane so I could go back to sleep.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em>Just Don’t</em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/liebig-severed/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Lie Big</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong> Beijing Mass Transit</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>One of the things I didn’t get to in the last episode when talking about my April trip to Beijing was to report out on mass transit. It’s been an on-going thread in the TravelCommons podcast, probably for the past couple of years, about getting around cities -- did videos for Frankfurt and Chicago, and have talked about Portland, San Francisco, Amsterdam… So let’s add Beijing to the mix.</li>\n 	<li>We got to the other side of customs in Beijing Airport late -- 10:30, 11:00pm local time after a 14-hr flight. We saw signs for an Airport Express, but since it was late, we couldn’t figure out the particulars of the Airport Express -- most importantly, where it would drop us in relation to our hotel -- and the cab fare was only about US$15, we headed toward the taxi line.</li>\n 	<li>Which offered its own kind of challenges. The line overflowed the regular switchback corral and past a sign that said “60 minute wait from here.” Great. And then there were what they call “black cabs”, non-licensed guys, walking up and down the back end of the line soliciting rides. But when I saw the locals blowing them off, I did the same. A couple of times, the airport police walked down the line, and the black cab guys ran off -- literally -- though we did see a couple of guys melt into the line, standing behind a concrete pillar out of the cops’ line of sight. In the end, it wasn’t that bad, 20 minutes and we were at the front of the line.</li>\n 	<li>Which then meant we could get our first experience with the hassle of dealing with Beijing cab drivers. They’re picky and incredibly argumentative. And, of course, since they’re arguing in Chinese, a language I don’t speak, it can be a challenge to actually get going. At the airport, the cab rank people waved me toward a cab. I had printed out the directions -- in Chinese -- of the Marriott from their website, complete with a small map. I showed it to the cab driver. He took the paper, looked a bit puzzled, showed it to another guy, who then tried to wave me over to his car -- a black cab -- while my assigned cab driver wandered away. I went back to the cab rank guy, showed <i>him</i> the directions. He then started yelling at the cab driver, which finally got the cab driver to start loading our bags into the cab.</li>\n 	<li>This scene would be repeated almost every time we caught a cab from the hotel. We would have the concierge book us a table at a restaurant, write the address and directions out in Chinese characters, we’d show it to the cab driver, who would then look puzzled and start arguing with the doormen. One time, I had to pull up Google Maps and do a bit of a pantomime with the cab driver -- here’s where we want to go -- before he would head off.</li>\n 	<li>The only thing that was worse than this was trying to hail a cab in town. Cabs would have their “available” sign showing in their window but wave me off when I tried to hail them. It would usually take 3-5 attempts, before one stopped. But then about half of those wouldn’t want to take us where we wanted to go. I tell you, I’ve had better luck getting a cab from mid-town Manhattan to LGA in the rain during rush hour than I had getting a taxi in Beijing. So it made perfect sense when I read TripAdvisor’s <a href=\"http://www.multivu.com/mnr/70425525-tokyo-tops-tripadvisor-world-city-survey-amongst-global-travelers\">survey</a> a couple of weeks ago saying that Beijing was second only to Moscow as the worst city for taxi service.</li>\n 	<li>Which really made us appreciate how great the Beijing subway is. It’s cheap, clean, modern, station announcements in Chinese and English -- leftover from the 2008 Summer Olympics? --- we took it all the time. The only downside -- it’s jammed. You think the London Tube at rush hour is crowded; the Chicago Red Line during a Cubs home game? Subway riding in Beijing is a full contact sport. But with 25 million people in the city, I’m not sure I should be surprised. I think I sat down in a subway car once in all the rides I took. But even crowded, it’s a great system. Except maybe for having to pass your bag through an X-ray machine before entering the station. But at least the Chinese didn’t want to take away my umbrella.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #109</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Magnatune</a></li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_109.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #109 — \'Round the World in 8 Days; Beijing Mass Transit','','inherit','closed','closed','','1353-revision-v1','','','2021-09-28 18:57:05','2021-09-28 23:57:05','',1353,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3879',0,'revision','',0),
(3881,1,'2021-09-28 18:58:41','2021-09-28 23:58:41','[caption id=\"attachment_1364\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/pic-r-1402317187245.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1364\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/pic-r-1402317187245-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Plane is here; no mechanics in sight. Do I feel lucky?\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Plane is here; no mechanics in sight. Do I feel lucky?[/caption]\n\nEven though the weather hasn\'t been bad this summer, I\'ve endured a rash of flight cancellations. Digging deeper, it\'s been regional jets operated by small airline \"partners\" that\'s causing me grief. Service to mid-sized cities has moved to regional jets, making travel to these cities more problematic. Traveling to China or India can catch US travelers by surprise with their visa requirements. We also talk about how fast airlines respond to Twitter messages, airport \"wall huggers\", carry-on luggage throwback, and I haven\'t flipped through a Skymall magazine in months. All this and more  at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_110.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #110:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you from the Sheraton Hotel on Canal St in New Orleans. I have a room looking over the French Quarter. It’s a big convention hotel -- not my usual choice. But the price is good, it has a great gym and I’m about 5 stays away from making Starwood Platinum, so what the heck.</li>\n 	<li>I’m back to my usual commute -- Chicago to New Orleans -- after taking a quick jaunt out to LA last week. It is that time of year on the Gulf Coast when the weather gets a bit monotonous -- high of 91 degrees with a chance of afternoon thunderstorms. Repeat until Labor Day. But the thunderstorms are tending to be earlier than last year when they seemed to roll in about 4:30 -- right about the time when the inbound plane for my flight back to Chicago would be scheduled to arrive. While my flights home still aren’t arriving on time, I haven’t hit the big 2-4 hour downpour delays I would get last year. Not killing as much time in the airport bars, but I always appreciate New Orleans airport letting me to take me beer to the gate.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em>Gargantua</em> by Admiral Bob (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/46361 Ft: My Free Mickey, Martijn de Boer</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Flying through LAX last week reminded me of what a dump that airport is -- or I guess I should say key parts of it. Flying out of there last Thursday morning, it took me a half-hour in the Hertz bus to get to the United terminal -- P7 -- because of access road traffic which is driven by this odd concept of a bunch of little terminals arranged in a U around short term parking garages. No problem is you’re flying Southwest in P1; really lousy if you’re going out American in P5 or United in P6 or P7. Annoying, but it gets really dumpy when you get inside. There’s not enough room in each of the little terminals to properly handle post-9/11 security, so small security stations are dotted over the terminals with lines snaking down the corridors. Given that LAX is a major gateway to international traffic from Asia, it’s fair to compare LAX to Singapore and Beijing -- much newer airports, yes, but the LAX experience ends up looking like the 4th circle of Hell comparatively. Can’t be a great thing for the US tourism industry.</li>\n 	<li>In the <a title=\"Podcast #109 — ‘Round the World in 8 Days; Beijing Mass Transit\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/06/07/podcast-109-round-the-world-in-8-days-beijing-mass-transit-2/\">last episode</a>, I updated my thoughts on using Twitter as a concierge service, or at least another way into airlines’ customer service groups. A couple of weeks back, the Wall Street Journal had a good <a href=\"http://online.wsj.com/articles/airlines-take-to-twitter-to-keep-world-informed-1406125253\">article</a> about airlines’ use of Twitter. They had an interesting graphic showing the differences in response times between airlines. American Airlines was the top, responding to 80% of customer queries within 15 minutes and 99% within an hour. KLM, which has made a big push into social media, was much lower, responding to 12% within 15 minutes, 64% within an hour, taking a full day to get up to 99%. Of course, as we talked about last time, it’s one thing to quickly press the button on a canned responses like United’s ubiquitous “No one dislikes delays more than us”, it’s a whole other thing to do something meaningful. Check out the detailed show notes on the TravelCommons web site for a link to the article.</li>\n 	<li>Also in the <a title=\"Podcast #109 — ‘Round the World in 8 Days; Beijing Mass Transit\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/06/07/podcast-109-round-the-world-in-8-days-beijing-mass-transit-2/\">last episode</a>, I mentioned my big technology switch -- from my iPhone 5 to an HTC One. The main reason for the switch was battery life. I got tired of being psychotic about battery life -- stalking airport gate areas for an outlet so I could top off my battery before getting on the plane. Last month, Samsung Mobile captured that hassle perfectly in a <a href=\"youtu.be/mzMUTrTYD9s%20\">video</a> about “wall huggers”. It’s on YouTube -- I put the <a href=\"youtu.be/mzMUTrTYD9s%20\">link</a> in the show notes. Check it out. It’s painfully close to my reality with the iPhone. But not with the HTC One. The battery life is great, even with the larger screen.</li>\n 	<li>One thing that has bitten me recently with that change is the Android version of American Airlines’ app. I always use the phone apps for boarding passes -- one less piece of paper to keep track of, one less line to stand in if I couldn’t print it at home. I’ve never had a problem until a couple of months ago. I was boarding a flight to New Orleans, put my phone on the reader, heard the beep, the gate agent waved me through, and I sat in my seat. A bit later during the boarding process, I looked at my screen again and saw that the app had refreshed and no longer showed a seat number on the boarding pass. Hmmm, that doesn’t seem good. And I was right. Somehow, my boarding must not have registered and so, 10 minutes before the flight, they flushed me as a no-show and gave my seat to a stand-by passenger. Unfortunately for her, I was in my seat, but because I didn’t have a paper boarding pass, I couldn’t prove that it was my seat. Lucky for me, the gate agent remembered me -- it was a small regional jet --and said “Oh, this happens a lot”. I kept the seat, but the flight was delayed about 15 minutes while they figured it all out. I never had that happen with American’s iPhone app, but then again, it hasn’t happened since on the Android app. Maybe they fixed in in out of the updates they pushed out, but I usually grab a paper boarding pass on American when I have the time.</li>\n 	<li>And I don’t know about you all, but I haven\'t looked at Skymall or any of the other seat back pocket air magazines since the FAA allowed use of tablets &amp; smartphones during takeoffs and landings. I always have a book or two on my tablet -- right now I’m pounding through “The War that Ended Peace”, Margaret MacMillian’s history of the lead up to World War I. I also download the daily edition of the Chicago Tribune -- they have an HTML5 web app that shows you each page of the physical paper; you then tap an article to read it. The app is pretty good, sometimes a bit fiddly, but it lets you download the content for offline reading -- perfect for a flight. The Wall Street Journal’s Android app used to let you do the same thing and so I’d read that too, but earlier this year they “upgraded” the app and took away the ability to download a day’s paper. Still trying to think how they qualified that as an upgrade.</li>\n 	<li>I saw a guy come onto a flight last week with a hanging suit bag. Wow! That was a throwback. Even the flight attendant looked at him kinda funny when he asked to hang it in the front closet. Which was a very typical thing -- in the ‘90’s. You’d angle for early boarding so you had a chance for hanging space in the front closet. You see guys pushing all the bags to one end so he could fit his in -- not even really needing to hang it; just staying put from the pressure of the other bags. The whole business casual trend expanded the fight -- moving it out of the front galley to the entire plane aisle with rolling bags. I can’t remember the last time I used a hanging bag. I have my cleaners fold my shirts so they’re easy to pack, and then I use them (with their cardboard inserts) to cushion the folds of my slacks so they don’t wrinkle. Even on those rare occasions when I wear a suit, I fold it and put it in my rolling bag. It’s certainly a lot easier on the shoulder and back. And just a lot less awkward. I could never figure out a really good way to carry gym shoes in my hanging bag.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any travel experiences -- technology or otherwise, or just general observations, thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons\">Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em>A Foolish Game</em> by Zep Hurme (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/zep_hurme/46448</li>\n</ul>\n<strong> Regional Jets Are Ruining My Life</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>One Wednesday afternoon in June, I had a particularly difficult time getting from Memphis to New Orleans. First, I felt my phone vibrate with multiple text messages while I was refueling my rental car at a particularly dicey gas station just north of the airport. I had a pretty good idea what was up -- United and TripIt were simultaneously notifying me that my flight was cancelled. I got on the phone to Amex. They were able to jam me onto a full US Air flight to Charlotte with a connection back to New Orleans. Bit of a zig zag, but OK. I returned the rental car. Just as I pulled my boarding pass out of the kiosk, I saw them update my flight -- 2 hr maintenance delay. Which would mean I’d miss the connection. I go up to the desk. Two agents -- one from USAir, one from American (I’m seeing the New American form right in front of me) -- bang on their terminal for a couple of minutes. “OK, we’ll put you in first class to DFW where you’ll connect to New Orleans” Great -- better routing with an upgrade to boot! I get to the gate. A colleague calls me. As we’re talking, I see them post a 2 hr delay -- weather in Texas -- which means I’d have 15 min for my connection if everything worked perfectly. Which it wasn’t going to because a delay with a round number -- like 2 hrs -- means they have no idea when the plane will actually leave</li>\n 	<li>That’s it! I give! Three airlines fail me in the span of 60 minutes. I can take a hint. I wasn’t meant to fly to New Orleans today. However, I did need to get there. So I fired up Google Maps. 5½ hour drive. Fine. I have nothing else going on tonight. I load the Hertz app, book a car, and walk back out of the terminal.</li>\n 	<li>I drive to the river front to get a decent dinner -- the food quality in Memphis airport, like the flight selection, have cratered since Delta shut down its hub operations there. While eating at the bar, I get the text from American -- the DFW flight cancelled. Now there’s a surprise.</li>\n 	<li>The drive to New Orleans to simple, straightforward -- and dull. I-55 south through Mississippi, into Louisiana until it dead ends into I-10. Take a left. You’re in New Orleans. At least that was the plan. South of Jackson, traffic comes to a complete halt. People are getting out of their cars -- never a good sign. I get out, look around an 18-wheeler and see a 10-ft column of fire. This is not a good sign. I-55 here is 2 lanes each way with a narrow shoulder. They’re not squeezing us past that. Eventually, after making an 8-point turn, I join a line of cars heading the back north along the shoulder -- one tire on the pavement, one tire in the wet red clay. After 10 minutes, I get to a gravel crossover that I don’t think will bottom out my rental Ford. I hit the frontage road, bypass the burning car, get back on a now empty I-55 and eventually pull into my hotel at 2am. Another glorious day of travel that I’m sure will inspire envy in all my Facebook friends.</li>\n 	<li>Now Memphis seems to be an extreme example -- a woman on my project is commuting weekly from New York and she’s yet to have an on-time, no-drama journey. Indeed, she’s spent a Thursday night in every Midwest hub city. But as airlines close hub operations in mid-size cities like Memphis and Cleveland, replacing mainline service with regional jets from smaller operators you’ve never heard -- ExpressJet or Endeavour Air -- getting to and from these cities just sucks.</li>\n 	<li>At first, I thought it was a United problem. After all, they’d canceled my flight down to New Orleans day before, and then the next week, they delayed my flight to Columbus, OH 2 hours because the flight before it was late getting off the gate, and then once our plane got to the gate, it needed to have a wheel bearing fixed before it could travel on. I mean, at some point, why does United bother posting actual departure and arrival times? Why not just post an AM or a PM and shoot for that? It’s not too far from what they’re doing now.</li>\n 	<li>But as I looked at the flights that were really screwing up my life, they weren’t the main United or American or Delta flights, they were the regional jets. My United flights to and from LAX last week were fine. But if I’d been flying a regional jet, I would’ve had a problem on the return leg. The original plane had a mechanical issue -- remember, this is United -- but they were able to get a replacement, so we left LAX on time and even got into ORD early. If it had been United Express by, say, GoJet, I would’ve been scrambling after yet another cancelled flight because they don’t have spare jets.</li>\n 	<li>I’m 5,000 miles away from hitting a million miles on United (I have over 2.5 million on American), but sitting at the bar that night in Memphis having dinner before my ill-fated drive, I tweeted out of pure frustration -- “Really @united? Two cancelled flights in two days? I\'ll never hit 1M miles when you cancel every flight I\'m on…” To which, of course, they pressed the button on reply #76 -- “No one dislikes flight cancellations more than we do. Do you need help with rebooking? Thanks.” My response the next morning -- “Unless you too had to drive 5+ hrs and get to your destination at 2am, you can\'t hate flight cancellations more than me…” No response… except from Dan, a longtime TravelCommons listener who chimed in -- “Sounds like an upcoming podcast topic”. Indeed it is, Dan. Some good had to come of it...</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em>Melt Away</em> by Kara Square (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/mindmapthat/46605</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Visas Hassles</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Over the past couple of episodes I’ve been talking about my Asian travels -- to India and China -- which has forced me to become knowledgeable about something that doesn’t often affect US travelers -- visas.</li>\n 	<li>When US travelers decide to cross their border, if they have a passport, they’re typically good to go. When I checked Wikipedia yesterday, US passport holders <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_requirements_for_United_States_citizens\">can visit</a> 174 countries without having to buy a visa in advance, tied at the top of the “travel freedom” ranking with Germany, Sweden, United Kingdom, and Finland.</li>\n 	<li>But this seemed to be the year for visas for me. My son doing a semester abroad in China, then us visiting him in the Spring, and then me going to India on business a couple of months ago. I just slipped out of another trip to China -- business this time, but I figured I’d risk it since my tourist visa is valid until next Spring.</li>\n 	<li>If you live in a major city -- New York, DC, LA, Chicago -- it’s not too bad because most of the big visa-requiring countries have consulates there. Otherwise, you’re mailing your passport away, or paying extra for a courier service. And paying to fly to the consulate for an interview if you don’t have a plain vanilla visa application -- like anyone of Pakistani descent applying for an Indian visa.</li>\n 	<li>But even walking to the consulates, like I can do in Chicago, is not always so straightforward. Research is important. Hitting the consulate web site, know their hours and what paperwork they require. Our visit for my son’s Chinese student visa was amazingly smooth. We had all the paperwork, had it organized, knew the consulate closed for lunch, so we showed up early. Boom, boom, boom -- we were in and out in 30 minutes. Four days later, we went back, paid, and picked up his passport with his visa.</li>\n 	<li>Getting visas for our visit to Beijing in March was less smooth. There was a little hiccup in the application. Their website said we needed proof of a return flight and hotel reservations. I had all that, all organized. But what wasn’t clear on the website was that I needed a copy for each visa. I’d printed out one copy of the hotel reservation for the one room that the three of us were staying in. I needed three copies -- one for each application. I’m not the first one who’d made that mistake. The woman pointed to the copying machine. Luckily, I had a pocket full of change.</li>\n 	<li>Picking them up was also a bit more of a hassle. First, because it was Spring Break season, there were a number of teachers picking up batches of passports for school trips. I think the guy two positions in front of me had 50 passports. A minor inconvenience -- until their credit card machine broke. The web site was adamant -- no personal checks, no cash accepted; just credit cards or cashier’s checks. And how many people know where to get a cashiers check anymore. So everything came to a screeching halt. “We’ll take cash if you have it,” one of the women said. But I didn’t bring any because it’s $140 a head -- $420 for all of us. I look at my watch -- it’s just about closing time. I ask the guard, “Will you let me back in if I make a run down to the ATM for some cash?” “Make it quick,” he said. I sprint down, around the corner, tap out the cash machine, and sprint back up. The guard lets me back in even though he’d locked the doors for the day. Everyone’s sorta milling around, not knowing what to do. The guy who had been in front of me was there to pick up 10 visas. No way he was coming up with $1,400 in cash quickly. I politely make my way to the window. “Cash?” I ask, giving her the fresh stack of ATM 20’s. She counts them twice, gives me my passports and I’m on my way.</li>\n 	<li>But this was nothing compared to the cluster that was the Indian visa process. Which was a real surprise to me because four years ago, when I went for my last Indian visa, it was the pinnacle of efficiency -- I dropped everything off at 8am and at 5pm received a text that my passport was ready for pickup. Impressive. Phenomenal. I used to rave about it. Not so much any more.</li>\n 	<li>But based on last time, I thought this would be simple. I put all the documents together and, because I was traveling, had my wife take it downtown for me. “No worries,” I said, “Drop it off, do some shopping, grab lunch, and it should be done”. 10am my wife calls me -- “They need your flight reservations”. “I haven’t made them yet,” I told her, “They specifically say on their website not to book flights until you get the visa.” “Hold on,” she said and talked to the clerk. “Yeah, I guess things have changed. She’ll hold onto your application until you e-mail her your flight info. Oh, and she’s going to charge you another $30 for an expedite fee.” “Wait,” I said, “according to the website, I’m OK on their deadlines -- I shouldn’t need them to expedite.” “Hold on,” she said again. “Yeah, I guess those deadlines have changed too.” Unfortunately, I was only able to get a 1 year visa. If this visa expires before my next trip, I think I’ll send one of my staff in my place. I think I need to introduce some other Americans to the fine art of applying for visas.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #110</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/\">cc:Mixter</a></li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_110.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #110 — Regional Jets Ruining My Life; Visa Hassles','','inherit','closed','closed','','1359-revision-v1','','','2021-09-28 18:58:41','2021-09-28 23:58:41','',1359,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3881',0,'revision','',0);
INSERT INTO `wp_posts` VALUES
(3883,1,'2021-09-28 19:00:19','2021-09-29 00:00:19','[caption id=\"attachment_1387\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/IMG_0002.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1387\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/IMG_0002-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Just a little snug for the next 14 hours...\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> It\'ll be a bit snug for the next 14 hours...[/caption]\n\nI tried to hold back, but I just couldn\'t. I <em>have</em> to finally weigh in on the seatback recline wars. I\'m stunned at the number of people who convert a couple of inches of seat movement into some sort of Manichean morality play. From that you can probably guess where I come out on this. On a much lighter side, I talk about finally taking Atlanta\'s MARTA subway from the airport and tagging on some beer hunting to some Midwest business travel. All this and more  at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_111.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #111:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL having, through nothing other than sheer blind luck, dodged the cancellations caused by fire and attempted suicide at the <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Air_Route_Traffic_Control_Center\">Air Route Traffic Control Center</a> in Aurora, IL. Wasn’t that a heck of a story. A guy living outside Chicago tips over the edge after being told he’s getting transferred to Hawaii. It usually happens the other way around, especially after last winter.</li>\n 	<li>And it’s still a mess. Kinda helped me with my decision to drive to Indianapolis last Friday. Indy is right on the cusp of the fly-vs-drive break point -- about 180 miles from Chicago but it’s straight, flat, and most of it has a 70 mph speed limit. Also pushed me to take a break from ORD this week. Aurora’s supposed to be back online Oct 13 which is the next airline ticket I have, so I hope someone is cracking the whip over there.</li>\n 	<li>This episode should sound better than the last one. I did some eBay shopping and significantly upgraded my recording rig. I’d been recording with an iRiver MP3 recorder/player and little condenser mic since the beginning of this podcast. Unfortunately, iRiver didn’t feel like upgrading the drivers from Windows XP to Windows 7 or 8, and when my last XP machine was converted to a VMWare image, it just got to be a hassle pulling the audio off of it. So I applied a firmware upgrade that was supposed to make it look like a regular jump drive, which it did, but it also reduced the gain, the volume on my mic to almost nothing. After struggling with it for a bit, I finally gave up. The last episode was recorded on my HTC One with a significant amount of massaging in Adobe Audition. But now, I think I’ve got something that’ll work. We’ll see how this goes.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/beyond7-revelations/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Miss America</em></a> by Beyond 7</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Regular listeners know that I always like to check out rapid transit to and from airports. On a trip to Atlanta last month, I finally decided to buck up and try <a href=\"http://www.itsmarta.com/\">MARTA</a>. I’ve flown into Atlanta for years, but always rented a car because I never did work in Atlanta, always some place between 10 o’clock and 2 o’clock on the I-285 beltway. Which is always lovely because the airport sits at 6 o’clock -- directly opposite of where I normally need to be. So my usual MO is to rent a car and grind it out through the traffic -- either straight up the city or around the beltway -- which is why I try very hard to avoid meetings in Atlanta. So anyway, on this particular Thursday, I caught the 6am flight from ORD, hitting Atlanta right at the tail end of the morning rush. I guess I was being a bit passive aggressive on this trip, but I didn’t book a rental car. I just didn’t want to deal with the traffic. I had planned on taking a cab, but walking past the MARTA station in the airport, I plugged the office address into Google Maps and hit the Transit button, and found it was a straight shot up the Red Line and then a 5 minute walk from the station. For a $2.50 fare, it seemed worth a shot. And it was. The toughest part was trying to figure out which station exit to use so that I got on the correct side of the six-lane divided street I needed to walk along. I got it wrong the first time. I was pleasantly surprised, though, to find sidewalks -- not a common amenity in office park land. The lone pedestrian sprinting across a couple of intersections to avoid turning cars, I got to my destination without fighting traffic and more than an order of magnitude cheaper than cab fare.</li>\n 	<li>I got an interesting reaction from people when I told them about my morning’s MARTA journey. “Well that’s adventuresome” and “What time were you on? Rush hour? That’s OK. I wouldn’t try that after dark though” I never felt unsafe or uncomfortable during my ride. But then again, I never felt unsafe on train rides in Brussels -- until my backpack was stolen. I never felt unsafe on DC’s Metro system -- until the day a woman reached across the aisle, tapped my arm and strongly suggested that I put my iPad away. But I dunno, MARTA seemed as safe as the Metro system or the L in Chicago. And it was a damn sight cleaner than BART in San Francisco. I’ll take it again when I have to go back down to Atlanta in two weeks.</li>\n 	<li>Especially after I sprung the dollar for the Breeze card, which is the contactless/touch card that MARTA now requires you to buy instead of issuing the little paper cards like New York or DC. The fare machine concierge assured me “It’s good for 10 years!” Yes, provided I remember to bring it with me next time. These things are starting to stack up. I have a London Oyster card in some desk drawer; I forgot how much that card cost me. Chicago’s <a href=\"https://www.ventrachicago.com/\">Ventra </a>card cost $5(!) which they say will be put back on the card if I register it -- which I did but didn’t see any $5 credit. Maybe all these new cards are great for regular riders, but for the minority like me -- the occasional rider -- it’s a bit of a pain; more cost, more confusion, and a growing stack of plastic in my desk drawer. The Chicago system theoretically lets you use the NFC capabilities of newer Android phones like my HTC One to tap and pay with Google Wallet. I’m planning to check that out the next time I take the L. Would’ve been nice to know before I sprung the $5, but I’ll look harder for that when I’m in a new city. Of course, we could always go back to the cash box, like they still have on the New Orleans streetcars. But there I’m find myself fishing around for a quarter to drop the exact change into the cash box. For all the whining, it’s still better than renting a car.</li>\n 	<li>In <a title=\"Podcast #107 — Serious About Hotel Reviews; TSA Gets Something Right!\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/01/29/podcast-107-serious-about-hotel-reviews-tsa-gets-something-right/\">episode #107</a> earlier this year, I talked about the checklist I run through when I decide to review a hotel on TripAdvisor -- the bathroom, room size, workout room, location, service quality. And it’s that last one -- service quality -- that I really see the difference. It’s not at the front desk. Hotels have their training and employee selection programs nailed. It’s been a long time since I’ve been treated with anything less than enthusiastic hospitality. No, where it falls down is the back of the house. The latest example was a couple of weeks ago. I check in around 5:30. Walking up to my room, I see dirty room service dishes -- the little ketchup and mustard bottles suggest it was the remnants of a burger. I get ready to turn around -- I bet they gave me an occupied room by mistake. But nope, my key worked and the room was clean and empty. Hmmm… I call down to the front desk to tell them about the dishes. The very nice woman who just checked me in greeted me by name and apologize profusely, saying she’d send someone up right away. I walk out for dinner. I come back a couple hours later -- dishes are still there. I go out a bit later to grab a beer -- dishes are still there. I come back -- yup, the burger carcass is still there. Now I’m thinking, what else is lying around. I call back down to the nice woman. I’ll be checking out tomorrow morning.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any travel experiences -- thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons\">Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/westexit-extra/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>On Condition of Anonymity</em></a> by the West Exit</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Last Word (Hopefully) On Seatback Recline Wars</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>I’ve resisted doing this topic, but how can I claim to be doing a podcast that gives the “voice of the traveler” and is “more about the journey than the destination” and not take some cut at whole seatback recline option explosion? Because it seems like no one else -- hard core traveler or rank amateur -- has kept their thoughts to themselves. The sheer amount of time and words -- physical or cyber -- devoted to this topic has been amazing.</li>\n 	<li>Let’s separate the specific from the general. First, let’s recap the incident that lit the fuse. A guy on his last leg home from Moscow, sitting in United’s Economy Plus, uses a Knee Defender to keep the woman in front of him from reclining her seat so he can get some work done on his laptop. She flags down the flight attendant about her seemingly malfunctioning seat, the flight attendant notices the Knee Defender and tells the guy to take it off. He does, and the woman slams her seat back to full recline. When she goes to the rest room, he pushes her seat back up and puts his Knee Defender back in. She comes back, pissed that she can’t recline her seat, tosses her glass of Sprite at him. The pilot makes an unscheduled landing to them both off the plane where, surprisingly, neither of them are rung up on charges.</li>\n 	<li>So the first thing to say is -- yes, these are two grown adults -- which is head-shakingly amazing. This would be out-of-bounds behavior at a ball park or a rock concert, let alone in a packed metal tube hurtling along at 600 mph at 36,000 feet. Now, that being said and in no way forgiving the woman, the guy was definitely the bigger pinhead in this escapade.</li>\n 	<li>The guy is 6’-1” -- about my size so I’ve got a pretty good frame of reference. Sitting in United’s Economy Plus, he had a extra 3-4 inches over the folks in the back of the plane. It’s roomy as coach seats go. When I’m flying United, I’ll regularly choose an E+ middle seat over a regular E aisle seat. From first hand experience, I call bull on his premise that he needed to use the Knee Defender to work on his laptop -- unless he has an undisclosed medical condition requiring him to type with completely extended arms, or his arms are long enough so he can tie his shoes without bending over.</li>\n 	<li>And moving from the specific case to the general discussion (argument?) about the morality of seat reclines, why does this guy (or anybody) think their right to work on a flight trumps another passenger’s right to comfort? I got it -- lots of people need those 2, 3, 4 hours to crank out stuff. But likewise, when I’m catching a 6:30am flight out Monday morning, I need to an hour or two of sleep to make it through the end of the day. And I don’t know of anyone who can sleep without reclining their seat. Which again get me to the question -- what’s with people casting this as some sort of Manichean morality play -- sitting straight up -- Good (morally upright?); space-hogging slouching recliners -- pure Evil.</li>\n 	<li>Of course, there are ways around this -- they just cost money. If you need the extra space to work -- or sleep -- then pay the extra money for a seat in something like United’s Economy Plus or American’s Main Cabin Extra -- or flight them enough to earn status and you get it for free. As I said earlier, I regularly give up shoulder space for leg room. Unfortunately, it’s a choice I have to make more often than I like, booking flights at the last minute in this age of high plane utilization. Need more space, get more status or buy a more expensive ticket that will get you to the top of the queue for an upgrade. Or just buy the 1st class ticket you need the space.</li>\n 	<li>But that’s not the story we want to hear -- we want more space than we’re willing to pay for. Airlines are pushing seats closer together because travelers shop purely on price -- a seat is a commodity. Years ago, American Airlines tried to differentiate themselves on legroom, pulling out rows of seats to increase pitch. I would fly those planes whenever I could. Unfortunately for American, I was in the small minority. They got their clocks cleaned and eventually had to put those rows back in. Most travelers don’t pay attention to seat pitch. They just click on the cheapest fare and then bitch about the lack of space.</li>\n 	<li>Don’t want to pay for the extra space, then do what our guy did when he had to get home after his unscheduled connection in Chicago. He flew Spirit. Their seats don’t recline.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/solace-medusa/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Subtle Vice</a> </em>by Solace</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Sneaking In Some Craft Beer Tourism</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>As regular podcast listeners <a title=\"Podcast #101 — Future of Mileage Tracking Tools; Searching for Local Food and Craft Beer\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/10/25/podcast-101-future-of-mileage-tracking-tools-searching-for-local-food-and-craft-beer/\">know</a>, I’m pretty much all-in with the US craft brew explosion. I was drinking Sierra Nevada in the ‘80’s while\n\n[caption id=\"attachment_1388\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/2012-10-11-16.11.25.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1388\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/2012-10-11-16.11.25-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Patron Saint of Craft Brewers\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Patron Saint of Craft Brewers[/caption]\n\nskiing at Lake Tahoe, got deep into Belgian beers in the early ‘90’s when I would travel to Brussels a half-dozen times a year while selling to the pharmaceutical industry, started homebrewing in the mid ‘90’s, and have just continued onward.</li>\n 	<li>The listeners who I’m friends with on <a href=\"https://untappd.com/\">Untappd</a> can see that I’ve checked in over 2,200 unique beers. It’s a passion that one could arguably say has tipped over a bit to obsession. So when I had a couple of Midwest trips recently -- I mentioned the Indy run, but also had a couple days in St Louis in September -- rather than bolting out of town immediately after my meetings, I did a bit of craft beer tourism, hitting some of the local microbreweries. In St Louis, where I had a bit more time, I hit <a href=\"http://urbanchestnut.com/home\">Urban Chestnut</a> for a dunkelweiss and a board full of knockwurst, stewed apples, cabbage, and pumpernickel bread -- which I managed to consume during a conference call with the judicious use of the mute button. I had some great sour beers at <a href=\"http://www.perennialbeer.com/\">Perennial Ales</a>, and then at <a href=\"http://www.thecivillife.com/\">Civil Life Brewing</a>, a very English pub-like place (not in the ersatz way of Union Jacks and Tube signs hanging around, but in the true sense of a pub -- a cozy local place) I had yet more encased meat -- a Hungarian bratwurst this time. Which was very pleasant change considering everything I’d eaten over the prior 48 hours had been from the Airport Marriott.</li>\n 	<li>In Indianapolis, I only had time for one stop and as it turned out, my meeting was 8 minutes away from<a href=\"http://www.sunkingbrewing.com/\"> Sun King Brewing</a>. I followed the line of growler-toting folks into the brewery. No taproom, but they gave me tickets and bottle caps good for 6 small samples. They had a Friday sale on growlers, but I’m already long in glassware, and when’s the next time I’m gonna be in Indy? Instead, I bought a couple of 4-packs of the beers I liked best. Since I drove, I didn’t have to make that decision -- is the beer good enough to justify checking luggage?</li>\n 	<li>Nowadays most hotel bars will have at least one decent craft beer on tap or available in bottles. The St Louis Airport Marriott had a nice selection with about 4 local draft handles including a <a href=\"http://schlafly.com/\">Schlafly </a>pumpkin beer -- not my favorite style, but you gotta give them props for giving it a tap. The Sheraton on Canal St in New Orleans has stepped up its game -- adding 1-2 more local taps in addition to the ubiquitous Abita tap. But on that 4th or 5th week in the same hotel -- or more; I just made Starwood Platinum at the Canal St Sheraton -- even those additional taps start to get boring. Luckily, some of the upscale grocery stores like Whole Foods are also tapped into the craft beer trend and sell single beers. On my first day in New Orleans, I tend to swing by <a href=\"https://shop.rouses.com/\">Rouse’s</a>, kind of a local version of Whole Foods, grab a couple of good beers and take them back to the Sheraton. The first time I did this, though, I had a problem -- there wasn’t a bottle opener in the room; these craft beers don’t typically come in twist-offs. I’m rummaging around, but nothing. It kinda pulled me up short -- when did hotels stop stocking their rooms with bottle openers? I go down to the front desk. They’re pretty puzzled too -- they start rummaging around their drawers. “Maybe you can borrow one from the bar?” Ever since, I always pack a bottle opener in my backpack. Just another thing to keep in the travel kit.</li>\n 	<li>Some airports are serving up great beer. I found two microbrewery joints at BWI, and I always try to swing by the <a href=\"http://www.greatlakesbrewing.com/home\">Great Lakes Brewery</a> spot in CLE. But in my last trip through ATL, a bartender saw me struggling with her Bud/Coors/Sam Adams draft selection. “Go down to the end of the terminal,” she said, “there’s a new craft beer bar just opened up” Great! I wheel my bag down the terminal but pull up short of the bar. This new beer bar is a smoking bar! That’s right -- I’m in the South. I watch the cigarette smoke billow out under the door. I turn around a walk away. Even an obsession has its limits.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #111</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>The bridge music is from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Magnatune</a>, the <em>we are not evil</em> label. <em>Miss America</em> by Beyond 7, <em>On Condition of Anonymity</em> by the West End, and <em>Subtle Vice</em> by Solace. You can find these and more at <a href=\"http://magnatune.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">magnatunes.com</a>.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_111.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #111 — Seatback Recline Wars; Craft Beer Tourism','','inherit','closed','closed','','1380-revision-v1','','','2021-09-28 19:00:19','2021-09-29 00:00:19','',1380,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3883',0,'revision','',0),
(3884,1,'2021-09-28 19:01:12','2021-09-29 00:01:12','[caption id=\"attachment_1402\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"225\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/IMG_0159.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1402\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/IMG_0159-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"That\'s Gonna Make for a Long Walk\" width=\"225\" height=\"300\" /></a> Need More Taxes To Fix This[/caption]\n\nHere\'s a new episode to keep you occupied if you’re stuck in a line somewhere while traveling Thanksgiving week. There are tips for the non-frequent traveler on how to avoid major airport faux pas and a review of how travel taxes will soak you when you get to your destination. We also talk about a high-tech suitcase that\'s blown through its Indiegogo funding campaign, hackers emptying out Hilton Honors accounts, and an overseas WiFi session that emptied out someone\'s wallet.  You can listen to all this and more using the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_112.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n<!--more-->\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #112:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside Chicago, IL. Giving you something new to listen to if you’re stuck in a line somewhere while traveling Thanksgiving week. Don’t look for me, though. I got home Weds night and won’t be traveling again until the crowds clear out.</li>\n 	<li>I was going to open up this episode with kind of a joke sponsorship, something like -- “Brought to you by People Express, thanking Spirit Airlines for making people nostalgic for us and Newark’s North Terminal”. For anyone old enough to have flown People Express in the early ‘80’s, I thought it would be a bit of a chuckle.</li>\n 	<li>But last week, walking through New Orleans airport, I saw a People Express counter. Wait, what? Turns out that some group picked up the name for a new <a href=\"https://www.flypex.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">airline</a> hubbing out of Newport News airport in southern Virginia. Service started this summer only to stop three months later after a ground truck hit one of their two planes. They were supposed to relaunch last month, but that didn’t happen. And then last month, Newport News airport <a href=\"http://wtkr.com/2014/11/18/whats-next-for-peoplexpress/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">evicted</a> them for failure to turn over the Passenger Facility Charge that People Express collected on ticket sales over the summer.</li>\n 	<li>So maybe my fake promo should go the other way, with Spirit thanking the new People Express for letting Spirit say to their passengers “Hey, you could do worse…”</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Zapac/25046\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><i>You are (funky mix)</i></a> by Zapac</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>A couple of comments from the last episode…</li>\n 	<li>On the TravelCommons’ Facebook <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">page</a>, Steve Frick said “Listened to your latest episode last week flying into Atlanta. As walked down Concourse A, I saw TAP,  the craft beer bar you mentioned...it looked like an aquarium full of smokers”. I rummaged around the file folders of my mobile phone and found a picture of that bar which I posted on Facebook under Steve’s post. He nailed it. I couldn’t have come up with a better description.</li>\n 	<li>Following up on the description of my first MARTA ride from ATL up north, Dan Gradwohl sent a note pointing to the website <a href=\"http://toandfromtheairport.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">toandfromtheairport.com</a>. He just returned from 5 weeks in the Balkans and said used the website for all those trips, and has used it to plan upcoming trips to Panama City (the one in Panama, not on the Redneck Riviera) and Santiago, Chile. I’d used it a couple of years ago when looking at rapid transit from Beijing airport into the city (I ended up punting and taking a cab, an adventure in its own right that I describe in episode #109). It’s a great resource, but, as you can imagine, tough to keep updated. Looking at the page for ORD, the train section doesn’t reflect the recent surcharge for L rides originating at ORD, and the taxi section doesn’t describe the logistical differences between getting a cab into the city (just get into the cab rank) vs. one to the suburbs -- which involves calling one of the cab companies, getting an assigned number, and then waiting one lane over, unless you want to pay meter-&amp;-a-half to one of the city cabs -- Welcome to Chicago.  I sent a note a week ago to the site owner, Steve Pells, with these updates but haven’t seen them reflected yet on the site.</li>\n 	<li>Turning to my <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Twitter</a> notifications, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/chris2x\">Chris Christensen</a> of the Amateur Traveler podcast sent a quick Twitter message on last episode’s seat recline rant -- “I agree with your assessment of the knee defender story, I am 6\' 3\" and can work on a laptop in <a href=\"https://twitter.com/united\">United</a>\'s Economy Plus seats”</li>\n 	<li>Last month, Arnoud Heijnis pointed me to the <a href=\"http://design-milk.com/bluesmart-smart-carry-luggage/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Bluesmart carry-on bag</a>, the roller board with its own app, allowing you to track it, lock it, and getting notifications when it moves out of range from you. It rocketed past its $50,000 Indiegogo fundraising goal. The last time I checked, they had $1.1M in pledges. The crowdfunding closes Mon, Nov 24. Their Indiegogo <a href=\"https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/bluesmart-world-s-first-smart-connected-carry-on\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">page</a> is really good -- nice video, good description of the product, timeline laying out the steps between now and their July shipping date. They definitely hit that sweet spot of travel technology lust. Arnoud and I traded tweets on whether or not to pull the trigger. Arnoud makes a good point about wanted to see how the inside is laid out -- there’s no picture of that on the Indiegogo page. I’m in the market for a new suitcase anyways. But can I wait until July? I’ll probably pull the trigger this weekend before it closes.</li>\n 	<li>As I continue to prattle on about the wonders and benefits of TSA PreCheck, I came up with a new one early Monday morning -- since I don’t have to take my shoes off, I don’t have to risk waking my wife up by turning on the light to make sure I don’t pick a pair of socks with a hole in it. Yeah, it’s a nit, but it’s one less little thing to spike my morning. And I do have to give the TSA credit for adapting to its popularity. Monday morning in ORD’s Terminal 1 -- the United terminal -- definitely rush hour with all the consultants flying out to their client sites -- they had 4 lanes of PreCheck, shuttling the non-PreCheck Premiere fliers to another line nearby. It could’ve been ugly, but I was through in 5 minutes. I’ve bashed the TSA enough; I also want to give credit where credit is due.</li>\n 	<li>Don’t know if you caught the <a href=\"http://www.tnooz.com/article/ongoing-hiltons-loyalty-program-hackers-continue-selling-account-access/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">news</a> at the beginning of the month that the Hilton HHonors program was hit by hackers. After getting replacement credit cards sent to me after the Target and then the Home Depot breaches, I gotta say that I’ve become a bit complacent about these announcements. Hilton had weak security, allowing the use of a 4-digit PIN instead of a strong password, allowing is suspected to be a brute force attack -- not a problem with just 4 numbers. Once in, the hackers drained the accounts, most of them swapping points for gift cards, or selling the points on hacker forums for pennies on the equivalent dollar, though there were a couple of cases of thieves redeeming the points for nights -- one victim found that 250,000 of his points had been used to buy $1200 worth of nights at low-end Hilton brands along the East Coast. Hilton hasn’t said how many points they’ve had to reimburse.  Many people treat their award points accounts like savings accounts for travel -- banking miles or frequent sleeper points for a summer vacation. But until recently, airlines and hotels haven’t secured them with anything close to bank-like security. Hilton and Delta allowed 4-digit PINs (Delta is switching over to strong passwords), United still allows 6-character passwords. But it’s changing. Before Delta’s switch, I noticed American and Marriott forcing the use of slightly stronger 8-character passwords. And Hilton has now added a captcha to slow down brute force attacks. It’s certainly not banking-style 2-factor authentication, but it’s a start. Another good start would be to change all my travel site passwords to something other than ABC123.</li>\n 	<li>There was another <a href=\"http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/11/18/passenger-stuck-with-1171-wi-fi-bill-on-singapore-airlines-flight/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">story</a> I tweeted out this week involving in-flight WiFi. Some guy racked up an almost $1,200 bill checking e-mail and downloading PPT files on his LHR-SIN flight -- $29 for the initial 30 MB and over $1,100 in overage fees. The guy gets the e-mail receipt and is probably stunned. Then, this being the age of social media, he appears to have immediately created a little picture with his receipt and an Sing Air plane and posted it on Twitter with the first word in all caps -- Gouged! And then put together a blog post. The guy, Jeremy Gutsche, bills himself as Innovation Expert, Author, Keynote Speaker &amp; Chief Trend Hunter (CEO) at TrendHunter.com. If he’s that hip to trends, you’d expect him to know how expensive in-flight overseas internet connectivity is. The WiFi provider, OnAir, says he has to pay the bill saying that the process for purchasing its services is “entirely transparent.” Passengers can choose to end their sessions when they reach a certain price limit, a graphic shows data consumption at all times and users can disconnect whenever they want. Gutsche said he only sent some e-mail, uploaded a 4 MB PPT file and looked at 155 web pages. OnAir said “To consume several hundred megabytes during one flight takes much more than basic email viewing, for example downloading heavy attachments, cloud access and using Skype”. I think the cloud access might be the culprit. While I love having all my documents sync’d to the cloud -- to get at them from any device and for backup -- I’ve found that it can quickly chew up bandwidth. When I first got my Verizon WiFi hot spot, I found myself easily chewing through 6-10 GB and just couldn’t figure it out. Until I remembered that I had my 2 GB Outlook archive pst file set to sync to Microsoft’s OneDrive. Now, when I switch over to the hot spot, I kill off the OneDrive sync app. No more nagging e-mails from Verizon. Would’ve been a much more expensive lesson at 35,000 ft.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any travel experiences -- technology or otherwise, or just general observations, thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/35879\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><i>Two Guitars</i></a> by Admiral Bob</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Holiday Airport Etiquette Refresher</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Unless you’ve been catatonic for the last week, you know that we’re creeping up to the busiest travel day of the year -- Travelgeddon as one local TV reporter called it, causing me to do an Elvis and throw something large at the hotel TV set (luckily today’s flat screens are much more resilient than tubes of Elvis’ day). Yes, the Wednesday before Thanksgiving is nigh.</li>\n 	<li>I also know this because, right around this time the TravelCommons mailbox gets filled with helpful story ideas from PR firms along the lines of this one from Energy Water -- “The day before Thanksgiving is the busiest travel day of the year—between the kids, pets and luggage holiday travel can be a hassle. These 6 travel must-haves take the stress out of traveling to see family and loved ones.”</li>\n 	<li>Top on the list, Energy Water, of course --which seems to be another twist on caffeinated water. Go ahead, give it to the kids and see how popular you are with your seat mates in the back of a Spirit Airlines plane. #2 -- noise cancelling headphones. Always a popular item, especially when surrounded by kids hyped up on Energy Water. #3 -- Therapeutic eye mask. Hmmm, I don’t see too many of those on my flight. #4 -- Portable power charger. One of those batteries-in-a-box things with a couple of USB ports at the end. I’d move this above the eye mask. Very handy, especially around holiday time when families will be huddling around airport electrical outlets the same way the forefathers would huddle around a fire while out on the hunt. #5 Packing cubes. Nah, never used them. They take up space that could be used for other clothes. #6 -- Portable UV germ sanitizer. Probably a bit more popular in these Ebola-paranoid times. Instead of swabbing everything down with hand sanitizer (which I’ve seen people do on airplanes), you just wave the UV wand over it. I dunno seems a bit too easy. I think I’d want to see some efficacy data before putting money down.</li>\n 	<li>So while there are tons of  “bring this” lists running around, I haven’t seen an advice list of what’s really the problem during holiday travel -- airport etiquette. It’s not just the crowds; it’s the crowds of, well what some might call “clueless” travelers. I think “amateur” is certainly a nicer and probably more accurate term. So for those amateur travelers, or folks who’ve been off the road for a bit and need a refresher, here’s a list of key etiquette tips, that from my recent travel observations, need to be said...</li>\n 	<li>Let’s start at the front of the airport -- the security line. The TSA is pushing PreCheck so you may get lucky and find it on your boarding pass. Or, a TSA person may randomly pull you out of the regular line and send you over to PreCheck. It’s your lucky day! Don’t spoil it, though, by not knowing the PreCheck rules. Put your phone away and read the signs -- don’t take off your shoes, don’t pull your liquids out, keep your jacket on, …. Read the signs and don’t slow it down for everyone else.</li>\n 	<li>If getting to your gate involves a moving platform or an escalator, stand to the right because people are walking -- usually quickly -- on the left. Traveling with others, you’ll naturally want to stand abreast, but then you’re blocking everyone else. Don’t do it unless you want to get run over.</li>\n 	<li>When you hit the airport Starbucks for your pre-flight coffee, remember that this isn’t your neighborhood Starbucks run by friendly Starbucks-trained baristas. It’s run by Sodexo Marriott that don’t care quite so much about coffee training. And they’re not quite as efficient. And there are usually a lot of people behind you in line. Keep your order to 3 adjectives or less. Tall skim latte is good. The half-decaf 3-pump no-foam vente vanilla latte -- not so much.</li>\n 	<li>Queuing up at the gate, don’t try to cheat on the boarding. Everyone’s looking at each others boarding passes, and airlines are telling their agents to get more strict. On almost every flight, I’ve seen the boarding agent direct someone over to the wall of shame to wait for their boarding group to be called. Don’t embarrass your family. Wait your turn.</li>\n 	<li>And if you’re using an electronic boarding pass on your smartphone, turn off auto-rotate. If you don’t, odds are that your screen will start oscillating between portrait and landscape while you’re trying to get it on the reader. Those readers are picky enough; you’ll delay the boarding line and quickly earn the enmity of your seatmates -- even before you sit shoulder-to-shoulder with them for 2-4 hours.</li>\n 	<li>And finally, and this is a big one, don’t put your small bag in the overhead. I don’t care if you checked a bag, don’t be that person who puts a purse or a briefcase in the overhead. Show a little holiday spirit -- put ‘em under the seat in front of you and leave space for one more roller board for the poor urchins in Groups 3, 4 or 5. When that person’s bag doesn’t get dropped on a tight connection through DFW, and they’re able to sit down to Thanksgiving dinner in something other than day-old sweats, they’ll thank you.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djlang59/22228\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Garden Of The Forking</em></a><em> </em>by J.Lang</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Travel Tax Pile-Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>I ought to title this episode “Mark’s Rant” ‘cause I’m rolling right from “Hey you, once-a-year traveler, get outta my airport” to “Hey you, politician, get outta my wallet.”</li>\n 	<li>Looking at my last couple of hotel bills in New Orleans -- room tax state, room tax city, occupancy tax, convention and visitors bureau assessment -- it adds 15% to my room rate; just a bit more than the regular New Orleans sales tax rate of 9%.</li>\n 	<li>Last year, a trade association -- the Global Business Travel Association -- put out a list of the top 10 worst cities for what they called “discriminatory travel taxes” -- those specifically on travel services (hotels, rental cars) above and beyond general sales taxes. New Orleans didn’t make the cut. Top on the list -- Portland, OR at $23/day in extra travel taxes. Boston is second at $19/day, with those welcoming Midwest cities of Indianapolis, Minneapolis, and Chicago rounding out the top 5.</li>\n 	<li>We all know why this happens -- ‘cause travelers don’t vote, at least in the places where they get charged these travel taxes. So for local politicians, raising the hotel or rental car tax generates much less blowback than a property tax bump. For example, of the 150 largest US cities, 120 of them have some sort of dedicated tax on hotel rooms. And there’s real money there -- $487 million of travel taxes in 2012 for New York City; $240 million for San Francisco. For hotel taxes, St Louis, surprisingly, has the highest rate -- 22%, with the average being about 13.5%. SFO has the highest rental car tax rate -- 24%; the average is 12.8%</li>\n 	<li>Of course, on top of these taxes, they stack additional line items. New Orleans’ hotel tax is 13%, just below the average. But then they tack on a dollar for city occupancy tax and another $2.50 to fund the convention and visitors bureau, which bumps up an average 13% tax rate to that 15% rate. I gotta say, though, that these add-ons pale in comparison to the 14% tourism tax that I got pegged with the last time I was up in Napa.</li>\n 	<li>Rental cars, though, are the worst. In one of my rare TravelCommons blog <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2009/10/25/skipping-the-rental-car/#more-176\">posts</a>, I looked at a string of 4 rental car receipts and saw taxes and state surcharges and airport facility charges increased my final bill by 27-51%!</li>\n 	<li>What do you do about it? Well, with rental cars, I work my damndest to skip them. In New Orleans, I pick hotels that let me walk to and from my client’s office -- skip the rental car fees <i>and</i> get exercise. A two-fer, ‘cause given the food in New Orleans, I need all the exercise I can get. Hotels -- it’s a bit tougher. You might think about using Airbnb, but that loophole is getting closed. Starting last month, Airbnb is collecting San Francisco’s 14% hotel tax and is getting squeezed by most other cities. And Couchsurfing, at least for business trips, is, for me, not worth the hassle.</li>\n 	<li>So whenever I pass the tourist kiosk in New Orleans airport, I always make sure I take something, even if I don’t really need it -- because I’m gonna be paying for it whether I take it or not.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #112</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_112.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #112 — Holiday Airport Etiquette; Travel Tax Pile-Up','','inherit','closed','closed','','1398-revision-v1','','','2021-09-28 19:01:12','2021-09-29 00:01:12','',1398,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3884',0,'revision','',0),
(3885,1,'2021-09-28 19:01:47','2021-09-29 00:01:47','[caption id=\"attachment_1412\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/IMG_2794.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1412\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/IMG_2794-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Don\'t rub it in that you\'re going some place warm for Christmas\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> Don\'t rub it in that you\'re going some place warm for Christmas[/caption]\n\nComing into the holiday travel season, every travel news outlet publishes their <a title=\"Top 10 Holiday Travel Tips\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2013/12/19/top-10-holiday-travel-tips/\">top travel tips</a>. Rather than repeat the typical \"pack light\" and \"give yourself extra time\" nostrums, I decided to create an advice list of what’s really the problem during holiday travel -- airport etiquette.\n\nThe challenge of holiday travel isn\'t necessarily the crowds; it’s the crowds of what some road warriors might call “clueless” travelers. I think “amateur” is certainly a more charitable and probably more accurate term. So for those amateur travelers or for those who\'ve been off the road for a bit and need a refresher, here’s a list of etiquette tips that some holiday time reinforcement...\n<ul>\n 	<li>Let\'s start&nbsp;at the front of the airport with the security line. The TSA is pushing <a href=\"http://www.tsa.gov/tsa-precheck/frequently-asked-questions\">PreCheck</a>. You may get it on your boarding pass or&nbsp;a TSA person may randomly pull you out of the regular line and route&nbsp;you to the PreCheck line. It’s your lucky day! Don’t spoil it, though, by not knowing the PreCheck rules. Put your phone away and read the signs -- don’t take off your shoes, don’t pull your liquids out, keep your jacket on, …. Read the signs and don’t slow it down for everyone else.</li>\n 	<li>If getting to your gate involves a moving platform or an escalator, stand to the right because people are walking -- usually quickly -- on the left. Traveling with others, you’ll naturally want to stand abreast, but then you’re blocking everyone else. Don’t do it unless you want to get run over.</li>\n 	<li>When you hit the airport Starbucks for your pre-flight coffee, remember that this isn’t your neighborhood Starbucks run by friendly Starbucks-trained baristas. It’s run by Sodexo which doesn’t care quite as&nbsp;much about coffee training. And they’re not quite as efficient. And there are usually a lot of people behind you in line. Keep your order to 3 adjectives or less. Tall skim latte is good. The half-decaf 3-pump no-foam vente vanilla latte -- not so much.</li>\n 	<li>While queuing at the gate, don’t try to cheat on the boarding. Everyone’s looking at each others boarding passes, and airlines are telling their agents to get more strict. On almost every flight, I’ve seen the boarding agent direct someone over to the wall of shame to wait for their boarding group to be called. Don’t embarrass your family. Wait your turn.</li>\n 	<li>And if you’re using an electronic boarding pass on your smartphone, turn off auto-rotate. If you don’t, odds are that your screen will start oscillating between portrait and landscape while you’re trying to get it on the electronic reader. You’ll delay the boarding line and quickly earn the enmity of your seatmates -- even before you sit shoulder-to-shoulder with them for 2-4 hours.</li>\n 	<li>And finally, and this is a big one, don’t put your small bag in the overhead. I don’t care if you checked a bag. Don’t be that person who puts a purse or a briefcase in the overhead. Show a little holiday spirit -- put ‘em under the seat in front of you and leave space for one more roller board for the poor urchins in Groups 3, 4 or 5. When that person’s bag doesn’t get dropped on a tight connection through DFW, and they’re able to sit down to Thanksgiving dinner in something other than day-old sweats, they’ll thank you.</li>\n</ul>','Travel Tips — Holiday Airport Etiquette','','inherit','closed','closed','','1410-revision-v1','','','2021-09-28 19:01:47','2021-09-29 00:01:47','',1410,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3885',0,'revision','',0),
(3886,1,'2021-09-28 19:02:34','2021-09-29 00:02:34','[caption id=\"attachment_1418\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/IMG_2430.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1418\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/IMG_2430-300x214.jpg\" alt=\"Authentically lacking seating\" width=\"300\" height=\"214\" /></a> Authentically lacking seating...[/caption]\n\nCan frequent travelers just write off 2014? We all knew we were abused by the airlines with high prices and lousy service. I guess it\'s somewhat comforting to know that <a href=\"http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-best-and-worst-airlines-1421254623\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">analysis</a> of 2014\'s data proves us right. I\'m not sure there\'s much more we can do than enjoy the little things and hope 2015 is better. Once we get to where we\'re going, the restaurant food has gotten a lot better and with trends toward local sourcing and flavors, a lot more interesting.  We also talk about a couple pieces of hotel industry news -- hoping that IHG\'s acquisition of Kimpton doesn\'t screw up the \"anti-chain\", and continued puzzlement as to why Marriott wanted to <a href=\"http://www.wsj.com/articles/fcc-warns-hotels-others-not-to-block-personal-wi-fi-1422406537\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">block</a> your WiFi hot spots. You can listen to all this and more using the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_113.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking below.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #113:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you from the San Antonio Northwest Marriott in San Antonio, TX.  Doing a quick down-and-back after the flight cancellations caused by the New York snopocalypse that wasn’t blew up my travel plans for the beginning of this week.</li>\n 	<li>I tried to get a podcast done over the Christmas holiday, but the eating and drinking and then the sleeping got in the way. Funny how that works. But after my traditional 2 week hiatus from travel, my first trip of the new year -- on Monday the 5th -- started about right -- with an hour departure delay out of ORD. I couldn’t complain too much, though. The plane was there; the crew was there. We were just waiting on the fuel truck which the morning’s sub-zero temperature had slowed down a bit. Frustrating, but understandable. Walking down the jetway, the cold just took my breath away -- even in a heavy coat. I can imagine the guys running the fuel trucks needed more than a few warming breaks.</li>\n 	<li>I was heading down to New Orleans, though were the temps were about 50 degrees higher than Chicago’s single digits</li>\n 	<li>It is that time of year that you think a bit more <i>strategically</i> about your travel choices -- if you can. A bit more interested in making sales calls in Phoenix or San Antonio rather than, say, Minneapolis; preferring United’s Houston hub over Denver for transcontinental connections.</li>\n 	<li>Or vectoring through airports with good places to pass the time in case of delays. I’ve been connecting through Nashville recently on Southwest and stumbled across an outpost of Tootsie’s, the well-known downtown music joint, as I was walking through Concourse C -- complete with live music. And then in the middle of Concourse C -- near the walk-by Yazoo City Brewery stand -- is another stage with live music.</li>\n 	<li>Of course, you can have too much of a good thing. Like back in mid-November, United had a piano player in ORD at gate C17 playing Christmas tunes -- a 5-tune repertoire that got old real quick during a 45-min flight delay...</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/rompaey-eastern2/\"><em>Indian Blossom</em></a> by Ruben van Rompaey</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Spelunking through my Twitter feed…</li>\n 	<li>A couple of weeks before Christmas, I had to swing through New York on a last minute trip and, being near the holidays, the rates were absurd. It was a struggle to get a decent room for less than $300/night. It just amazes me, because I had paid less than $100/night earlier that week in New Orleans. Anyhow, I ended up at a Kimpton Hotel -- 70 Park Avenue -- in the Murray Hill neighborhood of Manhattan. I’ve been a big fan of the Kimpton chain since I set up camp for 3 months in the Hotel Monaco in downtown Portland a couple of years ago. Kimpton’s schtick is to be sort of an “anti-chain” -- embracing the quirks of each locale, each building rather than trying to replicate a standard brand experience; what Marriott has done with the refreshed Courtyards -- same furniture, same lobby, same footprint in each property. Kimpton makes a big point of being pet-friendly. In Portland, just about every morning I was there, the elevator would open and a dog would walk in (with their owner). Most were reasonably sized, but there were a couple of times some sort of bull mastiff walked in and made for tight quarters. Not a normal experience at your typical Starwood property. Another notable Kimpton quirk is their leopard print bathrobes. Again, a bit different from the typical white terry numbers you get elsewhere. Walking into my room at 70 Park, it was laid out on the bed. I posted a picture to Twitter -- and it drew quite the set of comments. They also have some fun loyalty perks, like “Raid the Minibar”. I got into New York late, so the $30 credit 70 Park gave me came in very handy -- especially since it was one of the better stocked mini-bars I’ve seen in a while. My only beef is that Kimpton isn’t in many of the place I’ve been going -- New Orleans, Memphis,.... I’m lifetime platinum on Marriott and platinum on Starwood, but I always look to stay at a Kimpton property when there’s one available.</li>\n 	<li>So I was very concerned the next week when I saw the <a href=\"http://travelcodex.com/2014/12/ihg-acquires-kimpton-hopefully-wont-screw/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">announcement</a> that IHG -- the Holiday Inn people -- bought Kimpton. One of the blandest hotel chains in existence buys one of the quirkiest. I think the last Crowne Plaza I stayed in was 6 years ago in Joburg, SA.  IHG’s last attempt to be hip was the Indigo chain. How many of you have stayed there? I’m gonna be keeping my eyes on this deal. I hope they don’t screw up Kimpton.</li>\n 	<li>I’m glad Marriott is<a href=\"http://www.wsj.com/articles/fcc-warns-hotels-others-not-to-block-personal-wi-fi-1422406537\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> giving up</a> their misguided attempt to get FCC approval to block individual WiFi hotspots. It’s kinda weird. I can’t figure out why they want to so obviously poke their customers. And it can’t be that much of a revenue thing because they’re giving away WiFi to just about everyone -- I’ve been getting it free for a while as an upper tier Rewards member as have everyone at the lower end brands like Residence Inn and Courtyard, and as of the middle of this month, so do all Marriott Rewards members at their Marriott brand. Which seems to be a trend. Kimpton does the same thing. Indeed, if you hit the Kimpton WiFi log on screen and aren’t a member of their Karma program, you’re taken to an enrollment screen.</li>\n 	<li>Which is important because hotel loyalty programs seem to be losing their grip. In a recent Google study, an increasing number of business travelers say that hotel loyalty programs have <i>less </i>impact on the travel planning this year than last year. The same study also found that most business travelers would switch programs for better perks. Given that free WiFi is one of the most popular perks with frequent travelers, what Kimpton is doing makes sense -- and what Marriott tried to do just doesn’t.</li>\n 	<li>Now, Marriott’s stated reason -- it’s all about security, wanted to protect their guests from rogue WiFi hotspots. Very buzzword-compliant -- cybersecurity is hot right now. And of course, travelers do need to be careful about which WiFi access points they connect to. Sweden’s Pirate Party pulled a <a href=\"http://www.thelocal.se/20150114/young-pirate-hacks-into-top-security-conference\">cute prank</a> earlier this month highlighting this. They set up an access point named “Open Guest” at a Swedish conference and over 100 delegates -- government officials, journalists, security experts -- connected to it, using it for e-mail, web browsing, Skype, eBay, …. just about everything. The Pirate Party logged all the traffic. Are people that gullible -- or cheap -- or both? Even more of a reason to use your own hotspot.</li>\n 	<li>The Monday before Christmas, I wrote up the <a title=\"Travel Tips — Holiday Airport Etiquette\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/12/22/travel-tips-holiday-airport-etiquette/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">holiday airport etiquette tips</a> from the last episode as a stand-alone blog post. It seemed like a timely post going into the holiday travel season. It was a pretty popular post. Rob, a long time TravelCommons listener and Untappd friend, gave it a nice re-tweet -- “A bit brusque, but the best travel tips I\'ve read this year”. And he was right. I didn’t sugar coat it a lot -- just venting a bit from what I typically see -- gumming up the PreCheck line, the Starbucks line, the concourse hallways. Probably not the best holiday spirit.</li>\n 	<li>But what I thought was in the holiday spirit was a sign I saw on the bell stand of the Minneapolis Marriott -- “Br-r-r-r!! It’s cold out! We have warm coats to lend you, available upon request. Please see your friendly bell staff person. Thank you, and stay warm!” I asked one of the bell men how often people take them up on their offer. “Oh, a lot,” he said. Really? What part of “You’re coming to Minnesota in December so dress warmly” do people not get? He just shrugged and gave me that “Minnesota nice” smile.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any travel experiences -- technology or otherwise, or just general observations, thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://www.magnatune.com/artists/albums/williams-long/\"><em>Afternoon in the Sun</em></a> by John Williams</li>\n</ul>\n<b>2014 Was A Bad Year To Fly</b>\n<ul>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/PJ-BZ531_MIDSEA_16U_20150114114822.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-1421 size-large\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/PJ-BZ531_MIDSEA_16U_20150114114822-1024x448.jpg\" alt=\"PJ-BZ531_MIDSEA_16U_20150114114822\" width=\"640\" height=\"280\" /></a>A couple of weeks ago, the Wall Street Journal <a href=\"http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-best-and-worst-airlines-1421254623\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">posted</a> its 2014 airline scorecard. Now, every travel columnist seems to do one of these, but I liked the Journal’s. I apologize to my international listeners, but this scorecard is just focused on the US. And indeed, just the US majors -- Spirit and Hawaiian aren’t in the mix, though Frontier, Alaska, and Virgin America are. I posted the scorecard graphic on the TravelCommons Facebook page when it came out; I’ll also put it in the show notes. It scores the carriers across 7 operational measures -- on-time arrivals, cancelled flights, extreme delays, 2-hr tarmac delays, mishandled baggage, involuntary bumping, complaints -- and then generates an overall rank. The top 3 were Alaska, Virgin America, and Delta. The variability across the 7 operational measures for these top performers was interesting. Alaska, the top overall, had the best scores for on-time arrivals, extreme delays, and complaints, but were 5th out of 8 in mishandled baggage. United, on the other hand, was more consistently the worst airline -- ranking last (8th) in 4 measures and 7th in the other 3.</li>\n 	<li>Which kinda doesn’t surprise me because their customer service just kept getting worse in a sort of cavalierly indifferent sort of way. I get to LaGuardia early one afternoon and want to move up to an earlier flight that’s wide open. That’ll cost you $75 -- to move from a full flight to an empty flight. Or the guy who plopped down next to me in the middle seat one day. He originally had aisle seat. Then United upgraded him to First Class. But then, oops, the First Class passenger showed up, so the guy had to go back to coach -- except they’d already given away his aisle seat and all that was left was this middle seat. So there he was stuck -- with nothing but some shrugged shoulders and a mumbled “Sorry”. You’d think they could’ve given him a couple hundred frequent flyer points, or a drink coupon. Even the most basic restaurant will comp you a dessert if things aren’t right.</li>\n 	<li>It was entertaining, then, in a twisted sort of way, when I got an e-mail from United the following week offering to upgrade me from Premiere Gold to Platinum for $2,600. With these sorts of scores, you think they’d be paying me -- or at least making it something closer to an impulse purchase. But then again, they’re probably looking at my other choices in Chicago -- American with an overall score of 7 or Southwest, scoring 5 out of 8. Chicago hub airlines are kinda like Chicago football and baseball teams -- fighting it out for the cellar -- except without the silver lining of high draft picks.</li>\n 	<li>If you really think about it, 2014 was an awful year to fly. The airlines finally got market discipline; through acquisitions -- Delta buying Northwest, United buying Continental, American buying US Airways (or was that the other way around) -- they got the oligopoly working which pushed up prices and utilization -- high fares and crowded planes. Add to that the consistent ratcheting down for the base level of services -- unbundling -- charging an increasing amount for bags, change fees, pets, children traveling alone, decent seats.</li>\n 	<li>All this while the actual experience got worse. The Wall Street Journal article gives data to prove what we already knew -- we’re paying more for less. US airlines cancelled 66,000 more flights in 2014 than in 2013 and lost or delayed 2.1 million bags, a 17% increase. Which explains the 26% increase in complaints filed with the US Dept of Transportation. Not surprising, then, that American’s CEO <a href=\"http://skift.com/2015/01/27/american-airlines-ceo-awkwardly-explains-why-fares-arent-going-down/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">told</a> financial analysts and press during Tues’ Q4 earnings call “We are not asking our customers to be happy with anything.”</li>\n 	<li>We can always hope that 2014 will turn out to be the bottom. That the newer planes the major carriers are buying will mean fewer mechanical delays and fewer cancellations. That more profitable airlines will stop demanding givebacks from their employees, which would mean much more pleasant flight attendants and pilots, and more enthusiastically productive mechanics and baggage handlers.</li>\n 	<li>Until then, I’ll be try to be happy with the little things -- the unexpected first-class upgrade on my United flight down to San Antonio. The nearly empty mid-day flight from New Orleans to Chicago. The flight attendant told us we could change seats when we wanted, but nobody moved. We each had our own rows. The early arrival into Nashville that changed a tight connection into a leisurely stroll with time to catch a beer between gates. I’ll enjoy these little things, hoping that the bigger things get better in 2015.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/westexit-modern/\"><em>Arsenal</em></a> is by The West Exit</li>\n</ul>\n<b>Restaurant Trends Go Local</b>\n<ul>\n 	<li>So while the trip to where you’re going has gotten more miserable, odds are the food is a lot better once you get there. Every year I go to the National Restaurant Show looking at dining trends because frequent travelers have to eat and it’s typically in a restaurant.</li>\n 	<li>One of the interesting trends, though, is the expansion of what a restaurant is. At the most recent NRA show -- that’s National Restaurant, not Rifle, Association -- there was a good-sized section devoted to food trucks. And depending on where you’re traveling, you’ll see more and more of them in the wild. Of course, food trucks are old hat in places like Manhattan and Center City Philadelphia. And in Portland, I’m not sure you can really call them food trucks -- the ones set up in downtown parking lots don’t look like they’ve moved in years. But elsewhere, they’ll touch down outside of office building or universities around lunch time and offer up some very cool/innovative and often locally-unique food that’s provides some nice variety.</li>\n 	<li>Which ties into another big trend -- the shift to local -- locally-sourced fish, meat , vegetables; locally-made beer or spirits, house-made pickles and charcuterie, …. Which is kind of a throwback. If you think about the 70’s and the 80’s, big franchise chains expanded in the US and then globally, pushing out standard menus with the same dishes everywhere. Now the good side of this was it took the guess work and the risk out of picking a place to eat. No surprises -- which is both good and bad. If you stopped at a Kentucky Fried Chicken along the road or took a client out to a Morton’s Steak House, you knew what you were going to get and you could reasonably expect a certain level of quality. But you weren’t going to discover anything new; get anything unique to where you were visiting. That’s OK when food is fuel -- I want to stop being hungry. It isn’t when food becomes something more -- an experience, an expression of place, which it is now with these hyper-local trends. Yes, when overdone, it can feel like you’ve somehow slipped into a bad <i>Portlandia</i> episode, but when done right, it can make you happy you gutted out the lousy flight to get there.</li>\n 	<li>One trend I keep hearing about, but I don’t really see much in travels, is using tablets and smartphones to replace menus and servers and checks. Every year at the NRA show, there are rows and rows of vendors showing iPad menus and smartphone apps that allow diners to order, split the tab, and pay without seeing a waiter or a bartender. I’ve seen these in the wild exactly twice -- an iPad wine list at Restaurant Revolution in New Orleans. And it was actually kind of intrusive -- lighting up the face of the reader in an otherwise lower lit dining room. And at a restaurant/bar in MSP where the bartender reached over to do the ordering for me. Now this is different from alternative payment methods -- touch-and-pay with Apple Pay or using a bar code on the Starbucks app. Those are just different ways to end the transaction. What I don’t see, in spite of 2-3 years of trend hype, is a move in a restaurant to self-service ordering or paying.</li>\n 	<li>Indeed, if anything, I see a move to <i>more</i> interaction with service staff with seemingly more folks taking full meals at the bar -- your server, the bartender, is never further than 6 ft from you and, on a slower night, is good for a little conversation. I guess if I’m coming to a place for local cuisine made from local produce, I’m not sure why I’d want to skip talking to the local people.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #113</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a title=\"Magnatune\" href=\"http://magnatune.com/\">Magnatune</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_113.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #113 — 2014 was a Bad Year to Fly; Restaurants Go Local','','inherit','closed','closed','','1416-revision-v1','','','2021-09-28 19:02:34','2021-09-29 00:02:34','',1416,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3886',0,'revision','',0),
(3888,1,'2021-09-28 19:04:06','2021-09-29 00:04:06','[caption id=\"attachment_1433\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/2014_01_19_12_55.jpeg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1433\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/2014_01_19_12_55-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"Is Our Plane Behind That?\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Is Our Plane Behind That?[/caption]\n\nRecorded at the JW Marriott in New Orleans together with a GoPro <a title=\"Podcast #114 Uncut — The LoFi Video Version\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/03/20/podcast-114-uncut-the-lofi-video-version/\">video</a> capturing all the unedited bits. We go deep in a comparison of public transit and drive times to US airports, shed a tear for SkyMall magazine, and marvel at the stack of lost Android tablets at American Airlines\' ORD lost-and-found. We talk about what has been an awful start to the travel year in the US east of the Rocky Mountains, and wrap up with some observations about how hotel perks have become more important than points. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_114.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #114:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Which made me happy to head to ORD when I was flying south -- mostly to New Orleans, but the flight to Phoenix made me really smile. I think it was 15 degrees when I left Chicago and about 70 degrees when I landed. I spent at much time as possible outside, trying to resolve what I figured had to be a Vitamin D deficiency. I did get a chuckle on my last night there. I was sitting outside at a bar, must’ve been the low 60’s and they had the heat lamps on.</li>\n 	<li>I also flew through Memphis this past month. The flight selection in and out of there just gets worse. That airport is becoming a ghost town since Delta dismantled the hub that Northwest had there. Indeed, they have a 2-year project to shrink the airport -- demolish half the A and C concourses, mothball what remains, and consolidate everyone into the B concourse. Kinda surprising when some airports are at capacity with people sprawling on the floor, there are other airports with concourses that could double for bowling alleys. How much does the economy have to improve for it make sense for the airlines to start adding back some capacity?</li>\n 	<li>This coming week has me tempting the travel gods, hoping for better weather, with two up-and-backs to the East Coast -- a day trip to Newark and an overnight to Philadelphia. Perhaps a precautionary sacrifice is in order, but what? Maybe a sacrificial offering -- I dowse my travel size tube of Crest toothpaste with the extra bottle of Dewar’s</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>10p Mix</em> by <a href=\"http://www.last.fm/music/Amplifico\">amplifico</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Spelunking through my Twitter feed…</li>\n 	<li>Another thing that made me smile on my flight down to PHX last month wasn’t that I scored a 1st Class upgrade on American -- it was that the upgrade let me hear a woman ask, as she walks on the plane, to be reseated away from the plane’s WiFi access point because she’s allergic to WiFi.  Just when you think you’ve heard everything on a airplane… This seems absurd in just so many ways. Like, how did she make it through the terminal without going into anaphylactic shock? Run a WiFi analyzer app on your phone or tablet the next time you’re in an airport and you’ll see that we’re wading through a sea of WiFi signals. And what about the passengers sitting all around her -- because nobody remembers to shut off the WiFi on their laptops or tablets. And I guess she didn’t stop off at Starbucks on the way to ORD. As it was, the flight attendants just looked at one another -- like they (or anyone) would know exactly where the GoGo access point was located on a 737, and like they’d want to rejuggle seats on a 737 completely full of families heading out on Spring Break. They just mumbled “We’ll ask someone” and gently pushed her down the aisle.</li>\n 	<li>Taking mass transit to and from the airport is a running theme (fixation?) here at TravelCommons, so I immediately clicked through a tweet from Nate Silver’s 538 blog that went geekily deep on that, <a href=\"http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/planes-trains-and-taxis-when-to-take-public-transit-from-the-airport/\">comparing </a>public transit and driving times from the airport to downtown for the 40 busiest US airports. Only in Minneapolis, Honolulu, and Chicago (both ORD and MDW) is public transit quicker than taking a cab. If open the range a bit -- saying anything within 5 minutes is a toss-up, the list gets a lot longer -- Washington Reagan, Atlanta, San Diego, San Francisco, Austin. Open it to 10 minutes, which could be worth it given the cost difference, brings in Boston, Charlotte, Seattle, San Francisco but from OAK this time, and New York’s JFK. A number of these work because they’re close-in airports -- Chicago Midway, Washington Reagan. Others because the highway traffic is so bad -- most notably O’Hare and JFK. The list is ranked by public transit time and for the top 15 -- plus JFK which is #30 -- public transit times are reasonable enough to make the cost-convenience trade-off compelling. Some of the airports below that line that I know -- New Orleans, Orange County Calif, Detroit -- I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a public transit sign in those place. PDX jumped out at me. I <a title=\"Podcast #103 — Hospitality is Personal; Tablets Everywhere\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2013/01/24/podcast-103-hospitality-is-personal-tablets-everywhere/\">talked </a>about taking that airport light rail in an earlier episode. It’s a nice service, but it takes a while -- it makes a lot of intermediate stops -- and so it doesn’t compare well to a cab ride that takes half the time. Of course the gold standard is London’s Heathrow Express  -- a 15-minute straight shot from Paddington Station vs. an hour cab ride. But that’s not a real apples-to-apples comparison -- a Heathrow Express ticket is £21.50 (over $30) vs. $5 for ORD or $7.50 for JFK. The better comparison might be the £5.70 ($8.50) ride on the Tube’s Piccadilly Line that takes 50-60 minutes, which would fit in at the bottom of the top 15 US list.</li>\n 	<li>Waiting out an unbelievably long delay on a United ORD-DEN flight, I ran through all of my reading material -- electronic versions of the Wall Street Journal and NY Times, physical version of the Chicago Tribune, my Feedly newsreader stream, multiple refreshes of Twitter -- and so had to dive into the seatback pocket, the emptiness of which reminded me of SkyMall magazine’s bankruptcy at the end of January. SkyMall was always good for at least 15 minutes of entertainment, along the lines of “who in the world would buy that?” -- the zombie statue crawling out of your garden, the kickboard suitcase, the NFL wine shoe holder…. until last Christmas, when a friend bought my present out of SkyMall -- a 6-bottle leather wine holder for my bicycle. Stunning. I can’t wait for the snow to melt to try it. I only fly Delta when I absolutely have to (like to ATL or MEM) so I didn’t notice when they canned SkyMall back in Nov -- “We saw a decline in customer use,” they said. Yup, every electronic thing I read prior to reaching for SkyMall -- the WSJ, NYT, Feedly, Twitter; I could add Facebook; if I was younger I could add Tumblr. I think the minute the FAA allowed us to keep tablets on during take-off and landing, SkyMall was a dead man walking...</li>\n 	<li>And speaking of tablets, last month I thought I’d left my Google Nexus 7 behind on one of my American flights home from New Orleans. It was one in what seemed to be a stream of stuff I’d lost on the road -- a couple of pairs of sunglasses, earbuds, and now this. I went to the American’s lost-and-found in ORD. The woman came out with a stack of 10-12 7-inch Android tablets -- Lenovo’s, Samsung’s, but not mine. I could see she had a similar sized stack of iPad Mini’s. Looks like this happens a lot. I think the move from solid to mesh seat back pockets is a good thing. But that weekend, as I continued to steal my wife’s Nexus 7, I realized how much I used that tablet. So Sunday night, I hopped on Amazon and found a refurb 8-inch Samsung Galaxy Tab Pro for $200. Sold. I bought it on my son’s Prime account for cheap next day shipping. It’s a nice piece of kit -- bright screen, quick performance, which was a very pleasant change because after Google pushed the latest Android update (Lollipop) to my Nexus 7, its performance cratered to the point of nearly being unusable. It was nice not having a 2-3 second lag between screen touch and reaction. That following week, as I was adjusting my backpack contents -- notebook, Bose headphones, and now my Samsung tablet, I was having problems getting things to fit. I reached in to move some stuff around -- and found my Nexus 7. I hadn’t left in a seat-back pocket. I’d just lost it in my backpack. I gotta get a non-black case next time.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Emily C</em> by Fiasco</li>\n</ul>\n<b>Awful Winter Travel</b>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Now that the US snow cover appears to be retreating -- though Boston did get some more snow last weekend -- I’m hoping that we can bid farewell to what was a really lousy start to the year -- at least from a travel perspective. It kinda caught me by surprise because the start of the winter season -- end of Nov and through December -- wasn’t bad at all. But January started to have it’s problems, and then February -- it was 4 weeks of travel hell for just about everywhere in the US east of the Rockies. Cold, Snow, Ice, Wind -- kinda the 4 winter horsemen of the travel apocalypse.</li>\n 	<li>Every week seemed to have yet another disruption. I think it started with the Snopocalypse that wasn’t in New York and New Jersey. Mayors, governors closing offices, schools, roads, towns on the forecast of massive/huge/historic (they started to run out of adjectives) snowfall -- only to see, what, 4-6 inches? But everyone had flights delayed, cancelled -- it seemed to take the next couple of days before everyone got back in the traces. Only to have a real snow storm blow them back the next week. I had a string of I think 3 Mondays of flight cancellations. I’d get on a weekly conference call and half of everybody was not where they were supposed to be -- cancelled flights, diverted flights, working from home,.... One colleague trying to fly from Ft Myers, FL to Memphis (for work obviously) on Delta. Lands at ATL only to find they’d cancelled his MEM flight due to an ice storm. “When can I get there?” “We don’t know”. He turned around and went back home for the week. His clients couldn’t get to their offices for 3 days.</li>\n 	<li>As I mentioned in the <a title=\"Podcast #113 — 2014 was a Bad Year to Fly; Restaurant Trends Go Local\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/01/27/podcast-113-2014-was-a-bad-year-to-fly-restaurant-trends-go-local/\">last podcast</a>, I tried to be a bit more strategic in my travel -- picking some warm spots when I could, avoiding known trouble spots. I cringed whenever I had to fly to the East Coast, but sometimes I got lucky -- I hit San Antonio on a 70 degree day. The day after I left, it dropped down to 40. I managed to wrangle a half-week in Phoenix in mid-February. Mid-70’s and sunny -- I was outside every minute I could. Flying home, it was 77 degrees when I left PHX; -2 degrees when I landed at ORD. I thought I was going to shatter when I walked onto the jet bridge.</li>\n 	<li>I think the pinnacle was when the Delta jet slid off the LaGuardia runway, hit a fence, and came within yards of dumping into Jamaica Bay. Landing at any of those small, near-in airports -- LaGuardia, Washington Reagan, Chicago Midway -- are like putting down on an aircraft carrier, not a lot of room for error. Add snow or ice -- I’m surprised it doesn’t happen more often. Luckily, this one wasn’t fatal -- not like the Air Florida crash out of what was then Washington National on a snowy January, or the Southwest 737 that slid off the end of a Midway runway, through a fence and into a street intersection, crushing a car waiting at the red light, killing a small boy. This was just more inconvenience -- closing LGA for 7 hours, taking a big chunk of capacity out of what is already the most crowded/overtaxed airspace in the country. A friend trying to fly home to New York that afternoon boarded her flight, it pushed back, only to pull back in after it was cancelled. It was just one more delay, one more cancellation. I was a little luckier. Even though I was flying from Memphis to Chicago, some piece of my flight -- the plane, the crew -- got caught up in that East Coast mess. But thanks to the wonders of mobile message updates, I was able to track the delays from the relative comfort of a Mexican bar in East Memphis. One margarita with an high-school buddy turned to two turned to dinner with his wife joining us. I, unlike so many others, got home that night and had something other than bad airport food to show for it.</li>\n 	<li>The next week -- yet another delay on my New Orleans-Chicago flight. Late inbound aircraft. But why? ORD and MSY were fine; all the weather was again in the East. No one knew, not even the pilot. When we finally boarded the flight, he keyed the mic and said, “I’m awfully sorry about this delay. I wish I could tell you why, but I have no idea. The plane arrived Chicago on time from San Antonio and then just sat there. I wish I could tell you why.”</li>\n 	<li>I dunno -- maybe they lost it behind a snow drift.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em>Keep Your Motor Running</em> by Dave Hole</li>\n</ul>\n<b>Hospitality Beats Points</b>\n<ul>\n 	<li>One morning in some concierge lounge in some Marriott or Sheraton that I can’t quite place, I opened my umpteenth warming dish, looked in at yet another pond of runny scrambled eggs and wondered “Really? How difficult is it to properly cook institutional egg mix?”</li>\n 	<li>Just about every poll of statused hotel travelers rank free WiFi and free breakfast as the top amenities, the ones that keep travelers working to maintain status. But when you actually use those amenities, they’re often not so great -- slow WiFi (even the “enhanced speeds” that Marriott promises their gold and platinum members), semi-liquid scrambled eggs and stacks of over-cooked bacon.</li>\n 	<li>Which is a problem, because just about every hotel chain in the past couple of years has raised the number of points needed for a room and also created a new top tier for the best/most popular properties -- added, say, a Category 6 so they could charge even more points for that Maui property -- devaluing that big point balance -- your vacation savings account -- that you “road warriored” so hard to build.</li>\n 	<li>So if the points aren’t worth as much anymore, what keeps travelers loyal to a brand, what keeps you staying in, say, a Marriott 75 nights or 25 stays in a Westin to make top-tier platinum? It should be those amenities -- but how loyalty are those scrambled eggs worth? They’re convenient, but don’t differentiate much.</li>\n 	<li>Some places are ditching the whole lounge idea. I’ve been in some Renaissance hotels and Marriott Autograph hotels that serve the free breakfast in their restaurant -- there’s the standard-looking buffet, but if you have the time, you can order anything off the menu. Blows my diet a bit, but beats 4 mornings straight of scrambled eggs.</li>\n 	<li>I have noticed, though, that I’m being offered more specialty perks at places that I’m staying a lot. The Sheraton on Canal St in New Orleans will occasionally offer me basketball tickets -- the Pelicans are actually doing well this year -- and had some special grandstand deals to watch the Mardi Gras parades in front of the hotel. I didn’t take them up on either of their offers -- I had other commitments -- but it was nice to get the offer.</li>\n 	<li>I call it the “Cheers” effect -- you want to go where everyone knows your name. When you’re away from home, you want someone to smile and ask how you’re doing. And it’s not just hotels. The morning barista crew at the Starbucks on Canal St and St Charles fire up a spinach feta wrap when they see me walk through the door, even when it’s been a couple of weeks since my last visit.</li>\n 	<li>Of course, there is a fine line that can be crossed. Like a friend of mine, she received Christmas presents from a front desk clerk for years (!) after about an 18-month gig that had her weekly at the Trumbull CT Marriott. Or when I first started traveling for business, I was commuting between Dallas and Chicago, passing through the DFW Admirals Club every Monday morning. After about 3 months, one of the agents who’d I’d gotten to know asked me if I’d like to meet her daughter. Awkward. But in what I still think is one of my best moments, I asked her “Do you really want your daughter dating someone who travels as much as I do?” She thought for a moment, “No, not really”. Awkwardness averted, and we went on to have a nice friendship until I moved back to Chicago a year later.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #114</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://musicalley.com\">Music Alley</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_114.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #114 — Public Transit to Airports, Requiem for SkyMall, Awful Winter Travel','','inherit','closed','closed','','1429-revision-v1','','','2021-09-28 19:04:06','2021-09-29 00:04:06','',1429,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3888',0,'revision','',0),
(3889,1,'2021-09-28 19:04:48','2021-09-29 00:04:48','[caption id=\"attachment_1483\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/102434287_e1770f7622_z-01.jpeg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1483\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/102434287_e1770f7622_z-01-300x199.jpeg\" alt=\"My Briefcase – Feb 2006\" width=\"300\" height=\"199\"></a> My Briefcase – Feb 2006[/caption]\n\nIt\'s spring cleaning time, which for me means it\'s time to wade through my briefcase. Within&nbsp;every frequent traveler is the desire to carry everything you could possibly need on the road -- to make your briefcase into the road warrior version of <a title=\"Batman\'s utility belt - Wikipedia\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batman%27s_utility_belt\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Batman\'s utility belt</a>, letting you amaze your travel companions by pulling out just the right thing to solve any travel problem. Great for the ego; tough on the back. You\'re always prepared, but you\'re always dragging up the rear because you\'re schlepping the heaviest bag or TSA is pulling you for secondary screening because all your wires make them suspicious.\n\nYou need to hit the right balance between weight and need -- what do I need all the time vs. what can I buy or borrow for the couple of times I may need it?\n\n[caption id=\"attachment_1485\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"271\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/DSC_5150-01.jpeg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1485\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/DSC_5150-01-271x300.jpeg\" alt=\"My Briefcase – Apr 2015\" width=\"271\" height=\"300\"></a> My Briefcase – Apr 2015[/caption]\n\nTechnology makes up most of the&nbsp;weight. Looking back over my briefcase dissections&nbsp;in <a title=\"Podcast #33 – Listener Mailbag, What’s in My Briefcase?\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2006/02/18/podcast-33-listener-mailbag-whats-in-my-briefcase/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">2006</a> and <a title=\"Podcast #87 — Sick on the Road; What’s in My Briefcase?\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/02/06/podcast-87-sick-on-the-road-whats-in-my-briefcase/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">2011</a>, there\'s always a laptop &nbsp;-- going from a 3.6 lb 12-in <a href=\"http://www.engadget.com/products/ibm/thinkpad/x31/specs/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">ThinkPad</a> in 2006, to a 2.4 lb 11-in <a href=\"https://support.apple.com/kb/SP631?locale=en_US\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">MacBook Air</a> in 2011, to a 2.8 lb 12.5-in<a href=\"http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/x-series/x240/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> ThinkPad</a> today. An iPad appeared in the 2011 walkthrough. It replaced books, magazines, and printed out documents, but it couldn\'t replace the laptop. In 2015, the full-sized iPad has been bumped&nbsp;by a smaller Samsung Galaxy Tab Pro -- an inch smaller and half the weight. I use it to read and watch videos, though when I force myself to leave my laptop home on vacation, the <a href=\"https://products.office.com/en-us/mobile/office-android-tablet\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Microsoft Office for Android tablet</a> apps let me sneak in some document reviews while the family sleeps. A Verizon WiFi hot spot pays for itself when I\'m trying to pump out that one last e-mail in the airport or sidestepping overloaded hotel WiFi.\n\nAnd there\'s always been a phone, but here we&nbsp;can see a bit more evolutionary progress -- from a Motorola V551 flip-phone to a iPhone 4 to an&nbsp;HTC One. The iPhone let me ditch the U2-themed iPod that was in the 2006 briefcase while the front-facing speakers on the HTC One made a&nbsp;Jawbone Jambox redundant.\n\nNothing has replaced my&nbsp;Bose noise cancelling headphones, though. No self-respecting frequent traveler is seen on a plane without them -- even if they\'re not plugged into anything. After I wore out the original QC-2\'s, I upgraded to the QC-15\'s. The old DJ in me prefers the over-the-ear models.\n\nWhat\'s stayed the same? Mostly the non-technology things -- the <a href=\"http://www.moleskine.com/us/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Moleskine </a>notebook, a&nbsp;random selection of pens, the semi-transparent folder for the few expense receipts that don\'t get e-mailed to me, a bottle of <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibuprofen\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">ibuprofen</a> and <a href=\"https://www.zyrtec.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Zyrtec</a>&nbsp;tablets and, perhaps most importantly, a tin of <a href=\"http://www.wrigleyshop.com/Altoids-Wintergreen-Mints/dp/B000FKL0EU?childAsin=B000FKL0EU&amp;filter=off#.VTfzliFViko\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">wintergreen Altoids</a>&nbsp;to counter dry mouth when I fall asleep in a plane -- a very common occurrence.\n\nThe newest addition to my briefcase? A bottle opener. I just don\'t understand why have hotels taken bottle openers out of the rooms right when the craft beer revolution made them a critical necessity.','What\'s In My Briefcase – 2015?','','inherit','closed','closed','','1478-revision-v1','','','2021-09-28 19:04:48','2021-09-29 00:04:48','',1478,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3889',0,'revision','',0),
(3891,1,'2021-09-28 19:07:22','2021-09-29 00:07:22','[caption id=\"attachment_1508\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"228\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/2014-06-01-15.20.55-e1431490750219.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1508\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/2014-06-01-15.20.55-e1431490750219-228x300.jpg\" alt=\"Been on Duty for 10 Years...\" width=\"228\" height=\"300\" /></a> Been on Duty for 10 Years...[/caption]\n\nHard to believe that I\'ve been prattling along for 10 years. Looking back, I see that I\'ve become less of a TSA-hater, but am still pretty clear-eyed about the tediousness of the frequent travel experience. It\'s tough to pack 10 years into a 30-min episode, but I think I\'ve cherry-picked some good snippets. Before that, I talk about spending Semana Santa (Holy Week) in southern Spain and \"smart luggage.\" The listener mailbag continues the conversation about mass transit to airports. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_115.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #115:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, so no video “uncut” version like I did last episode from New Orleans. No maid service in the TravelCommons studio to tidy up before the podcast.</li>\n 	<li>We’re deep in the bipolar weather roller coaster that is Spring in the Midwest -- 70’s one day, 40’s the next; bright sun at 10 in the morning, pissing down rain at noon. Which is as good an explanation as any why Chicago’s two airports, O’Hare and Midway, own the basement of the DOT’s on-time departures ranking.</li>\n 	<li>My travel has been a bit more interesting since the last episode. Did a few of my normal runs down to New Orleans, but broke the pattern a bit with travel to Denver and Charlotte. And even one of the runs down to New Orleans broke the usual down-Monday-back-Thursday routine. At the beginning of April, I flew down Thursday night with my wife and daughter, met up with friends for the French Quarter Fest weekend. It’s one of my favorite music festivals. Free music from local bands; stages and food stands spread around the Quarter -- a bit lower key than the 460,000 people who descended on the Fair Grounds for Jazz Fest a few weeks back.</li>\n 	<li>The big trip, though, was a couple of weeks prior to that when we went to Andalucia -- southern Spain -- for Spring Break and found ourselves there during Semana Santa -- Holy Week. Cordoba, Granada, Sevilla, the hill town of Ronda. Processions (plural) almost every night. My wife said it was like the Tour de France for Catholics. And as a Catholic, I couldn’t argue -- it was pretty full contact. I posted a <a href=\"https://vine.co/v/OL66AUgHwwi\">Vine video</a> of a Granada procession to my <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter feed</a> and then a couple of minutes of GoPro footage from the last Holy Thursday procession in Sevilla on the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons\">Facebook</a> page and <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\">YouTube channel</a>. It was close to midnight, after which I think they took an hour break and then started up the Good Friday processions. We went to bed. When we went out the next morning around 8:30 to grab some breakfast -- our usual of cafe con leche and tomato bread topped with jamón iberico -- the restaurant was jammed with people who just finished a procession. It just kept going.</li>\n 	<li>And so do we. I drained my United account for a trip next month to Japan, and then in September, we’re heading over to Scotland so my daughter can start at the <a href=\"http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/\">University of St Andrews</a>, so I should have enough content to keep TravelCommons rolling into an 11th year.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/download_track.php?id=6E494292C6B4E14E784F04400EB2C54CE135E29730530171C5F931345CAA3733A93C8CF03BBFAC71CD59B5710E25327F\" rel=\"nofollow\">All Around</a></em> by <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=AEF14840F87CD6C39BE8918AF693E89C276517530C9606BA2CB20418C6A8B4CB\" rel=\"nofollow\">Jel</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Before we get into the meat of things, just a quick pointer to let everyone know that TravelCommons is available on the Stitcher radio smartphone app as well as on <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>. Since iTunes started handling podcasts -- June 2005, right around episodes <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/06/19/podcast-6-the-tsa-talks-back/\">6</a> or <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/06/29/podcast-7-eating-alone-classic-travel-stories/\">7</a> -- it dominated the TravelCommons download stats. Now it’s only responsible for a third of the downloads.</li>\n 	<li>Rummaging through the mailbag…</li>\n 	<li>Back last November in episode <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/11/22/podcast-112-holiday-airport-etiquette-travel-tax-pile-up/\">112</a>, Dan Gradwohl sent me a pointer to the website <a href=\"http://www.toandfromtheairport.com/\">To and From The Airport</a>, a collation of airport transit options. In that episode, I talked about reviewing the ORD listing and sending in a few updates. Toward the end of March, I received a note thanking me for my contribution and apologizing for the delay. Whatever issues were happening there now seem to have passed; it appears the site is back to being actively maintained.</li>\n 	<li>Tom Brown, a longtime TravelCommons listener, sent a note following up on last episode’s riff on Nate Silver’s <a href=\"http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/planes-trains-and-taxis-when-to-take-public-transit-from-the-airport/\">538 blog post</a> about mass transit times to major US airports. He wrote:\n<ul>\n 	<li>You noted London as the gold standard of public transport out of the airport. I would put it at bronze at best.  Decaying infrastructure, not so comfortable trains and destination not so friendly to business traveler in London doesn\'t help its ranking. Singapore is the best in my opinion with Hong Kong 2nd. Tokyo even ranks above London to me.</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Tom, thanks for that, expanding our sample size. My past trips thru Hong Kong and Singapore were family vacations - late arrivals from the US, tired kids, too much luggage - and so opted for taxis instead on mass transit. I missed the opportunity to add those trains to my personal sample, but I did end up with one of the wackiest cab rides while in HK. It was kind of a hoarder cab -- newspapers filling the trunk, tchotchkes all over the dashboard and hanging from the roof. I don’t know how we got 4 people and 4 bags into that cab. As I mentioned earlier, we’ll be flying in and out of Narita at the back half of June and given the distance and cab fares, we’ll take the Tokyo train at least once.</li>\n 	<li>Our Spring Break trip to Andalucia started with a flight into Madrid airport. Our plans had us landing in Madrid, then making the 20-min schlep in from Terminal 4 (could they have put that terminal any further out?) and then heading downtown to catch the high-speed Renfe train to Córdoba. After I booked the tickets on-line (a process made infinitely easier than 2 years ago now that Renfe accepts PayPal) I was pleasantly surprised to stumble across a TripAdvisor post saying that the tickets included a free train ride down to the Puerta Atocha train station. It wasn\'t the fastest ride - a local train that made 4-5 stops before Atocha - but it was clean and not beat up. And since we were headed downtown during Friday rush hour, it took the same 30 min that Google Maps estimated for the cab.</li>\n 	<li>And continuing on the transit theme, Nick Gassman sent a note about comments I made in episode <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/10/12/podcast-111-seatback-recline-wars-craft-beer-tourism/\">111</a> about the proliferation of pre-paid cards for subway and mass transit systems. Nick says about the London Underground:\n<ul>\n 	<li>You can use your own contactless payment card (Visa, Amex etc) without having to buy an Oyster card, and get the same rates. You can register the card if you wish, to track spend.</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>The link to the Tube web page is similar to the Chicago L page -- it feels a bit ambiguous, probably because the contactless technology is still a bit young, a bit ambiguous itself. Both London and Chicago say they’ll also work with NFC mobile phones -- like the latest Samsung Galaxies, the HTC Ones, and the iPhone 6. I think I’ve just got to get over to an L station and give it a try. But it’s probably not the kind of experiment I want to try and debug during rush hour when there’s a couple hundred hard-core commuters storming the 3-4 tap through gates. Seems like more of a midday or weekend morning thing.</li>\n 	<li>Reaching back again to episode <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/11/22/podcast-112-holiday-airport-etiquette-travel-tax-pile-up/\">112 </a>where I talked about funding the Indiegogo campaign for the Bluesmart carry-on bag, what they call “The First Smart, Connected Luggage” complete with a smartphone app that acts as a digital lock, a scale, tracks location, and sounds an alarm if your smart bag wanders off. They’ve gotten huge press; they blew thru the funding goal by 3800%. But now they have to deliver the bag. They’ve been doing a good job of pushing out <a href=\"https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/bluesmart-world-s-first-smart-connected-carry-on#activity\">updates </a>and seem to be sticking to their August ship date. Which would be good for them because competitors are starting to move into this space. I tweeted out a link to an Engadget story last week about Samsung and Samsonite partnering up on a line of smart suitcases with functionality that sounds very similar to Bluesmart’s. Then I received a press release in the TravelCommons e-mail box from Planet Traveler <a href=\"http://www.planettravelerusa.com/preorder\">announcing</a> a Kickstarter campaign for the Space Case 1 line of smart luggage which will have all the functionality of the Bluesmart bag <i>plus</i> fingerprint unlock <i>and</i> Bluetooth speakers. As if the gate areas aren’t noisy enough.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/download_track.php?id=A1F44F3B330BFBBD5C7863108B61B09977CADC67705C23C5AECA03FC6F2C0320A93C8CF03BBFAC71CD59B5710E25327F\" rel=\"nofollow\">La Tra (basephunk mix)</a></em> by <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/label.php?id=3AF558B2D658A22FFF10B13F9D87237D276517530C9606BA2CB20418C6A8B4CB\" rel=\"nofollow\">Omar Sosa</a></li>\n</ul>\n<b>A Decade of TravelCommons</b>\n<ul>\n 	<li>It was ten  years ago <i>today </i>that I recorded the first T/C podcast in the bathroom of the Wardman Park Marriott in NW Washington, DC</li>\n 	<li>[tc1-opening &amp; 1]</li>\n 	<li>It was an interesting mix of topics…\n<ul>\n 	<li>TSA problems in ORD, LGA and DCA, the first of many TSA rants over the years;</li>\n 	<li>The first sighting of a “puffer” security screening machine, don’t know if you ever walked through one of those, but we also talked about their multi-million dollar demise in an episode a some years later;</li>\n 	<li>Hungarian roadside prostitutes -- a topic that I don’t believe I’ve revisited</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>And it was the first in a long string of what one listener referred to as a “pottycast” -- using the tile of hotel bathrooms as a poor man’s reverb chamber</li>\n 	<li>[tc74-hotel medley]</li>\n 	<li>Listening to that, I now understand why I have lifetime Marriott Platinum status.</li>\n 	<li>One of the more noticeable changes over the years has been about the TSA. Early podcasts railed against the TSA -- the security theatre, the shoe carnival, liquid bans, and of course, the power trips</li>\n 	<li>[tc45-finding tooth powder]</li>\n 	<li>But with some much needed customer service training and, most importantly, the introduction of PreCheck, the TSA isn’t the podcast pinata it had been for the first 4-5 years -- especially when compared to airport security in places like India</li>\n 	<li>[tc109-mall cop, umbrella]</li>\n 	<li>Travel technology has been one constant through the TravelCommons decade</li>\n 	<li>[tc87-briefcase]</li>\n 	<li>[tc91-too much technology]</li>\n 	<li>And while I’ve cycled through a number of phones, tablets, and laptops, the Bose noise-cancelling headphones remain the official headphones of the TravelCommons podcast</li>\n 	<li>[tc48-bose lust]</li>\n 	<li>Food has also been a common theme…</li>\n 	<li>[tc97-food]</li>\n 	<li>Never one to be accused of being a travel industry cheerleader…</li>\n 	<li>[tc92-not-so-upbeat]</li>\n 	<li>But I always try, if only partially successfully, to maintain some perspective</li>\n 	<li>[t61-zen]</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #115</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>Links to 3 prior anniversary episodes\n<ul>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/12/27/podcast-27-best-of-2005/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Episode 27</a> -- Best of 2005</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2006/06/13/podcast-40-looking-back-over-the-first-year/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Episode 40</a> -- Looking Back Over the First Year</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2009/05/14/podcast-74-looking-back-over-four-years-of-travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Episode 74</a> -- Looking Back Over Four Years</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from the <a href=\"http://promonet.iodalliance.com/\">IODA Promonet</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_115.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #115 — A Decade of TravelCommons','','inherit','closed','closed','','1505-revision-v1','','','2021-09-28 19:07:22','2021-09-29 00:07:22','',1505,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3891',0,'revision','',0),
(3892,1,'2021-09-28 19:08:28','2021-09-29 00:08:28','[caption id=\"attachment_1532\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/DSC_5744.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1532\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/DSC_5744-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Lost Without Translation\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Lost Without Translation[/caption]\n\nBack behind the microphone after an extended summer break highlighted by a two-week family vacation in Japan. We talk about traveling in Japan. It was a fantastic time, though we were lost without translation at times. But with the US dollar buying 124 yen, it was the right time to go. We also talk about frustration in using frequent flier miles, trends toward prettier and higher tech luggage, and a connoisseur of scrambled eggs. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_116.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #116:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, after a <i>long </i>absence. Let’s call it summer vacation. And there was a nice bit of vacation there -- 2 weeks in Japan with the family. People would ask me “Have you been to Japan before?” Never outside of Narita. Which I translated to an answer of “Mostly no” before my trip, and updated to a plain “No” after my trip. But more on that later.</li>\n 	<li>Over the years, I’ve gotten into the habit of leaving the country if I want a real vacation. I find the disconnection process works much better I’m more than 5  time zones removed from home. Europe is 6 or 7 hours ahead -- pretty good. But the 14 hour difference between Chicago and Tokyo -- that’s real separation.</li>\n 	<li>You can’t unplug for 2 weeks for free, though. It takes a bit of planning, and in my case, a good bit of travel -- both before and after the trip.</li>\n 	<li>The 6 business days before my flight to Tokyo had me in Nashville, Detroit, Dallas, and the day before I left, Denver. I flew out Sunday night, flew home Monday night, and then left for Japan Tuesday noon. Coming back, we hit ORD 3:30 Sunday afternoon only to find myself back there 15 hours later for the first flight back out to Denver Monday morning. I was just happy that it was a short week for the 4th of July holiday.</li>\n 	<li>Since then, I’ve been keeping up the Denver-Dallas triangulation with the occasional random jump to somewhere like Detroit. I’ll probably keep it up through August since the beginning of September will have me out of the country again -- to Edinburgh, helping my daughter settle in at <a href=\"http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/\">University of St Andrews</a>. After that, I may just sleep until October.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://ghosts.nin.com/main/home\"><em>3 Ghosts I</em></a> by <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Nine Inch Nails\" href=\"http://www.nin.com/\" rel=\"homepage\">Nine Inch Nails</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>So that was the start of the <a href=\"https://blog.stackexchange.com/2015/06/stack-exchange-podcast-65-the-word-has-two-meanings-you-see/\">Stack Exchange Podcast</a> where Joel Spolsky goes pretty much non-linear over his attempt to use frequent flier miles.</li>\n 	<li>Any attempt to use frequent flier miles will be a frustrating exercise. My recent attempts to do <i>anything</i>with the 300,000 BA Avios miles is own personal exercise in masochism. But, to be honest, I’ve had pretty good luck this year, getting 2 flights down to New Orleans on Southwest, 4 direct flights from and from Tokyo with UA Mileage Plus and 3 flights between ORD and Edinburgh on American. Now, it wasn’t a complete cakewalk -- on SW, my wife and daughter took a 6am flight back on Monday, on UA, we had to come home a couple of days earlier than we had originally planned while on AA it’s a day later. But flexibility has always been a requirement to use frequent flyer miles. And those minor shifts are a whole lot better than my exercise with BA which only offered me one day in the entire month of September that I could use Avios miles to get to Edinburgh. I’m not sure there’s a more useless awards program.</li>\n 	<li>When I first started looking for Chicago to Edinburgh flights, I went straight to Hipmunk.com. It has been my go-to flight search tool for a while now. It’s easy -- it defaults to flight search, unlike Expedia’s push for bundled deals or Orbitz pushing hotels. And graphical display -- bars for each flight showing flight duration spread across the day -- makes it very easy to focus on the flights you’re most interested in. But when searching for Edinburgh flights, I spotted something new -- right under the red Virgin Atlantic bar was a purple one labeled “Mystery”. Kinda like Priceline’s unnamed hotels you bid for. But I’d never seen what the travel industry calls “opaque pricing” on Hipmunk before. Of course, it wasn’t really that opaque. Clicking on the bar revealed the flight details -- a 4:40pm departure with an hour connection in Madrid. Hmmm, let’s see. Only Iberia flies from ORD to MAD. Doing a quick search, I found the times did indeed match Iberia flight number 345 -- which Hipmunk only slightly masked as Mystery Airline #345. Must’ve been an experiment, because I haven’t seen it since, but I did get a good chuckle out of it.</li>\n 	<li>A colleague who I met up with on one of my Detroit trips flew Spirit Airline for the first time and <i>didn’t</i> get much of a chuckle. It was a last-minute meeting. He was flying in from Kansas City and, following the rules by using the mandated American Express Travel website to book his flight, he saw a Spirit flight that was significantly less than other carriers. Being a good corporate citizen, he booked it. He showed up at the ticket counter to get his boarding pass. “You gonna carry that one?” the Spirit agent asked him, pointing to his suitcase. “Of course,” he said. “That’ll cost you $55. And that briefcase doesn’t look like it’ll fit under the seat, so that’s another $55.” Pretty quickly, the price difference that led him to book Spirit disappeared in the smoke of carryon charges. Some might say it’s his fault for not knowing Spirit’s uniquely aggressive add-on fee structure -- what Spirit calls “bundling”. But I’d say it’s Amex’s fault -- for displaying Spirit’s base fare (without carryon fees) in the same ways as they display Delta’s or Southwest’s. And then marking those higher, but more inclusive, fares as being “out of policy” because they’re higher, and requiring additional steps to justify booking them. More power to Spirit to differentiate themselves with a unique fee structure, but Amex and the like need to do their job and let business travelers know what they’re in for when they book those low fares.</li>\n 	<li>Rich Fraser did saw my PreCheck frustration spill over to Twitter.\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" lang=\"en\">\n<p dir=\"ltr\" lang=\"en\">Folks, it\'s a *metal* detector! Large chunks of metal in your pocket - cell phones, car keys, $5 worth of quarters - *will* set it off</p>\n— Mark Peacock (@mpeacock) <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/623113695426670592\">July 20, 2015</a></blockquote>\n<script src=\"//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js\" async=\"\" charset=\"utf-8\"></script>I don’t know if it’s summer travel amateurs hitting the PreCheck lottery, but I’ve been stunned at the number of people who look amazed when the metal detector alarms when they try to walk through with a slug of metal in their pockets. Mobile phone, big electronic key fobs, two fistfuls of change… I mean, what part of “metal detector” do they not get? It’s doing it’s job! But people will stand there, dumbfounded, they can’t stroll through wearing the quarter-pound of metal and electronics that is an iPhone. I hate to be a snob, but I beginning to think they need to split PreCheck between the veterans who paid for it and the occasional random selectees. To which Rich mentioned that it’s not so occasional for him -- he’s gotten Pre on 3 of his last 4 trips. So, he says, why pay for it? Hey, as long as he remembers to take his mobile phone and car keys out of his pocket, I say, more power to him.</li>\n 	<li>I’ve probably mentioned this before, but I think one of the absolute best airport restaurants is Rick Bayless’ <a href=\"http://www.rickbayless.com/restaurants/tortas-frontera/\">Torta Frontera</a> in the American, United and International terminals at ORD. The tortas, the Mexican sandwiches, are fantastic -- great local ingredients and made-to-order. Being made-to-order is key to the great taste and texture, but it’s 10 minutes from the time you order and at ORD rush hour, you can stand in line for 10 minutes before you get to the counter. Great restaurant -- and popular. So I was cautiously excited last week when I saw they had a new ordering app. I was catching an evening flight to DTW and decided to check out the app. I downloaded and set up the app after parking in the deck -- created an account and loaded a credit card. Then, while in the PreCheck line, I scrolled through the menu and loaded the shopping cart with a Cubana, my favorite torta. I was going to hit the Order Now button, but the TSA guys were a little too efficient, waving 3 of us forward at once. So, I hit Order a couple of minutes later on the other side of the X-Ray machine. I quickly received an e-mail “Thanks for your order, we’ll let you know when it’s ready”. That’s it. No ETA, no typical wait time. Hmmm… I walk down to the T3 Tortas -- longest line I’ve seen. Hmmm…  Just then, I get a second e-mail -- 7 minutes after the first -- “You order will be ready at 5:43pm” -- 10 minutes from now. OK, not bad given this line. I walk to the rest room, browse the bookstore across the hall, and put myself in front of the order pick-up station at 5:43pm. About a minute later, the woman calls out “Anybody order on-line?” Two of us step up. “Mark?” I reach out and take my bag. The pre-order worked well, though next time, I’ll let the TSA guy wait for a minute while I hit the Order button a bit sooner.</li>\n 	<li>All the way back in April 2012, I wrote a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/04/21/best-hotel-amenity-free-breakfast/\">blog post</a> about free breakfast being the best hotel amenity.  (I had to do a good bit of scrolling on the TravelCommons website to find it -- I’ll save you that with a link in the show notes). It’s still true, even though, it’s, as I wrote back then, it’s more about convenience than food quality -- especially when you’re grabbing that breakfast in the concierge lounge of a Marriott or Sheraton or Westin. And it kinda turns you into a connoisseur of scrambled eggs. A buddy and I got into this conversation a few weeks back -- comparing the quality of scrambled eggs across hotels we’ve stayed at.  We concluded that the most typical consistency was firm, almost quiche like. We liked them with a bit of cheese mixed in to give them a bit of flavor (neither of us are vegan). Every once in a great while, you get great scrambled eggs -- soft curds, slightly moist. But you definitely don’t want them runny -- there’s nothing more disgusting at 6am than tilting back that warming tray clamshell lid and seeing scrambled eggs sitting in a pool of yellowish liquid. We’ll go for hard dry over swimming in yellow eggs every morning. But hard dry bacon, now that’s just wrong</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/buy_album.php?id=08E508A6096F11910641E13331B70EED6DFA5BB929282F731E19BBAFA8F08FFD686BD99DD86BA0D5E844DD5536E1AEFB\" rel=\"nofollow\"><em>Ghost Hardware</em></a> by Burial</li>\n</ul>\n<b>Traveling Thru Japan</b>\n<ul>\n 	<li>The family and I have done a fair bit of travel in Asia -- Thailand, Singapore, Vietnam, Hong Kong, China -- which left two big holes -- Japan and Korea. We filled one of them this summer when we spent two weeks visiting Tokyo, Kyoto, and Osaka. Japan had always been on our list to visit, but its reputation for high prices always gave us an excuse to put it off and go some place where we could stretch our dollars further. But with the dollar buying ¥124 and then scoring 4 direct ORD-NRT tickets on United Mileage Plus awards, this seemed the time.</li>\n 	<li>Now as long time listeners know, this won’t be a travelog, a list of things to see in Tokyo or Kyoto -- I leave that to friends like Chris Christensen of the <a href=\"http://asia.amateurtraveler.com/tag/japan/\">Amateur Travelers podcast</a>. Since I always say that this podcast is more about the journey than the destination, let’s talk about travel in Japan.</li>\n 	<li>As my family and I tend to do on our trips, our only trips to the airport were coming and going to the US. Everything else was on train. Which in Japan works very well. My wife bought us 2-week Japan Rail (JR) passes before we left. It wasn’t a small number for the 4 of us, but they paid off over our trip -- allowing us unlimited use of the high-speed bullet trains, even to reserve seats for a bit more relaxed boarding.</li>\n 	<li>We broke the passes in on the Narita Express, the hour ride from the airport to Tokyo Station. I’m not sure they could’ve put Narita any further out. Given the distance, everyone takes the train or a bus. The train was fine, kinda like the Heathrow Express but without the TV screens. It worked with a minimum amount of fuss -- which was a good thing after a 12-hour flight.</li>\n 	<li>We really hammered the JR passes to train among Tokyo, Kyoto, and Osaka, all less than 3-hour trips. Some of the stations were huge and there were times when we had to lean in to thread through the crowds of commuters. But the signage was pretty good and the trains absolutely met their reputation for timeliness (if only airlines in the US were half as timely…). And while JR would roll a food cart while on the rails, we got a bit more into the Japanese train culture and stocked up at the train station food courts before we left -- bento boxes, rice cakes, and of course, train beers -- Kirin tall boys usually. And if we didn’t have time to hit the food court, we could always grab something from the vending machines -- which were positioned about every 20 feet on the train platform. The vending machine thing in Japan is intense -- but convenient.</li>\n 	<li>We didn’t just train point-to-point between the major stations. A lot of times it was a smaller train to the main station, then the high-speed train, then connecting to again to a smaller train. The HyperDia smartphone app came highly recommended and the free version was great when planning out these connecting journeys -- both inter-city and within Tokyo where a trip across town might span a couple of rail companies, say Tokyo Metro to a JR train. It also displays the fare, which is very handy, avoiding the need to try and decipher the rate table while in front of the fare machine with a queue building behind you. The public transit tab on Google Maps also worked surprisingly well.</li>\n 	<li>Being able to use these apps when you really need them requires mobile data for your phone. You don’t want to be trying to search for an open WiFi access point before figuring out which train you’re connecting to. Which, in Japan, like so many things, isn’t exactly straightforward. As a tourist, you can only buy data SIMs; no voice capabilities. One of my go-to websites -- the aptly, but somewhat awkwardly named <a href=\"http://prepaid-data-sim-card.wikia.com/wiki/Japan\">Prepaid Data SIM Card Wiki</a> -- came through again. Before we left, I ordered a b-mobile SIM to be delivered to our first hotel -- the Marriott Courtyard in the Ginza District -- and then I bought another -- Japan Travel SIM -- from the Tourist Information Center at Tokyo Station. The lack of local voice wasn’t a huge inconvenience for us -- we were communicating via e-mail with hotels and apartment rentals -- but it still seemed a little weird.</li>\n 	<li>The one thing that pulled me up short was the limited amount of signage in the Latin alphabet. I’m OK with the Japanese names when phonetically rendered in Latin characters, but I’m not so hot on reading kanji or kana. We wrestled with this our first morning in Tokyo at the Tsukiji Fish Market. My wife had a list of sushi restaurant recommendations -- all of which were Japanese names in Latin script; all the restaurant signs were in kanji. And then at a Kyoto ramen restaurant, where you buy tickets for your food from a machine and then hand them across the counter to the cook, having only kanji on the machine buttons without pictures, made ordering a bit of a challenge. It got me thinking back to my trip last year to Beijing -- I didn’t recall having the same level of challenge there.</li>\n 	<li>What made this all work is that just about all of the Japanese people we ran into were the nicest, the most welcoming people. I was constantly struck at how many people would strike up a conversation -- asking where we’re from, helping us with Ramen machines, shouting “Welcome to Japan” while riding by on a bike, volunteering to walk us across train stations to help us with connections. I’m not sure I’ve experienced that consistent level of engagement from random strangers anywhere else. Of course, some of it could get a slightly embarrassing, like the group of middle school kids who wanted a picture with me. Or my daughter who regularly would get tagged by Japanese girls for pictures. We had that experience often in Beijing, but there, when we were often the lone white people, it was understandable. Having that same thing happen in Japan -- more Westernized, more white people wandering around -- that surprised us. In Arashiyama, a pretty touristy area on the west side of Kyoto, we were flagged down by 3 middle school teachers who video’d us answering their question about why we chose to visit this town. They told us that they taught English and wanted to show their classes native English speakers. OK, makes sense, but with all videos on YouTube, I wasn’t quite sure why they wanted a video of us.</li>\n 	<li>But that being said, except for the signage, Japan was one of the easier countries we’ve traveled in. And maybe, with a couple more revs of Google Translate, even that barrier will get smoothed away.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a title=\"MP3 Download\" href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/download_track.php?id=0E74C6FEB7390D18D02B4B399668093172F6C8CC66DDC09D90A3BF7DDA436823CFAC859AE2B2C73E46A278A4950E1030\">Lonely Dog Blues</a></em> by <a title=\"Tobin James\' Web Site\" href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/label.php?id=2A3449F03E7B8462FF74407B60F0C4B0A30A0CBE880C61DE37E3B342387F0643\">Tobin James</a></li>\n</ul>\n<b>Luggage Trends</b>\n<ul>\n 	<li>I think it was when I was grabbing our luggage off the carousel in ORD, returning from Spain with our luggage full of wine and olive oil. I picked up my wife’s red bag and was struck at how tatty the fabric had become. I set it down in front of her and said “That’s become embarrassing. I’m not sure I can travel with that bag again”</li>\n 	<li>Now it’s not that I have a styling bag. It’s stock Swiss Army black roller still bearing Vietnamese customs stickers from 2008. I had retired it in favor of a grey Samsonite bag, but had to pull it back out when the Samsonite’s wheels got wonky -- the rubber wore off and the wheels splayed out after 2.5 years of pulling it across New Orleans sidewalks.</li>\n 	<li>I’m seeing more hardshell rollers in non-black colors -- burgundy, yellow, floral prints, Disney characters…. They look nice; but that just may be because they look different -- they catch my eye because of what they’re not -- not a black ballistic nylon roller bag. My recently deceased Samsonite was non-black -- grey rather than floral, but still non-black. And after 3-4 months of my travel schedule, it started to look less non-black. Smudges from grease on overhead bin hinges, muck from taxi trunks, muddy water from New Orleans gutters, spilled coffee... That’s why I can’t have nice luggage.</li>\n 	<li>We’ve talked about the impending trend of “smart luggage” in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/11/22/podcast-112-holiday-airport-etiquette-travel-tax-pile-up/\">past</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/05/14/podcast-115-a-decade-of-travelcommons/\">episodes</a>. Bluesmart has been the poster child for this. They crushed their Indiegogo campaign last year, and 2 weeks ago announced they’re in volume production, targeting initial deliveries in late September. “Control your suitcase from the app” is one of their tag lines. Digital lock, digital scale, battery charger, location tracking, proximity alerts. It spoke to my inner travel propeller head, so I did the Indiegogo thing. When it shows up, I’ll be sure to tell you all about it.</li>\n 	<li>Bluesmart is at the top of the Google searches for “smart luggage”, but there are a growing list of followers with similar feature lists. Location tracking is an interesting one. I can count the number of times my luggage has been lost on one hand and have change left over, but when it happens, it can be catastrophic. I remember BA lost a bag on my way over to a 2-week “city-a-day” trip -- today London, tomorrow Stockholm, Friday in Zurich. My bag was always one stop behind me. So I get the importance of location tracking. At the high end, Bluesmart and others are equipping their bags with GPS and cellular modems to enable “global tracking”. At a much simpler level, travelers like long-time TC listener Mika Pyyhkala are using Bluetooth key fobs like the Pally Smartfinder to check if their bag made it onto their plane.</li>\n 	<li>I can see it being useful at the other end. Look at the app -- bag’s not off the plane yet. I have time to stop off at the restroom -- or better yet, the bar.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #116</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://iodapromonet.com/index.php\">IODA Promonet</a></li>\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_116.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #116 — Traveling Thru Japan; Luggage Trends','','inherit','closed','closed','','1531-revision-v1','','','2021-09-28 19:08:28','2021-09-29 00:08:28','',1531,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3892',0,'revision','',0),
(3893,1,'2021-09-29 08:06:51','2021-09-29 13:06:51','[caption id=\"attachment_1554\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/2015-09-03-15.12.36.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1554\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/2015-09-03-15.12.36-300x200.jpg\" alt=\"Did The Pope Have This Problem?\" width=\"300\" height=\"200\" /></a> Did The Pope Have This Problem?[/caption]\n\nApologies in advance because this is pretty much a stream-of-consciousness episode, with semi-strung together thoughts about eggs, car rentals, seeing the Pope, travel food, and stuff from my September trip to Scotland.  I talk about how handy I found the new <a href=\"https://revolut.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Revolut</a> service for spending and sending money in Europe; recent good and bad experiences with <a href=\"https://www.hertz.com/rentacar/emember/join/overview.do?learnMore=presidentsCircle\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Hertz </a>and other car rentals; most bad experience with <a href=\"http://britishairways.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">British Airways</a>; and how true-to-life the <a href=\"https://youtu.be/2JqRXLQYF9o\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Doritos Super Bowl commercial</a> portrays the Southwest boarding experience.  All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_117.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n<!--more-->\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #117:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you from TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. I was trying to do this from the Bally’s Casino in Las Vegas where I was earlier in the week, but it just didn’t work out. I was there for business, not pleasure, but I always feel that I should stay in a casino hotel when in Vegas. I dunno, staying in a Westin or Marriott up by the convention center just doesn’t feel Vegas. When I was here last year for a business convention I stayed in the MGM Grand. Years ago, though, when I’d do regular booth duty at technology shows, I would always stay at Mandalay Bay, which I really liked.</li>\n 	<li>The more I know about hotels, the more I’m impressed by Vegas hotel operations. Caesars, the MGM Grand, Mandalay Bay -- they’re huge mini-cities -- orders of magnitude bigger than couple-hundred room hotels I’d stay at in Denver or New Orleans. And yet the service, the execution is almost always way better than those smaller hotels. If you’re any sort of an operations nerd, you gotta give ‘em a nod. Though on the other hand, when you head to the gym at 6am and pass by the old guy dragging on a cigarette playing the quarter slots, it kinda makes you wish they were a little less good...</li>\n 	<li>As I mentioned in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/08/26/podcast-116-traveling-thru-japan-luggage-trends/\">the last episode</a>, the big travel for me was at the beginning of September when we were in Scotland for 2 weeks getting my daughter situated at Univ of St Andrews. Now while I say “getting my daughter situated,” there were equal parts getting my wife situated with the idea of her youngest child being an ocean away -- a big difference from when my son was 90 minutes up the road in Milwaukee.</li>\n 	<li>The following week’s travel had a nice difficulty factor. Weds morning, I flew from Chicago to DC for the papal Mass on the campus of my alma mater, Catholic University of America, and then back to Detroit that evening for meetings first thing Thursday morning. The difficulty factor was my luggage. No back packs, no selfie sticks, so certainly no roller bags were getting through the security checkpoints. Finding a checked luggage place is a real challenge anymore. I thought about checking my bag into my DCA-DTW flight, but I was too early -- 8 hours prior to flight time max. There is a checked baggage place at Union Station -- DC’s train station -- which is conveniently located a couple of stops south of Catholic on the Metro Red Line.</li>\n 	<li>Freed of my baggage, I emerged from the Brookland Metro Stop to an unbelievable combination of people and fencing. Incredibly long lines of people corralled in by what had to be miles of fences. I was lucky; I somehow got into a quick security line -- only 45 minutes. After finding my seating section, the gates were closed and we were sealed in our sections until the Pope arrived and did a couple of laps around campus in the Popemobile. After Mass started, they opened up the gates again. Which was great, because while the music and the liturgy were top notch, I wasn’t queuing up for communion with 25,000 other folks. After the homily, I was one of the trickle of folks making an early exit to beat the rush. I had a flight to catch. I’m sure the Pope understood.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>One Day</em> by <a href=\"http://www.hollowhorse.co.uk/\">Hollow Horse</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>OK, just as a warning, this section is going to ramble on for a while. I have a random walk of comments/opinions that I just can’t seem to synthesize into  coherent topics. So here it goes...</li>\n 	<li>First stop in the mail bag, I was pleasantly surprised to receive this audio comment from Linda Martin of the Indie Travel Podcast\n<ul>\n 	<li>Linda, thanks for that. The thing with eggs -- you can tell I’ve thought about this way too much -- it’s a trade-off between good eggs and time. It takes time for a cooked-to-order egg, but in the morning, I don’t often have that time. Usually, I’ve worked out; I’m cooling down during breakfast, then hitting the shower and off to work. When I stayed in one of the Renaissance Hotels in New Orleans, they didn’t have a separate executive lounge. Breakfast was served in the restaurant. They had the typical lounge buffet set up, but you could also order off the menu, which I think I did once in a dozen stays. It was a nice egg, but it took an extra 10 min that usually wasn’t in my morning schedule. Definitely a 1st World problem</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Lisa Walls wrote on the TravelCommons Facebook Wall\n<ul>\n 	<li>“Hey Mark, I love your podcast, especially the comments on food and craft beers. Other than the Altoids, do you carry any food in your briefcase, such as protein bars? I am always looking for something that is shelf stable that tastes good and travels well.”</li>\n 	<li>Lisa, thanks for the note. I usually keep 1-2 KIND bars in the bottom of my bag. The fruit-&amp;-nut ones seem to hold up to weeks of getting crushed by my PC power supply. They’re also not too sweet the way some other granola and power bars are.</li>\n 	<li>I know I’m about to lose any foodie cred I may have built up over the years, but I gotta say that, for me, the McDonald\'s grilled chicken Snack Wraps are just about the right amount of food to cover a 2-hour flight. They’re quick to buy, and compact to bring on board and eat. I find it tough to manage a salad while sitting in a center seat.</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>I’m not sure if I mentioned this last episode, but I’m flying Southwest on this week’s Vegas-Denver-Chicago trip to click over A-list status. It kinda crept up on me -- I don’t typically fly SW enough to make status, but apparently I have this year. As near as I can tell, this means I won’t have to pay the $12.50 Early Bird fee or be staring at my Southwest app exactly 24 hours before flight time in order to get a decent boarding position. Which, as we all know, is critical on Southwest since there’s no assigned seating. An A or early B boarding group number is necessary for an aisle seat. On my Vegas flight, hitting the “Check In” button maybe 2 seconds after the 24-hour window got me B 7, so I got an aisle seat in the back half of the plane. It was a full flight, so after that, I was living last year’s Super Bowl Doritos commercial -- looking down, trying to avoid eye contact with potentially bad seat mates while looking friendly to attract good ones. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://youtu.be/2JqRXLQYF9o\">link</a> to the commercial. It’s spot on.</li>\n 	<li>In the last episode, I talked about travel amateurs clogging up the PreCheck lanes. These would be people getting PreCheck as part of the TSA’s “Managed Inclusion” program, where they randomly shunt travelers over to PreCheck to balance screening line loads. This to the utter frustration of travelers who paid $85 for PreCheck screening or $100 for Global Entry. You might recall long-time listener Rich Fraser saying he was getting PreCheck about 75% of the time so why should he pay? But now the TSA says they’re throttling back on “Managed Inclusion”, driven at least in part by the publicity generated by auditors finding that travelers on various watch lists were being given PreCheck. I’ve certainly noticed the length of PreCheck lines dropping.</li>\n 	<li>Also in the last episode, I talked about luggage trends. One trend that sorta hit the cutting room floor is the move to fully rotating twirly wheels. Certainly handy in getting your luggage down a tight airplane aisle, but to my eye, most of them look a bit tinier, a bit flimsier than the standard roller-blade style wheel partially embedded in the back of the suitcase. The twirly wheels don’t seem rugged enough to survive getting pulled down Manhattan sidewalks or some of the ruts in New Orleans. And to allow full rotation, the wheels stick out of the bottom of the suitcase making the bag longer. This tripped up my wife on our flight from EDI to LHR. The BA gate agent asked my wife to put her bag in the luggage sizer. It would’ve fit -- except for the twirly wheels. Now we have to gate check it -- which means standing off to the side of the gate pulling some stuff out, transferring it into her shoulder bag. Understandable -- until we get on the plane and see it’s a half-full 767 and there are fully empty luggage bins. Really? So as is my wont, I vented my frustration on Twitter rather than any BA employees. BA’s social media department responded pretty quickly saying they needed to check all luggage to be fair to all passengers. But how would allowing a bag that was, at most, an inch over-long because of its twirly wheels on a half-full flight with empty overheads cheat any other passengers? It’s an over-officiousness that just doesn’t make sense. And it’s the reason I avoid BA now whenever possible. Which is a real shame, because back in the early ‘90’s when I was doing a lot of travel to Europe, I prefered BA. But that was 20 years ago and, it seems, a different BA.</li>\n 	<li>There is another reason I avoid BA -- officiousness <i>and</i> Heathrow. Again, another thing I loved in the ‘90’s, I now avoid whenever possible. Heathrow is a complete nightmare. You land, you trundle along through corridors, down escalators, into a bus, get a tour of the Heathrow back alleys, stop at another terminal, fight through security again, and then end up in the midst of a packed retail space where you wander through the shops because there’s no place to sit. It’s gotten to the point that I’ll fly the extra hour to connect through Frankfurt or Amsterdam just to avoid Heathrow. We were doing this St Andrews trip on AA miles. We were fine on the way out -- ORD-JFK-EDI all on AA. But coming back, it was EDI-LHR-ORD with the first leg on BA. Just ugh! I still keep thinking about how to get something out of my 300K BA Avios miles. Maybe I’ll make my daughter fly BA.</li>\n 	<li>On a brighter note, I tried a new financial service during this trip and it worked really well. It’s called Revolut -- as in Revolution cut a bit short. It’s a FinTech start up based in the UK that gives you a virtual and real debit card with really great exchange rates. As with all the cool start-ups nowadays, everything is done through a smartphone app -- which, to stow the snark for a second, makes a lot of sense for any travel app. I opened an account before I left and funded it with $200 from my regular ATM/debit card. I could then convert my dollars to pounds or euros at what appeared to be just about the market rate -- there didn’t seem to be a lot of margin taken on the buy or sell sides. I also instantly had a virtual debit card with which I could use those new pounds or euros to buy things on the web -- like train tickets or top up a phone card. I then requested a physical version of my card, which took about a week to show up from the UK. Now I had a proper European chip-&amp;-pin card that I could use at an ATM or, say, the self-serve checkout line at Tesco’s without waiting for a clerk to take my signed receipt. It only hiccuped one at the Costa coffee shop in St Andrews; I still don’t know why. Poking around a bit more, I found that I could send pounds to my daughter’s RBS account with a day or so lag. Now, none of this functionality is necessarily new, though being able to do it all through a slick smartphone app is very handy. The real innovation is the cost. Funding my Revolut account from my debit card cost me less than 1% -- less than $2 for the $200 transfer, which is cheaper than most non-network ATM fees. After that, no transaction fees to move money between currencies or to withdraw. Compare that to hitting a foreign ATM with your US card. My personal bank is very reasonable, only charging me Visa’s 1% transaction fee, but many big banks will hit you with a $5 non-network fee on top of any transaction fees. And then transferring money to my daughter’s account -- wire transfers can cost $25-30. Revolut has well-packaged functionality delivered at the lowest costs I’ve seen. I don’t know how long they’ll keep this price point, but right now, it’s the best deal I’ve seen for money needed for international travel. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://revolut.com/\">link</a> to the Revolut web site.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Clear My Head</em> by <a href=\"http://www.thefiasco.net/\">FIASCO</a></li>\n</ul>\n<b>Random Thoughts about Car Rentals</b>\n<ul>\n 	<li>I guess I could’ve cut two or three comments out of the last segment and labeled them “Random Comments about My Scotland Trip” but that just seems entire too gratuitous. But I have been collecting car rental experiences in my TravelCommons Evernote drop file and I think I now have enough for make up a topic -- or at least what might marginally pass for a topic</li>\n 	<li>As I’ve mentioned in past episodes, I really don’t like to rent cars. I much prefer to use rail or a cab in from the airport and then walk to where ever I need to go. That works well in New York or Chicago or San Francisco, not so much in Denver or Detroit. So I’ve been renting a lot of cars over the past 6 months.</li>\n 	<li>So many in fact that Hertz bumped my status up to President\'s Circle. Not quite sure that gets me, but it sounds status-y. Though right after my congratulatory e-mail, I found a dumpy Toyota Corolla in my Hertz Gold spot, so maybe it’s not anything special.</li>\n 	<li>But in times like those -- when I get assigned the 45,000-mile Toyota with crumbs still in the driver seat, or a Ford F-150 king cab pick up truck in Boston (?) -- I’ve come to love Hertz Gold Choice. If you rent a mid-size or above -- and for our corporate rate, the price of a compact and mid-size are the same -- you can go to the Choice aisle and take one of those cars instead. I left the dumpy Toyota and took a new Nissan instead.</li>\n 	<li>I have started to make note of differences in service <i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">and</span></i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> attitude across locations. I never rent from Hertz at Detroit airport anymore. I’ve yet to get a non-dumpy car there and the attitude is not great. Though I think Hertz’s Newark station is the worst. A recent example -- a colleague was driving his car toward the lot exit when a low tire pressure alarm lit up. So he asked the guy at the exit gate where he could get some air to top off the tire. “Try a gas station,” the attendant told him. That was helpful.</span></li>\n 	<li>I’ve had challenges with car rental web sites -- Hertz, Avis -- when my pick-up or drop off time didn’t match the hours of the office I selected. I get the error notice and then when I go back to try another site or time, these websites will randomly select another date or location. I had this happen to me in Edinburgh on the second car we rented. We were training from Lockerbie back to Edinburgh where we’d done 4 days of biking while our daughter was going through freshman orientation. I’d booked a car on Hertz’s web site to pick up at the train station and drop off at EDI 5 days later. It took me 5 tries to get it right -- each time I re-started, it reset the pick-up location from Waverly Station to EDI. And each time I’d correct it. Except, it seems, the last time. When we arrived in Waverly, there was no car. I looked at the res -- pick up at EDI. Ugh. Not the end of the world -- we could’ve taken the new light rail out to EDI, but it was aggravating. I searched through the Hertz.co.uk website for a phone number -- that itself being a little extra helping of aggravation -- and called the res center. The woman on the other end was inordinately calm and helpful. 3 minutes later, she’d moved my pick-up to Waverly. I thanked her -- a lot. I should’ve booked with her instead of the website.</li>\n 	<li>We rented our first car in Edinburgh from Enterprise. It was a great car -- a Fiat 500 L. All the bags fit easily in the hatchback. Nice nav, nice sound system, clean....  Drove to a near-by shopping mall -- grabbed a coffee at Starbucks and phone SIMs at the ee store. Next stop, IKEA to buy things we didn’t pack -- like towels and hangers. Coming off the motorway, through a traffic circle, the clutch crapped out. I’d put it in gear, let out the clutch pedal, nothing. 3 hours later after Enterprise, the auto club and Fiat scrummed about who was supposed to pick up the car, the tow truck dropped us back off at EDI where the Enterprise folks apologized profusely and gave us an even nicer Nissan. A couple of weeks, I noticed the Pope used a Fiat 500L to drive from Andrews Airforce Base to the Vatican Embassy. The next day, though, he was in a Jeep Popemobile. I could sympathize.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a title=\"MP3 Download\" href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/download_track.php?id=0E74C6FEB7390D18D02B4B399668093172F6C8CC66DDC09D90A3BF7DDA436823CFAC859AE2B2C73E46A278A4950E1030\">Lonely Dog Blues</a></em> by <a title=\"Tobin James\' Web Site\" href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/label.php?id=2A3449F03E7B8462FF74407B60F0C4B0A30A0CBE880C61DE37E3B342387F0643\">Tobin James</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #117</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/\">Podshow Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_117.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #117 — Random Thoughts About Eggs, Scotland & Car Rentals','','inherit','closed','closed','','1542-revision-v1','','','2021-09-29 08:06:51','2021-09-29 13:06:51','',1542,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3893',0,'revision','',0),
(3895,1,'2021-09-29 08:08:12','2021-09-29 13:08:12','[caption id=\"attachment_1573\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/DSC_4956.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1573\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/DSC_4956-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"This hotel door could use some work\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> This hotel door could use some work[/caption]\n\nA bit less of a random walk than the last episode, we talk about safety, physical safety, when traveling. While we sometimes put ourselves in the midst of dodgy surroundings, we usually feel safe when we retreat back into the \"travel bubble\" What about when the bubble is no longer safe? Smartphones are the frequent traveler\'s most important tool. So when an upgrade to my HTC One killed its usefulness, I found myself heading back to Apple.  All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_118.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #118:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, less than a month since the last episode. There’s a shocker. It’s been one of my lighter travel months. No international travel, no up-and-backs across the US. Indeed, there were a couple of weeks where I didn’t even pack a bag -- just did day trips to Detroit and Atlanta. There is something liberating about that -- just carrying a briefcase or backpack. I guess that would’ve been the ideal situation to check out Spirit Airlines, but I don’t hate myself that much.</li>\n 	<li>No rush to get to the gate for the start of boarding. Stroll up, sit down and then  stay seated while the agent works through the cadence of status boarding groups -- really important customers, kinda important customers, fake important customers, and then everyone else. No roller board meant no need for the boarding scrum. I just waited for last call and walked on board. Kinda reminded me of the days when I first started flying when, rather than racing to be first on the plane, we’d see who could be last -- how late you could show up and still get on the plane. My boss won when he talked his way past an agent, got onto the jet bridge, knocked on the plane door, which the crew opened and let him on. I don’t think I’ll push it quite that far.</li>\n 	<li>A few of this month’s trips have been in and out of Boston Logan Airport. And for as much stick as I give United Airlines -- broken planes, late flights, just general lousy service -- I have to give them credit for their <a href=\"http://newsroom.united.com/2014-04-28-New-United-Concourse-at-Boston-Logan-Offers-Customers-Modern-Streamlined-Airport-Experience\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">gate area</a> at Logan. Parts of it look like a hip hotel lounge -- cool hanging lights, non-bench seating. There’s stand-up/high-top counter space for laptops with lots of plugs. And even the self-serve boarding gates -- with modern subway-style turnstiles that scan your boarding pass before letting you in -- worked well. It’s probably one of the nicest gate areas I’ve been in in a long time. Nice job, United!</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Paint the Sky</em> by Hans Atom (c) 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/hansatom/50718 Ft: Miss Judged</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>I got a good bit of commentary from the last episode, so thank everyone very much.</li>\n 	<li>Rob Cheshire posted this comment on the web site:\n<ul>\n 	<li>“In defense of British Airways, you stepped into the middle of their new hand-luggage policy roll-out, which is designed to reign-in the amount of cabin baggage, which had really gotten out of hand. They are being strict across the board, on elite members, as well as everyone else, and it is definitely having a positive impact on bin-space, as well as minimising the amount of messing around (checking the last few wheelie bags that can’t be stowed) that the cabin crew have to take care of in the minutes prior to push-back.”</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Rob, thanks for that. One thing I did like BA’s luggage approach was tagging the second bag meant to go underseat -- in my case, a backpack -- with a bright yellow tag to keep people from putting 2 bags overhead. There is not much that’s ruder in plane travel than early boarders -- status fliers -- maximizing their leg space at the expense of the rest the plane. Tagging that second bag makes it easy for flight attendants or later boarders to call out bin hogging. I’d love to see that move across the Atlantic.</li>\n 	<li>Andrew Gill left a comment on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page building on my thoughts about using the new Revolut debit card during my September trip to Scotland. Andrew said:\n<ul>\n 	<li>“The piece of Revolut was interesting. I\'ve just spent six months living and working in The Philipines. I was lucky to be involved in the pilot of Supercard from <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/TravelexUK/?hc_location=ufi\">Travelex UK</a> (<a href=\"https://supercard.io/\">https://supercard.io/</a>). It\'s a physical card, complete with chip and pin, that can be used in retail stores and for online purchases too.</li>\n 	<li>“The card is free, and transactions are processed at the Visa Europe Exchange rate, with no foreign exchange fees or commission added on, but the *killer* feature is it\'s linked to an existing debit or credit card so there\'s no need to pre-load money onto the card. transactions are processed in my home currency, so again, there are no foreign exchange fees or commission added on</li>\n 	<li>“The pilot program has closed now, so fingers crossed, it comes out of pilot and into general release</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Andrew, thanks for that pointer. I agree that being able to link the Travelex Supercard back to a debit or credit card is very useful vs. the Revolut model which is more like a pre-paid debit card. Looking at the Supercard website, it looks like the pilot was only for UK card holders. Hopefully, they’ll be able to expand their geographic footprint when they fully launch the card. Interesting that Revolut is also a UK-based company. Seems like London is a hotspot for these fintech companies. Last week, I was talking to a guy who moved from London to Chicago to start up the US operations for a different London-based fintech company -- more based on lending than payments. He said that HSBC looked hard at buying Revolut because they were doing something HSBC couldn’t even given their global reach and scale. Between Revolut and Supercard, and big banks like Chase dropping foreign exchange fees on their credit cards, the money hassles of international travel keep going down. It’s a far cry from having to cash an American Express travelers check at the airport exchange desk so you could get a cab to your hotel.</li>\n 	<li>In an<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/01/29/podcast-107-serious-about-hotel-reviews-tsa-gets-something-right/\"> earlier episode</a>, I talked about evaluation criteria for my TripAdvisor reviews -- the bathroom, room size, workout room, location, service quality. I decided during one of my trips last month that I’m adding a new criterion -- accessible bedside electrical outlets. Most frequent travelers I know use their phone or tablet as an alarm, eliminating the need to discern operating instructions for each hotel’s unique brand of clock radio. Most hotels have figured this out and provide outlets on the nightstand -- in wall, along the side of the nightstand, on the lamp base…. But last month, I hit one of those knuckle draggers -- a hotel in Vegas. I practically had to disassemble one of the beds to find an outlet hidden behind it. Luckily, I carry long power cords.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Perfect Stranger</em> by stellarartwars (c) 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/stellarartwars/45510 Ft: TheDice</li>\n</ul>\n<b>Danger Within The Travel Bubble</b>\n<ul>\n 	<li>In the last episode, I talked about attending the <a href=\"http://popeindc.cua.edu/the-papal-mass/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Papal Mass</a> at <a href=\"http://www.cua.edu/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Catholic University</a> in northeast DC which has never been one of the nicer sections of DC. I had taken the Metro up from the airport and would be getting back on it to catch my evening flight to Detroit. The Brookland stop at Catholic isn’t a big stop and I figured it would get overwhelmed at the end of the Mass by the 25,000 people there. I started thinking of alternatives. Getting a cab or an Uber would probably be just as tough, so my best alternative would be to walk down to the next stop south on the Red Line -- Rhode Island Ave. From my days in DC, I remember that neighborhood being a particularly rough one. That would not be a pleasant walk. I decided to skip Communion and leave the Pope early to beat the crowds at the Brookland stop.</li>\n 	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Most of the times when we talk about travel security, we talk about airport security or digital security, but not often about physical security. Yet very often, travel drops in unfamiliar settings -- usually by our own choice -- where we could unknowingly wander into a very unsafe situation</span></li>\n 	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I did exactly this some years ago when visiting Cape Town, South Africa. I was shopping through some craft stalls set up in a park and just kept wandering along. I kinda looking at the buildings, up and around… Oh, and I have my big Nikon SLR slung over my shoulder. Not sure I could’ve looked any more like a tourist unless I was wearing a big “Don’t Mess With Texas” t-shirt and a Dallas Cowboys baseball cap. At some point, I finally regain some situational awareness -- and, from my university years living in Northeast DC and on the Southside of Chicago, realize that I’m not in the best neighborhood right now. I move to the middle of the street -- so I don’t get jumped from a doorway -- and walk, with purpose now, back the way I came.</span></li>\n 	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I did a little better this spring in New Orleans. I was standing on St Charles St in the Garden District watching a Mardi Gras parade. After a while, I got a bad feeling about the atmosphere around me. Nothing that I could put my finger on, but enough to make me give up a prime spot on the parade round and walk up the street a bit. In the next morning’s paper, I read there had been a gun fight at that spot about 30 minutes after I’d left.</span></li>\n 	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">There have been other times in Joburg, Bangalore, Guadalajara, but considering how much I travel, they’re rare events -- I’ve wandered all through Madrid, Beijing, Tokyo, Edinburgh, Saigon and never felt unsafe -- but they get your attention. But then again, that’s outside the “travel bubble”. We’ve talked about that in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2008/04/29/podcast-64-escaping-the-travel-bubble-marks-travel-tips/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">past episodes</a>, how travelers can often seem to float above the places they visit unless they make the effort to “pop” the travel bubble and engage.</span></li>\n 	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">When those outside problems penetrate our bubble, now that’s more disturbing. Like the time some years back when I was visiting Rio -- years before the World Cup. I was checking in with a colleague who had done a lot of business there. He saw my room was on the second floor. “No, that won’t do,” he said, “we need to get you on a double-digit floor. At least 10 if not higher” “Why?” I asked. “Because,” he explained, “when the smash-and-grab gangs break in, they start on the first floor and work their way up until their bags are full. The higher you are, the more likely they’ll fill up before they get to you.” The logic was brutally impeccable. And this from a guy still sporting a couple of bruises from an earlier mugging on Copacabana Beach.</span></li>\n 	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Or a few years ago, when another colleague had to take a taxi to connect between Delhi’s domestic and international terminal -- before the latest renovation. He’d forgotten to print out his international itinerary, so they wouldn’t let him on the transfer bus (I’ve talked about, in prior episodes, the need to have a printed flight itinerary in India). He couldn’t find anyone in the terminal to print one out for him so he walked out to the cab rank. He piles his bags into and on top of a taxi and off he goes -- to some out-of-the-way place under a highway overpass where the cab driver and a friend shake him down for most of his money and his watch -- they leave him with his luggage and enough money for cab fare to the international terminal. A polite mugging; no bruises with this one.</span></li>\n 	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">My most disturbing bubble burst happened in the US -- in a Westin in Connecticut. A friend checked in and, since the hotel was oversold, was given one of those rooms that’s a conference room with a bathroom. They rolled out the tables and rolled in a bed for him. The next morning, as he’s getting dressed, he’s missing his watch, his ring, and the money and credit cards from his wallet -- all which were next to him on the nightstand. As he put it together, someone had broken into the room -- he saw that the conference room’s double doors had enough of a gap between them that you could open the lock by slipping a credit card or room key through the gap -- and they had stood next to him going through his stuff on the night stand. He’s lucky he’s a sound sleeper.</span></li>\n 	<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">And I consider myself lucky. I don’t lock myself away in the hotel. I make an effort to step outside the travel bubble -- to engage -- and after 30 years of heavy travel, other than <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/05/20/podcast-98-stolen-luggage-restaurants-want-your-smartphone/\">having my camera and passport stolen</a>, I’m really no worse the wear. Certainly no bruises to show for it. I’m not sure I’d do it any other way. Though I do pay more attention to hotel door construction than I used to.</span></li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Foolish Game</em> by copperhead (c) 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/copperhead/46390 Ft: Snowflake,Sackjo22</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Switching Back to Apple</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>After your government ID, the smartphone is probably the most important thing you travel with. And while I quickly whip out my ID a few times a trip to prove my identity  -- to the TSA agent, to hotel clerks, to car rental check out folks, I use my smartphone constantly -- maybe too constantly. Be that as it may, the smartphone is <i>the</i> critical tool for today’s frequent traveler. A carpenter has his framing hammer, the auto mechanic his Snap-On wrench -- for the road warrior, it’s the smart phone.</li>\n 	<li>And so it wasn’t without a good bit of thought that I bit the bullet a few weeks ago and switched back to Apple; dumping my HTC One for a new iPhone 6S. I wasn’t thrilled to do it; I put it off for at least a month. And in the end, it was more a frustration with hardware -- with the slouching-toward-bankruptcy mess that HTC has become than it was excitement for the latest iThing.</li>\n 	<li>Which I guess is the pattern for me. My first smartphone was an iPhone 3G and I’d had just about every iPhone model up to the 5. And it was the frustration with its truly horrid battery life that led me to the HTC. The cause this time was the lousy performance of my HTC One after they pushed their Android upgrade -- “Lollipop” -- at the beginning of this year. It just trashed the phone -- the lag was awful. The hardware components have the specs to handle the new version; it’s just that HTC’s implementation of it is crap. Now, it’s not like Apple nails their OS upgrades every time. The IOS 8 release didn’t exactly cover them in glory. But at least they worked to resolve the problem by iterating through releases in a fairly timely manner. After the initial “Lollipop” release, Google iterated through updates  -- I think ver 5.1.1 is the most recent -- and I’m waited for HTC to use that as an opportunity to clean up their 5.0 mess. They would say on Twitter “It’s coming, just wait”, And then “Oh, we’ll just skip 5.1 and give you 6.0 by the end of the year”. That was it. I’d suffered through 6 months of lousy performance and now they were saying I would have at least 3 more -- not that I have any reason to think that the near-bankrupt company has gotten any better at software estimating.</li>\n 	<li>I don’t think that either Apple’s or Google’s operating systems are inherently better than the other. I’ve used them both. They both work. There are things I like about each of them, and since they seem to be stealing/emulating (?) each other’s best features, they’re more or less converging on each other.</li>\n 	<li>For me, the difference is the hardware -- which is what is actually in our hands each day. I’ve always thought Apple is a better hardware company than a software one. I loved my MacBook Air, but was very “meh” about OS X. It’s really the Android equipment manufacturers that are pushing me away. It seems that most of the Android hardware innovation is at the large end -- large screen sizes -- 5 ½ inches and up -- which is way bigger than what want. And then there are the delays in Android upgrades as each manufacturer gooses Google’s release -- my 18-month old Samsung tablet is still on version 4.4 “Kit Kat”, now two version levels down, with no update in sight, let alone any security patches. With mobile devices becoming more vital, that foot dragging on upgrades and security patching very uncomfortable.</li>\n 	<li>I was holding out for Google’s updated Nexus line, reading all rumor articles with spec leaks and blurred pictures. The 6P was too big for me, but the 5X -- I could do a 5.2-in screen with fast updates and patches. But then, when they unveiled the 5X, it topped it out at 32 GB with no expansion slots. For me, that is just too tight for my music, podcasts, pictures, video. So that’s it, I walked into the Apple store and bought a 64GB unlocked GSM 6S on their new upgrade plan -- new phone comes out, I trade mine in. It’s like leasing a car -- some people like the newest model. It’s all about the hardware.</li>\n 	<li>Now if I can just keep iTunes from crashing on my Windows 10 box...</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #118</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_118.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #118 — Danger In the Travel Bubble; Switching Back to Apple','','inherit','closed','closed','','1561-revision-v1','','','2021-09-29 08:08:12','2021-09-29 13:08:12','',1561,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3895',0,'revision','',0),
(3896,1,'2021-09-29 08:09:53','2021-09-29 13:09:53','[caption id=\"attachment_1603\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/IMG_0266-01.jpeg\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-1603\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1603\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/IMG_0266-01-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"Just a Few Guidebooks....\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Just a Few Guidebooks....[/caption]\n\nWhere do guidebooks fit in the world of apps, review websites, social media, and podcasts? Planning for a trip to Iceland got me thinking about how to make sense of the explosion of travel tips. And then, after giving my thoughts about my new <a href=\"http://bluesmart.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Bluesmart </a>\"smart connected suitcase\", I talk about how idiosyncratic frequent travelers are about packing strategies and their choice of suitcases. There\'s also follow-up about foreign exchange apps, and listener comments about digital travel security and Spirit Airlines\' growth. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_120.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #120:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, after a much longer-than-intended break. Looking back at the Google Docs revision history for this episode, I started it on Feb 2, so I had the best of intentions. But I’ve been traveling almost non-stop since then. At which point you might reasonably say “But you have all that time in airports and hotels to write” -- which should be the case, but I find that I have to remove all possible distractions before I can write. Hence my lack of a journalism career.</li>\n 	<li>So instead, I keep jotting down ideas in Evernote, feeling like I’m making progress, but not ever buckling down to actually write an episode. Until last Weds, when Dan Gradwohl sent me an e-mail with the subject line “Mark, where’s the next TravelCommons?”, asking in a very nice way -- when are you getting off your duff? I snarled back at Dan a bit -- more at frustration with myself than anything he wrote. But it got the intended result. So, I dedicate this episode to Dan.</li>\n 	<li>The travel that got in the way wasn’t anything exotic -- just the usual bouncing around -- New Orleans, Vegas, Atlanta, Boston, New Jersey. But it was the tail end of 7 weeks of straight travel -- which is right about the time I hit my fun quotient. My patience dives and my bitch tweeting climbs. Of course, the fact that my American Airlines flights were hitting a 50% on-time rate didn’t help. I think I finally tipped over when I found my EWR-ORD flight was an ancient AA MD-80. Trying to wedge my bag long ways into the short overhead bin on the AB side was a complete throwback to when I first started traveling for business -- in 1985, on American Airlines, out of DFW, on MD-80s. 30 years later, I find myself on the same plane -- with less legroom and no peanuts.</li>\n 	<li>I am gearing up for some fun travel in March, though. Trying out Iceland Air’s new Chicago-to-Reykjavik service with my son, and then trying out Iceland’s budget carrier Wow Air to meet up with my wife and daughter in Spain. I’m hoping it all works fine, but I’m preparing myself to having to call a couple of audibles.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/seldon-circles/\"><em>Making Circles</em></a> by the Seldon Plan</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Peter Zurich sent a great note, adding onto the digital security topic in<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/12/20/podcast-119-digital-security-on-the-road-us-airports-getting-better/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> the last episode</a>\n<ul>\n 	<li>“Your suggestion to switch to cellular network as opposed to airport wifi is okay but it is becoming easy to obtain technology to set up a rogue cell site that will silently capture traffic -- your data will be caught and you will be none the wiser.</li>\n 	<li>“Thus, in my opinion, it is still very important to only use HTPS encrypted web sites and I would still add on the VPN if you have one available. Bottom line when using any website where you need your password to access sensitive information, make sure the computer is trusted (no public access/borrowed/loaner computers) and make sure the website is HTTPS. If using Outlook or other applications than the web browser you should be on your company\'s VPN.</li>\n 	<li>“Second thing, people should be aware that tearing a 2-D barcode in half doesn\'t necessarily render it undecipherable. 2D barcodes have a configurable level of redundancy built-in so that even if part (or possibly most) of the barcode is missing/unreadable it can still be decoded. My personal policy is once we have confirmed our FF miles have posted, the BP\'s go in the shredder.”</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Peter, thanks for these. Last week’s <a href=\"http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/columnist/2016/02/24/got-hacked-my-mac-while-writing-story/80844720/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">story </a>about the USA Today columnist whose e-mail was hacked while he used Gogo’s WiFi service on an American Airlines flight demonstrates again the potential dangers of using public WiFi. It takes a bit of spelunking through the columnist’s Twitter feed to figure out how that happened -- he was using an Earthlink e-mail service that didn’t encrypt traffic back to the mail server. Technical listeners would be right in saying “Well, there you go. What did you expect doing plain-text comms over public WiFi?” Indeed, when we talked about this in the last episode, I specifically called out the need to encrypt e-mail protocols -- POP, IMAP, SMTP -- over SSL. But that’s not the default configuration for many e-mail clients, including Outlook and, the last time I checked, the iPhone mail client. You have to go poking around in the settings, changing ports. I know how to do it -- but it’s nothing my wife would. Building on Peter’s suggestion, probably the easiest thing to do is use a web e-mail client like GMail over https -- when the green lock shows in the browser address bar. Next easiest is to set up your e-mail client to encrypt its traffic. Most e-mail providers have instructions on their sites. Perhaps the fiddliest, but the most secure is to install and use a VPN. If your company device comes with one already installed, then it’s easy -- though remember VPN web traffic is usually tracked just like it is in your office. If it’s your own device, then you’re probably going to want to buy a service. They’re not overly expensive -- $3-8/month. I use ExpressVPN, which is on the pricer side, but their VPN client is easy to install and use. And it has the side benefit of letting me watch NCAA March Madness video streams when I’m overseas. In March, I’ll be trying out a hardware-based VPN solution -- <a href=\"http://www.homingsystems.com/alwayshome-duo\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">AlwaysHome</a>, which sets up a VPN with matching USB dongles. Could be an easier solution. I’ll report back in the next episode.</li>\n 	<li>Dan Gradwohl, before he poked me into action, had a “Hmm…” reaction to a comment in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/12/20/podcast-119-digital-security-on-the-road-us-airports-getting-better/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">the last episode</a> about Spirit Airlines passing Delta as the 3rd largest at Chicago O’Hare. Looking at January schedules, he found Spirit had 29 daily departures to Delta’s 52. Would seem like Delta is still larger. However, the Crain’s Chicago article said Spirit carried more passengers than Delta -- which could be since some of Delta’s 52 departures were co-branded smaller regional jets. This is not a new thing. For a long time, O’Hare continued to claim the title of World’s Busiest Airport based on <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_world%27s_busiest_airports_by_aircraft_movements#2014_statistics\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">number of takeoffs/landings</a> (which it reclaimed in 2014) after Atlanta Hartsfield passed it on total passengers handled. Using that <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_world%27s_busiest_airports_by_passenger_traffic#2015_statistics\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">stat</a>, ORD is the 4th largest after ATL, Beijing, and Dubai. All that being said, Spirit is ramping up hard in the Chicago market, hiring new flight attendants ahead of plane deliveries, and pushing the city for more gate space. And Delta and American are rolling out new Economy Basic fares to fight them. Might not be too long before Spirit passes Delta on both measures.</li>\n 	<li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/10/11/podcast-117-random-thoughts-about-eggs-scotland-car-rentals/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Episode #117</a>, I talked -- raved, actually -- about a FinTech company called <a href=\"https://revolut.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Revolut</a>. It offered a convenient and low-cost way to exchange, transfer, and access money internationally. I started using it last September when my daughter started up at University of St Andrews. I used it to convert and push money to her UK bank account, and used the Revolut chip-&amp;-pin debit card to avoid the hassle of US chip-&amp;-signature credit cards. Last week, though, the low-cost component of their value prop disappeared -- at least for US customers, when they added a 3% fee when you added money/”topped up” your Revolut account with a US debit card. They said they were passing through the fees they were being charged, a claim I don’t doubt. However, it started me looking for cheaper foreign exchange options. Which lead me down quite the rabbit hole -- sorting through the differences in transaction costs and exchange rates quickly led to an Excel modelling session, which is just how I want to spend a Saturday morning. If you look at <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">my Twitter feed</a>, there’s a string of tweets walking through my analysis, but for my case, TransferWise, another UK FinTech startup, and Xoom, owned by PayPal, were much cheaper than Revolut after considering their new 3% fee. I expect that I’ll still use the Revolut card a bit when in Europe -- at self-service check-outs or gas pumps -- but nowhere near the volume I was using it before last week. But, I’m glad to have options and do a bit of math so avoid a $50 bank wire fee or Western Union’s 7% premium from market exchange rates.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/eliyahu-wind/\">Oh Yeah</a></em> by Eliyahu Sills</li>\n</ul>\n<b>Where Do Guidebooks Fit In?</b>\n<ul>\n 	<li>As I mentioned in the opening, my son and I are hitting Iceland in a couple of weeks for a 4-day weekend. We’ve never been before, so I needed to figure out what to do and where to stay. Right about then, someone from what I used to know as Dorling Kindersley -- now shortened to DK -- pinged me about the February relaunch of <a href=\"http://www.dk.com/us/travel/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">DK’s Eyewitness Travel Top 10 Guides</a> -- one of the first 10 is for Iceland. It started me thinking about where guidebooks fit in these days of in the world of apps (Yelp, Foursquare, Untappd), podcasts (Amateur Traveler, Indie Travel Podcast), websites (TripAdvisor), newspaper articles (NYTimes’ <a href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/22/travel/36-hours-in-reykjavik.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">36 Hours in Reykjavik</a>) and friends’ social media posts on Facebook and Instagram.</li>\n 	<li>When I want to torture my kids, I do the “when I was young…” thing. But going back to our honeymoon 25 years ago (this November -- need to get on that planning!), I cashed in a slug of British Airways miles to fly us first class to Pisa for a touring holiday in Tuscany. The only plans I had made were to rent a car (a Fiat Panda) and book our first night’s room (via Telex) in Lucca. We ran the rest of the vacation off of a set of Michelin guides -- the red one to find hotels and restaurants and the green one to figure out what to see. Between those and reading “A Room With A View”, we were set. We exchanged American Express travelers checks at the bank for lira, took pictures on Kodak and Fuji film, navigated using a paper maps… Whoops, got off track a bit there. I think my kids are somewhere screaming “Stop!”</li>\n 	<li>I think like everybody, I start with a Google search -- “What to do in Iceland in March”, limit the results to the last 2 years and start clicking. Lots of articles from UK papers (I think because of Wow Air, the Icelandic version of Spirit or EasyJet, flying into London Gatwick) which I clip over to Evernote using their nifty little Chrome extension. Then I narrow the search down to specific interests -- like “Iceland craft beer” and a few more article get sync’d to Evernote. I stack up a bunch of facts -- a sort of <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointillism\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">pointillist </a>view of what to do in Iceland.</li>\n 	<li>Every survey about how people go about travel planning will tell you that personal recommendations are the far and away the most important source of travel planning information. Which makes sense -- you know the person, how their interests, ways of travel align with yours. We have good friends that we’ll take restaurant recommendations from, but not hotels. We share the same tastes in interesting food, but they like to stay in hotels with nice pools. We’re tend to stay a bit more “closer to ground” -- choosing vacation rentals over the Westin resort.</li>\n 	<li>And once people find that you travel a lot and to different/interesting places, you get hit up -- a lot -- for recommendations. Friend and long-time T/C listener Allan Marko curates a set of notes for his favorite European cities, places like Paris, that he regularly e-mails out. After a couple of visits to Spain, I’ve taken it to the next level of geekdom -- embedding my recommendations on a Google Map page and sending out the URL. For this trip, a friend from work sent me the itinerary she and her family did last summer. Not sure that she and her husband would be search out craft beer bars with 2 young kids in tow, but I did take her recommendation for the Hotel Geysir at the top of the Golden Circle route, and hitting the Blue Lagoon on the way back to the airport.</li>\n 	<li>I like The NY Times’ 36 Hours and United Airlines’ 3 Perfect Days series. They’re focused on the long weekend getaway -- if you have a limited amount of time, here’s what to do. These are the sorts of articles we used to rip out of the Sunday travel section of the local newspaper or a travel magazine and stash in a travel folder. The Internet has shifted that behavior just a bit -- we now search for them when we right when we need them. Perhaps more for travel planning than for inspiration, but they serve the same purpose as the green Michelin guide did for our honeymoon -- a curated list of things you ought to see.</li>\n 	<li>The DK Top 10 Iceland guide seems to fit into this “hit the highlights” mode -- top 10 highlights by region and by thing (top 10 churches, waterfalls, volcanoes, bars, cheap restaurants…), 2-day and 7-day itineraries, which is nice because the 36 Hours in Reykjavik article I pulled up was from 2013, maybe on the ragged edge of up-to-dateness. And the DK guide has everything nicely packaged, which I remember from the Dorling Kindersley books of old -- all the lists in one place wrapped in a sturdy cover that has fold-out maps in the front (Iceland) and the back (downtown Reykjavik) -- which is handy if you didn’t plan ahead and cache Google Maps data before leaving the hotel wi-fi bubble.</li>\n 	<li>There’s another kind of guidebook that I’ll use, though I couldn’t find one for Iceland. They’re less about lists and more about stories -- think Bill Bryson’s <em>Notes from a Small Island</em> about the UK, or more recently, <em><a href=\"http://roadsandkingdoms.com/store/rice-noodle-fish-book/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Rice Noodle Fish</a></em> an Anthony Bourdain book by Matt Goulding (whatever that means) about Japan. I read those more before I travel than packing them in my bag. They’re about context/texture -- kinda like what “Room With A View” was for us about Florence 25 years ago -- that prepare rather than guide you, and maybe give you a bit more appreciation when you’re running through those Top 10 Highlights lists.</li>\n 	<li>Maybe it comes down to the kind of reader you are -- are you someone that likes things more tangible than electronic. Do you like to flip pages rather than screens? The Kindle cannibalized a good-sized chunk of the demand for physical books, but didn’t replace it. Just like overall book market, recent numbers show the demand for physical guide books has stabilized albeit at a lower level. I sorta split the difference. I like paging through my Evernote virtual travel folder when I’m back at the room, but like to have a physical map and list when I’m out walking during the day. Maybe that physicality keeps me more engaged with where I am. Or at least looking up and forward, which should help keep me avoid that new travelers’ epidemic -- Death by GPS.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music --<em> <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/liquid-seventythree/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Is That Called Love</a> </em></em>by Liquid Zen</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>I Hate Shopping for Suitcases</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>I’ve been traveling for a few months now with the <a href=\"http://bluesmart.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Bluesmart </a>suitcase. I’ve mentioned it in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/08/26/podcast-116-traveling-thru-japan-luggage-trends/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">a past episode</a> when I pre-ordered it through their Indiegogo campaign. And now that they’re shipping, they’re making a lot of Top Traveler Gadget lists.</li>\n 	<li>It claims to be the first piece of “smart” luggage to hit the market. It pairs with my iPhone through Bluetooth. It automatically locks when I step away from it and then unlocks itself when I return. It has a built-in battery to power itself and charge personal electronics through a couple of USB ports. It also periodically sends out its location when I can then check through the iPhone app. And it has a cool front light that glows blue when it’s paired with my phone.</li>\n 	<li>Aside from all the electronics, it’s a hard-shell wheelie bag with nice-sized wheels that roll easily -- sometimes too easily. It fits perfectly into American’s and United’s luggage sizers -- at least the ones in Boston Logan airport. (Some blogger who reviewed the bag raised a bit of a ruckus saying that the bag dimensions on the website were too big for carry-on. I guess he doesn’t travel enough to go an airport and check it out himself). The iPhone app is getting better -- Bluesmart is doing a nice job of reving the app frequently to stomp bugs, though the location alerts -- “You’re leaving me behind” are still a bit wonky.</li>\n 	<li>All in all, it’s a nice enough bag. I had been thinking about getting something a bit smaller for 1-2 night trips and this fits the bill. I’m kinda “meh” on all the electronics. The large battery is fine, but I already carry a recharger in my backpack that will top up my iPhone or tablet a couple of times -- good enough and more accessible in-flight. The location functionality seems to work only when I press the button to “wake up” the bag -- which means I’m right beside my bag and know its location. And since it’s the perfect carry-on size, it’s usually right above me in the plane cabin. So it’s a nice enough hard-shell wheelie bag with a couple of bells and whistles that don’t necessarily wow me.</li>\n 	<li>Which shouldn’t be interpreted as a knock against Bluesmart. I’m sure there are a number of travelers who love every one of those bells and whistles. It’s not so much a criticism about Bluesmart as it is how personal and idiosyncratic frequent travelers are about suitcases. It’s gotta fit your packing strategies, which are also very idiosyncratic. Some people love compartments to help them structure their packing. Me? I’m all about the flexibility of a single open space -- I build my own structure with shoes and different kinds of clothes depending on the trip. And even though I see more and more hard-shell bags -- and now own one, I’m not completely sold on it. I still like the ability to bulge when I need to. And the two- vs. four-wheel thing. Pushing a 4-wheel through the airport seems easier on my wrist, but sometimes they roll too easily and won’t stay put. It’s the reason I’ve been walking around with a ripped backpack for 4 months -- I really hate shopping for travel bags. And am very happy that leather wallets last a really long time.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #120</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/\">Podshow Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_120.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #120 — Where Do Guidebooks Fit In? I Hate Shopping for Suitcases','','inherit','closed','closed','','1598-revision-v1','','','2021-09-29 08:09:53','2021-09-29 13:09:53','',1598,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3896',0,'revision','',0),
(3897,1,'2021-09-29 08:12:16','2021-09-29 13:12:16','[caption id=\"attachment_1654\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/IMG_0725.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1654\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/IMG_0725-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Earning Status at Camp O\'Hare\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Earning Status at Camp O\'Hare[/caption]\n\nIt\'s been a tough travel month for a large portion of the traveling public. Between Delta and Southwest system outages and two straight Thursdays of thunderstorms in the east half of the US, dealing with travel delays has been a part of this month\'s travel experience. In this episode, we think about ways to avoid delays, or at least minimize their impact. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_123.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #123:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>This episode is sponsored by HMSHost, operating the restaurants and bars in the 20 busiest airports in the US, thanking the IT staffs at Southwest and Delta for helping us hit our Q3 revenue numbers. Please use the promo code: KICKOUTTHEPLUG on our website for a 20% thank you card good at any airport.</li>\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, at the back end of what’s been kind of a tough couple of weeks of travel. On the surface, it shouldn’t have been. I wasn’t going anywhere particularly exotic -- still back and forth to Charlottesville, as well as a quick West Coast loop to Vegas and Irvine, CA. Things actually started going sideways on the Vegas to Orange County flight. This should’ve been a quick hour hop. But then Southwest’s systems tipped over and things kinda just spiraled down from there, even in Vegas. After a while, I got tired of playing the slots; the payout in the airport is lousy anyways. And the beer selection is not the greatest. I got jealous watching the Virgin America flights take off, but at least I wasn’t one of the folks sitting on the tarmac in 110 degree weather waiting for gates to clear. I think my flight ended up taking something like a 4-hour delay. I was just glad my schedule wasn’t tight; that I didn’t have a critical meeting booked that afternoon.</li>\n 	<li>The next day, Thursday, I was flying American back to O’Hare and started to get delay notices. I popped open my flight tracking apps -- <a href=\"https://flightaware.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">FlightAware</a> and <a href=\"http://www.flightstats.com/go/Home/home.do\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">FlightStats</a> and could see the problem -- an ugly line of red on the weather map running through Chicago. Being on the west side of that meant things weren’t too bad for me though. Once the thunderstorm line cleared O’Hare, the first planes they launched were heading west -- away from the storm line. I took an hour delay. Back in the office on Friday, people flying back from the East Coast were getting in at 2 or 3 in the morning, if they got out at all. I definitely dodged a bullet.</li>\n 	<li>Which found its target the next Thursday. I was back in Charlottesville and the delay notices started at 2pm for a 6:30pm flight. That’s not a good sign. Back to FlightAware and FlightStats. It was a replay of the prior Thursday, except this time I was right in the midst of it. Caught up in ORD ground stops, the equipment for my Charlottesville flight couldn’t get out east and eventually cancelled. I drove 2 hours up DC to catch the last flight out of Dulles which by that time was having its own ground stops. The Frontier flight that was supposed to leave at 9:30 finally pushed back at 1:10am. It was my turn to stagger home at 2:30am</li>\n 	<li>At first, I thought I wouldn’t fly at all this week, but then I got roped into a Tuesday morning meeting in Atlanta. Not so bad I thought -- fly down Monday night, fly back Tuesday afternoon. But then I woke up Monday morning to the news that Delta’s systems had tipped over. Another bullet dodged. I was booked on American going down and United coming back. And both those flights left on time and arrived early.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/swivel-deep/\"><em>Arlos Auto Parts and Salvation</em></a> by Swivel Neck Jones</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>So, my wish from the last episode was not granted. My Global Entry renewal was “conditionally approved” but I still have to go in for an interview. They do look busy though. I had to look 3 months out for the first availability in ORD -- I got my notice in July and my appointment is in mid-October. I hope they don’t listen to this podcast or follow me on Twitter.</li>\n 	<li>I’ve been thru Dulles twice since the last episode. I mentioned my second visit a couple of minutes ago, catching a Frontier flight out of the Z concourse gates. I had never seen any Z gates before in Dulles -- and for a good reason. They’re about a half-dozen gates stuffed in a dark hallway at the east end of terminal; the typical “slum concourse” inhabited by budget carriers. On the earlier visit, I was making a connection on United between the two midfield concourses with involved a ride on the old mobile lounges. Now, if you know the history of Dulles airport, you know that these mobile lounges were supposed to be the future of airport design, replacing the fixed gate and concourse structure with mobile gate lounges that would shuttle you out to your plane parked on the tarmac and then raise you up to the door. Not really all that different from what happens in a lot of European airports, but without the hydraulic fun ride at the end. I tweeted a picture of the lounge -- really more like a high-clearance bus --which elicited a response from Matt McCurdy with a link to a 1958 video “The Expanding Airport: A Study of Service and Convenience for Washington International” hosted on Vimeo. From the credits, it looks like it was created for the firm that designed Dulles. It’s a 9½-minute video and an absolute must-see; the disconnect between what people thought the future of travel would be and the reality almost 60 years later. Just the contrast between how the architects thought the mobile lounges would look -- couches with coffee tables and flower vases with cocktail service, and everyone in suits and dresses -- vs. my Twitter picture of people in shorts, t-shirts, and backpacks crammed in, hanging onto poles and straps -- is something. Check out the shownotes for <a href=\"https://vimeo.com/4139559\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Matt’s link to the video</a>. The mobile lounges are slowly being replaced by the new underground light rail system between the main terminal and the midfield concourses. Maybe as fewer people take them, they’ll be able to replace the poles with some nice chintz couches.</li>\n 	<li>Last month, a PR agency for Marriott invited me to a launch that was being held at the Windy City Smokeout BBQ event in Chicago. Never one to turn down free BBQ, especially on a Friday afternoon, I went. They were launching a new partnership between their TownePlace Suites brand and Weber grills, where they’re putting Weber gas grills and tools out in the common areas for use by guests. Kinda makes sense for an all-suite hotel -- families not looking to eat out every night fire up some burgers on the grill -- especially when the TownePlace folks explained that they’re targeting the mid-tier price range. It was kinda entertaining to see the young country pop tarts try to grill pizzas (and, by the way, I apply the pop tart label to both the male and female teams), but I was more interested in understanding how Marriott was positioning their suite brands -- how did TownePlace (which I’d never heard of) relate to Residence Inn and SpringHill Suites? The PR folks introduced me to a couple of brand guys who tried to lay it out for me -- TownePlace is lower priced but a bit hipper than Residence Inns, but not edgy like Moxy, their new brand targeted at Millennials. And SpringHill never made it into the discussion. I don’t know how well these micro-targets work in the reality of, say, an Orlando or a Houston. Are you really able to hit those target audiences or is it just another brand to sell to a new franchisee so the guy running the combo Courtyard-Residence Inn property a couple miles down the road doesn’t sue you? I dunno, but I got to wonder if these TownePlace properties with the new Webers are also going to provide shuttle service to the nearest Whole Foods?</li>\n 	<li>A colleague went to Defcon in Las Vegas last weekend. There’s always interesting stuff coming out of there; always enough to nurture any seed of paranoia you may have lurking in your id. It also makes me a bit more sympathetic to the corporate IT security guys trying to keep up with this stuff. “Video jacking” was the buzzed-about thing this year to keep frequent travelers on the watchout. The attack uses a smartphone’s ability to duplicate video out the micro USB or Lightning port to an HDMI TV. Nice if you want to watch videos from your phone or tablet on your larger hotel TV. A little less nice if you plug your phone into what you think is a charging station. But using these HDMI/Mobile High Definition Link cables which look very similar to straight power cables, your phone screen is duplicated on a TV screen perhaps with a person or video camera watching as you enter your PIN, work your banking apps, pull up that hidden text file with all your passwords written down. Krebs On Security has a <a href=\"http://krebsonsecurity.com/2016/08/road-warriors-beware-of-video-jacking/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">good write-up</a> on it, complete with a quick demo video. I’ll put a link in the show notes.</li>\n 	<li>We’ve talked before about how full planes and tight seats are breaking down some of the courtesies necessary to survive sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with complete strangers for 2-4 hours straight. Usually it’s not a problem; everyone gets along to go along. On one of my United flights last month, though, this broke down slightly. It started at boarding. I get to my row. There’s a guy already in the middle seat. I tell him I’m in the window. He asks my seat number. Hmmm, little odd, but I tell him, confirming that, yes I can read my boarding pass and that he’s going to have to move out to let me in. He’s a 1K who seems a bit pissed that he’s in a center seat. Perhaps he was hoping to slide over to the window, but if that’s the case, he missed the announcements asking for volunteers. This plane was packed. About 45 minutes into the flight, he looks over at me, exasperated, and says “Fine, if you want the armrest, just take it!” and then bitched about how miserable the middle seat is. Huh? I told him, “We can share it,” I said. “There’s no sharing,” he shot back. “I dunno, I can usually manage that when I’m in the middle.” He looked at me like he wanted to hit me and then thought the better of it. The remaining 2 ½ hours was less-than-comfortable as we sat within inches of each other. You may disagree, but I’m not in with this whole “the middle seat is so miserable that you’re entitled to everything else in the row” idea. I’ve sat in the middle seat a lot and don’t think it’s that bad if you’re in an exit row or, as in this case, in United’s Economy Plus where you have extra legroom. Indeed, I’ll pick those middle seats over a window seat in the back of the plane almost every time. And when I do, I don’t expect any special treatment from my row mates. I manage to arrange my elbows so we all can use the armrests -- one of us take the front half, the other the back half. But most of all, I don’t blame my row mates for my seat choice.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/fuzz-messy/\"><em>Smiling Perspective</em></a> by General Fuzz</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Can We Avoid Travel Delays?</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Peter Rukavina, a long-time T/C listener, sent me an interesting e-mail at the front part of this week\n<ul>\n 	<li>The tweet-stream of travel despair is a frequent enough occurrence as to almost be its own medium now (\"@aircanada announces 9 hour delay; help!\" etc.). I\'m an occasional practitioner myself. My question: to what extent can delays, cancellations, luggage loss, bumping, etc. be mitigated by being travel-savvy? In other words, by traveling smart, how much more control over wrenches thrown into plans do you have?</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>A pretty damned good question, especially given the tales of woe over the past month that I went through at the start of this episode which, I’ll admit, were accompanied by a couple of streams of bitch tweets. We\'ll never completely avoid travel despair -- complete system failures ought to be “black swan” events, though having 3 full outages (United, Southwest, and Delta) in 13 months suggests maybe they’re not, and flying into smaller places like Charlottesville, VA leave you with few options. But I do think there are things we can do -- the consultant in me want to call them “strategies” -- that can reduce the probability of a bad time and hopefully reduce the impact when they happen. I’ve talked about some “strategies” in earlier podcasts -- focus trips to earn airline and hotel status, don’t check luggage, fly direct, if you have to connect never book a connection less than 90 minutes -- and you’ll find most of these in travel listacles that pop up around the holidays. Knowing that Peter, as a long-time listener, has heard these before, I tried to think about some next-level “strategies”. Here are the ones that came to mind. Not an exhaustive list, but I think a decent start...</li>\n 	<li>First, avoid flying in the evenings -- Now I break this rule all the time, but think about it. Delays build during the day -- from weather, congestion, mechanicals, psychotic passengers -- because the airlines don\'t build their schedules with enough slack to allow recovery. By 4 or 5pm, the sum of these delays combines with the packed evening \"rush hour\" schedule to drive a high probability of delays. American and United’s LGA-ORD evening schedules are this in spades. Throw in a summer thunderstorm in ORD or DFW or ATL and flight ops centers start cancelling flights to catch up. If you’re on the last flight out, you can be looking at a night on the comfy-looking airport couch. Even without cancellations, delays lead to tight connections which can lead to missed luggage.</li>\n 	<li>Use flight-tracking smart phone apps -- I use apps like FlightAware to access more data than the typical gate agent can. On the Thursday that I ended up in DC, as the delay notices started coming in from American,, FlightAware showed me that my plane was on the ground in Wichita, KS, probably waiting out an ORD ground stop from thunderstorms. It still had to get to Chicago and then out to Charlottesville. Seeing parallel lines of red on the radar view, I had a pretty good sense that it wasn\'t going to happen. When I decided to head up to Dulles for the Frontier flight, I could see the flight history on FlightAware; it delayed more often than not, but rarely cancelled. That night, as ORD and IAD ground stops kept pushing the departure time, I wasn\'t too worried that it would cancel because I had seen the flight history.</li>\n 	<li>Spread clothes across checked and unchecked luggage -- If you\'ve checked luggage, I assume it\'s for a good reason (e.g., carrying a bottles of wine home from a Napa trip, needing formal wear for a wedding) and that you also have a carry-on. Put two changes of clothes and a bare set of toiletries (e.g., toothbrush) in your carry-on. Most lost luggage will catch up to you within 24-36 hours. If you\'re traveling as a family, spread everyone\'s clothes out across all the bags rather than each person having their own bag. It would be rare for the airlines to lose all the bags of an entire party. With things spread across bags, everyone is good for a couple of days even if a bag is lost. I’m always amazed that more families don’t do this.</li>\n 	<li>Know your geography -- What are your alternative airports and how far of a drive are they? This has become even more important over the past few years as the big carriers have reduced flight frequency to fill up their planes. I once had a project in the middle of Connecticut that was just about equidistant between White Plains and Hartford airports. We always flew in/out of White Plains even though it was a smaller airport because, when flights delayed/cancelled, we could just keep driving down the Hutchinson to LaGuardia. When we flew out of Hartford, it was a much longer haul to the nearest airport.</li>\n 	<li>This last one might be a bit obscure, but it’s been useful to me. If your corporate car rental agency is Hertz, always book an intermediate car so you can use Gold Choice to quickly swap cars if Hertz assigns you a real beater. Now, you can always go back to the counter, stand in line, and demand a better, cleaner, less decrepit car, but we’re trying to avoid delays. Most corporate rates that I’ve used has at most a dollar or two difference between the compact and intermediate rate. It’s cheap insurance. I’ve used Gold Choice maybe 10-20% of the time, but I’m always glad to have that option.</li>\n 	<li>So there you go,. Five ways to travel smarter. If you have a suggestion, please send it in.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/atek-phoenix/\"><em>Goa Life</em></a> by Ambient Teknology</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Coping with Travel Delays</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>During my last CIO gig, I was traveling as much, if not more, than any of my consulting gigs. I kept my Chicago residence and rotated weekly across offices in Scottsdale, Dallas, Naples, FL and Croydon, south of London. The head of my project management team started doing a bit of travel to support some system migrations and after a couple of months of the usual flight delays and other travel snafus, he asked me, “How do you deal with this all the time?” “I depend on 3 major food groups,” I told him. “Alcohol, salt, and fat.”</li>\n 	<li>I remembered that as I was killing time in Dulles with a dinner of fish and chips and a local beer, Hop Lips IPA from Dover, DE. It rang the bell on all three.</li>\n 	<li>Doing that too much, though, is how you end up quietly asking for belt extenders, so you gotta find other ways of coping.</li>\n 	<li>One bad habit that I have is bitch tweeting. I’ve confessed to that in many prior episodes, and as much as I try to stop, I find it releases my frustrations -- kinda like shouting into a bag or something -- and keeps me from popping a cork at innocent gate agents. I apologize to all my Twitter followers who have to endure that. I have downloaded a meditation app for my iPhone, but it hasn’t seemed to help.</li>\n 	<li>A more constructive thing is that I try not to show up to the airport until I have to. If I get an early notice of a delay, I push back my cab to the airport. Part of the frustration is that delays consume time. I can be more productive in my office than trying to find a place to work at a crowded gate or airport club. When I was traveling regularly to New Orleans a few years back, it seemed that half the flights back to Chicago in the summer were delayed by afternoon thunderstorms. I wouldn’t leave for the airport until I saw the inbound equipment was in the air. I got a lot more work done, and ate much better food.</li>\n 	<li>The trend of airports upgrading their amenities helps a lot. I’ve never done the neck massage thing, but, back to the alcohol food group, I’ve done a few wine flights at the Vino Volo wine bars that are popping up in more US airports, and the beer flights at microbrewery bars like Great Lakes Brewery’s place in Cleveland, Cisco Brewers’ bar in Boston Logan or the Karl Strauss bar in LAX. It’s something local that keeps you occupied for a bit. And searching them out -- because they’re inevitably in a different concourse than you -- also kills time.</li>\n 	<li>In the end, though, it is what it is. If the delay isn’t causing you to miss something important, it’s easy to kick back and read the paper. If you’re missing your kid’s parent-teacher conference, there’s not much that’s going to help your frustration. Except maybe bitch tweeting...</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #123</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\">Magnatune</a></li>\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_123.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #123 — How to Avoid Travel Delays','','inherit','closed','closed','','1644-revision-v1','','','2021-09-29 08:12:16','2021-09-29 13:12:16','',1644,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3897',0,'revision','',0),
(3898,1,'2021-09-29 08:13:34','2021-09-29 13:13:34','[caption id=\"attachment_1660\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/5777D166-DB5F-4FAF-A0D5-84AC87F58834.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1660\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/5777D166-DB5F-4FAF-A0D5-84AC87F58834-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Empty Beer Glasses\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> I Think We\'ve Bagged Our Limit[/caption]\n\nMy son joins the podcast to talk about hunting down craft beers. I then talk about a few \"a-ha\" moments from my recent trip to Scotland, my on-going struggles with bitch tweeting, a VPN hardware product that could come in handy, and why I\'ve come to hate the Rick Steves travel juggernaut. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_124.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #124:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you from the Sheraton Hotel and Conference Center in Framingham, MA. Just back from 10 mostly beautiful sunny days in Scotland. Flew United to Edinburgh via Newark on the the way out, but on the way back, paid an extra $200 for the luxury of skipping the Immigration lines there. Given my weekly experiences in Newark’s Terminal A at the beginning of this year, I can only imagine the Immigration hall as being a mash-up of the dungeons from all the Saw movies done in that frighteningly absurd sort of way that only the TSA can pull off. Think the LAX security lines without laid-back people, with that Jersey edge. Even with the Global Entry line cut, that was not the final memory I wanted from what had been a nice trip.</li>\n 	<li>My wife and I kinda ran the same play we did last year when we dropped our daughter off at University of St Andrews. Grabbed a car -- Hertz gave us a new Nissan X-Terra -- nice car, enough space for the bags my daughter brought over with her, but would be a lumbering beast among Fiat 500s later in the week when driving some of the single lane roads in the Highlands. I like to think I’m getting better at driving in the UK -- driving on the left and shifting with my left hand. No curb bumping or wide left-hand turns this time coming out of the airport. Stopped off at the mall 5 min from the airport for a Starbucks coffee and a couple of EE SIM cards -- £15 for 2GB of data, unlimited texts and, I dunno, 500 voice minutes, which for a week, is pretty much unlimited -- $20 at the current post-Brexit bargain basement exchange rate.</li>\n 	<li>After lunch and unloading our daughter, my wife and I drove up the coast for a few days of walking -- not hiking with packs and crampons, but trail walking. We stayed the weekend in Aberdeen because… we’d never been there before. It was a nice town. Went out to the Brewdog brewery for a tour and a couple of beers and then out walking it off along a North Sea trail. We also spent time in Cairngorms National Park on Balmoral getting blown out of our jackets by gale force winds while looking for the Queen in her Range Rover, and then straight up north to the coast -- through Banff, Portsoy, and Cullen for a bit more coastal trail walking. And then back down to St Andrews for the last couple of days doing the typical stuff parents do when they visit their kid at college -- take them out to nice restaurants, buy them groceries, and in our case, say good-bye until Christmas break.</li>\n 	<li>Flying out of Edinburgh airport on Saturday morning was surprisingly not a hassle. It’s not a huge airport -- mostly seems to be mostly budget airlines -- Ryanair, easyJet -- but United and American fly a couple of 757s in, and I saw an Etihad 787 -- jealous. The ticketing/check-in area is a bit of a cluster; gives a bad first impression. But once you get up the escalator and headed toward security, it’s much nicer -- a low hassle pass through security, and good shops and restaurants.</li>\n 	<li>It always strikes me how much more automated some of the European airports have become. At Edinburgh, there’s no security person checking your ticket before security. Instead, there’s a gate and a bar code reader. You scan your boarding pass. If it’s valid, the gate drops and you walk through. There are security people watching for gate jumpers and tailgaters, but there’s about a half-dozen automated gates, so there was no queue. And then at the X-ray machines, no TSA-like person bringing tubs to the front of the line. Instead, a person points you to one of 5 loading stations, a conveyor system spits out a bin, you load it up, and push it onto the belt that feeds the X-ray machine. Again, less waiting because, instead of a single person loading their tub and putting stuff on the belt, you have 5 people in parallel. If one person is slow, it doesn’t hold up the line. Not quite sure why the TSA, with all its budget and management staff, can’t just copy this.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/48114\">Velvet Green of Mystery (Instrumental)</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Kthugha, Jeris, Martijn de Boer</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Not to turn this into a complete Caledonian podcast, but I did have a few a-ha moments from this trip -\n<ul>\n 	<li>The spread of contactless card readers at stores in the UK has spread the acceptance of Apple and Android Pay, which makes not having a chip-&amp;-pin card much less painful (remember, the US cards are chip-&amp;-signature because, I guess, we can’t be trusted to remember 2 4-digit codes). It used to be painful -- or perhaps just embarrassing -- to wait for the Tesco self-service attendant to look at me a bit confused as she gave me a receipt to be signed. Now it’s even faster than a chip-&amp;-pin card -- tap my phone on the card reader, beep, and I’m done. Now they need to replace the little mobile card readers that restaurants use...</li>\n 	<li>It’s really tough to find a good cup of brewed black coffee in Europe. Now call me a red-necked Midwesterner, but there are times that I don’t want foamed milk, I don’t want a just a swig of coffee, and I certainly don’t want that swig of coffee -- espresso -- diluted with hot water, I just want a cup of black coffee -- filter coffee as I’ve learned. Impossible to find in Spain and Portugal and many places in the UK, except at Starbucks. There have been many European mornings after a late night that I thanked God (and Howard Schultz) for their aggressive international expansion. So I was surprised and thrilled (ecstatic, really) to find an actual Portlandia-like coffee pourover place, complete with Chemexes and Hario kettles, in Aberdeen on Saturday morning. Foodstory Cafe. I found it by Googling “Hipster Aberdeen”. Yes, really. Sounds silly/absurd but it works. I’ve used that search term in many cities and more times than not been happy with the results.</li>\n 	<li>Our hotel in Aberdeen was nice, except for one thing. The tub had one of those little half wall tub screens instead of a shower curtain. There should be a YouTube video on how to shower in those, because everytime I try, I hose down the sink and everything on it. Perhaps I’m too large. Why this instead of a shower curtain?</li>\n 	<li>Sitting in a restaurant our last night in St Andrews, our waitress -- very nice person, very good service -- had just a hint of an Eastern European accent. I wanted to ask her where she’s from, but in post-Brexit Britain, it felt rude to ask that. Now that’s not a snarky comment about the results of the vote -- the tough thing about democracy is that everyone\'s vote counts and needs to be respected, not just the people who agree with us. But you can feel a change -- just a bit...</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Back in the US, I continue to struggle with my tendency to bitch tweet. On one flight, I was able to hold back during a 20 min wait for a gate on United, though I did provide “frank” feedback on the customer service survey they sent me a couple of days later. But the next week, on my third straight delayed United flight, I just couldn’t control myself. I understood when we had to return to the gate to manually start the remaining engine -- jets often taxi out using just one engine in order to save fuel, which makes perfect sense. United did a good job of finding us a gate -- not easy at ORD -- and was pretty quick with the maintenance crew. Where I lost it, though, was when it took longer to download the updated data to the plane computer than the whole return to the gate and manually start the engine bit. To the pilot’s credit, he did a good job of explaining the situation and the status, and didn’t hide in the cabin when we were de-planing.</li>\n 	<li>Marc Loehrwald, a long-time listener, sent me a note asking “Would you consider this gentlemen solving his problems with Verizon over speakerphone in the otherwise quite empty and peaceful Lounge at JFK worth bitch tweeting…?” accompanied by a picture of a guy sitting alone among couple of dozen chairs. Bitch subtweeting! I should’ve done that to the guy behind me who had his feet up on the back of my seat the entire flight from BWI to ORD. Not a kid, a guy in his mid-50’s!. Marc, you’ve taken my bitch tweeting to a whole new level!</li>\n 	<li>Over the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/12/20/podcast-119-digital-security-on-the-road-us-airports-getting-better/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">past </a>few episodes, we’ve been talking about VPNs -- virtual private networks -- as a way to improve your security when you travel. VPNs encrypt your network traffic -- always a good thing over public and hotel WiFi -- and will also “tunnel” your traffic through the Internet, making it look like you’re accessing the Internet from the VPN end-point. For corporate users, this makes you look like you’re accessing the Internet from your office, allowing you to use systems inside your corporate firewall. For many international travelers, it gives you a way to watch, say, TV shows that are licensed to Netflix in the US but not in other countries. All the VPN products I’ve used have been software-based -- my company uses a Cisco VPN, while on my last trip to China, I used ExpressVPN to tunnel under the Great Firewall and post pictures to Facebook. A company called Homing Systems used Kickstarter to launch a hardware-based VPN product called AlwaysHome. They sent me a sample to try out. It’s a pair of USB dongles. You connect one to your home router -- I have it plugged into my Uverse box. I plugged the second one into the BT router in my daughter’s flat in St Andrews. She fired up her Netflix account and was able to continue her “Criminal Minds” binge, a show not on UK Netflix, without a problem. In earlier testing, I found AlwaysHome was a bit more fiddly when it needed to connect first through a password portal -- the typical set up at a hotel. It would connect, but took a bit more work. When the connection nailed up, though, the performance was solid. <a href=\"http://www.homingsystems.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Homing Systems</a>’ web site calls it “Space Shifting”. I think that’s the right positioning. I think it’s quicker to fire up a software VPN client for a quick session at Starbucks. The AlwaysHome dongle setup seems more suited for a more sustained session. Check out the show notes for links to Homing Systems.</li>\n 	<li><em>Homing Systems sent me a AlwaysHome Duo free of charge for me to review. I was not paid for this review. The opinions expressed in this episode are my own. </em></li>\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/spinmeister/53428\">Somewhere</a> by spinmeister (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license. Ft: DJ Vadim</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Craft Beer Hunting</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>My son and I hang out in his apartment in Chicago\'s Lake View neighborhood and talk about finding good beer in out-of-the-way places</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/48915\">Like Music (cdk Mix)</a> by cdk (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/\">Attribution Share-Alike (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Phasenwandler</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>I Hate Rick Steves</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Not personally, of course. I’m sure he’s a nice guy who doesn’t kick dogs. I guess to be more precise, I hate what he’s done to some of my vacations.</li>\n 	<li>Portugal is the most recent example. Preparing for our trip, my wife read a number of Lisbon travel guides, include Rick Steves. Rick advises his Lisbon travelers to do the day trip out to Sintra, the castle-filled UNESCO World Heritage Site, on Mondays when all the Lisbon museums are closed. So Monday morning, we get up early, go across the street for our standard breakfast of coffee and pastel de nata (egg custard tarts to die for), and hit the train. Standing room only. We get off the train in Sintra. All we see are older Americans with sensible haircuts, plastic rimmed glasses, and hiking shoes. It’s like we walking through an NPR listener convention in Ann Arbor, MI. And they’re all wearing their backpacks swung around in front to protect themselves from pickpockets and thieves. Except no local could penetrate the phalanx of blue book-wielding Steve-heads. Lucky for us, most of them followed Rick’s advice to catch the bus to the top of the hill. We decided we needed to work off that egg custard, and so broke away from the blue book brigade and walked up the road.</li>\n 	<li>I don’t begrudge Rick Steves his success -- good for him; he seems to have worked hard for it. But his motto -- “Europe through the back door” -- can’t really apply anymore when he has millions of readers trying to walk through it. The same thing happened to Lonely Planet. What was once the hip, backpacker’s guide to cool spots now leads people to mainstream tourism spots just by its recommendations because it’s Amazon’s best selling travel guide series.</li>\n 	<li>I think we successfully avoided the Steve-o’s on this trip to Scotland. Aberdeen and the Northeast Highlands are nowhere to be found in Rick Steves’ Scotland, and I can’t say that I heard too many North American accents during that part of our trip -- save for the one day we drove down to Dunnottar Castle, but that’s got to be one of the main tourist draws in that part of Scotland. I heard almost as much German as I did American twang.</li>\n 	<li>I’ve tended, more and more, to use local Google searches rather than guide books. Google often surfaces more local content, and limiting the results to the past year makes sure it’s current. But even this might not be “back door” enough. The barista in the Aberdeen coffee shop that I found through my “Hipster Aberdeen” Google search did mention seeing a surprising number of Americans recently. I wonder if my “Hipster” search strategy has gone mainstream.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #124</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/\">ccMixter</a></li>\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_124.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #124 — Craft Beer Hunting; I Hate Rick Steves','','inherit','closed','closed','','1658-revision-v1','','','2021-09-29 08:13:34','2021-09-29 13:13:34','',1658,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3898',0,'revision','',0),
(3899,1,'2021-09-29 08:14:45','2021-09-29 13:14:45','[caption id=\"attachment_1667\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/IMG_0201.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1667\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/IMG_0201-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"An aggressive Uber Pool driver\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> An aggressive Uber Pool driver[/caption]\n\nBack from 10 days in Tuscany where, among other things, we thought we\'d avoid all the noise of the US presidential election. We succeeded... almost. One of my latest travel hobbies has been to quiz Uber drivers for their life stories. It makes for interesting rides to and from the airport. We also continue the ongoing thread about travel safety. This time, we talk about using Bluetooth in rental cars. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_125.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #125:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, with a new episode just in time for the TSA Thanksgiving lines. I’m once again thankful that I’m able to avoid O’Hare this week -- the busiest travel week of the year. Since the last episode, I’ve been in Boston, Baltimore, Charlottesville, Hoboken, and, for the first time, I landed at Lehigh Valley Regional Airport in Allentown, PA. I was surprised how nice an airport it is. I was expecting something smaller -- just a handful of gates -- and perhaps a bit dingier -- maybe something along the lines of White Plains, NY. But it was clean and bright with big concourses -- not a lot of people, but a lot of space.</li>\n 	<li>Then I had 3 weeks at home -- my longest non-travel streak this year. There is something relaxing about not packing and unpacking. It also makes you realize how much time you lose in the act of travel -- standing in lines, waiting for security, to board the plane, to check in to your hotel, to get a cup of coffee…. The whole time, though, I was looking forward to getting back on the road -- because my next trip was with my wife to Tuscany for our 25th anniversary, revisiting the scene of our honeymoon.</li>\n 	<li>We flew into Pisa by way of Munich, another new airport for me. But I was much less impressed by this one. Things were going fine -- nothing special in typical German airport style -- until we hit security. There were a dozen lines that were just crawling. There weren’t that many people trying to go through security -- it was 10 or 11am on a Friday -- but maybe the security union was on a work slowdown because they had to be going out of their way to work that slow. As is my wont, I bitch tweeted that out. Colin McDowell tweeted back -- “Totally agree. Slowest security of any major airport, like Gatwick in the ‘80’s. Shops must be suffering”. And the bars too. I didn’t have time for my traditional German airport breakfast beer.</li>\n 	<li>Things got better at Pisa Airport though. This was not a new airport; we had flown in here for our honeymoon. I had booked a Fiat 500 from Hertz for kinda old times sake; we’d driven a Fiat Panda 25 years ago. I was pleasantly surprised to find an Alfa Romeo in the parking slot. Definitely a move up from the Panda. And it was an automatic -- the first time I haven’t driven a stick in Europe. At first I was kinda disappointed, but later, when I was winding through the Tuscan hills and picking my way through rutted dirt roads, I was happy that the car was doing the shifting.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/buy_album.php?id=39CE51194FB95B63577FBFD7E2EC168C99277BD6CE86C10FDC39095666B5D6CF\"><em>Heaven</em></a> by <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=BB22CBFF24501120EEC6ABA18AB0A15FEB05A36360E7FDA122C8D7A5C140F8DC\" rel=\"nofollow\">Los Lonely Boys</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>A <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/08/13/podcast-123-how-to-avoid-travel-delays/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">few episodes</a> back, I complained about having to do an interview for my Global Entry renewal. I’d read online about others getting renewed without the interview, so I was a bit peeved to have to make my way past the lines at the McDonalds in the lower lever of ORD Terminal 5 yet again. But, other than the smell of fries at 9am on a Friday (I’m too old to start my weekends on Thursday nights), it was a fairly painless experience. I was ushered back less than 5 minutes after I’d arrived and had a very straight forward interview with the Customs and Border Protection agent. He was a great guy; good conversation. Asked me a couple of questions -- including one about my stolen passport -- took a new picture and a new set of fingerprints and I was done. 10 minutes later, I was making my way past the McDonalds again. As I thought about it, I had no reason to be peeved. Seems reasonable that they’d want to put an eyeball on me after 5 years.</li>\n 	<li>Jim McDonough posted a comment on the TravelCommons web site about my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/09/28/podcast-124-craft-beer-hunting-i-hate-rick-steves/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Rick Steves rant</a>. Jim writes:\n<ul>\n 	<li>My wife and I love Rick Steves (we call ourselves Rickheads) and use his books all the time. But I know what you mean about his fans overwhelming a particular place. It’s funny how many people in the States have no idea who he is, but in Europe, Rick Steves sits at the right hand of the father. Get your restaurant or hotel into his book, and you have it made</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>And while I was able to dodge the Rickheads in Aberdeen, I knew I was toast in Tuscany. Even in November, I was shoulder-to-shoulder with older, sensibly dressed, empty-nester Rickheads toting their blue bibles through Pisa, Lucca, and Florence. Only when we were staying on a farm in Chianti a couple of miles up a rutted dirt road were we free of them.</li>\n 	<li>David Glickman sent me a note recommending a more detailed guide of Scotland for my next visit:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Living just outside London I am not sure I have never read a Rick Steves Guidebook, but what I recommend getting hold of Peter Irvine’s really excellent guide ‘Scotland The Best’ before your next trip to St.Andrews. My wife and I are regular visitors to the States, and my wife travels to Madison Wi about 6 times a year through ORD so we really enjoy your podcasts. We have just returned from a trip and boy is your country now expensive to us poor post-Brexit Brits!</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>I immediately hit Amazon and ordered the new 2016 edition of <a href=\"https://www.amazon.com/Scotland-Best-Peter-Irvine/dp/0007559348/ref=dp_ob_title_bk\"><em>Scotland The Best</em></a>. Very detailed, with lots of suggestions. Looking forward to giving it a workout on my next visit. And I can imagine the US looks very expensive for pound- and euro-based tourists. The euro dropped another 5% in the week-and-a-half we’ve been back from Italy.</li>\n 	<li>About a year ago in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/10/11/podcast-117-random-thoughts-about-eggs-scotland-car-rentals/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">episode #117</a>, I first talked about Revolut, a virtual and real chip-and-pin debit card with great exchange rates. I first used it last fall on a trip to the UK. I’d transfer funds into it using my US debit card and manage conversions with a smartphone app. It was great. But note my use of the past tense. Over the past 3 months, the service has been deteriorating for US users. First, they began charging a 3% fee on fund transfers using US debit cards. I soon found that they only charged the fee if those transfers were in dollars. If I transferred funds in euros or pounds, there was no charge. Weird, but OK, it still worked. But when I tried that trick before my trips to Scotland and Italy, no dice. All US debit transfers were blocked. I suppose I could’ve tried an interbank transfer using something like TransferWise, but that’s way too much of a hassle. They say they “aim to change it ASAP” but it’s been 3 months now and no update. I have to retract my praise for Revolut and delete the app from my iPhone.</li>\n 	<li>I mentioned in the last episode, that the lack of a chip-&amp;-pin card in Scotland has become less of a hassle with the spread of contactless card readers that let me use Apple Pay on my iPhone. I didn’t find that same convenience in Italy. I didn’t see one place with a contactless reader. Other than large restaurant bills (we managed to find tables at a few Michelin starred restaurants during our stay), I paid mostly cash. It seemed much less of a hassle.</li>\n 	<li>Over the last 3-4 episodes, we had one blurb that’s talked about travel security. Last episode was VPNs, the one before that video jacking. So in this installment of <em>Travel Security</em>, I want to talk about car rentals; specifically, about when you use Bluetooth to pair your smartphone with your rental’s audio system. I do this all the time. It’s safer -- let’s me talk handsfree, avoiding wrecks and tickets. And it lets me listen to podcasts or Pandora or Spotify when I’m driving instead of fiddling around, finding a local radio station that I don’t hate. However, if you do this, you need to remember to delete your pairing when you return your car. There hasn’t been one time when I haven’t gone through and deleted 3-5 pairings before pairing my own. And if you scroll through the devices, they all have personalized names like “Timmy’s iPhone”. And most phones by default will download your contacts to the car when paired. You can turn this default behavior off in an Android phone, but I haven’t found that capabilities with iPhones. Instead, every time I pair my iPhone, I have to remember to flip the switch that prevents it. So for most people, they leave behind a profile in their rental with all of their contacts and phone numbers. That is just bad in so many ways.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://cyberset.cc/artists2.php?tr_release_id=104\"><em>Heaven</em></a> by <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=A951998E6011FA9B2D22387EB3CAC0B5EB05A36360E7FDA122C8D7A5C140F8DC\" rel=\"nofollow\">Electric Skychurch</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Uber Driver Stories</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>I find myself taking more and more Ubers as opposed to regular taxi cabs. I like cabs, I like cab drivers, but Uber is usually a better experience. Thumbing the app is so much easier than trying to hail a cab, or finding the number of the local cab company and then dealing with an often(?)/usually(?) cab dispatcher. And the condition of the car is, 9 times out of 10, vastly superior to the beat-up cab I usually get. The Baltimore cabs I’d take from the Inner Harbor to the airport were some of the worst. But then in Chicago I got picked by an Uber driver in a BMW X3 and by a spotless Mercedes SUV at EWR. Indeed, 9 times out of 10 is giving cabs way too much of the benefit of the doubt. I’ve yet to ride in an Uber that was worse than a cab.</li>\n 	<li>But the best thing about taking an Uber is driver stories. Every Uber I take, I ask the driver how he/she likes it, how long they’ve been doing it, and what else they do -- if it’s not their full time gig (which is the definite minority)</li>\n 	<li>A lotta drivers I talk with are retired. One guy in Vegas told me he was a bit lonely and bored. He wanted to get out of the house, but really had nowhere to go. He didn’t want to gamble or sit in a bar at 10 in the morning, so driving Uber gave him a reason to get off the sofa.</li>\n 	<li>A Charlottesville, VA retired fireman drives the late night weekend shift when kids from UVa are willing to pay anything (or willing to charge anything to their parents’ accounts) for a ride home from the bars. He told me he gets huge surge fares, but he’s driving ‘til 3 or 4 in the morning.</li>\n 	<li>A woman in Baltimore is a retired teacher and principal. She drives to take a break from studying for her PhD. She too gets bored sitting around the house, and she likes to drive. She told me that it was her husband who got her to sign up for Uber. She was driving him crazy around the house. Another guy, non-retired, who is studying full-time for his CFA exam -- chartered financial analyst -- does the same thing, drives during his study breaks.</li>\n 	<li>I find that many morning drivers -- the ones taking me from my hotel to a client site -- are doing a little moonlighting; fitting in a few rides before they go to work, and then again at the end of the day. I was surprised to find out that Uber drivers don’t know your destination until they accept the ride. Thinking about it, it makes sense; keeps drivers from cherry picking, say, rides to the airport. But one woman told me about accepting a ride and finding out it was to some suburb 40 minutes away -- and she only had a quarter tank.</li>\n 	<li>Of course, there’s more to ridesharing than Uber. I’ve also used Lyft. During busy times, I’ll fire them both up to see which has less of a surge charge, or a shorter wait time. Most drivers will drive for both. In my unscientific polling, most prefer Lyft but get more traffic from Uber. One driver told my wife he prefers Lyft because the Lyft riders talk more. And then he proceeded to unload his life story on my wife and her friend for the next 40 minutes as they battled traffic into Chicago.</li>\n 	<li>I’m always interested in how the gig economy is working for them. For a while, we were reading that the sharing economy, the gig economy of Uber and Airbnb was the next wave. The froth seems to have worn off of that wave, but a lot of the Uber drivers I talk to need that extra money, though often they wonder if it’s worth it. The Mercedes SUV driver who took me from EWR to Hoboken wondered if it was worth hassle of waiting for an airport fare. The only full-time driver I had was in Baltimore, and she said she makes more money delivering packages for Uber than she does delivering passengers, and the packages are much quieter and more pleasant.</li>\n 	<li>But as good as these stories are, the best one I recently heard wasn’t from an Uber driver; it was from the manager of the Chianti farm we stayed at for a couple of days during our trip to Italy. He had lived in the Chicago area for about 10 years. He got his PhD in geochemistry at Univ of Illinois and then worked at Argonne National Labs doing research. After a while, he missed his family and the countryside where he’d grown up, so he moved back to Tuscany, married, had a kid, and now manages a cattle farm with a growing sideline in agritourism. Forget driving for Uber. I want to be this guy.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://www.podsafeaudio.com/jamroom/play.php?band_id=1258&amp;song_id=4378&amp;mode=song_hifi\"><em>Shadows</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.podsafeaudio.com/jamroom/bands/1258/\">Antardhyan</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Overseas for the Election</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>My wife and I flew to Italy the Thursday night before the election. We both voted early, so we didn’t shirk our civic duties. What we did do, though, was leave behind the last blast of election ads and media coverage. I mean, the one bad thing about Game 7 of the World Series going into extra innings was that it gave more time for political ads. We were very happy to leave all that noise behind us.</li>\n 	<li>On Election Day, we had dinner in a nice restaurant in a small town that was 45 minutes of switchbacks and rutted dirt roads away from our hotel. On the way back, I think we dodged a boar and a deer as we crossed back over the ridge of hills and headed down to our hotel. We went to bed while the polls in the US were still open and didn’t really think a thing about it.</li>\n 	<li>I woke up around 7 on Weds morning; Tuesday midnight in Chicago. I glanced at my iPhone and saw a cascade of notifications from the Wall Street Journal and Chicago Tribune about the election results. The election still hadn’t been called, but by the time we sat down for breakfast, it was done. Donald Trump had won.</li>\n 	<li>The Austrian guy working the desk and the breakfast (it was a small hotel) laughed when he walked up -- “At least you guys aren’t having a do-over” The July Austrian presidential election was set aside for problems with absentee ballots and they still haven’t done the revote. “Or Spain, going through two elections without getting a government.”</li>\n 	<li>Now, TravelCommons has never had a political point-of-view and I’m not about to change that here. I have good friends on both sides of the debate. What I will say is that I, like many others, was surprised by the results given all the predictions we’d heard right up until we were wheels up at ORD. All through breakfast, we refreshed our Twitter feeds and hit the Wall Street Journal and New York Times apps, trying to catch up on the coverage we’d slept through the night before. Where the night before, we were happy not to hear about politics, now we were digging for an explanation for this upset.</li>\n 	<li>After an hour of this, and an extra cappuccino, we set the phones aside again. It was nice that we could do that -- walk away from the disbelief (and some might say panic) at the result that was spreading over the media (social and traditional), and schools, and I imagine in the workplaces. Instead, we were driving our little Alfa Romeo through some beautiful Chianti vineyards that were brilliantly yellow with the vine leaves changing colors. We stopped off at the Antinori winery for a bit of a tasting and then continued our drive to Florence. We knew we’d eventually get pulled into the post-election vortex, but we knew we were lucky -- we would be in a cone of silence for another 3 days.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #125</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://promonet.iodalliance.com\">IODA Promonet</a> and <a href=\"http://podsafeaudio.com/\">PodSafe Audio</a></li>\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_125.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #125 — Uber Driver Stories; Overseas for the Election','','inherit','closed','closed','','1666-revision-v1','','','2021-09-29 08:14:45','2021-09-29 13:14:45','',1666,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3899',0,'revision','',0),
(3900,1,'2021-09-29 08:15:39','2021-09-29 13:15:39','[caption id=\"attachment_1683\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/774653_521026384596249_472247542_o.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1683\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/774653_521026384596249_472247542_o-300x225.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\"></a> Green Bay Looks So Pretty This Time of Year[/caption]\n\nAs the economy recovers, so does travel volume. As you gird yourself to wade into the crowds, here are 10 tips to keep you moving over the river and through the woods...\n<ol>\n 	<li><strong>Expand Your Fly-vs.-Drive Tipping Point&nbsp;</strong>— My normal tipping&nbsp;point is 350 miles; anything less and I drive it. However, the holiday traffic changes the calculus a bit. If you fly, figure the airport logistics will add 3 hours to your in-flight time. Airlines are recommending passengers arrive 2 hours before their holiday flights, and when you arrive, all the additional people means it\'ll take you at least an hour to de-plane, collect your luggage, and get off the airport property. And that\'s if there are no delays. This increases the holiday fly-vs.-drive tipping point to at least&nbsp;500 miles.</li>\n 	<li><strong>Use Multiple Navigation Apps&nbsp;—&nbsp;</strong>If you decide to drive, use more than one maps app to help you route around traffic jams from rush hour, construction, and accidents. I personally use both <a href=\"https://www.waze.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Waze</a> and <a href=\"https://maps.google.com\">Google Maps</a> because, even though they\'re both owned by Google, they often give you different directions. I find Waze is better at redirecting you around accidents and traffic jams, but can be a bit twitchy -- sending you wandering through sub-divisions to save a minute of drive time. I tend to follow Waze but periodically check it against Google Maps.</li>\n 	<li><strong>Sign Up for TSA PreCheck&nbsp;— </strong>Gift yourself and spend the $85 on some time and hassle reduction. You won\'t get it in time for this Christmas, but it\'s good for 5 years, so you\'ll have it next Christmas.</li>\n 	<li><strong>Apply for an Airline Credit Card&nbsp;— </strong>If your credit is good enough for instant approval, getting your airline\'s credit card will get&nbsp;you entry level frequent flier status. This allows you to use the status security lines (handy if you don\'t have PreCheck) and the second boarding group which is usually good enough to let you find some overhead bin space. This typically will work for you and your family. If the lead adult’s boarding pass shows priority/premiere access, the overworked minimum-wage airport staffers guarding the status security lanes will let the family tag along. And at the gate, I’ve never seen a family split across boarding groups.</li>\n 	<li><strong>Fly Non-Stop —</strong>&nbsp;Holiday travel stacks up problems — &nbsp;high passenger load factors combined with winter weather disruptions almost guarantees late arrivals and missed connections. Even if you’re connecting through Houston, an intermediate stop adds one more point of failure, one more opportunity for the airlines to screw up. Pay the extra $100 for a non-stop flight.</li>\n 	<li><strong>Skip the Tight Connection&nbsp;—&nbsp; </strong>If you can’t fly direct, step away from any connection that’s less than 60 minutes. &nbsp;Yes, we usually want to get to our destination in the shortest possible time, but accepting a connection of 1 hour or less…. Think about it – a 15-minute delay on your flight into a big hub like <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27hare_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Chicago</a> or <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denver_International_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Denver</a> or <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detroit_Metropolitan_Wayne_County_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Detroit</a> (as good as on-time in the winter for most airlines) and you’re sprinting across terminals and concourses just to beat the closing door.&nbsp; A 1-hr connection is just asking for a stress attack and/or an overnight stay at the airport branch of the <a title=\"Bates Motel\" href=\"http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092622/\" rel=\"imdb\">Bates Motel</a>.</li>\n 	<li><strong>Research Before You Leave&nbsp;—&nbsp;</strong>You don\'t have time to be clueless. Hit the <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/travel/travel-tips\">TSA website</a>&nbsp;or the <a href=\"https://twitter.com/AskTSA/with_replies\">@AskTSA</a>&nbsp;gang on Twitter so you know what\'s allowed in your carry-on. Research the airports you\'ll be using so you know how to your gates, where the good restaurants are, or better yet, if there\'s a brewpub. Also, figure out the geography. Knowing alternatives to your destination airport gives you more flexibility dealing with cancelled flights or missed connections. In New York, the&nbsp;LaGuardia-to-Newark pivot is&nbsp;easy, but others aren’t so obvious.&nbsp; Everyone knows that Chicago has two airports – O’Hare and Midway.&nbsp; But what about Milwaukee’s Mitchell Field 80 miles north? &nbsp;If Philadelphia is in trouble, how many folks think about Harrisburg or BWI?&nbsp; Or Sacramento as an alternative to SFO?</li>\n 	<li><strong>Catch the Early Flight&nbsp;</strong>—&nbsp;Delays stack up as the day wears on.&nbsp; As your airplane goes from airport to airport, the probability of it getting stuck increases. &nbsp;Overnight, airlines have a chance to recover – late planes finally get their destinations and operations groups can reassign planes.&nbsp; So while the last flight out can be a crap shoot, I rarely hit a delay on the first flight out.</li>\n 	<li><strong>Use Multiple Flight Tracking Apps</strong> — Use your smartphone to keep track of gate changes and flight delays. Sign up for text notifications from your airline when you book your ticket. However, &nbsp;I’ve often experienced long delays with the airlines’ services or notices that were never sent out. So I also use <a href=\"http://tripit.com/\">TripIt</a>, <a href=\"http://flightaware.com/\">FlightAware</a>, and <a href=\"http://flightstats.com\">FlightStats</a>. It means multiple notices, but it also means I don’t miss anything.</li>\n 	<li><strong>Use Twitter as a Concierge Service</strong> — Most airlines have social media teams monitoring Twitter. Before you leave, find and follow your airline’s Twitter customer service account. “At naming” them in a Tweet (e.g., “<a dir=\"ltr\" href=\"https://twitter.com/united\">@united</a> what’s happening with UA 4286 MSY-ORD that it’s 1:45 hr delayed?”) usually gets a response in a couple of minutes. Following them allows you to exchange personal information such as record locator numbers via direct message (DM). It’s usually faster than queuing up for a frazzled gate agent and the results can be better.</li>\n</ol>\nBut above all, be realistic. It’s gonna be a zoo. Steel yourself; get your inner karma tuned for it. Pack a snack and a book, and practice deep cleansing breaths.','Top 10 Holiday Travel Tips','','inherit','closed','closed','','1682-revision-v1','','','2021-09-29 08:15:39','2021-09-29 13:15:39','',1682,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3900',0,'revision','',0),
(3901,1,'2021-09-29 08:17:12','2021-09-29 13:17:12','[caption id=\"attachment_1703\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/File_000.jpeg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1703\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/File_000-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Car trunks need carry-on luggage limits too[/caption]\n\nSeems like I\'ve been doing as much driving as flying since the last episode, so I\'ve switched from apps that track flight delays to those that help me dodge traffic backups. I talk, yet again, about buying pay-as-you-go SIMs while traveling, but the need to do that may be ending. And I\'ve reshuffled my carry-on luggage as the airlines have changed their rules. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_126.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #126:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, hoping that everyone had a Merry Christmas -- or Happy Christmas if you’re on the other side of the Atlantic -- Happy Hanukkah, and a Happy New Year. I’m personally in trying a combo Dry-ish and Sugar-Free January in an attempt to drop 10 lbs of holiday weight that managed to sneak on-board -- the downside, I guess, from staying off the road for the back half of December.</li>\n 	<li>I eased back into travel mode with my usual Charlottesville trip the first workday of the New Year. I didn’t mind it too much since Charlottesville was about 20 degrees warmer than Chicago. It was nice to walk outside with just a scarf and a tweed jacket.</li>\n 	<li>Between <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/11/22/podcast-125-uber-driver-stories-overseas-for-the-election/\">the last episode</a> and my Christmas travel break, I did almost as much driving as I did flying. I drove down to Nashville the Friday after Thanksgiving to see my mother. That drive wasn’t so bad, The Sunday drive back to Chicago, though was a whole ‘nother matter. Then that next week, I had meetings in Richmond, VA, Baltimore, and Charlottesville. I didn’t even bother to look at flight schedules. I knew nonstop RIC-BWI and a BWI-CHO flights were non-existent and the 2-2.5 hour drive time was within my fly-or-drive tipping point. Neither drives were bad. The only hassle was the Hertz rental car. Since it was a one-way rental -- I was picking up in RIC and dropping off in CHO -- they gave me a beater car, an older Jeep Patriot that I think was the only car on their lot without Bluetooth, which made listening to podcasts or doing phone calls a bit less convenient.</li>\n 	<li>It did give me a chance to explore Baltimore and Charlottesville a bit more than usual, though. On my past visits, I wouldn’t bother with a rental; would just taxi in from the airport, and then walk or Uber to places. But with the beater Jeep, I could wander with a bit more range. In Baltimore, I drove around the Fells Point neighborhood, ending up in the <a href=\"http://www.thamesstreetoysterhouse.com/\">Thames St Oyster House</a>, then threading through some waterfront areas that I had been a bit hesitant to walk through. In Charlottesville, I wandered through the countryside until I found <a href=\"http://starrhill.com/\">Starr Hill Brewery</a>. Kinda empty on a rainy Weds night, which meant the bartender had time to take me through a flight of her favorite beers. Maybe I’ve found the source of a few of those holiday pounds.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/THE_CONCEPT_OF_ENERGY/55008\">ABANDONED BUTTERFLIES</a> by THE_CONCEPT_OF_ENERGY (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/\">Attribution</a> license. Ft: Doxent Zsigmond, Snowflake</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>I’ve talked a couple of times in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/09/28/podcast-124-craft-beer-hunting-i-hate-rick-steves/\">past episodes</a> about the benefits of buying a pay-as-you-go SIM when traveling internationally -- $20 for a GB of data vs. AT&amp;T’s $60 for 300 MB is easy math. The only hassle is buying the SIM. First, you have to find the phone store, which can be a bit of an Easter Egg hunt. Back in November, our first day in Italy was in Pisa. We land, get the car, and head to the city center to find the phone store. However, the easiest one to get to was closed -- at 1 in the afternoon. Luckily, the next closest one was only a 10-minute walk and it was open. This time, I’d done my research before we left, purchased the SIMs online, and had printed out vouchers with bar codes, and instructions in English and Italian. I was ready for a quick and easy transaction. And yet again, I was wrong. The clerk knew nothing about the vouchers, didn’t know how to process them, and had to call around to other shops to figure it out. And then, each of the SIMs had to be registered and activated. Over an hour later, we’re sprinting out of the shop so we can make our time slot to get into the Leaning Tower -- which we’d also pre-paid. And this was a pretty typical experience. Which was why I was really excited a telecoms industry consultant told me that the virtual SIM, or the e-SIM was getting close to launch. Apple took the first crack at this back in 2014, but it’s been a slow ramp up. The iPhone 7 I picked up back in Sept still has the classic SIM. But this guy was telling me that going SIM-less is just about possible. He said it’ll be like signing into a WiFi hotspot. The next time I land in Italy and turn on my phone, I’ll be presented with a sign-in screen where I’ll be able to select my carrier and plan, and charge it to my credit card. Now given how wonky some WiFi gateways are, I’m not sure that this is the best comparison to sell me on the service, but if it saves me a couple of hours of frustration when I’m at my most jet lagged, I’ll figure it out.</li>\n 	<li>My age odometer clicked over again last month -- which I guess is a good thing, because if it didn’t click over, I be… dead. So, unless I find that Dorian Grey portrait at a garage sale, getting older is better than the alternative. I try not to let it bother me -- with varying levels of success. One thing, though, this does frustrate me is the need to bring my glasses into hotel bathrooms with me. Because it seems just as my reading vision is deteriorating, hotels are reducing the type size on their shampoo and conditioner bottles. As they try to go upscale with their toiletries, the bottle designers are taking the regular sized fancy labels into Photoshop and shrinking them down to fit on the front of a much smaller bottle, resulting is minuscule type that I might’ve been challenged to read in my 20’s let alone now. So my drill is to wear my glasses into the bathroom, figure out which bottle is shampoo, which is conditioner, and which is soap (or shower gel as they call it), and then line them up in order on the soap dish in the shower. Then take my glasses off, turn on the water, and hope that my lined up bottles don’t fall. The Hyatt Place that I stay at in Charlottesville is one of the few that doesn’t require this drill. They have a big “1” printed on the shampoo -- it runs about ¾’s the length of the bottle -- and a big “2” printed on the conditioner. And they’re in different colors. No need for glasses there. I love that hotel.</li>\n 	<li>It’s accepted wisdom that the most disgusting place on an airplane is the seat back pocket, and it just keeps getting worse. As airlines try to tighten up their ground turns -- how long a plane is on the ground before it takes off again -- the amount of time the cabin clean-up crew has to do its job continues to shrink. I was reminded of this by a Chicago Tribune article right before Thanksgiving when many airport workers -- cabin cleaners, baggage handlers, wheelchair attendants -- threatened to strike during that busiest travel week. The reporter interviewed a cabin cleaner who recently moved to Chicago from San Juan, PR. She said her crew of four are given 7 minutes to clean the cabin; no where near enough time to clean up all the crumbs, spilled drinks, and wrappers ground into the carpet, let alone time to clear the junk people leave in the seat back pocket. \"I don\'t know what is wrong with passengers nowadays,” she said. I won’t even pull out the safety card when I’m sitting in the exit row. A buddy told me a story about flying Tunisair from Brussels to Tunis many years ago. After the meal service, when people were done eating, they just shoved their trays into the seat back pocket. I’m not sure it’s all that different today.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/snowflake/46164\">A Foolish Game</a> by snowflake (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/\">Attribution (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Admiral Bob</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Beating The Traffic</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>As I mentioned earlier, I’ve done a bunch of travel by car lately. I talked in the last episode about driving through Tuscany. I was pleasantly surprised when Hertz upgraded us to an Alfa Romeo sports car, but when we had to drive through the rutted dirt back roads outside of Greve in Chianti, I was left wanting for something with a bit more ground clearance.</li>\n 	<li>The Thanksgiving drive down to Nashville was a lot smoother. They finally finished the years of construction expanding the I-80/94 constriction point around Lake Michigan in Northwest Indiana, and the traffic from there to I-65 south flowed smoothly. We made good enough time to make a couple of beer stops -- in Columbus, IN at a new Upland Brewing restaurant, and in downtown Louisville at Against The Grain Brewing.</li>\n 	<li>The drive back would be a whole other matter -- and I knew it and dreaded it. We drove down on that Friday, sailing through downtown Indy, Louisville, and Nashville because everyone was on vacation or shopping. Driving back Sunday though, we were right in the thick of the busiest travel day in the US. And while I always avoid flying on this day, I had managed to put myself on one of the US’s main north-south interstates. It would’ve only been worse if we’d been on the East Coast driving I-95 or the Jersey Turnpike. And it was the beat-down that I’d expected. The start of the drive out of Nashville was fine, and a bit pretty, going through rolling hills up to Louisville. The traffic was steady, but flowing. But we kept picking up more traffic as we headed north. We took a break in Indy this time, stopping off at Sun King Brewing right off the interstate, and then coffee-d up at a nearby Starbucks. North of Indy was when it really hit -- more and more cars and trucks heading up to Chicago, but still just 2 lanes. And so when the inevitable accident happened -- as it did many times that Sunday -- closing down one of those lanes, cutting the already clogged road by 50%, Waze became, if not a life saver, a time saver. I was running 3 nav systems, Waze, Google Maps, and the in-dash BMW nav. All had real-time traffic, but Waze seemed to be the quickest in sensing the need for a reroute. A couple of times that Sunday, it would direct us to take the next exit after traffic had stopped, and would vector us around the bottleneck and back onto the interstate, saving us 15-20 minutes of crawling and at least 70 points of increased blood pressure. I did skip the recommended diversion through the south side of Chicago, though. Given the record number of shootings in Chicago, stop-and-go traffic didn’t seem quite the burden that it did in rural Indiana.</li>\n 	<li>The next week’s triangulation across Richmond, Baltimore, and Charlottesville found me on I-95 having to make 2 passes around Washington, DC on the Capital Beltway, always a brutal 8-lane chokepoint. Heading up from Richmond Tuesday night, Google Maps told me to take the clockwise/west route around DC while Waze told me to go east. Odd since Google owns both. A friend said that he researched this a bit and found some articles claiming that Waze’s algorithm weighs current information more than historical trends; Google Maps tips the scales the other way. I don’t know if this is true -- I haven’t been able to find anything that says this -- but I often see different rush hour recommendations. Since Waze served me well on Thanksgiving Sunday, I went east and took the counterclockwise path around. It was a rainy night, but traffic flowed better than I expected and I made it to Baltimore in time for an oyster dinner.</li>\n 	<li>In spite of juggling nav apps, I found that I was more productive driving from Richmond to Baltimore to Charlottesville than I would’ve flying. You’d think it would be the other way around, but lack of direct flights would’ve mean going up and down, connecting through Washington Dulles. And on those few minutes I might be able to work, full planes and tight seats make it seem almost anti-social to try to open a laptop. On my 3-hour drive from Baltimore to Charlottesville, though, I was able to hammer through 2 conference calls and an unhurried, wide-ranging conversation with my boss. He called me. I told him that I was having a nice drive through Virginia horse country. “Good,” he said, “I have you captive.”</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/49674\">H2O</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Having to Think about Carry-on Luggage</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>I don’t usually think a lot about packing or luggage. And sometimes I think that puts me in the minority of frequent travelers. I know guys who obsess over their Tumi bags and specific packing systems. I used a grey Samsonite roller until the New Orleans sidewalks beat the wheels out to a 30 degree splay, and then I went back to my old black Victorinox with customs stickers from Thailand and Vietnam.</li>\n 	<li>However, a few things in 2016 got me thinking about carry-ons -- my carry-on experience with Wow Air in Iceland that I talked about in an earlier episode where I had to pull out half my clothes to meet the weight restrictions; my daughter’s light blue carry-on catching the eye of seemingly every gate agent she tried to pass, being forced to check it, and then having it lost 75% of her flights in 2016; and most recently, enduring long and often cold waits on a jet bridge waiting for my “valet checked” carry-on bag when flying regional jets</li>\n 	<li>Starting from last to first, this regional jet thing kills me. It used to be that gate checking for a commuter flight wasn’t a big thing -- the bag would be waiting for you on the jet bridge before you got off the plane. Now, as regional jets have gotten larger, they put the gate checked luggage in the same hold with the regular checked luggage, the only differentiating factor being the tag they put on at the gate. I’m typically waiting around 10 minutes with 40-50 other passengers, lined up on one side of an unheated jet bridge leaning over to see if my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/File_000.png\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1708\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/File_000-169x300.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"169\" height=\"300\" /></a>bag has come up yet. It’s gotten bad. On some of the larger Embraer jets flown by JetBlue, the overhead bins are large enough for regular bags, but on most of the regionals, you’re standing in that jet bridge line. After a while, this got real old, so I scrounged around through the old luggage in the attic to find a smaller duffel for 1-2 night trips that would fit in the overhead. I found a black nylon duffel from a 2007 National Retail Foundation tech conference that was an attendee giveaway. It had all the sponsors names stenciled across it -- Oracle, Infosys. I kinda felt like a Nascar racer. But it did the job. I could squish it into the small overheads of the regional jets and so walk past the line of folks waiting for the “valets” to bring their luggage. But it still looked cheesy. So when I was in Italy in November, I kept my eye out for a nice leather bag. One rainy day in Florence - not unique on that trip -- we dove into a covered outdoor market. Wandering through the stalls, I found a beautiful leather bag for 100 euros. My wife pointed to a bag the next size up -- “Don’t you want this bigger one? It’s only 20 euros more.” Nope, that would defeat the whole purpose. I posted a picture of that bag on Twitter. Every time I walk up the ORD jet bridge when returning home from Charlottesville, I love that bag even more.</li>\n 	<li>I remember when I first started traveling, you’d never see a hard-sided carry-on. Now it seems at least 30% of the carry-ons are hard-sided. I think a lot of it is fashion -- they come in much cooler designs and colors, but there is some functionality to them. If you’re flying an airline that’s aggressively using a baggage sizer, it’s much easier to stay legal with a hard-sided bag. You can’t overstuff them to bulging like you can a soft-sided bag, and the polycarbonate shell slips much easier in and out of the metal baggage sizer. This is why I suggested to my daughter that she start using a hard-sided bag. And in a bit more muted color -- something that wouldn’t grab the gate agent’s eye.</li>\n 	<li>But if you’re working against weight limits as well as dimensions, like I was with Wow Air, you want the lightest, most stripped down bag possible. I haven’t experienced a carry-on weight limit in the US. Some US carriers post a 35 or 40 lb limit -- even Spirit is at 40 lbs -- but I’ve never seen a gate agent weigh a carry-on. The international carriers are where this comes in. Wow Air’s carry-on size dimensions are about the same as US carriers, but their weight limit is much less -- 10 kg or 22 lbs -- which seems like the consensus number for non-US carriers. In this case, you don’t want the extra weight of the hard siding. You probably don’t even want very sturdy wheels; just the lightest covering around your clothes that you can get. I know guys who’ll brag that they can fit everything they own into 2 suitcases. These guys are obviously aren’t doing carry-on.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #126</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/\">ccMixter.org</a></li>\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_126.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #126 — Beating the Traffic; Rethinking Carry-On Luggage','','inherit','closed','closed','','1697-revision-v1','','','2021-09-29 08:17:12','2021-09-29 13:17:12','',1697,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3901',0,'revision','',0),
(3902,1,'2021-09-29 08:18:04','2021-09-29 13:18:04','[caption id=\"attachment_1722\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/IMG_0215a.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1722\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/IMG_0215a-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Last generation digital security[/caption]\n\nIn this episode, I talk again about digital security on the road, especially the use of a VPN. I review three VPN products, including <a href=\"http://nordvpn.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">NordVPN</a> which is giving away a year\'s subscription to a TravelCommons listener. I dig into the process of generating the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/12/12/top-10-holiday-travel-tips-2/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Top 10 Holiday Travel Tips</a> listicle I do every couple of year, and follow up on stories from Uber and Lyft drivers. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_127.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #127:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, in the midst of my third straight week at home. It is yet another sign of the impending apocalypse. All just can’t be right with the world - the office manager is nervous that I’m in the office for days in a row, my friends are shocked that I’m available during the week for a beer, my wife is tired of cooking dinner for me, and the cat is visibly pissed (in his own kitty way) that I’m taking up space on the couch. But, I am getting current on my doctor and dentist appointments, and I was able to get a haircut in a timely manner. Though these may seem little things, they can be a pain to get done when you’re traveling every week, and weekend appointments are a scarce commodity. Convenient, if not a bit boring.</li>\n 	<li>It also means I’ve missed 1 Delta and 2 United system outages and the associated ground-stops and cancellations, as well as getting stranded in last weekend’s East Coast winter storm. Those of you who follow me on Twitter have got to be happy about the lull in bitch tweeting.</li>\n 	<li>And I’ve also been around to provide real-time advice and counsel to my wife as she’s been planning our family spring break trip -- this year we’re skipping the Iberian Peninsula and going to Paris. I’m not sure how much she really appreciates my immediate reactions, but…. The house is awash with guidebooks -- except, of course, for Rick Steves. I pulled out the 2016 review copy of <a href=\"https://www.dk.com/us/9781465440839-top-10-paris/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">DK’s Top 10 Paris</a>, the credenza looks like my wife cleared out the local library, and we have print outs of a bunch of web pages. I dunno,I guess I’m a visual and tactile person. When I’m trying to wrap my head around a bunch of disparate data sources, I still have to go physical -- print it out and spread it out. Or maybe this is just a fancy way to say I’m old.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Javolenus/41932\">Ianiscus</a> by Javolenus (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/\">Attribution (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Wired_Ant</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Just a heads up, I’ll be announcing a new giveaway later on in this episode. And since I can’t figure out how to create MP3 chapter marks in Adobe Audition, you’ll have listen all the way through.</li>\n 	<li>Rummaging through the mailbag…\n<ul>\n 	<li>Dan Gradwohl dropped me a line agreeing with my complaint in the last episode about the small print size on most hotel shampoo and conditioner bottles. And, like me, he like Hyatt Place’s solution -- print a big “1” on the shampoo, a big “2” on the conditioner, and a big “3” on the shower gel. No need then to wear your reading glasses in the shower then. Dan also said that he “really liked” the music in the last episode. I can’t take credit for that. I outsourced the music search to my daughter Claire who was home for Winter Break. Since she received what may be the first positive comment about the music in 12 years, I asked her to to help me with this episode too.</li>\n 	<li>Long-time listener Robert Fenerty hit the TravelCommons website to comment on my pay-as-you-go SIM travails -- “Not many people are courageous enough to admit what a time sink it can be to find, purchase and setup a local SIM card. Sometimes it’s easy, the many Heathrow SIM vending machines being a great example. And Austria is a breeze. But outside of western countries, I’ve had to hand over my passport, stand in long lines, and try to explain “no, I need the one with data” to clerks whose language I don’t speak. Once I found out after leaving the store that my SIM was not properly initialized. Please go back to square one. The Verizon Travelpass is a great alternative for those 2-3 day trips. It’s often less expensive than the local SIM and it’s about as painless to enable/disable as you can imagine. Please keep up the good work, the beer tips, and the warm sentiments from the road. Your podcast has become an old friend that I have over for dinner every once in awhile.”</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Robert, thanks for that post. What a nice way of putting it -- the podcast becoming an old friend. I haven’t heard it put that way before, but it’s a huge compliment.</li>\n 	<li>Looking at SIMs for our Paris trip next month, the new upstart network provider sells their SIMs through vending machines, so I think I’ll skip the Orange phone store and give the new guys a try. I’m not a Verizon phone customer, but many of my Verizon-using friend swear by Travelpass as being dead-simple. AT&amp;T finally matched that offer last month with their International Day Pass -- $10/day and it looks about as simple. An AT&amp;T-using friend who’ll be on an Asian cruise next month plans to use it. And that seems to be a perfect use case -- he’ll be in a different country every day.</li>\n 	<li>One of things we’ll be working on before the Paris trip is not to forget anything critical when we leave for the airport. Many years ago, we get out of the cab at ORD’s International Terminal for a family trip to London. I’m pulling the bags out of the trunk ...and there’s one missing. I send my family through to check-in and boarding while I hop back into the cab to run back home. I open the front door, and there’s the forgotten bag in the middle of the hallway. We only live a 25-min drive from ORD and luckily there was no traffic, and I had status on Virgin Atlantic at the time. I made it to the gate just before boarding was called. That memory seared in our brains, we never make that mistake again… until Sept when we were heading over to Scotland. We’re in the cab and my wife asks me “Do you have my passport?” Nope, thought you had it. At least we figured this out before we hit the airport. The driver makes an illegal U-turn across the tollway media and we sprint back home to find the passport sitting on my desk. It was only a 15-min backtrack this time, so we still got to ORD in time to get a sandwich at Tortas Frontera. But it was a wake-up call -- never be complacent about stupidity.</li>\n 	<li>We were in San Francisco a few weekends back. Always an interesting time, especially with 80,000 people marching through the center of town on Saturday. We stayed at the Westin St Francis on Union Square -- decided to go old-school for the weekend. It rained most of the weekend, which emptied out the cab rank outside the St Francis, which meant we did more ride-shares and less walking. I have both Uber and Lyft on my phone, so I’d pop them both open and compare wait times and pricing. Even with the rain, the wait times rarely topped 3 min -- which is almost instantaneous in the traffic around Union Square. I was amazed at the number of animated cars swarming the area. Continuing my research from a couple of episodes ago, I’d talk with each driver about how their gig was going. I was surprised at the overwhelming preference for Lyft over Uber. Lyft pays more than Uber, they said. Many said they only take Uber rides when they think they can hit Uber’s incentive bonuses. If not, they tend to Lyft. And they said the Lyft riders tended to be nicer, more considerate. Since I was using both apps, I didn’t quite know what to make of that. Our Sunday morning driver told us he drives solely for Lyft; he quit after Uber trialed driverless cars in San Francisco. He said it was just another proof point that Uber doesn’t care about its drivers. We ended up taking mostly Lyft that weekend.</li>\n 	<li>This echoed what I’d heard from an Uber and Lyft driver in Charlottesville, VA last month. This guy was a super driver -- he’d done 85,000 miles last year. He also preferred Lyft because they paid more, but said that he gets more rides from Uber. He lives in Charlottesville, but heads over to Richmond to drive when UVa is on break. He was planning to head up to DC for inauguration weekend, figuring the surge pricing would make it worth his while. I’ve never talked to anyone who is working the system as hard as this guy.</li>\n 	<li>Back home, telling our son Andrew about all this, he came down firmly on Uber’s side, because Uber can’t cancel a ride. He’s had too many Chicago Lyft drivers cancel on him. He deleted the<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/2017-02-20-08.37.43.png\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1729\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/2017-02-20-08.37.43-169x300.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"169\" height=\"300\" /></a> Lyft app off his phone and is exclusively Uber.</li>\n 	<li>Last month, I was back flying one of my usual routes from the ‘90’s -- ORD-DTW -- complete with the original aircraft -- an AA MD-80. That 2-3 cabin configuration and the what-now-seem-like half-height overhead bins. At least it was an original American MD-80, not one of TWA ones they held onto after that merger. The AA ones are actually not a bad plane if you’re toward the front, away from the engines in the back. They seem to have more rows of extra leg room Main Cabin Extra seats than the newer A319s and 320s. At some point during the flight, my row mate looks down at my phone and asks “How are you charging your phone? There aren’t any plugs here”. She was kinda right -- no regular two-prong AC plugs. But I knew from years of flying these planes (I first started flying American in 1985 -- when these MD-80s were in their prime), that down between the seats, I’d find an old cigarette lighter outlet. And I still carry a lighter power adapter for that 10% of the time Hertz sticks me with a beater rental that doesn’t have a USB plug -- or for times like this when I’m flying AA’s beater plane.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/48914\">In Peace (Somewhere Else Mix)</a> by cdk (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/\">Attribution (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Snowflake</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Critiquing my Top 10 Travel Tips</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Every couple of years, I bow to the search engine gods at Google and create a listicle -- an awful mashup word of list and article. They’re kinda click-baity. You see them on places like Mashable -- “Top 10 Ways to Hack Your Morning Routine” or “The 10 most cringeworthy advertising fails of 2015” (I didn’t make these up). But they exist because people search for them. So in December when my last listicle has rolled off the front page of TravelCommons, I create another one titled just like the last one -- “Top 10 Holiday Travel Tips”. And how do they score? When I searched just now for “Top 10 Holiday Travel Tips”, a Google+ posting for my 2013 edition made the first page of results -- albeit the last entry -- and last December’s, the most recent, made the top of the second page. Not too bad…</li>\n 	<li>When I write each new edition, I do try to think about what are today’s top 10 rather than just blindly copy-pasting the last post, although there is a good chunk of repetition -- “Fly Non-Stop” and “Skip the Tight Connection” are as valid today as they were 12 years ago when I started this podcast.\nThough they might also seem a bit obvious to even a slightly seasoned traveler. So I also have tried to weave in a few, if not Pro Tips, then at least a next level of insight. In 2013, I suggested buying status for the lead adult in the travel party. The rationale went like this -- for $20, you can take your whole family through the status security line and early boarding because I’ve never seen a security screener or gate agent split up a family.<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/2017-02-20-08.37.58.png\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1728\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/2017-02-20-08.37.58-169x300.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"169\" height=\"300\" /></a></li>\n 	<li>I’ve also consistently recommended that people use Twitter as an alternate way into customer service, “at addressing” an airline or hotel as a way to jump what might be a long queue in front of a gate agent or front-desk clerk. I don’t think a lot of folks realize the sophistication and focus that many companies put on monitoring social media. My tweet about that American MD-80 generated a quick reply from American -- “We\'re currently working on updating our fleet, Mark…” And while not exactly travel-related, AT&amp;T has now followed up with me twice over Twitter about a cellular service problem I was having last week. I gave this advice to a friend who called me from ORD on Christmas Day. Korean Air wouldn’t let him and his family board their flight to Hanoi because they didn’t have Vietnamese visas -- a new requirement that had just hit a couple of days earlier. They couldn’t find anyone to help them. Between the “at” Tweeting and sheer persistence, they finally found a way to get on the plane.</li>\n 	<li>I used to have “bring a portable battery pack” -- like a lipstick charger -- or a small power strip on my list because of the dearth of electrical outlets in airports. One listener recommended stalking cleaning crews to find hidden outlets. But now -- finally -- with long overdue gate area refreshes, airlines are adding accessible outlets -- either in new work areas or power “pylons” sponsored by Samsung or Verizon. So while I still carry a battery pack and often find it useful, it’s fallen out of the Top 10.</li>\n 	<li>Back in 2014, I did break it up a bit. Instead of a classic “Top 10” listicle, I offered Airport Etiquette tips -- things like “when traveling with your family, don’t stroll 4 abreast down the concourse” and “the airport Starbucks isn’t like your neighborhood one; keep your coffee order to 3 adjectives or less”. That article is nowhere to be found on the Google search page.</li>\n 	<li>What is the top travel pro tip that you’re handing out to your friends? Sending one in will be part of the giveaway I’ll announce in the next topic.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music --<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/35724\">Blue Like Venus</a> by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/\">Attribution (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Admiral Bob</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Reviewing VPNs</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/12/20/podcast-119-digital-security-on-the-road-us-airports-getting-better/\">episode #119</a>, I talked about digital security on the road, and the topic has turned into a persistent thread across episodes, which makes sense given the Chinese water torture-type steady drip, drip, drip of cyber breach announcements. Frequent travelers could be considered a high risk group because, being away from their homes and offices, heavily rely on public networks -- airports, hotels, Starbucks -- to work (and play) in today’s digitized -- what, economy, society, street corner?</li>\n 	<li>VPNs -- virtual private networks -- have two main use cases for the frequent traveler -- privacy on public networks and location shifting. VPNs accomplish these by altering the routing of the network traffic in and out of your PC, tablet or smartphone. What you’re putting out onto the Internet is encrypted so eavesdroppers -- like the guy wearing the hoodie in the dark corner of the Starbucks (to truck in stereotypes) running a packet sniffer -- can’t read what you’re browsing or e-mailing. And then the VPN routes your encrypted traffic to that it looks like you’re using the Internet from a different location -- what’s called the VPN “endpoint”</li>\n 	<li>So how much privacy do you really need, and is it worth the additional hassle of using a VPN? Like everything, it depends. Being a consultant, you’ll forgive me for giving into my reflex of distilling it down to a 2x2 matrix -- on what you’re doing, and how paranoid you are. In the low paranoid/high privacy need box I put things like on-line banking and filling out your Global Entry app. Lots of personal information there that you don’t want Mr Hoodie to hoover up and post on some dark web hacking site. In the low privacy need/high paranoid box, I’d put reading Mashable listicles or browsing porn site -- embarrassing if someone posted that info on your Facebook page, but they couldn’t drain your bank account.</li>\n 	<li>The location shifting use case -- I’m in Beijing but the Internet thinks I’m in Chicago -- only really comes into play for international travelers. Like when I’m in Madrid but wanting to stream the NCAA basketball tournament, or when my daughter in Scotland wants to watch “Friends” reruns (don’t ask me why) which is only on US Netflix. I also use VPNs whenever I’m in Beijing to hit Facebook and Twitter which are blocked by the “Great Firewall of China”.</li>\n 	<li>I looked at two highly rated software VPNs -- <a href=\"https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Private Internet Access</a> (PIA) and <a href=\"https://nordvpn.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">NordVPN</a> -- and a Kickstarter hardware-based VPN, <a href=\"http://www.homingsystems.com/alwayshome-duo\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">AlwaysHome</a>, that I reviewed last fall in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/09/28/podcast-124-craft-beer-hunting-i-hate-rick-steves/\">episode #124</a>.</li>\n 	<li>PIA and NordVPN are quick to set up -- go to their website, buy a subscription (promotions change all the time, but when I’m writing this, PIA has discounted their annual subscription to $40 while NordVPN’s is at $79), download, install and run their software (VPN client), pick a VPN endpoint (which country do you want the Internet to think you’re coming from), and off you go. And the next time you access the Internet, you need to remember to start the client and pick an endpoint, unless you set the client to start automatically each time you log in.</li>\n 	<li>AlwaysHome, the hardware VPN, takes a bit more planning. You need to buy a pair of USB dongles and a service subscription (right now $180 for the dongles and a year’s service), plug one into your home router, and then take the second with you in your laptop bag.</li>\n 	<li>I tested the software VPNs on three platforms -- a Windows 10 PC hardwired into a network, a Samsung tablet running Android 6.0.1 (Marshmallow) on WiFi, and an iPhone 7 running iOS 10.2 on WiFi and AT&amp;T LTE mobile data.</li>\n 	<li>I first looked at performance -- how much speed was I giving up for the additional encryption and routing that gives me privacy? The Windows PC had the lowest penalty -- both VPNs cut upload and download speeds by about 6%. They also the same on the iPhone on WiFi, though the download penalty increased to 11%. Don’t know if this is an iOS limitation or something else. On the Samsung Android tablet on WiFi, NordVPNs download was on par with Windows PC -- about 6% on downloads -- while PIA was 25% slower on downloads. This one has to be marked down to PIA’s Android client.</li>\n 	<li>The really interesting result was on the iPhone on AT&amp;T’s LTE service. The download penalty on LTE was around 83% for both NordVPN and PIA. Must have something to do with AT&amp;T’s LTE service. And while interesting, it probably has the least practical value. Other than triple-paranoid people, I’m not sure why someone would tack a VPN onto their cellular connection.</li>\n 	<li>Accessing US Netflix from abroad is kinda the acid test for location shifting. Netflix, prompted by their content suppliers, has been the most aggressive service in blocking VPN endpoints; blocking people from outside the US streaming content that Netflix has only licenses in the US. I asked my daughter Claire, who’s at University of St Andrews in the UK, to test each VPN with her Netflix “Friends” test. PIA failed; Netflix served up its “blocked” screen. NordVPN let her log into US Netflix, though she said the connection was slow; probably the result of the lousy BT service coming into her flat over a chip shop. AlwaysHome did the best -- no Netflix blocking because it looks like she’s logging in from our house, and the best connection over the BT service because the AlwaysHome hardware lets it do accelerate network traffic in a way that the software VPNs can’t.</li>\n 	<li>I also asked Claire for her thoughts on the NordVPN and PIA software clients. She liked the NordVPN client better -- more graphic, easier to understand. The PIA client is a bit more stripped down. But she also liked that, with the AlwaysHome VPN, she didn’t have to install any software -- just connect to its WiFi.</li>\n 	<li>Sorting it all out, it you want an easy VPN solution that allows you to use Netflix when you’re overseas, go with NordVPN. If you want the cheapest solution that’s a bit more stripped down and you’re not running Android, then go with PIA. If you want the best Netflix experience from, say, a vacation rental that doesn’t require you to navigate WiFi login pages and you can plan a couple of weeks ahead, try AlwaysHome.</li>\n 	<li><em>NordVPN provided me a free month of their VPN service for testing purposes. I purchased a PIA subscription with my own money. Homing Systems sent me a AlwaysHome Duo free of charge for me to review. I was not paid for this review. The opinions expressed in this episode are my own. </em></li>\n 	<li>Now, for the giveaway. NordVPN has given me a year’s subscription to give away to one lucky TravelCommons listener. Go to the TravelCommons website and check out the top post to enter the raffle. It’ll be open for 10 days from the posting of this episode -- which, if I have my calendar math right, is March 2. Come by the website and enter for a shot to be more cyber-secure for a year. And thanks to the folks at NordVPN for this giveaway.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #127</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/\">ccMixter.org</a></li>\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_127.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #127 — Critiquing My Top 10 Travel Tips; Reviewing VPNs','','inherit','closed','closed','','1723-revision-v1','','','2021-09-29 08:18:04','2021-09-29 13:18:04','',1723,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3902',0,'revision','',0),
(3903,1,'2021-09-29 08:19:39','2021-09-29 13:19:39','[caption id=\"attachment_1749\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/IMG_0033.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1749\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/IMG_0033-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> One of the Four Major Food Groups[/caption]\n\nIt\'s a very Paris-centric episode; I\'m still trying to drop the weight I picked up on our 10-day stay. I talk about hunts for beer and pastry took us out of the usual Notre Dame-to-Eiffel Tower-to-Louvre tourist triangle, some of the interesting buskers we saw along the way, and my surprise at Munich Airport receiving an airport award. I also continue our on-going discussions about buying international SIM cards and ride-sharing. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_128.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #128:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, after a full month of travel. I’m not complaining though, because -- first, I had been home, off the road, for 4 weeks straight and was beginning to make the place look untidy; and then more than a week of this travel spurt was in Paris, on vacation with the family. Tough to complain about travel with your mouth full of great food and wine. And mine certainly was. I’m not even looking at a scale for another 2 weeks.</li>\n 	<li>In what’s become our usual pattern for European trips, we flew out on a Thursday night. This works out well because typically Friday is a catch-up day at work -- more about internal conference calls than client work -- so it’s easier to skip out, and then landing on a Friday, more places are open -- like rental agency offices, phone stores -- if you need them. My wife and I flew into Paris and had a 3-star Michelin lunch to chase away jet lag, while the kids met up in Edinburgh for the weekend and lived off of beer and haggis. They then hopped one of the budget carriers to CDG Sunday night and managed to figure out the train well enough to land at the doorstep of our vacation rental on Rue de Rivoli, a bridge and a couple of blocks straight up from Notre Dame. My wife has this whole vacation rental thing down to a near science. I think I need to nag her into writing it up in a post for the TravelCommons web site.</li>\n 	<li>In the travel build-up to the Paris trip, another usual pattern; this one involves a bit more stupid travel -- bouncing across multiple clients and cities, to give everyone face-time before I disappear for a week; I found myself in Miami for a couple of days. I flew American back home to Chicago Friday night, and I guess because I was going between two of their hubs, I ended up on one of American’s international 767’s. Now, I typically despise 767’s because the overhead bins are way undersized. But, it was one of the best domestic upgrades I’ve scored. First, because between First and Business class, there’s a whole lot more seat for an upgrade. And then, this 767’s business class had been upgraded, so I had my own “pod” with a lie-flat seat and a 20-something inch screen -- much bigger than the screen smaller than my hand that I tweeted from the United 767 I took from ORD to CDG. Made for a very comfortable 3-hr flight.</li>\n 	<li>But back to Paris, the trip went without a hitch -- the strong dollar made an expensive a city a little less so, the weather was great for March -- sunny, a bit brisk. I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to get around with just English. I know I’m a language sloth, and while I didn’t expect it, I was happy not to have to struggle through with my minimal French. Indeed, the only smirch on trip was at the very end. We landed at ORD after 7pm, after half of Immigration shut down. The resulting lines were insane; Security was walking planeloads of people from the other side of the international terminal to our side and to the back of our line. They were shouting for all US citizens to get stand to the left of the hallway. After about 10 minutes of this, I asked a security person about Global Entry. “Oh, go this way,” she said and pointed down an empty line. We bolted, and were out after another 5 minutes. Customs should’ve had a guy walking that line taking Global Entry applications. They would’ve made a killing.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://www.magnatune.com/artists/albums/rompaey-mozaic/\">Bubbly</a></em> by Ruben van Rompaey</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>First up, a belated Thank You to iTunes user <em>California flying</em> for the 5-star review back in January:\n<ul>\n 	<li>“As a project manager with lots of travel thrown in, I really enjoy hearing Mark’s travel tales and can very much relate to his insight and observations. It’s an easy and fun listen. Just wish it was more frequent!”</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Thanks for taking the time to write that review. I’m glad you enjoy the podcast. I am trying on the frequency. This will be 3 straight months of episodes, so we’re starting 2017 in the right way.</li>\n 	<li>In the last episode, after deconstructing my own Top 10 travel tips list, I asked for listener contributions. Dan wrote this on the TravelCommons web site\n<ul>\n 	<li>“My biggest travel tip right now to my friends is get Nexus! Not only is it great when coming or going to the US (we live in Canada), but it gets you TSA Precheck while in the US which is great to have.”</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Good tip, Dan. As a US citizen, I’m still a bit confused on the Global Entry vs. Nexus choice. But anything that lets you skip Immigration lines and keep from having to disrobe in the security line is a good thing.</li>\n 	<li>Dan Brener and Max Flight both hit the TravelCommons’ Facebook page to say they found the VPN comparison in the last episode useful. Dan said that he also uses PIA and has found that, sometimes, Netflix will let it connect -- which I mentioned is kinda the acid test for location shifting. Dan says it is a bit hit-&amp;-miss though.</li>\n 	<li>Continuing the thread from the past couple of episodes on buying pay-as-you-go-SIMs when overseas, my Paris experiences were a mixed bag. On that first Friday, between picking up the apartment keys and heading to the George V for lunch, I wanted to pick up at least one SIM so we’d have some connectivity. I walked to nearest Orange store -- about 3 blocks down Rue de Rivoli. They didn’t have any regular prepaid SIMs in stock; only the special Holiday SIM which had inter-EU calling which I didn’t need and, at 40 euros, was more than I needed to pay. This became a common refrain. Every company-owned Orange and SFR store I visited was out of prepaid SIMs. Only what appeared to be a franchised Orange store in the bottom of the big underground shopping mall at Les Halles had them, and also very friendly service. That got us through the weekend. On Monday, after another string of Orange stiff arms, we walked up to the main Free store -- which I think sells TV as well as mobile service. We walked up to a vending machine in the lobby and pretty quickly had two more SIMs; a much better buying experience except for the fact that the store was inconveniently tucked away down a bland business street north of the Champs Elysee. I’ll be glad when the eSIM gets market traction.</li>\n 	<li>And continuing another thread, this one on Uber, while I regularly use Uber and Lyft in the US, I rarely -- if ever -- use them while traveling in Europe. I got to thinking about this while in Paris when, on Saturday when heading to the airport, we chose to roll the luggage to a taxi rank rather than use Uber. It’s a couple of reasons. First, there doesn’t seem to be that much of a price difference between Uber and taxis. I first noticed this in Lisbon last spring and then again in Paris. Second, most taxis in Europe are not the beaters that many US cabs are. In the US, even at the same rate, I’ll often take Uber because the cars are in so much better shape. The cabs in Baltimore last summer were the most egregious case. There was a cab stand right outside the building I was in, but I’d still wait 5 minutes for an Uber. And third, and maybe the most nebulous (squishy?), I’m maybe a bit less comfortable getting into a ride-share in a country where I don’t know the language and am not confident that I’m solid on the customs and protocols. In the US, I know what’s right and what’s not. Even in the UK, I’m comfortable enough and don’t worry about communicating effectively with the driver. I know zero Portuguese and little more French. So I’m a bit more willing to search out a taxi stand.</li>\n 	<li>I was flipping through the online version of the UK’s Telegraph newspaper earlier this month and got clickbaited into a Top 10 Airport listicle from the 2017 Skytrax World Airport Awards. They had all the usual suspects at the top of the list -- Singapore, Seoul, Hong Kong -- but at #4, they had Munich! I was stunned because my last two experiences connecting through Munich -- last Nov en route to Pisa and this month on my way back from Paris -- were not great as my Twitter followers already know. Probably the worst thing are the lines, and how brutally slow they move. Back in episode #125, I described the security crawl when trying to connect to our Pisa flight mid-morning on a Friday. I was stunned how slow the security staff was moving. No sense of urgency as a dozen lines tailed back through the terminal. I thought a union had called for some job action. But then in March, it was a huge tailback off of passport control. I’m used to Frankfurt where you walk up, answer a question, boom-boom they stamp your passport and through you go. Not in Munich. It was that same meandering pace. Like the place was in slow motion. The same thing at the one restaurant we found in the satellite portion of Terminal 2. Four people were behind the counter. The line trying to ordering tailed back, but only one of the four was helping customers. The other three were having some conversation and doing some paperwork. So why did Skytrax rate Munich #4? Apparently, it has its own brewery, a mini-golf course, and in the winter, a Christmas market and an ice skating rink -- none of which I experienced while struggling through lines trying to make a connection. And maybe that’s the problem -- Munich is focused on being a shopping mall/entertainment center rather than being an airport. Planning a flight to Budapest in May, I was offered two connection choices -- Munich or Vienna. I didn’t even pause to think about it. choosing Vienna, even though it’s nowhere in that Skytrax list. I’m hoping they’ll work harder on getting me through the airport than grooming a mini-golf course.</li>\n 	<li>And finally, congrats to Frank Mohnhaupt for winning a year\'s subscription to NordVPN. Frank’s entry in the Rafflecopter drawing was subscribing to the TravelCommons’ SoundCloud feed. And thanks again to NordVPN for providing the giveaway prize.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/kokoon-berlin/\">How Do I Work This</a></em> by The Kokoon</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>The Hunt for Experiences</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>In Paris, that first weekend when it was just my wife and I -- the kids were hunting haggis in Edinburgh -- was spent a good chunk of the time on what I call “hunts”. We got up and out early on Saturday -- always a good way to fight jet lag -- hunting for a pastry. Not just any pastry, because in Paris, that would in no way qualify as a hunt. No, it was a specific kind of pastry -- a kugelhopf, a kind of a hat-shaped pastry. And not just any kugelhopf. We were tracking down Vandermeersch, which, according to an article my wife read in Saveur magazine, makes the best kugelhopf in Paris and usually sells out shortly after opening -- hence the early morning alarm. So off we go, using Google Maps to tell us the right combination of Metros to get us to the correct outer bit of Paris. We get there shortly after opening and had the full selection of kugelhopfs -- small, medium, large. The couple of nice middle-aged women running what was a small shop helped us to by 2 smalls -- one to eat right away; the second for Sunday morning -- and a medium for Monday morning for breakfast with the kids. We ate that small one fresh, on the street. I don’t know if it was the best kugelhopf because my sample size was (and still is) one, but it was a pretty damn good pastry and worth forgoing the snooze button the early alarm.</li>\n 	<li>Saturday afternoon, we went on my hunt -- for a microbrewery, in an even further out bit of Paris, that’s only open Saturday afternoons. And where our morning visit to Vandermeersch landed us in a seemingly upscale neighborhood where people were up early for the morning runs along the grass boulevard dividers, that afternoon, we walked up the Metro steps on the main street of a heavily North African neighborhood; definitely outside the tourist bubble. Walking across the park here -- no grass, just dirt.</li>\n 	<li>But walking into the microbrewery, off kind of a dodgy street, put us in the midst of what seemed to be the standard afternoon outing for Parisian hipster families. Mostly while families with little kids; lots of bikes and beers; everyone eating sandwiches sold by an artisanal baker who looked to be friends of the brewers (his t-shirt read (in English) “More Bakers, Less Bankers”). Nice people; great beer. But an interesting contrast with the surrounding neighborhood. Inside the brewery, I could’ve been in Brooklyn or Portland. Outside, on the main street, maybe Algiers.</li>\n 	<li>Good pastry, good beer, but the hunt -- searching out these experiences -- is as much it’s own reward. It gave us a reason, a goal, to get out of the travel bubble, off the well-trod Notre Dame-to-Eiffel Tower-to-Louvre tourist triangle. Not that we didn’t do that too -- we did -- but if that’s all we did, it would have been a bit disappointing. And that we did it on our own, rather than as part of some “Hipster Paris” tour, gives an added touch of accomplishment.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music --<em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/weigl-proof/\">Piano Circus</a></em> by Philipp Weigl</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Pop-Up Entertainment</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Toward the end of our week in Paris, heading out again from the normal tourist zone -- in search of a brew pub with my son this time; my wife and daughter were hunting Longchamps bags -- we get on the Metro to find a busker on our subway car, a tuba busker. He was an older guy wearing a slightly Tyrolean looking hat with a waist-high battery-powered speaker in front of him taped to a luggage wheelie type of cart and an orange donations can taped to the handle. The speaker played the backing track while he played the main melody on the tuba. After one song (which I can’t say that I recognized), he left the backing track playing while walking the car with his hand out for tips. I think he was on the car for 3 stops.</li>\n 	<li>On the way back, during one of the 18 stops back, another busker walked onto our car, a younger guy who turned out to be a rapping busker. He had the same speaker rig and the same cadence as the tuba player -- last guy in, stood in front of the door, powered up the back beat on the speakers, rapped out a song between stops, solicited money between the next stops, and then left the train.</li>\n 	<li>I also saw what I consider the more typical subway buskers -- playing guitar, or a double-bass in the connecting tunnels, taking advantage of the tile acoustics. A little less typical was a couple ating out an opera scene in a wider area where 2 or 3 tunnels came together. Not only were they singing opera (with tile-driven acoustics), they were acting out the scene -- the woman fleeing toward one tunnel only to have the man catch her and pull her back. It took just a moment to connect the singing to the action; to realize that this wasn’t an actual assault. It drew a bit of a crowd. I don’t know if this was real busking or just advertising an opera show, but it certainly got my attention.</li>\n 	<li>Later on, my son and I were walking in front of Notre Dame and heard another woman singing opera. It took us a minute to locate her. She had her back to a building on the north side of the plaza. It was another good acoustic location -- the echo off the building seem to amplify and project her voice across the open space in front of the cathedral. The police seem to keep a heavy presence here. We’d seen them earlier descend on a woman who was panhandling the folks standing in line to get into the cathedral. But this time, they let the woman finish up her aria before moving her along. Quite a change from Chicago’s bucket boys.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #128</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Magnatune</a></li>\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_128.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #128 — Hunt for Experiences; Pop-Up Entertainment','','inherit','closed','closed','','1747-revision-v1','','','2021-09-29 08:19:39','2021-09-29 13:19:39','',1747,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3903',0,'revision','',0),
(3904,1,'2021-09-29 08:20:40','2021-09-29 13:20:40','[caption id=\"attachment_1763\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/IMG_0887.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1763\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/IMG_0887-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Scottish Food Tourism can be an acquired taste[/caption]\n\nDifficult to do a travel podcast without talking about this month\'s incidents on United and American Airlines. The videos that hit social media were damning, but as more of the facts came out, the stories around each incident became more complex. On a much lighter note, we also talk about the explosion of food tourism, called by some \"The Bourdain Effect\" after Anthony Bourdain\'s TV travelogue series. Also, listener suggestions for visiting the Budapest baths, and compliments on the terminal improvements at San Francisco Airport (SFO). All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_129.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #129:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, taking a breather after a week of what I like to call “stupid travel” -- Mon, Tues in Charlottesville, VA, flying out Tues night to San Francisco by way of Charlotte because, well, that’s the way the connections worked. Spent Weds in San Francisco complete with a 4-5pm meeting which meant I got to SFO too late for the last reasonable flight to Detroit (I gave up red-eyes for Lent many years ago), so instead I caught the 7pm SFO-ORD flight, getting into ORD at 1am. Which meant I had to turn around the next morning, head back to ORD for a mid-morning flight to Detroit for an afternoon meeting in Ann Arbor. As we were driving out of DTW for Ann Arbor, I began to get texts from American that our return flight home was already delayed by thunderstorms at ORD. Later, looking out the window of the meeting room in Ann Arbor, I watched the rain bucket down. The delay made more sense. And it wasn’t a huge thing for me other than extending an already long week of travel by a couple of hours -- I had nothing planned that evening other than going to bed. Twitter followers should be pleasantly surprised by the lack of bitch tweets.</li>\n 	<li>And, I really didn’t think I could complain if this was the only delay in six flights that week. Although I did help my cause by connecting through Charlotte instead of ORD for my flight from Charlottesville to San Francisco. The ORD-SFO flight would’ve been an hour shorter, but the probability of making that connection, I think, would’ve been significantly lower. So instead, discretion being the better part of valor, I booked the connection through Charlotte in spite of the longer total trip duration and the incredibly long walks I typically have through that airport. The regional flights come into Concourse E which just goes on forever -- 35 gates just in that concourse -- while my connecting flights seem to always go out of Concourse A. Which means I’m usually race-walking the length of the airport even with an on-time arrival and a 60-minute connection time. However, on Tuesday night, my CHO-CLT flight got in early, I had a 90-minute connection time, and my flight went out Concourse B, which meant I had more than enough time to score some Carolina BBQ and a tall-boy beer -- a good luck trifecta which probably helped my patience with the Detroit delay two days later.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Vidian/52190\">Memories (infiniti loop)</a> by Vidian (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license. Ft: TheDice</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>First up, thanks to Robert Fenerty for sending along Budapest travel ideas. My wife’s parents were refugees from the 1956 uprising, so I’ve been to Hungary a few times -- the first in 1989 when it was still Communist, and then the last time was 11 or 12 years ago. So it’s been a while. On of Robert’s suggestions is heading to the Gellert Baths -- “My favorite,” he says, “Ornate lions dump water into the pool and you can stand beneath the lions.” I hit the Gellert Baths my first or second trip to Hungary. There wasn’t really any English spoken then by folks -- mostly German or Russian -- but I had done a “Hungarian on Tape” language course, had about a hundred word vocabulary, and so was able to manage buying a ticket and finding the locker room. Watching the old guys around me -- and it was just old guys -- I figured out that I was supposed to strip down and tie this little white apron around my waist and head in. You did feel like you were walking into the 1890’s. High ceilings, the spouting lions, old guys playing chess in the pools. I loved it. I told my son that’s it’s kind of a Hungarian onsen. We were both a little disappointed though when we saw on the Gellert website that the dress code had changed in four years ago -- no more single sex pools, no more aprons. It’s now co-ed with bathing suits required; as the website says “all bathers are expected to cover the most important gender essentials”.</li>\n 	<li>Chris Christensen sent in a quick note about the Munich airport -- “Munich does have its own brewery,” he said, “but it’s outside of security”. Lotta good that did me.</li>\n 	<li>And continuing on that riff from the last episode, wondering how travel guides are coming up with their top 10 airports, I have to say that SFO is not getting the credit it deserves. I think they’re doing the best job of any major US airport to remake themselves on the fly. First they build a new international terminal, then they rebuilt Terminal 2 into something that I think rivals Hong Kong or Singapore. They’ve done a great job renovating Terminal 3 -- opening up what used to be an overcrowded Newark-live cave into a bright, high-ceilinged concourse with wide walkways -- and now they’re tearing down Terminal 1 to completely rebuild that. So in, what, 10 years SFO will have completely rebuilt the passenger-side experience focusing on what travelers need -- no water slides or luxury shops, but reasonable security, a great selection of restaurants and bars, lots of seating and workspace, and what was, at least last week, screaming fast 5 GHz WiFi. Perceptions always lag reality, but I’m hoping that SFO starts getting some well-deserved love from the airport ranking lists.</li>\n 	<li>One of the podcasts on my subscription list is Men In Blazers, a soccer (or football) podcast. Toward the end of each show, the two hosts, Roger Bennett and Michael Davis, quickly review products that they’re putting in their Amazon Emporium for a little fund-raising. One thing that Michael Davis put it caught my ear -- compression socks. He said he’s started using them on NY-to-LA flights and loves them. I started using them on international flights after a flight home from Hong Kong in United economy had my legs swelling and stiffening up to tree trunks. I wasn’t the only one. There was another guy laying on the floor by one of the exit doors elevating his legs until a flight attendant shooed him off. I couldn’t bring myself to lie on an airplane floor -- at least not without a sanitized mat -- but after that I started flying in compression socks. Not something that I’ve ever seen make a Top 10 travel tip list -- it’s not the most exciting tip -- but I swear by it. Maybe I’ll sneak it in on my next list.</li>\n 	<li>And it wouldn’t be a complete Following Up segment without some beer comment, so thanks to eTuk Denver who tweeted “Mark, next time you\'re in Denver we will personally take you on one of our Beer tours for all the hours of entertainment provided.” Thanks guys! I’m glad you enjoy the podcast and look forward to taking you up on that offer. From their website, it looks like the eTuk guys do beer tours through Denver’s RiNo or River North Art District. The Drink Rino website says they “have the largest concentration of craft beverage manufacturers in the United States, with 15 craft breweries, cideries, wineries and distilleries in a one mile radius.” Yes, it sounds like my kind of neighborhood.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/50485\">Sunset Boulevard</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Siobhan Dakay, unreal_dm</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Airplane Fight Clubs</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>I purposely don’t try to do instant Twitter “hot takes” on the news. The near-instantaneous outrage that flares up on Facebook and Twitter often isn’t justified when all the facts work their way out days later. And the United Airlines dragging incident and the American Airlines stroller incident seem to be following those patterns.</li>\n 	<li>The April 9th videos of the Chicago aviation police dragging a bloodied semi-conscious passenger down the aisle of a plane are awful. But reading the police report released two weeks later on the 25th add facts not in the video -- that when an officer tried to get the passenger out of his seat, the passenger \"started swinging his arms up and down fast and violently” and that this flailing knocked off the officer’s hands causing the passenger to fall and hit his mouth on the armrest. And that after running back on the plane a second time yelled “\"I\'m not getting off the plane. Just kill me. I want to go home,\" Not exactly the Rosa Parks mantle that his lawyer claimed for him at the press conference announcing his lawsuit.</li>\n 	<li>Now, United, actually Republic -- it was their flight to Louisville operating under the United Express banner -- completely screwed this up in so many ways -- trying to go cheap on the incentives for volunteers, involuntarily bumping passengers already in their seats, not figuring out another way to get the deadheading crew to Louisville, and then escalating to the police -- which then led to the passenger escalating. The three other passengers who were involuntarily bumped took the high road -- grudging got off the plane so as not to inconvenience their fellow passengers and to follow what everyone understands are the post-9/11 rules -- once you pass through the plane door, you obey the airline and the crew or else.</li>\n 	<li>Unfortunately, for some crew, this expectation of being unquestioned oracle of right and wrong leads them to demand passengers to “respect my authority” first rather than try to de-escalate. The American Airlines incident that happened last weekend -- a conflict between a flight attendant and a mother of two with oversized strollers -- shows again that escalation between, in this case, the flight attendant trying to load the plane and a mother trying to bring 1 or 2 oversized strollers onto the plane instead of gate-checking them. The conflicting demands between “respect my authority” and “the carry-on rules don’t apply to me” collide. It later comes out that the “hot take” on this -- the flight attendant hit the mother and child with the stroller while trying to take it from her -- wasn’t true (no one was hit), but the rapid escalation -- mother yelling, threats between the flight attendant and some First Class passenger who inserted himself -- is everyone’s fault. It’s an unwillingness for someone to step back, swallow hard, and sacrifice their ego.</li>\n 	<li>The lawyer for the United Airlines passenger said in his press conference that airlines have been “bullying” passengers. I don’t know that he’s completely wrong on this. Spirit and Ryanair seem to have built their brand around treating passengers rudely. But the passenger treatment of mainline airlines has eroded in the name of operational efficiency -- packed planes, reduced leg room, flight attendants yelling at boarding passengers to hurry up and sit down so the flight can leave. Earlier this week the American Customer Satisfaction Index reported that the airline industry as a whole remains in the bottom third of those the ACSI tracks. “Customer satisfaction has never appeared to be a goal for airlines,” their analysis said. “\"Compared to other industries, the financial return on passenger satisfaction is not much of an incentive.” As the airline industry as consolidated into an oligopoly of 4 main carriers in the US and 3 global alliances -- Star Alliance, OneWorld, and Skyteam -- there aren’t many alternatives. Most of us shrug and bear it; a few lash out.</li>\n 	<li>Interesting to see, though, United’s latest efforts to bury this PR nightmare is a pay-out to the bloodied passenger and an announcement that they’ll now offer up to $10,000 for voluntary rebookings. And Southwest, who’ve been completely untouched by this, saying they’ll eliminate overbookings by June.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music --<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/ramblinglibrarian/55007\">Dawn at the Top of the World ft. copperhead &amp; Robert Seikawitch</a> by Ivan Chew (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>The Bourdain Effect</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>That’s how travel wags are explaining the explosion of food tourism -- people wanting to recreate experiences from Anthony Bourdain’s <em>No Reservations</em> and <em>Parts Unknown</em>. Not that it’s anything new -- people have been going to South Philly forever and flipping a coin between Pat’s and Geno’s cheese steaks or going to Detroit for a similar dance between American and Lafayette for coney dogs.</li>\n 	<li>It’s more that it’s flipped around today -- it’s used to be that you’d come to Chicago to visit family or see a Cubs game, and, by the way, queue up at Gino’s East for deep dish pizza. Now, it’s booking a table at Alinea, perennially in the top of the <em>World’s 50 Best Restaurant</em> list, and then booking flights, a hotel, and checking the Cubs schedule. Food is now a main draw with restaurants becoming travel destinations in their own right. Noma, the Copenhagen restaurant that is regularly #1 on the World’s 50 Best list has taken this to what is currently the most extreme -- they’re doing a pop-up restaurant in Tulum, Mexico; $600/seat and they sold out -- 5,000 seats in 3 hrs.</li>\n 	<li>Regular listeners know that I’m not immune to this. We have a group of 3 couples -- the guys, we all went to college together -- that are Exhibit A of this trend. One wife found a lunch opening at the French Laundry on OpenTable, booked it, then told us, and we all immediately booked a weekend in Napa. Finishing that lunch, we asked ourselves, “What’s our next 3-star?” My wife booked the kitchen table at Alinea, and the other two couples flew into Chicago.</li>\n 	<li>Travel experts explain this, saying food is one of the main travel experiences that can’t be digitized -- even though a lot of people try. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve been eating at an upscale restaurant and the guy next to me whips out a big Nikon DSLR, stands up and shoots his plate. Over a 10-course meal, those guys are working some calories.</li>\n 	<li>But of course, you can’t digitize taste. And you can’t save it. You can only experience it in the moment. And actually, that moment isn’t just about taste -- it’s the whole experience -- whether you’re having a 3-star lunch in Napa or Paris, your first taste of durian at a roadside stand in Singapore, or a Chicago hot dog at the Weiner Circle at 2 in the morning.</li>\n 	<li>One of my favorite travel memories with my father was many years ago when he and I went down to Cabo for a week. Charlie Trotter, one of the early high-end chefs in Chicago, had opened a restaurant in the One and Only resort between Cabo San Lucas and San Jose del Cabo. I had eaten at Trotter’s in Chicago many times and had even worked a shift in the kitchen -- I won it in a charity auction; it was a great experience, but it was real work -- so I wanted to check out this new place. They had just opened. The management was all down from Chicago and they were shaking things out. The starter courses were great, but my dad’s main course wasn’t hot. I flagged down a manager and asked him if they could heat up it up. Away went both of our plates. Hey, mine was fine; you just need to heat his up. The manager quickly came back. Nope, we’ll re-make your dad a new dish, and since he can’t be expected to watch you eat, we’ve taken yours and will re-make yours too so we can serve them at the same time. And while you’re waiting, here are a couple more appetizer dishes. My dad and I looked at each other and started nibbling at the new appetizers. And then we finished them. And then our main courses re-arrived hot and fresh. My dad looked over the table at me and said, “You know, I’m not really that hungry anymore”. I stared him down -- “After what they just went through, you’re going to eat that dish, all of it, and enjoy it”. Complete role reversal. We would replay that scene and laugh about it for years afterwards; way more than we’d look at pictures of us outside the Giggling Marlin.</li>\n 	<li>And now that we’re gearing up for our trip to Hungary next month, my wife is running through the list of top Budapest restaurants. I’m looking forward to that, but I also remember up a steep narrow sidewalk in Szentendre a little lángos stand -- deep fried bread rubbed in garlic with a bit of cheese on top. It didn’t make Bourdain’s <em>Parts Unknown</em> Budapest episode, but I’ll be searching for it all the same.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #129</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_128.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #129 — Airport Fight Club; The Bourdain Effect','','inherit','closed','closed','','1760-revision-v1','','','2021-09-29 08:20:40','2021-09-29 13:20:40','',1760,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3904',0,'revision','',0),
(3905,1,'2021-09-29 08:21:44','2021-09-29 13:21:44','<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/IMG_0522.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1775\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/IMG_0522-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\nIt\'s a <em>Mitteleuropa</em> episode, talking about last month\'s travels through Vienna and Hungary. I came away with good first impressions of Austrian Airlines and the Vienna airport. And, for the first time in many visits, saw Hungary through a tourist\'s eyes, spending time in Budapest and the Tokaj wine region. We also talk about how Google Translate has become pretty much indistinguishable from magic and the potential impact the privatization of the US air traffic control system might have on the general aviation industry. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_130.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #130:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, after a good bit of travel -- I think the technical unit of measure is “a slug”. I’ve done a “slug” of travel recently. We got back from 9 days in Hungary on the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend, which gave us that Monday to recover a bit. After that short week at home, I got back on the road -- a week in Richmond and then last week and this week in Atlanta. Some folks wanted me to do stupid day trips -- say up to Michigan from Atlanta for a 90-minute meeting, but in a fit of, what is for me, rare realism, I said, “Uh, no”.</li>\n 	<li>This was the first time I’d spent any time in Richmond -- other than driving around it -- from Charlottesville to the airport, from DC over to Williamsburg. We were downtown. There are some nice pockets. Found a couple of restaurants and a microbrewery with a taproom, so I was happy. Even happier because it was just a 20-minute cab ride from the airport, and a 10-minute walk to the client. Contrast that to Atlanta, which I just hate having to travel to for business. It starts with the location of the airport -- at 6 o’clock, on the bottom of the I-285 perimeter, and all the business at the opposite side -- between 11 and 1 o’clock on the perimeter. And therein lies the most important question that every business traveler faces when they arrive and they leave Atlanta -- do I drive through the city or around it? Outside of rush hour, it’s not bad -- maybe 35 minutes. But when you’re trying to catch that 6pm flight home on Thursday night, the trip starts at an hour and deteriorates fast.</li>\n 	<li>And deterioration is a nice word for last week’s trip back. After an hour-and-a quarter drive through the city that would’ve been a lot worse except that there were 3 of us in the car, so we got to whiz by the beginnings of the traffic jam in the HOV lanes. Once in the center of the city, the HOV lanes were just as crowded, but it probably cut at least 5 minutes off our trip. We drop the car off at Hertz, board the Skytrain, are on our way to the terminal when it just stops. OK, maybe a bit of congestion at the station in front of us. So we wait, and wait,... and wait. No announcement, no nothing. Just wait. 10 minutes, 15 minutes. Finally, someone near the door presses the phone button. A voice comes on -- “We’re working on it; thanks for your patience.” Click. No reason for the delay; no thought on when we’d start up again. Another 5 minutes. Another guy presses the phone button. Same story. After 30 minutes, the train whirs to life and starts to move. And I never thought I’d get nostalgic for those car rental buses.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hansatom/47919\">Brilliant Day</a> by Hans Atom (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial license.  Ft: Lisa DeBenedictis</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>My son Andrew and I flew Austrian Air from Chicago to Budapest last month with an -- obvious -- connection in Vienna. Couple of things… First, why Austrian Air? Because it was among the cheapest non-budget fares over and because I could construct an 8-hr layover which meant we spent Saturday eating schnitzel and drinking beer in Vienna. We landed at 8:45 Saturday morning, checked our bags in Held Luggage, and then hopped a cab into the city. It wasn’t a cheap taxi -- probably around €40 -- but we didn’t have time to figure out and wait for the train. We went first to the Naschmarkt and met up with a friend of mine -- ex-client and ex-boss -- who’s now running the Polish development center for a stealth start-up. He came down Friday night; it was a good excuse to spend 3 hours on his new BMW motorcycle. We started out with coffee and then quickly moved to the beer crawl. At noon, we walked into a small place, <a href=\"http://www.xn--gasthauspschl-qmb.com/\">Gasthaus Pöschl</a> (Weihburggasse 17), just as they were opening. We promised to be out in an hour, so they picked up one of the “Reserved” signs and gave us great big plates of schnitzel and glasses of Grüner Veltliner. We needed a bit of a walk after that, a bit more beer, and we found a cab back to the airport. One of the best layovers I’ve had...</li>\n 	<li>And then the second thing -- Vienna Airport. I’ve whined over a couple of episodes about how much I don’t like Munich Airport. Indeed, one of my ORD-BUD options was on Lufthansa through MUC. That didn’t make the first cut. But Vienna was great. Pleasant folks in the immigration booths, efficient and well-staffed security, nice food and beer selection -- it was the anti-MUC. And the in-air service? Pretty good. Fairly new 777-200; typical kinda tight coach seat configuration; pleasant flight attendants. There was nothing that wowed me, but then again, I wasn’t expecting anything to. All I wanted was not to be annoyed; not to have a gate agent or flight attendant piss me off. Kinda the air travel version of the Hippocratic oath -- Do no harm to the passenger. And Austrian succeeded. If I were to ding them on anything, it would be that the bright red plane upholstery was a bit tough on the eyes. I’ll fly them again.</li>\n 	<li>I actually was two-for-two on airports on that trip. Budapest airport has had a significant upgrade since my last visit maybe 12 years ago. Again, efficient security lines, bright clean terminal, good places to grab a coffee and some breakfast. Much more pleasant than my first time passing through there in 1989, some Army guy checking that my exit visa had the right stamps. Much happier vibe this time. Two great airport experiences; I think I’ll need to consciously ratchet down my expectations for my next trip, though. I’ll be hitting London’s Gatwick and Heathrow next week.</li>\n 	<li>Thinking through my international travel this year -- Paris, Vienna, Budapest -- Google Translate has evolved to being pretty close to magic. Last September, Google made a big announcement that they moved Translate from a statistics-based approach to a neural network running in Google’s cloud. It was the cover story for the New York Times Sunday Magazine <a href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/14/magazine/the-great-ai-awakening.html\">The Great AI Awakening</a> -- using it as a case study of how artificial intelligence will “reinvent computing itself”. That’s all good -- and it was a good article -- but what’s really seems like magic is what Google calls Word Lens, where you activate your camera within Google Translate, point it at some text -- a menu or, say, the washing machine controls in a vacation rental -- and you see English words replacing the French or Hungarian words in real time. Amazingly useful. Saves you from blasting your delicates with hot water, or mistakenly ordering chicken when you mix up poulet and poisson after a couple of cocktails. The French translations seemed better than the Hungarian ones -- which makes sense when you remember that the quality of the neural network is dependent on the amount of training data -- but even the Hungarian was very useful. And Translate lets you download some amount of language data onto your phone so you don’t blow through $100 of roaming data trying to avoid brussels sprouts. As you can tell, a huge TravelCommons endorsement.</li>\n 	<li>A few weeks back, I retweeted an NPR story about the proposal to privatize US air traffic control. As someone who has had cumulative months if not years wasted on ATC delays, I commented that I can’t understand all the angst over this proposal. ATC privatization has worked for years in Canada and Europe. And it’s not like the FAA has bathed itself in glory with the NextGen program that was authorized in 2003. Rich Fraser, a long-time TravelCommons listener, fellow Midwesterner, and a pilot, came back with a great series of tweets explaining his objections, specifically on privatization’s impact on general aviation. I retweeted a number of them -- “Privatization decimated general aviation industries everywhere it was tried. GA is a $200 billion industry here. 1.4 mil jobs…” and “And Canada\'s general aviation industry is a tiny fraction the size of ours. Apples and oranges doesn\'t even begin to describe.” I was only thinking of the impact on commercial aviation -- the only aviation I experience. Rich’s tweets did a nice job of opening the aperture on the discussion to include the often unconsidered world of general aviation. Thanks for that, Rich.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/53277\">Fistful of Dub</a> (Feat. Snowflake and DJ Vadim) by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: snowflake and DJ Vadim</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Notes from Hungary</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>The flight from Vienna to Budapest is 40 minutes on a 20-seat prop plane. I don’t think it ever levels off -- just a parabola, going straight from climb out into descent. Not that really noticed. After one more beer in Vienna airport, Andrew and I were asleep before the plane left the ground. Yet another pleasant Austrian Air flight attendant graciously placed bottles of water for us in the seat back pocket in front of us. We found them when the plane touched down in Budapest.</li>\n 	<li>We’d been to Budapest many times before, but this one would be different. Many of my wife’s aunts and uncles has passed away in the 12 years since our last visit, so there weren’t many family obligations -- just a long Saturday lunch the day before we left. Instead, this was probably the first time we saw Hungary as tourists.</li>\n 	<li>Before we visited, we checked with friends who had recently visited. What had they seen, enjoyed? Everyone loved Budapest. Scouting out places to stay, we abandoned what had been our usual Budapest Marriott perch on the Danube for so many years and instead headed east to District VII -- Erzsébetváros, the old Jewish Quarter. During our last visit in 2005, no one would’ve thought to go out here. But now, it’s full of restaurants, craft beer bars, a few Starbucks, and ruin pubs.</li>\n 	<li>We followed TravelCommons’ listener Arnoud Heijnis’ recommendation to check out what is the classic -- and perhaps the first -- ruin bar in Budapest -- Szimpla Kert. Arnoud’s description of it having a “pop-uppy kinda feel” was right on-point. You walk through a dingy, half-lit hallway, with a couple of bars on each side, into an open two-story courtyard ringed by, I dunno, another half-dozen bars across the two floors. There were at least a couple of English stag parties going on when we walked in -- one with whom I assumed was the groom-to-be dressed in a white ballerina tutu; the other group was wearing matching t-shirts fronted with a goofy picture of their groom-to-be.</li>\n 	<li>I saw a lot of those while we were in Budapest -- party groups wearing matching t-shirts; not so much the ballerina tutus. Budapest -- at least the redeveloped district we were in -- seems to have become a fly-in party town. Maybe the bankruptcy of the old state-run airline Malev left a vacuum for budget carriers to fill -- including WizzAir with a Budapest hub. And then Hungary hasn’t yet joined the euro, so it can devalue its currency, the forint, and look cheap to the rest of Europe. And it had lots of buildings available to repurpose -- starting with squatters setting up bars and dance clubs in abandoned buildings, then large sports bars, and then what seemed to me an amazing number of burger places. And they were all filled starting Thursday night, mostly with English speaking parties. A huge change from my first visit in 1989 when seemingly no one but my wife spoke English, and we’d walk into empty restaurants looking for lunch.</li>\n 	<li>Spending money in some of those bars, you’d think that Hungary is moving toward a parallel currency economy -- the forint and euro being used interchangeably -- similar to what I saw in Vietnam where I’d pay, say, a single taxi fare, in a combination of dong and dollar bills. In Budapest, you’ll get a bar tab in forint with a euro number printed below it. You can pay in euro, but you’ll probably get change back in forint. If it’s not too late in the evening, say your first or second bar, and so you haven’t yet lost your capability to do arithmetic, you’ll notice that the euro exchange rate isn’t quite in your favor. I started doing the math at each bar -- which, by the way, seemed to make a couple of bartenders nervous. The range of exchange rates on bar tabs was between 250 and 275 forint to the euro. The market rate was about 300 forint to the euro. In effect, the bars were charging an 8-16% convenience fee for letting you skip the ATM down the street.</li>\n 	<li>District VII is not the only part of Budapest that’s upgraded. Downtown Pest, along the Danube, looks spiffier. The Parliament building -- always an incredibly ornate building that dares you not to take multiple pictures of it as you walk past -- looked like it has been freshly steam cleaned. In ‘89, a soldier shooed my wife and I off the steps; this time we walked down into a nice visitors center, bought some tour tickets and were escorted up the Golden Staircase, under the huge dome, and past the crown jewels. And further south along the river, new developments, plazas, bars, bike paths have all sprung up -- again, in places we wouldn’t have thought of going 12 years ago. I understood why friends who had visited over the past year had enjoyed it.</li>\n 	<li>As much as I liked knocking around Budapest -- and running through most of District VII’s craft beer bars where, according to Untappd, Andrew and I tasted 43 Hungarian beers -- my favorite bit of the trip was the day we spent visiting wineries in the Tokaj wine region -- about 2½ hrs northeast of Budapest near the border with Slovakia. We hired the guy (<a href=\"http://www.tokajtoday.com/contact/\">Gergely Somogyi</a>) who runs the Tokaj Today web site as our guide. He came to our hotel, gave us a 30-minute PowerPoint presentation (plugged right into the hotel’s flat screen TV in the breakfast room) on Tokaj’s history, geography, geology, grape and wine types. And with this Intro to Tokaj information still looking for neurons to hang out in, we were off to visit four winemakers. And say that rather than wineries because we sat down with each of the winemakers -- the two more established --<a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/demeterzoltantokaj\">Zoltán Demeter</a> and <a href=\"http://www.bottpince.hu/\">Judit Bodo</a> -- in their tasting rooms, the two garagistas -- <a href=\"http://new2017.samueltinon.com/en/\">Mathilde Hulot</a> and <a href=\"http://abrahampince.com/english/\">Róbert Péter</a> -- their kitchens and patios -- for an hour or more each, talking about their wine, about Hungary, and about what they’re trying to do. Only one of the four -- Demeter -- is from Tokaj. The rest moved there to make wine -- Bodo from the Hungarian-speaking part of Slovakia, Peter from Budapest, and Hulot from France -- because of its history and its potential to make great wine.</li>\n 	<li>Each told a version of the same story -- of Tokaj’s history, wine knowledge, and wine quality being broken during the 40-some years of Communism -- abandoning the high-quality vineyards on the hills for lower-quality fields on the plains that could be harvested with big Russian tractors, 5-year government planning that pushed quantity over quality. And of how each of them came to Tokaj to flip that equation back to quality over quantity -- even the Tokaj local had to leave to jobs in California and France to learn quality winemaking before he came back. But they all feel challenged to get the entire community, the “locals,” on board. Maybe it’s some of the residue of Communism -- it’s easier to crank out industrial plonk than good wine. Maybe it’s because many of them can’t afford these new wines and so don’t appreciate them. Bodo said she specifically priced one wine so that local young people who now drink beer could afford to drink good local wine. To appreciate what they have here, she said, everyone has to be able to enjoy good wine -- not just the winemakers.</li>\n 	<li>I hate to truck in the wine industry cliche that these winemakers have a “passion” for what they’re doing, but my thesaurus fails me, I can’t find a better word. They all appreciated that we’d taken the time to drive out from Budapest to visit (if maybe a bit puzzled by doing everything in a day), and were very generous with their time and their wine. It was tough to limit ourselves to buying just one bottle per stop. I had to keep reminding myself that I’d only brought my small rollerboard with me.</li>\n 	<li>On our last night, we’re back in Budapest, knocking around District VII, looking for our last dinner. We’d had some great food -- a couple of Michelin one-stars, some food trucks near a ruin bar -- but it was tough to find some of the homey Hungarian food -- call it “peasant food” -- that we’d had in the past. And then we found it -- a bit cafeteria style -- I’ll take that sausage, the hurka with the pork liver and rice -- oh, and that one too, the regular kolbasz with pork, paprika and garlic -- some pickled salad, a bowl of gulyas soup, and, OK, just one last beer.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #130</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_130.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #130 — Notes from Hungary','','inherit','closed','closed','','1774-revision-v1','','','2021-09-29 08:21:44','2021-09-29 13:21:44','',1774,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3905',0,'revision','',0),
(3906,1,'2021-09-29 08:22:51','2021-09-29 13:22:51','[caption id=\"attachment_1786\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/File_000.jpeg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1786\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/File_000-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> I have a craft beer problem...[/caption]\n\nThis past week in Atlanta Hartsfield Airport, when I traveled across four terminals to find a restaurant serving a nice selection of local Atlanta beers, I finally had to admit that I have a craft beer problem. In addition to this confession, I talk about about taking the London Underground back from the big Adele concert in Wembley Stadium. The experience proved out some of the positive stereotypes about the English -- queuing well and muddling through without complaining. I talk about hotel room flat screen TVs and using Twitter to quickly get Hertz to fix a mistaken refueling charge. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_131.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #131:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, ready to admit that I have a craft beer problem. On Tuesday, I’m in Atlanta airport, on the back end of an one-day up-and-back. I got to the airport a bit early because: (a) I wanted to get forward-positioned for a 5pm conference call, and (b) afternoon travel times from north of Atlanta, where all my clients have ever been, to south of Atlanta where the airport is inconveniently located is highly unpredictable -- I’ve experienced anything from 40 min to an hour and a half. The conference call ends early, just as United posts a 15-min flight delay. Rather than bitch tweeting, I pop open my Untappd app and see what beers have been checked in nearby. I see some local Atlanta beers showing up at a place called “Chicken + Beer”. Good name! I find an sign board. It’s in Terminal D near Gate D5 -- almost to the end of the terminal. I’m in Terminal T -- the closest-in terminal, 4 terminals away. I look at my watch. According to United, I have an hour. I pop open the United app. The delayed in-bound flight is due in at 6:35 and United is calling for a 7:05 departure. No way in this age of completely full flights do they get that plane emptied and re-loaded in 30 minutes. And, since it’s a day trip, I don’t have to worry about carry-on. Easy decision -- I’m off. Highly recommended place if you’re connecting through ATL -- especially if you’re a bit closer, maybe in Terminals C, D or E.</li>\n 	<li>I posted the last episode the day before we headed out to London for a week, the highlight of which was going to the Adele concert in Wembley Stadium that Wednesday night -- my wife’s Christmas and birthday present. It was the opening night of what was supposed to be a 4-night finale to her world tour. Glad we caught one of the front-end shows. She canceled the last two due to vocal cord stress. Would’ve been unspeakably awful if we’d flown over and then got canceled. As it was, it was a great concert -- great voice and a phenomenal swearer. Impressive f-bomb count.</li>\n 	<li>Back in the US, I’ve been alternating weeks between Richmond and Atlanta. As I said in the last episode, of the two, I prefer Richmond -- I’m able to walk around downtown so no need for a rental, and it’s only a 20-minute ride to and from the airport. And a local turned me onto the Scott’s Addition neighborhood with three microbreweries in a 5-block radius. Yes, as you already know, I have a craft beer problem.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mindmapthat/53340\">Dub the Uke</a> by Kara Square (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: DJ Vadim</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>This week’s day trip to Atlanta for a meeting was the first time I’ve done that in a long time -- trusted an airline enough to fly in the day of an important meeting. As it was, I still baked in a large safety buffer -- I took a 6:15am flight out of ORD that landed ATL just after 9am local time; for a 12:30p meeting. Instead, as a way to lower my personal stress as well as the amount of my bitch tweeting, I’ll fly out, say, the night before. Or a couple of weeks ago, when my wife booked a dinner for 5:30p Thursday night, I flew back Weds night. Last year, I would’ve flown home Thursday afternoon -- scheduling myself ORD at, say, 3:30p, and then taking the El into the city. Now, I just don’t trust the airlines. There’s not enough slack in the system -- the planes are full, the crew schedules are optimized to the tee, and so when something anomalous happens, the whole things starts to come apart at the seams. This kinda happened a few weeks ago flying out of Richmond. My colleague and I were sitting in a conference room after lunch when his phone started going off -- flight delay texts from American about his evening flight back to DFW. I check on my United flight to ORD -- sure enough, I’m delayed too. Not critical -- just means I’ll be dining in the airport rather than at home. I hit the “where is my flight now” in the United app a couple of times to find that the delay from Grand Rapids airport which is then cascading through IAD and down to RIC. When the plane is scheduled for tight turnarounds, there’s no way to catch up. We check every 20 minutes or so, hoping things get better. And, surprisingly, mine does -- suddenly, there’s no delay. Did Grand Rapids magically clear up? Nope. Tracking the inbound plane again, now it’s sitting on the ground at IAD. They swapped equipment and now we’re back on schedule. We head over to RIC, and just as I go through security, I get a delay text from United. The plane is in IAD but the crew isn’t. Their inbound flight is delayed, which pushes ours. I sit down at the Sam Adams bar in RIC’s Terminal 2; I order a beer and some food. I get the beer right away. 45 minutes later, the waitress tells me they’ve run out of food. So I end up eating dinner at home after all -- just a bit later than usual.</li>\n 	<li>Hotel room technology is slow to change. I still see a lot of those alarm clocks with the old 30-pin iPhone connectors on the top of them; the iPhone 5 with the smaller Lightning connector came out almost 5 years ago. I think a good bit of this has to do with scale -- just upgrading the TVs in the 3,976 rooms at a place like Caesars Palace in Las Vegas can be a multi-year project. That being said, it’s been a long time now since I’ve seen a tube TV in a hotel room. Seems that most everyone has made the switch to wall-mounted flat screens, and I’m even seeing more of the second-generation -- more smart TVs from Samsung and LG with built in Netflix and Hulu apps, letting me log in to my accounts, access my own queues and watch just like I’m at home. I tend not to take them up on that offer though. I’m still a bit hesitant to scatter too much of my personal digital stuff around. And also, it’s not just Netflix that I want to watch. Sometimes I want to watch, say, James Corden’s newest Carpool Karaoke on YouTube that my daughter told me about, or watch the start of a Tour de France stage on NBCSN which almost no hotel cable package carries. Lucky for me, all of these newer flat screens provide easy access to an HDMI port -- the digital successor to the older analog VGA connectors on computers. I picked up a $5 Displayport-to-HDMI cable on Amazon, and now regularly plug my ThinkPad into my hotel room flat screen. Now if these hotels would upgrade their WiFi speeds...</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Suenjo/11162\">Natchoongi (New Hope Remix)</a> by Suenjo (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Twitter Concierge</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>One of the standards in my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/12/12/top-10-holiday-travel-tips-2/\">Top 10</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2013/12/19/top-10-holiday-travel-tips/\">Travel Tips</a> list -- which I usually write once a year as part of my annual prayers to the Google gods for more website traffic -- is to use Twitter as sort of a customer service concierge service. I’ve used Twitter to ping airlines on the status of planes when the gate agents were in the dark, A few weeks back, I tweeted to Lyft, asking why the price estimation piece of their app didn’t work (answer: it was turned off in Richmond for some reason). And Twitter saved me a bit of a hassle last week with Hertz.</li>\n 	<li>Now, I’ve gone hot and cold on Hertz through my travel career. At the start, back in 1985 when I was working for IBM and regularly flying into SJC, I liked them. But that was when SJC was an old-style California airport -- no jetways, just a walkway under a metal canopy to planes parked on the tarmac; no rental counters, just a parking lot at one end of the terminal with a little Hertz hut in the middle staffed by a nice woman who’d give you your keys. After a few trips, we got to know each other and she’d always give me one of the nicer cars on the lot. Fast forward 15 years to my low point with Hertz at DTW. I was there every week for about a year and never got a clean car or one under 24,000 miles. I’m back on an upswing with Hertz now that they’re doing the National Car Rental-like “pick your own car” service and I’ve yet to climb into a car with more than 1,000 miles</li>\n 	<li>Dropping my car off at ATL last week, I do my usual thing -- fill the car just outside the airport, drop it off, and walk away without waiting for the Hertz guy to check me in because it’s usually too long a wait during the afternoon drop-off rush hour and they’ll e-mail me the receipt. I usually put the gas receipt on the dashboard under the keys, but I didn’t do that this time. The gas station near ATL was a bit dodgy and had signs posted on the gas pump “Keep your car locked when filling up”. I decided not to wait for the pump to spit out a receipt.</li>\n 	<li>The e-mail from Hertz showed up on my phone just after I’d boarded the plane at ATL. I scanned the numbers -- damn it, there was a refueling charge. And the gas charge hadn’t posted yet to my Amex card so I couldn’t download a receipt. It just pissed me off. The gas gauge was clearly/unambiguously on F, so the check-in guy was just pencil-whipping the check-in. That’s what really annoyed me. Sitting there, waiting for the rest of the flight to board, I had time to stew. And to tweet out my annoyance to @Hertz -- complete with a mad face emoji.</li>\n 	<li>My flight takes off. I land at ORD, take my phone out of airplane mode and bing, there’s a reply from Hertz -- please DM us your rental agreement number. I flip over to the emailed receipt and copy/paste the number into Twitter. While still on the plane -- we’re doing the usual ORD thing of taxiing all over the airport looking for a gate -- I get a message back “Mark, apologies for the trouble with the fueling fee. After further review I will be refunding this charge to the account billed. We appreciate you bringing this to our attention so that we might look into this with our local Atlanta team.” I’ve now gone from pissed to impressed with how fast that got fixed. Now I’m sure some of that has to do with my status at Hertz, but still -- Twitter can be a very effective line-cut into customer service.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/3lb3r3th/44072\">Misunderstood</a> by 3lb3r3th (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: Alchemistry</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>London Tube Story</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>A few weeks ago on one of my Saturday bike rides, I was listening to Craig and Linda Martin’s Indie Travel Podcast episode about using public transit and it got me thinking about my recent public transit experiences. We’ve talked about public transit in past episodes. I’ve kinda nerded out about a it a bit, especially taking public transit between a city and an airport.</li>\n 	<li>During our week in London at the end of June, we used the Tube a lot. Underground, it was surprisingly still warm and stuffy from the 40-year high temperatures the prior week when it had been very hot by British standards -- in the 30’s Celsius, the upper 80’s/low 90’s Farenheit. We were staying in the Fitzrovia neighborhood of London -- north of Oxford St, just off of Tottenham High Street near University College London. The area is well-served by a number of Tube lines, and we’d chosen it for easy Tube access to Wembley Stadium for the Adele concert.</li>\n 	<li>We headed out early, planning to get there a couple hours before show time because we expected security to be tight. We got on a train that was an interesting mix of commuters winding down their day and concert goers getting ramped up -- seated people heads down in their papers; standing groups of people chatting away, maybe slipping a sip of a canned gin &amp; tonic, maybe singing a little tune snippet.</li>\n 	<li>If you think about it, the trip to the concert wouldn’t be too bad -- people would be spread out across 2, maybe 3 hours worth of trains. The end of the concert, though -- 96,000 people leaving at once, and a huge sea of them heading for the Wembley Stadium tube stop. Luckily, the rain forecasted earlier in the week had hit London earlier in the day and the evening was dry. If not, the 30-45 minutes we spend shoulder-to-shoulder penguin-walking the third- to-half mile between our seats and the Tube stop would’ve been miserable. As it was, everyone was in good spirits (it had been a great concert), and polite and courteous (no shoving, not a lot of trying to snake up in front of others). The security police would hold up signs at an intersection -- one side in red would say “Stop”, the other side green with “Go”. And when they spun it around to “Stop” the crowd would stop. No one would try to slip around the edges or make a last dash. One cop was playing songs through his bullhorn for the crowd while they waited for the next “Go” sign. It was so crowded; so much could’ve easily gone wrong; but it didn’t. And once back on the Tube, we made it back to Fitzrovia in time for a nightcap.</li>\n 	<li>But I guess I shouldn’t be so surprised. Doesn’t that experience validate the English stereotype -- queues well, suffers through without complaining -- the whole “Keep Calm and Carry On” ethos -- and eventually get through to the other side in time for a pint at the pub.</li>\n 	<li>And maybe that’s what I really like about taking public transit. In past episodes, I talked about public transit as a way of popping the travel bubble, using it to get a real feeling for where you are. The whole “Mind the Gap” thing in the Tube is another very English thing, as is the small taped-off space where buskers can perform in the connecting passageways between lines. Compare that to the less structured Paris Metro experiences I described a few episodes ago -- of the tuba busker and the 3-person opera reenactment that took over the whole shop area of a Metro stop. Or the way people bringing their bikes onto a Portland, Oregon light rail car just solidifies the whole Portlandia image, or picking up the Chicago El in the Loop after the markets close, with the few traders who work the options pits, heading up to Wrigley for an afternoon Cubs game.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #131</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_131.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #131 — Twitter Concierge Customer Service; London Tube Story','','inherit','closed','closed','','1784-revision-v1','','','2021-09-29 08:22:51','2021-09-29 13:22:51','',1784,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3906',0,'revision','',0),
(3907,1,'2021-09-29 08:23:37','2021-09-29 13:23:37','[caption id=\"attachment_1803\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/DSC_5935a.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1803\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/DSC_5935a-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> How Are Their Yelp Reviews?[/caption]\n\nIt\'s a listener request podcast. A fellow Peacock, this one named Jack, asked \"What travel apps do you have on your iPhone?\" Paging back through the TravelCommons archives, I’ve covered different categories of travel apps,  -- in the most recent iteration of my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/12/12/top-10-holiday-travel-tips-2/\">Top 10 Travel Tips</a> I recommended some flight tracking apps and way before that, did a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/11/29/podcast-102-trip-management-app-comparison-tsa-scanner-shuffle/\">bake-off of trip management apps</a> -- but never covered walked through what’s in the travel folder on the home screen of my iPhone. I\'ve now remedied that oversight. We also continue talking about overseas phone SIMs; the impact of the new EU ban on roaming charges. Also, my first encounter with some new TSA scanning equipment.  All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_132.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #132:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you, as always it seems, from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. Seems that I’ve swapped the romance of hotel bathrooms for the sound quality of the studio here. Seems like yesterday when I was <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2009/04/15/podcast-73-eating-alone-on-the-road-more-things-you-never-want-to-hear/\">recording the intro</a> in the business class toilet of a South African Airways A340 on the way down to J’burg</li>\n 	<li>My travel since <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/07/30/podcast-131-twitter-concierge-customer-service-london-tube-story/\">the last episode</a> hasn’t been anything quite as exciting. Trips to Richmond, Baltimore and New York City. Indeed, if I tried recording in the toilet of one of those American or United A321s, I don’t think I’d get too far past “Hello, this is Mark Peacock…” before someone started banging on the door.</li>\n 	<li>Richmond airport continued to be a problem for me -- not the airport itself, just the carriers flying into it. I get up on a Tuesday morning -- sidestepping the Monday morning road warrior crush -- iPhone notifications from American, TripIt, and Google all say my flight is on-time. Pulling up to the terminal -- everything still looks OK. I walk through the doors and my phone explodes -- my 8:20 am flight is now leaving at 4 something pm! The next note is from American telling me they’ve booked me on the 11:45am flight, so instead of getting to RIC at 11:20am, I’m now due in at 2:40pm -- over 3 hrs late. A quick call to Amex Travel tells me that the early morning United flight has already left, so this is my best option. Since, as I talked about in the last episode, I’ve given up depending on airlines being able to meet their schedules, I hadn’t booked any early afternoon meetings, so I just parked myself in the Admirals Club and got some work done. Nothing lost but a bit of sleep.</li>\n 	<li>With this in mind, I was gritting my teeth when I had to head back to ORD the next week for my flight to LGA. I haven’t had to fly to New York much recently, and when I have, I’ve flown into EWR to avoid the nightmare-ish delays being reported from LGA because of the construction. There’d been stories of people abandoning their cabs on the Grand Central Parkway to walk into LGA. And then there’s just flying between two of the US’s most congested airports. I’ve always said that anything less than a 30-minute delay between LGA and ORD is on-time. So I booked my flights to avoid rush hours -- leaving ORD at 4pm, arriving LGA at 7:30, and my return flight leaving LGA at 3:30 the next afternoon. I land in LGA on-time. There’s no taxi queue, and I’m into the Sheraton Times Square by a little after 8 -- no flight delays, no traffic. I quietly offer up my first beer at The Three Monkeys to the travel gods in thanksgiving.</li>\n 	<li>The next day, we finish up our meeting in midtown an hour early, I walk out of the building to find all sorts of cabs. The first cab doesn’t have the time to take me to LGA, but the second guy is happy to. We make good time across town to the tunnel and there’s no traffic on the Grand Central. I tip the guy well, walk up to an American kiosk and see that I can standby on the 1:30pm flight -- which will be boarding in about 5 minutes. I hit the TSA PreCheck line -- about 5 people in front of me, but the TSA folks are in good humor and moving things along. I hear the gate agent call my name as I walk up to the gate. The flight takes off on time and lands early. Hey, American made up 2 of the 3 hr-delay from last week! And on an LGA-ORD flight. I offered up a bigger beer when I got home.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/JeffSpeed68/54450\">Hula Hoop Party</a> by Stefan Kartenberg (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: Martijn de Boer, Blue Wave Theory</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Mike Skinner took a couple of minutes to stop by the TravelCommons web site and leave a comment about the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/07/30/podcast-131-twitter-concierge-customer-service-london-tube-story/\">last episode</a>. Mike writes\n<ul>\n 	<li>“Long time listener, really enjoy the show.“Your comments on the Dreamliner were very interesting to me. I\'ve flown one long-haul on several occasions, and yes, the windows are fun to play with. But you didn\'t have any comments on what I think is the most important attribute. The 787 isn\'t just another \"metal tube\"..... It is constructed from carbon fiber, and can be pressurized to a higher level than most normal passenger jets. The environment inside is at higher air pressure (like being at 6,000\' rather than 10000\' elevation), with a higher level of humidity (air not so dry), and more refreshes. I found it a great plane to fly on a long red-eye! Or any 5+ hour flight.\n“I\'m looking forward to this fall, when I\'m flying one r/t LAX-SYD in UA\'s BF cabin (14 hour flight)”</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Mike, thanks for the comment. You’re absolutely right about the 787’s carbon fiber build allowing it to be pressurized at a lower level -- I’m not sure if that’s because of an increase in strength from the carbon fiber or because it’s less impervious to the higher moisture content of the denser air. But I didn’t notice a difference between my flight out to on an A330 and my flight back on the 787. Of course, it might be that I wasn’t paying enough attention to the negative -- less dry eye; less “cotton mouth” -- or that that the LHR-ORD flight wasn’t a red-eye; and so I was able to keep myself hydrated more than I would on a red-eye. Maybe I would’ve noticed the difference on those 17-hr SAA flights to Joburg those years ago. Whatever the reason, anything that makes those long-haul flights more bearable is a great thing. Safe travels on your upcoming flight to Sydney.</li>\n 	<li>That A330 flight didn’t go direct to London. I was late booking my ticket and so instead flew Aer Lingus to Gatwick via Dublin. It was the first time in at least 25 years that I’ve been through Dublin airport. It was a nice enough airport, but crowded for an early Monday morning. I was glad I didn’t have to go through security again, because when I looked past the scanners, it looked to be a bit of zoo parade. But, adding again to the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/01/16/podcast-126-beating-the-traffic-rethinking-carry-on-luggage/\">multi</a>-<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/02/20/podcast-127-critiquing-my-top-10-travel-tips-reviewing-vpns/\">episode</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/03/31/podcast-128-hunt-for-experiences-pop-up-entertainment/\">thread </a>about buying and using local phone SIMs during international travel, I saw the first benefits of the EU’s ban against mobile roaming charges. On the flight over, I’d swapped my US SIM for my UK SIM. Coming out of airplane mode in Dublin, I get what look like the typical welcome texts, but instead of giving me the roaming charges, they tell me that my UK plan is good in Ireland. Might seem kind of a minor thing, but at least for traveling within Europe, there are some real benefits. First is not having to burn through an hour or two at the beginning of a vacation finding a phone store and then going through the hassle of buying a pay-as-you-go SIM. In Paris, I had to go to 3 phone stores to find the SIM I wanted. In Hungary, T-Mobile wouldn’t sell my wife a SIM without a Hungarian citizenship or registration card -- which, of course, she didn’t have. Luckily, my wife’s cousin was with her and she was able to buy SIMs for all of us. If I don’t need to buy a new French or Hungarian SIM to avoid roaming charges, this kind of hassle goes away. I wonder also if there’s a bit of an arbitrage opportunity. Now that I have a UK, French, and Hungarian SIM, do I figure out which one has the cheapest rate and then use that one for all of my trips? I need to read the new regs on that one.</li>\n 	<li>On my last couple of trips through ATL, it seems that the lines for PreCheck are configured differently every time. Not quite sure why that is. Every other airport, it’s pretty static -- go to this set of lanes, but ATL, for some reason, wants to change the entrance to the maze each time. They also have put new parallel loading baggage X-ray machines in the ATL PreCheck line. These are pretty common in Europe but just now dribbling into US airports. Rather than queuing up and waiting for each person to put their stuff on the belt, there are 4 loading stations where a group of people each reach below, grab a bin, put it in front of you, put your stuff in it, and then push it onto the conveyor. Since there are 4 people loading at the same time, there’s no “performance anxiety” to make sure you have your belt-loading choreography flawless, and there’s no eye-rolling and foot-tapping while waiting for those who don’t. There are a couple of hassles, though. First, since it’s new, most people are still in serial mode; they don’t know that it’s OK to break queue and step around to an empty loading station. At many European airports, they have someone telling you which loading station to go to (usually with numbered stickers on the floor -- “You, station 1; you, station 6). The TSA hasn’t quite got with this program. Second, if you’re in one of the front loading stations, it takes a little, uh, muscle to break the stream of bins, to shove your bin onto the conveyor. Too polite and you’ll just stand there watching a stream of bins go by. All in all, it’s a definite improvement, but needs a bit of, say, process optimization.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/49674\">H2O</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Travel Apps on My Phone</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>A few weeks ago, Jack Peacock from northern Florida -- kinda near where the panhandle connects to the peninsula -- pinged me on the TravelCommons website with a couple of questions. First was a genealogy question. Peacock isn’t a common last name in the US and so when we meet, “where’s the last name from” is a common icebreaker. Peacock is probably more common down South where Jack and other southern Peacocks will trace their roots back to a Samuel Peacock born 1671 probably in Colonial VA. My line is from more recent immigrant stock, though. My dad grew up in Southport, on the northwest coast of the UK, between Liverpool and Blackpool, and came over to the US in 1956.</li>\n 	<li>That out of the way, Jack said that he and his wife are retired, have put their home and vehicles up for sale, and are getting ready to Airbnb the globe. “Geriatric gap year” as Jack put it. I am officially jealous. Which leads to his second question -- what travel apps do I have on my phone? A very timely question since Carlson Wagonlit Travel just <a href=\"http://www.carlsonwagonlit.com/content/cwt/global/en/news/news-releases/20170824-Business-travelers-find-they-are-very-productive-due-to-more-technology-options.html\">released a survey</a> where 80% of business travelers said their smartphone was the “travel tool they can’t live without”, and 45% used airline and hotel apps as their main travel technology.</li>\n 	<li>Paging back through the TravelCommons archives, I see that I’ve touched on some categories of travel apps -- in the most recent iteration of my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/12/12/top-10-holiday-travel-tips-2/\">Top 10 Travel Tips</a> I recommended some flight tracking apps and way before that, did a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/11/29/podcast-102-trip-management-app-comparison-tsa-scanner-shuffle/\">bake-off of trip management apps</a> -- but never walked through what’s in the travel folder on the home screen of my iPhone.</li>\n 	<li>As long time listeners know -- and have suffered through -- I can’t just go through a laundry list. In other words, I can’t just quickly answer Jack’s question. First, I need to build (and drag you all through) some kind of framework that provides some structure to my laundry list. It’s my own little piece of OCD. One way to start is to split between apps with broad general use -- say like Google Maps -- and those more specific to a situation -- the apps of the airlines you use the most, or, say, mass transit apps for a city you’ll be visiting.</li>\n 	<li>Let’s dig down to the next layer of the specific category. I have apps for the airlines I use for 90% of my travel -- American, United, Southwest, and Delta -- in that order -- because living in Chicago, American and United have hubs at ORD and Southwest owns MDW. I have Delta for the odd flight between, say, Atlanta and New York. The mix will change based on what you fly -- in Boston, you may have JetBlue, in London you certainly have BA. I mostly use these apps for two reasons -- electronic boarding passes and flight status. I talked in the last episode about how I used the “Where is my plane now” feature of United’s app to track back to the source of a RIC flight delay to GRR. Helped give me a sense of whether that delay could shrink or grow. Also, these apps are getting much quicker about pushing flight status and gate change notifications. Indeed, these apps have gotten good enough that the independent/more general flight tracking apps on my phone -- FlightAware, FlightView, and FlightStats -- are on the bubble. I’ll probably delete two of them and keep one -- either FlightAware or FlightView because of how they show the projected flight path on a weather map. You can find this in the United app, but you have to dig a bit. FlightAware and FlightView have it as their primary app view. It’s another good piece of information for when you’re thinking through flight delays.</li>\n 	<li>I didn’t load up the Aer Lingus app for my flight to London last month (if they even have one). It’s not worth it for a single flight. Same reason I’ve never loaded Alaska Air’s app even though I seem to end up on them at least once a year. It’s not worth the phone real estate. Which is the same reason I’ve deleted hotel apps from my phone. I’ve never found any value in the Marriott or Starwood apps. Same with the Hertz and Avis apps. However, if I was Airbnb’ing around the world like Jack is planning, I would probably load up their app.</li>\n 	<li>Another specific app I have is My EE -- the app for the UK mobile carrier who’s pay-as-you-go SIM I use. The last iteration of this app made it easier than EE’s website to do a SIM top-up, so it’s now in my Travel folder.</li>\n 	<li>A bit more general is the Priority Pass app which gets me access to international airport lounges through my Amex Platinum card. It regularly updates its list of available lounges and has airport maps to help you find them. This came in real handy in Dublin where the lounge was tucked away on a second floor with very minimal signage.</li>\n 	<li>Another kinda general app is the companion app to my Bluesmart roller bag. It connects to my bag via Bluetooth, automatically locks it when it’s out of range of my phone, and displays the bag’s location when I have to check it. The auto lock is probably the most useful thing. It’s consistently on the bubble.</li>\n 	<li>I have both Uber and Lyft in my Travel folder. I’ll typically light both of those apps up when looking for a ride somewhere, comparing price and wait time. As I mentioned during a broader discussion of ride sharing <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/11/22/podcast-125-uber-driver-stories-overseas-for-the-election/\">a few episodes back</a>, all things being equal, I’ll choose Lyft, but I use both of them regularly.</li>\n 	<li>Five years ago, I <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/11/29/podcast-102-trip-management-app-comparison-tsa-scanner-shuffle/\">reviewed</a> the 3 main trip management apps -- Tripit, TripCase, and Worldmate -- that recreated the old company travel agent’s printed trip itinerary by integrating separate airline, hotel, and rental car reservations for free, and real-time flight updates for a fee. I liked Worldmate the best, with TripCase a solid second. Today, I use Tripit. Carlson Wagonlit closed up Worldmate at the beginning of the year, and Sabre’s TripCase is hot mess of advertising. Tripit has continued to improve their app. The ability to share a piece of an itinerary (a flight, a hotel) through iPhone’s iMessage is surprisingly handy. But the $50/yr Tripit Pro is also on the bubble because of the airline apps’ improved notifications.</li>\n 	<li>Google Translate has grown into a critical travel app. I’ve talked in a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/06/24/podcast-130-notes-from-hungary/\">previous episode</a> about how, with real-time translation through the camera, it’s becoming pretty close to magic.\nTransit is another app that continues to solidify its hold on screen real estate. Transit covers mass transit across North America and major cities in Europe. Google Maps suggests mass transit routings, but Transit goes much deeper -- with things like real-time bus and subway data and bike share locations for cities like Chicago and New York.</li>\n 	<li>And then, of course, there is Google Maps. I use it to plan trips, find hotels, check out neighborhoods, figure out where I am, share locations -- as well as getting me from Point A to Point B. It is probably the most indispensable travel app on my phone. Indeed, it’s the only travel app with its own screen real estate rather than sharing space in the Travel folder</li>\n 	<li>What are your suggestions?</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #132</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_132.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #132 — Travel Apps on My Phone','','inherit','closed','closed','','1798-revision-v1','','','2021-09-29 08:23:37','2021-09-29 13:23:37','',1798,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3907',0,'revision','',0),
(3908,1,'2021-09-29 08:24:23','2021-09-29 13:24:23','[caption id=\"attachment_1820\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/IMG_0548.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1820\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/IMG_0548-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> One Way to Reduce Packing Needs by 50%[/caption]\n<p>Fitting 10 days of clothes for rain, hiking, and Michelin restaurants into a 22-inch carry-on forced me to pack ruthlessly, and to distill my packing thoughts into 5 packing pro tips. Flying to Hungary right after a cycling accident reminded me of the hassles of traveling on the injured reserve list. All this and listener comments on EU mobile regulations, travel apps on smartphones, and the need for Atlanta baggage X-ray ninja skills at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_133.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.<br /><br /><br />Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #133:</p>\n<ul>\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL after what has been a light month of travel, just 10 days in Scotland on vacation, and then a quick overnight to Atlanta a couple of days after I returned. Other than that, I’ve been in Chicago trying to get back my body clock back to local time. Conventional wisdom says that your body will adjust at the rate of 1-2 time zones a day. So, for the 6 hours between Chicago and the UK, it should take me 3-5 days to adjust. I dunno, it’s felt longer than that. The older I get, the longer it seems to get.</li>\n<li>It’s also harder for me coming west than going east. When I go to Europe, I can set an alarm to wake up at the right time and will myself out of bed and into the shower. Back in the US, I can’t quite “will” myself back to sleep when I wake up at 2 or 3 in the morning. I did find, though, on this trip that I needed to be careful how long I stayed up the first couple of nights. My usual routine is to take a 30-minute nap the first afternoon I’m there -- say around 4:30 -- which then lets me push through to, say 10 or 11 that night. I’m then tired enough to get to sleep at what my body might still think is 5 or 6pm. This trip, I found that if I stayed up past midnight -- maybe because I got to reading something after getting back from dinner -- my body sorta tipped over that inflection point, caught a second, or is it a third wind, and would be happy to push through to 2 or 3 in the morning, which would make the morning’s alarm much tougher to handle.</li>\n<li>The United flight to and from Edinburgh was direct -- always nice -- but on an old 757 that had definitely seen better days, and many of them. Eight hours on any narrow body is tough, but on a 757 -- the narrowest of the narrow bodies -- it’s a bit tougher. And it was completely full -- nothing out-of-the-ordinary nowadays. Our flight from ORD landed shortly after the United direct from EWR landed, and so there was quite a queue for the non-EU passport line. Indeed, as we were coming off the jet bridge, an airport worker turned off the escalator and blocked it off. The end of the passport queue was beginning to block it on the floor below. So I reached into my backpack and pulled out my UK passport and was waved over to a set of four unmanned automated gates with no lines. I put my passport in, took my glasses off for the camera, and walked through when the gates opened up. It was pretty slick.</li>\n<li>I still had to wait for my wife and kids to work their way through the non-EU line, but I made some good use of the time -- I helped a mother and daughter from the EWR flight wrestle some amazing large bags onto a luggage cart, and had collected all of our luggage. If they had a Starbucks there in baggage claim like they do at ORD, it would’ve been damn close to a perfect morning.</li>\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/bridges/15563\">i knew</a> by bridges (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. Ft: shannonsongs</li>\n</ul>\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<ul>\n<li>Received some good comments on the last episode</li>\n<li>Nick -- no last name on the e-mail -- helped answer the question I had about arbitraging different European phone SIMs now that the EU had banned roaming charges. Nick writes -\n<ul>\n<li>You mentioned having 3 EU SIMs to choose from in Dublin, and working out the best value of the three.<br />I live in the UK and have a UK SIM. If I go to Spain, and call a UK number (even if that number belongs to the person next to me) then I just pay a local rate call - or nothing if I have an unlimited calls account. However, if I call a Spanish number, then it counts as an overseas call, as if I were in the UK - even though I\'m in Spain. So which is the best SIM to use will to an extent depend on the actual call rates, but also which country it is registered in, and which country you are calling, independently of where you are.<br />I hope that makes sense, and it\'s useful</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n<li>Nick, thanks for that. It makes a lot of sense when I recall that the EU wanted to eliminate roaming charges, so a mobile call from the UK is the same as one from Spain. For us, though, we’re rarely making a phone call. Indeed, I’m usually the only one making phone calls and that’s typically into a conference bridge. During our 10 days in Scotland, I used 11 of the 300 minutes in my 30 day plan. My wife’s 7 day plan ran out and she never noticed, because her 1 GB of data didn’t. And I think that’s where the arbitrage still could work, on using the cheapest data plan. That will, though, take a good bit of wading through really bad websites with confusing plan descriptions that are only partially in English. I think I’ll probably default to using my UK SIM just out of sheer laziness.</li>\n<li>Steve Frick left a comment on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page about the new parallel loading baggage X-ray machines I’ve encountered in the ATL PreCheck line. Steve writes -\n<ul>\n<li>I agree with you that people are hesitant to jump the queue in front of others..... and you do need mad ninja skills if you\'re in the first slot trying to grab one of those oversized bins</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n<li>Steve linked to his blog post where he has video and a more detailed description of the situation. Check out the show notes for a <a href=\"http://www.hypeorlando.com/back-and-gone-again/2017/05/01/atlanta-hartsfield-has-automated-the-tsa-process/\">link to his blog</a></li>\n<li>I have to give the ATL TSA crew props for noticing the problem with breaking into the stream of bins if you’re in one of the front loading stations. When I was going through ATL a few weeks back, there was a TSA person at the parallel loading line choreographing each bin push, having everyone hold up until all the previous bins had cleared, and then having everyone push their bins onto the conveyor at once. I haven’t seen this problem with parallel loaders in, say, Edinburgh or Heathrow or Madrid. I wonder what’s different that requires this manual intervention.</li>\n<li>And there were a couple of comments on the travel apps people use on their smartphones. Dan Brener left this Facebook\n<ul>\n<li>Great episode! Here\'s the apps I use the most: Air Canada and United, TripIt (although it\'s not as good as it could/should be), I used to use FlightTrack and really miss it, FlightAware since the AC app doesn\'t tell me where planes are coming from, Uber and Lyft, Packing (it\'s a list app to make sure I don\'t forget something obvious!), SPG, Yelp, Google Maps and Waze. There\'s a few others, but those are the main ones.</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n<li>Dan, thanks for that list. I had forgotten to mention Yelp in the last episode. I have some colleagues who are heavy Yelp users; they’ll build lists of restaurants and bars before starting a project in a new city. I tend to use Yelp and the “Explore food &amp; drinks near you” feature in Google Maps for restaurant suggestions interchangeably when I’m in a new place. I’m always surprised at how different the recommendations often are.</li>\n<li>Gary Learned sent in on Twitter -\n<ul>\n<li>What I love about Lyft over Uber is their ability to produce a consolidated receipt of all my rides on a trip</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n<li>Thanks Gary. I’ve noticed that functionality in the Lyft app, but it’s not hugely useful for me since we use Concur for our T&amp;E reporting, and it picks up the individual Amex charges rather than a feed from Lyft. Would be handy if Concur would pull a single consolidated charge from Lyft.</li>\n<li>And finally, a couple of weeks later on Twitter, Eddie Antar, who is always a chuckle, said\n<ul>\n<li>Binge listening to TC bc I had to let an AA voucher expire.? OTOH I\'m not being groped or dragged down the aisle screaming, so.</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n<li>I dunno, listening to my is better than being groped or dragged down the plane aisle. Feels a bit like being damned with very faint praise...</li>\n<li>And one last Tweet, this one from the Craig and Linda Martin of the Indie Travel Podcast…\n<ul>\n<li>Highlight of the week? meeting fellow travel podcaster @mpeacock for lunch &amp; craft beer in Edinburgh. 10 or so years of podcast friendship</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n<li>Honestly, I think Linda and I had been trading e-mails for most of this year, seeing if we could physically meet up after so many years of knowing each other in the travel podcast universe. One of us would hear the other mention travel plans in a podcast that might overlap with the other’s. It finally came together at the end of our Scotland vacation and the beginning of theirs. They flew into EDI Sunday night; we were leaving from EDI Tuesday morning, so Monday lunch was the call. I drove over from St Andrews to a new neighborhood for me; kinda hip. Linda picked a nice pub with a great beer list that we all enjoyed. It is one of the great things about travel -- getting to meet up with friends; and in this case, for the first time.</li>\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/11510\">Funkist</a> - cdk dub mix by cdk (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: teru.</li>\n</ul>\n<p><strong>Packing Pro Tips</strong></p>\n<ul>\n<li>Getting everything I needed for our 10 days in Scotland into a carry-on bag pushed my packing skills just a bit. The trip was mostly hiking and hill walks with a couple of 1-star Michelin restaurants thrown into the mix. And the forecast was for rain just about every day. We were on a direct flight to EDI and my daughter had to check a bag with stuff she was taking back to university, so the carry-on limitation wasn’t because of lost luggage or being able to power past the baggage carousel -- a non-starter given the long non-EU immigration line at EDI. It was more about trunk space in the rental car. As it was, I was doing luggage jenga just about every morning trying to puzzle everything into the back of our Nissan X-Terra.</li>\n<li>I easily spent an hour -- 2-3 times longer than usual -- trying to figure out how to get hiking shoes, rain gear, dress shirts, and everything else into that 22-inch bag. It made me pack ruthlessly -- everything had to earn its space in the bag. And though I’ve casually mentioned some of these ideas in prior episodes, this latest packing experience really crystallized this pro tip list.</li>\n<li>First and foremost, pick a single color family for your clothes, and make it black. Three main reasons -- Black makes everyone look thinner, it spans casual to smart dress codes, and black doesn’t show stains. OK, the thinner thing is a nice-to-have, but hiding stains is key. I packed two pair of slacks and wore a third on the plane. I couldn’t be one-and-done because I took incoming from a fork-handling mishap.</li>\n<li>Second, no one-and-done outfits. Every piece of clothes has to serve multiple purposes so it can be worn multiple times -- every shirt has to work under multiple sweaters and has to go with more than one pair of pants. Versatility is key. And yet another reason to pack black.</li>\n<li>Third, think \"additively\"; pack layers. This was key in my last packing challenge too -- last year’s Spring Break trip to Iceland and Southern Spain that I talked about in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/05/30/podcast-121-tsa-lines-my-luggage-is-where/\">episode #121</a>. Pack multiple thin layers that you can pile on when it’s cold and wear separately when it’s not. Black sweaters and a black fleece vest are my layering go-to’s.</li>\n<li>Fourth, wear your bulkiest clothes on the flight. I packed the hiking rain shell and flew in the blazer I needed for the 1-stars because the shell is infinitely more crushable. My only caveat to this is shoes. I packed the hiking shoes, even though they were bulkier than the dressily casual walking shoes I was also bringing, because I didn’t want to set off the metal detector in the Pre-Check line or get pulled out because the soles are too thick. If you’re not doing Pre-Check, you’re already taking your shoes off, so wear your biggest ones.</li>\n<li>And my fifth and final pro tip, use a non-descript black rolling bag. Black not only makes you look thinner, it makes your bag look thinner to gate agents scanning for bag-sizer bait. My daughter had a baby blue roller bag for the longest time. She loved that color, and it was easy to spot on the luggage carousel, which is a good thing; it ended up there a lot because gate agents were always pulling my daughter out of line to gate check that bag. Her current bag is a dark eggplant purple. It’s not black, but it’s close. If you’re flying a budget airline that’s a stickler on size, use a hard-shell bag. It’ll keep its dimensions better when overstuffed, and the polycarbonate shell will slide past the metal bars of the sizer easier than the ballistic nylon of a soft-sided bag.</li>\n<li>There you go, my five packing pro tips. If you’ve got some of your own to share, send them along through the usual channels and we’ll have them on the next episode.</li>\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/48705\">Jolanta Blues</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license.  Ft: Admiral Bob, Martijn de Boer</li>\n</ul>\n<p><strong>Traveling Injured</strong></p>\n<ul>\n<li>In a couple of <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/02/06/podcast-87-sick-on-the-road-whats-in-my-briefcase/\">past</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/03/13/podcast-88-new-travel-goodies-losing-status/\">episodes</a>, we’ve talked about how miserable it is to be sick on the road. Traveling injured is a bit similar, but not quite the same. While you’re not, say, shivering under hotel blankets after you’ve cranked the thermostat as high as it’ll go, you’re not powering through your day at 100%.</li>\n<li>The most recent stint on travel injured reserve was our May trip to Hungary. My wife had left the week before to visit her aunt and cousins, leaving me alone with the cat. I was working from home one nice day and decided to take a break for a bike ride. Figured I should take every opportunity to burn some calories now since Hungarian food isn’t known as spa cuisine. I did my normal 17-mile circuit for the 50th or 60th time. Coming towards the last mile, I’m looking ahead to line up a turn and boom -- I hit some huge divot in the pavement that I’ve never seen before. My hands fly off the handle bar, I see the front wheel turned 90 degrees, and down I go, skidding across the asphalt. I come to a stop just short of the curb, pick myself up, rinse the visible road rash with the last bits of water in my bottle, and limp my bike and myself home.</li>\n<li>I immediately hit the shower, scrubbed out the road rash (with, as you might imagine, a bit of loud vocal commentary), and surveyed the damage. Good sized abrasions on my right elbow and forearm, my right butt cheek, both knees, and a line on my left chest where I must’ve popped the handle bar. I lost a bunch of skin, but felt lucky I didn’t break a collarbone or something worse.</li>\n<li>The Friday night flight to Vienna was not a comfortable one. No knock on Austrian Airlines; as I mentioned in an <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/06/24/podcast-130-notes-from-hungary/\">earlier podcast</a>, I was happy with their service. It was primarily the seat -- a standard coach seat, so not overly spacious -- pressing up against that large bit of road rash on my right, uhh, hip. Indeed, that abrasion was still -- I think “weeping” is the technical term. And so halfway through the flight, I was in the toilet with my tube of neosporin, my gauze pads and my surgical tape re-dressing it. It was either that or change pants. And following my packing pro tips, I couldn’t do a one-and-done on these pants. Luckily, I was in that quiet time between the after-dinner and the just-before-landing toilet rushes, so no banging on the door to hurry up.</li>\n<li>Every day was like that -- 30 minutes of removing and reapplying dressings, at first 3 times a day, then 2, and then when things finally scabbed up a bit, just in the morning, and really by then as much for cosmetic purposes -- so that people wouldn’t ask me about it -- as much as anything. I had to skip the family trip to a Budapest thermal bath -- I didn’t want some bath guard calling me out of the pool in front of a couple of thousand Hungarians, and I honestly wasn’t sure how aggressively they were chlorinating that water.</li>\n<li>That wasn’t my most awkward stint on the travel injured reserve list. Last year, I squeezed in a dermatologist appt for a mole scan before a flight out that afternoon. The doc said “This one looks a bit suspect”, putting his finger on a mole right in the middle of my back. He numbed it up, shaved it off, sent it off to the lab and bandaged me up. “Change that dressing every day,” he said as I raced out to head to ORD. The next morning, in a hotel bathroom, by myself, looking in the mirror at the gauze dressing between my shoulder blades that I couldn’t reach, I wondered how I could change that dressing -- call the front desk, ask a colleague? That seemed way too much to ask. And, it wasn’t that big of a mole. That dressing could wait ‘til Friday.</li>\n</ul>\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<ul>\n<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #133</li>\n<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\n<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_133.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #133 — Packing Pro Tips; Traveling Injured','','inherit','closed','closed','','1819-revision-v1','','','2021-09-29 08:24:23','2021-09-29 13:24:23','',1819,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3908',0,'revision','',0),
(3909,1,'2021-09-29 21:47:35','2021-09-30 02:47:35','[caption id=\"attachment_1703\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/File_000.jpeg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1703\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/File_000-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> Carefully thought-out carry-on luggage[/caption]\n\nMy longest packing sessions involve trying to get 10-14 days of clothes for multiple climates and/or activities into a single 22-inch carry-on bag.&nbsp; Two years ago, it was packing for a March trip that spanned Iceland and Southern Spain. Last month, it was a 10-day drive through Scotland with clothes for rainy day hikes and one<span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">-star Michelin restaurants. It makes me&nbsp;pack ruthlessly -- everything has to earn its space in the bag. And through these packing sessions, I\'ve developed this list of packing pro tips.</span>\n<ol>\n 	<li><strong>Pick a single color family for your clothes, and make it black</strong>. Three reasons: black makes everyone look thinner, it spans casual to smart dress codes, and black doesn’t show stains. The thinner thing is a nice-to-have, but hiding stains is key. I usually pack two pair of slacks and wear a third on the plane. I can\'t be one-and-done on a pair of pants because of incoming from a fork-handling mishap.</li>\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><strong>No one-and-done outfits</strong>. Every piece of clothes has to serve multiple purposes so it can be worn multiple times. Every shirt has to work under multiple sweaters and has to go with more than one pair of pants. Versatility is key. And another reason to pack black.</span></li>\n 	<li><strong>Think additively; pack layers</strong>. This was the key to solving my Iceland-Spain packing challenge. Pack multiple thin layers that you can pile on when it’s cold and wear separately when it’s not. Black sweaters and a black fleece vest are my layering go-to’s.</li>\n 	<li><strong>Leave the workout gear at home</strong>. Gym shoes take up a huge amount of space, which can be filled with a couple of sweaters and a second week of socks and understuff. Ditch the taxis, Ubers, and rental cars, and get your exercise by walking everywhere instead.</li>\n 	<li><strong>Wear your bulkiest clothes on the flight</strong>. On the trip to Scotland, I packed the hiking rain shell and flew in the blazer I needed for the one-stars because the shell was infinitely more crushable. My only caveat to this rule is shoes. For Scotland, I packed the hiking shoes even though they were bulkier. I didn’t want to set off the metal detector in the Pre-Check line or get pulled out by the TSA because the soles were too thick. If you’re not doing Pre-Check, you’re already taking your shoes off, so wear your biggest ones.</li>\n 	<li><strong>Use a nondescript black rolling bag</strong>. Black not only makes you look thinner, it makes your bag look thinner to gate agents scanning for bag-sizer bait. My daughter had a baby blue roller bag for the longest time. She loved that color, and it was easy to spot on the luggage carousel, which was a good thing. It ended up there a lot because gate agents were always pulling my daughter out of line to gate check that bag.&nbsp; If you’re flying a budget airline that’s a stickler on size, use a hard-shell bag. It’ll keep its dimensions better when overstuffed, and the polycarbonate shell will slide past the metal bars of the sizer easier than the ballistic nylon of a soft-sided bag.&nbsp;But if you’re working against weight limits as well as dimensions on international budget carriers like Wow Air, you want the lightest, most stripped down bag possible. You don’t want the extra weight of the hard siding. You probably don’t even want very sturdy wheels; just the lightest covering around your clothes that you can find.</li>\n</ol>','Ruthless Packing Tips','','inherit','closed','closed','','1835-revision-v1','','','2021-09-29 21:47:35','2021-09-30 02:47:35','',1835,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3909',0,'revision','',0),
(3910,1,'2021-09-29 21:48:37','2021-09-30 02:48:37','[caption id=\"attachment_1843\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/2D9A5999-E233-4434-BFCE-4A45D285BEA6.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1843\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/2D9A5999-E233-4434-BFCE-4A45D285BEA6-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Status Recognition in Vietnam[/caption]\n<p>Finding a Jag in the Hertz Presidents Club aisle has me thinking about the differing value of loyalty from hotel, airlines, and car rental companies while 5-star rating schemes are pushing grade inflation. All this and comments on luggage discounts, traveling while injured, and #metoo while flying at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_134.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.<br /><br /><br />Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #134:</p>\n<ul>\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. No exciting or exotic travel since the last episode; just a quick down-and-back to Atlanta, a day in Washington, DC, and a few trips to Charlottesville, VA.</li>\n<li>The first trip to Charlottesville, about 3 weeks ago, was the first time I’d been back in 5 months after spending more than a year there. Other than the flights being poorly timed -- there are non-stops from ORD, but they arrive at either 2:45 in the afternoon or quarter past midnight -- it’s been a great town to visit. So I was surprised as anyone by the white supremacist march there in August.</li>\n<li>I was on the late night flight and when I walked out of the terminal, the one cab at the curb had already been claimed. But it was only a 4 min wait for a Lyft driver, so not a problem. Indeed, it turned out to be a great ride. The Lyft driver, an older black guy, told me, unprompted, the whole back story of the protests; how it started as a local political battle that then blew up big. He wanted me to know that Charlottesville wasn’t like that. He told me “I’ve lived here for 40 years and have never seen that statue, until one day, I drove past a park, looked to my right and there it was!”</li>\n<li>Since the white supremacists had shown back up the Saturday before we came back, I said to the project team, “We need to find out where that statue is so we can avoid it.” One is from India, the other born in the US of Indian parents. I didn’t want us stumbling into a line of tiki torch-bearing protesters.<br />But as we got working that day, we forgot about it. Driving to dinner, we missed a turn -- actually we missed going straight; instead followed the road as it turned -- and as we wandered through some side streets to get back on track, I look to my right, and there’s the Robert E Lee statue covered in black tarp, with a couple of people camped out in front of it, and another group of people walking toward it. I suggested that we didn’t need to come to a complete stop at intersection. And, well, we know where that statue is now.</li>\n<li>For all of my complaints and bitch tweeting about delayed flights, I have to say that my American flight home from Reagan National Saturday morning was great. Exit row seat; no one in the middle. Everyone boarded quickly; they closed the door and left 10 minutes early and with no traffic on the taxiway and a beautiful sunny day, we were up and over the Potomac in 5 minutes. Typically, though, nothing like this goes unpunished at ORD, but we landed, didn’t have to wait for a gate, and taxied immediately in, arriving a half-hour early. Damn if this doesn’t make me look forward to my next trip.</li>\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/52154\">release.JOY.release</a> by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: essesq, Haskel (hej31)</li>\n</ul>\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<ul>\n<li>On my most recent trip through the ATL PreCheck line, there was no X-Ray machine choreography this time. If you remember in the last episode, I talked about the TSA agent at the parallel loading X-Ray machine coordinating each bin push, having everyone hold up until all the previous bins had cleared, and then having everyone push their bins onto the conveyor at once. Not this time, though I did get a bit of a stink eye from a couple when I walked around them to one of the further up loading stations. They’re obviously not old PC heads, otherwise they’d instantly understand the difference between serial and parallel paths.</li>\n<li>Following up on the packing pro tips topics from the last episode, which I also repurposed/recycled into the Ruthless Packing Tips blog post, Dan Bennett, the CEO of Test Facts, sent me a link to study where they tested and compared 32,672 luggage prices. I’ll put a <a href=\"https://www.testfacts.com/luggage-prices-analyzed/\"><strong>link</strong> </a>to the study in the show notes, but a couple of interesting factoids from their introductory infographic\n<ul>\n<li>You can save an average of $110/39% buying on-line</li>\n<li>Walmart and Target’s on-line stores tend to have the highest discounts; Kohl’s and Macy’s the lowest</li>\n<li>Amazon is in 10th place for average discount (in the 40% range), but is tops by a long way in greatest variety -- over 12,000 luggage items vs. 7,500 for Jet which was #2</li>\n<li>Luggage sets have a 23% higher discount than single pieces</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n<li>Check it out -- it’s an interesting piece of analysis</li>\n<li>Jim McDonough posted a “traveled while injured” story on Facebook that put my biking injury whining in its place\n<ul>\n<li>My wife and I were in County Kerry on the West Coast of Ireland. We were killing time before dinner, at an ancient stone circle on the edge of town. I was taking some photos, and it started raining. While walking down a slope, I was putting my camera back in my bag to keep it dry, when my left foot slipped on the wet grass. My right knee hyper-flexed, causing a complete tear of my quadriceps tendon. There was a loud crack, but no pain.</li>\n<li>It turns out you can\'t walk without a quadriceps tendon. We didn\'t know what the problem was. My wife ran off and found some people and got them to come and get me, and they took me to the doctor\'s house. The doctor (more like a physician\'s assistant, the regular doctor was away) poked around but couldn\'t diagnose anything. We went back to our B&amp;B but did not go out to dinner that night!</li>\n<li>Flying home, Dublin/Gatwick/DFW, I needed assistance for the connections. British Airways took such good care of me in Gatwick that I fly them whenever I can. While on the plane I was OK - I used seat backs to get to/from the head. American was supposed to provide a wheelchair at DFW but they failed to until the lead flight attendant got on the horn and got me one. I had surgery a couple of days later, and my rehab took a few months.</li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">This is the same injury that Bill Clinton had at Greg Norman\'s house. He had a better medical plan than I did</span></li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n<li>Just “ouch”, Jim. Reminds me of years ago when I broke my right foot getting out of my car in Philadelphia. I stepped on some broken concrete and heard a loud “snap”! After a long wait in an ER in downtown Philly -- where they rightly were triaging gunshot victims over me -- they plastered me up to my thigh and told me not to put any weight on my foot. The next day, I’m hobbling through 30th Street Station and down the stairs to the train platform on crutches with a carry-on bag across my back, swinging with every step. No one from Amtrak took any sort of care of me.</li>\n<li>Mika Pyyhkala tweeted me a great video of what I assume is a new service that guides blind travelers through airports. I’ll put a <a href=\"https://youtu.be/rXtv-M4WpMU\"><strong>link</strong> </a>in the show notes. It’s a great demo, show how a person in the contact center is viewing a real-time video stream through what I assume is a camera mounted on the head of the traveler, and then providing audio guidance. And watching the video made me realize what a mine field an airport is for blind or low-sight travelers. I guess I should’ve realized this; it’s typically a mine field for those with 20/20 vision. Thanks Mika for the pointer. Very cool video.</li>\n<li>The #metoo Twitter campaign on sexual harassment that started up a couple of weeks ago reminded me of a couple of stories women have told me about seat assignments. One from a woman CIO; she’s sitting in her aisle seat, pre-boarded with the top status group and is downloading some last-minute e-mails during regular boarding. She looks up, there’s a guy standing there who says “Why don’t you just slide over, honey”, pointing to the center seat. She closed her PC, stood up and pointed the guy to his center seat, and then leaned out into the aisle for the rest of the flight. Another story was from a friend, a woman air marshal, who was sitting in her assigned aisle First Class seat -- armed and incognito to everyone except the flight crew. During boarding, a well-known male TV host on MSNBC asks her to switch seats. She can’t; the regulations say that air marshals need to be in their assigned seats; but she can’t tell him that and stay undercover, so she politely tells him “No”. To which he becomes very irate, obnoxiously berating her -- “Do you know who I am” and all that. As much as she’d love to tell him why she can’t move, she can’t. So she has to sit there and take it, until finally a flight attendant comes over and intervenes. Followed by, again, an uncomfortable 2-hr flight in close quarters with a troglodyte. Sexual harassment is bad -- full stop. Having to fend someone off, and then be in the same tight metal tube with him unable to leave, even worse.</li>\n<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/snowflake/56508\">Rise Up (Like the Sun)</a> by Snowflake (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: Bluemillenium, Sackjo22, Martin Luther King, Kara Square</li>\n</ul>\n<p><strong>What’s the Current Value of Loyalty?</strong></p>\n<ul>\n<li>I continue to love Hertz’s new Presidents Club pick-your-own car aisle. Yes, National has been doing it for years. But on my last trip to Atlanta, I’m walking down the aisle looking at the cars -- Altima, Altima, Hyundai, Altima, Jag, Altima -- wait, what? I very quickly back up. It’s a new Jaguar Model XF. I look up -- nope, I haven’t slipped into the Upgrade aisle. I throw my bag in the back and take off for one of my nicer drives up I-85 through the city. Another time, I’m walking down the aisle and a Hertz guy pulls a new Dodge Charger into the space next to me. He hops out, hands me the keys saying “We want to make sure you guys have a nice selection of cars to choose from.” And so now as the year is winding down, I’m looking -- how many more rentals to keep Presidents Club status?</li>\n<li>I felt the flip side of this last week at the Charlottesville Courtyard where as I’m filling up a couple of water glasses in the workout room cooler, I tweet “I kinda hate Courtyard Hotels. They offer the worst experience for the money to Marriott Platinum members…” Scott Drake tweeted back “I’ll be the contrarian: at the price point is it not valuable? Are you expecting the JW experience at a Courtyard?” while Michael Kline asked “Detailed explanation? Maybe on the podcast?” Mine was a tweet that come from a comparison between my stay at an Atlanta Marriott the prior week and this Courtyard. For about the same rate, the Atlanta Marriott gave me a bit of a welcome gift, free breakfast every morning, and restocked my room with bottled water. The Courtyard -- I could either pick a bottle of something from their little market next to the front desk or have one free coffee during my stay. I took the bottle of water, which I then filled up every morning in the workout room until the maid threw it out. Not knocking the maid -- she’s just doing her job. But as I’m carrying the now filled water glasses back to my room, I’m thinking -- why am I staying here? And again, it’s not that I couldn’t go buy a bottle of water and expense it, it was more the disconnect of the thing -- how much better the Marriott treated me for the same price.</li>\n<li>On my last trip to ATL, I flew DL where I have absolutely no status. I was trying to thread my flights between already-booked conference calls, and DL, with way more flights than AA or UA, was the only way to string everything together. On the way down, I couldn’t get a seat assignment until I was at the gate -- 32B, second-to-the-last row on an old Boeing 717 -- the last of the DC-9/MD-80 series that I think Delta got from the old AirTrans. At the gate I thought I lucked into an aisle seat, but those 717’s have a 3-2 seat configuration, opposite of AA and the old NW, so B is a middle seat. The flight was fine; the service reasonable, and it was a short flight, so it wasn’t a big deal. But it was definitely a less enjoyable experience that my Saturday flight on American, with an exit row aisle seat and an empty middle seat.</li>\n<li>There was a study a few months ago that showed American was the most stingy carrier with award seats. And there are other ways that they’ve eroded the value of loyalty. I’ve flown American since July 1985 when I started my first full-time job in Dallas and I’ve noticed that chipping way over what’s now 37 years -- that’s a frightening number to say out loud. But when my objective is to get from Point A to Point B with the least amount of hassle, there is still some value to loyalty.</li>\n<li>Which is kinda the muddling middle ground I’ve carved out nowadays; invest enough time/effort to hit the loyalty level that fits the value I will get. I’ll go out of my way to re-up my Hertz status because it’s given me great rental car choices. I won’t push for anything more than mid-level airline status because, with the high load factors and the push to sell 1st-class seats, there not much more to get than free front-of-the-plane seating and a reasonable shot at overhead bin space. Going out of my way to make American’s Exec Platinum or United’s 1K again doesn’t appear to be worth it. And with Courtyards, there’s not much value in a $2 bottle of water.</li>\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djiz/10514\">Nube - Djiz Rmx</a> by Kwame (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: SylviaO</li>\n</ul>\n<p><strong>Need Those 5 Stars</strong></p>\n<ul>\n<li>A few months ago, after an overnight stay at a Residence Inn in Baltimore, I wrote up a TripAdvisor review. I titled it “Pretty standard Residence Inn experience” and gave the place 3 whatever TripAdvisor calls them -- stars, circles -- whatever they are, I gave them 3. Seemed in line with the review, where I said “Standard Residence Inn set up; friendly service. Shuttle driver provided good service driving us to/from nearby businesses”. Nothing controversial. So I was a little surprised when I got a note the next day from the general manager\n<ul>\n<li>“Thank you very much for going on TripAdvisor.com to review our hotel. We greatly appreciate it. One request I have, if you would be willing, is if you might consider changing your rating from a 3 star review to a 4 star review. Marriott hotels views a 3 star review or lower as a “0”. Meaning the hotel takes a hit/mark against it for providing what Marriott considers is a “bad” stay which is 3 or under in their view. It looks like your comments indicate that you had a good stay. In that regard, I wonder if you would be willing to change your score up to a 4? We would really appreciate it if you would.”</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n<li>I didn’t change the rating. Maybe I should’ve, but honestly, I don’t know. And even if I did, I really didn’t want to. I thought it was a 3-star experience. I’m sorry that Marriott doesn’t give you credit for that, but I kinda feel like that’s not my problem</li>\n<li>Now, I’m nothing if not inconsistent, because I’ll give every Uber and Lyft driver 5 stars if they get me to my destination in a reasonably clean car. Indeed, I was right with my son when he jumped all over my wife for giving a Lyft driver 3 stars for what she thought was an “OK, nothing special” ride. “You gonna get him kicked off!” he said. And he wasn’t wrong. Internal Uber documents leaked a few years back said that drivers with ratings less than 4.6 would be considered for deactivation. So this is a little different than TripAdvisor. Here, Uber, the owner of the platform, is saying that a reasonable, acceptable ride should be 5 stars, since anything less will slide the driver down toward the deactivation zone.</li>\n<li>It’s the Internet version of the Lake Wobegon effect -- everybody is above average. The latest stats I saw on Yelp said that the average rating is 3.8 and 46% of their reviews had 5 stars. Which explains why that 4-star diner you drove to try out was just “OK”.</li>\n<li>Call me cranky, but the two apps that I regularly rate on -- TripAdvisor and Untappd -- I rate “average” as a 3; kinda like King Canute trying to hold back the waves of grade inflation. On Untappd, anything below a 3, I wouldn’t order again. a 3 is OK, 4 is a great beer, 5 outstanding. I just downloaded my stats into Excel and after a little remedial pivot table training, I can see that I’m a bit skewed -- 13% of my ratings are below 3; 60% are between 3 and 3.75; 26% between 4 and 4.75; and 1% at 5 with a median rating of 3.5. Not as bad as Yelp, but maybe it’s because I really like beer.</li>\n</ul>\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<ul>\n<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #134</li>\n<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\n<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_134.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #134 — Value of Loyalty; Need Those 5 Stars','','inherit','closed','closed','','1842-revision-v1','','','2021-09-29 21:48:37','2021-09-30 02:48:37','',1842,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3910',0,'revision','',0),
(3912,1,'2021-09-29 21:49:55','2021-09-30 02:49:55','[caption id=\"attachment_1855\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/IMG_0513-cropped.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1855\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/IMG_0513-cropped-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Always use a coffee name when crossing the 3-adjective limit[/caption]\n\nHere\'s something to listen to while in the Thanksgiving airport lines and traffic jams. We list out some of the squares we\'d like to see in an airport bingo card, and I end up going back to the future with my new travel PC. We also talk about my growing stack of subway \"tap\" cards and some forecasts on what could be a traffic jammed Thanksgiving holiday. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_135.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n\n\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #135:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. Started my traditional Thanksgiving no-fly shutdown a week early. My normal practice is to stay at home Thanksgiving week, avoiding what is in the US the busiest travel week of the year. But this year, I’m taking advantage of every opportunity to scale back my travel a bit; consciously going to an every other week travel schedule. This is a big change for me; I think last year I travelled all but 6 or 8 weeks. I’m finding this more leisurely makes me much less brittle/much more accepting of travel hiccups.</li>\n 	<li>Which came in very handy on my last trip because, as I feared, I jinxed myself with the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/10/31/podcast-134-value-of-loyalty-need-those-5-stars/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">last episode</a> when, after a great flight back from DC, I said “Damn if this doesn’t make me look forward to my next trip.” Well, we all know that no good deed goes unpunished. My next flight to Charlottesville was late night Sunday -- leave ORD 9:50pm, get into CHO around 12:30am. I’m sitting in the Admirals Club catching up on e-mail, reading a bit. I’d been getting occasional phone notifications; my flight was bouncing around, changing departure gates, never a good sign, but it settled down after a while. Around 9:15, I figured I’d walk over to the departure gate. I looked at the monitor -- gate G7 as it had been for the past half-hour, so I packed up my stuff. Just as I picked up my phone -- bing, a new notification -- my flight’s cancelled. What the hell?</li>\n 	<li>I asked the Admirals Club folks to check -- yup, it’s cancelled; no, they don’t know why, and yes, they’re as surprised as I am. Of course, American sends me a nice notification that they’ve re-booked me onto the same flight the next day -- leaving 9:50pm Monday -- seeming to expect that I’d be perfectly happy with them blowing a day hole in my schedule. The Admirals Club agents knew that was not an acceptable answer, and one of them immediately started looking for alternatives. Me too -- looking at CHO, DC, and Richmond. Because of how late AA canceled, there was nothing available the next morning. Not surprising given how full planes are flying these days. After about 20 minutes of non-stop keystrokes, the Admirals Club agent found me a flight the next day at 11:30, getting me into Richmond at 2:30pm. I took it -- that was as good as it was going to get -- and gave her a couple of the service recognition coupons American sends the status fliers. She’d earned them. And as I heard other guys around me scrambling for hotel rooms, I stopped thinking about how American had wasted my Sunday night and was going to waste my Monday morning, and instead was happy that the cab I was going to catch was taking me to my own bed.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/duckett/23334\"><em>Another Girl</em></a> by duckett</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>I’m sorta short-cycling what has become my normal monthly cadence -- just squeaking in episodes at the last day of the month -- so that I can give you something to listen to in those Thanksgiving airport line and traffic jams. Triple A forecasts 45.5 million people hitting the roads, the highest since 2005 -- probably some combination of low unemployment and low gas prices. And as the Thanksgiving holiday has expanded -- trying finding anyone in the office on Weds -- Tuesday evening is <a href=\"http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-met-holiday-travel-chicago-20171114-story.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">forecasted </a>to be the worst traffic, when getaway drivers and outbound rush hour combine into a hellish brew of standstill traffic jams. In Chicago, the trip from downtown to O’Hare is predicted to be an hour and 14 minutes, almost 4x more than what it takes on a clear road. Surpassed only by the 2 hour trip to JFK also forecasted for Tuesday evening.</li>\n 	<li>Steve Frick left a comment on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> about<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/10/31/podcast-134-value-of-loyalty-need-those-5-stars/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> last episode</a>’s topic on ratings grade inflation -- the need for that 5-star review. Steve writes:\n<ul>\n 	<li>I\'m a \"Yelp\" guy and I consistently give Fairfield Inn 3 stars. My reviews are along these lines \"Typical Fairfield, nothing that bad yet nothing yet nothing that great. Friendly staff, clean location, and comfortable beds. Same sub-par Fairfield breakfast, but that\'s why you pack instant oatmeal and protein bars.\" There\'s nothing that makes me want to tell people to stay there.</li>\n 	<li>Your <a href=\"https://untappd.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Untappd </a>information got me thinking. With around 1200 unique beers I\'m well below your numbers but I came in with the bulk of my ratings also at 3.75.</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Thanks for that, Steve. My rationalization for my beer ratings skew is selection bias -- with over 5,200 unique beer check-ins, I pretty much know what I like and what I don’t like, so I’m not knowingly going to order and pay for a beer I don’t think I’ll like. I did have the exception to that last weekend when my son and I were at <a href=\"http://fobab.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">FoBAB</a> -- the Festival of Barrel Aged Beers. We volunteered to pour on Friday -- the first night -- which earned us a free ticket for Saturday night. At some point, my son give me a glass “Here, taste this”. I spit it back into the glass, dumped it, and rinsed the glass twice. It was awful. What was it? It was a beer that I had specifically said I wanted to avoid after reading the description in the program -- “Aged 12 months in Ardbeg scotch barrels with coffee and peanut butter.” I rated it 0.25 out of 5 because a zero doesn’t register as a rating. After that, I think I can live with a bit of rating skew.</li>\n 	<li>I started off the other topic in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/10/31/podcast-134-value-of-loyalty-need-those-5-stars/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">last episode</a> -- the value of loyalty -- with the story of finding a new Jag in the Hertz Presidents Club aisle at ATL. Of course, I grabbed it. The next afternoon, though, I was kinda wishing I’d taken an Uber or Lyft. My meeting in Norcross, north of Atlanta, was running late and refreshing Waze, I could see traffic both through and around Atlanta was building. And the rental return is at least a 15-minute ride to the terminal -- when the train doesn’t make an unscheduled stop mid-transit as I described in an earlier episode. So I was gearing myself up for missing my flight and the hassles of finding a seat on something later, when up popped an e-mail from Hertz offering to drive me to the terminal for $20. Sold! After I pulled in, one of the car “checker-inners” hopped into the driver’s seat and off we drove. And she was as happy to be driving that Jag as I was. “I love this car!” she said as we pulled out. “It’s such a beautiful day, I may drop you off and just keep on driving!” We had a good chat. She dropped me off at the door closest to the PreCheck line and I legged it in to make my flight. I won’t pop for that every time, but that $20 was worth it.</li>\n 	<li>Also, thanks to Cristina Sainz of Booking.com’s <a href=\"http://info.suite.booking.com/business-travel-blog/7-podcasts-every-travel-manager-needs-to-listen-to\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Business Travel Blog</a> who put TravelCommons #2 in her list of the “7 Podcasts Every Travel Manager Needs to Listen to Right Now”. She describes the podcast as “serving up pithy travel advice since 2005.” Well, we try. Thanks again Cristina for the shout-out.</li>\n 	<li>When I was in DC last month, I added another subway “tap” card to my collection, which was a little bit of a bummer because I still had an old style Metrocard -- the paper fare card with a mag stripe -- with at least one ride’s worth of fare still on it. So now I have a Smart Trip card along with a Ventra card from Chicago, an Oyster card from London, and a Breeze card from Atlanta. I hold onto them because they’re reusable and, while not expensive, their costs start to add up. The Atlanta and DC cards were $2 each; the Chicago card was $5, and the London card £5 -- or about $6.60 at today’s exchange rate. The Chicago card is, of course, the one I use the most. And it’s nice because I can top it up with a smartphone app. Comes in handy when I decide to take the L from ORD downtown. Beats standing in the perpetual long lines in front of the ORD fare machines. You’d think that if CTA is going to charge a premium to board at ORD, they’d at least pony up to cut the line to pay it. Little known pro tip for folks coming into ORD -- skip the line and pay with your iPhone if you have Apple Pay set up. It doesn’t read as fast as the Ventra card, but it works -- at least on the L -- the subway. When I was in London this past summer, the Underground was wonky. I could tap in at the turnstile with my iPhone, but couldn’t tap out which was a real hassle. But my daughter, though, who has a contactless debit card from RBS had no problems. And there wasn’t an app to top up my Oyster card, so I had to queue up in front of a lot of fare machines. Last month, New York announced that they’re hiring the same company London used to revamp the MTA’s payment system. I hope they get Apple and Android Pay working right. And more broadly, I hope these tap cards are just a temporary bridge until these transit systems can fully upgrade their systems to use smartphones. Until then, I carry a card holder in my backpack with my $15-$20 worth of subway tap cards.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/flatwound/14476\"><em>The Long Goodbye</em></a> by John Pazden</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Playing Airport Bingo</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>I got a press release a couple of days ago from <a href=\"https://www.airhelp.com/en/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">AirHelp</a>, a company that looks like will file compensation claims for delayed flights in return for a 25% cut -- which doesn’t seem too bad since they’re doing it on a contingent basis. They sent along an Airport Bingo card for “helping you pass the time while not so patiently waiting to board”. It’s kinda the airport version of “buzzword bingo” that we all play on conference calls -- instead of marking a square someone says “synergy”, AirHelp has squares for things like “police dog” and “solo traveler”.</li>\n 	<li>That’s OK for a start, I guess. But here at TravelCommons, we try to go to the next level of road warrior-ism. I’m not going to fill out all 24 squares, but here are 12 squares’ worth to get you started\n<ol>\n 	<li>10-15 minute traffic jam on the airport access road -- just long enough to get those stress hormones flowing</li>\n 	<li>Guy in front of you in the PreCheck line walks through the metal detector with his smartphone. The alarm sounds. He stands there, puzzled. The TSA person rolls her eyes and asks, yet again, if he’d emptied his pockets. He looks surprised that his smartphone would set it off. She looks at her watch for how long ‘til her next break.</li>\n 	<li>Girl pulling a Hello Kitty kids-sized roller board on her way to Grandma’s. Hey, who said airport bingo had to be 100% snarky?</li>\n 	<li>Woman in front of you in the Starbucks line orders a half-decaf 3-pump no-foam vanilla latte, breaking the 3-adjective rule. It’s Sodexo, not your corner Starbucks. Keep it simple so the rest of us can order.</li>\n 	<li>A piano bar playing Christmas carols -- or if you’re in Nashville airport, a country duo</li>\n 	<li>A family of four or more walking abreast, slowly, so that people racing for their gates drift into the on-coming traffic, or try to thread through the crowd in front of a boarding gate. The only upside? One of the family might be pulling a Hello Kitty bag.</li>\n 	<li>An available rocking chair. More airports are scattering these around, in front of windows in terminal connectors, in random hallways. Bonus if it’s next to an open -- and working -- electrical outlet</li>\n 	<li>A craft beer bar with beers you haven’t had -- get those stress hormones back under control, and increment your unique beer counter on Untappd</li>\n 	<li>Dueling gate announcements. Gates G20 and G22 are boarding at the same time, with each gate agent talking over the other one. You hear Boarding Group 3 called and hustle up to the door, only to be shunted over to wait in the shame station; the other gate called Boarding Group 3.</li>\n 	<li>Boarding is complete and there’s an empty middle seat next to you! The clouds part and a golden ray of sunshine reflects off the iPad of the guy sitting in the window seat, illuminating that lovely little bit of extra elbow room. You and the window seat guy look at each other, smile, and feel those stress hormones drop another notch.</li>\n 	<li>Missing crew. Boarding’s complete, you’re next to an empty middle seat, but you have no crew. Their flight was late, and pulled into a gate two terminals over. They’re on their way, but now you’re worried that some stand-by will drop into that empty seat. That golden ray of sunshine dims a bit.</li>\n 	<li>Early arrival! Not only did the seat stay empty, but favorable winds put you on the ground 30 minutes early. You start to think that you should travel more often.</li>\n</ol>\n</li>\n 	<li>OK, there you go. There’s half your airport bingo card filled out. If you’re flying out Tues or Weds, you’ll have more that enough time in line to figure out the rest. Let us know -- <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Facebook</a>, or <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">website</a> -- what squares you come up with.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/28792\"><em>Slinky Blues</em></a> by Admiral Bob</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Back to the Future with my New Travel PC</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>I’ve been muttering under my breath about my Lenovo ThinkPad for a while now. I’ve had it for 4 years now. It’s feeling a bit heavy and looking a bit beat up, and though it’s no doubt been fully depreciated off the firm’s balance sheet, I don’t hear any rumors of an impending refresh. So I’ve been semi-shopping for a new Travel PC -- clicking through to Engadget reviews, glancing over, eyeing what the other folks on the plane or in the concierge lounge are using.</li>\n 	<li>Seven years ago (just about to the day), in what might’ve passed as an instance of pithy travel advice, I <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2010/11/15/two-weeks-with-a-macbook-air/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">wrote </a>about the use case for a Travel PC -- what it is, and more importantly, what it is not. It’s not my primary computer; it’s not my podcast production or video editing machine. That’s my home PC which is now up to 16GBs of RAM, an 8-core processor, 2 21-inch monitors, Blu-Ray burner, and a couple of terabyte hard drives. My Travel PC is spec’d for what’s important, what I need when I travel — light weight, long battery life, low screen profile so not to get crushed when the guy in the row in front of me power-reclines his seat, and reasonable processing power (in that order) — and leaves behind what’s not. Seven years ago -- in 2010 to save you the math -- the 11-inch MacBook Air was my choice for the Best Travel PC.</li>\n 	<li>My Travel PC use case hasn’t changed, but the market has -- kinda. In my looking around, what I’ve seen is 2 ½ kinds of travel PCs. There are the next generations of the laptop -- thin ultrabooks from Lenovo, HP and Dell; MacBook Pros from Apple -- or full-sized iPads with combo covers/soft keyboards and pens -- with the Microsoft Surface Pro being that ½ case, a thin Windows PC with a fold-out keyboard cover and pen. Quite honestly, none of those options really spoke to me -- at least enough to make me part with my own cash. The ultrabooks didn’t offer much new; I’d might as well “accidently” dump a grande cappuccino on my old Lenovo ‘cause this is what I’d get in return. The MacBook Pros are certainly sleek, but as a Travel PC, don’t seem to offer much more for the Apple premium. I have been thinking about the tablet/keyboard combo, specifically the Surface Pro; but watching guys try to work that soft keyboard on an airplane seatback tray… I could see myself wearing a cup of coffee two weeks after starting to fly with one of those. So, I kept semi-shopping</li>\n 	<li>But then last week, I got an e-mail blast from Newegg, the online PC parts retailer; I usually buy from them them when I’m assembling or upgrading my home PC. They had a flash sale on refurbed 11-inch MacBook Airs, not the 2010 model but what Apple dubs an “early 2014” model. Pretty much identical to my old one, but with updated specs, including the same processor as my Lenovo. I looked at it, did a few Internet search. It sat in a shopping cart for a couple of days until I thought “For $385, why not?” and pulled the trigger. It showed up a few days ago, and save for a corner ding, looks pretty new. I’ve upgraded to the current version of MacOS, installed Office 365 and VMFusion on it, and so I’m pretty much ready to go -- back to the future.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #135</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_135.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #135 — Airport Bingo; My New Old Travel PC','','inherit','closed','closed','','1854-revision-v1','','','2021-09-29 21:49:55','2021-09-30 02:49:55','',1854,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3912',0,'revision','',0),
(3913,1,'2021-09-29 21:50:40','2021-09-30 02:50:40','[caption id=\"attachment_1884\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/iStock-672260056.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1884\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/iStock-672260056-300x200.jpg\" alt=\"Bingo card played with bottle caps.\" width=\"300\" height=\"200\"></a> Buy another round! I just saw a Hello Kitty bag![/caption]\n\nI remember playing <a href=\"https://www.walmart.com/ip/Regal-Games-License-Plate-Travel-Bingo-2-Cards/146176397\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">license plate</a> and <a href=\"https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004GVYD98/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">travel bingo</a> as a kid driving down I-65 to Grandma\'s house. But that was before deregulation, when plane flights were more comfortable but a lot more expensive. With more families flying to Grandma\'s house, airport bingo seems more on-target. A quick Google search will find all sorts of <a href=\"https://www.airhelp.com/en/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">airport</a> <a href=\"https://www.thomascook.com/blog/trip-tips/before-going-on-holiday/airport-bingo/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">bingo</a> <a href=\"https://staringispolite.github.io/airportbingo/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">cards</a>&nbsp;with squares for things like “police dog” and “solo traveler\" to help you&nbsp; as one press release put it, “pass the time while not so patiently waiting to board.\"\n\nThat’s OK for a start, I guess. But here at TravelCommons, we try to go to the next level of road warrior-ism, so here is an airport bingo card with a more realistic take at holiday air travel...\n<ol>\n 	<li>10-15 minute traffic jam on the airport access road -- just long enough to get those stress hormones flowing</li>\n 	<li>You score a complimentary PreCheck notice on your boarding pass</li>\n 	<li>Guy in front of you in the PreCheck line walks through the metal detector with his smartphone. The alarm sounds. He stands there, puzzled. The TSA person rolls her eyes and asks, yet again, if he’d emptied his pockets. He looks surprised that his smartphone would set it off. She looks at her watch for how long ‘til her next break.</li>\n 	<li>Girl pulling a Hello Kitty kids-sized roller board on her way to Grandma’s. Hey, who said airport bingo had to be 100% snarky?</li>\n 	<li>Woman in front of you in the Starbucks line orders a half-decaf 3-pump no-foam vanilla latte, breaking the 3-adjective rule. It’s Sodexo, not your corner Starbucks. Keep it simple so the rest of us can order.</li>\n 	<li>Piano bar playing Christmas carols -- or if you’re in Nashville airport, a country duo</li>\n 	<li>A family of four or more walking abreast, slowly, so that people racing for their gates drift into the on-coming traffic, or try to thread through the crowd in front of a boarding gate.</li>\n 	<li>Someone sprinting down the terminal</li>\n 	<li>Available rocking chair. More airports are scattering these around, in front of windows in terminal connectors, in random hallways. Bonus if it’s next to an open -- and working -- electrical outlet</li>\n 	<li>Craft beer bar with beers you haven’t had -- get those stress hormones back under control</li>\n 	<li>Dueling gate announcements. Gates G20 and G22 are boarding at the same time, with each gate agent talking over the other one. You hear Boarding Group 3 called and hustle up to the door, only to be shunted over to wait in the shame station; the other gate called Boarding Group 3.</li>\n 	<li>One of the cabin cleaning crew is wearing reindeer antlers</li>\n 	<li>Free Space</li>\n 	<li>Passenger walking back up to the front of the plane because the bag wouldn\'t fit in the overhead</li>\n 	<li>Boarding is complete and there’s an empty middle seat next to you!</li>\n 	<li>Missing crew. You’re next to an empty middle seat, but you have no crew. Their flight was late, and pulled into a gate two terminals over. They’re on their way, but now you’re worried that some stand-by will drop into that empty seat.</li>\n 	<li>Window seat passenger is startled by a direct hit from the de-icing fluid spray</li>\n 	<li>Someone in the row in front of you is watching a compilation of Game of Thrones sex scenes on a full-sized iPad</li>\n 	<li>Old school flight attendant hangs a coffee pack in the rear toilet as an air freshener</li>\n 	<li>Passenger wearing destination-inappropriate clothing (e.g., cargo shorts on a flight to Green Bay, Canada Goose jacket on a flight to Cancun)</li>\n 	<li>Passengers applaud the plane landing</li>\n 	<li>Early arrival!&nbsp; Favorable winds put you on the ground 30 minutes early. You start to think that you should travel more often.</li>\n 	<li>The first restroom you walk past is closed for cleaning, maintenance, or the line is out the door</li>\n 	<li>Your luggage is one of the first 10 bags to appear on the belt</li>\n 	<li>Grandma\'s car is there when you walk out of the terminal -- and the airport police didn\'t ticket her or make her recirculate</li>\n</ol>','Holiday Airport Bingo','','inherit','closed','closed','','1885-revision-v1','','','2021-09-29 21:50:40','2021-09-30 02:50:40','',1885,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3913',0,'revision','',0),
(3915,1,'2021-09-29 21:51:55','2021-09-30 02:51:55','[caption id=\"attachment_1895\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/iStock-502842002.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1895\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/iStock-502842002-300x200.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"200\" /></a> A C-Note for you, and you, and you...[/caption]\n\nAfter traveling with younger colleagues who pay for everything with cards, I wonder if I\'m the last generation of cash payers. I also talk about the upcoming smart luggage ban on US airlines and a long Saturday afternoon trying to redeem some British Airways Avios points. All this, a new Uber driver story, and a few Christmas carols at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_136.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #136:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL on what has been a very light travel month, just one trip to New York and then back down to Charlottesville, VA before an early wrap-up of my 2017 travel. I wanted to avoid flying into LGA because of the construction, but UA’s EWR monopoly jacks the price difference way beyond what I can justify, so I gritted my teeth and booked the LGA flight. It was amazingly smooth for Monday morning rush hour in ORD. Walked straight into the PreCheck line. There were a ton of people there -- as is typical on a Monday morning, lots of professional travelers -- but everything moved smoothly. The TSA stations were fully staffed; there was a minimal number of amateur travelers in PreCheck, and so what appeared to be a very daunting line was an easy 5-minute exercise. After that, I walked straight up the Starbucks register and ordered a coffee, and had a easy walk down to the gate. We left ORD on-time and landed at LGA 30 minutes early! I checked my watch again to make sure it was right. On a good day, I consider an flight between ORD and LGA to be on-time if I’m not more than 30 minutes late. I’m not sure I’ve ever arrived early. Indeed, somebody sent me a press release last month with stats saying that Chicago-New York is second only to SF-LA in the list of most disrupted air routes. All this joyousness hit the wall, though -- almost literally -- when I walked out of LGA Terminal B smack into the cab line which, for those of you not familiar with LGA, should not be see when you walk out the front of Terminal B because the cab rank is on the side of Terminal B. Well, maybe they moved it for the construction. Nope, it was where it always has been. So my time budget balanced out -- 30-minute early arrival funded the 30-minute cab ride. Easy come, easy go.</li>\n 	<li>I was only in New York for Monday day -- arrived at 11am and left at 8pm -- which meant trying to find a cab on 5th Ave to take me to LGA during rush hour. Or used to. Whatever your opinions on Uber or ride sharing in general, the ability to easily get a ride from Manhattan to LGA without dancing into the street, hiding your luggage behind a trash can, and pleading with the one guy who finally stopped is justification enough for its existence. And I’m obviously not the only one who feels this way, so there are gobs of Uber drivers on, say, 5th Ave at rush hour, making it hard to spot your ride and easy to get into someone else’s. Monday night, I noticed a new option on the Uber screen that was showing my driver crawling toward me through Midtown traffic. “Click here to change the color of your driver’s Uber badge”. I clicked and got a color spectrum slider, which kept me occupied while I was waiting. I changed the color to red, then blue, then yellow, and then Uber said he was a block away, to some shade of lime green. I looked up, and there was an SUV with a lime green Uber badge in the window. I hopped in and off we went. I asked him how his evening was going. “Fine,” he said, “though I think this Uber light is acting up. Just now, it started changing all sorts of colors.”</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/copperhead/40520\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen</a> by copperhead (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: Admiral Bob, Javolenus , Sackjo22</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Roger Nash sent a note on Twitter with a pointer to the Transport for London’s new Oyster app. In the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/11/20/podcast-135-airport-bingo-new-old-travel-pc/\">last episode</a>, I talked about my growing stack of contactless -- tap ‘n’ go -- transit cards, and difference between re-loading my Chicago Ventra card with a smartphone app vs. having to queue at a machine to top up my Oyster card when we were in London last summer. TfL launched their Oyster app a few months back and seem to be aggressively rev’ing it to add features. The only problem for me -- it’ll only take a UK-based payment card. So I’ll have to sponge off my daughter if I want to skip the machine. That’ll be a fun role change…</li>\n 	<li>Also got a good run of comments on the Airport Bingo topic.\n<ul>\n 	<li>An anonymous comment asking “Since when do bingo cards have a story arc?” Fair point…</li>\n 	<li>Donna Smith Pleiman on Twitter suggested a square for “sweaty guy racing onto the plane at the last minute plops down next to you, proceeds to take his shoes off.” Yeah, that one happens a little too often -- because once is too often</li>\n 	<li>Rob said: I like the \"3-adjective rule\". I\'ve always said, \"If you have to inhale to finish your drink order... you don\'t actually like coffee.\" Good point, if you have to use circular breathing in the Starbucks line, you need to re-think your beverage choices.</li>\n 	<li>And Steve Frick built his own card in a post on his Back and Gone Again blog. “Since not everyone travels by air, we’re focusing on travel in general,” he says and then spins through his set of 25 spaces. I’ll post a <a href=\"http://www.hypeorlando.com/back-and-gone-again/2017/11/22/holiday-travel-bingo/\">link</a> to it in the show notes.</li>\n 	<li>And with Steve throwing down that challenge, I stole a couple of his squares so I could expand my Airport Bingo card to the full 25 spaces in a blog post on the TravelCommons site last week. Check it out; I hope it keeps you entertained on your trip to Grandma’s house.</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>The smart luggage ban announced by Delta, American, and Alaska with the other US oligopoly members United and Southwest expected to follow shortly caused a bit of a Twitter storm. Next month, January 15 to be exact, smart luggage without removable batteries will be banned. And if your smart bag is checked, you have to remove battery before it goes in the hold -- which negates one of the key benefits pitched by smart bag sellers -- the ability to track your bag through built-in GPS and cellular data. No battery, and it’s just another bag left behind on the tarmac, or as one of my funnier Twitter followers @ThankYouLeetch replied that the airlines were hard at work -- “We\'re GOING to lose your bag, and we\'ll be damned if we let the likes of YOU find it! If you must know, we are just REALLY into this monopoly thing.\" Kinda blows if you just dropped $400 on one of these bags.</li>\n 	<li>This would seem to cause an existential problem for category pioneer Bluesmart because none of their bags -- the original one nor the recently released Series 2 -- have removable batteries. I backed Bluesmart’s initial Indiegogo campaign back in November 2014 -- longtime podcast listener Arnoud Heijnis <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/11/22/podcast-112-holiday-airport-etiquette-travel-tax-pile-up/\">pointed it out to me</a> -- and received my bag a year later. I reviewed it in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/12/podcast-120-where-do-guidebooks-fit-in-i-hate-shopping-for-suitcases/\">episode 120</a> after a couple of months of use -- my take: “I’m kinda “meh” on all the electronics, so it’s a nice enough hard-shell wheelie bag with a couple of bells and whistles that don’t necessarily wow me.” Though I did amend that “meh” in the very <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/05/30/podcast-121-tsa-lines-my-luggage-is-where/\">next episode</a> saying “the Bluesmart is the perfect carry-on size, it’s usually right above me in the plane cabin, so the location finder isn’t that valuable. Except when I have to gate check my bag on a small regional jet. On a recent Skywest flight, it was taking my bag a long time to show up at the gate after arriving. Hmmm, I pulled out my iPhone, hit the Location button on the Bluesmart app, and it showed me that my bag had updated its location a couple of minutes prior and was indeed here. A few minutes later, it showed up in the last tranche of bags heaved up into the jet bridge. Not critical functionality, but it moves up from “meh” to “kinda handy”.”</li>\n 	<li>The real pain for me is that I now have to shop for another suitcase which I really hate. I finally put my 10-year-old Victorinox bag out to pasture because the handle locked itself in the extended position, and so I’d switched over to my Bluesmart for these recent trips. My last flight back from CHO was on an American Eagle regional jet. I’m waiting along the side of a cold ORD bridge with about 20 other passengers for my bag. It comes out second because, even though there’s not First Class on this plane, I’ve clung to the yellow gate check tag that I got with a First Class upgrade last month. Sparky, the young gate agent, looks at my bag as he’s handing it to me and says “Is that a smart bag? Did you take the battery out of that?” “No, because I don’t have to until January 15,” I shot back. Don’t push it, American. You’re forcing me to scrap a 2-year-old bag; I got that. But don’t make me go luggage shopping the week before Christmas.</li>\n 	<li>One of the topics back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/11/22/podcast-125-uber-driver-stories-overseas-for-the-election/\">episode 125</a> was life stories from my Uber and Lyft drivers. I still do ask most of my drivers how they like driving, how long they’ve been doing it, and what else they do — if it’s not their full time gig. Last month, we were taking an Uber into the city on Saturday for a beer festival. The driver was great -- very personable guy. So I ask him about his gig. He’s been doing it full-time for 2 years now. Before that, he was a hotel manager. He quit because the stress was too much -- late night calls about guests, bedbug infestations,.... He said that driving Uber in Chicago was much less stressful. Think about next time you’re about to light into the assistant night manager about a missing towel -- their job is more stressful than driving full-time in bumper-to-bumper traffic. That was an eye-opener to me. I’ve gone out of my way to be more pleasant to front desk folks ever since.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/NiGiD/48586\">O Tannenbaum / Oh Christmas Tree</a> by Martijn de Boer (NiGiD) (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license.  Ft: Admiral Bob (admiralbob77)</span></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Is Cash is a Waning King?</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>As I said at the start of the show, my last trip this year was ORD to LGA to CHO. I didn’t arrive too late so there were a couple of cabs waiting -- no LGA-style lines, I just hopped in. It’s a $25 flat rate to downtown Charlottesville. We pulled up to my hotel, I gave the driver a 20 and a 10 and got out of the cab. “Cash? Thanks!” he said.</li>\n 	<li>I’ve said this before; I try to pay all of my cab fares in cash ever since one cab driver walked me through why he hates cards. There’s a timing problem-- he has to pay for gas, tolls, airport access fees, and the taxi company that day, but he doesn’t get his money until a couple of days later. And then there’s the high fees the processing companies charge taxi drivers.</li>\n 	<li>But when traveling with younger colleagues, I feel like I’m the last generation of cash payers. Not only do they pay for everything with a card, many of them don’t even carry cash. Maybe I’m just getting old, or maybe I remember when you couldn’t use cards everywhere.</li>\n 	<li>Especially in Europe in the late ‘80’s/early ‘90’s when I would be in a different country every day on sales calls with distributors. There weren’t international ATMs -- or really ATMs of any kind. We’d get a wallet full of American Express Travelers Checks before flying out and then typically cash a $100 check at the airport currency exchange after customs. This was before the euro, so we’d juggle D Marks, Belgian and French francs, British and Irish pounds, pesetas, lira,.... Almost all of the hotels we stayed in took credit cards -- except for this one random mom-&amp;-pop place outside of Munich; nice people but they screwed up my D Mark budget -- but not all restaurants and none of the taxis did. So our currency exit strategy -- so we didn’t pay double the exchange fees for having to go in and out of a currency that we might not use for another year or so -- was to throw down most of our excess cash at the hotel in the morning, saving enough for a sandwich, the cab back to the airport and a beer at the bar -- and then put on the Amex the balance of the hotel room. It usually worked well -- except for the one time that I mixed up the exchange rate between the Swedish krona and Swiss franc. Not an unreasonable mix up -- both countries start with an S and have a lot of snow -- but the krona exchange rate was about 6 to the dollar at that time while the Swiss franc was at 1.3 to the dollar. That one definitely screwed up my end-of-day cash strategy.</li>\n 	<li>But I absolutely understand the use case for going all plastic. First, you’re not having to float the money between travel and reimbursement. But I gotta think convenience is the bigger play. Many companies pipe their company card transactions straight into their expense reporting systems. Makes it incredibly easy -- log into Concur or whatever, assign each charge to an expense code and submit. Nothing forgotten and you’re done in 5 minutes. With cash, you have to remember what you spent, enter it, and probably submit a receipt too. I’ll never pay for my $2 ORD Starbucks coffee with my Amex card, but when the cab fare get above $50, even I’ll charge it.</li>\n 	<li>I do think it’s a bit of a generational thing, though. I remember my dad always walking around with a bunch of 50’s in a money clip in his pocket. And my kids always getting a $100 bill from their Hungarian grandparents for Christmas -- we’d call it the Eastern European C note. I now have a Venmo account, but I still like paying people back in cash. Feels like I need say “Get off my lawn” but I may not have completely aged out yet. When paying my daughter’s tuition at Univ of St Andrews, one sentence on the web site caught my eye -- “Ideally tuition and accommodation fees should not be paid in cash” -- which means that someone or multiple someones has done it. It’s not a travel expense, but the image of someone walking into the St Andrews bursar’s office and stacking piles of 100 pound notes just makes me smile. Makes me want to drop a C note on my next big cab ride.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/44580\"> What Child is This (Instrumental)</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license.  Ft: Jeris</span></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Don’t Make It Hard to Cash in on Loyalty</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Back in October, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/10/31/podcast-134-value-of-loyalty-need-those-5-stars/\">episode 134</a>, we talked about the value of loyalty. In November, JD Powers released their 2017 Airline Loyalty Program Satisfaction Study. Powers measured satisfaction “based on four factors (in order of importance): earning and redeeming rewards; program benefits; account management; and member communication”. Not a surprising list, and placing “redeeming awards” at the top makes sense since that’s sorta the core of a loyalty program -- here’s something to incent you to fly us more.</li>\n 	<li>A couple of years ago, in episode 116, I talked about why, for me, British Airways’ Avios program has been the worst program for redemptions. I had over 300,000 points sitting there because it never made sense to use them. When I’d price out an award ticket between Chicago and London, the addition cash I would owe for BA’s fuel surcharges (which made sense when oil was at $120/bbl, but much less so at $50) and Heathrow landing taxes would just about equal what I’d pay for a ticket with another airline -- so the miles were worth nothing. Not exactly a best practice for an airline loyalty program.</li>\n 	<li>But, when BA and Iberia, both owned by the same corporate parent, kinda combined their programs into, not a single but a sorta interchangeable Avios program, I thought there might be a way to finally get some value from my forlorn BA points. I said kinda interchangeable because I now have 2 Avios accounts -- a BA Avios account and an Iberia Avios account. And since I have had my Iberia Avios account for over 90 days, I can convert my BA Avios to Iberia Avios, which let me use points for a direct ORD-MAD flight this spring at a small fraction of the cash for fees and taxes that BA would charge.</li>\n 	<li>OK, good. I’ve found the flights, I’ve found the page on BA.com to transfer. I enter all the account info, press the button, and get a big red error screen. Hmmm… I try it a couple of more times, same result. Different browsers, same result. In incognito mode so there’s no legacy cookies, same result. Hmmm…</li>\n 	<li>So I dredge around BA’s site and find a technical support number. It’s Saturday afternoon Chicago time, but after a good bit of music, I get a live guy. And he’s a good guy. Here’s the problem, your name doesn’t match on your accounts -- it’s Mark Peacock on your BA account, and Mark Peacock Peacock on your Iberia account. You’ll need to call Iberia to change that, then the transfer will go through. OK, seems reasonable enough. So I call Iberia, again listen to music and again get a live person. Good guy, but he can’t help me. Here’s a number in Spain; give them a call. Which I do, a bit more music, and then another guy. We’ll need some documentation to make that change, send a picture of the first page of your passport to this Iberia email address and we’ll make the change.</li>\n 	<li>Lots of calls, spoke to some nice people, but I still can’t break these BA Avios points free. So I send the email, but I don’t expect this to get resolved soon. I open another beer and gear myself up for another fare search, but decide to give BA one more call. This time, I connect with a woman with a proper northern English accent. It felt like I’d somehow overflowed into a high status group; like when I was Global Services on United and agents picking up my calls were sitting in the corporate center near ORD and could make anything happen. I relate my tale of woe; “Oh, that’s no problem,” she says. Five minutes later, it’s done. Thanks to her, I got to redeem 100,000 Avios points and am feeling a bit more hopeful about the remaining balance. The only downside -- I didn’t get the woman’s name so I could give her a shout out. By the way, 3.5 weeks later and still no response to my email to Iberia.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #136</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_136.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #136 — Is Cash A Waning King; Don’t Make It Hard to Cash in on Loyalty','','inherit','closed','closed','','1894-revision-v1','','','2021-09-29 21:51:55','2021-09-30 02:51:55','',1894,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3915',0,'revision','',0),
(3916,1,'2021-09-29 21:53:03','2021-09-30 02:53:03','<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/iStock-454294231.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1906\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/iStock-454294231-213x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"213\" height=\"300\"></a>After clearing the mists of last night\'s New Year\'s Eve party, I thought about some of the highlights and lowlights of my travels in 2017\n\n<strong><u>Highlights</u></strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li><strong>Uber/Lyft Driver Stories</strong> -- Not only are Uber and Lyft rides easier to get than most taxis, the stories the drivers tell are a lot more entertaining. A Lyft driver in Charlottesville gave me a local\'s view on the Robert E. Lee statue controversy while a Uber driver told me why driving full-time in Chicago traffic was less stressful than being a hotel manager.</li>\n 	<li><strong>Continued Craft Beer Explosion</strong> -- Regular podcast listeners know that I have a craft beer obsession. The hunt for new beers and microbrewery taprooms helps me break out of the usual travel rut -- places like a light industrial area in Richmond, Virginia and a North African neighborhood on the west side of Paris.</li>\n 	<li><strong>Hertz\'s Presidents Circle Aisle</strong>&nbsp;-- My experience with Hertz has completely turned around -- from enduring a steady stream of beat-up high-mileage cars to picking out a new Jag. Three years ago, I paid no attention to Hertz\'s loyalty program. Two months ago, I made sure I had enough rentals to re-up my Presidents Club status for this year.</li>\n 	<li><strong>Hotel Flat-Screen TVs with Open HDMI Ports&nbsp;</strong>-- When I started traveling, hotel TVs were locked down tight because in-room movie rentals was a major revenue stream. While that stream dried up years before LodgeNet went bankrupt in 2013, hotels kept their TVs locked down and we resigned ourselves to watching Netflix on 14-inch laptop screens. But now that the latest generation of flat-screen TVs have open HDMI ports, I\'ve added an HDMI cable to my standard travel kit so I can plug my laptop in and watch movies on a 40-inch screen again.</li>\n 	<li><strong>Google Translate</strong> -- Thinking through my international travel this year (Paris, Vienna, Budapest), Google Translate has evolved to being pretty close to magic. The Word Lens feature lets you point your phone camera at, say, a menu and see English words replacing the French in real time. Saves you from mistakenly ordering chicken when you mix up poulet and poisson after a couple of cocktails.</li>\n 	<li><strong>Top 3 Airports</strong> -- SFO\'s new Terminal 2 which I think is better than perennial list toppers Singapore and Hong Kong, and then two pleasant surprises in May at Vienna and Budapest airports.</li>\n</ul>\n<span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><strong>Lowlights</strong></span>\n<ul>\n 	<li><strong>Passenger-Airline Personnel Conflicts Become Physical</strong> -- The worst thing that used to happen was raised voices between a gate agent and a bumped passenger. That now seems very quaint after United Airlines had ORD Security Police drag a passenger off a plane to make room for one of their employees.</li>\n 	<li><strong>Overtourism&nbsp;</strong>-- The #TouristGoHome campaign gaining traction in places like Barcelona and Venice recasts&nbsp; the travel industry as a resource-consuming zero-sum game that crowds out and prices out locals from the historic centers of their cities. Iceland is the poster child for overtourism with an estimated 2.3 million tourists in 2017 visiting a country with 340,000 residents. It\'s a wider threat, though; the dark side of the growth of Airbnb and budget airlines like WOW Air.</li>\n 	<li><strong>Smart Luggage Ban</strong> -- After two years of carrying GPS-enabled bags from start-ups like Bluesmart without incident, US airlines decided just before Christmas that the batteries powering those location trackers are a fire hazard and will be banned as of January 15. A lot of frequent travelers are going to need to find closet space for their expensive but now-obsolete luggage.</li>\n 	<li><strong>Full Planes with Tight Seats</strong> -- Airlines are flying fuller planes -- reducing the number of empty seats, and adding more rows. The tighter confines of the coach cabin make it difficult to do much more than sit up straight and listen to podcasts. I\'ve given up on trying to work on airplanes. It seems almost anti-social to try to open a laptop.</li>\n 	<li><strong>Lobbying for High Review Ratings&nbsp;</strong>-- More and more hotels, restaurants, and other travel businesses see anything other than a 5-star rating as an insult.</li>\n 	<li><strong>Bottom 3 Airports</strong> -- New York-LaGuardia (construction disruptions reinforce its bottom spot), Munich, and Atlanta (60-90 minutes of heavy traffic between the airport and most of Atlanta\'s business destinations)</li>\n</ul>','Looking Back at 2017 — The Highs and The Lows','','inherit','closed','closed','','1905-revision-v1','','','2021-09-29 21:53:03','2021-09-30 02:53:03','',1905,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3916',0,'revision','',0),
(3918,1,'2021-09-29 21:54:23','2021-09-30 02:54:23','[caption id=\"attachment_1925\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/IMG_20141210_231414.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1925\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/IMG_20141210_231414-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> How many nights to Leopard Print status?[/caption]\n\nSo we\'re four weeks into the new year and 30-50% of us have already ditched our New Year\'s resolutions, but we still have time to get our 2018 travel status lined up. Over the holiday break, I bought a non-smart carry-on to replace my now-banned Bluesmart; I walk through my shopping criteria. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_137.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\nThanks to <a href=\"http://go.travelperk.com/travelcommons\">TravelPerk</a> for sponsoring this episode.\n\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #137:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. This episode is sponsored by <a href=\"http://go.travelperk.com/travelcommons\">TravelPerk</a>, the #1 rated business travel tool on the Internet. It’s been a light travel month, just a drive down to Nashville, and a couple of trips over to Charlottesville, VA, which has been a nice break from what is otherwise turning out to be a brutally cold winter in Chicago. The day after New Years, I walked out of the house into a -10℉ morning -- not windchill, it was -10℉ ambient. Welcome to January. I had my team travel here last week for a 2018 kick-off meeting. No one accused us of boon-doggling. The guy from Phoenix did say he was filing an employee abuse claim though.</li>\n 	<li>I’ve found myself drinking less craft beer and much more Scotch whisky in this month; -10℉ is definitely brown liquor weather. Luckily, my daughter brought home a nice bottle of 18-year-old <a href=\"http://www.glenscotia.com/\">Glen Scotia</a> from Edinburgh for Christmas. I’ve made a sizable dent in it.</li>\n 	<li>On my first trip to Charlottesville, after being off the road for four weeks, it took me forever to gather up all the bits of my regular travel carry from around the house. Normally, my travel carry stays in my backpack and my suitcase; I buy duplicates of things like hair brushes and headphones just so I don’t need to pull them out of my bag. But for some reason, all discipline broke down over the holidays and my carefully curated travel carry was spread/spewed throughout the house. Luckily, my ride to ORD was 5 minutes late. I took my Bluesmart bag, squeezed in one last trip before American’s January 15th smart luggage ban took effect. I tweeted a picture of my Bluesmart before boarding. American replied “We\'re glad you\'re flying with us and appreciate your cooperation with our team.” My response -- “Not that I have much of a choice…” Especially with IATA recommending the ban to its 300 airline members. My new non-smart Victorinox bag arrived on my front porch before the ban clicked in, so once I shift everything from the Bluesmart to the Victorinox, I’ll power down the Bluesmart, delete its app from my iPhone, and consign it to the corner of the attic with all my other retired bags -- my own Land of Misfit Bags.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mactonite/29469\">Static</a> by Darkroom (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mactonite/29469 </span></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Starting off the New Year, I did a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/01/01/looking-back-at-2017-the-highs-and-the-lows/\">blog post</a> summarizing some of the high and low points that we talked about in 2017. The high points? Things like Uber and Lyft driver stories, yet more craft beer taprooms, and Hertz’s President Circle Aisle. Low points? Airlines dragging passengers from planes, everybody lobbying for 5-star reviews, and, no surprise, the smart luggage ban.</li>\n 	<li>Allan Marko, not just a long-time TravelCommon’s listener, but probably one of the original listeners showed his roots by posting on the original comment channel -- the TravelCommons website\n<ul>\n 	<li>Have had our Away luggage for only about six months prior to the battery ban. I really like the ‘smart’ charging feature. Luckily the Away battery is a nicely designed self-contained and easily removable unit (two screws; screwdriver included!) Now the battery lives in my backpack, and the luggage still usable.</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\"></li>\n 	<li>Allan’s psychic capabilities are showing. I think Away is the only major smart bag that meets the airlines’ requirement for a removable battery. But for me, charging wasn’t the major use case for me. I’m typically fine with my Anker lipstick charger. And if I forget to recharge that, my Verizon mobile WiFi hotspot also doubles as a charger. For me, the GPS tracking was the main use case -- for those times I had to check my bag, it was nice to know that it had also made it to my destination -- a use case that requires power. Pull out the battery and no more tracking. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted.</li>\n 	<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\"></li>\n 	<li>Jim McDonough replied to the Twitter announcement of the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">last episode</a> where I wondered if I was the last generation of cash payers. Jim wrote\n<ul>\n 	<li>I use cash a) at the local farmer’s market; b) pay for haircuts . . . having a hard time coming up with c)</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Jim, I dunno. Looking at your Twitter profile picture, you look like you could land in my generation. I apologize for using a card for anything under $20. Although I have to say that more and more microbrewery taprooms only take credit cards. I don’t apologize there; or at the self-service tills in Home Depot or Tesco’s -- mostly because there’s no one to apologize to even though they will take cash.</li>\n 	<li>Natalie on the British Airways social media team <a href=\"https://twitter.com/British_Airways/status/943550974102245376\">tweeted back</a> at me about the other topic on the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">last episode</a> -- about how hard it can be to cash in on loyalty points. You’ll remember that I talked about all the hassles I had in transferring Avios points from BA to Iberia, until I got a BA agent with solid northern accent. Natalie of BA said\n<ul>\n 	<li>Hey Mark! Thanks for tagging us in your article. I\'m glad to hear that one of our \'Geordie\' colleagues was able to help you redeem some of your Avios. It\'s a shame you didn\'t catch her name though.</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Absolutely it was a shame. She deserves huge props.</li>\n 	<li>In that same riff, I mentioned how my email to Iberia to clean up my name on my Iberia Plus account -- which might have been the root cause of my point transfer problem -- seemed to have fallen into a black hole. Well, apparently it didn’t. Soon after that episode, I got a letter from Iberia with a new card that had my correct name. That was nice. Would’ve been just a bit nicer if they’d hit the Reply button while handling the email and typed, I dunno, just 8 words -- “Got it fixed; new card in the mail” But it got done -- all of it, Avios points, non-stop ORD-MAD flight on points, and now, a card with my correct name.</li>\n 	<li>And that Iberia letter was probably one of the last surprises I got when I open the mailbox at home. Somehow, I’m not quite sure how, I signed up for a US Post Office service that sends me an email every morning with scanned images of letters I’m going to receive that day. When I got that first email, I was kinda “What the hell?”, but now I kinda like it, especially when I’m on the road. No more wondering what bills showed up, or during the holidays, who had sent us Christmas cards. It does kinda take the surprise out of opening the mailbox -- though not that there was much left since 90% of our physical mail is junk -- but it is kinda entertaining.</li>\n 	<li>Back in August, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/08/27/podcast-132-travel-apps-on-my-phone/\">episode #132</a> about the travel apps I have loaded on my phone, I talked about using the paid or “Pro” version of TripIt, and about how it was on the bubble for me because of how the airlines have improved the flight status notifications in their own apps. In 4 months since then, the airline apps have pretty consistently notified me of gate changes and delays faster than TripIt Pro. And so when my subscription ran out a few weeks ago, I ignored the renewal alerts. I’ll still use the free version -- I like the way TripIt consolidates separate plane, hotel, and rental car reservations into a single trip -- kinda replicating the itineraries your travel agent used to give you when they booked your entire trip. But paying $50 for what are now slower, redundant flight alerts? I’ll spend it on beer or brown liquor instead.</li>\n 	<li>I don’t know if it’s just me, but the cadence for boarding groups has gotten out of control. I think I was on a Delta flight where I was boarding group 1 or 2, but was the 4th or 5th group to board, after Delta One, and then Platinum Medallion, then Gold Medallion, Sky Team Elite -- it went on forever. American is a bit better -- only one non-numeric boarding group for the invite-only Concierge Key gang (remember George Clooney in Up In The Air) -- and then 1 through 9(!). I do love the announcement “If you don’t have a boarding group number, then board Group 7” which feels a bit random. Where it really becomes fun is on a regional jet, when the gate agent runs through this cadence for a plane with only 40-50 passengers and all the carry-on bags are gate… I mean valet checked. “Now boarding passengers in Group 1, Group 2, Group 3…” Four people board… “Groups 5, 6, 7, and the rest of you” followed by general scrum in front of the agent. I know the airlines have PhDs in psychology, sociology, and linear programming working on this stuff, but it continues to be a cluster</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>And thanks to this episode’s sponsor TravelPerk</li>\n 	<li>Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/11/20/podcast-135-airport-bingo-new-old-travel-pc/\">November episode</a>, I talked about American\'s last-minute cancellation of my night flight to Charlottesville and my ensuing scramble to find a replacement flight and to make sure the Hyatt Place didn\'t flush my reservation. But if I\'d booked with TravelPerk, they would\'ve done the scrambling for me.\n<ul>\n 	<li>This all-in-one business travel management tool includes a team of highly qualified agents ready to rescue disgruntled travelers from any scenario 24/7.</li>\n 	<li>It’s because of making magic happen in times like this that TravelPerk is now the #1 rated business travel tool on the internet.</li>\n 	<li>You\'ll love them because you can finally take control of your travel schedule, have freedom to book alternative accommodation like Airbnb, and have a built-in rescue team when stuff goes south. Remove some stress from the equation, go to <a href=\"http://go.travelperk.com/travelcommons\">go.travelperk.com/travelcommons</a> for a no-commitment test drive.</li>\n 	<li>It’s free forever if you to <a href=\"http://go.travelperk.com/travelcommons\">go.travelperk.com/travelcommons</a></li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Psykick/52938\">Another Way</a> by Psykick (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Psykick/52938</span></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Plan for 2018 Travel Perks</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>So here we are, 4 weeks into the new year and anywhere from a third to a half of us have already ditched our New Year\'s resolutions and are now in full anticipation of Super Bowl queso dip. But while your dry January may have been washed out early, you still have time to get your 2018 travel perks in place.</li>\n 	<li>Almost all travel perks come from status in loyalty programs and all those status earning counts reset on Jan 1, so the first step is to match up what you think your 2018 travel plans will be to your loyalty programs. Any gaps? If you think you’ll start flying to Seattle (maybe helping to shill your hometown for Amazon’s HQ2), you’ll probably want to sign up for Alaskan Airlines Mileage Plan, where before, it might not have been worth the extra junk mail.</li>\n 	<li>Or if you’re already a member, do a status match. When I took a new CIO job some years back, all the hotels near our offices were Hilton brands. I had a Hilton\'s Honors card but just in basic blue as opposed to my top-of-the-line sparkly platinum Marriott card. After I hit the “reset my password” link on the Hilton website, I went straight to their status match page. Right at the top, it says “For the next 90 days,... we’ll match your elite status with any other loyalty program.” If you complete 4 or 8 stays over those 90 days, the match is good for the year. So rather than having to grind my way to Hilton status, I started enjoying it on Day 1. I had a friend do that with American -- parlay his United 1K status to Executive Platinum when he moved from Denver to Dallas. Much better than slumming in Boarding Group 5 until you clear the first status bar.</li>\n 	<li>Doing this, you also need to keep in mind the different ecosystems; the partnerships that tie travel companies together. It used to be just the international alliances -- Star, SkyTeam, OneWorld. When I knew I’d be traveling down to South Africa, racking up some serious business class mileage, I had two real options -- SAA out of JFK and IAD, or DL out of ATL. Living in Chicago, I chose SAA because they’re part of Star Alliance with United, and I’d get a lot more use from United status out of Chicago than I would Delta. And it’s getting even more combinatorial now with United and Marriott are status matching each other.</li>\n 	<li>And then there’s the credit cards -- both affinity (United and Chase Visa, American and Citi MasterCard) and non (Amex Platinum, Chase Sapphire Reserve). You gotta do the math. For example, Amex’s Platinum card is $550/year. But with that, you get Membership Rewards points that transfer to airlines and hotels, access to Delta lounges and Amex’s Centurion Lounges, which if you travel frequently to DFW, LAS, MIA, LGA, and now JFK, is great. They’re much better than, say American’s Admirals Clubs. I wish they had one in Chicago. Amex also picks up the $100 Global Entry or $85 PreCheck fee, gives you 10 GoGo WiFi sessions, $200 in Uber credit, and some other benefits. If you’ll use these benefits, that $550 can be a better deal than, say, the $95 that the United Chase will cost you. However, that United Chase will get you baggage fee waiver, two United Club passes, and status boarding. If you don’t travel a huge amount and live in a United hub like Houston, the United card could be a better deal. But you gotta think about your travel, do the math, and sign up for it now so you have all year to maximize the status benefits.</li>\n 	<li>And while you’re in this planning zone, do yourself a big favor sign up and make an appointment for Global Entry if you do international travel, or PreCheck if you’re mostly a domestic flyer. If it makes sense for you to get an Amex Platinum or Chase Sapphire Reserve card, it’ll be free. To me, TSA and Customs lines are still the worst part of travel. While you’re figuring out how to bump your status up your status on airlines and hotels, do yourself a favor and step out of those TSA and Customs lines too.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/flatwound/14476\">The Long Goodbye</a> by John Pazdan (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/flatwound/14476</span></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>How to Shop For A Suitcase</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>OK, perhaps a bit presumptuous of a title; perhaps it’s “How I shopped for a suitcase.” But before we go there, let’s summarize the set up from past episodes -- my 10-year old black Swiss Army carry-on rendered itself unusable before Thanksgiving when the handle became stuck in the extended position (luckily as I was getting in a car coming home from ORD and not while trying to stow it in an overhead while boarding), I hate shopping for suitcases so I recharge my Bluesmart smart bag and put it back into service in December only to have it banned from air travel as of last week.</li>\n 	<li>So now I’m forced to shop for a suitcase. Like any good consultant, I, of course, construct a prioritized list of evaluation criteria. First, it has to be a carry-on. Now that may seem a bit of a “duh”, but there is some ambiguity; the <a href=\"https://travel-made-simple.com/carry-on-size-chart/\">approved height</a> varies by airline between 19 and 22-inches. If I wanted to play it safe, I’d go for a 20-inch bag, but I’m also want to maximize how much I can carry-on. I tilt toward choosing space. Most US carriers accept a 22-inch bag and that’s mostly what I fly, and even when I’m on European carriers I usually have enough alliance status (my American Platinum status carrying over to OneWorld) to glide past the baggage sizer.</li>\n 	<li>Which leads to the second criterion -- it needs to be black. As I said in my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/10/18/ruthless-packing-tips/\">Ruthless Packing Tips post</a> in October, black not only makes you look thinner, it makes your bag look thinner to gate agents scanning for bag-sizer bait.</li>\n 	<li>Third, 2 wheels, not 4. This is a bit more of a personal preference. My Bluesmart is a 4-wheel spinner and my wife swears by hers, but because the 4 wheels have to extend from the bottom of the bag, spinners sacrifice packing space for agility, while 2-wheelers can embed their wheels up in the backplane of the bag. Again trying to maximize packing space, I go for the 2-wheeler, and with the biggest wheels I can find to make it an easier, smoother pull. I was kinda surprised how this limited my selection. Spinners definitely rule.</li>\n 	<li>My fourth criterion -- I wanted the inside of the suitcase to be as plain and empty as possible. No bunch of zip compartments, or built-in suit hangers, or ratcheting down clothes dividers; just a wide open box that free to structure how I want for each trip. I was surprised how tough this was to find. Indeed, in the end, I couldn’t find it and settled for a bag where I could detach the suit hanger and clothes divider and stash that stuff up in the Land of Misfit Bags next to the Bluesmart.</li>\n 	<li>Whittling through all that, I ended up buying a black Victorinox Werks Traveler 5.0 2-wheeler. Victorinox is what used to be Swiss Army; I figured if my last bag survived 10 years of hard mileage, that said something for durability. It was also one of the few where I could detach all the internal storage stuff. And it has that additional zipper to expand the width by an inch -- kinda like when you drop a notch on your belt after Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner; for those times when I’m flying home and have bought a few too many bottles of wine or brown liquor.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #137</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>Thanks again to TravelPerk for sponsoring this episode. Remember to go to <a href=\"http://go.travelperk.com/travelcommons\">go.travelperk.com/travelcommons</a> for a test drive</li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_137.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #137 — New Year\'s Travel Status Tips; How to Shop for a Suitcase','','inherit','closed','closed','','1916-revision-v1','','','2021-09-29 21:54:23','2021-09-30 02:54:23','',1916,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3918',0,'revision','',0),
(3920,1,'2021-09-29 21:56:39','2021-09-30 02:56:39','[caption id=\"attachment_1949\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/iStock-535339649.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1949\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/iStock-535339649-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> TSA! Look at What You\'ve Done to Me![/caption]\n\nFebruary is a tough time to be in the Midwest, so when my travel took me south, to New Orleans and then to Florida, there was no bitch tweeting about the TSA lines or flight delays. In this episode, I walk through how each change in airport security has pushed me to be more hipster and how we all want to understand the real cause of the flight delays that inconvenience us. Also a good bit of listener feedback extending the on-going luggage discussion. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_138.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #138:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. This has been a good travel month for me. Not too heavy, and all my travel had me headed south -- an important thing in February when you live in Chicago. The week before Mardi Gras, I headed down to New Orleans for a meeting. It easily could’ve been an overnight trip, but neither my wife nor I had been down in a while, so she came down with me. We caught some parades -- Nyx, Chaos, Muses -- ate way too much food, and except for a cold rain Wednesday night, had great weather. On Thursday, we were walking along the Mississippi back to the French Quarter from the Bywater neighborhood in bright sunshine and upper 60’s while Chicago was getting slammed with 8-12 inches of snow.</li>\n 	<li>When flew back to Chicago Friday night, we were able to thread the gap between the Friday end of that 8-12 inch drop and the start of the Saturday-Sunday 5-inch fall. Timing is everything. We came to the airport prepared for a long delay -- fully charged batteries, and muffaletta sandwiches and a mini king cake from Cochon Butcher. Southwest had cancelled this same flight the night before and that morning -- understandable given the snow -- so we didn’t think we wouldn’t get home; it was just going to be a question of how long. As it turned out, we were only an hour late, which given the weather, felt as good as on-time.</li>\n 	<li>Last week, I managed to point myself south again, this time to Florida -- Orlando and Miami -- and was able to skip two days of a heavy cold rain. The JW Marriott in Miami upgraded me to a room with a balcony on the 20th floor -- I didn’t have an ocean view, but I sat outside, 75 degrees, drinking a couple of beers, watching the sun go down, looking over to some of the rooftop bar action in the Brickell neighborhood. Miami is always an experience. It’s not the southernmost US big city, but rather the northernmost Latin American big city. I was reminded of that in the airport when I heard them paging someone in Spanish -- twice. They didn’t even bother wasting their time with English.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- Leviathan by Kirkoid (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Kirkoid/31109</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Lots of comments about luggage since the last episode, which makes sense -- the last episode was heavy on luggage talk between the continuing thread on the smart luggage ban and the suitcase buying tips which I then ported over to a blog post.\n<ul>\n 	<li>So, starting off, Allan Marko forwarded along the latest e-mails from Away luggage, one of the few smart bags with removable batteries and so not caught up in the smart luggage ban. Or so they thought until Delta decided to add their own twist to the ban. If the battery in the bag requires a tool to remove it -- which the original Away bag does -- you have to remove it from the bag before you board -- whether you’re carrying on the bag or gate-checking it. The later version of the Away bag has an ejectable pop-up battery which Delta thinks is OK. What a mess! This is what happens when engineers run amok -- and I can say that as a recovering engineer. These guys are going to keep tweaking and twisting this, which will just confuse gate agents and frustrate passengers -- which is why I’ve mothballed my smart bag and bought another Anker lipstick charger.</li>\n 	<li>Steve Frick hit the TravelCommons web site and left this comment -- “I replaced my luggage with the exact same bag as I had before, a TravelPro. It was an easy choice, I like you, wanted a simple bag. I knew my gear would fit, I already knew what to put in the outside pockets. One of the guys I work with recently bought and then returned a 4-wheel spinner. The reason for the return……. he discovered that most hotel parking lots weren’t level and each time he let go of the bag to raise the trunk lid his bag rolled away.” Steve, I had that same problem with my Bluesmart 4-wheeler, except in airports rather than parking lots. I’d put the Bluesmart against the wall in a restroom and it would wander away.</li>\n 	<li>Jerry Sarfati posted on the TravelCommons Facebook page -- “Mark, great episode as usual” Thanks, Jerry! “I had a different experience when choosing a new bag. I was stopped twice by American Airlines gate agents telling me my 22\" bag was too big. I’m in Group 2. So I settled for the 20\" Victorinox spinner.” I asked Jerry if they made him put it in a bag sizer. “Once only. It barely fit, and she said ‘too big, it must slide in easily, it must be checked’. Other time the agent said the sizer is missing, but ‘I can already see it won\'t fit’. I didn\'t want to argue and get thrown off the flight.” Jerry, that -- in technical travel terms -- is bullshit. I remember one time in Boston Logan, I got shunted over to the bag sizer by the Icelandic Air gate agent. And I knew I was on the bubble because this was the trip I’ve talked about a couple of times where I had to pack for 10 days between Iceland and Southern Spain in one carry-on. I grabbed that bag by the side handle, had it about chest high, and then drove it into the bag sizer with all my might. It was either going to fit, break the bag or blow apart the bag sizer. Luckily, it fit -- though the gate agent jumped back just a bit when the bag hit the bottom of the sizer. She let me carry it on. I flew 3 legs on American last week with my 22-incher and didn’t get a glance. But having said that, you made the right choice -- discretion is the better part of valor. Gate agents have complete discretion. Obey or get bounced. Too bad you got caught up by other folks’ power trips.</li>\n 	<li>Back on the web site, Robert Fenerty wrote “I want a four-wheel spinner; my wife loves hers. But I won’t get one, because I believe that bags with only two wheels have a bit more interior space than four-wheelers of the same length. That’s because the spinners can’t tuck into the side of the bag so you’re losing the inch or two between the middle of the spinner wheel and the top of the stem that attaches the spinner to the bottom of the bag. How’s that for OCD?” Robert, I’ll see your OCD and raise you! I pulled out a metal ruler and measured the ground clearance difference between my Victorinox 2-wheeler and my wife’s Samsonite 4-wheel spinner. I measured a 1.5-inch difference. Multiply that by the 14x9-inch base size gives you a 189 cubic inch cost for spinner agility. I look at that being one day’s worth of workout kit.</li>\n 	<li>Also on the web site, Jim McDonough wrote “My favorite bag was a Rick Steves 21” rollaboard that had just one compartment and two really good wheels. I used it for a decade and finally had problems with my wife’s bag (wheel fell apart) and the side of mine cracked from all the abuse. He doesn’t sell them any more, because it was a hair too big for European airlines. We are now using Samsonite spinners. They don’t hold as much as the old Rick bags. We only check bags when we are staying in one place for at least a week. Carrying on is simply liberating.” Liberating in a couple of ways -- not standing around waiting for the luggage carousel to start to get your bag, and not waiting around for it to stop to confirm that airline has lost it. I remember one trip where BA forced me to gate-check a bag, and then somehow lost it -- how you lose a bag in the, say, 50 ft between the jet bridge and baggage hold I’ll never know. The problem was -- I was in a different city every day. And so, they’d deliver the bag to my hotel the next morning after I’d already checked out and headed for my first meeting. This went on for a couple of days until I finally convinced them to leapfrog me and send it two stops one. Liberating myself from well-worn clothes -- I love it when I can find happiness in the small things.</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Another reminder that Miami is a bit different -- the in-room coffee machine at the JW Marriott wasn’t the standard issue single cupper with Starbucks Pike Place filter disks (that, by the way, are always too big for the filter holder). Instead, it was an Illy espresso machine with its own special little capsules and branded demitasse cups. Took me a couple of tries to get the capsule properly situated, but after that, I ran through all 3, 4 (?) of the capsules in 15 minutes and was ready to attack the day.</li>\n 	<li>Last month, The Aviating Railfanner stopped by the TravelCommons YouTube page and left a comment on the 2012 video O\'Hare Layover Excursion: a 6-Hour Tour of Chicago saying “I think it would be a good idea to mention that the Randolph/Wabash station has been demolished and is now the Washington/Wabash station” Good point. Indeed, there are a more than a few things that have changed in the 5 years since I did that video. I stole the idea from the “One City, Five Hours” series that United used to have in their Hemisphere’s magazine. The locations are still good -- Wrigley Field, Millennium Park, the Picasso. I’m not sure in this age of Uber if the focus on the subway/the L is still valid. I may see if I can lightly edit this video -- insert some text to send people to the right station, and update the 1-day travel pass options -- and then think about some new options, like maybe a craft beer taproom-focused layover tour. There you go, One City, Five Taprooms and then come roaring back into the TSA line. Hmmm, I may need to rethink that one.</li>\n 	<li>And if you’re thinking about any questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Ethereal (nop mix) by @nop (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Lancefield/34818</span></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Travel Is Turning Me Hipster</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Not wanting to turn this into the “Luggage Today” podcast, but when I was shifting things from my Bluesmart to my new Victorinox bag, I also restructured my toiletries kit. And as I was going through the contents -- what stays, what don’t I need anymore -- it struck me how much my travelling had changed something as basic as how I started my day.</li>\n 	<li>It started years, no decades ago -- sometime in the late ‘80’s or early ‘90’s. I was living in Philadelphia and flying to Europe pretty frequently, and at that time, the only real direct flight over the Atlantic (can I tell you how much I hate it when people say “The Pond”; it just puts my teeth on edge) was a BA 747 into Heathrow. Now, back then, I loved Heathrow. It was a great airport with fantastic connections. Now it’s an overcrowed shitshow that I avoid at all costs, but back then, it was great. Anyhow, at some point, Heathrow security required all electric devices to be pulled out for screening. Note I didn’t say “electronic”; this was before laptops and tablets and mobile phones were ubiquitous. No, this meant things like my electric razor had to be pulled out of my bag. Two go-rounds with Heathrow security and that Philips razor got jettisoned for a Gillette non-electric blade.</li>\n 	<li>Fast forward a decade-and-a-half to August 2006. I woke up in the SFO Marriott to the news of the foiled plot to blow up London-to-US flights by disguising separate explosive ingredients in soda bottles then then assembling and detonating them on board. I was trying to fly back the next day. Baggage check lines exploded when all the flyers with toothpaste, shaving cream, make-up -- pretty much everyone -- were made to check their bags. That weekend, I re-worked my toiletries kit -- hitting the local Whole Foods for tooth powder to replace toothpaste, hair wax for hair gel, and trading the shaving cream that I picked up in that last revamp for a badger hair shaving brush. I think this was the tipping point -- when my kit started to skew hipster.</li>\n 	<li>Fast forward another decade-and-a-half to this Christmas. My son gives me a selection of travel sized shaving soaps, each in their own tin container with a screw top. My daughter gives me a bottle of Lush toothy tabs -- kinda compressed tooth powder. These immediately go into my travel kit. My son forwards me a Massdrop buy for an Oristo razor -- a $100 version of my grandfather’s safety razor, precision engineered for a “very efficient yet non-aggressive shaving experience”. I think seriously about this. My toiletry kit has gone almost full hipster.</li>\n 	<li>And though I’ve slagged on the TSA for God knows how many episodes over the life of this podcast, I do have to thank them for one thing, keeping my toiletry kit from going full-on hipster, because I know they’ll never allow me to shift to shaving with a straight razor.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">My Flaming Heart by Wired Ant (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Wired_Ant/36862 Ft: Javolenus</span></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Every Delay Has a Story</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>In the last episode, I talked about why I dropped my subscription to TripIt’s paid “Pro” service -- the main benefit, live flight status notifications, was slower than the free notifications I was getting from the airlines themselves -- from American, United, and Delta. However, when we were idling in the New Orleans airport waiting on our flight back to Chicago, I found the Southwest delay notifications lagged way behind TripIt Pro. Not that I re-upped my TripIt Pro subscription; my wife forgot to cancel a 30-day trial she signed up for, so she now has a year’s subscription. I, instead, was using FlightAware, specifically the feature I’ve talked about in prior episodes that shows you where your plane is. From that I could see that the delay wasn’t because of the snow in Chicago; the plane was spending a lot of time on the ground in Ft Lauderdale, the stop before New Orleans. So I hit Twitter -- Why is flight 860 sitting in FLL so long? The reply -- “Hey, Mark. We know delays can be tough, and apologize for the inconvenience. It looks like Flight #860 is delayed due to inclement weather earlier in the day.” Perhaps a delay in Denver, but why the long ground turn in FLL? No answer.</li>\n 	<li>United announced a pilot program in January called “Every Flight Has A Story” where they’d push out much more detailed information on delayed flights -- rather than “Late Arriving Aircraft”, it would be “Our maintenance team is replacing an item on your plane and needs extra time to complete”. The pilot was scheduled for Houston and Phoenix. I haven’t seen much reaction to it, but at least for me, having some sense for the reason for a delay let’s me better figure out what I’m going to do next. I’m much less trusting of a newly posted departure time if I know the inbound plane is still on the ground, or if it’s a maintenance delay.</li>\n 	<li>Of course, some of those explanations could be a bit more embarrassing than others. Like for Southwest, a couple of days after our flight back to Chicago, they had to cancel more than 200 flights because they ran out of de-icing fluid at Midway airport. You get that notification, and you’re shaking your head as you dial up an airline that knows how to fly in the winter.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #138</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_138.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #138 — Travel Turning Me Hipster; Every Delay Has a Story','','inherit','closed','closed','','1947-revision-v1','','','2021-09-29 21:56:39','2021-09-30 02:56:39','',1947,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3920',0,'revision','',0),
(3921,1,'2021-09-29 21:58:05','2021-09-30 02:58:05','[caption id=\"attachment_1985\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/6AB2DE86-7AE4-4DAF-AD9F-DEFB51F737E0-01.jpeg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1985\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/6AB2DE86-7AE4-4DAF-AD9F-DEFB51F737E0-01-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> The Look of Augmented Reality?[/caption]\n\nBroke out the mobile unit to record this episode in the Buckhead neighborhood of Atlanta; much warmer than getting caught in a spring snow storm in Milwaukee. When much of the travel tech news is about the latest phone apps, we talk about physical travel technology that we can touch and carry. <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">And when flying during the past two weeks, flight attendants\' safety demonstrations have become a bit more strident. </span>All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_140.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #140:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you from the Hyatt Place-Buckhead in Atlanta, GA missing what I hope is the long-delayed start of Spring finally showing up the Midwest. I have done damn little travel since the last episode -- a couple of drives to a client up north of Milwaukee, a quick trip to Minneapolis last week, and flight this morning down to Atlanta. I managed to avoid the foot of late April snow in Minnesota but got caught by 3-4 inches in Milwaukee. Luckily, I’d looked at the forecast before I left and, walking out to the garage, grabbed my LL Bean boots and threw them into the trunk of the car Which saved my dress shoes later that evening and the next morning on unshoveled walks and is is the good thing about driving; I didn’t have to worry about space constraints. I couldn’t have done the same thing flying to Minneapolis.</li>\n 	<li>I ended up flying Southwest to Minneapolis because: a) they were the cheapest flight out on Monday morning at short notice; and b) it let me meet an A-List challenge that Southwest had sent me at the beginning of the year -- fly 3 roundtrips by the end of April and get A-List for the rest of the year. Now, I don’t fly Southwest a whole lot, so I can’t completely justify what I pushed to do this challenge -- except just because it was a challenge, I guess. That, and it’ll make it easier for those times I end up on Southwest this year. I won’t have to pay the $12 for auto check-in or set an alarm to check in 24 hours before flight time -- both of which typically only get me in the second or “B” boarding group. Not an earth shattering perk, but anything that reduces travel hassles is a good thing.</li>\n 	<li>When I went Chicago Midway airport on last Monday to catch that flight, I ran into a new TSA trick -- funnel everyone through a single-file U-turn line to be sniffed a TSA agent and a dog, after people headed into either regular security or TSA PreCheck. Which, at 7am on a Monday morning, quickly pushed the security line back into the hallway toward the parking garage. So, after spending what looks like the $190 million a year the past couple of years on screening technology like those snazzy full-body scanners that people empty their pockets and line up for, the TSA is now having us line up for yet another a new screening technology -- but at least this technology is cute. And when was the last time you heard a traveler wanting to pet the body scanner.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/media/files/DJBLUE/11541\">Hear Me</a></em> by DJ Blue</li>\n</ul>\n<h3><strong>Following Up</strong></h3>\n<ul>\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">A couple of things for those not following my Twitter or the TravelCommons Facebook page…</span>\n<ul>\n 	<li>First, for those Amazon fans, Alexa will now play the latest episode of TravelCommons for you if you ask nicely. I got an Echo Spot in a schwag bag for a conference in January. I put it on the standing desk in my home office and started playing around with it. After listening to the WJS Minute Briefing as part of my Flash Briefing, I started thinking about how to get TravelCommons onto it. At first, I thought I was going to have to figure out how to build an Alexa skill, but digging a little deeper, I found out that the TuneIn app is sorta the default podcast player for Alexa. So after I got TravelCommons approved for TuneIn -- felt like they had an actual human check out my app -- it appeared on my Echo Spot. So if you say, “Alexa, play TravelCommons podcast”, she should play the latest episode for you. Check out the Facebook page or my Twitter feed for a quick video showing the magic happen</li>\n 	<li>Second, I took advantage of being in town and the crap April weather to do the filming for the Midway taproom tour layover video. As I mentioned in the last episode, the idea has been to feature an itinerary out of Chicago’s “other” airport -- what was Chicago’s original airport that morphed into the budget airline airport that morphed into Southwest Airlines’ biggest operation. We used Uber and Lyft to hit 4 taprooms in what can only be described as the “post-industrial” landscape of Chicago’s near south side. We started by driving past the Cook County prison en route to Lagunitas’ plant and taproom that’s built in an old steel mill. While New Belgium and Sierra Nevada landed their national expansions in the much more bucolic environs of the North Carolina Smoky Mountains, Lagunitas’ owner Tony Magee dropped his expansion in a dodgy part of Chicago. We then hit smaller scale, more local places that have repurposed old manufacturing plants in less-visited Chicago neighborhoods -- Lo Rez in Pilsen, Marz in what can charitably described as “lower” Bridgeport, and then ending up at Whiner Beer in the Back of the Yards neighborhood -- where the Chicago Stockyards used to be decades ago. I started working on production, but then looked at the calendar and knew that I only had time for either this episode or the video. And since I’ve worked hard on keeping a monthly cadence of podcast episodes, I kicked the video into next month. So watch Facebook, Twitter, and the web site for the post. Since it’s a bit more narrow scope, I don’t think I’ll put the video in the podcast feed; not sure the non-beer-drinking listeners will want some 100 meg video clogging up their internet.</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>While sitting in the backseat of one of those Lyft rides, I noticed something new on the pink Lyft light that many drivers have in the middle of their dash. You always see the front of it -- the pink Lyft logo -- from the outside, through the front windshield. Glancing at the back of it from inside of the car, I something flash by. Looking more closely, I saw a little message scroll by - “15 min eta”. I saw it again in the Lyft car I took to MSP on last Tuesday. I asked the driver about it. He told me that Lyft sent it to him after he did 300 rides -- “bit of a status thing” he said. I told him about the Uber dash light that I saw in New York, that let me adjust the color of the light from the app -- I talked about this in a prior episode. He thought that was pretty cool too, but he liked Lyft, the company, better than Uber, and he appreciated his messaging light.</li>\n 	<li>All sorts of press releases drop into the TravelCommons mailbox, but the one announcing April 24, last Tuesday, as the first National Business Traveler Day caught my eye. I guess because it’s new, it hasn’t made it onto the National Day Calendar, a list of these sorts of designations. It’s a good choice of date, though, because there is only one national day listed on the 24th -- National Pigs-In-A-Blanket Day -- which, I can imagine, some First or Business Class flight attendants might reasonably associate with some sleeping business travelers. National Business Traveler Day was announced (created?) by “Upside Business Travel, the first online travel service built just for the do-it-yourself (DIY) business traveler” in recognition of “the important contributions made by business travelers to America\'s economy.” I dunno, this could go in so many snarky directions -- with the pigs-in-a-blanket thing as just a starter. I have to say, though, I felt very unrecognized when I walked into MSP Terminal 2 the afternoon of National Business Travelers Day -- an obvious frequent business traveler: wearing a black blazer, head-down on the iPhone, speedwalking to the furthest security checkpoint because it’s the only one with PreCheck. Nobody was gave me a thank-you, a flower, a hug, but then again, the first person I had contact with was an old, overweight but jolly TSA screener. Nice guy, but not sure I would’ve wanted a hug from him.</li>\n 	<li>And it could’ve been that MSP’s Terminal 2 which I’ll add to my list of ghetto terminals, the land of misbegotten travelers, which also includes ORD’s T2, Detroit’s North Terminal, Madrid’s 4S satellite terminal, Munich’s T2 satellite terminal… I’ve talked about this before. In fortress hubs, like ORD, DTW, and MSP, the terminals the hub airlines use is clean, bright, has lots of restaurant and shopping choices. Delta’s terminal in Detroit has an airy 2 or 3-story ceiling with a monorail train running the length of the terminal up at the top. The North terminal that every other airline is dumped into is the old terminal that Delta -- or actually Northwest left behind, with a bit of a clean up and 3 restaurants. Delta’s terminal in Minneapolis is the same story -- lots of shops and restaurants, a big craft beer bar, all with a bit of that North Woods feel. Terminal 2 - generic airport sterility, a Subway sandwich joint, a bar where all the handles were removed from the beer taps. And there’s no inside-security connections between these terminals in MSP and DTW if you want to check out the better side -- it’s a 10-minute bus ride and another pass through security. At least in ORD, you can walk from T2 to the American or United terminals and hit Rick Bayless’ Torta Frontera for great Mexican food or Goose Island for a good beer. On Tuesday, I was stuck in the Humphrey Terminal with my Subway sandwich and a choice of Bud Light or Blue Moon -- which maybe was fitting on National Business Traveler Day.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/media/files/savoyard/10743\">Madrugada</a></em> by Savoyard</li>\n</ul>\n<h3><strong>Travel Tech Gets Physical</strong></h3>\n<ul>\n 	<li>In addition to press releases about National Business Travelers Day, I also get press releases announcing new funding rounds for travel startups. These things come in waves. Like the wave of companies building tour aggregation platforms. That investment thesis went -- because millennials are more into experiential travel, they’re more likely to spend money on something like a food tour or hang gliding; the market for travel experiences is fragmented making discovery and purchasing difficult; our platform will solve this problem by aggregating experience providers and providing world-class search and user experience. The latest wave seems to be about building platforms that “reduce the pain” of corporate business travel. In April, in addition to Upside’s National Business Traveler Day announcement, Rocketrip sent out a release about their $15 million funding round and TravelPerk, who sponsored our January episode, touted their $21 million round -- which sounds like, some 20+ years after Travelocity and Expedia hit the market, companies continue to spend millions of dollars trying to figure out how to replace travel agents.</li>\n 	<li>At times, it feels like much of the work on improving travel is virtual, about software -- new apps, new search platforms, better ways to spit out a single travel itinerary. But in spite of the venture capital mantra that “software is eating the world,” travel is inherently physical -- we want to move our bodies, our stuff from Point A to Point B, and most often back again. It seems like the ‘60’s were the golden age of this, when Boeing and Airbus’ predecessors and the Russians were designing and building supersonic planes. I really felt ancient the other day telling some Millennial staffers about, how way back when, Concorde would fly from JFK to LHR in less than 3 hrs. Now it seems that Boeing and Airbus are completely focused on cramming more people into subsonic flying buses. Logical, but not very aspirational. Now if all the work on hyperloops -- the test circuits, the design contests -- actually turns into something, and isn’t just high-tech hobbies for Elon Musk and Richard Branson -- we’ll be onto something.</li>\n 	<li>But in the meantime, in the space between now -- thinner, more uncomfortable plane seats and hotel keys that keep demagnetizing -- and the inspirational future -- us whizzing along in pods at 750 mph, doing LA to SF in 35 minutes without having to buy CO2 offsets to feel better about ourselves -- what are some of the physical things about to hit?</li>\n 	<li>One thing that seems to be finally hitting critical mass is real-time luggage tracking through RFID luggage tags. Logistics is another thing that’s hard, but it feels that airports and some airlines, Delta especially, have slogged through deploying enough RFID readers along the miles of luggage conveyor belts in the bowels of most of the airports they use, and then wiring it back in near real-time to their smartphone apps so that it’s useful. I’m hoping the combination of competitive pressure, falling equipment pricing, and government fines will push the rest of the airlines to follow suit. For me, real-time location tracking was the main use case for smart bags like BlueSmart. If I can get this through RFID tags, I’ll feel a lot less salty about the smart bag ban.</li>\n 	<li>Wearables also get a lot of buzz. Carnival Cruise Lines has been the latest, announcing their “Ocean Medallion” last year as a way to “personalize” your cruise experience -- and, of course, to make it easier to buy drinks on board. Nothing really new here. Disney’s been doing this forever; 20 years ago, I remember using a wristband at Northstar ski resort in Tahoe to track how many vertical feet we’d skied in a day, and to easily buy beers in the lodge. I’m wondering what happens here if the current noise about the use (and misuse) of personal data by Facebook and others resets people’s privacy vs. ease-of-use balance point rather than just blowing over. For me, it’s less about how the companies use the data (though I’m not completely unconcerned about this) and more about their inability to secure it. Seems like every couple of weeks, another travel company admits to some hack of, say, their point-of-sale system and the associated loss of millions of names and credit card numbers. Doesn’t incent me to let them track my movements and spending habits.</li>\n 	<li>AR/VR -- Augmented and virtual reality continues to buzz. I’ve talked about Google Translate’s AR feature -- point your camera at, say, a menu or washing machine, and it’ll display the translation over the original text in real-time. It’s not perfect -- the translations can rapidly change, sorta flicker between different interpretations, but it’s often “good enough”, and a whole lot quicker than banging in each menu entree. Google has tried to extend this real-time translation from visual to speech with their Pixel Bud headphones with much more Version 1.0 mixed results. I’m probably being way overly optimistic here, but if the Buds follow the same improvement trajectory, they could be pretty cool in 3 years’ time.</li>\n 	<li>It really gets buzzy when we move from AR to VR. A guy at a VR start-up talked to me about using VR in hotel rooms for what he called “social viewing”. Rather than watching, say Black Mirror on Netflix on your laptop or one of those Enseo TVs I’m seeing more and more of, you strap on a VR headset, as does your spouse or kids, and you’re all watching together in a virtual living room or virtual theater. And then there’s always the pitch -- why fly over to, say, Madrid to see Picasso’s Guernica in the Reina Sofia when you strap on a VR headset and “be” in the room instantly? Hey, remember how virtual reality turned out in The Matrix movies? Yeah, I think I’ll keep my travel physical.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/media/files/djlang59/10579\">Crazy Love</a></em> by DJ Lang</li>\n</ul>\n<h3><strong>You <em>Will</em> Pay Attention to the Safety Briefing</strong></h3>\n<ul>\n 	<li>The selfie of passengers on Southwest flight 1380 not wearing the oxygen masks correctly went viral in the days after the engine explosion, along with the stories -- the guy telling the woman next to him that she didn’t need to squeeze the airbag, and the guy who logged into WiFi and Facebook Live before putting on his mask. The flight attendant interviews that seemingly every news outlet did dripped with schadenfreude -- no one ever pays attention to the safety videos or demonstrations, and look what happened!</li>\n 	<li>Improving airline safety records have let people grow numb as to how unnatural air travel is -- flying over 600 mph at 35,000 ft. Flight 1380 was the first accident-related fatality on a US airliner since 2009, and the Southwest’s first ever -- since it was founded in 1971.</li>\n 	<li>I’ll admit that I don’t pay attention to every demo, especially when I do multiple flights in a single week. I do typically look around me for the nearest exits -- in front and behind me -- because those can change pretty often with different seat configurations. I will pay attention, as a refresher, if I haven’t flown for a couple of weeks -- like last week’s flight to MSP. Or if it’s a plane I haven’t flown in a while, I’ll look at the seat back card -- like I did today when noticing I was in a Boeing 717, a pretty rare event for me.</li>\n 	<li>I have noticed that the flight attendants’ requests/demands for attention have become a bit more strident since 1380. On my Southwest flight back home from MSP last week, the flight attendant chanted “Nose and mouth; nose and mouth!”, eliciting some nervous laughter.</li>\n 	<li>The attendant on my Delta flight this morning was a bit more direct, perhaps fatalistic this morning. “Please pay attention! We’re doing this for you. But if you don’t want to watch us, well, I guess it’s your life…”</li>\n</ul>\n<h3><strong>Closing</strong></h3>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #140</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a> and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_140.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #140 — Travel Tech Gets Physical; Pay Attention to the Safety Briefing','Physical travel technology rather than latest phone app; TSA K9 screening; dingy airport terminals, flight attendants\' safety demonstrations become strident. ','inherit','closed','closed','','1977-revision-v1','','','2021-09-29 21:58:05','2021-09-30 02:58:05','',1977,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3921',0,'revision','',0),
(3922,1,'2021-09-29 22:00:05','2021-09-30 03:00:05','[caption id=\"attachment_2044\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/2018-06-22-20.15.56-1.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2044\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/2018-06-22-20.15.56-1-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> What\'s the Chinese character for \"wurst\"?[/caption]\n\nYet another last-minute long-distance trip, this time to Frankfurt, Germany, lets me check out United Airlines\' new business class service, and think again about the value for those expensive lie-flat seats. Seeing a new Chinese menu at a favorite wurst stand in the old part of Frankfurt reminds me of the changes driven by the new wave of Chinese tourists. I also read recent PR pitches for a new smart bag and a business traveler\'s biohack. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_142.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #142:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you from a rather jumbled up TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. Been playing “furniture jenga” for the past couple of weeks as we do a lot of deferred maintenance before trying to relocate the studios into Chicago. The recording studio is jammed full and the regular production bay has been taken out of commission, hence me missing my usual end-of-month posting and slipping into the first week of July.</li>\n 	<li>June’s travel cadence was almost a complete rinse-and-repeat of May’s. A few day drives up to Wisconsin, pretty easy -- until I had to make a last-minute trip to Germany with about 36-hour notice -- leave Weds night, land Thurs morning, meet with the client Thursday afternoon, lead a workshop Friday, fly home Saturday morning. I booked an eye-bleedingly expensive last-minute business class ticket because I needed to work and get some sleep on the flight over, which United was kind enough to convert into a 1st-class seat on the Weds flight, giving me more than enough space to eat and work simultaneously.</li>\n 	<li>Though shorter notice than last month’s India trip, it was a bit easier -- no last-minute visa dash, and I got to walk out of the airport in Frankfurt this time rather than transferring to another 8-hour flight. And thanks to Google Maps, I was able to find a non-stop local train from the station in the basement of Frankfurt airport (just finding that was a win for Google) to the station just outside the client’s headquarters for about €8. And because the train ticketing machine could do contactless, I just dinged it with my iPhone rather than having to wrestle with my US Amex card not having a PIN. All in all, it was as painless as a last-minute 8,000-mile trip can be. And not having to push furniture around for 3 days -- that was a nice bonus...</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://www.nimbitmusic.com/saurabbhargava\">Exit</a></em> by Saurab Bhargava</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>The bumper music is from Saurab Bhargava, a long-time listener and longer-time friend and colleague who said in a note “Took some time on the cruise to catch up on some TravelCommons podcasts. Glad you\'re still keeping the rhythm on that!” I have been working to keep a regular monthly cadence. I’ve managed to keep it up for a year, which is why I’m a bit put off with myself for missing my June deadline. Though I have to tell you, the combination of a flash trip to Germany, studio reconfiguration, and the World Cup hasn’t helped -- especially the World Cup. Maybe now that we’re in the knockout round, and there’s only 2 games in a day, I’ll double up on episodes in July.</li>\n 	<li>Being World Cup-literate was very handy while in Germany. Good for making small talk with the client, and Friday night in Frankfurt, every bar seemed to have found half-a-dozen big screens a piece and stood them up everywhere inside and outside. It was easy to keep up with the matches, even when walking down the street. And this wasn’t even for the German team; it was Nigeria-Iceland and Switzerland-Serbia -- not even in Germany’s group. Good reminder of how big a deal it is outside the US.</li>\n 	<li>Long-time listener Geoffrey Greene pinged me on Facebook to let me know that TravelCommons is on the new Google Podcast app. I think I mentioned some time back, that I’ve been having problems with Google Play picking up TravelCommons ever since they started with podcasts. I’d filled out all the forms, submitted the RSS feed, but there was some error somewhere. Finding someone somewhere in Google support to resolve that has been on my to-do list for a while. I still need to get that sorted, but I’m glad to know the problem hasn’t carried over to the new app. I also need to update the website with links to all the places where people can subscribe to TravelCommons. Yet another line on the to-do list.</li>\n 	<li>Continuing the ongoing thread about smart bags… in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/05/31/podcast-141-when-you-think-the-tsa-is-bad-expired-money/\">last episode</a>, I talked about 2 smart bag manufacturers going out of business. But this past week, sifting through the PR pitches in the TravelCommons mail bag, I saw this -- “First Smart Luggage Safe to Fly Worldwide”. Plevo -- who thinks of these names? -- claims to be “the first smart luggage in the world that was designed to be safe to fly around the world” with “a removable battery pack, GPS Tracking, Smart Lock, Built-in Digital Scale, distance alerts and a Travel Assistant App”. OK, this is interesting. I head over to the inevitable Kickstarter page and check out the video. Very slick, but it didn’t answer what is the key question for smart bags -- how does Plevo provide location tracking and connect to the app when the battery pack is removed? Briana, the PR person, told me the Plevo bags have 2 batteries -- a removable Lithium battery pack and a permanent Nickel battery that takes over when the Li battery is removed. Elegant solution. The risk, though, is when that elegance breaks down in the face of a harried gate agent that doesn’t have the time to work through the safety differences between Li and Ni batteries, and just finds it easier to say “No”.  No problem getting past the UA gate agent in Frankfurt with my low-tech leather bag I bought in Italy a few years ago on our 25th anniversary. Checking my passport, she looked down -- “That’s a great bag!” she said. Sometimes, simpler is better.</li>\n 	<li>Another PR pitch that caught my eye, but in a less positive way, was titled “A Travel Hack Every Business Traveler Should Know About”. I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty much done with growth hackers and lifehackers and especially travel hackers. I’m old enough to remember when a hack was an ugly bit of code that managed to get a system running, but it wasn’t something that anyone was proud of. But I digress. I was killing time in United’s very nice new ORD Polaris business class lounge waiting for my Frankfurt flight, so I took the bail and opened it up. “With more executives turning to food as a biohack,” I’m regretting this click already, “an airport meal that fits with your food lifestyle can be hard to find.” The pitch was for Ample, a powdered, rehydrateable drinkable meal that’s TSA-compliant and “packed with on-trend ingredients like MCTs from coconut oil, fiber, probiotics, micronutrients from chlorella, and protein from grass-fed whey and collagen.” MCT’s, a Google search tells me, are medium-chain triglycerides that are good for you in a whole bunch of ways, I guess. Ample reduces decision fatigue -- “Just like Zuck never needs to decide what to wear, deciding what to eat at an airport is a piece of decision fatigue that you just don\'t need” and makes it easier to follow “a ketogenic lifestyle”. Feeling the onset of buzzword fatigue, I set my phone down, walked over to the bar, abandoned any hope of achieving ketosis, and pointed to the Revolution Brewing Anti-Hero IPA draft handle.</li>\n 	<li>I didn’t mention this in the last episode, but before I headed out on my India trip, I hit the AT&amp;T website to see if India is included in their international plan (it is) and to get one of their international data packages since I wasn’t going to have time to figure out the local SIM market. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the data limit of their base $60 offering has been bumped from 300MB to 1GB sometime in the last 2 years, and way up from 100MB back in 2011. The last time I used AT&amp;T’s international plan was March 2016 during a 4-day trip in Iceland. I turned cellular access off on just about every app except Google Maps and only just squeaked through without topping the 300MB limit. 1GB is a whole lot roomier. I had no problems in India. I don’t know when that limit got bumped up, but good on AT&amp;T for making that base plan much more realistic.</li>\n 	<li>This is about the time when I have the obligatory craft beer comment, and you’d think that coming off a trip to Germany, I’d be full of them. And at the end of the day on Thursday, after taking a 20-minute nap to catch my second or third wind, I headed out looking exactly for that -- a bierstube with some local beers and maybe a wurst platter. Walking around near the hotel, there wasn’t much -- it was kind of a dead plaza with some pizza and doner kebab places. One nice restaurant, but nothing special. I pulled out Google Maps and started scrolling around, zooming in and out looking for some beer places. I don’t see many of those, but I keep seeing wineries pop up south of me. So I start walking. 15 minutes, I hit one of the wineries and walk in. What’s with all the wineries, I ask? “You’re in one of the largest wine producing regions in Germany,” the guy nicely explained. “I’m getting ready for a big wine dinner right now, but stop in tomorrow if you want to taste our wines.” I’d be leaving for Frankfurt tomorrow, but I thanked him. So now, I’m looking for wine. It was after 5, and all the other wineries I passed looked closed, but I found a restaurant with what looked like a good local wine list and a nice courtyard. The waitress made some recommendations -- “This is a nice wine from our next door neighbor” We struggled a little bit figuring out the translation for the daily special on the chalkboard, but with dueling smartphone searches, we figured it out -- it was a local dish of spit-roasted pork. It was a nice surprise; a nice ending to the first day of what I thought was going to be just a Bataan death march of a trip. Which it would’ve been if I’d stayed in my hotel room rehydrating my third bottle of Ample ketogenic liquid so I could slog through another 50 emails on my way to zero inbox nirvana.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> or our new <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a> at travelcommons -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://www.nimbitmusic.com/saurabbhargava\">Yours in Mine</a> </em>by Saurab Bhargava</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Sleeping in Business Class</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>The trips to India and Germany put me back in international business class for the first time in a while. In past episodes, I’ve been ambivalent about the value for money for business class -- is the extra space and the better meal service worth the $5-6,000 uplift? On these trips, I kinda think “Yes” because neither trip had any slack in the schedule -- I’d be landing and going directly into meetings, so those lie-flat business class seats were what I really needed so I could get some amount of quality sleep.</li>\n 	<li>The start of both trips was a United flight from ORD to FRA. United has made a big deal of upgrading their international business class, even giving it a new name -- Polaris. And they’re building separate Polaris lounges, so it you’re flying international First or Business, no more slumming in the crowded Red Carpet clubs. The Polaris lounges are nice -- everything is free, good beer and wine selection -- even a cocktail list -- and a nice buffet. They’re probably the best business class lounges I hit on either trip, better than the variety of Lufthansa lounges I hit in Frankfurt. And United is pushing them. The Polaris lounge in ORD is in the far concourse, Concourse C, which makes sense; that’s where most of United’s international flights leave from. In June, though, my flight to Frankfurt left out of the B Concourse, so I went into the Red Carpet club right across from the gate. The guy at the desk looked at my ticket -- “Oh, you want to go to the Polaris Lounge. It’s about a 15 minute walk, but it’s definitely worth it.”</li>\n 	<li>Walking on the United Triple 7 though, you could feel United packing as much as they could in that business class with a 2-4-2 seat configuration -- only just slightly less packed than the 3-4-3 seating on the other side of the curtain in Economy. I’d never seen two middle seats in business class before. Business class in the Lufthansa A380s between Frankfurt and India were 2-2-2 -- no middle seats. Now on my flight over in May, I had the aisle and a couple had the middle two seats, so not too bad, and they were good folks. I felt bad for the husband during the night, though, when I had my seat in full lie-flat mode. When he needed to hit the toilet at night, he had to kinda vault me.</li>\n 	<li>On my last flight back from Frankfurt, a good-sized guy had the middle seat next to me. I’d guess he was a former football player, still in good shape, but taller and broader than the average build that United had sized these Polaris pods for. He said that the flight over, he couldn’t lay flat; it felt like a coffin, so he just reclined it and catnapped, which kinda defeated the purpose of hitting the ground running. I could sympathize. I’m not that broad, but I had to drop the aisle-side armrest in my pod to be able to comfortably fit. Kinda nice service, but definitely snug.</li>\n 	<li>The Lufthansa business class lounges lacked the pizzazz of United’s lounges. But one thing that was new to me… the flights to India went out of a different concourse in Frankfurt -- on the last episode, I talked about the mile-&amp;-a-half walk and the extra security -- and here, they boarded the A380 first and business classes straight from the lounge. No walking down to the gate and idling around with the economy classes. They had gate agents and kiosks in the club. I set down my beer, had my boarding pass scanned, and then walked down the jetway to the plane.</li>\n 	<li>Once on-board, Lufthansa’s A380s were definitely roomier than United’s Triple 7’s -- maybe a bigger plane, maybe because they weren’t trying to cram 8 people across. With only 6 people across, the lie-flat seats were more comfortable, not as “coffin-ish” as United’s. Indeed, maybe a little too comfortable. A guy in the row behind me on my flight to Delhi must’ve gone deep in sleep because he snored -- loudly, really sawing wood -- for a couple of hours. The one time I wouldn’t have minded a little turbulence to jostle the plane. But good for him, he was definitely getting his money’s worth from Business Class.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://www.nimbitmusic.com/saurabbhargava\">Through The Line</a> </em>by Saurab Bhargava</li>\n</ul>\n<b>Changes from Chinese Tourists</b>\n<ul>\n 	<li>The last night I was in Germany, Friday night, I stayed in Frankfurt so I’d have just a 20-minute cab ride to the airport for my 8:15am flight. It had been 7 years since I’d walked around the city -- back in 2011 when I did a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/05/01/video-2-one-city-five-hours-frankfurt/\">TravelCommons video</a>, retracing the “1 City, 5 Hours” article about Frankfurt in United’s seatback magazine. I walked down to the Romer area - a big open square surrounded by historic buildings -- and over to a sausage, a wurst stand that I’d eaten at in the past. They’d added a new menu -- the German menu was now on the ground, under the ordering window; the new menu at eye level was in Chinese.</li>\n 	<li>The travel press has been talking about the impending growth of Chinese tourism for a bit now. I’ve seen the tour buses full of Chinese travelers for some time -- back in 2016 when my son and I were in Iceland, it became a bit of a game for us to stay ahead of those buses, and then in Frankfurt, down in a basement applewine pub off some back alley, I was the only non-Asian person there. But now, I’m noticing more, I dunno, systemic or infrastructure changes being driven by Chinese tourism. Not just Chinese menus but also seeing restaurants in the US and Europe accepting Chinese mobile payments - WeChat and Alipay. And some folks in the hotel business will say that the push to provide free wi-fi, mobile apps and family-sized rooms is driven, in some ways, by what Chinese tourists are looking for. Makes sense. Last year, there were 130 million outbound Chinese tourists, a big number but only 10% of the population of China. There’s a lot more to come.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #142</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a> and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from from Saurab Bhargava’s album <em>Chromatique</em>.  The tracks were <em>Exit</em>, <em>Yours In Mine</em>, and <em>Through The Line</em>.  Here\'s an Amazon <a href=\"https://www.amazon.com/Chromatique-Saurab-Bhargava/dp/B004R7W3O8\">link </a>where you can buy the album.</li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_142.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #142 — Sleeping in Business Class; Changes from Chinese Tourists','','inherit','closed','closed','','2042-revision-v1','','','2021-09-29 22:00:05','2021-09-30 03:00:05','',2042,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3922',0,'revision','',0),
(3924,1,'2021-09-29 22:04:10','2021-09-30 03:04:10','[caption id=\"attachment_2100\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/20121212_195127000_iOS.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2100\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/20121212_195127000_iOS-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Duck squats are supposed to keep you healthy[/caption]\n\nNo long-distance travel this month. Instead, I\"m getting back into regional jets, and waiting out a long delay in Cincinnati has me wondering about American Eagle\'s flight scheduling algorithm. My flights into CVG cause me to think about the impact of losing hub status. CVG looks overbuilt, but MEM is spending money to shrink itself. A Harvard Business Review article about how frequent business travel leads to poor health choices emphasizes the need for \"mindfulness\" on the road. The Midway Layover Taproom video gets me thinking about the time needed for a fun layover tour. And I give a listener my Chicago restaurant and taproom recommendations. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_143.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #143:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you a spiffed up TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. The production bay has been somewhat reassembled -- less one piece of furniture in the name of decluttering -- with the walls now a real estate agent-approved shade of “greige” and the floors redone from cherry to a bit more of a walnut; bowing to the presumed tastes of the millennial buyer. It’s not bad, just different. Definitely lighter though.</li>\n 	<li>No spur-of-the-moment international trips in July; mostly just running around the Midwest, but re-vectoring from Wisconsin to Cincinnati; a bit too far to drive, so I’m losing the freedom to leave when I want and back to stooping through regional jet doorways.</li>\n 	<li>And back to having my schedule jacked up by weather events thousands of miles away from me. As we’ve talked about before, the regional jet operators, affiliates that don’t have spare jets available to step in and wipe out delays a plane may encounter along their daily bunny hop schedule. Last week, my AA flight from CVG to ORD was a textbook example of this. At 12:30, on the way back from lunch, I got my first delay notice -- for a 6pm flight. It was just 20 minutes, so I didn’t think much of it. It was a nice day in both Cincinnati and Chicago, so I just chalked it up to standard ORD traffic. But then the delay started to stretch -- to 30 minutes, to 40 minutes, to an hour. I fired up FlightAware and used the “Where’s My Plane Now?” functionality to try and figure out what was going on. The nice thing about the FlightAware screen is it shows you the flight path and the current weather. My plane was traveling from Norfolk, VA to Miami, and then up to Cincinnati -- and I could see heavy storms all along the Southeast coast. The plane was late leaving Norfolk, and then was having to vector down the Florida Gulf Coast to avoid the storms over the Atlantic Coast. This wasn’t looking good.</li>\n 	<li>FlightAware also shows a 10-day history for a flight’s departure/arrival times. This American flight had only arrived on-time once; had also canceled once, and arrived late the other 8 times. With a bit of time to kill, I fired up Excel and calculated that this flight averaged an hour and 20 minute delay -- counting the one on-time flight, but not counting the cancellation (figuring out how to average in infinity was a bit more work that I was willing to tackle). This wasn’t really a one-off weather delay; it was a bad flight route. So as I’m wont to do, I hit American on Twitter -- “this flt has been delayed/cancelled 8 of the past 9 days. Kinda think AA needs to rethink the scheduling for this one”. I looked at the history of the United flight also leaving at 6pm -- one late flight in the past 10 days. It flies back and forth between ORD and CVG. Maybe not a great plan for the winter, but better than flying through the humid South in July and August. I’m switching. Besides, the beer selection in CVG won’t keep me occupied through too many more hour-long delays.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/beyond7-revelations/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><em>Miss America</em></a> by Beyond 7</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul class=\"\">\n 	<li>Even in the midst of studio refurb, I managed to push out the long-promised Chicago Midway Layover Southside Taproom Tour video. These videos always take longer than I think, but it’s fun and I like the end result. One of the things I’ve liked about the craft beer explosion -- in addition, of course, to good beer -- is that searching out new microbreweries has taken me to parts of cities I never would’ve visited otherwise -- walking into a basement in Portland, Oregon wondering how in the hell they got these huge steel tanks down here; or coming out of the Paris Metro in the middle of a North African neighborhood. I hope this Midway video has some of that same feel -- skipping the parts of Chicago that make the tour guides or TV shows -- the baseball themepark of Wrigleyville, the lakefront, hipster enclaves of Wicker Park and Logan Square -- guiding folks to pass through Douglas Park, Pilsen, Bridgeport, and the Back of the Yards. If you haven’t seen it already, check it out. You can watch it on the TravelCommons Facebook page, or go to the TravelCommons web site and you can click through to it on YouTube. Robert Fenerty left a comment on YouTube -- “Might be an excellent way to help get my A List status renewed this year!” Which, I think, is an excellent idea…</li>\n 	<li>Rob Cheshire commented on the web site, talking about the Southside breweries I featured on the video --\n<ul>\n 	<li>Thanks Mark! I will definitely build a visit to Marz and Lo-rez into my schedule for my August trip to Chicago. I am undecided about Whiner, which might be a bit too “European” in terms of beer styles for my tastes.I am a bit conflicted about Lagunitas, being part of the evil-Heineken Empire! I have no doubt that they have some great beers, and that the tasting room is a very cool spot.</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Rob and I have trading thoughts on Chicago brewery in comments to TravelCommons web site posts and Untappd check ins for a couple of months leading up to his trip here. Little does he know that I’m going to hit him up the other way for suggestions for my quick visit to Copenhagen in September. Rob has started his own blog -- <a href=\"https://taproomadventure.blogspot.com/\">The Great Taproom Adventure</a> -- with his notes on the taprooms he visits.</li>\n 	<li>Keith Love -- “long-time listener, first-time caller” as he describes himself -- sent me a note. He and his son are hitting Chicago early this month -- maybe for Lollapalooza? You’d be surprised how many older folks go hard on that 4-day music festival. Keith asked me for some restaurant and taproom recommendations, which got me thinking that I should do a Chicago episode, but in lieu of that, here’s the list I built for Keith in case you’re passing through Chicago soon -\n<ul>\n 	<li>Restaurant suggestions with good food/beer selections\n<ul>\n 	<li><del>The Publican (Fulton Market)</del> <em>Food is not that great anymore</em></li>\n 	<li>Cruz Blanca (Randolph St)</li>\n 	<li><del>The Fountainhead (North Center)</del> <em>COVID casualty</em></li>\n 	<li>Hopleaf (Andersonville)</li>\n 	<li>Purple Pig (Michigan Ave)</li>\n 	<li>Eataly (River North; beer bar on the top floor)</li>\n 	<li><del>Fat Rice (Logan Square -- a bit of a cheat; OK beer, but food you won\'t find anywhere else)</del> <em>COVID casualty</em></li>\n 	<li>Wiener Circle (Lakeview -- even more of a cheat; no beer but a great char-Polish)</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Favorite Chicago taprooms -- this is more Northside focused since Keith said he was staying in River North\n<ul>\n 	<li>Goose Island Taproom (on Fulton St, not the brewpub)</li>\n 	<li>Half Acre (on either Lincoln or the new, larger one further north on Balmoral)</li>\n 	<li>Revolution Brewery Taproom (on Kedzie, not the brewpub on Milwaukee)</li>\n 	<li>Ravenswood taproom crawl -- 4 taprooms on Ravenswood between Foster and Irving Park Rd</li>\n 	<li>DryHop (Lakeview - another cheat; more of a brewpub, but a fav of mine)</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Keith also asked if I have a favorite airport app to, as he said, “actually guide you through airports and their amenities/services.” I had to admit that I’m a bit more old-school and use the maps that are posted around, though I will use Untappd to find the airport bars that have the best beer selection, which is how I killed a bit of that CVG delay I talked about earlier. If anybody uses an airport app, please let me know and I’ll talk about it on the next episode.</li>\n 	<li>The stint in Cincinnati forces me to fly out of ORD first thing Monday morning, the worst part of the road warrior rush hour. I normally avoid Monday morning flights like the plague, but my schedule these past weeks has forced me into it. That first Monday, I gave myself an extra 30 minutes, figuring life is too short to hyperventilate in a TSA line. But even then, the line tailing out of the Terminal 3 PreCheck took my breath away -- half the way down the terminal and I couldn’t catch up to the end of it; it grew faster than I could walk. I finally was able to get in -- I may have cut someone off, I dunno, the end of the line was a bit nebulous, lot of people muddling around, eventually forming a coherent line. Kinda like the travelers version of post-Big Bang dust clouds eventually forming galaxies. Anyhow, I get into line and start walking back toward the PreCheck station, at a brisk pace, and I didn’t really stop until I stood at the little swinging gate, waiting for the next available agent to check my license. It was 5-7 minutes tops. It’s amazing how many passengers they can process with 9 agents checking ID and every screening machine running. And with a line that’s 90% experienced travelers. It was just this side of a precision drill squad. I was impressed.</li>\n 	<li>I haven’t spent much time in Cincinnati airport before. It’s a very nice airport, but feels a bit “overbuilt”, especially with Delta “de-hubbing” it after it merged with Northwest.There’s two terminals with a train running between them and to the main building. The train is fine, as airplane trains go -- no better or worse than Denver’s or Atlanta’s -- but it seems a lot shorter. Indeed, the walk between terminals is maybe 3 minutes. The train seems a bit superfluous, or that the Cincinnati airport is trying to punch above its weight. Though feeling a bit overbuilt, it’s doesn’t have the ghost town feeling that the Memphis airport had the last time I was there. There were concourses there where I didn’t see a soul. It too was a casualty of the Delta-Northwest merger, a Northwest hub that was shut down in favor of Delta’s superhub in Atlanta. Memphis has lost ⅔’s of its passenger traffic and is now spending millions to downsize, to shutdown and mothball those empty concourses. There’s a <a href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/23/us/memphis-airport.html\">good NY Times story</a> about this. I tweeted out a link while I was writing this, but will also put a link in the show notes.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> or our new <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a> at travelcommons -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/westexit-extra/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><em>On Condition of Anonymity</em></a> by the West Exit</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>How Bad is Business Travel For Your Health?</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>I stumbled across an article in Harvard Business Review -- <a href=\"https://hbr.org/2018/05/just-how-bad-is-business-travel-for-your-health-heres-the-data\">Just How Bad is Business Travel for Your Health? Here’s the Data</a> -- by Dr Andrew Rundle, a pr ofessor of epidemiology at Columbia University. His bio says “his research focuses on the risks for, and consequences of, sedentary lifestyles and obesity.”\nThe article summarizes his recent research which boils down to\n<ul>\n 	<li>Employees who spent 14 or more nights away from home per month had significantly higher body mass index scores and were significantly more likely to report clinical symptoms of anxiety, depression and alcohol dependence; no physical activity or exercise; smoking; and trouble sleeping. The odds of being obese were 92% higher for those who traveled 21 or more nights per month</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Yup, so tell me something I don’t know. It takes work, or “mindfulness” to be on-trend, to eat right, exercise, and go to bed at a reasonable time when the guardrails of your normal routine disappear. Rundle’s population is people who travel every week. In the US, many consultancies shoot for a “3-4-5” travel schedule for their full-time project staff -- 3 nights, 4 days on the road -- leaving Monday morning, returning Thursday night -- with the 5th day in the office or working from home. Depending on the number of weeks in the month, that’s 12 -15 nights/month.</li>\n 	<li>When I went into consulting and full-time travel, the change was immediate -- working late and then project team dinners rolled over my evening workout routine, eating out every meal blew up my regular diet, and waking up at 4am on Monday morning to catch the 6am flight to LaGuardia, so I could be at my midtown Manhattan client by 10am screwed up my sleep cycle for the next couple of days. I could see the effects on the guys in my “class” -- the guys who joined the firm the same fall that I did -- putting on weight, walking a bit slower through the airport, drinking a bit more at dinner, maybe missing an early morning meeting or call after staying out a bit too late.</li>\n 	<li>I made some adjustments -- moved to morning workouts, became more “mindful” about what I was eating -- ordering fish and vegetarian meals where I could (though there aren’t always great options for non-Big 3 proteins (non-beef, chicken, or pork) in places like Dover, OH, Ephrata, PA, or Huntsville, AL). Maybe this slowed the inevitable, but 10 years on, we were on a family vacation with my folks, a Caribbean cruise. One of the stops along the Yucatan, the Mayan Riviera as they were starting to call it, I walk out of the water to our chairs, my dad looks up at me and says “You’ve put a bit of weight on, haven’t you?” I would’ve blown him off, except that I knew it was true. My waist size was 2 inches bigger and I was carrying 20 lbs more than when I started. I was heading in the same direction as my colleagues, even though it was at a slower pace.</li>\n 	<li>I was able to reverse the trend, and I think one of the key reasons was by then, I was senior enough to have more control over my schedule. I was managing the projects rather than being managed. So I could relieve the expectations of nightly team dinners -- at least one night a week, everyone was on their own, and no pressure if you bagged out other nights. I’d turn in early on Monday nights when most of us had gotten up early to fly out. We’d pick hotels with good workout rooms and where we could walk to the client and to restaurants rather than drive. Where I could, I’d negotiate remote work weeks with the client -- save them expense money, and give our team a break from the airport. It took work to break out of the usual, the default behaviors -- that “mindfulness” thing again.</li>\n 	<li>Thinking back on it, I guess I’m surprised that the firms I was with expected me to figure this out on my own. There were always travel policies on spending limits, and using the corporate travel agency, and what receipts were needed, and when you could fly business class, but no real guidance/support on how to lead a somewhat healthy life on the road. Maybe because the people writing those policies weren’t traveling -- the accountants and HR managers were paying for their own meals and going home every night, maybe a bit jealous thinking we were living it up every night eating steak dinners and drinking bottles of wine. Which some of us were, because we weren’t mindful enough to think about another way.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/solace-medusa/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Subtle Vice</a> </em>by Solace</li>\n</ul>\n<b>Make Layovers Fun</b>\n<ul>\n 	<li>One of the most sacred frequent traveler rules is Fly Direct. Be it winter with snow or summer with thunderstorms, adding that intermediate stop adds one more point of failure, one more opportunity for the airlines to screw up. But, with a bit of planning and an “adventuring” frame of mind, you can actually manufacture something good -- a mini-tour -- out of a connection. That has been the inspiration behind two TravelCommons videos -- the new MDW Layover Taproom Tour and the ORD Layover Excursion that I did almost 6 years ago -- and that is still getting regular hits on YouTube.</li>\n 	<li>To do it right, though, does take a bit of planning… and time. You have to factor in all the delay points -- getting off the plane, stashing your luggage if you carried on, getting to and from where you’re going, and then getting back through security when you return. For most airports, I think it’s tough to do a good layover tour in less than 4 hours -- this is supposed to be a fun daybreak, not another travel stressor.</li>\n 	<li>United Airlines used to have a series in their Hemispheres magazine called One City, Five Hours that would outline a 5-hour layover tour in a different city -- Reno, Albuquerque, Copenhagen, …. One of the early TravelCommons videos is me following their <a href=\"http://old.hemimag.us/2010/03/01/one-city-five-hours-frankfurt/\">Frankfurt tour</a> on a 6-hr layover between Mumbai and Chicago. Those article are tough to find, even with Google, but managed to dredge up the <a href=\"http://old.hemimag.us/2011/01/01/one-city-five-hours-copenhagen/\">Copenhagen one</a> from the Hemispheres archives and am going to give it a go at the end of this month.</li>\n 	<li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/06/24/podcast-130-notes-from-hungary/\">Episode 130</a> last year, I talked about how my son and I passed up a 90-minute connection in Vienna for an 8-hr one and then spent a Saturday eating schnitzel and drinking beer in the old section of town with a buddy of mine who came down from Poland.</li>\n 	<li>And I think that 5-8 hour span is about right. There are some exceptions -- the quick shopping jaunt from MSP to Mall of the Americas -- but even if you’re hitting the nearby Blue Lagoon on your Wow Air layover in Reykjavik, I’d still allow 4 hours, especially given the Wow check-in lines I stood in the last time I took flew them.\nJim McDonough felt that squeeze a few months ago. Commenting on the MDW Layover Facebook posting, Jim said</li>\n 	<li>We had a four hour layover at O\'Hare back in May on our way to Ireland. American did a schedule change that made a planned two hour layover into four. But we did not leave the airport. Somehow on international it didn\'t make sense. Had some bad \'free\' beer at the Admiral\'s Club.</li>\n 	<li>Yes, that would’ve been snug. Jim and his wife maybe could’ve swung down to Logan Square or Wicker Park -- both stops on the ORD subway line -- for a bite and a bit of a walkaround, but they would’ve needed to have a solid plan for that, tough with that last-minute schedule change.</li>\n 	<li>But even unplanned layovers can work out. Several years ago, my parents flew from Denver to Paducah, KY to visit my aunt and grandmother. As you can imagine, no direct flights so they connected through ORD. And, as you might guess, on the way home, their commuter flight was late out of Paducah and they missed a tight connection. My dad called me from the airport. It was New Year’s Eve night and we were having 3 or 4 couples over. “Get your luggage and book the flight out tomorrow,” I told him, “you can help me cook dinner.” I picked them up, brought them home, threw an apron at my dad, opened an early bottle of champagne, and we had a great time.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #143</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a> and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music is from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Magnatune</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_143.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #143 — How Bad is Business Travel For Your Health; Make Layovers Fun','','inherit','closed','closed','','2093-revision-v1','','','2021-09-29 22:04:10','2021-09-30 03:04:10','',2093,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3924',0,'revision','',0),
(3925,1,'2021-09-29 22:04:57','2021-09-30 03:04:57','[caption id=\"attachment_2128\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/IMG_0419.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2128\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/IMG_0419-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Greetings...[/caption]\n\nBack in front of the mic after 12 days of skipping across northern Europe -- Copenhagen, Brussels, and Scotland. In this episode, we get nostalgic about outside airports in California, talk about how a hospitality mentality is pervasive in hotels but not in restaurants, missing customer service responses from <a href=\"http://united.com\">United Airlines</a> and <a href=\"http://marriott.com\">Marriott</a>, and European perspectives about Chicago.  All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_144.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #144:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL after 12 days bunny hopping through Northern Europe -- first Copenhagen, then Brussels, and finally St Andrews, Scotland to drop my daughter off for her 4th and final year at University of St Andrews. Prior to that, I had a couple of US trips -- back to Charlottesville, VA -- always a nice place to visit -- and a day trip to Omaha. And while all my European flights last week were fine -- including the 40-min connection in Amsterdam that included a trip through passport control -- late August summer storms forced to call audibles on both trips. As opposed to last month, when my CVG-ORD flight was jacked up by storms in Miami, these flights were cratered by rain that I could see outside the window -- the terminal window or the airplane window.</li>\n 	<li>They both left me less than impressed by United’s notification service. The Monday of my Charlottesville flight, it had been steadily raining in Chicago -- heavily at times. I kept checking the status of the flight -- on-time, on-time on-time. Finally, I headed to ORD, got through security, and then checked again - 3 hour delay? Really, you only just figured that out an hour before departure time? Looking out the window, the rain wasn’t letting up. I could see where this was going. I grabbed dinner and then settled in at the gate to do some work. Every once in a while, I’d check the flight status in the United app -- 3-hr delay, 3-hr delay, 3-hr delay, then wait for it -- cancelled. I wasn’t surprised at the cancellation, but the lack of push notification. Normally, I’d get a message and an e-mail from Amex Travel. Nothing this time. Like I said, though, I wasn’t surprised, and I didn’t have a critical meeting the next morning in Charlottesville. United had “helpfully” booked the same flight out the next night, but a) I couldn’t lose a whole day at the client; and b) I felt United had lost the right to my money for this flight. So, I booked the next morning’s flight on American, caught a cab back home and slept that night in my own bed. Annoying, but, hey, I got over it.</li>\n 	<li>Next week’s trip to Omaha was on yet another rainy day. It was just a day trip, so I drove to ORD and saw the dark grey line of weather coming toward me. I mentally settled in for delay. This one, though, would be more problematic because I was flying into Omaha for a workshop, and flying out to Copenhagen the next evening. That dark grey line hit ORD as we were boarding, so I walked into that workshop about 30 minutes late. We walked outside at noon to grab lunch from a food truck. I could see an even darker grey line of weather. Back in the conference room, I’d check the United app every 30 minutes or so -- on-time, on-time, on-time, cancelled. What?! Again, no notice if I hadn’t been checking. And this was a bit more problematic than last week. I found earlier SW and American flights that weren’t cancelled. I gambled on the AA flight which left a bit later but would save me the crosstown MDW-ORD Uber ride to collect my car. I excused myself early from the workshop and headed back to the airport. Arriving late; leaving early. Not sure that’s the way to make a good first impression</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Zapac/25046\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><i>You are (funky mix)</i></a> by Zapac</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul class=\"\">\n 	<li>Steve Frick, a long time TravelCommons listener, left a note on the website about <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/08/09/podcast-143-how-bad-is-business-travel-for-your-health-make-layovers-fun/\">the last episode</a>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Lots of content as well as comments on this episode. Thoroughly enjoyed the Chicago Midway Layover Southside Taproom Tour video tour, when it comes to travel and Midway, though, all I can think about is delays.</li>\n 	<li>Chicago, I recently sent all the members of my tribe there sans, myself (Someone had to watch the dog, or vice-versa). When my wife travels she always checks baggage..... we\'ve only been married 8 years. Upon arrival, I grabbed her bag off the belt and it was unusually heavy. The reason it contained 2 six-packs of Revolution Brewery beer, God bless this woman.</li>\n 	<li>Travel and health, this one hit home. Somehow I\'ve managed to \"keep it tight\"... somewhat. I hired someone about three years ago, and while he doesn\'t drink he managed to partake in every meal that he was invited to. So much so that the rest of us had an over/under on how fast he could gain 30lbs (Yes, we\'re that cruel &amp; shallow). After two broken pants buttons, he managed to get control.</li>\n 	<li>Sorry for the long comment, but keep up the great work!</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Steve, thanks for that; no apologies needed. And you guys are not the only cruel and shallow ones. I may have told this story before, but I had a project in Memphis and one of the team members had kind of a similar problem as your new hire, except his weakness was barbecue ribs. The team would go out one night a week for ribs -- Corky’s, Central, Germantown Commissary, but then this guy would also do a take-out slab another night. The weight gain was obvious -- our over/under was when he topped 300 on his cholesterol reading.</li>\n 	<li>I was 1 for 2 last month on TravelCommons Chicago meet-ups. I wasn’t able to connect with Keith Love and his son when they were in town early in August, but I did meet up with Rob Cheshire and his UK crew for a bit of a taproom crawl on Chicago’s Near West Side on a Friday night at the end of the month. I even got Rob to relax his anti-AB InBev stance and spend an hour in the Goose Island taproom, complete with a round of Bourbon County Stout. At 14%, it’s a bit larger beer than you’d typically see in a UK pub.</li>\n 	<li>More telling, though, was the discussion I had with Drew, Rob’s friend on his first visit to the US. “Where are the dangerous parts of the city, where all the shootings are?” he asked. Fair question. Three weekends before, 66 people were shot in Chicago; 12 people died. “You’re fine here,” I told him, “but I wouldn’t want to go another mile west.” The next Thursday, I was sitting in a Copenhagen bar waiting out the rain -- my wife and daughter were waiting out the rain clothes shopping; to each their own -- and got talking to the bartender, a young woman who had never been to the US. “Where are you from?” she asked. “Chicago” “I read somewhere that’s the most dangerous city in the world.” I told her my experiences -- my family and I haven’t been impacted, but we also don’t hang out on the South or West sides where all the gang bullets are flying. But given the press about the August shootings, she asked a fair question. Both conversations got my attention; I’ve gotten a bit numb to all the gun violence reporting, which is not a good thing. Travel is all about getting different perspectives, even if they’re about your own home.</li>\n 	<li>In the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/08/09/podcast-143-how-bad-is-business-travel-for-your-health-make-layovers-fun/\">last episode</a>, I relayed Keith Love’s questions about good airport apps, ones that, he said, “actually guide you through airports and their amenities/services.” Chris Christensen of the Amateur Traveler Podcast dropped a lin e saying that he uses GateGuru, run by the same team that does SeatGuru. I haven’t tried it yet, but will download it and give it a go. Narita Airport in Tokyo is taking a different angle. Their free Wi-Fi service comes with a chatbot -- Bebot -- to help travelers. The press release didn’t give any chat samples -- “Bebot, where can I find a non-Asahi beer in this terminal?” “I’m sorry, there is none” -- but it could be useful -- or at least entertaining.</li>\n 	<li>Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/07/03/podcast-142-sleeping-in-business-class-changes-from-chinese-tourists/\">July episode</a>, I mentioned how tight the United Polaris business class seats were on the Triple 7’s that I took between ORD and Frankfurt. Last Monday, Irene and I flew a new American 787 back from London, and it didn’t seem any roomier. We flew back on miles, so were in the Main Cabin Extra section, but walking through Business Class to get there, I almost had to turn my body a bit to get down the aisle, and I’m not that big of a guy. When I got to my seat, the leg room was fine, even with the seat in front of me reclined. But the seats were narrow. The couple in the window and middle seats next to me were larger folks, and I could see it was a less-than-comfortable 8 hours for them.</li>\n 	<li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/08/09/podcast-143-how-bad-is-business-travel-for-your-health-make-layovers-fun/\">the last episode</a>, while not thrilled with American’s on-time performance between ORD and CVG, I was impressed by the customer service I got from their Twitter crew. Indeed, the next day, I added a final note to my tweet stream -- “BTW, while it was an operational failure last night, the Twitter customer service was not. I appreciated the delay explanation and backing me up on the next flight”. And any more, I typically get solid, timely service from Twitter customer service. Indeed, one constant on my Top 10 Travel Tips list is “Use Twitter as a Concierge Service”. So I was surprised when a colleague said to me “I gotta get some more followers so companies pay attention to me on Twitter”. He said he never gets any replies. Anybody else have this problem?</li>\n 	<li>Now while I get good quick responses from the airlines, my recent experience with Marriott was very different. I was trying to get the receipt/the folio from a stay in Colorado Springs. The e-mailed bill never came. Then I went to the website but the download link didn’t work. I submitted a folio request on the website and hit Marriott on Twitter. Twitter was faster, though it took them a full day to respond, which was better than the 12 days it took them to respond to my website query. Neither of which actually resulted in me getting a copy of my bill. I only got that when I gave up on all the digital channels and called the Colo Springs front desk. Now, I knew that would be the fastest way -- and it was; I got an e-mail from them in about 5 minutes. But I’m always interested in seeing how all the new channels work… or don’t. Maybe Marriott needs a chatbot...</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> or our new <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a> at travelcommons -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/35879\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><i>Two Guitars</i></a> by Admiral Bob</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>California Outside Airports</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>A college friend of mine posted a status on Facebook, saying that he was flying home to Boston from Long Beach Airport in Southern California. His comment -- “New favorite airport - outdoor terminals and boarding!!” It was an immediate shot of travel nostalgia for me. My first job out of school, in the mid-80’s, had me regularly traveling from Dallas to San Jose. My folks lived in Huntington Beach, CA and American had direct flights from DFW to Long Beach. So whenever I had to be in San Jose, I’d triangulate through Long Beach for the weekend -- fly in Friday afternoon, hang out on the beach for the weekend, and then catch a 7am Monday morning Alaskan Air flight out of Orange County to San Jose.</li>\n 	<li>I loved that triangle of airports -- LGB, SNA, and SJC. Compared to LAX or SFO, they were compact -- maybe even cozy, if you can apply that adjective to an airport and keep a straight face -- uncrowded, and all of them took advantage of the California climate to be outdoor airports. No jetways, and in LGB’s case, even the baggage carousel was outside. I remember the first time walking out to pick up my luggage at LGB, waiting by a palm tree for my bag to show up. This was right after surviving 2 of the coldest winters in Chicago while going to business school. LGB instantly became my favorite airport.</li>\n 	<li>When you arrived at SJC, the gate agent would meet you at the bottom of the steps and guide you under a covered walkway into the terminal -- almost like a Japanese tour guide, holding her clipboard up. I’d walk through the terminal to the car rental lot, to the little Hertz hut in the middle. I got to know the woman working in the hut, and in those days before Hertz Gold and President’s Circle, that’s all I needed to get an upgrade. Later trips through Palm Springs Airport -- pleasure rather than business -- and I loved that airport too, walking outdoors past the palm trees between terminals. Hard to imagine after 9/11 forced airports to harden their perimeters.</li>\n 	<li>SNA and SJC are no longer outside airports. Big renovations in the ‘90’s replaced the covered walkways with jetways, doing away with that one thing that made them a little special. The renovation of LGB’s terminal 6 years ago installed fire pits and outdoor dining, but no jetways. It’s still an outside airport, as is Palm Springs.</li>\n 	<li>Not that outdoor airports are California-only things. Charlottesville airport, which I’ve been frequenting over the past couple of years, is sort of a quarter to a half outdoors. There’s 4 gates -- 1 or 2 of them have jetways, the rest are outdoor boarding and baggage claim for gate-checked bags. And there’s a nice 2nd-floor outdoor terrace that I do phone calls from when it’s not too hot, or raining.</li>\n 	<li>One of the things I like about outdoor airports is there’s no waiting for gates. The plane lands, parks, they wheel up the stairs -- maybe even two; front and back if you’re lucky -- and off you go. No ORD treatment -- landing and then waiting 20 minutes for your gate to open up. However, the last time I flew into CHO, we landed and stopped short of the usual parking spot. The pilot keyed the mic -- “Our gate is full; we’ll have to wait a couple of minutes.” All us passengers looked at each other -- gate, what gate? Turns out he meant some fancy new ramp thing; instead of stairs, they pushed over some huge covered ramp, complete with a switchback so the descent wasn’t too steep. I dunno, call me old-school (or just old) but in my book, you have to have a proper set of stairs to be a true outdoor airport. Palm trees are optional, but highly recommended.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djlang59/22228\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><em>Garden Of The Forking</em></a><em> </em>by J.Lang</li>\n</ul>\n<b>Hospitality Mentality</b>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Nowadays, it seems that most hotels have got their front desk training pretty well down. I can’t remember the last time I hit an indifferent front desk person when checking in. And given the number of different hotels I stay in, it leads me to the conclusion that this, what I call, a hospitality mentality is a key part of their training, because, based on every other retail experience I have, I know I wouldn’t naturally run into this many nice people in a row. Not that I have a problem with this. It’s nice whenever I’m dragging myself into a hotel late because of flight delays or whatever, that the person checking me in is pleasant, wants to take care of me, walks out from behind the desk give me my key and to point me to the elevators, and seems genuinely concerned about my well-being. Even in hotels that otherwise are a bit “meh”, I find that my standard TripAdvisor review says “But the service was great.”</li>\n 	<li>Which is a huge contrast with the typical service I get at a restaurant where I would expect a hospitality mentality, but am surprised when I get it. Last Sunday night, Irene and I were overnighting in London on our way back from St Andrews, and walked to an Indian restaurant, <a href=\"http://www.dishoom.com/kings-cross/\">Dishoom</a>, up behind King’s Cross station. There was a queue outside the restaurant, typical for a popular place. A guy came out with an iPad, took our name, and told us it would be about a 30 minute wait. That was fine, we wanted a drink before dinner anyhow. They give us a pager -- again, typical stuff -- but now it gets a bit different. Instead of pointing us to a scrum around a bar, someone escorts us to two open seats, asks if the seats are OK for us, and right behind her was a waitress to take our order. Right at about 30 minutes, as we’re finishing our drinks, the pager goes off. We’re collecting our stuff to head back to the hostess stand when a guy walks over to us -- the same guy who took our name in line -- took our glasses and walked us to our table, chatting along the way -- where are you from, Oh I have friends in Chicago, how long are you in London…. We get to the table, but before we sit down, he asks us “Is this table OK for you?”</li>\n 	<li>I can’t remember the last time a busy restaurant asked me if I was happy with the table. Normally, the hostess expects you to be happy she actually seated you. The food was good, but what really impressed me about Dishoom that here was a big, mass-service restaurant with a hospitality mentality. Easy to do at a small place, or a Michelin-starred restaurant (though don’t get me started about French Laundry), but here, in London, a place not necessarily known for great customer service, they had it nailed. Oh, and the chicken curry -- they nailed that too.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #144</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a> and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_144.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #144 — Outside Airports; Hospitality Mentality','','inherit','closed','closed','','2126-revision-v1','','','2021-09-29 22:04:57','2021-09-30 03:04:57','',2126,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3925',0,'revision','',0),
(3926,1,'2021-09-29 22:06:08','2021-09-30 03:06:08','[caption id=\"attachment_2141\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/IMG_0031.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2141\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/IMG_0031-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> How Much Extra For A Plate?[/caption]\n\nJust regular domestic business travel since the last podcast, trying to dodge Hurricane Florence to get back to Charlottesville.  Thinking back to last month\'s European travels, we talk about a tight connection through Amsterdam and some odd concierge lounge rules, which gets me thinking about hotel breakfasts. And a listener request for restaurant recommendations gets me thinking about the balance of visiting good and not-so-good restaurant towns. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_145.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #145:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL after 3 weeks of “normal” travel -- no vacation, no international travel, just a couple of trips to Charlottesville, VA on sandwiching a quick shot down to Dallas. And no delays. And empty seats beside me. Indeed, I even scored an upgrade on the late United flight from IAD to ORD, the long leg of one of my flights home from Charlottesville. Feels like we’re at the start of maybe a 6-week travel lull between the final end of summer vacations and the early starts of Thanksgiving travel.</li>\n 	<li>There was a bit of drama around the Charlottesville trip in the middle of September. I had to fly out Sunday night -- the weekend that Hurricane Florence hit the Carolina coast. The storm track forecast had Florence plowing west through the Carolinas and then taking a right hand turn at the Appalachians and heading north over Virginia. The question for me -- when would it make the turn; would my Sunday flight make it through before or after the turn or would Florence be in my way on Sunday? Thursday night and Friday, I spent a bit of time hitting the Refresh button on the <a href=\"https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/\">Nat’l Hurricane Center’s website</a>. By Friday, Florence had dropped a couple of category levels and slowed down, and by Saturday, I could see that my Sunday flight would beat Florence to Charlottesville. It was a smooth flight that Sunday, though Monday was a bit wet.</li>\n 	<li>Going through TSA Pre-Check in ORD that Sunday night, I watched a guy use the electronic boarding pass on his Apple Watch. It looked a bit awkward, and if you think about it, it’s understandable. Boarding pass readers face up; you put your boarding pass or phone face down on them to read. But a watch is on face up on the top of your wrist. So the guy ends up standing on his toes and twisting his arm around to get his Apple Watch face down on the reader. You’d think he would’ve shifted to his phone after that, but I saw him twist himself up again about 30 minutes later when boarding his flight. Seems like it would’ve been easier to spin the watch on his wrist so it was facing down -- at least until Apple fires up the old Steve Jobs distortion field to convince airports to reorient all their readers for the convenience of Apple Watch users.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- Dub the Uke by Kara Square (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mindmapthat/53340 Ft: DJ Vadim</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul class=\"\">\n 	<li>Allan Marko, a long-time listener and even longer-time friend, sent me an <a href=\"http://www.patentlyapple.com/patently-apple/2018/09/apple-salesforce-are-working-marriott-international-to-bring-homepods-to-hotel-rooms-to-assist-guests-with-services.html\">article</a> that dove into an interesting part of Apple’s new partnership with Salesforce. The two of them are working with Marriott to put Siri in hotel rooms. You could ask Siri to turn up the heat, order room service, or get an Uber through an Apple HomePod in the room. That’s the Apple piece of it. The Salesforce piece lets Siri remember what you asked her, say your room temperature, at the next Marriott. Useful or creepy? And how do you make sure you wipe Siri’s memory before the next guest checks into the room so you can’t ask her things like “Hey Siri, tell me all about the last guest that was here...” or “Order me the same sandwich the last guy ordered”. I dunno. I don’t even like using these new Enseo TVs to log into my own Netflix account, let alone having Marriott listening to me through a HomePod and remembering everything I mutter. Some guys are making a nice living selling shutters that you can stick over your laptop webcam. Are earplugs for hotel HomePods the next thing?</li>\n 	<li>In the<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/09/15/podcast-144-outside-airports-hospitality-mentality/\"> last episode</a>, I mentioned flying SAS from Chicago to Copenhagen. It was an odd schedule -- leaving Chicago around 10pm, arriving Copenhagen after 1 in the afternoon. Leaving that late and having a long taxi, I fell asleep before we left the ground, and before putting my phone in Airplane mode. I woke up, I dunno, an hour or so later, looked at my phone for the time, and noticed some new e-mails. Huh? That’s weird. And then I noticed that my phone didn’t say “No Service”; it was connected to some cellular service, which turned out to be SAS’s in-flight cellular service. And as opposed to in-flight WiFi which you usually have to log into, my iPhone automatically started roaming on the SAS cellular service, that then continued to check/pull e-mail for a couple of hours until I flipped it to airplane mode. I got my AT&amp;T mobile bill a couple of weeks back and ended up with a $25 roaming charge for those half-dozen meaningless e-mails. A pain, but not too painful. Unlike the guy four years ago who <a href=\"https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/11/18/that-1200-in-flight-wifi-bill-was-terrifyingly-real/\">rang up a $1,200 WiFi bill</a> on Singapore Air when he fell asleep with his data still connected.</li>\n 	<li>On the third leg of that trip, going from BRU to EDI, our best option was KLM through AMS. I’ve been in and out and through Schiphol a number of times over the past 20-some odd years and have always liked it. Nothing flashy, but it works -- not too big, reasonable facilities. Booking this BRU-EDI trip on the KLM website, I had two options -- a tight 40-min connection or a 2-hr one. While I don’t mind Schiphol, I wasn’t looking to make an afternoon of it. So I broke one of my cardinal travel rules -- never book a connection shorter than an hour -- and booked the 40-min connection, knowing that we had a back-up if it didn’t work out. One factor I didn’t completely think through was that we’d have to cross the Schengen border during those 40 minutes too. The first leg -- Brussels to Amsterdam -- was within Schengen so it was just like an domestic US flight -- no passport control, no customs. But in Schiphol, we had switch concourses and go through passport control because the UK is outside of Schengen. We made it through, though, with time to spare because - we walked real fast; like I said before, Schiphol isn’t that big, so switching concourses wasn’t a long walk; but most importantly, my wife spotted the “short connection” line at passport control. We had gotten in the regular line, but then we saw on a display screen that our EDI flight was classified a “short connection”, so we switched to the much shorter line -- I earned a “Hey” from a security guard when I ducked under the tape -- and quickly passed through what was a well-staffed and brisk passport control line (Munich Airport, you could take some lessons here). We get to the gate with more than enough time -- boarding hasn’t been called yet. So while we made the 40-minute connection, the question now was -- would the checked luggage make it? As we were queuing to board, I looked out the terminal window. There’s our plane, and there, next to the baggage loader, was Irene’s and Claire’s luggage -- stationary, not rolling along like in that YouTube video. A very good sign, but there wasn’t anybody loading luggage. As I walk up to board, I tap one of the KLM guys standing around. Pointing out the window, I say “See those bags on the tarmac? Those are ours. It would be great if they made it onto this plane.” He laughed -- him a bit more than me. I was happy to see them appear on the EDI baggage carousel.</li>\n 	<li>I’m thinking that I need another carry-on bag; something between my maximum legal size 22-incher and my leather duffel overnighter. On that BRU-EDI trip, I carried my 22-incher on, but not without agents at Brussels and Amsterdam challenging me, even after showing them it fit in their baggage sizer. A few weeks after that trip, KLM added an <a href=\"https://news.klm.com/klms-augmented-reality-hand-baggage-check-now-available-in-messenger/\">augmented reality baggage sizer</a> to their iPhone app. You fire up the app, point your iPhone camera at your bag and the app overlays a properly sized rectangle over your bag. If your bag is within the rectangle, you’re good to go. Would’ve been easier -- and much cooler -- than slamming my bag into those metal sizers, but somehow, with those gate agents, I don’t think the outcome would’ve been any different.</li>\n 	<li>OK, one last thing from that trip. The concierge lounges in both the Copenhagen Marriott and the London St Pancras Renaissance had prominent “rules” signs at their entrances, and one of those rules was a ban on “fitness clothes”. Now, this wasn’t a big deal on this trip because I was on vacation, and wasn’t toting work-out gear. My normal program when I’m on business travel is to get up before 6, work out, go straight to the lounge in my “fitness gear” for some breakfast while cooling down, then head back to my room to shower, change, and head out. Having to separate the cool down from breakfast would add 15-20 minutes to what is an already tight morning routine. So I hope that rule doesn’t spread to the US lounges. The rest of the rules seemed pretty reasonable, though one -- no wearing a bathrobe in the lounge -- seemed a bit superfluous. I’ve never seen someone walk into a concierge lounge in a bathrobe… until in Copenhagen at 3 in the afternoon with it not looking like there was anything on under the robe. So, OK, I’m now completely on-board with the no robe rule.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> or our new <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a> at travelcommons -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music — Emma by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/50905 Ft: Martijn de Boer</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Restaurant Karma</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Casey Milch sent me a note a few weeks back -- “Greetings. Love the podcast. I know you mention frequent trips to Charlottesville and I’m finding myself there every six weeks for work myself now. Any restaurant suggestions?”</li>\n 	<li>One of the compensations for getting on an airplane just about every week is that you get to try a lot of restaurants. Now, in the last episode, we talked about the downside of that -- rapid waistline expansion -- but if you’re thoughtful about it, and you like trying different food (I hate the word “foodie”), business travel has its benefits. I sent Casey a few recommendations -- Fitzroy, a meat place -- burger, double pork chop, fried chicken -- on the Main Street pedestrian mall; Lampo, a small Neapolitan pizza place with a big wood oven that is -- I forgot to tell Casey this -- a 5-minute walk from Champion Brewing Company’s taproom; and The Alley Light, a speakeasy in an small alcove (a bit too short to be a proper alley) with no sign though there is a light over the door, that took 3 tries to find the first time in the pouring rain, which led to the question “How many consultants does it take to work Google Maps”. Putting the list together for Casey reminded me that we hadn’t been to Alley Light in a while, so we ate there last Tuesday night -- found it on the first try this time -- and had roasted bone marrow, pork rillette, duck confit -- oh, and some carrots. So much for thoughtfulness.</li>\n 	<li>Charlottesville punches above its weight for good restaurants, maybe because of University of Virginia. The 2 ½ years I spent in New Orleans was one of definitely one of my food high points, especially when crawfish were in season. 3 months in Portland, OR was fun with the food truck scene, and of course, it is ground-zero for the craft beer explosion. Stays in Manhattan, San Francisco, and London were that much more enjoyable with someone else picking up the dinner tab. Indeed, in San Francisco, I used to stay in different hotels so I could try different neighborhood joints.</li>\n 	<li>But karma always seeks balance, and for all these great food locations, there have been other, let’s say, less-than-stunning places. Dover, OH -- about 30 miles south of Canton -- had, when I was doing a project there -- two places to eat -- an Arby’s and the lunch counter of the Walmart knock-off. And the Walmart knock-off was the better of the two. Oldsmar, FL was a bit too far outside of Tampa for us to head in for dinner every night, so the near-by Buffalo Wild Wings - B-Dubs - and Applebee’s were our best shots. And downtown Detroit in the early 2000’s, working, eating, and sleeping in the urban fortress that is the Renaissance Center was brutally monotonous.</li>\n 	<li>But even when in London and New York, we weren’t splurging on big meals every night. We have reasonable expense budgets that we have to live within. So again, we find balance -- one night we’re underspending at a dive (but good) pizza-by-the-slice joint, so that the next night, we eat at nice place. Some guys will extend balancing act to travel -- sucking up the inconvenience of a cheaper connecting flight to pay for better meals. One colleague told me -- “I’ll happily travel cheap to eat great food”</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music — Astral Travel by Astral (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Astral/44282</li>\n</ul>\n<b>Hotel Breakfasts</b>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Growing up, those of us of a certain age heard that breakfast is the most important meal of the day -- usually from a cereal commercial. I mentioned a bit early earlier my morning hotel pattern -- work out, hit the concierge lounge for breakfast and then get on with my day. Most lounge breakfasts are pretty industrial -- chafing dishes of stiff scrambled pasteurized eggs, thin slices of oven-baked bacon, vat of oatmeal, a few cartons of yogurt, and a bowl of fruit. It gets the day started. I may be judging it a bit harshly though. My daughter Claire loves those scrambled eggs. Go a little more upscale and you’ll see maybe a platter of smoked salmon, some sliced meats and cheeses, bran muffins…</li>\n 	<li>So when I see something different, it gets my attention. Like roasted green chiles in New Mexico, Albuquerque and Santa Fe, to season those scrambled eggs, or the King Cake at the Canal St Sheraton in New Orleans during Mardi Gras season. Now, it’s not the best king cake I’ve had - and my wife has dragged me through a king cake tasting crawl there, so I speak with some knowledge -- but I look forward to it whenever I’m there in the spring. I remember one morning I walked in -- no king cake! I found one of the staff -- “you guys stop doing king cake?!” “No! I didn’t know we were out.” And they immediately brought out a new one. Crisis averted!</li>\n 	<li>It doesn’t even have to be anything big. The Copenhagen Marriott lounge had rhubarb juice. As a kid, my mother made pies from rhubarb growing in our backyard, that I think her mother had planted. So something different and nostalgic all in one. Was it life-changing? Not necessarily, but I’d never seen it before.</li>\n 	<li>A little more life-changing was the bowl of bun bo hue that we got for breakfast when staying at a local, non-chain, hotel in Hue in central Vietnam. Kind of a spicier, funkier version of the pho you see in the US, and tougher to find here. Not like any hotel breakfast I’d had, and I immediately switched my breakfast choice over to it or pho for the rest of the trip.\nBack in May, when I was in Pune, we stayed at a Marriott Courtyard, a chain which, as I’ve complained about before in prior episodes, doesn’t have a concierge lounge but they had a nice breakfast buffet with what I guess is a typical two-track system -- one side with the usual Western breakfast foods, and the other side with Indian food. The waiter pointed me to the omelette station. I was about ready to order when I noticed another station to my right with what looked like a super-sized crepe griddle. “What’s that?” I asked. “Oh, that’s to make dosas.” “Cool, I have one of those.” “Do you know what a dosa is?” “Nope, but I’ll take one, however it normally comes.” I watched him make this foot-wide diameter stiff crepe, rolled it up and put it, sticking up out of a cup of some sort of stew or curry. I walk back to the table. Everyone else has eggs, bacon, toast, arranged horizontally on their plate. I’m the only one with a vertical breakfast. But I liked that. Kinda flying the flag for something different at breakfast .</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #145</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and now on <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_145.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #145 — Restaurant Karma; Hotel Breakfasts','','inherit','closed','closed','','2138-revision-v1','','','2021-09-29 22:06:08','2021-09-30 03:06:08','',2138,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3926',0,'revision','',0),
(3927,1,'2021-09-29 22:07:14','2021-09-30 03:07:14','[caption id=\"attachment_2168\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2168\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> But I filled up the tank[/caption]\n\nGetting this posted just in time to give you something to listen to while jammed up in Thanksgiving traffic, be it on the road or in the airports. We talk about working the angles to maximize credit card benefits, which leads me to one more story from my fall trip to Europe -- a rental car scrape that my Chase Visa card just paid off. We also talk about the Wall Street Journal\'s new ranking of US airports and compare it to Skytrax\'s international rankings. And we wrap up with my Christmas gift suggestions for the frequent traveler on your list.  All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_146.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #146:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, trying to give you something to keep you entertained? Or at least occupied as you thread through the Thanksgiving travel traffic -- be it airports, trains, or roadways -- the forecasts are for a 5% increase over last year.</li>\n 	<li>I’ve been trying to get this episode done for the past 2 weeks, but I just haven’t been able to make it happen. Since we last spoke, I’ve been in the midst of a weekly commute between Chicago and Dallas. It’s the standard consultant commute -- leaving ORD Monday at 7am, leaving DFW Thursday at 5pm -- the consulting rush hour. The lounges are packed, the Starbucks line tails way back; no matter what status, you’re in a middle seat if you don’t book 3 weeks ahead of time, and for a mere Advantage Platinum person, there’s no chance of an upgrade. I do click through American’s website to request an upgrade every week -- more for the entertainment value than any expectation of getting a seat. This week, I was #35 on the upgrade list.</li>\n 	<li>The traffic between these 2 American hubs is pretty amazing. The first week of this commute, taking the 6:30p flight back to Chicago, it was a fully-packed 787 Dreamliner. So I’m thinking -- hey, I gotta have a good shot at an upgrade on this flight, with all the first and business class seats. Nope, though I did get up to the teens on the upgrade list -- #15 to be exact. I counted myself lucky to get out of a center seat at the last minute.</li>\n 	<li>I’m not a huge fan of DFW Airport. It’s a massive, spread-out place with a $4 toll charge to just to drive out of the place. The semi-circular terminals are also spread out affairs, with 3 security checkpoints arrayed around each perimeter, only one of which has PreCheck and really not well-marked. I tweeted that out in frustration a few weeks back after trundling around from checkpoint to checkpoint. The DFW Airport Twitter account quickly came back with a <a href=\"https://www.dfwairport.com/security/\">link</a> to their website that has the location and hours of each checkpoint, with the PreCheck one bolded. Very useful. I have bookmarked on my iPhone now.</li>\n 	<li>The next day, back in Chicago, I was downtown, getting a afternoon espresso jolt at Intelligentsia Coffee, not a completely full-on hipster joint -- there no turntable playing vintage vinyl -- but they are a bit fussy about their coffee. You place your order, they ask your name, and then you mill around a bit waiting for them to “craft” your coffee. I’m scrolling through e-mail, the barista is calling out names in the background. He calls out \"Marco\". Completely on reflex, my inner child responds \"Polo\" and not quietly or under my breath. The guy sitting across from me looks up from his MacBook and starts laughing. The guy getting his coffee, Marco, apparently, turns around and gives me a slightly nasty look. Or maybe just puzzled. Or more likely a bit of both.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/indidginus-seismic/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Superstring</a></em> by Indidginus</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul class=\"\">\n 	<li>Allan Marko, a long-time listener, posted a travel story on the TravelCommons Facebook page -\n<ul>\n 	<li>I flew from SFO to MUC with a colleague last month on UAL Business Class (my first trip on a 787 - nice plane, and decent service from the UA team) We had an early morning arrival, and an hour to kill before our transportation arrived. My colleague’s 1K status couldn’t get us into the Lufthansa Arrivals Lounge for showers. I pulled up the Priority Pass app on my iPhone (membership came with my Chase Sapphire Reserve Card) and saw there was an Atlantic Lounge over in Terminal 1 that had shower facilities. We took the bus over to Terminal 1 which serves many European, Middle East, and other second-tier airlines. Pulling out my physical Priority Pass card (as opposed to the one in the app) I got both of us into the lounge and their two shower rooms. The lounge only offered the basics and needed of refresh, but we were happy to find it that morning (including the free beer!).</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Allan, thanks for that, and good on you for figuring that all out. There are so many nooks and crannies in the card benefits world. There’s real value there, but you have to think about it and dig in a bit. The last time I used my Priority Pass (which I got with my Amex Platinum card) was last summer when I was connecting through DUB on my way to London. That lounge was similar to Allan’s MUC experience -- pretty basic, a bit threadbare, but a reasonable place for a cup of tea and breakfast. My son Andrew used his Priority Pass card (also from his Chase card) to get a $28 credit at a restaurant in BOS which paid for a pre-flight meal and a couple of beers. “For the two of us, I think we were due $56 credit, but we wanted to be able to board the plane, so we cut ourselves off.” A colleague of mine told me that, in LGA, after Amex’s Centurion Lounge closed, his UA Gold status got him into the Air Canada lounge to wait out the rest of a long flight delay. “I only thought they let in Star Alliance Gold passengers for international flights, but let me in for my LGA-ORD flight.” And then there’s things like the 10 Gogo in-flight WiFi passes that I get every year with my Platinum card that I never burn through, or the $200 in annual statement credit that I think I get on UA and am always surprised when I see the charge for the in-flight tapas box reversed. And I’m reminded that I gotta pay more attention to this stuff because I hate leaving money on the table.</li>\n 	<li>I will say that there are 2 good things about doing trunk line, hub-to-hub commute vs., say, my last regular commute, between ORD and Charlottesville, VA: great flight frequency -- between AA and UA, there’s a flight at most every hour and that’s not even looking at SWA’s schedule out of Love Field; and, no RJs, no regional jets. I had forgotten how nice it is to be able to stand up straight in the aisle, let alone in the toilet. I take happiness in the small things.</li>\n 	<li>I was talking to a colleague about this -- flying AA, and UA, and SWA based on the most convenient times and price, and then maybe equipment (avoiding those RJs when I can). He said “I’m always amazed at how promiscuous you are in your airline choices.” It was an interesting word choice; one that kinda speaks to how invested people can get in their travel choices. Though it can also be a bit of Stockholm Syndrome for folks who have to fly out of fortress hubs, like this colleague who is in a very conflicted relationship with United out of Newark. “I think you’re more right than me,” he said. He’s 1K on United, their top tier. I’m mid-tier on United and American. Comparing notes, he hasn’t gotten any more upgrades than me, and though I board after 1Ks (or Exec Platinums on AA), I haven’t yet had a problem finding overhead space, even on packed flights to DFW. I’ve said it before -- I don’t think there’s all that much difference between mid- and top-tier loyalty ranks; certainly not enough to take less convenient flights to earn the extra miles needed to stay top-tier.</li>\n 	<li>A study of US airport growth hit the TravelCommons inbox on Halloween, saying that the two airports with the biggest drop in traffic are Memphis and Cincinnati. We talked about this back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/08/09/podcast-143-how-bad-is-business-travel-for-your-health-make-layovers-fun/\">August episode</a> when I was flying in and out of Cincinnati for 4 weeks straight. Nice airport, but I said back then it felt a bit overbuilt, and how both it and Memphis felt empty after after being “de-hubbed” by Delta. I wasn’t wrong. This new survey ground through 10 years of FAA traffic data and came to the same conclusion. Memphis lost the most traffic, down 62%. Cincinnati was second, losing 51% of its traffic.</li>\n 	<li>So you can guess that neither made the Wall Street Journal’s ranking of the 20 largest US airports. Denver, Orlando and Phoenix at the top 3 finishers while the three NYC airports -- LaGuardia, JFK, and Newark -- brought up the rear, numbers 18, 19, and 20. Surprises? I dunno -- maybe that LaGuardia wasn’t in last place given all the construction disruptions, that LAX was higher at #9 than Minneapolis-St Paul at #11, and that O’Hare is one spot higher than San Francisco, 15 vs. 16. That’s probably as much to do with their methodology as anything - how they weighed all the different score components, things like on-time arrivals, average TSA wait, cost of on-prem parking, average ticket cost. It’s interesting, though, to compare this ranking with Skytrax’s ranking of global airports. Denver, the top US airport on both lists; at #28 on Skytrax’s list. Cincinnati is the second US airport on the Skytrax list at #34, which makes sense when you look at the methodologies. Skytrax is focused on the in-airport experience -- terminal seating, cleanliness, queue times, friendliness of staff. With these criteria, I don’t doubt that Cincinnati should rank high -- it’s probably helped by now being a bit overbuilt -- lots of space and fewer people to clean up after. The Journal’s is a bit more wide-ranging, looking both inside and outside the terminal, including things like average fares, rental-car taxes and fees, number of nonstop destinations and dominance of the largest airline to its rankings. I’ll put links to both in the show notes for those interesting in a deeper dive.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our new Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/yoria-suerte/\"><em>Suerte Mijo</em></a> by Arthur Yoria</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Rental Demolition Derby</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>I’ve rented a lot of cars in my business travel and have never crashed one. I drive them off the lot, use them for 3-4 days, fill them back up with gas, return them to the lot, and walk away. So when I picked up a car from Hertz at Edinburgh airport back in September, I skipped all the insurance coverages, took the keys to a brand new Toyota hybrid cross-over, and drove off the lot. This was my fourth September in a row renting from the Hertz and had never had an incident -- even when driving a manual on the left side of the road while shifting with my left hand -- well, other than a Fiat that dropped its transmission, but that wasn’t my fault. So, no need to waste the collision damage waiver charges.</li>\n 	<li>You can see where this is going. The next day, I was driving a narrow road in St Andrews, heading south out of town to go knock around the fishing villages on the north bank of the Firth of Forth. Roads in Scotland can get narrow. Driving the one-lane roads in the Highlands are an acquired talent, but this road is in a residential neighborhood, and I’ve driven it many times. So I couldn’t believe it when I heard a big thump as I drove past a van. Damn, I thought, had I drifted over to the left and popped the van’s rear view mirror? I pulled over and hopped out of the car. No, it was worse. There was a huge crease along the left side of the car; just missed the front wheel, so still driveable but very ugly. I walked down to the van. It belonged to a nearby community center. In a hurry to pick up kids from school, the driver had pulled out into me as I drove past. I pulled out an accident report form that Hertz had helpfully put in the glove compartment. We filled it out, skipped calling the police since no one was hurt.</li>\n 	<li>So, again, not my fault, but I’m still, a few days later, I’m turning in a car with a full tank and some extra body work. I point out the damage to the Hertz guy. He pulls up a different tab on his Samsung tablet -- click, click, click -- damage, front left wing; damage, front left door; damage, rear left door -- took a couple of pictures, and because I’d skipped the CDW, out burped the bill -- £780 or about $1,000. They ran it through on my Chase Sapphire Visa card.</li>\n 	<li>Which I gave to Hertz because, as I was poking through the nooks and crannies of the Chase website before I left home, I confirmed that card would cover UK rental car damage for rentals charged to it. The next week, back home, I found where to file a claim. They didn’t make it easy, but Google eventually uncovered it. I created a claim, uploaded a scan of the accident report, the Hertz receipt, and a couple of iPhone pictures of the damage. And then waited. The website said they’d take 2 weeks to review and get back to me. Three weeks later, I called. A guy said they’d sent me an email asking for two more documents from Hertz. Hmmm, never saw that, but who knows what gets caught up in the Spam filtering. They wanted a copy of the original Hertz agreement, which I had left in the car, and Hertz’s repair cost breakdown. OK, that was reasonable. I called Hertz and a very helpful woman put in a request and said get it in a week. Within a couple of days, Hertz sent me what I needed. I uploaded them to my claim and waited another 2 weeks. On Day 2 Weeks + 1, I called. A woman looked at my file, said it was still being reviewed by management, but said she’s put me on hold and ring them for status. Two minutes later, she picked up and they’d approved my claim. 48 hours later, the $1,000 showed up in my bank account. It took me a bit over 2 months, but Chase paid my claim with a minimum amount of hassle.</li>\n 	<li>Now, while I’ve had a good rental car record in Scotland, my record in Hungary is not quite clean. Indeed, every time I’ve driven there, it’s been something. The last time I drove, we were a couple of blocks away from the rental return next to the Marriott on the Danube. Pulling into an intersection after stopping at a Stop sign, a motorcycle messenger plowed into the front of my car, flew across the hood, and landed in the street on the other side of the intersection. Luckily, he was in a full helmet and leathers and unhurt. The rental car, not so lucky. The entire front end was ripped off. The rental car guy showed up as the police were finishing their report. I pulled out suitcases out of the trunk and gave him the key. He looked at the front of his car in disbelief. We wheeled our bags down the sidewalk to the Marriott because this time, I had bought the collision damage waiver.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/artemis-gravity/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Inception</a></em> by Artemis</li>\n</ul>\n<b>Traveler Gift Guide</b>\n<ul>\n 	<li>As we come into the Christmas shopping season, I thought it would be useful to pull together some suggestions for the frequent traveler in your life. Or, if you are the frequent traveler, a list of hints you might want to drop on family members looking for ideas.</li>\n 	<li>Top of the list is a good battery charger. Whatever the size or form factor -- slimline, lipstick, high-capacity brick -- having that second or third charge readily available is critical to get notified of gate changes and when you’re using electronic boarding passes. It saves you from stalking cleaning crews to find a live power outlet on your layover, or negotiating with your seatmate for possession of outlet between you. I’m always looking to shed weight, so I retired the heavy no-name pack I picked up in the depths of Beijing’s Pearl Street Market for an <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2Jrt83y\">Anker lipstick sized charger</a>. I bought three and gave one to my wife and daughter. It’s cheap peace of mind.</li>\n 	<li>On my shopping list, trying to catch up to what’s already a cold winter, is one of those puffy coats -- but one of the thin ones, like the <a href=\"https://www.patagonia.com/shop/nano-puff\">Patagonia Nano Puff</a>, one that will smoosh down to nothing in the front pocket of my suitcase, or will fit in the crevices of a jammed full overhead bin. Right next that on the list, a man’s scarf is an incredibly undervalued piece of intermediate winter wear. In an airplane cabin or hotel room where a coat is too much (especially in a middle seat), but there’s a draft that chills you, a scarf around the neck is just enough without being too much. You may have to teach him how to wear it, but you can have fun with colors.</li>\n 	<li>For someone just embarking on the road warrior life, how ‘bout a <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3k1E3Og\">black 20-inch hardsided carry-on</a>. Black not only makes you look thinner, it makes your bag look thinner to gate agents hunting for bag-sizer bait. Black also doesn’t show stains. A 20-incher should get on-board for 90% of airlines, and the hard sides are the easiest to get in and out of a bag sizer if the not-yet-statused traveler gets waylaid by an over-zealous gate agent.</li>\n 	<li>If you’re going big for someone -- or for those December babies, combining Christmas and birthday gifts -- noise canceling headphones are a statement gift. The good ones -- the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3mOrRC3\">Bose</a> or <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3kUfRyx\">Sonys</a> that make the drone of the jet engines disappear with the flick of a switch -- are a $300 number. But the drop in stress level and blood pressure that accompanies that flick of the switch -- you don’t realize how much that drone affects you until you turn on your Bose -- makes it worth the number. Everything in my briefcase has to earn its space. I’ve been carrying Bose headphones for, I dunno, 10, 15 years. They’re nowhere near compact, but I’ve never thought of leaving them behind.</li>\n 	<li>Another idea for the music -- or podcast lover, is a <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3oWPpXa\">small portable Bluetooth speaker</a>. I’ve started packing mine again for trips of a week or longer. For a couple of days, I’m fine with wearing headphones or using the phone speaker. But longer than that or if I’m with the family in, say, an Airbnb, I want something a bit more social. I’m still using my 6-year old Jambox speaker, the one that kinda created this category. The maker, Jawbone, went under last year, but the speaker still works. There are newer, better ones out there now, at all sorts of price points. The ones that can act as speaker phones are a nice to-have if they fit your budget.</li>\n 	<li>And finally, a stocking stuffer idea -- a travel notebook, something to jot down thoughts, ideas, observations, to do lists while waiting for the flight to board, the train to come, or the room to be made up. Nothing extravagant -- no leather embossed cover -- but it should be small enough to fit in a pocket, but substantial, something that can survive being knocked around in the bottom of a briefcase, and with paper quality that will hold onto those thoughts for a while. I used to use a <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3jOs3zq\">Moleskine 3½x5½” notebook</a> but have switched over a similar-sized A6 Clairefontaine. The soft cover fits better in a jeans back pocket, and the paper is more fountain-pen friendly. It’s $10 for a Moleskine, $7 for two Clairefontaines. Or go a bit more whimsical and get a 3-pack of Field Notes for $13. It’ll fit your budget and the stocking.</li>\n 	<li>So there you go, something to fit all sizes and budgets in time for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, or if you’re just killing time waiting for your Thanksgiving flight to leave.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #146</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and now on <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Magnatune</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_146.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #146 — Rental Demolition Derby; Traveler Gift Guide','','inherit','closed','closed','','2167-revision-v1','','','2021-09-29 22:07:14','2021-09-30 03:07:14','',2167,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3927',0,'revision','',0),
(3928,1,'2021-09-29 22:07:52','2021-09-30 03:07:52','[caption id=\"attachment_2186\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/IMG_0205.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2186\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/IMG_0205-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> I Think That\'s the Uber Pick-Up Spot[/caption]\n\nIt seems that the snow and cold temperatures settled into the northern part of the Northern Hemisphere a bit earlier than last year. With the crush of Christmas/New Years travel starting in a few weeks, here are the TravelCommons\' top holiday travel tips to get you started early on your travel prep...\n<ol>\n 	<li><strong>Fly Non-Stop —</strong>&nbsp;It\'s obvious because it\'s the cardinal rule of air travel. Holiday travel stacks up problems — &nbsp;high passenger load factors combined with winter weather disruptions almost guarantees late arrivals and missed connections. Even if you’re connecting through Houston, an intermediate stop adds one more point of failure, one more opportunity for the airlines to screw up. Pay the extra $100 for a non-stop flight.</li>\n 	<li><strong>Sign Up for TSA PreCheck&nbsp;— </strong>Gift yourself and spend the $85 on 5 years of time and hassle reduction.</li>\n 	<li><strong>Skip the Tight Connection&nbsp;—&nbsp; </strong>If you can’t fly non-stop, step away from any connection that’s less than 60 minutes. &nbsp;Yes, we usually want to get to our destination in the shortest possible time, but accepting a connection of 1 hour or less…. Think about it – a 15-minute delay on your flight into a big hub like <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27hare_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Chicago</a> or <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denver_International_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Denver</a> or <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detroit_Metropolitan_Wayne_County_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Detroit</a> (as good as on-time in the winter for most airlines) and you’re sprinting across terminals and concourses just to beat the closing door.&nbsp; A 1-hr connection is just asking for a stress attack and/or an overnight stay at the airport branch of the <a title=\"Bates Motel\" href=\"http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092622/\" rel=\"imdb\">Bates Motel</a>.</li>\n 	<li><strong>Catch the Early Flight&nbsp;</strong>—&nbsp;Delays stack up as the day wears on.&nbsp; As your airplane goes from airport to airport, the probability of it getting stuck increases. &nbsp;Overnight, airlines have a chance to recover – late planes finally get their destinations and operations groups can reassign planes.&nbsp; So while the last flight out can be a crap shoot, I rarely hit a delay on the first flight out.</li>\n 	<li><strong>Use Twitter as a Concierge Service</strong> — Most airlines have social media teams monitoring Twitter. Before you leave, find and follow your airline’s Twitter customer service account. “At naming” them in a Tweet (e.g., “<a dir=\"ltr\" href=\"https://twitter.com/united\">@united</a> what’s happening with UA 4286 MSY-ORD that it’s 1:45 hr delayed?”) usually gets a response in a couple of minutes. Following them allows you to exchange personal information such as record locator numbers via direct message (DM). It’s usually faster than queuing up for a frazzled gate agent and the results can be better.</li>\n 	<li><strong>Use Multiple Flight Tracking Apps</strong> — Use your smartphone to keep track of gate changes and flight delays. Sign up for text notifications from your airline when you book your ticket. However, &nbsp;I’ve often experienced long delays with the airlines’ services or notices that were never sent out. So I also use <a href=\"http://tripit.com/\">TripIt</a>, <a href=\"http://flightaware.com/\">FlightAware</a>, and <a href=\"http://flightstats.com\">FlightStats</a>. It means multiple notices, but it also means I don’t miss anything.</li>\n 	<li><strong>Bring a Battery Pack&nbsp;</strong>— Whatever the size or form factor -- slimline, lipstick, high-capacity brick -- having that second or third charge readily available is critical to get last-minute gate change notifications and when you’re using electronic boarding passes. It saves you from stalking cleaning crews to find a live power outlet on your layover, or negotiating with your seatmate for possession of outlet between you. It’s cheap peace of mind.</li>\n 	<li><strong>Carry On your Luggage</strong> -- Unless you\'re heading to the slopes for Christmas, everyone in your travel party should be able to fit into a carry-on sized bag. You can save $25/bag and increase the probability of having clean clothes at your destination. If you’re seating area 4 or higher, odds are there’s no overhead bin space for you. Let the agent gate-check the bag for you. You won’t have to pay a checked bag fee and it’s very unlikely that they’ll lose your bag – it’s only traveling a couple hundred feet from the jet bridge to the luggage hold.</li>\n 	<li><strong>Spread Clothes Across All Bags</strong> -- If you need to check your bags -- maybe you have to bring pre-wrapped gifts or a special bottle of wine for Christmas dinner --&nbsp; split everyone\'s clothes across all the bags. It\'s rare for an airline to lose&nbsp;<em>all</em> of your checked bags.</li>\n 	<li><strong>Know Your Geography&nbsp;</strong>-- Knowing alternatives to your destination airport gives you more flexibility dealing with cancelled flights or missed connections. In New York, the&nbsp;LaGuardia&nbsp;to Newark pivot is&nbsp;easy, but others aren\'t so obvious.&nbsp; Everyone knows that Chicago has two airports – O\'Hare and Midway.&nbsp; But what about Milwaukee\'s Mitchell Field 80 miles north? &nbsp;If PHL is in trouble, how many folks think about Harrisburg or Allentown?&nbsp; Or Sacramento as an alternative to SFO?&nbsp; I think about alternatives in two rings – within 60 miles – SNA and LGB for LAX; and then within 100-120 miles, which now picks up Palm Springs and San Diego for LAX.&nbsp; Someone will drive a couple of hours to pick you up if it means getting you to Christmas dinner on time.</li>\n</ol>\nBut above all, be realistic. It’s gonna be a zoo. Steel yourself; get your inner karma tuned for it. Pack a snack and a book, and practice deep cleansing breaths.','Top 10 Holiday Travel Tips','','inherit','closed','closed','','2185-revision-v1','','','2021-09-29 22:07:52','2021-09-30 03:07:52','',2185,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3928',0,'revision','',0),
(3930,1,'2021-09-29 22:09:16','2021-09-30 03:09:16','[caption id=\"attachment_2197\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/IMG_1158.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2197\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/IMG_1158-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> I won\'t pass for an emotional support reindeer[/caption]\n\nTrying to wrap up travel for the year so I can hunker down in the TravelCommons bunker outside of Chicago and <em>not</em> worry about any forecasted snow. But for those of you who are traveling, here\'s an episode to keep you occupied in the airport, train, or car traffic. We talk about some travel tips that didn\'t make my Top 10 Tips blog post, the great experience of flying on Thanksgiving day, losing my tablet on that flight but soon recovering it, storming Las Vegas with 50,000 other Amazon Web Services users, and some thoughts from our trip to Santa Fe, New Mexico. All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_147.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #147:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, trying to wind down the year’s travel. Was in Santa Fe, New Mexico for Thanksgiving, and then headed up to Las Vegas the next week for Amazon Web Service’s big annual conference, Re:Invent. Then did what I hoped was my last trip to Dallas, but we couldn’t corral all the cats, so I’m back down there next Weds for what will definitely be my last trip of the year.</li>\n 	<li>Irene and I flew out to Albuquerque 10am Thanksgiving morning and I have to say that it was one of the least stressful travel experiences I’ve ever had -- no traffic on the drive to ORD, no lines; I didn’t even have time to pull out my driver’s license before I hit the TSA podium. I walked straight through to a screening line. There were agents hanging around just looking for people to screen. The only line I stood in was the Starbucks. We even scored 1st-Class upgrades; the plane was only half full. I even think we left early. A very pleasant change from my ORD-DFW commute.</li>\n 	<li>The only real downside I noticed was when we hit the Hertz Presidents Club aisle in Albuquerque. It was pretty picked over, leaving behind an odd selection of Dodge vehicles -- the choice was between Dodge Challenger muscle cars or fully tricked out Ram Hemi king-cab pick-ups. I can’t say that I’ve ever faced quite that choice. The Challenger, with rear-wheel drive, wouldn’t be great if we got snow at elevation, but the Rams were just huge, and trying to parallel park that in Santa Fe would be an event. It took me a bit to decide. I went with the Challenger and hoped for clear skies.</li>\n 	<li>Well, there was one more downside that I didn’t discover until we unpacked in our little casita in Santa Fe that night. I’d left my Samsung tablet in that nice first-class seat. Not in the seat-back pocket; I always check there before leaving. There was a side compartment along the middle armrest that I’d put my tablet in when I folded up the table to hit the lav. Bad mistake. That compartment was deep, I couldn’t see the tablet; and I didn’t think to check it before deplaning.</li>\n 	<li>I hit Twitter, sending United a direct message asking about ABQ lost-and-found. I wanted to ping them to see if the cleaning crew had turn anything in since I’d be back at ABQ for our Monday morning flight to LAS. I’ve done this before when getting back coats that I’ve left in overhead compartments. The Twitter customer service agent instead sent me a link to a web form to fill out. I cooled my jets over the weekend and on Monday morning, swung by the United Baggage Services office to see if they had my tablet. Walked past the American Baggage Services office -- open; the Delta Baggage Services office -- open; to the United Baggage Services office -- closed. It was supposed to open at 9am. I waited for 15-20 minutes, and then had to head up to catch my Vegas flight. I wasn’t happy.</li>\n 	<li>Which changed that afternoon when I got a call from an unknown Cleveland number on my mobile. Robocallers have found my mobile number, so I usually let unrecognized numbers go straight to voicemail, but I remember Continental having a Cleveland hub before the United merger, so maybe this was a United person calling. And it was! “I think I have your tablet; could you verify your screensaver” It’s a wall painting of pink flamingos. “Yup, that’s it; we’ve got it” (Actually, it’s street art from Paris’ Montmartre neighborhood; you can see the picture on the TravelCommons’ Instagram feed). She told me that they no longer keep found items at the airports; they ship them the next day to centralized lost-&amp;-found centers for sorting and processing. So, even if the ABQ baggage services office had been open that morning, they wouldn’t have had my tablet; they probably shipped it to Cleveland that weekend.\nAfter I got off the phone, I got an e-mail with a link to pick a shipping method and pay. The day after I got home from Vegas, my flamingo’d tablet landed on my doorstep.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/copperhead/40520\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen</a> by copperhead (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: Admiral Bob, Javolenus , Sackjo22</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul class=\"\">\n 	<li>Couple of listener notes on the last episode. Nick Gassman wrote:\n<ul>\n 	<li>“When you were talking about car rental collision damage waiver, I took it to mean that that you pay the rental company for the insurance. It\'s much cheaper (at least in the UK) to purchase this separately. You can generally get it on a per-trip or annual basis, just like regular travel insurance.”</li>\n 	<li>Nick, good point on that. You get used to accepting the waiver on business travel because, for many corporate rates, it’s all rolled in or you’re just going to expense it. And for US domestic travel, at least for me, my regular auto insurance covers it. So that leaves international travel. Chase did a good job of handling the accident in the UK. But looking at a separate company is a good idea. May try that out the next time I rent in Spain.</li>\n 	<li>“And about BlueTooth speakers, you mentioned about using the speaker as an accessory for your phone - I assume you know that the Jambox can do this. I\'ve often used it at work in rooms with no speakerphone. I\'ve also now upgraded to the Bose Mini 2 Soundlink. It is heavier and slightly larger, but when going on holiday the difference in sound quality is significant and more than makes up for it.”</li>\n 	<li>Yup, I’ve used the Jambox for many conference calls though I’ve never checked the quality difference between it and the speaker, or maybe I should say the microphone on my iPhone. I’ve never swapped between them on a call and asked the person on the other end which is better. Something to try out on the next call where we’re waiting for the last person to join.</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Steve Frick picked up on something when I was talking about notebooks in last episode’s Traveler Gift Guide segment\n<ul>\n 	<li>“It sounds like you’ve also entered the “Fountain Pen Zone” as well. They’re like tattoos, you can’t have just one. I had used a Mont Blanc rollerball that I purchased in 1991, it’s been broken and repaired several times and it had been my go-to pen… until someone gave me a fountain pen. Now several years later I have a collection on fountain pens, as well as inks. Ughhhh just what I needed another obsession. Great episode!”</li>\n 	<li>Yup, I started with a plastic Waterman fountain pen that I bought many years ago on a business trip to Brussels. I just had that one pen for the longest time. But then I discovered the Internet, or more specifically, fountain pen forums and blogs and podcasts on the Internet. And, as you might guess, it went downhill pretty quickly. Sometimes my biggest decision of the morning is which color of ink to use that day. Which itself says something about the state of my daily choices...</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>I said earlier that I was in Vegas a few weeks back for the big Amazon Web Services convention. It was huge; 50,000 attendees, mostly pudgy, pasty-faced guys power walking up and down the strip, backpacks strapped down, ignoring the showgirls offering pictures so they wouldn’t be late to, say, the sold-out tutorial on best practices for ingesting streaming data from IoT devices into AWS’ new time series database. For me, that nerd-meets-baller dichotomy hit one morning at 7:30. I was in a marching nerd stream weaving through the casino floor of the MGM Grand when out from behind a slot machine a woman with a half-filled plastic glass shouted “Very impressive that you all have some place important to go this early.” No one broke stride. She shrugged and went back to her machine. There was a lot of walking, though, for that show. It was spread out from the MGM Grand up to the Venetian. The Health app on my iPhone clocked me at 10 miles of walking a day. Glad it wasn’t in the summer.</li>\n 	<li>I mentioned in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/05/31/podcast-141-when-you-think-the-tsa-is-bad-expired-money/\">an earlier episode</a> that I’d found a box of old European currency when cleaning off some shelves. It was from the late ‘80’s/early ‘90’s -- the pre-Euro days. I have some Belgian and French francs, a Deutsche mark, an Irish pound note, and an Italian 1000 lire note that I started using as a bookmark in my notebook. After one of these Amazon sessions, a young Italian woman looked over and commented on my lire bookmark. “Oh my God! I haven’t seen one of those in forever,” she said. She talked about her grandparents never really accepting that the lire was gone. “It’s good that we have the euro,” she said, “but it’ll never be the lire.” Which, remembering back 20-30 years ago, I thought might be a good thing, but decided not to say it; didn’t want to break her nostalgia. “I forgot how small it was!” she said.</li>\n 	<li>I was trading notes with friends a few weeks back after the Marriott hack was announced. It really is no longer a matter of if your personal data will be breached, but how often. A common theme across many of those Amazon talks was that mistakes will happen, so your cloud design should “limit the blast radius” of those mistakes. If I apply that same concept to website breaches (travel and otherwise), I’d freeze all my credit reports, have a unique password for each site, provide just the minimum amount of information required for a transaction, and I wouldn’t store/save credit card or other information with them. Indeed, if I really burrowed in, I’d use virtual credit card numbers from a bank that provides them. I’m pretty good except for the last one; I haven’t found a good bank that easily provides virtual card number. It all comes down to your personal trade-off point between resilience to a breach and convenience.</li>\n 	<li>With the Christmas season officially clicking in the day after Thanksgiving, TBS and TNT seem to have “Love Actually\" on power rotation every weekend. I like it; it’s a good Christmas movie. But picking up the end of it night while channel flipping in Santa Fe, I just couldn’t buy that scene toward the end when Liam Neeson encourages his stepson to breach Heathrow Airport security in the name of true love. I might be a bit of a Scrooge, but how does a 10-yr old kid commit a serious felony and not get gang-tackled at the gate and thrown into juvi? I dunno. Maybe I should stick to A Charlie Brown Christmas...</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our new Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/NiGiD/48586\">O Tannenbaum / Oh Christmas Tree</a> by Martijn de Boer (NiGiD) (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license.  Ft: Admiral Bob (admiralbob77)</span></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Holiday Travel Tips</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>I posted my kinda annual Top 10 Holiday Travel Tips a few weeks back. It feels like something I’m required to do to keep my status as a semi-professional travel blogger and podcaster. Not a lot of the flying tips have changed over the last few lists -- pay a bit extra to fly non-stop, don’t take tight connections, catch an early flight if you can, carry your luggage on if you can -- because not much has changed regarding air travel -- it’s a time when a huge bubble of travelers hit an infrastructure that is, for the most part, already operating near capacity and at the time of year when much of that capacity could get disrupted by weather. This year, US plane loads were over 80% -- as if you didn’t already know that hearing the constant refrain of gate agents and flight attendants - “This will be a completely full flight…” And no new airport or runway capacity has been added in the high traffic areas -- maybe since ORD finished spending a billion dollars straightening out its runways. The LGA renovation will hopefully eliminate the leaking roof and give us better food options, but after spending $8 billion dollars, there won’t be any new runway capacity.</li>\n 	<li>Having said that, I think the aggressive roll-out of TSA PreCheck has helped everyone -- the TSA, frequent travelers who’ve bought PreCheck (signing up for PreCheck moved up to #2 on this year’s list), and even the infrequent ones who haven’t -- by increasing security capacity by increasing “thru-put” for lack of a better term. Security seems to, on the whole, move along a bit brisker. Yes, there are still too many times when it doesn’t, but it’s been a while since we’ve seen a full-scale TSA meltdown causing people to miss flights.\nBringing your own battery pack cracked the top 10 for the first time this year at #7. It followed Use Twitter as a Concierge Service and Use Multiple Flight Tracking Apps at numbers 5 and 6 respectively. The more we rely on our smartphones for travel information, the more important power is. And when the holiday crowds are hovering over those Samsung or Verizon power towers, you want an alternative.</li>\n 	<li>A lot of the Top 10 lists I read end with a second list, of those things that didn’t quite make the Top 10. For me, some of those are:</li>\n 	<li><strong>Travel on the Actual Holiday</strong> - Our Thanksgiving flight out to Santa Fe reminded me of this tip. It didn’t make the Top 10 because not everyone can pull it off. Tough to fly or drive out Christmas morning if you have young kids, or if you have Italian in-laws who do the whole Feast of The Seven Fishes on Christmas Eve. But, if you can, it’s a quantum level decrease in travel stress. You’ll probably just glide through your travels.</li>\n 	<li><strong>Take Mass Transit to the Airport</strong> - Everybody worries about TSA lines, but just getting into the airport to be able to get into the TSA line can be a hassle. Airports with a single access road that goes past all the terminals -- think ORD, LAX, LGA -- can have 15-20 minute backups. When the construction at LGA first started, the backups were so bad, people were getting out of their cabs when they were still on the Grand Central Parkway and walking up the off ramps. Now, LGA doesn’t have mass transit access -- some of that $8 billion if for that -- but most airports do -- ORD, ATL, EWR and JFK, DCA,.... If it’s available, use it to skip at least one line.</li>\n 	<li>And my last “almost made it” tip, <strong>Bring Cash</strong> -- way back in episode #136, last December, I talked about what seems to be a generational split, maybe right around 30 or 35 -- old Millennials/youngster Gen X’s -- about the need to carry cash. No matter which side you sit on that split, it’s a fact that cash can get you out of a packed airport bar quicker than a card if you need to bolt for your flight -- maybe a delay got pulled up, your gate got moved to the next terminal, or you just misread the boarding time. Being able to lay down, say a twenty and 3 ones, on the bar with your check is a whole lot quicker than waiting for the waitress to show back up, take your card, walk to the back to run it, and then bring it back again for you to sign. This is where the Europeans with those mobile terminals are light-years ahead of us. But until we catch up -- which means we have to be trusted to remember a 4-digit PIN code -- bring cash so you can dash.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/44580\"> What Child is This (Instrumental)</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license.  Ft: Jeris</span></li>\n</ul>\n<b>Notes on Santa Fe</b>\n<ul>\n 	<li>As I mentioned earlier, Irene and I headed out to Santa Fe, New Mexico for the Thanksgiving holidays. Since both kids were gone, we figured “Why not?” And since I had to be in Vegas on Monday, it just made sense to head west.</li>\n 	<li>I’m going to do a full write-up on our trip in a blog post in a week or so; the first of a new series of Road Trip posts, where we’ll break the TravelCommons format a bit. Road Trip posts will be more about the destination than the journey -- things we did, places we stayed, ate, drank beer…. But here, just some notes.</li>\n 	<li>It had been a while since we’d been in Santa Fe -- maybe over 10 years; I haven’t paged back through my calendar to check -- but getting out of that Hertz Dodge Challenger that we’d blasted up I-25 -- the speed limit is 75 mph once you’re outside of Albuquerque -- I was immediately hit with the piñon smell, that unique pinewood smoke smell I only get in Santa Fe. I’ve been around a lot of pinewood fires in, say, Colorado and Arizona, but the piñon smoke billowing out of a kiva fireplace is a unique smell, and one that I love.\nVisiting Santa Fe, there’s an interesting mix of highbrow and lowbrow -- doing the Georgia O’Keefe museum and a run up Canyon Road through all the art galleries, or hunting the best green chile cheeseburger and then burning it off on a hike in the Sangre de Cristo mountains. This visit was all lowbrow.</li>\n 	<li>Friday, we did 1,700 vertical feet up the Atalaya Trail. The parking lot at the trailhead at St John’s College was pretty full, but the trail wasn’t crowded once we got going. It actually came in handy at times to see people - let us know we weren’t lost. There were some trail markings, but not to the extent we were used to in, say, the UK. 5 ½ hours later, we were sitting at the bar at Second St Brewing’s place in the Railyard district, replacing whatever calories we’d burned off with a green chile cheeseburger and a side of green chile cheese fries. Double lashings of american cheese, which I know is just a processed cheese food, but the creamy gooey-ness of it blended well with the chile bite, and a pint of one of the better American-made bitters I’ve had.</li>\n 	<li>Saturday, after hiking through Tent Rocks National Monument, we ended up on Guadalupe St, which feels like the lowbrow counterpart to the plaza or Canyon Road. We stopped in at Cowgirl BBQ for margaritas. During our last visit, I stole/borrowed their margarita recipe for my own. We worked through their margarita menu while listening to a group of local guys talk about taking dancing lessons and a woman at the bar telling us that, back in the ‘70’s when she moved to Santa Fe, cowboys still rode horses through town -- across the plaza and down Canyon Rd -- throwing cash down in Canyon Rd bars to buy rounds for the house.</li>\n 	<li>On Sunday, we walked down Canyon Road, looking into the sculpture gardens of all the art galleries. It seemed a popular Sunday morning stroll. I’d see some older couples -- older than me; at, say, the beginning of retirement, walking in high-end Western garb -- nice flat-brimmed hats, fur-trimmed duster coats. Kinda California money does cowboy. Would be interesting to see how those ‘70’s cowboys would fit in today.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #147</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and now on <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_147.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #147 — Holiday Travel Tips; Notes from Santa Fe','','inherit','closed','closed','','2198-revision-v1','','','2021-09-29 22:09:16','2021-09-30 03:09:16','',2198,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3930',0,'revision','',0),
(3932,1,'2021-09-30 09:50:47','2021-09-30 14:50:47','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_1985\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/708473504_18da6d5b07_z1.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-3581 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/708473504_18da6d5b07_z1-300x225.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\"></a> Standing in Line! © Lance Smith/Flickr[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Not much travel, but a lot of travel planning for our first post-lockdown international trip to Italy. Trying to thread our way through changing COVID rules and Alitalia\'s bankruptcy throes. I\'m getting inundated with discount offers for <a href=\"https://www.clearme.com/\">Clear\'s fast-pass service</a>. I\'ve resisted them so far, because I remember back to when the first incarnation of Clear wanted to <a href=\"https://www.wired.com/2009/08/defunct-airport-fast-pass-company-banned-from-selling-customer-biometrics/\">sell its members\' biometric data</a>.  We then talk to <a href=\"https://www.xovis.com/en/home/\">Xovis Technology</a>\'s Cody Shulman about how airports are better managing all sorts of lines in airports. Finally, air passenger traffic is dropping again because business travelers are still missing-in-action (MIA). All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_179.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #179: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois; no travel since the last episode, just a lot of travel planning. I’ve talked over the past couple of episodes about pushing forward with our first post-lockdown international trip; a bike tour through the bootheel of Italy. We booked the trip in the spring and then last month -- I talked about in the last episode -- we booked our hotels pre- and post- the ride and the flight over. But not the flight back, because -- what else do we want to do while we’re here? I just wrapped up an interim CIO gig last week, so there’s no huge rush to get back -- and it’s been 5 years since our last time in Italy, so… As we were thinking about this, a friend, a former colleague pinged me “ Hey there - Just saw your tweet about your upcoming international trip. Sitting here waiting for our pierogies (he now lives in Southern Poland). Where’re you going?” Turns out he and his wife will be in Syracuse, Sicily in October. So there was our answer -- after our bike tour ends in Lecce, we catch a flight to Catania and hang out on the beach for the next week. And I can’t remember the last time I said this, but “Thanks, Twitter” for that.</li><li>So, next step, fire up Google Flights and look for one-way flights from whatever airport is near Lecce to Catania. Which turns out to be Brindisi Airport in Salento -- 24 miles, an €8/30-min train ride from Lecce, so pretty convenient, except that the best flight to Catania is an Air Dolomiti-Lufthansa connection with a 13-hour layover in Munich. Yeah, no. So next I look at Bari, where we’re flying into. 90 miles away; less convenient, but doable. The flight options are not much better -- a 6am Ryanair flight (which I kinda think of as Spirit Airlines without the charm), a 5pm flight with Volotea (whom I’ve never heard of, but Google and Wikipedia say they’re a budget airline based in Barcelona), and those same insane Air Dolomiti connections through Munich. This makes no sense. What gives? A little more Googling tells the rest of the story. Alitalia has been winding through bankruptcy since 2017 and now 4 years later, after 75 years as Italy’s national carrier, it’s finally closing down-- the day before I’m trying to book our flight to Sicily. Timing; it’s a beautiful thing.</li><li>A little more Googling says there’s a new Italian carrier coming, ITA, but it’s still working through negotiating for Alitalia’s landing slots and equipment and labor contracts, so it’s not taking bookings yet. OK, then. Getting out of Lecce is starting to pick up a little “escape room” vibe. It’s a 7-hr drive, a 14-hr train; so if we’re going, we’re flying. I book the most basic seats on the Volotea flight -- €17 for two seats -- just to have something and let the whole Alitalia/ITA thing play out a bit more; I can always add the luggage fees and reserved seats later if need be. I book it on Weds, Sept 1; 5pm flight out of Bari, gives us time to have breakfast, pack, and train up to the airport with enough time to deal with the craziness of budget airlines, which is key. My last budget airline experience was flying Wow Air from Reykjavik to London. I arrived 2 hrs before check in to see what appeared to be a stationary check in line of a couple of hundred people. Three days later, on Saturday, I wake up to an email from Volotea saying “We regret to inform you that given the current context of uncertainty about the evolution of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have been forced to reschedule your flight.” to 12:30 -- 4½ hrs earlier. I look at the train schedule -- there goes the leisurely breakfast and a bit of the budget airline safety margin, but it’s doable. The next Saturday, the 11th, I wake up to yet another Volotea e-mail (you’d think these guys would knock off early on Friday). Same wind-up -- “given the current context of uncertainty about the evolution of the COVID-19 pandemic” -- but worse punch -- “we have been forced to cancel your flight”. Ugh, guess that door out of the Lecce escape room was a dead end. I fire up Google Flights again and now see Alitalia flights out of Brindisi. Seems their replacement, ITA, has figured out how to take bookings. But following the link from Google Flights takes me to the Alitalia website with a banner still saying they’re shutting down. Another escape room fake exit? I flip over to Amex Travel; I can book the flights there. No direct flight, so I take the afternoon flight with a 2-hr connection in Rome. I put it on the Platinum card; figure I’ll need all the status I can get if I have to file for a refund. And then this week, I <a href=\"https://apnews.com/article/europe-business-airlines-rome-italy-36d45a33150c638063946e9b151e2aa0\">read</a> about Alitalia telling passengers to bring just a single piece of hand luggage because of strikes and growing labor protests. My friend sends me a text “You still tracking for Sicily?” “Kinda” I replied.</li><li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/yongen-yello/\">Give You Up</a></em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/yongen\">Yongen</a> (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons&nbsp;<a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/1.0/\">by-nc-sa v1.0</a>&nbsp;license</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Jim McDonough stopped by the TravelCommons Facebook page to leave a comment on the post pointing to my list of the best bars and restaurants I’ve visited in 2021. I said that I think it’ll take guidebooks a while to catch up with all the closures caused by the COVID lockdowns. Jim agreed, saying<ul><li>“I heard Rick Steves talking about the topic. All of his guidebooks are out of date. It will take him all of 2022 to get them repaired - assuming Delta, etc don\'t clobber 2022”</li></ul></li><li>As predicted in the last episode, Southwest Airlines extended their in-flight alcohol bans to January 18, 2022, staying aligned with the new expiration of the federal in-flight mask mandate. American also extended their economy-class ban, but continue to serve alcohol in their first and business class cabins. That alignment offers them a good explanation for the ban <em>right now</em>, but it’s going to make it tougher to reinstate in-flight drink service because I don’t see the feds ending the in-flight mask mandate anytime in the near future. Although, I dunno, maybe as the US’s only Prohibition airline, Southwest is looking to reposition their “Wanna Get Away?” slogan as “Wanna Get Away from Drunk Mask Fights on Spirit and United?”</li><li>Back in the Spring, I talked about Irene and Claire missing their Global Entry/PreCheck expiration notices and then in June, about a fake email “make sure your PreCheck doesn’t expire” phishing campaign that scammed a bunch of benched frequent fliers. So last week when I got an email starting “Your Trusted Traveler membership will be expiring soon”, I was a little wary. I was expecting it; after Irene and Claire missed their renewals, I logged in and saw that mine expired in December. But still, I examined the entire email -- message headers, mail server authentications. It looked legit, but even then, I typed the web address ttp.dhs.gov into the browser rather than clicking through the link in the email. It was legit, so I buckled in, selected Global Entry (which I always recommend since for only $15 more, you get <em>both</em> PreCheck and the fast path through US passport control), and cranked through the application. It wasn’t bad; the only part that required any real thinking was the 5-year look back on international travel. I had my passport in front of me, but if you’ve country-hopped within the EU’s Schengen Zone, you only get stamped going in and out of the zone, but not when crossing borders within the zone. In kind of a sad commentary on my traveling style, one of the things that helped me fill in those blanks was a spreadsheet of my downloaded Untappd check-ins. I opened it up in Excel, filtered out check-ins before 2016 and venues in the US and Mexico (turns out I haven’t been to Canada in the last 5 years), and then wrote down the countries that were left. Very easy, and an incentive to always have at least one beer in each country I visit -- like I needed any more encouragement.<br><br>After I paid the $100 fee and was dropped back to the front page, I saw two interesting notes. The first --“Please remember to revisit our website for your application status updates. Notification of when you may schedule an interview appointment (if one is needed) will only be posted here.” So I guess don’t trust any emails about interviews. The second was more interesting - “Due to a significant increase in application volume, we are extending the grace period from 18 months to 24 months for any submitted renewal application. This means you will continue to receive full benefits for 24 months while U.S. Customs and Border Protection is finalizing your renewal application.” Which was interesting because the email I got from them said “6 months to 1 year”. Whichever it is, my guess is that I’m not getting that interview scheduled anytime soon.&nbsp;</li><li>I’ve gotten a bunch of discount offers recently for a CLEAR membership -- $100 off with United, full statement credit from Amex. I’m not sure why the sudden push, but I’m holding out. I enrolled in CLEAR’s first iteration, back in April 2008, 13 years ago -- I talked about it in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2008/04/29/podcast-64-escaping-the-travel-bubble-marks-travel-tips/\">episode #64</a> (but not before I slandered the Dutch by saying their language sounded a bit like a competitive throat-clearing exercise). A couple months later, I wrote a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2008/05/27/jumping-the-line-using-clear-registered-traveler-and-diamond-lane-self-select/\">blog post</a> about my experiences -- it was OK, but I couldn’t see much value over, what was to me, free premium status lines. And today, I’m still not sold on its value over PreCheck. But what really keeps me from picking up one of those free membership offers is that the first iteration of CLEAR abruptly closed down the next year and had to be sued to stop it from selling its customers’ biometric data -- fingerprints and iris scans -- before it went bankrupt. The current iteration of CLEAR says “We never sell or rent personal information about you”, but I dunno. They reserve the right to update their privacy policy periodically. What keeps them from updating that “We’ll never sell” sentence when money gets a little tight.</li><li>Bridge Music — <em><em>Flight</em> </em>by Ga\'inja  (c) copyright 1999 Licensed under a Creative Commons&nbsp;<a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/1.0/\">by-nc-sa v1.0</a>&nbsp;license</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>High-Tech Airport Line Avoidance</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Frequent travelers are an obsessive lot -- they/we obsess over things like packing efficiency (utilizing every cubic inch of our carry-ons) and gaming frequent flier programs. But top of the list is avoiding airport lines. For years after 9/11, line avoidance was more an art (or luck) than a science -- through trial and error you\'d get a sense of which lines would be shorter during Monday morning rush hour in ORD, or maybe some good-hearted airport worker would shout \"There\'s no line at Checkpoint D\" and then jump out of the way of the stampede of roller-boards.  And then, we jumped at the chance to give iris scans to CLEAR or allow the TSA to do background checks in exchange for a shorter line, brushing off any questions about the trade-off of privacy for convenience.</li><li>But what about the airports -- what are they doing to help us out? To dig into this side, I talked to Cody Shulman, managing director, Americas at Xovis Technology about how they help airports track and report on the airport lines we’re trying to avoid.<ul><li>Mark:  Cody, a number of big US hubs have installed Xovis’ technology, DFW, Minneapolis- St Paul, San Francisco, Atlanta. How does your technology help travelers in these busy airports?</li><li>Cody:  Let\'s let\'s take DFW for example. Let\'s first take back-end efficiency. We\'re kind of behind the scenes. That\'s where DFW terminal operations and their customer experience teams are working together to use the system. They\'ll make key staffing changes where passenger traffic is the busiest and do it in the moment. And at the same time, they\'ve taken the approach to give access to the local TSA leadership. So, there is no longer a disagreement when there is an issue. Problem solved rather than just finger pointing -- it was bad, there was a line, there was a queue over here; no, there wasn\'t -- because we\'ve visualized it all for them, it\'s facts. And then on the public side, the passenger facing side, you have all the same information at your fingertips that the airport has. So, before arrival you can use the DFW airport app to see all 15 checkpoints and their current wait times by queue down to the two-minute interval.</li><li>Mark:  Cody. I\'ve I\'ve noticed that, in more and more airports you go to, the airport websites aren\'t great, they\'re not optimized for mobile, which you think would be a key use case, and sometimes they\'re not well publicized. But if you drill in and you find them, you actually can find those sorts of wait time stats and those are critical. So, at DFW, is that your technology driving those stats?</li><li>Cody:  Yes, exactly. And I think you\'re also spot on in saying that they\'re underpublicized and underutilized. DFW, before they instituted and implemented that into their app, had pretty low utilization. In the world of FlightAware and Flight Tracker, people have these agnostic airport apps that can do everything with tracking of your departure and what not. But then when DFW added this, it’s really useful for DFW because you can use any single checkpoint among those 15 and reach your gate and, on top of it, when the situation, even if it\'s somehow dramatically changed when you got there, the signage right in front of you at the airport still shows for every terminal where there are three checkpoints, the wait time at the adjacent terminals and the walk time. So you can self calculate and figure it out yourself</li><li>Mark:  Yes, absolutely. I\'ve seen that more and more lately and it seems to be like a good add on.</li><li>Cody:  There\'s a trust element even to it as well. So, when this first started to launch with the airport, they were doing it with very vague statements: under 15 minutes, over 15 minutes. Then they went to between five and 10 minutes/10 and 15 minutes, and gradually they trusted the accuracy of the system down to two minutes. Any more than that they decided would just be kind of wonky for the customer. I remember when they first put up those signs. I can still remember the woman: she came up to me in front of the television screen and said, “Excuse me, do you work at the airport?” I kind of shrug my shoulder and go with you can probably answer your question rather you know, why not? So, she goes “That thing up there, is it right. Do you trust it?” And in my head, I\'m going “Oh, you\'ve asked the wrong guy.” Like I could, I could go on for minutes and minutes here.</li><li>Mark:  Yeah. How do I say no to that? But Cody, what makes it accurate? What makes you confident that you\'ve got something down to a two-minute interval?</li><li>Cody:  The system works with two key components. We have software, which is dashboards that are our live visualizations and historical ones for users. And we have hardware. We have sensors. Those sensors are designed for airports. They\'re made by Xovis ourselves, and they’re optimized around queuing, and queuing in a complex environment like security, or especially check in which is super unstructured. We\'re measuring a very specific thing, and that\'s people and it\'s their height. You end up under a sensor. It\'s not a camera. And we\'re taking a measurement of your head height and your shoulder height. And with the difference between those two we’re sure that it\'s you as in a human; not mark, not anything else that\'s personally identifying but that\'s it’s you. That\'s step one. That\'s a person. There are lots of people around in a queue. We want to make sure that we capture people exhibiting what we call queue-like behavior. So that\'s moving in a sequence close enough to other people understanding that some people travel in groups and then there are some independent, and we balance that out algorithmically, so that we know that it\'s a person and they\'re in the queue.</li><li>Mark:  How do you guys manage traveler privacy?</li><li>Cody:  It\'s a super relevant and honestly, for me, a pretty easy question; we\'re not detecting faces. Nor are we detecting heat or mobile devices or anything else sort of personally invasive or inconsistently available across every person. It\'s just those heights. And again that height differential. So, when we transmit data off our devices, our sensors were not transferring images. It\'s just coordinates. Its X and Y; there\'s nothing personally identifiable.</li><li>Mark:  Cody, looking out what\'s in the development around adding more convenience to help future travelers. If we look out 2-5 years, what\'s next on the horizon for travelers?</li><li>Cody:  To me, the most noteworthy thing for the passenger side is a connected and a predictive experience. Take Seattle. Our services are present on all the checkpoints in Seattle and we\'ve taken it a step further and integrated with Delta in their FlyDelta app. There\'s a feed to the user in the app to know what wait time to expect when you\'re a departing passenger from Seattle. Let\'s take that one step further and for that particular elite or frequent flyer in their office. It\'s a weekday afternoon. They have to catch an evening flight. What if all the things talk to each other and said, “Hey, this is the time you should probably leave.” Okay, you\'ve set up auto enable your Lyft to come at this time. It\'s going to drop you at the security checkpoint that, in this moment, we know is the best one because you can reach your gate from any of the five. Then you\'re through security. You have time for that extra beer which, not only do you want to have, but the airport wants you to have, because that\'s where the real money is. You’ve your beer; you\'re happy; you\'re relaxed. They\'re getting revenue. Happy, relaxed people spend more and then you’re “Wait! I have to grab…” I had a beer, but I grab a water before my flight. So, you walk over to Hudson news and there\'s a line. Again, you don\'t know that there\'s another Hudson news, which there probably is, 3 doors over. Maybe that doesn\'t have a line which is better for your wait time, or in COVID times, maybe a more comfortable experience. It\'s not as crowded. Or restroom. You get off a plane, you want to know how crowded is when it was last cleaned and then flip it to the to the operational side stop cleaning in a circle. Clean when that wide body plane came in with 400 people who all went to the first restroom and that thing’s trashed now.</li><li>Mark: I\'ve seen that, I\'ve experienced that before.</li><li>Cody:  Just having a smart airport experience and even in public US airports, which are strapped for cash. There\'s a changing tide and I expect to see that coming forward and making a customer better experience for everybody.</li><li>Mark:  Fantastic. Cody Shulman, managing Director Americas, <a href=\"http://xovis.com\" title=\"xovis\">Xovis Technology</a>. Cody, thanks for taking the time with us</li><li>Cody:  Mark, thank you. It\'s been a pleasure.</li></ul></li><li>Bridge Music —<a href=\"http://www.saurabbhargava.com/downloads/04%20The%20Void.mp3\"><em>The Void</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.saurabbhargava.com/\">Saurab Bhargava</a>  (c) copyright 2006 Saurab Bhargava</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Business Travel Still MIA</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Listening to airline and hotel CEOs <a href=\"https://skift.com/2021/09/07/what-travel-ceos-are-predicting-about-the-permanent-return-of-business-travel/\">let the air out of their revenue forecasts</a> <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-19-resurgence-clouds-business-travel-rebound-11630920600?st=m7iegfjwreygxoi&amp;reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink\">for the rest of the year</a>, I went back to the TSA’s <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/coronavirus/passenger-throughput\">web page</a> that gives the daily numbers of passengers going through airport security checkpoints. Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/06/15/podcast-176-why-business-travel-is-coming-back-learning-airport-history/\">June episode</a>, the first time I had fun with those numbers, checkpoint volume had passed 2 million for the first time since the lockdowns and the numbers were going up. Looking at a 7-day moving average to smooth things out a bit, it grew through June until it hit 2 million the first week of July. But after a month, in the first week of August, it turned, dropping back below 2 million and now, running in the 1.7 million range, about 20% down from its peak. Over the same period in 2019, the peak number was 2.6 million and it never dropped below 2 million.</li><li>It kinda makes sense. This summer’s peak was driven by leisure travel -- people, families getting out of the house and going to see places and other people. But as that travel faded, as it always does, when kids go back to school, this time there isn’t enough business travel to replace it.</li><li>As I mentioned at the top of the episode, I just finished up a 6-month interim CIO gig. It’s had the <em>least</em> amount of business travel of any job I’ve had -- by a long shot. Regular listeners to TravelCommons will recall that there have been times when I’ve traveled every week for 3-4 months straight, and a year or two when there was maybe 6 weeks in those years that I <em>didn’t</em> travel. So this last gig, where I had only one business trip, down to Miami in May, was a huge change in my standard operating procedure.&nbsp;</li><li>I’ve talked in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/07/17/podcast-165-first-post-lockdown-flight-when-does-business-travel-come-back/\">past</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/06/15/podcast-176-why-business-travel-is-coming-back-learning-airport-history/\">episodes</a> about this, skeptical of predictions like Bill Gates’ that <a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/17/coronavirus-bill-gates-says-more-than-50percent-of-business-travel-will-disappear-long-term.html\">50% of business travel will go away</a>. I was going through the TravelCommons archives, cleaning up show notes and the like, and found an <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2008/12/23/podcast-70-packing-a-suit-videoconference-over-travel-watching-winter-flight-delays/\">episode from December 2008</a> where I was answering listener questions about why I travel for in-person meetings instead of video conference; when tech analysts were saying it was “on the brink of widespread adoption.” I’m nothing if not consistent.</li><li>Of course, it’s difficult to do in-person meetings when people are still working from home; it would be a bit awkward doing a sales call around someone’s kitchen table, having to project the PowerPoint deck on their white tile backsplash. I gotta think you’d lose a bullet point or two in the grout lines.</li><li>But by fits and starts, slowed by the Delta variant, people are heading back into their offices and international travel barriers are dropping. At this CIO gig, one colleague, the global head of operations, lived in the UK and so couldn’t get into the US to meet with his staff at some newly acquired plants. He was doing daily video calls, but after a couple of months, he’d made all the progress he could and needed to physically meet with these people. So when Canada dropped their travel ban, he flew from London to Toronto, holed up in a hotel room, worked through Canada’s 14-day quarantine, and then drove across the US border at Buffalo and caught a domestic flight to Chicago. It’s just one data point, but I’m grabbing on and holding tight, hoping to tell Bill Gates “Told you so!”</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #179</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_179.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #179 — High-Tech Airport Lines; Business Travel Still Missing','','inherit','closed','closed','','3831-revision-v1','','','2021-09-30 09:50:47','2021-09-30 14:50:47','',3831,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3932',0,'revision','',0),
(3934,1,'2021-09-30 09:58:41','2021-09-30 14:58:41','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_1985\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/708473504_18da6d5b07_z1.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-3581 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/708473504_18da6d5b07_z1-300x225.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\"></a> Standing in Line! © Lance Smith/Flickr[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Not much travel, but a lot of travel planning for our first post-lockdown international trip to Italy. Trying to thread our way through changing COVID rules and Alitalia\'s bankruptcy throes. I\'m getting inundated with discount offers for <a href=\"https://www.clearme.com/\">Clear\'s fast-pass service</a>. I\'ve resisted them so far, because I remember back to when the first incarnation of Clear wanted to <a href=\"https://www.wired.com/2009/08/defunct-airport-fast-pass-company-banned-from-selling-customer-biometrics/\">sell its members\' biometric data</a>.  We then talk to <a href=\"https://www.xovis.com/en/home/\">Xovis Technology</a>\'s Cody Shulman about how airports are better managing all sorts of lines in airports. Finally, air passenger traffic is dropping again because business travelers are still missing-in-action (MIA). All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_179.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #179: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois; no travel since the last episode, just a lot of travel planning. I’ve talked over the past couple of episodes about pushing forward with our first post-lockdown international trip; a bike tour through the bootheel of Italy. We booked the trip in the spring and then last month -- I talked about in the last episode -- we booked our hotels pre- and post- the ride and the flight over. But not the flight back, because -- what else do we want to do while we’re here? I just wrapped up an interim CIO gig last week, so there’s no huge rush to get back -- and it’s been 5 years since our last time in Italy, so… As we were thinking about this, a friend, a former colleague pinged me “ Hey there - Just saw your tweet about your upcoming international trip. Sitting here waiting for our pierogies (he now lives in Southern Poland). Where’re you going?” Turns out he and his wife will be in Syracuse, Sicily in October. So there was our answer -- after our bike tour ends in Lecce, we catch a flight to Catania and hang out on the beach for the next week. And I can’t remember the last time I said this, but “Thanks, Twitter” for that.</li><li>So, next step, fire up Google Flights and look for one-way flights from whatever airport is near Lecce to Catania. Which turns out to be Brindisi Airport in Salento -- 24 miles, an €8/30-min train ride from Lecce, so pretty convenient, except that the best flight to Catania is an Air Dolomiti-Lufthansa connection with a 13-hour layover in Munich. Yeah, no. So next I look at Bari, where we’re flying into. 90 miles away; less convenient, but doable. The flight options are not much better -- a 6am Ryanair flight (which I kinda think of as Spirit Airlines without the charm), a 5pm flight with Volotea (whom I’ve never heard of, but Google and Wikipedia say they’re a budget airline based in Barcelona), and those same insane Air Dolomiti connections through Munich. This makes no sense. What gives? A little more Googling tells the rest of the story. Alitalia has been winding through bankruptcy since 2017 and now 4 years later, after 75 years as Italy’s national carrier, it’s finally closing down-- the day before I’m trying to book our flight to Sicily. Timing; it’s a beautiful thing.</li><li>A little more Googling says there’s a new Italian carrier coming, ITA, but it’s still working through negotiating for Alitalia’s landing slots and equipment and labor contracts, so it’s not taking bookings yet. OK, then. Getting out of Lecce is starting to pick up a little “escape room” vibe. It’s a 7-hr drive, a 14-hr train; so if we’re going, we’re flying. I book the most basic seats on the Volotea flight -- €17 for two seats -- just to have something and let the whole Alitalia/ITA thing play out a bit more; I can always add the luggage fees and reserved seats later if need be. I book it on Weds, Sept 1; 5pm flight out of Bari, gives us time to have breakfast, pack, and train up to the airport with enough time to deal with the craziness of budget airlines, which is key. My last budget airline experience was flying Wow Air from Reykjavik to London. I arrived 2 hrs before check in to see what appeared to be a stationary check in line of a couple of hundred people. Three days later, on Saturday, I wake up to an email from Volotea saying “We regret to inform you that given the current context of uncertainty about the evolution of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have been forced to reschedule your flight.” to 12:30 -- 4½ hrs earlier. I look at the train schedule -- there goes the leisurely breakfast and a bit of the budget airline safety margin, but it’s doable. The next Saturday, the 11th, I wake up to yet another Volotea e-mail (you’d think these guys would knock off early on Friday). Same wind-up -- “given the current context of uncertainty about the evolution of the COVID-19 pandemic” -- but worse punch -- “we have been forced to cancel your flight”. Ugh, guess that door out of the Lecce escape room was a dead end. I fire up Google Flights again and now see Alitalia flights out of Brindisi. Seems their replacement, ITA, has figured out how to take bookings. But following the link from Google Flights takes me to the Alitalia website with a banner still saying they’re shutting down. Another escape room fake exit? I flip over to Amex Travel; I can book the flights there. No direct flight, so I take the afternoon flight with a 2-hr connection in Rome. I put it on the Platinum card; figure I’ll need all the status I can get if I have to file for a refund. And then this week, I <a href=\"https://apnews.com/article/europe-business-airlines-rome-italy-36d45a33150c638063946e9b151e2aa0\">read</a> about Alitalia telling passengers to bring just a single piece of hand luggage because of strikes and growing labor protests. My friend sends me a text “You still tracking for Sicily?” “Kinda” I replied.</li><li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/yongen-yello/\">Give You Up</a></em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/yongen\">Yongen</a> (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons&nbsp;<a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/1.0/\">by-nc-sa v1.0</a>&nbsp;license</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Jim McDonough stopped by the TravelCommons Facebook page to leave a comment on the post pointing to my list of the best bars and restaurants I’ve visited in 2021. I said that I think it’ll take guidebooks a while to catch up with all the closures caused by the COVID lockdowns. Jim agreed, saying<ul><li>“I heard Rick Steves talking about the topic. All of his guidebooks are out of date. It will take him all of 2022 to get them repaired - assuming Delta, etc don\'t clobber 2022”</li></ul></li><li>As predicted in the last episode, Southwest Airlines extended their in-flight alcohol bans to January 18, 2022, staying aligned with the new expiration of the federal in-flight mask mandate. American also extended their economy-class ban, but continue to serve alcohol in their first and business class cabins. That alignment offers them a good explanation for the ban <em>right now</em>, but it’s going to make it tougher to reinstate in-flight drink service because I don’t see the feds ending the in-flight mask mandate anytime in the near future. Although, I dunno, maybe as the US’s only Prohibition airline, Southwest is looking to reposition their “Wanna Get Away?” slogan as “Wanna Get Away from Drunk Mask Fights on Spirit and United?”</li><li>Back in the Spring, I talked about Irene and Claire missing their Global Entry/PreCheck expiration notices and then in June, about a fake email “make sure your PreCheck doesn’t expire” phishing campaign that scammed a bunch of benched frequent fliers. So last week when I got an email starting “Your Trusted Traveler membership will be expiring soon”, I was a little wary. I was expecting it; after Irene and Claire missed their renewals, I logged in and saw that mine expired in December. But still, I examined the entire email -- message headers, mail server authentications. It looked legit, but even then, I typed the web address ttp.dhs.gov into the browser rather than clicking through the link in the email. It was legit, so I buckled in, selected Global Entry (which I always recommend since for only $15 more, you get <em>both</em> PreCheck and the fast path through US passport control), and cranked through the application. It wasn’t bad; the only part that required any real thinking was the 5-year look back on international travel. I had my passport in front of me, but if you’ve country-hopped within the EU’s Schengen Zone, you only get stamped going in and out of the zone, but not when crossing borders within the zone. In kind of a sad commentary on my traveling style, one of the things that helped me fill in those blanks was a spreadsheet of my downloaded Untappd check-ins. I opened it up in Excel, filtered out check-ins before 2016 and venues in the US and Mexico (turns out I haven’t been to Canada in the last 5 years), and then wrote down the countries that were left. Very easy, and an incentive to always have at least one beer in each country I visit -- like I needed any more encouragement.<br><br>After I paid the $100 fee and was dropped back to the front page, I saw two interesting notes. The first --“Please remember to revisit our website for your application status updates. Notification of when you may schedule an interview appointment (if one is needed) will only be posted here.” So I guess don’t trust any emails about interviews. The second was more interesting - “Due to a significant increase in application volume, we are extending the grace period from 18 months to 24 months for any submitted renewal application. This means you will continue to receive full benefits for 24 months while U.S. Customs and Border Protection is finalizing your renewal application.” Which was interesting because the email I got from them said “6 months to 1 year”. Whichever it is, my guess is that I’m not getting that interview scheduled anytime soon.&nbsp;</li><li>I’ve gotten a bunch of discount offers recently for a CLEAR membership -- $100 off with United, full statement credit from Amex. I’m not sure why the sudden push, but I’m holding out. I enrolled in CLEAR’s first iteration, back in April 2008, 13 years ago -- I talked about it in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2008/04/29/podcast-64-escaping-the-travel-bubble-marks-travel-tips/\">episode #64</a> (but not before I slandered the Dutch by saying their language sounded a bit like a competitive throat-clearing exercise). A couple months later, I wrote a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2008/05/27/jumping-the-line-using-clear-registered-traveler-and-diamond-lane-self-select/\">blog post</a> about my experiences -- it was OK, but I couldn’t see much value over, what was to me, free premium status lines. And today, I’m still not sold on its value over PreCheck. But what really keeps me from picking up one of those free membership offers is that the first iteration of CLEAR abruptly closed down the next year and had to be sued to stop it from selling its customers’ biometric data -- fingerprints and iris scans -- before it went bankrupt. The current iteration of CLEAR says “We never sell or rent personal information about you”, but I dunno. They reserve the right to update their privacy policy periodically. What keeps them from updating that “We’ll never sell” sentence when money gets a little tight.</li><li>Bridge Music — <em><em>Flight</em> </em>by Ga\'inja  (c) copyright 1999 Licensed under a Creative Commons&nbsp;<a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/1.0/\">by-nc-sa v1.0</a>&nbsp;license</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>High-Tech Airport Line Avoidance</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Frequent travelers are an obsessive lot -- they/we obsess over things like packing efficiency (utilizing every cubic inch of our carry-ons) and gaming frequent flier programs. But top of the list is avoiding airport lines. For years after 9/11, line avoidance was more an art (or luck) than a science -- through trial and error you\'d get a sense of which lines would be shorter during Monday morning rush hour in ORD, or maybe some good-hearted airport worker would shout \"There\'s no line at Checkpoint D\" and then jump out of the way of the stampede of roller-boards.  And then, we jumped at the chance to give iris scans to CLEAR or allow the TSA to do background checks in exchange for a shorter line, brushing off any questions about the trade-off of privacy for convenience.</li><li>But what about the airports -- what are they doing to help us out? To dig into this side, I talked to Cody Shulman, managing director, Americas at Xovis Technology about how they help airports track and report on the airport lines we’re trying to avoid.<ul><li>Mark:  Cody, a number of big US hubs have installed Xovis’ technology, DFW, Minneapolis- St Paul, San Francisco, Atlanta. How does your technology help travelers in these busy airports?</li><li>Cody:  Let\'s take DFW for example. Let\'s first take back-end efficiency. We\'re kind of behind the scenes. That\'s where DFW terminal operations and their customer experience teams are working together to use the system. They\'ll make key staffing changes where passenger traffic is the busiest and do it in the moment. And at the same time, they\'ve taken the approach to give access to the local TSA leadership. So, there is no longer a disagreement when there is an issue. Problem solved rather than just finger pointing -- it was bad, there was a line, there was a queue over here; no, there wasn\'t -- because we\'ve visualized it all for them, it\'s facts. And then on the public side, the passenger facing side, you have all the same information at your fingertips that the airport has. So, before arrival you can use the DFW airport app to see all 15 checkpoints and their current wait times by queue down to the two-minute interval.</li><li>Mark:  Cody. I\'ve noticed that, in more and more airports you go to, the airport websites aren\'t great, they\'re not optimized for mobile, which you think would be a key use case, and sometimes they\'re not well publicized. But if you drill in and you find them, you actually can find those sorts of wait time stats and those are critical. So, at DFW, is that your technology driving those stats?</li><li>Cody:  Yes, exactly. And I think you\'re also spot on in saying that they\'re underpublicized and underutilized. DFW, before they instituted and implemented that into their app, had pretty low utilization. In the world of FlightAware and Flight Tracker, people have these agnostic airport apps that can do everything with tracking of your departure and what not. But then when DFW added this, it’s really useful for DFW because you can use any single checkpoint among those 15 and reach your gate and, on top of it, when the situation, even if it\'s somehow dramatically changed when you got there, the signage right in front of you at the airport still shows for every terminal where there are three checkpoints, the wait time at the adjacent terminals and the walk time. So you can self calculate and figure it out yourself</li><li>Mark:  Yes, absolutely. I\'ve seen that more and more lately and it seems to be like a good add on.</li><li>Cody:  There\'s a trust element even to it as well. So, when this first started to launch with the airport, they were doing it with very vague statements: under 15 minutes, over 15 minutes. Then they went to between five and 10 minutes/10 and 15 minutes, and gradually they trusted the accuracy of the system down to two minutes. Any more than that they decided would just be kind of wonky for the customer. I remember when they first put up those signs. I can still remember the woman: she came up to me in front of the television screen and said, “Excuse me, do you work at the airport?” I kind of shrug my shoulder and go with you can probably answer your question rather you know, why not? So, she goes “That thing up there, is it right. Do you trust it?” And in my head, I\'m going “Oh, you\'ve asked the wrong guy.” Like I could, I could go on for minutes and minutes here.</li><li>Mark:  Yeah. How do I say no to that? But Cody, what makes it accurate? What makes you confident that you\'ve got something down to a two-minute interval?</li><li>Cody:  The system works with two key components. We have software, which is dashboards that are our live visualizations and historical ones for users. And we have hardware. We have sensors. Those sensors are designed for airports. They\'re made by Xovis ourselves, and they’re optimized around queuing, and queuing in a complex environment like security, or especially check in which is super unstructured. We\'re measuring a very specific thing, and that\'s people and it\'s their height. You end up under a sensor. It\'s not a camera. And we\'re taking a measurement of your head height and your shoulder height. And with the difference between those two we’re sure that it\'s you as in a human; not mark, not anything else that\'s personally identifying but that\'s it’s you. That\'s step one. That\'s a person. There are lots of people around in a queue. We want to make sure that we capture people exhibiting what we call queue-like behavior. So that\'s moving in a sequence close enough to other people understanding that some people travel in groups and then there are some independent, and we balance that out algorithmically, so that we know that it\'s a person and they\'re in the queue.</li><li>Mark:  How do you guys manage traveler privacy?</li><li>Cody:  It\'s a super relevant and honestly, for me, a pretty easy question; we\'re not detecting faces. Nor are we detecting heat or mobile devices or anything else sort of personally invasive or inconsistently available across every person. It\'s just those heights. And again that height differential. So, when we transmit data off our devices, our sensors were not transferring images. It\'s just coordinates. It\'s X and Y; there\'s nothing personally identifiable.</li><li>Mark:  Cody, looking out what\'s in the development around adding more convenience to help future travelers. If we look out 2-5 years, what\'s next on the horizon for travelers?</li><li>Cody:  To me, the most noteworthy thing for the passenger side is a connected and a predictive experience. Take Seattle. Our services are present on all the checkpoints in Seattle and we\'ve taken it a step further and integrated with Delta in their FlyDelta app. There\'s a feed to the user in the app to know what wait time to expect when you\'re a departing passenger from Seattle. Let\'s take that one step further and for that particular elite or frequent flyer in their office. It\'s a weekday afternoon. They have to catch an evening flight. What if all the things talk to each other and said, “Hey, this is the time you should probably leave.” Okay, you\'ve set up auto enable your Lyft to come at this time. It\'s going to drop you at the security checkpoint that, in this moment, we know is the best one because you can reach your gate from any of the five. Then you\'re through security. You have time for that extra beer which, not only do you want to have, but the airport wants you to have, because that\'s where the real money is. You’ve your beer; you\'re happy; you\'re relaxed. They\'re getting revenue. Happy, relaxed people spend more and then you’re “Wait! I have to grab…” I had a beer, but I grab a water before my flight. So, you walk over to Hudson news and there\'s a line. Again, you don\'t know that there\'s another Hudson news, which there probably is, 3 doors over. Maybe that doesn\'t have a line which is better for your wait time, or in COVID times, maybe a more comfortable experience. It\'s not as crowded. Or restroom. You get off a plane, you want to know how crowded it is when it was last cleaned. And then flip it to  the operational side: stop cleaning in a circle. Clean when that wide body plane came in with 400 people who all went to the first restroom and that thing’s trashed now.</li><li>Mark: I\'ve seen that, I\'ve experienced that before.</li><li>Cody:  Just having a smart airport experience and even in public US airports, which are strapped for cash. There\'s a changing tide and I expect to see that coming forward and making a customer better experience for everybody.</li><li>Mark:  Fantastic. Cody Shulman, managing Director Americas, <a href=\"http://xovis.com\" title=\"xovis\">Xovis Technology</a>. Cody, thanks for taking the time with us</li><li>Cody:  Mark, thank you. It\'s been a pleasure.</li></ul></li><li>Bridge Music —<a href=\"http://www.saurabbhargava.com/downloads/04%20The%20Void.mp3\"><em>The Void</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.saurabbhargava.com/\">Saurab Bhargava</a>  (c) copyright 2006 Saurab Bhargava</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Business Travel Still MIA</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Listening to airline and hotel CEOs <a href=\"https://skift.com/2021/09/07/what-travel-ceos-are-predicting-about-the-permanent-return-of-business-travel/\">let the air out of their revenue forecasts</a> <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-19-resurgence-clouds-business-travel-rebound-11630920600?st=m7iegfjwreygxoi&amp;reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink\">for the rest of the year</a>, I went back to the TSA’s <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/coronavirus/passenger-throughput\">web page</a> that gives the daily numbers of passengers going through airport security checkpoints. Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/06/15/podcast-176-why-business-travel-is-coming-back-learning-airport-history/\">June episode</a>, the first time I had fun with those numbers, checkpoint volume had passed 2 million for the first time since the lockdowns and the numbers were going up. Looking at a 7-day moving average to smooth things out a bit, it grew through June until it hit 2 million the first week of July. But after a month, in the first week of August, it turned, dropping back below 2 million and now, running in the 1.7 million range, about 20% down from its peak. Over the same period in 2019, the peak number was 2.6 million and it never dropped below 2 million.</li><li>It kinda makes sense. This summer’s peak was driven by leisure travel -- people, families getting out of the house and going to see places and other people. But as that travel faded, as it always does, when kids go back to school, this time there isn’t enough business travel to replace it.</li><li>As I mentioned at the top of the episode, I just finished up a 6-month interim CIO gig. It’s had the <em>least</em> amount of business travel of any job I’ve had -- by a long shot. Regular listeners to TravelCommons will recall that there have been times when I’ve traveled every week for 3-4 months straight, and a year or two when there was maybe 6 weeks in those years that I <em>didn’t</em> travel. So this last gig, where I had only one business trip, down to Miami in May, was a huge change in my standard operating procedure.&nbsp;</li><li>I’ve talked in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/07/17/podcast-165-first-post-lockdown-flight-when-does-business-travel-come-back/\">past</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/06/15/podcast-176-why-business-travel-is-coming-back-learning-airport-history/\">episodes</a> about this, skeptical of predictions like Bill Gates’ that <a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/17/coronavirus-bill-gates-says-more-than-50percent-of-business-travel-will-disappear-long-term.html\">50% of business travel will go away</a>. I was going through the TravelCommons archives, cleaning up show notes and the like, and found an <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2008/12/23/podcast-70-packing-a-suit-videoconference-over-travel-watching-winter-flight-delays/\">episode from December 2008</a> where I was answering listener questions about why I travel for in-person meetings instead of video conference; when tech analysts were saying it was “on the brink of widespread adoption.” I’m nothing if not consistent.</li><li>Of course, it’s difficult to do in-person meetings when people are still working from home; it would be a bit awkward doing a sales call around someone’s kitchen table, having to project the PowerPoint deck on their white tile backsplash. I gotta think you’d lose a bullet point or two in the grout lines.</li><li>But by fits and starts, slowed by the Delta variant, people are heading back into their offices and international travel barriers are dropping. At this CIO gig, one colleague, the global head of operations, lived in the UK and so couldn’t get into the US to meet with his staff at some newly acquired plants. He was doing daily video calls, but after a couple of months, he’d made all the progress he could and needed to physically meet with these people. So when Canada dropped their travel ban, he flew from London to Toronto, holed up in a hotel room, worked through Canada’s 14-day quarantine, and then drove across the US border at Buffalo and caught a domestic flight to Chicago. It’s just one data point, but I’m grabbing on and holding tight, hoping to tell Bill Gates “Told you so!”</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #179</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_179.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #179 — High-Tech Airport Lines; Business Travel Still Missing','','inherit','closed','closed','','3831-revision-v1','','','2021-09-30 09:58:41','2021-09-30 14:58:41','',3831,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3934',0,'revision','',0),
(3935,1,'2021-09-30 12:31:31','2021-09-30 17:31:31','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":2404} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/CoeazhcUMAAhyQN-300x251.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2404\"/><figcaption>This guy looks familiar...</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It\'s been a tough month for travel. Not quite to Book of Job-level torment, but two of this month\'s three trips spiraled into head-shaking metaphysical “What the hell is going on here” questioning of my decision to get out of bed that morning. I walk through the travel gods\' fun and games, as well as some new data on regional jet delays and buying a new travel bag.  All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_150.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #150: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, as the weather begins to stagger unsteadily toward Spring -- 74 degrees on Monday, 5.3 inches of snow (thundersnow!) on Sunday, then back up into the 70’s two days later. &nbsp;April 14 -- over 5 inches of snow, over 1,000 flights cancelled. A nasty surprise for folks who thought it would be safe to connect through ORD, but just validates a Chicago truism -- don’t put the snow gear away until after Tax Day. Yup, welcome to the Midwest.</li><li>Have done a <em>chunk</em> of travel -- there’s a unit of measure for you -- since the last episode. A 2-day trip that hit 4 airports in the first day -- Chicago-Midway, Las Vegas, Houston-Hobby, and Nashville. The next week, I squoze in a trip to a new airport - State College, PA -- before heading out on vacation to Brittany, France. The squeeze wasn’t too tight -- flew back from State College on Weds night and left on vacation Thursday night -- but I did scout out a couple of backups in case the United Express regional jet went AWOL; a hour or so drive down to Harrisburg, a couple hour drive over to Pittsburgh. Luckily, I didn’t need them. United Express was having a good day, and therefore, so did I.</li><li>The next day’s flight to Paris on SAS by way of Stockholm went fine. We got in on time, found the left luggage lockers, and then the express train into the city all without much hassle. Arlanda Airport is comfortably sized and has good signage. The only real problem was that we got into center city Stockholm too early -- around 8:30am -- and nothing was really open. So we coffee’d up at one place, had some cardamom pastries at another, and generally puttered around until things started opening up an hour or so later. It was a sunny, if brisk, day, so walking around the Gamla Stan and Sodermalm was nice. </li><li>I always chuckle a bit when going through De Gaulle Airport, passing through the tangle of flat escalator walkway tubes that bridge the levels and open center of Terminal 1. The walkways are a bit awkward with wheeled luggage -- going down and then up. An airport porter in front of us let a wheelchair go free on the downhill span -- took a moment for it to register that it was empty -- then it rolled back to him on the uphill. No knock against him; it was the end of the day.</li><li>The next day, we caught the train out to Brittany, to Saint Malo. We walked out of the train station and across the street to Europcar for what was one of the easiest rental car pick-ups I’ve ever had in Europe. No scare-tactic insurance upselling -- just a look at my driver’s license and a quick pointer to where I could find the car in the train station parking lot. Five minutes, max. And dropping off the car a week later at Rennes train station? Absolutely the easiest rental drop-off -- gave the guy the keys and a receipt showing I’d filled up the car and I was done. No waiting for him to go inspect the car, just a handshake and “Have a good day”. </li><li>The next day wasn’t near as carefree, but we’ll talk about that in a few minutes.</li><li> Bridge Music — <em>Countryside Summer Joyride</em> by Kara Square (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mindmapthat/56281 Ft: Javolenus</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I’ve been not-quite-hating on, but certainly have been down on regional jets for quite some time on this podcast. Given a choice, I recommend people avoid them -- not because of their size, but their schedule dependability. Because the regional airlines’ model is to bounce a plane from place to place rather than route through hubs, they never recover from weather or mechanical delays. Those delays just cascade through the rest of the day. Now there often aren’t alternatives. Hence my earlier comment about needing backup plans for my regional jet flight home from State College. My flight was at the end of the day, the most vulnerable time to delays. Given my personal experience, &nbsp;I wasn’t surprised to read that US Dept of Transportation data showed that regional flights were 2-4 times more likely to be cancelled than mainline flights. The Chicago Tribune dug into the DOT data and found flights operated by Delta’s regional partners were 4 times more likely to be canceled than flights operated by Delta, while American Eagle and United Express were 2-3 times more likely to cancel flights than their mainline partners. You can’t avoid regional jets when going to places like State College or Charlottesville, VA or Appleton, WI -- but you can when flying to LGA or DFW or MSY. And in those cases, unless those RJ flights have exactly the schedule I need, I’ll suffer a bit of inconvenience for a lot more dependability.</li><li>On our travels through Brittany earlier this month, I found that we were getting a large number of “card declined” messages when trying to use our Chase Sapphire Visa card -- at gas stations, stores, and in Paris when I tried to use my Uber app. Now this isn’t a new card -- we’ve had it for over 5 years -- and it’s not the first time we’ve used it on travels in Europe. But Chase fraud algorithm seems more sensitive, throwing more false positives, and no way to update things. On the way out of Brest, I pulled into a Total gas station to fill up on our way to the Crozon peninsula. We’d be there for a couple of days of hiking and I wasn’t sure many gas stations we’d see (turned out that I didn’t need to worry). I pull up to a pump, tap the Chase Visa, get a decline. Insert the card into the reader; get another decline. I do the same drill with my Citi MasterCard with the same result. However, I immediately get a fraud alert from Citi. I hit the big green “Yes” button on the e-mail -- as in, “Yes, I do recognize this charge” -- get an “all clear” response back, tap my Citi card again and fill up my tank. All this time, we get nothing from Chase. I open the Chase app on my phone; nothing there either. Same thing in Paris when I needed an Uber fast (more on that in a bit). Chase declined, but my Amex Platinum card went through. For me, it was just annoying; I always carry a full set of cards when traveling -- a Visa and a MasterCard from different banks, and an Amex -- because single points of failure when traveling are bad -- I don’t want to be left hanging if one bank or one card processor drops their network or loses a data center. Oh, and I also carry cash. But, as we’ve <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"talked (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/02/10/podcast-148-travel-potpourri-for-200-alex/\" target=\"_blank\">talked</a> <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"about (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/12/17/podcast-147-holiday-travel-tips-notes-from-santa-fe/\" target=\"_blank\">about</a> <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"before (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\" target=\"_blank\">before</a>, that’s ‘cause I’m old-school.</li><li>Brittany was a touring vacation, so we were moving every couple of days or so -- packing, unpacking, repacking. During one of those repacking sessions, maybe in Morgat on the Crozon peninsula -- I couldn’t find my Bose headphone case, which had my Bose headphones, in my backpack -- and I didn’t remember pulling out. Where the hell did they go, I asked myself. I pull everything out of my backpack and -- oh, there they are; they had slipped behind my camera bag in the bottom of my backpack. How did I lose my headphones in my backpack, you may ask -- and rightfully so because it really sounds stupid. Probably the same reason I lost a Google tablet in there a few years back -- too much black. The Bose case is black, the interior of Timbuk 2 backpack is black, my eyes aren’t as good as they used to be… I’d been toying around with getting a new bag, more of a messenger style -- that I could sling over one shoulder and with a bit better waterproofing. And, after this little panic drill, a non-black interior. I ended up getting a small Timbuk 2 Classic messenger bag from the Outlet section of REI.com for $50. It’s not too big -- holds my 11-inch MacBook Air, a couple of notebooks, an umbrella -- and has a bright yellow interior. I haven’t lost anything in it yet -- but I don’t trust myself. Maybe I need to get, like a white umbrella, and spray paint my Bose case red. I love black, but maybe I’ve taken that color palette a bit too far.</li><li>And if you have any travel rants, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. &nbsp;The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"mpeacock (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Facebook page (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Facebook page</a> or our Instagram account at <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\" (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Travelcommons</a> -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li> Bridge Music —  <em>Jester of the Golden Apocalypse</em> by Super_Sigil (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Super_Sigil/34750 </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Travel Interruptus</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A Greek tragedy in three acts where the travel gods toy with our anti-hero for fun and entertainment</li><li>OK, maybe not quite that bad, not quite Book of Job-level torment, but two out of the three trips I’ve taken in the past month spiraled into head-shaking metaphysical “What the hell is going on here” questioning of my decision to get out of bed that morning.</li><li><em>Act 1</em> - My Midway-Vegas-Nashville travel day. This trip didn’t start out to be stupid. It started as an easy day trip to downtown Nashville for a sales call. So many people are abandoning Chicago for Nashville, Southwest has non-stop flights every 90 minutes, so no problem with flight times. That works out fine -- until someone books a sales call the prior afternoon -- in Las Vegas. Hmmm, how do I get from Vegas after 4pm Pacific to Nashville in time for a meeting the next morning Central time? Southwest is about the only choice, connecting through either Denver or Houston. I go for the more direct routing through Denver -- my first mistake.</li><li>Because, as it turned out, the March “bomb cyclone” -- what the Weather Channel helpfully named “Winter Storm Ulmer” (who or what is an Ulmer?) -- was going to shut down DIA that day with 80 mph winds. I got an e-mail from Southwest the day before canceling my connection through Denver -- understandable -- but nothing else, no rebooking, just “We’re leaving you in Vegas” -- which I’ve found tends to be Southwest’s MO -- pleasantly unhelpful. Especially when the website errored out when I tried to find an alternate routing to Nashville, and the automated message answering their 800 number was estimating 80-some minute hold times. After about 45 minutes, between banging on the website, our corporate Concur app, and tweeting at their customer service, I managed to get re-routed through Houston, safely south of the bomb cyclone.</li><li>The next morning, I show up at the gate at Midway to find my 8am flight to Vegas delayed by 2 hours -- mechanical on the plane here meant they had to bring in a new plane and crew from somewhere else. Annoying, but not critical; I’d get into Vegas at noon for a 2pm meeting. I get another coffee, log into the Boingo hotspot and clear some emails. 9:40, we line up and board. And wait. Then the captain keys the mike, pauses (never a good sign) and then starts talking - he didn’t have time to do the walkaround before we boarded because they came in late. When they did, they noticed a problem with the front strut. Maintenance is looking at it, don’t know if they can fix it, but they need everyone off the plane. So we deplane for what is now my 2nd maintenance delay. We idle around the gate area. 10:30 and nothing. I start looking at my watch. If I’m don’t get into Vegas by 1pm, there won’t be enough time to get to my 2pm meeting, and so I shouldn’t get on the plane. Then they start to re-board us. What time will we get in? 12:20. OK, I’ll board. We all get back on -- and for the most part retaking the seats we had, in spite of Southwest’s open seating. We are creatures of habit. I’m surprised no one moo’d. We’re all on, and we wait. The mike keys. There’s a slight moan rather than a moo from the cabin. We’re waiting on the paperwork. It’s always paperwork. I’m looking at my watch. It’s past 11am Central and the door is still open. A 4-hour flight means we’re now coming up against that 1pm Pacific arrive time. Do I stay on the plane? A couple minutes more and my decision is made for me; they close the door. I lean back, put on my headphones and hope for no headwinds. We get to the gate at 1:02pm. Vegas is always a maze; there’s no straight walkways; they always want to vector you through a thicket of slot machines. I head to the cab rank -- shorter walk and no waiting -- and I get a guy with a heavy foot. I’m at the client 5 minutes before the meeting. That was a bit too close.</li><li>My return trip to the airport and the flight to Houston are uneventful, not even any turbulence as we skirt that bomb cyclone. We get into Hobby maybe even a bit early. I grab a beer and then head over to the gate. They call boarding - just half the A group -- 1-30 -- because that’s all there is on this late flight to Nashville. The gate agent scans the boarding passes, saying “You’re in Row 3, you’re in Row 4, you’re in Row 5….” &nbsp;We get all get in our separate rows, and then wait. The captain keys the mike, pauses, and then says “This plane had a bird strike on the nose on landing. There’s no damage, but Maintenance has to pull the nose cone off for a visual inspection. It’ll take about an hour, so you’re free to get off the plane.” But by now, everything in the airport was closed. “My 3rd maintenance delay of the day. Unbelievable!” I tweet out in frustrustration. Except that iPhone autocorrect turned “delay” into “deejay”. Hilary Baumann pointed it out with a nice emoji-laden tweet that gave me a good chuckle. I finally got to my Nashville hotel around 1:30 in the morning. I looked at the time, shook my head, and went to bed.</li><li> Bridge Music —  South Texas Cowboy Blues by texasradiofish (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/texasradiofish/52030 Ft: unreal_dm, ElRon XChile</li><li><em>Act 2</em> - A couple of weeks later, on Sunday in Rennes, France. We wheeled our luggage the 2 blocks from our AirBnB to Rennes train station for the TGV to CDG. We stood with everyone else, looking up at the departure board waiting for the track to be posted. Departure time came closer and still no track -- not a good sign. The crowd grew larger. There was an announcement in French and a scrolling message at the bottom of the departure screen. Irene banged it into Google Translate. The gist of it -- a bomb threat had been phoned into SCNF, the train company, and all the trains in and out of Paris were halted. Given France’s recent history with terrorism, it was a reasonable response, but still…. They finally start posting delay times -- 40 mins, then over an hour, but then it shrinks back. I pull up Google Maps. The drive to CDG is showing about the same time as the train, but we’d be in control of our own destiny. I walk down to the rental car offices. It’s Sunday morning; they’re all closed. They won’t open until the afternoon; too late for us to drive and make our flights. </li><li>Time continues to tick by, past the departure time for our flight. I call United -- any other options? I get a phenomenally helpful agent. I can hear the keystrokes. Nothing else today Sunday, nor tomorrow, Monday. I wasn’t surprised about nothing available today, but was about the next day -- until I got a text from Andrew. He was on this morning’s United flight to Chicago which just cancelled for a hydraulic problem and rebooked on tomorrow’s flight -- which explains the lack of seats for us. I took the Tuesday seats. Now would we get to CDG in time for Claire’s EasyJet flight to Edinburgh so she can make class the next day. The trains finally start moving. We head down and board our train. And then wait, and wait some &nbsp;more. And then the train starts moving. I look at my watch. I think Claire will be OK. </li><li>Until we come to a stop in the middle of a rail yard. I watch a couple of guys walk past our car -- maybe a visual inspection? After a bit, we start moving -- backwards. The conductor keys the mike, and makes an announcement in rapid French that we can’t pick up. I open Google Maps. I see we’re off to the east of Paris but can’t tell if we’re moving in the right direction. Until we pull into the next station -- it’s for EuroDisney. I find our train route on the SCNF website and see this is one of the stops en route to CDG, so we’re going in the right direction. We get to CDG by 3pm, which means Claire can make her flight. Andrew comes over from the Airport Hilton, where United is putting him up for the night, and we head down to Paris for another dinner together. There are, after all, worse cities to have to spend an extra day or two.</li><li> Bridge Music —  <em>Parisian </em>Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)<br> Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License<br> http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ </li><li><em>Act 3</em> - Tuesday morning, Paris. Our forced layover in Paris yesterday had been a beautiful day,&nbsp;sunny and warm. We walked through the Marais, south across Ile de la Cite, taking the obligatory selfie in front of Notre Dame that we pulled out at looked at two weeks later during the news coverage of the fire, and then rattled around the Latin Quarter looking for a place with outdoor seating and a nice rosé. This morning, though, not so beautiful. It was dumping rain. So rather than trundle our luggage 10 min to the Metro stop, I decide to order an Uber -- which takes a try or two when Chase declines my Visa again; and I switch over to Amex. A nice black Mercedes picks us up and heads for Les Halles -- or at least tries to. The traffic is a crawl at best. I watch our buffer time tick away and we’re not &nbsp;getting any closer. After sitting through a couple of traffic light cycles without clearing the intersection, we grab our bags and make for Les Halles on foot. We get there, a bit wet. We’re able to skip the ticket booth line; I have enough euros for the self-service machine, because it’s that or a chip-&amp;-pin card we don’t have. We get on the train. I look at my watch - we should have enough time to check our bags (bringing back some liquids), clear security, and get to the gate without too much more agita.</li><li>Until the train slows to a stop between stops. The conductor keys the mike, and makes an announcement in rapid French. I look at the other passengers. They don’t seem too agitated. I figure it’s some congestion on the track ahead. And, sure enough, we start moving after a couple of minutes. But at the next stop, the train doors stay open and a train employee come on, saying in French <em>and</em> English -- everyone has to get off, catch a bus outside the station to another station, then catch a different train to the airport. We head down the bus stop. There’s no one there to help; just a couple hundred people milling around.</li><li>Now I’m worried. We have no time to figure this out. The taxi stand is mobbed, I fire up Uber - 19-minute wait. Lyft? They’re not in Paris. I google to find taxi company but before I call, I try Uber one more time -- a 5-minute wait for a €60 fare. I hit the order button -- and then again after I swap over to Amex. €60 for a 15-minute ride to CDG is tough, but it’s cheaper than another night in a hotel. We get to the United desk 2 minutes before luggage check closes for our flight. The agent radioed down, checked in our bags, and then gave us the CDG version of Fast Track, so we could sidestep the long passport control and security lines. We board, sit down, but don’t really settle in until the plane leaves the ground. And when we’re finally at ORD, standing by the luggage carousel, our bags are the first ones to come out.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #150</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_150.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<p><!--EndFragment--></p>\n<p></p>','Podcast #150 — Travel Interruptus','','inherit','closed','closed','','2402-revision-v1','','','2021-09-30 12:31:31','2021-09-30 17:31:31','',2402,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3935',0,'revision','',0),
(3936,1,'2021-09-30 12:32:27','2021-09-30 17:32:27','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\">\n[caption id=\"attachment_2439\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/oysters_and_evian_bottles.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-2439 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/oysters_and_evian_bottles-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Cancale Oysters with a nice Evian Sancerre[/caption]\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p>Squeezing in another episode before moving the TravelCommons studios, we talk with <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mylaocoon\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Candid Wueest</span></a> of Symantec about websites that leak traveler data and what we can do to protect ourselves. I talk about yet more frustration with the <a href=\"http://avios.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Avios</a> frequent flyer program, while a listener writes in about his great experience with <a href=\"https://www.getfreebird.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Freebird</a>, a new flight rebooking service. I wrap up talking about great street food we had while touring Brittany, France last month. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_151.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #151: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, for the last time…. Not the last time for TravelCommons, just the last time for the studios “outside of Chicago”. We’re picking up stakes and moving about 20 miles east-northeast to Chicago’s Lakeview neighborhood. Hence the reason for the short-cycle on this episode. We’ll be breaking down and packing up the studio and production bay next week and probably won’t have everything reassembled until the end of the month. The recording isn’t really the issue -- I could always go back to my roots and find a spare bathroom to record in. It’s more about the production. I’m not sure I want to shrink my workflow down from a beefy dual 22-inch monitor Windows 10 mini-tower rig to my 2014 vintage 11-inch MacBook Air.</li><li>Being consumed by the move logistics vortex also means I haven’t done any real travel in the 2 weeks since the last episode -- but, given my most recent travel experiences, as laid out in last episode’s <em>Travel Interruptus</em> epic, I’ve appreciated the break. Especially when yet another yet another April snowstorm that blew up 700 flights last weekend. Instead, I’ve been wrestling once again with Avios -- the British Airways, Iberia, and now Aer Lingus frequent flyer program -- trying to book a Chicago-Dublin-Edinburgh Aer Lingus itinerary for my daughter’s graduation from University of St Andrews next month. I’ve been pretty <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/08/26/podcast-116-traveling-thru-japan-luggage-trends/\">vocal</a> about my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">challenges</a> with Avios over the years. In this go-around, the first wackiness was just trying to use the Avios website. To search for flights, you need to log in with your BA, Iberia, or Aer Lingus credentials. I try with all three; and fail with all three. Seems that the passwords given out by BA and Iberia don’t meet Avios’ security rules, so they fail. I assumed the username for my Aer Lingus account was my email address and the password seemed strong enough, but that kept failing too. Finally, after digging around my Aer Lingus profile, I found a separate username, which I’d never seen or used before, and <em>that</em> worked. Finally through the gate and onto the second wackiness -- the difference between the value of an Avios point on the Aer Lingus and Avios web sites. The award offers on both sites were points + cash. Taking the “market rate” for the ticket (pulled from Expedia), subtracting out the required cash payment, and dividing by the number of required Avios points gives the value of the Avios point for that award offer. My rule of thumb is -- get at least 2 cents/point or pay cash. The Aer Lingus site valued an Avios point at 0.7 cents while the Avios site hit my 2-cent minimum. I couldn’t quite understand that 65% difference, but I booked our tickets on the wonkier Avios site before it went away. If I remember anything from my University of Chicago business school courses, it’s that markets are efficient; 65% price differences don’t last forever. Though in this case, that difference may linger because the Avios website makes it so damn hard to find. </li><li>Bridge Music — <em>Lakeside Jam</em> by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/55998 </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Veteran TravelCommons listener Mika Pyyhkala sent in a note this week talking about his great experience with a flight rebooking service, <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Freebird (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"http://getfreebird.com\" target=\"_blank\">Freebird</a>. Mika writes:<ul><li>I was flying with a companion from (Wichita) ICT-STL and STL-DTW. &nbsp;Just as the plane was descending to DTW, I received text messages from WN and Freebird that STL-DTW on WN had been cancelled. &nbsp;Freebird then manually advised that the only flight for that day was a DL STL-DTW, and they were going to book it in case I wanted it; if they waited longer there might not be enough time to issue the new ticket on Delta through their travel agent. &nbsp;They just asked me to confirm that I in fact wanted the Delta ticket.  </li><li>I confirmed we wanted the 2 Delta tickets, and by the time the door opened in STL we had a confirmation number to check in for the Delta flight leaving in 47 minutes. We got seats together on the Delta flight that were assigned by the Freebird process, and they even gave us free drinks!</li><li>I think we actually arrived in DTW a few minutes earlier than we were scheduled on the original flight, and it made for a great travel story and adventure! &nbsp;This was my first time using Freebird as well!</li><li>It costs $19 to protect a one way trip per traveler. &nbsp;It’s simple to work with them: unlike insurance, there are no claim forms, long waits, or papers to sign</li></ul></li><li>Mika, thanks for this. I hadn’t heard of Freebird before Mika’s note. Hitting their website, they’re selling their service to companies, travel agencies, and to individual travelers. Clicking through to a TechCrunch article about them, it says they’re also talking to Amex and Citibank about including Freebird as a credit card benefit. The article quotes the CEO, Ethan Bernstein - “It’s funny what happens when people deal with uncertainty; uncertainty is the worst. As soon you give people information, human support and technology to help them solve their problems, they experience the event so much differently.” &nbsp;Which is exactly right. Certainty lets you plan; uncertainty just leaves you to stew… and drink at the airport bar… and eat bad airport food… and bitch Tweet. Yup, uncertainty leads to lots of bad things</li><li>One more-fun-than-necessarily-good thing on last month’s trip was getting to try out an alpha version of a new augmented reality feature for Google Maps. I used it first in Stockholm; we got off the Arlanda Express at the Central Train station and wanted make our way over to the <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Östermalms Saluhall (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.ostermalmshallen.se/en/\" target=\"_blank\">Östermalms Saluhall</a> for lunch. When I chose “Walking” as our transport mode, a “Start AR” button showed up next to the usual button to start the directions. With AR, I’d hold my phone up, the display would use the camera to show the streetscape in front of me with the &nbsp;directions -- street names, arrows -- overlaid on the real-time image. I thought it was a nice add; reduced any ambiguity about where the next turn was. One interesting feature -- when I started walking, the screen dimmed and a message popped up telling me to stop looking at the phone and look straight ahead. All in all, it’s kinda fun. At least I thought so; Andrew and Irene seemed much less impressed. It worked very well for what was billed as an alpha product. It’ll be interesting to see how it develops, and how fast Google rolls it out.</li><li>But even without a broader AR roll-out, Google Maps seems on track to become the next “<a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"super app (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://skift.com/2019/04/16/google-maps-is-ready-to-transform-the-world-of-superapps-a-skift-deep-dive/\" target=\"_blank\">super app</a>” -- sorta the Western counterpart to China’s WeChat -- the first “super app”, a Swiss Army Knife-kind of “it does everything” app. Now Google Maps isn’t to that level -- yet -- but it is growing. It started as a mapping app, then added driving directions, then ride share -- showing Uber and Lyft prices, then public transit directions with real-time arrival times, replacing the core use case for apps like Transit. Then the “Explore Nearby” became more prominent -- which, for me, has supplanted Yelp when looking for a restaurant because it’s so much more convenient, and with deep links to OpenTable for reservations; and for nearby hotels, direct booking links to Expedia and Booking.com. I wasn’t surprised when I saw a stat that those “Near Me” searches grew 150 percent the last year. I’m not quite sure what I think about this -- loving a free service that keeps becoming more valuable vs. becoming more enslaved to the Google overlords. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/08/27/podcast-132-travel-apps-on-my-phone/\">episode #132</a>, I listed all the travel apps on my smartphone, and Google Maps was the most important -- “Indeed, it’s the only travel app with its own screen real estate rather than sharing space in the Travel folder,” I said. And it only keeps getting more indispensable.</li><li>Thinking back to our last day in Paris when both Ubers that we ordered were nice black Mercedes, I couldn’t help thinking how the quality of US Uber and Lyft vehicles has slipped. I remember when I started using Uber in 4-5 years ago, the cars were pristine. I remember working in Baltimore one summer; I was more than happy to wait 5 minutes for an Uber rather than take one of the cabs waiting at the stand right outside the building I was in. Those cabs were so beat up, so full of trash, and most of the time, without working air conditioning. Today, cabs haven’t gotten much cleaner, but Uber and Lyft seem to be lowering their standards. I dunno if it’s because of falling unemployment rates or trying to keep up with growth or squeezing driver pay to improve their post-IPO margins -- or all of the above -- but I’m seeing a real drop in quality.</li><li>Long-time TravelCommons listeners will recall that I’ve spent a lot of time in New Orleans airport and other than serving beer in go cups French Quarter-style so you can walk around the terminal with it, there’s not much good to say about it. Especially with regards to food and restaurants. For such a great food town to have such mediocre airport concessions has always been beyond me. But then again, the original terminal was built in 1959, and then expanded in the mid-70’s and mid-90’s. The new $1 billion replacement terminal was originally scheduled to open last year during New Orleans’ tricentennial, but that then slipped to February of this year, then to May, and now to a “to be determined” date sometime in the fall. The restaurant selection is supposed to be much better but I hope they don’t change that beer policy though. One time, waiting out yet another thunderstorm delay, I’d bought a beer and was standing by the gate drinking it because the bar was full. American called boarding and I walked up to the gate. The agent stopped me -- “You can drink that beer anywhere in the airport -- except on the jetway.” I looked down; I’d forgotten that I was still carrying that beer. I stepped to the side, chugged it, and then got on the plane. Felt like a very New Orleans thing to do.</li><li>And if you have any travel rants, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. &nbsp;The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Facebook page</a> or our Instagram account at <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Travelcommons</a> -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music —  <em>A Thousand And None</em> by Speck (c) copyright 2018 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/speck/57256 Ft: Mr_Yesterday</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Traveler Data Leaks</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Interview with <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mylaocoon\">Candid Wueest</a>, Principal Threat Researcher at Symantec and author of a blog post titled <a href=\"https://www.symantec.com/blogs/threat-intelligence/hotel-websites-leak-guest-data\"><em>Two in Three Hotel Websites Leak Guest Booking Details and Allow Access to Personal Data</em></a></li><li>Bridge Music —  <em>dazed </em>by Jeris (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/VJ_Memes/39456 Ft: airtone</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Brittany Street Food</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I’ll write a proper “Road Trip” post about our Brittany trip later this spring, after we get settled in the new digs, but after streaming a few episodes of Netflix’s “Street Food” series, I started thinking about some of the Breton street food we enjoyed while touring last month. If you’ve seen any of the Netflix series, you know that it’s more about the vendors than the food. But my French trails off after “oui,” “non,” “merci,” and “S\'il vous plaît” so I wasn’t able to get much of the vendor’s life stories. So this will be all about the food.</li><li>The first place we stayed was <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancale\">Cancale</a>, and we went there for one reason - oysters. Like people have been doing for 300-some odd years. When the tide is out, you can see miles of oyster beds with big farm tractors moving through the rows, hauling out trailers of oysters. Lining the ramp where the tractors drive up out of the beds is a little oyster market -- 8 stalls selling oysters fresh from the beds for €5-6/dozen. After adding another couple of euros for shucking, a half lemon and the use of a plastic platter, we’d have our afternoon snack -- sitting on the sea wall by the market, slurping through a couple dozen very briny oysters while watching the tractors work, and then pitching the empty shells back onto the beach for the seagulls to pick through. Our first afternoon, we only had a couple of cans of beer in our jacket pocket. The next couple of afternoons, we’d pour a nice white wine into some empty Evian bottles (Claire and I preferred a Sancerre) and make sure we had a good supply of wet wipes. We didn’t miss an afternoon on that sea wall while in Cancale.</li><li>Buckwheat is a big thing in Brittany. It’s been grown in Brittany for half a millennium or more, and for almost that long, it seems, has been turned into a <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galette\">galette</a>. a buckwheat crêpe. But a crêpe in form and shape only. Instead of a soft white wheat flour crêpe filled with jam or Nutella, the galette is crisper/firmer and savory. Fine on its own smeared with Breton butter, or with egg and cheese and ham inside. We got into Concarneau, on the southwest coast of Brittany about an hour before the weekly Friday outdoor market closed. &nbsp;I counted a half-dozen galette trucks. We walked up to the closest one. The cook was finishing up what looked like a weekend’s worth of galettes for the person in front of us -- flipping them, then pulling them off two hot metal disks, buttering them, and adding them to the stack. It was Friday in Lent, so I went for the egg, onion, and cheese galette. The creaminess of the cheese played nicely against the nutty graininess of the buckwheat.</li><li>The next day we drove to Rennes, our last stop in Brittany. We dropped the rental car at the train station and took the subway to Place des Lices for the huge Saturday market. We walked down from the subway station, through the fruit and vegetable stands lining the street -- beautiful stuff, but we’re leaving the next day, so we’re not doing a lot of green grocery shopping. There, between the two market halls, is a collection of food trucks; about 70% of them selling what we were looking for -- <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galette-saucisse\">galette-saucisse</a> -- the classic Breton street food that is pretty much what the straight translation from French to English suggests -- a sausage in a galette. Kinda like a Breton hot dog, it’s a cooked pork sausage wrapped in a cool galette, maybe with some grilled onions and dijon mustard added. There were lines tailing back from all the trucks serving these. A local guy pointed one truck out to Irene -- “They’re the best”, he said. She and Claire stood in queue while Andrew and I searched for drinks. Around the corner, we found a local cider maker; a couple of tables surrounded by crates of cider bottles. Through a mangled bit of Franglais, we bought a bottle of dry cider that had stayed cool in the shade and four cups, and got back to the food truck line just in time to be handed my galette-saucisse. After finishing the sausage and cider, I swung past the cider stand to give him the empty bottle -- kinda in-person recycling. There wasn’t much time to catch up on his life story, but it was a sunny Saturday and he had a full line; looked like he was having a good day.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #151</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_151.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<p><!--EndFragment--></p>\n<p></p>','Podcast #151 — Traveler Data Leaks; Brittany Street Food','','inherit','closed','closed','','2436-revision-v1','','','2021-09-30 12:32:27','2021-09-30 17:32:27','',2436,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3936',0,'revision','',0),
(3937,1,'2021-09-30 12:33:11','2021-09-30 17:33:11','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\">\n<p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/IMG_0449.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2482 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/IMG_0449-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a></p>\n<figcaption>Latest in Sustainable Food Delivery </figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p>Moving the TravelCommons studios kept me mostly off the road this month except for a quick trip to Nashville, but staying out of restaurants has helped me finally drop the last bit of Christmas weight. We talk about the \"earn and burn\" strategy for frequent travel awards; answer a listener\'s question on how to keep from being overwhelmed when arriving in a new city, and new restaurant trends from the floor of the National Restaurant Association\'s big show. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_152.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #152: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the new TravelCommons studios <em>in</em> Chicago, IL. The move went surprisingly smoothly -- nothing lost, nothing destroyed on the 20-mile trip in from the western suburbs. Have the production bay rebuilt and now trying out the new studio set-up, so we’ll see how this sounds. </li><li>Which also means I haven’t done much travel since the last episode; just a quick trip last week down to Nashville. But the move downtown meant I had to rethink some of my travel patterns -- not how to get to and from Nashville, but how to get to and from Chicago Midway airport. We’ve said before in many episodes, most (all?) frequent travelers are all about optimizing the standard parts of their journey -- what’s the most efficient way to get to the airport, when to leave -- optimizing the trade-off between sleep and getting to the gate when status pre-boarding is announced. In the old digs, I had a pretty predictable 25-30 minute drive to either O’Hare or Midway, and long-term relationship with a dependable driver. Which meant answering the “when do I need leave for the airport” question was a mindless exercise -- subtract 90 minutes from the departure time and send a text to my guy the night before. But now it’s a kinda predictable 60-minute public transit ride or a very unpredictable 35-60-minute Uber/Lyft ride with even more unpredictable wait times and surge pricing, especially when catching a morning flight. Actually, for this 3-day trip, I think it would’ve been cheaper to drive and park, even with the City of Chicago’s latest parking taxes.</li><li>The Southwest flights between Midway and Nashville were a bit odd because the pilots kept everyone in their seats for the entire flight due to “expected turbulence” - of which there was absolutely none. Though I thought it was interesting that the pilot on our return trip said “We may ask our flight attendants to remain seated so we can fly faster and pick up some time.” It’s an hour-and-20-minute flight, so not too long to stay seated as long as you didn’t drop a couple of beers at the bar right before boarding. But it also meant I didn’t get a chance to use some of the free drink coupons Southwest sent me last month. I should’ve followed the advice of a Nashville Airport billboard that was posted right above the Southwest gate -- “Before Wheels Up, Whiskey up.”</li><li>Bridge Music — &nbsp;<em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/content/Per/Per_-_DLDN_Instrumental.mp3\" target=\"_blank\">DLDN Instrumental</a></em>&nbsp;by St Paul</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Because the trip to Nashville was personal travel, I used award points where I could -- Hyatt for our hotel and Hertz for the rental car. The only reason I didn’t use Southwest points was because I was burning off a $100 customer satisfaction certificate Southwest sent me as comp for one of their 3 delayed flights I talked about in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/podcast-150-travel-interruptus/\">Travel Interruptus episode</a> a couple of months back. We’ve talked about how to use awards many times over the years. And while the tactics may change a bit, my overall strategy has been pretty consistent -- use them rather than save them, or “earn and burn” as some folks say. I know a lot of travelers who save them -- hoard them -- thinking of them as their travel savings account -- or perhaps a badge of honor -- “I have 2 million American Airline points” to which I think (and try not to say) “that are going to get you a lot less the longer you keep holding them”. Because &nbsp;rather than increasing in value by earning interest, they can suddenly decrease in value when United or BA or Marriott or, a couple of weeks ago, Hertz decide to redo their awards charts. And, for all the luvvy words in those announcements about “increasing the value” of their programs, I’ve never seen one of those changes <em>increase</em> the value of the points. At the end of May, Hertz published -- without any warning or announcement -- a new award chart that increased the point cost for daily and weekly rentals by 11-36 percent. Back in March, Marriott added a new top hotel category with a 42% higher per-night award cost -- 85,000 points a night for the properties that moved into the new Category 8 vs. 60,000 points when they were in 7. And most of the properties that got that 42% bump were resort properties -- the ones you’d most likely want to use your points on. In November, United will eliminate their award charts altogether, following Delta and Southwest in moving to dynamic pricing. Pick your slogan - “Earn and burn”; “Use ‘em or lose ‘em”. Though I think I like “you deserve a break today” better. Plan a vacation and burn your points before the companies do.</li><li>Even though &nbsp;I haven’t traveled much since <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/podcast-151-traveler-data-leaks-brittany-street-food/\">the last episode</a>, I’ve still been thinking a lot about travel - specifically, laying out our trip at the back half of this month -- a week in Ireland and then heading over to Scotland for Claire’s graduation from Univ of St Andrews. I talked in the last episode about wrestling with the Avios website to book our flights, but with that done, I got consumed by packing and moving and unpacking, and sorta lost track of the other reservations that we needed for our week in Ireland. That insight landed on me pretty hard the Tuesday after Memorial Day when I looked at my calendar and started seeing June dates. I got nothing -- no car, no places to sleep. And it’s not like the end of June is low season in Ireland. Back in March, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/19/podcast-149-dining-single-airlines-need-to-tell-us-more/\">episode 149</a>, I talked about how we dug deep when planning our spring break trip to Brittany -- buying guidebooks, scouring web sites, .... But we had never been there before. My planning for Ireland is a lot more impromptu because, back in the early ‘90’s, I spent a lot of time in Cork for business, and while the country has no doubt changed a lot in the past 20-some odd years, I had a sense of what I wanted to see and a bit of an itinerary in mind -- spend most of the week hubbing out of Galway, going south to County Clare and north to the Connemara, and then heading over to Dublin for the weekend before flying over to Edinburgh. I found myself spending most of my time spelunking through TripAdvisor. First, in the Ireland forum trying to figure out the right rental car strategy. My default strategy -- go with Hertz and leverage my US status if anything goes sideways -- wouldn’t work because Hertz has franchised its name in Ireland to another company. Also, rental car insurance seems to be a bit unique there; using your credit card to cover damages like on my last trip to St Andrews apparently requires a letter from your card issuer and is still a particular hassle at the counter. Then there was the sifting through the Manichean universe of TripAdvisor reviews -- a bipolar split between 5-star “everything is fantabulous” and 1-star “it’s a complete dump and I’m sure the maid spit in my water glass” write-ups. I tend to the more forgiving end of that spectrum. I don’t think you should slam a place for a problem if you didn’t tell them about it and give them a chance to fix it. I also try to have reasonable expectations; you’re not going to get psychic/transcendent levels of service for $100/night. It took me a solid day-and-a-half of screen time, but we now have a bed for each night and a set of wheels to get us there. </li><li>Being off the road for a month has helped me drop a nagging 7-8 lbs that I put on over Christmas and until now -- 5-6 months later -- haven’t been able to drop. We’ve talked in past episodes how easy it is to put weight on when traveling -- eating 3 meals a day in restaurants, or worse on the run in airports, makes portion control difficult, as well as eating more vegetables than fries. But even when you’ve chosen, say, the fish instead of the burger, you’re still someone else’s mercy for how it’s cooked. This light bulb lit for me while watching <em><a href=\"https://www.netflix.com/title/81028317\">The Chef Show</a></em><a href=\"https://www.netflix.com/title/81028317\"> on Netflix</a> over the weekend. It’s a great cooking show. It stars Jon Favreau, director of the Iron Man movies, and Roy Choi, who was one of the first gourmet food truck guys in LA; you’d track them down on Twitter for fantastic Korean-Mexican tacos. These guys worked together on Favreau’s <em>Chef </em>movie a few years back and then got back together for this Netflix series. In the second episode, they’re cooking in Atlanta with Ford Fry at his restaurant, The Optimist. They’re making a Shrimp Toast dish that easily uses over a stick of butter to cook and sauce 5 large shrimp. They joke about the amount of butter and salt restaurants use -- “When they say ‘no salt’...,” Favreau asks Choi, Choi responds “...we add twice as much”. And then they add another half-stick of butter to the shrimp pan. I’m sure it tastes great, but it was an “a-ha” moment -- how, even when you think you’re ordering healthy, the guys in the back are focused on taste, not counting calories for you.</li><li>After our move, I’ve cranked through most of the change of addresses, but haven’t yet done my drivers license. But that one will take a little more work because my current Illinois drivers license isn’t a Real ID license -- it doesn’t have the gold star in the upper right corner. It’s not a problem right now, but in 16 months from now, October 2020, when the TSA says it will fully enforce the 2005 Real ID act -- 15 years later, for real this time, no more extensions or waivers -- and so will no longer accept non-compliant IDs at airports. Getting a Real ID license requires more documentation -- proof of my Social Security Number and two documents with our new address -- like a utility bill or a bank statement, which could be a bit of a challenge now that we get most everything electronically. Now, I could just skip it and use my passport or Global Entry card (if I could find it) instead. But that would mean I’d have to remember to bring one more thing with me to the airport, which is never a best practice. Not critical -- I have 16 months to get around to it -- though probably not something to wait until the last minute on. The Illinois DMV isn’t the quickest, most nimble organization on its best days. I can only imagine what it’ll be like come, say August or September 2020, when it gets crushed with people without passports looking to swap their drivers licenses before the October 1 deadline.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com. </li><li>Bridge Music —  &nbsp;<em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/content/oldDog/oldDog_-_Goodbye_sooner_or_later.mp3\" target=\"_blank\">Goodbye Sooner or Later</a></em>&nbsp;by oldDog    </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Overwhelmed By Travel</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Cristine Danielson, a long-time friend and first time listener, asked me after listening to the last episode “I’d love to hear how you get acclimatized to a new city from the moment you leave the gate. I always feel overwhelmed” &nbsp;That pulled me up short. I had never really thought about it that way. I’ve been traveling heavily coming up on 35 years; I’ve been traveling longer than I haven’t. I started when I was too young and seemingly indestructible to know any better, and now, I have enough travel experience, routines, rhythms &nbsp;-- patterns I called them earlier -- and status that, even when gutting through <em><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/podcast-150-travel-interruptus/\">Travel Interruptus</a></em>, things seem more inconvenient than overwhelming.</li><li>One of the most important things for me is having enough money in my pocket to handle what could come my way. At the end of the last century -- the 1990’s to be exact -- I was doing a lot of bunny hop trips through Europe -- Sweden one day, Switzerland the next, then Germany, then the UK …. This was pre-ATMs, pre-Euro, pre-mobile phones, and for many places in Europe, pre-widespread acceptance of credit cards. Truly the travel dark ages. So, my routine would be to exit Customs, head straight to the Currency Exchange, and cash a $100 American Express travelers check so I would have enough local cash for, say a coffee and a cab. Having that cash in my pocket settled me a bit; maybe gave me a sense of some control, no matter how illusionary it might be. Today, I head straight for an ATM instead of the Currency Exchange and, as I said a few episodes back, make sure I have a “full house” of credit cards -- a Visa and MasterCard from different banks, and an Amex. And it’s not just when I’m out of the country. Even in the US, I’m a lot more comfortable traveling when I have 5 or 10 $20’s in my wallet.</li><li>After my wallet comes my phone. Modern travel is all about the smartphone app -- is my plane on time, where’s the hotel, what train line do I need? My whole <em><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/podcast-150-travel-interruptus/\">Travel Interruptus</a></em> tale would’ve been much worse than “inconvenient” without smartphone connectivity. I wouldn’t have been able to tweet at Southwest customer service, I wouldn’t have been able to find a decent hotel in Paris when the train delays made us miss our flight home, I wouldn’t have been able to book that God-awful expensive Uber that got us to CDG just in time to make our flight. Back in the last century, I would’ve searched for a pay phone, pulled out my phone card, and rung up the travel agency. Even today, if I’m ringing up a travel agency instead of doing it on my own, when was the last time you saw a working pay phone? </li><li>Those are the mechanics of travel, but what about fitting in to the place you’ve arrived? I talked about how business travelers especially tend to float above everything in a “<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2008/04/29/podcast-64-escaping-the-travel-bubble-marks-travel-tips/\">travel bubble</a>”. You walk out -- of the plane with enough status, otherwise baggage claim -- and find someone holding a sign with your name who’s job is to give you a bottle of water and whisk you past the things that might be disconcerting, overwhelming. When that bubble pops, unexpectedly, and drops you into the day-to-day reality of the place you are; that decompression can be overwhelming. </li><li>The closest I came to an overwhelming experience was not arriving in a place, but trying to leave. A colleague and I wrapped up our day in Pune, India and were flying home from Mumbai that night, but on different flights; his leaving a couple of hours earlier than mine. For some reason, the person arranging our trip had us taking cars from Pune to Mumbai instead of flying. Well, OK. It wasn’t a bad drive -- actually a bit scenic -- right until we hit Mumbai traffic. We get to the international terminal, we pull our bags from the trunk, and make our way thru the general chaos of people and push carts and food vendors to the entrance. &nbsp;We both have our itineraries out and ready for inspection. My colleague goes first -- the officer looks at it and waves him through. I hand over my itinerary and follow my colleague. Except I can’t. I can’t go into the terminal; I’m too early. I’m now back out in the chaos with nowhere to go -- our car is long gone, I have no idea where Mumbai Airport is in relation to anything -- is there a hotel nearby. I don’t have a working mobile phone to ring anyone. I’m just standing around, with hundreds of other people trying to get in, or saying good-bye to someone trying to get in, or waiting for someone to come out. I walked up and down the sidewalk in front of the terminal, looking for something -- a phone, a bench. I find a door. I look in -- it’s a lounge for people waiting for arriving passengers. There’s a big plexiglass wall separating baggage claim. But more importantly, it has seats, is air conditioned, and has a restroom. I walk in -- except I can’t. I need a ticket. Where do I get that? Back out and around the corner. I find the ticket window. It’s a couple hundred rupee -- $2-3. I reach into my pocket and pull out my last bit of cash -- a 500 rupee note. Things got a lot less overwhelming.</li><li>Bridge Music —   &nbsp;<em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/content/Zapac/Zapac_-_Test_Drive.mp3\" target=\"_blank\">Test Drive</a>&nbsp;</em>by Zapac </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>New and Old Restaurant Trends</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Last month, I hit the <a href=\"https://restaurant.org/Home\">National Restaurant Association</a>’s <a href=\"https://www.nationalrestaurantshow.com/\">annual show</a> in Chicago’s McCormick Place convention center. If you need reminding of how big the restaurant business is in the US, this show is <em>huge</em>. I was interested to see what’s new and what has stayed the same since the last time I went, 4 years ago. </li><li>What’s new - Walking the aisles, I was immediately struck by the number of booths showing delivery containers. They were everywhere. Talking to a couple of vendors, they said some hotels are seeing huge growth in Doordash and Grubhub deliveries eating into their restaurant and room service revenues (all puns intended). And since they’re seeing it being driven by the new generation of new travelers -- the Millennial and Gen-Z travelers -- they think it’s more of a trend than a blip, yet another revenue stream lost to traveler technology -- like when they lost long-distance phone calls to cell phones, and then pay TV revenue to PCs and iPads running Netflix and YouTube. So many hotels, especially the lower end ones, are dropping food service altogether. But this collides head on with sustainability concerns -- the growth in delivery means a growth in styrofoam containers and plastic bags. And so I’d walk past, say, two booths back-to-back -- the first selling traditional containers; the second pushing compostable paper and bioplastics. These new containers looked good; except when I tried to use a paper straw on a frozen margarita sample that someone pushed on me. That was a complete fail.</li><li>Also saw a number of established ethnic food companies trying to branch out into new/hotter ethnic spaces. Kronos, for example, is one of the main companies selling Greek gyros meat. In their booth, they were sampling gyros, but also new chicken al pastor and Korean barbeque products. Cultural appropriation or trying to stay in business by catering to those darn Millennials and Gen Z’ers. I dunno, but a Kronos guy told me that 90% of their business still comes from gyros. Which kinda rang true when I looked at which sample booths had the longest lines -- hot dogs from Vienna Beef and Nathan’s and grilled cheese sandwiches from Tillamook Cheddar. </li><li>That being said, there were a lot of vendors selling Asian products -- primarily Japanese and Korean -- continuing the trend I’ve seen at the show. Digital is still big, but the focus seemed to have shifted from smartphone apps to \\ interfacing with those delivery services -- updating menus and getting orders automatically into their point-of-sale systems -- and more efficiently managing social media. I saw a Yelp booth for the first time at the show. It was a good-sized booth -- nicely carpeted, with tables full of phones running their app. But it was pretty empty -- mostly populated by Yelp employees. Gave me a good idea of how the restaurateurs were rating Yelp’s booth.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #152</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_152.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<p><!--EndFragment--></p>','Podcast #152 — Overwhelming Travel; New & Old Restaurant Trends','','inherit','closed','closed','','2474-revision-v1','','','2021-09-30 12:33:11','2021-09-30 17:33:11','',2474,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3937',0,'revision','',0),
(3938,1,'2021-09-30 12:34:04','2021-09-30 17:34:04','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\">\n<p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Cracked-mirror-square.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2482 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Cracked-mirror-square-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a></p>\n<figcaption>What\'s Behind Me Is Not Important</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p>Going upscale, recording in the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/1871Chicago/photos/we-have-a-new-podcast-studio-big-thanks-to-1871-company-parkergale-capital-for-h/1116900888351884/\">podcast studio</a> at the <a href=\"https://1871.com/\">1871 tech incubator</a> in Chicago, I talk about my surprising smooth 2-week trip in Ireland and Scotland. We also note the retirement (finally!) of American Airlines\' MD-80 jet, a very interesting new social media app, talk about how algorithms are changing the way we travel, and the melancholy of leaving familiar places for the last time.  All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_153.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #153: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the podcast studio in the 1871 tech incubator in Chicago, IL. I have to say that this is the most professional studio I’ve recorded in since my high-school radio days in Memphis. I mentor here once a month and so get to use this bang-up studio. This sound ought to be phenomenal. It’s a few weeks after our 2-week Celtic jaunt -- a week touring in Ireland and a week of graduation festivities at University of St Andrews in Scotland. I’ve talked a bit about the planning for this trip in the past couple of episodes -- wrestling through the Avios website to kludge together flights on Aer Lingus and burn off some of my Avios balance that’s been sitting around for, I dunno, 5-10 years; and trying to sift through the horror stories of Irish car rentals. There were a whole lot of places where this trip could’ve gone bad… but it didn’t. The flights on Aer Lingus were fine; nothing special, but they were serviceable. Our Budget Car rental experience was the same -- a basic Renault compact with 30,000 km on it, but no issues with the folks on either the pick-up or the drop-off in Dublin airport. All the places I booked in Ireland were fine -- the B&amp;Bs on the west coast were great; the hotel in Dublin was, again, serviceable. And, we didn’t really have any rain to speak of until our last day in Dublin.</li><li>The flights between Dublin and Edinburgh were on turboprop planes -- ATR-72-600s to be exact. I can’t remember the last time I was on a prop plane -- even the quick 30-min hops I’d do occasionally between IAD and CHO are on Embraer jets. But I remember way back in my early flying days, American Eagle used to fly a lot of these ATRs. Once those props started turning, I popped on my Bose noise-cancelling headphones. Those American Eagle ATRs were one of the main reasons I invested in my first pair of Bose.</li><li>But other than a bit of a rainy walk to and from that plane in DUB and EDI, they were fine flights. Indeed, if there was any hiccup, it was on arrival in DUB from ORD.&nbsp; We’d checked luggage, even though one of my regular top travel tips is to carry on. I knew the plane was full, and since Aer Lingus isn’t part of OneWorld or StarAlliance, neither my American nor my United status was going to get us pre-boarded. Rather than worrying about having to jockey for overhead space, we checked our bags - and anyways, it was free; it was included in the fare. So, low-hassle boarding. In DUB, I stood at the luggage carousel, watched it heave out a dozen or so bags, and then nothing. No worries; seen that before; the guys must be driving the tug back to the plane. And then the carousel stopped. Not too worried; seen that before too; just saving a little energy. And then the lights above us went out.&nbsp; OK, this is a new one. I have to say that I started to worry a bit -- until I saw our pilot also looking around for his luggage. After 20 minutes, the lights came on and the carousel started burping up bags again. And there was a simultaneous sigh of relief from all the chaperones accompanying the half-dozen student trips that had packed this flight.</li><li> Bridge Music -- <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/Loveshadow/26219\" target=\"_blank\"><em>SP*ANK Vox</em></a> by Loveshadow </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Biggest travel news -- at least to me -- since the last episode -- American announced the retirement (finally!) of the last of its MD-80s, the “Super 80s” or the “Mad Dog 80s” with the last revenue flight planned for Sept 4th from DFW to ORD. Which for me is very apropos because I spent a <em>lot</em> of time in the mid-80\'s flying MD-80\'s between those two AA hubs. I thought the 737 Max grounding might delay the final MD-80 flight, but it looks like American has scrounged up enough 737-800s to fill the gap. I posted American’s announcement on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page. Jim McDonough commented - “Flew the Mad Dog many, many times. My wife and I would select row 9 on the 2 seat side, flying, usually, DFW/SAN. She’s tiny, so I felt like I was in first class.” The left-hand 2-seat side was great for couples -- got a window and an aisle seat without having to guess if the center seat would be filled. But then you had to deal with the short overhead bins on that side where you could only fit your bag in sideways, and usually no power supply. The cigarette style power adapters were on the other side, the 3-seat side, but only in every <em>other</em> row. It was a unique plane...</li><li>Back in May, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/podcast-151-traveler-data-leaks-brittany-street-food/\">episode 151</a>, TravelCommons listener Mika Pyyhkala sent in a note about his great experience with a flight rebooking service, Freebird. This week, I was booking a trip to CHO on the Amex Travel site with my Platinum card. At the end of the booking, it offered me free Freebird coverage for the trip. I had to check a box to opt in, so I read the fine print closely to make sure it was really free, but it was. Seems Freebird and Amex are doing a free trial. Don’t know how long it lasts, but I’ll opt in -- with the hope that I don’t actually have to use it.</li><li>Some bits ‘n’ bobs observations from my Ireland-Scotland trip…</li><li>Like so many other folks, I’m carrying my own water bottle on flights. I started last fall. The big Amazon Web Services conference gave everyone a refillable water bottle, replacing barrels of iced single-use water bottles with refilling stations. Most airports now have refilling spigots next to regular water fountains. Irene has carried one forever. It came in handy when Aer Lingus wanted to charge her €3 for water on one of our flights. Now, I lost that original AWS water bottles a few months back -- matching my usual 6-month time-before-loss metric. No big deal; it was just a plastic bottle with a screw-on cap. But I wanted a new one. So for Fathers’ Day, Claire gave me a new souped-up 20 oz. water bottle with a push-button pop-up drinking spout and a carabiner loop -- very nice. I pulled it out during one of our Aer Lingus flights, skipping their €3 charge, hit the button for the spout and immediately get hit square between the eyes with a fat stream of water from my bottle-now-turned-water fountain. Apparently this new fancy water bottle seals airtight, meaning the water in the bottle stayed at ground pressure while our cabin was now lower, at something between 6 and 8,000 ft. I’m used to that with foil-sealed yogurts, but not my water bottle. A surprise not just for me, but also the Irish guy next to me who was napping before he caught some shrapnel from my portable water cannon.</li><li>One of the things I look forward to when staying at bed-&amp;-breakfasts in the UK and Ireland are… the breakfasts. And the breakfasts we had in Ireland were at least one order of magnitude better than the best concierge lounge fare at a Marriott -- which may be damning with faint praise, but I don’t mean to, we had great breakfasts. For most of our time on the west coast, we hubbed out of Galway, staying in the same place for 3 nights, or more importantly, 3 breakfasts. The first morning was easy; the full cooked breakfast -- eggs, bacon, sausage, black and white pudding, tomatoes, mushrooms, baked beans, and toast. We were doing a good bit of hiking that day and I wasn’t hungry until 3. Doing that two days in a row, though, felt like I was tempting fate -- or at least an arterial blockage. So the next morning, I went with the healthier choice -- oatmeal porridge. The presentation is pretty typical -- a big bowl of porridge with little cups of raisins, brown sugar, and cream. I mix in the raisins, a touch of the brown sugar, and a bit of the cream to loosen up the porridge. Except it doesn’t smell like cream. I taste it -- it’s Bailey\'s Irish Cream. I dump the rest of it in. I figure porridge with a Bailey’s topper is kinda the Irish version of a Bloody Mary.</li><li>One of the big differences for me between renting a car in the US and in Europe is the pre-car inspection. You get the keys, the rental agreement, and a form showing the condition of the car before you take if off the lot -- pre-existing dings and scratches. I always give this form to Irene -- she’s much pickier than I am. She walks around the car, making note of anything missing, while I figure out the rear-view mirrors and pairing my iPhone to the entertainment system. So I was kinda surprised to get an e-mail from Hertz before getting on our flight to EDI with a bunch of pictures of a Kia wagon. Here was our car; here was the documentation of its condition. We walked straight to the car, loaded up the luggage and drove off. No walkaround inspection. It makes sense. We had gotten to the point, on our last couple of rentals, where we were taking pictures of dings and scratches as well as marking them on the form. Now here, Hertz was doing it for us. Not sure if I got this because I have Hertz Gold, but it certainly was a big improvement in the rental experience -- though I still had to figure out how to pair my phone.</li><li>The timing on international connections in Europe always feels a little bit of a crap shoot because there doesn’t seem to be a consistent rule about having to pass thru security again. Amsterdam, no security. Frankfurt, no security for a European connection, but security if you’re flying to, say, India or the Middle East. London, security every time, maybe even a couple of additional passes just for kicks. Dublin, though, had a new twist. Go thru the usual drill -- pull out your electronics, take off your belt, push your bags thru the X-ray machine, but then -- where’s the metal detector? Just walk past the security guy and put my PC back in my bag. I looked back. There was a metal detector all the way at the end of the security hall, but only one. The rest of us were acting like we were walking thru a metal detector, except there wasn’t one. That was just odd.</li><li>We were in Scotland for Claire’s graduation from University of St Andrews. Hanging around, drinking beer with folks a couple of generations younger than you -- this group was right on the Millennial/Gen Z boundary -- is always an educational experience. But when the conversation turned to their new favorite app -- <a href=\"https://apps.apple.com/us/app/poop-map-pin-and-track/id1303269455\">Poop</a> <a href=\"https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.poopmap&amp;hl=en_US\">Map</a> -- I thought they were leading this old guy on. An app where you and your friends share the places you’ve pooped, complete with star ratings and comments, seemed too much like an Onion headline -- social media taken to the absurd extreme. Except is wasn’t satire; it was real. They all pulled out their phones, fired up the app, and showed me their check-ins. OK, then. But I think checking in beers on Untappd is as far as I want to go.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com. </li><li>Bridge Music —  &nbsp;<em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/trifonic/445\" target=\"_blank\">Bored on Your Backside</a></em> by Trifonic     </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Travel by Algorithm</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>On the rainy Monday we flew from DUB to EDI, I drove us downtown to meet some friends for the day. The rain was beginning to muck up traffic, so I was kinda glued to Google Maps to help route us around some of the traffic tie ups, which meant we weren’t on the usual route take in from the airport, which meant I was just about completely dependent on Google; completely trusting that algorithm. Which was kinda broken when I followed Google’s directions through a warning sign and onto a “Buses Only” road. Google directed me to keep driving down the road, but since I was only a single-decker Kia wagon, I didn’t think any attempt to masquerade as a bus was going to survive our first police encounter. So I took the first left (much easier when driving on the left side of the road) hoping the algorithm would produce a bit more legal routing.</li><li>Not overly shocking. There have been a steady stream of stories for years about GPSs leading people astray -- this was a topic way back in the early days of&nbsp; TravelCommons, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2006/05/04/podcast-38-the-accidental-vacation-trusting-travel-technology/\">episode #36</a> in 2006 to be exact, when they were called SatNavs, I told the story of making a dash to SFO after a sales meeting. I’m riding shotgun, tracking our progress on a one of those <em>paper</em> maps that Hertz used to put in every car. But we also had a Hertz NeverLost. It seemed about 10 seconds slow to me. I spotted our turn on I-580, but Hertz said nothing. “Turn,” I said. “No,” Brian said, “You need to trust the technology.” And so when Hertz said to turn 10 seconds later, he did -- right into a gas station. Not as bad as stories of people driving across closed bridges, into rivers, up unpaved mountain roads… But in the subsequent 13 years, with SatNav, now GPS, moving from our cars to our pockets, we’re lean on those algorithms more than ever. Now living in Chicago, I haven’t bothered to learn any of the public transit routes; I just use Google Maps or the Transit app to tell me what bus to catch when.</li><li>Sometimes I’ll use Hipmunk to look at flight options to a new city, or a place I haven’t been in a while. They promote their Agony sort, where their algorithm rates flight by a combination of price, duration, # of stops, and dependability. I’m heading back to CHO and since I haven’t been out there for 6 months, I hit Hipmunk to check out American’s and United’s current flight offerings, scrolled down from the non-stops thru the 1-stops. I thought it was interesting, though, that Hipmunk’s algorithm scored a 24-hr hour Amtrak ride with a 3-hr layover in DC’s Union Station as less agonizing than a 6-hr 2-stop trip on United Express with connections in Columbus and IAD. But given some of my United Express experiences, who am I to second-guess that algorithm?</li><li>One of the things I liked about the soon-to-be-turned-off Google Trips app, is how it would auto-magically generate itinerary recommendations for a city. It would pick out points of interest with high Google review scores, and then combine the hours each would be open from the business listing with the typical amount of time people would stay there, and location and traffic data from Google Maps to generate the best itinerary. This fascinated me. It sucked my into a click hole of academic papers presented at the International Conference on the Practice and Theory of Automated Timetabling and the International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining talking about how the “Tourist Trip Design Problem (TTDP) is a route-planning problem on multiple Points of Interest. TTDP can be considered as an extension of the classical problem of Team Orienteering Problem with Time Windows.” I want to use this to automatically generate microbrewery taproom crawls but the math made my eyes bleed.</li><li>But back to that rainy day in Edinburgh, Google Maps redeemed itself at the end of the day. There was so much rain that Monday, our usual path out of the city, the A90, was at a complete standstill because of flooded underpasses, and stalled cars that tried to make it thru the flooded underpasses. Google Maps guided us past a gridlocked traffic circle, winding us through some apartment complexes, bypassing the flooded parts, and putting us right onto the M90 so we could head out to St Andrews. Better travel through algorithms.</li><li>Bridge Music —   &nbsp; <em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/hepepe/21074\" target=\"_blank\">Bogi Beat Budapest</a> </em>by KarmaHacker  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Leaving Places Behind</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Driving out of St Andrews that last time was a bit melancholy. We’d spent the last 4 September there, saw things change -- restaurants open and close, Edinburgh airport get spiffier -- but also the familiar things stay the same -- <a href=\"http://keysbar.co.uk/\">The Keys</a>, my favorite dive whisky bar; <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"St Andrews Brewing Company (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.standrewsbrewingcompany.com/\" target=\"_blank\">St Andrews Brewing Company</a> or “Stabco” as my daughter would call it, always with a great beer selection from across the UK; and <a href=\"https://jahangirstandrews.co.uk/\">Jahangir</a>, an Indian restaurant we found our first year because they were the only place we could find a table that Friday night... and we kept going back because they had great food and we never couldn’t get a table</li><li>The melancholy was that we probably wouldn’t be back; at least not for a long time. It’s out-of-the-way -- which is part of its charm, but it’s why we probably won’t be back for a while.</li><li>I felt the same way when I finished a project in Portland, Oregon some years back. I was in Portland every week for 3-4 months and got to know it pretty well. I explored new places, but developed some favorite spots I’d hit every week -- <a href=\"https://www.clydecommon.com/\">Clyde Commons</a> for dinner at the bar, <a href=\"https://www.baileystaproom.com/\">Bailey’s Taproom</a> with a new beer selection every week. When that project ended, I knew I wouldn’t be back to Portland for a long time -- as opposed to New York or San Francisco. Wrapping up a project there, not really a big deal because there’s enough business to bring me back. New Orleans was kinda in the middle. I’d been there almost non-stop for 3-4 years, but while I didn’t think business would bring me down there again, it’s not out of the way, and I’d be down often for vacations or conventions -- which is how it’s turned out.</li><li>Some of that melancholy comes from regret -- from things you always meant to do but never made time for -- “I’ll do that next time,” you’d say to yourself, but never get to it. The last time I was in Charlottesville, VA, I was finishing up what had been another 3-4 year stream of work and wasn’t sure when I’d be back. For me, Charlottesville was a bit like St Andrews, an out-of-the-way college town (though only a 2-hr flight from Chicago rather than an 8-10 hour fly-and-drive) and wasn’t sure when -- if ever -- I’d get back. Over those years, I’d always plan to take a half-day and drive the 15 minutes from the client to <a href=\"https://www.monticello.org/\">Monticello</a>, Thomas Jefferson’s home, and take the tour. It’s always written up as a must-see, and I’m right here. But every time I was going to do it, something would come up, and I’d say “I’ll do that next time.” And so here I was, the last time -- I didn’t know when the next time would be. And I really didn’t have much time in my schedule, but after lunch one day, I walked out, taking calls all the way to the Monticello parking lot, and then turned off my phone and had a great tour. And flew out the next morning without that regret.&nbsp;</li><li>But now 6 months later, I’m heading back to Charlottesville. So maybe I’ll get back to St Andrews sooner than I thought. Maybe I should see if <a href=\"https://www.standrewsbrewingcompany.com/\">Stabco</a> needs an old-guy bartender.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #153</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_153.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #153 — Travel By Algorithm; Leaving Places Behind','','inherit','closed','closed','','2494-revision-v1','','','2021-09-30 12:34:04','2021-09-30 17:34:04','',2494,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3938',0,'revision','',0),
(3939,1,'2021-09-30 12:35:02','2021-09-30 17:35:02','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\">\n<p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/666C6507-4DEA-4808-9C1B-D3F828805BC8.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2521 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/666C6507-4DEA-4808-9C1B-D3F828805BC8-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a></p>\n<figcaption>The moment of truth</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p>Breaking out the mobile rig to record this episode in the Residence Inn in downtown Charlottesville, VA. Summer storms let me test Freebird\'s re-booking service, I wrestle with AT&amp;T so I can use my iPhone\'s dual SIM capability on my trip to Krakow and Budapest, booking more relaxed flight itineraries lets me call an audible when Uber and Lyft prices surge into the stratosphere, which gets me thinking -- will we still love those rideshare companies when they\'re no longer cheaper than taxis?  All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_154.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #154: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the Residence Inn just off the Main St pedestrian mall in downtown Charlottesville, VA, leaving behind last episode’s multi-mic, big mixer board, sound-baffled podcast studio to go old-school, back to the TravelCommons roots with the mobile rig in a hotel room. I was thinking about going way back and recording it in the bathroom, but there’s a noisy exhaust fan that I can’t figure out how to turn off. There may be a bit of traffic noise in the background, and maybe even some thunder if the black clouds out my window live up to their potential. This episode will be one of the shorter ones. I’m trying to get it in before Irene and I head out to Krakow and Budapest Thursday night.</li><li>This is my fourth week back in Charlottesville in Chicago, IL. Not much has changed since my last commute back at the end of last year. American Eagle and United Express have a couple of direct regional jets a day from Chicago, and when weather knocks those flights out, Richmond is an hour-and-a-bit drive to the east, or Washington-Dulles is 2 hours north as a last resort. It’s still a 5-gate airport; the bar in the middle still has a surprisingly decent local craft beer selection. The bartender still recognizes me, though she still asks for my ID each time I sit at the bar. So not much has changed at CHO.&nbsp;</li><li>However, my approach to flying there has a bit. I’ve talked about this in prior episodes; I’ve always planned my travel to maximize my time at home, with my family. Given a choice between flying out the night before or taking a 7am flight out the day of, I’d take the latter. The trade-off, though, is travel plans that don’t deal well with travel delays -- a 2-hour flight delay the night before is annoying but won’t make me miss a meeting; that same delay the morning of my meeting may mean I won’t need to take that flight. And I’ve had all that happen with my flights to Charlottesville. So this time, with the kids graduated and moved out, and now that we’ve downsized from a house to a city apartment, my wife thinking I’m underfoot a bit too much, the need to maximize my time at home has… eased a bit. So I’m booking more... resilient itineraries -- flying out the night before, staying over an extra day so I can fly out after lunch, before the summer humidity spools up the afternoon thunderstorms…. Which was paid off last week when thunderstorms in <em>Chicago</em> had my evening flight to CHO posting a 3 hour delay by noon. I had more than enough time to swing my endpoint from CHO to RIC (all done pretty seamlessly thru the United app, which I found pretty impressive). My travel plans may not be as optimized as before… or maybe they are, but for different things, like cutting down on stress and my need to bitch tweet.</li><li>Bridge Music -- One for Me by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/21492 Ft: Haskel </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>We’ve had a thread over a couple of episodes about <a href=\"http://getfreebird.com/\">Freebird</a>, a flight rebooking service. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/podcast-151-traveler-data-leaks-brittany-street-food/\">episode 151</a>, TravelCommons listener Mika Pyyhkala sent in a note about his great experience with them, how they picked up a Southwest flight cancellation and rebooked him on Delta while he was still in the air on his first Southwest leg. Saved him a huge disruption; well worth, he said, the $19/leg fee. I mentioned in the last episode that Amex Travel has been offering free coverage for flights I book on their site with my Platinum card. So Freebird has been covering these last few trips to Charlottesville. I get a text the night before and the morning of my flights assuring me that Freebird is monitoring them. And when last week’s outbound 6pm flight started posting delays at noon, I got texts letting me know they were monitoring the delay, but it hadn’t yet tripped their 4-hour trigger.&nbsp; But knowing that there weren’t going to be many alternative flights to RIC or IAD later in the evening, I didn’t feel comfortable waiting for United to push over 4 hours -- and then cancel -- and so moved myself to their 6pm Richmond flight -- which was on-time -- getting me into my hotel around 10pm after an hour Uber ride. And then, indulging in a bit of travel schadenfreude, I kept tracking the ORD-CHO flight on <a href=\"https://flightaware.com/\">FlightAware</a>. It finally took off at 11pm Central – 5 hrs late -- arriving CHO at 2am Eastern. So it did eventually cross Freebird’s 4-hour threshold, but I’m not sure if it was in time to catch an alternative flight. So, I’m glad I switched it myself. I dunno, maybe tight connections rather than thinly traveled direct routes is the better use case for Freebird</li><li>Also back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/podcast-151-traveler-data-leaks-brittany-street-food/\">episode 151</a>, I talked about trying out the alpha version of augmented reality directions in Google Maps, where you hold up your phone and the display uses the camera to show the streetscape in front of you with the&nbsp; directions -- street names, arrows -- overlaid on the real-time image. I thought it was kinda cool; Irene and the kids were less than impressed. But you can judge for yourself because Google <a href=\"https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/08/google-launches-live-view-ar-walking-directions-for-google-maps/\">announced last week</a> that they’ve widened the feature to a public beta. Give it a try and let me know what you think</li><li>Fast forward one whole episode -- from <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/podcast-151-traveler-data-leaks-brittany-street-food/\">151</a> in May to <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/06/16/podcast-152-overwhelming-travel-new-old-restaurant-trends/\">152</a> in June -- which really was a big jump because, right after recording episode <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/podcast-151-traveler-data-leaks-brittany-street-food/\">151</a>, we moved from the big house in the suburbs to a 60% smaller high-rise apartment on the lakefront -- but in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/06/16/podcast-152-overwhelming-travel-new-old-restaurant-trends/\">episode 152</a>, I talked about having to recalibrate how I’d get to the airport. I had my guy who’d pick me up for a 30-minute ride to ORD or MDW… But no more. Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve started to get a feel for it -- 45-50 minutes to ORD, but figure an hour for weird traffic. And in the morning, figure a 10-minute wait for an Uber or Lyft, and a tab with tip around $40-$45. So this Monday at 5am, I fire up Lyft and Uber while drinking my morning cup of tea to see what’s going on -- $110 on Uber and $60 on Lyft. What the hell is going on? Well, maybe all the drivers are sleeping in, so I shower, get dressed, gather all my worldly belongings, and check again -- $120 on Uber; $57 on Lyft. I hit the Lyft button and wait -- and wait and wait. Then someone accepts the ride, and cancels. Guess he didn’t want to go to ORD. So I fire up <a href=\"https://transitapp.com/\">Transit</a>, my favorite mass transit app. It’s developed in Montreal and does mass transit routing in a huge number of cities in the US and Canada. And in Chicago, it also covers Divvy bike share and constructs Lyft-to-mass transit routing. I fired it up thinking that, if I couldn’t get a Lyft to ORD, then maybe I could get one to the nearest Blue Line L stop and take the subway the rest of the way. But even it couldn’t find a Lyft. But, it showed that, across the street from our flat, a bus will pick me up and, 18 stops later, drop me at the L stop. I got nothing else going -- actually, I did but it would involve waking Irene up at&nbsp; now 5:40am for a ride to ORD, truly a last resort. I wheel my luggage across the street. Four minutes later, the bus shows up. There’s me and another guy -- no problem putting my luggage on the seat next to me. And we make pretty good time -- not a lot of people waiting at bus stops at 6am, and the traffic is pretty clear too. All told, we stop maybe 6 times and have 8 people on the bus at its most crowded.  I had to wait another 5 minutes for the L and, at 6:40, it was more crowded; almost everyone had an ORD badge around their neck -- pilots, flight attendants, ground staff -- except for a few passenger-looking folk like me. All told, it took me about an hour -- maybe 10 minutes longer than Uber and Lyft were quoting. But at $2.50 vs. $60 or $120, it seemed like I made out on the deal.</li><li>Also in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/06/16/podcast-152-overwhelming-travel-new-old-restaurant-trends/\">episode 152</a>, I talked about “earning and burning” frequent traveler points rather than saving them because airlines and hotels keep playing with redemption levels and rules that reduce the value of the points. Jim McDonough tweeted me with a contra view -<ul><li>Regarding frequent flyer miles and how they don\'t appreciate over time - I still like to keep some around in case we need to travel for family emergency situations. The walk-up fare does not compete with the $25 charge to book a frequent flyer mile ticket last minute.</li></ul></li><li>Jim, that’s a good point, but I wonder if that strategy still works as more airlines move from fixed awards schedules to dynamic point pricing -- Southwest, Delta, and soon United -- where point price for a flight climes as remaining ticket prices do. Does it still make sense to pay with points?</li><li>As I said earlier, Irene and I are heading out Thursday night for a weekend in Krakow, Poland and then heading down to Budapest for a mix of touring and visits with Irene’s family. So, I thought this was as good a time as any to try out <a href=\"https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT209044\">my iPhone’s dual SIM capability.</a> Up to now, my usual procedure is to transfer my US AT&amp;T SIM to an old HTC One phone and then put my UK EE SIM in my iPhone Xs (usually sometime in flight in that panic drill between them clearing the breakfast tray and packing everything up for final descent) if I’m going to an EU country or when I pick one up after we land. I do this because local data is <em>hugely</em> cheaper than an AT&amp;T international plan - the EE pay-as-you-go plan I got is £10, or $12 with this week’s Brexit exchange rate discount, for 3 GB of data, 100 minutes of voice, and unlimited texts. But I still want my US number to ring thru in case someone back home needs to reach me and doesn’t know I’m out of the country. I don’t carry both phones with me, though. I have the iPhone with me during the day, using the local SIM to run Google Maps and the like. The HTC stays in the hotel room and I check it for messages when we get back at night.</li><li>But with its dual SIM capabilities, I should be able to do this with just my iPhone. However, the iPhone has only one physical SIM slot; the second is an internal eSIM, like the ones Apple uses in their cellular Apple Watch. So to make this work, I had to get AT&amp;T to transfer my US number from its physical SIM to the eSIM in the phone. My first stop was the local AT&amp;T store. I explained to the store guy what I wanted to do. He looked at me for a moment and said, “Uh, I’m new; I don’t know how to do that. But I can give you an eSIM card if you want.” OK, that’s a start. He riffled around his desk drawer. “I don’t have one here. I’ll have to go in the back. But I’m the only one here today, so you’ll have to go outside so I can lock up while I’m in the back.” Interesting. I walked down the street to grab a bite rather than idle outside the door. I came back. He handed me the card, “Here you go, but I don’t know if this will work…” I went home and hit the AT&amp;T web site. I spelunked around the site until I found the chat link and fired it up. The person on the other end knew what needed to be done. I gave her a few numbers off the card, then pointed the camera at the card’s QR code and it added to plan to my iPhone. Now, the chat agent said that they’ll have to do a bit of provisioning at the back end. She’d text me when it was done. Irene and I went out to dinner; no text and no activation. So the next morning, I hit chat again and this time stuck with the guy until the provisioning was complete. Then I pulled out the AT&amp;T SIM and put in the EE SIM, and immediately got a text from EE telling me their US roaming charges. I also got a whole new set of selections under the Cellular section under Settings. Which line did I want to use for voice, for data, for iMessage and FaceTime. I spent some time on Apple’s FAQ pages trying to figure out which scenario works for me. My guess is that it’ll take me a bit of trial and error -- and self-inflected AT&amp;T international charges -- to really figure this out.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com. </li><li>Bridge Music —  &nbsp; Fall to pieces - Silence by mika (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mika/24945 Ft: Colab      </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Will We Still Love Uber When The Prices Go Up?</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><a href=\"https://www.reuters.com/article/us-lyft-results/lyft-sees-ride-hailing-price-war-easing-sending-uber-and-lyft-shares-up-idUSKCN1UX2BQ\">Lyft’s chief financial officer Brian Roberts said, during last week’s earnings call, that pricing was becoming “more rational.”</a> “Rational pricing” is CFO-speak for “more predictably higher.” <a href=\"https://www.marketwatch.com/story/lyft-and-uber-are-giving-investors-what-they-want-which-is-bad-for-the-rest-of-us-2019-08-08\">Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, during his earnings call, said, “We and Lyft are big-time competitors here and have been for some period of time, but for now we’re seeing, generally, category positions that are stable. We are focused on improving profitability in this market.”</a>&nbsp; Which is CEO-speak for “we’re no longer going to slash prices to buy market share.”</li><li>We all knew this time would come -- at least the rational ones. Uber lost $5.2 billion in the second quarter while the smaller Lyft lost a mere $644 million last quarter. Investors are going to let you torch large piles of cash for only so long. Hence the topic question -- will we stay with Uber and Lyft even when they’re not a bargain anymore?</li><li>I’ve been talking about this with frequent travelers I know, or sit next to at bars, or bump into waiting for an Uber at O’Hare. One school of thought is that the Uber/Lyft experience is better than your typical cab, so even at the same price, you’d still order an Uber. You can order it on your phone rather than running into the street, trying to flag down a passing cab. Indeed, I’ve always said that, for me, Uber’s prime use case is getting a ride from midtown Manhattan to LGA at the end of the day a somewhat sane experience. Before Uber, I’d be practically dancing into 5th Ave, hiding my luggage behind a trash can because if a cabbie saw you wanted to go to LGA, they’d accelerate by you. I tried the cab company’s iPhone app last time I was in New York. It failed miserably.</li><li>Adding Uber and Lyft drivers to the transit mix means you can get a car ride from somewhere outside the usual downtown and tourist spots. I remember pre-Uber New Orleans, getting a cab anywhere other than between the airport and the French Quarter was near impossible. One night for dinner, we decided to go to a Mid-City restaurant, <a href=\"http://toupsmeatery.com/\">Toups Meatery</a>. Phenomenal place. The owner, Isaac Toups, later made it to the finals of the <em>Top Chef </em>cooking show. He didn’t win, but was voted “fan favorite”. And his food was our favorite too. The only problem -- getting a cab back to the Sheraton on Canal St from his Mid-City location. The hostess called 3 cab companies and we waited 20 minutes for a 15-minute ride. And that driver told us, “Yup, all most cab drivers want to do is make the easy money, driving between the airport and the hotels”</li><li>There’s also fare predictability -- you see the price to get from, say, downtown Chicago to O’Hare before committing to the ride. No more meter anxiety, watching the number run up in traffic. And the accompanying “Will I have enough cash to pay” or “Will this guy’s credit card machine work?” anxiety. With Uber and Lyft drivers following GPS apps, there’s no more “am I being taken the long way around to run up the meter” anxiety, or depending on your cab driver’s knowledge to take the fast way, or having them punt it to you with the “bridge or tunnel” question I often get from LGA cabs. The technology helps avoid a lot of the bad experiences we’ve had with taxi cab rides.</li><li>I used to say that Uber and Lyft cars are nicer, but their bar has slipped as they’re scrambling for drivers in a full-employment economy. An Uber I took last week was missing the door armrest; a Lyft that Irene took had the front right quarter-panel held on with duct tape. These are exceptions, though a bit more common that a couple of years ago. But they’re still a damn sight better than the beat-to-hell Baltimore cabs that would sit at the cab ranks in the Inner Harbor. I only did that once, because the cab rank was right outside the client’s building and I was late leaving for the airport. The back seat was full of old newspapers and other crap, and there was no air conditioning -- on a July afternoon. After that, I’d stand there, looking at the cabs, while waiting 5 minutes for an Uber to show up.</li><li>The place I most often take a cab rather than waiting for an Uber is the airport. And here, it’s not really about price, it’s convenience. The cab ranks are usually right at the terminal exit, while the rideshare pickup spot can be an Easter Egg hunt (Vegas), a 15-minute walk to the back 40 (Atlanta) or a confusing scrum of screaming traffic cops (Chicago Midway). Vegas and LGA especially -- catching a cab is so much easier than a rideshare. Here at CHO also -- it’s a flat rate into town that’s about the same as Uber and Lyft and the cabs are in decent shape, so if one’s there, there’s no reason to wait.</li><li>And I could be wrong, but it feels like the pricing discussion is mostly a US thing. <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/podcast-150-travel-interruptus/\">In Paris last Spring</a>, none of the Ubers were “rideshares”; they were all black car livery companies with professional drivers. Near as I could tell, Uber was just another dispatch system for them. In Lisbon a few years back, I couldn’t tell if they were true rideshares, but the pricing was the same as taxis, and there were more taxis so less wait. We took the path of least resistance and hailed cabs.</li><li>The rough consensus of my completely unrepresentative polling was - ride sharing got traction because it was cheaper, but now the technology gives such a better experience that I’d even pay a premium over a taxi -- but I wouldn’t want to tell Lyft or Uber that. But what they said on those earnings calls, I think they already know that.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #154</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_154.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<p><!--EndFragment--></p>','Podcast #154 — Will We Still Love Uber When The Prices Go Up?','','inherit','closed','closed','','2508-revision-v1','','','2021-09-30 12:35:02','2021-09-30 17:35:02','',2508,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3939',0,'revision','',0),
(3940,1,'2021-10-01 11:48:29','2021-10-01 16:48:29','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\">\n<p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/IMG_1038.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2529 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/IMG_1038-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a></p>\n<figcaption>Polish health food</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p>Didn\'t have any problems with the 787\'s flying 4,800 miles to Krakow or back from Budapest, but the 560-mile regional jet flights between Chicago and Charlottesville, VA have been causing me no end of hassles. We talk about this, revisit our discussions about iPhone dual SIM capability and American Airlines\' MD-80 retirement. And then go deep on my very non-keto-friendly dive into Krakow and Budapest street food.  All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_155.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #155: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago on an off-travel week; taking a break this week after a couple of weeks of weather-induced hassles -- that in spite of completely avoiding Hurricane Dorian. Instead, it’s been a steady stream of morning thunderstorms hitting ORD and jacking it up for the rest of the day. That and flying regional jets, which we’ve said before, are often…. problematic. In the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/08/13/podcast-154-will-we-still-love-uber-when-the-prices-go-up/\">last episode</a>, I talked about having to shift my outbound evening flight from CHO to RIC because of morning thunderstorms at ORD. The last two weeks have been different variations on the theme. The Tuesday after Labor Day, I was on the bus to the L heading to ORD for an 8:30am flight (because the Uber and Lyft wait times were insane -- God, I miss my old Mongolian ex-taxi driver) when I got a text that my American Eagle flight was cancelled. Still on the bus, I called American’s Platinum line. They told me what I already knew -- no other American options until the end of the day. I told them that since I was coming home the next day (Weds), I needed to get to Charlottesville that morning. “What about the 9am United flight?” I asked her, “I’m already on my way to ORD.” “Let me call United to transfer the ticket,” she offered. I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised. Over the past few years, I’ve seen airlines more and more reluctant to lose \\ revenue by moving you to another carrier, but there was none of that coming from this American agent. Our call kept going as I got off the bus and walked down the stairs into the subway stop, but she got everything squared away. Now that United flight ended up being delayed an hour, but it eventually got me to Charlottesville.</li><li>Last Friday morning in Charlottesville, I woke up, and scrolling thru Twitter, saw <a href=\"https://twitter.com/NWSChicago\">NWS Chicago</a> -- Nat’l Weather Service -- tweeting about severe thunderstorms, so when I got the text from United at 9am delaying my 1pm flight 45 minutes, I wasn’t surprised. No big deal -- I’ll just get a second beer at the Radar Bar. But then, as these things tend to do it, it didn’t stop there. An hour later, another text from United -- the delay doubled to 90 minutes.  But then at noon, another text -- the delay is down to an hour -- shortly followed by another text -- it’s back up to 90 minutes. I pull up <a href=\"https://flightaware.com/\">FlightAware</a>; I’m not going to the airport until the inbound plane leaves the gate at ORD. Ten minutes later, I see it push back. OK, that should be the end of the delay cascade. I order an Uber and head to the airport. Halfway there, another text -- now my flight isn’t leaving until 3:30pm, 2½ hours late. Immediately followed by a text with a 3:57 departure time. I get out of the car and head to the gate agent. What’s going on? Has the plane left ORD yet? Unlike the American agent, the United agent -- or maybe she worked for Air Wisconsin, the United Express partner, is evasive -- don’t know what’s going on; no other options; everything else is oversold, even in Richmond. I back out of line and call United’s Premiere desk. Yes, there’s availability out of Richmond and DC. Richmond’s a little closer and has a helluva lot less of a rush hour, so I move over to the 5:30pm flight (the United agent said “I think you’re making the right decision”), book a one-way rental, and head out to the parking lot. There’s a mist starting to settle in over the airport. This can’t be good. It’s an uneventful 90-minute drive to Richmond. I sit at the Sam Adams Brewhouse bar and have a beer, and then another. This flight leaves on time -- it’s also a regional jet, but it’s been running up and down the East Coast, so today, it’s running on time -- getting me into ORD at 6:50pm, about 5 hours after my original flight was supposed to land. I fire up the United app and look up the status of that flight -- it still hasn’t left. It didn’t leave until 9pm and then only made it as far as Washington-Dulles -- 95 miles up the road.</li><li>Bridge Music —  &nbsp; I Will Writhe by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/26739 Ft: Soundprank </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>In contrast to my regional jet challenges, our trip at the end of August to Krakow and Budapest went much smoother. We flew LOT, the Polish airline, the whole way, including the last leg, BUD-ORD non-stop. I was kinda surprised by that leg -- a Transatlantic leg that didn’t go through Poland -- but there must be enough traffic on that route. A week before we left, American announced their own non-stop between ORD and BUD starting next year. Both airlines do/will use 787’s on the route. Perhaps it’s one of the “long, thin routes” that the 787 was designed to unlock. Anyways, all three flights on LOT -- 787’s on the long legs, and a Dash-8 prop job on the hop from Krakow to Budapest -- were reasonable. I thought the 787’s “morning wake-up” mode for breakfast -- where the cabin lights fade up while the darkened windows lighten -- was a pleasant change to usual “light on and PA announcement” approach. It was my first trip to Poland. Krakow Airport is nice -- new, compact, with train station into the city. It was a good trip.</li><li>I talked in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/08/13/podcast-154-will-we-still-love-uber-when-the-prices-go-up/\">last episode</a> about trying out my iPhone XS’s dual SIM capability in Hungary and Poland. I did the pre-work before I left -- working through a couple of chat sessions to move my US AT&amp;T number to the internal eSIM so I use the physical SIM slot for my UK EE pre-paid SIM. En route -- somewhere over the Faroe Islands I think -- I went into Settings and made my UK line the main voice and data line, leaving my US line open for phone calls and texts. It seemed to work as designed -- I replied to a couple of texts on my US line from my sister, but it looks like everything else went out over the UK line with the 3 GB for £10 plan. I’ll hold final judgement until I get this month’s bill from AT&amp;T, but from what I could see on their website, it looks like it worked. It was a nice change to only have one phone and not to have to remember to check my other phone every night. The new version of the iPhone operating system -- iOS 13 -- is supposed to have some improvements for dual SIM, but I was happy with it as it stands -- but check back with me after I get my AT&amp;T bill.</li><li>And, of course, I extend that 3 GB by hitting the WiFi in coffee shops and hotels, which is where we circle back to one of my top travel security tips -- use a VPN when on WiFi. I used to think that as long as I was hitting encrypted web sites I was OK -- it used to be that you’d see HTTPS in the address bar apparently Google and Apple think that’s too much for us to process; they’ve replaced it with a picture of a lock; Firefox still shows the full address, though. But it seems that more and more security breaches are taking advantage of obscure misconfigurations that get around basic security. And with major hotel chains regularly coughing up millions of credit card numbers, it seems a bit unreasonable to expect the staff at a small coffee shop or local hotel to be up-to-date on their router patching. So I have VPN clients on my iPhone, my Android tablet, and my MacBook Air. I usually forget to turn them on if I’m doing a quick check of Twitter or Google Maps while in line somewhere, but if I’m doing any sort of browsing session on public WiFi these days, I’ll fire it up.&nbsp;</li><li>Packing for this trip meant rummaging around for European plug adapters. Not voltage converters -- I don’t use them because all the electronics can handle 110 and 240 volt -- just the two blade-to-two round adapters. I’d rounded up my UK adapters for our June trip to Ireland and Scotland, but now I needed the European adapters -- the two round plug ones.&nbsp; I found the UK ones and a random South African one but I couldn’t find the European ones anywhere. Probably because I’d left them all behind in Brittany in March. So I got on Amazon (as one does when they need some random thing in a hurry) and ordered a box of 6. I only needed one, but given my history, 6 would keep me for a year or two. I ordered white adapters because that’s what popped up in Amazon. Which was OK in those hotels with black outlets, but not so great for white outlets. I took 2 and came home with 2, but only by sheer luck. At least twice, I was walking out of the room with my bag and only then noticed an adapter still plugged in, hiding in a recessed white outlet. I really need colored plug adapters. And not in tasteful colors; something gaudy, like a purple or pink or chartreuse. Maybe I’ll spray paint the ones I have before my next trip.&nbsp;</li><li>Leonard -- no last name -- commented on the last episode with a link to a Dallas TV station’s coverage of the last American Airlines MD-80 flight; appropriately flying from DFW to ORD, a route and a plane that contributed heavily to my Advantage Gold status -- when that was the highest level -- back in 1985. There’ve been a lot of stories covering the retirement; people waxing nostalgic -- though not too much since I haven’t heard of any big jump in Delta MD-80 bookings. They still fly almost 100 of them. I have seen a couple of quotes about not wanting to sit in the last rows because of the noise from the side-mounted engines. It’s true. Not even the Bose noise-cancelling headphones could handle all the engine and vibration noise. They were also bad seats because there were no windows; all you’d see would be the engine cowling and the window would make the noise even worse. And those times when I ended up in those seats -- usually last-minute bookings between ORD and DFW -- my mind would sometimes wander -- if the engine next to my head blows up, will the shrapnel blow out or blow into the cabin. I never heard of such a catastrophic failure on an MD-80 -- but that didn’t keep me from wondering.&nbsp;</li><li>Standing in the TSA PreCheck queue, watching the single screener who was checking boarding passes and IDs have to ping-pong between the regular and PreCheck lines, I wondered what was keeping US airports from installing the automated boarding pass-checking gates that I’ve passed thru at mid-sized European airports like Budapest and Krakow and Edinburgh. I got it -- they’re only checking for valid boarding passes; they’re not examining IDs -- but there’s got to be something there that can improve TSA efficiency <em>and</em> the traveler experience. Watching this poor woman, my mind fast-forwarded to October next year when the TSA starts enforcing the Real ID requirement, the time wasted arguing with people who travel maybe once a year and so didn’t go thru the additional hassle of getting a Real ID-compliant driver’s license. Note to self - don’t book any travel in October 2020. </li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com. </li><li>Bridge Music -- August (Reggae Rework) by el-B (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/elB/16075 Ft: Calendargirl </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Street Food in Poland and Hungary </strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Over-tourism is still a big topic in the tourism industry. Iceland seems to be cooling down after the Wow Air bankruptcy, but the photo from May of the queue to summit Mount Everest has become the new icon of the problem faced there and at places like Venice, Barcelona, and Machu Pichu. And it drives an interesting dichotomy -- travelers chasing the iconic Instagram picture -- sort of a virtual souvenir for this “pics or it didn’t happen” age -- while at the same time craving “authenticity” -- which is where, I think, the current glorification of street food is coming from. Wanting to experience something that you can only get in this place -- and, of course, post a picture of it.</li><li>Parking the cynicism for a sec -- if you’re queuing up (hopefully with some locals, not just tourists), doing the point-and-shoot ordering, and then eating it there on the street, it does create a very specific moment and memory. I vividly remember buying takoyaki, basically octopus croquettes, from a street vendor in Osaka; getting into the queue for a food stall in a Beijing hutong, the only non-Chinese guy, not knowing what for and getting this phenomenal crunchy scallion pancake; sending Andrew over to a vendor on a sidewalk in Hoi An, Vietnam for black sesame soup; folding up a slice of pizza in New York City in mid-bar crawl; and, as talked about a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/podcast-151-traveler-data-leaks-brittany-street-food/\">few episodes back</a>, slurping oysters on the Cancale sea wall on the Brittany coast.</li><li>So while we weren’t on a street food hunt in Poland and Hungary, our willingness, actually desire to eat pretty much whatever we came across without any filters -- no worries about keto or paleo or gluten-free diets -- led us to some good street food -- even though there were days I really felt the need to double down on the statins.</li><li>Probably the most memorable bit of street food came our first day in Krakow. We landed around 9am, took a taxi to the hotel, checked in, brushed our teeth, and walked up to the Old Square where I trawled through the vendor stalls. I came to a full stop at a small stand at the end of an aisle. An older couple had a huge pan over a wood fire. The pan had a metal divider down the middle; one half of the pan was frying onions; the other half, sliced kielbasa. I watched a couple people order and then stepped up. The man sliced a large, thick piece of bread off a round loaf, spread a thick smear of lard with cracklings, put down a layer of sliced kielbasa, finishing it off with fried onions. All for 13 złoty -- or about 3 and a half bucks. I don’t know what left more of an impression -- the size and heft of what he handed me or the staying power of the layer of pork fat it left on my lips. I’ll put a picture of it in the show notes.</li><li>We walked straight from there to a small square behind St Mary’s Basilica for the pierogi festival. There were 20-30 stands selling their selection of pierogis. Not sure if pierogis strictly qualify as a street food, but I queued up at the most popular ones and did point-&amp;-shoot ordering through most of their selection. I skipped the sweet pierogis -- the chocolate-banana and the blueberry ones just didn’t say “pierogi” to me -- but I still ended up with 5-6 from each stand -- from traditional onion and potato, to goose and duck and wild boar-filled ones. I tried to avoid pointing at one stand’s Mexican pierogi, but somehow it ended up on my plate. This was a pretty full-contact Day One. I needed a nap.</li><li>Chicago has a large Polish population -- somewhere in the range of 1-1.5 million Polish immigrants their descendants in the metro area, which, depending on who you read, is the largest Polish metropolitan area outside of Poland. So we get our share of Polish food and I wanted to try a few things I recognized. The first thing we hunted down was a pączki -- basically a Polish jelly doughnut. In Chicago, Pączki Day is Fat Tuesday and you see pączkis everywhere -- the grocery stores, bakeries. Asking around, Gorące Pączki -- “Hot Donuts” in English -- was the consensus recommendation in the Old Town. We rolled up there a couple of times and came away, I gotta say, disappointed. Even Chicago grocery store pączkis are better.</li><li>That weekend, we were staying with friends in the hills/mountains a couple of hours southwest of Krakow, down near the Czech and Slovakian borders. On Sunday, we went to a karczma for lunch, which as near as I could tell is a roadside pub/restaurant. But this one, the specialty was potato pancakes made in a wood-burning oven. One guy, the owner, was running the oven -- laying the pancake batter in the oven, shifting them around with a spatula, managing the fire, serving some pancakes flat while stuffing and folding others over like a potato pancake quesadilla. Watching this guy was like watching kitchen ballet. And the product -- like no potato pancake I’d ever had. Definitely beat out Chicago on this one.</li><li>We got into Budapest on St Stephen’s Day, Hungary’s biggest national holiday commemorating the founding of the Hungarian state; kinda like their version of the US Independence Day. After checking into our hotel, we walked over to the Buda side of the Danube where there was a huge food festival. The longest line was for the national cake. Apparently, they do a special cake each St Stephen’s Day. It was a really long line, but they were handing out free pieces of cake, so it was understandable. We skipped it though and went for the next longest line, for freshly fried lángos. Every culture seems to have some version of fried dough street food, and lángos is Hungary’s, though lángos is savory, not sweet. It was a hot day, but here was a booth full of women, hand stretching balls of dough into disks and dropping them into deep pans of hot oil for people waiting 15 minutes in the hot sun for them. The fully-dressed lángos was brushed with garlic and then topped with sour cream and shredded cheese. Still waddling from the weekend in Krakow, I went for the lite version -- just the garlic.&nbsp;</li><li>A couple of days later, Irene and I took a 40-minute train ride up along the Danube to Szentendre, a bit of an artist colony town. We hadn’t been up there in, I dunno, 20 years so we thought we’d check it out again. And top on our list of things to revisit was a little lángos shack tucked away halfway up a little stairway that goes from the town square up to the Catholic church on top of a hill. The last time we were in Szentendre, we tripped across this place walking up to the church - just a couple of people frying up lángos. It took us a bit to find the staircase this time -- it’s about a person-and-a-half wide archway next to a souvenir shop. The shack was still there, but it expanded, now with tables in a little courtyard, and it’s been found. We stood in a queue of tourists for 10-15 minutes watching 2 women crank out fried disks of dough. I cringed when I saw people putting ketchup on their lángos. We stayed pure with the garlic.</li><li>The <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/06/24/podcast-130-notes-from-hungary/\">last time</a> Irene and I were in Hungary, in 2017, we complained about not being able to find good, basic Hungarian food outside of the tourist traps. We saw lots of burger bars and pizza joint, especially in the Jewish Quarter, the party district where all the ruin bars are. But now, things seem to have diversified. Not far from Szimpla Kert, Ground Zero of the ruin bar circuit, there’s a place called Gettó Gulyás selling, well, gulyás and other Hungarian basics like chicken paprikas. And even better, it looks like there’s a bit of a chain called Langosh that’s open in the party district til 2 in the morning. Fried bread and beer -- not sure there’s any better definition of street food.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #155</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_155.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #155 — RJ Delays; Street Food in Poland and Hungary','','inherit','closed','closed','','2527-revision-v1','','','2021-10-01 11:48:29','2021-10-01 16:48:29','',2527,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3940',0,'revision','',0),
(3941,1,'2021-10-01 16:55:26','2021-10-01 21:55:26','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\">\n<p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/IMG_0159.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1402\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/IMG_0159-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"225\" height=\"300\" /></a></p>\n<figcaption>This Won\'t Help Your Flier Sat Score</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p>In this episode, we talk with Michael Taylor, author of <a href=\"https://www.jdpower.com/business/press-releases/2019-north-america-airport-satisfaction-study\">JD Power\'s 2019 Airport Satisfaction Survey</a>, about what keeps fliers happy. I also talk about what I like about eScooters, shopping for a smaller bag for upcoming flights on a Euro budget airline, and how Hertz\'s contract updates remind me to delete my Bluetooth pairings in rental cars. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_156.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #156: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago in the middle of what looks like a 6-week run of solid travel. Traveled to DC, Charlottesville, and Nashville, in that order, in the 3 weeks since the last episode. Heading back to Charlottesville this week, then a week hopscotching through the Baltics with my son Andrew -- Riga, Latvia; Talinn, Estonia; Helsinki, Finland -- and then back down to Charlottesville. </li><li>I flew Southwest on my non-Charlottesville flights -- into DC Reagan and Nashville -- and United again to Charlottesville. The Southwest flights went smoothly, except for trying to get to Chicago Midway for the DC flight. The Uber driver didn’t follow the app’s recommended route; instead, he pretended he was a cab driver and took the normal route down the Stevenson Expressway which was crawling due to an earlier accident. I wasn’t paying attention - first time I’ve had an Uber driver freelance on me - and didn’t notice he’d skipped the exit to the faster path until it was too late. We made our flight, but not without a bit of hustle through Midway. No tip, let alone a 5-star review for that guy.</li><li>Southwest flies into the old Terminal A at what I still call Washington National. I went to college in DC in the early ‘80’s, before it was named for President Reagan and when Terminal A was pretty much all that was there. I had forgotten what a long schlepp it is from that terminal to the Metro station. I remember way back then asking someone why they built the Metro station so far away. “Because they’re going to build new terminals right across from it.” Which they finally did, some 20 years after that Metro station was opened. Sometimes it seems that airport planning horizons are not in years, or even decades; feels more like they’re planning in lifetimes.</li><li>In between the Southwest flights, my United flight continued the string of disruptions trying to get into or out of Charlottesville. I checked that my flight was on-time before calling an Uber -- no weather delays at either end, United and FlightAware apps say the inbound plane is on-time…. Then, halfway to ORD, I get the text from United; a 2½-hour delay for crew arrival. What!? The next text “Because of crew scheduling disruptions this evening in Chicago, we’ve assigned your flight a new crew…. We know this delay wasn’t in your plans today, so we appreciate your patience.” No shit a 2½-hour delay wasn’t in my plans, especially when it’s because United stole our original crew because they screwed up their scheduling. And really United, you can’t find another pilot in ORD, your largest hub, that’s a little closer? I tell you what else isn’t in my plans, flying United to Charlottesville this week. </li><li>Bridge Music -- <em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/stefsax/7785\" target=\"_blank\">Awel</a> </em>by stefsax (c) copyright 2006 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/stefsax/7785 </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>That’s the sound of my new <a href=\"https://www.marriott.com/loyalty/member-benefits/titanium.mi\">Marriott Bonvoy Lifetime Titanium Elite</a> card hitting the kitchen counter. The mailer package was appropriately upscale, but the sheer weight of the thing stunned me. I put a quick video of it on the TravelCommons Facebook page. Cate Rose commented “Hope it scans into your Stocard app so you don’t actually have to carry it in your luggage allowance”. My thought exactly.</li><li>I got a note that Chicago’s electric scooter pilot ends tomorrow, which made me realize that I’ve seen them in just about every city I’ve been to this summer -- Budapest, Krakow, Charlottesville, Nashville, Washington, DC. I think the only places I didn’t see them were in Scotland and Ireland. They’re handy; because they’re dockless, I’ve found they have a wider distribution than, say, a traditional docked bike share and you can take them directly to your planned destination. And they’re a good fill-in between walking and an Uber or a Lyft. And, they’re fun! When I was in DC a couple of weeks ago, I was in the <a href=\"https://washington.org/visit-dc/neighborhoods/brookland\">Brookland</a> neighborhood in the Northeast part of town, and wanted to try out a new taproom there, <a href=\"http://www.rightproperbrewing.com/what-we-do\">Right Proper Brewing</a>. Now Brookland is not the nicest part of DC. It’s much better than when I went to school there, but there are still iffy parts. I wasn’t completely comfortable walking down to Right Proper from the Brookland Metro stop, but it seemed too short for an Uber ride and there was no bus that went down there. But, there was a scooter a couple of blocks from the Metro station. Running down 9th St at 10 mph felt a bit better than speedwalking at 4. And could leave it right in front of the taproom. It was exactly what I wanted. Two problems I’ve seen -- first, too many people riding them on the sidewalk, especially in DC. Maybe because I bike a lot in Chicago, I’m comfortable in bike lanes and navigating around cars on the street and keeping an eye out for potholes. I actually wouldn’t be comfortable riding a scooter on the sidewalk; I’d be afraid of popping a pedestrian who suddenly walked in front of me. To me, cars are much more predictable than pedestrians. The second thing, the need to have half-a-dozen scooter apps on your phone. In Chicago, there are 8 scooter companies, in addition to Uber and Lyft’s scooters. And you need to download their app to find and rent their scooter. Which meant that when I wanted to find a scooter near the Brookland Metro stop, I’d have to cycle thru 5 or 6 apps. Except I didn’t because I found an app called <a href=\"https://scootermap.com/\">Scooter Map</a> that shows all the scooter brands on one map. I think it’s targeted at folks who are making money recharging scooters (not quite sure how that works) but it worked fine for me. I fired it up and saw all the different scooters that were near me. One caveat -- I’ve only ridden these scooters on sunny days. I’m not sure how enthusiastic I’d be riding one in the rain or snow. </li><li>For the Baltics trip next week, we’re taking Finnair out and back from Chicago, an early morning ferry ride from Talinn to Helsinki, and then AirBaltic for everything else. Which then got me thinking about luggage sizes, because I bought my current bag, the <a href=\"https://www.swissarmy.com/us/en&amp;eoq=!t/Products/Travel-Gear/Werks-Traveler-5-0/collection/trg-collection/travelgear_collection_TRA-C2955\">Victorinox Werks</a> 22-incher, to use every last inch of US carry-on allowance. It even catches some side-eye from American and United where I have status. So I didn’t figure it’d fit into any European budget carrier’s luggage sizer. Looking up <a href=\"https://www.airbaltic.com/en/cabin-baggage\">AirBaltic’s carry-on allowance</a>, my Victorinox is a couple of inches too tall and an inch too deep. But what really got me shopping for a new bag for this trip is the weight. AirBaltic has an 8 kg/17½ lbs weight limit. In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/05/30/podcast-121-tsa-lines-my-luggage-is-where/\">episode #121</a>, I talked about the baggage strip tease exercise with Wow Air to make their 7 kg/15 lbs carry-on weight limit. I’d take my bag off the scale, pull some clothes out, zip it back up, and put it back on the scale. Still too heavy. Repeat 3 more times until the agent takes pity — or just gets tired of me — and gives me the approval tag to put on my bag. After which I walk about 10 feet, open my bag and put my armful of clothes back in. My Victorinox is a bit over 7 lbs, so not only is it too tall, the bag itself uses over 40% of the weight allowance. And even though I’ve talked before about how much I hate shopping for luggage, I searched for a smaller, lighter bag that wouldn’t cost a fortune, since my Victorinox will stay my primary bag. I landed on the the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/32lIURe\">TravelPro Maxlite 5</a>. I, or rather my daughter has a good history with TravelPro. It fit the AirBaltic dimensions and is one of the lighter bags I saw at 5.4 lbs which is down to 30% of the 8 kg weight allowance. It also meets three of the key suitcase criteria I laid down in the “how to shop for a suitcase” topic in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/01/25/podcast-137-new-years-travel-status-tips-how-to-shop-for-a-suitcase/\">episode #137</a> -- it’s black, it’s a 2-wheeler so no lost space on extended spinner wheels, and the inside is, for the most part, a wide open box without clothes hangers or a bunch of zip compartments. I’m taking it to Charlottesville tomorrow for a shakedown cruise.</li><li>Three years ago, back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/11/22/podcast-125-uber-driver-stories-overseas-for-the-election/\">episode #125</a>, in a Travel Security tip, I talked about the need to delete your phone’s Bluetooth pairing when you return a rental car. Usually when I go to pair my phone, I’ll first go through and delete 3-5 pairings before pairing my own. And they all have personalized names like “Timmy’s iPhone”. And most phones by default will download your contacts to the car when paired, so leave all of their contacts and phone numbers in their rental. That is just bad in so many ways. And now Hertz has gotten around to noticing it. In their newest rental terms and conditions, they specifically carve out any liability from you leaving a Bluetooth pairing behind. It’s a pain to remember, especially if you’re running for a flight, but as you’re taking that last scan around the car for your sunglasses and iPhone, remember not to leave your identity behind either.</li><li>Bridge Music -- Black Rainbow by Pitx (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Pitx/19513 Ft: ERH, acclivity</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Keeping Fliers Happy </strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A couple of weeks ago, JD Power released their 2019 North American Airport Satisfaction Study.&nbsp; The headline - “North American Airports Struggle to Keep Travelers Happy Amid Construction Delays and Surging Passenger Volumes” caught my eye, so I reached out to the study’s author, Michael Taylor, to dig into it a bit more. And so last Friday, we had a wide-ranging conversation. I was going to edit it down, but as I listened to it, I couldn’t think about what to cut. So here it is in its entirety…</li><li>Interview with <a href=\"https://www.jdpower.com/business/content/michael-taylor\">Michael Taylor</a>, Travel Intelligence Lead at J.D. Power</li><li>Thanks again to Michael for taking the time to talk to us. Here\'s the <a href=\"https://www.jdpower.com/business/press-releases/2019-north-america-airport-satisfaction-study\">link</a> to the study summary on the JD Power website.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #156</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li> And if you check out the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> page, you can click thru to highlights from my trips to Budapest and Ireland. And if you follow it, you can catch some pics from next week’s trip through the Baltics.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_156.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #156 — Airport Satisfaction; eScooters; Smaller Luggage','','inherit','closed','closed','','2543-revision-v1','','','2021-10-01 16:55:26','2021-10-01 21:55:26','',2543,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3941',0,'revision','',0),
(3942,1,'2021-10-01 16:57:07','2021-10-01 21:57:07','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\">\n<p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/2D576E07-6546-4D4B-9D64-0E593596FB0C.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2581 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/2D576E07-6546-4D4B-9D64-0E593596FB0C-268x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"268\" height=\"300\" /></a></p>\n<figcaption>Selfies with Friends in Tallinn</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p>Wrapping up my time in Charlottesville, VA with some \"bleisure\" travel, as well as some pure leisure travel with a quick trip in the Baltics. And a listener talks about the reason for his out-and-back day trip from Washington, DC to Hong Kong. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_157.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #157: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago just off the shores of Lake Michigan toward the end of what has been a record-breaking cold November. The first half of the month here was the coldest in 148 years with an average temperature of 31 degrees, which compares to an average high for November of 50 degrees, and a <em>low</em> of 39. But what’s been worse has been the early snow -- 3½ inches of snow on Halloween (another record) and again on Veterans Day. And by some incredible strokes of luck (as opposed to any foresight on my part), I dodged both snows -- by flying home from Charlottesville, VA the day before Halloween, and scheduling a week off the road the week of November 11. It’s <em>always</em> better to be lucky than good.</li><li>Last week was my last week in Charlottesville, finishing up an 18-week project that started in July. A year ago, when I wrapped up a long run in Charlottesville and didn’t know if/when I’d be back, I took an afternoon to hit Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s home that was only a 10-15 minute drive from the client. It was one of those things I wanted to do, but kept putting off -- I’ll get to it -- and here I was, the last day, and so squoze it in between meetings and calls.</li><li>With that in mind, I did just a touch more planning this year, and on my <em>second-to-last </em>trip, the week between the Halloween and Veterans Day snow storms, I flew in a day early on Monday, but to IAD rather than <a href=\"http://charlottesville-airport.com/\" class=\"aioseop-link\">CHO</a>, instead renting a car, and driving the length of the 105-mile <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Skyline Drive (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.nps.gov/shen/planyourvisit/driving-skyline-drive.htm\" target=\"_blank\">Skyline Drive</a> down to Charlottesville along the tops of the Blue Ridge Mountains through Shenandoah National Park. I was probably a week late for peak leaf peeping, but it was still pretty, especially when looking west over the Shenandoah Valley.&nbsp; I don’t think I would’ve made a special trip to drive Skyline Drive, but since I was in the neighborhood, why not? And it turned out to be just a great drive -- clear blue skies, still some good leaf color, and on a Monday, not a lot of people on that 2-lane road.&nbsp;</li><li>And then last Thursday, flying out of <a href=\"http://charlottesville-airport.com/\" class=\"aioseop-link\">CHO</a> for the last time until I don’t know when, I had to order one last beer at the <a href=\"http://www.gocho.com/concessions/\" class=\"aioseop-link\">Tailwind</a>, the airport bar. For an airport with only 5 gates, the Tailwind always has a great rotation of local craft beers. And there’s a mini-Cheers effect -- maybe not everyone knows my name, but Lyn the bartender recognizes me from my 4-year off-and-on presence in her bar. When I showed back up in July after a 9-month absence, she recognized me right away. So I had to get one last beer from her. I looked at the blackboard and ordered the stout from Blue Mountain Brewery, which was not far from when I ended my trip down Skyline Drive. I was getting over a bit of a cold; the IPA would’ve been a bit rough on the back of my throat. That <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Dark Hollow Stout (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/16352/39417/\" target=\"_blank\">Dark Hollow Stout</a> went down smoother, but what I didn’t quite pick up on is that it’s a 10% alcohol beer. Bit of an eye opener at 11:30am. Made for a good nap on the flight home.</li><li>Bridge Music -- Dive Deep (Loveshadow remix) by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/50488 Ft: Loveshadow</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Mark Skinner sent a note to comments@travelcommons.com a few days ago<ul><li>Hi Mark, Long time listener. So your tag line \"It\'s more about the journey than the destination” hit home to me with what has to be my oddest business trip yet. Tomorrow, I’m flying Washington to Hong Kong, via EWR, arriving Monday afternoon, and then returning on Tuesday morning! I’m basically there for dinner…</li><li>No meetings in Hong Kong, it’s all about taking a cosmic ray detector for NASA on an over-the-pole flight; which the UA flights 179/180 do quite well, EWR-HKG-EWR. They want to understand the amount of radiation from space inside the aircraft cabin. I’ll be in the air longer than on the ground. I’m planning to stay on and to sleep at “normal” east coast times, which means while I’ll have a hotel room by HKG, I’ll be awake then (night in HK, but daytime hours for me).&nbsp; Happily my upgrades to Polaris Business both ways have been confirmed! Otherwise the 16 hr flight would seem even longer…</li></ul></li><li>Oh, my! There’s a nice end-of-year mileage run! I told Mark that his itinerary reminds me of one I did 12 years ago when I flew to London for a lunch meeting to wrap up a project. I flew ORD-LHR, showered in the arrivals lounge, took a car out to Reading, gave the final readout over lunch, hopped back in the car to LHR, and caught the afternoon flight to DEN. I always say that ORD-LHR-DEN run was the epitome of \"stupid\" travel, but Mark has a good reason for his out-&amp;-back.&nbsp; Given the amount of time I’ve spent at 35,000 ft over the past 35 years, I’m not sure I want to know the results of Mark’s measurements.</li><li>United Airlines sent out a link promoting a jet lag app, <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Timeshifter (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.timeshifter.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Timeshifter</a>. Though Mark won’t need one because he’s staying on Eastern Time during his quick jaunt to Hong Kong, I decided to give it a try for my trip to Latvia, Estonia, and Finland. Going east, from the US to Europe, has always been easier for me. My usual routine - I skip the seat-back entertainment for 4-6 hrs of shut-eye (I wouldn’t call it true sleep) on the flight over, eat breakfast when I arrive even if I’m not hungry, get outside as much as possible, take a 30-minute nap after check-in, push through until 11:30pm that first night, and then set an alarm for, say, 7am the next morning. That usually resets my body clock and I’m pretty much good-to-go for the rest of the trip. Timeshifter added two things to my routine: starting to shift to destination time a few days before leaving, moving bedtime and wake-up time an hour earlier each day - going to bed at 10 instead of 11 and getting up at 5 instead of 6 the next morning. The second thing was taking melatonin before going to bed, which I tried by I’m not sure that it really does anything for me. It’s also a well-designed app that notifies you about things like when to seek out direct sunlight and when to start and stop with caffeinated drinks. I used the free first plan. Not sure I’ll pay the $9.99 for another plan, though.</li><li>And speaking of caffeinated drinks, last week, staying at the Omni Hotel in Charlottesville, they gave me two door hangers -- one for each night -- that I could exchange for a drink delivered to my door in the morning, or a beer at the bar in the evening. The first night, since I’d already had a margarita at dinner, I skipped the bar for something in the morning. Looking at the door hanger, my choices were coffee, tea, and Red Bull. Wow. Guess they’re catering to all kinds of morning afters. It wasn’t a big margarita, so I went for the cup of tea.</li><li>Following up on last episode’s carry-on discussion, about buying a new bag to meet Finnair and AirBaltic’s size and weight limits, My new <a href=\"https://amzn.to/32lIURe\">TravelPro Maxlite bag</a> worked like a charm. I packed a week of clothes and didn’t tagged by any gate agents. It even fit in the overheads of the ATR prop jobs that hopscotched us around between Riga, Tallinn, and Helsinki. On one of our passes through Helsinki, I saw an AirBaltic luggage sizer and scale by an empty customer service desk, so I decided to check the bag out. It was a bit of a force fit into the sizer and it weighed in at 8½ kilos, just a bit over the limit. Glad I didn’t catch a gate agent’s eye.</li><li>And since we’ve been talking about carry-on luggage over the past couple of episodes, so I pulled together all those threads into a new <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/11/06/how-to-choose-the-best-carry-on-luggage/\">“how to choose a new carry-on” blog post</a>. It went up at the beginning of the month, updating the one from last February, just in time for the Christmas shopping season. If you or a frequent traveling loved one needs a new carry-on, check it out, complete with Amazon Affiliate links if you want to toss a buck TravelCommons’ way.</li><li>And speaking of prop jobs, I definitely misfired on my Finnair seat choices between Helsinki and Riga. I was more focused on choosing seats for the long flights between Chicago and Helsinki, and didn’t pay much attention to the 45-minute flight to and from Riga. So just picked one off the seat map where there would be with no one next to me - 5C both ways - which, as it turned out, was empty for a reason, because it was right next to the propeller. I had forgotten how loud those propellers get on take-off. I popped on my Bose Noise Cancelling headphones (which, I noticed, are starting to show a good bit of wear; so I might be doing a bit of Black Friday/Cyber Monday shopping) on taxi, but when the pilot revved up the propellers, the noise cancellation started to cut in and out. The headphones were having to generate huge “anti-waves” to cancel the prop noise and the battery was too low to support the load. Luckily, I always carry extra triple-AAA batteries in the case. But while I was swapping the battery, the noise, the oscillation pressure was killer. I couldn’t get those headphones back over my ears fast enough. If you go to the <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">TravelCommons’ Instagram page</a>, you can see <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/p/B37C8LVnRkd/\">a bit of video</a> out the window of my HEL-RIX flight complete with a slow-motion propeller.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music - Drops of H2O ( The Filtered Water Treatment ) by J.Lang (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djlang59/37792 Ft: Airtone</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Notes from the Baltics: Riga, Latvia and Tallinn, Estonia</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>At the end of October, right after pushing out <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/10/14/podcast-156-airport-satisfaction-escooters-smaller-luggage/\">the last episode</a>, my son Andrew and I flew east for a week hopscotching through the Baltics -- Riga, Latvia; Tallinn, Estonia; and Helsinki, Finland. Why the Baltics? I’m not really sure. I’m sure we had a good rationale when we first thought of the trip a few years ago, but now, it wasn’t much more than “here are a few kinda outta-the-way countries that might be cool to wander around.”&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>Andrew booked our flights -- Finnair from ORD to Riga with a connection in Helsinki. The Finnair service was fine, a pretty standard Airbus A330 but with lots of polka-dot Marimekko patterns on everything. I’d forgotten they were a Finnish company. I skipped using my UK passport one last time for a quick pass down the EU passport lane, deciding not to strand Andrew in the “everyone else” passport path, which led to an unexpected grilling from the Finnish border control cop about the details of my itinerary. Then he spent a good bit of time paging back and forth through my passport stamps. Can’t think of what he found interesting -- the Chinese visa, the two Indian visas, maybe the Moroccan stamps from that day trip to Tangiers 3 years ago? Eventually, he decided to put his Helsinki stamp right next to August’s Krakow stamp and then open the gate so I could walk through.&nbsp;</li><li>I’m not quite sure what I expected from Riga, but it turned out to be a nice, mid-sized city. Maybe it shouldn’t have, but I was surprised at how well-preserved the city center is, especially the buildings with the over-the-top Art Nouveau edifices with huge faces over the doorways and carved figures holding up window sills. It took some money, though. Down by the river, I saw two buildings side-by-side, the one on the right recently refinished and repainted; the one on the left was still waiting its turn, but time is running out. The Art Nouveau look was there, but muted under the grime and soot and flaking plaster; with some relief decorations on the window balcony worn away.</li><li>I was surprised, though, at how empty Riga’s old town was in the middle of a Tuesday. The streets were empty. Where was everyone? Maybe across the river where it looks like they’ve built new modern office towers. I was glad I didn’t book our hotel down here.</li><li>The <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riga_Central_Market\">Central Market</a> down river from the Old Town was much more lively, and also where Riga stopped looking so Scandi and started looking a bit more post-Soviet. The busses and streetcars orbiting the market looked left over from the early ‘90’s. But I liked it. Most of the people here seemed to be doing their own grocery shopping -- unlike food markets in places like Paris and Barcelona that seem to have more people taking pictures of fish than buying them. But the place is so big that I don’t see that it could survive just on food porn tourism. They repurposed a set of World War I zeppelin hangars -- one for fishmongers, one of butchers, one for greengrocers, and then part of one with some restaurants where Andrew and I made lunch from a round loaf of Uzbeki bread and some tortellini-looking dumplings filled with lamb and venison. It was pretty good.</li><li>Then it was time to go search out some beer taprooms which had us walking sorta northeast, on a straight line away from the river, away from Old Town, across the canal and parks and past the embassies that sorta ring Old Town, and back into a less renovated landscape of storefronts and converted factories, some places run down, others with the hipster-signaling strands of naked edison bulbs over wood tables. Wandering into a courtyard off a busy street, we found&nbsp; <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Labietis (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.labietis.lv/en\" target=\"_blank\">Labietis</a> that had wide and interesting mix of beers -- herb beers and fruit beers, as well as the usual batch of IPAs. The names were interesting, also. <a href=\"https://www.labietis.lv/en/our-beers/fog\">Migla</a>, which they translated as “Fog” had hemp and peppermint in a light pale ale. Not sure it was my top pick, but I gotta give them props for trying something different.</li><li>It was a 45-minute prop job flight from Riga to Tallinn on AirBaltic. I did have a bit of a travel snob realization, though -- when everyone is getting on the same bus for a plane, boarding status is kinda meaningless. Anyhow, AirBaltic was fine service -- no hassles with carryon luggage, no annoying on-board upsells, though with only 45 minutes, there’s not too much damage they could do. Heading for the cab rank at Tallinn, I saw the same warning signs they had at Riga airport - there’s no regulated taxi fees so be careful which taxi you get into. At Riga, we used one of the airport-approved cabs with a meter. At Tallinn, we used <a href=\"https://bolt.eu/en/\">Bolt</a>, a ride-sharing app that looks a lot like Lyft. I used earlier in Krakow and had good luck with it, and it worked fine in Tallinn too - €4 from the airport to Old Town seemed a pretty good deal.</li><li>I can see why Tallinn is popular for long weekends. The Old Town is just that -- winding cobblestone streets, lots of churches and restored old buildings, and lots of shops in those old buildings. It’s up on a hill, so lots of scenic overlook Instagram moments. You could easily spend a couple of days wandering the streets, popping in and out of churches and museums… and shops and bars.</li><li>But after a half-day, I was ready to breach the Old Town’s walls to see what else there was to Tallinn. The first stop was a market by the train station - <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Balti Jaama Turg (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.visitestonia.com/en/baltic-station-market\" target=\"_blank\">Balti Jaama Turg</a>. Nowhere near the size of Riga’s Central Market, we strolled around until, after the 4th or 5th fruit stand and butcher stall, our minds wandered to lunch. We bought a couple different kinds of Uzbeki breads from one stand and a couple of beers from another. The breads were stuffed with some sliced meat cooked in a warming, floral spice, maybe cinnamon. It was very good, though I never got the story of why all the Uzbeki food up here.</li><li>We walked out and around the train station, and through a collection of restaurants in small square buildings, old cargo containers and a couple of railcars. As much as I liked the Uzbeki breads, I wish I’d seen these places first. On the other side was something called <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Telliskivi Creative City. (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://telliskivi.cc/en/\" target=\"_blank\">Telliskivi Creative City.</a> It looked like an old office or administrative building had been converted to a kinda “makers” mall, where people were doing small-scale clothing or leather work in the back of their space and selling it out of the front. We took a quick pass through it though didn’t see anything we wanted to haul back to the US.</li><li>We walked kinda north-northeast, through the<a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\" Kalamaja neighborhood (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.visittallinn.ee/eng/visitor/discover/articles-guides/kalamaja\" target=\"_blank\"> Kalamaja neighborhood</a> toward the harbor. Kalamaja was the exact opposite of the Old Town - wood buildings vs. stone; straight paved streets vs. windy cobblestones; groups of flats vs. castles and government buildings. A few blocks off the harbor we hit the <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Põhjala Brewery &amp; Tap Room (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://pohjalabeer.com/taproom\" target=\"_blank\">Põhjala Brewery &amp; Tap Room</a>. It was in what looked like a very recently renovated stone building; workers were in the midst of renovating the building next to it. Where Labietis felt very native -- funky space tucked away behind some kinda decaying buildings -- Põhjala could’ve been any new taproom in the US -- big U-shaped bar, open kitchen, BBQ on the menu. The beer was very good; the BBQ maybe less successful, but having lived in Memphis and Dallas, I’m a bit of a BBQ snob. The smoked trout dish, though -- that was great.&nbsp;</li><li>We walked back towards town on a path that ran along the harbor. There were lots of new apartment buildings across the road -- 3-4 stories with floor-to-ceiling windows and enclosed balconies facing the harbor. There wasn’t a lot there… yet. But you could see it coming.</li><li>We stopped at the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/ubajahumal/\">Uba Ja Humal</a> beer store before heading back through the Old Town walls. We walked through the front store to the taproom in the back, complete with a DJ who was set up between the back coolers. Locals would pull a can out of a cooler, pay for it at the bar, get a glass, and sit down at a table with their friends. Tallinn had that kind of easy-going vibe.</li><li>Both cities have done a good job renovating and preserving their Old Towns, and now seem to be expanding past that, repurposing older, maybe Soviet-era buildings to something a bit hipper, edgier (?), less traditional. I came away liking Tallinn a bit more than Riga, but maybe it’s because they’re a little bit further down that hipper, less traditional path.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #157</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li> And if you check out the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> page, you can click thru to highlights from Riga and Tallinn.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_157.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #157 — Notes from the Baltics: Riga, Latvia and Tallinn, Estonia','','inherit','closed','closed','','2575-revision-v1','','','2021-10-01 16:57:07','2021-10-01 21:57:07','',2575,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3942',0,'revision','',0),
(3943,1,'2021-10-01 16:59:16','2021-10-01 21:59:16','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/189764_1571139330482_7074048_n.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-2607\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/189764_1571139330482_7074048_n-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\n<figcaption>Good End to 2019</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p>Skipping the Chicago winter with trips to Phoenix and Sedona, Arizona, and a Christmas morning flight to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. Talk about those trips, my good and bad Hertz experiences, and then gather up odds-‘n’-ends from my travel notebooks to see off 2019 in this New Year\'s Eve episode. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_158.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #158: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois, just back from a bone-thawing trip with the family to Cabo San Lucas, sorta the Land’s End of Mexico’s Baja California peninsula. We booked this trip back in May. Andrew has read on some budget traveler newsletter that Southwest was about to start service to Cabo. So the morning that the flights went on offer, we all went after Southwest’s website and snagged our flights for just over 30,000 points a person. We flew down early Christmas morning, connecting through HOU, and, thinking back to how empty ORD was last year at Thanksgiving, I was stunned that both of our flights were completely full. It seemed that half of our 6:45a flight out of MDW was also walking over to the Cabo gate. Guess that once the kids stop believing in Santa, Christmas morning travel is fair game.</li><li>Flying back out of Cabo last Sunday, I walk up to the gate and don’t see the usual Southwest boarding number pylons. It’s just a typical shared gate with the Southwest flight to Hobby at Gate 4A and a Delta flight to maybe Salt Lake at Gate 4B. And no plane, because there’s no jetway. It’s a bus. Southwest’s open seating works because everyone enters the plane in numerical order. Squeezing all the A group and half of the B group onto one bus… this’ll be interesting. It’s a 3-minute bus ride around the corner of the terminal. The doors open; we pour out. A ramp worker is trying to recreate the Southwest boarding process on the tarmac, asking everyone to line up in 3 lines -- pre-boards, A1-30, and A31-60. It kinda works, for the most part… until another ramp worker says “Hey, we’re boarding through the back door, too” just as the second bus opens its doors. Then it just devolves into a free-for-all. I imagine that first ramp worker looking like Kevin Bacon in “Animal House”, flattened by stampeding passengers. I was the first one through the rear door, so I was fine with it, but it does feel like Southwest needs to re-engineer how they board from shared gates.</li><li>I say “bone-thawing,” but it’s not like I was suffering too much from the Chicago December. I’ve been in Phoenix most of the month between Thanksgiving and Christmas, walking around in shirt sleeves in 65 degree weather, topping up my Vitamin D levels while kinda chuckling at the locals hurrying&nbsp; by in their puffy Patagonia parkas. I even extended my stay through one of the weekends -- doing some more of that “bleisure” travel, this time a hiking weekend in the <a href=\"https://www.fs.fed.us/wildflowers/regions/southwestern/RedRockCountry/index.shtml\">Red Rock Country</a> around Sedona, Arizona.&nbsp; An hour or so before picking up a car from Hertz for the weekend, I got an e-mail from the Hertz PHX station manager saying they’d upgraded me as an early birthday present. With equal parts anticipation and trepidation (I remember DFW Hertz “upgrading” me to a Ford F-150 pickup) Irene and I rolled up to spot 43 to find a Mercedes A220 sedan under a “Happy Birthday” sign. OK, now <em>this</em> is an exciting upgrade. Once we fought our way through the Phoenix traffic, the A220 made the 2-hour drive up I-17 a fun run, especially with a 75 mph speed limit. </li><li> Bridge Music -- Earth Soda by septahelix (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial Share-Alike  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/septahelix/34050  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I pushed a <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1206606966031675393/photo/1\">picture of the Hertz car under the Happy Birthday sign</a> to the TravelCommons Instagram Story roll. Steve Frick replied, saying that a friend of his had gotten a Hertz birthday upgrade too, to a Jag. Not to throw any shade, but I definitely think the PHX team did me a bit better with the Benz, but it’s nice of Hertz to give their customers a bit of a birthday surprise. With so many travel providers working hard to squeeze, to optimize, and then to charge for every little thing, getting a birthday present from one of them with a bit of luxury -- and in my case not an insignificant upgrade -- it’s a pleasant throwback to what travel was like when I started business travel coming on 35 years ago.&nbsp;</li><li>But all that love was blown away less than 2 weeks later when the Hertz team in Cabo put me through a 20-minute hard sell on insurance -- $85/day on a $50/day rental -- and then charged me $14/day for something called “Credit Card Care”, all for a beat-up VW Passat with 50,000 hard miles on it. Ugh.</li><li>Steve also hit the TravelCommons website to talk about mileage runs. In the last episode, I said that Mark Skinner’s DC-HKG up-and-back to carry a NASA cosmic ray detector on United’s over-the-pole route was one helluva mileage run. Steve said -<ul><li>I haven’t done a mileage run in years but came real close to losing my Southwest companion pass status for 2020. I had to change a few of my travel website profiles to use my Southwest card over my Hilton American Express card in order to hit it for 2020. It’s always a tough decision do I want 12 points per dollar at Hilton properties or free Southwest flights for my wife</li></ul></li><li>Thanks, Steve. I’ll tweak my travel credit cards now and then to hit some goals, but I hadn’t thought of it as an end-of-year mileage run. But it does make sense, especially with Southwest which counts credit card spend toward Companion Pass. I like that, a credit-card mileage run -- definitely more climate friendly.</li><li>I was talking about my flights to and from Phoenix a couple of weeks ago with one of the guys on the project team, a younger guy, and the look he gave me suggested that I’d hit peak travel nerdery -- at least in his eyes. I was telling him that I fly out to Phoenix on United from ORD because United has an 8am flight out, it’s easier to get a morning coffee at ORD than MDW, I get a free upgrade to Economy Plus which makes it easier to sleep, and because United uses PHX in Terminal 2, the older “slum” terminal that, because it’s separate from the main terminals, makes it easier to get an Uber or Lyft. But then I fly back to Chicago on Southwest because they have more flights back in the afternoon which gives me some flexibility with last-minute meetings, they don’t charge a change fee, they fly out of the newer Terminal 4 in PHX which gives me a much better selection of restaurants and bars than Terminal 2, and it puts me into Chicago-Midway where the wait for an Uber or Lyft is always shorter than at ORD. To me, it was a completely reasonable thought process -- optimizing each leg for the amenities I’d use. I turned to one of the other guys -- a guy who’s been traveling 20-some years -- “Yup, makes perfect sense to me,” he said. The younger guy was just shaking his head; probably muttering “OK Boomer” under his breath. But he’ll learn.</li><li>Back in November, during one of my semi-regular spelunks through Google Analytics, I noticed that <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/11/20/podcast-146-rental-demolition-derby-traveler-gift-guide/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #146 — Rental Demolition Derby; Traveler Gift Guide\">the November 2018 episode - #146: Rental Demolition Derby and Traveler Gift Guide</a> - was one of the top 5 pages on the TravelCommons website. I couldn’t figure how stories of rental car wrecks would get a lot of Google hits, so it must be the gift guide. Which suggested that maybe I should update it for 2019, but more as a blog post this time. I read through a half-dozen or so other gift guides, looking for some ideas I could steal, but they got pretty repetitious pretty quick -- pushing Away luggage, Huzi infinity pillows, and Aesop travel kits, which suggests to a cynical mind that these companies must’ve been splashing a lot of samples around the blog-o-sphere. And maybe didn’t age all that well after the Verge published an <a aria-label=\"exposé on Away’s toxic work culture (opens in a new tab)\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/5/20995453/away-luggage-ceo-steph-korey-toxic-work-environment-travel-inclusion\" target=\"_blank\">exposé on Away’s toxic work culture</a>. But anyway, I wanted something a bit different, and on one of my flights got thinking about a chat I’d had with a friend a while back. She was looking for gift ideas for her daughter who, a couple of years out of college, was starting a new job with a lot more business travel. Replaying that chat in my head, and thinking about the younger guy on my project team, I started going through my travel kit -- rummaging through my messenger bag and then cycling through my suitcase -- mentally, though; not enough space to physically pull it down from the overhead and open it up; and that would’ve looked a bit weird. I built <a aria-label=\"a list of the things I really use on my trips (opens in a new tab)\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/12/11/best-gift-ideas-for-a-new-traveler/\" target=\"_blank\">a list of the things I really use on my trips</a>, and that I miss when I forget to bring them along. Then I winnowed it down to 10 -- because “Top 10” is a key search term -- and there you have it. If you haven’t looked at it yet, give it a read and leave a comment with your suggestions.</li><li>Number 2 on <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/12/11/best-gift-ideas-for-a-new-traveler/\">my list of ideas</a>, after a 20-inch black roller bag, is picking up the application fee for TSA Global Entry for your new traveler. For $100, or for free with many airline and hotel reward credit cards, you can gift them with 5 years of hassle reduction with PreCheck for domestic travel and a fast path through Customs when they travel internationally. Coming back from Cabo, we connected again through Houston-Hobby and so had to clear Immigration and Customs there. It was my first time through Customs there, so it took me a minute to find the Global Entry kiosks. The interface was a bit different from the ORD ones. Instead of asking for my passport and prompting me for the fingerprint pad, it asked me to fit my face inside a red box before taking my picture. The camera didn’t look adjustable, so I squatted down ‘til my face was in the frame and then clicked the Take Photo button. A couple seconds later, the kiosk spit out my receipt and I was off to the exit -- no passport or fingerprint scans, no clicking through questions. Quick, but odd. Some Google searches when I got home told me that I’d hit the new generation of Global Entry kiosks -- Global Entry 2.0 -- that uses facial recognition to match the kiosk picture with my passport and Global Entry application pictures. Given how crappy the kiosk picture looked on the receipt -- and that I hadn’t taken my glasses off -- I’m either really impressed or really concerned about the accuracy of their facial recognition algorithm; I’m not quite sure which.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li> Bridge Music -- Absolutely Clear (ft Jeris &amp; Goldfish) by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/45578 Ft: Jeris, Goldfish  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong> Travel Potpourri for $400, Alex </strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Here it is, the last episode of the year that I’m trying to get out before cracking the Vueve and trying to stay awake until midnight. With the clock ticking, instead of a proper topic, all I can do is gather up some odds-‘n’-ends from my travel notebooks into a Jeopardy-like topic “Travel Potpourri”</li><li>And writing in my travel notebooks is something I like to do. I have a couple: a small one -- a 3½x5½-in or A6 size that fits in my back pocket -- to jot down notes, bullet points; and a larger one that I use as a proper travel journal. For that, I was using a B6 Muji notebook that I picked up in Lisbon 3 years ago. After I filled that one up, I switched to a taller, thinner Japanese traveler-sized notebook because… that’s what I had laying around. I’ve been writing in travel notebooks since I’ve started the podcast -- gotta feed the beast -- usually in public places -- in bars, a lotta bars, while drinking beers, or on planes, a lotta&nbsp; planes, though turbulence can be a problem. And for some reason, I’ve found that this act of writing in public generates a bit of interest, and a chunk of questions. Back in October, on the Finnair flight back from our Baltics tour, I was catching up, writing up my thoughts on our couple of days in Helsinki when the guy a few seats over started asking me what I was writing. He was a younger Finnish guy. He and his girlfriend and a group of 5 or 6 others were connecting through Chicago to Miami for a cruise, and they started their cruise party the minute the drink carts rolled. But he wanted to know what I was writing and why. The what was easy; he wanted to know what I thought of Helsinki; where I’d been, how I liked it. He was intrigued by our Baltic Riga-Tallinn-Helsinki itinerary, in kind of a “that’s weird, but interesting” way. The why I’m not sure made it through translation. It’s not a pure travelogue -- not a “we did this, and then did that”. It’s more about impressions; what I found unique; what caught my eye. Writing it down makes me think about it, and when I go back and read those pages, some 2 or 10 or 20 years later, it reminds me of that place, that time, those experiences.&nbsp;</li><li>And when I talk about travel with folks, when I tell them how often I travel, I’ll often get a story -- in a bar, on a plane, or… while getting my hair cut. The girl who does my hair told me about her trip to Peru with a yoga group. Not the whole trip (I don’t have that much hair), but on their flight back, out of Lima, the plane took off, rotating up, while the flight attendants were still in the aisle doing the final check. It was a bit of mayhem, she said. That had to be one quick taxi out and take-off, I thought, because you’d think those flight attendants would be sprinting to their seats once that plane started rolling down the runway. Which I have seen before, especially when the captain gets a quick release from a ground hold and wants to get airborne before the tower changes their mind. But I’ve never seen them leave the ground with anyone still in the aisle.</li><li>Maybe the pilot was distracted -- a message from the tower, an animal on the runway, a sudden thought crossed his mind. I thought about pilot distraction when walking the <a href=\"https://thehikehouse.com/trails/airport-mesa-trail\">Airport Mesa trail</a> in Sedona earlier this month. The trail name says it all -- it’s a 3½-mile loop around the mesa where Sedona’s general aviation airport is. The hikers aren’t the potential distraction, though. It’s one of Sedona’s famous energy vortexes that’s right next to the airport. The Airport Vortex is, according to<a href=\"https://sedonaverdevalley.natgeotourism.com/content/airport-mesa-vortex/svvc7d222a849df1d7d6\"> one website</a>, “an Upflow area (also called Electric or Masculine) that helps your spirit soar for a higher perspective and/or greater oneness and serenity.” Watching a couple of private jets take off while on our hike, I wondered what would happen if the pilot suddenly achieved greater oneness and serenity while rotating off the top of that mesa. For someone as unenlightened and non-serene as me, that would be one helluva distraction.</li><li>I think for many, maybe close to most frequent travelers, Uber and Lyft have replaced taxis, at least in the US, when not renting a car. So it got my attention when I hit a weird Uber app failure at ORD at the end of October. Coming back from Charlottesville, I light up both Uber and Lyft while getting off the plane to compare wait times and fares (you’d think their surge pricing would be consistent, but it rarely is for me). Uber is a bit better, so I go to book a ride. Except that the Uber app wouldn’t pick up at the domestic terminals, just the separate international terminal, Terminal 5. I check Lyft again; yup, they’ll pick me up at Terminal 2, so I book with them instead. But it’s weird, so I keep checking Uber. I walk out the door to the rideshare pick-up area. There’s nothing but cars with pink Lyft lights; not an Uber decal in sight. An older couple walks up to me -- “Where does Uber pick up?” Normally here, I tell them, but they seem to have deleted it from their app today. It was a good night to be a Lyft driver. I wondered how long it took Uber to notice that they weren’t getting any pick-ups from one of the country’s busiest airports.</li><li>Tonight, though -- New Year’s Eve night -- I’ll be skipping Uber and their after-midnight price surges. I’ll be happy to hang out at home, to skip any travel, and just pop a bottle... or two of Vueve and wish all you TravelCommons’ listeners a Happy New Year and fun and safe travels in 2020.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #158</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_158.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #158 — Travel Potpourri for $400, Alex','','inherit','closed','closed','','2609-revision-v1','','','2021-10-01 16:59:16','2021-10-01 21:59:16','',2609,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3943',0,'revision','',0),
(3944,1,'2021-10-01 16:59:58','2021-10-01 21:59:58','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/DSC_7106-scaled.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2633\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/DSC_7106-300x293.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"293\"></a><figcaption>Just put my dragon\'s den on Airbnb</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>January is a big travel planning month; people thinking about about the places they want to visit, spending days on the Internet researching itineraries, and putting in their week\'s vacation requests. But what about a 9-week sabbatical you’ve worked 7 years for? In this episode, we talk about that kind of extreme travel planning. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_159.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #159: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois having finished 3 weeks of traveling down to Phoenix with one more to go. It’s been a mild winter -- for Chicago -- especially when compared to last winter, which means it’s been in the 20’s and 30’s as opposed to -23 as it was one morning last January. But even with a mild winter, I still appreciate the 70 degree days in Phoenix.</li><li> It’s a 4-hr flight between Chicago and Phoenix. I normally enjoy that amount of “unplugged” time to just read, listen to music, listen to podcasts. But a couple of weeks ago, I tweaked my back during a workout -- not a big thing, I’ve done it many times before. But this time, the pain didn’t go away, it’s hung around on my left side, moving from back to hip to thigh, making it very uncomfortable to sit for long periods of time -- like 4 hrs. Which has made me notice how long US carriers keep the “Fasten Seatbelt” sign on -- like, forever. By the time that seatbelt sign finally goes off, my back is screaming -- and the person next to me in the middle seat is pretty annoyed at my constant shifting. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/06/16/podcast-152-overwhelming-travel-new-old-restaurant-trends/\">episode #152</a>, I talked about Southwest flights between Chicago and Nashville keeping the seatbelt sign on the entire hour-and-20-minutes. It hasn’t been that bad, but it’s easily been 45 minutes. And it isn’t just Southwest; United is doing the same thing. Quite a difference from, say, when Andrew and I flew Air Baltic back in October. 10,000 ft and “bing” that seat belt sign would go off, and we’d still be climbing. It doesn’t need to turn off that fast, but there’s gotta be a happy medium there somewhere. </li><li>With the mild winter and a little bit of luck, my flights to and from Phoenix have been pretty dependable -- except for this week. On Monday, I started getting delay notices for my United 7:40pm flight right after lunch. United was doing their typical rolling delay exercise -- it’s a 30 minutes; no, really an hour; no, we’re leaving at 9pm; just kidding, it’s really 9:40. I was OK with the 30 and 60-minute delays, but then when I get two more delays in a 40-minute span -- now, something’s up. I call United. I get the Premier desk, which the guy tells me is in Chicago. I tell him the story -- rolling delays have now gotten to 2 hrs; I don’t trust that this flight is going off, and I need to get to PHX tonight. The guy says, “Yup, I got it. Makes sense.” He tries to find me routings through LAX and SFO, but the connections don’t work. So he cancels and refunds my ticket -- no hassle, no questions, no change fee. I love this guy. I pivot to Southwest and American, which both have 8:40 flights. I look at American’s seat map -- nothing but middle seats. That’s just not going to work with my back, so it’s over to Southwest. I’m A-List, so I know with their open seating I’ll get an aisle seat. (Exhale) Haven’t done that dance in a while, so was a bit out of shape. But with one more trip to PHX left, I’m not looking to get back into that shape.</li><li>Bridge Music --  <em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/hisboyelroy/430\" target=\"_blank\">Revolve</a> mix</em> by cinematrik (c) copyright 2005 Licensed under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hisboyelroy/430   </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Before writing a podcast, I go through all the interaction channels -- website comments, Facebook comments, Instagram comments, Twitter replies, e-mails, … and inevitably I miss something. Which I have done since October when Arnoud Heijnis and I traded Twitter direct messages about travel converters. In episode #155, I’d talked about having to rummage around for European plug adaptors before my Krakow and Budapest trip, and how I’m always leaving them behind. Arnoud wrote -<ul><li>Hi Mark, just caught up on your last two episodes. I also did the travel converter dance until someone recommended the Power Bagel. It\'s so small and comes in handy not only as a travel adapter but also in hotel rooms with not enough power plugs, conference tables with one outlet etc. Iit never leaves my bag so thought I\'d share.</li></ul></li><li>A very belated thanks, Arnoud! Clicking through the link that Arnoud sent, the Power Bagel is a compact circular power strip of universal plugs and a couple of USB ports. They say that the circular design keeps large power adapters, like a Macbook power supply, from blocking outlets like they do on straight power strips. And then in the center hole, they store a universal plug adapter so you can plug the Power Bagel in most international outlets. Cool design and Arnoud vouches for it. Clicking around the web site, the company MOGICS seems to be a 3-person design company based in Singapore. They got started a few years back on Kickstarter and are in the middle of a new campaign for an upgraded version of the Power Bagel, called, of course, the Super Bagel that upgrades the plug adapter and adds a on-trend USB-C port. Kickstarter says the campaign ends on Feb 25th. I’ll include a <a href=\"http://kck.st/354ozBx\">link</a> in the show notes for anyone interested.</li><li>Kickstarter seems to be the place for these things. I sent Arnoud a link to a travel adapter campaign that I joined. The Passport Go is a more traditional travel adapter -- a big cube that will plug into most international outlets and has 3 USB-A and 1 USB-C plugs and one universal plug receptacle. I used it on my Baltics trip. For personal travel, most of my power needs seem to now be driven by USB cords rather than plugs -- my iPhone did a rapid charge off the USB-C port, my tablet and headphones off the USB-A ports and since I don’t have enough hair to justify a blow dryer or curling iron, I never used the plug receptacle. Indeed, if I’d brought my Macbook Air, I could’ve powered that up off the USB-C port rather than bringing its power adapter. I’ll include a link to <a href=\"https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/zendure/passport-go-worlds-first-travel-adapter-w-gan-technology\"><em>their</em> Kickstarter page</a>.</li><li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/10/14/podcast-156-airport-satisfaction-escooters-smaller-luggage/\">episode #156,</a> I talked about how I really liked electric scooters, using them to run around in Chicago and Charlottesville and DC, and down here in Phoenix. Whereas Chicago wrapped up their e-scooter pilot in October -- which made sense; I don’t think those scooters would do well in the snow -- Phoenix seemed the perfect place with perfect weather -- no snow, not a lot of rain. And they seemed to have nailed one of the main problems with e-scooters -- people leaving them lying everywhere, especially in the middle of sidewalks. In downtown Phoenix, you have to park them in designated areas, typically near sidewalk corners, inside a painted box. So it surprised me when I started coming down here in December that I saw only 2 scooter companies -- Lime (which is partnered with Uber) and Spin (which is owned by the car company Ford). But then, a couple of weeks ago, Lime announced that they were pulling out -- that they couldn’t make money in Phoenix -- and a day or so later, all their scooters were gone. I don’t know what the right balance between scooter availability and public right-of-way is, but I hope Chicago and Phoenix and other cities can figure it out. This whole micro-mobility space -- bike shares, e-scooters -- is an important part of the urban transit mix. And, when the weather’s nice, they’re fun too!</li><li>In that <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/10/14/podcast-156-airport-satisfaction-escooters-smaller-luggage/\">same episode</a>, I talked about buying a smaller bag, a <a href=\"https://amzn.to/32lIURe\">TravelPro Maxlite 5 international carry-on size</a>, to meet the smaller carry-on size and weight requirements of AirBaltic, which Andrew and I would be using to hop between Riga, Tallinn, and Helsinki on our Baltics beer and sauna tour. I said back then that I didn’t want to spend a lot of money on it because I’d only be using it for this Baltics trip and maybe some short couple-of-day trips, that my big Victorinox 22-incher would remain my primary bag. But as it turns out, I’ve been using the smaller TravelPro for these 4-day/3-night trips to Phoenix. Now, with temperatures in 70’s, I’m not having to bring heavy, thick clothes with me, but still, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by what I can pack into that smaller TravelPro. But, I think I’ll be back to the Victorinox for next week’s trip -- I’m vectoring through Durango, CO for a ski weekend on the way home. Little colder, little more clothing; I think I’ll need all the space I can get. </li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music -- Velvet Green of Mystery (Instrumental) by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/48114 Ft: Kthugha, Jeris, Martijn de Boer  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong> </strong> <strong>Planning the Trip of a Lifetime</strong> </h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>We’ve talked on past episodes about trip planning -- using guidebooks, social media, Google algorithms, shooting the gaps between bipolar TripAdvisor reviews, casting runes, consulting tarot cards,... And all that for a week’s vacation, maybe two. What about a 9-week vacation, a paid sabbatical that you’ve worked and waited 7 years for? Well, that’s the extreme travel planning that long-time TravelCommons listener and even longer time friend Allan Marko and his wife Chris Chufo faced last year. And with January being a big travel planning month, I asked Allan to talk to us about how he and Chris planned for a trip of a lifetime.</li><li>Interview with Allan Marko</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #159</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2010/09/06/video-1-impressions-of-vietnam/\">Link to TravelCommons Vietnam video</a></li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_159.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #159 — Planning the Trip of a Lifetime in Southeast Asia','','inherit','closed','closed','','2626-revision-v1','','','2021-10-01 16:59:58','2021-10-01 21:59:58','',2626,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3944',0,'revision','',0),
(3945,1,'2021-10-01 17:00:42','2021-10-01 22:00:42','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/IMG_0368-scaled.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2664 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/IMG_0368-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a><figcaption>Is this the IMAX seatback screen?</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>Trying to watch the Super Bowl while flying from Durango, CO to Chicago via Denver got me thinking about the fading away of seatback entertainment. We also talk about the continuing evolution of ride sharing. Uber and Lyft are looking more and more like the taxi companies they fought to replace. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_160.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #160: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. I finished my Phoenix travels at the end of January and made the last trip a “bleisure” trip -- business in Phoenix Monday thru Thursday afternoon, and then leisure Thursday evening thru Sunday with a ski weekend in Durango, CO, the first time I’ve been on the slopes in 7 years. I first thought about heading up to Salt Lake for the weekend, but when I saw that the Sundance Film Festival was the same weekend, I thought “Nope” and started Googling for other ideas. The ski slopes around Flagstaff were too small and I didn’t want to fight the traffic on I-70 to hit the areas near Denver. Durango, in the San Juan mountains in the southwest corner of the state -- near Four Corners -- looked like a good spot. It’s a quick and fairly inexpensive hour hop from Phoenix; it’s an actual town, not just a ski resort, so there’d be other things to do when the lifts closed; the lift tickets at Purgatory and Wolf Creek were reasonable -- 40-50% of the price at, say, Vail or Park City; I was able to book a whole tiny house on AirBnB for the price of a generic Fairfield Inn room; and, I’d never been there before. And, as I found out from my AirBnB host, it was the weekend of Durango’s Snowdown Festival -- the 42nd annual, with a parade down Main Street and everything. The snow was just OK, but the skiing was great -- beautiful weather, damn few lift lines, nice people -- a weird but fun combination of families -- mostly from Texas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico -- and the Colorado hippy-dippy ski bum crew. It was a nice ending to my 2 months of Phoenix trips.</li><li>The only downside was… I had to check a bag. Even though I rented all my equipment -- skis, boots, poles -- I still needed that extra bag for all the other paraphernalia -- helmet, ski pants, gloves, parka, …. I love skiing but it requires a lot of stuff. Not that it cost me anything -- even flying Basic Economy on American from Phoenix to Durango, I got free bags with my Platinum status. Though American’s website wasn’t very clear about that when they tried to upsell me off of Basic Economy -- imagine that. And while I got free bags, I couldn’t select my seat in advance. But given it was a small regional jet with no middle seats, I figured I’d risk it.&nbsp; I will say, though, that I was pretty happy with the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/37R0sHX\">teal green luggage tags</a> I bought before the trip. Made it very easy to spot my bags amidst the sea of black suitcases on the luggage belt. Probably <a href=\"https://amzn.to/37R0sHX\">the best $5 I’ve spent on Amazon</a>.&nbsp;</li><li>One detail I missed when planning my ski weekend is that my Sunday night flights from Durango to Denver to Chicago would be right in the middle of the Super Bowl. Though I’m not sure I’d have changed anything if I’d remembered it. I didn’t really have a dog in that hunt -- I’m not a big San Francisco or Kansas City fan and so was kinda like everyone else who wasn’t in the Bay Area, I was rooting more for Andy Reid than KC. I did end up catching <em>most</em> of the game, but it was a little choppy. I watched the kick-off and 1st quarter in the bar at Durango Airport. Durango Airport isn’t big -- just 4 gates if I remember correctly -- and the bar kinda sticks out into the gate seating area. I sat at the bar, had a beer, and watched the game on the TV hanging on the wall near Gate 2 -- or maybe 3. But then United called boarding, so I caught bits of the second quarter on the Fox TV iPhone app while waiting to take off for Denver. And then tracked the start of the 3rd quarter after touchdown and a really long taxi in DEN. I caught the rest of the 3rd quarter on multiple screens -- bars, CNN gate TVs -- while walking down the B Concourse to make my ORD connection. I got lucky, though, and was able to catch all of Kansas City’s phenomenal come-back uninterrupted in a Mexican restaurant with about a dozen other fixated passengers and restaurant workers. After KC’s final interception, I walked down and caught the final plays on the CNN TV at the gate. Every other night, I consciously avoid those CNN TVs -- the volumes always up on people yelling at each other. But this night, I was happy for that volume -- the one night when they weren’t to CNN. </li><li>Bridge Music --  <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/48915\">Like Music (cdk Mix</a>) by Analog By Nature (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/48915 Ft: Phasenwandler  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>The week after that last Phoenix trip, I wrote <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/02/07/my-food-and-beer-hangouts-in-downtown-phoenix-dtphx/\">a post</a> on the TravelCommons website listing my favorite food and beer hangouts in downtown Phoenix. When I started traveling to Phoenix in the mid-’90’s, there wasn’t much to downtown Phoenix other than a big Hyatt Regency hotel. Everything was in Scottsdale and Tempe. I’d usually stay in Tempe because, with Arizona State University there, there were restaurants and bars I could walk to. Fast forward to today, downtown Phoenix has a lot more going on. Stadiums for the Phoenix Suns and the Arizona Diamondbacks, and a new downtown campus for ASU’s law school bring in enough people to support a solid selection of restaurants, coffee shops, and bars. The blog post doesn’t cover everything -- just the places I found myself going back to again and again during my 2-month stay.</li><li>Most of my flights from the mid-90’s on went into PHX Sky Harbor’s Terminal 2 -- on United and on American, until they moved to the much better Terminal 4 after merging with US Air which had merged with America West, the original hub airline for PHX. Terminal 2 was PHX’s slum terminal. Built in 1962 and originally planned to shut down in 2000, they finally shut it down on Feb 4, 2020, the week after I finished my latest Phoenix gig. The last two airlines using it -- United and Alaska Air -- have moved to Terminal 3 with the rest of the non-hub carriers. PHX’s two major carriers -- American and Southwest -- split Terminal 4. Some of the newspaper articles said business travelers liked it because it was compact, easy to navigate. I’m not one of them. I thought it was a cramped low-ceilinged place, with small restrooms and lousy food and beer options when I had to wait out delays back to ORD.&nbsp; I think you can tell that I won’t miss it. The plans are to demo the terminal this year and replace it with European-style bus gates -- using buses to take passengers out to remotely parked aircraft instead of boarding through jetways. I’m gonna bet those bus gates won’t be popular in August when PHX’s tarmac temperatures hit 120 degrees.&nbsp;</li><li>Waiting for my American Eagle PHX-Durango flight, I was half-paying attention to the PA announcements, but then noticed that the gate agent wasn’t doing the boarding announcements. Instead they were using recorded announcements. That wasn’t what caught my attention, though. I’ve heard recorded gate announcements hundreds of times. But usually, they’re recordings of humans reading the announcements. Here at gate B19, it was one of those robotic text-to-speech synthesized voices -- something like &lt;insert Boarding Groups 1, 2, and 3&gt;. I mean, why? How much savings do you get by using text-to-speech over some gate agent standing in a closet and recording it, say, on their iPhone? Maybe more that I think now that American has, what, 7, 10, 123 boarding groups? I asked this question “Why the robot” out loud -- to Twitter. American came back “We heard back and the PHX gate staff actually does record the voices used in the announcements. They are real humans.” Kudos for American’s Twitter staff for following up, but unless they have an android with a bad vox box working for them, I think the gang at gate B19 is using text2speech.org.</li><li>I posted an article on the TravelCommons Facebook page about a guy who wore a plastic tent on a plane to avoid the coronavirus. Now, as it turns out, it was really more of a publicity stunt for the guy’s company. He makes personal tents to protect people from bad weather when sitting on the sidelines of their kids’ soccer games. Might cut down on the colds I catch when flying, but from the picture, it looks like it would be quite a pain when the person in the window seat wants to get out to use the toilet.</li><li>On January 6th, the first Monday of the new year, I <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1214167465627979776\">posted a picture on Twitter</a> of the “cannabis amnesty box” that was on the other side of security at ORD’s Terminal 1. Pot became legal in Illinois the first of the year, and the Chicago Dept of Aviation put out these boxes “so travelers have the opportunity to ensure compliance with federal law, as well as the local laws at their destination” according to the police department. If you look at the picture I posted, the box looks like something the maintenance guys knocked together in the wood shop during their break. So no surprise that 3 weeks later, someone broke into a similar box at Midway airport and helped themselves to some surrendered weed. Actually, I think the only real surprise is that it took as long as 3 weeks for this to happen. </li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/spinmeister/53428\">Somewhere</a> by spinmeister (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/spinmeister/53428 Ft: DJ Vadim  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Seatback Screens Fading Away</strong> </h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>On my flight from Durango to Denver, half the guys on the plane were staring down at their phones during boarding and taxi, watching the second quarter until the plane rotated up off the runway. For folks flying United planes with DirectTV seatback screens -- the repainted Continental 737s -- no problems; just swipe your credit card and keep watching. But that’s a shrinking group. Seat back entertainment screens have been on the death watch list for 5 years now, but it seems to be on its way out -- at least on a lot of the domestic routes.&nbsp;</li><li>And I can’t really say that I miss them. The DirectTV controls on those United planes are in the armrest, so I’m always changing the channel or the volume or the screen brightness. On American 737s, screens bulging out of the seat backs into an already tight space thanks to American’s war against seat pitch; I have to recline my seat just to be able to get that screen in focus. And the power supplies for all these seat back units are under the seat, crowding out space for my backpack or my feet.&nbsp;</li><li>I’m happy with the BYOS -- bring your own screen -- approach. I watched the season finale of The Mandalorian Star Wars TV show on my 8-inch Samsung tablet. It wasn’t as good as watching it on the 65-inch LG 4K TV at home, but it was bigger than any domestic in-flight screen. On one of my Southwest flights home from PHX, I saw a guy hang his big iPhone Max from the tray on the seatback in front of him -- kind of a DIY seatback entertainment unit.&nbsp;</li><li>On long international flights, though, I can see the case for seatback screens. My wife and kids have perfected synchronized movie viewing. They’re sitting three abreast; they queue up the same movie and then count down -- 3, 2, 1, Press Play! The airplane version of watching a movie together in the living room. I’m not sure it would be the same if they were all looking down at their iPhones. This tends to work better on newer planes, like the 787, that have bigger screens. I remember Andrew trying to watch the movie Dunkirk - a big WW II action movie that was great on IMAX -- on a maybe 7-inch screen on a United 767. I don’t think he got the full experience of that movie.</li><li>Back in December, United <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1211759835181654018\">tweeted out the top 10 most watched in-flight movies in 2019</a> -- Bohemian Rhapsody, A Star is Born, and Crazy Rich Asians were 1, 2, and 3. Makes sense. In 9th place, though, was John Wick 3, the 3rd installment of the Keanu Reeves fists of fury action flick. Loved that movie, but I can’t see even the new 16-inch screens in United’s business class being big enough to handle that flick. </li><li> Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/scottaltham/20747\"> Hear Us Now (poptastic mix)</a> by Scott Altham (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/scottaltham/20747  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Any Difference Left Between Ride-Share and Taxis?</strong> </h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I got an e-mail survey the other day asking for my thoughts, impressions about Uber and Lyft. One of the questions was how long I’d used each of them -- less than 1 year; 1-2 years, 2-3 years, more than 3 years. Which got <em>me</em> kinda wondering, so I pulled out my iPhone and fired up each app. My first Uber ride was in December 2013, from midtown Manhattan to LGA at 4pm. I signed up because it’s such a pain to find a regular cab to take you to LGA at rush hour, and I’d forgotten to book a ride with the black car service I would normally use. Interesting that I didn’t use Uber again for another 6 months, in June 2014, when again, I’d didn’t have a black car book for a ride from PHL to a client out in the suburbs along the Blue Route. I signed up with Lyft in December 2015 when I was in Las Vegas for a project. I’d be using Uber more frequently in 2015, but back then, only Lyft had permission to drop-off at LAS. We had used Uber a couple of times, but they’d have to drop us off at the rental car center so we could take the bus to the terminal. I did that exactly one time and then pivoted to Lyft. So, according to this e-mail survey -- which, at the end, revealed itself to be sponsored by Uber -- I’m a grizzled ride-sharing veteran -- as I’m sure are many of you.</li><li>And ride-sharing was what it was -- an app-driven version of the old ride-sharing bulletin boards -- “I’m driving from Chicago to Rockford; looking for someone to split the gas and tolls” -- except locally. I remember, at the start, that caused a bit of an etiquette challenge -- do I sit in the front or the back? And you were careful because it was their car -- and usually a nice one. Certainly much nicer and way less beat-up than the typical cab.&nbsp; And there were usually good stories from the drivers -- all but a couple were doing it part-time, to make some additional cash. Way back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/11/22/podcast-125-uber-driver-stories-overseas-for-the-election/\">episode #125</a>, in November 2016, early on in my Uber/Lyft days, I told some of those stories.</li><li>A year later, a driver in Charlottesville, VA told me he was driving full-time and wanted to expand, so he’d bought 3 used Toyota Corollas (even back then the preferred ride-share car) and was renting them out to “Hispanics”, his words, who were driving Uber and Lyft a couple hours north in the Washington, DC area. Interesting idea. A bit like the standard taxi cab model -- leasing licensed cabs to drivers for a shift -- but without the need to drop money on a taxi license, or a medallion in places like New York and Chicago. Interesting enough that there are now 6-7 companies, including Hertz, offering daily and weekly rentals if you don’t want to share rides in your personal car.</li><li>Back in December, landing in Chicago Midway on a Southwest flight from PHX, I did my usual drill, opened up Uber and Lyft as I got off the plane and checked prices and wait times for a ride home. The prices were about the same, but the wait time… 10 min for Uber, 2 for Lyft. Lyft it is! I hit the Request Ride button, but instead of searching for a driver, I immediately get a 4-digit PIN. I head downstairs and get into a queue that looks a lot like the cab line a few doors over, except this one is run by women in pink Lyft safety vests. But they’re doing the same thing the cab rank workers do -- wave down cars and then point passengers to them. I wait, I dunno, maybe 5 minutes to get into a car, show the guy the PIN on my Lyft app, he enters it into his, and off we go. A bit less hectic than the typical airport rideshare scrum, but again, how is this different than a taxi -- except that I don’t have to ask the driver if his credit card machine works.</li><li>Indeed, on most of my trips over the past year, arriving in PHX or CHO, there typically wouldn’t be a line for a cab, so I’d skip the 5-10 minute wait for Uber or Lyft. Or, returning from Durango with my extra bag of ski paraphernalia, I skipped the schlep up to to the ride-share pick-up zone; I just walked out the door to a waiting cab. And the price difference is shrinking --&nbsp; as we talked about in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/08/13/podcast-154-will-we-still-love-uber-when-the-prices-go-up/\">episode #154</a>, Uber and Lyft have been nudging their rates up to stem their losses.&nbsp;</li><li>This is not to say there aren’t important differences; places where Uber and Lyft bring real value. I was working in New Orleans before Uber set up shop. It was impossible to get a cab anywhere other than between the airport and the French Quarter. Trying to get to and from a restaurant in, say, Mid-City or Uptown was painful -- until Uber showed up.</li><li>It kinda feels like, after all the hype, the battles with regulators, the IPOs, that Uber and Lyft used billions of venture capital dollars to break the medallion monopolies and build some phenomenal taxi dispatch systems. As a traveler, it’s been great for me. For the investors though? Well, I’m glad I skipped those IPOs</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #160</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_160.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #160 — Disappearing Seatback Screens; Shrinking Difference Between Ride-Share and Taxis','','inherit','closed','closed','','2661-revision-v1','','','2021-10-01 17:00:42','2021-10-01 22:00:42','',2661,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3945',0,'revision','',0);
INSERT INTO `wp_posts` VALUES
(3946,1,'2021-10-01 17:01:40','2021-10-01 22:01:40','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/738DE79A-D927-423E-A890-569A5F3A0AB1-scaled.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2682 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/738DE79A-D927-423E-A890-569A5F3A0AB1-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a><figcaption>You have reached your destination</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>Things started out well, skipping out on Chicago winter for a drive down to Key West. But then last week, coronavirus hit the US and everything unraveled. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_161.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #161: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you hunkered down in the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois, trying to figure out exactly what the governor’s “shelter-in-place” directive means. Not a lot of travel since the last episode, and that’s not just because of coronavirus. No business travel booked, so it was just one trip in the back half of February to visit some friends who are snowbirding in Key West, Florida. 80 degrees and sunny vs. 30 degrees and grey skies in Chicago -- tough duty. Our friends rented a nice house up a dead end street in the Historic District, just a couple of blocks off Duval Street. They had it for two months, Feb through the end of March, but left early, giving up their last 2 weeks of sunny weather to drive back to Chicago because they’re afraid hotels will be closing along their route home.&nbsp;</li><li>Hadn’t planned any travel in March, but watched our April plans dissolve as Covid-19 spread. First, a friend from Poland canceled his wedding in Sedona, AZ shortly after the US announced the 30-day travel ban for Europeans. While their wedding date was past the 30 days, they figured this was just the start -- which it was. Over the next 5 days, travel bans started popping up across Europe. We joked to ourselves, “Lucky timing -- first time in 4 years we’re not doing Spring Break in Europe”, opting instead for some wine tasting in Howell Mountain and Napa Valley. Until the next day when California locked everything down, closing everything including restaurants and wineries…</li><li>For some families, kids home from school and mom or dad off the road and working from home -- the forced family togetherness is adding to the stress. I was talking to a friend this week -- “I’m usually on the road 75% of the time, and the kids are in school or sports. After 2 days of this, my wife laid down the rules -- my son is in the basement, my wife and daughter are on the second floor, I’m on the third floor, and the first floor with the kitchen is neutral territory -- you can pass through, but you can’t claim table or counter space there.” Last time I checked in with him, everyone was still alive -- that is, they hadn’t killed each other yet.</li><li>But I’m nothing if not an optimist, so in the midst of this week’s unraveling, I found a deal on a direct American Air flight from ORD to Barcelona -- 8½ hr 787 flight -- so I booked it -- 2 weeks in Barcelona at the end of September. I don’t know what we’ll do yet or where we’ll stay, but I’m already looking forward to it.</li><li>Bridge Music --  <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/snowflake/46164\">A Foolish Game</a> by Snowflake (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/snowflake/46164 Ft: Admiral Bob  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Steve Frick, a longtime TravelCommons listener and Untappd buddy who also does a podcast, <a href=\"http://hypeamerica.com/back-and-gone-again\">Travel Stories from Back and Gone Again</a>, took some time to record and send in an audio comment on last month’s episode -<ul><li>Gotta love the text-to-speech robot voice. Steve, would’ve been great to see that selfie on your Twitter feed. Also, check out the show notes for a link to Steve’s podcast</li></ul></li><li>Darren Mak hit me up on Twitter<ul><li>“Hey Mark,&nbsp; just listened to Travel Commons <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/09/20/podcast-155-rj-delays-street-food-in-poland-and-hungary/\">episode 155</a> on my last flight... board my next one which is a Delta MD88. Look out the window and see this... thanks for putting that in my head buddy!”&nbsp;</li><li>From the picture on his tweet, you can see he’s sitting in the window seat of an MD-88 just in front of the engine cowl. In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/09/20/podcast-155-rj-delays-street-food-in-poland-and-hungary/\">episode 155</a>, we talked about American Airlines’ retirement of their MD-80’s. I mentioned that when I ended up in a seat like Darren’s, my mind would sometimes wander -- if the engine next to my head blows up, will the shrapnel blow out or blow into the cabin. I never heard of such a catastrophic failure on an MD-80 -- but that didn’t keep me from wondering. And now, Darren can’t keep from wondering. Sorry about that, Darren. You won’t be able to un-think that. I’m guessing, though, that those MD’s were the first planes Delta parked as air traffic cratered and will be the last to return -- if they ever do. Savor that pic...</li></ul></li><li>And for our UK subscribers, a shout out to another TravelCommons listener and Untappd friend Rob Cheshire who launched <a href=\"https://thisweekincraft.beer/\">This Week in Craft.Beer</a>, a weekly newsletter covering the UK craft beer scene. He’s four issues in and is on a good roll. We’re thinking about heading over to the UK for Thanksgiving and the taproom directory in Rob’s newsletter will be key to planning that trip. I also love that he’s using a .Beer domain name. Check out the show notes for a link.</li><li>I think I’ve mentioned in a past episode that I’ve switched my carryon from a Timbuk 2 backpack to a Timbuk 2 messenger bag. Digitizing means carrying less physical stuff; the backpack was feeling half empty, so I switched to the smaller messenger bag. I like it except for one thing -- it’ll only hold a short water bottle. The big 20oz’er my daughter gave me for Christmas? Fits great in the backpack side pocket, but is too tall for the messenger bag. I played around with a lot of water bottles, but the best one has turned out to be a 500 ml Evian bottle. Now I know that single use plastic is a bad thing, but I can get a week’s use out of one Evian bottle. Until I fill it up in the gym or the concierge lounge the morning before my flight home and forget about it -- until the TSA person pulls it out of my bag on the other side of security and asks me, a bit sarcastically, if I want to go back and check it in my luggage. Yeah, no -- just pitch it. Which is why I can’t have nice things -- like a $35 teakwood S’well bottle. Instead, I walk down the terminal and just spend $3.50 for another bottle of Evian.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>For my trip to Key West, I got back to an old habit of reading some non-guidebook books -- either fiction or non-fiction -- about my destination before going. Before driving down the Overseas Highway, I read <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2QzesjI\"><em>Last Train to Paradise</em></a> about the incredible effort that went into building a railroad line to Key West 100 years ago -- that was later repurposed for the first iteration of the highway, and then read Hemingway’s <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3a72oOv\"><em>To Have and Have Not</em></a> because, well,&nbsp; it’s Hemingway and it’s about Key West, and so you just have to. I used to do this a lot more. I started when I read Paul Theroux’s <a href=\"https://amzn.to/398SvhE\"><em>Kingdom by the Sea</em></a> before my first trip to the UK back in 1985. I read John Lukacs’ history <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2xNS9A7\"><em>Budapest 1900</em></a> before my first trip to Hungary in 1989, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3a7KDhX\"><em>Watermark</em></a> by Joseph Brodsky before a trip to Venice, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/394bji3\"><em>His Bloody Project</em></a> by Grahame Burnet before going to Scotland’s Western Highlands. As you’d guess, none of these were about what to do or see, but instead they gave some context about the place -- even the fiction books. Gives a bit of balance to the go-here/see-that stuff in guidebooks and web sites.&nbsp; Something new for this trip -- a Spotify playlist of Jimmy Buffet tunes from those 1970’s Key West albums -- <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2whAqRs\"><em>Living And Dying In ¾ Time</em></a>, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2vG6wG8\"><em>Havana Daydreamin\'</em></a> -- for some additional context for that 3 hour drive down through the Keys.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com. </li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/THE_CONCEPT_OF_ENERGY/55008\">ABANDONED BUTTERFLIES</a> by THE_CONCEPT_OF_ENERGY (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/THE_CONCEPT_OF_ENERGY/55008 Ft: Doxent Zsigmond, Snowflake</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>New Crisis, Old Question</strong> </h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I’m not gonna try to do any hot takes on what this whole coronavirus/Covid-19/ social distancing experience means because: a) I hate the whole “insta-punditry” that social media has spawned; and b) there are so many unknowns and things are changing so fast that any attempt at meaningful analysis right now won’t age very well. Indeed, I’ve had to re-write this episode 3 times now. I gotta get it recorded before things change and I have to re-do it again.</li><li>At first, it felt like the Black Monday crash of 1987 (which, I hate to admit, I’m old enough to have experienced) or Sept 11, 2001 were good comparison points -- significant, sharp, scary events that came out of nowhere with no warning, and when we were in it, felt like a free fall with no bottom in sight. But after a week or so, even though the stock market was still down or airports and airplanes were still empty, we could see a path to the other side -- maybe not turn-by-turn directions, but at least it felt like we could point ourselves in the general direction. But with this, we’re, what 2-3 weeks in?, and it still feels like we’re in that free fall; we don’t know where the bottom is, let alone the direction to get out.</li><li>I remember, after Sept 11th and the 2008 Great Recession, people saying “everything has changed” and wondering if travel would rebound, if people would get on planes again in the same numbers. And it did and then some -- though the growth has been driven more by leisure travelers than the road warriors. But the travel industry makes its money off the frequent business traveler, and that question pops up again -- will they come back? Because it’s a bit different this time. In 2001, remote work options were pretty much just AOL or Yahoo instant messaging. Video was limited to special rooms with ISDN lines; Skype didn’t launch for another 2 years. In 2008, things were a bit better, but we’re a few months after the second version of the iPhone is released (the iPhone 3G), WhatsApp doesn’t launch for another year, and Slack doesn’t show up for another 5. But now 12 years on, we have bandwidth, we have tools. Last fall, we had <em><a href=\"https://www.ft.com/content/5c635430-1dbc-11ea-97df-cc63de1d73f4\">flygskam</a></em>  -- flight shaming -- hit the mainstream, and now the Covid-19 pandemic that’s just about shut down international air travel. Were we ready to step back from business travel and the coronavirus is just the forcing function?</li><li>I’m coming up on the 35th anniversary of my first business flight, and in that time, I’ve known maybe a handful of guys (and they were all men) who went out of their way to do more business travel; when offered the choice between a conference call or a plane trip, they chose the plane trip. The vast majority got on the plane or the train or behind the wheel because that’s what they needed to do to get the job done -- to close a deal, to do a project, to work with an employee. As remote tools get better and get more ingrained in the culture, the ability to get tasks done remotely increases. But we are social animals. And for all the data and processes, most business is about relationships. And as long as that’s true, we’ll want to meet people face-to-face -- over a coffee or a beer or a meal -- once we finally touch bottom after this coronavirus free fall and can feel safe sitting next to each other again.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/49674\">H2O</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/49674  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Driving Down to Key West</strong> </h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Back to the pre-lock down days of February, it was the first time I’d been to Key West. We decided to drive down, run the whole <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overseas_Highway\">Overseas Highway</a>, the 113-mile stretch of US 1 from Homestead, south of Miami, to Key West. We flew into FLL because -- well, it’s a bit less of a zoo parade than MIA. We landed, walked straight out of the terminal, across the street and into the rental car center -- no shuttle bus ride to the back-40. RSW is the same on the Gulf side. There are damn few on-site rental sites left, and so I appreciate them when I can. Walking down the Hertz Five-Star aisle with Irene (I fell out of top-tier President’s Circle a few years back; too many in-city clients where Uber and Lyft were more convenient), I see a bunch of <a href=\"https://www.hyundaiusa.com/us/en/vehicles/kona/gallery\">Hyundai Konas</a> -- which is a new model for me, it’s a subcompact SUV -- a few Chevy Malibus and, as always, the requisite bunch of Nissan Altimas. I do my normal drill -- looking for non-beat up cars (so I don’t have to argue about damage when I return it) and low mileage (so it won’t break down during the rental). Irene, she’s looking for a cute color. Lucky for us, the car that was at the intersection of all those criteria was right in front of us -- a Surf Blue Hyundai Kona with 126 miles on the odometer. We threw our luggage in, dialed up Key West on Google Maps on Car Play, and pulled out -- into a 15-minute line to get out of the Hertz lot. Somehow that partnership with Clear doesn’t seem to be making much of a dent.</li><li>When we were planning this trip, everyone warned us off the drive -- “It’s slow”, “you’ll get caught behind a bunch of trucks”, “an accident will shut the whole road down” -- but I was as excited for the drive as I was the time in Key West. I think the Overseas Highway is one of the iconic drives in the US -- in my mind, it’s in the same league with Pacific Coast Highway between San Francisco and LA and Route 66 from Chicago to LA.&nbsp;</li><li>Even before we left the mainland, the drive was cool, with the Everglades on one side and the marinas and ocean inlets on the other. The drive through Key Largo was less interesting -- not much more than bait shops and boat parking. A bit further along, we crawled through Islamorada and Marathon in heavy traffic on a Monday afternoon.</li><li>Everyone talks about Seven Mile Bridge (we clocked it at 6.8 miles) and have seen it in movies, and it <em>is</em> very cool, but what was more interesting to me were the sections of the highway before that, that run across the low-lying keys along the route of the old Overseas Railroad which I read about in <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2QzesjI\"><em>Last Train to Paradise</em></a> -- time and again we’d be driving across what was nothing more than just a bit of a road bed and a 100 or so feet of beach and vegetation. After that, it’s ocean.&nbsp;</li><li>The warnings were right -- the highway is not a fast drive. It squeezes down from four lanes to two lanes for a bit, and Monroe County sheriff cars are parked where the speed limit dips when you pass through towns. But speed isn’t really the point. Just like you don’t run through Big Sur at 70 mph on PCH, you don’t blow past people surf fishing for snapper, snook, and grouper, or not slow down and try to spot Key Deer on Big Pine Key. If you just want to get to Key West as fast as possible, spend $100 or so for a flight from FLL or MIA. Otherwise, throttle back and remember -- on this drive, it’s as much about the journey as the destination.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #161</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_161.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #161 — New Crisis, Old Question; Driving Down to Key West','','inherit','closed','closed','','2680-revision-v1','','','2021-10-01 17:01:40','2021-10-01 22:01:40','',2680,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3946',0,'revision','',0),
(3947,1,'2021-10-01 17:02:33','2021-10-01 22:02:33','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/DSC00969.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2732 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/DSC00969-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\n<figcaption>Early attempts at travel journaling</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Kinda tough to do a podcast that’s more about the journey than the destination if I’m not “journeying,” but I give it a go. We talk about cyberattacks on frequent flyer accounts now that we don\'t have a reason to check them, planning for my first post-pandemic trips, and how re-reading my travel journals is pinch-hitting right now. </span>All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_162.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #162: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you, as you might expect, from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois, going into what is either the 3rd or 4th week of Lockdown, depending on how one scores the executive orders. I usually kick off each episode talking about my travel since the last episode -- which is going to be a very short conversation since I recorded the last episode at the end of Lockdown Week 1. Does make it kinda tough to do a podcast that’s more about the journey if I’m not “journeying”. Indeed, longtime TravelCommons listener Steve Frick pinged me on Twitter - “How are you holding up being off the road?” I told him I was taking some long walks to relieve the itching on the soles of my feet, but I’m not sure it’s working.&nbsp;</li><li>I thought I could keep myself occupied by working out more; drop the winter weight a little earlier than usual; be in better biking shape for when the Midwest weather breaks. But I had to call an audible on that when the city closed all the gyms, and then the running and biking path along Lake Michigan. Now I’m trying out a lot of new in-room/no-weight workouts. There’s a lot of them out there, even the Wall Street Journal published “Five Home Workouts to Do During the Coronavirus Outbreak”. I’ve never been a big HIIT guy, high-intensity interval training, so things like squat jumps, burpees, and mountain climbers haven’t been in my repertoire. But I’m kinda liking it and thinking that, when I’m back traveling, this could be a great in-room workout for those days when the hotel gym is jammed, especially those Marriott Courtyard gyms, when all four of the ellipticals and treadmills are taken, and there’s a queue for the handful of dumbells. Of course, I might have to warm up with some furniture jenga -- stacking the chairs and magazine table out of the way, maybe with one of the end tables -- but most US hotel rooms should have enough open space, except maybe in Manhattan.</li><li>However, my other new workout -- stair intervals, sprinting up the stairs in our 20-floor apartment building -- might not translate as well to hotels, especially those 4-story Courtyards.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Javolenus/41932\">Ianiscus</a> by Javolenus (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/\">Attribution (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Wired_Ant</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>The waves of Covid-19 e-mails from travel companies have been interesting.&nbsp; The first wave was at the beginning of March. I tweeted out a screenshot of what I received from United, but all the travel companies seem to be working off similar scripts -- “We care about you; let me tell you about the great job that HEPA air filters do; we’re cleaning the planes a bit more every night; we’ll get back to you later on your elite status.” Then the second wave as travel started to crater a couple of weeks later -- “We really care about you, so if you book a flight/room/car with us and give us money this month, we won’t charge you to change your dates if things are still mucked up… but we’ll keep your money; oh, and we cleaning the planes/rooms/cars real hard now”. This wave did get my attention. I mentioned in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/03/21/podcast-161-new-crisis-old-question-driving-down-to-key-west/\">last episode</a> how the combination of change fee waiver and a smokin’ deal on American’s direct ORD-BCN flight got me to open up my wallet for an end-of-September trip. Friends of ours are saying we’re crazy, but I’m an optimist. And now, starting last week, I’m starting to get the third wave of e-mails wherein the dam finally broke -- “Honest, we care a whole lot about you, so we’ve extended that change fee waiver for the next couple of months -- so long as you give us money now -- and, since we’re all sorta throwing in the towel on 2020, we’re giving you elites a push on your status -- whatever you have now, you keep through next year -- and extending your club memberships by 6 months; oh, and we’re still spraying disinfectant everywhere.” For me, hotel brands were the first -- Hilton and Hyatt, and Marriott notable in its absence. Then, this week,&nbsp; some of the airlines finally dropped -- Delta, United, and Alaska, with American and Southwest notable in <em>their</em> absence. And then, in mid-week, Marriott finally gave it. It’ll be interesting to see how long American and Southwest feel they can hold out. The longer the travel shutdown, the more the pressure will build. Internationally, the trend for airlines seems to be a bit more of a hedge -- not extending status, but reducing qualification levels by 25-30%. BA, KLM, Emirates all seem to be trying this. It’ll be interesting to see how long they can hold out.</li><li>As if this wasn’t enough, Marriott announced at the end of March yet <a href=\"https://hospitalitytech.com/52m-guests-affected-new-marriott-data-breach\">another security breach</a> -- <a href=\"https://www.wired.com/story/marriott-hacked-yes-again-2020/\" class=\"aioseop-link\">the second one in 16 months</a>. This one was in a PMS, a property management system, used at some of the properties managed by Marriott. They estimate that 5.2 million guests are affected. We’ve said many times before, it’s gotten to the point with all these hacks that you gotta assume that you’ve been compromised. But the coronavirus lockdown adds a bit of a twist. A security firm, PerimeterX, says that, in the past month, they’ve <a href=\"https://www.perimeterx.com/resources/blog/2020/covid-19-part-2-data-tells-the-story/\">seen account takeover attacks surge</a> to as high as 80% of all login attempts on travel sites. Kinda makes sense -- if we’re not traveling, we’re not hitting airline or hotel sites to book trips, or to check our account balances or figure out where we are on a status match. As we drop off, the remaining traffic -- from the bad guys -- becomes a higher percentage. And there is some money to be had there. I’ve said in past episodes that I tend to use 2¢/mile as the breakeven point between buying a flight or using miles, though that number might have drifted down to 1.5¢ with recent award chart changes. Crack and drain an account with 100,000 miles -- not a high balance for a frequent traveler who’s getting elite bonuses and uses the airline’s credit card -- and that’s $1,500. Would be nice if these companies used two-factor authentication, but I haven’t seen that with any of my accounts. So I make sure each account has a strong and unique password, and run the circuit -- logging into each of them, or at least the ones with big balances -- every month.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/48914\">In Peace (Somewhere Else Mix)</a> by cdk (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/\">Attribution (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Snowflake</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Post-Corona Trip Planning</strong> </h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I took a survey from Conde Nast Traveler magazine, asking about my post-coronavirus travel plans. Good timing because, as I mentioned earlier, I’ve been thinking about just that topic, because this will be the longest stretch I’ve stayed home in I don’t know how long. And you can imagine that topic is hot across the travel industry -- with airlines, hotels, trip planning apps -- hence, probably the reason for the Conde Nast survey. But before you can plan, you have to know when the lockdown will be released and how. Nobody in Chicago or anywhere else in the US seems to want to talk about that quite yet, but some European countries are -- Austria, Denmark, the Czech Republic, even Italy -- and as you’d guess, it’s looking like it’ll be more of a gradual release than a big bang; and happen first in places less impacted by Covid-19 -- rural before urban, then smaller cities; New York probably the last in line.&nbsp;</li><li>If that plays out, then I’m thinking that leisure travel will be the first to come back. A lot of business travel is between cities, and when those lockdowns finally release, companies will first be figuring out who they want to bring back to their offices. And they’ll be looking to cut expenses going into the expected recession. So the weekend warriors may be on the move before the road warriors.</li><li>Pulling on that thread a bit more, I think it means that, for many folks, their first post-lockdown trip is going to be a car ride. With a car, you have more control than a plane or a train -- more flexibility, no waiting for airlines to un-furlough their crews and spin up their route systems, and no worries about who you’re sitting next to. Maybe a drive requires a bit more planning -- probably want to make sure the lockdown is lifted in all the places you have to drive through. But when I add low gas prices to this flexibility, driving is probably the way I’ll go.</li><li>OK, but to where? Probably not too far initially -- not more than, say, a 6-8 hour drive, a day -- so no “let’s re-trace Route 66” out to LA or beeline for the Florida beaches. Also, given some of the blowback around some of those pre-lockdown Spring Break antics, I gotta think that party places like Florida beaches and Nashville’s Lower Broadway are gonna be some of the last spots released from lockdown, and even when they are, they’ll be different places. Not every bar and restaurant will survive this lockdown. With still maybe a month to go, I’m already seeing places in Chicago give up and shut down for good.</li><li>But that doesn’t really impact my planning. The first trip I want to do after the lockdown wasn’t some bachelor party long weekend blow out. I think I want to go see some family first, not least because there’s still uncertainty about if and when future waves of Covid-19 might prompt future lockdowns. So I’m thinking, right now, that first drive will be down to Spring Hill, TN to see my mother. It’s an 8-hr drive, so about as far as I can get in a day. I’ll throw my bike on the back of the car; take some solo rides on the roads that thread through horse country, hoping to hit an open barbeque joint, and a taproom or two.&nbsp;</li><li>Then some business travel comes back. People can only get so much done through Zoom and Microsoft Teams. Though we’ve pushed it off for 6-8 weeks, at some point people need to get together -- physically -- to close deals, do projects, work with employees. The ramp up will depend on how deep of a recession we find ourselves in. Maybe it’ll start up by cashing in some of those vouchers from cancelled March and April trips that airlines have been loath to refund.</li><li>Which, hopefully, works Irene, Claire and I up some trans-Atlantic trips in the late fall -- Barcelona in late September and perhaps London over Thanksgiving. They’ll probably still be sedate -- still some social distancing; not sure if we’ll be able to catch La Liga or Premier League matches. That’s OK, though. I’d be happy to walk again through the Gothic District, check out Cat Bar Cat, my craft beer hangout the last time I was in Barcelona, and to shop and eat through Mercado de La Boqueria. And then to walk through London streets for the Christmas lights.&nbsp;</li><li>But if I’m going to do any of this, I’ll probably need to get a hair cut first.</li><li>Bridge Music --<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/35724\">Blue Like Venus</a> by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/\">Attribution (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Admiral Bob</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Keeping a Travel Journal</strong> </h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>One of the questions on the Conde Nast Traveler survey was “How are you getting your travel fix during the lockdown?” My initial response was curt “I’m not”. But I paused for a minute and then backspaced over that and typed “I’m paging through my old travel journals”.</li><li>Travel journaling is kinda at the core of the TravelCommons podcast or at least its creation myth. I had been writing a weekly business column for an alternative newspaper in Philadelphia. An editorial change dropped my column right about the same time my career change to consulting put me on the road just about every week. I picked up a small Moleskine notebook in SFO while waiting out yet another Northwest Airlines flight delay, found an empty bar stool, ordered an Anchor Steam, and killed time writing down some of the goofier travel stories that had happened to me or that other guys had told me. When I had just about filled it up, I thought about starting a travel blog. But right about then, the first wave of podcasting hit the mainstream. I’d been in radio during high school in Memphis, so thought I’d give it a go. And here we are, coming on 15 years later.</li><li>If I go back even further -- before Moleskines became a thing -- I might say I started travel journaling by way of postcards. If I was in a new or interesting place -- think Tuscany or Lake Tahoe, not Dover, OH or Southfield, MI -- I’d write postcards to my folks, my girlfriend-later-wife, the kids, usually while sitting at the bar having an end-of-the-day beer or wine. Irene saved some of those postcards. Flipping through them and my travel journals, I didn’t find diaries of my travel days -- I did this, went there, ate at these dishes at that restaurant -- but rather little vignettes of things that caught my eye, things like “the favorite pastime in Bologna appears to be trying on sunglasses at the corner stand and then checking out ‘the look’ in the side mirrors of parked cars” or “I was told by law, a Swiss office worker has to be within 50 ft of a window. Explains why all the buildings I see in Basel are thin or doughnuts” or “Roadside billboards in Detroit are different from anywhere else I’ve been. Rather than pitching hotels or consumer products, the billboards on I-94 in from the airport are all selling auto parts, punctuated by that massive Uniroyal tire”</li><li>I’ve pretty much stuck to an end-of-the-day routine; maybe that beer or glass of wine helps me reflect back on the day and ID the things that stood out; the things that taught me something, and then write it down. I don’t have a goal, trying to write X number of pages; I just let each day dictate. Sometimes it’s a bit prosaic, and sometimes it feeds TravelCommons. The journal pages from our <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/01/24/road-trip-lowbrow-santa-fe/\" class=\"aioseop-link\">Thanksgiving getaway to Santa Fe a couple of years ago turned into a 2,000-word blog post</a>; and what poured out of my pen in frustration in France a year ago was at the core of the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/podcast-150-travel-interruptus/\" class=\"aioseop-link\">Travel Interruptus</a> episode, what I called “A Greek tragedy where the travel gods toy with our anti-hero for fun and entertainment”.</li><li>But more than anything, right now when the lockdown is aggravating my wanderlust, reading the pages that I wrote some 2 or 10 or 20 years ago, reminds me of those places, those times, those experiences, and gives me the travel fix that I need right now in this lockdown.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #162</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_162.mp3\" class=\"aioseop-link\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #162 — Post-Corona Trip Planning; Keeping a Travel Journal','','inherit','closed','closed','','2725-revision-v1','','','2021-10-01 17:02:33','2021-10-01 22:02:33','',2725,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3947',0,'revision','',0),
(3948,1,'2021-10-01 17:03:20','2021-10-01 22:03:20','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/IMG_1615-1.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2732 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/IMG_1615-1-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\n<figcaption>I think I put off finding a doc too long</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Though I\'m still locked down on the shores of Lake Michigan, data shows that people are starting to do short car trips. What will people need to feel comfortable to do more extensive travel -- spacing in aircraft, we talk with Erik Josowitz of <a href=\"https://insurancequotes.com\">insuranceQuotes.com</a> about trends in travel insurance, and a story about finding medical attention while traveling through Southeast Asia. </span>All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_163.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #163: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois, probably 10 lbs heavier, half of which is beer (my doing) and the other half baked goods courtesy of Irene. While the coronavirus restrictions are beginning to ease in some parts of the US and Europe, everything is still locked down here on the shores of Lake Michigan. So my travels since the last episode have mostly been between the kitchen and the couch, and occasionally out in search of carbohydrate comfort foods -- to grocery stores in an endless and fruitless search for King Arthur Bread Flour, and then running a circuit of Chicago microbreweries using curbside no-contact pick-up to collect 4-packs of whatever is new that week. A couple of breweries are even doing curbside sales of ⅙ barrel kegs -- tempting, but seems a bit of overkill for a 3-person flat, though Amazon claims they can get a kegerator to me next week. Must be on Amazon’s essential items list.&nbsp;</li><li>But with the lockdown easing in non-urban places like the exurbs of Nashville, I’m starting to prep for my first post-Corona trip that I talked about in the last episode, a drive down to Spring Hill, TN to see my mother. Got the oil and tires changed on the BMW to avoid any unplanned stops. Figure I’ll pack a lunch which’ll let me do the drive with just one gas stop. I also tuned up my Trek Madone road bike -- cleaned and lubed the gears, re-wrapped the handlebars -- to take that down with me. Haven’t been able to ride much after Chicago shut down the lake shore path, and so riding solo on small country roads would seem to be a pretty good match for “social distancing” criteria.</li><li>All this spare time has allowed me to be a bit more “planful” as one client used to say, one of those ugly adjective constructions meant to turn an activity “we need to do more planning” into a quality “we need to be more planful”. But anyhow, whether the lockdown allows me to be more planful about the podcast or to do a bit more planning, it has. Which, for this episode, means you’ll hear less of me, and more from informed people. First up is Erik Josowitz, an analyst at <a href=\"https://www.insurancequotes.com\" class=\"aioseop-link\">insuranceQuotes.com</a>. Erik and I did an old-school remote interview -- using Skype instead of Zoom -- talking about what travel insurance looks like in the post-Corona world. And then Allan Marko returns with his wife Chris, following up our conversation in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/01/25/podcast-159-planning-the-trip-of-a-lifetime-in-southeast-asia/\" class=\"aioseop-link\">January travel planning episode</a> with a story from their Southeast Asia sabbatical last year; how they tracked down a doctor in Thailand when his wife became ill; a topic that could weigh on us more when we venture out into the post-lockdown/ pre-corona vaccine world that we\'ll be in for the next 18-24 months.</li><li>But right now, for my Tennessee trip, I think I’m less concerned about finding a doctor, and a bit more concerned about reconnoitering open drive-thru Taco Bells along I-65.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/50485\">Sunset Boulevard</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Siobhan Dakay, unreal_dm</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Videoconferencing is having its moment during the pandemic. Maybe it’s because people are looking for more of a connection in their lockdown isolations, or because we know that everyone is sitting at home in front of a video-equipped laptop and has no excuse not to video, nothing like “Can only call in because I’ll be running through airport security then.” I haven’t done a straight conference call in forever. Doing interviews for this episode, I hit the videoconference trifecta&nbsp; - Skype with Erik, FaceTime with Allan and Chris,&nbsp;</li><li>and then Zoom to be on the other side of the microphone on Steve Frick’s <a href=\"https://anchor.fm/steve-frick/episodes/Travel-Commons---Stories-From-Home-Episode-83-edipo7\">Back &amp; Gone Again podcast</a>.&nbsp; This is the 15th year of TravelCommons; I started in May 2005, and here Steve and I talk about that first episode.</li><li>&nbsp;We had a lot of fun, telling travel stories and talking about our current life-off-the-road. Give it a listen. There’s a link in the show notes, on the TravelCommons Facebook page, and in the Twitter feed.</li><li>Cate Rose left a comment on the Facebook page on the April episode.<ul><li>“I don\'t travel nearly as much as you do Mark but I enjoy your podcasts. These are unprecedented times. We arrived home from a month long rail trip from Italy, up to Sweden at the end of January just as this whole thing was blowing up. And now people, including us, are locked down all over the world. Unbelievable. And here you are with plenty of time to write, but no place to go! We are on Week 4 of social isolation in Western Australia and the novelty is wearing off a little ;-) but it seems to be working so all for the greater good. Thanks for keeping up with the storytelling and letting a crack of life into home isolation! Stay safe.</li><li>Cate - thanks for that note. Sounds like you just got out of Italy in time. If I remember correctly, they started locking down Italy in mid-February. Glad you made it back home safely. And it sounds like Australia and New Zealand have done the best in crushing the Covid curve.</li></ul></li><li>In that same episode, when we talked about post-corona trip planning, I said I thought the first post-lockdown trip most people would take would be a car ride -- more flexibility; easier social distancing. Turns out I was right -- at least according to the company <a href=\"https://www.arrivalist.com/\">Arrivalist</a>, a “visitation intelligence company” that has started publishing a Daily Travel Index measuring consumer road trips of 50 miles or more using data drawn from GPS signals. Road trips on Friday, May 1 were almost back to the pre-pandemic levels of February, with the number of trips in the 100-250 mile range higher than February’s number for the first time since the lockdowns started. You can go to Arrivalist’s website and <a href=\"https://www.arrivalist.com/daily-travel-index/\">play with the data yourself</a> or read an <a href=\"https://www.phocuswire.com/arrivalist-road-trip-surge-data\">analysis by Phocuswright</a>, a travel research firm. Links are in the show notes and my Twitter feed.</li><li>I got yet another email survey, this time from United asking me what would make me comfortable to fly again, and to rank some of their plans. For me, it was pretty easy. I’m not excited about standing in a packed gate area, hearing the gate agent say “This is a completely full flight”, and then spend 2-3 hours shoulder-to-shoulder with a complete stranger, in effect letting that person into my family’s corona exposure space.</li><li>A couple of weeks later (not implying causation, only correlation), all the major US airlines announced that passengers and crew will have to wear masks, they’re moving to strict back-to-front boarding schemes to reduce the number of passengers passing one another, and that they’re blocking/not booking the middle seats, reducing capacity from what had been running over 80% at the beginning of the year down to the 60’s. It was then interesting to watch what happened after Frontier’s CEO did a round of TV interviews at the beginning of this week, saying that they too would block the middle seat -- if a passenger bought a More Room seat for at least $39. Today, after getting a blizzard of red challenge flags from Washington, Frontier reversed course. Just kidding - “It was never our intent” they said, “to profit… from safety”. “ We simply wanted to provide our customers with an option for more space.” Yup. Frontier continuing to position their brand as the Ryanair of the US.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Vidian/52190\">Memories (infiniti loop)</a> by Vidian (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license. Ft: TheDice</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>New World of Travel Insurance</strong> </h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Interview with Erik Josowitz, an analyst at <a class=\"aioseop-link\" href=\"http://www.insurancequotes.com/\">insuranceQuotes.com</a><ul><li>Mark: Eric, thanks for joining us on the TravelCommons Podcast. Could you just give us a little background on yourself?</li><li>Eric: My name is Eric Josowitz. I’m an insurance analyst at InsuranceQuotes. We publish in-depth studies, data and analysis related to auto, home, health, life, and small business insurance. And my role is to study the insurance industry and provide tips and advice and insights that are relevant to consumers and small business owners.</li><li>Mark: The reason I asked you to join us today is, in the past couple of episodes, we\'ve been talking about travel planning. If we continue this thread, what do travelers need to think about from an insurance standpoint in the upcoming post-lock down but pre-Coronavirus vaccine world, which depending on who you read, we\'re gonna be in for the next 18 to 24 months.</li><li>Eric: Travel insurance was kind of a nice to-have pre-pandemic, except in cases of very, very large and elaborate trips where the investment and potential loss was substantial. And I think coming out of this, travel insurance is much more important. There are really two things that travel insurance gets you. One is protection for cancelations that might occur before you actually take the trip, which with the level of uncertainty, that\'s pretty important. And the second thing, travel insurance provides benefits if things happen while you\'re on the trip, ranging from interruptions and delays to medical issues that may pop up while you\'re actually traveling.</li><li>Mark: When people are looking and thinking about travel insurance going forward, what are some of the key things that they need to look for and think about given in the past it was kind of a nice-to-have. It was a check box that showed up on the bottom of a website that three quarters of us ignored. And now we\'re gonna pay a lot more attention to that.</li><li>Eric: I think that\'s a great question. And I\'m glad you mentioned checking the box or not checking the box before. I think as this crisis started to build and spread from the rest of the world into the US, I talked to a lot of people that had travel insurance but didn\'t actually know what it covered because they had just checked the box. And so, I think one thing that that needs to happen moving forward is travelers need to actually look at the specific coverage and specific exclusions associated with travel insurance policy before they purchase it. And so those exclusions in many cases turned out to include communicable diseases; turned out to include cases where, for example, the US State Department has issued travel warnings or travel bans. Many people were also surprised to learn that if they decided to cancel a trip because they were afraid of traveling to an area that had higher risk, that their travel insurance didn\'t actually cover cancelation in cases of fear. And so, one thing I would encourage everyone to look into is what\'s called a cancel-for-any-reason rider or endorsement on their travel insurance policy. And what that in most cases will buy you is the ability to cancel for any reason, no questions asked. You know when you\'re traveling, what you wanna look at on the travel insurance policy is to make sure that any medical issues or interruptions or delays that could occur while you\'re traveling are covered, even though there\'s been a declaration that this is a pandemic by the World Health Organization, there have been these warnings by the US State Dept. Make sure that those things are not specifically excluded in terms of the coverage that you can receive</li><li>Mark: As people need to read the coverage more closely now, any tips on how they should click through or where they ought to look for guidance on those terms?</li><li>Eric: I\'ve had people say to me that they\'re not able to easily find the specific terms and conditions when they\'re using the click-thru form on, you know, a booking website. And so if they feel that they can\'t easily access those terms and conditions, I would encourage them to actually search separately for travel insurance policies. And there are major carriers that offer travel insurance coverage on a regular basis who have packages of policies available for different types of travel, and they do have good frequently asked questions pages on their websites. They do have clearly outlined terms and conditions</li><li>Mark: Searching using the control-F function on your browser for things like communicable diseases. Try saying that three times fast and cancelation for any reason, as you mentioned before is probably some good search terms. Are you seeing any trends in pricing and coverage and riders? Has the travel insurance market reacted to Covid-19 coronavirus yet or is that still a work in progress?</li><li>Eric: Well, many companies have stopped offering travel insurance temporarily. And so, one of the indications that it\'s perhaps safe to travel again is going to be the ability to actually purchase travel insurance coverage at that time. Now there are certain companies that are continuing to offer policies and many of those policies don\'t have exclusions in the case of communicable disease, but they are pretty explicit about what they do and don\'t cover right now. So that yes, the insurance companies are reacting to this crisis in near-real time.</li><li>Mark: Eric, thank you very much for joining us on the TravelCommons podcast. Great insights, good information, good suggestions. Again, thanks for joining us.</li><li>Eric: My pleasure, Mark. Have a great week.</li></ul></li><li>Bridge Music --<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/ramblinglibrarian/55007\">Dawn at the Top of the World ft. copperhead &amp; Robert Seikawitch</a> by Ivan Chew (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Getting Medical Help on the Road</strong> </h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Back in January, long-time TravelCommons listener Allan Marko talked about the planning he did for the 9-week SE Asia sabbatical he and his wife Chris took last year. Fast forward 4 months, and health care on the road will now become much more important when traveling in the post-lockdown/pre-vaccine world. So let’s continue our conversation with Allan, joined now by his wife Chris, to talk about how they thought about getting health care when they were half a world away from home.&nbsp; It started with the research before they left home…</li><li>Interview with Allan Marko and Chris Chufo</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #163</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_163.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #163 — New World of Travel Insurance; Getting Medical Help on the Road','','inherit','closed','closed','','2747-revision-v1','','','2021-10-01 17:03:20','2021-10-01 22:03:20','',2747,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3948',0,'revision','',0),
(3949,1,'2021-10-01 17:04:20','2021-10-01 22:04:20','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/DSC_6306-edit.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2770 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/DSC_6306-edit-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a><figcaption>Can I leave my house now?</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>I broke Chicago\'s containment for my first post-lockdown trip, a fast drive down I-65. We talk about hotels swapping hospitality for sanitation, Hertz\'s bankruptcy, and tips for travel credit card usage from Brett Holzhauer, the travel card expert at <a title=\"valuepenguin.com\" href=\"http://valuepenguin.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">ValuePenguin.com.</a>&nbsp;All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_164.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #164: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois, as the lockdown here is starting to lift. What’s open and what’s not is still a bit spotty, though I’ve managed to hit a couple of microbreweries with outdoor patios. The opening in Chicago is not dissimilar to what I experienced down in Tennessee last month. I was down in Spring Hill, south of Nashville, two weeks after the non-urban lockdown lifted -- for every place other than the cities of Nashville, Memphis, Knoxville, and Chattanooga. It seemed that everyone was still trying to figure out what to do -- the bar/pizza joint next to my hotel was fully open, but the local bar-be-que joints and the Starbucks were still only doing take-away. Which makes sense; it’s not like there’s a standard playbook on how to re-open an economy. And throughout my consulting career, I’ve learned it’s always easier to shut things down than to start them up.</li><li>The drive south on I-65 from Chicago is one that, I’m not gonna say I can do with my eyes closed, but I’ve been doing it for almost 40 years, starting when I was in business school at the University of Chicago and my family was living in Louisville, KY. I mean, there’s a clump of trees in the median between West Lafayette and Crown Point that’s a milestone for me; I know I’m an hour from home. Which just goes to show you how boring the drive through northern Indiana is when trees in the median are a notable feature.</li><li>The drive between Chicago and Nashville, while not the most exciting, especially through Indiana, it does usually require a bit of timing to thread through Chicago, Indianapolis, Louisville, and Nashville to avoid rush hour in each. On this trip, not so much. I left Chicago after breakfast and was driving 80 mph most of the way, maybe dropping down to 70 through the cities. And I was still getting passed by guys going aggressively faster. And the only time I saw police or state troopers was in front of big road construction sites, cars running with all their lights flashing in front of big barriers, more as a warning to speeders than an attempt to get them. It was, hands down, the easiest drive down I-65 I’ve ever done.</li><li>That wide-open drive may be one of the few things I’ll actually appreciate about this lockdown. Well, that and the $2/gallon gas along the way...</li><li>Bridge Music — Brilliant Day by Hans Atom (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hansatom/47919 Ft: Lisa DeBenedictis</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>First up, thanks to the TravelCommons listener who goes by the handle Abe Froman, Ferris Bueller’s sausage king of Chicago, for dropping a 5-star review on <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">our iTunes page</a>. Abe writes:<ul><li>“I have been a fan of this podcast for many years. If you are a road warrior or a mileage runner, you will love the tips to make your travel easier.”</li><li>Abe, thanks a lot for this.&nbsp; I’m glad you’ve enjoyed the podcast</li></ul></li><li>Last year in episodes <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/07/26/podcast-153-travel-by-algorithm-leaving-places-behind/\" title=\"Podcast #153 — Travel By Algorithm; Leaving Places Behind\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">153</a> and <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/09/20/podcast-155-rj-delays-street-food-in-poland-and-hungary/\" title=\"Podcast #155 — RJ Delays; Street Food in Poland and Hungary\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">155</a>, we talked about American Airlines’ retirement of their MD-80’s, the “Mad Dog 80”, the plane on which I earned my first Advantage status -- Gold, and there wasn’t anything higher back then. Last week, <a href=\"https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/delta-air-lines-md-80-last-flight/index.html\">Delta finally retired their last Mad Dogs</a> -- MD-88’s and -90’s. They were supposed to run through the end of the year, but with late ‘80’s technology and fuel efficiency, they were among the first planes in the fleet to be grounded when the lockdown hit. Delta said that “at their peak, the planes accounted for 50% of Delta’s arrivals and departures from” their Atlanta hub.&nbsp; Which will be a relief to longtime TravelCommons listener Darren Mak, who tweeted at me back at the beginning of March, a picture out the window seat of a Delta MD-88 just in front of the engine cowl, thanking me for mentioning, in episode <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/09/20/podcast-155-rj-delays-street-food-in-poland-and-hungary/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #155 — RJ Delays; Street Food in Poland and Hungary\">155</a>, that whenever I would end up in that same seat, I would wonder — if that engine blows up, will the shrapnel blow out or blow into the cabin. Well Darren, no more worries. We both survived the Mad Dog’s back seat.</li><li>We’ve talked in the past couple of episodes about the first post-lockdown trips would be by car -- more schedule flexibility; no worries of a stranger in the middle seat exhaling 18 inches away from you.&nbsp; CNBC ran <a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/31/five-charts-that-track-the-us-economy-as-states-reopen.html\">a story</a> last week analyzing the change in the number of requests for directions on Apple Maps in 2020. Using January 13th as the baseline for their comparison, requests for driving and walking directions dropped by 50% in the first month of the lockdowns, but had recovered by May 29th -- the last day of the data series. Transit direction requests had dropped by 75% and were still more than 50% down by the end of May. Now, using January 13th as the baseline probably exaggerates the recovery -- you’d think the number of walking and driving direction requests on a normal Memorial Day weekend would be hugely higher than for the second Monday of January when it was in or below the 30’s for about ⅔’s of the country -- but I don’t want to kill a green shoot with too much skepticism.</li><li>American talked about their own green shoots last week, saying they would be operating 55% of last year’s schedule in July, up from 20% in April and May. Driven mostly by demand from states opening up -- Texas, Florida, and Arizona -- rather than cities like New York, Chicago, and San Francisco that are still under stricter lockdown orders. If I keep pulling on this trend line, I’m thinking by September all those voluntary capacity limits and empty middle seat promises will have faded away.</li><li>The absence of update emails from airline and hotel CEOs this week I think is another green shoot. If things are starting to look up, no need to send me an email extending a bonus award offer or cancellation fee waivers. This has cut into a new hobby of mine, though -- comparing the use of \"in these uncertain times,\" \"in these challenging times,\" and “in these unprecedented times” in these emails. I have a stroke count going. Right now, “unprecedented” is the runaway leader, with “challenging” second, and “uncertain” third.</li><li>I’ve been a Hertz customer on and off over my 35-year travel career -- mostly on. I started my business traveling when I was at IBM, and in the mid-80’s, they had negotiated a smoking rate with Hertz. In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/09/15/podcast-144-outside-airports-hospitality-mentality\">episode 144</a>, I talked about getting to know the woman working in the little Hertz hut at SJC back then, when SJC was still an outdoor airport; and before Hertz Gold, that’s all I needed to get an upgrade. And more recently, I’ve, on balance, had good experiences with Hertz. So I was bummed for a moment when I saw they filed for bankruptcy last month. It wasn’t surprising, though. Hertz was still carrying a big debt load courtesy of a 2005 PE leveraged buyout, and we’ve talked in past episodes about how Uber and Lyft have been eating away at its core airport rental market. So, when travel stopped in March and used car auction prices cratered in April, Hertz tipped over. By now though, we’re kinda used to big travel companies cleaning their debt problems in bankruptcy -- United and American Airlines the most recent examples. So I’m not too worried about losing the rest of my Gold points. In the short term, though, I will be paying more attention to the mileage on the Hertz cars in the Five Star aisle. That’s where I usually see signs of financial distress -- a lot less 500-mile cars and a lot more 25,000-mile cars. And while 25,000 miles on a car doesn’t seem like a lot, remember that rental car miles are kinda like dog years -- you gotta multiply them by, like, 7 to get to regular car miles.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook page</a> or our Instagram account at <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">travelcommons</a> -- or you can post comments on the web site at <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">TravelCommons.com</a>.</li><li>Bridge Music — &nbsp;<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Suenjo/11162\">Natchoongi (New Hope Remix)</a>&nbsp;by Suenjo (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>First Post-Lockdown Trips</strong> </h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>As we talked about a few minutes ago, travel is starting to pick up as the lockdowns ease and people want to see something other than the 4 walls that have surrounded them since mid-March.&nbsp;</li><li>TravelCommons listener Mark Skinner dropped me a line towards the end of May about his first lockdown trip. You may remember Mark from <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/11/30/podcast-157-notes-from-the-baltics-riga-latvia-and-tallinn-estonia/\" title=\"Podcast #157 — Notes from the Baltics: Riga, Latvia and Tallinn, Estonia\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">episode 157</a> back in November when he wrote in to tell us about his day trip from Washington, DC to Hong Kong -- flying out Monday afternoon, returning Tuesday morning -- to take a NASA cosmic ray detector on an over-the-pole flight.&nbsp; This time, Mark writes -<ul><li>So I had my first trip this past week, since the “before times”. On the way back, I was listening to your recent podcast. Yes, my first trip was via automobile, down to the outer banks of North Carolina. Dare County had recently opened up (the day before!) to allow visitors into the county.&nbsp;</li><li>Stayed at the Hilton Garden Inn. No servicing of the room, and after a few days at this hotel on the beach, things were looking a little dingy. Tropical Storm Arthur squashed any hopes of long walks on the beach. Departed a day early because the storm wasn’t letting up. I thought this was a good use of Hilton points… Take-out only that week, and hotel not helping out by lending any china, glass or utensils. Ending up getting a couple of sets at a dollar store… I contrast this to my last trip in the before time, to Maui, just as things were buttoning up. The Grand Wailea was happy to provide all sorts of stuff to enjoy one’s take-out on the lanai! That trip got cut short as well, due to flights evaporating.&nbsp;</li><li>A highlight of the trip was stopping for lunch in Virginia Beach, which had recently opened out-door seating at restaurants, and enjoyed lunch at a seafood restaurant at an outside table, by the ocean, and greatly enjoyed ordering food and having it brought to the table! The previous “normal” meal had been first evening on Maui, before they went take-out only.&nbsp;</li><li>Next trip that is getting kicked around is Hilton Head in June…. that would involve flying. Crossing fingers about a trip to Austria in August…</li></ul></li><li>Mark, thanks for sending that along. Your experience on the Outer Banks was similar to mine down in Spring Hill, TN. I went back and forth about staying in a hotel vs. an Airbnb. Airbnb -- not as many people passing through the property and some time buffer (24 hours, 72 hours) between guests in the same rooms, but a major hotel chain should have the corporate resources to build out and maybe test a more thorough cleaning program for its properties; maybe with access to stronger, more industrial cleaners. Procrastination ended up making my decision -- while I was going back and forth, the Airbnb property in Spring Hill I was looking at got booked for the front of that week, so I ended up in the Spring Hill Hampton Inn -- another Hilton brand.</li><li>That Monday morning, right before I left Chicago, I checked in on the Hilton app. It even let me pick out my room. This may be old news to Hilton Diamond listeners, but I haven’t stayed in a Hilton for at least a year, and so haven’t been tracking their app improvements. When I arrived at 5:30pm, the front doors were locked, but opening up the app showed me a digital key that opened the front door and my room door. I didn\'t have to physically check in at the front desk which only struck me odd later that night. Whenever I’ve checked in on a hotel’s app before, I’ve still had to go to the front desk so they could see my ID, which was why I’ve never paid much attention to app check-ins. But at this Hampton Inn with full check-in and digital keys, it worked the way I’d always thought it should.</li><li>My in-room experience was the same as Mark’s -- nobody servicing the room, though a guy did stop by the room every now and again asking if I needed extra towels; no morning coffee or breakfast buffet, and eating mostly take-out in the room with some cans of local craft beer bought from the liquor store a couple of doors down. I was pretty rigorous about dumping the food trash right after eating. Waking up to the smell of 8-hour-old bar-be-que rib and cole slaw remnants is never a good start to the day. Hotels are saying it’s all about cleaning and sanitation, but I can’t say that I saw any out-of-the-ordinary efforts while I was there. Maybe what I was experiencing was the cost reductions to fund that behind-the-scenes deep cleaning.</li><li>While Mark’s highlight was his lunch in Virginia Beach, mine was being able to walk into a little family-owned craft beer joint in a strip mall on Spring Hill\'s Main St, order a beer, and then sit down and drink it at the bar. I go into this place every time I\'m there to visit my mother. Seeing them open was a nice little bit of normality -- especially since Chicago didn’t start opening up until last week.</li><li>Don\'t know my next trip yet, but I\'m keeping my eye on Spain, hoping there\'s no second wave before our trip to Barcelona at the end of September.</li><li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/53277\">Fistful of Dub</a>&nbsp;(Feat. Snowflake and DJ Vadim) by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. &nbsp;Ft: snowflake and DJ Vadim</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Travel Credit Cards</strong> </h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>As we start traveling again, we’ll start pulling out those travel cards -- Hilton or Delta Amex, United or Southwest or Marriott Visas, American MasterCards -- and so I invited Brett Holzhauer, the travel card expert at <a href=\"http://ValuePenguin.com\" title=\"ValuePenguin.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">ValuePenguin.com</a>, a site that goes deep into these cards, to give us some of his advice as we “un-lockdown” ourselves. First up, he reads out the results of a recent survey on travel planning, and then talks about travel cards<ul><li>Mark: Brett, thanks for joining us on the TravelCommons podcast.</li><li>Brett: Thank you so much for having me. I\'m excited</li><li>Mark: Brett, I wanted to talk to you about a recent survey that ValuePenguin.com has done on travel planning. And we\'ve had sort of an arc through the past couple of episodes of the TravelCommons podcast around travel planning. As we think about post-lock-down/pre-vaccine where people are still concerned about coronavirus and Covid, but they gotta move on with their lives. So, in the survey that ValuePenguin did, where are people going?</li><li>Brett: One of the biggest notes was the amount of people going to Florida, and it\'s a couple of reasons: 1) good weather; 2) it\'s affordable; 3) there\'s a lot of the older generation that lives in Florida, so maybe people are itching to see their parents or grandparents or just older relatives. So, it\'s a mixture of all of those things leading to people wanting to travel to the beaches and get outside.</li><li>Mark: I think that kind of ties into some things we\'re seeing, which is more of a focus on outdoors with the theory that coronavirus transmission is less efficient outdoors than indoors. As a travel card expert, as people begin to travel again, what are some of the strategies as far as being able to maximize the value of the travel credit cards? Because really most frequent travelers already have got them in their wallets, at least one if not multiple award cards, but they\'ll tend to focus on maximizing award points.</li><li>Brett: So one of the biggest things that\'s gonna eventually happen is huge bonuses. These companies like Chase and American Express. They\'re gonna really incentivize people to get back on the road. So if you’re brand new into the Points and Miles game, this is a very good opportunity to start understanding how this whole thing works. So that way, when these big bonuses start coming out, you can find some really great bonuses to start your travels once again, maybe late 2020 or early 2021. So that\'s one thing, Number two, obviously, the uptick in in travel insurance. People can get travel insurance through credit cards.</li><li>Mark: Typically, what are the travel insurance capabilities?</li><li>Brett: A lot of credit cards beyond the big sign-up bonuses have travel insurance, and a lot of consumers either don\'t know that they have it, they forget, or they just don\'t really pay too much attention to it. I\'m going to use a personal example. My wife and I both have the American Express Platinum Card. It\'s a $550 annual fee, and your first thought is -- that\'s a lot of money to invest in a credit card. Is that really worth it? And beyond all of the perks and the sign-up bonuses, the travel insurance through that specific credit card is comprehensive. You get trip cancelation, trip interruption. Also, you get rental car insurance, and so it\'s it\'s important to know the difference between primary and secondary. If you do have a credit card that has primary car insurance, that will go first so your personal car insurance will not be affected.</li><li>Mark: I\'ve talked in a previous TravelCommons episode about my own personal experience with using the Chase Sapphire Visa that ended up covering an accident and St Andrews, Scotland. When I got back home, I filed with Chase. Took me a little bit, but I got full coverage on it.</li><li>Brett: There\'s also baggage insurance. Those are kind of the big ones. There\'s also emergency medical assistant. It\'s important to know that consumers have these protections. I just feel that a lot of times we have these cards in our wallets. We\'re overlooking the value proposition of what these cards can really do.</li><li>Mark: Let me pivot to your set up as a digital nomad. What are what are you up to?</li><li>Brett: My wife and I, we met in 2015. I knew on the first date that I was gonna marry her by some way, somehow and sure enough ended up happening.</li><li>Mark: Did she have that same sense, or was there some selling involved there?</li><li>Brett: No, we definitely sold each other. And we walked away from that first date knowing that what she sold me on was traveling. I had a traveler’s itch. She had the traveling bug. So really sold me on the idea of doing this full time travel. In July of 2019, we officially sold everything. We drove back to her parents house in Los Angeles. Then in August of 2019, we took a one way flight from LAX to Fiji. We bounced between 10 countries in 3.5 months. We returned home in December for the holidays from Japan back to Los Angeles. And we had the plan of leaving again in February, and everything unfortunately started to melt. So now we\'re stuck in Los Angeles just itching to get back on the road. But yeah, we love taking advantage of rewards. If it wasn\'t for credit card points of miles, we wouldn\'t be able to afford these types of travels.</li><li>Mark: So, when do you think you and your wife will head out next?</li><li>Brett: Yeah, so our plan was to go to Europe. Obviously, that\'s been immensely hit by Covid-19. So for us, luckily, so I\'m 26 years old, she\'s 24. We’re both very healthy, we’re of the mindset that life is a little bit risky, and you have to take those risks to get those rewards. So, we approach travel with that mentality that it is a risk. Everything in life is a risk -- walking across the street, driving your car So, there\'s always a risk to it. I think if I had to guess, probably August. But again, God forbid there\'s a second wind of coronavirus. We might be here for extended period of time, But, you know, we are very blessed and very privilege that we have parents that will take us in. And we have a free place to stay, which is nice to save up more money for travel and pay down on my student loan.</li><li>Mark: Brett Holzhauer, travel awards expert from ValuePenguin.com Thanks very much for taking the time to join us on the TravelCommons Podcast.</li><li>Brett: Thank you so much</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #164</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_164.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #164 — First-Post Lockdown Trips; Travel Credit Cards','','inherit','closed','closed','','2771-revision-v1','','','2021-10-01 17:04:20','2021-10-01 22:04:20','',2771,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3949',0,'revision','',0),
(3950,1,'2021-10-01 17:05:06','2021-10-01 22:05:06','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/IMG_2073.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2789 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/IMG_2073-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a>\n<figcaption>The hop taste isn\'t coming through</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p>My first post-lockdown flight was a 90-minute Southwest non-stop from Chicago to Nashville. It wasn\'t bad, but not as casually easy as my last pre-coronavirus flight in February. We talk about that experience as well as Hertz\'s new cleaning program, my latest pair of Bose noise-cancelling headphones, and then wonder when business travel will return. All this and more at the<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_165.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"> <strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #165: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after a couple of runs back down to Nashville for family stuff -- one in the air and the other on the ground. And with COVID cases spiking in vacation spots like California and south Florida, it seems like that’s the market segment -- folks traveling to see friends and family -- that the airline and hotel companies are banking on. And that’s most of what I saw when flying back from Nashville a few Thursdays ago -- lots of families with kids, groups of people meeting up on the other side of security for maybe some 4 day-weekend trips? The tip-off for me on the business vs. leisure traveler mix was the TSA lines -- solid lines for regular TSA, while I pretty much walked straight through PreCheck. Another tip-off used to be mid-day lines at the bars, but with most of the airport restaurants closed up, that’s not a valid indicator right now.</li><li>Traveling right now requires a bit of nimbleness. On my first post-lockdown trip in May, the workout room at the Spring Hill Hampton Inn was open and I used it every day. Back down in June, there was a piece of paper taped to the door -- “Closed by order of the Health Department”. The front desk agent told me it was a couple of days old -- which explained all the banging in the room above me; somebody must’ve been doing their HIIT workout in their room. I didn’t know if I should be annoyed or impressed at how long they went at it. So for this last trip, I called the hotel the night before I left, before I packed my gym clothes vs. a yoga mat. They told me that they’d just reopened the workout room the day before, so the yoga mat went back in the closet.&nbsp;</li><li>It’s kinda the same very fluid situation right now with bars and restaurants. A few days before we got to Nashville, the mayor closed down any establishment with less than 50% of their sales in food, so pretty much all the bars and taprooms. Makes sense, not arguing it; just forced us to quickly pivot some of our plans. It also forced us to go a bit “old school”, back to making actual phone calls, asking “are you open; dine-in or just take-away?” since places seem to be having trouble updating their websites and their Facebook/Yelp/Google/OpenTable listings fast enough to keep up with the changes.</li><li>It proved out our decision to book the Residence Inn rather than the mainline Marriott a few blocks away. The full-size fridge held a lot more beer, and that kitchenette came in handy when we found out that<a href=\"https://www.princeshotchicken.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"https://www.princeshotchicken.com/\"> Prince’s Hot Chicken</a> was only doing take-away -- I can’t imagine trying to eat an extra-hot half-chicken perched on a king-size bed.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/JeffSpeed68/54450\">Hula Hoop Party</a> by Stefan Kartenberg (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. &nbsp;Ft: Martijn de Boer, Blue Wave Theory</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Lots has been written about how the COVID pandemic has massively accelerated changes toward contactless transactions. Microsoft’s CEO famously said back in April “We’ve seen two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months”.&nbsp; Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #136 — Is Cash A Waning King; Don’t Make It Hard to Cash in on Loyalty\">episode #136</a>, I said I felt like the last generation of cash payers, that my younger colleagues rarely carried cash; they paid for everything with a card. Looking into my wallet, I had the same $200 worth of 20’s in June that I’d taken out of an ATM in March. Nobody wants to handle cash; they don’t even want to handle my card (Most extreme experience - A bartender at Asgard Brewing’s taproom in Columbia, TN sprayed my Visa card with diluted chlorine bleach before swiping it to pay my bill. Made my wallet smell like a swimming pool). As much as possible, places want us to pre-order and pre-pay, so we just pick up our purchases in a socially distant way and then head home. It’s also switched up some opinions on using facial recognition for flight check ins. Pre-coronavirus, the push was from governments as a better way to do security screenings and to improve immigration compliance, and this was getting big pushback on privacy concerns. Now, it’s pivoted. The push is from travel companies using facial recognition as a way of providing the touchless check-in experience that most travelers now want.&nbsp;</li><li>But facial recognition is stymied by face masks which we wear when we’re checking in at airports and hotel lobbies. As is Face ID when trying to unlock my iPhone to get to my boarding pass or digital room key. Until I can downgrade to an iPhone SE with that old-school Touch ID that unlocks using my thumb print, I think I’m going to have to shorten the PIN code on my iPhone 11 Pro. I lengthened it for better security but am banging it in more and more often. And I’ve noticed the iPhone is really slow about recognizing my number presses -- or it misses some when I go too fast (like when I’m trying to pull up a boarding pass in line) and errors out.&nbsp;</li><li>Walking down the Hertz Five Star aisle at Nashville Airport, I saw their version of paper rings that hotels used to put around toilet seats to “certify” they’d been cleaned. In Hertz’s case, they put a “<a href=\"http://ir.hertz.com/2020-05-15-Hertz-Introduces-Hertz-Gold-Standard-Clean-Sealed-and-Certified-Vehicles\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Hertz Gold Standard Clean</a>” sticker across the driver-side center pillar (the B pillar for all my gearhead listeners) so that you break it when you open the driver door to get it. Nice gesture, though it kept me from doing my usual walk down the aisle, opening the door of a bunch of cars to check their mileage. Seemed rude to break all those stickers, though I did notice more than a few broken ones when choosing my car. Way back in the old days of TravelCommons, we used to talk about the TSA doing “security theater” in the screening lines. This feels a bit like “sanitation theater”.&nbsp;</li><li>I finally broke down and bought a new set of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2BbOqyA\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bose noise cancelling headphones -- the new 700’s</a>. This is my third set of Bose cans. Bought my first pair in 2009. I was flying a lot of short flights at the time, and in those days before regional jets, I was on a lot of prop planes. And they’re noisy -- not just on take-off, but the entire flight. After a while, I started to notice fatigue when getting off those planes. Talking to a few folks, they said the noise heightens stress. A friend told me how much he liked his Bose cans, and so I burnt some Amex Membership Rewards points on Amazon for a pair of Quiet Comfort 2’s. It was a revelation; flick the switch and, whoosh, quiet. I took them on every flight, until 3 years later, I left them in a seatback pocket when rushing off a plane to make a tight connection. I immediately lit up some more Membership Rewards points for a new pair - <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3eF2iPk\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">QC-15’s</a>. Four years later, I replaced a worn out set of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2OwiIPF\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">ear cushions</a>. And though the non-replaceable headband cushion is looking pretty ratty, the now 8-year-old headphones still work great. What got me to replace them was the wire. I’d be sitting in my usual aisle seat, plugged into my iPhone (using one of those dongles that Apple no longer gives you with a new phone). At some point in the flight, the folks in the middle and window seats would want to get up and use the toilet and inevitably, I’d snag the wire on the arm of the seat, pull the headphones off my head, and/or launch my phone a row forward.&nbsp; I could’ve gotten a pair of the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3eFWLYJ\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">QC-35’s</a> -- same form factor without the wire -- but decided to go all next-generation with the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2BbOqyA\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">700’s</a>, which has meant some adjustment pains. Like there are buttons in places where they never were before. So when I grab the ear cups to slip the headphones off, I manage to hit a button that changes the noise reduction level or summons Siri. Also new is using the touch surface on the right ear cup to control things. You tap or swipe the right ear cup to accept or drop a call, pause a song, raise or lower the volume, or skip 30 seconds to fast-forward past a podcast ad. I’m learning to be a bit more precise in my motions; I’ve already dropped a couple of calls when I was just trying to turn down the call volume.&nbsp; One thing I really like -- more for working-at-home than in-flight usage -- is that the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2BbOqyA\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">700’s</a> can pair with two Bluetooth devices at the same time. So, for me, I have them paired with my MacBook Air and my iPhone and they switch seamlessly between the two. Nice when I’ve got Zoom calls on my Mac and then a phone call on my iPhone. And, call me shallow, but they look a bit cooler than my old <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3eF2iPk\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">QC-15’s</a>. I’ve had the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2BbOqyA\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">700’s</a> for about a month now and really like them. I guess you could say they’re “TravelCommons Approved.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/bridges/15563\">i knew</a> by bridges (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp;Ft: shannonsongs</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>First Post-Lockdown Flight</strong> </h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Way back at the beginning of the lockdown, the first Saturday of April, I was on a Zoom beer drinking call with Rob Cheshire, a long-time TravelCommons listener and now a podcaster -- he interviews UK craft brewers on his <em><a href=\"https://thisweekincraft.beer/podcast/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">This Week in Craft Beer</a></em>. It was a Saturday afternoon call, for Rob and the other guys in London; just past noon for me in Chicago, but hey…. And somewhere around our second or third beer, Rob asked me “When will you be comfortable getting on a plane again?” I really didn\'t have a good answer. It was early days; I wasn’t sure.</li><li>Fast forward to the back half of June. I needed to get down to Nashville again and didn’t have the time to burn 8 hrs for the drive down and another 8 on the way back. I had some travel funds sitting in my Southwest account from a couple of April trip cancellations, and Southwest flies 6 non-stop 737s between Chicago and Nashville while American and United only do smaller regional jets, and Southwest isn’t packing them full -- booking those bigger planes at ⅔’s capacity -- while American and United say they’ll let you know if your flight books solid. All told, a pretty easy decision to fly Southwest. One of the benefits of living in Chicago, a rare 3-hub town.</li><li>The day before my flight, when getting my boarding pass on the Southwest app (my usual process; I was contactless before it was a thing), I had to click through a certification that I wasn’t running a temperature and that I hadn’t been exposed to or tested positive for COVID-19. OK, click. Then I get a screen telling me that face masks are required to board. Makes sense, click. And now I get my boarding pass.</li><li>Monday morning, Irene drops me off at a pretty sedate departures curb at Midway. I mask up and walk in. It’s not empty, but it’s definitely not the normal Monday morning bustle. It feels more like a Wednesday early afternoon. There’s a bit of a line at regular security, but no line at PreCheck. The TSA agent asks me to drop my mask for a moment to check my ID and then waves me through. I noticed that TSA still has their October 2020 Real ID deadline warning signs on the podium. Hmm… I remember reading at the end of March that the TSA has <a href=\"https://www.dhs.gov/real-id\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">pushed the deadline a year to October 2021</a>. Guess they haven’t had a chance to issue updated signs. You’d think they’d just take the old ones down.</li><li>Most of the restaurants and stores were closed; a pretty common situation. Kev Monteith, a TravelCommons listener and <a href=\"https://travelswithkev.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amtrak travel blogger</a>, replied to one of my Twitter posts saying “I flew Southwest a few weeks ago. Layovers are rough because most places in the airports are closed. I was at STL and only found beer at Burger King and Dunkin Doughnuts.” I would’ve been happy for just a coffee. Down in the main Southwest concourse, some gates were closed off with curtains which I assume was to keep people from sitting there so they don’t have to clean it.</li><li>Looking around the terminal, it felt like mask usage was about 80%. Just about everyone was wearing them when walking around. I’d see some people not wearing them while sitting at the gate, though those folks were distancing themselves from everyone else. I’d see kids ripping their masks off as soon as they got off the jetway. I did notice, though, a sizable minority of mask wearers were just covering their mouths, leaving their noses uncovered -- pilots, cleaning crew, passengers, wheelchair people. Now I’m no epidemiologist, but that seems to defeat the purpose.</li><li>When the agent called boarding, she said “There’s 40 of you on a plane with 175 seats. So everyone gets their own row, and please, don’t everyone sit up front. We need a bit of weight distribution.” It was a quick boarding; we pushed back and took off early. These truly are unprecedented times.</li><li>Nashville was more crowded on Thursday morning when I headed back home. Mostly families as I said at the top of the show. The end of the concourse where the&nbsp; Southwest gates are was as crowded as usual. There were signs around saying that 3 seats between people equals 6 ft, but there were too many people waiting to make it practical; at least everyone is masked up. I walked back up the terminal to find a bit more space and there, tucked away behind some construction sheeting, I found an empty gate. I’m all alone, mega social distanced, so I take off my mask, log into the WiFi and do some work until the Southwest app on my phone bings, telling me that boarding has begun.&nbsp;</li><li>There were a lot more than 40 people on this flight. I found an empty row and slid all the way over to the window seat since it’s only a 90-minute flight. About 3 minutes later, a guy sat down in the aisle seat. Nobody in the middle seat. Everyone wearing masks and nobody’s head right next to mine, I was good to go. Maybe helped just a bit by the fact that, in those 3 minutes, I pointed all three air jets toward the empty middle seat and turned them on full blast, creating an air curtain between me and the aisle seat -- just in case.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/3lb3r3th/44072\">Misunderstood</a> by 3lb3r3th (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. &nbsp;Ft: Alchemistry</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>When Does Business Travel Come Back?</strong> </h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>My son Andrew and his girlfriend took the 6am flight to LGA earlier this week. I asked him “How full was the flight?” “Maybe 20 people; mostly families,” he said. Didn’t surprise me that a Thursday 6am LGA flight was only at 11% capacity. That’s normally a business travel run; people getting up at 0 dark 30 in Chicago to make 10am meetings in Manhattan. But there’s not many business travelers now.&nbsp; While business travelers only make up about 10% of passengers on major airlines, they provide between 55 and 75% of the profits. You might could think they’re subsidizing the budget fares those families are using.</li><li>Over the past month, I’ve been talking with Sales VPs at companies that deliver complex IT services. If anybody would be feeling the bite of not traveling, I thought it would be these guys. I’ve done a number of these deals, and they always involved locking all the right decision makers in a conference room to hash out all the contract details and ride herd over the transition. But I was completely wrong. They all said that work hasn’t slowed down during the lockdown. They’ve been able to do all that conference room work over Zoom. Indeed, they said being virtual has made it easier for them. Pre-lockdown, one of their biggest challenges was calendar wrangling -- being able to get all their execs and the client execs into that conference room at the same time. Now, they just click some buttons and everyone shows up in Zoom gallery mode -- no travel planning, no scrambling after cancelled or delayed flights. They all said they love the ease of virtual meetings and, at the end of the day, closing the lid on their laptops and having dinner with the family every night.</li><li>Kinda supports the narrative that business travel will never rebound; back to the Microsoft CEO’s quote: in 2 months, we’ve advanced 2 years in virtual work culture. But when I probed a bit, I found that Zoom hasn’t completely replaced an airplane ticket. While these guys have been able to virtually close deals they had in their sales funnel, virtual meetings don’t seem to be replacing these deals; getting new prospects into the top of the sales funnel. So while things are looking good now, they’re beginning to worry about 4-6 months from now.</li><li>This was the exact opposite of what I’d expected. I thought the give and take of negotiations, the sidebar conversations, the emotional content, wouldn’t translate into video calls. But it looks like I was wrong; that once a deal has some momentum and a structure to guide everyone, the in-person hammering out turns out to be a nice-to-have. And the reason new opportunities aren’t coming in is that they need more exploratory, abstract, wide-ranging conversations that lack that guiding structure and selling a team as much as a product -- at least for complex services -- and that’s tough to do over a pane of glass.</li><li>And so they all said that they’d probably start traveling again -- reluctantly -- by the end of this month. But I do think this, call it a 4-month exercise in figuring out virtual work methods and cultures will move the set point, everybody’s default decision toward virtual meetings. And so maybe a bit less focused on high-profit road warriors and more dependent on those cost-conscious families. Does this mean repointing the 6am LGA flights to Cancun? They’re going to have to seriously reengineer those drink carts.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #165</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_165.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #165 — First Post Lockdown Flight; When Do We Travel For Business Again?','','inherit','closed','closed','','2788-revision-v1','','','2021-10-01 17:05:06','2021-10-01 22:05:06','',2788,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3950',0,'revision','',0),
(3951,1,'2021-10-01 17:05:51','2021-10-01 22:05:51','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/IMG_0822-scaled.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2810 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/IMG_0822-300x278.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"278\" /></a>\n<figcaption>Reindeer are ruining my cabin porn</figcaption>\n</figure>\n</div>\n<p>Trying to plan an August trip amidst dueling state quarantine lists and rapid lockdown changes while writing off my September plans for Barcelona. What\'s worse - hotels cutting back on housekeeping or breakfasts? And talking with <a href=\"https://emilythomaswrites.co.uk/about/\">Emily Thomas</a> about her new book <i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"https://amzn.to/2DO07fV\">The Meaning of Travel: Philosophers Abroad</a>. </span></i>All this and more, or listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below or by following this<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_166.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"> <strong>direct link</strong></a> to download the podcast file .</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #166: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after managing to front-run the city’s quarantine order on Wisconsin. Went up to Milwaukee to meet up with some friends and do a bit of biking a couple of weekends before the Chicago Health Department added Wisconsin to their list of 22 states where you’re required to self-quarantine for 14 days after returning from a trip. Mind you, they’re not setting up roadblock checkpoints like New York City is -- at least not as of the time of this recording. Reasonable people can differ on this -- New York’s governor claimed similar efforts back in March by Rhode Island and Florida aimed at New Yorkers were “unconstitutional” but seems OK with it when it’s pointed the other way -- but it does make travel planning for law abiding citizens a bit more of a challenge. And making me wonder about our downsizing move into Chicago last year -- was missing the yard, the extra rooms, and the basement gym in the suburbs during the lockdown earlier in the year; now after Chicago’s quarantine rules, am missing freedom of travel.</li><li>All this adds a couple orders of magnitude of complexity to our efforts to plan a week out of the city in a couple of weeks. Not only do we need to check Chicago’s quarantine list, but also the quarantine plans of any potential destinations. While New York isn’t on Chicago’s quarantine list, Illinois is on New York’s. Mapping it all out, we take the “clean destination” intersection of that quarantine Venn diagram and then look at what restrictions are in those places; if nothing’s open, it’s not worth traveling there. I’ve eaten more meals in my hotel rooms over the past 3 months than I have in the last couple of years.&nbsp;</li><li>But things are changing so fast, that even after you figure out what’s open now, we then start following local papers on Twitter to get any early warnings on new restrictions. Which also means paying a lot more attention to hotel cancellation policies than I ever did. And then overloading our itinerary with outdoor activities like hiking and biking so last-minute closures or restrictions don’t leave us with nothing to do. Which means spending more time trolling the AccuWeather and Weather Channel web sites because an outside-heavy itinerary is more vulnerable to big storm fronts and hurricanes. And to think I used to bitch about having to navigate TripAdvisor ratings.</li><li>Bridge Music — funkyGarden by Jeris (c) copyright 2020 Licensed under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/VJ_Memes/61356 Ft: airtone, SackJo22, Analog By Nature</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>First, a couple of shout-outs to folks who are helping me spread the word about the podcast</li><li>Thanks to GHLGB, an apparently long-time TravelCommons listener, who gave us a 5-star iTunes review the day after the last month’s episode dropped, writing:<ul><li>“Mark does a great job of relating the world of the road warrior with a bit of branching out to those of us who are miles and points nutty. Always a calm and reasonable voice one that’s been in my ears for four years”</li><li>Thanks for that. I appreciate the words, and the effort of wading through the iTunes interface to leave them</li></ul></li><li>Also, in last month’s episode, I mentioned Kev Monteith, a TravelCommons listener and Amtrak travel blogger, but didn’t thank him for calling us out in his <a href=\"https://travelswithkev.com/kevs-favorite-podcasts/\"><em>2020 Favorite Podcast</em> list</a> on his <a href=\"https://travelswithkev.com/\"><em>Travels With Kev</em> website</a>. So, I’m fixing that right now. Thanks, Kev! Check out the show notes for links to his site.</li><li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/06/09/podcast-164-first-post-lockdown-trips-travel-credit-cards/\">episode #164</a>, we talked about how hotels are pulling back on housekeeping during stays -- the Hampton Inn in Spring Hill, TN said they’d be 3 days between room visits while the Residence Inn up the road in Franklin said 7 days, which seems a bit excessive; more like a COVID-washing a cost-cutting move. Replacing the breakfast buffet with a “grab-&amp;-go” breakfast bag makes all the sense in the world, but here again, hotels are grabbing the opportunity to trim costs. Most of what I’ve seen is a brown lunch bag with a bottle of water, a NutriGrain breakfast bar, and an apple -- a banana if I’m lucky. But the Residence Inn in Wauwatosa, WI, just outside of Milwaukee, was having none of that a couple of weeks back. You had 4 options for the main breakfast course in your bag -- a turkey and waffle sandwich, a peanut and strawberry sandwich, an egg and cheese quiche, or one of 13 kinds of cereal boxes, accompanied by your choice of chocolate milk, or orange or apple juice. I’m not passing judgement on the food choices, but I was awfully impressed by their ambition -- yeah, we can’t lay out a breakfast buffet spread, but we’re gonna try our damndest to give you a decent alternative. I just had to give the turkey &amp; waffle sandwich a go. I had visions of a <a href=\"https://twitter.com/trev4president/status/857776562615308288\">Fyre Festival-like trainwreck of a sandwich</a> -- a deli slice of turkey breast between two Eggo waffles. But it was a little more reasonable -- a small wrapped sandwich of turkey sausage between two small waffles, meant to be heated in the microwave. I grabbed it on the way out for a bike ride, so missed the microwave step, which, I think, was critical. But like I said, I give that RI team huge props for the effort.</li><li>But outside the Wauwatosa gang, if this stripped down hotel service stays the norm for the next 12-18 months, it’s probably going to drive some big changes in the year-end traveler gift guides -- shifting from Away luggage and Aesop travel kits, last year’s big recommendations, to sets of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3izWHMJ\">wine tumblers</a>, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2PIgihg\">collapsible bowls</a>, and <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3an6BhJ\">camping mess kits</a>. And, of course, all sorts of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/30NAqF2\">upscale sporks</a>.</li><li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/03/21/podcast-161-new-crisis-old-question-driving-down-to-key-west/\">episode #161</a>, at the end of March, still in a bit of shock from the COVID lockdown and trying to figure out how long it was going to last, I said “I’m nothing if not an optimist. In the midst of this week’s unraveling, I found a deal on a direct American Air flight from ORD to Barcelona — 8½ hr 787 flight — so I booked it — 2 weeks in Barcelona at the end of September.”&nbsp; But here we are five months later and as we all know, things haven’t “re-raveled”. At the beginning of July, American announced that <a href=\"https://liveandletsfly.com/american-airlines-international-reset/\">direct 787 ORD-BCN flight won’t restart until next summer.</a> I checked our reservation on the AA iPhone app after I read this. It still showed us on that direct flight -- until I clicked through, which then, I guess, forced the app to pull the latest information from Dallas, and now showed us flight BA through Heathrow. Not that it really matters. The EU isn’t letting Americans in any time in the near future, and, last time I checked, Barcelona is in a voluntary lockdown because of a new spike in COVID cases. News articles are showing <a href=\"https://time.com/5876132/europe-coronavirus-second-wave/\">shuttered-up stalls at the La Boqueria market</a>; like I said earlier, if nothing’s open, why go? It was a gamble, and really, not even a big one. There’s no change fee, so it’s a push. We won’t lose any money -- unless American goes belly-up, but that’d never happen -- would it?!</li><li>Last year, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/podcast-150-travel-interruptus/\">episode #150</a>, (these show notes are gonna be chock full of backlinks), I talked about switching my carryon bag -- from a Timbuk2 backpack to a <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3izS991\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Timbuk2 messenger bag</a>. I gave two reasons for the switch: I wanted to carry something a little smaller that would stand up under a plane seat; and I wanted a non-black interior, I kept losing things in my backpack -- <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3iDWIiu\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">my tablet</a>, my Bose headphone case. But also because the backpack was breaking down a bit - the seam on one of the side pockets had blown out and one of the strap clips had broken. I was going to pitch it during our last downsizing binge before moving into the city and a friend said “You know, <a href=\"https://www.timbuk2.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Timbuk2</a> bags have <a href=\"https://www.timbuk2.com/pages/warranty-repairs\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">lifetime warranties</a>.” Huh. So I hung onto it because I still like the bag. And about 14 months later, I finally got around to sending it back to them in San Francisco. I wasn’t sure if they’d re-opened their factory, so I was ready for it to take awhile for them to process the bag and repair it. Tracking the package, I could see they received it on a Friday. I got a note from them the following Monday saying they’d inspected it and yes, it was covered by the warranty, and had the bag back in my hands that Saturday. I have to tell you that I am pretty damned impressed. I won’t be switching back from my messenger bag, but I have found that the backpack can carry 4 four-packs of 16-oz cans, perfect when I’m biking a circuit of Chicago microbreweries using curbside no-contact pick-up to grab whatever’s their newest thing. Timbuk2 is definitely “TravelCommons Approved.”</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — Xena\'s Kiss / Medea\'s Kiss by mwic (c) copyright 2018 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mwic/58883</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>The Meaning of Travel</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>This seems to be <em>the</em> existential question for a lot of travelers -- why do we travel? -- now that can’t, or at least can’t as easily and, well thoughtlessly is too strong a word, but when we could travel without having to plan as much. It’s been a whipsaw -- from overtourism to <a href=\"https://skift.com/2020/06/05/travel-sector-remains-thorn-in-a-falling-u-s-unemployment-rate-defying-expectations/\">36% unemployment in the travel and hospitality sector in the the US</a> -- so a bit soul-searching/navel-gazing is to be expected, if not encouraged. So when I saw the new book, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2DO07fV\"><em>The Meaning of Travel: Philosophers Abroad</em></a> by <a href=\"https://www.dur.ac.uk/research/directory/staff/?id=15319\">Dr. Emily</a> <a href=\"https://emilythomaswrites.co.uk/\">Thomas</a>, associate professor in philosophy at Durham University in the UK, immediately bought it and read it -- and then thought that I needed to have her on the podcast. Lucky for me, she’s a very nice person and agreed to spend a bit of time talking about “the meaning of travel”. It was a fun conversation; I hope you enjoy it.<ul><li>Mark: I\'ve got to admit that, as an engineer and an IT guy, my philosophy knowledge pretty much starts and ends with buying a T shirt that said “I Drink Therefore I Am.” It was a fundraiser for the Philosophy club for my undergrad. Emily, the first chapter “Why Do Philosophers Care About Travel” got me because you get straight into a topic we\'ve discussed often on the TravelCommons podcast about how travelers build travel bubbles around themselves. They isolate themselves from the places that they traveled to. Oftentimes they do it in the name of efficiency, maybe to keep themselves safe from experiencing what you call the “otherness of travel.” What do philosophers say about that difference between everyday journeys and traveling?</li><li>Emily: So, I think the difference between these kinds of everyday journeys, like popping to the grocery store, visiting your grandmother and what we think of as travel lies in how much unfamiliarity or otherness we experience along the way. And it seems to me that when I popped to the grocery store, everything is super familiar. I know how things work; I know the roads; I know the products I\'m going to buy. If I were to go grocery shopping in an unfamiliar country, that experience is going to be really different. I don\'t know how the roads work anymore; I don\'t necessarily recognize the writing on the signs of the products; I may not understand the languages that I\'m overhearing. And so, an everyday experience becomes much more unfamiliar. And then seems to be much more about travel in the deeper sense. And several philosophers, including folks like <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9_Descartes\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">René Descartes</a> and <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_de_Montaigne\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Michel de Montagne</a>, have talked about how the benefits of travel lie in experiencing otherness, that this broadens your mind, that it forces you to think past the familiar everyday world of your experience and think about how things might be otherwise, how they could be in other places and they think that\'s a really good thing.Frequent travelers often build travel bubbles around themselves that isolates them from the places they travel to; doing it in the name of efficiency,  but also perhaps to keep themselves safe from experiencing what philosophers call “the otherness” of travel</li><li>Mark: I was thinking about this -- is there a spectrum of otherness? I\'ve got the complete travel bubble at one end; in the middle, curated sidebar experiences -- you find a local restaurant, or hunting down a microbrewery or a taproom in a not-great section of town that you would not normally go; and then at the other end, full immersion – I live here, I’ve got a flat.</li><li>Emily: I definitely think there\'s a spectrum. And you can imagine, in your bubble, it might not be the full-blown experience of taking all the same clothes with you and you using all familiar airports. But even if you have your laptop and your mobile phone with you, part of the way that you\'ll be connecting with the world is through these really familiar mediums. Maybe you\'re going there, and you\'re still using Trip Advisor to look for recommendations like you would back home or you\'re still using Google maps to navigate your way around the streets. And again, I think that\'s going to provide you with this kind of buffer between you and the unfamiliar.</li><li>Mark: Later on in the book, you riff on <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_David_Thoreau\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Henry David Thoreau</a> and<em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/33SYvw3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"> Walden</a></em> and <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3kEGjw6\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Cabin Porn</a> and Solitude. When the lock down started, I just decided I was going to dig into some early American literature that I had been threatened with in high school and college but never really got into. And so I kind of flipped a coin between Thoreau and Whitman\'s <em>Leaves of Grass</em> and, heads so it was Thoreau. I will admit I did this in the beginning of April, and I still have not finished <em>Walden</em> yet, and here we are in August. So it has been a bit of a slog, but I\'m still working it. But before I get into that, I gotta ask – “cabin porn.” That\'s a new one on me – the term, not so much the porn. But the term <em>cabin porn</em>, what is that?</li><li>Emily: And so despite what you might think (laughter), Cabin Porn refers to photography of beautiful, isolated cabins. So, picture wood-built cabins nestled in the woods with smoke curling from the chimney. Or maybe they are stone cottages perched on the edge of a cliff, looking out over a crevasse. And there’s this whole industry dedicated to people taking photographs of these gorgeous cabins. The idea is that they\'re kind of aspirational. If you stick these into Google images, you will find some of the most astounding dwellings; places that you can rent and live for a little. <em>Walden</em> seemingly kicked this whole thing off. So, Thoreau describes building a cabin in the woods by Walden Pond and while the book can be a little bit of a slog in places, there are beautiful bits of the book. When he\'s describing living in nature in this really kind of rustic way, lots of people credit their cabin aspirations to <em>Walden</em>.</li><li>Mark: What is the strain about solitude and travel and in the balance with “otherness”?</li><li>Emily: Solitude is often held up is one of the things we can get through travel that\'s hard to get home. Although it seems like you can go out into a crowded cafe or a bar and be alone there, it seems like it\'s much easier to do that by venturing out into wilderness, that you\'re not going to meet other human beings and you have objects in front of you – trees, plants, creatures – that you can connect with. So the idea is that you\'re not being solitary in the sense of just introspection, but you\'re also connecting with some part of the world around you. It might in turn cause you to reflect on that world, and then your own part in that wider network. And that\'s very much what Thoreau is all about. He thinks that being alone in wilderness allows you to better understand wilderness and your own part in the wider universe.</li><li>Mark: I often find when I\'m traveling, it is kinda easy to hold yourself at a distance, especially if, where you are, you don\'t speak that language. It\'s almost like white noise.</li><li>Emily: Yes, when you spend large chunks of time without hearing words that you understand is a strange experience. I think it allows you to focus on other things. I think then you end up paying more attention, maybe to like the sights and the smells, the things that you can understand. I quite enjoy it, actually, the experience of being somewhere and not understanding anything that\'s going on.</li><li>Mark: (laughter) The only challenge, though, is because you\'re so used to people saying things and you don\'t understand it that you just don\'t listen. And then when you actually come back to the UK or the US and people are talking to you and you\'re just so used to tuning them out, just like “Oh, wait, you said something to me?” There was another piece in the book that you talked about global homogenization. And I\'ve felt this, I would say over the past 10-15 years. I started traveling a lot in the mid-80’s, back in the Dark Ages. In that chapter you talk about that it\'s an old complaint. You talk about Rousseau bitching about it, and John Stuart Mills…. Are we just repeating the same thing?</li><li>Emily: So, people like Mills and Rousseau are writing a couple of hundred years ago, and they are bitching about how Paris and Rome “seemed to me to be the same city” and reading this now, it just seems so implausible! I am sure that a large part of this feeling has to do with context. I would imagine that these men are moving in intellectual circles and then they\'re going to be around people who speak the same kind of languages, and value the same kind of things that you would like to hope that if they had broken free of those circles that they might have found things that were more unfamiliar. I do suspect that the world has been becoming more the same now than it was before, and simply because of the rise of global companies – that was just not around before. And the idea that you can go into a city and find the same shops and restaurants that you do back home is really strange. I mean, that would not have been there back in the 17th and 18th centuries. That said, I do think what we were talking about before – using technology to find your way around – I think that\'s going to give you the impression that things are all the same because you\'re looking at them through the same medium. That is an illusion. The real world is not all the same. New York is very different than Paris. Something in the US that I personally am really fond of is investigating small towns that are not listed in guidebooks, in search of what Bill Bryson once described as Anywhere, USA. I really enjoy that. Seeing how these small towns do differ from each other, but also what they have in common. For me, there\'s a reall attraction in that, especially in the US.</li><li>Mark: Are there any that are top of the list for you?</li><li>Emily: Yes, <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silverton,_Colorado\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Silverton, Colorado</a>. I enjoyed that enormously. As a British tourist, so much of it is totally unfamiliar, even though I got the impression that, to the people who lived there and are from Colorado, this is all just par for the course. It’s regular looking houses, it’s regular looking shops that, as is a non-American trying the local bars, seeing the local kind of pancake breakfast, all of this was completely new and really stunningly beautiful.</li><li>Mark: Just to wrap up, if you look forward and you think about philosophy and travel, what are some of the new things that philosophers are thinking about on travel?</li><li>Emily: I think the big thing right now it is the ethics of climate change and how best to travel responsibly. I think that issue is going to dwarf everything else in the philosophy of travel for several decades to come. Whether or not we are partaking in carbon off-setting schemes is enough, whether or not we should be looking to educate ourselves more about the places that we travel, possibly even traveling less but aiming for higher quality experiences. I think that stuff is really going to dominate. However, there is other stuff going on too. Looking at the issues posed by space travel and space tourism, which I don\'t think is that far away, actually. I mean in the immediate decades, it\'s going to be the province of the super wealthy, but I think past that it will become more and more accessible and that\'s also going to pose some ethical issues like the cost of fuel to get people up out of the atmosphere is gonna be enormous. But also, that will prompt us to think about our place in the world. I obviously have not been up into space, but were I to go, I imagine it would cause me to reflect on how little the planet Earth is in the grand scheme of things. And I wonder whether that will lead us to reconsider our place in the world and how we\'re treating the planet that we live on. I think space travel is going to be really rife with opportunities for philosophical reflection.</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #166</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_166.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #166 — What Is The Meaning of Travel?','','inherit','closed','closed','','2807-revision-v1','','','2021-10-01 17:05:51','2021-10-01 22:05:51','',2807,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3951',0,'revision','',0),
(3952,1,'2021-10-01 17:06:25','2021-10-01 22:06:25','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":2857,\"width\":300,\"height\":300,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large is-resized\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/F3E28DAE-0026-4E8A-957E-D6CE914F717C.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2857\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"/><figcaption>I seem to have put on a Quarantine 15</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Spent a week in <a href=\"https://www.uptravel.com/\">Michigan\'s Upper Peninsula</a> hiking, biking, kayaking, and running into a lot of other people getting away to do the same, which got me looking back six months to the start of the pandemic. I talk about a surprisingly good flight cancellation experience with American Airlines, and figuring out how to download 12 years of <a href=\"https://www.tripit.com/\">TripIt</a> data. We wrap up talking to <a href=\"https://www.lendingtree.com/writer/matt-schulz/\">Matt Schulz</a> of <a href=\"https://www.lendingtree.com/\">LendingTree</a>, asking him what are we doing with travel credit cards that are generating frequent traveler points we can’t use? All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_167.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>download</strong></a> the podcast file, subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #167: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after a week’s tour of the UP -- Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Did a counter-clockwise circle route around Lake Michigan. Headed out east on Friday morning; stopped at a brewery in Grand Rapids for lunch; drove the 5 miles across the Mackinac Bridge just before dusk; and had my first UP pasty (the first of many) and a local beer for dinner that night in Sault Ste Marie. Spent a couple of days in Soo; watched 700-ft lake freighters make their way through the locks that connect Lake Superior to Lake Huron; I’m still enough of an engineer to geek out on that kind of stuff. We then drove west to Marquette for 3 days and again west to Houghton for 2 days before heading home through Wisconsin down the west side of Lake Michigan. It was all outdoors stuff -- hiking, biking, kayaking; the things that last-minute COVID closures or restrictions won’t muck up.&nbsp; The UP has always been on my list of places to visit, but it’s always on sorta the B-list, and so plans to go someplace else -- Spain, Napa, Ireland -- would always push it down the list. But now, with most places blocked off with travel restrictions and quarantines, the UP -- drivable with lots of outdoor activities -- bubbled to the top of the list.</li><li>And I wasn’t the only one thinking that way. The guy renting rowboats at <a href=\"https://www2.dnr.state.mi.us/ParksandTrails/Details.aspx?id=428&amp;type=SPRK\">Tahquamenon Falls State Park</a> looked at our release forms and said “We’ve had a lot of people up here from Chicago. It’s been crazy busy. We can’t get enough people to handle it.” And biking around <a href=\"https://www.travelmarquette.com/things-to-do/attractions/presque-isle-park/\">Presque Isle Park</a> in Marquette, we got talking, in a socially distant way, to a biking couple up from St Louis. It was also their first time up. A bunch of their friends and family had been up earlier; they’d seen nothing but UP pictures in their Facebook feed for the past month.</li><li>The husband said that he had an underlying medical condition and so they were looking for places away from people; they’d rented a cabin in the little town of Au Train. Which got me thinking about the place we stayed in Soo -- the <a href=\"https://www.plazamotormotel.com/\">Plaza Motor Motel</a>. No lobby, no elevators, no hallways; no places to run into other guests; no need to have to remember to mask up when you leave your room. Just open your room door and there’s your car. Most frequent travelers would never think of voluntarily staying in a motor inn, a <em>mo</em>-tel. But with so many things changing in these unprecedented times, maybe COVID will have folks give motels another chance.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/11510\">Funkist</a> - cdk dub mix by cdk (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: teru</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>First, a big shout out to the folks in Hanoi, Vietnam listening to TravelCommons on Soundcloud. One of the fun things about the podcast is looking at where people are listening from. For the most part, the stats make sense -- most of the listeners are from the US, and then English-speaking countries -- the UK, Canada, Australia. But every once in a while, there’s a spike that I just can’t figure out. I’ll see it, go look at the episode notes to see if I’ve mentioned that country, but I usually can’t make sense of it. Last fall, it was Argentina., but over the past couple of months, it’s been folks from Hanoi, primarily listening to <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/04/11/podcast-162-post-corona-trip-planning-keeping-a-travel-journal/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #162 — Post-Corona Trip Planning; Keeping a Travel Journal\">April episode, #162</a>, about post-lockdown trip planning and keeping a travel journal. Not sure why, but if you’re in Hanoi and you’ve made it to this episode - Hi! And thanks for listening!</li><li>Dan Grabon sent me a note at the beginning of the month about my lockdown reading that I mentioned during <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #166 — What Is The Meaning of Travel?\">last month’s interview</a> with Dr Emily Thomas<ul><li>“Mark,&nbsp; I feel your pain. I started re-reading Walden back in April, and I just passed the halfway mark at the end of August. This was part of an overly ambitious effort to read one great book a month from a literary calendar that I bought. The Brothers Karamazov took up January through March, and even though COVID should have meant more time to read, it just hasn’t turned out that way.</li><li>“Writing this from a long overdue vacation near Lake George, where I saw the book Cabin Porn in a gift shop. Good timing.</li><li>“Thanks for keeping the podcast going— helps keep me going in this time of not going much of anywhere!”</li></ul></li><li>Dan, Thanks for the note. <em>The Brothers Karamazov</em> -- you are a better man than I.&nbsp; I swore off of Russian fiction after suffering through <em>Crime and Punishment</em> in high school. That and Charles Dickens, just can’t do ‘em. And I am still working my way through <em>Walden</em>. Just got through his half-dozen pages on hoeing his bean field. I find if I try to read more than a dozen pages in a sitting, I just start skimming -- or sleeping. Glad you were able to get away to the wilderness of Lake George. Feel like the perfect place to find that Cabin Porn book.</li><li>Jim McDonough hit the TravelCommons Facebook page, following up on my comment in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\" title=\"Podcast #166 — What Is The Meaning of Travel?\">last month’s episode</a> about my disappearing American flight from ORD to BCN. Jim writes...<ul><li>“We were going to Barcelona and Madrid with Rick Steves Europe in October, but of course Rick has canceled every tour for the rest of the year. Interestingly, AA says we are still booked on a BA 747 from SAN to LHR as part of this trip. BA has no more 747\'s and doesn\'t serve SAN any more.”</li></ul></li><li>I sometimes think any of the airline’s schedules more than one month out are more like aspirational projections than reflections of reality. Especially given how fast they’re shifting schedules to capture any sort of bump in passenger volume. Like United having <a href=\"https://airlineweekly.com/airlines-feeling-a-lift-from-rocky-mountain-hubs\">some transcontinental flights stop in DEN to pick up a bump in volume from people visiting national parks</a> -- there’s that outdoor activity trend again.</li><li>But back to that BCN trip, I should be getting things here in Chicago sorted before heading off for 2 weeks in Catalonia, but you’ve probably already guessed, that trip isn’t happening. Not a surprise. The EU still isn’t letting US travelers in and the case count in Spain’s second COVID wave has gotten worse in the last month. So at the beginning of the month, I gritted my teeth, called American and cancelled the flights. Actually, American had called me the prior week while we were in the UP, but I let it go to voicemail. We were in a taproom in Marquette and I didn’t feel ready to have that conversation. I wanted to have all our booking info in front of me and be clear minded (tough during a taproom session) and mentally girded for battle. So when I returned their call the next week, I was sitting in front of my laptop with all my itinerary documents up and was ready to go. It was a quick trip through the automated phone tree to a very nice woman in Dallas. No hassles with canceling. I was asking her about the logistics of the travel credit - how long will it be good for - when she said, “Since your flight was canceled and you were re-booked, you can get a refund if you like.” Wow. “Uh, yes,” I quickly said, not wanting her offer to disappear, “I think I’ll take the refund instead.” That was not what I expected from all the stories about American trying to keep as much cash as possible. It took her a couple of minutes to process the refunds during which we compared the weather between Chicago and Dallas. The refunds hit my credit card the following week, so full kudos to American on handling this. I’m hoping I don’t need to repeat in November for my Thanksgiving trip to London.</li><li>A couple of weeks back I was trading notes with TravelCommons contributor Allan Marko about <a href=\"https://www.sfgate.com/travel/article/United-bangalore-SFO-15551358.php\">United’s new SFO-Bangalore non-stop</a>. It’ll be their longest flight at 17½ hours. My immediate reaction was, of course, “that’s a helluva long time to wear a mask.” United is using a 787-9 with a special engine enhancement that makes the flight possible. Which got me thinking about what planes I’d flown into BLR. I’ve been using <a href=\"https://www.tripit.com/\">TripIt</a> since 2008 when it first broke out of the Silicon Valley venture cap bubble, so I logged in, clicked over to Past Trips and started clicking back through the pages -- and clicking and clicking because the last time I was in Bangalore was April 2014. I kept looking around the screen - there’s gotta be a way to export all my trip data; but I couldn’t find anything. So I sent a note to <a href=\"mailto:support@tripit.com\">support@tripit.com</a>. And, to my huge surprise, Andy from the Tripit Help Center replied in <em>15 minutes</em> saying “We currently do not offer customer driven travel data export capability. We have passed your suggestion on to the appropriate team for review.” Having run a software product team, I knew what that meant -- never. But, in the next paragraph, Andy offered a solution -- “You can check out a third party app Openflights. They have an API with TripIt that will allow you to import trips from your TripIt account to their site. From there you can create a list of all of your flights and download them to a csv file. Their basic account is free to use.” Sweet. I thanked Andy for his quick reply and hit <a href=\"https://openflights.org/\">Openflights</a>. I set up an account, hit the “Import” button and connected to my TripIt account. The import was a touch kludgy -- I had to go page by page, review each trip, and mark it to import. After 88 pages, I had imported 1006 flight segments, which they displayed on a world map. I clicked on BLR and a little card popped up. I clicked on the first option and it listed the 8 flights I’d taken to and from BLR. Turns out I’d mostly flown Airbus A320s, though I did once fly a 747-400 in from FRA. It has a couple of analysis buttons -- like my longest flight -- Joburg to IAD at 17:40 (ha! 10 minutes longer than the SFO-BLR flight); and my shortest -- IAD again, but this time a 44-minute flight to CHO. And of course, I was able to download all my trips into Excel so I can noodle around to my heart’s content. Openflights is free, but I’m going to <a href=\"https://openflights.org/donate\">donate</a> to help keep them going. <a href=\"https://openflights.org/\">Openflights.org</a> -- definitely recommended. I’ll put a link in the show notes.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/48705\">Jolanta Blues</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: Admiral Bob, Martijn de Boer</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>6 Months of Pandemic</strong> </h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Finally giving into reality and canceling my Barcelona flight 6 months after booking it got me thinking back on these -- you know what’s coming -- <em>unprecedented</em> times. Airlines canceled flights to China at the end of January, then to South Korea, Iran, and Italy in February, until, by the beginning of March, airline traffic joined the stock market in a free fall. But back then, we thought it was a one-off event, kinda like Sept 11th; a sharp, scary event that came out of nowhere with no warning but that would soon pass. So taking advantage of one of the many March fare sales to book a flight at the end of September didn’t seem that risky.</li><li>I was talking to one of my consulting friends a couple of weeks ago. His travel schedule was similar to mine - a week without seeing an airport was a rare exception. He hasn’t been on a plane since March and doesn’t know when he’ll get on one next. He just started a project with a manufacturer in Cincinnati. Most of the project will be virtual, but he’s pretty sure he ought to at least put eyes on their plant. He lives outside Detroit. In the past, he’d be flying down every week. Now, he fires up Google Maps -- it’s a 4½ drive down I-75. He’ll drive down once, stay a couple of days, and then head back home.&nbsp;</li><li>I can’t say that anyone I’ve talked to misses the act of business travel -- getting up at 0 dark 30 Monday morning to get to the airport, shuffle through the PreCheck line for 15-20 minutes, and then shoehorn into a full flight for an hour or 3.&nbsp; But we did it because that was part of the job. But now that it’s not, at least for now and what seems like (for now) through the end of the year, everybody is taking full advantage of sleeping in -- in their own beds.</li><li>Which explains why, of all the US airlines, Spirit Airlines, with its complete focus on low-cost leisure travelers, is the only one sounding even somewhat non-negative.&nbsp; And hotel chains like Choice, focused on what they call “drive-to” locations and extended stay properties getting occupancy rates over 50% while center city hotels like Chicago’s Hilton Palmer House are missing rent payments and slouching towards bankruptcy.</li><li>Irene and I were sitting outside at a microbrewery a couple of days ago, enjoying a sunny afternoon full in the knowledge that we have maybe 4 weeks of outdoor eating and drinking left in Chicago. We talked about what kind of travel we would do over the next 12 months, figuring travel restrictions and periodic lockdowns are going to be the norm for at least that long. No big plans; nothing that COVID could blow up but seeing some new places -- some skiing, maybe trying out Montana; some hiking, maybe checking out the Texas Hill Country. But next month, we’re trading Barcelona for Philadelphia; now that they’ve opened up the restaurants again, check out our old neighborhood and visit with some friends. It’ll be Irene’s first flight since February. It took a bit of talking, but I really think the threat of a total of 22 hrs in a car with me -- alone -- tipped her over.&nbsp;</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djiz/10514\">Nube - Djiz Rmx</a> by Kwame (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: SylviaO</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Do We Keep Travel Credit Cards?</strong> </h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Last week, <a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/14/delta-launches-6point5-billion-debt-deal-backed-by-its-frequent-flyer-program.html\">Delta used their SkyMiles program to back $6.5 billion in debt</a>, running the same play that United and American did in June. What caught my eye was some of the stats that came out with the debt filing -- that <a href=\"https://skift.com/2020/09/15/how-delta-looks-to-leverage-rewards-from-its-own-frequent-flyer-program/\">SkyMiles had about $6.1 billion in revenue in 2019, about two-thirds from American Express</a> which issues a co-branded Delta card, and that <a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/14/delta-launches-6point5-billion-debt-deal-backed-by-its-frequent-flyer-program.html\">total miles redeemed fell by 78% in the first half of this year.</a> The big carriers are leaning on their loyalty programs for cash, their biggest customers are credit card issuers, but those card users - us - are generating points that we’ve stopped using.&nbsp;</li><li>It’s against this background that I called up Matt Schulz, chief credit analyst at LendingTree, and to ask him -- do we want to keep travel credit cards?<ul><li>Mark: Matt, a lot of folks carry at least one travel credit card and I don’t think I’m going too far out on a limb guessing that damn close to every TravelCommons listeners carry them. We’re 6 months on from the COVID lockdowns and the resulting cratering of the travel industry. But with travel not recovering -- airline demand is still just a third of pre-pandemic levels and United Airlines’ CEO said last week it could be 3-4 years before it’s back to 2019 levels -- what are card holders doing with these cards generating frequent traveler points that they can’t or don’t want to use?</li><li>Matt: An awful lot of people are closing them simply because they may need to use those points that they had been planning to go on a trip to Paris or to Hawaii. But they need to use that money or those points to keep food on the table. Our survey that we just did found that about 30% of respondents with travel rewards card said that they had closed one and that number is even higher for Millennials. And that\'s got to be something that that scares the banks to death. It\'s not terribly surprising for all the reasons that you that you ticked off a minute ago, and I don\'t think that\'s going to slow down anytime soon either.</li><li>Mark: So, people are closing them out, so they\'re not taking those annual fees.</li><li>Matt: Our survey found that about half of those who had been laid off or furloughed had cashed out some of their points or miles. And again, it stands to reason because when you\'re trying to keep the lights on and keep food on the table, there are things more important than travel rewards. And I think that\'s a lot of what this comes down to -- if you are somebody who feels pretty stable in your job, has a decent emergency fund and generally feels kinda OK about things despite all of economic chaos, you\'re probably going to try and hold on to those miles</li><li>Mark: Back in March and April, it seemed the strategy for the big travel card issuers -- Chase, Citi, Amex -- seemed to be to sacrifice revenue to hold share -- statement credits for annual fees if you called them to cancel, new bonuses for stay-at-home purchases to keep wallet share -- seemed like 5x bonuses for grocery and gas was the most popular. Made sense when everyone was talking about 2-week shutdowns and a V-shaped recovery. But, as we said before, travel is gonna stay depressed for a while -- between state and country quarantines and many people not wanting to get in a plane -- how are travel card companies going to handle the next round of renewals? When I call Chase and Amex again, do I get more statement credits -- do they continue to fight for share? And if they don’t, what do I do with the balance of Ultimate or Membership Rewards points that I’ll lose if I don’t re-up and pay the fee?</li><li>Matt: I think what\'s gonna happen is that issuers are going to continue to tinker around the edges to see what people like and what is impactful. And the truth is that issuers desperately want to keep the customers on cards like Chase Sapphire Reserve, Amex Platinum -- all the high end and the next-step-down cards because those customers are so valuable from a lifetime value perspective. You may get a travel card when you\'re 25 and the bank will do what they can to keep you around to try and upsell you to other products that they might have. The issuers are going to try and do what they can to figure out how to make you stay. And right now, that may not look like giving a ton of travel rewards points.</li><li>Mark: Any recommendations for travel card holders as we\'re going forward to the end of the year and into the beginning of next year?</li><li>Matt: You really have to know your situation and understand it, and you also have to not feel guilty if you have to cash in your points that you had been saving up for that dream trip in order to help you extend your budget. Nobody gets a high-end travel card with a high annual fee hoping to eventually cash that in for groceries at Walmart, but sometimes these things have to happen. If you have the financial wherewithal and you can hold on to those points, I think it\'s worth doing because we are going to travel again. Nobody knows when. But we are going to travel again and assuming that your whole financial situation is generally OK, I think there is value in holding on to those points as something to look forward to in the future.</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #167</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and now, <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_167.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #167 — 6 Months On; Why Keep Travel Cards?','','inherit','closed','closed','','2856-revision-v1','','','2021-10-01 17:06:25','2021-10-01 22:06:25','',2856,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3952',0,'revision','',0),
(3953,1,'2021-10-01 17:07:03','2021-10-01 22:07:03','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":2899,\"width\":300,\"height\":300,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large is-resized\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/IMG_2240-1024x1024.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2899\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"/><figcaption>My mission is clear</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Trying to recover from a long weekend of eating and drinking through the neighborhoods of South Philly. Our movable feast reminded me that food may be the one experience of a place left that can’t be easily exported and bought on-line. We talk about the FBI\'s cybersecurity warning to work-from-home types using hotels for getaway offices, and are a bit amazed at how fast last year\'s \"flight shaming\" gave way to \"flights to nowhere.\" And we think about \"quarantine theater\" -- how cities and states are focusing on activities to signal they are serious about COVID, but that most folks know aren’t really effective. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_168.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>download</strong></a> the podcast file, go over to the <em>Subscribe</em> section on the right to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #168: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after a long weekend of eating and drinking and eating some more with friends in Philadelphia, a family we’ve traveled with before - South Africa, Singapore, Spain… and now, with COVID lockdowns, Philly. And while we’ll do a cultural thing or two, what we really like to do together is eat. It is the kind of group where comments like: “OK, we need to stop eating at 1:30 because we have 5:30 reservations” and “We’re only going to order the half-kilo of barbacoa because we’re eating again in 4 hours” are met with “Yeah, that’s a good point,” and “makes sense” rather than “I think we have a problem here.”&nbsp;</li><li>And Pennsylvania’s reopening regulation about needing to buy food when getting a beer didn’t help. After sneaking in a cheesesteak right before that 1:30 cutoff, we had to order some food with our afternoon beers -- the beer, of course, not subject to that 1:30 deadline because it’s liquid, so it’s not really food, so it doesn’t count. But we had to order some real, solid food with our beers. So we look at the menu -- ah, brussels sprouts, it’s a vegetable, that’s kinda healthy. Five minutes later, our beers arrive with a wire basket full of deep-fried brussels sprouts doused in a sweet chili sauce. So much for healthy.</li><li>But some of the bars, the smaller ones, the neighborhood ones, gamed it -- as these places are wont to do -- by putting a $1 food item on the menu -- 2 hard boiled eggs at one bar, a PB&amp;J at another. The best, though, was the Pop Tart we had with our last beer at Ray’s Happy Birthday Bar in South Philly. That one won the prize.</li><li>Which we found because we skipped the usual downtown/Center City/Society Hill hotels and grabbed an Airbnb in South Philly - kinda sandwiched between the older Italian neighborhoods and the newer Little Saigon area. We spent a lot of time outdoors, walking the neighborhoods -- and walking off our food -- and stopping in at neighborhood joints. One day, we’re picking up salamis and cheese from the Italian Market; another day, we’re buying banh mi’s from a Vietnamese bakery. I’ll write up a list of our favorite places for the TravelCommons website in a couple of weeks -- after my cholesterol level gets back to some semblance of normal.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/duckett/2333\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Another Girl (instrumental)</a> by duckett (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/duckett/23334 Ft: fourstones, miafas</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>First, a big “Thank You” to Gary Learned who goes by Denrael on social media for his review in Apple Podcasts. Gary is a long-time TravelCommons listener. Indeed, he’s pointed me to some great restaurants in places like Seattle and Memphis. Gary wrote a couple of weeks ago:<ul><li>“When people ask where I live, I usually just say airports and hilton. As someone who lives the life of the road warrior, I find this podcast strikes an all-to-familiar chord with my own experiences. A definite must-listen to understand the life of the traveller.</li><li>“I wrote the above a number of years ago and it is as true now as it was then, I look forward to Mark’s take on travel, it’s more about the journey, and cannot count the number of times when I’ve shook my head, laughed and said “yep, been there.”</li></ul></li><li>Gary, thanks for that. And thanks for staying with me this long.</li><li>The FBI pushed out a consumer alert last week to remind folks about the risks when using hotel wi-fi. We’ve talked about this many times and I think most frequent travelers know the drill when accessing any shared wi-fi, whether it be in a hotel or an airport or a bar or a Starbucks. Nothing new there, so why the FBI alert? Because the “FBI has observed a trend where individuals who were previously teleworking from home are beginning to telework from hotels. US hotels, predominantly in major cities, have begun to advertise daytime room reservations for guests seeking a quiet, distraction-free work environment.” So people who used to work in offices and have been working from home since March, are looking for a change of scenery, but either can’t or aren’t keen to go back to the group office setting. Enter downtown hotels, many of whom, we mentioned last month, are slouching towards bankruptcy because of low occupancy. Don’t want a bed for the night? How ‘bout a desk for the day? I just got an email from Omni Hotels pitching just that -- “Trade up your classroom for everything you need for a productive day of work plus downtown Los Angeles views.” I guess the FBI thinks these displaced office workers, used to working on secure corporate or home networks, might not be as careful. But even for frequent travelers, the alert is a good read:&nbsp; talking about the dangers of an “evil twin” attack, logging onto what looks like a hotel wi-fi but is actually a hacker’s network; logging into the actual hotel wi-fi which has been compromised through exploits in out-of-date or unpatched network hardware. The FBI’s top recommendations are ones we’ve <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/09/20/podcast-155-rj-delays-street-food-in-poland-and-hungary/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #155 — RJ Delays; Street Food in Poland and Hungary\">repeated</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/02/20/podcast-127-critiquing-my-top-10-travel-tips-reviewing-vpns/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #127 — Critiquing My Top 10 Travel Tips; Reviewing VPNs\">numerous</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/12/20/podcast-119-digital-security-on-the-road-us-airports-getting-better/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #119 — Digital Security On The Road; US Airports Getting Better?\">times</a> - use a VPN when you connect to public wi-fi, or avoid them altogether with a mobile hotspot. Even when I’ve had a corporate VPN, I’ve always used one of the top paid VPN providers - NordVPN, PIA or ExpressVPN - because their software is so much better. I’m using NordVPN now, and whenever I’m not on a private network, I fire up the Nord client and it handles everything -- connects to the best server, reconnects automatically when I open the lid to wake up my Mac again. I don’t have to think about it. Indeed, half the time I forget to shut it off at home, until I’m wondering why I can’t move a file to another PC. Also, only access secure websites; I used to say “look for https://” but I guess that was too geeky, so you need to look for lock icons instead. And, of course, enable 2-factor authentication whenever you can. Nothing new, but a good reminder nonetheless. I’ll put a <a href=\"https://www.ic3.gov/media/2020/201006.aspx\">link to the alert</a> in the show notes, but you can also find links on the TravelCommons Facebook page and Twitter account.</li><li>OK, I gotta ask “what happened to Greta Thunberg\'s ‘flygskam’ or ‘flight shaming’ -- the 2019 existential travel threat? Because the whole Asian thing of “flights to nowhere” -- EVA Air from Taiwan filling up its “Hello Kitty” plane, All Nippon doing a fake flight to Hawaii, and then Qantas selling out a 787 for a lap around Australia. Singapore Air scrapped their “flight to nowhere” at the last minute, instead turning one of their A380s into a pop-up restaurant. I have to tell you that, honestly, I just don’t get this. For me, the flight is a means to an end -- something I’ve got to bear to get where I want to go. Getting on that American 737 in ORD last week didn’t fill me with joy; it was just simple math -- 2 hrs in a plane vs. 11 hrs in a car. And all that I just said… goes double for the idea of voluntarily buying airplane meals to eat at home. Words fail me.</li><li>At the end of September, the CDC did an early release of an article slated for the November issue of their peer-reviewed journal <em>Emerging Infectious Diseases</em> (and I thought <em>Walden Pond</em> was a cure for insomnia). The article analyzed the in-flight transmission of coronavirus from one business class passenger to 14 other passengers and a crew member on a 10-hour Vietnam Air flight from London to Hanoi. Most of the reactions in the press and on Twitter were “Yikes! Single passenger infects 15 people!”. While noting the CDC’s disclaimer “Early release articles are not considered as final versions” (which I didn’t see mentioned in any of the press articles), I came away with a less-than- “Yikes” after reading the whole paper. The flight was on March 2nd, so while the world was still trying to figure this novel coronavirus thing out and way before mandatory in-flight masks. And the passenger was symptomatic with a cough and a sore throat. Of the 14 passengers infected, 12 were in the same business class cabin and of those, all but one were within a 2-seat radius. And the authors aren’t sure if the 2 economy class infections were from the business class index case or from a different source. My takeaways: 1) Don’t let symptomatic people on planes - even if temperature checks aren’t perfect, it might catch some folks and will certainly make people think about their condition before flying; 2) Because this appears to validate the risk of being kept in close proximity to an infected person over a prolonged period; 3) Which, to me, justifies the airlines’ no-excuses mask requirements; but 4) In spite of a symptomatic un-masked passenger coughing away in the front of the plane, no non-adjacent passengers got infected -- so maybe the airline execs’ confidence in HEPA filters kinda justified. I’ll put <a href=\"https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/11/20-3299_article\">a link to the CDC paper</a> in the show notes. It’s not that long. It’s interesting to read the source document rather than just a headline or a short USAToday blurb.</li><li>Having said all that, I’m in no way, shape, or form justifying the “hygiene theater” that the travel industry seems to be trying to use to bring folks back. I talked back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/07/17/podcast-165-first-post-lockdown-flight-when-does-business-travel-come-back/\">the July episode</a> about the “Hertz Gold Standard Clean” sticker Hertz is slapping across driver-side doors. And there are some hotels now scheduling cleaning during the day rather than overnight so guests can see it. And then, on my American flights between Chicago and Philly last week, the banner across the top of the American Way magazine cover in the seatback pocket - “This magazine has been treated with an antimicrobial process” -- which I guess means “Please, feel safe to open it up and look at the advertisements.” I dunno, it feels a bit like the “security theater” we all went through after 9/11 - it was less about actually making things safer and more about making us “feel” safer -- and so, more willing to get on a plane. But maybe if I’m an airline or hotel exec facing down the pain of laying off thousands or tens of thousands of people if travelers don’t come back, that distinction is meaningless; I’m just trying to survive.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/snowflake/56508\">Rise Up (Like the Sun)</a> by Snowflake (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: Bluemillenium, Sackjo22, Martin Luther King, Kara Square</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Quarantine Theater</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>While some folks in the hospitality industry are talking about “hygiene theater”, what about “quarantine theater”? Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #166 — What Is The Meaning of Travel?\">August episode</a>, I talked about the complexity local and state travel bans and quarantine measures are causing for people trying to plan some sort of travel.&nbsp;</li><li>My son Andrew and his significant other headed out to Portland, ME last month for work. The week before they left, the Marriott emailed him a form - “Please certify one of the following is true - I have received a negative COVID test performed no later than 72 hours prior to my arrival, or will quarantine for 14 days upon my arrival in Maine.” Since they were only going to be in Portland for 4 days, they trundled down to the nearest testing site for the quick test 2 days before they left -- where they got chewed out by one of the testers. “We’re running out of the quick tests. You should’ve planned better.” OK, how long to get results from the other test? “5 days” But that won’t meet Maine’s 3-day requirement. Tester just walks away. But they got their negative test results and got on their plane to Portland -- where no one in the airport or the hotel asked to see it.&nbsp; OK, not harm done other than the discomfort of a Q-tip probing their sinuses and a random bit of yelling, but waste scarce testing resources?</li><li>Chicago’s quarantine is also a bit of kabuki. Once a week the city’s health commission gets in front of the press to scold another state or two -- this week was Indiana and Wisconsin. There’s now 25 states and Puerto Rico that if you’re traveling from there to Chicago, you’re supposed to self-quarantine for 14 days or face fines up to $7,000. More interesting is that Chicago’s threshold for getting on the list is 15 new daily cases per 100,000 residents. On this week’s <a href=\"https://www.chicago.gov/city/en/sites/covid-19/home/emergency-travel-order.html\">tally,</a> Indiana is running in the 20-30 range, but so is the state of Illinois. You could call it hypocritical or pragmatic or keeping its powder dry for when the city needs another bucket of money from the state, but Chicago hasn’t put the rest of Illinois on its quarantine list.</li><li>Now, I’ve yet to hear of anyone who has actually self-quarantined and as of last week, <a href=\"https://chicago.cbslocal.com/2020/10/02/three-months-into-chicagos-emergency-travel-order-no-fines-issued-enforcement-focus-remains-on-education/\">no one has been rung up for not doing so</a>. But last month, a friend told me about how Chicago’s quarantine theater hit her last month. She finally got ‘round to taking some vacation at the end of the summer. She lives in Chicago, but is a big outdoors person; looking at airfares and tossing some darts at a map, she decided to go hit Bryce Canyon and Zion National Parks in Southern Utah. So she’s down there for a couple of days when her boss calls her. “They just announced that Utah is going on the city’s quarantine list. It’s not official until Friday, so I guess if you get out of there by Thursday, you won’t have to quarantine for 2 weeks before coming back to work.” And, it didn’t need to be said, those 2 weeks of self-quarantine wouldn’t be paid. My friend is unique in that she works for maybe the one company in Chicago that takes the city’s quarantine order seriously. So my friend fought through lousy cell coverage to see what she could salvage of the back half of her vacation. Luckily, she has friends in Oregon, which isn’t on the city’s list. So Thursday, she cut her hiking short, schlepped the 4½ hours back up to SLC and caught the last flight out to Portland -- which let her come back to work and make some money the next week.</li><li>Theater isn’t a new thing. If you’re, say, a <em>mature</em> traveler, you got to play a bit part in the security theater that premiered after 9/11 and the underwear bomber. While not a perfect analogy (and really, nothing ever is), we can see some similar theatrics -- government agencies (TSA then, health departments now) investing in activities that signal they are serious, but that most folks know aren’t really effective. For me and I think for most frequent travelers, the security theater ended with TSA PreCheck -- it seemed, again to most of us, as a reasonable balance between risk and getting on with our traveling lives. I don’t know what that looks like for quarantine theater, but I sure hope it doesn’t take the 10 years it took to figure out PreCheck.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/52154\">release.JOY.release</a> by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: essesq, Haskel (hej31)</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Traveling For Food</strong> </h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I talked at the start of the episode about eating my way through Philadelphia a couple of weeks back, and it was just that. We landed Thursday around 11:30a and were hitting our favs at Reading Terminal Market by 1:30p. I went straight for Tommy Dinic’s for the roast pork sandwich with sharp provolone and broccoli rabe while Irene and Claire made for the Mennonite pretzel place and Termini Brothers for fresh-filled cannolis. And then as we were leaving, I swung past one of the PA Dutch stands to buy a 1-lb block of <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrapple\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">scrapple</a> for breakfast the rest of the stay.</li><li>Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #166 — What Is The Meaning of Travel?\">August episode</a> in the interview with Emily Thomas about her book <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2IpLXnd\"><em>The Meaning of Travel</em></a><em>, </em>we talked about a chapter on global homogenization. One of the bits that I edited out was the observation that, back 10-20 year ago, it was fun to go shopping and bring something unique back home. But now, with globalized e-commerce, there’s not much that you can’t find easier (and often cheaper) on Amazon or Taobao or Rakuten. And so, for me, food is the one experience of a place that can’t be easily exported and bought on-line.</li><li>On our trip to the UP -- Michigan’s Upper Peninsula -- along with the biking, hiking, and kayaking, we were also on a bit of a <a href=\"https://thepastyguy.com/portfolio/the-pasty-trail-best-pasties-in-up/\">pasty tasting tour</a>. The UP is pretty well known -- in the Midwest at least -- for their <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pasty\">pasties</a>, brought over by Cornish miners working the copper mines. We had traditional pasties filled with steak, potatoes, onions, and rutabagas, and breakfast pasties. We worked our ways through the finer points of pasty critique -- picking out the pasties made from lard-based doughs, and fillings that held together so you could eat the pasty with your hand but weren’t just complete mush.</li><li>It’s funny how these comparison dishes can crop up on a vacation. On a trip to Phuket, Thailand, Andrew ordered pad thai everywhere we ate. On a trip to Hungary, Irene searched every menu for <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisherman\'s_soup\">halászlé</a> - a spicy fish soup - after having a great bowl of it at lunch with her cousin in some little town on the shores of <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Balaton\">Lake Balaton</a>. And again Irene, in Spain now, searched every city we visited for <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salmorejo\">salmorejo</a>, not quite soup, more of a tomato and bread and olive oil and garlic purée. These sorta horizontal tasting, some would be planned -- like our pasty tour -- and some would just come up, like Irene’s halászlé hunt. But it’d be fun, getting a feel for what the base of the dish is, what everyone agrees on, and what people put their own spin on, because usually for these core dishes -- dishes that everyone around has eaten all their lives -- everyone has an opinion about them. And that’s part of what makes the broad/horizontal tasting fun.</li><li>And also, these dishes don’t seem to be “industrialized.” While I’ve had mass produced pasties in the UK, grabbing something out from the West Cornish Pasty hut in Waterloo Station while running for a train, the pasties in the UP were much more -- not “artisanal” because I don’t think anyone making pasties in the UP would use that word, but “family made”. At Miners Pasties in Munising, which came out top in our pasty ranks, the woman helping us at the counter said the lard pastry recipe came from the owner’s grandmother and only 3 people know it -- the granddaughters and their niece. And only those three make the pastry each day.&nbsp; We sat back and enjoyed those pasties because we knew we wouldn’t be eating them again unless and until we found our way back to this bench again some day.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #168</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_168.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food','','inherit','closed','closed','','2896-revision-v1','','','2021-10-01 17:07:03','2021-10-01 22:07:03','',2896,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3953',0,'revision','',0),
(3954,1,'2021-10-01 17:08:36','2021-10-01 22:08:36','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":2935,\"width\":300,\"height\":300,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large is-resized\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714-1024x1024.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2935\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"/><figcaption>Locking Down The Christmas Tree</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>No travel since the last episode, so I had some time to think back through my post-lockdown travel and come up with my top 10 <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">gift ideas</a> for your pandemic travelers.  We look at the start of the year-end efforts by airlines, hotels, and credit card companies to keep their grounded travelers, unpack the work-from-hotel offerings from Marriott, Hilton, and Hyatt, and dissect the latest hotel reservation system data breach. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_169.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go over to the <em>Subscribe</em> section on the right to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #169: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. No travel, but a November week with temps in the 70’s felt like I was someplace other than Chicago. But the weather reverted to the mean yesterday, which chased me back indoors to finish this podcast.</li><li>Last week was a boon to Chicago’s bars and restaurants. The week before, the governor banned indoor service again as COVID cases began to rise. The bonus week of warm sunny weather gifted them with some needed outdoor dining revenue. Last Friday, a friend and I met for lunch at a neighborhood place that had been able to expand their outdoor seating by putting tables on the sidewalk in front of the shuttered retailer next door to them. We showed up at 11:30; the tables were full by 12.</li><li>One of the things we talked about was travel; how, over the past 8 months, we’d more or less adjusted to all of the COVID restrictions, the masks, the social distance, all of it -- except for travel. Yes, we’ve done the car trips and long weekends, but we miss the big trips -- I’d just cancelled our Thanksgiving trip to London and he’s trying to think through their annual Christmas trip to December. Now, I know this is definitely a “First World problem” for folks who’ve had families, friends, and even themselves hit with COVID, so I’m not trying to overplay this. But as the end of the year approaches, and I start hearing more public health experts reset expectation -- for the worse, saying <a href=\"https://www.smh.com.au/national/vaccine-is-imminent-but-virus-fight-has-long-way-to-go-fauci-20201028-p569h2.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">“Well, it’s probably more like the end of 2021 or maybe into the beginning of 2022 before things start feeling normal”</a> -- I dunno, for people who love travel, I don’t think they want to put it on hold for another year or two. You start hearing about people looking for openings -- Mexico, Costa Rica -- as they figure out their own personal risk profiles. Maybe <a href=\"https://hub.united.com/2020-10-29-united-airlines-launches-worlds-first-free-transatlantic-covid-19-testing-pilot-2648544789.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">United Airlines’ testing program</a> that they’re trialing on flights to Hawaii and London is part of the answer; certainly <a href=\"https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/11/heres-everything-to-know-about-pfizers-positive-vaccine-news/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pfizer’s release of preliminary vaccine results</a> on Monday got everybody hopeful again. I don’t think anyone expects -- or really wants -- an immediate snap-back to 2019. But the ability to stretch things a bit more would be greatly appreciated.</li><li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mactonite/29469\">Static</a>&nbsp;by Darkroom (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mactonite/29469</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>First, a quick program note. As I tweak things with the underlying TravelCommons infrastructure -- the audio file, the RSS feed, the website -- I’ll talk about the changes at the end of the podcast, so I don’t muck up the content that you come to listen to with the “inside baseball” sorta podcast stuff. If you’re not interested, you can skip to the end without missing anything. I will say, though, that I was pleasantly surprised when I looked at the Apple Podcast stats showing about 80% of you stay through the end of an episode. I’d fully expected to see at least 50% of folks hitting the “skip to next podcast” button when they heard the “Pictures of You” song clip. Thanks to everybody for sticking all the way through.</li><li>And congrats to Emily Thomas, our guest on the August episode, for winning the <a href=\"https://www.leverhulme.ac.uk/philip-leverhulme-prizes\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Leverhulme prize</a> last month. The prize recognizes the achievement of outstanding researchers across a broad range of disciplines whose work has already attracted international recognition and whose future career is exceptionally promising. I interviewed Emily about her book <em>The Meaning of Travel: Philosophers Abroad</em> and had a great time talking to her. A well-deserved award. I just may go back and listen to that interview again.</li><li>I got an email from Marriott last week announcing their work-from-hotel offerings. We\'ve talked about this trend in the past couple of episodes -- first as a way for downtown hotels to do something/anything about their low occupancy rates, and then in the last episode with the FBI\'s cyber security advisory to people moving from work-at-home to work-at-hotels. The Day Pass gives you a room from 6am to 6pm, wi-fi, bottled water, and lounge access if you’re a high-status Marriott Bonvoy member. They’re piloting it in Atlanta, Dallas, New York, and Phoenix. Scanning the pricing, the range looked to be in the $60-$90 range, though the Phoenician in Scottsdale did price out at $260. If you looked hard, you could probably get a day pass at a co-working place for cheaper, but if you can expense it, the Marriott offer is probably not a bad deal -- especially for those days that you have a big sales presentation or maybe a webinar, where you need that guaranteed alone time to focus on preparation and then delivery, and a video backdrop that’s not your closet door or a semi-made bed or random people walking past. Hilton and Hyatt are also offering work-from hotel plans, but with different spins. Hilton’s WorkSpaces will give you 10,000 Honors points for your first booking and, unlike Marriott, is across all of their properties, but it doesn’t feel as put together as Marriott’s. You have to ring up the property directly; looks like Hilton can’t figure out a way to shoehorn this day rate concept into their reservation system. Work from Hyatt, on the other hand, isn’t so much a WeWork replacement as a digital nomad trial package with its 7-night minimum stay requirement and a focus on resort locations like the Grand Hyatts in Kauai or Vail, CO. Kinda the complete opposite of spending 12 hours in a room at the Marriott by DFW. They all feel a bit “toe in the water”, a bit opportunistic in their own way.&nbsp;</li><li>At the beginning of this week, Candid Wueest, a cyber security researcher who joined us last year in episode #151 to talk about hotel websites that leaked traveler data, tweeted out a link to yet <a href=\"https://www.websiteplanet.com/blog/prestige-soft-breach-report/\">another hotel data breach</a>. This time it was channel management software, something that hotels use to automate the task of updating room availability and rates across all the on-line booking sites like Expedia and Booking.com and Hotels.com and on and on. Turns out this channel manager, Prestige Software, stored 24 GB of names and emails and credit card data and reservation records -- 10 million log files going back to 2013 -- in a misconfigured AWS S3 bucket -- storage space on Amazon’s cloud. The pandemic has massively accelerated companies moving from their own data centers to cloud services like Amazon and Microsoft. But sometimes it feels like the speed of that migration has overrun the skills of the teams supporting it.&nbsp; What can you do about it? In this case, not much. You would’ve booked your room on Expedia or Trivago and not known anything about something called a channel manager piping your data down to the hotel. We’ve talked about these breaches in so many past episodes. What I said then still stands: you need to be realistic -- it’s not <em>if</em> your personal data will get breached, it’s <em>when</em>. If you can, put your on-line purchases on a separate card and watch those transactions on the bank’s website or mobile app so you can quickly shut it down if you see something that doesn’t look right. I remember one time, years ago, seeing a Northwest Air flight from Tokyo to Beijing show up on my card. Struck me as odd because I was in Chicago with no plans to be in Asia. Immediately called the bank, disputed the charge, and they closed down the card. Interesting thing is that the crook had booked an economy class ticket. You’d think if you’re going to risk it, go big -- book the front of the plane -- business class if not first.&nbsp;</li><li>The quarantine theater we talked about in the last episode just keeps keeping on. Chicago now has 43 states on its list, 31 of which have <em>lower</em> COVID rates than Chicago. And, I guess in admission that no one’s paying attention, they’re moving from weekly updates to every other week. I guess ‘cause there’s not that many more states they can add. New York gave up on its quarantine list when COVID rates in neighboring Connecticut and New Jersey qualified them for the list. \"There will be no quarantine list, there will be no metrics,\" Governor Cuomo says. Everyone needs to test negative, except for people coming in from Connecticut, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania because, at some point, you just gotta be realistic. Especially in the face of this, what is it, a third wave? I’ve lost count.</li><li>And just to show how deeply all of this -- the quarantine, the lack of travel has gotten me, here’s a fun game I now play with my Google Mini.&nbsp;I dug around in the Google Home app and found where I can change the voice. I’ll switch to the British Racing Green voice to check the weather in London and then click over on Sydney Harbour Blue to check the weather there. Then I flip back to the default voice to get the weather at the Googleplex. And, of course, I ask it to play TravelCommons.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter message</a> to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> or our <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a> account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge music —&nbsp;<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Psykick/52938\">Another Way</a>&nbsp;by Psykick (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Psykick/52938</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Holiday Gift Guide for the Pandemic Traveler</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Like I mentioned at the top of the show, hearing public health officials saying things like “it will be easily by the end of 2021 and perhaps into the next year before we start having some semblance of normality” got my attention; got me thinking that this year’s travel gift guide needs to be a bit different. So I flipped through my 2020 travel journal, thought back through all of my post-lockdown travel to come up with my top shopping ideas for your pandemic travelers.</li><li>Check out this year\'s pandemic gift guide on the front page of the TravelCommons\' website or <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times\">here </a>at https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/2879\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Slinky Blues</a> by Admiral Bob (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/28792 Ft: unreal_dm</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>End of Year “Don’t Leave Me” Offers</strong> </h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Back in September, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/09/19/podcast-167-6-months-on-why-keep-travel-cards/\" title=\"Podcast #167 — 6 Months On; Why Keep Travel Cards?\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">episode #167</a>, we talked with <a href=\"https://www.lendingtree.com/writer/matt-schulz/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Matt Schulz, chief credit analyst at LendingTree</a>, about travel credit cards. Matt told us that their late summer surveys showed trends toward people canceling travel cards and cashing out points. But then earlier this week, <a href=\"https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-11-10/amex-says-its-cardholders-are-stockpiling-their-points-and-miles\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">American Express’ CFO said that their card customers <em>weren’t</em> cashing out points, and instead stocking them up to travel</a>.&nbsp; The two comments aren’t necessarily at odds. If you’re laid off, you can use those miles to buy groceries or clothes via gift cards or on Amazon. But if you don’t have to, the best value you’ll get for those points will be on travel. You’ll get less than a penny a point when cashing out Amex points on Amazon, but you can double that when you use them to book flights on, say, Singapore Air or KLM.&nbsp; So the hoarding makes sense -- if you can.</li><li>One of Matt’s points in our interview was that card companies will continue to tweak their rewards to keep people holding and using their cards because travelers are a valuable customer segment because, well, they typically spend chunks of money to travel. So as we come up on the end of the year, it’ll be interesting to see what those tweaks will be. Chase keeps extending the 5x grocery and gas bonus on their Southwest card while <a href=\"https://thepointsguy.com/news/amex-platinum-current-offer/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amex just announced a <em>10x</em> grocery and gas bonus as well as a 75K sign-up bonus for their Platinum card</a>.</li><li>Airlines and hotels are also rolling out their year-end offers. Back in the spring, all the majors gave existing status holders a push, extending elite expiration dates to Jan 2022 to keep them in the fold. So that settled everyone down for 2020. But now, with 2021 coming up and travel still in the hole, we’re starting to see new offers.<a href=\"http://news.aa.com/news/news-details/2020/Rewarding-AAdvantage-Members-With-More-Benefits-and-Flexibility-in-2021-AADV-10/default.aspx\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"> American opened the bidding last month</a>, knocking 20% off of 2021 status qualifying mileage clip levels (e.g., 40,000 instead of 50,000 to qualify for AAdvantage Platinum) and trying to get whatever they can for this year by counting October (last month), November, and December flights&nbsp; towards earning status in 2021, which is then good through Jan 2023. This afternoon, I got an email from <a href=\"https://hub.united.com/2020-11-12-united-airlines-makes-it-easier-to-earn-mileageplus-premier-status-for-2022-2648871852.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">United announcing their deal</a>. United’s status qualification methodology has gotten ridiculously complex over the past couple of years, but by at least one of their metrics, it looks like they’re dropping their status qualifying point (PQP -- don’t ask) clip levels by at least 30% <em>and</em> offering double points for flights taken in Q1 -- January, February, March -- next year. <a href=\"https://newsroom.hilton.com/hilton-honors/news/hilton-honors-adds-flexibility-value-for-members\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Hilton, though, made the simplest and deepest offer</a> -- knocking 50% off of all status qualifying measures -- stays, nights, points -- boom, mike drop.</li><li>It makes sense. Most statused travelers are business travelers and depending on which CEO is talking, business travel is down 85% (Delta), 90% (Southwest), and will be 3-4 years before it’s back to pre-pandemic levels (United). And those business travelers are the airlines’ and hotels’ most profitable customers. So expect to see Delta and Southwest and Marriott announcements soon, and maybe again this time next year if that “Well, it’s probably more like the end of 2021 or maybe into the beginning of 2022 before things start feeling normal” forecast turns out to be true.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #169</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li>As I mentioned at the end of the last episode, I restructured the RSS feed a bit so that I shouldn’t accidently trigger any more episode re-downloads. And I moved the episode number from the title to its own XML tag just to clean up how everything looks in your podcast app. Also, a few months ago, I tweaked the production workflow to add chapter markers in each episode. So, if your app supports them (Apple Podcasts and Overcast do), you can skip forward to the next section or, if you wanted to go back and listen to, say, the interview with Emily Thomas, you can go straight to it.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>, as well as asking Alexa and Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_169.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers','','inherit','closed','closed','','2936-revision-v1','','','2021-10-01 17:08:36','2021-10-01 22:08:36','',2936,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3954',0,'revision','',0),
(3955,1,'2021-10-01 17:09:10','2021-10-01 22:09:10','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":2960,\"width\":300,\"height\":300,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large is-resized\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2960\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"/><figcaption>How Do I Insert This Into My iPhone<br>(DoD photo by EJ Hersom)</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>No Thanksgiving travel, but looking at the travel volume for this, the busiest travel week of the year, shows just how far things have fallen. The Qantas CEO said \"No vax, no fly\", so we dig into the emerging world of digital vaccine passports. And then I trace my travel genealogy, wondering if road warrior-ism is hereditary. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_170.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go over to the <em>Subscribe</em> section on the right to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #170: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. And again, no travel since the last episode. Not too surprising given the way things are going right now. Back in April, I’d jumped on one of those smokin’ American Airlines’ promotions to book flights to London for Thanksgiving. Which then -- not surprisingly -- got cancelled at the beginning of September.&nbsp; So I was back to what has been my typical Thanksgiving travel pattern for the past 10-15 years -- staying at home to avoid the crowds on what is always the busiest travel week of the year. PK -- pre-kids -- Irene and I would always travel over the holidays, splitting Thanksgiving and Christmas between my family in Southern California and hers in Chicago. But post-kids -- which is also PK, so I guess it should be AK -- after kids -- we started staying at home. And I’d figure out how to “ground” myself from business travel also. I found that the challenge of holiday travel wasn’t necessarily the crowds; it’s the make-up of the crowds; what some road warriors might call “clueless” travelers. I think “amateur” is certainly a more charitable and probably more accurate term. Even more so this year with so many road warriors out of practice after being off the road since March. Lots of those folks definitely in danger of losing their “professional” traveler status.</li><li>I saw an interesting graph the other day comparing last year’s and this year’s day-by-day airport travel volumes over the Thanksgiving weekend. No surprises comparing the Wednesday travel volumes, what is traditionally the busiest travel day of the year. Last year’s Wednesday saw 2.6 million passengers, almost 2½ times busier than this year. I expected that. But what really caught my eye was that this year’s peak day -- <a href=\"https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/thanksgiving-travel-volume-2020-pandemic/index.html\">Sunday at about 1.2 million </a>-- was still a lot less than last year’s slowest day, Thanksgiving, at about 1.6 million. I didn’t travel last year at Thanksgiving, but did in 2018.&nbsp; Irene and I broke our no-travel rule and flew down to Santa Fe, NM on Thanksgiving Day. Back in episode <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/12/17/podcast-147-holiday-travel-tips-notes-from-santa-fe/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">#147</a>, I said that Thanksgiving Day flight was one of the least stressful travel experiences I’d ever had — no traffic on the drive to ORD, no lines. The TSA agents were hanging around just looking for people to screen. And that day, there were around 25% more people in airports than this year’s <em>busiest</em> day. I shouldn’t be surprised, but all the pictures I saw in the news coverage made it look like airports were a lot more crowded.&nbsp;</li><li>Our apartment is just south of one of the northern approaches to ORD. Flights from the east come in over the lake -- seats A, B, and C get a great view of the city skyline while seats D, E, and F get to look down into Wrigley Field -- then&nbsp; over the northwest side of the city, landing on one of the runways north of the terminal. I’ve always been impressed by the choreography of ORD. On a clear Friday afternoon, driving up the tollway that runs east of the airport, I’d see planes on parallel approaches landing simultaneously -- one to the north of the terminal and one to the south -- and looking up, see the lights of planes on approach behind them -- 2, 3, 4.... Back in April, during Chicago’s lockdown, I’d sit out on the rooftop deck -- because what else was I going to do? -- and maybe see one plane coming in over the lake on that approach. But now I’m seeing more planes -- sometimes 3, 4 in a row. Don’t know that they’re all carrying passengers -- some could be temporary cargo carriers taking some of that e-commerce money, with boxes instead of seats under the overhead bins. But I can feel travel starting to pick up. It could be a tough winter, but I’m trying to look out over the horizon a bit; trying to look forward to spring.</li><li>Bridge Music -- Leviathan by Kirkoid (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Kirkoid/31109</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>TravelCommons contributor Allan Marko commented on my little lockdown game with my Google Mini -- changing the voice to, say, an English accent and then asking about the weather in London.&nbsp; Allan wrote:<ul><li>I often change the Siri voice for a bit of variety. Currently “Australian Female” is providing my CarPlay directions. you can also ask Siri to “Play TravelCommons”…</li></ul></li><li>Which immediately got me digging into Siri’s settings, looking for the Voice options. I found I had a choice of American, Australian, British, Indian, Irish, and South African. Since I’d already used the first three with my Google Mini, it was between the last three. I chose Irish for now, but will probably switch to South African before the end of the month. Actually, Waze, the nav app, always impressed me with the number of voice and language options. Every once in a while, I switch Irene’s Waze over to Hungarian before she’s heading out somewhere. For some reason, I get more of a laugh out of it than she does.</li><li>TravelCommons listener Dan Grabon and I have been trading notes as we’ve each slogged through Thoreau’s <em>Walden</em>. We both started it back in April, in the height of the lockdown. Everybody was deciding that, with nothing much else to do, it was a good time to pick up that classic you’ve always been meaning to get to. Dan started out with <em>The Brothers Karamazov</em>, which I thought was damned impressive. I first reached for Whitman’s <em>Leaves of Grass</em>, but then thought I needed something a bit more down-to-earth, something that wouldn’t need quite that level of interpretation and abstract thinking. And <em>Walden</em>, about Thoreau’s self-isolation in the woods outside of Concord, MA, seemed a better fit with the lockdown. Dan finished last month, at the beginning of November. I was 50 pages behind, so I didn’t finish ‘til Thanksgiving -- it was tough cutting through the tryptophan fog, but I gutted it through. Dan said he was staying with Thoreau, moving onto <em>Civil Disobedience</em> before shelving the book. I pivoted to non-fiction, <em>Why We Sleep</em>, where a neuroscientist and sleep expert spends some 300+ pages saying “If you don’t sleep 8 hours, you’re killing yourself” which got me doing some mental math. Between jet lag from all the&nbsp; international flights and waking up at 4am to make 6am flights to LGA, I’ve probably dropped 5 years off my life. Though, given some dementia running through my family history, I might not have remembered those years anyways.</li><li>And I show up on the other side of the mic talking travel pro tips with Matt Wilson on his <a href=\"https://www.under30experiences.com/blog/travel-like-a-pro-with-mark-peacock-of-travelcommons\">Millennial Travel Podcast</a>.&nbsp; I’m trying to remember when we recorded this -- had to be pre-April 2019 because I was still in the suburban TravelCommons studio and Matt was hanging out down in Costa Rica. The connection fuzzes out now and again, but it was a fun conversation. I’ll put a link in the episode in the show notes but fair warning -- it’s mostly me rattling on for an hour. Listening back to it, I’m kinda embarrassed that I don’t give Matt much of a chance to get a word in edgewise.</li><li>In the last episode, I talked about the work-from-hotel offerings from Marriott, Hilton, and Hyatt. They all had their own twists, but Hyatt’s was the most unique in that their “Work from Hyatt” offer was resort-focused and had a 7-night minimum. I said it wasn’t so much a WeWork replacement as a digital nomad trial. Well, I’m guessing that they didn’t get much uptake on it because I just got another email from Hyatt with a new offering -- “Office for the Day” -- that pretty much matches Marriott’s Day Pass. Like I said last month, these offerings all feel a bit “toe in the water”, a bit opportunistic. And now that we’re starting to get better visibility into post-vaccine timelines, I wonder how long they’ll last -- will people still want to pay to work in a hotel room after all the Starbucks stores have reopened.</li><li>I’ve talked in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/12/podcast-120-where-do-guidebooks-fit-in-i-hate-shopping-for-suitcases\">past</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/09/28/podcast-124-craft-beer-hunting-i-hate-rick-steves\">episodes</a> about how I’m a bit of a knuckle-dragger regarding printed travel guides. I still find a physical book useful when traveling. But I’ve been wondering how quickly these physical guides will be able to push out post-COVID editions to reflect the closures of bars, restaurants, and independent shops they’ve recommended. I was running through my own Chicago recommendation list from 2019. A bunch of my favorite places have closed; it’s about an even split between “Closed forever, good-bye, we’ve taken down our sign” and “Closed until Spring… we hope.” The final proofs of the 2021 editions have to already be baked if not already at the printers. I dunno, maybe they’ll all post errata pages that you can download, print off, and then stick in your books.</li><li>In a massive intersection of all things social media, I posted a <a href=\"https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/tiktok-hotel-room-chef/index.html\">CNN article</a> on the TravelCommons Facebook page that a friend, a hotel company CIO, sent me on LinkedIn that showed TikTok videos of people cooking meals in hotel rooms using an iron for a griddle, a hot water kettle for a steamer, a pants presser as an oven, and the one that really wowed me -- a coffee maker as a sous vide water bath. I don’t know if I should be impressed by the ingenuity or looking to set up as a ghost kitchen/delivery service wherever they are because I’ve never seen anyone go to that extent to cook their own meal in a hotel room. Even guys I knew trying to squeeze the last pennies out of their per diems wouldn’t do much more than boil water for their Cup O’Noodles or work hard not to burn their microwave popcorn. I’ll also put a link in the show notes to the TikTok account of one of the guys, Jago Randles. His TikTok series,<a href=\"https://www.tiktok.com/@jagoscrandles\"> Isolation Kitchen</a>, has about 150,000 followers. He does some impressive stuff. But I will make sure, going forward, that I rinse out the coffee maker and wipe down the iron before using them.</li><li>For many frequent travelers, a key early milestone of the pandemic was when airlines and hotels gave them a year’s push on their status -- moving the expiration date from Jan 2021 to Jan 2022. Big sigh of relief. Then for Southwest fliers, another milestone -- drink coupon expiration dates all got pushed to the end of this year. Whew! All’s right in the traveling world. But a couple of days ago, I was rummaging around in my messenger bag and out tumbled 5 Southwest drink coupons -- one with a Sept expiration date; the rest, December 31. Look Southwest, I don’t want to seem greedy. I did get a year’s push on A-List and 6 months on Companion Pass. But I’d love you even more if you gave me another 6 months on those drink coupons. Nope, don’t say anything now; just think about it.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge music -- Ethereal (nop mix) by @nop (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Lancefield/34818</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Prove My Vax So I Can Fly</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Last month, I saw that quote from the Qantas CEO -- \"We will ask people to have a vaccination before they can get on the aircraft\'\' -- and thought, well it’s kinda the next logical step from Delta’s ATL-Rome and United’s EWR-LHR flights were you have to take COVID test and prove you’re negative before you can board.&nbsp;</li><li>I remember going to a travel clinic before my first flight to India; getting shot up with MMR, DTP, Hepatitis, and Typhoid vaccines and being given my <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carte_Jaune\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Yellow Card</a> -- officially my International Certificate of Vaccination or Prophylaxis -- listing all my shots. They told me to carry that with me to India, which I did and to Vietnam and Thailand and Singapore and China. No one ever asked to see it, not in an airport, an immigration line, a hotel,....&nbsp; It looks like the plans are that we’ll get a vaccination card from the CDC after receiving the first dose of COVID-19 vaccine. But that card isn’t meant as a validated proof of vaccination; it’s more of a reminder to go back in a couple of weeks for the second shot.&nbsp;</li><li>That handwritten piece of paper probably won’t pass muster at the Qantas boarding gate, and so that’s why we’re starting to see a bit of a vaccine passport app land grab going on. United has been testing the <a href=\"https://thecommonsproject.org/commonpass\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">CommonPass app</a> on their COVID-free EWR-LHR flight. You get your COVID test at the United Club near gate C93 and the results are uploaded into the app which then will display a QR code to the gate agent. CommonPass is being spun up with support from the World Economic Forum. Cathay Pacific, Lufthansa, SwissAir, and JetBlue also have plans to use it. Delta and Alitalia are trialing the <a href=\"https://www.aokpass.com/en/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">AOKPass </a>developed by the Int’l Chamber of Commerce on their COVID-free ATL-Rome flight. It uses blockchain for medical certificate storage, so bonus points to them in technology buzzword bingo. IATA, the Int’l Air Transport Association, an airline trade group, says they’re finishing up their app, <a href=\"https://www.iata.org/en/programs/passenger/travel-pass/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Travel Pass</a>, and will be piloting it with IAG, the parent of British Airways, Iberia, and Aer Lingus, in early 2021. And the World Health Organization says they’re looking at Estonia’s e-vaccination certificates as <a href=\"https://www.who.int/news-room/feature-stories/detail/estonia-and-who-to-jointly-develop-digital-vaccine-certificate-to-strengthen-covax#:~:text=WHO%20and%20Estonia%20recently%20agreed,access%20to%20COVID%2D19%20vaccines.\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the basis of a sort of “smart” Yellow Card app</a>.</li><li>I’m sure I’m missing a whole lot more; I just got tired of reading the same rehashed press release verbiage about secure and verifiable storage of health certifications. Going through this, it starts to feel like the health equivalent of those scooter apps, where I need half-a-dozen of them on my phone so I can rent the closest scooter to me. Unless someone blinks, it seems like I’ll need 3 or 4 of these vaccine passports to cover all my travel bases. But after reading through all the press releases and the infographics and the FAQs, none of these apps were real clear on how I get my physical CDC vaccine card into their digital storage vault. And I’m guessing that doctors and clinics are going to be more focused on taking care of patients and keeping their COVID vaccines cold, and not all that interested in entering my vaccination information into all those apps. Maybe Australia is further ahead with electronic health records, but I’m thinking, at least for the next year or so, that my CDC card is gonna be the best that Qantas and the gang are going to get.</li><li>Bridge music -- My Flaming Heart by Wired Ant (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial &nbsp;(3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Wired_Ant/36862 Ft: Javolenus</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Hereditary Road Warriors</strong> </h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I was reading some research, as one does during a lockdown advisory when one gets caught up running down a clickhole, about <a href=\"https://research.fb.com/blog/2016/03/do-jobs-run-in-families/\">jobs running in the family</a>. Some of the stats -- a son with a military father is 5 times more likely to enlist himself while if his mother is a lawyer, he’s 6.6 times more likely to follow her to the bar; a daughter with a scientist father is almost 4 times more likely to be a scientist. Indeed, when I was deciding my college major, I was leaning toward&nbsp; chemistry but chose chemical engineering mostly because my grandfather and father were both engineers.</li><li>Which got me thinking -- does traveling -- careers that require frequent traveling -- run in the family? Again, looking back on my family, my grandfather traveled a lot when he worked for Sears, checking out vendors for hard goods -- tools, small machinery -- and working with them on new products. My dad designed farm machinery -- things like hay balers and cotton pickers -- for International Harvester. He’d often be on the road for weeks at a time, testing prototypes at farms around the country, looking for different crop and field conditions, and then at plants helping to set up the manufacturing lines for the finished machine. And so I grew up seeing that rhythm of travel -- Dad at home, Dad packing, saying good-bye, and then getting on with our lives until he came back. This was back in the late ‘60’s and into the 70’s, so no cheap long-distance let alone messaging or email or video calls. He was gone, with the exception of a postcard or two, until he came back.</li><li>And then when I joined the workforce, the first day of my first real job out of school, I got on a plane and made the first of what’s been hundreds of flights between ORD and DFW.&nbsp; So many that, pretty soon, I got to know the women working the front desk at the DFW Admirals Club. One morning, one of them asks me if I’d maybe like to meet her daughter. Awkward. I asked her, “Would you want your daughter dating someone who’s out of town as much as I am?” She paused for a moment and then said, “No, not really”.&nbsp;</li><li>Also around this time, my dad had gotten promoted past the level of going out to the field and so was traveling a lot less. But my mother took a purchasing executive role and with that, the need for a lot of travel to vendors. So while travel was generational/ “hereditary” from my father to me, my mother and I started road warrior-ing at the same time, so we were more like travel “siblings” -- comparing hotel notes, competing on frequent flier status and perks.&nbsp;</li><li>Will traveling for a living continue to a 4th generation? Tough to tell right now; both kids measure their commute in feet rather than miles during the lockdown, and friends running consulting operations tell me the current state is great for staff productivity -- an hour sales call takes an hour, rather than a day’s worth of travel for that hour, and working remotely with clients saves the client money and consultants don’t get burnt out trying to balance work and home needs. As I said back in the March and July episodes, I don’t buy that 100% remote is the “new normal”, but I also don’t believe it will snap back to 2019 levels, not after what will have been a year’s-plus time working out the mechanics of virtual working. But will there be another generation of road warriors in my family? It’ll probably take a couple of years to figure that out.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #170</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li>I’ve made another little tweak to the RSS feed -- the file that all the podcast apps use to pull new episodes for your subscribed podcasts. This tweak affects the episode descriptions in the top podcast apps. For those apps that support it, there are now clickable links in the episode notes or descriptions. In last month’s episode, there were clickable links to the gift ideas blog post on the TravelCommons website as well as the episode show notes page. Going forward, there will always be a link to the episode’s show notes page. I’ve tested that this works on Apple Podcasts, Overcast (which is what I use), Stitcher, Pocket Casts, Podcast Addict, and Google Podcasts -- all of which make up 70-80% (depending on who’s doing the counting) of the TravelCommons downloads. So, if you get a chance, flip over to the episode description right now and check it out.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>, as well as asking Alexa, Siri, and Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_170.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors','','inherit','closed','closed','','2957-revision-v1','','','2021-10-01 17:09:10','2021-10-01 22:09:10','',2957,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3955',0,'revision','',0),
(3956,1,'2021-10-01 17:09:44','2021-10-01 22:09:44','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":2168,\"width\":300,\"height\":300,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large is-resized\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1-1024x1024.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2168\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"/></a><figcaption>Wait! I need to unpair my iPhone!</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Was all set to head to San Diego for a week\'s break from Chicago\'s grey January and then looked at the COVID restrictions... and then pivoted to Arizona. With people starting to think about 2021 travel, I pulled together my top 5 travel planning tips. Slow vaccine roll-out will probably keep us restricted for longer than we thought. Andrea Amico of <a href=\"https://www.privacy4cars.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Privacy4Cars</a> joins us to talk about the dangers of leaving our data behind in rental cars. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_171.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go over to the <em>Subscribe</em> section on the right to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #171: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>This Week</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. Stayed off the road over the entire holiday season which let me skip the TSA’s new post-lockdown checkpoint record of <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/coronavirus/passenger-throughput\">1.3 million on January 3rd</a>, the last Sunday of the holiday season -- though, to be fair,&nbsp; this is only just over half the 2.4 million passengers who flew on the same Sunday last year. And with every US airline except Delta now back to selling middle seats, it makes sense that load factors also ratcheted up over the holidays. I haven’t seen any industry-wide numbers yet, but <a href=\"https://www.ittn.ie/news/confidence-in-boeing-737-max-holding-firm/\">American’s COO did say that the load factor on their 737 Maxes over the last week of the holiday season was 90%</a>. Now, most of those Maxes are flying between LGA and MIA, always a busy holiday route, but I’ve seen reports of many other packed flights, as well as the much higher load . I was never a big fan of completely full flights pre-coronavirus and, as you can imagine, am even less so now pre-widespread vaccine distribution. So, I’m not too bothered that we didn’t try to get out of town over the holidays.</li><li>However, staying in town through the rest of January is a whole different thing because January is absolutely the worst part of Chicago’s winter. So, after&nbsp; Thanksgiving weekend, on what used to be called Cyber Monday when we actually shopped in physical stores, instead of trolling through Amazon, I was trolling through travel sites looking for cheap flights to someplace warm the 3rd wk of Jan. I figured that’d be long enough for any holiday COVID spike to work its way through the system.</li><li>I’d had some friends who’d gone down to Mexico, felt safe in the tourist zones, didn’t have any problems, came back healthy; but I don’t do well sitting on a beach for more than a day or two and I wanted to keep it a bit simpler, so we decided to stay in the US, which pretty quickly narrowed our search to Southern California, South Florida, and Arizona. Since we’d spent time last winter in both Arizona and Florida, we decided to do California and go as far down the coast as we could get, which was San Diego.&nbsp; And, as luck would have it, Southwest had cheap direct flights from Chicago Midway and I had Southwest travel credits from one of last spring’s flight cancellations burning a hole in my virtual pocket, so *boom* I booked it</li><li>On, what turned out to be, 3 days before the governor locked down most of California. But a friend hit the ground there a week before Christmas and said “Eh, it’s not a problem.” So, we stayed the course and didn’t really pay any attention to it until after New Years when we thought, you know, we should book a place to stay. And that’s when we started to pay attention. Bike and kayak rental places were open as “outdoor recreation” businesses. But vacation rental and hotel booking sites all pointed to the California Public Health Department statement -- “no hotel or lodging entity in California shall accept or honor out-of-state reservations for nonessential travel” which our January snowbird getaway definitely didn’t qualify as. Would things ease up in a couple of weeks? The trend lines on the state’s COVID website didn’t seem to be pointing in that direction.</li><li>So last Monday when I received another blast of airline sales emails, it seemed like the right time for a pivot. X-ing off California, we were back to Florida and Arizona. We talked to friends already down in Florida; they said the south beaches were already filling up with snowbirds, so we opted for drier sand and swung our Southwest flights over to Phoenix.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>But since we’d been in Phoenix last winter and continuing in the spirit of visiting not-quite-A-list places in the US we’ve never been while weaving around quarantines, we’re driving further south down I-10 to Tucson. We’re running the same travel planning play we did for our August trip to Michigan’s UP -- focus on outdoor activities like hiking and biking, have back-ups in case of last-minute closures, and above all, build a list of microbreweries with outdoor seating.</li><li>Bridge Music -- Say Their Names - Love and Remember by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2020 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/62230 Ft: DJ Lang</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Back at the beginning of December when the Pfizer vaccine approval was imminent and the Moderna approval wasn’t far behind, most travelers -- myself included -- got a bit giddy and started to think about the world opening up in the spring, the summer at the latest. Fast forward 30 days and, happy new year, that initial blast of vaccine optimism melted when it met the ugly realities of last-mile logistics. Spelunking through the stream of low-fare emails from American and Southwest and Delta and United and Iberia and British Airways filling my inbox, the consensus across airline demand forecasters seems to be that nothing’s going to change until the end of May. But even that doesn’t explain why, say, American, sends out an email pushing “Plan a European Vacation” that includes spring fares (March, April, May fares) to London, Manchester, and Madrid. I don’t know anyone who expects European vacation travel to open up in the next 3-4 months. Give credit to Delta for highlighting more achievable destinations -- Cancun, the Bahamas, Phoenix, and just about every airport in Florida with a runway long enough to handle a jet.&nbsp;</li><li>What will be as interesting is what the airlines and hotels do about elite status protection if travel continues to be slow through the summer. Remember that last spring, after it was clear that business travel was canceled for most of 2020, all the big travel companies grandfathered everyone into their status for this year. What you earned in 2019, you kept through this year, 2021. But now what? We talked about this a bit in t<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">he November episode (#169)</a> when the companies made their opening bid, knocking 20-30% off elite qualifying clip levels. Kinda like the low-fare sales -- it’ll be interesting to see what they offer come May.</li><li>We’ve talked in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\">prior episodes</a> about the challenges of planning a trip during COVID -- deciphering lockdown rules; parsing what can seem to be the almost theological differences between stay-at-home advisories vs. orders. And after all that, trying to keep up-to-date on last-minute changes. Things are changing so fast -- open, shut; outdoor seating vs just doing takeout -- that the normal crowdsourced tools we’d use -- things like Google Maps, Yelp -- can’t keep up because they don’t give a real-time view. The Foursquare app used to do it, but since they split <a href=\"https://www.swarmapp.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Swarm</a> from Foursquare, it seems that the real-time data is now sold just to business customers to target mobile ads. But, one app that I use does provide a real-time view into some traffic -- <a href=\"https://untappd.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Uptappd</a>. Yes, it’s just craft beer nerd traffic -- people checking in their beers at tap rooms and beer bars -- but that’s a kind of traffic that I’m pretty interested in.&nbsp; After our pivot to Tucson, I wanted to see what beer places were open for service, not just take-out. I could’ve spent time clicking around the app, but instead, I decided to put one of my lockdown self-improvement projects to use. Over the fall, I’d taken some on-line Python programming courses on Coursera, so I wrote a short program that pulled the most recent check-ins from the Tucson area and started making a list of places that are open. I probably could’ve made that list quicker by just plunking away on the app, but not with the same sense of achievement.</li><li>We talked about COVID-19 vaccination and test certification in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">last episode</a>. Over the last month, it seems that proof of negative test results rather than of vaccinations is the new hotness. Canada, the UK, and now the US are the latest countries requiring a negative COVID test for inbound passengers. It makes sense. The CDC released a paper in November -- in one of my favorite publications, the <a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/index.html\"><em>Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report</em></a> (I’ll link to it in the show notes) -- saying that <a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6945a4.htm\">temperature and symptom screening at airports is pretty worthless</a>; it only picked up 1 case for every 85,000 passengers screened. So not hard for the switch to pre-flight testing to be more effective. For Canada and the UK, though, they’ve layered the test requirements <em>on top of </em>their existing 14-day quarantine requirements, which just adds to the confusion -- especially since the Canadian government gave travelers one week’s notice of the new testing requirement. I haven’t seen the US regs yet, but the Canadian rules say you must have “proof in hand” of a negative test result, and that proof can be either electronic or paper. You gotta think that, pretty quick, that “proof in hand” has gotta default to “proof on phone” otherwise, forged paper results are going to be the new fake IDs from our teens. Last November, French cops <a href=\"https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2020/11/10/fake-tests-covid-flights/\">busted a ring selling fake test results at CDG</a>. The going rate was €150-300 which converts to something like $180-370. That compares to $125 for a <a href=\"https://fakeyourid.com/\">good fake driver’s license</a>.&nbsp; Since the last episode, the Caribbean country of <a href=\"https://skift.com/2020/12/18/airlines-still-waiting-on-governments-for-a-single-digital-health-passport-standard/\">Aruba was the first country</a> to standardize on one of the digital passport apps, <a href=\"https://commonpass.org/\">CommonPass</a>, the one backed by the World Economic Forum, the Davos gang, and, we mentioned, also used by United for their EWR-LHR flight. But then Sing Air picked its rival, <a href=\"https://www.iata.org/en/programs/passenger/travel-pass/\">Travel Pass</a> from IATA, to use on flights to/from Malaysia. So it still seems like, when it does go to “proof on phone”, we’re gonna need to set aside some memory screen space for a bunch of apps.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge music -- Staying Positive by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2019 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/59438 Ft: greg_baumont</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Leaving Data Behind in The Rental Car</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A couple of weeks back, I retweeted a news article - the third suspect charged in the fatal shooting of a retired Chicago fireman during a carjacking was caught because he’d synced his phone to the audio system of the stolen car.&nbsp; I dunno -- fleeing a murder but worrying about getting a ticket for not using hands free.&nbsp; I dunno. Good they caught the bad guy, but what about us law-abiding frequent travelers? When the Hertz or Avis person walks up to me at the car return lane, they always remind me not to leave anything behind; to remember to take my sunglasses and my mobile phone. But they never remind me to delete all the data I synced to the car.&nbsp;</li><li>And with more of our lives getting stored in our phones, I asked Andrea Amico, founder of the company <a href=\"https://www.privacy4cars.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Privacy4Cars</a>, to come onto the podcast to talk about the privacy problems at the intersection of cars and smartphones.<ul><li>Mark: Andrea, how did you get involved in this space?</li></ul><ul><li>Andrea: One of the companies that used to run was one of the largest used car inspection companies. We inspected a lot of vehicles that were ready to be sold. I just noticed that people were leaving their digital lives behind.</li><li>Mark: We first talked about the privacy/security issues around pairing your smartphone with your car rental about four years ago. Bluetooth-enabled entertainment systems were just becoming more common in rental car fleets as hands-free call laws became widespread. Even today, the first thing I do is to sync my iPhone. And I\'ve noticed more times than not, the sync slots are all full -- personalized names, Jan\'s iPhone, Timmy\'s iPhone. You end up having to delete at least one of them to make room for yours. And then, once paired, most phones by default, end up downloading all your contacts and your phone numbers and things like that. So, Jan and Timmy have left behind all of their contacts and all their phone numbers and that\'s just bad in so many ways.</li><li>Andrea: When you sync your phone through Bluetooth or you plug it into the USB port or now, in some newer cars, you just walk into the car and the car automatically sniffs your phone and start syncing to it, including those with Android Auto and Apple CarPlay. When that happens, you are creating a mini-clone of your phone inside the vehicle.</li><li>Mark: What other information are people leaving behind when they don\'t clear themselves out of a rental car?</li><li>Andrea: All sorts -- your phone book, your call logs, the text messages, including the body, meaning the actual text of the text messages; that stuff will be left behind. But also all sorts of meta data that allows criminals or law enforcement or just people who want to snoop on you to re-identify you, anything from the identifiers of your phones which are unique, your Bluetooth MAC address. Not to mention, of course, all your navigation data. I mean, you can reconstruct where people have been, just by data that has been stored in the infotainment system. And then you have, whether you are on Twitter and Facebook and what are the handles of those things, which are the last photos you have taken? What files have you synced, the emails, calendar entries. There\'s all sorts of stuff that people really don\'t understand that they\'re living behind.</li><li>Mark: But when people <em>do </em>delete pairings are they deleting all that information? Or is there some data still retained in that vehicle?</li><li>Andrea: &nbsp;By and large, deleting the data following the manufacturer\'s directions is helpful in preventing third parties to having access. And so if there is anything left behind, it requires a much deeper forensic type of analysis that is typically not accessible. But for most people, following the manufacturer\'s directions on how to remove the data, it is a very easy to do and very effective defense against getting their data being in the hands of somebody else.</li><li>Mark: That\'s where <a href=\"https://www.privacy4cars.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Privacy4Cars</a> comes in. That\'s where your app comes in -- helping people get that right?</li><li>Andrea: Yes, we have a free app that people can download, and you can just search for Privacy4Cars on the <a href=\"https://apps.apple.com/us/app/privacy4cars/id1370969499\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple App Store</a> or <a href=\"https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.privacy4cars\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Play</a>, depending what kind of phone you have, and download it for free.</li><li>Mark: The last time on the podcast we talked about this topic was a little over a year ago, October 2019. &nbsp;I\'d gotten a notice from Hertz that they had changed their terms and conditions. I noticed that Hertz had specifically carved out liability from me leaving information from a Bluetooth pairing. And now, on one hand, I could see that point. I\'ve actively and voluntarily synced my phone to the car and in doing so, caused my information to be downloaded. But at what point does that sort of digital maintenance, clearing personal identifiable information, after every rental become part of the rental company’s overall maintenance responsibility, like checking the oil levels and the tire pressure.</li><li>Andrea: I believe that the time has already passed, and it\'s been in the past for at least a year, right? At least, the passage of California Consumer Privacy Act. And probably you can go further back in the past because of other types of regulations. And there are some regulators who have actually spoken about this. So in the United States, you have the FTC that has issued already four guidances on the need to delete personal information. In Europe, they went as far as to give a guideline that mandates the removal of the personal information. Beyond rental, when people are traveling, sometimes they rent, sometimes they ride-share, and very often it happens to me that I in an Uber or Lyft and you have a very nice driver that tells you, “Hey, you need to fill up the tank on your battery? Here\'s a cable.” And the first thing I do is glance -- &nbsp;where does the cable end up? If it goes into the lighter, that\'s only power. So yes, I’ll recharge my phone. But if it goes straight &nbsp;into the USB port of the car, don\'t charge the phone unless you\'re really desperate, because as soon as your phone powers back up, it will start downloading all your information into a stranger\'s car. So you definitely don\'t want to do that.</li><li>Mark: Andrea Amico, founder of <a href=\"https://www.privacy4cars.com\">Privacy4Cars.com</a>, you can find his app on the <a href=\"https://apps.apple.com/us/app/privacy4cars/id1370969499\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple App store</a> and on <a href=\"https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.privacy4cars\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Play</a>. Andrea, thank you very much for taking the time to talk to us today.</li><li>Andrea: Thank you. Mark. I really enjoyed talking to you.</li></ul></li><li>Bridge music -- Latinium by Javolenus (c) copyright 2020 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Javolenus/62650 Ft: NiGiD</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>2021 Travel Planning Pro Tips</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I’ve been talking about travel planning in the time of COVID across maybe 6 months of episodes. And since January is always a big travel month, especially this year with some vouchers from last spring’s flight cancellations coming up on their 12-month expiration dates, combined with 10 months of pent-up demand and another 6, maybe 9 months to go, I thought I’d pull all my planning tips together here -- and probably in a blog post after I get back from Tucson.</li><li>First, book now. As I said earlier, there’s a steady stream of sales out there right now as airlines, hotels, and rental car companies are looking for cash to get through the start of the year. There are great domestic deals now, and if you can part with some cash now, good international deals for the second half of the year. Prices are only going to go up as vaccine rates improve, and that pent-up demand overwhelms any squeamishness about sitting next to a stranger. I’m eyeing that same American ORD-BCN 787 non-stop that I wasn’t able to take at the end of last September. The deals aren’t as smoking as they were last March when the travel world was in a freefall; the airlines have gotten a little smarter over the past year. But with cancellation fees still waived, there’s not much risk.&nbsp;</li><li>Second, check your destination’s health requirements -- and keep checking until you leave. Many of the airlines have built good web resources that summarize any restrictions by destination. Of the US majors, I think <a href=\"https://www.united.com/ual/en/us/fly/travel/restrictions-map.html\">United’s</a> is the easiest to use but I think American’s is the most complete. They actually link out to a Canadian company, <a href=\"https://apply.joinsherpa.com/travel-restrictions?affiliateId=americanairlines\">Sherpa</a>, that took my Arizona itinerary and noted that, while there’s no quarantine restrictions in Arizona, there are when I return to Chicago.&nbsp; <a href=\"https://www.delta.com/us/en/plan-your-next-trip/where-we-fly\">Delta’s</a> is pretty good too. I’ll put links to them in the show notes. But you can’t check once and be done. We talked at the top of the show about Canada putting in a new testing requirement with 7-days notice. And domestically, states are changing restrictions weekly. One trick I’ve talked about is to start following your destination’s local newspapers on Twitter to get any early warnings on anything new.&nbsp;</li><li>Third, read the cancellation rules a lot more closely. Being nimble and able to react to changes at your destination -- like Irene and I did with our pivot from San Diego to Tucson -- depends on being thoughtful about the cancellation risks you take. Right now, flights have the lowest cancellation risk; Airbnb and vacation rentals, the highest. Hotels are in-between. Our default strategy then is to book the flight as soon as we can, don’t do pre-paid hotel rooms or car rentals, and wait as long as we can before booking an Airbnb.</li><li>Fourth, overload your itinerary with outdoor activities like hiking and biking so last-minute closures or restrictions don’t leave you aimlessly flipping through the hotel TV channels. It was the big trend last summer -- airlines dialed down flights between big city airports like the ORD-LGA run and toward beaches and mountains. And it continues -- all the imagery in the airline and hotel “flash sale” emails over the past couple of weeks. But it does mean spending more time trolling the AccuWeather and Weather Channel web sites because an outside-heavy itinerary is more vulnerable to big storm fronts.</li><li>And finally, stay flexible, expect delays, and be patient. If there’s anything we learned from 2020, it’s that something will screw up your plans -- a positive COVID test will shut down the restaurant you really wanted to eat at, capacity restrictions will mean a line to get into something that was top of your list. Have back-up plans and give everyone you meet the benefit of the doubt. Like you, they’re just trying to get through this safe and sound.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #171</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li>In this episode’s tech notes, if you check out the show notes, you’ll find a full transcript of my interview with Andrea Amico courtesy of my free tier of Amazon Web Services which includes 60 minutes a month of their Transcribe service. I learned about it when watching a session during their virtual Re:Invent conference. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/12/17/podcast-147-holiday-travel-tips-notes-from-santa-fe/\">episode #147</a>, I talked about going to it in person in Las Vegas a couple of years ago -- me and 50,000 other attendees, mostly pudgy, pasty-faced guys power walking up and down the strip, backpacks strapped down tight, ignoring the showgirls on the corner so they wouldn’t be late to, say, the sold-out tutorial on best practices for ingesting streaming data from IoT devices into AWS’ time series database. Less stressful, though less entertaining this year. Anyhow, watching the session on Transcribe got me thinking about how I could use it for the interviews I’ve done over the past 12 months. I’ve started on the most current episodes, working my way back. So far I have three done --this interview with Andrea, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/09/19/podcast-167-6-months-on-why-keep-travel-cards/\">episode #167</a>’s interview with Matt Schulz about travel credit cards, and <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\">episode #166</a>’s interview with Emily Thomas about the meaning of travel. I’ll keep chipping away at the backlog as my 60 free minutes a month allows.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>, as well as asking Alexa, Siri, and Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_171.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips','Pivoting from San Diego to Tucson for COVID restrictions; planning tips for travel during COVID; CEO of Privacy4Cars talks about leaving data behind in rental cars','inherit','closed','closed','','2997-revision-v1','','','2021-10-01 17:09:44','2021-10-01 22:09:44','',2997,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3956',0,'revision','',0),
(3957,1,'2021-10-01 17:10:42','2021-10-01 22:10:42','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3037,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2776-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2776-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3037\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Escaped the Chicago winter for a week of hiking in the mountains around Tucson and searching for good Sonoran food. We also talk with Mike Kennedy, CEO and Co-Founder of <a href=\"http://www.go-koala.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Koala </a>about how he\'s making it easy to rent timeshares without buying into them. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_172.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go over to the <em>Subscribe</em> section on the right to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #172: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>This Week</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois on, depending where you are, Fat Tuesday or Shrove Tuesday or Pancake Tuesday. Here in Chicago, <a href=\"https://culture.pl/en/article/how-chicago-became-a-distinctly-polish-american-city\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">with a big Polish population</a>, it’s <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P%C4%85czki\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pączki</a> Day and I had mine for breakfast -- Polish-filled donuts; I went for a raspberry jam and a custard one. What had been one of the mildest winters on record started reverting to the mean in February. The last day the temperature cracked freezing was almost 2 weeks ago and it has snowed 13 of the past 17 days. We were all waiting for this, veterans of Midwest winters. It got me thinking that maybe Irene and I should’ve delayed our trip to Tucson from the third week of January when the temperatures here were hitting the mid-40’s, to last week or this week when we could’ve enjoyed 50-60° temperature differentials.</li><li>But even without the guilty pleasure of posting schadenfreude-trolling Instagram pictures of sunshine and temperature readings, we had a good week in Tucson. The flights out and back on Southwest were uneventful, <em>and</em> not full; the Airbnb was fine; the desert hikes were great, and we hit some good restaurants and taprooms, which, as I talked about in the last episode, was the main reason we pivoted from original destination, locked-down/shutdown San Diego to Tucson. Probably our only disappointment was not finding a great margarita -- which we fixed in the Amex Centurion Lounge in PHX while waiting for our flight home. I’ll talk more about Tucson later in the episode, but I also wrote up a blog post with all the details. If you go to the episode description in your podcast app, there’s a link that should be clickable to take you straight to the post.</li><li>Even though Southwest’s open middle seat pledge expired in December (<a href=\"https://news.delta.com/delta-only-us-airline-block-middle-seats-limit-onboard-capacity-through-march-30-2021\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Delta’s the last one standing</a>), no one landed in our middle seat on our MDW-PHX flight. That flight was a lot longer than I remember it being last year. I think it had something to do with the mask. Before getting on the plane, I switched from my standard EvolveTogether surgical style mask to a Korean version of the N-95 mask, decided to dial it up not knowing if I was going to be shoulder-to-shoulder with a stranger for 3+ hours. The KN-95 wasn’t too uncomfortable, as masks go, so I didn’t swap it out for my other mask when the middle seat stayed empty. My strategy with Southwest’s open seating was to go ¾’s of the way to the back of the plane, about halfway past the exit row. I figured this would mean fewer people walking past us but far enough away from the rear lavs to avoid the in-flight queues. And, since people still want to deplane quickly, if the last boarding groups, the C groups, were left with just middle seats, they’d take them in the front of the cabin. As it turned out, I probably over-thought that a bit; I didn’t see any occupied middle seat in the front or the back.</li><li>Then, a couple of days before our flight home, I got the dreaded e-mail from Southwest -- the flight “may not allow for an open middle seat next to you.” I waited until the night before to tell Irene. She’s a little more COVID risk-averse than me and didn’t want her stewing on it. But it turned out OK. She grabbed the 2-seat second exit row -- aisle and middle seat; no window seat. And looking behind us, I didn’t see any row with an occupied middle seat, so either people swapped their flights after receiving that email, or the flight was just a shade over ⅔’s full with any occupied middle seats in the front of the plane. And, those margaritas from the Centurion Lounge helped the flight home go by just a wee bit easier.</li><li>Bridge Music -- P.I.H.E. by Budapest BluesBoy (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hepepe/26362 Ft: Inna Barmash – Zhurbin</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>The <a href=\"https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/breaking/ct-ohare-trespasser-arrest-20210117-aad2craysvehzmk5rm6l23p3l4-story.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">story</a> of the guy who lived for 3 months on the secure side of O’Hare’s domestic terminals after getting off his flight from LA using an airport ID badge that an airport operations manager had reported missing back in October.&nbsp; Shades of Tom Hanks’ character in “The Terminal”. Now, O’Hare is a big airport but it’s not “hang out for 3 months unnoticed” big. There are hundreds of TSA, Chicago Police, and airport security staff -- not to mention all the airline gate agents, wheelchair porters, restaurant workers, and airport maintenance staff. And not one of them noticed this guy wandering around at all hours with an expired badge, even when passenger volumes are cut in half -- until finally, 2 United Airlines workers asked to see his ID. This is bad -- like Cats, The Movie-level bad, like Fyre Festival bad. Seems that, 20 years on from 9/11, “see something, say something” has faded. The TSA and Chicago Dept of Aviation should have to come up with some answers -- but a month on, I think they’ll quietly drop the charges and bury this thing, hoping that the next guy is a bit more obvious.</li><li>In the last episode, I wondered what the airlines and hotels will do about elite status protection if travel continues to be slow through the summer and closed saying “it’ll be interesting to see what they offer come May”. Well, I was off by, say 4-5 months. Things are moving fast. A week after posting that episode, I got an email from Southwest saying they were extending my Companion Pass from June to Dec, and then offers from American and United for status qualifier accelerators. The slooow roll-out of coronavirus vaccines is cutting into what was an end-of-year travel planning spurt. <a href=\"https://www.valuepenguin.com/news/consumers-travel-rewards-covid-2021\">ValuePenguin</a> -- we’ve talked to them in prior episodes about travel credit cards -- they did a survey in December and found people getting rev’d up for travel -- 16% of respondents booked travel as a result of vaccine approvals, 34% had bought plane tickets within the last month, and, in a turnaround from earlier in the year, 47% had increased use of travel credit cards to earn miles to fund their next trip. But two months on from that survey, you already hear some folks starting to write off the summer. Which, with airlines talking about new furloughs and <a href=\"https://skift.com/2021/02/05/u-s-hotel-jobs-recovery-stalls-unemployment-rises/\">hotel unemployment back up to 23%</a> in January, isn’t great news for anyone.</li><li>I also got emails from Iberia and British Airways reminding me that I have Avios balances with each of them that are expiring; Iberia’s at the end of March; BA’s the end of the year (interesting difference in warning periods). Iberia and BA merged 10-11 years ago to form IAG which later bought Aer Lingus, and all 3 use Avios points for their frequent flyer programs but they keep their programs separate. So I have different Avios balances at all three. For most of these programs, you need to have some activity over 24-36 months to keep your point balance. Some airlines have extended these timelines for COVID, but apparently not Iberia or BA. In the past, the easiest thing to do was transfer over the minimum number of credit card points from Chase or Amex -- usually 1,000 points -- and that activity would reset the clock. I was about to run that play again, but something made me check out the rules first. And, sure as hell, the Iberia website says that transferring miles <em>doesn’t</em> count as activity. Now while Iberia’s and BA’s Avios programs are separate, you can transfer points between them if you dig hard enough -- I talked about burning a Saturday afternoon on this back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">episode #136</a>. But they’ve made it easier in the intervening years; I scrounged around and found the page I needed to transfer all my Iberia Avios points to my BA account. I’ll give it a month to see if BA considers this transfer as enough “activity” to reset the 36-month clock. If not, I have until the end of the year to try an Amex transfer or, failing that, code a night’s Marriott or Hyatt stay to my BA account. Reminds me to make the rounds of my other odds-n-ends loyalty programs and see what else might be expiring.</li><li>I mentioned in the last segment that we hit the <a href=\"https://thecenturionlounge.com/locations/phx/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">PHX Amex Centurion Lounge</a> before flying home from our desert hiking week. I’ve talked in past episodes about how these lounges are head-and-shoulders above the regular US airline lounges -- great food, open bars. The only problems -- not enough of them and, because they’re a great deal, they get crowded. Or did pre-COVID. Walking into the PHX lounge, we saw maybe a dozen people. They’re still serving food, but they now have staff dishing it out for you from the buffet line. But we’d picked up a couple of sandwiches from Pizzeria Bianco, a great pizza and panini place, so we were just looking for drinks. I thought about a beer, walking up to the bar, the tequila bottle caught my eye, reminding me we hadn’t been able to find a good margarita in Tucson. The bartender solved that problem; she made two great margaritas. So good, that I wanted to squeeze one more in before heading down to the gate. I walked up to the bar; different bartender; I hoped her margaritas were as good. She looked at me for a moment and then said, “I have to be honest with you; I’ve never made a margarita before, but I’ll give it a try.” She was one of the girls from the buffet line standing in for the bartender while she was on break. I could’ve pivoted to a beer, but when she said “I’ll give it a try.” “No problem,” I said, “I’ll walk you through it.” Grab the shaker, fill it with ice. Take the tequila bottle, fill the large end of the jigger, pour it into the shaker. Now turn the jigger over and fill the short end with Cointreau. Pour that in. Now a short shot of lime juice. Now put the lid on and shake it. Now strain it into that martini glass; we’ll skip the salt rim. She was great; a little nervous, but game for it. We thanked each other -- me thanking her for yet another good margarita; she thanking me... but for what, not being another miserable, entitled Platinum card holder? Absolutely my best Centurion Lounge experience yet.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge music -- ~aether theories~ by Vidian (c) copyright 2018 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Vidian/57398 Ft: Gurdonark, White-throated Sparrow</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Timeshares Without The Pitch</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>For our Tucson trip, Irene ended up booking on Airbnb what turned out to be someone’s timeshare rental in a golf resort west of Tucson. It was a new one for us, and a little different than the typical Airbnb experience -- we had to put down a credit card for incidentals, and then had to check-out and check back in halfway thru the stay -- but it was a nice place and, better yet, we didn’t get trapped in a small room for an hour-long sales pitch.</li><li>And so when we got back home and I got a note from <a href=\"https://www.go-koala.com/about/team\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Mike Kennedy</a> introducing me to <a href=\"https://www.go-koala.com/\">Koala</a>, the timeshare rental search platform he co-founded and launched last August, I asked him to come onto the podcast to talk about timeshare rentals and how they fit into the travel eco-system:<ul><li>Mark: Mike, help us understand how timeshare rental fits into that spectrum of accommodations that travelers might be more familiar with. If I think about that spectrum, I could go from hotels to B &amp; Bs to vacation rentals to private home rentals. Where does timeshare rental fit?</li><li>Mike: That\'s a great question. There\'s kind of a natural bifurcation in options when you\'re selecting accommodations for vacations. You\'re either going down the route of an <a href=\"https://www.airbnb.com\">Airbnb</a> or a <a href=\"https://www.vrbo.com/\">VRBO</a>.&nbsp; You want to rent a home because you want some space, or you want to stay in something that is a hotel. But in those two scenarios, you typically have compromises, and the compromise with hotels is that, especially if you have a family, you\'re typically getting one hotel room in cramming your family in or getting adjoining hotel rooms. But you get the confidence that it’s managed by Mariott or Hilton, etc. Conversely, if you\'re getting a home rental, it\'s the opposite. You have the ability to rent a whole home. You don\'t have to leave three times a day for meals. However, you don\'t know who it\'s being cleaned by, or what protocols are being upheld. And in today\'s world, those things are really important. The timeshare product is the only natural hybrid product in the marketplace. You have all the benefits and features of your vacation rentals like the living rooms, the shared bedrooms, washer and dryer; all that space that you want from a vacation rental. But it\'s managed by a Marriott or Hilton, and it has resort amenities like swimming pools, check-in desks; things like that that give you the confidence again in today\'s world with that, people really want. Before us, the options to get one of these was to pay a lot of money on these OTAs, these online travel agencies through a rental, or to go and buy into one of these programs. And that\'s not really either affordable or even appealing to a lot of people.</li><li>Mark: What does Koala offer travelers that, say, Airbnb doesn\'t? I recently rented a Club Wyndham timeshare in Tucson from an owner on Airbnb. So how would that transaction be different/better/more optimized on Koala?</li><li>Mike: So, a couple things. One. You don\'t see a lot of timeshare inventory on Airbnb for the reasons I\'m about to discuss. And that is because it is not a platform that is built for that product.</li><li>Mark: What are some of the unique pieces that make Airbnb not optimized for timeshare rental?</li><li>Mike: If you own a home, you can open up a calendar for 365 and you can set different prices and different availability based off of that open calendar. If you own a timeshare, you typically own a seven-day interval.&nbsp; And how do you fit that into some place where it gets visibility for someone that may not be searching for those exact beginning and end dates? So, what ends up happening is that a lot of people show up to the resorts and the reservations are incorrect or wrong, or just not there at all. You know, it is a system because there\'s a little bit of a square peg in a round hole. Don’t get me wrong. It sounds like you had a fine experience, but they don\'t manage that in a way that is designed to be managed. There\'s a third party involved in this, the resort.&nbsp; When it\'s an Airbnb, it\'s a host and it\'s a traveler, and those two will figure out and arrange something. With a resort stay, there is a third party. There\'s a guest certificate transfer that happens on the back end to ensure that your name as a traveler gets switched to the reservation ledger in the system to ensure that the guest gets to walk into that check-in successfully. We do all that. There are extra steps involved that we ensure. And we handle all of that.</li><li>Mark: So it feels like you\'re acting as an OTA, an online travel agency like an Orbitz or an Expedia, to provide search, discovery and then booking.</li><li>Mike: Correct, yes</li><li>Mark: As you were working towards your August launch, what were some of the biggest challenges you faced in getting that inventory so that people could search and book?</li><li>Mike: That is the question, right? So, I know this from my time in Hilton Club that there was a problem in how people underutilize their timeshares but still had fees to pay. And that went from “I bought this thing; I don\'t understand it” all the way up to “I loved it for 10 years; I\'m just done with it and now what?” and everything in between. But at the end of the day, if you have a $2000 annual fee to pay, it becomes a problem. So, I knew that it was something that if we connected with these owners, we could help solve that problem for them. What we didn\'t understand was that, in many cases, these owners don\'t even know what they own. They don\'t know where to start. It\'s not like you have a vacation rental, and you\'re like “Oh, here\'s the house; I take some photos; I’m going to throw up a price and I’m going to rent a couple nights out, and I\'ll adjust the cost per night based off of rentals.” You have this thing that is either a fixed week or it\'s not; it\'s a specific resort or it\'s not. And in many cases, people don\'t really know what they bought. And in some cases, they bought something and then upgraded to something else. So that was by far the biggest problem was getting people to understand what they own. How do you create an asset out of that and leverage that asset in a way that could earn you some revenue? It\'s still a process that we\'re going through, like really making it very, very simple. You know, we\'re not really just tapping into this supply; we’re really empowering a whole group of people to understand this process.</li><li>Mark: Mike, last question. How did you get this idea? How\'d you get started on this down this path?</li><li>Mike: Yeah, good question. I was a musician when I was in my twenties, and I kind of meandered into residential real estate. And the real estate market in 2007 in New York, everywhere was just kind of flat. So, one of my good friends was like, “You should come check out this condo hotel; it\'s fractional real estate.” I ask “What the heck is fractional real estate?” “No, come check it out. It\'s Hilton.” “Alright.” I went in there. I\'m like, This is cool. There\'s a lot of hustle and bustle. My office is kind of dead; this office is moving. So, I joined the team. Three weeks into training, I ask “Is this a timeshare?”&nbsp; They\'re like “Yeah…”, but I was already hired in the job. It really started to resonate with me -- the more and more time I spent with people that I sold, after they\'re coming in over and over again, and we\'re trying to upgrade them into something else. It was cool, this product is great, but now people are looking for ways out, and I don\'t have answers for them. The solutions weren\'t there on the back end that I was hoping for. So, it really was a direct result of me being in touch with those situations that I felt like I could help. And yeah, I took the leap and I said, Look, this is where this is a problem we\'re solving. I think the industry is great. I think there\'s a lot of upside. I think it\'s got a bad rap, but I think if we mitigate some of that and amplify what people love about this industry, I think it will go a long way.</li><li>Mark: Fantastic. Mike Kennedy, CEO and Co-Founder of KOALA. Mike, thanks for joining us on the TravelCommons podcast</li><li>Mike: Thanks, Mark.</li></ul></li><li>Bridge music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/flatwound/14476\">The Long Goodbye</a>&nbsp;by John Pazdan (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/flatwound/14476</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Notes on Tucson</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>As I said at the top of the show, Irene and I had a good trip to Tucson at the end of January -- pretty much just hiking, eating, and drinking. I wrote it up in a blog post on the TravelCommons website -- <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Quick Notes on Our Trip to Tucson\">“Quick Notes on our Trip to Tucson”</a>, though at over 1,700 words, I’m not sure it necessarily qualified as “quick.” But there are some pictures, and links to all the parks, restaurants, and taprooms we enjoyed. Also a link to the Tucson Instagram story on the TravelCommons Instagram page if you want to see some more informal pictures.</li><li>We flew into PHX rather than TUS because the non-stop flights were cheaper and there were more of them. I was going to rent a car anyways, so the 100-mile drive straight down I-10 seemed a good trade-off for better flights. The only hitch in that plan was the bus between the terminal and the rental car center. They limited capacity to 15 people, which made sense. However, they didn’t add buses to make up that lost capacity. Wasn’t a problem when we got on the bus at the terminal, but the queue at the rental car center stretched the length of the center; hundreds of people trying to get back to make their flight. I saw some folks bailing out and calling Ubers. Made a note to add an extra 30 minutes to our return time. Turned out we didn’t need it; walked straight from the Hertz lot onto a bus. But that was OK. I used that time for my margarita lesson -- definitely a greater good.</li><li>Tucson sits kinda at the bottom of five sets of small-ish mountains; they’re an awkward size -- bigger than hills, but except for the Santa Catalinas, don’t feel big enough to be “mountains”. Which was OK because all we wanted to do was hike, well really walk, the trails. To be outside under blue skies in the high 60’s/low 70’s; that’s what we really wanted to do; to take a break from grey Chicago and to be far enough away from people that we could walk around without masks.&nbsp;</li><li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\">episode #168</a>, we talked about traveling for food, that food is one experience of a place that can’t be easily exported and bought on-line. In that episode, I talked about eating our way through South Philly and a pasty tour of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. In Tucson, it was the hunt for Sonoran food, a type of Mexican cuisine that you don’t see much outside of, well, the Sonoran desert -- Southern Arizona and the Mexican state of Sonora. It hasn’t “broken out” the way that, say, Tex-Mex and Baja and Oaxacan styles have. It’s all about beef, mostly <em>carne asada</em> grilled over mesquite and served in a thin flour tortilla that\'s more like the wrappers you get with Chinese Mandarin food than the thick flour tortillas you get with fajitas. Cross-referencing a couple of local food blogs, I had a list of places to try. And honestly, it was a bit of hit-and-miss; mostly misses the first couple of nights, but then we hit gold at the end of our stay. Looking back, I think we tried the nicer places on the list first. They weren’t <em>bad</em>; they were fine, but not places I’d go out of my way to recommend. And after that -- disappointment is too strong of a word, we kinda said, screw it. We found the Sonoran hot dog truck and ate a couple of $3 bacon-wrapped hot dogs topped with chopped tomatoes and onions, pinto beans, mayonnaise, mustard, and salsa verde off the hood of our rental car. And then drove over to a restaurant that’s website made it look very foody -- scrolling photos of nicely plated dishes -- but almost passed the building by; it looked like a repurposed Arby’s or Hardee’s with a vinyl sign pulled over the original one. But the food, especially the cabrito, the goat tacos, were phenomenal. Not all the dives were great; some disappointed, some were “meh”. But the ones that were great made it worth the “meh’s”.</li><li>But the absolute highlight of the trip? I was standing out on the back patio of our timeshare watching the sun set over the Tucson Mountains; it was beautiful; when I heard some rustling off to the right. What looked like a good-sized wild pig walked out from between two bushes and across the backyard. And then another one. They stopped, turned to look at me, and then kept walking. More kept coming – walking the same path across the backyard. They were <a href=\"https://www.azgfd.com/wildlife/livingwith/javelina/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">javelinas</a>, and <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peccary\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Wikipedia</a> told us that their groups are called \"squadrons\".&nbsp; Well, our squad looked comfortable here, like they were taking their usual end-of-day stroll back to wherever they bed down to stay safe from mountain lions. And the next morning, a couple came back sniffing around the patio door. I wondered if they smelled the egg and toast I made for breakfast. They reminded us to keep that patio door closed.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #172</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li>Nothing new on the tech front this month, but I should have the website freshened up by the next episode. I’ve had the current look since the beginning of 2006 courtesy of TravelCommons listener Hilary Baumann and her <a href=\"https://fascinationdesign.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Fascination Design</a> firm. The change is absolutely not a knock against Hilary’s work. It’s just that, after 15 years, I wanted to freshen things up a bit. So look for that by the end of February or beginning of March.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>, as well as asking Alexa, Siri, and Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_172.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #172 — Timeshares Without the Pitch; Notes on Tucson','Escaped Chicago winter for a week of hiking and eating in Tucson; CEO of Koala talks about renting timeshares; travel planning gets hot and then cools back down','inherit','closed','closed','','3342-revision-v1','','','2021-10-01 17:10:42','2021-10-01 22:10:42','',3342,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3957',0,'revision','',0),
(3958,1,'2021-10-01 17:11:43','2021-10-01 22:11:43','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_1985\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/7BA016C0-B99C-45F6-8A96-A0B9CD67D159-1-e1615580828646.jpg\" \"=\"\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1985\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/7BA016C0-B99C-45F6-8A96-A0B9CD67D159-1-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"People Camping Out on Airport Cots\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a>Wait Here \'til Your COVID Test is Negative[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>As travel bookings beginning to rise with vaccination rates, we talk with Michael Giusti of <a href=\"http://insurancequotes.com\" title=\"insurancequotes.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">InsuranceQuotes.com</a> to find out what\'s changed over the last year. I make the rounds through all my frequent traveler programs to reset impending expiration dates. We also talk about yet another travel data breach, a favorite beer bar is a COVID casualty, and bankrupt Hertz is starting to let its cars get old. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_173.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #173: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>This Week</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois on what has been a nice week. Temps got into the 60’s at the beginning of the week, so I broke out the bike for a ride along the lake -- sunny in most parts, but a bit chillier in the shady parts, riding narrow paths cut through 5-ft ice and snow mounds, the remnants of what were really impressive pile-ups of shore ice during the February deep freeze.</li><li>No travel since the last episode, but heading out next week to hang out on the beach in San Diego, reloading from our January pivot away from California because of their lockdown. A couple of months on, COVID cases are down, the state’s order banning hotel and Airbnb hosts from renting to out-of-state’er is gone, outdoor dining has re-opened and, most importantly, the craft brewery taprooms are open again. I pointed my little Python Untappd script at San Diego and can see a lot of Brewery check-ins. In between those taproom visits, I think we’ll manage to squeeze in some biking and kayaking.&nbsp;</li><li>And like many folks, we’re building our travel calendar for the rest of the year. Nashville, New York City, Northern Michigan, and Maine written in pen through the first half of the year. We’re penciling in the UK for November, booking it now to lock in no-fee cancelations in case of another winter spike, or what might be more likely, lingering resistance to dropping international quarantine requirements. But I’m optimistic (hopeful?) that the US and UK will get enough people vaccinated by then.</li><li>I was on a Zoom call a couple of nights ago with a bunch of college friends. “Do you think we can all get together in person in September for Homecoming?” someone asked. “Absolutely,” I said, “we just need to lean into it.” And it feels like that’s what more people are doing -- leaning into visits to physically get together with family and friends they haven’t seen for a year now. It’s always dangerous drawing a straight trend line, but it feels like travel might come back quicker than expected.&nbsp;</li><li>Bridge Music -- Madrugada(rmx) by savoyard (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/savoyard/10743 Ft: Curve</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I finally pushed out the refreshed website last week. First change since 2006. Figured website aesthetics have changed a bit over the last 15 years and so changed things up a bit. Thanks to everyone who responded to my request on Facebook and Twitter to hit the new site for a bit of crowd-sourced end-user testing. A bit like the <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1224798425499213828\">meme</a> you’ll see posted in a lot of IT shops; a picture of Dos Equis “most interesting man in the world” with the line -- “I don’t always test my code, but when I do, I test it in Production.” There’s still some tweaks I need to make, but it seems pretty solid. Check it out if you get a chance -- travelcommons.com -- and drop me a line at <a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a> with your thoughts.</li><li>Following up on last episode’s rant about the guy living unnoticed in ORD for 3 months, I tweeted out an <a href=\"https://theconversation.com/how-some-people-can-end-up-living-at-airports-for-months-even-years-at-a-time-154336\">article</a> about people living years in airports. Written by a history prof from University of Dayton who researches the history of airports (hey, everyone’s gotta have their niche), the article talks about other airport residents, an Iranian refugee who lived in CDG for 18 years, and most recently, an Estonian guy who was transiting through Manila Int’l Airport last March as the shutdowns hit was stuck there for 100 days until the Estonian embassy could get him on a repatriation flight. That one is brutal. I spent 3 hours in that airport a few years back and even, with everything open, it felt 2½ hours too long. Check out the article -- there’s a link in the show notes and at the top of the Twitter and Facebook feeds. It’s a good read.</li><li>Jim McDonough hit the Facebook page, responding to last episode’s margarita instruction story with one of his own.<ul><li>I know how you feel about teaching the bartender how to make a margarita. We ended a week-long trip to Switzerland by staying our last night at a hotel by the Zurich airport. At dinner, we each asked for a Scotch and water. They brought out this big tray, with a bowl of ice cubes, a pitcher of water, a bottle of Scotch, and two glasses. A crowd of hotel employees gathered to watch. Evidently, they don\'t do Scotch and water in Zurich. When I filled the glasses with ice, they gasped. I explained that we live in a hot climate. I went ahead and added Scotch and topped off with a little water, and they winced when I took a sip. A cultural exchange, I guess.</li></ul></li><li>Jim, I love you, man, but I gotta tell you -- I’d probably be wincing with the hotel staff. My usual Scotch order is -- Scotch and glass. But you paid for it (and in Zurich, it’s not going to be a small amount), so even if they couldn’t quite figure out what you wanted, they at least gave you all the tools you needed.</li><li>One of my absolute favorite beer bars, <a href=\"https://brewpublic.com/beer-news/baileys-taproom-and-the-upper-lip-permanently-closes-its-doors/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bailey’s Taproom in Portland, Oregon</a>, has shut off their taps permanently. I started a project in downtown Portland in January 2013. Found Bailey’s the second night I was there and just settled in; my last beer there was my last night in Portland. The owner said “After reopening to limited seating (after the initial shutdown), it was clear that people were not interested in coming downtown. When the PPP money ran out, I decided to close the doors”&nbsp; Another reminder that we should try to be purposeful about where we spend our discretionary dollars, thinking about what businesses we would miss if they closed up and then go out of our way to buy something from them. In my case, it helps rationalize a rather full beer shelf in our pantry.</li><li>After Hertz declared bankruptcy at the end of last May, I predicted in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/06/09/podcast-164-first-post-lockdown-trips-travel-credit-cards/\">episode #164</a> that I’d be paying more attention to the mileage on the cars in the Five Star aisle because that’s the first place I see signs of financial distress — a lot less 500-mile cars and a lot more 24,000-mile cars. And while 24,000 miles on a car doesn’t seem like a lot, remember that rental car miles are kinda like dog years — you gotta multiply them by, like, 7 to get to regular car miles. And true to form, when picking up our Hertz car in PHX at the end of January, every car I looked at had over 24,000 miles, a few with a <strong>lot</strong> more. Will be interesting to see what’s on offer at SAN in a few weeks.&nbsp;</li><li>If you have any status on a Star Alliance or One World carrier, you probably got an email from your carrier about a <a href=\"https://skift.com/2021/03/05/data-breach-affects-more-than-2-million-frequent-flyers-across-airline-alliances/\">data breach at SITA</a>. I got them from United and American saying my name, account number, and status was potentially exposed and that I should change my password, which I did. And then thought about how this is yet another data leak from some unknown player in what is an incredibly fragmented travel tech tool chain. We talked about this back in November in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">episode #169</a> when an obscure Spanish company used by hotels to update information on on-line booking sites leaked 24 GB of names, emails, credit card data and reservation records. And in this case, if you’re not in the airline industry, you probably don’t know about <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SITA_(company)\">SITA</a>. It’s a industry consortium started back in 1949 by 11 European airlines to share infrastructure costs and has expanded to provide all sorts of travel technology including the exchange of passenger data between airlines -- in this case, the exchange of frequent flyer status so that, say, Lufthansa recognizes your elite status with United on your flight with them. It’s one thing when the breach is from a company that you did business with -- the <a href=\"https://www.cnet.com/news/marriott-discloses-new-data-breach-impacting-5-point-2-million-guests/\">Marriott hacks</a> in 2018 and 2020, the 2018 breaches at <a href=\"https://www.theregister.com/2018/09/11/british_airways_website_scripts/\">British Airways</a> and <a href=\"https://www.theregister.com/2018/10/25/cathay_pacific_hacked_up_to_94_million_passenger_deets_exposed/\">Cathay Pacific</a>. But it’s a whole other thing when you find out some unknown third party coughed up your data. But actually, when you get a look at the spaghetti that is travel technology, and see all the places your data is getting sent to -- often small companies that can’t afford state-of-the-art cybersecurity, it’s kinda surprising -- in a sad way -- that not more of this happens.</li><li>Type “plane mask” into the Google search box and one of the first 5 suggestions is “plane mask fight”. Click through and you get what seems to be an endless stream of news reports and cellphone videos of passengers fighting about having to wear a mask during a flight. What is getting a lot less coverage, though I’m hearing snatches of it here and there, are people getting chewed out by their row mates when taking their masks off to eat or drink something, getting something like “Hey, can you not drink during the flight? I’d rather not die for your convenience.”&nbsp; And I’m afraid this is going to get worse as more people start traveling again and aircraft load factors get back into the 80% range. But honestly, both sides are being idiots. You know the rules before you buy your ticket and you’re reminded of them by emails before you travel, and again by gate agents before you board the plane. If you can’t handle the rules -- all of them, not just the ones you agree with -- then don’t walk down the jetway. Drive; charter a jet. But don’t try to bend the rules to your own personal belief system and hassle the rest of us who are just trying to get from Point A to Point B on-time and with the minimum amount of heartache.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on our fab new web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge music -- Tools of the Trade by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial &nbsp;(3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/56512 Ft: Abstract Audio, Mr Yesterday, Martijn de Boer, Speck</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>What\'s New in Travel Insurance</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A little over a year ago, the first coronavirus lockdowns started, and the execution of them was, to be charitable, mostly a mess. Borders were quickly shut; planes grounded. People were stranded in foreign countries with no way home; we just talked about the Estonian guy stuck in Manila airport for 100 days. And all of a sudden, people started paying attention to travel insurance. What was once a check box at the bottom of a booking webpage that most of us clicked “no” on so we could finish our reservation quickly became very important. Last May in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/05/08/podcast-163-new-world-of-travel-insurance-getting-medical-help-on-the-road/\">episode #163</a>, as people were beginning to think about their first post-lockdown trips, we talked about the state of travel insurance. Now, with travel bookings beginning to rise as vaccination rates rise, I wanted to check back in and see what’s changed with travel insurance. So I asked Michael Giusti, senior writer at <a href=\"https://www.insurancequotes.com/\">InsuranceQuotes.com</a>, to come onto the podcast and give us an update:&nbsp;<ul><li>Mark: Michael, last May, Eric Josowitz of <a href=\"https://www.insurancequotes.com/\">InsuranceQuotes.com</a> was on the podcast. We were talking about travel insurance after the initial lockdown. Back then, in the midst of all that travel disruption, many travelers were finding:&nbsp; a) they didn\'t actually know what their insurance covered; they’d just checked the box at the end of their booking process, paid some additional amount moved on; and&nbsp; b) the insurance that they had bought had exclusions for communicable diseases, WHO-declared pandemics, cancellations in cases of fear. And then, after that, insurers stopped offering travel insurance. So, Michael, that was May. This is now the end of February. What\'s the current situation regarding travel insurance?</li><li>Michael: Not many people were thinking about pandemics back when this started. But the few people who were thinking about it were insurers. They saw the SARS epidemic and they started writing in pandemic exclusions from that point on. And then there\'s a second little provision in these insurance policies called the Known Events Provisions. So once the pandemic declared, even if there wasn\'t a specific exclusion, they can turn around and say, “Well, we\'re not going to cover because it\'s now a known event.” It would be like there\'s a hurricane that\'s bearing down on your city and you buy a plane ticket while the hurricane is there, and then you get mad because you can\'t fly. It’s a known event, and so they\'re not going to cover that. So that\'s where we came from. And then, you\'re right, they stopped and they said, “Well, we have no idea what\'s going on, so let’s regroup.”&nbsp; And now they\'ve regrouped, and it\'s really interesting because in a lot of the insurance industry, they\'ve stopped covering pandemics. But in travel insurance, they specifically started including Covid 19, saying “We will cover it under these conditions.”</li><li>Mark: Michael, travel requirements have been changing quickly; the restrictions have been going in and out. I mean, most recently, the need to provide a negative COVID test just to be able to get on a plane.&nbsp; If you look at what Canada did, they basically gave travelers one-week notice of the rule change at the end of 2020. But if you\'ve bought a travel insurance policy when you booked travel six weeks prior, what\'s the best way to cover these late breaking requirements that pop up a week or two before our trip?</li><li>Michael: Two main things... One is the policy language. You do need to say what’s specifically included, what’s specifically excluded? Because whether they\'re going to cover not having a negative test very much depends on the policy language. The other thing that it\'s going to come down to is whether it\'s out of your control. If it\'s something that you\'ve neglected to do, it\'s never going to be covered. The policies I\'ve reviewed, I haven\'t seen any that specifically kick in if you haven\'t got a negative test. So if you\'re worried about that, you really do need to ask the agent or really read that fine print. I do know that if you\'re delayed at security while you\'re being tested, that\'s not covered. So you do have to get there in time to make sure if they do rapid tests on the spot, that you\'re going to have time to get through security.</li><li>Mark: Okay, let me unpack that just a little bit, Michael. So I booked my flight, and I\'ve booked it a month ago. And now I go to take my test 72 hours before departure, and I come up positive. If I\'ve bought the right policy, would that typically cover delay or cover cancellation?</li><li>Michael: Delay is always the first preference. So if we can just push this trip back a week or whatever, that\'s going to be everyone\'s favorite outcome. But there are cancellation provisions where, say, you can\'t move it because the wedding is not going to be moved, in which case the cancellation provisions might kick in.</li><li>Mark: So now let\'s flip that. I\'ve taken my test, it\'s been negative, I get on the plane, I fly down to Costa Rica. And now a week on, I\'ve taken my test to get back into the US and now that test comes out positive. So now, potentially, I can\'t get back into the US. How does insurance help me there?</li><li>Michael: There\'s a couple places where this insurance is going to really beneficial in that situation. First and foremost, the medical provisions in most of these comprehensive policies are going to actually help you pay for your healthcare. Many of them are going to be secondary coverage, meaning they\'re going to want your primary health care to kick in first and then they\'ll jump in and cover anything that\'s not covered. Some of them are primary, especially with the overseas trips. So, that\'s a really nice benefits that are built into a lot of these policies. The other place that will help is, if you\'re delayed because you can\'t travel because of a restriction like that, and that\'s outside of your control, a lot of them will cover a hotel while you\'re waiting and meals while you\'re waiting, and they\'ll get you back home safely. So that\'s actually a really positive outcome that can happen with these policies.</li><li>Mark: Michael, how do I make sure that I\'ve actually got one of those policies? If we go back to the April/May timeframe, people were finding that they didn\'t actually know what they had. How do I make sure I\'ve actually bought that coverage?</li><li>Michael: Well, best case scenario would be if you found a human and you asked them in plain English.</li><li>Mark: Yeah, good luck with that, right?</li><li>Michael: I know, calling 1 800 numbers anymore – that’s not in the cards. What I would do if I was doing that, I’d click through the terms of service and see who\'s offering that policy. If it doesn\'t really go into much detail, or if it\'s really garbly legalese, I’d go through to the provider\'s website. Most of them have FAQ pages that specifically address COVID. So that\'s gonna be probably your best resource.</li><li>Mark: Michael, people are starting to think about big trips as vaccination rates start to step up. You know, the back half of the year, if I\'m thinking about booking, say, a week\'s biking tour in Tuscany or Provence in September/October, what kind of travel insurance should I be looking for? Should I pony up for a cancel- for-any-reason rider? Or are there some cheaper alternatives for more limited scenarios like, “Hey, the EU still isn\'t letting Americans in” but won\'t cover the more generic “Oh, I\'m afraid to travel” kind of reason.</li><li>Michael: The question of “if you\'re afraid to travel” is never going to be covered unless you do have that cancel-for-any-reason policy. But travel insurance is meant to cover things that are out of your control. So you know, if it\'s not laid out your policy, it\'s not gonna be covered. So that\'s kind of the most expensive option. You know, you\'re going to pay the most for a cancel-for-any-reason policy. That middle ground is the standard policy where you say “I\'m taking a little bit of the risk on myself. I\'m going to bravely travel wherever I\'m allowed.” The least expensive option is really kind of a DIY. And a lot of the destinations that I\'m seeing, they\'re waiving cancellation and change fees. And so you can kind of make your DIY travel insurance by only booking places that would let you change for no fee. That\'s kind of the cheapest “I\'m feeling brave” policy. “I\'m feeling skittish” policy Is that cancel-for-any-reason.</li><li>Mark: Super. Michael Giusti, senior writer at <a href=\"https://www.insurancequotes.com/\">InsuranceQuotes.com</a>, thank you very much for joining us. This was a great update.</li><li>Michael: Thank you so much.</li></ul></li><li>Bridge music -- Crazy Love-The Alex &amp; Lang mix by J.Lang (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djlang59/10579 Ft: FHC and Alex &amp; Bradsucks</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Keeping Ahead of Expiring Miles</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Like most road warriors of a certain tenure, I have cards in my desk of some 30-odd frequent traveler programs -- those that I know of -- and am probably a member of another dozen or so that I’ve forgotten about. Of those, I have meaningful balances -- enough for at least one free flight or a free hotel night -- at the Big 4 US carriers, a couple of European carriers, and two of the big hotel chains. Most of the rest are random programs like IcelandAir or AirBaltic or Omni Hotels that I used for a specific trip or project but had some spiff, like seat selection or free WiFi, that was reason enough to put in the effort to sign up.</li><li>When I was traveling every week or so, keeping those main programs active wasn’t a big effort. And if I hadn’t flown, say, BA for a while, I’d code maybe a short American commuter flight, something where my status was a bit meaningless, to my BA account to reset the expiration clock.</li><li>But now, hitting the first anniversary of the first travel lockdown and with business travel still mostly on hold, some of those expiration cliffs are starting to become visible</li><li>Last episode, I talked about getting emails from BA and Iberia warning me of pending Avios expirations, and so I transferred my Iberia points to my BA account. But I can’t tell from the BA website if that was enough activity to change the BA expiration. So I spelunked some more thru the website and found where they call out Airbnb bookings as “recognized activity” that’ll reset the 36-month clock. So, I booked our San Diego Airbnb through a link on BA’s site, just had to enter my BA account number before moving to the booking screen. It’ll be interesting to see if the activity flows seamlessly into my BA account or if I’ll have to chase it down through a manual credit claim. I’m betting on the latter, but am hoping to be pleasantly surprised.</li><li>But that got me cycling through my other accounts. I wasn’t worried about my US carrier accounts. The trend there has been to do away with expiration dates, first Southwest, then Delta, most recently United. American, not surprisingly, is the knuckle dragger, clinging to their stingy 18-month policy, but I flew them last fall to PHL, so I’m fine there.</li><li>But Flying Blue, the KLM/Air France program? I last flew KLM the fall of 2018, so that had to be coming up. I hit the website; those miles were also expiring at the end of this year. And, they, like BA and Iberia, have managed to make resetting that data way overly complex.&nbsp; First, there’s “overall extending activities” which are flights or purchases on their co-branded credit card; they extend <em>all</em> Flying Blue miles by 2 years. “Partial extending activities” extend miles earned through, say, hotel or car rental partners. Please note, says the website, \"‘Partial extending activities’ do not extend the validity of Miles earned from ‘Overall extending activities’\". OK, then. Looking at it this way, I only had 500 miles from that 2018 flight, but 38,000 miles from when I had to quickly stash points from a corporate Amex account before leaving a company. So, a “partial” activity should suffice. I set myself a reminder for Dec 1st to push the minimum 1,000 points from my personal Amex.</li><li>And the expiration periods are kinda all over the place. BA is 36 months; KLM, Marriott, and Hyatt are 2 years; American is 18 months; Hilton is 15 months (weird number); and IHG is the stingiest at 12.&nbsp;</li><li>Seems like there should be a technology solution to this, right? There are a few. If you use TripIt to consolidate your trip itineraries, the $49/year upgrade to the Pro version gives you program tracking. I had used it one year when they upgraded me for free; probably by mistake. AwardWallet is another popular tool, but there too, you need to upgrade to the paid version (a little cheaper at $30/year) to track expirations.</li><li>But beyond the cost, for these programs to work, you have to give them access to your accounts -- your account numbers and passwords. And cycling back to what I was saying at the top of the show, with the travel industry’s kinda poor track record on data protection, and just after having to reset passwords to United, American, Lufthansa, BA, and Iberia because of SITA’s leak, do I really want to put <em>all</em> my frequent traveler logins into one spot? I think a simple spreadsheet on the hard drive of the PC in my office can do the job just fine.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #173</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li>Nothing new on the tech front this month, but I should have the website freshened up by the next episode. I’ve had the current look since the beginning of 2006 courtesy of TravelCommons listener Hilary Baumann and her <a href=\"https://fascinationdesign.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Fascination Design</a> firm. The change is absolutely not a knock against Hilary’s work. It’s just that, after 15 years, I wanted to freshen things up a bit. So look for that by the end of February or beginning of March.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>, as well as asking Alexa, Siri, and Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li><li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_173.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #173 — What\'s New in Travel Insurance; Keeping Ahead of Expiring Miles','','inherit','closed','closed','','3417-revision-v1','','','2021-10-01 17:11:43','2021-10-01 22:11:43','',3417,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3958',0,'revision','',0),
(3960,1,'2021-10-28 17:32:20','2021-10-28 22:32:20','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_1985\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/IMG_3845.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-3581 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/IMG_3845-300x300.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a>Gotta Stay Hydrated[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Back at the microphone after two weeks in Southern Italy. Lots of travel segments that could\'ve gone wrong, but none of them did. We talk about what international travel is like in COVID times, about the challenge of keeping track and complying with the different COVID travel requirements that seem to be constantly changing, and then some thoughts about our bike tour through Puglia with <a href=\"https://www.backroads.com/trips/BPLQ/puglia-italy-biking-tour\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Backroads</a>. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_180.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #180: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after 2 weeks in the south of Italy, a <a href=\"https://www.backroads.com/trips/BPLQ/puglia-italy-biking-tour\">cycling tour through Puglia</a>, and then visiting friends in Sicily; they’re grabbing one last bit of sunshine, topping up their vitamin D levels before the short, cold days of northern Europe’s winter sets in. I’ve talked in the last couple of episodes about travel planning for this trip, the changes, the shifts I’ve had to make, and about all the places, the segments that could’ve gone wrong -- but none of them did! For sure there was a little weirdness along the way, especially in Sicily, but every flight and train leg was on-time and pretty uneventful.&nbsp;</li><li>We hit what are now typical mask rule inconsistencies right off the bat in ORD. We walked into the Swissport Lounge that Air France and others use for business class and got the mask rules -- mask on unless actively eating or drinking; airplane rules -- and then walk into a small room with no food and a pretty dire bar. We sat down, but after a couple of minutes walked back out, straight down the concourse to <a href=\"https://www.rickbayless.com/restaurants/tortas-frontera/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tortas Frontera</a>, our favorite ORD restaurant, for good margaritas, and where they were applying Chicago indoor mask rules -- you can drop your mask once you’re at your table. It was worth paying $90 to drink quality in comfort rather than playing mask peek-a-boo with the Swissport’s free wine.</li><li>The next morning, DeGaulle was more confusing than I remember it being in 2019. Getting from Terminal 2E to 2F seemed to take more cognitive power than it should’ve; maybe I hadn’t gotten as much sleep on the flight over as I thought. But all in all, it was an easy, uneventful flight over to Italy.</li><li>As I expected it to be. My biggest worry was our flights the following week from Brindisi in Puglia to Catania in Sicily, connecting through Rome on what would be the second day of operations for ITA, the Italian government’s successor to the bankrupt Alitalia. This itinerary certainly wasn’t my first choice, but as I’ve mentioned in the last couple of episodes, I didn’t have another one. There were labor actions leading up to the switch over that had disrupted operations, and even without that, you’d figure there’d be at least a hundred places where some minor snafu could botch up their big Rome hub. But other than a couple of agents maybe staging an impromptu work slowdown at the Brindisi check-in desk (or that was just their normal pace), it all went smoothly. And really, across all our travel legs, but for wearing masks and having our vaccination cards checked, it didn’t seem all that different from 2019. Now I know that’s a pretty big “But for”, but I’ll happily take it.</li><li>Bridge Music — <em><em>Perfect Stranger</em>&nbsp;</em>by stellarartwars (c) 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/stellarartwars/45510 Ft: TheDice</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Jerry Sarfati hit the TravelCommons’ Instagram feed to say that he’s seen no delays in TSA’s Global Entry processing. Jerry said<ul><li>“Thanks for the latest podcast. I refreshed my Global Entry. Very easy. Was told 72 hours later that all was approved; no interview needed.”</li></ul></li><li>Thanks for that, Jerry. I just checked. A month-and-a-half later (936 hrs using Jerry’s unit of measure), the TTP Dashboard (Trusted Traveler Program) still shows an hourglass next to “Wait for Conditional Approval”. But I’m guessing I’m probably a bit more of a suspect character than you.&nbsp;</li><li>Twitter user @LAflyer weighed in on last episode’s discussion about how business travelers are still MIA (missing in action)<ul><li>“Thanks for the new episode. In my opinion, face-to-face is becoming increasingly the edge case. I think we’ve proven we can manage so much remotely that the need for on-site/in-person meetings will be the exception, not the rule anymore. That’s ok with me. I prefer my own bed over traveling 200,000 miles annually.”</li></ul></li><li>I think this is a valid and widely-held opinion/belief/hope -- that beginning in March 2020, we’ve now all lived through an extended crash course in remote work and video conference, we’ve done it successfully, and so can significantly reduce the need for business travel, which will allow people to spend more time in their own beds and with their families as well as reducing business expenses, and reducing airplane carbon emissions. How much business travel will be eliminated? That’s the big question that I’m guessing will take another year before we begin to see the answer.</li><li>Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/08/24/podcast-178-what-remains-from-pandemic-times-best-restaurant-and-bars/\" title=\"Podcast #178 — What Remains from Pandemic Times; Best Restaurant and Bars\">August episode</a>,&nbsp; asking the question “What Will Remain from These Pandemic Times?” the death of daily hotel room cleaning service was at the top of my list. Indeed, Hilton had just announced their move to on-demand housekeeping across all their non-luxury brands. But in Italy, I saw none of this. Not only did every hotel service our rooms every day, they were still doing turndowns every night. And they were doing their regular breakfasts, though with staff plating your food from the buffet rather than you digging in yourself. Now, we weren’t staying at major brands; only small Italian brands or independents, so I don’t know if that changes things, but they were much better hotel experiences than I’ve had recently in the US.</li><li>I didn’t realize how aggressive Apple is about iOS updates until this trip. I update pretty quickly when I’m at home, but on this trip, it seemed like I had to wave off the 15.0.2 update every couple of days. I didn’t bring my laptop with me, so I had no way to recover on the slight chance that the upgrade bricked my iPhone -- without which I wouldn’t have been able to do the video chat session for the Abbott home test kit or display the test results, which was how we were getting back into the US. As if we didn’t know it already, you just can’t easily travel anymore without a <em>working</em> mobile phone.</li><li>I’ve talked in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food\">past </a><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\" title=\"10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times\">episodes</a> about how I will use a VPN, a virtual private network, when using public WiFi networks in hotels, airports, Starbucks to make my connection more secure. I’ve used all the top paid VPNs over the years -- ExpressVPN, NordVPN, PIA -- and am using NordVPN now. And I’ve never had a problem with nailing up a connection -- until this trip to Italy. More than a couple of times, the VPN client wouldn’t connect to an Italian server. So, as I’m too prone to do, I bitch-tweeted at NordVPN and, to their credit, they immediately responded. We flipped over the direct messaging and they started trouble-shooting. What finally worked was connecting to one of their obfuscated servers, specialized VPN servers that hide the fact that you’re using a VPN. I don’t know if there are Italian regulations against using VPNs or if it’s just a couple of Italian ISPs blocking VPNs for some reason. Whatever the reason, I give NordVPN props for constructively responding to my whining and quickly solving my problem.</li><li>Also back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/08/24/podcast-178-what-remains-from-pandemic-times-best-restaurant-and-bars/\" title=\"Podcast #178 — What Remains from Pandemic Times; Best Restaurant and Bars\">August episode</a> when talking about booking our travel over to Italy, I talked about burning off some Amex points to fly Air France business class. I think, by now, the standard business class seat is an individual pod that give you your own space, your own cocoon -- some are snugger than others, the buttons and amenities are a bit different -- but over the last 5-6 years, that’s what I’ve come to expect when I walk into a business class cabin. So when I got to my seat on this Air France 777, I was very underwhelmed -- no pods, just a standard 2-3-2 seat configuration with no separators between the seats. I tweeted out a couple of pictures. It wasn’t a great first impression. But the service was good, the food and wine were very good (as I’d expect from Air France) and they didn’t put a 3rd person in Irene’s and my center section. And I ended up sleeping very well, probably with the help of an after-dinner armagnac.</li><li>Flying home was Lufthansa from Catania to Munich and then United straight to ORD.&nbsp; I wasn’t thrilled with the connection through Munich; the last time we’d connected through there, long lines at passport control and security had us sprinting down the concourse to make what should’ve been a reasonably timed connection. But this time, it wasn’t a problem. There was maybe a 5-minute queue at passport control and no additional security, so we had time to grab some breakfast in the Lufthansa lounge before heading down to the United gate. Walking to the gate, I said to Irene “Looks like they fixed whatever the problem was when we were last here ‘cause it’s been a smooth connection.” And as the word “smooth” left my mouth, we saw the line. Luckily, for us, we weren’t in it. There was a huge tailback out of passport control for people arriving from the US getting into the Schengen zone to make their connecting flights -- the same thing that happened to us. So they hadn’t fixed the problem. Arriving MUC <em>from</em> the US; still a problem. Leaving MUC <em>to</em> the US; not so much. I’ve filed that away for future reference.</li><li>Once on the United 787, I noticed that our seatback screens weren’t working. I mentioned this to the flight attendant when she came by to check on us. It wasn’t a problem; there was no one in the center section and all those screens were working, so we could just slide over if we wanted to. As it was, Irene was reading a book and I was listening to podcasts, so we didn’t need the screens. I just figured I’d tell the flight attendant so the ORD maintenance crew would know to look at it.&nbsp; About halfway through the flight, the attendant comes back around and says she wants to give us something for our inconvenience. “I want to do something for you because you’ve been so nice about this,” she said. There was absolutely no inconvenience, but if United wants to give me free stuff, who am I to refuse. She pulled out her phone, opened an app, and for each of us, checked our e-mail addresses, and asked if we wanted 7,500 miles or $150 in credit (we took the money). And when we lit up our phones on the runway at ORD, we both had emails with the voucher details. I gotta be nice more often.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> or the <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram </a>account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — <em><em>Paint the Sky</em>&nbsp;</em>by Hans Atom (c) 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/hansatom/50718 Ft: Miss Judged</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Tracking COVID Travel Requirements</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>If my biggest worry on our Italy trip was our Saturday flights on ITA, my second, more chronic worry was that we’d get caught up in paperwork hassles at one of the borders we were crossing (France, Italy, Germany, the US), maybe missing something in all the different requirements, having some airport gate agent or train conductor or immigration guy enforcing their own unique interpretation; or not our paper CDC vaccination card not accepted in lieu of an EU Green Pass QR code on our phones. The great thing, as I said earlier, is that none of this came to pass. And at the end of each travel day, I let out a small sigh of relief -- just enough to feel good, but not so much that it might jinx the next travel day.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>Catania Airport, where we flew into and out of Sicily, was the only place that things got a little weird. We landed there at 8pm after a pretty flawless trains, planes, and automobiles travel day -- a on-time, almost empty train ride from Lecce to Brindisi, a taxi to the airport, the no-problem ITA flights, and now in Catania, our bags were the first ones to pop out on the luggage belt.&nbsp; Another small sigh of relief and we walk out of baggage claim to meet our friend -- only to be waylaid by two security guards. “Where did you come from?” one of them asked. “Rome,” I said. “Where are you from?” “The US”. “Go to the line on the right,” she said. I looked at the sign; it said “COVID-19 test.”&nbsp; Apparently, Sicily, or maybe just Catania, was requiring on-site COVID tests for non-EU arrivals. I was completely blindsided. There was nothing like this when we landed in Bari, in Puglia, 10 days earlier, and I didn’t see this anywhere on any of the <em>many</em> Italian governmental websites I checked before our trip. I looked down the testing line; it was beginning to tail back; this was going to be a bad time. “Wait! Wait a minute!” I said to the other guard, “We’ve been in Italy since the beginning of the month.” I pulled out my paper boarding passes that luckily I’d saved. “See, we started our flight in Brindisi; we just connected through Rome.” “You’ve been here two weeks?” he asked. Actually, it was more like 10 days, but I wasn’t going to correct his math. “OK, no need to test. Go to the left,” and he waved to his colleague to let us through. We quickly walked outside before either of them could change their minds and saw the COVID test line full of people trying to fill out forms on each other’s backs while standing in a line that led into a large room full of cubicles where yet more people were waiting to be tested. It looked like at least an hour’s worth of a very bad time. I was very happy the security guard was fluent enough in English to let me talk my way out of that line.</li><li>All the different shades of testing and tracking requirements -- by country, by state, even by city --&nbsp; Italy requiring an EU digital passenger locator form, proof of vaccination, and a negative COVID test taken within 72 hours of arrival (vs. the US’s requirement that the test be taken within 72 hours of <em>departure</em>); Puglia adding to that another form to be filled out and emailed to the regional health department before arrival; there’s Sicily’s stealth on-arrival COVID testing, and I’m still trying to figure out exactly what the UK wants of us for our trip there in the back-half of November because it looks like the rules changed a bit this week.&nbsp; It all keeps you a bit off-balance, a bit anxious that you’ve missed something which is going to land you in a long, expensive line somewhere.</li><li>The mechanics of it all caught me off-guard at first. Checking into our Air France flight in ORD, the agent checked our vaccination cards and digital passenger locator forms (which, in spite of being digital, I’d printed out to make it easier to show someone). When we arrived in Bari, we walked straight out of baggage claim to the terminal. There was no one to check any of our paperwork. The same thing happened to my son Andrew last month when he flew into Barcelona. It seems like governments have made all of this a boarding requirement and pushed the responsibility to check it onto the carrier. Kinda like the carrier checks your passport and visa to make sure you can get into the country you’re going to; they’ve tacked on these additional COVID requirements. But even then, when I land in a new country, there’s still someone in a booth checking my passport. Irene tried to show one border police guy her vaccination card and he just waved her off.</li><li>But Italy requires proof of vaccination to go inside a restaurant or bar or a cathedral or an airport, so while the border cops weren’t interested in our vaccination status, a lot of waiters were. We kept our CDC cards handy, tucked in our passports. I worried about places turning us away for not being able to show the EU Green Pass QR code, but again, I was happy to be wrong. There was only one place, a restaurant in Bari, where a young waitress hesitated when we showed her our CDC cards, but almost immediately, one of the older waiters ran up, looked at the cards and said it was all good. Maybe some of this is timing. When Italy first re-opened back in, what July?, and people were trying to figure things out on the fly, it would make sense that waiters or gate agents would turn away people with unfamiliar pieces of cardboard. But now, 2-3 months on, they seem to have figured it out. I’m hoping I can too</li><li>Bridge Music — <em>Dub the Uke</em> by Kara Square (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mindmapthat/53340 Ft: DJ Vadim</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>&nbsp;Cycling Through Puglia</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>This trip didn’t start off with the idea “Let’s go to Puglia!” Instead, it started at the tired end of a Chicago winter as a combination of “Let’s go back to Europe” and “Let’s go on a cycling tour!” and then looking at what rides were available in the fall, in October because, back in April, Europe was not doing a great job with vaccine roll-out. And that was our path to Puglia.&nbsp;</li><li>We’d done a self-guided cycling tour in southwest Scotland some years ago, but in southern Italy, never been here, not sure how much support there would be and how English would be spoken, we decided to go with a full tour. We narrowed the tour companies down to Trek Travel and <a href=\"https://www.backroads.com/\">Backroads</a>. They both had good Puglia itineraries. I’d done a Trek tour in Moab, UT some years back, so we decided to give Backroads a shot.</li><li>There were 16 people on the tour, 12 of which were Backroads veterans; some very much so. One couple had done a Provence tour with them in July and another woman was doing back-to-back tours -- the week before she’d ridden their Sicily tour and then flew straight up to Bari for this tour. These veterans said that Backroads does a great job organizing everything; it makes travel easy. It’s kinda the same thing I hear from people who are big into cruising -- show up in some part of the world and have people take care of you. All that being said, after 6 days and 200 miles in the saddle, I came away happy (if a little sore) with the tour and impressed with the hospitality and service ethic of the Backroads tour guides.</li><li>We were riding through Puglia the week of October 10th which was probably a week too late because the towns were beginning to close up for the season. One day, we had a couple of hours in the hill town of Ostuni for lunch, but struggled to find places that were open. Many of the restaurants were dark, even though the signs on the doors said they should be open, as did the hours listed on their websites and their Google Maps listings. No signs saying “Closed for the season”, just locked doors through which we would see chairs on all the tables. We had similar experiences in Otronto and to a lesser extent in Lecce. One of the Backroads guides said that Puglia is a popular destination for Italian tourists from up north; many of them have vacation homes there. And when those folks head home, the remaining locals and handful of misdirected tourists aren’t enough to keep all the bars and restaurants going.</li><li>But the touring was great -- riding alongside groves of huge, old, gnarled olive trees with vegetable crops like fennel and bitter greens planted underneath; and along the Adriatic Sea, up on the ridge along the coastal road and then down through little beach towns and fishing villages.&nbsp;</li><li>And I think that’s the way to do Puglia, touring, doing a couple of days each in Bari and Lecce wandering through the narrow streets of their old towns, a day in Otronto, with half-day stops in Alberobello, Matera, and/or Ostuni, maybe a day or two hanging out in a nice agriturismo or one of those beach towns on the Adriatic.&nbsp;</li><li>We drank a lot of wine, mostly the local Primitivo, a grape closely related to California’s Zinfandel, and ate a lot of seafood, especially octopus. At dinner during our second night in Bari, a young guy walked in with two small clear plastic buckets full of small octopus, very similar to a bucket I saw at the feet of a fisherman at the dock earlier in the day. I don’t think the seafood we were eating that week had been out of the Adriatic for much more than 24 hours before it hit our plates.</li><li>It was a different experience, a different vibe from our prior trips to Italy, which had all been up north -- to Tuscany, to Milan, to Venice. But biking through those olive groves, those fields, those little towns; that’s the lower key experience we were looking for -- and got -- on our time in Puglia. If you want see pictures, head over to the TravelCommons’ Instagram site and click on Puglia/Sicily where I’ve collected some of the better Instagram Stories pictures.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #180</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_180.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #180 — Tracking COVID Travel Requirements; Cycling Thru Puglia','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-180-tracking-covid-travel-requirements-cycling-thru-puglia','','','2021-11-13 10:15:51','2021-11-13 15:15:51','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3960',0,'post','',0),
(3961,1,'2021-10-28 10:48:47','2021-10-28 15:48:47','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_1985\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/708473504_18da6d5b07_z1.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-3581 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/708473504_18da6d5b07_z1-300x225.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\"></a> Standing in Line! © Lance Smith/Flickr[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Not much travel, but a lot of travel planning for our first post-lockdown international trip to Italy. Trying to thread our way through changing COVID rules and Alitalia\'s bankruptcy throes. I\'m getting inundated with discount offers for <a href=\"https://www.clearme.com/\">Clear\'s fast-pass service</a>. I\'ve resisted them so far, because I remember back to when the first incarnation of Clear wanted to <a href=\"https://www.wired.com/2009/08/defunct-airport-fast-pass-company-banned-from-selling-customer-biometrics/\">sell its members\' biometric data</a>.  We then talk to <a href=\"https://www.xovis.com/en/home/\">Xovis Technology</a>\'s Cody Shulman about how airports are better managing all sorts of lines in airports. Finally, air passenger traffic is dropping again because business travelers are still missing-in-action (MIA). All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_179.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #179: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after 2 weeks in the south of Italy, a cycling tour through Puglia, and then visiting friends in Sicily; they’re grabbing one last bit of sunshine, topping up their vitamin D levels before the short, cold days of northern Europe’s winter sets in. I’ve talked in the last couple of episodes about travel planning for this trip, the changes, the shifts I’ve had to make, and about all the places, the segments that could’ve gone wrong -- but none of them did! For sure there was a little weirdness along the way, especially in Sicily, but every flight and train leg was on-time and pretty uneventful. </li><li>We hit what are now typical mask rule inconsistencies right off the bat in ORD. We walked into the Swissport Lounge that Air France and others use for business class and got the mask rules -- mask on unless actively eating or drinking; airplane rules -- and then walk into a small room with no food and a pretty dire bar. We sat down, but after a couple of minutes walked back out, straight down the concourse to <a href=\"https://www.rickbayless.com/restaurants/tortas-frontera/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tortas Frontera</a>, our favorite ORD restaurant, for good margaritas, and where they were applying Chicago indoor mask rules -- you can drop your mask once you’re at your table. It was worth paying $90 to drink quality in comfort rather than playing mask peek-a-boo with the Swissport’s free wine.</li><li>The next morning, DeGaulle was more confusing than I remember it being in 2019. Getting from Terminal 2E to 2F seemed to take more cognitive power than it should’ve; maybe I hadn’t gotten as much sleep on the flight over as I thought. But all in all, it was an easy, uneventful flight over to Italy.</li><li>As I expected it to be. My biggest worry was our flights the following week from Brindisi in Puglia to Catania in Sicily, connecting through Rome on what would be the second day of operations for ITA, the Italian government’s successor to the bankrupt Alitalia. This itinerary certainly wasn’t my first choice, but as I’ve mentioned in the last couple of episodes, I didn’t have another one. There were labor actions leading up to the switch over that had disrupted operations, and even without that, you’d figure there’d be at least a hundred places where some minor snafu could botch up their big Rome hub. But other than a couple of agents maybe staging an impromptu work slowdown at the Brindisi check-in desk (or that was just their normal pace), it all went smoothly. And really, across all our travel legs, but for wearing masks and having our vaccination cards checked, it didn’t seem all that different from 2019. Now I know that’s a pretty big “But for”, but I’ll happily take it.</li><li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/yongen-yello/\">Give You Up</a></em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/yongen\">Yongen</a> (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/1.0/\">by-nc-sa v1.0</a> license</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Jerry Sarfati hit the TravelCommons’ Instagram feed to say that he’s seen no delays in TSA’s Global Entry processing. Jerry said<ul><li>“Thanks for the latest podcast. I refreshed my Global Entry. Very easy. Was told 72 hours later that all was approved; no interview needed.”</li></ul></li><li>Thanks for that, Jerry. I just checked. A month-and-a-half later (936 hrs using Jerry’s unit of measure), the TTP Dashboard (Trusted Traveler Program) still shows an hourglass next to “Wait for Conditional Approval”. But I’m guessing I’m probably a bit more of a suspect character than you. </li><li>Twitter user @LAflyer weighed in on last episode’s discussion about how business travelers are still MIA (missing in action)<ul><li>“Thanks for the new episode. In my opinion, face-to-face is becoming increasingly the edge case. I think we’ve proven we can manage so much remotely that the need for on-site/in-person meetings will be the exception, not the rule anymore. That’s ok with me. I prefer my own bed over traveling 200,000 miles annually.”</li></ul></li><li>I think this is a valid and widely-held opinion/belief/hope -- that beginning in March 2020, we’ve now all lived through an extended crash course in remote work and video conference, we’ve done it successfully, and so can significantly reduce the need for business travel, which will allow people to spend more time in their own beds and with their families as well as reducing business expenses, and reducing airplane carbon emissions. How much business travel will be eliminated? That’s the big question that I’m guessing will take another year before we begin to see the answer.</li><li>Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/08/24/podcast-178-what-remains-from-pandemic-times-best-restaurant-and-bars/\" title=\"Podcast #178 — What Remains from Pandemic Times; Best Restaurant and Bars\">August episode</a>,  asking the question “What Will Remain from These Pandemic Times?” the death of daily hotel room cleaning service was at the top of my list. Indeed, Hilton had just announced their move to on-demand housekeeping across all their non-luxury brands. But in Italy, I saw none of this. Not only did every hotel service our rooms every day, they were still doing turndowns every night. And they were doing their regular breakfasts, though with staff plating your food from the buffet rather than you digging in yourself. Now, we weren’t staying at major brands; only small Italian brands or independents, so I don’t know if that changes things, but they were much better hotel experiences than I’ve had recently in the US.</li><li>I didn’t realize how aggressive Apple is about iOS updates until this trip. I update pretty quickly when I’m at home, but on this trip, it seemed like I had to wave off the 15.0.2 update every couple of days. I didn’t bring my laptop with me, so I had no way to recover on the slight chance that the upgrade bricked my iPhone -- without which I wouldn’t have been able to do the video chat session for the Abbott home test kit or display the test results, which was how we were getting back into the US. As if we didn’t know it already, you just can’t easily travel anymore without a <em>working</em> mobile phone.</li><li>I’ve talked in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food\">past </a><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\" title=\"10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times\">episodes</a> about how I will use a VPN, a virtual private network, when using public WiFi networks in hotels, airports, Starbucks to make my connection more secure. I’ve used all the top paid VPNs over the years -- ExpressVPN, NordVPN, PIA -- and am using NordVPN now. And I’ve never had a problem with nailing up a connection -- until this trip to Italy. More than a couple of times, the VPN client wouldn’t connect to an Italian server. So, as I’m too prone to do, I bitch-tweeted at NordVPN and, to their credit, they immediately responded. We flipped over the direct messaging and they started trouble-shooting. What finally worked was connecting to one of their obfuscated servers, specialized VPN servers that hide the fact that you’re using a VPN. I don’t know if there are Italian regulations against using VPNs or if it’s just a couple of Italian ISPs blocking VPNs for some reason. Whatever the reason, I give NordVPN props for constructively responding to my whining and quickly solving my problem.</li><li>Also back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/08/24/podcast-178-what-remains-from-pandemic-times-best-restaurant-and-bars/\" title=\"Podcast #178 — What Remains from Pandemic Times; Best Restaurant and Bars\">August episode</a> when talking about booking our travel over to Italy, I talked about burning off some Amex points to fly Air France business class. I think, by now, the standard business class seat is an individual pod that give you your own space, your own cocoon -- some are snugger than others, the buttons and amenities are a bit different -- but over the last 5-6 years, that’s what I’ve come to expect when I walk into a business class cabin. So when I got to my seat on this Air France 777, I was very underwhelmed -- no pods, just a standard 2-3-2 seat configuration with no separators between the seats. I tweeted out a couple of pictures. It wasn’t a great first impression. But the service was good, the food and wine were very good (as I’d expect from Air France) and they didn’t put a 3rd person in Irene’s and my center section. And I ended up sleeping very well, probably with the help of an after-dinner armagnac.</li><li>Flying home was Lufthansa from Catania to Munich and then United straight to ORD.  I wasn’t thrilled with the connection through Munich; the last time we’d connected through there, long lines at passport control and security had us sprinting down the concourse to make what should’ve been a reasonably timed connection. But this time, it wasn’t a problem. There was maybe a 5-minute queue at passport control and no additional security, so we had time to grab some breakfast in the Lufthansa lounge before heading down to the United gate. Walking to the gate, I said to Irene “Looks like they fixed whatever the problem was when we were last here ‘cause it’s been a smooth connection.” And as the word “smooth” left my mouth, we saw the line. Luckily, for us, we weren’t in it. There was a huge tailback out of passport control for people arriving from the US getting into the Schengen zone to make their connecting flights -- the same thing that happened to us. So they hadn’t fixed the problem. Arriving MUC <em>from</em> the US; still a problem. Leaving MUC <em>to</em> the US; not so much. I’ve filed that away for future reference.</li><li>Once on the United 787, I noticed that our seatback screens weren’t working. I mentioned this to the flight attendant when she came by to check on us. It wasn’t a problem; there was no one in the center section and all those screens were working, so we could just slide over if we wanted to. As it was, Irene was reading a book and I was listening to podcasts, so we didn’t need the screens. I just figured I’d tell the flight attendant so the ORD maintenance crew would know to look at it.  About halfway through the flight, the attendant comes back around and says she wants to give us something for our inconvenience. “I want to do something for you because you’ve been so nice about this,” she said. There was absolutely no inconvenience, but if United wants to give me free stuff, who am I to refuse. She pulled out her phone, opened an app, and for each of us, checked our e-mail addresses, and asked if we wanted 7,500 miles or $150 in credit (we took the money). And when we lit up our phones on the runway at ORD, we both had emails with the voucher details. I gotta be nice more often.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> or the <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram </a>account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — <em><em>Flight</em> </em>by Ga\'inja  (c) copyright 1999 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/1.0/\">by-nc-sa v1.0</a> license</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Tracking COVID Travel Requirements</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>If my biggest worry on our Italy trip was our Saturday flights on ITA, my second, more chronic worry was that we’d get caught up in paperwork hassles at one of the borders we were crossing (France, Italy, Germany, the US), maybe missing something in all the different requirements, having some airport gate agent or train conductor or immigration guy enforcing their own unique interpretation; or not our paper CDC vaccination card not accepted in lieu of an EU Green Pass QR code on our phones. The great thing, as I said earlier, is that none of this came to pass. And at the end of each travel day, I let out a small sigh of relief -- just enough to feel good, but not so much that it might jinx the next travel day.  </li><li>Catania Airport, where we flew into and out of Sicily, was the only place that things got a little weird. We landed there at 8pm after a pretty flawless trains, planes, and automobiles travel day -- a on-time, almost empty train ride from Lecce to Brindisi, a taxi to the airport, the no-problem ITA flights, and now in Catania, our bags were the first ones to pop out on the luggage belt.  Another small sigh of relief and we walk out of baggage claim to meet our friend -- only to be waylaid by two security guards. “Where did you come from?” one of them asked. “Rome,” I said. “Where are you from?” “The US”. “Go to the line on the right,” she said. I looked at the sign; it said “COVID-19 test.”  Apparently, Sicily, or maybe just Catania, was requiring on-site COVID tests for non-EU arrivals. I was completely blindsided. There was nothing like this when we landed in Bari, in Puglia, 10 days earlier, and I didn’t see this anywhere on any of the <em>many</em> Italian governmental websites I checked before our trip. I looked down the testing line; it was beginning to tail back; this was going to be a bad time. “Wait! Wait a minute!” I said to the other guard, “We’ve been in Italy since the beginning of the month.” I pulled out my paper boarding passes that luckily I’d saved. “See, we started our flight in Brindisi; we just connected through Rome.” “You’ve been here two weeks?” he asked. Actually, it was more like 10 days, but I wasn’t going to correct his math. “OK, no need to test. Go to the left,” and he waved to his colleague to let us through. We quickly walked outside before either of them could change their minds and saw the COVID test line full of people trying to fill out forms on each other’s backs while standing in a line that led into a large room full of cubicles where yet more people were waiting to be tested. It looked like at least an hour’s worth of a very bad time. I was very happy the security guard was fluent enough in English to let me talk my way out of that line.</li><li>All the different shades of testing and tracking requirements -- by country, by state, even by city --  Italy requiring an EU digital passenger locator form, proof of vaccination, and a negative COVID test taken within 72 hours of arrival (vs. the US’s requirement that the test be taken within 72 hours of <em>departure</em>); Puglia adding to that another form to be filled out and emailed to the regional health department before arrival; there’s Sicily’s stealth on-arrival COVID testing, and I’m still trying to figure out exactly what the UK wants of us for our trip there in the back-half of November because it looks like the rules changed a bit this week.  It all keeps you a bit off-balance, a bit anxious that you’ve missed something which is going to land you in a long, expensive line somewhere.</li><li>The mechanics of it all caught me off-guard at first. Checking into our Air France flight in ORD, the agent checked our vaccination cards and digital passenger locator forms (which, in spite of being digital, I’d printed out to make it easier to show someone). When we arrived in Bari, we walked straight out of baggage claim to the terminal. There was no one to check any of our paperwork. The same thing happened to my son Andrew last month when he flew into Barcelona. It seems like governments have made all of this a boarding requirement and pushed the responsibility to check it onto the carrier. Kinda like the carrier checks your passport and visa to make sure you can get into the country you’re going to; they’ve tacked on these additional COVID requirements. But even then, when I land in a new country, there’s still someone in a booth checking my passport. Irene tried to show one border police guy her vaccination card and he just waved her off.</li><li>But Italy requires proof of vaccination to go inside a restaurant or bar or a cathedral or an airport, so while the border cops weren’t interested in our vaccination status, a lot of waiters were. We kept our CDC cards handy, tucked in our passports. I worried about places turning us away for not being able to show the EU Green Pass QR code, but again, I was happy to be wrong. There was only one place, a restaurant in Bari, where a young waitress hesitated when we showed her our CDC cards, but almost immediately, one of the older waiters ran up, looked at the cards and said it was all good. Maybe some of this is timing. When Italy first re-opened back in, what July?, and people were trying to figure things out on the fly, it would make sense that waiters or gate agents would turn away people with unfamiliar pieces of cardboard. But now, 2-3 months on, they seem to have figured it out. I’m hoping I can too</li><li>Bridge Music —<a href=\"http://www.saurabbhargava.com/downloads/04%20The%20Void.mp3\"><em>The Void</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.saurabbhargava.com/\">Saurab Bhargava</a>  (c) copyright 2006 Saurab Bhargava</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong> Cycling Through Puglia</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>This trip didn’t start off with the idea “Let’s go to Puglia!” Instead, it started at the tired end of a Chicago winter as a combination of “Let’s go back to Europe” and “Let’s go on a cycling tour!” and then looking at what rides were available in the fall, in October because, back in April, Europe was not doing a great job with vaccine roll-out. And that was our path to Puglia.&nbsp;</li><li>We’d done a self-guided cycling tour in southwest Scotland some years ago, but in southern Italy, never been here, not sure how much support there would be and how English would be spoken, we decided to go with a full tour. We narrowed the tour companies down to Trek Travel and Backroads. They both had good Puglia itineraries. I’d done a Trek tour in Moab, UT some years back, so we decided to give Backroads a shot.</li><li>There were 16 people on the tour, 12 of which were Backroads veterans; some very much so. One couple had done a Provence tour with them in July and another woman was doing back-to-back tours -- the week before she’d ridden their Sicily tour and then flew straight up to Bari for this tour. These veterans said that Backroads does a great job organizing everything; it makes travel easy. It’s kinda the same thing I hear from people who are big into cruising -- show up in some part of the world and have people take care of you. All that being said, after 6 days and 200 miles in the saddle, I came away happy (if a little sore) with the tour and impressed with the hospitality and service ethic of the Backroads tour guides.</li><li>We were riding through Puglia the week of October 10th which was probably a week too late because the towns were beginning to close up for the season. One day, we had a couple of hours in the hill town of Ostuni for lunch, but struggled to find places that were open. Many of the restaurants were dark, even though the signs on the doors said they should be open, as did the hours listed on their websites and their Google Maps listings. No signs saying “Closed for the season”, just locked doors through which we would see chairs on all the tables. We had similar experiences in Otronto and to a lesser extent in Lecce. One of the Backroads guides said that Puglia is a popular destination for Italian tourists from up north; many of them have vacation homes there. And when those folks head home, the remaining locals and handful of misdirected tourists aren’t enough to keep all the bars and restaurants going.</li><li>But the touring was great -- riding alongside groves of huge, old, gnarled olive trees with vegetable crops like fennel and bitter greens planted underneath; and along the Adriatic Sea, up on the ridge along the coastal road and then down through little beach towns and fishing villages.&nbsp;</li><li>And I think that’s the way to do Puglia, touring, doing a couple of days each in Bari and Lecce wandering through the narrow streets of their old towns, a day in Otronto, with half-day stops in Alberobello, Matera, and/or Ostuni, maybe a day or two hanging out in a nice agriturismo or one of those beach towns on the Adriatic.&nbsp;</li><li>We drank a lot of wine, mostly the local Primitivo, a grape closely related to California’s Zinfandel, and ate a lot of seafood, especially octopus. At dinner during our second night in Bari, a young guy walked in with two small clear plastic buckets full of small octopus, very similar to a bucket I saw at the feet of a fisherman at the dock earlier in the day. I don’t think the seafood we were eating that week had been out of the Adriatic for much more than 24 hours before it hit our plates.</li><li>It was a different experience, a different vibe from our prior trips to Italy, which had all been up north -- to Tuscany, to Milan, to Venice. But biking through those olive groves, those fields, those little towns; that’s the lower key experience we were looking for -- and got -- on our time in Puglia. If you want see pictures, head over to the TravelCommons’ Instagram site and click on Puglia/Sicily where I’ve collected some of the better Instagram Stories pictures.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #180</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social  -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_179.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #180 — Changing COVID Travel Requirements; Cycling Thru Puglia','','inherit','closed','closed','','3960-revision-v1','','','2021-10-28 10:48:47','2021-10-28 15:48:47','',3960,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3961',0,'revision','',0),
(3962,1,'2021-10-28 10:49:38','2021-10-28 15:49:38','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_1985\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/708473504_18da6d5b07_z1.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-3581 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/708473504_18da6d5b07_z1-300x225.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\"></a> Standing in Line! © Lance Smith/Flickr[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Not much travel, but a lot of travel planning for our first post-lockdown international trip to Italy. Trying to thread our way through changing COVID rules and Alitalia\'s bankruptcy throes. I\'m getting inundated with discount offers for <a href=\"https://www.clearme.com/\">Clear\'s fast-pass service</a>. I\'ve resisted them so far, because I remember back to when the first incarnation of Clear wanted to <a href=\"https://www.wired.com/2009/08/defunct-airport-fast-pass-company-banned-from-selling-customer-biometrics/\">sell its members\' biometric data</a>.  We then talk to <a href=\"https://www.xovis.com/en/home/\">Xovis Technology</a>\'s Cody Shulman about how airports are better managing all sorts of lines in airports. Finally, air passenger traffic is dropping again because business travelers are still missing-in-action (MIA). All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_180.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #180: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after 2 weeks in the south of Italy, a cycling tour through Puglia, and then visiting friends in Sicily; they’re grabbing one last bit of sunshine, topping up their vitamin D levels before the short, cold days of northern Europe’s winter sets in. I’ve talked in the last couple of episodes about travel planning for this trip, the changes, the shifts I’ve had to make, and about all the places, the segments that could’ve gone wrong -- but none of them did! For sure there was a little weirdness along the way, especially in Sicily, but every flight and train leg was on-time and pretty uneventful. </li><li>We hit what are now typical mask rule inconsistencies right off the bat in ORD. We walked into the Swissport Lounge that Air France and others use for business class and got the mask rules -- mask on unless actively eating or drinking; airplane rules -- and then walk into a small room with no food and a pretty dire bar. We sat down, but after a couple of minutes walked back out, straight down the concourse to <a href=\"https://www.rickbayless.com/restaurants/tortas-frontera/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tortas Frontera</a>, our favorite ORD restaurant, for good margaritas, and where they were applying Chicago indoor mask rules -- you can drop your mask once you’re at your table. It was worth paying $90 to drink quality in comfort rather than playing mask peek-a-boo with the Swissport’s free wine.</li><li>The next morning, DeGaulle was more confusing than I remember it being in 2019. Getting from Terminal 2E to 2F seemed to take more cognitive power than it should’ve; maybe I hadn’t gotten as much sleep on the flight over as I thought. But all in all, it was an easy, uneventful flight over to Italy.</li><li>As I expected it to be. My biggest worry was our flights the following week from Brindisi in Puglia to Catania in Sicily, connecting through Rome on what would be the second day of operations for ITA, the Italian government’s successor to the bankrupt Alitalia. This itinerary certainly wasn’t my first choice, but as I’ve mentioned in the last couple of episodes, I didn’t have another one. There were labor actions leading up to the switch over that had disrupted operations, and even without that, you’d figure there’d be at least a hundred places where some minor snafu could botch up their big Rome hub. But other than a couple of agents maybe staging an impromptu work slowdown at the Brindisi check-in desk (or that was just their normal pace), it all went smoothly. And really, across all our travel legs, but for wearing masks and having our vaccination cards checked, it didn’t seem all that different from 2019. Now I know that’s a pretty big “But for”, but I’ll happily take it.</li><li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/yongen-yello/\">Give You Up</a></em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/yongen\">Yongen</a> (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/1.0/\">by-nc-sa v1.0</a> license</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Jerry Sarfati hit the TravelCommons’ Instagram feed to say that he’s seen no delays in TSA’s Global Entry processing. Jerry said<ul><li>“Thanks for the latest podcast. I refreshed my Global Entry. Very easy. Was told 72 hours later that all was approved; no interview needed.”</li></ul></li><li>Thanks for that, Jerry. I just checked. A month-and-a-half later (936 hrs using Jerry’s unit of measure), the TTP Dashboard (Trusted Traveler Program) still shows an hourglass next to “Wait for Conditional Approval”. But I’m guessing I’m probably a bit more of a suspect character than you. </li><li>Twitter user @LAflyer weighed in on last episode’s discussion about how business travelers are still MIA (missing in action)<ul><li>“Thanks for the new episode. In my opinion, face-to-face is becoming increasingly the edge case. I think we’ve proven we can manage so much remotely that the need for on-site/in-person meetings will be the exception, not the rule anymore. That’s ok with me. I prefer my own bed over traveling 200,000 miles annually.”</li></ul></li><li>I think this is a valid and widely-held opinion/belief/hope -- that beginning in March 2020, we’ve now all lived through an extended crash course in remote work and video conference, we’ve done it successfully, and so can significantly reduce the need for business travel, which will allow people to spend more time in their own beds and with their families as well as reducing business expenses, and reducing airplane carbon emissions. How much business travel will be eliminated? That’s the big question that I’m guessing will take another year before we begin to see the answer.</li><li>Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/08/24/podcast-178-what-remains-from-pandemic-times-best-restaurant-and-bars/\" title=\"Podcast #178 — What Remains from Pandemic Times; Best Restaurant and Bars\">August episode</a>,  asking the question “What Will Remain from These Pandemic Times?” the death of daily hotel room cleaning service was at the top of my list. Indeed, Hilton had just announced their move to on-demand housekeeping across all their non-luxury brands. But in Italy, I saw none of this. Not only did every hotel service our rooms every day, they were still doing turndowns every night. And they were doing their regular breakfasts, though with staff plating your food from the buffet rather than you digging in yourself. Now, we weren’t staying at major brands; only small Italian brands or independents, so I don’t know if that changes things, but they were much better hotel experiences than I’ve had recently in the US.</li><li>I didn’t realize how aggressive Apple is about iOS updates until this trip. I update pretty quickly when I’m at home, but on this trip, it seemed like I had to wave off the 15.0.2 update every couple of days. I didn’t bring my laptop with me, so I had no way to recover on the slight chance that the upgrade bricked my iPhone -- without which I wouldn’t have been able to do the video chat session for the Abbott home test kit or display the test results, which was how we were getting back into the US. As if we didn’t know it already, you just can’t easily travel anymore without a <em>working</em> mobile phone.</li><li>I’ve talked in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food\">past </a><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\" title=\"10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times\">episodes</a> about how I will use a VPN, a virtual private network, when using public WiFi networks in hotels, airports, Starbucks to make my connection more secure. I’ve used all the top paid VPNs over the years -- ExpressVPN, NordVPN, PIA -- and am using NordVPN now. And I’ve never had a problem with nailing up a connection -- until this trip to Italy. More than a couple of times, the VPN client wouldn’t connect to an Italian server. So, as I’m too prone to do, I bitch-tweeted at NordVPN and, to their credit, they immediately responded. We flipped over the direct messaging and they started trouble-shooting. What finally worked was connecting to one of their obfuscated servers, specialized VPN servers that hide the fact that you’re using a VPN. I don’t know if there are Italian regulations against using VPNs or if it’s just a couple of Italian ISPs blocking VPNs for some reason. Whatever the reason, I give NordVPN props for constructively responding to my whining and quickly solving my problem.</li><li>Also back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/08/24/podcast-178-what-remains-from-pandemic-times-best-restaurant-and-bars/\" title=\"Podcast #178 — What Remains from Pandemic Times; Best Restaurant and Bars\">August episode</a> when talking about booking our travel over to Italy, I talked about burning off some Amex points to fly Air France business class. I think, by now, the standard business class seat is an individual pod that give you your own space, your own cocoon -- some are snugger than others, the buttons and amenities are a bit different -- but over the last 5-6 years, that’s what I’ve come to expect when I walk into a business class cabin. So when I got to my seat on this Air France 777, I was very underwhelmed -- no pods, just a standard 2-3-2 seat configuration with no separators between the seats. I tweeted out a couple of pictures. It wasn’t a great first impression. But the service was good, the food and wine were very good (as I’d expect from Air France) and they didn’t put a 3rd person in Irene’s and my center section. And I ended up sleeping very well, probably with the help of an after-dinner armagnac.</li><li>Flying home was Lufthansa from Catania to Munich and then United straight to ORD.  I wasn’t thrilled with the connection through Munich; the last time we’d connected through there, long lines at passport control and security had us sprinting down the concourse to make what should’ve been a reasonably timed connection. But this time, it wasn’t a problem. There was maybe a 5-minute queue at passport control and no additional security, so we had time to grab some breakfast in the Lufthansa lounge before heading down to the United gate. Walking to the gate, I said to Irene “Looks like they fixed whatever the problem was when we were last here ‘cause it’s been a smooth connection.” And as the word “smooth” left my mouth, we saw the line. Luckily, for us, we weren’t in it. There was a huge tailback out of passport control for people arriving from the US getting into the Schengen zone to make their connecting flights -- the same thing that happened to us. So they hadn’t fixed the problem. Arriving MUC <em>from</em> the US; still a problem. Leaving MUC <em>to</em> the US; not so much. I’ve filed that away for future reference.</li><li>Once on the United 787, I noticed that our seatback screens weren’t working. I mentioned this to the flight attendant when she came by to check on us. It wasn’t a problem; there was no one in the center section and all those screens were working, so we could just slide over if we wanted to. As it was, Irene was reading a book and I was listening to podcasts, so we didn’t need the screens. I just figured I’d tell the flight attendant so the ORD maintenance crew would know to look at it.  About halfway through the flight, the attendant comes back around and says she wants to give us something for our inconvenience. “I want to do something for you because you’ve been so nice about this,” she said. There was absolutely no inconvenience, but if United wants to give me free stuff, who am I to refuse. She pulled out her phone, opened an app, and for each of us, checked our e-mail addresses, and asked if we wanted 7,500 miles or $150 in credit (we took the money). And when we lit up our phones on the runway at ORD, we both had emails with the voucher details. I gotta be nice more often.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> or the <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram </a>account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — <em><em>Flight</em> </em>by Ga\'inja  (c) copyright 1999 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/1.0/\">by-nc-sa v1.0</a> license</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Tracking COVID Travel Requirements</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>If my biggest worry on our Italy trip was our Saturday flights on ITA, my second, more chronic worry was that we’d get caught up in paperwork hassles at one of the borders we were crossing (France, Italy, Germany, the US), maybe missing something in all the different requirements, having some airport gate agent or train conductor or immigration guy enforcing their own unique interpretation; or not our paper CDC vaccination card not accepted in lieu of an EU Green Pass QR code on our phones. The great thing, as I said earlier, is that none of this came to pass. And at the end of each travel day, I let out a small sigh of relief -- just enough to feel good, but not so much that it might jinx the next travel day.  </li><li>Catania Airport, where we flew into and out of Sicily, was the only place that things got a little weird. We landed there at 8pm after a pretty flawless trains, planes, and automobiles travel day -- a on-time, almost empty train ride from Lecce to Brindisi, a taxi to the airport, the no-problem ITA flights, and now in Catania, our bags were the first ones to pop out on the luggage belt.  Another small sigh of relief and we walk out of baggage claim to meet our friend -- only to be waylaid by two security guards. “Where did you come from?” one of them asked. “Rome,” I said. “Where are you from?” “The US”. “Go to the line on the right,” she said. I looked at the sign; it said “COVID-19 test.”  Apparently, Sicily, or maybe just Catania, was requiring on-site COVID tests for non-EU arrivals. I was completely blindsided. There was nothing like this when we landed in Bari, in Puglia, 10 days earlier, and I didn’t see this anywhere on any of the <em>many</em> Italian governmental websites I checked before our trip. I looked down the testing line; it was beginning to tail back; this was going to be a bad time. “Wait! Wait a minute!” I said to the other guard, “We’ve been in Italy since the beginning of the month.” I pulled out my paper boarding passes that luckily I’d saved. “See, we started our flight in Brindisi; we just connected through Rome.” “You’ve been here two weeks?” he asked. Actually, it was more like 10 days, but I wasn’t going to correct his math. “OK, no need to test. Go to the left,” and he waved to his colleague to let us through. We quickly walked outside before either of them could change their minds and saw the COVID test line full of people trying to fill out forms on each other’s backs while standing in a line that led into a large room full of cubicles where yet more people were waiting to be tested. It looked like at least an hour’s worth of a very bad time. I was very happy the security guard was fluent enough in English to let me talk my way out of that line.</li><li>All the different shades of testing and tracking requirements -- by country, by state, even by city --  Italy requiring an EU digital passenger locator form, proof of vaccination, and a negative COVID test taken within 72 hours of arrival (vs. the US’s requirement that the test be taken within 72 hours of <em>departure</em>); Puglia adding to that another form to be filled out and emailed to the regional health department before arrival; there’s Sicily’s stealth on-arrival COVID testing, and I’m still trying to figure out exactly what the UK wants of us for our trip there in the back-half of November because it looks like the rules changed a bit this week.  It all keeps you a bit off-balance, a bit anxious that you’ve missed something which is going to land you in a long, expensive line somewhere.</li><li>The mechanics of it all caught me off-guard at first. Checking into our Air France flight in ORD, the agent checked our vaccination cards and digital passenger locator forms (which, in spite of being digital, I’d printed out to make it easier to show someone). When we arrived in Bari, we walked straight out of baggage claim to the terminal. There was no one to check any of our paperwork. The same thing happened to my son Andrew last month when he flew into Barcelona. It seems like governments have made all of this a boarding requirement and pushed the responsibility to check it onto the carrier. Kinda like the carrier checks your passport and visa to make sure you can get into the country you’re going to; they’ve tacked on these additional COVID requirements. But even then, when I land in a new country, there’s still someone in a booth checking my passport. Irene tried to show one border police guy her vaccination card and he just waved her off.</li><li>But Italy requires proof of vaccination to go inside a restaurant or bar or a cathedral or an airport, so while the border cops weren’t interested in our vaccination status, a lot of waiters were. We kept our CDC cards handy, tucked in our passports. I worried about places turning us away for not being able to show the EU Green Pass QR code, but again, I was happy to be wrong. There was only one place, a restaurant in Bari, where a young waitress hesitated when we showed her our CDC cards, but almost immediately, one of the older waiters ran up, looked at the cards and said it was all good. Maybe some of this is timing. When Italy first re-opened back in, what July?, and people were trying to figure things out on the fly, it would make sense that waiters or gate agents would turn away people with unfamiliar pieces of cardboard. But now, 2-3 months on, they seem to have figured it out. I’m hoping I can too</li><li>Bridge Music —<a href=\"http://www.saurabbhargava.com/downloads/04%20The%20Void.mp3\"><em>The Void</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.saurabbhargava.com/\">Saurab Bhargava</a>  (c) copyright 2006 Saurab Bhargava</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong> Cycling Through Puglia</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>This trip didn’t start off with the idea “Let’s go to Puglia!” Instead, it started at the tired end of a Chicago winter as a combination of “Let’s go back to Europe” and “Let’s go on a cycling tour!” and then looking at what rides were available in the fall, in October because, back in April, Europe was not doing a great job with vaccine roll-out. And that was our path to Puglia.&nbsp;</li><li>We’d done a self-guided cycling tour in southwest Scotland some years ago, but in southern Italy, never been here, not sure how much support there would be and how English would be spoken, we decided to go with a full tour. We narrowed the tour companies down to Trek Travel and Backroads. They both had good Puglia itineraries. I’d done a Trek tour in Moab, UT some years back, so we decided to give Backroads a shot.</li><li>There were 16 people on the tour, 12 of which were Backroads veterans; some very much so. One couple had done a Provence tour with them in July and another woman was doing back-to-back tours -- the week before she’d ridden their Sicily tour and then flew straight up to Bari for this tour. These veterans said that Backroads does a great job organizing everything; it makes travel easy. It’s kinda the same thing I hear from people who are big into cruising -- show up in some part of the world and have people take care of you. All that being said, after 6 days and 200 miles in the saddle, I came away happy (if a little sore) with the tour and impressed with the hospitality and service ethic of the Backroads tour guides.</li><li>We were riding through Puglia the week of October 10th which was probably a week too late because the towns were beginning to close up for the season. One day, we had a couple of hours in the hill town of Ostuni for lunch, but struggled to find places that were open. Many of the restaurants were dark, even though the signs on the doors said they should be open, as did the hours listed on their websites and their Google Maps listings. No signs saying “Closed for the season”, just locked doors through which we would see chairs on all the tables. We had similar experiences in Otronto and to a lesser extent in Lecce. One of the Backroads guides said that Puglia is a popular destination for Italian tourists from up north; many of them have vacation homes there. And when those folks head home, the remaining locals and handful of misdirected tourists aren’t enough to keep all the bars and restaurants going.</li><li>But the touring was great -- riding alongside groves of huge, old, gnarled olive trees with vegetable crops like fennel and bitter greens planted underneath; and along the Adriatic Sea, up on the ridge along the coastal road and then down through little beach towns and fishing villages.&nbsp;</li><li>And I think that’s the way to do Puglia, touring, doing a couple of days each in Bari and Lecce wandering through the narrow streets of their old towns, a day in Otronto, with half-day stops in Alberobello, Matera, and/or Ostuni, maybe a day or two hanging out in a nice agriturismo or one of those beach towns on the Adriatic.&nbsp;</li><li>We drank a lot of wine, mostly the local Primitivo, a grape closely related to California’s Zinfandel, and ate a lot of seafood, especially octopus. At dinner during our second night in Bari, a young guy walked in with two small clear plastic buckets full of small octopus, very similar to a bucket I saw at the feet of a fisherman at the dock earlier in the day. I don’t think the seafood we were eating that week had been out of the Adriatic for much more than 24 hours before it hit our plates.</li><li>It was a different experience, a different vibe from our prior trips to Italy, which had all been up north -- to Tuscany, to Milan, to Venice. But biking through those olive groves, those fields, those little towns; that’s the lower key experience we were looking for -- and got -- on our time in Puglia. If you want see pictures, head over to the TravelCommons’ Instagram site and click on Puglia/Sicily where I’ve collected some of the better Instagram Stories pictures.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #180</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social  -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_180.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #180 — Changing COVID Travel Requirements; Cycling Thru Puglia','','inherit','closed','closed','','3960-revision-v1','','','2021-10-28 10:49:38','2021-10-28 15:49:38','',3960,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3962',0,'revision','',0),
(3963,1,'2021-10-28 16:18:10','2021-10-28 21:18:10','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_1985\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/708473504_18da6d5b07_z1.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-3581 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/708473504_18da6d5b07_z1-300x225.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\"></a> Standing in Line! © Lance Smith/Flickr[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Not much travel, but a lot of travel planning for our first post-lockdown international trip to Italy. Trying to thread our way through changing COVID rules and Alitalia\'s bankruptcy throes. I\'m getting inundated with discount offers for <a href=\"https://www.clearme.com/\">Clear\'s fast-pass service</a>. I\'ve resisted them so far, because I remember back to when the first incarnation of Clear wanted to <a href=\"https://www.wired.com/2009/08/defunct-airport-fast-pass-company-banned-from-selling-customer-biometrics/\">sell its members\' biometric data</a>.  We then talk to <a href=\"https://www.xovis.com/en/home/\">Xovis Technology</a>\'s Cody Shulman about how airports are better managing all sorts of lines in airports. Finally, air passenger traffic is dropping again because business travelers are still missing-in-action (MIA). All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_180.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #180: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after 2 weeks in the south of Italy, a cycling tour through Puglia, and then visiting friends in Sicily; they’re grabbing one last bit of sunshine, topping up their vitamin D levels before the short, cold days of northern Europe’s winter sets in. I’ve talked in the last couple of episodes about travel planning for this trip, the changes, the shifts I’ve had to make, and about all the places, the segments that could’ve gone wrong -- but none of them did! For sure there was a little weirdness along the way, especially in Sicily, but every flight and train leg was on-time and pretty uneventful. </li><li>We hit what are now typical mask rule inconsistencies right off the bat in ORD. We walked into the Swissport Lounge that Air France and others use for business class and got the mask rules -- mask on unless actively eating or drinking; airplane rules -- and then walk into a small room with no food and a pretty dire bar. We sat down, but after a couple of minutes walked back out, straight down the concourse to <a href=\"https://www.rickbayless.com/restaurants/tortas-frontera/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tortas Frontera</a>, our favorite ORD restaurant, for good margaritas, and where they were applying Chicago indoor mask rules -- you can drop your mask once you’re at your table. It was worth paying $90 to drink quality in comfort rather than playing mask peek-a-boo with the Swissport’s free wine.</li><li>The next morning, DeGaulle was more confusing than I remember it being in 2019. Getting from Terminal 2E to 2F seemed to take more cognitive power than it should’ve; maybe I hadn’t gotten as much sleep on the flight over as I thought. But all in all, it was an easy, uneventful flight over to Italy.</li><li>As I expected it to be. My biggest worry was our flights the following week from Brindisi in Puglia to Catania in Sicily, connecting through Rome on what would be the second day of operations for ITA, the Italian government’s successor to the bankrupt Alitalia. This itinerary certainly wasn’t my first choice, but as I’ve mentioned in the last couple of episodes, I didn’t have another one. There were labor actions leading up to the switch over that had disrupted operations, and even without that, you’d figure there’d be at least a hundred places where some minor snafu could botch up their big Rome hub. But other than a couple of agents maybe staging an impromptu work slowdown at the Brindisi check-in desk (or that was just their normal pace), it all went smoothly. And really, across all our travel legs, but for wearing masks and having our vaccination cards checked, it didn’t seem all that different from 2019. Now I know that’s a pretty big “But for”, but I’ll happily take it.</li><li>Bridge Music — <em><em>Perfect Stranger</em> </em>by stellarartwars (c) 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/stellarartwars/45510 Ft: TheDice</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Jerry Sarfati hit the TravelCommons’ Instagram feed to say that he’s seen no delays in TSA’s Global Entry processing. Jerry said<ul><li>“Thanks for the latest podcast. I refreshed my Global Entry. Very easy. Was told 72 hours later that all was approved; no interview needed.”</li></ul></li><li>Thanks for that, Jerry. I just checked. A month-and-a-half later (936 hrs using Jerry’s unit of measure), the TTP Dashboard (Trusted Traveler Program) still shows an hourglass next to “Wait for Conditional Approval”. But I’m guessing I’m probably a bit more of a suspect character than you. </li><li>Twitter user @LAflyer weighed in on last episode’s discussion about how business travelers are still MIA (missing in action)<ul><li>“Thanks for the new episode. In my opinion, face-to-face is becoming increasingly the edge case. I think we’ve proven we can manage so much remotely that the need for on-site/in-person meetings will be the exception, not the rule anymore. That’s ok with me. I prefer my own bed over traveling 200,000 miles annually.”</li></ul></li><li>I think this is a valid and widely-held opinion/belief/hope -- that beginning in March 2020, we’ve now all lived through an extended crash course in remote work and video conference, we’ve done it successfully, and so can significantly reduce the need for business travel, which will allow people to spend more time in their own beds and with their families as well as reducing business expenses, and reducing airplane carbon emissions. How much business travel will be eliminated? That’s the big question that I’m guessing will take another year before we begin to see the answer.</li><li>Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/08/24/podcast-178-what-remains-from-pandemic-times-best-restaurant-and-bars/\" title=\"Podcast #178 — What Remains from Pandemic Times; Best Restaurant and Bars\">August episode</a>,  asking the question “What Will Remain from These Pandemic Times?” the death of daily hotel room cleaning service was at the top of my list. Indeed, Hilton had just announced their move to on-demand housekeeping across all their non-luxury brands. But in Italy, I saw none of this. Not only did every hotel service our rooms every day, they were still doing turndowns every night. And they were doing their regular breakfasts, though with staff plating your food from the buffet rather than you digging in yourself. Now, we weren’t staying at major brands; only small Italian brands or independents, so I don’t know if that changes things, but they were much better hotel experiences than I’ve had recently in the US.</li><li>I didn’t realize how aggressive Apple is about iOS updates until this trip. I update pretty quickly when I’m at home, but on this trip, it seemed like I had to wave off the 15.0.2 update every couple of days. I didn’t bring my laptop with me, so I had no way to recover on the slight chance that the upgrade bricked my iPhone -- without which I wouldn’t have been able to do the video chat session for the Abbott home test kit or display the test results, which was how we were getting back into the US. As if we didn’t know it already, you just can’t easily travel anymore without a <em>working</em> mobile phone.</li><li>I’ve talked in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food\">past </a><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\" title=\"10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times\">episodes</a> about how I will use a VPN, a virtual private network, when using public WiFi networks in hotels, airports, Starbucks to make my connection more secure. I’ve used all the top paid VPNs over the years -- ExpressVPN, NordVPN, PIA -- and am using NordVPN now. And I’ve never had a problem with nailing up a connection -- until this trip to Italy. More than a couple of times, the VPN client wouldn’t connect to an Italian server. So, as I’m too prone to do, I bitch-tweeted at NordVPN and, to their credit, they immediately responded. We flipped over the direct messaging and they started trouble-shooting. What finally worked was connecting to one of their obfuscated servers, specialized VPN servers that hide the fact that you’re using a VPN. I don’t know if there are Italian regulations against using VPNs or if it’s just a couple of Italian ISPs blocking VPNs for some reason. Whatever the reason, I give NordVPN props for constructively responding to my whining and quickly solving my problem.</li><li>Also back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/08/24/podcast-178-what-remains-from-pandemic-times-best-restaurant-and-bars/\" title=\"Podcast #178 — What Remains from Pandemic Times; Best Restaurant and Bars\">August episode</a> when talking about booking our travel over to Italy, I talked about burning off some Amex points to fly Air France business class. I think, by now, the standard business class seat is an individual pod that give you your own space, your own cocoon -- some are snugger than others, the buttons and amenities are a bit different -- but over the last 5-6 years, that’s what I’ve come to expect when I walk into a business class cabin. So when I got to my seat on this Air France 777, I was very underwhelmed -- no pods, just a standard 2-3-2 seat configuration with no separators between the seats. I tweeted out a couple of pictures. It wasn’t a great first impression. But the service was good, the food and wine were very good (as I’d expect from Air France) and they didn’t put a 3rd person in Irene’s and my center section. And I ended up sleeping very well, probably with the help of an after-dinner armagnac.</li><li>Flying home was Lufthansa from Catania to Munich and then United straight to ORD.  I wasn’t thrilled with the connection through Munich; the last time we’d connected through there, long lines at passport control and security had us sprinting down the concourse to make what should’ve been a reasonably timed connection. But this time, it wasn’t a problem. There was maybe a 5-minute queue at passport control and no additional security, so we had time to grab some breakfast in the Lufthansa lounge before heading down to the United gate. Walking to the gate, I said to Irene “Looks like they fixed whatever the problem was when we were last here ‘cause it’s been a smooth connection.” And as the word “smooth” left my mouth, we saw the line. Luckily, for us, we weren’t in it. There was a huge tailback out of passport control for people arriving from the US getting into the Schengen zone to make their connecting flights -- the same thing that happened to us. So they hadn’t fixed the problem. Arriving MUC <em>from</em> the US; still a problem. Leaving MUC <em>to</em> the US; not so much. I’ve filed that away for future reference.</li><li>Once on the United 787, I noticed that our seatback screens weren’t working. I mentioned this to the flight attendant when she came by to check on us. It wasn’t a problem; there was no one in the center section and all those screens were working, so we could just slide over if we wanted to. As it was, Irene was reading a book and I was listening to podcasts, so we didn’t need the screens. I just figured I’d tell the flight attendant so the ORD maintenance crew would know to look at it.  About halfway through the flight, the attendant comes back around and says she wants to give us something for our inconvenience. “I want to do something for you because you’ve been so nice about this,” she said. There was absolutely no inconvenience, but if United wants to give me free stuff, who am I to refuse. She pulled out her phone, opened an app, and for each of us, checked our e-mail addresses, and asked if we wanted 7,500 miles or $150 in credit (we took the money). And when we lit up our phones on the runway at ORD, we both had emails with the voucher details. I gotta be nice more often.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> or the <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram </a>account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — <em><em>Paint the Sky</em> </em>by Hans Atom (c) 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/hansatom/50718 Ft: Miss Judged</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Tracking COVID Travel Requirements</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>If my biggest worry on our Italy trip was our Saturday flights on ITA, my second, more chronic worry was that we’d get caught up in paperwork hassles at one of the borders we were crossing (France, Italy, Germany, the US), maybe missing something in all the different requirements, having some airport gate agent or train conductor or immigration guy enforcing their own unique interpretation; or not our paper CDC vaccination card not accepted in lieu of an EU Green Pass QR code on our phones. The great thing, as I said earlier, is that none of this came to pass. And at the end of each travel day, I let out a small sigh of relief -- just enough to feel good, but not so much that it might jinx the next travel day.  </li><li>Catania Airport, where we flew into and out of Sicily, was the only place that things got a little weird. We landed there at 8pm after a pretty flawless trains, planes, and automobiles travel day -- a on-time, almost empty train ride from Lecce to Brindisi, a taxi to the airport, the no-problem ITA flights, and now in Catania, our bags were the first ones to pop out on the luggage belt.  Another small sigh of relief and we walk out of baggage claim to meet our friend -- only to be waylaid by two security guards. “Where did you come from?” one of them asked. “Rome,” I said. “Where are you from?” “The US”. “Go to the line on the right,” she said. I looked at the sign; it said “COVID-19 test.”  Apparently, Sicily, or maybe just Catania, was requiring on-site COVID tests for non-EU arrivals. I was completely blindsided. There was nothing like this when we landed in Bari, in Puglia, 10 days earlier, and I didn’t see this anywhere on any of the <em>many</em> Italian governmental websites I checked before our trip. I looked down the testing line; it was beginning to tail back; this was going to be a bad time. “Wait! Wait a minute!” I said to the other guard, “We’ve been in Italy since the beginning of the month.” I pulled out my paper boarding passes that luckily I’d saved. “See, we started our flight in Brindisi; we just connected through Rome.” “You’ve been here two weeks?” he asked. Actually, it was more like 10 days, but I wasn’t going to correct his math. “OK, no need to test. Go to the left,” and he waved to his colleague to let us through. We quickly walked outside before either of them could change their minds and saw the COVID test line full of people trying to fill out forms on each other’s backs while standing in a line that led into a large room full of cubicles where yet more people were waiting to be tested. It looked like at least an hour’s worth of a very bad time. I was very happy the security guard was fluent enough in English to let me talk my way out of that line.</li><li>All the different shades of testing and tracking requirements -- by country, by state, even by city --  Italy requiring an EU digital passenger locator form, proof of vaccination, and a negative COVID test taken within 72 hours of arrival (vs. the US’s requirement that the test be taken within 72 hours of <em>departure</em>); Puglia adding to that another form to be filled out and emailed to the regional health department before arrival; there’s Sicily’s stealth on-arrival COVID testing, and I’m still trying to figure out exactly what the UK wants of us for our trip there in the back-half of November because it looks like the rules changed a bit this week.  It all keeps you a bit off-balance, a bit anxious that you’ve missed something which is going to land you in a long, expensive line somewhere.</li><li>The mechanics of it all caught me off-guard at first. Checking into our Air France flight in ORD, the agent checked our vaccination cards and digital passenger locator forms (which, in spite of being digital, I’d printed out to make it easier to show someone). When we arrived in Bari, we walked straight out of baggage claim to the terminal. There was no one to check any of our paperwork. The same thing happened to my son Andrew last month when he flew into Barcelona. It seems like governments have made all of this a boarding requirement and pushed the responsibility to check it onto the carrier. Kinda like the carrier checks your passport and visa to make sure you can get into the country you’re going to; they’ve tacked on these additional COVID requirements. But even then, when I land in a new country, there’s still someone in a booth checking my passport. Irene tried to show one border police guy her vaccination card and he just waved her off.</li><li>But Italy requires proof of vaccination to go inside a restaurant or bar or a cathedral or an airport, so while the border cops weren’t interested in our vaccination status, a lot of waiters were. We kept our CDC cards handy, tucked in our passports. I worried about places turning us away for not being able to show the EU Green Pass QR code, but again, I was happy to be wrong. There was only one place, a restaurant in Bari, where a young waitress hesitated when we showed her our CDC cards, but almost immediately, one of the older waiters ran up, looked at the cards and said it was all good. Maybe some of this is timing. When Italy first re-opened back in, what July?, and people were trying to figure things out on the fly, it would make sense that waiters or gate agents would turn away people with unfamiliar pieces of cardboard. But now, 2-3 months on, they seem to have figured it out. I’m hoping I can too</li><li>Bridge Music — <em>Dub the Uke</em> by Kara Square (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mindmapthat/53340 Ft: DJ Vadim</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong> Cycling Through Puglia</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>This trip didn’t start off with the idea “Let’s go to Puglia!” Instead, it started at the tired end of a Chicago winter as a combination of “Let’s go back to Europe” and “Let’s go on a cycling tour!” and then looking at what rides were available in the fall, in October because, back in April, Europe was not doing a great job with vaccine roll-out. And that was our path to Puglia.&nbsp;</li><li>We’d done a self-guided cycling tour in southwest Scotland some years ago, but in southern Italy, never been here, not sure how much support there would be and how English would be spoken, we decided to go with a full tour. We narrowed the tour companies down to Trek Travel and Backroads. They both had good Puglia itineraries. I’d done a Trek tour in Moab, UT some years back, so we decided to give Backroads a shot.</li><li>There were 16 people on the tour, 12 of which were Backroads veterans; some very much so. One couple had done a Provence tour with them in July and another woman was doing back-to-back tours -- the week before she’d ridden their Sicily tour and then flew straight up to Bari for this tour. These veterans said that Backroads does a great job organizing everything; it makes travel easy. It’s kinda the same thing I hear from people who are big into cruising -- show up in some part of the world and have people take care of you. All that being said, after 6 days and 200 miles in the saddle, I came away happy (if a little sore) with the tour and impressed with the hospitality and service ethic of the Backroads tour guides.</li><li>We were riding through Puglia the week of October 10th which was probably a week too late because the towns were beginning to close up for the season. One day, we had a couple of hours in the hill town of Ostuni for lunch, but struggled to find places that were open. Many of the restaurants were dark, even though the signs on the doors said they should be open, as did the hours listed on their websites and their Google Maps listings. No signs saying “Closed for the season”, just locked doors through which we would see chairs on all the tables. We had similar experiences in Otronto and to a lesser extent in Lecce. One of the Backroads guides said that Puglia is a popular destination for Italian tourists from up north; many of them have vacation homes there. And when those folks head home, the remaining locals and handful of misdirected tourists aren’t enough to keep all the bars and restaurants going.</li><li>But the touring was great -- riding alongside groves of huge, old, gnarled olive trees with vegetable crops like fennel and bitter greens planted underneath; and along the Adriatic Sea, up on the ridge along the coastal road and then down through little beach towns and fishing villages.&nbsp;</li><li>And I think that’s the way to do Puglia, touring, doing a couple of days each in Bari and Lecce wandering through the narrow streets of their old towns, a day in Otronto, with half-day stops in Alberobello, Matera, and/or Ostuni, maybe a day or two hanging out in a nice agriturismo or one of those beach towns on the Adriatic.&nbsp;</li><li>We drank a lot of wine, mostly the local Primitivo, a grape closely related to California’s Zinfandel, and ate a lot of seafood, especially octopus. At dinner during our second night in Bari, a young guy walked in with two small clear plastic buckets full of small octopus, very similar to a bucket I saw at the feet of a fisherman at the dock earlier in the day. I don’t think the seafood we were eating that week had been out of the Adriatic for much more than 24 hours before it hit our plates.</li><li>It was a different experience, a different vibe from our prior trips to Italy, which had all been up north -- to Tuscany, to Milan, to Venice. But biking through those olive groves, those fields, those little towns; that’s the lower key experience we were looking for -- and got -- on our time in Puglia. If you want see pictures, head over to the TravelCommons’ Instagram site and click on Puglia/Sicily where I’ve collected some of the better Instagram Stories pictures.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #180</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social  -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_180.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #180 — Changing COVID Travel Requirements; Cycling Thru Puglia','','inherit','closed','closed','','3960-revision-v1','','','2021-10-28 16:18:10','2021-10-28 21:18:10','',3960,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3963',0,'revision','',0),
(3964,1,'2021-10-28 16:29:41','2021-10-28 21:29:41','','IMG_3845','','inherit','open','closed','','img_3845','','','2021-12-10 10:27:49','2021-12-10 15:27:49','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/IMG_3845.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(3965,1,'2021-10-28 16:33:51','2021-10-28 21:33:51','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_1985\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/IMG_3845.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-3581 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/IMG_3845-300x300.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a>Gotta Stay Hydrated[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Not much travel, but a lot of travel planning for our first post-lockdown international trip to Italy. Trying to thread our way through changing COVID rules and Alitalia\'s bankruptcy throes. I\'m getting inundated with discount offers for <a href=\"https://www.clearme.com/\">Clear\'s fast-pass service</a>. I\'ve resisted them so far, because I remember back to when the first incarnation of Clear wanted to <a href=\"https://www.wired.com/2009/08/defunct-airport-fast-pass-company-banned-from-selling-customer-biometrics/\">sell its members\' biometric data</a>.  We then talk to <a href=\"https://www.xovis.com/en/home/\">Xovis Technology</a>\'s Cody Shulman about how airports are better managing all sorts of lines in airports. Finally, air passenger traffic is dropping again because business travelers are still missing-in-action (MIA). All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_180.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #180: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after 2 weeks in the south of Italy, a cycling tour through Puglia, and then visiting friends in Sicily; they’re grabbing one last bit of sunshine, topping up their vitamin D levels before the short, cold days of northern Europe’s winter sets in. I’ve talked in the last couple of episodes about travel planning for this trip, the changes, the shifts I’ve had to make, and about all the places, the segments that could’ve gone wrong -- but none of them did! For sure there was a little weirdness along the way, especially in Sicily, but every flight and train leg was on-time and pretty uneventful.&nbsp;</li><li>We hit what are now typical mask rule inconsistencies right off the bat in ORD. We walked into the Swissport Lounge that Air France and others use for business class and got the mask rules -- mask on unless actively eating or drinking; airplane rules -- and then walk into a small room with no food and a pretty dire bar. We sat down, but after a couple of minutes walked back out, straight down the concourse to <a href=\"https://www.rickbayless.com/restaurants/tortas-frontera/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tortas Frontera</a>, our favorite ORD restaurant, for good margaritas, and where they were applying Chicago indoor mask rules -- you can drop your mask once you’re at your table. It was worth paying $90 to drink quality in comfort rather than playing mask peek-a-boo with the Swissport’s free wine.</li><li>The next morning, DeGaulle was more confusing than I remember it being in 2019. Getting from Terminal 2E to 2F seemed to take more cognitive power than it should’ve; maybe I hadn’t gotten as much sleep on the flight over as I thought. But all in all, it was an easy, uneventful flight over to Italy.</li><li>As I expected it to be. My biggest worry was our flights the following week from Brindisi in Puglia to Catania in Sicily, connecting through Rome on what would be the second day of operations for ITA, the Italian government’s successor to the bankrupt Alitalia. This itinerary certainly wasn’t my first choice, but as I’ve mentioned in the last couple of episodes, I didn’t have another one. There were labor actions leading up to the switch over that had disrupted operations, and even without that, you’d figure there’d be at least a hundred places where some minor snafu could botch up their big Rome hub. But other than a couple of agents maybe staging an impromptu work slowdown at the Brindisi check-in desk (or that was just their normal pace), it all went smoothly. And really, across all our travel legs, but for wearing masks and having our vaccination cards checked, it didn’t seem all that different from 2019. Now I know that’s a pretty big “But for”, but I’ll happily take it.</li><li>Bridge Music — <em><em>Perfect Stranger</em>&nbsp;</em>by stellarartwars (c) 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/stellarartwars/45510 Ft: TheDice</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Jerry Sarfati hit the TravelCommons’ Instagram feed to say that he’s seen no delays in TSA’s Global Entry processing. Jerry said<ul><li>“Thanks for the latest podcast. I refreshed my Global Entry. Very easy. Was told 72 hours later that all was approved; no interview needed.”</li></ul></li><li>Thanks for that, Jerry. I just checked. A month-and-a-half later (936 hrs using Jerry’s unit of measure), the TTP Dashboard (Trusted Traveler Program) still shows an hourglass next to “Wait for Conditional Approval”. But I’m guessing I’m probably a bit more of a suspect character than you.&nbsp;</li><li>Twitter user @LAflyer weighed in on last episode’s discussion about how business travelers are still MIA (missing in action)<ul><li>“Thanks for the new episode. In my opinion, face-to-face is becoming increasingly the edge case. I think we’ve proven we can manage so much remotely that the need for on-site/in-person meetings will be the exception, not the rule anymore. That’s ok with me. I prefer my own bed over traveling 200,000 miles annually.”</li></ul></li><li>I think this is a valid and widely-held opinion/belief/hope -- that beginning in March 2020, we’ve now all lived through an extended crash course in remote work and video conference, we’ve done it successfully, and so can significantly reduce the need for business travel, which will allow people to spend more time in their own beds and with their families as well as reducing business expenses, and reducing airplane carbon emissions. How much business travel will be eliminated? That’s the big question that I’m guessing will take another year before we begin to see the answer.</li><li>Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/08/24/podcast-178-what-remains-from-pandemic-times-best-restaurant-and-bars/\" title=\"Podcast #178 — What Remains from Pandemic Times; Best Restaurant and Bars\">August episode</a>,&nbsp; asking the question “What Will Remain from These Pandemic Times?” the death of daily hotel room cleaning service was at the top of my list. Indeed, Hilton had just announced their move to on-demand housekeeping across all their non-luxury brands. But in Italy, I saw none of this. Not only did every hotel service our rooms every day, they were still doing turndowns every night. And they were doing their regular breakfasts, though with staff plating your food from the buffet rather than you digging in yourself. Now, we weren’t staying at major brands; only small Italian brands or independents, so I don’t know if that changes things, but they were much better hotel experiences than I’ve had recently in the US.</li><li>I didn’t realize how aggressive Apple is about iOS updates until this trip. I update pretty quickly when I’m at home, but on this trip, it seemed like I had to wave off the 15.0.2 update every couple of days. I didn’t bring my laptop with me, so I had no way to recover on the slight chance that the upgrade bricked my iPhone -- without which I wouldn’t have been able to do the video chat session for the Abbott home test kit or display the test results, which was how we were getting back into the US. As if we didn’t know it already, you just can’t easily travel anymore without a <em>working</em> mobile phone.</li><li>I’ve talked in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food\">past </a><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\" title=\"10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times\">episodes</a> about how I will use a VPN, a virtual private network, when using public WiFi networks in hotels, airports, Starbucks to make my connection more secure. I’ve used all the top paid VPNs over the years -- ExpressVPN, NordVPN, PIA -- and am using NordVPN now. And I’ve never had a problem with nailing up a connection -- until this trip to Italy. More than a couple of times, the VPN client wouldn’t connect to an Italian server. So, as I’m too prone to do, I bitch-tweeted at NordVPN and, to their credit, they immediately responded. We flipped over the direct messaging and they started trouble-shooting. What finally worked was connecting to one of their obfuscated servers, specialized VPN servers that hide the fact that you’re using a VPN. I don’t know if there are Italian regulations against using VPNs or if it’s just a couple of Italian ISPs blocking VPNs for some reason. Whatever the reason, I give NordVPN props for constructively responding to my whining and quickly solving my problem.</li><li>Also back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/08/24/podcast-178-what-remains-from-pandemic-times-best-restaurant-and-bars/\" title=\"Podcast #178 — What Remains from Pandemic Times; Best Restaurant and Bars\">August episode</a> when talking about booking our travel over to Italy, I talked about burning off some Amex points to fly Air France business class. I think, by now, the standard business class seat is an individual pod that give you your own space, your own cocoon -- some are snugger than others, the buttons and amenities are a bit different -- but over the last 5-6 years, that’s what I’ve come to expect when I walk into a business class cabin. So when I got to my seat on this Air France 777, I was very underwhelmed -- no pods, just a standard 2-3-2 seat configuration with no separators between the seats. I tweeted out a couple of pictures. It wasn’t a great first impression. But the service was good, the food and wine were very good (as I’d expect from Air France) and they didn’t put a 3rd person in Irene’s and my center section. And I ended up sleeping very well, probably with the help of an after-dinner armagnac.</li><li>Flying home was Lufthansa from Catania to Munich and then United straight to ORD.&nbsp; I wasn’t thrilled with the connection through Munich; the last time we’d connected through there, long lines at passport control and security had us sprinting down the concourse to make what should’ve been a reasonably timed connection. But this time, it wasn’t a problem. There was maybe a 5-minute queue at passport control and no additional security, so we had time to grab some breakfast in the Lufthansa lounge before heading down to the United gate. Walking to the gate, I said to Irene “Looks like they fixed whatever the problem was when we were last here ‘cause it’s been a smooth connection.” And as the word “smooth” left my mouth, we saw the line. Luckily, for us, we weren’t in it. There was a huge tailback out of passport control for people arriving from the US getting into the Schengen zone to make their connecting flights -- the same thing that happened to us. So they hadn’t fixed the problem. Arriving MUC <em>from</em> the US; still a problem. Leaving MUC <em>to</em> the US; not so much. I’ve filed that away for future reference.</li><li>Once on the United 787, I noticed that our seatback screens weren’t working. I mentioned this to the flight attendant when she came by to check on us. It wasn’t a problem; there was no one in the center section and all those screens were working, so we could just slide over if we wanted to. As it was, Irene was reading a book and I was listening to podcasts, so we didn’t need the screens. I just figured I’d tell the flight attendant so the ORD maintenance crew would know to look at it.&nbsp; About halfway through the flight, the attendant comes back around and says she wants to give us something for our inconvenience. “I want to do something for you because you’ve been so nice about this,” she said. There was absolutely no inconvenience, but if United wants to give me free stuff, who am I to refuse. She pulled out her phone, opened an app, and for each of us, checked our e-mail addresses, and asked if we wanted 7,500 miles or $150 in credit (we took the money). And when we lit up our phones on the runway at ORD, we both had emails with the voucher details. I gotta be nice more often.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> or the <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram </a>account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — <em><em>Paint the Sky</em>&nbsp;</em>by Hans Atom (c) 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/hansatom/50718 Ft: Miss Judged</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Tracking COVID Travel Requirements</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>If my biggest worry on our Italy trip was our Saturday flights on ITA, my second, more chronic worry was that we’d get caught up in paperwork hassles at one of the borders we were crossing (France, Italy, Germany, the US), maybe missing something in all the different requirements, having some airport gate agent or train conductor or immigration guy enforcing their own unique interpretation; or not our paper CDC vaccination card not accepted in lieu of an EU Green Pass QR code on our phones. The great thing, as I said earlier, is that none of this came to pass. And at the end of each travel day, I let out a small sigh of relief -- just enough to feel good, but not so much that it might jinx the next travel day.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>Catania Airport, where we flew into and out of Sicily, was the only place that things got a little weird. We landed there at 8pm after a pretty flawless trains, planes, and automobiles travel day -- a on-time, almost empty train ride from Lecce to Brindisi, a taxi to the airport, the no-problem ITA flights, and now in Catania, our bags were the first ones to pop out on the luggage belt.&nbsp; Another small sigh of relief and we walk out of baggage claim to meet our friend -- only to be waylaid by two security guards. “Where did you come from?” one of them asked. “Rome,” I said. “Where are you from?” “The US”. “Go to the line on the right,” she said. I looked at the sign; it said “COVID-19 test.”&nbsp; Apparently, Sicily, or maybe just Catania, was requiring on-site COVID tests for non-EU arrivals. I was completely blindsided. There was nothing like this when we landed in Bari, in Puglia, 10 days earlier, and I didn’t see this anywhere on any of the <em>many</em> Italian governmental websites I checked before our trip. I looked down the testing line; it was beginning to tail back; this was going to be a bad time. “Wait! Wait a minute!” I said to the other guard, “We’ve been in Italy since the beginning of the month.” I pulled out my paper boarding passes that luckily I’d saved. “See, we started our flight in Brindisi; we just connected through Rome.” “You’ve been here two weeks?” he asked. Actually, it was more like 10 days, but I wasn’t going to correct his math. “OK, no need to test. Go to the left,” and he waved to his colleague to let us through. We quickly walked outside before either of them could change their minds and saw the COVID test line full of people trying to fill out forms on each other’s backs while standing in a line that led into a large room full of cubicles where yet more people were waiting to be tested. It looked like at least an hour’s worth of a very bad time. I was very happy the security guard was fluent enough in English to let me talk my way out of that line.</li><li>All the different shades of testing and tracking requirements -- by country, by state, even by city --&nbsp; Italy requiring an EU digital passenger locator form, proof of vaccination, and a negative COVID test taken within 72 hours of arrival (vs. the US’s requirement that the test be taken within 72 hours of <em>departure</em>); Puglia adding to that another form to be filled out and emailed to the regional health department before arrival; there’s Sicily’s stealth on-arrival COVID testing, and I’m still trying to figure out exactly what the UK wants of us for our trip there in the back-half of November because it looks like the rules changed a bit this week.&nbsp; It all keeps you a bit off-balance, a bit anxious that you’ve missed something which is going to land you in a long, expensive line somewhere.</li><li>The mechanics of it all caught me off-guard at first. Checking into our Air France flight in ORD, the agent checked our vaccination cards and digital passenger locator forms (which, in spite of being digital, I’d printed out to make it easier to show someone). When we arrived in Bari, we walked straight out of baggage claim to the terminal. There was no one to check any of our paperwork. The same thing happened to my son Andrew last month when he flew into Barcelona. It seems like governments have made all of this a boarding requirement and pushed the responsibility to check it onto the carrier. Kinda like the carrier checks your passport and visa to make sure you can get into the country you’re going to; they’ve tacked on these additional COVID requirements. But even then, when I land in a new country, there’s still someone in a booth checking my passport. Irene tried to show one border police guy her vaccination card and he just waved her off.</li><li>But Italy requires proof of vaccination to go inside a restaurant or bar or a cathedral or an airport, so while the border cops weren’t interested in our vaccination status, a lot of waiters were. We kept our CDC cards handy, tucked in our passports. I worried about places turning us away for not being able to show the EU Green Pass QR code, but again, I was happy to be wrong. There was only one place, a restaurant in Bari, where a young waitress hesitated when we showed her our CDC cards, but almost immediately, one of the older waiters ran up, looked at the cards and said it was all good. Maybe some of this is timing. When Italy first re-opened back in, what July?, and people were trying to figure things out on the fly, it would make sense that waiters or gate agents would turn away people with unfamiliar pieces of cardboard. But now, 2-3 months on, they seem to have figured it out. I’m hoping I can too</li><li>Bridge Music — <em>Dub the Uke</em> by Kara Square (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mindmapthat/53340 Ft: DJ Vadim</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>&nbsp;Cycling Through Puglia</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>This trip didn’t start off with the idea “Let’s go to Puglia!” Instead, it started at the tired end of a Chicago winter as a combination of “Let’s go back to Europe” and “Let’s go on a cycling tour!” and then looking at what rides were available in the fall, in October because, back in April, Europe was not doing a great job with vaccine roll-out. And that was our path to Puglia.&nbsp;</li><li>We’d done a self-guided cycling tour in southwest Scotland some years ago, but in southern Italy, never been here, not sure how much support there would be and how English would be spoken, we decided to go with a full tour. We narrowed the tour companies down to Trek Travel and Backroads. They both had good Puglia itineraries. I’d done a Trek tour in Moab, UT some years back, so we decided to give Backroads a shot.</li><li>There were 16 people on the tour, 12 of which were Backroads veterans; some very much so. One couple had done a Provence tour with them in July and another woman was doing back-to-back tours -- the week before she’d ridden their Sicily tour and then flew straight up to Bari for this tour. These veterans said that Backroads does a great job organizing everything; it makes travel easy. It’s kinda the same thing I hear from people who are big into cruising -- show up in some part of the world and have people take care of you. All that being said, after 6 days and 200 miles in the saddle, I came away happy (if a little sore) with the tour and impressed with the hospitality and service ethic of the Backroads tour guides.</li><li>We were riding through Puglia the week of October 10th which was probably a week too late because the towns were beginning to close up for the season. One day, we had a couple of hours in the hill town of Ostuni for lunch, but struggled to find places that were open. Many of the restaurants were dark, even though the signs on the doors said they should be open, as did the hours listed on their websites and their Google Maps listings. No signs saying “Closed for the season”, just locked doors through which we would see chairs on all the tables. We had similar experiences in Otronto and to a lesser extent in Lecce. One of the Backroads guides said that Puglia is a popular destination for Italian tourists from up north; many of them have vacation homes there. And when those folks head home, the remaining locals and handful of misdirected tourists aren’t enough to keep all the bars and restaurants going.</li><li>But the touring was great -- riding alongside groves of huge, old, gnarled olive trees with vegetable crops like fennel and bitter greens planted underneath; and along the Adriatic Sea, up on the ridge along the coastal road and then down through little beach towns and fishing villages.&nbsp;</li><li>And I think that’s the way to do Puglia, touring, doing a couple of days each in Bari and Lecce wandering through the narrow streets of their old towns, a day in Otronto, with half-day stops in Alberobello, Matera, and/or Ostuni, maybe a day or two hanging out in a nice agriturismo or one of those beach towns on the Adriatic.&nbsp;</li><li>We drank a lot of wine, mostly the local Primitivo, a grape closely related to California’s Zinfandel, and ate a lot of seafood, especially octopus. At dinner during our second night in Bari, a young guy walked in with two small clear plastic buckets full of small octopus, very similar to a bucket I saw at the feet of a fisherman at the dock earlier in the day. I don’t think the seafood we were eating that week had been out of the Adriatic for much more than 24 hours before it hit our plates.</li><li>It was a different experience, a different vibe from our prior trips to Italy, which had all been up north -- to Tuscany, to Milan, to Venice. But biking through those olive groves, those fields, those little towns; that’s the lower key experience we were looking for -- and got -- on our time in Puglia. If you want see pictures, head over to the TravelCommons’ Instagram site and click on Puglia/Sicily where I’ve collected some of the better Instagram Stories pictures.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #180</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_180.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #180 — Tracking COVID Travel Requirements; Cycling Thru Puglia','','inherit','closed','closed','','3960-revision-v1','','','2021-10-28 16:33:51','2021-10-28 21:33:51','',3960,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3965',0,'revision','',0),
(3966,1,'2021-10-28 17:22:57','2021-10-28 22:22:57','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_1985\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/IMG_3845.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-3581 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/IMG_3845-300x300.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a>Gotta Stay Hydrated[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Back at the microphone after two weeks in Southern Italy. Lots of travel segments that could\'ve gone wrong, but none of them did. We talk about what international travel is like in COVID times, about the challenge of keeping track and complying with the different COVID travel requirements that seem to be constantly changing, and then some thoughts about our bike tour through Puglia with <a href=\"https://www.backroads.com/trips/BPLQ/puglia-italy-biking-tour\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Backroads</a>. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_180.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #180: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after 2 weeks in the south of Italy, a <a href=\"https://www.backroads.com/trips/BPLQ/puglia-italy-biking-tour\">cycling tour through Puglia</a>, and then visiting friends in Sicily; they’re grabbing one last bit of sunshine, topping up their vitamin D levels before the short, cold days of northern Europe’s winter sets in. I’ve talked in the last couple of episodes about travel planning for this trip, the changes, the shifts I’ve had to make, and about all the places, the segments that could’ve gone wrong -- but none of them did! For sure there was a little weirdness along the way, especially in Sicily, but every flight and train leg was on-time and pretty uneventful. </li><li>We hit what are now typical mask rule inconsistencies right off the bat in ORD. We walked into the Swissport Lounge that Air France and others use for business class and got the mask rules -- mask on unless actively eating or drinking; airplane rules -- and then walk into a small room with no food and a pretty dire bar. We sat down, but after a couple of minutes walked back out, straight down the concourse to <a href=\"https://www.rickbayless.com/restaurants/tortas-frontera/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tortas Frontera</a>, our favorite ORD restaurant, for good margaritas, and where they were applying Chicago indoor mask rules -- you can drop your mask once you’re at your table. It was worth paying $90 to drink quality in comfort rather than playing mask peek-a-boo with the Swissport’s free wine.</li><li>The next morning, DeGaulle was more confusing than I remember it being in 2019. Getting from Terminal 2E to 2F seemed to take more cognitive power than it should’ve; maybe I hadn’t gotten as much sleep on the flight over as I thought. But all in all, it was an easy, uneventful flight over to Italy.</li><li>As I expected it to be. My biggest worry was our flights the following week from Brindisi in Puglia to Catania in Sicily, connecting through Rome on what would be the second day of operations for ITA, the Italian government’s successor to the bankrupt Alitalia. This itinerary certainly wasn’t my first choice, but as I’ve mentioned in the last couple of episodes, I didn’t have another one. There were labor actions leading up to the switch over that had disrupted operations, and even without that, you’d figure there’d be at least a hundred places where some minor snafu could botch up their big Rome hub. But other than a couple of agents maybe staging an impromptu work slowdown at the Brindisi check-in desk (or that was just their normal pace), it all went smoothly. And really, across all our travel legs, but for wearing masks and having our vaccination cards checked, it didn’t seem all that different from 2019. Now I know that’s a pretty big “But for”, but I’ll happily take it.</li><li>Bridge Music — <em><em>Perfect Stranger</em> </em>by stellarartwars (c) 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/stellarartwars/45510 Ft: TheDice</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Jerry Sarfati hit the TravelCommons’ Instagram feed to say that he’s seen no delays in TSA’s Global Entry processing. Jerry said<ul><li>“Thanks for the latest podcast. I refreshed my Global Entry. Very easy. Was told 72 hours later that all was approved; no interview needed.”</li></ul></li><li>Thanks for that, Jerry. I just checked. A month-and-a-half later (936 hrs using Jerry’s unit of measure), the TTP Dashboard (Trusted Traveler Program) still shows an hourglass next to “Wait for Conditional Approval”. But I’m guessing I’m probably a bit more of a suspect character than you.&nbsp;</li><li>Twitter user @LAflyer weighed in on last episode’s discussion about how business travelers are still MIA (missing in action)<ul><li>“Thanks for the new episode. In my opinion, face-to-face is becoming increasingly the edge case. I think we’ve proven we can manage so much remotely that the need for on-site/in-person meetings will be the exception, not the rule anymore. That’s ok with me. I prefer my own bed over traveling 200,000 miles annually.”</li></ul></li><li>I think this is a valid and widely-held opinion/belief/hope -- that beginning in March 2020, we’ve now all lived through an extended crash course in remote work and video conference, we’ve done it successfully, and so can significantly reduce the need for business travel, which will allow people to spend more time in their own beds and with their families as well as reducing business expenses, and reducing airplane carbon emissions. How much business travel will be eliminated? That’s the big question that I’m guessing will take another year before we begin to see the answer.</li><li>Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/08/24/podcast-178-what-remains-from-pandemic-times-best-restaurant-and-bars/\" title=\"Podcast #178 — What Remains from Pandemic Times; Best Restaurant and Bars\">August episode</a>,&nbsp; asking the question “What Will Remain from These Pandemic Times?” the death of daily hotel room cleaning service was at the top of my list. Indeed, Hilton had just announced their move to on-demand housekeeping across all their non-luxury brands. But in Italy, I saw none of this. Not only did every hotel service our rooms every day, they were still doing turndowns every night. And they were doing their regular breakfasts, though with staff plating your food from the buffet rather than you digging in yourself. Now, we weren’t staying at major brands; only small Italian brands or independents, so I don’t know if that changes things, but they were much better hotel experiences than I’ve had recently in the US.</li><li>I didn’t realize how aggressive Apple is about iOS updates until this trip. I update pretty quickly when I’m at home, but on this trip, it seemed like I had to wave off the 15.0.2 update every couple of days. I didn’t bring my laptop with me, so I had no way to recover on the slight chance that the upgrade bricked my iPhone -- without which I wouldn’t have been able to do the video chat session for the Abbott home test kit or display the test results, which was how we were getting back into the US. As if we didn’t know it already, you just can’t easily travel anymore without a <em>working</em> mobile phone.</li><li>I’ve talked in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food\">past </a><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\" title=\"10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times\">episodes</a> about how I will use a VPN, a virtual private network, when using public WiFi networks in hotels, airports, Starbucks to make my connection more secure. I’ve used all the top paid VPNs over the years -- ExpressVPN, NordVPN, PIA -- and am using NordVPN now. And I’ve never had a problem with nailing up a connection -- until this trip to Italy. More than a couple of times, the VPN client wouldn’t connect to an Italian server. So, as I’m too prone to do, I bitch-tweeted at NordVPN and, to their credit, they immediately responded. We flipped over the direct messaging and they started trouble-shooting. What finally worked was connecting to one of their obfuscated servers, specialized VPN servers that hide the fact that you’re using a VPN. I don’t know if there are Italian regulations against using VPNs or if it’s just a couple of Italian ISPs blocking VPNs for some reason. Whatever the reason, I give NordVPN props for constructively responding to my whining and quickly solving my problem.</li><li>Also back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/08/24/podcast-178-what-remains-from-pandemic-times-best-restaurant-and-bars/\" title=\"Podcast #178 — What Remains from Pandemic Times; Best Restaurant and Bars\">August episode</a> when talking about booking our travel over to Italy, I talked about burning off some Amex points to fly Air France business class. I think, by now, the standard business class seat is an individual pod that give you your own space, your own cocoon -- some are snugger than others, the buttons and amenities are a bit different -- but over the last 5-6 years, that’s what I’ve come to expect when I walk into a business class cabin. So when I got to my seat on this Air France 777, I was very underwhelmed -- no pods, just a standard 2-3-2 seat configuration with no separators between the seats. I tweeted out a couple of pictures. It wasn’t a great first impression. But the service was good, the food and wine were very good (as I’d expect from Air France) and they didn’t put a 3rd person in Irene’s and my center section. And I ended up sleeping very well, probably with the help of an after-dinner armagnac.</li><li>Flying home was Lufthansa from Catania to Munich and then United straight to ORD.&nbsp; I wasn’t thrilled with the connection through Munich; the last time we’d connected through there, long lines at passport control and security had us sprinting down the concourse to make what should’ve been a reasonably timed connection. But this time, it wasn’t a problem. There was maybe a 5-minute queue at passport control and no additional security, so we had time to grab some breakfast in the Lufthansa lounge before heading down to the United gate. Walking to the gate, I said to Irene “Looks like they fixed whatever the problem was when we were last here ‘cause it’s been a smooth connection.” And as the word “smooth” left my mouth, we saw the line. Luckily, for us, we weren’t in it. There was a huge tailback out of passport control for people arriving from the US getting into the Schengen zone to make their connecting flights -- the same thing that happened to us. So they hadn’t fixed the problem. Arriving MUC <em>from</em> the US; still a problem. Leaving MUC <em>to</em> the US; not so much. I’ve filed that away for future reference.</li><li>Once on the United 787, I noticed that our seatback screens weren’t working. I mentioned this to the flight attendant when she came by to check on us. It wasn’t a problem; there was no one in the center section and all those screens were working, so we could just slide over if we wanted to. As it was, Irene was reading a book and I was listening to podcasts, so we didn’t need the screens. I just figured I’d tell the flight attendant so the ORD maintenance crew would know to look at it.&nbsp; About halfway through the flight, the attendant comes back around and says she wants to give us something for our inconvenience. “I want to do something for you because you’ve been so nice about this,” she said. There was absolutely no inconvenience, but if United wants to give me free stuff, who am I to refuse. She pulled out her phone, opened an app, and for each of us, checked our e-mail addresses, and asked if we wanted 7,500 miles or $150 in credit (we took the money). And when we lit up our phones on the runway at ORD, we both had emails with the voucher details. I gotta be nice more often.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> or the <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram </a>account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — <em><em>Paint the Sky</em>&nbsp;</em>by Hans Atom (c) 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/hansatom/50718 Ft: Miss Judged</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Tracking COVID Travel Requirements</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>If my biggest worry on our Italy trip was our Saturday flights on ITA, my second, more chronic worry was that we’d get caught up in paperwork hassles at one of the borders we were crossing (France, Italy, Germany, the US), maybe missing something in all the different requirements, having some airport gate agent or train conductor or immigration guy enforcing their own unique interpretation; or not our paper CDC vaccination card not accepted in lieu of an EU Green Pass QR code on our phones. The great thing, as I said earlier, is that none of this came to pass. And at the end of each travel day, I let out a small sigh of relief -- just enough to feel good, but not so much that it might jinx the next travel day.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>Catania Airport, where we flew into and out of Sicily, was the only place that things got a little weird. We landed there at 8pm after a pretty flawless trains, planes, and automobiles travel day -- a on-time, almost empty train ride from Lecce to Brindisi, a taxi to the airport, the no-problem ITA flights, and now in Catania, our bags were the first ones to pop out on the luggage belt.&nbsp; Another small sigh of relief and we walk out of baggage claim to meet our friend -- only to be waylaid by two security guards. “Where did you come from?” one of them asked. “Rome,” I said. “Where are you from?” “The US”. “Go to the line on the right,” she said. I looked at the sign; it said “COVID-19 test.”&nbsp; Apparently, Sicily, or maybe just Catania, was requiring on-site COVID tests for non-EU arrivals. I was completely blindsided. There was nothing like this when we landed in Bari, in Puglia, 10 days earlier, and I didn’t see this anywhere on any of the <em>many</em> Italian governmental websites I checked before our trip. I looked down the testing line; it was beginning to tail back; this was going to be a bad time. “Wait! Wait a minute!” I said to the other guard, “We’ve been in Italy since the beginning of the month.” I pulled out my paper boarding passes that luckily I’d saved. “See, we started our flight in Brindisi; we just connected through Rome.” “You’ve been here two weeks?” he asked. Actually, it was more like 10 days, but I wasn’t going to correct his math. “OK, no need to test. Go to the left,” and he waved to his colleague to let us through. We quickly walked outside before either of them could change their minds and saw the COVID test line full of people trying to fill out forms on each other’s backs while standing in a line that led into a large room full of cubicles where yet more people were waiting to be tested. It looked like at least an hour’s worth of a very bad time. I was very happy the security guard was fluent enough in English to let me talk my way out of that line.</li><li>All the different shades of testing and tracking requirements -- by country, by state, even by city --&nbsp; Italy requiring an EU digital passenger locator form, proof of vaccination, and a negative COVID test taken within 72 hours of arrival (vs. the US’s requirement that the test be taken within 72 hours of <em>departure</em>); Puglia adding to that another form to be filled out and emailed to the regional health department before arrival; there’s Sicily’s stealth on-arrival COVID testing, and I’m still trying to figure out exactly what the UK wants of us for our trip there in the back-half of November because it looks like the rules changed a bit this week.&nbsp; It all keeps you a bit off-balance, a bit anxious that you’ve missed something which is going to land you in a long, expensive line somewhere.</li><li>The mechanics of it all caught me off-guard at first. Checking into our Air France flight in ORD, the agent checked our vaccination cards and digital passenger locator forms (which, in spite of being digital, I’d printed out to make it easier to show someone). When we arrived in Bari, we walked straight out of baggage claim to the terminal. There was no one to check any of our paperwork. The same thing happened to my son Andrew last month when he flew into Barcelona. It seems like governments have made all of this a boarding requirement and pushed the responsibility to check it onto the carrier. Kinda like the carrier checks your passport and visa to make sure you can get into the country you’re going to; they’ve tacked on these additional COVID requirements. But even then, when I land in a new country, there’s still someone in a booth checking my passport. Irene tried to show one border police guy her vaccination card and he just waved her off.</li><li>But Italy requires proof of vaccination to go inside a restaurant or bar or a cathedral or an airport, so while the border cops weren’t interested in our vaccination status, a lot of waiters were. We kept our CDC cards handy, tucked in our passports. I worried about places turning us away for not being able to show the EU Green Pass QR code, but again, I was happy to be wrong. There was only one place, a restaurant in Bari, where a young waitress hesitated when we showed her our CDC cards, but almost immediately, one of the older waiters ran up, looked at the cards and said it was all good. Maybe some of this is timing. When Italy first re-opened back in, what July?, and people were trying to figure things out on the fly, it would make sense that waiters or gate agents would turn away people with unfamiliar pieces of cardboard. But now, 2-3 months on, they seem to have figured it out. I’m hoping I can too</li><li>Bridge Music — <em>Dub the Uke</em> by Kara Square (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mindmapthat/53340 Ft: DJ Vadim</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>&nbsp;Cycling Through Puglia</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>This trip didn’t start off with the idea “Let’s go to Puglia!” Instead, it started at the tired end of a Chicago winter as a combination of “Let’s go back to Europe” and “Let’s go on a cycling tour!” and then looking at what rides were available in the fall, in October because, back in April, Europe was not doing a great job with vaccine roll-out. And that was our path to Puglia.&nbsp;</li><li>We’d done a self-guided cycling tour in southwest Scotland some years ago, but in southern Italy, never been here, not sure how much support there would be and how English would be spoken, we decided to go with a full tour. We narrowed the tour companies down to Trek Travel and Backroads. They both had good Puglia itineraries. I’d done a Trek tour in Moab, UT some years back, so we decided to give Backroads a shot.</li><li>There were 16 people on the tour, 12 of which were Backroads veterans; some very much so. One couple had done a Provence tour with them in July and another woman was doing back-to-back tours -- the week before she’d ridden their Sicily tour and then flew straight up to Bari for this tour. These veterans said that Backroads does a great job organizing everything; it makes travel easy. It’s kinda the same thing I hear from people who are big into cruising -- show up in some part of the world and have people take care of you. All that being said, after 6 days and 200 miles in the saddle, I came away happy (if a little sore) with the tour and impressed with the hospitality and service ethic of the Backroads tour guides.</li><li>We were riding through Puglia the week of October 10th which was probably a week too late because the towns were beginning to close up for the season. One day, we had a couple of hours in the hill town of Ostuni for lunch, but struggled to find places that were open. Many of the restaurants were dark, even though the signs on the doors said they should be open, as did the hours listed on their websites and their Google Maps listings. No signs saying “Closed for the season”, just locked doors through which we would see chairs on all the tables. We had similar experiences in Otronto and to a lesser extent in Lecce. One of the Backroads guides said that Puglia is a popular destination for Italian tourists from up north; many of them have vacation homes there. And when those folks head home, the remaining locals and handful of misdirected tourists aren’t enough to keep all the bars and restaurants going.</li><li>But the touring was great -- riding alongside groves of huge, old, gnarled olive trees with vegetable crops like fennel and bitter greens planted underneath; and along the Adriatic Sea, up on the ridge along the coastal road and then down through little beach towns and fishing villages.&nbsp;</li><li>And I think that’s the way to do Puglia, touring, doing a couple of days each in Bari and Lecce wandering through the narrow streets of their old towns, a day in Otronto, with half-day stops in Alberobello, Matera, and/or Ostuni, maybe a day or two hanging out in a nice agriturismo or one of those beach towns on the Adriatic.&nbsp;</li><li>We drank a lot of wine, mostly the local Primitivo, a grape closely related to California’s Zinfandel, and ate a lot of seafood, especially octopus. At dinner during our second night in Bari, a young guy walked in with two small clear plastic buckets full of small octopus, very similar to a bucket I saw at the feet of a fisherman at the dock earlier in the day. I don’t think the seafood we were eating that week had been out of the Adriatic for much more than 24 hours before it hit our plates.</li><li>It was a different experience, a different vibe from our prior trips to Italy, which had all been up north -- to Tuscany, to Milan, to Venice. But biking through those olive groves, those fields, those little towns; that’s the lower key experience we were looking for -- and got -- on our time in Puglia. If you want see pictures, head over to the TravelCommons’ Instagram site and click on Puglia/Sicily where I’ve collected some of the better Instagram Stories pictures.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #180</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_180.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #180 — Tracking COVID Travel Requirements; Cycling Thru Puglia','','inherit','closed','closed','','3960-revision-v1','','','2021-10-28 17:22:57','2021-10-28 22:22:57','',3960,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3966',0,'revision','',0),
(3968,1,'2021-10-28 17:27:34','2021-10-28 22:27:34','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_1985\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/708473504_18da6d5b07_z1.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-3581 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/708473504_18da6d5b07_z1-300x225.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\"></a> Standing in Line! © Lance Smith/Flickr[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Not much travel, but a lot of travel planning for our first post-lockdown international trip to Italy. Trying to thread our way through changing COVID rules and Alitalia\'s bankruptcy throes. I\'m getting inundated with discount offers for <a href=\"https://www.clearme.com/\">Clear\'s fast-pass service</a>. I\'ve resisted them so far, because I remember back to when the first incarnation of Clear wanted to <a href=\"https://www.wired.com/2009/08/defunct-airport-fast-pass-company-banned-from-selling-customer-biometrics/\">sell its members\' biometric data</a>.  We then talk to <a href=\"https://www.xovis.com/en/home/\">Xovis Technology</a>\'s Cody Shulman about how airports are better managing all sorts of lines in airports. Finally, air passenger traffic is dropping again because business travelers are still missing-in-action (MIA). All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_179.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #179: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois; no travel since the last episode, just a lot of travel planning. I’ve talked over the past couple of episodes about pushing forward with our first post-lockdown international trip; a bike tour through the bootheel of Italy. We booked the trip in the spring and then last month -- I talked about in the last episode -- we booked our hotels pre- and post- the ride and the flight over. But not the flight back, because -- what else do we want to do while we’re here? I just wrapped up an interim CIO gig last week, so there’s no huge rush to get back -- and it’s been 5 years since our last time in Italy, so… As we were thinking about this, a friend, a former colleague pinged me “ Hey there - Just saw your tweet about your upcoming international trip. Sitting here waiting for our pierogies (he now lives in Southern Poland). Where’re you going?” Turns out he and his wife will be in Syracuse, Sicily in October. So there was our answer -- after our bike tour ends in Lecce, we catch a flight to Catania and hang out on the beach for the next week. And I can’t remember the last time I said this, but “Thanks, Twitter” for that.</li><li>So, next step, fire up Google Flights and look for one-way flights from whatever airport is near Lecce to Catania. Which turns out to be Brindisi Airport in Salento -- 24 miles, an €8/30-min train ride from Lecce, so pretty convenient, except that the best flight to Catania is an Air Dolomiti-Lufthansa connection with a 13-hour layover in Munich. Yeah, no. So next I look at Bari, where we’re flying into. 90 miles away; less convenient, but doable. The flight options are not much better -- a 6am Ryanair flight (which I kinda think of as Spirit Airlines without the charm), a 5pm flight with Volotea (whom I’ve never heard of, but Google and Wikipedia say they’re a budget airline based in Barcelona), and those same insane Air Dolomiti connections through Munich. This makes no sense. What gives? A little more Googling tells the rest of the story. Alitalia has been winding through bankruptcy since 2017 and now 4 years later, after 75 years as Italy’s national carrier, it’s finally closing down-- the day before I’m trying to book our flight to Sicily. Timing; it’s a beautiful thing.</li><li>A little more Googling says there’s a new Italian carrier coming, ITA, but it’s still working through negotiating for Alitalia’s landing slots and equipment and labor contracts, so it’s not taking bookings yet. OK, then. Getting out of Lecce is starting to pick up a little “escape room” vibe. It’s a 7-hr drive, a 14-hr train; so if we’re going, we’re flying. I book the most basic seats on the Volotea flight -- €17 for two seats -- just to have something and let the whole Alitalia/ITA thing play out a bit more; I can always add the luggage fees and reserved seats later if need be. I book it on Weds, Sept 1; 5pm flight out of Bari, gives us time to have breakfast, pack, and train up to the airport with enough time to deal with the craziness of budget airlines, which is key. My last budget airline experience was flying Wow Air from Reykjavik to London. I arrived 2 hrs before check in to see what appeared to be a stationary check in line of a couple of hundred people. Three days later, on Saturday, I wake up to an email from Volotea saying “We regret to inform you that given the current context of uncertainty about the evolution of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have been forced to reschedule your flight.” to 12:30 -- 4½ hrs earlier. I look at the train schedule -- there goes the leisurely breakfast and a bit of the budget airline safety margin, but it’s doable. The next Saturday, the 11th, I wake up to yet another Volotea e-mail (you’d think these guys would knock off early on Friday). Same wind-up -- “given the current context of uncertainty about the evolution of the COVID-19 pandemic” -- but worse punch -- “we have been forced to cancel your flight”. Ugh, guess that door out of the Lecce escape room was a dead end. I fire up Google Flights again and now see Alitalia flights out of Brindisi. Seems their replacement, ITA, has figured out how to take bookings. But following the link from Google Flights takes me to the Alitalia website with a banner still saying they’re shutting down. Another escape room fake exit? I flip over to Amex Travel; I can book the flights there. No direct flight, so I take the afternoon flight with a 2-hr connection in Rome. I put it on the Platinum card; figure I’ll need all the status I can get if I have to file for a refund. And then this week, I <a href=\"https://apnews.com/article/europe-business-airlines-rome-italy-36d45a33150c638063946e9b151e2aa0\">read</a> about Alitalia telling passengers to bring just a single piece of hand luggage because of strikes and growing labor protests. My friend sends me a text “You still tracking for Sicily?” “Kinda” I replied.</li><li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/yongen-yello/\">Give You Up</a></em> by <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/yongen\">Yongen</a> (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons&nbsp;<a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/1.0/\">by-nc-sa v1.0</a>&nbsp;license</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Jim McDonough stopped by the TravelCommons Facebook page to leave a comment on the post pointing to my list of the best bars and restaurants I’ve visited in 2021. I said that I think it’ll take guidebooks a while to catch up with all the closures caused by the COVID lockdowns. Jim agreed, saying<ul><li>“I heard Rick Steves talking about the topic. All of his guidebooks are out of date. It will take him all of 2022 to get them repaired - assuming Delta, etc don\'t clobber 2022”</li></ul></li><li>As predicted in the last episode, Southwest Airlines extended their in-flight alcohol bans to January 18, 2022, staying aligned with the new expiration of the federal in-flight mask mandate. American also extended their economy-class ban, but continue to serve alcohol in their first and business class cabins. That alignment offers them a good explanation for the ban <em>right now</em>, but it’s going to make it tougher to reinstate in-flight drink service because I don’t see the feds ending the in-flight mask mandate anytime in the near future. Although, I dunno, maybe as the US’s only Prohibition airline, Southwest is looking to reposition their “Wanna Get Away?” slogan as “Wanna Get Away from Drunk Mask Fights on Spirit and United?”</li><li>Back in the Spring, I talked about Irene and Claire missing their Global Entry/PreCheck expiration notices and then in June, about a fake email “make sure your PreCheck doesn’t expire” phishing campaign that scammed a bunch of benched frequent fliers. So last week when I got an email starting “Your Trusted Traveler membership will be expiring soon”, I was a little wary. I was expecting it; after Irene and Claire missed their renewals, I logged in and saw that mine expired in December. But still, I examined the entire email -- message headers, mail server authentications. It looked legit, but even then, I typed the web address ttp.dhs.gov into the browser rather than clicking through the link in the email. It was legit, so I buckled in, selected Global Entry (which I always recommend since for only $15 more, you get <em>both</em> PreCheck and the fast path through US passport control), and cranked through the application. It wasn’t bad; the only part that required any real thinking was the 5-year look back on international travel. I had my passport in front of me, but if you’ve country-hopped within the EU’s Schengen Zone, you only get stamped going in and out of the zone, but not when crossing borders within the zone. In kind of a sad commentary on my traveling style, one of the things that helped me fill in those blanks was a spreadsheet of my downloaded Untappd check-ins. I opened it up in Excel, filtered out check-ins before 2016 and venues in the US and Mexico (turns out I haven’t been to Canada in the last 5 years), and then wrote down the countries that were left. Very easy, and an incentive to always have at least one beer in each country I visit -- like I needed any more encouragement.<br><br>After I paid the $100 fee and was dropped back to the front page, I saw two interesting notes. The first --“Please remember to revisit our website for your application status updates. Notification of when you may schedule an interview appointment (if one is needed) will only be posted here.” So I guess don’t trust any emails about interviews. The second was more interesting - “Due to a significant increase in application volume, we are extending the grace period from 18 months to 24 months for any submitted renewal application. This means you will continue to receive full benefits for 24 months while U.S. Customs and Border Protection is finalizing your renewal application.” Which was interesting because the email I got from them said “6 months to 1 year”. Whichever it is, my guess is that I’m not getting that interview scheduled anytime soon.&nbsp;</li><li>I’ve gotten a bunch of discount offers recently for a CLEAR membership -- $100 off with United, full statement credit from Amex. I’m not sure why the sudden push, but I’m holding out. I enrolled in CLEAR’s first iteration, back in April 2008, 13 years ago -- I talked about it in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2008/04/29/podcast-64-escaping-the-travel-bubble-marks-travel-tips/\">episode #64</a> (but not before I slandered the Dutch by saying their language sounded a bit like a competitive throat-clearing exercise). A couple months later, I wrote a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2008/05/27/jumping-the-line-using-clear-registered-traveler-and-diamond-lane-self-select/\">blog post</a> about my experiences -- it was OK, but I couldn’t see much value over, what was to me, free premium status lines. And today, I’m still not sold on its value over PreCheck. But what really keeps me from picking up one of those free membership offers is that the first iteration of CLEAR abruptly closed down the next year and had to be sued to stop it from selling its customers’ biometric data -- fingerprints and iris scans -- before it went bankrupt. The current iteration of CLEAR says “We never sell or rent personal information about you”, but I dunno. They reserve the right to update their privacy policy periodically. What keeps them from updating that “We’ll never sell” sentence when money gets a little tight.</li><li>Bridge Music — <em><em>Flight</em> </em>by Ga\'inja  (c) copyright 1999 Licensed under a Creative Commons&nbsp;<a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/1.0/\">by-nc-sa v1.0</a>&nbsp;license</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>High-Tech Airport Line Avoidance</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Frequent travelers are an obsessive lot -- they/we obsess over things like packing efficiency (utilizing every cubic inch of our carry-ons) and gaming frequent flier programs. But top of the list is avoiding airport lines. For years after 9/11, line avoidance was more an art (or luck) than a science -- through trial and error you\'d get a sense of which lines would be shorter during Monday morning rush hour in ORD, or maybe some good-hearted airport worker would shout \"There\'s no line at Checkpoint D\" and then jump out of the way of the stampede of roller-boards.&nbsp; And then, we jumped at the chance to give iris scans to CLEAR or allow the TSA to do background checks in exchange for a shorter line, brushing off any questions about the trade-off of privacy for convenience.</li><li>But what about the airports -- what are they doing to help us out? To dig into this side, I talked to Cody Shulman, managing director, Americas at Xovis Technology about how they help airports track and report on the airport lines we’re trying to avoid.<ul><li>Mark:  Cody, a number of big US hubs have installed Xovis’ technology, DFW, Minneapolis- St Paul, San Francisco, Atlanta. How does your technology help travelers in these busy airports?</li><li>Cody:  Let\'s take DFW for example. Let\'s first take back-end efficiency. We\'re kind of behind the scenes. That\'s where DFW terminal operations and their customer experience teams are working together to use the system. They\'ll make key staffing changes where passenger traffic is the busiest and do it in the moment. And at the same time, they\'ve taken the approach to give access to the local TSA leadership. So, there is no longer a disagreement when there is an issue. Problem solved rather than just finger pointing -- it was bad, there was a line, there was a queue over here; no, there wasn\'t -- because we\'ve visualized it all for them, it\'s facts. And then on the public side, the passenger facing side, you have all the same information at your fingertips that the airport has. So, before arrival you can use the DFW airport app to see all 15 checkpoints and their current wait times by queue down to the two-minute interval.</li><li>Mark:  Cody. I\'ve noticed that, in more and more airports you go to, the airport websites aren\'t great, they\'re not optimized for mobile, which you think would be a key use case, and sometimes they\'re not well publicized. But if you drill in and you find them, you actually can find those sorts of wait time stats and those are critical. So, at DFW, is that your technology driving those stats?</li><li>Cody:  Yes, exactly. And I think you\'re also spot on in saying that they\'re underpublicized and underutilized. DFW, before they instituted and implemented that into their app, had pretty low utilization. In the world of FlightAware and Flight Tracker, people have these agnostic airport apps that can do everything with tracking of your departure and what not. But then when DFW added this, it’s really useful for DFW because you can use any single checkpoint among those 15 and reach your gate and, on top of it, when the situation, even if it\'s somehow dramatically changed when you got there, the signage right in front of you at the airport still shows for every terminal where there are three checkpoints, the wait time at the adjacent terminals and the walk time. So you can self calculate and figure it out yourself</li><li>Mark:  Yes, absolutely. I\'ve seen that more and more lately and it seems to be like a good add on.</li><li>Cody:  There\'s a trust element even to it as well. So, when this first started to launch with the airport, they were doing it with very vague statements: under 15 minutes, over 15 minutes. Then they went to between five and 10 minutes/10 and 15 minutes, and gradually they trusted the accuracy of the system down to two minutes. Any more than that they decided would just be kind of wonky for the customer. I remember when they first put up those signs. I can still remember the woman: she came up to me in front of the television screen and said, “Excuse me, do you work at the airport?” I kind of shrug my shoulder and go with you can probably answer your question rather you know, why not? So, she goes “That thing up there, is it right. Do you trust it?” And in my head, I\'m going “Oh, you\'ve asked the wrong guy.” Like I could, I could go on for minutes and minutes here.</li><li>Mark:  Yeah. How do I say no to that? But Cody, what makes it accurate? What makes you confident that you\'ve got something down to a two-minute interval?</li><li>Cody:  The system works with two key components. We have software, which is dashboards that are our live visualizations and historical ones for users. And we have hardware. We have sensors. Those sensors are designed for airports. They\'re made by Xovis ourselves, and they’re optimized around queuing, and queuing in a complex environment like security, or especially check in which is super unstructured. We\'re measuring a very specific thing, and that\'s people and it\'s their height. You end up under a sensor. It\'s not a camera. And we\'re taking a measurement of your head height and your shoulder height. And with the difference between those two we’re sure that it\'s you as in a human; not mark, not anything else that\'s personally identifying but that\'s it’s you. That\'s step one. That\'s a person. There are lots of people around in a queue. We want to make sure that we capture people exhibiting what we call queue-like behavior. So that\'s moving in a sequence close enough to other people understanding that some people travel in groups and then there are some independent, and we balance that out algorithmically, so that we know that it\'s a person and they\'re in the queue.</li><li>Mark:  How do you guys manage traveler privacy?</li><li>Cody:  It\'s a super relevant and honestly, for me, a pretty easy question; we\'re not detecting faces. Nor are we detecting heat or mobile devices or anything else sort of personally invasive or inconsistently available across every person. It\'s just those heights. And again that height differential. So, when we transmit data off our devices, our sensors were not transferring images. It\'s just coordinates. It\'s X and Y; there\'s nothing personally identifiable.</li><li>Mark:  Cody, looking out what\'s in the development around adding more convenience to help future travelers. If we look out 2-5 years, what\'s next on the horizon for travelers?</li><li>Cody:  To me, the most noteworthy thing for the passenger side is a connected and a predictive experience. Take Seattle. Our services are present on all the checkpoints in Seattle and we\'ve taken it a step further and integrated with Delta in their FlyDelta app. There\'s a feed to the user in the app to know what wait time to expect when you\'re a departing passenger from Seattle. Let\'s take that one step further and for that particular elite or frequent flyer in their office. It\'s a weekday afternoon. They have to catch an evening flight. What if all the things talk to each other and said, “Hey, this is the time you should probably leave.” Okay, you\'ve set up auto enable your Lyft to come at this time. It\'s going to drop you at the security checkpoint that, in this moment, we know is the best one because you can reach your gate from any of the five. Then you\'re through security. You have time for that extra beer which, not only do you want to have, but the airport wants you to have, because that\'s where the real money is. You’ve your beer; you\'re happy; you\'re relaxed. They\'re getting revenue. Happy, relaxed people spend more and then you’re “Wait! I have to grab…” I had a beer, but I grab a water before my flight. So, you walk over to Hudson news and there\'s a line. Again, you don\'t know that there\'s another Hudson news, which there probably is, 3 doors over. Maybe that doesn\'t have a line which is better for your wait time, or in COVID times, maybe a more comfortable experience. It\'s not as crowded. Or restroom. You get off a plane, you want to know how crowded it is when it was last cleaned. And then flip it to  the operational side: stop cleaning in a circle. Clean when that wide body plane came in with 400 people who all went to the first restroom and that thing’s trashed now.</li><li>Mark: I\'ve seen that, I\'ve experienced that before.</li><li>Cody:  Just having a smart airport experience and even in public US airports, which are strapped for cash. There\'s a changing tide and I expect to see that coming forward and making a customer better experience for everybody.</li><li>Mark:  Fantastic. Cody Shulman, managing Director Americas, <a href=\"http://xovis.com\" title=\"xovis\">Xovis Technology</a>. Cody, thanks for taking the time with us</li><li>Cody:  Mark, thank you. It\'s been a pleasure.</li></ul></li><li>Bridge Music —<a href=\"http://www.saurabbhargava.com/downloads/04%20The%20Void.mp3\"><em>The Void</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.saurabbhargava.com/\">Saurab Bhargava</a>  (c) copyright 2006 Saurab Bhargava</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Business Travel Still MIA</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Listening to airline and hotel CEOs <a href=\"https://skift.com/2021/09/07/what-travel-ceos-are-predicting-about-the-permanent-return-of-business-travel/\">let the air out of their revenue forecasts</a> <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-19-resurgence-clouds-business-travel-rebound-11630920600?st=m7iegfjwreygxoi&amp;reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink\">for the rest of the year</a>, I went back to the TSA’s <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/coronavirus/passenger-throughput\">web page</a> that gives the daily numbers of passengers going through airport security checkpoints. Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/06/15/podcast-176-why-business-travel-is-coming-back-learning-airport-history/\">June episode</a>, the first time I had fun with those numbers, checkpoint volume had passed 2 million for the first time since the lockdowns and the numbers were going up. Looking at a 7-day moving average to smooth things out a bit, it grew through June until it hit 2 million the first week of July. But after a month, in the first week of August, it turned, dropping back below 2 million and now, running in the 1.7 million range, about 20% down from its peak. Over the same period in 2019, the peak number was 2.6 million and it never dropped below 2 million.</li><li>It kinda makes sense. This summer’s peak was driven by leisure travel -- people, families getting out of the house and going to see places and other people. But as that travel faded, as it always does, when kids go back to school, this time there isn’t enough business travel to replace it.</li><li>As I mentioned at the top of the episode, I just finished up a 6-month interim CIO gig. It’s had the <em>least</em> amount of business travel of any job I’ve had -- by a long shot. Regular listeners to TravelCommons will recall that there have been times when I’ve traveled every week for 3-4 months straight, and a year or two when there was maybe 6 weeks in those years that I <em>didn’t</em> travel. So this last gig, where I had only one business trip, down to Miami in May, was a huge change in my standard operating procedure.&nbsp;</li><li>I’ve talked in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/07/17/podcast-165-first-post-lockdown-flight-when-does-business-travel-come-back/\">past</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/06/15/podcast-176-why-business-travel-is-coming-back-learning-airport-history/\">episodes</a> about this, skeptical of predictions like Bill Gates’ that <a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/17/coronavirus-bill-gates-says-more-than-50percent-of-business-travel-will-disappear-long-term.html\">50% of business travel will go away</a>. I was going through the TravelCommons archives, cleaning up show notes and the like, and found an <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2008/12/23/podcast-70-packing-a-suit-videoconference-over-travel-watching-winter-flight-delays/\">episode from December 2008</a> where I was answering listener questions about why I travel for in-person meetings instead of video conference; when tech analysts were saying it was “on the brink of widespread adoption.” I’m nothing if not consistent.</li><li>Of course, it’s difficult to do in-person meetings when people are still working from home; it would be a bit awkward doing a sales call around someone’s kitchen table, having to project the PowerPoint deck on their white tile backsplash. I gotta think you’d lose a bullet point or two in the grout lines.</li><li>But by fits and starts, slowed by the Delta variant, people are heading back into their offices and international travel barriers are dropping. At this CIO gig, one colleague, the global head of operations, lived in the UK and so couldn’t get into the US to meet with his staff at some newly acquired plants. He was doing daily video calls, but after a couple of months, he’d made all the progress he could and needed to physically meet with these people. So when Canada dropped their travel ban, he flew from London to Toronto, holed up in a hotel room, worked through Canada’s 14-day quarantine, and then drove across the US border at Buffalo and caught a domestic flight to Chicago. It’s just one data point, but I’m grabbing on and holding tight, hoping to tell Bill Gates “Told you so!”</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #179</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_179.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #179 — High-Tech Airport Lines; Business Travel Still Missing','','inherit','closed','closed','','3831-revision-v1','','','2021-10-28 17:27:34','2021-10-28 22:27:34','',3831,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3968',0,'revision','',0),
(3969,1,'2021-10-28 17:31:43','2021-10-28 22:31:43','[caption id=\"attachment_1554\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/2015-09-03-15.12.36.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1554\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/2015-09-03-15.12.36-300x200.jpg\" alt=\"Did The Pope Have This Problem?\" width=\"300\" height=\"200\"></a> Did The Pope Have This Problem?[/caption]\n\nApologies in advance because this is pretty much a stream-of-consciousness episode, with semi-strung together thoughts&nbsp;about eggs, car rentals, seeing the Pope, travel food, and stuff from my September trip to Scotland. &nbsp;I talk about how handy I found the new <a href=\"https://revolut.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Revolut</a> service for&nbsp;spending and sending money in Europe; recent good and bad experiences with <a href=\"https://www.hertz.com/rentacar/emember/join/overview.do?learnMore=presidentsCircle\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Hertz </a>and other car rentals; most bad experience with <a href=\"http://britishairways.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">British Airways</a>;&nbsp;and how true-to-life&nbsp;the <a href=\"https://youtu.be/2JqRXLQYF9o\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Doritos Super Bowl commercial</a> portrays the Southwest boarding experience. &nbsp;All this and more at the&nbsp;<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_117.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n<!--more-->\n\n<hr>\n\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #117:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you from TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL. I was trying to do this from the Bally’s Casino in Las Vegas where I was earlier in the week, but it just didn’t work out. I was there for business, not pleasure, but I always feel that I should stay in a casino hotel when in Vegas. I dunno, staying in a Westin or Marriott up by the convention center just doesn’t feel Vegas. When I was here last year for a business convention I stayed in the MGM Grand. Years ago, though, when I’d do regular booth duty at technology shows, I would always stay at Mandalay Bay, which I really liked.</li>\n 	<li>The more I know about hotels, the more I’m impressed by Vegas hotel operations. Caesars, the MGM Grand, Mandalay Bay -- they’re huge mini-cities -- orders of magnitude bigger than couple-hundred room hotels I’d stay at in Denver or New Orleans. And yet the service, the execution is almost always way better than those smaller hotels. If you’re any sort of an operations nerd, you gotta give ‘em a nod. Though on the other hand, when you head to the gym at 6am and pass by the old guy dragging on a cigarette playing the quarter slots, it kinda makes you wish they were a little less good...</li>\n 	<li>As I mentioned in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/08/26/podcast-116-traveling-thru-japan-luggage-trends/\">the last episode</a>, the big travel for me was at the beginning of September when we were in Scotland for 2 weeks getting my daughter situated at Univ of St Andrews. Now while I say “getting my daughter situated,” there were equal parts getting my wife situated with the idea of her youngest child being an ocean away -- a big difference from when my son was 90 minutes up the road in Milwaukee.</li>\n 	<li>The following week’s travel had a nice difficulty factor. Weds morning, I flew from Chicago to DC for the papal Mass on the campus of my alma mater, Catholic University of America, and then back to Detroit that evening for meetings first thing Thursday morning. The difficulty factor was my luggage. No back packs, no selfie sticks, so certainly no roller bags were getting through the security checkpoints. Finding a checked luggage place is a real challenge anymore. I thought about checking my bag into my DCA-DTW flight, but I was too early -- 8 hours prior to flight time max. There is a checked baggage place at Union Station -- DC’s train station -- which is conveniently located a couple of stops south of Catholic on the Metro Red Line.</li>\n 	<li>Freed of my baggage, I emerged from the Brookland Metro Stop to an unbelievable combination of people and fencing. Incredibly long lines of people corralled in by what had to be miles of fences. I was lucky; I somehow got into a quick security line -- only 45 minutes. After finding my seating section, the gates were closed and we were sealed in our sections until the Pope arrived and did a couple of laps around campus in the Popemobile. After Mass started, they opened up the gates again. Which was great, because while the music and the liturgy were top notch, I wasn’t queuing up for communion with 25,000 other folks. After the homily, I was one of the trickle of folks making an early exit to beat the rush. I had a flight to catch. I’m sure the Pope understood.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>One Day</em> by <a href=\"http://www.hollowhorse.co.uk/\">Hollow Horse</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>OK, just as a warning, this section is going to ramble on for a while. I have a random walk of comments/opinions that I just can’t seem to synthesize into &nbsp;coherent topics. So here it goes...</li>\n 	<li>First stop in the mail bag, I was pleasantly surprised to receive this audio comment from Linda Martin of the Indie Travel Podcast\n<ul>\n 	<li>Linda, thanks for that. The thing with eggs -- you can tell I’ve thought about this way too much -- it’s a trade-off between good eggs and time. It takes time for a cooked-to-order egg, but in the morning, I don’t often have that time. Usually, I’ve worked out; I’m cooling down during breakfast, then hitting the shower and off to work. When I stayed in one of the Renaissance Hotels in New Orleans, they didn’t have a separate executive lounge. Breakfast was served in the restaurant. They had the typical lounge buffet set up, but you could also order off the menu, which I think I did once in a dozen stays. It was a nice egg, but it took an extra 10 min that usually wasn’t in my morning schedule. Definitely a 1st World problem</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Lisa Walls wrote on the TravelCommons Facebook Wall\n<ul>\n 	<li>“Hey Mark, I love your podcast, especially the comments on food and craft beers. Other than the Altoids, do you carry any food in your briefcase, such as protein bars? I am always looking for something that is shelf stable that tastes good and travels well.”</li>\n 	<li>Lisa, thanks for the note. I usually keep 1-2 KIND bars in the bottom of my bag. The fruit-&amp;-nut ones seem to hold up to weeks of getting crushed by my PC power supply. They’re also not too sweet the way some other granola and power bars are.</li>\n 	<li>I know I’m about to lose any foodie cred I may have built up over the years, but I gotta say that, for me, the McDonald\'s grilled chicken Snack Wraps are just about the right amount of food to cover a 2-hour flight. They’re quick to buy, and compact to bring on board and eat. I find it tough to manage a salad while sitting in a center seat.</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>I’m not sure if I mentioned this last episode, but I’m flying Southwest on this week’s Vegas-Denver-Chicago trip to click over A-list status. It kinda crept up on me -- I don’t typically fly SW enough to make status, but apparently I have this year. As near as I can tell, this means I won’t have to pay the $12.50 Early Bird fee or be staring at my Southwest app exactly 24 hours before flight time in order to get a decent boarding position. Which, as we all know, is critical on Southwest since there’s no assigned seating. An A or early B boarding group number is necessary for an aisle seat. On my Vegas flight, hitting the “Check In” button maybe 2 seconds after the 24-hour window got me B 7, so I got an aisle seat in the back half of the plane. It was a full flight, so after that, I was living last year’s Super Bowl Doritos commercial -- looking down, trying to avoid eye contact with potentially bad seat mates while looking friendly to attract good ones. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://youtu.be/2JqRXLQYF9o\">link</a> to the commercial. It’s spot on.</li>\n 	<li>In the last episode, I talked about travel amateurs clogging up the PreCheck lanes. These would be people getting PreCheck as part of the TSA’s “Managed Inclusion” program, where they randomly shunt travelers over to PreCheck to balance screening line loads. This to the utter frustration of travelers who paid $85 for PreCheck screening or $100 for Global Entry. You might recall long-time listener Rich Fraser saying he was getting PreCheck about 75% of the time so why should he pay? But now the TSA says they’re throttling back on “Managed Inclusion”, driven at least in part by the publicity generated by auditors finding that travelers on various watch lists were being given PreCheck. I’ve certainly noticed the length of PreCheck lines dropping.</li>\n 	<li>Also in the last episode, I talked about luggage trends. One trend that sorta hit the cutting room floor is the move to fully rotating twirly wheels. Certainly handy in getting your luggage down a tight airplane aisle, but to my eye, most of them look a bit tinier, a bit flimsier than the standard roller-blade style wheel partially embedded in the back of the suitcase. The twirly wheels don’t seem rugged enough to survive getting pulled down Manhattan sidewalks or some of the ruts in New Orleans. And to allow full rotation, the wheels stick out of the bottom of the suitcase making the bag longer. This tripped up my wife on our flight from EDI to LHR. The BA gate agent asked my wife to put her bag in the luggage sizer. It would’ve fit -- except for the twirly wheels. Now we have to gate check it -- which means standing off to the side of the gate pulling some stuff out, transferring it into her shoulder bag. Understandable -- until we get on the plane and see it’s a half-full 767 and there are fully empty luggage bins. Really? So as is my wont, I vented my frustration on Twitter rather than any BA employees. BA’s social media department responded pretty quickly saying they needed to check all luggage to be fair to all passengers. But how would allowing a bag that was, at most, an inch over-long because of its twirly wheels on a half-full flight with empty overheads cheat any other passengers? It’s an over-officiousness that just doesn’t make sense. And it’s the reason I avoid BA now whenever possible. Which is a real shame, because back in the early ‘90’s when I was doing a lot of travel to Europe, I prefered BA. But that was 20 years ago and, it seems, a different BA.</li>\n 	<li>There is another reason I avoid BA -- officiousness <i>and</i> Heathrow. Again, another thing I loved in the ‘90’s, I now avoid whenever possible. Heathrow is a complete nightmare. You land, you trundle along through corridors, down escalators, into a bus, get a tour of the Heathrow back alleys, stop at another terminal, fight through security again, and then end up in the midst of a packed retail space where you wander through the shops because there’s no place to sit. It’s gotten to the point that I’ll fly the extra hour to connect through Frankfurt or Amsterdam just to avoid Heathrow. We were doing this St Andrews trip on AA miles. We were fine on the way out -- ORD-JFK-EDI all on AA. But coming back, it was EDI-LHR-ORD with the first leg on BA. Just ugh! I still keep thinking about how to get something out of my 300K BA Avios miles. Maybe I’ll make my daughter fly BA.</li>\n 	<li>On a brighter note, I tried a new financial service during this trip and it worked really well. It’s called Revolut -- as in Revolution cut a bit short. It’s a FinTech start up based in the UK that gives you a virtual and real debit card with really great exchange rates. As with all the cool start-ups nowadays, everything is done through a smartphone app -- which, to stow the snark for a second, makes a lot of sense for any travel app. I opened an account before I left and funded it with $200 from my regular ATM/debit card. I could then convert my dollars to pounds or euros at what appeared to be just about the market rate -- there didn’t seem to be a lot of margin taken on the buy or sell sides. I also instantly had a virtual debit card with which I could use those new pounds or euros to buy things on the web -- like train tickets or top up a phone card. I then requested a physical version of my card, which took about a week to show up from the UK. Now I had a proper European chip-&amp;-pin card that I could use at an ATM or, say, the self-serve checkout line at Tesco’s without waiting for a clerk to take my signed receipt. It only hiccuped one at the Costa coffee shop in St Andrews; I still don’t know why. Poking around a bit more, I found that I could send pounds to my daughter’s RBS account with a day or so lag. Now, none of this functionality is necessarily new, though being able to do it all through a slick smartphone app is very handy. The real innovation is the cost. Funding my Revolut account from my debit card cost me less than 1% -- less than $2 for the $200 transfer, which is cheaper than most non-network ATM fees. After that, no transaction fees to move money between currencies or to withdraw. Compare that to hitting a foreign ATM with your US card. My personal bank is very reasonable, only charging me Visa’s 1% transaction fee, but many big banks will hit you with a $5 non-network fee on top of any transaction fees. And then transferring money to my daughter’s account -- wire transfers can cost $25-30. Revolut has well-packaged functionality delivered at the lowest costs I’ve seen. I don’t know how long they’ll keep this price point, but right now, it’s the best deal I’ve seen for money needed for international travel. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://revolut.com/\">link</a> to the Revolut web site.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. &nbsp;The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Clear My Head</em> by <a href=\"http://www.thefiasco.net/\">FIASCO</a></li>\n</ul>\n<b>Random Thoughts about Car Rentals</b>\n<ul>\n 	<li>I guess I could’ve cut two or three comments out of the last segment and labeled them “Random Comments about My Scotland Trip” but that just seems entire too gratuitous. But I have been collecting car rental experiences in my TravelCommons Evernote drop file and I think I now have enough for make up a topic -- or at least what might marginally pass for a topic</li>\n 	<li>As I’ve mentioned in past episodes, I really don’t like to rent cars. I much prefer to use rail or a cab in from the airport and then walk to where ever I need to go. That works well in New York or Chicago or San Francisco, not so much in Denver or Detroit. So I’ve been renting a lot of cars over the past 6 months.</li>\n 	<li>So many in fact that Hertz bumped my status up to President\'s Circle. Not quite sure that gets me, but it sounds status-y. Though right after my congratulatory e-mail, I found a dumpy Toyota Corolla in my Hertz Gold spot, so maybe it’s not anything special.</li>\n 	<li>But in times like those -- when I get assigned the 45,000-mile Toyota with crumbs still in the driver seat, or a Ford F-150 king cab pick up truck in Boston (?) -- I’ve come to love Hertz Gold Choice. If you rent a mid-size or above -- and for our corporate rate, the price of a compact and mid-size are the same -- you can go to the Choice aisle and take one of those cars instead. I left the dumpy Toyota and took a new Nissan instead.</li>\n 	<li>I have started to make note of differences in service <i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">and</span></i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> attitude across locations. I never rent from Hertz at Detroit airport anymore. I’ve yet to get a non-dumpy car there and the attitude is not great. Though I think Hertz’s Newark station is the worst. A recent example -- a colleague was driving his car toward the lot exit when a low tire pressure alarm lit up. So he asked the guy at the exit gate where he could get some air to top off the tire. “Try a gas station,” the attendant told him. That was helpful.</span></li>\n 	<li>I’ve had challenges with car rental web sites -- Hertz, Avis -- when my pick-up or drop off time didn’t match the hours of the office I selected. I get the error notice and then when I go back to try another site or time, these websites will randomly select another date or location. I had this happen to me in Edinburgh on the second car we rented. We were training from Lockerbie back to Edinburgh where we’d done 4 days of biking while our daughter was going through freshman orientation. I’d booked a car on Hertz’s web site to pick up at the train station and drop off at EDI 5 days later. It took me 5 tries to get it right -- each time I re-started, it reset the pick-up location from Waverly Station to EDI. And each time I’d correct it. Except, it seems, the last time. When we arrived in Waverly, there was no car. I looked at the res -- pick up at EDI. Ugh. Not the end of the world -- we could’ve taken the new light rail out to EDI, but it was aggravating. I searched through the Hertz.co.uk website for a phone number -- that itself being a little extra helping of aggravation -- and called the res center. The woman on the other end was inordinately calm and helpful. 3 minutes later, she’d moved my pick-up to Waverly. I thanked her -- a lot. I should’ve booked with her instead of the website.</li>\n 	<li>We rented our first car in Edinburgh from Enterprise. It was a great car -- a Fiat 500 L. All the bags fit easily in the hatchback. Nice nav, nice sound system, clean.... &nbsp;Drove to a near-by shopping mall -- grabbed a coffee at Starbucks and phone SIMs at the ee store. Next stop, IKEA to buy things we didn’t pack -- like towels and hangers. Coming off the motorway, through a traffic circle, the clutch crapped out. I’d put it in gear, let out the clutch pedal, nothing. 3 hours later after Enterprise, the auto club and Fiat scrummed about who was supposed to pick up the car, the tow truck dropped us back off at EDI where the Enterprise folks apologized profusely and gave us an even nicer Nissan. A couple of weeks, I noticed the Pope used a Fiat 500L to drive from Andrews Airforce Base to the Vatican Embassy. The next day, though, he was in a Jeep Popemobile. I could sympathize.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a title=\"MP3 Download\" href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/download_track.php?id=0E74C6FEB7390D18D02B4B399668093172F6C8CC66DDC09D90A3BF7DDA436823CFAC859AE2B2C73E46A278A4950E1030\">Lonely Dog Blues</a></em> by <a title=\"Tobin James\' Web Site\" href=\"http://redirect2.iodalliance.com/label.php?id=2A3449F03E7B8462FF74407B60F0C4B0A30A0CBE880C61DE37E3B342387F0643\">Tobin James</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #117</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://music.podshow.com/\">Podshow Podsafe Music Network</a></li>\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_117.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #117 — Random Thoughts About Eggs, Scotland & Car Rentals','','inherit','closed','closed','','1542-revision-v1','','','2021-10-28 17:31:43','2021-10-28 22:31:43','',1542,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3969',0,'revision','',0),
(3970,1,'2021-10-28 17:32:20','2021-10-28 22:32:20','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_1985\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/IMG_3845.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-3581 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/IMG_3845-300x300.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a>Gotta Stay Hydrated[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Back at the microphone after two weeks in Southern Italy. Lots of travel segments that could\'ve gone wrong, but none of them did. We talk about what international travel is like in COVID times, about the challenge of keeping track and complying with the different COVID travel requirements that seem to be constantly changing, and then some thoughts about our bike tour through Puglia with <a href=\"https://www.backroads.com/trips/BPLQ/puglia-italy-biking-tour\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Backroads</a>. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_180.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #180: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after 2 weeks in the south of Italy, a <a href=\"https://www.backroads.com/trips/BPLQ/puglia-italy-biking-tour\">cycling tour through Puglia</a>, and then visiting friends in Sicily; they’re grabbing one last bit of sunshine, topping up their vitamin D levels before the short, cold days of northern Europe’s winter sets in. I’ve talked in the last couple of episodes about travel planning for this trip, the changes, the shifts I’ve had to make, and about all the places, the segments that could’ve gone wrong -- but none of them did! For sure there was a little weirdness along the way, especially in Sicily, but every flight and train leg was on-time and pretty uneventful. </li><li>We hit what are now typical mask rule inconsistencies right off the bat in ORD. We walked into the Swissport Lounge that Air France and others use for business class and got the mask rules -- mask on unless actively eating or drinking; airplane rules -- and then walk into a small room with no food and a pretty dire bar. We sat down, but after a couple of minutes walked back out, straight down the concourse to <a href=\"https://www.rickbayless.com/restaurants/tortas-frontera/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tortas Frontera</a>, our favorite ORD restaurant, for good margaritas, and where they were applying Chicago indoor mask rules -- you can drop your mask once you’re at your table. It was worth paying $90 to drink quality in comfort rather than playing mask peek-a-boo with the Swissport’s free wine.</li><li>The next morning, DeGaulle was more confusing than I remember it being in 2019. Getting from Terminal 2E to 2F seemed to take more cognitive power than it should’ve; maybe I hadn’t gotten as much sleep on the flight over as I thought. But all in all, it was an easy, uneventful flight over to Italy.</li><li>As I expected it to be. My biggest worry was our flights the following week from Brindisi in Puglia to Catania in Sicily, connecting through Rome on what would be the second day of operations for ITA, the Italian government’s successor to the bankrupt Alitalia. This itinerary certainly wasn’t my first choice, but as I’ve mentioned in the last couple of episodes, I didn’t have another one. There were labor actions leading up to the switch over that had disrupted operations, and even without that, you’d figure there’d be at least a hundred places where some minor snafu could botch up their big Rome hub. But other than a couple of agents maybe staging an impromptu work slowdown at the Brindisi check-in desk (or that was just their normal pace), it all went smoothly. And really, across all our travel legs, but for wearing masks and having our vaccination cards checked, it didn’t seem all that different from 2019. Now I know that’s a pretty big “But for”, but I’ll happily take it.</li><li>Bridge Music — <em><em>Perfect Stranger</em> </em>by stellarartwars (c) 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/stellarartwars/45510 Ft: TheDice</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Jerry Sarfati hit the TravelCommons’ Instagram feed to say that he’s seen no delays in TSA’s Global Entry processing. Jerry said<ul><li>“Thanks for the latest podcast. I refreshed my Global Entry. Very easy. Was told 72 hours later that all was approved; no interview needed.”</li></ul></li><li>Thanks for that, Jerry. I just checked. A month-and-a-half later (936 hrs using Jerry’s unit of measure), the TTP Dashboard (Trusted Traveler Program) still shows an hourglass next to “Wait for Conditional Approval”. But I’m guessing I’m probably a bit more of a suspect character than you.&nbsp;</li><li>Twitter user @LAflyer weighed in on last episode’s discussion about how business travelers are still MIA (missing in action)<ul><li>“Thanks for the new episode. In my opinion, face-to-face is becoming increasingly the edge case. I think we’ve proven we can manage so much remotely that the need for on-site/in-person meetings will be the exception, not the rule anymore. That’s ok with me. I prefer my own bed over traveling 200,000 miles annually.”</li></ul></li><li>I think this is a valid and widely-held opinion/belief/hope -- that beginning in March 2020, we’ve now all lived through an extended crash course in remote work and video conference, we’ve done it successfully, and so can significantly reduce the need for business travel, which will allow people to spend more time in their own beds and with their families as well as reducing business expenses, and reducing airplane carbon emissions. How much business travel will be eliminated? That’s the big question that I’m guessing will take another year before we begin to see the answer.</li><li>Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/08/24/podcast-178-what-remains-from-pandemic-times-best-restaurant-and-bars/\" title=\"Podcast #178 — What Remains from Pandemic Times; Best Restaurant and Bars\">August episode</a>,&nbsp; asking the question “What Will Remain from These Pandemic Times?” the death of daily hotel room cleaning service was at the top of my list. Indeed, Hilton had just announced their move to on-demand housekeeping across all their non-luxury brands. But in Italy, I saw none of this. Not only did every hotel service our rooms every day, they were still doing turndowns every night. And they were doing their regular breakfasts, though with staff plating your food from the buffet rather than you digging in yourself. Now, we weren’t staying at major brands; only small Italian brands or independents, so I don’t know if that changes things, but they were much better hotel experiences than I’ve had recently in the US.</li><li>I didn’t realize how aggressive Apple is about iOS updates until this trip. I update pretty quickly when I’m at home, but on this trip, it seemed like I had to wave off the 15.0.2 update every couple of days. I didn’t bring my laptop with me, so I had no way to recover on the slight chance that the upgrade bricked my iPhone -- without which I wouldn’t have been able to do the video chat session for the Abbott home test kit or display the test results, which was how we were getting back into the US. As if we didn’t know it already, you just can’t easily travel anymore without a <em>working</em> mobile phone.</li><li>I’ve talked in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food\">past </a><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\" title=\"10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times\">episodes</a> about how I will use a VPN, a virtual private network, when using public WiFi networks in hotels, airports, Starbucks to make my connection more secure. I’ve used all the top paid VPNs over the years -- ExpressVPN, NordVPN, PIA -- and am using NordVPN now. And I’ve never had a problem with nailing up a connection -- until this trip to Italy. More than a couple of times, the VPN client wouldn’t connect to an Italian server. So, as I’m too prone to do, I bitch-tweeted at NordVPN and, to their credit, they immediately responded. We flipped over the direct messaging and they started trouble-shooting. What finally worked was connecting to one of their obfuscated servers, specialized VPN servers that hide the fact that you’re using a VPN. I don’t know if there are Italian regulations against using VPNs or if it’s just a couple of Italian ISPs blocking VPNs for some reason. Whatever the reason, I give NordVPN props for constructively responding to my whining and quickly solving my problem.</li><li>Also back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/08/24/podcast-178-what-remains-from-pandemic-times-best-restaurant-and-bars/\" title=\"Podcast #178 — What Remains from Pandemic Times; Best Restaurant and Bars\">August episode</a> when talking about booking our travel over to Italy, I talked about burning off some Amex points to fly Air France business class. I think, by now, the standard business class seat is an individual pod that give you your own space, your own cocoon -- some are snugger than others, the buttons and amenities are a bit different -- but over the last 5-6 years, that’s what I’ve come to expect when I walk into a business class cabin. So when I got to my seat on this Air France 777, I was very underwhelmed -- no pods, just a standard 2-3-2 seat configuration with no separators between the seats. I tweeted out a couple of pictures. It wasn’t a great first impression. But the service was good, the food and wine were very good (as I’d expect from Air France) and they didn’t put a 3rd person in Irene’s and my center section. And I ended up sleeping very well, probably with the help of an after-dinner armagnac.</li><li>Flying home was Lufthansa from Catania to Munich and then United straight to ORD.&nbsp; I wasn’t thrilled with the connection through Munich; the last time we’d connected through there, long lines at passport control and security had us sprinting down the concourse to make what should’ve been a reasonably timed connection. But this time, it wasn’t a problem. There was maybe a 5-minute queue at passport control and no additional security, so we had time to grab some breakfast in the Lufthansa lounge before heading down to the United gate. Walking to the gate, I said to Irene “Looks like they fixed whatever the problem was when we were last here ‘cause it’s been a smooth connection.” And as the word “smooth” left my mouth, we saw the line. Luckily, for us, we weren’t in it. There was a huge tailback out of passport control for people arriving from the US getting into the Schengen zone to make their connecting flights -- the same thing that happened to us. So they hadn’t fixed the problem. Arriving MUC <em>from</em> the US; still a problem. Leaving MUC <em>to</em> the US; not so much. I’ve filed that away for future reference.</li><li>Once on the United 787, I noticed that our seatback screens weren’t working. I mentioned this to the flight attendant when she came by to check on us. It wasn’t a problem; there was no one in the center section and all those screens were working, so we could just slide over if we wanted to. As it was, Irene was reading a book and I was listening to podcasts, so we didn’t need the screens. I just figured I’d tell the flight attendant so the ORD maintenance crew would know to look at it.&nbsp; About halfway through the flight, the attendant comes back around and says she wants to give us something for our inconvenience. “I want to do something for you because you’ve been so nice about this,” she said. There was absolutely no inconvenience, but if United wants to give me free stuff, who am I to refuse. She pulled out her phone, opened an app, and for each of us, checked our e-mail addresses, and asked if we wanted 7,500 miles or $150 in credit (we took the money). And when we lit up our phones on the runway at ORD, we both had emails with the voucher details. I gotta be nice more often.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> or the <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram </a>account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — <em><em>Paint the Sky</em>&nbsp;</em>by Hans Atom (c) 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/hansatom/50718 Ft: Miss Judged</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Tracking COVID Travel Requirements</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>If my biggest worry on our Italy trip was our Saturday flights on ITA, my second, more chronic worry was that we’d get caught up in paperwork hassles at one of the borders we were crossing (France, Italy, Germany, the US), maybe missing something in all the different requirements, having some airport gate agent or train conductor or immigration guy enforcing their own unique interpretation; or not our paper CDC vaccination card not accepted in lieu of an EU Green Pass QR code on our phones. The great thing, as I said earlier, is that none of this came to pass. And at the end of each travel day, I let out a small sigh of relief -- just enough to feel good, but not so much that it might jinx the next travel day.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>Catania Airport, where we flew into and out of Sicily, was the only place that things got a little weird. We landed there at 8pm after a pretty flawless trains, planes, and automobiles travel day -- a on-time, almost empty train ride from Lecce to Brindisi, a taxi to the airport, the no-problem ITA flights, and now in Catania, our bags were the first ones to pop out on the luggage belt.&nbsp; Another small sigh of relief and we walk out of baggage claim to meet our friend -- only to be waylaid by two security guards. “Where did you come from?” one of them asked. “Rome,” I said. “Where are you from?” “The US”. “Go to the line on the right,” she said. I looked at the sign; it said “COVID-19 test.”&nbsp; Apparently, Sicily, or maybe just Catania, was requiring on-site COVID tests for non-EU arrivals. I was completely blindsided. There was nothing like this when we landed in Bari, in Puglia, 10 days earlier, and I didn’t see this anywhere on any of the <em>many</em> Italian governmental websites I checked before our trip. I looked down the testing line; it was beginning to tail back; this was going to be a bad time. “Wait! Wait a minute!” I said to the other guard, “We’ve been in Italy since the beginning of the month.” I pulled out my paper boarding passes that luckily I’d saved. “See, we started our flight in Brindisi; we just connected through Rome.” “You’ve been here two weeks?” he asked. Actually, it was more like 10 days, but I wasn’t going to correct his math. “OK, no need to test. Go to the left,” and he waved to his colleague to let us through. We quickly walked outside before either of them could change their minds and saw the COVID test line full of people trying to fill out forms on each other’s backs while standing in a line that led into a large room full of cubicles where yet more people were waiting to be tested. It looked like at least an hour’s worth of a very bad time. I was very happy the security guard was fluent enough in English to let me talk my way out of that line.</li><li>All the different shades of testing and tracking requirements -- by country, by state, even by city --&nbsp; Italy requiring an EU digital passenger locator form, proof of vaccination, and a negative COVID test taken within 72 hours of arrival (vs. the US’s requirement that the test be taken within 72 hours of <em>departure</em>); Puglia adding to that another form to be filled out and emailed to the regional health department before arrival; there’s Sicily’s stealth on-arrival COVID testing, and I’m still trying to figure out exactly what the UK wants of us for our trip there in the back-half of November because it looks like the rules changed a bit this week.&nbsp; It all keeps you a bit off-balance, a bit anxious that you’ve missed something which is going to land you in a long, expensive line somewhere.</li><li>The mechanics of it all caught me off-guard at first. Checking into our Air France flight in ORD, the agent checked our vaccination cards and digital passenger locator forms (which, in spite of being digital, I’d printed out to make it easier to show someone). When we arrived in Bari, we walked straight out of baggage claim to the terminal. There was no one to check any of our paperwork. The same thing happened to my son Andrew last month when he flew into Barcelona. It seems like governments have made all of this a boarding requirement and pushed the responsibility to check it onto the carrier. Kinda like the carrier checks your passport and visa to make sure you can get into the country you’re going to; they’ve tacked on these additional COVID requirements. But even then, when I land in a new country, there’s still someone in a booth checking my passport. Irene tried to show one border police guy her vaccination card and he just waved her off.</li><li>But Italy requires proof of vaccination to go inside a restaurant or bar or a cathedral or an airport, so while the border cops weren’t interested in our vaccination status, a lot of waiters were. We kept our CDC cards handy, tucked in our passports. I worried about places turning us away for not being able to show the EU Green Pass QR code, but again, I was happy to be wrong. There was only one place, a restaurant in Bari, where a young waitress hesitated when we showed her our CDC cards, but almost immediately, one of the older waiters ran up, looked at the cards and said it was all good. Maybe some of this is timing. When Italy first re-opened back in, what July?, and people were trying to figure things out on the fly, it would make sense that waiters or gate agents would turn away people with unfamiliar pieces of cardboard. But now, 2-3 months on, they seem to have figured it out. I’m hoping I can too</li><li>Bridge Music — <em>Dub the Uke</em> by Kara Square (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mindmapthat/53340 Ft: DJ Vadim</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>&nbsp;Cycling Through Puglia</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>This trip didn’t start off with the idea “Let’s go to Puglia!” Instead, it started at the tired end of a Chicago winter as a combination of “Let’s go back to Europe” and “Let’s go on a cycling tour!” and then looking at what rides were available in the fall, in October because, back in April, Europe was not doing a great job with vaccine roll-out. And that was our path to Puglia. </li><li>We’d done a self-guided cycling tour in southwest Scotland some years ago, but in southern Italy, never been here, not sure how much support there would be and how English would be spoken, we decided to go with a full tour. We narrowed the tour companies down to Trek Travel and <a href=\"https://www.backroads.com/\">Backroads</a>. They both had good Puglia itineraries. I’d done a Trek tour in Moab, UT some years back, so we decided to give Backroads a shot.</li><li>There were 16 people on the tour, 12 of which were Backroads veterans; some very much so. One couple had done a Provence tour with them in July and another woman was doing back-to-back tours -- the week before she’d ridden their Sicily tour and then flew straight up to Bari for this tour. These veterans said that Backroads does a great job organizing everything; it makes travel easy. It’s kinda the same thing I hear from people who are big into cruising -- show up in some part of the world and have people take care of you. All that being said, after 6 days and 200 miles in the saddle, I came away happy (if a little sore) with the tour and impressed with the hospitality and service ethic of the Backroads tour guides.</li><li>We were riding through Puglia the week of October 10th which was probably a week too late because the towns were beginning to close up for the season. One day, we had a couple of hours in the hill town of Ostuni for lunch, but struggled to find places that were open. Many of the restaurants were dark, even though the signs on the doors said they should be open, as did the hours listed on their websites and their Google Maps listings. No signs saying “Closed for the season”, just locked doors through which we would see chairs on all the tables. We had similar experiences in Otronto and to a lesser extent in Lecce. One of the Backroads guides said that Puglia is a popular destination for Italian tourists from up north; many of them have vacation homes there. And when those folks head home, the remaining locals and handful of misdirected tourists aren’t enough to keep all the bars and restaurants going.</li><li>But the touring was great -- riding alongside groves of huge, old, gnarled olive trees with vegetable crops like fennel and bitter greens planted underneath; and along the Adriatic Sea, up on the ridge along the coastal road and then down through little beach towns and fishing villages. </li><li>And I think that’s the way to do Puglia, touring, doing a couple of days each in Bari and Lecce wandering through the narrow streets of their old towns, a day in Otronto, with half-day stops in Alberobello, Matera, and/or Ostuni, maybe a day or two hanging out in a nice agriturismo or one of those beach towns on the Adriatic. </li><li>We drank a lot of wine, mostly the local Primitivo, a grape closely related to California’s Zinfandel, and ate a lot of seafood, especially octopus. At dinner during our second night in Bari, a young guy walked in with two small clear plastic buckets full of small octopus, very similar to a bucket I saw at the feet of a fisherman at the dock earlier in the day. I don’t think the seafood we were eating that week had been out of the Adriatic for much more than 24 hours before it hit our plates.</li><li>It was a different experience, a different vibe from our prior trips to Italy, which had all been up north -- to Tuscany, to Milan, to Venice. But biking through those olive groves, those fields, those little towns; that’s the lower key experience we were looking for -- and got -- on our time in Puglia. If you want see pictures, head over to the TravelCommons’ Instagram site and click on Puglia/Sicily where I’ve collected some of the better Instagram Stories pictures.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #180</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_180.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #180 — Tracking COVID Travel Requirements; Cycling Thru Puglia','','inherit','closed','closed','','3960-revision-v1','','','2021-10-28 17:32:20','2021-10-28 22:32:20','',3960,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3970',0,'revision','',0),
(3971,1,'2021-10-28 18:00:07','2021-10-28 23:00:07','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_1985\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/IMG_3845.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-3581 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/IMG_3845-300x300.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a>Gotta Stay Hydrated[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Back at the microphone after two weeks in Southern Italy. Lots of travel segments that could\'ve gone wrong, but none of them did. We talk about what international travel is like in COVID times, about the challenge of keeping track and complying with the different COVID travel requirements that seem to be constantly changing, and then some thoughts about our bike tour through Puglia with <a href=\"https://www.backroads.com/trips/BPLQ/puglia-italy-biking-tour\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Backroads</a>. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_180.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #180: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after 2 weeks in the south of Italy, a <a href=\"https://www.backroads.com/trips/BPLQ/puglia-italy-biking-tour\">cycling tour through Puglia</a>, and then visiting friends in Sicily; they’re grabbing one last bit of sunshine, topping up their vitamin D levels before the short, cold days of northern Europe’s winter sets in. I’ve talked in the last couple of episodes about travel planning for this trip, the changes, the shifts I’ve had to make, and about all the places, the segments that could’ve gone wrong -- but none of them did! For sure there was a little weirdness along the way, especially in Sicily, but every flight and train leg was on-time and pretty uneventful.&nbsp;</li><li>We hit what are now typical mask rule inconsistencies right off the bat in ORD. We walked into the Swissport Lounge that Air France and others use for business class and got the mask rules -- mask on unless actively eating or drinking; airplane rules -- and then walk into a small room with no food and a pretty dire bar. We sat down, but after a couple of minutes walked back out, straight down the concourse to <a href=\"https://www.rickbayless.com/restaurants/tortas-frontera/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tortas Frontera</a>, our favorite ORD restaurant, for good margaritas, and where they were applying Chicago indoor mask rules -- you can drop your mask once you’re at your table. It was worth paying $90 to drink quality in comfort rather than playing mask peek-a-boo with the Swissport’s free wine.</li><li>The next morning, DeGaulle was more confusing than I remember it being in 2019. Getting from Terminal 2E to 2F seemed to take more cognitive power than it should’ve; maybe I hadn’t gotten as much sleep on the flight over as I thought. But all in all, it was an easy, uneventful flight over to Italy.</li><li>As I expected it to be. My biggest worry was our flights the following week from Brindisi in Puglia to Catania in Sicily, connecting through Rome on what would be the second day of operations for ITA, the Italian government’s successor to the bankrupt Alitalia. This itinerary certainly wasn’t my first choice, but as I’ve mentioned in the last couple of episodes, I didn’t have another one. There were labor actions leading up to the switch over that had disrupted operations, and even without that, you’d figure there’d be at least a hundred places where some minor snafu could botch up their big Rome hub. But other than a couple of agents maybe staging an impromptu work slowdown at the Brindisi check-in desk (or that was just their normal pace), it all went smoothly. And really, across all our travel legs, but for wearing masks and having our vaccination cards checked, it didn’t seem all that different from 2019. Now I know that’s a pretty big “But for”, but I’ll happily take it.</li><li>Bridge Music — <em><em>Perfect Stranger</em>&nbsp;</em>by stellarartwars (c) 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/stellarartwars/45510 Ft: TheDice</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Jerry Sarfati hit the TravelCommons’ Instagram feed to say that he’s seen no delays in TSA’s Global Entry processing. Jerry said<ul><li>“Thanks for the latest podcast. I refreshed my Global Entry. Very easy. Was told 72 hours later that all was approved; no interview needed.”</li></ul></li><li>Thanks for that, Jerry. I just checked. A month-and-a-half later (936 hrs using Jerry’s unit of measure), the TTP Dashboard (Trusted Traveler Program) still shows an hourglass next to “Wait for Conditional Approval”. But I’m guessing I’m probably a bit more of a suspect character than you.&nbsp;</li><li>Twitter user @LAflyer weighed in on last episode’s discussion about how business travelers are still MIA (missing in action)<ul><li>“Thanks for the new episode. In my opinion, face-to-face is becoming increasingly the edge case. I think we’ve proven we can manage so much remotely that the need for on-site/in-person meetings will be the exception, not the rule anymore. That’s ok with me. I prefer my own bed over traveling 200,000 miles annually.”</li></ul></li><li>I think this is a valid and widely-held opinion/belief/hope -- that beginning in March 2020, we’ve now all lived through an extended crash course in remote work and video conference, we’ve done it successfully, and so can significantly reduce the need for business travel, which will allow people to spend more time in their own beds and with their families as well as reducing business expenses, and reducing airplane carbon emissions. How much business travel will be eliminated? That’s the big question that I’m guessing will take another year before we begin to see the answer.</li><li>Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/08/24/podcast-178-what-remains-from-pandemic-times-best-restaurant-and-bars/\" title=\"Podcast #178 — What Remains from Pandemic Times; Best Restaurant and Bars\">August episode</a>,&nbsp; asking the question “What Will Remain from These Pandemic Times?” the death of daily hotel room cleaning service was at the top of my list. Indeed, Hilton had just announced their move to on-demand housekeeping across all their non-luxury brands. But in Italy, I saw none of this. Not only did every hotel service our rooms every day, they were still doing turndowns every night. And they were doing their regular breakfasts, though with staff plating your food from the buffet rather than you digging in yourself. Now, we weren’t staying at major brands; only small Italian brands or independents, so I don’t know if that changes things, but they were much better hotel experiences than I’ve had recently in the US.</li><li>I didn’t realize how aggressive Apple is about iOS updates until this trip. I update pretty quickly when I’m at home, but on this trip, it seemed like I had to wave off the 15.0.2 update every couple of days. I didn’t bring my laptop with me, so I had no way to recover on the slight chance that the upgrade bricked my iPhone -- without which I wouldn’t have been able to do the video chat session for the Abbott home test kit or display the test results, which was how we were getting back into the US. As if we didn’t know it already, you just can’t easily travel anymore without a <em>working</em> mobile phone.</li><li>I’ve talked in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food\">past </a><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\" title=\"10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times\">episodes</a> about how I will use a VPN, a virtual private network, when using public WiFi networks in hotels, airports, Starbucks to make my connection more secure. I’ve used all the top paid VPNs over the years -- ExpressVPN, NordVPN, PIA -- and am using NordVPN now. And I’ve never had a problem with nailing up a connection -- until this trip to Italy. More than a couple of times, the VPN client wouldn’t connect to an Italian server. So, as I’m too prone to do, I bitch-tweeted at NordVPN and, to their credit, they immediately responded. We flipped over the direct messaging and they started trouble-shooting. What finally worked was connecting to one of their obfuscated servers, specialized VPN servers that hide the fact that you’re using a VPN. I don’t know if there are Italian regulations against using VPNs or if it’s just a couple of Italian ISPs blocking VPNs for some reason. Whatever the reason, I give NordVPN props for constructively responding to my whining and quickly solving my problem.</li><li>Also back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/08/24/podcast-178-what-remains-from-pandemic-times-best-restaurant-and-bars/\" title=\"Podcast #178 — What Remains from Pandemic Times; Best Restaurant and Bars\">August episode</a> when talking about booking our travel over to Italy, I talked about burning off some Amex points to fly Air France business class. I think, by now, the standard business class seat is an individual pod that give you your own space, your own cocoon -- some are snugger than others, the buttons and amenities are a bit different -- but over the last 5-6 years, that’s what I’ve come to expect when I walk into a business class cabin. So when I got to my seat on this Air France 777, I was very underwhelmed -- no pods, just a standard 2-3-2 seat configuration with no separators between the seats. I tweeted out a couple of pictures. It wasn’t a great first impression. But the service was good, the food and wine were very good (as I’d expect from Air France) and they didn’t put a 3rd person in Irene’s and my center section. And I ended up sleeping very well, probably with the help of an after-dinner armagnac.</li><li>Flying home was Lufthansa from Catania to Munich and then United straight to ORD.&nbsp; I wasn’t thrilled with the connection through Munich; the last time we’d connected through there, long lines at passport control and security had us sprinting down the concourse to make what should’ve been a reasonably timed connection. But this time, it wasn’t a problem. There was maybe a 5-minute queue at passport control and no additional security, so we had time to grab some breakfast in the Lufthansa lounge before heading down to the United gate. Walking to the gate, I said to Irene “Looks like they fixed whatever the problem was when we were last here ‘cause it’s been a smooth connection.” And as the word “smooth” left my mouth, we saw the line. Luckily, for us, we weren’t in it. There was a huge tailback out of passport control for people arriving from the US getting into the Schengen zone to make their connecting flights -- the same thing that happened to us. So they hadn’t fixed the problem. Arriving MUC <em>from</em> the US; still a problem. Leaving MUC <em>to</em> the US; not so much. I’ve filed that away for future reference.</li><li>Once on the United 787, I noticed that our seatback screens weren’t working. I mentioned this to the flight attendant when she came by to check on us. It wasn’t a problem; there was no one in the center section and all those screens were working, so we could just slide over if we wanted to. As it was, Irene was reading a book and I was listening to podcasts, so we didn’t need the screens. I just figured I’d tell the flight attendant so the ORD maintenance crew would know to look at it.&nbsp; About halfway through the flight, the attendant comes back around and says she wants to give us something for our inconvenience. “I want to do something for you because you’ve been so nice about this,” she said. There was absolutely no inconvenience, but if United wants to give me free stuff, who am I to refuse. She pulled out her phone, opened an app, and for each of us, checked our e-mail addresses, and asked if we wanted 7,500 miles or $150 in credit (we took the money). And when we lit up our phones on the runway at ORD, we both had emails with the voucher details. I gotta be nice more often.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> or the <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram </a>account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — <em><em>Paint the Sky</em>&nbsp;</em>by Hans Atom (c) 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/hansatom/50718 Ft: Miss Judged</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Tracking COVID Travel Requirements</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>If my biggest worry on our Italy trip was our Saturday flights on ITA, my second, more chronic worry was that we’d get caught up in paperwork hassles at one of the borders we were crossing (France, Italy, Germany, the US), maybe missing something in all the different requirements, having some airport gate agent or train conductor or immigration guy enforcing their own unique interpretation; or not our paper CDC vaccination card not accepted in lieu of an EU Green Pass QR code on our phones. The great thing, as I said earlier, is that none of this came to pass. And at the end of each travel day, I let out a small sigh of relief -- just enough to feel good, but not so much that it might jinx the next travel day.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>Catania Airport, where we flew into and out of Sicily, was the only place that things got a little weird. We landed there at 8pm after a pretty flawless trains, planes, and automobiles travel day -- a on-time, almost empty train ride from Lecce to Brindisi, a taxi to the airport, the no-problem ITA flights, and now in Catania, our bags were the first ones to pop out on the luggage belt.&nbsp; Another small sigh of relief and we walk out of baggage claim to meet our friend -- only to be waylaid by two security guards. “Where did you come from?” one of them asked. “Rome,” I said. “Where are you from?” “The US”. “Go to the line on the right,” she said. I looked at the sign; it said “COVID-19 test.”&nbsp; Apparently, Sicily, or maybe just Catania, was requiring on-site COVID tests for non-EU arrivals. I was completely blindsided. There was nothing like this when we landed in Bari, in Puglia, 10 days earlier, and I didn’t see this anywhere on any of the <em>many</em> Italian governmental websites I checked before our trip. I looked down the testing line; it was beginning to tail back; this was going to be a bad time. “Wait! Wait a minute!” I said to the other guard, “We’ve been in Italy since the beginning of the month.” I pulled out my paper boarding passes that luckily I’d saved. “See, we started our flight in Brindisi; we just connected through Rome.” “You’ve been here two weeks?” he asked. Actually, it was more like 10 days, but I wasn’t going to correct his math. “OK, no need to test. Go to the left,” and he waved to his colleague to let us through. We quickly walked outside before either of them could change their minds and saw the COVID test line full of people trying to fill out forms on each other’s backs while standing in a line that led into a large room full of cubicles where yet more people were waiting to be tested. It looked like at least an hour’s worth of a very bad time. I was very happy the security guard was fluent enough in English to let me talk my way out of that line.</li><li>All the different shades of testing and tracking requirements -- by country, by state, even by city --&nbsp; Italy requiring an EU digital passenger locator form, proof of vaccination, and a negative COVID test taken within 72 hours of arrival (vs. the US’s requirement that the test be taken within 72 hours of <em>departure</em>); Puglia adding to that another form to be filled out and emailed to the regional health department before arrival; there’s Sicily’s stealth on-arrival COVID testing, and I’m still trying to figure out exactly what the UK wants of us for our trip there in the back-half of November because it looks like the rules changed a bit this week.&nbsp; It all keeps you a bit off-balance, a bit anxious that you’ve missed something which is going to land you in a long, expensive line somewhere.</li><li>The mechanics of it all caught me off-guard at first. Checking into our Air France flight in ORD, the agent checked our vaccination cards and digital passenger locator forms (which, in spite of being digital, I’d printed out to make it easier to show someone). When we arrived in Bari, we walked straight out of baggage claim to the terminal. There was no one to check any of our paperwork. The same thing happened to my son Andrew last month when he flew into Barcelona. It seems like governments have made all of this a boarding requirement and pushed the responsibility to check it onto the carrier. Kinda like the carrier checks your passport and visa to make sure you can get into the country you’re going to; they’ve tacked on these additional COVID requirements. But even then, when I land in a new country, there’s still someone in a booth checking my passport. Irene tried to show one border police guy her vaccination card and he just waved her off.</li><li>But Italy requires proof of vaccination to go inside a restaurant or bar or a cathedral or an airport, so while the border cops weren’t interested in our vaccination status, a lot of waiters were. We kept our CDC cards handy, tucked in our passports. I worried about places turning us away for not being able to show the EU Green Pass QR code, but again, I was happy to be wrong. There was only one place, a restaurant in Bari, where a young waitress hesitated when we showed her our CDC cards, but almost immediately, one of the older waiters ran up, looked at the cards and said it was all good. Maybe some of this is timing. When Italy first re-opened back in, what July?, and people were trying to figure things out on the fly, it would make sense that waiters or gate agents would turn away people with unfamiliar pieces of cardboard. But now, 2-3 months on, they seem to have figured it out. I’m hoping I can too</li><li>Bridge Music — <em>Dub the Uke</em> by Kara Square (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mindmapthat/53340 Ft: DJ Vadim</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>&nbsp;Cycling Through Puglia</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>This trip didn’t start off with the idea “Let’s go to Puglia!” Instead, it started at the tired end of a Chicago winter as a combination of “Let’s go back to Europe” and “Let’s go on a cycling tour!” and then looking at what rides were available in the fall, in October because, back in April, Europe was not doing a great job with vaccine roll-out. And that was our path to Puglia.&nbsp;</li><li>We’d done a self-guided cycling tour in southwest Scotland some years ago, but in southern Italy, never been here, not sure how much support there would be and how English would be spoken, we decided to go with a full tour. We narrowed the tour companies down to Trek Travel and <a href=\"https://www.backroads.com/\">Backroads</a>. They both had good Puglia itineraries. I’d done a Trek tour in Moab, UT some years back, so we decided to give Backroads a shot.</li><li>There were 16 people on the tour, 12 of which were Backroads veterans; some very much so. One couple had done a Provence tour with them in July and another woman was doing back-to-back tours -- the week before she’d ridden their Sicily tour and then flew straight up to Bari for this tour. These veterans said that Backroads does a great job organizing everything; it makes travel easy. It’s kinda the same thing I hear from people who are big into cruising -- show up in some part of the world and have people take care of you. All that being said, after 6 days and 200 miles in the saddle, I came away happy (if a little sore) with the tour and impressed with the hospitality and service ethic of the Backroads tour guides.</li><li>We were riding through Puglia the week of October 10th which was probably a week too late because the towns were beginning to close up for the season. One day, we had a couple of hours in the hill town of Ostuni for lunch, but struggled to find places that were open. Many of the restaurants were dark, even though the signs on the doors said they should be open, as did the hours listed on their websites and their Google Maps listings. No signs saying “Closed for the season”, just locked doors through which we would see chairs on all the tables. We had similar experiences in Otronto and to a lesser extent in Lecce. One of the Backroads guides said that Puglia is a popular destination for Italian tourists from up north; many of them have vacation homes there. And when those folks head home, the remaining locals and handful of misdirected tourists aren’t enough to keep all the bars and restaurants going.</li><li>But the touring was great -- riding alongside groves of huge, old, gnarled olive trees with vegetable crops like fennel and bitter greens planted underneath; and along the Adriatic Sea, up on the ridge along the coastal road and then down through little beach towns and fishing villages.&nbsp;</li><li>And I think that’s the way to do Puglia, touring, doing a couple of days each in Bari and Lecce wandering through the narrow streets of their old towns, a day in Otronto, with half-day stops in Alberobello, Matera, and/or Ostuni, maybe a day or two hanging out in a nice agriturismo or one of those beach towns on the Adriatic.&nbsp;</li><li>We drank a lot of wine, mostly the local Primitivo, a grape closely related to California’s Zinfandel, and ate a lot of seafood, especially octopus. At dinner during our second night in Bari, a young guy walked in with two small clear plastic buckets full of small octopus, very similar to a bucket I saw at the feet of a fisherman at the dock earlier in the day. I don’t think the seafood we were eating that week had been out of the Adriatic for much more than 24 hours before it hit our plates.</li><li>It was a different experience, a different vibe from our prior trips to Italy, which had all been up north -- to Tuscany, to Milan, to Venice. But biking through those olive groves, those fields, those little towns; that’s the lower key experience we were looking for -- and got -- on our time in Puglia. If you want see pictures, head over to the TravelCommons’ Instagram site and click on Puglia/Sicily where I’ve collected some of the better Instagram Stories pictures.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #180</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_180.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #180 — Tracking COVID Travel Requirements; Cycling Thru Puglia','','inherit','closed','closed','','3960-revision-v1','','','2021-10-28 18:00:07','2021-10-28 23:00:07','',3960,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3971',0,'revision','',0),
(3973,1,'2021-11-02 13:11:09','2021-11-02 18:11:09','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":2591,\"width\":316,\"height\":210} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright is-resized\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/DSC_2534-1024x683.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2591\" width=\"316\" height=\"210\"/></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Coming into the heart of the Christmas shopping season, when people are getting desperate for gift ideas, I thought I\'d offer up 10 suggestions for gifts that a new frequent traveler will actually use. While many gift lists are pushing Away luggage, Huzi infinity pillows, and Aesop travel kits (these companies must\'ve splashed a lot of samples around the blog-o-sphere), I built my list based on my own travel kit; the things I use every travel day in the 40-50 trips I take each year.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list {\"ordered\":true} -->\n<ol><li><strong>Black 20-inch carry-on suitcase</strong> <strong>—</strong> Black not only makes you look thinner, it makes your bag look thinner to gate agents hunting for bag-sizer bait. Black also doesn’t show stains. A 20-incher should get your traveler on-board for 90% of airlines without a hassle. I go for the 2-wheeler with the biggest wheels I can find to make it an easier, smoother pull. But that\'s my personal preference; a lot of travelers (including my wife) swear by their 4-wheel spinners. I bought the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/32lIURe\">TravelPro Maxlite 5</a> a few months ago and highly recommend it.</li><li><strong>TSA Global Entry or Pre-Check</strong> <strong>—</strong> Gift your new traveler with 5 years of time and hassle reduction. <a aria-label=\"$100 for both (opens in a new tab)\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.cbp.gov/travel/trusted-traveler-programs/global-entry\" target=\"_blank\">$100 for both</a>; $85 for just <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Pre-Check. (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/precheck\" target=\"_blank\">Pre-Check.</a> If you have a high-end card like an <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Amex Platinum (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.americanexpress.com/us/expedite-your-travel.html\" target=\"_blank\">Amex Platinum</a>, you might be able to put your card on their application and get the $100 fee back in a statement credit.</li><li><strong>Noise Canceling Headphones</strong> <strong>—</strong> I mentioned in <a aria-label=\"$100 for both (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/11/30/podcast-157-notes-from-the-baltics-riga-latvia-and-tallinn-estonia/\">the last podcast episode</a> how my trusty Bose QC-15s saved me from the propeller drone on my flights around the Baltics. The drone of jet or propeller engines disappear with the flick of a switch. But it\'s the drop in stress level and blood pressure that accompanies that flick of the switch — you don’t realize how much that drone affects you. Everything in my briefcase has to earn its space. I’ve been carrying Bose headphones for, I dunno, 10, 15 years. They’re nowhere near compact, but I’ve never thought of leaving them behind. The models you want to look for -- either the <a aria-label=\" (opens in a new tab)\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2RG7V80\" target=\"_blank\">Bose QC-35 II</a> or the <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Sony WH-1000XM3 (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2LGlVuK\" target=\"_blank\">Sony WH-1000XM3</a>. Your generous gift will be lovingly appreciated by your new traveler.</li><li><strong>VPN Subscription</strong> <strong>—</strong> Frequent travelers spend much of their time on public WiFi networks -- airports, hotels, bars, coffee shops, ....  Help them surf safe with a VPN subscription. I\'ve used <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"NordVPN (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"http://nordvpn.com\" target=\"_blank\">NordVPN</a> and <a aria-label=\" (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/\">PIA</a>.  They both protect laptops, and iOS and Android phones and tablets. VPN providers always have some promotion going on. A one-year subscription is usually in the $35-85 range.</li><li><strong>Portable Power Bank</strong> <strong>—</strong> Whatever the size or form factor -- slimline, lipstick, high-capacity brick -- having that second or third charge readily available is critical to get last-minute gate change notifications and when you’re using electronic boarding passes. It saves you from stalking cleaning crews to find a live power outlet on your layover, or negotiating with your seat mate for possession of outlet between you. It’s cheap peace of mind.  The <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Anker PowerCore+ Mini (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2E6HMri\" target=\"_blank\">Anker PowerCore+ Mini</a> is light enough (under 3 oz) to carry any time. I\'ve also started carrying a <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Zendure Power Bank Supermini (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/34fcbON\" target=\"_blank\">Zendure Power Bank Supermini</a> for faster iPhone 11 charging.</li><li><strong>Badger Hair Shaving Brush</strong> <strong>—</strong> I switched from an electric razor to blade to make it easier to pass through London-Heathrow during one of their security crack-downs and never went back. To do it right, though, you need to have a badger hair shaving brush. I use a not-too-expensive <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Edwin Jagger brush (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2Pcm1wy\" target=\"_blank\">Edwin Jagger brush</a> that makes my morning shave into a bit of a meditation. If you want to go all in, get your traveler the <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Alluvian Shave Soap 5-Piece Travel Size Sampler. (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://alluvian.co/shop/shave-soap-travel-size-sampler\" target=\"_blank\">Alluvian Shave Soap 5-Piece Travel Size Sampler.</a> They smell great and are the perfect travel size.</li><li><strong>Merino Wool Scarf</strong> <strong>—</strong>&nbsp;A man’s scarf is an incredibly undervalued piece of intermediate winter wear. In an airplane cabin or hotel room where a coat is too much (especially in a middle seat), but there’s a draft that chills you, a scarf around the neck is just enough without being too much. You may have to teach your new traveler how to wear it, but you can have fun with colors. I\'m a big fan of <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"merino wool scarves (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/35ckwUq\" target=\"_blank\">merino wool scarves</a> -- they\'re warm, soft, and dry out if you spill water on them.</li><li><strong>Compression Socks</strong> <strong>—</strong> Yes, I know that compression socks won\'t generate the most ooh\'s and aah\'s when their wrapping is torn off. But not having to stuff swollen feet back into shoes after an international or transcontinental flight has made me appreciate them. I wear <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"SB SOX Compression Socks (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/38kJGCi\" target=\"_blank\">SB SOX Compression Socks</a>, but any moderate compression sock should be fine.</li><li><strong>Short HDMI Cable and Dongle</strong> <strong>—</strong> It\'s a rare hotel room I walk into that doesn\'t have a big flat-screen TV mounted to the wall. Many of these will let you log into your Netflix or HBO Go account so you can watch your content on the big screen. But why go through all that (and trust their data and network security set-up) when you can just plug your laptop into one of their spare HDMI ports? I use a <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"basic 3-foot HDMI cable (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2PbFBZx\" target=\"_blank\">basic 3-foot HDMI cable</a>. Most of the common business laptops from Dell and Lenovo have HDMI ports but, because I have a MacBook Air, I also carry an <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Apple USB-C-to-HDMI adapter (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2E4HfpI\" target=\"_blank\">Apple USB-C-to-HDMI adapter</a>. </li><li><strong>Travel Notebook</strong> <strong>—</strong> And finally, a stocking stuffer idea — a travel notebook, something to jot down thoughts, ideas, observations, to do lists while waiting for the flight to board, the train to come, or the room to be made up. Nothing extravagant — no leather embossed cover — but it should be small enough to fit in a pocket, but substantial, something that can survive being knocked around in the bottom of a briefcase, and with paper quality that will hold onto those thoughts for a while. I used to use a <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Moleskine pocket notebook (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/36mN8dZ\" target=\"_blank\">Moleskine pocket notebook</a> but have switched over a similar-sized <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Clairefontaine A6 notebook (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2LMAOM9\" target=\"_blank\">Clairefontaine A6 notebook</a>. The soft cover fits better in a jeans back pocket, and the paper is more fountain-pen friendly. Or go a bit more whimsical and get <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"a pack of Field Notes (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://amzn.to/36pK68D\" target=\"_blank\">a pack of Field Notes</a>.</li></ol>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:block {\"ref\":2601} /-->','10 Best Gift Ideas for a New Traveler','','inherit','closed','closed','','2590-revision-v1','','','2021-11-02 13:11:09','2021-11-02 18:11:09','',2590,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3973',0,'revision','',0),
(3974,1,'2021-11-04 12:33:31','2021-11-04 17:33:31','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_2168\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/E30FECE9-6481-4CD6-835A-6CDF0206F770.jpeg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2168\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/E30FECE9-6481-4CD6-835A-6CDF0206F770-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> Black bags circling under the tree[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>If <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\" title=\"10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">last year\'s gift guide</a> was all about helping folks travel while dodging last-minute lockdowns, this year\'s guide is stacked with the best travel gift ideas to help the frequent traveler in your life cope with <a href=\"https://onemileatatime.com/news/spirit-airlines-operational-meltdown/\">all</a> <a href=\"https://liveandletsfly.com/skywest-cancels-or-delays-thousands-of-flights-impacting-alaska-american-delta-and-united/\">the</a> <a href=\"https://viewfromthewing.com/delta-air-lines-suffers-mass-cancellations-easter-weekend-fills-middle-seats-again-to-recover/\">major</a> <a href=\"https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/10/business/southwest-cancellations/index.html\">airline</a> <a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/30/american-airlines-cancels-hundreds-of-weekend-flights.html\">meltdowns</a>. Or, if <em>you</em> are the frequent traveler, here\'s a list of hints you could strategically drop on family members looking for shopping ideas.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list {\"ordered\":true} -->\n<ol><li><strong>Battery Packs</strong> <strong>—</strong> We just can’t easily travel anymore without a <em>working</em> mobile phone. It holds our boarding passes and our proof of COVID vaccination, gives us gate change and flight delay notifications, and routes us around traffic jams.  A dead phone while flights are being cancelled is more than just a bit of an inconvenience; having that second or third charge immediately available is critical when trying to swerve a long delay. There are a lot of choices; just pick one. I carry <a href=\"https://amzn.to/34fcbON\">Zendure</a> and <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3bHni97\">Anker</a> power banks; they\'ve served me well.</li><li><strong>Noise Canceling Headphone or Ear Buds —</strong> Whether you\'re sitting in a noisy airport waiting out a delay or are up in the air, it\'s great being able to cut out all the background noise and find your Zen place with the flick of a switch. I’ve been carrying Bose headphones for at least 15 years and am now on my 3rd pair, the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2Y9NWnY\">Bose 700\'s</a>. They’re not compact yet they continue to earn their space in my travel bag. I find over-the-ear cans more comfortable, but if you can handle in-the-ear buds for extended periods, Bose does <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3ByWEda\">ear buds</a>, or for Apple eco-system diehards, my kids recommend the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3GNszds\">AirPod Pros</a>.</li><li><strong>Comfortable Masks —</strong> I don\'t see an end to airport or in-flight mask mandates anytime soon. Since you’ll be wearing a mask for 3 or 4 or 8 hours straight between the airport and the flight, you’ll want something a bit better than the bargain-basement masks the gate agent give away for free. I’m a big fan of the <a href=\"https://evolvetogether.com/collections/health-and-wellness\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"https://evolvetogether.com/collections/adult-masks/products/black-milan-coordinates-30-face-masks\">evolvetogether masks</a>. I wear their standard masks all the time and wore their KN-95 masks on my recent flights to and from Italy. They’re breathable, they come with a pocket carrier for spares, and at $1.20/mask, they hit the right cost-vs.-quality point.</li><li><strong>Apple AirTags</strong> <strong><strong>—</strong></strong> Another suggestion for you Apple eco-system inhabitants... Putting an <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3k4rCUy\">AirTag</a> in your checked luggage lets you see if your bag is joining you on the new flight the airline just rebooked you on, or you can hang one from your backpack to track it if it somehow wanders off while you\'re checking the departure board.</li><li><strong><strong>Water Bottle —</strong></strong> With in-flight service still being a bit iffy, many people are carrying on their own water bottles. Most airports have refilling spigots next to regular water fountains so it\'s easy to fill up on the air side of security. There\'s a huge range of bottles and prices to choose from. I use a mid-range <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3bBVRgU\">Contigo</a> bottle when I\'m not refilling the Evian bottle I bought at the Hudson News stand 15 minutes ago.</li><li><strong>Merino Wool Scarf</strong> <strong>—</strong> Men\'s scarves are way undervalued (at least in the US) as something that can you can whip out of your travel bag to ward the chill off. In an airplane cabin where a coat is too much (especially in a middle seat) but you\'re getting cold because you\'ve pointed the air jet straight down to create an air curtain between you and the guys next to you, a scarf around the neck is just enough without being too much. I’m a big fan of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/35ckwUq\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" target=\"_blank\">merino wool scarves</a> — they’re warm, soft, and dry out if you spill water on them.</li><li><strong>USB-C to HDMI Cable</strong> <strong><strong>—</strong></strong> Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/07/28/podcast-177-b-sides-and-rarities/\" title=\"Podcast #177 — B-Sides and Rarities… Interview Outtakes\">July episode</a>, I said my <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3q5vY1l\">USB-C to HDMI cable</a> was the most important piece of travel kit on my trip through the Northeast because, by mirroring my MacBook Air display on hotel and beach house TVs, I could sit back with a beer and comfortably watch YouTube highlights of the Euro 2020 soccer tournament and the Tour de France on 40-60” flat screens instead of hunching over a 13” laptop screen.</li><li><strong><strong>Portable Bluetooth Speaker </strong></strong>— Wearing headphones is OK for a day or two if you’re by yourself, but when I’m with the family, I want something a bit more social. I’m a Bose fan, so I like their <a href=\"https://amzn.to/328yhUP\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundLink Micro</a>, but there’s a broad selection of makers, form factors, and price points to choose from.</li><li><strong>Smartphone Tripod</strong> — My lightweight <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3pZmjcS\">Square Jellyfish phone tripod</a> came in very handy while doing my <a href=\"https://www.emed.com/products/covid-at-home-testkit-six-pack?hsLang=en\">at-home COVID test</a> in Italy the morning before my flight home. The eMed test proctor wanted to watch me swirl the cotton swab in my nose and then insert it into the test kit. I\'m not sure how I would\'ve done that while holding my phone. I use it a lot more than I thought I would for video calls and to watch quick videos on my phone.</li><li><strong>Travel Notebook</strong> <strong>—</strong> Nothing fancy, no leather embossed cover, just something to jot down thoughts, ideas, observations, or to-do lists while waiting out that flight delay or for the bartender to bring you a beer. My first travel notebooks were <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://amzn.to/36mN8dZ\" target=\"_blank\">Moleskine pocket notebooks</a> but I’ve switched over similar-sized <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2LMAOM9\" target=\"_blank\">Clairefontaine A6 notebooks</a>. Their soft cover fits better in the back pocket of my Levis and the paper is more fountain-pen friendly. Or you could go a bit more whimsical and get <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://amzn.to/36pK68D\" target=\"_blank\">a pack of Field Notes</a>.</li></ol>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><em>Note: None of these suggestions are paid endorsements. This post contains links to Amazon where I can earn a small commission from qualifying purchases.</em></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','10 Best Travel Gift Ideas To Survive Post-Pandemic Travel','','publish','closed','closed','','10-best-travel-gift-ideas-to-survive-post-pandemic-travel','','\nhttps://viewfromthewing.com/delta-air-lines-suffers-mass-cancellations-easter-weekend-fills-middle-seats-again-to-recover/','2021-12-10 11:11:10','2021-12-10 16:11:10','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3974',0,'post','',0),
(3975,1,'2021-11-02 13:28:48','2021-11-02 18:28:48','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530.jpg\"><img=\"\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2931\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"><figcaption>Social distancing the reindeer will be tough</figcaption></img=\"\"></a></figure>\n</div>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>With public health officials saying things like <a href=\"https://www.smh.com.au/national/vaccine-is-imminent-but-virus-fight-has-long-way-to-go-fauci-20201028-p569h2.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">\"it will be easily by the end of 2021 and perhaps into the next year before we start having some semblance of normality,\"</a> I figured this year\'s travel gift guide would need to be a bit different. Here are my top shopping ideas for your pandemic traveler.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list {\"ordered\":true} -->\n<ol><li><strong>Comfortable Masks —</strong> If your traveler is a bandana/buff wearer, they\'re going to need a more conventional mask to get on an airplane. And since they\'ll be wearing it for 2 or 3 or 4 hours straight, they\'ll want something a bit more breathable than the bargain-basement masks the gate agent give away for free. I\'m a big fan of the <a href=\"https://evolvetogether.com/collections/adult-masks/products/black-milan-coordinates-30-face-masks\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">evolvetogether masks in basic black</a>. They\'re breathable, they come with a pocket carrier for spares, and at $1.20/mask, they hit the right cost/quality balance point.</li><li><strong>Battery Packs</strong> <strong>—</strong> With more things going contactless -- electronic boarding passes, digital hotel door locks, order-ahead food and beer -- a dead phone is more than just a bit of an inconvenience, and having that second or third charge immediately available is a lot more important. I carry a mix of sizes. The <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2E6HMri\" target=\"_blank\">Anker PowerCore+ Mini</a> lipstick charger is light enough (under 3 oz) for my pocket while the heavier/higher-capacity <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://amzn.to/34fcbON\" target=\"_blank\">Zendure Power Bank Supermini</a> waits for me in my computer bag.</li><li><strong>TSA Pre-Check or Global Entry —</strong> A perennial on the gift guide, but even more important when we want to limit time spent in security lines because no one is really staying 6 feet away from each other. It\'s $85 for 5 years of <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/precheck\" target=\"_blank\">Pre-Check</a> or, if you\'re feeling optimistic about international travel opening soon, <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.cbp.gov/travel/trusted-traveler-programs/global-entry\" target=\"_blank\">$100 for both Global Entry and Pre-Check.</a> You might be able to use a high-end travel card like an <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.americanexpress.com/us/expedite-your-travel.html\" target=\"_blank\">Amex Platinum</a> to pay for your traveler\'s application and get the TSA fee back as a statement credit.</li><li><strong>Car Phone Mount —</strong> If your traveler isn\'t buying <a href=\"https://youtu.be/4ZvIoVfqbw0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the airlines\' \"HEPA filters are great!\" pitch</a>, they\'ll be doing more road trips -- and so could probably could use a phone mount upgrade. I like the simplicity and low profile of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/34VrMX4\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">air vent mounts</a>. If your traveler just upgraded to a new iPhone 12, you could go all-in for a matching <a href=\"https://www.belkin.com/us/p/P-WIC002/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">MagSafe vent mount</a>.</li><li><strong>VPN Subscription</strong> <strong>—</strong> Another suggestion that\'s on every one of my gift guides. When you travel away from home or the office, you spend most of your time on public WiFi networks. In the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">last podcast episode</a>, we talked about an <a href=\"https://www.ic3.gov/Media/Y2020/PSA201006\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" target=\"_blank\">FBI consumer alert</a> reminding folks about the risks of these networks. Help your traveler surf safe with a VPN subscription. I’ve always used one of the top paid VPN providers:  <a href=\"http://nordvpn.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">NordVPN</a>, ExpressVPN, or <a href=\"https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/\">PIA</a>. A single subscription, usually in the $35-$85 range, will cover their laptop, phone, and tablet. VPN providers always have some promotion going on so it pays to shop around.</li><li><strong>Bring-Your-Own Dining Sets —</strong> Trying to navigate all the restaurant lockdowns and indoor dining limits, I\'ve eaten more take-away meals in my hotel room in the past 6 month than I have in the prior 6 years.  Rather than struggling with plastic knives on styrofoam plates, upgrade your traveler\'s dining experience with their own non-breakable&nbsp;<a href=\"https://amzn.to/3izWHMJ\">wine tumblers</a>, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/364UTXc\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">IPA glasses</a>, and&nbsp;<a href=\"https://amzn.to/3an6BhJ\">camping mess kit</a>. And don\'t forget the non-plastic <a href=\"https://amzn.to/30NAqF2\">upscale sporks</a>.</li><li><strong>In-Room Coffee Brewing Kit —</strong> In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/03/29/podcast-139-brewing-best-hotel-room-coffee-notes-from-spain/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #139 — Brewing Best Hotel Room Coffee; Notes from Spain\">episode #139</a>, I interviewed Coleman Collins about <a href=\"https://roadwarrior.blog/hotel-room-coffee/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">brewing the best hotel room coffee</a>.  Back then, it was only a thing for coffee geeks (snobs?) because just about every hotel lobby offered free coffee. But now, those coffee pots are locked up with the rest of the free breakfast gear, and most hotels aren\'t restocking the in-room coffee makers. So keep your traveler caffeinated with their own coffee brewing kit. I like keeping things simple with a <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3864wYy\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">plastic Hario V60 cone</a> over a coffee mug, but you could go all-barista with an <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2I7RsqR\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Aeropress Go travel press</a> and <a href=\"https://amzn.to/362FQ0u\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Hario mini-mill coffee grinder</a>.</li><li><strong>Portable Bluetooth Speaker —</strong> Last-minute restrictions and closures could have your traveler spending more time than planned in their hotel room or Airbnb, and needing a way to keep themselves entertained. Wearing headphones is OK for a day or two if you\'re by yourself, but when I’m with the family, I want something a bit more social. I\'m a Bose fan, so I like their <a href=\"https://amzn.to/328yhUP\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundLink Micro</a>, but there\'s a broad selection of makers, form factors, and price points to choose from.</li><li><strong>Smartphone Tripod —</strong> It\'s tough to get everyone into an arms-length selfie <em>and</em> maintain social distance. A tabletop tripod with a smartphone clamp like the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/34Vk5QS\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Manfrotto PIXI</a> can help your traveler get those group shots as well as taking some night shots and maybe a cool timelapse video.</li><li><strong>Travel Notebook</strong> <strong>—</strong> Nothing fancy, no leather embossed cover, just something to jot down thoughts, ideas, observations, or to do lists while traveling in this time of COVID. My first travel notebooks were <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://amzn.to/36mN8dZ\" target=\"_blank\">Moleskine pocket notebooks</a> but I\'ve switched over similar-sized <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2LMAOM9\" target=\"_blank\">Clairefontaine A6 notebooks</a>. Their soft cover fits better in the back pocket of my Levis and the paper is more fountain-pen friendly. Or you could go a bit more whimsical and get <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://amzn.to/36pK68D\" target=\"_blank\">a pack of Field Notes</a>.</li></ol>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:block {\"ref\":2601} /-->','10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times','','inherit','closed','closed','','2917-autosave-v1','','','2021-11-02 13:28:48','2021-11-02 18:28:48','',2917,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3975',0,'revision','',0),
(3976,1,'2021-11-02 13:41:10','2021-11-02 18:41:10','','E30FECE9-6481-4CD6-835A-6CDF0206F770','I\'ll take the black bag circling under the tree','inherit','open','closed','','e30fece9-6481-4cd6-835a-6cdf0206f770','','','2021-11-02 13:46:02','2021-11-02 18:46:02','',3974,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/E30FECE9-6481-4CD6-835A-6CDF0206F770.jpeg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(3977,1,'2021-11-02 13:42:00','2021-11-02 18:42:00','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3976,\"width\":300,\"height\":300,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large is-resized\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/E30FECE9-6481-4CD6-835A-6CDF0206F770.jpeg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/E30FECE9-6481-4CD6-835A-6CDF0206F770-1024x1024.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3976\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>With public health officials saying things like  I figured this year’s travel gift guide would need to be a bit different. Here are my top shopping ideas for your pandemic traveler.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','10 Best Travel Gifts Ideas for 2021','','inherit','closed','closed','','3974-revision-v1','','','2021-11-02 13:42:00','2021-11-02 18:42:00','',3974,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3977',0,'revision','',0),
(3978,1,'2021-11-02 13:43:01','2021-11-02 18:43:01','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3976,\"width\":400,\"height\":400,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large is-resized\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/E30FECE9-6481-4CD6-835A-6CDF0206F770.jpeg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/E30FECE9-6481-4CD6-835A-6CDF0206F770-1024x1024.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3976\" width=\"400\" height=\"400\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>With public health officials saying things like  I figured this year’s travel gift guide would need to be a bit different. Here are my top shopping ideas for your pandemic traveler.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','10 Best Travel Gifts Ideas for 2021','','inherit','closed','closed','','3974-revision-v1','','','2021-11-02 13:43:01','2021-11-02 18:43:01','',3974,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3978',0,'revision','',0),
(3979,1,'2021-11-02 13:44:07','2021-11-02 18:44:07','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3976,\"width\":400,\"height\":400,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large is-resized\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/E30FECE9-6481-4CD6-835A-6CDF0206F770.jpeg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/E30FECE9-6481-4CD6-835A-6CDF0206F770-1024x1024.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3976\" width=\"400\" height=\"400\"/></a><figcaption>I\'ll take one of the black bags circling under the Christmas tree</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>With public health officials saying things like  I figured this year’s travel gift guide would need to be a bit different. Here are my top shopping ideas for your pandemic traveler.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','10 Best Travel Gifts Ideas for 2021','','inherit','closed','closed','','3974-revision-v1','','','2021-11-02 13:44:07','2021-11-02 18:44:07','',3974,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3979',0,'revision','',0),
(3980,1,'2021-11-02 13:46:37','2021-11-02 18:46:37','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3976,\"width\":400,\"height\":400,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large is-resized\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/E30FECE9-6481-4CD6-835A-6CDF0206F770.jpeg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/E30FECE9-6481-4CD6-835A-6CDF0206F770-1024x1024.jpeg\" alt=\"Christmas tree on baggage carousel\" class=\"wp-image-3976\" width=\"400\" height=\"400\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>With public health officials saying things like  I figured this year’s travel gift guide would need to be a bit different. Here are my top shopping ideas for your pandemic traveler.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','10 Best Travel Gifts Ideas for 2021','','inherit','closed','closed','','3974-revision-v1','','','2021-11-02 13:46:37','2021-11-02 18:46:37','',3974,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3980',0,'revision','',0),
(3982,1,'2021-11-02 13:54:45','2021-11-02 18:54:45','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3976,\"width\":400,\"height\":400,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large is-resized\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/E30FECE9-6481-4CD6-835A-6CDF0206F770.jpeg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/E30FECE9-6481-4CD6-835A-6CDF0206F770-1024x1024.jpeg\" alt=\"Christmas tree on baggage carousel\" class=\"wp-image-3976\" width=\"400\" height=\"400\"/></a><caption>Black bags circling under the tree</caption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>With public health officials saying things like&nbsp;&nbsp;I figured this year’s travel gift guide would need to be a bit different. Here are my top shopping ideas for your pandemic traveler.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','10 Best Travel Gifts Ideas for 2021','','inherit','closed','closed','','3974-revision-v1','','','2021-11-02 13:54:45','2021-11-02 18:54:45','',3974,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3982',0,'revision','',0),
(3983,1,'2021-11-02 13:55:12','2021-11-02 18:55:12','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3976,\"width\":400,\"height\":400,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large is-resized\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/E30FECE9-6481-4CD6-835A-6CDF0206F770.jpeg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/E30FECE9-6481-4CD6-835A-6CDF0206F770-1024x1024.jpeg\" alt=\"Christmas tree on baggage carousel\" class=\"wp-image-3976\" width=\"400\" height=\"400\"/></a><figcaption>Black bags circling under the tree</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>With public health officials saying things like&nbsp;&nbsp;I figured this year’s travel gift guide would need to be a bit different. Here are my top shopping ideas for your pandemic traveler.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','10 Best Travel Gifts Ideas for 2021','','inherit','closed','closed','','3974-revision-v1','','','2021-11-02 13:55:12','2021-11-02 18:55:12','',3974,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3983',0,'revision','',0),
(3984,1,'2021-11-02 13:59:15','2021-11-02 18:59:15','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_2168\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/E30FECE9-6481-4CD6-835A-6CDF0206F770.jpeg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2168\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/E30FECE9-6481-4CD6-835A-6CDF0206F770-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a>Black bags circling under the tree[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>With public health officials saying things like&nbsp;&nbsp;I figured this year’s travel gift guide would need to be a bit different. Here are my top shopping ideas for your pandemic traveler.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','10 Best Travel Gifts Ideas for 2021','','inherit','closed','closed','','3974-revision-v1','','','2021-11-02 13:59:15','2021-11-02 18:59:15','',3974,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3984',0,'revision','',0),
(3985,1,'2021-11-02 13:59:47','2021-11-02 18:59:47','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":2168} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/E30FECE9-6481-4CD6-835A-6CDF0206F770.jpeg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/E30FECE9-6481-4CD6-835A-6CDF0206F770-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2168\"/></a><figcaption>Black bags circling under the tree</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>With public health officials saying things like&nbsp;&nbsp;I figured this year’s travel gift guide would need to be a bit different. Here are my top shopping ideas for your pandemic traveler.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','10 Best Travel Gifts Ideas for 2021','','inherit','closed','closed','','3974-revision-v1','','','2021-11-02 13:59:47','2021-11-02 18:59:47','',3974,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3985',0,'revision','',0),
(3986,1,'2021-11-02 17:27:40','2021-11-02 22:27:40','[caption id=\"attachment_2168\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/E30FECE9-6481-4CD6-835A-6CDF0206F770.jpeg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2168\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/E30FECE9-6481-4CD6-835A-6CDF0206F770-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Black bags circling under the tree[/caption]\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>If <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\" title=\"10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">last year\'s gift guide</a> was all about helping you travel while dodging last-minute lockdowns, this year\'s guide is stacked with the best travel gift ideas to help the frequent traveler on your life cope with <a href=\"https://onemileatatime.com/news/spirit-airlines-operational-meltdown/\">yet</a> <a href=\"https://liveandletsfly.com/skywest-cancels-or-delays-thousands-of-flights-impacting-alaska-american-delta-and-united/\">another</a> <a href=\"https://viewfromthewing.com/delta-air-lines-suffers-mass-cancellations-easter-weekend-fills-middle-seats-again-to-recover/\">major</a> <a href=\"https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/10/business/southwest-cancellations/index.html\">airline</a> <a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/30/american-airlines-cancels-hundreds-of-weekend-flights.html\">meltdown</a>. Or, if you are the frequent traveler, here\'s a list of hints you might want to drop on family members looking for ideas.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list {\"ordered\":true} -->\n<ol><li><strong>Battery Packs</strong> <strong>—</strong> We just can’t easily travel anymore without a <em>working</em> mobile phone. It holds our boarding passes and our proof of COVID vaccination, gives us gate change and flight delay notifications, and routes us around traffic jams.  A dead phone while flights are being cancelled is more than just a bit of an inconvenience; having that second or third charge immediately available is critical when sitting out a long delay. There are a lot of choices. I carry <a href=\"https://amzn.to/34fcbON\">Zendure</a> and <a href=\"https://amzn.to/34fcbON\">Anker</a> power banks; they\'ve served me well.</li><li><strong>Noise Canceling Headphones or Ear Buds—</strong> I mentioned in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/11/30/podcast-157-notes-from-the-baltics-riga-latvia-and-tallinn-estonia/\">the last podcast episode</a> how my trusty Bose QC-15s saved me from the propeller drone on my flights around the Baltics. The drone of jet or propeller engines disappear with the flick of a switch. But it’s the drop in stress level and blood pressure that accompanies that flick of the switch — you don’t realize how much that drone affects you. Everything in my briefcase has to earn its space. I’ve been carrying Bose headphones for, I dunno, 10, 15 years. They’re nowhere near compact, but I’ve never thought of leaving them behind. The models you want to look for — either the <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2RG7V80\" target=\"_blank\">Bose QC-35 II</a> or the <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2LGlVuK\" target=\"_blank\">Sony WH-1000XM3</a>. Your generous gift will be lovingly appreciated by your new traveler.</li></ol>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','10 Best Travel Gift Ideas To Survive Post-Pandemic Travel','','inherit','closed','closed','','3974-revision-v1','','','2021-11-02 17:27:40','2021-11-02 22:27:40','',3974,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3986',0,'revision','',0),
(3987,1,'2021-11-02 18:12:06','2021-11-02 23:12:06','[caption id=\"attachment_2168\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/E30FECE9-6481-4CD6-835A-6CDF0206F770.jpeg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2168\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/E30FECE9-6481-4CD6-835A-6CDF0206F770-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Black bags circling under the tree[/caption]\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>If <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\" title=\"10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">last year\'s gift guide</a> was all about helping you travel while dodging last-minute lockdowns, this year\'s guide is stacked with the best travel gift ideas to help the frequent traveler on your life cope with <a href=\"https://onemileatatime.com/news/spirit-airlines-operational-meltdown/\">yet</a> <a href=\"https://liveandletsfly.com/skywest-cancels-or-delays-thousands-of-flights-impacting-alaska-american-delta-and-united/\">another</a> <a href=\"https://viewfromthewing.com/delta-air-lines-suffers-mass-cancellations-easter-weekend-fills-middle-seats-again-to-recover/\">major</a> <a href=\"https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/10/business/southwest-cancellations/index.html\">airline</a> <a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/30/american-airlines-cancels-hundreds-of-weekend-flights.html\">meltdown</a>. Or, if you are the frequent traveler, here\'s a list of hints you might want to drop on family members looking for ideas.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list {\"ordered\":true} -->\n<ol><li><strong>Battery Packs</strong> <strong>—</strong> We just can’t easily travel anymore without a <em>working</em> mobile phone. It holds our boarding passes and our proof of COVID vaccination, gives us gate change and flight delay notifications, and routes us around traffic jams.  A dead phone while flights are being cancelled is more than just a bit of an inconvenience; having that second or third charge immediately available is critical when sitting out a long delay. There are a lot of choices. I carry <a href=\"https://amzn.to/34fcbON\">Zendure</a> and <a href=\"https://amzn.to/34fcbON\">Anker</a> power banks; they\'ve served me well.</li><li><strong>Noise Canceling Headphones or Ear Buds—</strong> Whether you\'re sitting in a noisy airport waiting out a delay or in the air, it\'s great being able to cut out all the background noise and find your Zen place with the flick of a switch. I’ve been carrying Bose headphones for at least 15 years and I\'m now on my 3rd pair, the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2Y9NWnY\">Bose 700\'s</a>. They’re not compact and everything in my briefcase has to earn its space, but I’ve never thought of leaving them behind. I find over-the-ear cans more comfortable, but if you can handle in-the-ear buds for extended periods, Bose does <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3ByWEda\">ear buds</a>, or for Apple eco-system diehards, my kids recommend the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3GNszds\">AirPod Pros</a>.</li><li></li></ol>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','10 Best Travel Gift Ideas To Survive Post-Pandemic Travel','','inherit','closed','closed','','3974-revision-v1','','','2021-11-02 18:12:06','2021-11-02 23:12:06','',3974,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3987',0,'revision','',0),
(3988,1,'2021-11-02 18:39:09','2021-11-02 23:39:09','[caption id=\"attachment_2168\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/E30FECE9-6481-4CD6-835A-6CDF0206F770.jpeg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2168\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/E30FECE9-6481-4CD6-835A-6CDF0206F770-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Black bags circling under the tree[/caption]\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>If <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\" title=\"10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">last year\'s gift guide</a> was all about helping you travel while dodging last-minute lockdowns, this year\'s guide is stacked with the best travel gift ideas to help the frequent traveler on your life cope with <a href=\"https://onemileatatime.com/news/spirit-airlines-operational-meltdown/\">yet</a> <a href=\"https://liveandletsfly.com/skywest-cancels-or-delays-thousands-of-flights-impacting-alaska-american-delta-and-united/\">another</a> <a href=\"https://viewfromthewing.com/delta-air-lines-suffers-mass-cancellations-easter-weekend-fills-middle-seats-again-to-recover/\">major</a> <a href=\"https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/10/business/southwest-cancellations/index.html\">airline</a> <a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/30/american-airlines-cancels-hundreds-of-weekend-flights.html\">meltdown</a>. Or, if you are the frequent traveler, here\'s a list of hints you might want to drop on family members looking for ideas.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list {\"ordered\":true} -->\n<ol><li><strong>Battery Packs</strong> <strong>—</strong> We just can’t easily travel anymore without a <em>working</em> mobile phone. It holds our boarding passes and our proof of COVID vaccination, gives us gate change and flight delay notifications, and routes us around traffic jams.  A dead phone while flights are being cancelled is more than just a bit of an inconvenience; having that second or third charge immediately available is critical when sitting out a long delay. There are a lot of choices. I carry <a href=\"https://amzn.to/34fcbON\">Zendure</a> and <a href=\"https://amzn.to/34fcbON\">Anker</a> power banks; they\'ve served me well.</li><li><strong>Noise Canceling Headphones or Ear Buds—</strong> Whether you\'re sitting in a noisy airport waiting out a delay or in the air, it\'s great being able to cut out all the background noise and find your Zen place with the flick of a switch. I’ve been carrying Bose headphones for at least 15 years and I\'m now on my 3rd pair, the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2Y9NWnY\">Bose 700\'s</a>. They’re not compact and everything in my briefcase has to earn its space, but I’ve never thought of leaving them behind. I find over-the-ear cans more comfortable, but if you can handle in-the-ear buds for extended periods, Bose does <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3ByWEda\">ear buds</a>, or for Apple eco-system diehards, my kids recommend the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3GNszds\">AirPod Pros</a>.</li><li><strong>Comfortable Masks —</strong> I don\'t see an off-ramp to airport or in-flight mask mandates anytime soon. Since you’ll be wearing a mask for 3 or 4 or 8 hours straight between the airport and the flight, you’ll want something a bit better than the bargain-basement masks the gate agent give away for free. I’m a big fan of the <a href=\"https://evolvetogether.com/collections/health-and-wellness\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"https://evolvetogether.com/collections/adult-masks/products/black-milan-coordinates-30-face-masks\">evolvetogether masks</a>. I wear their standard masks all the time and wore their KN-95 masks on my recent flights to/from Italy. They’re breathable, they come with a pocket carrier for spares, and at $1.20/mask, they hit the right cost/quality balance point.</li><li></li></ol>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','10 Best Travel Gift Ideas To Survive Post-Pandemic Travel','','inherit','closed','closed','','3974-revision-v1','','','2021-11-02 18:39:09','2021-11-02 23:39:09','',3974,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3988',0,'revision','',0),
(3989,1,'2021-11-02 19:08:11','2021-11-03 00:08:11','[caption id=\"attachment_2168\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/E30FECE9-6481-4CD6-835A-6CDF0206F770.jpeg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2168\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/E30FECE9-6481-4CD6-835A-6CDF0206F770-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Black bags circling under the tree[/caption]\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>If <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\" title=\"10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">last year\'s gift guide</a> was all about helping you travel while dodging last-minute lockdowns, this year\'s guide is stacked with the best travel gift ideas to help the frequent traveler on your life cope with <a href=\"https://onemileatatime.com/news/spirit-airlines-operational-meltdown/\">yet</a> <a href=\"https://liveandletsfly.com/skywest-cancels-or-delays-thousands-of-flights-impacting-alaska-american-delta-and-united/\">another</a> <a href=\"https://viewfromthewing.com/delta-air-lines-suffers-mass-cancellations-easter-weekend-fills-middle-seats-again-to-recover/\">major</a> <a href=\"https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/10/business/southwest-cancellations/index.html\">airline</a> <a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/30/american-airlines-cancels-hundreds-of-weekend-flights.html\">meltdown</a>. Or, if you are the frequent traveler, here\'s a list of hints you might want to drop on family members looking for ideas.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list {\"ordered\":true} -->\n<ol><li><strong>Battery Packs</strong> <strong>—</strong> We just can’t easily travel anymore without a <em>working</em> mobile phone. It holds our boarding passes and our proof of COVID vaccination, gives us gate change and flight delay notifications, and routes us around traffic jams.  A dead phone while flights are being cancelled is more than just a bit of an inconvenience; having that second or third charge immediately available is critical when sitting out a long delay. There are a lot of choices. I carry <a href=\"https://amzn.to/34fcbON\">Zendure</a> and <a href=\"https://amzn.to/34fcbON\">Anker</a> power banks; they\'ve served me well.</li><li><strong>Noise Canceling Headphones or Ear Buds—</strong> Whether you\'re sitting in a noisy airport waiting out a delay or in the air, it\'s great being able to cut out all the background noise and find your Zen place with the flick of a switch. I’ve been carrying Bose headphones for at least 15 years and I\'m now on my 3rd pair, the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2Y9NWnY\">Bose 700\'s</a>. They’re not compact and everything in my briefcase has to earn its space, but I’ve never thought of leaving them behind. I find over-the-ear cans more comfortable, but if you can handle in-the-ear buds for extended periods, Bose does <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3ByWEda\">ear buds</a>, or for Apple eco-system diehards, my kids recommend the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3GNszds\">AirPod Pros</a>.</li><li><strong>Comfortable Masks —</strong> I don\'t see an off-ramp to airport or in-flight mask mandates anytime soon. Since you’ll be wearing a mask for 3 or 4 or 8 hours straight between the airport and the flight, you’ll want something a bit better than the bargain-basement masks the gate agent give away for free. I’m a big fan of the <a href=\"https://evolvetogether.com/collections/health-and-wellness\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"https://evolvetogether.com/collections/adult-masks/products/black-milan-coordinates-30-face-masks\">evolvetogether masks</a>. I wear their standard masks all the time and wore their KN-95 masks on my recent flights to/from Italy. They’re breathable, they come with a pocket carrier for spares, and at $1.20/mask, they hit the right cost/quality balance point.</li><li><strong><strong>Water Bottle —</strong></strong> With in-flight service still being a bit iffy, most people are carrying on their own water bottles. Most airports have refilling spigots next to regular water fountains, so it\'s easy to fill up your bottle on the air side of security. There\'s a huge range of bottles and prices to choose from. I use a mid-range <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3bBVRgU\">Contigo</a> bottle when I\'m not just repurposing the Evian bottle I bought at the Hudson News stand 15 minutes ago.</li><li>USB-C to HDMI Cable </li></ol>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','10 Best Travel Gift Ideas To Survive Post-Pandemic Travel','','inherit','closed','closed','','3974-revision-v1','','','2021-11-02 19:08:11','2021-11-03 00:08:11','',3974,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3989',0,'revision','',0),
(3990,1,'2021-11-02 19:08:55','2021-11-03 00:08:55','[caption id=\"attachment_2168\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/E30FECE9-6481-4CD6-835A-6CDF0206F770.jpeg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2168\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/E30FECE9-6481-4CD6-835A-6CDF0206F770-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Black bags circling under the tree[/caption]\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>If <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\" title=\"10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">last year\'s gift guide</a> was all about helping you travel while dodging last-minute lockdowns, this year\'s guide is stacked with the best travel gift ideas to help the frequent traveler on your life cope with <a href=\"https://onemileatatime.com/news/spirit-airlines-operational-meltdown/\">yet</a> <a href=\"https://liveandletsfly.com/skywest-cancels-or-delays-thousands-of-flights-impacting-alaska-american-delta-and-united/\">another</a> <a href=\"https://viewfromthewing.com/delta-air-lines-suffers-mass-cancellations-easter-weekend-fills-middle-seats-again-to-recover/\">major</a> <a href=\"https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/10/business/southwest-cancellations/index.html\">airline</a> <a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/30/american-airlines-cancels-hundreds-of-weekend-flights.html\">meltdown</a>. Or, if you are the frequent traveler, here\'s a list of hints you might want to drop on family members looking for ideas.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list {\"ordered\":true} -->\n<ol><li><strong>Battery Packs</strong> <strong>—</strong> We just can’t easily travel anymore without a <em>working</em> mobile phone. It holds our boarding passes and our proof of COVID vaccination, gives us gate change and flight delay notifications, and routes us around traffic jams.  A dead phone while flights are being cancelled is more than just a bit of an inconvenience; having that second or third charge immediately available is critical when sitting out a long delay. There are a lot of choices. I carry <a href=\"https://amzn.to/34fcbON\">Zendure</a> and <a href=\"https://amzn.to/34fcbON\">Anker</a> power banks; they\'ve served me well.</li><li><strong>Noise Canceling Headphones or Ear Buds—</strong> Whether you\'re sitting in a noisy airport waiting out a delay or in the air, it\'s great being able to cut out all the background noise and find your Zen place with the flick of a switch. I’ve been carrying Bose headphones for at least 15 years and I\'m now on my 3rd pair, the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2Y9NWnY\">Bose 700\'s</a>. They’re not compact and everything in my briefcase has to earn its space, but I’ve never thought of leaving them behind. I find over-the-ear cans more comfortable, but if you can handle in-the-ear buds for extended periods, Bose does <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3ByWEda\">ear buds</a>, or for Apple eco-system diehards, my kids recommend the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3GNszds\">AirPod Pros</a>.</li><li><strong>Comfortable Masks —</strong> I don\'t see an off-ramp to airport or in-flight mask mandates anytime soon. Since you’ll be wearing a mask for 3 or 4 or 8 hours straight between the airport and the flight, you’ll want something a bit better than the bargain-basement masks the gate agent give away for free. I’m a big fan of the <a href=\"https://evolvetogether.com/collections/health-and-wellness\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"https://evolvetogether.com/collections/adult-masks/products/black-milan-coordinates-30-face-masks\">evolvetogether masks</a>. I wear their standard masks all the time and wore their KN-95 masks on my recent flights to/from Italy. They’re breathable, they come with a pocket carrier for spares, and at $1.20/mask, they hit the right cost/quality balance point.</li><li><strong><strong>Water Bottle —</strong></strong> With in-flight service still being a bit iffy, most people are carrying on their own water bottles. Most airports have refilling spigots next to regular water fountains, so it\'s easy to fill up your bottle on the air side of security. There\'s a huge range of bottles and prices to choose from. I use a mid-range <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3bBVRgU\">Contigo</a> bottle when I\'m not just repurposing the Evian bottle I bought at the Hudson News stand 15 minutes ago.</li><li><strong>USB-C to HDMI Cable</strong> <strong><strong>—</strong></strong></li></ol>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','10 Best Travel Gift Ideas To Survive Post-Pandemic Travel','','inherit','closed','closed','','3974-revision-v1','','','2021-11-02 19:08:55','2021-11-03 00:08:55','',3974,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3990',0,'revision','',0),
(3991,1,'2021-11-03 16:54:28','2021-11-03 21:54:28','[caption id=\"attachment_2168\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/E30FECE9-6481-4CD6-835A-6CDF0206F770.jpeg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2168\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/E30FECE9-6481-4CD6-835A-6CDF0206F770-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Black bags circling under the tree[/caption]\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>If <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\" title=\"10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">last year\'s gift guide</a> was all about helping you travel while dodging last-minute lockdowns, this year\'s guide is stacked with the best travel gift ideas to help the frequent traveler in your life cope with <a href=\"https://onemileatatime.com/news/spirit-airlines-operational-meltdown/\">yet</a> <a href=\"https://liveandletsfly.com/skywest-cancels-or-delays-thousands-of-flights-impacting-alaska-american-delta-and-united/\">another</a> <a href=\"https://viewfromthewing.com/delta-air-lines-suffers-mass-cancellations-easter-weekend-fills-middle-seats-again-to-recover/\">major</a> <a href=\"https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/10/business/southwest-cancellations/index.html\">airline</a> <a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/30/american-airlines-cancels-hundreds-of-weekend-flights.html\">meltdown</a>. Or, if <em>you</em> are the frequent traveler, here\'s a list of hints you might want to drop on family members looking for shopping ideas.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list {\"ordered\":true} -->\n<ol><li><strong>Battery Packs</strong> <strong>—</strong> We just can’t easily travel anymore without a <em>working</em> mobile phone. It holds our boarding passes and our proof of COVID vaccination, gives us gate change and flight delay notifications, and routes us around traffic jams.  A dead phone while flights are being cancelled is more than just a bit of an inconvenience; having that second or third charge immediately available is critical when sitting out a long delay. There are a lot of choices. I carry <a href=\"https://amzn.to/34fcbON\">Zendure</a> and <a href=\"https://amzn.to/34fcbON\">Anker</a> power banks; they\'ve served me well.</li><li><strong>Noise Canceling Headphones or Ear Buds—</strong> Whether you\'re sitting in a noisy airport waiting out a delay or in the air, it\'s great being able to cut out all the background noise and find your Zen place with the flick of a switch. I’ve been carrying Bose headphones for at least 15 years and I\'m now on my 3rd pair, the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2Y9NWnY\">Bose 700\'s</a>. They’re not compact and everything in my briefcase has to earn its space, but I’ve never thought of leaving them behind. I find over-the-ear cans more comfortable, but if you can handle in-the-ear buds for extended periods, Bose does <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3ByWEda\">ear buds</a>, or for Apple eco-system diehards, my kids recommend the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3GNszds\">AirPod Pros</a>.</li><li><strong>Comfortable Masks —</strong> I don\'t see an end to airport or in-flight mask mandates anytime soon. Since you’ll be wearing a mask for 3 or 4 or 8 hours straight between the airport and the flight, you’ll want something a bit better than the bargain-basement masks the gate agent give away for free. I’m a big fan of the <a href=\"https://evolvetogether.com/collections/health-and-wellness\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"https://evolvetogether.com/collections/adult-masks/products/black-milan-coordinates-30-face-masks\">evolvetogether masks</a>. I wear their standard masks all the time and wore their KN-95 masks on my recent flights to/from Italy. They’re breathable, they come with a pocket carrier for spares, and at $1.20/mask, they hit the right cost/quality balance point.</li><li><strong>Apple AirTags</strong> <strong><strong>—</strong></strong> If you live within the Apple ecosystem, putting an <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3k4rCUy\">AirTag</a> in your checked luggage lets you see if your bag is joining you on the new flight the airline just rebooked you on, or hang one from your backpack so you can track it if it \"wanders off\".</li><li><strong><strong>Water Bottle —</strong></strong> With in-flight service still being a bit iffy, many people are carrying on their own water bottles. Most airports have refilling spigots next to regular water fountains so it\'s easy to fill up your bottle on the air side of security. There\'s a huge range of bottles and prices to choose from. I use a mid-range <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3bBVRgU\">Contigo</a> bottle when I\'m not refilling the Evian bottle I bought at the Hudson News stand 15 minutes ago.</li><li><strong>Merino Wool Scarf</strong> <strong>—</strong> Men\'s scarves are way undervalued (at least in the US) as something that can you can whip out of your briefcase/backpack to ward the chill off. In an airplane cabin where a coat is too much (especially in a middle seat), but there’s a draft that nipping at you, a scarf around the neck is just enough without being too much. I’m a big fan of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/35ckwUq\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" target=\"_blank\">merino wool scarves</a> — they’re warm, soft, and dry out if you spill water on them.</li><li><strong>USB-C to HDMI Cable</strong> <strong><strong>—</strong></strong> Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/07/28/podcast-177-b-sides-and-rarities/\" title=\"Podcast #177 — B-Sides and Rarities… Interview Outtakes\">July episode</a>, I said my <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3q5vY1l\">USB-C to HDMI cable</a> was the most important piece of travel kit on my trip through the Northeast because, by mirroring my MacBook Air display on hotel and beach house TVs, I could sit back with a beer and comfortably watch YouTube highlights of the Euro 2020 soccer tournament and the Tour de France on 40-60” flat screens instead of hunching over a 13” laptop screen.</li><li><strong><strong>Portable Bluetooth Speaker </strong></strong>— Wearing headphones is OK for a day or two if you’re by yourself, but when I’m with the family, I want something a bit more social. I’m a Bose fan, so I like their <a href=\"https://amzn.to/328yhUP\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundLink Micro</a>, but there’s a broad selection of makers, form factors, and price points to choose from.</li><li><strong>Smartphone Tripod</strong> — My lightweight <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3pZmjcS\">Square Jellyfish phone tripod</a> came in very handy while doing my <a href=\"https://www.emed.com/products/covid-at-home-testkit-six-pack?hsLang=en\">at-home COVID test</a> in Italy the morning before my flight home. The eMed test proctor wanted to watch me swirl the cotton swab in my nose and then insert it into the test kit. I\'m not sure how I would\'ve done that while holding my phone. I use it a lot more than I thought I would for video calls and to watch quick videos on my phone.</li><li><strong>Travel Notebook</strong> <strong>—</strong> Nothing fancy, no leather embossed cover, just something to jot down thoughts, ideas, observations, or to do lists while waiting out that flight delay or for the bartender to bring you a beer. My first travel notebooks were <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://amzn.to/36mN8dZ\" target=\"_blank\">Moleskine pocket notebooks</a> but I’ve switched over similar-sized <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2LMAOM9\" target=\"_blank\">Clairefontaine A6 notebooks</a>. Their soft cover fits better in the back pocket of my Levis and the paper is more fountain-pen friendly. Or you could go a bit more whimsical and get <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://amzn.to/36pK68D\" target=\"_blank\">a pack of Field Notes</a>.</li></ol>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><em>Note: None of these suggestions are paid endorsements. This post contains links to Amazon where I can earn a small commission from qualifying purchases.</em></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','10 Best Travel Gift Ideas To Survive Post-Pandemic Travel','','inherit','closed','closed','','3974-revision-v1','','','2021-11-03 16:54:28','2021-11-03 21:54:28','',3974,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3991',0,'revision','',0),
(3992,1,'2021-11-04 12:24:49','2021-11-04 17:24:49','[caption id=\"attachment_2168\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2168\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> But I filled up the tank[/caption]\n\nGetting this posted just in time to give you something to listen to while jammed up in Thanksgiving traffic, be it on the road or in the airports. We talk about working the angles to maximize credit card benefits, which leads me to one more story from my fall trip to Europe -- a rental car scrape that my Chase Visa card just paid off. We also talk about the Wall Street Journal\'s new ranking of US airports and compare it to Skytrax\'s international rankings. And we wrap up with my Christmas gift suggestions for the frequent traveler on your list.  All this and more at the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_146.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\nHere is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #146:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, trying to give you something to keep you entertained? Or at least occupied as you thread through the Thanksgiving travel traffic -- be it airports, trains, or roadways -- the forecasts are for a 5% increase over last year.</li>\n 	<li>I’ve been trying to get this episode done for the past 2 weeks, but I just haven’t been able to make it happen. Since we last spoke, I’ve been in the midst of a weekly commute between Chicago and Dallas. It’s the standard consultant commute -- leaving ORD Monday at 7am, leaving DFW Thursday at 5pm -- the consulting rush hour. The lounges are packed, the Starbucks line tails way back; no matter what status, you’re in a middle seat if you don’t book 3 weeks ahead of time, and for a mere Advantage Platinum person, there’s no chance of an upgrade. I do click through American’s website to request an upgrade every week -- more for the entertainment value than any expectation of getting a seat. This week, I was #35 on the upgrade list.</li>\n 	<li>The traffic between these 2 American hubs is pretty amazing. The first week of this commute, taking the 6:30p flight back to Chicago, it was a fully-packed 787 Dreamliner. So I’m thinking -- hey, I gotta have a good shot at an upgrade on this flight, with all the first and business class seats. Nope, though I did get up to the teens on the upgrade list -- #15 to be exact. I counted myself lucky to get out of a center seat at the last minute.</li>\n 	<li>I’m not a huge fan of DFW Airport. It’s a massive, spread-out place with a $4 toll charge to just to drive out of the place. The semi-circular terminals are also spread out affairs, with 3 security checkpoints arrayed around each perimeter, only one of which has PreCheck and really not well-marked. I tweeted that out in frustration a few weeks back after trundling around from checkpoint to checkpoint. The DFW Airport Twitter account quickly came back with a <a href=\"https://www.dfwairport.com/security/\">link</a> to their website that has the location and hours of each checkpoint, with the PreCheck one bolded. Very useful. I have bookmarked on my iPhone now.</li>\n 	<li>The next day, back in Chicago, I was downtown, getting a afternoon espresso jolt at Intelligentsia Coffee, not a completely full-on hipster joint -- there no turntable playing vintage vinyl -- but they are a bit fussy about their coffee. You place your order, they ask your name, and then you mill around a bit waiting for them to “craft” your coffee. I’m scrolling through e-mail, the barista is calling out names in the background. He calls out \"Marco\". Completely on reflex, my inner child responds \"Polo\" and not quietly or under my breath. The guy sitting across from me looks up from his MacBook and starts laughing. The guy getting his coffee, Marco, apparently, turns around and gives me a slightly nasty look. Or maybe just puzzled. Or more likely a bit of both.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/indidginus-seismic/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Superstring</a></em> by Indidginus</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul class=\"\">\n 	<li>Allan Marko, a long-time listener, posted a travel story on the TravelCommons Facebook page -\n<ul>\n 	<li>I flew from SFO to MUC with a colleague last month on UAL Business Class (my first trip on a 787 - nice plane, and decent service from the UA team) We had an early morning arrival, and an hour to kill before our transportation arrived. My colleague’s 1K status couldn’t get us into the Lufthansa Arrivals Lounge for showers. I pulled up the Priority Pass app on my iPhone (membership came with my Chase Sapphire Reserve Card) and saw there was an Atlantic Lounge over in Terminal 1 that had shower facilities. We took the bus over to Terminal 1 which serves many European, Middle East, and other second-tier airlines. Pulling out my physical Priority Pass card (as opposed to the one in the app) I got both of us into the lounge and their two shower rooms. The lounge only offered the basics and needed of refresh, but we were happy to find it that morning (including the free beer!).</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Allan, thanks for that, and good on you for figuring that all out. There are so many nooks and crannies in the card benefits world. There’s real value there, but you have to think about it and dig in a bit. The last time I used my Priority Pass (which I got with my Amex Platinum card) was last summer when I was connecting through DUB on my way to London. That lounge was similar to Allan’s MUC experience -- pretty basic, a bit threadbare, but a reasonable place for a cup of tea and breakfast. My son Andrew used his Priority Pass card (also from his Chase card) to get a $28 credit at a restaurant in BOS which paid for a pre-flight meal and a couple of beers. “For the two of us, I think we were due $56 credit, but we wanted to be able to board the plane, so we cut ourselves off.” A colleague of mine told me that, in LGA, after Amex’s Centurion Lounge closed, his UA Gold status got him into the Air Canada lounge to wait out the rest of a long flight delay. “I only thought they let in Star Alliance Gold passengers for international flights, but let me in for my LGA-ORD flight.” And then there’s things like the 10 Gogo in-flight WiFi passes that I get every year with my Platinum card that I never burn through, or the $200 in annual statement credit that I think I get on UA and am always surprised when I see the charge for the in-flight tapas box reversed. And I’m reminded that I gotta pay more attention to this stuff because I hate leaving money on the table.</li>\n 	<li>I will say that there are 2 good things about doing trunk line, hub-to-hub commute vs., say, my last regular commute, between ORD and Charlottesville, VA: great flight frequency -- between AA and UA, there’s a flight at most every hour and that’s not even looking at SWA’s schedule out of Love Field; and, no RJs, no regional jets. I had forgotten how nice it is to be able to stand up straight in the aisle, let alone in the toilet. I take happiness in the small things.</li>\n 	<li>I was talking to a colleague about this -- flying AA, and UA, and SWA based on the most convenient times and price, and then maybe equipment (avoiding those RJs when I can). He said “I’m always amazed at how promiscuous you are in your airline choices.” It was an interesting word choice; one that kinda speaks to how invested people can get in their travel choices. Though it can also be a bit of Stockholm Syndrome for folks who have to fly out of fortress hubs, like this colleague who is in a very conflicted relationship with United out of Newark. “I think you’re more right than me,” he said. He’s 1K on United, their top tier. I’m mid-tier on United and American. Comparing notes, he hasn’t gotten any more upgrades than me, and though I board after 1Ks (or Exec Platinums on AA), I haven’t yet had a problem finding overhead space, even on packed flights to DFW. I’ve said it before -- I don’t think there’s all that much difference between mid- and top-tier loyalty ranks; certainly not enough to take less convenient flights to earn the extra miles needed to stay top-tier.</li>\n 	<li>A study of US airport growth hit the TravelCommons inbox on Halloween, saying that the two airports with the biggest drop in traffic are Memphis and Cincinnati. We talked about this back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/08/09/podcast-143-how-bad-is-business-travel-for-your-health-make-layovers-fun/\">August episode</a> when I was flying in and out of Cincinnati for 4 weeks straight. Nice airport, but I said back then it felt a bit overbuilt, and how both it and Memphis felt empty after after being “de-hubbed” by Delta. I wasn’t wrong. This new survey ground through 10 years of FAA traffic data and came to the same conclusion. Memphis lost the most traffic, down 62%. Cincinnati was second, losing 51% of its traffic.</li>\n 	<li>So you can guess that neither made the Wall Street Journal’s ranking of the 20 largest US airports. Denver, Orlando and Phoenix at the top 3 finishers while the three NYC airports -- LaGuardia, JFK, and Newark -- brought up the rear, numbers 18, 19, and 20. Surprises? I dunno -- maybe that LaGuardia wasn’t in last place given all the construction disruptions, that LAX was higher at #9 than Minneapolis-St Paul at #11, and that O’Hare is one spot higher than San Francisco, 15 vs. 16. That’s probably as much to do with their methodology as anything - how they weighed all the different score components, things like on-time arrivals, average TSA wait, cost of on-prem parking, average ticket cost. It’s interesting, though, to compare this ranking with Skytrax’s ranking of global airports. Denver, the top US airport on both lists; at #28 on Skytrax’s list. Cincinnati is the second US airport on the Skytrax list at #34, which makes sense when you look at the methodologies. Skytrax is focused on the in-airport experience -- terminal seating, cleanliness, queue times, friendliness of staff. With these criteria, I don’t doubt that Cincinnati should rank high -- it’s probably helped by now being a bit overbuilt -- lots of space and fewer people to clean up after. The Journal’s is a bit more wide-ranging, looking both inside and outside the terminal, including things like average fares, rental-car taxes and fees, number of nonstop destinations and dominance of the largest airline to its rankings. I’ll put links to both in the show notes for those interesting in a deeper dive.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any travel questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our new Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/yoria-suerte/\"><em>Suerte Mijo</em></a> by Arthur Yoria</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Rental Demolition Derby</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>I’ve rented a lot of cars in my business travel and have never crashed one. I drive them off the lot, use them for 3-4 days, fill them back up with gas, return them to the lot, and walk away. So when I picked up a car from Hertz at Edinburgh airport back in September, I skipped all the insurance coverages, took the keys to a brand new Toyota hybrid cross-over, and drove off the lot. This was my fourth September in a row renting from the Hertz and had never had an incident -- even when driving a manual on the left side of the road while shifting with my left hand -- well, other than a Fiat that dropped its transmission, but that wasn’t my fault. So, no need to waste the collision damage waiver charges.</li>\n 	<li>You can see where this is going. The next day, I was driving a narrow road in St Andrews, heading south out of town to go knock around the fishing villages on the north bank of the Firth of Forth. Roads in Scotland can get narrow. Driving the one-lane roads in the Highlands are an acquired talent, but this road is in a residential neighborhood, and I’ve driven it many times. So I couldn’t believe it when I heard a big thump as I drove past a van. Damn, I thought, had I drifted over to the left and popped the van’s rear view mirror? I pulled over and hopped out of the car. No, it was worse. There was a huge crease along the left side of the car; just missed the front wheel, so still driveable but very ugly. I walked down to the van. It belonged to a nearby community center. In a hurry to pick up kids from school, the driver had pulled out into me as I drove past. I pulled out an accident report form that Hertz had helpfully put in the glove compartment. We filled it out, skipped calling the police since no one was hurt.</li>\n 	<li>So, again, not my fault, but I’m still, a few days later, I’m turning in a car with a full tank and some extra body work. I point out the damage to the Hertz guy. He pulls up a different tab on his Samsung tablet -- click, click, click -- damage, front left wing; damage, front left door; damage, rear left door -- took a couple of pictures, and because I’d skipped the CDW, out burped the bill -- £780 or about $1,000. They ran it through on my Chase Sapphire Visa card.</li>\n 	<li>Which I gave to Hertz because, as I was poking through the nooks and crannies of the Chase website before I left home, I confirmed that card would cover UK rental car damage for rentals charged to it. The next week, back home, I found where to file a claim. They didn’t make it easy, but Google eventually uncovered it. I created a claim, uploaded a scan of the accident report, the Hertz receipt, and a couple of iPhone pictures of the damage. And then waited. The website said they’d take 2 weeks to review and get back to me. Three weeks later, I called. A guy said they’d sent me an email asking for two more documents from Hertz. Hmmm, never saw that, but who knows what gets caught up in the Spam filtering. They wanted a copy of the original Hertz agreement, which I had left in the car, and Hertz’s repair cost breakdown. OK, that was reasonable. I called Hertz and a very helpful woman put in a request and said get it in a week. Within a couple of days, Hertz sent me what I needed. I uploaded them to my claim and waited another 2 weeks. On Day 2 Weeks + 1, I called. A woman looked at my file, said it was still being reviewed by management, but said she’s put me on hold and ring them for status. Two minutes later, she picked up and they’d approved my claim. 48 hours later, the $1,000 showed up in my bank account. It took me a bit over 2 months, but Chase paid my claim with a minimum amount of hassle.</li>\n 	<li>Now, while I’ve had a good rental car record in Scotland, my record in Hungary is not quite clean. Indeed, every time I’ve driven there, it’s been something. The last time I drove, we were a couple of blocks away from the rental return next to the Marriott on the Danube. Pulling into an intersection after stopping at a Stop sign, a motorcycle messenger plowed into the front of my car, flew across the hood, and landed in the street on the other side of the intersection. Luckily, he was in a full helmet and leathers and unhurt. The rental car, not so lucky. The entire front end was ripped off. The rental car guy showed up as the police were finishing their report. I pulled out suitcases out of the trunk and gave him the key. He looked at the front of his car in disbelief. We wheeled our bags down the sidewalk to the Marriott because this time, I had bought the collision damage waiver.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/artemis-gravity/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Inception</a></em> by Artemis</li>\n</ul>\n<b>Traveler Gift Guide</b>\n<ul>\n 	<li>As we come into the Christmas shopping season, I thought it would be useful to pull together some suggestions for the frequent traveler in your life. Or, if you are the frequent traveler, a list of hints you might want to drop on family members looking for ideas.</li>\n 	<li>Top of the list is a good battery charger. Whatever the size or form factor -- slimline, lipstick, high-capacity brick -- having that second or third charge readily available is critical to get notified of gate changes and when you’re using electronic boarding passes. It saves you from stalking cleaning crews to find a live power outlet on your layover, or negotiating with your seatmate for possession of outlet between you. I’m always looking to shed weight, so I retired the heavy no-name pack I picked up in the depths of Beijing’s Pearl Street Market for an <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2Jrt83y\">Anker lipstick sized charger</a>. I bought three and gave one to my wife and daughter. It’s cheap peace of mind.</li>\n 	<li>On my shopping list, trying to catch up to what’s already a cold winter, is one of those puffy coats -- but one of the thin ones, like the <a href=\"https://www.patagonia.com/shop/nano-puff\">Patagonia Nano Puff</a>, one that will smoosh down to nothing in the front pocket of my suitcase, or will fit in the crevices of a jammed full overhead bin. Right next that on the list, a man’s scarf is an incredibly undervalued piece of intermediate winter wear. In an airplane cabin or hotel room where a coat is too much (especially in a middle seat), but there’s a draft that chills you, a scarf around the neck is just enough without being too much. You may have to teach him how to wear it, but you can have fun with colors.</li>\n 	<li>For someone just embarking on the road warrior life, how ‘bout a <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3k1E3Og\">black 20-inch hardsided carry-on</a>. Black not only makes you look thinner, it makes your bag look thinner to gate agents hunting for bag-sizer bait. Black also doesn’t show stains. A 20-incher should get on-board for 90% of airlines, and the hard sides are the easiest to get in and out of a bag sizer if the not-yet-statused traveler gets waylaid by an over-zealous gate agent.</li>\n 	<li>If you’re going big for someone -- or for those December babies, combining Christmas and birthday gifts -- noise canceling headphones are a statement gift. The good ones -- the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3mOrRC3\">Bose</a> or <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3kUfRyx\">Sonys</a> that make the drone of the jet engines disappear with the flick of a switch -- are a $300 number. But the drop in stress level and blood pressure that accompanies that flick of the switch -- you don’t realize how much that drone affects you until you turn on your Bose -- makes it worth the number. Everything in my briefcase has to earn its space. I’ve been carrying Bose headphones for, I dunno, 10, 15 years. They’re nowhere near compact, but I’ve never thought of leaving them behind.</li>\n 	<li>Another idea for the music -- or podcast lover, is a <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3oWPpXa\">small portable Bluetooth speaker</a>. I’ve started packing mine again for trips of a week or longer. For a couple of days, I’m fine with wearing headphones or using the phone speaker. But longer than that or if I’m with the family in, say, an Airbnb, I want something a bit more social. I’m still using my 6-year old Jambox speaker, the one that kinda created this category. The maker, Jawbone, went under last year, but the speaker still works. There are newer, better ones out there now, at all sorts of price points. The ones that can act as speaker phones are a nice to-have if they fit your budget.</li>\n 	<li>And finally, a stocking stuffer idea -- a travel notebook, something to jot down thoughts, ideas, observations, to do lists while waiting for the flight to board, the train to come, or the room to be made up. Nothing extravagant -- no leather embossed cover -- but it should be small enough to fit in a pocket, but substantial, something that can survive being knocked around in the bottom of a briefcase, and with paper quality that will hold onto those thoughts for a while. I used to use a <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3jOs3zq\">Moleskine 3½x5½” notebook</a> but have switched over a similar-sized A6 Clairefontaine. The soft cover fits better in a jeans back pocket, and the paper is more fountain-pen friendly. It’s $10 for a Moleskine, $7 for two Clairefontaines. Or go a bit more whimsical and get a 3-pack of Field Notes for $13. It’ll fit your budget and the stocking.</li>\n 	<li>So there you go, something to fit all sizes and budgets in time for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, or if you’re just killing time waiting for your Thanksgiving flight to leave.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #146</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and now on <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Magnatune</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_146.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #146 — Rental Demolition Derby; Traveler Gift Guide','','inherit','closed','closed','','2167-autosave-v1','','','2021-11-04 12:24:49','2021-11-04 17:24:49','',2167,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3992',0,'revision','',0),
(3993,1,'2021-11-04 12:27:48','2021-11-04 17:27:48','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_2168\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/E30FECE9-6481-4CD6-835A-6CDF0206F770.jpeg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2168\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/E30FECE9-6481-4CD6-835A-6CDF0206F770-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> Black bags circling under the tree[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>If <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\" title=\"10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">last year\'s gift guide</a> was all about helping folks travel while dodging last-minute lockdowns, this year\'s guide is stacked with the best travel gift ideas to help the frequent traveler in your life cope with <a href=\"https://onemileatatime.com/news/spirit-airlines-operational-meltdown/\">all</a> <a href=\"https://liveandletsfly.com/skywest-cancels-or-delays-thousands-of-flights-impacting-alaska-american-delta-and-united/\">the</a> <a href=\"https://viewfromthewing.com/delta-air-lines-suffers-mass-cancellations-easter-weekend-fills-middle-seats-again-to-recover/\">major</a> <a href=\"https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/10/business/southwest-cancellations/index.html\">airline</a> <a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/30/american-airlines-cancels-hundreds-of-weekend-flights.html\">meltdowns</a>. Or, if <em>you</em> are the frequent traveler, here\'s a list of hints you could strategically drop on family members looking for shopping ideas.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list {\"ordered\":true} -->\n<ol><li><strong>Battery Packs</strong> <strong>—</strong> We just can’t easily travel anymore without a <em>working</em> mobile phone. It holds our boarding passes and our proof of COVID vaccination, gives us gate change and flight delay notifications, and routes us around traffic jams.  A dead phone while flights are being cancelled is more than just a bit of an inconvenience; having that second or third charge immediately available is critical when trying to swerve a long delay. There are a lot of choices; just pick one. I carry <a href=\"https://amzn.to/34fcbON\">Zendure</a> and <a href=\"https://amzn.to/34fcbON\">Anker</a> power banks; they\'ve served me well.</li><li><strong>Noise Canceling Headphone or Ear Buds—</strong> Whether you\'re sitting in a noisy airport waiting out a delay or are up in the air, it\'s great being able to cut out all the background noise and find your Zen place with the flick of a switch. I’ve been carrying Bose headphones for at least 15 years and am now on my 3rd pair, the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2Y9NWnY\">Bose 700\'s</a>. They’re not compact yet then continue to earn their space in my travel bag. I find over-the-ear cans more comfortable, but if you can handle in-the-ear buds for extended periods, Bose does <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3ByWEda\">ear buds</a>, or for Apple eco-system diehards, my kids recommend the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3GNszds\">AirPod Pros</a>.</li><li><strong>Comfortable Masks —</strong> I don\'t see an end to airport or in-flight mask mandates anytime soon. Since you’ll be wearing a mask for 3 or 4 or 8 hours straight between the airport and the flight, you’ll want something a bit better than the bargain-basement masks the gate agent give away for free. I’m a big fan of the <a href=\"https://evolvetogether.com/collections/health-and-wellness\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"https://evolvetogether.com/collections/adult-masks/products/black-milan-coordinates-30-face-masks\">evolvetogether masks</a>. I wear their standard masks all the time and wore their KN-95 masks on my recent flights to and from Italy. They’re breathable, they come with a pocket carrier for spares, and at $1.20/mask, they hit the right cost-vs.-quality point.</li><li><strong>Apple AirTags</strong> <strong><strong>—</strong></strong> Another suggestion for you Apple eco-system inhabitants... Putting an <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3k4rCUy\">AirTag</a> in your checked luggage lets you see if your bag is joining you on the new flight the airline just rebooked you on, or you can hang one from your backpack to track it if it somehow wanders off while you\'re checking the departure board.</li><li><strong><strong>Water Bottle —</strong></strong> With in-flight service still being a bit iffy, many people are carrying on their own water bottles. Most airports have refilling spigots next to regular water fountains so it\'s easy to fill up on the air side of security. There\'s a huge range of bottles and prices to choose from. I use a mid-range <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3bBVRgU\">Contigo</a> bottle when I\'m not refilling the Evian bottle I bought at the Hudson News stand 15 minutes ago.</li><li><strong>Merino Wool Scarf</strong> <strong>—</strong> Men\'s scarves are way undervalued (at least in the US) as something that can you can whip out of your travel bag to ward the chill off. In an airplane cabin where a coat is too much (especially in a middle seat) but you\'re getting cold because you\'ve pointed the air jet straight down to create an air curtain between you and the guys next to you, a scarf around the neck is just enough without being too much. I’m a big fan of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/35ckwUq\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" target=\"_blank\">merino wool scarves</a> — they’re warm, soft, and dry out if you spill water on them.</li><li><strong>USB-C to HDMI Cable</strong> <strong><strong>—</strong></strong> Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/07/28/podcast-177-b-sides-and-rarities/\" title=\"Podcast #177 — B-Sides and Rarities… Interview Outtakes\">July episode</a>, I said my <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3q5vY1l\">USB-C to HDMI cable</a> was the most important piece of travel kit on my trip through the Northeast because, by mirroring my MacBook Air display on hotel and beach house TVs, I could sit back with a beer and comfortably watch YouTube highlights of the Euro 2020 soccer tournament and the Tour de France on 40-60” flat screens instead of hunching over a 13” laptop screen.</li><li><strong><strong>Portable Bluetooth Speaker </strong></strong>— Wearing headphones is OK for a day or two if you’re by yourself, but when I’m with the family, I want something a bit more social. I’m a Bose fan, so I like their <a href=\"https://amzn.to/328yhUP\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundLink Micro</a>, but there’s a broad selection of makers, form factors, and price points to choose from.</li><li><strong>Smartphone Tripod</strong> — My lightweight <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3pZmjcS\">Square Jellyfish phone tripod</a> came in very handy while doing my <a href=\"https://www.emed.com/products/covid-at-home-testkit-six-pack?hsLang=en\">at-home COVID test</a> in Italy the morning before my flight home. The eMed test proctor wanted to watch me swirl the cotton swab in my nose and then insert it into the test kit. I\'m not sure how I would\'ve done that while holding my phone. I use it a lot more than I thought I would for video calls and to watch quick videos on my phone.</li><li><strong>Travel Notebook</strong> <strong>—</strong> Nothing fancy, no leather embossed cover, just something to jot down thoughts, ideas, observations, or to-do lists while waiting out that flight delay or for the bartender to bring you a beer. My first travel notebooks were <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://amzn.to/36mN8dZ\" target=\"_blank\">Moleskine pocket notebooks</a> but I’ve switched over similar-sized <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2LMAOM9\" target=\"_blank\">Clairefontaine A6 notebooks</a>. Their soft cover fits better in the back pocket of my Levis and the paper is more fountain-pen friendly. Or you could go a bit more whimsical and get <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://amzn.to/36pK68D\" target=\"_blank\">a pack of Field Notes</a>.</li></ol>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><em>Note: None of these suggestions are paid endorsements. This post contains links to Amazon where I can earn a small commission from qualifying purchases.</em></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','10 Best Travel Gift Ideas To Survive Post-Pandemic Travel','','inherit','closed','closed','','3974-revision-v1','','','2021-11-04 12:27:48','2021-11-04 17:27:48','',3974,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3993',0,'revision','',0),
(3994,1,'2021-11-04 12:33:31','2021-11-04 17:33:31','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_2168\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/E30FECE9-6481-4CD6-835A-6CDF0206F770.jpeg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2168\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/E30FECE9-6481-4CD6-835A-6CDF0206F770-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> Black bags circling under the tree[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>If <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\" title=\"10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">last year\'s gift guide</a> was all about helping folks travel while dodging last-minute lockdowns, this year\'s guide is stacked with the best travel gift ideas to help the frequent traveler in your life cope with <a href=\"https://onemileatatime.com/news/spirit-airlines-operational-meltdown/\">all</a> <a href=\"https://liveandletsfly.com/skywest-cancels-or-delays-thousands-of-flights-impacting-alaska-american-delta-and-united/\">the</a> <a href=\"https://viewfromthewing.com/delta-air-lines-suffers-mass-cancellations-easter-weekend-fills-middle-seats-again-to-recover/\">major</a> <a href=\"https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/10/business/southwest-cancellations/index.html\">airline</a> <a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/30/american-airlines-cancels-hundreds-of-weekend-flights.html\">meltdowns</a>. Or, if <em>you</em> are the frequent traveler, here\'s a list of hints you could strategically drop on family members looking for shopping ideas.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list {\"ordered\":true} -->\n<ol><li><strong>Battery Packs</strong>&nbsp;<strong>—</strong>&nbsp;We just can’t easily travel anymore without a <em>working</em> mobile phone. It holds our boarding passes and our proof of COVID vaccination, gives us gate change and flight delay notifications, and routes us around traffic jams.  A dead phone while flights are being cancelled is more than just a bit of an inconvenience; having that second or third charge immediately available is critical when trying to swerve a long delay. There are a lot of choices; just pick one. I carry <a href=\"https://amzn.to/34fcbON\">Zendure</a> and <a href=\"https://amzn.to/34fcbON\">Anker</a> power banks; they\'ve served me well.</li><li><strong>Noise Canceling Headphone or Ear Buds—</strong>&nbsp;Whether you\'re sitting in a noisy airport waiting out a delay or are up in the air, it\'s great being able to cut out all the background noise and find your Zen place with the flick of a switch. I’ve been carrying Bose headphones for at least 15 years and am now on my 3rd pair, the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2Y9NWnY\">Bose 700\'s</a>. They’re not compact yet then continue to earn their space in my travel bag. I find over-the-ear cans more comfortable, but if you can handle in-the-ear buds for extended periods, Bose does <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3ByWEda\">ear buds</a>, or for Apple eco-system diehards, my kids recommend the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3GNszds\">AirPod Pros</a>.</li><li><strong>Comfortable Masks —</strong>&nbsp;I don\'t see an end to airport or in-flight mask mandates anytime soon. Since you’ll be wearing a mask for 3 or 4 or 8 hours straight between the airport and the flight, you’ll want something a bit better than the bargain-basement masks the gate agent give away for free. I’m a big fan of the&nbsp;<a href=\"https://evolvetogether.com/collections/health-and-wellness\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"https://evolvetogether.com/collections/adult-masks/products/black-milan-coordinates-30-face-masks\">evolvetogether masks</a>. I wear their standard masks all the time and wore their KN-95 masks on my recent flights to and from Italy. They’re breathable, they come with a pocket carrier for spares, and at $1.20/mask, they hit the right cost-vs.-quality point.</li><li><strong>Apple AirTags</strong> <strong><strong>—</strong></strong> Another suggestion for you Apple eco-system inhabitants... Putting an <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3k4rCUy\">AirTag</a> in your checked luggage lets you see if your bag is joining you on the new flight the airline just rebooked you on, or you can hang one from your backpack to track it if it somehow wanders off while you\'re checking the departure board.</li><li><strong><strong>Water Bottle —</strong></strong> With in-flight service still being a bit iffy, many people are carrying on their own water bottles. Most airports have refilling spigots next to regular water fountains so it\'s easy to fill up on the air side of security. There\'s a huge range of bottles and prices to choose from. I use a mid-range <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3bBVRgU\">Contigo</a> bottle when I\'m not refilling the Evian bottle I bought at the Hudson News stand 15 minutes ago.</li><li><strong>Merino Wool Scarf</strong>&nbsp;<strong>—</strong> Men\'s scarves are way undervalued (at least in the US) as something that can you can whip out of your travel bag to ward the chill off. In an airplane cabin where a coat is too much (especially in a middle seat) but you\'re getting cold because you\'ve pointed the air jet straight down to create an air curtain between you and the guys next to you, a scarf around the neck is just enough without being too much. I’m a big fan of&nbsp;<a href=\"https://amzn.to/35ckwUq\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" target=\"_blank\">merino wool scarves</a>&nbsp;— they’re warm, soft, and dry out if you spill water on them.</li><li><strong>USB-C to HDMI Cable</strong> <strong><strong>—</strong></strong> Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/07/28/podcast-177-b-sides-and-rarities/\" title=\"Podcast #177 — B-Sides and Rarities… Interview Outtakes\">July episode</a>, I said my <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3q5vY1l\">USB-C to HDMI cable</a> was the most important piece of travel kit on my trip through the Northeast because, by mirroring my MacBook Air display on hotel and beach house TVs, I could sit back with a beer and comfortably watch YouTube highlights of the Euro 2020 soccer tournament and the Tour de France on 40-60” flat screens instead of hunching over a 13” laptop screen.</li><li><strong><strong>Portable Bluetooth Speaker </strong></strong>—&nbsp;Wearing headphones is OK for a day or two if you’re by yourself, but when I’m with the family, I want something a bit more social. I’m a Bose fan, so I like their&nbsp;<a href=\"https://amzn.to/328yhUP\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundLink Micro</a>, but there’s a broad selection of makers, form factors, and price points to choose from.</li><li><strong>Smartphone Tripod</strong> —&nbsp;My lightweight <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3pZmjcS\">Square Jellyfish phone tripod</a> came in very handy while doing my <a href=\"https://www.emed.com/products/covid-at-home-testkit-six-pack?hsLang=en\">at-home COVID test</a> in Italy the morning before my flight home. The eMed test proctor wanted to watch me swirl the cotton swab in my nose and then insert it into the test kit. I\'m not sure how I would\'ve done that while holding my phone. I use it a lot more than I thought I would for video calls and to watch quick videos on my phone.</li><li><strong>Travel Notebook</strong>&nbsp;<strong>—</strong>&nbsp;Nothing fancy, no leather embossed cover, just something to jot down thoughts, ideas, observations, or to-do lists while waiting out that flight delay or for the bartender to bring you a beer. My first travel notebooks were&nbsp;<a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://amzn.to/36mN8dZ\" target=\"_blank\">Moleskine pocket notebooks</a>&nbsp;but I’ve switched over similar-sized&nbsp;<a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2LMAOM9\" target=\"_blank\">Clairefontaine A6 notebooks</a>. Their soft cover fits better in the back pocket of my Levis and the paper is more fountain-pen friendly. Or you could go a bit more whimsical and get&nbsp;<a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://amzn.to/36pK68D\" target=\"_blank\">a pack of Field Notes</a>.</li></ol>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><em>Note: None of these suggestions are paid endorsements. This post contains links to Amazon where I can earn a small commission from qualifying purchases.</em></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','10 Best Travel Gift Ideas To Survive Post-Pandemic Travel','','inherit','closed','closed','','3974-revision-v1','','','2021-11-04 12:33:31','2021-11-04 17:33:31','',3974,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3994',0,'revision','',0),
(3995,1,'2021-11-04 14:09:08','2021-11-04 19:09:08','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_2168\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/E30FECE9-6481-4CD6-835A-6CDF0206F770.jpeg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2168\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/E30FECE9-6481-4CD6-835A-6CDF0206F770-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> Black bags circling under the tree[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>If <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\" title=\"10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">last year\'s gift guide</a> was all about helping folks travel while dodging last-minute lockdowns, this year\'s guide is stacked with the best travel gift ideas to help the frequent traveler in your life cope with <a href=\"https://onemileatatime.com/news/spirit-airlines-operational-meltdown/\">all</a> <a href=\"https://liveandletsfly.com/skywest-cancels-or-delays-thousands-of-flights-impacting-alaska-american-delta-and-united/\">the</a> <a href=\"https://viewfromthewing.com/delta-air-lines-suffers-mass-cancellations-easter-weekend-fills-middle-seats-again-to-recover/\">major</a> <a href=\"https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/10/business/southwest-cancellations/index.html\">airline</a> <a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/30/american-airlines-cancels-hundreds-of-weekend-flights.html\">meltdowns</a>. Or, if <em>you</em> are the frequent traveler, here\'s a list of hints you could strategically drop on family members looking for shopping ideas.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list {\"ordered\":true} -->\n<ol><li><strong>Battery Packs</strong> <strong>—</strong> We just can’t easily travel anymore without a <em>working</em> mobile phone. It holds our boarding passes and our proof of COVID vaccination, gives us gate change and flight delay notifications, and routes us around traffic jams.  A dead phone while flights are being cancelled is more than just a bit of an inconvenience; having that second or third charge immediately available is critical when trying to swerve a long delay. There are a lot of choices; just pick one. I carry <a href=\"https://amzn.to/34fcbON\">Zendure</a> and <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3bHni97\">Anker</a> power banks; they\'ve served me well.</li><li><strong>Noise Canceling Headphone or Ear Buds—</strong> Whether you\'re sitting in a noisy airport waiting out a delay or are up in the air, it\'s great being able to cut out all the background noise and find your Zen place with the flick of a switch. I’ve been carrying Bose headphones for at least 15 years and am now on my 3rd pair, the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2Y9NWnY\">Bose 700\'s</a>. They’re not compact yet then continue to earn their space in my travel bag. I find over-the-ear cans more comfortable, but if you can handle in-the-ear buds for extended periods, Bose does <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3ByWEda\">ear buds</a>, or for Apple eco-system diehards, my kids recommend the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3GNszds\">AirPod Pros</a>.</li><li><strong>Comfortable Masks —</strong> I don\'t see an end to airport or in-flight mask mandates anytime soon. Since you’ll be wearing a mask for 3 or 4 or 8 hours straight between the airport and the flight, you’ll want something a bit better than the bargain-basement masks the gate agent give away for free. I’m a big fan of the <a href=\"https://evolvetogether.com/collections/health-and-wellness\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"https://evolvetogether.com/collections/adult-masks/products/black-milan-coordinates-30-face-masks\">evolvetogether masks</a>. I wear their standard masks all the time and wore their KN-95 masks on my recent flights to and from Italy. They’re breathable, they come with a pocket carrier for spares, and at $1.20/mask, they hit the right cost-vs.-quality point.</li><li><strong>Apple AirTags</strong> <strong><strong>—</strong></strong> Another suggestion for you Apple eco-system inhabitants... Putting an <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3k4rCUy\">AirTag</a> in your checked luggage lets you see if your bag is joining you on the new flight the airline just rebooked you on, or you can hang one from your backpack to track it if it somehow wanders off while you\'re checking the departure board.</li><li><strong><strong>Water Bottle —</strong></strong> With in-flight service still being a bit iffy, many people are carrying on their own water bottles. Most airports have refilling spigots next to regular water fountains so it\'s easy to fill up on the air side of security. There\'s a huge range of bottles and prices to choose from. I use a mid-range <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3bBVRgU\">Contigo</a> bottle when I\'m not refilling the Evian bottle I bought at the Hudson News stand 15 minutes ago.</li><li><strong>Merino Wool Scarf</strong> <strong>—</strong> Men\'s scarves are way undervalued (at least in the US) as something that can you can whip out of your travel bag to ward the chill off. In an airplane cabin where a coat is too much (especially in a middle seat) but you\'re getting cold because you\'ve pointed the air jet straight down to create an air curtain between you and the guys next to you, a scarf around the neck is just enough without being too much. I’m a big fan of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/35ckwUq\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" target=\"_blank\">merino wool scarves</a> — they’re warm, soft, and dry out if you spill water on them.</li><li><strong>USB-C to HDMI Cable</strong> <strong><strong>—</strong></strong> Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/07/28/podcast-177-b-sides-and-rarities/\" title=\"Podcast #177 — B-Sides and Rarities… Interview Outtakes\">July episode</a>, I said my <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3q5vY1l\">USB-C to HDMI cable</a> was the most important piece of travel kit on my trip through the Northeast because, by mirroring my MacBook Air display on hotel and beach house TVs, I could sit back with a beer and comfortably watch YouTube highlights of the Euro 2020 soccer tournament and the Tour de France on 40-60” flat screens instead of hunching over a 13” laptop screen.</li><li><strong><strong>Portable Bluetooth Speaker </strong></strong>— Wearing headphones is OK for a day or two if you’re by yourself, but when I’m with the family, I want something a bit more social. I’m a Bose fan, so I like their <a href=\"https://amzn.to/328yhUP\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundLink Micro</a>, but there’s a broad selection of makers, form factors, and price points to choose from.</li><li><strong>Smartphone Tripod</strong> — My lightweight <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3pZmjcS\">Square Jellyfish phone tripod</a> came in very handy while doing my <a href=\"https://www.emed.com/products/covid-at-home-testkit-six-pack?hsLang=en\">at-home COVID test</a> in Italy the morning before my flight home. The eMed test proctor wanted to watch me swirl the cotton swab in my nose and then insert it into the test kit. I\'m not sure how I would\'ve done that while holding my phone. I use it a lot more than I thought I would for video calls and to watch quick videos on my phone.</li><li><strong>Travel Notebook</strong> <strong>—</strong> Nothing fancy, no leather embossed cover, just something to jot down thoughts, ideas, observations, or to-do lists while waiting out that flight delay or for the bartender to bring you a beer. My first travel notebooks were <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://amzn.to/36mN8dZ\" target=\"_blank\">Moleskine pocket notebooks</a> but I’ve switched over similar-sized <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2LMAOM9\" target=\"_blank\">Clairefontaine A6 notebooks</a>. Their soft cover fits better in the back pocket of my Levis and the paper is more fountain-pen friendly. Or you could go a bit more whimsical and get <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://amzn.to/36pK68D\" target=\"_blank\">a pack of Field Notes</a>.</li></ol>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><em>Note: None of these suggestions are paid endorsements. This post contains links to Amazon where I can earn a small commission from qualifying purchases.</em></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','10 Best Travel Gift Ideas To Survive Post-Pandemic Travel','','inherit','closed','closed','','3974-revision-v1','','','2021-11-04 14:09:08','2021-11-04 19:09:08','',3974,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3995',0,'revision','',0),
(3996,1,'2021-11-07 19:18:22','2021-11-08 00:18:22','Finishing my vacation with a podcast from the bathroom of the <a title=\"Budapest\" href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/hungary/budapest\" rel=\"lonelyplanet\">Budapest (Hungary)</a> Marriott, high above the <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danube\">Danube</a>. The second vacation podcast focuses on differences between business and leisure travel -- how to \"downshift\" from business to leisure travel, balancing cost with risk when choosing a travel brand, and a Budapest traffic accident illustrates what business travelers take for granted. Also, listener comments from podcast #8, and music/sounds from Budapest street festivals. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_9.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr>\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #9:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <em>Warmth</em> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in the bathroom of <a href=\"http://hotels.lonelyplanet.com/hungary/budapest-r2097989/budapest-marriott-hotel-q1192767/\">Budapest Marriott</a></li>\n 	<li>Finishing up a 2½-week vacation in Europe</li>\n 	<li>The transition music in this podcast are iRiver recordings of Budapest street festival sounds</li>\n 	<li>Listener comments about podcast #8</li>\n 	<li>What does it take to \"downshift\" from the efficient cadence of a business traveler; how to enjoy the act of traveling?</li>\n 	<li>Following up on the <em>Comfort in brands</em> topic from podcast #8</li>\n 	<li>Two great experiences with non-brands -- the <a href=\"http://www.altiporthotel.com\">Hotel Altiport</a> in Meribel, France, and <a href=\"http://www.fox-autorent.com\">Fox Auto-Rent</a> in Budapest</li>\n 	<li>Discount airlines taking over Budapest airport</li>\n 	<li>A traffic accident points out some of the things that business travelers take for granted</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/travelcommons/103646966/\"><strong>Direct Link</strong></a> to a picture of the wrecked car</li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments[at]travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_9.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #9 - Wrapping Up the Vacation','','inherit','closed','closed','','12-revision-v1','','','2021-11-07 19:18:22','2021-11-08 00:18:22','',12,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3996',0,'revision','',0),
(3998,1,'2021-11-11 21:00:58','2021-11-12 02:00:58','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_2168\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/E30FECE9-6481-4CD6-835A-6CDF0206F770.jpeg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2168\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/E30FECE9-6481-4CD6-835A-6CDF0206F770-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> Black bags circling under the tree[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>If <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\" title=\"10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">last year\'s gift guide</a> was all about helping folks travel while dodging last-minute lockdowns, this year\'s guide is stacked with the best travel gift ideas to help the frequent traveler in your life cope with <a href=\"https://onemileatatime.com/news/spirit-airlines-operational-meltdown/\">all</a> <a href=\"https://liveandletsfly.com/skywest-cancels-or-delays-thousands-of-flights-impacting-alaska-american-delta-and-united/\">the</a> <a href=\"https://viewfromthewing.com/delta-air-lines-suffers-mass-cancellations-easter-weekend-fills-middle-seats-again-to-recover/\">major</a> <a href=\"https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/10/business/southwest-cancellations/index.html\">airline</a> <a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/30/american-airlines-cancels-hundreds-of-weekend-flights.html\">meltdowns</a>. Or, if <em>you</em> are the frequent traveler, here\'s a list of hints you could strategically drop on family members looking for shopping ideas.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list {\"ordered\":true} -->\n<ol><li><strong>Battery Packs</strong> <strong>—</strong> We just can’t easily travel anymore without a <em>working</em> mobile phone. It holds our boarding passes and our proof of COVID vaccination, gives us gate change and flight delay notifications, and routes us around traffic jams.  A dead phone while flights are being cancelled is more than just a bit of an inconvenience; having that second or third charge immediately available is critical when trying to swerve a long delay. There are a lot of choices; just pick one. I carry <a href=\"https://amzn.to/34fcbON\">Zendure</a> and <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3bHni97\">Anker</a> power banks; they\'ve served me well.</li><li><strong>Noise Canceling Headphone or Ear Buds —</strong> Whether you\'re sitting in a noisy airport waiting out a delay or are up in the air, it\'s great being able to cut out all the background noise and find your Zen place with the flick of a switch. I’ve been carrying Bose headphones for at least 15 years and am now on my 3rd pair, the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2Y9NWnY\">Bose 700\'s</a>. They’re not compact yet then continue to earn their space in my travel bag. I find over-the-ear cans more comfortable, but if you can handle in-the-ear buds for extended periods, Bose does <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3ByWEda\">ear buds</a>, or for Apple eco-system diehards, my kids recommend the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3GNszds\">AirPod Pros</a>.</li><li><strong>Comfortable Masks —</strong> I don\'t see an end to airport or in-flight mask mandates anytime soon. Since you’ll be wearing a mask for 3 or 4 or 8 hours straight between the airport and the flight, you’ll want something a bit better than the bargain-basement masks the gate agent give away for free. I’m a big fan of the <a href=\"https://evolvetogether.com/collections/health-and-wellness\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"https://evolvetogether.com/collections/adult-masks/products/black-milan-coordinates-30-face-masks\">evolvetogether masks</a>. I wear their standard masks all the time and wore their KN-95 masks on my recent flights to and from Italy. They’re breathable, they come with a pocket carrier for spares, and at $1.20/mask, they hit the right cost-vs.-quality point.</li><li><strong>Apple AirTags</strong> <strong><strong>—</strong></strong> Another suggestion for you Apple eco-system inhabitants... Putting an <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3k4rCUy\">AirTag</a> in your checked luggage lets you see if your bag is joining you on the new flight the airline just rebooked you on, or you can hang one from your backpack to track it if it somehow wanders off while you\'re checking the departure board.</li><li><strong><strong>Water Bottle —</strong></strong> With in-flight service still being a bit iffy, many people are carrying on their own water bottles. Most airports have refilling spigots next to regular water fountains so it\'s easy to fill up on the air side of security. There\'s a huge range of bottles and prices to choose from. I use a mid-range <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3bBVRgU\">Contigo</a> bottle when I\'m not refilling the Evian bottle I bought at the Hudson News stand 15 minutes ago.</li><li><strong>Merino Wool Scarf</strong> <strong>—</strong> Men\'s scarves are way undervalued (at least in the US) as something that can you can whip out of your travel bag to ward the chill off. In an airplane cabin where a coat is too much (especially in a middle seat) but you\'re getting cold because you\'ve pointed the air jet straight down to create an air curtain between you and the guys next to you, a scarf around the neck is just enough without being too much. I’m a big fan of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/35ckwUq\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" target=\"_blank\">merino wool scarves</a> — they’re warm, soft, and dry out if you spill water on them.</li><li><strong>USB-C to HDMI Cable</strong> <strong><strong>—</strong></strong> Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/07/28/podcast-177-b-sides-and-rarities/\" title=\"Podcast #177 — B-Sides and Rarities… Interview Outtakes\">July episode</a>, I said my <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3q5vY1l\">USB-C to HDMI cable</a> was the most important piece of travel kit on my trip through the Northeast because, by mirroring my MacBook Air display on hotel and beach house TVs, I could sit back with a beer and comfortably watch YouTube highlights of the Euro 2020 soccer tournament and the Tour de France on 40-60” flat screens instead of hunching over a 13” laptop screen.</li><li><strong><strong>Portable Bluetooth Speaker </strong></strong>— Wearing headphones is OK for a day or two if you’re by yourself, but when I’m with the family, I want something a bit more social. I’m a Bose fan, so I like their <a href=\"https://amzn.to/328yhUP\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundLink Micro</a>, but there’s a broad selection of makers, form factors, and price points to choose from.</li><li><strong>Smartphone Tripod</strong> — My lightweight <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3pZmjcS\">Square Jellyfish phone tripod</a> came in very handy while doing my <a href=\"https://www.emed.com/products/covid-at-home-testkit-six-pack?hsLang=en\">at-home COVID test</a> in Italy the morning before my flight home. The eMed test proctor wanted to watch me swirl the cotton swab in my nose and then insert it into the test kit. I\'m not sure how I would\'ve done that while holding my phone. I use it a lot more than I thought I would for video calls and to watch quick videos on my phone.</li><li><strong>Travel Notebook</strong> <strong>—</strong> Nothing fancy, no leather embossed cover, just something to jot down thoughts, ideas, observations, or to-do lists while waiting out that flight delay or for the bartender to bring you a beer. My first travel notebooks were <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://amzn.to/36mN8dZ\" target=\"_blank\">Moleskine pocket notebooks</a> but I’ve switched over similar-sized <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2LMAOM9\" target=\"_blank\">Clairefontaine A6 notebooks</a>. Their soft cover fits better in the back pocket of my Levis and the paper is more fountain-pen friendly. Or you could go a bit more whimsical and get <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://amzn.to/36pK68D\" target=\"_blank\">a pack of Field Notes</a>.</li></ol>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><em>Note: None of these suggestions are paid endorsements. This post contains links to Amazon where I can earn a small commission from qualifying purchases.</em></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','10 Best Travel Gift Ideas To Survive Post-Pandemic Travel','','inherit','closed','closed','','3974-revision-v1','','','2021-11-11 21:00:58','2021-11-12 02:00:58','',3974,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3998',0,'revision','',0),
(3999,1,'2021-11-11 21:07:24','2021-11-12 02:07:24','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_2168\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/E30FECE9-6481-4CD6-835A-6CDF0206F770.jpeg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2168\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/E30FECE9-6481-4CD6-835A-6CDF0206F770-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> Black bags circling under the tree[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>If <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\" title=\"10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">last year\'s gift guide</a> was all about helping folks travel while dodging last-minute lockdowns, this year\'s guide is stacked with the best travel gift ideas to help the frequent traveler in your life cope with <a href=\"https://onemileatatime.com/news/spirit-airlines-operational-meltdown/\">all</a> <a href=\"https://liveandletsfly.com/skywest-cancels-or-delays-thousands-of-flights-impacting-alaska-american-delta-and-united/\">the</a> <a href=\"https://viewfromthewing.com/delta-air-lines-suffers-mass-cancellations-easter-weekend-fills-middle-seats-again-to-recover/\">major</a> <a href=\"https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/10/business/southwest-cancellations/index.html\">airline</a> <a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/30/american-airlines-cancels-hundreds-of-weekend-flights.html\">meltdowns</a>. Or, if <em>you</em> are the frequent traveler, here\'s a list of hints you could strategically drop on family members looking for shopping ideas.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list {\"ordered\":true} -->\n<ol><li><strong>Battery Packs</strong> <strong>—</strong> We just can’t easily travel anymore without a <em>working</em> mobile phone. It holds our boarding passes and our proof of COVID vaccination, gives us gate change and flight delay notifications, and routes us around traffic jams.  A dead phone while flights are being cancelled is more than just a bit of an inconvenience; having that second or third charge immediately available is critical when trying to swerve a long delay. There are a lot of choices; just pick one. I carry <a href=\"https://amzn.to/34fcbON\">Zendure</a> and <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3bHni97\">Anker</a> power banks; they\'ve served me well.</li><li><strong>Noise Canceling Headphone or Ear Buds —</strong> Whether you\'re sitting in a noisy airport waiting out a delay or are up in the air, it\'s great being able to cut out all the background noise and find your Zen place with the flick of a switch. I’ve been carrying Bose headphones for at least 15 years and am now on my 3rd pair, the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2Y9NWnY\">Bose 700\'s</a>. They’re not compact yet they continue to earn their space in my travel bag. I find over-the-ear cans more comfortable, but if you can handle in-the-ear buds for extended periods, Bose does <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3ByWEda\">ear buds</a>, or for Apple eco-system diehards, my kids recommend the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3GNszds\">AirPod Pros</a>.</li><li><strong>Comfortable Masks —</strong> I don\'t see an end to airport or in-flight mask mandates anytime soon. Since you’ll be wearing a mask for 3 or 4 or 8 hours straight between the airport and the flight, you’ll want something a bit better than the bargain-basement masks the gate agent give away for free. I’m a big fan of the <a href=\"https://evolvetogether.com/collections/health-and-wellness\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"https://evolvetogether.com/collections/adult-masks/products/black-milan-coordinates-30-face-masks\">evolvetogether masks</a>. I wear their standard masks all the time and wore their KN-95 masks on my recent flights to and from Italy. They’re breathable, they come with a pocket carrier for spares, and at $1.20/mask, they hit the right cost-vs.-quality point.</li><li><strong>Apple AirTags</strong> <strong><strong>—</strong></strong> Another suggestion for you Apple eco-system inhabitants... Putting an <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3k4rCUy\">AirTag</a> in your checked luggage lets you see if your bag is joining you on the new flight the airline just rebooked you on, or you can hang one from your backpack to track it if it somehow wanders off while you\'re checking the departure board.</li><li><strong><strong>Water Bottle —</strong></strong> With in-flight service still being a bit iffy, many people are carrying on their own water bottles. Most airports have refilling spigots next to regular water fountains so it\'s easy to fill up on the air side of security. There\'s a huge range of bottles and prices to choose from. I use a mid-range <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3bBVRgU\">Contigo</a> bottle when I\'m not refilling the Evian bottle I bought at the Hudson News stand 15 minutes ago.</li><li><strong>Merino Wool Scarf</strong> <strong>—</strong> Men\'s scarves are way undervalued (at least in the US) as something that can you can whip out of your travel bag to ward the chill off. In an airplane cabin where a coat is too much (especially in a middle seat) but you\'re getting cold because you\'ve pointed the air jet straight down to create an air curtain between you and the guys next to you, a scarf around the neck is just enough without being too much. I’m a big fan of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/35ckwUq\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" target=\"_blank\">merino wool scarves</a> — they’re warm, soft, and dry out if you spill water on them.</li><li><strong>USB-C to HDMI Cable</strong> <strong><strong>—</strong></strong> Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/07/28/podcast-177-b-sides-and-rarities/\" title=\"Podcast #177 — B-Sides and Rarities… Interview Outtakes\">July episode</a>, I said my <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3q5vY1l\">USB-C to HDMI cable</a> was the most important piece of travel kit on my trip through the Northeast because, by mirroring my MacBook Air display on hotel and beach house TVs, I could sit back with a beer and comfortably watch YouTube highlights of the Euro 2020 soccer tournament and the Tour de France on 40-60” flat screens instead of hunching over a 13” laptop screen.</li><li><strong><strong>Portable Bluetooth Speaker </strong></strong>— Wearing headphones is OK for a day or two if you’re by yourself, but when I’m with the family, I want something a bit more social. I’m a Bose fan, so I like their <a href=\"https://amzn.to/328yhUP\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundLink Micro</a>, but there’s a broad selection of makers, form factors, and price points to choose from.</li><li><strong>Smartphone Tripod</strong> — My lightweight <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3pZmjcS\">Square Jellyfish phone tripod</a> came in very handy while doing my <a href=\"https://www.emed.com/products/covid-at-home-testkit-six-pack?hsLang=en\">at-home COVID test</a> in Italy the morning before my flight home. The eMed test proctor wanted to watch me swirl the cotton swab in my nose and then insert it into the test kit. I\'m not sure how I would\'ve done that while holding my phone. I use it a lot more than I thought I would for video calls and to watch quick videos on my phone.</li><li><strong>Travel Notebook</strong> <strong>—</strong> Nothing fancy, no leather embossed cover, just something to jot down thoughts, ideas, observations, or to-do lists while waiting out that flight delay or for the bartender to bring you a beer. My first travel notebooks were <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://amzn.to/36mN8dZ\" target=\"_blank\">Moleskine pocket notebooks</a> but I’ve switched over similar-sized <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://amzn.to/2LMAOM9\" target=\"_blank\">Clairefontaine A6 notebooks</a>. Their soft cover fits better in the back pocket of my Levis and the paper is more fountain-pen friendly. Or you could go a bit more whimsical and get <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://amzn.to/36pK68D\" target=\"_blank\">a pack of Field Notes</a>.</li></ol>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><em>Note: None of these suggestions are paid endorsements. This post contains links to Amazon where I can earn a small commission from qualifying purchases.</em></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','10 Best Travel Gift Ideas To Survive Post-Pandemic Travel','','inherit','closed','closed','','3974-revision-v1','','','2021-11-11 21:07:24','2021-11-12 02:07:24','',3974,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=3999',0,'revision','',0),
(4000,1,'2021-11-12 11:06:41','2021-11-12 16:06:41','','IMG_3657','','inherit','open','closed','','img_3657','','','2021-12-10 10:27:13','2021-12-10 15:27:13','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/IMG_3657.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(4001,1,'2021-11-13 13:42:28','2021-11-13 18:42:28','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/IMG_3657-scaled.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/IMG_3657-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Jumble of Travel Signs\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> Post-Pandemic Travel Guidance[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>No travel since the last episode, so just talking through a random potpourri of travel stuff. There\'s more travel planning; this time for a couple of weeks split between London and Wales which means sorting through a new set of COVID travel requirements. We look at some stats -- Uber\'s latest financials and how deeply last year\'s lockdown hit Nashville airport vendors.  I marvel at how much European mobile data rates have fallen, strip down my English to have a deeper chat with an Italian bartender, and wrap it all up with highlights from this year\'s traveler\'s gift guide. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_181.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #181: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois, only 2 weeks after <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/10/28/podcast-180-tracking-covid-travel-requirements-cycling-thru-puglia/\" title=\"Podcast #180 — Tracking COVID Travel Requirements; Cycling Thru Puglia\">the last episode</a>. Decided to kinda short-cycle this episode, see if I can get in an actual November episode rather than wait for December like I said at the end of the last episode. And to think that I used to do these weekly when I started out in 2005. Oh, the enthusiasm of youth -- and notebooks full of unused travel stories. I was going through some of those old episodes while doing a bit of website maintenance. The TSA gave me a lot of fodder for content back in the day. It was only 3½ years old when TravelCommons started, so I got to comment on (bitch about) all their growing pains -- the start of the shoe carnival, the liquid ban, all the different tries at screening technology (who could forget those “puffer” machines?) and, of course, their stellar customer service. But once I started going through PreCheck in 2012, there wasn’t much more to comment/bitch about -- which I know is a good thing overall, but it did leave me with a big content hole, kinda like in those TV series where the villain becomes one of the good guys in season 3 -- what do you do next?</li><li>And 16 years on, as I slouch towards semi-retirement, my travel experiences are changing. I’m thinking less about clever new ways to navigate ORD’s Monday morning road warrior rush hour or about totaling up delays on a 4- or 5-city cross-country itinerary, and thinking more about planning for longer leisure(?)/experiential(?) travel. Though I guess that’s not a complete change.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>Going through those old episodes reminded me that, even back at the start, I was talking about leisure travel -- to the point that episodes <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/07/14/podcast-8-travelcommons-on-vacation/\" title=\"Podcast #8 – TravelCommons on Vacation\">#8</a> and <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/07/27/podcast-9-wrapping-up-the-vacation/\" title=\"Podcast #9 – Wrapping Up the Vacation\">#9</a> were done while on vacation! I can only imagine what my family was thinking when they heard me nattering away in the bathroom of the Geneva, Switz Novatel and the Budapest Marriott.</li><li>But back to the present… Obviously, no travel since the last episode, just travel planning for our trip to the UK next week -- a week in London and then heading out to southern Wales for a week of walking, hiking, pretty much just being cold and wet because I didn’t get enough of that while biking in Puglia.&nbsp;</li><li>A big chunk of my time has been spent trying to figure out exactly what COVID paperwork we need to get into the UK. Since we’re vaccinated and coming from a non-red list country, we don’t need to show a negative COVID test before getting on the plane, but instead we have to get a test done in the UK and have to pre-pay for it so we can also fill out a passenger locator form 48 hours before departure. The UK government’s website is actually pretty good, with links to approved test providers. But most of them want to ship the test to a UK address, which is good if you’re returning home to the UK; less good if you’re staying in a hotel or Airbnb. So now I’m trying to figure out -- do I risk a long line at a Heathrow test center when we land or do I find a place somewhere in London the next day? Kinda makes me long for the days when all I had to worry about was finding a bank before 3pm on Friday to cash an American Express Travelers Check so I had cash for the weekend.... Nah, who am I kidding? That was so much more of a pain than this. Worst case, I figure out how to eat a full-cooked English breakfast standing up while in line.</li><li>Bridge Music — <em>Countryside Summer Joyride</em> by Kara Square (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mindmapthat/56281 Ft: Javolenus</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>This time last year, in t<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">he November 2020 episode</a>, we talked about all the end-of-the-year “don’t leave me” offers from the airlines and hotels, 20-50% cuts in whatever metric they used to award status --&nbsp; stays, nights, miles, stays, segments, spend. And at the end of that bit, I said “Maybe they’ll be doing it again this time next year if that ‘Well, it’s probably more like the end of 2021 or maybe into the beginning of 2022 before things start feeling normal; forecast turns out to be true.” A year later, and after the Delta variant knocked down everyone’s Q3 revenues, I haven’t received any airline status sales yet, but I’ve already received status extensions from Marriott, Hilton, and, weirdly enough, IHG -- weird ‘cause I don’t <em>have</em> any status with them… that I know of, maybe I need to check. They’re all extending status for another year, to February or March 2023. So everyone’s kept their 2019 status for 3 years now -- 2020, 2021, and now 2022. And why not? Since a lot of the cost is concierge lounges that have been closed and free breakfasts that are now boxes with a yogurt and an orange, it’s probably the cheapest way to buy continued customer loyalty.</li><li>We’ve talked a lot in this podcast about Uber and Lyft. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/08/13/podcast-154-will-we-still-love-uber-when-the-prices-go-up/\" title=\"Podcast #154 — Will We Still Love Uber When The Prices Go Up?\">episode #154</a> in August 2019, I asked “Will We Still Love Uber and Lyft When The Prices Go Up?” after both CEOs talked about getting to “rational pricing” -- “rational” being CEO-speak for “higher”. And then this year, talking about their post-pandemic driver shortages, customer service issues, and rising prices -- a pretty common topic. The Times of London <a href=\"https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/is-uber-over-cm70m2blm\">asks</a> “Is Uber Dead?” and the Chicago Tribune says in <a href=\"https://www.chicagotribune.com/opinion/editorials/ct-editorial-taxicabs-uber-lyft-rideshare-20210913-ljnt5wgxejepbmagoe33w7jud4-story.html\">an editorial</a> “We were wrong to abandon Chicago’s taxicabs for ride-shares and the city now needs to find a fix” which is a bit of a laugh because 4-5 years ago, everyone here complained that you couldn’t get a cab other than downtown or the airports, and definitely never in the poorer neighborhoods of the South and West sides.&nbsp; If you read the <a href=\"https://investor.uber.com/news-events/news/press-release-details/2021/Uber-Announces-Results-for-Third-Quarter-2021/\">highlights of Uber’s Q3 financial results</a> released last week, they’re not quite dead. They trumpet that Q3 was their “first Adjusted EBITDA profitable quarter as a public company” Adjusted EBITDA - a fun accounting construct meaning “earnings before taxes, depreciation, and all the other bad stuff” and that the number of active drivers is up more than 65% since January. But what was interesting to me -- their delivery business, like Uber Eats, now generates more revenue than their traditional ride business. And maybe competing for drivers? Does make some sense. As the Times’ writer put it, “Food doesn’t complain about the route and parcels tend not to throw up on the back seat.”</li><li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors\">episode #170 last December</a>, we talked about how the CEO of Qantas had stirred up a good bit of controversy saying “We will ask people to have a vaccination before they can get on the aircraft” and the resulting land grab in vaccine passport apps. United and Lufthansa were testing out the <a href=\"https://thecommonsproject.org/commonpass\">CommonPass app</a>, Delta and Alitalia (may they rest in peace) the <a href=\"https://www.aokpass.com/en/\" title=\"AOKPass\">AOKPass </a>from the International Chamber of Commerce, and British Airways and Iberia the Travel Pass from an airline industry group. I said back then that it was a little messy, but it made sense since I didn’t think the handwritten card the CDC was handing out was going to pass muster at a boarding gate. Now, less than a year later, the Qantas CEO’s quote is pretty much standard operating procedure for international travel.&nbsp; But vaccine passport apps? It’s a bit more mixed. Last month I flew Air France, United, Lufthansa, and ITA, the successor to Alitalia, and was never prompted to download any apps. Instead, I pulled out my trusty CDC card many times to prove my vaccination status, and for my flight home, opened Gmail on my iPhone a couple of times to show the PDF of my negative COVID test.&nbsp; Pretty low tech, but honestly, at least in Italy, it worked faster than the EU’s Green Pass QR codes. We’d show our CDC cards and after a second or two be waved through while the Europeans were still trying to right-size the QR code on their phone screens so the scanner would register it. Upgrading to iOS 15.1 on my iPhone let me add a digital vaccination card to my Apple Wallet, but I don’t know where I’ll actually use it.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> or the <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram </a>account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music —  <em>Jester of the Golden Apocalypse</em> by Super_Sigil (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Super_Sigil/34750 </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Travel Potpourri for $600</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Regular listeners know that, every <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/02/10/podcast-148-travel-potpourri-for-200-alex/\" title=\"Podcast #148 — Travel Potpourri for $200, Alex\">now </a>and <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/12/31/podcast-158-travel-potpourri-for-400-alex/\" title=\"Podcast #158 — Travel Potpourri for $400, Alex\">again</a>, usually when I’m scraping for content, I gather up the odds-‘n’-ends from my travel notebooks that I can’t get “grow up” into a stand-alone topic and just string ‘em together into a Jeopardy-like topic “Travel Potpourri”.&nbsp;</li><li>I recently <a href=\"https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/2021/11/11/nashville-airport-race-build-more-dining-options-for-surging-travelers/6317805001/\">read some stats</a> about how the March 2020 lockdown impacted Nashville’s airport -- daily passenger count went from 50,000 to 500, and only 8 airport concessions out of a pre-COVID count of 52 survived. And now, 20 months later, passenger counts are pretty much back to pre-pandemic levels, but the concession count isn’t. They’re only back to 34 -- 18 food places and 16 shops, newsstands and other things. It takes more time to start things up than to shut them down -- especially when you have to get all your workers and supplies through TSA security every day. I’ll keep this in mind the next time I want to complain about a 10-deep line for a cup of coffee.</li><li>Traveling to Europe again means re-bookmarking the <a href=\"https://prepaid-data-sim-card.fandom.com/wiki/Prepaid_SIM_with_data\">Prepaid Data SIM Card Wiki</a> so I can research mobile data plans again. For 4 years, I didn’t have to worry about it. The EU had outlawed roaming charges and so I’d just use the UK SIM I bought the first time we took our daughter over to Scotland for college. That worked well until Brexit day last year. So on our first day in Bari, I searched out the nearest TIM store -- stands for Telecom Italia Mobile, I think. I wanted one of Italy’s big networks because our cycling tour would be taking us into the countryside, and so was OK paying a bit more for better coverage.&nbsp; The last time I bought a mobile SIM in Italy was 5 years in Pisa and it was a huge hassle. But in Bari, we walked into the store, and the clerk was great. She kinda figured we were looking for SIMs, knew about the international plan I’d found on their website, and got the whole thing done in maybe 15 minutes. The price -- €25 ($30) for 70 GB of data, which, for all practical purposes translates to unlimited data -- meant the break-even point vs. paying AT&amp;T $10/day for international roaming was 3 days. Since we were in Italy for 16 days, it was a well-spent 15 minutes. I was amazed at how far mobile data prices have fallen. The last time I was in Europe, the fall of 2019, I put £10 on my EE SIM (about $12 back then) and got 3 GB. I just topped up that SIM again for our UK trip and got 15 GB for £15 -- 500% increase in data for 50% more money. That should hold us for 2 weeks.&nbsp;</li><li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/09/28/podcast-124-craft-beer-hunting-i-hate-rick-steves/\" title=\"Podcast #124 — Craft Beer Hunting; I Hate Rick Steves\">many </a><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/10/12/podcast-111-seatback-recline-wars-craft-beer-tourism/\" title=\"Podcast #111 — Seatback Recline Wars; Craft Beer Tourism\">past </a><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/04/10/podcast-174-how-the-pros-plan-their-taproom-tourism/\" title=\"Podcast #174 — How the Pros Plan Their Taproom Tourism\">episodes</a>, I’ve talked about how my search for local craft beer has taken me to places outside the typical travel bubble. And, for me, this is even more important since I’m doing less (no?) business travel. Because the nature of business travel -- traveling to work with clients who live there -- makes it easier to connect with that place, even if it’s just through hallway conversations like “What’d you do over the weekend”, but most times, it’s them saying “Oh, you gotta go to my favorite place while you’re here.” Our Puglia bike tour ended in Lecce in lousy weather. The rain had started the night before and continued dumping the next morning. We skipped the last ride. You could say we were lightweights, but we didn’t want to have to figure out how to pack soaking wet biking clothes. I wanted to walk around Lecce a bit before our dinner reservation, but Irene was cold from the wind and rain. So she headed back to the hotel while I searched out a beer bar I’d found on Untappd.</li><li>The place was pretty empty when I walked in; 7pm, it was early by Italian standards. The draft handles were all from a local Lecce brewery, so I asked the bartender, a young guy, his favorite, and he pointed to the IPA tap -- of course, but it was a pretty solid session IPA. He offered me a table, but I asked him if I could just stand and drink at the counter. We started to chat a bit (“Why have you come… to Lecce?”) His English wasn’t great (though orders-of magnitude better than my Italian, which is sorta damning with faint praise) so I started stripping down my English -- no slang, no contractions, clean articulation, simple declarative sentences. But in maybe a verbal corollary to the Mark Twain-ism “I would have written a shorter letter if I had the time…”, I find it takes a lot of thinking, a lot of mental work to do this, to strip my English down to something easily understandable. And the bartender appreciated it. “English people talk so fast,” he said. “I have a hard time understanding everything they say.” And by making my English more understandable, he gained confidence in his, and pushed it into more interesting topics like the split between Northern and Southern Italy (“They hate us!”) and even within Puglia (“We hate Bari and Bari hates us!”).&nbsp; And why he wants to work on his English (“It’s so much more useful than Italian. A German person, a Swedish person comes into the bar; we all talk English)”. He was happy to get to practice his English. I was happy to oblige, and get a little peek at non-tourist Puglia without knowing any Italian.</li><li>Bridge Music —  South Texas Cowboy Blues by texasradiofish (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/texasradiofish/52030 Ft: unreal_dm, ElRon XChile</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>&nbsp;2021 Traveler’s Gift Guide</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Last week, I posted <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-to-survive-post-pandemic-travel/\" title=\"10 Best Travel Gift Ideas To Survive Post-Pandemic Travel\">this year’s traveler’s gift guide</a>. You can find it on the front page of the TravelCommons’ website; I’ll also put a link in the episode description so you can click to it straight from your podcast app. If <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">last year’s gift guide</a> was about helping people travel handle last-minute lockdowns with suggestions like bring-your-own dining sets and upscale in-room coffee brewing kits, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-to-survive-post-pandemic-travel/\">this year’s guide</a> is stacked with the gift ideas to help cope with all the predicted airline meltdowns when holiday passenger traffic smacks straight into crew and ground staff shortages.&nbsp;</li><li>I’m not going to run through the whole list -- you can hit the website for that -- but I’ll hit a couple of highlights. Top of this year’s list is battery packs. We talked in the<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/10/28/podcast-180-tracking-covid-travel-requirements-cycling-thru-puglia/\" title=\"Podcast #180 — Tracking COVID Travel Requirements; Cycling Thru Puglia\"> last episode</a> that we just can’t easily travel anymore without a working mobile phone. It holds our boarding passes and our proof of COVID vaccination, gives us gate change and flight delay notifications, and routes us around traffic jams. A dead phone while flights are being cancelled is more than just a bit of an inconvenience; having that second or third charge immediately available is critical when trying to swerve a long delay. There are a lot of choices; just pick one. I carry <a href=\"https://amzn.to/34fcbON\">Zendure</a> and <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3bHni97\">Anker</a> power banks; they’ve served me well. (And thanks to Jim McDonough for QA’ing the power bank links in the original blog post!)</li><li>Number 2 and a perennial favorite - Noise Canceling Headphone or Ear Buds. Whether you’re sitting in a noisy airport waiting out a delay or are up in the air, it’s great being able to cut out all the background noise and find your Zen place with the flick of a switch. I’ve been carrying Bose headphones for at least 15 years and am now on my 3rd pair, the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2Y9NWnY\">Bose 700’s</a>. They’re not compact yet they continue to earn their space in my travel bag. I find over-the-ear cans more comfortable, but if you can handle in-the-ear buds for extended periods, Bose does <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3ByWEda\">ear buds</a>, or for Apple ecosystem diehards, my kids recommend the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3GNszds\">AirPod Pros</a>.</li><li>Another suggestion for Apple ecosystem inhabitants is Apple’s <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3k4rCUy\">AirTag</a>. They have a lot more range than straight Bluetooth trackers like Tile because AirTags can ping off of any nearby Apple device, not just yours, to report its location. Putting an AirTag in your checked luggage can you see if your bag is joining you on the new flight the airline just rebooked you on, or you can hang one from your backpack to track it if it somehow wanders off down the concourse while your eyes are trying to find your delayed flight on the airport’s departure board.</li><li>Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/07/28/podcast-177-b-sides-and-rarities/\">July episode, episode #177</a>, I said my <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3q5vY1l\">USB-C to HDMI cable</a> was the most important piece of travel kit on my trip through the Northeast because, it let me mirror my MacBook Air on the hotel and beach house TVs so I could sit back with a beer and comfortably watch YouTube highlights of the Euro 2020 soccer tournament and the Tour de France on 40-60” flat screens instead of hunching over a 13” laptop screen.</li><li>And at number 9, a smartphone tripod. My <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3pZmjcS\">Square Jellyfish phone tripod</a> is light and doesn’t take up much space, but came in very handy while doing my COVID test video session in Italy the morning before my flight home. The eMed test proctor wanted to watch me swirl the cotton swab in my nose and then insert it into the test kit. I’m not sure how I would’ve done that while holding my phone. I use it a lot more than I thought I would for video calls and to watch quick videos on my phone.</li><li>So there you go, something to fit all sizes and budgets in time for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, or if you’re just killing time waiting for your Thanksgiving flight to leave.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #181</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_181.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #181 — Travel Potpourri; 2021 Traveler’s Gift Guide','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-181-travel-potpourri-2021-travelers-gift-guide','','','2021-12-10 12:06:10','2021-12-10 17:06:10','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4001',0,'post','',0),
(4002,1,'2021-11-12 11:11:22','2021-11-12 16:11:22','','Podcast #181 — Travel Potpourri; 2021 Traveler’s Gift Guide','','inherit','closed','closed','','4001-revision-v1','','','2021-11-12 11:11:22','2021-11-12 16:11:22','',4001,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4002',0,'revision','',0),
(4003,1,'2021-11-12 11:14:34','2021-11-12 16:14:34','[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/IMG_3657-scaled.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/IMG_3657-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Jumble of Travel Signs\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Post-Pandemic Travel Guidance[/caption]\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Back at the microphone after two weeks in Southern Italy. Lots of travel segments that could\'ve gone wrong, but none of them did. We talk about what international travel is like in COVID times, about the challenge of keeping track and complying with the different COVID travel requirements that seem to be constantly changing, and then some thoughts about our bike tour through Puglia with <a href=\"https://www.backroads.com/trips/BPLQ/puglia-italy-biking-tour\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Backroads</a>. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_180.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #180: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after 2 weeks in the south of Italy, a <a href=\"https://www.backroads.com/trips/BPLQ/puglia-italy-biking-tour\">cycling tour through Puglia</a>, and then visiting friends in Sicily; they’re grabbing one last bit of sunshine, topping up their vitamin D levels before the short, cold days of northern Europe’s winter sets in. I’ve talked in the last couple of episodes about travel planning for this trip, the changes, the shifts I’ve had to make, and about all the places, the segments that could’ve gone wrong -- but none of them did! For sure there was a little weirdness along the way, especially in Sicily, but every flight and train leg was on-time and pretty uneventful.&nbsp;</li><li>We hit what are now typical mask rule inconsistencies right off the bat in ORD. We walked into the Swissport Lounge that Air France and others use for business class and got the mask rules -- mask on unless actively eating or drinking; airplane rules -- and then walk into a small room with no food and a pretty dire bar. We sat down, but after a couple of minutes walked back out, straight down the concourse to <a href=\"https://www.rickbayless.com/restaurants/tortas-frontera/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tortas Frontera</a>, our favorite ORD restaurant, for good margaritas, and where they were applying Chicago indoor mask rules -- you can drop your mask once you’re at your table. It was worth paying $90 to drink quality in comfort rather than playing mask peek-a-boo with the Swissport’s free wine.</li><li>The next morning, DeGaulle was more confusing than I remember it being in 2019. Getting from Terminal 2E to 2F seemed to take more cognitive power than it should’ve; maybe I hadn’t gotten as much sleep on the flight over as I thought. But all in all, it was an easy, uneventful flight over to Italy.</li><li>As I expected it to be. My biggest worry was our flights the following week from Brindisi in Puglia to Catania in Sicily, connecting through Rome on what would be the second day of operations for ITA, the Italian government’s successor to the bankrupt Alitalia. This itinerary certainly wasn’t my first choice, but as I’ve mentioned in the last couple of episodes, I didn’t have another one. There were labor actions leading up to the switch over that had disrupted operations, and even without that, you’d figure there’d be at least a hundred places where some minor snafu could botch up their big Rome hub. But other than a couple of agents maybe staging an impromptu work slowdown at the Brindisi check-in desk (or that was just their normal pace), it all went smoothly. And really, across all our travel legs, but for wearing masks and having our vaccination cards checked, it didn’t seem all that different from 2019. Now I know that’s a pretty big “But for”, but I’ll happily take it.</li><li>Bridge Music — <em><em>Perfect Stranger</em>&nbsp;</em>by stellarartwars (c) 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/stellarartwars/45510 Ft: TheDice</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Jerry Sarfati hit the TravelCommons’ Instagram feed to say that he’s seen no delays in TSA’s Global Entry processing. Jerry said<ul><li>“Thanks for the latest podcast. I refreshed my Global Entry. Very easy. Was told 72 hours later that all was approved; no interview needed.”</li></ul></li><li>Thanks for that, Jerry. I just checked. A month-and-a-half later (936 hrs using Jerry’s unit of measure), the TTP Dashboard (Trusted Traveler Program) still shows an hourglass next to “Wait for Conditional Approval”. But I’m guessing I’m probably a bit more of a suspect character than you.&nbsp;</li><li>Twitter user @LAflyer weighed in on last episode’s discussion about how business travelers are still MIA (missing in action)<ul><li>“Thanks for the new episode. In my opinion, face-to-face is becoming increasingly the edge case. I think we’ve proven we can manage so much remotely that the need for on-site/in-person meetings will be the exception, not the rule anymore. That’s ok with me. I prefer my own bed over traveling 200,000 miles annually.”</li></ul></li><li>I think this is a valid and widely-held opinion/belief/hope -- that beginning in March 2020, we’ve now all lived through an extended crash course in remote work and video conference, we’ve done it successfully, and so can significantly reduce the need for business travel, which will allow people to spend more time in their own beds and with their families as well as reducing business expenses, and reducing airplane carbon emissions. How much business travel will be eliminated? That’s the big question that I’m guessing will take another year before we begin to see the answer.</li><li>Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/08/24/podcast-178-what-remains-from-pandemic-times-best-restaurant-and-bars/\" title=\"Podcast #178 — What Remains from Pandemic Times; Best Restaurant and Bars\">August episode</a>,&nbsp; asking the question “What Will Remain from These Pandemic Times?” the death of daily hotel room cleaning service was at the top of my list. Indeed, Hilton had just announced their move to on-demand housekeeping across all their non-luxury brands. But in Italy, I saw none of this. Not only did every hotel service our rooms every day, they were still doing turndowns every night. And they were doing their regular breakfasts, though with staff plating your food from the buffet rather than you digging in yourself. Now, we weren’t staying at major brands; only small Italian brands or independents, so I don’t know if that changes things, but they were much better hotel experiences than I’ve had recently in the US.</li><li>I didn’t realize how aggressive Apple is about iOS updates until this trip. I update pretty quickly when I’m at home, but on this trip, it seemed like I had to wave off the 15.0.2 update every couple of days. I didn’t bring my laptop with me, so I had no way to recover on the slight chance that the upgrade bricked my iPhone -- without which I wouldn’t have been able to do the video chat session for the Abbott home test kit or display the test results, which was how we were getting back into the US. As if we didn’t know it already, you just can’t easily travel anymore without a <em>working</em> mobile phone.</li><li>I’ve talked in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food\">past </a><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\" title=\"10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times\">episodes</a> about how I will use a VPN, a virtual private network, when using public WiFi networks in hotels, airports, Starbucks to make my connection more secure. I’ve used all the top paid VPNs over the years -- ExpressVPN, NordVPN, PIA -- and am using NordVPN now. And I’ve never had a problem with nailing up a connection -- until this trip to Italy. More than a couple of times, the VPN client wouldn’t connect to an Italian server. So, as I’m too prone to do, I bitch-tweeted at NordVPN and, to their credit, they immediately responded. We flipped over the direct messaging and they started trouble-shooting. What finally worked was connecting to one of their obfuscated servers, specialized VPN servers that hide the fact that you’re using a VPN. I don’t know if there are Italian regulations against using VPNs or if it’s just a couple of Italian ISPs blocking VPNs for some reason. Whatever the reason, I give NordVPN props for constructively responding to my whining and quickly solving my problem.</li><li>Also back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/08/24/podcast-178-what-remains-from-pandemic-times-best-restaurant-and-bars/\" title=\"Podcast #178 — What Remains from Pandemic Times; Best Restaurant and Bars\">August episode</a> when talking about booking our travel over to Italy, I talked about burning off some Amex points to fly Air France business class. I think, by now, the standard business class seat is an individual pod that give you your own space, your own cocoon -- some are snugger than others, the buttons and amenities are a bit different -- but over the last 5-6 years, that’s what I’ve come to expect when I walk into a business class cabin. So when I got to my seat on this Air France 777, I was very underwhelmed -- no pods, just a standard 2-3-2 seat configuration with no separators between the seats. I tweeted out a couple of pictures. It wasn’t a great first impression. But the service was good, the food and wine were very good (as I’d expect from Air France) and they didn’t put a 3rd person in Irene’s and my center section. And I ended up sleeping very well, probably with the help of an after-dinner armagnac.</li><li>Flying home was Lufthansa from Catania to Munich and then United straight to ORD.&nbsp; I wasn’t thrilled with the connection through Munich; the last time we’d connected through there, long lines at passport control and security had us sprinting down the concourse to make what should’ve been a reasonably timed connection. But this time, it wasn’t a problem. There was maybe a 5-minute queue at passport control and no additional security, so we had time to grab some breakfast in the Lufthansa lounge before heading down to the United gate. Walking to the gate, I said to Irene “Looks like they fixed whatever the problem was when we were last here ‘cause it’s been a smooth connection.” And as the word “smooth” left my mouth, we saw the line. Luckily, for us, we weren’t in it. There was a huge tailback out of passport control for people arriving from the US getting into the Schengen zone to make their connecting flights -- the same thing that happened to us. So they hadn’t fixed the problem. Arriving MUC <em>from</em> the US; still a problem. Leaving MUC <em>to</em> the US; not so much. I’ve filed that away for future reference.</li><li>Once on the United 787, I noticed that our seatback screens weren’t working. I mentioned this to the flight attendant when she came by to check on us. It wasn’t a problem; there was no one in the center section and all those screens were working, so we could just slide over if we wanted to. As it was, Irene was reading a book and I was listening to podcasts, so we didn’t need the screens. I just figured I’d tell the flight attendant so the ORD maintenance crew would know to look at it.&nbsp; About halfway through the flight, the attendant comes back around and says she wants to give us something for our inconvenience. “I want to do something for you because you’ve been so nice about this,” she said. There was absolutely no inconvenience, but if United wants to give me free stuff, who am I to refuse. She pulled out her phone, opened an app, and for each of us, checked our e-mail addresses, and asked if we wanted 7,500 miles or $150 in credit (we took the money). And when we lit up our phones on the runway at ORD, we both had emails with the voucher details. I gotta be nice more often.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> or the <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram </a>account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — <em><em>Paint the Sky</em>&nbsp;</em>by Hans Atom (c) 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/hansatom/50718 Ft: Miss Judged</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Tracking COVID Travel Requirements</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>If my biggest worry on our Italy trip was our Saturday flights on ITA, my second, more chronic worry was that we’d get caught up in paperwork hassles at one of the borders we were crossing (France, Italy, Germany, the US), maybe missing something in all the different requirements, having some airport gate agent or train conductor or immigration guy enforcing their own unique interpretation; or not our paper CDC vaccination card not accepted in lieu of an EU Green Pass QR code on our phones. The great thing, as I said earlier, is that none of this came to pass. And at the end of each travel day, I let out a small sigh of relief -- just enough to feel good, but not so much that it might jinx the next travel day.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>Catania Airport, where we flew into and out of Sicily, was the only place that things got a little weird. We landed there at 8pm after a pretty flawless trains, planes, and automobiles travel day -- a on-time, almost empty train ride from Lecce to Brindisi, a taxi to the airport, the no-problem ITA flights, and now in Catania, our bags were the first ones to pop out on the luggage belt.&nbsp; Another small sigh of relief and we walk out of baggage claim to meet our friend -- only to be waylaid by two security guards. “Where did you come from?” one of them asked. “Rome,” I said. “Where are you from?” “The US”. “Go to the line on the right,” she said. I looked at the sign; it said “COVID-19 test.”&nbsp; Apparently, Sicily, or maybe just Catania, was requiring on-site COVID tests for non-EU arrivals. I was completely blindsided. There was nothing like this when we landed in Bari, in Puglia, 10 days earlier, and I didn’t see this anywhere on any of the <em>many</em> Italian governmental websites I checked before our trip. I looked down the testing line; it was beginning to tail back; this was going to be a bad time. “Wait! Wait a minute!” I said to the other guard, “We’ve been in Italy since the beginning of the month.” I pulled out my paper boarding passes that luckily I’d saved. “See, we started our flight in Brindisi; we just connected through Rome.” “You’ve been here two weeks?” he asked. Actually, it was more like 10 days, but I wasn’t going to correct his math. “OK, no need to test. Go to the left,” and he waved to his colleague to let us through. We quickly walked outside before either of them could change their minds and saw the COVID test line full of people trying to fill out forms on each other’s backs while standing in a line that led into a large room full of cubicles where yet more people were waiting to be tested. It looked like at least an hour’s worth of a very bad time. I was very happy the security guard was fluent enough in English to let me talk my way out of that line.</li><li>All the different shades of testing and tracking requirements -- by country, by state, even by city --&nbsp; Italy requiring an EU digital passenger locator form, proof of vaccination, and a negative COVID test taken within 72 hours of arrival (vs. the US’s requirement that the test be taken within 72 hours of <em>departure</em>); Puglia adding to that another form to be filled out and emailed to the regional health department before arrival; there’s Sicily’s stealth on-arrival COVID testing, and I’m still trying to figure out exactly what the UK wants of us for our trip there in the back-half of November because it looks like the rules changed a bit this week.&nbsp; It all keeps you a bit off-balance, a bit anxious that you’ve missed something which is going to land you in a long, expensive line somewhere.</li><li>The mechanics of it all caught me off-guard at first. Checking into our Air France flight in ORD, the agent checked our vaccination cards and digital passenger locator forms (which, in spite of being digital, I’d printed out to make it easier to show someone). When we arrived in Bari, we walked straight out of baggage claim to the terminal. There was no one to check any of our paperwork. The same thing happened to my son Andrew last month when he flew into Barcelona. It seems like governments have made all of this a boarding requirement and pushed the responsibility to check it onto the carrier. Kinda like the carrier checks your passport and visa to make sure you can get into the country you’re going to; they’ve tacked on these additional COVID requirements. But even then, when I land in a new country, there’s still someone in a booth checking my passport. Irene tried to show one border police guy her vaccination card and he just waved her off.</li><li>But Italy requires proof of vaccination to go inside a restaurant or bar or a cathedral or an airport, so while the border cops weren’t interested in our vaccination status, a lot of waiters were. We kept our CDC cards handy, tucked in our passports. I worried about places turning us away for not being able to show the EU Green Pass QR code, but again, I was happy to be wrong. There was only one place, a restaurant in Bari, where a young waitress hesitated when we showed her our CDC cards, but almost immediately, one of the older waiters ran up, looked at the cards and said it was all good. Maybe some of this is timing. When Italy first re-opened back in, what July?, and people were trying to figure things out on the fly, it would make sense that waiters or gate agents would turn away people with unfamiliar pieces of cardboard. But now, 2-3 months on, they seem to have figured it out. I’m hoping I can too</li><li>Bridge Music — <em>Dub the Uke</em> by Kara Square (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mindmapthat/53340 Ft: DJ Vadim</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>&nbsp;Cycling Through Puglia</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>This trip didn’t start off with the idea “Let’s go to Puglia!” Instead, it started at the tired end of a Chicago winter as a combination of “Let’s go back to Europe” and “Let’s go on a cycling tour!” and then looking at what rides were available in the fall, in October because, back in April, Europe was not doing a great job with vaccine roll-out. And that was our path to Puglia.&nbsp;</li><li>We’d done a self-guided cycling tour in southwest Scotland some years ago, but in southern Italy, never been here, not sure how much support there would be and how English would be spoken, we decided to go with a full tour. We narrowed the tour companies down to Trek Travel and <a href=\"https://www.backroads.com/\">Backroads</a>. They both had good Puglia itineraries. I’d done a Trek tour in Moab, UT some years back, so we decided to give Backroads a shot.</li><li>There were 16 people on the tour, 12 of which were Backroads veterans; some very much so. One couple had done a Provence tour with them in July and another woman was doing back-to-back tours -- the week before she’d ridden their Sicily tour and then flew straight up to Bari for this tour. These veterans said that Backroads does a great job organizing everything; it makes travel easy. It’s kinda the same thing I hear from people who are big into cruising -- show up in some part of the world and have people take care of you. All that being said, after 6 days and 200 miles in the saddle, I came away happy (if a little sore) with the tour and impressed with the hospitality and service ethic of the Backroads tour guides.</li><li>We were riding through Puglia the week of October 10th which was probably a week too late because the towns were beginning to close up for the season. One day, we had a couple of hours in the hill town of Ostuni for lunch, but struggled to find places that were open. Many of the restaurants were dark, even though the signs on the doors said they should be open, as did the hours listed on their websites and their Google Maps listings. No signs saying “Closed for the season”, just locked doors through which we would see chairs on all the tables. We had similar experiences in Otronto and to a lesser extent in Lecce. One of the Backroads guides said that Puglia is a popular destination for Italian tourists from up north; many of them have vacation homes there. And when those folks head home, the remaining locals and handful of misdirected tourists aren’t enough to keep all the bars and restaurants going.</li><li>But the touring was great -- riding alongside groves of huge, old, gnarled olive trees with vegetable crops like fennel and bitter greens planted underneath; and along the Adriatic Sea, up on the ridge along the coastal road and then down through little beach towns and fishing villages.&nbsp;</li><li>And I think that’s the way to do Puglia, touring, doing a couple of days each in Bari and Lecce wandering through the narrow streets of their old towns, a day in Otronto, with half-day stops in Alberobello, Matera, and/or Ostuni, maybe a day or two hanging out in a nice agriturismo or one of those beach towns on the Adriatic.&nbsp;</li><li>We drank a lot of wine, mostly the local Primitivo, a grape closely related to California’s Zinfandel, and ate a lot of seafood, especially octopus. At dinner during our second night in Bari, a young guy walked in with two small clear plastic buckets full of small octopus, very similar to a bucket I saw at the feet of a fisherman at the dock earlier in the day. I don’t think the seafood we were eating that week had been out of the Adriatic for much more than 24 hours before it hit our plates.</li><li>It was a different experience, a different vibe from our prior trips to Italy, which had all been up north -- to Tuscany, to Milan, to Venice. But biking through those olive groves, those fields, those little towns; that’s the lower key experience we were looking for -- and got -- on our time in Puglia. If you want see pictures, head over to the TravelCommons’ Instagram site and click on Puglia/Sicily where I’ve collected some of the better Instagram Stories pictures.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #180</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_180.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #181 — Travel Potpourri; 2021 Traveler’s Gift Guide','','inherit','closed','closed','','4001-revision-v1','','','2021-11-12 11:14:34','2021-11-12 16:14:34','',4001,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4003',0,'revision','',0),
(4004,1,'2021-11-12 11:15:09','2021-11-12 16:15:09','[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/IMG_3657-scaled.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/IMG_3657-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Jumble of Travel Signs\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Post-Pandemic Travel Guidance[/caption]\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Back at the microphone after two weeks in Southern Italy. Lots of travel segments that could\'ve gone wrong, but none of them did. We talk about what international travel is like in COVID times, about the challenge of keeping track and complying with the different COVID travel requirements that seem to be constantly changing, and then some thoughts about our bike tour through Puglia with <a href=\"https://www.backroads.com/trips/BPLQ/puglia-italy-biking-tour\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Backroads</a>. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_180.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #180: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after 2 weeks in the south of Italy, a <a href=\"https://www.backroads.com/trips/BPLQ/puglia-italy-biking-tour\">cycling tour through Puglia</a>, and then visiting friends in Sicily; they’re grabbing one last bit of sunshine, topping up their vitamin D levels before the short, cold days of northern Europe’s winter sets in. I’ve talked in the last couple of episodes about travel planning for this trip, the changes, the shifts I’ve had to make, and about all the places, the segments that could’ve gone wrong -- but none of them did! For sure there was a little weirdness along the way, especially in Sicily, but every flight and train leg was on-time and pretty uneventful.&nbsp;</li><li>We hit what are now typical mask rule inconsistencies right off the bat in ORD. We walked into the Swissport Lounge that Air France and others use for business class and got the mask rules -- mask on unless actively eating or drinking; airplane rules -- and then walk into a small room with no food and a pretty dire bar. We sat down, but after a couple of minutes walked back out, straight down the concourse to <a href=\"https://www.rickbayless.com/restaurants/tortas-frontera/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tortas Frontera</a>, our favorite ORD restaurant, for good margaritas, and where they were applying Chicago indoor mask rules -- you can drop your mask once you’re at your table. It was worth paying $90 to drink quality in comfort rather than playing mask peek-a-boo with the Swissport’s free wine.</li><li>The next morning, DeGaulle was more confusing than I remember it being in 2019. Getting from Terminal 2E to 2F seemed to take more cognitive power than it should’ve; maybe I hadn’t gotten as much sleep on the flight over as I thought. But all in all, it was an easy, uneventful flight over to Italy.</li><li>As I expected it to be. My biggest worry was our flights the following week from Brindisi in Puglia to Catania in Sicily, connecting through Rome on what would be the second day of operations for ITA, the Italian government’s successor to the bankrupt Alitalia. This itinerary certainly wasn’t my first choice, but as I’ve mentioned in the last couple of episodes, I didn’t have another one. There were labor actions leading up to the switch over that had disrupted operations, and even without that, you’d figure there’d be at least a hundred places where some minor snafu could botch up their big Rome hub. But other than a couple of agents maybe staging an impromptu work slowdown at the Brindisi check-in desk (or that was just their normal pace), it all went smoothly. And really, across all our travel legs, but for wearing masks and having our vaccination cards checked, it didn’t seem all that different from 2019. Now I know that’s a pretty big “But for”, but I’ll happily take it.</li><li>Bridge Music — <em><em>Perfect Stranger</em>&nbsp;</em>by stellarartwars (c) 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/stellarartwars/45510 Ft: TheDice</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Jerry Sarfati hit the TravelCommons’ Instagram feed to say that he’s seen no delays in TSA’s Global Entry processing. Jerry said<ul><li>“Thanks for the latest podcast. I refreshed my Global Entry. Very easy. Was told 72 hours later that all was approved; no interview needed.”</li></ul></li><li>Thanks for that, Jerry. I just checked. A month-and-a-half later (936 hrs using Jerry’s unit of measure), the TTP Dashboard (Trusted Traveler Program) still shows an hourglass next to “Wait for Conditional Approval”. But I’m guessing I’m probably a bit more of a suspect character than you.&nbsp;</li><li>Twitter user @LAflyer weighed in on last episode’s discussion about how business travelers are still MIA (missing in action)<ul><li>“Thanks for the new episode. In my opinion, face-to-face is becoming increasingly the edge case. I think we’ve proven we can manage so much remotely that the need for on-site/in-person meetings will be the exception, not the rule anymore. That’s ok with me. I prefer my own bed over traveling 200,000 miles annually.”</li></ul></li><li>I think this is a valid and widely-held opinion/belief/hope -- that beginning in March 2020, we’ve now all lived through an extended crash course in remote work and video conference, we’ve done it successfully, and so can significantly reduce the need for business travel, which will allow people to spend more time in their own beds and with their families as well as reducing business expenses, and reducing airplane carbon emissions. How much business travel will be eliminated? That’s the big question that I’m guessing will take another year before we begin to see the answer.</li><li>Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/08/24/podcast-178-what-remains-from-pandemic-times-best-restaurant-and-bars/\" title=\"Podcast #178 — What Remains from Pandemic Times; Best Restaurant and Bars\">August episode</a>,&nbsp; asking the question “What Will Remain from These Pandemic Times?” the death of daily hotel room cleaning service was at the top of my list. Indeed, Hilton had just announced their move to on-demand housekeeping across all their non-luxury brands. But in Italy, I saw none of this. Not only did every hotel service our rooms every day, they were still doing turndowns every night. And they were doing their regular breakfasts, though with staff plating your food from the buffet rather than you digging in yourself. Now, we weren’t staying at major brands; only small Italian brands or independents, so I don’t know if that changes things, but they were much better hotel experiences than I’ve had recently in the US.</li><li>I didn’t realize how aggressive Apple is about iOS updates until this trip. I update pretty quickly when I’m at home, but on this trip, it seemed like I had to wave off the 15.0.2 update every couple of days. I didn’t bring my laptop with me, so I had no way to recover on the slight chance that the upgrade bricked my iPhone -- without which I wouldn’t have been able to do the video chat session for the Abbott home test kit or display the test results, which was how we were getting back into the US. As if we didn’t know it already, you just can’t easily travel anymore without a <em>working</em> mobile phone.</li><li>I’ve talked in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\" title=\"Podcast #168 — Surviving Quarantine Theater; Traveling for Food\">past </a><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\" title=\"10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times\">episodes</a> about how I will use a VPN, a virtual private network, when using public WiFi networks in hotels, airports, Starbucks to make my connection more secure. I’ve used all the top paid VPNs over the years -- ExpressVPN, NordVPN, PIA -- and am using NordVPN now. And I’ve never had a problem with nailing up a connection -- until this trip to Italy. More than a couple of times, the VPN client wouldn’t connect to an Italian server. So, as I’m too prone to do, I bitch-tweeted at NordVPN and, to their credit, they immediately responded. We flipped over the direct messaging and they started trouble-shooting. What finally worked was connecting to one of their obfuscated servers, specialized VPN servers that hide the fact that you’re using a VPN. I don’t know if there are Italian regulations against using VPNs or if it’s just a couple of Italian ISPs blocking VPNs for some reason. Whatever the reason, I give NordVPN props for constructively responding to my whining and quickly solving my problem.</li><li>Also back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/08/24/podcast-178-what-remains-from-pandemic-times-best-restaurant-and-bars/\" title=\"Podcast #178 — What Remains from Pandemic Times; Best Restaurant and Bars\">August episode</a> when talking about booking our travel over to Italy, I talked about burning off some Amex points to fly Air France business class. I think, by now, the standard business class seat is an individual pod that give you your own space, your own cocoon -- some are snugger than others, the buttons and amenities are a bit different -- but over the last 5-6 years, that’s what I’ve come to expect when I walk into a business class cabin. So when I got to my seat on this Air France 777, I was very underwhelmed -- no pods, just a standard 2-3-2 seat configuration with no separators between the seats. I tweeted out a couple of pictures. It wasn’t a great first impression. But the service was good, the food and wine were very good (as I’d expect from Air France) and they didn’t put a 3rd person in Irene’s and my center section. And I ended up sleeping very well, probably with the help of an after-dinner armagnac.</li><li>Flying home was Lufthansa from Catania to Munich and then United straight to ORD.&nbsp; I wasn’t thrilled with the connection through Munich; the last time we’d connected through there, long lines at passport control and security had us sprinting down the concourse to make what should’ve been a reasonably timed connection. But this time, it wasn’t a problem. There was maybe a 5-minute queue at passport control and no additional security, so we had time to grab some breakfast in the Lufthansa lounge before heading down to the United gate. Walking to the gate, I said to Irene “Looks like they fixed whatever the problem was when we were last here ‘cause it’s been a smooth connection.” And as the word “smooth” left my mouth, we saw the line. Luckily, for us, we weren’t in it. There was a huge tailback out of passport control for people arriving from the US getting into the Schengen zone to make their connecting flights -- the same thing that happened to us. So they hadn’t fixed the problem. Arriving MUC <em>from</em> the US; still a problem. Leaving MUC <em>to</em> the US; not so much. I’ve filed that away for future reference.</li><li>Once on the United 787, I noticed that our seatback screens weren’t working. I mentioned this to the flight attendant when she came by to check on us. It wasn’t a problem; there was no one in the center section and all those screens were working, so we could just slide over if we wanted to. As it was, Irene was reading a book and I was listening to podcasts, so we didn’t need the screens. I just figured I’d tell the flight attendant so the ORD maintenance crew would know to look at it.&nbsp; About halfway through the flight, the attendant comes back around and says she wants to give us something for our inconvenience. “I want to do something for you because you’ve been so nice about this,” she said. There was absolutely no inconvenience, but if United wants to give me free stuff, who am I to refuse. She pulled out her phone, opened an app, and for each of us, checked our e-mail addresses, and asked if we wanted 7,500 miles or $150 in credit (we took the money). And when we lit up our phones on the runway at ORD, we both had emails with the voucher details. I gotta be nice more often.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> or the <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram </a>account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — <em><em>Paint the Sky</em>&nbsp;</em>by Hans Atom (c) 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/hansatom/50718 Ft: Miss Judged</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Tracking COVID Travel Requirements</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>If my biggest worry on our Italy trip was our Saturday flights on ITA, my second, more chronic worry was that we’d get caught up in paperwork hassles at one of the borders we were crossing (France, Italy, Germany, the US), maybe missing something in all the different requirements, having some airport gate agent or train conductor or immigration guy enforcing their own unique interpretation; or not our paper CDC vaccination card not accepted in lieu of an EU Green Pass QR code on our phones. The great thing, as I said earlier, is that none of this came to pass. And at the end of each travel day, I let out a small sigh of relief -- just enough to feel good, but not so much that it might jinx the next travel day.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>Catania Airport, where we flew into and out of Sicily, was the only place that things got a little weird. We landed there at 8pm after a pretty flawless trains, planes, and automobiles travel day -- a on-time, almost empty train ride from Lecce to Brindisi, a taxi to the airport, the no-problem ITA flights, and now in Catania, our bags were the first ones to pop out on the luggage belt.&nbsp; Another small sigh of relief and we walk out of baggage claim to meet our friend -- only to be waylaid by two security guards. “Where did you come from?” one of them asked. “Rome,” I said. “Where are you from?” “The US”. “Go to the line on the right,” she said. I looked at the sign; it said “COVID-19 test.”&nbsp; Apparently, Sicily, or maybe just Catania, was requiring on-site COVID tests for non-EU arrivals. I was completely blindsided. There was nothing like this when we landed in Bari, in Puglia, 10 days earlier, and I didn’t see this anywhere on any of the <em>many</em> Italian governmental websites I checked before our trip. I looked down the testing line; it was beginning to tail back; this was going to be a bad time. “Wait! Wait a minute!” I said to the other guard, “We’ve been in Italy since the beginning of the month.” I pulled out my paper boarding passes that luckily I’d saved. “See, we started our flight in Brindisi; we just connected through Rome.” “You’ve been here two weeks?” he asked. Actually, it was more like 10 days, but I wasn’t going to correct his math. “OK, no need to test. Go to the left,” and he waved to his colleague to let us through. We quickly walked outside before either of them could change their minds and saw the COVID test line full of people trying to fill out forms on each other’s backs while standing in a line that led into a large room full of cubicles where yet more people were waiting to be tested. It looked like at least an hour’s worth of a very bad time. I was very happy the security guard was fluent enough in English to let me talk my way out of that line.</li><li>All the different shades of testing and tracking requirements -- by country, by state, even by city --&nbsp; Italy requiring an EU digital passenger locator form, proof of vaccination, and a negative COVID test taken within 72 hours of arrival (vs. the US’s requirement that the test be taken within 72 hours of <em>departure</em>); Puglia adding to that another form to be filled out and emailed to the regional health department before arrival; there’s Sicily’s stealth on-arrival COVID testing, and I’m still trying to figure out exactly what the UK wants of us for our trip there in the back-half of November because it looks like the rules changed a bit this week.&nbsp; It all keeps you a bit off-balance, a bit anxious that you’ve missed something which is going to land you in a long, expensive line somewhere.</li><li>The mechanics of it all caught me off-guard at first. Checking into our Air France flight in ORD, the agent checked our vaccination cards and digital passenger locator forms (which, in spite of being digital, I’d printed out to make it easier to show someone). When we arrived in Bari, we walked straight out of baggage claim to the terminal. There was no one to check any of our paperwork. The same thing happened to my son Andrew last month when he flew into Barcelona. It seems like governments have made all of this a boarding requirement and pushed the responsibility to check it onto the carrier. Kinda like the carrier checks your passport and visa to make sure you can get into the country you’re going to; they’ve tacked on these additional COVID requirements. But even then, when I land in a new country, there’s still someone in a booth checking my passport. Irene tried to show one border police guy her vaccination card and he just waved her off.</li><li>But Italy requires proof of vaccination to go inside a restaurant or bar or a cathedral or an airport, so while the border cops weren’t interested in our vaccination status, a lot of waiters were. We kept our CDC cards handy, tucked in our passports. I worried about places turning us away for not being able to show the EU Green Pass QR code, but again, I was happy to be wrong. There was only one place, a restaurant in Bari, where a young waitress hesitated when we showed her our CDC cards, but almost immediately, one of the older waiters ran up, looked at the cards and said it was all good. Maybe some of this is timing. When Italy first re-opened back in, what July?, and people were trying to figure things out on the fly, it would make sense that waiters or gate agents would turn away people with unfamiliar pieces of cardboard. But now, 2-3 months on, they seem to have figured it out. I’m hoping I can too</li><li>Bridge Music — <em>Dub the Uke</em> by Kara Square (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mindmapthat/53340 Ft: DJ Vadim</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>&nbsp;Cycling Through Puglia</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>This trip didn’t start off with the idea “Let’s go to Puglia!” Instead, it started at the tired end of a Chicago winter as a combination of “Let’s go back to Europe” and “Let’s go on a cycling tour!” and then looking at what rides were available in the fall, in October because, back in April, Europe was not doing a great job with vaccine roll-out. And that was our path to Puglia.&nbsp;</li><li>We’d done a self-guided cycling tour in southwest Scotland some years ago, but in southern Italy, never been here, not sure how much support there would be and how English would be spoken, we decided to go with a full tour. We narrowed the tour companies down to Trek Travel and <a href=\"https://www.backroads.com/\">Backroads</a>. They both had good Puglia itineraries. I’d done a Trek tour in Moab, UT some years back, so we decided to give Backroads a shot.</li><li>There were 16 people on the tour, 12 of which were Backroads veterans; some very much so. One couple had done a Provence tour with them in July and another woman was doing back-to-back tours -- the week before she’d ridden their Sicily tour and then flew straight up to Bari for this tour. These veterans said that Backroads does a great job organizing everything; it makes travel easy. It’s kinda the same thing I hear from people who are big into cruising -- show up in some part of the world and have people take care of you. All that being said, after 6 days and 200 miles in the saddle, I came away happy (if a little sore) with the tour and impressed with the hospitality and service ethic of the Backroads tour guides.</li><li>We were riding through Puglia the week of October 10th which was probably a week too late because the towns were beginning to close up for the season. One day, we had a couple of hours in the hill town of Ostuni for lunch, but struggled to find places that were open. Many of the restaurants were dark, even though the signs on the doors said they should be open, as did the hours listed on their websites and their Google Maps listings. No signs saying “Closed for the season”, just locked doors through which we would see chairs on all the tables. We had similar experiences in Otronto and to a lesser extent in Lecce. One of the Backroads guides said that Puglia is a popular destination for Italian tourists from up north; many of them have vacation homes there. And when those folks head home, the remaining locals and handful of misdirected tourists aren’t enough to keep all the bars and restaurants going.</li><li>But the touring was great -- riding alongside groves of huge, old, gnarled olive trees with vegetable crops like fennel and bitter greens planted underneath; and along the Adriatic Sea, up on the ridge along the coastal road and then down through little beach towns and fishing villages.&nbsp;</li><li>And I think that’s the way to do Puglia, touring, doing a couple of days each in Bari and Lecce wandering through the narrow streets of their old towns, a day in Otronto, with half-day stops in Alberobello, Matera, and/or Ostuni, maybe a day or two hanging out in a nice agriturismo or one of those beach towns on the Adriatic.&nbsp;</li><li>We drank a lot of wine, mostly the local Primitivo, a grape closely related to California’s Zinfandel, and ate a lot of seafood, especially octopus. At dinner during our second night in Bari, a young guy walked in with two small clear plastic buckets full of small octopus, very similar to a bucket I saw at the feet of a fisherman at the dock earlier in the day. I don’t think the seafood we were eating that week had been out of the Adriatic for much more than 24 hours before it hit our plates.</li><li>It was a different experience, a different vibe from our prior trips to Italy, which had all been up north -- to Tuscany, to Milan, to Venice. But biking through those olive groves, those fields, those little towns; that’s the lower key experience we were looking for -- and got -- on our time in Puglia. If you want see pictures, head over to the TravelCommons’ Instagram site and click on Puglia/Sicily where I’ve collected some of the better Instagram Stories pictures.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #180</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_180.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #181 — Travel Potpourri; 2021 Traveler’s Gift Guide','','inherit','closed','closed','','4001-revision-v1','','','2021-11-12 11:15:09','2021-11-12 16:15:09','',4001,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4004',0,'revision','',0),
(4005,1,'2021-11-12 11:22:53','2021-11-12 16:22:53','[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/IMG_3657-scaled.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/IMG_3657-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Jumble of Travel Signs\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Post-Pandemic Travel Guidance[/caption]\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Back at the microphone after two weeks in Southern Italy. Lots of travel segments that could\'ve gone wrong, but none of them did. We talk about what international travel is like in COVID times, about the challenge of keeping track and complying with the different COVID travel requirements that seem to be constantly changing, and then some thoughts about our bike tour through Puglia with <a href=\"https://www.backroads.com/trips/BPLQ/puglia-italy-biking-tour\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Backroads</a>. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_181.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #181: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois, only 2 weeks after the last episode. Decided to kinda short-cycle this episode, see if I can get in an actual November episode rather than wait for December like I said at the end of the last episode. And to think that I used to do these weekly when I started out in 2005. Oh, the enthusiasm of youth -- and notebooks full of unused travel stories. I was going through some of those old episodes while doing a bit of website maintenance. The TSA gave me a lot of fodder for content back in the day. It was only 3½ years old when TravelCommons started, so I got to comment on (bitch about) all their growing pains -- the start of the shoe carnival, the liquid ban, all the different tries at screening technology (who could forget those “puffer” machines?) and, of course, their stellar customer service. But once I started going through PreCheck in 2012, there wasn’t much more to comment/bitch about -- which I know is a good thing overall, but it did leave me with a big content hole, kinda like in those TV series where the villain becomes one of the good guys in season 3 -- what do you do next?</li><li>And 16 years on, as I slouch towards semi-retirement, my travel experiences are changing. I’m thinking less about clever new ways to navigate ORD’s Monday morning road warrior rush hour or about totaling up delays on a 4- or 5-city cross-country itinerary, and thinking more about planning for longer leisure(?)/experiential(?) travel. Though I guess that’s not a complete change.  </li><li>Going through those old episodes reminded me that, even back at the start, I was talking about leisure travel -- to the point that episodes #8 and #9 were done while on vacation! I can only imagine what my family was thinking when they heard me nattering away in the bathroom of the Geneva, Switz Novatel and the Budapest Marriott.</li><li>But back to the present… Obviously, no travel since the last episode, just travel planning for our trip to the UK next week -- a week in London and then heading out to southern Wales for a week of walking, hiking, pretty much just being cold and wet because I didn’t get enough of that while biking in Puglia. </li><li>A big chunk of my time has been spent trying to figure out exactly what COVID paperwork we need to get into the UK. Since we’re vaccinated and coming from a non-red list country, we don’t need to show a negative COVID test before getting on the plane, but instead we have to get a test done in the UK and have to pre-pay for it so we can also fill out a passenger locator form 48 hours before departure. The UK government’s website is actually pretty good, with links to approved test providers. But most of them want to ship the test to a UK address, which is good if you’re returning home to the UK; less good if you’re staying in a hotel or Airbnb. So now I’m trying to figure out -- do I risk a long line at a Heathrow test center when we land or do I find a place somewhere in London the next day? Kinda makes me long for the days when all I had to worry about was finding a bank before 3pm on Friday to cash an American Express Travelers Check so I had cash for the weekend.... Nah, who am I kidding? That was so much more of a pain than this. Worst case, I figure out how to eat a full-cooked English breakfast standing up while in line.</li><li>Bridge Music — <em><em>Perfect Stranger</em> </em>by stellarartwars (c) 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/stellarartwars/45510 Ft: TheDice</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>This time last year, in t<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">he November 2020 episode</a>, we talked about all the end-of-the-year “don’t leave me” offers from the airlines and hotels, 20-50% cuts in whatever metric they used to award status --  stays, nights, miles, stays, segments, spend. And at the end of that bit, I said “Maybe they’ll be doing it again this time next year if that ‘Well, it’s probably more like the end of 2021 or maybe into the beginning of 2022 before things start feeling normal; forecast turns out to be true.” A year later, and after the Delta variant knocked down everyone’s Q3 revenues, I haven’t received any airline status sales yet, but I’ve already received status extensions from Marriott, Hilton, and, weirdly enough, IHG -- weird ‘cause I don’t <em>have</em> any status with them… that I know of, maybe I need to check. They’re all extending status for another year, to February or March 2023. So everyone’s kept their 2019 status for 3 years now -- 2020, 2021, and now 2022. And why not? Since a lot of the cost is concierge lounges that have been closed and free breakfasts that are now boxes with a yogurt and an orange, it’s probably the cheapest way to buy continued customer loyalty.</li><li>We’ve talked a lot in this podcast about Uber and Lyft. Back in episode #154 in August 2019, I asked “Will We Still Love Uber and Lyft When The Prices Go Up?” after both CEOs talked about getting to “rational pricing” -- “rational” being CEO-speak for “higher”. And then this year, talking about their post-pandemic driver shortages, customer service issues, and rising prices -- a pretty common topic. The Times of London <a href=\"https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/is-uber-over-cm70m2blm\">asks</a> “Is Uber Dead?” and the Chicago Tribune says in <a href=\"https://www.chicagotribune.com/opinion/editorials/ct-editorial-taxicabs-uber-lyft-rideshare-20210913-ljnt5wgxejepbmagoe33w7jud4-story.html\">an editorial</a> “We were wrong to abandon Chicago’s taxicabs for ride-shares and the city now needs to find a fix” which is a bit of a laugh because 4-5 years ago, everyone here complained that you couldn’t get a cab other than downtown or the airports, and definitely never in the poorer neighborhoods of the South and West sides.  If you read the <a href=\"https://investor.uber.com/news-events/news/press-release-details/2021/Uber-Announces-Results-for-Third-Quarter-2021/\">highlights of Uber’s Q3 financial results</a> released last week, they’re not quite dead. They trumpet that Q3 was their “first Adjusted EBITDA profitable quarter as a public company” Adjusted EBITDA - a fun accounting construct meaning “earnings before taxes, depreciation, and all the other bad stuff” and that the number of active drivers is up more than 65% since January. But what was interesting to me -- their delivery business, like Uber Eats, now generates more revenue than their traditional ride business. And maybe competing for drivers? Does make some sense. As the Times’ writer put it, “Food doesn’t complain about the route and parcels tend not to throw up on the back seat.”</li><li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors\">episode #170 last December</a>, we talked about how the CEO of Qantas had stirred up a good bit of controversy saying “We will ask people to have a vaccination before they can get on the aircraft” and the resulting land grab in vaccine passport apps. United and Lufthansa were testing out the <a href=\"https://thecommonsproject.org/commonpass\">CommonPass app</a>, Delta and Alitalia (may they rest in peace) the <a href=\"https://www.aokpass.com/en/\" title=\"AOKPass\">AOKPass </a>from the International Chamber of Commerce, and British Airways and Iberia the Travel Pass from an airline industry group. I said back then that it was a little messy, but it made sense since I didn’t think the handwritten card the CDC was handing out was going to pass muster at a boarding gate. Now, less than a year later, the Qantas CEO’s quote is pretty much standard operating procedure for international travel.  But vaccine passport apps? It’s a bit more mixed. Last month I flew Air France, United, Lufthansa, and ITA, the successor to Alitalia, and was never prompted to download any apps. Instead, I pulled out my trusty CDC card many times to prove my vaccination status, and for my flight home, opened Gmail on my iPhone a couple of times to show the PDF of my negative COVID test.  Pretty low tech, but honestly, at least in Italy, it worked faster than the EU’s Green Pass QR codes. We’d show our CDC cards and after a second or two be waved through while the Europeans were still trying to right-size the QR code on their phone screens so the scanner would register it. Upgrading to iOS 15.1 on my iPhone let me add a digital vaccination card to my Apple Wallet, but I don’t know where I’ll actually use it.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> or the <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram </a>account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — <em><em>Paint the Sky</em> </em>by Hans Atom (c) 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/hansatom/50718 Ft: Miss Judged</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Travel Potpourri for $600</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Regular listeners know that, every now and again, usually when I’m scraping for content, I gather up the odds-‘n’-ends from my travel notebooks that I can’t get “grow up” into a stand-alone topic and just string ‘em together into a Jeopardy-like topic “Travel Potpourri”. </li><li>I recently <a href=\"https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/2021/11/11/nashville-airport-race-build-more-dining-options-for-surging-travelers/6317805001/\">read some stats</a> about how the March 2020 lockdown impacted Nashville’s airport -- daily passenger count went from 50,000 to 500, and only 8 airport concessions out of a pre-COVID count of 52 survived. And now, 20 months later, passenger counts are pretty much back to pre-pandemic levels, but the concession count isn’t. They’re only back to 34 -- 18 food places and 16 shops, newsstands and other things. It takes more time to start things up than to shut them down -- especially when you have to get all your workers and supplies through TSA security every day. I’ll keep this in mind the next time I want to complain about a 10-deep line for a cup of coffee.</li><li>Traveling to Europe again means re-bookmarking the <a href=\"https://prepaid-data-sim-card.fandom.com/wiki/Prepaid_SIM_with_data\">Prepaid Data SIM Card Wiki</a> so I can research mobile data plans again. For 4 years, I didn’t have to worry about it. The EU had outlawed roaming charges and so I’d just use the UK SIM I bought the first time we took our daughter over to Scotland for college. That worked well until Brexit day last year. So on our first day in Bari, I searched out the nearest TIM store -- stands for Telecom Italia Mobile, I think. I wanted one of Italy’s big networks because our cycling tour would be taking us into the countryside, and so was OK paying a bit more for better coverage.  The last time I bought a mobile SIM in Italy was 5 years in Pisa and it was a huge hassle. But in Bari, we walked into the store, and the clerk was great. She kinda figured we were looking for SIMs, knew about the international plan I’d found on their website, and got the whole thing done in maybe 15 minutes. The price -- €25 ($30) for 70 GB of data, which, for all practical purposes translates to unlimited data -- meant the break-even point vs. paying AT&amp;T $10/day for international roaming was 3 days. Since we were in Italy for 16 days, it was a well-spent 15 minutes. I was amazed at how far mobile data prices have fallen. The last time I was in Europe, the fall of 2019, I put £10 on my EE SIM (about $12 back then) and got 3 GB. I just topped up that SIM again for our UK trip and got 15 GB for £15 -- 500% increase in data for 50% more money. That should hold us for 2 weeks. </li><li>In many past episodes, I’ve talked about how my search for local craft beer has taken me to places outside the typical travel bubble. And, for me, this is even more important since I’m doing less (no?) business travel. Because the nature of business travel -- traveling to work with clients who live there -- makes it easier to connect with that place, even if it’s just through hallway conversations like “What’d you do over the weekend”, but most times, it’s them saying “Oh, you gotta go to my favorite place while you’re here.” Our Puglia bike tour ended in Lecce in lousy weather. The rain had started the night before and continued dumping the next morning. We skipped the last ride. You could say we were lightweights, but we didn’t want to have to figure out how to pack soaking wet biking clothes. I wanted to walk around Lecce a bit before our dinner reservation, but Irene was cold from the wind and rain. So she headed back to the hotel while I searched out a beer bar I’d found on Untappd.</li><li>The place was pretty empty when I walked in; 7pm, it was early by Italian standards. The draft handles were all from a local Lecce brewery, so I asked the bartender, a young guy, his favorite, and he pointed to the IPA tap -- of course, but it was a pretty solid session IPA. He offered me a table, but I asked him if I could just stand and drink at the counter. We started to chat a bit (“Why have you come… to Lecce?”) His English wasn’t great (though orders-of magnitude better than my Italian, which is sorta damning with faint praise) so I started stripping down my English -- no slang, no contractions, clean articulation, simple declarative sentences. But in maybe a verbal corollary to the Mark Twain-ism “I would have written a shorter letter if I had the time…”, I find it takes a lot of thinking, a lot of mental work to do this, to strip my English down to something easily understandable. And the bartender appreciated it. “English people talk so fast,” he said. “I have a hard time understanding everything they say.” And by making my English more understandable, he gained confidence in his, and pushed it into more interesting topics like the split between Northern and Southern Italy (“They hate us!”) and even within Puglia (“We hate Bari and Bari hates us!”).  And why he wants to work on his English (“It’s so much more useful than Italian. A German person, a Swedish person comes into the bar; we all talk English)”. He was happy to get to practice his English. I was happy to oblige, and get a little peek at non-tourist Puglia without knowing any Italian.</li><li>Bridge Music — <em>Dub the Uke</em> by Kara Square (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mindmapthat/53340 Ft: DJ Vadim</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>&nbsp;Cycling Through Puglia</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>This trip didn’t start off with the idea “Let’s go to Puglia!” Instead, it started at the tired end of a Chicago winter as a combination of “Let’s go back to Europe” and “Let’s go on a cycling tour!” and then looking at what rides were available in the fall, in October because, back in April, Europe was not doing a great job with vaccine roll-out. And that was our path to Puglia.&nbsp;</li><li>We’d done a self-guided cycling tour in southwest Scotland some years ago, but in southern Italy, never been here, not sure how much support there would be and how English would be spoken, we decided to go with a full tour. We narrowed the tour companies down to Trek Travel and <a href=\"https://www.backroads.com/\">Backroads</a>. They both had good Puglia itineraries. I’d done a Trek tour in Moab, UT some years back, so we decided to give Backroads a shot.</li><li>There were 16 people on the tour, 12 of which were Backroads veterans; some very much so. One couple had done a Provence tour with them in July and another woman was doing back-to-back tours -- the week before she’d ridden their Sicily tour and then flew straight up to Bari for this tour. These veterans said that Backroads does a great job organizing everything; it makes travel easy. It’s kinda the same thing I hear from people who are big into cruising -- show up in some part of the world and have people take care of you. All that being said, after 6 days and 200 miles in the saddle, I came away happy (if a little sore) with the tour and impressed with the hospitality and service ethic of the Backroads tour guides.</li><li>We were riding through Puglia the week of October 10th which was probably a week too late because the towns were beginning to close up for the season. One day, we had a couple of hours in the hill town of Ostuni for lunch, but struggled to find places that were open. Many of the restaurants were dark, even though the signs on the doors said they should be open, as did the hours listed on their websites and their Google Maps listings. No signs saying “Closed for the season”, just locked doors through which we would see chairs on all the tables. We had similar experiences in Otronto and to a lesser extent in Lecce. One of the Backroads guides said that Puglia is a popular destination for Italian tourists from up north; many of them have vacation homes there. And when those folks head home, the remaining locals and handful of misdirected tourists aren’t enough to keep all the bars and restaurants going.</li><li>But the touring was great -- riding alongside groves of huge, old, gnarled olive trees with vegetable crops like fennel and bitter greens planted underneath; and along the Adriatic Sea, up on the ridge along the coastal road and then down through little beach towns and fishing villages.&nbsp;</li><li>And I think that’s the way to do Puglia, touring, doing a couple of days each in Bari and Lecce wandering through the narrow streets of their old towns, a day in Otronto, with half-day stops in Alberobello, Matera, and/or Ostuni, maybe a day or two hanging out in a nice agriturismo or one of those beach towns on the Adriatic.&nbsp;</li><li>We drank a lot of wine, mostly the local Primitivo, a grape closely related to California’s Zinfandel, and ate a lot of seafood, especially octopus. At dinner during our second night in Bari, a young guy walked in with two small clear plastic buckets full of small octopus, very similar to a bucket I saw at the feet of a fisherman at the dock earlier in the day. I don’t think the seafood we were eating that week had been out of the Adriatic for much more than 24 hours before it hit our plates.</li><li>It was a different experience, a different vibe from our prior trips to Italy, which had all been up north -- to Tuscany, to Milan, to Venice. But biking through those olive groves, those fields, those little towns; that’s the lower key experience we were looking for -- and got -- on our time in Puglia. If you want see pictures, head over to the TravelCommons’ Instagram site and click on Puglia/Sicily where I’ve collected some of the better Instagram Stories pictures.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #181</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social  -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_181.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #181 — Travel Potpourri; 2021 Traveler’s Gift Guide','','inherit','closed','closed','','4001-revision-v1','','','2021-11-12 11:22:53','2021-11-12 16:22:53','',4001,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4005',0,'revision','',0),
(4006,1,'2021-11-12 11:24:13','2021-11-12 16:24:13','[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/IMG_3657-scaled.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/IMG_3657-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Jumble of Travel Signs\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Post-Pandemic Travel Guidance[/caption]\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Back at the microphone after two weeks in Southern Italy. Lots of travel segments that could\'ve gone wrong, but none of them did. We talk about what international travel is like in COVID times, about the challenge of keeping track and complying with the different COVID travel requirements that seem to be constantly changing, and then some thoughts about our bike tour through Puglia with <a href=\"https://www.backroads.com/trips/BPLQ/puglia-italy-biking-tour\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Backroads</a>. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_181.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #181: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois, only 2 weeks after the last episode. Decided to kinda short-cycle this episode, see if I can get in an actual November episode rather than wait for December like I said at the end of the last episode. And to think that I used to do these weekly when I started out in 2005. Oh, the enthusiasm of youth -- and notebooks full of unused travel stories. I was going through some of those old episodes while doing a bit of website maintenance. The TSA gave me a lot of fodder for content back in the day. It was only 3½ years old when TravelCommons started, so I got to comment on (bitch about) all their growing pains -- the start of the shoe carnival, the liquid ban, all the different tries at screening technology (who could forget those “puffer” machines?) and, of course, their stellar customer service. But once I started going through PreCheck in 2012, there wasn’t much more to comment/bitch about -- which I know is a good thing overall, but it did leave me with a big content hole, kinda like in those TV series where the villain becomes one of the good guys in season 3 -- what do you do next?</li><li>And 16 years on, as I slouch towards semi-retirement, my travel experiences are changing. I’m thinking less about clever new ways to navigate ORD’s Monday morning road warrior rush hour or about totaling up delays on a 4- or 5-city cross-country itinerary, and thinking more about planning for longer leisure(?)/experiential(?) travel. Though I guess that’s not a complete change.  </li><li>Going through those old episodes reminded me that, even back at the start, I was talking about leisure travel -- to the point that episodes #8 and #9 were done while on vacation! I can only imagine what my family was thinking when they heard me nattering away in the bathroom of the Geneva, Switz Novatel and the Budapest Marriott.</li><li>But back to the present… Obviously, no travel since the last episode, just travel planning for our trip to the UK next week -- a week in London and then heading out to southern Wales for a week of walking, hiking, pretty much just being cold and wet because I didn’t get enough of that while biking in Puglia. </li><li>A big chunk of my time has been spent trying to figure out exactly what COVID paperwork we need to get into the UK. Since we’re vaccinated and coming from a non-red list country, we don’t need to show a negative COVID test before getting on the plane, but instead we have to get a test done in the UK and have to pre-pay for it so we can also fill out a passenger locator form 48 hours before departure. The UK government’s website is actually pretty good, with links to approved test providers. But most of them want to ship the test to a UK address, which is good if you’re returning home to the UK; less good if you’re staying in a hotel or Airbnb. So now I’m trying to figure out -- do I risk a long line at a Heathrow test center when we land or do I find a place somewhere in London the next day? Kinda makes me long for the days when all I had to worry about was finding a bank before 3pm on Friday to cash an American Express Travelers Check so I had cash for the weekend.... Nah, who am I kidding? That was so much more of a pain than this. Worst case, I figure out how to eat a full-cooked English breakfast standing up while in line.</li><li>Bridge Music — <em><em>Perfect Stranger</em> </em>by stellarartwars (c) 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/stellarartwars/45510 Ft: TheDice</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>This time last year, in t<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">he November 2020 episode</a>, we talked about all the end-of-the-year “don’t leave me” offers from the airlines and hotels, 20-50% cuts in whatever metric they used to award status --  stays, nights, miles, stays, segments, spend. And at the end of that bit, I said “Maybe they’ll be doing it again this time next year if that ‘Well, it’s probably more like the end of 2021 or maybe into the beginning of 2022 before things start feeling normal; forecast turns out to be true.” A year later, and after the Delta variant knocked down everyone’s Q3 revenues, I haven’t received any airline status sales yet, but I’ve already received status extensions from Marriott, Hilton, and, weirdly enough, IHG -- weird ‘cause I don’t <em>have</em> any status with them… that I know of, maybe I need to check. They’re all extending status for another year, to February or March 2023. So everyone’s kept their 2019 status for 3 years now -- 2020, 2021, and now 2022. And why not? Since a lot of the cost is concierge lounges that have been closed and free breakfasts that are now boxes with a yogurt and an orange, it’s probably the cheapest way to buy continued customer loyalty.</li><li>We’ve talked a lot in this podcast about Uber and Lyft. Back in episode #154 in August 2019, I asked “Will We Still Love Uber and Lyft When The Prices Go Up?” after both CEOs talked about getting to “rational pricing” -- “rational” being CEO-speak for “higher”. And then this year, talking about their post-pandemic driver shortages, customer service issues, and rising prices -- a pretty common topic. The Times of London <a href=\"https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/is-uber-over-cm70m2blm\">asks</a> “Is Uber Dead?” and the Chicago Tribune says in <a href=\"https://www.chicagotribune.com/opinion/editorials/ct-editorial-taxicabs-uber-lyft-rideshare-20210913-ljnt5wgxejepbmagoe33w7jud4-story.html\">an editorial</a> “We were wrong to abandon Chicago’s taxicabs for ride-shares and the city now needs to find a fix” which is a bit of a laugh because 4-5 years ago, everyone here complained that you couldn’t get a cab other than downtown or the airports, and definitely never in the poorer neighborhoods of the South and West sides.  If you read the <a href=\"https://investor.uber.com/news-events/news/press-release-details/2021/Uber-Announces-Results-for-Third-Quarter-2021/\">highlights of Uber’s Q3 financial results</a> released last week, they’re not quite dead. They trumpet that Q3 was their “first Adjusted EBITDA profitable quarter as a public company” Adjusted EBITDA - a fun accounting construct meaning “earnings before taxes, depreciation, and all the other bad stuff” and that the number of active drivers is up more than 65% since January. But what was interesting to me -- their delivery business, like Uber Eats, now generates more revenue than their traditional ride business. And maybe competing for drivers? Does make some sense. As the Times’ writer put it, “Food doesn’t complain about the route and parcels tend not to throw up on the back seat.”</li><li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors\">episode #170 last December</a>, we talked about how the CEO of Qantas had stirred up a good bit of controversy saying “We will ask people to have a vaccination before they can get on the aircraft” and the resulting land grab in vaccine passport apps. United and Lufthansa were testing out the <a href=\"https://thecommonsproject.org/commonpass\">CommonPass app</a>, Delta and Alitalia (may they rest in peace) the <a href=\"https://www.aokpass.com/en/\" title=\"AOKPass\">AOKPass </a>from the International Chamber of Commerce, and British Airways and Iberia the Travel Pass from an airline industry group. I said back then that it was a little messy, but it made sense since I didn’t think the handwritten card the CDC was handing out was going to pass muster at a boarding gate. Now, less than a year later, the Qantas CEO’s quote is pretty much standard operating procedure for international travel.  But vaccine passport apps? It’s a bit more mixed. Last month I flew Air France, United, Lufthansa, and ITA, the successor to Alitalia, and was never prompted to download any apps. Instead, I pulled out my trusty CDC card many times to prove my vaccination status, and for my flight home, opened Gmail on my iPhone a couple of times to show the PDF of my negative COVID test.  Pretty low tech, but honestly, at least in Italy, it worked faster than the EU’s Green Pass QR codes. We’d show our CDC cards and after a second or two be waved through while the Europeans were still trying to right-size the QR code on their phone screens so the scanner would register it. Upgrading to iOS 15.1 on my iPhone let me add a digital vaccination card to my Apple Wallet, but I don’t know where I’ll actually use it.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> or the <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram </a>account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — <em><em>Paint the Sky</em> </em>by Hans Atom (c) 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/hansatom/50718 Ft: Miss Judged</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Travel Potpourri for $600</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Regular listeners know that, every now and again, usually when I’m scraping for content, I gather up the odds-‘n’-ends from my travel notebooks that I can’t get “grow up” into a stand-alone topic and just string ‘em together into a Jeopardy-like topic “Travel Potpourri”. </li><li>I recently <a href=\"https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/2021/11/11/nashville-airport-race-build-more-dining-options-for-surging-travelers/6317805001/\">read some stats</a> about how the March 2020 lockdown impacted Nashville’s airport -- daily passenger count went from 50,000 to 500, and only 8 airport concessions out of a pre-COVID count of 52 survived. And now, 20 months later, passenger counts are pretty much back to pre-pandemic levels, but the concession count isn’t. They’re only back to 34 -- 18 food places and 16 shops, newsstands and other things. It takes more time to start things up than to shut them down -- especially when you have to get all your workers and supplies through TSA security every day. I’ll keep this in mind the next time I want to complain about a 10-deep line for a cup of coffee.</li><li>Traveling to Europe again means re-bookmarking the <a href=\"https://prepaid-data-sim-card.fandom.com/wiki/Prepaid_SIM_with_data\">Prepaid Data SIM Card Wiki</a> so I can research mobile data plans again. For 4 years, I didn’t have to worry about it. The EU had outlawed roaming charges and so I’d just use the UK SIM I bought the first time we took our daughter over to Scotland for college. That worked well until Brexit day last year. So on our first day in Bari, I searched out the nearest TIM store -- stands for Telecom Italia Mobile, I think. I wanted one of Italy’s big networks because our cycling tour would be taking us into the countryside, and so was OK paying a bit more for better coverage.  The last time I bought a mobile SIM in Italy was 5 years in Pisa and it was a huge hassle. But in Bari, we walked into the store, and the clerk was great. She kinda figured we were looking for SIMs, knew about the international plan I’d found on their website, and got the whole thing done in maybe 15 minutes. The price -- €25 ($30) for 70 GB of data, which, for all practical purposes translates to unlimited data -- meant the break-even point vs. paying AT&amp;T $10/day for international roaming was 3 days. Since we were in Italy for 16 days, it was a well-spent 15 minutes. I was amazed at how far mobile data prices have fallen. The last time I was in Europe, the fall of 2019, I put £10 on my EE SIM (about $12 back then) and got 3 GB. I just topped up that SIM again for our UK trip and got 15 GB for £15 -- 500% increase in data for 50% more money. That should hold us for 2 weeks. </li><li>In many past episodes, I’ve talked about how my search for local craft beer has taken me to places outside the typical travel bubble. And, for me, this is even more important since I’m doing less (no?) business travel. Because the nature of business travel -- traveling to work with clients who live there -- makes it easier to connect with that place, even if it’s just through hallway conversations like “What’d you do over the weekend”, but most times, it’s them saying “Oh, you gotta go to my favorite place while you’re here.” Our Puglia bike tour ended in Lecce in lousy weather. The rain had started the night before and continued dumping the next morning. We skipped the last ride. You could say we were lightweights, but we didn’t want to have to figure out how to pack soaking wet biking clothes. I wanted to walk around Lecce a bit before our dinner reservation, but Irene was cold from the wind and rain. So she headed back to the hotel while I searched out a beer bar I’d found on Untappd.</li><li>The place was pretty empty when I walked in; 7pm, it was early by Italian standards. The draft handles were all from a local Lecce brewery, so I asked the bartender, a young guy, his favorite, and he pointed to the IPA tap -- of course, but it was a pretty solid session IPA. He offered me a table, but I asked him if I could just stand and drink at the counter. We started to chat a bit (“Why have you come… to Lecce?”) His English wasn’t great (though orders-of magnitude better than my Italian, which is sorta damning with faint praise) so I started stripping down my English -- no slang, no contractions, clean articulation, simple declarative sentences. But in maybe a verbal corollary to the Mark Twain-ism “I would have written a shorter letter if I had the time…”, I find it takes a lot of thinking, a lot of mental work to do this, to strip my English down to something easily understandable. And the bartender appreciated it. “English people talk so fast,” he said. “I have a hard time understanding everything they say.” And by making my English more understandable, he gained confidence in his, and pushed it into more interesting topics like the split between Northern and Southern Italy (“They hate us!”) and even within Puglia (“We hate Bari and Bari hates us!”).  And why he wants to work on his English (“It’s so much more useful than Italian. A German person, a Swedish person comes into the bar; we all talk English)”. He was happy to get to practice his English. I was happy to oblige, and get a little peek at non-tourist Puglia without knowing any Italian.</li><li>Bridge Music — <em>Dub the Uke</em> by Kara Square (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mindmapthat/53340 Ft: DJ Vadim</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong> 2021 Traveler’s Gift Guide</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Last week, I posted this year’s traveler’s gift guide. You can find it on the front page of the TravelCommons’ website; I’ll also put a link in the episode description so you can click to it straight from your podcast app. If <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">last year’s gift guide</a> was about helping people travel handle last-minute lockdowns with suggestions like bring-your-own dining sets and upscale in-room coffee brewing kits, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-to-survive-post-pandemic-travel/\">this year’s guide</a> is stacked with the gift ideas to help cope with all the predicted airline meltdowns when holiday passenger traffic smacks straight into crew and ground staff shortages. </li><li>I’m not going to run through the whole list -- you can hit the website for that -- but I’ll hit a couple of highlights. Top of this year’s list is battery packs. We talked in the last episode that we just can’t easily travel anymore without a working mobile phone. It holds our boarding passes and our proof of COVID vaccination, gives us gate change and flight delay notifications, and routes us around traffic jams. A dead phone while flights are being cancelled is more than just a bit of an inconvenience; having that second or third charge immediately available is critical when trying to swerve a long delay. There are a lot of choices; just pick one. I carry <a href=\"https://amzn.to/34fcbON\">Zendure</a> and <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3bHni97\">Anker</a> power banks; they’ve served me well. (And thanks to Jim McDonough for QA’ing the power bank links in the original blog post!)</li><li>Number 2 and a perennial favorite - Noise Canceling Headphone or Ear Buds. Whether you’re sitting in a noisy airport waiting out a delay or are up in the air, it’s great being able to cut out all the background noise and find your Zen place with the flick of a switch. I’ve been carrying Bose headphones for at least 15 years and am now on my 3rd pair, the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2Y9NWnY\">Bose 700’s</a>. They’re not compact yet they continue to earn their space in my travel bag. I find over-the-ear cans more comfortable, but if you can handle in-the-ear buds for extended periods, Bose does <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3ByWEda\">ear buds</a>, or for Apple ecosystem diehards, my kids recommend the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3GNszds\">AirPod Pros</a>.</li><li>Another suggestion for Apple ecosystem inhabitants is Apple’s <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3k4rCUy\">AirTag</a>. They have a lot more range than straight Bluetooth trackers like Tile because AirTags can ping off of any nearby Apple device, not just yours, to report its location. Putting an AirTag in your checked luggage can you see if your bag is joining you on the new flight the airline just rebooked you on, or you can hang one from your backpack to track it if it somehow wanders off down the concourse while your eyes are trying to find your delayed flight on the airport’s departure board.</li><li>Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/07/28/podcast-177-b-sides-and-rarities/\">July episode, episode #177</a>, I said my <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3q5vY1l\">USB-C to HDMI cable</a> was the most important piece of travel kit on my trip through the Northeast because, it let me mirror my MacBook Air on the hotel and beach house TVs so I could sit back with a beer and comfortably watch YouTube highlights of the Euro 2020 soccer tournament and the Tour de France on 40-60” flat screens instead of hunching over a 13” laptop screen.</li><li>And at number 9, a smartphone tripod. My <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3pZmjcS\">Square Jellyfish phone tripod</a> is light and doesn’t take up much space, but came in very handy while doing my COVID test video session in Italy the morning before my flight home. The eMed test proctor wanted to watch me swirl the cotton swab in my nose and then insert it into the test kit. I’m not sure how I would’ve done that while holding my phone. I use it a lot more than I thought I would for video calls and to watch quick videos on my phone.</li><li>So there you go, something to fit all sizes and budgets in time for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, or if you’re just killing time waiting for your Thanksgiving flight to leave.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #181</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social  -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_181.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #181 — Travel Potpourri; 2021 Traveler’s Gift Guide','','inherit','closed','closed','','4001-revision-v1','','','2021-11-12 11:24:13','2021-11-12 16:24:13','',4001,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4006',0,'revision','',0),
(4007,1,'2021-11-12 12:10:08','2021-11-12 17:10:08','[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/IMG_3657-scaled.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/IMG_3657-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Jumble of Travel Signs\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Post-Pandemic Travel Guidance[/caption]\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>No travel since the last episode, so just talking through a random potpourri of travel stuff. There\'s more travel planning; this time for a couple of weeks split between London and Wales which means sorting through a new set of COVID travel requirements. We look at some stats -- Uber\'s latest financials and how deeply last year\'s lockdown hit Nashville airport vendors.  I marvel at how much European mobile data rates have fallen, strip down my English to have a good chat with an Italian bartender, and wrap it all up with the highlight of this year\'s traveler\'s gift guide. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_181.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #181: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois, only 2 weeks after the last episode. Decided to kinda short-cycle this episode, see if I can get in an actual November episode rather than wait for December like I said at the end of the last episode. And to think that I used to do these weekly when I started out in 2005. Oh, the enthusiasm of youth -- and notebooks full of unused travel stories. I was going through some of those old episodes while doing a bit of website maintenance. The TSA gave me a lot of fodder for content back in the day. It was only 3½ years old when TravelCommons started, so I got to comment on (bitch about) all their growing pains -- the start of the shoe carnival, the liquid ban, all the different tries at screening technology (who could forget those “puffer” machines?) and, of course, their stellar customer service. But once I started going through PreCheck in 2012, there wasn’t much more to comment/bitch about -- which I know is a good thing overall, but it did leave me with a big content hole, kinda like in those TV series where the villain becomes one of the good guys in season 3 -- what do you do next?</li><li>And 16 years on, as I slouch towards semi-retirement, my travel experiences are changing. I’m thinking less about clever new ways to navigate ORD’s Monday morning road warrior rush hour or about totaling up delays on a 4- or 5-city cross-country itinerary, and thinking more about planning for longer leisure(?)/experiential(?) travel. Though I guess that’s not a complete change.  </li><li>Going through those old episodes reminded me that, even back at the start, I was talking about leisure travel -- to the point that episodes #8 and #9 were done while on vacation! I can only imagine what my family was thinking when they heard me nattering away in the bathroom of the Geneva, Switz Novatel and the Budapest Marriott.</li><li>But back to the present… Obviously, no travel since the last episode, just travel planning for our trip to the UK next week -- a week in London and then heading out to southern Wales for a week of walking, hiking, pretty much just being cold and wet because I didn’t get enough of that while biking in Puglia. </li><li>A big chunk of my time has been spent trying to figure out exactly what COVID paperwork we need to get into the UK. Since we’re vaccinated and coming from a non-red list country, we don’t need to show a negative COVID test before getting on the plane, but instead we have to get a test done in the UK and have to pre-pay for it so we can also fill out a passenger locator form 48 hours before departure. The UK government’s website is actually pretty good, with links to approved test providers. But most of them want to ship the test to a UK address, which is good if you’re returning home to the UK; less good if you’re staying in a hotel or Airbnb. So now I’m trying to figure out -- do I risk a long line at a Heathrow test center when we land or do I find a place somewhere in London the next day? Kinda makes me long for the days when all I had to worry about was finding a bank before 3pm on Friday to cash an American Express Travelers Check so I had cash for the weekend.... Nah, who am I kidding? That was so much more of a pain than this. Worst case, I figure out how to eat a full-cooked English breakfast standing up while in line.</li><li>Bridge Music — <em><em>Perfect Stranger</em> </em>by stellarartwars (c) 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/stellarartwars/45510 Ft: TheDice</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>This time last year, in t<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">he November 2020 episode</a>, we talked about all the end-of-the-year “don’t leave me” offers from the airlines and hotels, 20-50% cuts in whatever metric they used to award status --  stays, nights, miles, stays, segments, spend. And at the end of that bit, I said “Maybe they’ll be doing it again this time next year if that ‘Well, it’s probably more like the end of 2021 or maybe into the beginning of 2022 before things start feeling normal; forecast turns out to be true.” A year later, and after the Delta variant knocked down everyone’s Q3 revenues, I haven’t received any airline status sales yet, but I’ve already received status extensions from Marriott, Hilton, and, weirdly enough, IHG -- weird ‘cause I don’t <em>have</em> any status with them… that I know of, maybe I need to check. They’re all extending status for another year, to February or March 2023. So everyone’s kept their 2019 status for 3 years now -- 2020, 2021, and now 2022. And why not? Since a lot of the cost is concierge lounges that have been closed and free breakfasts that are now boxes with a yogurt and an orange, it’s probably the cheapest way to buy continued customer loyalty.</li><li>We’ve talked a lot in this podcast about Uber and Lyft. Back in episode #154 in August 2019, I asked “Will We Still Love Uber and Lyft When The Prices Go Up?” after both CEOs talked about getting to “rational pricing” -- “rational” being CEO-speak for “higher”. And then this year, talking about their post-pandemic driver shortages, customer service issues, and rising prices -- a pretty common topic. The Times of London <a href=\"https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/is-uber-over-cm70m2blm\">asks</a> “Is Uber Dead?” and the Chicago Tribune says in <a href=\"https://www.chicagotribune.com/opinion/editorials/ct-editorial-taxicabs-uber-lyft-rideshare-20210913-ljnt5wgxejepbmagoe33w7jud4-story.html\">an editorial</a> “We were wrong to abandon Chicago’s taxicabs for ride-shares and the city now needs to find a fix” which is a bit of a laugh because 4-5 years ago, everyone here complained that you couldn’t get a cab other than downtown or the airports, and definitely never in the poorer neighborhoods of the South and West sides.  If you read the <a href=\"https://investor.uber.com/news-events/news/press-release-details/2021/Uber-Announces-Results-for-Third-Quarter-2021/\">highlights of Uber’s Q3 financial results</a> released last week, they’re not quite dead. They trumpet that Q3 was their “first Adjusted EBITDA profitable quarter as a public company” Adjusted EBITDA - a fun accounting construct meaning “earnings before taxes, depreciation, and all the other bad stuff” and that the number of active drivers is up more than 65% since January. But what was interesting to me -- their delivery business, like Uber Eats, now generates more revenue than their traditional ride business. And maybe competing for drivers? Does make some sense. As the Times’ writer put it, “Food doesn’t complain about the route and parcels tend not to throw up on the back seat.”</li><li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors\">episode #170 last December</a>, we talked about how the CEO of Qantas had stirred up a good bit of controversy saying “We will ask people to have a vaccination before they can get on the aircraft” and the resulting land grab in vaccine passport apps. United and Lufthansa were testing out the <a href=\"https://thecommonsproject.org/commonpass\">CommonPass app</a>, Delta and Alitalia (may they rest in peace) the <a href=\"https://www.aokpass.com/en/\" title=\"AOKPass\">AOKPass </a>from the International Chamber of Commerce, and British Airways and Iberia the Travel Pass from an airline industry group. I said back then that it was a little messy, but it made sense since I didn’t think the handwritten card the CDC was handing out was going to pass muster at a boarding gate. Now, less than a year later, the Qantas CEO’s quote is pretty much standard operating procedure for international travel.  But vaccine passport apps? It’s a bit more mixed. Last month I flew Air France, United, Lufthansa, and ITA, the successor to Alitalia, and was never prompted to download any apps. Instead, I pulled out my trusty CDC card many times to prove my vaccination status, and for my flight home, opened Gmail on my iPhone a couple of times to show the PDF of my negative COVID test.  Pretty low tech, but honestly, at least in Italy, it worked faster than the EU’s Green Pass QR codes. We’d show our CDC cards and after a second or two be waved through while the Europeans were still trying to right-size the QR code on their phone screens so the scanner would register it. Upgrading to iOS 15.1 on my iPhone let me add a digital vaccination card to my Apple Wallet, but I don’t know where I’ll actually use it.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> or the <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram </a>account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — <em><em>Paint the Sky</em> </em>by Hans Atom (c) 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/hansatom/50718 Ft: Miss Judged</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Travel Potpourri for $600</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Regular listeners know that, every now and again, usually when I’m scraping for content, I gather up the odds-‘n’-ends from my travel notebooks that I can’t get “grow up” into a stand-alone topic and just string ‘em together into a Jeopardy-like topic “Travel Potpourri”. </li><li>I recently <a href=\"https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/2021/11/11/nashville-airport-race-build-more-dining-options-for-surging-travelers/6317805001/\">read some stats</a> about how the March 2020 lockdown impacted Nashville’s airport -- daily passenger count went from 50,000 to 500, and only 8 airport concessions out of a pre-COVID count of 52 survived. And now, 20 months later, passenger counts are pretty much back to pre-pandemic levels, but the concession count isn’t. They’re only back to 34 -- 18 food places and 16 shops, newsstands and other things. It takes more time to start things up than to shut them down -- especially when you have to get all your workers and supplies through TSA security every day. I’ll keep this in mind the next time I want to complain about a 10-deep line for a cup of coffee.</li><li>Traveling to Europe again means re-bookmarking the <a href=\"https://prepaid-data-sim-card.fandom.com/wiki/Prepaid_SIM_with_data\">Prepaid Data SIM Card Wiki</a> so I can research mobile data plans again. For 4 years, I didn’t have to worry about it. The EU had outlawed roaming charges and so I’d just use the UK SIM I bought the first time we took our daughter over to Scotland for college. That worked well until Brexit day last year. So on our first day in Bari, I searched out the nearest TIM store -- stands for Telecom Italia Mobile, I think. I wanted one of Italy’s big networks because our cycling tour would be taking us into the countryside, and so was OK paying a bit more for better coverage.  The last time I bought a mobile SIM in Italy was 5 years in Pisa and it was a huge hassle. But in Bari, we walked into the store, and the clerk was great. She kinda figured we were looking for SIMs, knew about the international plan I’d found on their website, and got the whole thing done in maybe 15 minutes. The price -- €25 ($30) for 70 GB of data, which, for all practical purposes translates to unlimited data -- meant the break-even point vs. paying AT&amp;T $10/day for international roaming was 3 days. Since we were in Italy for 16 days, it was a well-spent 15 minutes. I was amazed at how far mobile data prices have fallen. The last time I was in Europe, the fall of 2019, I put £10 on my EE SIM (about $12 back then) and got 3 GB. I just topped up that SIM again for our UK trip and got 15 GB for £15 -- 500% increase in data for 50% more money. That should hold us for 2 weeks. </li><li>In many past episodes, I’ve talked about how my search for local craft beer has taken me to places outside the typical travel bubble. And, for me, this is even more important since I’m doing less (no?) business travel. Because the nature of business travel -- traveling to work with clients who live there -- makes it easier to connect with that place, even if it’s just through hallway conversations like “What’d you do over the weekend”, but most times, it’s them saying “Oh, you gotta go to my favorite place while you’re here.” Our Puglia bike tour ended in Lecce in lousy weather. The rain had started the night before and continued dumping the next morning. We skipped the last ride. You could say we were lightweights, but we didn’t want to have to figure out how to pack soaking wet biking clothes. I wanted to walk around Lecce a bit before our dinner reservation, but Irene was cold from the wind and rain. So she headed back to the hotel while I searched out a beer bar I’d found on Untappd.</li><li>The place was pretty empty when I walked in; 7pm, it was early by Italian standards. The draft handles were all from a local Lecce brewery, so I asked the bartender, a young guy, his favorite, and he pointed to the IPA tap -- of course, but it was a pretty solid session IPA. He offered me a table, but I asked him if I could just stand and drink at the counter. We started to chat a bit (“Why have you come… to Lecce?”) His English wasn’t great (though orders-of magnitude better than my Italian, which is sorta damning with faint praise) so I started stripping down my English -- no slang, no contractions, clean articulation, simple declarative sentences. But in maybe a verbal corollary to the Mark Twain-ism “I would have written a shorter letter if I had the time…”, I find it takes a lot of thinking, a lot of mental work to do this, to strip my English down to something easily understandable. And the bartender appreciated it. “English people talk so fast,” he said. “I have a hard time understanding everything they say.” And by making my English more understandable, he gained confidence in his, and pushed it into more interesting topics like the split between Northern and Southern Italy (“They hate us!”) and even within Puglia (“We hate Bari and Bari hates us!”).  And why he wants to work on his English (“It’s so much more useful than Italian. A German person, a Swedish person comes into the bar; we all talk English)”. He was happy to get to practice his English. I was happy to oblige, and get a little peek at non-tourist Puglia without knowing any Italian.</li><li>Bridge Music — <em>Dub the Uke</em> by Kara Square (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mindmapthat/53340 Ft: DJ Vadim</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong> 2021 Traveler’s Gift Guide</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Last week, I posted this year’s traveler’s gift guide. You can find it on the front page of the TravelCommons’ website; I’ll also put a link in the episode description so you can click to it straight from your podcast app. If <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">last year’s gift guide</a> was about helping people travel handle last-minute lockdowns with suggestions like bring-your-own dining sets and upscale in-room coffee brewing kits, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-to-survive-post-pandemic-travel/\">this year’s guide</a> is stacked with the gift ideas to help cope with all the predicted airline meltdowns when holiday passenger traffic smacks straight into crew and ground staff shortages. </li><li>I’m not going to run through the whole list -- you can hit the website for that -- but I’ll hit a couple of highlights. Top of this year’s list is battery packs. We talked in the last episode that we just can’t easily travel anymore without a working mobile phone. It holds our boarding passes and our proof of COVID vaccination, gives us gate change and flight delay notifications, and routes us around traffic jams. A dead phone while flights are being cancelled is more than just a bit of an inconvenience; having that second or third charge immediately available is critical when trying to swerve a long delay. There are a lot of choices; just pick one. I carry <a href=\"https://amzn.to/34fcbON\">Zendure</a> and <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3bHni97\">Anker</a> power banks; they’ve served me well. (And thanks to Jim McDonough for QA’ing the power bank links in the original blog post!)</li><li>Number 2 and a perennial favorite - Noise Canceling Headphone or Ear Buds. Whether you’re sitting in a noisy airport waiting out a delay or are up in the air, it’s great being able to cut out all the background noise and find your Zen place with the flick of a switch. I’ve been carrying Bose headphones for at least 15 years and am now on my 3rd pair, the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2Y9NWnY\">Bose 700’s</a>. They’re not compact yet they continue to earn their space in my travel bag. I find over-the-ear cans more comfortable, but if you can handle in-the-ear buds for extended periods, Bose does <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3ByWEda\">ear buds</a>, or for Apple ecosystem diehards, my kids recommend the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3GNszds\">AirPod Pros</a>.</li><li>Another suggestion for Apple ecosystem inhabitants is Apple’s <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3k4rCUy\">AirTag</a>. They have a lot more range than straight Bluetooth trackers like Tile because AirTags can ping off of any nearby Apple device, not just yours, to report its location. Putting an AirTag in your checked luggage can you see if your bag is joining you on the new flight the airline just rebooked you on, or you can hang one from your backpack to track it if it somehow wanders off down the concourse while your eyes are trying to find your delayed flight on the airport’s departure board.</li><li>Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/07/28/podcast-177-b-sides-and-rarities/\">July episode, episode #177</a>, I said my <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3q5vY1l\">USB-C to HDMI cable</a> was the most important piece of travel kit on my trip through the Northeast because, it let me mirror my MacBook Air on the hotel and beach house TVs so I could sit back with a beer and comfortably watch YouTube highlights of the Euro 2020 soccer tournament and the Tour de France on 40-60” flat screens instead of hunching over a 13” laptop screen.</li><li>And at number 9, a smartphone tripod. My <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3pZmjcS\">Square Jellyfish phone tripod</a> is light and doesn’t take up much space, but came in very handy while doing my COVID test video session in Italy the morning before my flight home. The eMed test proctor wanted to watch me swirl the cotton swab in my nose and then insert it into the test kit. I’m not sure how I would’ve done that while holding my phone. I use it a lot more than I thought I would for video calls and to watch quick videos on my phone.</li><li>So there you go, something to fit all sizes and budgets in time for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, or if you’re just killing time waiting for your Thanksgiving flight to leave.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #181</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social  -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_181.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #181 — Travel Potpourri; 2021 Traveler’s Gift Guide','','inherit','closed','closed','','4001-revision-v1','','','2021-11-12 12:10:08','2021-11-12 17:10:08','',4001,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4007',0,'revision','',0),
(4008,1,'2021-11-12 12:15:38','2021-11-12 17:15:38','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":2404} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/CoeazhcUMAAhyQN-300x251.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2404\"/><figcaption>This guy looks familiar...</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It\'s been a tough month for travel. Not quite to Book of Job-level torment, but two of this month\'s three trips spiraled into head-shaking metaphysical “What the hell is going on here” questioning of my decision to get out of bed that morning. I walk through the travel gods\' fun and games, as well as some new data on regional jet delays and buying a new travel bag.  All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_150.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #150: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, as the weather begins to stagger unsteadily toward Spring -- 74 degrees on Monday, 5.3 inches of snow (thundersnow!) on Sunday, then back up into the 70’s two days later.  April 14 -- over 5 inches of snow, over 1,000 flights cancelled. A nasty surprise for folks who thought it would be safe to connect through ORD, but just validates a Chicago truism -- don’t put the snow gear away until after Tax Day. Yup, welcome to the Midwest.</li><li>Have done a <em>chunk</em> of travel -- there’s a unit of measure for you -- since the last episode. A 2-day trip that hit 4 airports in the first day -- Chicago-Midway, Las Vegas, Houston-Hobby, and Nashville. The next week, I squoze in a trip to a new airport - State College, PA -- before heading out on vacation to Brittany, France. The squeeze wasn’t too tight -- flew back from State College on Weds night and left on vacation Thursday night -- but I did scout out a couple of backups in case the United Express regional jet went AWOL; a hour or so drive down to Harrisburg, a couple hour drive over to Pittsburgh. Luckily, I didn’t need them. United Express was having a good day, and therefore, so did I.</li><li>The next day’s flight to Paris on SAS by way of Stockholm went fine. We got in on time, found the left luggage lockers, and then the express train into the city all without much hassle. Arlanda Airport is comfortably sized and has good signage. The only real problem was that we got into center city Stockholm too early -- around 8:30am -- and nothing was really open. So we coffee’d up at one place, had some cardamom pastries at another, and generally puttered around until things started opening up an hour or so later. It was a sunny, if brisk, day, so walking around the Gamla Stan and Sodermalm was nice. </li><li>I always chuckle a bit when going through De Gaulle Airport, passing through the tangle of flat escalator walkway tubes that bridge the levels and open center of Terminal 1. The walkways are a bit awkward with wheeled luggage -- going down and then up. An airport porter in front of us let a wheelchair go free on the downhill span -- took a moment for it to register that it was empty -- then it rolled back to him on the uphill. No knock against him; it was the end of the day.</li><li>The next day, we caught the train out to Brittany, to Saint Malo. We walked out of the train station and across the street to Europcar for what was one of the easiest rental car pick-ups I’ve ever had in Europe. No scare-tactic insurance upselling -- just a look at my driver’s license and a quick pointer to where I could find the car in the train station parking lot. Five minutes, max. And dropping off the car a week later at Rennes train station? Absolutely the easiest rental drop-off -- gave the guy the keys and a receipt showing I’d filled up the car and I was done. No waiting for him to go inspect the car, just a handshake and “Have a good day”. </li><li>The next day wasn’t near as carefree, but we’ll talk about that in a few minutes.</li><li>Bridge Music — <em>Countryside Summer Joyride</em> by Kara Square (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mindmapthat/56281 Ft: Javolenus</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I’ve been not-quite-hating on, but certainly have been down on regional jets for quite some time on this podcast. Given a choice, I recommend people avoid them -- not because of their size, but their schedule dependability. Because the regional airlines’ model is to bounce a plane from place to place rather than route through hubs, they never recover from weather or mechanical delays. Those delays just cascade through the rest of the day. Now there often aren’t alternatives. Hence my earlier comment about needing backup plans for my regional jet flight home from State College. My flight was at the end of the day, the most vulnerable time to delays. Given my personal experience,  I wasn’t surprised to read that US Dept of Transportation data showed that regional flights were 2-4 times more likely to be cancelled than mainline flights. The Chicago Tribune dug into the DOT data and found flights operated by Delta’s regional partners were 4 times more likely to be canceled than flights operated by Delta, while American Eagle and United Express were 2-3 times more likely to cancel flights than their mainline partners. You can’t avoid regional jets when going to places like State College or Charlottesville, VA or Appleton, WI -- but you can when flying to LGA or DFW or MSY. And in those cases, unless those RJ flights have exactly the schedule I need, I’ll suffer a bit of inconvenience for a lot more dependability.</li><li>On our travels through Brittany earlier this month, I found that we were getting a large number of “card declined” messages when trying to use our Chase Sapphire Visa card -- at gas stations, stores, and in Paris when I tried to use my Uber app. Now this isn’t a new card -- we’ve had it for over 5 years -- and it’s not the first time we’ve used it on travels in Europe. But Chase fraud algorithm seems more sensitive, throwing more false positives, and no way to update things. On the way out of Brest, I pulled into a Total gas station to fill up on our way to the Crozon peninsula. We’d be there for a couple of days of hiking and I wasn’t sure many gas stations we’d see (turned out that I didn’t need to worry). I pull up to a pump, tap the Chase Visa, get a decline. Insert the card into the reader; get another decline. I do the same drill with my Citi MasterCard with the same result. However, I immediately get a fraud alert from Citi. I hit the big green “Yes” button on the e-mail -- as in, “Yes, I do recognize this charge” -- get an “all clear” response back, tap my Citi card again and fill up my tank. All this time, we get nothing from Chase. I open the Chase app on my phone; nothing there either. Same thing in Paris when I needed an Uber fast (more on that in a bit). Chase declined, but my Amex Platinum card went through. For me, it was just annoying; I always carry a full set of cards when traveling -- a Visa and a MasterCard from different banks, and an Amex -- because single points of failure when traveling are bad -- I don’t want to be left hanging if one bank or one card processor drops their network or loses a data center. Oh, and I also carry cash. But, as we’ve <a aria-label=\"talked (opens in a new tab)\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/02/10/podcast-148-travel-potpourri-for-200-alex/\" target=\"_blank\">talked</a> <a aria-label=\"about (opens in a new tab)\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/12/17/podcast-147-holiday-travel-tips-notes-from-santa-fe/\" target=\"_blank\">about</a> <a aria-label=\"before (opens in a new tab)\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\" target=\"_blank\">before</a>, that’s ‘cause I’m old-school.</li><li>Brittany was a touring vacation, so we were moving every couple of days or so -- packing, unpacking, repacking. During one of those repacking sessions, maybe in Morgat on the Crozon peninsula -- I couldn’t find my Bose headphone case, which had my Bose headphones, in my backpack -- and I didn’t remember pulling out. Where the hell did they go, I asked myself. I pull everything out of my backpack and -- oh, there they are; they had slipped behind my camera bag in the bottom of my backpack. How did I lose my headphones in my backpack, you may ask -- and rightfully so because it really sounds stupid. Probably the same reason I lost a Google tablet in there a few years back -- too much black. The Bose case is black, the interior of Timbuk 2 backpack is black, my eyes aren’t as good as they used to be… I’d been toying around with getting a new bag, more of a messenger style -- that I could sling over one shoulder and with a bit better waterproofing. And, after this little panic drill, a non-black interior. I ended up getting a small Timbuk 2 Classic messenger bag from the Outlet section of REI.com for $50. It’s not too big -- holds my 11-inch MacBook Air, a couple of notebooks, an umbrella -- and has a bright yellow interior. I haven’t lost anything in it yet -- but I don’t trust myself. Maybe I need to get, like a white umbrella, and spray paint my Bose case red. I love black, but maybe I’ve taken that color palette a bit too far.</li><li>And if you have any travel rants, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a aria-label=\"mpeacock (opens in a new tab)\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a aria-label=\"Facebook page (opens in a new tab)\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Facebook page</a> or our Instagram account at <a aria-label=\" (opens in a new tab)\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Travelcommons</a> -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music —  <em>Jester of the Golden Apocalypse</em> by Super_Sigil (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Super_Sigil/34750 </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Travel Interruptus</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A Greek tragedy in three acts where the travel gods toy with our anti-hero for fun and entertainment</li><li>OK, maybe not quite that bad, not quite Book of Job-level torment, but two out of the three trips I’ve taken in the past month spiraled into head-shaking metaphysical “What the hell is going on here” questioning of my decision to get out of bed that morning.</li><li><em>Act 1</em> - My Midway-Vegas-Nashville travel day. This trip didn’t start out to be stupid. It started as an easy day trip to downtown Nashville for a sales call. So many people are abandoning Chicago for Nashville, Southwest has non-stop flights every 90 minutes, so no problem with flight times. That works out fine -- until someone books a sales call the prior afternoon -- in Las Vegas. Hmmm, how do I get from Vegas after 4pm Pacific to Nashville in time for a meeting the next morning Central time? Southwest is about the only choice, connecting through either Denver or Houston. I go for the more direct routing through Denver -- my first mistake.</li><li>Because, as it turned out, the March “bomb cyclone” -- what the Weather Channel helpfully named “Winter Storm Ulmer” (who or what is an Ulmer?) -- was going to shut down DIA that day with 80 mph winds. I got an e-mail from Southwest the day before canceling my connection through Denver -- understandable -- but nothing else, no rebooking, just “We’re leaving you in Vegas” -- which I’ve found tends to be Southwest’s MO -- pleasantly unhelpful. Especially when the website errored out when I tried to find an alternate routing to Nashville, and the automated message answering their 800 number was estimating 80-some minute hold times. After about 45 minutes, between banging on the website, our corporate Concur app, and tweeting at their customer service, I managed to get re-routed through Houston, safely south of the bomb cyclone.</li><li>The next morning, I show up at the gate at Midway to find my 8am flight to Vegas delayed by 2 hours -- mechanical on the plane here meant they had to bring in a new plane and crew from somewhere else. Annoying, but not critical; I’d get into Vegas at noon for a 2pm meeting. I get another coffee, log into the Boingo hotspot and clear some emails. 9:40, we line up and board. And wait. Then the captain keys the mike, pauses (never a good sign) and then starts talking - he didn’t have time to do the walkaround before we boarded because they came in late. When they did, they noticed a problem with the front strut. Maintenance is looking at it, don’t know if they can fix it, but they need everyone off the plane. So we deplane for what is now my 2nd maintenance delay. We idle around the gate area. 10:30 and nothing. I start looking at my watch. If I’m don’t get into Vegas by 1pm, there won’t be enough time to get to my 2pm meeting, and so I shouldn’t get on the plane. Then they start to re-board us. What time will we get in? 12:20. OK, I’ll board. We all get back on -- and for the most part retaking the seats we had, in spite of Southwest’s open seating. We are creatures of habit. I’m surprised no one moo’d. We’re all on, and we wait. The mike keys. There’s a slight moan rather than a moo from the cabin. We’re waiting on the paperwork. It’s always paperwork. I’m looking at my watch. It’s past 11am Central and the door is still open. A 4-hour flight means we’re now coming up against that 1pm Pacific arrive time. Do I stay on the plane? A couple minutes more and my decision is made for me; they close the door. I lean back, put on my headphones and hope for no headwinds. We get to the gate at 1:02pm. Vegas is always a maze; there’s no straight walkways; they always want to vector you through a thicket of slot machines. I head to the cab rank -- shorter walk and no waiting -- and I get a guy with a heavy foot. I’m at the client 5 minutes before the meeting. That was a bit too close.</li><li>My return trip to the airport and the flight to Houston are uneventful, not even any turbulence as we skirt that bomb cyclone. We get into Hobby maybe even a bit early. I grab a beer and then head over to the gate. They call boarding - just half the A group -- 1-30 -- because that’s all there is on this late flight to Nashville. The gate agent scans the boarding passes, saying “You’re in Row 3, you’re in Row 4, you’re in Row 5….”  We get all get in our separate rows, and then wait. The captain keys the mike, pauses, and then says “This plane had a bird strike on the nose on landing. There’s no damage, but Maintenance has to pull the nose cone off for a visual inspection. It’ll take about an hour, so you’re free to get off the plane.” But by now, everything in the airport was closed. “My 3rd maintenance delay of the day. Unbelievable!” I tweet out in frustrustration. Except that iPhone autocorrect turned “delay” into “deejay”. Hilary Baumann pointed it out with a nice emoji-laden tweet that gave me a good chuckle. I finally got to my Nashville hotel around 1:30 in the morning. I looked at the time, shook my head, and went to bed.</li><li>Bridge Music —  South Texas Cowboy Blues by texasradiofish (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/texasradiofish/52030 Ft: unreal_dm, ElRon XChile</li><li><em>Act 2</em> - A couple of weeks later, on Sunday in Rennes, France. We wheeled our luggage the 2 blocks from our AirBnB to Rennes train station for the TGV to CDG. We stood with everyone else, looking up at the departure board waiting for the track to be posted. Departure time came closer and still no track -- not a good sign. The crowd grew larger. There was an announcement in French and a scrolling message at the bottom of the departure screen. Irene banged it into Google Translate. The gist of it -- a bomb threat had been phoned into SCNF, the train company, and all the trains in and out of Paris were halted. Given France’s recent history with terrorism, it was a reasonable response, but still…. They finally start posting delay times -- 40 mins, then over an hour, but then it shrinks back. I pull up Google Maps. The drive to CDG is showing about the same time as the train, but we’d be in control of our own destiny. I walk down to the rental car offices. It’s Sunday morning; they’re all closed. They won’t open until the afternoon; too late for us to drive and make our flights. </li><li>Time continues to tick by, past the departure time for our flight. I call United -- any other options? I get a phenomenally helpful agent. I can hear the keystrokes. Nothing else today Sunday, nor tomorrow, Monday. I wasn’t surprised about nothing available today, but was about the next day -- until I got a text from Andrew. He was on this morning’s United flight to Chicago which just cancelled for a hydraulic problem and rebooked on tomorrow’s flight -- which explains the lack of seats for us. I took the Tuesday seats. Now would we get to CDG in time for Claire’s EasyJet flight to Edinburgh so she can make class the next day. The trains finally start moving. We head down and board our train. And then wait, and wait some  more. And then the train starts moving. I look at my watch. I think Claire will be OK. </li><li>Until we come to a stop in the middle of a rail yard. I watch a couple of guys walk past our car -- maybe a visual inspection? After a bit, we start moving -- backwards. The conductor keys the mike, and makes an announcement in rapid French that we can’t pick up. I open Google Maps. I see we’re off to the east of Paris but can’t tell if we’re moving in the right direction. Until we pull into the next station -- it’s for EuroDisney. I find our train route on the SCNF website and see this is one of the stops en route to CDG, so we’re going in the right direction. We get to CDG by 3pm, which means Claire can make her flight. Andrew comes over from the Airport Hilton, where United is putting him up for the night, and we head down to Paris for another dinner together. There are, after all, worse cities to have to spend an extra day or two.</li><li>Bridge Music —  <em>Parisian </em>Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ </li><li><em>Act 3</em> - Tuesday morning, Paris. Our forced layover in Paris yesterday had been a beautiful day, sunny and warm. We walked through the Marais, south across Ile de la Cite, taking the obligatory selfie in front of Notre Dame that we pulled out at looked at two weeks later during the news coverage of the fire, and then rattled around the Latin Quarter looking for a place with outdoor seating and a nice rosé. This morning, though, not so beautiful. It was dumping rain. So rather than trundle our luggage 10 min to the Metro stop, I decide to order an Uber -- which takes a try or two when Chase declines my Visa again; and I switch over to Amex. A nice black Mercedes picks us up and heads for Les Halles -- or at least tries to. The traffic is a crawl at best. I watch our buffer time tick away and we’re not  getting any closer. After sitting through a couple of traffic light cycles without clearing the intersection, we grab our bags and make for Les Halles on foot. We get there, a bit wet. We’re able to skip the ticket booth line; I have enough euros for the self-service machine, because it’s that or a chip-&amp;-pin card we don’t have. We get on the train. I look at my watch - we should have enough time to check our bags (bringing back some liquids), clear security, and get to the gate without too much more agita.</li><li>Until the train slows to a stop between stops. The conductor keys the mike, and makes an announcement in rapid French. I look at the other passengers. They don’t seem too agitated. I figure it’s some congestion on the track ahead. And, sure enough, we start moving after a couple of minutes. But at the next stop, the train doors stay open and a train employee come on, saying in French <em>and</em> English -- everyone has to get off, catch a bus outside the station to another station, then catch a different train to the airport. We head down the bus stop. There’s no one there to help; just a couple hundred people milling around.</li><li>Now I’m worried. We have no time to figure this out. The taxi stand is mobbed, I fire up Uber - 19-minute wait. Lyft? They’re not in Paris. I google to find taxi company but before I call, I try Uber one more time -- a 5-minute wait for a €60 fare. I hit the order button -- and then again after I swap over to Amex. €60 for a 15-minute ride to CDG is tough, but it’s cheaper than another night in a hotel. We get to the United desk 2 minutes before luggage check closes for our flight. The agent radioed down, checked in our bags, and then gave us the CDG version of Fast Track, so we could sidestep the long passport control and security lines. We board, sit down, but don’t really settle in until the plane leaves the ground. And when we’re finally at ORD, standing by the luggage carousel, our bags are the first ones to come out.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #150</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_150.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<p><!--EndFragment--></p>\n<p></p>','Podcast #150 — Travel Interruptus','','inherit','closed','closed','','2402-autosave-v1','','','2021-11-12 12:15:38','2021-11-12 17:15:38','',2402,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4008',0,'revision','',0),
(4009,1,'2021-11-12 12:16:17','2021-11-12 17:16:17','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":2404} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/CoeazhcUMAAhyQN-300x251.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2404\"/><figcaption>This guy looks familiar...</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It\'s been a tough month for travel. Not quite to Book of Job-level torment, but two of this month\'s three trips spiraled into head-shaking metaphysical “What the hell is going on here” questioning of my decision to get out of bed that morning. I walk through the travel gods\' fun and games, as well as some new data on regional jet delays and buying a new travel bag.  All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_150.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #150: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, as the weather begins to stagger unsteadily toward Spring -- 74 degrees on Monday, 5.3 inches of snow (thundersnow!) on Sunday, then back up into the 70’s two days later.  April 14 -- over 5 inches of snow, over 1,000 flights cancelled. A nasty surprise for folks who thought it would be safe to connect through ORD, but just validates a Chicago truism -- don’t put the snow gear away until after Tax Day. Yup, welcome to the Midwest.</li><li>Have done a <em>chunk</em> of travel -- there’s a unit of measure for you -- since the last episode. A 2-day trip that hit 4 airports in the first day -- Chicago-Midway, Las Vegas, Houston-Hobby, and Nashville. The next week, I squoze in a trip to a new airport - State College, PA -- before heading out on vacation to Brittany, France. The squeeze wasn’t too tight -- flew back from State College on Weds night and left on vacation Thursday night -- but I did scout out a couple of backups in case the United Express regional jet went AWOL; a hour or so drive down to Harrisburg, a couple hour drive over to Pittsburgh. Luckily, I didn’t need them. United Express was having a good day, and therefore, so did I.</li><li>The next day’s flight to Paris on SAS by way of Stockholm went fine. We got in on time, found the left luggage lockers, and then the express train into the city all without much hassle. Arlanda Airport is comfortably sized and has good signage. The only real problem was that we got into center city Stockholm too early -- around 8:30am -- and nothing was really open. So we coffee’d up at one place, had some cardamom pastries at another, and generally puttered around until things started opening up an hour or so later. It was a sunny, if brisk, day, so walking around the Gamla Stan and Sodermalm was nice. </li><li>I always chuckle a bit when going through De Gaulle Airport, passing through the tangle of flat escalator walkway tubes that bridge the levels and open center of Terminal 1. The walkways are a bit awkward with wheeled luggage -- going down and then up. An airport porter in front of us let a wheelchair go free on the downhill span -- took a moment for it to register that it was empty -- then it rolled back to him on the uphill. No knock against him; it was the end of the day.</li><li>The next day, we caught the train out to Brittany, to Saint Malo. We walked out of the train station and across the street to Europcar for what was one of the easiest rental car pick-ups I’ve ever had in Europe. No scare-tactic insurance upselling -- just a look at my driver’s license and a quick pointer to where I could find the car in the train station parking lot. Five minutes, max. And dropping off the car a week later at Rennes train station? Absolutely the easiest rental drop-off -- gave the guy the keys and a receipt showing I’d filled up the car and I was done. No waiting for him to go inspect the car, just a handshake and “Have a good day”. </li><li>The next day wasn’t near as carefree, but we’ll talk about that in a few minutes.</li><li>Bridge Music — <em>Countryside Summer Joyride</em> by Kara Square (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mindmapthat/56281 Ft: Javolenus</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I’ve been not-quite-hating on, but certainly have been down on regional jets for quite some time on this podcast. Given a choice, I recommend people avoid them -- not because of their size, but their schedule dependability. Because the regional airlines’ model is to bounce a plane from place to place rather than route through hubs, they never recover from weather or mechanical delays. Those delays just cascade through the rest of the day. Now there often aren’t alternatives. Hence my earlier comment about needing backup plans for my regional jet flight home from State College. My flight was at the end of the day, the most vulnerable time to delays. Given my personal experience,  I wasn’t surprised to read that US Dept of Transportation data showed that regional flights were 2-4 times more likely to be cancelled than mainline flights. The Chicago Tribune dug into the DOT data and found flights operated by Delta’s regional partners were 4 times more likely to be canceled than flights operated by Delta, while American Eagle and United Express were 2-3 times more likely to cancel flights than their mainline partners. You can’t avoid regional jets when going to places like State College or Charlottesville, VA or Appleton, WI -- but you can when flying to LGA or DFW or MSY. And in those cases, unless those RJ flights have exactly the schedule I need, I’ll suffer a bit of inconvenience for a lot more dependability.</li><li>On our travels through Brittany earlier this month, I found that we were getting a large number of “card declined” messages when trying to use our Chase Sapphire Visa card -- at gas stations, stores, and in Paris when I tried to use my Uber app. Now this isn’t a new card -- we’ve had it for over 5 years -- and it’s not the first time we’ve used it on travels in Europe. But Chase fraud algorithm seems more sensitive, throwing more false positives, and no way to update things. On the way out of Brest, I pulled into a Total gas station to fill up on our way to the Crozon peninsula. We’d be there for a couple of days of hiking and I wasn’t sure many gas stations we’d see (turned out that I didn’t need to worry). I pull up to a pump, tap the Chase Visa, get a decline. Insert the card into the reader; get another decline. I do the same drill with my Citi MasterCard with the same result. However, I immediately get a fraud alert from Citi. I hit the big green “Yes” button on the e-mail -- as in, “Yes, I do recognize this charge” -- get an “all clear” response back, tap my Citi card again and fill up my tank. All this time, we get nothing from Chase. I open the Chase app on my phone; nothing there either. Same thing in Paris when I needed an Uber fast (more on that in a bit). Chase declined, but my Amex Platinum card went through. For me, it was just annoying; I always carry a full set of cards when traveling -- a Visa and a MasterCard from different banks, and an Amex -- because single points of failure when traveling are bad -- I don’t want to be left hanging if one bank or one card processor drops their network or loses a data center. Oh, and I also carry cash. But, as we’ve <a aria-label=\"talked (opens in a new tab)\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/02/10/podcast-148-travel-potpourri-for-200-alex/\" target=\"_blank\">talked</a> <a aria-label=\"about (opens in a new tab)\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/12/17/podcast-147-holiday-travel-tips-notes-from-santa-fe/\" target=\"_blank\">about</a> <a aria-label=\"before (opens in a new tab)\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\" target=\"_blank\">before</a>, that’s ‘cause I’m old-school.</li><li>Brittany was a touring vacation, so we were moving every couple of days or so -- packing, unpacking, repacking. During one of those repacking sessions, maybe in Morgat on the Crozon peninsula -- I couldn’t find my Bose headphone case, which had my Bose headphones, in my backpack -- and I didn’t remember pulling out. Where the hell did they go, I asked myself. I pull everything out of my backpack and -- oh, there they are; they had slipped behind my camera bag in the bottom of my backpack. How did I lose my headphones in my backpack, you may ask -- and rightfully so because it really sounds stupid. Probably the same reason I lost a Google tablet in there a few years back -- too much black. The Bose case is black, the interior of Timbuk 2 backpack is black, my eyes aren’t as good as they used to be… I’d been toying around with getting a new bag, more of a messenger style -- that I could sling over one shoulder and with a bit better waterproofing. And, after this little panic drill, a non-black interior. I ended up getting a small Timbuk 2 Classic messenger bag from the Outlet section of REI.com for $50. It’s not too big -- holds my 11-inch MacBook Air, a couple of notebooks, an umbrella -- and has a bright yellow interior. I haven’t lost anything in it yet -- but I don’t trust myself. Maybe I need to get, like a white umbrella, and spray paint my Bose case red. I love black, but maybe I’ve taken that color palette a bit too far.</li><li>And if you have any travel rants, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a aria-label=\"mpeacock (opens in a new tab)\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a aria-label=\"Facebook page (opens in a new tab)\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Facebook page</a> or our Instagram account at <a aria-label=\" (opens in a new tab)\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Travelcommons</a> -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music —  <em>Jester of the Golden Apocalypse</em> by Super_Sigil (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Super_Sigil/34750 </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Travel Interruptus</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A Greek tragedy in three acts where the travel gods toy with our anti-hero for fun and entertainment</li><li>OK, maybe not quite that bad, not quite Book of Job-level torment, but two out of the three trips I’ve taken in the past month spiraled into head-shaking metaphysical “What the hell is going on here” questioning of my decision to get out of bed that morning.</li><li><em>Act 1</em> - My Midway-Vegas-Nashville travel day. This trip didn’t start out to be stupid. It started as an easy day trip to downtown Nashville for a sales call. So many people are abandoning Chicago for Nashville, Southwest has non-stop flights every 90 minutes, so no problem with flight times. That works out fine -- until someone books a sales call the prior afternoon -- in Las Vegas. Hmmm, how do I get from Vegas after 4pm Pacific to Nashville in time for a meeting the next morning Central time? Southwest is about the only choice, connecting through either Denver or Houston. I go for the more direct routing through Denver -- my first mistake.</li><li>Because, as it turned out, the March “bomb cyclone” -- what the Weather Channel helpfully named “Winter Storm Ulmer” (who or what is an Ulmer?) -- was going to shut down DIA that day with 80 mph winds. I got an e-mail from Southwest the day before canceling my connection through Denver -- understandable -- but nothing else, no rebooking, just “We’re leaving you in Vegas” -- which I’ve found tends to be Southwest’s MO -- pleasantly unhelpful. Especially when the website errored out when I tried to find an alternate routing to Nashville, and the automated message answering their 800 number was estimating 80-some minute hold times. After about 45 minutes, between banging on the website, our corporate Concur app, and tweeting at their customer service, I managed to get re-routed through Houston, safely south of the bomb cyclone.</li><li>The next morning, I show up at the gate at Midway to find my 8am flight to Vegas delayed by 2 hours -- mechanical on the plane here meant they had to bring in a new plane and crew from somewhere else. Annoying, but not critical; I’d get into Vegas at noon for a 2pm meeting. I get another coffee, log into the Boingo hotspot and clear some emails. 9:40, we line up and board. And wait. Then the captain keys the mike, pauses (never a good sign) and then starts talking - he didn’t have time to do the walkaround before we boarded because they came in late. When they did, they noticed a problem with the front strut. Maintenance is looking at it, don’t know if they can fix it, but they need everyone off the plane. So we deplane for what is now my 2nd maintenance delay. We idle around the gate area. 10:30 and nothing. I start looking at my watch. If I’m don’t get into Vegas by 1pm, there won’t be enough time to get to my 2pm meeting, and so I shouldn’t get on the plane. Then they start to re-board us. What time will we get in? 12:20. OK, I’ll board. We all get back on -- and for the most part retaking the seats we had, in spite of Southwest’s open seating. We are creatures of habit. I’m surprised no one moo’d. We’re all on, and we wait. The mike keys. There’s a slight moan rather than a moo from the cabin. We’re waiting on the paperwork. It’s always paperwork. I’m looking at my watch. It’s past 11am Central and the door is still open. A 4-hour flight means we’re now coming up against that 1pm Pacific arrive time. Do I stay on the plane? A couple minutes more and my decision is made for me; they close the door. I lean back, put on my headphones and hope for no headwinds. We get to the gate at 1:02pm. Vegas is always a maze; there’s no straight walkways; they always want to vector you through a thicket of slot machines. I head to the cab rank -- shorter walk and no waiting -- and I get a guy with a heavy foot. I’m at the client 5 minutes before the meeting. That was a bit too close.</li><li>My return trip to the airport and the flight to Houston are uneventful, not even any turbulence as we skirt that bomb cyclone. We get into Hobby maybe even a bit early. I grab a beer and then head over to the gate. They call boarding - just half the A group -- 1-30 -- because that’s all there is on this late flight to Nashville. The gate agent scans the boarding passes, saying “You’re in Row 3, you’re in Row 4, you’re in Row 5….”  We get all get in our separate rows, and then wait. The captain keys the mike, pauses, and then says “This plane had a bird strike on the nose on landing. There’s no damage, but Maintenance has to pull the nose cone off for a visual inspection. It’ll take about an hour, so you’re free to get off the plane.” But by now, everything in the airport was closed. “My 3rd maintenance delay of the day. Unbelievable!” I tweet out in frustrustration. Except that iPhone autocorrect turned “delay” into “deejay”. Hilary Baumann pointed it out with a nice emoji-laden tweet that gave me a good chuckle. I finally got to my Nashville hotel around 1:30 in the morning. I looked at the time, shook my head, and went to bed.</li><li>Bridge Music —  South Texas Cowboy Blues by texasradiofish (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/texasradiofish/52030 Ft: unreal_dm, ElRon XChile</li><li><em>Act 2</em> - A couple of weeks later, on Sunday in Rennes, France. We wheeled our luggage the 2 blocks from our AirBnB to Rennes train station for the TGV to CDG. We stood with everyone else, looking up at the departure board waiting for the track to be posted. Departure time came closer and still no track -- not a good sign. The crowd grew larger. There was an announcement in French and a scrolling message at the bottom of the departure screen. Irene banged it into Google Translate. The gist of it -- a bomb threat had been phoned into SCNF, the train company, and all the trains in and out of Paris were halted. Given France’s recent history with terrorism, it was a reasonable response, but still…. They finally start posting delay times -- 40 mins, then over an hour, but then it shrinks back. I pull up Google Maps. The drive to CDG is showing about the same time as the train, but we’d be in control of our own destiny. I walk down to the rental car offices. It’s Sunday morning; they’re all closed. They won’t open until the afternoon; too late for us to drive and make our flights. </li><li>Time continues to tick by, past the departure time for our flight. I call United -- any other options? I get a phenomenally helpful agent. I can hear the keystrokes. Nothing else today Sunday, nor tomorrow, Monday. I wasn’t surprised about nothing available today, but was about the next day -- until I got a text from Andrew. He was on this morning’s United flight to Chicago which just cancelled for a hydraulic problem and rebooked on tomorrow’s flight -- which explains the lack of seats for us. I took the Tuesday seats. Now would we get to CDG in time for Claire’s EasyJet flight to Edinburgh so she can make class the next day. The trains finally start moving. We head down and board our train. And then wait, and wait some  more. And then the train starts moving. I look at my watch. I think Claire will be OK. </li><li>Until we come to a stop in the middle of a rail yard. I watch a couple of guys walk past our car -- maybe a visual inspection? After a bit, we start moving -- backwards. The conductor keys the mike, and makes an announcement in rapid French that we can’t pick up. I open Google Maps. I see we’re off to the east of Paris but can’t tell if we’re moving in the right direction. Until we pull into the next station -- it’s for EuroDisney. I find our train route on the SCNF website and see this is one of the stops en route to CDG, so we’re going in the right direction. We get to CDG by 3pm, which means Claire can make her flight. Andrew comes over from the Airport Hilton, where United is putting him up for the night, and we head down to Paris for another dinner together. There are, after all, worse cities to have to spend an extra day or two.</li><li>Bridge Music —  <em>Parisian </em>Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ </li><li><em>Act 3</em> - Tuesday morning, Paris. Our forced layover in Paris yesterday had been a beautiful day, sunny and warm. We walked through the Marais, south across Ile de la Cite, taking the obligatory selfie in front of Notre Dame that we pulled out at looked at two weeks later during the news coverage of the fire, and then rattled around the Latin Quarter looking for a place with outdoor seating and a nice rosé. This morning, though, not so beautiful. It was dumping rain. So rather than trundle our luggage 10 min to the Metro stop, I decide to order an Uber -- which takes a try or two when Chase declines my Visa again; and I switch over to Amex. A nice black Mercedes picks us up and heads for Les Halles -- or at least tries to. The traffic is a crawl at best. I watch our buffer time tick away and we’re not  getting any closer. After sitting through a couple of traffic light cycles without clearing the intersection, we grab our bags and make for Les Halles on foot. We get there, a bit wet. We’re able to skip the ticket booth line; I have enough euros for the self-service machine, because it’s that or a chip-&amp;-pin card we don’t have. We get on the train. I look at my watch - we should have enough time to check our bags (bringing back some liquids), clear security, and get to the gate without too much more agita.</li><li>Until the train slows to a stop between stops. The conductor keys the mike, and makes an announcement in rapid French. I look at the other passengers. They don’t seem too agitated. I figure it’s some congestion on the track ahead. And, sure enough, we start moving after a couple of minutes. But at the next stop, the train doors stay open and a train employee come on, saying in French <em>and</em> English -- everyone has to get off, catch a bus outside the station to another station, then catch a different train to the airport. We head down the bus stop. There’s no one there to help; just a couple hundred people milling around.</li><li>Now I’m worried. We have no time to figure this out. The taxi stand is mobbed, I fire up Uber - 19-minute wait. Lyft? They’re not in Paris. I google to find taxi company but before I call, I try Uber one more time -- a 5-minute wait for a €60 fare. I hit the order button -- and then again after I swap over to Amex. €60 for a 15-minute ride to CDG is tough, but it’s cheaper than another night in a hotel. We get to the United desk 2 minutes before luggage check closes for our flight. The agent radioed down, checked in our bags, and then gave us the CDG version of Fast Track, so we could sidestep the long passport control and security lines. We board, sit down, but don’t really settle in until the plane leaves the ground. And when we’re finally at ORD, standing by the luggage carousel, our bags are the first ones to come out.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #150</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_150.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<p><!--EndFragment--></p>\n<p></p>','Podcast #150 — Travel Interruptus','','inherit','closed','closed','','2402-revision-v1','','','2021-11-12 12:16:17','2021-11-12 17:16:17','',2402,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4009',0,'revision','',0),
(4010,1,'2021-11-12 12:16:24','2021-11-12 17:16:24','[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/IMG_3657-scaled.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/IMG_3657-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Jumble of Travel Signs\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Post-Pandemic Travel Guidance[/caption]\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>No travel since the last episode, so just talking through a random potpourri of travel stuff. There\'s more travel planning; this time for a couple of weeks split between London and Wales which means sorting through a new set of COVID travel requirements. We look at some stats -- Uber\'s latest financials and how deeply last year\'s lockdown hit Nashville airport vendors.  I marvel at how much European mobile data rates have fallen, strip down my English to have a good chat with an Italian bartender, and wrap it all up with the highlight of this year\'s traveler\'s gift guide. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_181.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #181: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois, only 2 weeks after the last episode. Decided to kinda short-cycle this episode, see if I can get in an actual November episode rather than wait for December like I said at the end of the last episode. And to think that I used to do these weekly when I started out in 2005. Oh, the enthusiasm of youth -- and notebooks full of unused travel stories. I was going through some of those old episodes while doing a bit of website maintenance. The TSA gave me a lot of fodder for content back in the day. It was only 3½ years old when TravelCommons started, so I got to comment on (bitch about) all their growing pains -- the start of the shoe carnival, the liquid ban, all the different tries at screening technology (who could forget those “puffer” machines?) and, of course, their stellar customer service. But once I started going through PreCheck in 2012, there wasn’t much more to comment/bitch about -- which I know is a good thing overall, but it did leave me with a big content hole, kinda like in those TV series where the villain becomes one of the good guys in season 3 -- what do you do next?</li><li>And 16 years on, as I slouch towards semi-retirement, my travel experiences are changing. I’m thinking less about clever new ways to navigate ORD’s Monday morning road warrior rush hour or about totaling up delays on a 4- or 5-city cross-country itinerary, and thinking more about planning for longer leisure(?)/experiential(?) travel. Though I guess that’s not a complete change.  </li><li>Going through those old episodes reminded me that, even back at the start, I was talking about leisure travel -- to the point that episodes #8 and #9 were done while on vacation! I can only imagine what my family was thinking when they heard me nattering away in the bathroom of the Geneva, Switz Novatel and the Budapest Marriott.</li><li>But back to the present… Obviously, no travel since the last episode, just travel planning for our trip to the UK next week -- a week in London and then heading out to southern Wales for a week of walking, hiking, pretty much just being cold and wet because I didn’t get enough of that while biking in Puglia. </li><li>A big chunk of my time has been spent trying to figure out exactly what COVID paperwork we need to get into the UK. Since we’re vaccinated and coming from a non-red list country, we don’t need to show a negative COVID test before getting on the plane, but instead we have to get a test done in the UK and have to pre-pay for it so we can also fill out a passenger locator form 48 hours before departure. The UK government’s website is actually pretty good, with links to approved test providers. But most of them want to ship the test to a UK address, which is good if you’re returning home to the UK; less good if you’re staying in a hotel or Airbnb. So now I’m trying to figure out -- do I risk a long line at a Heathrow test center when we land or do I find a place somewhere in London the next day? Kinda makes me long for the days when all I had to worry about was finding a bank before 3pm on Friday to cash an American Express Travelers Check so I had cash for the weekend.... Nah, who am I kidding? That was so much more of a pain than this. Worst case, I figure out how to eat a full-cooked English breakfast standing up while in line.</li><li>Bridge Music — <em>Countryside Summer Joyride</em> by Kara Square (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mindmapthat/56281 Ft: Javolenus</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>This time last year, in t<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">he November 2020 episode</a>, we talked about all the end-of-the-year “don’t leave me” offers from the airlines and hotels, 20-50% cuts in whatever metric they used to award status --  stays, nights, miles, stays, segments, spend. And at the end of that bit, I said “Maybe they’ll be doing it again this time next year if that ‘Well, it’s probably more like the end of 2021 or maybe into the beginning of 2022 before things start feeling normal; forecast turns out to be true.” A year later, and after the Delta variant knocked down everyone’s Q3 revenues, I haven’t received any airline status sales yet, but I’ve already received status extensions from Marriott, Hilton, and, weirdly enough, IHG -- weird ‘cause I don’t <em>have</em> any status with them… that I know of, maybe I need to check. They’re all extending status for another year, to February or March 2023. So everyone’s kept their 2019 status for 3 years now -- 2020, 2021, and now 2022. And why not? Since a lot of the cost is concierge lounges that have been closed and free breakfasts that are now boxes with a yogurt and an orange, it’s probably the cheapest way to buy continued customer loyalty.</li><li>We’ve talked a lot in this podcast about Uber and Lyft. Back in episode #154 in August 2019, I asked “Will We Still Love Uber and Lyft When The Prices Go Up?” after both CEOs talked about getting to “rational pricing” -- “rational” being CEO-speak for “higher”. And then this year, talking about their post-pandemic driver shortages, customer service issues, and rising prices -- a pretty common topic. The Times of London <a href=\"https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/is-uber-over-cm70m2blm\">asks</a> “Is Uber Dead?” and the Chicago Tribune says in <a href=\"https://www.chicagotribune.com/opinion/editorials/ct-editorial-taxicabs-uber-lyft-rideshare-20210913-ljnt5wgxejepbmagoe33w7jud4-story.html\">an editorial</a> “We were wrong to abandon Chicago’s taxicabs for ride-shares and the city now needs to find a fix” which is a bit of a laugh because 4-5 years ago, everyone here complained that you couldn’t get a cab other than downtown or the airports, and definitely never in the poorer neighborhoods of the South and West sides.  If you read the <a href=\"https://investor.uber.com/news-events/news/press-release-details/2021/Uber-Announces-Results-for-Third-Quarter-2021/\">highlights of Uber’s Q3 financial results</a> released last week, they’re not quite dead. They trumpet that Q3 was their “first Adjusted EBITDA profitable quarter as a public company” Adjusted EBITDA - a fun accounting construct meaning “earnings before taxes, depreciation, and all the other bad stuff” and that the number of active drivers is up more than 65% since January. But what was interesting to me -- their delivery business, like Uber Eats, now generates more revenue than their traditional ride business. And maybe competing for drivers? Does make some sense. As the Times’ writer put it, “Food doesn’t complain about the route and parcels tend not to throw up on the back seat.”</li><li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors\">episode #170 last December</a>, we talked about how the CEO of Qantas had stirred up a good bit of controversy saying “We will ask people to have a vaccination before they can get on the aircraft” and the resulting land grab in vaccine passport apps. United and Lufthansa were testing out the <a href=\"https://thecommonsproject.org/commonpass\">CommonPass app</a>, Delta and Alitalia (may they rest in peace) the <a href=\"https://www.aokpass.com/en/\" title=\"AOKPass\">AOKPass </a>from the International Chamber of Commerce, and British Airways and Iberia the Travel Pass from an airline industry group. I said back then that it was a little messy, but it made sense since I didn’t think the handwritten card the CDC was handing out was going to pass muster at a boarding gate. Now, less than a year later, the Qantas CEO’s quote is pretty much standard operating procedure for international travel.  But vaccine passport apps? It’s a bit more mixed. Last month I flew Air France, United, Lufthansa, and ITA, the successor to Alitalia, and was never prompted to download any apps. Instead, I pulled out my trusty CDC card many times to prove my vaccination status, and for my flight home, opened Gmail on my iPhone a couple of times to show the PDF of my negative COVID test.  Pretty low tech, but honestly, at least in Italy, it worked faster than the EU’s Green Pass QR codes. We’d show our CDC cards and after a second or two be waved through while the Europeans were still trying to right-size the QR code on their phone screens so the scanner would register it. Upgrading to iOS 15.1 on my iPhone let me add a digital vaccination card to my Apple Wallet, but I don’t know where I’ll actually use it.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> or the <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram </a>account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music —  <em>Jester of the Golden Apocalypse</em> by Super_Sigil (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Super_Sigil/34750 </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Travel Potpourri for $600</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Regular listeners know that, every now and again, usually when I’m scraping for content, I gather up the odds-‘n’-ends from my travel notebooks that I can’t get “grow up” into a stand-alone topic and just string ‘em together into a Jeopardy-like topic “Travel Potpourri”. </li><li>I recently <a href=\"https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/2021/11/11/nashville-airport-race-build-more-dining-options-for-surging-travelers/6317805001/\">read some stats</a> about how the March 2020 lockdown impacted Nashville’s airport -- daily passenger count went from 50,000 to 500, and only 8 airport concessions out of a pre-COVID count of 52 survived. And now, 20 months later, passenger counts are pretty much back to pre-pandemic levels, but the concession count isn’t. They’re only back to 34 -- 18 food places and 16 shops, newsstands and other things. It takes more time to start things up than to shut them down -- especially when you have to get all your workers and supplies through TSA security every day. I’ll keep this in mind the next time I want to complain about a 10-deep line for a cup of coffee.</li><li>Traveling to Europe again means re-bookmarking the <a href=\"https://prepaid-data-sim-card.fandom.com/wiki/Prepaid_SIM_with_data\">Prepaid Data SIM Card Wiki</a> so I can research mobile data plans again. For 4 years, I didn’t have to worry about it. The EU had outlawed roaming charges and so I’d just use the UK SIM I bought the first time we took our daughter over to Scotland for college. That worked well until Brexit day last year. So on our first day in Bari, I searched out the nearest TIM store -- stands for Telecom Italia Mobile, I think. I wanted one of Italy’s big networks because our cycling tour would be taking us into the countryside, and so was OK paying a bit more for better coverage.  The last time I bought a mobile SIM in Italy was 5 years in Pisa and it was a huge hassle. But in Bari, we walked into the store, and the clerk was great. She kinda figured we were looking for SIMs, knew about the international plan I’d found on their website, and got the whole thing done in maybe 15 minutes. The price -- €25 ($30) for 70 GB of data, which, for all practical purposes translates to unlimited data -- meant the break-even point vs. paying AT&amp;T $10/day for international roaming was 3 days. Since we were in Italy for 16 days, it was a well-spent 15 minutes. I was amazed at how far mobile data prices have fallen. The last time I was in Europe, the fall of 2019, I put £10 on my EE SIM (about $12 back then) and got 3 GB. I just topped up that SIM again for our UK trip and got 15 GB for £15 -- 500% increase in data for 50% more money. That should hold us for 2 weeks. </li><li>In many past episodes, I’ve talked about how my search for local craft beer has taken me to places outside the typical travel bubble. And, for me, this is even more important since I’m doing less (no?) business travel. Because the nature of business travel -- traveling to work with clients who live there -- makes it easier to connect with that place, even if it’s just through hallway conversations like “What’d you do over the weekend”, but most times, it’s them saying “Oh, you gotta go to my favorite place while you’re here.” Our Puglia bike tour ended in Lecce in lousy weather. The rain had started the night before and continued dumping the next morning. We skipped the last ride. You could say we were lightweights, but we didn’t want to have to figure out how to pack soaking wet biking clothes. I wanted to walk around Lecce a bit before our dinner reservation, but Irene was cold from the wind and rain. So she headed back to the hotel while I searched out a beer bar I’d found on Untappd.</li><li>The place was pretty empty when I walked in; 7pm, it was early by Italian standards. The draft handles were all from a local Lecce brewery, so I asked the bartender, a young guy, his favorite, and he pointed to the IPA tap -- of course, but it was a pretty solid session IPA. He offered me a table, but I asked him if I could just stand and drink at the counter. We started to chat a bit (“Why have you come… to Lecce?”) His English wasn’t great (though orders-of magnitude better than my Italian, which is sorta damning with faint praise) so I started stripping down my English -- no slang, no contractions, clean articulation, simple declarative sentences. But in maybe a verbal corollary to the Mark Twain-ism “I would have written a shorter letter if I had the time…”, I find it takes a lot of thinking, a lot of mental work to do this, to strip my English down to something easily understandable. And the bartender appreciated it. “English people talk so fast,” he said. “I have a hard time understanding everything they say.” And by making my English more understandable, he gained confidence in his, and pushed it into more interesting topics like the split between Northern and Southern Italy (“They hate us!”) and even within Puglia (“We hate Bari and Bari hates us!”).  And why he wants to work on his English (“It’s so much more useful than Italian. A German person, a Swedish person comes into the bar; we all talk English)”. He was happy to get to practice his English. I was happy to oblige, and get a little peek at non-tourist Puglia without knowing any Italian.</li><li>Bridge Music —  South Texas Cowboy Blues by texasradiofish (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/texasradiofish/52030 Ft: unreal_dm, ElRon XChile</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong> 2021 Traveler’s Gift Guide</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Last week, I posted this year’s traveler’s gift guide. You can find it on the front page of the TravelCommons’ website; I’ll also put a link in the episode description so you can click to it straight from your podcast app. If <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">last year’s gift guide</a> was about helping people travel handle last-minute lockdowns with suggestions like bring-your-own dining sets and upscale in-room coffee brewing kits, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-to-survive-post-pandemic-travel/\">this year’s guide</a> is stacked with the gift ideas to help cope with all the predicted airline meltdowns when holiday passenger traffic smacks straight into crew and ground staff shortages. </li><li>I’m not going to run through the whole list -- you can hit the website for that -- but I’ll hit a couple of highlights. Top of this year’s list is battery packs. We talked in the last episode that we just can’t easily travel anymore without a working mobile phone. It holds our boarding passes and our proof of COVID vaccination, gives us gate change and flight delay notifications, and routes us around traffic jams. A dead phone while flights are being cancelled is more than just a bit of an inconvenience; having that second or third charge immediately available is critical when trying to swerve a long delay. There are a lot of choices; just pick one. I carry <a href=\"https://amzn.to/34fcbON\">Zendure</a> and <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3bHni97\">Anker</a> power banks; they’ve served me well. (And thanks to Jim McDonough for QA’ing the power bank links in the original blog post!)</li><li>Number 2 and a perennial favorite - Noise Canceling Headphone or Ear Buds. Whether you’re sitting in a noisy airport waiting out a delay or are up in the air, it’s great being able to cut out all the background noise and find your Zen place with the flick of a switch. I’ve been carrying Bose headphones for at least 15 years and am now on my 3rd pair, the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2Y9NWnY\">Bose 700’s</a>. They’re not compact yet they continue to earn their space in my travel bag. I find over-the-ear cans more comfortable, but if you can handle in-the-ear buds for extended periods, Bose does <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3ByWEda\">ear buds</a>, or for Apple ecosystem diehards, my kids recommend the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3GNszds\">AirPod Pros</a>.</li><li>Another suggestion for Apple ecosystem inhabitants is Apple’s <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3k4rCUy\">AirTag</a>. They have a lot more range than straight Bluetooth trackers like Tile because AirTags can ping off of any nearby Apple device, not just yours, to report its location. Putting an AirTag in your checked luggage can you see if your bag is joining you on the new flight the airline just rebooked you on, or you can hang one from your backpack to track it if it somehow wanders off down the concourse while your eyes are trying to find your delayed flight on the airport’s departure board.</li><li>Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/07/28/podcast-177-b-sides-and-rarities/\">July episode, episode #177</a>, I said my <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3q5vY1l\">USB-C to HDMI cable</a> was the most important piece of travel kit on my trip through the Northeast because, it let me mirror my MacBook Air on the hotel and beach house TVs so I could sit back with a beer and comfortably watch YouTube highlights of the Euro 2020 soccer tournament and the Tour de France on 40-60” flat screens instead of hunching over a 13” laptop screen.</li><li>And at number 9, a smartphone tripod. My <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3pZmjcS\">Square Jellyfish phone tripod</a> is light and doesn’t take up much space, but came in very handy while doing my COVID test video session in Italy the morning before my flight home. The eMed test proctor wanted to watch me swirl the cotton swab in my nose and then insert it into the test kit. I’m not sure how I would’ve done that while holding my phone. I use it a lot more than I thought I would for video calls and to watch quick videos on my phone.</li><li>So there you go, something to fit all sizes and budgets in time for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, or if you’re just killing time waiting for your Thanksgiving flight to leave.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #181</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social  -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_181.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #181 — Travel Potpourri; 2021 Traveler’s Gift Guide','','inherit','closed','closed','','4001-revision-v1','','','2021-11-12 12:16:24','2021-11-12 17:16:24','',4001,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4010',0,'revision','',0),
(4011,1,'2021-11-13 10:23:25','2021-11-13 15:23:25','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/IMG_3657-scaled.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/IMG_3657-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Jumble of Travel Signs\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> Post-Pandemic Travel Guidance[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>No travel since the last episode, so just talking through a random potpourri of travel stuff. There\'s more travel planning; this time for a couple of weeks split between London and Wales which means sorting through a new set of COVID travel requirements. We look at some stats -- Uber\'s latest financials and how deeply last year\'s lockdown hit Nashville airport vendors.  I marvel at how much European mobile data rates have fallen, strip down my English to have a deeper chat with an Italian bartender, and wrap it all up with the highlight of this year\'s traveler\'s gift guide. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_181.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #181: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois, only 2 weeks after the last episode. Decided to kinda short-cycle this episode, see if I can get in an actual November episode rather than wait for December like I said at the end of the last episode. And to think that I used to do these weekly when I started out in 2005. Oh, the enthusiasm of youth -- and notebooks full of unused travel stories. I was going through some of those old episodes while doing a bit of website maintenance. The TSA gave me a lot of fodder for content back in the day. It was only 3½ years old when TravelCommons started, so I got to comment on (bitch about) all their growing pains -- the start of the shoe carnival, the liquid ban, all the different tries at screening technology (who could forget those “puffer” machines?) and, of course, their stellar customer service. But once I started going through PreCheck in 2012, there wasn’t much more to comment/bitch about -- which I know is a good thing overall, but it did leave me with a big content hole, kinda like in those TV series where the villain becomes one of the good guys in season 3 -- what do you do next?</li><li>And 16 years on, as I slouch towards semi-retirement, my travel experiences are changing. I’m thinking less about clever new ways to navigate ORD’s Monday morning road warrior rush hour or about totaling up delays on a 4- or 5-city cross-country itinerary, and thinking more about planning for longer leisure(?)/experiential(?) travel. Though I guess that’s not a complete change.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>Going through those old episodes reminded me that, even back at the start, I was talking about leisure travel -- to the point that episodes #8 and #9 were done while on vacation! I can only imagine what my family was thinking when they heard me nattering away in the bathroom of the Geneva, Switz Novatel and the Budapest Marriott.</li><li>But back to the present… Obviously, no travel since the last episode, just travel planning for our trip to the UK next week -- a week in London and then heading out to southern Wales for a week of walking, hiking, pretty much just being cold and wet because I didn’t get enough of that while biking in Puglia.&nbsp;</li><li>A big chunk of my time has been spent trying to figure out exactly what COVID paperwork we need to get into the UK. Since we’re vaccinated and coming from a non-red list country, we don’t need to show a negative COVID test before getting on the plane, but instead we have to get a test done in the UK and have to pre-pay for it so we can also fill out a passenger locator form 48 hours before departure. The UK government’s website is actually pretty good, with links to approved test providers. But most of them want to ship the test to a UK address, which is good if you’re returning home to the UK; less good if you’re staying in a hotel or Airbnb. So now I’m trying to figure out -- do I risk a long line at a Heathrow test center when we land or do I find a place somewhere in London the next day? Kinda makes me long for the days when all I had to worry about was finding a bank before 3pm on Friday to cash an American Express Travelers Check so I had cash for the weekend.... Nah, who am I kidding? That was so much more of a pain than this. Worst case, I figure out how to eat a full-cooked English breakfast standing up while in line.</li><li>Bridge Music — <em>Countryside Summer Joyride</em> by Kara Square (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mindmapthat/56281 Ft: Javolenus</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>This time last year, in t<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">he November 2020 episode</a>, we talked about all the end-of-the-year “don’t leave me” offers from the airlines and hotels, 20-50% cuts in whatever metric they used to award status --&nbsp; stays, nights, miles, stays, segments, spend. And at the end of that bit, I said “Maybe they’ll be doing it again this time next year if that ‘Well, it’s probably more like the end of 2021 or maybe into the beginning of 2022 before things start feeling normal; forecast turns out to be true.” A year later, and after the Delta variant knocked down everyone’s Q3 revenues, I haven’t received any airline status sales yet, but I’ve already received status extensions from Marriott, Hilton, and, weirdly enough, IHG -- weird ‘cause I don’t <em>have</em> any status with them… that I know of, maybe I need to check. They’re all extending status for another year, to February or March 2023. So everyone’s kept their 2019 status for 3 years now -- 2020, 2021, and now 2022. And why not? Since a lot of the cost is concierge lounges that have been closed and free breakfasts that are now boxes with a yogurt and an orange, it’s probably the cheapest way to buy continued customer loyalty.</li><li>We’ve talked a lot in this podcast about Uber and Lyft. Back in episode #154 in August 2019, I asked “Will We Still Love Uber and Lyft When The Prices Go Up?” after both CEOs talked about getting to “rational pricing” -- “rational” being CEO-speak for “higher”. And then this year, talking about their post-pandemic driver shortages, customer service issues, and rising prices -- a pretty common topic. The Times of London <a href=\"https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/is-uber-over-cm70m2blm\">asks</a> “Is Uber Dead?” and the Chicago Tribune says in <a href=\"https://www.chicagotribune.com/opinion/editorials/ct-editorial-taxicabs-uber-lyft-rideshare-20210913-ljnt5wgxejepbmagoe33w7jud4-story.html\">an editorial</a> “We were wrong to abandon Chicago’s taxicabs for ride-shares and the city now needs to find a fix” which is a bit of a laugh because 4-5 years ago, everyone here complained that you couldn’t get a cab other than downtown or the airports, and definitely never in the poorer neighborhoods of the South and West sides.&nbsp; If you read the <a href=\"https://investor.uber.com/news-events/news/press-release-details/2021/Uber-Announces-Results-for-Third-Quarter-2021/\">highlights of Uber’s Q3 financial results</a> released last week, they’re not quite dead. They trumpet that Q3 was their “first Adjusted EBITDA profitable quarter as a public company” Adjusted EBITDA - a fun accounting construct meaning “earnings before taxes, depreciation, and all the other bad stuff” and that the number of active drivers is up more than 65% since January. But what was interesting to me -- their delivery business, like Uber Eats, now generates more revenue than their traditional ride business. And maybe competing for drivers? Does make some sense. As the Times’ writer put it, “Food doesn’t complain about the route and parcels tend not to throw up on the back seat.”</li><li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors\">episode #170 last December</a>, we talked about how the CEO of Qantas had stirred up a good bit of controversy saying “We will ask people to have a vaccination before they can get on the aircraft” and the resulting land grab in vaccine passport apps. United and Lufthansa were testing out the <a href=\"https://thecommonsproject.org/commonpass\">CommonPass app</a>, Delta and Alitalia (may they rest in peace) the <a href=\"https://www.aokpass.com/en/\" title=\"AOKPass\">AOKPass </a>from the International Chamber of Commerce, and British Airways and Iberia the Travel Pass from an airline industry group. I said back then that it was a little messy, but it made sense since I didn’t think the handwritten card the CDC was handing out was going to pass muster at a boarding gate. Now, less than a year later, the Qantas CEO’s quote is pretty much standard operating procedure for international travel.&nbsp; But vaccine passport apps? It’s a bit more mixed. Last month I flew Air France, United, Lufthansa, and ITA, the successor to Alitalia, and was never prompted to download any apps. Instead, I pulled out my trusty CDC card many times to prove my vaccination status, and for my flight home, opened Gmail on my iPhone a couple of times to show the PDF of my negative COVID test.&nbsp; Pretty low tech, but honestly, at least in Italy, it worked faster than the EU’s Green Pass QR codes. We’d show our CDC cards and after a second or two be waved through while the Europeans were still trying to right-size the QR code on their phone screens so the scanner would register it. Upgrading to iOS 15.1 on my iPhone let me add a digital vaccination card to my Apple Wallet, but I don’t know where I’ll actually use it.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> or the <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram </a>account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music —  <em>Jester of the Golden Apocalypse</em> by Super_Sigil (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Super_Sigil/34750 </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Travel Potpourri for $600</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Regular listeners know that, every now and again, usually when I’m scraping for content, I gather up the odds-‘n’-ends from my travel notebooks that I can’t get “grow up” into a stand-alone topic and just string ‘em together into a Jeopardy-like topic “Travel Potpourri”.&nbsp;</li><li>I recently <a href=\"https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/2021/11/11/nashville-airport-race-build-more-dining-options-for-surging-travelers/6317805001/\">read some stats</a> about how the March 2020 lockdown impacted Nashville’s airport -- daily passenger count went from 50,000 to 500, and only 8 airport concessions out of a pre-COVID count of 52 survived. And now, 20 months later, passenger counts are pretty much back to pre-pandemic levels, but the concession count isn’t. They’re only back to 34 -- 18 food places and 16 shops, newsstands and other things. It takes more time to start things up than to shut them down -- especially when you have to get all your workers and supplies through TSA security every day. I’ll keep this in mind the next time I want to complain about a 10-deep line for a cup of coffee.</li><li>Traveling to Europe again means re-bookmarking the <a href=\"https://prepaid-data-sim-card.fandom.com/wiki/Prepaid_SIM_with_data\">Prepaid Data SIM Card Wiki</a> so I can research mobile data plans again. For 4 years, I didn’t have to worry about it. The EU had outlawed roaming charges and so I’d just use the UK SIM I bought the first time we took our daughter over to Scotland for college. That worked well until Brexit day last year. So on our first day in Bari, I searched out the nearest TIM store -- stands for Telecom Italia Mobile, I think. I wanted one of Italy’s big networks because our cycling tour would be taking us into the countryside, and so was OK paying a bit more for better coverage.&nbsp; The last time I bought a mobile SIM in Italy was 5 years in Pisa and it was a huge hassle. But in Bari, we walked into the store, and the clerk was great. She kinda figured we were looking for SIMs, knew about the international plan I’d found on their website, and got the whole thing done in maybe 15 minutes. The price -- €25 ($30) for 70 GB of data, which, for all practical purposes translates to unlimited data -- meant the break-even point vs. paying AT&amp;T $10/day for international roaming was 3 days. Since we were in Italy for 16 days, it was a well-spent 15 minutes. I was amazed at how far mobile data prices have fallen. The last time I was in Europe, the fall of 2019, I put £10 on my EE SIM (about $12 back then) and got 3 GB. I just topped up that SIM again for our UK trip and got 15 GB for £15 -- 500% increase in data for 50% more money. That should hold us for 2 weeks.&nbsp;</li><li>In many past episodes, I’ve talked about how my search for local craft beer has taken me to places outside the typical travel bubble. And, for me, this is even more important since I’m doing less (no?) business travel. Because the nature of business travel -- traveling to work with clients who live there -- makes it easier to connect with that place, even if it’s just through hallway conversations like “What’d you do over the weekend”, but most times, it’s them saying “Oh, you gotta go to my favorite place while you’re here.” Our Puglia bike tour ended in Lecce in lousy weather. The rain had started the night before and continued dumping the next morning. We skipped the last ride. You could say we were lightweights, but we didn’t want to have to figure out how to pack soaking wet biking clothes. I wanted to walk around Lecce a bit before our dinner reservation, but Irene was cold from the wind and rain. So she headed back to the hotel while I searched out a beer bar I’d found on Untappd.</li><li>The place was pretty empty when I walked in; 7pm, it was early by Italian standards. The draft handles were all from a local Lecce brewery, so I asked the bartender, a young guy, his favorite, and he pointed to the IPA tap -- of course, but it was a pretty solid session IPA. He offered me a table, but I asked him if I could just stand and drink at the counter. We started to chat a bit (“Why have you come… to Lecce?”) His English wasn’t great (though orders-of magnitude better than my Italian, which is sorta damning with faint praise) so I started stripping down my English -- no slang, no contractions, clean articulation, simple declarative sentences. But in maybe a verbal corollary to the Mark Twain-ism “I would have written a shorter letter if I had the time…”, I find it takes a lot of thinking, a lot of mental work to do this, to strip my English down to something easily understandable. And the bartender appreciated it. “English people talk so fast,” he said. “I have a hard time understanding everything they say.” And by making my English more understandable, he gained confidence in his, and pushed it into more interesting topics like the split between Northern and Southern Italy (“They hate us!”) and even within Puglia (“We hate Bari and Bari hates us!”).&nbsp; And why he wants to work on his English (“It’s so much more useful than Italian. A German person, a Swedish person comes into the bar; we all talk English)”. He was happy to get to practice his English. I was happy to oblige, and get a little peek at non-tourist Puglia without knowing any Italian.</li><li>Bridge Music —  South Texas Cowboy Blues by texasradiofish (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/texasradiofish/52030 Ft: unreal_dm, ElRon XChile</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>&nbsp;2021 Traveler’s Gift Guide</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Last week, I posted this year’s traveler’s gift guide. You can find it on the front page of the TravelCommons’ website; I’ll also put a link in the episode description so you can click to it straight from your podcast app. If <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">last year’s gift guide</a> was about helping people travel handle last-minute lockdowns with suggestions like bring-your-own dining sets and upscale in-room coffee brewing kits, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-to-survive-post-pandemic-travel/\">this year’s guide</a> is stacked with the gift ideas to help cope with all the predicted airline meltdowns when holiday passenger traffic smacks straight into crew and ground staff shortages.&nbsp;</li><li>I’m not going to run through the whole list -- you can hit the website for that -- but I’ll hit a couple of highlights. Top of this year’s list is battery packs. We talked in the last episode that we just can’t easily travel anymore without a working mobile phone. It holds our boarding passes and our proof of COVID vaccination, gives us gate change and flight delay notifications, and routes us around traffic jams. A dead phone while flights are being cancelled is more than just a bit of an inconvenience; having that second or third charge immediately available is critical when trying to swerve a long delay. There are a lot of choices; just pick one. I carry <a href=\"https://amzn.to/34fcbON\">Zendure</a> and <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3bHni97\">Anker</a> power banks; they’ve served me well. (And thanks to Jim McDonough for QA’ing the power bank links in the original blog post!)</li><li>Number 2 and a perennial favorite - Noise Canceling Headphone or Ear Buds. Whether you’re sitting in a noisy airport waiting out a delay or are up in the air, it’s great being able to cut out all the background noise and find your Zen place with the flick of a switch. I’ve been carrying Bose headphones for at least 15 years and am now on my 3rd pair, the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2Y9NWnY\">Bose 700’s</a>. They’re not compact yet they continue to earn their space in my travel bag. I find over-the-ear cans more comfortable, but if you can handle in-the-ear buds for extended periods, Bose does <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3ByWEda\">ear buds</a>, or for Apple ecosystem diehards, my kids recommend the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3GNszds\">AirPod Pros</a>.</li><li>Another suggestion for Apple ecosystem inhabitants is Apple’s <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3k4rCUy\">AirTag</a>. They have a lot more range than straight Bluetooth trackers like Tile because AirTags can ping off of any nearby Apple device, not just yours, to report its location. Putting an AirTag in your checked luggage can you see if your bag is joining you on the new flight the airline just rebooked you on, or you can hang one from your backpack to track it if it somehow wanders off down the concourse while your eyes are trying to find your delayed flight on the airport’s departure board.</li><li>Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/07/28/podcast-177-b-sides-and-rarities/\">July episode, episode #177</a>, I said my <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3q5vY1l\">USB-C to HDMI cable</a> was the most important piece of travel kit on my trip through the Northeast because, it let me mirror my MacBook Air on the hotel and beach house TVs so I could sit back with a beer and comfortably watch YouTube highlights of the Euro 2020 soccer tournament and the Tour de France on 40-60” flat screens instead of hunching over a 13” laptop screen.</li><li>And at number 9, a smartphone tripod. My <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3pZmjcS\">Square Jellyfish phone tripod</a> is light and doesn’t take up much space, but came in very handy while doing my COVID test video session in Italy the morning before my flight home. The eMed test proctor wanted to watch me swirl the cotton swab in my nose and then insert it into the test kit. I’m not sure how I would’ve done that while holding my phone. I use it a lot more than I thought I would for video calls and to watch quick videos on my phone.</li><li>So there you go, something to fit all sizes and budgets in time for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, or if you’re just killing time waiting for your Thanksgiving flight to leave.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #181</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_181.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #181 — Travel Potpourri; 2021 Traveler’s Gift Guide','','inherit','closed','closed','','4001-revision-v1','','','2021-11-13 10:23:25','2021-11-13 15:23:25','',4001,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4011',0,'revision','',0),
(4013,1,'2021-11-13 13:51:09','2021-11-13 18:51:09','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/IMG_3657-scaled.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/IMG_3657-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Jumble of Travel Signs\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> Post-Pandemic Travel Guidance[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>No travel since the last episode, so just talking through a random potpourri of travel stuff. There\'s more travel planning; this time for a couple of weeks split between London and Wales which means sorting through a new set of COVID travel requirements. We look at some stats -- Uber\'s latest financials and how deeply last year\'s lockdown hit Nashville airport vendors.  I marvel at how much European mobile data rates have fallen, strip down my English to have a deeper chat with an Italian bartender, and wrap it all up with the highlight of this year\'s traveler\'s gift guide. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_181.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #181: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois, only 2 weeks after <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/10/28/podcast-180-tracking-covid-travel-requirements-cycling-thru-puglia/\" title=\"Podcast #180 — Tracking COVID Travel Requirements; Cycling Thru Puglia\">the last episode</a>. Decided to kinda short-cycle this episode, see if I can get in an actual November episode rather than wait for December like I said at the end of the last episode. And to think that I used to do these weekly when I started out in 2005. Oh, the enthusiasm of youth -- and notebooks full of unused travel stories. I was going through some of those old episodes while doing a bit of website maintenance. The TSA gave me a lot of fodder for content back in the day. It was only 3½ years old when TravelCommons started, so I got to comment on (bitch about) all their growing pains -- the start of the shoe carnival, the liquid ban, all the different tries at screening technology (who could forget those “puffer” machines?) and, of course, their stellar customer service. But once I started going through PreCheck in 2012, there wasn’t much more to comment/bitch about -- which I know is a good thing overall, but it did leave me with a big content hole, kinda like in those TV series where the villain becomes one of the good guys in season 3 -- what do you do next?</li><li>And 16 years on, as I slouch towards semi-retirement, my travel experiences are changing. I’m thinking less about clever new ways to navigate ORD’s Monday morning road warrior rush hour or about totaling up delays on a 4- or 5-city cross-country itinerary, and thinking more about planning for longer leisure(?)/experiential(?) travel. Though I guess that’s not a complete change.  </li><li>Going through those old episodes reminded me that, even back at the start, I was talking about leisure travel -- to the point that episodes <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/07/14/podcast-8-travelcommons-on-vacation/\" title=\"Podcast #8 – TravelCommons on Vacation\">#8</a> and <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/07/27/podcast-9-wrapping-up-the-vacation/\" title=\"Podcast #9 – Wrapping Up the Vacation\">#9</a> were done while on vacation! I can only imagine what my family was thinking when they heard me nattering away in the bathroom of the Geneva, Switz Novatel and the Budapest Marriott.</li><li>But back to the present… Obviously, no travel since the last episode, just travel planning for our trip to the UK next week -- a week in London and then heading out to southern Wales for a week of walking, hiking, pretty much just being cold and wet because I didn’t get enough of that while biking in Puglia. </li><li>A big chunk of my time has been spent trying to figure out exactly what COVID paperwork we need to get into the UK. Since we’re vaccinated and coming from a non-red list country, we don’t need to show a negative COVID test before getting on the plane, but instead we have to get a test done in the UK and have to pre-pay for it so we can also fill out a passenger locator form 48 hours before departure. The UK government’s website is actually pretty good, with links to approved test providers. But most of them want to ship the test to a UK address, which is good if you’re returning home to the UK; less good if you’re staying in a hotel or Airbnb. So now I’m trying to figure out -- do I risk a long line at a Heathrow test center when we land or do I find a place somewhere in London the next day? Kinda makes me long for the days when all I had to worry about was finding a bank before 3pm on Friday to cash an American Express Travelers Check so I had cash for the weekend.... Nah, who am I kidding? That was so much more of a pain than this. Worst case, I figure out how to eat a full-cooked English breakfast standing up while in line.</li><li>Bridge Music — <em>Countryside Summer Joyride</em> by Kara Square (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mindmapthat/56281 Ft: Javolenus</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>This time last year, in t<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">he November 2020 episode</a>, we talked about all the end-of-the-year “don’t leave me” offers from the airlines and hotels, 20-50% cuts in whatever metric they used to award status --  stays, nights, miles, stays, segments, spend. And at the end of that bit, I said “Maybe they’ll be doing it again this time next year if that ‘Well, it’s probably more like the end of 2021 or maybe into the beginning of 2022 before things start feeling normal; forecast turns out to be true.” A year later, and after the Delta variant knocked down everyone’s Q3 revenues, I haven’t received any airline status sales yet, but I’ve already received status extensions from Marriott, Hilton, and, weirdly enough, IHG -- weird ‘cause I don’t <em>have</em> any status with them… that I know of, maybe I need to check. They’re all extending status for another year, to February or March 2023. So everyone’s kept their 2019 status for 3 years now -- 2020, 2021, and now 2022. And why not? Since a lot of the cost is concierge lounges that have been closed and free breakfasts that are now boxes with a yogurt and an orange, it’s probably the cheapest way to buy continued customer loyalty.</li><li>We’ve talked a lot in this podcast about Uber and Lyft. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/08/13/podcast-154-will-we-still-love-uber-when-the-prices-go-up/\" title=\"Podcast #154 — Will We Still Love Uber When The Prices Go Up?\">episode #154</a> in August 2019, I asked “Will We Still Love Uber and Lyft When The Prices Go Up?” after both CEOs talked about getting to “rational pricing” -- “rational” being CEO-speak for “higher”. And then this year, talking about their post-pandemic driver shortages, customer service issues, and rising prices -- a pretty common topic. The Times of London <a href=\"https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/is-uber-over-cm70m2blm\">asks</a> “Is Uber Dead?” and the Chicago Tribune says in <a href=\"https://www.chicagotribune.com/opinion/editorials/ct-editorial-taxicabs-uber-lyft-rideshare-20210913-ljnt5wgxejepbmagoe33w7jud4-story.html\">an editorial</a> “We were wrong to abandon Chicago’s taxicabs for ride-shares and the city now needs to find a fix” which is a bit of a laugh because 4-5 years ago, everyone here complained that you couldn’t get a cab other than downtown or the airports, and definitely never in the poorer neighborhoods of the South and West sides.  If you read the <a href=\"https://investor.uber.com/news-events/news/press-release-details/2021/Uber-Announces-Results-for-Third-Quarter-2021/\">highlights of Uber’s Q3 financial results</a> released last week, they’re not quite dead. They trumpet that Q3 was their “first Adjusted EBITDA profitable quarter as a public company” Adjusted EBITDA - a fun accounting construct meaning “earnings before taxes, depreciation, and all the other bad stuff” and that the number of active drivers is up more than 65% since January. But what was interesting to me -- their delivery business, like Uber Eats, now generates more revenue than their traditional ride business. And maybe competing for drivers? Does make some sense. As the Times’ writer put it, “Food doesn’t complain about the route and parcels tend not to throw up on the back seat.”</li><li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors\">episode #170 last December</a>, we talked about how the CEO of Qantas had stirred up a good bit of controversy saying “We will ask people to have a vaccination before they can get on the aircraft” and the resulting land grab in vaccine passport apps. United and Lufthansa were testing out the <a href=\"https://thecommonsproject.org/commonpass\">CommonPass app</a>, Delta and Alitalia (may they rest in peace) the <a href=\"https://www.aokpass.com/en/\" title=\"AOKPass\">AOKPass </a>from the International Chamber of Commerce, and British Airways and Iberia the Travel Pass from an airline industry group. I said back then that it was a little messy, but it made sense since I didn’t think the handwritten card the CDC was handing out was going to pass muster at a boarding gate. Now, less than a year later, the Qantas CEO’s quote is pretty much standard operating procedure for international travel.  But vaccine passport apps? It’s a bit more mixed. Last month I flew Air France, United, Lufthansa, and ITA, the successor to Alitalia, and was never prompted to download any apps. Instead, I pulled out my trusty CDC card many times to prove my vaccination status, and for my flight home, opened Gmail on my iPhone a couple of times to show the PDF of my negative COVID test.  Pretty low tech, but honestly, at least in Italy, it worked faster than the EU’s Green Pass QR codes. We’d show our CDC cards and after a second or two be waved through while the Europeans were still trying to right-size the QR code on their phone screens so the scanner would register it. Upgrading to iOS 15.1 on my iPhone let me add a digital vaccination card to my Apple Wallet, but I don’t know where I’ll actually use it.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> or the <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram </a>account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music —  <em>Jester of the Golden Apocalypse</em> by Super_Sigil (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Super_Sigil/34750 </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Travel Potpourri for $600</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Regular listeners know that, every <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/02/10/podcast-148-travel-potpourri-for-200-alex/\" title=\"Podcast #148 — Travel Potpourri for $200, Alex\">now </a>and <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/12/31/podcast-158-travel-potpourri-for-400-alex/\" title=\"Podcast #158 — Travel Potpourri for $400, Alex\">again</a>, usually when I’m scraping for content, I gather up the odds-‘n’-ends from my travel notebooks that I can’t get “grow up” into a stand-alone topic and just string ‘em together into a Jeopardy-like topic “Travel Potpourri”. </li><li>I recently <a href=\"https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/2021/11/11/nashville-airport-race-build-more-dining-options-for-surging-travelers/6317805001/\">read some stats</a> about how the March 2020 lockdown impacted Nashville’s airport -- daily passenger count went from 50,000 to 500, and only 8 airport concessions out of a pre-COVID count of 52 survived. And now, 20 months later, passenger counts are pretty much back to pre-pandemic levels, but the concession count isn’t. They’re only back to 34 -- 18 food places and 16 shops, newsstands and other things. It takes more time to start things up than to shut them down -- especially when you have to get all your workers and supplies through TSA security every day. I’ll keep this in mind the next time I want to complain about a 10-deep line for a cup of coffee.</li><li>Traveling to Europe again means re-bookmarking the <a href=\"https://prepaid-data-sim-card.fandom.com/wiki/Prepaid_SIM_with_data\">Prepaid Data SIM Card Wiki</a> so I can research mobile data plans again. For 4 years, I didn’t have to worry about it. The EU had outlawed roaming charges and so I’d just use the UK SIM I bought the first time we took our daughter over to Scotland for college. That worked well until Brexit day last year. So on our first day in Bari, I searched out the nearest TIM store -- stands for Telecom Italia Mobile, I think. I wanted one of Italy’s big networks because our cycling tour would be taking us into the countryside, and so was OK paying a bit more for better coverage.  The last time I bought a mobile SIM in Italy was 5 years in Pisa and it was a huge hassle. But in Bari, we walked into the store, and the clerk was great. She kinda figured we were looking for SIMs, knew about the international plan I’d found on their website, and got the whole thing done in maybe 15 minutes. The price -- €25 ($30) for 70 GB of data, which, for all practical purposes translates to unlimited data -- meant the break-even point vs. paying AT&amp;T $10/day for international roaming was 3 days. Since we were in Italy for 16 days, it was a well-spent 15 minutes. I was amazed at how far mobile data prices have fallen. The last time I was in Europe, the fall of 2019, I put £10 on my EE SIM (about $12 back then) and got 3 GB. I just topped up that SIM again for our UK trip and got 15 GB for £15 -- 500% increase in data for 50% more money. That should hold us for 2 weeks. </li><li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/09/28/podcast-124-craft-beer-hunting-i-hate-rick-steves/\" title=\"Podcast #124 — Craft Beer Hunting; I Hate Rick Steves\">many </a><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/10/12/podcast-111-seatback-recline-wars-craft-beer-tourism/\" title=\"Podcast #111 — Seatback Recline Wars; Craft Beer Tourism\">past </a><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/04/10/podcast-174-how-the-pros-plan-their-taproom-tourism/\" title=\"Podcast #174 — How the Pros Plan Their Taproom Tourism\">episodes</a>, I’ve talked about how my search for local craft beer has taken me to places outside the typical travel bubble. And, for me, this is even more important since I’m doing less (no?) business travel. Because the nature of business travel -- traveling to work with clients who live there -- makes it easier to connect with that place, even if it’s just through hallway conversations like “What’d you do over the weekend”, but most times, it’s them saying “Oh, you gotta go to my favorite place while you’re here.” Our Puglia bike tour ended in Lecce in lousy weather. The rain had started the night before and continued dumping the next morning. We skipped the last ride. You could say we were lightweights, but we didn’t want to have to figure out how to pack soaking wet biking clothes. I wanted to walk around Lecce a bit before our dinner reservation, but Irene was cold from the wind and rain. So she headed back to the hotel while I searched out a beer bar I’d found on Untappd.</li><li>The place was pretty empty when I walked in; 7pm, it was early by Italian standards. The draft handles were all from a local Lecce brewery, so I asked the bartender, a young guy, his favorite, and he pointed to the IPA tap -- of course, but it was a pretty solid session IPA. He offered me a table, but I asked him if I could just stand and drink at the counter. We started to chat a bit (“Why have you come… to Lecce?”) His English wasn’t great (though orders-of magnitude better than my Italian, which is sorta damning with faint praise) so I started stripping down my English -- no slang, no contractions, clean articulation, simple declarative sentences. But in maybe a verbal corollary to the Mark Twain-ism “I would have written a shorter letter if I had the time…”, I find it takes a lot of thinking, a lot of mental work to do this, to strip my English down to something easily understandable. And the bartender appreciated it. “English people talk so fast,” he said. “I have a hard time understanding everything they say.” And by making my English more understandable, he gained confidence in his, and pushed it into more interesting topics like the split between Northern and Southern Italy (“They hate us!”) and even within Puglia (“We hate Bari and Bari hates us!”).  And why he wants to work on his English (“It’s so much more useful than Italian. A German person, a Swedish person comes into the bar; we all talk English)”. He was happy to get to practice his English. I was happy to oblige, and get a little peek at non-tourist Puglia without knowing any Italian.</li><li>Bridge Music —  South Texas Cowboy Blues by texasradiofish (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/texasradiofish/52030 Ft: unreal_dm, ElRon XChile</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>&nbsp;2021 Traveler’s Gift Guide</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Last week, I posted <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-to-survive-post-pandemic-travel/\" title=\"10 Best Travel Gift Ideas To Survive Post-Pandemic Travel\">this year’s traveler’s gift guide</a>. You can find it on the front page of the TravelCommons’ website; I’ll also put a link in the episode description so you can click to it straight from your podcast app. If <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">last year’s gift guide</a> was about helping people travel handle last-minute lockdowns with suggestions like bring-your-own dining sets and upscale in-room coffee brewing kits, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-to-survive-post-pandemic-travel/\">this year’s guide</a> is stacked with the gift ideas to help cope with all the predicted airline meltdowns when holiday passenger traffic smacks straight into crew and ground staff shortages. </li><li>I’m not going to run through the whole list -- you can hit the website for that -- but I’ll hit a couple of highlights. Top of this year’s list is battery packs. We talked in the<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/10/28/podcast-180-tracking-covid-travel-requirements-cycling-thru-puglia/\" title=\"Podcast #180 — Tracking COVID Travel Requirements; Cycling Thru Puglia\"> last episode</a> that we just can’t easily travel anymore without a working mobile phone. It holds our boarding passes and our proof of COVID vaccination, gives us gate change and flight delay notifications, and routes us around traffic jams. A dead phone while flights are being cancelled is more than just a bit of an inconvenience; having that second or third charge immediately available is critical when trying to swerve a long delay. There are a lot of choices; just pick one. I carry <a href=\"https://amzn.to/34fcbON\">Zendure</a> and <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3bHni97\">Anker</a> power banks; they’ve served me well. (And thanks to Jim McDonough for QA’ing the power bank links in the original blog post!)</li><li>Number 2 and a perennial favorite - Noise Canceling Headphone or Ear Buds. Whether you’re sitting in a noisy airport waiting out a delay or are up in the air, it’s great being able to cut out all the background noise and find your Zen place with the flick of a switch. I’ve been carrying Bose headphones for at least 15 years and am now on my 3rd pair, the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2Y9NWnY\">Bose 700’s</a>. They’re not compact yet they continue to earn their space in my travel bag. I find over-the-ear cans more comfortable, but if you can handle in-the-ear buds for extended periods, Bose does <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3ByWEda\">ear buds</a>, or for Apple ecosystem diehards, my kids recommend the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3GNszds\">AirPod Pros</a>.</li><li>Another suggestion for Apple ecosystem inhabitants is Apple’s <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3k4rCUy\">AirTag</a>. They have a lot more range than straight Bluetooth trackers like Tile because AirTags can ping off of any nearby Apple device, not just yours, to report its location. Putting an AirTag in your checked luggage can you see if your bag is joining you on the new flight the airline just rebooked you on, or you can hang one from your backpack to track it if it somehow wanders off down the concourse while your eyes are trying to find your delayed flight on the airport’s departure board.</li><li>Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/07/28/podcast-177-b-sides-and-rarities/\">July episode, episode #177</a>, I said my <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3q5vY1l\">USB-C to HDMI cable</a> was the most important piece of travel kit on my trip through the Northeast because, it let me mirror my MacBook Air on the hotel and beach house TVs so I could sit back with a beer and comfortably watch YouTube highlights of the Euro 2020 soccer tournament and the Tour de France on 40-60” flat screens instead of hunching over a 13” laptop screen.</li><li>And at number 9, a smartphone tripod. My <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3pZmjcS\">Square Jellyfish phone tripod</a> is light and doesn’t take up much space, but came in very handy while doing my COVID test video session in Italy the morning before my flight home. The eMed test proctor wanted to watch me swirl the cotton swab in my nose and then insert it into the test kit. I’m not sure how I would’ve done that while holding my phone. I use it a lot more than I thought I would for video calls and to watch quick videos on my phone.</li><li>So there you go, something to fit all sizes and budgets in time for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, or if you’re just killing time waiting for your Thanksgiving flight to leave.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #181</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_181.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #181 — Travel Potpourri; 2021 Traveler’s Gift Guide','','inherit','closed','closed','','4001-revision-v1','','','2021-11-13 13:51:09','2021-11-13 18:51:09','',4001,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4013',0,'revision','',0);
INSERT INTO `wp_posts` VALUES
(4014,1,'2021-11-13 14:07:51','2021-11-13 19:07:51','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/IMG_3657-scaled.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/IMG_3657-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Jumble of Travel Signs\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> Post-Pandemic Travel Guidance[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>No travel since the last episode, so just talking through a random potpourri of travel stuff. There\'s more travel planning; this time for a couple of weeks split between London and Wales which means sorting through a new set of COVID travel requirements. We look at some stats -- Uber\'s latest financials and how deeply last year\'s lockdown hit Nashville airport vendors.  I marvel at how much European mobile data rates have fallen, strip down my English to have a deeper chat with an Italian bartender, and wrap it all up with highlights from this year\'s traveler\'s gift guide. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_181.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #181: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois, only 2 weeks after <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/10/28/podcast-180-tracking-covid-travel-requirements-cycling-thru-puglia/\" title=\"Podcast #180 — Tracking COVID Travel Requirements; Cycling Thru Puglia\">the last episode</a>. Decided to kinda short-cycle this episode, see if I can get in an actual November episode rather than wait for December like I said at the end of the last episode. And to think that I used to do these weekly when I started out in 2005. Oh, the enthusiasm of youth -- and notebooks full of unused travel stories. I was going through some of those old episodes while doing a bit of website maintenance. The TSA gave me a lot of fodder for content back in the day. It was only 3½ years old when TravelCommons started, so I got to comment on (bitch about) all their growing pains -- the start of the shoe carnival, the liquid ban, all the different tries at screening technology (who could forget those “puffer” machines?) and, of course, their stellar customer service. But once I started going through PreCheck in 2012, there wasn’t much more to comment/bitch about -- which I know is a good thing overall, but it did leave me with a big content hole, kinda like in those TV series where the villain becomes one of the good guys in season 3 -- what do you do next?</li><li>And 16 years on, as I slouch towards semi-retirement, my travel experiences are changing. I’m thinking less about clever new ways to navigate ORD’s Monday morning road warrior rush hour or about totaling up delays on a 4- or 5-city cross-country itinerary, and thinking more about planning for longer leisure(?)/experiential(?) travel. Though I guess that’s not a complete change.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>Going through those old episodes reminded me that, even back at the start, I was talking about leisure travel -- to the point that episodes <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/07/14/podcast-8-travelcommons-on-vacation/\" title=\"Podcast #8 – TravelCommons on Vacation\">#8</a> and <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/07/27/podcast-9-wrapping-up-the-vacation/\" title=\"Podcast #9 – Wrapping Up the Vacation\">#9</a> were done while on vacation! I can only imagine what my family was thinking when they heard me nattering away in the bathroom of the Geneva, Switz Novatel and the Budapest Marriott.</li><li>But back to the present… Obviously, no travel since the last episode, just travel planning for our trip to the UK next week -- a week in London and then heading out to southern Wales for a week of walking, hiking, pretty much just being cold and wet because I didn’t get enough of that while biking in Puglia.&nbsp;</li><li>A big chunk of my time has been spent trying to figure out exactly what COVID paperwork we need to get into the UK. Since we’re vaccinated and coming from a non-red list country, we don’t need to show a negative COVID test before getting on the plane, but instead we have to get a test done in the UK and have to pre-pay for it so we can also fill out a passenger locator form 48 hours before departure. The UK government’s website is actually pretty good, with links to approved test providers. But most of them want to ship the test to a UK address, which is good if you’re returning home to the UK; less good if you’re staying in a hotel or Airbnb. So now I’m trying to figure out -- do I risk a long line at a Heathrow test center when we land or do I find a place somewhere in London the next day? Kinda makes me long for the days when all I had to worry about was finding a bank before 3pm on Friday to cash an American Express Travelers Check so I had cash for the weekend.... Nah, who am I kidding? That was so much more of a pain than this. Worst case, I figure out how to eat a full-cooked English breakfast standing up while in line.</li><li>Bridge Music — <em>Countryside Summer Joyride</em> by Kara Square (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mindmapthat/56281 Ft: Javolenus</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>This time last year, in t<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">he November 2020 episode</a>, we talked about all the end-of-the-year “don’t leave me” offers from the airlines and hotels, 20-50% cuts in whatever metric they used to award status --&nbsp; stays, nights, miles, stays, segments, spend. And at the end of that bit, I said “Maybe they’ll be doing it again this time next year if that ‘Well, it’s probably more like the end of 2021 or maybe into the beginning of 2022 before things start feeling normal; forecast turns out to be true.” A year later, and after the Delta variant knocked down everyone’s Q3 revenues, I haven’t received any airline status sales yet, but I’ve already received status extensions from Marriott, Hilton, and, weirdly enough, IHG -- weird ‘cause I don’t <em>have</em> any status with them… that I know of, maybe I need to check. They’re all extending status for another year, to February or March 2023. So everyone’s kept their 2019 status for 3 years now -- 2020, 2021, and now 2022. And why not? Since a lot of the cost is concierge lounges that have been closed and free breakfasts that are now boxes with a yogurt and an orange, it’s probably the cheapest way to buy continued customer loyalty.</li><li>We’ve talked a lot in this podcast about Uber and Lyft. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/08/13/podcast-154-will-we-still-love-uber-when-the-prices-go-up/\" title=\"Podcast #154 — Will We Still Love Uber When The Prices Go Up?\">episode #154</a> in August 2019, I asked “Will We Still Love Uber and Lyft When The Prices Go Up?” after both CEOs talked about getting to “rational pricing” -- “rational” being CEO-speak for “higher”. And then this year, talking about their post-pandemic driver shortages, customer service issues, and rising prices -- a pretty common topic. The Times of London <a href=\"https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/is-uber-over-cm70m2blm\">asks</a> “Is Uber Dead?” and the Chicago Tribune says in <a href=\"https://www.chicagotribune.com/opinion/editorials/ct-editorial-taxicabs-uber-lyft-rideshare-20210913-ljnt5wgxejepbmagoe33w7jud4-story.html\">an editorial</a> “We were wrong to abandon Chicago’s taxicabs for ride-shares and the city now needs to find a fix” which is a bit of a laugh because 4-5 years ago, everyone here complained that you couldn’t get a cab other than downtown or the airports, and definitely never in the poorer neighborhoods of the South and West sides.&nbsp; If you read the <a href=\"https://investor.uber.com/news-events/news/press-release-details/2021/Uber-Announces-Results-for-Third-Quarter-2021/\">highlights of Uber’s Q3 financial results</a> released last week, they’re not quite dead. They trumpet that Q3 was their “first Adjusted EBITDA profitable quarter as a public company” Adjusted EBITDA - a fun accounting construct meaning “earnings before taxes, depreciation, and all the other bad stuff” and that the number of active drivers is up more than 65% since January. But what was interesting to me -- their delivery business, like Uber Eats, now generates more revenue than their traditional ride business. And maybe competing for drivers? Does make some sense. As the Times’ writer put it, “Food doesn’t complain about the route and parcels tend not to throw up on the back seat.”</li><li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors\">episode #170 last December</a>, we talked about how the CEO of Qantas had stirred up a good bit of controversy saying “We will ask people to have a vaccination before they can get on the aircraft” and the resulting land grab in vaccine passport apps. United and Lufthansa were testing out the <a href=\"https://thecommonsproject.org/commonpass\">CommonPass app</a>, Delta and Alitalia (may they rest in peace) the <a href=\"https://www.aokpass.com/en/\" title=\"AOKPass\">AOKPass </a>from the International Chamber of Commerce, and British Airways and Iberia the Travel Pass from an airline industry group. I said back then that it was a little messy, but it made sense since I didn’t think the handwritten card the CDC was handing out was going to pass muster at a boarding gate. Now, less than a year later, the Qantas CEO’s quote is pretty much standard operating procedure for international travel.&nbsp; But vaccine passport apps? It’s a bit more mixed. Last month I flew Air France, United, Lufthansa, and ITA, the successor to Alitalia, and was never prompted to download any apps. Instead, I pulled out my trusty CDC card many times to prove my vaccination status, and for my flight home, opened Gmail on my iPhone a couple of times to show the PDF of my negative COVID test.&nbsp; Pretty low tech, but honestly, at least in Italy, it worked faster than the EU’s Green Pass QR codes. We’d show our CDC cards and after a second or two be waved through while the Europeans were still trying to right-size the QR code on their phone screens so the scanner would register it. Upgrading to iOS 15.1 on my iPhone let me add a digital vaccination card to my Apple Wallet, but I don’t know where I’ll actually use it.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> or the <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram </a>account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music —  <em>Jester of the Golden Apocalypse</em> by Super_Sigil (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Super_Sigil/34750 </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Travel Potpourri for $600</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Regular listeners know that, every <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/02/10/podcast-148-travel-potpourri-for-200-alex/\" title=\"Podcast #148 — Travel Potpourri for $200, Alex\">now </a>and <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/12/31/podcast-158-travel-potpourri-for-400-alex/\" title=\"Podcast #158 — Travel Potpourri for $400, Alex\">again</a>, usually when I’m scraping for content, I gather up the odds-‘n’-ends from my travel notebooks that I can’t get “grow up” into a stand-alone topic and just string ‘em together into a Jeopardy-like topic “Travel Potpourri”.&nbsp;</li><li>I recently <a href=\"https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/2021/11/11/nashville-airport-race-build-more-dining-options-for-surging-travelers/6317805001/\">read some stats</a> about how the March 2020 lockdown impacted Nashville’s airport -- daily passenger count went from 50,000 to 500, and only 8 airport concessions out of a pre-COVID count of 52 survived. And now, 20 months later, passenger counts are pretty much back to pre-pandemic levels, but the concession count isn’t. They’re only back to 34 -- 18 food places and 16 shops, newsstands and other things. It takes more time to start things up than to shut them down -- especially when you have to get all your workers and supplies through TSA security every day. I’ll keep this in mind the next time I want to complain about a 10-deep line for a cup of coffee.</li><li>Traveling to Europe again means re-bookmarking the <a href=\"https://prepaid-data-sim-card.fandom.com/wiki/Prepaid_SIM_with_data\">Prepaid Data SIM Card Wiki</a> so I can research mobile data plans again. For 4 years, I didn’t have to worry about it. The EU had outlawed roaming charges and so I’d just use the UK SIM I bought the first time we took our daughter over to Scotland for college. That worked well until Brexit day last year. So on our first day in Bari, I searched out the nearest TIM store -- stands for Telecom Italia Mobile, I think. I wanted one of Italy’s big networks because our cycling tour would be taking us into the countryside, and so was OK paying a bit more for better coverage.&nbsp; The last time I bought a mobile SIM in Italy was 5 years in Pisa and it was a huge hassle. But in Bari, we walked into the store, and the clerk was great. She kinda figured we were looking for SIMs, knew about the international plan I’d found on their website, and got the whole thing done in maybe 15 minutes. The price -- €25 ($30) for 70 GB of data, which, for all practical purposes translates to unlimited data -- meant the break-even point vs. paying AT&amp;T $10/day for international roaming was 3 days. Since we were in Italy for 16 days, it was a well-spent 15 minutes. I was amazed at how far mobile data prices have fallen. The last time I was in Europe, the fall of 2019, I put £10 on my EE SIM (about $12 back then) and got 3 GB. I just topped up that SIM again for our UK trip and got 15 GB for £15 -- 500% increase in data for 50% more money. That should hold us for 2 weeks.&nbsp;</li><li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/09/28/podcast-124-craft-beer-hunting-i-hate-rick-steves/\" title=\"Podcast #124 — Craft Beer Hunting; I Hate Rick Steves\">many </a><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/10/12/podcast-111-seatback-recline-wars-craft-beer-tourism/\" title=\"Podcast #111 — Seatback Recline Wars; Craft Beer Tourism\">past </a><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/04/10/podcast-174-how-the-pros-plan-their-taproom-tourism/\" title=\"Podcast #174 — How the Pros Plan Their Taproom Tourism\">episodes</a>, I’ve talked about how my search for local craft beer has taken me to places outside the typical travel bubble. And, for me, this is even more important since I’m doing less (no?) business travel. Because the nature of business travel -- traveling to work with clients who live there -- makes it easier to connect with that place, even if it’s just through hallway conversations like “What’d you do over the weekend”, but most times, it’s them saying “Oh, you gotta go to my favorite place while you’re here.” Our Puglia bike tour ended in Lecce in lousy weather. The rain had started the night before and continued dumping the next morning. We skipped the last ride. You could say we were lightweights, but we didn’t want to have to figure out how to pack soaking wet biking clothes. I wanted to walk around Lecce a bit before our dinner reservation, but Irene was cold from the wind and rain. So she headed back to the hotel while I searched out a beer bar I’d found on Untappd.</li><li>The place was pretty empty when I walked in; 7pm, it was early by Italian standards. The draft handles were all from a local Lecce brewery, so I asked the bartender, a young guy, his favorite, and he pointed to the IPA tap -- of course, but it was a pretty solid session IPA. He offered me a table, but I asked him if I could just stand and drink at the counter. We started to chat a bit (“Why have you come… to Lecce?”) His English wasn’t great (though orders-of magnitude better than my Italian, which is sorta damning with faint praise) so I started stripping down my English -- no slang, no contractions, clean articulation, simple declarative sentences. But in maybe a verbal corollary to the Mark Twain-ism “I would have written a shorter letter if I had the time…”, I find it takes a lot of thinking, a lot of mental work to do this, to strip my English down to something easily understandable. And the bartender appreciated it. “English people talk so fast,” he said. “I have a hard time understanding everything they say.” And by making my English more understandable, he gained confidence in his, and pushed it into more interesting topics like the split between Northern and Southern Italy (“They hate us!”) and even within Puglia (“We hate Bari and Bari hates us!”).&nbsp; And why he wants to work on his English (“It’s so much more useful than Italian. A German person, a Swedish person comes into the bar; we all talk English)”. He was happy to get to practice his English. I was happy to oblige, and get a little peek at non-tourist Puglia without knowing any Italian.</li><li>Bridge Music —  South Texas Cowboy Blues by texasradiofish (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/texasradiofish/52030 Ft: unreal_dm, ElRon XChile</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>&nbsp;2021 Traveler’s Gift Guide</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Last week, I posted <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-to-survive-post-pandemic-travel/\" title=\"10 Best Travel Gift Ideas To Survive Post-Pandemic Travel\">this year’s traveler’s gift guide</a>. You can find it on the front page of the TravelCommons’ website; I’ll also put a link in the episode description so you can click to it straight from your podcast app. If <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">last year’s gift guide</a> was about helping people travel handle last-minute lockdowns with suggestions like bring-your-own dining sets and upscale in-room coffee brewing kits, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-to-survive-post-pandemic-travel/\">this year’s guide</a> is stacked with the gift ideas to help cope with all the predicted airline meltdowns when holiday passenger traffic smacks straight into crew and ground staff shortages.&nbsp;</li><li>I’m not going to run through the whole list -- you can hit the website for that -- but I’ll hit a couple of highlights. Top of this year’s list is battery packs. We talked in the<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/10/28/podcast-180-tracking-covid-travel-requirements-cycling-thru-puglia/\" title=\"Podcast #180 — Tracking COVID Travel Requirements; Cycling Thru Puglia\"> last episode</a> that we just can’t easily travel anymore without a working mobile phone. It holds our boarding passes and our proof of COVID vaccination, gives us gate change and flight delay notifications, and routes us around traffic jams. A dead phone while flights are being cancelled is more than just a bit of an inconvenience; having that second or third charge immediately available is critical when trying to swerve a long delay. There are a lot of choices; just pick one. I carry <a href=\"https://amzn.to/34fcbON\">Zendure</a> and <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3bHni97\">Anker</a> power banks; they’ve served me well. (And thanks to Jim McDonough for QA’ing the power bank links in the original blog post!)</li><li>Number 2 and a perennial favorite - Noise Canceling Headphone or Ear Buds. Whether you’re sitting in a noisy airport waiting out a delay or are up in the air, it’s great being able to cut out all the background noise and find your Zen place with the flick of a switch. I’ve been carrying Bose headphones for at least 15 years and am now on my 3rd pair, the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2Y9NWnY\">Bose 700’s</a>. They’re not compact yet they continue to earn their space in my travel bag. I find over-the-ear cans more comfortable, but if you can handle in-the-ear buds for extended periods, Bose does <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3ByWEda\">ear buds</a>, or for Apple ecosystem diehards, my kids recommend the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3GNszds\">AirPod Pros</a>.</li><li>Another suggestion for Apple ecosystem inhabitants is Apple’s <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3k4rCUy\">AirTag</a>. They have a lot more range than straight Bluetooth trackers like Tile because AirTags can ping off of any nearby Apple device, not just yours, to report its location. Putting an AirTag in your checked luggage can you see if your bag is joining you on the new flight the airline just rebooked you on, or you can hang one from your backpack to track it if it somehow wanders off down the concourse while your eyes are trying to find your delayed flight on the airport’s departure board.</li><li>Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/07/28/podcast-177-b-sides-and-rarities/\">July episode, episode #177</a>, I said my <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3q5vY1l\">USB-C to HDMI cable</a> was the most important piece of travel kit on my trip through the Northeast because, it let me mirror my MacBook Air on the hotel and beach house TVs so I could sit back with a beer and comfortably watch YouTube highlights of the Euro 2020 soccer tournament and the Tour de France on 40-60” flat screens instead of hunching over a 13” laptop screen.</li><li>And at number 9, a smartphone tripod. My <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3pZmjcS\">Square Jellyfish phone tripod</a> is light and doesn’t take up much space, but came in very handy while doing my COVID test video session in Italy the morning before my flight home. The eMed test proctor wanted to watch me swirl the cotton swab in my nose and then insert it into the test kit. I’m not sure how I would’ve done that while holding my phone. I use it a lot more than I thought I would for video calls and to watch quick videos on my phone.</li><li>So there you go, something to fit all sizes and budgets in time for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, or if you’re just killing time waiting for your Thanksgiving flight to leave.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #181</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_181.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #181 — Travel Potpourri; 2021 Traveler’s Gift Guide','','inherit','closed','closed','','4001-revision-v1','','','2021-11-13 14:07:51','2021-11-13 19:07:51','',4001,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4014',0,'revision','',0),
(4017,1,'2021-12-07 15:59:08','2021-12-07 20:59:08','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_1985\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/IMG_1758-scaled.jpeg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-3581 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/IMG_2173-300x300.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a>I Feel Safer Already[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Last month\'s travel got me wondering what travel changes are going to stick after the COVID pandemic begins to recede. With all the restaurant and bar closures caused by COVID lockdowns, I\'m updating my recommendations list based on recent travels. And I\'m <em>way </em>overthinking our first post-lockdown international trip.  All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_178.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #178: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois after a much lighter travel schedule than before the last episode. The day after posting the July episode, Irene and I got back in the car (because those 12-hour drives to and from the East Coast just weren’t enough for me), but this time heading north, as I mentioned at the end of the last episode, to Traverse City, MI to do Paddle for Pints with some friends; it’s a taproom crawl, but in kayaks instead of on streets. It’s a lot of fun. There’s something about physical exertion while drinking that seems to justify the next beer.&nbsp;</li><li>Now, anyone who’s driven any distance through the Midwest knows there’s only two seasons here -- winter and construction season -- and we didn’t get too far outside of Chicago on I-90 before a merge down to single lane traffic ground traffic to a crawl and I started refreshing Waze and Google Maps looking for alternatives. I’ve said in past episodes that, even though Google owns both, my experience is they can recommend different routes, especially in high-traffic, fast-changing situations. To me, Waze feels a little “twitchier”; it’ll twist you down a half-dozen random side streets to save 30 seconds while Google Maps guesses you’re willing to suck it up for a couple more minutes in exchange for a simpler route. And that’s exactly what happened to us in northwest Indiana which leaves me trying to figure out which route to take. I tweeted out later (actually while on a snack break in a taproom in Grand Rapids) “ I really hate it when Google Maps and Waze fight” to which the Waze social media crew replied “We like to think of it more as a disagreement”. Nicely done. And then Jim McDonough, a long-time TravelCommons listener, added “Apple Maps breaks the tie?”&nbsp; Good idea, but I was having enough fun swiping between two maps; adding a third would’ve put me in the ditch for sure. I mostly used Waze, but skipped the recommended routing through side streets in Gary, Indiana. The risk-reward trade-off on that just didn’t feel worth it.</li><li>I was supposed to head out to the Bay Area last week on business, going to a plant on the east side of the Bay for a big team meeting. But it got re-vectored at the last minute from California back to Chicago because that Bay Area country had reinstated indoor mask mandates. Nobody questioned the move. With everyone on the team fully vaccinated months ago, we’d all happily gotten used to meeting with each other like it’s 2019 again and really didn’t want to go back to 8 hours of masks, muffled voices, and trying to read non-verbal cues from the nose up. As it was, we just made it under the wire -- our meeting was Wednesday and Thursday, and then on Friday, Chicago’s indoor mask mandate went into effect. It’s sorta peak Chicago that the city collected the revenue off of 385,000 mostly maskless Lollapalooza attendees before dropping the boom on those of us who actually live in the city.</li><li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;Astral Travel by Astral (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Astral/44282</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>One of the reasons it takes me so long to do an episode is I lack the discipline to bail out when I get caught in a click spiral. This time it was about the <a href=\"https://www.pennlive.com/nation-world/2021/07/teen-airdrops-photo-of-an-airsoft-gun-forcing-the-evacuation-of-a-united-airlines-flight.html\">United Airlines flight that was evacuated because a teenager decided to troll fellow passengers by AirDropping them a picture of an Airsoft gun</a>. For the non-iPhone users out there, AirDrop lets iPhones and Macs easily share stuff -- pictures, videos, web links -- wirelessly with others nearby. It’s been around for about 10 years and pretty quickly people figured out they could drop random/<em>interesting</em> pictures onto nearby strangers who had set their phones wide-open. I’ve seen this happen and it can be pretty funny, watching someone suddenly start looking around in a bar or a train, wondering who’d AirDropped them a picture. But what’s funny or, at worst, annoying in a bar is easily interpreted as a safety threat 10 years on from 9/11. They pulled everyone off for rescreening, searched the plane, and then left three hours later, leaving the teen behind in SFO. Understandable, I thought, if maybe a slight overreaction -- until I got to maybe the 5th page of Google search results where I clicked through to not-yet- another rehash of the United incident, but something different -- a <a href=\"https://www.fox5atlanta.com/news/panic-on-planes-after-images-are-airdropped\">story</a> about an AirDropped message on a Delta flight. It said “A plane-jacking will happen soon, 2 hours and 37 minutes it will start in the front on aisle 6.” That flight too was evacuated, but this time they didn’t find the sender. Maybe airlines’ safety demos need to show iPhone users how to set their AirDrop to “Receiving Off”.</li><li>Irene and I continue to push on with plans for our first post-lockdown international trip, to Italy for a bike tour through Puglia. The whole Delta variant thing adds to the uncertainty. I talked in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/05/09/podcast-175-how-to-find-local-tour-guides-rebuild-travel-muscles/\">episode #175</a> about sorting through trip insurance and figuring out what credit card to use for the tour. Now booking hotels before and after the tour, we’re choosing to pay 10-15 euros more a night for cancellable rates, kind of a DIY trip insurance. Booking our flights into Bari, where the tour starts, I’ve also felt the need to be a bit more thoughtful. Airline schedules seem to be a bit more <em>variable</em> than usual. Last week, American sent me a note to let me know our November LHR-ORD flight has moved up 5:15pm to 10:35am. I understand that; air traffic is <em>not</em> following predictable patterns and they’re trying to keep up. For that direct flight home from London, it’s not a problem. But when we’re having to make a connection to a city with not-frequent service, it’s a different matter. The first thing I did was X out anything with more than 1 stop; it’ll be hard enough keeping 2 flights aligned let alone 3. Then I focused on the big European hubs -- Heathrow, Frankfurt, DeGaulle -- skipping connections at smaller places like Munich, Zurich. Finally, I look for connection times around 3 hours; what I thought would be a “Goldilocks” connection -- not too short that any hiccup on the inbound flight would cause a problem, but not too long that we’d be having to sit in the airport all day wearing a mask or would have to track COVID protocols in yet another country because of an overnight connection. All that being said, we’re booked on Air France with a 2 hr, 50 minute connection in DeGaulle. But I don’t have any SkyTeam status, which causes me a bit of a worry -- maybe we get caught in a long non-status security line. So I did some DIY trip insurance on the flight, burning an extra bit of my pile of American Express Membership miles for a ride in business class (cancellable, of course) to make up for my non-status status. You could say I’ve gone <em>way</em> down a rabbit hole overthinking this one and I wouldn’t really argue with you. But then again, it’s the first international trip in 2 years that I’ve been able to plan. So it’s kinda like an only child, getting way too much their parent’s attention. </li><li>I was digging through my travel card wallet for my Global Entry card to find my Known Traveler number to put on the Air France reservation and came across a handful of Southwest drink coupons that are about to hit their expiration date. <a href=\"https://community.southwest.com/t5/Knowledge-Base/Expired-2020-Drink-Coupons/ta-p/114294\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Southwest says expiring drink coupons are good through the end of this year</a>. But Southwest suspended alcohol sales a few months back, and rightly so after a passenger assaulted a flight attendant, saying the booze won’t return until the federal mask mandate ends. But the TSA just extended that until January, past the coupons’ extended expiration date. And really, I don’t see the TSA letting up on in-flight masks anytime soon, so is Southwest going to be the first dry airline?</li><li>I mentor start-up founders at <a href=\"https://1871.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">a tech incubator in Chicago</a>. A few months ago, one of my sessions was with a bionic implant start-up. Implant the chip and the back of your hand becomes a contactless card; get into your office or pay at Starbucks with the tap of your hand. Another reminder, if a bit, say, unsettling (icky?), of the move to a cashless society. I talked about it back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\" title=\"Podcast #136 — Is Cash A Waning King; Don’t Make It Hard to Cash in on Loyalty\">episode #136</a> in 2017, about being maybe the last generation of cash payers, that my younger traveling colleagues rarely carried cash; they paid for everything with a card. And then, the pandemic massively accelerated it. Everything went contactless; nobody wanted to handle your cash. Last year, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/07/17/podcast-165-first-post-lockdown-flight-when-does-business-travel-come-back/\" title=\"Podcast #165 — First Post Lockdown Flight; When Do We Travel For Business Again?\">episode #165</a>, I noticed I had the same $200 of 20’s in my wallet in June that I’d taken out of an ATM right before the March lockdown. Last month in New York, the coffee joint across from our hotel was card-only and the same for the ice cream shop around the corner from our place in Chicago. Restaurants that use the Toast point-of-sale system print out a QR code at the bottom of your receipt, letting you pay and walk away. The country of Sweden thinks they’ll be completely cashless in 2 years. But I’m seeing a little reversion to the mean post-lockdown. I stopped off at a bar during a Saturday bike ride for a rehydration break. I asked the bartender if she took cash. “Yup,” she said, “Never stopped. It spends just like everything else.” It felt good to put a 20 on the bar, order beers, and see her take cash from the pile just like in 2019. It’s also that inflation is making it tougher for small places to eat the 2.5-3% card fees. The little Mexican place across the street from work where I’ll grab carne asada tacos for lunch now tacks on that fee for card users. They’re happy when I pull out cash, though last week I got 80 cents back in nickels. I guess the cashless thing has now caused a shortage of quarters. </li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — Emma by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/50905 Ft: Martijn de Boer</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>What Will Remain from These Pandemic Times?</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>In past episodes, I’ve been pretty skeptical about forecasts of permanent changes to the travel industry, or society in general, from&nbsp; the pandemic. I have enough grey hair to remember commentators using the same “everything has changed” and “this is the new normal” language 13 years ago after the 2008 Great Recession, yet somehow we ended up back to maybe within 90% of&nbsp; 2007, the pre-recession starting point. Reversion to the mean is a strong force.</li><li>Unless it’s countered by a stronger force -- like saving money -- which is why I think the odds-on favorites for <a href=\"https://onemileatatime.com/hilton-hotel-service-cuts-permanent/\">pandemic changes made permanent</a> are what we’ve seen at hotels and restaurants. Checking into the Hilton in Midtown Manhattan last month, the front desk guy told us that they weren’t doing daily housekeeping; we could either schedule housekeeping now or call them when we wanted it. Pre-pandemic, Starwood and then Marriott would offer you points for skipping housekeeping -- Go Green they called it. They pitched it as eco-friendly, but it really was all about saving labor costs. But the Hilton didn’t offer me any points. The week before,<a href=\"https://onemileatatime.com/news/hilton-housekeeping-on-demand/\"> Hilton announced their new policy of on-request housekeeping</a> across all of their brands; the first major chain to cement what had been an <em>ad hoc</em> pandemic response into a new chain-wide policy. The press release talked about “guest comfort”, but behind the PR flacks, it’s all about cost savings. I expect to see Marriott and others follow soon. I do have to give props to the housekeeping staff at that Hilton, though. When, after 3 days, I did call for a room cleaning, they were there in 5 minutes.&nbsp;</li><li>A bigger loss for me is the breakfast buffet. My usual pre-pandemic routine was to work out and then take a quick pass through the concierge lounge for breakfast. Hotels must’ve found their <em>ad hoc</em> grab-n-go breakfast sacks cheaper because that too feels like it’s going to be the new normal. Way back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/01/27/podcast-113-2014-was-a-bad-year-to-fly-restaurant-trends-go-local/\">episode #113</a>, in January 2015, I scoffed at a bartender in MSP who reached over to punch my food order into the iPad mounted in front of me. Now, we aim our own smartphones at QR codes and order our own meals -- without any help -- again, saving labor costs.&nbsp;</li><li>Airlines started reverting to the mean at the end of last year when they dropped capacity restrictions and put butts in the middle seats again -- just as traffic began to recover. If you haven’t been on a flight this year, you’d think nothing happened -- well, except everyone wearing masks and the missing Bloody Mary eye openers on the morning Southwest flights to Vegas. Some folks are predicting the death of cancellation fees, but I don’t buy it. <a href=\"https://thepointsguy.com/news/will-american-delta-eliminate-change-fees/\">In 2019, United made $625 million in change and cancellation fees; ten of the largest U.S. carriers made $2.84 billion</a>. That’s too big of a hole to leave unfilled. And they’re already creeping back in. Most Basic Economy seats are back to non-changeable/non-refundable. Maybe not this year, but if traffic holds up, I’d expect to see some airlines quietly <em>not</em> extend their fee waiver deadlines.</li><li>Private company behaviors are pretty straight-forward to forecast -- just follow the money. It’s the government regs that are uncertain -- how long do the mask mandates and COVID testing international entry rules stay around? Government rules only seem to ratchet up -- it’s been 15 years since the TSA had us take our shoes off and dump our water bottles at security checkpoints and other than letting people bring on larger bottles of hand sanitizer, no one thinks the TSA is going to change those rules anytime soon. There’s no incentive.</li><li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<em>Melt Away</em>&nbsp;by Kara Square (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp;http://ccmixter.org/files/mindmapthat/46605</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>The Best Places I’ve Ate and Drank At In 2021… So Far</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I talk <em>a lot</em> about food and beer in this podcast -- as proven by the direct links to those categories in the top menu on the TravelCommons website. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/10/16/podcast-168-surviving-quarantine-theater-traveling-for-food/\">episode #168</a> last fall, I said that, for me, food is one of the last hold-outs to global e-commerce and social media. 10-20 year ago, it was fun to go shopping and bring something unique back home. But now, there’s not much that you can’t find easier (and often cheaper) on Amazon or Taobao or Rakuten. And don’t even get me started on Instagram -- if people aren’t in <a href=\"https://www.npr.org/2021/07/09/1014208160/national-parks-crowds-litter\">a 100-person queue to get their own personal shot of the Delicate Arch in Moab, UT</a> then they’re queuing for made-for-Instagram-selfie murals like the <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/explore/tags/whatliftsyou/\">WhatLiftsYou</a> wings in Nashville’s Gulch neighborhood.&nbsp; But food -- you can post all the pictures you want of it, but you can’t post that sense memory of eating a dozen fresh oysters on a breakwater in Brittany, having a bowl of pho for breakfast in Saigon, or a 1am fresh-off-the-grill char polish that’s been dragged through the garden at a Chicago hot dog stand.&nbsp;</li><li>And so, over the years, I’ve talked about restaurants, bars, taprooms that I’ve enjoyed and posted links to them on the website in show notes or in blog posts. But reading articles about the number of places that’ve closed since March 2020 -- some say <a href=\"https://www.nrn.com/fast-casual/datassential-more-10-us-restaurants-have-closed-permanently\">10% of all restaurants in the US</a>, <a href=\"https://www.chicagobusiness.com/restaurants/heres-how-many-chicago-restaurants-have-closed-pandemic\">almost 20% in Chicago</a> -- I figure it’ll take travel guide books and blogs a while to catch up with all the changes. It kinda hit me when a college friend pinged our group text for Nashville recommendations. I’ve been going there a couple of times a year for the past 5 years, but when I started going through my list of places, it struck me how many of them had closed. I had to re-curate my recommendations. I figured a good start on that would be to post <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/08/14/my-best-restaurants-and-bars-of-2021/\">a list of the best places I’ve ate and drank at during my 2021 travels</a> on the TravelCommons website.</li><li>Now, fair warning, this is a <em>very</em> idiosyncratic list; it’s the best places <em>I</em> ate and drank at in, say, New York City in May and July. The New York list is pretty Midtown/Murray Hill-centric because that’s where we were staying and that’s where Claire was looking for flats. I walked into <a href=\"https://www.tedscornertavern.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Ted’s Corner Tavern</a> because it’s around the corner from Claire’s new place; it made the list because it’s what I think a great neighborhood bar should be -- good-sized bar with friendly bartenders who aren’t too busy to chat with you, the right volume level (lively, but not so loud that you have to shout across the table), and, of course, 30 taps and a well-curated beer list.</li><li>I’ve tried to make my list a well-curated one.&nbsp; I don’t mention restaurants or taprooms that I thought were fine -- the 3 or 3½-star places. It’s a list of places that stuck out in my mind for one reason or another, and would make me go out of my way to recommend them to, say, a college friend. This played out in a funny way on my Portland, Maine recommendations. I recommend <a href=\"https://bobsclamhut.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bob’s Clam Hut</a> in Kittery for fried clams and <a href=\"https://portland.islandcreekoysters.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Island Creek Oyster\'s place</a> in the East End/Munjoy Hill neighborhood for local oysters, but have no specific recommendation for a lobster roll place. It’s not for lack of trying; we had a lobster roll whenever we saw it on a menu, which wasn’t a cheap exercise since they were about $25 a pop. They were all good -- we didn’t have a bad lobster roll anywhere. But after all that, there’s no one place I could point to and say “Go <em>there</em> for a lobster roll.”&nbsp; I just say “Order one if you see it. It’ll probably be good no matter where you are”.&nbsp;</li><li>Another oddity of the list -- no Chicago places. Irene and I talked about this a bit. Between favorite places closing and cooking at home a lot more during the lockdowns and the strict mask mandate (which in Chicago was worded kinda like the airplane mandate -- wear your mask at all times unless you were actively eating or drinking), we haven’t been anywhere that’s really stuck out. Well, except maybe for the<a href=\"https://goo.gl/maps/XzUBYcWTn8nmc42E8\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"> Nancy’s Pizza</a> a couple of blocks from the TravelCommons studios. They do a great pepperoni, spinach, and fresh tomato pan pizza. That’ll definitely make the list.</li><li>Because the list is a work-in-progress; I posted the first edition on the website last week with sections on Tucson, San Diego, Nashville, New York, and Portland. You’ll find a link in the episode description in your podcast app -- if it supports HTML descriptions. I’ll be adding places through the rest of the year. There <em>will</em> be at least a couple of Chicago places (in addition to Nancy’s) on the list. I’m sure we’ll find some places in Puglia to add; and I’m positive I’ll find some UK taprooms that’ll make the cut since Rob Cheshire of This Week in Craft Beer has offered me a personal tour of his favorites.</li><li>When I’ve added a new section or think there’s enough new stuff to justify people taking a fresh look, I’ll put a new date on it so it goes back to the top of the Food and the Beer sections of the website, and I’ll post it on Facebook and Twitter. And if you end up hitting one of these places, shoot me a note and let me know if I got it right.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #178</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_178.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #178 — What Remains from Pandemic Times; Best Restaurant and Bars','','inherit','closed','closed','','3642-revision-v1','','','2021-12-07 15:59:08','2021-12-07 20:59:08','',3642,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4017',0,'revision','',0),
(4019,1,'2021-12-10 10:25:26','2021-12-10 15:25:26','','JPEG image','Cleared to Adventure','inherit','open','closed','','jpeg-image','','','2021-12-10 10:42:24','2021-12-10 15:42:24','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/JPEG-image.jpeg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(4020,1,'2021-12-10 11:10:45','2021-12-10 16:10:45','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/JPEG-image.jpeg\"><img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/JPEG-image-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"COVID rapid test results\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> Cleared to Adventure[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Back in front of the microphone after a two-week trip to the UK, getting back home just before the new <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/omicron-covid-travel-international-11638216229?st=sm0fcotd0jfju1i&amp;reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink\">Omicron travel restrictions</a> hit. We talk about getting to London, surfing the waves of changing travel requirements, a new way to renew Global Entry, moan a bit more about the inexorable advance of the cashless society, and finish up talking with <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_Glenn\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Josh Glenn</a> about his new book <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3lSNcwg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">The Adventurer\'s Glossary</a></em>.  All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_182.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #182: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois a couple of weeks since getting back from two weeks in the UK -- a week in London and a week of hiking in Southern Wales. Had really great weather for the back half of November -- brisk temperatures, but more sun than we expected; certainly a bit windy when walking the cliffs above the Atlantic, but nothing that we couldn’t layer up for; and only one day of real rain. It was a lot better than the weather forecasts had led us to expect.</li><li>The trip over and back was pretty uneventful. I’d hit American on a mileage sale back in March for direct flights between ORD and LHR. We flew coach on a Triple 7 that was pretty empty on the way over. People were popping up the armrests in the 4-seat center section and laying down to sleep. One guy even built a little tent out of blankets to cover his head. I’m not sure if he was trying to block the cabin lights or maybe he was concerned people walking down the aisles would breathe on him while he slept (though mask discipline was very solid) or maybe <em>he</em> wanted to drop <em>his</em> mask while he slept and didn’t want to get called out by the flight attendants. Whatever his deal was, it looked a little weird.</li><li>I ate dinner on that flight even though I’d eaten a cubano sandwich at Tortas Frontera, my favorite ORD restaurant, right before boarding. I took the meal not because I was hungry but because it gave me an excuse to drop my mask for a little bit on that 8-hr flight. Rather than the “replace your mask between bites and sips” rules that I heard on domestic flights this year, on my international flights over the past couple of months, most everyone takes off their mask for the duration of the meal. I don’t know if this difference comes from emptier planes, longer flights, or that international fliers are less likely to try to get around mask rules (and, purely my own experience, I haven’t seen any passenger pushback on masks on any of my international flights, whereas I was seeing/hearing a lot of it on domestic flights earlier this year), but I appreciate the flexibility/pragmatism (?) on these long flights.</li><li>While the plane wasn’t full, I was worried about passport control when we got to Heathrow. There’s always a bit of suspense anyways as you make the long walk from the plane to passport control. Did a whole bunch of Triple 7’s disgorge at the same time, let alone some massive A-380’s? Did the immigration force botch their workforce scheduling up? Will we flow smoothly into the immigration hall or will our march suddenly stop short?&nbsp; Worse, will we smack into one of those Heathrow e-gate failures that has caused 2-4 hour queues over the past couple of months?&nbsp;</li><li>We kept moving, but then came to a sudden stop as we made the final turn toward the hall. Looking around the line, I could see the room wasn’t jammed -- good sign. It looked like they’d paused us for a minute while they rejiggered their cowpen zig-zag line. After a minute or two, we started moving again, and at a pretty good clip with almost everyone getting pointed to the automated e-gates. I walked up, put my passport on the reader, a camera box popped up, mechanically adjusted to my height, and then after what I assume was some facial recognition analysis, opened the gate and let me go to baggage claim. No “how long are you going to be in the country” quiz, which I didn’t miss, but also no stamp in my passport. How am I going to remember this trip for my next Global Entry renewal. Guess I’ll have to drink a beer or two while I’m here so it shows up on my Untappd history.</li><li>Bridge Music —  <em>dazed </em>by Jeris (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/VJ_Memes/39456 Ft: airtone</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Speaking of Global Entry, back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/10/28/podcast-180-tracking-covid-travel-requirements-cycling-thru-puglia/\">episode #180</a> at the end of October, I was still waiting for my renewal approval and compare my month-and-a-half and counting wait with listener Jerry Sarfati’s 2-day wait. Then, the day before we left for the UK, I got an email with the subject line “TTP (Trusted Traveler Program) Application Status Change” telling me to check the website for more information. Logging in, I saw that I’d been given conditional approval, so about 2 months from submitting my renewal application. I still had to do an interview, but if I was reading everything correctly, I had 12 months to get that done. I looked to see if ORD had an appointment available the day we were flying back from London, but no dice. The earliest appointment was mid-December. OK, I’ll think about it later. No rush; I have 12 months. But the next day, I got another email from dhs.gov telling me about a new program, Enrollment-On-Arrival, where I could knock out my interview while in the customs/immigration area coming back from an international trip, no appointment necessary. Perfect!</li><li>So that Monday afternoon after a quick pass-through the Global Entry kiosk, I went looking for Booth 58 which is where, according to the Enrollment-On-Arrival website, was where the ORD interviews would be. But it looked like getting to Booth 58 would mean standing in a long and growing line of non-US passengers. Ah, forget it. Again, I have 12 months to get this done. But the luggage carousel for our flight hadn’t even started turning yet, so I went up to one of the customs officers and asked her. She immediately pointed me to a guy in a booth completely separate from the rest of the immigration traffic, and in the complete opposite direction of Booth 58. There was one guy in front of me getting his interview, but by the time I stepped up to the officer, there was a family of 4 and two other people behind me. The interview took about 5 minutes. I walked out and our luggage carousel still wasn’t moving. By the end of the day, the TTP website showed my Global Entry was good for another 5 years. Full credit to DHS for coming up with ways to make Global Entry easier. I just wish they’d keep their website locator up-to-date.</li><li>In the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/11/13/podcast-181-travel-potpourri-2021-travelers-gift-guide/\">last episode</a>, we talked about how last year’s flurry of vaccination passport app announcements has pretty much turned out to be, in the words of Macbeth, “a tale, Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing” But American Airlines’ partnership with <a href=\"https://www.myverifly.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Verifly</a> did actually have a little something to it. I downloaded the app and, after wrestling through what is not the most intuitive interface, was able to see a list of the UK travel requirements and then validate that I met them, by uploading pictures of Irene’s and my vaccination cards and our passenger locator form QR codes. That’s nice, but what was better was when we checked in for our flight, all we had to do was show the agent the green “All good” screens for Irene and me and we were done. None of the fishing out the right forms and holding them up to the lucite screen. Two swipes on the phone and we were done. Nothing earth-shattering, but it does relieve the friction out of one part of the journey</li><li>A <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">recurring</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/08/24/podcast-178-what-remains-from-pandemic-times-best-restaurant-and-bars/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">topic</a> on the TravelCommons podcast is the move to a cashless society. And certainly the pandemic accelerated this with the push toward contactless transactions; nobody wanted to handle your possibly-infectious cash. On our first day in London, on our walk to pick up our COVID tests, I stopped at the first ATM I saw to pull out £100, just to have some cash in my wallet. I’m a bit old-school in that way. And I’m glad I did it because once we left London and were staying in small towns in South Wales, it was really tough to find an ATM. Now, this shouldn’t be that big a deal with everyone taking cards and contactless, be it a card or on the phone with Google or Apple Pay, doing away (mostly) with the need for a PIN or to sign anything. But in Wales, the parking lots at the base of our hikes, the pay-&amp;-display machines, weren’t taking my cards, either contactless or physical. And by the time we were in our last town, Hay-on-Wye, I’d run out of coins and needed to find an ATM. Google Maps was no help; it kept pointing me to phantom machines in little grocery stores. Irene had better luck in the tourist information center. The woman there gave us directions to what she said was the one remaining ATM in town -- which surprised me because Hay-on-Wye has a good bit of tourist traffic with their book festivals. But anyhow, we found it <em>and </em>it worked; it had cash. Of course, then we had to find something like a coffee shop that would take cash so we could break a bill and get coins for the machine, which knocked out any of the usual chains. Walking down the street, I found a place that looked indy enough -- the sign said “coffee shop” but it looked more like a thrift store. Sure enough, the guy was happy to take cash, though he had to pull out his wallet to make change.&nbsp;</li><li>We’ve talked about Hertz’s downward service spiral, which I forecasted in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/06/09/podcast-164-first-post-lockdown-trips-travel-credit-cards/\">episode #164</a> after their bankruptcy filing. But since I haven’t held back in slamming them for empty lots in Phoenix and San Diego, and for incorrect fuel charges, I need to give kudos to the Hertz location in Cardiff in Wales for what had to be, hands down, the easiest and therefore best Hertz transaction I’ve had in Europe. Leaving London for the Welsh hiking part of our trip, we decided to skip the fun and excitement of driving in London and instead took a train to Cardiff and then drove to the coast from there. The Hertz place was about a 10-min cab ride from the train station in a bit of an auto dealer row. I walked in, showed the woman my Illinois drivers license, she asked me if I’d be OK driving an automatic (how fast can I say “Yes!”), gave me a key, and pointed me to a grey Skoda in the back lot. Done; no hard upsell on enhanced insurance or refueling options, just “Here’s the key; have a good trip”. And then returning the car, I pulled in after gassing it up; the guy took a quick walk around it; had me sign his screen, and we were done. And nothing wonky when I looked at the emailed receipt. It’s sorta damning with faint praise that I’m so impressed when a transaction goes smoothly. It should always be this easy, but it rarely is.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> or the <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram </a>account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music —  <em>A Thousand And None</em> by Speck (c) copyright 2018 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/speck/57256 Ft: Mr_Yesterday</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Yet More COVID Changes</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I mentioned in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/11/13/podcast-181-travel-potpourri-2021-travelers-gift-guide/\">last episode</a> that I was a little concerned about the logistics of getting COVID testing done by our second day in London. But it turned out fine. With a bit of Googling, I found <a href=\"https://covid.randox.com/day-2-test-at-home/\">Randox,</a> a big UK test firm, offering “click &amp; collect” rapid antigen tests for $25 a piece. It gave us a good reason, a destination for a post-arrival walk. It’s always good to spend a lot of time in the sunlight on that first day in Europe; I find it’s key to resetting my body clock. We did them in our hotel room the next morning. Yet more suspense -- waiting those 15 minutes, hoping that second pink line wouldn’t materialize, and then taking a picture of it in Randox’s app to get the “all clear” email back.</li><li>Of course, this was all pre-Omicron. That bombshell dropped the weekend before we flew home which had me back doing the rounds on Google, trying to figure out what travel requirements were changing. The UK quickly added pre-departure tests and shifted their Day 2 testing back to the more sensitive -- but 3 times more expensive -- PCR tests. But we were already in the UK. What mattered to us getting back to Chicago. The communications out of the US were less clear; mostly rumors; nothing official. The rumors were: tightening the window on pre-departure tests -- from 72 hours to 24 hours before departure, which could’ve been a problem for us; we’d already done the Abbott rapid antigen tests we’d brought from home Saturday afternoon before Monday morning departure. And adding a post-arrival test, similar to the UK’s. But the worst rumor was requiring a 7-day quarantine <em>even with</em> a negative test. Lucky for us, none of these US rumors came true -- at least by the Monday morning of our flight.&nbsp;</li><li>It wasn’t until later in the week the new rules were announced and it seems that folks had come to their senses a bit. The only rumor that came true was tightening the testing window down to 1 day. Well, that and extending the airplane mask requirement to March 2022, but as I said back in September in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/09/27/podcast-179-high-tech-airport-lines-business-travel-still-missing/\">episode #179</a>, I don’t think that was a surprise to anyone. Going to a 1-day window just reinforces the case for bringing a rapid antigen test with you. The only caveat is that the test has to be done in concert with a telehealth call to validate it’s actually you doing the test and the results are really negative. Coming home from Italy and the UK, Irene and I used <a href=\"https://www.emed.com/products/covid-at-home-testkit-six-pack?hsLang=en\">Abbott BinaxNow tests</a> with telehealth sessions from eMed. Depending on how many you buy (2, 3 or 6-pack), the cost per test ranges from $25 to $35, which is pretty competitive with the prices I saw for airport same-day testing services and it’s a helluva lot more convenient. Though as I recommended in this year’s <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-to-survive-post-pandemic-travel/\">travelers gift guide</a>, some sort of smartphone tripod comes in handy when the eMed guy wants to watch you swirl the cotton swab in your nose and then insert it into the test kit. Not sure how you’d do all that one-handed.</li><li>I hate the term “the new normal”, but perhaps, at least for the near term, we have to think about changes in COVID restrictions the same way we think about storms, terrorism, and strikes -- work to avoid them, but be flexible, agile enough to deal with it if you get caught. Now no analogy is perfect. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/podcast-150-travel-interruptus/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #150 — Travel Interruptus\">episode #150</a>, I told the story of how a bomb threat on the train line into Paris caused us to our flight home. It’s a lot easier to accept a couple of bonus days in Paris than an unplanned quarantine week in an airport Holiday Inn.</li><li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<em>Foolish Game</em>&nbsp;by copperhead (c) 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/copperhead/46390 Ft: Snowflake,Sackjo22 </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Words We Use for Adventure</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>We know that words impact the ways we think, feel, experience things -- including travel. Josh Glenn, a Boston-based author and semiotician (semiotics, the study of signs, symbols, and language, and how they create meaning) has just published a book <em><a href=\"https://www.hilobrow.com/2021/09/28/the-adventurers-glossary/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">The Adventurer’s Glossary</a></em>, with some 500 words associated with adventure. And since going on an adventure often involves travel, I wanted to talk to Josh about his book and how the words that we use to describe adventure could affect how we think about travel.<ul><li>Mark: Josh, how do you read <em>The Adventurer’s Glossary</em>?&nbsp; It\'s an alphabetical list of words, terms, and their not-quite-Oxford-Dictionary definitions. They’re really more stories than definitions. Should I start at the top (0-Dark-Hundred is the first entry) and work my way through? Or just randomly riff through the pages, open it, put my finger down and read something?</li><li>Josh: It’s sort of a capricious decision to alphabetize all these terms because that just completely put them out of order. So all of the travel terms are not together, and all of the military terms are not together, and the stuff I got from hip hop or gaming culture or adventure literature, none of them are grouped together. It could just be something you pick up and randomly browse through. It\'s absolutely okay. However, as much as possible, I did try to edit it in such a way that if you were reading it from beginning to end it would kind of make sense in that direction as well. So if there\'s a little bit of beginning to end stuff in it, but really it\'s read randomly.</li><li>Mark: How did you choose which words to include? It\'s a pretty wide-ranging list. You’ve got bottle, hair, stoic, as well as the stuff that I would normally associate with adventure like bug-out bag, roam, and voyageur.</li><li>Josh: This is the third glossary that I\'ve done. I did one back in 2008 called <em>The Idler’s Glossary</em> which was all about basically how much I hate having a regular job and enjoy doing things that look like you\'re doing nothing from the outside but actually, it might be very rich and deep what you\'re doing. And then I did another book called<em> The Wage Slave’s Glossary</em>, which was about how much I hate my job. And I was working at the Boston Globe at the time. Actually, a job I kind of liked, but I just don\'t like having bosses and it was all about the horrible jargon of the workplace. Basically, these are topics I\'ve been interested in for many, many years and I just started gathering words as I also read a lot of adventure novels and watch a lot of adventure movies. So sort of gathering words that occurred to me over time. But then I also do really nerdy things like literally sit down and read through a slang dictionary or pick up a thesaurus and go look up the definitions and the etymology of every synonym for a certain word. So the list balloons; I think there\'s something like 500 words in this book.</li><li>Mark: So Josh, we think about adventure. Adventure often involves travel. Do you think that the language or the words that we use to describe adventure impact our expectations of how we travel?</li><li>Josh: The language of our culture helps shape and guide the way we are able to perceive and think about anything including adventure and travel. We can\'t think outside of this kind of structure of language that we have. I mean an adventure is, and that word comes from the Latin meaning to arrive unexpectedly. That\'s actually really an important philosophical piece for me as I was going through this, the idea that you can have a trip is not an adventure if nothing unexpected happens and if you don\'t take enough risks to allow things unexpected to happen. So when I think back to the amazing road trips I took when I was in college with my friends around the country, it\'s all kind of a blur. I don\'t really remember a lot of specific details except when something went wrong -- when we broke down in the middle of the highway on a mountain in Colorado and we had to go to a small town and have people that help us get parts and explore that town and meet the locals and almost get beat up etcetera, etcetera. That\'s an adventure. Something unexpected happened and it\'s very, very memorable. Those are the memories that you cherish later.</li><li>Mark: I think that\'s probably where travel stories come from are more of the things that you didn\'t expect, more of the hiccups. God only knows on this podcast, most of the stories that I\'ll tell have come from things that went sideways, not things that went well.</li><li>Josh: It\'s so interesting to think more about how that\'s really baked right into our language. So for example, the word chance comes from the Latin <em>cadentia </em>meaning <em>falling</em>. So just when we think about how we use the words of “let the chips fall where they may” or “something befalls you”, this idea of having our feet off the ground, falling through space, we can\'t grasp anything, what do you do with that? If you’re someone who likes, in some kind of existential way, that feeling of falling, then you\'re an adventurer. You\'re going to get more out of your travel experiences than someone who wants everything to be exactly the same way every time and never have any hiccups.</li><li>Mark: In a prior episode, we talked with <a href=\"https://emilythomaswrites.co.uk/about/\">Emily Thomas</a>, philosophy professor at Durham University in the UK, and she wrote a book <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/2DO07fV\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">The Meaning of Travel</a></em>. And one of the things that we got talking about was this idea of travel giving you a sense of otherness, so taking you out of your comfort zone and putting you in the middle of something different ,and what you experience out of that, both from where you are as well as within yourself. And I think about that a little bit, as you think about, you\'re putting yourself into a potential adventure. You don\'t know where you\'re going, you\'re just putting yourself into a situation and figuring it out.</li><li>Josh: I like how you\'re saying “put yourself into... “ Of course, another aspect of adventure is getting yourself out of the ordinary.</li><li>Mark: Yes, getting you out of that small town without getting your ass kicked.</li><li>Josh: Yeah, getting out of your routine, getting out of your small town, getting out of the kind of the spell that the quotidian everyday life casts on us, this kind of enchantment or bewitchment where you just want, you just expect everything to be the same all the time. Travel is one of the great ways, you know historically, traveling to other cultures and seeing the world, seeing how people live in other places. These are great ways to kind of break that spell of enchantment that every day puts on us.</li><li>Mark: Josh, the act of travel has come under pressure of late. Pre-pandemic that was starting to see a thread of travels perhaps of frivolous luxury that was killing the planet through carbon emissions and global warming, maybe overcrowding of specific places like Machu Picchu or Angkor Wat. And now in the time of Covid, there seems another riff which is -- travel is a selfish act because it hastens the spread of coronavirus around the world. How do we square this? How do we square these concepts of travel being negative with the need for adventure, that need for escape and the ability therefore to find ourselves?</li><li>Josh: You can\'t entirely square, I do think that there is some truth to those criticisms. We shouldn\'t be spreading disease and we shouldn\'t be destroying the planet by unnecessary travel. But then the question is “what\'s necessary and how often do we do it?” Maybe if you’re somebody who travels 100 times a year, maybe that\'s too much. But maybe if you travel once a year, that\'s not enough. But I do think that for me anyway, during Covid, I didn\'t travel really at all outside of Boston, New Hampshire and Vermont, but I traveled widely through reading adventure novels, watching movies and Google Streets where you can walk around inside the Sistine Chapel remotely. Of course these are not as good -- just the same as Zoom calls are not the same as being in the same room with someone. It\'s not as soul nourishing, you don\'t get as much out of it. You\'re not really experiencing the whole context that you get when you travel, but you can have sort of armchair adventures to some extent that helps square that circle. But yeah, there\'s no right answer to that.</li><li>Mark: Yeah, absolutely. Josh, as you think about <em>The Adventure’s Glossary</em>, how should people think about it, take it, enjoy it?</li><li>Josh: I hope that word nerds will enjoy it just on its own merits. However, there is kind of a secret philosophy woven through this alphabetized list of words, which is this idea that adventure is something that we should seek. We should try to break out of the ordinary and see things in a new way and expand our horizons, whether it\'s through actual literal travel or other ways, and that there are certain qualities that we need to cultivate in ourselves to be good adventurers. Whether that\'s a sense of humor, whether that\'s wit, whether that\'s courage, grit and so forth. These are all the kinds of things that I\'ve tried to express through this book, which from the outside might just look like a fun, slightly frivolous word nerd book.</li><li>Mark: Josh Glenn, thanks very much for joining us on the TravelCommons podcast. We\'ll put a link to <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3lSNcwg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">The Adventurer’s Glossary</a></em> so people can find it.</li><li>Josh: Thank you for having me and happy travels to all your listeners.</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #182</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_182.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #182 — More COVID Changes; Words That Mean Adventure','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-182-more-covid-changes-words-that-mean-adventure','','','2022-01-16 19:32:51','2022-01-17 00:32:51','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4020',0,'post','',0),
(4021,1,'2021-12-10 10:58:02','2021-12-10 15:58:02','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/JPEG-image.jpeg\"><img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/JPEG-image-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"Jumble of Travel Signs\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> Cleared to Adventure[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>No travel since the last episode, so just talking through a random potpourri of travel stuff. There\'s more travel planning; this time for a couple of weeks split between London and Wales which means sorting through a new set of COVID travel requirements. We look at some stats -- Uber\'s latest financials and how deeply last year\'s lockdown hit Nashville airport vendors.  I marvel at how much European mobile data rates have fallen, strip down my English to have a deeper chat with an Italian bartender, and wrap it all up with highlights from this year\'s traveler\'s gift guide. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_182.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #182: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois a couple of weeks since getting back from two weeks in the UK -- a week in London and a week of hiking in Southern Wales. Had really great weather for the back half of November -- brisk temperatures, but more sun than we expected; certainly a bit windy when walking the cliffs above the Atlantic, but nothing that we couldn’t layer up for; and only one day of real rain. It was a lot better than the weather forecasts had led us to expect.</li><li>The trip over and back was pretty uneventful. I’d hit American on a mileage sale back in March for direct flights between ORD and LHR. We flew coach on a Triple 7 that was pretty empty on the way over. People were popping up the armrests in the 4-seat center section and laying down to sleep. One guy even built a little tent out of blankets to cover his head. I’m not sure if he was trying to block the cabin lights or maybe he was concerned people walking down the aisles would breathe on him while he slept (though mask discipline was very solid) or maybe <em>he</em> wanted to drop <em>his</em> mask while he slept and didn’t want to get called out by the flight attendants. Whatever his deal was, it looked a little weird.</li><li>I ate dinner on that flight even though I’d eaten a cubano sandwich at Tortas Frontera, my favorite ORD restaurant, right before boarding. I took the meal not because I was hungry but because it gave me an excuse to drop my mask for a little bit on that 8-hr flight. Rather than the “replace your mask between bites and sips” rules that I heard on domestic flights this year, on my international flights over the past couple of months, most everyone takes off their mask for the duration of the meal. I don’t know if this difference comes from emptier planes, longer flights, or that international fliers are less likely to try to get around mask rules (and, purely my own experience, I haven’t seen any passenger pushback on masks on any of my international flights, whereas I was seeing/hearing a lot of it on domestic flights earlier this year), but I appreciate the flexibility/pragmatism (?) on these long flights.</li><li>While the plane wasn’t full, I was worried about passport control when we got to Heathrow. There’s always a bit of suspense anyways as you make the long walk from the plane to passport control. Did a whole bunch of Triple 7’s disgorge at the same time, let alone some massive A-380’s? Did the immigration force botch their workforce scheduling up? Will we flow smoothly into the immigration hall or will our march suddenly stop short?  Worse, will we smack into one of those Heathrow e-gate failures that has caused 2-4 hour queues over the past couple of months? </li><li>We kept moving, but then came to a sudden stop as we made the final turn toward the hall. Looking around the line, I could see the room wasn’t jammed -- good sign. It looked like they’d paused us for a minute while they rejiggered their cowpen zig-zag line. After a minute or two, we started moving again, and at a pretty good clip with almost everyone getting pointed to the automated e-gates. I walked up, put my passport on the reader, a camera box popped up, mechanically adjusted to my height, and then after what I assume was some facial recognition analysis, opened the gate and let me go to baggage claim. No “how long are you going to be in the country” quiz, which I didn’t miss, but also no stamp in my passport. How am I going to remember this trip for my next Global Entry renewal. Guess I’ll have to drink a beer or two while I’m here so it shows up on my Untappd history.</li><li>Bridge Music — <em>Countryside Summer Joyride</em> by Kara Square (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mindmapthat/56281 Ft: Javolenus</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Speaking of Global Entry, back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/10/28/podcast-180-tracking-covid-travel-requirements-cycling-thru-puglia/\">episode #180</a> at the end of October, I was still waiting for my renewal approval and compare my month-and-a-half and counting wait with listener Jerry Sarfati’s 2-day wait. Then, the day before we left for the UK, I got an email with the subject line “TTP (Trusted Traveler Program) Application Status Change” telling me to check the website for more information. Logging in, I saw that I’d been given conditional approval, so about 2 months from submitting my renewal application. I still had to do an interview, but if I was reading everything correctly, I had 12 months to get that done. I looked to see if ORD had an appointment available the day we were flying back from London, but no dice. The earliest appointment was mid-December. OK, I’ll think about it later. No rush; I have 12 months. But the next day, I got another email from dhs.gov telling me about a new program, Enrollment-On-Arrival, where I could knock out my interview while in the customs/immigration area coming back from an international trip, no appointment necessary. Perfect!</li><li>So that Monday afternoon after a quick pass-through the Global Entry kiosk, I went looking for Booth 58 which is where, according to the Enrollment-On-Arrival website, was where the ORD interviews would be. But it looked like getting to Booth 58 would mean standing in a long and growing line of non-US passengers. Ah, forget it. Again, I have 12 months to get this done. But the luggage carousel for our flight hadn’t even started turning yet, so I went up to one of the customs officers and asked her. She immediately pointed me to a guy in a booth completely separate from the rest of the immigration traffic, and in the complete opposite direction of Booth 58. There was one guy in front of me getting his interview, but by the time I stepped up to the officer, there was a family of 4 and two other people behind me. The interview took about 5 minutes. I walked out and our luggage carousel still wasn’t moving. By the end of the day, the TTP website showed my Global Entry was good for another 5 years. Full credit to DHS for coming up with ways to make Global Entry easier. I just wish they’d keep their website locator up-to-date.</li><li>In the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/11/13/podcast-181-travel-potpourri-2021-travelers-gift-guide/\">last episode</a>, we talked about how last year’s flurry of vaccination passport app announcements has pretty much turned out to be, in the words of Macbeth, “a tale, Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing” But American Airlines’ partnership with Verifly did actually have a little something to it. I downloaded the app and, after wrestling through what is not the most intuitive interface, was able to see a list of the UK travel requirements and then validate that I met them, by uploading pictures of Irene’s and my vaccination cards and our passenger locator form QR codes. That’s nice, but what was better was when we checked in for our flight, all we had to do was show the agent the green “All good” screens for Irene and me and we were done. None of the fishing out the right forms and holding them up to the lucite screen. Two swipes on the phone and we were done. Nothing earth-shattering, but it does relieve the friction out of one part of the journey</li><li>A <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">recurring</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/08/24/podcast-178-what-remains-from-pandemic-times-best-restaurant-and-bars/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">topic</a> on the TravelCommons podcast is the move to a cashless society. And certainly the pandemic accelerated this with the push toward contactless transactions; nobody wanted to handle your possibly-infectious cash. On our first day in London, on our walk to pick up our COVID tests, I stopped at the first ATM I saw to pull out £100, just to have some cash in my wallet. I’m a bit old-school in that way. And I’m glad I did it because once we left London and were staying in small towns in South Wales, it was really tough to find an ATM. Now, this shouldn’t be that big a deal with everyone taking cards and contactless, be it a card or on the phone with Google or Apple Pay, doing away (mostly) with the need for a PIN or to sign anything. But in Wales, the parking lots at the base of our hikes, the pay-&amp;-display machines, weren’t taking my cards, either contactless or physical. And by the time we were in our last town, Hay-on-Wye, I’d run out of coins and needed to find an ATM. Google Maps was no help; it kept pointing me to phantom machines in little grocery stores. Irene had better luck in the tourist information center. The woman there gave us directions to what she said was the one remaining ATM in town -- which surprised me because Hay-on-Wye has a good bit of tourist traffic with their book festivals. But anyhow, we found it <em>and </em>it worked; it had cash. Of course, then we had to find something like a coffee shop that would take cash so we could break a bill and get coins for the machine, which knocked out any of the usual chains. Walking down the street, I found a place that looked indy enough -- the sign said “coffee shop” but it looked more like a thrift store. Sure enough, the guy was happy to take cash, though he had to pull out his wallet to make change. </li><li>We’ve talked about Hertz’s downward service spiral, which I forecasted in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/06/09/podcast-164-first-post-lockdown-trips-travel-credit-cards/\">episode #164</a> after their bankruptcy filing. But since I haven’t held back in slamming them for empty lots in Phoenix and San Diego, and for incorrect fuel charges, I need to give kudos to the Hertz location in Cardiff in Wales for what had to be, hands down, the easiest and therefore best Hertz transaction I’ve had in Europe. Leaving London for the Welsh hiking part of our trip, we decided to skip the fun and excitement of driving in London and instead took a train to Cardiff and then drove to the coast from there. The Hertz place was about a 10-min cab ride from the train station in a bit of an auto dealer row. I walked in, showed the woman my Illinois drivers license, she asked me if I’d be OK driving an automatic (how fast can I say “Yes!”), gave me a key, and pointed me to a grey Skoda in the back lot. Done; no hard upsell on enhanced insurance or refueling options, just “Here’s the key; have a good trip”. And then returning the car, I pulled in after gassing it up; the guy took a quick walk around it; had me sign his screen, and we were done. And nothing wonky when I looked at the emailed receipt. It’s sorta damning with faint praise that I’m so impressed when a transaction goes smoothly. It should always be this easy, but it rarely is.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> or the <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram </a>account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music —  <em>Jester of the Golden Apocalypse</em> by Super_Sigil (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Super_Sigil/34750 </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Yet More COVID Changes</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I mentioned in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/11/13/podcast-181-travel-potpourri-2021-travelers-gift-guide/\">last episode</a> that I was a little concerned about the logistics of getting COVID testing done by our second day in London. But it turned out fine. With a bit of Googling, I found <a href=\"https://covid.randox.com/day-2-test-at-home/\">Randox,</a> a big UK test firm, offering “click &amp; collect” rapid antigen tests for $25 a piece. It gave us a good reason, a destination for a post-arrival walk. It’s always good to spend a lot of time in the sunlight on that first day in Europe; I find it’s key to resetting my body clock. We did them in our hotel room the next morning. Yet more suspense -- waiting those 15 minutes, hoping that second pink line wouldn’t materialize, and then taking a picture of it in Randox’s app to get the “all clear” email back.</li><li>Of course, this was all pre-Omicron. That bombshell dropped the weekend before we flew home which had me back doing the rounds on Google, trying to figure out what travel requirements were changing. The UK quickly added pre-departure tests and shifted their Day 2 testing back to the more sensitive -- but 3 times more expensive -- PCR tests. But we were already in the UK. What mattered to us getting back to Chicago. The communications out of the US were less clear; mostly rumors; nothing official. The rumors were: tightening the window on pre-departure tests -- from 72 hours to 24 hours before departure, which could’ve been a problem for us; we’d already done the Abbott rapid antigen tests we’d brought from home Saturday afternoon before Monday morning departure. And adding a post-arrival test, similar to the UK’s. But the worst rumor was requiring a 7-day quarantine <em>even with</em> a negative test. Lucky for us, none of these US rumors came true -- at least by the Monday morning of our flight. </li><li>It wasn’t until later in the week the new rules were announced and it seems that folks had come to their senses a bit. The only rumor that came true was tightening the testing window down to 1 day. Well, that and extending the airplane mask requirement to March 2022, but as I said back in September in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/09/27/podcast-179-high-tech-airport-lines-business-travel-still-missing/\">episode #179</a>, I don’t think that was a surprise to anyone. Going to a 1-day window just reinforces the case for bringing a rapid antigen test with you. The only caveat is that the test has to be done in concert with a telehealth call to validate it’s actually you doing the test and the results are really negative. Coming home from Italy and the UK, Irene and I used <a href=\"https://www.emed.com/products/covid-at-home-testkit-six-pack?hsLang=en\">Abbott BinaxNow tests</a> with telehealth sessions from eMed. Depending on how many you buy (2, 3 or 6-pack), the cost per test ranges from $25 to $35, which is pretty competitive with the prices I saw for airport same-day testing services and it’s a helluva lot more convenient. Though as I recommended in this year’s <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-to-survive-post-pandemic-travel/\">travelers gift guide</a>, some sort of smartphone tripod comes in handy when the eMed guy wants to watch you swirl the cotton swab in your nose and then insert it into the test kit. Not sure how you’d do all that one-handed.</li><li>I hate the term “the new normal”, but perhaps, at least for the near term, we have to think about changes in COVID restrictions the same way we think about storms, terrorism, and strikes -- work to avoid them, but be flexible, agile enough to deal with it if you get caught. Now no analogy is perfect. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/podcast-150-travel-interruptus/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #150 — Travel Interruptus\">episode #150</a>, I told the story of how a bomb threat on the train line into Paris caused us to our flight home. It’s a lot easier to accept a couple of bonus days in Paris than an unplanned quarantine week in an airport Holiday Inn.</li><li>Bridge Music —  South Texas Cowboy Blues by texasradiofish (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/texasradiofish/52030 Ft: unreal_dm, ElRon XChile</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Words We Use for Adventure</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>We know that words impact the ways we think, feel, experience things -- including travel. Josh Glenn, a Boston-based author and semiotician (semiotics, the study of signs, symbols, and language, and how they create meaning) has just published a book <em><a href=\"https://www.hilobrow.com/2021/09/28/the-adventurers-glossary/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">The Adventurer’s Glossary</a></em>, with some 500 words associated with adventure. And since going on an adventure often involves travel, I wanted to talk to Josh about his book and how the words that we use to describe adventure could affect how we think about travel.<ul><li>Mark: Josh, how do you read <em>The Adventurer’s Glossary</em>?  It\'s an alphabetical list of words, terms, and their not-quite-Oxford-Dictionary definitions. They’re really more stories than definitions. Should I start at the top (0-Dark-Hundred is the first entry) and work my way through? Or just randomly riff through the pages, open it, put my finger down and read something?</li><li>Josh: It’s sort of a capricious decision to alphabetize all these terms because that just completely put them out of order. So all of the travel terms are not together, and all of the military terms are not together, and the stuff I got from hip hop or gaming culture or adventure literature, none of them are grouped together. It could just be something you pick up and randomly browse through. It\'s absolutely okay. However, as much as possible, I did try to edit it in such a way that if you were reading it from beginning to end it would kind of make sense in that direction as well. So if there\'s a little bit of beginning to end stuff in it, but really it\'s read randomly.</li><li>Mark: How did you choose which words to include? It\'s a pretty wide-ranging list. You’ve got bottle, hair, stoic, as well as the stuff that I would normally associate with adventure like bug-out bag, roam, and voyageur.</li><li>Josh: This is the third glossary that I\'ve done. I did one back in 2008 called <em>The Idler’s Glossary</em> which was all about basically how much I hate having a regular job and enjoy doing things that look like you\'re doing nothing from the outside but actually, it might be very rich and deep what you\'re doing. And then I did another book called<em> The Wage Slave’s Glossary</em>, which was about how much I hate my job. And I was working at the Boston Globe at the time. Actually, a job I kind of liked, but I just don\'t like having bosses and it was all about the horrible jargon of the workplace. Basically, these are topics I\'ve been interested in for many, many years and I just started gathering words as I also read a lot of adventure novels and watch a lot of adventure movies. So sort of gathering words that occurred to me over time. But then I also do really nerdy things like literally sit down and read through a slang dictionary or pick up a thesaurus and go look up the definitions and the etymology of every synonym for a certain word. So the list balloons; I think there\'s something like 500 words in this book.</li><li>Mark: So Josh, we think about adventure. Adventure often involves travel. Do you think that the language or the words that we use to describe adventure impact our expectations of how we travel?</li><li>Josh: The language of our culture helps shape and guide the way we are able to perceive and think about anything including adventure and travel. We can\'t think outside of this kind of structure of language that we have. I mean an adventure is, and that word comes from the Latin meaning to arrive unexpectedly. That\'s actually really an important philosophical piece for me as I was going through this, the idea that you can have a trip is not an adventure if nothing unexpected happens and if you don\'t take enough risks to allow things unexpected to happen. So when I think back to the amazing road trips I took when I was in college with my friends around the country, it\'s all kind of a blur. I don\'t really remember a lot of specific details except when something went wrong -- when we broke down in the middle of the highway on a mountain in Colorado and we had to go to a small town and have people that help us get parts and explore that town and meet the locals and almost get beat up etcetera, etcetera. That\'s an adventure. Something unexpected happened and it\'s very, very memorable. Those are the memories that you cherish later.</li><li>Mark: I think that\'s probably where travel stories come from are more of the things that you didn\'t expect, more of the hiccups. God only knows on this podcast, most of the stories that I\'ll tell have come from things that went sideways, not things that went well.</li><li>Josh: It\'s so interesting to think more about how that\'s really baked right into our language. So for example, the word chance comes from the Latin <em>cadentia </em>meaning <em>falling</em>. So just when we think about how we use the words of “let the chips fall where they may” or “something befalls you”, this idea of having our feet off the ground, falling through space, we can\'t grasp anything, what do you do with that? If you’re someone who likes, in some kind of existential way, that feeling of falling, then you\'re an adventurer. You\'re going to get more out of your travel experiences than someone who wants everything to be exactly the same way every time and never have any hiccups.</li><li>Mark: In a prior episode, we talked with Emily Thomas, philosophy professor at Durham University in the UK, and she wrote a book <em>The Meaning of Travel</em>. And one of the things that we got talking about was this idea of travel giving you a sense of otherness, so taking you out of your comfort zone and putting you in the middle of something different ,and what you experience out of that, both from where you are as well as within yourself. And I think about that a little bit, as you think about, you\'re putting yourself into a potential adventure. You don\'t know where you\'re going, you\'re just putting yourself into a situation and figuring it out.</li><li>Josh: I like how you\'re saying “put yourself into... “ Of course, another aspect of adventure is getting yourself out of the ordinary.</li><li>Mark: Yes, getting you out of that small town without getting your ass kicked.</li><li>Josh: Yeah, getting out of your routine, getting out of your small town, getting out of the kind of the spell that the quotidian everyday life casts on us, this kind of enchantment or bewitchment where you just want, you just expect everything to be the same all the time. Travel is one of the great ways, you know historically, traveling to other cultures and seeing the world, seeing how people live in other places. These are great ways to kind of break that spell of enchantment that every day puts on us.</li><li>Mark: Josh, the act of travel has come under pressure of late. Pre-pandemic that was starting to see a thread of travels perhaps of frivolous luxury that was killing the planet through carbon emissions and global warming, maybe overcrowding of specific places like Machu Picchu or Angkor Wat. And now in the time of Covid, there seems another riff which is -- travel is a selfish act because it hastens the spread of coronavirus around the world. How do we square this? How do we square these concepts of travel being negative with the need for adventure, that need for escape and the ability therefore to find ourselves?</li><li>Josh: You can\'t entirely square, I do think that there is some truth to those criticisms. We shouldn\'t be spreading disease and we shouldn\'t be destroying the planet by unnecessary travel. But then the question is “what\'s necessary and how often do we do it?” Maybe if you’re somebody who travels 100 times a year, maybe that\'s too much. But maybe if you travel once a year, that\'s not enough. But I do think that for me anyway, during Covid, I didn\'t travel really at all outside of Boston, New Hampshire and Vermont, but I traveled widely through reading adventure novels, watching movies and Google Streets where you can walk around inside the Sistine Chapel remotely. Of course these are not as good -- just the same as Zoom calls are not the same as being in the same room with someone. It\'s not as soul nourishing, you don\'t get as much out of it. You\'re not really experiencing the whole context that you get when you travel, but you can have sort of armchair adventures to some extent that helps square that circle. But yeah, there\'s no right answer to that.</li><li>Mark: Yeah, absolutely. Josh, as you think about <em>The Adventure’s Glossary</em>, how should people think about it, take it, enjoy it?</li><li>Josh: I hope that word nerds will enjoy it just on its own merits. However, there is kind of a secret philosophy woven through this alphabetized list of words, which is this idea that adventure is something that we should seek. We should try to break out of the ordinary and see things in a new way and expand our horizons, whether it\'s through actual literal travel or other ways, and that there are certain qualities that we need to cultivate in ourselves to be good adventurers. Whether that\'s a sense of humor, whether that\'s wit, whether that\'s courage, grit and so forth. These are all the kinds of things that I\'ve tried to express through this book, which from the outside might just look like a fun, slightly frivolous word nerd book.</li><li>Mark: Josh Glenn, thanks very much for joining us on the TravelCommons podcast. We\'ll put a link to <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3lSNcwg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">The Adventure’s Glossary</a></em> so people can find it.</li><li>Josh: Thank you for having me and happy travels to all your listeners.</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #182</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social  -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_182.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #182 — More COVID Changes; Words That Mean Adventure','','inherit','closed','closed','','4020-revision-v1','','','2021-12-10 10:58:02','2021-12-10 15:58:02','',4020,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4021',0,'revision','',0),
(4022,1,'2021-12-10 11:16:00','2021-12-10 16:16:00','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/JPEG-image.jpeg\"><img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/JPEG-image-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"Jumble of Travel Signs\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> Cleared to Adventure[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>No travel since the last episode, so just talking through a random potpourri of travel stuff. There\'s more travel planning; this time for a couple of weeks split between London and Wales which means sorting through a new set of COVID travel requirements. We look at some stats -- Uber\'s latest financials and how deeply last year\'s lockdown hit Nashville airport vendors.  I marvel at how much European mobile data rates have fallen, strip down my English to have a deeper chat with an Italian bartender, and wrap it all up with highlights from this year\'s traveler\'s gift guide. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_182.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #182: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois a couple of weeks since getting back from two weeks in the UK -- a week in London and a week of hiking in Southern Wales. Had really great weather for the back half of November -- brisk temperatures, but more sun than we expected; certainly a bit windy when walking the cliffs above the Atlantic, but nothing that we couldn’t layer up for; and only one day of real rain. It was a lot better than the weather forecasts had led us to expect.</li><li>The trip over and back was pretty uneventful. I’d hit American on a mileage sale back in March for direct flights between ORD and LHR. We flew coach on a Triple 7 that was pretty empty on the way over. People were popping up the armrests in the 4-seat center section and laying down to sleep. One guy even built a little tent out of blankets to cover his head. I’m not sure if he was trying to block the cabin lights or maybe he was concerned people walking down the aisles would breathe on him while he slept (though mask discipline was very solid) or maybe <em>he</em> wanted to drop <em>his</em> mask while he slept and didn’t want to get called out by the flight attendants. Whatever his deal was, it looked a little weird.</li><li>I ate dinner on that flight even though I’d eaten a cubano sandwich at Tortas Frontera, my favorite ORD restaurant, right before boarding. I took the meal not because I was hungry but because it gave me an excuse to drop my mask for a little bit on that 8-hr flight. Rather than the “replace your mask between bites and sips” rules that I heard on domestic flights this year, on my international flights over the past couple of months, most everyone takes off their mask for the duration of the meal. I don’t know if this difference comes from emptier planes, longer flights, or that international fliers are less likely to try to get around mask rules (and, purely my own experience, I haven’t seen any passenger pushback on masks on any of my international flights, whereas I was seeing/hearing a lot of it on domestic flights earlier this year), but I appreciate the flexibility/pragmatism (?) on these long flights.</li><li>While the plane wasn’t full, I was worried about passport control when we got to Heathrow. There’s always a bit of suspense anyways as you make the long walk from the plane to passport control. Did a whole bunch of Triple 7’s disgorge at the same time, let alone some massive A-380’s? Did the immigration force botch their workforce scheduling up? Will we flow smoothly into the immigration hall or will our march suddenly stop short?  Worse, will we smack into one of those Heathrow e-gate failures that has caused 2-4 hour queues over the past couple of months? </li><li>We kept moving, but then came to a sudden stop as we made the final turn toward the hall. Looking around the line, I could see the room wasn’t jammed -- good sign. It looked like they’d paused us for a minute while they rejiggered their cowpen zig-zag line. After a minute or two, we started moving again, and at a pretty good clip with almost everyone getting pointed to the automated e-gates. I walked up, put my passport on the reader, a camera box popped up, mechanically adjusted to my height, and then after what I assume was some facial recognition analysis, opened the gate and let me go to baggage claim. No “how long are you going to be in the country” quiz, which I didn’t miss, but also no stamp in my passport. How am I going to remember this trip for my next Global Entry renewal. Guess I’ll have to drink a beer or two while I’m here so it shows up on my Untappd history.</li><li>Bridge Music — <em>Countryside Summer Joyride</em> by Kara Square (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mindmapthat/56281 Ft: Javolenus</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Speaking of Global Entry, back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/10/28/podcast-180-tracking-covid-travel-requirements-cycling-thru-puglia/\">episode #180</a> at the end of October, I was still waiting for my renewal approval and compare my month-and-a-half and counting wait with listener Jerry Sarfati’s 2-day wait. Then, the day before we left for the UK, I got an email with the subject line “TTP (Trusted Traveler Program) Application Status Change” telling me to check the website for more information. Logging in, I saw that I’d been given conditional approval, so about 2 months from submitting my renewal application. I still had to do an interview, but if I was reading everything correctly, I had 12 months to get that done. I looked to see if ORD had an appointment available the day we were flying back from London, but no dice. The earliest appointment was mid-December. OK, I’ll think about it later. No rush; I have 12 months. But the next day, I got another email from dhs.gov telling me about a new program, Enrollment-On-Arrival, where I could knock out my interview while in the customs/immigration area coming back from an international trip, no appointment necessary. Perfect!</li><li>So that Monday afternoon after a quick pass-through the Global Entry kiosk, I went looking for Booth 58 which is where, according to the Enrollment-On-Arrival website, was where the ORD interviews would be. But it looked like getting to Booth 58 would mean standing in a long and growing line of non-US passengers. Ah, forget it. Again, I have 12 months to get this done. But the luggage carousel for our flight hadn’t even started turning yet, so I went up to one of the customs officers and asked her. She immediately pointed me to a guy in a booth completely separate from the rest of the immigration traffic, and in the complete opposite direction of Booth 58. There was one guy in front of me getting his interview, but by the time I stepped up to the officer, there was a family of 4 and two other people behind me. The interview took about 5 minutes. I walked out and our luggage carousel still wasn’t moving. By the end of the day, the TTP website showed my Global Entry was good for another 5 years. Full credit to DHS for coming up with ways to make Global Entry easier. I just wish they’d keep their website locator up-to-date.</li><li>In the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/11/13/podcast-181-travel-potpourri-2021-travelers-gift-guide/\">last episode</a>, we talked about how last year’s flurry of vaccination passport app announcements has pretty much turned out to be, in the words of Macbeth, “a tale, Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing” But American Airlines’ partnership with Verifly did actually have a little something to it. I downloaded the app and, after wrestling through what is not the most intuitive interface, was able to see a list of the UK travel requirements and then validate that I met them, by uploading pictures of Irene’s and my vaccination cards and our passenger locator form QR codes. That’s nice, but what was better was when we checked in for our flight, all we had to do was show the agent the green “All good” screens for Irene and me and we were done. None of the fishing out the right forms and holding them up to the lucite screen. Two swipes on the phone and we were done. Nothing earth-shattering, but it does relieve the friction out of one part of the journey</li><li>A <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">recurring</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/08/24/podcast-178-what-remains-from-pandemic-times-best-restaurant-and-bars/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">topic</a> on the TravelCommons podcast is the move to a cashless society. And certainly the pandemic accelerated this with the push toward contactless transactions; nobody wanted to handle your possibly-infectious cash. On our first day in London, on our walk to pick up our COVID tests, I stopped at the first ATM I saw to pull out £100, just to have some cash in my wallet. I’m a bit old-school in that way. And I’m glad I did it because once we left London and were staying in small towns in South Wales, it was really tough to find an ATM. Now, this shouldn’t be that big a deal with everyone taking cards and contactless, be it a card or on the phone with Google or Apple Pay, doing away (mostly) with the need for a PIN or to sign anything. But in Wales, the parking lots at the base of our hikes, the pay-&amp;-display machines, weren’t taking my cards, either contactless or physical. And by the time we were in our last town, Hay-on-Wye, I’d run out of coins and needed to find an ATM. Google Maps was no help; it kept pointing me to phantom machines in little grocery stores. Irene had better luck in the tourist information center. The woman there gave us directions to what she said was the one remaining ATM in town -- which surprised me because Hay-on-Wye has a good bit of tourist traffic with their book festivals. But anyhow, we found it <em>and </em>it worked; it had cash. Of course, then we had to find something like a coffee shop that would take cash so we could break a bill and get coins for the machine, which knocked out any of the usual chains. Walking down the street, I found a place that looked indy enough -- the sign said “coffee shop” but it looked more like a thrift store. Sure enough, the guy was happy to take cash, though he had to pull out his wallet to make change. </li><li>We’ve talked about Hertz’s downward service spiral, which I forecasted in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/06/09/podcast-164-first-post-lockdown-trips-travel-credit-cards/\">episode #164</a> after their bankruptcy filing. But since I haven’t held back in slamming them for empty lots in Phoenix and San Diego, and for incorrect fuel charges, I need to give kudos to the Hertz location in Cardiff in Wales for what had to be, hands down, the easiest and therefore best Hertz transaction I’ve had in Europe. Leaving London for the Welsh hiking part of our trip, we decided to skip the fun and excitement of driving in London and instead took a train to Cardiff and then drove to the coast from there. The Hertz place was about a 10-min cab ride from the train station in a bit of an auto dealer row. I walked in, showed the woman my Illinois drivers license, she asked me if I’d be OK driving an automatic (how fast can I say “Yes!”), gave me a key, and pointed me to a grey Skoda in the back lot. Done; no hard upsell on enhanced insurance or refueling options, just “Here’s the key; have a good trip”. And then returning the car, I pulled in after gassing it up; the guy took a quick walk around it; had me sign his screen, and we were done. And nothing wonky when I looked at the emailed receipt. It’s sorta damning with faint praise that I’m so impressed when a transaction goes smoothly. It should always be this easy, but it rarely is.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> or the <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram </a>account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music —  <em>Jester of the Golden Apocalypse</em> by Super_Sigil (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Super_Sigil/34750 </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Yet More COVID Changes</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I mentioned in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/11/13/podcast-181-travel-potpourri-2021-travelers-gift-guide/\">last episode</a> that I was a little concerned about the logistics of getting COVID testing done by our second day in London. But it turned out fine. With a bit of Googling, I found <a href=\"https://covid.randox.com/day-2-test-at-home/\">Randox,</a> a big UK test firm, offering “click &amp; collect” rapid antigen tests for $25 a piece. It gave us a good reason, a destination for a post-arrival walk. It’s always good to spend a lot of time in the sunlight on that first day in Europe; I find it’s key to resetting my body clock. We did them in our hotel room the next morning. Yet more suspense -- waiting those 15 minutes, hoping that second pink line wouldn’t materialize, and then taking a picture of it in Randox’s app to get the “all clear” email back.</li><li>Of course, this was all pre-Omicron. That bombshell dropped the weekend before we flew home which had me back doing the rounds on Google, trying to figure out what travel requirements were changing. The UK quickly added pre-departure tests and shifted their Day 2 testing back to the more sensitive -- but 3 times more expensive -- PCR tests. But we were already in the UK. What mattered to us getting back to Chicago. The communications out of the US were less clear; mostly rumors; nothing official. The rumors were: tightening the window on pre-departure tests -- from 72 hours to 24 hours before departure, which could’ve been a problem for us; we’d already done the Abbott rapid antigen tests we’d brought from home Saturday afternoon before Monday morning departure. And adding a post-arrival test, similar to the UK’s. But the worst rumor was requiring a 7-day quarantine <em>even with</em> a negative test. Lucky for us, none of these US rumors came true -- at least by the Monday morning of our flight. </li><li>It wasn’t until later in the week the new rules were announced and it seems that folks had come to their senses a bit. The only rumor that came true was tightening the testing window down to 1 day. Well, that and extending the airplane mask requirement to March 2022, but as I said back in September in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/09/27/podcast-179-high-tech-airport-lines-business-travel-still-missing/\">episode #179</a>, I don’t think that was a surprise to anyone. Going to a 1-day window just reinforces the case for bringing a rapid antigen test with you. The only caveat is that the test has to be done in concert with a telehealth call to validate it’s actually you doing the test and the results are really negative. Coming home from Italy and the UK, Irene and I used <a href=\"https://www.emed.com/products/covid-at-home-testkit-six-pack?hsLang=en\">Abbott BinaxNow tests</a> with telehealth sessions from eMed. Depending on how many you buy (2, 3 or 6-pack), the cost per test ranges from $25 to $35, which is pretty competitive with the prices I saw for airport same-day testing services and it’s a helluva lot more convenient. Though as I recommended in this year’s <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-to-survive-post-pandemic-travel/\">travelers gift guide</a>, some sort of smartphone tripod comes in handy when the eMed guy wants to watch you swirl the cotton swab in your nose and then insert it into the test kit. Not sure how you’d do all that one-handed.</li><li>I hate the term “the new normal”, but perhaps, at least for the near term, we have to think about changes in COVID restrictions the same way we think about storms, terrorism, and strikes -- work to avoid them, but be flexible, agile enough to deal with it if you get caught. Now no analogy is perfect. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/podcast-150-travel-interruptus/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #150 — Travel Interruptus\">episode #150</a>, I told the story of how a bomb threat on the train line into Paris caused us to our flight home. It’s a lot easier to accept a couple of bonus days in Paris than an unplanned quarantine week in an airport Holiday Inn.</li><li>Bridge Music —  South Texas Cowboy Blues by texasradiofish (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/texasradiofish/52030 Ft: unreal_dm, ElRon XChile</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Words We Use for Adventure</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>We know that words impact the ways we think, feel, experience things -- including travel. Josh Glenn, a Boston-based author and semiotician (semiotics, the study of signs, symbols, and language, and how they create meaning) has just published a book <em><a href=\"https://www.hilobrow.com/2021/09/28/the-adventurers-glossary/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">The Adventurer’s Glossary</a></em>, with some 500 words associated with adventure. And since going on an adventure often involves travel, I wanted to talk to Josh about his book and how the words that we use to describe adventure could affect how we think about travel.<ul><li>Mark: Josh, how do you read <em>The Adventurer’s Glossary</em>?  It\'s an alphabetical list of words, terms, and their not-quite-Oxford-Dictionary definitions. They’re really more stories than definitions. Should I start at the top (0-Dark-Hundred is the first entry) and work my way through? Or just randomly riff through the pages, open it, put my finger down and read something?</li><li>Josh: It’s sort of a capricious decision to alphabetize all these terms because that just completely put them out of order. So all of the travel terms are not together, and all of the military terms are not together, and the stuff I got from hip hop or gaming culture or adventure literature, none of them are grouped together. It could just be something you pick up and randomly browse through. It\'s absolutely okay. However, as much as possible, I did try to edit it in such a way that if you were reading it from beginning to end it would kind of make sense in that direction as well. So if there\'s a little bit of beginning to end stuff in it, but really it\'s read randomly.</li><li>Mark: How did you choose which words to include? It\'s a pretty wide-ranging list. You’ve got bottle, hair, stoic, as well as the stuff that I would normally associate with adventure like bug-out bag, roam, and voyageur.</li><li>Josh: This is the third glossary that I\'ve done. I did one back in 2008 called <em>The Idler’s Glossary</em> which was all about basically how much I hate having a regular job and enjoy doing things that look like you\'re doing nothing from the outside but actually, it might be very rich and deep what you\'re doing. And then I did another book called<em> The Wage Slave’s Glossary</em>, which was about how much I hate my job. And I was working at the Boston Globe at the time. Actually, a job I kind of liked, but I just don\'t like having bosses and it was all about the horrible jargon of the workplace. Basically, these are topics I\'ve been interested in for many, many years and I just started gathering words as I also read a lot of adventure novels and watch a lot of adventure movies. So sort of gathering words that occurred to me over time. But then I also do really nerdy things like literally sit down and read through a slang dictionary or pick up a thesaurus and go look up the definitions and the etymology of every synonym for a certain word. So the list balloons; I think there\'s something like 500 words in this book.</li><li>Mark: So Josh, we think about adventure. Adventure often involves travel. Do you think that the language or the words that we use to describe adventure impact our expectations of how we travel?</li><li>Josh: The language of our culture helps shape and guide the way we are able to perceive and think about anything including adventure and travel. We can\'t think outside of this kind of structure of language that we have. I mean an adventure is, and that word comes from the Latin meaning to arrive unexpectedly. That\'s actually really an important philosophical piece for me as I was going through this, the idea that you can have a trip is not an adventure if nothing unexpected happens and if you don\'t take enough risks to allow things unexpected to happen. So when I think back to the amazing road trips I took when I was in college with my friends around the country, it\'s all kind of a blur. I don\'t really remember a lot of specific details except when something went wrong -- when we broke down in the middle of the highway on a mountain in Colorado and we had to go to a small town and have people that help us get parts and explore that town and meet the locals and almost get beat up etcetera, etcetera. That\'s an adventure. Something unexpected happened and it\'s very, very memorable. Those are the memories that you cherish later.</li><li>Mark: I think that\'s probably where travel stories come from are more of the things that you didn\'t expect, more of the hiccups. God only knows on this podcast, most of the stories that I\'ll tell have come from things that went sideways, not things that went well.</li><li>Josh: It\'s so interesting to think more about how that\'s really baked right into our language. So for example, the word chance comes from the Latin <em>cadentia </em>meaning <em>falling</em>. So just when we think about how we use the words of “let the chips fall where they may” or “something befalls you”, this idea of having our feet off the ground, falling through space, we can\'t grasp anything, what do you do with that? If you’re someone who likes, in some kind of existential way, that feeling of falling, then you\'re an adventurer. You\'re going to get more out of your travel experiences than someone who wants everything to be exactly the same way every time and never have any hiccups.</li><li>Mark: In a prior episode, we talked with <a href=\"https://emilythomaswrites.co.uk/about/\">Emily Thomas</a>, philosophy professor at Durham University in the UK, and she wrote a book <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/2DO07fV\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">The Meaning of Travel</a></em>. And one of the things that we got talking about was this idea of travel giving you a sense of otherness, so taking you out of your comfort zone and putting you in the middle of something different ,and what you experience out of that, both from where you are as well as within yourself. And I think about that a little bit, as you think about, you\'re putting yourself into a potential adventure. You don\'t know where you\'re going, you\'re just putting yourself into a situation and figuring it out.</li><li>Josh: I like how you\'re saying “put yourself into... “ Of course, another aspect of adventure is getting yourself out of the ordinary.</li><li>Mark: Yes, getting you out of that small town without getting your ass kicked.</li><li>Josh: Yeah, getting out of your routine, getting out of your small town, getting out of the kind of the spell that the quotidian everyday life casts on us, this kind of enchantment or bewitchment where you just want, you just expect everything to be the same all the time. Travel is one of the great ways, you know historically, traveling to other cultures and seeing the world, seeing how people live in other places. These are great ways to kind of break that spell of enchantment that every day puts on us.</li><li>Mark: Josh, the act of travel has come under pressure of late. Pre-pandemic that was starting to see a thread of travels perhaps of frivolous luxury that was killing the planet through carbon emissions and global warming, maybe overcrowding of specific places like Machu Picchu or Angkor Wat. And now in the time of Covid, there seems another riff which is -- travel is a selfish act because it hastens the spread of coronavirus around the world. How do we square this? How do we square these concepts of travel being negative with the need for adventure, that need for escape and the ability therefore to find ourselves?</li><li>Josh: You can\'t entirely square, I do think that there is some truth to those criticisms. We shouldn\'t be spreading disease and we shouldn\'t be destroying the planet by unnecessary travel. But then the question is “what\'s necessary and how often do we do it?” Maybe if you’re somebody who travels 100 times a year, maybe that\'s too much. But maybe if you travel once a year, that\'s not enough. But I do think that for me anyway, during Covid, I didn\'t travel really at all outside of Boston, New Hampshire and Vermont, but I traveled widely through reading adventure novels, watching movies and Google Streets where you can walk around inside the Sistine Chapel remotely. Of course these are not as good -- just the same as Zoom calls are not the same as being in the same room with someone. It\'s not as soul nourishing, you don\'t get as much out of it. You\'re not really experiencing the whole context that you get when you travel, but you can have sort of armchair adventures to some extent that helps square that circle. But yeah, there\'s no right answer to that.</li><li>Mark: Yeah, absolutely. Josh, as you think about <em>The Adventure’s Glossary</em>, how should people think about it, take it, enjoy it?</li><li>Josh: I hope that word nerds will enjoy it just on its own merits. However, there is kind of a secret philosophy woven through this alphabetized list of words, which is this idea that adventure is something that we should seek. We should try to break out of the ordinary and see things in a new way and expand our horizons, whether it\'s through actual literal travel or other ways, and that there are certain qualities that we need to cultivate in ourselves to be good adventurers. Whether that\'s a sense of humor, whether that\'s wit, whether that\'s courage, grit and so forth. These are all the kinds of things that I\'ve tried to express through this book, which from the outside might just look like a fun, slightly frivolous word nerd book.</li><li>Mark: Josh Glenn, thanks very much for joining us on the TravelCommons podcast. We\'ll put a link to <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3lSNcwg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">The Adventure’s Glossary</a></em> so people can find it.</li><li>Josh: Thank you for having me and happy travels to all your listeners.</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #182</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social  -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_182.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #182 — More COVID Changes; Words That Mean Adventure','','inherit','closed','closed','','4020-revision-v1','','','2021-12-10 11:16:00','2021-12-10 16:16:00','',4020,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4022',0,'revision','',0),
(4023,1,'2021-12-10 11:44:29','2021-12-10 16:44:29','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/JPEG-image.jpeg\"><img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/JPEG-image-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"Jumble of Travel Signs\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> Cleared to Adventure[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Back in front of the microphone after a two-week trip to the UK, getting back home just before the new <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/omicron-covid-travel-international-11638216229?st=sm0fcotd0jfju1i&amp;reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink\">Omicron travel restrictions</a> hit. We talk about getting to London, surfing the waves of changing travel requirements, a new way to renew Global Entry, and finish up talking with <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_Glenn\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Josh Glenn</a> about his new book <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3lSNcwg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">The Adventure’s Glossary</a></em>. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_182.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #182: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois a couple of weeks since getting back from two weeks in the UK -- a week in London and a week of hiking in Southern Wales. Had really great weather for the back half of November -- brisk temperatures, but more sun than we expected; certainly a bit windy when walking the cliffs above the Atlantic, but nothing that we couldn’t layer up for; and only one day of real rain. It was a lot better than the weather forecasts had led us to expect.</li><li>The trip over and back was pretty uneventful. I’d hit American on a mileage sale back in March for direct flights between ORD and LHR. We flew coach on a Triple 7 that was pretty empty on the way over. People were popping up the armrests in the 4-seat center section and laying down to sleep. One guy even built a little tent out of blankets to cover his head. I’m not sure if he was trying to block the cabin lights or maybe he was concerned people walking down the aisles would breathe on him while he slept (though mask discipline was very solid) or maybe <em>he</em> wanted to drop <em>his</em> mask while he slept and didn’t want to get called out by the flight attendants. Whatever his deal was, it looked a little weird.</li><li>I ate dinner on that flight even though I’d eaten a cubano sandwich at Tortas Frontera, my favorite ORD restaurant, right before boarding. I took the meal not because I was hungry but because it gave me an excuse to drop my mask for a little bit on that 8-hr flight. Rather than the “replace your mask between bites and sips” rules that I heard on domestic flights this year, on my international flights over the past couple of months, most everyone takes off their mask for the duration of the meal. I don’t know if this difference comes from emptier planes, longer flights, or that international fliers are less likely to try to get around mask rules (and, purely my own experience, I haven’t seen any passenger pushback on masks on any of my international flights, whereas I was seeing/hearing a lot of it on domestic flights earlier this year), but I appreciate the flexibility/pragmatism (?) on these long flights.</li><li>While the plane wasn’t full, I was worried about passport control when we got to Heathrow. There’s always a bit of suspense anyways as you make the long walk from the plane to passport control. Did a whole bunch of Triple 7’s disgorge at the same time, let alone some massive A-380’s? Did the immigration force botch their workforce scheduling up? Will we flow smoothly into the immigration hall or will our march suddenly stop short?  Worse, will we smack into one of those Heathrow e-gate failures that has caused 2-4 hour queues over the past couple of months? </li><li>We kept moving, but then came to a sudden stop as we made the final turn toward the hall. Looking around the line, I could see the room wasn’t jammed -- good sign. It looked like they’d paused us for a minute while they rejiggered their cowpen zig-zag line. After a minute or two, we started moving again, and at a pretty good clip with almost everyone getting pointed to the automated e-gates. I walked up, put my passport on the reader, a camera box popped up, mechanically adjusted to my height, and then after what I assume was some facial recognition analysis, opened the gate and let me go to baggage claim. No “how long are you going to be in the country” quiz, which I didn’t miss, but also no stamp in my passport. How am I going to remember this trip for my next Global Entry renewal. Guess I’ll have to drink a beer or two while I’m here so it shows up on my Untappd history.</li><li>Bridge Music — <em>Countryside Summer Joyride</em> by Kara Square (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mindmapthat/56281 Ft: Javolenus</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Speaking of Global Entry, back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/10/28/podcast-180-tracking-covid-travel-requirements-cycling-thru-puglia/\">episode #180</a> at the end of October, I was still waiting for my renewal approval and compare my month-and-a-half and counting wait with listener Jerry Sarfati’s 2-day wait. Then, the day before we left for the UK, I got an email with the subject line “TTP (Trusted Traveler Program) Application Status Change” telling me to check the website for more information. Logging in, I saw that I’d been given conditional approval, so about 2 months from submitting my renewal application. I still had to do an interview, but if I was reading everything correctly, I had 12 months to get that done. I looked to see if ORD had an appointment available the day we were flying back from London, but no dice. The earliest appointment was mid-December. OK, I’ll think about it later. No rush; I have 12 months. But the next day, I got another email from dhs.gov telling me about a new program, Enrollment-On-Arrival, where I could knock out my interview while in the customs/immigration area coming back from an international trip, no appointment necessary. Perfect!</li><li>So that Monday afternoon after a quick pass-through the Global Entry kiosk, I went looking for Booth 58 which is where, according to the Enrollment-On-Arrival website, was where the ORD interviews would be. But it looked like getting to Booth 58 would mean standing in a long and growing line of non-US passengers. Ah, forget it. Again, I have 12 months to get this done. But the luggage carousel for our flight hadn’t even started turning yet, so I went up to one of the customs officers and asked her. She immediately pointed me to a guy in a booth completely separate from the rest of the immigration traffic, and in the complete opposite direction of Booth 58. There was one guy in front of me getting his interview, but by the time I stepped up to the officer, there was a family of 4 and two other people behind me. The interview took about 5 minutes. I walked out and our luggage carousel still wasn’t moving. By the end of the day, the TTP website showed my Global Entry was good for another 5 years. Full credit to DHS for coming up with ways to make Global Entry easier. I just wish they’d keep their website locator up-to-date.</li><li>In the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/11/13/podcast-181-travel-potpourri-2021-travelers-gift-guide/\">last episode</a>, we talked about how last year’s flurry of vaccination passport app announcements has pretty much turned out to be, in the words of Macbeth, “a tale, Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing” But American Airlines’ partnership with Verifly did actually have a little something to it. I downloaded the app and, after wrestling through what is not the most intuitive interface, was able to see a list of the UK travel requirements and then validate that I met them, by uploading pictures of Irene’s and my vaccination cards and our passenger locator form QR codes. That’s nice, but what was better was when we checked in for our flight, all we had to do was show the agent the green “All good” screens for Irene and me and we were done. None of the fishing out the right forms and holding them up to the lucite screen. Two swipes on the phone and we were done. Nothing earth-shattering, but it does relieve the friction out of one part of the journey</li><li>A <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">recurring</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/08/24/podcast-178-what-remains-from-pandemic-times-best-restaurant-and-bars/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">topic</a> on the TravelCommons podcast is the move to a cashless society. And certainly the pandemic accelerated this with the push toward contactless transactions; nobody wanted to handle your possibly-infectious cash. On our first day in London, on our walk to pick up our COVID tests, I stopped at the first ATM I saw to pull out £100, just to have some cash in my wallet. I’m a bit old-school in that way. And I’m glad I did it because once we left London and were staying in small towns in South Wales, it was really tough to find an ATM. Now, this shouldn’t be that big a deal with everyone taking cards and contactless, be it a card or on the phone with Google or Apple Pay, doing away (mostly) with the need for a PIN or to sign anything. But in Wales, the parking lots at the base of our hikes, the pay-&amp;-display machines, weren’t taking my cards, either contactless or physical. And by the time we were in our last town, Hay-on-Wye, I’d run out of coins and needed to find an ATM. Google Maps was no help; it kept pointing me to phantom machines in little grocery stores. Irene had better luck in the tourist information center. The woman there gave us directions to what she said was the one remaining ATM in town -- which surprised me because Hay-on-Wye has a good bit of tourist traffic with their book festivals. But anyhow, we found it <em>and </em>it worked; it had cash. Of course, then we had to find something like a coffee shop that would take cash so we could break a bill and get coins for the machine, which knocked out any of the usual chains. Walking down the street, I found a place that looked indy enough -- the sign said “coffee shop” but it looked more like a thrift store. Sure enough, the guy was happy to take cash, though he had to pull out his wallet to make change. </li><li>We’ve talked about Hertz’s downward service spiral, which I forecasted in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/06/09/podcast-164-first-post-lockdown-trips-travel-credit-cards/\">episode #164</a> after their bankruptcy filing. But since I haven’t held back in slamming them for empty lots in Phoenix and San Diego, and for incorrect fuel charges, I need to give kudos to the Hertz location in Cardiff in Wales for what had to be, hands down, the easiest and therefore best Hertz transaction I’ve had in Europe. Leaving London for the Welsh hiking part of our trip, we decided to skip the fun and excitement of driving in London and instead took a train to Cardiff and then drove to the coast from there. The Hertz place was about a 10-min cab ride from the train station in a bit of an auto dealer row. I walked in, showed the woman my Illinois drivers license, she asked me if I’d be OK driving an automatic (how fast can I say “Yes!”), gave me a key, and pointed me to a grey Skoda in the back lot. Done; no hard upsell on enhanced insurance or refueling options, just “Here’s the key; have a good trip”. And then returning the car, I pulled in after gassing it up; the guy took a quick walk around it; had me sign his screen, and we were done. And nothing wonky when I looked at the emailed receipt. It’s sorta damning with faint praise that I’m so impressed when a transaction goes smoothly. It should always be this easy, but it rarely is.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> or the <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram </a>account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music —  <em>Jester of the Golden Apocalypse</em> by Super_Sigil (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Super_Sigil/34750 </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Yet More COVID Changes</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I mentioned in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/11/13/podcast-181-travel-potpourri-2021-travelers-gift-guide/\">last episode</a> that I was a little concerned about the logistics of getting COVID testing done by our second day in London. But it turned out fine. With a bit of Googling, I found <a href=\"https://covid.randox.com/day-2-test-at-home/\">Randox,</a> a big UK test firm, offering “click &amp; collect” rapid antigen tests for $25 a piece. It gave us a good reason, a destination for a post-arrival walk. It’s always good to spend a lot of time in the sunlight on that first day in Europe; I find it’s key to resetting my body clock. We did them in our hotel room the next morning. Yet more suspense -- waiting those 15 minutes, hoping that second pink line wouldn’t materialize, and then taking a picture of it in Randox’s app to get the “all clear” email back.</li><li>Of course, this was all pre-Omicron. That bombshell dropped the weekend before we flew home which had me back doing the rounds on Google, trying to figure out what travel requirements were changing. The UK quickly added pre-departure tests and shifted their Day 2 testing back to the more sensitive -- but 3 times more expensive -- PCR tests. But we were already in the UK. What mattered to us getting back to Chicago. The communications out of the US were less clear; mostly rumors; nothing official. The rumors were: tightening the window on pre-departure tests -- from 72 hours to 24 hours before departure, which could’ve been a problem for us; we’d already done the Abbott rapid antigen tests we’d brought from home Saturday afternoon before Monday morning departure. And adding a post-arrival test, similar to the UK’s. But the worst rumor was requiring a 7-day quarantine <em>even with</em> a negative test. Lucky for us, none of these US rumors came true -- at least by the Monday morning of our flight. </li><li>It wasn’t until later in the week the new rules were announced and it seems that folks had come to their senses a bit. The only rumor that came true was tightening the testing window down to 1 day. Well, that and extending the airplane mask requirement to March 2022, but as I said back in September in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/09/27/podcast-179-high-tech-airport-lines-business-travel-still-missing/\">episode #179</a>, I don’t think that was a surprise to anyone. Going to a 1-day window just reinforces the case for bringing a rapid antigen test with you. The only caveat is that the test has to be done in concert with a telehealth call to validate it’s actually you doing the test and the results are really negative. Coming home from Italy and the UK, Irene and I used <a href=\"https://www.emed.com/products/covid-at-home-testkit-six-pack?hsLang=en\">Abbott BinaxNow tests</a> with telehealth sessions from eMed. Depending on how many you buy (2, 3 or 6-pack), the cost per test ranges from $25 to $35, which is pretty competitive with the prices I saw for airport same-day testing services and it’s a helluva lot more convenient. Though as I recommended in this year’s <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-to-survive-post-pandemic-travel/\">travelers gift guide</a>, some sort of smartphone tripod comes in handy when the eMed guy wants to watch you swirl the cotton swab in your nose and then insert it into the test kit. Not sure how you’d do all that one-handed.</li><li>I hate the term “the new normal”, but perhaps, at least for the near term, we have to think about changes in COVID restrictions the same way we think about storms, terrorism, and strikes -- work to avoid them, but be flexible, agile enough to deal with it if you get caught. Now no analogy is perfect. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/podcast-150-travel-interruptus/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #150 — Travel Interruptus\">episode #150</a>, I told the story of how a bomb threat on the train line into Paris caused us to our flight home. It’s a lot easier to accept a couple of bonus days in Paris than an unplanned quarantine week in an airport Holiday Inn.</li><li>Bridge Music —  South Texas Cowboy Blues by texasradiofish (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/texasradiofish/52030 Ft: unreal_dm, ElRon XChile</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Words We Use for Adventure</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>We know that words impact the ways we think, feel, experience things -- including travel. Josh Glenn, a Boston-based author and semiotician (semiotics, the study of signs, symbols, and language, and how they create meaning) has just published a book <em><a href=\"https://www.hilobrow.com/2021/09/28/the-adventurers-glossary/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">The Adventurer’s Glossary</a></em>, with some 500 words associated with adventure. And since going on an adventure often involves travel, I wanted to talk to Josh about his book and how the words that we use to describe adventure could affect how we think about travel.<ul><li>Mark: Josh, how do you read <em>The Adventurer’s Glossary</em>?  It\'s an alphabetical list of words, terms, and their not-quite-Oxford-Dictionary definitions. They’re really more stories than definitions. Should I start at the top (0-Dark-Hundred is the first entry) and work my way through? Or just randomly riff through the pages, open it, put my finger down and read something?</li><li>Josh: It’s sort of a capricious decision to alphabetize all these terms because that just completely put them out of order. So all of the travel terms are not together, and all of the military terms are not together, and the stuff I got from hip hop or gaming culture or adventure literature, none of them are grouped together. It could just be something you pick up and randomly browse through. It\'s absolutely okay. However, as much as possible, I did try to edit it in such a way that if you were reading it from beginning to end it would kind of make sense in that direction as well. So if there\'s a little bit of beginning to end stuff in it, but really it\'s read randomly.</li><li>Mark: How did you choose which words to include? It\'s a pretty wide-ranging list. You’ve got bottle, hair, stoic, as well as the stuff that I would normally associate with adventure like bug-out bag, roam, and voyageur.</li><li>Josh: This is the third glossary that I\'ve done. I did one back in 2008 called <em>The Idler’s Glossary</em> which was all about basically how much I hate having a regular job and enjoy doing things that look like you\'re doing nothing from the outside but actually, it might be very rich and deep what you\'re doing. And then I did another book called<em> The Wage Slave’s Glossary</em>, which was about how much I hate my job. And I was working at the Boston Globe at the time. Actually, a job I kind of liked, but I just don\'t like having bosses and it was all about the horrible jargon of the workplace. Basically, these are topics I\'ve been interested in for many, many years and I just started gathering words as I also read a lot of adventure novels and watch a lot of adventure movies. So sort of gathering words that occurred to me over time. But then I also do really nerdy things like literally sit down and read through a slang dictionary or pick up a thesaurus and go look up the definitions and the etymology of every synonym for a certain word. So the list balloons; I think there\'s something like 500 words in this book.</li><li>Mark: So Josh, we think about adventure. Adventure often involves travel. Do you think that the language or the words that we use to describe adventure impact our expectations of how we travel?</li><li>Josh: The language of our culture helps shape and guide the way we are able to perceive and think about anything including adventure and travel. We can\'t think outside of this kind of structure of language that we have. I mean an adventure is, and that word comes from the Latin meaning to arrive unexpectedly. That\'s actually really an important philosophical piece for me as I was going through this, the idea that you can have a trip is not an adventure if nothing unexpected happens and if you don\'t take enough risks to allow things unexpected to happen. So when I think back to the amazing road trips I took when I was in college with my friends around the country, it\'s all kind of a blur. I don\'t really remember a lot of specific details except when something went wrong -- when we broke down in the middle of the highway on a mountain in Colorado and we had to go to a small town and have people that help us get parts and explore that town and meet the locals and almost get beat up etcetera, etcetera. That\'s an adventure. Something unexpected happened and it\'s very, very memorable. Those are the memories that you cherish later.</li><li>Mark: I think that\'s probably where travel stories come from are more of the things that you didn\'t expect, more of the hiccups. God only knows on this podcast, most of the stories that I\'ll tell have come from things that went sideways, not things that went well.</li><li>Josh: It\'s so interesting to think more about how that\'s really baked right into our language. So for example, the word chance comes from the Latin <em>cadentia </em>meaning <em>falling</em>. So just when we think about how we use the words of “let the chips fall where they may” or “something befalls you”, this idea of having our feet off the ground, falling through space, we can\'t grasp anything, what do you do with that? If you’re someone who likes, in some kind of existential way, that feeling of falling, then you\'re an adventurer. You\'re going to get more out of your travel experiences than someone who wants everything to be exactly the same way every time and never have any hiccups.</li><li>Mark: In a prior episode, we talked with <a href=\"https://emilythomaswrites.co.uk/about/\">Emily Thomas</a>, philosophy professor at Durham University in the UK, and she wrote a book <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/2DO07fV\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">The Meaning of Travel</a></em>. And one of the things that we got talking about was this idea of travel giving you a sense of otherness, so taking you out of your comfort zone and putting you in the middle of something different ,and what you experience out of that, both from where you are as well as within yourself. And I think about that a little bit, as you think about, you\'re putting yourself into a potential adventure. You don\'t know where you\'re going, you\'re just putting yourself into a situation and figuring it out.</li><li>Josh: I like how you\'re saying “put yourself into... “ Of course, another aspect of adventure is getting yourself out of the ordinary.</li><li>Mark: Yes, getting you out of that small town without getting your ass kicked.</li><li>Josh: Yeah, getting out of your routine, getting out of your small town, getting out of the kind of the spell that the quotidian everyday life casts on us, this kind of enchantment or bewitchment where you just want, you just expect everything to be the same all the time. Travel is one of the great ways, you know historically, traveling to other cultures and seeing the world, seeing how people live in other places. These are great ways to kind of break that spell of enchantment that every day puts on us.</li><li>Mark: Josh, the act of travel has come under pressure of late. Pre-pandemic that was starting to see a thread of travels perhaps of frivolous luxury that was killing the planet through carbon emissions and global warming, maybe overcrowding of specific places like Machu Picchu or Angkor Wat. And now in the time of Covid, there seems another riff which is -- travel is a selfish act because it hastens the spread of coronavirus around the world. How do we square this? How do we square these concepts of travel being negative with the need for adventure, that need for escape and the ability therefore to find ourselves?</li><li>Josh: You can\'t entirely square, I do think that there is some truth to those criticisms. We shouldn\'t be spreading disease and we shouldn\'t be destroying the planet by unnecessary travel. But then the question is “what\'s necessary and how often do we do it?” Maybe if you’re somebody who travels 100 times a year, maybe that\'s too much. But maybe if you travel once a year, that\'s not enough. But I do think that for me anyway, during Covid, I didn\'t travel really at all outside of Boston, New Hampshire and Vermont, but I traveled widely through reading adventure novels, watching movies and Google Streets where you can walk around inside the Sistine Chapel remotely. Of course these are not as good -- just the same as Zoom calls are not the same as being in the same room with someone. It\'s not as soul nourishing, you don\'t get as much out of it. You\'re not really experiencing the whole context that you get when you travel, but you can have sort of armchair adventures to some extent that helps square that circle. But yeah, there\'s no right answer to that.</li><li>Mark: Yeah, absolutely. Josh, as you think about <em>The Adventure’s Glossary</em>, how should people think about it, take it, enjoy it?</li><li>Josh: I hope that word nerds will enjoy it just on its own merits. However, there is kind of a secret philosophy woven through this alphabetized list of words, which is this idea that adventure is something that we should seek. We should try to break out of the ordinary and see things in a new way and expand our horizons, whether it\'s through actual literal travel or other ways, and that there are certain qualities that we need to cultivate in ourselves to be good adventurers. Whether that\'s a sense of humor, whether that\'s wit, whether that\'s courage, grit and so forth. These are all the kinds of things that I\'ve tried to express through this book, which from the outside might just look like a fun, slightly frivolous word nerd book.</li><li>Mark: Josh Glenn, thanks very much for joining us on the TravelCommons podcast. We\'ll put a link to <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3lSNcwg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">The Adventure’s Glossary</a></em> so people can find it.</li><li>Josh: Thank you for having me and happy travels to all your listeners.</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #182</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social  -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_182.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #182 — More COVID Changes; Words That Mean Adventure','','inherit','closed','closed','','4020-revision-v1','','','2021-12-10 11:44:29','2021-12-10 16:44:29','',4020,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4023',0,'revision','',0),
(4024,1,'2021-12-10 11:46:52','2021-12-10 16:46:52','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/JPEG-image.jpeg\"><img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/JPEG-image-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"Jumble of Travel Signs\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> Cleared to Adventure[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Back in front of the microphone after a two-week trip to the UK, getting back home just before the new <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/omicron-covid-travel-international-11638216229?st=sm0fcotd0jfju1i&amp;reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink\">Omicron travel restrictions</a> hit. We talk about getting to London, surfing the waves of changing travel requirements, a new way to renew Global Entry, moan a bit more about the inexorable advance of the cashless society, and finish up talking with <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_Glenn\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Josh Glenn</a> about his new book <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3lSNcwg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">The Adventure’s Glossary</a></em>.  All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_182.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #182: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois a couple of weeks since getting back from two weeks in the UK -- a week in London and a week of hiking in Southern Wales. Had really great weather for the back half of November -- brisk temperatures, but more sun than we expected; certainly a bit windy when walking the cliffs above the Atlantic, but nothing that we couldn’t layer up for; and only one day of real rain. It was a lot better than the weather forecasts had led us to expect.</li><li>The trip over and back was pretty uneventful. I’d hit American on a mileage sale back in March for direct flights between ORD and LHR. We flew coach on a Triple 7 that was pretty empty on the way over. People were popping up the armrests in the 4-seat center section and laying down to sleep. One guy even built a little tent out of blankets to cover his head. I’m not sure if he was trying to block the cabin lights or maybe he was concerned people walking down the aisles would breathe on him while he slept (though mask discipline was very solid) or maybe <em>he</em> wanted to drop <em>his</em> mask while he slept and didn’t want to get called out by the flight attendants. Whatever his deal was, it looked a little weird.</li><li>I ate dinner on that flight even though I’d eaten a cubano sandwich at Tortas Frontera, my favorite ORD restaurant, right before boarding. I took the meal not because I was hungry but because it gave me an excuse to drop my mask for a little bit on that 8-hr flight. Rather than the “replace your mask between bites and sips” rules that I heard on domestic flights this year, on my international flights over the past couple of months, most everyone takes off their mask for the duration of the meal. I don’t know if this difference comes from emptier planes, longer flights, or that international fliers are less likely to try to get around mask rules (and, purely my own experience, I haven’t seen any passenger pushback on masks on any of my international flights, whereas I was seeing/hearing a lot of it on domestic flights earlier this year), but I appreciate the flexibility/pragmatism (?) on these long flights.</li><li>While the plane wasn’t full, I was worried about passport control when we got to Heathrow. There’s always a bit of suspense anyways as you make the long walk from the plane to passport control. Did a whole bunch of Triple 7’s disgorge at the same time, let alone some massive A-380’s? Did the immigration force botch their workforce scheduling up? Will we flow smoothly into the immigration hall or will our march suddenly stop short?  Worse, will we smack into one of those Heathrow e-gate failures that has caused 2-4 hour queues over the past couple of months? </li><li>We kept moving, but then came to a sudden stop as we made the final turn toward the hall. Looking around the line, I could see the room wasn’t jammed -- good sign. It looked like they’d paused us for a minute while they rejiggered their cowpen zig-zag line. After a minute or two, we started moving again, and at a pretty good clip with almost everyone getting pointed to the automated e-gates. I walked up, put my passport on the reader, a camera box popped up, mechanically adjusted to my height, and then after what I assume was some facial recognition analysis, opened the gate and let me go to baggage claim. No “how long are you going to be in the country” quiz, which I didn’t miss, but also no stamp in my passport. How am I going to remember this trip for my next Global Entry renewal. Guess I’ll have to drink a beer or two while I’m here so it shows up on my Untappd history.</li><li>Bridge Music — <em>Countryside Summer Joyride</em> by Kara Square (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mindmapthat/56281 Ft: Javolenus</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Speaking of Global Entry, back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/10/28/podcast-180-tracking-covid-travel-requirements-cycling-thru-puglia/\">episode #180</a> at the end of October, I was still waiting for my renewal approval and compare my month-and-a-half and counting wait with listener Jerry Sarfati’s 2-day wait. Then, the day before we left for the UK, I got an email with the subject line “TTP (Trusted Traveler Program) Application Status Change” telling me to check the website for more information. Logging in, I saw that I’d been given conditional approval, so about 2 months from submitting my renewal application. I still had to do an interview, but if I was reading everything correctly, I had 12 months to get that done. I looked to see if ORD had an appointment available the day we were flying back from London, but no dice. The earliest appointment was mid-December. OK, I’ll think about it later. No rush; I have 12 months. But the next day, I got another email from dhs.gov telling me about a new program, Enrollment-On-Arrival, where I could knock out my interview while in the customs/immigration area coming back from an international trip, no appointment necessary. Perfect!</li><li>So that Monday afternoon after a quick pass-through the Global Entry kiosk, I went looking for Booth 58 which is where, according to the Enrollment-On-Arrival website, was where the ORD interviews would be. But it looked like getting to Booth 58 would mean standing in a long and growing line of non-US passengers. Ah, forget it. Again, I have 12 months to get this done. But the luggage carousel for our flight hadn’t even started turning yet, so I went up to one of the customs officers and asked her. She immediately pointed me to a guy in a booth completely separate from the rest of the immigration traffic, and in the complete opposite direction of Booth 58. There was one guy in front of me getting his interview, but by the time I stepped up to the officer, there was a family of 4 and two other people behind me. The interview took about 5 minutes. I walked out and our luggage carousel still wasn’t moving. By the end of the day, the TTP website showed my Global Entry was good for another 5 years. Full credit to DHS for coming up with ways to make Global Entry easier. I just wish they’d keep their website locator up-to-date.</li><li>In the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/11/13/podcast-181-travel-potpourri-2021-travelers-gift-guide/\">last episode</a>, we talked about how last year’s flurry of vaccination passport app announcements has pretty much turned out to be, in the words of Macbeth, “a tale, Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing” But American Airlines’ partnership with Verifly did actually have a little something to it. I downloaded the app and, after wrestling through what is not the most intuitive interface, was able to see a list of the UK travel requirements and then validate that I met them, by uploading pictures of Irene’s and my vaccination cards and our passenger locator form QR codes. That’s nice, but what was better was when we checked in for our flight, all we had to do was show the agent the green “All good” screens for Irene and me and we were done. None of the fishing out the right forms and holding them up to the lucite screen. Two swipes on the phone and we were done. Nothing earth-shattering, but it does relieve the friction out of one part of the journey</li><li>A <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">recurring</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/08/24/podcast-178-what-remains-from-pandemic-times-best-restaurant-and-bars/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">topic</a> on the TravelCommons podcast is the move to a cashless society. And certainly the pandemic accelerated this with the push toward contactless transactions; nobody wanted to handle your possibly-infectious cash. On our first day in London, on our walk to pick up our COVID tests, I stopped at the first ATM I saw to pull out £100, just to have some cash in my wallet. I’m a bit old-school in that way. And I’m glad I did it because once we left London and were staying in small towns in South Wales, it was really tough to find an ATM. Now, this shouldn’t be that big a deal with everyone taking cards and contactless, be it a card or on the phone with Google or Apple Pay, doing away (mostly) with the need for a PIN or to sign anything. But in Wales, the parking lots at the base of our hikes, the pay-&amp;-display machines, weren’t taking my cards, either contactless or physical. And by the time we were in our last town, Hay-on-Wye, I’d run out of coins and needed to find an ATM. Google Maps was no help; it kept pointing me to phantom machines in little grocery stores. Irene had better luck in the tourist information center. The woman there gave us directions to what she said was the one remaining ATM in town -- which surprised me because Hay-on-Wye has a good bit of tourist traffic with their book festivals. But anyhow, we found it <em>and </em>it worked; it had cash. Of course, then we had to find something like a coffee shop that would take cash so we could break a bill and get coins for the machine, which knocked out any of the usual chains. Walking down the street, I found a place that looked indy enough -- the sign said “coffee shop” but it looked more like a thrift store. Sure enough, the guy was happy to take cash, though he had to pull out his wallet to make change. </li><li>We’ve talked about Hertz’s downward service spiral, which I forecasted in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/06/09/podcast-164-first-post-lockdown-trips-travel-credit-cards/\">episode #164</a> after their bankruptcy filing. But since I haven’t held back in slamming them for empty lots in Phoenix and San Diego, and for incorrect fuel charges, I need to give kudos to the Hertz location in Cardiff in Wales for what had to be, hands down, the easiest and therefore best Hertz transaction I’ve had in Europe. Leaving London for the Welsh hiking part of our trip, we decided to skip the fun and excitement of driving in London and instead took a train to Cardiff and then drove to the coast from there. The Hertz place was about a 10-min cab ride from the train station in a bit of an auto dealer row. I walked in, showed the woman my Illinois drivers license, she asked me if I’d be OK driving an automatic (how fast can I say “Yes!”), gave me a key, and pointed me to a grey Skoda in the back lot. Done; no hard upsell on enhanced insurance or refueling options, just “Here’s the key; have a good trip”. And then returning the car, I pulled in after gassing it up; the guy took a quick walk around it; had me sign his screen, and we were done. And nothing wonky when I looked at the emailed receipt. It’s sorta damning with faint praise that I’m so impressed when a transaction goes smoothly. It should always be this easy, but it rarely is.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> or the <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram </a>account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music —  <em>Jester of the Golden Apocalypse</em> by Super_Sigil (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Super_Sigil/34750 </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Yet More COVID Changes</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I mentioned in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/11/13/podcast-181-travel-potpourri-2021-travelers-gift-guide/\">last episode</a> that I was a little concerned about the logistics of getting COVID testing done by our second day in London. But it turned out fine. With a bit of Googling, I found <a href=\"https://covid.randox.com/day-2-test-at-home/\">Randox,</a> a big UK test firm, offering “click &amp; collect” rapid antigen tests for $25 a piece. It gave us a good reason, a destination for a post-arrival walk. It’s always good to spend a lot of time in the sunlight on that first day in Europe; I find it’s key to resetting my body clock. We did them in our hotel room the next morning. Yet more suspense -- waiting those 15 minutes, hoping that second pink line wouldn’t materialize, and then taking a picture of it in Randox’s app to get the “all clear” email back.</li><li>Of course, this was all pre-Omicron. That bombshell dropped the weekend before we flew home which had me back doing the rounds on Google, trying to figure out what travel requirements were changing. The UK quickly added pre-departure tests and shifted their Day 2 testing back to the more sensitive -- but 3 times more expensive -- PCR tests. But we were already in the UK. What mattered to us getting back to Chicago. The communications out of the US were less clear; mostly rumors; nothing official. The rumors were: tightening the window on pre-departure tests -- from 72 hours to 24 hours before departure, which could’ve been a problem for us; we’d already done the Abbott rapid antigen tests we’d brought from home Saturday afternoon before Monday morning departure. And adding a post-arrival test, similar to the UK’s. But the worst rumor was requiring a 7-day quarantine <em>even with</em> a negative test. Lucky for us, none of these US rumors came true -- at least by the Monday morning of our flight. </li><li>It wasn’t until later in the week the new rules were announced and it seems that folks had come to their senses a bit. The only rumor that came true was tightening the testing window down to 1 day. Well, that and extending the airplane mask requirement to March 2022, but as I said back in September in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/09/27/podcast-179-high-tech-airport-lines-business-travel-still-missing/\">episode #179</a>, I don’t think that was a surprise to anyone. Going to a 1-day window just reinforces the case for bringing a rapid antigen test with you. The only caveat is that the test has to be done in concert with a telehealth call to validate it’s actually you doing the test and the results are really negative. Coming home from Italy and the UK, Irene and I used <a href=\"https://www.emed.com/products/covid-at-home-testkit-six-pack?hsLang=en\">Abbott BinaxNow tests</a> with telehealth sessions from eMed. Depending on how many you buy (2, 3 or 6-pack), the cost per test ranges from $25 to $35, which is pretty competitive with the prices I saw for airport same-day testing services and it’s a helluva lot more convenient. Though as I recommended in this year’s <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-to-survive-post-pandemic-travel/\">travelers gift guide</a>, some sort of smartphone tripod comes in handy when the eMed guy wants to watch you swirl the cotton swab in your nose and then insert it into the test kit. Not sure how you’d do all that one-handed.</li><li>I hate the term “the new normal”, but perhaps, at least for the near term, we have to think about changes in COVID restrictions the same way we think about storms, terrorism, and strikes -- work to avoid them, but be flexible, agile enough to deal with it if you get caught. Now no analogy is perfect. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/podcast-150-travel-interruptus/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #150 — Travel Interruptus\">episode #150</a>, I told the story of how a bomb threat on the train line into Paris caused us to our flight home. It’s a lot easier to accept a couple of bonus days in Paris than an unplanned quarantine week in an airport Holiday Inn.</li><li>Bridge Music —  South Texas Cowboy Blues by texasradiofish (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/texasradiofish/52030 Ft: unreal_dm, ElRon XChile</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Words We Use for Adventure</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>We know that words impact the ways we think, feel, experience things -- including travel. Josh Glenn, a Boston-based author and semiotician (semiotics, the study of signs, symbols, and language, and how they create meaning) has just published a book <em><a href=\"https://www.hilobrow.com/2021/09/28/the-adventurers-glossary/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">The Adventurer’s Glossary</a></em>, with some 500 words associated with adventure. And since going on an adventure often involves travel, I wanted to talk to Josh about his book and how the words that we use to describe adventure could affect how we think about travel.<ul><li>Mark: Josh, how do you read <em>The Adventurer’s Glossary</em>?  It\'s an alphabetical list of words, terms, and their not-quite-Oxford-Dictionary definitions. They’re really more stories than definitions. Should I start at the top (0-Dark-Hundred is the first entry) and work my way through? Or just randomly riff through the pages, open it, put my finger down and read something?</li><li>Josh: It’s sort of a capricious decision to alphabetize all these terms because that just completely put them out of order. So all of the travel terms are not together, and all of the military terms are not together, and the stuff I got from hip hop or gaming culture or adventure literature, none of them are grouped together. It could just be something you pick up and randomly browse through. It\'s absolutely okay. However, as much as possible, I did try to edit it in such a way that if you were reading it from beginning to end it would kind of make sense in that direction as well. So if there\'s a little bit of beginning to end stuff in it, but really it\'s read randomly.</li><li>Mark: How did you choose which words to include? It\'s a pretty wide-ranging list. You’ve got bottle, hair, stoic, as well as the stuff that I would normally associate with adventure like bug-out bag, roam, and voyageur.</li><li>Josh: This is the third glossary that I\'ve done. I did one back in 2008 called <em>The Idler’s Glossary</em> which was all about basically how much I hate having a regular job and enjoy doing things that look like you\'re doing nothing from the outside but actually, it might be very rich and deep what you\'re doing. And then I did another book called<em> The Wage Slave’s Glossary</em>, which was about how much I hate my job. And I was working at the Boston Globe at the time. Actually, a job I kind of liked, but I just don\'t like having bosses and it was all about the horrible jargon of the workplace. Basically, these are topics I\'ve been interested in for many, many years and I just started gathering words as I also read a lot of adventure novels and watch a lot of adventure movies. So sort of gathering words that occurred to me over time. But then I also do really nerdy things like literally sit down and read through a slang dictionary or pick up a thesaurus and go look up the definitions and the etymology of every synonym for a certain word. So the list balloons; I think there\'s something like 500 words in this book.</li><li>Mark: So Josh, we think about adventure. Adventure often involves travel. Do you think that the language or the words that we use to describe adventure impact our expectations of how we travel?</li><li>Josh: The language of our culture helps shape and guide the way we are able to perceive and think about anything including adventure and travel. We can\'t think outside of this kind of structure of language that we have. I mean an adventure is, and that word comes from the Latin meaning to arrive unexpectedly. That\'s actually really an important philosophical piece for me as I was going through this, the idea that you can have a trip is not an adventure if nothing unexpected happens and if you don\'t take enough risks to allow things unexpected to happen. So when I think back to the amazing road trips I took when I was in college with my friends around the country, it\'s all kind of a blur. I don\'t really remember a lot of specific details except when something went wrong -- when we broke down in the middle of the highway on a mountain in Colorado and we had to go to a small town and have people that help us get parts and explore that town and meet the locals and almost get beat up etcetera, etcetera. That\'s an adventure. Something unexpected happened and it\'s very, very memorable. Those are the memories that you cherish later.</li><li>Mark: I think that\'s probably where travel stories come from are more of the things that you didn\'t expect, more of the hiccups. God only knows on this podcast, most of the stories that I\'ll tell have come from things that went sideways, not things that went well.</li><li>Josh: It\'s so interesting to think more about how that\'s really baked right into our language. So for example, the word chance comes from the Latin <em>cadentia </em>meaning <em>falling</em>. So just when we think about how we use the words of “let the chips fall where they may” or “something befalls you”, this idea of having our feet off the ground, falling through space, we can\'t grasp anything, what do you do with that? If you’re someone who likes, in some kind of existential way, that feeling of falling, then you\'re an adventurer. You\'re going to get more out of your travel experiences than someone who wants everything to be exactly the same way every time and never have any hiccups.</li><li>Mark: In a prior episode, we talked with <a href=\"https://emilythomaswrites.co.uk/about/\">Emily Thomas</a>, philosophy professor at Durham University in the UK, and she wrote a book <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/2DO07fV\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">The Meaning of Travel</a></em>. And one of the things that we got talking about was this idea of travel giving you a sense of otherness, so taking you out of your comfort zone and putting you in the middle of something different ,and what you experience out of that, both from where you are as well as within yourself. And I think about that a little bit, as you think about, you\'re putting yourself into a potential adventure. You don\'t know where you\'re going, you\'re just putting yourself into a situation and figuring it out.</li><li>Josh: I like how you\'re saying “put yourself into... “ Of course, another aspect of adventure is getting yourself out of the ordinary.</li><li>Mark: Yes, getting you out of that small town without getting your ass kicked.</li><li>Josh: Yeah, getting out of your routine, getting out of your small town, getting out of the kind of the spell that the quotidian everyday life casts on us, this kind of enchantment or bewitchment where you just want, you just expect everything to be the same all the time. Travel is one of the great ways, you know historically, traveling to other cultures and seeing the world, seeing how people live in other places. These are great ways to kind of break that spell of enchantment that every day puts on us.</li><li>Mark: Josh, the act of travel has come under pressure of late. Pre-pandemic that was starting to see a thread of travels perhaps of frivolous luxury that was killing the planet through carbon emissions and global warming, maybe overcrowding of specific places like Machu Picchu or Angkor Wat. And now in the time of Covid, there seems another riff which is -- travel is a selfish act because it hastens the spread of coronavirus around the world. How do we square this? How do we square these concepts of travel being negative with the need for adventure, that need for escape and the ability therefore to find ourselves?</li><li>Josh: You can\'t entirely square, I do think that there is some truth to those criticisms. We shouldn\'t be spreading disease and we shouldn\'t be destroying the planet by unnecessary travel. But then the question is “what\'s necessary and how often do we do it?” Maybe if you’re somebody who travels 100 times a year, maybe that\'s too much. But maybe if you travel once a year, that\'s not enough. But I do think that for me anyway, during Covid, I didn\'t travel really at all outside of Boston, New Hampshire and Vermont, but I traveled widely through reading adventure novels, watching movies and Google Streets where you can walk around inside the Sistine Chapel remotely. Of course these are not as good -- just the same as Zoom calls are not the same as being in the same room with someone. It\'s not as soul nourishing, you don\'t get as much out of it. You\'re not really experiencing the whole context that you get when you travel, but you can have sort of armchair adventures to some extent that helps square that circle. But yeah, there\'s no right answer to that.</li><li>Mark: Yeah, absolutely. Josh, as you think about <em>The Adventure’s Glossary</em>, how should people think about it, take it, enjoy it?</li><li>Josh: I hope that word nerds will enjoy it just on its own merits. However, there is kind of a secret philosophy woven through this alphabetized list of words, which is this idea that adventure is something that we should seek. We should try to break out of the ordinary and see things in a new way and expand our horizons, whether it\'s through actual literal travel or other ways, and that there are certain qualities that we need to cultivate in ourselves to be good adventurers. Whether that\'s a sense of humor, whether that\'s wit, whether that\'s courage, grit and so forth. These are all the kinds of things that I\'ve tried to express through this book, which from the outside might just look like a fun, slightly frivolous word nerd book.</li><li>Mark: Josh Glenn, thanks very much for joining us on the TravelCommons podcast. We\'ll put a link to <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3lSNcwg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">The Adventure’s Glossary</a></em> so people can find it.</li><li>Josh: Thank you for having me and happy travels to all your listeners.</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #182</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social  -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_182.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #182 — More COVID Changes; Words That Mean Adventure','','inherit','closed','closed','','4020-revision-v1','','','2021-12-10 11:46:52','2021-12-10 16:46:52','',4020,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4024',0,'revision','',0),
(4025,1,'2021-12-10 11:51:04','2021-12-10 16:51:04','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":2382,\"width\":300,\"height\":300} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright is-resized\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/DSC_5715-1024x1024.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2382\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"/><figcaption>Not Looking Friendly for a Solo Diner</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I dusted off the mobile rig to record this episode in Happy Valley, the home of Penn State. And I am kinda happy with some travel to Phoenix and Florida to thaw me out after Chicago\'s run in with the polar vortex. In this episode, I talk about budget airlines, stepping down in Hertz status, why I bought physical guidebooks for a trip to France, the challenges of being a solo diner, and then dig into the archives for a classic travel story. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_149.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #149:</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the Hyatt Place in State College, PA, feeling a bit more positive about life after a couple of warm weather getaways -- an afternoon meeting in Phoenix that I happily turned into a 3-day stay by flying in early for a “prep” session and staying late “in case our session ran long”; and then a long weekend with friends on the Gulf side of Florida. It was a nice break to walk outside without layering up coats, and scarves, and hats, and without taking an Arctic blast in the face. Not that it was toasty in Phoenix, but I was walking around downtown in a blazer, passing people -- natives, I’d guess -- in puffy down jackets. Not that they were wrong; it’s just that my reference point was that -22 degree polar vortex day. </li><li>Reminds me of a time many years ago when I was doing a project in J’burg South Africa in July -- our summer, their winter. We’re going to a restaurant for dinner. The inside is full, but the outside tables are available. The owner apologizes, offers to bring us blankets. My colleague from Detroit is wearing a polo shirt; I’m in dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up. “Thanks, but we’re fine,” we tell him. Halfway through the meal, he comes out, offering to move us inside now that a table has freed up. He’s wearing a parka. “No, really, we’re OK,” we tell him. Different reference points on what’s cold.</li><li>Both trips -- out to Phoenix and down to Ft Myers airport, were full of young families, also getting away from the cold, maybe to stay with parents/ grandparents who’d retired in more reasonable climes. I flew Southwest to Phoenix and United to Ft Myers, and I came to appreciate what, before this, was, to me, an undiscovered benefit of Southwest’s open seating. Because I was in the B boarding group, those families with young children boarded before me. Walking down the aisle, I could spot the crying babies -- there, and there, and there -- and could just keep walking, until I was behind them all. Sure, I was in the back of the plane, and it took me a while to deplane, but that was a very small price I was willing to pay for 3 hours of relative peace. </li><li>Bridge Music — <em>Paint the Sky</em> by Hans Atom (c) 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/hansatom/50718 Ft: Miss Judged </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>In past episodes, we talked about the bare bones budget airlines -- Spirit and Frontier in the US; Ryanair and EasyJet in Europe, and Wow Air and Norwegian as the second coming of Laker Airways, doing TransAtlantic budget flight. Of those, I’ve flown Frontier, EasyJet, and Wow Air which, as a group, seems like the less severe set of the budgets. Ryanair and Spirit always seem to have a harder edge about the “budget-ness.” And then there’s their impact on the mainline carriers -- United, American, and Delta’s basic economy fares. Usually, when I look at a mainline carrier’s basic economy fare, the difference vs. their regular economy fare isn’t big enough to make up extra hassles. But booking our trip down to Florida, the difference on United was over $100 a ticket. Irene and I figured we could put up with a few hassles for over $200. But as dug a bit further, we didn’t find as many hassles as we thought. Because we’re both United Gold, there was no limitation on carry-on bags and we boarded in the usual Group 1. The only downgrade was that we had to pay to reserve seats and we couldn’t book them in Economy Plus -- the aisles with the extra legroom. Even after paying for reserved seats, we still saved enough to pay for a couple of nice dinners of grilled grouper. </li><li>Our friends who joined us from Milwaukee flew down on American through DFW without a hassle. Their flight back -- a direct to Milwaukee on Frontier -- not so much. Their flight was supposed to leave at 7:45pm. Around lunch, they received a note that their flight was delayed by 5 hours. What? We checked that again. We pulled up the FlightAware app, searched for their flight, and then started walked its planned flight legs back, hitting the “Where’s My Plane?” button until we found it -- still on the ground in Milwaukee 6 hours after its scheduled departure time. The weather wasn’t that bad, so it had to be a maintenance problem, which is a huge problem when flying budget and regional airlines because their model is to bounce a plane from place to place rather than flying it out of a hub where they could swap out a busted plane if need be. So that 6 hour delay was going to cascade through that day’s schedule. Our friends finally left Ft Myers at 2:45am. Which is something I’ve noticed about Frontier -- I’ve never seen them cancel a flight no matter how late they leave. A regional airline would’ve cancelled that flight way earlier, but not Frontier. I don’t know how their crews don’t time out, but I kinda admire them for getting you home no matter what time. Would be way better <em>not </em> to take a 7-hr delay, but at least they get you home.</li><li>This year, I got dropped a status level on Hertz, from President’s Circle down to Five Star. I didn’t do 20 rentals last year, and I missed an offer back in December to pay some points to keep my status. But, I can’t say that I notice the downgrade too much. When I was in Phoenix, I snagged a great Chrysler 300 with custom black rims. In Ft Myers, I got a brand new GMC Terrain SUV that held 4 adults very comfortable… Though I have to say that the Terrain through me for a loop when I got in. I’ve rented all sort of different cars. I get in, pair my phone to the Bluetooh, adjust the mirrors, put it in Drive, and pull out. With the Terrain, I was good with all of that right up until the “put it in Drive” step. I look down at the console -- no gear shift, no gear dial (the Chrysler experience talking). Then grab the stalk on the right side of the steering column and turn on the windshield wipers. I’m looking all over -- “WTF? Where is the damn gear shift?” From the back seat, Kristin points under the climate control “It’s right there”. And then I see, a line of buttons -- P, R, N, D. I push the D button and off we go. The last time I saw a push button gear selector was when I was a kid, riding in somebody’s old Plymouth. I mean, come on GMC, do we really need <em>another</em> type of gear selection? Searching the Internet later for the Terrain’s gear buttons yields a whole slew of “Worst Shifter Design” article featuring these buttons. I don’t know which was worse -- the actual buttons or me, the alpha road warrior, getting back seat instructions on how to put a rental car in gear.</li><li>Another new thing I learned at Hertz Ft Myers -- besides where to find gear buttons -- is that, for Hertz Gold customers, there’s no additional driver fee for your spouse. I’ve been in Hertz Gold since it started, but I never connected to this benefit. It’s saves real money -- additional driver fees can run $10/day -- and hassle. Another reason to like the Hertz Gold program.</li><li>TravelCommons made our little local newspaper in an installment of their “Ask The Expert” series with the sub-headline “How can travel be more relaxing and fun?”  When Sandy, the reporter, emailed me to schedule the interview, she wanted to talk about advice for successful spring break travel. So I started off talking about how those spring break families should avoid traveling during road warrior rush hours -- Monday mornings and Thursday evenings. “Boarding a plane filled with busy professionals can quickly rob you of that pre-vacation high,” Sandy wrote, “Peacock advise leisure travelers to avoid sharing a plane with these potential buzzkills.” Such as me. The last thing a family heading for Disney wants to encounter is people like me powering down the concourse. I also recounted some of the tips that you’ve seen in my Top Holiday Travel Tips posts -- fly early in the day, avoid regional jets, and no one-and-done outfits so you can get everything you need into a carry-on. And I talked about turning long layovers into mini-vacations with our upcoming Stockholm layover as an example. Of course, I didn’t mention that a lot of these layovers turn into taproom crawls, like in last year’s video of the Midway layover taproom tour, and potentially this Stockholm stop thanks to TravelCommons’ listener Rob Cheshire’s custom Google map. No, I figured than might be a bit much for our nice local paper. Sandy turned our 45-minute conversation into a nice article. I posted a picture of the article on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">TravelCommons Facebook page</a> since they don’t seem to put their issues on-line. </li><li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/12/podcast-120-where-do-guidebooks-fit-in-i-hate-shopping-for-suitcases/\">episode #120</a>, back in March 2016, I asked the question -- Where do physical guidebooks fit in the world of apps, review websites, social media, and podcasts? Back then, I was planning Andrew’s and my visit to Iceland. Now, getting ready to head over to Brittany, France for 10 days, I bought two physical guidebooks to take with us. Irene wanted DK’s Eyewitness Travel; it was her favorite out of the stack of guidebooks she checked out of the library. While I did a throwback, picked up our go-to book from our PK (pre-kids) days of travel, Michelin’s Green Guide. The DK book is definitely more visually punchy, but I figured Michelin, a French company, should have Brittany covered pretty well, and they published this new edition just last month. Maybe I’m getting lazy in my old age, but I’m kinda glad to have everything in one spot -- a bit of local history, touring maps, city guides -- rather than having to rummage through multiple PDFs in an Evernote folder. However, I took a pass on Amazon’s recommended add-on of Michelin’s Brittany Road and Tourist Map No. 512. I’ve topped up my local SIM for 2.5 GB of mobile data; I’m sticking with Google Maps. I maybe old school, but I’m not going back to the Dark Ages.</li><li>And if you have any travel rants, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or  Instagram  at travelcommons -- or  post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com. </li><li>Bridge Music — <em>Perfect Stranger</em> by stellarartwars (c) 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/stellarartwars/45510 Ft: TheDice </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Dining Single</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Our daughter Claire is heading down to London for her first week of Spring Break and will then meet us in Paris for our Brittany trip.  Planning it, we got talking about eating alone on the road. Years ago, it used to be more awkward - escorted to the small table off in the corner, a server a bit ticked off at the small check and therefore small tip. You’d read the newspaper or a book between courses to keep yourself occupied, wrap it up pretty quickly and head back to the hotel.</li><li>For guy travelers, the sports bar was (and still is) the exception to that rule. Fine, sit me in a booth alone as long as I have a clear view of walls of TV screens showing all ESPN all the time – ESPN, ESPN-2, ESPN-3, ESPN-U, ESPN News… No need for a book, especially over the next few weeks watching the opening rounds of the NCAA tournaments when I can watch a couple of games at once. Rush out? Hell no, give me another large Coors Light, we haven’t even hit half time.</li><li>Most restaurants now serve a full menu at the bar, complete with a full set up -- placemats, maybe a bread basket. Might be a touch cramped at happy hour, but it’s usually nice to be in the main flow of things rather than off in the corner. The trend toward shared plates , while getting a bit tired when dining with a group (“OK, what can we all agree on?”) works great for the single diner. If I want a bit of variety without overeating, I now have choices beyond sushi or tapas bars. Not that those are bad choices. I have no doubt that Claire will find her way to the bar at Barrafina in Soho.</li><li>Sitting at the bar also gave you a chance for a little social interaction, some serendipity; with the bartender, maybe with the guy sitting next to you. Some years ago, on my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/08/14/food-and-drink-highlights-from-my-drive-south/\">2,100-mile circle tour through the South</a>, a guy next to me at a Louisville bar told me to check out a restaurant in the not-yet-hip Bywater neighborhood in New Orleans; turned out to be a great recommendation. But I get less and less of that as people eat and just interact with their smartphones. Maybe Claire wouldn’t be keen on random bar conversations, but I kinda miss it.</li><li>Nowadays, where I do find that interaction is microbrewery taprooms. Sure, people still have their phones out to check their tasting flight into Untappd, but there’s an acceptance, almost an expectation, that people will “nerd out” about hops and malt and yeast esters with each other and with folks behind the bar. During one of my Dallas trips, I found my way to Grapevine Craft Brewing on a rainy Weds night. The brewmaster was pulling the taps, passing out some barrel samples, and we all spinning our beer nerd propellers real hard.</li><li>Bridge Music — <em>Foolish Game</em> by copperhead (c) 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/copperhead/46390 Ft: Snowflake,Sackjo22 </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><b>From The Travel Story Archives -- Airlines Need To Tell Us More</b></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Prepping for that interview with the local paper had me spelunking deep into the TravelCommons archives, fixing some broken links and listening to some of those early shows for the first time in a long time. A couple of things struck me -- the really poor sound quality I got from the little iRiver MP3 recorder that I was using, and how good some of those early travel stories were.</li><li> So here’s one from<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/09/24/podcast-15-begging-for-business-needing-to-know-at-35000-ft/\"> episode #15</a>, very long-time TC listener Allan Marko talking about wanting to know just a little bit more about what an airline maintenance guy is doing.  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #149</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_149.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #149 — Dining Single; Airlines Need To Tell Us More','','inherit','closed','closed','','2373-revision-v1','','','2021-12-10 11:51:04','2021-12-10 16:51:04','',2373,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4025',0,'revision','',0),
(4027,1,'2021-12-10 11:51:41','2021-12-10 16:51:41','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":2382,\"width\":300,\"height\":300} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright is-resized\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/DSC_5715-1024x1024.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2382\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"/><figcaption>Not Looking Friendly for a Solo Diner</figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I dusted off the mobile rig to record this episode in Happy Valley, the home of Penn State. And I am kinda happy with some travel to Phoenix and Florida to thaw me out after Chicago\'s run in with the polar vortex. In this episode, I talk about budget airlines, stepping down in Hertz status, why I bought physical guidebooks for a trip to France, the challenges of being a solo diner, and then dig into the archives for a classic travel story. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_149.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #149:</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the Hyatt Place in State College, PA, feeling a bit more positive about life after a couple of warm weather getaways -- an afternoon meeting in Phoenix that I happily turned into a 3-day stay by flying in early for a “prep” session and staying late “in case our session ran long”; and then a long weekend with friends on the Gulf side of Florida. It was a nice break to walk outside without layering up coats, and scarves, and hats, and without taking an Arctic blast in the face. Not that it was toasty in Phoenix, but I was walking around downtown in a blazer, passing people -- natives, I’d guess -- in puffy down jackets. Not that they were wrong; it’s just that my reference point was that -22 degree polar vortex day. </li><li>Reminds me of a time many years ago when I was doing a project in J’burg South Africa in July -- our summer, their winter. We’re going to a restaurant for dinner. The inside is full, but the outside tables are available. The owner apologizes, offers to bring us blankets. My colleague from Detroit is wearing a polo shirt; I’m in dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up. “Thanks, but we’re fine,” we tell him. Halfway through the meal, he comes out, offering to move us inside now that a table has freed up. He’s wearing a parka. “No, really, we’re OK,” we tell him. Different reference points on what’s cold.</li><li>Both trips -- out to Phoenix and down to Ft Myers airport, were full of young families, also getting away from the cold, maybe to stay with parents/ grandparents who’d retired in more reasonable climes. I flew Southwest to Phoenix and United to Ft Myers, and I came to appreciate what, before this, was, to me, an undiscovered benefit of Southwest’s open seating. Because I was in the B boarding group, those families with young children boarded before me. Walking down the aisle, I could spot the crying babies -- there, and there, and there -- and could just keep walking, until I was behind them all. Sure, I was in the back of the plane, and it took me a while to deplane, but that was a very small price I was willing to pay for 3 hours of relative peace. </li><li>Bridge Music — <em>Paint the Sky</em> by Hans Atom (c) 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/hansatom/50718 Ft: Miss Judged </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Following Up</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>In past episodes, we talked about the bare bones budget airlines -- Spirit and Frontier in the US; Ryanair and EasyJet in Europe, and Wow Air and Norwegian as the second coming of Laker Airways, doing Transatlantic budget flights. Of those, I’ve flown Frontier, EasyJet, and Wow Air which, as a group, seems like the less severe set of the budgets. Ryanair and Spirit always seem to have a harder edge about the “budget-ness.” And then there’s their impact on the mainline carriers -- United, American, and Delta’s basic economy fares. Usually, when I look at a mainline carrier’s basic economy fare, the difference vs. their regular economy fare isn’t big enough to make up extra hassles. But booking our trip down to Florida, the difference on United was over $100 a ticket. Irene and I figured we could put up with a few hassles for over $200. But as dug a bit further, we didn’t find as many hassles as we thought. Because we’re both United Gold, there was no limitation on carry-on bags and we boarded in the usual Group 1. The only downgrade was that we had to pay to reserve seats and we couldn’t book them in Economy Plus -- the aisles with the extra legroom. Even after paying for reserved seats, we still saved enough to pay for a couple of nice dinners of grilled grouper. </li><li>Our friends who joined us from Milwaukee flew down on American through DFW without a hassle. Their flight back -- a direct to Milwaukee on Frontier -- not so much. Their flight was supposed to leave at 7:45pm. Around lunch, they received a note that their flight was delayed by 5 hours. What? We checked that again. We pulled up the FlightAware app, searched for their flight, and then started walked its planned flight legs back, hitting the “Where’s My Plane?” button until we found it -- still on the ground in Milwaukee 6 hours after its scheduled departure time. The weather wasn’t that bad, so it had to be a maintenance problem, which is a huge problem when flying budget and regional airlines because their model is to bounce a plane from place to place rather than flying it out of a hub where they could swap out a busted plane if need be. So that 6 hour delay was going to cascade through that day’s schedule. Our friends finally left Ft Myers at 2:45am. Which is something I’ve noticed about Frontier -- I’ve never seen them cancel a flight no matter how late they leave. A regional airline would’ve cancelled that flight way earlier, but not Frontier. I don’t know how their crews don’t time out, but I kinda admire them for getting you home no matter what time. Would be way better <em>not </em> to take a 7-hr delay, but at least they get you home.</li><li>This year, I got dropped a status level on Hertz, from President’s Circle down to Five Star. I didn’t do 20 rentals last year, and I missed an offer back in December to pay some points to keep my status. But, I can’t say that I notice the downgrade too much. When I was in Phoenix, I snagged a great Chrysler 300 with custom black rims. In Ft Myers, I got a brand new GMC Terrain SUV that held 4 adults very comfortable… Though I have to say that the Terrain through me for a loop when I got in. I’ve rented all sort of different cars. I get in, pair my phone to the Bluetooh, adjust the mirrors, put it in Drive, and pull out. With the Terrain, I was good with all of that right up until the “put it in Drive” step. I look down at the console -- no gear shift, no gear dial (the Chrysler experience talking). Then grab the stalk on the right side of the steering column and turn on the windshield wipers. I’m looking all over -- “WTF? Where is the damn gear shift?” From the back seat, Kristin points under the climate control “It’s right there”. And then I see, a line of buttons -- P, R, N, D. I push the D button and off we go. The last time I saw a push button gear selector was when I was a kid, riding in somebody’s old Plymouth. I mean, come on GMC, do we really need <em>another</em> type of gear selection? Searching the Internet later for the Terrain’s gear buttons yields a whole slew of “Worst Shifter Design” article featuring these buttons. I don’t know which was worse -- the actual buttons or me, the alpha road warrior, getting back seat instructions on how to put a rental car in gear.</li><li>Another new thing I learned at Hertz Ft Myers -- besides where to find gear buttons -- is that, for Hertz Gold customers, there’s no additional driver fee for your spouse. I’ve been in Hertz Gold since it started, but I never connected to this benefit. It’s saves real money -- additional driver fees can run $10/day -- and hassle. Another reason to like the Hertz Gold program.</li><li>TravelCommons made our little local newspaper in an installment of their “Ask The Expert” series with the sub-headline “How can travel be more relaxing and fun?”  When Sandy, the reporter, emailed me to schedule the interview, she wanted to talk about advice for successful spring break travel. So I started off talking about how those spring break families should avoid traveling during road warrior rush hours -- Monday mornings and Thursday evenings. “Boarding a plane filled with busy professionals can quickly rob you of that pre-vacation high,” Sandy wrote, “Peacock advise leisure travelers to avoid sharing a plane with these potential buzzkills.” Such as me. The last thing a family heading for Disney wants to encounter is people like me powering down the concourse. I also recounted some of the tips that you’ve seen in my Top Holiday Travel Tips posts -- fly early in the day, avoid regional jets, and no one-and-done outfits so you can get everything you need into a carry-on. And I talked about turning long layovers into mini-vacations with our upcoming Stockholm layover as an example. Of course, I didn’t mention that a lot of these layovers turn into taproom crawls, like in last year’s video of the Midway layover taproom tour, and potentially this Stockholm stop thanks to TravelCommons’ listener Rob Cheshire’s custom Google map. No, I figured than might be a bit much for our nice local paper. Sandy turned our 45-minute conversation into a nice article. I posted a picture of the article on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">TravelCommons Facebook page</a> since they don’t seem to put their issues on-line. </li><li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/12/podcast-120-where-do-guidebooks-fit-in-i-hate-shopping-for-suitcases/\">episode #120</a>, back in March 2016, I asked the question -- Where do physical guidebooks fit in the world of apps, review websites, social media, and podcasts? Back then, I was planning Andrew’s and my visit to Iceland. Now, getting ready to head over to Brittany, France for 10 days, I bought two physical guidebooks to take with us. Irene wanted DK’s Eyewitness Travel; it was her favorite out of the stack of guidebooks she checked out of the library. While I did a throwback, picked up our go-to book from our PK (pre-kids) days of travel, Michelin’s Green Guide. The DK book is definitely more visually punchy, but I figured Michelin, a French company, should have Brittany covered pretty well, and they published this new edition just last month. Maybe I’m getting lazy in my old age, but I’m kinda glad to have everything in one spot -- a bit of local history, touring maps, city guides -- rather than having to rummage through multiple PDFs in an Evernote folder. However, I took a pass on Amazon’s recommended add-on of Michelin’s Brittany Road and Tourist Map No. 512. I’ve topped up my local SIM for 2.5 GB of mobile data; I’m sticking with Google Maps. I maybe old school, but I’m not going back to the Dark Ages.</li><li>And if you have any travel rants, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or  Instagram  at travelcommons -- or  post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com. </li><li>Bridge Music — <em>Perfect Stranger</em> by stellarartwars (c) 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/stellarartwars/45510 Ft: TheDice </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Dining Single</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Our daughter Claire is heading down to London for her first week of Spring Break and will then meet us in Paris for our Brittany trip.  Planning it, we got talking about eating alone on the road. Years ago, it used to be more awkward - escorted to the small table off in the corner, a server a bit ticked off at the small check and therefore small tip. You’d read the newspaper or a book between courses to keep yourself occupied, wrap it up pretty quickly and head back to the hotel.</li><li>For guy travelers, the sports bar was (and still is) the exception to that rule. Fine, sit me in a booth alone as long as I have a clear view of walls of TV screens showing all ESPN all the time – ESPN, ESPN-2, ESPN-3, ESPN-U, ESPN News… No need for a book, especially over the next few weeks watching the opening rounds of the NCAA tournaments when I can watch a couple of games at once. Rush out? Hell no, give me another large Coors Light, we haven’t even hit half time.</li><li>Most restaurants now serve a full menu at the bar, complete with a full set up -- placemats, maybe a bread basket. Might be a touch cramped at happy hour, but it’s usually nice to be in the main flow of things rather than off in the corner. The trend toward shared plates , while getting a bit tired when dining with a group (“OK, what can we all agree on?”) works great for the single diner. If I want a bit of variety without overeating, I now have choices beyond sushi or tapas bars. Not that those are bad choices. I have no doubt that Claire will find her way to the bar at Barrafina in Soho.</li><li>Sitting at the bar also gave you a chance for a little social interaction, some serendipity; with the bartender, maybe with the guy sitting next to you. Some years ago, on my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/08/14/food-and-drink-highlights-from-my-drive-south/\">2,100-mile circle tour through the South</a>, a guy next to me at a Louisville bar told me to check out a restaurant in the not-yet-hip Bywater neighborhood in New Orleans; turned out to be a great recommendation. But I get less and less of that as people eat and just interact with their smartphones. Maybe Claire wouldn’t be keen on random bar conversations, but I kinda miss it.</li><li>Nowadays, where I do find that interaction is microbrewery taprooms. Sure, people still have their phones out to check their tasting flight into Untappd, but there’s an acceptance, almost an expectation, that people will “nerd out” about hops and malt and yeast esters with each other and with folks behind the bar. During one of my Dallas trips, I found my way to Grapevine Craft Brewing on a rainy Weds night. The brewmaster was pulling the taps, passing out some barrel samples, and we all spinning our beer nerd propellers real hard.</li><li>Bridge Music — <em>Foolish Game</em> by copperhead (c) 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/copperhead/46390 Ft: Snowflake,Sackjo22 </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><b>From The Travel Story Archives -- Airlines Need To Tell Us More</b></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Prepping for that interview with the local paper had me spelunking deep into the TravelCommons archives, fixing some broken links and listening to some of those early shows for the first time in a long time. A couple of things struck me -- the really poor sound quality I got from the little iRiver MP3 recorder that I was using, and how good some of those early travel stories were.</li><li> So here’s one from<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/09/24/podcast-15-begging-for-business-needing-to-know-at-35000-ft/\"> episode #15</a>, very long-time TC listener Allan Marko talking about wanting to know just a little bit more about what an airline maintenance guy is doing.  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Closing</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #149</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org\">dig.ccmixter.org</a></li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_149.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #149 — Dining Single; Airlines Need To Tell Us More','','inherit','closed','closed','','2373-revision-v1','','','2021-12-10 11:51:41','2021-12-10 16:51:41','',2373,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4027',0,'revision','',0),
(4028,1,'2021-12-10 11:52:56','2021-12-10 16:52:56','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/JPEG-image.jpeg\"><img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/JPEG-image-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"Jumble of Travel Signs\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> Cleared to Adventure[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Back in front of the microphone after a two-week trip to the UK, getting back home just before the new <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/omicron-covid-travel-international-11638216229?st=sm0fcotd0jfju1i&amp;reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink\">Omicron travel restrictions</a> hit. We talk about getting to London, surfing the waves of changing travel requirements, a new way to renew Global Entry, moan a bit more about the inexorable advance of the cashless society, and finish up talking with <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_Glenn\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Josh Glenn</a> about his new book <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3lSNcwg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">The Adventure’s Glossary</a></em>.  All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_182.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #182: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois a couple of weeks since getting back from two weeks in the UK -- a week in London and a week of hiking in Southern Wales. Had really great weather for the back half of November -- brisk temperatures, but more sun than we expected; certainly a bit windy when walking the cliffs above the Atlantic, but nothing that we couldn’t layer up for; and only one day of real rain. It was a lot better than the weather forecasts had led us to expect.</li><li>The trip over and back was pretty uneventful. I’d hit American on a mileage sale back in March for direct flights between ORD and LHR. We flew coach on a Triple 7 that was pretty empty on the way over. People were popping up the armrests in the 4-seat center section and laying down to sleep. One guy even built a little tent out of blankets to cover his head. I’m not sure if he was trying to block the cabin lights or maybe he was concerned people walking down the aisles would breathe on him while he slept (though mask discipline was very solid) or maybe <em>he</em> wanted to drop <em>his</em> mask while he slept and didn’t want to get called out by the flight attendants. Whatever his deal was, it looked a little weird.</li><li>I ate dinner on that flight even though I’d eaten a cubano sandwich at Tortas Frontera, my favorite ORD restaurant, right before boarding. I took the meal not because I was hungry but because it gave me an excuse to drop my mask for a little bit on that 8-hr flight. Rather than the “replace your mask between bites and sips” rules that I heard on domestic flights this year, on my international flights over the past couple of months, most everyone takes off their mask for the duration of the meal. I don’t know if this difference comes from emptier planes, longer flights, or that international fliers are less likely to try to get around mask rules (and, purely my own experience, I haven’t seen any passenger pushback on masks on any of my international flights, whereas I was seeing/hearing a lot of it on domestic flights earlier this year), but I appreciate the flexibility/pragmatism (?) on these long flights.</li><li>While the plane wasn’t full, I was worried about passport control when we got to Heathrow. There’s always a bit of suspense anyways as you make the long walk from the plane to passport control. Did a whole bunch of Triple 7’s disgorge at the same time, let alone some massive A-380’s? Did the immigration force botch their workforce scheduling up? Will we flow smoothly into the immigration hall or will our march suddenly stop short?  Worse, will we smack into one of those Heathrow e-gate failures that has caused 2-4 hour queues over the past couple of months? </li><li>We kept moving, but then came to a sudden stop as we made the final turn toward the hall. Looking around the line, I could see the room wasn’t jammed -- good sign. It looked like they’d paused us for a minute while they rejiggered their cowpen zig-zag line. After a minute or two, we started moving again, and at a pretty good clip with almost everyone getting pointed to the automated e-gates. I walked up, put my passport on the reader, a camera box popped up, mechanically adjusted to my height, and then after what I assume was some facial recognition analysis, opened the gate and let me go to baggage claim. No “how long are you going to be in the country” quiz, which I didn’t miss, but also no stamp in my passport. How am I going to remember this trip for my next Global Entry renewal. Guess I’ll have to drink a beer or two while I’m here so it shows up on my Untappd history.</li><li>Bridge Music —  <em>dazed </em>by Jeris (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/VJ_Memes/39456 Ft: airtone</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Speaking of Global Entry, back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/10/28/podcast-180-tracking-covid-travel-requirements-cycling-thru-puglia/\">episode #180</a> at the end of October, I was still waiting for my renewal approval and compare my month-and-a-half and counting wait with listener Jerry Sarfati’s 2-day wait. Then, the day before we left for the UK, I got an email with the subject line “TTP (Trusted Traveler Program) Application Status Change” telling me to check the website for more information. Logging in, I saw that I’d been given conditional approval, so about 2 months from submitting my renewal application. I still had to do an interview, but if I was reading everything correctly, I had 12 months to get that done. I looked to see if ORD had an appointment available the day we were flying back from London, but no dice. The earliest appointment was mid-December. OK, I’ll think about it later. No rush; I have 12 months. But the next day, I got another email from dhs.gov telling me about a new program, Enrollment-On-Arrival, where I could knock out my interview while in the customs/immigration area coming back from an international trip, no appointment necessary. Perfect!</li><li>So that Monday afternoon after a quick pass-through the Global Entry kiosk, I went looking for Booth 58 which is where, according to the Enrollment-On-Arrival website, was where the ORD interviews would be. But it looked like getting to Booth 58 would mean standing in a long and growing line of non-US passengers. Ah, forget it. Again, I have 12 months to get this done. But the luggage carousel for our flight hadn’t even started turning yet, so I went up to one of the customs officers and asked her. She immediately pointed me to a guy in a booth completely separate from the rest of the immigration traffic, and in the complete opposite direction of Booth 58. There was one guy in front of me getting his interview, but by the time I stepped up to the officer, there was a family of 4 and two other people behind me. The interview took about 5 minutes. I walked out and our luggage carousel still wasn’t moving. By the end of the day, the TTP website showed my Global Entry was good for another 5 years. Full credit to DHS for coming up with ways to make Global Entry easier. I just wish they’d keep their website locator up-to-date.</li><li>In the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/11/13/podcast-181-travel-potpourri-2021-travelers-gift-guide/\">last episode</a>, we talked about how last year’s flurry of vaccination passport app announcements has pretty much turned out to be, in the words of Macbeth, “a tale, Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing” But American Airlines’ partnership with Verifly did actually have a little something to it. I downloaded the app and, after wrestling through what is not the most intuitive interface, was able to see a list of the UK travel requirements and then validate that I met them, by uploading pictures of Irene’s and my vaccination cards and our passenger locator form QR codes. That’s nice, but what was better was when we checked in for our flight, all we had to do was show the agent the green “All good” screens for Irene and me and we were done. None of the fishing out the right forms and holding them up to the lucite screen. Two swipes on the phone and we were done. Nothing earth-shattering, but it does relieve the friction out of one part of the journey</li><li>A <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">recurring</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/08/24/podcast-178-what-remains-from-pandemic-times-best-restaurant-and-bars/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">topic</a> on the TravelCommons podcast is the move to a cashless society. And certainly the pandemic accelerated this with the push toward contactless transactions; nobody wanted to handle your possibly-infectious cash. On our first day in London, on our walk to pick up our COVID tests, I stopped at the first ATM I saw to pull out £100, just to have some cash in my wallet. I’m a bit old-school in that way. And I’m glad I did it because once we left London and were staying in small towns in South Wales, it was really tough to find an ATM. Now, this shouldn’t be that big a deal with everyone taking cards and contactless, be it a card or on the phone with Google or Apple Pay, doing away (mostly) with the need for a PIN or to sign anything. But in Wales, the parking lots at the base of our hikes, the pay-&amp;-display machines, weren’t taking my cards, either contactless or physical. And by the time we were in our last town, Hay-on-Wye, I’d run out of coins and needed to find an ATM. Google Maps was no help; it kept pointing me to phantom machines in little grocery stores. Irene had better luck in the tourist information center. The woman there gave us directions to what she said was the one remaining ATM in town -- which surprised me because Hay-on-Wye has a good bit of tourist traffic with their book festivals. But anyhow, we found it <em>and </em>it worked; it had cash. Of course, then we had to find something like a coffee shop that would take cash so we could break a bill and get coins for the machine, which knocked out any of the usual chains. Walking down the street, I found a place that looked indy enough -- the sign said “coffee shop” but it looked more like a thrift store. Sure enough, the guy was happy to take cash, though he had to pull out his wallet to make change. </li><li>We’ve talked about Hertz’s downward service spiral, which I forecasted in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/06/09/podcast-164-first-post-lockdown-trips-travel-credit-cards/\">episode #164</a> after their bankruptcy filing. But since I haven’t held back in slamming them for empty lots in Phoenix and San Diego, and for incorrect fuel charges, I need to give kudos to the Hertz location in Cardiff in Wales for what had to be, hands down, the easiest and therefore best Hertz transaction I’ve had in Europe. Leaving London for the Welsh hiking part of our trip, we decided to skip the fun and excitement of driving in London and instead took a train to Cardiff and then drove to the coast from there. The Hertz place was about a 10-min cab ride from the train station in a bit of an auto dealer row. I walked in, showed the woman my Illinois drivers license, she asked me if I’d be OK driving an automatic (how fast can I say “Yes!”), gave me a key, and pointed me to a grey Skoda in the back lot. Done; no hard upsell on enhanced insurance or refueling options, just “Here’s the key; have a good trip”. And then returning the car, I pulled in after gassing it up; the guy took a quick walk around it; had me sign his screen, and we were done. And nothing wonky when I looked at the emailed receipt. It’s sorta damning with faint praise that I’m so impressed when a transaction goes smoothly. It should always be this easy, but it rarely is.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> or the <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram </a>account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Veteran TravelCommons listener Mika Pyyhkala sent in a note this week talking about his great experience with a flight rebooking service, <a aria-label=\"Freebird (opens in a new tab)\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://getfreebird.com\" target=\"_blank\">Freebird</a>. Mika writes:<ul><li>I was flying with a companion from (Wichita) ICT-STL and STL-DTW.  Just as the plane was descending to DTW, I received text messages from WN and Freebird that STL-DTW on WN had been cancelled.  Freebird then manually advised that the only flight for that day was a DL STL-DTW, and they were going to book it in case I wanted it; if they waited longer there might not be enough time to issue the new ticket on Delta through their travel agent.  They just asked me to confirm that I in fact wanted the Delta ticket.  </li><li>I confirmed we wanted the 2 Delta tickets, and by the time the door opened in STL we had a confirmation number to check in for the Delta flight leaving in 47 minutes. We got seats together on the Delta flight that were assigned by the Freebird process, and they even gave us free drinks!</li><li>I think we actually arrived in DTW a few minutes earlier than we were scheduled on the original flight, and it made for a great travel story and adventure!  This was my first time using Freebird as well!</li><li>It costs $19 to protect a one way trip per traveler.  It’s simple to work with them: unlike insurance, there are no claim forms, long waits, or papers to sign</li></ul></li><li>Mika, thanks for this. I hadn’t heard of Freebird before Mika’s note. Hitting their website, they’re selling their service to companies, travel agencies, and to individual travelers. Clicking through to a TechCrunch article about them, it says they’re also talking to Amex and Citibank about including Freebird as a credit card benefit. The article quotes the CEO, Ethan Bernstein - “It’s funny what happens when people deal with uncertainty; uncertainty is the worst. As soon you give people information, human support and technology to help them solve their problems, they experience the event so much differently.”  Which is exactly right. Certainty lets you plan; uncertainty just leaves you to stew… and drink at the airport bar… and eat bad airport food… and bitch Tweet. Yup, uncertainty leads to lots of bad things</li><li>One more-fun-than-necessarily-good thing on last month’s trip was getting to try out an alpha version of a new augmented reality feature for Google Maps. I used it first in Stockholm; we got off the Arlanda Express at the Central Train station and wanted make our way over to the <a aria-label=\"Östermalms Saluhall (opens in a new tab)\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.ostermalmshallen.se/en/\" target=\"_blank\">Östermalms Saluhall</a> for lunch. When I chose “Walking” as our transport mode, a “Start AR” button showed up next to the usual button to start the directions. With AR, I’d hold my phone up, the display would use the camera to show the streetscape in front of me with the  directions -- street names, arrows -- overlaid on the real-time image. I thought it was a nice add; reduced any ambiguity about where the next turn was. One interesting feature -- when I started walking, the screen dimmed and a message popped up telling me to stop looking at the phone and look straight ahead. All in all, it’s kinda fun. At least I thought so; Andrew and Irene seemed much less impressed. It worked very well for what was billed as an alpha product. It’ll be interesting to see how it develops, and how fast Google rolls it out.</li><li>But even without a broader AR roll-out, Google Maps seems on track to become the next “<a aria-label=\"super app (opens in a new tab)\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://skift.com/2019/04/16/google-maps-is-ready-to-transform-the-world-of-superapps-a-skift-deep-dive/\" target=\"_blank\">super app</a>” -- sorta the Western counterpart to China’s WeChat -- the first “super app”, a Swiss Army Knife-kind of “it does everything” app. Now Google Maps isn’t to that level -- yet -- but it is growing. It started as a mapping app, then added driving directions, then ride share -- showing Uber and Lyft prices, then public transit directions with real-time arrival times, replacing the core use case for apps like Transit. Then the “Explore Nearby” became more prominent -- which, for me, has supplanted Yelp when looking for a restaurant because it’s so much more convenient, and with deep links to OpenTable for reservations; and for nearby hotels, direct booking links to Expedia and Booking.com. I wasn’t surprised when I saw a stat that those “Near Me” searches grew 150 percent the last year. I’m not quite sure what I think about this -- loving a free service that keeps becoming more valuable vs. becoming more enslaved to the Google overlords. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/08/27/podcast-132-travel-apps-on-my-phone/\">episode #132</a>, I listed all the travel apps on my smartphone, and Google Maps was the most important -- “Indeed, it’s the only travel app with its own screen real estate rather than sharing space in the Travel folder,” I said. And it only keeps getting more indispensable.</li><li>Thinking back to our last day in Paris when both Ubers that we ordered were nice black Mercedes, I couldn’t help thinking how the quality of US Uber and Lyft vehicles has slipped. I remember when I started using Uber in 4-5 years ago, the cars were pristine. I remember working in Baltimore one summer; I was more than happy to wait 5 minutes for an Uber rather than take one of the cabs waiting at the stand right outside the building I was in. Those cabs were so beat up, so full of trash, and most of the time, without working air conditioning. Today, cabs haven’t gotten much cleaner, but Uber and Lyft seem to be lowering their standards. I dunno if it’s because of falling unemployment rates or trying to keep up with growth or squeezing driver pay to improve their post-IPO margins -- or all of the above -- but I’m seeing a real drop in quality.</li><li>Long-time TravelCommons listeners will recall that I’ve spent a lot of time in New Orleans airport and other than serving beer in go cups French Quarter-style so you can walk around the terminal with it, there’s not much good to say about it. Especially with regards to food and restaurants. For such a great food town to have such mediocre airport concessions has always been beyond me. But then again, the original terminal was built in 1959, and then expanded in the mid-70’s and mid-90’s. The new $1 billion replacement terminal was originally scheduled to open last year during New Orleans’ tricentennial, but that then slipped to February of this year, then to May, and now to a “to be determined” date sometime in the fall. The restaurant selection is supposed to be much better but I hope they don’t change that beer policy though. One time, waiting out yet another thunderstorm delay, I’d bought a beer and was standing by the gate drinking it because the bar was full. American called boarding and I walked up to the gate. The agent stopped me -- “You can drink that beer anywhere in the airport -- except on the jetway.” I looked down; I’d forgotten that I was still carrying that beer. I stepped to the side, chugged it, and then got on the plane. Felt like a very New Orleans thing to do.</li><li>And if you have any travel rants, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Facebook page</a> or our Instagram account at <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Travelcommons</a> -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music —  <em>A Thousand And None</em> by Speck (c) copyright 2018 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/speck/57256 Ft: Mr_Yesterday</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Yet More COVID Changes</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I mentioned in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/11/13/podcast-181-travel-potpourri-2021-travelers-gift-guide/\">last episode</a> that I was a little concerned about the logistics of getting COVID testing done by our second day in London. But it turned out fine. With a bit of Googling, I found <a href=\"https://covid.randox.com/day-2-test-at-home/\">Randox,</a> a big UK test firm, offering “click &amp; collect” rapid antigen tests for $25 a piece. It gave us a good reason, a destination for a post-arrival walk. It’s always good to spend a lot of time in the sunlight on that first day in Europe; I find it’s key to resetting my body clock. We did them in our hotel room the next morning. Yet more suspense -- waiting those 15 minutes, hoping that second pink line wouldn’t materialize, and then taking a picture of it in Randox’s app to get the “all clear” email back.</li><li>Of course, this was all pre-Omicron. That bombshell dropped the weekend before we flew home which had me back doing the rounds on Google, trying to figure out what travel requirements were changing. The UK quickly added pre-departure tests and shifted their Day 2 testing back to the more sensitive -- but 3 times more expensive -- PCR tests. But we were already in the UK. What mattered to us getting back to Chicago. The communications out of the US were less clear; mostly rumors; nothing official. The rumors were: tightening the window on pre-departure tests -- from 72 hours to 24 hours before departure, which could’ve been a problem for us; we’d already done the Abbott rapid antigen tests we’d brought from home Saturday afternoon before Monday morning departure. And adding a post-arrival test, similar to the UK’s. But the worst rumor was requiring a 7-day quarantine <em>even with</em> a negative test. Lucky for us, none of these US rumors came true -- at least by the Monday morning of our flight. </li><li>It wasn’t until later in the week the new rules were announced and it seems that folks had come to their senses a bit. The only rumor that came true was tightening the testing window down to 1 day. Well, that and extending the airplane mask requirement to March 2022, but as I said back in September in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/09/27/podcast-179-high-tech-airport-lines-business-travel-still-missing/\">episode #179</a>, I don’t think that was a surprise to anyone. Going to a 1-day window just reinforces the case for bringing a rapid antigen test with you. The only caveat is that the test has to be done in concert with a telehealth call to validate it’s actually you doing the test and the results are really negative. Coming home from Italy and the UK, Irene and I used <a href=\"https://www.emed.com/products/covid-at-home-testkit-six-pack?hsLang=en\">Abbott BinaxNow tests</a> with telehealth sessions from eMed. Depending on how many you buy (2, 3 or 6-pack), the cost per test ranges from $25 to $35, which is pretty competitive with the prices I saw for airport same-day testing services and it’s a helluva lot more convenient. Though as I recommended in this year’s <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-to-survive-post-pandemic-travel/\">travelers gift guide</a>, some sort of smartphone tripod comes in handy when the eMed guy wants to watch you swirl the cotton swab in your nose and then insert it into the test kit. Not sure how you’d do all that one-handed.</li><li>I hate the term “the new normal”, but perhaps, at least for the near term, we have to think about changes in COVID restrictions the same way we think about storms, terrorism, and strikes -- work to avoid them, but be flexible, agile enough to deal with it if you get caught. Now no analogy is perfect. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/podcast-150-travel-interruptus/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #150 — Travel Interruptus\">episode #150</a>, I told the story of how a bomb threat on the train line into Paris caused us to our flight home. It’s a lot easier to accept a couple of bonus days in Paris than an unplanned quarantine week in an airport Holiday Inn.</li><li>Bridge Music — <em>Foolish Game</em> by copperhead (c) 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/copperhead/46390 Ft: Snowflake,Sackjo22 </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Words We Use for Adventure</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>We know that words impact the ways we think, feel, experience things -- including travel. Josh Glenn, a Boston-based author and semiotician (semiotics, the study of signs, symbols, and language, and how they create meaning) has just published a book <em><a href=\"https://www.hilobrow.com/2021/09/28/the-adventurers-glossary/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">The Adventurer’s Glossary</a></em>, with some 500 words associated with adventure. And since going on an adventure often involves travel, I wanted to talk to Josh about his book and how the words that we use to describe adventure could affect how we think about travel.<ul><li>Mark: Josh, how do you read <em>The Adventurer’s Glossary</em>?  It\'s an alphabetical list of words, terms, and their not-quite-Oxford-Dictionary definitions. They’re really more stories than definitions. Should I start at the top (0-Dark-Hundred is the first entry) and work my way through? Or just randomly riff through the pages, open it, put my finger down and read something?</li><li>Josh: It’s sort of a capricious decision to alphabetize all these terms because that just completely put them out of order. So all of the travel terms are not together, and all of the military terms are not together, and the stuff I got from hip hop or gaming culture or adventure literature, none of them are grouped together. It could just be something you pick up and randomly browse through. It\'s absolutely okay. However, as much as possible, I did try to edit it in such a way that if you were reading it from beginning to end it would kind of make sense in that direction as well. So if there\'s a little bit of beginning to end stuff in it, but really it\'s read randomly.</li><li>Mark: How did you choose which words to include? It\'s a pretty wide-ranging list. You’ve got bottle, hair, stoic, as well as the stuff that I would normally associate with adventure like bug-out bag, roam, and voyageur.</li><li>Josh: This is the third glossary that I\'ve done. I did one back in 2008 called <em>The Idler’s Glossary</em> which was all about basically how much I hate having a regular job and enjoy doing things that look like you\'re doing nothing from the outside but actually, it might be very rich and deep what you\'re doing. And then I did another book called<em> The Wage Slave’s Glossary</em>, which was about how much I hate my job. And I was working at the Boston Globe at the time. Actually, a job I kind of liked, but I just don\'t like having bosses and it was all about the horrible jargon of the workplace. Basically, these are topics I\'ve been interested in for many, many years and I just started gathering words as I also read a lot of adventure novels and watch a lot of adventure movies. So sort of gathering words that occurred to me over time. But then I also do really nerdy things like literally sit down and read through a slang dictionary or pick up a thesaurus and go look up the definitions and the etymology of every synonym for a certain word. So the list balloons; I think there\'s something like 500 words in this book.</li><li>Mark: So Josh, we think about adventure. Adventure often involves travel. Do you think that the language or the words that we use to describe adventure impact our expectations of how we travel?</li><li>Josh: The language of our culture helps shape and guide the way we are able to perceive and think about anything including adventure and travel. We can\'t think outside of this kind of structure of language that we have. I mean an adventure is, and that word comes from the Latin meaning to arrive unexpectedly. That\'s actually really an important philosophical piece for me as I was going through this, the idea that you can have a trip is not an adventure if nothing unexpected happens and if you don\'t take enough risks to allow things unexpected to happen. So when I think back to the amazing road trips I took when I was in college with my friends around the country, it\'s all kind of a blur. I don\'t really remember a lot of specific details except when something went wrong -- when we broke down in the middle of the highway on a mountain in Colorado and we had to go to a small town and have people that help us get parts and explore that town and meet the locals and almost get beat up etcetera, etcetera. That\'s an adventure. Something unexpected happened and it\'s very, very memorable. Those are the memories that you cherish later.</li><li>Mark: I think that\'s probably where travel stories come from are more of the things that you didn\'t expect, more of the hiccups. God only knows on this podcast, most of the stories that I\'ll tell have come from things that went sideways, not things that went well.</li><li>Josh: It\'s so interesting to think more about how that\'s really baked right into our language. So for example, the word chance comes from the Latin <em>cadentia </em>meaning <em>falling</em>. So just when we think about how we use the words of “let the chips fall where they may” or “something befalls you”, this idea of having our feet off the ground, falling through space, we can\'t grasp anything, what do you do with that? If you’re someone who likes, in some kind of existential way, that feeling of falling, then you\'re an adventurer. You\'re going to get more out of your travel experiences than someone who wants everything to be exactly the same way every time and never have any hiccups.</li><li>Mark: In a prior episode, we talked with <a href=\"https://emilythomaswrites.co.uk/about/\">Emily Thomas</a>, philosophy professor at Durham University in the UK, and she wrote a book <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/2DO07fV\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">The Meaning of Travel</a></em>. And one of the things that we got talking about was this idea of travel giving you a sense of otherness, so taking you out of your comfort zone and putting you in the middle of something different ,and what you experience out of that, both from where you are as well as within yourself. And I think about that a little bit, as you think about, you\'re putting yourself into a potential adventure. You don\'t know where you\'re going, you\'re just putting yourself into a situation and figuring it out.</li><li>Josh: I like how you\'re saying “put yourself into... “ Of course, another aspect of adventure is getting yourself out of the ordinary.</li><li>Mark: Yes, getting you out of that small town without getting your ass kicked.</li><li>Josh: Yeah, getting out of your routine, getting out of your small town, getting out of the kind of the spell that the quotidian everyday life casts on us, this kind of enchantment or bewitchment where you just want, you just expect everything to be the same all the time. Travel is one of the great ways, you know historically, traveling to other cultures and seeing the world, seeing how people live in other places. These are great ways to kind of break that spell of enchantment that every day puts on us.</li><li>Mark: Josh, the act of travel has come under pressure of late. Pre-pandemic that was starting to see a thread of travels perhaps of frivolous luxury that was killing the planet through carbon emissions and global warming, maybe overcrowding of specific places like Machu Picchu or Angkor Wat. And now in the time of Covid, there seems another riff which is -- travel is a selfish act because it hastens the spread of coronavirus around the world. How do we square this? How do we square these concepts of travel being negative with the need for adventure, that need for escape and the ability therefore to find ourselves?</li><li>Josh: You can\'t entirely square, I do think that there is some truth to those criticisms. We shouldn\'t be spreading disease and we shouldn\'t be destroying the planet by unnecessary travel. But then the question is “what\'s necessary and how often do we do it?” Maybe if you’re somebody who travels 100 times a year, maybe that\'s too much. But maybe if you travel once a year, that\'s not enough. But I do think that for me anyway, during Covid, I didn\'t travel really at all outside of Boston, New Hampshire and Vermont, but I traveled widely through reading adventure novels, watching movies and Google Streets where you can walk around inside the Sistine Chapel remotely. Of course these are not as good -- just the same as Zoom calls are not the same as being in the same room with someone. It\'s not as soul nourishing, you don\'t get as much out of it. You\'re not really experiencing the whole context that you get when you travel, but you can have sort of armchair adventures to some extent that helps square that circle. But yeah, there\'s no right answer to that.</li><li>Mark: Yeah, absolutely. Josh, as you think about <em>The Adventure’s Glossary</em>, how should people think about it, take it, enjoy it?</li><li>Josh: I hope that word nerds will enjoy it just on its own merits. However, there is kind of a secret philosophy woven through this alphabetized list of words, which is this idea that adventure is something that we should seek. We should try to break out of the ordinary and see things in a new way and expand our horizons, whether it\'s through actual literal travel or other ways, and that there are certain qualities that we need to cultivate in ourselves to be good adventurers. Whether that\'s a sense of humor, whether that\'s wit, whether that\'s courage, grit and so forth. These are all the kinds of things that I\'ve tried to express through this book, which from the outside might just look like a fun, slightly frivolous word nerd book.</li><li>Mark: Josh Glenn, thanks very much for joining us on the TravelCommons podcast. We\'ll put a link to <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3lSNcwg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">The Adventure’s Glossary</a></em> so people can find it.</li><li>Josh: Thank you for having me and happy travels to all your listeners.</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #182</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social  -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_182.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #182 — More COVID Changes; Words That Mean Adventure','','inherit','closed','closed','','4020-revision-v1','','','2021-12-10 11:52:56','2021-12-10 16:52:56','',4020,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4028',0,'revision','',0),
(4030,1,'2021-12-10 12:04:39','2021-12-10 17:04:39','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/JPEG-image.jpeg\"><img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/JPEG-image-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"Jumble of Travel Signs\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> Cleared to Adventure[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Back in front of the microphone after a two-week trip to the UK, getting back home just before the new <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/omicron-covid-travel-international-11638216229?st=sm0fcotd0jfju1i&amp;reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink\">Omicron travel restrictions</a> hit. We talk about getting to London, surfing the waves of changing travel requirements, a new way to renew Global Entry, moan a bit more about the inexorable advance of the cashless society, and finish up talking with <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_Glenn\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Josh Glenn</a> about his new book <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3lSNcwg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">The Adventurer\'s Glossary</a></em>.  All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_182.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #182: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois a couple of weeks since getting back from two weeks in the UK -- a week in London and a week of hiking in Southern Wales. Had really great weather for the back half of November -- brisk temperatures, but more sun than we expected; certainly a bit windy when walking the cliffs above the Atlantic, but nothing that we couldn’t layer up for; and only one day of real rain. It was a lot better than the weather forecasts had led us to expect.</li><li>The trip over and back was pretty uneventful. I’d hit American on a mileage sale back in March for direct flights between ORD and LHR. We flew coach on a Triple 7 that was pretty empty on the way over. People were popping up the armrests in the 4-seat center section and laying down to sleep. One guy even built a little tent out of blankets to cover his head. I’m not sure if he was trying to block the cabin lights or maybe he was concerned people walking down the aisles would breathe on him while he slept (though mask discipline was very solid) or maybe <em>he</em> wanted to drop <em>his</em> mask while he slept and didn’t want to get called out by the flight attendants. Whatever his deal was, it looked a little weird.</li><li>I ate dinner on that flight even though I’d eaten a cubano sandwich at Tortas Frontera, my favorite ORD restaurant, right before boarding. I took the meal not because I was hungry but because it gave me an excuse to drop my mask for a little bit on that 8-hr flight. Rather than the “replace your mask between bites and sips” rules that I heard on domestic flights this year, on my international flights over the past couple of months, most everyone takes off their mask for the duration of the meal. I don’t know if this difference comes from emptier planes, longer flights, or that international fliers are less likely to try to get around mask rules (and, purely my own experience, I haven’t seen any passenger pushback on masks on any of my international flights, whereas I was seeing/hearing a lot of it on domestic flights earlier this year), but I appreciate the flexibility/pragmatism (?) on these long flights.</li><li>While the plane wasn’t full, I was worried about passport control when we got to Heathrow. There’s always a bit of suspense anyways as you make the long walk from the plane to passport control. Did a whole bunch of Triple 7’s disgorge at the same time, let alone some massive A-380’s? Did the immigration force botch their workforce scheduling up? Will we flow smoothly into the immigration hall or will our march suddenly stop short?&nbsp; Worse, will we smack into one of those Heathrow e-gate failures that has caused 2-4 hour queues over the past couple of months?&nbsp;</li><li>We kept moving, but then came to a sudden stop as we made the final turn toward the hall. Looking around the line, I could see the room wasn’t jammed -- good sign. It looked like they’d paused us for a minute while they rejiggered their cowpen zig-zag line. After a minute or two, we started moving again, and at a pretty good clip with almost everyone getting pointed to the automated e-gates. I walked up, put my passport on the reader, a camera box popped up, mechanically adjusted to my height, and then after what I assume was some facial recognition analysis, opened the gate and let me go to baggage claim. No “how long are you going to be in the country” quiz, which I didn’t miss, but also no stamp in my passport. How am I going to remember this trip for my next Global Entry renewal. Guess I’ll have to drink a beer or two while I’m here so it shows up on my Untappd history.</li><li>Bridge Music —  <em>dazed </em>by Jeris (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/VJ_Memes/39456 Ft: airtone</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Speaking of Global Entry, back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/10/28/podcast-180-tracking-covid-travel-requirements-cycling-thru-puglia/\">episode #180</a> at the end of October, I was still waiting for my renewal approval and compare my month-and-a-half and counting wait with listener Jerry Sarfati’s 2-day wait. Then, the day before we left for the UK, I got an email with the subject line “TTP (Trusted Traveler Program) Application Status Change” telling me to check the website for more information. Logging in, I saw that I’d been given conditional approval, so about 2 months from submitting my renewal application. I still had to do an interview, but if I was reading everything correctly, I had 12 months to get that done. I looked to see if ORD had an appointment available the day we were flying back from London, but no dice. The earliest appointment was mid-December. OK, I’ll think about it later. No rush; I have 12 months. But the next day, I got another email from dhs.gov telling me about a new program, Enrollment-On-Arrival, where I could knock out my interview while in the customs/immigration area coming back from an international trip, no appointment necessary. Perfect!</li><li>So that Monday afternoon after a quick pass-through the Global Entry kiosk, I went looking for Booth 58 which is where, according to the Enrollment-On-Arrival website, was where the ORD interviews would be. But it looked like getting to Booth 58 would mean standing in a long and growing line of non-US passengers. Ah, forget it. Again, I have 12 months to get this done. But the luggage carousel for our flight hadn’t even started turning yet, so I went up to one of the customs officers and asked her. She immediately pointed me to a guy in a booth completely separate from the rest of the immigration traffic, and in the complete opposite direction of Booth 58. There was one guy in front of me getting his interview, but by the time I stepped up to the officer, there was a family of 4 and two other people behind me. The interview took about 5 minutes. I walked out and our luggage carousel still wasn’t moving. By the end of the day, the TTP website showed my Global Entry was good for another 5 years. Full credit to DHS for coming up with ways to make Global Entry easier. I just wish they’d keep their website locator up-to-date.</li><li>In the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/11/13/podcast-181-travel-potpourri-2021-travelers-gift-guide/\">last episode</a>, we talked about how last year’s flurry of vaccination passport app announcements has pretty much turned out to be, in the words of Macbeth, “a tale, Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing” But American Airlines’ partnership with Verifly did actually have a little something to it. I downloaded the app and, after wrestling through what is not the most intuitive interface, was able to see a list of the UK travel requirements and then validate that I met them, by uploading pictures of Irene’s and my vaccination cards and our passenger locator form QR codes. That’s nice, but what was better was when we checked in for our flight, all we had to do was show the agent the green “All good” screens for Irene and me and we were done. None of the fishing out the right forms and holding them up to the lucite screen. Two swipes on the phone and we were done. Nothing earth-shattering, but it does relieve the friction out of one part of the journey</li><li>A <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">recurring</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/08/24/podcast-178-what-remains-from-pandemic-times-best-restaurant-and-bars/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">topic</a> on the TravelCommons podcast is the move to a cashless society. And certainly the pandemic accelerated this with the push toward contactless transactions; nobody wanted to handle your possibly-infectious cash. On our first day in London, on our walk to pick up our COVID tests, I stopped at the first ATM I saw to pull out £100, just to have some cash in my wallet. I’m a bit old-school in that way. And I’m glad I did it because once we left London and were staying in small towns in South Wales, it was really tough to find an ATM. Now, this shouldn’t be that big a deal with everyone taking cards and contactless, be it a card or on the phone with Google or Apple Pay, doing away (mostly) with the need for a PIN or to sign anything. But in Wales, the parking lots at the base of our hikes, the pay-&amp;-display machines, weren’t taking my cards, either contactless or physical. And by the time we were in our last town, Hay-on-Wye, I’d run out of coins and needed to find an ATM. Google Maps was no help; it kept pointing me to phantom machines in little grocery stores. Irene had better luck in the tourist information center. The woman there gave us directions to what she said was the one remaining ATM in town -- which surprised me because Hay-on-Wye has a good bit of tourist traffic with their book festivals. But anyhow, we found it <em>and </em>it worked; it had cash. Of course, then we had to find something like a coffee shop that would take cash so we could break a bill and get coins for the machine, which knocked out any of the usual chains. Walking down the street, I found a place that looked indy enough -- the sign said “coffee shop” but it looked more like a thrift store. Sure enough, the guy was happy to take cash, though he had to pull out his wallet to make change.&nbsp;</li><li>We’ve talked about Hertz’s downward service spiral, which I forecasted in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/06/09/podcast-164-first-post-lockdown-trips-travel-credit-cards/\">episode #164</a> after their bankruptcy filing. But since I haven’t held back in slamming them for empty lots in Phoenix and San Diego, and for incorrect fuel charges, I need to give kudos to the Hertz location in Cardiff in Wales for what had to be, hands down, the easiest and therefore best Hertz transaction I’ve had in Europe. Leaving London for the Welsh hiking part of our trip, we decided to skip the fun and excitement of driving in London and instead took a train to Cardiff and then drove to the coast from there. The Hertz place was about a 10-min cab ride from the train station in a bit of an auto dealer row. I walked in, showed the woman my Illinois drivers license, she asked me if I’d be OK driving an automatic (how fast can I say “Yes!”), gave me a key, and pointed me to a grey Skoda in the back lot. Done; no hard upsell on enhanced insurance or refueling options, just “Here’s the key; have a good trip”. And then returning the car, I pulled in after gassing it up; the guy took a quick walk around it; had me sign his screen, and we were done. And nothing wonky when I looked at the emailed receipt. It’s sorta damning with faint praise that I’m so impressed when a transaction goes smoothly. It should always be this easy, but it rarely is.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> or the <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram </a>account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Veteran TravelCommons listener Mika Pyyhkala sent in a note this week talking about his great experience with a flight rebooking service, <a aria-label=\"Freebird (opens in a new tab)\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://getfreebird.com\" target=\"_blank\">Freebird</a>. Mika writes:<ul><li>I was flying with a companion from (Wichita) ICT-STL and STL-DTW. &nbsp;Just as the plane was descending to DTW, I received text messages from WN and Freebird that STL-DTW on WN had been cancelled. &nbsp;Freebird then manually advised that the only flight for that day was a DL STL-DTW, and they were going to book it in case I wanted it; if they waited longer there might not be enough time to issue the new ticket on Delta through their travel agent. &nbsp;They just asked me to confirm that I in fact wanted the Delta ticket.  </li><li>I confirmed we wanted the 2 Delta tickets, and by the time the door opened in STL we had a confirmation number to check in for the Delta flight leaving in 47 minutes. We got seats together on the Delta flight that were assigned by the Freebird process, and they even gave us free drinks!</li><li>I think we actually arrived in DTW a few minutes earlier than we were scheduled on the original flight, and it made for a great travel story and adventure! &nbsp;This was my first time using Freebird as well!</li><li>It costs $19 to protect a one way trip per traveler. &nbsp;It’s simple to work with them: unlike insurance, there are no claim forms, long waits, or papers to sign</li></ul></li><li>Mika, thanks for this. I hadn’t heard of Freebird before Mika’s note. Hitting their website, they’re selling their service to companies, travel agencies, and to individual travelers. Clicking through to a TechCrunch article about them, it says they’re also talking to Amex and Citibank about including Freebird as a credit card benefit. The article quotes the CEO, Ethan Bernstein - “It’s funny what happens when people deal with uncertainty; uncertainty is the worst. As soon you give people information, human support and technology to help them solve their problems, they experience the event so much differently.” &nbsp;Which is exactly right. Certainty lets you plan; uncertainty just leaves you to stew… and drink at the airport bar… and eat bad airport food… and bitch Tweet. Yup, uncertainty leads to lots of bad things</li><li>One more-fun-than-necessarily-good thing on last month’s trip was getting to try out an alpha version of a new augmented reality feature for Google Maps. I used it first in Stockholm; we got off the Arlanda Express at the Central Train station and wanted make our way over to the <a aria-label=\"Östermalms Saluhall (opens in a new tab)\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.ostermalmshallen.se/en/\" target=\"_blank\">Östermalms Saluhall</a> for lunch. When I chose “Walking” as our transport mode, a “Start AR” button showed up next to the usual button to start the directions. With AR, I’d hold my phone up, the display would use the camera to show the streetscape in front of me with the &nbsp;directions -- street names, arrows -- overlaid on the real-time image. I thought it was a nice add; reduced any ambiguity about where the next turn was. One interesting feature -- when I started walking, the screen dimmed and a message popped up telling me to stop looking at the phone and look straight ahead. All in all, it’s kinda fun. At least I thought so; Andrew and Irene seemed much less impressed. It worked very well for what was billed as an alpha product. It’ll be interesting to see how it develops, and how fast Google rolls it out.</li><li>But even without a broader AR roll-out, Google Maps seems on track to become the next “<a aria-label=\"super app (opens in a new tab)\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://skift.com/2019/04/16/google-maps-is-ready-to-transform-the-world-of-superapps-a-skift-deep-dive/\" target=\"_blank\">super app</a>” -- sorta the Western counterpart to China’s WeChat -- the first “super app”, a Swiss Army Knife-kind of “it does everything” app. Now Google Maps isn’t to that level -- yet -- but it is growing. It started as a mapping app, then added driving directions, then ride share -- showing Uber and Lyft prices, then public transit directions with real-time arrival times, replacing the core use case for apps like Transit. Then the “Explore Nearby” became more prominent -- which, for me, has supplanted Yelp when looking for a restaurant because it’s so much more convenient, and with deep links to OpenTable for reservations; and for nearby hotels, direct booking links to Expedia and Booking.com. I wasn’t surprised when I saw a stat that those “Near Me” searches grew 150 percent the last year. I’m not quite sure what I think about this -- loving a free service that keeps becoming more valuable vs. becoming more enslaved to the Google overlords. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/08/27/podcast-132-travel-apps-on-my-phone/\">episode #132</a>, I listed all the travel apps on my smartphone, and Google Maps was the most important -- “Indeed, it’s the only travel app with its own screen real estate rather than sharing space in the Travel folder,” I said. And it only keeps getting more indispensable.</li><li>Thinking back to our last day in Paris when both Ubers that we ordered were nice black Mercedes, I couldn’t help thinking how the quality of US Uber and Lyft vehicles has slipped. I remember when I started using Uber in 4-5 years ago, the cars were pristine. I remember working in Baltimore one summer; I was more than happy to wait 5 minutes for an Uber rather than take one of the cabs waiting at the stand right outside the building I was in. Those cabs were so beat up, so full of trash, and most of the time, without working air conditioning. Today, cabs haven’t gotten much cleaner, but Uber and Lyft seem to be lowering their standards. I dunno if it’s because of falling unemployment rates or trying to keep up with growth or squeezing driver pay to improve their post-IPO margins -- or all of the above -- but I’m seeing a real drop in quality.</li><li>Long-time TravelCommons listeners will recall that I’ve spent a lot of time in New Orleans airport and other than serving beer in go cups French Quarter-style so you can walk around the terminal with it, there’s not much good to say about it. Especially with regards to food and restaurants. For such a great food town to have such mediocre airport concessions has always been beyond me. But then again, the original terminal was built in 1959, and then expanded in the mid-70’s and mid-90’s. The new $1 billion replacement terminal was originally scheduled to open last year during New Orleans’ tricentennial, but that then slipped to February of this year, then to May, and now to a “to be determined” date sometime in the fall. The restaurant selection is supposed to be much better but I hope they don’t change that beer policy though. One time, waiting out yet another thunderstorm delay, I’d bought a beer and was standing by the gate drinking it because the bar was full. American called boarding and I walked up to the gate. The agent stopped me -- “You can drink that beer anywhere in the airport -- except on the jetway.” I looked down; I’d forgotten that I was still carrying that beer. I stepped to the side, chugged it, and then got on the plane. Felt like a very New Orleans thing to do.</li><li>And if you have any travel rants, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. &nbsp;The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send in an audio comment; a Twitter message to <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\">mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Facebook page</a> or our Instagram account at <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\">Travelcommons</a> -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music —  <em>A Thousand And None</em> by Speck (c) copyright 2018 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/speck/57256 Ft: Mr_Yesterday</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Yet More COVID Changes</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I mentioned in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/11/13/podcast-181-travel-potpourri-2021-travelers-gift-guide/\">last episode</a> that I was a little concerned about the logistics of getting COVID testing done by our second day in London. But it turned out fine. With a bit of Googling, I found <a href=\"https://covid.randox.com/day-2-test-at-home/\">Randox,</a> a big UK test firm, offering “click &amp; collect” rapid antigen tests for $25 a piece. It gave us a good reason, a destination for a post-arrival walk. It’s always good to spend a lot of time in the sunlight on that first day in Europe; I find it’s key to resetting my body clock. We did them in our hotel room the next morning. Yet more suspense -- waiting those 15 minutes, hoping that second pink line wouldn’t materialize, and then taking a picture of it in Randox’s app to get the “all clear” email back.</li><li>Of course, this was all pre-Omicron. That bombshell dropped the weekend before we flew home which had me back doing the rounds on Google, trying to figure out what travel requirements were changing. The UK quickly added pre-departure tests and shifted their Day 2 testing back to the more sensitive -- but 3 times more expensive -- PCR tests. But we were already in the UK. What mattered to us getting back to Chicago. The communications out of the US were less clear; mostly rumors; nothing official. The rumors were: tightening the window on pre-departure tests -- from 72 hours to 24 hours before departure, which could’ve been a problem for us; we’d already done the Abbott rapid antigen tests we’d brought from home Saturday afternoon before Monday morning departure. And adding a post-arrival test, similar to the UK’s. But the worst rumor was requiring a 7-day quarantine <em>even with</em> a negative test. Lucky for us, none of these US rumors came true -- at least by the Monday morning of our flight.&nbsp;</li><li>It wasn’t until later in the week the new rules were announced and it seems that folks had come to their senses a bit. The only rumor that came true was tightening the testing window down to 1 day. Well, that and extending the airplane mask requirement to March 2022, but as I said back in September in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/09/27/podcast-179-high-tech-airport-lines-business-travel-still-missing/\">episode #179</a>, I don’t think that was a surprise to anyone. Going to a 1-day window just reinforces the case for bringing a rapid antigen test with you. The only caveat is that the test has to be done in concert with a telehealth call to validate it’s actually you doing the test and the results are really negative. Coming home from Italy and the UK, Irene and I used <a href=\"https://www.emed.com/products/covid-at-home-testkit-six-pack?hsLang=en\">Abbott BinaxNow tests</a> with telehealth sessions from eMed. Depending on how many you buy (2, 3 or 6-pack), the cost per test ranges from $25 to $35, which is pretty competitive with the prices I saw for airport same-day testing services and it’s a helluva lot more convenient. Though as I recommended in this year’s <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-to-survive-post-pandemic-travel/\">travelers gift guide</a>, some sort of smartphone tripod comes in handy when the eMed guy wants to watch you swirl the cotton swab in your nose and then insert it into the test kit. Not sure how you’d do all that one-handed.</li><li>I hate the term “the new normal”, but perhaps, at least for the near term, we have to think about changes in COVID restrictions the same way we think about storms, terrorism, and strikes -- work to avoid them, but be flexible, agile enough to deal with it if you get caught. Now no analogy is perfect. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/podcast-150-travel-interruptus/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #150 — Travel Interruptus\">episode #150</a>, I told the story of how a bomb threat on the train line into Paris caused us to our flight home. It’s a lot easier to accept a couple of bonus days in Paris than an unplanned quarantine week in an airport Holiday Inn.</li><li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<em>Foolish Game</em>&nbsp;by copperhead (c) 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/copperhead/46390 Ft: Snowflake,Sackjo22 </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Words We Use for Adventure</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>We know that words impact the ways we think, feel, experience things -- including travel. Josh Glenn, a Boston-based author and semiotician (semiotics, the study of signs, symbols, and language, and how they create meaning) has just published a book <em><a href=\"https://www.hilobrow.com/2021/09/28/the-adventurers-glossary/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">The Adventurer’s Glossary</a></em>, with some 500 words associated with adventure. And since going on an adventure often involves travel, I wanted to talk to Josh about his book and how the words that we use to describe adventure could affect how we think about travel.<ul><li>Mark: Josh, how do you read <em>The Adventurer’s Glossary</em>?  It\'s an alphabetical list of words, terms, and their not-quite-Oxford-Dictionary definitions. They’re really more stories than definitions. Should I start at the top (0-Dark-Hundred is the first entry) and work my way through? Or just randomly riff through the pages, open it, put my finger down and read something?</li><li>Josh: It’s sort of a capricious decision to alphabetize all these terms because that just completely put them out of order. So all of the travel terms are not together, and all of the military terms are not together, and the stuff I got from hip hop or gaming culture or adventure literature, none of them are grouped together. It could just be something you pick up and randomly browse through. It\'s absolutely okay. However, as much as possible, I did try to edit it in such a way that if you were reading it from beginning to end it would kind of make sense in that direction as well. So if there\'s a little bit of beginning to end stuff in it, but really it\'s read randomly.</li><li>Mark: How did you choose which words to include? It\'s a pretty wide-ranging list. You’ve got bottle, hair, stoic, as well as the stuff that I would normally associate with adventure like bug-out bag, roam, and voyageur.</li><li>Josh: This is the third glossary that I\'ve done. I did one back in 2008 called <em>The Idler’s Glossary</em> which was all about basically how much I hate having a regular job and enjoy doing things that look like you\'re doing nothing from the outside but actually, it might be very rich and deep what you\'re doing. And then I did another book called<em> The Wage Slave’s Glossary</em>, which was about how much I hate my job. And I was working at the Boston Globe at the time. Actually, a job I kind of liked, but I just don\'t like having bosses and it was all about the horrible jargon of the workplace. Basically, these are topics I\'ve been interested in for many, many years and I just started gathering words as I also read a lot of adventure novels and watch a lot of adventure movies. So sort of gathering words that occurred to me over time. But then I also do really nerdy things like literally sit down and read through a slang dictionary or pick up a thesaurus and go look up the definitions and the etymology of every synonym for a certain word. So the list balloons; I think there\'s something like 500 words in this book.</li><li>Mark: So Josh, we think about adventure. Adventure often involves travel. Do you think that the language or the words that we use to describe adventure impact our expectations of how we travel?</li><li>Josh: The language of our culture helps shape and guide the way we are able to perceive and think about anything including adventure and travel. We can\'t think outside of this kind of structure of language that we have. I mean an adventure is, and that word comes from the Latin meaning to arrive unexpectedly. That\'s actually really an important philosophical piece for me as I was going through this, the idea that you can have a trip is not an adventure if nothing unexpected happens and if you don\'t take enough risks to allow things unexpected to happen. So when I think back to the amazing road trips I took when I was in college with my friends around the country, it\'s all kind of a blur. I don\'t really remember a lot of specific details except when something went wrong -- when we broke down in the middle of the highway on a mountain in Colorado and we had to go to a small town and have people that help us get parts and explore that town and meet the locals and almost get beat up etcetera, etcetera. That\'s an adventure. Something unexpected happened and it\'s very, very memorable. Those are the memories that you cherish later.</li><li>Mark: I think that\'s probably where travel stories come from are more of the things that you didn\'t expect, more of the hiccups. God only knows on this podcast, most of the stories that I\'ll tell have come from things that went sideways, not things that went well.</li><li>Josh: It\'s so interesting to think more about how that\'s really baked right into our language. So for example, the word chance comes from the Latin <em>cadentia </em>meaning <em>falling</em>. So just when we think about how we use the words of “let the chips fall where they may” or “something befalls you”, this idea of having our feet off the ground, falling through space, we can\'t grasp anything, what do you do with that? If you’re someone who likes, in some kind of existential way, that feeling of falling, then you\'re an adventurer. You\'re going to get more out of your travel experiences than someone who wants everything to be exactly the same way every time and never have any hiccups.</li><li>Mark: In a prior episode, we talked with <a href=\"https://emilythomaswrites.co.uk/about/\">Emily Thomas</a>, philosophy professor at Durham University in the UK, and she wrote a book <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/2DO07fV\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">The Meaning of Travel</a></em>. And one of the things that we got talking about was this idea of travel giving you a sense of otherness, so taking you out of your comfort zone and putting you in the middle of something different ,and what you experience out of that, both from where you are as well as within yourself. And I think about that a little bit, as you think about, you\'re putting yourself into a potential adventure. You don\'t know where you\'re going, you\'re just putting yourself into a situation and figuring it out.</li><li>Josh: I like how you\'re saying “put yourself into... “ Of course, another aspect of adventure is getting yourself out of the ordinary.</li><li>Mark: Yes, getting you out of that small town without getting your ass kicked.</li><li>Josh: Yeah, getting out of your routine, getting out of your small town, getting out of the kind of the spell that the quotidian everyday life casts on us, this kind of enchantment or bewitchment where you just want, you just expect everything to be the same all the time. Travel is one of the great ways, you know historically, traveling to other cultures and seeing the world, seeing how people live in other places. These are great ways to kind of break that spell of enchantment that every day puts on us.</li><li>Mark: Josh, the act of travel has come under pressure of late. Pre-pandemic that was starting to see a thread of travels perhaps of frivolous luxury that was killing the planet through carbon emissions and global warming, maybe overcrowding of specific places like Machu Picchu or Angkor Wat. And now in the time of Covid, there seems another riff which is -- travel is a selfish act because it hastens the spread of coronavirus around the world. How do we square this? How do we square these concepts of travel being negative with the need for adventure, that need for escape and the ability therefore to find ourselves?</li><li>Josh: You can\'t entirely square, I do think that there is some truth to those criticisms. We shouldn\'t be spreading disease and we shouldn\'t be destroying the planet by unnecessary travel. But then the question is “what\'s necessary and how often do we do it?” Maybe if you’re somebody who travels 100 times a year, maybe that\'s too much. But maybe if you travel once a year, that\'s not enough. But I do think that for me anyway, during Covid, I didn\'t travel really at all outside of Boston, New Hampshire and Vermont, but I traveled widely through reading adventure novels, watching movies and Google Streets where you can walk around inside the Sistine Chapel remotely. Of course these are not as good -- just the same as Zoom calls are not the same as being in the same room with someone. It\'s not as soul nourishing, you don\'t get as much out of it. You\'re not really experiencing the whole context that you get when you travel, but you can have sort of armchair adventures to some extent that helps square that circle. But yeah, there\'s no right answer to that.</li><li>Mark: Yeah, absolutely. Josh, as you think about <em>The Adventure’s Glossary</em>, how should people think about it, take it, enjoy it?</li><li>Josh: I hope that word nerds will enjoy it just on its own merits. However, there is kind of a secret philosophy woven through this alphabetized list of words, which is this idea that adventure is something that we should seek. We should try to break out of the ordinary and see things in a new way and expand our horizons, whether it\'s through actual literal travel or other ways, and that there are certain qualities that we need to cultivate in ourselves to be good adventurers. Whether that\'s a sense of humor, whether that\'s wit, whether that\'s courage, grit and so forth. These are all the kinds of things that I\'ve tried to express through this book, which from the outside might just look like a fun, slightly frivolous word nerd book.</li><li>Mark: Josh Glenn, thanks very much for joining us on the TravelCommons podcast. We\'ll put a link to <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3lSNcwg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">The Adventurer’s Glossary</a></em> so people can find it.</li><li>Josh: Thank you for having me and happy travels to all your listeners.</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #182</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_182.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #182 — More COVID Changes; Words That Mean Adventure','','inherit','closed','closed','','4020-revision-v1','','','2021-12-10 12:04:39','2021-12-10 17:04:39','',4020,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4030',0,'revision','',0),
(4032,1,'2021-12-18 11:28:22','2021-12-18 16:28:22','','IMG_2601','','inherit','open','closed','','img_2601','','','2021-12-18 11:28:22','2021-12-18 16:28:22','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/IMG_2601.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(4034,1,'2021-12-18 11:34:00','2021-12-18 16:34:00','<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2><strong>About Mark Peacock</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:image -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignleft size-large is-resized\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/IMG_2601.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/IMG_2601-200x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3354\" width=\"200\" height=\"300\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Mark Peacock has been a near-constant business traveler for over 35 years. Beginning with his first flight on his first day of work (an American Airline MD-80 from ORD to DFW), Mark has traveled extensively for high-tech companies and management consultancies.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><p>Mark has lived in Chicago, Memphis, Louisville, Washington DC, the Bay Area, Dallas, Philadelphia, and Detroit. He is back in Chicago for the third time, where he lives with his wife and two children.</p>\n<br><br><br></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2><strong>Contact Us</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>EMAIL – comments@travelcommons.com</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2><strong>About the TravelCommons Podcast</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Click <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/TravelCommonsMediaKit.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"mediakit\">here</a> to download a media kit</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','About Us','','inherit','closed','closed','','85-revision-v1','','','2021-12-18 11:34:00','2021-12-18 16:34:00','',85,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4034',0,'revision','',0),
(4035,1,'2021-12-18 11:34:27','2021-12-18 16:34:27','<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2><strong>About Mark Peacock</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:image -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignleft size-large is-resized\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/IMG_2601.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/IMG_2601-200x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3354\" width=\"200\" height=\"300\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Mark Peacock has been a near-constant business traveler for over 35 years. Beginning with his first flight on his first day of work (an American Airline MD-80 from ORD to DFW), Mark has traveled extensively for high-tech companies and management consultancies.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><p>Mark has lived in Chicago, Memphis, Louisville, Washington DC, the Bay Area, Dallas, Philadelphia, and Detroit. He is back in Chicago for the third time, where he lives with his wife and two children.</p>\n<br><br><br></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2><strong>Contact Us</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>EMAIL – comments@travelcommons.com</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2><strong>About the TravelCommons Podcast</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Click <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/TravelCommonsMediaKit.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"mediakit\">here</a> to download a media kit</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','About Us','','inherit','closed','closed','','85-revision-v1','','','2021-12-18 11:34:27','2021-12-18 16:34:27','',85,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4035',0,'revision','',0),
(4036,1,'2021-12-18 11:35:03','2021-12-18 16:35:03','<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2><strong>About Mark Peacock</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:image -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/IMG_2601.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/IMG_2601-200x300.jpg\" alt=\"\"/></a></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Mark Peacock has been a near-constant business traveler for over 35 years. Beginning with his first flight on his first day of work (an American Airline MD-80 from ORD to DFW), Mark has traveled extensively for high-tech companies and management consultancies.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2><strong>Contact Us</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>EMAIL – comments@travelcommons.com</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2><strong>About the TravelCommons Podcast</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Click <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/TravelCommonsMediaKit.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"mediakit\">here</a> to download a media kit</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','About Us','','inherit','closed','closed','','85-revision-v1','','','2021-12-18 11:35:03','2021-12-18 16:35:03','',85,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4036',0,'revision','',0),
(4037,1,'2021-12-18 11:36:22','2021-12-18 16:36:22','<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2><strong>About Mark Peacock</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:image -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/IMG_2601.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/IMG_2601-200x300.jpg\" alt=\"\"/></a></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Mark Peacock has been a near-constant business traveler for over 35 years. Beginning with his first flight on his first day of work (an American Airline MD-80 from ORD to DFW), Mark has traveled extensively for high-tech companies and management consultancies.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Mark has lived in Chicago, Memphis, Louisville, Washington DC, the Bay Area, Dallas, Philadelphia, and Detroit. He is back in Chicago for the third time, where he lives with his wife and two children.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2><strong>Contact Us</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>EMAIL – comments@travelcommons.com</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2><strong>About the TravelCommons Podcast</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Click <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/TravelCommonsMediaKit.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"mediakit\">here</a> to download a media kit</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','About Us','','inherit','closed','closed','','85-revision-v1','','','2021-12-18 11:36:22','2021-12-18 16:36:22','',85,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4037',0,'revision','',0),
(4038,1,'2021-12-18 11:37:17','2021-12-18 16:37:17','<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2><strong>About Mark Peacock</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/IMG_2601.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/IMG_2601-200x300.jpg\" alt=\"\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Mark Peacock has been a near-constant business traveler for over 35 years. Beginning with his first flight on his first day of work (an American Airline MD-80 from ORD to DFW), Mark has traveled extensively for high-tech companies and management consultancies.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Mark has lived in Chicago, Memphis, Louisville, Washington DC, the Bay Area, Dallas, Philadelphia, and Detroit. He is back in Chicago for the third time, where he lives with his wife and two children.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2><strong>Contact Us</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>EMAIL – comments@travelcommons.com</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2><strong>About the TravelCommons Podcast</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Click <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/TravelCommonsMediaKit.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"mediakit\">here</a> to download a media kit</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','About Us','','inherit','closed','closed','','85-revision-v1','','','2021-12-18 11:37:17','2021-12-18 16:37:17','',85,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4038',0,'revision','',0),
(4039,1,'2021-12-18 11:37:43','2021-12-18 16:37:43','<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2><strong>About Mark Peacock</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"left\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignleft\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/IMG_2601.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/IMG_2601-200x300.jpg\" alt=\"\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Mark Peacock has been a near-constant business traveler for over 35 years. Beginning with his first flight on his first day of work (an American Airline MD-80 from ORD to DFW), Mark has traveled extensively for high-tech companies and management consultancies.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Mark has lived in Chicago, Memphis, Louisville, Washington DC, the Bay Area, Dallas, Philadelphia, and Detroit. He is back in Chicago for the third time, where he lives with his wife and two children.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2><strong>Contact Us</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>EMAIL – comments@travelcommons.com</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2><strong>About the TravelCommons Podcast</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Click <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/TravelCommonsMediaKit.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"mediakit\">here</a> to download a media kit</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','About Us','','inherit','closed','closed','','85-revision-v1','','','2021-12-18 11:37:43','2021-12-18 16:37:43','',85,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4039',0,'revision','',0),
(4041,1,'2021-12-18 11:40:15','2021-12-18 16:40:15','<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2><strong>About Mark Peacock</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:image -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/IMG_2601.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/IMG_2601-200x300.jpg\" alt=\"\"/></a></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Mark Peacock has been a near-constant business traveler for over 35 years. Beginning with his first flight on his first day of work (an American Airline MD-80 from ORD to DFW), Mark has traveled extensively for high-tech companies and management consultancies.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2><strong>Contact Us</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>EMAIL – comments@travelcommons.com</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2><strong>About the TravelCommons Podcast</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Click <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/TravelCommonsMediaKit.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"mediakit\">here</a> to download a media kit</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','About Us','','inherit','closed','closed','','85-revision-v1','','','2021-12-18 11:40:15','2021-12-18 16:40:15','',85,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4041',0,'revision','',0),
(4042,1,'2021-12-18 11:40:40','2021-12-18 16:40:40','<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2><strong>About Mark Peacock</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:image -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/IMG_2601.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/IMG_2601-200x300.jpg\" alt=\"\"/></a></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Mark Peacock has been a near-constant business traveler for over 35 years. Beginning with his first flight on his first day of work (an American Airline MD-80 from ORD to DFW), Mark has traveled extensively for high-tech companies and management consultancies.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Mark has lived in Chicago, Memphis, Louisville, Washington DC, the Bay Area, Dallas, Philadelphia, and Detroit. He is back in Chicago for the third time, where he lives with his wife and two children.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2><strong>Contact Us</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>EMAIL – comments@travelcommons.com</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2><strong>About the TravelCommons Podcast</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Click <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/TravelCommonsMediaKit.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"mediakit\">here</a> to download a media kit</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','About Us','','inherit','closed','closed','','85-revision-v1','','','2021-12-18 11:40:40','2021-12-18 16:40:40','',85,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4042',0,'revision','',0),
(4044,1,'2021-12-30 20:05:25','2021-12-31 01:05:25','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">Update</span></strong>: From the US State Department\'s <a href=\"https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/traveladvisories/covid-19-travel-information.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">website:</a> <em>The CDC order from December 2, 2021, requiring persons aged two and above to show a negative COVID-19 test result or documentation of recovery from COVID-19 before boarding a flight to the United States, is rescinded, effective June 12, 2022, at 12:01AM ET.  This means that starting at 12:01AM ET on June 12, 2022, air passengers will not need to get tested and show a negative COVID-19 test result or show documentation of recovery from COVID-19 prior to boarding a flight to the United States regardless of vaccination status or citizenship</em></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:separator -->\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity\"/>\n<!-- /wp:separator -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>On December 6, the US <a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2021/p1203-covid-testing-tightens-intl.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">tightened the COVID testing window</a> for inbound international travelers from 72 hours prior to departure to one day. Going from one of the widest testing windows to the narrowest leaves you with just a couple of options. You can hit the airport test center and hope to get a negative result e-mailed to you before boarding, or pack a <a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/travelers/testing-international-air-travelers.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">CDC-approved self-test</a> in your carry-on and use it the night before you leave. I took the low-risk route and brought along <a href=\"https://www.emed.com/products/covid-at-home-testkit-six-pack?hsLang=en\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Abbott\'s BinaxNOW rapid antigen test with eMed</a>. I needed to do a bit of upfront planning, but it made our return home a lot easier.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Pre-Trip Planning</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>You can\'t just hit your local Walgreens or CVS the night before leaving and grab a kit off the shelf. This might meet the first requirement of <a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/travelers/testing-international-air-travelers.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the CDC\'s order</a> -- an FDA-approved test -- but not the second -- a telehealth provider that watches you take the test and then issues the lab result you\'ll need to show the gate agent to get on the plane. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":4048,\"width\":288,\"height\":512,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-large is-resized\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/F856BB2F-44E0-4C95-98BC-34855C2329FD.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/F856BB2F-44E0-4C95-98BC-34855C2329FD-576x1024.jpg\" alt=\"Doing your own COVID testing takes up a lot of valuable luggage real estate\" class=\"wp-image-4048\" width=\"288\" height=\"512\"/></a></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>There are a couple of tests that meet the CDC\'s requirements, but the Abbott BinaxNOW test is the easiest one to buy. You can buy a 6-pack directly from <a href=\"https://www.emed.com/products/covid-at-home-testkit-six-pack?hsLang=en\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">eMed</a>, or a 2- or 3-pack from <a href=\"https://store.optum.com/shop/category/tests-devices/covid-19-home-tests/\">Optum</a>, but make sure you buy the BinaxNOW tests <em><strong>with</strong></em> eMed telehealth services. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>When figuring out how many to order, there\'s a few things to keep in mind. First, how many spares to take with you in case a test doesn\'t work or gives you an ambiguous result? Second, the more you buy, the cheaper each test is. The 2-pack from Optum prices out at $30/test while buying the 6-pack from eMed drops it to $25/test. But third, remember that the tests only have a 12-month shelf life, so don\'t overbuy. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Irene and I had two international trips coming up, so I ordered a 6-pack from eMed a month before our first trip. The tests arrived a week later. We took four tests with us on each trip but never had to use the spares. One thing to keep in mind --  because you\'re not supposed to open the test until you\'re on-line with the teleproctor, those four boxes can take up a lot of valuable luggage space.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I also downloaded and set up the companion Navica app and created a profile on the eMed website before we left. You don\'t have to do this before traveling, but it\'ll make the actual testing session faster.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><meta charset=\"utf-8\"><strong>Take the Test The Day Before Flying to the US</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/travelers/testing-international-air-travelers.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">The CDC\'s new test window</a> is 1 day before departure, not 24 hours. So, if your flight leaves 1pm on Friday, you could board with a negative test taken any time the day before; a test taken Thursday morning would be fine.  You\'ll need to find a clear space on a table or desk and a solid WiFi signal, and then give yourself 30 minutes for the test -- 5 minutes to log into eMed website and start the telehealth session, a couple of minutes to do the test, 15 minutes for the results to develop, and a final couple of minutes back on with the teleproctor to read the results. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":4049,\"width\":288,\"height\":512,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-large is-resized\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/116C8D86-ED66-4E5F-A516-D3E6046CA582.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/116C8D86-ED66-4E5F-A516-D3E6046CA582-576x1024.jpg\" alt=\"BinaxNOW COVID testing session\" class=\"wp-image-4049\" width=\"288\" height=\"512\"/></a></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We weren\'t traveling with computers, but we successfully ran our telehealth sessions on a selection of handheld devices -- a Samsung Galaxy S2 Android tablet, an iPad Mini, and two vintages of iPhones (Xr and 13 Pro).</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>You log into the eMed website, run through four questions that prompt you to wash your hands and have your ID ready, and then get into queue for a telehealth session. Last summer, I heard complaints of 2+ hour queues, but we didn\'t wait over 3 minutes for any of our sessions. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>When the session starts, the proctor can see you, but you only hear the proctor. They\'ll want to check your photo ID, watch you open the test box, and then scan the QR code on the test card. On our phones and tablets, this process awkwardly flipped the web session between the front and back cameras a couple of times. Then, back to the front camera, the proctor watches you swab both nostrils and then insert the swab into the test card. I don\'t know how you\'d do this one-handed; you\'ll want <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3pZmjcS\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">some way</a> to use your phone or tablet hands-free. With the testing complete, the proctor starts a 15-minute on-screen timer and drops off the call.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>After the timer finishes, the web page asks if you\'re ready to rejoin the session. Pressing \"Yes\", you enter shorter queue for another proctor session (we never waited more than 90 seconds). They confirm it\'s the same test card by having you scan QR code again and then confirm the test results with you, asking you how many lines you see. On one of these review sessions, the proctor\'s audio was all fuzzed up. She asked me if I was comfortable proceeding using the chat function and we finished the session without a problem. eMed then e-mails you a PDF of the test results as well as notifying you in the Navica app. We didn\'t wait more than 10 minutes for our results to show up. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Using The Test Results</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>This is why you\'ve gone through that telehealth drill -- to get a lab result that meets<a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/travelers/testing-international-air-travelers.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"> CDC requirements</a> so your airline will let you fly home. On our flight home from Italy, we pulled up the test result PDF twice on our iPhones, when checking in for Lufthansa flight from Catania, Sicily to Munich and again for a United Airlines agent at the final gate-side security check before boarding our MUC-ORD flight. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>A month later, we were flying American Airlines home from London. American uses the <a href=\"https://support.myverifly.com/hc/en-us\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Verifly</a> app to pull together all the required COVID travel documents. Verifly didn\'t recognize the QR code on the Navica test pass, so I uploaded a screenshot of my test results for manual verification. After about 30 minutes, the \"in-process\" status icon turned green and we were good to go. When we checked in for our flight at Heathrow, all we had to do was show the agent the green “All good” screens on the Verifly app; no need to show the actual test results. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Bottom Line</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> A little pre-departure planning will let you enjoy a more relaxed final day of vacation.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Easy Way to Do 1-Day Testing For Returning to US','How to meet the US 1-day COVID testing window by packing Abbott BinaxNOW kits so you can self-test in your hotel the day before your flight home','private','closed','closed','','easy-way-to-do-1-day-testing-for-returning-to-us','','','2024-05-30 10:06:05','2024-05-30 15:06:05','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4044',0,'post','',0),
(4046,1,'2021-12-29 16:29:33','2021-12-29 21:29:33','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/JPEG-image.jpeg\"><img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/JPEG-image-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"Jumble of Travel Signs\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> Cleared to Adventure[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Back in front of the microphone after a two-week trip to the UK, getting back home just before the new <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/omicron-covid-travel-international-11638216229?st=sm0fcotd0jfju1i&amp;reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink\">Omicron travel restrictions</a> hit. We talk about getting to London, surfing the waves of changing travel requirements, a new way to renew Global Entry, moan a bit more about the inexorable advance of the cashless society, and finish up talking with <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_Glenn\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Josh Glenn</a> about his new book <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3lSNcwg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">The Adventurer\'s Glossary</a></em>.  All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_182.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #182: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois a couple of weeks since getting back from two weeks in the UK -- a week in London and a week of hiking in Southern Wales. Had really great weather for the back half of November -- brisk temperatures, but more sun than we expected; certainly a bit windy when walking the cliffs above the Atlantic, but nothing that we couldn’t layer up for; and only one day of real rain. It was a lot better than the weather forecasts had led us to expect.</li><li>The trip over and back was pretty uneventful. I’d hit American on a mileage sale back in March for direct flights between ORD and LHR. We flew coach on a Triple 7 that was pretty empty on the way over. People were popping up the armrests in the 4-seat center section and laying down to sleep. One guy even built a little tent out of blankets to cover his head. I’m not sure if he was trying to block the cabin lights or maybe he was concerned people walking down the aisles would breathe on him while he slept (though mask discipline was very solid) or maybe <em>he</em> wanted to drop <em>his</em> mask while he slept and didn’t want to get called out by the flight attendants. Whatever his deal was, it looked a little weird.</li><li>I ate dinner on that flight even though I’d eaten a cubano sandwich at Tortas Frontera, my favorite ORD restaurant, right before boarding. I took the meal not because I was hungry but because it gave me an excuse to drop my mask for a little bit on that 8-hr flight. Rather than the “replace your mask between bites and sips” rules that I heard on domestic flights this year, on my international flights over the past couple of months, most everyone takes off their mask for the duration of the meal. I don’t know if this difference comes from emptier planes, longer flights, or that international fliers are less likely to try to get around mask rules (and, purely my own experience, I haven’t seen any passenger pushback on masks on any of my international flights, whereas I was seeing/hearing a lot of it on domestic flights earlier this year), but I appreciate the flexibility/pragmatism (?) on these long flights.</li><li>While the plane wasn’t full, I was worried about passport control when we got to Heathrow. There’s always a bit of suspense anyways as you make the long walk from the plane to passport control. Did a whole bunch of Triple 7’s disgorge at the same time, let alone some massive A-380’s? Did the immigration force botch their workforce scheduling up? Will we flow smoothly into the immigration hall or will our march suddenly stop short?&nbsp; Worse, will we smack into one of those Heathrow e-gate failures that has caused 2-4 hour queues over the past couple of months?&nbsp;</li><li>We kept moving, but then came to a sudden stop as we made the final turn toward the hall. Looking around the line, I could see the room wasn’t jammed -- good sign. It looked like they’d paused us for a minute while they rejiggered their cowpen zig-zag line. After a minute or two, we started moving again, and at a pretty good clip with almost everyone getting pointed to the automated e-gates. I walked up, put my passport on the reader, a camera box popped up, mechanically adjusted to my height, and then after what I assume was some facial recognition analysis, opened the gate and let me go to baggage claim. No “how long are you going to be in the country” quiz, which I didn’t miss, but also no stamp in my passport. How am I going to remember this trip for my next Global Entry renewal. Guess I’ll have to drink a beer or two while I’m here so it shows up on my Untappd history.</li><li>Bridge Music —  <em>dazed </em>by Jeris (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/VJ_Memes/39456 Ft: airtone</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Speaking of Global Entry, back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/10/28/podcast-180-tracking-covid-travel-requirements-cycling-thru-puglia/\">episode #180</a> at the end of October, I was still waiting for my renewal approval and compare my month-and-a-half and counting wait with listener Jerry Sarfati’s 2-day wait. Then, the day before we left for the UK, I got an email with the subject line “TTP (Trusted Traveler Program) Application Status Change” telling me to check the website for more information. Logging in, I saw that I’d been given conditional approval, so about 2 months from submitting my renewal application. I still had to do an interview, but if I was reading everything correctly, I had 12 months to get that done. I looked to see if ORD had an appointment available the day we were flying back from London, but no dice. The earliest appointment was mid-December. OK, I’ll think about it later. No rush; I have 12 months. But the next day, I got another email from dhs.gov telling me about a new program, Enrollment-On-Arrival, where I could knock out my interview while in the customs/immigration area coming back from an international trip, no appointment necessary. Perfect!</li><li>So that Monday afternoon after a quick pass-through the Global Entry kiosk, I went looking for Booth 58 which is where, according to the Enrollment-On-Arrival website, was where the ORD interviews would be. But it looked like getting to Booth 58 would mean standing in a long and growing line of non-US passengers. Ah, forget it. Again, I have 12 months to get this done. But the luggage carousel for our flight hadn’t even started turning yet, so I went up to one of the customs officers and asked her. She immediately pointed me to a guy in a booth completely separate from the rest of the immigration traffic, and in the complete opposite direction of Booth 58. There was one guy in front of me getting his interview, but by the time I stepped up to the officer, there was a family of 4 and two other people behind me. The interview took about 5 minutes. I walked out and our luggage carousel still wasn’t moving. By the end of the day, the TTP website showed my Global Entry was good for another 5 years. Full credit to DHS for coming up with ways to make Global Entry easier. I just wish they’d keep their website locator up-to-date.</li><li>In the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/11/13/podcast-181-travel-potpourri-2021-travelers-gift-guide/\">last episode</a>, we talked about how last year’s flurry of vaccination passport app announcements has pretty much turned out to be, in the words of Macbeth, “a tale, Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing” But American Airlines’ partnership with Verifly did actually have a little something to it. I downloaded the app and, after wrestling through what is not the most intuitive interface, was able to see a list of the UK travel requirements and then validate that I met them, by uploading pictures of Irene’s and my vaccination cards and our passenger locator form QR codes. That’s nice, but what was better was when we checked in for our flight, all we had to do was show the agent the green “All good” screens for Irene and me and we were done. None of the fishing out the right forms and holding them up to the lucite screen. Two swipes on the phone and we were done. Nothing earth-shattering, but it does relieve the friction out of one part of the journey</li><li>A <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">recurring</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/08/24/podcast-178-what-remains-from-pandemic-times-best-restaurant-and-bars/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">topic</a> on the TravelCommons podcast is the move to a cashless society. And certainly the pandemic accelerated this with the push toward contactless transactions; nobody wanted to handle your possibly-infectious cash. On our first day in London, on our walk to pick up our COVID tests, I stopped at the first ATM I saw to pull out £100, just to have some cash in my wallet. I’m a bit old-school in that way. And I’m glad I did it because once we left London and were staying in small towns in South Wales, it was really tough to find an ATM. Now, this shouldn’t be that big a deal with everyone taking cards and contactless, be it a card or on the phone with Google or Apple Pay, doing away (mostly) with the need for a PIN or to sign anything. But in Wales, the parking lots at the base of our hikes, the pay-&amp;-display machines, weren’t taking my cards, either contactless or physical. And by the time we were in our last town, Hay-on-Wye, I’d run out of coins and needed to find an ATM. Google Maps was no help; it kept pointing me to phantom machines in little grocery stores. Irene had better luck in the tourist information center. The woman there gave us directions to what she said was the one remaining ATM in town -- which surprised me because Hay-on-Wye has a good bit of tourist traffic with their book festivals. But anyhow, we found it <em>and </em>it worked; it had cash. Of course, then we had to find something like a coffee shop that would take cash so we could break a bill and get coins for the machine, which knocked out any of the usual chains. Walking down the street, I found a place that looked indy enough -- the sign said “coffee shop” but it looked more like a thrift store. Sure enough, the guy was happy to take cash, though he had to pull out his wallet to make change. </li><li>We’ve talked about Hertz’s downward service spiral, which I forecasted in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/06/09/podcast-164-first-post-lockdown-trips-travel-credit-cards/\">episode #164</a> after their bankruptcy filing. But since I haven’t held back in slamming them for empty lots in Phoenix and San Diego, and for incorrect fuel charges, I need to give kudos to the Hertz location in Cardiff in Wales for what had to be, hands down, the easiest and therefore best Hertz transaction I’ve had in Europe. Leaving London for the Welsh hiking part of our trip, we decided to skip the fun and excitement of driving in London and instead took a train to Cardiff and then drove to the coast from there. The Hertz place was about a 10-min cab ride from the train station in a bit of an auto dealer row. I walked in, showed the woman my Illinois drivers license, she asked me if I’d be OK driving an automatic (how fast can I say “Yes!”), gave me a key, and pointed me to a grey Skoda in the back lot. Done; no hard upsell on enhanced insurance or refueling options, just “Here’s the key; have a good trip”. And then returning the car, I pulled in after gassing it up; the guy took a quick walk around it; had me sign his screen, and we were done. And nothing wonky when I looked at the emailed receipt. It’s sorta damning with faint praise that I’m so impressed when a transaction goes smoothly. It should always be this easy, but it rarely is.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> or the <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram </a>account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music —  <em>A Thousand And None</em> by Speck (c) copyright 2018 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/speck/57256 Ft: Mr_Yesterday</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Yet More COVID Changes</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I mentioned in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/11/13/podcast-181-travel-potpourri-2021-travelers-gift-guide/\">last episode</a> that I was a little concerned about the logistics of getting COVID testing done by our second day in London. But it turned out fine. With a bit of Googling, I found <a href=\"https://covid.randox.com/day-2-test-at-home/\">Randox,</a> a big UK test firm, offering “click &amp; collect” rapid antigen tests for $25 a piece. It gave us a good reason, a destination for a post-arrival walk. It’s always good to spend a lot of time in the sunlight on that first day in Europe; I find it’s key to resetting my body clock. We did them in our hotel room the next morning. Yet more suspense -- waiting those 15 minutes, hoping that second pink line wouldn’t materialize, and then taking a picture of it in Randox’s app to get the “all clear” email back.</li><li>Of course, this was all pre-Omicron. That bombshell dropped the weekend before we flew home which had me back doing the rounds on Google, trying to figure out what travel requirements were changing. The UK quickly added pre-departure tests and shifted their Day 2 testing back to the more sensitive -- but 3 times more expensive -- PCR tests. But we were already in the UK. What mattered to us getting back to Chicago. The communications out of the US were less clear; mostly rumors; nothing official. The rumors were: tightening the window on pre-departure tests -- from 72 hours to 24 hours before departure, which could’ve been a problem for us; we’d already done the Abbott rapid antigen tests we’d brought from home Saturday afternoon before Monday morning departure. And adding a post-arrival test, similar to the UK’s. But the worst rumor was requiring a 7-day quarantine <em>even with</em> a negative test. Lucky for us, none of these US rumors came true -- at least by the Monday morning of our flight.&nbsp;</li><li>It wasn’t until later in the week the new rules were announced and it seems that folks had come to their senses a bit. The only rumor that came true was tightening the testing window down to 1 day. Well, that and extending the airplane mask requirement to March 2022, but as I said back in September in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/09/27/podcast-179-high-tech-airport-lines-business-travel-still-missing/\">episode #179</a>, I don’t think that was a surprise to anyone. Going to a 1-day window just reinforces the case for bringing a rapid antigen test with you. The only caveat is that the test has to be done in concert with a telehealth call to validate it’s actually you doing the test and the results are really negative. Coming home from Italy and the UK, Irene and I used <a href=\"https://www.emed.com/products/covid-at-home-testkit-six-pack?hsLang=en\">Abbott BinaxNow tests</a> with telehealth sessions from eMed. Depending on how many you buy (2, 3 or 6-pack), the cost per test ranges from $25 to $35, which is pretty competitive with the prices I saw for airport same-day testing services and it’s a helluva lot more convenient. Though as I recommended in this year’s <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-to-survive-post-pandemic-travel/\">travelers gift guide</a>, some sort of smartphone tripod comes in handy when the eMed guy wants to watch you swirl the cotton swab in your nose and then insert it into the test kit. Not sure how you’d do all that one-handed.</li><li>I hate the term “the new normal”, but perhaps, at least for the near term, we have to think about changes in COVID restrictions the same way we think about storms, terrorism, and strikes -- work to avoid them, but be flexible, agile enough to deal with it if you get caught. Now no analogy is perfect. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/podcast-150-travel-interruptus/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #150 — Travel Interruptus\">episode #150</a>, I told the story of how a bomb threat on the train line into Paris caused us to our flight home. It’s a lot easier to accept a couple of bonus days in Paris than an unplanned quarantine week in an airport Holiday Inn.</li><li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<em>Foolish Game</em>&nbsp;by copperhead (c) 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/copperhead/46390 Ft: Snowflake,Sackjo22 </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Words We Use for Adventure</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>We know that words impact the ways we think, feel, experience things -- including travel. Josh Glenn, a Boston-based author and semiotician (semiotics, the study of signs, symbols, and language, and how they create meaning) has just published a book <em><a href=\"https://www.hilobrow.com/2021/09/28/the-adventurers-glossary/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">The Adventurer’s Glossary</a></em>, with some 500 words associated with adventure. And since going on an adventure often involves travel, I wanted to talk to Josh about his book and how the words that we use to describe adventure could affect how we think about travel.<ul><li>Mark: Josh, how do you read <em>The Adventurer’s Glossary</em>?&nbsp; It\'s an alphabetical list of words, terms, and their not-quite-Oxford-Dictionary definitions. They’re really more stories than definitions. Should I start at the top (0-Dark-Hundred is the first entry) and work my way through? Or just randomly riff through the pages, open it, put my finger down and read something?</li><li>Josh: It’s sort of a capricious decision to alphabetize all these terms because that just completely put them out of order. So all of the travel terms are not together, and all of the military terms are not together, and the stuff I got from hip hop or gaming culture or adventure literature, none of them are grouped together. It could just be something you pick up and randomly browse through. It\'s absolutely okay. However, as much as possible, I did try to edit it in such a way that if you were reading it from beginning to end it would kind of make sense in that direction as well. So if there\'s a little bit of beginning to end stuff in it, but really it\'s read randomly.</li><li>Mark: How did you choose which words to include? It\'s a pretty wide-ranging list. You’ve got bottle, hair, stoic, as well as the stuff that I would normally associate with adventure like bug-out bag, roam, and voyageur.</li><li>Josh: This is the third glossary that I\'ve done. I did one back in 2008 called <em>The Idler’s Glossary</em> which was all about basically how much I hate having a regular job and enjoy doing things that look like you\'re doing nothing from the outside but actually, it might be very rich and deep what you\'re doing. And then I did another book called<em> The Wage Slave’s Glossary</em>, which was about how much I hate my job. And I was working at the Boston Globe at the time. Actually, a job I kind of liked, but I just don\'t like having bosses and it was all about the horrible jargon of the workplace. Basically, these are topics I\'ve been interested in for many, many years and I just started gathering words as I also read a lot of adventure novels and watch a lot of adventure movies. So sort of gathering words that occurred to me over time. But then I also do really nerdy things like literally sit down and read through a slang dictionary or pick up a thesaurus and go look up the definitions and the etymology of every synonym for a certain word. So the list balloons; I think there\'s something like 500 words in this book.</li><li>Mark: So Josh, we think about adventure. Adventure often involves travel. Do you think that the language or the words that we use to describe adventure impact our expectations of how we travel?</li><li>Josh: The language of our culture helps shape and guide the way we are able to perceive and think about anything including adventure and travel. We can\'t think outside of this kind of structure of language that we have. I mean an adventure is, and that word comes from the Latin meaning to arrive unexpectedly. That\'s actually really an important philosophical piece for me as I was going through this, the idea that you can have a trip is not an adventure if nothing unexpected happens and if you don\'t take enough risks to allow things unexpected to happen. So when I think back to the amazing road trips I took when I was in college with my friends around the country, it\'s all kind of a blur. I don\'t really remember a lot of specific details except when something went wrong -- when we broke down in the middle of the highway on a mountain in Colorado and we had to go to a small town and have people that help us get parts and explore that town and meet the locals and almost get beat up etcetera, etcetera. That\'s an adventure. Something unexpected happened and it\'s very, very memorable. Those are the memories that you cherish later.</li><li>Mark: I think that\'s probably where travel stories come from are more of the things that you didn\'t expect, more of the hiccups. God only knows on this podcast, most of the stories that I\'ll tell have come from things that went sideways, not things that went well.</li><li>Josh: It\'s so interesting to think more about how that\'s really baked right into our language. So for example, the word chance comes from the Latin <em>cadentia </em>meaning <em>falling</em>. So just when we think about how we use the words of “let the chips fall where they may” or “something befalls you”, this idea of having our feet off the ground, falling through space, we can\'t grasp anything, what do you do with that? If you’re someone who likes, in some kind of existential way, that feeling of falling, then you\'re an adventurer. You\'re going to get more out of your travel experiences than someone who wants everything to be exactly the same way every time and never have any hiccups.</li><li>Mark: In a prior episode, we talked with <a href=\"https://emilythomaswrites.co.uk/about/\">Emily Thomas</a>, philosophy professor at Durham University in the UK, and she wrote a book <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/2DO07fV\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">The Meaning of Travel</a></em>. And one of the things that we got talking about was this idea of travel giving you a sense of otherness, so taking you out of your comfort zone and putting you in the middle of something different ,and what you experience out of that, both from where you are as well as within yourself. And I think about that a little bit, as you think about, you\'re putting yourself into a potential adventure. You don\'t know where you\'re going, you\'re just putting yourself into a situation and figuring it out.</li><li>Josh: I like how you\'re saying “put yourself into... “ Of course, another aspect of adventure is getting yourself out of the ordinary.</li><li>Mark: Yes, getting you out of that small town without getting your ass kicked.</li><li>Josh: Yeah, getting out of your routine, getting out of your small town, getting out of the kind of the spell that the quotidian everyday life casts on us, this kind of enchantment or bewitchment where you just want, you just expect everything to be the same all the time. Travel is one of the great ways, you know historically, traveling to other cultures and seeing the world, seeing how people live in other places. These are great ways to kind of break that spell of enchantment that every day puts on us.</li><li>Mark: Josh, the act of travel has come under pressure of late. Pre-pandemic that was starting to see a thread of travels perhaps of frivolous luxury that was killing the planet through carbon emissions and global warming, maybe overcrowding of specific places like Machu Picchu or Angkor Wat. And now in the time of Covid, there seems another riff which is -- travel is a selfish act because it hastens the spread of coronavirus around the world. How do we square this? How do we square these concepts of travel being negative with the need for adventure, that need for escape and the ability therefore to find ourselves?</li><li>Josh: You can\'t entirely square, I do think that there is some truth to those criticisms. We shouldn\'t be spreading disease and we shouldn\'t be destroying the planet by unnecessary travel. But then the question is “what\'s necessary and how often do we do it?” Maybe if you’re somebody who travels 100 times a year, maybe that\'s too much. But maybe if you travel once a year, that\'s not enough. But I do think that for me anyway, during Covid, I didn\'t travel really at all outside of Boston, New Hampshire and Vermont, but I traveled widely through reading adventure novels, watching movies and Google Streets where you can walk around inside the Sistine Chapel remotely. Of course these are not as good -- just the same as Zoom calls are not the same as being in the same room with someone. It\'s not as soul nourishing, you don\'t get as much out of it. You\'re not really experiencing the whole context that you get when you travel, but you can have sort of armchair adventures to some extent that helps square that circle. But yeah, there\'s no right answer to that.</li><li>Mark: Yeah, absolutely. Josh, as you think about <em>The Adventure’s Glossary</em>, how should people think about it, take it, enjoy it?</li><li>Josh: I hope that word nerds will enjoy it just on its own merits. However, there is kind of a secret philosophy woven through this alphabetized list of words, which is this idea that adventure is something that we should seek. We should try to break out of the ordinary and see things in a new way and expand our horizons, whether it\'s through actual literal travel or other ways, and that there are certain qualities that we need to cultivate in ourselves to be good adventurers. Whether that\'s a sense of humor, whether that\'s wit, whether that\'s courage, grit and so forth. These are all the kinds of things that I\'ve tried to express through this book, which from the outside might just look like a fun, slightly frivolous word nerd book.</li><li>Mark: Josh Glenn, thanks very much for joining us on the TravelCommons podcast. We\'ll put a link to <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3lSNcwg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">The Adventurer’s Glossary</a></em> so people can find it.</li><li>Josh: Thank you for having me and happy travels to all your listeners.</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #182</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_182.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #182 — More COVID Changes; Words That Mean Adventure','','inherit','closed','closed','','4020-revision-v1','','','2021-12-29 16:29:33','2021-12-29 21:29:33','',4020,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4046',0,'revision','',0),
(4047,1,'2021-12-29 16:36:17','2021-12-29 21:36:17','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>On December 6, the US <a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2021/p1203-covid-testing-tightens-intl.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">tightened the COVID testing window</a> for inbound international travelers from 72 hours prior to departure to one day. Going from one of the widest testing windows to the narrowest leaves you with just a couple of options. You can hit the airport test center and hope to get a negative result e-mailed to you before boarding, or pack a <a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/travelers/testing-international-air-travelers.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">CDC-approved self-test</a> in your carry-on and use it the night before you leave. I took the low-risk route and brought along <a href=\"https://www.emed.com/products/covid-at-home-testkit-six-pack?hsLang=en\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Abbott\'s BinaxNOW rapid antigen test</a>. I needed to do a bit of upfront planning, but it made our return home a lot easier.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Easy Way to Get 1-Day Testing to Return to US','','inherit','closed','closed','','4044-revision-v1','','','2021-12-29 16:36:17','2021-12-29 21:36:17','',4044,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4047',0,'revision','',0),
(4048,1,'2021-12-29 16:36:55','2021-12-29 21:36:55','','F856BB2F-44E0-4C95-98BC-34855C2329FD','','inherit','open','closed','','f856bb2f-44e0-4c95-98bc-34855c2329fd','','','2021-12-29 16:36:55','2021-12-29 21:36:55','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/F856BB2F-44E0-4C95-98BC-34855C2329FD.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(4049,1,'2021-12-29 16:36:59','2021-12-29 21:36:59','','116C8D86-ED66-4E5F-A516-D3E6046CA582','','inherit','open','closed','','116c8d86-ed66-4e5f-a516-d3e6046ca582','','','2021-12-30 14:04:25','2021-12-30 19:04:25','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/116C8D86-ED66-4E5F-A516-D3E6046CA582.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(4050,1,'2021-12-30 13:02:43','2021-12-30 18:02:43','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>On December 6, the US <a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2021/p1203-covid-testing-tightens-intl.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">tightened the COVID testing window</a> for inbound international travelers from 72 hours prior to departure to one day. Going from one of the widest testing windows to the narrowest leaves you with just a couple of options. You can hit the airport test center and hope to get a negative result e-mailed to you before boarding, or pack a <a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/travelers/testing-international-air-travelers.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">CDC-approved self-test</a> in your carry-on and use it the night before you leave. I took the low-risk route and brought along <a href=\"https://www.emed.com/products/covid-at-home-testkit-six-pack?hsLang=en\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Abbott\'s BinaxNOW rapid antigen test with eMed</a>. I needed to do a bit of upfront planning, but it made our return home a lot easier.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Pre-Trip Planning</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>You can\'t just hit your local Walgreens or CVS the night before leaving and grab whatever kits they have on the shelf. This might meet the first requirement of <a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/travelers/testing-international-air-travelers.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the CDC\'s order</a> -- an FDA-approved test -- but not the second -- a telehealth provider that watches you do the test and then issues the digital report you\'ll need to show the gate agent to get on the plane. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":4048,\"width\":288,\"height\":512,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large is-resized\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/F856BB2F-44E0-4C95-98BC-34855C2329FD.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/F856BB2F-44E0-4C95-98BC-34855C2329FD-576x1024.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-4048\" width=\"288\" height=\"512\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>There are a couple of tests that meet the CDC\'s requirements, but the Abbott BinaxNOW test is the easiest one to buy. You can buy a 6-pack directly from <a href=\"https://www.emed.com/products/covid-at-home-testkit-six-pack?hsLang=en\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">eMed</a>, or a 2- or 3-pack from <a href=\"https://store.optum.com/shop/category/tests-devices/covid-19-home-tests/\">Optum</a>, but make sure you buy the BinaxNOW tests <em>with</em> eMed telehealth services. When figuring out how many to order, there\'s a couple of things to keep in mind. First, how many spares do you want to take with you in case </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Easy Way to Get 1-Day Testing to Return to US','','inherit','closed','closed','','4044-revision-v1','','','2021-12-30 13:02:43','2021-12-30 18:02:43','',4044,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4050',0,'revision','',0),
(4051,1,'2021-12-30 13:44:38','2021-12-30 18:44:38','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>On December 6, the US <a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2021/p1203-covid-testing-tightens-intl.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">tightened the COVID testing window</a> for inbound international travelers from 72 hours prior to departure to one day. Going from one of the widest testing windows to the narrowest leaves you with just a couple of options. You can hit the airport test center and hope to get a negative result e-mailed to you before boarding, or pack a <a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/travelers/testing-international-air-travelers.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">CDC-approved self-test</a> in your carry-on and use it the night before you leave. I took the low-risk route and brought along <a href=\"https://www.emed.com/products/covid-at-home-testkit-six-pack?hsLang=en\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Abbott\'s BinaxNOW rapid antigen test with eMed</a>. I needed to do a bit of upfront planning, but it made our return home a lot easier.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Pre-Trip Planning</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>You can\'t just hit your local Walgreens or CVS the night before leaving and grab whatever kits they have on the shelf. This might meet the first requirement of <a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/travelers/testing-international-air-travelers.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the CDC\'s order</a> -- an FDA-approved test -- but not the second -- a telehealth provider that watches you do the test and then issues the digital report you\'ll need to show the gate agent to get on the plane. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":4048,\"width\":288,\"height\":512,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large is-resized\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/F856BB2F-44E0-4C95-98BC-34855C2329FD.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/F856BB2F-44E0-4C95-98BC-34855C2329FD-576x1024.jpg\" alt=\"Doing your own COVID testing takes up a lot of valuable luggage real estate\" class=\"wp-image-4048\" width=\"288\" height=\"512\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>There are a couple of tests that meet the CDC\'s requirements, but the Abbott BinaxNOW test is the easiest one to buy. You can buy a 6-pack directly from <a href=\"https://www.emed.com/products/covid-at-home-testkit-six-pack?hsLang=en\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">eMed</a>, or a 2- or 3-pack from <a href=\"https://store.optum.com/shop/category/tests-devices/covid-19-home-tests/\">Optum</a>, but make sure you buy the BinaxNOW tests <em><strong>with</strong></em> eMed telehealth services. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>When figuring out how many to order, there\'s a few things to keep in mind. First, how many spares to take with you in case one doesn\'t work or gives you an ambiguous result. Second, the more you buy, the cheaper each test is. The 2-pack from Optum prices out at $30/test while buying the 6-pack from eMed drops it to $25/test. But third, remember that the tests only have a 12-month shelf life, so don\'t overbuy. Irene and I had two international trips coming up, so I ordered a 6-pack from eMed a month before our first trip. The tests arrived a week later. We took four tests with us on each trip but never had to use the spares. However, because you\'re not supposed to open the test until you\'re on-line with the teleproctor, those four boxes took up a lot of valuable luggage space.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I also downloaded and set up the companion Navica app and created a profile on the eMed website before we left. You don\'t have to do this before traveling, but it\'ll make the actual testing session faster.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><meta charset=\"utf-8\"><strong>Take the Test The Day Before Flying to the US</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/travelers/testing-international-air-travelers.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">The CDC\'s new test window</a> is 1 day before departure, not 24 hours. So, if your flight leaves 1pm on Friday, you could board with a negative test taken any time the day before; a test taken Thursday morning would be fine.  </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Easy Way to Get 1-Day Testing to Return to US','','inherit','closed','closed','','4044-revision-v1','','','2021-12-30 13:44:38','2021-12-30 18:44:38','',4044,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4051',0,'revision','',0),
(4052,1,'2021-12-30 14:05:05','2021-12-30 19:05:05','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>On December 6, the US <a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2021/p1203-covid-testing-tightens-intl.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">tightened the COVID testing window</a> for inbound international travelers from 72 hours prior to departure to one day. Going from one of the widest testing windows to the narrowest leaves you with just a couple of options. You can hit the airport test center and hope to get a negative result e-mailed to you before boarding, or pack a <a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/travelers/testing-international-air-travelers.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">CDC-approved self-test</a> in your carry-on and use it the night before you leave. I took the low-risk route and brought along <a href=\"https://www.emed.com/products/covid-at-home-testkit-six-pack?hsLang=en\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Abbott\'s BinaxNOW rapid antigen test with eMed</a>. I needed to do a bit of upfront planning, but it made our return home a lot easier.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Pre-Trip Planning</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>You can\'t just hit your local Walgreens or CVS the night before leaving and grab whatever kits they have on the shelf. This might meet the first requirement of <a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/travelers/testing-international-air-travelers.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the CDC\'s order</a> -- an FDA-approved test -- but not the second -- a telehealth provider that watches you do the test and then issues the digital report you\'ll need to show the gate agent to get on the plane. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":4048,\"width\":288,\"height\":512,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large is-resized\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/F856BB2F-44E0-4C95-98BC-34855C2329FD.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/F856BB2F-44E0-4C95-98BC-34855C2329FD-576x1024.jpg\" alt=\"Doing your own COVID testing takes up a lot of valuable luggage real estate\" class=\"wp-image-4048\" width=\"288\" height=\"512\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>There are a couple of tests that meet the CDC\'s requirements, but the Abbott BinaxNOW test is the easiest one to buy. You can buy a 6-pack directly from <a href=\"https://www.emed.com/products/covid-at-home-testkit-six-pack?hsLang=en\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">eMed</a>, or a 2- or 3-pack from <a href=\"https://store.optum.com/shop/category/tests-devices/covid-19-home-tests/\">Optum</a>, but make sure you buy the BinaxNOW tests <em><strong>with</strong></em> eMed telehealth services. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>When figuring out how many to order, there\'s a few things to keep in mind. First, how many spares to take with you in case one doesn\'t work or gives you an ambiguous result. Second, the more you buy, the cheaper each test is. The 2-pack from Optum prices out at $30/test while buying the 6-pack from eMed drops it to $25/test. But third, remember that the tests only have a 12-month shelf life, so don\'t overbuy. Irene and I had two international trips coming up, so I ordered a 6-pack from eMed a month before our first trip. The tests arrived a week later. We took four tests with us on each trip but never had to use the spares. However, because you\'re not supposed to open the test until you\'re on-line with the teleproctor, those four boxes took up a lot of valuable luggage space.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I also downloaded and set up the companion Navica app and created a profile on the eMed website before we left. You don\'t have to do this before traveling, but it\'ll make the actual testing session faster.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><meta charset=\"utf-8\"><strong>Take the Test The Day Before Flying to the US</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/travelers/testing-international-air-travelers.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">The CDC\'s new test window</a> is 1 day before departure, not 24 hours. So, if your flight leaves 1pm on Friday, you could board with a negative test taken any time the day before; a test taken Thursday morning would be fine.  Find a clear space on a table or desk and a solid WiFi signal, and then give yourself 30 minutes for the test -- 5 minutes to log into eMed website and start the telehealth session, a couple of minutes to do the test, 15 minutes for the results to develop, and a final couple of minutes back on with the teleproctor to read the results. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":4049,\"width\":288,\"height\":512,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large is-resized\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/116C8D86-ED66-4E5F-A516-D3E6046CA582.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/116C8D86-ED66-4E5F-A516-D3E6046CA582-576x1024.jpg\" alt=\"BinaxNOW COVID testing session\" class=\"wp-image-4049\" width=\"288\" height=\"512\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We weren\'t traveling with computers, so we ran the telehealth sessions on a selection of handheld devices -- a Samsung Galaxy S2 Android tablet, and two vintages of iPhones (Xr and 13 Pro). The telehealth session requires a current version of Safari or Chrome (but not Firefox); check their <a href=\"https://www.emed.com/technical-requirements?hsLang=en\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">technical requirements page</a> if you get an error message.  </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Easy Way to Get 1-Day Testing to Return to US','','inherit','closed','closed','','4044-revision-v1','','','2021-12-30 14:05:05','2021-12-30 19:05:05','',4044,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4052',0,'revision','',0),
(4053,1,'2021-12-30 14:46:52','2021-12-30 19:46:52','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>On December 6, the US <a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2021/p1203-covid-testing-tightens-intl.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">tightened the COVID testing window</a> for inbound international travelers from 72 hours prior to departure to one day. Going from one of the widest testing windows to the narrowest leaves you with just a couple of options. You can hit the airport test center and hope to get a negative result e-mailed to you before boarding, or pack a <a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/travelers/testing-international-air-travelers.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">CDC-approved self-test</a> in your carry-on and use it the night before you leave. I took the low-risk route and brought along <a href=\"https://www.emed.com/products/covid-at-home-testkit-six-pack?hsLang=en\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Abbott\'s BinaxNOW rapid antigen test with eMed</a>. I needed to do a bit of upfront planning, but it made our return home a lot easier.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Pre-Trip Planning</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>You can\'t just hit your local Walgreens or CVS the night before leaving and grab whatever kits they have on the shelf. This might meet the first requirement of <a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/travelers/testing-international-air-travelers.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the CDC\'s order</a> -- an FDA-approved test -- but not the second -- a telehealth provider that watches you do the test and then issues the digital report you\'ll need to show the gate agent to get on the plane. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":4048,\"width\":288,\"height\":512,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large is-resized\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/F856BB2F-44E0-4C95-98BC-34855C2329FD.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/F856BB2F-44E0-4C95-98BC-34855C2329FD-576x1024.jpg\" alt=\"Doing your own COVID testing takes up a lot of valuable luggage real estate\" class=\"wp-image-4048\" width=\"288\" height=\"512\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>There are a couple of tests that meet the CDC\'s requirements, but the Abbott BinaxNOW test is the easiest one to buy. You can buy a 6-pack directly from <a href=\"https://www.emed.com/products/covid-at-home-testkit-six-pack?hsLang=en\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">eMed</a>, or a 2- or 3-pack from <a href=\"https://store.optum.com/shop/category/tests-devices/covid-19-home-tests/\">Optum</a>, but make sure you buy the BinaxNOW tests <em><strong>with</strong></em> eMed telehealth services. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>When figuring out how many to order, there\'s a few things to keep in mind. First, how many spares to take with you in case one doesn\'t work or gives you an ambiguous result. Second, the more you buy, the cheaper each test is. The 2-pack from Optum prices out at $30/test while buying the 6-pack from eMed drops it to $25/test. But third, remember that the tests only have a 12-month shelf life, so don\'t overbuy. Irene and I had two international trips coming up, so I ordered a 6-pack from eMed a month before our first trip. The tests arrived a week later. We took four tests with us on each trip but never had to use the spares. However, because you\'re not supposed to open the test until you\'re on-line with the teleproctor, those four boxes took up a lot of valuable luggage space.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I also downloaded and set up the companion Navica app and created a profile on the eMed website before we left. You don\'t have to do this before traveling, but it\'ll make the actual testing session faster.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><meta charset=\"utf-8\"><strong>Take the Test The Day Before Flying to the US</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/travelers/testing-international-air-travelers.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">The CDC\'s new test window</a> is 1 day before departure, not 24 hours. So, if your flight leaves 1pm on Friday, you could board with a negative test taken any time the day before; a test taken Thursday morning would be fine.  Find a clear space on a table or desk and a solid WiFi signal, and then give yourself 30 minutes for the test -- 5 minutes to log into eMed website and start the telehealth session, a couple of minutes to do the test, 15 minutes for the results to develop, and a final couple of minutes back on with the teleproctor to read the results. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":4049,\"width\":288,\"height\":512,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large is-resized\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/116C8D86-ED66-4E5F-A516-D3E6046CA582.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/116C8D86-ED66-4E5F-A516-D3E6046CA582-576x1024.jpg\" alt=\"BinaxNOW COVID testing session\" class=\"wp-image-4049\" width=\"288\" height=\"512\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We weren\'t traveling with computers, so we ran the telehealth sessions on a selection of handheld devices -- a Samsung Galaxy S2 Android tablet, an iPad Mini, and two vintages of iPhones (Xr and 13 Pro).  You\'ll want some way to use your device hands free for  when the eMed guy wants to watch you swirl the cotton swab in your nose and then insert it into the test kit. I\'m sure how to do all that one-handed.  </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>You then log into the eMed website, run through four questions that prompt you to wash your hands and have your ID ready, and then get into queue for a telehealth session. Last summer, I heard complaints of 2+ hour queues, but we didn\'t wait over 3 minutes for any of our sessions. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>When the session starts, the proctor can see you, but you only hear the proctor. They want to check your photo ID, watch you open the test box, and then scan the QR code on the test card. On our phones and tablets, this process awkwardly flipped the session between the front and back cameras a couple of times. Then, back to the front camera, the proctor watches you swab both nostrils and then insert the swab into the test card. With the testing complete, the proctor starts a 15-minute on-screen timer and drops off the call.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>After the timer finishes, the web page asks if you\'re ready to rejoin the session. Pressing \"Yes\", you enter shorter queue (we didn\'t wait more than 90 seconds) for another proctor session. They confirm it\'s the same test card by having you scan QR code again and then confirm the test results with you, asking you how many lines you see. On one of these review sessions, the proctor\'s audio was all fuzzed up. She asked me if I was comfortable proceeding with the chat function (which I was) and we finished the session without a problem. eMed then e-mails you the test result as well as sending you  notification in the Navica app. We didn\'t wait more than 10 minutes for our results to show up. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Easy Way to Get 1-Day Testing to Return to US','','inherit','closed','closed','','4044-revision-v1','','','2021-12-30 14:46:52','2021-12-30 19:46:52','',4044,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4053',0,'revision','',0),
(4054,1,'2021-12-30 15:36:49','2021-12-30 20:36:49','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>On December 6, the US <a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2021/p1203-covid-testing-tightens-intl.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">tightened the COVID testing window</a> for inbound international travelers from 72 hours prior to departure to one day. Going from one of the widest testing windows to the narrowest leaves you with just a couple of options. You can hit the airport test center and hope to get a negative result e-mailed to you before boarding, or pack a <a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/travelers/testing-international-air-travelers.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">CDC-approved self-test</a> in your carry-on and use it the night before you leave. I took the low-risk route and brought along <a href=\"https://www.emed.com/products/covid-at-home-testkit-six-pack?hsLang=en\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Abbott\'s BinaxNOW rapid antigen test with eMed</a>. I needed to do a bit of upfront planning, but it made our return home a lot easier.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Pre-Trip Planning</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>You can\'t just hit your local Walgreens or CVS the night before leaving and grab whatever kits they have on the shelf. This might meet the first requirement of <a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/travelers/testing-international-air-travelers.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the CDC\'s order</a> -- an FDA-approved test -- but not the second -- a telehealth provider that watches you do the test and then issues the digital report you\'ll need to show the gate agent to get on the plane. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":4048,\"width\":288,\"height\":512,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large is-resized\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/F856BB2F-44E0-4C95-98BC-34855C2329FD.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/F856BB2F-44E0-4C95-98BC-34855C2329FD-576x1024.jpg\" alt=\"Doing your own COVID testing takes up a lot of valuable luggage real estate\" class=\"wp-image-4048\" width=\"288\" height=\"512\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>There are a couple of tests that meet the CDC\'s requirements, but the Abbott BinaxNOW test is the easiest one to buy. You can buy a 6-pack directly from <a href=\"https://www.emed.com/products/covid-at-home-testkit-six-pack?hsLang=en\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">eMed</a>, or a 2- or 3-pack from <a href=\"https://store.optum.com/shop/category/tests-devices/covid-19-home-tests/\">Optum</a>, but make sure you buy the BinaxNOW tests <em><strong>with</strong></em> eMed telehealth services. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>When figuring out how many to order, there\'s a few things to keep in mind. First, how many spares to take with you in case one doesn\'t work or gives you an ambiguous result. Second, the more you buy, the cheaper each test is. The 2-pack from Optum prices out at $30/test while buying the 6-pack from eMed drops it to $25/test. But third, remember that the tests only have a 12-month shelf life, so don\'t overbuy. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Irene and I had two international trips coming up, so I ordered a 6-pack from eMed a month before our first trip. The tests arrived a week later. We took four tests with us on each trip but never had to use the spares. However, because you\'re not supposed to open the test until you\'re on-line with the teleproctor, those four boxes took up a lot of valuable luggage space.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I also downloaded and set up the companion Navica app and created a profile on the eMed website before we left. You don\'t have to do this before traveling, but it\'ll make the actual testing session faster.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><meta charset=\"utf-8\"><strong>Take the Test The Day Before Flying to the US</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/travelers/testing-international-air-travelers.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">The CDC\'s new test window</a> is 1 day before departure, not 24 hours. So, if your flight leaves 1pm on Friday, you could board with a negative test taken any time the day before; a test taken Thursday morning would be fine.  Find a clear space on a table or desk and a solid WiFi signal, and then give yourself 30 minutes for the test -- 5 minutes to log into eMed website and start the telehealth session, a couple of minutes to do the test, 15 minutes for the results to develop, and a final couple of minutes back on with the teleproctor to read the results. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":4049,\"width\":288,\"height\":512,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large is-resized\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/116C8D86-ED66-4E5F-A516-D3E6046CA582.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/116C8D86-ED66-4E5F-A516-D3E6046CA582-576x1024.jpg\" alt=\"BinaxNOW COVID testing session\" class=\"wp-image-4049\" width=\"288\" height=\"512\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We weren\'t traveling with computers, so we ran the telehealth sessions on a selection of handheld devices -- a Samsung Galaxy S2 Android tablet, an iPad Mini, and two vintages of iPhones (Xr and 13 Pro).  </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>You then log into the eMed website, run through four questions that prompt you to wash your hands and have your ID ready, and then get into queue for a telehealth session. Last summer, I heard complaints of 2+ hour queues, but we didn\'t wait over 3 minutes for any of our sessions. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>When the session starts, the proctor can see you, but you only hear the proctor. They\'ll want to check your photo ID, watch you open the test box, and then scan the QR code on the test card. On our phones and tablets, this process awkwardly flipped the session between the front and back cameras a couple of times. Then, back to the front camera, the proctor watches you swab both nostrils and then insert the swab into the test card. I don\'t know how you\'d do this one-handed; you\'ll want some way to use your phone or tablet hands-free. With the testing complete, the proctor starts a 15-minute on-screen timer and drops off the call.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>After the timer finishes, the web page asks if you\'re ready to rejoin the session. Pressing \"Yes\", you enter shorter queue (we didn\'t wait more than 90 seconds) for another proctor session. They confirm it\'s the same test card by having you scan QR code again and then confirm the test results with you, asking you how many lines you see. On one of these review sessions, the proctor\'s audio was all fuzzed up. She asked me if I was comfortable proceeding with the chat function (which I was) and we finished the session without a problem. eMed then e-mails you the test result as well as sending you  notification in the Navica app. We didn\'t wait more than 10 minutes for our results to show up. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Using The Test Results</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>jkhkhkhkj</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Easy Way to Get 1-Day Testing to Return to US','','inherit','closed','closed','','4044-revision-v1','','','2021-12-30 15:36:49','2021-12-30 20:36:49','',4044,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4054',0,'revision','',0),
(4055,1,'2021-12-30 16:16:05','2021-12-30 21:16:05','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/JPEG-image.jpeg\"><img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/JPEG-image-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"Jumble of Travel Signs\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> Cleared to Adventure[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Back in front of the microphone after a two-week trip to the UK, getting back home just before the new <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/omicron-covid-travel-international-11638216229?st=sm0fcotd0jfju1i&amp;reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink\">Omicron travel restrictions</a> hit. We talk about getting to London, surfing the waves of changing travel requirements, a new way to renew Global Entry, moan a bit more about the inexorable advance of the cashless society, and finish up talking with <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_Glenn\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Josh Glenn</a> about his new book <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3lSNcwg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">The Adventurer\'s Glossary</a></em>.  All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_182.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #182: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois a couple of weeks since getting back from two weeks in the UK -- a week in London and a week of hiking in Southern Wales. Had really great weather for the back half of November -- brisk temperatures, but more sun than we expected; certainly a bit windy when walking the cliffs above the Atlantic, but nothing that we couldn’t layer up for; and only one day of real rain. It was a lot better than the weather forecasts had led us to expect.</li><li>The trip over and back was pretty uneventful. I’d hit American on a mileage sale back in March for direct flights between ORD and LHR. We flew coach on a Triple 7 that was pretty empty on the way over. People were popping up the armrests in the 4-seat center section and laying down to sleep. One guy even built a little tent out of blankets to cover his head. I’m not sure if he was trying to block the cabin lights or maybe he was concerned people walking down the aisles would breathe on him while he slept (though mask discipline was very solid) or maybe <em>he</em> wanted to drop <em>his</em> mask while he slept and didn’t want to get called out by the flight attendants. Whatever his deal was, it looked a little weird.</li><li>I ate dinner on that flight even though I’d eaten a cubano sandwich at Tortas Frontera, my favorite ORD restaurant, right before boarding. I took the meal not because I was hungry but because it gave me an excuse to drop my mask for a little bit on that 8-hr flight. Rather than the “replace your mask between bites and sips” rules that I heard on domestic flights this year, on my international flights over the past couple of months, most everyone takes off their mask for the duration of the meal. I don’t know if this difference comes from emptier planes, longer flights, or that international fliers are less likely to try to get around mask rules (and, purely my own experience, I haven’t seen any passenger pushback on masks on any of my international flights, whereas I was seeing/hearing a lot of it on domestic flights earlier this year), but I appreciate the flexibility/pragmatism (?) on these long flights.</li><li>While the plane wasn’t full, I was worried about passport control when we got to Heathrow. There’s always a bit of suspense anyways as you make the long walk from the plane to passport control. Did a whole bunch of Triple 7’s disgorge at the same time, let alone some massive A-380’s? Did the immigration force botch their workforce scheduling up? Will we flow smoothly into the immigration hall or will our march suddenly stop short?&nbsp; Worse, will we smack into one of those Heathrow e-gate failures that has caused 2-4 hour queues over the past couple of months?&nbsp;</li><li>We kept moving, but then came to a sudden stop as we made the final turn toward the hall. Looking around the line, I could see the room wasn’t jammed -- good sign. It looked like they’d paused us for a minute while they rejiggered their cowpen zig-zag line. After a minute or two, we started moving again, and at a pretty good clip with almost everyone getting pointed to the automated e-gates. I walked up, put my passport on the reader, a camera box popped up, mechanically adjusted to my height, and then after what I assume was some facial recognition analysis, opened the gate and let me go to baggage claim. No “how long are you going to be in the country” quiz, which I didn’t miss, but also no stamp in my passport. How am I going to remember this trip for my next Global Entry renewal. Guess I’ll have to drink a beer or two while I’m here so it shows up on my Untappd history.</li><li>Bridge Music —  <em>dazed </em>by Jeris (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/VJ_Memes/39456 Ft: airtone</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Speaking of Global Entry, back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/10/28/podcast-180-tracking-covid-travel-requirements-cycling-thru-puglia/\">episode #180</a> at the end of October, I was still waiting for my renewal approval and compare my month-and-a-half and counting wait with listener Jerry Sarfati’s 2-day wait. Then, the day before we left for the UK, I got an email with the subject line “TTP (Trusted Traveler Program) Application Status Change” telling me to check the website for more information. Logging in, I saw that I’d been given conditional approval, so about 2 months from submitting my renewal application. I still had to do an interview, but if I was reading everything correctly, I had 12 months to get that done. I looked to see if ORD had an appointment available the day we were flying back from London, but no dice. The earliest appointment was mid-December. OK, I’ll think about it later. No rush; I have 12 months. But the next day, I got another email from dhs.gov telling me about a new program, Enrollment-On-Arrival, where I could knock out my interview while in the customs/immigration area coming back from an international trip, no appointment necessary. Perfect!</li><li>So that Monday afternoon after a quick pass-through the Global Entry kiosk, I went looking for Booth 58 which is where, according to the Enrollment-On-Arrival website, was where the ORD interviews would be. But it looked like getting to Booth 58 would mean standing in a long and growing line of non-US passengers. Ah, forget it. Again, I have 12 months to get this done. But the luggage carousel for our flight hadn’t even started turning yet, so I went up to one of the customs officers and asked her. She immediately pointed me to a guy in a booth completely separate from the rest of the immigration traffic, and in the complete opposite direction of Booth 58. There was one guy in front of me getting his interview, but by the time I stepped up to the officer, there was a family of 4 and two other people behind me. The interview took about 5 minutes. I walked out and our luggage carousel still wasn’t moving. By the end of the day, the TTP website showed my Global Entry was good for another 5 years. Full credit to DHS for coming up with ways to make Global Entry easier. I just wish they’d keep their website locator up-to-date.</li><li>In the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/11/13/podcast-181-travel-potpourri-2021-travelers-gift-guide/\">last episode</a>, we talked about how last year’s flurry of vaccination passport app announcements has pretty much turned out to be, in the words of Macbeth, “a tale, Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing” But American Airlines’ partnership with <a href=\"https://www.myverifly.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Verifly</a> did actually have a little something to it. I downloaded the app and, after wrestling through what is not the most intuitive interface, was able to see a list of the UK travel requirements and then validate that I met them, by uploading pictures of Irene’s and my vaccination cards and our passenger locator form QR codes. That’s nice, but what was better was when we checked in for our flight, all we had to do was show the agent the green “All good” screens for Irene and me and we were done. None of the fishing out the right forms and holding them up to the lucite screen. Two swipes on the phone and we were done. Nothing earth-shattering, but it does relieve the friction out of one part of the journey</li><li>A <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">recurring</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/08/24/podcast-178-what-remains-from-pandemic-times-best-restaurant-and-bars/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">topic</a> on the TravelCommons podcast is the move to a cashless society. And certainly the pandemic accelerated this with the push toward contactless transactions; nobody wanted to handle your possibly-infectious cash. On our first day in London, on our walk to pick up our COVID tests, I stopped at the first ATM I saw to pull out £100, just to have some cash in my wallet. I’m a bit old-school in that way. And I’m glad I did it because once we left London and were staying in small towns in South Wales, it was really tough to find an ATM. Now, this shouldn’t be that big a deal with everyone taking cards and contactless, be it a card or on the phone with Google or Apple Pay, doing away (mostly) with the need for a PIN or to sign anything. But in Wales, the parking lots at the base of our hikes, the pay-&amp;-display machines, weren’t taking my cards, either contactless or physical. And by the time we were in our last town, Hay-on-Wye, I’d run out of coins and needed to find an ATM. Google Maps was no help; it kept pointing me to phantom machines in little grocery stores. Irene had better luck in the tourist information center. The woman there gave us directions to what she said was the one remaining ATM in town -- which surprised me because Hay-on-Wye has a good bit of tourist traffic with their book festivals. But anyhow, we found it <em>and </em>it worked; it had cash. Of course, then we had to find something like a coffee shop that would take cash so we could break a bill and get coins for the machine, which knocked out any of the usual chains. Walking down the street, I found a place that looked indy enough -- the sign said “coffee shop” but it looked more like a thrift store. Sure enough, the guy was happy to take cash, though he had to pull out his wallet to make change. </li><li>We’ve talked about Hertz’s downward service spiral, which I forecasted in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/06/09/podcast-164-first-post-lockdown-trips-travel-credit-cards/\">episode #164</a> after their bankruptcy filing. But since I haven’t held back in slamming them for empty lots in Phoenix and San Diego, and for incorrect fuel charges, I need to give kudos to the Hertz location in Cardiff in Wales for what had to be, hands down, the easiest and therefore best Hertz transaction I’ve had in Europe. Leaving London for the Welsh hiking part of our trip, we decided to skip the fun and excitement of driving in London and instead took a train to Cardiff and then drove to the coast from there. The Hertz place was about a 10-min cab ride from the train station in a bit of an auto dealer row. I walked in, showed the woman my Illinois drivers license, she asked me if I’d be OK driving an automatic (how fast can I say “Yes!”), gave me a key, and pointed me to a grey Skoda in the back lot. Done; no hard upsell on enhanced insurance or refueling options, just “Here’s the key; have a good trip”. And then returning the car, I pulled in after gassing it up; the guy took a quick walk around it; had me sign his screen, and we were done. And nothing wonky when I looked at the emailed receipt. It’s sorta damning with faint praise that I’m so impressed when a transaction goes smoothly. It should always be this easy, but it rarely is.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> or the <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram </a>account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music —  <em>A Thousand And None</em> by Speck (c) copyright 2018 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/speck/57256 Ft: Mr_Yesterday</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Yet More COVID Changes</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I mentioned in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/11/13/podcast-181-travel-potpourri-2021-travelers-gift-guide/\">last episode</a> that I was a little concerned about the logistics of getting COVID testing done by our second day in London. But it turned out fine. With a bit of Googling, I found <a href=\"https://covid.randox.com/day-2-test-at-home/\">Randox,</a> a big UK test firm, offering “click &amp; collect” rapid antigen tests for $25 a piece. It gave us a good reason, a destination for a post-arrival walk. It’s always good to spend a lot of time in the sunlight on that first day in Europe; I find it’s key to resetting my body clock. We did them in our hotel room the next morning. Yet more suspense -- waiting those 15 minutes, hoping that second pink line wouldn’t materialize, and then taking a picture of it in Randox’s app to get the “all clear” email back.</li><li>Of course, this was all pre-Omicron. That bombshell dropped the weekend before we flew home which had me back doing the rounds on Google, trying to figure out what travel requirements were changing. The UK quickly added pre-departure tests and shifted their Day 2 testing back to the more sensitive -- but 3 times more expensive -- PCR tests. But we were already in the UK. What mattered to us getting back to Chicago. The communications out of the US were less clear; mostly rumors; nothing official. The rumors were: tightening the window on pre-departure tests -- from 72 hours to 24 hours before departure, which could’ve been a problem for us; we’d already done the Abbott rapid antigen tests we’d brought from home Saturday afternoon before Monday morning departure. And adding a post-arrival test, similar to the UK’s. But the worst rumor was requiring a 7-day quarantine <em>even with</em> a negative test. Lucky for us, none of these US rumors came true -- at least by the Monday morning of our flight.&nbsp;</li><li>It wasn’t until later in the week the new rules were announced and it seems that folks had come to their senses a bit. The only rumor that came true was tightening the testing window down to 1 day. Well, that and extending the airplane mask requirement to March 2022, but as I said back in September in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/09/27/podcast-179-high-tech-airport-lines-business-travel-still-missing/\">episode #179</a>, I don’t think that was a surprise to anyone. Going to a 1-day window just reinforces the case for bringing a rapid antigen test with you. The only caveat is that the test has to be done in concert with a telehealth call to validate it’s actually you doing the test and the results are really negative. Coming home from Italy and the UK, Irene and I used <a href=\"https://www.emed.com/products/covid-at-home-testkit-six-pack?hsLang=en\">Abbott BinaxNow tests</a> with telehealth sessions from eMed. Depending on how many you buy (2, 3 or 6-pack), the cost per test ranges from $25 to $35, which is pretty competitive with the prices I saw for airport same-day testing services and it’s a helluva lot more convenient. Though as I recommended in this year’s <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-to-survive-post-pandemic-travel/\">travelers gift guide</a>, some sort of smartphone tripod comes in handy when the eMed guy wants to watch you swirl the cotton swab in your nose and then insert it into the test kit. Not sure how you’d do all that one-handed.</li><li>I hate the term “the new normal”, but perhaps, at least for the near term, we have to think about changes in COVID restrictions the same way we think about storms, terrorism, and strikes -- work to avoid them, but be flexible, agile enough to deal with it if you get caught. Now no analogy is perfect. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/podcast-150-travel-interruptus/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #150 — Travel Interruptus\">episode #150</a>, I told the story of how a bomb threat on the train line into Paris caused us to our flight home. It’s a lot easier to accept a couple of bonus days in Paris than an unplanned quarantine week in an airport Holiday Inn.</li><li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<em>Foolish Game</em>&nbsp;by copperhead (c) 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/copperhead/46390 Ft: Snowflake,Sackjo22 </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Words We Use for Adventure</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>We know that words impact the ways we think, feel, experience things -- including travel. Josh Glenn, a Boston-based author and semiotician (semiotics, the study of signs, symbols, and language, and how they create meaning) has just published a book <em><a href=\"https://www.hilobrow.com/2021/09/28/the-adventurers-glossary/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">The Adventurer’s Glossary</a></em>, with some 500 words associated with adventure. And since going on an adventure often involves travel, I wanted to talk to Josh about his book and how the words that we use to describe adventure could affect how we think about travel.<ul><li>Mark: Josh, how do you read <em>The Adventurer’s Glossary</em>?&nbsp; It\'s an alphabetical list of words, terms, and their not-quite-Oxford-Dictionary definitions. They’re really more stories than definitions. Should I start at the top (0-Dark-Hundred is the first entry) and work my way through? Or just randomly riff through the pages, open it, put my finger down and read something?</li><li>Josh: It’s sort of a capricious decision to alphabetize all these terms because that just completely put them out of order. So all of the travel terms are not together, and all of the military terms are not together, and the stuff I got from hip hop or gaming culture or adventure literature, none of them are grouped together. It could just be something you pick up and randomly browse through. It\'s absolutely okay. However, as much as possible, I did try to edit it in such a way that if you were reading it from beginning to end it would kind of make sense in that direction as well. So if there\'s a little bit of beginning to end stuff in it, but really it\'s read randomly.</li><li>Mark: How did you choose which words to include? It\'s a pretty wide-ranging list. You’ve got bottle, hair, stoic, as well as the stuff that I would normally associate with adventure like bug-out bag, roam, and voyageur.</li><li>Josh: This is the third glossary that I\'ve done. I did one back in 2008 called <em>The Idler’s Glossary</em> which was all about basically how much I hate having a regular job and enjoy doing things that look like you\'re doing nothing from the outside but actually, it might be very rich and deep what you\'re doing. And then I did another book called<em> The Wage Slave’s Glossary</em>, which was about how much I hate my job. And I was working at the Boston Globe at the time. Actually, a job I kind of liked, but I just don\'t like having bosses and it was all about the horrible jargon of the workplace. Basically, these are topics I\'ve been interested in for many, many years and I just started gathering words as I also read a lot of adventure novels and watch a lot of adventure movies. So sort of gathering words that occurred to me over time. But then I also do really nerdy things like literally sit down and read through a slang dictionary or pick up a thesaurus and go look up the definitions and the etymology of every synonym for a certain word. So the list balloons; I think there\'s something like 500 words in this book.</li><li>Mark: So Josh, we think about adventure. Adventure often involves travel. Do you think that the language or the words that we use to describe adventure impact our expectations of how we travel?</li><li>Josh: The language of our culture helps shape and guide the way we are able to perceive and think about anything including adventure and travel. We can\'t think outside of this kind of structure of language that we have. I mean an adventure is, and that word comes from the Latin meaning to arrive unexpectedly. That\'s actually really an important philosophical piece for me as I was going through this, the idea that you can have a trip is not an adventure if nothing unexpected happens and if you don\'t take enough risks to allow things unexpected to happen. So when I think back to the amazing road trips I took when I was in college with my friends around the country, it\'s all kind of a blur. I don\'t really remember a lot of specific details except when something went wrong -- when we broke down in the middle of the highway on a mountain in Colorado and we had to go to a small town and have people that help us get parts and explore that town and meet the locals and almost get beat up etcetera, etcetera. That\'s an adventure. Something unexpected happened and it\'s very, very memorable. Those are the memories that you cherish later.</li><li>Mark: I think that\'s probably where travel stories come from are more of the things that you didn\'t expect, more of the hiccups. God only knows on this podcast, most of the stories that I\'ll tell have come from things that went sideways, not things that went well.</li><li>Josh: It\'s so interesting to think more about how that\'s really baked right into our language. So for example, the word chance comes from the Latin <em>cadentia </em>meaning <em>falling</em>. So just when we think about how we use the words of “let the chips fall where they may” or “something befalls you”, this idea of having our feet off the ground, falling through space, we can\'t grasp anything, what do you do with that? If you’re someone who likes, in some kind of existential way, that feeling of falling, then you\'re an adventurer. You\'re going to get more out of your travel experiences than someone who wants everything to be exactly the same way every time and never have any hiccups.</li><li>Mark: In a prior episode, we talked with <a href=\"https://emilythomaswrites.co.uk/about/\">Emily Thomas</a>, philosophy professor at Durham University in the UK, and she wrote a book <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/2DO07fV\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">The Meaning of Travel</a></em>. And one of the things that we got talking about was this idea of travel giving you a sense of otherness, so taking you out of your comfort zone and putting you in the middle of something different ,and what you experience out of that, both from where you are as well as within yourself. And I think about that a little bit, as you think about, you\'re putting yourself into a potential adventure. You don\'t know where you\'re going, you\'re just putting yourself into a situation and figuring it out.</li><li>Josh: I like how you\'re saying “put yourself into... “ Of course, another aspect of adventure is getting yourself out of the ordinary.</li><li>Mark: Yes, getting you out of that small town without getting your ass kicked.</li><li>Josh: Yeah, getting out of your routine, getting out of your small town, getting out of the kind of the spell that the quotidian everyday life casts on us, this kind of enchantment or bewitchment where you just want, you just expect everything to be the same all the time. Travel is one of the great ways, you know historically, traveling to other cultures and seeing the world, seeing how people live in other places. These are great ways to kind of break that spell of enchantment that every day puts on us.</li><li>Mark: Josh, the act of travel has come under pressure of late. Pre-pandemic that was starting to see a thread of travels perhaps of frivolous luxury that was killing the planet through carbon emissions and global warming, maybe overcrowding of specific places like Machu Picchu or Angkor Wat. And now in the time of Covid, there seems another riff which is -- travel is a selfish act because it hastens the spread of coronavirus around the world. How do we square this? How do we square these concepts of travel being negative with the need for adventure, that need for escape and the ability therefore to find ourselves?</li><li>Josh: You can\'t entirely square, I do think that there is some truth to those criticisms. We shouldn\'t be spreading disease and we shouldn\'t be destroying the planet by unnecessary travel. But then the question is “what\'s necessary and how often do we do it?” Maybe if you’re somebody who travels 100 times a year, maybe that\'s too much. But maybe if you travel once a year, that\'s not enough. But I do think that for me anyway, during Covid, I didn\'t travel really at all outside of Boston, New Hampshire and Vermont, but I traveled widely through reading adventure novels, watching movies and Google Streets where you can walk around inside the Sistine Chapel remotely. Of course these are not as good -- just the same as Zoom calls are not the same as being in the same room with someone. It\'s not as soul nourishing, you don\'t get as much out of it. You\'re not really experiencing the whole context that you get when you travel, but you can have sort of armchair adventures to some extent that helps square that circle. But yeah, there\'s no right answer to that.</li><li>Mark: Yeah, absolutely. Josh, as you think about <em>The Adventure’s Glossary</em>, how should people think about it, take it, enjoy it?</li><li>Josh: I hope that word nerds will enjoy it just on its own merits. However, there is kind of a secret philosophy woven through this alphabetized list of words, which is this idea that adventure is something that we should seek. We should try to break out of the ordinary and see things in a new way and expand our horizons, whether it\'s through actual literal travel or other ways, and that there are certain qualities that we need to cultivate in ourselves to be good adventurers. Whether that\'s a sense of humor, whether that\'s wit, whether that\'s courage, grit and so forth. These are all the kinds of things that I\'ve tried to express through this book, which from the outside might just look like a fun, slightly frivolous word nerd book.</li><li>Mark: Josh Glenn, thanks very much for joining us on the TravelCommons podcast. We\'ll put a link to <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3lSNcwg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">The Adventurer’s Glossary</a></em> so people can find it.</li><li>Josh: Thank you for having me and happy travels to all your listeners.</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #182</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_182.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #182 — More COVID Changes; Words That Mean Adventure','','inherit','closed','closed','','4020-revision-v1','','','2021-12-30 16:16:05','2021-12-30 21:16:05','',4020,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4055',0,'revision','',0),
(4056,1,'2021-12-30 19:35:29','2021-12-31 00:35:29','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>On December 6, the US <a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2021/p1203-covid-testing-tightens-intl.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">tightened the COVID testing window</a> for inbound international travelers from 72 hours prior to departure to one day. Going from one of the widest testing windows to the narrowest leaves you with just a couple of options. You can hit the airport test center and hope to get a negative result e-mailed to you before boarding, or pack a <a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/travelers/testing-international-air-travelers.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">CDC-approved self-test</a> in your carry-on and use it the night before you leave. I took the low-risk route and brought along <a href=\"https://www.emed.com/products/covid-at-home-testkit-six-pack?hsLang=en\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Abbott\'s BinaxNOW rapid antigen test with eMed</a>. I needed to do a bit of upfront planning, but it made our return home a lot easier.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Pre-Trip Planning</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>You can\'t just hit your local Walgreens or CVS the night before leaving and grab whatever kits they have on the shelf. This might meet the first requirement of <a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/travelers/testing-international-air-travelers.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the CDC\'s order</a> -- an FDA-approved test -- but not the second -- a telehealth provider that watches you do the test and then issues the digital report you\'ll need to show the gate agent to get on the plane. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":4048,\"width\":288,\"height\":512,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large is-resized\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/F856BB2F-44E0-4C95-98BC-34855C2329FD.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/F856BB2F-44E0-4C95-98BC-34855C2329FD-576x1024.jpg\" alt=\"Doing your own COVID testing takes up a lot of valuable luggage real estate\" class=\"wp-image-4048\" width=\"288\" height=\"512\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>There are a couple of tests that meet the CDC\'s requirements, but the Abbott BinaxNOW test is the easiest one to buy. You can buy a 6-pack directly from <a href=\"https://www.emed.com/products/covid-at-home-testkit-six-pack?hsLang=en\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">eMed</a>, or a 2- or 3-pack from <a href=\"https://store.optum.com/shop/category/tests-devices/covid-19-home-tests/\">Optum</a>, but make sure you buy the BinaxNOW tests <em><strong>with</strong></em> eMed telehealth services. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>When figuring out how many to order, there\'s a few things to keep in mind. First, how many spares to take with you in case one doesn\'t work or gives you an ambiguous result. Second, the more you buy, the cheaper each test is. The 2-pack from Optum prices out at $30/test while buying the 6-pack from eMed drops it to $25/test. But third, remember that the tests only have a 12-month shelf life, so don\'t overbuy. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Irene and I had two international trips coming up, so I ordered a 6-pack from eMed a month before our first trip. The tests arrived a week later. We took four tests with us on each trip but never had to use the spares. However, because you\'re not supposed to open the test until you\'re on-line with the teleproctor, those four boxes took up a lot of valuable luggage space.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I also downloaded and set up the companion Navica app and created a profile on the eMed website before we left. You don\'t have to do this before traveling, but it\'ll make the actual testing session faster.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><meta charset=\"utf-8\"><strong>Take the Test The Day Before Flying to the US</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/travelers/testing-international-air-travelers.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">The CDC\'s new test window</a> is 1 day before departure, not 24 hours. So, if your flight leaves 1pm on Friday, you could board with a negative test taken any time the day before; a test taken Thursday morning would be fine.  Find a clear space on a table or desk and a solid WiFi signal, and then give yourself 30 minutes for the test -- 5 minutes to log into eMed website and start the telehealth session, a couple of minutes to do the test, 15 minutes for the results to develop, and a final couple of minutes back on with the teleproctor to read the results. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":4049,\"width\":288,\"height\":512,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large is-resized\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/116C8D86-ED66-4E5F-A516-D3E6046CA582.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/116C8D86-ED66-4E5F-A516-D3E6046CA582-576x1024.jpg\" alt=\"BinaxNOW COVID testing session\" class=\"wp-image-4049\" width=\"288\" height=\"512\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We weren\'t traveling with computers, but successfully we ran our telehealth sessions on a selection of handheld devices -- a Samsung Galaxy S2 Android tablet, an iPad Mini, and two vintages of iPhones (Xr and 13 Pro).</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>You log into the eMed website, run through four questions that prompt you to wash your hands and have your ID ready, and then get into queue for a telehealth session. Last summer, I heard complaints of 2+ hour queues, but we didn\'t wait over 3 minutes for any of our sessions. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>When the session starts, the proctor can see you, but you only hear the proctor. They\'ll want to check your photo ID, watch you open the test box, and then scan the QR code on the test card. On our phones and tablets, this process awkwardly flipped the web session between the front and back cameras a couple of times. Then, back to the front camera, the proctor watches you swab both nostrils and then insert the swab into the test card. I don\'t know how you\'d do this one-handed; you\'ll want <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3pZmjcS\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">some way</a> to use your phone or tablet hands-free. With the testing complete, the proctor starts a 15-minute on-screen timer and drops off the call.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>After the timer finishes, the web page asks if you\'re ready to rejoin the session. Pressing \"Yes\", you enter shorter queue (we didn\'t wait more than 90 seconds) for another proctor session. They confirm it\'s the same test card by having you scan QR code again and then confirm the test results with you, asking you how many lines you see. On one of these review sessions, the proctor\'s audio was all fuzzed up. She asked me if I was comfortable proceeding with the chat function (which I was) and we finished the session without a problem. eMed then e-mails you a test result PDF as well as notifying you in the Navica app. We didn\'t wait more than 10 minutes for our results to show up. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Using The Test Results</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>This is why you\'ve gone through that telehealth drill -- to get a lab result that meets<a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/travelers/testing-international-air-travelers.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"> CDC requirements</a> so your airline will let you fly home. On our flight home from Italy, we pulled up the test result PDF twice on our iPhones, when checking in with Lufthansa for our flight from Catania, Sicily to Munich and then to a United Airlines agent at the final gate-side security check before boarding our MUC-ORD flight. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>A month later, we were flying American Airlines home from London. American uses the <a href=\"https://support.myverifly.com/hc/en-us\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Verifly</a> app to pull together all the required COVID travel documents. Verifly didn\'t recognize the QR code on the Navica test pass, so I uploaded a screenshot of my test results for manual verification. After about 30 minutes, the \"in-process\" status icon turned green and we were good to go. When we checked in for our flight at Heathrow, all we had to do was show the agent the green “All good” screens on the Verifly app; no need to show the actual test results.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Bottom Line</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>With the US COVID testing window tightened to one day, packing your own CDC-approved self-test kit is lower risk, lower hassle, and often lower cost than gambling on an airport testing center the day of departure. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Easy Way to Get 1-Day Testing to Return to US','','inherit','closed','closed','','4044-revision-v1','','','2021-12-30 19:35:29','2021-12-31 00:35:29','',4044,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4056',0,'revision','',0),
(4057,1,'2021-12-30 19:52:27','2021-12-31 00:52:27','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>On December 6, the US <a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2021/p1203-covid-testing-tightens-intl.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">tightened the COVID testing window</a> for inbound international travelers from 72 hours prior to departure to one day. Going from one of the widest testing windows to the narrowest leaves you with just a couple of options. You can hit the airport test center and hope to get a negative result e-mailed to you before boarding, or pack a <a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/travelers/testing-international-air-travelers.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">CDC-approved self-test</a> in your carry-on and use it the night before you leave. I took the low-risk route and brought along <a href=\"https://www.emed.com/products/covid-at-home-testkit-six-pack?hsLang=en\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Abbott\'s BinaxNOW rapid antigen test with eMed</a>. I needed to do a bit of upfront planning, but it made our return home a lot easier.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Pre-Trip Planning</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>You can\'t just hit your local Walgreens or CVS the night before leaving and grab a kit off the shelf. This might meet the first requirement of <a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/travelers/testing-international-air-travelers.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the CDC\'s order</a> -- an FDA-approved test -- but not the second -- a telehealth provider that watches you take the test and then issues the lab result you\'ll need to show the gate agent to get on the plane. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":4048,\"width\":288,\"height\":512,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large is-resized\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/F856BB2F-44E0-4C95-98BC-34855C2329FD.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/F856BB2F-44E0-4C95-98BC-34855C2329FD-576x1024.jpg\" alt=\"Doing your own COVID testing takes up a lot of valuable luggage real estate\" class=\"wp-image-4048\" width=\"288\" height=\"512\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>There are a couple of tests that meet the CDC\'s requirements, but the Abbott BinaxNOW test is the easiest one to buy. You can buy a 6-pack directly from <a href=\"https://www.emed.com/products/covid-at-home-testkit-six-pack?hsLang=en\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">eMed</a>, or a 2- or 3-pack from <a href=\"https://store.optum.com/shop/category/tests-devices/covid-19-home-tests/\">Optum</a>, but make sure you buy the BinaxNOW tests <em><strong>with</strong></em> eMed telehealth services. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>When figuring out how many to order, there\'s a few things to keep in mind. First, how many spares to take with you in case a test doesn\'t work or gives you an ambiguous result? Second, the more you buy, the cheaper each test is. The 2-pack from Optum prices out at $30/test while buying the 6-pack from eMed drops it to $25/test. But third, remember that the tests only have a 12-month shelf life, so don\'t overbuy. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Irene and I had two international trips coming up, so I ordered a 6-pack from eMed a month before our first trip. The tests arrived a week later. We took four tests with us on each trip but never had to use the spares. One thing to keep in mind --  because you\'re not supposed to open the test until you\'re on-line with the teleproctor, those four boxes can take up a lot of valuable luggage space.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I also downloaded and set up the companion Navica app and created a profile on the eMed website before we left. You don\'t have to do this before traveling, but it\'ll make the actual testing session faster.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><meta charset=\"utf-8\"><strong>Take the Test The Day Before Flying to the US</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/travelers/testing-international-air-travelers.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">The CDC\'s new test window</a> is 1 day before departure, not 24 hours. So, if your flight leaves 1pm on Friday, you could board with a negative test taken any time the day before; a test taken Thursday morning would be fine.  You\'ll need to find a clear space on a table or desk and a solid WiFi signal, and then give yourself 30 minutes for the test -- 5 minutes to log into eMed website and start the telehealth session, a couple of minutes to do the test, 15 minutes for the results to develop, and a final couple of minutes back on with the teleproctor to read the results. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":4049,\"width\":288,\"height\":512,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large is-resized\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/116C8D86-ED66-4E5F-A516-D3E6046CA582.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/116C8D86-ED66-4E5F-A516-D3E6046CA582-576x1024.jpg\" alt=\"BinaxNOW COVID testing session\" class=\"wp-image-4049\" width=\"288\" height=\"512\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We weren\'t traveling with computers, but we successfully ran our telehealth sessions on a selection of handheld devices -- a Samsung Galaxy S2 Android tablet, an iPad Mini, and two vintages of iPhones (Xr and 13 Pro).</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>You log into the eMed website, run through four questions that prompt you to wash your hands and have your ID ready, and then get into queue for a telehealth session. Last summer, I heard complaints of 2+ hour queues, but we didn\'t wait over 3 minutes for any of our sessions. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>When the session starts, the proctor can see you, but you only hear the proctor. They\'ll want to check your photo ID, watch you open the test box, and then scan the QR code on the test card. On our phones and tablets, this process awkwardly flipped the web session between the front and back cameras a couple of times. Then, back to the front camera, the proctor watches you swab both nostrils and then insert the swab into the test card. I don\'t know how you\'d do this one-handed; you\'ll want <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3pZmjcS\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">some way</a> to use your phone or tablet hands-free. With the testing complete, the proctor starts a 15-minute on-screen timer and drops off the call.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>After the timer finishes, the web page asks if you\'re ready to rejoin the session. Pressing \"Yes\", you enter shorter queue for another proctor session (we never waited more than 90 seconds). They confirm it\'s the same test card by having you scan QR code again and then confirm the test results with you, asking you how many lines you see. On one of these review sessions, the proctor\'s audio was all fuzzed up. She asked me if I was comfortable proceeding using the chat function and we finished the session without a problem. eMed then e-mails you a PDF of the test results as well as notifying you in the Navica app. We didn\'t wait more than 10 minutes for our results to show up. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Using The Test Results</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>This is why you\'ve gone through that telehealth drill -- to get a lab result that meets<a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/travelers/testing-international-air-travelers.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"> CDC requirements</a> so your airline will let you fly home. On our flight home from Italy, we pulled up the test result PDF twice on our iPhones, when checking in for Lufthansa flight from Catania, Sicily to Munich and again for a United Airlines agent at the final gate-side security check before boarding our MUC-ORD flight. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>A month later, we were flying American Airlines home from London. American uses the <a href=\"https://support.myverifly.com/hc/en-us\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Verifly</a> app to pull together all the required COVID travel documents. Verifly didn\'t recognize the QR code on the Navica test pass, so I uploaded a screenshot of my test results for manual verification. After about 30 minutes, the \"in-process\" status icon turned green and we were good to go. When we checked in for our flight at Heathrow, all we had to do was show the agent the green “All good” screens on the Verifly app; no need to show the actual test results. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Bottom Line</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>With the US COVID testing window tightened to one day, packing your own CDC-approved self-test kit is lower risk, lower hassle, and often lower cost than gambling on an airport testing center the day of departure. A little pre-departure planning will let you enjoy a more relaxed final day of vacation.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Easy Way to Do 1-Day Testing For Returning to US','','inherit','closed','closed','','4044-revision-v1','','','2021-12-30 19:52:27','2021-12-31 00:52:27','',4044,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4057',0,'revision','',0),
(4058,1,'2021-12-30 20:05:25','2021-12-31 01:05:25','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>On December 6, the US <a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2021/p1203-covid-testing-tightens-intl.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">tightened the COVID testing window</a> for inbound international travelers from 72 hours prior to departure to one day. Going from one of the widest testing windows to the narrowest leaves you with just a couple of options. You can hit the airport test center and hope to get a negative result e-mailed to you before boarding, or pack a <a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/travelers/testing-international-air-travelers.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">CDC-approved self-test</a> in your carry-on and use it the night before you leave. I took the low-risk route and brought along <a href=\"https://www.emed.com/products/covid-at-home-testkit-six-pack?hsLang=en\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Abbott\'s BinaxNOW rapid antigen test with eMed</a>. I needed to do a bit of upfront planning, but it made our return home a lot easier.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Pre-Trip Planning</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>You can\'t just hit your local Walgreens or CVS the night before leaving and grab a kit off the shelf. This might meet the first requirement of <a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/travelers/testing-international-air-travelers.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the CDC\'s order</a> -- an FDA-approved test -- but not the second -- a telehealth provider that watches you take the test and then issues the lab result you\'ll need to show the gate agent to get on the plane. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":4048,\"width\":288,\"height\":512,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large is-resized\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/F856BB2F-44E0-4C95-98BC-34855C2329FD.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/F856BB2F-44E0-4C95-98BC-34855C2329FD-576x1024.jpg\" alt=\"Doing your own COVID testing takes up a lot of valuable luggage real estate\" class=\"wp-image-4048\" width=\"288\" height=\"512\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>There are a couple of tests that meet the CDC\'s requirements, but the Abbott BinaxNOW test is the easiest one to buy. You can buy a 6-pack directly from <a href=\"https://www.emed.com/products/covid-at-home-testkit-six-pack?hsLang=en\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">eMed</a>, or a 2- or 3-pack from <a href=\"https://store.optum.com/shop/category/tests-devices/covid-19-home-tests/\">Optum</a>, but make sure you buy the BinaxNOW tests <em><strong>with</strong></em> eMed telehealth services. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>When figuring out how many to order, there\'s a few things to keep in mind. First, how many spares to take with you in case a test doesn\'t work or gives you an ambiguous result? Second, the more you buy, the cheaper each test is. The 2-pack from Optum prices out at $30/test while buying the 6-pack from eMed drops it to $25/test. But third, remember that the tests only have a 12-month shelf life, so don\'t overbuy. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Irene and I had two international trips coming up, so I ordered a 6-pack from eMed a month before our first trip. The tests arrived a week later. We took four tests with us on each trip but never had to use the spares. One thing to keep in mind --  because you\'re not supposed to open the test until you\'re on-line with the teleproctor, those four boxes can take up a lot of valuable luggage space.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I also downloaded and set up the companion Navica app and created a profile on the eMed website before we left. You don\'t have to do this before traveling, but it\'ll make the actual testing session faster.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><meta charset=\"utf-8\"><strong>Take the Test The Day Before Flying to the US</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/travelers/testing-international-air-travelers.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">The CDC\'s new test window</a> is 1 day before departure, not 24 hours. So, if your flight leaves 1pm on Friday, you could board with a negative test taken any time the day before; a test taken Thursday morning would be fine.  You\'ll need to find a clear space on a table or desk and a solid WiFi signal, and then give yourself 30 minutes for the test -- 5 minutes to log into eMed website and start the telehealth session, a couple of minutes to do the test, 15 minutes for the results to develop, and a final couple of minutes back on with the teleproctor to read the results. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":4049,\"width\":288,\"height\":512,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large is-resized\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/116C8D86-ED66-4E5F-A516-D3E6046CA582.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/116C8D86-ED66-4E5F-A516-D3E6046CA582-576x1024.jpg\" alt=\"BinaxNOW COVID testing session\" class=\"wp-image-4049\" width=\"288\" height=\"512\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We weren\'t traveling with computers, but we successfully ran our telehealth sessions on a selection of handheld devices -- a Samsung Galaxy S2 Android tablet, an iPad Mini, and two vintages of iPhones (Xr and 13 Pro).</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>You log into the eMed website, run through four questions that prompt you to wash your hands and have your ID ready, and then get into queue for a telehealth session. Last summer, I heard complaints of 2+ hour queues, but we didn\'t wait over 3 minutes for any of our sessions. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>When the session starts, the proctor can see you, but you only hear the proctor. They\'ll want to check your photo ID, watch you open the test box, and then scan the QR code on the test card. On our phones and tablets, this process awkwardly flipped the web session between the front and back cameras a couple of times. Then, back to the front camera, the proctor watches you swab both nostrils and then insert the swab into the test card. I don\'t know how you\'d do this one-handed; you\'ll want <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3pZmjcS\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">some way</a> to use your phone or tablet hands-free. With the testing complete, the proctor starts a 15-minute on-screen timer and drops off the call.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>After the timer finishes, the web page asks if you\'re ready to rejoin the session. Pressing \"Yes\", you enter shorter queue for another proctor session (we never waited more than 90 seconds). They confirm it\'s the same test card by having you scan QR code again and then confirm the test results with you, asking you how many lines you see. On one of these review sessions, the proctor\'s audio was all fuzzed up. She asked me if I was comfortable proceeding using the chat function and we finished the session without a problem. eMed then e-mails you a PDF of the test results as well as notifying you in the Navica app. We didn\'t wait more than 10 minutes for our results to show up. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Using The Test Results</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>This is why you\'ve gone through that telehealth drill -- to get a lab result that meets<a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/travelers/testing-international-air-travelers.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"> CDC requirements</a> so your airline will let you fly home. On our flight home from Italy, we pulled up the test result PDF twice on our iPhones, when checking in for Lufthansa flight from Catania, Sicily to Munich and again for a United Airlines agent at the final gate-side security check before boarding our MUC-ORD flight. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>A month later, we were flying American Airlines home from London. American uses the <a href=\"https://support.myverifly.com/hc/en-us\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Verifly</a> app to pull together all the required COVID travel documents. Verifly didn\'t recognize the QR code on the Navica test pass, so I uploaded a screenshot of my test results for manual verification. After about 30 minutes, the \"in-process\" status icon turned green and we were good to go. When we checked in for our flight at Heathrow, all we had to do was show the agent the green “All good” screens on the Verifly app; no need to show the actual test results. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Bottom Line</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> A little pre-departure planning will let you enjoy a more relaxed final day of vacation.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Easy Way to Do 1-Day Testing For Returning to US','','inherit','closed','closed','','4044-revision-v1','','','2021-12-30 20:05:25','2021-12-31 01:05:25','',4044,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4058',0,'revision','',0),
(4059,1,'2021-12-30 20:07:08','2021-12-31 01:07:08','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>On December 6, the US <a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2021/p1203-covid-testing-tightens-intl.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">tightened the COVID testing window</a> for inbound international travelers from 72 hours prior to departure to one day. Going from one of the widest testing windows to the narrowest leaves you with just a couple of options. You can hit the airport test center and hope to get a negative result e-mailed to you before boarding, or pack a <a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/travelers/testing-international-air-travelers.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">CDC-approved self-test</a> in your carry-on and use it the night before you leave. I took the low-risk route and brought along <a href=\"https://www.emed.com/products/covid-at-home-testkit-six-pack?hsLang=en\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Abbott\'s BinaxNOW rapid antigen test with eMed</a>. I needed to do a bit of upfront planning, but it made our return home a lot easier.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Pre-Trip Planning</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>You can\'t just hit your local Walgreens or CVS the night before leaving and grab a kit off the shelf. This might meet the first requirement of <a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/travelers/testing-international-air-travelers.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the CDC\'s order</a> -- an FDA-approved test -- but not the second -- a telehealth provider that watches you take the test and then issues the lab result you\'ll need to show the gate agent to get on the plane. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":4048,\"width\":288,\"height\":512,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large is-resized\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/F856BB2F-44E0-4C95-98BC-34855C2329FD.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/F856BB2F-44E0-4C95-98BC-34855C2329FD-576x1024.jpg\" alt=\"Doing your own COVID testing takes up a lot of valuable luggage real estate\" class=\"wp-image-4048\" width=\"288\" height=\"512\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>There are a couple of tests that meet the CDC\'s requirements, but the Abbott BinaxNOW test is the easiest one to buy. You can buy a 6-pack directly from <a href=\"https://www.emed.com/products/covid-at-home-testkit-six-pack?hsLang=en\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">eMed</a>, or a 2- or 3-pack from <a href=\"https://store.optum.com/shop/category/tests-devices/covid-19-home-tests/\">Optum</a>, but make sure you buy the BinaxNOW tests <em><strong>with</strong></em> eMed telehealth services. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>When figuring out how many to order, there\'s a few things to keep in mind. First, how many spares to take with you in case a test doesn\'t work or gives you an ambiguous result? Second, the more you buy, the cheaper each test is. The 2-pack from Optum prices out at $30/test while buying the 6-pack from eMed drops it to $25/test. But third, remember that the tests only have a 12-month shelf life, so don\'t overbuy. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Irene and I had two international trips coming up, so I ordered a 6-pack from eMed a month before our first trip. The tests arrived a week later. We took four tests with us on each trip but never had to use the spares. One thing to keep in mind --  because you\'re not supposed to open the test until you\'re on-line with the teleproctor, those four boxes can take up a lot of valuable luggage space.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I also downloaded and set up the companion Navica app and created a profile on the eMed website before we left. You don\'t have to do this before traveling, but it\'ll make the actual testing session faster.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><meta charset=\"utf-8\"><strong>Take the Test The Day Before Flying to the US</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/travelers/testing-international-air-travelers.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">The CDC\'s new test window</a> is 1 day before departure, not 24 hours. So, if your flight leaves 1pm on Friday, you could board with a negative test taken any time the day before; a test taken Thursday morning would be fine.  You\'ll need to find a clear space on a table or desk and a solid WiFi signal, and then give yourself 30 minutes for the test -- 5 minutes to log into eMed website and start the telehealth session, a couple of minutes to do the test, 15 minutes for the results to develop, and a final couple of minutes back on with the teleproctor to read the results. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":4049,\"width\":288,\"height\":512,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large is-resized\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/116C8D86-ED66-4E5F-A516-D3E6046CA582.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/116C8D86-ED66-4E5F-A516-D3E6046CA582-576x1024.jpg\" alt=\"BinaxNOW COVID testing session\" class=\"wp-image-4049\" width=\"288\" height=\"512\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We weren\'t traveling with computers, but we successfully ran our telehealth sessions on a selection of handheld devices -- a Samsung Galaxy S2 Android tablet, an iPad Mini, and two vintages of iPhones (Xr and 13 Pro).</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>You log into the eMed website, run through four questions that prompt you to wash your hands and have your ID ready, and then get into queue for a telehealth session. Last summer, I heard complaints of 2+ hour queues, but we didn\'t wait over 3 minutes for any of our sessions. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>When the session starts, the proctor can see you, but you only hear the proctor. They\'ll want to check your photo ID, watch you open the test box, and then scan the QR code on the test card. On our phones and tablets, this process awkwardly flipped the web session between the front and back cameras a couple of times. Then, back to the front camera, the proctor watches you swab both nostrils and then insert the swab into the test card. I don\'t know how you\'d do this one-handed; you\'ll want <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3pZmjcS\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">some way</a> to use your phone or tablet hands-free. With the testing complete, the proctor starts a 15-minute on-screen timer and drops off the call.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>After the timer finishes, the web page asks if you\'re ready to rejoin the session. Pressing \"Yes\", you enter shorter queue for another proctor session (we never waited more than 90 seconds). They confirm it\'s the same test card by having you scan QR code again and then confirm the test results with you, asking you how many lines you see. On one of these review sessions, the proctor\'s audio was all fuzzed up. She asked me if I was comfortable proceeding using the chat function and we finished the session without a problem. eMed then e-mails you a PDF of the test results as well as notifying you in the Navica app. We didn\'t wait more than 10 minutes for our results to show up. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Using The Test Results</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>This is why you\'ve gone through that telehealth drill -- to get a lab result that meets<a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/travelers/testing-international-air-travelers.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"> CDC requirements</a> so your airline will let you fly home. On our flight home from Italy, we pulled up the test result PDF twice on our iPhones, when checking in for Lufthansa flight from Catania, Sicily to Munich and again for a United Airlines agent at the final gate-side security check before boarding our MUC-ORD flight. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>A month later, we were flying American Airlines home from London. American uses the <a href=\"https://support.myverifly.com/hc/en-us\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Verifly</a> app to pull together all the required COVID travel documents. Verifly didn\'t recognize the QR code on the Navica test pass, so I uploaded a screenshot of my test results for manual verification. After about 30 minutes, the \"in-process\" status icon turned green and we were good to go. When we checked in for our flight at Heathrow, all we had to do was show the agent the green “All good” screens on the Verifly app; no need to show the actual test results. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Bottom Line</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> A little pre-departure planning will let you enjoy a more relaxed final day of vacation.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Easy Way to Do 1-Day Testing For Returning to US','How to meet the 1-day COVID testing window for entry into the US by packing Abbott BinaxNOW kits to self-test in your hotel the day before your flight home','inherit','closed','closed','','4044-revision-v1','','','2021-12-30 20:07:08','2021-12-31 01:07:08','',4044,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4059',0,'revision','',0),
(4060,1,'2021-12-30 20:08:34','2021-12-31 01:08:34','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>On December 6, the US <a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2021/p1203-covid-testing-tightens-intl.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">tightened the COVID testing window</a> for inbound international travelers from 72 hours prior to departure to one day. Going from one of the widest testing windows to the narrowest leaves you with just a couple of options. You can hit the airport test center and hope to get a negative result e-mailed to you before boarding, or pack a <a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/travelers/testing-international-air-travelers.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">CDC-approved self-test</a> in your carry-on and use it the night before you leave. I took the low-risk route and brought along <a href=\"https://www.emed.com/products/covid-at-home-testkit-six-pack?hsLang=en\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Abbott\'s BinaxNOW rapid antigen test with eMed</a>. I needed to do a bit of upfront planning, but it made our return home a lot easier.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Pre-Trip Planning</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>You can\'t just hit your local Walgreens or CVS the night before leaving and grab a kit off the shelf. This might meet the first requirement of <a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/travelers/testing-international-air-travelers.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the CDC\'s order</a> -- an FDA-approved test -- but not the second -- a telehealth provider that watches you take the test and then issues the lab result you\'ll need to show the gate agent to get on the plane. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":4048,\"width\":288,\"height\":512,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large is-resized\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/F856BB2F-44E0-4C95-98BC-34855C2329FD.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/F856BB2F-44E0-4C95-98BC-34855C2329FD-576x1024.jpg\" alt=\"Doing your own COVID testing takes up a lot of valuable luggage real estate\" class=\"wp-image-4048\" width=\"288\" height=\"512\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>There are a couple of tests that meet the CDC\'s requirements, but the Abbott BinaxNOW test is the easiest one to buy. You can buy a 6-pack directly from <a href=\"https://www.emed.com/products/covid-at-home-testkit-six-pack?hsLang=en\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">eMed</a>, or a 2- or 3-pack from <a href=\"https://store.optum.com/shop/category/tests-devices/covid-19-home-tests/\">Optum</a>, but make sure you buy the BinaxNOW tests <em><strong>with</strong></em> eMed telehealth services. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>When figuring out how many to order, there\'s a few things to keep in mind. First, how many spares to take with you in case a test doesn\'t work or gives you an ambiguous result? Second, the more you buy, the cheaper each test is. The 2-pack from Optum prices out at $30/test while buying the 6-pack from eMed drops it to $25/test. But third, remember that the tests only have a 12-month shelf life, so don\'t overbuy. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Irene and I had two international trips coming up, so I ordered a 6-pack from eMed a month before our first trip. The tests arrived a week later. We took four tests with us on each trip but never had to use the spares. One thing to keep in mind --  because you\'re not supposed to open the test until you\'re on-line with the teleproctor, those four boxes can take up a lot of valuable luggage space.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I also downloaded and set up the companion Navica app and created a profile on the eMed website before we left. You don\'t have to do this before traveling, but it\'ll make the actual testing session faster.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><meta charset=\"utf-8\"><strong>Take the Test The Day Before Flying to the US</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/travelers/testing-international-air-travelers.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">The CDC\'s new test window</a> is 1 day before departure, not 24 hours. So, if your flight leaves 1pm on Friday, you could board with a negative test taken any time the day before; a test taken Thursday morning would be fine.  You\'ll need to find a clear space on a table or desk and a solid WiFi signal, and then give yourself 30 minutes for the test -- 5 minutes to log into eMed website and start the telehealth session, a couple of minutes to do the test, 15 minutes for the results to develop, and a final couple of minutes back on with the teleproctor to read the results. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":4049,\"width\":288,\"height\":512,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-large is-resized\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/116C8D86-ED66-4E5F-A516-D3E6046CA582.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/116C8D86-ED66-4E5F-A516-D3E6046CA582-576x1024.jpg\" alt=\"BinaxNOW COVID testing session\" class=\"wp-image-4049\" width=\"288\" height=\"512\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We weren\'t traveling with computers, but we successfully ran our telehealth sessions on a selection of handheld devices -- a Samsung Galaxy S2 Android tablet, an iPad Mini, and two vintages of iPhones (Xr and 13 Pro).</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>You log into the eMed website, run through four questions that prompt you to wash your hands and have your ID ready, and then get into queue for a telehealth session. Last summer, I heard complaints of 2+ hour queues, but we didn\'t wait over 3 minutes for any of our sessions. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>When the session starts, the proctor can see you, but you only hear the proctor. They\'ll want to check your photo ID, watch you open the test box, and then scan the QR code on the test card. On our phones and tablets, this process awkwardly flipped the web session between the front and back cameras a couple of times. Then, back to the front camera, the proctor watches you swab both nostrils and then insert the swab into the test card. I don\'t know how you\'d do this one-handed; you\'ll want <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3pZmjcS\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">some way</a> to use your phone or tablet hands-free. With the testing complete, the proctor starts a 15-minute on-screen timer and drops off the call.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>After the timer finishes, the web page asks if you\'re ready to rejoin the session. Pressing \"Yes\", you enter shorter queue for another proctor session (we never waited more than 90 seconds). They confirm it\'s the same test card by having you scan QR code again and then confirm the test results with you, asking you how many lines you see. On one of these review sessions, the proctor\'s audio was all fuzzed up. She asked me if I was comfortable proceeding using the chat function and we finished the session without a problem. eMed then e-mails you a PDF of the test results as well as notifying you in the Navica app. We didn\'t wait more than 10 minutes for our results to show up. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Using The Test Results</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>This is why you\'ve gone through that telehealth drill -- to get a lab result that meets<a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/travelers/testing-international-air-travelers.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"> CDC requirements</a> so your airline will let you fly home. On our flight home from Italy, we pulled up the test result PDF twice on our iPhones, when checking in for Lufthansa flight from Catania, Sicily to Munich and again for a United Airlines agent at the final gate-side security check before boarding our MUC-ORD flight. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>A month later, we were flying American Airlines home from London. American uses the <a href=\"https://support.myverifly.com/hc/en-us\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Verifly</a> app to pull together all the required COVID travel documents. Verifly didn\'t recognize the QR code on the Navica test pass, so I uploaded a screenshot of my test results for manual verification. After about 30 minutes, the \"in-process\" status icon turned green and we were good to go. When we checked in for our flight at Heathrow, all we had to do was show the agent the green “All good” screens on the Verifly app; no need to show the actual test results. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Bottom Line</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> A little pre-departure planning will let you enjoy a more relaxed final day of vacation.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Easy Way to Do 1-Day Testing For Returning to US','How to meet the US 1-day COVID testing window by packing Abbott BinaxNOW kits so you can self-test in your hotel the day before your flight home','inherit','closed','closed','','4044-revision-v1','','','2021-12-30 20:08:34','2021-12-31 01:08:34','',4044,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4060',0,'revision','',0),
(4063,1,'2022-01-16 10:03:00','2022-01-16 15:03:00','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/IMG_3929-scaled.jpeg\"><img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/IMG_3929-300x300.jpeg\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a>Post-dinner pic complete with gang sign[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>No travel since the last episode, but lots of travel planning. Are we making our way back to pre-COVID travel planning patterns? Omicron has lots of people worried about testing positive and getting stuck abroad. Michael Giusti of&nbsp;<a href=\"https://insurancequotes.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">InsuranceQuotes.com</a> talks about how travel insurance can help. A blogger’s <a href=\"https://everywhereist.com/2021/12/bros-restaurant-lecce-we-eat-at-the-worst-michelin-starred-restaurant-ever/\">brutal review</a> of a Michelin-starred restaurant where we ate in October gets me thinking about food as an adventure.  All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_183.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #183: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. Hope everyone had a great New Year’s. No travel since the last episode, which has turned out to be a good thing given the, what?, two weeks straight of over 1,000 cancelled flights a day. I’ve always tried to avoid traveling during the Christmas holidays; crowded planes, lots of not-very-experienced travelers, and the inevitable winter storm or two has never resulted in smooth travel experiences. Add to that airlines struggling to staff back up to passenger loads and then omicron comes ripping through their ranks…. The two folks I knew flying last week both got home a day late which, given all this, could’ve been a lot worse. Like being trapped in that 27-hour mess on I-95 in Northern Virginia. Definitely a reminder never to let yourself get below a quarter tank.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>So while I haven’t been traveling, I <em>have</em> been travel <em>planning</em>, which is not unusual. January has traditionally been <em>the</em> big travel planning month; pack up the Christmas decorations, figure out where you want to go this year and then put in your time off requests. And because January is just the worst month of the year, at least in the upper Northern Hemisphere when it’s the coldest month of the year and the sun sets early; so you need something, anything to look forward to.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But COVID changed all that, of course, especially the planning timeline. We’ve talked in prior episodes how last-minute travel restrictions have made that planning timeline, what the travel industry calls the <em>booking window</em>, a lot shorter. Last year, in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"January 2021 episode\">January 2021 episode</a>, I talked about having to make a last-minute pivot away from a San Diego trip I’d booked just the month before because California was still in their post-holiday lock down and not letting out-of-state visitors make hotel reservations.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I thought this year I’d revert back to the old patterns and do a bit more longer-term travel planning. Looking at <a href=\"https://www.kayak.com/flight-trends\">Kayak’s flight search trends</a>, where they now compare current flight search volumes to pre-pandemic levels, so comparing 2021 to 2019, seem to be an optimistic outlier because their search volumes have cratered vs. 2 year ago. Eyeballing their trend chart, I’d say it’s down something like 50%. Though switching over and looking at Google’s Hotel Insights page, I might not be too far out of the fat part of the curve; their hotel search trends seem to be recovering. Which sorta maps into our plans. In February, we’re driving down to Louisville rather than flying, giving the airlines a couple of months to unscramble their operations, and then getting on planes -- to New York in March, Santa Fe, NM in April, maybe DC in May. But for that February drive down I-65, across the frozen tundra of central Indiana, we’re definitely packing a couple of blankets -- and snacks -- and keeping the gas tank topped off just in case. News reports of that I-95 jam up talked about a Good Samaritan family going car to car, passing out oranges they were bringing back from Florida. Coming back from Louisville, I’m guessing any Good Samaritan would be going car to car with a couple bottles of bourbon and a sleeve of plastic shot glasses -- which is not a bad thing. Would definitely warm you up for at least a little bit.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — &nbsp;<em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/content/Per/Per_-_DLDN_Instrumental.mp3\" target=\"_blank\">DLDN Instrumental</a></em>&nbsp;by St Paul</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Last April, the Department of Homeland Security <a href=\"https://www.dhs.gov/real-id/news/2021/04/27/dhs-announces-extension-real-id-full-enforcement-deadline\">kicked the Real ID can down the road</a> -- again -- so now we have until May 2023 before we’ll need Real ID-compliant identification to get through a TSA checkpoint. We don’t <em>have</em> to get a Real ID driver’s license; <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/travel/security-screening/identification\">a passport or a Global Entry card</a> would work also. But, last month, since I had to visit the 5th Circle of Hell also known as the Dept of Motor Vehicles, to renew my expiring driver’s license, I figured I might as well get the Real ID version. And why not? In Illinois, the Real and non-Real ID driver\'s licenses cost the same, you go through the same lines…. The only difference was it took maybe an extra 3 minutes for them to scan in my social security card and the documents I used to prove my address. Which, if I’d kept in mind the Distributive Property of Cybersecurity, “Any data entered into a system will eventually be hacked and distributed on the dark web” -- I would’ve used something a bit more innocuous than my bank statement.  But, I now have a driver’s license with a requisite gold star in the upper right corner just in case DHS is really serious this time about the Real ID deadline.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/10/podcast-182-more-covid-changes-words-that-mean-adventure/\">the last episode</a>, I talked about finishing up my Global Entry renewal. And so with that done, last week I sent my passport into the void that is the US Passport Agency for renewal. I don’t have any international travel planned right now, but I’m very uncomfortable to be without my passport. I don’t know why, but I am. And the discomfort is only amplified by the 8-11 week processing time the State Department is now quoting. It also reminded me that it’s been 10 years since my most embarrassing cock-up - letting my backpack with my son’s and my passports get stolen from the overhead rack of the train to Brussels airport. I told the whole story in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/05/20/podcast-98-stolen-luggage-restaurants-want-your-smartphone/\">episode #98</a>, about what a stupid, what I called “the rookie-est of rookie mistakes” it was, and how it could’ve been worse, but for the very pleasant and helpful Brussels airport police and US Embassy staff, and that my son and I then got in a couple extra days of Belgian beer drinking.&nbsp; Lesson learned, though; I’ve kept my passport on my person when traveling ever since.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>It’s funny, sometimes, how travel can prepare you for things back home. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/10/28/podcast-180-tracking-covid-travel-requirements-cycling-thru-puglia/\">episode #180</a>, talking about our travels through Italy, I walked through what were back then the most stringent vaccine passport requirements around; you need to show an EU Green Pass on your phone or, for us, our CDC vaccination cards to get into restaurants, bars, airports, train stations,.... And so when Chicago started doing the same thing on January 1st, we were ready. In some ways Chicago is easier than Italy -- showing a picture of my CDC card is quicker than waiting for someone to scan a QR code; but here, and New York City and Washington, DC, we’ve added the extra step -- having to show a picture ID that matches to the vax card. We didn’t have to do that in Italy. You know, if I hadn’t had to send my passport in, maybe I’d just do what I did in Italy, carry my CDC card in my passport; I could pull ‘em both out in one hopefully suave and graceful move and be done with it.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/11/13/podcast-181-travel-potpourri-2021-travelers-gift-guide/\">November episode</a>, I said that I’d already gotten status roll-overs from Marriott, Hilton, and IHG, extending my current level in their frequent sleeper programs for the third time -- now they expire in February or March 2023. I figured that was the end of it, so when I received a note from Southwest in mid-December with the subject line “Surprise: A-List status extended,” it was pretty accurate. I was very surprised! I hadn’t expected any airlines to extend status; they all seemed to be lowering the qualification clip levels instead. So, thanks Southwest! I’ll be using this status on my flights to LGA and ABQ -- also because I still have some 2020 pandemic cancellation credits that are about to hit their disappearing 2-year birthday. Any chance you can extend that expiration data too?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Just to spin the propeller on top of the travel tech beanie hat for a sec…. Over the past couple of trips, I’ve noticed my briefcase/messenger bag has finally passed a tipping point -- I now have more electronic devices needing a newer USB-C cord than an original USB-A cord. (I told you this would be a propeller spin). The USB-C cord invasion started with the iPhone 11 Pro; another cord to carry, but it occasionally came in handy, like when Hertz gave me a birthday upgrade a few years back to a Mercedes A220; it only had the smaller USB-C plugs. But the invasion picked up speed with each upgrade -- first it was my new Bose headphones, then when I upgraded my battery pack, my power bank; then again when I got my MacBook Air, and again squared when I got a pair of cheap Anker earbuds last Prime Day. Which led me, finally, to replacing my dual USB-A power adapter for one with two USB-C plugs and one USB-A for my old Samsung tablet that just won’t die. But I still have to carry an old iPhone USB-A cord for those times when all that’s left on the Hertz lot is a 3-year old Chevy Malibu.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music —  <em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/content/oldDog/oldDog_-_Goodbye_sooner_or_later.mp3\" target=\"_blank\">Goodbye Sooner or Later</a></em>&nbsp;by oldDog</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>COVID Test Anxiety</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>A friend of mine said he wanted to get together this month. “Sure,” I said, “but if we can’t, we’ll be together for a weekend in February in Louisville at a wedding.” “Uh, no,” he said, “I’m not going.” “Why not?” “I’m going to isolate, kinda like a soft quarantine in February, don’t go outside except to walk the dog so I don’t screw up my trip to Egypt. It’s non-refundable, so I’ll be out a lot of money if I test positive for COVID before leaving and can’t go.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And last month, in early December, right when everyone was tightening travel restrictions in what turned out to be a futile effort to keep omicron out of their country, another friend cancelled a long-planned trip to Scotland. “I just don’t want to get trapped, away from home,” he said.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>COVID test anxiety. I understand it, especially around test-on-arrival rules. The week before our flight to London in November, I got a text from my doctor group -- time to get your COVID booster. I clicked through to the appointment website, started looking at slots, but then stopped. I have to take a COVID test by our second day in London. What if that spike of antibodies from the booster lingers long enough to turn that test positive? I clicked onto the next page of the website and booked my booster for December, after we got back home.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As I mentioned in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/10/podcast-182-more-covid-changes-words-that-mean-adventure/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"last episode\">last episode</a>, we tested negative on our test in London and went about our vacation. But as we got close to our return date, that anxiety crept back in. This was before the US tightened the testing window, so we took our Abbott tests 2 days before departure, both to give us some wiggle room, some time to retest if one came up positive, but also to calm those worries. I remember on that trip talking to an American guy in the elevator of our hotel in London. He had an Abbott rapid test sticking out of his briefcase. “Getting ready to head home?” I asked. “No,” he said, “I just test myself every 2 days.” I kinda laughed at that, thinking it was a bit over-rotation. But thinking back on it now, maybe he had it right -- test yourself every couple of days to relieve that uncertainty rather than waiting for the night before departure.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But even that might not be enough. I tweeted out <a href=\"https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/covid-in-koh-samui-its-scary-0hs7h0pk9\">an article</a> from the UK Times newspaper written by a guy who visited Thailand last month. The article starts “On December 19, after a week of near-hourly negative lateral flow and PCR tests, I flew to Thailand.” The next sentence (you know where this is going): “On December 20 I stepped off the plane, took another PCR, and headed to my hotel. The next morning I received a text informing me I had tested positive.” And then he tells the story of his 10 days of solo isolation in a Thai hospital. He did everything right and it still went wrong.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>One big anxiety driver is the cost for those extra days quarantined in a hotel somewhere. This should be the kind of risk that trip insurance could help you manage. So I rang up Michael Giusti, senior writer at <a href=\"https://insurancequotes.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"InsuranceQuotes.com\">InsuranceQuotes.com</a> -- he was with us on <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/12/podcast-173-whats-new-in-travel-insurance-keeping-ahead-of-expiring-miles/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"episode #173\">episode #173</a> last March, talking about travel insurance one year after the pandemic lockdowns -- to ask him about this.<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Michael: So from a travel insurance policy perspective that scenario you just said is actually almost the better scenario because that\'s what travel insurance is built for. So you come up with a positive test -- that kicks in the policy language. Now they can hit their contingency plans, whether that\'s paying you per day for the extended stay or finding alternative ways home. What scares me is the no man\'s land where you can\'t find a test. A lot of these policies have language that excludes government mandates and so if you just can\'t find a test and now can\'t get in not because you\'re sick, because being sick would trigger the policy, but because the government mandate has got you in limbo, that\'s the scary part and that\'s really gonna come down to a policy-by-policy view to see how they\'re gonna handle it.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Is this standard travel insurance coverage or is there something special you need to look for?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Michael: When you\'re buying your policy, you do need to pay attention, but there are the three buckets you want to make sure are included. One is the cancellation that\'s going to protect you if you get sick before the trip. One is health and that\'s going to pay for care while you\'re abroad or outside of your normal healthcare network. But the other is interruption and that\'s the piece that I was just talking about. The interruption policy is going to be standard in their baseline, we\'ll call it the silver plan -- not the platinum, not the bronze -- that standard baseline plan should have all three of those buckets. But know what you\'re buying because I was reading through some policies over the weekend and there were definitely some that were peeling one or more buckets out to save some costs. That\'s great if you want to take that risk but do it with open eyes, knowing what you\'re doing. Insurance is there to protect you from unknown risks, unknowable risks. All of these policies, when you start reading the language, they\'re quick to point out “COVID-19 became a global pandemic in January of 2020.” They want you to know this is a known risk and then that sets the table -- with this being known, how are you going to protect yourself? Some of them are built into the standard policies but some require that COVID rider, some different policy language which most of them are offering. But you can\'t just assume it\'s gonna be wrapped into standard coverage. You need to be asking the COVID question.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Thanks to Michael Giusti for joining us. Interesting point he makes about test access being a grey area for coverage. As I mentioned earlier, Irene and I brought our own Abbott tests with us to Italy and the UK, but more for convenience than concern about availability. I wrote up a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/30/easy-way-to-do-1-day-testing-for-returning-to-us/\">detailed \"how to\"</a> on ordering and using the Abbott BinaxNOW testing kit. It’s on the TravelCommons website in case you want to sidestep Michael’s addition to&nbsp; COVID test anxiety.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music —  &nbsp;<em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/content/Zapac/Zapac_-_Test_Drive.mp3\" target=\"_blank\">Test Drive</a>&nbsp;</em>by Zapac</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Michelin Dining Adventures</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Last month, I picked up on the buzz around a blogger’s <a href=\"https://everywhereist.com/2021/12/bros-restaurant-lecce-we-eat-at-the-worst-michelin-starred-restaurant-ever/\">brutal review</a> of a 1-star Michelin restaurant in Italy. It initially caught my eye because Irene and I like to hit a Michelin star or two when we’re traveling. Indeed, a 1-star place called <a href=\"https://www.behindrestaurant.co.uk/\"><em>Behind</em></a> as in “ it’s an open kitchen so there’s nothing to hide behind” got us figuring out how to get from central London to Hackney, a neighborhood we would’ve had no reason to explore otherwise. It was a great lunch; a great experience talking to the chef, and it\'s going on my final Best of 2021 list -- which is on my to-do list to update right after I finish this podcast. Having said that, we’ve also had some meals that weren’t great, like our 25th anniversary dinner at a 3-star place in Florence, or a 2-star in Spain that we loved -- until the next morning when we both came down with food poisoning. But on balance, we’ve had more really good meals than bad, and they’ve often taken us out of the travel bubble to parts of cities we wouldn’t normally go -- kinda like my microbrewery taprooms, only a <strong><em>lot</em></strong> more expensive.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>So when I saw the title “We Eat at The Worst Michelin Starred Restaurant, Ever,” it got my attention. First, what restaurant is it, so we can avoid it, and second, what made it the worst ever because that’s a big claim. But then I see the <em>full</em> title, with the restaurant, Bros in Lecce, Italy. We won’t be able to skip it because we ate there in mid-October, the night after our Puglia bike tour ended.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I read through the reviews and looked closely at the pictures. A couple of courses look familiar, but others -- like the now-famous (infamous?) grey foam oozing out of a plaster replica of the chef’s mouth was (thankfully) not on our menu. I have to say that I was on the fence about eating at Bros when Irene brought it up when we were planning our Puglia trip. The reviews I could find were <em>very</em> mixed, and it wasn’t a cheap ticket. We decided to go, but with the understanding that it could be a high-variance meal, with some courses that might not work out. I think the oyster with rancid fat was that dish for Irene. I didn’t love it, but it didn’t trigger a gag reflex like it did for Irene. Certainly not what you hope for, and it was only that dish, the rest was fine. But like I said, we went into Bros eye wide open, expecting an edgy experimental food experience -- and definitely not a standard 3-course fine dining Italian meal. We walked out thinking “Well, that was interesting” -- not bad, but not the worst 1-star meal I’ve had; probably in the bottom quartile, though. As you might guess, Bros <em>won’t</em> make it on that Best of 2021 list update.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>So why didn’t this blogger, a James Beard-award winning writer, come in with similar expectations? Who knows, though we do know that outrage porn drives clicks which, for her, also drove some high-profile TV interviews which probably helped move a few copies of her book. And, since no publicity is bad publicity, I’m guessing it was <a href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/23/world/europe/bros-restaurant-review.html\">a net positive for the restaurant</a> too.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But why pay what was about a lot of money for a meal that I think might be a complete train wreck? I walked past a lot of places in Lecce that I know would put a good meal down in front of us for a lot less. It becomes a bit less about food and a bit more about the experience; less about stomach and more about the brain. It reminded me of something Josh Glenn said in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/10/podcast-182-more-covid-changes-words-that-mean-adventure/\" title=\"the last episode\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the last episode</a> when I was talking with him about the language of adventure<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Josh: I mean an adventure is, and that word comes from the Latin meaning <em>to arrive unexpectedly</em>. That\'s actually really an important philosophical piece for me as I was going through this, the idea that you can have a trip is not an adventure if nothing unexpected happens and if you don\'t take enough risks to allow things unexpected to happen.... The word <em>chance </em>comes from the Latin <em>cadentia </em>meaning <em>falling</em>. So just when we think about how we use the words of “let the chips fall where they may” or “something befalls you”, this idea of having our feet off the ground, falling through space, we can\'t grasp anything, what do you do with that? If you’re someone who likes, in some kind of existential way, that feeling of falling, then you\'re an adventurer. You\'re going to get more out of your travel experiences than someone who wants everything to be exactly the same way every time and never have any hiccups.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I always say to Irene “If every meal we have is a great one, then we’re not trying enough weird places.” After food poisoning has befallen you a couple times, how bad can a little rancid fat be?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #183</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_183.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #183 — COVID Test Anxiety; Michelin Food Adventures','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-183-covid-test-anxiety-michelin-food-adventures','','','2022-12-20 17:01:08','2022-12-20 22:01:08','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4063',0,'post','',0),
(4064,1,'2022-01-15 13:33:29','2022-01-15 18:33:29','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/JPEG-image.jpeg\"><img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/JPEG-image-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"Jumble of Travel Signs\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> Cleared to Adventure[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Back in front of the microphone after a two-week trip to the UK, getting back home just before the new <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/omicron-covid-travel-international-11638216229?st=sm0fcotd0jfju1i&amp;reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink\">Omicron travel restrictions</a> hit. We talk about getting to London, surfing the waves of changing travel requirements, a new way to renew Global Entry, moan a bit more about the inexorable advance of the cashless society, and finish up talking with <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_Glenn\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Josh Glenn</a> about his new book <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3lSNcwg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">The Adventurer\'s Glossary</a></em>.  All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_183.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #182: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. Hope everyone had a great New Year’s. No travel since the last episode, which has turned out to be a good thing given the, what?, two weeks straight of over 1,000 cancelled flights a day. I’ve always tried to avoid traveling during the Christmas holidays; crowded planes, lots of not-very-experienced travelers, and the inevitable winter storm or two has never resulted in smooth travel experiences. Add to that airlines struggling to staff back up to passenger loads and then omicron comes ripping through their ranks…. The two folks I knew flying last week both got home a day late which, given all this, could’ve been a lot worse. Like being trapped in that 27-hour mess on I-95 in Northern Virginia. Definitely a reminder never to let yourself get below a quarter tank.</li><li>So while I haven’t been traveling, I <em>have</em> been travel <em>planning</em>, which is not unusual. January has traditionally been <em>the</em> big travel planning month; pack up the Christmas decorations, figure out where you want to go this year and then put in your time off requests. And because January is just the worst month of the year, at least in the upper Northern Hemisphere when it’s the coldest month of the year and the sun sets early; so you need something, anything to look forward to.</li><li>But COVID changed all that, of course, especially the planning timeline. We’ve talked in prior episodes how last-minute travel restrictions have made that planning timeline, what the travel industry calls the <em>booking window</em>, a lot shorter. Last year, in the January 2021 episode, I talked about having to make a last-minute pivot away from a San Diego trip I’d booked just the month before because California was still in their post-holiday lock down and not letting out-of-state visitors make hotel reservations. </li><li>I thought this year I’d revert back to the old patterns and do a bit more longer-term travel planning. Looking at <a href=\"https://www.kayak.com/flight-trends\">Kayak’s flight search trends</a>, where they now compare current flight search volumes to pre-pandemic levels, so comparing 2021 to 2019, seem to be an optimistic outlier because their search volumes have cratered vs. 2 year ago. Eyeballing their trend chart, I’d say it’s down something like 50%. Though switching over and looking at Google’s Hotel Insights page, I might not be too far out of the fat part of the curve; their hotel search trends seem to be recovering. Which sorta maps into our plans. In February, we’re driving down to Louisville rather than flying, giving the airlines a couple of months to unscramble their operations, and then getting on planes -- to New York in March, Santa Fe, NM in April, maybe DC in May. But for that February drive down I-65, across the frozen tundra of central Indiana, we’re definitely packing a couple of blankets -- and snacks -- and keeping the gas tank topped off just in case. News reports of that I-95 jam up talked about a Good Samaritan family going car to car, passing out oranges they were bringing back from Florida. Coming back from Louisville, I’m guessing any Good Samaritan would be going car to car with a couple bottles of bourbon and a sleeve of plastic shot glasses -- which is not a bad thing. Would definitely warm you up for at least a little bit.</li><li>Bridge Music —  <em>dazed </em>by Jeris (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/VJ_Memes/39456 Ft: airtone</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Last April, the Department of Homeland Security <a href=\"https://www.dhs.gov/real-id/news/2021/04/27/dhs-announces-extension-real-id-full-enforcement-deadline\">kicked the Real ID can down the road</a> -- again -- so now we have until May 2023 before we’ll need Real ID-compliant identification to get through a TSA checkpoint. We don’t <em>have</em> to get a Real ID driver’s license; <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/travel/security-screening/identification\">a passport or a Global Entry card</a> would work also. But, last month, since I had to visit the 5th Circle of Hell also known as the Dept of Motor Vehicles, to renew my expiring driver’s license, I figured I might as well get the Real ID version. And why not? In Illinois, the Real and non-Real ID driver\'s licenses cost the same, you go through the same lines…. The only difference was it took maybe an extra 3 minutes for them to scan in my social security card and the documents I used to prove my address. Which, if I’d kept in mind the Distributive Property of Cybersecurity, “Any data entered into a system will eventually be hacked and distributed on the dark web” -- I would’ve used something a bit more innocuous than my bank statement.  But, I now have a driver’s license with a requisite gold start in the upper right corner just in case DHS is really serious this time about the Real ID deadline.</li><li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/10/podcast-182-more-covid-changes-words-that-mean-adventure/\">the last episode</a>, I talked about finishing up my Global Entry renewal. And so with that done, last week I sent my passport into the void that is the US Passport Agency for renewal. I don’t have any international travel planned right now, but I’m very uncomfortable to be without my passport. I don’t know why, but I am. And the discomfort is only amplified by the 8-11 week processing time the State Department is now quoting. It also reminded me that it’s been 10 years since my most embarrassing cock-up - letting my backpack with my son’s and my passports get stolen from the overhead rack of the train to Brussels airport. I told the whole story in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/05/20/podcast-98-stolen-luggage-restaurants-want-your-smartphone/\">episode #98</a>, about what a stupid, what I called “the rookie-est of rookie mistakes” it was, and how it could’ve been worse, but for the very pleasant and helpful Brussels airport police and US Embassy staff, and that my son and I then got in a couple extra days of Belgian beer drinking.  Lesson learned, though; I’ve kept my passport on my person when traveling ever since.</li><li>It’s funny, sometimes, how travel can prepare you for things back home. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/10/28/podcast-180-tracking-covid-travel-requirements-cycling-thru-puglia/\">episode #180</a>, talking about our travels through Italy, I walked through what were back then the most stringent vaccine passport requirements around; you need to show an EU Green Pass on your phone or, for us, our CDC vaccination cards to get into restaurants, bars, airports, train stations,.... And so when Chicago started doing the same thing on January 1st, we were ready. In some ways Chicago is easier than Italy -- showing a picture of my CDC card is quicker than waiting for someone to scan a QR code; but here, and New York City and Washington, DC, we’ve added the extra step -- having to show a picture ID that matches to the vax card. We didn’t have to do that in Italy. You know, if I hadn’t had to send my passport in, maybe I’d just do what I did in Italy, carry my CDC card in my passport; I could pull ‘em both out in one hopefully suave and graceful move and be done with it.</li><li>Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/11/13/podcast-181-travel-potpourri-2021-travelers-gift-guide/\">November episode</a>, I said that I’d already gotten status roll-overs from Marriott, Hilton, and IHG, extending my current level in their frequent sleeper programs for the third time -- now they expire in February or March 2023. I figured that was the end of it, so when I received a note from Southwest in mid-December with the subject line “Surprise: A-List status extended,” it was pretty accurate. I was very surprised! I hadn’t expected any airlines to extend status; they all seemed to be lowering the qualification clip levels instead. So, thanks Southwest! I’ll be using this status on my flights to LGA and ABQ -- also because I still have some 2020 pandemic cancellation credits that are about to hit their disappearing 2-year birthday. Any chance you can extend that expiration data too?</li><li>Just to spin the propeller on top of the travel tech beanie hat for a sec…. Over the past couple of trips, I’ve noticed my briefcase/messenger bag has finally passed a tipping point -- I now have more electronic devices needing a newer USB-C cord than an original USB-A cord. (I told you this would be a propeller spin). The USB-C cord invasion started with the iPhone 11 Pro; another cord to carry, but it occasionally came in handy, like when Hertz gave me a birthday upgrade a few years back to a Mercedes A220; it only had the smaller USB-C plugs. But the invasion picked up speed with each upgrade -- first it was my new Bose headphones, then when I upgraded my battery pack, my power bank; then again when I got my MacBook Air, and again squared when I got a pair of cheap Anker earbuds last Prime Day. Which led me, finally, to replacing my dual USB-A power adapter for one with two USB-C plugs and one USB-A for my old Samsung tablet that just won’t die. But I still have to carry an old iPhone USB-A cord for those times when all that’s left on the Hertz lot is a 3-year old Chevy Malibu.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music —  <em>dazed </em>by Jeris (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/VJ_Memes/39456 Ft: airtone</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>COVID Test Anxiety</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A friend of mine said he wanted to get together this month. “Sure,” I said, “but if we can’t, we’ll be together for a weekend in February in Louisville at a wedding.” “Uh, no,” he said, “I’m not going.” “Why not?” “I’m going to isolate, kinda like a soft quarantine in February, don’t go outside except to walk the dog so I don’t screw up my trip to Egypt. It’s non-refundable, so I’ll be out a lot of money if I test positive for COVID before leaving and can’t go.”</li><li>And last month, in early December, right when everyone was tightening travel restrictions in what turned out to be a futile effort to keep omicron out of their country, another friend cancelled a long-planned trip to Scotland. “I just don’t want to get trapped, away from home,” he said.</li><li>COVID test anxiety. I understand it, especially around test-on-arrival rules. The week before our flight to London in November, I got a text from my doctor group -- time to get your COVID booster. I clicked through to the appointment website, started looking at slots, but then stopped. I have to take a COVID test by our second day in London. What if that spike of antibodies from the booster lingers long enough to turn that test positive? I clicked onto the next page of the website and booked my booster for December, after we got back home.</li><li>As I mentioned in the last episode, we tested negative on our test in London and went about our vacation. But as we got close to our return date, that anxiety crept back in. This was before the US tightened the testing window, so we took our Abbott tests 2 days before departure, both to give us some wiggle room, some time to retest if one came up positive, but also to calm those worries. I remember on that trip talking to an American guy in the elevator of our hotel in London. He had an Abbott rapid test sticking out of his briefcase. “Getting ready to head home?” I asked. “No,” he said, “I just test myself every 2 days.” I kinda laughed at that, thinking it was a bit over-rotation. But thinking back on it now, maybe he had it right -- test yourself every couple of days to relieve that uncertainty rather than waiting for the night before departure.</li><li>But even that might not be enough. I tweeted out <a href=\"https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/covid-in-koh-samui-its-scary-0hs7h0pk9\">an article</a> from the UK Times newspaper written by a guy who visited Thailand last month. The article starts “On December 19, after a week of near-hourly negative lateral flow and PCR tests, I flew to Thailand.” The next sentence (you know where this is going): “On December 20 I stepped off the plane, took another PCR, and headed to my hotel. The next morning I received a text informing me I had tested positive.” And then he tells the story of his 10 days of solo isolation in a Thai hospital. He did everything right and it still went wrong.</li><li>One big anxiety driver is the cost for those extra days quarantined in a hotel somewhere. This should be the kind of risk that trip insurance could help you manage. So I rang up Michael Giusti, senior writer at InsuranceQuotes.com -- he was with us on episode #173 last March, talking about travel insurance one year after the pandemic lockdowns -- to ask him about this.</li><li>Bridge Music —  <em>dazed </em>by Jeris (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/VJ_Memes/39456 Ft: airtone</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Michelin Food Adventures</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Last month, I picked up on the buzz around a blogger’s <a href=\"https://everywhereist.com/2021/12/bros-restaurant-lecce-we-eat-at-the-worst-michelin-starred-restaurant-ever/\">brutal review</a> of a 1-star Michelin restaurant in Italy. It initially caught my eye because Irene and I like to hit a Michelin star or two when we’re traveling. Indeed, a 1-star place called <a href=\"https://www.behindrestaurant.co.uk/\"><em>Behind</em></a> as in “ it’s an open kitchen so there’s nothing to hide behind” got us figuring out how to get from central London to Hackney, a neighborhood we would’ve had no reason to explore otherwise. It was a great lunch; a great experience talking to the chef, and it\'s going on my final Best of 2021 list -- which is on my to-do list to update right after I finish this podcast. Having said that, we’ve also had some meals that weren’t great, like our 25th anniversary dinner at a 3-star place in Florence, or a 2-star in Spain that we loved -- until the next morning when we both came down with food poisoning. But on balance, we’ve had more really good meals than bad, and they’ve often taken us out of the travel bubble to parts of cities we wouldn’t normally go -- kinda like my microbrewery taprooms, only a <strong><em>lot</em></strong> more expensive.</li><li>So when I saw the title “We Eat at The Worst Michelin Starred Restaurant, Ever,” it got my attention. First, what restaurant is it, so we can avoid it, and second, what made it the worst ever because that’s a big claim. But then I see the <em>full</em> title, with the restaurant, Bros in Lecce, Italy. We won’t be able to skip it because we ate there in mid-October, the night after our Puglia bike tour ended.&nbsp;</li><li>I read through the reviews and looked closely at the pictures. A couple of courses look familiar, but others -- like the now-famous (infamous?) grey foam oozing out of a plaster-looking replica of the chef’s mouth was (thankfully) not on our menu. I have to say that I was on the fence about eating at Bros when Irene brought it up when we were planning our Puglia trip. The reviews I could find were <em>very</em> mixed, and it wasn’t a cheap ticket. We decided to go, but with the understanding that it could be a high-variance meal, with some courses that might not work out. I think the oyster with rancid fat was that dish for Irene. I didn’t love it, but it didn’t trigger a gag reflex like it did for Irene. Certainly not what you hope for, and it was only that dish, the rest was fine. But like I said, we went into Bros eye wide open, expecting an edgy experimental food experience -- and definitely not a standard 3-course fine dining Italian meal. We walked out thinking “Well, that was interesting” -- not bad, but not the worst 1-star meal I’ve had; probably in the bottom quartile, though. As you might guess, Bros <em>won’t</em> make it on that Best of 2021 list update.</li><li>So why didn’t this blogger, a James Beard-award winning writer, come in with similar expectations? Who knows, though we do know that outrage porn drives clicks which, for her, also drove some high-profile TV interviews which probably helped move a few copies of her book. And, since no publicity is bad publicity, I’m guessing it was <a href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/23/world/europe/bros-restaurant-review.html\">a net positive for the restaurant</a> too.</li><li>But why pay what was about a lot of money for a meal that I think might be a complete train wreck? I walked past a lot of places in Lecce that I know would put a good meal down in front of us for a lot less. It becomes a bit less about food and a bit more about the experience; less about stomach and more about the brain. It reminded me of something Josh Glenn said in the last episode when I was talking with him about the language of adventure<ul><li>Josh: I mean an adventure is, and that word comes from the Latin meaning <em>to arrive unexpectedly</em>. That\'s actually really an important philosophical piece for me as I was going through this, the idea that you can have a trip is not an adventure if nothing unexpected happens and if you don\'t take enough risks to allow things unexpected to happen.<br><br>So for example, the word chance comes from the Latin <em>cadentia </em>meaning <em>falling</em>. So just when we think about how we use the words of “let the chips fall where they may” or “something befalls you”, this idea of having our feet off the ground, falling through space, we can\'t grasp anything, what do you do with that? If you’re someone who likes, in some kind of existential way, that feeling of falling, then you\'re an adventurer. You\'re going to get more out of your travel experiences than someone who wants everything to be exactly the same way every time and never have any hiccups.</li></ul></li><li>I always say to Irene “If every meal we have is a great one, then we’re not trying enough weird places.” After food poisoning has befallen you a couple times, how bad can a little rancid fat be?</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #183</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social  -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_183.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #183 — COVID Test Anxiety; Michelin Food Adventures','','inherit','closed','closed','','4063-revision-v1','','','2022-01-15 13:33:29','2022-01-15 18:33:29','',4063,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4064',0,'revision','',0),
(4065,1,'2022-01-15 13:42:32','2022-01-15 18:42:32','','IMG_3929','','inherit','open','closed','','img_3929','','','2022-01-15 13:42:32','2022-01-15 18:42:32','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/IMG_3929.jpeg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(4066,1,'2022-01-15 13:46:57','2022-01-15 18:46:57','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/IMG_3929-scaled.jpeg\"><img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/IMG_3929-300x300.jpeg\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> Cleared to Adventure[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Back in front of the microphone after a two-week trip to the UK, getting back home just before the new <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/omicron-covid-travel-international-11638216229?st=sm0fcotd0jfju1i&amp;reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink\">Omicron travel restrictions</a> hit. We talk about getting to London, surfing the waves of changing travel requirements, a new way to renew Global Entry, moan a bit more about the inexorable advance of the cashless society, and finish up talking with <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_Glenn\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Josh Glenn</a> about his new book <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3lSNcwg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">The Adventurer\'s Glossary</a></em>.  All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_183.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #182: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. Hope everyone had a great New Year’s. No travel since the last episode, which has turned out to be a good thing given the, what?, two weeks straight of over 1,000 cancelled flights a day. I’ve always tried to avoid traveling during the Christmas holidays; crowded planes, lots of not-very-experienced travelers, and the inevitable winter storm or two has never resulted in smooth travel experiences. Add to that airlines struggling to staff back up to passenger loads and then omicron comes ripping through their ranks…. The two folks I knew flying last week both got home a day late which, given all this, could’ve been a lot worse. Like being trapped in that 27-hour mess on I-95 in Northern Virginia. Definitely a reminder never to let yourself get below a quarter tank.</li><li>So while I haven’t been traveling, I <em>have</em> been travel <em>planning</em>, which is not unusual. January has traditionally been <em>the</em> big travel planning month; pack up the Christmas decorations, figure out where you want to go this year and then put in your time off requests. And because January is just the worst month of the year, at least in the upper Northern Hemisphere when it’s the coldest month of the year and the sun sets early; so you need something, anything to look forward to.</li><li>But COVID changed all that, of course, especially the planning timeline. We’ve talked in prior episodes how last-minute travel restrictions have made that planning timeline, what the travel industry calls the <em>booking window</em>, a lot shorter. Last year, in the January 2021 episode, I talked about having to make a last-minute pivot away from a San Diego trip I’d booked just the month before because California was still in their post-holiday lock down and not letting out-of-state visitors make hotel reservations.&nbsp;</li><li>I thought this year I’d revert back to the old patterns and do a bit more longer-term travel planning. Looking at <a href=\"https://www.kayak.com/flight-trends\">Kayak’s flight search trends</a>, where they now compare current flight search volumes to pre-pandemic levels, so comparing 2021 to 2019, seem to be an optimistic outlier because their search volumes have cratered vs. 2 year ago. Eyeballing their trend chart, I’d say it’s down something like 50%. Though switching over and looking at Google’s Hotel Insights page, I might not be too far out of the fat part of the curve; their hotel search trends seem to be recovering. Which sorta maps into our plans. In February, we’re driving down to Louisville rather than flying, giving the airlines a couple of months to unscramble their operations, and then getting on planes -- to New York in March, Santa Fe, NM in April, maybe DC in May. But for that February drive down I-65, across the frozen tundra of central Indiana, we’re definitely packing a couple of blankets -- and snacks -- and keeping the gas tank topped off just in case. News reports of that I-95 jam up talked about a Good Samaritan family going car to car, passing out oranges they were bringing back from Florida. Coming back from Louisville, I’m guessing any Good Samaritan would be going car to car with a couple bottles of bourbon and a sleeve of plastic shot glasses -- which is not a bad thing. Would definitely warm you up for at least a little bit.</li><li>Bridge Music —  <em>dazed </em>by Jeris (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/VJ_Memes/39456 Ft: airtone</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Last April, the Department of Homeland Security <a href=\"https://www.dhs.gov/real-id/news/2021/04/27/dhs-announces-extension-real-id-full-enforcement-deadline\">kicked the Real ID can down the road</a> -- again -- so now we have until May 2023 before we’ll need Real ID-compliant identification to get through a TSA checkpoint. We don’t <em>have</em> to get a Real ID driver’s license; <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/travel/security-screening/identification\">a passport or a Global Entry card</a> would work also. But, last month, since I had to visit the 5th Circle of Hell also known as the Dept of Motor Vehicles, to renew my expiring driver’s license, I figured I might as well get the Real ID version. And why not? In Illinois, the Real and non-Real ID driver\'s licenses cost the same, you go through the same lines…. The only difference was it took maybe an extra 3 minutes for them to scan in my social security card and the documents I used to prove my address. Which, if I’d kept in mind the Distributive Property of Cybersecurity, “Any data entered into a system will eventually be hacked and distributed on the dark web” -- I would’ve used something a bit more innocuous than my bank statement.&nbsp; But, I now have a driver’s license with a requisite gold start in the upper right corner just in case DHS is really serious this time about the Real ID deadline.</li><li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/10/podcast-182-more-covid-changes-words-that-mean-adventure/\">the last episode</a>, I talked about finishing up my Global Entry renewal. And so with that done, last week I sent my passport into the void that is the US Passport Agency for renewal. I don’t have any international travel planned right now, but I’m very uncomfortable to be without my passport. I don’t know why, but I am. And the discomfort is only amplified by the 8-11 week processing time the State Department is now quoting. It also reminded me that it’s been 10 years since my most embarrassing cock-up - letting my backpack with my son’s and my passports get stolen from the overhead rack of the train to Brussels airport. I told the whole story in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/05/20/podcast-98-stolen-luggage-restaurants-want-your-smartphone/\">episode #98</a>, about what a stupid, what I called “the rookie-est of rookie mistakes” it was, and how it could’ve been worse, but for the very pleasant and helpful Brussels airport police and US Embassy staff, and that my son and I then got in a couple extra days of Belgian beer drinking.&nbsp; Lesson learned, though; I’ve kept my passport on my person when traveling ever since.</li><li>It’s funny, sometimes, how travel can prepare you for things back home. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/10/28/podcast-180-tracking-covid-travel-requirements-cycling-thru-puglia/\">episode #180</a>, talking about our travels through Italy, I walked through what were back then the most stringent vaccine passport requirements around; you need to show an EU Green Pass on your phone or, for us, our CDC vaccination cards to get into restaurants, bars, airports, train stations,.... And so when Chicago started doing the same thing on January 1st, we were ready. In some ways Chicago is easier than Italy -- showing a picture of my CDC card is quicker than waiting for someone to scan a QR code; but here, and New York City and Washington, DC, we’ve added the extra step -- having to show a picture ID that matches to the vax card. We didn’t have to do that in Italy. You know, if I hadn’t had to send my passport in, maybe I’d just do what I did in Italy, carry my CDC card in my passport; I could pull ‘em both out in one hopefully suave and graceful move and be done with it.</li><li>Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/11/13/podcast-181-travel-potpourri-2021-travelers-gift-guide/\">November episode</a>, I said that I’d already gotten status roll-overs from Marriott, Hilton, and IHG, extending my current level in their frequent sleeper programs for the third time -- now they expire in February or March 2023. I figured that was the end of it, so when I received a note from Southwest in mid-December with the subject line “Surprise: A-List status extended,” it was pretty accurate. I was very surprised! I hadn’t expected any airlines to extend status; they all seemed to be lowering the qualification clip levels instead. So, thanks Southwest! I’ll be using this status on my flights to LGA and ABQ -- also because I still have some 2020 pandemic cancellation credits that are about to hit their disappearing 2-year birthday. Any chance you can extend that expiration data too?</li><li>Just to spin the propeller on top of the travel tech beanie hat for a sec…. Over the past couple of trips, I’ve noticed my briefcase/messenger bag has finally passed a tipping point -- I now have more electronic devices needing a newer USB-C cord than an original USB-A cord. (I told you this would be a propeller spin). The USB-C cord invasion started with the iPhone 11 Pro; another cord to carry, but it occasionally came in handy, like when Hertz gave me a birthday upgrade a few years back to a Mercedes A220; it only had the smaller USB-C plugs. But the invasion picked up speed with each upgrade -- first it was my new Bose headphones, then when I upgraded my battery pack, my power bank; then again when I got my MacBook Air, and again squared when I got a pair of cheap Anker earbuds last Prime Day. Which led me, finally, to replacing my dual USB-A power adapter for one with two USB-C plugs and one USB-A for my old Samsung tablet that just won’t die. But I still have to carry an old iPhone USB-A cord for those times when all that’s left on the Hertz lot is a 3-year old Chevy Malibu.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music —  <em>dazed </em>by Jeris (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/VJ_Memes/39456 Ft: airtone</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>COVID Test Anxiety</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A friend of mine said he wanted to get together this month. “Sure,” I said, “but if we can’t, we’ll be together for a weekend in February in Louisville at a wedding.” “Uh, no,” he said, “I’m not going.” “Why not?” “I’m going to isolate, kinda like a soft quarantine in February, don’t go outside except to walk the dog so I don’t screw up my trip to Egypt. It’s non-refundable, so I’ll be out a lot of money if I test positive for COVID before leaving and can’t go.”</li><li>And last month, in early December, right when everyone was tightening travel restrictions in what turned out to be a futile effort to keep omicron out of their country, another friend cancelled a long-planned trip to Scotland. “I just don’t want to get trapped, away from home,” he said.</li><li>COVID test anxiety. I understand it, especially around test-on-arrival rules. The week before our flight to London in November, I got a text from my doctor group -- time to get your COVID booster. I clicked through to the appointment website, started looking at slots, but then stopped. I have to take a COVID test by our second day in London. What if that spike of antibodies from the booster lingers long enough to turn that test positive? I clicked onto the next page of the website and booked my booster for December, after we got back home.</li><li>As I mentioned in the last episode, we tested negative on our test in London and went about our vacation. But as we got close to our return date, that anxiety crept back in. This was before the US tightened the testing window, so we took our Abbott tests 2 days before departure, both to give us some wiggle room, some time to retest if one came up positive, but also to calm those worries. I remember on that trip talking to an American guy in the elevator of our hotel in London. He had an Abbott rapid test sticking out of his briefcase. “Getting ready to head home?” I asked. “No,” he said, “I just test myself every 2 days.” I kinda laughed at that, thinking it was a bit over-rotation. But thinking back on it now, maybe he had it right -- test yourself every couple of days to relieve that uncertainty rather than waiting for the night before departure.</li><li>But even that might not be enough. I tweeted out <a href=\"https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/covid-in-koh-samui-its-scary-0hs7h0pk9\">an article</a> from the UK Times newspaper written by a guy who visited Thailand last month. The article starts “On December 19, after a week of near-hourly negative lateral flow and PCR tests, I flew to Thailand.” The next sentence (you know where this is going): “On December 20 I stepped off the plane, took another PCR, and headed to my hotel. The next morning I received a text informing me I had tested positive.” And then he tells the story of his 10 days of solo isolation in a Thai hospital. He did everything right and it still went wrong.</li><li>One big anxiety driver is the cost for those extra days quarantined in a hotel somewhere. This should be the kind of risk that trip insurance could help you manage. So I rang up Michael Giusti, senior writer at InsuranceQuotes.com -- he was with us on episode #173 last March, talking about travel insurance one year after the pandemic lockdowns -- to ask him about this.</li><li>Bridge Music —  <em>dazed </em>by Jeris (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/VJ_Memes/39456 Ft: airtone</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Michelin Food Adventures</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Last month, I picked up on the buzz around a blogger’s <a href=\"https://everywhereist.com/2021/12/bros-restaurant-lecce-we-eat-at-the-worst-michelin-starred-restaurant-ever/\">brutal review</a> of a 1-star Michelin restaurant in Italy. It initially caught my eye because Irene and I like to hit a Michelin star or two when we’re traveling. Indeed, a 1-star place called <a href=\"https://www.behindrestaurant.co.uk/\"><em>Behind</em></a> as in “ it’s an open kitchen so there’s nothing to hide behind” got us figuring out how to get from central London to Hackney, a neighborhood we would’ve had no reason to explore otherwise. It was a great lunch; a great experience talking to the chef, and it\'s going on my final Best of 2021 list -- which is on my to-do list to update right after I finish this podcast. Having said that, we’ve also had some meals that weren’t great, like our 25th anniversary dinner at a 3-star place in Florence, or a 2-star in Spain that we loved -- until the next morning when we both came down with food poisoning. But on balance, we’ve had more really good meals than bad, and they’ve often taken us out of the travel bubble to parts of cities we wouldn’t normally go -- kinda like my microbrewery taprooms, only a <strong><em>lot</em></strong> more expensive.</li><li>So when I saw the title “We Eat at The Worst Michelin Starred Restaurant, Ever,” it got my attention. First, what restaurant is it, so we can avoid it, and second, what made it the worst ever because that’s a big claim. But then I see the <em>full</em> title, with the restaurant, Bros in Lecce, Italy. We won’t be able to skip it because we ate there in mid-October, the night after our Puglia bike tour ended.&nbsp;</li><li>I read through the reviews and looked closely at the pictures. A couple of courses look familiar, but others -- like the now-famous (infamous?) grey foam oozing out of a plaster-looking replica of the chef’s mouth was (thankfully) not on our menu. I have to say that I was on the fence about eating at Bros when Irene brought it up when we were planning our Puglia trip. The reviews I could find were <em>very</em> mixed, and it wasn’t a cheap ticket. We decided to go, but with the understanding that it could be a high-variance meal, with some courses that might not work out. I think the oyster with rancid fat was that dish for Irene. I didn’t love it, but it didn’t trigger a gag reflex like it did for Irene. Certainly not what you hope for, and it was only that dish, the rest was fine. But like I said, we went into Bros eye wide open, expecting an edgy experimental food experience -- and definitely not a standard 3-course fine dining Italian meal. We walked out thinking “Well, that was interesting” -- not bad, but not the worst 1-star meal I’ve had; probably in the bottom quartile, though. As you might guess, Bros <em>won’t</em> make it on that Best of 2021 list update.</li><li>So why didn’t this blogger, a James Beard-award winning writer, come in with similar expectations? Who knows, though we do know that outrage porn drives clicks which, for her, also drove some high-profile TV interviews which probably helped move a few copies of her book. And, since no publicity is bad publicity, I’m guessing it was <a href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/23/world/europe/bros-restaurant-review.html\">a net positive for the restaurant</a> too.</li><li>But why pay what was about a lot of money for a meal that I think might be a complete train wreck? I walked past a lot of places in Lecce that I know would put a good meal down in front of us for a lot less. It becomes a bit less about food and a bit more about the experience; less about stomach and more about the brain. It reminded me of something Josh Glenn said in the last episode when I was talking with him about the language of adventure<ul><li>Josh: I mean an adventure is, and that word comes from the Latin meaning <em>to arrive unexpectedly</em>. That\'s actually really an important philosophical piece for me as I was going through this, the idea that you can have a trip is not an adventure if nothing unexpected happens and if you don\'t take enough risks to allow things unexpected to happen.<br><br>So for example, the word chance comes from the Latin <em>cadentia </em>meaning <em>falling</em>. So just when we think about how we use the words of “let the chips fall where they may” or “something befalls you”, this idea of having our feet off the ground, falling through space, we can\'t grasp anything, what do you do with that? If you’re someone who likes, in some kind of existential way, that feeling of falling, then you\'re an adventurer. You\'re going to get more out of your travel experiences than someone who wants everything to be exactly the same way every time and never have any hiccups.</li></ul></li><li>I always say to Irene “If every meal we have is a great one, then we’re not trying enough weird places.” After food poisoning has befallen you a couple times, how bad can a little rancid fat be?</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #183</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_183.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #183 — COVID Test Anxiety; Michelin Food Adventures','','inherit','closed','closed','','4063-revision-v1','','','2022-01-15 13:46:57','2022-01-15 18:46:57','',4063,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4066',0,'revision','',0),
(4067,1,'2022-01-15 13:48:32','2022-01-15 18:48:32','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/JPEG-image.jpeg\"><img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/JPEG-image-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"COVID rapid test results\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> Cleared to Adventure[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Back in front of the microphone after a two-week trip to the UK, getting back home just before the new <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/omicron-covid-travel-international-11638216229?st=sm0fcotd0jfju1i&amp;reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink\">Omicron travel restrictions</a> hit. We talk about getting to London, surfing the waves of changing travel requirements, a new way to renew Global Entry, moan a bit more about the inexorable advance of the cashless society, and finish up talking with <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_Glenn\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Josh Glenn</a> about his new book <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3lSNcwg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">The Adventurer\'s Glossary</a></em>.  All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_182.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #182: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois a couple of weeks since getting back from two weeks in the UK -- a week in London and a week of hiking in Southern Wales. Had really great weather for the back half of November -- brisk temperatures, but more sun than we expected; certainly a bit windy when walking the cliffs above the Atlantic, but nothing that we couldn’t layer up for; and only one day of real rain. It was a lot better than the weather forecasts had led us to expect.</li><li>The trip over and back was pretty uneventful. I’d hit American on a mileage sale back in March for direct flights between ORD and LHR. We flew coach on a Triple 7 that was pretty empty on the way over. People were popping up the armrests in the 4-seat center section and laying down to sleep. One guy even built a little tent out of blankets to cover his head. I’m not sure if he was trying to block the cabin lights or maybe he was concerned people walking down the aisles would breathe on him while he slept (though mask discipline was very solid) or maybe <em>he</em> wanted to drop <em>his</em> mask while he slept and didn’t want to get called out by the flight attendants. Whatever his deal was, it looked a little weird.</li><li>I ate dinner on that flight even though I’d eaten a cubano sandwich at Tortas Frontera, my favorite ORD restaurant, right before boarding. I took the meal not because I was hungry but because it gave me an excuse to drop my mask for a little bit on that 8-hr flight. Rather than the “replace your mask between bites and sips” rules that I heard on domestic flights this year, on my international flights over the past couple of months, most everyone takes off their mask for the duration of the meal. I don’t know if this difference comes from emptier planes, longer flights, or that international fliers are less likely to try to get around mask rules (and, purely my own experience, I haven’t seen any passenger pushback on masks on any of my international flights, whereas I was seeing/hearing a lot of it on domestic flights earlier this year), but I appreciate the flexibility/pragmatism (?) on these long flights.</li><li>While the plane wasn’t full, I was worried about passport control when we got to Heathrow. There’s always a bit of suspense anyways as you make the long walk from the plane to passport control. Did a whole bunch of Triple 7’s disgorge at the same time, let alone some massive A-380’s? Did the immigration force botch their workforce scheduling up? Will we flow smoothly into the immigration hall or will our march suddenly stop short?&nbsp; Worse, will we smack into one of those Heathrow e-gate failures that has caused 2-4 hour queues over the past couple of months?&nbsp;</li><li>We kept moving, but then came to a sudden stop as we made the final turn toward the hall. Looking around the line, I could see the room wasn’t jammed -- good sign. It looked like they’d paused us for a minute while they rejiggered their cowpen zig-zag line. After a minute or two, we started moving again, and at a pretty good clip with almost everyone getting pointed to the automated e-gates. I walked up, put my passport on the reader, a camera box popped up, mechanically adjusted to my height, and then after what I assume was some facial recognition analysis, opened the gate and let me go to baggage claim. No “how long are you going to be in the country” quiz, which I didn’t miss, but also no stamp in my passport. How am I going to remember this trip for my next Global Entry renewal. Guess I’ll have to drink a beer or two while I’m here so it shows up on my Untappd history.</li><li>Bridge Music —  <em>dazed </em>by Jeris (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/VJ_Memes/39456 Ft: airtone</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Speaking of Global Entry, back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/10/28/podcast-180-tracking-covid-travel-requirements-cycling-thru-puglia/\">episode #180</a> at the end of October, I was still waiting for my renewal approval and compare my month-and-a-half and counting wait with listener Jerry Sarfati’s 2-day wait. Then, the day before we left for the UK, I got an email with the subject line “TTP (Trusted Traveler Program) Application Status Change” telling me to check the website for more information. Logging in, I saw that I’d been given conditional approval, so about 2 months from submitting my renewal application. I still had to do an interview, but if I was reading everything correctly, I had 12 months to get that done. I looked to see if ORD had an appointment available the day we were flying back from London, but no dice. The earliest appointment was mid-December. OK, I’ll think about it later. No rush; I have 12 months. But the next day, I got another email from dhs.gov telling me about a new program, Enrollment-On-Arrival, where I could knock out my interview while in the customs/immigration area coming back from an international trip, no appointment necessary. Perfect!</li><li>So that Monday afternoon after a quick pass-through the Global Entry kiosk, I went looking for Booth 58 which is where, according to the Enrollment-On-Arrival website, was where the ORD interviews would be. But it looked like getting to Booth 58 would mean standing in a long and growing line of non-US passengers. Ah, forget it. Again, I have 12 months to get this done. But the luggage carousel for our flight hadn’t even started turning yet, so I went up to one of the customs officers and asked her. She immediately pointed me to a guy in a booth completely separate from the rest of the immigration traffic, and in the complete opposite direction of Booth 58. There was one guy in front of me getting his interview, but by the time I stepped up to the officer, there was a family of 4 and two other people behind me. The interview took about 5 minutes. I walked out and our luggage carousel still wasn’t moving. By the end of the day, the TTP website showed my Global Entry was good for another 5 years. Full credit to DHS for coming up with ways to make Global Entry easier. I just wish they’d keep their website locator up-to-date.</li><li>In the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/11/13/podcast-181-travel-potpourri-2021-travelers-gift-guide/\">last episode</a>, we talked about how last year’s flurry of vaccination passport app announcements has pretty much turned out to be, in the words of Macbeth, “a tale, Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing” But American Airlines’ partnership with <a href=\"https://www.myverifly.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Verifly</a> did actually have a little something to it. I downloaded the app and, after wrestling through what is not the most intuitive interface, was able to see a list of the UK travel requirements and then validate that I met them, by uploading pictures of Irene’s and my vaccination cards and our passenger locator form QR codes. That’s nice, but what was better was when we checked in for our flight, all we had to do was show the agent the green “All good” screens for Irene and me and we were done. None of the fishing out the right forms and holding them up to the lucite screen. Two swipes on the phone and we were done. Nothing earth-shattering, but it does relieve the friction out of one part of the journey</li><li>A <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">recurring</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/08/24/podcast-178-what-remains-from-pandemic-times-best-restaurant-and-bars/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">topic</a> on the TravelCommons podcast is the move to a cashless society. And certainly the pandemic accelerated this with the push toward contactless transactions; nobody wanted to handle your possibly-infectious cash. On our first day in London, on our walk to pick up our COVID tests, I stopped at the first ATM I saw to pull out £100, just to have some cash in my wallet. I’m a bit old-school in that way. And I’m glad I did it because once we left London and were staying in small towns in South Wales, it was really tough to find an ATM. Now, this shouldn’t be that big a deal with everyone taking cards and contactless, be it a card or on the phone with Google or Apple Pay, doing away (mostly) with the need for a PIN or to sign anything. But in Wales, the parking lots at the base of our hikes, the pay-&amp;-display machines, weren’t taking my cards, either contactless or physical. And by the time we were in our last town, Hay-on-Wye, I’d run out of coins and needed to find an ATM. Google Maps was no help; it kept pointing me to phantom machines in little grocery stores. Irene had better luck in the tourist information center. The woman there gave us directions to what she said was the one remaining ATM in town -- which surprised me because Hay-on-Wye has a good bit of tourist traffic with their book festivals. But anyhow, we found it <em>and </em>it worked; it had cash. Of course, then we had to find something like a coffee shop that would take cash so we could break a bill and get coins for the machine, which knocked out any of the usual chains. Walking down the street, I found a place that looked indy enough -- the sign said “coffee shop” but it looked more like a thrift store. Sure enough, the guy was happy to take cash, though he had to pull out his wallet to make change.&nbsp;</li><li>We’ve talked about Hertz’s downward service spiral, which I forecasted in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/06/09/podcast-164-first-post-lockdown-trips-travel-credit-cards/\">episode #164</a> after their bankruptcy filing. But since I haven’t held back in slamming them for empty lots in Phoenix and San Diego, and for incorrect fuel charges, I need to give kudos to the Hertz location in Cardiff in Wales for what had to be, hands down, the easiest and therefore best Hertz transaction I’ve had in Europe. Leaving London for the Welsh hiking part of our trip, we decided to skip the fun and excitement of driving in London and instead took a train to Cardiff and then drove to the coast from there. The Hertz place was about a 10-min cab ride from the train station in a bit of an auto dealer row. I walked in, showed the woman my Illinois drivers license, she asked me if I’d be OK driving an automatic (how fast can I say “Yes!”), gave me a key, and pointed me to a grey Skoda in the back lot. Done; no hard upsell on enhanced insurance or refueling options, just “Here’s the key; have a good trip”. And then returning the car, I pulled in after gassing it up; the guy took a quick walk around it; had me sign his screen, and we were done. And nothing wonky when I looked at the emailed receipt. It’s sorta damning with faint praise that I’m so impressed when a transaction goes smoothly. It should always be this easy, but it rarely is.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a> or the <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram </a>account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music —  <em>A Thousand And None</em> by Speck (c) copyright 2018 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/speck/57256 Ft: Mr_Yesterday</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Yet More COVID Changes</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I mentioned in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/11/13/podcast-181-travel-potpourri-2021-travelers-gift-guide/\">last episode</a> that I was a little concerned about the logistics of getting COVID testing done by our second day in London. But it turned out fine. With a bit of Googling, I found <a href=\"https://covid.randox.com/day-2-test-at-home/\">Randox,</a> a big UK test firm, offering “click &amp; collect” rapid antigen tests for $25 a piece. It gave us a good reason, a destination for a post-arrival walk. It’s always good to spend a lot of time in the sunlight on that first day in Europe; I find it’s key to resetting my body clock. We did them in our hotel room the next morning. Yet more suspense -- waiting those 15 minutes, hoping that second pink line wouldn’t materialize, and then taking a picture of it in Randox’s app to get the “all clear” email back.</li><li>Of course, this was all pre-Omicron. That bombshell dropped the weekend before we flew home which had me back doing the rounds on Google, trying to figure out what travel requirements were changing. The UK quickly added pre-departure tests and shifted their Day 2 testing back to the more sensitive -- but 3 times more expensive -- PCR tests. But we were already in the UK. What mattered to us getting back to Chicago. The communications out of the US were less clear; mostly rumors; nothing official. The rumors were: tightening the window on pre-departure tests -- from 72 hours to 24 hours before departure, which could’ve been a problem for us; we’d already done the Abbott rapid antigen tests we’d brought from home Saturday afternoon before Monday morning departure. And adding a post-arrival test, similar to the UK’s. But the worst rumor was requiring a 7-day quarantine <em>even with</em> a negative test. Lucky for us, none of these US rumors came true -- at least by the Monday morning of our flight.&nbsp;</li><li>It wasn’t until later in the week the new rules were announced and it seems that folks had come to their senses a bit. The only rumor that came true was tightening the testing window down to 1 day. Well, that and extending the airplane mask requirement to March 2022, but as I said back in September in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/09/27/podcast-179-high-tech-airport-lines-business-travel-still-missing/\">episode #179</a>, I don’t think that was a surprise to anyone. Going to a 1-day window just reinforces the case for bringing a rapid antigen test with you. The only caveat is that the test has to be done in concert with a telehealth call to validate it’s actually you doing the test and the results are really negative. Coming home from Italy and the UK, Irene and I used <a href=\"https://www.emed.com/products/covid-at-home-testkit-six-pack?hsLang=en\">Abbott BinaxNow tests</a> with telehealth sessions from eMed. Depending on how many you buy (2, 3 or 6-pack), the cost per test ranges from $25 to $35, which is pretty competitive with the prices I saw for airport same-day testing services and it’s a helluva lot more convenient. Though as I recommended in this year’s <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-to-survive-post-pandemic-travel/\">travelers gift guide</a>, some sort of smartphone tripod comes in handy when the eMed guy wants to watch you swirl the cotton swab in your nose and then insert it into the test kit. Not sure how you’d do all that one-handed.</li><li>I hate the term “the new normal”, but perhaps, at least for the near term, we have to think about changes in COVID restrictions the same way we think about storms, terrorism, and strikes -- work to avoid them, but be flexible, agile enough to deal with it if you get caught. Now no analogy is perfect. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/04/22/podcast-150-travel-interruptus/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #150 — Travel Interruptus\">episode #150</a>, I told the story of how a bomb threat on the train line into Paris caused us to our flight home. It’s a lot easier to accept a couple of bonus days in Paris than an unplanned quarantine week in an airport Holiday Inn.</li><li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<em>Foolish Game</em>&nbsp;by copperhead (c) 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/copperhead/46390 Ft: Snowflake,Sackjo22 </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Words We Use for Adventure</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>We know that words impact the ways we think, feel, experience things -- including travel. Josh Glenn, a Boston-based author and semiotician (semiotics, the study of signs, symbols, and language, and how they create meaning) has just published a book <em><a href=\"https://www.hilobrow.com/2021/09/28/the-adventurers-glossary/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">The Adventurer’s Glossary</a></em>, with some 500 words associated with adventure. And since going on an adventure often involves travel, I wanted to talk to Josh about his book and how the words that we use to describe adventure could affect how we think about travel.<ul><li>Mark: Josh, how do you read <em>The Adventurer’s Glossary</em>?&nbsp; It\'s an alphabetical list of words, terms, and their not-quite-Oxford-Dictionary definitions. They’re really more stories than definitions. Should I start at the top (0-Dark-Hundred is the first entry) and work my way through? Or just randomly riff through the pages, open it, put my finger down and read something?</li><li>Josh: It’s sort of a capricious decision to alphabetize all these terms because that just completely put them out of order. So all of the travel terms are not together, and all of the military terms are not together, and the stuff I got from hip hop or gaming culture or adventure literature, none of them are grouped together. It could just be something you pick up and randomly browse through. It\'s absolutely okay. However, as much as possible, I did try to edit it in such a way that if you were reading it from beginning to end it would kind of make sense in that direction as well. So if there\'s a little bit of beginning to end stuff in it, but really it\'s read randomly.</li><li>Mark: How did you choose which words to include? It\'s a pretty wide-ranging list. You’ve got bottle, hair, stoic, as well as the stuff that I would normally associate with adventure like bug-out bag, roam, and voyageur.</li><li>Josh: This is the third glossary that I\'ve done. I did one back in 2008 called <em>The Idler’s Glossary</em> which was all about basically how much I hate having a regular job and enjoy doing things that look like you\'re doing nothing from the outside but actually, it might be very rich and deep what you\'re doing. And then I did another book called<em> The Wage Slave’s Glossary</em>, which was about how much I hate my job. And I was working at the Boston Globe at the time. Actually, a job I kind of liked, but I just don\'t like having bosses and it was all about the horrible jargon of the workplace. Basically, these are topics I\'ve been interested in for many, many years and I just started gathering words as I also read a lot of adventure novels and watch a lot of adventure movies. So sort of gathering words that occurred to me over time. But then I also do really nerdy things like literally sit down and read through a slang dictionary or pick up a thesaurus and go look up the definitions and the etymology of every synonym for a certain word. So the list balloons; I think there\'s something like 500 words in this book.</li><li>Mark: So Josh, we think about adventure. Adventure often involves travel. Do you think that the language or the words that we use to describe adventure impact our expectations of how we travel?</li><li>Josh: The language of our culture helps shape and guide the way we are able to perceive and think about anything including adventure and travel. We can\'t think outside of this kind of structure of language that we have. I mean an adventure is, and that word comes from the Latin meaning to arrive unexpectedly. That\'s actually really an important philosophical piece for me as I was going through this, the idea that you can have a trip is not an adventure if nothing unexpected happens and if you don\'t take enough risks to allow things unexpected to happen. So when I think back to the amazing road trips I took when I was in college with my friends around the country, it\'s all kind of a blur. I don\'t really remember a lot of specific details except when something went wrong -- when we broke down in the middle of the highway on a mountain in Colorado and we had to go to a small town and have people that help us get parts and explore that town and meet the locals and almost get beat up etcetera, etcetera. That\'s an adventure. Something unexpected happened and it\'s very, very memorable. Those are the memories that you cherish later.</li><li>Mark: I think that\'s probably where travel stories come from are more of the things that you didn\'t expect, more of the hiccups. God only knows on this podcast, most of the stories that I\'ll tell have come from things that went sideways, not things that went well.</li><li>Josh: It\'s so interesting to think more about how that\'s really baked right into our language. So for example, the word chance comes from the Latin <em>cadentia </em>meaning <em>falling</em>. So just when we think about how we use the words of “let the chips fall where they may” or “something befalls you”, this idea of having our feet off the ground, falling through space, we can\'t grasp anything, what do you do with that? If you’re someone who likes, in some kind of existential way, that feeling of falling, then you\'re an adventurer. You\'re going to get more out of your travel experiences than someone who wants everything to be exactly the same way every time and never have any hiccups.</li><li>Mark: In a prior episode, we talked with <a href=\"https://emilythomaswrites.co.uk/about/\">Emily Thomas</a>, philosophy professor at Durham University in the UK, and she wrote a book <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/2DO07fV\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">The Meaning of Travel</a></em>. And one of the things that we got talking about was this idea of travel giving you a sense of otherness, so taking you out of your comfort zone and putting you in the middle of something different ,and what you experience out of that, both from where you are as well as within yourself. And I think about that a little bit, as you think about, you\'re putting yourself into a potential adventure. You don\'t know where you\'re going, you\'re just putting yourself into a situation and figuring it out.</li><li>Josh: I like how you\'re saying “put yourself into... “ Of course, another aspect of adventure is getting yourself out of the ordinary.</li><li>Mark: Yes, getting you out of that small town without getting your ass kicked.</li><li>Josh: Yeah, getting out of your routine, getting out of your small town, getting out of the kind of the spell that the quotidian everyday life casts on us, this kind of enchantment or bewitchment where you just want, you just expect everything to be the same all the time. Travel is one of the great ways, you know historically, traveling to other cultures and seeing the world, seeing how people live in other places. These are great ways to kind of break that spell of enchantment that every day puts on us.</li><li>Mark: Josh, the act of travel has come under pressure of late. Pre-pandemic that was starting to see a thread of travels perhaps of frivolous luxury that was killing the planet through carbon emissions and global warming, maybe overcrowding of specific places like Machu Picchu or Angkor Wat. And now in the time of Covid, there seems another riff which is -- travel is a selfish act because it hastens the spread of coronavirus around the world. How do we square this? How do we square these concepts of travel being negative with the need for adventure, that need for escape and the ability therefore to find ourselves?</li><li>Josh: You can\'t entirely square, I do think that there is some truth to those criticisms. We shouldn\'t be spreading disease and we shouldn\'t be destroying the planet by unnecessary travel. But then the question is “what\'s necessary and how often do we do it?” Maybe if you’re somebody who travels 100 times a year, maybe that\'s too much. But maybe if you travel once a year, that\'s not enough. But I do think that for me anyway, during Covid, I didn\'t travel really at all outside of Boston, New Hampshire and Vermont, but I traveled widely through reading adventure novels, watching movies and Google Streets where you can walk around inside the Sistine Chapel remotely. Of course these are not as good -- just the same as Zoom calls are not the same as being in the same room with someone. It\'s not as soul nourishing, you don\'t get as much out of it. You\'re not really experiencing the whole context that you get when you travel, but you can have sort of armchair adventures to some extent that helps square that circle. But yeah, there\'s no right answer to that.</li><li>Mark: Yeah, absolutely. Josh, as you think about <em>The Adventure’s Glossary</em>, how should people think about it, take it, enjoy it?</li><li>Josh: I hope that word nerds will enjoy it just on its own merits. However, there is kind of a secret philosophy woven through this alphabetized list of words, which is this idea that adventure is something that we should seek. We should try to break out of the ordinary and see things in a new way and expand our horizons, whether it\'s through actual literal travel or other ways, and that there are certain qualities that we need to cultivate in ourselves to be good adventurers. Whether that\'s a sense of humor, whether that\'s wit, whether that\'s courage, grit and so forth. These are all the kinds of things that I\'ve tried to express through this book, which from the outside might just look like a fun, slightly frivolous word nerd book.</li><li>Mark: Josh Glenn, thanks very much for joining us on the TravelCommons podcast. We\'ll put a link to <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3lSNcwg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">The Adventurer’s Glossary</a></em> so people can find it.</li><li>Josh: Thank you for having me and happy travels to all your listeners.</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #182</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_182.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #182 — More COVID Changes; Words That Mean Adventure','','inherit','closed','closed','','4020-revision-v1','','','2022-01-15 13:48:32','2022-01-15 18:48:32','',4020,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4067',0,'revision','',0),
(4068,1,'2022-01-16 12:04:14','2022-01-16 17:04:14','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/IMG_3929-scaled.jpeg\"><img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/IMG_3929-300x300.jpeg\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> Cleared to Adventure[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Back in front of the microphone after a two-week trip to the UK, getting back home just before the new <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/omicron-covid-travel-international-11638216229?st=sm0fcotd0jfju1i&amp;reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink\">Omicron travel restrictions</a> hit. We talk about getting to London, surfing the waves of changing travel requirements, a new way to renew Global Entry, moan a bit more about the inexorable advance of the cashless society, and finish up talking with <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_Glenn\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Josh Glenn</a> about his new book <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3lSNcwg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">The Adventurer\'s Glossary</a></em>.  All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_183.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #182: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. Hope everyone had a great New Year’s. No travel since the last episode, which has turned out to be a good thing given the, what?, two weeks straight of over 1,000 cancelled flights a day. I’ve always tried to avoid traveling during the Christmas holidays; crowded planes, lots of not-very-experienced travelers, and the inevitable winter storm or two has never resulted in smooth travel experiences. Add to that airlines struggling to staff back up to passenger loads and then omicron comes ripping through their ranks…. The two folks I knew flying last week both got home a day late which, given all this, could’ve been a lot worse. Like being trapped in that 27-hour mess on I-95 in Northern Virginia. Definitely a reminder never to let yourself get below a quarter tank.</li><li>So while I haven’t been traveling, I <em>have</em> been travel <em>planning</em>, which is not unusual. January has traditionally been <em>the</em> big travel planning month; pack up the Christmas decorations, figure out where you want to go this year and then put in your time off requests. And because January is just the worst month of the year, at least in the upper Northern Hemisphere when it’s the coldest month of the year and the sun sets early; so you need something, anything to look forward to.</li><li>But COVID changed all that, of course, especially the planning timeline. We’ve talked in prior episodes how last-minute travel restrictions have made that planning timeline, what the travel industry calls the <em>booking window</em>, a lot shorter. Last year, in the January 2021 episode, I talked about having to make a last-minute pivot away from a San Diego trip I’d booked just the month before because California was still in their post-holiday lock down and not letting out-of-state visitors make hotel reservations. </li><li>I thought this year I’d revert back to the old patterns and do a bit more longer-term travel planning. Looking at <a href=\"https://www.kayak.com/flight-trends\">Kayak’s flight search trends</a>, where they now compare current flight search volumes to pre-pandemic levels, so comparing 2021 to 2019, seem to be an optimistic outlier because their search volumes have cratered vs. 2 year ago. Eyeballing their trend chart, I’d say it’s down something like 50%. Though switching over and looking at Google’s Hotel Insights page, I might not be too far out of the fat part of the curve; their hotel search trends seem to be recovering. Which sorta maps into our plans. In February, we’re driving down to Louisville rather than flying, giving the airlines a couple of months to unscramble their operations, and then getting on planes -- to New York in March, Santa Fe, NM in April, maybe DC in May. But for that February drive down I-65, across the frozen tundra of central Indiana, we’re definitely packing a couple of blankets -- and snacks -- and keeping the gas tank topped off just in case. News reports of that I-95 jam up talked about a Good Samaritan family going car to car, passing out oranges they were bringing back from Florida. Coming back from Louisville, I’m guessing any Good Samaritan would be going car to car with a couple bottles of bourbon and a sleeve of plastic shot glasses -- which is not a bad thing. Would definitely warm you up for at least a little bit.</li><li>Bridge Music —  Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the new TravelCommons studios <em>in</em> Chicago, IL. The move went surprisingly smoothly -- nothing lost, nothing destroyed on the 20-mile trip in from the western suburbs. Have the production bay rebuilt and now trying out the new studio set-up, so we’ll see how this sounds. </li><li>Which also means I haven’t done much travel since the last episode; just a quick trip last week down to Nashville. But the move downtown meant I had to rethink some of my travel patterns -- not how to get to and from Nashville, but how to get to and from Chicago Midway airport. We’ve said before in many episodes, most (all?) frequent travelers are all about optimizing the standard parts of their journey -- what’s the most efficient way to get to the airport, when to leave -- optimizing the trade-off between sleep and getting to the gate when status pre-boarding is announced. In the old digs, I had a pretty predictable 25-30 minute drive to either O’Hare or Midway, and long-term relationship with a dependable driver. Which meant answering the “when do I need leave for the airport” question was a mindless exercise -- subtract 90 minutes from the departure time and send a text to my guy the night before. But now it’s a kinda predictable 60-minute public transit ride or a very unpredictable 35-60-minute Uber/Lyft ride with even more unpredictable wait times and surge pricing, especially when catching a morning flight. Actually, for this 3-day trip, I think it would’ve been cheaper to drive and park, even with the City of Chicago’s latest parking taxes.</li><li>The Southwest flights between Midway and Nashville were a bit odd because the pilots kept everyone in their seats for the entire flight due to “expected turbulence” - of which there was absolutely none. Though I thought it was interesting that the pilot on our return trip said “We may ask our flight attendants to remain seated so we can fly faster and pick up some time.” It’s an hour-and-20-minute flight, so not too long to stay seated as long as you didn’t drop a couple of beers at the bar right before boarding. But it also meant I didn’t get a chance to use some of the free drink coupons Southwest sent me last month. I should’ve followed the advice of a Nashville Airport billboard that was posted right above the Southwest gate -- “Before Wheels Up, Whiskey up.”</li><li>Bridge Music —  <em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/content/Per/Per_-_DLDN_Instrumental.mp3\" target=\"_blank\">DLDN Instrumental</a></em> by St Paul</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Last April, the Department of Homeland Security <a href=\"https://www.dhs.gov/real-id/news/2021/04/27/dhs-announces-extension-real-id-full-enforcement-deadline\">kicked the Real ID can down the road</a> -- again -- so now we have until May 2023 before we’ll need Real ID-compliant identification to get through a TSA checkpoint. We don’t <em>have</em> to get a Real ID driver’s license; <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/travel/security-screening/identification\">a passport or a Global Entry card</a> would work also. But, last month, since I had to visit the 5th Circle of Hell also known as the Dept of Motor Vehicles, to renew my expiring driver’s license, I figured I might as well get the Real ID version. And why not? In Illinois, the Real and non-Real ID driver\'s licenses cost the same, you go through the same lines…. The only difference was it took maybe an extra 3 minutes for them to scan in my social security card and the documents I used to prove my address. Which, if I’d kept in mind the Distributive Property of Cybersecurity, “Any data entered into a system will eventually be hacked and distributed on the dark web” -- I would’ve used something a bit more innocuous than my bank statement.  But, I now have a driver’s license with a requisite gold start in the upper right corner just in case DHS is really serious this time about the Real ID deadline.</li><li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/10/podcast-182-more-covid-changes-words-that-mean-adventure/\">the last episode</a>, I talked about finishing up my Global Entry renewal. And so with that done, last week I sent my passport into the void that is the US Passport Agency for renewal. I don’t have any international travel planned right now, but I’m very uncomfortable to be without my passport. I don’t know why, but I am. And the discomfort is only amplified by the 8-11 week processing time the State Department is now quoting. It also reminded me that it’s been 10 years since my most embarrassing cock-up - letting my backpack with my son’s and my passports get stolen from the overhead rack of the train to Brussels airport. I told the whole story in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/05/20/podcast-98-stolen-luggage-restaurants-want-your-smartphone/\">episode #98</a>, about what a stupid, what I called “the rookie-est of rookie mistakes” it was, and how it could’ve been worse, but for the very pleasant and helpful Brussels airport police and US Embassy staff, and that my son and I then got in a couple extra days of Belgian beer drinking.  Lesson learned, though; I’ve kept my passport on my person when traveling ever since.</li><li>It’s funny, sometimes, how travel can prepare you for things back home. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/10/28/podcast-180-tracking-covid-travel-requirements-cycling-thru-puglia/\">episode #180</a>, talking about our travels through Italy, I walked through what were back then the most stringent vaccine passport requirements around; you need to show an EU Green Pass on your phone or, for us, our CDC vaccination cards to get into restaurants, bars, airports, train stations,.... And so when Chicago started doing the same thing on January 1st, we were ready. In some ways Chicago is easier than Italy -- showing a picture of my CDC card is quicker than waiting for someone to scan a QR code; but here, and New York City and Washington, DC, we’ve added the extra step -- having to show a picture ID that matches to the vax card. We didn’t have to do that in Italy. You know, if I hadn’t had to send my passport in, maybe I’d just do what I did in Italy, carry my CDC card in my passport; I could pull ‘em both out in one hopefully suave and graceful move and be done with it.</li><li>Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/11/13/podcast-181-travel-potpourri-2021-travelers-gift-guide/\">November episode</a>, I said that I’d already gotten status roll-overs from Marriott, Hilton, and IHG, extending my current level in their frequent sleeper programs for the third time -- now they expire in February or March 2023. I figured that was the end of it, so when I received a note from Southwest in mid-December with the subject line “Surprise: A-List status extended,” it was pretty accurate. I was very surprised! I hadn’t expected any airlines to extend status; they all seemed to be lowering the qualification clip levels instead. So, thanks Southwest! I’ll be using this status on my flights to LGA and ABQ -- also because I still have some 2020 pandemic cancellation credits that are about to hit their disappearing 2-year birthday. Any chance you can extend that expiration data too?</li><li>Just to spin the propeller on top of the travel tech beanie hat for a sec…. Over the past couple of trips, I’ve noticed my briefcase/messenger bag has finally passed a tipping point -- I now have more electronic devices needing a newer USB-C cord than an original USB-A cord. (I told you this would be a propeller spin). The USB-C cord invasion started with the iPhone 11 Pro; another cord to carry, but it occasionally came in handy, like when Hertz gave me a birthday upgrade a few years back to a Mercedes A220; it only had the smaller USB-C plugs. But the invasion picked up speed with each upgrade -- first it was my new Bose headphones, then when I upgraded my battery pack, my power bank; then again when I got my MacBook Air, and again squared when I got a pair of cheap Anker earbuds last Prime Day. Which led me, finally, to replacing my dual USB-A power adapter for one with two USB-C plugs and one USB-A for my old Samsung tablet that just won’t die. But I still have to carry an old iPhone USB-A cord for those times when all that’s left on the Hertz lot is a 3-year old Chevy Malibu.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music —  <em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/content/oldDog/oldDog_-_Goodbye_sooner_or_later.mp3\" target=\"_blank\">Goodbye Sooner or Later</a></em> by oldDog</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>COVID Test Anxiety</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A friend of mine said he wanted to get together this month. “Sure,” I said, “but if we can’t, we’ll be together for a weekend in February in Louisville at a wedding.” “Uh, no,” he said, “I’m not going.” “Why not?” “I’m going to isolate, kinda like a soft quarantine in February, don’t go outside except to walk the dog so I don’t screw up my trip to Egypt. It’s non-refundable, so I’ll be out a lot of money if I test positive for COVID before leaving and can’t go.”</li><li>And last month, in early December, right when everyone was tightening travel restrictions in what turned out to be a futile effort to keep omicron out of their country, another friend cancelled a long-planned trip to Scotland. “I just don’t want to get trapped, away from home,” he said.</li><li>COVID test anxiety. I understand it, especially around test-on-arrival rules. The week before our flight to London in November, I got a text from my doctor group -- time to get your COVID booster. I clicked through to the appointment website, started looking at slots, but then stopped. I have to take a COVID test by our second day in London. What if that spike of antibodies from the booster lingers long enough to turn that test positive? I clicked onto the next page of the website and booked my booster for December, after we got back home.</li><li>As I mentioned in the last episode, we tested negative on our test in London and went about our vacation. But as we got close to our return date, that anxiety crept back in. This was before the US tightened the testing window, so we took our Abbott tests 2 days before departure, both to give us some wiggle room, some time to retest if one came up positive, but also to calm those worries. I remember on that trip talking to an American guy in the elevator of our hotel in London. He had an Abbott rapid test sticking out of his briefcase. “Getting ready to head home?” I asked. “No,” he said, “I just test myself every 2 days.” I kinda laughed at that, thinking it was a bit over-rotation. But thinking back on it now, maybe he had it right -- test yourself every couple of days to relieve that uncertainty rather than waiting for the night before departure.</li><li>But even that might not be enough. I tweeted out <a href=\"https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/covid-in-koh-samui-its-scary-0hs7h0pk9\">an article</a> from the UK Times newspaper written by a guy who visited Thailand last month. The article starts “On December 19, after a week of near-hourly negative lateral flow and PCR tests, I flew to Thailand.” The next sentence (you know where this is going): “On December 20 I stepped off the plane, took another PCR, and headed to my hotel. The next morning I received a text informing me I had tested positive.” And then he tells the story of his 10 days of solo isolation in a Thai hospital. He did everything right and it still went wrong.</li><li>One big anxiety driver is the cost for those extra days quarantined in a hotel somewhere. This should be the kind of risk that trip insurance could help you manage. So I rang up Michael Giusti, senior writer at InsuranceQuotes.com -- he was with us on episode #173 last March, talking about travel insurance one year after the pandemic lockdowns -- to ask him about this.</li><li>Bridge Music —   <em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/content/Zapac/Zapac_-_Test_Drive.mp3\" target=\"_blank\">Test Drive</a> </em>by Zapac</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Michelin Food Adventures</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Last month, I picked up on the buzz around a blogger’s <a href=\"https://everywhereist.com/2021/12/bros-restaurant-lecce-we-eat-at-the-worst-michelin-starred-restaurant-ever/\">brutal review</a> of a 1-star Michelin restaurant in Italy. It initially caught my eye because Irene and I like to hit a Michelin star or two when we’re traveling. Indeed, a 1-star place called <a href=\"https://www.behindrestaurant.co.uk/\"><em>Behind</em></a> as in “ it’s an open kitchen so there’s nothing to hide behind” got us figuring out how to get from central London to Hackney, a neighborhood we would’ve had no reason to explore otherwise. It was a great lunch; a great experience talking to the chef, and it\'s going on my final Best of 2021 list -- which is on my to-do list to update right after I finish this podcast. Having said that, we’ve also had some meals that weren’t great, like our 25th anniversary dinner at a 3-star place in Florence, or a 2-star in Spain that we loved -- until the next morning when we both came down with food poisoning. But on balance, we’ve had more really good meals than bad, and they’ve often taken us out of the travel bubble to parts of cities we wouldn’t normally go -- kinda like my microbrewery taprooms, only a <strong><em>lot</em></strong> more expensive.</li><li>So when I saw the title “We Eat at The Worst Michelin Starred Restaurant, Ever,” it got my attention. First, what restaurant is it, so we can avoid it, and second, what made it the worst ever because that’s a big claim. But then I see the <em>full</em> title, with the restaurant, Bros in Lecce, Italy. We won’t be able to skip it because we ate there in mid-October, the night after our Puglia bike tour ended.&nbsp;</li><li>I read through the reviews and looked closely at the pictures. A couple of courses look familiar, but others -- like the now-famous (infamous?) grey foam oozing out of a plaster-looking replica of the chef’s mouth was (thankfully) not on our menu. I have to say that I was on the fence about eating at Bros when Irene brought it up when we were planning our Puglia trip. The reviews I could find were <em>very</em> mixed, and it wasn’t a cheap ticket. We decided to go, but with the understanding that it could be a high-variance meal, with some courses that might not work out. I think the oyster with rancid fat was that dish for Irene. I didn’t love it, but it didn’t trigger a gag reflex like it did for Irene. Certainly not what you hope for, and it was only that dish, the rest was fine. But like I said, we went into Bros eye wide open, expecting an edgy experimental food experience -- and definitely not a standard 3-course fine dining Italian meal. We walked out thinking “Well, that was interesting” -- not bad, but not the worst 1-star meal I’ve had; probably in the bottom quartile, though. As you might guess, Bros <em>won’t</em> make it on that Best of 2021 list update.</li><li>So why didn’t this blogger, a James Beard-award winning writer, come in with similar expectations? Who knows, though we do know that outrage porn drives clicks which, for her, also drove some high-profile TV interviews which probably helped move a few copies of her book. And, since no publicity is bad publicity, I’m guessing it was <a href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/23/world/europe/bros-restaurant-review.html\">a net positive for the restaurant</a> too.</li><li>But why pay what was about a lot of money for a meal that I think might be a complete train wreck? I walked past a lot of places in Lecce that I know would put a good meal down in front of us for a lot less. It becomes a bit less about food and a bit more about the experience; less about stomach and more about the brain. It reminded me of something Josh Glenn said in the last episode when I was talking with him about the language of adventure<ul><li>Josh: I mean an adventure is, and that word comes from the Latin meaning <em>to arrive unexpectedly</em>. That\'s actually really an important philosophical piece for me as I was going through this, the idea that you can have a trip is not an adventure if nothing unexpected happens and if you don\'t take enough risks to allow things unexpected to happen.<br><br>So for example, the word chance comes from the Latin <em>cadentia </em>meaning <em>falling</em>. So just when we think about how we use the words of “let the chips fall where they may” or “something befalls you”, this idea of having our feet off the ground, falling through space, we can\'t grasp anything, what do you do with that? If you’re someone who likes, in some kind of existential way, that feeling of falling, then you\'re an adventurer. You\'re going to get more out of your travel experiences than someone who wants everything to be exactly the same way every time and never have any hiccups.</li></ul></li><li>I always say to Irene “If every meal we have is a great one, then we’re not trying enough weird places.” After food poisoning has befallen you a couple times, how bad can a little rancid fat be?</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #183</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_183.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #183 — COVID Test Anxiety; Michelin Food Adventures','','inherit','closed','closed','','4063-revision-v1','','','2022-01-16 12:04:14','2022-01-16 17:04:14','',4063,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4068',0,'revision','',0),
(4069,1,'2022-01-16 12:09:51','2022-01-16 17:09:51','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/IMG_3929-scaled.jpeg\"><img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/IMG_3929-300x300.jpeg\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> Cleared to Adventure[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Back in front of the microphone after a two-week trip to the UK, getting back home just before the new <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/omicron-covid-travel-international-11638216229?st=sm0fcotd0jfju1i&amp;reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink\">Omicron travel restrictions</a> hit. We talk about getting to London, surfing the waves of changing travel requirements, a new way to renew Global Entry, moan a bit more about the inexorable advance of the cashless society, and finish up talking with <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_Glenn\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Josh Glenn</a> about his new book <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3lSNcwg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">The Adventurer\'s Glossary</a></em>.  All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_183.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #182: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. Hope everyone had a great New Year’s. No travel since the last episode, which has turned out to be a good thing given the, what?, two weeks straight of over 1,000 cancelled flights a day. I’ve always tried to avoid traveling during the Christmas holidays; crowded planes, lots of not-very-experienced travelers, and the inevitable winter storm or two has never resulted in smooth travel experiences. Add to that airlines struggling to staff back up to passenger loads and then omicron comes ripping through their ranks…. The two folks I knew flying last week both got home a day late which, given all this, could’ve been a lot worse. Like being trapped in that 27-hour mess on I-95 in Northern Virginia. Definitely a reminder never to let yourself get below a quarter tank.</li><li>So while I haven’t been traveling, I <em>have</em> been travel <em>planning</em>, which is not unusual. January has traditionally been <em>the</em> big travel planning month; pack up the Christmas decorations, figure out where you want to go this year and then put in your time off requests. And because January is just the worst month of the year, at least in the upper Northern Hemisphere when it’s the coldest month of the year and the sun sets early; so you need something, anything to look forward to.</li><li>But COVID changed all that, of course, especially the planning timeline. We’ve talked in prior episodes how last-minute travel restrictions have made that planning timeline, what the travel industry calls the <em>booking window</em>, a lot shorter. Last year, in the January 2021 episode, I talked about having to make a last-minute pivot away from a San Diego trip I’d booked just the month before because California was still in their post-holiday lock down and not letting out-of-state visitors make hotel reservations. </li><li>I thought this year I’d revert back to the old patterns and do a bit more longer-term travel planning. Looking at <a href=\"https://www.kayak.com/flight-trends\">Kayak’s flight search trends</a>, where they now compare current flight search volumes to pre-pandemic levels, so comparing 2021 to 2019, seem to be an optimistic outlier because their search volumes have cratered vs. 2 year ago. Eyeballing their trend chart, I’d say it’s down something like 50%. Though switching over and looking at Google’s Hotel Insights page, I might not be too far out of the fat part of the curve; their hotel search trends seem to be recovering. Which sorta maps into our plans. In February, we’re driving down to Louisville rather than flying, giving the airlines a couple of months to unscramble their operations, and then getting on planes -- to New York in March, Santa Fe, NM in April, maybe DC in May. But for that February drive down I-65, across the frozen tundra of central Indiana, we’re definitely packing a couple of blankets -- and snacks -- and keeping the gas tank topped off just in case. News reports of that I-95 jam up talked about a Good Samaritan family going car to car, passing out oranges they were bringing back from Florida. Coming back from Louisville, I’m guessing any Good Samaritan would be going car to car with a couple bottles of bourbon and a sleeve of plastic shot glasses -- which is not a bad thing. Would definitely warm you up for at least a little bit.</li><li>Bridge Music —  <em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/content/Per/Per_-_DLDN_Instrumental.mp3\" target=\"_blank\">DLDN Instrumental</a></em> by St Paul</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Last April, the Department of Homeland Security <a href=\"https://www.dhs.gov/real-id/news/2021/04/27/dhs-announces-extension-real-id-full-enforcement-deadline\">kicked the Real ID can down the road</a> -- again -- so now we have until May 2023 before we’ll need Real ID-compliant identification to get through a TSA checkpoint. We don’t <em>have</em> to get a Real ID driver’s license; <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/travel/security-screening/identification\">a passport or a Global Entry card</a> would work also. But, last month, since I had to visit the 5th Circle of Hell also known as the Dept of Motor Vehicles, to renew my expiring driver’s license, I figured I might as well get the Real ID version. And why not? In Illinois, the Real and non-Real ID driver\'s licenses cost the same, you go through the same lines…. The only difference was it took maybe an extra 3 minutes for them to scan in my social security card and the documents I used to prove my address. Which, if I’d kept in mind the Distributive Property of Cybersecurity, “Any data entered into a system will eventually be hacked and distributed on the dark web” -- I would’ve used something a bit more innocuous than my bank statement.  But, I now have a driver’s license with a requisite gold start in the upper right corner just in case DHS is really serious this time about the Real ID deadline.</li><li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/10/podcast-182-more-covid-changes-words-that-mean-adventure/\">the last episode</a>, I talked about finishing up my Global Entry renewal. And so with that done, last week I sent my passport into the void that is the US Passport Agency for renewal. I don’t have any international travel planned right now, but I’m very uncomfortable to be without my passport. I don’t know why, but I am. And the discomfort is only amplified by the 8-11 week processing time the State Department is now quoting. It also reminded me that it’s been 10 years since my most embarrassing cock-up - letting my backpack with my son’s and my passports get stolen from the overhead rack of the train to Brussels airport. I told the whole story in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/05/20/podcast-98-stolen-luggage-restaurants-want-your-smartphone/\">episode #98</a>, about what a stupid, what I called “the rookie-est of rookie mistakes” it was, and how it could’ve been worse, but for the very pleasant and helpful Brussels airport police and US Embassy staff, and that my son and I then got in a couple extra days of Belgian beer drinking.  Lesson learned, though; I’ve kept my passport on my person when traveling ever since.</li><li>It’s funny, sometimes, how travel can prepare you for things back home. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/10/28/podcast-180-tracking-covid-travel-requirements-cycling-thru-puglia/\">episode #180</a>, talking about our travels through Italy, I walked through what were back then the most stringent vaccine passport requirements around; you need to show an EU Green Pass on your phone or, for us, our CDC vaccination cards to get into restaurants, bars, airports, train stations,.... And so when Chicago started doing the same thing on January 1st, we were ready. In some ways Chicago is easier than Italy -- showing a picture of my CDC card is quicker than waiting for someone to scan a QR code; but here, and New York City and Washington, DC, we’ve added the extra step -- having to show a picture ID that matches to the vax card. We didn’t have to do that in Italy. You know, if I hadn’t had to send my passport in, maybe I’d just do what I did in Italy, carry my CDC card in my passport; I could pull ‘em both out in one hopefully suave and graceful move and be done with it.</li><li>Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/11/13/podcast-181-travel-potpourri-2021-travelers-gift-guide/\">November episode</a>, I said that I’d already gotten status roll-overs from Marriott, Hilton, and IHG, extending my current level in their frequent sleeper programs for the third time -- now they expire in February or March 2023. I figured that was the end of it, so when I received a note from Southwest in mid-December with the subject line “Surprise: A-List status extended,” it was pretty accurate. I was very surprised! I hadn’t expected any airlines to extend status; they all seemed to be lowering the qualification clip levels instead. So, thanks Southwest! I’ll be using this status on my flights to LGA and ABQ -- also because I still have some 2020 pandemic cancellation credits that are about to hit their disappearing 2-year birthday. Any chance you can extend that expiration data too?</li><li>Just to spin the propeller on top of the travel tech beanie hat for a sec…. Over the past couple of trips, I’ve noticed my briefcase/messenger bag has finally passed a tipping point -- I now have more electronic devices needing a newer USB-C cord than an original USB-A cord. (I told you this would be a propeller spin). The USB-C cord invasion started with the iPhone 11 Pro; another cord to carry, but it occasionally came in handy, like when Hertz gave me a birthday upgrade a few years back to a Mercedes A220; it only had the smaller USB-C plugs. But the invasion picked up speed with each upgrade -- first it was my new Bose headphones, then when I upgraded my battery pack, my power bank; then again when I got my MacBook Air, and again squared when I got a pair of cheap Anker earbuds last Prime Day. Which led me, finally, to replacing my dual USB-A power adapter for one with two USB-C plugs and one USB-A for my old Samsung tablet that just won’t die. But I still have to carry an old iPhone USB-A cord for those times when all that’s left on the Hertz lot is a 3-year old Chevy Malibu.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music —  <em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/content/oldDog/oldDog_-_Goodbye_sooner_or_later.mp3\" target=\"_blank\">Goodbye Sooner or Later</a></em> by oldDog</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>COVID Test Anxiety</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A friend of mine said he wanted to get together this month. “Sure,” I said, “but if we can’t, we’ll be together for a weekend in February in Louisville at a wedding.” “Uh, no,” he said, “I’m not going.” “Why not?” “I’m going to isolate, kinda like a soft quarantine in February, don’t go outside except to walk the dog so I don’t screw up my trip to Egypt. It’s non-refundable, so I’ll be out a lot of money if I test positive for COVID before leaving and can’t go.”</li><li>And last month, in early December, right when everyone was tightening travel restrictions in what turned out to be a futile effort to keep omicron out of their country, another friend cancelled a long-planned trip to Scotland. “I just don’t want to get trapped, away from home,” he said.</li><li>COVID test anxiety. I understand it, especially around test-on-arrival rules. The week before our flight to London in November, I got a text from my doctor group -- time to get your COVID booster. I clicked through to the appointment website, started looking at slots, but then stopped. I have to take a COVID test by our second day in London. What if that spike of antibodies from the booster lingers long enough to turn that test positive? I clicked onto the next page of the website and booked my booster for December, after we got back home.</li><li>As I mentioned in the last episode, we tested negative on our test in London and went about our vacation. But as we got close to our return date, that anxiety crept back in. This was before the US tightened the testing window, so we took our Abbott tests 2 days before departure, both to give us some wiggle room, some time to retest if one came up positive, but also to calm those worries. I remember on that trip talking to an American guy in the elevator of our hotel in London. He had an Abbott rapid test sticking out of his briefcase. “Getting ready to head home?” I asked. “No,” he said, “I just test myself every 2 days.” I kinda laughed at that, thinking it was a bit over-rotation. But thinking back on it now, maybe he had it right -- test yourself every couple of days to relieve that uncertainty rather than waiting for the night before departure.</li><li>But even that might not be enough. I tweeted out <a href=\"https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/covid-in-koh-samui-its-scary-0hs7h0pk9\">an article</a> from the UK Times newspaper written by a guy who visited Thailand last month. The article starts “On December 19, after a week of near-hourly negative lateral flow and PCR tests, I flew to Thailand.” The next sentence (you know where this is going): “On December 20 I stepped off the plane, took another PCR, and headed to my hotel. The next morning I received a text informing me I had tested positive.” And then he tells the story of his 10 days of solo isolation in a Thai hospital. He did everything right and it still went wrong.</li><li>One big anxiety driver is the cost for those extra days quarantined in a hotel somewhere. This should be the kind of risk that trip insurance could help you manage. So I rang up Michael Giusti, senior writer at <a href=\"https://insurancequotes.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"InsuranceQuotes.com\">InsuranceQuotes.com</a> -- he was with us on <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/12/podcast-173-whats-new-in-travel-insurance-keeping-ahead-of-expiring-miles/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"episode #173\">episode #173</a> last March, talking about travel insurance one year after the pandemic lockdowns -- to ask him about this.</li><li>Bridge Music —   <em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/content/Zapac/Zapac_-_Test_Drive.mp3\" target=\"_blank\">Test Drive</a> </em>by Zapac</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Michelin Food Adventures</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Last month, I picked up on the buzz around a blogger’s <a href=\"https://everywhereist.com/2021/12/bros-restaurant-lecce-we-eat-at-the-worst-michelin-starred-restaurant-ever/\">brutal review</a> of a 1-star Michelin restaurant in Italy. It initially caught my eye because Irene and I like to hit a Michelin star or two when we’re traveling. Indeed, a 1-star place called <a href=\"https://www.behindrestaurant.co.uk/\"><em>Behind</em></a> as in “ it’s an open kitchen so there’s nothing to hide behind” got us figuring out how to get from central London to Hackney, a neighborhood we would’ve had no reason to explore otherwise. It was a great lunch; a great experience talking to the chef, and it\'s going on my final Best of 2021 list -- which is on my to-do list to update right after I finish this podcast. Having said that, we’ve also had some meals that weren’t great, like our 25th anniversary dinner at a 3-star place in Florence, or a 2-star in Spain that we loved -- until the next morning when we both came down with food poisoning. But on balance, we’ve had more really good meals than bad, and they’ve often taken us out of the travel bubble to parts of cities we wouldn’t normally go -- kinda like my microbrewery taprooms, only a <strong><em>lot</em></strong> more expensive.</li><li>So when I saw the title “We Eat at The Worst Michelin Starred Restaurant, Ever,” it got my attention. First, what restaurant is it, so we can avoid it, and second, what made it the worst ever because that’s a big claim. But then I see the <em>full</em> title, with the restaurant, Bros in Lecce, Italy. We won’t be able to skip it because we ate there in mid-October, the night after our Puglia bike tour ended.&nbsp;</li><li>I read through the reviews and looked closely at the pictures. A couple of courses look familiar, but others -- like the now-famous (infamous?) grey foam oozing out of a plaster-looking replica of the chef’s mouth was (thankfully) not on our menu. I have to say that I was on the fence about eating at Bros when Irene brought it up when we were planning our Puglia trip. The reviews I could find were <em>very</em> mixed, and it wasn’t a cheap ticket. We decided to go, but with the understanding that it could be a high-variance meal, with some courses that might not work out. I think the oyster with rancid fat was that dish for Irene. I didn’t love it, but it didn’t trigger a gag reflex like it did for Irene. Certainly not what you hope for, and it was only that dish, the rest was fine. But like I said, we went into Bros eye wide open, expecting an edgy experimental food experience -- and definitely not a standard 3-course fine dining Italian meal. We walked out thinking “Well, that was interesting” -- not bad, but not the worst 1-star meal I’ve had; probably in the bottom quartile, though. As you might guess, Bros <em>won’t</em> make it on that Best of 2021 list update.</li><li>So why didn’t this blogger, a James Beard-award winning writer, come in with similar expectations? Who knows, though we do know that outrage porn drives clicks which, for her, also drove some high-profile TV interviews which probably helped move a few copies of her book. And, since no publicity is bad publicity, I’m guessing it was <a href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/23/world/europe/bros-restaurant-review.html\">a net positive for the restaurant</a> too.</li><li>But why pay what was about a lot of money for a meal that I think might be a complete train wreck? I walked past a lot of places in Lecce that I know would put a good meal down in front of us for a lot less. It becomes a bit less about food and a bit more about the experience; less about stomach and more about the brain. It reminded me of something Josh Glenn said in the last episode when I was talking with him about the language of adventure<ul><li>Josh: I mean an adventure is, and that word comes from the Latin meaning <em>to arrive unexpectedly</em>. That\'s actually really an important philosophical piece for me as I was going through this, the idea that you can have a trip is not an adventure if nothing unexpected happens and if you don\'t take enough risks to allow things unexpected to happen.<br><br>So for example, the word chance comes from the Latin <em>cadentia </em>meaning <em>falling</em>. So just when we think about how we use the words of “let the chips fall where they may” or “something befalls you”, this idea of having our feet off the ground, falling through space, we can\'t grasp anything, what do you do with that? If you’re someone who likes, in some kind of existential way, that feeling of falling, then you\'re an adventurer. You\'re going to get more out of your travel experiences than someone who wants everything to be exactly the same way every time and never have any hiccups.</li></ul></li><li>I always say to Irene “If every meal we have is a great one, then we’re not trying enough weird places.” After food poisoning has befallen you a couple times, how bad can a little rancid fat be?</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #183</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social  -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_183.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #183 — COVID Test Anxiety; Michelin Food Adventures','','inherit','closed','closed','','4063-revision-v1','','','2022-01-16 12:09:51','2022-01-16 17:09:51','',4063,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4069',0,'revision','',0),
(4070,1,'2022-01-16 12:16:16','2022-01-16 17:16:16','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/IMG_3929-scaled.jpeg\"><img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/IMG_3929-300x300.jpeg\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> Cleared to Adventure[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Back in front of the microphone after a two-week trip to the UK, getting back home just before the new <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/omicron-covid-travel-international-11638216229?st=sm0fcotd0jfju1i&amp;reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink\">Omicron travel restrictions</a> hit. We talk about getting to London, surfing the waves of changing travel requirements, a new way to renew Global Entry, moan a bit more about the inexorable advance of the cashless society, and finish up talking with <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_Glenn\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Josh Glenn</a> about his new book <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3lSNcwg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">The Adventurer\'s Glossary</a></em>.  All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_183.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #182: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. Hope everyone had a great New Year’s. No travel since the last episode, which has turned out to be a good thing given the, what?, two weeks straight of over 1,000 cancelled flights a day. I’ve always tried to avoid traveling during the Christmas holidays; crowded planes, lots of not-very-experienced travelers, and the inevitable winter storm or two has never resulted in smooth travel experiences. Add to that airlines struggling to staff back up to passenger loads and then omicron comes ripping through their ranks…. The two folks I knew flying last week both got home a day late which, given all this, could’ve been a lot worse. Like being trapped in that 27-hour mess on I-95 in Northern Virginia. Definitely a reminder never to let yourself get below a quarter tank.</li><li>So while I haven’t been traveling, I <em>have</em> been travel <em>planning</em>, which is not unusual. January has traditionally been <em>the</em> big travel planning month; pack up the Christmas decorations, figure out where you want to go this year and then put in your time off requests. And because January is just the worst month of the year, at least in the upper Northern Hemisphere when it’s the coldest month of the year and the sun sets early; so you need something, anything to look forward to.</li><li>But COVID changed all that, of course, especially the planning timeline. We’ve talked in prior episodes how last-minute travel restrictions have made that planning timeline, what the travel industry calls the <em>booking window</em>, a lot shorter. Last year, in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"January 2021 episode\">January 2021 episode</a>, I talked about having to make a last-minute pivot away from a San Diego trip I’d booked just the month before because California was still in their post-holiday lock down and not letting out-of-state visitors make hotel reservations. </li><li>I thought this year I’d revert back to the old patterns and do a bit more longer-term travel planning. Looking at <a href=\"https://www.kayak.com/flight-trends\">Kayak’s flight search trends</a>, where they now compare current flight search volumes to pre-pandemic levels, so comparing 2021 to 2019, seem to be an optimistic outlier because their search volumes have cratered vs. 2 year ago. Eyeballing their trend chart, I’d say it’s down something like 50%. Though switching over and looking at Google’s Hotel Insights page, I might not be too far out of the fat part of the curve; their hotel search trends seem to be recovering. Which sorta maps into our plans. In February, we’re driving down to Louisville rather than flying, giving the airlines a couple of months to unscramble their operations, and then getting on planes -- to New York in March, Santa Fe, NM in April, maybe DC in May. But for that February drive down I-65, across the frozen tundra of central Indiana, we’re definitely packing a couple of blankets -- and snacks -- and keeping the gas tank topped off just in case. News reports of that I-95 jam up talked about a Good Samaritan family going car to car, passing out oranges they were bringing back from Florida. Coming back from Louisville, I’m guessing any Good Samaritan would be going car to car with a couple bottles of bourbon and a sleeve of plastic shot glasses -- which is not a bad thing. Would definitely warm you up for at least a little bit.</li><li>Bridge Music —  <em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/content/Per/Per_-_DLDN_Instrumental.mp3\" target=\"_blank\">DLDN Instrumental</a></em> by St Paul</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Last April, the Department of Homeland Security <a href=\"https://www.dhs.gov/real-id/news/2021/04/27/dhs-announces-extension-real-id-full-enforcement-deadline\">kicked the Real ID can down the road</a> -- again -- so now we have until May 2023 before we’ll need Real ID-compliant identification to get through a TSA checkpoint. We don’t <em>have</em> to get a Real ID driver’s license; <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/travel/security-screening/identification\">a passport or a Global Entry card</a> would work also. But, last month, since I had to visit the 5th Circle of Hell also known as the Dept of Motor Vehicles, to renew my expiring driver’s license, I figured I might as well get the Real ID version. And why not? In Illinois, the Real and non-Real ID driver\'s licenses cost the same, you go through the same lines…. The only difference was it took maybe an extra 3 minutes for them to scan in my social security card and the documents I used to prove my address. Which, if I’d kept in mind the Distributive Property of Cybersecurity, “Any data entered into a system will eventually be hacked and distributed on the dark web” -- I would’ve used something a bit more innocuous than my bank statement.  But, I now have a driver’s license with a requisite gold start in the upper right corner just in case DHS is really serious this time about the Real ID deadline.</li><li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/10/podcast-182-more-covid-changes-words-that-mean-adventure/\">the last episode</a>, I talked about finishing up my Global Entry renewal. And so with that done, last week I sent my passport into the void that is the US Passport Agency for renewal. I don’t have any international travel planned right now, but I’m very uncomfortable to be without my passport. I don’t know why, but I am. And the discomfort is only amplified by the 8-11 week processing time the State Department is now quoting. It also reminded me that it’s been 10 years since my most embarrassing cock-up - letting my backpack with my son’s and my passports get stolen from the overhead rack of the train to Brussels airport. I told the whole story in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/05/20/podcast-98-stolen-luggage-restaurants-want-your-smartphone/\">episode #98</a>, about what a stupid, what I called “the rookie-est of rookie mistakes” it was, and how it could’ve been worse, but for the very pleasant and helpful Brussels airport police and US Embassy staff, and that my son and I then got in a couple extra days of Belgian beer drinking.  Lesson learned, though; I’ve kept my passport on my person when traveling ever since.</li><li>It’s funny, sometimes, how travel can prepare you for things back home. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/10/28/podcast-180-tracking-covid-travel-requirements-cycling-thru-puglia/\">episode #180</a>, talking about our travels through Italy, I walked through what were back then the most stringent vaccine passport requirements around; you need to show an EU Green Pass on your phone or, for us, our CDC vaccination cards to get into restaurants, bars, airports, train stations,.... And so when Chicago started doing the same thing on January 1st, we were ready. In some ways Chicago is easier than Italy -- showing a picture of my CDC card is quicker than waiting for someone to scan a QR code; but here, and New York City and Washington, DC, we’ve added the extra step -- having to show a picture ID that matches to the vax card. We didn’t have to do that in Italy. You know, if I hadn’t had to send my passport in, maybe I’d just do what I did in Italy, carry my CDC card in my passport; I could pull ‘em both out in one hopefully suave and graceful move and be done with it.</li><li>Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/11/13/podcast-181-travel-potpourri-2021-travelers-gift-guide/\">November episode</a>, I said that I’d already gotten status roll-overs from Marriott, Hilton, and IHG, extending my current level in their frequent sleeper programs for the third time -- now they expire in February or March 2023. I figured that was the end of it, so when I received a note from Southwest in mid-December with the subject line “Surprise: A-List status extended,” it was pretty accurate. I was very surprised! I hadn’t expected any airlines to extend status; they all seemed to be lowering the qualification clip levels instead. So, thanks Southwest! I’ll be using this status on my flights to LGA and ABQ -- also because I still have some 2020 pandemic cancellation credits that are about to hit their disappearing 2-year birthday. Any chance you can extend that expiration data too?</li><li>Just to spin the propeller on top of the travel tech beanie hat for a sec…. Over the past couple of trips, I’ve noticed my briefcase/messenger bag has finally passed a tipping point -- I now have more electronic devices needing a newer USB-C cord than an original USB-A cord. (I told you this would be a propeller spin). The USB-C cord invasion started with the iPhone 11 Pro; another cord to carry, but it occasionally came in handy, like when Hertz gave me a birthday upgrade a few years back to a Mercedes A220; it only had the smaller USB-C plugs. But the invasion picked up speed with each upgrade -- first it was my new Bose headphones, then when I upgraded my battery pack, my power bank; then again when I got my MacBook Air, and again squared when I got a pair of cheap Anker earbuds last Prime Day. Which led me, finally, to replacing my dual USB-A power adapter for one with two USB-C plugs and one USB-A for my old Samsung tablet that just won’t die. But I still have to carry an old iPhone USB-A cord for those times when all that’s left on the Hertz lot is a 3-year old Chevy Malibu.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music —  <em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/content/oldDog/oldDog_-_Goodbye_sooner_or_later.mp3\" target=\"_blank\">Goodbye Sooner or Later</a></em> by oldDog</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>COVID Test Anxiety</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A friend of mine said he wanted to get together this month. “Sure,” I said, “but if we can’t, we’ll be together for a weekend in February in Louisville at a wedding.” “Uh, no,” he said, “I’m not going.” “Why not?” “I’m going to isolate, kinda like a soft quarantine in February, don’t go outside except to walk the dog so I don’t screw up my trip to Egypt. It’s non-refundable, so I’ll be out a lot of money if I test positive for COVID before leaving and can’t go.”</li><li>And last month, in early December, right when everyone was tightening travel restrictions in what turned out to be a futile effort to keep omicron out of their country, another friend cancelled a long-planned trip to Scotland. “I just don’t want to get trapped, away from home,” he said.</li><li>COVID test anxiety. I understand it, especially around test-on-arrival rules. The week before our flight to London in November, I got a text from my doctor group -- time to get your COVID booster. I clicked through to the appointment website, started looking at slots, but then stopped. I have to take a COVID test by our second day in London. What if that spike of antibodies from the booster lingers long enough to turn that test positive? I clicked onto the next page of the website and booked my booster for December, after we got back home.</li><li>As I mentioned in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/10/podcast-182-more-covid-changes-words-that-mean-adventure/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"last episode\">last episode</a>, we tested negative on our test in London and went about our vacation. But as we got close to our return date, that anxiety crept back in. This was before the US tightened the testing window, so we took our Abbott tests 2 days before departure, both to give us some wiggle room, some time to retest if one came up positive, but also to calm those worries. I remember on that trip talking to an American guy in the elevator of our hotel in London. He had an Abbott rapid test sticking out of his briefcase. “Getting ready to head home?” I asked. “No,” he said, “I just test myself every 2 days.” I kinda laughed at that, thinking it was a bit over-rotation. But thinking back on it now, maybe he had it right -- test yourself every couple of days to relieve that uncertainty rather than waiting for the night before departure.</li><li>But even that might not be enough. I tweeted out <a href=\"https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/covid-in-koh-samui-its-scary-0hs7h0pk9\">an article</a> from the UK Times newspaper written by a guy who visited Thailand last month. The article starts “On December 19, after a week of near-hourly negative lateral flow and PCR tests, I flew to Thailand.” The next sentence (you know where this is going): “On December 20 I stepped off the plane, took another PCR, and headed to my hotel. The next morning I received a text informing me I had tested positive.” And then he tells the story of his 10 days of solo isolation in a Thai hospital. He did everything right and it still went wrong.</li><li>One big anxiety driver is the cost for those extra days quarantined in a hotel somewhere. This should be the kind of risk that trip insurance could help you manage. So I rang up Michael Giusti, senior writer at <a href=\"https://insurancequotes.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"InsuranceQuotes.com\">InsuranceQuotes.com</a> -- he was with us on <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/12/podcast-173-whats-new-in-travel-insurance-keeping-ahead-of-expiring-miles/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"episode #173\">episode #173</a> last March, talking about travel insurance one year after the pandemic lockdowns -- to ask him about this.</li><li>Bridge Music —   <em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/content/Zapac/Zapac_-_Test_Drive.mp3\" target=\"_blank\">Test Drive</a> </em>by Zapac</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Michelin Food Adventures</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Last month, I picked up on the buzz around a blogger’s <a href=\"https://everywhereist.com/2021/12/bros-restaurant-lecce-we-eat-at-the-worst-michelin-starred-restaurant-ever/\">brutal review</a> of a 1-star Michelin restaurant in Italy. It initially caught my eye because Irene and I like to hit a Michelin star or two when we’re traveling. Indeed, a 1-star place called <a href=\"https://www.behindrestaurant.co.uk/\"><em>Behind</em></a> as in “ it’s an open kitchen so there’s nothing to hide behind” got us figuring out how to get from central London to Hackney, a neighborhood we would’ve had no reason to explore otherwise. It was a great lunch; a great experience talking to the chef, and it\'s going on my final Best of 2021 list -- which is on my to-do list to update right after I finish this podcast. Having said that, we’ve also had some meals that weren’t great, like our 25th anniversary dinner at a 3-star place in Florence, or a 2-star in Spain that we loved -- until the next morning when we both came down with food poisoning. But on balance, we’ve had more really good meals than bad, and they’ve often taken us out of the travel bubble to parts of cities we wouldn’t normally go -- kinda like my microbrewery taprooms, only a <strong><em>lot</em></strong> more expensive.</li><li>So when I saw the title “We Eat at The Worst Michelin Starred Restaurant, Ever,” it got my attention. First, what restaurant is it, so we can avoid it, and second, what made it the worst ever because that’s a big claim. But then I see the <em>full</em> title, with the restaurant, Bros in Lecce, Italy. We won’t be able to skip it because we ate there in mid-October, the night after our Puglia bike tour ended. </li><li>I read through the reviews and looked closely at the pictures. A couple of courses look familiar, but others -- like the now-famous (infamous?) grey foam oozing out of a plaster replica of the chef’s mouth was (thankfully) not on our menu. I have to say that I was on the fence about eating at Bros when Irene brought it up when we were planning our Puglia trip. The reviews I could find were <em>very</em> mixed, and it wasn’t a cheap ticket. We decided to go, but with the understanding that it could be a high-variance meal, with some courses that might not work out. I think the oyster with rancid fat was that dish for Irene. I didn’t love it, but it didn’t trigger a gag reflex like it did for Irene. Certainly not what you hope for, and it was only that dish, the rest was fine. But like I said, we went into Bros eye wide open, expecting an edgy experimental food experience -- and definitely not a standard 3-course fine dining Italian meal. We walked out thinking “Well, that was interesting” -- not bad, but not the worst 1-star meal I’ve had; probably in the bottom quartile, though. As you might guess, Bros <em>won’t</em> make it on that Best of 2021 list update.</li><li>So why didn’t this blogger, a James Beard-award winning writer, come in with similar expectations? Who knows, though we do know that outrage porn drives clicks which, for her, also drove some high-profile TV interviews which probably helped move a few copies of her book. And, since no publicity is bad publicity, I’m guessing it was <a href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/23/world/europe/bros-restaurant-review.html\">a net positive for the restaurant</a> too.</li><li>But why pay what was about a lot of money for a meal that I think might be a complete train wreck? I walked past a lot of places in Lecce that I know would put a good meal down in front of us for a lot less. It becomes a bit less about food and a bit more about the experience; less about stomach and more about the brain. It reminded me of something Josh Glenn said in the last episode when I was talking with him about the language of adventure<ul><li>Josh: I mean an adventure is, and that word comes from the Latin meaning <em>to arrive unexpectedly</em>. That\'s actually really an important philosophical piece for me as I was going through this, the idea that you can have a trip is not an adventure if nothing unexpected happens and if you don\'t take enough risks to allow things unexpected to happen.<br><br>So for example, the word chance comes from the Latin <em>cadentia </em>meaning <em>falling</em>. So just when we think about how we use the words of “let the chips fall where they may” or “something befalls you”, this idea of having our feet off the ground, falling through space, we can\'t grasp anything, what do you do with that? If you’re someone who likes, in some kind of existential way, that feeling of falling, then you\'re an adventurer. You\'re going to get more out of your travel experiences than someone who wants everything to be exactly the same way every time and never have any hiccups.</li></ul></li><li>I always say to Irene “If every meal we have is a great one, then we’re not trying enough weird places.” After food poisoning has befallen you a couple times, how bad can a little rancid fat be?</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #183</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social  -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_183.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #183 — COVID Test Anxiety; Michelin Food Adventures','','inherit','closed','closed','','4063-revision-v1','','','2022-01-16 12:16:16','2022-01-16 17:16:16','',4063,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4070',0,'revision','',0),
(4071,1,'2022-01-16 14:08:05','2022-01-16 19:08:05','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/IMG_3929-scaled.jpeg\"><img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/IMG_3929-300x300.jpeg\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> Cleared to Adventure[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Back in front of the microphone after a two-week trip to the UK, getting back home just before the new <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/omicron-covid-travel-international-11638216229?st=sm0fcotd0jfju1i&amp;reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink\">Omicron travel restrictions</a> hit. We talk about getting to London, surfing the waves of changing travel requirements, a new way to renew Global Entry, moan a bit more about the inexorable advance of the cashless society, and finish up talking with <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_Glenn\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Josh Glenn</a> about his new book <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3lSNcwg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">The Adventurer\'s Glossary</a></em>.  All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_183.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #182: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. Hope everyone had a great New Year’s. No travel since the last episode, which has turned out to be a good thing given the, what?, two weeks straight of over 1,000 cancelled flights a day. I’ve always tried to avoid traveling during the Christmas holidays; crowded planes, lots of not-very-experienced travelers, and the inevitable winter storm or two has never resulted in smooth travel experiences. Add to that airlines struggling to staff back up to passenger loads and then omicron comes ripping through their ranks…. The two folks I knew flying last week both got home a day late which, given all this, could’ve been a lot worse. Like being trapped in that 27-hour mess on I-95 in Northern Virginia. Definitely a reminder never to let yourself get below a quarter tank.</li><li>So while I haven’t been traveling, I <em>have</em> been travel <em>planning</em>, which is not unusual. January has traditionally been <em>the</em> big travel planning month; pack up the Christmas decorations, figure out where you want to go this year and then put in your time off requests. And because January is just the worst month of the year, at least in the upper Northern Hemisphere when it’s the coldest month of the year and the sun sets early; so you need something, anything to look forward to.</li><li>But COVID changed all that, of course, especially the planning timeline. We’ve talked in prior episodes how last-minute travel restrictions have made that planning timeline, what the travel industry calls the <em>booking window</em>, a lot shorter. Last year, in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"January 2021 episode\">January 2021 episode</a>, I talked about having to make a last-minute pivot away from a San Diego trip I’d booked just the month before because California was still in their post-holiday lock down and not letting out-of-state visitors make hotel reservations.&nbsp;</li><li>I thought this year I’d revert back to the old patterns and do a bit more longer-term travel planning. Looking at <a href=\"https://www.kayak.com/flight-trends\">Kayak’s flight search trends</a>, where they now compare current flight search volumes to pre-pandemic levels, so comparing 2021 to 2019, seem to be an optimistic outlier because their search volumes have cratered vs. 2 year ago. Eyeballing their trend chart, I’d say it’s down something like 50%. Though switching over and looking at Google’s Hotel Insights page, I might not be too far out of the fat part of the curve; their hotel search trends seem to be recovering. Which sorta maps into our plans. In February, we’re driving down to Louisville rather than flying, giving the airlines a couple of months to unscramble their operations, and then getting on planes -- to New York in March, Santa Fe, NM in April, maybe DC in May. But for that February drive down I-65, across the frozen tundra of central Indiana, we’re definitely packing a couple of blankets -- and snacks -- and keeping the gas tank topped off just in case. News reports of that I-95 jam up talked about a Good Samaritan family going car to car, passing out oranges they were bringing back from Florida. Coming back from Louisville, I’m guessing any Good Samaritan would be going car to car with a couple bottles of bourbon and a sleeve of plastic shot glasses -- which is not a bad thing. Would definitely warm you up for at least a little bit.</li><li>Bridge Music — &nbsp;<em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/content/Per/Per_-_DLDN_Instrumental.mp3\" target=\"_blank\">DLDN Instrumental</a></em>&nbsp;by St Paul</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Last April, the Department of Homeland Security <a href=\"https://www.dhs.gov/real-id/news/2021/04/27/dhs-announces-extension-real-id-full-enforcement-deadline\">kicked the Real ID can down the road</a> -- again -- so now we have until May 2023 before we’ll need Real ID-compliant identification to get through a TSA checkpoint. We don’t <em>have</em> to get a Real ID driver’s license; <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/travel/security-screening/identification\">a passport or a Global Entry card</a> would work also. But, last month, since I had to visit the 5th Circle of Hell also known as the Dept of Motor Vehicles, to renew my expiring driver’s license, I figured I might as well get the Real ID version. And why not? In Illinois, the Real and non-Real ID driver\'s licenses cost the same, you go through the same lines…. The only difference was it took maybe an extra 3 minutes for them to scan in my social security card and the documents I used to prove my address. Which, if I’d kept in mind the Distributive Property of Cybersecurity, “Any data entered into a system will eventually be hacked and distributed on the dark web” -- I would’ve used something a bit more innocuous than my bank statement.&nbsp; But, I now have a driver’s license with a requisite gold start in the upper right corner just in case DHS is really serious this time about the Real ID deadline.</li><li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/10/podcast-182-more-covid-changes-words-that-mean-adventure/\">the last episode</a>, I talked about finishing up my Global Entry renewal. And so with that done, last week I sent my passport into the void that is the US Passport Agency for renewal. I don’t have any international travel planned right now, but I’m very uncomfortable to be without my passport. I don’t know why, but I am. And the discomfort is only amplified by the 8-11 week processing time the State Department is now quoting. It also reminded me that it’s been 10 years since my most embarrassing cock-up - letting my backpack with my son’s and my passports get stolen from the overhead rack of the train to Brussels airport. I told the whole story in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/05/20/podcast-98-stolen-luggage-restaurants-want-your-smartphone/\">episode #98</a>, about what a stupid, what I called “the rookie-est of rookie mistakes” it was, and how it could’ve been worse, but for the very pleasant and helpful Brussels airport police and US Embassy staff, and that my son and I then got in a couple extra days of Belgian beer drinking.&nbsp; Lesson learned, though; I’ve kept my passport on my person when traveling ever since.</li><li>It’s funny, sometimes, how travel can prepare you for things back home. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/10/28/podcast-180-tracking-covid-travel-requirements-cycling-thru-puglia/\">episode #180</a>, talking about our travels through Italy, I walked through what were back then the most stringent vaccine passport requirements around; you need to show an EU Green Pass on your phone or, for us, our CDC vaccination cards to get into restaurants, bars, airports, train stations,.... And so when Chicago started doing the same thing on January 1st, we were ready. In some ways Chicago is easier than Italy -- showing a picture of my CDC card is quicker than waiting for someone to scan a QR code; but here, and New York City and Washington, DC, we’ve added the extra step -- having to show a picture ID that matches to the vax card. We didn’t have to do that in Italy. You know, if I hadn’t had to send my passport in, maybe I’d just do what I did in Italy, carry my CDC card in my passport; I could pull ‘em both out in one hopefully suave and graceful move and be done with it.</li><li>Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/11/13/podcast-181-travel-potpourri-2021-travelers-gift-guide/\">November episode</a>, I said that I’d already gotten status roll-overs from Marriott, Hilton, and IHG, extending my current level in their frequent sleeper programs for the third time -- now they expire in February or March 2023. I figured that was the end of it, so when I received a note from Southwest in mid-December with the subject line “Surprise: A-List status extended,” it was pretty accurate. I was very surprised! I hadn’t expected any airlines to extend status; they all seemed to be lowering the qualification clip levels instead. So, thanks Southwest! I’ll be using this status on my flights to LGA and ABQ -- also because I still have some 2020 pandemic cancellation credits that are about to hit their disappearing 2-year birthday. Any chance you can extend that expiration data too?</li><li>Just to spin the propeller on top of the travel tech beanie hat for a sec…. Over the past couple of trips, I’ve noticed my briefcase/messenger bag has finally passed a tipping point -- I now have more electronic devices needing a newer USB-C cord than an original USB-A cord. (I told you this would be a propeller spin). The USB-C cord invasion started with the iPhone 11 Pro; another cord to carry, but it occasionally came in handy, like when Hertz gave me a birthday upgrade a few years back to a Mercedes A220; it only had the smaller USB-C plugs. But the invasion picked up speed with each upgrade -- first it was my new Bose headphones, then when I upgraded my battery pack, my power bank; then again when I got my MacBook Air, and again squared when I got a pair of cheap Anker earbuds last Prime Day. Which led me, finally, to replacing my dual USB-A power adapter for one with two USB-C plugs and one USB-A for my old Samsung tablet that just won’t die. But I still have to carry an old iPhone USB-A cord for those times when all that’s left on the Hertz lot is a 3-year old Chevy Malibu.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music —  <em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/content/oldDog/oldDog_-_Goodbye_sooner_or_later.mp3\" target=\"_blank\">Goodbye Sooner or Later</a></em>&nbsp;by oldDog</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>COVID Test Anxiety</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A friend of mine said he wanted to get together this month. “Sure,” I said, “but if we can’t, we’ll be together for a weekend in February in Louisville at a wedding.” “Uh, no,” he said, “I’m not going.” “Why not?” “I’m going to isolate, kinda like a soft quarantine in February, don’t go outside except to walk the dog so I don’t screw up my trip to Egypt. It’s non-refundable, so I’ll be out a lot of money if I test positive for COVID before leaving and can’t go.”</li><li>And last month, in early December, right when everyone was tightening travel restrictions in what turned out to be a futile effort to keep omicron out of their country, another friend cancelled a long-planned trip to Scotland. “I just don’t want to get trapped, away from home,” he said.</li><li>COVID test anxiety. I understand it, especially around test-on-arrival rules. The week before our flight to London in November, I got a text from my doctor group -- time to get your COVID booster. I clicked through to the appointment website, started looking at slots, but then stopped. I have to take a COVID test by our second day in London. What if that spike of antibodies from the booster lingers long enough to turn that test positive? I clicked onto the next page of the website and booked my booster for December, after we got back home.</li><li>As I mentioned in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/10/podcast-182-more-covid-changes-words-that-mean-adventure/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"last episode\">last episode</a>, we tested negative on our test in London and went about our vacation. But as we got close to our return date, that anxiety crept back in. This was before the US tightened the testing window, so we took our Abbott tests 2 days before departure, both to give us some wiggle room, some time to retest if one came up positive, but also to calm those worries. I remember on that trip talking to an American guy in the elevator of our hotel in London. He had an Abbott rapid test sticking out of his briefcase. “Getting ready to head home?” I asked. “No,” he said, “I just test myself every 2 days.” I kinda laughed at that, thinking it was a bit over-rotation. But thinking back on it now, maybe he had it right -- test yourself every couple of days to relieve that uncertainty rather than waiting for the night before departure.</li><li>But even that might not be enough. I tweeted out <a href=\"https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/covid-in-koh-samui-its-scary-0hs7h0pk9\">an article</a> from the UK Times newspaper written by a guy who visited Thailand last month. The article starts “On December 19, after a week of near-hourly negative lateral flow and PCR tests, I flew to Thailand.” The next sentence (you know where this is going): “On December 20 I stepped off the plane, took another PCR, and headed to my hotel. The next morning I received a text informing me I had tested positive.” And then he tells the story of his 10 days of solo isolation in a Thai hospital. He did everything right and it still went wrong.</li><li>One big anxiety driver is the cost for those extra days quarantined in a hotel somewhere. This should be the kind of risk that trip insurance could help you manage. So I rang up Michael Giusti, senior writer at <a href=\"https://insurancequotes.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"InsuranceQuotes.com\">InsuranceQuotes.com</a> -- he was with us on <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/12/podcast-173-whats-new-in-travel-insurance-keeping-ahead-of-expiring-miles/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"episode #173\">episode #173</a> last March, talking about travel insurance one year after the pandemic lockdowns -- to ask him about this.</li><li>Bridge Music —  &nbsp;<em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/content/Zapac/Zapac_-_Test_Drive.mp3\" target=\"_blank\">Test Drive</a>&nbsp;</em>by Zapac</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Michelin Food Adventures</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Last month, I picked up on the buzz around a blogger’s <a href=\"https://everywhereist.com/2021/12/bros-restaurant-lecce-we-eat-at-the-worst-michelin-starred-restaurant-ever/\">brutal review</a> of a 1-star Michelin restaurant in Italy. It initially caught my eye because Irene and I like to hit a Michelin star or two when we’re traveling. Indeed, a 1-star place called <a href=\"https://www.behindrestaurant.co.uk/\"><em>Behind</em></a> as in “ it’s an open kitchen so there’s nothing to hide behind” got us figuring out how to get from central London to Hackney, a neighborhood we would’ve had no reason to explore otherwise. It was a great lunch; a great experience talking to the chef, and it\'s going on my final Best of 2021 list -- which is on my to-do list to update right after I finish this podcast. Having said that, we’ve also had some meals that weren’t great, like our 25th anniversary dinner at a 3-star place in Florence, or a 2-star in Spain that we loved -- until the next morning when we both came down with food poisoning. But on balance, we’ve had more really good meals than bad, and they’ve often taken us out of the travel bubble to parts of cities we wouldn’t normally go -- kinda like my microbrewery taprooms, only a <strong><em>lot</em></strong> more expensive.</li><li>So when I saw the title “We Eat at The Worst Michelin Starred Restaurant, Ever,” it got my attention. First, what restaurant is it, so we can avoid it, and second, what made it the worst ever because that’s a big claim. But then I see the <em>full</em> title, with the restaurant, Bros in Lecce, Italy. We won’t be able to skip it because we ate there in mid-October, the night after our Puglia bike tour ended. </li><li>I read through the reviews and looked closely at the pictures. A couple of courses look familiar, but others -- like the now-famous (infamous?) grey foam oozing out of a plaster replica of the chef’s mouth was (thankfully) not on our menu. I have to say that I was on the fence about eating at Bros when Irene brought it up when we were planning our Puglia trip. The reviews I could find were <em>very</em> mixed, and it wasn’t a cheap ticket. We decided to go, but with the understanding that it could be a high-variance meal, with some courses that might not work out. I think the oyster with rancid fat was that dish for Irene. I didn’t love it, but it didn’t trigger a gag reflex like it did for Irene. Certainly not what you hope for, and it was only that dish, the rest was fine. But like I said, we went into Bros eye wide open, expecting an edgy experimental food experience -- and definitely not a standard 3-course fine dining Italian meal. We walked out thinking “Well, that was interesting” -- not bad, but not the worst 1-star meal I’ve had; probably in the bottom quartile, though. As you might guess, Bros <em>won’t</em> make it on that Best of 2021 list update.</li><li>So why didn’t this blogger, a James Beard-award winning writer, come in with similar expectations? Who knows, though we do know that outrage porn drives clicks which, for her, also drove some high-profile TV interviews which probably helped move a few copies of her book. And, since no publicity is bad publicity, I’m guessing it was <a href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/23/world/europe/bros-restaurant-review.html\">a net positive for the restaurant</a> too.</li><li>But why pay what was about a lot of money for a meal that I think might be a complete train wreck? I walked past a lot of places in Lecce that I know would put a good meal down in front of us for a lot less. It becomes a bit less about food and a bit more about the experience; less about stomach and more about the brain. It reminded me of something Josh Glenn said in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/10/podcast-182-more-covid-changes-words-that-mean-adventure/\" title=\"the last episode\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the last episode</a> when I was talking with him about the language of adventure<ul><li>Josh: I mean an adventure is, and that word comes from the Latin meaning <em>to arrive unexpectedly</em>. That\'s actually really an important philosophical piece for me as I was going through this, the idea that you can have a trip is not an adventure if nothing unexpected happens and if you don\'t take enough risks to allow things unexpected to happen.... The word <em>chance </em>comes from the Latin <em>cadentia </em>meaning <em>falling</em>. So just when we think about how we use the words of “let the chips fall where they may” or “something befalls you”, this idea of having our feet off the ground, falling through space, we can\'t grasp anything, what do you do with that? If you’re someone who likes, in some kind of existential way, that feeling of falling, then you\'re an adventurer. You\'re going to get more out of your travel experiences than someone who wants everything to be exactly the same way every time and never have any hiccups.</li></ul></li><li>I always say to Irene “If every meal we have is a great one, then we’re not trying enough weird places.” After food poisoning has befallen you a couple times, how bad can a little rancid fat be?</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #183</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_183.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #183 — COVID Test Anxiety; Michelin Food Adventures','','inherit','closed','closed','','4063-revision-v1','','','2022-01-16 14:08:05','2022-01-16 19:08:05','',4063,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4071',0,'revision','',0),
(4072,1,'2022-01-16 14:16:08','2022-01-16 19:16:08','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/IMG_3929-scaled.jpeg\"><img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/IMG_3929-300x300.jpeg\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> Cleared to Adventure[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Back in front of the microphone after a two-week trip to the UK, getting back home just before the new <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/omicron-covid-travel-international-11638216229?st=sm0fcotd0jfju1i&amp;reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink\">Omicron travel restrictions</a> hit. We talk about getting to London, surfing the waves of changing travel requirements, a new way to renew Global Entry, moan a bit more about the inexorable advance of the cashless society, and finish up talking with <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_Glenn\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Josh Glenn</a> about his new book <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3lSNcwg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">The Adventurer\'s Glossary</a></em>.  All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_183.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #182: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. Hope everyone had a great New Year’s. No travel since the last episode, which has turned out to be a good thing given the, what?, two weeks straight of over 1,000 cancelled flights a day. I’ve always tried to avoid traveling during the Christmas holidays; crowded planes, lots of not-very-experienced travelers, and the inevitable winter storm or two has never resulted in smooth travel experiences. Add to that airlines struggling to staff back up to passenger loads and then omicron comes ripping through their ranks…. The two folks I knew flying last week both got home a day late which, given all this, could’ve been a lot worse. Like being trapped in that 27-hour mess on I-95 in Northern Virginia. Definitely a reminder never to let yourself get below a quarter tank.</li><li>So while I haven’t been traveling, I <em>have</em> been travel <em>planning</em>, which is not unusual. January has traditionally been <em>the</em> big travel planning month; pack up the Christmas decorations, figure out where you want to go this year and then put in your time off requests. And because January is just the worst month of the year, at least in the upper Northern Hemisphere when it’s the coldest month of the year and the sun sets early; so you need something, anything to look forward to.</li><li>But COVID changed all that, of course, especially the planning timeline. We’ve talked in prior episodes how last-minute travel restrictions have made that planning timeline, what the travel industry calls the <em>booking window</em>, a lot shorter. Last year, in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"January 2021 episode\">January 2021 episode</a>, I talked about having to make a last-minute pivot away from a San Diego trip I’d booked just the month before because California was still in their post-holiday lock down and not letting out-of-state visitors make hotel reservations.&nbsp;</li><li>I thought this year I’d revert back to the old patterns and do a bit more longer-term travel planning. Looking at <a href=\"https://www.kayak.com/flight-trends\">Kayak’s flight search trends</a>, where they now compare current flight search volumes to pre-pandemic levels, so comparing 2021 to 2019, seem to be an optimistic outlier because their search volumes have cratered vs. 2 year ago. Eyeballing their trend chart, I’d say it’s down something like 50%. Though switching over and looking at Google’s Hotel Insights page, I might not be too far out of the fat part of the curve; their hotel search trends seem to be recovering. Which sorta maps into our plans. In February, we’re driving down to Louisville rather than flying, giving the airlines a couple of months to unscramble their operations, and then getting on planes -- to New York in March, Santa Fe, NM in April, maybe DC in May. But for that February drive down I-65, across the frozen tundra of central Indiana, we’re definitely packing a couple of blankets -- and snacks -- and keeping the gas tank topped off just in case. News reports of that I-95 jam up talked about a Good Samaritan family going car to car, passing out oranges they were bringing back from Florida. Coming back from Louisville, I’m guessing any Good Samaritan would be going car to car with a couple bottles of bourbon and a sleeve of plastic shot glasses -- which is not a bad thing. Would definitely warm you up for at least a little bit.</li><li>Bridge Music — &nbsp;<em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/content/Per/Per_-_DLDN_Instrumental.mp3\" target=\"_blank\">DLDN Instrumental</a></em>&nbsp;by St Paul</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Last April, the Department of Homeland Security <a href=\"https://www.dhs.gov/real-id/news/2021/04/27/dhs-announces-extension-real-id-full-enforcement-deadline\">kicked the Real ID can down the road</a> -- again -- so now we have until May 2023 before we’ll need Real ID-compliant identification to get through a TSA checkpoint. We don’t <em>have</em> to get a Real ID driver’s license; <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/travel/security-screening/identification\">a passport or a Global Entry card</a> would work also. But, last month, since I had to visit the 5th Circle of Hell also known as the Dept of Motor Vehicles, to renew my expiring driver’s license, I figured I might as well get the Real ID version. And why not? In Illinois, the Real and non-Real ID driver\'s licenses cost the same, you go through the same lines…. The only difference was it took maybe an extra 3 minutes for them to scan in my social security card and the documents I used to prove my address. Which, if I’d kept in mind the Distributive Property of Cybersecurity, “Any data entered into a system will eventually be hacked and distributed on the dark web” -- I would’ve used something a bit more innocuous than my bank statement.&nbsp; But, I now have a driver’s license with a requisite gold start in the upper right corner just in case DHS is really serious this time about the Real ID deadline.</li><li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/10/podcast-182-more-covid-changes-words-that-mean-adventure/\">the last episode</a>, I talked about finishing up my Global Entry renewal. And so with that done, last week I sent my passport into the void that is the US Passport Agency for renewal. I don’t have any international travel planned right now, but I’m very uncomfortable to be without my passport. I don’t know why, but I am. And the discomfort is only amplified by the 8-11 week processing time the State Department is now quoting. It also reminded me that it’s been 10 years since my most embarrassing cock-up - letting my backpack with my son’s and my passports get stolen from the overhead rack of the train to Brussels airport. I told the whole story in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/05/20/podcast-98-stolen-luggage-restaurants-want-your-smartphone/\">episode #98</a>, about what a stupid, what I called “the rookie-est of rookie mistakes” it was, and how it could’ve been worse, but for the very pleasant and helpful Brussels airport police and US Embassy staff, and that my son and I then got in a couple extra days of Belgian beer drinking.&nbsp; Lesson learned, though; I’ve kept my passport on my person when traveling ever since.</li><li>It’s funny, sometimes, how travel can prepare you for things back home. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/10/28/podcast-180-tracking-covid-travel-requirements-cycling-thru-puglia/\">episode #180</a>, talking about our travels through Italy, I walked through what were back then the most stringent vaccine passport requirements around; you need to show an EU Green Pass on your phone or, for us, our CDC vaccination cards to get into restaurants, bars, airports, train stations,.... And so when Chicago started doing the same thing on January 1st, we were ready. In some ways Chicago is easier than Italy -- showing a picture of my CDC card is quicker than waiting for someone to scan a QR code; but here, and New York City and Washington, DC, we’ve added the extra step -- having to show a picture ID that matches to the vax card. We didn’t have to do that in Italy. You know, if I hadn’t had to send my passport in, maybe I’d just do what I did in Italy, carry my CDC card in my passport; I could pull ‘em both out in one hopefully suave and graceful move and be done with it.</li><li>Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/11/13/podcast-181-travel-potpourri-2021-travelers-gift-guide/\">November episode</a>, I said that I’d already gotten status roll-overs from Marriott, Hilton, and IHG, extending my current level in their frequent sleeper programs for the third time -- now they expire in February or March 2023. I figured that was the end of it, so when I received a note from Southwest in mid-December with the subject line “Surprise: A-List status extended,” it was pretty accurate. I was very surprised! I hadn’t expected any airlines to extend status; they all seemed to be lowering the qualification clip levels instead. So, thanks Southwest! I’ll be using this status on my flights to LGA and ABQ -- also because I still have some 2020 pandemic cancellation credits that are about to hit their disappearing 2-year birthday. Any chance you can extend that expiration data too?</li><li>Just to spin the propeller on top of the travel tech beanie hat for a sec…. Over the past couple of trips, I’ve noticed my briefcase/messenger bag has finally passed a tipping point -- I now have more electronic devices needing a newer USB-C cord than an original USB-A cord. (I told you this would be a propeller spin). The USB-C cord invasion started with the iPhone 11 Pro; another cord to carry, but it occasionally came in handy, like when Hertz gave me a birthday upgrade a few years back to a Mercedes A220; it only had the smaller USB-C plugs. But the invasion picked up speed with each upgrade -- first it was my new Bose headphones, then when I upgraded my battery pack, my power bank; then again when I got my MacBook Air, and again squared when I got a pair of cheap Anker earbuds last Prime Day. Which led me, finally, to replacing my dual USB-A power adapter for one with two USB-C plugs and one USB-A for my old Samsung tablet that just won’t die. But I still have to carry an old iPhone USB-A cord for those times when all that’s left on the Hertz lot is a 3-year old Chevy Malibu.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music —  <em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/content/oldDog/oldDog_-_Goodbye_sooner_or_later.mp3\" target=\"_blank\">Goodbye Sooner or Later</a></em>&nbsp;by oldDog</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>COVID Test Anxiety</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A friend of mine said he wanted to get together this month. “Sure,” I said, “but if we can’t, we’ll be together for a weekend in February in Louisville at a wedding.” “Uh, no,” he said, “I’m not going.” “Why not?” “I’m going to isolate, kinda like a soft quarantine in February, don’t go outside except to walk the dog so I don’t screw up my trip to Egypt. It’s non-refundable, so I’ll be out a lot of money if I test positive for COVID before leaving and can’t go.”</li><li>And last month, in early December, right when everyone was tightening travel restrictions in what turned out to be a futile effort to keep omicron out of their country, another friend cancelled a long-planned trip to Scotland. “I just don’t want to get trapped, away from home,” he said.</li><li>COVID test anxiety. I understand it, especially around test-on-arrival rules. The week before our flight to London in November, I got a text from my doctor group -- time to get your COVID booster. I clicked through to the appointment website, started looking at slots, but then stopped. I have to take a COVID test by our second day in London. What if that spike of antibodies from the booster lingers long enough to turn that test positive? I clicked onto the next page of the website and booked my booster for December, after we got back home.</li><li>As I mentioned in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/10/podcast-182-more-covid-changes-words-that-mean-adventure/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"last episode\">last episode</a>, we tested negative on our test in London and went about our vacation. But as we got close to our return date, that anxiety crept back in. This was before the US tightened the testing window, so we took our Abbott tests 2 days before departure, both to give us some wiggle room, some time to retest if one came up positive, but also to calm those worries. I remember on that trip talking to an American guy in the elevator of our hotel in London. He had an Abbott rapid test sticking out of his briefcase. “Getting ready to head home?” I asked. “No,” he said, “I just test myself every 2 days.” I kinda laughed at that, thinking it was a bit over-rotation. But thinking back on it now, maybe he had it right -- test yourself every couple of days to relieve that uncertainty rather than waiting for the night before departure.</li><li>But even that might not be enough. I tweeted out <a href=\"https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/covid-in-koh-samui-its-scary-0hs7h0pk9\">an article</a> from the UK Times newspaper written by a guy who visited Thailand last month. The article starts “On December 19, after a week of near-hourly negative lateral flow and PCR tests, I flew to Thailand.” The next sentence (you know where this is going): “On December 20 I stepped off the plane, took another PCR, and headed to my hotel. The next morning I received a text informing me I had tested positive.” And then he tells the story of his 10 days of solo isolation in a Thai hospital. He did everything right and it still went wrong.</li><li>One big anxiety driver is the cost for those extra days quarantined in a hotel somewhere. This should be the kind of risk that trip insurance could help you manage. So I rang up Michael Giusti, senior writer at <a href=\"https://insurancequotes.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"InsuranceQuotes.com\">InsuranceQuotes.com</a> -- he was with us on <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/12/podcast-173-whats-new-in-travel-insurance-keeping-ahead-of-expiring-miles/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"episode #173\">episode #173</a> last March, talking about travel insurance one year after the pandemic lockdowns -- to ask him about this.</li><li>Thanks to Michael Giusti for joining us. Interesting point he makes about test access being a grey area for coverage. As I mentioned earlier, Irene and I brought our own Abbott tests with us to Italy and the UK, but more for convenience than concern about availability. I wrote up a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/30/easy-way-to-do-1-day-testing-for-returning-to-us/\">detailed \"how to\"</a> on ordering and using the Abbott BinaxNOW testing kit. It’s on the TravelCommons website in case you want to sidestep Michael’s addition to  COVID test anxiety.</li><li>Bridge Music —   <em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/content/Zapac/Zapac_-_Test_Drive.mp3\" target=\"_blank\">Test Drive</a> </em>by Zapac</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Michelin Food Adventures</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Last month, I picked up on the buzz around a blogger’s <a href=\"https://everywhereist.com/2021/12/bros-restaurant-lecce-we-eat-at-the-worst-michelin-starred-restaurant-ever/\">brutal review</a> of a 1-star Michelin restaurant in Italy. It initially caught my eye because Irene and I like to hit a Michelin star or two when we’re traveling. Indeed, a 1-star place called <a href=\"https://www.behindrestaurant.co.uk/\"><em>Behind</em></a> as in “ it’s an open kitchen so there’s nothing to hide behind” got us figuring out how to get from central London to Hackney, a neighborhood we would’ve had no reason to explore otherwise. It was a great lunch; a great experience talking to the chef, and it\'s going on my final Best of 2021 list -- which is on my to-do list to update right after I finish this podcast. Having said that, we’ve also had some meals that weren’t great, like our 25th anniversary dinner at a 3-star place in Florence, or a 2-star in Spain that we loved -- until the next morning when we both came down with food poisoning. But on balance, we’ve had more really good meals than bad, and they’ve often taken us out of the travel bubble to parts of cities we wouldn’t normally go -- kinda like my microbrewery taprooms, only a <strong><em>lot</em></strong> more expensive.</li><li>So when I saw the title “We Eat at The Worst Michelin Starred Restaurant, Ever,” it got my attention. First, what restaurant is it, so we can avoid it, and second, what made it the worst ever because that’s a big claim. But then I see the <em>full</em> title, with the restaurant, Bros in Lecce, Italy. We won’t be able to skip it because we ate there in mid-October, the night after our Puglia bike tour ended. </li><li>I read through the reviews and looked closely at the pictures. A couple of courses look familiar, but others -- like the now-famous (infamous?) grey foam oozing out of a plaster replica of the chef’s mouth was (thankfully) not on our menu. I have to say that I was on the fence about eating at Bros when Irene brought it up when we were planning our Puglia trip. The reviews I could find were <em>very</em> mixed, and it wasn’t a cheap ticket. We decided to go, but with the understanding that it could be a high-variance meal, with some courses that might not work out. I think the oyster with rancid fat was that dish for Irene. I didn’t love it, but it didn’t trigger a gag reflex like it did for Irene. Certainly not what you hope for, and it was only that dish, the rest was fine. But like I said, we went into Bros eye wide open, expecting an edgy experimental food experience -- and definitely not a standard 3-course fine dining Italian meal. We walked out thinking “Well, that was interesting” -- not bad, but not the worst 1-star meal I’ve had; probably in the bottom quartile, though. As you might guess, Bros <em>won’t</em> make it on that Best of 2021 list update.</li><li>So why didn’t this blogger, a James Beard-award winning writer, come in with similar expectations? Who knows, though we do know that outrage porn drives clicks which, for her, also drove some high-profile TV interviews which probably helped move a few copies of her book. And, since no publicity is bad publicity, I’m guessing it was <a href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/23/world/europe/bros-restaurant-review.html\">a net positive for the restaurant</a> too.</li><li>But why pay what was about a lot of money for a meal that I think might be a complete train wreck? I walked past a lot of places in Lecce that I know would put a good meal down in front of us for a lot less. It becomes a bit less about food and a bit more about the experience; less about stomach and more about the brain. It reminded me of something Josh Glenn said in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/10/podcast-182-more-covid-changes-words-that-mean-adventure/\" title=\"the last episode\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the last episode</a> when I was talking with him about the language of adventure<ul><li>Josh: I mean an adventure is, and that word comes from the Latin meaning <em>to arrive unexpectedly</em>. That\'s actually really an important philosophical piece for me as I was going through this, the idea that you can have a trip is not an adventure if nothing unexpected happens and if you don\'t take enough risks to allow things unexpected to happen.... The word <em>chance </em>comes from the Latin <em>cadentia </em>meaning <em>falling</em>. So just when we think about how we use the words of “let the chips fall where they may” or “something befalls you”, this idea of having our feet off the ground, falling through space, we can\'t grasp anything, what do you do with that? If you’re someone who likes, in some kind of existential way, that feeling of falling, then you\'re an adventurer. You\'re going to get more out of your travel experiences than someone who wants everything to be exactly the same way every time and never have any hiccups.</li></ul></li><li>I always say to Irene “If every meal we have is a great one, then we’re not trying enough weird places.” After food poisoning has befallen you a couple times, how bad can a little rancid fat be?</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #183</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_183.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #183 — COVID Test Anxiety; Michelin Food Adventures','','inherit','closed','closed','','4063-revision-v1','','','2022-01-16 14:16:08','2022-01-16 19:16:08','',4063,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4072',0,'revision','',0),
(4073,1,'2022-01-16 18:37:01','2022-01-16 23:37:01','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/IMG_3929-scaled.jpeg\"><img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/IMG_3929-300x300.jpeg\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> Cleared to Adventure[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Back in front of the microphone after a two-week trip to the UK, getting back home just before the new <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/omicron-covid-travel-international-11638216229?st=sm0fcotd0jfju1i&amp;reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink\">Omicron travel restrictions</a> hit. We talk about getting to London, surfing the waves of changing travel requirements, a new way to renew Global Entry, moan a bit more about the inexorable advance of the cashless society, and finish up talking with <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_Glenn\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Josh Glenn</a> about his new book <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3lSNcwg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">The Adventurer\'s Glossary</a></em>.  All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_183.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #183: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. Hope everyone had a great New Year’s. No travel since the last episode, which has turned out to be a good thing given the, what?, two weeks straight of over 1,000 cancelled flights a day. I’ve always tried to avoid traveling during the Christmas holidays; crowded planes, lots of not-very-experienced travelers, and the inevitable winter storm or two has never resulted in smooth travel experiences. Add to that airlines struggling to staff back up to passenger loads and then omicron comes ripping through their ranks…. The two folks I knew flying last week both got home a day late which, given all this, could’ve been a lot worse. Like being trapped in that 27-hour mess on I-95 in Northern Virginia. Definitely a reminder never to let yourself get below a quarter tank.</li><li>So while I haven’t been traveling, I <em>have</em> been travel <em>planning</em>, which is not unusual. January has traditionally been <em>the</em> big travel planning month; pack up the Christmas decorations, figure out where you want to go this year and then put in your time off requests. And because January is just the worst month of the year, at least in the upper Northern Hemisphere when it’s the coldest month of the year and the sun sets early; so you need something, anything to look forward to.</li><li>But COVID changed all that, of course, especially the planning timeline. We’ve talked in prior episodes how last-minute travel restrictions have made that planning timeline, what the travel industry calls the <em>booking window</em>, a lot shorter. Last year, in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"January 2021 episode\">January 2021 episode</a>, I talked about having to make a last-minute pivot away from a San Diego trip I’d booked just the month before because California was still in their post-holiday lock down and not letting out-of-state visitors make hotel reservations.&nbsp;</li><li>I thought this year I’d revert back to the old patterns and do a bit more longer-term travel planning. Looking at <a href=\"https://www.kayak.com/flight-trends\">Kayak’s flight search trends</a>, where they now compare current flight search volumes to pre-pandemic levels, so comparing 2021 to 2019, seem to be an optimistic outlier because their search volumes have cratered vs. 2 year ago. Eyeballing their trend chart, I’d say it’s down something like 50%. Though switching over and looking at Google’s Hotel Insights page, I might not be too far out of the fat part of the curve; their hotel search trends seem to be recovering. Which sorta maps into our plans. In February, we’re driving down to Louisville rather than flying, giving the airlines a couple of months to unscramble their operations, and then getting on planes -- to New York in March, Santa Fe, NM in April, maybe DC in May. But for that February drive down I-65, across the frozen tundra of central Indiana, we’re definitely packing a couple of blankets -- and snacks -- and keeping the gas tank topped off just in case. News reports of that I-95 jam up talked about a Good Samaritan family going car to car, passing out oranges they were bringing back from Florida. Coming back from Louisville, I’m guessing any Good Samaritan would be going car to car with a couple bottles of bourbon and a sleeve of plastic shot glasses -- which is not a bad thing. Would definitely warm you up for at least a little bit.</li><li>Bridge Music — &nbsp;<em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/content/Per/Per_-_DLDN_Instrumental.mp3\" target=\"_blank\">DLDN Instrumental</a></em>&nbsp;by St Paul</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Last April, the Department of Homeland Security <a href=\"https://www.dhs.gov/real-id/news/2021/04/27/dhs-announces-extension-real-id-full-enforcement-deadline\">kicked the Real ID can down the road</a> -- again -- so now we have until May 2023 before we’ll need Real ID-compliant identification to get through a TSA checkpoint. We don’t <em>have</em> to get a Real ID driver’s license; <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/travel/security-screening/identification\">a passport or a Global Entry card</a> would work also. But, last month, since I had to visit the 5th Circle of Hell also known as the Dept of Motor Vehicles, to renew my expiring driver’s license, I figured I might as well get the Real ID version. And why not? In Illinois, the Real and non-Real ID driver\'s licenses cost the same, you go through the same lines…. The only difference was it took maybe an extra 3 minutes for them to scan in my social security card and the documents I used to prove my address. Which, if I’d kept in mind the Distributive Property of Cybersecurity, “Any data entered into a system will eventually be hacked and distributed on the dark web” -- I would’ve used something a bit more innocuous than my bank statement.&nbsp; But, I now have a driver’s license with a requisite gold start in the upper right corner just in case DHS is really serious this time about the Real ID deadline.</li><li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/10/podcast-182-more-covid-changes-words-that-mean-adventure/\">the last episode</a>, I talked about finishing up my Global Entry renewal. And so with that done, last week I sent my passport into the void that is the US Passport Agency for renewal. I don’t have any international travel planned right now, but I’m very uncomfortable to be without my passport. I don’t know why, but I am. And the discomfort is only amplified by the 8-11 week processing time the State Department is now quoting. It also reminded me that it’s been 10 years since my most embarrassing cock-up - letting my backpack with my son’s and my passports get stolen from the overhead rack of the train to Brussels airport. I told the whole story in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/05/20/podcast-98-stolen-luggage-restaurants-want-your-smartphone/\">episode #98</a>, about what a stupid, what I called “the rookie-est of rookie mistakes” it was, and how it could’ve been worse, but for the very pleasant and helpful Brussels airport police and US Embassy staff, and that my son and I then got in a couple extra days of Belgian beer drinking.&nbsp; Lesson learned, though; I’ve kept my passport on my person when traveling ever since.</li><li>It’s funny, sometimes, how travel can prepare you for things back home. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/10/28/podcast-180-tracking-covid-travel-requirements-cycling-thru-puglia/\">episode #180</a>, talking about our travels through Italy, I walked through what were back then the most stringent vaccine passport requirements around; you need to show an EU Green Pass on your phone or, for us, our CDC vaccination cards to get into restaurants, bars, airports, train stations,.... And so when Chicago started doing the same thing on January 1st, we were ready. In some ways Chicago is easier than Italy -- showing a picture of my CDC card is quicker than waiting for someone to scan a QR code; but here, and New York City and Washington, DC, we’ve added the extra step -- having to show a picture ID that matches to the vax card. We didn’t have to do that in Italy. You know, if I hadn’t had to send my passport in, maybe I’d just do what I did in Italy, carry my CDC card in my passport; I could pull ‘em both out in one hopefully suave and graceful move and be done with it.</li><li>Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/11/13/podcast-181-travel-potpourri-2021-travelers-gift-guide/\">November episode</a>, I said that I’d already gotten status roll-overs from Marriott, Hilton, and IHG, extending my current level in their frequent sleeper programs for the third time -- now they expire in February or March 2023. I figured that was the end of it, so when I received a note from Southwest in mid-December with the subject line “Surprise: A-List status extended,” it was pretty accurate. I was very surprised! I hadn’t expected any airlines to extend status; they all seemed to be lowering the qualification clip levels instead. So, thanks Southwest! I’ll be using this status on my flights to LGA and ABQ -- also because I still have some 2020 pandemic cancellation credits that are about to hit their disappearing 2-year birthday. Any chance you can extend that expiration data too?</li><li>Just to spin the propeller on top of the travel tech beanie hat for a sec…. Over the past couple of trips, I’ve noticed my briefcase/messenger bag has finally passed a tipping point -- I now have more electronic devices needing a newer USB-C cord than an original USB-A cord. (I told you this would be a propeller spin). The USB-C cord invasion started with the iPhone 11 Pro; another cord to carry, but it occasionally came in handy, like when Hertz gave me a birthday upgrade a few years back to a Mercedes A220; it only had the smaller USB-C plugs. But the invasion picked up speed with each upgrade -- first it was my new Bose headphones, then when I upgraded my battery pack, my power bank; then again when I got my MacBook Air, and again squared when I got a pair of cheap Anker earbuds last Prime Day. Which led me, finally, to replacing my dual USB-A power adapter for one with two USB-C plugs and one USB-A for my old Samsung tablet that just won’t die. But I still have to carry an old iPhone USB-A cord for those times when all that’s left on the Hertz lot is a 3-year old Chevy Malibu.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music —  <em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/content/oldDog/oldDog_-_Goodbye_sooner_or_later.mp3\" target=\"_blank\">Goodbye Sooner or Later</a></em>&nbsp;by oldDog</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>COVID Test Anxiety</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A friend of mine said he wanted to get together this month. “Sure,” I said, “but if we can’t, we’ll be together for a weekend in February in Louisville at a wedding.” “Uh, no,” he said, “I’m not going.” “Why not?” “I’m going to isolate, kinda like a soft quarantine in February, don’t go outside except to walk the dog so I don’t screw up my trip to Egypt. It’s non-refundable, so I’ll be out a lot of money if I test positive for COVID before leaving and can’t go.”</li><li>And last month, in early December, right when everyone was tightening travel restrictions in what turned out to be a futile effort to keep omicron out of their country, another friend cancelled a long-planned trip to Scotland. “I just don’t want to get trapped, away from home,” he said.</li><li>COVID test anxiety. I understand it, especially around test-on-arrival rules. The week before our flight to London in November, I got a text from my doctor group -- time to get your COVID booster. I clicked through to the appointment website, started looking at slots, but then stopped. I have to take a COVID test by our second day in London. What if that spike of antibodies from the booster lingers long enough to turn that test positive? I clicked onto the next page of the website and booked my booster for December, after we got back home.</li><li>As I mentioned in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/10/podcast-182-more-covid-changes-words-that-mean-adventure/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"last episode\">last episode</a>, we tested negative on our test in London and went about our vacation. But as we got close to our return date, that anxiety crept back in. This was before the US tightened the testing window, so we took our Abbott tests 2 days before departure, both to give us some wiggle room, some time to retest if one came up positive, but also to calm those worries. I remember on that trip talking to an American guy in the elevator of our hotel in London. He had an Abbott rapid test sticking out of his briefcase. “Getting ready to head home?” I asked. “No,” he said, “I just test myself every 2 days.” I kinda laughed at that, thinking it was a bit over-rotation. But thinking back on it now, maybe he had it right -- test yourself every couple of days to relieve that uncertainty rather than waiting for the night before departure.</li><li>But even that might not be enough. I tweeted out <a href=\"https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/covid-in-koh-samui-its-scary-0hs7h0pk9\">an article</a> from the UK Times newspaper written by a guy who visited Thailand last month. The article starts “On December 19, after a week of near-hourly negative lateral flow and PCR tests, I flew to Thailand.” The next sentence (you know where this is going): “On December 20 I stepped off the plane, took another PCR, and headed to my hotel. The next morning I received a text informing me I had tested positive.” And then he tells the story of his 10 days of solo isolation in a Thai hospital. He did everything right and it still went wrong.</li><li>One big anxiety driver is the cost for those extra days quarantined in a hotel somewhere. This should be the kind of risk that trip insurance could help you manage. So I rang up Michael Giusti, senior writer at <a href=\"https://insurancequotes.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"InsuranceQuotes.com\">InsuranceQuotes.com</a> -- he was with us on <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/12/podcast-173-whats-new-in-travel-insurance-keeping-ahead-of-expiring-miles/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"episode #173\">episode #173</a> last March, talking about travel insurance one year after the pandemic lockdowns -- to ask him about this.</li><li>Thanks to Michael Giusti for joining us. Interesting point he makes about test access being a grey area for coverage. As I mentioned earlier, Irene and I brought our own Abbott tests with us to Italy and the UK, but more for convenience than concern about availability. I wrote up a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/30/easy-way-to-do-1-day-testing-for-returning-to-us/\">detailed \"how to\"</a> on ordering and using the Abbott BinaxNOW testing kit. It’s on the TravelCommons website in case you want to sidestep Michael’s addition to  COVID test anxiety.</li><li>Bridge Music —   <em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/content/Zapac/Zapac_-_Test_Drive.mp3\" target=\"_blank\">Test Drive</a> </em>by Zapac</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Michelin Food Adventures</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Last month, I picked up on the buzz around a blogger’s <a href=\"https://everywhereist.com/2021/12/bros-restaurant-lecce-we-eat-at-the-worst-michelin-starred-restaurant-ever/\">brutal review</a> of a 1-star Michelin restaurant in Italy. It initially caught my eye because Irene and I like to hit a Michelin star or two when we’re traveling. Indeed, a 1-star place called <a href=\"https://www.behindrestaurant.co.uk/\"><em>Behind</em></a> as in “ it’s an open kitchen so there’s nothing to hide behind” got us figuring out how to get from central London to Hackney, a neighborhood we would’ve had no reason to explore otherwise. It was a great lunch; a great experience talking to the chef, and it\'s going on my final Best of 2021 list -- which is on my to-do list to update right after I finish this podcast. Having said that, we’ve also had some meals that weren’t great, like our 25th anniversary dinner at a 3-star place in Florence, or a 2-star in Spain that we loved -- until the next morning when we both came down with food poisoning. But on balance, we’ve had more really good meals than bad, and they’ve often taken us out of the travel bubble to parts of cities we wouldn’t normally go -- kinda like my microbrewery taprooms, only a <strong><em>lot</em></strong> more expensive.</li><li>So when I saw the title “We Eat at The Worst Michelin Starred Restaurant, Ever,” it got my attention. First, what restaurant is it, so we can avoid it, and second, what made it the worst ever because that’s a big claim. But then I see the <em>full</em> title, with the restaurant, Bros in Lecce, Italy. We won’t be able to skip it because we ate there in mid-October, the night after our Puglia bike tour ended. </li><li>I read through the reviews and looked closely at the pictures. A couple of courses look familiar, but others -- like the now-famous (infamous?) grey foam oozing out of a plaster replica of the chef’s mouth was (thankfully) not on our menu. I have to say that I was on the fence about eating at Bros when Irene brought it up when we were planning our Puglia trip. The reviews I could find were <em>very</em> mixed, and it wasn’t a cheap ticket. We decided to go, but with the understanding that it could be a high-variance meal, with some courses that might not work out. I think the oyster with rancid fat was that dish for Irene. I didn’t love it, but it didn’t trigger a gag reflex like it did for Irene. Certainly not what you hope for, and it was only that dish, the rest was fine. But like I said, we went into Bros eye wide open, expecting an edgy experimental food experience -- and definitely not a standard 3-course fine dining Italian meal. We walked out thinking “Well, that was interesting” -- not bad, but not the worst 1-star meal I’ve had; probably in the bottom quartile, though. As you might guess, Bros <em>won’t</em> make it on that Best of 2021 list update.</li><li>So why didn’t this blogger, a James Beard-award winning writer, come in with similar expectations? Who knows, though we do know that outrage porn drives clicks which, for her, also drove some high-profile TV interviews which probably helped move a few copies of her book. And, since no publicity is bad publicity, I’m guessing it was <a href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/23/world/europe/bros-restaurant-review.html\">a net positive for the restaurant</a> too.</li><li>But why pay what was about a lot of money for a meal that I think might be a complete train wreck? I walked past a lot of places in Lecce that I know would put a good meal down in front of us for a lot less. It becomes a bit less about food and a bit more about the experience; less about stomach and more about the brain. It reminded me of something Josh Glenn said in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/10/podcast-182-more-covid-changes-words-that-mean-adventure/\" title=\"the last episode\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the last episode</a> when I was talking with him about the language of adventure<ul><li>Josh: I mean an adventure is, and that word comes from the Latin meaning <em>to arrive unexpectedly</em>. That\'s actually really an important philosophical piece for me as I was going through this, the idea that you can have a trip is not an adventure if nothing unexpected happens and if you don\'t take enough risks to allow things unexpected to happen.... The word <em>chance </em>comes from the Latin <em>cadentia </em>meaning <em>falling</em>. So just when we think about how we use the words of “let the chips fall where they may” or “something befalls you”, this idea of having our feet off the ground, falling through space, we can\'t grasp anything, what do you do with that? If you’re someone who likes, in some kind of existential way, that feeling of falling, then you\'re an adventurer. You\'re going to get more out of your travel experiences than someone who wants everything to be exactly the same way every time and never have any hiccups.</li></ul></li><li>I always say to Irene “If every meal we have is a great one, then we’re not trying enough weird places.” After food poisoning has befallen you a couple times, how bad can a little rancid fat be?</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #183</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_183.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #183 — COVID Test Anxiety; Michelin Food Adventures','','inherit','closed','closed','','4063-revision-v1','','','2022-01-16 18:37:01','2022-01-16 23:37:01','',4063,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4073',0,'revision','',0),
(4074,1,'2022-01-16 19:17:19','2022-01-17 00:17:19','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/IMG_3929-scaled.jpeg\"><img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/IMG_3929-300x300.jpeg\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> Cleared to Adventure[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Back in front of the microphone after a two-week trip to the UK, getting back home just before the new <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/omicron-covid-travel-international-11638216229?st=sm0fcotd0jfju1i&amp;reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink\">Omicron travel restrictions</a> hit. We talk about getting to London, surfing the waves of changing travel requirements, a new way to renew Global Entry, moan a bit more about the inexorable advance of the cashless society, and finish up talking with <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_Glenn\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Josh Glenn</a> about his new book <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3lSNcwg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">The Adventurer\'s Glossary</a></em>.  All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_183.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #183: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. Hope everyone had a great New Year’s. No travel since the last episode, which has turned out to be a good thing given the, what?, two weeks straight of over 1,000 cancelled flights a day. I’ve always tried to avoid traveling during the Christmas holidays; crowded planes, lots of not-very-experienced travelers, and the inevitable winter storm or two has never resulted in smooth travel experiences. Add to that airlines struggling to staff back up to passenger loads and then omicron comes ripping through their ranks…. The two folks I knew flying last week both got home a day late which, given all this, could’ve been a lot worse. Like being trapped in that 27-hour mess on I-95 in Northern Virginia. Definitely a reminder never to let yourself get below a quarter tank.</li><li>So while I haven’t been traveling, I <em>have</em> been travel <em>planning</em>, which is not unusual. January has traditionally been <em>the</em> big travel planning month; pack up the Christmas decorations, figure out where you want to go this year and then put in your time off requests. And because January is just the worst month of the year, at least in the upper Northern Hemisphere when it’s the coldest month of the year and the sun sets early; so you need something, anything to look forward to.</li><li>But COVID changed all that, of course, especially the planning timeline. We’ve talked in prior episodes how last-minute travel restrictions have made that planning timeline, what the travel industry calls the <em>booking window</em>, a lot shorter. Last year, in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"January 2021 episode\">January 2021 episode</a>, I talked about having to make a last-minute pivot away from a San Diego trip I’d booked just the month before because California was still in their post-holiday lock down and not letting out-of-state visitors make hotel reservations.&nbsp;</li><li>I thought this year I’d revert back to the old patterns and do a bit more longer-term travel planning. Looking at <a href=\"https://www.kayak.com/flight-trends\">Kayak’s flight search trends</a>, where they now compare current flight search volumes to pre-pandemic levels, so comparing 2021 to 2019, seem to be an optimistic outlier because their search volumes have cratered vs. 2 year ago. Eyeballing their trend chart, I’d say it’s down something like 50%. Though switching over and looking at Google’s Hotel Insights page, I might not be too far out of the fat part of the curve; their hotel search trends seem to be recovering. Which sorta maps into our plans. In February, we’re driving down to Louisville rather than flying, giving the airlines a couple of months to unscramble their operations, and then getting on planes -- to New York in March, Santa Fe, NM in April, maybe DC in May. But for that February drive down I-65, across the frozen tundra of central Indiana, we’re definitely packing a couple of blankets -- and snacks -- and keeping the gas tank topped off just in case. News reports of that I-95 jam up talked about a Good Samaritan family going car to car, passing out oranges they were bringing back from Florida. Coming back from Louisville, I’m guessing any Good Samaritan would be going car to car with a couple bottles of bourbon and a sleeve of plastic shot glasses -- which is not a bad thing. Would definitely warm you up for at least a little bit.</li><li>Bridge Music — &nbsp;<em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/content/Per/Per_-_DLDN_Instrumental.mp3\" target=\"_blank\">DLDN Instrumental</a></em>&nbsp;by St Paul</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Last April, the Department of Homeland Security <a href=\"https://www.dhs.gov/real-id/news/2021/04/27/dhs-announces-extension-real-id-full-enforcement-deadline\">kicked the Real ID can down the road</a> -- again -- so now we have until May 2023 before we’ll need Real ID-compliant identification to get through a TSA checkpoint. We don’t <em>have</em> to get a Real ID driver’s license; <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/travel/security-screening/identification\">a passport or a Global Entry card</a> would work also. But, last month, since I had to visit the 5th Circle of Hell also known as the Dept of Motor Vehicles, to renew my expiring driver’s license, I figured I might as well get the Real ID version. And why not? In Illinois, the Real and non-Real ID driver\'s licenses cost the same, you go through the same lines…. The only difference was it took maybe an extra 3 minutes for them to scan in my social security card and the documents I used to prove my address. Which, if I’d kept in mind the Distributive Property of Cybersecurity, “Any data entered into a system will eventually be hacked and distributed on the dark web” -- I would’ve used something a bit more innocuous than my bank statement.&nbsp; But, I now have a driver’s license with a requisite gold start in the upper right corner just in case DHS is really serious this time about the Real ID deadline.</li><li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/10/podcast-182-more-covid-changes-words-that-mean-adventure/\">the last episode</a>, I talked about finishing up my Global Entry renewal. And so with that done, last week I sent my passport into the void that is the US Passport Agency for renewal. I don’t have any international travel planned right now, but I’m very uncomfortable to be without my passport. I don’t know why, but I am. And the discomfort is only amplified by the 8-11 week processing time the State Department is now quoting. It also reminded me that it’s been 10 years since my most embarrassing cock-up - letting my backpack with my son’s and my passports get stolen from the overhead rack of the train to Brussels airport. I told the whole story in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/05/20/podcast-98-stolen-luggage-restaurants-want-your-smartphone/\">episode #98</a>, about what a stupid, what I called “the rookie-est of rookie mistakes” it was, and how it could’ve been worse, but for the very pleasant and helpful Brussels airport police and US Embassy staff, and that my son and I then got in a couple extra days of Belgian beer drinking.&nbsp; Lesson learned, though; I’ve kept my passport on my person when traveling ever since.</li><li>It’s funny, sometimes, how travel can prepare you for things back home. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/10/28/podcast-180-tracking-covid-travel-requirements-cycling-thru-puglia/\">episode #180</a>, talking about our travels through Italy, I walked through what were back then the most stringent vaccine passport requirements around; you need to show an EU Green Pass on your phone or, for us, our CDC vaccination cards to get into restaurants, bars, airports, train stations,.... And so when Chicago started doing the same thing on January 1st, we were ready. In some ways Chicago is easier than Italy -- showing a picture of my CDC card is quicker than waiting for someone to scan a QR code; but here, and New York City and Washington, DC, we’ve added the extra step -- having to show a picture ID that matches to the vax card. We didn’t have to do that in Italy. You know, if I hadn’t had to send my passport in, maybe I’d just do what I did in Italy, carry my CDC card in my passport; I could pull ‘em both out in one hopefully suave and graceful move and be done with it.</li><li>Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/11/13/podcast-181-travel-potpourri-2021-travelers-gift-guide/\">November episode</a>, I said that I’d already gotten status roll-overs from Marriott, Hilton, and IHG, extending my current level in their frequent sleeper programs for the third time -- now they expire in February or March 2023. I figured that was the end of it, so when I received a note from Southwest in mid-December with the subject line “Surprise: A-List status extended,” it was pretty accurate. I was very surprised! I hadn’t expected any airlines to extend status; they all seemed to be lowering the qualification clip levels instead. So, thanks Southwest! I’ll be using this status on my flights to LGA and ABQ -- also because I still have some 2020 pandemic cancellation credits that are about to hit their disappearing 2-year birthday. Any chance you can extend that expiration data too?</li><li>Just to spin the propeller on top of the travel tech beanie hat for a sec…. Over the past couple of trips, I’ve noticed my briefcase/messenger bag has finally passed a tipping point -- I now have more electronic devices needing a newer USB-C cord than an original USB-A cord. (I told you this would be a propeller spin). The USB-C cord invasion started with the iPhone 11 Pro; another cord to carry, but it occasionally came in handy, like when Hertz gave me a birthday upgrade a few years back to a Mercedes A220; it only had the smaller USB-C plugs. But the invasion picked up speed with each upgrade -- first it was my new Bose headphones, then when I upgraded my battery pack, my power bank; then again when I got my MacBook Air, and again squared when I got a pair of cheap Anker earbuds last Prime Day. Which led me, finally, to replacing my dual USB-A power adapter for one with two USB-C plugs and one USB-A for my old Samsung tablet that just won’t die. But I still have to carry an old iPhone USB-A cord for those times when all that’s left on the Hertz lot is a 3-year old Chevy Malibu.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music —  <em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/content/oldDog/oldDog_-_Goodbye_sooner_or_later.mp3\" target=\"_blank\">Goodbye Sooner or Later</a></em>&nbsp;by oldDog</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>COVID Test Anxiety</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A friend of mine said he wanted to get together this month. “Sure,” I said, “but if we can’t, we’ll be together for a weekend in February in Louisville at a wedding.” “Uh, no,” he said, “I’m not going.” “Why not?” “I’m going to isolate, kinda like a soft quarantine in February, don’t go outside except to walk the dog so I don’t screw up my trip to Egypt. It’s non-refundable, so I’ll be out a lot of money if I test positive for COVID before leaving and can’t go.”</li><li>And last month, in early December, right when everyone was tightening travel restrictions in what turned out to be a futile effort to keep omicron out of their country, another friend cancelled a long-planned trip to Scotland. “I just don’t want to get trapped, away from home,” he said.</li><li>COVID test anxiety. I understand it, especially around test-on-arrival rules. The week before our flight to London in November, I got a text from my doctor group -- time to get your COVID booster. I clicked through to the appointment website, started looking at slots, but then stopped. I have to take a COVID test by our second day in London. What if that spike of antibodies from the booster lingers long enough to turn that test positive? I clicked onto the next page of the website and booked my booster for December, after we got back home.</li><li>As I mentioned in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/10/podcast-182-more-covid-changes-words-that-mean-adventure/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"last episode\">last episode</a>, we tested negative on our test in London and went about our vacation. But as we got close to our return date, that anxiety crept back in. This was before the US tightened the testing window, so we took our Abbott tests 2 days before departure, both to give us some wiggle room, some time to retest if one came up positive, but also to calm those worries. I remember on that trip talking to an American guy in the elevator of our hotel in London. He had an Abbott rapid test sticking out of his briefcase. “Getting ready to head home?” I asked. “No,” he said, “I just test myself every 2 days.” I kinda laughed at that, thinking it was a bit over-rotation. But thinking back on it now, maybe he had it right -- test yourself every couple of days to relieve that uncertainty rather than waiting for the night before departure.</li><li>But even that might not be enough. I tweeted out <a href=\"https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/covid-in-koh-samui-its-scary-0hs7h0pk9\">an article</a> from the UK Times newspaper written by a guy who visited Thailand last month. The article starts “On December 19, after a week of near-hourly negative lateral flow and PCR tests, I flew to Thailand.” The next sentence (you know where this is going): “On December 20 I stepped off the plane, took another PCR, and headed to my hotel. The next morning I received a text informing me I had tested positive.” And then he tells the story of his 10 days of solo isolation in a Thai hospital. He did everything right and it still went wrong.</li><li>One big anxiety driver is the cost for those extra days quarantined in a hotel somewhere. This should be the kind of risk that trip insurance could help you manage. So I rang up Michael Giusti, senior writer at <a href=\"https://insurancequotes.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"InsuranceQuotes.com\">InsuranceQuotes.com</a> -- he was with us on <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/12/podcast-173-whats-new-in-travel-insurance-keeping-ahead-of-expiring-miles/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"episode #173\">episode #173</a> last March, talking about travel insurance one year after the pandemic lockdowns -- to ask him about this.<ul><li>Michael: So from a travel insurance policy perspective that scenario you just said is actually almost the better scenario because that\'s what travel insurance is built for. So you come up with a positive test -- that kicks in the policy language. Now they can hit their contingency plans, whether that\'s paying you per day for the extended stay or finding alternative ways home. What scares me is the no man\'s land where you can\'t find a test. A lot of these policies have language that excludes government mandates and so if you just can\'t find a test and now can\'t get in not because you\'re sick, because being sick would trigger the policy, but because the government mandate has got you in limbo, that\'s the scary part and that\'s really gonna come down to a policy-by-policy view to see how they\'re gonna handle it.</li><li>Mark: Is this standard travel insurance coverage or is there something special you need to look for?</li><li>Michael: When you\'re buying your policy, you do need to pay attention, but there are the three buckets you want to make sure are included. One is the cancellation that\'s going to protect you if you get sick before the trip. One is health and that\'s going to pay for care while you\'re abroad or outside of your normal healthcare network. But the other is interruption and that\'s the piece that I was just talking about. The interruption policy is going to be standard in their baseline, we\'ll call it the silver plan -- not the platinum, not the bronze -- that standard baseline plan should have all three of those buckets. But know what you\'re buying because I was reading through some policies over the weekend and there were definitely some that were peeling one or more buckets out to save some costs. That\'s great if you want to take that risk but do it with open eyes, knowing what you\'re doing. Insurance is there to protect you from unknown risks, unknowable risks. All of these policies, when you start reading the language, they\'re quick to point out “COVID-19 became a global pandemic in January of 2020.” They want you to know this is a known risk and then that sets the table -- with this being known, how are you going to protect yourself? Some of them are built into the standard policies but some require that COVID rider, some different policy language which most of them are offering. But you can\'t just assume it\'s gonna be wrapped into standard coverage. You need to be asking the COVID question.</li></ul></li><li>Thanks to Michael Giusti for joining us. Interesting point he makes about test access being a grey area for coverage. As I mentioned earlier, Irene and I brought our own Abbott tests with us to Italy and the UK, but more for convenience than concern about availability. I wrote up a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/30/easy-way-to-do-1-day-testing-for-returning-to-us/\">detailed \"how to\"</a> on ordering and using the Abbott BinaxNOW testing kit. It’s on the TravelCommons website in case you want to sidestep Michael’s addition to  COVID test anxiety.</li><li>Bridge Music —   <em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/content/Zapac/Zapac_-_Test_Drive.mp3\" target=\"_blank\">Test Drive</a> </em>by Zapac</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Michelin Food Adventures</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Last month, I picked up on the buzz around a blogger’s <a href=\"https://everywhereist.com/2021/12/bros-restaurant-lecce-we-eat-at-the-worst-michelin-starred-restaurant-ever/\">brutal review</a> of a 1-star Michelin restaurant in Italy. It initially caught my eye because Irene and I like to hit a Michelin star or two when we’re traveling. Indeed, a 1-star place called <a href=\"https://www.behindrestaurant.co.uk/\"><em>Behind</em></a> as in “ it’s an open kitchen so there’s nothing to hide behind” got us figuring out how to get from central London to Hackney, a neighborhood we would’ve had no reason to explore otherwise. It was a great lunch; a great experience talking to the chef, and it\'s going on my final Best of 2021 list -- which is on my to-do list to update right after I finish this podcast. Having said that, we’ve also had some meals that weren’t great, like our 25th anniversary dinner at a 3-star place in Florence, or a 2-star in Spain that we loved -- until the next morning when we both came down with food poisoning. But on balance, we’ve had more really good meals than bad, and they’ve often taken us out of the travel bubble to parts of cities we wouldn’t normally go -- kinda like my microbrewery taprooms, only a <strong><em>lot</em></strong> more expensive.</li><li>So when I saw the title “We Eat at The Worst Michelin Starred Restaurant, Ever,” it got my attention. First, what restaurant is it, so we can avoid it, and second, what made it the worst ever because that’s a big claim. But then I see the <em>full</em> title, with the restaurant, Bros in Lecce, Italy. We won’t be able to skip it because we ate there in mid-October, the night after our Puglia bike tour ended. </li><li>I read through the reviews and looked closely at the pictures. A couple of courses look familiar, but others -- like the now-famous (infamous?) grey foam oozing out of a plaster replica of the chef’s mouth was (thankfully) not on our menu. I have to say that I was on the fence about eating at Bros when Irene brought it up when we were planning our Puglia trip. The reviews I could find were <em>very</em> mixed, and it wasn’t a cheap ticket. We decided to go, but with the understanding that it could be a high-variance meal, with some courses that might not work out. I think the oyster with rancid fat was that dish for Irene. I didn’t love it, but it didn’t trigger a gag reflex like it did for Irene. Certainly not what you hope for, and it was only that dish, the rest was fine. But like I said, we went into Bros eye wide open, expecting an edgy experimental food experience -- and definitely not a standard 3-course fine dining Italian meal. We walked out thinking “Well, that was interesting” -- not bad, but not the worst 1-star meal I’ve had; probably in the bottom quartile, though. As you might guess, Bros <em>won’t</em> make it on that Best of 2021 list update.</li><li>So why didn’t this blogger, a James Beard-award winning writer, come in with similar expectations? Who knows, though we do know that outrage porn drives clicks which, for her, also drove some high-profile TV interviews which probably helped move a few copies of her book. And, since no publicity is bad publicity, I’m guessing it was <a href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/23/world/europe/bros-restaurant-review.html\">a net positive for the restaurant</a> too.</li><li>But why pay what was about a lot of money for a meal that I think might be a complete train wreck? I walked past a lot of places in Lecce that I know would put a good meal down in front of us for a lot less. It becomes a bit less about food and a bit more about the experience; less about stomach and more about the brain. It reminded me of something Josh Glenn said in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/10/podcast-182-more-covid-changes-words-that-mean-adventure/\" title=\"the last episode\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the last episode</a> when I was talking with him about the language of adventure<ul><li>Josh: I mean an adventure is, and that word comes from the Latin meaning <em>to arrive unexpectedly</em>. That\'s actually really an important philosophical piece for me as I was going through this, the idea that you can have a trip is not an adventure if nothing unexpected happens and if you don\'t take enough risks to allow things unexpected to happen.... The word <em>chance </em>comes from the Latin <em>cadentia </em>meaning <em>falling</em>. So just when we think about how we use the words of “let the chips fall where they may” or “something befalls you”, this idea of having our feet off the ground, falling through space, we can\'t grasp anything, what do you do with that? If you’re someone who likes, in some kind of existential way, that feeling of falling, then you\'re an adventurer. You\'re going to get more out of your travel experiences than someone who wants everything to be exactly the same way every time and never have any hiccups.</li></ul></li><li>I always say to Irene “If every meal we have is a great one, then we’re not trying enough weird places.” After food poisoning has befallen you a couple times, how bad can a little rancid fat be?</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #183</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_183.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #183 — COVID Test Anxiety; Michelin Food Adventures','','inherit','closed','closed','','4063-revision-v1','','','2022-01-16 19:17:19','2022-01-17 00:17:19','',4063,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4074',0,'revision','',0),
(4075,1,'2022-01-16 19:20:27','2022-01-17 00:20:27','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/IMG_3929-scaled.jpeg\"><img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/IMG_3929-300x300.jpeg\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a>Post-dinner pic complete with gang sign[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Back in front of the microphone after a two-week trip to the UK, getting back home just before the new <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/omicron-covid-travel-international-11638216229?st=sm0fcotd0jfju1i&amp;reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink\">Omicron travel restrictions</a> hit. We talk about getting to London, surfing the waves of changing travel requirements, a new way to renew Global Entry, moan a bit more about the inexorable advance of the cashless society, and finish up talking with <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_Glenn\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Josh Glenn</a> about his new book <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3lSNcwg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">The Adventurer\'s Glossary</a></em>.  All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_183.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #183: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. Hope everyone had a great New Year’s. No travel since the last episode, which has turned out to be a good thing given the, what?, two weeks straight of over 1,000 cancelled flights a day. I’ve always tried to avoid traveling during the Christmas holidays; crowded planes, lots of not-very-experienced travelers, and the inevitable winter storm or two has never resulted in smooth travel experiences. Add to that airlines struggling to staff back up to passenger loads and then omicron comes ripping through their ranks…. The two folks I knew flying last week both got home a day late which, given all this, could’ve been a lot worse. Like being trapped in that 27-hour mess on I-95 in Northern Virginia. Definitely a reminder never to let yourself get below a quarter tank.</li><li>So while I haven’t been traveling, I <em>have</em> been travel <em>planning</em>, which is not unusual. January has traditionally been <em>the</em> big travel planning month; pack up the Christmas decorations, figure out where you want to go this year and then put in your time off requests. And because January is just the worst month of the year, at least in the upper Northern Hemisphere when it’s the coldest month of the year and the sun sets early; so you need something, anything to look forward to.</li><li>But COVID changed all that, of course, especially the planning timeline. We’ve talked in prior episodes how last-minute travel restrictions have made that planning timeline, what the travel industry calls the <em>booking window</em>, a lot shorter. Last year, in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"January 2021 episode\">January 2021 episode</a>, I talked about having to make a last-minute pivot away from a San Diego trip I’d booked just the month before because California was still in their post-holiday lock down and not letting out-of-state visitors make hotel reservations.&nbsp;</li><li>I thought this year I’d revert back to the old patterns and do a bit more longer-term travel planning. Looking at <a href=\"https://www.kayak.com/flight-trends\">Kayak’s flight search trends</a>, where they now compare current flight search volumes to pre-pandemic levels, so comparing 2021 to 2019, seem to be an optimistic outlier because their search volumes have cratered vs. 2 year ago. Eyeballing their trend chart, I’d say it’s down something like 50%. Though switching over and looking at Google’s Hotel Insights page, I might not be too far out of the fat part of the curve; their hotel search trends seem to be recovering. Which sorta maps into our plans. In February, we’re driving down to Louisville rather than flying, giving the airlines a couple of months to unscramble their operations, and then getting on planes -- to New York in March, Santa Fe, NM in April, maybe DC in May. But for that February drive down I-65, across the frozen tundra of central Indiana, we’re definitely packing a couple of blankets -- and snacks -- and keeping the gas tank topped off just in case. News reports of that I-95 jam up talked about a Good Samaritan family going car to car, passing out oranges they were bringing back from Florida. Coming back from Louisville, I’m guessing any Good Samaritan would be going car to car with a couple bottles of bourbon and a sleeve of plastic shot glasses -- which is not a bad thing. Would definitely warm you up for at least a little bit.</li><li>Bridge Music — &nbsp;<em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/content/Per/Per_-_DLDN_Instrumental.mp3\" target=\"_blank\">DLDN Instrumental</a></em>&nbsp;by St Paul</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Last April, the Department of Homeland Security <a href=\"https://www.dhs.gov/real-id/news/2021/04/27/dhs-announces-extension-real-id-full-enforcement-deadline\">kicked the Real ID can down the road</a> -- again -- so now we have until May 2023 before we’ll need Real ID-compliant identification to get through a TSA checkpoint. We don’t <em>have</em> to get a Real ID driver’s license; <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/travel/security-screening/identification\">a passport or a Global Entry card</a> would work also. But, last month, since I had to visit the 5th Circle of Hell also known as the Dept of Motor Vehicles, to renew my expiring driver’s license, I figured I might as well get the Real ID version. And why not? In Illinois, the Real and non-Real ID driver\'s licenses cost the same, you go through the same lines…. The only difference was it took maybe an extra 3 minutes for them to scan in my social security card and the documents I used to prove my address. Which, if I’d kept in mind the Distributive Property of Cybersecurity, “Any data entered into a system will eventually be hacked and distributed on the dark web” -- I would’ve used something a bit more innocuous than my bank statement.&nbsp; But, I now have a driver’s license with a requisite gold start in the upper right corner just in case DHS is really serious this time about the Real ID deadline.</li><li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/10/podcast-182-more-covid-changes-words-that-mean-adventure/\">the last episode</a>, I talked about finishing up my Global Entry renewal. And so with that done, last week I sent my passport into the void that is the US Passport Agency for renewal. I don’t have any international travel planned right now, but I’m very uncomfortable to be without my passport. I don’t know why, but I am. And the discomfort is only amplified by the 8-11 week processing time the State Department is now quoting. It also reminded me that it’s been 10 years since my most embarrassing cock-up - letting my backpack with my son’s and my passports get stolen from the overhead rack of the train to Brussels airport. I told the whole story in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/05/20/podcast-98-stolen-luggage-restaurants-want-your-smartphone/\">episode #98</a>, about what a stupid, what I called “the rookie-est of rookie mistakes” it was, and how it could’ve been worse, but for the very pleasant and helpful Brussels airport police and US Embassy staff, and that my son and I then got in a couple extra days of Belgian beer drinking.&nbsp; Lesson learned, though; I’ve kept my passport on my person when traveling ever since.</li><li>It’s funny, sometimes, how travel can prepare you for things back home. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/10/28/podcast-180-tracking-covid-travel-requirements-cycling-thru-puglia/\">episode #180</a>, talking about our travels through Italy, I walked through what were back then the most stringent vaccine passport requirements around; you need to show an EU Green Pass on your phone or, for us, our CDC vaccination cards to get into restaurants, bars, airports, train stations,.... And so when Chicago started doing the same thing on January 1st, we were ready. In some ways Chicago is easier than Italy -- showing a picture of my CDC card is quicker than waiting for someone to scan a QR code; but here, and New York City and Washington, DC, we’ve added the extra step -- having to show a picture ID that matches to the vax card. We didn’t have to do that in Italy. You know, if I hadn’t had to send my passport in, maybe I’d just do what I did in Italy, carry my CDC card in my passport; I could pull ‘em both out in one hopefully suave and graceful move and be done with it.</li><li>Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/11/13/podcast-181-travel-potpourri-2021-travelers-gift-guide/\">November episode</a>, I said that I’d already gotten status roll-overs from Marriott, Hilton, and IHG, extending my current level in their frequent sleeper programs for the third time -- now they expire in February or March 2023. I figured that was the end of it, so when I received a note from Southwest in mid-December with the subject line “Surprise: A-List status extended,” it was pretty accurate. I was very surprised! I hadn’t expected any airlines to extend status; they all seemed to be lowering the qualification clip levels instead. So, thanks Southwest! I’ll be using this status on my flights to LGA and ABQ -- also because I still have some 2020 pandemic cancellation credits that are about to hit their disappearing 2-year birthday. Any chance you can extend that expiration data too?</li><li>Just to spin the propeller on top of the travel tech beanie hat for a sec…. Over the past couple of trips, I’ve noticed my briefcase/messenger bag has finally passed a tipping point -- I now have more electronic devices needing a newer USB-C cord than an original USB-A cord. (I told you this would be a propeller spin). The USB-C cord invasion started with the iPhone 11 Pro; another cord to carry, but it occasionally came in handy, like when Hertz gave me a birthday upgrade a few years back to a Mercedes A220; it only had the smaller USB-C plugs. But the invasion picked up speed with each upgrade -- first it was my new Bose headphones, then when I upgraded my battery pack, my power bank; then again when I got my MacBook Air, and again squared when I got a pair of cheap Anker earbuds last Prime Day. Which led me, finally, to replacing my dual USB-A power adapter for one with two USB-C plugs and one USB-A for my old Samsung tablet that just won’t die. But I still have to carry an old iPhone USB-A cord for those times when all that’s left on the Hertz lot is a 3-year old Chevy Malibu.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music —  <em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/content/oldDog/oldDog_-_Goodbye_sooner_or_later.mp3\" target=\"_blank\">Goodbye Sooner or Later</a></em>&nbsp;by oldDog</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>COVID Test Anxiety</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A friend of mine said he wanted to get together this month. “Sure,” I said, “but if we can’t, we’ll be together for a weekend in February in Louisville at a wedding.” “Uh, no,” he said, “I’m not going.” “Why not?” “I’m going to isolate, kinda like a soft quarantine in February, don’t go outside except to walk the dog so I don’t screw up my trip to Egypt. It’s non-refundable, so I’ll be out a lot of money if I test positive for COVID before leaving and can’t go.”</li><li>And last month, in early December, right when everyone was tightening travel restrictions in what turned out to be a futile effort to keep omicron out of their country, another friend cancelled a long-planned trip to Scotland. “I just don’t want to get trapped, away from home,” he said.</li><li>COVID test anxiety. I understand it, especially around test-on-arrival rules. The week before our flight to London in November, I got a text from my doctor group -- time to get your COVID booster. I clicked through to the appointment website, started looking at slots, but then stopped. I have to take a COVID test by our second day in London. What if that spike of antibodies from the booster lingers long enough to turn that test positive? I clicked onto the next page of the website and booked my booster for December, after we got back home.</li><li>As I mentioned in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/10/podcast-182-more-covid-changes-words-that-mean-adventure/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"last episode\">last episode</a>, we tested negative on our test in London and went about our vacation. But as we got close to our return date, that anxiety crept back in. This was before the US tightened the testing window, so we took our Abbott tests 2 days before departure, both to give us some wiggle room, some time to retest if one came up positive, but also to calm those worries. I remember on that trip talking to an American guy in the elevator of our hotel in London. He had an Abbott rapid test sticking out of his briefcase. “Getting ready to head home?” I asked. “No,” he said, “I just test myself every 2 days.” I kinda laughed at that, thinking it was a bit over-rotation. But thinking back on it now, maybe he had it right -- test yourself every couple of days to relieve that uncertainty rather than waiting for the night before departure.</li><li>But even that might not be enough. I tweeted out <a href=\"https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/covid-in-koh-samui-its-scary-0hs7h0pk9\">an article</a> from the UK Times newspaper written by a guy who visited Thailand last month. The article starts “On December 19, after a week of near-hourly negative lateral flow and PCR tests, I flew to Thailand.” The next sentence (you know where this is going): “On December 20 I stepped off the plane, took another PCR, and headed to my hotel. The next morning I received a text informing me I had tested positive.” And then he tells the story of his 10 days of solo isolation in a Thai hospital. He did everything right and it still went wrong.</li><li>One big anxiety driver is the cost for those extra days quarantined in a hotel somewhere. This should be the kind of risk that trip insurance could help you manage. So I rang up Michael Giusti, senior writer at <a href=\"https://insurancequotes.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"InsuranceQuotes.com\">InsuranceQuotes.com</a> -- he was with us on <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/12/podcast-173-whats-new-in-travel-insurance-keeping-ahead-of-expiring-miles/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"episode #173\">episode #173</a> last March, talking about travel insurance one year after the pandemic lockdowns -- to ask him about this.<ul><li>Michael: So from a travel insurance policy perspective that scenario you just said is actually almost the better scenario because that\'s what travel insurance is built for. So you come up with a positive test -- that kicks in the policy language. Now they can hit their contingency plans, whether that\'s paying you per day for the extended stay or finding alternative ways home. What scares me is the no man\'s land where you can\'t find a test. A lot of these policies have language that excludes government mandates and so if you just can\'t find a test and now can\'t get in not because you\'re sick, because being sick would trigger the policy, but because the government mandate has got you in limbo, that\'s the scary part and that\'s really gonna come down to a policy-by-policy view to see how they\'re gonna handle it.</li><li>Mark: Is this standard travel insurance coverage or is there something special you need to look for?</li><li>Michael: When you\'re buying your policy, you do need to pay attention, but there are the three buckets you want to make sure are included. One is the cancellation that\'s going to protect you if you get sick before the trip. One is health and that\'s going to pay for care while you\'re abroad or outside of your normal healthcare network. But the other is interruption and that\'s the piece that I was just talking about. The interruption policy is going to be standard in their baseline, we\'ll call it the silver plan -- not the platinum, not the bronze -- that standard baseline plan should have all three of those buckets. But know what you\'re buying because I was reading through some policies over the weekend and there were definitely some that were peeling one or more buckets out to save some costs. That\'s great if you want to take that risk but do it with open eyes, knowing what you\'re doing. Insurance is there to protect you from unknown risks, unknowable risks. All of these policies, when you start reading the language, they\'re quick to point out “COVID-19 became a global pandemic in January of 2020.” They want you to know this is a known risk and then that sets the table -- with this being known, how are you going to protect yourself? Some of them are built into the standard policies but some require that COVID rider, some different policy language which most of them are offering. But you can\'t just assume it\'s gonna be wrapped into standard coverage. You need to be asking the COVID question.</li></ul></li><li>Thanks to Michael Giusti for joining us. Interesting point he makes about test access being a grey area for coverage. As I mentioned earlier, Irene and I brought our own Abbott tests with us to Italy and the UK, but more for convenience than concern about availability. I wrote up a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/30/easy-way-to-do-1-day-testing-for-returning-to-us/\">detailed \"how to\"</a> on ordering and using the Abbott BinaxNOW testing kit. It’s on the TravelCommons website in case you want to sidestep Michael’s addition to&nbsp; COVID test anxiety.</li><li>Bridge Music —  &nbsp;<em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/content/Zapac/Zapac_-_Test_Drive.mp3\" target=\"_blank\">Test Drive</a>&nbsp;</em>by Zapac</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Michelin Food Adventures</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Last month, I picked up on the buzz around a blogger’s <a href=\"https://everywhereist.com/2021/12/bros-restaurant-lecce-we-eat-at-the-worst-michelin-starred-restaurant-ever/\">brutal review</a> of a 1-star Michelin restaurant in Italy. It initially caught my eye because Irene and I like to hit a Michelin star or two when we’re traveling. Indeed, a 1-star place called <a href=\"https://www.behindrestaurant.co.uk/\"><em>Behind</em></a> as in “ it’s an open kitchen so there’s nothing to hide behind” got us figuring out how to get from central London to Hackney, a neighborhood we would’ve had no reason to explore otherwise. It was a great lunch; a great experience talking to the chef, and it\'s going on my final Best of 2021 list -- which is on my to-do list to update right after I finish this podcast. Having said that, we’ve also had some meals that weren’t great, like our 25th anniversary dinner at a 3-star place in Florence, or a 2-star in Spain that we loved -- until the next morning when we both came down with food poisoning. But on balance, we’ve had more really good meals than bad, and they’ve often taken us out of the travel bubble to parts of cities we wouldn’t normally go -- kinda like my microbrewery taprooms, only a <strong><em>lot</em></strong> more expensive.</li><li>So when I saw the title “We Eat at The Worst Michelin Starred Restaurant, Ever,” it got my attention. First, what restaurant is it, so we can avoid it, and second, what made it the worst ever because that’s a big claim. But then I see the <em>full</em> title, with the restaurant, Bros in Lecce, Italy. We won’t be able to skip it because we ate there in mid-October, the night after our Puglia bike tour ended.&nbsp;</li><li>I read through the reviews and looked closely at the pictures. A couple of courses look familiar, but others -- like the now-famous (infamous?) grey foam oozing out of a plaster replica of the chef’s mouth was (thankfully) not on our menu. I have to say that I was on the fence about eating at Bros when Irene brought it up when we were planning our Puglia trip. The reviews I could find were <em>very</em> mixed, and it wasn’t a cheap ticket. We decided to go, but with the understanding that it could be a high-variance meal, with some courses that might not work out. I think the oyster with rancid fat was that dish for Irene. I didn’t love it, but it didn’t trigger a gag reflex like it did for Irene. Certainly not what you hope for, and it was only that dish, the rest was fine. But like I said, we went into Bros eye wide open, expecting an edgy experimental food experience -- and definitely not a standard 3-course fine dining Italian meal. We walked out thinking “Well, that was interesting” -- not bad, but not the worst 1-star meal I’ve had; probably in the bottom quartile, though. As you might guess, Bros <em>won’t</em> make it on that Best of 2021 list update.</li><li>So why didn’t this blogger, a James Beard-award winning writer, come in with similar expectations? Who knows, though we do know that outrage porn drives clicks which, for her, also drove some high-profile TV interviews which probably helped move a few copies of her book. And, since no publicity is bad publicity, I’m guessing it was <a href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/23/world/europe/bros-restaurant-review.html\">a net positive for the restaurant</a> too.</li><li>But why pay what was about a lot of money for a meal that I think might be a complete train wreck? I walked past a lot of places in Lecce that I know would put a good meal down in front of us for a lot less. It becomes a bit less about food and a bit more about the experience; less about stomach and more about the brain. It reminded me of something Josh Glenn said in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/10/podcast-182-more-covid-changes-words-that-mean-adventure/\" title=\"the last episode\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the last episode</a> when I was talking with him about the language of adventure<ul><li>Josh: I mean an adventure is, and that word comes from the Latin meaning <em>to arrive unexpectedly</em>. That\'s actually really an important philosophical piece for me as I was going through this, the idea that you can have a trip is not an adventure if nothing unexpected happens and if you don\'t take enough risks to allow things unexpected to happen.... The word <em>chance </em>comes from the Latin <em>cadentia </em>meaning <em>falling</em>. So just when we think about how we use the words of “let the chips fall where they may” or “something befalls you”, this idea of having our feet off the ground, falling through space, we can\'t grasp anything, what do you do with that? If you’re someone who likes, in some kind of existential way, that feeling of falling, then you\'re an adventurer. You\'re going to get more out of your travel experiences than someone who wants everything to be exactly the same way every time and never have any hiccups.</li></ul></li><li>I always say to Irene “If every meal we have is a great one, then we’re not trying enough weird places.” After food poisoning has befallen you a couple times, how bad can a little rancid fat be?</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #183</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_183.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #183 — COVID Test Anxiety; Michelin Food Adventures','','inherit','closed','closed','','4063-revision-v1','','','2022-01-16 19:20:27','2022-01-17 00:20:27','',4063,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4075',0,'revision','',0),
(4076,1,'2022-01-16 19:31:01','2022-01-17 00:31:01','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/IMG_3929-scaled.jpeg\"><img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/IMG_3929-300x300.jpeg\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a>Post-dinner pic complete with gang sign[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>No travel since the last episode, but lots of travel planning. Are we making our way back to pre-COVID travel planning patterns? Omicron has lots of people worried about testing positive and getting stuck abroad. Michael Giusti of <a href=\"https://insurancequotes.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">InsuranceQuotes.com</a> talks about how travel insurance can help. A blogger’s <a href=\"https://everywhereist.com/2021/12/bros-restaurant-lecce-we-eat-at-the-worst-michelin-starred-restaurant-ever/\">brutal review</a> of a Michelin-starred restaurant we\'d eaten at gets me thinking about food as an adventure.  All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_183.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #183: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. Hope everyone had a great New Year’s. No travel since the last episode, which has turned out to be a good thing given the, what?, two weeks straight of over 1,000 cancelled flights a day. I’ve always tried to avoid traveling during the Christmas holidays; crowded planes, lots of not-very-experienced travelers, and the inevitable winter storm or two has never resulted in smooth travel experiences. Add to that airlines struggling to staff back up to passenger loads and then omicron comes ripping through their ranks…. The two folks I knew flying last week both got home a day late which, given all this, could’ve been a lot worse. Like being trapped in that 27-hour mess on I-95 in Northern Virginia. Definitely a reminder never to let yourself get below a quarter tank.</li><li>So while I haven’t been traveling, I <em>have</em> been travel <em>planning</em>, which is not unusual. January has traditionally been <em>the</em> big travel planning month; pack up the Christmas decorations, figure out where you want to go this year and then put in your time off requests. And because January is just the worst month of the year, at least in the upper Northern Hemisphere when it’s the coldest month of the year and the sun sets early; so you need something, anything to look forward to.</li><li>But COVID changed all that, of course, especially the planning timeline. We’ve talked in prior episodes how last-minute travel restrictions have made that planning timeline, what the travel industry calls the <em>booking window</em>, a lot shorter. Last year, in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"January 2021 episode\">January 2021 episode</a>, I talked about having to make a last-minute pivot away from a San Diego trip I’d booked just the month before because California was still in their post-holiday lock down and not letting out-of-state visitors make hotel reservations.&nbsp;</li><li>I thought this year I’d revert back to the old patterns and do a bit more longer-term travel planning. Looking at <a href=\"https://www.kayak.com/flight-trends\">Kayak’s flight search trends</a>, where they now compare current flight search volumes to pre-pandemic levels, so comparing 2021 to 2019, seem to be an optimistic outlier because their search volumes have cratered vs. 2 year ago. Eyeballing their trend chart, I’d say it’s down something like 50%. Though switching over and looking at Google’s Hotel Insights page, I might not be too far out of the fat part of the curve; their hotel search trends seem to be recovering. Which sorta maps into our plans. In February, we’re driving down to Louisville rather than flying, giving the airlines a couple of months to unscramble their operations, and then getting on planes -- to New York in March, Santa Fe, NM in April, maybe DC in May. But for that February drive down I-65, across the frozen tundra of central Indiana, we’re definitely packing a couple of blankets -- and snacks -- and keeping the gas tank topped off just in case. News reports of that I-95 jam up talked about a Good Samaritan family going car to car, passing out oranges they were bringing back from Florida. Coming back from Louisville, I’m guessing any Good Samaritan would be going car to car with a couple bottles of bourbon and a sleeve of plastic shot glasses -- which is not a bad thing. Would definitely warm you up for at least a little bit.</li><li>Bridge Music — &nbsp;<em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/content/Per/Per_-_DLDN_Instrumental.mp3\" target=\"_blank\">DLDN Instrumental</a></em>&nbsp;by St Paul</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Last April, the Department of Homeland Security <a href=\"https://www.dhs.gov/real-id/news/2021/04/27/dhs-announces-extension-real-id-full-enforcement-deadline\">kicked the Real ID can down the road</a> -- again -- so now we have until May 2023 before we’ll need Real ID-compliant identification to get through a TSA checkpoint. We don’t <em>have</em> to get a Real ID driver’s license; <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/travel/security-screening/identification\">a passport or a Global Entry card</a> would work also. But, last month, since I had to visit the 5th Circle of Hell also known as the Dept of Motor Vehicles, to renew my expiring driver’s license, I figured I might as well get the Real ID version. And why not? In Illinois, the Real and non-Real ID driver\'s licenses cost the same, you go through the same lines…. The only difference was it took maybe an extra 3 minutes for them to scan in my social security card and the documents I used to prove my address. Which, if I’d kept in mind the Distributive Property of Cybersecurity, “Any data entered into a system will eventually be hacked and distributed on the dark web” -- I would’ve used something a bit more innocuous than my bank statement.&nbsp; But, I now have a driver’s license with a requisite gold start in the upper right corner just in case DHS is really serious this time about the Real ID deadline.</li><li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/10/podcast-182-more-covid-changes-words-that-mean-adventure/\">the last episode</a>, I talked about finishing up my Global Entry renewal. And so with that done, last week I sent my passport into the void that is the US Passport Agency for renewal. I don’t have any international travel planned right now, but I’m very uncomfortable to be without my passport. I don’t know why, but I am. And the discomfort is only amplified by the 8-11 week processing time the State Department is now quoting. It also reminded me that it’s been 10 years since my most embarrassing cock-up - letting my backpack with my son’s and my passports get stolen from the overhead rack of the train to Brussels airport. I told the whole story in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/05/20/podcast-98-stolen-luggage-restaurants-want-your-smartphone/\">episode #98</a>, about what a stupid, what I called “the rookie-est of rookie mistakes” it was, and how it could’ve been worse, but for the very pleasant and helpful Brussels airport police and US Embassy staff, and that my son and I then got in a couple extra days of Belgian beer drinking.&nbsp; Lesson learned, though; I’ve kept my passport on my person when traveling ever since.</li><li>It’s funny, sometimes, how travel can prepare you for things back home. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/10/28/podcast-180-tracking-covid-travel-requirements-cycling-thru-puglia/\">episode #180</a>, talking about our travels through Italy, I walked through what were back then the most stringent vaccine passport requirements around; you need to show an EU Green Pass on your phone or, for us, our CDC vaccination cards to get into restaurants, bars, airports, train stations,.... And so when Chicago started doing the same thing on January 1st, we were ready. In some ways Chicago is easier than Italy -- showing a picture of my CDC card is quicker than waiting for someone to scan a QR code; but here, and New York City and Washington, DC, we’ve added the extra step -- having to show a picture ID that matches to the vax card. We didn’t have to do that in Italy. You know, if I hadn’t had to send my passport in, maybe I’d just do what I did in Italy, carry my CDC card in my passport; I could pull ‘em both out in one hopefully suave and graceful move and be done with it.</li><li>Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/11/13/podcast-181-travel-potpourri-2021-travelers-gift-guide/\">November episode</a>, I said that I’d already gotten status roll-overs from Marriott, Hilton, and IHG, extending my current level in their frequent sleeper programs for the third time -- now they expire in February or March 2023. I figured that was the end of it, so when I received a note from Southwest in mid-December with the subject line “Surprise: A-List status extended,” it was pretty accurate. I was very surprised! I hadn’t expected any airlines to extend status; they all seemed to be lowering the qualification clip levels instead. So, thanks Southwest! I’ll be using this status on my flights to LGA and ABQ -- also because I still have some 2020 pandemic cancellation credits that are about to hit their disappearing 2-year birthday. Any chance you can extend that expiration data too?</li><li>Just to spin the propeller on top of the travel tech beanie hat for a sec…. Over the past couple of trips, I’ve noticed my briefcase/messenger bag has finally passed a tipping point -- I now have more electronic devices needing a newer USB-C cord than an original USB-A cord. (I told you this would be a propeller spin). The USB-C cord invasion started with the iPhone 11 Pro; another cord to carry, but it occasionally came in handy, like when Hertz gave me a birthday upgrade a few years back to a Mercedes A220; it only had the smaller USB-C plugs. But the invasion picked up speed with each upgrade -- first it was my new Bose headphones, then when I upgraded my battery pack, my power bank; then again when I got my MacBook Air, and again squared when I got a pair of cheap Anker earbuds last Prime Day. Which led me, finally, to replacing my dual USB-A power adapter for one with two USB-C plugs and one USB-A for my old Samsung tablet that just won’t die. But I still have to carry an old iPhone USB-A cord for those times when all that’s left on the Hertz lot is a 3-year old Chevy Malibu.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music —  <em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/content/oldDog/oldDog_-_Goodbye_sooner_or_later.mp3\" target=\"_blank\">Goodbye Sooner or Later</a></em>&nbsp;by oldDog</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>COVID Test Anxiety</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A friend of mine said he wanted to get together this month. “Sure,” I said, “but if we can’t, we’ll be together for a weekend in February in Louisville at a wedding.” “Uh, no,” he said, “I’m not going.” “Why not?” “I’m going to isolate, kinda like a soft quarantine in February, don’t go outside except to walk the dog so I don’t screw up my trip to Egypt. It’s non-refundable, so I’ll be out a lot of money if I test positive for COVID before leaving and can’t go.”</li><li>And last month, in early December, right when everyone was tightening travel restrictions in what turned out to be a futile effort to keep omicron out of their country, another friend cancelled a long-planned trip to Scotland. “I just don’t want to get trapped, away from home,” he said.</li><li>COVID test anxiety. I understand it, especially around test-on-arrival rules. The week before our flight to London in November, I got a text from my doctor group -- time to get your COVID booster. I clicked through to the appointment website, started looking at slots, but then stopped. I have to take a COVID test by our second day in London. What if that spike of antibodies from the booster lingers long enough to turn that test positive? I clicked onto the next page of the website and booked my booster for December, after we got back home.</li><li>As I mentioned in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/10/podcast-182-more-covid-changes-words-that-mean-adventure/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"last episode\">last episode</a>, we tested negative on our test in London and went about our vacation. But as we got close to our return date, that anxiety crept back in. This was before the US tightened the testing window, so we took our Abbott tests 2 days before departure, both to give us some wiggle room, some time to retest if one came up positive, but also to calm those worries. I remember on that trip talking to an American guy in the elevator of our hotel in London. He had an Abbott rapid test sticking out of his briefcase. “Getting ready to head home?” I asked. “No,” he said, “I just test myself every 2 days.” I kinda laughed at that, thinking it was a bit over-rotation. But thinking back on it now, maybe he had it right -- test yourself every couple of days to relieve that uncertainty rather than waiting for the night before departure.</li><li>But even that might not be enough. I tweeted out <a href=\"https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/covid-in-koh-samui-its-scary-0hs7h0pk9\">an article</a> from the UK Times newspaper written by a guy who visited Thailand last month. The article starts “On December 19, after a week of near-hourly negative lateral flow and PCR tests, I flew to Thailand.” The next sentence (you know where this is going): “On December 20 I stepped off the plane, took another PCR, and headed to my hotel. The next morning I received a text informing me I had tested positive.” And then he tells the story of his 10 days of solo isolation in a Thai hospital. He did everything right and it still went wrong.</li><li>One big anxiety driver is the cost for those extra days quarantined in a hotel somewhere. This should be the kind of risk that trip insurance could help you manage. So I rang up Michael Giusti, senior writer at <a href=\"https://insurancequotes.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"InsuranceQuotes.com\">InsuranceQuotes.com</a> -- he was with us on <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/12/podcast-173-whats-new-in-travel-insurance-keeping-ahead-of-expiring-miles/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"episode #173\">episode #173</a> last March, talking about travel insurance one year after the pandemic lockdowns -- to ask him about this.<ul><li>Michael: So from a travel insurance policy perspective that scenario you just said is actually almost the better scenario because that\'s what travel insurance is built for. So you come up with a positive test -- that kicks in the policy language. Now they can hit their contingency plans, whether that\'s paying you per day for the extended stay or finding alternative ways home. What scares me is the no man\'s land where you can\'t find a test. A lot of these policies have language that excludes government mandates and so if you just can\'t find a test and now can\'t get in not because you\'re sick, because being sick would trigger the policy, but because the government mandate has got you in limbo, that\'s the scary part and that\'s really gonna come down to a policy-by-policy view to see how they\'re gonna handle it.</li><li>Mark: Is this standard travel insurance coverage or is there something special you need to look for?</li><li>Michael: When you\'re buying your policy, you do need to pay attention, but there are the three buckets you want to make sure are included. One is the cancellation that\'s going to protect you if you get sick before the trip. One is health and that\'s going to pay for care while you\'re abroad or outside of your normal healthcare network. But the other is interruption and that\'s the piece that I was just talking about. The interruption policy is going to be standard in their baseline, we\'ll call it the silver plan -- not the platinum, not the bronze -- that standard baseline plan should have all three of those buckets. But know what you\'re buying because I was reading through some policies over the weekend and there were definitely some that were peeling one or more buckets out to save some costs. That\'s great if you want to take that risk but do it with open eyes, knowing what you\'re doing. Insurance is there to protect you from unknown risks, unknowable risks. All of these policies, when you start reading the language, they\'re quick to point out “COVID-19 became a global pandemic in January of 2020.” They want you to know this is a known risk and then that sets the table -- with this being known, how are you going to protect yourself? Some of them are built into the standard policies but some require that COVID rider, some different policy language which most of them are offering. But you can\'t just assume it\'s gonna be wrapped into standard coverage. You need to be asking the COVID question.</li></ul></li><li>Thanks to Michael Giusti for joining us. Interesting point he makes about test access being a grey area for coverage. As I mentioned earlier, Irene and I brought our own Abbott tests with us to Italy and the UK, but more for convenience than concern about availability. I wrote up a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/30/easy-way-to-do-1-day-testing-for-returning-to-us/\">detailed \"how to\"</a> on ordering and using the Abbott BinaxNOW testing kit. It’s on the TravelCommons website in case you want to sidestep Michael’s addition to&nbsp; COVID test anxiety.</li><li>Bridge Music —  &nbsp;<em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/content/Zapac/Zapac_-_Test_Drive.mp3\" target=\"_blank\">Test Drive</a>&nbsp;</em>by Zapac</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Michelin Dining Adventures</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Last month, I picked up on the buzz around a blogger’s <a href=\"https://everywhereist.com/2021/12/bros-restaurant-lecce-we-eat-at-the-worst-michelin-starred-restaurant-ever/\">brutal review</a> of a 1-star Michelin restaurant in Italy. It initially caught my eye because Irene and I like to hit a Michelin star or two when we’re traveling. Indeed, a 1-star place called <a href=\"https://www.behindrestaurant.co.uk/\"><em>Behind</em></a> as in “ it’s an open kitchen so there’s nothing to hide behind” got us figuring out how to get from central London to Hackney, a neighborhood we would’ve had no reason to explore otherwise. It was a great lunch; a great experience talking to the chef, and it\'s going on my final Best of 2021 list -- which is on my to-do list to update right after I finish this podcast. Having said that, we’ve also had some meals that weren’t great, like our 25th anniversary dinner at a 3-star place in Florence, or a 2-star in Spain that we loved -- until the next morning when we both came down with food poisoning. But on balance, we’ve had more really good meals than bad, and they’ve often taken us out of the travel bubble to parts of cities we wouldn’t normally go -- kinda like my microbrewery taprooms, only a <strong><em>lot</em></strong> more expensive.</li><li>So when I saw the title “We Eat at The Worst Michelin Starred Restaurant, Ever,” it got my attention. First, what restaurant is it, so we can avoid it, and second, what made it the worst ever because that’s a big claim. But then I see the <em>full</em> title, with the restaurant, Bros in Lecce, Italy. We won’t be able to skip it because we ate there in mid-October, the night after our Puglia bike tour ended.&nbsp;</li><li>I read through the reviews and looked closely at the pictures. A couple of courses look familiar, but others -- like the now-famous (infamous?) grey foam oozing out of a plaster replica of the chef’s mouth was (thankfully) not on our menu. I have to say that I was on the fence about eating at Bros when Irene brought it up when we were planning our Puglia trip. The reviews I could find were <em>very</em> mixed, and it wasn’t a cheap ticket. We decided to go, but with the understanding that it could be a high-variance meal, with some courses that might not work out. I think the oyster with rancid fat was that dish for Irene. I didn’t love it, but it didn’t trigger a gag reflex like it did for Irene. Certainly not what you hope for, and it was only that dish, the rest was fine. But like I said, we went into Bros eye wide open, expecting an edgy experimental food experience -- and definitely not a standard 3-course fine dining Italian meal. We walked out thinking “Well, that was interesting” -- not bad, but not the worst 1-star meal I’ve had; probably in the bottom quartile, though. As you might guess, Bros <em>won’t</em> make it on that Best of 2021 list update.</li><li>So why didn’t this blogger, a James Beard-award winning writer, come in with similar expectations? Who knows, though we do know that outrage porn drives clicks which, for her, also drove some high-profile TV interviews which probably helped move a few copies of her book. And, since no publicity is bad publicity, I’m guessing it was <a href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/23/world/europe/bros-restaurant-review.html\">a net positive for the restaurant</a> too.</li><li>But why pay what was about a lot of money for a meal that I think might be a complete train wreck? I walked past a lot of places in Lecce that I know would put a good meal down in front of us for a lot less. It becomes a bit less about food and a bit more about the experience; less about stomach and more about the brain. It reminded me of something Josh Glenn said in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/10/podcast-182-more-covid-changes-words-that-mean-adventure/\" title=\"the last episode\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the last episode</a> when I was talking with him about the language of adventure<ul><li>Josh: I mean an adventure is, and that word comes from the Latin meaning <em>to arrive unexpectedly</em>. That\'s actually really an important philosophical piece for me as I was going through this, the idea that you can have a trip is not an adventure if nothing unexpected happens and if you don\'t take enough risks to allow things unexpected to happen.... The word <em>chance </em>comes from the Latin <em>cadentia </em>meaning <em>falling</em>. So just when we think about how we use the words of “let the chips fall where they may” or “something befalls you”, this idea of having our feet off the ground, falling through space, we can\'t grasp anything, what do you do with that? If you’re someone who likes, in some kind of existential way, that feeling of falling, then you\'re an adventurer. You\'re going to get more out of your travel experiences than someone who wants everything to be exactly the same way every time and never have any hiccups.</li></ul></li><li>I always say to Irene “If every meal we have is a great one, then we’re not trying enough weird places.” After food poisoning has befallen you a couple times, how bad can a little rancid fat be?</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #183</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_183.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #183 — COVID Test Anxiety; Michelin Food Adventures','','inherit','closed','closed','','4063-revision-v1','','','2022-01-16 19:31:01','2022-01-17 00:31:01','',4063,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4076',0,'revision','',0),
(4077,1,'2022-01-16 19:33:22','2022-01-17 00:33:22','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/IMG_3929-scaled.jpeg\"><img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/IMG_3929-300x300.jpeg\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a>Post-dinner pic complete with gang sign[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>No travel since the last episode, but lots of travel planning. Are we making our way back to pre-COVID travel planning patterns? Omicron has lots of people worried about testing positive and getting stuck abroad. Michael Giusti of&nbsp;<a href=\"https://insurancequotes.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">InsuranceQuotes.com</a> talks about how travel insurance can help. A blogger’s <a href=\"https://everywhereist.com/2021/12/bros-restaurant-lecce-we-eat-at-the-worst-michelin-starred-restaurant-ever/\">brutal review</a> of a Michelin-starred restaurant we\'d eaten at gets me thinking about food as an adventure.  All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_183.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #183: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. Hope everyone had a great New Year’s. No travel since the last episode, which has turned out to be a good thing given the, what?, two weeks straight of over 1,000 cancelled flights a day. I’ve always tried to avoid traveling during the Christmas holidays; crowded planes, lots of not-very-experienced travelers, and the inevitable winter storm or two has never resulted in smooth travel experiences. Add to that airlines struggling to staff back up to passenger loads and then omicron comes ripping through their ranks…. The two folks I knew flying last week both got home a day late which, given all this, could’ve been a lot worse. Like being trapped in that 27-hour mess on I-95 in Northern Virginia. Definitely a reminder never to let yourself get below a quarter tank.</li><li>So while I haven’t been traveling, I <em>have</em> been travel <em>planning</em>, which is not unusual. January has traditionally been <em>the</em> big travel planning month; pack up the Christmas decorations, figure out where you want to go this year and then put in your time off requests. And because January is just the worst month of the year, at least in the upper Northern Hemisphere when it’s the coldest month of the year and the sun sets early; so you need something, anything to look forward to.</li><li>But COVID changed all that, of course, especially the planning timeline. We’ve talked in prior episodes how last-minute travel restrictions have made that planning timeline, what the travel industry calls the <em>booking window</em>, a lot shorter. Last year, in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"January 2021 episode\">January 2021 episode</a>, I talked about having to make a last-minute pivot away from a San Diego trip I’d booked just the month before because California was still in their post-holiday lock down and not letting out-of-state visitors make hotel reservations.&nbsp;</li><li>I thought this year I’d revert back to the old patterns and do a bit more longer-term travel planning. Looking at <a href=\"https://www.kayak.com/flight-trends\">Kayak’s flight search trends</a>, where they now compare current flight search volumes to pre-pandemic levels, so comparing 2021 to 2019, seem to be an optimistic outlier because their search volumes have cratered vs. 2 year ago. Eyeballing their trend chart, I’d say it’s down something like 50%. Though switching over and looking at Google’s Hotel Insights page, I might not be too far out of the fat part of the curve; their hotel search trends seem to be recovering. Which sorta maps into our plans. In February, we’re driving down to Louisville rather than flying, giving the airlines a couple of months to unscramble their operations, and then getting on planes -- to New York in March, Santa Fe, NM in April, maybe DC in May. But for that February drive down I-65, across the frozen tundra of central Indiana, we’re definitely packing a couple of blankets -- and snacks -- and keeping the gas tank topped off just in case. News reports of that I-95 jam up talked about a Good Samaritan family going car to car, passing out oranges they were bringing back from Florida. Coming back from Louisville, I’m guessing any Good Samaritan would be going car to car with a couple bottles of bourbon and a sleeve of plastic shot glasses -- which is not a bad thing. Would definitely warm you up for at least a little bit.</li><li>Bridge Music — &nbsp;<em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/content/Per/Per_-_DLDN_Instrumental.mp3\" target=\"_blank\">DLDN Instrumental</a></em>&nbsp;by St Paul</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Last April, the Department of Homeland Security <a href=\"https://www.dhs.gov/real-id/news/2021/04/27/dhs-announces-extension-real-id-full-enforcement-deadline\">kicked the Real ID can down the road</a> -- again -- so now we have until May 2023 before we’ll need Real ID-compliant identification to get through a TSA checkpoint. We don’t <em>have</em> to get a Real ID driver’s license; <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/travel/security-screening/identification\">a passport or a Global Entry card</a> would work also. But, last month, since I had to visit the 5th Circle of Hell also known as the Dept of Motor Vehicles, to renew my expiring driver’s license, I figured I might as well get the Real ID version. And why not? In Illinois, the Real and non-Real ID driver\'s licenses cost the same, you go through the same lines…. The only difference was it took maybe an extra 3 minutes for them to scan in my social security card and the documents I used to prove my address. Which, if I’d kept in mind the Distributive Property of Cybersecurity, “Any data entered into a system will eventually be hacked and distributed on the dark web” -- I would’ve used something a bit more innocuous than my bank statement.&nbsp; But, I now have a driver’s license with a requisite gold start in the upper right corner just in case DHS is really serious this time about the Real ID deadline.</li><li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/10/podcast-182-more-covid-changes-words-that-mean-adventure/\">the last episode</a>, I talked about finishing up my Global Entry renewal. And so with that done, last week I sent my passport into the void that is the US Passport Agency for renewal. I don’t have any international travel planned right now, but I’m very uncomfortable to be without my passport. I don’t know why, but I am. And the discomfort is only amplified by the 8-11 week processing time the State Department is now quoting. It also reminded me that it’s been 10 years since my most embarrassing cock-up - letting my backpack with my son’s and my passports get stolen from the overhead rack of the train to Brussels airport. I told the whole story in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/05/20/podcast-98-stolen-luggage-restaurants-want-your-smartphone/\">episode #98</a>, about what a stupid, what I called “the rookie-est of rookie mistakes” it was, and how it could’ve been worse, but for the very pleasant and helpful Brussels airport police and US Embassy staff, and that my son and I then got in a couple extra days of Belgian beer drinking.&nbsp; Lesson learned, though; I’ve kept my passport on my person when traveling ever since.</li><li>It’s funny, sometimes, how travel can prepare you for things back home. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/10/28/podcast-180-tracking-covid-travel-requirements-cycling-thru-puglia/\">episode #180</a>, talking about our travels through Italy, I walked through what were back then the most stringent vaccine passport requirements around; you need to show an EU Green Pass on your phone or, for us, our CDC vaccination cards to get into restaurants, bars, airports, train stations,.... And so when Chicago started doing the same thing on January 1st, we were ready. In some ways Chicago is easier than Italy -- showing a picture of my CDC card is quicker than waiting for someone to scan a QR code; but here, and New York City and Washington, DC, we’ve added the extra step -- having to show a picture ID that matches to the vax card. We didn’t have to do that in Italy. You know, if I hadn’t had to send my passport in, maybe I’d just do what I did in Italy, carry my CDC card in my passport; I could pull ‘em both out in one hopefully suave and graceful move and be done with it.</li><li>Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/11/13/podcast-181-travel-potpourri-2021-travelers-gift-guide/\">November episode</a>, I said that I’d already gotten status roll-overs from Marriott, Hilton, and IHG, extending my current level in their frequent sleeper programs for the third time -- now they expire in February or March 2023. I figured that was the end of it, so when I received a note from Southwest in mid-December with the subject line “Surprise: A-List status extended,” it was pretty accurate. I was very surprised! I hadn’t expected any airlines to extend status; they all seemed to be lowering the qualification clip levels instead. So, thanks Southwest! I’ll be using this status on my flights to LGA and ABQ -- also because I still have some 2020 pandemic cancellation credits that are about to hit their disappearing 2-year birthday. Any chance you can extend that expiration data too?</li><li>Just to spin the propeller on top of the travel tech beanie hat for a sec…. Over the past couple of trips, I’ve noticed my briefcase/messenger bag has finally passed a tipping point -- I now have more electronic devices needing a newer USB-C cord than an original USB-A cord. (I told you this would be a propeller spin). The USB-C cord invasion started with the iPhone 11 Pro; another cord to carry, but it occasionally came in handy, like when Hertz gave me a birthday upgrade a few years back to a Mercedes A220; it only had the smaller USB-C plugs. But the invasion picked up speed with each upgrade -- first it was my new Bose headphones, then when I upgraded my battery pack, my power bank; then again when I got my MacBook Air, and again squared when I got a pair of cheap Anker earbuds last Prime Day. Which led me, finally, to replacing my dual USB-A power adapter for one with two USB-C plugs and one USB-A for my old Samsung tablet that just won’t die. But I still have to carry an old iPhone USB-A cord for those times when all that’s left on the Hertz lot is a 3-year old Chevy Malibu.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music —  <em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/content/oldDog/oldDog_-_Goodbye_sooner_or_later.mp3\" target=\"_blank\">Goodbye Sooner or Later</a></em>&nbsp;by oldDog</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>COVID Test Anxiety</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A friend of mine said he wanted to get together this month. “Sure,” I said, “but if we can’t, we’ll be together for a weekend in February in Louisville at a wedding.” “Uh, no,” he said, “I’m not going.” “Why not?” “I’m going to isolate, kinda like a soft quarantine in February, don’t go outside except to walk the dog so I don’t screw up my trip to Egypt. It’s non-refundable, so I’ll be out a lot of money if I test positive for COVID before leaving and can’t go.”</li><li>And last month, in early December, right when everyone was tightening travel restrictions in what turned out to be a futile effort to keep omicron out of their country, another friend cancelled a long-planned trip to Scotland. “I just don’t want to get trapped, away from home,” he said.</li><li>COVID test anxiety. I understand it, especially around test-on-arrival rules. The week before our flight to London in November, I got a text from my doctor group -- time to get your COVID booster. I clicked through to the appointment website, started looking at slots, but then stopped. I have to take a COVID test by our second day in London. What if that spike of antibodies from the booster lingers long enough to turn that test positive? I clicked onto the next page of the website and booked my booster for December, after we got back home.</li><li>As I mentioned in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/10/podcast-182-more-covid-changes-words-that-mean-adventure/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"last episode\">last episode</a>, we tested negative on our test in London and went about our vacation. But as we got close to our return date, that anxiety crept back in. This was before the US tightened the testing window, so we took our Abbott tests 2 days before departure, both to give us some wiggle room, some time to retest if one came up positive, but also to calm those worries. I remember on that trip talking to an American guy in the elevator of our hotel in London. He had an Abbott rapid test sticking out of his briefcase. “Getting ready to head home?” I asked. “No,” he said, “I just test myself every 2 days.” I kinda laughed at that, thinking it was a bit over-rotation. But thinking back on it now, maybe he had it right -- test yourself every couple of days to relieve that uncertainty rather than waiting for the night before departure.</li><li>But even that might not be enough. I tweeted out <a href=\"https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/covid-in-koh-samui-its-scary-0hs7h0pk9\">an article</a> from the UK Times newspaper written by a guy who visited Thailand last month. The article starts “On December 19, after a week of near-hourly negative lateral flow and PCR tests, I flew to Thailand.” The next sentence (you know where this is going): “On December 20 I stepped off the plane, took another PCR, and headed to my hotel. The next morning I received a text informing me I had tested positive.” And then he tells the story of his 10 days of solo isolation in a Thai hospital. He did everything right and it still went wrong.</li><li>One big anxiety driver is the cost for those extra days quarantined in a hotel somewhere. This should be the kind of risk that trip insurance could help you manage. So I rang up Michael Giusti, senior writer at <a href=\"https://insurancequotes.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"InsuranceQuotes.com\">InsuranceQuotes.com</a> -- he was with us on <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/12/podcast-173-whats-new-in-travel-insurance-keeping-ahead-of-expiring-miles/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"episode #173\">episode #173</a> last March, talking about travel insurance one year after the pandemic lockdowns -- to ask him about this.<ul><li>Michael: So from a travel insurance policy perspective that scenario you just said is actually almost the better scenario because that\'s what travel insurance is built for. So you come up with a positive test -- that kicks in the policy language. Now they can hit their contingency plans, whether that\'s paying you per day for the extended stay or finding alternative ways home. What scares me is the no man\'s land where you can\'t find a test. A lot of these policies have language that excludes government mandates and so if you just can\'t find a test and now can\'t get in not because you\'re sick, because being sick would trigger the policy, but because the government mandate has got you in limbo, that\'s the scary part and that\'s really gonna come down to a policy-by-policy view to see how they\'re gonna handle it.</li><li>Mark: Is this standard travel insurance coverage or is there something special you need to look for?</li><li>Michael: When you\'re buying your policy, you do need to pay attention, but there are the three buckets you want to make sure are included. One is the cancellation that\'s going to protect you if you get sick before the trip. One is health and that\'s going to pay for care while you\'re abroad or outside of your normal healthcare network. But the other is interruption and that\'s the piece that I was just talking about. The interruption policy is going to be standard in their baseline, we\'ll call it the silver plan -- not the platinum, not the bronze -- that standard baseline plan should have all three of those buckets. But know what you\'re buying because I was reading through some policies over the weekend and there were definitely some that were peeling one or more buckets out to save some costs. That\'s great if you want to take that risk but do it with open eyes, knowing what you\'re doing. Insurance is there to protect you from unknown risks, unknowable risks. All of these policies, when you start reading the language, they\'re quick to point out “COVID-19 became a global pandemic in January of 2020.” They want you to know this is a known risk and then that sets the table -- with this being known, how are you going to protect yourself? Some of them are built into the standard policies but some require that COVID rider, some different policy language which most of them are offering. But you can\'t just assume it\'s gonna be wrapped into standard coverage. You need to be asking the COVID question.</li></ul></li><li>Thanks to Michael Giusti for joining us. Interesting point he makes about test access being a grey area for coverage. As I mentioned earlier, Irene and I brought our own Abbott tests with us to Italy and the UK, but more for convenience than concern about availability. I wrote up a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/30/easy-way-to-do-1-day-testing-for-returning-to-us/\">detailed \"how to\"</a> on ordering and using the Abbott BinaxNOW testing kit. It’s on the TravelCommons website in case you want to sidestep Michael’s addition to&nbsp; COVID test anxiety.</li><li>Bridge Music —  &nbsp;<em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/content/Zapac/Zapac_-_Test_Drive.mp3\" target=\"_blank\">Test Drive</a>&nbsp;</em>by Zapac</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Michelin Dining Adventures</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Last month, I picked up on the buzz around a blogger’s <a href=\"https://everywhereist.com/2021/12/bros-restaurant-lecce-we-eat-at-the-worst-michelin-starred-restaurant-ever/\">brutal review</a> of a 1-star Michelin restaurant in Italy. It initially caught my eye because Irene and I like to hit a Michelin star or two when we’re traveling. Indeed, a 1-star place called <a href=\"https://www.behindrestaurant.co.uk/\"><em>Behind</em></a> as in “ it’s an open kitchen so there’s nothing to hide behind” got us figuring out how to get from central London to Hackney, a neighborhood we would’ve had no reason to explore otherwise. It was a great lunch; a great experience talking to the chef, and it\'s going on my final Best of 2021 list -- which is on my to-do list to update right after I finish this podcast. Having said that, we’ve also had some meals that weren’t great, like our 25th anniversary dinner at a 3-star place in Florence, or a 2-star in Spain that we loved -- until the next morning when we both came down with food poisoning. But on balance, we’ve had more really good meals than bad, and they’ve often taken us out of the travel bubble to parts of cities we wouldn’t normally go -- kinda like my microbrewery taprooms, only a <strong><em>lot</em></strong> more expensive.</li><li>So when I saw the title “We Eat at The Worst Michelin Starred Restaurant, Ever,” it got my attention. First, what restaurant is it, so we can avoid it, and second, what made it the worst ever because that’s a big claim. But then I see the <em>full</em> title, with the restaurant, Bros in Lecce, Italy. We won’t be able to skip it because we ate there in mid-October, the night after our Puglia bike tour ended.&nbsp;</li><li>I read through the reviews and looked closely at the pictures. A couple of courses look familiar, but others -- like the now-famous (infamous?) grey foam oozing out of a plaster replica of the chef’s mouth was (thankfully) not on our menu. I have to say that I was on the fence about eating at Bros when Irene brought it up when we were planning our Puglia trip. The reviews I could find were <em>very</em> mixed, and it wasn’t a cheap ticket. We decided to go, but with the understanding that it could be a high-variance meal, with some courses that might not work out. I think the oyster with rancid fat was that dish for Irene. I didn’t love it, but it didn’t trigger a gag reflex like it did for Irene. Certainly not what you hope for, and it was only that dish, the rest was fine. But like I said, we went into Bros eye wide open, expecting an edgy experimental food experience -- and definitely not a standard 3-course fine dining Italian meal. We walked out thinking “Well, that was interesting” -- not bad, but not the worst 1-star meal I’ve had; probably in the bottom quartile, though. As you might guess, Bros <em>won’t</em> make it on that Best of 2021 list update.</li><li>So why didn’t this blogger, a James Beard-award winning writer, come in with similar expectations? Who knows, though we do know that outrage porn drives clicks which, for her, also drove some high-profile TV interviews which probably helped move a few copies of her book. And, since no publicity is bad publicity, I’m guessing it was <a href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/23/world/europe/bros-restaurant-review.html\">a net positive for the restaurant</a> too.</li><li>But why pay what was about a lot of money for a meal that I think might be a complete train wreck? I walked past a lot of places in Lecce that I know would put a good meal down in front of us for a lot less. It becomes a bit less about food and a bit more about the experience; less about stomach and more about the brain. It reminded me of something Josh Glenn said in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/10/podcast-182-more-covid-changes-words-that-mean-adventure/\" title=\"the last episode\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the last episode</a> when I was talking with him about the language of adventure<ul><li>Josh: I mean an adventure is, and that word comes from the Latin meaning <em>to arrive unexpectedly</em>. That\'s actually really an important philosophical piece for me as I was going through this, the idea that you can have a trip is not an adventure if nothing unexpected happens and if you don\'t take enough risks to allow things unexpected to happen.... The word <em>chance </em>comes from the Latin <em>cadentia </em>meaning <em>falling</em>. So just when we think about how we use the words of “let the chips fall where they may” or “something befalls you”, this idea of having our feet off the ground, falling through space, we can\'t grasp anything, what do you do with that? If you’re someone who likes, in some kind of existential way, that feeling of falling, then you\'re an adventurer. You\'re going to get more out of your travel experiences than someone who wants everything to be exactly the same way every time and never have any hiccups.</li></ul></li><li>I always say to Irene “If every meal we have is a great one, then we’re not trying enough weird places.” After food poisoning has befallen you a couple times, how bad can a little rancid fat be?</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #183</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_183.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #183 — COVID Test Anxiety; Michelin Food Adventures','','inherit','closed','closed','','4063-revision-v1','','','2022-01-16 19:33:22','2022-01-17 00:33:22','',4063,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4077',0,'revision','',0),
(4078,1,'2022-01-17 00:03:03','2022-01-17 05:03:03','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/IMG_3929-scaled.jpeg\"><img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/IMG_3929-300x300.jpeg\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a>Post-dinner pic complete with gang sign[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>No travel since the last episode, but lots of travel planning. Are we making our way back to pre-COVID travel planning patterns? Omicron has lots of people worried about testing positive and getting stuck abroad. Michael Giusti of <a href=\"https://insurancequotes.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">InsuranceQuotes.com</a> talks about how travel insurance can help. A blogger’s <a href=\"https://everywhereist.com/2021/12/bros-restaurant-lecce-we-eat-at-the-worst-michelin-starred-restaurant-ever/\">brutal review</a> of a Michelin-starred restaurant where we ate in October gets me thinking about food as an adventure.  All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_183.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #183: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. Hope everyone had a great New Year’s. No travel since the last episode, which has turned out to be a good thing given the, what?, two weeks straight of over 1,000 cancelled flights a day. I’ve always tried to avoid traveling during the Christmas holidays; crowded planes, lots of not-very-experienced travelers, and the inevitable winter storm or two has never resulted in smooth travel experiences. Add to that airlines struggling to staff back up to passenger loads and then omicron comes ripping through their ranks…. The two folks I knew flying last week both got home a day late which, given all this, could’ve been a lot worse. Like being trapped in that 27-hour mess on I-95 in Northern Virginia. Definitely a reminder never to let yourself get below a quarter tank.</li><li>So while I haven’t been traveling, I <em>have</em> been travel <em>planning</em>, which is not unusual. January has traditionally been <em>the</em> big travel planning month; pack up the Christmas decorations, figure out where you want to go this year and then put in your time off requests. And because January is just the worst month of the year, at least in the upper Northern Hemisphere when it’s the coldest month of the year and the sun sets early; so you need something, anything to look forward to.</li><li>But COVID changed all that, of course, especially the planning timeline. We’ve talked in prior episodes how last-minute travel restrictions have made that planning timeline, what the travel industry calls the <em>booking window</em>, a lot shorter. Last year, in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"January 2021 episode\">January 2021 episode</a>, I talked about having to make a last-minute pivot away from a San Diego trip I’d booked just the month before because California was still in their post-holiday lock down and not letting out-of-state visitors make hotel reservations.&nbsp;</li><li>I thought this year I’d revert back to the old patterns and do a bit more longer-term travel planning. Looking at <a href=\"https://www.kayak.com/flight-trends\">Kayak’s flight search trends</a>, where they now compare current flight search volumes to pre-pandemic levels, so comparing 2021 to 2019, seem to be an optimistic outlier because their search volumes have cratered vs. 2 year ago. Eyeballing their trend chart, I’d say it’s down something like 50%. Though switching over and looking at Google’s Hotel Insights page, I might not be too far out of the fat part of the curve; their hotel search trends seem to be recovering. Which sorta maps into our plans. In February, we’re driving down to Louisville rather than flying, giving the airlines a couple of months to unscramble their operations, and then getting on planes -- to New York in March, Santa Fe, NM in April, maybe DC in May. But for that February drive down I-65, across the frozen tundra of central Indiana, we’re definitely packing a couple of blankets -- and snacks -- and keeping the gas tank topped off just in case. News reports of that I-95 jam up talked about a Good Samaritan family going car to car, passing out oranges they were bringing back from Florida. Coming back from Louisville, I’m guessing any Good Samaritan would be going car to car with a couple bottles of bourbon and a sleeve of plastic shot glasses -- which is not a bad thing. Would definitely warm you up for at least a little bit.</li><li>Bridge Music — &nbsp;<em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/content/Per/Per_-_DLDN_Instrumental.mp3\" target=\"_blank\">DLDN Instrumental</a></em>&nbsp;by St Paul</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Last April, the Department of Homeland Security <a href=\"https://www.dhs.gov/real-id/news/2021/04/27/dhs-announces-extension-real-id-full-enforcement-deadline\">kicked the Real ID can down the road</a> -- again -- so now we have until May 2023 before we’ll need Real ID-compliant identification to get through a TSA checkpoint. We don’t <em>have</em> to get a Real ID driver’s license; <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/travel/security-screening/identification\">a passport or a Global Entry card</a> would work also. But, last month, since I had to visit the 5th Circle of Hell also known as the Dept of Motor Vehicles, to renew my expiring driver’s license, I figured I might as well get the Real ID version. And why not? In Illinois, the Real and non-Real ID driver\'s licenses cost the same, you go through the same lines…. The only difference was it took maybe an extra 3 minutes for them to scan in my social security card and the documents I used to prove my address. Which, if I’d kept in mind the Distributive Property of Cybersecurity, “Any data entered into a system will eventually be hacked and distributed on the dark web” -- I would’ve used something a bit more innocuous than my bank statement.&nbsp; But, I now have a driver’s license with a requisite gold start in the upper right corner just in case DHS is really serious this time about the Real ID deadline.</li><li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/10/podcast-182-more-covid-changes-words-that-mean-adventure/\">the last episode</a>, I talked about finishing up my Global Entry renewal. And so with that done, last week I sent my passport into the void that is the US Passport Agency for renewal. I don’t have any international travel planned right now, but I’m very uncomfortable to be without my passport. I don’t know why, but I am. And the discomfort is only amplified by the 8-11 week processing time the State Department is now quoting. It also reminded me that it’s been 10 years since my most embarrassing cock-up - letting my backpack with my son’s and my passports get stolen from the overhead rack of the train to Brussels airport. I told the whole story in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/05/20/podcast-98-stolen-luggage-restaurants-want-your-smartphone/\">episode #98</a>, about what a stupid, what I called “the rookie-est of rookie mistakes” it was, and how it could’ve been worse, but for the very pleasant and helpful Brussels airport police and US Embassy staff, and that my son and I then got in a couple extra days of Belgian beer drinking.&nbsp; Lesson learned, though; I’ve kept my passport on my person when traveling ever since.</li><li>It’s funny, sometimes, how travel can prepare you for things back home. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/10/28/podcast-180-tracking-covid-travel-requirements-cycling-thru-puglia/\">episode #180</a>, talking about our travels through Italy, I walked through what were back then the most stringent vaccine passport requirements around; you need to show an EU Green Pass on your phone or, for us, our CDC vaccination cards to get into restaurants, bars, airports, train stations,.... And so when Chicago started doing the same thing on January 1st, we were ready. In some ways Chicago is easier than Italy -- showing a picture of my CDC card is quicker than waiting for someone to scan a QR code; but here, and New York City and Washington, DC, we’ve added the extra step -- having to show a picture ID that matches to the vax card. We didn’t have to do that in Italy. You know, if I hadn’t had to send my passport in, maybe I’d just do what I did in Italy, carry my CDC card in my passport; I could pull ‘em both out in one hopefully suave and graceful move and be done with it.</li><li>Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/11/13/podcast-181-travel-potpourri-2021-travelers-gift-guide/\">November episode</a>, I said that I’d already gotten status roll-overs from Marriott, Hilton, and IHG, extending my current level in their frequent sleeper programs for the third time -- now they expire in February or March 2023. I figured that was the end of it, so when I received a note from Southwest in mid-December with the subject line “Surprise: A-List status extended,” it was pretty accurate. I was very surprised! I hadn’t expected any airlines to extend status; they all seemed to be lowering the qualification clip levels instead. So, thanks Southwest! I’ll be using this status on my flights to LGA and ABQ -- also because I still have some 2020 pandemic cancellation credits that are about to hit their disappearing 2-year birthday. Any chance you can extend that expiration data too?</li><li>Just to spin the propeller on top of the travel tech beanie hat for a sec…. Over the past couple of trips, I’ve noticed my briefcase/messenger bag has finally passed a tipping point -- I now have more electronic devices needing a newer USB-C cord than an original USB-A cord. (I told you this would be a propeller spin). The USB-C cord invasion started with the iPhone 11 Pro; another cord to carry, but it occasionally came in handy, like when Hertz gave me a birthday upgrade a few years back to a Mercedes A220; it only had the smaller USB-C plugs. But the invasion picked up speed with each upgrade -- first it was my new Bose headphones, then when I upgraded my battery pack, my power bank; then again when I got my MacBook Air, and again squared when I got a pair of cheap Anker earbuds last Prime Day. Which led me, finally, to replacing my dual USB-A power adapter for one with two USB-C plugs and one USB-A for my old Samsung tablet that just won’t die. But I still have to carry an old iPhone USB-A cord for those times when all that’s left on the Hertz lot is a 3-year old Chevy Malibu.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music —  <em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/content/oldDog/oldDog_-_Goodbye_sooner_or_later.mp3\" target=\"_blank\">Goodbye Sooner or Later</a></em>&nbsp;by oldDog</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>COVID Test Anxiety</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A friend of mine said he wanted to get together this month. “Sure,” I said, “but if we can’t, we’ll be together for a weekend in February in Louisville at a wedding.” “Uh, no,” he said, “I’m not going.” “Why not?” “I’m going to isolate, kinda like a soft quarantine in February, don’t go outside except to walk the dog so I don’t screw up my trip to Egypt. It’s non-refundable, so I’ll be out a lot of money if I test positive for COVID before leaving and can’t go.”</li><li>And last month, in early December, right when everyone was tightening travel restrictions in what turned out to be a futile effort to keep omicron out of their country, another friend cancelled a long-planned trip to Scotland. “I just don’t want to get trapped, away from home,” he said.</li><li>COVID test anxiety. I understand it, especially around test-on-arrival rules. The week before our flight to London in November, I got a text from my doctor group -- time to get your COVID booster. I clicked through to the appointment website, started looking at slots, but then stopped. I have to take a COVID test by our second day in London. What if that spike of antibodies from the booster lingers long enough to turn that test positive? I clicked onto the next page of the website and booked my booster for December, after we got back home.</li><li>As I mentioned in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/10/podcast-182-more-covid-changes-words-that-mean-adventure/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"last episode\">last episode</a>, we tested negative on our test in London and went about our vacation. But as we got close to our return date, that anxiety crept back in. This was before the US tightened the testing window, so we took our Abbott tests 2 days before departure, both to give us some wiggle room, some time to retest if one came up positive, but also to calm those worries. I remember on that trip talking to an American guy in the elevator of our hotel in London. He had an Abbott rapid test sticking out of his briefcase. “Getting ready to head home?” I asked. “No,” he said, “I just test myself every 2 days.” I kinda laughed at that, thinking it was a bit over-rotation. But thinking back on it now, maybe he had it right -- test yourself every couple of days to relieve that uncertainty rather than waiting for the night before departure.</li><li>But even that might not be enough. I tweeted out <a href=\"https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/covid-in-koh-samui-its-scary-0hs7h0pk9\">an article</a> from the UK Times newspaper written by a guy who visited Thailand last month. The article starts “On December 19, after a week of near-hourly negative lateral flow and PCR tests, I flew to Thailand.” The next sentence (you know where this is going): “On December 20 I stepped off the plane, took another PCR, and headed to my hotel. The next morning I received a text informing me I had tested positive.” And then he tells the story of his 10 days of solo isolation in a Thai hospital. He did everything right and it still went wrong.</li><li>One big anxiety driver is the cost for those extra days quarantined in a hotel somewhere. This should be the kind of risk that trip insurance could help you manage. So I rang up Michael Giusti, senior writer at <a href=\"https://insurancequotes.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"InsuranceQuotes.com\">InsuranceQuotes.com</a> -- he was with us on <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/12/podcast-173-whats-new-in-travel-insurance-keeping-ahead-of-expiring-miles/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"episode #173\">episode #173</a> last March, talking about travel insurance one year after the pandemic lockdowns -- to ask him about this.<ul><li>Michael: So from a travel insurance policy perspective that scenario you just said is actually almost the better scenario because that\'s what travel insurance is built for. So you come up with a positive test -- that kicks in the policy language. Now they can hit their contingency plans, whether that\'s paying you per day for the extended stay or finding alternative ways home. What scares me is the no man\'s land where you can\'t find a test. A lot of these policies have language that excludes government mandates and so if you just can\'t find a test and now can\'t get in not because you\'re sick, because being sick would trigger the policy, but because the government mandate has got you in limbo, that\'s the scary part and that\'s really gonna come down to a policy-by-policy view to see how they\'re gonna handle it.</li><li>Mark: Is this standard travel insurance coverage or is there something special you need to look for?</li><li>Michael: When you\'re buying your policy, you do need to pay attention, but there are the three buckets you want to make sure are included. One is the cancellation that\'s going to protect you if you get sick before the trip. One is health and that\'s going to pay for care while you\'re abroad or outside of your normal healthcare network. But the other is interruption and that\'s the piece that I was just talking about. The interruption policy is going to be standard in their baseline, we\'ll call it the silver plan -- not the platinum, not the bronze -- that standard baseline plan should have all three of those buckets. But know what you\'re buying because I was reading through some policies over the weekend and there were definitely some that were peeling one or more buckets out to save some costs. That\'s great if you want to take that risk but do it with open eyes, knowing what you\'re doing. Insurance is there to protect you from unknown risks, unknowable risks. All of these policies, when you start reading the language, they\'re quick to point out “COVID-19 became a global pandemic in January of 2020.” They want you to know this is a known risk and then that sets the table -- with this being known, how are you going to protect yourself? Some of them are built into the standard policies but some require that COVID rider, some different policy language which most of them are offering. But you can\'t just assume it\'s gonna be wrapped into standard coverage. You need to be asking the COVID question.</li></ul></li><li>Thanks to Michael Giusti for joining us. Interesting point he makes about test access being a grey area for coverage. As I mentioned earlier, Irene and I brought our own Abbott tests with us to Italy and the UK, but more for convenience than concern about availability. I wrote up a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/30/easy-way-to-do-1-day-testing-for-returning-to-us/\">detailed \"how to\"</a> on ordering and using the Abbott BinaxNOW testing kit. It’s on the TravelCommons website in case you want to sidestep Michael’s addition to&nbsp; COVID test anxiety.</li><li>Bridge Music —  &nbsp;<em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/content/Zapac/Zapac_-_Test_Drive.mp3\" target=\"_blank\">Test Drive</a>&nbsp;</em>by Zapac</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Michelin Dining Adventures</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Last month, I picked up on the buzz around a blogger’s <a href=\"https://everywhereist.com/2021/12/bros-restaurant-lecce-we-eat-at-the-worst-michelin-starred-restaurant-ever/\">brutal review</a> of a 1-star Michelin restaurant in Italy. It initially caught my eye because Irene and I like to hit a Michelin star or two when we’re traveling. Indeed, a 1-star place called <a href=\"https://www.behindrestaurant.co.uk/\"><em>Behind</em></a> as in “ it’s an open kitchen so there’s nothing to hide behind” got us figuring out how to get from central London to Hackney, a neighborhood we would’ve had no reason to explore otherwise. It was a great lunch; a great experience talking to the chef, and it\'s going on my final Best of 2021 list -- which is on my to-do list to update right after I finish this podcast. Having said that, we’ve also had some meals that weren’t great, like our 25th anniversary dinner at a 3-star place in Florence, or a 2-star in Spain that we loved -- until the next morning when we both came down with food poisoning. But on balance, we’ve had more really good meals than bad, and they’ve often taken us out of the travel bubble to parts of cities we wouldn’t normally go -- kinda like my microbrewery taprooms, only a <strong><em>lot</em></strong> more expensive.</li><li>So when I saw the title “We Eat at The Worst Michelin Starred Restaurant, Ever,” it got my attention. First, what restaurant is it, so we can avoid it, and second, what made it the worst ever because that’s a big claim. But then I see the <em>full</em> title, with the restaurant, Bros in Lecce, Italy. We won’t be able to skip it because we ate there in mid-October, the night after our Puglia bike tour ended.&nbsp;</li><li>I read through the reviews and looked closely at the pictures. A couple of courses look familiar, but others -- like the now-famous (infamous?) grey foam oozing out of a plaster replica of the chef’s mouth was (thankfully) not on our menu. I have to say that I was on the fence about eating at Bros when Irene brought it up when we were planning our Puglia trip. The reviews I could find were <em>very</em> mixed, and it wasn’t a cheap ticket. We decided to go, but with the understanding that it could be a high-variance meal, with some courses that might not work out. I think the oyster with rancid fat was that dish for Irene. I didn’t love it, but it didn’t trigger a gag reflex like it did for Irene. Certainly not what you hope for, and it was only that dish, the rest was fine. But like I said, we went into Bros eye wide open, expecting an edgy experimental food experience -- and definitely not a standard 3-course fine dining Italian meal. We walked out thinking “Well, that was interesting” -- not bad, but not the worst 1-star meal I’ve had; probably in the bottom quartile, though. As you might guess, Bros <em>won’t</em> make it on that Best of 2021 list update.</li><li>So why didn’t this blogger, a James Beard-award winning writer, come in with similar expectations? Who knows, though we do know that outrage porn drives clicks which, for her, also drove some high-profile TV interviews which probably helped move a few copies of her book. And, since no publicity is bad publicity, I’m guessing it was <a href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/23/world/europe/bros-restaurant-review.html\">a net positive for the restaurant</a> too.</li><li>But why pay what was about a lot of money for a meal that I think might be a complete train wreck? I walked past a lot of places in Lecce that I know would put a good meal down in front of us for a lot less. It becomes a bit less about food and a bit more about the experience; less about stomach and more about the brain. It reminded me of something Josh Glenn said in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/10/podcast-182-more-covid-changes-words-that-mean-adventure/\" title=\"the last episode\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the last episode</a> when I was talking with him about the language of adventure<ul><li>Josh: I mean an adventure is, and that word comes from the Latin meaning <em>to arrive unexpectedly</em>. That\'s actually really an important philosophical piece for me as I was going through this, the idea that you can have a trip is not an adventure if nothing unexpected happens and if you don\'t take enough risks to allow things unexpected to happen.... The word <em>chance </em>comes from the Latin <em>cadentia </em>meaning <em>falling</em>. So just when we think about how we use the words of “let the chips fall where they may” or “something befalls you”, this idea of having our feet off the ground, falling through space, we can\'t grasp anything, what do you do with that? If you’re someone who likes, in some kind of existential way, that feeling of falling, then you\'re an adventurer. You\'re going to get more out of your travel experiences than someone who wants everything to be exactly the same way every time and never have any hiccups.</li></ul></li><li>I always say to Irene “If every meal we have is a great one, then we’re not trying enough weird places.” After food poisoning has befallen you a couple times, how bad can a little rancid fat be?</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #183</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_183.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #183 — COVID Test Anxiety; Michelin Food Adventures','','inherit','closed','closed','','4063-revision-v1','','','2022-01-17 00:03:03','2022-01-17 05:03:03','',4063,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4078',0,'revision','',0),
(4079,1,'2022-01-17 00:26:53','2022-01-17 05:26:53','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/IMG_3929-scaled.jpeg\"><img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/IMG_3929-300x300.jpeg\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a>Post-dinner pic complete with gang sign[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>No travel since the last episode, but lots of travel planning. Are we making our way back to pre-COVID travel planning patterns? Omicron has lots of people worried about testing positive and getting stuck abroad. Michael Giusti of&nbsp;<a href=\"https://insurancequotes.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">InsuranceQuotes.com</a> talks about how travel insurance can help. A blogger’s <a href=\"https://everywhereist.com/2021/12/bros-restaurant-lecce-we-eat-at-the-worst-michelin-starred-restaurant-ever/\">brutal review</a> of a Michelin-starred restaurant where we ate in October gets me thinking about food as an adventure.  All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_183.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #183: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. Hope everyone had a great New Year’s. No travel since the last episode, which has turned out to be a good thing given the, what?, two weeks straight of over 1,000 cancelled flights a day. I’ve always tried to avoid traveling during the Christmas holidays; crowded planes, lots of not-very-experienced travelers, and the inevitable winter storm or two has never resulted in smooth travel experiences. Add to that airlines struggling to staff back up to passenger loads and then omicron comes ripping through their ranks…. The two folks I knew flying last week both got home a day late which, given all this, could’ve been a lot worse. Like being trapped in that 27-hour mess on I-95 in Northern Virginia. Definitely a reminder never to let yourself get below a quarter tank.</li><li>So while I haven’t been traveling, I <em>have</em> been travel <em>planning</em>, which is not unusual. January has traditionally been <em>the</em> big travel planning month; pack up the Christmas decorations, figure out where you want to go this year and then put in your time off requests. And because January is just the worst month of the year, at least in the upper Northern Hemisphere when it’s the coldest month of the year and the sun sets early; so you need something, anything to look forward to.</li><li>But COVID changed all that, of course, especially the planning timeline. We’ve talked in prior episodes how last-minute travel restrictions have made that planning timeline, what the travel industry calls the <em>booking window</em>, a lot shorter. Last year, in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"January 2021 episode\">January 2021 episode</a>, I talked about having to make a last-minute pivot away from a San Diego trip I’d booked just the month before because California was still in their post-holiday lock down and not letting out-of-state visitors make hotel reservations.&nbsp;</li><li>I thought this year I’d revert back to the old patterns and do a bit more longer-term travel planning. Looking at <a href=\"https://www.kayak.com/flight-trends\">Kayak’s flight search trends</a>, where they now compare current flight search volumes to pre-pandemic levels, so comparing 2021 to 2019, seem to be an optimistic outlier because their search volumes have cratered vs. 2 year ago. Eyeballing their trend chart, I’d say it’s down something like 50%. Though switching over and looking at Google’s Hotel Insights page, I might not be too far out of the fat part of the curve; their hotel search trends seem to be recovering. Which sorta maps into our plans. In February, we’re driving down to Louisville rather than flying, giving the airlines a couple of months to unscramble their operations, and then getting on planes -- to New York in March, Santa Fe, NM in April, maybe DC in May. But for that February drive down I-65, across the frozen tundra of central Indiana, we’re definitely packing a couple of blankets -- and snacks -- and keeping the gas tank topped off just in case. News reports of that I-95 jam up talked about a Good Samaritan family going car to car, passing out oranges they were bringing back from Florida. Coming back from Louisville, I’m guessing any Good Samaritan would be going car to car with a couple bottles of bourbon and a sleeve of plastic shot glasses -- which is not a bad thing. Would definitely warm you up for at least a little bit.</li><li>Bridge Music — &nbsp;<em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/content/Per/Per_-_DLDN_Instrumental.mp3\" target=\"_blank\">DLDN Instrumental</a></em>&nbsp;by St Paul</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Last April, the Department of Homeland Security <a href=\"https://www.dhs.gov/real-id/news/2021/04/27/dhs-announces-extension-real-id-full-enforcement-deadline\">kicked the Real ID can down the road</a> -- again -- so now we have until May 2023 before we’ll need Real ID-compliant identification to get through a TSA checkpoint. We don’t <em>have</em> to get a Real ID driver’s license; <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/travel/security-screening/identification\">a passport or a Global Entry card</a> would work also. But, last month, since I had to visit the 5th Circle of Hell also known as the Dept of Motor Vehicles, to renew my expiring driver’s license, I figured I might as well get the Real ID version. And why not? In Illinois, the Real and non-Real ID driver\'s licenses cost the same, you go through the same lines…. The only difference was it took maybe an extra 3 minutes for them to scan in my social security card and the documents I used to prove my address. Which, if I’d kept in mind the Distributive Property of Cybersecurity, “Any data entered into a system will eventually be hacked and distributed on the dark web” -- I would’ve used something a bit more innocuous than my bank statement.&nbsp; But, I now have a driver’s license with a requisite gold start in the upper right corner just in case DHS is really serious this time about the Real ID deadline.</li><li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/10/podcast-182-more-covid-changes-words-that-mean-adventure/\">the last episode</a>, I talked about finishing up my Global Entry renewal. And so with that done, last week I sent my passport into the void that is the US Passport Agency for renewal. I don’t have any international travel planned right now, but I’m very uncomfortable to be without my passport. I don’t know why, but I am. And the discomfort is only amplified by the 8-11 week processing time the State Department is now quoting. It also reminded me that it’s been 10 years since my most embarrassing cock-up - letting my backpack with my son’s and my passports get stolen from the overhead rack of the train to Brussels airport. I told the whole story in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/05/20/podcast-98-stolen-luggage-restaurants-want-your-smartphone/\">episode #98</a>, about what a stupid, what I called “the rookie-est of rookie mistakes” it was, and how it could’ve been worse, but for the very pleasant and helpful Brussels airport police and US Embassy staff, and that my son and I then got in a couple extra days of Belgian beer drinking.&nbsp; Lesson learned, though; I’ve kept my passport on my person when traveling ever since.</li><li>It’s funny, sometimes, how travel can prepare you for things back home. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/10/28/podcast-180-tracking-covid-travel-requirements-cycling-thru-puglia/\">episode #180</a>, talking about our travels through Italy, I walked through what were back then the most stringent vaccine passport requirements around; you need to show an EU Green Pass on your phone or, for us, our CDC vaccination cards to get into restaurants, bars, airports, train stations,.... And so when Chicago started doing the same thing on January 1st, we were ready. In some ways Chicago is easier than Italy -- showing a picture of my CDC card is quicker than waiting for someone to scan a QR code; but here, and New York City and Washington, DC, we’ve added the extra step -- having to show a picture ID that matches to the vax card. We didn’t have to do that in Italy. You know, if I hadn’t had to send my passport in, maybe I’d just do what I did in Italy, carry my CDC card in my passport; I could pull ‘em both out in one hopefully suave and graceful move and be done with it.</li><li>Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/11/13/podcast-181-travel-potpourri-2021-travelers-gift-guide/\">November episode</a>, I said that I’d already gotten status roll-overs from Marriott, Hilton, and IHG, extending my current level in their frequent sleeper programs for the third time -- now they expire in February or March 2023. I figured that was the end of it, so when I received a note from Southwest in mid-December with the subject line “Surprise: A-List status extended,” it was pretty accurate. I was very surprised! I hadn’t expected any airlines to extend status; they all seemed to be lowering the qualification clip levels instead. So, thanks Southwest! I’ll be using this status on my flights to LGA and ABQ -- also because I still have some 2020 pandemic cancellation credits that are about to hit their disappearing 2-year birthday. Any chance you can extend that expiration data too?</li><li>Just to spin the propeller on top of the travel tech beanie hat for a sec…. Over the past couple of trips, I’ve noticed my briefcase/messenger bag has finally passed a tipping point -- I now have more electronic devices needing a newer USB-C cord than an original USB-A cord. (I told you this would be a propeller spin). The USB-C cord invasion started with the iPhone 11 Pro; another cord to carry, but it occasionally came in handy, like when Hertz gave me a birthday upgrade a few years back to a Mercedes A220; it only had the smaller USB-C plugs. But the invasion picked up speed with each upgrade -- first it was my new Bose headphones, then when I upgraded my battery pack, my power bank; then again when I got my MacBook Air, and again squared when I got a pair of cheap Anker earbuds last Prime Day. Which led me, finally, to replacing my dual USB-A power adapter for one with two USB-C plugs and one USB-A for my old Samsung tablet that just won’t die. But I still have to carry an old iPhone USB-A cord for those times when all that’s left on the Hertz lot is a 3-year old Chevy Malibu.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music —  <em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/content/oldDog/oldDog_-_Goodbye_sooner_or_later.mp3\" target=\"_blank\">Goodbye Sooner or Later</a></em>&nbsp;by oldDog</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>COVID Test Anxiety</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A friend of mine said he wanted to get together this month. “Sure,” I said, “but if we can’t, we’ll be together for a weekend in February in Louisville at a wedding.” “Uh, no,” he said, “I’m not going.” “Why not?” “I’m going to isolate, kinda like a soft quarantine in February, don’t go outside except to walk the dog so I don’t screw up my trip to Egypt. It’s non-refundable, so I’ll be out a lot of money if I test positive for COVID before leaving and can’t go.”</li><li>And last month, in early December, right when everyone was tightening travel restrictions in what turned out to be a futile effort to keep omicron out of their country, another friend cancelled a long-planned trip to Scotland. “I just don’t want to get trapped, away from home,” he said.</li><li>COVID test anxiety. I understand it, especially around test-on-arrival rules. The week before our flight to London in November, I got a text from my doctor group -- time to get your COVID booster. I clicked through to the appointment website, started looking at slots, but then stopped. I have to take a COVID test by our second day in London. What if that spike of antibodies from the booster lingers long enough to turn that test positive? I clicked onto the next page of the website and booked my booster for December, after we got back home.</li><li>As I mentioned in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/10/podcast-182-more-covid-changes-words-that-mean-adventure/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"last episode\">last episode</a>, we tested negative on our test in London and went about our vacation. But as we got close to our return date, that anxiety crept back in. This was before the US tightened the testing window, so we took our Abbott tests 2 days before departure, both to give us some wiggle room, some time to retest if one came up positive, but also to calm those worries. I remember on that trip talking to an American guy in the elevator of our hotel in London. He had an Abbott rapid test sticking out of his briefcase. “Getting ready to head home?” I asked. “No,” he said, “I just test myself every 2 days.” I kinda laughed at that, thinking it was a bit over-rotation. But thinking back on it now, maybe he had it right -- test yourself every couple of days to relieve that uncertainty rather than waiting for the night before departure.</li><li>But even that might not be enough. I tweeted out <a href=\"https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/covid-in-koh-samui-its-scary-0hs7h0pk9\">an article</a> from the UK Times newspaper written by a guy who visited Thailand last month. The article starts “On December 19, after a week of near-hourly negative lateral flow and PCR tests, I flew to Thailand.” The next sentence (you know where this is going): “On December 20 I stepped off the plane, took another PCR, and headed to my hotel. The next morning I received a text informing me I had tested positive.” And then he tells the story of his 10 days of solo isolation in a Thai hospital. He did everything right and it still went wrong.</li><li>One big anxiety driver is the cost for those extra days quarantined in a hotel somewhere. This should be the kind of risk that trip insurance could help you manage. So I rang up Michael Giusti, senior writer at <a href=\"https://insurancequotes.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"InsuranceQuotes.com\">InsuranceQuotes.com</a> -- he was with us on <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/12/podcast-173-whats-new-in-travel-insurance-keeping-ahead-of-expiring-miles/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"episode #173\">episode #173</a> last March, talking about travel insurance one year after the pandemic lockdowns -- to ask him about this.<ul><li>Michael: So from a travel insurance policy perspective that scenario you just said is actually almost the better scenario because that\'s what travel insurance is built for. So you come up with a positive test -- that kicks in the policy language. Now they can hit their contingency plans, whether that\'s paying you per day for the extended stay or finding alternative ways home. What scares me is the no man\'s land where you can\'t find a test. A lot of these policies have language that excludes government mandates and so if you just can\'t find a test and now can\'t get in not because you\'re sick, because being sick would trigger the policy, but because the government mandate has got you in limbo, that\'s the scary part and that\'s really gonna come down to a policy-by-policy view to see how they\'re gonna handle it.</li><li>Mark: Is this standard travel insurance coverage or is there something special you need to look for?</li><li>Michael: When you\'re buying your policy, you do need to pay attention, but there are the three buckets you want to make sure are included. One is the cancellation that\'s going to protect you if you get sick before the trip. One is health and that\'s going to pay for care while you\'re abroad or outside of your normal healthcare network. But the other is interruption and that\'s the piece that I was just talking about. The interruption policy is going to be standard in their baseline, we\'ll call it the silver plan -- not the platinum, not the bronze -- that standard baseline plan should have all three of those buckets. But know what you\'re buying because I was reading through some policies over the weekend and there were definitely some that were peeling one or more buckets out to save some costs. That\'s great if you want to take that risk but do it with open eyes, knowing what you\'re doing. Insurance is there to protect you from unknown risks, unknowable risks. All of these policies, when you start reading the language, they\'re quick to point out “COVID-19 became a global pandemic in January of 2020.” They want you to know this is a known risk and then that sets the table -- with this being known, how are you going to protect yourself? Some of them are built into the standard policies but some require that COVID rider, some different policy language which most of them are offering. But you can\'t just assume it\'s gonna be wrapped into standard coverage. You need to be asking the COVID question.</li></ul></li><li>Thanks to Michael Giusti for joining us. Interesting point he makes about test access being a grey area for coverage. As I mentioned earlier, Irene and I brought our own Abbott tests with us to Italy and the UK, but more for convenience than concern about availability. I wrote up a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/30/easy-way-to-do-1-day-testing-for-returning-to-us/\">detailed \"how to\"</a> on ordering and using the Abbott BinaxNOW testing kit. It’s on the TravelCommons website in case you want to sidestep Michael’s addition to&nbsp; COVID test anxiety.</li><li>Bridge Music —  &nbsp;<em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/content/Zapac/Zapac_-_Test_Drive.mp3\" target=\"_blank\">Test Drive</a>&nbsp;</em>by Zapac</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Michelin Dining Adventures</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Last month, I picked up on the buzz around a blogger’s <a href=\"https://everywhereist.com/2021/12/bros-restaurant-lecce-we-eat-at-the-worst-michelin-starred-restaurant-ever/\">brutal review</a> of a 1-star Michelin restaurant in Italy. It initially caught my eye because Irene and I like to hit a Michelin star or two when we’re traveling. Indeed, a 1-star place called <a href=\"https://www.behindrestaurant.co.uk/\"><em>Behind</em></a> as in “ it’s an open kitchen so there’s nothing to hide behind” got us figuring out how to get from central London to Hackney, a neighborhood we would’ve had no reason to explore otherwise. It was a great lunch; a great experience talking to the chef, and it\'s going on my final Best of 2021 list -- which is on my to-do list to update right after I finish this podcast. Having said that, we’ve also had some meals that weren’t great, like our 25th anniversary dinner at a 3-star place in Florence, or a 2-star in Spain that we loved -- until the next morning when we both came down with food poisoning. But on balance, we’ve had more really good meals than bad, and they’ve often taken us out of the travel bubble to parts of cities we wouldn’t normally go -- kinda like my microbrewery taprooms, only a <strong><em>lot</em></strong> more expensive.</li><li>So when I saw the title “We Eat at The Worst Michelin Starred Restaurant, Ever,” it got my attention. First, what restaurant is it, so we can avoid it, and second, what made it the worst ever because that’s a big claim. But then I see the <em>full</em> title, with the restaurant, Bros in Lecce, Italy. We won’t be able to skip it because we ate there in mid-October, the night after our Puglia bike tour ended.&nbsp;</li><li>I read through the reviews and looked closely at the pictures. A couple of courses look familiar, but others -- like the now-famous (infamous?) grey foam oozing out of a plaster replica of the chef’s mouth was (thankfully) not on our menu. I have to say that I was on the fence about eating at Bros when Irene brought it up when we were planning our Puglia trip. The reviews I could find were <em>very</em> mixed, and it wasn’t a cheap ticket. We decided to go, but with the understanding that it could be a high-variance meal, with some courses that might not work out. I think the oyster with rancid fat was that dish for Irene. I didn’t love it, but it didn’t trigger a gag reflex like it did for Irene. Certainly not what you hope for, and it was only that dish, the rest was fine. But like I said, we went into Bros eye wide open, expecting an edgy experimental food experience -- and definitely not a standard 3-course fine dining Italian meal. We walked out thinking “Well, that was interesting” -- not bad, but not the worst 1-star meal I’ve had; probably in the bottom quartile, though. As you might guess, Bros <em>won’t</em> make it on that Best of 2021 list update.</li><li>So why didn’t this blogger, a James Beard-award winning writer, come in with similar expectations? Who knows, though we do know that outrage porn drives clicks which, for her, also drove some high-profile TV interviews which probably helped move a few copies of her book. And, since no publicity is bad publicity, I’m guessing it was <a href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/23/world/europe/bros-restaurant-review.html\">a net positive for the restaurant</a> too.</li><li>But why pay what was about a lot of money for a meal that I think might be a complete train wreck? I walked past a lot of places in Lecce that I know would put a good meal down in front of us for a lot less. It becomes a bit less about food and a bit more about the experience; less about stomach and more about the brain. It reminded me of something Josh Glenn said in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/10/podcast-182-more-covid-changes-words-that-mean-adventure/\" title=\"the last episode\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the last episode</a> when I was talking with him about the language of adventure<ul><li>Josh: I mean an adventure is, and that word comes from the Latin meaning <em>to arrive unexpectedly</em>. That\'s actually really an important philosophical piece for me as I was going through this, the idea that you can have a trip is not an adventure if nothing unexpected happens and if you don\'t take enough risks to allow things unexpected to happen.... The word <em>chance </em>comes from the Latin <em>cadentia </em>meaning <em>falling</em>. So just when we think about how we use the words of “let the chips fall where they may” or “something befalls you”, this idea of having our feet off the ground, falling through space, we can\'t grasp anything, what do you do with that? If you’re someone who likes, in some kind of existential way, that feeling of falling, then you\'re an adventurer. You\'re going to get more out of your travel experiences than someone who wants everything to be exactly the same way every time and never have any hiccups.</li></ul></li><li>I always say to Irene “If every meal we have is a great one, then we’re not trying enough weird places.” After food poisoning has befallen you a couple times, how bad can a little rancid fat be?</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #183</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_183.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #183 — COVID Test Anxiety; Michelin Food Adventures','','inherit','closed','closed','','4063-revision-v1','','','2022-01-17 00:26:53','2022-01-17 05:26:53','',4063,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4079',0,'revision','',0),
(4083,1,'2022-01-31 17:24:15','2022-01-31 22:24:15','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It\'ll take travel guide books a while to catch up with <a href=\"https://www.nrn.com/fast-casual/datassential-more-10-us-restaurants-have-closed-permanently\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">all</a> <a href=\"https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-07/over-110-000-restaurants-have-closed-with-sector-in-free-fall\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the</a> restaurants and bars closures caused by the COVID lockdowns. To help fill that gap, here are the best places I\'ve ate and drank at during my 2021 travels. I\'ll update this after each trip, so keep it bookmarked.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Chicago</strong><ul><li><a href=\"http://www.noodlebird.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"NoodleBird at Fat Rice\">NoodleBird at Fat Rice</a>, 2957 W Diversey Ave (at N Sacramento), Logan Square -- The lower price-point, post-pandemic reincarnation of Fat Rice, a perennial recommendation of mine. Like Fat Rice, NoodleBird\'s starting point is the Chinese-Portuguese fusion cuisine of Macau and then extends to other Asian regions</li><li><a href=\"http://www.galitrestaurant.com/menu-1\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Galit\">Galit</a>, 2429 N Lincoln Ave (just north of Fullerton), Lincoln Park -- Great Israeli/Middle Eastern restaurant with a nice 4-course menu that let\'s your table try a lot of dishes</li><li><a href=\"http://highfiveramen.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"High Five Ramen\">High Five Ramen</a>, 112 N Green St, West Loop -- Small, hip basement ramen joint. Expect a wait, but have a beer and a Texas BBQ appetizer upstairs at <a href=\"http://greenstreetmeats.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Green Street Smoked Meats\">Green Street Smoked Meats</a> while you wait</li><li><a href=\"https://www.minghincuisine.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"MingHin Cuisine\">MingHin Cuisine</a>, 2168 S Archer Ave, Chinatown -- It\'s our favorite dim sum place. And they take reservations!</li><li><a href=\"http://www.birrieriazaragoza.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Birrieria Zaragoza\">Birrieria Zaragoza</a>, 4852 S Pulaski Rd, Archer Heights (near Midway Airport) -- Small, family-owned place with a small menu focused on <em>birria</em> (stewed goat) from Jalisco. Warm service and phenomenal food. </li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3046,\"width\":225,\"height\":179,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium is-resized\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7836-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7836-300x238.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3046\" width=\"225\" height=\"179\"/></a><figcaption><em>Sonoran Hot Dog</em></figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tuscon</a></strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.yelp.com/biz/ruiz-hot-dogs-tucson\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Ruiz Hot Dogs</a> food truck 1140 S 6th Ave at W 22nd St -- It\'s all about the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonoran_hot_dog\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Sonoran hot dog</a></li><li><a href=\"https://www.tacorustico.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">El Taco Rustico</a>, 2281 N Oracle Rd -- Quesabirras and cabrito (goat) tacos.</li></ul><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.tacosapson.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tacos Apson</a>, 3501 S 12th Ave -- Mesquite-grilled beef rib tacos and a hass burro</li><li><a href=\"https://1912brewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">1912 Brewing Company</a>, 2045 N Forbes Blvd, Ste 105 -- 20 taps with a wide variety of styles</li><li><a href=\"https://www.pueblovidabrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pueblo Vida Brewing Company</a>, 115 E Broadway Blvd -- Best beers of the trip!</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Phoenix</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.pizzeriabianco.com/pizzeria-bianco-heritage-square\">Pizzeria Bianco</a>, 623 E Adams St -- Thin crust pizza a short drive from the airport</li><li><a href=\"https://www.pizzeriabianco.com/pane-bianco\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pane Bianco</a>, 4404 N Central Ave -- Great sandwich place by the same group further north</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3605,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/IMG_2942.jpeg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/IMG_2942-225x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3605\"/></a><figcaption><em>Eppiq Brewing</em></figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>San Diego</strong><ul><li><a href=\"http://www.mikestacoclub.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Mike\'s Taco Club</a>, 5060 Newport Ave Ocean Beach -- Big fish tacos two blocks off the ocean beneath a tattoo parlor</li><li><a href=\"https://iloveazucar.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Azúcar</a>&nbsp;Patisserie, 4820 Newport Ave Ocean Beach -- Cuban-inspired pastries </li><li><a href=\"http://www.eppigbrewing.com/waterfront-biergarten\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Eppig Brewing Waterfront Biergarten</a>, 2817 Dickens St -- Good beers sitting by the marina</li><li><a href=\"https://www.purebrewing.org/location/balboa-park/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pure Project Brewing Balboa Park Biergarten</a>, 2865 Fifth Ave -- Re-hydrate after walking through Balboa Park</li><li><a href=\"http://www.moderntimesbeer.com/tasting-room/point-loma\">Modern Times Lomaland Fermentorium</a>, 3725 Greenwood St -- 32 taps of great beer 10 minutes from the airport</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Nashville</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.biscuitlove.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Biscuit Love Gulch</a>, 316 11th Ave S -- Fun toppings on great buttermilk biscuits for breakfast</li><li><a href=\"https://barsovereign.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bar Sovereign</a>, 514 Rep. John Lewis Way S -- Fun speakeasy-ish bar south of the Broadway strip</li><li><a href=\"https://blackdynastyramen.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Black Dynasty Secret Ramen House</a>, Pop-up that is moving from the back of Bar Sovereign to Bearded Iris\' new taproom</li><li><a href=\"https://hattieb.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Hattie B\'s Hot Chicken - Melrose</a>, 2222 8th Ave S -- Good hot chicken without a wait near Belmont University</li><li><a href=\"https://beardedirisbrewing.com/location/germantown/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bearded Iris Brewing</a>, 101 Van Buren St -- Original taproom with pool tables and a big patio</li><li><a href=\"https://www.variousartistsbrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Various Artists Brewing</a>, 1011 Elm Hill Pike -- Wide variety of beer styles; big patio; guest chefs working a big grill</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>New York City</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.thehummuskitchen.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Hummus Kitchen</a>, 444 3rd Ave (at 31st St), Murray Hill --  Well-executed Middle-Eastern food</li><li><a href=\"http://www.hernameishan.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Her Name is Han</a>, 17 E 31st St (at Madison Ave), Koreatown -- Home-style Korean food</li><li><a href=\"https://www.craftandcarry.beer/murray-hill\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Craft + Carry - Murray Hill</a>, 440 3rd St (at 30th St) -- Excellent selection of NY craft beers on draft and in cans to-go</li><li><a href=\"https://www.tedscornertavern.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Ted\'s Corner Tavern</a>, 523 3rd Ave (at 35th St), Murray Hill -- Comfortable neighborhood bar with a great beer selection</li><li><a href=\"http://theponybar.com/\" title=\"The Pony Bar\">The Pony Bar</a>,  1444 1st Ave (at E 75th St), Upper East Side -- Casual bar with a great beer selection. Been going there for 10 years</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3621,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/0C76568F-F5B5-4831-B8F5-CA16FCF8C829.jpeg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/0C76568F-F5B5-4831-B8F5-CA16FCF8C829-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3621\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Portland, Maine</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://bobsclamhut.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bob\'s Clam Hut</a>, 315 Route 1, Kittery -- Best fried clams I\'ve ever had</li><li><a href=\"https://portland.islandcreekoysters.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">The Shop by Island Creek Oysters</a>, 123 Washington Ave, Portland -- Excellent (and inexpensive) selection of Maine oysters</li><li><a href=\"https://oxbowbeer.com/location/portland/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Oxbow Blending &amp; Bottling</a>, 49 Washington Ave, Portland -- Great selection of farmhouse ales with an outpost of <a href=\"http://www.duckfatfriteshack.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Duckfat</a> serving up fries on the patio</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','My Best Restaurants and Bars of 2021','','inherit','closed','closed','','3596-revision-v1','','','2022-01-31 17:24:15','2022-01-31 22:24:15','',3596,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4083',0,'revision','',0),
(4085,1,'2022-01-31 17:47:56','2022-01-31 22:47:56','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It\'ll take travel guide books a while to catch up with <a href=\"https://www.nrn.com/fast-casual/datassential-more-10-us-restaurants-have-closed-permanently\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">all</a> <a href=\"https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-07/over-110-000-restaurants-have-closed-with-sector-in-free-fall\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the</a> restaurants and bars closures caused by the COVID lockdowns. To help fill that gap, here are the best places I\'ve ate and drank at during my 2021 travels. I\'ll update this after each trip, so keep it bookmarked.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Chicago</strong><ul><li><a href=\"http://www.noodlebird.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"NoodleBird at Fat Rice\">NoodleBird at Fat Rice</a>, 2957 W Diversey Ave (at N Sacramento), Logan Square -- The lower price-point, post-pandemic reincarnation of Fat Rice, a perennial recommendation of mine. Like Fat Rice, NoodleBird\'s starting point is the Chinese-Portuguese fusion cuisine of Macau and then extends to other Asian regions</li><li><a href=\"http://www.galitrestaurant.com/menu-1\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Galit\">Galit</a>, 2429 N Lincoln Ave (just north of Fullerton), Lincoln Park -- Great Israeli/Middle Eastern restaurant with a nice 4-course menu that let\'s your table try a lot of dishes</li><li><a href=\"http://highfiveramen.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"High Five Ramen\">High Five Ramen</a>, 112 N Green St, West Loop -- Small, hip basement ramen joint. Expect a wait, but have a beer and a Texas BBQ appetizer upstairs at <a href=\"http://greenstreetmeats.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Green Street Smoked Meats\">Green Street Smoked Meats</a> while you wait</li><li><a href=\"https://www.minghincuisine.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"MingHin Cuisine\">MingHin Cuisine</a>, 2168 S Archer Ave, Chinatown -- It\'s our favorite dim sum place. And they take reservations!</li><li><a href=\"http://www.birrieriazaragoza.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Birrieria Zaragoza\">Birrieria Zaragoza</a>, 4852 S Pulaski Rd, Archer Heights (near Midway Airport) -- Small, family-owned place with a small menu focused on <em>birria</em> (stewed goat) from Jalisco. Warm service and phenomenal food. </li><li><a href=\"https://bitterpops.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Bitter Pops\">Bitter Pops</a>, 3357 N Lincoln Ave (at Roscoe), Roscoe Village -- a renovated slashie (bar + packaged goods) that has a great selection of Chicago craft beer</li><li><a href=\"http://www.revbrew.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Revolution Brewing - Brewery &amp; Taproom\">Revolution Brewing - Brewery &amp; Taproom</a>, 3340 N Kedzie Ave, Avondale -- Great beers; wide range of styles; bring your own food</li><li><a href=\"http://maplewoodbrew.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Maplewood Brewery\">Maplewood Brewery &amp; Distillery</a>, 2717 N Maplewood Ave (South of Diversey), east of Logan Square -- Small, neighborhood bar tucked up against the Kennedy Expressway</li><li>For more taproom ideas, check out this <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/07/15/video-chicago-mdw-layover-taproom-tour/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"pre-pandemic TravelCommons taproom tour.\">pre-pandemic TravelCommons taproom tour.</a> Three of the four taprooms featured are still open -- Marz, Whiner, and Lo-Rez. Only Lagunitas Brewing is still closed</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3046,\"width\":225,\"height\":179,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium is-resized\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7836-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7836-300x238.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3046\" width=\"225\" height=\"179\"/></a><figcaption><em>Sonoran Hot Dog</em></figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tuscon</a></strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.yelp.com/biz/ruiz-hot-dogs-tucson\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Ruiz Hot Dogs</a> food truck 1140 S 6th Ave at W 22nd St -- It\'s all about the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonoran_hot_dog\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Sonoran hot dog</a></li><li><a href=\"https://www.tacorustico.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">El Taco Rustico</a>, 2281 N Oracle Rd -- Quesabirras and cabrito (goat) tacos.</li></ul><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.tacosapson.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tacos Apson</a>, 3501 S 12th Ave -- Mesquite-grilled beef rib tacos and a hass burro</li><li><a href=\"https://1912brewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">1912 Brewing Company</a>, 2045 N Forbes Blvd, Ste 105 -- 20 taps with a wide variety of styles</li><li><a href=\"https://www.pueblovidabrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pueblo Vida Brewing Company</a>, 115 E Broadway Blvd -- Best beers of the trip!</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Phoenix</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.pizzeriabianco.com/pizzeria-bianco-heritage-square\">Pizzeria Bianco</a>, 623 E Adams St -- Thin crust pizza a short drive from the airport</li><li><a href=\"https://www.pizzeriabianco.com/pane-bianco\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pane Bianco</a>, 4404 N Central Ave -- Great sandwich place by the same group further north</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3605,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/IMG_2942.jpeg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/IMG_2942-225x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3605\"/></a><figcaption><em>Eppiq Brewing</em></figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>San Diego</strong><ul><li><a href=\"http://www.mikestacoclub.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Mike\'s Taco Club</a>, 5060 Newport Ave Ocean Beach -- Big fish tacos two blocks off the ocean beneath a tattoo parlor</li><li><a href=\"https://iloveazucar.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Azúcar</a>&nbsp;Patisserie, 4820 Newport Ave Ocean Beach -- Cuban-inspired pastries </li><li><a href=\"http://www.eppigbrewing.com/waterfront-biergarten\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Eppig Brewing Waterfront Biergarten</a>, 2817 Dickens St -- Good beers sitting by the marina</li><li><a href=\"https://www.purebrewing.org/location/balboa-park/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pure Project Brewing Balboa Park Biergarten</a>, 2865 Fifth Ave -- Re-hydrate after walking through Balboa Park</li><li><a href=\"http://www.moderntimesbeer.com/tasting-room/point-loma\">Modern Times Lomaland Fermentorium</a>, 3725 Greenwood St -- 32 taps of great beer 10 minutes from the airport</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Nashville</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.biscuitlove.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Biscuit Love Gulch</a>, 316 11th Ave S -- Fun toppings on great buttermilk biscuits for breakfast</li><li><a href=\"https://barsovereign.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bar Sovereign</a>, 514 Rep. John Lewis Way S -- Fun speakeasy-ish bar south of the Broadway strip</li><li><a href=\"https://blackdynastyramen.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Black Dynasty Secret Ramen House</a>, Pop-up that is moving from the back of Bar Sovereign to Bearded Iris\' new taproom</li><li><a href=\"https://hattieb.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Hattie B\'s Hot Chicken - Melrose</a>, 2222 8th Ave S -- Good hot chicken without a wait near Belmont University</li><li><a href=\"https://beardedirisbrewing.com/location/germantown/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bearded Iris Brewing</a>, 101 Van Buren St -- Original taproom with pool tables and a big patio</li><li><a href=\"https://www.variousartistsbrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Various Artists Brewing</a>, 1011 Elm Hill Pike -- Wide variety of beer styles; big patio; guest chefs working a big grill</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>New York City</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.thehummuskitchen.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Hummus Kitchen</a>, 444 3rd Ave (at 31st St), Murray Hill --  Well-executed Middle-Eastern food</li><li><a href=\"http://www.hernameishan.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Her Name is Han</a>, 17 E 31st St (at Madison Ave), Koreatown -- Home-style Korean food</li><li><a href=\"https://www.craftandcarry.beer/murray-hill\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Craft + Carry - Murray Hill</a>, 440 3rd St (at 30th St) -- Excellent selection of NY craft beers on draft and in cans to-go</li><li><a href=\"https://www.tedscornertavern.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Ted\'s Corner Tavern</a>, 523 3rd Ave (at 35th St), Murray Hill -- Comfortable neighborhood bar with a great beer selection</li><li><a href=\"http://theponybar.com/\" title=\"The Pony Bar\">The Pony Bar</a>,  1444 1st Ave (at E 75th St), Upper East Side -- Casual bar with a great beer selection. Been going there for 10 years</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3621,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/0C76568F-F5B5-4831-B8F5-CA16FCF8C829.jpeg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/0C76568F-F5B5-4831-B8F5-CA16FCF8C829-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3621\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Portland, Maine</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://bobsclamhut.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bob\'s Clam Hut</a>, 315 Route 1, Kittery -- Best fried clams I\'ve ever had</li><li><a href=\"https://portland.islandcreekoysters.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">The Shop by Island Creek Oysters</a>, 123 Washington Ave, Portland -- Excellent (and inexpensive) selection of Maine oysters</li><li><a href=\"https://oxbowbeer.com/location/portland/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Oxbow Blending &amp; Bottling</a>, 49 Washington Ave, Portland -- Great selection of farmhouse ales with an outpost of <a href=\"http://www.duckfatfriteshack.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Duckfat</a> serving up fries on the patio</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','My Best Restaurants and Bars of 2021','','inherit','closed','closed','','3596-revision-v1','','','2022-01-31 17:47:56','2022-01-31 22:47:56','',3596,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4085',0,'revision','',0),
(4086,1,'2022-01-31 17:48:45','2022-01-31 22:48:45','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It\'ll take travel guide books a while to catch up with <a href=\"https://www.nrn.com/fast-casual/datassential-more-10-us-restaurants-have-closed-permanently\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">all</a> <a href=\"https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-07/over-110-000-restaurants-have-closed-with-sector-in-free-fall\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the</a> restaurants and bars closures caused by the COVID lockdowns. To help fill that gap, here are the best places I\'ve ate and drank at during my 2021 travels. I\'ll update this after each trip, so keep it bookmarked.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Chicago</strong><ul><li><a href=\"http://www.noodlebird.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"NoodleBird at Fat Rice\">NoodleBird at Fat Rice</a>, 2957 W Diversey Ave (at N Sacramento), Logan Square -- The lower price-point, post-pandemic reincarnation of Fat Rice, a perennial recommendation of mine. Like Fat Rice, NoodleBird\'s starting point is the Chinese-Portuguese fusion cuisine of Macau and then extends to other Asian regions</li><li><a href=\"http://www.galitrestaurant.com/menu-1\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Galit\">Galit</a>, 2429 N Lincoln Ave (just north of Fullerton), Lincoln Park -- Great Israeli/Middle Eastern restaurant with a nice 4-course menu that let\'s your table try a lot of dishes</li><li><a href=\"http://highfiveramen.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"High Five Ramen\">High Five Ramen</a>, 112 N Green St, West Loop -- Small, hip basement ramen joint. Expect a wait, but have a beer and a Texas BBQ appetizer upstairs at <a href=\"http://greenstreetmeats.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Green Street Smoked Meats\">Green Street Smoked Meats</a> while you wait</li><li><a href=\"https://www.minghincuisine.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"MingHin Cuisine\">MingHin Cuisine</a>, 2168 S Archer Ave, Chinatown -- It\'s our favorite dim sum place. And they take reservations!</li><li><a href=\"http://www.birrieriazaragoza.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Birrieria Zaragoza\">Birrieria Zaragoza</a>, 4852 S Pulaski Rd, Archer Heights (near Midway Airport) -- Small, family-owned place with a small menu focused on <em>birria</em> (stewed goat) from Jalisco. Warm service and phenomenal food.&nbsp;</li><li><a href=\"https://bitterpops.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Bitter Pops\">Bitter Pops</a>, 3357 N Lincoln Ave (at Roscoe), Roscoe Village -- a renovated slashie (bar + packaged goods) that has a great selection of Chicago craft beer</li><li><a href=\"http://www.revbrew.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Revolution Brewing - Brewery &amp; Taproom\">Revolution Brewing - Brewery &amp; Taproom</a>, 3340 N Kedzie Ave, Avondale -- Great beers; wide range of styles; bring your own food</li><li><a href=\"http://maplewoodbrew.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Maplewood Brewery\">Maplewood Brewery &amp; Distillery</a>, 2717 N Maplewood Ave (South of Diversey), east of Logan Square -- Small, neighborhood bar tucked up against the Kennedy Expressway</li><li>For more taproom ideas, check out this <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/07/15/video-chicago-mdw-layover-taproom-tour/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"pre-pandemic TravelCommons taproom tour.\">pre-pandemic TravelCommons taproom tour.</a> Three of the four taprooms featured are still open -- Marz, Whiner, and Lo-Rez. Only Lagunitas Brewing is still closed</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3046,\"width\":225,\"height\":179,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium is-resized\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7836-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7836-300x238.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3046\" width=\"225\" height=\"179\"/></a><figcaption><em>Sonoran Hot Dog</em></figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tuscon</a></strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.yelp.com/biz/ruiz-hot-dogs-tucson\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Ruiz Hot Dogs</a> food truck 1140 S 6th Ave at W 22nd St -- It\'s all about the&nbsp;<a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonoran_hot_dog\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Sonoran hot dog</a></li><li><a href=\"https://www.tacorustico.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">El Taco Rustico</a>, 2281 N Oracle Rd -- Quesabirras and cabrito (goat) tacos.</li></ul><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.tacosapson.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tacos Apson</a>, 3501 S 12th Ave -- Mesquite-grilled beef rib tacos and a hass burro</li><li><a href=\"https://1912brewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">1912 Brewing Company</a>, 2045 N Forbes Blvd, Ste 105 -- 20 taps with a wide variety of styles</li><li><a href=\"https://www.pueblovidabrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pueblo Vida Brewing Company</a>, 115 E Broadway Blvd -- Best beers of the trip!</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Phoenix</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.pizzeriabianco.com/pizzeria-bianco-heritage-square\">Pizzeria Bianco</a>, 623 E Adams St -- Thin crust pizza a short drive from the airport</li><li><a href=\"https://www.pizzeriabianco.com/pane-bianco\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pane Bianco</a>, 4404 N Central Ave -- Great sandwich place by the same group further north</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3605,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/IMG_2942.jpeg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/IMG_2942-225x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3605\"/></a><figcaption><em>Eppiq Brewing</em></figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>San Diego</strong><ul><li><a href=\"http://www.mikestacoclub.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Mike\'s Taco Club</a>, 5060 Newport Ave Ocean Beach -- Big fish tacos two blocks off the ocean beneath a tattoo parlor</li><li><a href=\"https://iloveazucar.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Azúcar</a>&nbsp;Patisserie, 4820 Newport Ave Ocean Beach -- Cuban-inspired pastries </li><li><a href=\"http://www.eppigbrewing.com/waterfront-biergarten\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Eppig Brewing Waterfront Biergarten</a>, 2817 Dickens St -- Good beers sitting by the marina</li><li><a href=\"https://www.purebrewing.org/location/balboa-park/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pure Project Brewing Balboa Park Biergarten</a>, 2865 Fifth Ave -- Re-hydrate after walking through Balboa Park</li><li><a href=\"http://www.moderntimesbeer.com/tasting-room/point-loma\">Modern Times Lomaland Fermentorium</a>, 3725 Greenwood St -- 32 taps of great beer 10 minutes from the airport</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Nashville</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.biscuitlove.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Biscuit Love Gulch</a>, 316 11th Ave S -- Fun toppings on great buttermilk biscuits for breakfast</li><li><a href=\"https://barsovereign.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bar Sovereign</a>, 514 Rep. John Lewis Way S -- Fun speakeasy-ish bar south of the Broadway strip</li><li><a href=\"https://blackdynastyramen.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Black Dynasty Secret Ramen House</a>, Pop-up that is moving from the back of Bar Sovereign to Bearded Iris\' new taproom</li><li><a href=\"https://hattieb.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Hattie B\'s Hot Chicken - Melrose</a>, 2222 8th Ave S -- Good hot chicken without a wait near Belmont University</li><li><a href=\"https://beardedirisbrewing.com/location/germantown/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bearded Iris Brewing</a>, 101 Van Buren St -- Original taproom with pool tables and a big patio</li><li><a href=\"https://www.variousartistsbrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Various Artists Brewing</a>, 1011 Elm Hill Pike -- Wide variety of beer styles; big patio; guest chefs working a big grill</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>New York City</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.thehummuskitchen.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Hummus Kitchen</a>, 444 3rd Ave (at 31st St), Murray Hill --  Well-executed Middle-Eastern food</li><li><a href=\"http://www.hernameishan.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Her Name is Han</a>, 17 E 31st St (at Madison Ave), Koreatown -- Home-style Korean food</li><li><a href=\"https://www.craftandcarry.beer/murray-hill\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Craft + Carry - Murray Hill</a>, 440 3rd St (at 30th St) -- Excellent selection of NY craft beers on draft and in cans to-go</li><li><a href=\"https://www.tedscornertavern.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Ted\'s Corner Tavern</a>, 523 3rd Ave (at 35th St), Murray Hill -- Comfortable neighborhood bar with a great beer selection</li><li><a href=\"http://theponybar.com/\" title=\"The Pony Bar\">The Pony Bar</a>,  1444 1st Ave (at E 75th St), Upper East Side -- Casual bar with a great beer selection. Been going there for 10 years</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3621,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/0C76568F-F5B5-4831-B8F5-CA16FCF8C829.jpeg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/0C76568F-F5B5-4831-B8F5-CA16FCF8C829-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3621\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Portland, Maine</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://bobsclamhut.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bob\'s Clam Hut</a>, 315 Route 1, Kittery -- Best fried clams I\'ve ever had</li><li><a href=\"https://portland.islandcreekoysters.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">The Shop by Island Creek Oysters</a>, 123 Washington Ave, Portland -- Excellent (and inexpensive) selection of Maine oysters</li><li><a href=\"https://oxbowbeer.com/location/portland/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Oxbow Blending &amp; Bottling</a>, 49 Washington Ave, Portland -- Great selection of farmhouse ales with an outpost of <a href=\"http://www.duckfatfriteshack.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Duckfat</a> serving up fries on the patio</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','My Best Restaurants and Bars of 2021','','inherit','closed','closed','','3596-revision-v1','','','2022-01-31 17:48:45','2022-01-31 22:48:45','',3596,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4086',0,'revision','',0),
(4087,1,'2022-01-31 17:52:22','2022-01-31 22:52:22','<h2>TravelCommons</h2>		\n			The podcast giving the voice of the traveler<br><br>It\'s more about the journey than the destination		\n			<ul>\n								<li>\n						<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/16/podcast-172-timeshares-without-the-pitch-notes-on-tucson/\"><h2>Podcast #172 — Timeshares Without the Pitch; Notes on Tucson</h2></a>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/16/podcast-172-timeshares-without-the-pitch-notes-on-tucson/\">February 16, 2021</a>\n									Episode 172								\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n																	<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n								28.17								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/16/podcast-172-timeshares-without-the-pitch-notes-on-tucson/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n									<p>\n										Escaped Chicago winter for a week of hiking and eating in Tucson; CEO of Koala talks about renting timeshares; travel planning gets hot and then cools back down																			</p>									\n							<!--[if lt IE 9]><![endif]-->\n<audio id=\"audio-3342-1\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/3342/podcast-172-timeshares-without-the-pitch-notes-on-tucson.mp3?_=1\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/3342/podcast-172-timeshares-without-the-pitch-notes-on-tucson.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/3342/podcast-172-timeshares-without-the-pitch-notes-on-tucson.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/3342/podcast-172-timeshares-without-the-pitch-notes-on-tucson.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #172 — Timeshares Without the Pitch; Notes on Tucson \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/3342/podcast-172-timeshares-without-the-pitch-notes-on-tucson.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #172 — Timeshares Without the Pitch; Notes on Tucson \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a> | Duration: 28.17 | Recorded on February 16, 2021</p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>						\n			<!-- close .slider-content-max-width -->\n		<!-- close .slider-text-floating-container -->\n	<!-- close .slider-elements-display-table -->\n<!-- close .secondline-elements-slider-background -->\n				</li>\n								<li>\n						<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\"><h2>Quick Notes on Our Trip to Tucson</h2></a>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\">February 1, 2021</a>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n																	<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/beer/\" rel=\"category tag\">Beer</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/food-2/\" rel=\"category tag\">Food</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-journal/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Journal</a>\n																<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/#comments\">2 Comments</a>\n									<p>\n										I left my suitcase at the door of our West Tucson Airbnb and walked out onto the back patio to watch the sun slip behind the Tucson Mountains. The shades of red and orange on the undersides of a couple of clouds stood out in the pale blue sky. This was exactly what we were...																			</p>									\n			<!-- close .slider-content-max-width -->\n		<!-- close .slider-text-floating-container -->\n	<!-- close .slider-elements-display-table -->\n<!-- close .secondline-elements-slider-background -->\n				</li>\n								<li>\n						<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\"><h2>Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips</h2></a>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">January 14, 2021</a>\n									Episode 171								\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n																	<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n								28:17								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n									<p>\n										Pivoting from San Diego to Tucson for COVID restrictions; planning tips for travel during COVID; CEO of Privacy4Cars talks about leaving data behind in rental cars																			</p>									\n							<audio id=\"audio-2997-2\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?_=2\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a> | Duration: 28:17 | Recorded on January 14, 2021</p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>						\n			<!-- close .slider-content-max-width -->\n		<!-- close .slider-text-floating-container -->\n	<!-- close .slider-elements-display-table -->\n<!-- close .secondline-elements-slider-background -->\n				</li>\n							</ul>\n		<!-- #-elements-secondline-flexslider-56656ff -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-slider-main -->\n<a onMouseOver=\"this.style.color=`#2d2d2d`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#ffffff`\" onMouseOut=\"this.style.color=`#ffffff`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#c01f2c`\" style=\"color:#ffffff; background-color:#c01f2c\" href=\"#!\">Subscribe</a>   \n<!-- Modal HTML embedded directly into document. -->\n	<ul><li><a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Apple-Podcasts.png\" />Apple Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Google-Podcasts.png\" />Google Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Spotify.png\" />Spotify</a></li><li><a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/SoundCloud.png\" />SoundCloud</a></li><li><a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Stitcher.png\" />Stitcher</a></li><li><a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Amazon-Music.png\" />Amazon Music</a></li><li><a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/TravelcommonsPodcast\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/RSS.png\" />RSS</a></li></ul>                                       \n			<!-- close .secondline-addons-subscribe-button-container -->\n			<h2>Latest Posts</h2>		\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/16/podcast-172-timeshares-without-the-pitch-notes-on-tucson/\">\n					<img width=\"375\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2776-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2776-scaled.jpg?w=1920 1920w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2776-scaled.jpg?resize=225%2C300 225w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2776-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C1024 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2776-scaled.jpg?resize=1152%2C1536 1152w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2776-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C2048 1536w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 375px) 100vw, 375px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/16/podcast-172-timeshares-without-the-pitch-notes-on-tucson/\">\nPodcast #172 — Timeshares Without the Pitch; Notes on Tucson</a></h2>\n					February 16, 2021\n						Episode 172										\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					28.17\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/16/podcast-172-timeshares-without-the-pitch-notes-on-tucson/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n						<p>Escaped Chicago winter for a week of hiking and eating in Tucson; CEO of Koala talks about renting timeshares; travel planning gets hot and then cools back down</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/16/podcast-172-timeshares-without-the-pitch-notes-on-tucson/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-3342-3\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/3342/podcast-172-timeshares-without-the-pitch-notes-on-tucson.mp3?_=3\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/3342/podcast-172-timeshares-without-the-pitch-notes-on-tucson.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/3342/podcast-172-timeshares-without-the-pitch-notes-on-tucson.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/3342/podcast-172-timeshares-without-the-pitch-notes-on-tucson.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #172 — Timeshares Without the Pitch; Notes on Tucson \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/3342/podcast-172-timeshares-without-the-pitch-notes-on-tucson.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #172 — Timeshares Without the Pitch; Notes on Tucson \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a> | Duration: 28.17 | Recorded on February 16, 2021</p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?w=2000 2000w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\">\nQuick Notes on Our Trip to Tucson</a></h2>\n					February 1, 2021\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/beer/\" rel=\"category tag\">Beer</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/food-2/\" rel=\"category tag\">Food</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-journal/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Journal</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/#comments\">2 Comments</a>\n						<p>I left my suitcase at the door of our West Tucson Airbnb and walked out onto the back patio to watch the sun slip behind the Tucson Mountains. The...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?w=1334 1334w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\nPodcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips</a></h2>\n					January 14, 2021\n						Episode 171										\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					28:17\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n						<p>Pivoting from San Diego to Tucson for COVID restrictions; planning tips for travel during COVID; CEO of Privacy4Cars talks about leaving data behind in rental cars</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2997-4\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?_=4\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a> | Duration: 28:17 | Recorded on January 14, 2021</p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?w=919 919w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">\nPodcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors</a></h2>\n					December 16, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					Comments Off on Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors\n						<p>No Thanksgiving travel, but looking at the travel volume for this, the busiest travel week of the year, shows just how far things have fallen. The Qantas CEO said...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2957-5\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?_=5\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?w=1299 1299w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">\nPodcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers</a></h2>\n					November 12, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-tech/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Tech</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/#comments\">3 Comments</a>\n						<p>No travel since the last episode, so I had some time to think back through my post-lockdown travel and come up with my top 10 gift ideas for your...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2936-6\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?_=6\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?w=2560 2560w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C2048 2048w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?w=2400 2400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">\n10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times</a></h2>\n					November 4, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-journal/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Journal</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-tech/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Tech</a>\n					Comments Off on 10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times\n						<p>With public health officials saying things like &#8220;it will be easily by the end of 2021 and perhaps into the next year before we start having some semblance of...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php?paged=2\" >More Posts</a>\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-list-main -->','Home','','inherit','closed','closed','','3141-revision-v1','','','2022-01-31 17:52:22','2022-01-31 22:52:22','',3141,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4087',0,'revision','',0),
(4088,1,'2022-01-31 17:52:22','2022-01-31 22:52:22','<h2>TravelCommons</h2>		\n			The podcast giving the voice of the traveler<br><br>It\'s more about the journey than the destination		\n			<ul>\n								<li>\n						<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/16/podcast-172-timeshares-without-the-pitch-notes-on-tucson/\"><h2>Podcast #172 — Timeshares Without the Pitch; Notes on Tucson</h2></a>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/16/podcast-172-timeshares-without-the-pitch-notes-on-tucson/\">February 16, 2021</a>\n									Episode 172								\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n																	<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n								28.17								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/16/podcast-172-timeshares-without-the-pitch-notes-on-tucson/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n									<p>\n										Escaped Chicago winter for a week of hiking and eating in Tucson; CEO of Koala talks about renting timeshares; travel planning gets hot and then cools back down																			</p>									\n							<!--[if lt IE 9]><![endif]-->\n<audio id=\"audio-3342-1\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/3342/podcast-172-timeshares-without-the-pitch-notes-on-tucson.mp3?_=1\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/3342/podcast-172-timeshares-without-the-pitch-notes-on-tucson.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/3342/podcast-172-timeshares-without-the-pitch-notes-on-tucson.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/3342/podcast-172-timeshares-without-the-pitch-notes-on-tucson.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #172 — Timeshares Without the Pitch; Notes on Tucson \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/3342/podcast-172-timeshares-without-the-pitch-notes-on-tucson.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #172 — Timeshares Without the Pitch; Notes on Tucson \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a> | Duration: 28.17 | Recorded on February 16, 2021</p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>						\n			<!-- close .slider-content-max-width -->\n		<!-- close .slider-text-floating-container -->\n	<!-- close .slider-elements-display-table -->\n<!-- close .secondline-elements-slider-background -->\n				</li>\n								<li>\n						<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\"><h2>Quick Notes on Our Trip to Tucson</h2></a>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\">February 1, 2021</a>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n																	<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/beer/\" rel=\"category tag\">Beer</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/food-2/\" rel=\"category tag\">Food</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-journal/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Journal</a>\n																<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/#comments\">2 Comments</a>\n									<p>\n										I left my suitcase at the door of our West Tucson Airbnb and walked out onto the back patio to watch the sun slip behind the Tucson Mountains. The shades of red and orange on the undersides of a couple of clouds stood out in the pale blue sky. This was exactly what we were...																			</p>									\n			<!-- close .slider-content-max-width -->\n		<!-- close .slider-text-floating-container -->\n	<!-- close .slider-elements-display-table -->\n<!-- close .secondline-elements-slider-background -->\n				</li>\n								<li>\n						<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\"><h2>Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips</h2></a>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">January 14, 2021</a>\n									Episode 171								\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n																	<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n								28:17								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n									<p>\n										Pivoting from San Diego to Tucson for COVID restrictions; planning tips for travel during COVID; CEO of Privacy4Cars talks about leaving data behind in rental cars																			</p>									\n							<audio id=\"audio-2997-2\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?_=2\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a> | Duration: 28:17 | Recorded on January 14, 2021</p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>						\n			<!-- close .slider-content-max-width -->\n		<!-- close .slider-text-floating-container -->\n	<!-- close .slider-elements-display-table -->\n<!-- close .secondline-elements-slider-background -->\n				</li>\n							</ul>\n		<!-- #-elements-secondline-flexslider-56656ff -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-slider-main -->\n<a onMouseOver=\"this.style.color=`#2d2d2d`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#ffffff`\" onMouseOut=\"this.style.color=`#ffffff`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#c01f2c`\" style=\"color:#ffffff; background-color:#c01f2c\" href=\"#!\">Subscribe</a>   \n<!-- Modal HTML embedded directly into document. -->\n	<ul><li><a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Apple-Podcasts.png\" />Apple Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Google-Podcasts.png\" />Google Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Spotify.png\" />Spotify</a></li><li><a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/SoundCloud.png\" />SoundCloud</a></li><li><a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Stitcher.png\" />Stitcher</a></li><li><a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Amazon-Music.png\" />Amazon Music</a></li><li><a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/TravelcommonsPodcast\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/RSS.png\" />RSS</a></li></ul>                                       \n			<!-- close .secondline-addons-subscribe-button-container -->\n			<h2>Latest Posts</h2>		\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/16/podcast-172-timeshares-without-the-pitch-notes-on-tucson/\">\n					<img width=\"375\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2776-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2776-scaled.jpg?w=1920 1920w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2776-scaled.jpg?resize=225%2C300 225w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2776-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C1024 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2776-scaled.jpg?resize=1152%2C1536 1152w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_2776-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C2048 1536w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 375px) 100vw, 375px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/16/podcast-172-timeshares-without-the-pitch-notes-on-tucson/\">\nPodcast #172 — Timeshares Without the Pitch; Notes on Tucson</a></h2>\n					February 16, 2021\n						Episode 172										\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					28.17\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/16/podcast-172-timeshares-without-the-pitch-notes-on-tucson/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n						<p>Escaped Chicago winter for a week of hiking and eating in Tucson; CEO of Koala talks about renting timeshares; travel planning gets hot and then cools back down</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/16/podcast-172-timeshares-without-the-pitch-notes-on-tucson/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-3342-3\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/3342/podcast-172-timeshares-without-the-pitch-notes-on-tucson.mp3?_=3\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/3342/podcast-172-timeshares-without-the-pitch-notes-on-tucson.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/3342/podcast-172-timeshares-without-the-pitch-notes-on-tucson.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/3342/podcast-172-timeshares-without-the-pitch-notes-on-tucson.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #172 — Timeshares Without the Pitch; Notes on Tucson \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/3342/podcast-172-timeshares-without-the-pitch-notes-on-tucson.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #172 — Timeshares Without the Pitch; Notes on Tucson \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a> | Duration: 28.17 | Recorded on February 16, 2021</p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?w=2000 2000w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tuscon_Mountain.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\">\nQuick Notes on Our Trip to Tucson</a></h2>\n					February 1, 2021\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/beer/\" rel=\"category tag\">Beer</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/food-2/\" rel=\"category tag\">Food</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-journal/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Journal</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/#comments\">2 Comments</a>\n						<p>I left my suitcase at the door of our West Tucson Airbnb and walked out onto the back patio to watch the sun slip behind the Tucson Mountains. The...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?w=1334 1334w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DSC04229-1.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">\nPodcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips</a></h2>\n					January 14, 2021\n						Episode 171										\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					28:17\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/#comments\">1 Comment</a>\n						<p>Pivoting from San Diego to Tucson for COVID restrictions; planning tips for travel during COVID; CEO of Privacy4Cars talks about leaving data behind in rental cars</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2997-4\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?_=4\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2997/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #171 — Data Privacy and Rental Cars; 2021 Travel Planning Tips \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a> | Duration: 28:17 | Recorded on January 14, 2021</p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?w=919 919w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201113-D-DB155-011.jpeg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\">\nPodcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors</a></h2>\n					December 16, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					Comments Off on Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors\n						<p>No Thanksgiving travel, but looking at the travel volume for this, the busiest travel week of the year, shows just how far things have fallen. The Qantas CEO said...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/12/16/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2957-5\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?_=5\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2957/podcast-170-show-me-the-proof-hereditary-road-warriors.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #170 — Show Me the Proof; Hereditary Road Warriors \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?w=1299 1299w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i1.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/AdobeStock_377236581-scaled-e1605243718714.jpeg?resize=144%2C144 144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\">\nPodcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers</a></h2>\n					November 12, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-tech/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Tech</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/#comments\">3 Comments</a>\n						<p>No travel since the last episode, so I had some time to think back through my post-lockdown travel and come up with my top 10 gift ideas for your...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/12/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-2936-6\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?_=6\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/2936/podcast-169-pandemic-holiday-gift-guide-year-end-status-offers.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #169 — Pandemic Holiday Gift Guide; Year-End Status Offers \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a></p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">\n					<img width=\"500\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?w=2560 2560w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C300 300w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C1024 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=150%2C150 150w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C768 768w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1536 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C2048 2048w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?resize=144%2C144 144w, https://i0.wp.com/staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2530-scaled.jpg?w=2400 2400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">\n10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times</a></h2>\n					November 4, 2020\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-journal/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Journal</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-tech/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Tech</a>\n					Comments Off on 10 Best Travel Gift Ideas for These Unprecedented Times\n						<p>With public health officials saying things like &#8220;it will be easily by the end of 2021 and perhaps into the next year before we start having some semblance of...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php?paged=2\" >More Posts</a>\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-list-main -->','Home','','inherit','closed','closed','','3141-revision-v1','','','2022-01-31 17:52:22','2022-01-31 22:52:22','',3141,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4088',0,'revision','',0);
INSERT INTO `wp_posts` VALUES
(4089,1,'2022-01-31 17:52:22','2022-01-31 22:52:22','<h2>TravelCommons</h2>		\n			The podcast giving the voice of the traveler<br><br>It\'s more about the journey than the destination		\n			<ul>\n								<li>\n						<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/01/16/podcast-183-covid-test-anxiety-michelin-food-adventures/\"><h2>Podcast #183 — COVID Test Anxiety; Michelin Food Adventures</h2></a>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/01/16/podcast-183-covid-test-anxiety-michelin-food-adventures/\">January 16, 2022</a>\n									Episode 183								\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n																	<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n								25:17								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/01/16/podcast-183-covid-test-anxiety-michelin-food-adventures/#respond\">0 Comments</a>\n									<p>\n										No travel since the last episode, but lots of travel planning. Are we making our way back to pre-COVID travel planning patterns? Omicron has lots of people worried about testing positive and getting stuck abroad. Michael Giusti of&nbsp;InsuranceQuotes.com talks about how travel insurance can help. A blogger’s brutal review of a Michelin-starred restaurant where we...																			</p>									\n							<!--[if lt IE 9]><![endif]-->\n<audio id=\"audio-4063-1\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/4063/podcast-183-covid-test-anxiety-michelin-food-adventures.mp3?_=1\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/4063/podcast-183-covid-test-anxiety-michelin-food-adventures.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/4063/podcast-183-covid-test-anxiety-michelin-food-adventures.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/4063/podcast-183-covid-test-anxiety-michelin-food-adventures.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #183 — COVID Test Anxiety; Michelin Food Adventures \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/4063/podcast-183-covid-test-anxiety-michelin-food-adventures.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #183 — COVID Test Anxiety; Michelin Food Adventures \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a> | Duration: 25:17 | Recorded on January 16, 2022</p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>						\n			<!-- close .slider-content-max-width -->\n		<!-- close .slider-text-floating-container -->\n	<!-- close .slider-elements-display-table -->\n<!-- close .secondline-elements-slider-background -->\n				</li>\n								<li>\n						<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/31/my-best-restaurants-and-bars-of-2021/\"><h2>My Best Restaurants and Bars of 2021</h2></a>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/31/my-best-restaurants-and-bars-of-2021/\">December 31, 2021</a>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n																	<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/beer/\" rel=\"category tag\">Beer</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/food-2/\" rel=\"category tag\">Food</a>\n																<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/31/my-best-restaurants-and-bars-of-2021/#respond\">0 Comments</a>\n									<p>\n										It&#8217;ll take travel guide books a while to catch up with all the restaurants and bars closures caused by the COVID lockdowns. To help fill that gap, here are the best places I&#8217;ve ate and drank at during my 2021 travels. I&#8217;ll update this after each trip, so keep it bookmarked. Chicago NoodleBird at Fat...																			</p>									\n			<!-- close .slider-content-max-width -->\n		<!-- close .slider-text-floating-container -->\n	<!-- close .slider-elements-display-table -->\n<!-- close .secondline-elements-slider-background -->\n				</li>\n								<li>\n						<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/30/easy-way-to-do-1-day-testing-for-returning-to-us/\"><h2>Easy Way to Do 1-Day Testing For Returning to US</h2></a>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/30/easy-way-to-do-1-day-testing-for-returning-to-us/\">December 30, 2021</a>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n																	<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-journal/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Journal</a>\n																<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/30/easy-way-to-do-1-day-testing-for-returning-to-us/#respond\">0 Comments</a>\n									<p>\n										How to meet the US 1-day COVID testing window by packing Abbott BinaxNOW kits so you can self-test in your hotel the day before your flight home																			</p>									\n			<!-- close .slider-content-max-width -->\n		<!-- close .slider-text-floating-container -->\n	<!-- close .slider-elements-display-table -->\n<!-- close .secondline-elements-slider-background -->\n				</li>\n								<li>\n						<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/10/podcast-182-more-covid-changes-words-that-mean-adventure/\"><h2>Podcast #182 — More COVID Changes; Words That Mean Adventure</h2></a>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/10/podcast-182-more-covid-changes-words-that-mean-adventure/\">December 10, 2021</a>\n									Episode 182								\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n																	<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n								28:34								Comments Off on Podcast #182 — More COVID Changes; Words That Mean Adventure\n									<p>\n										Back in front of the microphone after a two-week trip to the UK, getting back home just before the new Omicron travel restrictions hit. We talk about getting to London, surfing the waves of changing travel requirements, a new way to renew Global Entry, moan a bit more about the inexorable advance of the cashless...																			</p>									\n							<audio id=\"audio-4020-2\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/4020/podcast-182-more-covid-changes-words-that-mean-adventure.mp3?_=2\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/4020/podcast-182-more-covid-changes-words-that-mean-adventure.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/4020/podcast-182-more-covid-changes-words-that-mean-adventure.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/4020/podcast-182-more-covid-changes-words-that-mean-adventure.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #182 — More COVID Changes; Words That Mean Adventure \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/4020/podcast-182-more-covid-changes-words-that-mean-adventure.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #182 — More COVID Changes; Words That Mean Adventure \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a> | Duration: 28:34 | Recorded on December 10, 2021</p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>						\n			<!-- close .slider-content-max-width -->\n		<!-- close .slider-text-floating-container -->\n	<!-- close .slider-elements-display-table -->\n<!-- close .secondline-elements-slider-background -->\n				</li>\n							</ul>\n		<!-- #-elements-secondline-flexslider-56656ff -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-slider-main -->\n<a onMouseOver=\"this.style.color=`#2d2d2d`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#ffffff`\" onMouseOut=\"this.style.color=`#ffffff`; this.style.backgroundColor=`#c01f2c`\" style=\"color:#ffffff; background-color:#c01f2c\" href=\"\">Subscribe</a>\n<!-- Modal HTML embedded directly into document. -->\n	<ul><li><a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Apple-Podcasts.svg\" alt=\"Apple Podcasts\" />Apple Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Google-Podcasts.png\" alt=\"Google Podcasts\" />Google Podcasts</a></li><li><a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Spotify.svg\" alt=\"Spotify\" />Spotify</a></li><li><a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/SoundCloud.svg\" alt=\"SoundCloud\" />SoundCloud</a></li><li><a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Stitcher.svg\" alt=\"Stitcher\" />Stitcher</a></li><li><a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/Amazon-Music.svg\" alt=\"Amazon Music\" />Amazon Music</a></li><li><a href=\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/TravelcommonsPodcast\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/assets/img/icons/RSS.svg\" alt=\"RSS\" />RSS</a></li></ul>                                       \n			<!-- close .secondline-addons-subscribe-button-container -->\n			<h2>Latest Posts</h2>		\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/01/16/podcast-183-covid-test-anxiety-michelin-food-adventures/\">\n					<img width=\"800\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/IMG_3929-800x500.jpeg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/IMG_3929-scaled.jpeg?resize=800%2C500 800w, https://i0.wp.com/travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/IMG_3929-scaled.jpeg?resize=400%2C250 400w, https://i0.wp.com/travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/IMG_3929-scaled.jpeg?zoom=2&amp;resize=800%2C500 1600w, https://i0.wp.com/travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/IMG_3929-scaled.jpeg?zoom=3&amp;resize=800%2C500 2400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/01/16/podcast-183-covid-test-anxiety-michelin-food-adventures/\">\nPodcast #183 — COVID Test Anxiety; Michelin Food Adventures</a></h2>\n					January 16, 2022\n						Episode 183										\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					25:17\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/01/16/podcast-183-covid-test-anxiety-michelin-food-adventures/#respond\">0 Comments</a>\n						<p>No travel since the last episode, but lots of travel planning. Are we making our way back to pre-COVID travel planning patterns? Omicron has lots of people worried about...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/01/16/podcast-183-covid-test-anxiety-michelin-food-adventures/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-4063-3\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/4063/podcast-183-covid-test-anxiety-michelin-food-adventures.mp3?_=3\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/4063/podcast-183-covid-test-anxiety-michelin-food-adventures.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/4063/podcast-183-covid-test-anxiety-michelin-food-adventures.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/4063/podcast-183-covid-test-anxiety-michelin-food-adventures.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #183 — COVID Test Anxiety; Michelin Food Adventures \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/4063/podcast-183-covid-test-anxiety-michelin-food-adventures.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #183 — COVID Test Anxiety; Michelin Food Adventures \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a> | Duration: 25:17 | Recorded on January 16, 2022</p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/31/my-best-restaurants-and-bars-of-2021/\">\n					<img width=\"631\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7836-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7836-scaled.jpg?w=2560 2560w, https://i0.wp.com/travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7836-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C238 300w, https://i0.wp.com/travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7836-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C811 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7836-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C608 768w, https://i0.wp.com/travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7836-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1217 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7836-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C1622 2048w, https://i0.wp.com/travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7836-scaled.jpg?w=2400 2400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 631px) 100vw, 631px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/31/my-best-restaurants-and-bars-of-2021/\">\nMy Best Restaurants and Bars of 2021</a></h2>\n					December 31, 2021\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/beer/\" rel=\"category tag\">Beer</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/food-2/\" rel=\"category tag\">Food</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/31/my-best-restaurants-and-bars-of-2021/#respond\">0 Comments</a>\n						<p>It&#8217;ll take travel guide books a while to catch up with all the restaurants and bars closures caused by the COVID lockdowns. To help fill that gap, here are...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/31/my-best-restaurants-and-bars-of-2021/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/30/easy-way-to-do-1-day-testing-for-returning-to-us/\">\n					<img width=\"800\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/116C8D86-ED66-4E5F-A516-D3E6046CA582-800x500.jpg\" alt=\"BinaxNOW COVID testing session\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/116C8D86-ED66-4E5F-A516-D3E6046CA582.jpg?resize=800%2C500 800w, https://i0.wp.com/travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/116C8D86-ED66-4E5F-A516-D3E6046CA582.jpg?resize=400%2C250 400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/30/easy-way-to-do-1-day-testing-for-returning-to-us/\">\nEasy Way to Do 1-Day Testing For Returning to US</a></h2>\n					December 30, 2021\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-journal/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Journal</a>\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/30/easy-way-to-do-1-day-testing-for-returning-to-us/#respond\">0 Comments</a>\n						<p>How to meet the US 1-day COVID testing window by packing Abbott BinaxNOW kits so you can self-test in your hotel the day before your flight home</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/30/easy-way-to-do-1-day-testing-for-returning-to-us/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/10/podcast-182-more-covid-changes-words-that-mean-adventure/\">\n					<img width=\"800\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/JPEG-image-800x500.jpeg\" alt=\"Two negative COVID rapid antigen tests\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/JPEG-image.jpeg?resize=800%2C500 800w, https://i0.wp.com/travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/JPEG-image.jpeg?resize=400%2C250 400w, https://i0.wp.com/travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/JPEG-image.jpeg?zoom=2&amp;resize=800%2C500 1600w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/10/podcast-182-more-covid-changes-words-that-mean-adventure/\">\nPodcast #182 — More COVID Changes; Words That Mean Adventure</a></h2>\n					December 10, 2021\n						Episode 182										\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>\n					28:34\n					Comments Off on Podcast #182 — More COVID Changes; Words That Mean Adventure\n						<p>Back in front of the microphone after a two-week trip to the UK, getting back home just before the new Omicron travel restrictions hit. We talk about getting to...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/10/podcast-182-more-covid-changes-words-that-mean-adventure/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-4020-4\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/4020/podcast-182-more-covid-changes-words-that-mean-adventure.mp3?_=4\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/4020/podcast-182-more-covid-changes-words-that-mean-adventure.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/4020/podcast-182-more-covid-changes-words-that-mean-adventure.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/4020/podcast-182-more-covid-changes-words-that-mean-adventure.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #182 — More COVID Changes; Words That Mean Adventure \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/4020/podcast-182-more-covid-changes-words-that-mean-adventure.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #182 — More COVID Changes; Words That Mean Adventure \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a> | Duration: 28:34 | Recorded on December 10, 2021</p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/11/13/podcast-181-travel-potpourri-2021-travelers-gift-guide/\">\n					<img width=\"800\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/IMG_3657-800x500.jpg\" alt=\"Jumble of US Road Signs\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/IMG_3657-scaled.jpg?resize=800%2C500 800w, https://i0.wp.com/travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/IMG_3657-scaled.jpg?resize=400%2C250 400w, https://i0.wp.com/travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/IMG_3657-scaled.jpg?zoom=2&amp;resize=800%2C500 1600w, https://i0.wp.com/travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/IMG_3657-scaled.jpg?zoom=3&amp;resize=800%2C500 2400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/11/13/podcast-181-travel-potpourri-2021-travelers-gift-guide/\">\nPodcast #181 — Travel Potpourri; 2021 Traveler’s Gift Guide</a></h2>\n					November 13, 2021\n						Episode 181										\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/podcasts/\" rel=\"category tag\">Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-tech/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Tech</a>\n					24:40\n					Comments Off on Podcast #181 — Travel Potpourri; 2021 Traveler’s Gift Guide\n						<p>No travel since the last episode, so just talking through a random potpourri of travel stuff. There&#8217;s more travel planning; this time for a couple of weeks split between...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/11/13/podcast-181-travel-potpourri-2021-travelers-gift-guide/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n					<audio id=\"audio-4001-5\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio/mpeg\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/4001/podcast-181-travel-potpourri-2021-travelers-gift-guide.mp3?_=5\" /><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/4001/podcast-181-travel-potpourri-2021-travelers-gift-guide.mp3\">https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-player/4001/podcast-181-travel-potpourri-2021-travelers-gift-guide.mp3</a></audio><aside><p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/4001/podcast-181-travel-potpourri-2021-travelers-gift-guide.mp3?ref=download\" title=\"Podcast #181 — Travel Potpourri; 2021 Traveler’s Gift Guide \">Download file</a> | <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-download/4001/podcast-181-travel-potpourri-2021-travelers-gift-guide.mp3?ref=new_window\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Podcast #181 — Travel Potpourri; 2021 Traveler’s Gift Guide \" rel=\"noopener\">Play in new window</a> | Duration: 24:40 | Recorded on November 13, 2021</p><p>Subscribe: <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Apple Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stitcher\" rel=\"noopener\">Stitcher</a> | <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Google Podcasts\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spotify\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify</a></p></aside>				\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-to-survive-post-pandemic-travel/\">\n					<img width=\"800\" height=\"500\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/E30FECE9-6481-4CD6-835A-6CDF0206F770-800x500.jpeg\" alt=\"Christmas tree on baggage carousel\" srcset=\"https://i0.wp.com/travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/E30FECE9-6481-4CD6-835A-6CDF0206F770.jpeg?resize=800%2C500 800w, https://i0.wp.com/travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/E30FECE9-6481-4CD6-835A-6CDF0206F770.jpeg?resize=400%2C250 400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\" />				</a>\n			<!-- close .secondline-themes-feaured-image -->\n		<!-- close gallery -->\n			<h2>\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-to-survive-post-pandemic-travel/\">\n10 Best Travel Gift Ideas To Survive Post-Pandemic Travel</a></h2>\n					November 4, 2021\n					<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/author/trave248_wp/\">mark</a>\n											<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-journal/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Journal</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/travel-tech/\" rel=\"category tag\">Travel Tech</a>\n					Comments Off on 10 Best Travel Gift Ideas To Survive Post-Pandemic Travel\n						<p>If last year&#8217;s gift guide was all about helping folks travel while dodging last-minute lockdowns, this year&#8217;s guide is stacked with the best travel gift ideas to help the...</p>\n								<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-to-survive-post-pandemic-travel/\"> Click Here for More</a>\n		<!-- close .secondline-blog-content -->\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-default-blog-index -->\n<!-- #post-## -->\n				<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php?paged=2\" >More Posts</a>\n	<!-- close .secondline-themes-post-list-main -->','Home','','inherit','closed','closed','','3141-revision-v1','','','2022-01-31 17:52:22','2022-01-31 22:52:22','',3141,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4089',0,'revision','',0),
(4091,1,'2022-02-04 13:22:09','2022-02-04 18:22:09','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It\'ll take travel guide books a while to catch up with <a href=\"https://www.nrn.com/fast-casual/datassential-more-10-us-restaurants-have-closed-permanently\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">all</a> <a href=\"https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-07/over-110-000-restaurants-have-closed-with-sector-in-free-fall\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the</a> restaurants and bars closures caused by the COVID lockdowns. To help fill that gap, here are the best places I\'ve ate and drank at during my 2021 travels. I\'ll update this after each trip, so keep it bookmarked.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Chicago</strong><ul><li><a href=\"http://www.noodlebird.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"NoodleBird at Fat Rice\">NoodleBird at Fat Rice</a>, 2957 W Diversey Ave (at N Sacramento), Logan Square -- The lower price-point, post-pandemic reincarnation of Fat Rice, a perennial recommendation of mine. Like Fat Rice, NoodleBird\'s starting point is the Chinese-Portuguese fusion cuisine of Macau and then extends to other Asian regions</li><li><a href=\"http://www.galitrestaurant.com/menu-1\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Galit\">Galit</a>, 2429 N Lincoln Ave (just north of Fullerton), Lincoln Park -- Great Israeli/Middle Eastern restaurant with a nice 4-course menu that let\'s your table try a lot of dishes</li><li><a href=\"http://highfiveramen.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"High Five Ramen\">High Five Ramen</a>, 112 N Green St, West Loop -- Small, hip basement ramen joint. Expect a wait, but have a beer and a Texas BBQ appetizer upstairs at <a href=\"http://greenstreetmeats.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Green Street Smoked Meats\">Green Street Smoked Meats</a> while you wait</li><li><a href=\"https://www.minghincuisine.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"MingHin Cuisine\">MingHin Cuisine</a>, 2168 S Archer Ave, Chinatown -- It\'s our favorite dim sum place. And they take reservations!</li><li><a href=\"http://www.birrieriazaragoza.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Birrieria Zaragoza\">Birrieria Zaragoza</a>, 4852 S Pulaski Rd, Archer Heights (near Midway Airport) -- Small, family-owned place with a small menu focused on <em>birria</em> (stewed goat) from Jalisco. Warm service and phenomenal food.&nbsp;</li><li><a href=\"https://bitterpops.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Bitter Pops\">Bitter Pops</a>, 3357 N Lincoln Ave (at Roscoe), Roscoe Village -- a renovated slashie (bar + packaged goods) that has a great selection of Chicago craft beer</li><li><a href=\"http://www.revbrew.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Revolution Brewing - Brewery &amp; Taproom\">Revolution Brewing - Brewery &amp; Taproom</a>, 3340 N Kedzie Ave, Avondale -- Great beers; wide range of styles; bring your own food</li><li><a href=\"http://maplewoodbrew.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Maplewood Brewery\">Maplewood Brewery &amp; Distillery</a>, 2717 N Maplewood Ave (South of Diversey), east of Logan Square -- Small, neighborhood bar tucked up against the Kennedy Expressway</li><li>For more taproom ideas, check out this <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/07/15/video-chicago-mdw-layover-taproom-tour/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"pre-pandemic TravelCommons taproom tour.\">pre-pandemic TravelCommons taproom tour.</a> Three of the four taprooms featured are still open -- Marz, Whiner, and Lo-Rez. Only Lagunitas Brewing is still closed</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3046,\"width\":225,\"height\":179,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium is-resized\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7836-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7836-300x238.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3046\" width=\"225\" height=\"179\"/></a><figcaption><em>Sonoran Hot Dog</em></figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tuscon</a></strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.yelp.com/biz/ruiz-hot-dogs-tucson\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Ruiz Hot Dogs</a> food truck 1140 S 6th Ave at W 22nd St -- It\'s all about the&nbsp;<a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonoran_hot_dog\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Sonoran hot dog</a></li><li><a href=\"https://www.tacorustico.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">El Taco Rustico</a>, 2281 N Oracle Rd -- Quesabirras and cabrito (goat) tacos.</li></ul><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.tacosapson.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tacos Apson</a>, 3501 S 12th Ave -- Mesquite-grilled beef rib tacos and a hass burro</li><li><a href=\"https://1912brewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">1912 Brewing Company</a>, 2045 N Forbes Blvd, Ste 105 -- 20 taps with a wide variety of styles</li><li><a href=\"https://www.pueblovidabrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pueblo Vida Brewing Company</a>, 115 E Broadway Blvd -- Best beers of the trip!</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Phoenix</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.pizzeriabianco.com/pizzeria-bianco-heritage-square\">Pizzeria Bianco</a>, 623 E Adams St -- Thin crust pizza a short drive from the airport</li><li><a href=\"https://www.pizzeriabianco.com/pane-bianco\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pane Bianco</a>, 4404 N Central Ave -- Great sandwich place by the same group further north</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3605,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/IMG_2942.jpeg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/IMG_2942-225x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3605\"/></a><figcaption><em>Eppiq Brewing</em></figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>San Diego</strong><ul><li><a href=\"http://www.mikestacoclub.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Mike\'s Taco Club</a>, 5060 Newport Ave Ocean Beach -- Big fish tacos two blocks off the ocean beneath a tattoo parlor</li><li><a href=\"https://iloveazucar.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Azúcar</a>&nbsp;Patisserie, 4820 Newport Ave Ocean Beach -- Cuban-inspired pastries </li><li><a href=\"http://www.eppigbrewing.com/waterfront-biergarten\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Eppig Brewing Waterfront Biergarten</a>, 2817 Dickens St -- Good beers sitting by the marina</li><li><a href=\"https://www.purebrewing.org/location/balboa-park/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pure Project Brewing Balboa Park Biergarten</a>, 2865 Fifth Ave -- Re-hydrate after walking through Balboa Park</li><li><a href=\"http://www.moderntimesbeer.com/tasting-room/point-loma\">Modern Times Lomaland Fermentorium</a>, 3725 Greenwood St -- 32 taps of great beer 10 minutes from the airport</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Nashville</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.biscuitlove.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Biscuit Love Gulch</a>, 316 11th Ave S -- Fun toppings on great buttermilk biscuits for breakfast</li><li><a href=\"https://barsovereign.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bar Sovereign</a>, 514 Rep. John Lewis Way S -- Fun speakeasy-ish bar south of the Broadway strip</li><li><a href=\"https://blackdynastyramen.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Black Dynasty Secret Ramen House</a>, Pop-up that is moving from the back of Bar Sovereign to Bearded Iris\' new taproom</li><li><a href=\"https://hattieb.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Hattie B\'s Hot Chicken - Melrose</a>, 2222 8th Ave S -- Good hot chicken without a wait near Belmont University</li><li><a href=\"https://beardedirisbrewing.com/location/germantown/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bearded Iris Brewing</a>, 101 Van Buren St -- Original taproom with pool tables and a big patio</li><li><a href=\"https://www.variousartistsbrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Various Artists Brewing</a>, 1011 Elm Hill Pike -- Wide variety of beer styles; big patio; guest chefs working a big grill</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>New York City</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.thehummuskitchen.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Hummus Kitchen</a>, 444 3rd Ave (at 31st St), Murray Hill --  Well-executed Middle-Eastern food</li><li><a href=\"http://www.hernameishan.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Her Name is Han</a>, 17 E 31st St (at Madison Ave), Koreatown -- Home-style Korean food</li><li><a href=\"https://www.craftandcarry.beer/murray-hill\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Craft + Carry - Murray Hill</a>, 440 3rd St (at 30th St) -- Excellent selection of NY craft beers on draft and in cans to-go</li><li><a href=\"https://www.tedscornertavern.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Ted\'s Corner Tavern</a>, 523 3rd Ave (at 35th St), Murray Hill -- Comfortable neighborhood bar with a great beer selection</li><li><a href=\"http://theponybar.com/\" title=\"The Pony Bar\">The Pony Bar</a>,  1444 1st Ave (at E 75th St), Upper East Side -- Casual bar with a great beer selection. Been going there for 10 years</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3621,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/0C76568F-F5B5-4831-B8F5-CA16FCF8C829.jpeg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/0C76568F-F5B5-4831-B8F5-CA16FCF8C829-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3621\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Portland, Maine</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://bobsclamhut.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bob\'s Clam Hut</a>, 315 Route 1, Kittery -- Best fried clams I\'ve ever had</li><li><a href=\"https://portland.islandcreekoysters.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">The Shop by Island Creek Oysters</a>, 123 Washington Ave, Portland -- Excellent (and inexpensive) selection of Maine oysters</li><li><a href=\"https://oxbowbeer.com/location/portland/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Oxbow Blending &amp; Bottling</a>, 49 Washington Ave, Portland -- Great selection of farmhouse ales with an outpost of <a href=\"http://www.duckfatfriteshack.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Duckfat</a> serving up fries on the patio</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>London</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.behindrestaurant.co.uk/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Behind Restaurant\">Behind Restaurant</a>, 20 Sidworth St E8 3SD, Hackney -- Focused on seafood and modern British flavors. The whole restaurant is a kitchen table experience, watching chefs prepare the dishes and then serve them to you. One of the best Michelin 1-star restaurants I\'ve visited.</li><li><a href=\"http://www.thegingerpig.co.uk/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"The Ginger Pig\">The Ginger Pig</a>, Corner of Stoney St and Park St, Borough Market -- Bought the best sausage rolls I\'ve ever had from their walk-up display. Want to go back and try their meat pies.</li><li>Al Masar, 214, 216 Borough High St SE1 1JX -- Strategically located near the Borough tube stop. Solid Lebanese wraps; exactly what I needed after a long taproom crawl down the Bermondsey Beer Mile.</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','My Best Restaurants, Bars and Taprooms of 2021','','inherit','closed','closed','','3596-revision-v1','','','2022-02-04 13:22:09','2022-02-04 18:22:09','',3596,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4091',0,'revision','',0),
(4094,1,'2022-02-04 18:58:20','2022-02-04 23:58:20','','camphoto_33463914','','inherit','open','closed','','camphoto_33463914-2','','','2022-02-04 18:58:20','2022-02-04 23:58:20','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/camphoto_33463914-1.jpeg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(4095,1,'2022-02-04 19:05:42','2022-02-05 00:05:42','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It\'ll take travel guide books a while to catch up with <a href=\"https://www.nrn.com/fast-casual/datassential-more-10-us-restaurants-have-closed-permanently\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">all</a> <a href=\"https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-07/over-110-000-restaurants-have-closed-with-sector-in-free-fall\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the</a> restaurants and bars closures caused by the COVID lockdowns. To help fill that gap, here are the best places I\'ve ate and drank at during my 2021 travels. I\'ll update this after each trip, so keep it bookmarked.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Chicago</strong><ul><li><a href=\"http://www.noodlebird.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"NoodleBird at Fat Rice\">NoodleBird at Fat Rice</a>, 2957 W Diversey Ave (at N Sacramento), Logan Square -- The lower price-point, post-pandemic reincarnation of Fat Rice, a perennial recommendation of mine. Like Fat Rice, NoodleBird\'s starting point is the Chinese-Portuguese fusion cuisine of Macau and then extends to other Asian regions</li><li><a href=\"http://www.galitrestaurant.com/menu-1\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Galit\">Galit</a>, 2429 N Lincoln Ave (just north of Fullerton), Lincoln Park -- Great Israeli/Middle Eastern restaurant with a nice 4-course menu that let\'s your table try a lot of dishes</li><li><a href=\"http://highfiveramen.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"High Five Ramen\">High Five Ramen</a>, 112 N Green St, West Loop -- Small, hip basement ramen joint. Expect a wait, but have a beer and a Texas BBQ appetizer upstairs at <a href=\"http://greenstreetmeats.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Green Street Smoked Meats\">Green Street Smoked Meats</a> while you wait</li><li><a href=\"https://www.minghincuisine.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"MingHin Cuisine\">MingHin Cuisine</a>, 2168 S Archer Ave, Chinatown -- It\'s our favorite dim sum place. And they take reservations!</li><li><a href=\"http://www.birrieriazaragoza.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Birrieria Zaragoza\">Birrieria Zaragoza</a>, 4852 S Pulaski Rd, Archer Heights (near Midway Airport) -- Small, family-owned place with a small menu focused on <em>birria</em> (stewed goat) from Jalisco. Warm service and phenomenal food.&nbsp;</li><li><a href=\"https://bitterpops.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Bitter Pops\">Bitter Pops</a>, 3357 N Lincoln Ave (at Roscoe), Roscoe Village -- a renovated slashie (bar + packaged goods) that has a great selection of Chicago craft beer</li><li><a href=\"http://www.revbrew.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Revolution Brewing - Brewery &amp; Taproom\">Revolution Brewing - Brewery &amp; Taproom</a>, 3340 N Kedzie Ave, Avondale -- Great beers; wide range of styles; bring your own food</li><li><a href=\"http://maplewoodbrew.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Maplewood Brewery\">Maplewood Brewery &amp; Distillery</a>, 2717 N Maplewood Ave (South of Diversey), east of Logan Square -- Small, neighborhood bar tucked up against the Kennedy Expressway</li><li>For more taproom ideas, check out this <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/07/15/video-chicago-mdw-layover-taproom-tour/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"pre-pandemic TravelCommons taproom tour.\">pre-pandemic TravelCommons taproom tour.</a> Three of the four taprooms featured are still open -- Marz, Whiner, and Lo-Rez. Only Lagunitas Brewing is still closed</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3046,\"width\":225,\"height\":179,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium is-resized\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7836-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7836-300x238.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3046\" width=\"225\" height=\"179\"/></a><figcaption><em>Sonoran Hot Dog</em></figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tuscon</a></strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.yelp.com/biz/ruiz-hot-dogs-tucson\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Ruiz Hot Dogs</a> food truck 1140 S 6th Ave at W 22nd St -- It\'s all about the&nbsp;<a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonoran_hot_dog\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Sonoran hot dog</a></li><li><a href=\"https://www.tacorustico.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">El Taco Rustico</a>, 2281 N Oracle Rd -- Quesabirras and cabrito (goat) tacos.</li></ul><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.tacosapson.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tacos Apson</a>, 3501 S 12th Ave -- Mesquite-grilled beef rib tacos and a hass burro</li><li><a href=\"https://1912brewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">1912 Brewing Company</a>, 2045 N Forbes Blvd, Ste 105 -- 20 taps with a wide variety of styles</li><li><a href=\"https://www.pueblovidabrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pueblo Vida Brewing Company</a>, 115 E Broadway Blvd -- Best beers of the trip!</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Phoenix</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.pizzeriabianco.com/pizzeria-bianco-heritage-square\">Pizzeria Bianco</a>, 623 E Adams St -- Thin crust pizza a short drive from the airport</li><li><a href=\"https://www.pizzeriabianco.com/pane-bianco\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pane Bianco</a>, 4404 N Central Ave -- Great sandwich place by the same group further north</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3605,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/IMG_2942.jpeg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/IMG_2942-225x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3605\"/></a><figcaption><em>Eppiq Brewing</em></figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>San Diego</strong><ul><li><a href=\"http://www.mikestacoclub.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Mike\'s Taco Club</a>, 5060 Newport Ave Ocean Beach -- Big fish tacos two blocks off the ocean beneath a tattoo parlor</li><li><a href=\"https://iloveazucar.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Azúcar</a>&nbsp;Patisserie, 4820 Newport Ave Ocean Beach -- Cuban-inspired pastries </li><li><a href=\"http://www.eppigbrewing.com/waterfront-biergarten\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Eppig Brewing Waterfront Biergarten</a>, 2817 Dickens St -- Good beers sitting by the marina</li><li><a href=\"https://www.purebrewing.org/location/balboa-park/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pure Project Brewing Balboa Park Biergarten</a>, 2865 Fifth Ave -- Re-hydrate after walking through Balboa Park</li><li><a href=\"http://www.moderntimesbeer.com/tasting-room/point-loma\">Modern Times Lomaland Fermentorium</a>, 3725 Greenwood St -- 32 taps of great beer 10 minutes from the airport</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Nashville</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.biscuitlove.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Biscuit Love Gulch</a>, 316 11th Ave S -- Fun toppings on great buttermilk biscuits for breakfast</li><li><a href=\"https://barsovereign.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bar Sovereign</a>, 514 Rep. John Lewis Way S -- Fun speakeasy-ish bar south of the Broadway strip</li><li><a href=\"https://blackdynastyramen.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Black Dynasty Secret Ramen House</a>, Pop-up that is moving from the back of Bar Sovereign to Bearded Iris\' new taproom</li><li><a href=\"https://hattieb.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Hattie B\'s Hot Chicken - Melrose</a>, 2222 8th Ave S -- Good hot chicken without a wait near Belmont University</li><li><a href=\"https://beardedirisbrewing.com/location/germantown/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bearded Iris Brewing</a>, 101 Van Buren St -- Original taproom with pool tables and a big patio</li><li><a href=\"https://www.variousartistsbrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Various Artists Brewing</a>, 1011 Elm Hill Pike -- Wide variety of beer styles; big patio; guest chefs working a big grill</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>New York City</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.thehummuskitchen.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Hummus Kitchen</a>, 444 3rd Ave (at 31st St), Murray Hill --  Well-executed Middle-Eastern food</li><li><a href=\"http://www.hernameishan.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Her Name is Han</a>, 17 E 31st St (at Madison Ave), Koreatown -- Home-style Korean food</li><li><a href=\"https://www.craftandcarry.beer/murray-hill\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Craft + Carry - Murray Hill</a>, 440 3rd St (at 30th St) -- Excellent selection of NY craft beers on draft and in cans to-go</li><li><a href=\"https://www.tedscornertavern.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Ted\'s Corner Tavern</a>, 523 3rd Ave (at 35th St), Murray Hill -- Comfortable neighborhood bar with a great beer selection</li><li><a href=\"http://theponybar.com/\" title=\"The Pony Bar\">The Pony Bar</a>,  1444 1st Ave (at E 75th St), Upper East Side -- Casual bar with a great beer selection. Been going there for 10 years</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3621,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/0C76568F-F5B5-4831-B8F5-CA16FCF8C829.jpeg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/0C76568F-F5B5-4831-B8F5-CA16FCF8C829-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3621\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Portland, Maine</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://bobsclamhut.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bob\'s Clam Hut</a>, 315 Route 1, Kittery -- Best fried clams I\'ve ever had</li><li><a href=\"https://portland.islandcreekoysters.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">The Shop by Island Creek Oysters</a>, 123 Washington Ave, Portland -- Excellent (and inexpensive) selection of Maine oysters</li><li><a href=\"https://oxbowbeer.com/location/portland/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Oxbow Blending &amp; Bottling</a>, 49 Washington Ave, Portland -- Great selection of farmhouse ales with an outpost of <a href=\"http://www.duckfatfriteshack.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Duckfat</a> serving up fries on the patio</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>London</strong><ul><li><a href=\"http://www.oldfountain.co.uk/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Old Fountain\">Old Fountain</a>, 3 Baldwin St (at City Rd) EC1V 9NU, Shoreditch -- Tucked into a little side street, it\'s a comfortable pub with a great UK craft beer selection. </li><li><a href=\"https://www.behindrestaurant.co.uk/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Behind Restaurant\">Behind Restaurant</a>, 20 Sidworth St E8 3SD, Hackney -- Focused on seafood and modern British flavors. The whole restaurant is a kitchen table experience, watching chefs prepare the dishes and then serve them to you. One of the best Michelin 1-star restaurants I\'ve visited.</li><li><a href=\"http://www.thegingerpig.co.uk/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"The Ginger Pig\">The Ginger Pig</a>, Corner of Stoney St and Park St, Borough Market -- Bought the best sausage rolls I\'ve ever had from their walk-up display. Want to go back and try their meat pies.</li><li><a href=\"https://ottolenghi.co.uk/restaurants/nopi\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"NOPI\">NOPI</a>, 21-22 Warwick St W1B 5NE, Soho -- Fun Mediterranean/Middle Eastern fusion restaurant from star chef Yotam Ottolenghi. Sat at the bar and had a great late lunch.</li><li>Al Masar, 214, 216 Borough High St SE1 1JX -- Strategically located near the Borough tube stop. Solid Lebanese wraps; exactly what I needed after a long taproom crawl down the Bermondsey Beer Mile.</li><li><a href=\"https://www.londonxlondon.com/bermondsey-beer-mile/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Bermondsey Beer Mile\">Bermondsey Beer Mile</a>, a mile of craft brewery taprooms that have set up shop in adjacent railway arches under a huge brick bridge carrying commuter trains in and out of London Bridge train station. Rob Cheshire, long-time TravelCommons listener and <a href=\"https://thisweekincraft.beer/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"UK craft beer podcaster\">UK craft beer podcaster</a> laid out a taproom crawl that started at <a href=\"http://www.thekernelbrewery.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"The Kernel\">The Kernel</a>, the first brewery in on the Mile, and continued through <a href=\"http://www.thebarrelproject.co.uk/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"The Barrel Proje\">The Barrel Project</a>, <a href=\"https://cloudwaterbrew.co/location-enid-st/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Cloudwater\">Cloudwater</a>, and <a href=\"http://bbno.co/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Brew By Numbers\">Brew By Numbers</a>.</li><li><a href=\"http://www.oldfountain.co.uk/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Old Fountain\">Old Fountain</a>, 3 Baldwin St (at City Rd) EC1V 9NU, Shoreditch -- Tucked into a little side street, it\'s a comfortable pub with a great UK craft beer selection. </li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','My Best Restaurants, Bars and Taprooms of 2021','','inherit','closed','closed','','3596-revision-v1','','','2022-02-04 19:05:42','2022-02-05 00:05:42','',3596,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4095',0,'revision','',0),
(4096,1,'2022-02-04 19:06:36','2022-02-05 00:06:36','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It\'ll take travel guide books a while to catch up with <a href=\"https://www.nrn.com/fast-casual/datassential-more-10-us-restaurants-have-closed-permanently\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">all</a> <a href=\"https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-07/over-110-000-restaurants-have-closed-with-sector-in-free-fall\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the</a> restaurants and bars closures caused by the COVID lockdowns. To help fill that gap, here are the best places I\'ve ate and drank at during my 2021 travels. I\'ll update this after each trip, so keep it bookmarked.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Chicago</strong><ul><li><a href=\"http://www.noodlebird.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"NoodleBird at Fat Rice\">NoodleBird at Fat Rice</a>, 2957 W Diversey Ave (at N Sacramento), Logan Square -- The lower price-point, post-pandemic reincarnation of Fat Rice, a perennial recommendation of mine. Like Fat Rice, NoodleBird\'s starting point is the Chinese-Portuguese fusion cuisine of Macau and then extends to other Asian regions</li><li><a href=\"http://www.galitrestaurant.com/menu-1\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Galit\">Galit</a>, 2429 N Lincoln Ave (just north of Fullerton), Lincoln Park -- Great Israeli/Middle Eastern restaurant with a nice 4-course menu that let\'s your table try a lot of dishes</li><li><a href=\"http://highfiveramen.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"High Five Ramen\">High Five Ramen</a>, 112 N Green St, West Loop -- Small, hip basement ramen joint. Expect a wait, but have a beer and a Texas BBQ appetizer upstairs at <a href=\"http://greenstreetmeats.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Green Street Smoked Meats\">Green Street Smoked Meats</a> while you wait</li><li><a href=\"https://www.minghincuisine.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"MingHin Cuisine\">MingHin Cuisine</a>, 2168 S Archer Ave, Chinatown -- It\'s our favorite dim sum place. And they take reservations!</li><li><a href=\"http://www.birrieriazaragoza.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Birrieria Zaragoza\">Birrieria Zaragoza</a>, 4852 S Pulaski Rd, Archer Heights (near Midway Airport) -- Small, family-owned place with a small menu focused on <em>birria</em> (stewed goat) from Jalisco. Warm service and phenomenal food.&nbsp;</li><li><a href=\"https://bitterpops.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Bitter Pops\">Bitter Pops</a>, 3357 N Lincoln Ave (at Roscoe), Roscoe Village -- a renovated slashie (bar + packaged goods) that has a great selection of Chicago craft beer</li><li><a href=\"http://www.revbrew.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Revolution Brewing - Brewery &amp; Taproom\">Revolution Brewing - Brewery &amp; Taproom</a>, 3340 N Kedzie Ave, Avondale -- Great beers; wide range of styles; bring your own food</li><li><a href=\"http://maplewoodbrew.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Maplewood Brewery\">Maplewood Brewery &amp; Distillery</a>, 2717 N Maplewood Ave (South of Diversey), east of Logan Square -- Small, neighborhood bar tucked up against the Kennedy Expressway</li><li>For more taproom ideas, check out this <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/07/15/video-chicago-mdw-layover-taproom-tour/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"pre-pandemic TravelCommons taproom tour.\">pre-pandemic TravelCommons taproom tour.</a> Three of the four taprooms featured are still open -- Marz, Whiner, and Lo-Rez. Only Lagunitas Brewing is still closed</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3046,\"width\":225,\"height\":179,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium is-resized\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7836-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_7836-300x238.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3046\" width=\"225\" height=\"179\"/></a><figcaption><em>Sonoran Hot Dog</em></figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tuscon</a></strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.yelp.com/biz/ruiz-hot-dogs-tucson\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Ruiz Hot Dogs</a> food truck 1140 S 6th Ave at W 22nd St -- It\'s all about the&nbsp;<a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonoran_hot_dog\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Sonoran hot dog</a></li><li><a href=\"https://www.tacorustico.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">El Taco Rustico</a>, 2281 N Oracle Rd -- Quesabirras and cabrito (goat) tacos.</li></ul><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.tacosapson.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tacos Apson</a>, 3501 S 12th Ave -- Mesquite-grilled beef rib tacos and a hass burro</li><li><a href=\"https://1912brewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">1912 Brewing Company</a>, 2045 N Forbes Blvd, Ste 105 -- 20 taps with a wide variety of styles</li><li><a href=\"https://www.pueblovidabrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pueblo Vida Brewing Company</a>, 115 E Broadway Blvd -- Best beers of the trip!</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Phoenix</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.pizzeriabianco.com/pizzeria-bianco-heritage-square\">Pizzeria Bianco</a>, 623 E Adams St -- Thin crust pizza a short drive from the airport</li><li><a href=\"https://www.pizzeriabianco.com/pane-bianco\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pane Bianco</a>, 4404 N Central Ave -- Great sandwich place by the same group further north</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3605,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/IMG_2942.jpeg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/IMG_2942-225x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3605\"/></a><figcaption><em>Eppiq Brewing</em></figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>San Diego</strong><ul><li><a href=\"http://www.mikestacoclub.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Mike\'s Taco Club</a>, 5060 Newport Ave Ocean Beach -- Big fish tacos two blocks off the ocean beneath a tattoo parlor</li><li><a href=\"https://iloveazucar.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Azúcar</a>&nbsp;Patisserie, 4820 Newport Ave Ocean Beach -- Cuban-inspired pastries </li><li><a href=\"http://www.eppigbrewing.com/waterfront-biergarten\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Eppig Brewing Waterfront Biergarten</a>, 2817 Dickens St -- Good beers sitting by the marina</li><li><a href=\"https://www.purebrewing.org/location/balboa-park/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pure Project Brewing Balboa Park Biergarten</a>, 2865 Fifth Ave -- Re-hydrate after walking through Balboa Park</li><li><a href=\"http://www.moderntimesbeer.com/tasting-room/point-loma\">Modern Times Lomaland Fermentorium</a>, 3725 Greenwood St -- 32 taps of great beer 10 minutes from the airport</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Nashville</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.biscuitlove.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Biscuit Love Gulch</a>, 316 11th Ave S -- Fun toppings on great buttermilk biscuits for breakfast</li><li><a href=\"https://barsovereign.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bar Sovereign</a>, 514 Rep. John Lewis Way S -- Fun speakeasy-ish bar south of the Broadway strip</li><li><a href=\"https://blackdynastyramen.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Black Dynasty Secret Ramen House</a>, Pop-up that is moving from the back of Bar Sovereign to Bearded Iris\' new taproom</li><li><a href=\"https://hattieb.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Hattie B\'s Hot Chicken - Melrose</a>, 2222 8th Ave S -- Good hot chicken without a wait near Belmont University</li><li><a href=\"https://beardedirisbrewing.com/location/germantown/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bearded Iris Brewing</a>, 101 Van Buren St -- Original taproom with pool tables and a big patio</li><li><a href=\"https://www.variousartistsbrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Various Artists Brewing</a>, 1011 Elm Hill Pike -- Wide variety of beer styles; big patio; guest chefs working a big grill</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>New York City</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.thehummuskitchen.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Hummus Kitchen</a>, 444 3rd Ave (at 31st St), Murray Hill --  Well-executed Middle-Eastern food</li><li><a href=\"http://www.hernameishan.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Her Name is Han</a>, 17 E 31st St (at Madison Ave), Koreatown -- Home-style Korean food</li><li><a href=\"https://www.craftandcarry.beer/murray-hill\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Craft + Carry - Murray Hill</a>, 440 3rd St (at 30th St) -- Excellent selection of NY craft beers on draft and in cans to-go</li><li><a href=\"https://www.tedscornertavern.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Ted\'s Corner Tavern</a>, 523 3rd Ave (at 35th St), Murray Hill -- Comfortable neighborhood bar with a great beer selection</li><li><a href=\"http://theponybar.com/\" title=\"The Pony Bar\">The Pony Bar</a>,  1444 1st Ave (at E 75th St), Upper East Side -- Casual bar with a great beer selection. Been going there for 10 years</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":3621,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/0C76568F-F5B5-4831-B8F5-CA16FCF8C829.jpeg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/0C76568F-F5B5-4831-B8F5-CA16FCF8C829-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3621\"/></a></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>Portland, Maine</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://bobsclamhut.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bob\'s Clam Hut</a>, 315 Route 1, Kittery -- Best fried clams I\'ve ever had</li><li><a href=\"https://portland.islandcreekoysters.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">The Shop by Island Creek Oysters</a>, 123 Washington Ave, Portland -- Excellent (and inexpensive) selection of Maine oysters</li><li><a href=\"https://oxbowbeer.com/location/portland/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Oxbow Blending &amp; Bottling</a>, 49 Washington Ave, Portland -- Great selection of farmhouse ales with an outpost of <a href=\"http://www.duckfatfriteshack.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Duckfat</a> serving up fries on the patio</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li><strong>London</strong><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.behindrestaurant.co.uk/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Behind Restaurant\">Behind Restaurant</a>, 20 Sidworth St E8 3SD, Hackney -- Focused on seafood and modern British flavors. The whole restaurant is a kitchen table experience, watching chefs prepare the dishes and then serve them to you. One of the best Michelin 1-star restaurants I\'ve visited.</li><li><a href=\"http://www.thegingerpig.co.uk/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"The Ginger Pig\">The Ginger Pig</a>, Corner of Stoney St and Park St, Borough Market -- Bought the best sausage rolls I\'ve ever had from their walk-up display. Want to go back and try their meat pies.</li><li><a href=\"https://ottolenghi.co.uk/restaurants/nopi\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"NOPI\">NOPI</a>, 21-22 Warwick St W1B 5NE, Soho -- Fun Mediterranean/Middle Eastern fusion restaurant from star chef Yotam Ottolenghi. Sat at the bar and had a great late lunch.</li><li>Al Masar, 214, 216 Borough High St SE1 1JX -- Strategically located near the Borough tube stop. Solid Lebanese wraps; exactly what I needed after a long taproom crawl down the Bermondsey Beer Mile.</li><li><a href=\"https://www.londonxlondon.com/bermondsey-beer-mile/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Bermondsey Beer Mile\">Bermondsey Beer Mile</a>, a mile of craft brewery taprooms that have set up shop in adjacent railway arches under a huge brick bridge carrying commuter trains in and out of London Bridge train station. Rob Cheshire, long-time TravelCommons listener and <a href=\"https://thisweekincraft.beer/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"UK craft beer podcaster\">UK craft beer podcaster</a> laid out a taproom crawl that started at <a href=\"http://www.thekernelbrewery.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"The Kernel\">The Kernel</a>, the first brewery in on the Mile, and continued through <a href=\"http://www.thebarrelproject.co.uk/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"The Barrel Proje\">The Barrel Project</a>, <a href=\"https://cloudwaterbrew.co/location-enid-st/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Cloudwater\">Cloudwater</a>, and <a href=\"http://bbno.co/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Brew By Numbers\">Brew By Numbers</a>.</li><li><a href=\"http://www.oldfountain.co.uk/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Old Fountain\">Old Fountain</a>, 3 Baldwin St (at City Rd) EC1V 9NU, Shoreditch -- Tucked into a little side street, it\'s a comfortable pub with a great UK craft beer selection. </li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','My Best Restaurants, Bars and Taprooms of 2021','','inherit','closed','closed','','3596-revision-v1','','','2022-02-04 19:06:36','2022-02-05 00:06:36','',3596,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4096',0,'revision','',0),
(4098,1,'2022-02-23 19:06:17','2022-02-24 00:06:17','{\"version\": 2, \"isGlobalStylesUserThemeJSON\": true }','Custom Styles','','publish','closed','closed','','wp-global-styles-satchmo-secondline','','','2022-02-23 19:06:17','2022-02-24 00:06:17','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/02/23/wp-global-styles-satchmo-secondline/',0,'wp_global_styles','',0),
(4100,1,'2022-03-03 12:26:39','2022-03-03 17:26:39','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/IMG_2429-scaled.jpeg\"><img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/IMG_2429-300x300.jpeg\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> Gonna need to spend a lot more time here[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>In the travel world, what goes up -- rules, fees, prices -- often stays up. It\'s the ratchet effect and it\'s a theme running through this episode. Inflation is on everyone\'s mind, and so we dig into travel inflation, comparing today\'s prices with pre-pandemic levels.  We also talk about US passport renewals ahead of the summer vacation season, and some good Cuban food in Louisville and a questionable food trend in London. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_184.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #184: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. Sorry about getting this episode out late. I pushed it out a couple of weeks for a trip down to Louisville for a wedding; so I didn’t have to say “No travel since the last episode” again -- tough to do a podcast that’s “more about the journey than the destination” if you’re not journey-ing. And also to give my voice some time to recover from something I picked up down there. I can write a great episode, but if all I can do is croak it out and no one can stand to listen, it feels a bit like a podcast version of “If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, did it make a sound?” And, I have to be honest -- my heart just couldn’t get into trying to be snarky and witty as the Russians launched their invasion of Ukraine. But here we are, a week or so into it and, with a heavy heart, need to move forward.&nbsp;</li><li>So back to travel. I used to get a serious cold at least once a year when traveling non-stop; to the point that, every time I bought something at CVS, at least 4 ft of the usual 6 ft of coupons printed out with the receipt were for cough and cold medications. But after the March 2020 lockdowns, nothing; a nice side benefit of masks and social distancing. But now, maybe in a sign that things are creeping back to normal, I’ve got that old feeling again -- a runny nose, a cough,... So back to CVS for the usual boxes of 12-hour Sudafed and maximum strength Mucinex. And there, at the check-out counter, is a stack of Abbott Binax COVID tests. I throw one of those into the basket because there’s a bit of <a href=\"https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/coronavirus/in-depth/covid-19-cold-flu-and-allergies-differences/art-20503981\">symptom overlap</a> between omicron and a cold. But 15 minutes after violating each of my nostrils in the CVS parking lot, no second line appeared on the test strip. No omicron; I’m just back to my usual cold. The next week I had a couple of in-person meetings and, since I had one more test in the Binax box, decided to ping those nostrils again, just to be safe. Bam! So that’s what a positive test looks like. The sample pink line showed up immediately, even before the second, higher control line did. The instructions may say to wait for 15 minutes, but I knew within 2. Not that much changed -- other than canceling the in-person meeting. I just kept popping the Sudafed and the Mucinex.</li><li>We were lucky with the timing of our drive back home on I-65, threading the weather needle between two snow storms that shut down parts of the interstate north of Indiana. Even with reasonable weather, Waze and Google Maps pointed us toward the exit a couple of times to vector around accident slow downs. It’s kinda funny to see which cars and trucks are using Waze, because we’re all getting off at the same exit, and all making the same turns onto seemingly random county roads running through flat snow-covered farm land, pretty featureless save for a couple of farm houses and stands of gigantic wind mills.&nbsp; But, there were no multi-hour back-ups that would’ve forced us to break out the bourbon bottles to stay warm which, this winter, marks this down as a successful drive home.</li><li>Bridge Music —  &nbsp; I Will Writhe by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/26739 Ft: Soundprank </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>In the last episode, we talked about COVID test anxiety; not being able to start a vacation or come back home from one due to a positive test. With the omicron wave having crested, some countries -- the UK, France, Ireland, but not Italy -- are dropping inbound test requirements for travelers who are fully vaccinated, with the caveat that “fully vaccinated” for these countries includes a booster. I was pleasantly surprised by this. Usually, travel requirements ratchet up; new ones stick and old ones never expire. If you don’t have TSA PreCheck, you’ve been walking through security in your stocking feet for over 15 years now. Maybe because there’s a real cost that travelers can see -- ranging over $100/person sometimes -- as opposed to 5 minutes of inconvenience.</li><li>But as with dropping the initial travel bans, the US is the laggard. Drop in-bound test requirements? The US hasn’t even relaxed the 1-day testing window put in place at the beginning of December to try and keep omicron out of the US. We all knew within 2 weeks that didn’t work, but here we are 3 months later and there’s no movement back to the pre-omicron 72-hour testing window. It’s that ratchet again. In the last episode, I mentioned that, at the end of December, I\'d written up a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/30/easy-way-to-do-1-day-testing-for-returning-to-us/\">detailed blog post</a> on how to order and use the Abbott BinaxNOW testing kit to easily hit the US’s 1-day testing window. Allan Marko, occasional TravelCommons contributor, clicked through to the eMed site to order a 6-pack so he could take a couple tests with him on his February getaway to the Yucatan as backup, in case the resort ran out of tests -- those damn supply chain issues. As it turned out, the resort had ample tests -- at $100 a pop, which is… a number. Allan used his Abbott tests -- at $25 each -- instead. Leaves a little extra cash for a good-bye margarita or two… or three.</li><li>And speaking of margaritas, you can get one again on Southwest Airlines. They&nbsp; finally blinked, <a href=\"https://www.swamedia.com/releases/release-a0731e681107d30a52590eb3f92b92a3-southwest-airlines-restoring-on-board-beverage-options\">restarting their in-flight alcohol service</a>, giving up their linkage with the in-flight mask mandate. No surprise, really. No one sees an end in site for in-flight masking. Indeed, European airline execs from Ryanair and TAP, the Portuguese airline, have said they expect masks to be one of the last things dropped and could be around for years. It’s that ratcheting thing again. Glad I kept hold of my old drink coupons. Southwest extended the life of 2020 and 2021 coupons ‘til the end of this year.&nbsp;</li><li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/01/16/podcast-183-covid-test-anxiety-michelin-food-adventures/\">the last episode</a>, I talked about sending my passport into the void that is the US Passport Agency for renewal. My passport didn’t expire until April, but since a lot of countries won’t let you if your passport has less than 6 months left on it, and with all the State Department’s warnings about extended processing times, I figured I should renew it sooner rather than later. The Passport Agency is quoting 8-11 weeks processing time and, here’s a little twist, they’ll only accept your application via US Postal Service. Now I don’t know about you, but the Chicago branches of the Postal Service haven’t exactly been covering themselves in glory over the past couple of months. So, I sent in my application Priority Mail and paid the Passport Agency extra so they’d send it back the same way. Priority Mail did the job getting my application there in a couple of days, and then I was able to track the progress on the Passport Agency’s website. The only glitch was the email update function, where they send you an email each time your application status changes, doesn’t seem to work. But anyhow, the Passport Agency processed my renewal and put my passport in a Priority Mail envelope right at 7 weeks. So good on them coming in under their time quote. But then the Postal Service couldn’t quite get it done. From the tracking history, my passport appears to have hung out a few days in a Chicago transit facility before finally making it into my mailbox. And it’s a bit different from, say, my wife’s passport that she renewed a few years ago. The page with the picture and all the personal information is no longer a kinda sealed paper page. Now, it’s a heavier, thicker piece of plastic, and some data like the passport number and the expiration date are raised. It seems a quantum step up in non-tampering/forgery-proof technology. Now I’m keeping my eye out for my old passport which they send back to me separately because it has my still-valid India visa in it. I don’t have any plans to visit India right now, which is a good thing since the Passport Agency is sending it back via regular post, which means it should get some time, maybe, this spring.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":4110,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/camphoto_684387517-scaled.jpeg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/camphoto_684387517-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-4110\"/></a><figcaption class=\"figure-caption text-center\"><strong>Yorkshire Pudding Wrap</strong></figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>And as I promised in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/01/16/podcast-183-covid-test-anxiety-michelin-food-adventures/\">the last episode</a>, I finally finished updating my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/31/my-best-restaurants-and-bars-of-2021/\">Best Restaurants, Bars, and Taprooms of 2021</a> post, adding sections for Chicago and London. One of the things that <em>didn’t</em> make the London section was Yorkshire pudding wraps and burritos. I saw these on menus all over the place, where they’d basically take a whole Sunday roast dinner -- roast beef, vegetables, mashed potatoes, gravy -- and wrap it in a flatbread made out of the same ingredients as a Yorkshire pudding -- eggs, flour, and milk. Honestly, it was like shame-watching a car crash. I knew I shouldn’t, but I ordered one anyways, and immediately hated myself for it. So any place with this on the menu; immediate disqualification from my list.</li><li>Also, I unfortunately had to delete a great little corner dumpling place in New York’s Chinatown that’s “reconcepted” itself since last May. Which was the reason I started that running list last year -- the pandemic closings were happening faster than the guidebooks and blogs could keep up with. Indeed, I went back through the TravelCommons archives and was striking through at least half of my earlier recommendations. So anyhow, I gave the 2021 post a new date of Dec 31 so it would be easy to find; it’s showing up right now on the TravelCommons homepage and at the top of the Blog page. I’m also doing a better job of keeping a running list of my 2022 recommendations. In Louisville, we ate at a <strong><em>great</em></strong> Cuban restaurant, <a href=\"https://www.labodeguitademima.com/\">La Bodeguita De Mima</a>, next door to the AC Hotel in the NuLu district. Apparently, there’s a huge Cuban immigrant community in Louisville, which I can tell you was <strong><em>not</em></strong> the case when my parents lived there in the early ‘80’s. And La Bodeguita De Mimi is just the latest of many Cuban places to open. Highly recommended, especially the Lechon Asado, the roast pork. I’ll post the first cut of my 2022 list in April, after our trips to Brooklyn next week and Santa Fe at the beginning of April</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music -- August (Reggae Rework) by el-B (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/elB/16075 Ft: Calendargirl </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Stealth Travel Inflation</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>For those of us of (and past) a certain age, the last 6 months of inflation news is flashing us back to the ‘70’s and early ‘80’s, and there’s certainly no sense of wistful nostalgia coming from it. Maybe not abject terror, but it’s not a comfortable feeling. The <a href=\"https://www.ustravel.org/\">US Travel Association</a> unpicks the US Department of Labor’s consumer price index (CPI) report and publishes its own monthly <a href=\"https://www.ustravel.org/research/travel-price-index\">travel price index</a> (TPI). I started looking through their <a href=\"https://www.ustravel.org/sites/default/files/2022-02/tpi_jan-2022_0.pdf\">latest TPI which is for January 2022</a> and, among other things, it compares this current travel price index to January 2021 <em>and</em> to pre-pandemic January 2019, before any travel restrictions were in place. Tough to remember, but back then, everybody was traveling. And while all the current inflation headlines prepped me for the current travel price index being 14.5% over last year’s, I was surprised when I saw that current prices are 11.6% higher than January 2019. I guess I anchored a bit too much on those rock-bottom airfares and hotel rates and gas prices in the Spring and Summer of 2020 when no one was traveling. But digging through the detailed line items, it turns out I’m not entirely wrong -- the Airline Fares component of the TPI is still 15% <em>below</em> 2019’s and hotels are only up 6.5% three years on. I couldn’t figure out which line has car rental prices, but it’s no secret that those blew up -- when you could actually <em>find</em> a car. The biggest jumps over 2019 that show up are Food &amp; Beverage, up 13%, and Motor Fuel, no surprise there, up 44%.&nbsp;</li><li>But here’s where we get into the stealth components. Let’s start with hotels. There are cuts in service, getting less for the same price, what’s now being called <em>shrinkflation,</em> that I don’t think is reflected in that 6.5% inflation number. The most common of these are pandemic service cuts that have never gone away. In 2020, when we were still figuring out how COVID spread, how long the surfaces could stay infectious (remember people leaving their groceries outside for 3 days?), it made sense to stop daily room housekeeping. The first post-lockdown trip I made, I stayed in a Hampton Inn and never saw anyone. The Hilton app let me remotely check-in and gave me a digital key, no one serviced the room during my stay, and no free breakfast. And I was fine with that; it made perfect sense given how much we <em>didn’t</em> know in May 2020.&nbsp;</li><li>But now, almost 2 years and 3 vaccination shots later, the AC Hotel in Louisville has a sign taped to the desk in our room saying housekeeping was limited to every 3rd day because of COVID. No, it’s not because of COVID anymore; it’s to improve margins. Comparing this to our stays in similarly-priced hotels in Italy and the UK last fall where service was pretty much back to pre-pandemic standards (the main exception was you couldn’t serve yourself from the breakfast buffet; you pointed at something and a server put it on your plate), it’s that ratchet again; the US chains are working hard to keep those early pandemic service standards. Though with Hilton, there seems to be some play in that ratchet. Rather than a hard “we’re only servicing your room every 3 days”, it’s a softer “our housekeeping is now on request.” So, I guess I could request it every day. For me, it’s not about fresh towels; it’s about getting those little garbage cans emptied. They don’t hold too many empty 16-oz craft beer cans.</li><li>On first look, you’d think that restaurants are doing a bit of their own shrinkflation by continuing their contactless service tactics -- using QR codes for menus and having people order and pay through apps like Toast instead of waiters. Now maybe it’s me, but I don’t see it as reducing service. Instead, I see it as improving productivity through automation. But the stealth inflation that I’ve noticed is the COVID add-on fees that started showing up in post-lockdown 2020 -- 2-3% for extra cleaning or personal protective equipment -- are sticking around. I’m not arguing that they are not real expenses, but so are, say, janitorial service and property taxes but they’re not showing up as additional fees. Roll it into the price of your burger like you do with every other business cost.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>It’s kinda like they’re trying to run the same play the airlines did back in 2008 with baggage fees. American Airlines was the first of the big carriers to do it, charging $15 a bag, saying they needed it to cover the high cost of jet fuel when oil hit $145 a barrel that summer. But 3-4 months later, <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_oil_market_chronology_from_2003#2008:_oil_prices_peak_at_$145.85_then_bottom_at_$32\">when oil prices were half that</a>, the baggage fee stayed and even increased; <a href=\"https://www.aa.com/i18n/travel-info/baggage/checked-baggage-policy.jsp\">American doubled it</a>. Again, it’s that ratchet; the excuse goes away, but the fee doesn’t. Which means it’s really just a price increase; it’s just more inflation.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #184</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_184.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #184 — Figuring Out Stealth Travel Inflation','In the travel world, what goes up -- rules, fees, prices -- often stays up. It\'s the ratchet effect and it\'s a theme running through this episode. Inflation is on everyone\'s mind, and so we dig into travel inflation, comparing today\'s prices with pre-pandemic levels.  We also talk about US passport renewals ahead of the summer vacation season, and some good Cuban food in Louisville and a questionable food trend in London,. All this and more - click here to download the podcast file, go up to the Subscribe section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-184-figuring-out-stealth-travel-inflation','','https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/01/16/podcast-183-covid-test-anxiety-michelin-food-adventures/\nhttps://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/31/my-best-restaurants-and-bars-of-2021/','2022-03-28 16:51:46','2022-03-28 21:51:46','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4100',0,'post','',0),
(4101,1,'2022-03-03 11:00:12','2022-03-03 16:00:12','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/IMG_3929-scaled.jpeg\"><img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/IMG_3929-300x300.jpeg\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a>Post-dinner pic complete with gang sign[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>No travel since the last episode, but lots of travel planning. Are we making our way back to pre-COVID travel planning patterns? Omicron has lots of people worried about testing positive and getting stuck abroad. Michael Giusti of&nbsp;<a href=\"https://insurancequotes.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">InsuranceQuotes.com</a> talks about how travel insurance can help. A blogger’s <a href=\"https://everywhereist.com/2021/12/bros-restaurant-lecce-we-eat-at-the-worst-michelin-starred-restaurant-ever/\">brutal review</a> of a Michelin-starred restaurant where we ate in October gets me thinking about food as an adventure.  All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_184.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #184: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. Hope everyone had a great New Year’s. No travel since the last episode, which has turned out to be a good thing given the, what?, two weeks straight of over 1,000 cancelled flights a day. I’ve always tried to avoid traveling during the Christmas holidays; crowded planes, lots of not-very-experienced travelers, and the inevitable winter storm or two has never resulted in smooth travel experiences. Add to that airlines struggling to staff back up to passenger loads and then omicron comes ripping through their ranks…. The two folks I knew flying last week both got home a day late which, given all this, could’ve been a lot worse. Like being trapped in that 27-hour mess on I-95 in Northern Virginia. Definitely a reminder never to let yourself get below a quarter tank.</li><li>So while I haven’t been traveling, I <em>have</em> been travel <em>planning</em>, which is not unusual. January has traditionally been <em>the</em> big travel planning month; pack up the Christmas decorations, figure out where you want to go this year and then put in your time off requests. And because January is just the worst month of the year, at least in the upper Northern Hemisphere when it’s the coldest month of the year and the sun sets early; so you need something, anything to look forward to.</li><li>But COVID changed all that, of course, especially the planning timeline. We’ve talked in prior episodes how last-minute travel restrictions have made that planning timeline, what the travel industry calls the <em>booking window</em>, a lot shorter. Last year, in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"January 2021 episode\">January 2021 episode</a>, I talked about having to make a last-minute pivot away from a San Diego trip I’d booked just the month before because California was still in their post-holiday lock down and not letting out-of-state visitors make hotel reservations.&nbsp;</li><li>I thought this year I’d revert back to the old patterns and do a bit more longer-term travel planning. Looking at <a href=\"https://www.kayak.com/flight-trends\">Kayak’s flight search trends</a>, where they now compare current flight search volumes to pre-pandemic levels, so comparing 2021 to 2019, seem to be an optimistic outlier because their search volumes have cratered vs. 2 year ago. Eyeballing their trend chart, I’d say it’s down something like 50%. Though switching over and looking at Google’s Hotel Insights page, I might not be too far out of the fat part of the curve; their hotel search trends seem to be recovering. Which sorta maps into our plans. In February, we’re driving down to Louisville rather than flying, giving the airlines a couple of months to unscramble their operations, and then getting on planes -- to New York in March, Santa Fe, NM in April, maybe DC in May. But for that February drive down I-65, across the frozen tundra of central Indiana, we’re definitely packing a couple of blankets -- and snacks -- and keeping the gas tank topped off just in case. News reports of that I-95 jam up talked about a Good Samaritan family going car to car, passing out oranges they were bringing back from Florida. Coming back from Louisville, I’m guessing any Good Samaritan would be going car to car with a couple bottles of bourbon and a sleeve of plastic shot glasses -- which is not a bad thing. Would definitely warm you up for at least a little bit.</li><li>Bridge Music — &nbsp;<em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/content/Per/Per_-_DLDN_Instrumental.mp3\" target=\"_blank\">DLDN Instrumental</a></em>&nbsp;by St Paul</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Last April, the Department of Homeland Security <a href=\"https://www.dhs.gov/real-id/news/2021/04/27/dhs-announces-extension-real-id-full-enforcement-deadline\">kicked the Real ID can down the road</a> -- again -- so now we have until May 2023 before we’ll need Real ID-compliant identification to get through a TSA checkpoint. We don’t <em>have</em> to get a Real ID driver’s license; <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/travel/security-screening/identification\">a passport or a Global Entry card</a> would work also. But, last month, since I had to visit the 5th Circle of Hell also known as the Dept of Motor Vehicles, to renew my expiring driver’s license, I figured I might as well get the Real ID version. And why not? In Illinois, the Real and non-Real ID driver\'s licenses cost the same, you go through the same lines…. The only difference was it took maybe an extra 3 minutes for them to scan in my social security card and the documents I used to prove my address. Which, if I’d kept in mind the Distributive Property of Cybersecurity, “Any data entered into a system will eventually be hacked and distributed on the dark web” -- I would’ve used something a bit more innocuous than my bank statement.&nbsp; But, I now have a driver’s license with a requisite gold start in the upper right corner just in case DHS is really serious this time about the Real ID deadline.</li><li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/10/podcast-182-more-covid-changes-words-that-mean-adventure/\">the last episode</a>, I talked about finishing up my Global Entry renewal. And so with that done, last week I sent my passport into the void that is the US Passport Agency for renewal. I don’t have any international travel planned right now, but I’m very uncomfortable to be without my passport. I don’t know why, but I am. And the discomfort is only amplified by the 8-11 week processing time the State Department is now quoting. It also reminded me that it’s been 10 years since my most embarrassing cock-up - letting my backpack with my son’s and my passports get stolen from the overhead rack of the train to Brussels airport. I told the whole story in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/05/20/podcast-98-stolen-luggage-restaurants-want-your-smartphone/\">episode #98</a>, about what a stupid, what I called “the rookie-est of rookie mistakes” it was, and how it could’ve been worse, but for the very pleasant and helpful Brussels airport police and US Embassy staff, and that my son and I then got in a couple extra days of Belgian beer drinking.&nbsp; Lesson learned, though; I’ve kept my passport on my person when traveling ever since.</li><li>It’s funny, sometimes, how travel can prepare you for things back home. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/10/28/podcast-180-tracking-covid-travel-requirements-cycling-thru-puglia/\">episode #180</a>, talking about our travels through Italy, I walked through what were back then the most stringent vaccine passport requirements around; you need to show an EU Green Pass on your phone or, for us, our CDC vaccination cards to get into restaurants, bars, airports, train stations,.... And so when Chicago started doing the same thing on January 1st, we were ready. In some ways Chicago is easier than Italy -- showing a picture of my CDC card is quicker than waiting for someone to scan a QR code; but here, and New York City and Washington, DC, we’ve added the extra step -- having to show a picture ID that matches to the vax card. We didn’t have to do that in Italy. You know, if I hadn’t had to send my passport in, maybe I’d just do what I did in Italy, carry my CDC card in my passport; I could pull ‘em both out in one hopefully suave and graceful move and be done with it.</li><li>Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/11/13/podcast-181-travel-potpourri-2021-travelers-gift-guide/\">November episode</a>, I said that I’d already gotten status roll-overs from Marriott, Hilton, and IHG, extending my current level in their frequent sleeper programs for the third time -- now they expire in February or March 2023. I figured that was the end of it, so when I received a note from Southwest in mid-December with the subject line “Surprise: A-List status extended,” it was pretty accurate. I was very surprised! I hadn’t expected any airlines to extend status; they all seemed to be lowering the qualification clip levels instead. So, thanks Southwest! I’ll be using this status on my flights to LGA and ABQ -- also because I still have some 2020 pandemic cancellation credits that are about to hit their disappearing 2-year birthday. Any chance you can extend that expiration data too?</li><li>Just to spin the propeller on top of the travel tech beanie hat for a sec…. Over the past couple of trips, I’ve noticed my briefcase/messenger bag has finally passed a tipping point -- I now have more electronic devices needing a newer USB-C cord than an original USB-A cord. (I told you this would be a propeller spin). The USB-C cord invasion started with the iPhone 11 Pro; another cord to carry, but it occasionally came in handy, like when Hertz gave me a birthday upgrade a few years back to a Mercedes A220; it only had the smaller USB-C plugs. But the invasion picked up speed with each upgrade -- first it was my new Bose headphones, then when I upgraded my battery pack, my power bank; then again when I got my MacBook Air, and again squared when I got a pair of cheap Anker earbuds last Prime Day. Which led me, finally, to replacing my dual USB-A power adapter for one with two USB-C plugs and one USB-A for my old Samsung tablet that just won’t die. But I still have to carry an old iPhone USB-A cord for those times when all that’s left on the Hertz lot is a 3-year old Chevy Malibu.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music —  <em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/content/oldDog/oldDog_-_Goodbye_sooner_or_later.mp3\" target=\"_blank\">Goodbye Sooner or Later</a></em>&nbsp;by oldDog</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>COVID Test Anxiety</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A friend of mine said he wanted to get together this month. “Sure,” I said, “but if we can’t, we’ll be together for a weekend in February in Louisville at a wedding.” “Uh, no,” he said, “I’m not going.” “Why not?” “I’m going to isolate, kinda like a soft quarantine in February, don’t go outside except to walk the dog so I don’t screw up my trip to Egypt. It’s non-refundable, so I’ll be out a lot of money if I test positive for COVID before leaving and can’t go.”</li><li>And last month, in early December, right when everyone was tightening travel restrictions in what turned out to be a futile effort to keep omicron out of their country, another friend cancelled a long-planned trip to Scotland. “I just don’t want to get trapped, away from home,” he said.</li><li>COVID test anxiety. I understand it, especially around test-on-arrival rules. The week before our flight to London in November, I got a text from my doctor group -- time to get your COVID booster. I clicked through to the appointment website, started looking at slots, but then stopped. I have to take a COVID test by our second day in London. What if that spike of antibodies from the booster lingers long enough to turn that test positive? I clicked onto the next page of the website and booked my booster for December, after we got back home.</li><li>As I mentioned in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/10/podcast-182-more-covid-changes-words-that-mean-adventure/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"last episode\">last episode</a>, we tested negative on our test in London and went about our vacation. But as we got close to our return date, that anxiety crept back in. This was before the US tightened the testing window, so we took our Abbott tests 2 days before departure, both to give us some wiggle room, some time to retest if one came up positive, but also to calm those worries. I remember on that trip talking to an American guy in the elevator of our hotel in London. He had an Abbott rapid test sticking out of his briefcase. “Getting ready to head home?” I asked. “No,” he said, “I just test myself every 2 days.” I kinda laughed at that, thinking it was a bit over-rotation. But thinking back on it now, maybe he had it right -- test yourself every couple of days to relieve that uncertainty rather than waiting for the night before departure.</li><li>But even that might not be enough. I tweeted out <a href=\"https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/covid-in-koh-samui-its-scary-0hs7h0pk9\">an article</a> from the UK Times newspaper written by a guy who visited Thailand last month. The article starts “On December 19, after a week of near-hourly negative lateral flow and PCR tests, I flew to Thailand.” The next sentence (you know where this is going): “On December 20 I stepped off the plane, took another PCR, and headed to my hotel. The next morning I received a text informing me I had tested positive.” And then he tells the story of his 10 days of solo isolation in a Thai hospital. He did everything right and it still went wrong.</li><li>One big anxiety driver is the cost for those extra days quarantined in a hotel somewhere. This should be the kind of risk that trip insurance could help you manage. So I rang up Michael Giusti, senior writer at <a href=\"https://insurancequotes.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"InsuranceQuotes.com\">InsuranceQuotes.com</a> -- he was with us on <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/12/podcast-173-whats-new-in-travel-insurance-keeping-ahead-of-expiring-miles/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"episode #173\">episode #173</a> last March, talking about travel insurance one year after the pandemic lockdowns -- to ask him about this.<ul><li>Michael: So from a travel insurance policy perspective that scenario you just said is actually almost the better scenario because that\'s what travel insurance is built for. So you come up with a positive test -- that kicks in the policy language. Now they can hit their contingency plans, whether that\'s paying you per day for the extended stay or finding alternative ways home. What scares me is the no man\'s land where you can\'t find a test. A lot of these policies have language that excludes government mandates and so if you just can\'t find a test and now can\'t get in not because you\'re sick, because being sick would trigger the policy, but because the government mandate has got you in limbo, that\'s the scary part and that\'s really gonna come down to a policy-by-policy view to see how they\'re gonna handle it.</li><li>Mark: Is this standard travel insurance coverage or is there something special you need to look for?</li><li>Michael: When you\'re buying your policy, you do need to pay attention, but there are the three buckets you want to make sure are included. One is the cancellation that\'s going to protect you if you get sick before the trip. One is health and that\'s going to pay for care while you\'re abroad or outside of your normal healthcare network. But the other is interruption and that\'s the piece that I was just talking about. The interruption policy is going to be standard in their baseline, we\'ll call it the silver plan -- not the platinum, not the bronze -- that standard baseline plan should have all three of those buckets. But know what you\'re buying because I was reading through some policies over the weekend and there were definitely some that were peeling one or more buckets out to save some costs. That\'s great if you want to take that risk but do it with open eyes, knowing what you\'re doing. Insurance is there to protect you from unknown risks, unknowable risks. All of these policies, when you start reading the language, they\'re quick to point out “COVID-19 became a global pandemic in January of 2020.” They want you to know this is a known risk and then that sets the table -- with this being known, how are you going to protect yourself? Some of them are built into the standard policies but some require that COVID rider, some different policy language which most of them are offering. But you can\'t just assume it\'s gonna be wrapped into standard coverage. You need to be asking the COVID question.</li></ul></li><li>Thanks to Michael Giusti for joining us. Interesting point he makes about test access being a grey area for coverage. As I mentioned earlier, Irene and I brought our own Abbott tests with us to Italy and the UK, but more for convenience than concern about availability. I wrote up a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/30/easy-way-to-do-1-day-testing-for-returning-to-us/\">detailed \"how to\"</a> on ordering and using the Abbott BinaxNOW testing kit. It’s on the TravelCommons website in case you want to sidestep Michael’s addition to&nbsp; COVID test anxiety.</li><li>Bridge Music —  &nbsp;<em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/content/Zapac/Zapac_-_Test_Drive.mp3\" target=\"_blank\">Test Drive</a>&nbsp;</em>by Zapac</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Michelin Dining Adventures</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Last month, I picked up on the buzz around a blogger’s <a href=\"https://everywhereist.com/2021/12/bros-restaurant-lecce-we-eat-at-the-worst-michelin-starred-restaurant-ever/\">brutal review</a> of a 1-star Michelin restaurant in Italy. It initially caught my eye because Irene and I like to hit a Michelin star or two when we’re traveling. Indeed, a 1-star place called <a href=\"https://www.behindrestaurant.co.uk/\"><em>Behind</em></a> as in “ it’s an open kitchen so there’s nothing to hide behind” got us figuring out how to get from central London to Hackney, a neighborhood we would’ve had no reason to explore otherwise. It was a great lunch; a great experience talking to the chef, and it\'s going on my final Best of 2021 list -- which is on my to-do list to update right after I finish this podcast. Having said that, we’ve also had some meals that weren’t great, like our 25th anniversary dinner at a 3-star place in Florence, or a 2-star in Spain that we loved -- until the next morning when we both came down with food poisoning. But on balance, we’ve had more really good meals than bad, and they’ve often taken us out of the travel bubble to parts of cities we wouldn’t normally go -- kinda like my microbrewery taprooms, only a <strong><em>lot</em></strong> more expensive.</li><li>So when I saw the title “We Eat at The Worst Michelin Starred Restaurant, Ever,” it got my attention. First, what restaurant is it, so we can avoid it, and second, what made it the worst ever because that’s a big claim. But then I see the <em>full</em> title, with the restaurant, Bros in Lecce, Italy. We won’t be able to skip it because we ate there in mid-October, the night after our Puglia bike tour ended.&nbsp;</li><li>I read through the reviews and looked closely at the pictures. A couple of courses look familiar, but others -- like the now-famous (infamous?) grey foam oozing out of a plaster replica of the chef’s mouth was (thankfully) not on our menu. I have to say that I was on the fence about eating at Bros when Irene brought it up when we were planning our Puglia trip. The reviews I could find were <em>very</em> mixed, and it wasn’t a cheap ticket. We decided to go, but with the understanding that it could be a high-variance meal, with some courses that might not work out. I think the oyster with rancid fat was that dish for Irene. I didn’t love it, but it didn’t trigger a gag reflex like it did for Irene. Certainly not what you hope for, and it was only that dish, the rest was fine. But like I said, we went into Bros eye wide open, expecting an edgy experimental food experience -- and definitely not a standard 3-course fine dining Italian meal. We walked out thinking “Well, that was interesting” -- not bad, but not the worst 1-star meal I’ve had; probably in the bottom quartile, though. As you might guess, Bros <em>won’t</em> make it on that Best of 2021 list update.</li><li>So why didn’t this blogger, a James Beard-award winning writer, come in with similar expectations? Who knows, though we do know that outrage porn drives clicks which, for her, also drove some high-profile TV interviews which probably helped move a few copies of her book. And, since no publicity is bad publicity, I’m guessing it was <a href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/23/world/europe/bros-restaurant-review.html\">a net positive for the restaurant</a> too.</li><li>But why pay what was about a lot of money for a meal that I think might be a complete train wreck? I walked past a lot of places in Lecce that I know would put a good meal down in front of us for a lot less. It becomes a bit less about food and a bit more about the experience; less about stomach and more about the brain. It reminded me of something Josh Glenn said in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/10/podcast-182-more-covid-changes-words-that-mean-adventure/\" title=\"the last episode\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the last episode</a> when I was talking with him about the language of adventure<ul><li>Josh: I mean an adventure is, and that word comes from the Latin meaning <em>to arrive unexpectedly</em>. That\'s actually really an important philosophical piece for me as I was going through this, the idea that you can have a trip is not an adventure if nothing unexpected happens and if you don\'t take enough risks to allow things unexpected to happen.... The word <em>chance </em>comes from the Latin <em>cadentia </em>meaning <em>falling</em>. So just when we think about how we use the words of “let the chips fall where they may” or “something befalls you”, this idea of having our feet off the ground, falling through space, we can\'t grasp anything, what do you do with that? If you’re someone who likes, in some kind of existential way, that feeling of falling, then you\'re an adventurer. You\'re going to get more out of your travel experiences than someone who wants everything to be exactly the same way every time and never have any hiccups.</li></ul></li><li>I always say to Irene “If every meal we have is a great one, then we’re not trying enough weird places.” After food poisoning has befallen you a couple times, how bad can a little rancid fat be?</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #184</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_184.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #184 — Ratcheting Up; Stealth Travel Inflation','','inherit','closed','closed','','4100-revision-v1','','','2022-03-03 11:00:12','2022-03-03 16:00:12','',4100,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4101',0,'revision','',0),
(4102,1,'2022-03-03 11:09:22','2022-03-03 16:09:22','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/IMG_3929-scaled.jpeg\"><img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/IMG_3929-300x300.jpeg\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a>Post-dinner pic complete with gang sign[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>No travel since the last episode, but lots of travel planning. Are we making our way back to pre-COVID travel planning patterns? Omicron has lots of people worried about testing positive and getting stuck abroad. Michael Giusti of&nbsp;<a href=\"https://insurancequotes.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">InsuranceQuotes.com</a> talks about how travel insurance can help. A blogger’s <a href=\"https://everywhereist.com/2021/12/bros-restaurant-lecce-we-eat-at-the-worst-michelin-starred-restaurant-ever/\">brutal review</a> of a Michelin-starred restaurant where we ate in October gets me thinking about food as an adventure.  All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_184.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #184: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. Sorry about getting this episode out late. I pushed it out a couple of weeks for a trip down to Louisville for a wedding; so I didn’t have to say “No travel since the last episode” again -- tough to do a podcast that’s “more about the journey than the destination” if you’re not journey-ing. And also to give my voice some time to recover from something I picked up down there. I can write a great episode, but if all I can do is croak it out and no one can stand to listen, it feels a bit like a podcast version of “If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, did it make a sound?” And, I have to be honest -- my heart just couldn’t get into trying to be snarky and witty as the Russians launched their invasion of Ukraine. But here we are, a week or so into it and, with a heavy heart, need to move forward. </li><li>So back to travel. I used to get a serious cold at least once a year when traveling non-stop; to the point that, every time I bought something at CVS, at least 4 ft of the usual 6 ft of coupons printed out with the receipt were for cough and cold medications. But after the March 2020 lockdowns, nothing; a nice side benefit of masks and social distancing. But now, maybe in a sign that things are creeping back to normal, I’ve got that old feeling again -- a runny nose, a cough,... So back to CVS for the usual boxes of 12-hour Sudafed and maximum strength Mucinex. And there, at the check-out counter, is a stack of Abbott Binax COVID tests. I throw one of those into the basket because there’s a bit of <a href=\"https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/coronavirus/in-depth/covid-19-cold-flu-and-allergies-differences/art-20503981\">symptom overlap</a> between omicron and a cold. But 15 minutes after violating each of my nostrils in the CVS parking lot, no second line appeared on the test strip. No omicron; I’m just back to my usual cold. The next week I had a couple of in-person meetings and, since I had one more test in the Binax box, decided to ping those nostrils again, just to be safe. Bam! So that’s what a positive test looks like. The sample pink line showed up immediately, even before the second, higher control line did. The instructions may say to wait for 15 minutes, but I knew within 2. Not that much changed -- other than canceling the in-person meeting. I just kept popping the Sudafed and the Mucinex.</li><li>We were lucky with the timing of our drive back home on I-65, threading the weather needle between two snow storms that shut down parts of the interstate north of Indiana. Even with reasonable weather, Waze and Google Maps pointed us toward the exit a couple of times to vector around accident slow downs. It’s kinda funny to see which cars and trucks are using Waze, because we’re all getting off at the same exit, and all making the same turns onto seemingly random county roads running through flat snow-covered farm land, pretty featureless save for a couple of farm houses and stands of gigantic wind mills.  But, there were no multi-hour back-ups that would’ve forced us to break out the bourbon bottles to stay warm which, this winter, marks this down as a successful drive home.</li><li>Bridge Music —    I Will Writhe by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/26739 Ft: Soundprank </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>In the last episode, we talked about COVID test anxiety; not being able to start a vacation or come back home from one due to a positive test. With the omicron wave having crested, some countries -- the UK, France, Ireland, but not Italy -- are dropping inbound test requirements for travelers who are fully vaccinated, with the caveat that “fully vaccinated” for these countries includes a booster. I was pleasantly surprised by this. Usually, travel requirements ratchet up; new ones stick and old ones never expire. If you don’t have TSA PreCheck, you’ve been walking through security in your stocking feet for over 15 years now. Maybe because there’s a real cost that travelers can see -- ranging over $100/person sometimes -- as opposed to 5 minutes of inconvenience.</li><li>But as with dropping the initial travel bans, the US is the laggard. Drop in-bound test requirements? The US hasn’t even relaxed the 1-day testing window put in place at the beginning of December to try and keep omicron out of the US. We all knew within 2 weeks that didn’t work, but here we are 3 months later and there’s no movement back to the pre-omicron 72-hour testing window. It’s that ratchet again. In the last episode, I mentioned that, at the end of December, I\'d written up a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/30/easy-way-to-do-1-day-testing-for-returning-to-us/\">detailed blog post</a> on how to order and use the Abbott BinaxNOW testing kit to easily hit the US’s 1-day testing window. Allan Marko, occasional TravelCommons contributor, clicked through to the eMed site to order a 6-pack so he could take a couple tests with him on his February getaway to the Yucatan as backup, in case the resort ran out of tests -- those damn supply chain issues. As it turned out, the resort had ample tests -- at $100 a pop, which is… a number. Allan used his Abbott tests -- at $25 each -- instead. Leaves a little extra cash for a good-bye margarita or two… or three.</li><li>And speaking of margaritas, you can get one again on Southwest Airlines. They  finally blinked, <a href=\"https://www.swamedia.com/releases/release-a0731e681107d30a52590eb3f92b92a3-southwest-airlines-restoring-on-board-beverage-options\">restarting their in-flight alcohol service</a>, giving up their linkage with the in-flight mask mandate. No surprise, really. No one sees an end in site for in-flight masking. Indeed, European airline execs from Ryanair and TAP, the Portuguese airline, have said they expect masks to be one of the last things dropped and could be around for years. It’s that ratcheting thing again. Glad I kept hold of my old drink coupons. Southwest extended the life of 2020 and 2021 coupons ‘til the end of this year. </li><li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/01/16/podcast-183-covid-test-anxiety-michelin-food-adventures/\">the last episode</a>, I talked about sending my passport into the void that is the US Passport Agency for renewal. My passport didn’t expire until April, but since a lot of countries won’t let you if your passport has less than 6 months left on it, and with all the State Department’s warnings about extended processing times, I figured I should renew it sooner rather than later. The Passport Agency is quoting 8-11 weeks processing time and, here’s a little twist, they’ll only accept your application via US Postal Service. Now I don’t know about you, but the Chicago branches of the Postal Service haven’t exactly been covering themselves in glory over the past couple of months. So, I sent in my application Priority Mail and paid the Passport Agency extra so they’d send it back the same way. Priority Mail did the job getting my application there in a couple of days, and then I was able to track the progress on the Passport Agency’s website. The only glitch was the email update function, where they send you an email each time your application status changes, doesn’t seem to work. But anyhow, the Passport Agency processed my renewal and put my passport in a Priority Mail envelope right at 7 weeks. So good on them coming in under their time quote. But then the Postal Service couldn’t quite get it done. From the tracking history, my passport appears to have hung out a few days in a Chicago transit facility before finally making it into my mailbox. And it’s a bit different from, say, my wife’s passport that she renewed a few years ago. The page with the picture and all the personal information is no longer a kinda sealed paper page. Now, it’s a heavier, thicker piece of plastic, and some data like the passport number and the expiration date are raised. It seems a quantum step up in non-tampering/forgery-proof technology. Now I’m keeping my eye out for my old passport which they send back to me separately because it has my still-valid India visa in it. I don’t have any plans to visit India right now, which is a good thing since the Passport Agency is sending it back via regular post, which means it should get some time, maybe, this spring.</li><li>And as I promised in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/01/16/podcast-183-covid-test-anxiety-michelin-food-adventures/\">the last episode</a>, I finally finished updating my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/31/my-best-restaurants-and-bars-of-2021/\">Best Restaurants, Bars, and Taprooms of 2021</a> post, adding sections for Chicago and London. One of the things that <em>didn’t</em> make the London section was Yorkshire pudding wraps and burritos. I saw these on menus all over the place, where they’d basically take a whole Sunday roast dinner -- roast beef, vegetables, mashed potatoes, gravy -- and wrap it in a flatbread made out of the same ingredients as a Yorkshire pudding -- eggs, flour, and milk. Honestly, it was like shame-watching a car crash. I knew I shouldn’t, but I ordered one anyways, and immediately hated myself for it. So any place with this on the menu; immediate disqualification from my list. Also, I unfortunately had to delete a great little corner dumpling place in New York’s Chinatown that’s “reconcepted” itself since last May. Which was the reason I started that running list last year -- the pandemic closings were happening faster than the guidebooks and blogs could keep up with. Indeed, I went back through the TravelCommons archives and was striking through at least half of my earlier recommendations. So anyhow, I gave the 2021 post a new date of Dec 31 so it would be easy to find; it’s showing up right now on the TravelCommons homepage and at the top of the Blog page. I’m also doing a better job of keeping a running list of my 2022 recommendations. In Louisville, we ate at a <strong><em>great</em></strong> Cuban restaurant, <a href=\"https://www.labodeguitademima.com/\">La Bodeguita De Mima</a>, next door to the AC Hotel in the NuLu district. Apparently, there’s a huge Cuban immigrant community in Louisville, which I can tell you was <strong><em>not</em></strong> the case when my parents lived there in the early ‘80’s. And La Bodeguita De Mimi is just the latest of many Cuban places to open. Highly recommended, especially the Lechon Asado, the roast pork. I’ll post the first cut of my 2022 list in April, after our trips to Brooklyn next week and Santa Fe at the beginning of April</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music -- August (Reggae Rework) by el-B (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/elB/16075 Ft: Calendargirl </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Stealth Travel Inflation</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>For those of us of (and past) a certain age, the last 6 months of inflation news is flashing us back to the ‘70’s and early ‘80’s, and there’s certainly no sense of wistful nostalgia coming from it. Maybe not abject terror, but it’s not a comfortable feeling. The <a href=\"https://www.ustravel.org/\">US Travel Association</a> unpicks the US Department of Labor’s consumer price index (CPI) report and publishes its own monthly <a href=\"https://www.ustravel.org/research/travel-price-index\">travel price index</a> (TPI). I started looking through their <a href=\"https://www.ustravel.org/sites/default/files/2022-02/tpi_jan-2022_0.pdf\">latest TPI which is for January 2022</a> and, among other things, it compares this current travel price index to January 2021 <em>and</em> to pre-pandemic January 2019, before any travel restrictions were in place. Tough to remember, but back then, everybody was traveling. And while all the current inflation headlines prepped me for the current travel price index being 14.5% over last year’s, I was surprised when I saw that current prices are 11.6% higher than January 2019. I guess I anchored a bit too much on those rock-bottom airfares and hotel rates and gas prices in the Spring and Summer of 2020 when no one was traveling. But digging through the detailed line items, it turns out I’m not entirely wrong -- the Airline Fares component of the TPI is still 15% <em>below</em> 2019’s and hotels are only up 6.5% three years on. I couldn’t figure out which line has car rental prices, but it’s no secret that those blew up -- when you could actually <em>find</em> a car. The biggest jumps over 2019 that show up are Food &amp; Beverage, up 13%, and Motor Fuel, no surprise there, up 44%. </li><li>But here’s where we get into the stealth components. Let’s start with hotels. There are cuts in service, getting less for the same price, what’s now being called <em>shrinkflation,</em> that I don’t think is reflected in that 6.5% inflation number. The most common of these are pandemic service cuts that have never gone away. In 2020, when we were still figuring out how COVID spread, how long the surfaces could stay infectious (remember people leaving their groceries outside for 3 days?), it made sense to stop daily room housekeeping. The first post-lockdown trip I made, I stayed in a Hampton Inn and never saw anyone. The Hilton app let me remotely check-in and gave me a digital key, no one serviced the room during my stay, and no free breakfast. And I was fine with that; it made perfect sense given how much we <em>didn’t</em> know in May 2020. </li><li>But now, almost 2 years and 3 vaccination shots later, the AC Hotel in Louisville has a sign taped to the desk in our room saying housekeeping was limited to every 3rd day because of COVID. No, it’s not because of COVID anymore; it’s to improve margins. Comparing this to our stays in similarly-priced hotels in Italy and the UK last fall where service was pretty much back to pre-pandemic standards (the main exception was you couldn’t serve yourself from the breakfast buffet; you pointed at something and a server put it on your plate), it’s that ratchet again; the US chains are working hard to keep those early pandemic service standards. Though with Hilton, there seems to be some play in that ratchet. Rather than a hard “we’re only servicing your room every 3 days”, it’s a softer “our housekeeping is now on request.” So, I guess I could request it every day. For me, it’s not about fresh towels; it’s about getting those little garbage cans emptied. They don’t hold too many empty 16-oz craft beer cans.</li><li>On first look, you’d think that restaurants are doing a bit of their own shrinkflation by continuing their contactless service tactics -- using QR codes for menus and having people order and pay through apps like Toast instead of waiters. Now maybe it’s me, but I don’t see it as reducing service. Instead, I see it as improving productivity through automation. But the stealth inflation that I’ve noticed is the COVID add-on fees that started showing up in post-lockdown 2020 -- 2-3% for extra cleaning or personal protective equipment -- are sticking around. I’m not arguing that they are not real expenses, but so are, say, janitorial service and property taxes but they’re not showing up as additional fees. Roll it into the price of your burger like you do with every other business cost.  </li><li>It’s kinda like they’re trying to run the same play the airlines did back in 2008 with baggage fees. American Airlines was the first of the big carriers to do it, charging $15 a bag, saying they needed it to cover the high cost of jet fuel when oil hit $145 a barrel that summer. But 3-4 months later, <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_oil_market_chronology_from_2003#2008:_oil_prices_peak_at_$145.85_then_bottom_at_$32\">when oil prices were half that</a>, the baggage fee stayed and even increased; <a href=\"https://www.aa.com/i18n/travel-info/baggage/checked-baggage-policy.jsp\">American doubled it</a>. Again, it’s that ratchet; the excuse goes away, but the fee doesn’t. Which means it’s really just a price increase; it’s just more inflation.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #184</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_184.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #184 — Ratcheting Up; Stealth Travel Inflation','','inherit','closed','closed','','4100-revision-v1','','','2022-03-03 11:09:22','2022-03-03 16:09:22','',4100,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4102',0,'revision','',0),
(4103,1,'2022-03-03 11:17:21','2022-03-03 16:17:21','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/IMG_3929-scaled.jpeg\"><img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/IMG_3929-300x300.jpeg\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a>Post-dinner pic complete with gang sign[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>No travel since the last episode, but lots of travel planning. Are we making our way back to pre-COVID travel planning patterns? Omicron has lots of people worried about testing positive and getting stuck abroad. Michael Giusti of&nbsp;<a href=\"https://insurancequotes.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">InsuranceQuotes.com</a> talks about how travel insurance can help. A blogger’s <a href=\"https://everywhereist.com/2021/12/bros-restaurant-lecce-we-eat-at-the-worst-michelin-starred-restaurant-ever/\">brutal review</a> of a Michelin-starred restaurant where we ate in October gets me thinking about food as an adventure.  All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_184.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #184: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. Sorry about getting this episode out late. I pushed it out a couple of weeks for a trip down to Louisville for a wedding; so I didn’t have to say “No travel since the last episode” again -- tough to do a podcast that’s “more about the journey than the destination” if you’re not journey-ing. And also to give my voice some time to recover from something I picked up down there. I can write a great episode, but if all I can do is croak it out and no one can stand to listen, it feels a bit like a podcast version of “If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, did it make a sound?” And, I have to be honest -- my heart just couldn’t get into trying to be snarky and witty as the Russians launched their invasion of Ukraine. But here we are, a week or so into it and, with a heavy heart, need to move forward. </li><li>So back to travel. I used to get a serious cold at least once a year when traveling non-stop; to the point that, every time I bought something at CVS, at least 4 ft of the usual 6 ft of coupons printed out with the receipt were for cough and cold medications. But after the March 2020 lockdowns, nothing; a nice side benefit of masks and social distancing. But now, maybe in a sign that things are creeping back to normal, I’ve got that old feeling again -- a runny nose, a cough,... So back to CVS for the usual boxes of 12-hour Sudafed and maximum strength Mucinex. And there, at the check-out counter, is a stack of Abbott Binax COVID tests. I throw one of those into the basket because there’s a bit of <a href=\"https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/coronavirus/in-depth/covid-19-cold-flu-and-allergies-differences/art-20503981\">symptom overlap</a> between omicron and a cold. But 15 minutes after violating each of my nostrils in the CVS parking lot, no second line appeared on the test strip. No omicron; I’m just back to my usual cold. The next week I had a couple of in-person meetings and, since I had one more test in the Binax box, decided to ping those nostrils again, just to be safe. Bam! So that’s what a positive test looks like. The sample pink line showed up immediately, even before the second, higher control line did. The instructions may say to wait for 15 minutes, but I knew within 2. Not that much changed -- other than canceling the in-person meeting. I just kept popping the Sudafed and the Mucinex.</li><li>We were lucky with the timing of our drive back home on I-65, threading the weather needle between two snow storms that shut down parts of the interstate north of Indiana. Even with reasonable weather, Waze and Google Maps pointed us toward the exit a couple of times to vector around accident slow downs. It’s kinda funny to see which cars and trucks are using Waze, because we’re all getting off at the same exit, and all making the same turns onto seemingly random county roads running through flat snow-covered farm land, pretty featureless save for a couple of farm houses and stands of gigantic wind mills.  But, there were no multi-hour back-ups that would’ve forced us to break out the bourbon bottles to stay warm which, this winter, marks this down as a successful drive home.</li><li>Bridge Music —    I Will Writhe by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/26739 Ft: Soundprank </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>In the last episode, we talked about COVID test anxiety; not being able to start a vacation or come back home from one due to a positive test. With the omicron wave having crested, some countries -- the UK, France, Ireland, but not Italy -- are dropping inbound test requirements for travelers who are fully vaccinated, with the caveat that “fully vaccinated” for these countries includes a booster. I was pleasantly surprised by this. Usually, travel requirements ratchet up; new ones stick and old ones never expire. If you don’t have TSA PreCheck, you’ve been walking through security in your stocking feet for over 15 years now. Maybe because there’s a real cost that travelers can see -- ranging over $100/person sometimes -- as opposed to 5 minutes of inconvenience.</li><li>But as with dropping the initial travel bans, the US is the laggard. Drop in-bound test requirements? The US hasn’t even relaxed the 1-day testing window put in place at the beginning of December to try and keep omicron out of the US. We all knew within 2 weeks that didn’t work, but here we are 3 months later and there’s no movement back to the pre-omicron 72-hour testing window. It’s that ratchet again. In the last episode, I mentioned that, at the end of December, I\'d written up a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/30/easy-way-to-do-1-day-testing-for-returning-to-us/\">detailed blog post</a> on how to order and use the Abbott BinaxNOW testing kit to easily hit the US’s 1-day testing window. Allan Marko, occasional TravelCommons contributor, clicked through to the eMed site to order a 6-pack so he could take a couple tests with him on his February getaway to the Yucatan as backup, in case the resort ran out of tests -- those damn supply chain issues. As it turned out, the resort had ample tests -- at $100 a pop, which is… a number. Allan used his Abbott tests -- at $25 each -- instead. Leaves a little extra cash for a good-bye margarita or two… or three.</li><li>And speaking of margaritas, you can get one again on Southwest Airlines. They  finally blinked, <a href=\"https://www.swamedia.com/releases/release-a0731e681107d30a52590eb3f92b92a3-southwest-airlines-restoring-on-board-beverage-options\">restarting their in-flight alcohol service</a>, giving up their linkage with the in-flight mask mandate. No surprise, really. No one sees an end in site for in-flight masking. Indeed, European airline execs from Ryanair and TAP, the Portuguese airline, have said they expect masks to be one of the last things dropped and could be around for years. It’s that ratcheting thing again. Glad I kept hold of my old drink coupons. Southwest extended the life of 2020 and 2021 coupons ‘til the end of this year. </li><li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/01/16/podcast-183-covid-test-anxiety-michelin-food-adventures/\">the last episode</a>, I talked about sending my passport into the void that is the US Passport Agency for renewal. My passport didn’t expire until April, but since a lot of countries won’t let you if your passport has less than 6 months left on it, and with all the State Department’s warnings about extended processing times, I figured I should renew it sooner rather than later. The Passport Agency is quoting 8-11 weeks processing time and, here’s a little twist, they’ll only accept your application via US Postal Service. Now I don’t know about you, but the Chicago branches of the Postal Service haven’t exactly been covering themselves in glory over the past couple of months. So, I sent in my application Priority Mail and paid the Passport Agency extra so they’d send it back the same way. Priority Mail did the job getting my application there in a couple of days, and then I was able to track the progress on the Passport Agency’s website. The only glitch was the email update function, where they send you an email each time your application status changes, doesn’t seem to work. But anyhow, the Passport Agency processed my renewal and put my passport in a Priority Mail envelope right at 7 weeks. So good on them coming in under their time quote. But then the Postal Service couldn’t quite get it done. From the tracking history, my passport appears to have hung out a few days in a Chicago transit facility before finally making it into my mailbox. And it’s a bit different from, say, my wife’s passport that she renewed a few years ago. The page with the picture and all the personal information is no longer a kinda sealed paper page. Now, it’s a heavier, thicker piece of plastic, and some data like the passport number and the expiration date are raised. It seems a quantum step up in non-tampering/forgery-proof technology. Now I’m keeping my eye out for my old passport which they send back to me separately because it has my still-valid India visa in it. I don’t have any plans to visit India right now, which is a good thing since the Passport Agency is sending it back via regular post, which means it should get some time, maybe, this spring.</li><li>And as I promised in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/01/16/podcast-183-covid-test-anxiety-michelin-food-adventures/\">the last episode</a>, I finally finished updating my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/31/my-best-restaurants-and-bars-of-2021/\">Best Restaurants, Bars, and Taprooms of 2021</a> post, adding sections for Chicago and London. One of the things that <em>didn’t</em> make the London section was Yorkshire pudding wraps and burritos. I saw these on menus all over the place, where they’d basically take a whole Sunday roast dinner -- roast beef, vegetables, mashed potatoes, gravy -- and wrap it in a flatbread made out of the same ingredients as a Yorkshire pudding -- eggs, flour, and milk. Honestly, it was like shame-watching a car crash. I knew I shouldn’t, but I ordered one anyways, and immediately hated myself for it. So any place with this on the menu; immediate disqualification from my list. Also, I unfortunately had to delete a great little corner dumpling place in New York’s Chinatown that’s “reconcepted” itself since last May. Which was the reason I started that running list last year -- the pandemic closings were happening faster than the guidebooks and blogs could keep up with. Indeed, I went back through the TravelCommons archives and was striking through at least half of my earlier recommendations. So anyhow, I gave the 2021 post a new date of Dec 31 so it would be easy to find; it’s showing up right now on the TravelCommons homepage and at the top of the Blog page. I’m also doing a better job of keeping a running list of my 2022 recommendations. In Louisville, we ate at a <strong><em>great</em></strong> Cuban restaurant, <a href=\"https://www.labodeguitademima.com/\">La Bodeguita De Mima</a>, next door to the AC Hotel in the NuLu district. Apparently, there’s a huge Cuban immigrant community in Louisville, which I can tell you was <strong><em>not</em></strong> the case when my parents lived there in the early ‘80’s. And La Bodeguita De Mimi is just the latest of many Cuban places to open. Highly recommended, especially the Lechon Asado, the roast pork. I’ll post the first cut of my 2022 list in April, after our trips to Brooklyn next week and Santa Fe at the beginning of April</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music -- August (Reggae Rework) by el-B (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/elB/16075 Ft: Calendargirl </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Stealth Travel Inflation</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>For those of us of (and past) a certain age, the last 6 months of inflation news is flashing us back to the ‘70’s and early ‘80’s, and there’s certainly no sense of wistful nostalgia coming from it. Maybe not abject terror, but it’s not a comfortable feeling. The <a href=\"https://www.ustravel.org/\">US Travel Association</a> unpicks the US Department of Labor’s consumer price index (CPI) report and publishes its own monthly <a href=\"https://www.ustravel.org/research/travel-price-index\">travel price index</a> (TPI). I started looking through their <a href=\"https://www.ustravel.org/sites/default/files/2022-02/tpi_jan-2022_0.pdf\">latest TPI which is for January 2022</a> and, among other things, it compares this current travel price index to January 2021 <em>and</em> to pre-pandemic January 2019, before any travel restrictions were in place. Tough to remember, but back then, everybody was traveling. And while all the current inflation headlines prepped me for the current travel price index being 14.5% over last year’s, I was surprised when I saw that current prices are 11.6% higher than January 2019. I guess I anchored a bit too much on those rock-bottom airfares and hotel rates and gas prices in the Spring and Summer of 2020 when no one was traveling. But digging through the detailed line items, it turns out I’m not entirely wrong -- the Airline Fares component of the TPI is still 15% <em>below</em> 2019’s and hotels are only up 6.5% three years on. I couldn’t figure out which line has car rental prices, but it’s no secret that those blew up -- when you could actually <em>find</em> a car. The biggest jumps over 2019 that show up are Food &amp; Beverage, up 13%, and Motor Fuel, no surprise there, up 44%. </li><li>But here’s where we get into the stealth components. Let’s start with hotels. There are cuts in service, getting less for the same price, what’s now being called <em>shrinkflation,</em> that I don’t think is reflected in that 6.5% inflation number. The most common of these are pandemic service cuts that have never gone away. In 2020, when we were still figuring out how COVID spread, how long the surfaces could stay infectious (remember people leaving their groceries outside for 3 days?), it made sense to stop daily room housekeeping. The first post-lockdown trip I made, I stayed in a Hampton Inn and never saw anyone. The Hilton app let me remotely check-in and gave me a digital key, no one serviced the room during my stay, and no free breakfast. And I was fine with that; it made perfect sense given how much we <em>didn’t</em> know in May 2020. </li><li>But now, almost 2 years and 3 vaccination shots later, the AC Hotel in Louisville has a sign taped to the desk in our room saying housekeeping was limited to every 3rd day because of COVID. No, it’s not because of COVID anymore; it’s to improve margins. Comparing this to our stays in similarly-priced hotels in Italy and the UK last fall where service was pretty much back to pre-pandemic standards (the main exception was you couldn’t serve yourself from the breakfast buffet; you pointed at something and a server put it on your plate), it’s that ratchet again; the US chains are working hard to keep those early pandemic service standards. Though with Hilton, there seems to be some play in that ratchet. Rather than a hard “we’re only servicing your room every 3 days”, it’s a softer “our housekeeping is now on request.” So, I guess I could request it every day. For me, it’s not about fresh towels; it’s about getting those little garbage cans emptied. They don’t hold too many empty 16-oz craft beer cans.</li><li>On first look, you’d think that restaurants are doing a bit of their own shrinkflation by continuing their contactless service tactics -- using QR codes for menus and having people order and pay through apps like Toast instead of waiters. Now maybe it’s me, but I don’t see it as reducing service. Instead, I see it as improving productivity through automation. But the stealth inflation that I’ve noticed is the COVID add-on fees that started showing up in post-lockdown 2020 -- 2-3% for extra cleaning or personal protective equipment -- are sticking around. I’m not arguing that they are not real expenses, but so are, say, janitorial service and property taxes but they’re not showing up as additional fees. Roll it into the price of your burger like you do with every other business cost.  </li><li>It’s kinda like they’re trying to run the same play the airlines did back in 2008 with baggage fees. American Airlines was the first of the big carriers to do it, charging $15 a bag, saying they needed it to cover the high cost of jet fuel when oil hit $145 a barrel that summer. But 3-4 months later, <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_oil_market_chronology_from_2003#2008:_oil_prices_peak_at_$145.85_then_bottom_at_$32\">when oil prices were half that</a>, the baggage fee stayed and even increased; <a href=\"https://www.aa.com/i18n/travel-info/baggage/checked-baggage-policy.jsp\">American doubled it</a>. Again, it’s that ratchet; the excuse goes away, but the fee doesn’t. Which means it’s really just a price increase; it’s just more inflation.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #184</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_184.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #184 — Figuring Out Stealth Travel Inflation','','inherit','closed','closed','','4100-revision-v1','','','2022-03-03 11:17:21','2022-03-03 16:17:21','',4100,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4103',0,'revision','',0),
(4104,1,'2022-03-03 11:33:45','2022-03-03 16:33:45','','IMG_2429','','inherit','open','closed','','img_2429','','','2022-03-03 11:33:45','2022-03-03 16:33:45','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/IMG_2429.jpeg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(4105,1,'2022-03-03 11:36:14','2022-03-03 16:36:14','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/IMG_2429-scaled.jpeg\"><img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/IMG_2429-300x300.jpeg\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a>Spending a lot more time here[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>No travel since the last episode, but lots of travel planning. Are we making our way back to pre-COVID travel planning patterns? Omicron has lots of people worried about testing positive and getting stuck abroad. Michael Giusti of&nbsp;<a href=\"https://insurancequotes.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">InsuranceQuotes.com</a> talks about how travel insurance can help. A blogger’s <a href=\"https://everywhereist.com/2021/12/bros-restaurant-lecce-we-eat-at-the-worst-michelin-starred-restaurant-ever/\">brutal review</a> of a Michelin-starred restaurant where we ate in October gets me thinking about food as an adventure.  All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_184.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #184: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. Sorry about getting this episode out late. I pushed it out a couple of weeks for a trip down to Louisville for a wedding; so I didn’t have to say “No travel since the last episode” again -- tough to do a podcast that’s “more about the journey than the destination” if you’re not journey-ing. And also to give my voice some time to recover from something I picked up down there. I can write a great episode, but if all I can do is croak it out and no one can stand to listen, it feels a bit like a podcast version of “If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, did it make a sound?” And, I have to be honest -- my heart just couldn’t get into trying to be snarky and witty as the Russians launched their invasion of Ukraine. But here we are, a week or so into it and, with a heavy heart, need to move forward.&nbsp;</li><li>So back to travel. I used to get a serious cold at least once a year when traveling non-stop; to the point that, every time I bought something at CVS, at least 4 ft of the usual 6 ft of coupons printed out with the receipt were for cough and cold medications. But after the March 2020 lockdowns, nothing; a nice side benefit of masks and social distancing. But now, maybe in a sign that things are creeping back to normal, I’ve got that old feeling again -- a runny nose, a cough,... So back to CVS for the usual boxes of 12-hour Sudafed and maximum strength Mucinex. And there, at the check-out counter, is a stack of Abbott Binax COVID tests. I throw one of those into the basket because there’s a bit of <a href=\"https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/coronavirus/in-depth/covid-19-cold-flu-and-allergies-differences/art-20503981\">symptom overlap</a> between omicron and a cold. But 15 minutes after violating each of my nostrils in the CVS parking lot, no second line appeared on the test strip. No omicron; I’m just back to my usual cold. The next week I had a couple of in-person meetings and, since I had one more test in the Binax box, decided to ping those nostrils again, just to be safe. Bam! So that’s what a positive test looks like. The sample pink line showed up immediately, even before the second, higher control line did. The instructions may say to wait for 15 minutes, but I knew within 2. Not that much changed -- other than canceling the in-person meeting. I just kept popping the Sudafed and the Mucinex.</li><li>We were lucky with the timing of our drive back home on I-65, threading the weather needle between two snow storms that shut down parts of the interstate north of Indiana. Even with reasonable weather, Waze and Google Maps pointed us toward the exit a couple of times to vector around accident slow downs. It’s kinda funny to see which cars and trucks are using Waze, because we’re all getting off at the same exit, and all making the same turns onto seemingly random county roads running through flat snow-covered farm land, pretty featureless save for a couple of farm houses and stands of gigantic wind mills.&nbsp; But, there were no multi-hour back-ups that would’ve forced us to break out the bourbon bottles to stay warm which, this winter, marks this down as a successful drive home.</li><li>Bridge Music —  &nbsp; I Will Writhe by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/26739 Ft: Soundprank </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>In the last episode, we talked about COVID test anxiety; not being able to start a vacation or come back home from one due to a positive test. With the omicron wave having crested, some countries -- the UK, France, Ireland, but not Italy -- are dropping inbound test requirements for travelers who are fully vaccinated, with the caveat that “fully vaccinated” for these countries includes a booster. I was pleasantly surprised by this. Usually, travel requirements ratchet up; new ones stick and old ones never expire. If you don’t have TSA PreCheck, you’ve been walking through security in your stocking feet for over 15 years now. Maybe because there’s a real cost that travelers can see -- ranging over $100/person sometimes -- as opposed to 5 minutes of inconvenience.</li><li>But as with dropping the initial travel bans, the US is the laggard. Drop in-bound test requirements? The US hasn’t even relaxed the 1-day testing window put in place at the beginning of December to try and keep omicron out of the US. We all knew within 2 weeks that didn’t work, but here we are 3 months later and there’s no movement back to the pre-omicron 72-hour testing window. It’s that ratchet again. In the last episode, I mentioned that, at the end of December, I\'d written up a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/30/easy-way-to-do-1-day-testing-for-returning-to-us/\">detailed blog post</a> on how to order and use the Abbott BinaxNOW testing kit to easily hit the US’s 1-day testing window. Allan Marko, occasional TravelCommons contributor, clicked through to the eMed site to order a 6-pack so he could take a couple tests with him on his February getaway to the Yucatan as backup, in case the resort ran out of tests -- those damn supply chain issues. As it turned out, the resort had ample tests -- at $100 a pop, which is… a number. Allan used his Abbott tests -- at $25 each -- instead. Leaves a little extra cash for a good-bye margarita or two… or three.</li><li>And speaking of margaritas, you can get one again on Southwest Airlines. They&nbsp; finally blinked, <a href=\"https://www.swamedia.com/releases/release-a0731e681107d30a52590eb3f92b92a3-southwest-airlines-restoring-on-board-beverage-options\">restarting their in-flight alcohol service</a>, giving up their linkage with the in-flight mask mandate. No surprise, really. No one sees an end in site for in-flight masking. Indeed, European airline execs from Ryanair and TAP, the Portuguese airline, have said they expect masks to be one of the last things dropped and could be around for years. It’s that ratcheting thing again. Glad I kept hold of my old drink coupons. Southwest extended the life of 2020 and 2021 coupons ‘til the end of this year.&nbsp;</li><li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/01/16/podcast-183-covid-test-anxiety-michelin-food-adventures/\">the last episode</a>, I talked about sending my passport into the void that is the US Passport Agency for renewal. My passport didn’t expire until April, but since a lot of countries won’t let you if your passport has less than 6 months left on it, and with all the State Department’s warnings about extended processing times, I figured I should renew it sooner rather than later. The Passport Agency is quoting 8-11 weeks processing time and, here’s a little twist, they’ll only accept your application via US Postal Service. Now I don’t know about you, but the Chicago branches of the Postal Service haven’t exactly been covering themselves in glory over the past couple of months. So, I sent in my application Priority Mail and paid the Passport Agency extra so they’d send it back the same way. Priority Mail did the job getting my application there in a couple of days, and then I was able to track the progress on the Passport Agency’s website. The only glitch was the email update function, where they send you an email each time your application status changes, doesn’t seem to work. But anyhow, the Passport Agency processed my renewal and put my passport in a Priority Mail envelope right at 7 weeks. So good on them coming in under their time quote. But then the Postal Service couldn’t quite get it done. From the tracking history, my passport appears to have hung out a few days in a Chicago transit facility before finally making it into my mailbox. And it’s a bit different from, say, my wife’s passport that she renewed a few years ago. The page with the picture and all the personal information is no longer a kinda sealed paper page. Now, it’s a heavier, thicker piece of plastic, and some data like the passport number and the expiration date are raised. It seems a quantum step up in non-tampering/forgery-proof technology. Now I’m keeping my eye out for my old passport which they send back to me separately because it has my still-valid India visa in it. I don’t have any plans to visit India right now, which is a good thing since the Passport Agency is sending it back via regular post, which means it should get some time, maybe, this spring.</li><li>And as I promised in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/01/16/podcast-183-covid-test-anxiety-michelin-food-adventures/\">the last episode</a>, I finally finished updating my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/31/my-best-restaurants-and-bars-of-2021/\">Best Restaurants, Bars, and Taprooms of 2021</a> post, adding sections for Chicago and London. One of the things that <em>didn’t</em> make the London section was Yorkshire pudding wraps and burritos. I saw these on menus all over the place, where they’d basically take a whole Sunday roast dinner -- roast beef, vegetables, mashed potatoes, gravy -- and wrap it in a flatbread made out of the same ingredients as a Yorkshire pudding -- eggs, flour, and milk. Honestly, it was like shame-watching a car crash. I knew I shouldn’t, but I ordered one anyways, and immediately hated myself for it. So any place with this on the menu; immediate disqualification from my list. Also, I unfortunately had to delete a great little corner dumpling place in New York’s Chinatown that’s “reconcepted” itself since last May. Which was the reason I started that running list last year -- the pandemic closings were happening faster than the guidebooks and blogs could keep up with. Indeed, I went back through the TravelCommons archives and was striking through at least half of my earlier recommendations. So anyhow, I gave the 2021 post a new date of Dec 31 so it would be easy to find; it’s showing up right now on the TravelCommons homepage and at the top of the Blog page. I’m also doing a better job of keeping a running list of my 2022 recommendations. In Louisville, we ate at a <strong><em>great</em></strong> Cuban restaurant, <a href=\"https://www.labodeguitademima.com/\">La Bodeguita De Mima</a>, next door to the AC Hotel in the NuLu district. Apparently, there’s a huge Cuban immigrant community in Louisville, which I can tell you was <strong><em>not</em></strong> the case when my parents lived there in the early ‘80’s. And La Bodeguita De Mimi is just the latest of many Cuban places to open. Highly recommended, especially the Lechon Asado, the roast pork. I’ll post the first cut of my 2022 list in April, after our trips to Brooklyn next week and Santa Fe at the beginning of April</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music -- August (Reggae Rework) by el-B (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/elB/16075 Ft: Calendargirl </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Stealth Travel Inflation</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>For those of us of (and past) a certain age, the last 6 months of inflation news is flashing us back to the ‘70’s and early ‘80’s, and there’s certainly no sense of wistful nostalgia coming from it. Maybe not abject terror, but it’s not a comfortable feeling. The <a href=\"https://www.ustravel.org/\">US Travel Association</a> unpicks the US Department of Labor’s consumer price index (CPI) report and publishes its own monthly <a href=\"https://www.ustravel.org/research/travel-price-index\">travel price index</a> (TPI). I started looking through their <a href=\"https://www.ustravel.org/sites/default/files/2022-02/tpi_jan-2022_0.pdf\">latest TPI which is for January 2022</a> and, among other things, it compares this current travel price index to January 2021 <em>and</em> to pre-pandemic January 2019, before any travel restrictions were in place. Tough to remember, but back then, everybody was traveling. And while all the current inflation headlines prepped me for the current travel price index being 14.5% over last year’s, I was surprised when I saw that current prices are 11.6% higher than January 2019. I guess I anchored a bit too much on those rock-bottom airfares and hotel rates and gas prices in the Spring and Summer of 2020 when no one was traveling. But digging through the detailed line items, it turns out I’m not entirely wrong -- the Airline Fares component of the TPI is still 15% <em>below</em> 2019’s and hotels are only up 6.5% three years on. I couldn’t figure out which line has car rental prices, but it’s no secret that those blew up -- when you could actually <em>find</em> a car. The biggest jumps over 2019 that show up are Food &amp; Beverage, up 13%, and Motor Fuel, no surprise there, up 44%.&nbsp;</li><li>But here’s where we get into the stealth components. Let’s start with hotels. There are cuts in service, getting less for the same price, what’s now being called <em>shrinkflation,</em> that I don’t think is reflected in that 6.5% inflation number. The most common of these are pandemic service cuts that have never gone away. In 2020, when we were still figuring out how COVID spread, how long the surfaces could stay infectious (remember people leaving their groceries outside for 3 days?), it made sense to stop daily room housekeeping. The first post-lockdown trip I made, I stayed in a Hampton Inn and never saw anyone. The Hilton app let me remotely check-in and gave me a digital key, no one serviced the room during my stay, and no free breakfast. And I was fine with that; it made perfect sense given how much we <em>didn’t</em> know in May 2020.&nbsp;</li><li>But now, almost 2 years and 3 vaccination shots later, the AC Hotel in Louisville has a sign taped to the desk in our room saying housekeeping was limited to every 3rd day because of COVID. No, it’s not because of COVID anymore; it’s to improve margins. Comparing this to our stays in similarly-priced hotels in Italy and the UK last fall where service was pretty much back to pre-pandemic standards (the main exception was you couldn’t serve yourself from the breakfast buffet; you pointed at something and a server put it on your plate), it’s that ratchet again; the US chains are working hard to keep those early pandemic service standards. Though with Hilton, there seems to be some play in that ratchet. Rather than a hard “we’re only servicing your room every 3 days”, it’s a softer “our housekeeping is now on request.” So, I guess I could request it every day. For me, it’s not about fresh towels; it’s about getting those little garbage cans emptied. They don’t hold too many empty 16-oz craft beer cans.</li><li>On first look, you’d think that restaurants are doing a bit of their own shrinkflation by continuing their contactless service tactics -- using QR codes for menus and having people order and pay through apps like Toast instead of waiters. Now maybe it’s me, but I don’t see it as reducing service. Instead, I see it as improving productivity through automation. But the stealth inflation that I’ve noticed is the COVID add-on fees that started showing up in post-lockdown 2020 -- 2-3% for extra cleaning or personal protective equipment -- are sticking around. I’m not arguing that they are not real expenses, but so are, say, janitorial service and property taxes but they’re not showing up as additional fees. Roll it into the price of your burger like you do with every other business cost.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>It’s kinda like they’re trying to run the same play the airlines did back in 2008 with baggage fees. American Airlines was the first of the big carriers to do it, charging $15 a bag, saying they needed it to cover the high cost of jet fuel when oil hit $145 a barrel that summer. But 3-4 months later, <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_oil_market_chronology_from_2003#2008:_oil_prices_peak_at_$145.85_then_bottom_at_$32\">when oil prices were half that</a>, the baggage fee stayed and even increased; <a href=\"https://www.aa.com/i18n/travel-info/baggage/checked-baggage-policy.jsp\">American doubled it</a>. Again, it’s that ratchet; the excuse goes away, but the fee doesn’t. Which means it’s really just a price increase; it’s just more inflation.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #184</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_184.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #184 — Figuring Out Stealth Travel Inflation','','inherit','closed','closed','','4100-revision-v1','','','2022-03-03 11:36:14','2022-03-03 16:36:14','',4100,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4105',0,'revision','',0),
(4106,1,'2022-03-03 12:15:10','2022-03-03 17:15:10','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/IMG_2429-scaled.jpeg\"><img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/IMG_2429-300x300.jpeg\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a>Spending a lot more time here[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>In the travel world, what goes up -- rules, fees, prices -- often stays up. It\'s the ratchet effect and it\'s a theme running through this episode. Inflation is on everyone\'s mind, and so we dig into travel price increases, comparing today\'s prices with pre-pandemic levels.  We also talk about US passport renewals ahead of the summer vacation season, and some good Cuban food in Louisville and a questionable food trend in London,. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_184.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #184: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. Sorry about getting this episode out late. I pushed it out a couple of weeks for a trip down to Louisville for a wedding; so I didn’t have to say “No travel since the last episode” again -- tough to do a podcast that’s “more about the journey than the destination” if you’re not journey-ing. And also to give my voice some time to recover from something I picked up down there. I can write a great episode, but if all I can do is croak it out and no one can stand to listen, it feels a bit like a podcast version of “If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, did it make a sound?” And, I have to be honest -- my heart just couldn’t get into trying to be snarky and witty as the Russians launched their invasion of Ukraine. But here we are, a week or so into it and, with a heavy heart, need to move forward.&nbsp;</li><li>So back to travel. I used to get a serious cold at least once a year when traveling non-stop; to the point that, every time I bought something at CVS, at least 4 ft of the usual 6 ft of coupons printed out with the receipt were for cough and cold medications. But after the March 2020 lockdowns, nothing; a nice side benefit of masks and social distancing. But now, maybe in a sign that things are creeping back to normal, I’ve got that old feeling again -- a runny nose, a cough,... So back to CVS for the usual boxes of 12-hour Sudafed and maximum strength Mucinex. And there, at the check-out counter, is a stack of Abbott Binax COVID tests. I throw one of those into the basket because there’s a bit of <a href=\"https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/coronavirus/in-depth/covid-19-cold-flu-and-allergies-differences/art-20503981\">symptom overlap</a> between omicron and a cold. But 15 minutes after violating each of my nostrils in the CVS parking lot, no second line appeared on the test strip. No omicron; I’m just back to my usual cold. The next week I had a couple of in-person meetings and, since I had one more test in the Binax box, decided to ping those nostrils again, just to be safe. Bam! So that’s what a positive test looks like. The sample pink line showed up immediately, even before the second, higher control line did. The instructions may say to wait for 15 minutes, but I knew within 2. Not that much changed -- other than canceling the in-person meeting. I just kept popping the Sudafed and the Mucinex.</li><li>We were lucky with the timing of our drive back home on I-65, threading the weather needle between two snow storms that shut down parts of the interstate north of Indiana. Even with reasonable weather, Waze and Google Maps pointed us toward the exit a couple of times to vector around accident slow downs. It’s kinda funny to see which cars and trucks are using Waze, because we’re all getting off at the same exit, and all making the same turns onto seemingly random county roads running through flat snow-covered farm land, pretty featureless save for a couple of farm houses and stands of gigantic wind mills.&nbsp; But, there were no multi-hour back-ups that would’ve forced us to break out the bourbon bottles to stay warm which, this winter, marks this down as a successful drive home.</li><li>Bridge Music —  &nbsp; I Will Writhe by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/26739 Ft: Soundprank </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>In the last episode, we talked about COVID test anxiety; not being able to start a vacation or come back home from one due to a positive test. With the omicron wave having crested, some countries -- the UK, France, Ireland, but not Italy -- are dropping inbound test requirements for travelers who are fully vaccinated, with the caveat that “fully vaccinated” for these countries includes a booster. I was pleasantly surprised by this. Usually, travel requirements ratchet up; new ones stick and old ones never expire. If you don’t have TSA PreCheck, you’ve been walking through security in your stocking feet for over 15 years now. Maybe because there’s a real cost that travelers can see -- ranging over $100/person sometimes -- as opposed to 5 minutes of inconvenience.</li><li>But as with dropping the initial travel bans, the US is the laggard. Drop in-bound test requirements? The US hasn’t even relaxed the 1-day testing window put in place at the beginning of December to try and keep omicron out of the US. We all knew within 2 weeks that didn’t work, but here we are 3 months later and there’s no movement back to the pre-omicron 72-hour testing window. It’s that ratchet again. In the last episode, I mentioned that, at the end of December, I\'d written up a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/30/easy-way-to-do-1-day-testing-for-returning-to-us/\">detailed blog post</a> on how to order and use the Abbott BinaxNOW testing kit to easily hit the US’s 1-day testing window. Allan Marko, occasional TravelCommons contributor, clicked through to the eMed site to order a 6-pack so he could take a couple tests with him on his February getaway to the Yucatan as backup, in case the resort ran out of tests -- those damn supply chain issues. As it turned out, the resort had ample tests -- at $100 a pop, which is… a number. Allan used his Abbott tests -- at $25 each -- instead. Leaves a little extra cash for a good-bye margarita or two… or three.</li><li>And speaking of margaritas, you can get one again on Southwest Airlines. They&nbsp; finally blinked, <a href=\"https://www.swamedia.com/releases/release-a0731e681107d30a52590eb3f92b92a3-southwest-airlines-restoring-on-board-beverage-options\">restarting their in-flight alcohol service</a>, giving up their linkage with the in-flight mask mandate. No surprise, really. No one sees an end in site for in-flight masking. Indeed, European airline execs from Ryanair and TAP, the Portuguese airline, have said they expect masks to be one of the last things dropped and could be around for years. It’s that ratcheting thing again. Glad I kept hold of my old drink coupons. Southwest extended the life of 2020 and 2021 coupons ‘til the end of this year.&nbsp;</li><li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/01/16/podcast-183-covid-test-anxiety-michelin-food-adventures/\">the last episode</a>, I talked about sending my passport into the void that is the US Passport Agency for renewal. My passport didn’t expire until April, but since a lot of countries won’t let you if your passport has less than 6 months left on it, and with all the State Department’s warnings about extended processing times, I figured I should renew it sooner rather than later. The Passport Agency is quoting 8-11 weeks processing time and, here’s a little twist, they’ll only accept your application via US Postal Service. Now I don’t know about you, but the Chicago branches of the Postal Service haven’t exactly been covering themselves in glory over the past couple of months. So, I sent in my application Priority Mail and paid the Passport Agency extra so they’d send it back the same way. Priority Mail did the job getting my application there in a couple of days, and then I was able to track the progress on the Passport Agency’s website. The only glitch was the email update function, where they send you an email each time your application status changes, doesn’t seem to work. But anyhow, the Passport Agency processed my renewal and put my passport in a Priority Mail envelope right at 7 weeks. So good on them coming in under their time quote. But then the Postal Service couldn’t quite get it done. From the tracking history, my passport appears to have hung out a few days in a Chicago transit facility before finally making it into my mailbox. And it’s a bit different from, say, my wife’s passport that she renewed a few years ago. The page with the picture and all the personal information is no longer a kinda sealed paper page. Now, it’s a heavier, thicker piece of plastic, and some data like the passport number and the expiration date are raised. It seems a quantum step up in non-tampering/forgery-proof technology. Now I’m keeping my eye out for my old passport which they send back to me separately because it has my still-valid India visa in it. I don’t have any plans to visit India right now, which is a good thing since the Passport Agency is sending it back via regular post, which means it should get some time, maybe, this spring.</li><li>And as I promised in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/01/16/podcast-183-covid-test-anxiety-michelin-food-adventures/\">the last episode</a>, I finally finished updating my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/31/my-best-restaurants-and-bars-of-2021/\">Best Restaurants, Bars, and Taprooms of 2021</a> post, adding sections for Chicago and London. One of the things that <em>didn’t</em> make the London section was Yorkshire pudding wraps and burritos. I saw these on menus all over the place, where they’d basically take a whole Sunday roast dinner -- roast beef, vegetables, mashed potatoes, gravy -- and wrap it in a flatbread made out of the same ingredients as a Yorkshire pudding -- eggs, flour, and milk. Honestly, it was like shame-watching a car crash. I knew I shouldn’t, but I ordered one anyways, and immediately hated myself for it. So any place with this on the menu; immediate disqualification from my list. Also, I unfortunately had to delete a great little corner dumpling place in New York’s Chinatown that’s “reconcepted” itself since last May. Which was the reason I started that running list last year -- the pandemic closings were happening faster than the guidebooks and blogs could keep up with. Indeed, I went back through the TravelCommons archives and was striking through at least half of my earlier recommendations. So anyhow, I gave the 2021 post a new date of Dec 31 so it would be easy to find; it’s showing up right now on the TravelCommons homepage and at the top of the Blog page. I’m also doing a better job of keeping a running list of my 2022 recommendations. In Louisville, we ate at a <strong><em>great</em></strong> Cuban restaurant, <a href=\"https://www.labodeguitademima.com/\">La Bodeguita De Mima</a>, next door to the AC Hotel in the NuLu district. Apparently, there’s a huge Cuban immigrant community in Louisville, which I can tell you was <strong><em>not</em></strong> the case when my parents lived there in the early ‘80’s. And La Bodeguita De Mimi is just the latest of many Cuban places to open. Highly recommended, especially the Lechon Asado, the roast pork. I’ll post the first cut of my 2022 list in April, after our trips to Brooklyn next week and Santa Fe at the beginning of April</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music -- August (Reggae Rework) by el-B (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/elB/16075 Ft: Calendargirl </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Stealth Travel Inflation</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>For those of us of (and past) a certain age, the last 6 months of inflation news is flashing us back to the ‘70’s and early ‘80’s, and there’s certainly no sense of wistful nostalgia coming from it. Maybe not abject terror, but it’s not a comfortable feeling. The <a href=\"https://www.ustravel.org/\">US Travel Association</a> unpicks the US Department of Labor’s consumer price index (CPI) report and publishes its own monthly <a href=\"https://www.ustravel.org/research/travel-price-index\">travel price index</a> (TPI). I started looking through their <a href=\"https://www.ustravel.org/sites/default/files/2022-02/tpi_jan-2022_0.pdf\">latest TPI which is for January 2022</a> and, among other things, it compares this current travel price index to January 2021 <em>and</em> to pre-pandemic January 2019, before any travel restrictions were in place. Tough to remember, but back then, everybody was traveling. And while all the current inflation headlines prepped me for the current travel price index being 14.5% over last year’s, I was surprised when I saw that current prices are 11.6% higher than January 2019. I guess I anchored a bit too much on those rock-bottom airfares and hotel rates and gas prices in the Spring and Summer of 2020 when no one was traveling. But digging through the detailed line items, it turns out I’m not entirely wrong -- the Airline Fares component of the TPI is still 15% <em>below</em> 2019’s and hotels are only up 6.5% three years on. I couldn’t figure out which line has car rental prices, but it’s no secret that those blew up -- when you could actually <em>find</em> a car. The biggest jumps over 2019 that show up are Food &amp; Beverage, up 13%, and Motor Fuel, no surprise there, up 44%.&nbsp;</li><li>But here’s where we get into the stealth components. Let’s start with hotels. There are cuts in service, getting less for the same price, what’s now being called <em>shrinkflation,</em> that I don’t think is reflected in that 6.5% inflation number. The most common of these are pandemic service cuts that have never gone away. In 2020, when we were still figuring out how COVID spread, how long the surfaces could stay infectious (remember people leaving their groceries outside for 3 days?), it made sense to stop daily room housekeeping. The first post-lockdown trip I made, I stayed in a Hampton Inn and never saw anyone. The Hilton app let me remotely check-in and gave me a digital key, no one serviced the room during my stay, and no free breakfast. And I was fine with that; it made perfect sense given how much we <em>didn’t</em> know in May 2020.&nbsp;</li><li>But now, almost 2 years and 3 vaccination shots later, the AC Hotel in Louisville has a sign taped to the desk in our room saying housekeeping was limited to every 3rd day because of COVID. No, it’s not because of COVID anymore; it’s to improve margins. Comparing this to our stays in similarly-priced hotels in Italy and the UK last fall where service was pretty much back to pre-pandemic standards (the main exception was you couldn’t serve yourself from the breakfast buffet; you pointed at something and a server put it on your plate), it’s that ratchet again; the US chains are working hard to keep those early pandemic service standards. Though with Hilton, there seems to be some play in that ratchet. Rather than a hard “we’re only servicing your room every 3 days”, it’s a softer “our housekeeping is now on request.” So, I guess I could request it every day. For me, it’s not about fresh towels; it’s about getting those little garbage cans emptied. They don’t hold too many empty 16-oz craft beer cans.</li><li>On first look, you’d think that restaurants are doing a bit of their own shrinkflation by continuing their contactless service tactics -- using QR codes for menus and having people order and pay through apps like Toast instead of waiters. Now maybe it’s me, but I don’t see it as reducing service. Instead, I see it as improving productivity through automation. But the stealth inflation that I’ve noticed is the COVID add-on fees that started showing up in post-lockdown 2020 -- 2-3% for extra cleaning or personal protective equipment -- are sticking around. I’m not arguing that they are not real expenses, but so are, say, janitorial service and property taxes but they’re not showing up as additional fees. Roll it into the price of your burger like you do with every other business cost.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>It’s kinda like they’re trying to run the same play the airlines did back in 2008 with baggage fees. American Airlines was the first of the big carriers to do it, charging $15 a bag, saying they needed it to cover the high cost of jet fuel when oil hit $145 a barrel that summer. But 3-4 months later, <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_oil_market_chronology_from_2003#2008:_oil_prices_peak_at_$145.85_then_bottom_at_$32\">when oil prices were half that</a>, the baggage fee stayed and even increased; <a href=\"https://www.aa.com/i18n/travel-info/baggage/checked-baggage-policy.jsp\">American doubled it</a>. Again, it’s that ratchet; the excuse goes away, but the fee doesn’t. Which means it’s really just a price increase; it’s just more inflation.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #184</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_184.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #184 — Figuring Out Stealth Travel Inflation','','inherit','closed','closed','','4100-revision-v1','','','2022-03-03 12:15:10','2022-03-03 17:15:10','',4100,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4106',0,'revision','',0),
(4107,1,'2022-03-03 12:21:15','2022-03-03 17:21:15','[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/IMG_2429-scaled.jpeg\"><img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/IMG_2429-300x300.jpeg\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Gonna need to spend a lot more time here[/caption]\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>In the travel world, what goes up -- rules, fees, prices -- often stays up. It\'s the ratchet effect and it\'s a theme running through this episode. Inflation is on everyone\'s mind, and so we dig into travel inflation, comparing today\'s prices with pre-pandemic levels.  We also talk about US passport renewals ahead of the summer vacation season, and some good Cuban food in Louisville and a questionable food trend in London,. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_184.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #184: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. Sorry about getting this episode out late. I pushed it out a couple of weeks for a trip down to Louisville for a wedding; so I didn’t have to say “No travel since the last episode” again -- tough to do a podcast that’s “more about the journey than the destination” if you’re not journey-ing. And also to give my voice some time to recover from something I picked up down there. I can write a great episode, but if all I can do is croak it out and no one can stand to listen, it feels a bit like a podcast version of “If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, did it make a sound?” And, I have to be honest -- my heart just couldn’t get into trying to be snarky and witty as the Russians launched their invasion of Ukraine. But here we are, a week or so into it and, with a heavy heart, need to move forward.&nbsp;</li><li>So back to travel. I used to get a serious cold at least once a year when traveling non-stop; to the point that, every time I bought something at CVS, at least 4 ft of the usual 6 ft of coupons printed out with the receipt were for cough and cold medications. But after the March 2020 lockdowns, nothing; a nice side benefit of masks and social distancing. But now, maybe in a sign that things are creeping back to normal, I’ve got that old feeling again -- a runny nose, a cough,... So back to CVS for the usual boxes of 12-hour Sudafed and maximum strength Mucinex. And there, at the check-out counter, is a stack of Abbott Binax COVID tests. I throw one of those into the basket because there’s a bit of <a href=\"https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/coronavirus/in-depth/covid-19-cold-flu-and-allergies-differences/art-20503981\">symptom overlap</a> between omicron and a cold. But 15 minutes after violating each of my nostrils in the CVS parking lot, no second line appeared on the test strip. No omicron; I’m just back to my usual cold. The next week I had a couple of in-person meetings and, since I had one more test in the Binax box, decided to ping those nostrils again, just to be safe. Bam! So that’s what a positive test looks like. The sample pink line showed up immediately, even before the second, higher control line did. The instructions may say to wait for 15 minutes, but I knew within 2. Not that much changed -- other than canceling the in-person meeting. I just kept popping the Sudafed and the Mucinex.</li><li>We were lucky with the timing of our drive back home on I-65, threading the weather needle between two snow storms that shut down parts of the interstate north of Indiana. Even with reasonable weather, Waze and Google Maps pointed us toward the exit a couple of times to vector around accident slow downs. It’s kinda funny to see which cars and trucks are using Waze, because we’re all getting off at the same exit, and all making the same turns onto seemingly random county roads running through flat snow-covered farm land, pretty featureless save for a couple of farm houses and stands of gigantic wind mills.&nbsp; But, there were no multi-hour back-ups that would’ve forced us to break out the bourbon bottles to stay warm which, this winter, marks this down as a successful drive home.</li><li>Bridge Music —  &nbsp; I Will Writhe by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/26739 Ft: Soundprank </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>In the last episode, we talked about COVID test anxiety; not being able to start a vacation or come back home from one due to a positive test. With the omicron wave having crested, some countries -- the UK, France, Ireland, but not Italy -- are dropping inbound test requirements for travelers who are fully vaccinated, with the caveat that “fully vaccinated” for these countries includes a booster. I was pleasantly surprised by this. Usually, travel requirements ratchet up; new ones stick and old ones never expire. If you don’t have TSA PreCheck, you’ve been walking through security in your stocking feet for over 15 years now. Maybe because there’s a real cost that travelers can see -- ranging over $100/person sometimes -- as opposed to 5 minutes of inconvenience.</li><li>But as with dropping the initial travel bans, the US is the laggard. Drop in-bound test requirements? The US hasn’t even relaxed the 1-day testing window put in place at the beginning of December to try and keep omicron out of the US. We all knew within 2 weeks that didn’t work, but here we are 3 months later and there’s no movement back to the pre-omicron 72-hour testing window. It’s that ratchet again. In the last episode, I mentioned that, at the end of December, I\'d written up a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/30/easy-way-to-do-1-day-testing-for-returning-to-us/\">detailed blog post</a> on how to order and use the Abbott BinaxNOW testing kit to easily hit the US’s 1-day testing window. Allan Marko, occasional TravelCommons contributor, clicked through to the eMed site to order a 6-pack so he could take a couple tests with him on his February getaway to the Yucatan as backup, in case the resort ran out of tests -- those damn supply chain issues. As it turned out, the resort had ample tests -- at $100 a pop, which is… a number. Allan used his Abbott tests -- at $25 each -- instead. Leaves a little extra cash for a good-bye margarita or two… or three.</li><li>And speaking of margaritas, you can get one again on Southwest Airlines. They&nbsp; finally blinked, <a href=\"https://www.swamedia.com/releases/release-a0731e681107d30a52590eb3f92b92a3-southwest-airlines-restoring-on-board-beverage-options\">restarting their in-flight alcohol service</a>, giving up their linkage with the in-flight mask mandate. No surprise, really. No one sees an end in site for in-flight masking. Indeed, European airline execs from Ryanair and TAP, the Portuguese airline, have said they expect masks to be one of the last things dropped and could be around for years. It’s that ratcheting thing again. Glad I kept hold of my old drink coupons. Southwest extended the life of 2020 and 2021 coupons ‘til the end of this year.&nbsp;</li><li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/01/16/podcast-183-covid-test-anxiety-michelin-food-adventures/\">the last episode</a>, I talked about sending my passport into the void that is the US Passport Agency for renewal. My passport didn’t expire until April, but since a lot of countries won’t let you if your passport has less than 6 months left on it, and with all the State Department’s warnings about extended processing times, I figured I should renew it sooner rather than later. The Passport Agency is quoting 8-11 weeks processing time and, here’s a little twist, they’ll only accept your application via US Postal Service. Now I don’t know about you, but the Chicago branches of the Postal Service haven’t exactly been covering themselves in glory over the past couple of months. So, I sent in my application Priority Mail and paid the Passport Agency extra so they’d send it back the same way. Priority Mail did the job getting my application there in a couple of days, and then I was able to track the progress on the Passport Agency’s website. The only glitch was the email update function, where they send you an email each time your application status changes, doesn’t seem to work. But anyhow, the Passport Agency processed my renewal and put my passport in a Priority Mail envelope right at 7 weeks. So good on them coming in under their time quote. But then the Postal Service couldn’t quite get it done. From the tracking history, my passport appears to have hung out a few days in a Chicago transit facility before finally making it into my mailbox. And it’s a bit different from, say, my wife’s passport that she renewed a few years ago. The page with the picture and all the personal information is no longer a kinda sealed paper page. Now, it’s a heavier, thicker piece of plastic, and some data like the passport number and the expiration date are raised. It seems a quantum step up in non-tampering/forgery-proof technology. Now I’m keeping my eye out for my old passport which they send back to me separately because it has my still-valid India visa in it. I don’t have any plans to visit India right now, which is a good thing since the Passport Agency is sending it back via regular post, which means it should get some time, maybe, this spring.</li><li>And as I promised in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/01/16/podcast-183-covid-test-anxiety-michelin-food-adventures/\">the last episode</a>, I finally finished updating my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/31/my-best-restaurants-and-bars-of-2021/\">Best Restaurants, Bars, and Taprooms of 2021</a> post, adding sections for Chicago and London. One of the things that <em>didn’t</em> make the London section was Yorkshire pudding wraps and burritos. I saw these on menus all over the place, where they’d basically take a whole Sunday roast dinner -- roast beef, vegetables, mashed potatoes, gravy -- and wrap it in a flatbread made out of the same ingredients as a Yorkshire pudding -- eggs, flour, and milk. Honestly, it was like shame-watching a car crash. I knew I shouldn’t, but I ordered one anyways, and immediately hated myself for it. So any place with this on the menu; immediate disqualification from my list. Also, I unfortunately had to delete a great little corner dumpling place in New York’s Chinatown that’s “reconcepted” itself since last May. Which was the reason I started that running list last year -- the pandemic closings were happening faster than the guidebooks and blogs could keep up with. Indeed, I went back through the TravelCommons archives and was striking through at least half of my earlier recommendations. So anyhow, I gave the 2021 post a new date of Dec 31 so it would be easy to find; it’s showing up right now on the TravelCommons homepage and at the top of the Blog page. I’m also doing a better job of keeping a running list of my 2022 recommendations. In Louisville, we ate at a <strong><em>great</em></strong> Cuban restaurant, <a href=\"https://www.labodeguitademima.com/\">La Bodeguita De Mima</a>, next door to the AC Hotel in the NuLu district. Apparently, there’s a huge Cuban immigrant community in Louisville, which I can tell you was <strong><em>not</em></strong> the case when my parents lived there in the early ‘80’s. And La Bodeguita De Mimi is just the latest of many Cuban places to open. Highly recommended, especially the Lechon Asado, the roast pork. I’ll post the first cut of my 2022 list in April, after our trips to Brooklyn next week and Santa Fe at the beginning of April</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music -- August (Reggae Rework) by el-B (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/elB/16075 Ft: Calendargirl </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Stealth Travel Inflation</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>For those of us of (and past) a certain age, the last 6 months of inflation news is flashing us back to the ‘70’s and early ‘80’s, and there’s certainly no sense of wistful nostalgia coming from it. Maybe not abject terror, but it’s not a comfortable feeling. The <a href=\"https://www.ustravel.org/\">US Travel Association</a> unpicks the US Department of Labor’s consumer price index (CPI) report and publishes its own monthly <a href=\"https://www.ustravel.org/research/travel-price-index\">travel price index</a> (TPI). I started looking through their <a href=\"https://www.ustravel.org/sites/default/files/2022-02/tpi_jan-2022_0.pdf\">latest TPI which is for January 2022</a> and, among other things, it compares this current travel price index to January 2021 <em>and</em> to pre-pandemic January 2019, before any travel restrictions were in place. Tough to remember, but back then, everybody was traveling. And while all the current inflation headlines prepped me for the current travel price index being 14.5% over last year’s, I was surprised when I saw that current prices are 11.6% higher than January 2019. I guess I anchored a bit too much on those rock-bottom airfares and hotel rates and gas prices in the Spring and Summer of 2020 when no one was traveling. But digging through the detailed line items, it turns out I’m not entirely wrong -- the Airline Fares component of the TPI is still 15% <em>below</em> 2019’s and hotels are only up 6.5% three years on. I couldn’t figure out which line has car rental prices, but it’s no secret that those blew up -- when you could actually <em>find</em> a car. The biggest jumps over 2019 that show up are Food &amp; Beverage, up 13%, and Motor Fuel, no surprise there, up 44%.&nbsp;</li><li>But here’s where we get into the stealth components. Let’s start with hotels. There are cuts in service, getting less for the same price, what’s now being called <em>shrinkflation,</em> that I don’t think is reflected in that 6.5% inflation number. The most common of these are pandemic service cuts that have never gone away. In 2020, when we were still figuring out how COVID spread, how long the surfaces could stay infectious (remember people leaving their groceries outside for 3 days?), it made sense to stop daily room housekeeping. The first post-lockdown trip I made, I stayed in a Hampton Inn and never saw anyone. The Hilton app let me remotely check-in and gave me a digital key, no one serviced the room during my stay, and no free breakfast. And I was fine with that; it made perfect sense given how much we <em>didn’t</em> know in May 2020.&nbsp;</li><li>But now, almost 2 years and 3 vaccination shots later, the AC Hotel in Louisville has a sign taped to the desk in our room saying housekeeping was limited to every 3rd day because of COVID. No, it’s not because of COVID anymore; it’s to improve margins. Comparing this to our stays in similarly-priced hotels in Italy and the UK last fall where service was pretty much back to pre-pandemic standards (the main exception was you couldn’t serve yourself from the breakfast buffet; you pointed at something and a server put it on your plate), it’s that ratchet again; the US chains are working hard to keep those early pandemic service standards. Though with Hilton, there seems to be some play in that ratchet. Rather than a hard “we’re only servicing your room every 3 days”, it’s a softer “our housekeeping is now on request.” So, I guess I could request it every day. For me, it’s not about fresh towels; it’s about getting those little garbage cans emptied. They don’t hold too many empty 16-oz craft beer cans.</li><li>On first look, you’d think that restaurants are doing a bit of their own shrinkflation by continuing their contactless service tactics -- using QR codes for menus and having people order and pay through apps like Toast instead of waiters. Now maybe it’s me, but I don’t see it as reducing service. Instead, I see it as improving productivity through automation. But the stealth inflation that I’ve noticed is the COVID add-on fees that started showing up in post-lockdown 2020 -- 2-3% for extra cleaning or personal protective equipment -- are sticking around. I’m not arguing that they are not real expenses, but so are, say, janitorial service and property taxes but they’re not showing up as additional fees. Roll it into the price of your burger like you do with every other business cost.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>It’s kinda like they’re trying to run the same play the airlines did back in 2008 with baggage fees. American Airlines was the first of the big carriers to do it, charging $15 a bag, saying they needed it to cover the high cost of jet fuel when oil hit $145 a barrel that summer. But 3-4 months later, <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_oil_market_chronology_from_2003#2008:_oil_prices_peak_at_$145.85_then_bottom_at_$32\">when oil prices were half that</a>, the baggage fee stayed and even increased; <a href=\"https://www.aa.com/i18n/travel-info/baggage/checked-baggage-policy.jsp\">American doubled it</a>. Again, it’s that ratchet; the excuse goes away, but the fee doesn’t. Which means it’s really just a price increase; it’s just more inflation.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #184</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_184.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #184 — Figuring Out Stealth Travel Inflation','','inherit','closed','closed','','4100-revision-v1','','','2022-03-03 12:21:15','2022-03-03 17:21:15','',4100,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4107',0,'revision','',0),
(4108,1,'2022-03-03 12:25:44','2022-03-03 17:25:44','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/IMG_2429-scaled.jpeg\"><img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/IMG_2429-300x300.jpeg\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> Gonna need to spend a lot more time here[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>In the travel world, what goes up -- rules, fees, prices -- often stays up. It\'s the ratchet effect and it\'s a theme running through this episode. Inflation is on everyone\'s mind, and so we dig into travel inflation, comparing today\'s prices with pre-pandemic levels.  We also talk about US passport renewals ahead of the summer vacation season, and some good Cuban food in Louisville and a questionable food trend in London,. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_184.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #184: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. Sorry about getting this episode out late. I pushed it out a couple of weeks for a trip down to Louisville for a wedding; so I didn’t have to say “No travel since the last episode” again -- tough to do a podcast that’s “more about the journey than the destination” if you’re not journey-ing. And also to give my voice some time to recover from something I picked up down there. I can write a great episode, but if all I can do is croak it out and no one can stand to listen, it feels a bit like a podcast version of “If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, did it make a sound?” And, I have to be honest -- my heart just couldn’t get into trying to be snarky and witty as the Russians launched their invasion of Ukraine. But here we are, a week or so into it and, with a heavy heart, need to move forward.&nbsp;</li><li>So back to travel. I used to get a serious cold at least once a year when traveling non-stop; to the point that, every time I bought something at CVS, at least 4 ft of the usual 6 ft of coupons printed out with the receipt were for cough and cold medications. But after the March 2020 lockdowns, nothing; a nice side benefit of masks and social distancing. But now, maybe in a sign that things are creeping back to normal, I’ve got that old feeling again -- a runny nose, a cough,... So back to CVS for the usual boxes of 12-hour Sudafed and maximum strength Mucinex. And there, at the check-out counter, is a stack of Abbott Binax COVID tests. I throw one of those into the basket because there’s a bit of <a href=\"https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/coronavirus/in-depth/covid-19-cold-flu-and-allergies-differences/art-20503981\">symptom overlap</a> between omicron and a cold. But 15 minutes after violating each of my nostrils in the CVS parking lot, no second line appeared on the test strip. No omicron; I’m just back to my usual cold. The next week I had a couple of in-person meetings and, since I had one more test in the Binax box, decided to ping those nostrils again, just to be safe. Bam! So that’s what a positive test looks like. The sample pink line showed up immediately, even before the second, higher control line did. The instructions may say to wait for 15 minutes, but I knew within 2. Not that much changed -- other than canceling the in-person meeting. I just kept popping the Sudafed and the Mucinex.</li><li>We were lucky with the timing of our drive back home on I-65, threading the weather needle between two snow storms that shut down parts of the interstate north of Indiana. Even with reasonable weather, Waze and Google Maps pointed us toward the exit a couple of times to vector around accident slow downs. It’s kinda funny to see which cars and trucks are using Waze, because we’re all getting off at the same exit, and all making the same turns onto seemingly random county roads running through flat snow-covered farm land, pretty featureless save for a couple of farm houses and stands of gigantic wind mills.&nbsp; But, there were no multi-hour back-ups that would’ve forced us to break out the bourbon bottles to stay warm which, this winter, marks this down as a successful drive home.</li><li>Bridge Music —  &nbsp; I Will Writhe by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/26739 Ft: Soundprank </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>In the last episode, we talked about COVID test anxiety; not being able to start a vacation or come back home from one due to a positive test. With the omicron wave having crested, some countries -- the UK, France, Ireland, but not Italy -- are dropping inbound test requirements for travelers who are fully vaccinated, with the caveat that “fully vaccinated” for these countries includes a booster. I was pleasantly surprised by this. Usually, travel requirements ratchet up; new ones stick and old ones never expire. If you don’t have TSA PreCheck, you’ve been walking through security in your stocking feet for over 15 years now. Maybe because there’s a real cost that travelers can see -- ranging over $100/person sometimes -- as opposed to 5 minutes of inconvenience.</li><li>But as with dropping the initial travel bans, the US is the laggard. Drop in-bound test requirements? The US hasn’t even relaxed the 1-day testing window put in place at the beginning of December to try and keep omicron out of the US. We all knew within 2 weeks that didn’t work, but here we are 3 months later and there’s no movement back to the pre-omicron 72-hour testing window. It’s that ratchet again. In the last episode, I mentioned that, at the end of December, I\'d written up a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/30/easy-way-to-do-1-day-testing-for-returning-to-us/\">detailed blog post</a> on how to order and use the Abbott BinaxNOW testing kit to easily hit the US’s 1-day testing window. Allan Marko, occasional TravelCommons contributor, clicked through to the eMed site to order a 6-pack so he could take a couple tests with him on his February getaway to the Yucatan as backup, in case the resort ran out of tests -- those damn supply chain issues. As it turned out, the resort had ample tests -- at $100 a pop, which is… a number. Allan used his Abbott tests -- at $25 each -- instead. Leaves a little extra cash for a good-bye margarita or two… or three.</li><li>And speaking of margaritas, you can get one again on Southwest Airlines. They&nbsp; finally blinked, <a href=\"https://www.swamedia.com/releases/release-a0731e681107d30a52590eb3f92b92a3-southwest-airlines-restoring-on-board-beverage-options\">restarting their in-flight alcohol service</a>, giving up their linkage with the in-flight mask mandate. No surprise, really. No one sees an end in site for in-flight masking. Indeed, European airline execs from Ryanair and TAP, the Portuguese airline, have said they expect masks to be one of the last things dropped and could be around for years. It’s that ratcheting thing again. Glad I kept hold of my old drink coupons. Southwest extended the life of 2020 and 2021 coupons ‘til the end of this year.&nbsp;</li><li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/01/16/podcast-183-covid-test-anxiety-michelin-food-adventures/\">the last episode</a>, I talked about sending my passport into the void that is the US Passport Agency for renewal. My passport didn’t expire until April, but since a lot of countries won’t let you if your passport has less than 6 months left on it, and with all the State Department’s warnings about extended processing times, I figured I should renew it sooner rather than later. The Passport Agency is quoting 8-11 weeks processing time and, here’s a little twist, they’ll only accept your application via US Postal Service. Now I don’t know about you, but the Chicago branches of the Postal Service haven’t exactly been covering themselves in glory over the past couple of months. So, I sent in my application Priority Mail and paid the Passport Agency extra so they’d send it back the same way. Priority Mail did the job getting my application there in a couple of days, and then I was able to track the progress on the Passport Agency’s website. The only glitch was the email update function, where they send you an email each time your application status changes, doesn’t seem to work. But anyhow, the Passport Agency processed my renewal and put my passport in a Priority Mail envelope right at 7 weeks. So good on them coming in under their time quote. But then the Postal Service couldn’t quite get it done. From the tracking history, my passport appears to have hung out a few days in a Chicago transit facility before finally making it into my mailbox. And it’s a bit different from, say, my wife’s passport that she renewed a few years ago. The page with the picture and all the personal information is no longer a kinda sealed paper page. Now, it’s a heavier, thicker piece of plastic, and some data like the passport number and the expiration date are raised. It seems a quantum step up in non-tampering/forgery-proof technology. Now I’m keeping my eye out for my old passport which they send back to me separately because it has my still-valid India visa in it. I don’t have any plans to visit India right now, which is a good thing since the Passport Agency is sending it back via regular post, which means it should get some time, maybe, this spring.</li><li>And as I promised in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/01/16/podcast-183-covid-test-anxiety-michelin-food-adventures/\">the last episode</a>, I finally finished updating my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/31/my-best-restaurants-and-bars-of-2021/\">Best Restaurants, Bars, and Taprooms of 2021</a> post, adding sections for Chicago and London. One of the things that <em>didn’t</em> make the London section was Yorkshire pudding wraps and burritos. I saw these on menus all over the place, where they’d basically take a whole Sunday roast dinner -- roast beef, vegetables, mashed potatoes, gravy -- and wrap it in a flatbread made out of the same ingredients as a Yorkshire pudding -- eggs, flour, and milk. Honestly, it was like shame-watching a car crash. I knew I shouldn’t, but I ordered one anyways, and immediately hated myself for it. So any place with this on the menu; immediate disqualification from my list. Also, I unfortunately had to delete a great little corner dumpling place in New York’s Chinatown that’s “reconcepted” itself since last May. Which was the reason I started that running list last year -- the pandemic closings were happening faster than the guidebooks and blogs could keep up with. Indeed, I went back through the TravelCommons archives and was striking through at least half of my earlier recommendations. So anyhow, I gave the 2021 post a new date of Dec 31 so it would be easy to find; it’s showing up right now on the TravelCommons homepage and at the top of the Blog page. I’m also doing a better job of keeping a running list of my 2022 recommendations. In Louisville, we ate at a <strong><em>great</em></strong> Cuban restaurant, <a href=\"https://www.labodeguitademima.com/\">La Bodeguita De Mima</a>, next door to the AC Hotel in the NuLu district. Apparently, there’s a huge Cuban immigrant community in Louisville, which I can tell you was <strong><em>not</em></strong> the case when my parents lived there in the early ‘80’s. And La Bodeguita De Mimi is just the latest of many Cuban places to open. Highly recommended, especially the Lechon Asado, the roast pork. I’ll post the first cut of my 2022 list in April, after our trips to Brooklyn next week and Santa Fe at the beginning of April</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music -- August (Reggae Rework) by el-B (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/elB/16075 Ft: Calendargirl </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Stealth Travel Inflation</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>For those of us of (and past) a certain age, the last 6 months of inflation news is flashing us back to the ‘70’s and early ‘80’s, and there’s certainly no sense of wistful nostalgia coming from it. Maybe not abject terror, but it’s not a comfortable feeling. The <a href=\"https://www.ustravel.org/\">US Travel Association</a> unpicks the US Department of Labor’s consumer price index (CPI) report and publishes its own monthly <a href=\"https://www.ustravel.org/research/travel-price-index\">travel price index</a> (TPI). I started looking through their <a href=\"https://www.ustravel.org/sites/default/files/2022-02/tpi_jan-2022_0.pdf\">latest TPI which is for January 2022</a> and, among other things, it compares this current travel price index to January 2021 <em>and</em> to pre-pandemic January 2019, before any travel restrictions were in place. Tough to remember, but back then, everybody was traveling. And while all the current inflation headlines prepped me for the current travel price index being 14.5% over last year’s, I was surprised when I saw that current prices are 11.6% higher than January 2019. I guess I anchored a bit too much on those rock-bottom airfares and hotel rates and gas prices in the Spring and Summer of 2020 when no one was traveling. But digging through the detailed line items, it turns out I’m not entirely wrong -- the Airline Fares component of the TPI is still 15% <em>below</em> 2019’s and hotels are only up 6.5% three years on. I couldn’t figure out which line has car rental prices, but it’s no secret that those blew up -- when you could actually <em>find</em> a car. The biggest jumps over 2019 that show up are Food &amp; Beverage, up 13%, and Motor Fuel, no surprise there, up 44%.&nbsp;</li><li>But here’s where we get into the stealth components. Let’s start with hotels. There are cuts in service, getting less for the same price, what’s now being called <em>shrinkflation,</em> that I don’t think is reflected in that 6.5% inflation number. The most common of these are pandemic service cuts that have never gone away. In 2020, when we were still figuring out how COVID spread, how long the surfaces could stay infectious (remember people leaving their groceries outside for 3 days?), it made sense to stop daily room housekeeping. The first post-lockdown trip I made, I stayed in a Hampton Inn and never saw anyone. The Hilton app let me remotely check-in and gave me a digital key, no one serviced the room during my stay, and no free breakfast. And I was fine with that; it made perfect sense given how much we <em>didn’t</em> know in May 2020.&nbsp;</li><li>But now, almost 2 years and 3 vaccination shots later, the AC Hotel in Louisville has a sign taped to the desk in our room saying housekeeping was limited to every 3rd day because of COVID. No, it’s not because of COVID anymore; it’s to improve margins. Comparing this to our stays in similarly-priced hotels in Italy and the UK last fall where service was pretty much back to pre-pandemic standards (the main exception was you couldn’t serve yourself from the breakfast buffet; you pointed at something and a server put it on your plate), it’s that ratchet again; the US chains are working hard to keep those early pandemic service standards. Though with Hilton, there seems to be some play in that ratchet. Rather than a hard “we’re only servicing your room every 3 days”, it’s a softer “our housekeeping is now on request.” So, I guess I could request it every day. For me, it’s not about fresh towels; it’s about getting those little garbage cans emptied. They don’t hold too many empty 16-oz craft beer cans.</li><li>On first look, you’d think that restaurants are doing a bit of their own shrinkflation by continuing their contactless service tactics -- using QR codes for menus and having people order and pay through apps like Toast instead of waiters. Now maybe it’s me, but I don’t see it as reducing service. Instead, I see it as improving productivity through automation. But the stealth inflation that I’ve noticed is the COVID add-on fees that started showing up in post-lockdown 2020 -- 2-3% for extra cleaning or personal protective equipment -- are sticking around. I’m not arguing that they are not real expenses, but so are, say, janitorial service and property taxes but they’re not showing up as additional fees. Roll it into the price of your burger like you do with every other business cost.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>It’s kinda like they’re trying to run the same play the airlines did back in 2008 with baggage fees. American Airlines was the first of the big carriers to do it, charging $15 a bag, saying they needed it to cover the high cost of jet fuel when oil hit $145 a barrel that summer. But 3-4 months later, <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_oil_market_chronology_from_2003#2008:_oil_prices_peak_at_$145.85_then_bottom_at_$32\">when oil prices were half that</a>, the baggage fee stayed and even increased; <a href=\"https://www.aa.com/i18n/travel-info/baggage/checked-baggage-policy.jsp\">American doubled it</a>. Again, it’s that ratchet; the excuse goes away, but the fee doesn’t. Which means it’s really just a price increase; it’s just more inflation.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #184</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_184.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #184 — Figuring Out Stealth Travel Inflation','In the travel world, what goes up -- rules, fees, prices -- often stays up. It\'s the ratchet effect and it\'s a theme running through this episode. Inflation is on everyone\'s mind, and so we dig into travel inflation, comparing today\'s prices with pre-pandemic levels.  We also talk about US passport renewals ahead of the summer vacation season, and some good Cuban food in Louisville and a questionable food trend in London,. All this and more - click here to download the podcast file, go up to the Subscribe section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.','inherit','closed','closed','','4100-revision-v1','','','2022-03-03 12:25:44','2022-03-03 17:25:44','',4100,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4108',0,'revision','',0),
(4109,1,'2022-03-03 12:35:13','2022-03-03 17:35:13','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/IMG_2429-scaled.jpeg\"><img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/IMG_2429-300x300.jpeg\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> Gonna need to spend a lot more time here[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>In the travel world, what goes up -- rules, fees, prices -- often stays up. It\'s the ratchet effect and it\'s a theme running through this episode. Inflation is on everyone\'s mind, and so we dig into travel inflation, comparing today\'s prices with pre-pandemic levels.  We also talk about US passport renewals ahead of the summer vacation season, and some good Cuban food in Louisville and a questionable food trend in London. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_184.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #184: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. Sorry about getting this episode out late. I pushed it out a couple of weeks for a trip down to Louisville for a wedding; so I didn’t have to say “No travel since the last episode” again -- tough to do a podcast that’s “more about the journey than the destination” if you’re not journey-ing. And also to give my voice some time to recover from something I picked up down there. I can write a great episode, but if all I can do is croak it out and no one can stand to listen, it feels a bit like a podcast version of “If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, did it make a sound?” And, I have to be honest -- my heart just couldn’t get into trying to be snarky and witty as the Russians launched their invasion of Ukraine. But here we are, a week or so into it and, with a heavy heart, need to move forward.&nbsp;</li><li>So back to travel. I used to get a serious cold at least once a year when traveling non-stop; to the point that, every time I bought something at CVS, at least 4 ft of the usual 6 ft of coupons printed out with the receipt were for cough and cold medications. But after the March 2020 lockdowns, nothing; a nice side benefit of masks and social distancing. But now, maybe in a sign that things are creeping back to normal, I’ve got that old feeling again -- a runny nose, a cough,... So back to CVS for the usual boxes of 12-hour Sudafed and maximum strength Mucinex. And there, at the check-out counter, is a stack of Abbott Binax COVID tests. I throw one of those into the basket because there’s a bit of <a href=\"https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/coronavirus/in-depth/covid-19-cold-flu-and-allergies-differences/art-20503981\">symptom overlap</a> between omicron and a cold. But 15 minutes after violating each of my nostrils in the CVS parking lot, no second line appeared on the test strip. No omicron; I’m just back to my usual cold. The next week I had a couple of in-person meetings and, since I had one more test in the Binax box, decided to ping those nostrils again, just to be safe. Bam! So that’s what a positive test looks like. The sample pink line showed up immediately, even before the second, higher control line did. The instructions may say to wait for 15 minutes, but I knew within 2. Not that much changed -- other than canceling the in-person meeting. I just kept popping the Sudafed and the Mucinex.</li><li>We were lucky with the timing of our drive back home on I-65, threading the weather needle between two snow storms that shut down parts of the interstate north of Indiana. Even with reasonable weather, Waze and Google Maps pointed us toward the exit a couple of times to vector around accident slow downs. It’s kinda funny to see which cars and trucks are using Waze, because we’re all getting off at the same exit, and all making the same turns onto seemingly random county roads running through flat snow-covered farm land, pretty featureless save for a couple of farm houses and stands of gigantic wind mills.&nbsp; But, there were no multi-hour back-ups that would’ve forced us to break out the bourbon bottles to stay warm which, this winter, marks this down as a successful drive home.</li><li>Bridge Music —  &nbsp; I Will Writhe by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/26739 Ft: Soundprank </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>In the last episode, we talked about COVID test anxiety; not being able to start a vacation or come back home from one due to a positive test. With the omicron wave having crested, some countries -- the UK, France, Ireland, but not Italy -- are dropping inbound test requirements for travelers who are fully vaccinated, with the caveat that “fully vaccinated” for these countries includes a booster. I was pleasantly surprised by this. Usually, travel requirements ratchet up; new ones stick and old ones never expire. If you don’t have TSA PreCheck, you’ve been walking through security in your stocking feet for over 15 years now. Maybe because there’s a real cost that travelers can see -- ranging over $100/person sometimes -- as opposed to 5 minutes of inconvenience.</li><li>But as with dropping the initial travel bans, the US is the laggard. Drop in-bound test requirements? The US hasn’t even relaxed the 1-day testing window put in place at the beginning of December to try and keep omicron out of the US. We all knew within 2 weeks that didn’t work, but here we are 3 months later and there’s no movement back to the pre-omicron 72-hour testing window. It’s that ratchet again. In the last episode, I mentioned that, at the end of December, I\'d written up a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/30/easy-way-to-do-1-day-testing-for-returning-to-us/\">detailed blog post</a> on how to order and use the Abbott BinaxNOW testing kit to easily hit the US’s 1-day testing window. Allan Marko, occasional TravelCommons contributor, clicked through to the eMed site to order a 6-pack so he could take a couple tests with him on his February getaway to the Yucatan as backup, in case the resort ran out of tests -- those damn supply chain issues. As it turned out, the resort had ample tests -- at $100 a pop, which is… a number. Allan used his Abbott tests -- at $25 each -- instead. Leaves a little extra cash for a good-bye margarita or two… or three.</li><li>And speaking of margaritas, you can get one again on Southwest Airlines. They&nbsp; finally blinked, <a href=\"https://www.swamedia.com/releases/release-a0731e681107d30a52590eb3f92b92a3-southwest-airlines-restoring-on-board-beverage-options\">restarting their in-flight alcohol service</a>, giving up their linkage with the in-flight mask mandate. No surprise, really. No one sees an end in site for in-flight masking. Indeed, European airline execs from Ryanair and TAP, the Portuguese airline, have said they expect masks to be one of the last things dropped and could be around for years. It’s that ratcheting thing again. Glad I kept hold of my old drink coupons. Southwest extended the life of 2020 and 2021 coupons ‘til the end of this year.&nbsp;</li><li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/01/16/podcast-183-covid-test-anxiety-michelin-food-adventures/\">the last episode</a>, I talked about sending my passport into the void that is the US Passport Agency for renewal. My passport didn’t expire until April, but since a lot of countries won’t let you if your passport has less than 6 months left on it, and with all the State Department’s warnings about extended processing times, I figured I should renew it sooner rather than later. The Passport Agency is quoting 8-11 weeks processing time and, here’s a little twist, they’ll only accept your application via US Postal Service. Now I don’t know about you, but the Chicago branches of the Postal Service haven’t exactly been covering themselves in glory over the past couple of months. So, I sent in my application Priority Mail and paid the Passport Agency extra so they’d send it back the same way. Priority Mail did the job getting my application there in a couple of days, and then I was able to track the progress on the Passport Agency’s website. The only glitch was the email update function, where they send you an email each time your application status changes, doesn’t seem to work. But anyhow, the Passport Agency processed my renewal and put my passport in a Priority Mail envelope right at 7 weeks. So good on them coming in under their time quote. But then the Postal Service couldn’t quite get it done. From the tracking history, my passport appears to have hung out a few days in a Chicago transit facility before finally making it into my mailbox. And it’s a bit different from, say, my wife’s passport that she renewed a few years ago. The page with the picture and all the personal information is no longer a kinda sealed paper page. Now, it’s a heavier, thicker piece of plastic, and some data like the passport number and the expiration date are raised. It seems a quantum step up in non-tampering/forgery-proof technology. Now I’m keeping my eye out for my old passport which they send back to me separately because it has my still-valid India visa in it. I don’t have any plans to visit India right now, which is a good thing since the Passport Agency is sending it back via regular post, which means it should get some time, maybe, this spring.</li><li>And as I promised in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/01/16/podcast-183-covid-test-anxiety-michelin-food-adventures/\">the last episode</a>, I finally finished updating my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/31/my-best-restaurants-and-bars-of-2021/\">Best Restaurants, Bars, and Taprooms of 2021</a> post, adding sections for Chicago and London. One of the things that <em>didn’t</em> make the London section was Yorkshire pudding wraps and burritos. I saw these on menus all over the place, where they’d basically take a whole Sunday roast dinner -- roast beef, vegetables, mashed potatoes, gravy -- and wrap it in a flatbread made out of the same ingredients as a Yorkshire pudding -- eggs, flour, and milk. Honestly, it was like shame-watching a car crash. I knew I shouldn’t, but I ordered one anyways, and immediately hated myself for it. So any place with this on the menu; immediate disqualification from my list. Also, I unfortunately had to delete a great little corner dumpling place in New York’s Chinatown that’s “reconcepted” itself since last May. Which was the reason I started that running list last year -- the pandemic closings were happening faster than the guidebooks and blogs could keep up with. Indeed, I went back through the TravelCommons archives and was striking through at least half of my earlier recommendations. So anyhow, I gave the 2021 post a new date of Dec 31 so it would be easy to find; it’s showing up right now on the TravelCommons homepage and at the top of the Blog page. I’m also doing a better job of keeping a running list of my 2022 recommendations. In Louisville, we ate at a <strong><em>great</em></strong> Cuban restaurant, <a href=\"https://www.labodeguitademima.com/\">La Bodeguita De Mima</a>, next door to the AC Hotel in the NuLu district. Apparently, there’s a huge Cuban immigrant community in Louisville, which I can tell you was <strong><em>not</em></strong> the case when my parents lived there in the early ‘80’s. And La Bodeguita De Mimi is just the latest of many Cuban places to open. Highly recommended, especially the Lechon Asado, the roast pork. I’ll post the first cut of my 2022 list in April, after our trips to Brooklyn next week and Santa Fe at the beginning of April</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music -- August (Reggae Rework) by el-B (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/elB/16075 Ft: Calendargirl </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Stealth Travel Inflation</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>For those of us of (and past) a certain age, the last 6 months of inflation news is flashing us back to the ‘70’s and early ‘80’s, and there’s certainly no sense of wistful nostalgia coming from it. Maybe not abject terror, but it’s not a comfortable feeling. The <a href=\"https://www.ustravel.org/\">US Travel Association</a> unpicks the US Department of Labor’s consumer price index (CPI) report and publishes its own monthly <a href=\"https://www.ustravel.org/research/travel-price-index\">travel price index</a> (TPI). I started looking through their <a href=\"https://www.ustravel.org/sites/default/files/2022-02/tpi_jan-2022_0.pdf\">latest TPI which is for January 2022</a> and, among other things, it compares this current travel price index to January 2021 <em>and</em> to pre-pandemic January 2019, before any travel restrictions were in place. Tough to remember, but back then, everybody was traveling. And while all the current inflation headlines prepped me for the current travel price index being 14.5% over last year’s, I was surprised when I saw that current prices are 11.6% higher than January 2019. I guess I anchored a bit too much on those rock-bottom airfares and hotel rates and gas prices in the Spring and Summer of 2020 when no one was traveling. But digging through the detailed line items, it turns out I’m not entirely wrong -- the Airline Fares component of the TPI is still 15% <em>below</em> 2019’s and hotels are only up 6.5% three years on. I couldn’t figure out which line has car rental prices, but it’s no secret that those blew up -- when you could actually <em>find</em> a car. The biggest jumps over 2019 that show up are Food &amp; Beverage, up 13%, and Motor Fuel, no surprise there, up 44%.&nbsp;</li><li>But here’s where we get into the stealth components. Let’s start with hotels. There are cuts in service, getting less for the same price, what’s now being called <em>shrinkflation,</em> that I don’t think is reflected in that 6.5% inflation number. The most common of these are pandemic service cuts that have never gone away. In 2020, when we were still figuring out how COVID spread, how long the surfaces could stay infectious (remember people leaving their groceries outside for 3 days?), it made sense to stop daily room housekeeping. The first post-lockdown trip I made, I stayed in a Hampton Inn and never saw anyone. The Hilton app let me remotely check-in and gave me a digital key, no one serviced the room during my stay, and no free breakfast. And I was fine with that; it made perfect sense given how much we <em>didn’t</em> know in May 2020.&nbsp;</li><li>But now, almost 2 years and 3 vaccination shots later, the AC Hotel in Louisville has a sign taped to the desk in our room saying housekeeping was limited to every 3rd day because of COVID. No, it’s not because of COVID anymore; it’s to improve margins. Comparing this to our stays in similarly-priced hotels in Italy and the UK last fall where service was pretty much back to pre-pandemic standards (the main exception was you couldn’t serve yourself from the breakfast buffet; you pointed at something and a server put it on your plate), it’s that ratchet again; the US chains are working hard to keep those early pandemic service standards. Though with Hilton, there seems to be some play in that ratchet. Rather than a hard “we’re only servicing your room every 3 days”, it’s a softer “our housekeeping is now on request.” So, I guess I could request it every day. For me, it’s not about fresh towels; it’s about getting those little garbage cans emptied. They don’t hold too many empty 16-oz craft beer cans.</li><li>On first look, you’d think that restaurants are doing a bit of their own shrinkflation by continuing their contactless service tactics -- using QR codes for menus and having people order and pay through apps like Toast instead of waiters. Now maybe it’s me, but I don’t see it as reducing service. Instead, I see it as improving productivity through automation. But the stealth inflation that I’ve noticed is the COVID add-on fees that started showing up in post-lockdown 2020 -- 2-3% for extra cleaning or personal protective equipment -- are sticking around. I’m not arguing that they are not real expenses, but so are, say, janitorial service and property taxes but they’re not showing up as additional fees. Roll it into the price of your burger like you do with every other business cost.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>It’s kinda like they’re trying to run the same play the airlines did back in 2008 with baggage fees. American Airlines was the first of the big carriers to do it, charging $15 a bag, saying they needed it to cover the high cost of jet fuel when oil hit $145 a barrel that summer. But 3-4 months later, <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_oil_market_chronology_from_2003#2008:_oil_prices_peak_at_$145.85_then_bottom_at_$32\">when oil prices were half that</a>, the baggage fee stayed and even increased; <a href=\"https://www.aa.com/i18n/travel-info/baggage/checked-baggage-policy.jsp\">American doubled it</a>. Again, it’s that ratchet; the excuse goes away, but the fee doesn’t. Which means it’s really just a price increase; it’s just more inflation.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #184</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_184.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #184 — Figuring Out Stealth Travel Inflation','In the travel world, what goes up -- rules, fees, prices -- often stays up. It\'s the ratchet effect and it\'s a theme running through this episode. Inflation is on everyone\'s mind, and so we dig into travel inflation, comparing today\'s prices with pre-pandemic levels.  We also talk about US passport renewals ahead of the summer vacation season, and some good Cuban food in Louisville and a questionable food trend in London,. All this and more - click here to download the podcast file, go up to the Subscribe section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.','inherit','closed','closed','','4100-revision-v1','','','2022-03-03 12:35:13','2022-03-03 17:35:13','',4100,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4109',0,'revision','',0),
(4110,1,'2022-03-03 14:51:05','2022-03-03 19:51:05','','camphoto_684387517','','inherit','open','closed','','camphoto_684387517','','','2022-03-03 14:51:05','2022-03-03 19:51:05','',4100,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/camphoto_684387517.jpeg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(4113,1,'2022-03-03 15:34:16','2022-03-03 20:34:16','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/IMG_2429-scaled.jpeg\"><img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/IMG_2429-300x300.jpeg\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> Gonna need to spend a lot more time here[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>In the travel world, what goes up -- rules, fees, prices -- often stays up. It\'s the ratchet effect and it\'s a theme running through this episode. Inflation is on everyone\'s mind, and so we dig into travel inflation, comparing today\'s prices with pre-pandemic levels.  We also talk about US passport renewals ahead of the summer vacation season, and some good Cuban food in Louisville and a questionable food trend in London. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_184.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #184: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. Sorry about getting this episode out late. I pushed it out a couple of weeks for a trip down to Louisville for a wedding; so I didn’t have to say “No travel since the last episode” again -- tough to do a podcast that’s “more about the journey than the destination” if you’re not journey-ing. And also to give my voice some time to recover from something I picked up down there. I can write a great episode, but if all I can do is croak it out and no one can stand to listen, it feels a bit like a podcast version of “If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, did it make a sound?” And, I have to be honest -- my heart just couldn’t get into trying to be snarky and witty as the Russians launched their invasion of Ukraine. But here we are, a week or so into it and, with a heavy heart, need to move forward.&nbsp;</li><li>So back to travel. I used to get a serious cold at least once a year when traveling non-stop; to the point that, every time I bought something at CVS, at least 4 ft of the usual 6 ft of coupons printed out with the receipt were for cough and cold medications. But after the March 2020 lockdowns, nothing; a nice side benefit of masks and social distancing. But now, maybe in a sign that things are creeping back to normal, I’ve got that old feeling again -- a runny nose, a cough,... So back to CVS for the usual boxes of 12-hour Sudafed and maximum strength Mucinex. And there, at the check-out counter, is a stack of Abbott Binax COVID tests. I throw one of those into the basket because there’s a bit of <a href=\"https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/coronavirus/in-depth/covid-19-cold-flu-and-allergies-differences/art-20503981\">symptom overlap</a> between omicron and a cold. But 15 minutes after violating each of my nostrils in the CVS parking lot, no second line appeared on the test strip. No omicron; I’m just back to my usual cold. The next week I had a couple of in-person meetings and, since I had one more test in the Binax box, decided to ping those nostrils again, just to be safe. Bam! So that’s what a positive test looks like. The sample pink line showed up immediately, even before the second, higher control line did. The instructions may say to wait for 15 minutes, but I knew within 2. Not that much changed -- other than canceling the in-person meeting. I just kept popping the Sudafed and the Mucinex.</li><li>We were lucky with the timing of our drive back home on I-65, threading the weather needle between two snow storms that shut down parts of the interstate north of Indiana. Even with reasonable weather, Waze and Google Maps pointed us toward the exit a couple of times to vector around accident slow downs. It’s kinda funny to see which cars and trucks are using Waze, because we’re all getting off at the same exit, and all making the same turns onto seemingly random county roads running through flat snow-covered farm land, pretty featureless save for a couple of farm houses and stands of gigantic wind mills.&nbsp; But, there were no multi-hour back-ups that would’ve forced us to break out the bourbon bottles to stay warm which, this winter, marks this down as a successful drive home.</li><li>Bridge Music —  &nbsp; I Will Writhe by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/26739 Ft: Soundprank </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>In the last episode, we talked about COVID test anxiety; not being able to start a vacation or come back home from one due to a positive test. With the omicron wave having crested, some countries -- the UK, France, Ireland, but not Italy -- are dropping inbound test requirements for travelers who are fully vaccinated, with the caveat that “fully vaccinated” for these countries includes a booster. I was pleasantly surprised by this. Usually, travel requirements ratchet up; new ones stick and old ones never expire. If you don’t have TSA PreCheck, you’ve been walking through security in your stocking feet for over 15 years now. Maybe because there’s a real cost that travelers can see -- ranging over $100/person sometimes -- as opposed to 5 minutes of inconvenience.</li><li>But as with dropping the initial travel bans, the US is the laggard. Drop in-bound test requirements? The US hasn’t even relaxed the 1-day testing window put in place at the beginning of December to try and keep omicron out of the US. We all knew within 2 weeks that didn’t work, but here we are 3 months later and there’s no movement back to the pre-omicron 72-hour testing window. It’s that ratchet again. In the last episode, I mentioned that, at the end of December, I\'d written up a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/30/easy-way-to-do-1-day-testing-for-returning-to-us/\">detailed blog post</a> on how to order and use the Abbott BinaxNOW testing kit to easily hit the US’s 1-day testing window. Allan Marko, occasional TravelCommons contributor, clicked through to the eMed site to order a 6-pack so he could take a couple tests with him on his February getaway to the Yucatan as backup, in case the resort ran out of tests -- those damn supply chain issues. As it turned out, the resort had ample tests -- at $100 a pop, which is… a number. Allan used his Abbott tests -- at $25 each -- instead. Leaves a little extra cash for a good-bye margarita or two… or three.</li><li>And speaking of margaritas, you can get one again on Southwest Airlines. They&nbsp; finally blinked, <a href=\"https://www.swamedia.com/releases/release-a0731e681107d30a52590eb3f92b92a3-southwest-airlines-restoring-on-board-beverage-options\">restarting their in-flight alcohol service</a>, giving up their linkage with the in-flight mask mandate. No surprise, really. No one sees an end in site for in-flight masking. Indeed, European airline execs from Ryanair and TAP, the Portuguese airline, have said they expect masks to be one of the last things dropped and could be around for years. It’s that ratcheting thing again. Glad I kept hold of my old drink coupons. Southwest extended the life of 2020 and 2021 coupons ‘til the end of this year.&nbsp;</li><li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/01/16/podcast-183-covid-test-anxiety-michelin-food-adventures/\">the last episode</a>, I talked about sending my passport into the void that is the US Passport Agency for renewal. My passport didn’t expire until April, but since a lot of countries won’t let you if your passport has less than 6 months left on it, and with all the State Department’s warnings about extended processing times, I figured I should renew it sooner rather than later. The Passport Agency is quoting 8-11 weeks processing time and, here’s a little twist, they’ll only accept your application via US Postal Service. Now I don’t know about you, but the Chicago branches of the Postal Service haven’t exactly been covering themselves in glory over the past couple of months. So, I sent in my application Priority Mail and paid the Passport Agency extra so they’d send it back the same way. Priority Mail did the job getting my application there in a couple of days, and then I was able to track the progress on the Passport Agency’s website. The only glitch was the email update function, where they send you an email each time your application status changes, doesn’t seem to work. But anyhow, the Passport Agency processed my renewal and put my passport in a Priority Mail envelope right at 7 weeks. So good on them coming in under their time quote. But then the Postal Service couldn’t quite get it done. From the tracking history, my passport appears to have hung out a few days in a Chicago transit facility before finally making it into my mailbox. And it’s a bit different from, say, my wife’s passport that she renewed a few years ago. The page with the picture and all the personal information is no longer a kinda sealed paper page. Now, it’s a heavier, thicker piece of plastic, and some data like the passport number and the expiration date are raised. It seems a quantum step up in non-tampering/forgery-proof technology. Now I’m keeping my eye out for my old passport which they send back to me separately because it has my still-valid India visa in it. I don’t have any plans to visit India right now, which is a good thing since the Passport Agency is sending it back via regular post, which means it should get some time, maybe, this spring.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":4110,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/camphoto_684387517-scaled.jpeg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/camphoto_684387517-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-4110\"/></a><figcaption class=\"figure-caption text-center\"><strong>Yorkshire Pudding Wrap</strong></figcaption></figure></div>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>And as I promised in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/01/16/podcast-183-covid-test-anxiety-michelin-food-adventures/\">the last episode</a>, I finally finished updating my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/31/my-best-restaurants-and-bars-of-2021/\">Best Restaurants, Bars, and Taprooms of 2021</a> post, adding sections for Chicago and London. One of the things that <em>didn’t</em> make the London section was Yorkshire pudding wraps and burritos. I saw these on menus all over the place, where they’d basically take a whole Sunday roast dinner -- roast beef, vegetables, mashed potatoes, gravy -- and wrap it in a flatbread made out of the same ingredients as a Yorkshire pudding -- eggs, flour, and milk. Honestly, it was like shame-watching a car crash. I knew I shouldn’t, but I ordered one anyways, and immediately hated myself for it. So any place with this on the menu; immediate disqualification from my list.</li><li>Also, I unfortunately had to delete a great little corner dumpling place in New York’s Chinatown that’s “reconcepted” itself since last May. Which was the reason I started that running list last year -- the pandemic closings were happening faster than the guidebooks and blogs could keep up with. Indeed, I went back through the TravelCommons archives and was striking through at least half of my earlier recommendations. So anyhow, I gave the 2021 post a new date of Dec 31 so it would be easy to find; it’s showing up right now on the TravelCommons homepage and at the top of the Blog page. I’m also doing a better job of keeping a running list of my 2022 recommendations. In Louisville, we ate at a <strong><em>great</em></strong> Cuban restaurant, <a href=\"https://www.labodeguitademima.com/\">La Bodeguita De Mima</a>, next door to the AC Hotel in the NuLu district. Apparently, there’s a huge Cuban immigrant community in Louisville, which I can tell you was <strong><em>not</em></strong> the case when my parents lived there in the early ‘80’s. And La Bodeguita De Mimi is just the latest of many Cuban places to open. Highly recommended, especially the Lechon Asado, the roast pork. I’ll post the first cut of my 2022 list in April, after our trips to Brooklyn next week and Santa Fe at the beginning of April</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music -- August (Reggae Rework) by el-B (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/elB/16075 Ft: Calendargirl </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Stealth Travel Inflation</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>For those of us of (and past) a certain age, the last 6 months of inflation news is flashing us back to the ‘70’s and early ‘80’s, and there’s certainly no sense of wistful nostalgia coming from it. Maybe not abject terror, but it’s not a comfortable feeling. The <a href=\"https://www.ustravel.org/\">US Travel Association</a> unpicks the US Department of Labor’s consumer price index (CPI) report and publishes its own monthly <a href=\"https://www.ustravel.org/research/travel-price-index\">travel price index</a> (TPI). I started looking through their <a href=\"https://www.ustravel.org/sites/default/files/2022-02/tpi_jan-2022_0.pdf\">latest TPI which is for January 2022</a> and, among other things, it compares this current travel price index to January 2021 <em>and</em> to pre-pandemic January 2019, before any travel restrictions were in place. Tough to remember, but back then, everybody was traveling. And while all the current inflation headlines prepped me for the current travel price index being 14.5% over last year’s, I was surprised when I saw that current prices are 11.6% higher than January 2019. I guess I anchored a bit too much on those rock-bottom airfares and hotel rates and gas prices in the Spring and Summer of 2020 when no one was traveling. But digging through the detailed line items, it turns out I’m not entirely wrong -- the Airline Fares component of the TPI is still 15% <em>below</em> 2019’s and hotels are only up 6.5% three years on. I couldn’t figure out which line has car rental prices, but it’s no secret that those blew up -- when you could actually <em>find</em> a car. The biggest jumps over 2019 that show up are Food &amp; Beverage, up 13%, and Motor Fuel, no surprise there, up 44%.&nbsp;</li><li>But here’s where we get into the stealth components. Let’s start with hotels. There are cuts in service, getting less for the same price, what’s now being called <em>shrinkflation,</em> that I don’t think is reflected in that 6.5% inflation number. The most common of these are pandemic service cuts that have never gone away. In 2020, when we were still figuring out how COVID spread, how long the surfaces could stay infectious (remember people leaving their groceries outside for 3 days?), it made sense to stop daily room housekeeping. The first post-lockdown trip I made, I stayed in a Hampton Inn and never saw anyone. The Hilton app let me remotely check-in and gave me a digital key, no one serviced the room during my stay, and no free breakfast. And I was fine with that; it made perfect sense given how much we <em>didn’t</em> know in May 2020.&nbsp;</li><li>But now, almost 2 years and 3 vaccination shots later, the AC Hotel in Louisville has a sign taped to the desk in our room saying housekeeping was limited to every 3rd day because of COVID. No, it’s not because of COVID anymore; it’s to improve margins. Comparing this to our stays in similarly-priced hotels in Italy and the UK last fall where service was pretty much back to pre-pandemic standards (the main exception was you couldn’t serve yourself from the breakfast buffet; you pointed at something and a server put it on your plate), it’s that ratchet again; the US chains are working hard to keep those early pandemic service standards. Though with Hilton, there seems to be some play in that ratchet. Rather than a hard “we’re only servicing your room every 3 days”, it’s a softer “our housekeeping is now on request.” So, I guess I could request it every day. For me, it’s not about fresh towels; it’s about getting those little garbage cans emptied. They don’t hold too many empty 16-oz craft beer cans.</li><li>On first look, you’d think that restaurants are doing a bit of their own shrinkflation by continuing their contactless service tactics -- using QR codes for menus and having people order and pay through apps like Toast instead of waiters. Now maybe it’s me, but I don’t see it as reducing service. Instead, I see it as improving productivity through automation. But the stealth inflation that I’ve noticed is the COVID add-on fees that started showing up in post-lockdown 2020 -- 2-3% for extra cleaning or personal protective equipment -- are sticking around. I’m not arguing that they are not real expenses, but so are, say, janitorial service and property taxes but they’re not showing up as additional fees. Roll it into the price of your burger like you do with every other business cost.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>It’s kinda like they’re trying to run the same play the airlines did back in 2008 with baggage fees. American Airlines was the first of the big carriers to do it, charging $15 a bag, saying they needed it to cover the high cost of jet fuel when oil hit $145 a barrel that summer. But 3-4 months later, <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_oil_market_chronology_from_2003#2008:_oil_prices_peak_at_$145.85_then_bottom_at_$32\">when oil prices were half that</a>, the baggage fee stayed and even increased; <a href=\"https://www.aa.com/i18n/travel-info/baggage/checked-baggage-policy.jsp\">American doubled it</a>. Again, it’s that ratchet; the excuse goes away, but the fee doesn’t. Which means it’s really just a price increase; it’s just more inflation.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #184</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_184.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #184 — Figuring Out Stealth Travel Inflation','In the travel world, what goes up -- rules, fees, prices -- often stays up. It\'s the ratchet effect and it\'s a theme running through this episode. Inflation is on everyone\'s mind, and so we dig into travel inflation, comparing today\'s prices with pre-pandemic levels.  We also talk about US passport renewals ahead of the summer vacation season, and some good Cuban food in Louisville and a questionable food trend in London,. All this and more - click here to download the podcast file, go up to the Subscribe section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.','inherit','closed','closed','','4100-revision-v1','','','2022-03-03 15:34:16','2022-03-03 20:34:16','',4100,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4113',0,'revision','',0),
(4117,1,'2022-03-24 13:46:47','2022-03-24 18:46:47','[caption id=\"attachment_1039\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/399422_3361993820725_821625873_n.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1039\" title=\"Stax Museum Marquee-Memphis\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/399422_3361993820725_821625873_n-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> One of the stops on my Drive South...[/caption]\n\nBack in the TravelCommons studios after a 2,100-mile drive through the Mid-South. We genuflect quickly to the milestone episode number and then move onto the topics at hand -- best piece of hardware schwag from Google I/O 2012, a slightly icky subway ride from downtown San Francisco to SFO, a grab bag of observations from my southern road trip, and why I find myself breaking up with American Airlines after almost 30 years of travel. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_100.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #100:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Well, here we are at a milestone episode number -- number 100 -- 7 years and a couple of months after I started. It took me 1½ years to do 50 podcasts... and then another 5½ to do 50 more.  Looks like my podcast productivity is exponentially decaying...</li>\n 	<li>But you people still keep hanging around! I do appreciate the kind words that you’ve sent along via FaceBook and Twitter. I am glad that so many of you find this podcast interesting/entertaining. It’s that more than anything else that keeps me plugging away.</li>\n 	<li>Changes on the job front have kept me off the road for business travel, but I’ve managed to fill a couple of the weeks since the last episode with some personal travel.</li>\n 	<li>At the end of June, the family and I headed off to San Francisco.  My son scored an academic ticket to the big geek-a-palooza Google I/O. I think this year’s event sold out in 20 minutes and there were a very limited number of discounted academic tickets, so getting one was a bit like getting one of the golden tickets in <em><a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Willy Wonka &amp; the Chocolate Factory\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willy_Wonka_%26_the_Chocolate_Factory\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"wikipedia noopener noreferrer\">Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory</a></em>.  So while my son watched videos of guys skydiving with Google virtual reality glasses, and dove into the intricacies of Google Maps APIs and the latest whizzy things that Chrome does, my wife, daughter and I did San Francisco tourist stuff -- rode bikes across the Golden Gate Bridge, rode cable cars, hang out in hipster coffee joints -- the sort of stuff that I’ve never quite found time to do in the 10-15 years that I’ve been going to SF for business.</li>\n 	<li>\n\n[caption id=\"attachment_1042\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/564585_3384869592605_665394828_n.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1042\" title=\"I-65 Between Louisville and Nashville\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/564585_3384869592605_665394828_n-300x225.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\" /></a> I-65 From Louisville to Nashville[/caption]\n\nAnd then last week, I decided to do a little trip on my own -- a 2,100-mile loop through the South.  I ran I-65 from top to bottom -- from its start in northern Indiana down to Louisville, Nashville, and <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Mobile, Alabama\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile%2C_Alabama\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"wikipedia noopener noreferrer\">Mobile, AL</a>; across the Mississippi Gulf Coast on US-90 to New Orleans, up I-55 to Memphis, up US-51 to Dyersburg, then across I-155 to <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Sikeston, Missouri\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sikeston%2C_Missouri\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"wikipedia noopener noreferrer\">Sikeston, MO</a>, and then finally up I-57 back to Chicago.  But more about that later in the show.</li>\n 	<li>I have noticed though that whenever I travel for leisure, I don’t travel quite as sharp -- I don’t feel as tightly wrapped, as “in the zone” as I do when I travel for business. On my flight out to SFO, I hit a new level of bad planning, of “non-preparedness.”  I had to reach for the SkyMall catalog before the plane even left the taxiway...</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/stefsax/7785\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Awel</a> </em>by Stefsax</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>I wrote a <a title=\"How Much Do You Want to Tip?\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/06/16/how-much-do-you-want-to-tip/\">blog post</a> last month about tipping. I received a link to a nice infographic from somebody from Hospitalitymangementschools.org -- a web site that I still can’t quite figure out what it is. It seems like a legit web site with information about the hospitality management industry, but there’s no contact information -- just a web submissions form, and the domain name is held in proxy by GoDaddy.  I dunno -- it feels just a little fishy.</li>\n 	<li>Anyhow, the tipping guide infographic was good, if a little wonky on the iPhone, and seemed to offer reasonable advice.  There is a surprising amount of emotion wrapped up in figuring out a tip amount. You want to appropriately acknowledge the service someone has just given you, and that then gets combined with the image you want to portray -- am I a nice generous person, am I a sharp you-won’t-get-anything-by-me person?</li>\n 	<li>Looking at on my own tipping, I think I do well when dealing with a service person face-to-face -- a waiter, a car valet, a hotel bellhop -- but not so well with tipping people I don’t see -- like a hotel maid.</li>\n 	<li>Rich Fraser is in the same place -- both about not tipping cleaning staff and feeling slightly “off” about that\n<ul>\n 	<li>I agree with your take on tipping the housekeeping staff. I’m probably totally off base, but I always considered housekeeping to be a service inherent to my stay. I get that service whether I ask for it or not, as opposed to the bellhop, bartender or concierge, which are optional services.</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>And that’s just dealing with the US. Don’t get me started about international tipping -- which countries it’s an insult to tip, it’s an insult not to tip, which countries you just round the tab up....</li>\n 	<li>One of the highlights of our SF trip was, at the end of each day, seeing what schwag my son hauled back from<a href=\"http://www.techradar.com/news/computing/google-io-2012-top-moments-1086645\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"> Google I/O</a>. These developer sessions have become quite the giveaway spree as companies try to recruit independent developers to their platforms. Microsoft gave away Windows 8 tablets at its last conference, but Google is the one that goes the deepest. Over two days, my son got an unlocked Samsung Galaxy Nexus phone, a Chromebox, the Google Nexus Q media streaming device slash bocce ball stand-in, and a Nexus 7 tablet.  $1,200 of hardware for a $300 academic ticket.  No wonder it sold out in 20 minutes.</li>\n 	<li>The <a href=\"https://play.google.com/store/devices/details?id=nexus_7_8gb\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Nexus 7 tablet</a> was the highlight of the schwag bag.  $200 for the 8 GB model, it directly competes with the Kindle Fire and blows it out of the water. It runs the latest Android version-- 4.1 or Jelly Bean as the droid-heads call it -- while the Fire sits at a custom version of 2.3 or Gingerbread. In those intervening versions, Google has smoothed off a lot of Android’s sharp edges and has significantly improved performance. For the first time, I could see an Android tablet being a real competitor to the iPad.</li>\n 	<li>I also like the 7-inch form factor. Steve Jobs is famous for dismissing anything less than the iPad’s piece-of-paper size. I was surprised, though, how much easier I found reading and web-browsing on this much lighter device. And since most of what I use a tablet for is media consumption -- rather than as an executive laptop replacement -- I’m thinking I may downsize my next tablet. I’ll see if the rumored iPad “mini” appears and then, if not, I may head down the Google route too.</li>\n 	<li>\n\n[caption id=\"attachment_1048\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/IMG_1311.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1048\" title=\"Powell St BART Station\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/IMG_1311-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Can\'t See the Dirt if Everything is Blurry[/caption]\n\nAnd continuing on my periodic trains-to-airports thread, when leaving San Francisco, I took BART -- Bay Area Rapid Transit -- from downtown -- we were staying at the St Francis in Union Square -- to SFO for my flight home. It was a Sunday -- the last Sunday in June -- and a nice sunny, warm day -- a rare event in SF -- which brought out in full force the standard SF mix of street performers, cup rattlers, and tourists.  Getting through this melange with my rolling bag was my first challenge.  Once I got down to the station and in front of the fare machine, I got a bit of sticker shock -- it was $8.25 to get to the airport. Sure, you pay a lot more for London’s Heathrow Express, but it’s a private train company with just one stope.  The BART fare is one of the bigger numbers I’ve hit for a subway system -- Chicago is a flat-rate $2.25 from the Loop to O’Hare; Washington’s Metro is $3 from downtown to Reagan National. Sure, $8.25 is cheaper than a $40 cab ride, but still...</li>\n 	<li>And that sticker shock only sinks in deeper when you get on the train and see how beat-to-hell they are.  They’re the same style trains as the Metro, but they’re in much worse shape. Who thought it was a good idea to put cloth seats on a public transit train?  I wished I had a plastic sheet to sit on.  And I made a bee line to a restroom once I hit SFO to I could wash my hands -- it was just that disgusting.  I’m back to taxis when next in SF.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a question, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along.  The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- use the Voice Memo app on your iPhone or something like Virtual Recorder on your Android phone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/williams-dusty/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Steam Train</a> </em>by John Williams</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Drive South -- A Southern Road Trip</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>\n\n[caption id=\"attachment_1040\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"226\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/311522_3384921793910_1477911803_n.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1040\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/311522_3384921793910_1477911803_n-226x300.jpg\" alt=\"My &quot;Great Circle&quot; Route Through the Mid-South\" width=\"226\" height=\"300\" /></a> My \"Great Circle\" Route Through the Mid-South[/caption]\n\nAs I mentioned at the top of the show, I did a “great circle” road trip of the Mid-South earlier this month -- me, a full-up old 30 GB click-wheel iPod, a list of restaurants and bars, and a suitcase of nothing more than shorts and polo shirts all loaded up into my Saab convertible.  I started off by running I-65 from top to bottom -- from the Indiana Toll Road to Mobile, AL, with stops in Louisville, Nashville, and Birmingham.  I jogged over to the state line to Florida, passing the huge rebuilt version of the Florabama Bar &amp; Grill, for a weekend on the Gulf at Perdido Key.</li>\n 	<li>I then drove across the Mississippi Gulf Coast, past the re-built casinos in Biloxi, and then past the not-so-rebuilt towns of Gulfport and Pass Christian.  Here we are 7 years after the eye of Hurricane Katrina made landfall at Bay St Louis, MS and the vacant lots along the coastal road - US-90 -- far outnumber the rebuilt homes.  Indeed, the For Sale signs on vacant lots -- many of them hand-made with “Make me an offer” scrawled across the front” -- outnumber the rebuilt homes.</li>\n 	<li>I eventually ended up on I-10 and drove into New Orleans for dinner, reloaded on beignets and chicory coffee the next morning, and headed up I-55 with a lunch stop in Jackson, MS before landing in Memphis for a couple of days.  The final leg was Memphis to Sikeston, MO and then up I-57 back home to Chicago.  A 2,100-mile loop through what many people consider “fly-over” country.</li>\n 	<li>The first reaction that most folks have to this itinerary is -- Why? It’s certainly not on anyone’s top 10 scenic drives list. But it’s always been on my list of trips to-do -- to stop off on “drive thru” cities and spend a little time exploring, even if only for a couple of hours. And to do a bit of a nostalgia tour -- visit places I lived 25-30 years ago.  And to catch up with old friends -- physically rather than just over Facebook. But while I’ve been thinking about it for a while, it’s always been on the “B” list -- always getting bumped by something else.  Well, as I hinted at the start of the show, my professional situation has changed, providing me a bit of a summer sabbatical.  With a suddenly open schedule and nothing else planned, it’s the perfect time to work into that next tier of things to do.</li>\n 	<li>I took a week to do this great circle route -- not too fast, but not dawdling either. I had a great time. And came away with a few observations...</li>\n 	<li>First, that drive is not as boring as you might fear.  Now, I don’t want to sugar-coat it -- I-65 through northern Indiana and I-57 through Illinois are brutally mind-numbing -- flat unending fields of corn and soybeans, the monotony of which is occasionally broken by a unending rows of wind generators (they’re just too huge to be called windmills).  But past that, the landscape does have character.  The low-lying clouds tight against the hills, resting in the valleys in Southern Kentucky.  Driving long causeways over the marshes and bayous heading south into Mobile on I-65 or coming north out of New Orleans on I-55.  The red clay of any turned over ground in Alabama.  The forests of Southern Mississippi.  It’s certainly not the Big Sur Coastal drive, but it’s not (except for Illinois and Indiana) hundreds of miles of sameness.</li>\n 	<li>Second, with all that windshield time, I finally found a good use case for Apple’s Siri. I’ve seen the Samuel L Jackson and Zooey Deschanel commercials, but have never gotten Siri to be more than an annoyance -- I can always find something faster myself than repeating my question 3 times.  But with both hands on the wheel and my eyes on the road, Siri was very good at reading and replying to the daily flow of text messages.  The results of “Read new message” was unintelligible only once, and given my sister’s tendency for random punctuation and abbreviations, it was understandable.  Siri’s still not the virtual assistant Apple keeps pitching her as, but she does have her uses on a long drive.</li>\n 	<li>\n\n[caption id=\"attachment_1041\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"225\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/382380_3350829861633_1849689155_n.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1041\" title=\"The Ham Bar Menu\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/382380_3350829861633_1849689155_n-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"225\" height=\"300\" /></a> Today\'s Selections at the Ham Bar[/caption]\n\nThird, there’s good local food and beer everywhere.  Call it the “Brooklyn-ization” of America, but every decent sized city I visited had its own hipster neighborhoods with restaurants serving local artisan foods and local craft beers.  Louisville has its unfortunately named <a href=\"http://www.chicagotribune.com/travel/sc-trav-0327-louisville-kentucky-20120327,0,6168490.story\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">NuLu</a> neighborhood, Memphis the better-named <a href=\"http://cooperyoung.biz/night-out/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Cooper Young</a> at the intersection of Cooper St and Young Ave, and New Orleans has the Bywater district a good bit away from the French Quarter.</li>\n 	<li>You expect good food in New Orleans, but I had very good food and beer in every other place I stopped.  An example of that Southern local focus is restaurants using country ham in place of prosciutto -- which makes sense if you think of prosciutto as just another kind of air-dried ham -- but from Italy instead of Virginia.  At the<a href=\"http://www.garageonmarket.com\"> Garage Bar</a> in Louisville, they had a ham bar with a choice of country hams from farms in Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee.  At the <a href=\"http://thebeautyshoprestaurant.anotherroadsideattractioncatering.com/\">Beauty Shop</a> in Memphis -- a great Twitter recommendation from @denrael -- country ham, cantaloupe, and an arugula salad made a great appetizer on a hot day.  I also hit on a string of locally sour brown ales at breweries in <a href=\"http://www.atgbrewery.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Louisville</a> and <a href=\"http://www.avondalebrewing.com/taproom.php\">Birmingham</a>. Definitely not lawnmower beers and as good as any I had in Brussels last spring. Finding these restaurants and breweries had the side benefit of taking me out of the normal tourist spots -- leaving behind the French Quarter and Beale Street.  Just look for art galleries, record stores, tattoo parlors, and people in skinny pants riding bicycles without helmets.</li>\n 	<li>Another observation -- waiting for the last minute to book a hotel room with Priceline’s Negotiator app works -- sometimes.  I’ve never used Priceline’s “opaque” pricing before -- naming my price for an unnamed hotel room. If I’m traveling on business or with my family, I typically want things nailed down a bit tighter. I have a much lower appetite for risk; am willing to pay more money to insure a good experience. But on this trip, I’m by myself and am only looking for a clean bed and decent water pressure for the morning’s shower.  Seemed like the right time to give Bill Shatner a try.</li>\n 	<li>My first try was Friday night around 7pm in Louisville.  Sitting in the Garage Bar after my serving of Kentucky country ham, I fired up the iPhone, got a sense of that the going rate at reasonable hotels was in the $75-110 range, and then bid $50 for a 3-star place near the airport. “Whoa, that’s a low bid” said a pop-up screen on the Priceline app.  Yup, that’s the idea.  After working through a few screens, I had a great room at a very nice Holiday Inn.  I ran the same play Sunday night driving into New Orleans and got a room at the Marriott on Canal St for $60.</li>\n 	<li>\n\n[caption id=\"attachment_1044\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"225\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/IMG_1368-e1343753854622.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1044\" title=\"Monday Special at Chimneyville Smokehouse, Jackson, MS\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/IMG_1368-e1343753854622-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"225\" height=\"300\" /></a> Hoping Vegetables Cut The Pork Fat[/caption]\n\nBut during the week while in Memphis, no luck. No one bit on my lowball bids and I ended up in a very substandard Hampton Inn and not so clean Comfort Inn.  Apparently there was some Little League tournament in town.  Don’t know others’ experiences, but the risk-reward trade-off with Priceline bidding is real. Which confirmed my initial instinct -- useful tool when traveling by myself with no rigid itinerary, but not so much for family or business travel.</li>\n 	<li>And finally, if I do this trip again, I’m packing some statins, some Mevacor.  After my fourth straight day of barbecue, I could feel the pork fat thicken my blood.  Not that that kept me from ordering one last slab of ribs on the drive home...</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music --<a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/rompaey-mozaic/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"> <em>Bubbly</em></a> by Ruben van Rompaey</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Breaking Up with American Airlines</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>My relationship with American Airlines began June 1985 when I flew from Chicago to Dallas to start my first job out of school.  And now here I am, 27 years and about 2.5 million miles later and I’m feeling just done with them.</li>\n 	<li>I wasn’t always like that. It’s easy enough to fly American out of DFW -- indeed, it damn close to impossible not to.  But I went out of my way to fly American after I left Dallas -- first back in Chicago, and then in Philadelphia.  Not too tough in Chicago; ORD is another AA hub. But sticking with them while flying out of US Air’s Philly fortress hub -- that took some commitment.</li>\n</ul>\n[caption id=\"attachment_952\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"200\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/photo.png\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-952\" title=\"AA Tweets &quot;I\'m Sorry&quot;\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/photo-200x300.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"200\" height=\"300\" /></a> Tweeting Apologies[/caption]\n<ul>\n 	<li>Over the past, say, 5 years, though, things have changed.  American’s competitors declared bankruptcy, cleaned up their balance sheets and bought new planes.  Lousy if you’re an investor with stock, an executive with options, or a creditor taking a haircut on loans, but for a customer it works out. American seemed proud of not going bankrupt, but as their planes got older and dingier, and fuel prices got higher, something had to give.</li>\n 	<li>And give it has, not just renegotiating plane leases. At a time you’d think American would want to take extra care of customers, their service taken a dive. And they’ve gotten more aggressive with add-on luggage and seating fees.  And now combining older frequent flyer miles that had no expiration date with those that expire in 18 months. For me, it’s not a big number; it’s the change in attitude; the final break in what I thought I could expect from American.</li>\n 	<li>Will I stop flying American? No, unless they go completely under. Or worse, merge with USAir. They’ll keep a big hub out of ORD and I have lifetime Platinum status with them -- unless that too becomes a casualty of their new “take away” mentality.  What will stop, though, is giving American the benefit of the doubt, of having them be my “default” choice.  After 27 years, they’re just another uncomfortable plane seat.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #100</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from the <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">ccMixter</a> web site and from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Magnatune</a></li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_100.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #100 — Southern Road Trip; Breaking Up with American Airlines','','inherit','closed','closed','','1034-revision-v1','','','2022-03-24 13:46:47','2022-03-24 18:46:47','',1034,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4117',0,'revision','',0),
(4118,1,'2022-03-27 13:26:16','2022-03-27 18:26:16','[caption id=\"attachment_1069\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/IMG_1380.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1069\" title=\"Elvis Statue in Memphis\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/IMG_1380-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Young Elvis Before Too Many Peanut Butter &amp; Banana Sandwiches[/caption]\n\nOn my <a title=\"Podcast #100 — Southern Road Trip; Breaking Up with American Airlines\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/07/31/podcast-100-southern-road-trip-breaking-up-with-american-airlines/\">Drive South</a>, I ate and drank my way down I-65 and back up I-55. I had excellent meals throughout my trip -- something you expect in New Orleans, but might find a bit more surprising in Louisville or Nashville if you haven\'t been paying attention.  Every city I visited had neighborhoods with restaurants serving local artisan food and local craft beers. (Here\'s a Flickr <a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/travelcommons/sets/72157631067493698/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">photo set</a> of some of my better pictures).\n\nThe chefs, bartenders, and owners with whom I talked were all on top of the latest food trends in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and London. Indeed, many had worked in the top restaurants in those cities for 5-10 years and were bringing those experiences and ways of thinking about food back home with them.  But rather than just recreating Chicago dishes, they\'re twisting them to fit their new homes -- replacing prosciutto with country ham, topping a bit crispy chicken skin with dots of Wonder Bread purée, and aging sour brown ales in bourbon casks.  If you\'re heading south, here are the places I recommend you search out:\n\n<strong>Nashville</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://thecatbirdseatrestaurant.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Catbird Seat</a> - In most restaurants, the chef\'s table is a 6-top in the corner of the kitchen were the diners watch their food being prepared and, if they\'re lucky, get to exchange a couple of words with the chef. At Catbird Seat, the entire restaurant is a chef\'s table -- a bar that wraps around the cooking stations. There are no waiters -- the food is served and explained by the chefs. And, as should be expected from chefs who worked at places like <a href=\"http://www.theworlds50best.com/awards/1-50-winners/alinea/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Alinea</a> and <a href=\"http://frenchlaundry.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">French Laundry</a>, an explanation from the chef of all the flavors on the plate helps your appreciation of what\'s been set before you. At $100 for 9 courses and $40 for the (recommended) wine pairing, it\'s not a cheap meal, but it\'s every bit on par with the best restaurants in New York (here\'s a recent NY Times <a href=\"http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/13/now-dining-the-catbird-seat-in-nashville/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">write-up</a>), Chicago, and San Francisco.  If you like imaginative fine cuisine, don\'t miss it.  Show up early enough to have a cocktail in <a href=\"http://www.cntraveler.com/daily-traveler/2011/12/If-You-Have-One-Drink-in-Nashville\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Patterson House</a>, the speakeasy looking bar that\'s in the same building.</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://yazoobrew.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Yazoo Brewing Company</a> - Tucked away at the edge of the <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gulch_(Nashville)\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Gulch</a> neighborhood, Yazoo Brewing has a good-sized taproom serving a nice variety of craft beers. I can be a bit of a hop-head, so I like their <a href=\"http://yazoobrew.com/our-beers/hopproject.php\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Hop Project</a>, but their <a href=\"http://yazoobrew.com/our-beers/dos-perros.php\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Dos Perros</a> surprised me as did the Rye Saison they were serving in the taproom.\n\n[caption id=\"attachment_1041\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"150\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/382380_3350829861633_1849689155_n.jpg\"><img class=\"size-thumbnail wp-image-1041\" title=\"The Ham Bar Menu\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/382380_3350829861633_1849689155_n-150x150.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"150\" height=\"150\" /></a> Today\'s Selections at the Ham Bar[/caption]</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Louisville</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://www.garageonmarket.com/site/\">Garage Bar</a> - The people and tables spill out of this re-purposed gas station into the unfortunately named <a href=\"http://eastmarketdistrict.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">NuLu</a> neighborhood in a way that pulls you off the sidewalk into the melee.  The night I was there, a band was playing under what used to be the gas pump awning while on the other side of the patio, a bunch of people jumped out of seats to take their picture with the neighborhood tortoise that was (slowly) moving through. The ham bar offered a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/382380_3350829861633_1849689155_n.jpg\">selection</a> of country ham from Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee (a good-sized portion for $5), good craft beer and, because you\'re in Kentucky, craft bourbons.</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://www.atgbrewery.com/\">Against The Grain</a> - It\'s a brewpub attached to Louisville\'s minor league baseball park on the Ohio River, about a 10 minute walk from the NuLu area. They have a great beer selection, but when they described the sour brown ale, I was sold.  My time in Belgium has given me a soft spot for sour beers.  The bartender couldn\'t understand my excitement. \"That\'s the only beer we make that I have to spit out\".</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/theholygrale/\">Holy Grale</a>- Housed in a former Unitarian Church in the Highlands\' neighborhood, Holy Grale is a cozy (tight?) gastropub with a great selection of local and Belgian beers and the right kind of bar food (brats, pork belly, poutine) to soak it up.\n\n[caption id=\"attachment_1079\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"150\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/IMG_1345.jpg\"><img class=\"size-thumbnail wp-image-1079\" title=\"IMG_1345\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/IMG_1345-150x150.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"150\" height=\"150\" /></a> Nice Set of Tanks at Avondale Brewing Company[/caption]</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Birmingham, Alabama</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://www.avondalebrewing.com/index-full.php\">Avondale Brewing Company</a> - Finding this place took me off the beaten path to Birmingham\'s Avondale neighborhood. The neighborhood looks like it\'s trying to gentrify with a few hip storefronts, but Avondale Brewing seems to attract most of the crowds. The taproom was full early Saturday afternoon, but the beer was worth waiting my turn -- another sour brown ale...</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>New Orleans</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://maurepasfoods.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Maurepas Foods</a> -  I didn\'t plan on visiting New Orleans. I\'d intended to stay on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, but as they still try to rebuild after Katrina\'s direct hit, there isn\'t much other than the casinos in Biloxi.  Remembering a conversation two nights prior with the guy sitting next to me at Holy Grale in Louisville, I skipped my usual haunts in the Arts/Warehouse District and headed over to the <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bywater,_New_Orleans\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Bywater</a> neighborhood. I parked near Maurepas Foods, looked at the menu, and walked in. It\'s a neighborhood place, but not a dive. The bartender offered me the Sunday night tasting menu complete with paired cocktails, but I wasn\'t that hungry. I had a sausage and squid sandwich -- sounds awful but tasted great.  They have a good cocktail and craft beer selection that matches up well with their menu. It\'s a nice break from the usual French Quarter drill.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Memphis</strong>\n\n[caption id=\"attachment_1083\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"150\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/IMG_1381-e1344996846435.jpg\"><img class=\"size-thumbnail wp-image-1083\" title=\"2 Piece Dark Meat Plate At Gus\'s\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/IMG_1381-e1344996846435-150x150.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"150\" height=\"150\" /></a> 2 Piece Dark Meat Plate At Gus\'s[/caption]\n<ul>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://thebeautyshoprestaurant.anotherroadsideattractioncatering.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Beauty Shop</a> - In an old beauty shop in the midtown Cooper Young neighborhood, Beauty Shop is run by a Memphis art student who went to New York, learned to cook, and then brought her training home. Has a hip vibe and menu.</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://www.southofbeale.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">South of Beale</a> - A good downtown gastropub in the <a href=\"http://southmainmemphis.net/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">South Main</a> district -- walking distance from Beale Street but a nice place to get away from the noise and crowds. A duck patty melt and rabbit sausage sandwich are on the menu that\'s a step up from typical pub grub, and there\'s a good selection of Southern craft beers and whiskey.</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://travel.usatoday.com/destinations/great-american-bites/story/2011/07/Great-American-Bites-Guss-World-Famous-Fried-Chicken-in-Memphis/49517608/1\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Gus\'s World Famous Fried Chicken</a> - Not every meal on my trip was at posh hipster places. Gus\'s is about as unhip as you can get, but they\'ve perfected fried chicken. Crispy (but not overly) outside, moist inside -- if it\'s not \"world famous\", it deserves to be. The sides are serviceable, but no one cares because it\'s all about the chicken. Gus\'s is a small place on a marginal block, so pick your time -- don\'t go during lunch rush, but don\'t wait until the sun goes down. But do go...</li>\n</ul>','Food and Drink Highlights from My Drive South','','inherit','closed','closed','','1068-revision-v1','','','2022-03-27 13:26:16','2022-03-27 18:26:16','',1068,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4118',0,'revision','',0),
(4120,1,'2022-03-28 16:50:33','2022-03-28 21:50:33','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/IMG_4455-scaled.jpeg\"><img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/IMG_4455-300x300.jpeg\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" alt=\"Skeleton in Louisville taproom\"></a>Having Fun in Louisville![/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>As the great American philosopher Ferris Bueller once said, “Life moves pretty fast” and in this episode, we talk about the rapid changes in hotel service, and in-flight mask mandates. Then I go into detail about our recent trip to Louisville, complete with recommendations for food and drink. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_185.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #185: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois a couple of weeks after hanging out in Brooklyn for what maybe I should call a <em>longer</em> weekend -- Thursday to Tuesday -- rather than a <em>long</em> weekend, which traditionally was the 3 days, Friday to Sunday, when I was growing up, but now with telecommuting feels like it’s gone to 3½ - 4, Thursday noon to Sunday.&nbsp;</li><li>I always have stayed in Manhattan on my trips to New York, so I decided to change it up this time. Rather than run the usual play -- cycling through corporate codes on hotel websites to find something reasonable in midtown Manhattan -- we posted up at an Airbnb in the Cobble Hill neighborhood in Brooklyn. And instead of threading through crowds on Madison Avenue to find a quick bite, we wandered down the much emptier sidewalks, maybe dodging a work-from-home dad following his daughter on a bike, and walked into a local butcher shop, G Esposito &amp; Sons, to get a couple of sandwiches. Which turned into a 10-minute conversation with the owner -- not sure if it was G himself or one of the Esposito sons -- about his wife’s favorite sandwich, how he screwed up his Ash Wednesday fast right at breakfast, and pointing in the case to the sausage his wife was making sausage for dinner that night. Definitely a change from my usual Midtown lunch experiences.</li><li>And that’s kinda what I wanted to get with this stay, the chance to dig into Brooklyn a bit by staying there; walking the neighborhoods; trying places like Esposito’s and Caputo’s Bakery just down Court St where we grabbed bread and pastries; places you probably wouldn’t journey to, but places you’d absolutely duck into if you were walking by. I used to do this when I’d do every-week trips to San Francisco or New Orleans. I wouldn’t stay in the same place every week. Instead, I’d move around. In San Francisco, I’d stay on Nob Hill one week, maybe SoMa the next week, and then maybe down the 101 in San Mateo for a change of scenery… and restaurants. I wouldn’t come out of it an expert in the city, but I’d come away with a lot more experiences, more of a feel of the city than if I’d stayed in the same place for 6 or 8 weeks straight.</li><li>And that’s what we got out of this weekend, a little better feel for Brooklyn. And part of that feel I picked up pretty quick -- cash is still king in Brooklyn, at least in Cobble Hill. These old-school Italian places -- cash only, though they do make space in the back of the shop for an ATM, just in case you find yourself a little short.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/Loveshadow/26219\"><em>SP*ANK Vox</em></a> by&nbsp;Loveshadow (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/Loveshadow/26219</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Following up on my recent rants about US hotel housekeeping cutbacks, Jim McDonough hit me up on Twitter with his most recent experience<ul><li>“We stayed at the Whaler on Kaanapali Beach on Maui late January/early February. The deal was \"room cleaned on checkout\". However, we noticed the trash was being emptied (or someone was stealing it) while we were out. Apparently, the Monday after our arrival, they had resumed daily cleaning -- but forgot to tell us.”</li></ul></li><li>Jim, thanks for that. You’d think they’d want to take credit for the service upgrade -- or at least prevent you thinking someone was breaking into your room</li><li>Long-time friend, long-time listener, first-time caller Laura Wotycha texted me about her recent experience with travel inflation<ul><li>“Having found myself with 3 unexpected days off from work, I decided to head south for some sun and a Vitamin D top-up at my favorite, favorite, <em>favorite</em> resort, the outstanding JW Marriott Grande Lakes in Orlando. I’m all about the most beautiful (grown-up) lazy river and handsome pool boys who come right over when you flip your flag up on your lounge chair. But the number was huge -- twice the decent sized number I paid last May for my birthday weekend.</li><li>“So instead, I headed a bit east, to the Eastern Shore of Maryland to a much more reasonably priced Hyatt resort in Cambridge, MD. It was freaking ridiculously beautiful! Saved money on the flight as well as on the room, some of which I promptly dropped on multiple platters of Chesapeake Bay oysters.”</li></ul></li><li>Laura, I’m glad it all worked out for you. The Eastern Shore is its own world, and a fun place to explore before the summer crowds hit. I understand the attraction of flipping up the flag for an instant cocktail in the Florida sun, but I’ll take those oysters with a cold beer every time.</li><li>In the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/03/03/podcast-184-figuring-out-stealth-travel-inflation/\">last episode</a>, I said “No one sees an end in site for in-flight masking”. And 2 weeks later, the UK ditches its remaining COVID travel restrictions. Heathrow airport then drops mandatory masking; UK-based airlines BA, Virgin Atlantic, Tui, and EasyJet drop mask rules where they can -- mostly within the UK (except for Scotland), and to Denmark, Iceland, Gibraltar, Hungary, and the Caribbean. Then <a href=\"https://thepointsguy.com/news/klm-face-mask-rules-boycott/\">KLM announces they’ll stop enforcing in-flight masking</a> even though it’s still a legal Dutch requirement. And now this week, <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/airline-ceos-ask-biden-to-drop-mask-requirement-for-planes-and-airports-11648098070?reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink\">US airline CEOs</a> and  <a href=\"https://www.dallasnews.com/business/airlines/2022/03/22/southwest-airlines-flight-attendants-ask-biden-to-drop-face-mask-mandate/\">Southwest Airlines’ flight attendants’ union are calling for the end of the US mask mandate</a>. In the words of the great American philosopher Ferris Bueller, “Life moves pretty fast”<br><br>The US CEOs have said this before. The Southwest flight attendants are a new voice, and they have a point. The mask mandate impacts them more than anyone day-in, day-out --  they’re the ones having to enforce it and, let’s face it, that wasn’t in the job description when they took the job. Indeed, a Tui flight attendant <a href=\"https://twitter.com/flywithclaude/status/1502697933719937027\">tweeted out</a> “First flight done without a mask and it was an absolute dream .. Happy passengers .. Happy crew”  The March extension of the US mandate was only a month -- from March 18 to April 18 -- the shortest extension I can recall. Right now, the <a href=\"https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-extend-airplane-transit-mask-mandate-through-april-18-official-2022-03-10/\">CDC is supposed to be working on a “revised policy framework” for mask mandates on public transport</a>. In spite of being a lousy forecaster, I’m guessing that they’ll take every bit of that month before they make an announcement.<br><br>Irene and I were talking about this yesterday. Even without a mandate, we’ll probably voluntarily pull out a KN-95 on a completely packed plane in the winter; when I’m sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with a guy coughing or sniffling. It’s less of a COVID thing and more of a “I should’ve been doing this for the last 30 years” thing. Would’ve saved a fortune on cough and cold medicine and pocket packs of Kleenex.</li><li>At the end of the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/03/03/podcast-184-figuring-out-stealth-travel-inflation/\">last episode</a>, I mentioned looking forward to checking out the new <a href=\"https://thecenturionlounge.com/locations/lga/\">LGA Amex Centurion Club</a>. The old LGA club was upstairs, tucked in a corner and, worst of all, before security, so next to the bar, they had a TV showing the live feed from a camera pointed at the TSA checkpoint so you could figure out when you needed to leave the lounge to make your flight. The <em>new</em> club, in the <em>new </em>Terminal B, is great -- properly placed <em>after</em> security, on the way to the gates, and twice as big as the old lounge, so plenty of room even when there’s a weather delay.  The one kink in my plan was -- I’d forgotten to bring my Amex Platinum card to New York. Ugh. So the night before leaving, I hit the Amex website, fire up the chat box and ask “Is there any way to get in without my physical card?” The net net of the back-and-forth was “No” -- as I expected. Ugh, again. But then, on the Uber ride to the airport, I was killing time, poking around the Amex app on my iPhone and found a screen on the LGA Centurion Lounge. And there, under Access Information, it said I could use a Platinum card or a Check-In Code. So I hit the button for a Check-In Code and got a QR code from Loungebuddy. Hmmm. Well, nothing to lose, so after security, I walked up to the desk, the agent scanned the QR code and my boarding pass and I was good to go. “Everyone’s using it now,” she told me. I went to the bar and got a free beer thinking “Somebody should tell the chat guys that.”</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/55998\">Lakeside Jam</a></em> by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/55998</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Notes on Louisville</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Sticking my head into the open hatch of the fermentation vessel during the <a href=\"https://www.angelsenvy.com/\">Angel’s Envy distillery</a> tour was probably my peak Louisville moment -- looking down at the bubbling mash, and then inhaling -- enjoying those nice yeasty notes for just second or two until the hot CO<sub>2</sub> coming up from those bubbles burnt out my nostrils.</li><li>I’m not a big bourbon guy; more of a Scotch guy, but it still was a great tour. I like these kinds of tours; ones where you see people making things. It was a Friday afternoon and the place running at full tilt -- the mash tuns and the fermenters were full, the distilling column was burbling away, a couple of guys were emptying aged bourbon out of barrels giving that room a really nice smell, and the bottling line was running at a surprisingly not-hectic pace, the filled bottles proceeding along the conveyor at a kinda stately pace past a couple of inspectors and then to the boxing crew. And there were only 7 of us on the tour, so we all got front-row views. The tasting at the end of the tour was well-done; a 15-20-minute guided tasting session rather than the “here’s your complimentary shot” I usually get at Scottish distilleries.</li><li>I mentioned in the last episode that I have a small bit of history with Louisville. My folks moved there from Memphis in the early ‘80’s while I was in college in DC. And I ended up living one summer when I was too broke to stay in DC. And where I learned to pronounce Louisville like a native -- “Lou-a-vul”, not moving your mouth, swallowing all the vowels. Which is how you know someone pronouncing it “Louisville” is not from there. I only ever heard one person pronounce it “Louis-ville”. He was English, so I couldn’t tell if he was serious or not. But after my family moved to Southern California in the late ‘80’s, that was pretty much it until July 2012 when Louisville was the first stop on my 2,100-mile drive around the South that I talked about in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/07/31/podcast-100-southern-road-trip-breaking-up-with-american-airlines/\">episode #100</a>. And then 10 years later, this trip.</li><li>Back in 2012, after 6 hours of I-65, I took the first exit I could after crossing the Ohio River and parked myself at the counter of Garage Bar, a repurposed gas station in NuLu -- New Louisville -- the hip neighborhood developing east of downtown, running a few blocks down East Market Street. Ten years later, Garage Bar is still there and NuLu has expanded east and north, starting to smear into what was called Butchertown when my folks lived there. There seems to be a coffee shop or taproom on every corner and cool independent boutiques and restaurants filling the spaces in-between. It’s a fun neighborhood with a buzz about it -- people on the sidewalks, every coffee shop and restaurant I walked into were doing good business. I talked about <a href=\"https://www.labodeguitademima.com/\">La Bodeguita De Mima</a> in the last episode, a great Cuban restaurant that was jammed on Thursday night. Saturday morning, we tried to carb up at <a href=\"https://biscuitbelly.com/nulu/\">Biscuit Belly</a>, but it was packed, so we walked up a block to <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/butchertowngrocery/\">Butchertown Grocery Bakery</a> for my biscuit &amp; gravy fix.&nbsp;</li><li>Working our way through the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butchertown,_Louisville\">Butchertown neighborhood</a> toward the river, we had to navigate our way under a huge set of elevated expressway lanes -- a&nbsp; tangle of I-64 and I-71 -- to get to the Ohio River. The Ohio River, like the Mississippi and the Missouri and the Cumberland, is a working river, carrying barge tows 5 football fields long, making it a bit dodgy for small pleasure craft, and so the banks of these rivers are often pretty industrial. But Louisville’s <a href=\"https://ourwaterfront.org/\">Waterfront Park</a> reclaimed some of that industrial space, scrap yards and sand pits, to provide a nice stretch of riverside recreation. The one bit of industrial scrap they did leave -- the late 1800’s Big Four railroad bridge, decommissioned in 1969, left standing above the river without connections to either side… until about 8 years ago when Kentucky and Indiana built ramps to reconnect it to the river banks on each side and now it’s a pedestrian and biking path.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>We drove over to the <a href=\"https://shelbyparklouisville.squarespace.com/\">Shelby Park neighborhood</a>, parked the car and walked along Logan Street. We started at the <a href=\"https://loganstmarket.com/\">Logan St Market</a>, shopping the food stalls on the first floor and then browsing through a makers’ market on the second floor. We walked down Logan Street, past a <a href=\"https://www.idlewildbutterflyfarm.com/\">butterfly farm</a>, a ping pong emporium, a hot dog joint and a bunch of houses ‘til we got to <a href=\"https://www.atriumbrewing.com/\">Atrium Brewing</a> which had some great beers, a nice taproom, and a big TV showing college basketball because, what else would be on in Kentucky. It was a nice walk. We could feel this stretch was beginning to develop, but I don’t think it’ll be another NuLu. Feels like it’ll be something more neighborhoody, lower key, maybe a touch crunchy granola.&nbsp;</li><li>And that’s what struck me about walking and driving around Louisville. It seems to have these separate neighborhoods, strips of 4 or 8 or 10 blocks that aren’t linked up. They’re sorta islands separated by runs of dodgy blocks -- maybe vacant lots or some rundown housing or a big underpass -- that don’t invite continued walking. Like our walk from our AC Hotel in NuLu to the Angel’s Envy distillery. Navigating under the multiple lands of I-65 was poorly lit and slightly uncomfortable and&nbsp; at 2pm; I definitely would’ve had second thoughts at 6 or 7. Once there, the distillery is a great building; they dropped a sleek new distilling operation between the brick walls and steel beams of an abandoned 1900’s manufacturing building. And it’s kitty corner from Louisville’s minor league baseball park and <a href=\"https://atgbrewery.com/location/smokehouse/\">Against The Grain</a> microbrewery. But then, that’s it, except for open surface parking lots. I’m hoping that Louisville finds a way, multiple ways (some planned, some organic) to grow into the empty spaces and link up these neighborhood islands</li><li>We had a fun four days in Louisville. I definitely recommend it. Get a car, base yourself in NuLu hotel, and explore the neighborhoods and the riverbank parks. Check out the show notes; I’ll summarize all this into an easy-to-use list of places and links.&nbsp;</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote\">\n<p><strong>My Recommendations</strong>:</p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https://www.labodeguitademima.com/\">La Bodeguita De Mima</a>, 725 East Market Street, NuLu — Great Cuban food; big portion sizes; loved the the Lechon Asado (roast pork)</li>\n<li><a href=\"http://quillscoffee.com/\">Quills Coffee</a>, 802 E Main St, NuLu — Unpretentious coffee joint on the NuLu/Butchertown border; friendly service; good coffee; no condescension</li>\n<li><a href=\"https://www.angelsenvy.com/\">Angel’s Envy Distillery</a>, 500 E Main St — Great tour of the distillery followed by one of the best guided tasting sessions I\'ve had</li>\n<li><a href=\"https://www.atriumbrewing.com/\">Atrium Brewing</a>, 1154 Logan St, Shelby Park — Solid beer selection; good-sized taproom in an upcoming neighborhood</li>\n<li><a href=\"http://www.milewidebeer.com/\">Mile Wide Beer</a>, 636 Barret Ave, Highlands — At the base of the grain silos of a former biscuit factory, good bar and wide selection of beer styles</li>\n</ul>\n</blockquote>\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #185</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_185.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #185 — Notes on Louisville; Changing Mask Mandates','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-185-notes-on-louisville-changing-mask-mandates','','','2022-04-25 13:20:08','2022-04-25 18:20:08','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4120',0,'post','',0),
(4121,1,'2022-03-28 08:56:46','2022-03-28 13:56:46','','IMG_4455','','inherit','open','closed','','img_4455','','','2022-03-28 08:56:46','2022-03-28 13:56:46','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/IMG_4455.jpeg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(4123,1,'2022-03-28 09:05:28','2022-03-28 14:05:28','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\">\n<p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Cracked-mirror-square.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright wp-image-2482 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Cracked-mirror-square-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a></p><figcaption>What\'s Behind Me Is Not Important</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>Going upscale, recording in the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/1871Chicago/photos/we-have-a-new-podcast-studio-big-thanks-to-1871-company-parkergale-capital-for-h/1116900888351884/\">podcast studio</a> at the <a href=\"https://1871.com/\">1871 tech incubator</a> in Chicago, I talk about my surprising smooth 2-week trip in Ireland and Scotland. We also note the retirement (finally!) of American Airlines\' MD-80 jet, a very interesting new social media app, talk about how algorithms are changing the way we travel, and the melancholy of leaving familiar places for the last time.&nbsp; All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_153.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #153: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you today from the podcast studio in the 1871 tech incubator in Chicago, IL. I have to say that this is the most professional studio I’ve recorded in since my high-school radio days in Memphis. I mentor here once a month and so get to use this bang-up studio. This sound ought to be phenomenal. It’s a few weeks after our 2-week Celtic jaunt -- a week touring in Ireland and a week of graduation festivities at University of St Andrews in Scotland. I’ve talked a bit about the planning for this trip in the past couple of episodes -- wrestling through the Avios website to kludge together flights on Aer Lingus and burn off some of my Avios balance that’s been sitting around for, I dunno, 5-10 years; and trying to sift through the horror stories of Irish car rentals. There were a whole lot of places where this trip could’ve gone bad… but it didn’t. The flights on Aer Lingus were fine; nothing special, but they were serviceable. Our Budget Car rental experience was the same -- a basic Renault compact with 30,000 km on it, but no issues with the folks on either the pick-up or the drop-off in Dublin airport. All the places I booked in Ireland were fine -- the B&amp;Bs on the west coast were great; the hotel in Dublin was, again, serviceable. And, we didn’t really have any rain to speak of until our last day in Dublin.</li><li>The flights between Dublin and Edinburgh were on turboprop planes -- ATR-72-600s to be exact. I can’t remember the last time I was on a prop plane -- even the quick 30-min hops I’d do occasionally between IAD and CHO are on Embraer jets. But I remember way back in my early flying days, American Eagle used to fly a lot of these ATRs. Once those props started turning, I popped on my Bose noise-cancelling headphones. Those American Eagle ATRs were one of the main reasons I invested in my first pair of Bose.</li><li>But other than a bit of a rainy walk to and from that plane in DUB and EDI, they were fine flights. Indeed, if there was any hiccup, it was on arrival in DUB from ORD.  We’d checked luggage, even though one of my regular top travel tips is to carry on. I knew the plane was full, and since Aer Lingus isn’t part of OneWorld or StarAlliance, neither my American nor my United status was going to get us pre-boarded. Rather than worrying about having to jockey for overhead space, we checked our bags - and anyways, it was free; it was included in the fare. So, low-hassle boarding. In DUB, I stood at the luggage carousel, watched it heave out a dozen or so bags, and then nothing. No worries; seen that before; the guys must be driving the tug back to the plane. And then the carousel stopped. Not too worried; seen that before too; just saving a little energy. And then the lights above us went out.  OK, this is a new one. I have to say that I started to worry a bit -- until I saw our pilot also looking around for his luggage. After 20 minutes, the lights came on and the carousel started burping up bags again. And there was a simultaneous sigh of relief from all the chaperones accompanying the half-dozen student trips that had packed this flight.</li><li> Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/Loveshadow/26219\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><em>SP*ANK Vox</em></a> by Loveshadow (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/Loveshadow/26219 </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Biggest travel news -- at least to me -- since the last episode -- American announced the retirement (finally!) of the last of its MD-80s, the “Super 80s” or the “Mad Dog 80s” with the last revenue flight planned for Sept 4th from DFW to ORD. Which for me is very apropos because I spent a <em>lot</em> of time in the mid-80\'s flying MD-80\'s between those two AA hubs. I thought the 737 Max grounding might delay the final MD-80 flight, but it looks like American has scrounged up enough 737-800s to fill the gap. I posted American’s announcement on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page. Jim McDonough commented - “Flew the Mad Dog many, many times. My wife and I would select row 9 on the 2 seat side, flying, usually, DFW/SAN. She’s tiny, so I felt like I was in first class.” The left-hand 2-seat side was great for couples -- got a window and an aisle seat without having to guess if the center seat would be filled. But then you had to deal with the short overhead bins on that side where you could only fit your bag in sideways, and usually no power supply. The cigarette style power adapters were on the other side, the 3-seat side, but only in every <em>other</em> row. It was a unique plane...</li><li>Back in May, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/05/07/podcast-151-traveler-data-leaks-brittany-street-food/\">episode 151</a>, TravelCommons listener Mika Pyyhkala sent in a note about his great experience with a flight rebooking service, Freebird. This week, I was booking a trip to CHO on the Amex Travel site with my Platinum card. At the end of the booking, it offered me free Freebird coverage for the trip. I had to check a box to opt in, so I read the fine print closely to make sure it was really free, but it was. Seems Freebird and Amex are doing a free trial. Don’t know how long it lasts, but I’ll opt in -- with the hope that I don’t actually have to use it.</li><li>Some bits ‘n’ bobs observations from my Ireland-Scotland trip…</li><li>Like so many other folks, I’m carrying my own water bottle on flights. I started last fall. The big Amazon Web Services conference gave everyone a refillable water bottle, replacing barrels of iced single-use water bottles with refilling stations. Most airports now have refilling spigots next to regular water fountains. Irene has carried one forever. It came in handy when Aer Lingus wanted to charge her €3 for water on one of our flights. Now, I lost that original AWS water bottles a few months back -- matching my usual 6-month time-before-loss metric. No big deal; it was just a plastic bottle with a screw-on cap. But I wanted a new one. So for Fathers’ Day, Claire gave me a new souped-up 20 oz. water bottle with a push-button pop-up drinking spout and a carabiner loop -- very nice. I pulled it out during one of our Aer Lingus flights, skipping their €3 charge, hit the button for the spout and immediately get hit square between the eyes with a fat stream of water from my bottle-now-turned-water fountain. Apparently this new fancy water bottle seals airtight, meaning the water in the bottle stayed at ground pressure while our cabin was now lower, at something between 6 and 8,000 ft. I’m used to that with foil-sealed yogurts, but not my water bottle. A surprise not just for me, but also the Irish guy next to me who was napping before he caught some shrapnel from my portable water cannon.</li><li>One of the things I look forward to when staying at bed-&amp;-breakfasts in the UK and Ireland are… the breakfasts. And the breakfasts we had in Ireland were at least one order of magnitude better than the best concierge lounge fare at a Marriott -- which may be damning with faint praise, but I don’t mean to, we had great breakfasts. For most of our time on the west coast, we hubbed out of Galway, staying in the same place for 3 nights, or more importantly, 3 breakfasts. The first morning was easy; the full cooked breakfast -- eggs, bacon, sausage, black and white pudding, tomatoes, mushrooms, baked beans, and toast. We were doing a good bit of hiking that day and I wasn’t hungry until 3. Doing that two days in a row, though, felt like I was tempting fate -- or at least an arterial blockage. So the next morning, I went with the healthier choice -- oatmeal porridge. The presentation is pretty typical -- a big bowl of porridge with little cups of raisins, brown sugar, and cream. I mix in the raisins, a touch of the brown sugar, and a bit of the cream to loosen up the porridge. Except it doesn’t smell like cream. I taste it -- it’s Bailey\'s Irish Cream. I dump the rest of it in. I figure porridge with a Bailey’s topper is kinda the Irish version of a Bloody Mary.</li><li>One of the big differences for me between renting a car in the US and in Europe is the pre-car inspection. You get the keys, the rental agreement, and a form showing the condition of the car before you take if off the lot -- pre-existing dings and scratches. I always give this form to Irene -- she’s much pickier than I am. She walks around the car, making note of anything missing, while I figure out the rear-view mirrors and pairing my iPhone to the entertainment system. So I was kinda surprised to get an e-mail from Hertz before getting on our flight to EDI with a bunch of pictures of a Kia wagon. Here was our car; here was the documentation of its condition. We walked straight to the car, loaded up the luggage and drove off. No walkaround inspection. It makes sense. We had gotten to the point, on our last couple of rentals, where we were taking pictures of dings and scratches as well as marking them on the form. Now here, Hertz was doing it for us. Not sure if I got this because I have Hertz Gold, but it certainly was a big improvement in the rental experience -- though I still had to figure out how to pair my phone.</li><li>The timing on international connections in Europe always feels a little bit of a crap shoot because there doesn’t seem to be a consistent rule about having to pass thru security again. Amsterdam, no security. Frankfurt, no security for a European connection, but security if you’re flying to, say, India or the Middle East. London, security every time, maybe even a couple of additional passes just for kicks. Dublin, though, had a new twist. Go thru the usual drill -- pull out your electronics, take off your belt, push your bags thru the X-ray machine, but then -- where’s the metal detector? Just walk past the security guy and put my PC back in my bag. I looked back. There was a metal detector all the way at the end of the security hall, but only one. The rest of us were acting like we were walking thru a metal detector, except there wasn’t one. That was just odd.</li><li>We were in Scotland for Claire’s graduation from University of St Andrews. Hanging around, drinking beer with folks a couple of generations younger than you -- this group was right on the Millennial/Gen Z boundary -- is always an educational experience. But when the conversation turned to their new favorite app -- <a href=\"https://apps.apple.com/us/app/poop-map-pin-and-track/id1303269455\">Poop</a> <a href=\"https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.poopmap&amp;hl=en_US\">Map</a> -- I thought they were leading this old guy on. An app where you and your friends share the places you’ve pooped, complete with star ratings and comments, seemed too much like an Onion headline -- social media taken to the absurd extreme. Except is wasn’t satire; it was real. They all pulled out their phones, fired up the app, and showed me their check-ins. OK, then. But I think checking in beers on Untappd is as far as I want to go.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com. </li><li>Bridge Music —  &nbsp;<em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/trifonic/445\" target=\"_blank\">Bored on Your Backside</a></em> by Trifonic     </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Travel by Algorithm</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>On the rainy Monday we flew from DUB to EDI, I drove us downtown to meet some friends for the day. The rain was beginning to muck up traffic, so I was kinda glued to Google Maps to help route us around some of the traffic tie ups, which meant we weren’t on the usual route take in from the airport, which meant I was just about completely dependent on Google; completely trusting that algorithm. Which was kinda broken when I followed Google’s directions through a warning sign and onto a “Buses Only” road. Google directed me to keep driving down the road, but since I was only a single-decker Kia wagon, I didn’t think any attempt to masquerade as a bus was going to survive our first police encounter. So I took the first left (much easier when driving on the left side of the road) hoping the algorithm would produce a bit more legal routing.</li><li>Not overly shocking. There have been a steady stream of stories for years about GPSs leading people astray -- this was a topic way back in the early days of&nbsp; TravelCommons, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2006/05/04/podcast-38-the-accidental-vacation-trusting-travel-technology/\">episode #36</a> in 2006 to be exact, when they were called SatNavs, I told the story of making a dash to SFO after a sales meeting. I’m riding shotgun, tracking our progress on a one of those <em>paper</em> maps that Hertz used to put in every car. But we also had a Hertz NeverLost. It seemed about 10 seconds slow to me. I spotted our turn on I-580, but Hertz said nothing. “Turn,” I said. “No,” Brian said, “You need to trust the technology.” And so when Hertz said to turn 10 seconds later, he did -- right into a gas station. Not as bad as stories of people driving across closed bridges, into rivers, up unpaved mountain roads… But in the subsequent 13 years, with SatNav, now GPS, moving from our cars to our pockets, we’re lean on those algorithms more than ever. Now living in Chicago, I haven’t bothered to learn any of the public transit routes; I just use Google Maps or the Transit app to tell me what bus to catch when.</li><li>Sometimes I’ll use Hipmunk to look at flight options to a new city, or a place I haven’t been in a while. They promote their Agony sort, where their algorithm rates flight by a combination of price, duration, # of stops, and dependability. I’m heading back to CHO and since I haven’t been out there for 6 months, I hit Hipmunk to check out American’s and United’s current flight offerings, scrolled down from the non-stops thru the 1-stops. I thought it was interesting, though, that Hipmunk’s algorithm scored a 24-hr hour Amtrak ride with a 3-hr layover in DC’s Union Station as less agonizing than a 6-hr 2-stop trip on United Express with connections in Columbus and IAD. But given some of my United Express experiences, who am I to second-guess that algorithm?</li><li>One of the things I liked about the soon-to-be-turned-off Google Trips app, is how it would auto-magically generate itinerary recommendations for a city. It would pick out points of interest with high Google review scores, and then combine the hours each would be open from the business listing with the typical amount of time people would stay there, and location and traffic data from Google Maps to generate the best itinerary. This fascinated me. It sucked my into a click hole of academic papers presented at the International Conference on the Practice and Theory of Automated Timetabling and the International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining talking about how the “Tourist Trip Design Problem (TTDP) is a route-planning problem on multiple Points of Interest. TTDP can be considered as an extension of the classical problem of Team Orienteering Problem with Time Windows.” I want to use this to automatically generate microbrewery taproom crawls but the math made my eyes bleed.</li><li>But back to that rainy day in Edinburgh, Google Maps redeemed itself at the end of the day. There was so much rain that Monday, our usual path out of the city, the A90, was at a complete standstill because of flooded underpasses, and stalled cars that tried to make it thru the flooded underpasses. Google Maps guided us past a gridlocked traffic circle, winding us through some apartment complexes, bypassing the flooded parts, and putting us right onto the M90 so we could head out to St Andrews. Better travel through algorithms.</li><li>Bridge Music —   &nbsp; <em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/hepepe/21074\" target=\"_blank\">Bogi Beat Budapest</a> </em>by KarmaHacker  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Leaving Places Behind</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Driving out of St Andrews that last time was a bit melancholy. We’d spent the last 4 September there, saw things change -- restaurants open and close, Edinburgh airport get spiffier -- but also the familiar things stay the same -- <a href=\"http://keysbar.co.uk/\">The Keys</a>, my favorite dive whisky bar; <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"St Andrews Brewing Company (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https://www.standrewsbrewingcompany.com/\" target=\"_blank\">St Andrews Brewing Company</a> or “Stabco” as my daughter would call it, always with a great beer selection from across the UK; and <a href=\"https://jahangirstandrews.co.uk/\">Jahangir</a>, an Indian restaurant we found our first year because they were the only place we could find a table that Friday night... and we kept going back because they had great food and we never couldn’t get a table</li><li>The melancholy was that we probably wouldn’t be back; at least not for a long time. It’s out-of-the-way -- which is part of its charm, but it’s why we probably won’t be back for a while.</li><li>I felt the same way when I finished a project in Portland, Oregon some years back. I was in Portland every week for 3-4 months and got to know it pretty well. I explored new places, but developed some favorite spots I’d hit every week -- <a href=\"https://www.clydecommon.com/\">Clyde Commons</a> for dinner at the bar, <a href=\"https://www.baileystaproom.com/\">Bailey’s Taproom</a> with a new beer selection every week. When that project ended, I knew I wouldn’t be back to Portland for a long time -- as opposed to New York or San Francisco. Wrapping up a project there, not really a big deal because there’s enough business to bring me back. New Orleans was kinda in the middle. I’d been there almost non-stop for 3-4 years, but while I didn’t think business would bring me down there again, it’s not out of the way, and I’d be down often for vacations or conventions -- which is how it’s turned out.</li><li>Some of that melancholy comes from regret -- from things you always meant to do but never made time for -- “I’ll do that next time,” you’d say to yourself, but never get to it. The last time I was in Charlottesville, VA, I was finishing up what had been another 3-4 year stream of work and wasn’t sure when I’d be back. For me, Charlottesville was a bit like St Andrews, an out-of-the-way college town (though only a 2-hr flight from Chicago rather than an 8-10 hour fly-and-drive) and wasn’t sure when -- if ever -- I’d get back. Over those years, I’d always plan to take a half-day and drive the 15 minutes from the client to <a href=\"https://www.monticello.org/\">Monticello</a>, Thomas Jefferson’s home, and take the tour. It’s always written up as a must-see, and I’m right here. But every time I was going to do it, something would come up, and I’d say “I’ll do that next time.” And so here I was, the last time -- I didn’t know when the next time would be. And I really didn’t have much time in my schedule, but after lunch one day, I walked out, taking calls all the way to the Monticello parking lot, and then turned off my phone and had a great tour. And flew out the next morning without that regret.&nbsp;</li><li>But now 6 months later, I’m heading back to Charlottesville. So maybe I’ll get back to St Andrews sooner than I thought. Maybe I should see if <a href=\"https://www.standrewsbrewingcompany.com/\">Stabco</a> needs an old-guy bartender.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #153</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a></li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_153.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #153 — Travel By Algorithm; Leaving Places Behind','','inherit','closed','closed','','2494-revision-v1','','','2022-03-28 09:05:28','2022-03-28 14:05:28','',2494,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4123',0,'revision','',0),
(4124,1,'2022-03-28 09:19:39','2022-03-28 14:19:39','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/IMG_4455-scaled.jpeg\"><img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/IMG_4455-300x300.jpeg\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a>Having Fun in Louisville![/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>In the travel world, what goes up -- rules, fees, prices -- often stays up. It\'s the ratchet effect and it\'s a theme running through this episode. Inflation is on everyone\'s mind, and so we dig into travel inflation, comparing today\'s prices with pre-pandemic levels.  We also talk about US passport renewals ahead of the summer vacation season, and some good Cuban food in Louisville and a questionable food trend in London. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_185.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #185: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois a couple of weeks after hanging out in Brooklyn for what maybe I should call a <em>longer</em> weekend -- Thursday to Tuesday -- rather than a <em>long</em> weekend, which traditionally was the 3 days, Friday to Sunday, when I was growing up, but now with telecommuting feels like it’s gone to 3½ - 4, Thursday noon to Sunday.&nbsp;</li><li>I always have stayed in Manhattan on my trips to New York, so I decided to change it up this time. Rather than run the usual play -- cycling through corporate codes on hotel websites to find something reasonable in midtown Manhattan -- we posted up at an Airbnb in the Cobble Hill neighborhood in Brooklyn. And instead of threading through crowds on Madison Avenue to find a quick bite, we wandered down the much emptier sidewalks, maybe dodging a work-from-home dad following his daughter on a bike, and walked into a local butcher shop, G Esposito &amp; Sons, to get a couple of sandwiches. Which turned into a 10-minute conversation with the owner -- not sure if it was G himself or one of the Esposito sons -- about his wife’s favorite sandwich, how he screwed up his Ash Wednesday fast right at breakfast, and pointing in the case to the sausage his wife was making sausage for dinner that night. Definitely a change from my usual Midtown lunch experiences.</li><li>And that’s kinda what I wanted to get with this stay, the chance to dig into Brooklyn a bit by staying there; walking the neighborhoods; trying places like Esposito’s and Caputo’s Bakery just down Court St where we grabbed bread and pastries; places you probably wouldn’t journey to, but places you’d absolutely duck into if you were walking by. I used to do this when I’d do every-week trips to San Francisco or New Orleans. I wouldn’t stay in the same place every week. Instead, I’d move around. In San Francisco, I’d stay on Nob Hill one week, maybe SoMa the next week, and then maybe down the 101 in San Mateo for a change of scenery… and restaurants. I wouldn’t come out of it an expert in the city, but I’d come away with a lot more experiences, more of a feel of the city than if I’d stayed in the same place for 6 or 8 weeks straight.</li><li>And that’s what we got out of this weekend, a little better feel for Brooklyn. And part of that feel I picked up pretty quick -- cash is still king in Brooklyn, at least in Cobble Hill. These old-school Italian places -- cash only, though they do make space in the back of the shop for an ATM, just in case you find yourself a little short.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/Loveshadow/26219\">SP*ANK Vox</a> by&nbsp;Loveshadow (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/Loveshadow/26219</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Following up on my recent rants about US hotel housekeeping cutbacks, John McDonough hit me up on Twitter with his most recent experience<ul><li>“We stayed at the Whaler on Kaanapali Beach on Maui late January/early February. The deal was \"room cleaned on checkout\". However, we noticed the trash was being emptied (or someone was stealing it) while we were out. Apparently, the Monday after our arrival, they had resumed daily cleaning -- but forgot to tell us.”</li></ul></li><li>Jim, thanks for that. You’d think they’d want to take credit for the service upgrade -- or at least prevent you thinking someone was breaking into your room</li><li>Long-time friend, long-time listener, first-time caller Laura Wotycha texted me about her recent experience with travel inflation<ul><li>“Having found myself with 3 unexpected days off from work, I decided to head south for some sun and a Vitamin D top-up at my favorite, favorite, <em>favorite</em> resort, the outstanding JW Marriott Grande Lakes in Orlando. I’m all about the most beautiful (grown-up) lazy river and handsome pool boys who come right over when you flip your flag up on your lounge chair. But the number was huge -- twice the decent sized number I paid last May for my birthday weekend.</li><li>“So instead, I headed a bit east, to the Eastern Shore of Maryland to a much more reasonably priced Hyatt resort in Cambridge, MD. It was freaking ridiculously beautiful! Saved money on the flight as well as on the room, some of which I promptly dropped on multiple platters of Chesapeake Bay oysters.”</li></ul></li><li>Laura, I’m glad it all worked out for you. The Eastern Shore is its own world, and a fun place to explore before the summer crowds hit. I understand the attraction of flipping up the flag for an instant cocktail in the Florida sun, but I’ll take those oysters with a cold beer every time.</li><li>In the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/03/03/podcast-184-figuring-out-stealth-travel-inflation/\">last episode</a>, I said “No one sees an end in site for in-flight masking”. And 2 weeks later, the UK ditches its remaining COVID travel restrictions. Heathrow airport then drops mandatory masking; UK-based airlines BA, Virgin Atlantic, Tui, and EasyJet drop mask rules where they can -- mostly within the UK (except for Scotland), and to Denmark, Iceland, Gibraltar, Hungary, and the Caribbean. Then <a href=\"https://thepointsguy.com/news/klm-face-mask-rules-boycott/\">KLM announces they’ll stop enforcing in-flight masking</a> even though it’s still a legal Dutch requirement. And now this week, <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/airline-ceos-ask-biden-to-drop-mask-requirement-for-planes-and-airports-11648098070?reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink\">US airline CEOs</a> and&nbsp; <a href=\"https://www.dallasnews.com/business/airlines/2022/03/22/southwest-airlines-flight-attendants-ask-biden-to-drop-face-mask-mandate/\">Southwest Airlines’ flight attendants’ union are calling for the end of the US mask mandate</a>. In the words of the great American philosopher Ferris Bueller, “Life moves pretty fast”<br><br>The US CEOs have said this before. The Southwest flight attendants are a new voice, and they have a point. The mask mandate impacts them more than anyone day-in, day-out --&nbsp; they’re the ones having to enforce it and, let’s face it, that wasn’t in the job description when they took the job. Indeed, a Tui flight attendant <a href=\"https://twitter.com/flywithclaude/status/1502697933719937027\">tweeted out</a> “First flight done without a mask and it was an absolute dream .. Happy passengers .. Happy crew”&nbsp; The March extension of the US mandate was only a month -- from March 18 to April 18 -- the shortest extension I can recall. Right now, the <a href=\"https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-extend-airplane-transit-mask-mandate-through-april-18-official-2022-03-10/\">CDC is supposed to be working on a “revised policy framework” for mask mandates on public transport</a>. In spite of being a lousy forecaster, I’m guessing that they’ll take every bit of that month before they make an announcement.<br><br>Irene and I were talking about this yesterday. Even without a mandate, we’ll probably voluntarily pull out a KN-95 on a completely packed plane in the winter; when I’m sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with a guy coughing or sniffling. It’s less of a COVID thing and more of a “I should’ve been doing this for the last 30 years” thing. Would’ve saved a fortune on cough and cold medicine and pocket packs of Kleenex.</li><li>At the end of the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/03/03/podcast-184-figuring-out-stealth-travel-inflation/\">last episode</a>, I mentioned looking forward to checking out the new <a href=\"https://thecenturionlounge.com/locations/lga/\">LGA Amex Centurion Club</a>. The old LGA club was upstairs, tucked in a corner and, worst of all, before security, so next to the bar, they had a TV showing the live feed from a camera pointed at the TSA checkpoint so you could figure out when you needed to leave the lounge to make your flight. The <em>new</em> club, in the <em>new </em>Terminal B, is great -- properly placed <em>after</em> security, on the way to the gates, and twice as big as the old lounge, so plenty of room even when there’s a weather delay.&nbsp; The one kink in my plan was -- I’d forgotten to bring my Amex Platinum card to New York. Ugh. So the night before leaving, I hit the Amex website, fire up the chat box and ask “Is there any way to get in without my physical card?” The net net of the back-and-forth was “No” -- as I expected. Ugh, again. But then, on the Uber ride to the airport, I was killing time, poking around the Amex app on my iPhone and found a screen on the LGA Centurion Lounge. And there, under Access Information, it said I could use a Platinum card or a Check-In Code. So I hit the button for a Check-In Code and got a QR code from Loungebuddy. Hmmm. Well, nothing to lose, so after security, I walked up to the desk, the agent scanned the QR code and my boarding pass and I was good to go. “Everyone’s using it now,” she told me. I went to the bar and got a free beer thinking “Somebody should tell the chat guys that.”</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — <em>Lakeside Jam</em> by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/55998</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Notes on Louisville</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Sticking my head into the open hatch of the fermentation vessel during the <a href=\"https://www.angelsenvy.com/\">Angel’s Envy distillery</a> tour was probably my peak Louisville moment -- looking down at the bubbling mash, and then inhaling -- enjoying those nice yeasty notes for just second or two until the hot CO<sub>2</sub> coming up from those bubbles burnt out my nostrils.</li><li>I’m not a big bourbon guy; more of a Scotch guy, but it still was a great tour. I like these kinds of tours; ones where you see people making things. It was a Friday afternoon and the place running at full tilt -- the mash tuns and the fermenters were full, the distilling column was burbling away, a couple of guys were emptying aged bourbon out of barrels giving that room a really nice smell, and the bottling line was running at a surprisingly not-hectic pace, the filled bottles proceeding along the conveyor at a kinda stately pace past a couple of inspectors and then to the boxing crew. And there were only 7 of us on the tour, so we all got front-row views. The tasting at the end of the tour was well-done; a 15-20-minute guided tasting session rather than the “here’s your complimentary shot” I usually get at Scottish distilleries.</li><li>I mentioned in the last episode that I have a small bit of history with Louisville. My folks moved there from Memphis in the early ‘80’s while I was in college in DC. And I ended up living one summer when I was too broke to stay in DC. And where I learned to pronounce Louisville like a native -- “Lou-a-vul”, not moving your mouth, swallowing all the vowels. Which is how you know someone pronouncing it “Louisville” is not from there. I only ever heard one person pronounce it “Louis-ville”. He was English, so I couldn’t tell if he was serious or not. But after my family moved to Southern California in the late ‘80’s, that was pretty much it until July 2012 when Louisville was the first stop on my 2,100-mile drive around the South that I talked about in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/07/31/podcast-100-southern-road-trip-breaking-up-with-american-airlines/\">episode #100</a>. And then 10 years later, this trip.</li><li>Back in 2012, after 6 hours of I-65, I took the first exit I could after crossing the Ohio River and parked myself at the counter of Garage Bar, a repurposed gas station in NuLu -- New Louisville -- the hip neighborhood developing east of downtown, running a few blocks down East Market Street. Ten years later, Garage Bar is still there and NuLu has expanded east and north, starting to smear into what was called Butchertown when my folks lived there. There seems to be a coffee shop or taproom on every corner and cool independent boutiques and restaurants filling the spaces in-between. It’s a fun neighborhood with a buzz about it -- people on the sidewalks, every coffee shop and restaurant I walked into were doing good business. I talked about <a href=\"https://www.labodeguitademima.com/\">La Bodeguita De Mima</a> in the last episode, a great Cuban restaurant that was jammed on Thursday night. Saturday morning, we tried to carb up at Biscuit Belly, but it was packed, so we walked up a block to Butchertown Grocery Bakery for my biscuit &amp; gravy fix.&nbsp;</li><li>Working our way through the Butchertown neighborhood toward the river, we had to navigate our way under a huge set of elevated expressway lanes -- a&nbsp; tangle of I-64 and I-71 -- to get to the Ohio River. The Ohio River, like the Mississippi and the Missouri and the Cumberland, is a working river, carrying barge tows 5 football fields long, making it a bit dodgy for small pleasure craft, and so the banks of these rivers are often pretty industrial. But Louisville’s <a href=\"https://ourwaterfront.org/\">Waterfront Park</a> reclaimed some of that industrial space, scrap yards and sand pits, to provide a nice stretch of riverside recreation. The one bit of industrial scrap they did leave -- the late 1800’s Big Four railroad bridge, decommissioned in 1969, left standing above the river without connections to either side… until about 8 years ago when Kentucky and Indiana built ramps to reconnect it to the river banks on each side and now it’s a pedestrian and biking path.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>We drove over to the <a href=\"https://shelbyparklouisville.squarespace.com/\">Shelby Park neighborhood</a>, parked the car and walked along Logan Street. We started at the <a href=\"https://loganstmarket.com/\">Logan St Market</a>, shopping the food stalls on the first floor and then browsing through a makers’ market on the second floor. We walked down Logan Street, past a <a href=\"https://www.idlewildbutterflyfarm.com/\">butterfly farm</a>, a ping pong emporium, a hot dog joint and a bunch of houses ‘til we got to <a href=\"https://www.atriumbrewing.com/\">Atrium Brewing</a> which had some great beers, a nice taproom, and a big TV showing college basketball because, what else would be on in Kentucky. It was a nice walk. We could feel this stretch was beginning to develop, but I don’t think it’ll be another NuLu. Feels like it’ll be something more neighborhoody, lower key, maybe a touch crunchy granola.&nbsp;</li><li>And that’s what struck me about walking and driving around Louisville. It seems to have these separate neighborhoods, strips of 4 or 8 or 10 blocks that aren’t linked up. They’re sorta islands separated by runs of dodgy blocks -- maybe vacant lots or some rundown housing or a big underpass -- that don’t invite continued walking. Like our walk from our AC Hotel in NuLu to the Angel’s Envy distillery. Navigating under the multiple lands of I-65 was poorly lit and slightly uncomfortable and&nbsp; at 2pm; I definitely would’ve had second thoughts at 6 or 7. Once there, the distillery is a great building; they dropped a sleek new distilling operation between the brick walls and steel beams of an abandoned 1900’s manufacturing building. And it’s kitty corner from Louisville’s minor league baseball park and Against The Grain microbrewery. But then, that’s it, except for open surface parking lots. I’m hoping that Louisville finds a way, multiple ways (some planned, some organic) to grow into the empty spaces and link up these neighborhood islands</li><li>We had a fun four days in Louisville. I definitely recommend it. Get a car, base yourself in NuLu hotel, and explore the neighborhoods and the riverbank parks. Check out the show notes; I’ll summarize all this into an easy-to-use list of places and links.&nbsp;</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #185</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_185.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #185 — Changing Mask Mandates; Notes on Louisville','','inherit','closed','closed','','4120-revision-v1','','','2022-03-28 09:19:39','2022-03-28 14:19:39','',4120,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4124',0,'revision','',0),
(4125,1,'2022-03-28 09:24:56','2022-03-28 14:24:56','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/IMG_4455-scaled.jpeg\"><img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/IMG_4455-300x300.jpeg\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a>Having Fun in Louisville![/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>In the travel world, what goes up -- rules, fees, prices -- often stays up. It\'s the ratchet effect and it\'s a theme running through this episode. Inflation is on everyone\'s mind, and so we dig into travel inflation, comparing today\'s prices with pre-pandemic levels.  We also talk about US passport renewals ahead of the summer vacation season, and some good Cuban food in Louisville and a questionable food trend in London. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_185.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #185: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois a couple of weeks after hanging out in Brooklyn for what maybe I should call a <em>longer</em> weekend -- Thursday to Tuesday -- rather than a <em>long</em> weekend, which traditionally was the 3 days, Friday to Sunday, when I was growing up, but now with telecommuting feels like it’s gone to 3½ - 4, Thursday noon to Sunday. </li><li>I always have stayed in Manhattan on my trips to New York, so I decided to change it up this time. Rather than run the usual play -- cycling through corporate codes on hotel websites to find something reasonable in midtown Manhattan -- we posted up at an Airbnb in the Cobble Hill neighborhood in Brooklyn. And instead of threading through crowds on Madison Avenue to find a quick bite, we wandered down the much emptier sidewalks, maybe dodging a work-from-home dad following his daughter on a bike, and walked into a local butcher shop, G Esposito &amp; Sons, to get a couple of sandwiches. Which turned into a 10-minute conversation with the owner -- not sure if it was G himself or one of the Esposito sons -- about his wife’s favorite sandwich, how he screwed up his Ash Wednesday fast right at breakfast, and pointing in the case to the sausage his wife was making sausage for dinner that night. Definitely a change from my usual Midtown lunch experiences.</li><li>And that’s kinda what I wanted to get with this stay, the chance to dig into Brooklyn a bit by staying there; walking the neighborhoods; trying places like Esposito’s and Caputo’s Bakery just down Court St where we grabbed bread and pastries; places you probably wouldn’t journey to, but places you’d absolutely duck into if you were walking by. I used to do this when I’d do every-week trips to San Francisco or New Orleans. I wouldn’t stay in the same place every week. Instead, I’d move around. In San Francisco, I’d stay on Nob Hill one week, maybe SoMa the next week, and then maybe down the 101 in San Mateo for a change of scenery… and restaurants. I wouldn’t come out of it an expert in the city, but I’d come away with a lot more experiences, more of a feel of the city than if I’d stayed in the same place for 6 or 8 weeks straight.</li><li>And that’s what we got out of this weekend, a little better feel for Brooklyn. And part of that feel I picked up pretty quick -- cash is still king in Brooklyn, at least in Cobble Hill. These old-school Italian places -- cash only, though they do make space in the back of the shop for an ATM, just in case you find yourself a little short.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/Loveshadow/26219\"><em>SP*ANK Vox</em></a> by Loveshadow (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/Loveshadow/26219</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Following up on my recent rants about US hotel housekeeping cutbacks, John McDonough hit me up on Twitter with his most recent experience<ul><li>“We stayed at the Whaler on Kaanapali Beach on Maui late January/early February. The deal was \"room cleaned on checkout\". However, we noticed the trash was being emptied (or someone was stealing it) while we were out. Apparently, the Monday after our arrival, they had resumed daily cleaning -- but forgot to tell us.”</li></ul></li><li>Jim, thanks for that. You’d think they’d want to take credit for the service upgrade -- or at least prevent you thinking someone was breaking into your room</li><li>Long-time friend, long-time listener, first-time caller Laura Wotycha texted me about her recent experience with travel inflation<ul><li>“Having found myself with 3 unexpected days off from work, I decided to head south for some sun and a Vitamin D top-up at my favorite, favorite, <em>favorite</em> resort, the outstanding JW Marriott Grande Lakes in Orlando. I’m all about the most beautiful (grown-up) lazy river and handsome pool boys who come right over when you flip your flag up on your lounge chair. But the number was huge -- twice the decent sized number I paid last May for my birthday weekend.</li><li>“So instead, I headed a bit east, to the Eastern Shore of Maryland to a much more reasonably priced Hyatt resort in Cambridge, MD. It was freaking ridiculously beautiful! Saved money on the flight as well as on the room, some of which I promptly dropped on multiple platters of Chesapeake Bay oysters.”</li></ul></li><li>Laura, I’m glad it all worked out for you. The Eastern Shore is its own world, and a fun place to explore before the summer crowds hit. I understand the attraction of flipping up the flag for an instant cocktail in the Florida sun, but I’ll take those oysters with a cold beer every time.</li><li>In the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/03/03/podcast-184-figuring-out-stealth-travel-inflation/\">last episode</a>, I said “No one sees an end in site for in-flight masking”. And 2 weeks later, the UK ditches its remaining COVID travel restrictions. Heathrow airport then drops mandatory masking; UK-based airlines BA, Virgin Atlantic, Tui, and EasyJet drop mask rules where they can -- mostly within the UK (except for Scotland), and to Denmark, Iceland, Gibraltar, Hungary, and the Caribbean. Then <a href=\"https://thepointsguy.com/news/klm-face-mask-rules-boycott/\">KLM announces they’ll stop enforcing in-flight masking</a> even though it’s still a legal Dutch requirement. And now this week, <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/airline-ceos-ask-biden-to-drop-mask-requirement-for-planes-and-airports-11648098070?reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink\">US airline CEOs</a> and  <a href=\"https://www.dallasnews.com/business/airlines/2022/03/22/southwest-airlines-flight-attendants-ask-biden-to-drop-face-mask-mandate/\">Southwest Airlines’ flight attendants’ union are calling for the end of the US mask mandate</a>. In the words of the great American philosopher Ferris Bueller, “Life moves pretty fast”<br><br>The US CEOs have said this before. The Southwest flight attendants are a new voice, and they have a point. The mask mandate impacts them more than anyone day-in, day-out --  they’re the ones having to enforce it and, let’s face it, that wasn’t in the job description when they took the job. Indeed, a Tui flight attendant <a href=\"https://twitter.com/flywithclaude/status/1502697933719937027\">tweeted out</a> “First flight done without a mask and it was an absolute dream .. Happy passengers .. Happy crew”  The March extension of the US mandate was only a month -- from March 18 to April 18 -- the shortest extension I can recall. Right now, the <a href=\"https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-extend-airplane-transit-mask-mandate-through-april-18-official-2022-03-10/\">CDC is supposed to be working on a “revised policy framework” for mask mandates on public transport</a>. In spite of being a lousy forecaster, I’m guessing that they’ll take every bit of that month before they make an announcement.<br><br>Irene and I were talking about this yesterday. Even without a mandate, we’ll probably voluntarily pull out a KN-95 on a completely packed plane in the winter; when I’m sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with a guy coughing or sniffling. It’s less of a COVID thing and more of a “I should’ve been doing this for the last 30 years” thing. Would’ve saved a fortune on cough and cold medicine and pocket packs of Kleenex.</li><li>At the end of the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/03/03/podcast-184-figuring-out-stealth-travel-inflation/\">last episode</a>, I mentioned looking forward to checking out the new <a href=\"https://thecenturionlounge.com/locations/lga/\">LGA Amex Centurion Club</a>. The old LGA club was upstairs, tucked in a corner and, worst of all, before security, so next to the bar, they had a TV showing the live feed from a camera pointed at the TSA checkpoint so you could figure out when you needed to leave the lounge to make your flight. The <em>new</em> club, in the <em>new </em>Terminal B, is great -- properly placed <em>after</em> security, on the way to the gates, and twice as big as the old lounge, so plenty of room even when there’s a weather delay.  The one kink in my plan was -- I’d forgotten to bring my Amex Platinum card to New York. Ugh. So the night before leaving, I hit the Amex website, fire up the chat box and ask “Is there any way to get in without my physical card?” The net net of the back-and-forth was “No” -- as I expected. Ugh, again. But then, on the Uber ride to the airport, I was killing time, poking around the Amex app on my iPhone and found a screen on the LGA Centurion Lounge. And there, under Access Information, it said I could use a Platinum card or a Check-In Code. So I hit the button for a Check-In Code and got a QR code from Loungebuddy. Hmmm. Well, nothing to lose, so after security, I walked up to the desk, the agent scanned the QR code and my boarding pass and I was good to go. “Everyone’s using it now,” she told me. I went to the bar and got a free beer thinking “Somebody should tell the chat guys that.”</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/55998\">Lakeside Jam</a></em> by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/55998</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Notes on Louisville</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Sticking my head into the open hatch of the fermentation vessel during the <a href=\"https://www.angelsenvy.com/\">Angel’s Envy distillery</a> tour was probably my peak Louisville moment -- looking down at the bubbling mash, and then inhaling -- enjoying those nice yeasty notes for just second or two until the hot CO<sub>2</sub> coming up from those bubbles burnt out my nostrils.</li><li>I’m not a big bourbon guy; more of a Scotch guy, but it still was a great tour. I like these kinds of tours; ones where you see people making things. It was a Friday afternoon and the place running at full tilt -- the mash tuns and the fermenters were full, the distilling column was burbling away, a couple of guys were emptying aged bourbon out of barrels giving that room a really nice smell, and the bottling line was running at a surprisingly not-hectic pace, the filled bottles proceeding along the conveyor at a kinda stately pace past a couple of inspectors and then to the boxing crew. And there were only 7 of us on the tour, so we all got front-row views. The tasting at the end of the tour was well-done; a 15-20-minute guided tasting session rather than the “here’s your complimentary shot” I usually get at Scottish distilleries.</li><li>I mentioned in the last episode that I have a small bit of history with Louisville. My folks moved there from Memphis in the early ‘80’s while I was in college in DC. And I ended up living one summer when I was too broke to stay in DC. And where I learned to pronounce Louisville like a native -- “Lou-a-vul”, not moving your mouth, swallowing all the vowels. Which is how you know someone pronouncing it “Louisville” is not from there. I only ever heard one person pronounce it “Louis-ville”. He was English, so I couldn’t tell if he was serious or not. But after my family moved to Southern California in the late ‘80’s, that was pretty much it until July 2012 when Louisville was the first stop on my 2,100-mile drive around the South that I talked about in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/07/31/podcast-100-southern-road-trip-breaking-up-with-american-airlines/\">episode #100</a>. And then 10 years later, this trip.</li><li>Back in 2012, after 6 hours of I-65, I took the first exit I could after crossing the Ohio River and parked myself at the counter of Garage Bar, a repurposed gas station in NuLu -- New Louisville -- the hip neighborhood developing east of downtown, running a few blocks down East Market Street. Ten years later, Garage Bar is still there and NuLu has expanded east and north, starting to smear into what was called Butchertown when my folks lived there. There seems to be a coffee shop or taproom on every corner and cool independent boutiques and restaurants filling the spaces in-between. It’s a fun neighborhood with a buzz about it -- people on the sidewalks, every coffee shop and restaurant I walked into were doing good business. I talked about <a href=\"https://www.labodeguitademima.com/\">La Bodeguita De Mima</a> in the last episode, a great Cuban restaurant that was jammed on Thursday night. Saturday morning, we tried to carb up at <a href=\"https://biscuitbelly.com/nulu/\">Biscuit Belly</a>, but it was packed, so we walked up a block to <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/butchertowngrocery/\">Butchertown Grocery Bakery</a> for my biscuit &amp; gravy fix. </li><li>Working our way through the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butchertown,_Louisville\">Butchertown neighborhood</a> toward the river, we had to navigate our way under a huge set of elevated expressway lanes -- a  tangle of I-64 and I-71 -- to get to the Ohio River. The Ohio River, like the Mississippi and the Missouri and the Cumberland, is a working river, carrying barge tows 5 football fields long, making it a bit dodgy for small pleasure craft, and so the banks of these rivers are often pretty industrial. But Louisville’s <a href=\"https://ourwaterfront.org/\">Waterfront Park</a> reclaimed some of that industrial space, scrap yards and sand pits, to provide a nice stretch of riverside recreation. The one bit of industrial scrap they did leave -- the late 1800’s Big Four railroad bridge, decommissioned in 1969, left standing above the river without connections to either side… until about 8 years ago when Kentucky and Indiana built ramps to reconnect it to the river banks on each side and now it’s a pedestrian and biking path.  </li><li>We drove over to the <a href=\"https://shelbyparklouisville.squarespace.com/\">Shelby Park neighborhood</a>, parked the car and walked along Logan Street. We started at the <a href=\"https://loganstmarket.com/\">Logan St Market</a>, shopping the food stalls on the first floor and then browsing through a makers’ market on the second floor. We walked down Logan Street, past a <a href=\"https://www.idlewildbutterflyfarm.com/\">butterfly farm</a>, a ping pong emporium, a hot dog joint and a bunch of houses ‘til we got to <a href=\"https://www.atriumbrewing.com/\">Atrium Brewing</a> which had some great beers, a nice taproom, and a big TV showing college basketball because, what else would be on in Kentucky. It was a nice walk. We could feel this stretch was beginning to develop, but I don’t think it’ll be another NuLu. Feels like it’ll be something more neighborhoody, lower key, maybe a touch crunchy granola. </li><li>And that’s what struck me about walking and driving around Louisville. It seems to have these separate neighborhoods, strips of 4 or 8 or 10 blocks that aren’t linked up. They’re sorta islands separated by runs of dodgy blocks -- maybe vacant lots or some rundown housing or a big underpass -- that don’t invite continued walking. Like our walk from our AC Hotel in NuLu to the Angel’s Envy distillery. Navigating under the multiple lands of I-65 was poorly lit and slightly uncomfortable and  at 2pm; I definitely would’ve had second thoughts at 6 or 7. Once there, the distillery is a great building; they dropped a sleek new distilling operation between the brick walls and steel beams of an abandoned 1900’s manufacturing building. And it’s kitty corner from Louisville’s minor league baseball park and <a href=\"https://atgbrewery.com/location/smokehouse/\">Against The Grain</a> microbrewery. But then, that’s it, except for open surface parking lots. I’m hoping that Louisville finds a way, multiple ways (some planned, some organic) to grow into the empty spaces and link up these neighborhood islands</li><li>We had a fun four days in Louisville. I definitely recommend it. Get a car, base yourself in NuLu hotel, and explore the neighborhoods and the riverbank parks. Check out the show notes; I’ll summarize all this into an easy-to-use list of places and links. </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #185</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_185.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #185 — Changing Mask Mandates; Notes on Louisville','','inherit','closed','closed','','4120-revision-v1','','','2022-03-28 09:24:56','2022-03-28 14:24:56','',4120,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4125',0,'revision','',0),
(4126,1,'2022-03-28 10:10:58','2022-03-28 15:10:58','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/IMG_4455-scaled.jpeg\"><img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/IMG_4455-300x300.jpeg\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" alt=\"Skeleton in Louisville taproom\"></a>Having Fun in Louisville![/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>In the travel world, what goes up -- rules, fees, prices -- often stays up. It\'s the ratchet effect and it\'s a theme running through this episode. Inflation is on everyone\'s mind, and so we dig into travel inflation, comparing today\'s prices with pre-pandemic levels.  We also talk about US passport renewals ahead of the summer vacation season, and some good Cuban food in Louisville and a questionable food trend in London. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_185.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #185: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois a couple of weeks after hanging out in Brooklyn for what maybe I should call a <em>longer</em> weekend -- Thursday to Tuesday -- rather than a <em>long</em> weekend, which traditionally was the 3 days, Friday to Sunday, when I was growing up, but now with telecommuting feels like it’s gone to 3½ - 4, Thursday noon to Sunday.&nbsp;</li><li>I always have stayed in Manhattan on my trips to New York, so I decided to change it up this time. Rather than run the usual play -- cycling through corporate codes on hotel websites to find something reasonable in midtown Manhattan -- we posted up at an Airbnb in the Cobble Hill neighborhood in Brooklyn. And instead of threading through crowds on Madison Avenue to find a quick bite, we wandered down the much emptier sidewalks, maybe dodging a work-from-home dad following his daughter on a bike, and walked into a local butcher shop, G Esposito &amp; Sons, to get a couple of sandwiches. Which turned into a 10-minute conversation with the owner -- not sure if it was G himself or one of the Esposito sons -- about his wife’s favorite sandwich, how he screwed up his Ash Wednesday fast right at breakfast, and pointing in the case to the sausage his wife was making sausage for dinner that night. Definitely a change from my usual Midtown lunch experiences.</li><li>And that’s kinda what I wanted to get with this stay, the chance to dig into Brooklyn a bit by staying there; walking the neighborhoods; trying places like Esposito’s and Caputo’s Bakery just down Court St where we grabbed bread and pastries; places you probably wouldn’t journey to, but places you’d absolutely duck into if you were walking by. I used to do this when I’d do every-week trips to San Francisco or New Orleans. I wouldn’t stay in the same place every week. Instead, I’d move around. In San Francisco, I’d stay on Nob Hill one week, maybe SoMa the next week, and then maybe down the 101 in San Mateo for a change of scenery… and restaurants. I wouldn’t come out of it an expert in the city, but I’d come away with a lot more experiences, more of a feel of the city than if I’d stayed in the same place for 6 or 8 weeks straight.</li><li>And that’s what we got out of this weekend, a little better feel for Brooklyn. And part of that feel I picked up pretty quick -- cash is still king in Brooklyn, at least in Cobble Hill. These old-school Italian places -- cash only, though they do make space in the back of the shop for an ATM, just in case you find yourself a little short.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/Loveshadow/26219\"><em>SP*ANK Vox</em></a> by&nbsp;Loveshadow (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/Loveshadow/26219</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Following up on my recent rants about US hotel housekeeping cutbacks, John McDonough hit me up on Twitter with his most recent experience<ul><li>“We stayed at the Whaler on Kaanapali Beach on Maui late January/early February. The deal was \"room cleaned on checkout\". However, we noticed the trash was being emptied (or someone was stealing it) while we were out. Apparently, the Monday after our arrival, they had resumed daily cleaning -- but forgot to tell us.”</li></ul></li><li>Jim, thanks for that. You’d think they’d want to take credit for the service upgrade -- or at least prevent you thinking someone was breaking into your room</li><li>Long-time friend, long-time listener, first-time caller Laura Wotycha texted me about her recent experience with travel inflation<ul><li>“Having found myself with 3 unexpected days off from work, I decided to head south for some sun and a Vitamin D top-up at my favorite, favorite, <em>favorite</em> resort, the outstanding JW Marriott Grande Lakes in Orlando. I’m all about the most beautiful (grown-up) lazy river and handsome pool boys who come right over when you flip your flag up on your lounge chair. But the number was huge -- twice the decent sized number I paid last May for my birthday weekend.</li><li>“So instead, I headed a bit east, to the Eastern Shore of Maryland to a much more reasonably priced Hyatt resort in Cambridge, MD. It was freaking ridiculously beautiful! Saved money on the flight as well as on the room, some of which I promptly dropped on multiple platters of Chesapeake Bay oysters.”</li></ul></li><li>Laura, I’m glad it all worked out for you. The Eastern Shore is its own world, and a fun place to explore before the summer crowds hit. I understand the attraction of flipping up the flag for an instant cocktail in the Florida sun, but I’ll take those oysters with a cold beer every time.</li><li>In the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/03/03/podcast-184-figuring-out-stealth-travel-inflation/\">last episode</a>, I said “No one sees an end in site for in-flight masking”. And 2 weeks later, the UK ditches its remaining COVID travel restrictions. Heathrow airport then drops mandatory masking; UK-based airlines BA, Virgin Atlantic, Tui, and EasyJet drop mask rules where they can -- mostly within the UK (except for Scotland), and to Denmark, Iceland, Gibraltar, Hungary, and the Caribbean. Then <a href=\"https://thepointsguy.com/news/klm-face-mask-rules-boycott/\">KLM announces they’ll stop enforcing in-flight masking</a> even though it’s still a legal Dutch requirement. And now this week, <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/airline-ceos-ask-biden-to-drop-mask-requirement-for-planes-and-airports-11648098070?reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink\">US airline CEOs</a> and&nbsp; <a href=\"https://www.dallasnews.com/business/airlines/2022/03/22/southwest-airlines-flight-attendants-ask-biden-to-drop-face-mask-mandate/\">Southwest Airlines’ flight attendants’ union are calling for the end of the US mask mandate</a>. In the words of the great American philosopher Ferris Bueller, “Life moves pretty fast”<br><br>The US CEOs have said this before. The Southwest flight attendants are a new voice, and they have a point. The mask mandate impacts them more than anyone day-in, day-out --&nbsp; they’re the ones having to enforce it and, let’s face it, that wasn’t in the job description when they took the job. Indeed, a Tui flight attendant <a href=\"https://twitter.com/flywithclaude/status/1502697933719937027\">tweeted out</a> “First flight done without a mask and it was an absolute dream .. Happy passengers .. Happy crew”&nbsp; The March extension of the US mandate was only a month -- from March 18 to April 18 -- the shortest extension I can recall. Right now, the <a href=\"https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-extend-airplane-transit-mask-mandate-through-april-18-official-2022-03-10/\">CDC is supposed to be working on a “revised policy framework” for mask mandates on public transport</a>. In spite of being a lousy forecaster, I’m guessing that they’ll take every bit of that month before they make an announcement.<br><br>Irene and I were talking about this yesterday. Even without a mandate, we’ll probably voluntarily pull out a KN-95 on a completely packed plane in the winter; when I’m sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with a guy coughing or sniffling. It’s less of a COVID thing and more of a “I should’ve been doing this for the last 30 years” thing. Would’ve saved a fortune on cough and cold medicine and pocket packs of Kleenex.</li><li>At the end of the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/03/03/podcast-184-figuring-out-stealth-travel-inflation/\">last episode</a>, I mentioned looking forward to checking out the new <a href=\"https://thecenturionlounge.com/locations/lga/\">LGA Amex Centurion Club</a>. The old LGA club was upstairs, tucked in a corner and, worst of all, before security, so next to the bar, they had a TV showing the live feed from a camera pointed at the TSA checkpoint so you could figure out when you needed to leave the lounge to make your flight. The <em>new</em> club, in the <em>new </em>Terminal B, is great -- properly placed <em>after</em> security, on the way to the gates, and twice as big as the old lounge, so plenty of room even when there’s a weather delay.&nbsp; The one kink in my plan was -- I’d forgotten to bring my Amex Platinum card to New York. Ugh. So the night before leaving, I hit the Amex website, fire up the chat box and ask “Is there any way to get in without my physical card?” The net net of the back-and-forth was “No” -- as I expected. Ugh, again. But then, on the Uber ride to the airport, I was killing time, poking around the Amex app on my iPhone and found a screen on the LGA Centurion Lounge. And there, under Access Information, it said I could use a Platinum card or a Check-In Code. So I hit the button for a Check-In Code and got a QR code from Loungebuddy. Hmmm. Well, nothing to lose, so after security, I walked up to the desk, the agent scanned the QR code and my boarding pass and I was good to go. “Everyone’s using it now,” she told me. I went to the bar and got a free beer thinking “Somebody should tell the chat guys that.”</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/55998\">Lakeside Jam</a></em> by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/55998</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Notes on Louisville</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Sticking my head into the open hatch of the fermentation vessel during the <a href=\"https://www.angelsenvy.com/\">Angel’s Envy distillery</a> tour was probably my peak Louisville moment -- looking down at the bubbling mash, and then inhaling -- enjoying those nice yeasty notes for just second or two until the hot CO<sub>2</sub> coming up from those bubbles burnt out my nostrils.</li><li>I’m not a big bourbon guy; more of a Scotch guy, but it still was a great tour. I like these kinds of tours; ones where you see people making things. It was a Friday afternoon and the place running at full tilt -- the mash tuns and the fermenters were full, the distilling column was burbling away, a couple of guys were emptying aged bourbon out of barrels giving that room a really nice smell, and the bottling line was running at a surprisingly not-hectic pace, the filled bottles proceeding along the conveyor at a kinda stately pace past a couple of inspectors and then to the boxing crew. And there were only 7 of us on the tour, so we all got front-row views. The tasting at the end of the tour was well-done; a 15-20-minute guided tasting session rather than the “here’s your complimentary shot” I usually get at Scottish distilleries.</li><li>I mentioned in the last episode that I have a small bit of history with Louisville. My folks moved there from Memphis in the early ‘80’s while I was in college in DC. And I ended up living one summer when I was too broke to stay in DC. And where I learned to pronounce Louisville like a native -- “Lou-a-vul”, not moving your mouth, swallowing all the vowels. Which is how you know someone pronouncing it “Louisville” is not from there. I only ever heard one person pronounce it “Louis-ville”. He was English, so I couldn’t tell if he was serious or not. But after my family moved to Southern California in the late ‘80’s, that was pretty much it until July 2012 when Louisville was the first stop on my 2,100-mile drive around the South that I talked about in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/07/31/podcast-100-southern-road-trip-breaking-up-with-american-airlines/\">episode #100</a>. And then 10 years later, this trip.</li><li>Back in 2012, after 6 hours of I-65, I took the first exit I could after crossing the Ohio River and parked myself at the counter of Garage Bar, a repurposed gas station in NuLu -- New Louisville -- the hip neighborhood developing east of downtown, running a few blocks down East Market Street. Ten years later, Garage Bar is still there and NuLu has expanded east and north, starting to smear into what was called Butchertown when my folks lived there. There seems to be a coffee shop or taproom on every corner and cool independent boutiques and restaurants filling the spaces in-between. It’s a fun neighborhood with a buzz about it -- people on the sidewalks, every coffee shop and restaurant I walked into were doing good business. I talked about <a href=\"https://www.labodeguitademima.com/\">La Bodeguita De Mima</a> in the last episode, a great Cuban restaurant that was jammed on Thursday night. Saturday morning, we tried to carb up at <a href=\"https://biscuitbelly.com/nulu/\">Biscuit Belly</a>, but it was packed, so we walked up a block to <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/butchertowngrocery/\">Butchertown Grocery Bakery</a> for my biscuit &amp; gravy fix.&nbsp;</li><li>Working our way through the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butchertown,_Louisville\">Butchertown neighborhood</a> toward the river, we had to navigate our way under a huge set of elevated expressway lanes -- a&nbsp; tangle of I-64 and I-71 -- to get to the Ohio River. The Ohio River, like the Mississippi and the Missouri and the Cumberland, is a working river, carrying barge tows 5 football fields long, making it a bit dodgy for small pleasure craft, and so the banks of these rivers are often pretty industrial. But Louisville’s <a href=\"https://ourwaterfront.org/\">Waterfront Park</a> reclaimed some of that industrial space, scrap yards and sand pits, to provide a nice stretch of riverside recreation. The one bit of industrial scrap they did leave -- the late 1800’s Big Four railroad bridge, decommissioned in 1969, left standing above the river without connections to either side… until about 8 years ago when Kentucky and Indiana built ramps to reconnect it to the river banks on each side and now it’s a pedestrian and biking path.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>We drove over to the <a href=\"https://shelbyparklouisville.squarespace.com/\">Shelby Park neighborhood</a>, parked the car and walked along Logan Street. We started at the <a href=\"https://loganstmarket.com/\">Logan St Market</a>, shopping the food stalls on the first floor and then browsing through a makers’ market on the second floor. We walked down Logan Street, past a <a href=\"https://www.idlewildbutterflyfarm.com/\">butterfly farm</a>, a ping pong emporium, a hot dog joint and a bunch of houses ‘til we got to <a href=\"https://www.atriumbrewing.com/\">Atrium Brewing</a> which had some great beers, a nice taproom, and a big TV showing college basketball because, what else would be on in Kentucky. It was a nice walk. We could feel this stretch was beginning to develop, but I don’t think it’ll be another NuLu. Feels like it’ll be something more neighborhoody, lower key, maybe a touch crunchy granola.&nbsp;</li><li>And that’s what struck me about walking and driving around Louisville. It seems to have these separate neighborhoods, strips of 4 or 8 or 10 blocks that aren’t linked up. They’re sorta islands separated by runs of dodgy blocks -- maybe vacant lots or some rundown housing or a big underpass -- that don’t invite continued walking. Like our walk from our AC Hotel in NuLu to the Angel’s Envy distillery. Navigating under the multiple lands of I-65 was poorly lit and slightly uncomfortable and&nbsp; at 2pm; I definitely would’ve had second thoughts at 6 or 7. Once there, the distillery is a great building; they dropped a sleek new distilling operation between the brick walls and steel beams of an abandoned 1900’s manufacturing building. And it’s kitty corner from Louisville’s minor league baseball park and <a href=\"https://atgbrewery.com/location/smokehouse/\">Against The Grain</a> microbrewery. But then, that’s it, except for open surface parking lots. I’m hoping that Louisville finds a way, multiple ways (some planned, some organic) to grow into the empty spaces and link up these neighborhood islands</li><li>We had a fun four days in Louisville. I definitely recommend it. Get a car, base yourself in NuLu hotel, and explore the neighborhoods and the riverbank parks. Check out the show notes; I’ll summarize all this into an easy-to-use list of places and links.&nbsp;</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #185</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_185.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #185 — Changing Mask Mandates; Notes on Louisville','','inherit','closed','closed','','4120-revision-v1','','','2022-03-28 10:10:58','2022-03-28 15:10:58','',4120,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4126',0,'revision','',0),
(4127,1,'2022-03-28 10:11:48','2022-03-28 15:11:48','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/IMG_4455-scaled.jpeg\"><img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/IMG_4455-300x300.jpeg\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" alt=\"Skeleton in Louisville taproom\"></a>Having Fun in Louisville![/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>In the travel world, what goes up -- rules, fees, prices -- often stays up. It\'s the ratchet effect and it\'s a theme running through this episode. Inflation is on everyone\'s mind, and so we dig into travel inflation, comparing today\'s prices with pre-pandemic levels.  We also talk about US passport renewals ahead of the summer vacation season, and some good Cuban food in Louisville and a questionable food trend in London. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_185.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #185: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois a couple of weeks after hanging out in Brooklyn for what maybe I should call a <em>longer</em> weekend -- Thursday to Tuesday -- rather than a <em>long</em> weekend, which traditionally was the 3 days, Friday to Sunday, when I was growing up, but now with telecommuting feels like it’s gone to 3½ - 4, Thursday noon to Sunday.&nbsp;</li><li>I always have stayed in Manhattan on my trips to New York, so I decided to change it up this time. Rather than run the usual play -- cycling through corporate codes on hotel websites to find something reasonable in midtown Manhattan -- we posted up at an Airbnb in the Cobble Hill neighborhood in Brooklyn. And instead of threading through crowds on Madison Avenue to find a quick bite, we wandered down the much emptier sidewalks, maybe dodging a work-from-home dad following his daughter on a bike, and walked into a local butcher shop, G Esposito &amp; Sons, to get a couple of sandwiches. Which turned into a 10-minute conversation with the owner -- not sure if it was G himself or one of the Esposito sons -- about his wife’s favorite sandwich, how he screwed up his Ash Wednesday fast right at breakfast, and pointing in the case to the sausage his wife was making sausage for dinner that night. Definitely a change from my usual Midtown lunch experiences.</li><li>And that’s kinda what I wanted to get with this stay, the chance to dig into Brooklyn a bit by staying there; walking the neighborhoods; trying places like Esposito’s and Caputo’s Bakery just down Court St where we grabbed bread and pastries; places you probably wouldn’t journey to, but places you’d absolutely duck into if you were walking by. I used to do this when I’d do every-week trips to San Francisco or New Orleans. I wouldn’t stay in the same place every week. Instead, I’d move around. In San Francisco, I’d stay on Nob Hill one week, maybe SoMa the next week, and then maybe down the 101 in San Mateo for a change of scenery… and restaurants. I wouldn’t come out of it an expert in the city, but I’d come away with a lot more experiences, more of a feel of the city than if I’d stayed in the same place for 6 or 8 weeks straight.</li><li>And that’s what we got out of this weekend, a little better feel for Brooklyn. And part of that feel I picked up pretty quick -- cash is still king in Brooklyn, at least in Cobble Hill. These old-school Italian places -- cash only, though they do make space in the back of the shop for an ATM, just in case you find yourself a little short.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/Loveshadow/26219\"><em>SP*ANK Vox</em></a> by&nbsp;Loveshadow (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/Loveshadow/26219</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Following up on my recent rants about US hotel housekeeping cutbacks, John McDonough hit me up on Twitter with his most recent experience<ul><li>“We stayed at the Whaler on Kaanapali Beach on Maui late January/early February. The deal was \"room cleaned on checkout\". However, we noticed the trash was being emptied (or someone was stealing it) while we were out. Apparently, the Monday after our arrival, they had resumed daily cleaning -- but forgot to tell us.”</li></ul></li><li>Jim, thanks for that. You’d think they’d want to take credit for the service upgrade -- or at least prevent you thinking someone was breaking into your room</li><li>Long-time friend, long-time listener, first-time caller Laura Wotycha texted me about her recent experience with travel inflation<ul><li>“Having found myself with 3 unexpected days off from work, I decided to head south for some sun and a Vitamin D top-up at my favorite, favorite, <em>favorite</em> resort, the outstanding JW Marriott Grande Lakes in Orlando. I’m all about the most beautiful (grown-up) lazy river and handsome pool boys who come right over when you flip your flag up on your lounge chair. But the number was huge -- twice the decent sized number I paid last May for my birthday weekend.</li><li>“So instead, I headed a bit east, to the Eastern Shore of Maryland to a much more reasonably priced Hyatt resort in Cambridge, MD. It was freaking ridiculously beautiful! Saved money on the flight as well as on the room, some of which I promptly dropped on multiple platters of Chesapeake Bay oysters.”</li></ul></li><li>Laura, I’m glad it all worked out for you. The Eastern Shore is its own world, and a fun place to explore before the summer crowds hit. I understand the attraction of flipping up the flag for an instant cocktail in the Florida sun, but I’ll take those oysters with a cold beer every time.</li><li>In the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/03/03/podcast-184-figuring-out-stealth-travel-inflation/\">last episode</a>, I said “No one sees an end in site for in-flight masking”. And 2 weeks later, the UK ditches its remaining COVID travel restrictions. Heathrow airport then drops mandatory masking; UK-based airlines BA, Virgin Atlantic, Tui, and EasyJet drop mask rules where they can -- mostly within the UK (except for Scotland), and to Denmark, Iceland, Gibraltar, Hungary, and the Caribbean. Then <a href=\"https://thepointsguy.com/news/klm-face-mask-rules-boycott/\">KLM announces they’ll stop enforcing in-flight masking</a> even though it’s still a legal Dutch requirement. And now this week, <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/airline-ceos-ask-biden-to-drop-mask-requirement-for-planes-and-airports-11648098070?reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink\">US airline CEOs</a> and&nbsp; <a href=\"https://www.dallasnews.com/business/airlines/2022/03/22/southwest-airlines-flight-attendants-ask-biden-to-drop-face-mask-mandate/\">Southwest Airlines’ flight attendants’ union are calling for the end of the US mask mandate</a>. In the words of the great American philosopher Ferris Bueller, “Life moves pretty fast”<br><br>The US CEOs have said this before. The Southwest flight attendants are a new voice, and they have a point. The mask mandate impacts them more than anyone day-in, day-out --&nbsp; they’re the ones having to enforce it and, let’s face it, that wasn’t in the job description when they took the job. Indeed, a Tui flight attendant <a href=\"https://twitter.com/flywithclaude/status/1502697933719937027\">tweeted out</a> “First flight done without a mask and it was an absolute dream .. Happy passengers .. Happy crew”&nbsp; The March extension of the US mandate was only a month -- from March 18 to April 18 -- the shortest extension I can recall. Right now, the <a href=\"https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-extend-airplane-transit-mask-mandate-through-april-18-official-2022-03-10/\">CDC is supposed to be working on a “revised policy framework” for mask mandates on public transport</a>. In spite of being a lousy forecaster, I’m guessing that they’ll take every bit of that month before they make an announcement.<br><br>Irene and I were talking about this yesterday. Even without a mandate, we’ll probably voluntarily pull out a KN-95 on a completely packed plane in the winter; when I’m sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with a guy coughing or sniffling. It’s less of a COVID thing and more of a “I should’ve been doing this for the last 30 years” thing. Would’ve saved a fortune on cough and cold medicine and pocket packs of Kleenex.</li><li>At the end of the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/03/03/podcast-184-figuring-out-stealth-travel-inflation/\">last episode</a>, I mentioned looking forward to checking out the new <a href=\"https://thecenturionlounge.com/locations/lga/\">LGA Amex Centurion Club</a>. The old LGA club was upstairs, tucked in a corner and, worst of all, before security, so next to the bar, they had a TV showing the live feed from a camera pointed at the TSA checkpoint so you could figure out when you needed to leave the lounge to make your flight. The <em>new</em> club, in the <em>new </em>Terminal B, is great -- properly placed <em>after</em> security, on the way to the gates, and twice as big as the old lounge, so plenty of room even when there’s a weather delay.&nbsp; The one kink in my plan was -- I’d forgotten to bring my Amex Platinum card to New York. Ugh. So the night before leaving, I hit the Amex website, fire up the chat box and ask “Is there any way to get in without my physical card?” The net net of the back-and-forth was “No” -- as I expected. Ugh, again. But then, on the Uber ride to the airport, I was killing time, poking around the Amex app on my iPhone and found a screen on the LGA Centurion Lounge. And there, under Access Information, it said I could use a Platinum card or a Check-In Code. So I hit the button for a Check-In Code and got a QR code from Loungebuddy. Hmmm. Well, nothing to lose, so after security, I walked up to the desk, the agent scanned the QR code and my boarding pass and I was good to go. “Everyone’s using it now,” she told me. I went to the bar and got a free beer thinking “Somebody should tell the chat guys that.”</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/55998\">Lakeside Jam</a></em> by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/55998</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Notes on Louisville</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Sticking my head into the open hatch of the fermentation vessel during the <a href=\"https://www.angelsenvy.com/\">Angel’s Envy distillery</a> tour was probably my peak Louisville moment -- looking down at the bubbling mash, and then inhaling -- enjoying those nice yeasty notes for just second or two until the hot CO<sub>2</sub> coming up from those bubbles burnt out my nostrils.</li><li>I’m not a big bourbon guy; more of a Scotch guy, but it still was a great tour. I like these kinds of tours; ones where you see people making things. It was a Friday afternoon and the place running at full tilt -- the mash tuns and the fermenters were full, the distilling column was burbling away, a couple of guys were emptying aged bourbon out of barrels giving that room a really nice smell, and the bottling line was running at a surprisingly not-hectic pace, the filled bottles proceeding along the conveyor at a kinda stately pace past a couple of inspectors and then to the boxing crew. And there were only 7 of us on the tour, so we all got front-row views. The tasting at the end of the tour was well-done; a 15-20-minute guided tasting session rather than the “here’s your complimentary shot” I usually get at Scottish distilleries.</li><li>I mentioned in the last episode that I have a small bit of history with Louisville. My folks moved there from Memphis in the early ‘80’s while I was in college in DC. And I ended up living one summer when I was too broke to stay in DC. And where I learned to pronounce Louisville like a native -- “Lou-a-vul”, not moving your mouth, swallowing all the vowels. Which is how you know someone pronouncing it “Louisville” is not from there. I only ever heard one person pronounce it “Louis-ville”. He was English, so I couldn’t tell if he was serious or not. But after my family moved to Southern California in the late ‘80’s, that was pretty much it until July 2012 when Louisville was the first stop on my 2,100-mile drive around the South that I talked about in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/07/31/podcast-100-southern-road-trip-breaking-up-with-american-airlines/\">episode #100</a>. And then 10 years later, this trip.</li><li>Back in 2012, after 6 hours of I-65, I took the first exit I could after crossing the Ohio River and parked myself at the counter of Garage Bar, a repurposed gas station in NuLu -- New Louisville -- the hip neighborhood developing east of downtown, running a few blocks down East Market Street. Ten years later, Garage Bar is still there and NuLu has expanded east and north, starting to smear into what was called Butchertown when my folks lived there. There seems to be a coffee shop or taproom on every corner and cool independent boutiques and restaurants filling the spaces in-between. It’s a fun neighborhood with a buzz about it -- people on the sidewalks, every coffee shop and restaurant I walked into were doing good business. I talked about <a href=\"https://www.labodeguitademima.com/\">La Bodeguita De Mima</a> in the last episode, a great Cuban restaurant that was jammed on Thursday night. Saturday morning, we tried to carb up at <a href=\"https://biscuitbelly.com/nulu/\">Biscuit Belly</a>, but it was packed, so we walked up a block to <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/butchertowngrocery/\">Butchertown Grocery Bakery</a> for my biscuit &amp; gravy fix.&nbsp;</li><li>Working our way through the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butchertown,_Louisville\">Butchertown neighborhood</a> toward the river, we had to navigate our way under a huge set of elevated expressway lanes -- a&nbsp; tangle of I-64 and I-71 -- to get to the Ohio River. The Ohio River, like the Mississippi and the Missouri and the Cumberland, is a working river, carrying barge tows 5 football fields long, making it a bit dodgy for small pleasure craft, and so the banks of these rivers are often pretty industrial. But Louisville’s <a href=\"https://ourwaterfront.org/\">Waterfront Park</a> reclaimed some of that industrial space, scrap yards and sand pits, to provide a nice stretch of riverside recreation. The one bit of industrial scrap they did leave -- the late 1800’s Big Four railroad bridge, decommissioned in 1969, left standing above the river without connections to either side… until about 8 years ago when Kentucky and Indiana built ramps to reconnect it to the river banks on each side and now it’s a pedestrian and biking path.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>We drove over to the <a href=\"https://shelbyparklouisville.squarespace.com/\">Shelby Park neighborhood</a>, parked the car and walked along Logan Street. We started at the <a href=\"https://loganstmarket.com/\">Logan St Market</a>, shopping the food stalls on the first floor and then browsing through a makers’ market on the second floor. We walked down Logan Street, past a <a href=\"https://www.idlewildbutterflyfarm.com/\">butterfly farm</a>, a ping pong emporium, a hot dog joint and a bunch of houses ‘til we got to <a href=\"https://www.atriumbrewing.com/\">Atrium Brewing</a> which had some great beers, a nice taproom, and a big TV showing college basketball because, what else would be on in Kentucky. It was a nice walk. We could feel this stretch was beginning to develop, but I don’t think it’ll be another NuLu. Feels like it’ll be something more neighborhoody, lower key, maybe a touch crunchy granola.&nbsp;</li><li>And that’s what struck me about walking and driving around Louisville. It seems to have these separate neighborhoods, strips of 4 or 8 or 10 blocks that aren’t linked up. They’re sorta islands separated by runs of dodgy blocks -- maybe vacant lots or some rundown housing or a big underpass -- that don’t invite continued walking. Like our walk from our AC Hotel in NuLu to the Angel’s Envy distillery. Navigating under the multiple lands of I-65 was poorly lit and slightly uncomfortable and&nbsp; at 2pm; I definitely would’ve had second thoughts at 6 or 7. Once there, the distillery is a great building; they dropped a sleek new distilling operation between the brick walls and steel beams of an abandoned 1900’s manufacturing building. And it’s kitty corner from Louisville’s minor league baseball park and <a href=\"https://atgbrewery.com/location/smokehouse/\">Against The Grain</a> microbrewery. But then, that’s it, except for open surface parking lots. I’m hoping that Louisville finds a way, multiple ways (some planned, some organic) to grow into the empty spaces and link up these neighborhood islands</li><li>We had a fun four days in Louisville. I definitely recommend it. Get a car, base yourself in NuLu hotel, and explore the neighborhoods and the riverbank parks. Check out the show notes; I’ll summarize all this into an easy-to-use list of places and links.&nbsp;</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #185</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_185.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #185 — Notes on Louisville; Changing Mask Mandates','','inherit','closed','closed','','4120-revision-v1','','','2022-03-28 10:11:48','2022-03-28 15:11:48','',4120,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4127',0,'revision','',0),
(4128,1,'2022-03-28 11:59:16','2022-03-28 16:59:16','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/IMG_4455-scaled.jpeg\"><img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/IMG_4455-300x300.jpeg\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" alt=\"Skeleton in Louisville taproom\"></a>Having Fun in Louisville![/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>In the travel world, what goes up -- rules, fees, prices -- often stays up. It\'s the ratchet effect and it\'s a theme running through this episode. Inflation is on everyone\'s mind, and so we dig into travel inflation, comparing today\'s prices with pre-pandemic levels.  We also talk about US passport renewals ahead of the summer vacation season, and some good Cuban food in Louisville and a questionable food trend in London. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_185.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #185: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois a couple of weeks after hanging out in Brooklyn for what maybe I should call a <em>longer</em> weekend -- Thursday to Tuesday -- rather than a <em>long</em> weekend, which traditionally was the 3 days, Friday to Sunday, when I was growing up, but now with telecommuting feels like it’s gone to 3½ - 4, Thursday noon to Sunday.&nbsp;</li><li>I always have stayed in Manhattan on my trips to New York, so I decided to change it up this time. Rather than run the usual play -- cycling through corporate codes on hotel websites to find something reasonable in midtown Manhattan -- we posted up at an Airbnb in the Cobble Hill neighborhood in Brooklyn. And instead of threading through crowds on Madison Avenue to find a quick bite, we wandered down the much emptier sidewalks, maybe dodging a work-from-home dad following his daughter on a bike, and walked into a local butcher shop, G Esposito &amp; Sons, to get a couple of sandwiches. Which turned into a 10-minute conversation with the owner -- not sure if it was G himself or one of the Esposito sons -- about his wife’s favorite sandwich, how he screwed up his Ash Wednesday fast right at breakfast, and pointing in the case to the sausage his wife was making sausage for dinner that night. Definitely a change from my usual Midtown lunch experiences.</li><li>And that’s kinda what I wanted to get with this stay, the chance to dig into Brooklyn a bit by staying there; walking the neighborhoods; trying places like Esposito’s and Caputo’s Bakery just down Court St where we grabbed bread and pastries; places you probably wouldn’t journey to, but places you’d absolutely duck into if you were walking by. I used to do this when I’d do every-week trips to San Francisco or New Orleans. I wouldn’t stay in the same place every week. Instead, I’d move around. In San Francisco, I’d stay on Nob Hill one week, maybe SoMa the next week, and then maybe down the 101 in San Mateo for a change of scenery… and restaurants. I wouldn’t come out of it an expert in the city, but I’d come away with a lot more experiences, more of a feel of the city than if I’d stayed in the same place for 6 or 8 weeks straight.</li><li>And that’s what we got out of this weekend, a little better feel for Brooklyn. And part of that feel I picked up pretty quick -- cash is still king in Brooklyn, at least in Cobble Hill. These old-school Italian places -- cash only, though they do make space in the back of the shop for an ATM, just in case you find yourself a little short.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/Loveshadow/26219\"><em>SP*ANK Vox</em></a> by&nbsp;Loveshadow (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/Loveshadow/26219</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Following up on my recent rants about US hotel housekeeping cutbacks, John McDonough hit me up on Twitter with his most recent experience<ul><li>“We stayed at the Whaler on Kaanapali Beach on Maui late January/early February. The deal was \"room cleaned on checkout\". However, we noticed the trash was being emptied (or someone was stealing it) while we were out. Apparently, the Monday after our arrival, they had resumed daily cleaning -- but forgot to tell us.”</li></ul></li><li>Jim, thanks for that. You’d think they’d want to take credit for the service upgrade -- or at least prevent you thinking someone was breaking into your room</li><li>Long-time friend, long-time listener, first-time caller Laura Wotycha texted me about her recent experience with travel inflation<ul><li>“Having found myself with 3 unexpected days off from work, I decided to head south for some sun and a Vitamin D top-up at my favorite, favorite, <em>favorite</em> resort, the outstanding JW Marriott Grande Lakes in Orlando. I’m all about the most beautiful (grown-up) lazy river and handsome pool boys who come right over when you flip your flag up on your lounge chair. But the number was huge -- twice the decent sized number I paid last May for my birthday weekend.</li><li>“So instead, I headed a bit east, to the Eastern Shore of Maryland to a much more reasonably priced Hyatt resort in Cambridge, MD. It was freaking ridiculously beautiful! Saved money on the flight as well as on the room, some of which I promptly dropped on multiple platters of Chesapeake Bay oysters.”</li></ul></li><li>Laura, I’m glad it all worked out for you. The Eastern Shore is its own world, and a fun place to explore before the summer crowds hit. I understand the attraction of flipping up the flag for an instant cocktail in the Florida sun, but I’ll take those oysters with a cold beer every time.</li><li>In the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/03/03/podcast-184-figuring-out-stealth-travel-inflation/\">last episode</a>, I said “No one sees an end in site for in-flight masking”. And 2 weeks later, the UK ditches its remaining COVID travel restrictions. Heathrow airport then drops mandatory masking; UK-based airlines BA, Virgin Atlantic, Tui, and EasyJet drop mask rules where they can -- mostly within the UK (except for Scotland), and to Denmark, Iceland, Gibraltar, Hungary, and the Caribbean. Then <a href=\"https://thepointsguy.com/news/klm-face-mask-rules-boycott/\">KLM announces they’ll stop enforcing in-flight masking</a> even though it’s still a legal Dutch requirement. And now this week, <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/airline-ceos-ask-biden-to-drop-mask-requirement-for-planes-and-airports-11648098070?reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink\">US airline CEOs</a> and&nbsp; <a href=\"https://www.dallasnews.com/business/airlines/2022/03/22/southwest-airlines-flight-attendants-ask-biden-to-drop-face-mask-mandate/\">Southwest Airlines’ flight attendants’ union are calling for the end of the US mask mandate</a>. In the words of the great American philosopher Ferris Bueller, “Life moves pretty fast”<br><br>The US CEOs have said this before. The Southwest flight attendants are a new voice, and they have a point. The mask mandate impacts them more than anyone day-in, day-out --&nbsp; they’re the ones having to enforce it and, let’s face it, that wasn’t in the job description when they took the job. Indeed, a Tui flight attendant <a href=\"https://twitter.com/flywithclaude/status/1502697933719937027\">tweeted out</a> “First flight done without a mask and it was an absolute dream .. Happy passengers .. Happy crew”&nbsp; The March extension of the US mandate was only a month -- from March 18 to April 18 -- the shortest extension I can recall. Right now, the <a href=\"https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-extend-airplane-transit-mask-mandate-through-april-18-official-2022-03-10/\">CDC is supposed to be working on a “revised policy framework” for mask mandates on public transport</a>. In spite of being a lousy forecaster, I’m guessing that they’ll take every bit of that month before they make an announcement.<br><br>Irene and I were talking about this yesterday. Even without a mandate, we’ll probably voluntarily pull out a KN-95 on a completely packed plane in the winter; when I’m sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with a guy coughing or sniffling. It’s less of a COVID thing and more of a “I should’ve been doing this for the last 30 years” thing. Would’ve saved a fortune on cough and cold medicine and pocket packs of Kleenex.</li><li>At the end of the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/03/03/podcast-184-figuring-out-stealth-travel-inflation/\">last episode</a>, I mentioned looking forward to checking out the new <a href=\"https://thecenturionlounge.com/locations/lga/\">LGA Amex Centurion Club</a>. The old LGA club was upstairs, tucked in a corner and, worst of all, before security, so next to the bar, they had a TV showing the live feed from a camera pointed at the TSA checkpoint so you could figure out when you needed to leave the lounge to make your flight. The <em>new</em> club, in the <em>new </em>Terminal B, is great -- properly placed <em>after</em> security, on the way to the gates, and twice as big as the old lounge, so plenty of room even when there’s a weather delay.&nbsp; The one kink in my plan was -- I’d forgotten to bring my Amex Platinum card to New York. Ugh. So the night before leaving, I hit the Amex website, fire up the chat box and ask “Is there any way to get in without my physical card?” The net net of the back-and-forth was “No” -- as I expected. Ugh, again. But then, on the Uber ride to the airport, I was killing time, poking around the Amex app on my iPhone and found a screen on the LGA Centurion Lounge. And there, under Access Information, it said I could use a Platinum card or a Check-In Code. So I hit the button for a Check-In Code and got a QR code from Loungebuddy. Hmmm. Well, nothing to lose, so after security, I walked up to the desk, the agent scanned the QR code and my boarding pass and I was good to go. “Everyone’s using it now,” she told me. I went to the bar and got a free beer thinking “Somebody should tell the chat guys that.”</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/55998\">Lakeside Jam</a></em> by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/55998</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Notes on Louisville</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Sticking my head into the open hatch of the fermentation vessel during the <a href=\"https://www.angelsenvy.com/\">Angel’s Envy distillery</a> tour was probably my peak Louisville moment -- looking down at the bubbling mash, and then inhaling -- enjoying those nice yeasty notes for just second or two until the hot CO<sub>2</sub> coming up from those bubbles burnt out my nostrils.</li><li>I’m not a big bourbon guy; more of a Scotch guy, but it still was a great tour. I like these kinds of tours; ones where you see people making things. It was a Friday afternoon and the place running at full tilt -- the mash tuns and the fermenters were full, the distilling column was burbling away, a couple of guys were emptying aged bourbon out of barrels giving that room a really nice smell, and the bottling line was running at a surprisingly not-hectic pace, the filled bottles proceeding along the conveyor at a kinda stately pace past a couple of inspectors and then to the boxing crew. And there were only 7 of us on the tour, so we all got front-row views. The tasting at the end of the tour was well-done; a 15-20-minute guided tasting session rather than the “here’s your complimentary shot” I usually get at Scottish distilleries.</li><li>I mentioned in the last episode that I have a small bit of history with Louisville. My folks moved there from Memphis in the early ‘80’s while I was in college in DC. And I ended up living one summer when I was too broke to stay in DC. And where I learned to pronounce Louisville like a native -- “Lou-a-vul”, not moving your mouth, swallowing all the vowels. Which is how you know someone pronouncing it “Louisville” is not from there. I only ever heard one person pronounce it “Louis-ville”. He was English, so I couldn’t tell if he was serious or not. But after my family moved to Southern California in the late ‘80’s, that was pretty much it until July 2012 when Louisville was the first stop on my 2,100-mile drive around the South that I talked about in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/07/31/podcast-100-southern-road-trip-breaking-up-with-american-airlines/\">episode #100</a>. And then 10 years later, this trip.</li><li>Back in 2012, after 6 hours of I-65, I took the first exit I could after crossing the Ohio River and parked myself at the counter of Garage Bar, a repurposed gas station in NuLu -- New Louisville -- the hip neighborhood developing east of downtown, running a few blocks down East Market Street. Ten years later, Garage Bar is still there and NuLu has expanded east and north, starting to smear into what was called Butchertown when my folks lived there. There seems to be a coffee shop or taproom on every corner and cool independent boutiques and restaurants filling the spaces in-between. It’s a fun neighborhood with a buzz about it -- people on the sidewalks, every coffee shop and restaurant I walked into were doing good business. I talked about <a href=\"https://www.labodeguitademima.com/\">La Bodeguita De Mima</a> in the last episode, a great Cuban restaurant that was jammed on Thursday night. Saturday morning, we tried to carb up at <a href=\"https://biscuitbelly.com/nulu/\">Biscuit Belly</a>, but it was packed, so we walked up a block to <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/butchertowngrocery/\">Butchertown Grocery Bakery</a> for my biscuit &amp; gravy fix.&nbsp;</li><li>Working our way through the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butchertown,_Louisville\">Butchertown neighborhood</a> toward the river, we had to navigate our way under a huge set of elevated expressway lanes -- a&nbsp; tangle of I-64 and I-71 -- to get to the Ohio River. The Ohio River, like the Mississippi and the Missouri and the Cumberland, is a working river, carrying barge tows 5 football fields long, making it a bit dodgy for small pleasure craft, and so the banks of these rivers are often pretty industrial. But Louisville’s <a href=\"https://ourwaterfront.org/\">Waterfront Park</a> reclaimed some of that industrial space, scrap yards and sand pits, to provide a nice stretch of riverside recreation. The one bit of industrial scrap they did leave -- the late 1800’s Big Four railroad bridge, decommissioned in 1969, left standing above the river without connections to either side… until about 8 years ago when Kentucky and Indiana built ramps to reconnect it to the river banks on each side and now it’s a pedestrian and biking path.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>We drove over to the <a href=\"https://shelbyparklouisville.squarespace.com/\">Shelby Park neighborhood</a>, parked the car and walked along Logan Street. We started at the <a href=\"https://loganstmarket.com/\">Logan St Market</a>, shopping the food stalls on the first floor and then browsing through a makers’ market on the second floor. We walked down Logan Street, past a <a href=\"https://www.idlewildbutterflyfarm.com/\">butterfly farm</a>, a ping pong emporium, a hot dog joint and a bunch of houses ‘til we got to <a href=\"https://www.atriumbrewing.com/\">Atrium Brewing</a> which had some great beers, a nice taproom, and a big TV showing college basketball because, what else would be on in Kentucky. It was a nice walk. We could feel this stretch was beginning to develop, but I don’t think it’ll be another NuLu. Feels like it’ll be something more neighborhoody, lower key, maybe a touch crunchy granola.&nbsp;</li><li>And that’s what struck me about walking and driving around Louisville. It seems to have these separate neighborhoods, strips of 4 or 8 or 10 blocks that aren’t linked up. They’re sorta islands separated by runs of dodgy blocks -- maybe vacant lots or some rundown housing or a big underpass -- that don’t invite continued walking. Like our walk from our AC Hotel in NuLu to the Angel’s Envy distillery. Navigating under the multiple lands of I-65 was poorly lit and slightly uncomfortable and&nbsp; at 2pm; I definitely would’ve had second thoughts at 6 or 7. Once there, the distillery is a great building; they dropped a sleek new distilling operation between the brick walls and steel beams of an abandoned 1900’s manufacturing building. And it’s kitty corner from Louisville’s minor league baseball park and <a href=\"https://atgbrewery.com/location/smokehouse/\">Against The Grain</a> microbrewery. But then, that’s it, except for open surface parking lots. I’m hoping that Louisville finds a way, multiple ways (some planned, some organic) to grow into the empty spaces and link up these neighborhood islands</li><li>We had a fun four days in Louisville. I definitely recommend it. Get a car, base yourself in NuLu hotel, and explore the neighborhoods and the riverbank parks. Check out the show notes; I’ll summarize all this into an easy-to-use list of places and links.&nbsp;</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote\">\n<p><strong>My Recommendations</strong>:</p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https://www.labodeguitademima.com/\">La Bodeguita De Mima</a>, 725 East Market Street, NuLu — Great Cuban food; big portion sizes; loved the the Lechon Asado (roast pork)</li>\n<li><a href=\"http://quillscoffee.com/\">Quills Coffee</a>, 802 E Main St, NuLu — Unpretentious coffee joint on the NuLu/Butchertown border; friendly service; good coffee; no condescension</li>\n<li><a href=\"https://www.angelsenvy.com/\">Angel’s Envy Distillery</a>, 500 E Main St — Great tour of the distillery followed by one of the best guided tasting sessions I\'ve had</li>\n<li><a href=\"https://www.atriumbrewing.com/\">Atrium Brewing</a>, 1154 Logan St, Shelby Park — Solid beer selection; good-sized taproom in an upcoming neighborhood</li>\n<li><a href=\"http://www.milewidebeer.com/\">Mile Wide Beer</a>, 636 Barret Ave, Highlands — At the base of the grain silos of a former biscuit factory, good bar and wide selection of beer styles</li>\n</ul>\n</blockquote>\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #185</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_185.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #185 — Notes on Louisville; Changing Mask Mandates','','inherit','closed','closed','','4120-revision-v1','','','2022-03-28 11:59:16','2022-03-28 16:59:16','',4120,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4128',0,'revision','',0),
(4129,1,'2022-03-28 12:13:19','2022-03-28 17:13:19','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/IMG_4455-scaled.jpeg\"><img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/IMG_4455-300x300.jpeg\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" alt=\"Skeleton in Louisville taproom\"></a>Having Fun in Louisville![/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>As the great American philosopher Ferris Bueller once said, “Life moves pretty fast” and in this episode, we talk about the rapid changes in hotel service, travel prices, and in-flight mask mandates. Then I go into detail about our recent trip to Louisville. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_185.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #185: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois a couple of weeks after hanging out in Brooklyn for what maybe I should call a <em>longer</em> weekend -- Thursday to Tuesday -- rather than a <em>long</em> weekend, which traditionally was the 3 days, Friday to Sunday, when I was growing up, but now with telecommuting feels like it’s gone to 3½ - 4, Thursday noon to Sunday.&nbsp;</li><li>I always have stayed in Manhattan on my trips to New York, so I decided to change it up this time. Rather than run the usual play -- cycling through corporate codes on hotel websites to find something reasonable in midtown Manhattan -- we posted up at an Airbnb in the Cobble Hill neighborhood in Brooklyn. And instead of threading through crowds on Madison Avenue to find a quick bite, we wandered down the much emptier sidewalks, maybe dodging a work-from-home dad following his daughter on a bike, and walked into a local butcher shop, G Esposito &amp; Sons, to get a couple of sandwiches. Which turned into a 10-minute conversation with the owner -- not sure if it was G himself or one of the Esposito sons -- about his wife’s favorite sandwich, how he screwed up his Ash Wednesday fast right at breakfast, and pointing in the case to the sausage his wife was making sausage for dinner that night. Definitely a change from my usual Midtown lunch experiences.</li><li>And that’s kinda what I wanted to get with this stay, the chance to dig into Brooklyn a bit by staying there; walking the neighborhoods; trying places like Esposito’s and Caputo’s Bakery just down Court St where we grabbed bread and pastries; places you probably wouldn’t journey to, but places you’d absolutely duck into if you were walking by. I used to do this when I’d do every-week trips to San Francisco or New Orleans. I wouldn’t stay in the same place every week. Instead, I’d move around. In San Francisco, I’d stay on Nob Hill one week, maybe SoMa the next week, and then maybe down the 101 in San Mateo for a change of scenery… and restaurants. I wouldn’t come out of it an expert in the city, but I’d come away with a lot more experiences, more of a feel of the city than if I’d stayed in the same place for 6 or 8 weeks straight.</li><li>And that’s what we got out of this weekend, a little better feel for Brooklyn. And part of that feel I picked up pretty quick -- cash is still king in Brooklyn, at least in Cobble Hill. These old-school Italian places -- cash only, though they do make space in the back of the shop for an ATM, just in case you find yourself a little short.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/Loveshadow/26219\"><em>SP*ANK Vox</em></a> by&nbsp;Loveshadow (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/Loveshadow/26219</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Following up on my recent rants about US hotel housekeeping cutbacks, John McDonough hit me up on Twitter with his most recent experience<ul><li>“We stayed at the Whaler on Kaanapali Beach on Maui late January/early February. The deal was \"room cleaned on checkout\". However, we noticed the trash was being emptied (or someone was stealing it) while we were out. Apparently, the Monday after our arrival, they had resumed daily cleaning -- but forgot to tell us.”</li></ul></li><li>Jim, thanks for that. You’d think they’d want to take credit for the service upgrade -- or at least prevent you thinking someone was breaking into your room</li><li>Long-time friend, long-time listener, first-time caller Laura Wotycha texted me about her recent experience with travel inflation<ul><li>“Having found myself with 3 unexpected days off from work, I decided to head south for some sun and a Vitamin D top-up at my favorite, favorite, <em>favorite</em> resort, the outstanding JW Marriott Grande Lakes in Orlando. I’m all about the most beautiful (grown-up) lazy river and handsome pool boys who come right over when you flip your flag up on your lounge chair. But the number was huge -- twice the decent sized number I paid last May for my birthday weekend.</li><li>“So instead, I headed a bit east, to the Eastern Shore of Maryland to a much more reasonably priced Hyatt resort in Cambridge, MD. It was freaking ridiculously beautiful! Saved money on the flight as well as on the room, some of which I promptly dropped on multiple platters of Chesapeake Bay oysters.”</li></ul></li><li>Laura, I’m glad it all worked out for you. The Eastern Shore is its own world, and a fun place to explore before the summer crowds hit. I understand the attraction of flipping up the flag for an instant cocktail in the Florida sun, but I’ll take those oysters with a cold beer every time.</li><li>In the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/03/03/podcast-184-figuring-out-stealth-travel-inflation/\">last episode</a>, I said “No one sees an end in site for in-flight masking”. And 2 weeks later, the UK ditches its remaining COVID travel restrictions. Heathrow airport then drops mandatory masking; UK-based airlines BA, Virgin Atlantic, Tui, and EasyJet drop mask rules where they can -- mostly within the UK (except for Scotland), and to Denmark, Iceland, Gibraltar, Hungary, and the Caribbean. Then <a href=\"https://thepointsguy.com/news/klm-face-mask-rules-boycott/\">KLM announces they’ll stop enforcing in-flight masking</a> even though it’s still a legal Dutch requirement. And now this week, <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/airline-ceos-ask-biden-to-drop-mask-requirement-for-planes-and-airports-11648098070?reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink\">US airline CEOs</a> and&nbsp; <a href=\"https://www.dallasnews.com/business/airlines/2022/03/22/southwest-airlines-flight-attendants-ask-biden-to-drop-face-mask-mandate/\">Southwest Airlines’ flight attendants’ union are calling for the end of the US mask mandate</a>. In the words of the great American philosopher Ferris Bueller, “Life moves pretty fast”<br><br>The US CEOs have said this before. The Southwest flight attendants are a new voice, and they have a point. The mask mandate impacts them more than anyone day-in, day-out --&nbsp; they’re the ones having to enforce it and, let’s face it, that wasn’t in the job description when they took the job. Indeed, a Tui flight attendant <a href=\"https://twitter.com/flywithclaude/status/1502697933719937027\">tweeted out</a> “First flight done without a mask and it was an absolute dream .. Happy passengers .. Happy crew”&nbsp; The March extension of the US mandate was only a month -- from March 18 to April 18 -- the shortest extension I can recall. Right now, the <a href=\"https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-extend-airplane-transit-mask-mandate-through-april-18-official-2022-03-10/\">CDC is supposed to be working on a “revised policy framework” for mask mandates on public transport</a>. In spite of being a lousy forecaster, I’m guessing that they’ll take every bit of that month before they make an announcement.<br><br>Irene and I were talking about this yesterday. Even without a mandate, we’ll probably voluntarily pull out a KN-95 on a completely packed plane in the winter; when I’m sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with a guy coughing or sniffling. It’s less of a COVID thing and more of a “I should’ve been doing this for the last 30 years” thing. Would’ve saved a fortune on cough and cold medicine and pocket packs of Kleenex.</li><li>At the end of the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/03/03/podcast-184-figuring-out-stealth-travel-inflation/\">last episode</a>, I mentioned looking forward to checking out the new <a href=\"https://thecenturionlounge.com/locations/lga/\">LGA Amex Centurion Club</a>. The old LGA club was upstairs, tucked in a corner and, worst of all, before security, so next to the bar, they had a TV showing the live feed from a camera pointed at the TSA checkpoint so you could figure out when you needed to leave the lounge to make your flight. The <em>new</em> club, in the <em>new </em>Terminal B, is great -- properly placed <em>after</em> security, on the way to the gates, and twice as big as the old lounge, so plenty of room even when there’s a weather delay.&nbsp; The one kink in my plan was -- I’d forgotten to bring my Amex Platinum card to New York. Ugh. So the night before leaving, I hit the Amex website, fire up the chat box and ask “Is there any way to get in without my physical card?” The net net of the back-and-forth was “No” -- as I expected. Ugh, again. But then, on the Uber ride to the airport, I was killing time, poking around the Amex app on my iPhone and found a screen on the LGA Centurion Lounge. And there, under Access Information, it said I could use a Platinum card or a Check-In Code. So I hit the button for a Check-In Code and got a QR code from Loungebuddy. Hmmm. Well, nothing to lose, so after security, I walked up to the desk, the agent scanned the QR code and my boarding pass and I was good to go. “Everyone’s using it now,” she told me. I went to the bar and got a free beer thinking “Somebody should tell the chat guys that.”</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/55998\">Lakeside Jam</a></em> by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/55998</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Notes on Louisville</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Sticking my head into the open hatch of the fermentation vessel during the <a href=\"https://www.angelsenvy.com/\">Angel’s Envy distillery</a> tour was probably my peak Louisville moment -- looking down at the bubbling mash, and then inhaling -- enjoying those nice yeasty notes for just second or two until the hot CO<sub>2</sub> coming up from those bubbles burnt out my nostrils.</li><li>I’m not a big bourbon guy; more of a Scotch guy, but it still was a great tour. I like these kinds of tours; ones where you see people making things. It was a Friday afternoon and the place running at full tilt -- the mash tuns and the fermenters were full, the distilling column was burbling away, a couple of guys were emptying aged bourbon out of barrels giving that room a really nice smell, and the bottling line was running at a surprisingly not-hectic pace, the filled bottles proceeding along the conveyor at a kinda stately pace past a couple of inspectors and then to the boxing crew. And there were only 7 of us on the tour, so we all got front-row views. The tasting at the end of the tour was well-done; a 15-20-minute guided tasting session rather than the “here’s your complimentary shot” I usually get at Scottish distilleries.</li><li>I mentioned in the last episode that I have a small bit of history with Louisville. My folks moved there from Memphis in the early ‘80’s while I was in college in DC. And I ended up living one summer when I was too broke to stay in DC. And where I learned to pronounce Louisville like a native -- “Lou-a-vul”, not moving your mouth, swallowing all the vowels. Which is how you know someone pronouncing it “Louisville” is not from there. I only ever heard one person pronounce it “Louis-ville”. He was English, so I couldn’t tell if he was serious or not. But after my family moved to Southern California in the late ‘80’s, that was pretty much it until July 2012 when Louisville was the first stop on my 2,100-mile drive around the South that I talked about in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/07/31/podcast-100-southern-road-trip-breaking-up-with-american-airlines/\">episode #100</a>. And then 10 years later, this trip.</li><li>Back in 2012, after 6 hours of I-65, I took the first exit I could after crossing the Ohio River and parked myself at the counter of Garage Bar, a repurposed gas station in NuLu -- New Louisville -- the hip neighborhood developing east of downtown, running a few blocks down East Market Street. Ten years later, Garage Bar is still there and NuLu has expanded east and north, starting to smear into what was called Butchertown when my folks lived there. There seems to be a coffee shop or taproom on every corner and cool independent boutiques and restaurants filling the spaces in-between. It’s a fun neighborhood with a buzz about it -- people on the sidewalks, every coffee shop and restaurant I walked into were doing good business. I talked about <a href=\"https://www.labodeguitademima.com/\">La Bodeguita De Mima</a> in the last episode, a great Cuban restaurant that was jammed on Thursday night. Saturday morning, we tried to carb up at <a href=\"https://biscuitbelly.com/nulu/\">Biscuit Belly</a>, but it was packed, so we walked up a block to <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/butchertowngrocery/\">Butchertown Grocery Bakery</a> for my biscuit &amp; gravy fix.&nbsp;</li><li>Working our way through the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butchertown,_Louisville\">Butchertown neighborhood</a> toward the river, we had to navigate our way under a huge set of elevated expressway lanes -- a&nbsp; tangle of I-64 and I-71 -- to get to the Ohio River. The Ohio River, like the Mississippi and the Missouri and the Cumberland, is a working river, carrying barge tows 5 football fields long, making it a bit dodgy for small pleasure craft, and so the banks of these rivers are often pretty industrial. But Louisville’s <a href=\"https://ourwaterfront.org/\">Waterfront Park</a> reclaimed some of that industrial space, scrap yards and sand pits, to provide a nice stretch of riverside recreation. The one bit of industrial scrap they did leave -- the late 1800’s Big Four railroad bridge, decommissioned in 1969, left standing above the river without connections to either side… until about 8 years ago when Kentucky and Indiana built ramps to reconnect it to the river banks on each side and now it’s a pedestrian and biking path.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>We drove over to the <a href=\"https://shelbyparklouisville.squarespace.com/\">Shelby Park neighborhood</a>, parked the car and walked along Logan Street. We started at the <a href=\"https://loganstmarket.com/\">Logan St Market</a>, shopping the food stalls on the first floor and then browsing through a makers’ market on the second floor. We walked down Logan Street, past a <a href=\"https://www.idlewildbutterflyfarm.com/\">butterfly farm</a>, a ping pong emporium, a hot dog joint and a bunch of houses ‘til we got to <a href=\"https://www.atriumbrewing.com/\">Atrium Brewing</a> which had some great beers, a nice taproom, and a big TV showing college basketball because, what else would be on in Kentucky. It was a nice walk. We could feel this stretch was beginning to develop, but I don’t think it’ll be another NuLu. Feels like it’ll be something more neighborhoody, lower key, maybe a touch crunchy granola.&nbsp;</li><li>And that’s what struck me about walking and driving around Louisville. It seems to have these separate neighborhoods, strips of 4 or 8 or 10 blocks that aren’t linked up. They’re sorta islands separated by runs of dodgy blocks -- maybe vacant lots or some rundown housing or a big underpass -- that don’t invite continued walking. Like our walk from our AC Hotel in NuLu to the Angel’s Envy distillery. Navigating under the multiple lands of I-65 was poorly lit and slightly uncomfortable and&nbsp; at 2pm; I definitely would’ve had second thoughts at 6 or 7. Once there, the distillery is a great building; they dropped a sleek new distilling operation between the brick walls and steel beams of an abandoned 1900’s manufacturing building. And it’s kitty corner from Louisville’s minor league baseball park and <a href=\"https://atgbrewery.com/location/smokehouse/\">Against The Grain</a> microbrewery. But then, that’s it, except for open surface parking lots. I’m hoping that Louisville finds a way, multiple ways (some planned, some organic) to grow into the empty spaces and link up these neighborhood islands</li><li>We had a fun four days in Louisville. I definitely recommend it. Get a car, base yourself in NuLu hotel, and explore the neighborhoods and the riverbank parks. Check out the show notes; I’ll summarize all this into an easy-to-use list of places and links.&nbsp;</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote\">\n<p><strong>My Recommendations</strong>:</p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https://www.labodeguitademima.com/\">La Bodeguita De Mima</a>, 725 East Market Street, NuLu — Great Cuban food; big portion sizes; loved the the Lechon Asado (roast pork)</li>\n<li><a href=\"http://quillscoffee.com/\">Quills Coffee</a>, 802 E Main St, NuLu — Unpretentious coffee joint on the NuLu/Butchertown border; friendly service; good coffee; no condescension</li>\n<li><a href=\"https://www.angelsenvy.com/\">Angel’s Envy Distillery</a>, 500 E Main St — Great tour of the distillery followed by one of the best guided tasting sessions I\'ve had</li>\n<li><a href=\"https://www.atriumbrewing.com/\">Atrium Brewing</a>, 1154 Logan St, Shelby Park — Solid beer selection; good-sized taproom in an upcoming neighborhood</li>\n<li><a href=\"http://www.milewidebeer.com/\">Mile Wide Beer</a>, 636 Barret Ave, Highlands — At the base of the grain silos of a former biscuit factory, good bar and wide selection of beer styles</li>\n</ul>\n</blockquote>\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #185</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_185.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #185 — Notes on Louisville; Changing Mask Mandates','','inherit','closed','closed','','4120-revision-v1','','','2022-03-28 12:13:19','2022-03-28 17:13:19','',4120,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4129',0,'revision','',0),
(4130,1,'2022-03-28 16:50:33','2022-03-28 21:50:33','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/IMG_4455-scaled.jpeg\"><img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/IMG_4455-300x300.jpeg\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" alt=\"Skeleton in Louisville taproom\"></a>Having Fun in Louisville![/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>As the great American philosopher Ferris Bueller once said, “Life moves pretty fast” and in this episode, we talk about the rapid changes in hotel service, travel prices, and in-flight mask mandates. Then I go into detail about our recent trip to Louisville. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_185.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #185: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois a couple of weeks after hanging out in Brooklyn for what maybe I should call a <em>longer</em> weekend -- Thursday to Tuesday -- rather than a <em>long</em> weekend, which traditionally was the 3 days, Friday to Sunday, when I was growing up, but now with telecommuting feels like it’s gone to 3½ - 4, Thursday noon to Sunday.&nbsp;</li><li>I always have stayed in Manhattan on my trips to New York, so I decided to change it up this time. Rather than run the usual play -- cycling through corporate codes on hotel websites to find something reasonable in midtown Manhattan -- we posted up at an Airbnb in the Cobble Hill neighborhood in Brooklyn. And instead of threading through crowds on Madison Avenue to find a quick bite, we wandered down the much emptier sidewalks, maybe dodging a work-from-home dad following his daughter on a bike, and walked into a local butcher shop, G Esposito &amp; Sons, to get a couple of sandwiches. Which turned into a 10-minute conversation with the owner -- not sure if it was G himself or one of the Esposito sons -- about his wife’s favorite sandwich, how he screwed up his Ash Wednesday fast right at breakfast, and pointing in the case to the sausage his wife was making sausage for dinner that night. Definitely a change from my usual Midtown lunch experiences.</li><li>And that’s kinda what I wanted to get with this stay, the chance to dig into Brooklyn a bit by staying there; walking the neighborhoods; trying places like Esposito’s and Caputo’s Bakery just down Court St where we grabbed bread and pastries; places you probably wouldn’t journey to, but places you’d absolutely duck into if you were walking by. I used to do this when I’d do every-week trips to San Francisco or New Orleans. I wouldn’t stay in the same place every week. Instead, I’d move around. In San Francisco, I’d stay on Nob Hill one week, maybe SoMa the next week, and then maybe down the 101 in San Mateo for a change of scenery… and restaurants. I wouldn’t come out of it an expert in the city, but I’d come away with a lot more experiences, more of a feel of the city than if I’d stayed in the same place for 6 or 8 weeks straight.</li><li>And that’s what we got out of this weekend, a little better feel for Brooklyn. And part of that feel I picked up pretty quick -- cash is still king in Brooklyn, at least in Cobble Hill. These old-school Italian places -- cash only, though they do make space in the back of the shop for an ATM, just in case you find yourself a little short.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/Loveshadow/26219\"><em>SP*ANK Vox</em></a> by&nbsp;Loveshadow (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/Loveshadow/26219</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Following up on my recent rants about US hotel housekeeping cutbacks, Jim McDonough hit me up on Twitter with his most recent experience<ul><li>“We stayed at the Whaler on Kaanapali Beach on Maui late January/early February. The deal was \"room cleaned on checkout\". However, we noticed the trash was being emptied (or someone was stealing it) while we were out. Apparently, the Monday after our arrival, they had resumed daily cleaning -- but forgot to tell us.”</li></ul></li><li>Jim, thanks for that. You’d think they’d want to take credit for the service upgrade -- or at least prevent you thinking someone was breaking into your room</li><li>Long-time friend, long-time listener, first-time caller Laura Wotycha texted me about her recent experience with travel inflation<ul><li>“Having found myself with 3 unexpected days off from work, I decided to head south for some sun and a Vitamin D top-up at my favorite, favorite, <em>favorite</em> resort, the outstanding JW Marriott Grande Lakes in Orlando. I’m all about the most beautiful (grown-up) lazy river and handsome pool boys who come right over when you flip your flag up on your lounge chair. But the number was huge -- twice the decent sized number I paid last May for my birthday weekend.</li><li>“So instead, I headed a bit east, to the Eastern Shore of Maryland to a much more reasonably priced Hyatt resort in Cambridge, MD. It was freaking ridiculously beautiful! Saved money on the flight as well as on the room, some of which I promptly dropped on multiple platters of Chesapeake Bay oysters.”</li></ul></li><li>Laura, I’m glad it all worked out for you. The Eastern Shore is its own world, and a fun place to explore before the summer crowds hit. I understand the attraction of flipping up the flag for an instant cocktail in the Florida sun, but I’ll take those oysters with a cold beer every time.</li><li>In the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/03/03/podcast-184-figuring-out-stealth-travel-inflation/\">last episode</a>, I said “No one sees an end in site for in-flight masking”. And 2 weeks later, the UK ditches its remaining COVID travel restrictions. Heathrow airport then drops mandatory masking; UK-based airlines BA, Virgin Atlantic, Tui, and EasyJet drop mask rules where they can -- mostly within the UK (except for Scotland), and to Denmark, Iceland, Gibraltar, Hungary, and the Caribbean. Then <a href=\"https://thepointsguy.com/news/klm-face-mask-rules-boycott/\">KLM announces they’ll stop enforcing in-flight masking</a> even though it’s still a legal Dutch requirement. And now this week, <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/airline-ceos-ask-biden-to-drop-mask-requirement-for-planes-and-airports-11648098070?reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink\">US airline CEOs</a> and  <a href=\"https://www.dallasnews.com/business/airlines/2022/03/22/southwest-airlines-flight-attendants-ask-biden-to-drop-face-mask-mandate/\">Southwest Airlines’ flight attendants’ union are calling for the end of the US mask mandate</a>. In the words of the great American philosopher Ferris Bueller, “Life moves pretty fast”<br><br>The US CEOs have said this before. The Southwest flight attendants are a new voice, and they have a point. The mask mandate impacts them more than anyone day-in, day-out --  they’re the ones having to enforce it and, let’s face it, that wasn’t in the job description when they took the job. Indeed, a Tui flight attendant <a href=\"https://twitter.com/flywithclaude/status/1502697933719937027\">tweeted out</a> “First flight done without a mask and it was an absolute dream .. Happy passengers .. Happy crew”  The March extension of the US mandate was only a month -- from March 18 to April 18 -- the shortest extension I can recall. Right now, the <a href=\"https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-extend-airplane-transit-mask-mandate-through-april-18-official-2022-03-10/\">CDC is supposed to be working on a “revised policy framework” for mask mandates on public transport</a>. In spite of being a lousy forecaster, I’m guessing that they’ll take every bit of that month before they make an announcement.<br><br>Irene and I were talking about this yesterday. Even without a mandate, we’ll probably voluntarily pull out a KN-95 on a completely packed plane in the winter; when I’m sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with a guy coughing or sniffling. It’s less of a COVID thing and more of a “I should’ve been doing this for the last 30 years” thing. Would’ve saved a fortune on cough and cold medicine and pocket packs of Kleenex.</li><li>At the end of the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/03/03/podcast-184-figuring-out-stealth-travel-inflation/\">last episode</a>, I mentioned looking forward to checking out the new <a href=\"https://thecenturionlounge.com/locations/lga/\">LGA Amex Centurion Club</a>. The old LGA club was upstairs, tucked in a corner and, worst of all, before security, so next to the bar, they had a TV showing the live feed from a camera pointed at the TSA checkpoint so you could figure out when you needed to leave the lounge to make your flight. The <em>new</em> club, in the <em>new </em>Terminal B, is great -- properly placed <em>after</em> security, on the way to the gates, and twice as big as the old lounge, so plenty of room even when there’s a weather delay.  The one kink in my plan was -- I’d forgotten to bring my Amex Platinum card to New York. Ugh. So the night before leaving, I hit the Amex website, fire up the chat box and ask “Is there any way to get in without my physical card?” The net net of the back-and-forth was “No” -- as I expected. Ugh, again. But then, on the Uber ride to the airport, I was killing time, poking around the Amex app on my iPhone and found a screen on the LGA Centurion Lounge. And there, under Access Information, it said I could use a Platinum card or a Check-In Code. So I hit the button for a Check-In Code and got a QR code from Loungebuddy. Hmmm. Well, nothing to lose, so after security, I walked up to the desk, the agent scanned the QR code and my boarding pass and I was good to go. “Everyone’s using it now,” she told me. I went to the bar and got a free beer thinking “Somebody should tell the chat guys that.”</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/55998\">Lakeside Jam</a></em> by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/55998</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Notes on Louisville</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Sticking my head into the open hatch of the fermentation vessel during the <a href=\"https://www.angelsenvy.com/\">Angel’s Envy distillery</a> tour was probably my peak Louisville moment -- looking down at the bubbling mash, and then inhaling -- enjoying those nice yeasty notes for just second or two until the hot CO<sub>2</sub> coming up from those bubbles burnt out my nostrils.</li><li>I’m not a big bourbon guy; more of a Scotch guy, but it still was a great tour. I like these kinds of tours; ones where you see people making things. It was a Friday afternoon and the place running at full tilt -- the mash tuns and the fermenters were full, the distilling column was burbling away, a couple of guys were emptying aged bourbon out of barrels giving that room a really nice smell, and the bottling line was running at a surprisingly not-hectic pace, the filled bottles proceeding along the conveyor at a kinda stately pace past a couple of inspectors and then to the boxing crew. And there were only 7 of us on the tour, so we all got front-row views. The tasting at the end of the tour was well-done; a 15-20-minute guided tasting session rather than the “here’s your complimentary shot” I usually get at Scottish distilleries.</li><li>I mentioned in the last episode that I have a small bit of history with Louisville. My folks moved there from Memphis in the early ‘80’s while I was in college in DC. And I ended up living one summer when I was too broke to stay in DC. And where I learned to pronounce Louisville like a native -- “Lou-a-vul”, not moving your mouth, swallowing all the vowels. Which is how you know someone pronouncing it “Louisville” is not from there. I only ever heard one person pronounce it “Louis-ville”. He was English, so I couldn’t tell if he was serious or not. But after my family moved to Southern California in the late ‘80’s, that was pretty much it until July 2012 when Louisville was the first stop on my 2,100-mile drive around the South that I talked about in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/07/31/podcast-100-southern-road-trip-breaking-up-with-american-airlines/\">episode #100</a>. And then 10 years later, this trip.</li><li>Back in 2012, after 6 hours of I-65, I took the first exit I could after crossing the Ohio River and parked myself at the counter of Garage Bar, a repurposed gas station in NuLu -- New Louisville -- the hip neighborhood developing east of downtown, running a few blocks down East Market Street. Ten years later, Garage Bar is still there and NuLu has expanded east and north, starting to smear into what was called Butchertown when my folks lived there. There seems to be a coffee shop or taproom on every corner and cool independent boutiques and restaurants filling the spaces in-between. It’s a fun neighborhood with a buzz about it -- people on the sidewalks, every coffee shop and restaurant I walked into were doing good business. I talked about <a href=\"https://www.labodeguitademima.com/\">La Bodeguita De Mima</a> in the last episode, a great Cuban restaurant that was jammed on Thursday night. Saturday morning, we tried to carb up at <a href=\"https://biscuitbelly.com/nulu/\">Biscuit Belly</a>, but it was packed, so we walked up a block to <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/butchertowngrocery/\">Butchertown Grocery Bakery</a> for my biscuit &amp; gravy fix.&nbsp;</li><li>Working our way through the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butchertown,_Louisville\">Butchertown neighborhood</a> toward the river, we had to navigate our way under a huge set of elevated expressway lanes -- a&nbsp; tangle of I-64 and I-71 -- to get to the Ohio River. The Ohio River, like the Mississippi and the Missouri and the Cumberland, is a working river, carrying barge tows 5 football fields long, making it a bit dodgy for small pleasure craft, and so the banks of these rivers are often pretty industrial. But Louisville’s <a href=\"https://ourwaterfront.org/\">Waterfront Park</a> reclaimed some of that industrial space, scrap yards and sand pits, to provide a nice stretch of riverside recreation. The one bit of industrial scrap they did leave -- the late 1800’s Big Four railroad bridge, decommissioned in 1969, left standing above the river without connections to either side… until about 8 years ago when Kentucky and Indiana built ramps to reconnect it to the river banks on each side and now it’s a pedestrian and biking path.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>We drove over to the <a href=\"https://shelbyparklouisville.squarespace.com/\">Shelby Park neighborhood</a>, parked the car and walked along Logan Street. We started at the <a href=\"https://loganstmarket.com/\">Logan St Market</a>, shopping the food stalls on the first floor and then browsing through a makers’ market on the second floor. We walked down Logan Street, past a <a href=\"https://www.idlewildbutterflyfarm.com/\">butterfly farm</a>, a ping pong emporium, a hot dog joint and a bunch of houses ‘til we got to <a href=\"https://www.atriumbrewing.com/\">Atrium Brewing</a> which had some great beers, a nice taproom, and a big TV showing college basketball because, what else would be on in Kentucky. It was a nice walk. We could feel this stretch was beginning to develop, but I don’t think it’ll be another NuLu. Feels like it’ll be something more neighborhoody, lower key, maybe a touch crunchy granola.&nbsp;</li><li>And that’s what struck me about walking and driving around Louisville. It seems to have these separate neighborhoods, strips of 4 or 8 or 10 blocks that aren’t linked up. They’re sorta islands separated by runs of dodgy blocks -- maybe vacant lots or some rundown housing or a big underpass -- that don’t invite continued walking. Like our walk from our AC Hotel in NuLu to the Angel’s Envy distillery. Navigating under the multiple lands of I-65 was poorly lit and slightly uncomfortable and&nbsp; at 2pm; I definitely would’ve had second thoughts at 6 or 7. Once there, the distillery is a great building; they dropped a sleek new distilling operation between the brick walls and steel beams of an abandoned 1900’s manufacturing building. And it’s kitty corner from Louisville’s minor league baseball park and <a href=\"https://atgbrewery.com/location/smokehouse/\">Against The Grain</a> microbrewery. But then, that’s it, except for open surface parking lots. I’m hoping that Louisville finds a way, multiple ways (some planned, some organic) to grow into the empty spaces and link up these neighborhood islands</li><li>We had a fun four days in Louisville. I definitely recommend it. Get a car, base yourself in NuLu hotel, and explore the neighborhoods and the riverbank parks. Check out the show notes; I’ll summarize all this into an easy-to-use list of places and links.&nbsp;</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote\">\n<p><strong>My Recommendations</strong>:</p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https://www.labodeguitademima.com/\">La Bodeguita De Mima</a>, 725 East Market Street, NuLu — Great Cuban food; big portion sizes; loved the the Lechon Asado (roast pork)</li>\n<li><a href=\"http://quillscoffee.com/\">Quills Coffee</a>, 802 E Main St, NuLu — Unpretentious coffee joint on the NuLu/Butchertown border; friendly service; good coffee; no condescension</li>\n<li><a href=\"https://www.angelsenvy.com/\">Angel’s Envy Distillery</a>, 500 E Main St — Great tour of the distillery followed by one of the best guided tasting sessions I\'ve had</li>\n<li><a href=\"https://www.atriumbrewing.com/\">Atrium Brewing</a>, 1154 Logan St, Shelby Park — Solid beer selection; good-sized taproom in an upcoming neighborhood</li>\n<li><a href=\"http://www.milewidebeer.com/\">Mile Wide Beer</a>, 636 Barret Ave, Highlands — At the base of the grain silos of a former biscuit factory, good bar and wide selection of beer styles</li>\n</ul>\n</blockquote>\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #185</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_185.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #185 — Notes on Louisville; Changing Mask Mandates','','inherit','closed','closed','','4120-revision-v1','','','2022-03-28 16:50:33','2022-03-28 21:50:33','',4120,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4130',0,'revision','',0),
(4132,1,'2022-03-28 17:05:14','2022-03-28 22:05:14','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/IMG_4455-scaled.jpeg\"><img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/IMG_4455-300x300.jpeg\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" alt=\"Skeleton in Louisville taproom\"></a>Having Fun in Louisville![/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>As the great American philosopher Ferris Bueller once said, “Life moves pretty fast” and in this episode, we talk about the rapid changes in hotel service, and in-flight mask mandates. Then I go into detail about our recent trip to Louisville, complete with recommendations for food and drink. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_185.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #185: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois a couple of weeks after hanging out in Brooklyn for what maybe I should call a <em>longer</em> weekend -- Thursday to Tuesday -- rather than a <em>long</em> weekend, which traditionally was the 3 days, Friday to Sunday, when I was growing up, but now with telecommuting feels like it’s gone to 3½ - 4, Thursday noon to Sunday.&nbsp;</li><li>I always have stayed in Manhattan on my trips to New York, so I decided to change it up this time. Rather than run the usual play -- cycling through corporate codes on hotel websites to find something reasonable in midtown Manhattan -- we posted up at an Airbnb in the Cobble Hill neighborhood in Brooklyn. And instead of threading through crowds on Madison Avenue to find a quick bite, we wandered down the much emptier sidewalks, maybe dodging a work-from-home dad following his daughter on a bike, and walked into a local butcher shop, G Esposito &amp; Sons, to get a couple of sandwiches. Which turned into a 10-minute conversation with the owner -- not sure if it was G himself or one of the Esposito sons -- about his wife’s favorite sandwich, how he screwed up his Ash Wednesday fast right at breakfast, and pointing in the case to the sausage his wife was making sausage for dinner that night. Definitely a change from my usual Midtown lunch experiences.</li><li>And that’s kinda what I wanted to get with this stay, the chance to dig into Brooklyn a bit by staying there; walking the neighborhoods; trying places like Esposito’s and Caputo’s Bakery just down Court St where we grabbed bread and pastries; places you probably wouldn’t journey to, but places you’d absolutely duck into if you were walking by. I used to do this when I’d do every-week trips to San Francisco or New Orleans. I wouldn’t stay in the same place every week. Instead, I’d move around. In San Francisco, I’d stay on Nob Hill one week, maybe SoMa the next week, and then maybe down the 101 in San Mateo for a change of scenery… and restaurants. I wouldn’t come out of it an expert in the city, but I’d come away with a lot more experiences, more of a feel of the city than if I’d stayed in the same place for 6 or 8 weeks straight.</li><li>And that’s what we got out of this weekend, a little better feel for Brooklyn. And part of that feel I picked up pretty quick -- cash is still king in Brooklyn, at least in Cobble Hill. These old-school Italian places -- cash only, though they do make space in the back of the shop for an ATM, just in case you find yourself a little short.</li><li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/Loveshadow/26219\"><em>SP*ANK Vox</em></a> by&nbsp;Loveshadow (c) copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/Loveshadow/26219</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Following up on my recent rants about US hotel housekeeping cutbacks, Jim McDonough hit me up on Twitter with his most recent experience<ul><li>“We stayed at the Whaler on Kaanapali Beach on Maui late January/early February. The deal was \"room cleaned on checkout\". However, we noticed the trash was being emptied (or someone was stealing it) while we were out. Apparently, the Monday after our arrival, they had resumed daily cleaning -- but forgot to tell us.”</li></ul></li><li>Jim, thanks for that. You’d think they’d want to take credit for the service upgrade -- or at least prevent you thinking someone was breaking into your room</li><li>Long-time friend, long-time listener, first-time caller Laura Wotycha texted me about her recent experience with travel inflation<ul><li>“Having found myself with 3 unexpected days off from work, I decided to head south for some sun and a Vitamin D top-up at my favorite, favorite, <em>favorite</em> resort, the outstanding JW Marriott Grande Lakes in Orlando. I’m all about the most beautiful (grown-up) lazy river and handsome pool boys who come right over when you flip your flag up on your lounge chair. But the number was huge -- twice the decent sized number I paid last May for my birthday weekend.</li><li>“So instead, I headed a bit east, to the Eastern Shore of Maryland to a much more reasonably priced Hyatt resort in Cambridge, MD. It was freaking ridiculously beautiful! Saved money on the flight as well as on the room, some of which I promptly dropped on multiple platters of Chesapeake Bay oysters.”</li></ul></li><li>Laura, I’m glad it all worked out for you. The Eastern Shore is its own world, and a fun place to explore before the summer crowds hit. I understand the attraction of flipping up the flag for an instant cocktail in the Florida sun, but I’ll take those oysters with a cold beer every time.</li><li>In the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/03/03/podcast-184-figuring-out-stealth-travel-inflation/\">last episode</a>, I said “No one sees an end in site for in-flight masking”. And 2 weeks later, the UK ditches its remaining COVID travel restrictions. Heathrow airport then drops mandatory masking; UK-based airlines BA, Virgin Atlantic, Tui, and EasyJet drop mask rules where they can -- mostly within the UK (except for Scotland), and to Denmark, Iceland, Gibraltar, Hungary, and the Caribbean. Then <a href=\"https://thepointsguy.com/news/klm-face-mask-rules-boycott/\">KLM announces they’ll stop enforcing in-flight masking</a> even though it’s still a legal Dutch requirement. And now this week, <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/airline-ceos-ask-biden-to-drop-mask-requirement-for-planes-and-airports-11648098070?reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink\">US airline CEOs</a> and  <a href=\"https://www.dallasnews.com/business/airlines/2022/03/22/southwest-airlines-flight-attendants-ask-biden-to-drop-face-mask-mandate/\">Southwest Airlines’ flight attendants’ union are calling for the end of the US mask mandate</a>. In the words of the great American philosopher Ferris Bueller, “Life moves pretty fast”<br><br>The US CEOs have said this before. The Southwest flight attendants are a new voice, and they have a point. The mask mandate impacts them more than anyone day-in, day-out --  they’re the ones having to enforce it and, let’s face it, that wasn’t in the job description when they took the job. Indeed, a Tui flight attendant <a href=\"https://twitter.com/flywithclaude/status/1502697933719937027\">tweeted out</a> “First flight done without a mask and it was an absolute dream .. Happy passengers .. Happy crew”  The March extension of the US mandate was only a month -- from March 18 to April 18 -- the shortest extension I can recall. Right now, the <a href=\"https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-extend-airplane-transit-mask-mandate-through-april-18-official-2022-03-10/\">CDC is supposed to be working on a “revised policy framework” for mask mandates on public transport</a>. In spite of being a lousy forecaster, I’m guessing that they’ll take every bit of that month before they make an announcement.<br><br>Irene and I were talking about this yesterday. Even without a mandate, we’ll probably voluntarily pull out a KN-95 on a completely packed plane in the winter; when I’m sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with a guy coughing or sniffling. It’s less of a COVID thing and more of a “I should’ve been doing this for the last 30 years” thing. Would’ve saved a fortune on cough and cold medicine and pocket packs of Kleenex.</li><li>At the end of the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/03/03/podcast-184-figuring-out-stealth-travel-inflation/\">last episode</a>, I mentioned looking forward to checking out the new <a href=\"https://thecenturionlounge.com/locations/lga/\">LGA Amex Centurion Club</a>. The old LGA club was upstairs, tucked in a corner and, worst of all, before security, so next to the bar, they had a TV showing the live feed from a camera pointed at the TSA checkpoint so you could figure out when you needed to leave the lounge to make your flight. The <em>new</em> club, in the <em>new </em>Terminal B, is great -- properly placed <em>after</em> security, on the way to the gates, and twice as big as the old lounge, so plenty of room even when there’s a weather delay.  The one kink in my plan was -- I’d forgotten to bring my Amex Platinum card to New York. Ugh. So the night before leaving, I hit the Amex website, fire up the chat box and ask “Is there any way to get in without my physical card?” The net net of the back-and-forth was “No” -- as I expected. Ugh, again. But then, on the Uber ride to the airport, I was killing time, poking around the Amex app on my iPhone and found a screen on the LGA Centurion Lounge. And there, under Access Information, it said I could use a Platinum card or a Check-In Code. So I hit the button for a Check-In Code and got a QR code from Loungebuddy. Hmmm. Well, nothing to lose, so after security, I walked up to the desk, the agent scanned the QR code and my boarding pass and I was good to go. “Everyone’s using it now,” she told me. I went to the bar and got a free beer thinking “Somebody should tell the chat guys that.”</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — <em><a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/55998\">Lakeside Jam</a></em> by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/55998</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Notes on Louisville</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Sticking my head into the open hatch of the fermentation vessel during the <a href=\"https://www.angelsenvy.com/\">Angel’s Envy distillery</a> tour was probably my peak Louisville moment -- looking down at the bubbling mash, and then inhaling -- enjoying those nice yeasty notes for just second or two until the hot CO<sub>2</sub> coming up from those bubbles burnt out my nostrils.</li><li>I’m not a big bourbon guy; more of a Scotch guy, but it still was a great tour. I like these kinds of tours; ones where you see people making things. It was a Friday afternoon and the place running at full tilt -- the mash tuns and the fermenters were full, the distilling column was burbling away, a couple of guys were emptying aged bourbon out of barrels giving that room a really nice smell, and the bottling line was running at a surprisingly not-hectic pace, the filled bottles proceeding along the conveyor at a kinda stately pace past a couple of inspectors and then to the boxing crew. And there were only 7 of us on the tour, so we all got front-row views. The tasting at the end of the tour was well-done; a 15-20-minute guided tasting session rather than the “here’s your complimentary shot” I usually get at Scottish distilleries.</li><li>I mentioned in the last episode that I have a small bit of history with Louisville. My folks moved there from Memphis in the early ‘80’s while I was in college in DC. And I ended up living one summer when I was too broke to stay in DC. And where I learned to pronounce Louisville like a native -- “Lou-a-vul”, not moving your mouth, swallowing all the vowels. Which is how you know someone pronouncing it “Louisville” is not from there. I only ever heard one person pronounce it “Louis-ville”. He was English, so I couldn’t tell if he was serious or not. But after my family moved to Southern California in the late ‘80’s, that was pretty much it until July 2012 when Louisville was the first stop on my 2,100-mile drive around the South that I talked about in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/07/31/podcast-100-southern-road-trip-breaking-up-with-american-airlines/\">episode #100</a>. And then 10 years later, this trip.</li><li>Back in 2012, after 6 hours of I-65, I took the first exit I could after crossing the Ohio River and parked myself at the counter of Garage Bar, a repurposed gas station in NuLu -- New Louisville -- the hip neighborhood developing east of downtown, running a few blocks down East Market Street. Ten years later, Garage Bar is still there and NuLu has expanded east and north, starting to smear into what was called Butchertown when my folks lived there. There seems to be a coffee shop or taproom on every corner and cool independent boutiques and restaurants filling the spaces in-between. It’s a fun neighborhood with a buzz about it -- people on the sidewalks, every coffee shop and restaurant I walked into were doing good business. I talked about <a href=\"https://www.labodeguitademima.com/\">La Bodeguita De Mima</a> in the last episode, a great Cuban restaurant that was jammed on Thursday night. Saturday morning, we tried to carb up at <a href=\"https://biscuitbelly.com/nulu/\">Biscuit Belly</a>, but it was packed, so we walked up a block to <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/butchertowngrocery/\">Butchertown Grocery Bakery</a> for my biscuit &amp; gravy fix.&nbsp;</li><li>Working our way through the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butchertown,_Louisville\">Butchertown neighborhood</a> toward the river, we had to navigate our way under a huge set of elevated expressway lanes -- a&nbsp; tangle of I-64 and I-71 -- to get to the Ohio River. The Ohio River, like the Mississippi and the Missouri and the Cumberland, is a working river, carrying barge tows 5 football fields long, making it a bit dodgy for small pleasure craft, and so the banks of these rivers are often pretty industrial. But Louisville’s <a href=\"https://ourwaterfront.org/\">Waterfront Park</a> reclaimed some of that industrial space, scrap yards and sand pits, to provide a nice stretch of riverside recreation. The one bit of industrial scrap they did leave -- the late 1800’s Big Four railroad bridge, decommissioned in 1969, left standing above the river without connections to either side… until about 8 years ago when Kentucky and Indiana built ramps to reconnect it to the river banks on each side and now it’s a pedestrian and biking path.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>We drove over to the <a href=\"https://shelbyparklouisville.squarespace.com/\">Shelby Park neighborhood</a>, parked the car and walked along Logan Street. We started at the <a href=\"https://loganstmarket.com/\">Logan St Market</a>, shopping the food stalls on the first floor and then browsing through a makers’ market on the second floor. We walked down Logan Street, past a <a href=\"https://www.idlewildbutterflyfarm.com/\">butterfly farm</a>, a ping pong emporium, a hot dog joint and a bunch of houses ‘til we got to <a href=\"https://www.atriumbrewing.com/\">Atrium Brewing</a> which had some great beers, a nice taproom, and a big TV showing college basketball because, what else would be on in Kentucky. It was a nice walk. We could feel this stretch was beginning to develop, but I don’t think it’ll be another NuLu. Feels like it’ll be something more neighborhoody, lower key, maybe a touch crunchy granola.&nbsp;</li><li>And that’s what struck me about walking and driving around Louisville. It seems to have these separate neighborhoods, strips of 4 or 8 or 10 blocks that aren’t linked up. They’re sorta islands separated by runs of dodgy blocks -- maybe vacant lots or some rundown housing or a big underpass -- that don’t invite continued walking. Like our walk from our AC Hotel in NuLu to the Angel’s Envy distillery. Navigating under the multiple lands of I-65 was poorly lit and slightly uncomfortable and&nbsp; at 2pm; I definitely would’ve had second thoughts at 6 or 7. Once there, the distillery is a great building; they dropped a sleek new distilling operation between the brick walls and steel beams of an abandoned 1900’s manufacturing building. And it’s kitty corner from Louisville’s minor league baseball park and <a href=\"https://atgbrewery.com/location/smokehouse/\">Against The Grain</a> microbrewery. But then, that’s it, except for open surface parking lots. I’m hoping that Louisville finds a way, multiple ways (some planned, some organic) to grow into the empty spaces and link up these neighborhood islands</li><li>We had a fun four days in Louisville. I definitely recommend it. Get a car, base yourself in NuLu hotel, and explore the neighborhoods and the riverbank parks. Check out the show notes; I’ll summarize all this into an easy-to-use list of places and links.&nbsp;</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote\">\n<p><strong>My Recommendations</strong>:</p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https://www.labodeguitademima.com/\">La Bodeguita De Mima</a>, 725 East Market Street, NuLu — Great Cuban food; big portion sizes; loved the the Lechon Asado (roast pork)</li>\n<li><a href=\"http://quillscoffee.com/\">Quills Coffee</a>, 802 E Main St, NuLu — Unpretentious coffee joint on the NuLu/Butchertown border; friendly service; good coffee; no condescension</li>\n<li><a href=\"https://www.angelsenvy.com/\">Angel’s Envy Distillery</a>, 500 E Main St — Great tour of the distillery followed by one of the best guided tasting sessions I\'ve had</li>\n<li><a href=\"https://www.atriumbrewing.com/\">Atrium Brewing</a>, 1154 Logan St, Shelby Park — Solid beer selection; good-sized taproom in an upcoming neighborhood</li>\n<li><a href=\"http://www.milewidebeer.com/\">Mile Wide Beer</a>, 636 Barret Ave, Highlands — At the base of the grain silos of a former biscuit factory, good bar and wide selection of beer styles</li>\n</ul>\n</blockquote>\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #185</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_185.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #185 — Notes on Louisville; Changing Mask Mandates','','inherit','closed','closed','','4120-revision-v1','','','2022-03-28 17:05:14','2022-03-28 22:05:14','',4120,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4132',0,'revision','',0),
(4135,1,'2022-04-21 21:20:51','2022-04-22 02:20:51','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/IMG_0161.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/IMG_0161-300x300.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" alt=\"Pink Scarf on Statue in Lucca\"></a>Switching from Face Covering to Shawl[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We recap the bouncing ball history of the in-flight mask mandate as we try to figure out where it\'s going land now that it\'s in the courts. But before that, I recap my trip to Santa Fe, NM, take the flight tracking app <a href=\"https://apps.apple.com/us/app/flighty-all-airlines-tracker/id1358823008\">Flighty</a> for a spin, and wonder why <a href=\"https://www.clearme.com/\">CLEAR</a> keeps giving away annual subscriptions. Then we dig into the current state of regional airports with Joanne Magley, of <a href=\"http://www.flydaytonafirst.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Daytona Beach International Airport</a>.  All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_186.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #186: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois riding the spring roller coaster of Midwest temperatures -- 65 degrees one day, 45 degrees the next. We were in Santa Fe, NM a week-and-a-half ago with a group of friends and the Midwest has nothing on high-desert plateau temperature swings. We’d wake up to 35-40 degrees, bundle up, and then be stripping off layers at lunch when it’d hit the upper 60’s. We had great weather; maybe one day where it was windy, overcast, and cold all day. The rest of the time was sunny and clear blue skies. Some bits of our visit were kind of a replay of our Thanksgiving 2018 trip there. I talked about that trip in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/12/17/podcast-147-holiday-travel-tips-notes-from-santa-fe/\">episode #147</a> and then wrote it up in more detail in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/01/24/road-trip-lowbrow-santa-fe/\"><em>Lowbrow Santa Fe</em></a> blog post -- which came in very handy; reminding me of restaurants, taprooms, and things to do while we were doing some bare-minimum planning for the group. And even if some of it was a replay for us, it was the first time for our friends, and seeing these places again through their eyes gave it all a new spin for us.</li><li>Actually, I was happy to see that not a lot had changed in the intervening 3½ years; that COVID hadn’t driven any of our favorite places out of business. The only places I saw closed up were the ABQ restaurant before security and <a href=\"https://www.blm.gov/visit/kktr\">Tent Rocks National Monument</a> which the Bureau of Land Management closed during the COVID lockdowns but now are keeping closed to upgrade the trails. We stayed again at the <a href=\"https://farolito.com/\">El Farolito</a> bed &amp; breakfast -- there were 10 of us, so we kinda took it over. The owner told us Santa Fe was as busy as ever. And we saw it -- our flight down to ABQ was completely full as were all the restaurants.&nbsp;</li><li>But we still managed to wedge our way into a number of places on <a href=\"https://www.santafe.org/visiting-santa-fe/self-guided-tours/santa-fe-margarita-trail/\">Santa Fe’s Margarita Trail</a>. Yes, I know that it’s a pure marketing thing, but we were square in their target market and were happy to be tagged. We had high-end premium tequila margaritas, low-brow house margaritas, green chile-infused margaritas; all kinds -- except those made with sour mix. I had to draw the line somewhere. A lot of places were saying theirs was the best margarita -- so we had to try as many as we could. But as one of our crew so aptly put it, “The world’s best margarita is the one in your hand.”</li><li>Bridge Music — <em><em>Bogi Beat Budapest </em></em>by KarmaHacke<a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/Loveshadow/26219\">r<em> </em></a> (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/hepepe/21074</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>OK, just one more note about the place we stayed in Santa Fe, El Farolito -- full housekeeping every day in our casita without asking, including restocking the kiva fireplace with fresh wood and newspaper, ready for us to just strike the match. Also, full cooked breakfast. The only lingering COVID service reduction -- no afternoon cookies. But given the amount of food and margaritas we were consuming, I actually think that was a good thing.</li><li>Before my flight down to ABQ, T/C contributor Allan Marko pointed me to <a href=\"https://apps.apple.com/us/app/flighty-all-airlines-tracker/id1358823008\">Flighty</a>, a flight tracker app. I’ve talked about flight tracking apps in past episodes. Years back, I paid the $50/year for TripIt Pro, but eventually dropped it as airlines kept upgrading their own apps -- improving real-time status notifications, adding “where’s my plane” functionality. Add in the free <a href=\"https://apps.apple.com/us/app/live-flight-tracker/id316793974\">FlightAware</a> app and that’s been my flight tracker “tech stack” for a number of years. But looking at app reviews, Flighty seems to be the latest hotness, so I downloaded it to give it a go. It’s a nice looking app, and they’re smart to give a free trial of all the paid features for the first flight. I first sync’d it with TripIt, so didn’t need to re-enter my ABQ flights. Then, that day, got flight status notifications faster and more granular than what Southwest was sending me; scrolled down for a nice timeline of&nbsp; “where’s my plane” -- always important for Southwest flights since they tend to “bunny hop” across the country during the day rather than run out-and-back to hubs. There was also a detailed flight timeline -- pushback, taxi, take-off, landing. Nothing I couldn’t get from FlightAware, but the UI was so much better, more modern, all on one screen. But of course, all of this information I was liking is part of their Pro, their paid offering. It was all blurred out for the flight home, which I really could’ve used when I woke up to a 1-hour delay notification from Southwest. The only thing I got from Flighty was an upsell notification -- “Looks like your flight’s delayed; you should upgrade to Pro for more information.” Not the most helpful, especially after some bug in their system sent me the same notification every couple of minutes until I spelunked far enough into my iPhone’s notification settings to shut them off. And then I opened FlightAware to figure out what was really going on. Our plane was late getting out of BWI, its first hop, and we were another couple of hops down the line.&nbsp; So, net net, the Flighty Pro offering is nice. If I was back to flying every week, I’d pay the $50 to have all that information on a single screen. But Flighty Free can’t replace the free, if slightly clunkier, FlightAware.</li><li>I’ve been noticing a new bunch of deals offering a free year of <a href=\"https://www.clearme.com/\">CLEAR</a>, the biometrically powered security line cut service that lists out at $179/year. I’ve always been ambivalent about CLEAR. I talked about this last fall in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/09/27/podcast-179-high-tech-airport-lines-business-travel-still-missing/\">episode #179</a> when I received the first raft of offers -- from Amex and United. The time savings over regular TSA PreCheck has never seemed enough to justify the cost of letting them hold my biometric information -- especially since the first incarnation of CLEAR had to be sued to stop it from selling customers’ fingerprint and iris scan data before it went bankrupt. Having said that, I’m seeing them at more airports, and if TSA hiring can’t keep up passenger volume growth and those PreCheck lines start to lengthen, it might be enough to get me opening my eyes wide to CLEAR again.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — Black Rainbow by Pitx (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Pitx/19513 Ft: ERH, acclivity</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Mask Mandate Scramble</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>We talked in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/03/28/podcast-185-notes-on-louisville-changing-mask-mandates/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #185 — Notes on Louisville; Changing Mask Mandates\">the last episode</a> about the CDC kicking can containing in-flight mask mandate down the road a month -- from March 18th to this past Monday, April 18th. And so last week, anticipation began to build in travel circles about what the CDC would do. On our flight home from ABQ, the Southwest flight attendant said during her pre-take-off announcements “Hopefully the in-flight mask mandate ends next week, but until then…” and then ran through the standard mask instructions. I wasn’t surprised since, as we mentioned in the last episode, their union had been asking for the mandate to end. However, I was surprised that the instruction announcement included “if oxygen masks fall during the flight, please take off your mask before putting the oxygen mask on.” That would seem a bit obvious to me, but maybe I think about these things more than the average passenger.</li><li>The next day, after finishing my interview with Joanne Magley of <a href=\"http://flydaytonafirst.com\" title=\"Daytona Beach Int’l Airport\">Daytona Beach Int’l Airport</a> -- which you’ll hear in the next segment -- we got talking about the mask mandate; what’s going to happen on Monday. Joanne’s cut -- I hope we know something by Sunday so we’re prepared for Monday. Which happened -- the next day, word began to leak out that the CDC was going to extend the mandate again, for 2 weeks this time.</li><li>Almost two years ago, in 2020, soon after the lockdowns and travel bans started and passenger volumes plummeted, the airlines themselves started requiring in-flight masks in an attempt to coax people back into what were seen as modern-day plague ships. In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/07/17/podcast-165-first-post-lockdown-flight-when-does-business-travel-come-back/\">episode #165</a>, I talked about my first post-lockdown flight that June saying back then “it felt like mask usage was about 80%. I see kids ripping their masks off as soon as they get off the jetway. A sizable minority of mask wearers were just covering their mouths, leaving their noses uncovered — pilots, cleaning crew, passengers, wheelchair people.” It wasn’t until Joe Biden’s inauguration day, January 2021, that it became a federal mandate. That initial mandate was through mid-May, 5 months, but a few weeks before it expired, it was extended for 4 months, to mid-September, then another 4 months to mid-January 2022, then 2 months to mid-March, then 1 month to mid-April, then a half-month (2 weeks), to May. And with indoor mask mandates dropping everywhere else, each of these last extensions of this last remaining mandate generated more and more pushback.</li><li>And so when the <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/judge-throws-out-federal-mask-mandate-for-public-transportation-11650306480\">federal judge struck down the mask mandate</a> on this Monday, the speed at which everyone ditched their mask rules was amazing. Within hours of the ruling, the TSA and all the major US airlines announced they were no longer requiring masks. There were reports of flight attendants announcing the decision in-flight and walking down the aisle with trash bags to collect unwanted and now-unneeded face masks. On Tuesday morning, I got emails from Uber and Lyft dropping their mask requirements. On Tuesday afternoon, Illinois’ governor dropped the state’s masking requirements on regional trains, buses, and Chicago’s airports. The rush of announcements; it was almost like everyone was working to make it a <em>fait accompli</em>, a done deal that couldn’t be reversed.&nbsp;</li><li>Because amidst all this activity was an undertone, an unknown -- would the Biden Administration, the CDC appeal the judge’s ruling. Nothing on Monday, or Tuesday, but then yesterday, Wednesday afternoon, the CDC asked the Dept of Justice to file an appeal, which it did but without a request to stay the judge’s ruling, to reinstate the mandate -- at least as of mid-day today. I can’t figure out what their plan is -- or if there is one. As I said in the last episode, without a mask mandate, I’ll probably ride the pragmatic middle -- probably skipping the mask while turning the air jet on full blast on half-full planes but then pulling out a KN-95 when I’m sitting there’s someone in the middle seat sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with me, like on our full flight down to ABQ last week. I really didn’t mind wearing a mask for that 3½ hours. It’s not just a COVID thing. I haven’t had a bad cold since this all started and I’d kinda like to keep it this way.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/stefsax/7785\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Awel</a> </em>by stefsax (c) copyright 2006 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/stefsax/7785 </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Small Airport Survival</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>American Airlines made news a couple of weeks back when they, in industry lingo <em>down-gauged</em> flights to Allentown, PA and Atlantic City, NJ from their Philadelphia hub. <em>Up-gauging</em> and <em>down-gauging</em> -- changing the size of the plane on the route -- happens all the time. What made <em>this</em> change news was that&nbsp; American down-gauged from a regional jet to a bus. But I guess it could’ve been worse. US airline execs have been talking for a while now about the need to reduce, even eliminate service to small, regional airports; pinning the blame first on crew shortages, and most recently on fuel costs.</li><li>Like many frequent travelers, I’ve traveled through a lot of smaller, regional airports. I’ve appreciated the ability to skip the 2-hr rental car drive and fly directly into Allentown, PA; Charlottesville, VA; Appletown, WI; and Sioux City, IA (not a bad place, in spite of its airport code SUX). So to check in on what it’s like to run a regional airport today, I fired up Zoom for a chat with Joanne Magley, the Director of Air Service, Marketing and Customer Experience for <a href=\"http://www.flydaytonafirst.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Daytona Beach International Airport</a><ul><li>Mark: Joanne, back last June on the TravelCommons podcast in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/06/15/podcast-176-why-business-travel-is-coming-back-learning-airport-history/\">episode #176</a>, we talked with Dr Janet Bednarek of University of Dayton about the history of airports. So how did Daytona Beach International Airport get started?</li><li>Joanne: We started as a naval base and then from there it was given to the city and then somehow it was given back to the county</li><li>Mark: Daytona Beach International Airport is about an hour from Orlando, and about an hour and a half from Jacksonville. What types of travelers are choosing Daytona Beach over those two bigger airports?</li><li>Joanne: Orlando might be an hour, maybe an hour and 10 minutes. But then you have to add in the time to go from where you\'re parking back to the terminal, and the time it takes to get through the security checkpoints.&nbsp; So really that hour or so drive becomes two plus hours of just trying to get to your gate. The people that use Daytona Beach International Airport love the convenience factor of walking five minutes from the parking spot, maybe spending five minutes at the TSA checkpoints. And also, we pride ourselves on really high customer service. Many times, when you go through TSA security, you forget that you might have packed an item on your carry-on that is not allowed -- something as simple as a wine opener or your heirloom pocket knife from your grandfather. Well, you can\'t take these things through the checkpoint.</li><li>Mark: And rightfully so…</li><li>Joanne: TSA will confiscate.... Well, no, the TSA does not confiscate it; you surrender your items to TSA. Usually you don\'t see your item ever again. But at our airport, the TSA agents will give you an envelope. You can put the item in the envelope, put your address on the envelope, and then TSA will put it into a little locker. And then every day, our operations team comes and unloads that locker. And then every morning, we mail it back to the passengers free of charge. It\'s simple on our part. It really is. It\'s just mailing an item and the cost of mailing an item is very small compared to the reward that we get for having happy people come through the terminal. And we can do it because we\'re smaller.</li><li>Mark: How difficult was it to get the local TSA to agree to that program?</li><li>Joanne: Not difficult at all. They\'re a great partner with us and they are some of the friendliest TSA agents you will ever come across.</li><li>Mark: Well, that\'s nice to hear because certainly myself and a lot of travelers step up to the TSA kiosk with, let\'s call it, a mixed set of experiences. One of the things that I think we\'ve seen recently is US airlines talking about having to park smaller jets, the regional jets and having to reduce some and even ending some service to smaller airports because of pilot shortages. Have you seen any of this?</li><li>Joanne: Sure, Sure. Like a lot of smaller regional airports, we used to have dozens of airlines and then deregulation which consolidated a lot of airlines and then the great recession. And so, through the years, we\'ve landed with two main carriers, Delta and American. We are very fortunate that we had not lost any service with our two main carriers. In fact, we gained a few extra routes starting with December 2020. American Airlines started seasonal service to Philadelphia and Dallas-Fort Worth. So we gained some service. But one thing that we are noticing -- typically when they would bring in a larger plane, they haven\'t done that yet. We\'ve seen some cancellations due to maybe crew shortages. Again, not a lot, but where we know that it\'s affecting us is the opportunity to get more new destinations because at this point, it\'s difficult for the airlines to say, “OK, we\'ll add new service here and here,” even though the airlines know that it could be a profitable flight. They don\'t have the crew; they don\'t necessarily have the pilots to add a new flight. They would have to stop service from somewhere else in order to start up new and actually starting up new comes with all sorts of new costs as well.</li><li>Mark: Joanne,&nbsp; how do you pitch a new airline for new service and a new airline?</li><li>Joanne: What it takes to at least be high on the consideration. First, you have to show that there is a demand for service, and the airlines can see where passengers are coming and going from so that part\'s kind of easy. But then the part where there is the cost for the startup... What we\'re seeing is a lot of communities are coming together to put in an air service support program. It can\'t come from the airport. The airport incentives have to be separate. So, the community is coming forth with an air service development program which is in the form of a minimum revenue guarantee. That minimum revenue guarantee will only kick in if they\'re not meeting what their expected revenues are supposed to be. So, let\'s say, a community gathers $2 million dollars from their economic development fund and from businesses and corporations. And it\'s, it\'s more of a pledge. It\'s not like they\'re giving these $2 million dollars to an airline. It\'s like a pledge.</li><li>Mark: It sounds like the local community is looking to take the risk out of the business case for the new service.</li><li>Joanne: That\'s exactly what it is. It\'s risk mitigation. The economic impact of a new airline coming in with twice-a-week daily flights to multiple destinations, that’s a good investment. But that\'s what the airlines are looking for, especially the new ones. There\'s a number of Canadian airlines that are just kind of chomping at the bit to get back. So if everything kind of stays where we\'re at and the border stays open, we will see our Canadian visitors coming back.</li><li>Mark: Joanne. I really want to thank you for joining us on the TravelCommons podcast. It\'s been a great conversation; I\'ve really enjoyed it. Joanne Magley, Director of Air Service, Marketing and Customer Experience for <a href=\"http://flydaytonafirst.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Daytona Beach International Airport\">Daytona Beach International Airport</a>. Having a lot better weather in April than what we have in Chicago. Thanks again for joining us, Joanne.</li><li>Joanne: You\'re welcome, Mark. Thank you.</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #186</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_186.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #186 — Mask Mandate Scramble; Small Airport Survival','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-186-mask-mandate-scramble-small-airport-survival','','','2022-05-25 16:41:30','2022-05-25 21:41:30','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4135',0,'post','',2),
(4136,1,'2022-04-21 16:19:38','2022-04-21 21:19:38','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/IMG_4455-scaled.jpeg\"><img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/IMG_4455-300x300.jpeg\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" alt=\"Skeleton in Louisville taproom\"></a>Having Fun in Louisville![/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>As the great American philosopher Ferris Bueller once said, “Life moves pretty fast” and in this episode, we talk about the rapid changes in hotel service, and in-flight mask mandates. Then I go into detail about our recent trip to Louisville, complete with recommendations for food and drink. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_186.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #186: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois riding the spring roller coaster of Midwest temperatures -- 65 degrees one day, 45 degrees the next. We were in Santa Fe, NM a week-and-a-half ago with a group of friends and the Midwest has nothing on high-desert plateau temperature swings. We’d wake up to 35-40 degrees, bundle up, and then be stripping off layers at lunch when it’d hit the upper 60’s. We had great weather; maybe one day where it was windy, overcast, and cold all day. The rest of the time was sunny and clear blue skies. Some bits of our visit were kind of a replay of our Thanksgiving 2018 trip there. I talked about that trip in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/12/17/podcast-147-holiday-travel-tips-notes-from-santa-fe/\">episode #147</a> and then wrote it up in more detail in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/01/24/road-trip-lowbrow-santa-fe/\"><em>Lowbrow Santa Fe</em></a> blog post -- which came in very handy; reminding me of restaurants, taprooms, and things to do while we were doing some bare-minimum planning for the group. And even if some of it was a replay for us, it was the first time for our friends, and seeing these places again through their eyes gave it all a new spin for us.</li><li>Actually, I was happy to see that not a lot had changed in the intervening 3½ years; that COVID hadn’t driven any of our favorite places out of business. The only places I saw closed up were the ABQ restaurant before security and <a href=\"https://www.blm.gov/visit/kktr\">Tent Rocks National Monument</a> which the Bureau of Land Management closed during the COVID lockdowns but now are keeping closed to upgrade the trails. We stayed again at the <a href=\"https://farolito.com/\">El Farolito</a> bed &amp; breakfast -- there were 10 of us, so we kinda took it over. The owner told us Santa Fe was as busy as ever. And we saw it -- our flight down to ABQ was completely full as were all the restaurants.&nbsp;</li><li>But we still managed to wedge our way into a number of places on <a href=\"https://www.santafe.org/visiting-santa-fe/self-guided-tours/santa-fe-margarita-trail/\">Santa Fe’s Margarita Trail</a>. Yes, I know that it’s a pure marketing thing, but we were square in their target market and were happy to be tagged. We had high-end premium tequila margaritas, low-brow house margaritas, green chile-infused margaritas; all kinds -- except those made with sour mix. I had to draw the line somewhere. A lot of places were saying theirs was the best margarita -- so we had to try as many as we could. But as one of our crew so aptly put it, “The world’s best margarita is the one in your hand.”</li><li>Bridge Music — <em><em>Bogi Beat Budapest </em>by KarmaHacke</em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/Loveshadow/26219\"><em>r </em></a> (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/hepepe/21074</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>OK, just one more note about the place we stayed in Santa Fe, El Farolito -- full housekeeping every day in our casita without asking, including restocking the kiva fireplace with fresh wood and newspaper, ready for us to just strike the match. Also, full cooked breakfast. The only lingering COVID service reduction -- no afternoon cookies. But given the amount of food and margaritas we were consuming, I actually think that was a good thing.</li><li>Before my flight down to ABQ, T/C contributor Allan Marko pointed me to <a href=\"https://apps.apple.com/us/app/flighty-all-airlines-tracker/id1358823008\">Flighty</a>, a flight tracker app. I’ve talked about flight tracking apps in past episodes. Years back, I paid the $50/year for TripIt Pro, but eventually dropped it as airlines kept upgrading their own apps -- improving real-time status notifications, adding “where’s my plane” functionality. Add in the free <a href=\"https://apps.apple.com/us/app/live-flight-tracker/id316793974\">FlightAware</a> app and that’s been my flight tracker “tech stack” for a number of years. But looking at app reviews, Flighty seems to be the latest hotness, so I downloaded it to give it a go. It’s a nice looking app, and they’re smart to give a free trial of all the paid features for the first flight. I first sync’d it with TripIt, so didn’t need to re-enter my ABQ flights. Then, that day, got flight status notifications faster and more granular than what Southwest was sending me; scrolled down for a nice timeline of&nbsp; “where’s my plane” -- always important for Southwest flights since they tend to “bunny hop” across the country during the day rather than run out-and-back to hubs. There was also a detailed flight timeline -- pushback, taxi, take-off, landing. Nothing I couldn’t get from FlightAware, but the UI was so much better, more modern, all on one screen. But of course, all of this information I was liking is part of their Pro, their paid offering. It was all blurred out for the flight home, which I really could’ve used when I woke up to a 1-hour delay notification from Southwest. The only thing I got from Flighty was an upsell notification -- “Looks like your flight’s delayed; you should upgrade to Pro for more information.” Not the most helpful, especially after some bug in their system sent me the same notification every couple of minutes until I spelunked far enough into my iPhone’s notification settings to shut them off. And then I opened FlightAware to figure out what was really going on. Our plane was late getting out of BWI, its first hop, and we were another couple of hops down the line.&nbsp; So, net net, the Flighty Pro offering is nice. If I was back to flying every week, I’d pay the $50 to have all that information on a single screen. But Flighty Free can’t replace the free, if slightly clunkier, FlightAware.</li><li>I’ve been noticing a new bunch of deals offering a free year of CLEAR, the biometrically powered security line cut service that lists out at $179/year. I’ve always been ambivalent about CLEAR. I talked about this last fall in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/09/27/podcast-179-high-tech-airport-lines-business-travel-still-missing/\">episode #179</a> when I received the first raft of offers -- from Amex and United. The time savings over regular TSA PreCheck has never seemed enough to justify the cost of letting them hold my biometric information -- especially since the first incarnation of CLEAR had to be sued to stop it from selling customers’ fingerprint and iris scan data before it went bankrupt. Having said that, I’m seeing them at more airports, and if TSA hiring can’t keep up passenger volume growth and those PreCheck lines start to lengthen, it might be enough to get me opening my eyes wide to CLEAR again.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — Black Rainbow by Pitx (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Pitx/19513 Ft: ERH, acclivity</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Mask Mandate Scramble</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>We talked in the last episode about the CDC kicking can containing in-flight mask mandate down the road a month -- from March 18th to this past Monday, April 18th. And so last week, anticipation began to build in travel circles about what the CDC would do. On our flight home from ABQ, the Southwest flight attendant said during her pre-take-off announcements “Hopefully the in-flight mask mandate ends next week, but until then…” and then ran through the standard mask instructions. I wasn’t surprised since, as we mentioned in the last episode, their union had been asking for the mandate to end. However, I was surprised that the instruction announcement included “if oxygen masks fall during the flight, please take off your mask before putting the oxygen mask on.” That would seem a bit obvious to me, but maybe I think about these things more than the average passenger.</li><li>The next day, after finishing my interview with Joanne Magley of Daytona Beach Int’l Airport -- which you’ll hear in the next segment -- we got talking about the mask mandate; what’s going to happen on Monday. Joanne’s cut -- I hope we know something by Sunday so we’re prepared for Monday. Which happened -- the next day, word began to leak out that the CDC was going to extend the mandate again, for 2 weeks this time.</li><li>Almost two years ago, in 2020, soon after the lockdowns and travel bans started and passenger volumes plummeted, the airlines themselves started requiring in-flight masks in an attempt to coax people back into what were seen as modern-day plague ships. In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/07/17/podcast-165-first-post-lockdown-flight-when-does-business-travel-come-back/\">episode #165</a>, I talked about my first post-lockdown flight that June saying back then “it felt like mask usage was about 80%. I see kids ripping their masks off as soon as they get off the jetway. A sizable minority of mask wearers were just covering their mouths, leaving their noses uncovered — pilots, cleaning crew, passengers, wheelchair people.” It wasn’t until Joe Biden’s inauguration day, January 2021, that it became a federal mandate. That initial mandate was through mid-May, 5 months, but a few weeks before it expired, it was extended for 4 months, to mid-September, then another 4 months to mid-January 2022, then 2 months to mid-March, then 1 month to mid-April, then a half-month (2 weeks), to May. And with indoor mask mandates dropping everywhere else, each of these last extensions of this last remaining mandate generated more and more pushback.</li><li>And so when the <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/judge-throws-out-federal-mask-mandate-for-public-transportation-11650306480\">federal judge struck down the mask mandate</a> on this Monday, the speed at which everyone ditched their mask rules was amazing. Within hours of the ruling, the TSA and all the major US airlines announced they were no longer requiring masks. There were reports of flight attendants announcing the decision in-flight and walking down the aisle with trash bags to collect unwanted and now-unneeded face masks. On Tuesday morning, I got emails from Uber and Lyft dropping their mask requirements. On Tuesday afternoon, Illinois’ governor dropped the state’s masking requirements on regional trains, buses, and Chicago’s airports. The rush of announcements; it was almost like everyone was working to make it a <em>fait accompli</em>, a done deal that couldn’t be reversed.&nbsp;</li><li>Because amidst all this activity was an undertone, an unknown -- would the Biden Administration, the CDC appeal the judge’s ruling. Nothing on Monday, or Tuesday, but then yesterday, Wednesday afternoon, the CDC asked the Dept of Justice to file an appeal, which it did but without a request to stay the judge’s ruling, to reinstate the mandate -- at least as of mid-day today. I can’t figure out what their plan is -- or if there is one. As I said in the last episode, without a mask mandate, I’ll probably ride the pragmatic middle -- probably skipping the mask while turning the air jet on full blast on half-full planes but then pulling out a KN-95 when I’m sitting there’s someone in the middle seat sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with me, like on our full flight down to ABQ last week. I really didn’t mind wearing a mask for that 3½ hours. It’s not just a COVID thing. I haven’t had a bad cold since this all started and I’d kinda like to keep it this way.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/stefsax/7785\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Awel</a> </em>by stefsax (c) copyright 2006 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/stefsax/7785 </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Small Airport Survival</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>American Airlines made news a couple of weeks back when they, in industry lingo <em>down-gauged</em> flights to Allentown, PA and Atlantic City, NJ from their Philadelphia hub. <em>Up-gauging</em> and <em>down-gauging</em> -- changing the size of the plane on the route -- happens all the time. What made <em>this</em> change news was that  American down-gauged from a regional jet to a bus. But I guess it could’ve been worse. US airline execs have been talking for a while now about the need to reduce, even eliminate service to small, regional airports; pinning the blame first on crew shortages, and most recently on fuel costs.</li><li>Like many frequent travelers, I’ve traveled through a lot of smaller, regional airports. I’ve appreciated the ability to skip the 2-hr rental car drive and fly directly into Allentown, PA; Charlottesville, VA; Appletown, WI; and Sioux City, IA (not a bad place, in spite of its airport code SUX). So to check in on what it’s like to run a regional airport today, I fired up Zoom for a chat with Joanne Magley, the Director of Air Service, Marketing and Customer Experience for <a href=\"http://www.flydaytonafirst.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Daytona Beach International Airport</a><ul><li>Mark: Joanne, back last June on the TravelCommons podcast in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/06/15/podcast-176-why-business-travel-is-coming-back-learning-airport-history/\">episode #176</a>, we talked with Dr Janet Bednarek of University of Dayton about the history of airports. So how did Daytona Beach International Airport get started?</li><li>Joanne: We started as a naval base and then from there it was given to the city and then somehow it was given back to the county</li><li>Mark: Daytona Beach International Airport is about an hour from Orlando, and about an hour and a half from Jacksonville. What types of travelers are choosing Daytona Beach over those two bigger airports?</li><li>Joanne: Orlando might be an hour, maybe an hour and 10 minutes. But then you have to add in the time to go from where you\'re parking back to the terminal, and the time it takes to get through the security checkpoints.  So really that hour or so drive becomes two plus hours of just trying to get to your gate. The people that use Daytona Beach International Airport love the convenience factor of walking five minutes from the parking spot, maybe spending five minutes at the TSA checkpoints. And also, we pride ourselves on really high customer service. Many times, when you go through TSA security, you forget that you might have packed an item on your carry-on that is not allowed -- something as simple as a wine opener or your heirloom pocket knife from your grandfather. Well, you can\'t take these things through the checkpoint.</li><li>Mark: And rightfully so…</li><li>Joanne: TSA will confiscate.... Well, no, the TSA does not confiscate it; you surrender your items to TSA. Usually you don\'t see your item ever again. But at our airport, the TSA agents will give you an envelope. You can put the item in the envelope, put your address on the envelope, and then TSA will put it into a little locker. And then every day, our operations team comes and unloads that locker. And then every morning, we mail it back to the passengers free of charge. It\'s simple on our part. It really is. It\'s just mailing an item and the cost of mailing an item is very small compared to the reward that we get for having happy people come through the terminal. And we can do it because we\'re smaller.</li><li>Mark: How difficult was it to get the local TSA to agree to that program?</li><li>Joanne: Not difficult at all. They\'re a great partner with us and they are some of the friendliest TSA agents you will ever come across.</li><li>Mark: Well, that\'s nice to hear because certainly myself and a lot of travelers step up to the TSA kiosk with, let\'s call it, a mixed set of experiences. One of the things that I think we\'ve seen recently is US airlines talking about having to park smaller jets, the regional jets and having to reduce some and even ending some service to smaller airports because of pilot shortages. Have you seen any of this?</li><li>Joanne: Sure, Sure. Like a lot of smaller regional airports, we used to have dozens of airlines and then deregulation which consolidated a lot of airlines and then the great recession. And so, through the years, we\'ve landed with two main carriers, Delta and American. We are very fortunate that we had not lost any service with our two main carriers. In fact, we gained a few extra routes starting with December 2020. American Airlines started seasonal service to Philadelphia and Dallas-Fort Worth. So we gained some service. But one thing that we are noticing -- typically when they would bring in a larger plane, they haven\'t done that yet. We\'ve seen some cancellations due to maybe crew shortages. Again, not a lot, but where we know that it\'s affecting us is the opportunity to get more new destinations because at this point, it\'s difficult for the airlines to say, “OK, we\'ll add new service here and here,” even though the airlines know that it could be a profitable flight. They don\'t have the crew; they don\'t necessarily have the pilots to add a new flight. They would have to stop service from somewhere else in order to start up new and actually starting up new comes with all sorts of new costs as well.</li><li>Mark: Joanne,  how do you pitch a new airline for new service and a new airline?</li><li>Joanne: What it takes to at least be high on the consideration. First, you have to show that there is a demand for service, and the airlines can see where passengers are coming and going from so that part\'s kind of easy. But then the part where there is the cost for the startup... What we\'re seeing is a lot of communities are coming together to put in an air service support program. It can\'t come from the airport. The airport incentives have to be separate. So, the community is coming forth with an air service development program which is in the form of a minimum revenue guarantee. That minimum revenue guarantee will only kick in if they\'re not meeting what their expected revenues are supposed to be. So, let\'s say, a community gathers $2 million dollars from their economic development fund and from businesses and corporations. And it\'s, it\'s more of a pledge. It\'s not like they\'re giving these $2 million dollars to an airline. It\'s like a pledge.</li><li>Mark: It sounds like the local community is looking to take the risk out of the business case for the new service.</li><li>Joanne: That\'s exactly what it is. It\'s risk mitigation. The economic impact of a new airline coming in with twice-a-week daily flights to multiple destinations, that’s a good investment. But that\'s what the airlines are looking for, especially the new ones. There\'s a number of Canadian airlines that are just kind of chomping at the bit to get back. So if everything kind of stays where we\'re at and the border stays open, we will see our Canadian visitors coming back.</li><li>Mark: Joanne. I really want to thank you for joining us on the TravelCommons podcast. It\'s been a great conversation; I\'ve really enjoyed it. Joanne Magley, Director of Air Service, Marketing and Customer Experience for Daytona Beach International Airport. Having a lot better weather in April than what we have in Chicago. Thanks again for joining us, Joanne.</li><li>Joanne: You\'re welcome, Mark. Thank you.</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #186</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social  -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_186.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #186 — Mask Mandate Scramble; Small Airport Survival','','inherit','closed','closed','','4135-revision-v1','','','2022-04-21 16:19:38','2022-04-21 21:19:38','',4135,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4136',0,'revision','',0),
(4137,1,'2022-04-21 16:39:03','2022-04-21 21:39:03','','IMG_0161','','inherit','open','closed','','img_0161','','','2022-04-21 16:39:03','2022-04-21 21:39:03','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/IMG_0161.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(4138,1,'2022-04-21 20:52:47','2022-04-22 01:52:47','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/IMG_0161.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/IMG_0161-300x300.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" alt=\"Pink Scarf on Statue in Lucca\"></a>Switching from Face Covering to Shawl[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We recap the bouncing ball history of the in-flight mask mandate as we try to figure out where it\'s going land now that it\'s in the courts. But before that, I recap my trip to Santa Fe, NM, take the flight tracking app <a href=\"https://apps.apple.com/us/app/flighty-all-airlines-tracker/id1358823008\">Flighty</a> for a spin, and wonder why <a href=\"https://www.clearme.com/\">CLEAR</a> keeps giving away annual subscriptions. Then we dig into the current state of regional airports with Joanne Magley, of <a href=\"http://www.flydaytonafirst.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Daytona Beach International Airport</a>.  All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_186.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #186: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois riding the spring roller coaster of Midwest temperatures -- 65 degrees one day, 45 degrees the next. We were in Santa Fe, NM a week-and-a-half ago with a group of friends and the Midwest has nothing on high-desert plateau temperature swings. We’d wake up to 35-40 degrees, bundle up, and then be stripping off layers at lunch when it’d hit the upper 60’s. We had great weather; maybe one day where it was windy, overcast, and cold all day. The rest of the time was sunny and clear blue skies. Some bits of our visit were kind of a replay of our Thanksgiving 2018 trip there. I talked about that trip in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/12/17/podcast-147-holiday-travel-tips-notes-from-santa-fe/\">episode #147</a> and then wrote it up in more detail in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/01/24/road-trip-lowbrow-santa-fe/\"><em>Lowbrow Santa Fe</em></a> blog post -- which came in very handy; reminding me of restaurants, taprooms, and things to do while we were doing some bare-minimum planning for the group. And even if some of it was a replay for us, it was the first time for our friends, and seeing these places again through their eyes gave it all a new spin for us.</li><li>Actually, I was happy to see that not a lot had changed in the intervening 3½ years; that COVID hadn’t driven any of our favorite places out of business. The only places I saw closed up were the ABQ restaurant before security and <a href=\"https://www.blm.gov/visit/kktr\">Tent Rocks National Monument</a> which the Bureau of Land Management closed during the COVID lockdowns but now are keeping closed to upgrade the trails. We stayed again at the <a href=\"https://farolito.com/\">El Farolito</a> bed &amp; breakfast -- there were 10 of us, so we kinda took it over. The owner told us Santa Fe was as busy as ever. And we saw it -- our flight down to ABQ was completely full as were all the restaurants.&nbsp;</li><li>But we still managed to wedge our way into a number of places on <a href=\"https://www.santafe.org/visiting-santa-fe/self-guided-tours/santa-fe-margarita-trail/\">Santa Fe’s Margarita Trail</a>. Yes, I know that it’s a pure marketing thing, but we were square in their target market and were happy to be tagged. We had high-end premium tequila margaritas, low-brow house margaritas, green chile-infused margaritas; all kinds -- except those made with sour mix. I had to draw the line somewhere. A lot of places were saying theirs was the best margarita -- so we had to try as many as we could. But as one of our crew so aptly put it, “The world’s best margarita is the one in your hand.”</li><li>Bridge Music — <em><em>Bogi Beat Budapest </em>by KarmaHacke</em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/Loveshadow/26219\"><em>r </em></a> (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/hepepe/21074</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>OK, just one more note about the place we stayed in Santa Fe, El Farolito -- full housekeeping every day in our casita without asking, including restocking the kiva fireplace with fresh wood and newspaper, ready for us to just strike the match. Also, full cooked breakfast. The only lingering COVID service reduction -- no afternoon cookies. But given the amount of food and margaritas we were consuming, I actually think that was a good thing.</li><li>Before my flight down to ABQ, T/C contributor Allan Marko pointed me to <a href=\"https://apps.apple.com/us/app/flighty-all-airlines-tracker/id1358823008\">Flighty</a>, a flight tracker app. I’ve talked about flight tracking apps in past episodes. Years back, I paid the $50/year for TripIt Pro, but eventually dropped it as airlines kept upgrading their own apps -- improving real-time status notifications, adding “where’s my plane” functionality. Add in the free <a href=\"https://apps.apple.com/us/app/live-flight-tracker/id316793974\">FlightAware</a> app and that’s been my flight tracker “tech stack” for a number of years. But looking at app reviews, Flighty seems to be the latest hotness, so I downloaded it to give it a go. It’s a nice looking app, and they’re smart to give a free trial of all the paid features for the first flight. I first sync’d it with TripIt, so didn’t need to re-enter my ABQ flights. Then, that day, got flight status notifications faster and more granular than what Southwest was sending me; scrolled down for a nice timeline of  “where’s my plane” -- always important for Southwest flights since they tend to “bunny hop” across the country during the day rather than run out-and-back to hubs. There was also a detailed flight timeline -- pushback, taxi, take-off, landing. Nothing I couldn’t get from FlightAware, but the UI was so much better, more modern, all on one screen. But of course, all of this information I was liking is part of their Pro, their paid offering. It was all blurred out for the flight home, which I really could’ve used when I woke up to a 1-hour delay notification from Southwest. The only thing I got from Flighty was an upsell notification -- “Looks like your flight’s delayed; you should upgrade to Pro for more information.” Not the most helpful, especially after some bug in their system sent me the same notification every couple of minutes until I spelunked far enough into my iPhone’s notification settings to shut them off. And then I opened FlightAware to figure out what was really going on. Our plane was late getting out of BWI, its first hop, and we were another couple of hops down the line.  So, net net, the Flighty Pro offering is nice. If I was back to flying every week, I’d pay the $50 to have all that information on a single screen. But Flighty Free can’t replace the free, if slightly clunkier, FlightAware.</li><li>I’ve been noticing a new bunch of deals offering a free year of <a href=\"https://www.clearme.com/\">CLEAR</a>, the biometrically powered security line cut service that lists out at $179/year. I’ve always been ambivalent about CLEAR. I talked about this last fall in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/09/27/podcast-179-high-tech-airport-lines-business-travel-still-missing/\">episode #179</a> when I received the first raft of offers -- from Amex and United. The time savings over regular TSA PreCheck has never seemed enough to justify the cost of letting them hold my biometric information -- especially since the first incarnation of CLEAR had to be sued to stop it from selling customers’ fingerprint and iris scan data before it went bankrupt. Having said that, I’m seeing them at more airports, and if TSA hiring can’t keep up passenger volume growth and those PreCheck lines start to lengthen, it might be enough to get me opening my eyes wide to CLEAR again.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — Black Rainbow by Pitx (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Pitx/19513 Ft: ERH, acclivity</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Mask Mandate Scramble</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>We talked in the last episode about the CDC kicking can containing in-flight mask mandate down the road a month -- from March 18th to this past Monday, April 18th. And so last week, anticipation began to build in travel circles about what the CDC would do. On our flight home from ABQ, the Southwest flight attendant said during her pre-take-off announcements “Hopefully the in-flight mask mandate ends next week, but until then…” and then ran through the standard mask instructions. I wasn’t surprised since, as we mentioned in the last episode, their union had been asking for the mandate to end. However, I was surprised that the instruction announcement included “if oxygen masks fall during the flight, please take off your mask before putting the oxygen mask on.” That would seem a bit obvious to me, but maybe I think about these things more than the average passenger.</li><li>The next day, after finishing my interview with Joanne Magley of Daytona Beach Int’l Airport -- which you’ll hear in the next segment -- we got talking about the mask mandate; what’s going to happen on Monday. Joanne’s cut -- I hope we know something by Sunday so we’re prepared for Monday. Which happened -- the next day, word began to leak out that the CDC was going to extend the mandate again, for 2 weeks this time.</li><li>Almost two years ago, in 2020, soon after the lockdowns and travel bans started and passenger volumes plummeted, the airlines themselves started requiring in-flight masks in an attempt to coax people back into what were seen as modern-day plague ships. In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/07/17/podcast-165-first-post-lockdown-flight-when-does-business-travel-come-back/\">episode #165</a>, I talked about my first post-lockdown flight that June saying back then “it felt like mask usage was about 80%. I see kids ripping their masks off as soon as they get off the jetway. A sizable minority of mask wearers were just covering their mouths, leaving their noses uncovered — pilots, cleaning crew, passengers, wheelchair people.” It wasn’t until Joe Biden’s inauguration day, January 2021, that it became a federal mandate. That initial mandate was through mid-May, 5 months, but a few weeks before it expired, it was extended for 4 months, to mid-September, then another 4 months to mid-January 2022, then 2 months to mid-March, then 1 month to mid-April, then a half-month (2 weeks), to May. And with indoor mask mandates dropping everywhere else, each of these last extensions of this last remaining mandate generated more and more pushback.</li><li>And so when the <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/judge-throws-out-federal-mask-mandate-for-public-transportation-11650306480\">federal judge struck down the mask mandate</a> on this Monday, the speed at which everyone ditched their mask rules was amazing. Within hours of the ruling, the TSA and all the major US airlines announced they were no longer requiring masks. There were reports of flight attendants announcing the decision in-flight and walking down the aisle with trash bags to collect unwanted and now-unneeded face masks. On Tuesday morning, I got emails from Uber and Lyft dropping their mask requirements. On Tuesday afternoon, Illinois’ governor dropped the state’s masking requirements on regional trains, buses, and Chicago’s airports. The rush of announcements; it was almost like everyone was working to make it a <em>fait accompli</em>, a done deal that couldn’t be reversed.&nbsp;</li><li>Because amidst all this activity was an undertone, an unknown -- would the Biden Administration, the CDC appeal the judge’s ruling. Nothing on Monday, or Tuesday, but then yesterday, Wednesday afternoon, the CDC asked the Dept of Justice to file an appeal, which it did but without a request to stay the judge’s ruling, to reinstate the mandate -- at least as of mid-day today. I can’t figure out what their plan is -- or if there is one. As I said in the last episode, without a mask mandate, I’ll probably ride the pragmatic middle -- probably skipping the mask while turning the air jet on full blast on half-full planes but then pulling out a KN-95 when I’m sitting there’s someone in the middle seat sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with me, like on our full flight down to ABQ last week. I really didn’t mind wearing a mask for that 3½ hours. It’s not just a COVID thing. I haven’t had a bad cold since this all started and I’d kinda like to keep it this way.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/stefsax/7785\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Awel</a> </em>by stefsax (c) copyright 2006 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/stefsax/7785 </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Small Airport Survival</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>American Airlines made news a couple of weeks back when they, in industry lingo <em>down-gauged</em> flights to Allentown, PA and Atlantic City, NJ from their Philadelphia hub. <em>Up-gauging</em> and <em>down-gauging</em> -- changing the size of the plane on the route -- happens all the time. What made <em>this</em> change news was that&nbsp; American down-gauged from a regional jet to a bus. But I guess it could’ve been worse. US airline execs have been talking for a while now about the need to reduce, even eliminate service to small, regional airports; pinning the blame first on crew shortages, and most recently on fuel costs.</li><li>Like many frequent travelers, I’ve traveled through a lot of smaller, regional airports. I’ve appreciated the ability to skip the 2-hr rental car drive and fly directly into Allentown, PA; Charlottesville, VA; Appletown, WI; and Sioux City, IA (not a bad place, in spite of its airport code SUX). So to check in on what it’s like to run a regional airport today, I fired up Zoom for a chat with Joanne Magley, the Director of Air Service, Marketing and Customer Experience for <a href=\"http://www.flydaytonafirst.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Daytona Beach International Airport</a><ul><li>Mark: Joanne, back last June on the TravelCommons podcast in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/06/15/podcast-176-why-business-travel-is-coming-back-learning-airport-history/\">episode #176</a>, we talked with Dr Janet Bednarek of University of Dayton about the history of airports. So how did Daytona Beach International Airport get started?</li><li>Joanne: We started as a naval base and then from there it was given to the city and then somehow it was given back to the county</li><li>Mark: Daytona Beach International Airport is about an hour from Orlando, and about an hour and a half from Jacksonville. What types of travelers are choosing Daytona Beach over those two bigger airports?</li><li>Joanne: Orlando might be an hour, maybe an hour and 10 minutes. But then you have to add in the time to go from where you\'re parking back to the terminal, and the time it takes to get through the security checkpoints.&nbsp; So really that hour or so drive becomes two plus hours of just trying to get to your gate. The people that use Daytona Beach International Airport love the convenience factor of walking five minutes from the parking spot, maybe spending five minutes at the TSA checkpoints. And also, we pride ourselves on really high customer service. Many times, when you go through TSA security, you forget that you might have packed an item on your carry-on that is not allowed -- something as simple as a wine opener or your heirloom pocket knife from your grandfather. Well, you can\'t take these things through the checkpoint.</li><li>Mark: And rightfully so…</li><li>Joanne: TSA will confiscate.... Well, no, the TSA does not confiscate it; you surrender your items to TSA. Usually you don\'t see your item ever again. But at our airport, the TSA agents will give you an envelope. You can put the item in the envelope, put your address on the envelope, and then TSA will put it into a little locker. And then every day, our operations team comes and unloads that locker. And then every morning, we mail it back to the passengers free of charge. It\'s simple on our part. It really is. It\'s just mailing an item and the cost of mailing an item is very small compared to the reward that we get for having happy people come through the terminal. And we can do it because we\'re smaller.</li><li>Mark: How difficult was it to get the local TSA to agree to that program?</li><li>Joanne: Not difficult at all. They\'re a great partner with us and they are some of the friendliest TSA agents you will ever come across.</li><li>Mark: Well, that\'s nice to hear because certainly myself and a lot of travelers step up to the TSA kiosk with, let\'s call it, a mixed set of experiences. One of the things that I think we\'ve seen recently is US airlines talking about having to park smaller jets, the regional jets and having to reduce some and even ending some service to smaller airports because of pilot shortages. Have you seen any of this?</li><li>Joanne: Sure, Sure. Like a lot of smaller regional airports, we used to have dozens of airlines and then deregulation which consolidated a lot of airlines and then the great recession. And so, through the years, we\'ve landed with two main carriers, Delta and American. We are very fortunate that we had not lost any service with our two main carriers. In fact, we gained a few extra routes starting with December 2020. American Airlines started seasonal service to Philadelphia and Dallas-Fort Worth. So we gained some service. But one thing that we are noticing -- typically when they would bring in a larger plane, they haven\'t done that yet. We\'ve seen some cancellations due to maybe crew shortages. Again, not a lot, but where we know that it\'s affecting us is the opportunity to get more new destinations because at this point, it\'s difficult for the airlines to say, “OK, we\'ll add new service here and here,” even though the airlines know that it could be a profitable flight. They don\'t have the crew; they don\'t necessarily have the pilots to add a new flight. They would have to stop service from somewhere else in order to start up new and actually starting up new comes with all sorts of new costs as well.</li><li>Mark: Joanne,&nbsp; how do you pitch a new airline for new service and a new airline?</li><li>Joanne: What it takes to at least be high on the consideration. First, you have to show that there is a demand for service, and the airlines can see where passengers are coming and going from so that part\'s kind of easy. But then the part where there is the cost for the startup... What we\'re seeing is a lot of communities are coming together to put in an air service support program. It can\'t come from the airport. The airport incentives have to be separate. So, the community is coming forth with an air service development program which is in the form of a minimum revenue guarantee. That minimum revenue guarantee will only kick in if they\'re not meeting what their expected revenues are supposed to be. So, let\'s say, a community gathers $2 million dollars from their economic development fund and from businesses and corporations. And it\'s, it\'s more of a pledge. It\'s not like they\'re giving these $2 million dollars to an airline. It\'s like a pledge.</li><li>Mark: It sounds like the local community is looking to take the risk out of the business case for the new service.</li><li>Joanne: That\'s exactly what it is. It\'s risk mitigation. The economic impact of a new airline coming in with twice-a-week daily flights to multiple destinations, that’s a good investment. But that\'s what the airlines are looking for, especially the new ones. There\'s a number of Canadian airlines that are just kind of chomping at the bit to get back. So if everything kind of stays where we\'re at and the border stays open, we will see our Canadian visitors coming back.</li><li>Mark: Joanne. I really want to thank you for joining us on the TravelCommons podcast. It\'s been a great conversation; I\'ve really enjoyed it. Joanne Magley, Director of Air Service, Marketing and Customer Experience for Daytona Beach International Airport. Having a lot better weather in April than what we have in Chicago. Thanks again for joining us, Joanne.</li><li>Joanne: You\'re welcome, Mark. Thank you.</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #186</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_186.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #186 — Mask Mandate Scramble; Small Airport Survival','','inherit','closed','closed','','4135-revision-v1','','','2022-04-21 20:52:47','2022-04-22 01:52:47','',4135,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4138',0,'revision','',0),
(4140,1,'2022-04-25 13:23:47','2022-04-25 18:23:47','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/IMG_0161.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/IMG_0161-300x300.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" alt=\"Pink Scarf on Statue in Lucca\"></a>Switching from Face Covering to Shawl[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We recap the bouncing ball history of the in-flight mask mandate as we try to figure out where it\'s going land now that it\'s in the courts. But before that, I recap my trip to Santa Fe, NM, take the flight tracking app <a href=\"https://apps.apple.com/us/app/flighty-all-airlines-tracker/id1358823008\">Flighty</a> for a spin, and wonder why <a href=\"https://www.clearme.com/\">CLEAR</a> keeps giving away annual subscriptions. Then we dig into the current state of regional airports with Joanne Magley, of <a href=\"http://www.flydaytonafirst.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Daytona Beach International Airport</a>.  All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_186.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #186: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois riding the spring roller coaster of Midwest temperatures -- 65 degrees one day, 45 degrees the next. We were in Santa Fe, NM a week-and-a-half ago with a group of friends and the Midwest has nothing on high-desert plateau temperature swings. We’d wake up to 35-40 degrees, bundle up, and then be stripping off layers at lunch when it’d hit the upper 60’s. We had great weather; maybe one day where it was windy, overcast, and cold all day. The rest of the time was sunny and clear blue skies. Some bits of our visit were kind of a replay of our Thanksgiving 2018 trip there. I talked about that trip in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/12/17/podcast-147-holiday-travel-tips-notes-from-santa-fe/\">episode #147</a> and then wrote it up in more detail in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/01/24/road-trip-lowbrow-santa-fe/\"><em>Lowbrow Santa Fe</em></a> blog post -- which came in very handy; reminding me of restaurants, taprooms, and things to do while we were doing some bare-minimum planning for the group. And even if some of it was a replay for us, it was the first time for our friends, and seeing these places again through their eyes gave it all a new spin for us.</li><li>Actually, I was happy to see that not a lot had changed in the intervening 3½ years; that COVID hadn’t driven any of our favorite places out of business. The only places I saw closed up were the ABQ restaurant before security and <a href=\"https://www.blm.gov/visit/kktr\">Tent Rocks National Monument</a> which the Bureau of Land Management closed during the COVID lockdowns but now are keeping closed to upgrade the trails. We stayed again at the <a href=\"https://farolito.com/\">El Farolito</a> bed &amp; breakfast -- there were 10 of us, so we kinda took it over. The owner told us Santa Fe was as busy as ever. And we saw it -- our flight down to ABQ was completely full as were all the restaurants. </li><li>But we still managed to wedge our way into a number of places on <a href=\"https://www.santafe.org/visiting-santa-fe/self-guided-tours/santa-fe-margarita-trail/\">Santa Fe’s Margarita Trail</a>. Yes, I know that it’s a pure marketing thing, but we were square in their target market and were happy to be tagged. We had high-end premium tequila margaritas, low-brow house margaritas, green chile-infused margaritas; all kinds -- except those made with sour mix. I had to draw the line somewhere. A lot of places were saying theirs was the best margarita -- so we had to try as many as we could. But as one of our crew so aptly put it, “The world’s best margarita is the one in your hand.”</li><li>Bridge Music — <em><em>Bogi Beat Budapest </em></em>by KarmaHacke<a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/Loveshadow/26219\">r<em> </em></a> (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/hepepe/21074</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>OK, just one more note about the place we stayed in Santa Fe, El Farolito -- full housekeeping every day in our casita without asking, including restocking the kiva fireplace with fresh wood and newspaper, ready for us to just strike the match. Also, full cooked breakfast. The only lingering COVID service reduction -- no afternoon cookies. But given the amount of food and margaritas we were consuming, I actually think that was a good thing.</li><li>Before my flight down to ABQ, T/C contributor Allan Marko pointed me to <a href=\"https://apps.apple.com/us/app/flighty-all-airlines-tracker/id1358823008\">Flighty</a>, a flight tracker app. I’ve talked about flight tracking apps in past episodes. Years back, I paid the $50/year for TripIt Pro, but eventually dropped it as airlines kept upgrading their own apps -- improving real-time status notifications, adding “where’s my plane” functionality. Add in the free <a href=\"https://apps.apple.com/us/app/live-flight-tracker/id316793974\">FlightAware</a> app and that’s been my flight tracker “tech stack” for a number of years. But looking at app reviews, Flighty seems to be the latest hotness, so I downloaded it to give it a go. It’s a nice looking app, and they’re smart to give a free trial of all the paid features for the first flight. I first sync’d it with TripIt, so didn’t need to re-enter my ABQ flights. Then, that day, got flight status notifications faster and more granular than what Southwest was sending me; scrolled down for a nice timeline of&nbsp; “where’s my plane” -- always important for Southwest flights since they tend to “bunny hop” across the country during the day rather than run out-and-back to hubs. There was also a detailed flight timeline -- pushback, taxi, take-off, landing. Nothing I couldn’t get from FlightAware, but the UI was so much better, more modern, all on one screen. But of course, all of this information I was liking is part of their Pro, their paid offering. It was all blurred out for the flight home, which I really could’ve used when I woke up to a 1-hour delay notification from Southwest. The only thing I got from Flighty was an upsell notification -- “Looks like your flight’s delayed; you should upgrade to Pro for more information.” Not the most helpful, especially after some bug in their system sent me the same notification every couple of minutes until I spelunked far enough into my iPhone’s notification settings to shut them off. And then I opened FlightAware to figure out what was really going on. Our plane was late getting out of BWI, its first hop, and we were another couple of hops down the line.&nbsp; So, net net, the Flighty Pro offering is nice. If I was back to flying every week, I’d pay the $50 to have all that information on a single screen. But Flighty Free can’t replace the free, if slightly clunkier, FlightAware.</li><li>I’ve been noticing a new bunch of deals offering a free year of <a href=\"https://www.clearme.com/\">CLEAR</a>, the biometrically powered security line cut service that lists out at $179/year. I’ve always been ambivalent about CLEAR. I talked about this last fall in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/09/27/podcast-179-high-tech-airport-lines-business-travel-still-missing/\">episode #179</a> when I received the first raft of offers -- from Amex and United. The time savings over regular TSA PreCheck has never seemed enough to justify the cost of letting them hold my biometric information -- especially since the first incarnation of CLEAR had to be sued to stop it from selling customers’ fingerprint and iris scan data before it went bankrupt. Having said that, I’m seeing them at more airports, and if TSA hiring can’t keep up passenger volume growth and those PreCheck lines start to lengthen, it might be enough to get me opening my eyes wide to CLEAR again.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — Black Rainbow by Pitx (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Pitx/19513 Ft: ERH, acclivity</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Mask Mandate Scramble</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>We talked in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/03/28/podcast-185-notes-on-louisville-changing-mask-mandates/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #185 — Notes on Louisville; Changing Mask Mandates\">the last episode</a> about the CDC kicking can containing in-flight mask mandate down the road a month -- from March 18th to this past Monday, April 18th. And so last week, anticipation began to build in travel circles about what the CDC would do. On our flight home from ABQ, the Southwest flight attendant said during her pre-take-off announcements “Hopefully the in-flight mask mandate ends next week, but until then…” and then ran through the standard mask instructions. I wasn’t surprised since, as we mentioned in the last episode, their union had been asking for the mandate to end. However, I was surprised that the instruction announcement included “if oxygen masks fall during the flight, please take off your mask before putting the oxygen mask on.” That would seem a bit obvious to me, but maybe I think about these things more than the average passenger.</li><li>The next day, after finishing my interview with Joanne Magley of <a href=\"http://flydaytonafirst.com\" title=\"Daytona Beach Int’l Airport\">Daytona Beach Int’l Airport</a> -- which you’ll hear in the next segment -- we got talking about the mask mandate; what’s going to happen on Monday. Joanne’s cut -- I hope we know something by Sunday so we’re prepared for Monday. Which happened -- the next day, word began to leak out that the CDC was going to extend the mandate again, for 2 weeks this time.</li><li>Almost two years ago, in 2020, soon after the lockdowns and travel bans started and passenger volumes plummeted, the airlines themselves started requiring in-flight masks in an attempt to coax people back into what were seen as modern-day plague ships. In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/07/17/podcast-165-first-post-lockdown-flight-when-does-business-travel-come-back/\">episode #165</a>, I talked about my first post-lockdown flight that June saying back then “it felt like mask usage was about 80%. I see kids ripping their masks off as soon as they get off the jetway. A sizable minority of mask wearers were just covering their mouths, leaving their noses uncovered — pilots, cleaning crew, passengers, wheelchair people.” It wasn’t until Joe Biden’s inauguration day, January 2021, that it became a federal mandate. That initial mandate was through mid-May, 5 months, but a few weeks before it expired, it was extended for 4 months, to mid-September, then another 4 months to mid-January 2022, then 2 months to mid-March, then 1 month to mid-April, then a half-month (2 weeks), to May. And with indoor mask mandates dropping everywhere else, each of these last extensions of this last remaining mandate generated more and more pushback.</li><li>And so when the <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/judge-throws-out-federal-mask-mandate-for-public-transportation-11650306480\">federal judge struck down the mask mandate</a> on this Monday, the speed at which everyone ditched their mask rules was amazing. Within hours of the ruling, the TSA and all the major US airlines announced they were no longer requiring masks. There were reports of flight attendants announcing the decision in-flight and walking down the aisle with trash bags to collect unwanted and now-unneeded face masks. On Tuesday morning, I got emails from Uber and Lyft dropping their mask requirements. On Tuesday afternoon, Illinois’ governor dropped the state’s masking requirements on regional trains, buses, and Chicago’s airports. The rush of announcements; it was almost like everyone was working to make it a <em>fait accompli</em>, a done deal that couldn’t be reversed. </li><li>Because amidst all this activity was an undertone, an unknown -- would the Biden Administration, the CDC appeal the judge’s ruling. Nothing on Monday, or Tuesday, but then yesterday, Wednesday afternoon, the CDC asked the Dept of Justice to file an appeal, which it did but without a request to stay the judge’s ruling, to reinstate the mandate -- at least as of mid-day today. I can’t figure out what their plan is -- or if there is one. As I said in the last episode, without a mask mandate, I’ll probably ride the pragmatic middle -- probably skipping the mask while turning the air jet on full blast on half-full planes but then pulling out a KN-95 when I’m sitting there’s someone in the middle seat sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with me, like on our full flight down to ABQ last week. I really didn’t mind wearing a mask for that 3½ hours. It’s not just a COVID thing. I haven’t had a bad cold since this all started and I’d kinda like to keep it this way.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/stefsax/7785\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Awel</a> </em>by stefsax (c) copyright 2006 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/stefsax/7785 </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Small Airport Survival</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>American Airlines made news a couple of weeks back when they, in industry lingo <em>down-gauged</em> flights to Allentown, PA and Atlantic City, NJ from their Philadelphia hub. <em>Up-gauging</em> and <em>down-gauging</em> -- changing the size of the plane on the route -- happens all the time. What made <em>this</em> change news was that  American down-gauged from a regional jet to a bus. But I guess it could’ve been worse. US airline execs have been talking for a while now about the need to reduce, even eliminate service to small, regional airports; pinning the blame first on crew shortages, and most recently on fuel costs.</li><li>Like many frequent travelers, I’ve traveled through a lot of smaller, regional airports. I’ve appreciated the ability to skip the 2-hr rental car drive and fly directly into Allentown, PA; Charlottesville, VA; Appletown, WI; and Sioux City, IA (not a bad place, in spite of its airport code SUX). So to check in on what it’s like to run a regional airport today, I fired up Zoom for a chat with Joanne Magley, the Director of Air Service, Marketing and Customer Experience for <a href=\"http://www.flydaytonafirst.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Daytona Beach International Airport</a><ul><li>Mark: Joanne, back last June on the TravelCommons podcast in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/06/15/podcast-176-why-business-travel-is-coming-back-learning-airport-history/\">episode #176</a>, we talked with Dr Janet Bednarek of University of Dayton about the history of airports. So how did Daytona Beach International Airport get started?</li><li>Joanne: We started as a naval base and then from there it was given to the city and then somehow it was given back to the county</li><li>Mark: Daytona Beach International Airport is about an hour from Orlando, and about an hour and a half from Jacksonville. What types of travelers are choosing Daytona Beach over those two bigger airports?</li><li>Joanne: Orlando might be an hour, maybe an hour and 10 minutes. But then you have to add in the time to go from where you\'re parking back to the terminal, and the time it takes to get through the security checkpoints.  So really that hour or so drive becomes two plus hours of just trying to get to your gate. The people that use Daytona Beach International Airport love the convenience factor of walking five minutes from the parking spot, maybe spending five minutes at the TSA checkpoints. And also, we pride ourselves on really high customer service. Many times, when you go through TSA security, you forget that you might have packed an item on your carry-on that is not allowed -- something as simple as a wine opener or your heirloom pocket knife from your grandfather. Well, you can\'t take these things through the checkpoint.</li><li>Mark: And rightfully so…</li><li>Joanne: TSA will confiscate.... Well, no, the TSA does not confiscate it; you surrender your items to TSA. Usually you don\'t see your item ever again. But at our airport, the TSA agents will give you an envelope. You can put the item in the envelope, put your address on the envelope, and then TSA will put it into a little locker. And then every day, our operations team comes and unloads that locker. And then every morning, we mail it back to the passengers free of charge. It\'s simple on our part. It really is. It\'s just mailing an item and the cost of mailing an item is very small compared to the reward that we get for having happy people come through the terminal. And we can do it because we\'re smaller.</li><li>Mark: How difficult was it to get the local TSA to agree to that program?</li><li>Joanne: Not difficult at all. They\'re a great partner with us and they are some of the friendliest TSA agents you will ever come across.</li><li>Mark: Well, that\'s nice to hear because certainly myself and a lot of travelers step up to the TSA kiosk with, let\'s call it, a mixed set of experiences. One of the things that I think we\'ve seen recently is US airlines talking about having to park smaller jets, the regional jets and having to reduce some and even ending some service to smaller airports because of pilot shortages. Have you seen any of this?</li><li>Joanne: Sure, Sure. Like a lot of smaller regional airports, we used to have dozens of airlines and then deregulation which consolidated a lot of airlines and then the great recession. And so, through the years, we\'ve landed with two main carriers, Delta and American. We are very fortunate that we had not lost any service with our two main carriers. In fact, we gained a few extra routes starting with December 2020. American Airlines started seasonal service to Philadelphia and Dallas-Fort Worth. So we gained some service. But one thing that we are noticing -- typically when they would bring in a larger plane, they haven\'t done that yet. We\'ve seen some cancellations due to maybe crew shortages. Again, not a lot, but where we know that it\'s affecting us is the opportunity to get more new destinations because at this point, it\'s difficult for the airlines to say, “OK, we\'ll add new service here and here,” even though the airlines know that it could be a profitable flight. They don\'t have the crew; they don\'t necessarily have the pilots to add a new flight. They would have to stop service from somewhere else in order to start up new and actually starting up new comes with all sorts of new costs as well.</li><li>Mark: Joanne,  how do you pitch a new airline for new service and a new airline?</li><li>Joanne: What it takes to at least be high on the consideration. First, you have to show that there is a demand for service, and the airlines can see where passengers are coming and going from so that part\'s kind of easy. But then the part where there is the cost for the startup... What we\'re seeing is a lot of communities are coming together to put in an air service support program. It can\'t come from the airport. The airport incentives have to be separate. So, the community is coming forth with an air service development program which is in the form of a minimum revenue guarantee. That minimum revenue guarantee will only kick in if they\'re not meeting what their expected revenues are supposed to be. So, let\'s say, a community gathers $2 million dollars from their economic development fund and from businesses and corporations. And it\'s, it\'s more of a pledge. It\'s not like they\'re giving these $2 million dollars to an airline. It\'s like a pledge.</li><li>Mark: It sounds like the local community is looking to take the risk out of the business case for the new service.</li><li>Joanne: That\'s exactly what it is. It\'s risk mitigation. The economic impact of a new airline coming in with twice-a-week daily flights to multiple destinations, that’s a good investment. But that\'s what the airlines are looking for, especially the new ones. There\'s a number of Canadian airlines that are just kind of chomping at the bit to get back. So if everything kind of stays where we\'re at and the border stays open, we will see our Canadian visitors coming back.</li><li>Mark: Joanne. I really want to thank you for joining us on the TravelCommons podcast. It\'s been a great conversation; I\'ve really enjoyed it. Joanne Magley, Director of Air Service, Marketing and Customer Experience for <a href=\"http://flydaytonafirst.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Daytona Beach International Airport\">Daytona Beach International Airport</a>. Having a lot better weather in April than what we have in Chicago. Thanks again for joining us, Joanne.</li><li>Joanne: You\'re welcome, Mark. Thank you.</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #186</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_186.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #186 — Mask Mandate Scramble; Small Airport Survival','','inherit','closed','closed','','4135-revision-v1','','','2022-04-25 13:23:47','2022-04-25 18:23:47','',4135,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4140',0,'revision','',0),
(4145,1,'2022-05-26 14:56:36','2022-05-26 19:56:36','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/IMG_4803.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/IMG_4803-300x300.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" alt=\"Taproom Draft Beer Taps Arranged as a Smiley Face\"></a>I\'m Happy To See You Too![/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>The last episode recording in Chicago before we relocate the TravelCommons studios, and our lives, down to Nashville. We close out our threads on in-flight mask mandates and hotel housekeeping, and critique an academic paper about the moral hazard of frequent flier elite status. I talk through the changes I\'ll have to make when flying out of a non-hub airport. And then, as I\'m making a list of the Chicago breweries I want to re-visit before leaving, I think through the characteristics that makes a taproom great. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_187.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #187: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you, for the last time, from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois because we’re packing everything up and moving the 500 miles down I-65 to Nashville at the end of June. After 25 years here, we decided we needed a change of scenery. So with all the packing and everything, I don’t see a June episode in the offing.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Way back when I was doing heavy international travel -- Chicago on Monday, Toronto on Tuesday, New York to London on Wednesday, Zurich on Thursday, getting back to Chicago at Friday midnight -- what then seemed like necessary travel, but now, looking back on it, seems like stupid travel -- people would ask me my favorite city. I thought about it a lot, but would always end up with the same answer -- Chicago. And not just because it was my home; I was offering up that answer when we lived in Philadelphia. No, my explanation to the raised eyebrows that answer often generated was that Chicago was the right size -- big enough to support a wide range of interesting stuff (sports, culture, restaurants, microbreweries), but not so big that you couldn’t get your arms around it, and with enough Midwest pragmatism, from people moving in from Indiana and Iowa and Minnesota and Wisconsin, to keep everything grounded, to keep it from getting too wacky. And to their “But what about the weather?” question I’d say “yes, it can be -10° in Chicago in January, but it can be +110° in Phoenix in August; most every place has 3 months of lousy weather (save for maybe San Diego) sometime during the year; different people choose the 3 months they can endure.”&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But over the past few years, I realized my answer about Chicago didn’t hold up any more -- not about the weather, the winters still suck; it’s that the pragmatism seems to be gone, with violent crime -- robberies, shootings, carjackings -- and definitely not-pragmatic local government decisions filling the void. It has started to feel like a replay of the 1970’s, which were not a great time in Chicago.&nbsp; Now, I don’t think it’s permanent. It’s a pendulum. Just like the city came back from a bad stretch in the ‘70’s to be a great place in the mid/late ‘80’s. It’ll happen again; I just don’t want to hang around for the low point. And according to the half-dozen movers we talked to, we’re not the only ones.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Dive Deep (Loveshadow remix)</em> by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/50488 Ft: Loveshadow</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>A quick public service announcement -- the COVID Real ID extension expires in less than a year. <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/news/press/releases/2021/04/27/dhs-announces-extension-real-id-full-enforcement-deadline\">According to the TSA</a>, “Beginning May 3, 2023, every air traveler 18 years of age and older will need a REAL ID-compliant driver’s license or identification card… at airport security checkpoints for domestic air travel.”&nbsp; Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/01/16/podcast-183-covid-test-anxiety-michelin-food-adventures/\">episode #183</a> in January, I talked about getting a Real ID version of my Illinois driver’s license when I had to renew it. No additional cost and maybe 3 additional minutes of time. But if you can’t pick up a Real ID driver’s license before next May, you’ll have to remember to take along <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/travel/security-screening/identification\">your passport or your Global Entry card</a>.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>In the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/04/21/podcast-186-mask-mandate-scramble-small-airport-survival/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #186 — Mask Mandate Scramble; Small Airport Survival\">last episode</a>, we walked through the abrupt end of the US CDC’s transportation mask mandate -- on planes, buses, trains,....&nbsp; That news cycle lasted right at about a week, the last entry being the CDC asking the Dept of Justice to appeal the federal judge’s ruling that struck down the mandate that they had extended for 2 weeks to May 3rd. On May 3rd, the CDC posted a <a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2022/s0503-covid-19-travel.html\">press release reiterating their <em>recommendation</em></a> that everyone aged 2 and older wear masks on planes and trains, and in airports and stations -- but nothing about the status of that appeal. I’m guessing that they decided to accept the facts on the ground and quietly forget about any appeal -- which is probably the only real option they have.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And then this week, adding to those facts on the ground, the European CDC has dropped their transportation mask mandate recommendations. The difference, though, is the European CDC’s recommendations are just that, recommendations. The enforceable <em>rules</em> are made by each country, and Spain and Italy, many of the countries hardest hit by the initial wave of COVID, have extended their mask mandates to mid-June.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, I wasn’t going to say anything more about hotel housekeeping because <em>even I’m</em> bored with it, but then I ran across an <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/hotel-housekeepers-want-you-to-request-daily-room-cleaning-11652650925\">article</a> in the Wall Street Journal about how hotel housekeeping unions are pushing for a return to daily room service. Certainly a big part of the push is to drive more work, more hours for the union members. But also because rooms are dirtier and take longer to clean when they have gone a few days without service, especially with the current guest mix that’s still heavier with leisure travelers, who tend to have more people in the room than the road-warrior business traveler. As you’d guess, hotel owners disagree, but for changing reasons. Their arc of rationale has gone from the pre-pandemic “be green, save water, and we’ll give you an extra 500 points to skip housekeeping” to pandemic “we’re keeping everyone safe by staying out of your room” to the current “it’s your choice, and ‘labor shortage’”.&nbsp; OK, that’s it. I’m <em>really </em>not going to talk about room cleaning anymore.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But I <em>will</em> talk about TSA checkpoint passenger volumes again. <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/09/27/podcast-179-high-tech-airport-lines-business-travel-still-missing/\">Back in September 2021</a>, the last time I scraped the numbers off the TSA <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/coronavirus/passenger-throughput\">website</a>, average daily passenger volumes were bouncing around 1.7 million, down 20% from the July summer peak of over 2 million and down 24% from pre-pandemic September 2019 numbers. Six months later, looking at the last month-and-a-half -- April to mid-May -- the average daily volume is 2.1 million and growing, and now just 10-12% off the April/May 2019 numbers. So if those TSA checkpoints and airplanes are feeling a bit more crowded, it’s because they are. Tough to remember back to my first post-lockdown flight in June 2020, when daily passenger volumes were 5-600,000 and the Southwest boarding agent said “There’s 40 of you on a plane with 175 seats. So everyone gets their own row.” I, in no way, want to go back to those times, but having a bit more plane space <em>was</em> nice.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I get <em>a lot</em> of emails from public relations firms. I read the subject lines of all of them because every once in a rare while, there’s something that catches my eye, like the pitch that led to last episode’s interview about Daytona Beach airport trying to survive in the shadow of the behemoth that is Orlando Int’l. So when I read the subject line “Study Finds that Frequent-Flyer Programs Increase Cost of Business Travel” in my inbox a few weeks back, I just had to click through. The study, <a href=\"https://www.informs.org/About-INFORMS/News-Room/Press-Releases/Study-Finds-that-Frequent-Flyer-Programs-Increase-Cost-of-Business-Travel\">just published</a> in the journal <em>Marketing Science</em> which I admit I don’t read as often as I should because I get tied up pouring through the CDC’s <em>Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report</em>, is titled <em>Reaching for Gold: Frequent-Flyer Status Incentives and Moral Hazard</em>, written by professors from University of Michigan and Duke business schools. According to the press release, after “(analyzing) the transactional database of a leading U.S.-based airline’s frequent-flyer program (that) included the histories and point accumulations of 3.5 million frequent-flyer program members during the 2010 and 2011 point-earning cycles” their main insights were -- “‘Points Members’ are More Likely to Choose Higher Fares When Not Paying for It” and “the closer frequent-flyer program members get to ‘elite status’ the more likely they are to choose an airline even when it may be more expensive than a competitor’s flight”. Hmm, that feels a bit “Dawn breaking over Marblehead”. How can you be researching frequent flier programs and act like you’ve never heard of (let alone done) a mileage run. Maybe the press release overly summarized the research and just isn’t communicating its subtlety. So I hit Google to find the <a href=\"https://yesimorhun.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/18/2018/11/Orhun_Guo_2018.pdf\">actual paper</a>. 29 pages of text and equations, and 15 pages of bibliography and data tables later -- nope, the press release was pretty much it. If the moral hazard of business travelers using their employer’s money to pay for more expensive flights to make status is eliminated, the paper estimates that companies would save at least 7% of their travel costs. Looking at 2019 data, the <a href=\"https://www.statista.com/statistics/562804/us-air-traffic-domestic-average-ticket-price/\">average cost of a walk-up US domestic ticket</a> -- one booked less than a week in advance, so the typical road warrior ticket -- is about $500. 7% is $35. I dunno, maybe some full-contact procurement guy will get excited about that $35 savings, but I don\'t know any executive in his or her right mind is thinking to themselves “Oh yes, pissing off the people who are jamming themselves in to coach seats and spending nights away from their family for $35 a trip” is a great idea.&nbsp; Except at GM. I remember when frequent flier programs first came out, GM didn’t let their travelers keep the points from business trips, which led to all sorts of weird booking behavior. Until that policy died a quiet death a few years later. Kinda like this research -- I’m sure these professors are nice, smart people; but they gotta get out of their offices a bit more.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music - <em>Drops of H2O ( The Filtered Water Treatment )</em> by J.Lang (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djlang59/37792 Ft: Airtone</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Moving to a Non-Hub Airport</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>One thing that kinda snuck up on me about our move to Nashville -- it’ll be the first time in almost 40 years that I haven’t lived in an airport hub city: Chicago with American and United at ORD; San Francisco with their United hub; Dallas when I signed up for American’s Advantage program my first day of work; Philadelphia with US Air, though I avoided them as much as I could; Detroit with Northwest; and then back to Chicago, now a 3-hub town after Southwest took over MDW after the big expansion.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Nashville <em>was</em> a hub in the late ‘80’s/early ‘90’s -- well, a mini-hub, actually -- when American was playing around with their network. They built mini-hubs in Nashville, Raleigh/Durham, and San Jose. The experiment lasted maybe 10 years but never really made any money. I think the only thing of American left in those airports are Admirals Clubs; in Nashville, they’re down to 9% of the passenger volume.&nbsp; Today, Nashville’s direct flight distribution looks like any non-hub airport -- the top 4 destinations are Big 3 hubs -- ATL, DEN, DFW, ORD -- with the fifth being MCO, thanks to all that Mouseketeer traffic.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The #1 travel tip on my and any other experienced traveler’s list is “fly non-stop” -- much easier from a hub airport, of course, and then your frequent flier strategy just falls out from there. If you live in Atlanta, you’re doubling down on Delta’s SkyMiles; realistically, there’s not another option. Non-hub? It could be just as straight-forward -- if your flight patterns take you primarily to one of those hub cities -- Chicago, Atlanta, San Francisco -- then your choice too is made for you. But if you’re in sales or consulting -- or maybe slouching toward retirement -- and your flight patterns are a bit more scattershot, then you have to think -- what’s my objective? -- flying non-stop for the shortest flight times and lowest probability of disruption; making elite status because the perks make my travel easier; or is it building up points to help fund my vacations?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Thinking about my consulting colleagues who flew out of non-hub airports every week, they were all about status. One guy I worked with lived in Ft Myers, Florida and was all in on Delta. Even when flying every week to projects in, say, Dallas or Chicago, he’d always skip the direct American flights and connect through Atlanta, killing the time from all those missed connections with drinks in Delta’s Sky Club -- which was free with his Diamond Medallion status.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>My calculus is a little easier. One of the side benefits of flying <em>a lot</em> for over 35 years is that I stacked up enough mileage for lifetime mid-tier elite status on American and United. Not enough status to get into their clubs for free, but along with the usual early boarding and free bags, it’s gotten me free club entry to OneWorld and Star Alliance partners’ lounges -- which is very valuable when trying to navigate the rabbit warrens that are FRA and LHR after north Atlantic turbulence has screwed up your in-flight sleep plans.&nbsp; If I didn’t already have these metal levels or I was in striking distance of a new level -- say close to the 2 million I’d need to jump from United Premier Gold to lifetime Platinum -- then I’d probably suck it up like my colleagues do, and get, say, the top tier United credit card with free club access for a place to sit out ORD, DEN, and IAH weather delays.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Those lifetime statuses let me step off the elite hamster wheel, so I’m now looking at non-stop flights and earning miles. Out of Nashville, Southwest has the most non-stop flights, so I’ll probably be flying them a fair bit. But while Southwest’s Companion Pass perk -- their “buy a ticket, get one free” top tier status is phenomenal, I can’t BOGO Southwest to Europe, so I need to be banking miles on one of the Big 3 so I can book on their OneWorld, Star Alliance, or SkyTeam partners -- which is where travel credit cards come back into the picture. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/09/19/podcast-167-6-months-on-why-keep-travel-cards/\">episode #167</a> in September 2020, we talked about people replacing their mileage cards with cash-back cards since no one was flying. But that trend is reverting to the mean and credit card companies have big slugs of mileage to dole out after buying them cheap in 2020 when the airlines needed real cash real fast. So my non-hub strategy -- fly direct when I can, leverage those hard-earned lifetime statuses when I can, and charge everything I can on a mileage-earning card -- including any drinks I may need to see me through those missed connections.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music —  &nbsp;<em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/trifonic/445\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bored on Your Backside</a></em> by Trifonic (c) copyright 2005 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Sampling Plus 1.0 license. http://ccmixter.org/files/trifonic/445</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>What Makes a Great Taproom?</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>With a month left in Chicago, Irene and I have built a list of “Places to Hit Before Move” that’s some mix of greatest hits and places we’ve always wanted to go but have, for some reason or another, never gotten ‘round to. And then I have a separate list of Chicago taprooms I want to hit one more time -- Goose Island, Revolution Brewing, Off Color, Solemn Oath, Marz, Dovetail, and Metropolitan Brewing. Which then got me thinking -- why these and not other; what makes a good taproom for me?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>First thing to do is to open up Untappd, the beer social networking app that\'s been my beer diary for over 11 years now.&nbsp; I’ve checked beer in at over 1,900 locations and the #1 location category is -- a brewery taproom. I scrolled through the list on the app and jotted down the ones I thought “Yeah, I’d like to go back there.”&nbsp;&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Probably the smallest group is about unique brewery experiences; where I actually did the brewery tour and it was something more than just row after row of steel tanks. Cantillon in Brussels is everyone’s favorite; they send you off on your own guided with nothing but a paper brochure and tell you not to break anything. And then, after you’ve navigated coolships and barrel rooms, they pour you their amazing lambic beers. Or the original Lagunitas Brewery in Petaluma, CA where the tour guide tossed us just-filled IPA bottles he’d grabbed before they got to the packaging machine.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But except for these few exceptions, my favorite places have a wide beer selection (something more than 5 taps of IPAs) and/or a cool space and/or the chance to chat with the brewer. Labietis’ original place in Riga, Latvia hit the first two square on the head: a <em>diverse</em> beer menu -- a juniper beer inspired by Latvian folk songs, a wheat beer with meadowsweet, a lager with Latvian hops -- that’s located in the back courtyard of what looked like, in <a title=\"Podcast #157 — Notes from the Baltics: Riga, Latvia and Tallinn, Estonia\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/11/30/podcast-157-notes-from-the-baltics-riga-latvia-and-tallinn-estonia/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the fall of 2019</a>, a block of now slightly derelict early 20th Century manor houses.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Going to a brewery’s taproom is kinda like seeing a band in concert -- I’m going to get a fuller picture of that band than I will just hearing their hit songs on the radio or a Spotify playlist. Hitting a good taproom can be similar -- getting past the high-volume core beers to see what the brewer can really do. When we were in Santa Fe last month, I went out of my way to hit Rowley Farmhouse Ales because I really liked their range during our last visit in 2018. So of course I ordered the Teosinte, a funky, earthy, grassy sour made from Oaxacan green dent corn grown a couple hundred miles east, near the Texas-New Mexico border. It was an incredibly interesting beer. I wouldn’t buy a six-pack of it, but I was more than happy to have a glass of it.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But probably the best time I have at taprooms is when I get to talk to the brewer. During one of my trips last year to Nashville, I found myself an hour south in Columbia, TN, which bills itself “Muletown.” I missed the 2021 “Mule Day” festival; it was canceled due to COVID. Instead, I wound my way through a light industrial neighborhood hard against some freight train tracks billed as Columbia’s Art District to find <a href=\"http://www.badideabrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bad Idea Brewing</a>. There were two other folks sitting at the bar; the brewer was behind it, serving. And we just got talking -- about the beer, about his brewery, about Columbia, about brewing in Columbia, about what kind of beer sells in Columbia. And through all that, taster glasses kept landing in front of me -- “try this,” “what do you think of that?” he’d ask. What was going to be a quick side trip for a beer turned into a nice afternoon of conversation… and beer.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I guess there’s one more thing that can make for a great taproom, or maybe more of a great taproom experience and that is -- it took me to a part of a city that I wouldn’t have otherwise gone. I talked a bit about this in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/04/10/podcast-174-how-the-pros-plan-their-taproom-tourism/\">episode #174</a> when I talked with Rob Cheshire of the UK podcast <a href=\"https://thisweekincraft.beer/podcast/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">This Week in Craft Beer</a> about planning taproom visits. Navigating the maze of a Beijing hutong to find Great Leap Brewing, or exiting a Paris Metro stop in a North African neighborhood on my way to <a href=\"http://deck-donohue.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Deck &amp; Donohue</a>, or riding an e-scooter through a questionable neighborhood in northeast DC to <a href=\"https://www.rightproperbrewing.com/brookland\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Right Proper Brewing</a>. These three were fine places with solid beers, but they’re more memorable for the trip to find them than for the places themselves.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But you can’t always tell this from Google search. So if you go to the show notes on travelcommons.com you’ll find my list of&nbsp; “Yeah, I’d like to go back there” taprooms.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>My<em> Yeah, I’d like to go back there</em>  Taproom List</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Chicago<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.gooseisland.com/fulton-brewery/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Goose Island Taproom</a>, 1800 W Fulton St — Yes, it\'s now owned by AB InBev, but it was the original Chicago microbrewery in the late \'80\'s and they created the whole barrel-aged stout category with Bourbon County Stout</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"http://www.revbrew.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Revolution Brewing Brewery &amp; Taproom</a>, 3340 N Kedzie Ave— Great beers; wide range of styles; bring your own food</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"http://maplewoodbrew.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Maplewood Brewery &amp; Distillery</a>, 2717 N Maplewood Ave (South of Diversey) — Small, neighborhood bar tucked up against the Kennedy Expressway</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"http://dovetailbrewery.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Dovetail Brewery</a>, 1800 W Belle Plaine Ave — German lagers and spontaneously fermented beers; the best taproom on the Ravenswood neighborhood\'s <a href=\"https://ravenswoodchicago.org/neighborhood/malt-row/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">\"Malt Row\"</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"http://www.offcolorbrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Off Color Brewing</a>, 1460 N Kingsbury St — Great range of beer styles, all of which are well-done</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.solemnoathbrewery.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Solemn Oath Brewery</a>, 1661 Quincy Ave #179, Naperville, IL — In a <em>faaar</em> west neighborhood of Chicago, one of the OG suburban breweries. Great beers and a great outdoor space, especially in the winter.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"http://marzbrewing.com/\">Marz Community Brewing</a>, 3630 S Iron St</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Elsewhere in the US<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://oxbowbeer.com/location/portland/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Oxbow Blending &amp; Bottling</a>, 49 Washington Ave, Portland, ME — Great selection of farmhouse ales with an outpost of&nbsp;<a href=\"http://www.duckfatfriteshack.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Duckfat</a>&nbsp;serving up fries on the patio</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li> <a href=\"http://www.allagash.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Allagash Brewing Company</a>, 50 Industrial Way, Portland, ME — One of the OG Maine breweries; huge range of beers beyond Allagash White; nice outdoor space; two more taprooms across the street makes it a nice afternoon destination</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://otherhalfbrewing.com/location/domino-park/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Other Half Brewing Domino Park</a>, 34 River St, Brooklyn, NY — Great hazy IPAs; great views of Manhattan across the East River</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.rightproperbrewing.com/brookland\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Right Proper Brewing Brookland Production House + Tasting Room</a>, 920 Girard St NE, Washington, DC — A nice little taproom in a DC neighborhood that is <em>way</em> off the typical tourist track</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://beardedirisbrewing.com/location/germantown/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bearded Iris Brewing</a>, 101 Van Buren St, Nashville, TN — Original Germantown taproom with great hazy IPAs, pool tables and a nice patio</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"http://www.faitlaforcebrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Fait la Force Brewing</a>, 1414 3rd Ave S, Nashville, TN — An unassuming place tucked away in the Chestnut Hill neighborhood; comfortable space; great range of beer styles; had a great conversation with the brewer behind the bar</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"http://www.badideabrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bad Idea Brewing Company</a>, 307 W 11th St, Columbia, TN — Comfortable taproom with well-executed beers in Columbia\'s Art District; another place I had a nice conversation with the brewer</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"http://www.lagunitas.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Lagunitas Brewing Company</a>, 1280 N McDowell Blvd, Petaluma, CA — Yes, they\'ve been bought out by Heineken, but the original brewery still has a bit of that old Cali anarchic feel</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.pueblovidabrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pueblo Vida Brewing Company</a>, 115 E Broadway Blvd, Tucson, AZ — A little joint in downtown Tucson that executes great beers with a focus on local ingredients</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"http://www.eppigbrewing.com/waterfront-biergarten\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Eppig Brewing Waterfront Biergarten</a>, 2817 Dickens St, San Diego, CA — It\'s all about drinking good beers outside in the sunshine along the marina</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Outside the US<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.thebarrelproject.co.uk/beer-menu/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">London Beer Factory - Barrel Project</a>, 80 Druid St, London SE1 2HQ — Great beers; very cool space in railway arch along London\'s <a href=\"https://www.londonxlondon.com/bermondsey-beer-mile/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bermondsey Beer Mile</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"http://www.cantillon.be/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Brasserie Cantillon</a>, Rue Gheude 56, 1070 Anderlecht, Belgium — Ground zero for spontaneously fermented lambic and gueuze beers; just follow the train of beer geeks to the door</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://mikkeller.com/locations/mikkeller-baghaven\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Mikkeller Baghaven</a>, Refshalevej 169B, 1432 København — Lots of spontaneously fermented sour beer on a converted industrial island</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"http://www.fmaravillas.com/\">Fábrica Maravillas</a>, C. de Valverde, 29, 28004 Madrid — Nice taproom tucked into Madrid\'s Malasaña neighborhood serving good pale ales and IPAs </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://deck-donohue.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Deck &amp; Donohue</a>, 1 Av. des Marronniers, 94380 Bonneuil-sur-Marne, France — Took me outside the usual Paris tourist circuit to a North African shopping street</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://labietis.lv/en/krogs/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Labietis Brewpub</a>, 2, Aristida Briāna iela 9a, Rīga, LV-1001, Latvia — Out-of-the-way taproom; interesting selection of beer styles, not just the usual IPAs, but herb beers, fruit beers, and meads; helpful bartenders do a good job of describing what\'s on tap</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #187</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As I said at the top of the show, there’s probably not going to be a June show, between packing up the Chicago studio and then unpacking it in Nashville. Good news, though -- the sound quality in Nashville might get a step-function improvement. Just about every apt building Irene and I looked at had a music studio as one of the amenities. The sound proofing, the sound deadening, and maybe a better microphone should make things sound a bit better. Quite a ways from those first episodes, recording with the iRiver MP3 player’s built-in mic while standing in a shower stall. Oh my!</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. You’ll have to go to the TravelCommons’ website if you want to torture your ears listening to those first bathroom-studio episodes; what one listener labelled a “pottycast”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_187.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #187 — Moving to a Non-Hub Airport; What Makes A Great Taproom?','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-187-moving-to-a-non-hub-airport-what-makes-a-great-taproom','','','2026-08-27 15:19:36','2026-08-27 20:19:36','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4145',0,'post','',0),
(4146,1,'2022-05-25 16:41:27','2022-05-25 21:41:27','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/IMG_0161.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/IMG_0161-300x300.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" alt=\"Pink Scarf on Statue in Lucca\"></a>Switching from Face Covering to Shawl[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We recap the bouncing ball history of the in-flight mask mandate as we try to figure out where it\'s going land now that it\'s in the courts. But before that, I recap my trip to Santa Fe, NM, take the flight tracking app <a href=\"https://apps.apple.com/us/app/flighty-all-airlines-tracker/id1358823008\">Flighty</a> for a spin, and wonder why <a href=\"https://www.clearme.com/\">CLEAR</a> keeps giving away annual subscriptions. Then we dig into the current state of regional airports with Joanne Magley, of <a href=\"http://www.flydaytonafirst.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Daytona Beach International Airport</a>.  All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_186.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #186: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois riding the spring roller coaster of Midwest temperatures -- 65 degrees one day, 45 degrees the next. We were in Santa Fe, NM a week-and-a-half ago with a group of friends and the Midwest has nothing on high-desert plateau temperature swings. We’d wake up to 35-40 degrees, bundle up, and then be stripping off layers at lunch when it’d hit the upper 60’s. We had great weather; maybe one day where it was windy, overcast, and cold all day. The rest of the time was sunny and clear blue skies. Some bits of our visit were kind of a replay of our Thanksgiving 2018 trip there. I talked about that trip in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/12/17/podcast-147-holiday-travel-tips-notes-from-santa-fe/\">episode #147</a> and then wrote it up in more detail in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/01/24/road-trip-lowbrow-santa-fe/\"><em>Lowbrow Santa Fe</em></a> blog post -- which came in very handy; reminding me of restaurants, taprooms, and things to do while we were doing some bare-minimum planning for the group. And even if some of it was a replay for us, it was the first time for our friends, and seeing these places again through their eyes gave it all a new spin for us.</li><li>Actually, I was happy to see that not a lot had changed in the intervening 3½ years; that COVID hadn’t driven any of our favorite places out of business. The only places I saw closed up were the ABQ restaurant before security and <a href=\"https://www.blm.gov/visit/kktr\">Tent Rocks National Monument</a> which the Bureau of Land Management closed during the COVID lockdowns but now are keeping closed to upgrade the trails. We stayed again at the <a href=\"https://farolito.com/\">El Farolito</a> bed &amp; breakfast -- there were 10 of us, so we kinda took it over. The owner told us Santa Fe was as busy as ever. And we saw it -- our flight down to ABQ was completely full as were all the restaurants.&nbsp;</li><li>But we still managed to wedge our way into a number of places on <a href=\"https://www.santafe.org/visiting-santa-fe/self-guided-tours/santa-fe-margarita-trail/\">Santa Fe’s Margarita Trail</a>. Yes, I know that it’s a pure marketing thing, but we were square in their target market and were happy to be tagged. We had high-end premium tequila margaritas, low-brow house margaritas, green chile-infused margaritas; all kinds -- except those made with sour mix. I had to draw the line somewhere. A lot of places were saying theirs was the best margarita -- so we had to try as many as we could. But as one of our crew so aptly put it, “The world’s best margarita is the one in your hand.”</li><li>Bridge Music — <em><em>Bogi Beat Budapest </em></em>by KarmaHacke<a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/Loveshadow/26219\">r<em> </em></a> (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/hepepe/21074</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>OK, just one more note about the place we stayed in Santa Fe, El Farolito -- full housekeeping every day in our casita without asking, including restocking the kiva fireplace with fresh wood and newspaper, ready for us to just strike the match. Also, full cooked breakfast. The only lingering COVID service reduction -- no afternoon cookies. But given the amount of food and margaritas we were consuming, I actually think that was a good thing.</li><li>Before my flight down to ABQ, T/C contributor Allan Marko pointed me to <a href=\"https://apps.apple.com/us/app/flighty-all-airlines-tracker/id1358823008\">Flighty</a>, a flight tracker app. I’ve talked about flight tracking apps in past episodes. Years back, I paid the $50/year for TripIt Pro, but eventually dropped it as airlines kept upgrading their own apps -- improving real-time status notifications, adding “where’s my plane” functionality. Add in the free <a href=\"https://apps.apple.com/us/app/live-flight-tracker/id316793974\">FlightAware</a> app and that’s been my flight tracker “tech stack” for a number of years. But looking at app reviews, Flighty seems to be the latest hotness, so I downloaded it to give it a go. It’s a nice looking app, and they’re smart to give a free trial of all the paid features for the first flight. I first sync’d it with TripIt, so didn’t need to re-enter my ABQ flights. Then, that day, got flight status notifications faster and more granular than what Southwest was sending me; scrolled down for a nice timeline of&nbsp; “where’s my plane” -- always important for Southwest flights since they tend to “bunny hop” across the country during the day rather than run out-and-back to hubs. There was also a detailed flight timeline -- pushback, taxi, take-off, landing. Nothing I couldn’t get from FlightAware, but the UI was so much better, more modern, all on one screen. But of course, all of this information I was liking is part of their Pro, their paid offering. It was all blurred out for the flight home, which I really could’ve used when I woke up to a 1-hour delay notification from Southwest. The only thing I got from Flighty was an upsell notification -- “Looks like your flight’s delayed; you should upgrade to Pro for more information.” Not the most helpful, especially after some bug in their system sent me the same notification every couple of minutes until I spelunked far enough into my iPhone’s notification settings to shut them off. And then I opened FlightAware to figure out what was really going on. Our plane was late getting out of BWI, its first hop, and we were another couple of hops down the line.&nbsp; So, net net, the Flighty Pro offering is nice. If I was back to flying every week, I’d pay the $50 to have all that information on a single screen. But Flighty Free can’t replace the free, if slightly clunkier, FlightAware.</li><li>I’ve been noticing a new bunch of deals offering a free year of <a href=\"https://www.clearme.com/\">CLEAR</a>, the biometrically powered security line cut service that lists out at $179/year. I’ve always been ambivalent about CLEAR. I talked about this last fall in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/09/27/podcast-179-high-tech-airport-lines-business-travel-still-missing/\">episode #179</a> when I received the first raft of offers -- from Amex and United. The time savings over regular TSA PreCheck has never seemed enough to justify the cost of letting them hold my biometric information -- especially since the first incarnation of CLEAR had to be sued to stop it from selling customers’ fingerprint and iris scan data before it went bankrupt. Having said that, I’m seeing them at more airports, and if TSA hiring can’t keep up passenger volume growth and those PreCheck lines start to lengthen, it might be enough to get me opening my eyes wide to CLEAR again.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — Black Rainbow by Pitx (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Pitx/19513 Ft: ERH, acclivity</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Mask Mandate Scramble</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>We talked in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/03/28/podcast-185-notes-on-louisville-changing-mask-mandates/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #185 — Notes on Louisville; Changing Mask Mandates\">the last episode</a> about the CDC kicking can containing in-flight mask mandate down the road a month -- from March 18th to this past Monday, April 18th. And so last week, anticipation began to build in travel circles about what the CDC would do. On our flight home from ABQ, the Southwest flight attendant said during her pre-take-off announcements “Hopefully the in-flight mask mandate ends next week, but until then…” and then ran through the standard mask instructions. I wasn’t surprised since, as we mentioned in the last episode, their union had been asking for the mandate to end. However, I was surprised that the instruction announcement included “if oxygen masks fall during the flight, please take off your mask before putting the oxygen mask on.” That would seem a bit obvious to me, but maybe I think about these things more than the average passenger.</li><li>The next day, after finishing my interview with Joanne Magley of <a href=\"http://flydaytonafirst.com\" title=\"Daytona Beach Int’l Airport\">Daytona Beach Int’l Airport</a> -- which you’ll hear in the next segment -- we got talking about the mask mandate; what’s going to happen on Monday. Joanne’s cut -- I hope we know something by Sunday so we’re prepared for Monday. Which happened -- the next day, word began to leak out that the CDC was going to extend the mandate again, for 2 weeks this time.</li><li>Almost two years ago, in 2020, soon after the lockdowns and travel bans started and passenger volumes plummeted, the airlines themselves started requiring in-flight masks in an attempt to coax people back into what were seen as modern-day plague ships. In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/07/17/podcast-165-first-post-lockdown-flight-when-does-business-travel-come-back/\">episode #165</a>, I talked about my first post-lockdown flight that June saying back then “it felt like mask usage was about 80%. I see kids ripping their masks off as soon as they get off the jetway. A sizable minority of mask wearers were just covering their mouths, leaving their noses uncovered — pilots, cleaning crew, passengers, wheelchair people.” It wasn’t until Joe Biden’s inauguration day, January 2021, that it became a federal mandate. That initial mandate was through mid-May, 5 months, but a few weeks before it expired, it was extended for 4 months, to mid-September, then another 4 months to mid-January 2022, then 2 months to mid-March, then 1 month to mid-April, then a half-month (2 weeks), to May. And with indoor mask mandates dropping everywhere else, each of these last extensions of this last remaining mandate generated more and more pushback.</li><li>And so when the <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/judge-throws-out-federal-mask-mandate-for-public-transportation-11650306480\">federal judge struck down the mask mandate</a> on this Monday, the speed at which everyone ditched their mask rules was amazing. Within hours of the ruling, the TSA and all the major US airlines announced they were no longer requiring masks. There were reports of flight attendants announcing the decision in-flight and walking down the aisle with trash bags to collect unwanted and now-unneeded face masks. On Tuesday morning, I got emails from Uber and Lyft dropping their mask requirements. On Tuesday afternoon, Illinois’ governor dropped the state’s masking requirements on regional trains, buses, and Chicago’s airports. The rush of announcements; it was almost like everyone was working to make it a <em>fait accompli</em>, a done deal that couldn’t be reversed.&nbsp;</li><li>Because amidst all this activity was an undertone, an unknown -- would the Biden Administration, the CDC appeal the judge’s ruling. Nothing on Monday, or Tuesday, but then yesterday, Wednesday afternoon, the CDC asked the Dept of Justice to file an appeal, which it did but without a request to stay the judge’s ruling, to reinstate the mandate -- at least as of mid-day today. I can’t figure out what their plan is -- or if there is one. As I said in the last episode, without a mask mandate, I’ll probably ride the pragmatic middle -- probably skipping the mask while turning the air jet on full blast on half-full planes but then pulling out a KN-95 when I’m sitting there’s someone in the middle seat sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with me, like on our full flight down to ABQ last week. I really didn’t mind wearing a mask for that 3½ hours. It’s not just a COVID thing. I haven’t had a bad cold since this all started and I’d kinda like to keep it this way.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/stefsax/7785\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Awel</a> </em>by stefsax (c) copyright 2006 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/stefsax/7785 </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Small Airport Survival</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>American Airlines made news a couple of weeks back when they, in industry lingo <em>down-gauged</em> flights to Allentown, PA and Atlantic City, NJ from their Philadelphia hub. <em>Up-gauging</em> and <em>down-gauging</em> -- changing the size of the plane on the route -- happens all the time. What made <em>this</em> change news was that&nbsp; American down-gauged from a regional jet to a bus. But I guess it could’ve been worse. US airline execs have been talking for a while now about the need to reduce, even eliminate service to small, regional airports; pinning the blame first on crew shortages, and most recently on fuel costs.</li><li>Like many frequent travelers, I’ve traveled through a lot of smaller, regional airports. I’ve appreciated the ability to skip the 2-hr rental car drive and fly directly into Allentown, PA; Charlottesville, VA; Appletown, WI; and Sioux City, IA (not a bad place, in spite of its airport code SUX). So to check in on what it’s like to run a regional airport today, I fired up Zoom for a chat with Joanne Magley, the Director of Air Service, Marketing and Customer Experience for <a href=\"http://www.flydaytonafirst.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Daytona Beach International Airport</a><ul><li>Mark: Joanne, back last June on the TravelCommons podcast in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/06/15/podcast-176-why-business-travel-is-coming-back-learning-airport-history/\">episode #176</a>, we talked with Dr Janet Bednarek of University of Dayton about the history of airports. So how did Daytona Beach International Airport get started?</li><li>Joanne: We started as a naval base and then from there it was given to the city and then somehow it was given back to the county</li><li>Mark: Daytona Beach International Airport is about an hour from Orlando, and about an hour and a half from Jacksonville. What types of travelers are choosing Daytona Beach over those two bigger airports?</li><li>Joanne: Orlando might be an hour, maybe an hour and 10 minutes. But then you have to add in the time to go from where you\'re parking back to the terminal, and the time it takes to get through the security checkpoints.&nbsp; So really that hour or so drive becomes two plus hours of just trying to get to your gate. The people that use Daytona Beach International Airport love the convenience factor of walking five minutes from the parking spot, maybe spending five minutes at the TSA checkpoints. And also, we pride ourselves on really high customer service. Many times, when you go through TSA security, you forget that you might have packed an item on your carry-on that is not allowed -- something as simple as a wine opener or your heirloom pocket knife from your grandfather. Well, you can\'t take these things through the checkpoint.</li><li>Mark: And rightfully so…</li><li>Joanne: TSA will confiscate.... Well, no, the TSA does not confiscate it; you surrender your items to TSA. Usually you don\'t see your item ever again. But at our airport, the TSA agents will give you an envelope. You can put the item in the envelope, put your address on the envelope, and then TSA will put it into a little locker. And then every day, our operations team comes and unloads that locker. And then every morning, we mail it back to the passengers free of charge. It\'s simple on our part. It really is. It\'s just mailing an item and the cost of mailing an item is very small compared to the reward that we get for having happy people come through the terminal. And we can do it because we\'re smaller.</li><li>Mark: How difficult was it to get the local TSA to agree to that program?</li><li>Joanne: Not difficult at all. They\'re a great partner with us and they are some of the friendliest TSA agents you will ever come across.</li><li>Mark: Well, that\'s nice to hear because certainly myself and a lot of travelers step up to the TSA kiosk with, let\'s call it, a mixed set of experiences. One of the things that I think we\'ve seen recently is US airlines talking about having to park smaller jets, the regional jets and having to reduce some and even ending some service to smaller airports because of pilot shortages. Have you seen any of this?</li><li>Joanne: Sure, Sure. Like a lot of smaller regional airports, we used to have dozens of airlines and then deregulation which consolidated a lot of airlines and then the great recession. And so, through the years, we\'ve landed with two main carriers, Delta and American. We are very fortunate that we had not lost any service with our two main carriers. In fact, we gained a few extra routes starting with December 2020. American Airlines started seasonal service to Philadelphia and Dallas-Fort Worth. So we gained some service. But one thing that we are noticing -- typically when they would bring in a larger plane, they haven\'t done that yet. We\'ve seen some cancellations due to maybe crew shortages. Again, not a lot, but where we know that it\'s affecting us is the opportunity to get more new destinations because at this point, it\'s difficult for the airlines to say, “OK, we\'ll add new service here and here,” even though the airlines know that it could be a profitable flight. They don\'t have the crew; they don\'t necessarily have the pilots to add a new flight. They would have to stop service from somewhere else in order to start up new and actually starting up new comes with all sorts of new costs as well.</li><li>Mark: Joanne,&nbsp; how do you pitch a new airline for new service and a new airline?</li><li>Joanne: What it takes to at least be high on the consideration. First, you have to show that there is a demand for service, and the airlines can see where passengers are coming and going from so that part\'s kind of easy. But then the part where there is the cost for the startup... What we\'re seeing is a lot of communities are coming together to put in an air service support program. It can\'t come from the airport. The airport incentives have to be separate. So, the community is coming forth with an air service development program which is in the form of a minimum revenue guarantee. That minimum revenue guarantee will only kick in if they\'re not meeting what their expected revenues are supposed to be. So, let\'s say, a community gathers $2 million dollars from their economic development fund and from businesses and corporations. And it\'s, it\'s more of a pledge. It\'s not like they\'re giving these $2 million dollars to an airline. It\'s like a pledge.</li><li>Mark: It sounds like the local community is looking to take the risk out of the business case for the new service.</li><li>Joanne: That\'s exactly what it is. It\'s risk mitigation. The economic impact of a new airline coming in with twice-a-week daily flights to multiple destinations, that’s a good investment. But that\'s what the airlines are looking for, especially the new ones. There\'s a number of Canadian airlines that are just kind of chomping at the bit to get back. So if everything kind of stays where we\'re at and the border stays open, we will see our Canadian visitors coming back.</li><li>Mark: Joanne. I really want to thank you for joining us on the TravelCommons podcast. It\'s been a great conversation; I\'ve really enjoyed it. Joanne Magley, Director of Air Service, Marketing and Customer Experience for <a href=\"http://flydaytonafirst.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Daytona Beach International Airport\">Daytona Beach International Airport</a>. Having a lot better weather in April than what we have in Chicago. Thanks again for joining us, Joanne.</li><li>Joanne: You\'re welcome, Mark. Thank you.</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #186</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_186.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #186 — Mask Mandate Scramble; Small Airport Survival','','inherit','closed','closed','','4135-revision-v1','','','2022-05-25 16:41:27','2022-05-25 21:41:27','',4135,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4146',0,'revision','',0),
(4147,1,'2022-05-25 16:47:57','2022-05-25 21:47:57','','IMG_4803','','inherit','open','closed','','img_4803','','','2022-05-25 16:47:57','2022-05-25 21:47:57','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/IMG_4803.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(4148,1,'2022-05-25 17:00:00','2022-05-25 22:00:00','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/IMG_4803.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/IMG_4803-300x300.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" alt=\"Taproom Draft Beer Taps Arranged as a Smiley Face\"></a>I\'m Happy To See You Too![/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We recap the bouncing ball history of the in-flight mask mandate as we try to figure out where it\'s going land now that it\'s in the courts. But before that, I recap my trip to Santa Fe, NM, take the flight tracking app <a href=\"https://apps.apple.com/us/app/flighty-all-airlines-tracker/id1358823008\">Flighty</a> for a spin, and wonder why <a href=\"https://www.clearme.com/\">CLEAR</a> keeps giving away annual subscriptions. Then we dig into the current state of regional airports with Joanne Magley, of <a href=\"http://www.flydaytonafirst.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Daytona Beach International Airport</a>.  All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_186.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #187: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you, for the last time, from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois because we’re packing everything up and moving the 500 miles down I-65 to Nashville at the end of June. After 25 years here, we decided we needed a change of scenery. So with all the packing and everything, I don’t see a June episode in the offing. </li><li>Way back when I was doing heavy international travel -- Chicago on Monday, Toronto on Tuesday, New York to London on Wednesday, Zurich on Thursday, getting back to Chicago at Friday midnight -- what then seemed like necessary travel, but now, looking back on it, seems like stupid travel -- people would ask me my favorite city. I thought about it a lot, but would always end up with the same answer -- Chicago. And not just because it was my home; I was offering up that answer when we lived in Philadelphia. No, my explanation to the raised eyebrows that answer often generated was that Chicago was the right size -- big enough to support a wide range of interesting stuff (sports, culture, restaurants, microbreweries), but not so big that you couldn’t get your arms around it, and with enough Midwest pragmatism, from people moving in from Indiana and Iowa and Minnesota and Wisconsin, to keep everything grounded, to keep it from getting too wacky. And to their “But what about the weather?” question I’d say “yes, it can be -10° in Chicago in January, but it can be +110° in Phoenix in August; most every place has 3 months of lousy weather (save for maybe San Diego) sometime during the year; different people choose the 3 months they can endure.” </li><li>But over the past few years, I realized my answer about Chicago didn’t hold up any more -- not about the weather, the winters still suck; it’s that the pragmatism seems to be gone, with violent crime -- robberies, shootings, carjackings -- and definitely not-pragmatic local government decisions filling the void. It has started to feel like a replay of the 1970’s, which were not a great time in Chicago.  Now, I don’t think it’s permanent. It’s a pendulum. Just like the city came back from a bad stretch in the ‘70’s to be a great place in the mid/late ‘80’s. It’ll happen again; I just don’t want to hang around for the low point. And according to the half-dozen movers we talked to, we’re not the only ones.</li><li>Bridge Music — <em><em>Bogi Beat Budapest </em></em>by KarmaHacke<a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/Loveshadow/26219\">r<em> </em></a> (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/hepepe/21074</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>In the last episode, we walked through the abrupt end of the US CDC’s transportation mask mandate -- on planes, buses, trains,....  That news cycle lasted right at about a week, the last entry being the CDC asking the Dept of Justice to appeal the federal judge’s ruling that struck down the mandate that they had extended for 2 weeks to May 3rd. On May 3rd, the CDC posted a <a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2022/s0503-covid-19-travel.html\">press release reiterating their <em>recommendation</em></a> that everyone aged 2 and older wear masks on planes and trains, and in airports and stations -- but nothing about the status of that appeal. I’m guessing that they decided to accept the facts on the ground and quietly forget about any appeal -- which is probably the only real option they have.</li><li>And then this week, adding to those facts on the ground, the European CDC has dropped their transportation mask mandate recommendations. The difference, though, is the European CDC’s recommendations are just that, recommendations. The enforceable <em>rules</em> are made by each country, and Spain and Italy, many of the countries hardest hit by the initial wave of COVID, have extended their mask mandates to mid-June.</li><li>OK, I wasn’t going to say anything more about hotel housekeeping because <em>even I’m</em> bored with it, but then I ran across an <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/hotel-housekeepers-want-you-to-request-daily-room-cleaning-11652650925\">article</a> in the Wall Street Journal about how hotel housekeeping unions are pushing for a return to daily room service. Certainly a big part of the push is to drive more work, more hours for the union members. But also because rooms are dirtier and take longer to clean when they have gone a few days without service, especially with the current guest mix that’s still heavier with leisure travelers, who tend to have more people in the room than the road-warrior business traveler. As you’d guess, hotel owners disagree, but for changing reasons. Their arc of rationale has gone from the pre-pandemic “be green, save water, and we’ll give you an extra 500 points to skip housekeeping” to pandemic “we’re keeping everyone safe by staying out of your room” to the current “it’s your choice, and ‘labor shortage’”.  OK, that’s it. I’m <em>really </em>not going to talk about room cleaning anymore.</li><li>But I <em>will</em> talk about TSA checkpoint passenger volumes again. <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/09/27/podcast-179-high-tech-airport-lines-business-travel-still-missing/\">Back in September 2021</a>, the last time I scraped the numbers off the TSA <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/coronavirus/passenger-throughput\">website</a>, average daily passenger volumes were bouncing around 1.7 million, down 20% from the July summer peak of over 2 million and down 24% from pre-pandemic September 2019 numbers. Six months later, looking at the last month-and-a-half -- April to mid-May -- the average daily volume is 2.1 million and growing, and now just 10-12% off the April/May 2019 numbers. So if those TSA checkpoints and airplanes are feeling a bit more crowded, it’s because they are. Tough to remember back to my first post-lockdown flight in June 2020, when daily passenger volumes were 5-600,000 and the Southwest boarding agent said “There’s 40 of you on a plane with 175 seats. So everyone gets their own row.” I, in no way, want to go back to those times, but having a bit more plane space <em>was</em> nice.</li><li>I get <em>a lot</em> of emails from public relations firms. I read the subject lines of all of them because every once in a rare while, there’s something that catches my eye, like the pitch that led to last episode’s interview about Daytona Beach airport trying to survive in the shadow of the behemoth that is Orlando Int’l. So when I read the subject line “Study Finds that Frequent-Flyer Programs Increase Cost of Business Travel” in my inbox a few weeks back, I just had to click through. The study, <a href=\"https://www.informs.org/About-INFORMS/News-Room/Press-Releases/Study-Finds-that-Frequent-Flyer-Programs-Increase-Cost-of-Business-Travel\">just published</a> in the journal <em>Marketing Science</em> which I admit I don’t read as often as I should because I get tied up pouring through the CDC’s <em>Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report</em>, is titled <em>Reaching for Gold: Frequent-Flyer Status Incentives and Moral Hazard</em>, written by professors from University of Michigan and Duke business schools. According to the press release, after “(analyzing) the transactional database of a leading U.S.-based airline’s frequent-flyer program (that) included the histories and point accumulations of 3.5 million frequent-flyer program members during the 2010 and 2011 point-earning cycles” their main insights were -- “‘Points Members’ are More Likely to Choose Higher Fares When Not Paying for It” and “the closer frequent-flyer program members get to ‘elite status’ the more likely they are to choose an airline even when it may be more expensive than a competitor’s flight”. Hmm, that feels a bit “Dawn breaking over Marblehead”. How can you be researching frequent flier programs and act like you’ve never heard of (let alone done) a mileage run. Maybe the press release overly summarized the research and just isn’t communicating its subtlety. So I hit Google to find the <a href=\"https://yesimorhun.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/18/2018/11/Orhun_Guo_2018.pdf\">actual paper</a>. 29 pages of text and equations, and 15 pages of bibliography and data tables later -- nope, the press release was pretty much it. If the moral hazard of business travelers using their employer’s money to pay for more expensive flights to make status is eliminated, the paper estimates that companies would save at least 7% of their travel costs. Looking at 2019 data, the <a href=\"https://www.statista.com/statistics/562804/us-air-traffic-domestic-average-ticket-price/\">average cost of a walk-up US domestic ticket</a> -- one booked less than a week in advance, so the typical road warrior ticket -- is about $500. 7% is $35. I dunno, maybe some full-contact procurement guy will get excited about that $35 savings, but I know that any executive in his or her right mind thinking to themselves “Oh yes, pissing off the people who are jamming themselves in to coach seats and spending nights away from their family for $35 a trip” is a great idea.  Except at GM. I remember when frequent flier programs first came out, GM didn’t let their travelers keep the points from business trips, which led to all sorts of weird booking behavior. Until that policy died a quiet death a few years later. Kinda like this research -- I’m sure these professors are nice, smart people; but they gotta get out of their offices a bit more.</li><li>Bridge Music — <em><em>Bogi Beat Budapest </em></em>by KarmaHacke<a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/Loveshadow/26219\">r<em> </em></a> (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/hepepe/21074</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Moving to a Non-Hub Airport</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>One thing that kinda snuck up on me about our move to Nashville -- it’ll be the first time in almost 40 years that I haven’t lived in an airport hub city: Chicago with American and United at ORD; San Francisco with their United hub; Dallas when I signed up for American’s Advantage program my first day of work; Philadelphia with US Air, though I avoided them as much as I could; Detroit with Northwest; and then back to Chicago, now a 3-hub town after Southwest took over MDW after the big expansion.  </li><li>Nashville <em>was</em> a hub in the late ‘80’s/early ‘90’s -- well, a mini-hub, actually -- when American was playing around with their network. They built mini-hubs in Nashville, Raleigh/Durham, and San Jose. The experiment lasted maybe 10 years but never really made any money. I think the only thing of American left in those airports are Admirals Clubs; in Nashville, they’re down to 9% of the passenger volume.  Today, Nashville’s direct flight distribution looks like any non-hub airport -- the top 4 destinations are Big 3 hubs -- ATL, DEN, DFW, ORD -- with the fifth being MCO, thanks to all that Mouseketeer traffic.</li><li>The #1 travel tip on my and any other experienced traveler’s list is “fly non-stop” -- much easier from a hub airport, of course, and then your frequent flier strategy just falls out from there. If you live in Atlanta, you’re doubling down on Delta’s SkyMiles; realistically, there’s not another option. Non-hub? It could be just as straight-forward -- if your flight patterns take you primarily to one of those hub cities -- Chicago, Atlanta, San Francisco -- then your choice too is made for you. But if you’re in sales or consulting -- or maybe slouching toward retirement -- and your flight patterns are a bit more scattershot, then you have to think -- what’s my objective? -- flying non-stop for the shortest flight times and lowest probability of disruption; making elite status because the perks make my travel easier; or is it building up points to help fund my vacations?</li><li>Thinking about my consulting colleagues who flew out of non-hub airports every week, they were all about status. One guy I worked with lived in Ft Myers, Florida and was all in on Delta. Even when flying every week to projects in, say, Dallas or Chicago, he’d always skip the direct American flights and connect through Atlanta, killing the time from all those missed connections with drinks in Delta’s Sky Club -- which was free with his Diamond Medallion status.</li><li>My calculus is a little easier. One of the side benefits of flying <em>a lot</em> for over 35 years is that I stacked up enough mileage for lifetime mid-tier elite status on American and United. Not enough status to get into their clubs for free, but along with the usual early boarding and free bags, it’s gotten me free club entry to OneWorld and Star Alliance partners’ lounges -- which is very valuable when trying to navigate the rabbit warrens that are FRA and LHR after north Atlantic turbulence has screwed up your in-flight sleep plans.  If I didn’t already have these metal levels or I was in striking distance of a new level -- say close to the 2 million I’d need to jump from United Premier Gold to lifetime Platinum -- then I’d probably suck it up like my colleagues do, and get, say, the top tier United credit card with free club access for a place to sit out ORD, DEN, and IAH weather delays.</li><li>Those lifetime statuses let me step off the elite hamster wheel, so I’m now looking at non-stop flights and earning miles. Out of Nashville, Southwest has the most non-stop flights, so I’ll probably be flying them a fair bit. But while Southwest’s Companion Pass perk -- their “buy a ticket, get one free” top tier status is phenomenal, I can’t BOGO Southwest to Europe, so I need to be banking miles on one of the Big 3 so I can book on their OneWorld, Star Alliance, or SkyTeam partners -- which is where travel credit cards come back into the picture. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/09/19/podcast-167-6-months-on-why-keep-travel-cards/\">episode #167</a> in September 2020, we talked about people replacing their mileage cards with cash-back cards since no one was flying. But that trend is reverting to the mean and credit card companies have big slugs of mileage to dole out after buying them cheap in 2020 when the airlines needed real cash real fast. So my non-hub strategy -- fly direct when I can, leverage those hard-earned lifetime statuses when I can, and charge everything I can on a mileage-earning card -- including any drinks I may need to see me through those missed connections.</li><li>Bridge Music — <em><em>Bogi Beat Budapest </em></em>by KarmaHacke<a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/Loveshadow/26219\">r<em> </em></a> (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/hepepe/21074</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>What Makes a Great Taproom?</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>With a month left in Chicago, Irene and I have built a list of “Places to Hit Before Move” that’s some mix of greatest hits and places we’ve always wanted to go but have, for some reason or another, never gotten ‘round to. And then I have a separate list of Chicago taprooms I want to hit one more time -- Goose Island, Revolution Brewing, Off Color, Solemn Oath, Marz, Dovetail, and Metropolitan Brewing. Which then got me thinking -- why these and not other; what makes a good taproom for me?</li><li>First thing to do is to open up Untappd, the beer social networking app that\'s been my beer diary for over 11 years now.&nbsp; I’ve checked beer in at over 1,900 locations and the #1 location category is -- a brewery taproom. I scrolled through the list on the app and jotted down the ones I thought “Yeah, I’d like to go back there.”&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>Probably the smallest group is about unique brewery experiences; where I actually did the brewery tour and it was something more than just row after row of steel tanks. Cantillon in Brussels is everyone’s favorite; they send you off on your own guided with nothing but a paper brochure and tell you not to break anything. And then, after you’ve navigated coolships and barrel rooms, they pour you their amazing lambic beers. Or the original Lagunitas Brewery in Petaluma, CA where the tour guide tossed us just-filled IPA bottles he’d grabbed before they got to the packaging machine.&nbsp;</li><li>But except for these few exceptions, my favorite places have a wide beer selection (something more than 5 taps of IPAs) and/or a cool space and/or the chance to chat with the brewer. Labietis’ original place in Riga, Latvia hit the first two square on the head: a <em>diverse</em> beer menu -- a juniper beer inspired by Latvian folk songs, a wheat beer with meadowsweet, a lager with Latvian hops -- that’s located in the back courtyard of what looked like, in the fall of 2019, a block of now slightly derelict early 20th Century manor houses. A little closer to home on my Chicago list, Metropolitan Brewing does nothing but German-style lagers which are a perfect fit for their taproom patio that looks out on the north branch of the Chicago River.</li><li>Going to a brewery’s taproom is kinda like seeing a band in concert -- I’m going to get a fuller picture of that band than I will just hearing their hit songs on the radio or a Spotify playlist. Hitting a good taproom can be similar -- getting past the high-volume core beers to see what the brewer can really do. When we were in Santa Fe last month, I went out of my way to hit Rowley Farmhouse Ales because I really liked their range during our last visit in 2018. So of course I ordered the Teosinte, a funky, earthy, grassy sour made from Oaxacan green dent corn grown a couple hundred miles east, near the Texas-New Mexico border. It was an incredibly interesting beer. I wouldn’t buy a six-pack of it, but I was more than happy to have a glass of it.</li><li>But probably the best time I have at taprooms is when I get to talk to the brewer. During one of my trips last year to Nashville, I found myself an hour south in Columbia, TN, which bills itself “Muletown.” I missed the 2021 “Mule Day” festival; it was canceled due to COVID. Instead, I wound my way through a light industrial neighborhood hard against some freight train tracks billed as Columbia’s Art District to find Bad Idea Brewing. There were two other folks sitting at the bar; the brewer was behind it, serving. And we just got talking -- about the beer, about his brewery, about Columbia, about brewing in Columbia, about what kind of beer sells in Columbia. And through all that, taster glasses kept landing in front of me -- “try this,” “what do you think of that?” he’d ask. What was going to be a quick side trip for a beer turned into a nice afternoon of conversation… and beer.</li><li>I guess there’s one more thing that can make for a great taproom, or maybe more of a great taproom experience and that is -- it took me to a part of a city that I wouldn’t have otherwise gone. I talked a bit about this in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/04/10/podcast-174-how-the-pros-plan-their-taproom-tourism/\">episode #174</a> when I talked with Rob Cheshire of the UK podcast This Week in Craft Beer about planning taproom visits. Navigating the maze of a Beijing hutong to find Great Leap Brewing, or exiting a Paris Metro stop in a North African neighborhood on my way to Deck &amp; Donohue, or riding an e-scooter through a questionable neighborhood in northeast DC to Right Proper Brewing. These three were fine places with solid beers, but they’re more memorable for the trip to find them than for the places themselves.</li><li>But you can’t always tell this from Google search. So if you go to the show notes on travelcommons.com you’ll find my list of&nbsp; “Yeah, I’d like to go back there” taprooms.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #187</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social  -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_186.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #187 — Moving to a Non-Hub Airport; What Makes A Great Taproom?','','inherit','closed','closed','','4145-revision-v1','','','2022-05-25 17:00:00','2022-05-25 22:00:00','',4145,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4148',0,'revision','',0),
(4149,1,'2022-05-25 17:30:43','2022-05-25 22:30:43','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/IMG_4803.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/IMG_4803-300x300.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" alt=\"Taproom Draft Beer Taps Arranged as a Smiley Face\"></a>I\'m Happy To See You Too![/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>The last episode recording in Chicago before we relocate the TravelCommons studios, and our lives, down to Nashville. We close out our threads on in-flight mask mandates and hotel housekeeping, and critique an academic paper about the moral hazard of frequent flier elite status. I talk through the changes I\'ll have to make when flying out of a non-hub airport. And then, as I\'m making a list of the Chicago breweries I want to re-visit before leaving, I think through the characteristics that makes a taproom great. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_186.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #187: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you, for the last time, from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois because we’re packing everything up and moving the 500 miles down I-65 to Nashville at the end of June. After 25 years here, we decided we needed a change of scenery. So with all the packing and everything, I don’t see a June episode in the offing. </li><li>Way back when I was doing heavy international travel -- Chicago on Monday, Toronto on Tuesday, New York to London on Wednesday, Zurich on Thursday, getting back to Chicago at Friday midnight -- what then seemed like necessary travel, but now, looking back on it, seems like stupid travel -- people would ask me my favorite city. I thought about it a lot, but would always end up with the same answer -- Chicago. And not just because it was my home; I was offering up that answer when we lived in Philadelphia. No, my explanation to the raised eyebrows that answer often generated was that Chicago was the right size -- big enough to support a wide range of interesting stuff (sports, culture, restaurants, microbreweries), but not so big that you couldn’t get your arms around it, and with enough Midwest pragmatism, from people moving in from Indiana and Iowa and Minnesota and Wisconsin, to keep everything grounded, to keep it from getting too wacky. And to their “But what about the weather?” question I’d say “yes, it can be -10° in Chicago in January, but it can be +110° in Phoenix in August; most every place has 3 months of lousy weather (save for maybe San Diego) sometime during the year; different people choose the 3 months they can endure.” </li><li>But over the past few years, I realized my answer about Chicago didn’t hold up any more -- not about the weather, the winters still suck; it’s that the pragmatism seems to be gone, with violent crime -- robberies, shootings, carjackings -- and definitely not-pragmatic local government decisions filling the void. It has started to feel like a replay of the 1970’s, which were not a great time in Chicago.  Now, I don’t think it’s permanent. It’s a pendulum. Just like the city came back from a bad stretch in the ‘70’s to be a great place in the mid/late ‘80’s. It’ll happen again; I just don’t want to hang around for the low point. And according to the half-dozen movers we talked to, we’re not the only ones.</li><li>Bridge Music — <em><em>Bogi Beat Budapest </em></em>by KarmaHacke<a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/Loveshadow/26219\">r<em> </em></a> (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/hepepe/21074</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>In the last episode, we walked through the abrupt end of the US CDC’s transportation mask mandate -- on planes, buses, trains,....  That news cycle lasted right at about a week, the last entry being the CDC asking the Dept of Justice to appeal the federal judge’s ruling that struck down the mandate that they had extended for 2 weeks to May 3rd. On May 3rd, the CDC posted a <a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2022/s0503-covid-19-travel.html\">press release reiterating their <em>recommendation</em></a> that everyone aged 2 and older wear masks on planes and trains, and in airports and stations -- but nothing about the status of that appeal. I’m guessing that they decided to accept the facts on the ground and quietly forget about any appeal -- which is probably the only real option they have.</li><li>And then this week, adding to those facts on the ground, the European CDC has dropped their transportation mask mandate recommendations. The difference, though, is the European CDC’s recommendations are just that, recommendations. The enforceable <em>rules</em> are made by each country, and Spain and Italy, many of the countries hardest hit by the initial wave of COVID, have extended their mask mandates to mid-June.</li><li>OK, I wasn’t going to say anything more about hotel housekeeping because <em>even I’m</em> bored with it, but then I ran across an <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/hotel-housekeepers-want-you-to-request-daily-room-cleaning-11652650925\">article</a> in the Wall Street Journal about how hotel housekeeping unions are pushing for a return to daily room service. Certainly a big part of the push is to drive more work, more hours for the union members. But also because rooms are dirtier and take longer to clean when they have gone a few days without service, especially with the current guest mix that’s still heavier with leisure travelers, who tend to have more people in the room than the road-warrior business traveler. As you’d guess, hotel owners disagree, but for changing reasons. Their arc of rationale has gone from the pre-pandemic “be green, save water, and we’ll give you an extra 500 points to skip housekeeping” to pandemic “we’re keeping everyone safe by staying out of your room” to the current “it’s your choice, and ‘labor shortage’”.  OK, that’s it. I’m <em>really </em>not going to talk about room cleaning anymore.</li><li>But I <em>will</em> talk about TSA checkpoint passenger volumes again. <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/09/27/podcast-179-high-tech-airport-lines-business-travel-still-missing/\">Back in September 2021</a>, the last time I scraped the numbers off the TSA <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/coronavirus/passenger-throughput\">website</a>, average daily passenger volumes were bouncing around 1.7 million, down 20% from the July summer peak of over 2 million and down 24% from pre-pandemic September 2019 numbers. Six months later, looking at the last month-and-a-half -- April to mid-May -- the average daily volume is 2.1 million and growing, and now just 10-12% off the April/May 2019 numbers. So if those TSA checkpoints and airplanes are feeling a bit more crowded, it’s because they are. Tough to remember back to my first post-lockdown flight in June 2020, when daily passenger volumes were 5-600,000 and the Southwest boarding agent said “There’s 40 of you on a plane with 175 seats. So everyone gets their own row.” I, in no way, want to go back to those times, but having a bit more plane space <em>was</em> nice.</li><li>I get <em>a lot</em> of emails from public relations firms. I read the subject lines of all of them because every once in a rare while, there’s something that catches my eye, like the pitch that led to last episode’s interview about Daytona Beach airport trying to survive in the shadow of the behemoth that is Orlando Int’l. So when I read the subject line “Study Finds that Frequent-Flyer Programs Increase Cost of Business Travel” in my inbox a few weeks back, I just had to click through. The study, <a href=\"https://www.informs.org/About-INFORMS/News-Room/Press-Releases/Study-Finds-that-Frequent-Flyer-Programs-Increase-Cost-of-Business-Travel\">just published</a> in the journal <em>Marketing Science</em> which I admit I don’t read as often as I should because I get tied up pouring through the CDC’s <em>Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report</em>, is titled <em>Reaching for Gold: Frequent-Flyer Status Incentives and Moral Hazard</em>, written by professors from University of Michigan and Duke business schools. According to the press release, after “(analyzing) the transactional database of a leading U.S.-based airline’s frequent-flyer program (that) included the histories and point accumulations of 3.5 million frequent-flyer program members during the 2010 and 2011 point-earning cycles” their main insights were -- “‘Points Members’ are More Likely to Choose Higher Fares When Not Paying for It” and “the closer frequent-flyer program members get to ‘elite status’ the more likely they are to choose an airline even when it may be more expensive than a competitor’s flight”. Hmm, that feels a bit “Dawn breaking over Marblehead”. How can you be researching frequent flier programs and act like you’ve never heard of (let alone done) a mileage run. Maybe the press release overly summarized the research and just isn’t communicating its subtlety. So I hit Google to find the <a href=\"https://yesimorhun.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/18/2018/11/Orhun_Guo_2018.pdf\">actual paper</a>. 29 pages of text and equations, and 15 pages of bibliography and data tables later -- nope, the press release was pretty much it. If the moral hazard of business travelers using their employer’s money to pay for more expensive flights to make status is eliminated, the paper estimates that companies would save at least 7% of their travel costs. Looking at 2019 data, the <a href=\"https://www.statista.com/statistics/562804/us-air-traffic-domestic-average-ticket-price/\">average cost of a walk-up US domestic ticket</a> -- one booked less than a week in advance, so the typical road warrior ticket -- is about $500. 7% is $35. I dunno, maybe some full-contact procurement guy will get excited about that $35 savings, but I know that any executive in his or her right mind thinking to themselves “Oh yes, pissing off the people who are jamming themselves in to coach seats and spending nights away from their family for $35 a trip” is a great idea.  Except at GM. I remember when frequent flier programs first came out, GM didn’t let their travelers keep the points from business trips, which led to all sorts of weird booking behavior. Until that policy died a quiet death a few years later. Kinda like this research -- I’m sure these professors are nice, smart people; but they gotta get out of their offices a bit more.</li><li>Bridge Music — <em><em>Bogi Beat Budapest </em></em>by KarmaHacke<a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/Loveshadow/26219\">r<em> </em></a> (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/hepepe/21074</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Moving to a Non-Hub Airport</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>One thing that kinda snuck up on me about our move to Nashville -- it’ll be the first time in almost 40 years that I haven’t lived in an airport hub city: Chicago with American and United at ORD; San Francisco with their United hub; Dallas when I signed up for American’s Advantage program my first day of work; Philadelphia with US Air, though I avoided them as much as I could; Detroit with Northwest; and then back to Chicago, now a 3-hub town after Southwest took over MDW after the big expansion.  </li><li>Nashville <em>was</em> a hub in the late ‘80’s/early ‘90’s -- well, a mini-hub, actually -- when American was playing around with their network. They built mini-hubs in Nashville, Raleigh/Durham, and San Jose. The experiment lasted maybe 10 years but never really made any money. I think the only thing of American left in those airports are Admirals Clubs; in Nashville, they’re down to 9% of the passenger volume.  Today, Nashville’s direct flight distribution looks like any non-hub airport -- the top 4 destinations are Big 3 hubs -- ATL, DEN, DFW, ORD -- with the fifth being MCO, thanks to all that Mouseketeer traffic.</li><li>The #1 travel tip on my and any other experienced traveler’s list is “fly non-stop” -- much easier from a hub airport, of course, and then your frequent flier strategy just falls out from there. If you live in Atlanta, you’re doubling down on Delta’s SkyMiles; realistically, there’s not another option. Non-hub? It could be just as straight-forward -- if your flight patterns take you primarily to one of those hub cities -- Chicago, Atlanta, San Francisco -- then your choice too is made for you. But if you’re in sales or consulting -- or maybe slouching toward retirement -- and your flight patterns are a bit more scattershot, then you have to think -- what’s my objective? -- flying non-stop for the shortest flight times and lowest probability of disruption; making elite status because the perks make my travel easier; or is it building up points to help fund my vacations?</li><li>Thinking about my consulting colleagues who flew out of non-hub airports every week, they were all about status. One guy I worked with lived in Ft Myers, Florida and was all in on Delta. Even when flying every week to projects in, say, Dallas or Chicago, he’d always skip the direct American flights and connect through Atlanta, killing the time from all those missed connections with drinks in Delta’s Sky Club -- which was free with his Diamond Medallion status.</li><li>My calculus is a little easier. One of the side benefits of flying <em>a lot</em> for over 35 years is that I stacked up enough mileage for lifetime mid-tier elite status on American and United. Not enough status to get into their clubs for free, but along with the usual early boarding and free bags, it’s gotten me free club entry to OneWorld and Star Alliance partners’ lounges -- which is very valuable when trying to navigate the rabbit warrens that are FRA and LHR after north Atlantic turbulence has screwed up your in-flight sleep plans.  If I didn’t already have these metal levels or I was in striking distance of a new level -- say close to the 2 million I’d need to jump from United Premier Gold to lifetime Platinum -- then I’d probably suck it up like my colleagues do, and get, say, the top tier United credit card with free club access for a place to sit out ORD, DEN, and IAH weather delays.</li><li>Those lifetime statuses let me step off the elite hamster wheel, so I’m now looking at non-stop flights and earning miles. Out of Nashville, Southwest has the most non-stop flights, so I’ll probably be flying them a fair bit. But while Southwest’s Companion Pass perk -- their “buy a ticket, get one free” top tier status is phenomenal, I can’t BOGO Southwest to Europe, so I need to be banking miles on one of the Big 3 so I can book on their OneWorld, Star Alliance, or SkyTeam partners -- which is where travel credit cards come back into the picture. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/09/19/podcast-167-6-months-on-why-keep-travel-cards/\">episode #167</a> in September 2020, we talked about people replacing their mileage cards with cash-back cards since no one was flying. But that trend is reverting to the mean and credit card companies have big slugs of mileage to dole out after buying them cheap in 2020 when the airlines needed real cash real fast. So my non-hub strategy -- fly direct when I can, leverage those hard-earned lifetime statuses when I can, and charge everything I can on a mileage-earning card -- including any drinks I may need to see me through those missed connections.</li><li>Bridge Music — <em><em>Bogi Beat Budapest </em></em>by KarmaHacke<a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/Loveshadow/26219\">r<em> </em></a> (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/hepepe/21074</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>What Makes a Great Taproom?</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>With a month left in Chicago, Irene and I have built a list of “Places to Hit Before Move” that’s some mix of greatest hits and places we’ve always wanted to go but have, for some reason or another, never gotten ‘round to. And then I have a separate list of Chicago taprooms I want to hit one more time -- Goose Island, Revolution Brewing, Off Color, Solemn Oath, Marz, Dovetail, and Metropolitan Brewing. Which then got me thinking -- why these and not other; what makes a good taproom for me?</li><li>First thing to do is to open up Untappd, the beer social networking app that\'s been my beer diary for over 11 years now.&nbsp; I’ve checked beer in at over 1,900 locations and the #1 location category is -- a brewery taproom. I scrolled through the list on the app and jotted down the ones I thought “Yeah, I’d like to go back there.”&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>Probably the smallest group is about unique brewery experiences; where I actually did the brewery tour and it was something more than just row after row of steel tanks. Cantillon in Brussels is everyone’s favorite; they send you off on your own guided with nothing but a paper brochure and tell you not to break anything. And then, after you’ve navigated coolships and barrel rooms, they pour you their amazing lambic beers. Or the original Lagunitas Brewery in Petaluma, CA where the tour guide tossed us just-filled IPA bottles he’d grabbed before they got to the packaging machine.&nbsp;</li><li>But except for these few exceptions, my favorite places have a wide beer selection (something more than 5 taps of IPAs) and/or a cool space and/or the chance to chat with the brewer. Labietis’ original place in Riga, Latvia hit the first two square on the head: a <em>diverse</em> beer menu -- a juniper beer inspired by Latvian folk songs, a wheat beer with meadowsweet, a lager with Latvian hops -- that’s located in the back courtyard of what looked like, in the fall of 2019, a block of now slightly derelict early 20th Century manor houses. A little closer to home on my Chicago list, Metropolitan Brewing does nothing but German-style lagers which are a perfect fit for their taproom patio that looks out on the north branch of the Chicago River.</li><li>Going to a brewery’s taproom is kinda like seeing a band in concert -- I’m going to get a fuller picture of that band than I will just hearing their hit songs on the radio or a Spotify playlist. Hitting a good taproom can be similar -- getting past the high-volume core beers to see what the brewer can really do. When we were in Santa Fe last month, I went out of my way to hit Rowley Farmhouse Ales because I really liked their range during our last visit in 2018. So of course I ordered the Teosinte, a funky, earthy, grassy sour made from Oaxacan green dent corn grown a couple hundred miles east, near the Texas-New Mexico border. It was an incredibly interesting beer. I wouldn’t buy a six-pack of it, but I was more than happy to have a glass of it.</li><li>But probably the best time I have at taprooms is when I get to talk to the brewer. During one of my trips last year to Nashville, I found myself an hour south in Columbia, TN, which bills itself “Muletown.” I missed the 2021 “Mule Day” festival; it was canceled due to COVID. Instead, I wound my way through a light industrial neighborhood hard against some freight train tracks billed as Columbia’s Art District to find Bad Idea Brewing. There were two other folks sitting at the bar; the brewer was behind it, serving. And we just got talking -- about the beer, about his brewery, about Columbia, about brewing in Columbia, about what kind of beer sells in Columbia. And through all that, taster glasses kept landing in front of me -- “try this,” “what do you think of that?” he’d ask. What was going to be a quick side trip for a beer turned into a nice afternoon of conversation… and beer.</li><li>I guess there’s one more thing that can make for a great taproom, or maybe more of a great taproom experience and that is -- it took me to a part of a city that I wouldn’t have otherwise gone. I talked a bit about this in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/04/10/podcast-174-how-the-pros-plan-their-taproom-tourism/\">episode #174</a> when I talked with Rob Cheshire of the UK podcast This Week in Craft Beer about planning taproom visits. Navigating the maze of a Beijing hutong to find Great Leap Brewing, or exiting a Paris Metro stop in a North African neighborhood on my way to Deck &amp; Donohue, or riding an e-scooter through a questionable neighborhood in northeast DC to Right Proper Brewing. These three were fine places with solid beers, but they’re more memorable for the trip to find them than for the places themselves.</li><li>But you can’t always tell this from Google search. So if you go to the show notes on travelcommons.com you’ll find my list of&nbsp; “Yeah, I’d like to go back there” taprooms.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #187</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social  -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_186.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #187 — Moving to a Non-Hub Airport; What Makes A Great Taproom?','','inherit','closed','closed','','4145-revision-v1','','','2022-05-25 17:30:43','2022-05-25 22:30:43','',4145,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4149',0,'revision','',0),
(4150,1,'2022-05-26 10:10:20','2022-05-26 15:10:20','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/IMG_4803.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/IMG_4803-300x300.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" alt=\"Taproom Draft Beer Taps Arranged as a Smiley Face\"></a>I\'m Happy To See You Too![/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>The last episode recording in Chicago before we relocate the TravelCommons studios, and our lives, down to Nashville. We close out our threads on in-flight mask mandates and hotel housekeeping, and critique an academic paper about the moral hazard of frequent flier elite status. I talk through the changes I\'ll have to make when flying out of a non-hub airport. And then, as I\'m making a list of the Chicago breweries I want to re-visit before leaving, I think through the characteristics that makes a taproom great. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_186.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #187: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you, for the last time, from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois because we’re packing everything up and moving the 500 miles down I-65 to Nashville at the end of June. After 25 years here, we decided we needed a change of scenery. So with all the packing and everything, I don’t see a June episode in the offing.&nbsp;</li><li>Way back when I was doing heavy international travel -- Chicago on Monday, Toronto on Tuesday, New York to London on Wednesday, Zurich on Thursday, getting back to Chicago at Friday midnight -- what then seemed like necessary travel, but now, looking back on it, seems like stupid travel -- people would ask me my favorite city. I thought about it a lot, but would always end up with the same answer -- Chicago. And not just because it was my home; I was offering up that answer when we lived in Philadelphia. No, my explanation to the raised eyebrows that answer often generated was that Chicago was the right size -- big enough to support a wide range of interesting stuff (sports, culture, restaurants, microbreweries), but not so big that you couldn’t get your arms around it, and with enough Midwest pragmatism, from people moving in from Indiana and Iowa and Minnesota and Wisconsin, to keep everything grounded, to keep it from getting too wacky. And to their “But what about the weather?” question I’d say “yes, it can be -10° in Chicago in January, but it can be +110° in Phoenix in August; most every place has 3 months of lousy weather (save for maybe San Diego) sometime during the year; different people choose the 3 months they can endure.”&nbsp;</li><li>But over the past few years, I realized my answer about Chicago didn’t hold up any more -- not about the weather, the winters still suck; it’s that the pragmatism seems to be gone, with violent crime -- robberies, shootings, carjackings -- and definitely not-pragmatic local government decisions filling the void. It has started to feel like a replay of the 1970’s, which were not a great time in Chicago.&nbsp; Now, I don’t think it’s permanent. It’s a pendulum. Just like the city came back from a bad stretch in the ‘70’s to be a great place in the mid/late ‘80’s. It’ll happen again; I just don’t want to hang around for the low point. And according to the half-dozen movers we talked to, we’re not the only ones.</li><li>Bridge Music — <em><em>Bogi Beat Budapest </em></em>by KarmaHacke<a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/Loveshadow/26219\">r<em> </em></a> (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/hepepe/21074</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A quick public service announcement -- the COVID Real ID extension expires in less than a year. <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/news/press/releases/2021/04/27/dhs-announces-extension-real-id-full-enforcement-deadline\">According to the TSA</a>, “Beginning May 3, 2023, every air traveler 18 years of age and older will need a REAL ID-compliant driver’s license or identification card… at airport security checkpoints for domestic air travel.”  Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/01/16/podcast-183-covid-test-anxiety-michelin-food-adventures/\">episode #183</a> in January, I talked about getting a Real ID version of my Illinois driver’s license when I had to renew it. No additional cost and maybe 3 additional minutes of time. But if you can’t pick up a Real ID driver’s license before next May, you’ll have to remember to take along <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/travel/security-screening/identification\">your passport or your Global Entry card</a>.</li><li>In the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/04/21/podcast-186-mask-mandate-scramble-small-airport-survival/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #186 — Mask Mandate Scramble; Small Airport Survival\">last episode</a>, we walked through the abrupt end of the US CDC’s transportation mask mandate -- on planes, buses, trains,....  That news cycle lasted right at about a week, the last entry being the CDC asking the Dept of Justice to appeal the federal judge’s ruling that struck down the mandate that they had extended for 2 weeks to May 3rd. On May 3rd, the CDC posted a <a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2022/s0503-covid-19-travel.html\">press release reiterating their <em>recommendation</em></a> that everyone aged 2 and older wear masks on planes and trains, and in airports and stations -- but nothing about the status of that appeal. I’m guessing that they decided to accept the facts on the ground and quietly forget about any appeal -- which is probably the only real option they have.</li><li>And then this week, adding to those facts on the ground, the European CDC has dropped their transportation mask mandate recommendations. The difference, though, is the European CDC’s recommendations are just that, recommendations. The enforceable <em>rules</em> are made by each country, and Spain and Italy, many of the countries hardest hit by the initial wave of COVID, have extended their mask mandates to mid-June.</li><li>OK, I wasn’t going to say anything more about hotel housekeeping because <em>even I’m</em> bored with it, but then I ran across an <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/hotel-housekeepers-want-you-to-request-daily-room-cleaning-11652650925\">article</a> in the Wall Street Journal about how hotel housekeeping unions are pushing for a return to daily room service. Certainly a big part of the push is to drive more work, more hours for the union members. But also because rooms are dirtier and take longer to clean when they have gone a few days without service, especially with the current guest mix that’s still heavier with leisure travelers, who tend to have more people in the room than the road-warrior business traveler. As you’d guess, hotel owners disagree, but for changing reasons. Their arc of rationale has gone from the pre-pandemic “be green, save water, and we’ll give you an extra 500 points to skip housekeeping” to pandemic “we’re keeping everyone safe by staying out of your room” to the current “it’s your choice, and ‘labor shortage’”.  OK, that’s it. I’m <em>really </em>not going to talk about room cleaning anymore.</li><li>But I <em>will</em> talk about TSA checkpoint passenger volumes again. <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/09/27/podcast-179-high-tech-airport-lines-business-travel-still-missing/\">Back in September 2021</a>, the last time I scraped the numbers off the TSA <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/coronavirus/passenger-throughput\">website</a>, average daily passenger volumes were bouncing around 1.7 million, down 20% from the July summer peak of over 2 million and down 24% from pre-pandemic September 2019 numbers. Six months later, looking at the last month-and-a-half -- April to mid-May -- the average daily volume is 2.1 million and growing, and now just 10-12% off the April/May 2019 numbers. So if those TSA checkpoints and airplanes are feeling a bit more crowded, it’s because they are. Tough to remember back to my first post-lockdown flight in June 2020, when daily passenger volumes were 5-600,000 and the Southwest boarding agent said “There’s 40 of you on a plane with 175 seats. So everyone gets their own row.” I, in no way, want to go back to those times, but having a bit more plane space <em>was</em> nice.</li><li>I get <em>a lot</em> of emails from public relations firms. I read the subject lines of all of them because every once in a rare while, there’s something that catches my eye, like the pitch that led to last episode’s interview about Daytona Beach airport trying to survive in the shadow of the behemoth that is Orlando Int’l. So when I read the subject line “Study Finds that Frequent-Flyer Programs Increase Cost of Business Travel” in my inbox a few weeks back, I just had to click through. The study, <a href=\"https://www.informs.org/About-INFORMS/News-Room/Press-Releases/Study-Finds-that-Frequent-Flyer-Programs-Increase-Cost-of-Business-Travel\">just published</a> in the journal <em>Marketing Science</em> which I admit I don’t read as often as I should because I get tied up pouring through the CDC’s <em>Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report</em>, is titled <em>Reaching for Gold: Frequent-Flyer Status Incentives and Moral Hazard</em>, written by professors from University of Michigan and Duke business schools. According to the press release, after “(analyzing) the transactional database of a leading U.S.-based airline’s frequent-flyer program (that) included the histories and point accumulations of 3.5 million frequent-flyer program members during the 2010 and 2011 point-earning cycles” their main insights were -- “‘Points Members’ are More Likely to Choose Higher Fares When Not Paying for It” and “the closer frequent-flyer program members get to ‘elite status’ the more likely they are to choose an airline even when it may be more expensive than a competitor’s flight”. Hmm, that feels a bit “Dawn breaking over Marblehead”. How can you be researching frequent flier programs and act like you’ve never heard of (let alone done) a mileage run. Maybe the press release overly summarized the research and just isn’t communicating its subtlety. So I hit Google to find the <a href=\"https://yesimorhun.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/18/2018/11/Orhun_Guo_2018.pdf\">actual paper</a>. 29 pages of text and equations, and 15 pages of bibliography and data tables later -- nope, the press release was pretty much it. If the moral hazard of business travelers using their employer’s money to pay for more expensive flights to make status is eliminated, the paper estimates that companies would save at least 7% of their travel costs. Looking at 2019 data, the <a href=\"https://www.statista.com/statistics/562804/us-air-traffic-domestic-average-ticket-price/\">average cost of a walk-up US domestic ticket</a> -- one booked less than a week in advance, so the typical road warrior ticket -- is about $500. 7% is $35. I dunno, maybe some full-contact procurement guy will get excited about that $35 savings, but I know that any executive in his or her right mind thinking to themselves “Oh yes, pissing off the people who are jamming themselves in to coach seats and spending nights away from their family for $35 a trip” is a great idea.  Except at GM. I remember when frequent flier programs first came out, GM didn’t let their travelers keep the points from business trips, which led to all sorts of weird booking behavior. Until that policy died a quiet death a few years later. Kinda like this research -- I’m sure these professors are nice, smart people; but they gotta get out of their offices a bit more.</li><li>Bridge Music — <em><em>Bogi Beat Budapest </em></em>by KarmaHacke<a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/Loveshadow/26219\">r<em> </em></a> (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/hepepe/21074</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Moving to a Non-Hub Airport</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>One thing that kinda snuck up on me about our move to Nashville -- it’ll be the first time in almost 40 years that I haven’t lived in an airport hub city: Chicago with American and United at ORD; San Francisco with their United hub; Dallas when I signed up for American’s Advantage program my first day of work; Philadelphia with US Air, though I avoided them as much as I could; Detroit with Northwest; and then back to Chicago, now a 3-hub town after Southwest took over MDW after the big expansion.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>Nashville <em>was</em> a hub in the late ‘80’s/early ‘90’s -- well, a mini-hub, actually -- when American was playing around with their network. They built mini-hubs in Nashville, Raleigh/Durham, and San Jose. The experiment lasted maybe 10 years but never really made any money. I think the only thing of American left in those airports are Admirals Clubs; in Nashville, they’re down to 9% of the passenger volume.&nbsp; Today, Nashville’s direct flight distribution looks like any non-hub airport -- the top 4 destinations are Big 3 hubs -- ATL, DEN, DFW, ORD -- with the fifth being MCO, thanks to all that Mouseketeer traffic.</li><li>The #1 travel tip on my and any other experienced traveler’s list is “fly non-stop” -- much easier from a hub airport, of course, and then your frequent flier strategy just falls out from there. If you live in Atlanta, you’re doubling down on Delta’s SkyMiles; realistically, there’s not another option. Non-hub? It could be just as straight-forward -- if your flight patterns take you primarily to one of those hub cities -- Chicago, Atlanta, San Francisco -- then your choice too is made for you. But if you’re in sales or consulting -- or maybe slouching toward retirement -- and your flight patterns are a bit more scattershot, then you have to think -- what’s my objective? -- flying non-stop for the shortest flight times and lowest probability of disruption; making elite status because the perks make my travel easier; or is it building up points to help fund my vacations?</li><li>Thinking about my consulting colleagues who flew out of non-hub airports every week, they were all about status. One guy I worked with lived in Ft Myers, Florida and was all in on Delta. Even when flying every week to projects in, say, Dallas or Chicago, he’d always skip the direct American flights and connect through Atlanta, killing the time from all those missed connections with drinks in Delta’s Sky Club -- which was free with his Diamond Medallion status.</li><li>My calculus is a little easier. One of the side benefits of flying <em>a lot</em> for over 35 years is that I stacked up enough mileage for lifetime mid-tier elite status on American and United. Not enough status to get into their clubs for free, but along with the usual early boarding and free bags, it’s gotten me free club entry to OneWorld and Star Alliance partners’ lounges -- which is very valuable when trying to navigate the rabbit warrens that are FRA and LHR after north Atlantic turbulence has screwed up your in-flight sleep plans.&nbsp; If I didn’t already have these metal levels or I was in striking distance of a new level -- say close to the 2 million I’d need to jump from United Premier Gold to lifetime Platinum -- then I’d probably suck it up like my colleagues do, and get, say, the top tier United credit card with free club access for a place to sit out ORD, DEN, and IAH weather delays.</li><li>Those lifetime statuses let me step off the elite hamster wheel, so I’m now looking at non-stop flights and earning miles. Out of Nashville, Southwest has the most non-stop flights, so I’ll probably be flying them a fair bit. But while Southwest’s Companion Pass perk -- their “buy a ticket, get one free” top tier status is phenomenal, I can’t BOGO Southwest to Europe, so I need to be banking miles on one of the Big 3 so I can book on their OneWorld, Star Alliance, or SkyTeam partners -- which is where travel credit cards come back into the picture. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/09/19/podcast-167-6-months-on-why-keep-travel-cards/\">episode #167</a> in September 2020, we talked about people replacing their mileage cards with cash-back cards since no one was flying. But that trend is reverting to the mean and credit card companies have big slugs of mileage to dole out after buying them cheap in 2020 when the airlines needed real cash real fast. So my non-hub strategy -- fly direct when I can, leverage those hard-earned lifetime statuses when I can, and charge everything I can on a mileage-earning card -- including any drinks I may need to see me through those missed connections.</li><li>Bridge Music — <em><em>Bogi Beat Budapest </em></em>by KarmaHacke<a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/Loveshadow/26219\">r<em> </em></a> (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/hepepe/21074</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>What Makes a Great Taproom?</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>With a month left in Chicago, Irene and I have built a list of “Places to Hit Before Move” that’s some mix of greatest hits and places we’ve always wanted to go but have, for some reason or another, never gotten ‘round to. And then I have a separate list of Chicago taprooms I want to hit one more time -- Goose Island, Revolution Brewing, Off Color, Solemn Oath, Marz, Dovetail, and Metropolitan Brewing. Which then got me thinking -- why these and not other; what makes a good taproom for me?</li><li>First thing to do is to open up Untappd, the beer social networking app that\'s been my beer diary for over 11 years now.&nbsp; I’ve checked beer in at over 1,900 locations and the #1 location category is -- a brewery taproom. I scrolled through the list on the app and jotted down the ones I thought “Yeah, I’d like to go back there.”&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>Probably the smallest group is about unique brewery experiences; where I actually did the brewery tour and it was something more than just row after row of steel tanks. Cantillon in Brussels is everyone’s favorite; they send you off on your own guided with nothing but a paper brochure and tell you not to break anything. And then, after you’ve navigated coolships and barrel rooms, they pour you their amazing lambic beers. Or the original Lagunitas Brewery in Petaluma, CA where the tour guide tossed us just-filled IPA bottles he’d grabbed before they got to the packaging machine.&nbsp;</li><li>But except for these few exceptions, my favorite places have a wide beer selection (something more than 5 taps of IPAs) and/or a cool space and/or the chance to chat with the brewer. Labietis’ original place in Riga, Latvia hit the first two square on the head: a <em>diverse</em> beer menu -- a juniper beer inspired by Latvian folk songs, a wheat beer with meadowsweet, a lager with Latvian hops -- that’s located in the back courtyard of what looked like, in the fall of 2019, a block of now slightly derelict early 20th Century manor houses. A little closer to home on my Chicago list, Metropolitan Brewing does nothing but German-style lagers which are a perfect fit for their taproom patio that looks out on the north branch of the Chicago River.</li><li>Going to a brewery’s taproom is kinda like seeing a band in concert -- I’m going to get a fuller picture of that band than I will just hearing their hit songs on the radio or a Spotify playlist. Hitting a good taproom can be similar -- getting past the high-volume core beers to see what the brewer can really do. When we were in Santa Fe last month, I went out of my way to hit Rowley Farmhouse Ales because I really liked their range during our last visit in 2018. So of course I ordered the Teosinte, a funky, earthy, grassy sour made from Oaxacan green dent corn grown a couple hundred miles east, near the Texas-New Mexico border. It was an incredibly interesting beer. I wouldn’t buy a six-pack of it, but I was more than happy to have a glass of it.</li><li>But probably the best time I have at taprooms is when I get to talk to the brewer. During one of my trips last year to Nashville, I found myself an hour south in Columbia, TN, which bills itself “Muletown.” I missed the 2021 “Mule Day” festival; it was canceled due to COVID. Instead, I wound my way through a light industrial neighborhood hard against some freight train tracks billed as Columbia’s Art District to find Bad Idea Brewing. There were two other folks sitting at the bar; the brewer was behind it, serving. And we just got talking -- about the beer, about his brewery, about Columbia, about brewing in Columbia, about what kind of beer sells in Columbia. And through all that, taster glasses kept landing in front of me -- “try this,” “what do you think of that?” he’d ask. What was going to be a quick side trip for a beer turned into a nice afternoon of conversation… and beer.</li><li>I guess there’s one more thing that can make for a great taproom, or maybe more of a great taproom experience and that is -- it took me to a part of a city that I wouldn’t have otherwise gone. I talked a bit about this in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/04/10/podcast-174-how-the-pros-plan-their-taproom-tourism/\">episode #174</a> when I talked with Rob Cheshire of the UK podcast This Week in Craft Beer about planning taproom visits. Navigating the maze of a Beijing hutong to find Great Leap Brewing, or exiting a Paris Metro stop in a North African neighborhood on my way to Deck &amp; Donohue, or riding an e-scooter through a questionable neighborhood in northeast DC to Right Proper Brewing. These three were fine places with solid beers, but they’re more memorable for the trip to find them than for the places themselves.</li><li>But you can’t always tell this from Google search. So if you go to the show notes on travelcommons.com you’ll find my list of&nbsp; “Yeah, I’d like to go back there” taprooms.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #187</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_186.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #187 — Moving to a Non-Hub Airport; What Makes A Great Taproom?','','inherit','closed','closed','','4145-revision-v1','','','2022-05-26 10:10:20','2022-05-26 15:10:20','',4145,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4150',0,'revision','',0),
(4151,1,'2022-05-26 10:16:08','2022-05-26 15:16:08','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/IMG_4803.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/IMG_4803-300x300.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" alt=\"Taproom Draft Beer Taps Arranged as a Smiley Face\"></a>I\'m Happy To See You Too![/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>The last episode recording in Chicago before we relocate the TravelCommons studios, and our lives, down to Nashville. We close out our threads on in-flight mask mandates and hotel housekeeping, and critique an academic paper about the moral hazard of frequent flier elite status. I talk through the changes I\'ll have to make when flying out of a non-hub airport. And then, as I\'m making a list of the Chicago breweries I want to re-visit before leaving, I think through the characteristics that makes a taproom great. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_186.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #187: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you, for the last time, from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois because we’re packing everything up and moving the 500 miles down I-65 to Nashville at the end of June. After 25 years here, we decided we needed a change of scenery. So with all the packing and everything, I don’t see a June episode in the offing.&nbsp;</li><li>Way back when I was doing heavy international travel -- Chicago on Monday, Toronto on Tuesday, New York to London on Wednesday, Zurich on Thursday, getting back to Chicago at Friday midnight -- what then seemed like necessary travel, but now, looking back on it, seems like stupid travel -- people would ask me my favorite city. I thought about it a lot, but would always end up with the same answer -- Chicago. And not just because it was my home; I was offering up that answer when we lived in Philadelphia. No, my explanation to the raised eyebrows that answer often generated was that Chicago was the right size -- big enough to support a wide range of interesting stuff (sports, culture, restaurants, microbreweries), but not so big that you couldn’t get your arms around it, and with enough Midwest pragmatism, from people moving in from Indiana and Iowa and Minnesota and Wisconsin, to keep everything grounded, to keep it from getting too wacky. And to their “But what about the weather?” question I’d say “yes, it can be -10° in Chicago in January, but it can be +110° in Phoenix in August; most every place has 3 months of lousy weather (save for maybe San Diego) sometime during the year; different people choose the 3 months they can endure.”&nbsp;</li><li>But over the past few years, I realized my answer about Chicago didn’t hold up any more -- not about the weather, the winters still suck; it’s that the pragmatism seems to be gone, with violent crime -- robberies, shootings, carjackings -- and definitely not-pragmatic local government decisions filling the void. It has started to feel like a replay of the 1970’s, which were not a great time in Chicago.&nbsp; Now, I don’t think it’s permanent. It’s a pendulum. Just like the city came back from a bad stretch in the ‘70’s to be a great place in the mid/late ‘80’s. It’ll happen again; I just don’t want to hang around for the low point. And according to the half-dozen movers we talked to, we’re not the only ones.</li><li>Bridge Music — <em><em>Bogi Beat Budapest </em></em>by KarmaHacke<a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/Loveshadow/26219\">r<em> </em></a> (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/hepepe/21074</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A quick public service announcement -- the COVID Real ID extension expires in less than a year. <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/news/press/releases/2021/04/27/dhs-announces-extension-real-id-full-enforcement-deadline\">According to the TSA</a>, “Beginning May 3, 2023, every air traveler 18 years of age and older will need a REAL ID-compliant driver’s license or identification card… at airport security checkpoints for domestic air travel.”  Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/01/16/podcast-183-covid-test-anxiety-michelin-food-adventures/\">episode #183</a> in January, I talked about getting a Real ID version of my Illinois driver’s license when I had to renew it. No additional cost and maybe 3 additional minutes of time. But if you can’t pick up a Real ID driver’s license before next May, you’ll have to remember to take along <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/travel/security-screening/identification\">your passport or your Global Entry card</a>.</li><li>In the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/04/21/podcast-186-mask-mandate-scramble-small-airport-survival/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #186 — Mask Mandate Scramble; Small Airport Survival\">last episode</a>, we walked through the abrupt end of the US CDC’s transportation mask mandate -- on planes, buses, trains,....  That news cycle lasted right at about a week, the last entry being the CDC asking the Dept of Justice to appeal the federal judge’s ruling that struck down the mandate that they had extended for 2 weeks to May 3rd. On May 3rd, the CDC posted a <a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2022/s0503-covid-19-travel.html\">press release reiterating their <em>recommendation</em></a> that everyone aged 2 and older wear masks on planes and trains, and in airports and stations -- but nothing about the status of that appeal. I’m guessing that they decided to accept the facts on the ground and quietly forget about any appeal -- which is probably the only real option they have.</li><li>And then this week, adding to those facts on the ground, the European CDC has dropped their transportation mask mandate recommendations. The difference, though, is the European CDC’s recommendations are just that, recommendations. The enforceable <em>rules</em> are made by each country, and Spain and Italy, many of the countries hardest hit by the initial wave of COVID, have extended their mask mandates to mid-June.</li><li>OK, I wasn’t going to say anything more about hotel housekeeping because <em>even I’m</em> bored with it, but then I ran across an <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/hotel-housekeepers-want-you-to-request-daily-room-cleaning-11652650925\">article</a> in the Wall Street Journal about how hotel housekeeping unions are pushing for a return to daily room service. Certainly a big part of the push is to drive more work, more hours for the union members. But also because rooms are dirtier and take longer to clean when they have gone a few days without service, especially with the current guest mix that’s still heavier with leisure travelers, who tend to have more people in the room than the road-warrior business traveler. As you’d guess, hotel owners disagree, but for changing reasons. Their arc of rationale has gone from the pre-pandemic “be green, save water, and we’ll give you an extra 500 points to skip housekeeping” to pandemic “we’re keeping everyone safe by staying out of your room” to the current “it’s your choice, and ‘labor shortage’”.  OK, that’s it. I’m <em>really </em>not going to talk about room cleaning anymore.</li><li>But I <em>will</em> talk about TSA checkpoint passenger volumes again. <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/09/27/podcast-179-high-tech-airport-lines-business-travel-still-missing/\">Back in September 2021</a>, the last time I scraped the numbers off the TSA <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/coronavirus/passenger-throughput\">website</a>, average daily passenger volumes were bouncing around 1.7 million, down 20% from the July summer peak of over 2 million and down 24% from pre-pandemic September 2019 numbers. Six months later, looking at the last month-and-a-half -- April to mid-May -- the average daily volume is 2.1 million and growing, and now just 10-12% off the April/May 2019 numbers. So if those TSA checkpoints and airplanes are feeling a bit more crowded, it’s because they are. Tough to remember back to my first post-lockdown flight in June 2020, when daily passenger volumes were 5-600,000 and the Southwest boarding agent said “There’s 40 of you on a plane with 175 seats. So everyone gets their own row.” I, in no way, want to go back to those times, but having a bit more plane space <em>was</em> nice.</li><li>I get <em>a lot</em> of emails from public relations firms. I read the subject lines of all of them because every once in a rare while, there’s something that catches my eye, like the pitch that led to last episode’s interview about Daytona Beach airport trying to survive in the shadow of the behemoth that is Orlando Int’l. So when I read the subject line “Study Finds that Frequent-Flyer Programs Increase Cost of Business Travel” in my inbox a few weeks back, I just had to click through. The study, <a href=\"https://www.informs.org/About-INFORMS/News-Room/Press-Releases/Study-Finds-that-Frequent-Flyer-Programs-Increase-Cost-of-Business-Travel\">just published</a> in the journal <em>Marketing Science</em> which I admit I don’t read as often as I should because I get tied up pouring through the CDC’s <em>Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report</em>, is titled <em>Reaching for Gold: Frequent-Flyer Status Incentives and Moral Hazard</em>, written by professors from University of Michigan and Duke business schools. According to the press release, after “(analyzing) the transactional database of a leading U.S.-based airline’s frequent-flyer program (that) included the histories and point accumulations of 3.5 million frequent-flyer program members during the 2010 and 2011 point-earning cycles” their main insights were -- “‘Points Members’ are More Likely to Choose Higher Fares When Not Paying for It” and “the closer frequent-flyer program members get to ‘elite status’ the more likely they are to choose an airline even when it may be more expensive than a competitor’s flight”. Hmm, that feels a bit “Dawn breaking over Marblehead”. How can you be researching frequent flier programs and act like you’ve never heard of (let alone done) a mileage run. Maybe the press release overly summarized the research and just isn’t communicating its subtlety. So I hit Google to find the <a href=\"https://yesimorhun.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/18/2018/11/Orhun_Guo_2018.pdf\">actual paper</a>. 29 pages of text and equations, and 15 pages of bibliography and data tables later -- nope, the press release was pretty much it. If the moral hazard of business travelers using their employer’s money to pay for more expensive flights to make status is eliminated, the paper estimates that companies would save at least 7% of their travel costs. Looking at 2019 data, the <a href=\"https://www.statista.com/statistics/562804/us-air-traffic-domestic-average-ticket-price/\">average cost of a walk-up US domestic ticket</a> -- one booked less than a week in advance, so the typical road warrior ticket -- is about $500. 7% is $35. I dunno, maybe some full-contact procurement guy will get excited about that $35 savings, but I know that any executive in his or her right mind thinking to themselves “Oh yes, pissing off the people who are jamming themselves in to coach seats and spending nights away from their family for $35 a trip” is a great idea.  Except at GM. I remember when frequent flier programs first came out, GM didn’t let their travelers keep the points from business trips, which led to all sorts of weird booking behavior. Until that policy died a quiet death a few years later. Kinda like this research -- I’m sure these professors are nice, smart people; but they gotta get out of their offices a bit more.</li><li>Bridge Music — <em><em>Bogi Beat Budapest </em></em>by KarmaHacke<a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/Loveshadow/26219\">r<em> </em></a> (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/hepepe/21074</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Moving to a Non-Hub Airport</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>One thing that kinda snuck up on me about our move to Nashville -- it’ll be the first time in almost 40 years that I haven’t lived in an airport hub city: Chicago with American and United at ORD; San Francisco with their United hub; Dallas when I signed up for American’s Advantage program my first day of work; Philadelphia with US Air, though I avoided them as much as I could; Detroit with Northwest; and then back to Chicago, now a 3-hub town after Southwest took over MDW after the big expansion.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>Nashville <em>was</em> a hub in the late ‘80’s/early ‘90’s -- well, a mini-hub, actually -- when American was playing around with their network. They built mini-hubs in Nashville, Raleigh/Durham, and San Jose. The experiment lasted maybe 10 years but never really made any money. I think the only thing of American left in those airports are Admirals Clubs; in Nashville, they’re down to 9% of the passenger volume.&nbsp; Today, Nashville’s direct flight distribution looks like any non-hub airport -- the top 4 destinations are Big 3 hubs -- ATL, DEN, DFW, ORD -- with the fifth being MCO, thanks to all that Mouseketeer traffic.</li><li>The #1 travel tip on my and any other experienced traveler’s list is “fly non-stop” -- much easier from a hub airport, of course, and then your frequent flier strategy just falls out from there. If you live in Atlanta, you’re doubling down on Delta’s SkyMiles; realistically, there’s not another option. Non-hub? It could be just as straight-forward -- if your flight patterns take you primarily to one of those hub cities -- Chicago, Atlanta, San Francisco -- then your choice too is made for you. But if you’re in sales or consulting -- or maybe slouching toward retirement -- and your flight patterns are a bit more scattershot, then you have to think -- what’s my objective? -- flying non-stop for the shortest flight times and lowest probability of disruption; making elite status because the perks make my travel easier; or is it building up points to help fund my vacations?</li><li>Thinking about my consulting colleagues who flew out of non-hub airports every week, they were all about status. One guy I worked with lived in Ft Myers, Florida and was all in on Delta. Even when flying every week to projects in, say, Dallas or Chicago, he’d always skip the direct American flights and connect through Atlanta, killing the time from all those missed connections with drinks in Delta’s Sky Club -- which was free with his Diamond Medallion status.</li><li>My calculus is a little easier. One of the side benefits of flying <em>a lot</em> for over 35 years is that I stacked up enough mileage for lifetime mid-tier elite status on American and United. Not enough status to get into their clubs for free, but along with the usual early boarding and free bags, it’s gotten me free club entry to OneWorld and Star Alliance partners’ lounges -- which is very valuable when trying to navigate the rabbit warrens that are FRA and LHR after north Atlantic turbulence has screwed up your in-flight sleep plans.&nbsp; If I didn’t already have these metal levels or I was in striking distance of a new level -- say close to the 2 million I’d need to jump from United Premier Gold to lifetime Platinum -- then I’d probably suck it up like my colleagues do, and get, say, the top tier United credit card with free club access for a place to sit out ORD, DEN, and IAH weather delays.</li><li>Those lifetime statuses let me step off the elite hamster wheel, so I’m now looking at non-stop flights and earning miles. Out of Nashville, Southwest has the most non-stop flights, so I’ll probably be flying them a fair bit. But while Southwest’s Companion Pass perk -- their “buy a ticket, get one free” top tier status is phenomenal, I can’t BOGO Southwest to Europe, so I need to be banking miles on one of the Big 3 so I can book on their OneWorld, Star Alliance, or SkyTeam partners -- which is where travel credit cards come back into the picture. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/09/19/podcast-167-6-months-on-why-keep-travel-cards/\">episode #167</a> in September 2020, we talked about people replacing their mileage cards with cash-back cards since no one was flying. But that trend is reverting to the mean and credit card companies have big slugs of mileage to dole out after buying them cheap in 2020 when the airlines needed real cash real fast. So my non-hub strategy -- fly direct when I can, leverage those hard-earned lifetime statuses when I can, and charge everything I can on a mileage-earning card -- including any drinks I may need to see me through those missed connections.</li><li>Bridge Music — <em><em>Bogi Beat Budapest </em></em>by KarmaHacke<a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/Loveshadow/26219\">r<em> </em></a> (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/hepepe/21074</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>What Makes a Great Taproom?</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>With a month left in Chicago, Irene and I have built a list of “Places to Hit Before Move” that’s some mix of greatest hits and places we’ve always wanted to go but have, for some reason or another, never gotten ‘round to. And then I have a separate list of Chicago taprooms I want to hit one more time -- Goose Island, Revolution Brewing, Off Color, Solemn Oath, Marz, Dovetail, and Metropolitan Brewing. Which then got me thinking -- why these and not other; what makes a good taproom for me?</li><li>First thing to do is to open up Untappd, the beer social networking app that\'s been my beer diary for over 11 years now.  I’ve checked beer in at over 1,900 locations and the #1 location category is -- a brewery taproom. I scrolled through the list on the app and jotted down the ones I thought “Yeah, I’d like to go back there.”  </li><li>Probably the smallest group is about unique brewery experiences; where I actually did the brewery tour and it was something more than just row after row of steel tanks. Cantillon in Brussels is everyone’s favorite; they send you off on your own guided with nothing but a paper brochure and tell you not to break anything. And then, after you’ve navigated coolships and barrel rooms, they pour you their amazing lambic beers. Or the original Lagunitas Brewery in Petaluma, CA where the tour guide tossed us just-filled IPA bottles he’d grabbed before they got to the packaging machine. </li><li>But except for these few exceptions, my favorite places have a wide beer selection (something more than 5 taps of IPAs) and/or a cool space and/or the chance to chat with the brewer. Labietis’ original place in Riga, Latvia hit the first two square on the head: a <em>diverse</em> beer menu -- a juniper beer inspired by Latvian folk songs, a wheat beer with meadowsweet, a lager with Latvian hops -- that’s located in the back courtyard of what looked like, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/11/30/podcast-157-notes-from-the-baltics-riga-latvia-and-tallinn-estonia/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #157 — Notes from the Baltics: Riga, Latvia and Tallinn, Estonia\">the fall of 2019</a>, a block of now slightly derelict early 20th Century manor houses. A little closer to home on my Chicago list, Metropolitan Brewing does nothing but German-style lagers which are a perfect fit for their taproom patio that looks out on the north branch of the Chicago River.</li><li>Going to a brewery’s taproom is kinda like seeing a band in concert -- I’m going to get a fuller picture of that band than I will just hearing their hit songs on the radio or a Spotify playlist. Hitting a good taproom can be similar -- getting past the high-volume core beers to see what the brewer can really do. When we were in Santa Fe last month, I went out of my way to hit Rowley Farmhouse Ales because I really liked their range during our last visit in 2018. So of course I ordered the Teosinte, a funky, earthy, grassy sour made from Oaxacan green dent corn grown a couple hundred miles east, near the Texas-New Mexico border. It was an incredibly interesting beer. I wouldn’t buy a six-pack of it, but I was more than happy to have a glass of it.</li><li>But probably the best time I have at taprooms is when I get to talk to the brewer. During one of my trips last year to Nashville, I found myself an hour south in Columbia, TN, which bills itself “Muletown.” I missed the 2021 “Mule Day” festival; it was canceled due to COVID. Instead, I wound my way through a light industrial neighborhood hard against some freight train tracks billed as Columbia’s Art District to find Bad Idea Brewing. There were two other folks sitting at the bar; the brewer was behind it, serving. And we just got talking -- about the beer, about his brewery, about Columbia, about brewing in Columbia, about what kind of beer sells in Columbia. And through all that, taster glasses kept landing in front of me -- “try this,” “what do you think of that?” he’d ask. What was going to be a quick side trip for a beer turned into a nice afternoon of conversation… and beer.</li><li>I guess there’s one more thing that can make for a great taproom, or maybe more of a great taproom experience and that is -- it took me to a part of a city that I wouldn’t have otherwise gone. I talked a bit about this in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/04/10/podcast-174-how-the-pros-plan-their-taproom-tourism/\">episode #174</a> when I talked with Rob Cheshire of the UK podcast This Week in Craft Beer about planning taproom visits. Navigating the maze of a Beijing hutong to find Great Leap Brewing, or exiting a Paris Metro stop in a North African neighborhood on my way to Deck &amp; Donohue, or riding an e-scooter through a questionable neighborhood in northeast DC to Right Proper Brewing. These three were fine places with solid beers, but they’re more memorable for the trip to find them than for the places themselves.</li><li>But you can’t always tell this from Google search. So if you go to the show notes on travelcommons.com you’ll find my list of  “Yeah, I’d like to go back there” taprooms.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #187</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>As I said at the top of the show, there’s probably not going to be a June show, between packing up the Chicago studio and then unpacking it in Nashville. Good news, though -- the sound quality in Nashville might get a step-function improvement. Just about every apt building Irene and I looked at had a music studio as one of the amenities. The sound proofing, the sound deadening, and maybe a better microphone should make things sound a bit better. Quite a ways from those first episodes, recording with the iRiver MP3 player’s built-in mic while standing in a shower stall. Oh my!</li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. You’ll have to go to the TravelCommons’ website if you want to torture your ears listening to those first bathroom-studio episodes; what one listener labelled a “pottycast”</li><li>And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social  -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_186.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #187 — Moving to a Non-Hub Airport; What Makes A Great Taproom?','','inherit','closed','closed','','4145-revision-v1','','','2022-05-26 10:16:08','2022-05-26 15:16:08','',4145,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4151',0,'revision','',0),
(4152,1,'2022-05-26 11:27:18','2022-05-26 16:27:18','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/IMG_4803.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/IMG_4803-300x300.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" alt=\"Taproom Draft Beer Taps Arranged as a Smiley Face\"></a>I\'m Happy To See You Too![/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>The last episode recording in Chicago before we relocate the TravelCommons studios, and our lives, down to Nashville. We close out our threads on in-flight mask mandates and hotel housekeeping, and critique an academic paper about the moral hazard of frequent flier elite status. I talk through the changes I\'ll have to make when flying out of a non-hub airport. And then, as I\'m making a list of the Chicago breweries I want to re-visit before leaving, I think through the characteristics that makes a taproom great. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_186.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #187: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you, for the last time, from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois because we’re packing everything up and moving the 500 miles down I-65 to Nashville at the end of June. After 25 years here, we decided we needed a change of scenery. So with all the packing and everything, I don’t see a June episode in the offing.&nbsp;</li><li>Way back when I was doing heavy international travel -- Chicago on Monday, Toronto on Tuesday, New York to London on Wednesday, Zurich on Thursday, getting back to Chicago at Friday midnight -- what then seemed like necessary travel, but now, looking back on it, seems like stupid travel -- people would ask me my favorite city. I thought about it a lot, but would always end up with the same answer -- Chicago. And not just because it was my home; I was offering up that answer when we lived in Philadelphia. No, my explanation to the raised eyebrows that answer often generated was that Chicago was the right size -- big enough to support a wide range of interesting stuff (sports, culture, restaurants, microbreweries), but not so big that you couldn’t get your arms around it, and with enough Midwest pragmatism, from people moving in from Indiana and Iowa and Minnesota and Wisconsin, to keep everything grounded, to keep it from getting too wacky. And to their “But what about the weather?” question I’d say “yes, it can be -10° in Chicago in January, but it can be +110° in Phoenix in August; most every place has 3 months of lousy weather (save for maybe San Diego) sometime during the year; different people choose the 3 months they can endure.”&nbsp;</li><li>But over the past few years, I realized my answer about Chicago didn’t hold up any more -- not about the weather, the winters still suck; it’s that the pragmatism seems to be gone, with violent crime -- robberies, shootings, carjackings -- and definitely not-pragmatic local government decisions filling the void. It has started to feel like a replay of the 1970’s, which were not a great time in Chicago.&nbsp; Now, I don’t think it’s permanent. It’s a pendulum. Just like the city came back from a bad stretch in the ‘70’s to be a great place in the mid/late ‘80’s. It’ll happen again; I just don’t want to hang around for the low point. And according to the half-dozen movers we talked to, we’re not the only ones.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <em>Dive Deep (Loveshadow remix)</em> by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/50488 Ft: Loveshadow</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A quick public service announcement -- the COVID Real ID extension expires in less than a year. <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/news/press/releases/2021/04/27/dhs-announces-extension-real-id-full-enforcement-deadline\">According to the TSA</a>, “Beginning May 3, 2023, every air traveler 18 years of age and older will need a REAL ID-compliant driver’s license or identification card… at airport security checkpoints for domestic air travel.”&nbsp; Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/01/16/podcast-183-covid-test-anxiety-michelin-food-adventures/\">episode #183</a> in January, I talked about getting a Real ID version of my Illinois driver’s license when I had to renew it. No additional cost and maybe 3 additional minutes of time. But if you can’t pick up a Real ID driver’s license before next May, you’ll have to remember to take along <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/travel/security-screening/identification\">your passport or your Global Entry card</a>.</li><li>In the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/04/21/podcast-186-mask-mandate-scramble-small-airport-survival/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #186 — Mask Mandate Scramble; Small Airport Survival\">last episode</a>, we walked through the abrupt end of the US CDC’s transportation mask mandate -- on planes, buses, trains,....&nbsp; That news cycle lasted right at about a week, the last entry being the CDC asking the Dept of Justice to appeal the federal judge’s ruling that struck down the mandate that they had extended for 2 weeks to May 3rd. On May 3rd, the CDC posted a <a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2022/s0503-covid-19-travel.html\">press release reiterating their <em>recommendation</em></a> that everyone aged 2 and older wear masks on planes and trains, and in airports and stations -- but nothing about the status of that appeal. I’m guessing that they decided to accept the facts on the ground and quietly forget about any appeal -- which is probably the only real option they have.</li><li>And then this week, adding to those facts on the ground, the European CDC has dropped their transportation mask mandate recommendations. The difference, though, is the European CDC’s recommendations are just that, recommendations. The enforceable <em>rules</em> are made by each country, and Spain and Italy, many of the countries hardest hit by the initial wave of COVID, have extended their mask mandates to mid-June.</li><li>OK, I wasn’t going to say anything more about hotel housekeeping because <em>even I’m</em> bored with it, but then I ran across an <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/hotel-housekeepers-want-you-to-request-daily-room-cleaning-11652650925\">article</a> in the Wall Street Journal about how hotel housekeeping unions are pushing for a return to daily room service. Certainly a big part of the push is to drive more work, more hours for the union members. But also because rooms are dirtier and take longer to clean when they have gone a few days without service, especially with the current guest mix that’s still heavier with leisure travelers, who tend to have more people in the room than the road-warrior business traveler. As you’d guess, hotel owners disagree, but for changing reasons. Their arc of rationale has gone from the pre-pandemic “be green, save water, and we’ll give you an extra 500 points to skip housekeeping” to pandemic “we’re keeping everyone safe by staying out of your room” to the current “it’s your choice, and ‘labor shortage’”.&nbsp; OK, that’s it. I’m <em>really </em>not going to talk about room cleaning anymore.</li><li>But I <em>will</em> talk about TSA checkpoint passenger volumes again. <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/09/27/podcast-179-high-tech-airport-lines-business-travel-still-missing/\">Back in September 2021</a>, the last time I scraped the numbers off the TSA <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/coronavirus/passenger-throughput\">website</a>, average daily passenger volumes were bouncing around 1.7 million, down 20% from the July summer peak of over 2 million and down 24% from pre-pandemic September 2019 numbers. Six months later, looking at the last month-and-a-half -- April to mid-May -- the average daily volume is 2.1 million and growing, and now just 10-12% off the April/May 2019 numbers. So if those TSA checkpoints and airplanes are feeling a bit more crowded, it’s because they are. Tough to remember back to my first post-lockdown flight in June 2020, when daily passenger volumes were 5-600,000 and the Southwest boarding agent said “There’s 40 of you on a plane with 175 seats. So everyone gets their own row.” I, in no way, want to go back to those times, but having a bit more plane space <em>was</em> nice.</li><li>I get <em>a lot</em> of emails from public relations firms. I read the subject lines of all of them because every once in a rare while, there’s something that catches my eye, like the pitch that led to last episode’s interview about Daytona Beach airport trying to survive in the shadow of the behemoth that is Orlando Int’l. So when I read the subject line “Study Finds that Frequent-Flyer Programs Increase Cost of Business Travel” in my inbox a few weeks back, I just had to click through. The study, <a href=\"https://www.informs.org/About-INFORMS/News-Room/Press-Releases/Study-Finds-that-Frequent-Flyer-Programs-Increase-Cost-of-Business-Travel\">just published</a> in the journal <em>Marketing Science</em> which I admit I don’t read as often as I should because I get tied up pouring through the CDC’s <em>Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report</em>, is titled <em>Reaching for Gold: Frequent-Flyer Status Incentives and Moral Hazard</em>, written by professors from University of Michigan and Duke business schools. According to the press release, after “(analyzing) the transactional database of a leading U.S.-based airline’s frequent-flyer program (that) included the histories and point accumulations of 3.5 million frequent-flyer program members during the 2010 and 2011 point-earning cycles” their main insights were -- “‘Points Members’ are More Likely to Choose Higher Fares When Not Paying for It” and “the closer frequent-flyer program members get to ‘elite status’ the more likely they are to choose an airline even when it may be more expensive than a competitor’s flight”. Hmm, that feels a bit “Dawn breaking over Marblehead”. How can you be researching frequent flier programs and act like you’ve never heard of (let alone done) a mileage run. Maybe the press release overly summarized the research and just isn’t communicating its subtlety. So I hit Google to find the <a href=\"https://yesimorhun.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/18/2018/11/Orhun_Guo_2018.pdf\">actual paper</a>. 29 pages of text and equations, and 15 pages of bibliography and data tables later -- nope, the press release was pretty much it. If the moral hazard of business travelers using their employer’s money to pay for more expensive flights to make status is eliminated, the paper estimates that companies would save at least 7% of their travel costs. Looking at 2019 data, the <a href=\"https://www.statista.com/statistics/562804/us-air-traffic-domestic-average-ticket-price/\">average cost of a walk-up US domestic ticket</a> -- one booked less than a week in advance, so the typical road warrior ticket -- is about $500. 7% is $35. I dunno, maybe some full-contact procurement guy will get excited about that $35 savings, but I know that any executive in his or her right mind thinking to themselves “Oh yes, pissing off the people who are jamming themselves in to coach seats and spending nights away from their family for $35 a trip” is a great idea.&nbsp; Except at GM. I remember when frequent flier programs first came out, GM didn’t let their travelers keep the points from business trips, which led to all sorts of weird booking behavior. Until that policy died a quiet death a few years later. Kinda like this research -- I’m sure these professors are nice, smart people; but they gotta get out of their offices a bit more.</li><li>Bridge Music - <em>Drops of H2O ( The Filtered Water Treatment )</em> by J.Lang (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djlang59/37792 Ft: Airtone</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Moving to a Non-Hub Airport</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>One thing that kinda snuck up on me about our move to Nashville -- it’ll be the first time in almost 40 years that I haven’t lived in an airport hub city: Chicago with American and United at ORD; San Francisco with their United hub; Dallas when I signed up for American’s Advantage program my first day of work; Philadelphia with US Air, though I avoided them as much as I could; Detroit with Northwest; and then back to Chicago, now a 3-hub town after Southwest took over MDW after the big expansion.  </li><li>Nashville <em>was</em> a hub in the late ‘80’s/early ‘90’s -- well, a mini-hub, actually -- when American was playing around with their network. They built mini-hubs in Nashville, Raleigh/Durham, and San Jose. The experiment lasted maybe 10 years but never really made any money. I think the only thing of American left in those airports are Admirals Clubs; in Nashville, they’re down to 9% of the passenger volume.  Today, Nashville’s direct flight distribution looks like any non-hub airport -- the top 4 destinations are Big 3 hubs -- ATL, DEN, DFW, ORD -- with the fifth being MCO, thanks to all that Mouseketeer traffic.</li><li>The #1 travel tip on my and any other experienced traveler’s list is “fly non-stop” -- much easier from a hub airport, of course, and then your frequent flier strategy just falls out from there. If you live in Atlanta, you’re doubling down on Delta’s SkyMiles; realistically, there’s not another option. Non-hub? It could be just as straight-forward -- if your flight patterns take you primarily to one of those hub cities -- Chicago, Atlanta, San Francisco -- then your choice too is made for you. But if you’re in sales or consulting -- or maybe slouching toward retirement -- and your flight patterns are a bit more scattershot, then you have to think -- what’s my objective? -- flying non-stop for the shortest flight times and lowest probability of disruption; making elite status because the perks make my travel easier; or is it building up points to help fund my vacations?</li><li>Thinking about my consulting colleagues who flew out of non-hub airports every week, they were all about status. One guy I worked with lived in Ft Myers, Florida and was all in on Delta. Even when flying every week to projects in, say, Dallas or Chicago, he’d always skip the direct American flights and connect through Atlanta, killing the time from all those missed connections with drinks in Delta’s Sky Club -- which was free with his Diamond Medallion status.</li><li>My calculus is a little easier. One of the side benefits of flying <em>a lot</em> for over 35 years is that I stacked up enough mileage for lifetime mid-tier elite status on American and United. Not enough status to get into their clubs for free, but along with the usual early boarding and free bags, it’s gotten me free club entry to OneWorld and Star Alliance partners’ lounges -- which is very valuable when trying to navigate the rabbit warrens that are FRA and LHR after north Atlantic turbulence has screwed up your in-flight sleep plans.  If I didn’t already have these metal levels or I was in striking distance of a new level -- say close to the 2 million I’d need to jump from United Premier Gold to lifetime Platinum -- then I’d probably suck it up like my colleagues do, and get, say, the top tier United credit card with free club access for a place to sit out ORD, DEN, and IAH weather delays.</li><li>Those lifetime statuses let me step off the elite hamster wheel, so I’m now looking at non-stop flights and earning miles. Out of Nashville, Southwest has the most non-stop flights, so I’ll probably be flying them a fair bit. But while Southwest’s Companion Pass perk -- their “buy a ticket, get one free” top tier status is phenomenal, I can’t BOGO Southwest to Europe, so I need to be banking miles on one of the Big 3 so I can book on their OneWorld, Star Alliance, or SkyTeam partners -- which is where travel credit cards come back into the picture. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/09/19/podcast-167-6-months-on-why-keep-travel-cards/\">episode #167</a> in September 2020, we talked about people replacing their mileage cards with cash-back cards since no one was flying. But that trend is reverting to the mean and credit card companies have big slugs of mileage to dole out after buying them cheap in 2020 when the airlines needed real cash real fast. So my non-hub strategy -- fly direct when I can, leverage those hard-earned lifetime statuses when I can, and charge everything I can on a mileage-earning card -- including any drinks I may need to see me through those missed connections.</li><li>Bridge Music —   <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/trifonic/445\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bored on Your Backside</a></em> by Trifonic (c) copyright 2005 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Sampling Plus 1.0 license. http://ccmixter.org/files/trifonic/445</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>What Makes a Great Taproom?</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>With a month left in Chicago, Irene and I have built a list of “Places to Hit Before Move” that’s some mix of greatest hits and places we’ve always wanted to go but have, for some reason or another, never gotten ‘round to. And then I have a separate list of Chicago taprooms I want to hit one more time -- Goose Island, Revolution Brewing, Off Color, Solemn Oath, Marz, Dovetail, and Metropolitan Brewing. Which then got me thinking -- why these and not other; what makes a good taproom for me?</li><li>First thing to do is to open up Untappd, the beer social networking app that\'s been my beer diary for over 11 years now.&nbsp; I’ve checked beer in at over 1,900 locations and the #1 location category is -- a brewery taproom. I scrolled through the list on the app and jotted down the ones I thought “Yeah, I’d like to go back there.”&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>Probably the smallest group is about unique brewery experiences; where I actually did the brewery tour and it was something more than just row after row of steel tanks. Cantillon in Brussels is everyone’s favorite; they send you off on your own guided with nothing but a paper brochure and tell you not to break anything. And then, after you’ve navigated coolships and barrel rooms, they pour you their amazing lambic beers. Or the original Lagunitas Brewery in Petaluma, CA where the tour guide tossed us just-filled IPA bottles he’d grabbed before they got to the packaging machine.&nbsp;</li><li>But except for these few exceptions, my favorite places have a wide beer selection (something more than 5 taps of IPAs) and/or a cool space and/or the chance to chat with the brewer. Labietis’ original place in Riga, Latvia hit the first two square on the head: a <em>diverse</em> beer menu -- a juniper beer inspired by Latvian folk songs, a wheat beer with meadowsweet, a lager with Latvian hops -- that’s located in the back courtyard of what looked like, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/11/30/podcast-157-notes-from-the-baltics-riga-latvia-and-tallinn-estonia/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #157 — Notes from the Baltics: Riga, Latvia and Tallinn, Estonia\">the fall of 2019</a>, a block of now slightly derelict early 20th Century manor houses. A little closer to home on my Chicago list, Metropolitan Brewing does nothing but German-style lagers which are a perfect fit for their taproom patio that looks out on the north branch of the Chicago River.</li><li>Going to a brewery’s taproom is kinda like seeing a band in concert -- I’m going to get a fuller picture of that band than I will just hearing their hit songs on the radio or a Spotify playlist. Hitting a good taproom can be similar -- getting past the high-volume core beers to see what the brewer can really do. When we were in Santa Fe last month, I went out of my way to hit Rowley Farmhouse Ales because I really liked their range during our last visit in 2018. So of course I ordered the Teosinte, a funky, earthy, grassy sour made from Oaxacan green dent corn grown a couple hundred miles east, near the Texas-New Mexico border. It was an incredibly interesting beer. I wouldn’t buy a six-pack of it, but I was more than happy to have a glass of it.</li><li>But probably the best time I have at taprooms is when I get to talk to the brewer. During one of my trips last year to Nashville, I found myself an hour south in Columbia, TN, which bills itself “Muletown.” I missed the 2021 “Mule Day” festival; it was canceled due to COVID. Instead, I wound my way through a light industrial neighborhood hard against some freight train tracks billed as Columbia’s Art District to find Bad Idea Brewing. There were two other folks sitting at the bar; the brewer was behind it, serving. And we just got talking -- about the beer, about his brewery, about Columbia, about brewing in Columbia, about what kind of beer sells in Columbia. And through all that, taster glasses kept landing in front of me -- “try this,” “what do you think of that?” he’d ask. What was going to be a quick side trip for a beer turned into a nice afternoon of conversation… and beer.</li><li>I guess there’s one more thing that can make for a great taproom, or maybe more of a great taproom experience and that is -- it took me to a part of a city that I wouldn’t have otherwise gone. I talked a bit about this in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/04/10/podcast-174-how-the-pros-plan-their-taproom-tourism/\">episode #174</a> when I talked with Rob Cheshire of the UK podcast This Week in Craft Beer about planning taproom visits. Navigating the maze of a Beijing hutong to find Great Leap Brewing, or exiting a Paris Metro stop in a North African neighborhood on my way to Deck &amp; Donohue, or riding an e-scooter through a questionable neighborhood in northeast DC to Right Proper Brewing. These three were fine places with solid beers, but they’re more memorable for the trip to find them than for the places themselves.</li><li>But you can’t always tell this from Google search. So if you go to the show notes on travelcommons.com you’ll find my list of&nbsp; “Yeah, I’d like to go back there” taprooms.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #187</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>As I said at the top of the show, there’s probably not going to be a June show, between packing up the Chicago studio and then unpacking it in Nashville. Good news, though -- the sound quality in Nashville might get a step-function improvement. Just about every apt building Irene and I looked at had a music studio as one of the amenities. The sound proofing, the sound deadening, and maybe a better microphone should make things sound a bit better. Quite a ways from those first episodes, recording with the iRiver MP3 player’s built-in mic while standing in a shower stall. Oh my!</li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. You’ll have to go to the TravelCommons’ website if you want to torture your ears listening to those first bathroom-studio episodes; what one listener labelled a “pottycast”</li><li>And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_186.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #187 — Moving to a Non-Hub Airport; What Makes A Great Taproom?','','inherit','closed','closed','','4145-revision-v1','','','2022-05-26 11:27:18','2022-05-26 16:27:18','',4145,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4152',0,'revision','',0),
(4153,1,'2022-05-26 14:49:38','2022-05-26 19:49:38','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/IMG_4803.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/IMG_4803-300x300.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" alt=\"Taproom Draft Beer Taps Arranged as a Smiley Face\"></a>I\'m Happy To See You Too![/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>The last episode recording in Chicago before we relocate the TravelCommons studios, and our lives, down to Nashville. We close out our threads on in-flight mask mandates and hotel housekeeping, and critique an academic paper about the moral hazard of frequent flier elite status. I talk through the changes I\'ll have to make when flying out of a non-hub airport. And then, as I\'m making a list of the Chicago breweries I want to re-visit before leaving, I think through the characteristics that makes a taproom great. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_187.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #187: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you, for the last time, from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois because we’re packing everything up and moving the 500 miles down I-65 to Nashville at the end of June. After 25 years here, we decided we needed a change of scenery. So with all the packing and everything, I don’t see a June episode in the offing.&nbsp;</li><li>Way back when I was doing heavy international travel -- Chicago on Monday, Toronto on Tuesday, New York to London on Wednesday, Zurich on Thursday, getting back to Chicago at Friday midnight -- what then seemed like necessary travel, but now, looking back on it, seems like stupid travel -- people would ask me my favorite city. I thought about it a lot, but would always end up with the same answer -- Chicago. And not just because it was my home; I was offering up that answer when we lived in Philadelphia. No, my explanation to the raised eyebrows that answer often generated was that Chicago was the right size -- big enough to support a wide range of interesting stuff (sports, culture, restaurants, microbreweries), but not so big that you couldn’t get your arms around it, and with enough Midwest pragmatism, from people moving in from Indiana and Iowa and Minnesota and Wisconsin, to keep everything grounded, to keep it from getting too wacky. And to their “But what about the weather?” question I’d say “yes, it can be -10° in Chicago in January, but it can be +110° in Phoenix in August; most every place has 3 months of lousy weather (save for maybe San Diego) sometime during the year; different people choose the 3 months they can endure.”&nbsp;</li><li>But over the past few years, I realized my answer about Chicago didn’t hold up any more -- not about the weather, the winters still suck; it’s that the pragmatism seems to be gone, with violent crime -- robberies, shootings, carjackings -- and definitely not-pragmatic local government decisions filling the void. It has started to feel like a replay of the 1970’s, which were not a great time in Chicago.&nbsp; Now, I don’t think it’s permanent. It’s a pendulum. Just like the city came back from a bad stretch in the ‘70’s to be a great place in the mid/late ‘80’s. It’ll happen again; I just don’t want to hang around for the low point. And according to the half-dozen movers we talked to, we’re not the only ones.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <em>Dive Deep (Loveshadow remix)</em> by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/50488 Ft: Loveshadow</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A quick public service announcement -- the COVID Real ID extension expires in less than a year. <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/news/press/releases/2021/04/27/dhs-announces-extension-real-id-full-enforcement-deadline\">According to the TSA</a>, “Beginning May 3, 2023, every air traveler 18 years of age and older will need a REAL ID-compliant driver’s license or identification card… at airport security checkpoints for domestic air travel.”&nbsp; Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/01/16/podcast-183-covid-test-anxiety-michelin-food-adventures/\">episode #183</a> in January, I talked about getting a Real ID version of my Illinois driver’s license when I had to renew it. No additional cost and maybe 3 additional minutes of time. But if you can’t pick up a Real ID driver’s license before next May, you’ll have to remember to take along <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/travel/security-screening/identification\">your passport or your Global Entry card</a>.</li><li>In the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/04/21/podcast-186-mask-mandate-scramble-small-airport-survival/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #186 — Mask Mandate Scramble; Small Airport Survival\">last episode</a>, we walked through the abrupt end of the US CDC’s transportation mask mandate -- on planes, buses, trains,....&nbsp; That news cycle lasted right at about a week, the last entry being the CDC asking the Dept of Justice to appeal the federal judge’s ruling that struck down the mandate that they had extended for 2 weeks to May 3rd. On May 3rd, the CDC posted a <a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2022/s0503-covid-19-travel.html\">press release reiterating their <em>recommendation</em></a> that everyone aged 2 and older wear masks on planes and trains, and in airports and stations -- but nothing about the status of that appeal. I’m guessing that they decided to accept the facts on the ground and quietly forget about any appeal -- which is probably the only real option they have.</li><li>And then this week, adding to those facts on the ground, the European CDC has dropped their transportation mask mandate recommendations. The difference, though, is the European CDC’s recommendations are just that, recommendations. The enforceable <em>rules</em> are made by each country, and Spain and Italy, many of the countries hardest hit by the initial wave of COVID, have extended their mask mandates to mid-June.</li><li>OK, I wasn’t going to say anything more about hotel housekeeping because <em>even I’m</em> bored with it, but then I ran across an <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/hotel-housekeepers-want-you-to-request-daily-room-cleaning-11652650925\">article</a> in the Wall Street Journal about how hotel housekeeping unions are pushing for a return to daily room service. Certainly a big part of the push is to drive more work, more hours for the union members. But also because rooms are dirtier and take longer to clean when they have gone a few days without service, especially with the current guest mix that’s still heavier with leisure travelers, who tend to have more people in the room than the road-warrior business traveler. As you’d guess, hotel owners disagree, but for changing reasons. Their arc of rationale has gone from the pre-pandemic “be green, save water, and we’ll give you an extra 500 points to skip housekeeping” to pandemic “we’re keeping everyone safe by staying out of your room” to the current “it’s your choice, and ‘labor shortage’”.&nbsp; OK, that’s it. I’m <em>really </em>not going to talk about room cleaning anymore.</li><li>But I <em>will</em> talk about TSA checkpoint passenger volumes again. <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/09/27/podcast-179-high-tech-airport-lines-business-travel-still-missing/\">Back in September 2021</a>, the last time I scraped the numbers off the TSA <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/coronavirus/passenger-throughput\">website</a>, average daily passenger volumes were bouncing around 1.7 million, down 20% from the July summer peak of over 2 million and down 24% from pre-pandemic September 2019 numbers. Six months later, looking at the last month-and-a-half -- April to mid-May -- the average daily volume is 2.1 million and growing, and now just 10-12% off the April/May 2019 numbers. So if those TSA checkpoints and airplanes are feeling a bit more crowded, it’s because they are. Tough to remember back to my first post-lockdown flight in June 2020, when daily passenger volumes were 5-600,000 and the Southwest boarding agent said “There’s 40 of you on a plane with 175 seats. So everyone gets their own row.” I, in no way, want to go back to those times, but having a bit more plane space <em>was</em> nice.</li><li>I get <em>a lot</em> of emails from public relations firms. I read the subject lines of all of them because every once in a rare while, there’s something that catches my eye, like the pitch that led to last episode’s interview about Daytona Beach airport trying to survive in the shadow of the behemoth that is Orlando Int’l. So when I read the subject line “Study Finds that Frequent-Flyer Programs Increase Cost of Business Travel” in my inbox a few weeks back, I just had to click through. The study, <a href=\"https://www.informs.org/About-INFORMS/News-Room/Press-Releases/Study-Finds-that-Frequent-Flyer-Programs-Increase-Cost-of-Business-Travel\">just published</a> in the journal <em>Marketing Science</em> which I admit I don’t read as often as I should because I get tied up pouring through the CDC’s <em>Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report</em>, is titled <em>Reaching for Gold: Frequent-Flyer Status Incentives and Moral Hazard</em>, written by professors from University of Michigan and Duke business schools. According to the press release, after “(analyzing) the transactional database of a leading U.S.-based airline’s frequent-flyer program (that) included the histories and point accumulations of 3.5 million frequent-flyer program members during the 2010 and 2011 point-earning cycles” their main insights were -- “‘Points Members’ are More Likely to Choose Higher Fares When Not Paying for It” and “the closer frequent-flyer program members get to ‘elite status’ the more likely they are to choose an airline even when it may be more expensive than a competitor’s flight”. Hmm, that feels a bit “Dawn breaking over Marblehead”. How can you be researching frequent flier programs and act like you’ve never heard of (let alone done) a mileage run. Maybe the press release overly summarized the research and just isn’t communicating its subtlety. So I hit Google to find the <a href=\"https://yesimorhun.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/18/2018/11/Orhun_Guo_2018.pdf\">actual paper</a>. 29 pages of text and equations, and 15 pages of bibliography and data tables later -- nope, the press release was pretty much it. If the moral hazard of business travelers using their employer’s money to pay for more expensive flights to make status is eliminated, the paper estimates that companies would save at least 7% of their travel costs. Looking at 2019 data, the <a href=\"https://www.statista.com/statistics/562804/us-air-traffic-domestic-average-ticket-price/\">average cost of a walk-up US domestic ticket</a> -- one booked less than a week in advance, so the typical road warrior ticket -- is about $500. 7% is $35. I dunno, maybe some full-contact procurement guy will get excited about that $35 savings, but I don\'t know that any executive in his or her right mind thinking to themselves “Oh yes, pissing off the people who are jamming themselves in to coach seats and spending nights away from their family for $35 a trip” is a great idea.&nbsp; Except at GM. I remember when frequent flier programs first came out, GM didn’t let their travelers keep the points from business trips, which led to all sorts of weird booking behavior. Until that policy died a quiet death a few years later. Kinda like this research -- I’m sure these professors are nice, smart people; but they gotta get out of their offices a bit more.</li><li>Bridge Music - <em>Drops of H2O ( The Filtered Water Treatment )</em> by J.Lang (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djlang59/37792 Ft: Airtone</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Moving to a Non-Hub Airport</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>One thing that kinda snuck up on me about our move to Nashville -- it’ll be the first time in almost 40 years that I haven’t lived in an airport hub city: Chicago with American and United at ORD; San Francisco with their United hub; Dallas when I signed up for American’s Advantage program my first day of work; Philadelphia with US Air, though I avoided them as much as I could; Detroit with Northwest; and then back to Chicago, now a 3-hub town after Southwest took over MDW after the big expansion.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>Nashville <em>was</em> a hub in the late ‘80’s/early ‘90’s -- well, a mini-hub, actually -- when American was playing around with their network. They built mini-hubs in Nashville, Raleigh/Durham, and San Jose. The experiment lasted maybe 10 years but never really made any money. I think the only thing of American left in those airports are Admirals Clubs; in Nashville, they’re down to 9% of the passenger volume.&nbsp; Today, Nashville’s direct flight distribution looks like any non-hub airport -- the top 4 destinations are Big 3 hubs -- ATL, DEN, DFW, ORD -- with the fifth being MCO, thanks to all that Mouseketeer traffic.</li><li>The #1 travel tip on my and any other experienced traveler’s list is “fly non-stop” -- much easier from a hub airport, of course, and then your frequent flier strategy just falls out from there. If you live in Atlanta, you’re doubling down on Delta’s SkyMiles; realistically, there’s not another option. Non-hub? It could be just as straight-forward -- if your flight patterns take you primarily to one of those hub cities -- Chicago, Atlanta, San Francisco -- then your choice too is made for you. But if you’re in sales or consulting -- or maybe slouching toward retirement -- and your flight patterns are a bit more scattershot, then you have to think -- what’s my objective? -- flying non-stop for the shortest flight times and lowest probability of disruption; making elite status because the perks make my travel easier; or is it building up points to help fund my vacations?</li><li>Thinking about my consulting colleagues who flew out of non-hub airports every week, they were all about status. One guy I worked with lived in Ft Myers, Florida and was all in on Delta. Even when flying every week to projects in, say, Dallas or Chicago, he’d always skip the direct American flights and connect through Atlanta, killing the time from all those missed connections with drinks in Delta’s Sky Club -- which was free with his Diamond Medallion status.</li><li>My calculus is a little easier. One of the side benefits of flying <em>a lot</em> for over 35 years is that I stacked up enough mileage for lifetime mid-tier elite status on American and United. Not enough status to get into their clubs for free, but along with the usual early boarding and free bags, it’s gotten me free club entry to OneWorld and Star Alliance partners’ lounges -- which is very valuable when trying to navigate the rabbit warrens that are FRA and LHR after north Atlantic turbulence has screwed up your in-flight sleep plans.&nbsp; If I didn’t already have these metal levels or I was in striking distance of a new level -- say close to the 2 million I’d need to jump from United Premier Gold to lifetime Platinum -- then I’d probably suck it up like my colleagues do, and get, say, the top tier United credit card with free club access for a place to sit out ORD, DEN, and IAH weather delays.</li><li>Those lifetime statuses let me step off the elite hamster wheel, so I’m now looking at non-stop flights and earning miles. Out of Nashville, Southwest has the most non-stop flights, so I’ll probably be flying them a fair bit. But while Southwest’s Companion Pass perk -- their “buy a ticket, get one free” top tier status is phenomenal, I can’t BOGO Southwest to Europe, so I need to be banking miles on one of the Big 3 so I can book on their OneWorld, Star Alliance, or SkyTeam partners -- which is where travel credit cards come back into the picture. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/09/19/podcast-167-6-months-on-why-keep-travel-cards/\">episode #167</a> in September 2020, we talked about people replacing their mileage cards with cash-back cards since no one was flying. But that trend is reverting to the mean and credit card companies have big slugs of mileage to dole out after buying them cheap in 2020 when the airlines needed real cash real fast. So my non-hub strategy -- fly direct when I can, leverage those hard-earned lifetime statuses when I can, and charge everything I can on a mileage-earning card -- including any drinks I may need to see me through those missed connections.</li><li>Bridge Music —  &nbsp;<em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/trifonic/445\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bored on Your Backside</a></em> by Trifonic (c) copyright 2005 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Sampling Plus 1.0 license. http://ccmixter.org/files/trifonic/445</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>What Makes a Great Taproom?</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>With a month left in Chicago, Irene and I have built a list of “Places to Hit Before Move” that’s some mix of greatest hits and places we’ve always wanted to go but have, for some reason or another, never gotten ‘round to. And then I have a separate list of Chicago taprooms I want to hit one more time -- Goose Island, Revolution Brewing, Off Color, Solemn Oath, Marz, Dovetail, and Metropolitan Brewing. Which then got me thinking -- why these and not other; what makes a good taproom for me?</li><li>First thing to do is to open up Untappd, the beer social networking app that\'s been my beer diary for over 11 years now.&nbsp; I’ve checked beer in at over 1,900 locations and the #1 location category is -- a brewery taproom. I scrolled through the list on the app and jotted down the ones I thought “Yeah, I’d like to go back there.”&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>Probably the smallest group is about unique brewery experiences; where I actually did the brewery tour and it was something more than just row after row of steel tanks. Cantillon in Brussels is everyone’s favorite; they send you off on your own guided with nothing but a paper brochure and tell you not to break anything. And then, after you’ve navigated coolships and barrel rooms, they pour you their amazing lambic beers. Or the original Lagunitas Brewery in Petaluma, CA where the tour guide tossed us just-filled IPA bottles he’d grabbed before they got to the packaging machine.&nbsp;</li><li>But except for these few exceptions, my favorite places have a wide beer selection (something more than 5 taps of IPAs) and/or a cool space and/or the chance to chat with the brewer. Labietis’ original place in Riga, Latvia hit the first two square on the head: a <em>diverse</em> beer menu -- a juniper beer inspired by Latvian folk songs, a wheat beer with meadowsweet, a lager with Latvian hops -- that’s located in the back courtyard of what looked like, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/11/30/podcast-157-notes-from-the-baltics-riga-latvia-and-tallinn-estonia/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #157 — Notes from the Baltics: Riga, Latvia and Tallinn, Estonia\">the fall of 2019</a>, a block of now slightly derelict early 20th Century manor houses. A little closer to home on my Chicago list, Metropolitan Brewing does nothing but German-style lagers which are a perfect fit for their taproom patio that looks out on the north branch of the Chicago River.</li><li>Going to a brewery’s taproom is kinda like seeing a band in concert -- I’m going to get a fuller picture of that band than I will just hearing their hit songs on the radio or a Spotify playlist. Hitting a good taproom can be similar -- getting past the high-volume core beers to see what the brewer can really do. When we were in Santa Fe last month, I went out of my way to hit Rowley Farmhouse Ales because I really liked their range during our last visit in 2018. So of course I ordered the Teosinte, a funky, earthy, grassy sour made from Oaxacan green dent corn grown a couple hundred miles east, near the Texas-New Mexico border. It was an incredibly interesting beer. I wouldn’t buy a six-pack of it, but I was more than happy to have a glass of it.</li><li>But probably the best time I have at taprooms is when I get to talk to the brewer. During one of my trips last year to Nashville, I found myself an hour south in Columbia, TN, which bills itself “Muletown.” I missed the 2021 “Mule Day” festival; it was canceled due to COVID. Instead, I wound my way through a light industrial neighborhood hard against some freight train tracks billed as Columbia’s Art District to find Bad Idea Brewing. There were two other folks sitting at the bar; the brewer was behind it, serving. And we just got talking -- about the beer, about his brewery, about Columbia, about brewing in Columbia, about what kind of beer sells in Columbia. And through all that, taster glasses kept landing in front of me -- “try this,” “what do you think of that?” he’d ask. What was going to be a quick side trip for a beer turned into a nice afternoon of conversation… and beer.</li><li>I guess there’s one more thing that can make for a great taproom, or maybe more of a great taproom experience and that is -- it took me to a part of a city that I wouldn’t have otherwise gone. I talked a bit about this in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/04/10/podcast-174-how-the-pros-plan-their-taproom-tourism/\">episode #174</a> when I talked with Rob Cheshire of the UK podcast This Week in Craft Beer about planning taproom visits. Navigating the maze of a Beijing hutong to find Great Leap Brewing, or exiting a Paris Metro stop in a North African neighborhood on my way to Deck &amp; Donohue, or riding an e-scooter through a questionable neighborhood in northeast DC to Right Proper Brewing. These three were fine places with solid beers, but they’re more memorable for the trip to find them than for the places themselves.</li><li>But you can’t always tell this from Google search. So if you go to the show notes on travelcommons.com you’ll find my list of&nbsp; “Yeah, I’d like to go back there” taprooms.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #187</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>As I said at the top of the show, there’s probably not going to be a June show, between packing up the Chicago studio and then unpacking it in Nashville. Good news, though -- the sound quality in Nashville might get a step-function improvement. Just about every apt building Irene and I looked at had a music studio as one of the amenities. The sound proofing, the sound deadening, and maybe a better microphone should make things sound a bit better. Quite a ways from those first episodes, recording with the iRiver MP3 player’s built-in mic while standing in a shower stall. Oh my!</li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. You’ll have to go to the TravelCommons’ website if you want to torture your ears listening to those first bathroom-studio episodes; what one listener labelled a “pottycast”</li><li>And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_187.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #187 — Moving to a Non-Hub Airport; What Makes A Great Taproom?','','inherit','closed','closed','','4145-revision-v1','','','2022-05-26 14:49:38','2022-05-26 19:49:38','',4145,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4153',0,'revision','',0),
(4155,1,'2022-05-28 12:19:09','2022-05-28 17:19:09','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/IMG_4803.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/IMG_4803-300x300.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" alt=\"Taproom Draft Beer Taps Arranged as a Smiley Face\"></a>I\'m Happy To See You Too![/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>The last episode recording in Chicago before we relocate the TravelCommons studios, and our lives, down to Nashville. We close out our threads on in-flight mask mandates and hotel housekeeping, and critique an academic paper about the moral hazard of frequent flier elite status. I talk through the changes I\'ll have to make when flying out of a non-hub airport. And then, as I\'m making a list of the Chicago breweries I want to re-visit before leaving, I think through the characteristics that makes a taproom great. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_187.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #187: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you, for the last time, from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois because we’re packing everything up and moving the 500 miles down I-65 to Nashville at the end of June. After 25 years here, we decided we needed a change of scenery. So with all the packing and everything, I don’t see a June episode in the offing.&nbsp;</li><li>Way back when I was doing heavy international travel -- Chicago on Monday, Toronto on Tuesday, New York to London on Wednesday, Zurich on Thursday, getting back to Chicago at Friday midnight -- what then seemed like necessary travel, but now, looking back on it, seems like stupid travel -- people would ask me my favorite city. I thought about it a lot, but would always end up with the same answer -- Chicago. And not just because it was my home; I was offering up that answer when we lived in Philadelphia. No, my explanation to the raised eyebrows that answer often generated was that Chicago was the right size -- big enough to support a wide range of interesting stuff (sports, culture, restaurants, microbreweries), but not so big that you couldn’t get your arms around it, and with enough Midwest pragmatism, from people moving in from Indiana and Iowa and Minnesota and Wisconsin, to keep everything grounded, to keep it from getting too wacky. And to their “But what about the weather?” question I’d say “yes, it can be -10° in Chicago in January, but it can be +110° in Phoenix in August; most every place has 3 months of lousy weather (save for maybe San Diego) sometime during the year; different people choose the 3 months they can endure.”&nbsp;</li><li>But over the past few years, I realized my answer about Chicago didn’t hold up any more -- not about the weather, the winters still suck; it’s that the pragmatism seems to be gone, with violent crime -- robberies, shootings, carjackings -- and definitely not-pragmatic local government decisions filling the void. It has started to feel like a replay of the 1970’s, which were not a great time in Chicago.&nbsp; Now, I don’t think it’s permanent. It’s a pendulum. Just like the city came back from a bad stretch in the ‘70’s to be a great place in the mid/late ‘80’s. It’ll happen again; I just don’t want to hang around for the low point. And according to the half-dozen movers we talked to, we’re not the only ones.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <em>Dive Deep (Loveshadow remix)</em> by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/50488 Ft: Loveshadow</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A quick public service announcement -- the COVID Real ID extension expires in less than a year. <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/news/press/releases/2021/04/27/dhs-announces-extension-real-id-full-enforcement-deadline\">According to the TSA</a>, “Beginning May 3, 2023, every air traveler 18 years of age and older will need a REAL ID-compliant driver’s license or identification card… at airport security checkpoints for domestic air travel.”&nbsp; Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/01/16/podcast-183-covid-test-anxiety-michelin-food-adventures/\">episode #183</a> in January, I talked about getting a Real ID version of my Illinois driver’s license when I had to renew it. No additional cost and maybe 3 additional minutes of time. But if you can’t pick up a Real ID driver’s license before next May, you’ll have to remember to take along <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/travel/security-screening/identification\">your passport or your Global Entry card</a>.</li><li>In the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/04/21/podcast-186-mask-mandate-scramble-small-airport-survival/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #186 — Mask Mandate Scramble; Small Airport Survival\">last episode</a>, we walked through the abrupt end of the US CDC’s transportation mask mandate -- on planes, buses, trains,....&nbsp; That news cycle lasted right at about a week, the last entry being the CDC asking the Dept of Justice to appeal the federal judge’s ruling that struck down the mandate that they had extended for 2 weeks to May 3rd. On May 3rd, the CDC posted a <a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2022/s0503-covid-19-travel.html\">press release reiterating their <em>recommendation</em></a> that everyone aged 2 and older wear masks on planes and trains, and in airports and stations -- but nothing about the status of that appeal. I’m guessing that they decided to accept the facts on the ground and quietly forget about any appeal -- which is probably the only real option they have.</li><li>And then this week, adding to those facts on the ground, the European CDC has dropped their transportation mask mandate recommendations. The difference, though, is the European CDC’s recommendations are just that, recommendations. The enforceable <em>rules</em> are made by each country, and Spain and Italy, many of the countries hardest hit by the initial wave of COVID, have extended their mask mandates to mid-June.</li><li>OK, I wasn’t going to say anything more about hotel housekeeping because <em>even I’m</em> bored with it, but then I ran across an <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/hotel-housekeepers-want-you-to-request-daily-room-cleaning-11652650925\">article</a> in the Wall Street Journal about how hotel housekeeping unions are pushing for a return to daily room service. Certainly a big part of the push is to drive more work, more hours for the union members. But also because rooms are dirtier and take longer to clean when they have gone a few days without service, especially with the current guest mix that’s still heavier with leisure travelers, who tend to have more people in the room than the road-warrior business traveler. As you’d guess, hotel owners disagree, but for changing reasons. Their arc of rationale has gone from the pre-pandemic “be green, save water, and we’ll give you an extra 500 points to skip housekeeping” to pandemic “we’re keeping everyone safe by staying out of your room” to the current “it’s your choice, and ‘labor shortage’”.&nbsp; OK, that’s it. I’m <em>really </em>not going to talk about room cleaning anymore.</li><li>But I <em>will</em> talk about TSA checkpoint passenger volumes again. <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/09/27/podcast-179-high-tech-airport-lines-business-travel-still-missing/\">Back in September 2021</a>, the last time I scraped the numbers off the TSA <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/coronavirus/passenger-throughput\">website</a>, average daily passenger volumes were bouncing around 1.7 million, down 20% from the July summer peak of over 2 million and down 24% from pre-pandemic September 2019 numbers. Six months later, looking at the last month-and-a-half -- April to mid-May -- the average daily volume is 2.1 million and growing, and now just 10-12% off the April/May 2019 numbers. So if those TSA checkpoints and airplanes are feeling a bit more crowded, it’s because they are. Tough to remember back to my first post-lockdown flight in June 2020, when daily passenger volumes were 5-600,000 and the Southwest boarding agent said “There’s 40 of you on a plane with 175 seats. So everyone gets their own row.” I, in no way, want to go back to those times, but having a bit more plane space <em>was</em> nice.</li><li>I get <em>a lot</em> of emails from public relations firms. I read the subject lines of all of them because every once in a rare while, there’s something that catches my eye, like the pitch that led to last episode’s interview about Daytona Beach airport trying to survive in the shadow of the behemoth that is Orlando Int’l. So when I read the subject line “Study Finds that Frequent-Flyer Programs Increase Cost of Business Travel” in my inbox a few weeks back, I just had to click through. The study, <a href=\"https://www.informs.org/About-INFORMS/News-Room/Press-Releases/Study-Finds-that-Frequent-Flyer-Programs-Increase-Cost-of-Business-Travel\">just published</a> in the journal <em>Marketing Science</em> which I admit I don’t read as often as I should because I get tied up pouring through the CDC’s <em>Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report</em>, is titled <em>Reaching for Gold: Frequent-Flyer Status Incentives and Moral Hazard</em>, written by professors from University of Michigan and Duke business schools. According to the press release, after “(analyzing) the transactional database of a leading U.S.-based airline’s frequent-flyer program (that) included the histories and point accumulations of 3.5 million frequent-flyer program members during the 2010 and 2011 point-earning cycles” their main insights were -- “‘Points Members’ are More Likely to Choose Higher Fares When Not Paying for It” and “the closer frequent-flyer program members get to ‘elite status’ the more likely they are to choose an airline even when it may be more expensive than a competitor’s flight”. Hmm, that feels a bit “Dawn breaking over Marblehead”. How can you be researching frequent flier programs and act like you’ve never heard of (let alone done) a mileage run. Maybe the press release overly summarized the research and just isn’t communicating its subtlety. So I hit Google to find the <a href=\"https://yesimorhun.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/18/2018/11/Orhun_Guo_2018.pdf\">actual paper</a>. 29 pages of text and equations, and 15 pages of bibliography and data tables later -- nope, the press release was pretty much it. If the moral hazard of business travelers using their employer’s money to pay for more expensive flights to make status is eliminated, the paper estimates that companies would save at least 7% of their travel costs. Looking at 2019 data, the <a href=\"https://www.statista.com/statistics/562804/us-air-traffic-domestic-average-ticket-price/\">average cost of a walk-up US domestic ticket</a> -- one booked less than a week in advance, so the typical road warrior ticket -- is about $500. 7% is $35. I dunno, maybe some full-contact procurement guy will get excited about that $35 savings, but I don\'t know any executive in his or her right mind is thinking to themselves “Oh yes, pissing off the people who are jamming themselves in to coach seats and spending nights away from their family for $35 a trip” is a great idea.&nbsp; Except at GM. I remember when frequent flier programs first came out, GM didn’t let their travelers keep the points from business trips, which led to all sorts of weird booking behavior. Until that policy died a quiet death a few years later. Kinda like this research -- I’m sure these professors are nice, smart people; but they gotta get out of their offices a bit more.</li><li>Bridge Music - <em>Drops of H2O ( The Filtered Water Treatment )</em> by J.Lang (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djlang59/37792 Ft: Airtone</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Moving to a Non-Hub Airport</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>One thing that kinda snuck up on me about our move to Nashville -- it’ll be the first time in almost 40 years that I haven’t lived in an airport hub city: Chicago with American and United at ORD; San Francisco with their United hub; Dallas when I signed up for American’s Advantage program my first day of work; Philadelphia with US Air, though I avoided them as much as I could; Detroit with Northwest; and then back to Chicago, now a 3-hub town after Southwest took over MDW after the big expansion.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>Nashville <em>was</em> a hub in the late ‘80’s/early ‘90’s -- well, a mini-hub, actually -- when American was playing around with their network. They built mini-hubs in Nashville, Raleigh/Durham, and San Jose. The experiment lasted maybe 10 years but never really made any money. I think the only thing of American left in those airports are Admirals Clubs; in Nashville, they’re down to 9% of the passenger volume.&nbsp; Today, Nashville’s direct flight distribution looks like any non-hub airport -- the top 4 destinations are Big 3 hubs -- ATL, DEN, DFW, ORD -- with the fifth being MCO, thanks to all that Mouseketeer traffic.</li><li>The #1 travel tip on my and any other experienced traveler’s list is “fly non-stop” -- much easier from a hub airport, of course, and then your frequent flier strategy just falls out from there. If you live in Atlanta, you’re doubling down on Delta’s SkyMiles; realistically, there’s not another option. Non-hub? It could be just as straight-forward -- if your flight patterns take you primarily to one of those hub cities -- Chicago, Atlanta, San Francisco -- then your choice too is made for you. But if you’re in sales or consulting -- or maybe slouching toward retirement -- and your flight patterns are a bit more scattershot, then you have to think -- what’s my objective? -- flying non-stop for the shortest flight times and lowest probability of disruption; making elite status because the perks make my travel easier; or is it building up points to help fund my vacations?</li><li>Thinking about my consulting colleagues who flew out of non-hub airports every week, they were all about status. One guy I worked with lived in Ft Myers, Florida and was all in on Delta. Even when flying every week to projects in, say, Dallas or Chicago, he’d always skip the direct American flights and connect through Atlanta, killing the time from all those missed connections with drinks in Delta’s Sky Club -- which was free with his Diamond Medallion status.</li><li>My calculus is a little easier. One of the side benefits of flying <em>a lot</em> for over 35 years is that I stacked up enough mileage for lifetime mid-tier elite status on American and United. Not enough status to get into their clubs for free, but along with the usual early boarding and free bags, it’s gotten me free club entry to OneWorld and Star Alliance partners’ lounges -- which is very valuable when trying to navigate the rabbit warrens that are FRA and LHR after north Atlantic turbulence has screwed up your in-flight sleep plans.&nbsp; If I didn’t already have these metal levels or I was in striking distance of a new level -- say close to the 2 million I’d need to jump from United Premier Gold to lifetime Platinum -- then I’d probably suck it up like my colleagues do, and get, say, the top tier United credit card with free club access for a place to sit out ORD, DEN, and IAH weather delays.</li><li>Those lifetime statuses let me step off the elite hamster wheel, so I’m now looking at non-stop flights and earning miles. Out of Nashville, Southwest has the most non-stop flights, so I’ll probably be flying them a fair bit. But while Southwest’s Companion Pass perk -- their “buy a ticket, get one free” top tier status is phenomenal, I can’t BOGO Southwest to Europe, so I need to be banking miles on one of the Big 3 so I can book on their OneWorld, Star Alliance, or SkyTeam partners -- which is where travel credit cards come back into the picture. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/09/19/podcast-167-6-months-on-why-keep-travel-cards/\">episode #167</a> in September 2020, we talked about people replacing their mileage cards with cash-back cards since no one was flying. But that trend is reverting to the mean and credit card companies have big slugs of mileage to dole out after buying them cheap in 2020 when the airlines needed real cash real fast. So my non-hub strategy -- fly direct when I can, leverage those hard-earned lifetime statuses when I can, and charge everything I can on a mileage-earning card -- including any drinks I may need to see me through those missed connections.</li><li>Bridge Music —  &nbsp;<em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/trifonic/445\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bored on Your Backside</a></em> by Trifonic (c) copyright 2005 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Sampling Plus 1.0 license. http://ccmixter.org/files/trifonic/445</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>What Makes a Great Taproom?</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>With a month left in Chicago, Irene and I have built a list of “Places to Hit Before Move” that’s some mix of greatest hits and places we’ve always wanted to go but have, for some reason or another, never gotten ‘round to. And then I have a separate list of Chicago taprooms I want to hit one more time -- Goose Island, Revolution Brewing, Off Color, Solemn Oath, Marz, Dovetail, and Metropolitan Brewing. Which then got me thinking -- why these and not other; what makes a good taproom for me?</li><li>First thing to do is to open up Untappd, the beer social networking app that\'s been my beer diary for over 11 years now.&nbsp; I’ve checked beer in at over 1,900 locations and the #1 location category is -- a brewery taproom. I scrolled through the list on the app and jotted down the ones I thought “Yeah, I’d like to go back there.”&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>Probably the smallest group is about unique brewery experiences; where I actually did the brewery tour and it was something more than just row after row of steel tanks. Cantillon in Brussels is everyone’s favorite; they send you off on your own guided with nothing but a paper brochure and tell you not to break anything. And then, after you’ve navigated coolships and barrel rooms, they pour you their amazing lambic beers. Or the original Lagunitas Brewery in Petaluma, CA where the tour guide tossed us just-filled IPA bottles he’d grabbed before they got to the packaging machine.&nbsp;</li><li>But except for these few exceptions, my favorite places have a wide beer selection (something more than 5 taps of IPAs) and/or a cool space and/or the chance to chat with the brewer. Labietis’ original place in Riga, Latvia hit the first two square on the head: a <em>diverse</em> beer menu -- a juniper beer inspired by Latvian folk songs, a wheat beer with meadowsweet, a lager with Latvian hops -- that’s located in the back courtyard of what looked like, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/11/30/podcast-157-notes-from-the-baltics-riga-latvia-and-tallinn-estonia/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #157 — Notes from the Baltics: Riga, Latvia and Tallinn, Estonia\">the fall of 2019</a>, a block of now slightly derelict early 20th Century manor houses. A little closer to home on my Chicago list, Metropolitan Brewing does nothing but German-style lagers which are a perfect fit for their taproom patio that looks out on the north branch of the Chicago River.</li><li>Going to a brewery’s taproom is kinda like seeing a band in concert -- I’m going to get a fuller picture of that band than I will just hearing their hit songs on the radio or a Spotify playlist. Hitting a good taproom can be similar -- getting past the high-volume core beers to see what the brewer can really do. When we were in Santa Fe last month, I went out of my way to hit Rowley Farmhouse Ales because I really liked their range during our last visit in 2018. So of course I ordered the Teosinte, a funky, earthy, grassy sour made from Oaxacan green dent corn grown a couple hundred miles east, near the Texas-New Mexico border. It was an incredibly interesting beer. I wouldn’t buy a six-pack of it, but I was more than happy to have a glass of it.</li><li>But probably the best time I have at taprooms is when I get to talk to the brewer. During one of my trips last year to Nashville, I found myself an hour south in Columbia, TN, which bills itself “Muletown.” I missed the 2021 “Mule Day” festival; it was canceled due to COVID. Instead, I wound my way through a light industrial neighborhood hard against some freight train tracks billed as Columbia’s Art District to find Bad Idea Brewing. There were two other folks sitting at the bar; the brewer was behind it, serving. And we just got talking -- about the beer, about his brewery, about Columbia, about brewing in Columbia, about what kind of beer sells in Columbia. And through all that, taster glasses kept landing in front of me -- “try this,” “what do you think of that?” he’d ask. What was going to be a quick side trip for a beer turned into a nice afternoon of conversation… and beer.</li><li>I guess there’s one more thing that can make for a great taproom, or maybe more of a great taproom experience and that is -- it took me to a part of a city that I wouldn’t have otherwise gone. I talked a bit about this in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/04/10/podcast-174-how-the-pros-plan-their-taproom-tourism/\">episode #174</a> when I talked with Rob Cheshire of the UK podcast This Week in Craft Beer about planning taproom visits. Navigating the maze of a Beijing hutong to find Great Leap Brewing, or exiting a Paris Metro stop in a North African neighborhood on my way to Deck &amp; Donohue, or riding an e-scooter through a questionable neighborhood in northeast DC to Right Proper Brewing. These three were fine places with solid beers, but they’re more memorable for the trip to find them than for the places themselves.</li><li>But you can’t always tell this from Google search. So if you go to the show notes on travelcommons.com you’ll find my list of&nbsp; “Yeah, I’d like to go back there” taprooms.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>My<em> Yeah, I’d like to go back there</em>  Taproom List</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Chicago <ul><li><a href=\"https://www.gooseisland.com/fulton-brewery/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Goose Island Taproom</a>, 1800 W Fulton St — Yes, it\'s now owned by AB InBev, but it was the original Chicago microbrewery in the late \'80\'s and they created the whole barrel-aged stout category with Bourbon County Stout</li><li><a href=\"http://www.revbrew.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Revolution Brewing Brewery &amp; Taproom</a>, 3340 N Kedzie Ave— Great beers; wide range of styles; bring your own food</li><li><a href=\"http://maplewoodbrew.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Maplewood Brewery &amp; Distillery</a>, 2717 N Maplewood Ave (South of Diversey) — Small, neighborhood bar tucked up against the Kennedy Expressway</li><li><a href=\"http://www.metrobrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Metropolitan Brewing</a>, 3057 N Rockwell St — Been brewing German-style lagers since 2009; great patio seating that looks out over the north branch of the Chicago River</li><li><a href=\"http://dovetailbrewery.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Dovetail Brewery</a>, 1800 W Belle Plaine Ave — German lagers and spontaneous fermented beers; the best taproom on the Ravenswood neighborhood\'s <a href=\"https://ravenswoodchicago.org/neighborhood/malt-row/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">\"Malt Row\"</a></li><li><a href=\"http://www.offcolorbrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Off Color Brewing</a>, 1460 N Kingsbury St — Great range of beer styles, all of which are well-done</li><li><a href=\"https://www.solemnoathbrewery.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Solemn Oath Brewery</a>, 1661 Quincy Ave #179, Naperville, IL — In a <em>faaar</em> west neighborhood of Chicago, one of the OG suburban breweries. Great beers and a great outdoor space, especially in the winter.</li><li>A couple of South Side taprooms featured on the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/07/15/video-chicago-mdw-layover-taproom-tour/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Chicago MDW Layover Taproom Tour</a> video<ul><li><a href=\"http://marzbrewing.com/\">Marz Community Brewing</a>, 3630 S Iron St</li><li><a href=\"http://www.whinerbeer.com/\">Whiner Beer</a>, 1400 W 46th St</li></ul></li></ul></li><li>But over the </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #187</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>As I said at the top of the show, there’s probably not going to be a June show, between packing up the Chicago studio and then unpacking it in Nashville. Good news, though -- the sound quality in Nashville might get a step-function improvement. Just about every apt building Irene and I looked at had a music studio as one of the amenities. The sound proofing, the sound deadening, and maybe a better microphone should make things sound a bit better. Quite a ways from those first episodes, recording with the iRiver MP3 player’s built-in mic while standing in a shower stall. Oh my!</li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. You’ll have to go to the TravelCommons’ website if you want to torture your ears listening to those first bathroom-studio episodes; what one listener labelled a “pottycast”</li><li>And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_187.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #187 — Moving to a Non-Hub Airport; What Makes A Great Taproom?','','inherit','closed','closed','','4145-revision-v1','','','2022-05-28 12:19:09','2022-05-28 17:19:09','',4145,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4155',0,'revision','',0),
(4157,1,'2022-05-28 12:58:42','2022-05-28 17:58:42','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/IMG_4803.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/IMG_4803-300x300.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" alt=\"Taproom Draft Beer Taps Arranged as a Smiley Face\"></a>I\'m Happy To See You Too![/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>The last episode recording in Chicago before we relocate the TravelCommons studios, and our lives, down to Nashville. We close out our threads on in-flight mask mandates and hotel housekeeping, and critique an academic paper about the moral hazard of frequent flier elite status. I talk through the changes I\'ll have to make when flying out of a non-hub airport. And then, as I\'m making a list of the Chicago breweries I want to re-visit before leaving, I think through the characteristics that makes a taproom great. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_187.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #187: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you, for the last time, from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois because we’re packing everything up and moving the 500 miles down I-65 to Nashville at the end of June. After 25 years here, we decided we needed a change of scenery. So with all the packing and everything, I don’t see a June episode in the offing.&nbsp;</li><li>Way back when I was doing heavy international travel -- Chicago on Monday, Toronto on Tuesday, New York to London on Wednesday, Zurich on Thursday, getting back to Chicago at Friday midnight -- what then seemed like necessary travel, but now, looking back on it, seems like stupid travel -- people would ask me my favorite city. I thought about it a lot, but would always end up with the same answer -- Chicago. And not just because it was my home; I was offering up that answer when we lived in Philadelphia. No, my explanation to the raised eyebrows that answer often generated was that Chicago was the right size -- big enough to support a wide range of interesting stuff (sports, culture, restaurants, microbreweries), but not so big that you couldn’t get your arms around it, and with enough Midwest pragmatism, from people moving in from Indiana and Iowa and Minnesota and Wisconsin, to keep everything grounded, to keep it from getting too wacky. And to their “But what about the weather?” question I’d say “yes, it can be -10° in Chicago in January, but it can be +110° in Phoenix in August; most every place has 3 months of lousy weather (save for maybe San Diego) sometime during the year; different people choose the 3 months they can endure.”&nbsp;</li><li>But over the past few years, I realized my answer about Chicago didn’t hold up any more -- not about the weather, the winters still suck; it’s that the pragmatism seems to be gone, with violent crime -- robberies, shootings, carjackings -- and definitely not-pragmatic local government decisions filling the void. It has started to feel like a replay of the 1970’s, which were not a great time in Chicago.&nbsp; Now, I don’t think it’s permanent. It’s a pendulum. Just like the city came back from a bad stretch in the ‘70’s to be a great place in the mid/late ‘80’s. It’ll happen again; I just don’t want to hang around for the low point. And according to the half-dozen movers we talked to, we’re not the only ones.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <em>Dive Deep (Loveshadow remix)</em> by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/50488 Ft: Loveshadow</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A quick public service announcement -- the COVID Real ID extension expires in less than a year. <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/news/press/releases/2021/04/27/dhs-announces-extension-real-id-full-enforcement-deadline\">According to the TSA</a>, “Beginning May 3, 2023, every air traveler 18 years of age and older will need a REAL ID-compliant driver’s license or identification card… at airport security checkpoints for domestic air travel.”&nbsp; Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/01/16/podcast-183-covid-test-anxiety-michelin-food-adventures/\">episode #183</a> in January, I talked about getting a Real ID version of my Illinois driver’s license when I had to renew it. No additional cost and maybe 3 additional minutes of time. But if you can’t pick up a Real ID driver’s license before next May, you’ll have to remember to take along <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/travel/security-screening/identification\">your passport or your Global Entry card</a>.</li><li>In the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/04/21/podcast-186-mask-mandate-scramble-small-airport-survival/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #186 — Mask Mandate Scramble; Small Airport Survival\">last episode</a>, we walked through the abrupt end of the US CDC’s transportation mask mandate -- on planes, buses, trains,....&nbsp; That news cycle lasted right at about a week, the last entry being the CDC asking the Dept of Justice to appeal the federal judge’s ruling that struck down the mandate that they had extended for 2 weeks to May 3rd. On May 3rd, the CDC posted a <a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2022/s0503-covid-19-travel.html\">press release reiterating their <em>recommendation</em></a> that everyone aged 2 and older wear masks on planes and trains, and in airports and stations -- but nothing about the status of that appeal. I’m guessing that they decided to accept the facts on the ground and quietly forget about any appeal -- which is probably the only real option they have.</li><li>And then this week, adding to those facts on the ground, the European CDC has dropped their transportation mask mandate recommendations. The difference, though, is the European CDC’s recommendations are just that, recommendations. The enforceable <em>rules</em> are made by each country, and Spain and Italy, many of the countries hardest hit by the initial wave of COVID, have extended their mask mandates to mid-June.</li><li>OK, I wasn’t going to say anything more about hotel housekeeping because <em>even I’m</em> bored with it, but then I ran across an <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/hotel-housekeepers-want-you-to-request-daily-room-cleaning-11652650925\">article</a> in the Wall Street Journal about how hotel housekeeping unions are pushing for a return to daily room service. Certainly a big part of the push is to drive more work, more hours for the union members. But also because rooms are dirtier and take longer to clean when they have gone a few days without service, especially with the current guest mix that’s still heavier with leisure travelers, who tend to have more people in the room than the road-warrior business traveler. As you’d guess, hotel owners disagree, but for changing reasons. Their arc of rationale has gone from the pre-pandemic “be green, save water, and we’ll give you an extra 500 points to skip housekeeping” to pandemic “we’re keeping everyone safe by staying out of your room” to the current “it’s your choice, and ‘labor shortage’”.&nbsp; OK, that’s it. I’m <em>really </em>not going to talk about room cleaning anymore.</li><li>But I <em>will</em> talk about TSA checkpoint passenger volumes again. <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/09/27/podcast-179-high-tech-airport-lines-business-travel-still-missing/\">Back in September 2021</a>, the last time I scraped the numbers off the TSA <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/coronavirus/passenger-throughput\">website</a>, average daily passenger volumes were bouncing around 1.7 million, down 20% from the July summer peak of over 2 million and down 24% from pre-pandemic September 2019 numbers. Six months later, looking at the last month-and-a-half -- April to mid-May -- the average daily volume is 2.1 million and growing, and now just 10-12% off the April/May 2019 numbers. So if those TSA checkpoints and airplanes are feeling a bit more crowded, it’s because they are. Tough to remember back to my first post-lockdown flight in June 2020, when daily passenger volumes were 5-600,000 and the Southwest boarding agent said “There’s 40 of you on a plane with 175 seats. So everyone gets their own row.” I, in no way, want to go back to those times, but having a bit more plane space <em>was</em> nice.</li><li>I get <em>a lot</em> of emails from public relations firms. I read the subject lines of all of them because every once in a rare while, there’s something that catches my eye, like the pitch that led to last episode’s interview about Daytona Beach airport trying to survive in the shadow of the behemoth that is Orlando Int’l. So when I read the subject line “Study Finds that Frequent-Flyer Programs Increase Cost of Business Travel” in my inbox a few weeks back, I just had to click through. The study, <a href=\"https://www.informs.org/About-INFORMS/News-Room/Press-Releases/Study-Finds-that-Frequent-Flyer-Programs-Increase-Cost-of-Business-Travel\">just published</a> in the journal <em>Marketing Science</em> which I admit I don’t read as often as I should because I get tied up pouring through the CDC’s <em>Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report</em>, is titled <em>Reaching for Gold: Frequent-Flyer Status Incentives and Moral Hazard</em>, written by professors from University of Michigan and Duke business schools. According to the press release, after “(analyzing) the transactional database of a leading U.S.-based airline’s frequent-flyer program (that) included the histories and point accumulations of 3.5 million frequent-flyer program members during the 2010 and 2011 point-earning cycles” their main insights were -- “‘Points Members’ are More Likely to Choose Higher Fares When Not Paying for It” and “the closer frequent-flyer program members get to ‘elite status’ the more likely they are to choose an airline even when it may be more expensive than a competitor’s flight”. Hmm, that feels a bit “Dawn breaking over Marblehead”. How can you be researching frequent flier programs and act like you’ve never heard of (let alone done) a mileage run. Maybe the press release overly summarized the research and just isn’t communicating its subtlety. So I hit Google to find the <a href=\"https://yesimorhun.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/18/2018/11/Orhun_Guo_2018.pdf\">actual paper</a>. 29 pages of text and equations, and 15 pages of bibliography and data tables later -- nope, the press release was pretty much it. If the moral hazard of business travelers using their employer’s money to pay for more expensive flights to make status is eliminated, the paper estimates that companies would save at least 7% of their travel costs. Looking at 2019 data, the <a href=\"https://www.statista.com/statistics/562804/us-air-traffic-domestic-average-ticket-price/\">average cost of a walk-up US domestic ticket</a> -- one booked less than a week in advance, so the typical road warrior ticket -- is about $500. 7% is $35. I dunno, maybe some full-contact procurement guy will get excited about that $35 savings, but I don\'t know any executive in his or her right mind is thinking to themselves “Oh yes, pissing off the people who are jamming themselves in to coach seats and spending nights away from their family for $35 a trip” is a great idea.&nbsp; Except at GM. I remember when frequent flier programs first came out, GM didn’t let their travelers keep the points from business trips, which led to all sorts of weird booking behavior. Until that policy died a quiet death a few years later. Kinda like this research -- I’m sure these professors are nice, smart people; but they gotta get out of their offices a bit more.</li><li>Bridge Music - <em>Drops of H2O ( The Filtered Water Treatment )</em> by J.Lang (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djlang59/37792 Ft: Airtone</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Moving to a Non-Hub Airport</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>One thing that kinda snuck up on me about our move to Nashville -- it’ll be the first time in almost 40 years that I haven’t lived in an airport hub city: Chicago with American and United at ORD; San Francisco with their United hub; Dallas when I signed up for American’s Advantage program my first day of work; Philadelphia with US Air, though I avoided them as much as I could; Detroit with Northwest; and then back to Chicago, now a 3-hub town after Southwest took over MDW after the big expansion.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>Nashville <em>was</em> a hub in the late ‘80’s/early ‘90’s -- well, a mini-hub, actually -- when American was playing around with their network. They built mini-hubs in Nashville, Raleigh/Durham, and San Jose. The experiment lasted maybe 10 years but never really made any money. I think the only thing of American left in those airports are Admirals Clubs; in Nashville, they’re down to 9% of the passenger volume.&nbsp; Today, Nashville’s direct flight distribution looks like any non-hub airport -- the top 4 destinations are Big 3 hubs -- ATL, DEN, DFW, ORD -- with the fifth being MCO, thanks to all that Mouseketeer traffic.</li><li>The #1 travel tip on my and any other experienced traveler’s list is “fly non-stop” -- much easier from a hub airport, of course, and then your frequent flier strategy just falls out from there. If you live in Atlanta, you’re doubling down on Delta’s SkyMiles; realistically, there’s not another option. Non-hub? It could be just as straight-forward -- if your flight patterns take you primarily to one of those hub cities -- Chicago, Atlanta, San Francisco -- then your choice too is made for you. But if you’re in sales or consulting -- or maybe slouching toward retirement -- and your flight patterns are a bit more scattershot, then you have to think -- what’s my objective? -- flying non-stop for the shortest flight times and lowest probability of disruption; making elite status because the perks make my travel easier; or is it building up points to help fund my vacations?</li><li>Thinking about my consulting colleagues who flew out of non-hub airports every week, they were all about status. One guy I worked with lived in Ft Myers, Florida and was all in on Delta. Even when flying every week to projects in, say, Dallas or Chicago, he’d always skip the direct American flights and connect through Atlanta, killing the time from all those missed connections with drinks in Delta’s Sky Club -- which was free with his Diamond Medallion status.</li><li>My calculus is a little easier. One of the side benefits of flying <em>a lot</em> for over 35 years is that I stacked up enough mileage for lifetime mid-tier elite status on American and United. Not enough status to get into their clubs for free, but along with the usual early boarding and free bags, it’s gotten me free club entry to OneWorld and Star Alliance partners’ lounges -- which is very valuable when trying to navigate the rabbit warrens that are FRA and LHR after north Atlantic turbulence has screwed up your in-flight sleep plans.&nbsp; If I didn’t already have these metal levels or I was in striking distance of a new level -- say close to the 2 million I’d need to jump from United Premier Gold to lifetime Platinum -- then I’d probably suck it up like my colleagues do, and get, say, the top tier United credit card with free club access for a place to sit out ORD, DEN, and IAH weather delays.</li><li>Those lifetime statuses let me step off the elite hamster wheel, so I’m now looking at non-stop flights and earning miles. Out of Nashville, Southwest has the most non-stop flights, so I’ll probably be flying them a fair bit. But while Southwest’s Companion Pass perk -- their “buy a ticket, get one free” top tier status is phenomenal, I can’t BOGO Southwest to Europe, so I need to be banking miles on one of the Big 3 so I can book on their OneWorld, Star Alliance, or SkyTeam partners -- which is where travel credit cards come back into the picture. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/09/19/podcast-167-6-months-on-why-keep-travel-cards/\">episode #167</a> in September 2020, we talked about people replacing their mileage cards with cash-back cards since no one was flying. But that trend is reverting to the mean and credit card companies have big slugs of mileage to dole out after buying them cheap in 2020 when the airlines needed real cash real fast. So my non-hub strategy -- fly direct when I can, leverage those hard-earned lifetime statuses when I can, and charge everything I can on a mileage-earning card -- including any drinks I may need to see me through those missed connections.</li><li>Bridge Music —  &nbsp;<em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/trifonic/445\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bored on Your Backside</a></em> by Trifonic (c) copyright 2005 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Sampling Plus 1.0 license. http://ccmixter.org/files/trifonic/445</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>What Makes a Great Taproom?</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>With a month left in Chicago, Irene and I have built a list of “Places to Hit Before Move” that’s some mix of greatest hits and places we’ve always wanted to go but have, for some reason or another, never gotten ‘round to. And then I have a separate list of Chicago taprooms I want to hit one more time -- Goose Island, Revolution Brewing, Off Color, Solemn Oath, Marz, Dovetail, and Metropolitan Brewing. Which then got me thinking -- why these and not other; what makes a good taproom for me?</li><li>First thing to do is to open up Untappd, the beer social networking app that\'s been my beer diary for over 11 years now.  I’ve checked beer in at over 1,900 locations and the #1 location category is -- a brewery taproom. I scrolled through the list on the app and jotted down the ones I thought “Yeah, I’d like to go back there.”  </li><li>Probably the smallest group is about unique brewery experiences; where I actually did the brewery tour and it was something more than just row after row of steel tanks. Cantillon in Brussels is everyone’s favorite; they send you off on your own guided with nothing but a paper brochure and tell you not to break anything. And then, after you’ve navigated coolships and barrel rooms, they pour you their amazing lambic beers. Or the original Lagunitas Brewery in Petaluma, CA where the tour guide tossed us just-filled IPA bottles he’d grabbed before they got to the packaging machine. </li><li>But except for these few exceptions, my favorite places have a wide beer selection (something more than 5 taps of IPAs) and/or a cool space and/or the chance to chat with the brewer. Labietis’ original place in Riga, Latvia hit the first two square on the head: a <em>diverse</em> beer menu -- a juniper beer inspired by Latvian folk songs, a wheat beer with meadowsweet, a lager with Latvian hops -- that’s located in the back courtyard of what looked like, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/11/30/podcast-157-notes-from-the-baltics-riga-latvia-and-tallinn-estonia/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #157 — Notes from the Baltics: Riga, Latvia and Tallinn, Estonia\">the fall of 2019</a>, a block of now slightly derelict early 20th Century manor houses. A little closer to home on my Chicago list, Metropolitan Brewing does nothing but German-style lagers which are a perfect fit for their taproom patio that looks out on the north branch of the Chicago River.</li><li>Going to a brewery’s taproom is kinda like seeing a band in concert -- I’m going to get a fuller picture of that band than I will just hearing their hit songs on the radio or a Spotify playlist. Hitting a good taproom can be similar -- getting past the high-volume core beers to see what the brewer can really do. When we were in Santa Fe last month, I went out of my way to hit Rowley Farmhouse Ales because I really liked their range during our last visit in 2018. So of course I ordered the Teosinte, a funky, earthy, grassy sour made from Oaxacan green dent corn grown a couple hundred miles east, near the Texas-New Mexico border. It was an incredibly interesting beer. I wouldn’t buy a six-pack of it, but I was more than happy to have a glass of it.</li><li>But probably the best time I have at taprooms is when I get to talk to the brewer. During one of my trips last year to Nashville, I found myself an hour south in Columbia, TN, which bills itself “Muletown.” I missed the 2021 “Mule Day” festival; it was canceled due to COVID. Instead, I wound my way through a light industrial neighborhood hard against some freight train tracks billed as Columbia’s Art District to find <a href=\"http://www.badideabrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bad Idea Brewing</a>. There were two other folks sitting at the bar; the brewer was behind it, serving. And we just got talking -- about the beer, about his brewery, about Columbia, about brewing in Columbia, about what kind of beer sells in Columbia. And through all that, taster glasses kept landing in front of me -- “try this,” “what do you think of that?” he’d ask. What was going to be a quick side trip for a beer turned into a nice afternoon of conversation… and beer.</li><li>I guess there’s one more thing that can make for a great taproom, or maybe more of a great taproom experience and that is -- it took me to a part of a city that I wouldn’t have otherwise gone. I talked a bit about this in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/04/10/podcast-174-how-the-pros-plan-their-taproom-tourism/\">episode #174</a> when I talked with Rob Cheshire of the UK podcast <a href=\"https://thisweekincraft.beer/podcast/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">This Week in Craft Beer</a> about planning taproom visits. Navigating the maze of a Beijing hutong to find Great Leap Brewing, or exiting a Paris Metro stop in a North African neighborhood on my way to Deck &amp; Donohue, or riding an e-scooter through a questionable neighborhood in northeast DC to <a href=\"https://www.rightproperbrewing.com/brookland\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Right Proper Brewing</a>. These three were fine places with solid beers, but they’re more memorable for the trip to find them than for the places themselves.</li><li>But you can’t always tell this from Google search. So if you go to the show notes on travelcommons.com you’ll find my list of  “Yeah, I’d like to go back there” taprooms.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>My<em> Yeah, I’d like to go back there</em>  Taproom List</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Chicago <ul><li><a href=\"https://www.gooseisland.com/fulton-brewery/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Goose Island Taproom</a>, 1800 W Fulton St — Yes, it\'s now owned by AB InBev, but it was the original Chicago microbrewery in the late \'80\'s and they created the whole barrel-aged stout category with Bourbon County Stout</li><li><a href=\"http://www.revbrew.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Revolution Brewing Brewery &amp; Taproom</a>, 3340 N Kedzie Ave— Great beers; wide range of styles; bring your own food</li><li><a href=\"http://maplewoodbrew.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Maplewood Brewery &amp; Distillery</a>, 2717 N Maplewood Ave (South of Diversey) — Small, neighborhood bar tucked up against the Kennedy Expressway</li><li><a href=\"http://www.metrobrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Metropolitan Brewing</a>, 3057 N Rockwell St — Been brewing German-style lagers since 2009; great patio seating that looks out over the north branch of the Chicago River</li><li><a href=\"http://dovetailbrewery.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Dovetail Brewery</a>, 1800 W Belle Plaine Ave — German lagers and spontaneous fermented beers; the best taproom on the Ravenswood neighborhood\'s <a href=\"https://ravenswoodchicago.org/neighborhood/malt-row/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">\"Malt Row\"</a></li><li><a href=\"http://www.offcolorbrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Off Color Brewing</a>, 1460 N Kingsbury St — Great range of beer styles, all of which are well-done</li><li><a href=\"https://www.solemnoathbrewery.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Solemn Oath Brewery</a>, 1661 Quincy Ave #179, Naperville, IL — In a <em>faaar</em> west neighborhood of Chicago, one of the OG suburban breweries. Great beers and a great outdoor space, especially in the winter.</li><li>A couple of South Side taprooms featured on the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/07/15/video-chicago-mdw-layover-taproom-tour/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Chicago MDW Layover Taproom Tour</a> video<ul><li><a href=\"http://marzbrewing.com/\">Marz Community Brewing</a>, 3630 S Iron St</li><li><a href=\"http://www.whinerbeer.com/\">Whiner Beer</a>, 1400 W 46th St</li></ul></li></ul></li><li>Elsewhere in the US<ul><li><a href=\"https://oxbowbeer.com/location/portland/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Oxbow Blending &amp; Bottling</a>, 49 Washington Ave, Portland, ME — Great selection of farmhouse ales with an outpost of <a href=\"http://www.duckfatfriteshack.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Duckfat</a> serving up fries on the patio</li><li> <a href=\"http://www.allagash.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Allagash Brewing Company</a>, 50 Industrial Way, Portland, ME — One of the OG Maine breweries; huge range of beers; nice outdoor space; two more taprooms across the street makes it a nice afternoon destination</li><li><a href=\"https://otherhalfbrewing.com/location/domino-park/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Other Half Brewing Domino Park</a>, 34 River St, Brooklyn, NY — Great hazy IPAs; great views of Manhattan across the East River</li><li><a href=\"https://www.rightproperbrewing.com/brookland\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Right Proper Brewing Brookland Production House + Tasting Room</a>, 920 Girard St NE, Washington, DC — A nice little taproom in a DC neighborhood that is <em>way</em> off the typical tourist track</li><li><a href=\"http://www.thefermentorium.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">The Fermentorium Brewery and Tasting Room</a>, 7481 WI-60 Trunk, Cedarburg, WI — Well done range of beers just outside of a scenic small Wisconsin town</li><li><a href=\"http://drifabrewing.beer/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Drífa Brewing Company</a>, 501 S Lake St, Marquette, MI — Great beer stop on the bike path along the shore of Lake Superior</li><li><a href=\"https://beardedirisbrewing.com/location/germantown/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bearded Iris Brewing</a>, 101 Van Buren St, Nashville, TN — Original Germantown taproom with great hazy IPAs, pool tables and a nice patio</li><li><a href=\"https://www.variousartistsbrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Various Artists Brewing</a>, 1011 Elm Hill Pike, Nashville, TN — Wide variety of beer styles; big patio; guest chefs working a big grill</li><li><a href=\"http://www.faitlaforcebrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Fait la Force Brewing</a>, 1414 3rd Ave S, Nashville, TN — An unassuming place tucked away in the Chestnut Hill neighborhood; comfortable space; great range of beer styles; had a great conversation with the brewer behind the bar</li><li><a href=\"http://www.badideabrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bad Idea Brewing Company</a>, 307 W 11th St, Columbia, TN — Comfortable taproom with well-executed beers in Columbia\'s Art District; another place I had a nice conversation with the brewer</li><li><a href=\"https://www.rowleyfarmhouse.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Rowley Farmhouse Ales</a>, 1405 Maclovia St, Santa Fe, NM — Nice range of IPAs, saisons, and sours, and a solid green chile cheeseburger</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #187</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>As I said at the top of the show, there’s probably not going to be a June show, between packing up the Chicago studio and then unpacking it in Nashville. Good news, though -- the sound quality in Nashville might get a step-function improvement. Just about every apt building Irene and I looked at had a music studio as one of the amenities. The sound proofing, the sound deadening, and maybe a better microphone should make things sound a bit better. Quite a ways from those first episodes, recording with the iRiver MP3 player’s built-in mic while standing in a shower stall. Oh my!</li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. You’ll have to go to the TravelCommons’ website if you want to torture your ears listening to those first bathroom-studio episodes; what one listener labelled a “pottycast”</li><li>And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_187.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #187 — Moving to a Non-Hub Airport; What Makes A Great Taproom?','','inherit','closed','closed','','4145-revision-v1','','','2022-05-28 12:58:42','2022-05-28 17:58:42','',4145,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4157',0,'revision','',0),
(4159,1,'2022-05-28 13:09:54','2022-05-28 18:09:54','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/IMG_4803.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/IMG_4803-300x300.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" alt=\"Taproom Draft Beer Taps Arranged as a Smiley Face\"></a>I\'m Happy To See You Too![/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>The last episode recording in Chicago before we relocate the TravelCommons studios, and our lives, down to Nashville. We close out our threads on in-flight mask mandates and hotel housekeeping, and critique an academic paper about the moral hazard of frequent flier elite status. I talk through the changes I\'ll have to make when flying out of a non-hub airport. And then, as I\'m making a list of the Chicago breweries I want to re-visit before leaving, I think through the characteristics that makes a taproom great. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_187.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #187: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you, for the last time, from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois because we’re packing everything up and moving the 500 miles down I-65 to Nashville at the end of June. After 25 years here, we decided we needed a change of scenery. So with all the packing and everything, I don’t see a June episode in the offing.&nbsp;</li><li>Way back when I was doing heavy international travel -- Chicago on Monday, Toronto on Tuesday, New York to London on Wednesday, Zurich on Thursday, getting back to Chicago at Friday midnight -- what then seemed like necessary travel, but now, looking back on it, seems like stupid travel -- people would ask me my favorite city. I thought about it a lot, but would always end up with the same answer -- Chicago. And not just because it was my home; I was offering up that answer when we lived in Philadelphia. No, my explanation to the raised eyebrows that answer often generated was that Chicago was the right size -- big enough to support a wide range of interesting stuff (sports, culture, restaurants, microbreweries), but not so big that you couldn’t get your arms around it, and with enough Midwest pragmatism, from people moving in from Indiana and Iowa and Minnesota and Wisconsin, to keep everything grounded, to keep it from getting too wacky. And to their “But what about the weather?” question I’d say “yes, it can be -10° in Chicago in January, but it can be +110° in Phoenix in August; most every place has 3 months of lousy weather (save for maybe San Diego) sometime during the year; different people choose the 3 months they can endure.”&nbsp;</li><li>But over the past few years, I realized my answer about Chicago didn’t hold up any more -- not about the weather, the winters still suck; it’s that the pragmatism seems to be gone, with violent crime -- robberies, shootings, carjackings -- and definitely not-pragmatic local government decisions filling the void. It has started to feel like a replay of the 1970’s, which were not a great time in Chicago.&nbsp; Now, I don’t think it’s permanent. It’s a pendulum. Just like the city came back from a bad stretch in the ‘70’s to be a great place in the mid/late ‘80’s. It’ll happen again; I just don’t want to hang around for the low point. And according to the half-dozen movers we talked to, we’re not the only ones.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <em>Dive Deep (Loveshadow remix)</em> by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/50488 Ft: Loveshadow</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A quick public service announcement -- the COVID Real ID extension expires in less than a year. <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/news/press/releases/2021/04/27/dhs-announces-extension-real-id-full-enforcement-deadline\">According to the TSA</a>, “Beginning May 3, 2023, every air traveler 18 years of age and older will need a REAL ID-compliant driver’s license or identification card… at airport security checkpoints for domestic air travel.”&nbsp; Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/01/16/podcast-183-covid-test-anxiety-michelin-food-adventures/\">episode #183</a> in January, I talked about getting a Real ID version of my Illinois driver’s license when I had to renew it. No additional cost and maybe 3 additional minutes of time. But if you can’t pick up a Real ID driver’s license before next May, you’ll have to remember to take along <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/travel/security-screening/identification\">your passport or your Global Entry card</a>.</li><li>In the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/04/21/podcast-186-mask-mandate-scramble-small-airport-survival/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #186 — Mask Mandate Scramble; Small Airport Survival\">last episode</a>, we walked through the abrupt end of the US CDC’s transportation mask mandate -- on planes, buses, trains,....&nbsp; That news cycle lasted right at about a week, the last entry being the CDC asking the Dept of Justice to appeal the federal judge’s ruling that struck down the mandate that they had extended for 2 weeks to May 3rd. On May 3rd, the CDC posted a <a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2022/s0503-covid-19-travel.html\">press release reiterating their <em>recommendation</em></a> that everyone aged 2 and older wear masks on planes and trains, and in airports and stations -- but nothing about the status of that appeal. I’m guessing that they decided to accept the facts on the ground and quietly forget about any appeal -- which is probably the only real option they have.</li><li>And then this week, adding to those facts on the ground, the European CDC has dropped their transportation mask mandate recommendations. The difference, though, is the European CDC’s recommendations are just that, recommendations. The enforceable <em>rules</em> are made by each country, and Spain and Italy, many of the countries hardest hit by the initial wave of COVID, have extended their mask mandates to mid-June.</li><li>OK, I wasn’t going to say anything more about hotel housekeeping because <em>even I’m</em> bored with it, but then I ran across an <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/hotel-housekeepers-want-you-to-request-daily-room-cleaning-11652650925\">article</a> in the Wall Street Journal about how hotel housekeeping unions are pushing for a return to daily room service. Certainly a big part of the push is to drive more work, more hours for the union members. But also because rooms are dirtier and take longer to clean when they have gone a few days without service, especially with the current guest mix that’s still heavier with leisure travelers, who tend to have more people in the room than the road-warrior business traveler. As you’d guess, hotel owners disagree, but for changing reasons. Their arc of rationale has gone from the pre-pandemic “be green, save water, and we’ll give you an extra 500 points to skip housekeeping” to pandemic “we’re keeping everyone safe by staying out of your room” to the current “it’s your choice, and ‘labor shortage’”.&nbsp; OK, that’s it. I’m <em>really </em>not going to talk about room cleaning anymore.</li><li>But I <em>will</em> talk about TSA checkpoint passenger volumes again. <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/09/27/podcast-179-high-tech-airport-lines-business-travel-still-missing/\">Back in September 2021</a>, the last time I scraped the numbers off the TSA <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/coronavirus/passenger-throughput\">website</a>, average daily passenger volumes were bouncing around 1.7 million, down 20% from the July summer peak of over 2 million and down 24% from pre-pandemic September 2019 numbers. Six months later, looking at the last month-and-a-half -- April to mid-May -- the average daily volume is 2.1 million and growing, and now just 10-12% off the April/May 2019 numbers. So if those TSA checkpoints and airplanes are feeling a bit more crowded, it’s because they are. Tough to remember back to my first post-lockdown flight in June 2020, when daily passenger volumes were 5-600,000 and the Southwest boarding agent said “There’s 40 of you on a plane with 175 seats. So everyone gets their own row.” I, in no way, want to go back to those times, but having a bit more plane space <em>was</em> nice.</li><li>I get <em>a lot</em> of emails from public relations firms. I read the subject lines of all of them because every once in a rare while, there’s something that catches my eye, like the pitch that led to last episode’s interview about Daytona Beach airport trying to survive in the shadow of the behemoth that is Orlando Int’l. So when I read the subject line “Study Finds that Frequent-Flyer Programs Increase Cost of Business Travel” in my inbox a few weeks back, I just had to click through. The study, <a href=\"https://www.informs.org/About-INFORMS/News-Room/Press-Releases/Study-Finds-that-Frequent-Flyer-Programs-Increase-Cost-of-Business-Travel\">just published</a> in the journal <em>Marketing Science</em> which I admit I don’t read as often as I should because I get tied up pouring through the CDC’s <em>Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report</em>, is titled <em>Reaching for Gold: Frequent-Flyer Status Incentives and Moral Hazard</em>, written by professors from University of Michigan and Duke business schools. According to the press release, after “(analyzing) the transactional database of a leading U.S.-based airline’s frequent-flyer program (that) included the histories and point accumulations of 3.5 million frequent-flyer program members during the 2010 and 2011 point-earning cycles” their main insights were -- “‘Points Members’ are More Likely to Choose Higher Fares When Not Paying for It” and “the closer frequent-flyer program members get to ‘elite status’ the more likely they are to choose an airline even when it may be more expensive than a competitor’s flight”. Hmm, that feels a bit “Dawn breaking over Marblehead”. How can you be researching frequent flier programs and act like you’ve never heard of (let alone done) a mileage run. Maybe the press release overly summarized the research and just isn’t communicating its subtlety. So I hit Google to find the <a href=\"https://yesimorhun.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/18/2018/11/Orhun_Guo_2018.pdf\">actual paper</a>. 29 pages of text and equations, and 15 pages of bibliography and data tables later -- nope, the press release was pretty much it. If the moral hazard of business travelers using their employer’s money to pay for more expensive flights to make status is eliminated, the paper estimates that companies would save at least 7% of their travel costs. Looking at 2019 data, the <a href=\"https://www.statista.com/statistics/562804/us-air-traffic-domestic-average-ticket-price/\">average cost of a walk-up US domestic ticket</a> -- one booked less than a week in advance, so the typical road warrior ticket -- is about $500. 7% is $35. I dunno, maybe some full-contact procurement guy will get excited about that $35 savings, but I don\'t know any executive in his or her right mind is thinking to themselves “Oh yes, pissing off the people who are jamming themselves in to coach seats and spending nights away from their family for $35 a trip” is a great idea.&nbsp; Except at GM. I remember when frequent flier programs first came out, GM didn’t let their travelers keep the points from business trips, which led to all sorts of weird booking behavior. Until that policy died a quiet death a few years later. Kinda like this research -- I’m sure these professors are nice, smart people; but they gotta get out of their offices a bit more.</li><li>Bridge Music - <em>Drops of H2O ( The Filtered Water Treatment )</em> by J.Lang (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djlang59/37792 Ft: Airtone</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Moving to a Non-Hub Airport</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>One thing that kinda snuck up on me about our move to Nashville -- it’ll be the first time in almost 40 years that I haven’t lived in an airport hub city: Chicago with American and United at ORD; San Francisco with their United hub; Dallas when I signed up for American’s Advantage program my first day of work; Philadelphia with US Air, though I avoided them as much as I could; Detroit with Northwest; and then back to Chicago, now a 3-hub town after Southwest took over MDW after the big expansion.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>Nashville <em>was</em> a hub in the late ‘80’s/early ‘90’s -- well, a mini-hub, actually -- when American was playing around with their network. They built mini-hubs in Nashville, Raleigh/Durham, and San Jose. The experiment lasted maybe 10 years but never really made any money. I think the only thing of American left in those airports are Admirals Clubs; in Nashville, they’re down to 9% of the passenger volume.&nbsp; Today, Nashville’s direct flight distribution looks like any non-hub airport -- the top 4 destinations are Big 3 hubs -- ATL, DEN, DFW, ORD -- with the fifth being MCO, thanks to all that Mouseketeer traffic.</li><li>The #1 travel tip on my and any other experienced traveler’s list is “fly non-stop” -- much easier from a hub airport, of course, and then your frequent flier strategy just falls out from there. If you live in Atlanta, you’re doubling down on Delta’s SkyMiles; realistically, there’s not another option. Non-hub? It could be just as straight-forward -- if your flight patterns take you primarily to one of those hub cities -- Chicago, Atlanta, San Francisco -- then your choice too is made for you. But if you’re in sales or consulting -- or maybe slouching toward retirement -- and your flight patterns are a bit more scattershot, then you have to think -- what’s my objective? -- flying non-stop for the shortest flight times and lowest probability of disruption; making elite status because the perks make my travel easier; or is it building up points to help fund my vacations?</li><li>Thinking about my consulting colleagues who flew out of non-hub airports every week, they were all about status. One guy I worked with lived in Ft Myers, Florida and was all in on Delta. Even when flying every week to projects in, say, Dallas or Chicago, he’d always skip the direct American flights and connect through Atlanta, killing the time from all those missed connections with drinks in Delta’s Sky Club -- which was free with his Diamond Medallion status.</li><li>My calculus is a little easier. One of the side benefits of flying <em>a lot</em> for over 35 years is that I stacked up enough mileage for lifetime mid-tier elite status on American and United. Not enough status to get into their clubs for free, but along with the usual early boarding and free bags, it’s gotten me free club entry to OneWorld and Star Alliance partners’ lounges -- which is very valuable when trying to navigate the rabbit warrens that are FRA and LHR after north Atlantic turbulence has screwed up your in-flight sleep plans.&nbsp; If I didn’t already have these metal levels or I was in striking distance of a new level -- say close to the 2 million I’d need to jump from United Premier Gold to lifetime Platinum -- then I’d probably suck it up like my colleagues do, and get, say, the top tier United credit card with free club access for a place to sit out ORD, DEN, and IAH weather delays.</li><li>Those lifetime statuses let me step off the elite hamster wheel, so I’m now looking at non-stop flights and earning miles. Out of Nashville, Southwest has the most non-stop flights, so I’ll probably be flying them a fair bit. But while Southwest’s Companion Pass perk -- their “buy a ticket, get one free” top tier status is phenomenal, I can’t BOGO Southwest to Europe, so I need to be banking miles on one of the Big 3 so I can book on their OneWorld, Star Alliance, or SkyTeam partners -- which is where travel credit cards come back into the picture. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/09/19/podcast-167-6-months-on-why-keep-travel-cards/\">episode #167</a> in September 2020, we talked about people replacing their mileage cards with cash-back cards since no one was flying. But that trend is reverting to the mean and credit card companies have big slugs of mileage to dole out after buying them cheap in 2020 when the airlines needed real cash real fast. So my non-hub strategy -- fly direct when I can, leverage those hard-earned lifetime statuses when I can, and charge everything I can on a mileage-earning card -- including any drinks I may need to see me through those missed connections.</li><li>Bridge Music —  &nbsp;<em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/trifonic/445\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bored on Your Backside</a></em> by Trifonic (c) copyright 2005 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Sampling Plus 1.0 license. http://ccmixter.org/files/trifonic/445</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>What Makes a Great Taproom?</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>With a month left in Chicago, Irene and I have built a list of “Places to Hit Before Move” that’s some mix of greatest hits and places we’ve always wanted to go but have, for some reason or another, never gotten ‘round to. And then I have a separate list of Chicago taprooms I want to hit one more time -- Goose Island, Revolution Brewing, Off Color, Solemn Oath, Marz, Dovetail, and Metropolitan Brewing. Which then got me thinking -- why these and not other; what makes a good taproom for me?</li><li>First thing to do is to open up Untappd, the beer social networking app that\'s been my beer diary for over 11 years now.  I’ve checked beer in at over 1,900 locations and the #1 location category is -- a brewery taproom. I scrolled through the list on the app and jotted down the ones I thought “Yeah, I’d like to go back there.”  </li><li>Probably the smallest group is about unique brewery experiences; where I actually did the brewery tour and it was something more than just row after row of steel tanks. Cantillon in Brussels is everyone’s favorite; they send you off on your own guided with nothing but a paper brochure and tell you not to break anything. And then, after you’ve navigated coolships and barrel rooms, they pour you their amazing lambic beers. Or the original Lagunitas Brewery in Petaluma, CA where the tour guide tossed us just-filled IPA bottles he’d grabbed before they got to the packaging machine. </li><li>But except for these few exceptions, my favorite places have a wide beer selection (something more than 5 taps of IPAs) and/or a cool space and/or the chance to chat with the brewer. Labietis’ original place in Riga, Latvia hit the first two square on the head: a <em>diverse</em> beer menu -- a juniper beer inspired by Latvian folk songs, a wheat beer with meadowsweet, a lager with Latvian hops -- that’s located in the back courtyard of what looked like, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/11/30/podcast-157-notes-from-the-baltics-riga-latvia-and-tallinn-estonia/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #157 — Notes from the Baltics: Riga, Latvia and Tallinn, Estonia\">the fall of 2019</a>, a block of now slightly derelict early 20th Century manor houses. A little closer to home on my Chicago list, Metropolitan Brewing does nothing but German-style lagers which are a perfect fit for their taproom patio that looks out on the north branch of the Chicago River.</li><li>Going to a brewery’s taproom is kinda like seeing a band in concert -- I’m going to get a fuller picture of that band than I will just hearing their hit songs on the radio or a Spotify playlist. Hitting a good taproom can be similar -- getting past the high-volume core beers to see what the brewer can really do. When we were in Santa Fe last month, I went out of my way to hit Rowley Farmhouse Ales because I really liked their range during our last visit in 2018. So of course I ordered the Teosinte, a funky, earthy, grassy sour made from Oaxacan green dent corn grown a couple hundred miles east, near the Texas-New Mexico border. It was an incredibly interesting beer. I wouldn’t buy a six-pack of it, but I was more than happy to have a glass of it.</li><li>But probably the best time I have at taprooms is when I get to talk to the brewer. During one of my trips last year to Nashville, I found myself an hour south in Columbia, TN, which bills itself “Muletown.” I missed the 2021 “Mule Day” festival; it was canceled due to COVID. Instead, I wound my way through a light industrial neighborhood hard against some freight train tracks billed as Columbia’s Art District to find <a href=\"http://www.badideabrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bad Idea Brewing</a>. There were two other folks sitting at the bar; the brewer was behind it, serving. And we just got talking -- about the beer, about his brewery, about Columbia, about brewing in Columbia, about what kind of beer sells in Columbia. And through all that, taster glasses kept landing in front of me -- “try this,” “what do you think of that?” he’d ask. What was going to be a quick side trip for a beer turned into a nice afternoon of conversation… and beer.</li><li>I guess there’s one more thing that can make for a great taproom, or maybe more of a great taproom experience and that is -- it took me to a part of a city that I wouldn’t have otherwise gone. I talked a bit about this in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/04/10/podcast-174-how-the-pros-plan-their-taproom-tourism/\">episode #174</a> when I talked with Rob Cheshire of the UK podcast <a href=\"https://thisweekincraft.beer/podcast/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">This Week in Craft Beer</a> about planning taproom visits. Navigating the maze of a Beijing hutong to find Great Leap Brewing, or exiting a Paris Metro stop in a North African neighborhood on my way to Deck &amp; Donohue, or riding an e-scooter through a questionable neighborhood in northeast DC to <a href=\"https://www.rightproperbrewing.com/brookland\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Right Proper Brewing</a>. These three were fine places with solid beers, but they’re more memorable for the trip to find them than for the places themselves.</li><li>But you can’t always tell this from Google search. So if you go to the show notes on travelcommons.com you’ll find my list of  “Yeah, I’d like to go back there” taprooms.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>My<em> Yeah, I’d like to go back there</em>  Taproom List</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Chicago <ul><li><a href=\"https://www.gooseisland.com/fulton-brewery/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Goose Island Taproom</a>, 1800 W Fulton St — Yes, it\'s now owned by AB InBev, but it was the original Chicago microbrewery in the late \'80\'s and they created the whole barrel-aged stout category with Bourbon County Stout</li><li><a href=\"http://www.revbrew.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Revolution Brewing Brewery &amp; Taproom</a>, 3340 N Kedzie Ave— Great beers; wide range of styles; bring your own food</li><li><a href=\"http://maplewoodbrew.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Maplewood Brewery &amp; Distillery</a>, 2717 N Maplewood Ave (South of Diversey) — Small, neighborhood bar tucked up against the Kennedy Expressway</li><li><a href=\"http://www.metrobrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Metropolitan Brewing</a>, 3057 N Rockwell St — Been brewing German-style lagers since 2009; great patio seating that looks out over the north branch of the Chicago River</li><li><a href=\"http://dovetailbrewery.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Dovetail Brewery</a>, 1800 W Belle Plaine Ave — German lagers and spontaneous fermented beers; the best taproom on the Ravenswood neighborhood\'s <a href=\"https://ravenswoodchicago.org/neighborhood/malt-row/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">\"Malt Row\"</a></li><li><a href=\"http://www.offcolorbrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Off Color Brewing</a>, 1460 N Kingsbury St — Great range of beer styles, all of which are well-done</li><li><a href=\"https://www.solemnoathbrewery.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Solemn Oath Brewery</a>, 1661 Quincy Ave #179, Naperville, IL — In a <em>faaar</em> west neighborhood of Chicago, one of the OG suburban breweries. Great beers and a great outdoor space, especially in the winter.</li><li>A couple of South Side taprooms featured on the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/07/15/video-chicago-mdw-layover-taproom-tour/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Chicago MDW Layover Taproom Tour</a> video<ul><li><a href=\"http://marzbrewing.com/\">Marz Community Brewing</a>, 3630 S Iron St</li><li><a href=\"http://www.whinerbeer.com/\">Whiner Beer</a>, 1400 W 46th St</li></ul></li></ul></li><li>Elsewhere in the US<ul><li><a href=\"https://oxbowbeer.com/location/portland/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Oxbow Blending &amp; Bottling</a>, 49 Washington Ave, Portland, ME — Great selection of farmhouse ales with an outpost of <a href=\"http://www.duckfatfriteshack.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Duckfat</a> serving up fries on the patio</li><li> <a href=\"http://www.allagash.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Allagash Brewing Company</a>, 50 Industrial Way, Portland, ME — One of the OG Maine breweries; huge range of beers; nice outdoor space; two more taprooms across the street makes it a nice afternoon destination</li><li><a href=\"https://otherhalfbrewing.com/location/domino-park/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Other Half Brewing Domino Park</a>, 34 River St, Brooklyn, NY — Great hazy IPAs; great views of Manhattan across the East River</li><li><a href=\"https://www.rightproperbrewing.com/brookland\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Right Proper Brewing Brookland Production House + Tasting Room</a>, 920 Girard St NE, Washington, DC — A nice little taproom in a DC neighborhood that is <em>way</em> off the typical tourist track</li><li><a href=\"http://www.thefermentorium.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">The Fermentorium Brewery and Tasting Room</a>, 7481 WI-60 Trunk, Cedarburg, WI — Well done range of beers just outside of a scenic small Wisconsin town</li><li><a href=\"http://drifabrewing.beer/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Drífa Brewing Company</a>, 501 S Lake St, Marquette, MI — Great beer stop on the bike path along the shore of Lake Superior</li><li><a href=\"https://beardedirisbrewing.com/location/germantown/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bearded Iris Brewing</a>, 101 Van Buren St, Nashville, TN — Original Germantown taproom with great hazy IPAs, pool tables and a nice patio</li><li><a href=\"https://www.variousartistsbrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Various Artists Brewing</a>, 1011 Elm Hill Pike, Nashville, TN — Wide variety of beer styles; big patio; guest chefs working a big grill</li><li><a href=\"http://www.faitlaforcebrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Fait la Force Brewing</a>, 1414 3rd Ave S, Nashville, TN — An unassuming place tucked away in the Chestnut Hill neighborhood; comfortable space; great range of beer styles; had a great conversation with the brewer behind the bar</li><li><a href=\"http://www.badideabrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bad Idea Brewing Company</a>, 307 W 11th St, Columbia, TN — Comfortable taproom with well-executed beers in Columbia\'s Art District; another place I had a nice conversation with the brewer</li><li><a href=\"https://www.rowleyfarmhouse.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Rowley Farmhouse Ales</a>, 1405 Maclovia St, Santa Fe, NM — Nice range of IPAs, saisons, and sours, and a solid green chile cheeseburger</li><li><a href=\"http://www.lagunitas.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Lagunitas Brewing Company</a>, 1280 N McDowell Blvd, Petaluma, CA — Yes, they\'ve been bought out by Heineken, but the original brewery still has a bit of that old Cali anarchic feel</li><li><a href=\"https://www.pueblovidabrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pueblo Vida Brewing Company</a>, 115 E Broadway Blvd, Tucson, AZ — A little joint in downtown Tucson that executes great beers with a focus on local ingredients</li><li><a href=\"http://www.eppigbrewing.com/waterfront-biergarten\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Eppig Brewing Waterfront Biergarten</a>, 2817 Dickens St, San Diego, CA — It\'s all about drinking good beers outside in the sunshine along the marina</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #187</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>As I said at the top of the show, there’s probably not going to be a June show, between packing up the Chicago studio and then unpacking it in Nashville. Good news, though -- the sound quality in Nashville might get a step-function improvement. Just about every apt building Irene and I looked at had a music studio as one of the amenities. The sound proofing, the sound deadening, and maybe a better microphone should make things sound a bit better. Quite a ways from those first episodes, recording with the iRiver MP3 player’s built-in mic while standing in a shower stall. Oh my!</li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. You’ll have to go to the TravelCommons’ website if you want to torture your ears listening to those first bathroom-studio episodes; what one listener labelled a “pottycast”</li><li>And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_187.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #187 — Moving to a Non-Hub Airport; What Makes A Great Taproom?','','inherit','closed','closed','','4145-revision-v1','','','2022-05-28 13:09:54','2022-05-28 18:09:54','',4145,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4159',0,'revision','',0),
(4161,1,'2022-05-28 13:43:23','2022-05-28 18:43:23','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/IMG_4803.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/IMG_4803-300x300.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" alt=\"Taproom Draft Beer Taps Arranged as a Smiley Face\"></a>I\'m Happy To See You Too![/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>The last episode recording in Chicago before we relocate the TravelCommons studios, and our lives, down to Nashville. We close out our threads on in-flight mask mandates and hotel housekeeping, and critique an academic paper about the moral hazard of frequent flier elite status. I talk through the changes I\'ll have to make when flying out of a non-hub airport. And then, as I\'m making a list of the Chicago breweries I want to re-visit before leaving, I think through the characteristics that makes a taproom great. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_187.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #187: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you, for the last time, from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois because we’re packing everything up and moving the 500 miles down I-65 to Nashville at the end of June. After 25 years here, we decided we needed a change of scenery. So with all the packing and everything, I don’t see a June episode in the offing.&nbsp;</li><li>Way back when I was doing heavy international travel -- Chicago on Monday, Toronto on Tuesday, New York to London on Wednesday, Zurich on Thursday, getting back to Chicago at Friday midnight -- what then seemed like necessary travel, but now, looking back on it, seems like stupid travel -- people would ask me my favorite city. I thought about it a lot, but would always end up with the same answer -- Chicago. And not just because it was my home; I was offering up that answer when we lived in Philadelphia. No, my explanation to the raised eyebrows that answer often generated was that Chicago was the right size -- big enough to support a wide range of interesting stuff (sports, culture, restaurants, microbreweries), but not so big that you couldn’t get your arms around it, and with enough Midwest pragmatism, from people moving in from Indiana and Iowa and Minnesota and Wisconsin, to keep everything grounded, to keep it from getting too wacky. And to their “But what about the weather?” question I’d say “yes, it can be -10° in Chicago in January, but it can be +110° in Phoenix in August; most every place has 3 months of lousy weather (save for maybe San Diego) sometime during the year; different people choose the 3 months they can endure.”&nbsp;</li><li>But over the past few years, I realized my answer about Chicago didn’t hold up any more -- not about the weather, the winters still suck; it’s that the pragmatism seems to be gone, with violent crime -- robberies, shootings, carjackings -- and definitely not-pragmatic local government decisions filling the void. It has started to feel like a replay of the 1970’s, which were not a great time in Chicago.&nbsp; Now, I don’t think it’s permanent. It’s a pendulum. Just like the city came back from a bad stretch in the ‘70’s to be a great place in the mid/late ‘80’s. It’ll happen again; I just don’t want to hang around for the low point. And according to the half-dozen movers we talked to, we’re not the only ones.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <em>Dive Deep (Loveshadow remix)</em> by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/50488 Ft: Loveshadow</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A quick public service announcement -- the COVID Real ID extension expires in less than a year. <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/news/press/releases/2021/04/27/dhs-announces-extension-real-id-full-enforcement-deadline\">According to the TSA</a>, “Beginning May 3, 2023, every air traveler 18 years of age and older will need a REAL ID-compliant driver’s license or identification card… at airport security checkpoints for domestic air travel.”&nbsp; Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/01/16/podcast-183-covid-test-anxiety-michelin-food-adventures/\">episode #183</a> in January, I talked about getting a Real ID version of my Illinois driver’s license when I had to renew it. No additional cost and maybe 3 additional minutes of time. But if you can’t pick up a Real ID driver’s license before next May, you’ll have to remember to take along <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/travel/security-screening/identification\">your passport or your Global Entry card</a>.</li><li>In the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/04/21/podcast-186-mask-mandate-scramble-small-airport-survival/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #186 — Mask Mandate Scramble; Small Airport Survival\">last episode</a>, we walked through the abrupt end of the US CDC’s transportation mask mandate -- on planes, buses, trains,....&nbsp; That news cycle lasted right at about a week, the last entry being the CDC asking the Dept of Justice to appeal the federal judge’s ruling that struck down the mandate that they had extended for 2 weeks to May 3rd. On May 3rd, the CDC posted a <a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2022/s0503-covid-19-travel.html\">press release reiterating their <em>recommendation</em></a> that everyone aged 2 and older wear masks on planes and trains, and in airports and stations -- but nothing about the status of that appeal. I’m guessing that they decided to accept the facts on the ground and quietly forget about any appeal -- which is probably the only real option they have.</li><li>And then this week, adding to those facts on the ground, the European CDC has dropped their transportation mask mandate recommendations. The difference, though, is the European CDC’s recommendations are just that, recommendations. The enforceable <em>rules</em> are made by each country, and Spain and Italy, many of the countries hardest hit by the initial wave of COVID, have extended their mask mandates to mid-June.</li><li>OK, I wasn’t going to say anything more about hotel housekeeping because <em>even I’m</em> bored with it, but then I ran across an <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/hotel-housekeepers-want-you-to-request-daily-room-cleaning-11652650925\">article</a> in the Wall Street Journal about how hotel housekeeping unions are pushing for a return to daily room service. Certainly a big part of the push is to drive more work, more hours for the union members. But also because rooms are dirtier and take longer to clean when they have gone a few days without service, especially with the current guest mix that’s still heavier with leisure travelers, who tend to have more people in the room than the road-warrior business traveler. As you’d guess, hotel owners disagree, but for changing reasons. Their arc of rationale has gone from the pre-pandemic “be green, save water, and we’ll give you an extra 500 points to skip housekeeping” to pandemic “we’re keeping everyone safe by staying out of your room” to the current “it’s your choice, and ‘labor shortage’”.&nbsp; OK, that’s it. I’m <em>really </em>not going to talk about room cleaning anymore.</li><li>But I <em>will</em> talk about TSA checkpoint passenger volumes again. <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/09/27/podcast-179-high-tech-airport-lines-business-travel-still-missing/\">Back in September 2021</a>, the last time I scraped the numbers off the TSA <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/coronavirus/passenger-throughput\">website</a>, average daily passenger volumes were bouncing around 1.7 million, down 20% from the July summer peak of over 2 million and down 24% from pre-pandemic September 2019 numbers. Six months later, looking at the last month-and-a-half -- April to mid-May -- the average daily volume is 2.1 million and growing, and now just 10-12% off the April/May 2019 numbers. So if those TSA checkpoints and airplanes are feeling a bit more crowded, it’s because they are. Tough to remember back to my first post-lockdown flight in June 2020, when daily passenger volumes were 5-600,000 and the Southwest boarding agent said “There’s 40 of you on a plane with 175 seats. So everyone gets their own row.” I, in no way, want to go back to those times, but having a bit more plane space <em>was</em> nice.</li><li>I get <em>a lot</em> of emails from public relations firms. I read the subject lines of all of them because every once in a rare while, there’s something that catches my eye, like the pitch that led to last episode’s interview about Daytona Beach airport trying to survive in the shadow of the behemoth that is Orlando Int’l. So when I read the subject line “Study Finds that Frequent-Flyer Programs Increase Cost of Business Travel” in my inbox a few weeks back, I just had to click through. The study, <a href=\"https://www.informs.org/About-INFORMS/News-Room/Press-Releases/Study-Finds-that-Frequent-Flyer-Programs-Increase-Cost-of-Business-Travel\">just published</a> in the journal <em>Marketing Science</em> which I admit I don’t read as often as I should because I get tied up pouring through the CDC’s <em>Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report</em>, is titled <em>Reaching for Gold: Frequent-Flyer Status Incentives and Moral Hazard</em>, written by professors from University of Michigan and Duke business schools. According to the press release, after “(analyzing) the transactional database of a leading U.S.-based airline’s frequent-flyer program (that) included the histories and point accumulations of 3.5 million frequent-flyer program members during the 2010 and 2011 point-earning cycles” their main insights were -- “‘Points Members’ are More Likely to Choose Higher Fares When Not Paying for It” and “the closer frequent-flyer program members get to ‘elite status’ the more likely they are to choose an airline even when it may be more expensive than a competitor’s flight”. Hmm, that feels a bit “Dawn breaking over Marblehead”. How can you be researching frequent flier programs and act like you’ve never heard of (let alone done) a mileage run. Maybe the press release overly summarized the research and just isn’t communicating its subtlety. So I hit Google to find the <a href=\"https://yesimorhun.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/18/2018/11/Orhun_Guo_2018.pdf\">actual paper</a>. 29 pages of text and equations, and 15 pages of bibliography and data tables later -- nope, the press release was pretty much it. If the moral hazard of business travelers using their employer’s money to pay for more expensive flights to make status is eliminated, the paper estimates that companies would save at least 7% of their travel costs. Looking at 2019 data, the <a href=\"https://www.statista.com/statistics/562804/us-air-traffic-domestic-average-ticket-price/\">average cost of a walk-up US domestic ticket</a> -- one booked less than a week in advance, so the typical road warrior ticket -- is about $500. 7% is $35. I dunno, maybe some full-contact procurement guy will get excited about that $35 savings, but I don\'t know any executive in his or her right mind is thinking to themselves “Oh yes, pissing off the people who are jamming themselves in to coach seats and spending nights away from their family for $35 a trip” is a great idea.&nbsp; Except at GM. I remember when frequent flier programs first came out, GM didn’t let their travelers keep the points from business trips, which led to all sorts of weird booking behavior. Until that policy died a quiet death a few years later. Kinda like this research -- I’m sure these professors are nice, smart people; but they gotta get out of their offices a bit more.</li><li>Bridge Music - <em>Drops of H2O ( The Filtered Water Treatment )</em> by J.Lang (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djlang59/37792 Ft: Airtone</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Moving to a Non-Hub Airport</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>One thing that kinda snuck up on me about our move to Nashville -- it’ll be the first time in almost 40 years that I haven’t lived in an airport hub city: Chicago with American and United at ORD; San Francisco with their United hub; Dallas when I signed up for American’s Advantage program my first day of work; Philadelphia with US Air, though I avoided them as much as I could; Detroit with Northwest; and then back to Chicago, now a 3-hub town after Southwest took over MDW after the big expansion.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>Nashville <em>was</em> a hub in the late ‘80’s/early ‘90’s -- well, a mini-hub, actually -- when American was playing around with their network. They built mini-hubs in Nashville, Raleigh/Durham, and San Jose. The experiment lasted maybe 10 years but never really made any money. I think the only thing of American left in those airports are Admirals Clubs; in Nashville, they’re down to 9% of the passenger volume.&nbsp; Today, Nashville’s direct flight distribution looks like any non-hub airport -- the top 4 destinations are Big 3 hubs -- ATL, DEN, DFW, ORD -- with the fifth being MCO, thanks to all that Mouseketeer traffic.</li><li>The #1 travel tip on my and any other experienced traveler’s list is “fly non-stop” -- much easier from a hub airport, of course, and then your frequent flier strategy just falls out from there. If you live in Atlanta, you’re doubling down on Delta’s SkyMiles; realistically, there’s not another option. Non-hub? It could be just as straight-forward -- if your flight patterns take you primarily to one of those hub cities -- Chicago, Atlanta, San Francisco -- then your choice too is made for you. But if you’re in sales or consulting -- or maybe slouching toward retirement -- and your flight patterns are a bit more scattershot, then you have to think -- what’s my objective? -- flying non-stop for the shortest flight times and lowest probability of disruption; making elite status because the perks make my travel easier; or is it building up points to help fund my vacations?</li><li>Thinking about my consulting colleagues who flew out of non-hub airports every week, they were all about status. One guy I worked with lived in Ft Myers, Florida and was all in on Delta. Even when flying every week to projects in, say, Dallas or Chicago, he’d always skip the direct American flights and connect through Atlanta, killing the time from all those missed connections with drinks in Delta’s Sky Club -- which was free with his Diamond Medallion status.</li><li>My calculus is a little easier. One of the side benefits of flying <em>a lot</em> for over 35 years is that I stacked up enough mileage for lifetime mid-tier elite status on American and United. Not enough status to get into their clubs for free, but along with the usual early boarding and free bags, it’s gotten me free club entry to OneWorld and Star Alliance partners’ lounges -- which is very valuable when trying to navigate the rabbit warrens that are FRA and LHR after north Atlantic turbulence has screwed up your in-flight sleep plans.&nbsp; If I didn’t already have these metal levels or I was in striking distance of a new level -- say close to the 2 million I’d need to jump from United Premier Gold to lifetime Platinum -- then I’d probably suck it up like my colleagues do, and get, say, the top tier United credit card with free club access for a place to sit out ORD, DEN, and IAH weather delays.</li><li>Those lifetime statuses let me step off the elite hamster wheel, so I’m now looking at non-stop flights and earning miles. Out of Nashville, Southwest has the most non-stop flights, so I’ll probably be flying them a fair bit. But while Southwest’s Companion Pass perk -- their “buy a ticket, get one free” top tier status is phenomenal, I can’t BOGO Southwest to Europe, so I need to be banking miles on one of the Big 3 so I can book on their OneWorld, Star Alliance, or SkyTeam partners -- which is where travel credit cards come back into the picture. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/09/19/podcast-167-6-months-on-why-keep-travel-cards/\">episode #167</a> in September 2020, we talked about people replacing their mileage cards with cash-back cards since no one was flying. But that trend is reverting to the mean and credit card companies have big slugs of mileage to dole out after buying them cheap in 2020 when the airlines needed real cash real fast. So my non-hub strategy -- fly direct when I can, leverage those hard-earned lifetime statuses when I can, and charge everything I can on a mileage-earning card -- including any drinks I may need to see me through those missed connections.</li><li>Bridge Music —  &nbsp;<em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/trifonic/445\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bored on Your Backside</a></em> by Trifonic (c) copyright 2005 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Sampling Plus 1.0 license. http://ccmixter.org/files/trifonic/445</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>What Makes a Great Taproom?</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>With a month left in Chicago, Irene and I have built a list of “Places to Hit Before Move” that’s some mix of greatest hits and places we’ve always wanted to go but have, for some reason or another, never gotten ‘round to. And then I have a separate list of Chicago taprooms I want to hit one more time -- Goose Island, Revolution Brewing, Off Color, Solemn Oath, Marz, Dovetail, and Metropolitan Brewing. Which then got me thinking -- why these and not other; what makes a good taproom for me?</li><li>First thing to do is to open up Untappd, the beer social networking app that\'s been my beer diary for over 11 years now.  I’ve checked beer in at over 1,900 locations and the #1 location category is -- a brewery taproom. I scrolled through the list on the app and jotted down the ones I thought “Yeah, I’d like to go back there.”  </li><li>Probably the smallest group is about unique brewery experiences; where I actually did the brewery tour and it was something more than just row after row of steel tanks. Cantillon in Brussels is everyone’s favorite; they send you off on your own guided with nothing but a paper brochure and tell you not to break anything. And then, after you’ve navigated coolships and barrel rooms, they pour you their amazing lambic beers. Or the original Lagunitas Brewery in Petaluma, CA where the tour guide tossed us just-filled IPA bottles he’d grabbed before they got to the packaging machine. </li><li>But except for these few exceptions, my favorite places have a wide beer selection (something more than 5 taps of IPAs) and/or a cool space and/or the chance to chat with the brewer. Labietis’ original place in Riga, Latvia hit the first two square on the head: a <em>diverse</em> beer menu -- a juniper beer inspired by Latvian folk songs, a wheat beer with meadowsweet, a lager with Latvian hops -- that’s located in the back courtyard of what looked like, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/11/30/podcast-157-notes-from-the-baltics-riga-latvia-and-tallinn-estonia/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #157 — Notes from the Baltics: Riga, Latvia and Tallinn, Estonia\">the fall of 2019</a>, a block of now slightly derelict early 20th Century manor houses. A little closer to home on my Chicago list, Metropolitan Brewing does nothing but German-style lagers which are a perfect fit for their taproom patio that looks out on the north branch of the Chicago River.</li><li>Going to a brewery’s taproom is kinda like seeing a band in concert -- I’m going to get a fuller picture of that band than I will just hearing their hit songs on the radio or a Spotify playlist. Hitting a good taproom can be similar -- getting past the high-volume core beers to see what the brewer can really do. When we were in Santa Fe last month, I went out of my way to hit Rowley Farmhouse Ales because I really liked their range during our last visit in 2018. So of course I ordered the Teosinte, a funky, earthy, grassy sour made from Oaxacan green dent corn grown a couple hundred miles east, near the Texas-New Mexico border. It was an incredibly interesting beer. I wouldn’t buy a six-pack of it, but I was more than happy to have a glass of it.</li><li>But probably the best time I have at taprooms is when I get to talk to the brewer. During one of my trips last year to Nashville, I found myself an hour south in Columbia, TN, which bills itself “Muletown.” I missed the 2021 “Mule Day” festival; it was canceled due to COVID. Instead, I wound my way through a light industrial neighborhood hard against some freight train tracks billed as Columbia’s Art District to find <a href=\"http://www.badideabrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bad Idea Brewing</a>. There were two other folks sitting at the bar; the brewer was behind it, serving. And we just got talking -- about the beer, about his brewery, about Columbia, about brewing in Columbia, about what kind of beer sells in Columbia. And through all that, taster glasses kept landing in front of me -- “try this,” “what do you think of that?” he’d ask. What was going to be a quick side trip for a beer turned into a nice afternoon of conversation… and beer.</li><li>I guess there’s one more thing that can make for a great taproom, or maybe more of a great taproom experience and that is -- it took me to a part of a city that I wouldn’t have otherwise gone. I talked a bit about this in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/04/10/podcast-174-how-the-pros-plan-their-taproom-tourism/\">episode #174</a> when I talked with Rob Cheshire of the UK podcast <a href=\"https://thisweekincraft.beer/podcast/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">This Week in Craft Beer</a> about planning taproom visits. Navigating the maze of a Beijing hutong to find Great Leap Brewing, or exiting a Paris Metro stop in a North African neighborhood on my way to Deck &amp; Donohue, or riding an e-scooter through a questionable neighborhood in northeast DC to <a href=\"https://www.rightproperbrewing.com/brookland\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Right Proper Brewing</a>. These three were fine places with solid beers, but they’re more memorable for the trip to find them than for the places themselves.</li><li>But you can’t always tell this from Google search. So if you go to the show notes on travelcommons.com you’ll find my list of  “Yeah, I’d like to go back there” taprooms.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>My<em> Yeah, I’d like to go back there</em>  Taproom List</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Chicago <ul><li><a href=\"https://www.gooseisland.com/fulton-brewery/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Goose Island Taproom</a>, 1800 W Fulton St — Yes, it\'s now owned by AB InBev, but it was the original Chicago microbrewery in the late \'80\'s and they created the whole barrel-aged stout category with Bourbon County Stout</li><li><a href=\"http://www.revbrew.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Revolution Brewing Brewery &amp; Taproom</a>, 3340 N Kedzie Ave— Great beers; wide range of styles; bring your own food</li><li><a href=\"http://maplewoodbrew.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Maplewood Brewery &amp; Distillery</a>, 2717 N Maplewood Ave (South of Diversey) — Small, neighborhood bar tucked up against the Kennedy Expressway</li><li><a href=\"http://www.metrobrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Metropolitan Brewing</a>, 3057 N Rockwell St — Been brewing German-style lagers since 2009; great patio seating that looks out over the north branch of the Chicago River</li><li><a href=\"http://dovetailbrewery.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Dovetail Brewery</a>, 1800 W Belle Plaine Ave — German lagers and spontaneously fermented beers; the best taproom on the Ravenswood neighborhood\'s <a href=\"https://ravenswoodchicago.org/neighborhood/malt-row/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">\"Malt Row\"</a></li><li><a href=\"http://www.offcolorbrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Off Color Brewing</a>, 1460 N Kingsbury St — Great range of beer styles, all of which are well-done</li><li><a href=\"https://www.solemnoathbrewery.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Solemn Oath Brewery</a>, 1661 Quincy Ave #179, Naperville, IL — In a <em>faaar</em> west neighborhood of Chicago, one of the OG suburban breweries. Great beers and a great outdoor space, especially in the winter.</li><li>A couple of South Side taprooms featured on the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/07/15/video-chicago-mdw-layover-taproom-tour/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Chicago MDW Layover Taproom Tour</a> video<ul><li><a href=\"http://marzbrewing.com/\">Marz Community Brewing</a>, 3630 S Iron St</li><li><a href=\"http://www.whinerbeer.com/\">Whiner Beer</a>, 1400 W 46th St</li></ul></li></ul></li><li>Elsewhere in the US<ul><li><a href=\"https://oxbowbeer.com/location/portland/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Oxbow Blending &amp; Bottling</a>, 49 Washington Ave, Portland, ME — Great selection of farmhouse ales with an outpost of rtyu<a href=\"http://www.duckfatfriteshack.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Duckfat</a> serving up fries on the patio</li><li> <a href=\"http://www.allagash.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Allagash Brewing Company</a>, 50 Industrial Way, Portland, ME — One of the OG Maine breweries; huge range of beers beyond Allagash White; nice outdoor space; two more taprooms across the street makes it a nice afternoon destination</li><li><a href=\"https://otherhalfbrewing.com/location/domino-park/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Other Half Brewing Domino Park</a>, 34 River St, Brooklyn, NY — Great hazy IPAs; great views of Manhattan across the East River</li><li><a href=\"https://www.rightproperbrewing.com/brookland\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Right Proper Brewing Brookland Production House + Tasting Room</a>, 920 Girard St NE, Washington, DC — A nice little taproom in a DC neighborhood that is <em>way</em> off the typical tourist track</li><li><a href=\"http://www.thefermentorium.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">The Fermentorium Brewery and Tasting Room</a>, 7481 WI-60 Trunk, Cedarburg, WI — Well done range of beers just outside of a scenic small Wisconsin town</li><li><a href=\"http://drifabrewing.beer/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Drífa Brewing Company</a>, 501 S Lake St, Marquette, MI — Great beer stop on the bike path along the shore of Lake Superior</li><li><a href=\"https://beardedirisbrewing.com/location/germantown/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bearded Iris Brewing</a>, 101 Van Buren St, Nashville, TN — Original Germantown taproom with great hazy IPAs, pool tables and a nice patio</li><li><a href=\"https://www.variousartistsbrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Various Artists Brewing</a>, 1011 Elm Hill Pike, Nashville, TN — Wide variety of beer styles; big patio; guest chefs working a big grill</li><li><a href=\"http://www.faitlaforcebrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Fait la Force Brewing</a>, 1414 3rd Ave S, Nashville, TN — An unassuming place tucked away in the Chestnut Hill neighborhood; comfortable space; great range of beer styles; had a great conversation with the brewer behind the bar</li><li><a href=\"http://www.badideabrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bad Idea Brewing Company</a>, 307 W 11th St, Columbia, TN — Comfortable taproom with well-executed beers in Columbia\'s Art District; another place I had a nice conversation with the brewer</li><li><a href=\"https://www.rowleyfarmhouse.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Rowley Farmhouse Ales</a>, 1405 Maclovia St, Santa Fe, NM — Nice range of IPAs, saisons, and sours, and a solid green chile cheeseburger</li><li><a href=\"http://www.lagunitas.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Lagunitas Brewing Company</a>, 1280 N McDowell Blvd, Petaluma, CA — Yes, they\'ve been bought out by Heineken, but the original brewery still has a bit of that old Cali anarchic feel</li><li><a href=\"https://www.pueblovidabrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pueblo Vida Brewing Company</a>, 115 E Broadway Blvd, Tucson, AZ — A little joint in downtown Tucson that executes great beers with a focus on local ingredients</li><li><a href=\"http://www.eppigbrewing.com/waterfront-biergarten\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Eppig Brewing Waterfront Biergarten</a>, 2817 Dickens St, San Diego, CA — It\'s all about drinking good beers outside in the sunshine along the marina</li></ul></li><li>Outside the US<ul><li><a href=\"https://www.thebarrelproject.co.uk/beer-menu/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">London Beer Factory - Barrel Project</a>, 80 Druid St, London SE1 2HQ — Great beers; very cool space in railway arch along London\'s <a href=\"https://www.londonxlondon.com/bermondsey-beer-mile/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bermondsey Beer Mile</a></li><li><a href=\"http://www.cantillon.be/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Brasserie Cantillon</a>, Rue Gheude 56, 1070 Anderlecht, Belgium — Ground zero for spontaneously fermented lambic and gueuze beers; just follow the train of beer geeks to the door</li><li><a href=\"https://mikkeller.com/locations/mikkeller-baghaven\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Mikkeller Baghaven</a>, Refshalevej 169B, 1432 København — Lots of spontaneously fermented sour beer on a converted industrial island</li><li>Fábrica Maravillas, C. de Valverde, 29, 28004 Madrid — L</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #187</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>As I said at the top of the show, there’s probably not going to be a June show, between packing up the Chicago studio and then unpacking it in Nashville. Good news, though -- the sound quality in Nashville might get a step-function improvement. Just about every apt building Irene and I looked at had a music studio as one of the amenities. The sound proofing, the sound deadening, and maybe a better microphone should make things sound a bit better. Quite a ways from those first episodes, recording with the iRiver MP3 player’s built-in mic while standing in a shower stall. Oh my!</li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. You’ll have to go to the TravelCommons’ website if you want to torture your ears listening to those first bathroom-studio episodes; what one listener labelled a “pottycast”</li><li>And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_187.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #187 — Moving to a Non-Hub Airport; What Makes A Great Taproom?','','inherit','closed','closed','','4145-revision-v1','','','2022-05-28 13:43:23','2022-05-28 18:43:23','',4145,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4161',0,'revision','',0);
INSERT INTO `wp_posts` VALUES
(4163,1,'2022-05-28 14:02:57','2022-05-28 19:02:57','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/IMG_4803.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/IMG_4803-300x300.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" alt=\"Taproom Draft Beer Taps Arranged as a Smiley Face\"></a>I\'m Happy To See You Too![/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>The last episode recording in Chicago before we relocate the TravelCommons studios, and our lives, down to Nashville. We close out our threads on in-flight mask mandates and hotel housekeeping, and critique an academic paper about the moral hazard of frequent flier elite status. I talk through the changes I\'ll have to make when flying out of a non-hub airport. And then, as I\'m making a list of the Chicago breweries I want to re-visit before leaving, I think through the characteristics that makes a taproom great. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_187.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #187: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you, for the last time, from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois because we’re packing everything up and moving the 500 miles down I-65 to Nashville at the end of June. After 25 years here, we decided we needed a change of scenery. So with all the packing and everything, I don’t see a June episode in the offing.&nbsp;</li><li>Way back when I was doing heavy international travel -- Chicago on Monday, Toronto on Tuesday, New York to London on Wednesday, Zurich on Thursday, getting back to Chicago at Friday midnight -- what then seemed like necessary travel, but now, looking back on it, seems like stupid travel -- people would ask me my favorite city. I thought about it a lot, but would always end up with the same answer -- Chicago. And not just because it was my home; I was offering up that answer when we lived in Philadelphia. No, my explanation to the raised eyebrows that answer often generated was that Chicago was the right size -- big enough to support a wide range of interesting stuff (sports, culture, restaurants, microbreweries), but not so big that you couldn’t get your arms around it, and with enough Midwest pragmatism, from people moving in from Indiana and Iowa and Minnesota and Wisconsin, to keep everything grounded, to keep it from getting too wacky. And to their “But what about the weather?” question I’d say “yes, it can be -10° in Chicago in January, but it can be +110° in Phoenix in August; most every place has 3 months of lousy weather (save for maybe San Diego) sometime during the year; different people choose the 3 months they can endure.”&nbsp;</li><li>But over the past few years, I realized my answer about Chicago didn’t hold up any more -- not about the weather, the winters still suck; it’s that the pragmatism seems to be gone, with violent crime -- robberies, shootings, carjackings -- and definitely not-pragmatic local government decisions filling the void. It has started to feel like a replay of the 1970’s, which were not a great time in Chicago.&nbsp; Now, I don’t think it’s permanent. It’s a pendulum. Just like the city came back from a bad stretch in the ‘70’s to be a great place in the mid/late ‘80’s. It’ll happen again; I just don’t want to hang around for the low point. And according to the half-dozen movers we talked to, we’re not the only ones.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <em>Dive Deep (Loveshadow remix)</em> by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/50488 Ft: Loveshadow</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A quick public service announcement -- the COVID Real ID extension expires in less than a year. <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/news/press/releases/2021/04/27/dhs-announces-extension-real-id-full-enforcement-deadline\">According to the TSA</a>, “Beginning May 3, 2023, every air traveler 18 years of age and older will need a REAL ID-compliant driver’s license or identification card… at airport security checkpoints for domestic air travel.”&nbsp; Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/01/16/podcast-183-covid-test-anxiety-michelin-food-adventures/\">episode #183</a> in January, I talked about getting a Real ID version of my Illinois driver’s license when I had to renew it. No additional cost and maybe 3 additional minutes of time. But if you can’t pick up a Real ID driver’s license before next May, you’ll have to remember to take along <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/travel/security-screening/identification\">your passport or your Global Entry card</a>.</li><li>In the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/04/21/podcast-186-mask-mandate-scramble-small-airport-survival/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #186 — Mask Mandate Scramble; Small Airport Survival\">last episode</a>, we walked through the abrupt end of the US CDC’s transportation mask mandate -- on planes, buses, trains,....&nbsp; That news cycle lasted right at about a week, the last entry being the CDC asking the Dept of Justice to appeal the federal judge’s ruling that struck down the mandate that they had extended for 2 weeks to May 3rd. On May 3rd, the CDC posted a <a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2022/s0503-covid-19-travel.html\">press release reiterating their <em>recommendation</em></a> that everyone aged 2 and older wear masks on planes and trains, and in airports and stations -- but nothing about the status of that appeal. I’m guessing that they decided to accept the facts on the ground and quietly forget about any appeal -- which is probably the only real option they have.</li><li>And then this week, adding to those facts on the ground, the European CDC has dropped their transportation mask mandate recommendations. The difference, though, is the European CDC’s recommendations are just that, recommendations. The enforceable <em>rules</em> are made by each country, and Spain and Italy, many of the countries hardest hit by the initial wave of COVID, have extended their mask mandates to mid-June.</li><li>OK, I wasn’t going to say anything more about hotel housekeeping because <em>even I’m</em> bored with it, but then I ran across an <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/hotel-housekeepers-want-you-to-request-daily-room-cleaning-11652650925\">article</a> in the Wall Street Journal about how hotel housekeeping unions are pushing for a return to daily room service. Certainly a big part of the push is to drive more work, more hours for the union members. But also because rooms are dirtier and take longer to clean when they have gone a few days without service, especially with the current guest mix that’s still heavier with leisure travelers, who tend to have more people in the room than the road-warrior business traveler. As you’d guess, hotel owners disagree, but for changing reasons. Their arc of rationale has gone from the pre-pandemic “be green, save water, and we’ll give you an extra 500 points to skip housekeeping” to pandemic “we’re keeping everyone safe by staying out of your room” to the current “it’s your choice, and ‘labor shortage’”.&nbsp; OK, that’s it. I’m <em>really </em>not going to talk about room cleaning anymore.</li><li>But I <em>will</em> talk about TSA checkpoint passenger volumes again. <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/09/27/podcast-179-high-tech-airport-lines-business-travel-still-missing/\">Back in September 2021</a>, the last time I scraped the numbers off the TSA <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/coronavirus/passenger-throughput\">website</a>, average daily passenger volumes were bouncing around 1.7 million, down 20% from the July summer peak of over 2 million and down 24% from pre-pandemic September 2019 numbers. Six months later, looking at the last month-and-a-half -- April to mid-May -- the average daily volume is 2.1 million and growing, and now just 10-12% off the April/May 2019 numbers. So if those TSA checkpoints and airplanes are feeling a bit more crowded, it’s because they are. Tough to remember back to my first post-lockdown flight in June 2020, when daily passenger volumes were 5-600,000 and the Southwest boarding agent said “There’s 40 of you on a plane with 175 seats. So everyone gets their own row.” I, in no way, want to go back to those times, but having a bit more plane space <em>was</em> nice.</li><li>I get <em>a lot</em> of emails from public relations firms. I read the subject lines of all of them because every once in a rare while, there’s something that catches my eye, like the pitch that led to last episode’s interview about Daytona Beach airport trying to survive in the shadow of the behemoth that is Orlando Int’l. So when I read the subject line “Study Finds that Frequent-Flyer Programs Increase Cost of Business Travel” in my inbox a few weeks back, I just had to click through. The study, <a href=\"https://www.informs.org/About-INFORMS/News-Room/Press-Releases/Study-Finds-that-Frequent-Flyer-Programs-Increase-Cost-of-Business-Travel\">just published</a> in the journal <em>Marketing Science</em> which I admit I don’t read as often as I should because I get tied up pouring through the CDC’s <em>Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report</em>, is titled <em>Reaching for Gold: Frequent-Flyer Status Incentives and Moral Hazard</em>, written by professors from University of Michigan and Duke business schools. According to the press release, after “(analyzing) the transactional database of a leading U.S.-based airline’s frequent-flyer program (that) included the histories and point accumulations of 3.5 million frequent-flyer program members during the 2010 and 2011 point-earning cycles” their main insights were -- “‘Points Members’ are More Likely to Choose Higher Fares When Not Paying for It” and “the closer frequent-flyer program members get to ‘elite status’ the more likely they are to choose an airline even when it may be more expensive than a competitor’s flight”. Hmm, that feels a bit “Dawn breaking over Marblehead”. How can you be researching frequent flier programs and act like you’ve never heard of (let alone done) a mileage run. Maybe the press release overly summarized the research and just isn’t communicating its subtlety. So I hit Google to find the <a href=\"https://yesimorhun.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/18/2018/11/Orhun_Guo_2018.pdf\">actual paper</a>. 29 pages of text and equations, and 15 pages of bibliography and data tables later -- nope, the press release was pretty much it. If the moral hazard of business travelers using their employer’s money to pay for more expensive flights to make status is eliminated, the paper estimates that companies would save at least 7% of their travel costs. Looking at 2019 data, the <a href=\"https://www.statista.com/statistics/562804/us-air-traffic-domestic-average-ticket-price/\">average cost of a walk-up US domestic ticket</a> -- one booked less than a week in advance, so the typical road warrior ticket -- is about $500. 7% is $35. I dunno, maybe some full-contact procurement guy will get excited about that $35 savings, but I don\'t know any executive in his or her right mind is thinking to themselves “Oh yes, pissing off the people who are jamming themselves in to coach seats and spending nights away from their family for $35 a trip” is a great idea.&nbsp; Except at GM. I remember when frequent flier programs first came out, GM didn’t let their travelers keep the points from business trips, which led to all sorts of weird booking behavior. Until that policy died a quiet death a few years later. Kinda like this research -- I’m sure these professors are nice, smart people; but they gotta get out of their offices a bit more.</li><li>Bridge Music - <em>Drops of H2O ( The Filtered Water Treatment )</em> by J.Lang (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djlang59/37792 Ft: Airtone</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Moving to a Non-Hub Airport</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>One thing that kinda snuck up on me about our move to Nashville -- it’ll be the first time in almost 40 years that I haven’t lived in an airport hub city: Chicago with American and United at ORD; San Francisco with their United hub; Dallas when I signed up for American’s Advantage program my first day of work; Philadelphia with US Air, though I avoided them as much as I could; Detroit with Northwest; and then back to Chicago, now a 3-hub town after Southwest took over MDW after the big expansion.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>Nashville <em>was</em> a hub in the late ‘80’s/early ‘90’s -- well, a mini-hub, actually -- when American was playing around with their network. They built mini-hubs in Nashville, Raleigh/Durham, and San Jose. The experiment lasted maybe 10 years but never really made any money. I think the only thing of American left in those airports are Admirals Clubs; in Nashville, they’re down to 9% of the passenger volume.&nbsp; Today, Nashville’s direct flight distribution looks like any non-hub airport -- the top 4 destinations are Big 3 hubs -- ATL, DEN, DFW, ORD -- with the fifth being MCO, thanks to all that Mouseketeer traffic.</li><li>The #1 travel tip on my and any other experienced traveler’s list is “fly non-stop” -- much easier from a hub airport, of course, and then your frequent flier strategy just falls out from there. If you live in Atlanta, you’re doubling down on Delta’s SkyMiles; realistically, there’s not another option. Non-hub? It could be just as straight-forward -- if your flight patterns take you primarily to one of those hub cities -- Chicago, Atlanta, San Francisco -- then your choice too is made for you. But if you’re in sales or consulting -- or maybe slouching toward retirement -- and your flight patterns are a bit more scattershot, then you have to think -- what’s my objective? -- flying non-stop for the shortest flight times and lowest probability of disruption; making elite status because the perks make my travel easier; or is it building up points to help fund my vacations?</li><li>Thinking about my consulting colleagues who flew out of non-hub airports every week, they were all about status. One guy I worked with lived in Ft Myers, Florida and was all in on Delta. Even when flying every week to projects in, say, Dallas or Chicago, he’d always skip the direct American flights and connect through Atlanta, killing the time from all those missed connections with drinks in Delta’s Sky Club -- which was free with his Diamond Medallion status.</li><li>My calculus is a little easier. One of the side benefits of flying <em>a lot</em> for over 35 years is that I stacked up enough mileage for lifetime mid-tier elite status on American and United. Not enough status to get into their clubs for free, but along with the usual early boarding and free bags, it’s gotten me free club entry to OneWorld and Star Alliance partners’ lounges -- which is very valuable when trying to navigate the rabbit warrens that are FRA and LHR after north Atlantic turbulence has screwed up your in-flight sleep plans.&nbsp; If I didn’t already have these metal levels or I was in striking distance of a new level -- say close to the 2 million I’d need to jump from United Premier Gold to lifetime Platinum -- then I’d probably suck it up like my colleagues do, and get, say, the top tier United credit card with free club access for a place to sit out ORD, DEN, and IAH weather delays.</li><li>Those lifetime statuses let me step off the elite hamster wheel, so I’m now looking at non-stop flights and earning miles. Out of Nashville, Southwest has the most non-stop flights, so I’ll probably be flying them a fair bit. But while Southwest’s Companion Pass perk -- their “buy a ticket, get one free” top tier status is phenomenal, I can’t BOGO Southwest to Europe, so I need to be banking miles on one of the Big 3 so I can book on their OneWorld, Star Alliance, or SkyTeam partners -- which is where travel credit cards come back into the picture. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/09/19/podcast-167-6-months-on-why-keep-travel-cards/\">episode #167</a> in September 2020, we talked about people replacing their mileage cards with cash-back cards since no one was flying. But that trend is reverting to the mean and credit card companies have big slugs of mileage to dole out after buying them cheap in 2020 when the airlines needed real cash real fast. So my non-hub strategy -- fly direct when I can, leverage those hard-earned lifetime statuses when I can, and charge everything I can on a mileage-earning card -- including any drinks I may need to see me through those missed connections.</li><li>Bridge Music —  &nbsp;<em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/trifonic/445\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bored on Your Backside</a></em> by Trifonic (c) copyright 2005 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Sampling Plus 1.0 license. http://ccmixter.org/files/trifonic/445</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>What Makes a Great Taproom?</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>With a month left in Chicago, Irene and I have built a list of “Places to Hit Before Move” that’s some mix of greatest hits and places we’ve always wanted to go but have, for some reason or another, never gotten ‘round to. And then I have a separate list of Chicago taprooms I want to hit one more time -- Goose Island, Revolution Brewing, Off Color, Solemn Oath, Marz, Dovetail, and Metropolitan Brewing. Which then got me thinking -- why these and not other; what makes a good taproom for me?</li><li>First thing to do is to open up Untappd, the beer social networking app that\'s been my beer diary for over 11 years now.  I’ve checked beer in at over 1,900 locations and the #1 location category is -- a brewery taproom. I scrolled through the list on the app and jotted down the ones I thought “Yeah, I’d like to go back there.”  </li><li>Probably the smallest group is about unique brewery experiences; where I actually did the brewery tour and it was something more than just row after row of steel tanks. Cantillon in Brussels is everyone’s favorite; they send you off on your own guided with nothing but a paper brochure and tell you not to break anything. And then, after you’ve navigated coolships and barrel rooms, they pour you their amazing lambic beers. Or the original Lagunitas Brewery in Petaluma, CA where the tour guide tossed us just-filled IPA bottles he’d grabbed before they got to the packaging machine. </li><li>But except for these few exceptions, my favorite places have a wide beer selection (something more than 5 taps of IPAs) and/or a cool space and/or the chance to chat with the brewer. Labietis’ original place in Riga, Latvia hit the first two square on the head: a <em>diverse</em> beer menu -- a juniper beer inspired by Latvian folk songs, a wheat beer with meadowsweet, a lager with Latvian hops -- that’s located in the back courtyard of what looked like, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/11/30/podcast-157-notes-from-the-baltics-riga-latvia-and-tallinn-estonia/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #157 — Notes from the Baltics: Riga, Latvia and Tallinn, Estonia\">the fall of 2019</a>, a block of now slightly derelict early 20th Century manor houses. A little closer to home on my Chicago list, Metropolitan Brewing does nothing but German-style lagers which are a perfect fit for their taproom patio that looks out on the north branch of the Chicago River.</li><li>Going to a brewery’s taproom is kinda like seeing a band in concert -- I’m going to get a fuller picture of that band than I will just hearing their hit songs on the radio or a Spotify playlist. Hitting a good taproom can be similar -- getting past the high-volume core beers to see what the brewer can really do. When we were in Santa Fe last month, I went out of my way to hit Rowley Farmhouse Ales because I really liked their range during our last visit in 2018. So of course I ordered the Teosinte, a funky, earthy, grassy sour made from Oaxacan green dent corn grown a couple hundred miles east, near the Texas-New Mexico border. It was an incredibly interesting beer. I wouldn’t buy a six-pack of it, but I was more than happy to have a glass of it.</li><li>But probably the best time I have at taprooms is when I get to talk to the brewer. During one of my trips last year to Nashville, I found myself an hour south in Columbia, TN, which bills itself “Muletown.” I missed the 2021 “Mule Day” festival; it was canceled due to COVID. Instead, I wound my way through a light industrial neighborhood hard against some freight train tracks billed as Columbia’s Art District to find <a href=\"http://www.badideabrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bad Idea Brewing</a>. There were two other folks sitting at the bar; the brewer was behind it, serving. And we just got talking -- about the beer, about his brewery, about Columbia, about brewing in Columbia, about what kind of beer sells in Columbia. And through all that, taster glasses kept landing in front of me -- “try this,” “what do you think of that?” he’d ask. What was going to be a quick side trip for a beer turned into a nice afternoon of conversation… and beer.</li><li>I guess there’s one more thing that can make for a great taproom, or maybe more of a great taproom experience and that is -- it took me to a part of a city that I wouldn’t have otherwise gone. I talked a bit about this in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/04/10/podcast-174-how-the-pros-plan-their-taproom-tourism/\">episode #174</a> when I talked with Rob Cheshire of the UK podcast <a href=\"https://thisweekincraft.beer/podcast/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">This Week in Craft Beer</a> about planning taproom visits. Navigating the maze of a Beijing hutong to find Great Leap Brewing, or exiting a Paris Metro stop in a North African neighborhood on my way to <a href=\"http://deck-donohue.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Deck &amp; Donohue</a>, or riding an e-scooter through a questionable neighborhood in northeast DC to <a href=\"https://www.rightproperbrewing.com/brookland\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Right Proper Brewing</a>. These three were fine places with solid beers, but they’re more memorable for the trip to find them than for the places themselves.</li><li>But you can’t always tell this from Google search. So if you go to the show notes on travelcommons.com you’ll find my list of  “Yeah, I’d like to go back there” taprooms.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>My<em> Yeah, I’d like to go back there</em>  Taproom List</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Chicago <ul><li><a href=\"https://www.gooseisland.com/fulton-brewery/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Goose Island Taproom</a>, 1800 W Fulton St — Yes, it\'s now owned by AB InBev, but it was the original Chicago microbrewery in the late \'80\'s and they created the whole barrel-aged stout category with Bourbon County Stout</li><li><a href=\"http://www.revbrew.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Revolution Brewing Brewery &amp; Taproom</a>, 3340 N Kedzie Ave— Great beers; wide range of styles; bring your own food</li><li><a href=\"http://maplewoodbrew.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Maplewood Brewery &amp; Distillery</a>, 2717 N Maplewood Ave (South of Diversey) — Small, neighborhood bar tucked up against the Kennedy Expressway</li><li><a href=\"http://www.metrobrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Metropolitan Brewing</a>, 3057 N Rockwell St — Been brewing German-style lagers since 2009; great patio seating that looks out over the north branch of the Chicago River</li><li><a href=\"http://dovetailbrewery.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Dovetail Brewery</a>, 1800 W Belle Plaine Ave — German lagers and spontaneously fermented beers; the best taproom on the Ravenswood neighborhood\'s <a href=\"https://ravenswoodchicago.org/neighborhood/malt-row/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">\"Malt Row\"</a></li><li><a href=\"http://www.offcolorbrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Off Color Brewing</a>, 1460 N Kingsbury St — Great range of beer styles, all of which are well-done</li><li><a href=\"https://www.solemnoathbrewery.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Solemn Oath Brewery</a>, 1661 Quincy Ave #179, Naperville, IL — In a <em>faaar</em> west neighborhood of Chicago, one of the OG suburban breweries. Great beers and a great outdoor space, especially in the winter.</li><li>A couple of South Side taprooms featured on the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/07/15/video-chicago-mdw-layover-taproom-tour/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Chicago MDW Layover Taproom Tour</a> video<ul><li><a href=\"http://marzbrewing.com/\">Marz Community Brewing</a>, 3630 S Iron St</li><li><a href=\"http://www.whinerbeer.com/\">Whiner Beer</a>, 1400 W 46th St</li></ul></li></ul></li><li>Elsewhere in the US<ul><li><a href=\"https://oxbowbeer.com/location/portland/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Oxbow Blending &amp; Bottling</a>, 49 Washington Ave, Portland, ME — Great selection of farmhouse ales with an outpost of rtyu<a href=\"http://www.duckfatfriteshack.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Duckfat</a> serving up fries on the patio</li><li> <a href=\"http://www.allagash.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Allagash Brewing Company</a>, 50 Industrial Way, Portland, ME — One of the OG Maine breweries; huge range of beers beyond Allagash White; nice outdoor space; two more taprooms across the street makes it a nice afternoon destination</li><li><a href=\"https://otherhalfbrewing.com/location/domino-park/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Other Half Brewing Domino Park</a>, 34 River St, Brooklyn, NY — Great hazy IPAs; great views of Manhattan across the East River</li><li><a href=\"https://www.rightproperbrewing.com/brookland\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Right Proper Brewing Brookland Production House + Tasting Room</a>, 920 Girard St NE, Washington, DC — A nice little taproom in a DC neighborhood that is <em>way</em> off the typical tourist track</li><li><a href=\"http://www.thefermentorium.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">The Fermentorium Brewery and Tasting Room</a>, 7481 WI-60 Trunk, Cedarburg, WI — Well done range of beers just outside of a scenic small Wisconsin town</li><li><a href=\"http://drifabrewing.beer/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Drífa Brewing Company</a>, 501 S Lake St, Marquette, MI — Great beer stop on the bike path along the shore of Lake Superior</li><li><a href=\"https://beardedirisbrewing.com/location/germantown/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bearded Iris Brewing</a>, 101 Van Buren St, Nashville, TN — Original Germantown taproom with great hazy IPAs, pool tables and a nice patio</li><li><a href=\"https://www.variousartistsbrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Various Artists Brewing</a>, 1011 Elm Hill Pike, Nashville, TN — Wide variety of beer styles; big patio; guest chefs working a big grill</li><li><a href=\"http://www.faitlaforcebrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Fait la Force Brewing</a>, 1414 3rd Ave S, Nashville, TN — An unassuming place tucked away in the Chestnut Hill neighborhood; comfortable space; great range of beer styles; had a great conversation with the brewer behind the bar</li><li><a href=\"http://www.badideabrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bad Idea Brewing Company</a>, 307 W 11th St, Columbia, TN — Comfortable taproom with well-executed beers in Columbia\'s Art District; another place I had a nice conversation with the brewer</li><li><a href=\"https://www.rowleyfarmhouse.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Rowley Farmhouse Ales</a>, 1405 Maclovia St, Santa Fe, NM — Nice range of IPAs, saisons, and sours, and a solid green chile cheeseburger</li><li><a href=\"http://www.lagunitas.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Lagunitas Brewing Company</a>, 1280 N McDowell Blvd, Petaluma, CA — Yes, they\'ve been bought out by Heineken, but the original brewery still has a bit of that old Cali anarchic feel</li><li><a href=\"https://www.pueblovidabrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pueblo Vida Brewing Company</a>, 115 E Broadway Blvd, Tucson, AZ — A little joint in downtown Tucson that executes great beers with a focus on local ingredients</li><li><a href=\"http://www.eppigbrewing.com/waterfront-biergarten\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Eppig Brewing Waterfront Biergarten</a>, 2817 Dickens St, San Diego, CA — It\'s all about drinking good beers outside in the sunshine along the marina</li></ul></li><li>Outside the US<ul><li><a href=\"https://www.thebarrelproject.co.uk/beer-menu/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">London Beer Factory - Barrel Project</a>, 80 Druid St, London SE1 2HQ — Great beers; very cool space in railway arch along London\'s <a href=\"https://www.londonxlondon.com/bermondsey-beer-mile/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bermondsey Beer Mile</a></li><li><a href=\"http://www.cantillon.be/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Brasserie Cantillon</a>, Rue Gheude 56, 1070 Anderlecht, Belgium — Ground zero for spontaneously fermented lambic and gueuze beers; just follow the train of beer geeks to the door</li><li><a href=\"https://mikkeller.com/locations/mikkeller-baghaven\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Mikkeller Baghaven</a>, Refshalevej 169B, 1432 København — Lots of spontaneously fermented sour beer on a converted industrial island</li><li><a href=\"http://www.fmaravillas.com/\">Fábrica Maravillas</a>, C. de Valverde, 29, 28004 Madrid — Nice taproom tucked into Madrid\'s Malasaña neighborhood serving good pale ales and IPAs </li><li><a href=\"https://deck-donohue.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Deck &amp; Donohue</a>, 1 Av. des Marronniers, 94380 Bonneuil-sur-Marne, France — Took me outside the usual Paris tourist circuit to a North African shopping street</li><li><a href=\"https://labietis.lv/en/krogs/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Labietis Brewpub</a>, 2, Aristida Briāna iela 9a, Rīga, LV-1001, Latvia — Out-of-the-way taproom; interesting selection of beer styles, not just the usual IPAs, but herb beers, fruit beers, and meads; helpful bartenders do a good job of describing what\'s on tap</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #187</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>As I said at the top of the show, there’s probably not going to be a June show, between packing up the Chicago studio and then unpacking it in Nashville. Good news, though -- the sound quality in Nashville might get a step-function improvement. Just about every apt building Irene and I looked at had a music studio as one of the amenities. The sound proofing, the sound deadening, and maybe a better microphone should make things sound a bit better. Quite a ways from those first episodes, recording with the iRiver MP3 player’s built-in mic while standing in a shower stall. Oh my!</li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. You’ll have to go to the TravelCommons’ website if you want to torture your ears listening to those first bathroom-studio episodes; what one listener labelled a “pottycast”</li><li>And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_187.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Podcast #187 — Moving to a Non-Hub Airport; What Makes A Great Taproom?','','inherit','closed','closed','','4145-revision-v1','','','2022-05-28 14:02:57','2022-05-28 19:02:57','',4145,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4163',0,'revision','',0),
(4167,1,'2022-06-17 15:19:32','2022-06-17 20:19:32','[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/IMG_0161.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/IMG_0161-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Pink Scarf on Statue in Lucca\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> Switching from Face Covering to Shawl[/caption]\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We recap the bouncing ball history of the in-flight mask mandate as we try to figure out where it\'s going land now that it\'s in the courts. But before that, I recap my trip to Santa Fe, NM, take the flight tracking app <a href=\"https://apps.apple.com/us/app/flighty-all-airlines-tracker/id1358823008\">Flighty</a> for a spin, and wonder why <a href=\"https://www.clearme.com/\">CLEAR</a> keeps giving away annual subscriptions. Then we dig into the current state of regional airports with Joanne Magley, of <a href=\"http://www.flydaytonafirst.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Daytona Beach International Airport</a>.  All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_186.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #186: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois riding the spring roller coaster of Midwest temperatures -- 65 degrees one day, 45 degrees the next. We were in Santa Fe, NM a week-and-a-half ago with a group of friends and the Midwest has nothing on high-desert plateau temperature swings. We’d wake up to 35-40 degrees, bundle up, and then be stripping off layers at lunch when it’d hit the upper 60’s. We had great weather; maybe one day where it was windy, overcast, and cold all day. The rest of the time was sunny and clear blue skies. Some bits of our visit were kind of a replay of our Thanksgiving 2018 trip there. I talked about that trip in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/12/17/podcast-147-holiday-travel-tips-notes-from-santa-fe/\">episode #147</a> and then wrote it up in more detail in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/01/24/road-trip-lowbrow-santa-fe/\"><em>Lowbrow Santa Fe</em></a> blog post -- which came in very handy; reminding me of restaurants, taprooms, and things to do while we were doing some bare-minimum planning for the group. And even if some of it was a replay for us, it was the first time for our friends, and seeing these places again through their eyes gave it all a new spin for us.</li><li>Actually, I was happy to see that not a lot had changed in the intervening 3½ years; that COVID hadn’t driven any of our favorite places out of business. The only places I saw closed up were the ABQ restaurant before security and <a href=\"https://www.blm.gov/visit/kktr\">Tent Rocks National Monument</a> which the Bureau of Land Management closed during the COVID lockdowns but now are keeping closed to upgrade the trails. We stayed again at the <a href=\"https://farolito.com/\">El Farolito</a> bed &amp; breakfast -- there were 10 of us, so we kinda took it over. The owner told us Santa Fe was as busy as ever. And we saw it -- our flight down to ABQ was completely full as were all the restaurants.&nbsp;</li><li>But we still managed to wedge our way into a number of places on <a href=\"https://www.santafe.org/visiting-santa-fe/self-guided-tours/santa-fe-margarita-trail/\">Santa Fe’s Margarita Trail</a>. Yes, I know that it’s a pure marketing thing, but we were square in their target market and were happy to be tagged. We had high-end premium tequila margaritas, low-brow house margaritas, green chile-infused margaritas; all kinds -- except those made with sour mix. I had to draw the line somewhere. A lot of places were saying theirs was the best margarita -- so we had to try as many as we could. But as one of our crew so aptly put it, “The world’s best margarita is the one in your hand.”</li><li>Bridge Music — <em><em>Bogi Beat Budapest </em></em>by KarmaHacke<a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/Loveshadow/26219\">r<em> </em></a> (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/hepepe/21074</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>OK, just one more note about the place we stayed in Santa Fe, El Farolito -- full housekeeping every day in our casita without asking, including restocking the kiva fireplace with fresh wood and newspaper, ready for us to just strike the match. Also, full cooked breakfast. The only lingering COVID service reduction -- no afternoon cookies. But given the amount of food and margaritas we were consuming, I actually think that was a good thing.</li><li>Before my flight down to ABQ, T/C contributor Allan Marko pointed me to <a href=\"https://apps.apple.com/us/app/flighty-all-airlines-tracker/id1358823008\">Flighty</a>, a flight tracker app. I’ve talked about flight tracking apps in past episodes. Years back, I paid the $50/year for TripIt Pro, but eventually dropped it as airlines kept upgrading their own apps -- improving real-time status notifications, adding “where’s my plane” functionality. Add in the free <a href=\"https://apps.apple.com/us/app/live-flight-tracker/id316793974\">FlightAware</a> app and that’s been my flight tracker “tech stack” for a number of years. But looking at app reviews, Flighty seems to be the latest hotness, so I downloaded it to give it a go. It’s a nice looking app, and they’re smart to give a free trial of all the paid features for the first flight. I first sync’d it with TripIt, so didn’t need to re-enter my ABQ flights. Then, that day, got flight status notifications faster and more granular than what Southwest was sending me; scrolled down for a nice timeline of&nbsp; “where’s my plane” -- always important for Southwest flights since they tend to “bunny hop” across the country during the day rather than run out-and-back to hubs. There was also a detailed flight timeline -- pushback, taxi, take-off, landing. Nothing I couldn’t get from FlightAware, but the UI was so much better, more modern, all on one screen. But of course, all of this information I was liking is part of their Pro, their paid offering. It was all blurred out for the flight home, which I really could’ve used when I woke up to a 1-hour delay notification from Southwest. The only thing I got from Flighty was an upsell notification -- “Looks like your flight’s delayed; you should upgrade to Pro for more information.” Not the most helpful, especially after some bug in their system sent me the same notification every couple of minutes until I spelunked far enough into my iPhone’s notification settings to shut them off. And then I opened FlightAware to figure out what was really going on. Our plane was late getting out of BWI, its first hop, and we were another couple of hops down the line.&nbsp; So, net net, the Flighty Pro offering is nice. If I was back to flying every week, I’d pay the $50 to have all that information on a single screen. But Flighty Free can’t replace the free, if slightly clunkier, FlightAware.</li><li>I’ve been noticing a new bunch of deals offering a free year of <a href=\"https://www.clearme.com/\">CLEAR</a>, the biometrically powered security line cut service that lists out at $179/year. I’ve always been ambivalent about CLEAR. I talked about this last fall in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/09/27/podcast-179-high-tech-airport-lines-business-travel-still-missing/\">episode #179</a> when I received the first raft of offers -- from Amex and United. The time savings over regular TSA PreCheck has never seemed enough to justify the cost of letting them hold my biometric information -- especially since the first incarnation of CLEAR had to be sued to stop it from selling customers’ fingerprint and iris scan data before it went bankrupt. Having said that, I’m seeing them at more airports, and if TSA hiring can’t keep up passenger volume growth and those PreCheck lines start to lengthen, it might be enough to get me opening my eyes wide to CLEAR again.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music — Black Rainbow by Pitx (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Pitx/19513 Ft: ERH, acclivity</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Mask Mandate Scramble</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>We talked in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/03/28/podcast-185-notes-on-louisville-changing-mask-mandates/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #185 — Notes on Louisville; Changing Mask Mandates\">the last episode</a> about the CDC kicking can containing in-flight mask mandate down the road a month -- from March 18th to this past Monday, April 18th. And so last week, anticipation began to build in travel circles about what the CDC would do. On our flight home from ABQ, the Southwest flight attendant said during her pre-take-off announcements “Hopefully the in-flight mask mandate ends next week, but until then…” and then ran through the standard mask instructions. I wasn’t surprised since, as we mentioned in the last episode, their union had been asking for the mandate to end. However, I was surprised that the instruction announcement included “if oxygen masks fall during the flight, please take off your mask before putting the oxygen mask on.” That would seem a bit obvious to me, but maybe I think about these things more than the average passenger.</li><li>The next day, after finishing my interview with Joanne Magley of <a href=\"http://flydaytonafirst.com\" title=\"Daytona Beach Int’l Airport\">Daytona Beach Int’l Airport</a> -- which you’ll hear in the next segment -- we got talking about the mask mandate; what’s going to happen on Monday. Joanne’s cut -- I hope we know something by Sunday so we’re prepared for Monday. Which happened -- the next day, word began to leak out that the CDC was going to extend the mandate again, for 2 weeks this time.</li><li>Almost two years ago, in 2020, soon after the lockdowns and travel bans started and passenger volumes plummeted, the airlines themselves started requiring in-flight masks in an attempt to coax people back into what were seen as modern-day plague ships. In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/07/17/podcast-165-first-post-lockdown-flight-when-does-business-travel-come-back/\">episode #165</a>, I talked about my first post-lockdown flight that June saying back then “it felt like mask usage was about 80%. I see kids ripping their masks off as soon as they get off the jetway. A sizable minority of mask wearers were just covering their mouths, leaving their noses uncovered — pilots, cleaning crew, passengers, wheelchair people.” It wasn’t until Joe Biden’s inauguration day, January 2021, that it became a federal mandate. That initial mandate was through mid-May, 5 months, but a few weeks before it expired, it was extended for 4 months, to mid-September, then another 4 months to mid-January 2022, then 2 months to mid-March, then 1 month to mid-April, then a half-month (2 weeks), to May. And with indoor mask mandates dropping everywhere else, each of these last extensions of this last remaining mandate generated more and more pushback.</li><li>And so when the <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/judge-throws-out-federal-mask-mandate-for-public-transportation-11650306480\">federal judge struck down the mask mandate</a> on this Monday, the speed at which everyone ditched their mask rules was amazing. Within hours of the ruling, the TSA and all the major US airlines announced they were no longer requiring masks. There were reports of flight attendants announcing the decision in-flight and walking down the aisle with trash bags to collect unwanted and now-unneeded face masks. On Tuesday morning, I got emails from Uber and Lyft dropping their mask requirements. On Tuesday afternoon, Illinois’ governor dropped the state’s masking requirements on regional trains, buses, and Chicago’s airports. The rush of announcements; it was almost like everyone was working to make it a <em>fait accompli</em>, a done deal that couldn’t be reversed.&nbsp;</li><li>Because amidst all this activity was an undertone, an unknown -- would the Biden Administration, the CDC appeal the judge’s ruling. Nothing on Monday, or Tuesday, but then yesterday, Wednesday afternoon, the CDC asked the Dept of Justice to file an appeal, which it did but without a request to stay the judge’s ruling, to reinstate the mandate -- at least as of mid-day today. I can’t figure out what their plan is -- or if there is one. As I said in the last episode, without a mask mandate, I’ll probably ride the pragmatic middle -- probably skipping the mask while turning the air jet on full blast on half-full planes but then pulling out a KN-95 when I’m sitting there’s someone in the middle seat sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with me, like on our full flight down to ABQ last week. I really didn’t mind wearing a mask for that 3½ hours. It’s not just a COVID thing. I haven’t had a bad cold since this all started and I’d kinda like to keep it this way.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/stefsax/7785\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Awel</a> </em>by stefsax (c) copyright 2006 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/stefsax/7785 </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Small Airport Survival</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>American Airlines made news a couple of weeks back when they, in industry lingo <em>down-gauged</em> flights to Allentown, PA and Atlantic City, NJ from their Philadelphia hub. <em>Up-gauging</em> and <em>down-gauging</em> -- changing the size of the plane on the route -- happens all the time. What made <em>this</em> change news was that&nbsp; American down-gauged from a regional jet to a bus. But I guess it could’ve been worse. US airline execs have been talking for a while now about the need to reduce, even eliminate service to small, regional airports; pinning the blame first on crew shortages, and most recently on fuel costs.</li><li>Like many frequent travelers, I’ve traveled through a lot of smaller, regional airports. I’ve appreciated the ability to skip the 2-hr rental car drive and fly directly into Allentown, PA; Charlottesville, VA; Appletown, WI; and Sioux City, IA (not a bad place, in spite of its airport code SUX). So to check in on what it’s like to run a regional airport today, I fired up Zoom for a chat with Joanne Magley, the Director of Air Service, Marketing and Customer Experience for <a href=\"http://www.flydaytonafirst.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Daytona Beach International Airport</a><ul><li>Mark: Joanne, back last June on the TravelCommons podcast in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/06/15/podcast-176-why-business-travel-is-coming-back-learning-airport-history/\">episode #176</a>, we talked with Dr Janet Bednarek of University of Dayton about the history of airports. So how did Daytona Beach International Airport get started?</li><li>Joanne: We started as a naval base and then from there it was given to the city and then somehow it was given back to the county</li><li>Mark: Daytona Beach International Airport is about an hour from Orlando, and about an hour and a half from Jacksonville. What types of travelers are choosing Daytona Beach over those two bigger airports?</li><li>Joanne: Orlando might be an hour, maybe an hour and 10 minutes. But then you have to add in the time to go from where you\'re parking back to the terminal, and the time it takes to get through the security checkpoints.&nbsp; So really that hour or so drive becomes two plus hours of just trying to get to your gate. The people that use Daytona Beach International Airport love the convenience factor of walking five minutes from the parking spot, maybe spending five minutes at the TSA checkpoints. And also, we pride ourselves on really high customer service. Many times, when you go through TSA security, you forget that you might have packed an item on your carry-on that is not allowed -- something as simple as a wine opener or your heirloom pocket knife from your grandfather. Well, you can\'t take these things through the checkpoint.</li><li>Mark: And rightfully so…</li><li>Joanne: TSA will confiscate.... Well, no, the TSA does not confiscate it; you surrender your items to TSA. Usually you don\'t see your item ever again. But at our airport, the TSA agents will give you an envelope. You can put the item in the envelope, put your address on the envelope, and then TSA will put it into a little locker. And then every day, our operations team comes and unloads that locker. And then every morning, we mail it back to the passengers free of charge. It\'s simple on our part. It really is. It\'s just mailing an item and the cost of mailing an item is very small compared to the reward that we get for having happy people come through the terminal. And we can do it because we\'re smaller.</li><li>Mark: How difficult was it to get the local TSA to agree to that program?</li><li>Joanne: Not difficult at all. They\'re a great partner with us and they are some of the friendliest TSA agents you will ever come across.</li><li>Mark: Well, that\'s nice to hear because certainly myself and a lot of travelers step up to the TSA kiosk with, let\'s call it, a mixed set of experiences. One of the things that I think we\'ve seen recently is US airlines talking about having to park smaller jets, the regional jets and having to reduce some and even ending some service to smaller airports because of pilot shortages. Have you seen any of this?</li><li>Joanne: Sure, Sure. Like a lot of smaller regional airports, we used to have dozens of airlines and then deregulation which consolidated a lot of airlines and then the great recession. And so, through the years, we\'ve landed with two main carriers, Delta and American. We are very fortunate that we had not lost any service with our two main carriers. In fact, we gained a few extra routes starting with December 2020. American Airlines started seasonal service to Philadelphia and Dallas-Fort Worth. So we gained some service. But one thing that we are noticing -- typically when they would bring in a larger plane, they haven\'t done that yet. We\'ve seen some cancellations due to maybe crew shortages. Again, not a lot, but where we know that it\'s affecting us is the opportunity to get more new destinations because at this point, it\'s difficult for the airlines to say, “OK, we\'ll add new service here and here,” even though the airlines know that it could be a profitable flight. They don\'t have the crew; they don\'t necessarily have the pilots to add a new flight. They would have to stop service from somewhere else in order to start up new and actually starting up new comes with all sorts of new costs as well.</li><li>Mark: Joanne,&nbsp; how do you pitch a new airline for new service and a new airline?</li><li>Joanne: What it takes to at least be high on the consideration. First, you have to show that there is a demand for service, and the airlines can see where passengers are coming and going from so that part\'s kind of easy. But then the part where there is the cost for the startup... What we\'re seeing is a lot of communities are coming together to put in an air service support program. It can\'t come from the airport. The airport incentives have to be separate. So, the community is coming forth with an air service development program which is in the form of a minimum revenue guarantee. That minimum revenue guarantee will only kick in if they\'re not meeting what their expected revenues are supposed to be. So, let\'s say, a community gathers $2 million dollars from their economic development fund and from businesses and corporations. And it\'s, it\'s more of a pledge. It\'s not like they\'re giving these $2 million dollars to an airline. It\'s like a pledge.</li><li>Mark: It sounds like the local community is looking to take the risk out of the business case for the new service.</li><li>Joanne: That\'s exactly what it is. It\'s risk mitigation. The economic impact of a new airline coming in with twice-a-week daily flights to multiple destinations, that’s a good investment. But that\'s what the airlines are looking for, especially the new ones. There\'s a number of Canadian airlines that are just kind of chomping at the bit to get back. So if everything kind of stays where we\'re at and the border stays open, we will see our Canadian visitors coming back.</li><li>Mark: Joanne. I really want to thank you for joining us on the TravelCommons podcast. It\'s been a great conversation; I\'ve really enjoyed it. Joanne Magley, Director of Air Service, Marketing and Customer Experience for <a href=\"http://flydaytonafirst.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Daytona Beach International Airport\">Daytona Beach International Airport</a>. Having a lot better weather in April than what we have in Chicago. Thanks again for joining us, Joanne.</li><li>Joanne: You\'re welcome, Mark. Thank you.</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #186</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_186.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #186 — Mask Mandate Scramble; Small Airport Survival','','inherit','closed','closed','','4135-autosave-v1','','','2022-06-17 15:19:32','2022-06-17 20:19:32','',4135,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4167',0,'revision','',0),
(4175,1,'2022-08-18 20:15:39','2022-08-19 01:15:39','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/IMG_4140.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/IMG_4140-300x300.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" alt=\"Stenciled graffiti of gasmask-wearing woman carrying bags labeled Hope and Dreams to avoid travel chaos\"></a>Carrying Travel Hopes and Dreams to the Airport[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Back behind the microphone after a couple of months of setting up the new studios in Nashville. I\'ve been dishing out travel advice to friends and family swept up in this summer\'s travel chaos. I\'ve distilled all those texts and messages down to my top 13 travel tips to help those traveling through the rest of the year. We also talk about the countries that have dropped all of the COVID testing requirements for inbound passengers, noodle about the rationale for JetBlue\'s dogged pursuit of Spirit Airways, Delta\'s new time limits for their Sky Club lounges, and why frequent flier award travel is suddenly a bargain again. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_188.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #188: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Back after a June/July hiatus to relocate the TravelCommons studio -- and the rest of our worldly belongings -- from Chicago to Nashville, Tennessee. So that’s been the most recent travel, the drive down I-65 and then digging into the different neighborhoods and brewery taprooms here. You know you haven’t been on the road when Lyft pushes you a coupon for just opening their app and Uber sends you emails like “You haven’t taken a ride with us in a while, so we’re checking in to ask for some feedback…. Let us know why we haven’t seen you in a while.” The right response was “I haven’t had a reason to use Uber” but I was really tempted to hit “Prices are too high” or “ETAs are too long”. I dunno, my next Uber ride will probably be one of the Lime e-scooters I’m seeing all over town here.&nbsp;</li><li>Of course, if there was a time to drop off the road, this summer was it. With flight cancellations rising -- the US July Fourth weekend a train wreck with 500 flights canceled on the Friday and then 600 on Saturday, accented by 4,000 delays. And then record-high gas prices and still screwed-up rental car fleets make for the chef’s kiss on top of it all, turning the fly-vs-drive trade-off into some witches brew of partial differential equations. At some point, you just throw the suitcase back in the closet and treat your Weber to a load of premium lump charcoal. As if the frequent traveler rule of “Avoid holiday weekend travel” needed another proof point.</li><li>So while I wasn’t <em>in</em> that maelstrom -- though I’m not sure unpacking a hundred or so moving boxes was all that much better -- I have been an interested, maybe even <em>involved</em> observer with friends and family calling me, messaging me -- “Hey, Mark! I have a question for a travel guru and thought of you first”-- trying to help them navigate as best I could. And after I dished out the same advice more than a couple of times -- indeed, often copy/pasting the same suggestion from one text stream to another -- I decided maybe this would be a good time to pull it all together in a single place, maybe even a podcast with, better yet, some written show notes for easy reference. Stay tuned; it’s coming up in a couple of minutes…</li><li>Bridge Music -- <em><em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/hisboyelroy/430\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Revolve</a>&nbsp;</em>mix&nbsp;</em>by cinematrik (c) copyright 2005 Licensed under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hisboyelroy/430</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>In June, while I was wrapping myself in bubble wrap and packing tape, the US, Canada, most European and Latin American countries dropped their inbound COVID testing requirements. I mean, it makes sense. These testing requirements were put in place to keep COVID at bay, and they failed miserably. At the beginning of last December, the US <em>tightened</em> its inbound testing requirement to try to keep out the then-new Omicron variant, but by the end of the month, it was rampant. And yet the US kept that 24-hour testing requirement for another 7 months -- long after the rationale had been overrun by real life. But, give credit where credit is due, they did finally drop it. One less thing to cause back-ups at airports and border crossings, I guess. It’ll be interesting to see if the testing requirements start cropping up again if we get another autumn surge.</li><li>The Spirit-Frontier-JetBlue Dance Macabre seems to have finally ended with JetBlue’s escalating share price offer trumping Frontier’s more obvious business case of merging two ultra-low cost (and ultra-low service) US carriers. JetBlue’s desperation just didn’t make sense to me -- so yes, maybe they expand their Florida footprint -- always important for an East Coast airline -- but at what integration costs. I’ve always enjoyed flying JetBlue; it felt like they tried to add just a touch more to their service to differentiate themselves from, say, United or American. So now merge that with Spirit, which seems to be a kinder, gentler Ryanair, or maybe a Ryanair but without the chip on its shoulder? Where’s the sense in that? Then someone suggested that I had completely missed the plot. It’s not about Florida; it’s not about low-cost; it’s about the pilot shortage. JetBlue and Spirit both fly Airbus. JetBlue’s other growth option would be Alaska Airlines, which is a Boeing shop. It’s much easier to cross-train and leverage pilots across, say, an all-Airbus fleet than a mixed one. It’s the same reason Southwest and Ryanair are so rabidly focused on the Boeing 737, and Spirit and Frontier on the Airbus A320. OK, got it. But I’ll be a bit sad if this whole mess ends up “Spirit-izing” JetBlue.</li><li>“We’re not a WeWork,” said the head of Delta’s Sky Club lounge system as they put new limits on lounge access. You can’t get in earlier than 3 hours before your departure time. So no more checking out of the hotel to post up in the Sky Lounge for free food, drinks, and WiFi until your afternoon flight. I gotta tell you that this wouldn’t be a big thing for me if I was a regular Delta flier. I’m always trying to figure out how to spend the <em>least</em> amount of time in the airport. Maybe a couple of times, I’d set up camp in the Admirals Club for a morning of calls before, say, a noon flight out. But I’d much prefer working my hotel status to get a later room check-out and then take my calls there, by myself, instead of hoping to find a club workstation that <em>wasn’t</em> next to some sales guy loudly regaling somebody about the deal he just closed. Now to me, though, the more interesting piece of this story is the other limit they <em>wanted</em> to put in but couldn’t -- no lounge access <em>after</em> your flight had landed. Now <em>that one</em> would’ve left a mark. Lots of times, I’d wedge my flight into a 2, 3-hour calendar window between phone calls. And for me, it was those after-flight calls where the lounge was critical. I’m not surprised that Delta had to quickly back off of that rule. But they had to do something because, as the main floors of the terminals have become more of a zoo, and as the lounges have added more free stuff -- better food, free drinks -- they’ve become jammed. It’s tough to find a place to <em>sit</em> before the morning and evening flight banks, let alone a place to take a call. Amex is upping their price, starting this February to charge $50 to get your guest into a Centurion Lounge with you. Looks like Delta is pivoting the other way and trying rationing instead. It’ll be interesting to see which way American and United go.</li><li>There’s been a good bit of commentary over the past few years about the devaluation of frequent flier miles, that they’re worth less than they used to be, that the old benchmark of 2¢/mile no longer holds because airlines are pushing up the number of points needed for a flight, in large part because of the increased supply of points sloshing around the system from when airlines sold huge tranches of points to credit card companies for cash. The comparison to the real economy -- how expansion of monetary supply leads to inflation -- is left as an exercise for the listener. But I noticed something as I was working on flights for an autumn trip back to Europe -- a week in Croatia at the end of September and then a couple of weeks back in Italy. It seems that the cost increases in frequent flier miles haven’t kept up with their real dollar cost increases for flights, and the resulting gap had me busting through that 2¢/mile benchmark on every flight I booked. Maybe if I was more ambitious, I’d find an arbitrage opportunity somewhere in there, but for now, I’m just happy to get some decent deals with my United miles. Now if the euro-to-dollar parity exchange rate holds, it’ll be a real bargain trip.&nbsp;</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music - <em>Velvet Green of Mystery (Instrumental)</em> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/48114 Ft: Kthugha, Jeris, Martijn de Boer</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>My Top Travel Tips for Avoiding Chaos</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>As I mentioned at the top of the show, I’ve gotten pinged a bunch of times over the past couple of months by friends and family who, stuck in the midst of some travel <em>challenge</em> (not an uncommon event this summer), pinged me on Twitter, Facebook Messenger, iMessage asking “What do I do?” I thought this would die down come Labor Day with kids heading back to school ending the summer travel season. But over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been seeing a steady stream of articles headlined “Travel Woes Won’t End This Summer,” saying an extended collision of staff shortages and “revenge travel” traffic will keep things gummed up until at least October, after which we’ll slam right into the Thanksgiving and Christmas travel rush. Lovely. So in the spirit of those “I’m a flight attendant and here’s what you should do \'\' articles that have popped up this summer, here’s my “I’m a 37-year road warrior; these are my tips for handling travel chaos” list.&nbsp;</li><li>Most of this list are things you do before the day of travel -- planning and preparation. That colonial era road warrior Ben Franklin said “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” Not sure if he wrote that about his trips to England or France, but it still applies to travel. What you do the month or two before travel day is way more important that what you do that morning. So let’s get into it.<ul><li>First, figure out if you really need to fly. My normal <strong>fly-vs.-drive tipping point</strong> is 350 miles; anything less and I’ll drive it. But, all this travel chaos might change your calculus. If you fly, figure the airport logistics will add 3 hours to your in-flight time. Maybe the stories of baggage check and security lines have you thinking of arriving 2 hours before your flight. And when you arrive, the crowds mean it could take you another hour to de-plane, collect your luggage (if they haven’t lost it), and find your rental car or wait for an Uber. And that’s if there are no flight delays. Maybe the sum of all this starts to bump up your fly-vs.-drive breakeven point to something closer to 400 or 500 miles.</li><li>If you’re flying, <strong>sign up for TSA PreCheck</strong>. It’s $85 for 5 years of hassle reduction or better yet, if your revenge travel is international, sign up for <strong>Global Entry</strong> for $15 more and get Pre-Check plus no line at US passport control. And a lot of travel credit cards will credit you the $100 as one of their benefits. Just do it; the difference between a 5-minute and 45-minute line at the start of your trip is huge.</li><li><strong>Fly Non-Stop</strong> — It’s obvious because it’s the cardinal rule of air travel. High passenger load factors combined with summer thunderstorms almost guarantees late arrivals and missed connections. And an intermediate stop adds one more point of failure, one more place your luggage could fall off the trolley, one more opportunity for the airlines to screw up. Pay the extra $100 for a non-stop flight.</li><li>If you can’t fly non-stop, <strong>skip the tight connection</strong>; step away from anything less than an hour.&nbsp; Yes, we usually want to get to our destination in the shortest possible time, but accepting a connection of 1 hour or less…. Think about it – a 15-minute delay on your flight into a big hub like Chicago or Denver or Detroit (which is as good as on-time for most airlines nowadays) and you’re sprinting across terminals and concourses just to beat the closing door.</li><li>No matter non-stop or connection, <strong>catch the earliest flight</strong> you can. Delays stack up as the day wears on.&nbsp; As your airplane goes from airport to airport, the probability of it getting stuck increases.&nbsp; Overnight, airlines have a chance to recover – late planes finally get their destinations and operations groups can reassign planes.&nbsp; So while the last flight out can be a crap shoot, I rarely hit a delay on the first flight out.</li></ul></li><li>So you’ve done a good job of planning, so the night before you leave…<ul><li>Pack so you can <strong>carry on your luggage</strong>. It’s summer, so no sweaters, no coats; you’re packing your thinnest clothes. I mean, some years back, I got everything I needed for a 10-day trip in March to Iceland and Southern Spain into a 22-inch carry-on. So unless you’re doing multiple formals, everyone in your travel party should be able to fit into a carry-on sized bag. You can save $25/bag and increase the probability of having clean clothes at your destination.</li><li>And if you <em>are</em> doing multiple formals or for some other reason need to check your bags, <strong>spread everyone’s clothes across all the bags</strong>. It’s rare for an airline to lose all of your checked bags. This way, no one is having to show up at the first formal in an outfit from the nearest Walmart.</li><li>While you’re packing, <strong>charge up your battery packs</strong>. We can’t travel easily anymore without a working mobile phone. It holds our boarding passes, proof of COVID vaccination, gives us gate change and flight delay notifications, and routes us around traffic jams. A dead phone while flights are being canceled is more than just a bit of an inconvenience; having that second or third charge immediately available is critical when trying to swerve a long delay.</li><li>And then download your carrier’s app and an independent <strong>flight tracking app</strong>. Carriers have been pushing more and more functionality into their apps -- boarding passes, one-day lounge passes, real-time gate change and flight delay notifications, canceled flight rebookings…. -- so if you haven’t already, you’ll want to download that and log into it. But I also run a couple of independent apps as back-up, maybe to get a “second opinion” on delays. The free <a href=\"https://flightaware.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">FlightAware </a>app has been my go-to for years. Last spring, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/04/21/podcast-186-mask-mandate-scramble-small-airport-survival/\">episode #186</a>, I talked about another flight tracker app, <a href=\"https://www.flightyapp.com/\">Flighty</a>, that I tried out on our April trip to Santa Fe, NM. The Pro version is nice if you’re willing to pay $50/year, but not enough to get me to ditch FlightAware.</li></ul></li><li>And now we’re here, travel day. You’re all ready; your flight hasn’t been canceled or delayed… yet. Here are some “day of” tips if things start to get a little bumpy…<ul><li><strong>Keep moving forward</strong> - if you hit a delay, always keep moving forward, in the direction of your destination; the closer you are, the more options you’ll have. Last month, my daughter Claire was flying from Denver to Manchester, NH, a tough itinerary, especially now with carriers pulling back from smaller airports. She found a route on American - Denver to Charlotte to Manchester, though it left much later than the rest of her team, so she had some hours to kill at DIA. And pretty soon, she started to get alerts from the American app -- storms were forecasted in Charlotte, so if her plans were flexible…. Well, they weren’t completely flexible; she needed to get to New Hampshire that night. She pinged me - “They’re offering me a standby seat on an earlier flight to Charlotte. Should I take it?” she asked. “Absolutely!” I said. It gets you out of the Rockies and onto the East Coast. Still not drivable, but if your Manchester flight gets canceled, maybe you can get close -- like to Boston or Portland, ME and then drive from there. This is another good reason to do carry-on; it’s tough to call a quick audible like this when someone else has your bag.</li><li>And this leads me to my next travel day tip --<strong> know your geography</strong>. Claire and I joke about this. All that time she spent learning new and unique ways to do arithmetic (something about columns and diagonals; I could never figure it out), so she’d have a better <em>feel</em> for numbers. It crowded out those grade school geography and map lessons us Boomers took all those years ago. Came in handy when I was helping her think about what New England airports would be good alternatives to Manchester, to give her flexibility if her flight got canceled. In New York, the LaGuardia to Newark pivot is easy, as is the SFO to Oakland or San Jose redirect, but others aren’t so obvious.&nbsp; Everyone knows that Chicago has two airports – O’Hare and Midway.&nbsp; But what about Milwaukee’s Mitchell Field 80 miles north?&nbsp; If PHL is in trouble, how many folks think about Harrisburg or Allentown?&nbsp; I think about alternatives in two rings – within 60 miles – say, SNA and LGB for LAX; and then within 100-120 miles, which now picks up Palm Springs and San Diego for LAX.</li><li>And when something goes sideways, don’t wait; <strong>hit every contact channel the airline has</strong> <strong>immediately</strong> -- dial the customer service number while standing in line for the agent. Hit their airline’s Twitter account too; it can be a good side channel into customer service. You never know which one will open up first. Indeed, I often find I’ll get what I need from “at-ing” and DM’ing the airline on Twitter before the hold music stops playing on the 800 number. Bonus pro tip -- have your confirmation number easily available. It makes it much easier for the agent to find your reservation and help you out.</li><li>And one last thing,<strong> bring cash.</strong> Way back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">episode #136,</a> I talked about what seems to be a generational split, between residual Boomers like me and older Millennials, on the need to carry cash. No matter which side you sit on that split, it’s a fact that cash can get you out of a packed airport bar quicker than a card if you need to bolt for your flight — maybe a delay got pulled up, your gate got moved to the next terminal, or you just misread the boarding time. Being able to lay down, say a twenty and 3 ones, on the bar with your check is a whole lot quicker than waiting for the waitress to show back up, take your card, walk to the back to run it, and then bring it back again for you to sign.</li></ul></li><li>So there you go, all the things I’ve been texting folks this summer, and then some. I hope it helps you too. If you’ve got a tip, a tactic I missed, please send it along. We’ll add it to the list and talk about it on the next episode.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #188</li><li>I hope you enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. Sorry for the June-July gap. It took me longer than I thought to pack and then unpack all our worldly belongings.</li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. </li><li>And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>. And while you’re at TravelCommons.com, you can check out the show notes page for a transcript and any links I’ve mentioned. Or you can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page.</li><li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_188.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #188 —  My Top Travel Tips to Survive Airport Chaos','Distilled my travel advice down to the top 13 travel tips to avoid the current chaos. Also, the scrapping of COVID travel test rules and why frequent flier award travel is a bargain again.','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-188-my-top-tips-to-survive-travel-chaos','','','2022-09-21 22:30:55','2022-09-22 03:30:55','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4175',0,'post','',1),
(4176,1,'2022-08-18 19:11:08','2022-08-19 00:11:08','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/IMG_4803.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/IMG_4803-300x300.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" alt=\"Taproom Draft Beer Taps Arranged as a Smiley Face\"></a>I\'m Happy To See You Too![/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>The last episode recording in Chicago before we relocate the TravelCommons studios, and our lives, down to Nashville. We close out our threads on in-flight mask mandates and hotel housekeeping, and critique an academic paper about the moral hazard of frequent flier elite status. I talk through the changes I\'ll have to make when flying out of a non-hub airport. And then, as I\'m making a list of the Chicago breweries I want to re-visit before leaving, I think through the characteristics that makes a taproom great. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_187.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #187: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you, for the last time, from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois because we’re packing everything up and moving the 500 miles down I-65 to Nashville at the end of June. After 25 years here, we decided we needed a change of scenery. So with all the packing and everything, I don’t see a June episode in the offing.&nbsp;</li><li>Way back when I was doing heavy international travel -- Chicago on Monday, Toronto on Tuesday, New York to London on Wednesday, Zurich on Thursday, getting back to Chicago at Friday midnight -- what then seemed like necessary travel, but now, looking back on it, seems like stupid travel -- people would ask me my favorite city. I thought about it a lot, but would always end up with the same answer -- Chicago. And not just because it was my home; I was offering up that answer when we lived in Philadelphia. No, my explanation to the raised eyebrows that answer often generated was that Chicago was the right size -- big enough to support a wide range of interesting stuff (sports, culture, restaurants, microbreweries), but not so big that you couldn’t get your arms around it, and with enough Midwest pragmatism, from people moving in from Indiana and Iowa and Minnesota and Wisconsin, to keep everything grounded, to keep it from getting too wacky. And to their “But what about the weather?” question I’d say “yes, it can be -10° in Chicago in January, but it can be +110° in Phoenix in August; most every place has 3 months of lousy weather (save for maybe San Diego) sometime during the year; different people choose the 3 months they can endure.”&nbsp;</li><li>But over the past few years, I realized my answer about Chicago didn’t hold up any more -- not about the weather, the winters still suck; it’s that the pragmatism seems to be gone, with violent crime -- robberies, shootings, carjackings -- and definitely not-pragmatic local government decisions filling the void. It has started to feel like a replay of the 1970’s, which were not a great time in Chicago.&nbsp; Now, I don’t think it’s permanent. It’s a pendulum. Just like the city came back from a bad stretch in the ‘70’s to be a great place in the mid/late ‘80’s. It’ll happen again; I just don’t want to hang around for the low point. And according to the half-dozen movers we talked to, we’re not the only ones.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <em>Dive Deep (Loveshadow remix)</em> by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/50488 Ft: Loveshadow</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>A quick public service announcement -- the COVID Real ID extension expires in less than a year. <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/news/press/releases/2021/04/27/dhs-announces-extension-real-id-full-enforcement-deadline\">According to the TSA</a>, “Beginning May 3, 2023, every air traveler 18 years of age and older will need a REAL ID-compliant driver’s license or identification card… at airport security checkpoints for domestic air travel.”&nbsp; Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/01/16/podcast-183-covid-test-anxiety-michelin-food-adventures/\">episode #183</a> in January, I talked about getting a Real ID version of my Illinois driver’s license when I had to renew it. No additional cost and maybe 3 additional minutes of time. But if you can’t pick up a Real ID driver’s license before next May, you’ll have to remember to take along <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/travel/security-screening/identification\">your passport or your Global Entry card</a>.</li><li>In the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/04/21/podcast-186-mask-mandate-scramble-small-airport-survival/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #186 — Mask Mandate Scramble; Small Airport Survival\">last episode</a>, we walked through the abrupt end of the US CDC’s transportation mask mandate -- on planes, buses, trains,....&nbsp; That news cycle lasted right at about a week, the last entry being the CDC asking the Dept of Justice to appeal the federal judge’s ruling that struck down the mandate that they had extended for 2 weeks to May 3rd. On May 3rd, the CDC posted a <a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2022/s0503-covid-19-travel.html\">press release reiterating their <em>recommendation</em></a> that everyone aged 2 and older wear masks on planes and trains, and in airports and stations -- but nothing about the status of that appeal. I’m guessing that they decided to accept the facts on the ground and quietly forget about any appeal -- which is probably the only real option they have.</li><li>And then this week, adding to those facts on the ground, the European CDC has dropped their transportation mask mandate recommendations. The difference, though, is the European CDC’s recommendations are just that, recommendations. The enforceable <em>rules</em> are made by each country, and Spain and Italy, many of the countries hardest hit by the initial wave of COVID, have extended their mask mandates to mid-June.</li><li>OK, I wasn’t going to say anything more about hotel housekeeping because <em>even I’m</em> bored with it, but then I ran across an <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/hotel-housekeepers-want-you-to-request-daily-room-cleaning-11652650925\">article</a> in the Wall Street Journal about how hotel housekeeping unions are pushing for a return to daily room service. Certainly a big part of the push is to drive more work, more hours for the union members. But also because rooms are dirtier and take longer to clean when they have gone a few days without service, especially with the current guest mix that’s still heavier with leisure travelers, who tend to have more people in the room than the road-warrior business traveler. As you’d guess, hotel owners disagree, but for changing reasons. Their arc of rationale has gone from the pre-pandemic “be green, save water, and we’ll give you an extra 500 points to skip housekeeping” to pandemic “we’re keeping everyone safe by staying out of your room” to the current “it’s your choice, and ‘labor shortage’”.&nbsp; OK, that’s it. I’m <em>really </em>not going to talk about room cleaning anymore.</li><li>But I <em>will</em> talk about TSA checkpoint passenger volumes again. <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/09/27/podcast-179-high-tech-airport-lines-business-travel-still-missing/\">Back in September 2021</a>, the last time I scraped the numbers off the TSA <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/coronavirus/passenger-throughput\">website</a>, average daily passenger volumes were bouncing around 1.7 million, down 20% from the July summer peak of over 2 million and down 24% from pre-pandemic September 2019 numbers. Six months later, looking at the last month-and-a-half -- April to mid-May -- the average daily volume is 2.1 million and growing, and now just 10-12% off the April/May 2019 numbers. So if those TSA checkpoints and airplanes are feeling a bit more crowded, it’s because they are. Tough to remember back to my first post-lockdown flight in June 2020, when daily passenger volumes were 5-600,000 and the Southwest boarding agent said “There’s 40 of you on a plane with 175 seats. So everyone gets their own row.” I, in no way, want to go back to those times, but having a bit more plane space <em>was</em> nice.</li><li>I get <em>a lot</em> of emails from public relations firms. I read the subject lines of all of them because every once in a rare while, there’s something that catches my eye, like the pitch that led to last episode’s interview about Daytona Beach airport trying to survive in the shadow of the behemoth that is Orlando Int’l. So when I read the subject line “Study Finds that Frequent-Flyer Programs Increase Cost of Business Travel” in my inbox a few weeks back, I just had to click through. The study, <a href=\"https://www.informs.org/About-INFORMS/News-Room/Press-Releases/Study-Finds-that-Frequent-Flyer-Programs-Increase-Cost-of-Business-Travel\">just published</a> in the journal <em>Marketing Science</em> which I admit I don’t read as often as I should because I get tied up pouring through the CDC’s <em>Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report</em>, is titled <em>Reaching for Gold: Frequent-Flyer Status Incentives and Moral Hazard</em>, written by professors from University of Michigan and Duke business schools. According to the press release, after “(analyzing) the transactional database of a leading U.S.-based airline’s frequent-flyer program (that) included the histories and point accumulations of 3.5 million frequent-flyer program members during the 2010 and 2011 point-earning cycles” their main insights were -- “‘Points Members’ are More Likely to Choose Higher Fares When Not Paying for It” and “the closer frequent-flyer program members get to ‘elite status’ the more likely they are to choose an airline even when it may be more expensive than a competitor’s flight”. Hmm, that feels a bit “Dawn breaking over Marblehead”. How can you be researching frequent flier programs and act like you’ve never heard of (let alone done) a mileage run. Maybe the press release overly summarized the research and just isn’t communicating its subtlety. So I hit Google to find the <a href=\"https://yesimorhun.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/18/2018/11/Orhun_Guo_2018.pdf\">actual paper</a>. 29 pages of text and equations, and 15 pages of bibliography and data tables later -- nope, the press release was pretty much it. If the moral hazard of business travelers using their employer’s money to pay for more expensive flights to make status is eliminated, the paper estimates that companies would save at least 7% of their travel costs. Looking at 2019 data, the <a href=\"https://www.statista.com/statistics/562804/us-air-traffic-domestic-average-ticket-price/\">average cost of a walk-up US domestic ticket</a> -- one booked less than a week in advance, so the typical road warrior ticket -- is about $500. 7% is $35. I dunno, maybe some full-contact procurement guy will get excited about that $35 savings, but I don\'t know any executive in his or her right mind is thinking to themselves “Oh yes, pissing off the people who are jamming themselves in to coach seats and spending nights away from their family for $35 a trip” is a great idea.&nbsp; Except at GM. I remember when frequent flier programs first came out, GM didn’t let their travelers keep the points from business trips, which led to all sorts of weird booking behavior. Until that policy died a quiet death a few years later. Kinda like this research -- I’m sure these professors are nice, smart people; but they gotta get out of their offices a bit more.</li><li>Bridge Music - <em>Drops of H2O ( The Filtered Water Treatment )</em> by J.Lang (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djlang59/37792 Ft: Airtone</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Moving to a Non-Hub Airport</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>One thing that kinda snuck up on me about our move to Nashville -- it’ll be the first time in almost 40 years that I haven’t lived in an airport hub city: Chicago with American and United at ORD; San Francisco with their United hub; Dallas when I signed up for American’s Advantage program my first day of work; Philadelphia with US Air, though I avoided them as much as I could; Detroit with Northwest; and then back to Chicago, now a 3-hub town after Southwest took over MDW after the big expansion.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>Nashville <em>was</em> a hub in the late ‘80’s/early ‘90’s -- well, a mini-hub, actually -- when American was playing around with their network. They built mini-hubs in Nashville, Raleigh/Durham, and San Jose. The experiment lasted maybe 10 years but never really made any money. I think the only thing of American left in those airports are Admirals Clubs; in Nashville, they’re down to 9% of the passenger volume.&nbsp; Today, Nashville’s direct flight distribution looks like any non-hub airport -- the top 4 destinations are Big 3 hubs -- ATL, DEN, DFW, ORD -- with the fifth being MCO, thanks to all that Mouseketeer traffic.</li><li>The #1 travel tip on my and any other experienced traveler’s list is “fly non-stop” -- much easier from a hub airport, of course, and then your frequent flier strategy just falls out from there. If you live in Atlanta, you’re doubling down on Delta’s SkyMiles; realistically, there’s not another option. Non-hub? It could be just as straight-forward -- if your flight patterns take you primarily to one of those hub cities -- Chicago, Atlanta, San Francisco -- then your choice too is made for you. But if you’re in sales or consulting -- or maybe slouching toward retirement -- and your flight patterns are a bit more scattershot, then you have to think -- what’s my objective? -- flying non-stop for the shortest flight times and lowest probability of disruption; making elite status because the perks make my travel easier; or is it building up points to help fund my vacations?</li><li>Thinking about my consulting colleagues who flew out of non-hub airports every week, they were all about status. One guy I worked with lived in Ft Myers, Florida and was all in on Delta. Even when flying every week to projects in, say, Dallas or Chicago, he’d always skip the direct American flights and connect through Atlanta, killing the time from all those missed connections with drinks in Delta’s Sky Club -- which was free with his Diamond Medallion status.</li><li>My calculus is a little easier. One of the side benefits of flying <em>a lot</em> for over 35 years is that I stacked up enough mileage for lifetime mid-tier elite status on American and United. Not enough status to get into their clubs for free, but along with the usual early boarding and free bags, it’s gotten me free club entry to OneWorld and Star Alliance partners’ lounges -- which is very valuable when trying to navigate the rabbit warrens that are FRA and LHR after north Atlantic turbulence has screwed up your in-flight sleep plans.&nbsp; If I didn’t already have these metal levels or I was in striking distance of a new level -- say close to the 2 million I’d need to jump from United Premier Gold to lifetime Platinum -- then I’d probably suck it up like my colleagues do, and get, say, the top tier United credit card with free club access for a place to sit out ORD, DEN, and IAH weather delays.</li><li>Those lifetime statuses let me step off the elite hamster wheel, so I’m now looking at non-stop flights and earning miles. Out of Nashville, Southwest has the most non-stop flights, so I’ll probably be flying them a fair bit. But while Southwest’s Companion Pass perk -- their “buy a ticket, get one free” top tier status is phenomenal, I can’t BOGO Southwest to Europe, so I need to be banking miles on one of the Big 3 so I can book on their OneWorld, Star Alliance, or SkyTeam partners -- which is where travel credit cards come back into the picture. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/09/19/podcast-167-6-months-on-why-keep-travel-cards/\">episode #167</a> in September 2020, we talked about people replacing their mileage cards with cash-back cards since no one was flying. But that trend is reverting to the mean and credit card companies have big slugs of mileage to dole out after buying them cheap in 2020 when the airlines needed real cash real fast. So my non-hub strategy -- fly direct when I can, leverage those hard-earned lifetime statuses when I can, and charge everything I can on a mileage-earning card -- including any drinks I may need to see me through those missed connections.</li><li>Bridge Music —  &nbsp;<em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/trifonic/445\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bored on Your Backside</a></em> by Trifonic (c) copyright 2005 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Sampling Plus 1.0 license. http://ccmixter.org/files/trifonic/445</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>What Makes a Great Taproom?</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>With a month left in Chicago, Irene and I have built a list of “Places to Hit Before Move” that’s some mix of greatest hits and places we’ve always wanted to go but have, for some reason or another, never gotten ‘round to. And then I have a separate list of Chicago taprooms I want to hit one more time -- Goose Island, Revolution Brewing, Off Color, Solemn Oath, Marz, Dovetail, and Metropolitan Brewing. Which then got me thinking -- why these and not other; what makes a good taproom for me?</li><li>First thing to do is to open up Untappd, the beer social networking app that\'s been my beer diary for over 11 years now.&nbsp; I’ve checked beer in at over 1,900 locations and the #1 location category is -- a brewery taproom. I scrolled through the list on the app and jotted down the ones I thought “Yeah, I’d like to go back there.”&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>Probably the smallest group is about unique brewery experiences; where I actually did the brewery tour and it was something more than just row after row of steel tanks. Cantillon in Brussels is everyone’s favorite; they send you off on your own guided with nothing but a paper brochure and tell you not to break anything. And then, after you’ve navigated coolships and barrel rooms, they pour you their amazing lambic beers. Or the original Lagunitas Brewery in Petaluma, CA where the tour guide tossed us just-filled IPA bottles he’d grabbed before they got to the packaging machine.&nbsp;</li><li>But except for these few exceptions, my favorite places have a wide beer selection (something more than 5 taps of IPAs) and/or a cool space and/or the chance to chat with the brewer. Labietis’ original place in Riga, Latvia hit the first two square on the head: a <em>diverse</em> beer menu -- a juniper beer inspired by Latvian folk songs, a wheat beer with meadowsweet, a lager with Latvian hops -- that’s located in the back courtyard of what looked like, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/11/30/podcast-157-notes-from-the-baltics-riga-latvia-and-tallinn-estonia/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #157 — Notes from the Baltics: Riga, Latvia and Tallinn, Estonia\">the fall of 2019</a>, a block of now slightly derelict early 20th Century manor houses. A little closer to home on my Chicago list, Metropolitan Brewing does nothing but German-style lagers which are a perfect fit for their taproom patio that looks out on the north branch of the Chicago River.</li><li>Going to a brewery’s taproom is kinda like seeing a band in concert -- I’m going to get a fuller picture of that band than I will just hearing their hit songs on the radio or a Spotify playlist. Hitting a good taproom can be similar -- getting past the high-volume core beers to see what the brewer can really do. When we were in Santa Fe last month, I went out of my way to hit Rowley Farmhouse Ales because I really liked their range during our last visit in 2018. So of course I ordered the Teosinte, a funky, earthy, grassy sour made from Oaxacan green dent corn grown a couple hundred miles east, near the Texas-New Mexico border. It was an incredibly interesting beer. I wouldn’t buy a six-pack of it, but I was more than happy to have a glass of it.</li><li>But probably the best time I have at taprooms is when I get to talk to the brewer. During one of my trips last year to Nashville, I found myself an hour south in Columbia, TN, which bills itself “Muletown.” I missed the 2021 “Mule Day” festival; it was canceled due to COVID. Instead, I wound my way through a light industrial neighborhood hard against some freight train tracks billed as Columbia’s Art District to find <a href=\"http://www.badideabrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bad Idea Brewing</a>. There were two other folks sitting at the bar; the brewer was behind it, serving. And we just got talking -- about the beer, about his brewery, about Columbia, about brewing in Columbia, about what kind of beer sells in Columbia. And through all that, taster glasses kept landing in front of me -- “try this,” “what do you think of that?” he’d ask. What was going to be a quick side trip for a beer turned into a nice afternoon of conversation… and beer.</li><li>I guess there’s one more thing that can make for a great taproom, or maybe more of a great taproom experience and that is -- it took me to a part of a city that I wouldn’t have otherwise gone. I talked a bit about this in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/04/10/podcast-174-how-the-pros-plan-their-taproom-tourism/\">episode #174</a> when I talked with Rob Cheshire of the UK podcast <a href=\"https://thisweekincraft.beer/podcast/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">This Week in Craft Beer</a> about planning taproom visits. Navigating the maze of a Beijing hutong to find Great Leap Brewing, or exiting a Paris Metro stop in a North African neighborhood on my way to <a href=\"http://deck-donohue.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Deck &amp; Donohue</a>, or riding an e-scooter through a questionable neighborhood in northeast DC to <a href=\"https://www.rightproperbrewing.com/brookland\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Right Proper Brewing</a>. These three were fine places with solid beers, but they’re more memorable for the trip to find them than for the places themselves.</li><li>But you can’t always tell this from Google search. So if you go to the show notes on travelcommons.com you’ll find my list of&nbsp; “Yeah, I’d like to go back there” taprooms.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>My<em> Yeah, I’d like to go back there</em>  Taproom List</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Chicago&nbsp;<ul><li><a href=\"https://www.gooseisland.com/fulton-brewery/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Goose Island Taproom</a>, 1800 W Fulton St — Yes, it\'s now owned by AB InBev, but it was the original Chicago microbrewery in the late \'80\'s and they created the whole barrel-aged stout category with Bourbon County Stout</li><li><a href=\"http://www.revbrew.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Revolution Brewing Brewery &amp; Taproom</a>, 3340 N Kedzie Ave— Great beers; wide range of styles; bring your own food</li><li><a href=\"http://maplewoodbrew.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Maplewood Brewery &amp; Distillery</a>, 2717 N Maplewood Ave (South of Diversey) — Small, neighborhood bar tucked up against the Kennedy Expressway</li><li><a href=\"http://www.metrobrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Metropolitan Brewing</a>, 3057 N Rockwell St — Been brewing German-style lagers since 2009; great patio seating that looks out over the north branch of the Chicago River</li><li><a href=\"http://dovetailbrewery.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Dovetail Brewery</a>, 1800 W Belle Plaine Ave — German lagers and spontaneously fermented beers; the best taproom on the Ravenswood neighborhood\'s <a href=\"https://ravenswoodchicago.org/neighborhood/malt-row/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">\"Malt Row\"</a></li><li><a href=\"http://www.offcolorbrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Off Color Brewing</a>, 1460 N Kingsbury St — Great range of beer styles, all of which are well-done</li><li><a href=\"https://www.solemnoathbrewery.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Solemn Oath Brewery</a>, 1661 Quincy Ave #179, Naperville, IL — In a <em>faaar</em> west neighborhood of Chicago, one of the OG suburban breweries. Great beers and a great outdoor space, especially in the winter.</li><li>A couple of South Side taprooms featured on the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/07/15/video-chicago-mdw-layover-taproom-tour/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Chicago MDW Layover Taproom Tour</a> video<ul><li><a href=\"http://marzbrewing.com/\">Marz Community Brewing</a>, 3630 S Iron St</li><li><a href=\"http://www.whinerbeer.com/\">Whiner Beer</a>, 1400 W 46th St</li></ul></li></ul></li><li>Elsewhere in the US<ul><li><a href=\"https://oxbowbeer.com/location/portland/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Oxbow Blending &amp; Bottling</a>, 49 Washington Ave, Portland, ME — Great selection of farmhouse ales with an outpost of&nbsp;rtyu<a href=\"http://www.duckfatfriteshack.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Duckfat</a>&nbsp;serving up fries on the patio</li><li> <a href=\"http://www.allagash.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Allagash Brewing Company</a>, 50 Industrial Way, Portland, ME — One of the OG Maine breweries; huge range of beers beyond Allagash White; nice outdoor space; two more taprooms across the street makes it a nice afternoon destination</li><li><a href=\"https://otherhalfbrewing.com/location/domino-park/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Other Half Brewing Domino Park</a>, 34 River St, Brooklyn, NY — Great hazy IPAs; great views of Manhattan across the East River</li><li><a href=\"https://www.rightproperbrewing.com/brookland\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Right Proper Brewing Brookland Production House + Tasting Room</a>, 920 Girard St NE, Washington, DC — A nice little taproom in a DC neighborhood that is <em>way</em> off the typical tourist track</li><li><a href=\"http://www.thefermentorium.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">The Fermentorium Brewery and Tasting Room</a>, 7481 WI-60 Trunk, Cedarburg, WI — Well done range of beers just outside of a scenic small Wisconsin town</li><li><a href=\"http://drifabrewing.beer/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Drífa Brewing Company</a>, 501 S Lake St, Marquette, MI — Great beer stop on the bike path along the shore of Lake Superior</li><li><a href=\"https://beardedirisbrewing.com/location/germantown/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bearded Iris Brewing</a>, 101 Van Buren St, Nashville, TN — Original Germantown taproom with great hazy IPAs, pool tables and a nice patio</li><li><a href=\"https://www.variousartistsbrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Various Artists Brewing</a>, 1011 Elm Hill Pike, Nashville, TN — Wide variety of beer styles; big patio; guest chefs working a big grill</li><li><a href=\"http://www.faitlaforcebrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Fait la Force Brewing</a>, 1414 3rd Ave S, Nashville, TN — An unassuming place tucked away in the Chestnut Hill neighborhood; comfortable space; great range of beer styles; had a great conversation with the brewer behind the bar</li><li><a href=\"http://www.badideabrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bad Idea Brewing Company</a>, 307 W 11th St, Columbia, TN — Comfortable taproom with well-executed beers in Columbia\'s Art District; another place I had a nice conversation with the brewer</li><li><a href=\"https://www.rowleyfarmhouse.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Rowley Farmhouse Ales</a>, 1405 Maclovia St, Santa Fe, NM — Nice range of IPAs, saisons, and sours, and a solid green chile cheeseburger</li><li><a href=\"http://www.lagunitas.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Lagunitas Brewing Company</a>, 1280 N McDowell Blvd, Petaluma, CA — Yes, they\'ve been bought out by Heineken, but the original brewery still has a bit of that old Cali anarchic feel</li><li><a href=\"https://www.pueblovidabrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pueblo Vida Brewing Company</a>, 115 E Broadway Blvd, Tucson, AZ — A little joint in downtown Tucson that executes great beers with a focus on local ingredients</li><li><a href=\"http://www.eppigbrewing.com/waterfront-biergarten\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Eppig Brewing Waterfront Biergarten</a>, 2817 Dickens St, San Diego, CA — It\'s all about drinking good beers outside in the sunshine along the marina</li></ul></li><li>Outside the US<ul><li><a href=\"https://www.thebarrelproject.co.uk/beer-menu/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">London Beer Factory - Barrel Project</a>, 80 Druid St, London SE1 2HQ — Great beers; very cool space in railway arch along London\'s <a href=\"https://www.londonxlondon.com/bermondsey-beer-mile/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bermondsey Beer Mile</a></li><li><a href=\"http://www.cantillon.be/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Brasserie Cantillon</a>, Rue Gheude 56, 1070 Anderlecht, Belgium — Ground zero for spontaneously fermented lambic and gueuze beers; just follow the train of beer geeks to the door</li><li><a href=\"https://mikkeller.com/locations/mikkeller-baghaven\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Mikkeller Baghaven</a>, Refshalevej 169B, 1432 København — Lots of spontaneously fermented sour beer on a converted industrial island</li><li><a href=\"http://www.fmaravillas.com/\">Fábrica Maravillas</a>, C. de Valverde, 29, 28004 Madrid — Nice taproom tucked into Madrid\'s Malasaña neighborhood serving good pale ales and IPAs </li><li><a href=\"https://deck-donohue.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Deck &amp; Donohue</a>, 1 Av. des Marronniers, 94380 Bonneuil-sur-Marne, France — Took me outside the usual Paris tourist circuit to a North African shopping street</li><li><a href=\"https://labietis.lv/en/krogs/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Labietis Brewpub</a>, 2, Aristida Briāna iela 9a, Rīga, LV-1001, Latvia — Out-of-the-way taproom; interesting selection of beer styles, not just the usual IPAs, but herb beers, fruit beers, and meads; helpful bartenders do a good job of describing what\'s on tap</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #187</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>As I said at the top of the show, there’s probably not going to be a June show, between packing up the Chicago studio and then unpacking it in Nashville. Good news, though -- the sound quality in Nashville might get a step-function improvement. Just about every apt building Irene and I looked at had a music studio as one of the amenities. The sound proofing, the sound deadening, and maybe a better microphone should make things sound a bit better. Quite a ways from those first episodes, recording with the iRiver MP3 player’s built-in mic while standing in a shower stall. Oh my!</li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. You’ll have to go to the TravelCommons’ website if you want to torture your ears listening to those first bathroom-studio episodes; what one listener labelled a “pottycast”</li><li>And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_187.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #187 — Moving to a Non-Hub Airport; What Makes A Great Taproom?','','inherit','closed','closed','','4145-revision-v1','','','2022-08-18 19:11:08','2022-08-19 00:11:08','',4145,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4176',0,'revision','',0),
(4178,1,'2022-08-18 19:14:24','2022-08-19 00:14:24','','IMG_4140','','inherit','open','closed','','img_4140','','','2022-08-18 19:14:24','2022-08-19 00:14:24','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/IMG_4140.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(4179,1,'2022-08-18 19:35:34','2022-08-19 00:35:34','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/IMG_4140.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/IMG_4140-300x300.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" alt=\"Stenciled graffiti of gasmask-wearing woman carrying bags labeled Hope and Dreams to avoid travel chaos\"></a>Carrying Travel Hopes and Dreams to the Airport[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>The travel tips last episode recording in Chicago before we relocate the TravelCommons studios, and our lives, down to Nashville. We close out our threads on in-flight mask mandates and hotel housekeeping, and critique an academic paper about the moral hazard of frequent flier elite status. I talk through the changes I\'ll have to make when flying out of a non-hub airport. And then, as I\'m making a list of the Chicago breweries I want to re-visit before leaving, I think through the characteristics that makes a taproom great. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_188.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #188: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Back after a June/July hiatus to relocate the TravelCommons studio -- and the rest of our worldly belongings -- from Chicago to Nashville, Tennessee. So that’s been the most recent travel, the drive down I-65 and then digging into the different neighborhoods and brewery taprooms here. You know you haven’t been on the road when Lyft pushes you a coupon for just opening their app and Uber sends you emails like “You haven’t taken a ride with us in a while, so we’re checking in to ask for some feedback…. Let us know why we haven’t seen you in a while.” The right response was “I haven’t had a reason to use Uber” but I was really tempted to hit “Prices are too high” or “ETAs are too long”. I dunno, my next Uber ride will probably be one of the Lime e-scooters I’m seeing all over town here.&nbsp;</li><li>Of course, if there was a time to drop off the road, this summer was it. With flight cancellations rising -- the US July Fourth weekend a train wreck with 500 flights canceled on the Friday and then 600 on Saturday, accented by 4,000 delays. And then record-high gas prices and still screwed-up rental car fleets make for the chef’s kiss on top of it all, turning the fly-vs-drive trade-off into some witches brew of partial differential equations. At some point, you just throw the suitcase back in the closet and treat your Weber to a load of premium lump charcoal. As if the frequent traveler rule of “Avoid holiday weekend travel” needed another proof point.</li><li>So while I wasn’t <em>in</em> that maelstrom -- though I’m not sure unpacking a hundred or so moving boxes was all that much better -- I have been an interested, maybe even <em>involved</em> observer with friends and family calling me, messaging me -- “Hey, Mark! I have a question for a travel guru and thought of you first”-- trying to help them navigate as best I could. And after I dished out the same advice more than a couple of times -- indeed, often copy/pasting the same suggestion from one text stream to another -- I decided maybe this would be a good time to pull it all together in a single place, maybe even a podcast with, better yet, some written show notes for easy reference. Stay tuned; it’s coming up in a couple of minutes…</li><li>Bridge Music -- <em><em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/hisboyelroy/430\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Revolve</a>&nbsp;</em>mix&nbsp;</em>by cinematrik (c) copyright 2005 Licensed under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hisboyelroy/430</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>In June, while I was wrapping myself in bubble wrap and packing tape, the US, Canada, most European and Latin American countries dropped their inbound COVID testing requirements. I mean, it makes sense. These testing requirements were put in place to keep COVID at bay, and they failed miserably. At the beginning of last December, the US <em>tightened</em> its inbound testing requirement to try to keep out the then-new Omicron variant, but by the end of the month, it was rampant. And yet the US kept that 24-hour testing requirement for another 7 months -- long after the rationale had been overrun by real life. But, give credit where credit is due, they did finally drop it. One less thing to cause back-ups at airports and border crossings, I guess. It’ll be interesting to see if the testing requirements start cropping up again if we get another autumn surge.</li><li>The Spirit-Frontier-JetBlue Dance Macabre seems to have finally ended with JetBlue’s escalating share price offer trumping Frontier’s more obvious business case of merging two ultra-low cost (and ultra-low service) US carriers. JetBlue’s desperation just didn’t make sense to me -- so yes, maybe they expand their Florida footprint -- always important for an East Coast airline -- but at what integration costs. I’ve always enjoyed flying JetBlue; it felt like they tried to add just a touch more to their service to differentiate themselves from, say, United or American. So now merge that with Spirit, which seems to be a kinder, gentler Ryanair, or maybe a Ryanair but without the chip on its shoulder? Where’s the sense in that? Then someone suggested that I had completely missed the plot. It’s not about Florida; it’s not about low-cost; it’s about the pilot shortage. JetBlue and Spirit both fly Airbus. JetBlue’s other growth option would be Alaska Airlines, which is a Boeing shop. It’s much easier to cross-train and leverage pilots across, say, an all-Airbus fleet than a mixed one. It’s the same reason Southwest and Ryanair are so rabidly focused on the Boeing 737, and Spirit and Frontier on the Airbus A320. OK, got it. But I’ll be a bit sad if this whole mess ends up “Spirit-izing” JetBlue.</li><li>“We’re not a WeWork,” said the head of Delta’s Sky Club lounge system as they put new limits on lounge access. You can’t get in earlier than 3 hours before your departure time. So no more checking out of the hotel to post up in the Sky Lounge for free food, drinks, and WiFi until your afternoon flight. I gotta tell you that this wouldn’t be a big thing for me if I was a regular Delta flier. I’m always trying to figure out how to spend the <em>least</em> amount of time in the airport. Maybe a couple of times, I’d set up camp in the Admirals Club for a morning of calls before, say, a noon flight out. But I’d much prefer working my hotel status to get a later room check-out and then take my calls there, by myself, instead of hoping to find a club workstation that <em>wasn’t</em> next to some sales guy loudly regaling somebody about the deal he just closed. Now to me, though, the more interesting piece of this story is the other limit they <em>wanted</em> to put in but couldn’t -- no lounge access <em>after</em> your flight had landed. Now <em>that one</em> would’ve left a mark. Lots of times, I’d wedge my flight into a 2, 3-hour calendar window between phone calls. And for me, it was those after-flight calls where the lounge was critical. I’m not surprised that Delta had to quickly back off of that rule. But they had to do something because, as the main floors of the terminals have become more of a zoo, and as the lounges have added more free stuff -- better food, free drinks -- they’ve become jammed. It’s tough to find a place to <em>sit</em> before the morning and evening flight banks, let alone a place to take a call. Amex is upping their price, starting this February to charge $50 to get your guest into a Centurion Lounge with you. Looks like Delta is pivoting the other way and trying rationing instead. It’ll be interesting to see which way American and United go.</li><li>There’s been a good bit of commentary over the past few years about the devaluation of frequent flier miles, that they’re worth less than they used to be, that the old benchmark of 2¢/mile no longer holds because airlines are pushing up the number of points needed for a flight, in large part because of the increased supply of points sloshing around the system from when airlines sold huge tranches of points to credit card companies for cash. The comparison to the real economy -- how expansion of monetary supply leads to inflation -- is left as an exercise for the listener. But I noticed something as I was working on flights for an autumn trip back to Europe -- a week in Croatia at the end of September and then a couple of weeks back in Italy. It seems that the cost increases in frequent flier miles haven’t kept up with their real dollar cost increases for flights, and the resulting gap had me busting through that 2¢/mile benchmark on every flight I booked. Maybe if I was more ambitious, I’d find an arbitrage opportunity somewhere in there, but for now, I’m just happy to get some decent deals with my United miles. Now if the euro-to-dollar parity exchange rate holds, it’ll be a real bargain trip.&nbsp;</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music - <em>Velvet Green of Mystery (Instrumental)</em> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/48114 Ft: Kthugha, Jeris, Martijn de Boer</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>My Top Travel Tips for Avoiding Chaos</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>One thing that kinda snuck up on me about our move to Nashville -- it’ll be the first time in almost 40 years that I haven’t lived in an airport hub city: Chicago with American and United at ORD; San Francisco with their United hub; Dallas when I signed up for American’s Advantage program my first day of work; Philadelphia with US Air, though I avoided them as much as I could; Detroit with Northwest; and then back to Chicago, now a 3-hub town after Southwest took over MDW after the big expansion.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>Nashville <em>was</em> a hub in the late ‘80’s/early ‘90’s -- well, a mini-hub, actually -- when American was playing around with their network. They built mini-hubs in Nashville, Raleigh/Durham, and San Jose. The experiment lasted maybe 10 years but never really made any money. I think the only thing of American left in those airports are Admirals Clubs; in Nashville, they’re down to 9% of the passenger volume.  Today, Nashville’s direct flight distribution looks like any non-hub airport -- the top 4 destinations are Big 3 hubs -- ATL, DEN, DFW, ORD -- with the fifth being MCO, thanks to all that Mouseketeer traffic.</li><li>The #1 travel tip on my and any other experienced traveler’s list is “fly non-stop” -- much easier from a hub airport, of course, and then your frequent flier strategy just falls out from there. If you live in Atlanta, you’re doubling down on Delta’s SkyMiles; realistically, there’s not another option. Non-hub? It could be just as straight-forward -- if your flight patterns take you primarily to one of those hub cities -- Chicago, Atlanta, San Francisco -- then your choice too is made for you. But if you’re in sales or consulting -- or maybe slouching toward retirement -- and your flight patterns are a bit more scattershot, then you have to think -- what’s my objective? -- flying non-stop for the shortest flight times and lowest probability of disruption; making elite status because the perks make my travel easier; or is it building up points to help fund my vacations?</li><li>Thinking about my consulting colleagues who flew out of non-hub airports every week, they were all about status. One guy I worked with lived in Ft Myers, Florida and was all in on Delta. Even when flying every week to projects in, say, Dallas or Chicago, he’d always skip the direct American flights and connect through Atlanta, killing the time from all those missed connections with drinks in Delta’s Sky Club -- which was free with his Diamond Medallion status.</li><li>My calculus is a little easier. One of the side benefits of flying <em>a lot</em> for over 35 years is that I stacked up enough mileage for lifetime mid-tier elite status on American and United. Not enough status to get into their clubs for free, but along with the usual early boarding and free bags, it’s gotten me free club entry to OneWorld and Star Alliance partners’ lounges -- which is very valuable when trying to navigate the rabbit warrens that are FRA and LHR after north Atlantic turbulence has screwed up your in-flight sleep plans.&nbsp; If I didn’t already have these metal levels or I was in striking distance of a new level -- say close to the 2 million I’d need to jump from United Premier Gold to lifetime Platinum -- then I’d probably suck it up like my colleagues do, and get, say, the top tier United credit card with free club access for a place to sit out ORD, DEN, and IAH weather delays.</li><li>Those lifetime statuses let me step off the elite hamster wheel, so I’m now looking at non-stop flights and earning miles. Out of Nashville, Southwest has the most non-stop flights, so I’ll probably be flying them a fair bit. But while Southwest’s Companion Pass perk -- their “buy a ticket, get one free” top tier status is phenomenal, I can’t BOGO Southwest to Europe, so I need to be banking miles on one of the Big 3 so I can book on their OneWorld, Star Alliance, or SkyTeam partners -- which is where travel credit cards come back into the picture. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/09/19/podcast-167-6-months-on-why-keep-travel-cards/\">episode #167</a> in September 2020, we talked about people replacing their mileage cards with cash-back cards since no one was flying. But that trend is reverting to the mean and credit card companies have big slugs of mileage to dole out after buying them cheap in 2020 when the airlines needed real cash real fast. So my non-hub strategy -- fly direct when I can, leverage those hard-earned lifetime statuses when I can, and charge everything I can on a mileage-earning card -- including any drinks I may need to see me through those missed connections.</li><li>Bridge Music —  &nbsp;<em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/trifonic/445\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bored on Your Backside</a></em> by Trifonic (c) copyright 2005 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Sampling Plus 1.0 license. http://ccmixter.org/files/trifonic/445</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>What Makes a Great Taproom?</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>With a month left in Chicago, Irene and I have built a list of “Places to Hit Before Move” that’s some mix of greatest hits and places we’ve always wanted to go but have, for some reason or another, never gotten ‘round to. And then I have a separate list of Chicago taprooms I want to hit one more time -- Goose Island, Revolution Brewing, Off Color, Solemn Oath, Marz, Dovetail, and Metropolitan Brewing. Which then got me thinking -- why these and not other; what makes a good taproom for me?</li><li>First thing to do is to open up Untappd, the beer social networking app that\'s been my beer diary for over 11 years now.&nbsp; I’ve checked beer in at over 1,900 locations and the #1 location category is -- a brewery taproom. I scrolled through the list on the app and jotted down the ones I thought “Yeah, I’d like to go back there.”</li><li>Probably the smallest group is about unique brewery experiences; where I actually did the brewery tour and it was something more than just row after row of steel tanks. Cantillon in Brussels is everyone’s favorite; they send you off on your own guided with nothing but a paper brochure and tell you not to break anything. And then, after you’ve navigated coolships and barrel rooms, they pour you their amazing lambic beers. Or the original Lagunitas Brewery in Petaluma, CA where the tour guide tossed us just-filled IPA bottles he’d grabbed before they got to the packaging machine.&nbsp;</li><li>But except for these few exceptions, my favorite places have a wide beer selection (something more than 5 taps of IPAs) and/or a cool space and/or the chance to chat with the brewer. Labietis’ original place in Riga, Latvia hit the first two square on the head: a <em>diverse</em> beer menu -- a juniper beer inspired by Latvian folk songs, a wheat beer with meadowsweet, a lager with Latvian hops -- that’s located in the back courtyard of what looked like, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/11/30/podcast-157-notes-from-the-baltics-riga-latvia-and-tallinn-estonia/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #157 — Notes from the Baltics: Riga, Latvia and Tallinn, Estonia\">the fall of 2019</a>, a block of now slightly derelict early 20th Century manor houses. A little closer to home on my Chicago list, Metropolitan Brewing does nothing but German-style lagers which are a perfect fit for their taproom patio that looks out on the north branch of the Chicago River.</li><li>Going to a brewery’s taproom is kinda like seeing a band in concert -- I’m going to get a fuller picture of that band than I will just hearing their hit songs on the radio or a Spotify playlist. Hitting a good taproom can be similar -- getting past the high-volume core beers to see what the brewer can really do. When we were in Santa Fe last month, I went out of my way to hit Rowley Farmhouse Ales because I really liked their range during our last visit in 2018. So of course I ordered the Teosinte, a funky, earthy, grassy sour made from Oaxacan green dent corn grown a couple hundred miles east, near the Texas-New Mexico border. It was an incredibly interesting beer. I wouldn’t buy a six-pack of it, but I was more than happy to have a glass of it.</li><li>But probably the best time I have at taprooms is when I get to talk to the brewer. During one of my trips last year to Nashville, I found myself an hour south in Columbia, TN, which bills itself “Muletown.” I missed the 2021 “Mule Day” festival; it was canceled due to COVID. Instead, I wound my way through a light industrial neighborhood hard against some freight train tracks billed as Columbia’s Art District to find <a href=\"http://www.badideabrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bad Idea Brewing</a>. There were two other folks sitting at the bar; the brewer was behind it, serving. And we just got talking -- about the beer, about his brewery, about Columbia, about brewing in Columbia, about what kind of beer sells in Columbia. And through all that, taster glasses kept landing in front of me -- “try this,” “what do you think of that?” he’d ask. What was going to be a quick side trip for a beer turned into a nice afternoon of conversation… and beer.</li><li>I guess there’s one more thing that can make for a great taproom, or maybe more of a great taproom experience and that is -- it took me to a part of a city that I wouldn’t have otherwise gone. I talked a bit about this in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/04/10/podcast-174-how-the-pros-plan-their-taproom-tourism/\">episode #174</a> when I talked with Rob Cheshire of the UK podcast <a href=\"https://thisweekincraft.beer/podcast/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">This Week in Craft Beer</a> about planning taproom visits. Navigating the maze of a Beijing hutong to find Great Leap Brewing, or exiting a Paris Metro stop in a North African neighborhood on my way to <a href=\"http://deck-donohue.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Deck &amp; Donohue</a>, or riding an e-scooter through a questionable neighborhood in northeast DC to <a href=\"https://www.rightproperbrewing.com/brookland\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Right Proper Brewing</a>. These three were fine places with solid beers, but they’re more memorable for the trip to find them than for the places themselves.</li><li>But you can’t always tell this from Google search. So if you go to the show notes on travelcommons.com you’ll find my list of&nbsp; “Yeah, I’d like to go back there” taprooms.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>My<em> Yeah, I’d like to go back there</em>  Taproom List</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Chicago&nbsp;<ul><li><a href=\"https://www.gooseisland.com/fulton-brewery/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Goose Island Taproom</a>, 1800 W Fulton St — Yes, it\'s now owned by AB InBev, but it was the original Chicago microbrewery in the late \'80\'s and they created the whole barrel-aged stout category with Bourbon County Stout</li><li><a href=\"http://www.revbrew.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Revolution Brewing Brewery &amp; Taproom</a>, 3340 N Kedzie Ave— Great beers; wide range of styles; bring your own food</li><li><a href=\"http://maplewoodbrew.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Maplewood Brewery &amp; Distillery</a>, 2717 N Maplewood Ave (South of Diversey) — Small, neighborhood bar tucked up against the Kennedy Expressway</li><li><a href=\"http://www.metrobrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Metropolitan Brewing</a>, 3057 N Rockwell St — Been brewing German-style lagers since 2009; great patio seating that looks out over the north branch of the Chicago River</li><li><a href=\"http://dovetailbrewery.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Dovetail Brewery</a>, 1800 W Belle Plaine Ave — German lagers and spontaneously fermented beers; the best taproom on the Ravenswood neighborhood\'s <a href=\"https://ravenswoodchicago.org/neighborhood/malt-row/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">\"Malt Row\"</a></li><li><a href=\"http://www.offcolorbrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Off Color Brewing</a>, 1460 N Kingsbury St — Great range of beer styles, all of which are well-done</li><li><a href=\"https://www.solemnoathbrewery.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Solemn Oath Brewery</a>, 1661 Quincy Ave #179, Naperville, IL — In a <em>faaar</em> west neighborhood of Chicago, one of the OG suburban breweries. Great beers and a great outdoor space, especially in the winter.</li><li>A couple of South Side taprooms featured on the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/07/15/video-chicago-mdw-layover-taproom-tour/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Chicago MDW Layover Taproom Tour</a> video<ul><li><a href=\"http://marzbrewing.com/\">Marz Community Brewing</a>, 3630 S Iron St</li><li><a href=\"http://www.whinerbeer.com/\">Whiner Beer</a>, 1400 W 46th St</li></ul></li></ul></li><li>Elsewhere in the US<ul><li><a href=\"https://oxbowbeer.com/location/portland/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Oxbow Blending &amp; Bottling</a>, 49 Washington Ave, Portland, ME — Great selection of farmhouse ales with an outpost of&nbsp;rtyu<a href=\"http://www.duckfatfriteshack.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Duckfat</a>&nbsp;serving up fries on the patio</li><li> <a href=\"http://www.allagash.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Allagash Brewing Company</a>, 50 Industrial Way, Portland, ME — One of the OG Maine breweries; huge range of beers beyond Allagash White; nice outdoor space; two more taprooms across the street makes it a nice afternoon destination</li><li><a href=\"https://otherhalfbrewing.com/location/domino-park/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Other Half Brewing Domino Park</a>, 34 River St, Brooklyn, NY — Great hazy IPAs; great views of Manhattan across the East River</li><li><a href=\"https://www.rightproperbrewing.com/brookland\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Right Proper Brewing Brookland Production House + Tasting Room</a>, 920 Girard St NE, Washington, DC — A nice little taproom in a DC neighborhood that is <em>way</em> off the typical tourist track</li><li><a href=\"http://www.thefermentorium.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">The Fermentorium Brewery and Tasting Room</a>, 7481 WI-60 Trunk, Cedarburg, WI — Well done range of beers just outside of a scenic small Wisconsin town</li><li><a href=\"http://drifabrewing.beer/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Drífa Brewing Company</a>, 501 S Lake St, Marquette, MI — Great beer stop on the bike path along the shore of Lake Superior</li><li><a href=\"https://beardedirisbrewing.com/location/germantown/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bearded Iris Brewing</a>, 101 Van Buren St, Nashville, TN — Original Germantown taproom with great hazy IPAs, pool tables and a nice patio</li><li><a href=\"https://www.variousartistsbrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Various Artists Brewing</a>, 1011 Elm Hill Pike, Nashville, TN — Wide variety of beer styles; big patio; guest chefs working a big grill</li><li><a href=\"http://www.faitlaforcebrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Fait la Force Brewing</a>, 1414 3rd Ave S, Nashville, TN — An unassuming place tucked away in the Chestnut Hill neighborhood; comfortable space; great range of beer styles; had a great conversation with the brewer behind the bar</li><li><a href=\"http://www.badideabrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bad Idea Brewing Company</a>, 307 W 11th St, Columbia, TN — Comfortable taproom with well-executed beers in Columbia\'s Art District; another place I had a nice conversation with the brewer</li><li><a href=\"https://www.rowleyfarmhouse.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Rowley Farmhouse Ales</a>, 1405 Maclovia St, Santa Fe, NM — Nice range of IPAs, saisons, and sours, and a solid green chile cheeseburger</li><li><a href=\"http://www.lagunitas.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Lagunitas Brewing Company</a>, 1280 N McDowell Blvd, Petaluma, CA — Yes, they\'ve been bought out by Heineken, but the original brewery still has a bit of that old Cali anarchic feel</li><li><a href=\"https://www.pueblovidabrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pueblo Vida Brewing Company</a>, 115 E Broadway Blvd, Tucson, AZ — A little joint in downtown Tucson that executes great beers with a focus on local ingredients</li><li><a href=\"http://www.eppigbrewing.com/waterfront-biergarten\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Eppig Brewing Waterfront Biergarten</a>, 2817 Dickens St, San Diego, CA — It\'s all about drinking good beers outside in the sunshine along the marina</li></ul></li><li>Outside the US<ul><li><a href=\"https://www.thebarrelproject.co.uk/beer-menu/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">London Beer Factory - Barrel Project</a>, 80 Druid St, London SE1 2HQ — Great beers; very cool space in railway arch along London\'s <a href=\"https://www.londonxlondon.com/bermondsey-beer-mile/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bermondsey Beer Mile</a></li><li><a href=\"http://www.cantillon.be/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Brasserie Cantillon</a>, Rue Gheude 56, 1070 Anderlecht, Belgium — Ground zero for spontaneously fermented lambic and gueuze beers; just follow the train of beer geeks to the door</li><li><a href=\"https://mikkeller.com/locations/mikkeller-baghaven\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Mikkeller Baghaven</a>, Refshalevej 169B, 1432 København — Lots of spontaneously fermented sour beer on a converted industrial island</li><li><a href=\"http://www.fmaravillas.com/\">Fábrica Maravillas</a>, C. de Valverde, 29, 28004 Madrid — Nice taproom tucked into Madrid\'s Malasaña neighborhood serving good pale ales and IPAs </li><li><a href=\"https://deck-donohue.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Deck &amp; Donohue</a>, 1 Av. des Marronniers, 94380 Bonneuil-sur-Marne, France — Took me outside the usual Paris tourist circuit to a North African shopping street</li><li><a href=\"https://labietis.lv/en/krogs/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Labietis Brewpub</a>, 2, Aristida Briāna iela 9a, Rīga, LV-1001, Latvia — Out-of-the-way taproom; interesting selection of beer styles, not just the usual IPAs, but herb beers, fruit beers, and meads; helpful bartenders do a good job of describing what\'s on tap</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #187</li><li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li><li>As I said at the top of the show, there’s probably not going to be a June show, between packing up the Chicago studio and then unpacking it in Nashville. Good news, though -- the sound quality in Nashville might get a step-function improvement. Just about every apt building Irene and I looked at had a music studio as one of the amenities. The sound proofing, the sound deadening, and maybe a better microphone should make things sound a bit better. Quite a ways from those first episodes, recording with the iRiver MP3 player’s built-in mic while standing in a shower stall. Oh my!</li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. You’ll have to go to the TravelCommons’ website if you want to torture your ears listening to those first bathroom-studio episodes; what one listener labelled a “pottycast”</li><li>And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li><li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_188.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #188 —  My Top Tips to Survive Travel Chaos','','inherit','closed','closed','','4175-revision-v1','','','2022-08-18 19:35:34','2022-08-19 00:35:34','',4175,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4179',0,'revision','',0),
(4180,1,'2022-08-18 19:57:17','2022-08-19 00:57:17','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/IMG_4140.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/IMG_4140-300x300.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" alt=\"Stenciled graffiti of gasmask-wearing woman carrying bags labeled Hope and Dreams to avoid travel chaos\"></a>Carrying Travel Hopes and Dreams to the Airport[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Back behind the microphone after a couple of monthsThe travel tips last episode recording in Chicago before we relocate the TravelCommons studios, and our lives, down to Nashville. We close out our threads on in-flight mask mandates and hotel housekeeping, and critique an academic paper about the moral hazard of frequent flier elite status. I talk through the changes I\'ll have to make when flying out of a non-hub airport. And then, as I\'m making a list of the Chicago breweries I want to re-visit before leaving, I think through the characteristics that makes a taproom great. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_188.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #188: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Back after a June/July hiatus to relocate the TravelCommons studio -- and the rest of our worldly belongings -- from Chicago to Nashville, Tennessee. So that’s been the most recent travel, the drive down I-65 and then digging into the different neighborhoods and brewery taprooms here. You know you haven’t been on the road when Lyft pushes you a coupon for just opening their app and Uber sends you emails like “You haven’t taken a ride with us in a while, so we’re checking in to ask for some feedback…. Let us know why we haven’t seen you in a while.” The right response was “I haven’t had a reason to use Uber” but I was really tempted to hit “Prices are too high” or “ETAs are too long”. I dunno, my next Uber ride will probably be one of the Lime e-scooters I’m seeing all over town here.&nbsp;</li><li>Of course, if there was a time to drop off the road, this summer was it. With flight cancellations rising -- the US July Fourth weekend a train wreck with 500 flights canceled on the Friday and then 600 on Saturday, accented by 4,000 delays. And then record-high gas prices and still screwed-up rental car fleets make for the chef’s kiss on top of it all, turning the fly-vs-drive trade-off into some witches brew of partial differential equations. At some point, you just throw the suitcase back in the closet and treat your Weber to a load of premium lump charcoal. As if the frequent traveler rule of “Avoid holiday weekend travel” needed another proof point.</li><li>So while I wasn’t <em>in</em> that maelstrom -- though I’m not sure unpacking a hundred or so moving boxes was all that much better -- I have been an interested, maybe even <em>involved</em> observer with friends and family calling me, messaging me -- “Hey, Mark! I have a question for a travel guru and thought of you first”-- trying to help them navigate as best I could. And after I dished out the same advice more than a couple of times -- indeed, often copy/pasting the same suggestion from one text stream to another -- I decided maybe this would be a good time to pull it all together in a single place, maybe even a podcast with, better yet, some written show notes for easy reference. Stay tuned; it’s coming up in a couple of minutes…</li><li>Bridge Music -- <em><em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/hisboyelroy/430\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Revolve</a>&nbsp;</em>mix&nbsp;</em>by cinematrik (c) copyright 2005 Licensed under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hisboyelroy/430</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>In June, while I was wrapping myself in bubble wrap and packing tape, the US, Canada, most European and Latin American countries dropped their inbound COVID testing requirements. I mean, it makes sense. These testing requirements were put in place to keep COVID at bay, and they failed miserably. At the beginning of last December, the US <em>tightened</em> its inbound testing requirement to try to keep out the then-new Omicron variant, but by the end of the month, it was rampant. And yet the US kept that 24-hour testing requirement for another 7 months -- long after the rationale had been overrun by real life. But, give credit where credit is due, they did finally drop it. One less thing to cause back-ups at airports and border crossings, I guess. It’ll be interesting to see if the testing requirements start cropping up again if we get another autumn surge.</li><li>The Spirit-Frontier-JetBlue Dance Macabre seems to have finally ended with JetBlue’s escalating share price offer trumping Frontier’s more obvious business case of merging two ultra-low cost (and ultra-low service) US carriers. JetBlue’s desperation just didn’t make sense to me -- so yes, maybe they expand their Florida footprint -- always important for an East Coast airline -- but at what integration costs. I’ve always enjoyed flying JetBlue; it felt like they tried to add just a touch more to their service to differentiate themselves from, say, United or American. So now merge that with Spirit, which seems to be a kinder, gentler Ryanair, or maybe a Ryanair but without the chip on its shoulder? Where’s the sense in that? Then someone suggested that I had completely missed the plot. It’s not about Florida; it’s not about low-cost; it’s about the pilot shortage. JetBlue and Spirit both fly Airbus. JetBlue’s other growth option would be Alaska Airlines, which is a Boeing shop. It’s much easier to cross-train and leverage pilots across, say, an all-Airbus fleet than a mixed one. It’s the same reason Southwest and Ryanair are so rabidly focused on the Boeing 737, and Spirit and Frontier on the Airbus A320. OK, got it. But I’ll be a bit sad if this whole mess ends up “Spirit-izing” JetBlue.</li><li>“We’re not a WeWork,” said the head of Delta’s Sky Club lounge system as they put new limits on lounge access. You can’t get in earlier than 3 hours before your departure time. So no more checking out of the hotel to post up in the Sky Lounge for free food, drinks, and WiFi until your afternoon flight. I gotta tell you that this wouldn’t be a big thing for me if I was a regular Delta flier. I’m always trying to figure out how to spend the <em>least</em> amount of time in the airport. Maybe a couple of times, I’d set up camp in the Admirals Club for a morning of calls before, say, a noon flight out. But I’d much prefer working my hotel status to get a later room check-out and then take my calls there, by myself, instead of hoping to find a club workstation that <em>wasn’t</em> next to some sales guy loudly regaling somebody about the deal he just closed. Now to me, though, the more interesting piece of this story is the other limit they <em>wanted</em> to put in but couldn’t -- no lounge access <em>after</em> your flight had landed. Now <em>that one</em> would’ve left a mark. Lots of times, I’d wedge my flight into a 2, 3-hour calendar window between phone calls. And for me, it was those after-flight calls where the lounge was critical. I’m not surprised that Delta had to quickly back off of that rule. But they had to do something because, as the main floors of the terminals have become more of a zoo, and as the lounges have added more free stuff -- better food, free drinks -- they’ve become jammed. It’s tough to find a place to <em>sit</em> before the morning and evening flight banks, let alone a place to take a call. Amex is upping their price, starting this February to charge $50 to get your guest into a Centurion Lounge with you. Looks like Delta is pivoting the other way and trying rationing instead. It’ll be interesting to see which way American and United go.</li><li>There’s been a good bit of commentary over the past few years about the devaluation of frequent flier miles, that they’re worth less than they used to be, that the old benchmark of 2¢/mile no longer holds because airlines are pushing up the number of points needed for a flight, in large part because of the increased supply of points sloshing around the system from when airlines sold huge tranches of points to credit card companies for cash. The comparison to the real economy -- how expansion of monetary supply leads to inflation -- is left as an exercise for the listener. But I noticed something as I was working on flights for an autumn trip back to Europe -- a week in Croatia at the end of September and then a couple of weeks back in Italy. It seems that the cost increases in frequent flier miles haven’t kept up with their real dollar cost increases for flights, and the resulting gap had me busting through that 2¢/mile benchmark on every flight I booked. Maybe if I was more ambitious, I’d find an arbitrage opportunity somewhere in there, but for now, I’m just happy to get some decent deals with my United miles. Now if the euro-to-dollar parity exchange rate holds, it’ll be a real bargain trip.&nbsp;</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music - <em>Velvet Green of Mystery (Instrumental)</em> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/48114 Ft: Kthugha, Jeris, Martijn de Boer</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>My Top Travel Tips for Avoiding Chaos</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>As I mentioned at the top of the show, I’ve gotten pinged a bunch of times over the past couple of months by friends and family who, stuck in the midst of some travel <em>challenge</em> (not an uncommon event this summer), pinged me on Twitter, Facebook Messenger, iMessage asking “What do I do?” I thought this would die down come Labor Day with kids heading back to school ending the summer travel season. But over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been seeing a steady stream of articles headlined “Travel Woes Won’t End This Summer,” saying an extended collision of staff shortages and “revenge travel” traffic will keep things gummed up until at least October, after which we’ll slam right into the Thanksgiving and Christmas travel rush. Lovely. So in the spirit of those “I’m a flight attendant and here’s what you should do \'\' articles that have popped up this summer, here’s my “I’m a 37-year road warrior; these are my tips for handling travel chaos” list. </li><li>Most of this list are things you do before the day of travel -- planning and preparation. That colonial era road warrior Ben Franklin said “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” Not sure if he wrote that about his trips to England or France, but it still applies to travel. What you do the month or two before travel day is way more important that what you do that morning. So let’s get into it.<ul><li>First, figure out if you really need to fly. My normal <strong>fly-vs.-drive tipping point</strong> is 350 miles; anything less and I’ll drive it. But, all this travel chaos might change your calculus. If you fly, figure the airport logistics will add 3 hours to your in-flight time. Maybe the stories of baggage check and security lines have you thinking of arriving 2 hours before your flight. And when you arrive, the crowds mean it could take you another hour to de-plane, collect your luggage (if they haven’t lost it), and find your rental car or wait for an Uber. And that’s if there are no flight delays. Maybe the sum of all this starts to bump up your fly-vs.-drive breakeven point to something closer to 400 or 500 miles.</li><li>If you’re flying, <strong>sign up for TSA PreCheck</strong>. It’s $85 for 5 years of hassle reduction or better yet, if your revenge travel is international, sign up for <strong>Global Entry</strong> for $15 more and get Pre-Check plus no line at US passport control. And a lot of travel credit cards will credit you the $100 as one of their benefits. Just do it; the difference between a 5-minute and 45-minute line at the start of your trip is huge.</li><li><strong>Fly Non-Stop</strong> — It’s obvious because it’s the cardinal rule of air travel. High passenger load factors combined with summer thunderstorms almost guarantees late arrivals and missed connections. And an intermediate stop adds one more point of failure, one more place your luggage could fall off the trolley, one more opportunity for the airlines to screw up. Pay the extra $100 for a non-stop flight.</li><li>If you can’t fly non-stop, <strong>skip the tight connection</strong>; step away from anything less than an hour.  Yes, we usually want to get to our destination in the shortest possible time, but accepting a connection of 1 hour or less…. Think about it – a 15-minute delay on your flight into a big hub like Chicago or Denver or Detroit (which is as good as on-time for most airlines nowadays) and you’re sprinting across terminals and concourses just to beat the closing door.</li><li>No matter non-stop or connection, <strong>catch the earliest flight</strong> you can. Delays stack up as the day wears on.  As your airplane goes from airport to airport, the probability of it getting stuck increases.  Overnight, airlines have a chance to recover – late planes finally get their destinations and operations groups can reassign planes.  So while the last flight out can be a crap shoot, I rarely hit a delay on the first flight out.</li></ul></li><li>So you’ve done a good job of planning, so the night before you leave…<ul><li>Pack so you can <strong>carry on your luggage</strong>. It’s summer, so no sweaters, no coats; you’re packing your thinnest clothes. I mean, some years back, I got everything I needed for a 10-day trip in March to Iceland and Southern Spain into a 22-inch carry-on. So unless you’re doing multiple formals, everyone in your travel party should be able to fit into a carry-on sized bag. You can save $25/bag and increase the probability of having clean clothes at your destination.</li><li>And if you <em>are</em> doing multiple formals or for some other reason need to check your bags, <strong>spread everyone’s clothes across all the bags</strong>. It’s rare for an airline to lose all of your checked bags. This way, no one is having to show up at the first formal in an outfit from the nearest Walmart.</li><li>While you’re packing, <strong>charge up your battery packs</strong>. We can’t travel easily anymore without a working mobile phone. It holds our boarding passes, proof of COVID vaccination, gives us gate change and flight delay notifications, and routes us around traffic jams. A dead phone while flights are being canceled is more than just a bit of an inconvenience; having that second or third charge immediately available is critical when trying to swerve a long delay.</li><li>And then download your carrier’s app and an independent <strong>flight tracking app</strong>. Carriers have been pushing more and more functionality into their apps -- boarding passes, one-day lounge passes, real-time gate change and flight delay notifications, canceled flight rebookings…. -- so if you haven’t already, you’ll want to download that and log into it. But I also run a couple of independent apps as back-up, maybe to get a “second opinion” on delays. The free <a href=\"https://flightaware.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">FlightAware </a>app has been my go-to for years. Last spring, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/04/21/podcast-186-mask-mandate-scramble-small-airport-survival/\">episode #186</a>, I talked about another flight tracker app, <a href=\"https://www.flightyapp.com/\">Flighty</a>, that I tried out on our April trip to Santa Fe, NM. The Pro version is nice if you’re willing to pay $50/year, but not enough to get me to ditch FlightAware.</li></ul></li><li>And now we’re here, travel day. You’re all ready; your flight hasn’t been canceled or delayed… yet. Here are some “day of” tips if things start to get a little bumpy…<ul><li><strong>Keep moving forward</strong> - if you hit a delay, always keep moving forward, in the direction of your destination; the closer you are, the more options you’ll have. Last month, my daughter Claire was flying from Denver to Manchester, NH, a tough itinerary, especially now with carriers pulling back from smaller airports. She found a route on American - Denver to Charlotte to Manchester, though it left much later than the rest of her team, so she had some hours to kill at DIA. And pretty soon, she started to get alerts from the American app -- storms were forecasted in Charlotte, so if her plans were flexible…. Well, they weren’t completely flexible; she needed to get to New Hampshire that night. She pinged me - “They’re offering me a standby seat on an earlier flight to Charlotte. Should I take it?” she asked. “Absolutely!” I said. It gets you out of the Rockies and onto the East Coast. Still not drivable, but if your Manchester flight gets canceled, maybe you can get close -- like to Boston or Portland, ME and then drive from there. This is another good reason to do carry-on; it’s tough to call a quick audible like this when someone else has your bag.</li><li>And this leads me to my next travel day tip --<strong> know your geography</strong>. Claire and I joke about this. All that time she spent learning new and unique ways to do arithmetic (something about columns and diagonals; I could never figure it out), so she’d have a better <em>feel</em> for numbers. It crowded out those grade school geography and map lessons us Boomers took all those years ago. Came in handy when I was helping her think about what New England airports would be good alternatives to Manchester, to give her flexibility if her flight got canceled. In New York, the LaGuardia to Newark pivot is easy, as is the SFO to Oakland or San Jose redirect, but others aren’t so obvious.  Everyone knows that Chicago has two airports – O’Hare and Midway.  But what about Milwaukee’s Mitchell Field 80 miles north?  If PHL is in trouble, how many folks think about Harrisburg or Allentown?  I think about alternatives in two rings – within 60 miles – say, SNA and LGB for LAX; and then within 100-120 miles, which now picks up Palm Springs and San Diego for LAX.</li><li>And when something goes sideways, don’t wait; <strong>hit every contact channel the airline has</strong> <strong>immediately</strong> -- dial the customer service number while standing in line for the agent. Hit their airline’s Twitter account too; it can be a good side channel into customer service. You never know which one will open up first. Indeed, I often find I’ll get what I need from “at-ing” and DM’ing the airline on Twitter before the hold music stops playing on the 800 number. Bonus pro tip -- have your confirmation number easily available. It makes it much easier for the agent to find your reservation and help you out.</li><li>And one last thing,<strong> bring cash.</strong> Way back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">episode #136,</a> I talked about what seems to be a generational split, between residual Boomers like me and older Millennials, on the need to carry cash. No matter which side you sit on that split, it’s a fact that cash can get you out of a packed airport bar quicker than a card if you need to bolt for your flight — maybe a delay got pulled up, your gate got moved to the next terminal, or you just misread the boarding time. Being able to lay down, say a twenty and 3 ones, on the bar with your check is a whole lot quicker than waiting for the waitress to show back up, take your card, walk to the back to run it, and then bring it back again for you to sign.</li></ul></li><li>So there you go, all the things I’ve been texting folks this summer, and then some. I hope it helps you too. If you’ve got a tip, a tactic I missed, please send it along. We’ll add it to the list and talk about it on the next episode.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #188</li><li>I hope you enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. Sorry for the June-July gap. It took me longer than I thought to pack and then unpack all our worldly belongings.</li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. </li><li>And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social  -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>. And while you’re at TravelCommons.com, you can check out the show notes page for a transcript and any links I’ve mentioned. Or you can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page.</li><li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_188.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #188 —  My Top Tips to Survive Travel Chaos','','inherit','closed','closed','','4175-revision-v1','','','2022-08-18 19:57:17','2022-08-19 00:57:17','',4175,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4180',0,'revision','',0),
(4181,1,'2022-08-18 20:15:39','2022-08-19 01:15:39','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/IMG_4140.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/IMG_4140-300x300.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" alt=\"Stenciled graffiti of gasmask-wearing woman carrying bags labeled Hope and Dreams to avoid travel chaos\"></a>Carrying Travel Hopes and Dreams to the Airport[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Back behind the microphone after a couple of months of setting up the new studios in Nashville. I\'ve been dishing out travel advice to friends and family swept up in this summer\'s travel chaos. I\'ve distilled all those texts and messages down to my top 13 travel tips to help those traveling through the rest of the year. We also talk about the countries that have dropped all of the COVID testing requirements for inbound passengers, noodle about the rationale for JetBlue\'s dogged pursuit of Spirit Airways, Delta\'s new time limits for their Sky Club lounges, and why frequent flier award travel is suddenly a bargain again. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_188.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #188: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Back after a June/July hiatus to relocate the TravelCommons studio -- and the rest of our worldly belongings -- from Chicago to Nashville, Tennessee. So that’s been the most recent travel, the drive down I-65 and then digging into the different neighborhoods and brewery taprooms here. You know you haven’t been on the road when Lyft pushes you a coupon for just opening their app and Uber sends you emails like “You haven’t taken a ride with us in a while, so we’re checking in to ask for some feedback…. Let us know why we haven’t seen you in a while.” The right response was “I haven’t had a reason to use Uber” but I was really tempted to hit “Prices are too high” or “ETAs are too long”. I dunno, my next Uber ride will probably be one of the Lime e-scooters I’m seeing all over town here.&nbsp;</li><li>Of course, if there was a time to drop off the road, this summer was it. With flight cancellations rising -- the US July Fourth weekend a train wreck with 500 flights canceled on the Friday and then 600 on Saturday, accented by 4,000 delays. And then record-high gas prices and still screwed-up rental car fleets make for the chef’s kiss on top of it all, turning the fly-vs-drive trade-off into some witches brew of partial differential equations. At some point, you just throw the suitcase back in the closet and treat your Weber to a load of premium lump charcoal. As if the frequent traveler rule of “Avoid holiday weekend travel” needed another proof point.</li><li>So while I wasn’t <em>in</em> that maelstrom -- though I’m not sure unpacking a hundred or so moving boxes was all that much better -- I have been an interested, maybe even <em>involved</em> observer with friends and family calling me, messaging me -- “Hey, Mark! I have a question for a travel guru and thought of you first”-- trying to help them navigate as best I could. And after I dished out the same advice more than a couple of times -- indeed, often copy/pasting the same suggestion from one text stream to another -- I decided maybe this would be a good time to pull it all together in a single place, maybe even a podcast with, better yet, some written show notes for easy reference. Stay tuned; it’s coming up in a couple of minutes…</li><li>Bridge Music -- <em><em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/hisboyelroy/430\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Revolve</a>&nbsp;</em>mix&nbsp;</em>by cinematrik (c) copyright 2005 Licensed under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hisboyelroy/430</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>In June, while I was wrapping myself in bubble wrap and packing tape, the US, Canada, most European and Latin American countries dropped their inbound COVID testing requirements. I mean, it makes sense. These testing requirements were put in place to keep COVID at bay, and they failed miserably. At the beginning of last December, the US <em>tightened</em> its inbound testing requirement to try to keep out the then-new Omicron variant, but by the end of the month, it was rampant. And yet the US kept that 24-hour testing requirement for another 7 months -- long after the rationale had been overrun by real life. But, give credit where credit is due, they did finally drop it. One less thing to cause back-ups at airports and border crossings, I guess. It’ll be interesting to see if the testing requirements start cropping up again if we get another autumn surge.</li><li>The Spirit-Frontier-JetBlue Dance Macabre seems to have finally ended with JetBlue’s escalating share price offer trumping Frontier’s more obvious business case of merging two ultra-low cost (and ultra-low service) US carriers. JetBlue’s desperation just didn’t make sense to me -- so yes, maybe they expand their Florida footprint -- always important for an East Coast airline -- but at what integration costs. I’ve always enjoyed flying JetBlue; it felt like they tried to add just a touch more to their service to differentiate themselves from, say, United or American. So now merge that with Spirit, which seems to be a kinder, gentler Ryanair, or maybe a Ryanair but without the chip on its shoulder? Where’s the sense in that? Then someone suggested that I had completely missed the plot. It’s not about Florida; it’s not about low-cost; it’s about the pilot shortage. JetBlue and Spirit both fly Airbus. JetBlue’s other growth option would be Alaska Airlines, which is a Boeing shop. It’s much easier to cross-train and leverage pilots across, say, an all-Airbus fleet than a mixed one. It’s the same reason Southwest and Ryanair are so rabidly focused on the Boeing 737, and Spirit and Frontier on the Airbus A320. OK, got it. But I’ll be a bit sad if this whole mess ends up “Spirit-izing” JetBlue.</li><li>“We’re not a WeWork,” said the head of Delta’s Sky Club lounge system as they put new limits on lounge access. You can’t get in earlier than 3 hours before your departure time. So no more checking out of the hotel to post up in the Sky Lounge for free food, drinks, and WiFi until your afternoon flight. I gotta tell you that this wouldn’t be a big thing for me if I was a regular Delta flier. I’m always trying to figure out how to spend the <em>least</em> amount of time in the airport. Maybe a couple of times, I’d set up camp in the Admirals Club for a morning of calls before, say, a noon flight out. But I’d much prefer working my hotel status to get a later room check-out and then take my calls there, by myself, instead of hoping to find a club workstation that <em>wasn’t</em> next to some sales guy loudly regaling somebody about the deal he just closed. Now to me, though, the more interesting piece of this story is the other limit they <em>wanted</em> to put in but couldn’t -- no lounge access <em>after</em> your flight had landed. Now <em>that one</em> would’ve left a mark. Lots of times, I’d wedge my flight into a 2, 3-hour calendar window between phone calls. And for me, it was those after-flight calls where the lounge was critical. I’m not surprised that Delta had to quickly back off of that rule. But they had to do something because, as the main floors of the terminals have become more of a zoo, and as the lounges have added more free stuff -- better food, free drinks -- they’ve become jammed. It’s tough to find a place to <em>sit</em> before the morning and evening flight banks, let alone a place to take a call. Amex is upping their price, starting this February to charge $50 to get your guest into a Centurion Lounge with you. Looks like Delta is pivoting the other way and trying rationing instead. It’ll be interesting to see which way American and United go.</li><li>There’s been a good bit of commentary over the past few years about the devaluation of frequent flier miles, that they’re worth less than they used to be, that the old benchmark of 2¢/mile no longer holds because airlines are pushing up the number of points needed for a flight, in large part because of the increased supply of points sloshing around the system from when airlines sold huge tranches of points to credit card companies for cash. The comparison to the real economy -- how expansion of monetary supply leads to inflation -- is left as an exercise for the listener. But I noticed something as I was working on flights for an autumn trip back to Europe -- a week in Croatia at the end of September and then a couple of weeks back in Italy. It seems that the cost increases in frequent flier miles haven’t kept up with their real dollar cost increases for flights, and the resulting gap had me busting through that 2¢/mile benchmark on every flight I booked. Maybe if I was more ambitious, I’d find an arbitrage opportunity somewhere in there, but for now, I’m just happy to get some decent deals with my United miles. Now if the euro-to-dollar parity exchange rate holds, it’ll be a real bargain trip.&nbsp;</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music - <em>Velvet Green of Mystery (Instrumental)</em> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/48114 Ft: Kthugha, Jeris, Martijn de Boer</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>My Top Travel Tips for Avoiding Chaos</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>As I mentioned at the top of the show, I’ve gotten pinged a bunch of times over the past couple of months by friends and family who, stuck in the midst of some travel <em>challenge</em> (not an uncommon event this summer), pinged me on Twitter, Facebook Messenger, iMessage asking “What do I do?” I thought this would die down come Labor Day with kids heading back to school ending the summer travel season. But over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been seeing a steady stream of articles headlined “Travel Woes Won’t End This Summer,” saying an extended collision of staff shortages and “revenge travel” traffic will keep things gummed up until at least October, after which we’ll slam right into the Thanksgiving and Christmas travel rush. Lovely. So in the spirit of those “I’m a flight attendant and here’s what you should do \'\' articles that have popped up this summer, here’s my “I’m a 37-year road warrior; these are my tips for handling travel chaos” list. </li><li>Most of this list are things you do before the day of travel -- planning and preparation. That colonial era road warrior Ben Franklin said “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” Not sure if he wrote that about his trips to England or France, but it still applies to travel. What you do the month or two before travel day is way more important that what you do that morning. So let’s get into it.<ul><li>First, figure out if you really need to fly. My normal <strong>fly-vs.-drive tipping point</strong> is 350 miles; anything less and I’ll drive it. But, all this travel chaos might change your calculus. If you fly, figure the airport logistics will add 3 hours to your in-flight time. Maybe the stories of baggage check and security lines have you thinking of arriving 2 hours before your flight. And when you arrive, the crowds mean it could take you another hour to de-plane, collect your luggage (if they haven’t lost it), and find your rental car or wait for an Uber. And that’s if there are no flight delays. Maybe the sum of all this starts to bump up your fly-vs.-drive breakeven point to something closer to 400 or 500 miles.</li><li>If you’re flying, <strong>sign up for TSA PreCheck</strong>. It’s $85 for 5 years of hassle reduction or better yet, if your revenge travel is international, sign up for <strong>Global Entry</strong> for $15 more and get Pre-Check plus no line at US passport control. And a lot of travel credit cards will credit you the $100 as one of their benefits. Just do it; the difference between a 5-minute and 45-minute line at the start of your trip is huge.</li><li><strong>Fly Non-Stop</strong> — It’s obvious because it’s the cardinal rule of air travel. High passenger load factors combined with summer thunderstorms almost guarantees late arrivals and missed connections. And an intermediate stop adds one more point of failure, one more place your luggage could fall off the trolley, one more opportunity for the airlines to screw up. Pay the extra $100 for a non-stop flight.</li><li>If you can’t fly non-stop, <strong>skip the tight connection</strong>; step away from anything less than an hour.  Yes, we usually want to get to our destination in the shortest possible time, but accepting a connection of 1 hour or less…. Think about it – a 15-minute delay on your flight into a big hub like Chicago or Denver or Detroit (which is as good as on-time for most airlines nowadays) and you’re sprinting across terminals and concourses just to beat the closing door.</li><li>No matter non-stop or connection, <strong>catch the earliest flight</strong> you can. Delays stack up as the day wears on.  As your airplane goes from airport to airport, the probability of it getting stuck increases.  Overnight, airlines have a chance to recover – late planes finally get their destinations and operations groups can reassign planes.  So while the last flight out can be a crap shoot, I rarely hit a delay on the first flight out.</li></ul></li><li>So you’ve done a good job of planning, so the night before you leave…<ul><li>Pack so you can <strong>carry on your luggage</strong>. It’s summer, so no sweaters, no coats; you’re packing your thinnest clothes. I mean, some years back, I got everything I needed for a 10-day trip in March to Iceland and Southern Spain into a 22-inch carry-on. So unless you’re doing multiple formals, everyone in your travel party should be able to fit into a carry-on sized bag. You can save $25/bag and increase the probability of having clean clothes at your destination.</li><li>And if you <em>are</em> doing multiple formals or for some other reason need to check your bags, <strong>spread everyone’s clothes across all the bags</strong>. It’s rare for an airline to lose all of your checked bags. This way, no one is having to show up at the first formal in an outfit from the nearest Walmart.</li><li>While you’re packing, <strong>charge up your battery packs</strong>. We can’t travel easily anymore without a working mobile phone. It holds our boarding passes, proof of COVID vaccination, gives us gate change and flight delay notifications, and routes us around traffic jams. A dead phone while flights are being canceled is more than just a bit of an inconvenience; having that second or third charge immediately available is critical when trying to swerve a long delay.</li><li>And then download your carrier’s app and an independent <strong>flight tracking app</strong>. Carriers have been pushing more and more functionality into their apps -- boarding passes, one-day lounge passes, real-time gate change and flight delay notifications, canceled flight rebookings…. -- so if you haven’t already, you’ll want to download that and log into it. But I also run a couple of independent apps as back-up, maybe to get a “second opinion” on delays. The free <a href=\"https://flightaware.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">FlightAware </a>app has been my go-to for years. Last spring, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/04/21/podcast-186-mask-mandate-scramble-small-airport-survival/\">episode #186</a>, I talked about another flight tracker app, <a href=\"https://www.flightyapp.com/\">Flighty</a>, that I tried out on our April trip to Santa Fe, NM. The Pro version is nice if you’re willing to pay $50/year, but not enough to get me to ditch FlightAware.</li></ul></li><li>And now we’re here, travel day. You’re all ready; your flight hasn’t been canceled or delayed… yet. Here are some “day of” tips if things start to get a little bumpy…<ul><li><strong>Keep moving forward</strong> - if you hit a delay, always keep moving forward, in the direction of your destination; the closer you are, the more options you’ll have. Last month, my daughter Claire was flying from Denver to Manchester, NH, a tough itinerary, especially now with carriers pulling back from smaller airports. She found a route on American - Denver to Charlotte to Manchester, though it left much later than the rest of her team, so she had some hours to kill at DIA. And pretty soon, she started to get alerts from the American app -- storms were forecasted in Charlotte, so if her plans were flexible…. Well, they weren’t completely flexible; she needed to get to New Hampshire that night. She pinged me - “They’re offering me a standby seat on an earlier flight to Charlotte. Should I take it?” she asked. “Absolutely!” I said. It gets you out of the Rockies and onto the East Coast. Still not drivable, but if your Manchester flight gets canceled, maybe you can get close -- like to Boston or Portland, ME and then drive from there. This is another good reason to do carry-on; it’s tough to call a quick audible like this when someone else has your bag.</li><li>And this leads me to my next travel day tip --<strong> know your geography</strong>. Claire and I joke about this. All that time she spent learning new and unique ways to do arithmetic (something about columns and diagonals; I could never figure it out), so she’d have a better <em>feel</em> for numbers. It crowded out those grade school geography and map lessons us Boomers took all those years ago. Came in handy when I was helping her think about what New England airports would be good alternatives to Manchester, to give her flexibility if her flight got canceled. In New York, the LaGuardia to Newark pivot is easy, as is the SFO to Oakland or San Jose redirect, but others aren’t so obvious.  Everyone knows that Chicago has two airports – O’Hare and Midway.  But what about Milwaukee’s Mitchell Field 80 miles north?  If PHL is in trouble, how many folks think about Harrisburg or Allentown?  I think about alternatives in two rings – within 60 miles – say, SNA and LGB for LAX; and then within 100-120 miles, which now picks up Palm Springs and San Diego for LAX.</li><li>And when something goes sideways, don’t wait; <strong>hit every contact channel the airline has</strong> <strong>immediately</strong> -- dial the customer service number while standing in line for the agent. Hit their airline’s Twitter account too; it can be a good side channel into customer service. You never know which one will open up first. Indeed, I often find I’ll get what I need from “at-ing” and DM’ing the airline on Twitter before the hold music stops playing on the 800 number. Bonus pro tip -- have your confirmation number easily available. It makes it much easier for the agent to find your reservation and help you out.</li><li>And one last thing,<strong> bring cash.</strong> Way back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">episode #136,</a> I talked about what seems to be a generational split, between residual Boomers like me and older Millennials, on the need to carry cash. No matter which side you sit on that split, it’s a fact that cash can get you out of a packed airport bar quicker than a card if you need to bolt for your flight — maybe a delay got pulled up, your gate got moved to the next terminal, or you just misread the boarding time. Being able to lay down, say a twenty and 3 ones, on the bar with your check is a whole lot quicker than waiting for the waitress to show back up, take your card, walk to the back to run it, and then bring it back again for you to sign.</li></ul></li><li>So there you go, all the things I’ve been texting folks this summer, and then some. I hope it helps you too. If you’ve got a tip, a tactic I missed, please send it along. We’ll add it to the list and talk about it on the next episode.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #188</li><li>I hope you enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. Sorry for the June-July gap. It took me longer than I thought to pack and then unpack all our worldly belongings.</li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. </li><li>And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social  -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>. And while you’re at TravelCommons.com, you can check out the show notes page for a transcript and any links I’ve mentioned. Or you can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page.</li><li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_188.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #188 —  My Top Tips to Survive Travel Chaos','Distilled my travel advice down to the top 13 travel tips to avoid the current chaos. Also, the scrapping of COVID travel test rules and why frequent flier award travel is a bargain again.','inherit','closed','closed','','4175-revision-v1','','','2022-08-18 20:15:39','2022-08-19 01:15:39','',4175,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4181',0,'revision','',0),
(4183,1,'2022-08-19 09:40:05','2022-08-19 14:40:05','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/IMG_4140.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/IMG_4140-300x300.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" alt=\"Stenciled graffiti of gasmask-wearing woman carrying bags labeled Hope and Dreams to avoid travel chaos\"></a>Carrying Travel Hopes and Dreams to the Airport[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Back behind the microphone after a couple of months of setting up the new studios in Nashville. I\'ve been dishing out travel advice to friends and family swept up in this summer\'s travel chaos. I\'ve distilled all those texts and messages down to my top 13 travel tips to help those traveling through the rest of the year. We also talk about the countries that have dropped all of the COVID testing requirements for inbound passengers, noodle about the rationale for JetBlue\'s dogged pursuit of Spirit Airways, Delta\'s new time limits for their Sky Club lounges, and why frequent flier award travel is suddenly a bargain again. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_188.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #188: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Back after a June/July hiatus to relocate the TravelCommons studio -- and the rest of our worldly belongings -- from Chicago to Nashville, Tennessee. So that’s been the most recent travel, the drive down I-65 and then digging into the different neighborhoods and brewery taprooms here. You know you haven’t been on the road when Lyft pushes you a coupon for just opening their app and Uber sends you emails like “You haven’t taken a ride with us in a while, so we’re checking in to ask for some feedback…. Let us know why we haven’t seen you in a while.” The right response was “I haven’t had a reason to use Uber” but I was really tempted to hit “Prices are too high” or “ETAs are too long”. I dunno, my next Uber ride will probably be one of the Lime e-scooters I’m seeing all over town here.&nbsp;</li><li>Of course, if there was a time to drop off the road, this summer was it. With flight cancellations rising -- the US July Fourth weekend a train wreck with 500 flights canceled on the Friday and then 600 on Saturday, accented by 4,000 delays. And then record-high gas prices and still screwed-up rental car fleets make for the chef’s kiss on top of it all, turning the fly-vs-drive trade-off into some witches brew of partial differential equations. At some point, you just throw the suitcase back in the closet and treat your Weber to a load of premium lump charcoal. As if the frequent traveler rule of “Avoid holiday weekend travel” needed another proof point.</li><li>So while I wasn’t <em>in</em> that maelstrom -- though I’m not sure unpacking a hundred or so moving boxes was all that much better -- I have been an interested, maybe even <em>involved</em> observer with friends and family calling me, messaging me -- “Hey, Mark! I have a question for a travel guru and thought of you first”-- trying to help them navigate as best I could. And after I dished out the same advice more than a couple of times -- indeed, often copy/pasting the same suggestion from one text stream to another -- I decided maybe this would be a good time to pull it all together in a single place, maybe even a podcast with, better yet, some written show notes for easy reference. Stay tuned; it’s coming up in a couple of minutes…</li><li>Bridge Music -- <em><em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/hisboyelroy/430\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Revolve</a>&nbsp;</em>mix&nbsp;</em>by cinematrik (c) copyright 2005 Licensed under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hisboyelroy/430</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>In June, while I was wrapping myself in bubble wrap and packing tape, the US, Canada, most European and Latin American countries dropped their inbound COVID testing requirements. I mean, it makes sense. These testing requirements were put in place to keep COVID at bay, and they failed miserably. At the beginning of last December, the US <em>tightened</em> its inbound testing requirement to try to keep out the then-new Omicron variant, but by the end of the month, it was rampant. And yet the US kept that 24-hour testing requirement for another 7 months -- long after the rationale had been overrun by real life. But, give credit where credit is due, they did finally drop it. One less thing to cause back-ups at airports and border crossings, I guess. It’ll be interesting to see if the testing requirements start cropping up again if we get another autumn surge.</li><li>The Spirit-Frontier-JetBlue Dance Macabre seems to have finally ended with JetBlue’s escalating share price offer trumping Frontier’s more obvious business case of merging two ultra-low cost (and ultra-low service) US carriers. JetBlue’s desperation just didn’t make sense to me -- so yes, maybe they expand their Florida footprint -- always important for an East Coast airline -- but at what integration costs. I’ve always enjoyed flying JetBlue; it felt like they tried to add just a touch more to their service to differentiate themselves from, say, United or American. So now merge that with Spirit, which seems to be a kinder, gentler Ryanair, or maybe a Ryanair but without the chip on its shoulder? Where’s the sense in that? Then someone suggested that I had completely missed the plot. It’s not about Florida; it’s not about low-cost; it’s about the pilot shortage. JetBlue and Spirit both fly Airbus. JetBlue’s other growth option would be Alaska Airlines, which is a Boeing shop. It’s much easier to cross-train and leverage pilots across, say, an all-Airbus fleet than a mixed one. It’s the same reason Southwest and Ryanair are so rabidly focused on the Boeing 737, and Spirit and Frontier on the Airbus A320. OK, got it. But I’ll be a bit sad if this whole mess ends up “Spirit-izing” JetBlue.</li><li>“We’re not a WeWork,” said the head of Delta’s Sky Club lounge system as they put new limits on lounge access. You can’t get in earlier than 3 hours before your departure time. So no more checking out of the hotel to post up in the Sky Lounge for free food, drinks, and WiFi until your afternoon flight. I gotta tell you that this wouldn’t be a big thing for me if I was a regular Delta flier. I’m always trying to figure out how to spend the <em>least</em> amount of time in the airport. Maybe a couple of times, I’d set up camp in the Admirals Club for a morning of calls before, say, a noon flight out. But I’d much prefer working my hotel status to get a later room check-out and then take my calls there, by myself, instead of hoping to find a club workstation that <em>wasn’t</em> next to some sales guy loudly regaling somebody about the deal he just closed. Now to me, though, the more interesting piece of this story is the other limit they <em>wanted</em> to put in but couldn’t -- no lounge access <em>after</em> your flight had landed. Now <em>that one</em> would’ve left a mark. Lots of times, I’d wedge my flight into a 2, 3-hour calendar window between phone calls. And for me, it was those after-flight calls where the lounge was critical. I’m not surprised that Delta had to quickly back off of that rule. But they had to do something because, as the main floors of the terminals have become more of a zoo, and as the lounges have added more free stuff -- better food, free drinks -- they’ve become jammed. It’s tough to find a place to <em>sit</em> before the morning and evening flight banks, let alone a place to take a call. Amex is upping their price, starting this February to charge $50 to get your guest into a Centurion Lounge with you. Looks like Delta is pivoting the other way and trying rationing instead. It’ll be interesting to see which way American and United go.</li><li>There’s been a good bit of commentary over the past few years about the devaluation of frequent flier miles, that they’re worth less than they used to be, that the old benchmark of 2¢/mile no longer holds because airlines are pushing up the number of points needed for a flight, in large part because of the increased supply of points sloshing around the system from when airlines sold huge tranches of points to credit card companies for cash. The comparison to the real economy -- how expansion of monetary supply leads to inflation -- is left as an exercise for the listener. But I noticed something as I was working on flights for an autumn trip back to Europe -- a week in Croatia at the end of September and then a couple of weeks back in Italy. It seems that the cost increases in frequent flier miles haven’t kept up with their real dollar cost increases for flights, and the resulting gap had me busting through that 2¢/mile benchmark on every flight I booked. Maybe if I was more ambitious, I’d find an arbitrage opportunity somewhere in there, but for now, I’m just happy to get some decent deals with my United miles. Now if the euro-to-dollar parity exchange rate holds, it’ll be a real bargain trip.&nbsp;</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music - <em>Velvet Green of Mystery (Instrumental)</em> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/48114 Ft: Kthugha, Jeris, Martijn de Boer</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>My Top Travel Tips for Avoiding Chaos</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>As I mentioned at the top of the show, I’ve gotten pinged a bunch of times over the past couple of months by friends and family who, stuck in the midst of some travel <em>challenge</em> (not an uncommon event this summer), pinged me on Twitter, Facebook Messenger, iMessage asking “What do I do?” I thought this would die down come Labor Day with kids heading back to school ending the summer travel season. But over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been seeing a steady stream of articles headlined “Travel Woes Won’t End This Summer,” saying an extended collision of staff shortages and “revenge travel” traffic will keep things gummed up until at least October, after which we’ll slam right into the Thanksgiving and Christmas travel rush. Lovely. So in the spirit of those “I’m a flight attendant and here’s what you should do \'\' articles that have popped up this summer, here’s my “I’m a 37-year road warrior; these are my tips for handling travel chaos” list.&nbsp;</li><li>Most of this list are things you do before the day of travel -- planning and preparation. That colonial era road warrior Ben Franklin said “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” Not sure if he wrote that about his trips to England or France, but it still applies to travel. What you do the month or two before travel day is way more important that what you do that morning. So let’s get into it.<ul><li>First, figure out if you really need to fly. My normal <strong>fly-vs.-drive tipping point</strong> is 350 miles; anything less and I’ll drive it. But, all this travel chaos might change your calculus. If you fly, figure the airport logistics will add 3 hours to your in-flight time. Maybe the stories of baggage check and security lines have you thinking of arriving 2 hours before your flight. And when you arrive, the crowds mean it could take you another hour to de-plane, collect your luggage (if they haven’t lost it), and find your rental car or wait for an Uber. And that’s if there are no flight delays. Maybe the sum of all this starts to bump up your fly-vs.-drive breakeven point to something closer to 400 or 500 miles.</li><li>If you’re flying, <strong>sign up for TSA PreCheck</strong>. It’s $85 for 5 years of hassle reduction or better yet, if your revenge travel is international, sign up for <strong>Global Entry</strong> for $15 more and get Pre-Check plus no line at US passport control. And a lot of travel credit cards will credit you the $100 as one of their benefits. Just do it; the difference between a 5-minute and 45-minute line at the start of your trip is huge.</li><li><strong>Fly Non-Stop</strong> — It’s obvious because it’s the cardinal rule of air travel. High passenger load factors combined with summer thunderstorms almost guarantees late arrivals and missed connections. And an intermediate stop adds one more point of failure, one more place your luggage could fall off the trolley, one more opportunity for the airlines to screw up. Pay the extra $100 for a non-stop flight.</li><li>If you can’t fly non-stop, <strong>skip the tight connection</strong>; step away from anything less than an hour.&nbsp; Yes, we usually want to get to our destination in the shortest possible time, but accepting a connection of 1 hour or less…. Think about it – a 15-minute delay on your flight into a big hub like Chicago or Denver or Detroit (which is as good as on-time for most airlines nowadays) and you’re sprinting across terminals and concourses just to beat the closing door.</li><li>No matter non-stop or connection, <strong>catch the earliest flight</strong> you can. Delays stack up as the day wears on.&nbsp; As your airplane goes from airport to airport, the probability of it getting stuck increases.&nbsp; Overnight, airlines have a chance to recover – late planes finally get their destinations and operations groups can reassign planes.&nbsp; So while the last flight out can be a crap shoot, I rarely hit a delay on the first flight out.</li></ul></li><li>So you’ve done a good job of planning, so the night before you leave…<ul><li>Pack so you can <strong>carry on your luggage</strong>. It’s summer, so no sweaters, no coats; you’re packing your thinnest clothes. I mean, some years back, I got everything I needed for a 10-day trip in March to Iceland and Southern Spain into a 22-inch carry-on. So unless you’re doing multiple formals, everyone in your travel party should be able to fit into a carry-on sized bag. You can save $25/bag and increase the probability of having clean clothes at your destination.</li><li>And if you <em>are</em> doing multiple formals or for some other reason need to check your bags, <strong>spread everyone’s clothes across all the bags</strong>. It’s rare for an airline to lose all of your checked bags. This way, no one is having to show up at the first formal in an outfit from the nearest Walmart.</li><li>While you’re packing, <strong>charge up your battery packs</strong>. We can’t travel easily anymore without a working mobile phone. It holds our boarding passes, proof of COVID vaccination, gives us gate change and flight delay notifications, and routes us around traffic jams. A dead phone while flights are being canceled is more than just a bit of an inconvenience; having that second or third charge immediately available is critical when trying to swerve a long delay.</li><li>And then download your carrier’s app and an independent <strong>flight tracking app</strong>. Carriers have been pushing more and more functionality into their apps -- boarding passes, one-day lounge passes, real-time gate change and flight delay notifications, canceled flight rebookings…. -- so if you haven’t already, you’ll want to download that and log into it. But I also run a couple of independent apps as back-up, maybe to get a “second opinion” on delays. The free <a href=\"https://flightaware.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">FlightAware </a>app has been my go-to for years. Last spring, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/04/21/podcast-186-mask-mandate-scramble-small-airport-survival/\">episode #186</a>, I talked about another flight tracker app, <a href=\"https://www.flightyapp.com/\">Flighty</a>, that I tried out on our April trip to Santa Fe, NM. The Pro version is nice if you’re willing to pay $50/year, but not enough to get me to ditch FlightAware.</li></ul></li><li>And now we’re here, travel day. You’re all ready; your flight hasn’t been canceled or delayed… yet. Here are some “day of” tips if things start to get a little bumpy…<ul><li><strong>Keep moving forward</strong> - if you hit a delay, always keep moving forward, in the direction of your destination; the closer you are, the more options you’ll have. Last month, my daughter Claire was flying from Denver to Manchester, NH, a tough itinerary, especially now with carriers pulling back from smaller airports. She found a route on American - Denver to Charlotte to Manchester, though it left much later than the rest of her team, so she had some hours to kill at DIA. And pretty soon, she started to get alerts from the American app -- storms were forecasted in Charlotte, so if her plans were flexible…. Well, they weren’t completely flexible; she needed to get to New Hampshire that night. She pinged me - “They’re offering me a standby seat on an earlier flight to Charlotte. Should I take it?” she asked. “Absolutely!” I said. It gets you out of the Rockies and onto the East Coast. Still not drivable, but if your Manchester flight gets canceled, maybe you can get close -- like to Boston or Portland, ME and then drive from there. This is another good reason to do carry-on; it’s tough to call a quick audible like this when someone else has your bag.</li><li>And this leads me to my next travel day tip --<strong> know your geography</strong>. Claire and I joke about this. All that time she spent learning new and unique ways to do arithmetic (something about columns and diagonals; I could never figure it out), so she’d have a better <em>feel</em> for numbers. It crowded out those grade school geography and map lessons us Boomers took all those years ago. Came in handy when I was helping her think about what New England airports would be good alternatives to Manchester, to give her flexibility if her flight got canceled. In New York, the LaGuardia to Newark pivot is easy, as is the SFO to Oakland or San Jose redirect, but others aren’t so obvious.&nbsp; Everyone knows that Chicago has two airports – O’Hare and Midway.&nbsp; But what about Milwaukee’s Mitchell Field 80 miles north?&nbsp; If PHL is in trouble, how many folks think about Harrisburg or Allentown?&nbsp; I think about alternatives in two rings – within 60 miles – say, SNA and LGB for LAX; and then within 100-120 miles, which now picks up Palm Springs and San Diego for LAX.</li><li>And when something goes sideways, don’t wait; <strong>hit every contact channel the airline has</strong> <strong>immediately</strong> -- dial the customer service number while standing in line for the agent. Hit their airline’s Twitter account too; it can be a good side channel into customer service. You never know which one will open up first. Indeed, I often find I’ll get what I need from “at-ing” and DM’ing the airline on Twitter before the hold music stops playing on the 800 number. Bonus pro tip -- have your confirmation number easily available. It makes it much easier for the agent to find your reservation and help you out.</li><li>And one last thing,<strong> bring cash.</strong> Way back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">episode #136,</a> I talked about what seems to be a generational split, between residual Boomers like me and older Millennials, on the need to carry cash. No matter which side you sit on that split, it’s a fact that cash can get you out of a packed airport bar quicker than a card if you need to bolt for your flight — maybe a delay got pulled up, your gate got moved to the next terminal, or you just misread the boarding time. Being able to lay down, say a twenty and 3 ones, on the bar with your check is a whole lot quicker than waiting for the waitress to show back up, take your card, walk to the back to run it, and then bring it back again for you to sign.</li></ul></li><li>So there you go, all the things I’ve been texting folks this summer, and then some. I hope it helps you too. If you’ve got a tip, a tactic I missed, please send it along. We’ll add it to the list and talk about it on the next episode.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #188</li><li>I hope you enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. Sorry for the June-July gap. It took me longer than I thought to pack and then unpack all our worldly belongings.</li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. </li><li>And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>. And while you’re at TravelCommons.com, you can check out the show notes page for a transcript and any links I’ve mentioned. Or you can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page.</li><li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_188.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #188 —  My Top Travel Tips to Survive Airport Chaos','Distilled my travel advice down to the top 13 travel tips to avoid the current chaos. Also, the scrapping of COVID travel test rules and why frequent flier award travel is a bargain again.','inherit','closed','closed','','4175-revision-v1','','','2022-08-19 09:40:05','2022-08-19 14:40:05','',4175,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4183',0,'revision','',0),
(4186,1,'2022-08-30 19:14:25','2022-08-31 00:14:25','<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2><strong>About Mark Peacock</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:image -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/IMG_2601.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/IMG_2601-200x300.jpg\" alt=\"\"/></a></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Mark Peacock has been a near-constant business traveler for over 35 years. Beginning with his first flight on his first day of first full-time job (an American Airline MD-80 from ORD to DFW), Mark has traveled continuously for high-tech companies and management consultancies.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Mark has lived in Chicago (three times), Memphis, Louisville, Washington DC, the Bay Area, Dallas, Philadelphia, Detroit, and now lives in Nashville.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2><strong>Contact Us</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>EMAIL – comments@travelcommons.com</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2><strong>About the TravelCommons Podcast</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Click <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/TravelCommonsMediaKit.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"mediakit\">here</a> to download a media kit</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','About Us','','inherit','closed','closed','','85-revision-v1','','','2022-08-30 19:14:25','2022-08-31 00:14:25','',85,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4186',0,'revision','',0),
(4188,1,'2022-08-30 19:40:09','2022-08-31 00:40:09','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">Update</span></strong>: From the US State Department\'s <a href=\"https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/traveladvisories/covid-19-travel-information.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">website:</a> <em>The CDC order from December 2, 2021, requiring persons aged two and above to show a negative COVID-19 test result or documentation of recovery from COVID-19 before boarding a flight to the United States, is rescinded, effective June 12, 2022, at 12:01AM ET.  This means that starting at 12:01AM ET on June 12, 2022, air passengers will not need to get tested and show a negative COVID-19 test result or show documentation of recovery from COVID-19 prior to boarding a flight to the United States regardless of vaccination status or citizenship</em></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:separator -->\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity\"/>\n<!-- /wp:separator -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>On December 6, the US <a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2021/p1203-covid-testing-tightens-intl.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">tightened the COVID testing window</a> for inbound international travelers from 72 hours prior to departure to one day. Going from one of the widest testing windows to the narrowest leaves you with just a couple of options. You can hit the airport test center and hope to get a negative result e-mailed to you before boarding, or pack a <a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/travelers/testing-international-air-travelers.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">CDC-approved self-test</a> in your carry-on and use it the night before you leave. I took the low-risk route and brought along <a href=\"https://www.emed.com/products/covid-at-home-testkit-six-pack?hsLang=en\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Abbott\'s BinaxNOW rapid antigen test with eMed</a>. I needed to do a bit of upfront planning, but it made our return home a lot easier.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Pre-Trip Planning</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>You can\'t just hit your local Walgreens or CVS the night before leaving and grab a kit off the shelf. This might meet the first requirement of <a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/travelers/testing-international-air-travelers.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the CDC\'s order</a> -- an FDA-approved test -- but not the second -- a telehealth provider that watches you take the test and then issues the lab result you\'ll need to show the gate agent to get on the plane. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":4048,\"width\":288,\"height\":512,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-large is-resized\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/F856BB2F-44E0-4C95-98BC-34855C2329FD.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/F856BB2F-44E0-4C95-98BC-34855C2329FD-576x1024.jpg\" alt=\"Doing your own COVID testing takes up a lot of valuable luggage real estate\" class=\"wp-image-4048\" width=\"288\" height=\"512\"/></a></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>There are a couple of tests that meet the CDC\'s requirements, but the Abbott BinaxNOW test is the easiest one to buy. You can buy a 6-pack directly from <a href=\"https://www.emed.com/products/covid-at-home-testkit-six-pack?hsLang=en\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">eMed</a>, or a 2- or 3-pack from <a href=\"https://store.optum.com/shop/category/tests-devices/covid-19-home-tests/\">Optum</a>, but make sure you buy the BinaxNOW tests <em><strong>with</strong></em> eMed telehealth services. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>When figuring out how many to order, there\'s a few things to keep in mind. First, how many spares to take with you in case a test doesn\'t work or gives you an ambiguous result? Second, the more you buy, the cheaper each test is. The 2-pack from Optum prices out at $30/test while buying the 6-pack from eMed drops it to $25/test. But third, remember that the tests only have a 12-month shelf life, so don\'t overbuy. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Irene and I had two international trips coming up, so I ordered a 6-pack from eMed a month before our first trip. The tests arrived a week later. We took four tests with us on each trip but never had to use the spares. One thing to keep in mind --  because you\'re not supposed to open the test until you\'re on-line with the teleproctor, those four boxes can take up a lot of valuable luggage space.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I also downloaded and set up the companion Navica app and created a profile on the eMed website before we left. You don\'t have to do this before traveling, but it\'ll make the actual testing session faster.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><meta charset=\"utf-8\"><strong>Take the Test The Day Before Flying to the US</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/travelers/testing-international-air-travelers.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">The CDC\'s new test window</a> is 1 day before departure, not 24 hours. So, if your flight leaves 1pm on Friday, you could board with a negative test taken any time the day before; a test taken Thursday morning would be fine.  You\'ll need to find a clear space on a table or desk and a solid WiFi signal, and then give yourself 30 minutes for the test -- 5 minutes to log into eMed website and start the telehealth session, a couple of minutes to do the test, 15 minutes for the results to develop, and a final couple of minutes back on with the teleproctor to read the results. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":4049,\"width\":288,\"height\":512,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-large is-resized\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/116C8D86-ED66-4E5F-A516-D3E6046CA582.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/116C8D86-ED66-4E5F-A516-D3E6046CA582-576x1024.jpg\" alt=\"BinaxNOW COVID testing session\" class=\"wp-image-4049\" width=\"288\" height=\"512\"/></a></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We weren\'t traveling with computers, but we successfully ran our telehealth sessions on a selection of handheld devices -- a Samsung Galaxy S2 Android tablet, an iPad Mini, and two vintages of iPhones (Xr and 13 Pro).</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>You log into the eMed website, run through four questions that prompt you to wash your hands and have your ID ready, and then get into queue for a telehealth session. Last summer, I heard complaints of 2+ hour queues, but we didn\'t wait over 3 minutes for any of our sessions. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>When the session starts, the proctor can see you, but you only hear the proctor. They\'ll want to check your photo ID, watch you open the test box, and then scan the QR code on the test card. On our phones and tablets, this process awkwardly flipped the web session between the front and back cameras a couple of times. Then, back to the front camera, the proctor watches you swab both nostrils and then insert the swab into the test card. I don\'t know how you\'d do this one-handed; you\'ll want <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3pZmjcS\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">some way</a> to use your phone or tablet hands-free. With the testing complete, the proctor starts a 15-minute on-screen timer and drops off the call.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>After the timer finishes, the web page asks if you\'re ready to rejoin the session. Pressing \"Yes\", you enter shorter queue for another proctor session (we never waited more than 90 seconds). They confirm it\'s the same test card by having you scan QR code again and then confirm the test results with you, asking you how many lines you see. On one of these review sessions, the proctor\'s audio was all fuzzed up. She asked me if I was comfortable proceeding using the chat function and we finished the session without a problem. eMed then e-mails you a PDF of the test results as well as notifying you in the Navica app. We didn\'t wait more than 10 minutes for our results to show up. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Using The Test Results</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>This is why you\'ve gone through that telehealth drill -- to get a lab result that meets<a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/travelers/testing-international-air-travelers.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"> CDC requirements</a> so your airline will let you fly home. On our flight home from Italy, we pulled up the test result PDF twice on our iPhones, when checking in for Lufthansa flight from Catania, Sicily to Munich and again for a United Airlines agent at the final gate-side security check before boarding our MUC-ORD flight. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>A month later, we were flying American Airlines home from London. American uses the <a href=\"https://support.myverifly.com/hc/en-us\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Verifly</a> app to pull together all the required COVID travel documents. Verifly didn\'t recognize the QR code on the Navica test pass, so I uploaded a screenshot of my test results for manual verification. After about 30 minutes, the \"in-process\" status icon turned green and we were good to go. When we checked in for our flight at Heathrow, all we had to do was show the agent the green “All good” screens on the Verifly app; no need to show the actual test results. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Bottom Line</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> A little pre-departure planning will let you enjoy a more relaxed final day of vacation.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Easy Way to Do 1-Day Testing For Returning to US','How to meet the US 1-day COVID testing window by packing Abbott BinaxNOW kits so you can self-test in your hotel the day before your flight home','inherit','closed','closed','','4044-revision-v1','','','2022-08-30 19:40:09','2022-08-31 00:40:09','',4044,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4188',0,'revision','',0),
(4192,1,'2022-09-22 18:45:18','2022-09-22 23:45:18','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/IMG_5006.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/IMG_5006-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Person standing in front of a wall with the message stenciled No Selfies\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> There Are Rules About Why We Travel[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Lots of different voices in this episode. Listeners adding to our list of travel tips, and conversations with <a href=\"http://shj.cs.illinois.edu/\">Dr. Sheldon Jacobson</a> about why one of those tips -- always catch the first flight out -- isn\'t always right, and <a href=\"https://www.workman.com/authors/patricia-schultz\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Patricia Schultz</a> about her new book, <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3BWnv6n\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Why We Travel: 100 Reasons to See the World</a></em>. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_189.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #189: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in the Gulch neighborhood of Nashville, TN. Not a whole lot of travel since the last episode. Was back in Chicago after almost 2 months away. As a tourist this time, staying in a hotel just off the Michigan Avenue Mag Mile strip, a neighborhood we’d actively avoid when we lived in Chicago -- too crowded, too many tourists. But now that <em>we are</em> tourists, maybe it fits a little better. We ended up here more out of convenience than anything else. It was the furthest north in the city that I could find a place to burn off some Marriott points.&nbsp;</li><li>It’s been another month where I’ve spent more time planning travel than doing it; stitching together the itinerary for an almost 3-week trip -- Nashville, connecting through Chicago (‘cause I’m no longer in a hub city) and Frankfurt, to Split, Croatia; then over to Rome and a train to Naples to get to Positano; then back to Naples for a few days; then to Rome; then to Florence; then back down to Rome to fly home by way of Newark. That looks kinda silly just typing it out. TripIt ended up being a very valuable tool. I forwarded all the various confirmation emails to it, and it did a damn good job of sequencing everything into a single itinerary, which helped me spot holes where I’d screwed up, say, a departure date or had just completely forgot about a trip leg.&nbsp; But it’s all done; I leave next week. And writing this episode is giving me another good excuse to put off thinking about packing -- 3 weeks in a carryon. “Has a washing machine” might’ve been my most critical Airbnb search criteria.</li><li>Bridge Music --  <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/48915\">Like Music (cdk Mix</a>) by Analog By Nature (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/48915 Ft: Phasenwandler  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Yup, we have mail … and comments.</li><li>Let’s start with two comments on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">TravelCommons Facebook page</a>. First up, Jim McDonough tagged the post for <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/05/26/podcast-187-moving-to-a-non-hub-airport-what-makes-a-great-taproom/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Podcast #187 — Moving to a Non-Hub Airport; What Makes A Great Taproom?\">episode #187</a> with his experience moving to a non-hub airport. Jim writes…<ul><li>“We moved from a hub (DFW, 7 parallel runways plus one other) to a non-hub (SAN, 1 runway). Clearly we were tied to American at DFW (both lifetime Gold), and there really is no single dominant carrier at SAN. We do have some sneaky long non-stops from here, though, like to Hawaii, London, Munich, Boston, New York. None of these on American, though. We are trending towards Alaska Airlines, which has pretty good service and Boeing airplanes, and if there\'s an Admirals Club around we can use it flying Alaska. I was among the people who switched to cash-back credit cards during the pandemic when no flying was happening, but I\'m rethinking that position with an eye to using miles to go places.”</li><li>Jim, thanks for that. The American-Alaska relationship has always been good for West Coast fliers. I remember, years ago, flying Alaska from Long Beach up the coast to San Jose. I could never figure out why Alaska was flying that route, but it was handy with my American status.</li></ul></li><li>Next up, Thelma Smith adding a travel tip to the post for last month’s episode<ul><li>“Good episode. I don’t travel a lot but one thing I do is if I have to check a bag I use the sky cap. I don’t have to be lugging anything through the airport and the cash comes in handy to tip them.”</li><li>Thanks, Thelma, for that tip. I\'m a big sky cap fan when I have to check a bag -- like when I’m loaded up from a big wine country trip -- and, yes, cash is absolutely required for their tip!</li></ul></li><li>Moving to the TravelCommons website, Geoff Slater left this comment<ul><li>“Excellent return podcast! A very frequent traveler, I agreed with everything. A quibble however was the advice to take a nonstop. While I don’t disagree, I fly in and out of Burlington, VT, so that’s rarely an option. So for me, I also consider my options for connecting airports. As a United flier, Denver in the summer when it’s an option, and then IAD, and trying to avoid EWR. Getting a bit more esoteric for the non-frequent flier, I also consider plane type. And with United 1K status, I also take advantage of the same day change to avoid weather problems.”</li><li>Geoff, thanks for the comments. Kinda back to my pre-break episode about moving from to a non-hub airport -- most of your direct flight options are to hubs like DEN and IAD. Your strategy on hub selection is smart; pick hubs off by themselves with long well-separated runways. When I was doing work in north Jersey, we used to joke that anyone spitting on a runway at EWR would mean an hour delay; the runways are too close together to allow parallel take-offs and landings in all but the best of weather. Your comment about plane type -- rather than esoteric, I think it’s more of a graduate-level flight planning tip. The first cut is regional jet vs. main-line jet. I’ll always pick the, say, United Airbus 319 over the American Eagle Embraer. Making a choice between main-line jets can be a bit more subtle; different fliers will make different trade-offs between size -- flights with smaller capacity jets might be sacrificed when storms reduce flight slots but they’re quicker to get out of if a delay has tightened your connection. Again, graduate-level linear programming optimization algorithms for flight planning.</li></ul></li><li>On Twitter, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/PortaPocketGal\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Kendra Kroll</a> offered up a travel tip<ul><li>“Know names of cities in local vernacular. I\'ll never forget when folks on our Southbound train to Rome missed their stop by several hours as they didn\'t realize Firenze = Florence!”</li><li>Ouch! That’s a good tip; probably a next-level version of my <em>Know Your Geography</em> tip. For extra credit, be able to recognize your destination in the local non-Latin alphabet. I was in Tokyo back right before they moved the old Tsukiji Fish Market. The morning after I arrived, I was up early with jet lag and so walked over to the market. Someone had recommended a small sushi joint there, so I went looking for it. The recommendation gave the name in Latin characters but the signs in the market were only in Kanji. I eventually found a guy at an information desk who gave me directions to the place, but something to keep in mind when I travel to, say, Greece or Georgia -- the country, not the state.</li></ul></li><li>And finally, Aaron Woodlin responded to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1564695213217648642\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">my re-tweet of an ORD TSA post</a> with a picture of what one passenger pulled out of their carry-on and put in a bin to pass through the X-ray machine -- a meat cleaver, a couple of knives, a couple of saws… Somebody who’s definitely unclear on the concept of “no sharp objects in your carry-on.” Aaron’s cut -<ul><li>“What I really don\'t get are people who don\'t keep their range bags and carry-on luggage separate, and end up unintentionally packing heat at the checkpoint.&nbsp; If you can afford plane fare, guns and ammo, you can spring for separate bags!”</li><li>Range bag, tool box… I can just imagine being the TSA guy shaking his head as the image of a bin full of knives and saws comes across the monitor. The guy is aware enough to know that you need to pull metal stuff out of your bag, but not hip to the fact of why. And now you’re the TSA guy who has to explain it all to him.&nbsp;</li></ul></li><li>And as always, thanks to all of you for the comments! Some great stuff here.</li><li>I think I’ve mentioned in prior episodes that I’m on Apple’s iPhone upgrade plan. Every year I get the new phone, send in my old one, and it resets the payment clock. Kinda like leasing a car but with lower monthly payments. Anyhow, a few weeks back, I’m scrubbing through Apple’s hour-and-a-half long announcement video -- skip all the Apple Watch stuff, slow down on the new AirPods, and then settle in for the iPhone 14 walk through. Nothing earth-shaking; I’m liking the new purple color. But then, as they were wrapping up, I had a record-scratch moment -- no SIM tray! What, what? Yup, for US iPhones, no more SIM tray; it’s all internal eSIMs! Isn’t that great? No more searching for a paper clip to pop out the tray, losing the little nano-SIM, …. No, it’s <em>not</em> great, at least for those of us who travel internationally. I’ve talked many times over the years about using local SIMs. Most recently, in episode #181, I talked about, at the start of our Puglia bike trip, spending 15 minutes and $25 in a Telecom Italia store for a SIM that gave me a local phone number (very handy for restaurant reservations) and <em>70 GB</em> of data. And now next week, all I have to do is load some money onto that SIM through the Telecom Italia website, and I’m good to go when I connect thru Frankfurt, and land in Croatia and Italy. But what about an eSIM? I couldn’t find any mainline Italian mobile carrier that offered a prepaid eSIM. Same with the UK. When I <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1567661384875347969\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">bitch-tweeted about this</a>, <a href=\"https://alosim.com/\">aloSIM</a>, a company that sells eSIMs for many countries, quickly responded “Well, our Italy eSIM data packages start at $4.50 for a week of data…” I hit their website. Their $4.50/week gives 1 GB of data. For an extra 50¢, I can get 10x that -- 10 GB of data for $5/week. I <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1567856046328135683\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">tweeted that back</a>. As you might guess, no response from aloSIM’s social media team. So, I’ve dropped off the iPhone upgrade wheel. I know I’m an edge case, and I think this could accelerate the push toward eSIMs. But like when Apple dropped the headphone jack, I think they’re 12-18 months ahead of the curve for frequent international travelers and I need something that works <em>today</em>, where the curve is right now. So I’ll wait a bit, like TravelCommons listener Jerry Sarfati who said he’s waiting for the “iPhone 15… with a USB-C charger.” I really hope it comes in purple too.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/spinmeister/53428\">Somewhere</a> by spinmeister (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/spinmeister/53428 Ft: DJ Vadim </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>When <em>Not </em>To Take the First Flight Out</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Moving to the mail portion of the episode, a day after I published <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/08/18/podcast-188-my-top-tips-to-survive-travel-chaos/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Podcast #188 —  My Top Travel Tips to Survive Airport Chaos\">the last episode</a>, I saw an email in the TravelCommons inbox with the subject “Is the first flight of the day still the best one? No. – air travel scientist for interviews.” This caught my eye because the 5th of the 13 tips to avoid airport chaos I’d <em>just </em>published was “catch the earliest flight you can”. So I replied to the email “Tell me why I’m wrong!”</li><li>Which led to this conversation with <a href=\"http://shj.cs.illinois.edu/\">Dr. Sheldon Jacobson</a>, Professor in Computer Science at the University of Illinois. Over the years, Dr. Jacobson has done projects using operations research models to optimize aviation security. But most recently, he <a href=\"https://www.chicagotribune.com/opinion/commentary/ct-opinion-travel-delays-flight-bookings-pandemic-20220830-p64ax3a74vaxnnzqwts4nel3cy-story.html\">wrote about</a> how the received frequent flier wisdom about catching the first flight out might not always be right. So I started our discussion asking him “Where did I get it wrong?”<ul><li>Sheldon: When you\'re flying in and out of hub airports, conventional wisdom is, in fact, correct. You do want to take the first flight of the day because at a hub airport, there\'s a lot more flexibility once a plane arrives at the end of the day. It\'s going to be cleaned, it\'s going to be maintained. Its gonna be fresh for the new day. If it turns out that some of the crew members become unavailable, you have alternatives because so many people have bases. So, this is in Chicago and Dallas for American, For United, you also have Washington Dulles as well as Chicago. For Delta, of course, it\'s Atlanta, Minneapolis, Detroit. So that\'s a great strategy. But what if you\'re not in a hub airport and that\'s when things start to get more nuanced. And the best way to think of this is that every airplane as well as every crew when they fly from city to city, they are a link in a chain. At the end of the day, you think, “Okay, the chain ends.” Actually, it doesn\'t. because the first flight of the day is the connection and the link from the last flight of the previous day. And all of this comes out and starts to impact that decision of the first flight of the day. Because if that flight comes in late, remember the last flight of the day, that\'s going to be the first flight out of a regional airport. So as a result of that, you actually want to take the second flight of the day out of a regional airport or a smaller large airport. That\'s the best strategy when it comes to these secondary and tertiary airports.</li><li>Mark: Actually, what you\'ve said, I\'ve seen that happen in smaller regional airports, say Lexington Kentucky, Appleton, Wisconsin, where that first flight of the day is not on the ground, so it\'s got to come in from a hub. Is there a split where, say, larger non-hub airports, the conventional wisdom still holds? Say where I am now in Nashville, or something like in Indianapolis? Where do those fall as far as the conventional wisdom on catching the first flight out?</li><li>Sheldon: Yes, certainly when you come to Nashville, Indianapolis, Columbus,&nbsp; Ohio, Pittsburgh,&nbsp; Pennsylvania -- some of these have been de-hubbed over the years. You\'re getting into a point that you have a lot of choices available. So then it becomes a little more nuanced because you could book the first flight on, let\'s say American and that one may have difficulties because that plane came in overnight and it was delayed because of storms in Chicago. But on the other hand, if there are options on Delta which are coming from Atlanta where there were not storms, you can always then get switched over for it. So when you get into those middle airports, they\'re not full hubs, but they\'re not the small regionals that have two flights a day, then it becomes a little more nuanced. And then you start to look across airlines as opposed to just within the airline.</li><li>Mark: Now if we pivot just slightly and think about different types of airlines. So if I think about hub-centric airlines, like the traditional United, American, Delta versus, say, a Southwest, which I\'ve joked in the past feels like they\'re running milk runs across the country. So there\'s not necessarily a hub, just that plane is running a line. Is there a difference between those two types of airlines on that first flight out?</li><li>Sheldon: There is, for a variety of reasons. With Southwest, they\'re trying to pack as many segments or links per day for every airplane. That\'s how they stay profitable. Their turn times are tremendous, but it also makes them more vulnerable to any kind of mechanical or weather delays or air traffic control slowdowns because they don\'t have the slack built into their system in their links. As a result of that, when you get to the end of the day, they still have to abide by the FAA regulations in terms of crew rest. And the question is, even though they are in some sense of point to point airline, they have areas of the country that have a concentration of flights like Dallas Love for example, like Chicago, like Baltimore-Washington, where they traditionally had a lot of flights. So you do have to look then, even though they aren\'t traditional hubs, they operate similarly. Where is the crew located; where they choosing to live? And that\'s an important component because when you\'re trying to reschedule because of delays, the flight that you\'re going to take out at 6 am may have come from a city where the plane only arrived at midnight. The flight crew needs the rest. They will not be able to leave on time. But if you switch crews and you have the flexibility because you have a sufficient number of crew members. It solves the problem. Is that going to exist in your city? So even though Southwest doesn\'t have the traditional hub and spoke system, they have airports that, in some sense, act like their hubs.</li><li>Mark: Sheldon, how much of this do you think is a function of the current tight labor market that airlines say they\'re operating in?</li><li>Sheldon: Now the situation we\'re in, which was brought on by COVID, of course, meant that they had a tremendous amount of layoffs and looking down the road, they were trying to survive financially. And now they\'re in a situation where they have to rehire but retrain all of these pilots. People think “Oh, you haven\'t flown for 8 months, 9 months? We’ll just put you in a cockpit and you’re fine.” It doesn\'t work that way. Once you\'ve been off for 6 months, it\'s as if you\'ve never flown. You still have the 1,500 hours which are required to fly, but you get rusty. And the pilots themselves say “I\'m really not as comfortable as I used to be,” especially on landings, which is the most critical activity that they do once they\'re in flight, it\'s pretty much status quo. Taking off is reasonably straightforward, but landing is the tricky part. And they just feel a little less comfortable unless they have the training. And the fact is they want to be safe as much as the passengers and the airline\'s want them to be safe. Getting these people back in the cockpit training and they have so many flight simulators. So much training that needs to be gone through. This is a non-trivial process.</li><li>Mark: Sheldon, thank you very much for that. That\'s very helpful. Any last thought, any last tips as people are looking to navigate through the back end of the summer season and into the holiday flying; things that you use to avoid airport chaos?</li><li>Sheldon: Well, we\'ve just now entered the post-summer/fall travel period and I check the numbers daily in terms of screenings at TSA checkpoints and the numbers are trying to come down, which means that there\'s gonna be a lot less stress and strain on the system. The airlines are starting to ramp up their schedules. I\'ve booked some things out for later in the fall and they\'re already changing the schedules. So, I know that they\'re starting to add more flights and more opportunities for people. For the holiday travel season this year, Christmas and New Year\'s fall on a Sunday. And that means that people are going to be traveling on Friday and Saturday. If you can travel on Thursday or Wednesday, you may find it a lot less taxing. So, thinking a little bit ahead in that regard may be very helpful. You can\'t predict weather storms, a nor’easter is going through, you know, it’s late in the year. The other strategy that I\'ve used because I\'ve mostly lived in non-hub cities is that there\'s always been a dominant airline and a non-dominant airline. And the strategy I\'ve always used is to always become loyal to the non-dominant airline. And the reason being is that when the non-dominant airline had problems, they were always gracious to put you on the dominant airline, which had much more choices. And as a result, I rarely got stuck because if I was on the dominant airline, trying to find a plane on the non-dominant one was much more difficult to get the seats available</li><li>Mark: That\'s an interesting strategy. Kind of counterintuitive, but as you explain it, it makes sense.</li><li>Sheldon: I have never gotten stuck because by flying the non-dominant, even out of a hub airport. You think of a place like Detroit where they have Delta as the dominant airline. If you fly American out of there, the people are working extra hard to get your business. And as a result of that, I\'ve always found service is better in the non-dominant airline, even in the hub cities where they\'re competing.</li><li>Mark: That\'s a good tip. Thanks for that Sheldon. Dr. Sheldon, Jacobson at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. Thank you very much for joining us on the TravelCommons podcast.</li><li>Sheldon: Thank you. It\'s wonderful to be with you.</li></ul></li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/scottaltham/20747\"> Hear Us Now (poptastic mix)</a> by Scott Altham (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/scottaltham/20747</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Why We Travel</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Some years ago, on some milestone birthday (I’m not saying which), my kids gave me the book <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3DHoiJC\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">1,000 Places to See Before You Die</a></em>. Hmm… was there a message somewhere in that gift? Not that they would admit. But it was a fun book flip through -- to remind me of past trips and give me ideas of places to go next. So when the TravelCommons inbox offered up an opportunity to interview the author, <a href=\"http://1000Places.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Patricia Schultz</a>, about her new book, I jumped at it.<ul><li>Mark: Patricia, thanks for joining us on the TravelCommons podcast. Your new book is <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3BWnv6n\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Why We Travel: 100 Reasons to See the World</a></em>. That topic -- why we travel -- has been a common one here on TravelCommons; how travel expands our horizons, our perspectives, helps us connect with others and with ourselves as we lose ourselves in the “otherness” of a new place. So Patricia, help us. What\'s your take on why we travel?</li><li>Patricia: Well, I used this period of the pandemic to have that conversation with myself. This moment of COVID allowed me this unprecedented moment where suddenly I was very stationary. I thought it was very important for me, as a travel writer, to reassess all over again the importance of travel. But the “why” needs to be kept very forefront, so that we have that appreciation, and we understand that we\'re privileged and it\'s an honor and it\'s something that you need to travel meaningfully and not just on automatic pilot. And I think first and foremost it\'s, for me, it\'s food for my soul. And as you said, it opens our perspectives and it opens our heads, it opens our hearts. You mentioned connecting with other people. That\'s part of opening your heart with that exchange with your Uber driver or your guide or the lady in the open-air market who’s selling her tomatoes and whoever you have that moment with. It’s all the people along the way that you meet and accrue and collect all of these experiences that are life lessons. Not just the logistics and the details of trip planning, but life lessons as they pertain to what you bring home with you and how you deal with life and how you\'ve become more resourceful and the “daily-ness” of life is dealt with in a different way. I know I\'m more tolerant. I know I\'m more respectful in general. I know that I\'m more curious and that\'s what gets you out the front door at the end of the day, which is often usually the most difficult part of all of this -- getting going.</li><li>Mark: Absolutely. Patricia, the book is a great mix of beautiful photos and quotes about travel. Definitely a book that you need to have in your hand rather than on your tablet. What was your curation process? How did you pick the pictures and the quotes that went into the book?</li><li>Patricia: I\'m so glad that you touched on that because I myself thought that a book that seemingly this simplistic would just kind of write itself.</li><li>Mark: It\'s never that simple though. Right?</li><li>Patricia: No. One of the quotes I used is by Beverly Sills, the great operatic singer, who said there are no shortcuts to any place worth going to or anything worth doing, I might add as a postscript, and writing one of them. But the photos, which are not mine I\'m sorry to say, they\'re colorful and they\'re energetic and they\'re vibrant and there\'s a great sense of place and excitement to them, I think. And that\'s what we were aiming for to have this book, everything, kind of jump off the page at you because that\'s part of the message, the message of how exciting and exhilarating travel can be and then to match it with the appropriate message. The message that is embodied in a quotation or in an aphorism or in a list that I make up or in an anecdote that matches what the photograph recounts. So, it all was a real departure for me because my books until now have just been a kind of encyclopedia of 1,000 places around the world. But that same broad, comprehensive mix of experience and geography and message and importance of travel that I tried to infuse throughout <em>1,000 Places</em> is the same mix that I tried to embed in every aphorism and in every photo and in the sequence of the book. It\'s not a big book. It\'s a hardcover book. It\'s not oversized and it\'s not all that many pages; it\'s somewhere over 100 pages. But there\'s a lot that can be said because travel means many, many, many different things to many different people. But at the end of the day, it makes us better people and that\'s kind of Period, Amen!</li><li>Mark: And it\'s certainly more focused, as you said, on inspiring people to travel, to pull their bag out from under their bed rather than a tour guide\'s list of where to go, or some expert’s advice on how to pack that bag. But some might see this collide with the ethics, the concern about climate change. How do you square that circle?</li><li>Patricia: If you travel with respect and with that, conviction to see the world for all the right places, and not because you\'re checking off countries or you\'re filling empty time. But if you want to experience another culture and bring those experiences home with you, ultimately, probably the best thing we can hope to take away from travel is that when we return to our homes, we are equipped to make your best life for yourself and your neighbors and your community and the world at large. And also, the very notion that travel isn\'t inherently international or a 12-hour long haul flight to get you to the other side of the world. You know, you can walk out your front door and walk around the block in midtown Manhattan where I live and that\'s travel enough for many people. The people watching, the theater of the street or filling your car or charging your car and taking that road trip to the local state park. So, there are all kinds of ways that you can easily accommodate all of those concerns if you travel well. And I don\'t mean five-star deluxe and I don\'t mean remote dream destinations of Mongolia and Africa, although those are all pretty fantastic as well. Travel well in that you really maximize the time made available to you and the money that\'s in your budget. But I think you just need to go with the right head and the right head to me has always meant curiosity and respect. And if that\'s the case then you will travel respectfully, and you will address climate change in a way that as an individual we can.</li><li>Mark: Fantastic. Well, Patricia Schultz, author of the new book <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3S61BDa\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Why We Travel: 100 Reasons to See the World</a></em>. Patricia, thanks for stopping by the TravelCommons podcast to give us your thoughts on why we should travel. Really appreciate the time.</li><li>Patricia: Thank you very much. Thank you for having me.</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #189</li><li>A little change of pace; a lot less of my voice and more of others. I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. </li><li>And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>. And while you’re at TravelCommons.com, you can check out the show notes page for a transcript and any links I’ve mentioned. Or you can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page.</li><li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_189.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #189 — Why We Travel; When The First Flight Isn\'t Best','Lots of different voices - listeners adding to our list of travel tips, Dr. Sheldon Jacobson on why one of our tips isn\'t always right, and Patricia Schultz on her new book \"Why We Travel\"','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-189-why-we-travel-when-the-first-flight-isnt-best','','','2022-10-31 16:46:04','2022-10-31 21:46:04','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4192',0,'post','',0),
(4193,1,'2022-09-21 16:44:06','2022-09-21 21:44:06','','IMG_5006','','inherit','open','closed','','img_5006','','','2022-09-21 16:44:06','2022-09-21 21:44:06','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/IMG_5006.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(4194,1,'2022-09-21 17:00:52','2022-09-21 22:00:52','[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/IMG_5006.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/IMG_5006-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Person standing in front of a wall with the message stenciled No Selfies\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> There Are Rules About Why We Travel[/caption]\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Back behind the microphone after a couple of months of setting up the new studios in Nashville. I\'ve been dishing out travel advice to friends and family swept up in this summer\'s travel chaos. I\'ve distilled all those texts and messages down to my top 13 travel tips to help those traveling through the rest of the year. We also talk about the countries that have dropped all of the COVID testing requirements for inbound passengers, noodle about the rationale for JetBlue\'s dogged pursuit of Spirit Airways, Delta\'s new time limits for their Sky Club lounges, and why frequent flier award travel is suddenly a bargain again. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_189.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #189: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in the Gulch neighborhood of Nashville, TN with packs of tourists on e-scooter, and screeching freight trains losing the battle of the decibels to bachelorette parties “who-hoo-ing” from open-air party buses. Now I understand the “Nash-vegas” tag.</li><li>Not a whole lot of travel since the last episode. Was back in Chicago after almost 2 months away. As a tourist this time, staying in a hotel just off the Michigan Avenue Mag Mile strip, a neighborhood we’d actively avoid when we lived in Chicago -- too crowded, too many tourists. But now that <em>we are</em> tourists, maybe it fits a little better. We ended up here more out of convenience than anything else. It was the furthest north in the city that I could find a place to burn off some Marriott points. </li><li>It’s been another month where I’ve spent more time planning travel than doing it; stitching together the itinerary for an almost 3-week trip -- Nashville, connecting through Chicago (‘cause I’m no longer in a hub city) and Frankfurt, to Split, Croatia; then over to Rome and a train to Naples to get to Positano; then back to Naples for a few days; then to Rome; then to Florence; then back down to Rome to fly home by way of Newark. That looks kinda silly just typing it out. TripIt ended up being a very valuable tool. I forwarded all the various confirmation emails to it, and it did a damn good job of sequencing everything into a single itinerary, which helped me spot holes where I’d screwed up, say, a departure date or had just completely forgot about a trip leg.  But it’s all done; I leave next week. And writing this episode is giving me another good excuse to put off thinking about packing -- 3 weeks in a carryon. “Has a washing machine” might’ve been my most critical Airbnb search criteria.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <em><em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/hisboyelroy/430\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Revolve</a> </em>mix </em>by cinematrik (c) copyright 2005 Licensed under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hisboyelroy/430</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Yup, we have mail … and comments.</li><li>Let’s start with two comments on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">TravelCommons Facebook page</a>. First up, Jim McDonough tagged the post for <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/05/26/podcast-187-moving-to-a-non-hub-airport-what-makes-a-great-taproom/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Podcast #187 — Moving to a Non-Hub Airport; What Makes A Great Taproom?\">episode #187</a> with his experience moving to a non-hub airport. Jim writes…<ul><li>“We moved from a hub (DFW, 7 parallel runways plus one other) to a non-hub (SAN, 1 runway). Clearly we were tied to American at DFW (both lifetime Gold), and there really is no single dominant carrier at SAN. We do have some sneaky long non-stops from here, though, like to Hawaii, London, Munich, Boston, New York. None of these on American, though. We are trending towards Alaska Airlines, which has pretty good service and Boeing airplanes, and if there\'s an Admirals Club around we can use it flying Alaska. I was among the people who switched to cash-back credit cards during the pandemic when no flying was happening, but I\'m rethinking that position with an eye to using miles to go places.”</li><li>Jim, thanks for that. The American-Alaska relationship has always been good for West Coast fliers. I remember, years ago, flying Alaska from Long Beach up the coast to San Jose. I could never figure out why Alaska was flying that route, but it was handy with my American status.</li></ul></li><li>Next up, Thelma Smith adding a travel tip to the post for last month’s episode<ul><li>“Good episode. I don’t travel a lot but one thing I do is if I have to check a bag I use the sky cap. I don’t have to be lugging anything through the airport and the cash comes in handy to tip them.”</li><li>Thanks, Thelma, for that tip. I\'m a big sky cap fan when I have to check a bag -- like when I’m loaded up from a big wine country trip -- and, yes, cash is absolutely required for their tip!</li></ul></li><li>Moving to the TravelCommons website, Geoff Slater left this comment<ul><li>“Excellent return podcast! A very frequent traveler, I agreed with everything. A quibble however was the advice to take a nonstop. While I don’t disagree, I fly in and out of Burlington, VT, so that’s rarely an option. So for me, I also consider my options for connecting airports. As a United flier, Denver in the summer when it’s an option, and then IAD, and trying to avoid EWR. Getting a bit more esoteric for the non-frequent flier, I also consider plane type. And with United 1K status, I also take advantage of the same day change to avoid weather problems.”</li><li>Geoff, thanks for the comments. Kinda back to my pre-break episode about moving from to a non-hub airport -- most of your direct flight options are to hubs like DEN and IAD. Your strategy on hub selection is smart; pick hubs off by themselves with long well-separated runways. When I was doing work in north Jersey, we used to joke that anyone spitting on a runway at EWR would mean an hour delay; the runways are too close together to allow parallel take-offs and landings in all but the best of weather. Your comment about plane type -- rather than esoteric, I think it’s more of a graduate-level flight planning tip. The first cut is regional jet vs. main-line jet. I’ll always pick the, say, United Airbus 319 over the American Eagle Embraer. Making a choice between main-line jets can be a bit more subtle; different fliers will make different trade-offs between size -- flights with smaller capacity jets might be sacrificed when storms reduce flight slots but they’re quicker to get out of if a delay has tightened your connection. Again, graduate-level linear programming optimization algorithms for flight planning.</li></ul></li><li>On Twitter, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/PortaPocketGal\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Kendra Kroll</a> offered up a travel tip<ul><li>“Know names of cities in local vernacular. I\'ll never forget when folks on our Southbound train to Rome missed their stop by several hours as they didn\'t realize Firenze = Florence!”</li><li>Ouch! That’s a good tip; probably a next-level version of my <em>Know Your Geography</em> tip. For extra credit, be able to recognize your destination in the local non-Latin alphabet. I was in Tokyo back right before they moved the old Tsukiji Fish Market. The morning after I arrived, I was up early with jet lag and so walked over to the market. Someone had recommended a small sushi joint there, so I went looking for it. The recommendation gave the name in Latin characters but the signs in the market were only in Kanji. I eventually found a guy at an information desk who gave me directions to the place, but something to keep in mind when I travel to, say, Greece or Georgia -- the country, not the state.</li></ul></li><li>And finally, Aaron Woodlin responded to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1564695213217648642\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">my re-tweet of an ORD TSA post</a> with a picture of what one passenger pulled out of their carry-on and put in a bin to pass through the X-ray machine -- a meat cleaver, a couple of knives, a couple of saws… Somebody who’s definitely unclear on the concept of “no sharp objects in your carry-on.” Aaron’s cut -<ul><li>“What I really don\'t get are people who don\'t keep their range bags and carry-on luggage separate, and end up unintentionally packing heat at the checkpoint.  If you can afford plane fare, guns and ammo, you can spring for separate bags!”</li><li>Range bag, tool box… I can just imagine being the TSA guy shaking his head as the image of a bin full of knives and saws comes across the monitor. The guy is aware enough to know that you need to pull metal stuff out of your bag, but not hip to the fact of why. And now you’re the TSA guy who has to explain it all to him. </li></ul></li><li>And as always, thanks to all of you for the comments! Some great stuff here.</li><li>I think I’ve mentioned in prior episodes that I’m on Apple’s iPhone upgrade plan. Every year I get the new phone, send in my old one, and it resets the payment clock. Kinda like leasing a car but with lower monthly payments. Anyhow, a few weeks back, I’m scrubbing through Apple’s hour-and-a-half long announcement video -- skip all the Apple Watch stuff, slow down on the new AirPods, and then settle in for the iPhone 14 walk through. Nothing earth-shaking; I’m liking the new purple color. But then, as they were wrapping up, I had a record-scratch moment -- no SIM tray! What, what? Yup, for US iPhones, no more SIM tray; it’s all internal eSIMs! Isn’t that great? No more searching for a paper clip to pop out the tray, losing the little nano-SIM, …. No, it’s <em>not</em> great, at least for those of us who travel internationally. I’ve talked many times over the years about using local SIMs. Most recently, in episode #181, I talked about, at the start of our Puglia bike trip, spending 15 minutes and $25 in a Telecom Italia store for a SIM that gave me a local phone number (very handy for restaurant reservations) and <em>70 GB</em> of data. And now next week, all I have to do is load some money onto that SIM through the Telecom Italia website, and I’m good to go when I connect thru Frankfurt, and land in Croatia and Italy. But what about an eSIM? I couldn’t find any mainline Italian mobile carrier that offered a prepaid eSIM. Same with the UK. When I <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1567661384875347969\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">bitch-tweeted about this</a>, <a href=\"https://alosim.com/\">aloSIM</a>, a company that sells eSIMs for many countries, quickly responded “Well, our Italy eSIM data packages start at $4.50 for a week of data…” I hit their website. Their $4.50/week gives 1 GB of data. For an extra 50¢, I can get 10x that -- 10 GB of data for $5/week. I <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1567856046328135683\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">tweeted that back</a>. As you might guess, no response from aloSIM’s social media team. So, I’ve dropped off the iPhone upgrade wheel. I know I’m an edge case, and I think this could accelerate the push toward eSIMs. But like when Apple dropped the headphone jack, I think they’re 12-18 months ahead of the curve for frequent international travelers and I need something that works <em>today</em>, where the curve is right now. So I’ll wait a bit, like TravelCommons listener Jerry Sarfati who said he’s waiting for the “iPhone 15… with a USB-C charger.” I really hope it comes in purple too.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music - <em>Velvet Green of Mystery (Instrumental)</em> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/48114 Ft: Kthugha, Jeris, Martijn de Boer</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>When <em>Not </em>To Take the First Flight Out</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>As I mentioned at the top of the show, I’ve gotten pinged a bunch of times over the past couple of months by friends and family who, stuck in the midst of some travel <em>challenge</em> (not an uncommon event this summer), pinged me on Twitter, Facebook Messenger, iMessage asking “What do I do?” I thought this would die down come Labor Day with kids heading back to school ending the summer travel season. But over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been seeing a steady stream of articles headlined “Travel Woes Won’t End This Summer,” saying an extended collision of staff shortages and “revenge travel” traffic will keep things gummed up until at least October, after which we’ll slam right into the Thanksgiving and Christmas travel rush. Lovely. So in the spirit of those “I’m a flight attendant and here’s what you should do \'\' articles that have popped up this summer, here’s my “I’m a 37-year road warrior; these are my tips for handling travel chaos” list.&nbsp;</li><li>Most of this list are things you do before the day of travel -- planning and preparation. That colonial era road warrior Ben Franklin said “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” Not sure if he wrote that about his trips to England or France, but it still applies to travel. What you do the month or two before travel day is way more important that what you do that morning. So let’s get into it.<ul><li>First, figure out if you really need to fly. My normal <strong>fly-vs.-drive tipping point</strong> is 350 miles; anything less and I’ll drive it. But, all this travel chaos might change your calculus. If you fly, figure the airport logistics will add 3 hours to your in-flight time. Maybe the stories of baggage check and security lines have you thinking of arriving 2 hours before your flight. And when you arrive, the crowds mean it could take you another hour to de-plane, collect your luggage (if they haven’t lost it), and find your rental car or wait for an Uber. And that’s if there are no flight delays. Maybe the sum of all this starts to bump up your fly-vs.-drive breakeven point to something closer to 400 or 500 miles.</li><li>If you’re flying, <strong>sign up for TSA PreCheck</strong>. It’s $85 for 5 years of hassle reduction or better yet, if your revenge travel is international, sign up for <strong>Global Entry</strong> for $15 more and get Pre-Check plus no line at US passport control. And a lot of travel credit cards will credit you the $100 as one of their benefits. Just do it; the difference between a 5-minute and 45-minute line at the start of your trip is huge.</li><li><strong>Fly Non-Stop</strong> — It’s obvious because it’s the cardinal rule of air travel. High passenger load factors combined with summer thunderstorms almost guarantees late arrivals and missed connections. And an intermediate stop adds one more point of failure, one more place your luggage could fall off the trolley, one more opportunity for the airlines to screw up. Pay the extra $100 for a non-stop flight.</li><li>If you can’t fly non-stop, <strong>skip the tight connection</strong>; step away from anything less than an hour.&nbsp; Yes, we usually want to get to our destination in the shortest possible time, but accepting a connection of 1 hour or less…. Think about it – a 15-minute delay on your flight into a big hub like Chicago or Denver or Detroit (which is as good as on-time for most airlines nowadays) and you’re sprinting across terminals and concourses just to beat the closing door.</li><li>No matter non-stop or connection, <strong>catch the earliest flight</strong> you can. Delays stack up as the day wears on.&nbsp; As your airplane goes from airport to airport, the probability of it getting stuck increases.&nbsp; Overnight, airlines have a chance to recover – late planes finally get their destinations and operations groups can reassign planes.&nbsp; So while the last flight out can be a crap shoot, I rarely hit a delay on the first flight out.</li></ul></li><li>So you’ve done a good job of planning, so the night before you leave…<ul><li>Pack so you can <strong>carry on your luggage</strong>. It’s summer, so no sweaters, no coats; you’re packing your thinnest clothes. I mean, some years back, I got everything I needed for a 10-day trip in March to Iceland and Southern Spain into a 22-inch carry-on. So unless you’re doing multiple formals, everyone in your travel party should be able to fit into a carry-on sized bag. You can save $25/bag and increase the probability of having clean clothes at your destination.</li><li>And if you <em>are</em> doing multiple formals or for some other reason need to check your bags, <strong>spread everyone’s clothes across all the bags</strong>. It’s rare for an airline to lose all of your checked bags. This way, no one is having to show up at the first formal in an outfit from the nearest Walmart.</li><li>While you’re packing, <strong>charge up your battery packs</strong>. We can’t travel easily anymore without a working mobile phone. It holds our boarding passes, proof of COVID vaccination, gives us gate change and flight delay notifications, and routes us around traffic jams. A dead phone while flights are being canceled is more than just a bit of an inconvenience; having that second or third charge immediately available is critical when trying to swerve a long delay.</li><li>And then download your carrier’s app and an independent <strong>flight tracking app</strong>. Carriers have been pushing more and more functionality into their apps -- boarding passes, one-day lounge passes, real-time gate change and flight delay notifications, canceled flight rebookings…. -- so if you haven’t already, you’ll want to download that and log into it. But I also run a couple of independent apps as back-up, maybe to get a “second opinion” on delays. The free <a href=\"https://flightaware.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">FlightAware </a>app has been my go-to for years. Last spring, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/04/21/podcast-186-mask-mandate-scramble-small-airport-survival/\">episode #186</a>, I talked about another flight tracker app, <a href=\"https://www.flightyapp.com/\">Flighty</a>, that I tried out on our April trip to Santa Fe, NM. The Pro version is nice if you’re willing to pay $50/year, but not enough to get me to ditch FlightAware.</li></ul></li><li>And now we’re here, travel day. You’re all ready; your flight hasn’t been canceled or delayed… yet. Here are some “day of” tips if things start to get a little bumpy…<ul><li><strong>Keep moving forward</strong> - if you hit a delay, always keep moving forward, in the direction of your destination; the closer you are, the more options you’ll have. Last month, my daughter Claire was flying from Denver to Manchester, NH, a tough itinerary, especially now with carriers pulling back from smaller airports. She found a route on American - Denver to Charlotte to Manchester, though it left much later than the rest of her team, so she had some hours to kill at DIA. And pretty soon, she started to get alerts from the American app -- storms were forecasted in Charlotte, so if her plans were flexible…. Well, they weren’t completely flexible; she needed to get to New Hampshire that night. She pinged me - “They’re offering me a standby seat on an earlier flight to Charlotte. Should I take it?” she asked. “Absolutely!” I said. It gets you out of the Rockies and onto the East Coast. Still not drivable, but if your Manchester flight gets canceled, maybe you can get close -- like to Boston or Portland, ME and then drive from there. This is another good reason to do carry-on; it’s tough to call a quick audible like this when someone else has your bag.</li><li>And this leads me to my next travel day tip --<strong> know your geography</strong>. Claire and I joke about this. All that time she spent learning new and unique ways to do arithmetic (something about columns and diagonals; I could never figure it out), so she’d have a better <em>feel</em> for numbers. It crowded out those grade school geography and map lessons us Boomers took all those years ago. Came in handy when I was helping her think about what New England airports would be good alternatives to Manchester, to give her flexibility if her flight got canceled. In New York, the LaGuardia to Newark pivot is easy, as is the SFO to Oakland or San Jose redirect, but others aren’t so obvious.&nbsp; Everyone knows that Chicago has two airports – O’Hare and Midway.&nbsp; But what about Milwaukee’s Mitchell Field 80 miles north?&nbsp; If PHL is in trouble, how many folks think about Harrisburg or Allentown?&nbsp; I think about alternatives in two rings – within 60 miles – say, SNA and LGB for LAX; and then within 100-120 miles, which now picks up Palm Springs and San Diego for LAX.</li><li>And when something goes sideways, don’t wait; <strong>hit every contact channel the airline has</strong> <strong>immediately</strong> -- dial the customer service number while standing in line for the agent. Hit their airline’s Twitter account too; it can be a good side channel into customer service. You never know which one will open up first. Indeed, I often find I’ll get what I need from “at-ing” and DM’ing the airline on Twitter before the hold music stops playing on the 800 number. Bonus pro tip -- have your confirmation number easily available. It makes it much easier for the agent to find your reservation and help you out.</li><li>And one last thing,<strong> bring cash.</strong> Way back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">episode #136,</a> I talked about what seems to be a generational split, between residual Boomers like me and older Millennials, on the need to carry cash. No matter which side you sit on that split, it’s a fact that cash can get you out of a packed airport bar quicker than a card if you need to bolt for your flight — maybe a delay got pulled up, your gate got moved to the next terminal, or you just misread the boarding time. Being able to lay down, say a twenty and 3 ones, on the bar with your check is a whole lot quicker than waiting for the waitress to show back up, take your card, walk to the back to run it, and then bring it back again for you to sign.</li></ul></li><li>So there you go, all the things I’ve been texting folks this summer, and then some. I hope it helps you too. If you’ve got a tip, a tactic I missed, please send it along. We’ll add it to the list and talk about it on the next episode.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #189</li><li>I hope you enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. Sorry for the June-July gap. It took me longer than I thought to pack and then unpack all our worldly belongings.</li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. </li><li>And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social  -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>. And while you’re at TravelCommons.com, you can check out the show notes page for a transcript and any links I’ve mentioned. Or you can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page.</li><li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_189.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #189 —  Why We Travel; When The First Flight Isn\'t The Best','','inherit','closed','closed','','4192-revision-v1','','','2022-09-21 17:00:52','2022-09-21 22:00:52','',4192,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4194',0,'revision','',0),
(4195,1,'2022-09-21 17:15:51','2022-09-21 22:15:51','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/IMG_5006.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/IMG_5006-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Person standing in front of a wall with the message stenciled No Selfies\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> There Are Rules About Why We Travel[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Back behind the microphone after a couple of months of setting up the new studios in Nashville. I\'ve been dishing out travel advice to friends and family swept up in this summer\'s travel chaos. I\'ve distilled all those texts and messages down to my top 13 travel tips to help those traveling through the rest of the year. We also talk about the countries that have dropped all of the COVID testing requirements for inbound passengers, noodle about the rationale for JetBlue\'s dogged pursuit of Spirit Airways, Delta\'s new time limits for their Sky Club lounges, and why frequent flier award travel is suddenly a bargain again. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_189.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #189: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in the Gulch neighborhood of Nashville, TN with packs of tourists on e-scooter, and screeching freight trains losing the battle of the decibels to bachelorette parties “who-hoo-ing” from open-air party buses. Now I understand the “Nash-vegas” tag.</li><li>Not a whole lot of travel since the last episode. Was back in Chicago after almost 2 months away. As a tourist this time, staying in a hotel just off the Michigan Avenue Mag Mile strip, a neighborhood we’d actively avoid when we lived in Chicago -- too crowded, too many tourists. But now that <em>we are</em> tourists, maybe it fits a little better. We ended up here more out of convenience than anything else. It was the furthest north in the city that I could find a place to burn off some Marriott points.&nbsp;</li><li>It’s been another month where I’ve spent more time planning travel than doing it; stitching together the itinerary for an almost 3-week trip -- Nashville, connecting through Chicago (‘cause I’m no longer in a hub city) and Frankfurt, to Split, Croatia; then over to Rome and a train to Naples to get to Positano; then back to Naples for a few days; then to Rome; then to Florence; then back down to Rome to fly home by way of Newark. That looks kinda silly just typing it out. TripIt ended up being a very valuable tool. I forwarded all the various confirmation emails to it, and it did a damn good job of sequencing everything into a single itinerary, which helped me spot holes where I’d screwed up, say, a departure date or had just completely forgot about a trip leg.&nbsp; But it’s all done; I leave next week. And writing this episode is giving me another good excuse to put off thinking about packing -- 3 weeks in a carryon. “Has a washing machine” might’ve been my most critical Airbnb search criteria.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <em><em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/hisboyelroy/430\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Revolve</a>&nbsp;</em>mix&nbsp;</em>by cinematrik (c) copyright 2005 Licensed under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hisboyelroy/430</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Yup, we have mail … and comments.</li><li>Let’s start with two comments on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">TravelCommons Facebook page</a>. First up, Jim McDonough tagged the post for <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/05/26/podcast-187-moving-to-a-non-hub-airport-what-makes-a-great-taproom/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Podcast #187 — Moving to a Non-Hub Airport; What Makes A Great Taproom?\">episode #187</a> with his experience moving to a non-hub airport. Jim writes…<ul><li>“We moved from a hub (DFW, 7 parallel runways plus one other) to a non-hub (SAN, 1 runway). Clearly we were tied to American at DFW (both lifetime Gold), and there really is no single dominant carrier at SAN. We do have some sneaky long non-stops from here, though, like to Hawaii, London, Munich, Boston, New York. None of these on American, though. We are trending towards Alaska Airlines, which has pretty good service and Boeing airplanes, and if there\'s an Admirals Club around we can use it flying Alaska. I was among the people who switched to cash-back credit cards during the pandemic when no flying was happening, but I\'m rethinking that position with an eye to using miles to go places.”</li><li>Jim, thanks for that. The American-Alaska relationship has always been good for West Coast fliers. I remember, years ago, flying Alaska from Long Beach up the coast to San Jose. I could never figure out why Alaska was flying that route, but it was handy with my American status.</li></ul></li><li>Next up, Thelma Smith adding a travel tip to the post for last month’s episode<ul><li>“Good episode. I don’t travel a lot but one thing I do is if I have to check a bag I use the sky cap. I don’t have to be lugging anything through the airport and the cash comes in handy to tip them.”</li><li>Thanks, Thelma, for that tip. I\'m a big sky cap fan when I have to check a bag -- like when I’m loaded up from a big wine country trip -- and, yes, cash is absolutely required for their tip!</li></ul></li><li>Moving to the TravelCommons website, Geoff Slater left this comment<ul><li>“Excellent return podcast! A very frequent traveler, I agreed with everything. A quibble however was the advice to take a nonstop. While I don’t disagree, I fly in and out of Burlington, VT, so that’s rarely an option. So for me, I also consider my options for connecting airports. As a United flier, Denver in the summer when it’s an option, and then IAD, and trying to avoid EWR. Getting a bit more esoteric for the non-frequent flier, I also consider plane type. And with United 1K status, I also take advantage of the same day change to avoid weather problems.”</li><li>Geoff, thanks for the comments. Kinda back to my pre-break episode about moving from to a non-hub airport -- most of your direct flight options are to hubs like DEN and IAD. Your strategy on hub selection is smart; pick hubs off by themselves with long well-separated runways. When I was doing work in north Jersey, we used to joke that anyone spitting on a runway at EWR would mean an hour delay; the runways are too close together to allow parallel take-offs and landings in all but the best of weather. Your comment about plane type -- rather than esoteric, I think it’s more of a graduate-level flight planning tip. The first cut is regional jet vs. main-line jet. I’ll always pick the, say, United Airbus 319 over the American Eagle Embraer. Making a choice between main-line jets can be a bit more subtle; different fliers will make different trade-offs between size -- flights with smaller capacity jets might be sacrificed when storms reduce flight slots but they’re quicker to get out of if a delay has tightened your connection. Again, graduate-level linear programming optimization algorithms for flight planning.</li></ul></li><li>On Twitter, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/PortaPocketGal\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Kendra Kroll</a> offered up a travel tip<ul><li>“Know names of cities in local vernacular. I\'ll never forget when folks on our Southbound train to Rome missed their stop by several hours as they didn\'t realize Firenze = Florence!”</li><li>Ouch! That’s a good tip; probably a next-level version of my <em>Know Your Geography</em> tip. For extra credit, be able to recognize your destination in the local non-Latin alphabet. I was in Tokyo back right before they moved the old Tsukiji Fish Market. The morning after I arrived, I was up early with jet lag and so walked over to the market. Someone had recommended a small sushi joint there, so I went looking for it. The recommendation gave the name in Latin characters but the signs in the market were only in Kanji. I eventually found a guy at an information desk who gave me directions to the place, but something to keep in mind when I travel to, say, Greece or Georgia -- the country, not the state.</li></ul></li><li>And finally, Aaron Woodlin responded to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1564695213217648642\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">my re-tweet of an ORD TSA post</a> with a picture of what one passenger pulled out of their carry-on and put in a bin to pass through the X-ray machine -- a meat cleaver, a couple of knives, a couple of saws… Somebody who’s definitely unclear on the concept of “no sharp objects in your carry-on.” Aaron’s cut -<ul><li>“What I really don\'t get are people who don\'t keep their range bags and carry-on luggage separate, and end up unintentionally packing heat at the checkpoint.&nbsp; If you can afford plane fare, guns and ammo, you can spring for separate bags!”</li><li>Range bag, tool box… I can just imagine being the TSA guy shaking his head as the image of a bin full of knives and saws comes across the monitor. The guy is aware enough to know that you need to pull metal stuff out of your bag, but not hip to the fact of why. And now you’re the TSA guy who has to explain it all to him.&nbsp;</li></ul></li><li>And as always, thanks to all of you for the comments! Some great stuff here.</li><li>I think I’ve mentioned in prior episodes that I’m on Apple’s iPhone upgrade plan. Every year I get the new phone, send in my old one, and it resets the payment clock. Kinda like leasing a car but with lower monthly payments. Anyhow, a few weeks back, I’m scrubbing through Apple’s hour-and-a-half long announcement video -- skip all the Apple Watch stuff, slow down on the new AirPods, and then settle in for the iPhone 14 walk through. Nothing earth-shaking; I’m liking the new purple color. But then, as they were wrapping up, I had a record-scratch moment -- no SIM tray! What, what? Yup, for US iPhones, no more SIM tray; it’s all internal eSIMs! Isn’t that great? No more searching for a paper clip to pop out the tray, losing the little nano-SIM, …. No, it’s <em>not</em> great, at least for those of us who travel internationally. I’ve talked many times over the years about using local SIMs. Most recently, in episode #181, I talked about, at the start of our Puglia bike trip, spending 15 minutes and $25 in a Telecom Italia store for a SIM that gave me a local phone number (very handy for restaurant reservations) and <em>70 GB</em> of data. And now next week, all I have to do is load some money onto that SIM through the Telecom Italia website, and I’m good to go when I connect thru Frankfurt, and land in Croatia and Italy. But what about an eSIM? I couldn’t find any mainline Italian mobile carrier that offered a prepaid eSIM. Same with the UK. When I <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1567661384875347969\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">bitch-tweeted about this</a>, <a href=\"https://alosim.com/\">aloSIM</a>, a company that sells eSIMs for many countries, quickly responded “Well, our Italy eSIM data packages start at $4.50 for a week of data…” I hit their website. Their $4.50/week gives 1 GB of data. For an extra 50¢, I can get 10x that -- 10 GB of data for $5/week. I <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1567856046328135683\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">tweeted that back</a>. As you might guess, no response from aloSIM’s social media team. So, I’ve dropped off the iPhone upgrade wheel. I know I’m an edge case, and I think this could accelerate the push toward eSIMs. But like when Apple dropped the headphone jack, I think they’re 12-18 months ahead of the curve for frequent international travelers and I need something that works <em>today</em>, where the curve is right now. So I’ll wait a bit, like TravelCommons listener Jerry Sarfati who said he’s waiting for the “iPhone 15… with a USB-C charger.” I really hope it comes in purple too.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music - <em>Velvet Green of Mystery (Instrumental)</em> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/48114 Ft: Kthugha, Jeris, Martijn de Boer</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>When <em>Not </em>To Take the First Flight Out</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Moving to the mail portion of the episode, a day after I published <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/08/18/podcast-188-my-top-tips-to-survive-travel-chaos/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Podcast #188 —  My Top Travel Tips to Survive Airport Chaos\">the last episode</a>, I saw an email in the TravelCommons inbox with the subject “Is the first flight of the day still the best one? No. – air travel scientist for interviews.” This caught my eye because the 5th of the 13 tips to avoid airport chaos I’d <em>just </em>published was “catch the earliest flight you can”. So I replied to the email “Tell me why I’m wrong!”</li><li>Which led to this conversation with <a href=\"http://shj.cs.illinois.edu/\">Dr. Sheldon Jacobson</a>, Professor in Computer Science at the University of Illinois. Over the years, Dr. Jacobson has done projects using operations research models to optimize aviation security. But most recently, he <a href=\"https://www.chicagotribune.com/opinion/commentary/ct-opinion-travel-delays-flight-bookings-pandemic-20220830-p64ax3a74vaxnnzqwts4nel3cy-story.html\">wrote about</a> how the received frequent flier wisdom about catching the first flight out might not always be right. So I started our discussion asking him “Where did I get it wrong?”<ul><li>Sheldon: When you\'re flying in and out of hub airports, conventional wisdom is, in fact, correct. You do want to take the first flight of the day because at a hub airport, there\'s a lot more flexibility once a plane arrives at the end of the day. It\'s going to be cleaned, it\'s going to be maintained. Its gonna be fresh for the new day. If it turns out that some of the crew members become unavailable, you have alternatives because so many people have bases. So, this is in Chicago and Dallas for American, For United, you also have Washington Dulles as well as Chicago. For Delta, of course, it\'s Atlanta, Minneapolis, Detroit. So that\'s a great strategy. But what if you\'re not in a hub airport and that\'s when things start to get more nuanced. And the best way to think of this is that every airplane as well as every crew when they fly from city to city, they are a link in a chain. At the end of the day, you think, “Okay, the chain ends.” Actually, it doesn\'t. because the first flight of the day is the connection and the link from the last flight of the previous day. And all of this comes out and starts to impact that decision of the first flight of the day. Because if that flight comes in late, remember the last flight of the day, that\'s going to be the first flight out of a regional airport. So as a result of that, you actually want to take the second flight of the day out of a regional airport or a smaller large airport. That\'s the best strategy when it comes to these secondary and tertiary airports.</li><li>Mark: Actually, what you\'ve said, I\'ve seen that happen in smaller regional airports, say Lexington Kentucky, Appleton, Wisconsin, where that first flight of the day is not on the ground, so it\'s got to come in from a hub. Is there a split where, say, larger non-hub airports, the conventional wisdom still holds? Say where I am now in Nashville, or something like in Indianapolis? Where do those fall as far as the conventional wisdom on catching the first flight out?</li><li>Sheldon: Yes, certainly when you come to Nashville, Indianapolis, Columbus,&nbsp; Ohio, Pittsburgh,&nbsp; Pennsylvania -- some of these have been de-hubbed over the years. You\'re getting into a point that you have a lot of choices available. So then it becomes a little more nuanced because you could book the first flight on, let\'s say American and that one may have difficulties because that plane came in overnight and it was delayed because of storms in Chicago. But on the other hand, if there are options on Delta which are coming from Atlanta where there were not storms, you can always then get switched over for it. So when you get into those middle airports, they\'re not full hubs, but they\'re not the small regionals that have two flights a day, then it becomes a little more nuanced. And then you start to look across airlines as opposed to just within the airline.</li><li>Mark: Now if we pivot just slightly and think about different types of airlines. So if I think about hub-centric airlines, like the traditional United, American, Delta versus, say, a Southwest, which I\'ve joked in the past feels like they\'re running milk runs across the country. So there\'s not necessarily a hub, just that plane is running a line. Is there a difference between those two types of airlines on that first flight out?</li><li>Sheldon: There is, for a variety of reasons. With Southwest, they\'re trying to pack as many segments or links per day for every airplane. That\'s how they stay profitable. Their turn times are tremendous, but it also makes them more vulnerable to any kind of mechanical or weather delays or air traffic control slowdowns because they don\'t have the slack built into their system in their links. As a result of that, when you get to the end of the day, they still have to abide by the FAA regulations in terms of crew rest. And the question is, even though they are in some sense of point to point airline, they have areas of the country that have a concentration of flights like Dallas Love for example, like Chicago, like Baltimore-Washington, where they traditionally had a lot of flights. So you do have to look then, even though they aren\'t traditional hubs, they operate similarly. Where is the crew located; where they choosing to live? And that\'s an important component because when you\'re trying to reschedule because of delays, the flight that you\'re going to take out at 6 am may have come from a city where the plane only arrived at midnight. The flight crew needs the rest. They will not be able to leave on time. But if you switch crews and you have the flexibility because you have a sufficient number of crew members. It solves the problem. Is that going to exist in your city? So even though Southwest doesn\'t have the traditional hub and spoke system, they have airports that, in some sense, act like their hubs.</li><li>Mark: Sheldon, how much of this do you think is a function of the current tight labor market that airlines say they\'re operating in?</li><li>Sheldon: Now the situation we\'re in, which was brought on by COVID, of course, meant that they had a tremendous amount of layoffs and looking down the road, they were trying to survive financially. And now they\'re in a situation where they have to rehire but retrain all of these pilots. People think “Oh, you haven\'t flown for 8 months, 9 months? We’ll just put you in a cockpit and you’re fine.” It doesn\'t work that way. Once you\'ve been off for 6 months, it\'s as if you\'ve never flown. You still have the 1,500 hours which are required to fly, but you get rusty. And the pilots themselves say “I\'m really not as comfortable as I used to be,” especially on landings, which is the most critical activity that they do once they\'re in flight, it\'s pretty much status quo. Taking off is reasonably straightforward, but landing is the tricky part. And they just feel a little less comfortable unless they have the training. And the fact is they want to be safe as much as the passengers and the airline\'s want them to be safe. Getting these people back in the cockpit training and they have so many flight simulators. So much training that needs to be gone through. This is a non-trivial process.</li><li>Mark: Sheldon, thank you very much for that. That\'s very helpful. Any last thought, any last tips as people are looking to navigate through the back end of the summer season and into the holiday flying; things that you use to avoid airport chaos?</li><li>Sheldon: Well, we\'ve just now entered the post-summer/fall travel period and I check the numbers daily in terms of screenings at TSA checkpoints and the numbers are trying to come down, which means that there\'s gonna be a lot less stress and strain on the system. The airlines are starting to ramp up their schedules. I\'ve booked some things out for later in the fall and they\'re already changing the schedules. So, I know that they\'re starting to add more flights and more opportunities for people. For the holiday travel season this year, Christmas and New Year\'s fall on a Sunday. And that means that people are going to be traveling on Friday and Saturday. If you can travel on Thursday or Wednesday, you may find it a lot less taxing. So, thinking a little bit ahead in that regard may be very helpful. You can\'t predict weather storms, a nor’easter is going through, you know, it’s late in the year. The other strategy that I\'ve used because I\'ve mostly lived in non-hub cities is that there\'s always been a dominant airline and a non-dominant airline. And the strategy I\'ve always used is to always become loyal to the non-dominant airline. And the reason being is that when the non-dominant airline had problems, they were always gracious to put you on the dominant airline, which had much more choices. And as a result, I rarely got stuck because if I was on the dominant airline, trying to find a plane on the non-dominant one was much more difficult to get the seats available</li><li>Mark: That\'s an interesting strategy. Kind of counterintuitive, but as you explain it, it makes sense.</li><li>Sheldon: I have never gotten stuck because by flying the non-dominant, even out of a hub airport. You think of a place like Detroit where they have Delta as the dominant airline. If you fly American out of there, the people are working extra hard to get your business. And as a result of that, I\'ve always found service is better in the non-dominant airline, even in the hub cities where they\'re competing.</li><li>Mark: That\'s a good tip. Thanks for that Sheldon. Dr. Sheldon, Jacobson at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. Thank you very much for joining us on the TravelCommons podcast.</li><li>Sheldon: Thank you. It\'s wonderful to be with you.</li></ul></li><li>Bridge Music - <em>Velvet Green of Mystery (Instrumental)</em> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/48114 Ft: Kthugha, Jeris, Martijn de Boer</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Why We Travel</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Some years ago, on some milestone birthday (I’m not saying which), my kids gave me the book <em>1,000 Places to See Before You Die</em>. Hmm… was there a message somewhere in that gift? Not that they would admit. But it was a fun book flip through -- to remind me of past trips and give me ideas of places to go next. So when the TravelCommons inbox offered up an opportunity to interview the author, Patricia Schultz, about her new book, I jumped at it.<ul><li>Mark: Patricia, thanks for joining us on the TravelCommons podcast. Your new book is <em>Why We Travel: 100 Reasons to See the World</em>. That topic -- why we travel -- has been a common one here on TravelCommons; how travel expands our horizons, our perspectives, helps us connect with others and with ourselves as we lose ourselves in the “otherness” of a new place. So Patricia, help us. What\'s your take on why we travel?</li><li>Patricia: Well, I used this period of the pandemic to have that conversation with myself. This moment of Covid allowed me this unprecedented moment where suddenly I was very stationary. I thought it was very important for me, as a travel writer, to reassess all over again the importance of travel. But the “why” needs to be kept very forefront, so that we have that appreciation, and we understand that we\'re privileged and it\'s an honor and it\'s something that you need to travel meaningfully and not just on automatic pilot. And I think first and foremost it\'s, for me, it\'s food for my soul. And as you said, it opens our perspectives and it opens our heads, it opens our hearts. You mentioned connecting with other people. That\'s part of opening your heart with that exchange with your Uber driver or your guide or the lady in the open-air market who’s selling her tomatoes and whoever you have that moment with. It’s all the people along the way that you meet and accrue and collect all of these experiences that are life lessons. Not just the logistics and the details of trip planning, but life lessons as they pertain to what you bring home with you and how you deal with life and how you\'ve become more resourceful and the “daily-ness” of life is dealt with in a different way. I know I\'m more tolerant. I know I\'m more respectful in general. I know that I\'m more curious and that\'s what gets you out the front door at the end of the day, which is often usually the most difficult part of all of this -- getting going.</li><li>Mark: Absolutely. Patricia, the book is a great mix of beautiful photos and quotes about travel. Definitely a book that you need to have in your hand rather than on your tablet. What was your curation process? How did you pick the pictures and the quotes that went into the book?</li><li>Patricia: I\'m so glad that you touched on that because I myself thought that a book that seemingly this simplistic would just kind of write itself.</li><li>Mark: It\'s never that simple though. Right?</li><li>Patricia: No. One of the quotes I used is by Beverly Sills, the great operatic singer, who said there are no shortcuts to any place worth going to or anything worth doing, I might add as a postscript, and writing one of them. But the photos, which are not mine I\'m sorry to say, they\'re colorful and they\'re energetic and they\'re vibrant and there\'s a great sense of place and excitement to them, I think. And that\'s what we were aiming for to have this book, everything, kind of jump off the page at you because that\'s part of the message, the message of how exciting and exhilarating travel can be and then to match it with the appropriate message. The message that is embodied in a quotation or in an aphorism or in a list that I make up or in an anecdote that matches what the photograph recounts. So, it all was a real departure for me because my books until now have just been a kind of encyclopedia of 1,000 places around the world. But that same broad, comprehensive mix of experience and geography and message and importance of travel that I tried to infuse throughout <em>1,000 Places</em> is the same mix that I tried to embed in every aphorism and in every photo and in the sequence of the book. It\'s not a big book. It\'s a hardcover book. It\'s not oversized and it\'s not all that many pages; it\'s somewhere over 100 pages. But there\'s a lot that can be said because travel means many, many, many different things to many different people. But at the end of the day, it makes us better people and that\'s kind of Period, Amen!</li><li>Mark: And it\'s certainly more focused, as you said, on inspiring people to travel, to pull their bag out from under their bed rather than a tour guide\'s list of where to go, or some expert’s advice on how to pack that bag. But some might see this collide with the ethics, the concern about climate change. How do you square that circle?</li><li>Patricia: If you travel with respect and with that, conviction to see the world for all the right places, and not because you\'re checking off countries or you\'re filling empty time. But if you want to experience another culture and bring those experiences home with you, ultimately, probably the best thing we can hope to take away from travel is that when we return to our homes, we are equipped to make your best life for yourself and your neighbors and your community and the world at large. And also, the very notion that travel isn\'t inherently international or a 12-hour long haul flight to get you to the other side of the world. You know, you can walk out your front door and walk around the block in midtown Manhattan where I live and that\'s travel enough for many people. The people watching, the theater of the street or filling your car or charging your car and taking that road trip to the local state park. So, there are all kinds of ways that you can easily accommodate all of those concerns if you travel well. And I don\'t mean five-star deluxe and I don\'t mean remote dream destinations of Mongolia and Africa, although those are all pretty fantastic as well. Travel well in that you really maximize the time made available to you and the money that\'s in your budget. But I think you just need to go with the right head and the right head to me has always meant curiosity and respect. And if that\'s the case then you will travel respectfully, and you will address climate change in a way that as an individual we can.</li><li>Mark: Fantastic. Well, Patricia Schultz, author of the new book <em>Why We Travel: 100 Reasons to See the World</em>. Patricia, thanks for stopping by the TravelCommons podcast to give us your thoughts on why we should travel. Really appreciate the time.</li><li>Patricia: Thank you very much. Thank you for having me.</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #189</li><li>A little change of pace; a lot less of my voice and more of others. I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. </li><li>And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social  -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>. And while you’re at TravelCommons.com, you can check out the show notes page for a transcript and any links I’ve mentioned. Or you can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page.</li><li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_189.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #189 —  Why We Travel; When The First Flight Isn\'t The Best','','inherit','closed','closed','','4192-revision-v1','','','2022-09-21 17:15:51','2022-09-21 22:15:51','',4192,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4195',0,'revision','',0),
(4196,1,'2022-09-21 17:20:49','2022-09-21 22:20:49','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/IMG_5006.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/IMG_5006-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Person standing in front of a wall with the message stenciled No Selfies\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> There Are Rules About Why We Travel[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Back behind the microphone after a couple of months of setting up the new studios in Nashville. I\'ve been dishing out travel advice to friends and family swept up in this summer\'s travel chaos. I\'ve distilled all those texts and messages down to my top 13 travel tips to help those traveling through the rest of the year. We also talk about the countries that have dropped all of the COVID testing requirements for inbound passengers, noodle about the rationale for JetBlue\'s dogged pursuit of Spirit Airways, Delta\'s new time limits for their Sky Club lounges, and why frequent flier award travel is suddenly a bargain again. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_189.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #189: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in the Gulch neighborhood of Nashville, TN with packs of tourists on e-scooter, and screeching freight trains losing the battle of the decibels to bachelorette parties “who-hoo-ing” from open-air party buses. Now I understand the “Nash-vegas” tag.</li><li>Not a whole lot of travel since the last episode. Was back in Chicago after almost 2 months away. As a tourist this time, staying in a hotel just off the Michigan Avenue Mag Mile strip, a neighborhood we’d actively avoid when we lived in Chicago -- too crowded, too many tourists. But now that <em>we are</em> tourists, maybe it fits a little better. We ended up here more out of convenience than anything else. It was the furthest north in the city that I could find a place to burn off some Marriott points.&nbsp;</li><li>It’s been another month where I’ve spent more time planning travel than doing it; stitching together the itinerary for an almost 3-week trip -- Nashville, connecting through Chicago (‘cause I’m no longer in a hub city) and Frankfurt, to Split, Croatia; then over to Rome and a train to Naples to get to Positano; then back to Naples for a few days; then to Rome; then to Florence; then back down to Rome to fly home by way of Newark. That looks kinda silly just typing it out. TripIt ended up being a very valuable tool. I forwarded all the various confirmation emails to it, and it did a damn good job of sequencing everything into a single itinerary, which helped me spot holes where I’d screwed up, say, a departure date or had just completely forgot about a trip leg.&nbsp; But it’s all done; I leave next week. And writing this episode is giving me another good excuse to put off thinking about packing -- 3 weeks in a carryon. “Has a washing machine” might’ve been my most critical Airbnb search criteria.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <em><em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/hisboyelroy/430\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Revolve</a>&nbsp;</em>mix&nbsp;</em>by cinematrik (c) copyright 2005 Licensed under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hisboyelroy/430</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Yup, we have mail … and comments.</li><li>Let’s start with two comments on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">TravelCommons Facebook page</a>. First up, Jim McDonough tagged the post for <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/05/26/podcast-187-moving-to-a-non-hub-airport-what-makes-a-great-taproom/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Podcast #187 — Moving to a Non-Hub Airport; What Makes A Great Taproom?\">episode #187</a> with his experience moving to a non-hub airport. Jim writes…<ul><li>“We moved from a hub (DFW, 7 parallel runways plus one other) to a non-hub (SAN, 1 runway). Clearly we were tied to American at DFW (both lifetime Gold), and there really is no single dominant carrier at SAN. We do have some sneaky long non-stops from here, though, like to Hawaii, London, Munich, Boston, New York. None of these on American, though. We are trending towards Alaska Airlines, which has pretty good service and Boeing airplanes, and if there\'s an Admirals Club around we can use it flying Alaska. I was among the people who switched to cash-back credit cards during the pandemic when no flying was happening, but I\'m rethinking that position with an eye to using miles to go places.”</li><li>Jim, thanks for that. The American-Alaska relationship has always been good for West Coast fliers. I remember, years ago, flying Alaska from Long Beach up the coast to San Jose. I could never figure out why Alaska was flying that route, but it was handy with my American status.</li></ul></li><li>Next up, Thelma Smith adding a travel tip to the post for last month’s episode<ul><li>“Good episode. I don’t travel a lot but one thing I do is if I have to check a bag I use the sky cap. I don’t have to be lugging anything through the airport and the cash comes in handy to tip them.”</li><li>Thanks, Thelma, for that tip. I\'m a big sky cap fan when I have to check a bag -- like when I’m loaded up from a big wine country trip -- and, yes, cash is absolutely required for their tip!</li></ul></li><li>Moving to the TravelCommons website, Geoff Slater left this comment<ul><li>“Excellent return podcast! A very frequent traveler, I agreed with everything. A quibble however was the advice to take a nonstop. While I don’t disagree, I fly in and out of Burlington, VT, so that’s rarely an option. So for me, I also consider my options for connecting airports. As a United flier, Denver in the summer when it’s an option, and then IAD, and trying to avoid EWR. Getting a bit more esoteric for the non-frequent flier, I also consider plane type. And with United 1K status, I also take advantage of the same day change to avoid weather problems.”</li><li>Geoff, thanks for the comments. Kinda back to my pre-break episode about moving from to a non-hub airport -- most of your direct flight options are to hubs like DEN and IAD. Your strategy on hub selection is smart; pick hubs off by themselves with long well-separated runways. When I was doing work in north Jersey, we used to joke that anyone spitting on a runway at EWR would mean an hour delay; the runways are too close together to allow parallel take-offs and landings in all but the best of weather. Your comment about plane type -- rather than esoteric, I think it’s more of a graduate-level flight planning tip. The first cut is regional jet vs. main-line jet. I’ll always pick the, say, United Airbus 319 over the American Eagle Embraer. Making a choice between main-line jets can be a bit more subtle; different fliers will make different trade-offs between size -- flights with smaller capacity jets might be sacrificed when storms reduce flight slots but they’re quicker to get out of if a delay has tightened your connection. Again, graduate-level linear programming optimization algorithms for flight planning.</li></ul></li><li>On Twitter, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/PortaPocketGal\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Kendra Kroll</a> offered up a travel tip<ul><li>“Know names of cities in local vernacular. I\'ll never forget when folks on our Southbound train to Rome missed their stop by several hours as they didn\'t realize Firenze = Florence!”</li><li>Ouch! That’s a good tip; probably a next-level version of my <em>Know Your Geography</em> tip. For extra credit, be able to recognize your destination in the local non-Latin alphabet. I was in Tokyo back right before they moved the old Tsukiji Fish Market. The morning after I arrived, I was up early with jet lag and so walked over to the market. Someone had recommended a small sushi joint there, so I went looking for it. The recommendation gave the name in Latin characters but the signs in the market were only in Kanji. I eventually found a guy at an information desk who gave me directions to the place, but something to keep in mind when I travel to, say, Greece or Georgia -- the country, not the state.</li></ul></li><li>And finally, Aaron Woodlin responded to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1564695213217648642\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">my re-tweet of an ORD TSA post</a> with a picture of what one passenger pulled out of their carry-on and put in a bin to pass through the X-ray machine -- a meat cleaver, a couple of knives, a couple of saws… Somebody who’s definitely unclear on the concept of “no sharp objects in your carry-on.” Aaron’s cut -<ul><li>“What I really don\'t get are people who don\'t keep their range bags and carry-on luggage separate, and end up unintentionally packing heat at the checkpoint.&nbsp; If you can afford plane fare, guns and ammo, you can spring for separate bags!”</li><li>Range bag, tool box… I can just imagine being the TSA guy shaking his head as the image of a bin full of knives and saws comes across the monitor. The guy is aware enough to know that you need to pull metal stuff out of your bag, but not hip to the fact of why. And now you’re the TSA guy who has to explain it all to him.&nbsp;</li></ul></li><li>And as always, thanks to all of you for the comments! Some great stuff here.</li><li>I think I’ve mentioned in prior episodes that I’m on Apple’s iPhone upgrade plan. Every year I get the new phone, send in my old one, and it resets the payment clock. Kinda like leasing a car but with lower monthly payments. Anyhow, a few weeks back, I’m scrubbing through Apple’s hour-and-a-half long announcement video -- skip all the Apple Watch stuff, slow down on the new AirPods, and then settle in for the iPhone 14 walk through. Nothing earth-shaking; I’m liking the new purple color. But then, as they were wrapping up, I had a record-scratch moment -- no SIM tray! What, what? Yup, for US iPhones, no more SIM tray; it’s all internal eSIMs! Isn’t that great? No more searching for a paper clip to pop out the tray, losing the little nano-SIM, …. No, it’s <em>not</em> great, at least for those of us who travel internationally. I’ve talked many times over the years about using local SIMs. Most recently, in episode #181, I talked about, at the start of our Puglia bike trip, spending 15 minutes and $25 in a Telecom Italia store for a SIM that gave me a local phone number (very handy for restaurant reservations) and <em>70 GB</em> of data. And now next week, all I have to do is load some money onto that SIM through the Telecom Italia website, and I’m good to go when I connect thru Frankfurt, and land in Croatia and Italy. But what about an eSIM? I couldn’t find any mainline Italian mobile carrier that offered a prepaid eSIM. Same with the UK. When I <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1567661384875347969\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">bitch-tweeted about this</a>, <a href=\"https://alosim.com/\">aloSIM</a>, a company that sells eSIMs for many countries, quickly responded “Well, our Italy eSIM data packages start at $4.50 for a week of data…” I hit their website. Their $4.50/week gives 1 GB of data. For an extra 50¢, I can get 10x that -- 10 GB of data for $5/week. I <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1567856046328135683\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">tweeted that back</a>. As you might guess, no response from aloSIM’s social media team. So, I’ve dropped off the iPhone upgrade wheel. I know I’m an edge case, and I think this could accelerate the push toward eSIMs. But like when Apple dropped the headphone jack, I think they’re 12-18 months ahead of the curve for frequent international travelers and I need something that works <em>today</em>, where the curve is right now. So I’ll wait a bit, like TravelCommons listener Jerry Sarfati who said he’s waiting for the “iPhone 15… with a USB-C charger.” I really hope it comes in purple too.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music - <em>Velvet Green of Mystery (Instrumental)</em> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/48114 Ft: Kthugha, Jeris, Martijn de Boer</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>When <em>Not </em>To Take the First Flight Out</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Moving to the mail portion of the episode, a day after I published <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/08/18/podcast-188-my-top-tips-to-survive-travel-chaos/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Podcast #188 —  My Top Travel Tips to Survive Airport Chaos\">the last episode</a>, I saw an email in the TravelCommons inbox with the subject “Is the first flight of the day still the best one? No. – air travel scientist for interviews.” This caught my eye because the 5th of the 13 tips to avoid airport chaos I’d <em>just </em>published was “catch the earliest flight you can”. So I replied to the email “Tell me why I’m wrong!”</li><li>Which led to this conversation with <a href=\"http://shj.cs.illinois.edu/\">Dr. Sheldon Jacobson</a>, Professor in Computer Science at the University of Illinois. Over the years, Dr. Jacobson has done projects using operations research models to optimize aviation security. But most recently, he <a href=\"https://www.chicagotribune.com/opinion/commentary/ct-opinion-travel-delays-flight-bookings-pandemic-20220830-p64ax3a74vaxnnzqwts4nel3cy-story.html\">wrote about</a> how the received frequent flier wisdom about catching the first flight out might not always be right. So I started our discussion asking him “Where did I get it wrong?”<ul><li>Sheldon: When you\'re flying in and out of hub airports, conventional wisdom is, in fact, correct. You do want to take the first flight of the day because at a hub airport, there\'s a lot more flexibility once a plane arrives at the end of the day. It\'s going to be cleaned, it\'s going to be maintained. Its gonna be fresh for the new day. If it turns out that some of the crew members become unavailable, you have alternatives because so many people have bases. So, this is in Chicago and Dallas for American, For United, you also have Washington Dulles as well as Chicago. For Delta, of course, it\'s Atlanta, Minneapolis, Detroit. So that\'s a great strategy. But what if you\'re not in a hub airport and that\'s when things start to get more nuanced. And the best way to think of this is that every airplane as well as every crew when they fly from city to city, they are a link in a chain. At the end of the day, you think, “Okay, the chain ends.” Actually, it doesn\'t. because the first flight of the day is the connection and the link from the last flight of the previous day. And all of this comes out and starts to impact that decision of the first flight of the day. Because if that flight comes in late, remember the last flight of the day, that\'s going to be the first flight out of a regional airport. So as a result of that, you actually want to take the second flight of the day out of a regional airport or a smaller large airport. That\'s the best strategy when it comes to these secondary and tertiary airports.</li><li>Mark: Actually, what you\'ve said, I\'ve seen that happen in smaller regional airports, say Lexington Kentucky, Appleton, Wisconsin, where that first flight of the day is not on the ground, so it\'s got to come in from a hub. Is there a split where, say, larger non-hub airports, the conventional wisdom still holds? Say where I am now in Nashville, or something like in Indianapolis? Where do those fall as far as the conventional wisdom on catching the first flight out?</li><li>Sheldon: Yes, certainly when you come to Nashville, Indianapolis, Columbus,&nbsp; Ohio, Pittsburgh,&nbsp; Pennsylvania -- some of these have been de-hubbed over the years. You\'re getting into a point that you have a lot of choices available. So then it becomes a little more nuanced because you could book the first flight on, let\'s say American and that one may have difficulties because that plane came in overnight and it was delayed because of storms in Chicago. But on the other hand, if there are options on Delta which are coming from Atlanta where there were not storms, you can always then get switched over for it. So when you get into those middle airports, they\'re not full hubs, but they\'re not the small regionals that have two flights a day, then it becomes a little more nuanced. And then you start to look across airlines as opposed to just within the airline.</li><li>Mark: Now if we pivot just slightly and think about different types of airlines. So if I think about hub-centric airlines, like the traditional United, American, Delta versus, say, a Southwest, which I\'ve joked in the past feels like they\'re running milk runs across the country. So there\'s not necessarily a hub, just that plane is running a line. Is there a difference between those two types of airlines on that first flight out?</li><li>Sheldon: There is, for a variety of reasons. With Southwest, they\'re trying to pack as many segments or links per day for every airplane. That\'s how they stay profitable. Their turn times are tremendous, but it also makes them more vulnerable to any kind of mechanical or weather delays or air traffic control slowdowns because they don\'t have the slack built into their system in their links. As a result of that, when you get to the end of the day, they still have to abide by the FAA regulations in terms of crew rest. And the question is, even though they are in some sense of point to point airline, they have areas of the country that have a concentration of flights like Dallas Love for example, like Chicago, like Baltimore-Washington, where they traditionally had a lot of flights. So you do have to look then, even though they aren\'t traditional hubs, they operate similarly. Where is the crew located; where they choosing to live? And that\'s an important component because when you\'re trying to reschedule because of delays, the flight that you\'re going to take out at 6 am may have come from a city where the plane only arrived at midnight. The flight crew needs the rest. They will not be able to leave on time. But if you switch crews and you have the flexibility because you have a sufficient number of crew members. It solves the problem. Is that going to exist in your city? So even though Southwest doesn\'t have the traditional hub and spoke system, they have airports that, in some sense, act like their hubs.</li><li>Mark: Sheldon, how much of this do you think is a function of the current tight labor market that airlines say they\'re operating in?</li><li>Sheldon: Now the situation we\'re in, which was brought on by COVID, of course, meant that they had a tremendous amount of layoffs and looking down the road, they were trying to survive financially. And now they\'re in a situation where they have to rehire but retrain all of these pilots. People think “Oh, you haven\'t flown for 8 months, 9 months? We’ll just put you in a cockpit and you’re fine.” It doesn\'t work that way. Once you\'ve been off for 6 months, it\'s as if you\'ve never flown. You still have the 1,500 hours which are required to fly, but you get rusty. And the pilots themselves say “I\'m really not as comfortable as I used to be,” especially on landings, which is the most critical activity that they do once they\'re in flight, it\'s pretty much status quo. Taking off is reasonably straightforward, but landing is the tricky part. And they just feel a little less comfortable unless they have the training. And the fact is they want to be safe as much as the passengers and the airline\'s want them to be safe. Getting these people back in the cockpit training and they have so many flight simulators. So much training that needs to be gone through. This is a non-trivial process.</li><li>Mark: Sheldon, thank you very much for that. That\'s very helpful. Any last thought, any last tips as people are looking to navigate through the back end of the summer season and into the holiday flying; things that you use to avoid airport chaos?</li><li>Sheldon: Well, we\'ve just now entered the post-summer/fall travel period and I check the numbers daily in terms of screenings at TSA checkpoints and the numbers are trying to come down, which means that there\'s gonna be a lot less stress and strain on the system. The airlines are starting to ramp up their schedules. I\'ve booked some things out for later in the fall and they\'re already changing the schedules. So, I know that they\'re starting to add more flights and more opportunities for people. For the holiday travel season this year, Christmas and New Year\'s fall on a Sunday. And that means that people are going to be traveling on Friday and Saturday. If you can travel on Thursday or Wednesday, you may find it a lot less taxing. So, thinking a little bit ahead in that regard may be very helpful. You can\'t predict weather storms, a nor’easter is going through, you know, it’s late in the year. The other strategy that I\'ve used because I\'ve mostly lived in non-hub cities is that there\'s always been a dominant airline and a non-dominant airline. And the strategy I\'ve always used is to always become loyal to the non-dominant airline. And the reason being is that when the non-dominant airline had problems, they were always gracious to put you on the dominant airline, which had much more choices. And as a result, I rarely got stuck because if I was on the dominant airline, trying to find a plane on the non-dominant one was much more difficult to get the seats available</li><li>Mark: That\'s an interesting strategy. Kind of counterintuitive, but as you explain it, it makes sense.</li><li>Sheldon: I have never gotten stuck because by flying the non-dominant, even out of a hub airport. You think of a place like Detroit where they have Delta as the dominant airline. If you fly American out of there, the people are working extra hard to get your business. And as a result of that, I\'ve always found service is better in the non-dominant airline, even in the hub cities where they\'re competing.</li><li>Mark: That\'s a good tip. Thanks for that Sheldon. Dr. Sheldon, Jacobson at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. Thank you very much for joining us on the TravelCommons podcast.</li><li>Sheldon: Thank you. It\'s wonderful to be with you.</li></ul></li><li>Bridge Music - <em>Velvet Green of Mystery (Instrumental)</em> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/48114 Ft: Kthugha, Jeris, Martijn de Boer</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Why We Travel</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Some years ago, on some milestone birthday (I’m not saying which), my kids gave me the book <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3DHoiJC\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">1,000 Places to See Before You Die</a></em>. Hmm… was there a message somewhere in that gift? Not that they would admit. But it was a fun book flip through -- to remind me of past trips and give me ideas of places to go next. So when the TravelCommons inbox offered up an opportunity to interview the author, Patricia Schultz, about her new book, I jumped at it.<ul><li>Mark: Patricia, thanks for joining us on the TravelCommons podcast. Your new book is <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3BWnv6n\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Why We Travel: 100 Reasons to See the World</a></em>. That topic -- why we travel -- has been a common one here on TravelCommons; how travel expands our horizons, our perspectives, helps us connect with others and with ourselves as we lose ourselves in the “otherness” of a new place. So Patricia, help us. What\'s your take on why we travel?</li><li>Patricia: Well, I used this period of the pandemic to have that conversation with myself. This moment of Covid allowed me this unprecedented moment where suddenly I was very stationary. I thought it was very important for me, as a travel writer, to reassess all over again the importance of travel. But the “why” needs to be kept very forefront, so that we have that appreciation, and we understand that we\'re privileged and it\'s an honor and it\'s something that you need to travel meaningfully and not just on automatic pilot. And I think first and foremost it\'s, for me, it\'s food for my soul. And as you said, it opens our perspectives and it opens our heads, it opens our hearts. You mentioned connecting with other people. That\'s part of opening your heart with that exchange with your Uber driver or your guide or the lady in the open-air market who’s selling her tomatoes and whoever you have that moment with. It’s all the people along the way that you meet and accrue and collect all of these experiences that are life lessons. Not just the logistics and the details of trip planning, but life lessons as they pertain to what you bring home with you and how you deal with life and how you\'ve become more resourceful and the “daily-ness” of life is dealt with in a different way. I know I\'m more tolerant. I know I\'m more respectful in general. I know that I\'m more curious and that\'s what gets you out the front door at the end of the day, which is often usually the most difficult part of all of this -- getting going.</li><li>Mark: Absolutely. Patricia, the book is a great mix of beautiful photos and quotes about travel. Definitely a book that you need to have in your hand rather than on your tablet. What was your curation process? How did you pick the pictures and the quotes that went into the book?</li><li>Patricia: I\'m so glad that you touched on that because I myself thought that a book that seemingly this simplistic would just kind of write itself.</li><li>Mark: It\'s never that simple though. Right?</li><li>Patricia: No. One of the quotes I used is by Beverly Sills, the great operatic singer, who said there are no shortcuts to any place worth going to or anything worth doing, I might add as a postscript, and writing one of them. But the photos, which are not mine I\'m sorry to say, they\'re colorful and they\'re energetic and they\'re vibrant and there\'s a great sense of place and excitement to them, I think. And that\'s what we were aiming for to have this book, everything, kind of jump off the page at you because that\'s part of the message, the message of how exciting and exhilarating travel can be and then to match it with the appropriate message. The message that is embodied in a quotation or in an aphorism or in a list that I make up or in an anecdote that matches what the photograph recounts. So, it all was a real departure for me because my books until now have just been a kind of encyclopedia of 1,000 places around the world. But that same broad, comprehensive mix of experience and geography and message and importance of travel that I tried to infuse throughout <em>1,000 Places</em> is the same mix that I tried to embed in every aphorism and in every photo and in the sequence of the book. It\'s not a big book. It\'s a hardcover book. It\'s not oversized and it\'s not all that many pages; it\'s somewhere over 100 pages. But there\'s a lot that can be said because travel means many, many, many different things to many different people. But at the end of the day, it makes us better people and that\'s kind of Period, Amen!</li><li>Mark: And it\'s certainly more focused, as you said, on inspiring people to travel, to pull their bag out from under their bed rather than a tour guide\'s list of where to go, or some expert’s advice on how to pack that bag. But some might see this collide with the ethics, the concern about climate change. How do you square that circle?</li><li>Patricia: If you travel with respect and with that, conviction to see the world for all the right places, and not because you\'re checking off countries or you\'re filling empty time. But if you want to experience another culture and bring those experiences home with you, ultimately, probably the best thing we can hope to take away from travel is that when we return to our homes, we are equipped to make your best life for yourself and your neighbors and your community and the world at large. And also, the very notion that travel isn\'t inherently international or a 12-hour long haul flight to get you to the other side of the world. You know, you can walk out your front door and walk around the block in midtown Manhattan where I live and that\'s travel enough for many people. The people watching, the theater of the street or filling your car or charging your car and taking that road trip to the local state park. So, there are all kinds of ways that you can easily accommodate all of those concerns if you travel well. And I don\'t mean five-star deluxe and I don\'t mean remote dream destinations of Mongolia and Africa, although those are all pretty fantastic as well. Travel well in that you really maximize the time made available to you and the money that\'s in your budget. But I think you just need to go with the right head and the right head to me has always meant curiosity and respect. And if that\'s the case then you will travel respectfully, and you will address climate change in a way that as an individual we can.</li><li>Mark: Fantastic. Well, Patricia Schultz, author of the new book <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3S61BDa\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Why We Travel: 100 Reasons to See the World</a></em>. Patricia, thanks for stopping by the TravelCommons podcast to give us your thoughts on why we should travel. Really appreciate the time.</li><li>Patricia: Thank you very much. Thank you for having me.</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #189</li><li>A little change of pace; a lot less of my voice and more of others. I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. </li><li>And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social  -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>. And while you’re at TravelCommons.com, you can check out the show notes page for a transcript and any links I’ve mentioned. Or you can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page.</li><li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_189.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #189 —  Why We Travel; When The First Flight Isn\'t The Best','','inherit','closed','closed','','4192-revision-v1','','','2022-09-21 17:20:49','2022-09-21 22:20:49','',4192,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4196',0,'revision','',0),
(4197,1,'2022-09-21 22:09:15','2022-09-22 03:09:15','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/IMG_5006.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/IMG_5006-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Person standing in front of a wall with the message stenciled No Selfies\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> There Are Rules About Why We Travel[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Back behind the microphone after a couple of months of setting up the new studios in Nashville. I\'ve been dishing out travel advice to friends and family swept up in this summer\'s travel chaos. I\'ve distilled all those texts and messages down to my top 13 travel tips to help those traveling through the rest of the year. We also talk about the countries that have dropped all of the COVID testing requirements for inbound passengers, noodle about the rationale for JetBlue\'s dogged pursuit of Spirit Airways, Delta\'s new time limits for their Sky Club lounges, and why frequent flier award travel is suddenly a bargain again. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_189.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #189: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in the Gulch neighborhood of Nashville, TN with packs of tourists on e-scooter, and screeching freight trains losing the battle of the decibels to bachelorette parties “who-hoo-ing” from open-air party buses. Now I understand the “Nash-vegas” tag.</li><li>Not a whole lot of travel since the last episode. Was back in Chicago after almost 2 months away. As a tourist this time, staying in a hotel just off the Michigan Avenue Mag Mile strip, a neighborhood we’d actively avoid when we lived in Chicago -- too crowded, too many tourists. But now that <em>we are</em> tourists, maybe it fits a little better. We ended up here more out of convenience than anything else. It was the furthest north in the city that I could find a place to burn off some Marriott points. </li><li>It’s been another month where I’ve spent more time planning travel than doing it; stitching together the itinerary for an almost 3-week trip -- Nashville, connecting through Chicago (‘cause I’m no longer in a hub city) and Frankfurt, to Split, Croatia; then over to Rome and a train to Naples to get to Positano; then back to Naples for a few days; then to Rome; then to Florence; then back down to Rome to fly home by way of Newark. That looks kinda silly just typing it out. TripIt ended up being a very valuable tool. I forwarded all the various confirmation emails to it, and it did a damn good job of sequencing everything into a single itinerary, which helped me spot holes where I’d screwed up, say, a departure date or had just completely forgot about a trip leg.  But it’s all done; I leave next week. And writing this episode is giving me another good excuse to put off thinking about packing -- 3 weeks in a carryon. “Has a washing machine” might’ve been my most critical Airbnb search criteria.</li><li>Bridge Music --  <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/48915\">Like Music (cdk Mix</a>) by Analog By Nature (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/48915 Ft: Phasenwandler  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Yup, we have mail … and comments.</li><li>Let’s start with two comments on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">TravelCommons Facebook page</a>. First up, Jim McDonough tagged the post for <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/05/26/podcast-187-moving-to-a-non-hub-airport-what-makes-a-great-taproom/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Podcast #187 — Moving to a Non-Hub Airport; What Makes A Great Taproom?\">episode #187</a> with his experience moving to a non-hub airport. Jim writes…<ul><li>“We moved from a hub (DFW, 7 parallel runways plus one other) to a non-hub (SAN, 1 runway). Clearly we were tied to American at DFW (both lifetime Gold), and there really is no single dominant carrier at SAN. We do have some sneaky long non-stops from here, though, like to Hawaii, London, Munich, Boston, New York. None of these on American, though. We are trending towards Alaska Airlines, which has pretty good service and Boeing airplanes, and if there\'s an Admirals Club around we can use it flying Alaska. I was among the people who switched to cash-back credit cards during the pandemic when no flying was happening, but I\'m rethinking that position with an eye to using miles to go places.”</li><li>Jim, thanks for that. The American-Alaska relationship has always been good for West Coast fliers. I remember, years ago, flying Alaska from Long Beach up the coast to San Jose. I could never figure out why Alaska was flying that route, but it was handy with my American status.</li></ul></li><li>Next up, Thelma Smith adding a travel tip to the post for last month’s episode<ul><li>“Good episode. I don’t travel a lot but one thing I do is if I have to check a bag I use the sky cap. I don’t have to be lugging anything through the airport and the cash comes in handy to tip them.”</li><li>Thanks, Thelma, for that tip. I\'m a big sky cap fan when I have to check a bag -- like when I’m loaded up from a big wine country trip -- and, yes, cash is absolutely required for their tip!</li></ul></li><li>Moving to the TravelCommons website, Geoff Slater left this comment<ul><li>“Excellent return podcast! A very frequent traveler, I agreed with everything. A quibble however was the advice to take a nonstop. While I don’t disagree, I fly in and out of Burlington, VT, so that’s rarely an option. So for me, I also consider my options for connecting airports. As a United flier, Denver in the summer when it’s an option, and then IAD, and trying to avoid EWR. Getting a bit more esoteric for the non-frequent flier, I also consider plane type. And with United 1K status, I also take advantage of the same day change to avoid weather problems.”</li><li>Geoff, thanks for the comments. Kinda back to my pre-break episode about moving from to a non-hub airport -- most of your direct flight options are to hubs like DEN and IAD. Your strategy on hub selection is smart; pick hubs off by themselves with long well-separated runways. When I was doing work in north Jersey, we used to joke that anyone spitting on a runway at EWR would mean an hour delay; the runways are too close together to allow parallel take-offs and landings in all but the best of weather. Your comment about plane type -- rather than esoteric, I think it’s more of a graduate-level flight planning tip. The first cut is regional jet vs. main-line jet. I’ll always pick the, say, United Airbus 319 over the American Eagle Embraer. Making a choice between main-line jets can be a bit more subtle; different fliers will make different trade-offs between size -- flights with smaller capacity jets might be sacrificed when storms reduce flight slots but they’re quicker to get out of if a delay has tightened your connection. Again, graduate-level linear programming optimization algorithms for flight planning.</li></ul></li><li>On Twitter, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/PortaPocketGal\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Kendra Kroll</a> offered up a travel tip<ul><li>“Know names of cities in local vernacular. I\'ll never forget when folks on our Southbound train to Rome missed their stop by several hours as they didn\'t realize Firenze = Florence!”</li><li>Ouch! That’s a good tip; probably a next-level version of my <em>Know Your Geography</em> tip. For extra credit, be able to recognize your destination in the local non-Latin alphabet. I was in Tokyo back right before they moved the old Tsukiji Fish Market. The morning after I arrived, I was up early with jet lag and so walked over to the market. Someone had recommended a small sushi joint there, so I went looking for it. The recommendation gave the name in Latin characters but the signs in the market were only in Kanji. I eventually found a guy at an information desk who gave me directions to the place, but something to keep in mind when I travel to, say, Greece or Georgia -- the country, not the state.</li></ul></li><li>And finally, Aaron Woodlin responded to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1564695213217648642\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">my re-tweet of an ORD TSA post</a> with a picture of what one passenger pulled out of their carry-on and put in a bin to pass through the X-ray machine -- a meat cleaver, a couple of knives, a couple of saws… Somebody who’s definitely unclear on the concept of “no sharp objects in your carry-on.” Aaron’s cut -<ul><li>“What I really don\'t get are people who don\'t keep their range bags and carry-on luggage separate, and end up unintentionally packing heat at the checkpoint.  If you can afford plane fare, guns and ammo, you can spring for separate bags!”</li><li>Range bag, tool box… I can just imagine being the TSA guy shaking his head as the image of a bin full of knives and saws comes across the monitor. The guy is aware enough to know that you need to pull metal stuff out of your bag, but not hip to the fact of why. And now you’re the TSA guy who has to explain it all to him. </li></ul></li><li>And as always, thanks to all of you for the comments! Some great stuff here.</li><li>I think I’ve mentioned in prior episodes that I’m on Apple’s iPhone upgrade plan. Every year I get the new phone, send in my old one, and it resets the payment clock. Kinda like leasing a car but with lower monthly payments. Anyhow, a few weeks back, I’m scrubbing through Apple’s hour-and-a-half long announcement video -- skip all the Apple Watch stuff, slow down on the new AirPods, and then settle in for the iPhone 14 walk through. Nothing earth-shaking; I’m liking the new purple color. But then, as they were wrapping up, I had a record-scratch moment -- no SIM tray! What, what? Yup, for US iPhones, no more SIM tray; it’s all internal eSIMs! Isn’t that great? No more searching for a paper clip to pop out the tray, losing the little nano-SIM, …. No, it’s <em>not</em> great, at least for those of us who travel internationally. I’ve talked many times over the years about using local SIMs. Most recently, in episode #181, I talked about, at the start of our Puglia bike trip, spending 15 minutes and $25 in a Telecom Italia store for a SIM that gave me a local phone number (very handy for restaurant reservations) and <em>70 GB</em> of data. And now next week, all I have to do is load some money onto that SIM through the Telecom Italia website, and I’m good to go when I connect thru Frankfurt, and land in Croatia and Italy. But what about an eSIM? I couldn’t find any mainline Italian mobile carrier that offered a prepaid eSIM. Same with the UK. When I <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1567661384875347969\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">bitch-tweeted about this</a>, <a href=\"https://alosim.com/\">aloSIM</a>, a company that sells eSIMs for many countries, quickly responded “Well, our Italy eSIM data packages start at $4.50 for a week of data…” I hit their website. Their $4.50/week gives 1 GB of data. For an extra 50¢, I can get 10x that -- 10 GB of data for $5/week. I <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1567856046328135683\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">tweeted that back</a>. As you might guess, no response from aloSIM’s social media team. So, I’ve dropped off the iPhone upgrade wheel. I know I’m an edge case, and I think this could accelerate the push toward eSIMs. But like when Apple dropped the headphone jack, I think they’re 12-18 months ahead of the curve for frequent international travelers and I need something that works <em>today</em>, where the curve is right now. So I’ll wait a bit, like TravelCommons listener Jerry Sarfati who said he’s waiting for the “iPhone 15… with a USB-C charger.” I really hope it comes in purple too.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/spinmeister/53428\">Somewhere</a> by spinmeister (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/spinmeister/53428 Ft: DJ Vadim </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>When <em>Not </em>To Take the First Flight Out</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Moving to the mail portion of the episode, a day after I published <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/08/18/podcast-188-my-top-tips-to-survive-travel-chaos/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Podcast #188 —  My Top Travel Tips to Survive Airport Chaos\">the last episode</a>, I saw an email in the TravelCommons inbox with the subject “Is the first flight of the day still the best one? No. – air travel scientist for interviews.” This caught my eye because the 5th of the 13 tips to avoid airport chaos I’d <em>just </em>published was “catch the earliest flight you can”. So I replied to the email “Tell me why I’m wrong!”</li><li>Which led to this conversation with <a href=\"http://shj.cs.illinois.edu/\">Dr. Sheldon Jacobson</a>, Professor in Computer Science at the University of Illinois. Over the years, Dr. Jacobson has done projects using operations research models to optimize aviation security. But most recently, he <a href=\"https://www.chicagotribune.com/opinion/commentary/ct-opinion-travel-delays-flight-bookings-pandemic-20220830-p64ax3a74vaxnnzqwts4nel3cy-story.html\">wrote about</a> how the received frequent flier wisdom about catching the first flight out might not always be right. So I started our discussion asking him “Where did I get it wrong?”<ul><li>Sheldon: When you\'re flying in and out of hub airports, conventional wisdom is, in fact, correct. You do want to take the first flight of the day because at a hub airport, there\'s a lot more flexibility once a plane arrives at the end of the day. It\'s going to be cleaned, it\'s going to be maintained. Its gonna be fresh for the new day. If it turns out that some of the crew members become unavailable, you have alternatives because so many people have bases. So, this is in Chicago and Dallas for American, For United, you also have Washington Dulles as well as Chicago. For Delta, of course, it\'s Atlanta, Minneapolis, Detroit. So that\'s a great strategy. But what if you\'re not in a hub airport and that\'s when things start to get more nuanced. And the best way to think of this is that every airplane as well as every crew when they fly from city to city, they are a link in a chain. At the end of the day, you think, “Okay, the chain ends.” Actually, it doesn\'t. because the first flight of the day is the connection and the link from the last flight of the previous day. And all of this comes out and starts to impact that decision of the first flight of the day. Because if that flight comes in late, remember the last flight of the day, that\'s going to be the first flight out of a regional airport. So as a result of that, you actually want to take the second flight of the day out of a regional airport or a smaller large airport. That\'s the best strategy when it comes to these secondary and tertiary airports.</li><li>Mark: Actually, what you\'ve said, I\'ve seen that happen in smaller regional airports, say Lexington Kentucky, Appleton, Wisconsin, where that first flight of the day is not on the ground, so it\'s got to come in from a hub. Is there a split where, say, larger non-hub airports, the conventional wisdom still holds? Say where I am now in Nashville, or something like in Indianapolis? Where do those fall as far as the conventional wisdom on catching the first flight out?</li><li>Sheldon: Yes, certainly when you come to Nashville, Indianapolis, Columbus,  Ohio, Pittsburgh,  Pennsylvania -- some of these have been de-hubbed over the years. You\'re getting into a point that you have a lot of choices available. So then it becomes a little more nuanced because you could book the first flight on, let\'s say American and that one may have difficulties because that plane came in overnight and it was delayed because of storms in Chicago. But on the other hand, if there are options on Delta which are coming from Atlanta where there were not storms, you can always then get switched over for it. So when you get into those middle airports, they\'re not full hubs, but they\'re not the small regionals that have two flights a day, then it becomes a little more nuanced. And then you start to look across airlines as opposed to just within the airline.</li><li>Mark: Now if we pivot just slightly and think about different types of airlines. So if I think about hub-centric airlines, like the traditional United, American, Delta versus, say, a Southwest, which I\'ve joked in the past feels like they\'re running milk runs across the country. So there\'s not necessarily a hub, just that plane is running a line. Is there a difference between those two types of airlines on that first flight out?</li><li>Sheldon: There is, for a variety of reasons. With Southwest, they\'re trying to pack as many segments or links per day for every airplane. That\'s how they stay profitable. Their turn times are tremendous, but it also makes them more vulnerable to any kind of mechanical or weather delays or air traffic control slowdowns because they don\'t have the slack built into their system in their links. As a result of that, when you get to the end of the day, they still have to abide by the FAA regulations in terms of crew rest. And the question is, even though they are in some sense of point to point airline, they have areas of the country that have a concentration of flights like Dallas Love for example, like Chicago, like Baltimore-Washington, where they traditionally had a lot of flights. So you do have to look then, even though they aren\'t traditional hubs, they operate similarly. Where is the crew located; where they choosing to live? And that\'s an important component because when you\'re trying to reschedule because of delays, the flight that you\'re going to take out at 6 am may have come from a city where the plane only arrived at midnight. The flight crew needs the rest. They will not be able to leave on time. But if you switch crews and you have the flexibility because you have a sufficient number of crew members. It solves the problem. Is that going to exist in your city? So even though Southwest doesn\'t have the traditional hub and spoke system, they have airports that, in some sense, act like their hubs.</li><li>Mark: Sheldon, how much of this do you think is a function of the current tight labor market that airlines say they\'re operating in?</li><li>Sheldon: Now the situation we\'re in, which was brought on by COVID, of course, meant that they had a tremendous amount of layoffs and looking down the road, they were trying to survive financially. And now they\'re in a situation where they have to rehire but retrain all of these pilots. People think “Oh, you haven\'t flown for 8 months, 9 months? We’ll just put you in a cockpit and you’re fine.” It doesn\'t work that way. Once you\'ve been off for 6 months, it\'s as if you\'ve never flown. You still have the 1,500 hours which are required to fly, but you get rusty. And the pilots themselves say “I\'m really not as comfortable as I used to be,” especially on landings, which is the most critical activity that they do once they\'re in flight, it\'s pretty much status quo. Taking off is reasonably straightforward, but landing is the tricky part. And they just feel a little less comfortable unless they have the training. And the fact is they want to be safe as much as the passengers and the airline\'s want them to be safe. Getting these people back in the cockpit training and they have so many flight simulators. So much training that needs to be gone through. This is a non-trivial process.</li><li>Mark: Sheldon, thank you very much for that. That\'s very helpful. Any last thought, any last tips as people are looking to navigate through the back end of the summer season and into the holiday flying; things that you use to avoid airport chaos?</li><li>Sheldon: Well, we\'ve just now entered the post-summer/fall travel period and I check the numbers daily in terms of screenings at TSA checkpoints and the numbers are trying to come down, which means that there\'s gonna be a lot less stress and strain on the system. The airlines are starting to ramp up their schedules. I\'ve booked some things out for later in the fall and they\'re already changing the schedules. So, I know that they\'re starting to add more flights and more opportunities for people. For the holiday travel season this year, Christmas and New Year\'s fall on a Sunday. And that means that people are going to be traveling on Friday and Saturday. If you can travel on Thursday or Wednesday, you may find it a lot less taxing. So, thinking a little bit ahead in that regard may be very helpful. You can\'t predict weather storms, a nor’easter is going through, you know, it’s late in the year. The other strategy that I\'ve used because I\'ve mostly lived in non-hub cities is that there\'s always been a dominant airline and a non-dominant airline. And the strategy I\'ve always used is to always become loyal to the non-dominant airline. And the reason being is that when the non-dominant airline had problems, they were always gracious to put you on the dominant airline, which had much more choices. And as a result, I rarely got stuck because if I was on the dominant airline, trying to find a plane on the non-dominant one was much more difficult to get the seats available</li><li>Mark: That\'s an interesting strategy. Kind of counterintuitive, but as you explain it, it makes sense.</li><li>Sheldon: I have never gotten stuck because by flying the non-dominant, even out of a hub airport. You think of a place like Detroit where they have Delta as the dominant airline. If you fly American out of there, the people are working extra hard to get your business. And as a result of that, I\'ve always found service is better in the non-dominant airline, even in the hub cities where they\'re competing.</li><li>Mark: That\'s a good tip. Thanks for that Sheldon. Dr. Sheldon, Jacobson at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. Thank you very much for joining us on the TravelCommons podcast.</li><li>Sheldon: Thank you. It\'s wonderful to be with you.</li></ul></li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/scottaltham/20747\"> Hear Us Now (poptastic mix)</a> by Scott Altham (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/scottaltham/20747</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Why We Travel</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Some years ago, on some milestone birthday (I’m not saying which), my kids gave me the book <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3DHoiJC\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">1,000 Places to See Before You Die</a></em>. Hmm… was there a message somewhere in that gift? Not that they would admit. But it was a fun book flip through -- to remind me of past trips and give me ideas of places to go next. So when the TravelCommons inbox offered up an opportunity to interview the author, Patricia Schultz, about her new book, I jumped at it.<ul><li>Mark: Patricia, thanks for joining us on the TravelCommons podcast. Your new book is <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3BWnv6n\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Why We Travel: 100 Reasons to See the World</a></em>. That topic -- why we travel -- has been a common one here on TravelCommons; how travel expands our horizons, our perspectives, helps us connect with others and with ourselves as we lose ourselves in the “otherness” of a new place. So Patricia, help us. What\'s your take on why we travel?</li><li>Patricia: Well, I used this period of the pandemic to have that conversation with myself. This moment of COVID allowed me this unprecedented moment where suddenly I was very stationary. I thought it was very important for me, as a travel writer, to reassess all over again the importance of travel. But the “why” needs to be kept very forefront, so that we have that appreciation, and we understand that we\'re privileged and it\'s an honor and it\'s something that you need to travel meaningfully and not just on automatic pilot. And I think first and foremost it\'s, for me, it\'s food for my soul. And as you said, it opens our perspectives and it opens our heads, it opens our hearts. You mentioned connecting with other people. That\'s part of opening your heart with that exchange with your Uber driver or your guide or the lady in the open-air market who’s selling her tomatoes and whoever you have that moment with. It’s all the people along the way that you meet and accrue and collect all of these experiences that are life lessons. Not just the logistics and the details of trip planning, but life lessons as they pertain to what you bring home with you and how you deal with life and how you\'ve become more resourceful and the “daily-ness” of life is dealt with in a different way. I know I\'m more tolerant. I know I\'m more respectful in general. I know that I\'m more curious and that\'s what gets you out the front door at the end of the day, which is often usually the most difficult part of all of this -- getting going.</li><li>Mark: Absolutely. Patricia, the book is a great mix of beautiful photos and quotes about travel. Definitely a book that you need to have in your hand rather than on your tablet. What was your curation process? How did you pick the pictures and the quotes that went into the book?</li><li>Patricia: I\'m so glad that you touched on that because I myself thought that a book that seemingly this simplistic would just kind of write itself.</li><li>Mark: It\'s never that simple though. Right?</li><li>Patricia: No. One of the quotes I used is by Beverly Sills, the great operatic singer, who said there are no shortcuts to any place worth going to or anything worth doing, I might add as a postscript, and writing one of them. But the photos, which are not mine I\'m sorry to say, they\'re colorful and they\'re energetic and they\'re vibrant and there\'s a great sense of place and excitement to them, I think. And that\'s what we were aiming for to have this book, everything, kind of jump off the page at you because that\'s part of the message, the message of how exciting and exhilarating travel can be and then to match it with the appropriate message. The message that is embodied in a quotation or in an aphorism or in a list that I make up or in an anecdote that matches what the photograph recounts. So, it all was a real departure for me because my books until now have just been a kind of encyclopedia of 1,000 places around the world. But that same broad, comprehensive mix of experience and geography and message and importance of travel that I tried to infuse throughout <em>1,000 Places</em> is the same mix that I tried to embed in every aphorism and in every photo and in the sequence of the book. It\'s not a big book. It\'s a hardcover book. It\'s not oversized and it\'s not all that many pages; it\'s somewhere over 100 pages. But there\'s a lot that can be said because travel means many, many, many different things to many different people. But at the end of the day, it makes us better people and that\'s kind of Period, Amen!</li><li>Mark: And it\'s certainly more focused, as you said, on inspiring people to travel, to pull their bag out from under their bed rather than a tour guide\'s list of where to go, or some expert’s advice on how to pack that bag. But some might see this collide with the ethics, the concern about climate change. How do you square that circle?</li><li>Patricia: If you travel with respect and with that, conviction to see the world for all the right places, and not because you\'re checking off countries or you\'re filling empty time. But if you want to experience another culture and bring those experiences home with you, ultimately, probably the best thing we can hope to take away from travel is that when we return to our homes, we are equipped to make your best life for yourself and your neighbors and your community and the world at large. And also, the very notion that travel isn\'t inherently international or a 12-hour long haul flight to get you to the other side of the world. You know, you can walk out your front door and walk around the block in midtown Manhattan where I live and that\'s travel enough for many people. The people watching, the theater of the street or filling your car or charging your car and taking that road trip to the local state park. So, there are all kinds of ways that you can easily accommodate all of those concerns if you travel well. And I don\'t mean five-star deluxe and I don\'t mean remote dream destinations of Mongolia and Africa, although those are all pretty fantastic as well. Travel well in that you really maximize the time made available to you and the money that\'s in your budget. But I think you just need to go with the right head and the right head to me has always meant curiosity and respect. And if that\'s the case then you will travel respectfully, and you will address climate change in a way that as an individual we can.</li><li>Mark: Fantastic. Well, Patricia Schultz, author of the new book <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3S61BDa\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Why We Travel: 100 Reasons to See the World</a></em>. Patricia, thanks for stopping by the TravelCommons podcast to give us your thoughts on why we should travel. Really appreciate the time.</li><li>Patricia: Thank you very much. Thank you for having me.</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #189</li><li>A little change of pace; a lot less of my voice and more of others. I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. </li><li>And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social  -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>. And while you’re at TravelCommons.com, you can check out the show notes page for a transcript and any links I’ve mentioned. Or you can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page.</li><li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_189.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #189 —  Why We Travel; When The First Flight Isn\'t The Best','','inherit','closed','closed','','4192-revision-v1','','','2022-09-21 22:09:15','2022-09-22 03:09:15','',4192,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4197',0,'revision','',0),
(4199,1,'2022-09-21 22:22:24','2022-09-22 03:22:24','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/IMG_5006.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/IMG_5006-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Person standing in front of a wall with the message stenciled No Selfies\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> There Are Rules About Why We Travel[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Back behind the microphone after a couple of months of setting up the new studios in Nashville. I\'ve been dishing out travel advice to friends and family swept up in this summer\'s travel chaos. I\'ve distilled all those texts and messages down to my top 13 travel tips to help those traveling through the rest of the year. We also talk about the countries that have dropped all of the COVID testing requirements for inbound passengers, noodle about the rationale for JetBlue\'s dogged pursuit of Spirit Airways, Delta\'s new time limits for their Sky Club lounges, and why frequent flier award travel is suddenly a bargain again. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_189.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #189: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in the Gulch neighborhood of Nashville, TN with packs of tourists on e-scooter, and screeching freight trains losing the battle of the decibels to bachelorette parties “woo-hoo-ing” from open-air party buses. Now I understand the “Nash-vegas” tag.</li><li>Not a whole lot of travel since the last episode. Was back in Chicago after almost 2 months away. As a tourist this time, staying in a hotel just off the Michigan Avenue Mag Mile strip, a neighborhood we’d actively avoid when we lived in Chicago -- too crowded, too many tourists. But now that <em>we are</em> tourists, maybe it fits a little better. We ended up here more out of convenience than anything else. It was the furthest north in the city that I could find a place to burn off some Marriott points. </li><li>It’s been another month where I’ve spent more time planning travel than doing it; stitching together the itinerary for an almost 3-week trip -- Nashville, connecting through Chicago (‘cause I’m no longer in a hub city) and Frankfurt, to Split, Croatia; then over to Rome and a train to Naples to get to Positano; then back to Naples for a few days; then to Rome; then to Florence; then back down to Rome to fly home by way of Newark. That looks kinda silly just typing it out. TripIt ended up being a very valuable tool. I forwarded all the various confirmation emails to it, and it did a damn good job of sequencing everything into a single itinerary, which helped me spot holes where I’d screwed up, say, a departure date or had just completely forgot about a trip leg.  But it’s all done; I leave next week. And writing this episode is giving me another good excuse to put off thinking about packing -- 3 weeks in a carryon. “Has a washing machine” might’ve been my most critical Airbnb search criteria.</li><li>Bridge Music --  <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/48915\">Like Music (cdk Mix</a>) by Analog By Nature (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/48915 Ft: Phasenwandler  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Yup, we have mail … and comments.</li><li>Let’s start with two comments on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">TravelCommons Facebook page</a>. First up, Jim McDonough tagged the post for <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/05/26/podcast-187-moving-to-a-non-hub-airport-what-makes-a-great-taproom/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Podcast #187 — Moving to a Non-Hub Airport; What Makes A Great Taproom?\">episode #187</a> with his experience moving to a non-hub airport. Jim writes…<ul><li>“We moved from a hub (DFW, 7 parallel runways plus one other) to a non-hub (SAN, 1 runway). Clearly we were tied to American at DFW (both lifetime Gold), and there really is no single dominant carrier at SAN. We do have some sneaky long non-stops from here, though, like to Hawaii, London, Munich, Boston, New York. None of these on American, though. We are trending towards Alaska Airlines, which has pretty good service and Boeing airplanes, and if there\'s an Admirals Club around we can use it flying Alaska. I was among the people who switched to cash-back credit cards during the pandemic when no flying was happening, but I\'m rethinking that position with an eye to using miles to go places.”</li><li>Jim, thanks for that. The American-Alaska relationship has always been good for West Coast fliers. I remember, years ago, flying Alaska from Long Beach up the coast to San Jose. I could never figure out why Alaska was flying that route, but it was handy with my American status.</li></ul></li><li>Next up, Thelma Smith adding a travel tip to the post for last month’s episode<ul><li>“Good episode. I don’t travel a lot but one thing I do is if I have to check a bag I use the sky cap. I don’t have to be lugging anything through the airport and the cash comes in handy to tip them.”</li><li>Thanks, Thelma, for that tip. I\'m a big sky cap fan when I have to check a bag -- like when I’m loaded up from a big wine country trip -- and, yes, cash is absolutely required for their tip!</li></ul></li><li>Moving to the TravelCommons website, Geoff Slater left this comment<ul><li>“Excellent return podcast! A very frequent traveler, I agreed with everything. A quibble however was the advice to take a nonstop. While I don’t disagree, I fly in and out of Burlington, VT, so that’s rarely an option. So for me, I also consider my options for connecting airports. As a United flier, Denver in the summer when it’s an option, and then IAD, and trying to avoid EWR. Getting a bit more esoteric for the non-frequent flier, I also consider plane type. And with United 1K status, I also take advantage of the same day change to avoid weather problems.”</li><li>Geoff, thanks for the comments. Kinda back to my pre-break episode about moving from to a non-hub airport -- most of your direct flight options are to hubs like DEN and IAD. Your strategy on hub selection is smart; pick hubs off by themselves with long well-separated runways. When I was doing work in north Jersey, we used to joke that anyone spitting on a runway at EWR would mean an hour delay; the runways are too close together to allow parallel take-offs and landings in all but the best of weather. Your comment about plane type -- rather than esoteric, I think it’s more of a graduate-level flight planning tip. The first cut is regional jet vs. main-line jet. I’ll always pick the, say, United Airbus 319 over the American Eagle Embraer. Making a choice between main-line jets can be a bit more subtle; different fliers will make different trade-offs between size -- flights with smaller capacity jets might be sacrificed when storms reduce flight slots but they’re quicker to get out of if a delay has tightened your connection. Again, graduate-level linear programming optimization algorithms for flight planning.</li></ul></li><li>On Twitter, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/PortaPocketGal\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Kendra Kroll</a> offered up a travel tip<ul><li>“Know names of cities in local vernacular. I\'ll never forget when folks on our Southbound train to Rome missed their stop by several hours as they didn\'t realize Firenze = Florence!”</li><li>Ouch! That’s a good tip; probably a next-level version of my <em>Know Your Geography</em> tip. For extra credit, be able to recognize your destination in the local non-Latin alphabet. I was in Tokyo back right before they moved the old Tsukiji Fish Market. The morning after I arrived, I was up early with jet lag and so walked over to the market. Someone had recommended a small sushi joint there, so I went looking for it. The recommendation gave the name in Latin characters but the signs in the market were only in Kanji. I eventually found a guy at an information desk who gave me directions to the place, but something to keep in mind when I travel to, say, Greece or Georgia -- the country, not the state.</li></ul></li><li>And finally, Aaron Woodlin responded to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1564695213217648642\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">my re-tweet of an ORD TSA post</a> with a picture of what one passenger pulled out of their carry-on and put in a bin to pass through the X-ray machine -- a meat cleaver, a couple of knives, a couple of saws… Somebody who’s definitely unclear on the concept of “no sharp objects in your carry-on.” Aaron’s cut -<ul><li>“What I really don\'t get are people who don\'t keep their range bags and carry-on luggage separate, and end up unintentionally packing heat at the checkpoint.  If you can afford plane fare, guns and ammo, you can spring for separate bags!”</li><li>Range bag, tool box… I can just imagine being the TSA guy shaking his head as the image of a bin full of knives and saws comes across the monitor. The guy is aware enough to know that you need to pull metal stuff out of your bag, but not hip to the fact of why. And now you’re the TSA guy who has to explain it all to him. </li></ul></li><li>And as always, thanks to all of you for the comments! Some great stuff here.</li><li>I think I’ve mentioned in prior episodes that I’m on Apple’s iPhone upgrade plan. Every year I get the new phone, send in my old one, and it resets the payment clock. Kinda like leasing a car but with lower monthly payments. Anyhow, a few weeks back, I’m scrubbing through Apple’s hour-and-a-half long announcement video -- skip all the Apple Watch stuff, slow down on the new AirPods, and then settle in for the iPhone 14 walk through. Nothing earth-shaking; I’m liking the new purple color. But then, as they were wrapping up, I had a record-scratch moment -- no SIM tray! What, what? Yup, for US iPhones, no more SIM tray; it’s all internal eSIMs! Isn’t that great? No more searching for a paper clip to pop out the tray, losing the little nano-SIM, …. No, it’s <em>not</em> great, at least for those of us who travel internationally. I’ve talked many times over the years about using local SIMs. Most recently, in episode #181, I talked about, at the start of our Puglia bike trip, spending 15 minutes and $25 in a Telecom Italia store for a SIM that gave me a local phone number (very handy for restaurant reservations) and <em>70 GB</em> of data. And now next week, all I have to do is load some money onto that SIM through the Telecom Italia website, and I’m good to go when I connect thru Frankfurt, and land in Croatia and Italy. But what about an eSIM? I couldn’t find any mainline Italian mobile carrier that offered a prepaid eSIM. Same with the UK. When I <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1567661384875347969\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">bitch-tweeted about this</a>, <a href=\"https://alosim.com/\">aloSIM</a>, a company that sells eSIMs for many countries, quickly responded “Well, our Italy eSIM data packages start at $4.50 for a week of data…” I hit their website. Their $4.50/week gives 1 GB of data. For an extra 50¢, I can get 10x that -- 10 GB of data for $5/week. I <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1567856046328135683\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">tweeted that back</a>. As you might guess, no response from aloSIM’s social media team. So, I’ve dropped off the iPhone upgrade wheel. I know I’m an edge case, and I think this could accelerate the push toward eSIMs. But like when Apple dropped the headphone jack, I think they’re 12-18 months ahead of the curve for frequent international travelers and I need something that works <em>today</em>, where the curve is right now. So I’ll wait a bit, like TravelCommons listener Jerry Sarfati who said he’s waiting for the “iPhone 15… with a USB-C charger.” I really hope it comes in purple too.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/spinmeister/53428\">Somewhere</a> by spinmeister (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/spinmeister/53428 Ft: DJ Vadim </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>When <em>Not </em>To Take the First Flight Out</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Moving to the mail portion of the episode, a day after I published <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/08/18/podcast-188-my-top-tips-to-survive-travel-chaos/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Podcast #188 —  My Top Travel Tips to Survive Airport Chaos\">the last episode</a>, I saw an email in the TravelCommons inbox with the subject “Is the first flight of the day still the best one? No. – air travel scientist for interviews.” This caught my eye because the 5th of the 13 tips to avoid airport chaos I’d <em>just </em>published was “catch the earliest flight you can”. So I replied to the email “Tell me why I’m wrong!”</li><li>Which led to this conversation with <a href=\"http://shj.cs.illinois.edu/\">Dr. Sheldon Jacobson</a>, Professor in Computer Science at the University of Illinois. Over the years, Dr. Jacobson has done projects using operations research models to optimize aviation security. But most recently, he <a href=\"https://www.chicagotribune.com/opinion/commentary/ct-opinion-travel-delays-flight-bookings-pandemic-20220830-p64ax3a74vaxnnzqwts4nel3cy-story.html\">wrote about</a> how the received frequent flier wisdom about catching the first flight out might not always be right. So I started our discussion asking him “Where did I get it wrong?”<ul><li>Sheldon: When you\'re flying in and out of hub airports, conventional wisdom is, in fact, correct. You do want to take the first flight of the day because at a hub airport, there\'s a lot more flexibility once a plane arrives at the end of the day. It\'s going to be cleaned, it\'s going to be maintained. Its gonna be fresh for the new day. If it turns out that some of the crew members become unavailable, you have alternatives because so many people have bases. So, this is in Chicago and Dallas for American, For United, you also have Washington Dulles as well as Chicago. For Delta, of course, it\'s Atlanta, Minneapolis, Detroit. So that\'s a great strategy. But what if you\'re not in a hub airport and that\'s when things start to get more nuanced. And the best way to think of this is that every airplane as well as every crew when they fly from city to city, they are a link in a chain. At the end of the day, you think, “Okay, the chain ends.” Actually, it doesn\'t. because the first flight of the day is the connection and the link from the last flight of the previous day. And all of this comes out and starts to impact that decision of the first flight of the day. Because if that flight comes in late, remember the last flight of the day, that\'s going to be the first flight out of a regional airport. So as a result of that, you actually want to take the second flight of the day out of a regional airport or a smaller large airport. That\'s the best strategy when it comes to these secondary and tertiary airports.</li><li>Mark: Actually, what you\'ve said, I\'ve seen that happen in smaller regional airports, say Lexington Kentucky, Appleton, Wisconsin, where that first flight of the day is not on the ground, so it\'s got to come in from a hub. Is there a split where, say, larger non-hub airports, the conventional wisdom still holds? Say where I am now in Nashville, or something like in Indianapolis? Where do those fall as far as the conventional wisdom on catching the first flight out?</li><li>Sheldon: Yes, certainly when you come to Nashville, Indianapolis, Columbus,  Ohio, Pittsburgh,  Pennsylvania -- some of these have been de-hubbed over the years. You\'re getting into a point that you have a lot of choices available. So then it becomes a little more nuanced because you could book the first flight on, let\'s say American and that one may have difficulties because that plane came in overnight and it was delayed because of storms in Chicago. But on the other hand, if there are options on Delta which are coming from Atlanta where there were not storms, you can always then get switched over for it. So when you get into those middle airports, they\'re not full hubs, but they\'re not the small regionals that have two flights a day, then it becomes a little more nuanced. And then you start to look across airlines as opposed to just within the airline.</li><li>Mark: Now if we pivot just slightly and think about different types of airlines. So if I think about hub-centric airlines, like the traditional United, American, Delta versus, say, a Southwest, which I\'ve joked in the past feels like they\'re running milk runs across the country. So there\'s not necessarily a hub, just that plane is running a line. Is there a difference between those two types of airlines on that first flight out?</li><li>Sheldon: There is, for a variety of reasons. With Southwest, they\'re trying to pack as many segments or links per day for every airplane. That\'s how they stay profitable. Their turn times are tremendous, but it also makes them more vulnerable to any kind of mechanical or weather delays or air traffic control slowdowns because they don\'t have the slack built into their system in their links. As a result of that, when you get to the end of the day, they still have to abide by the FAA regulations in terms of crew rest. And the question is, even though they are in some sense of point to point airline, they have areas of the country that have a concentration of flights like Dallas Love for example, like Chicago, like Baltimore-Washington, where they traditionally had a lot of flights. So you do have to look then, even though they aren\'t traditional hubs, they operate similarly. Where is the crew located; where they choosing to live? And that\'s an important component because when you\'re trying to reschedule because of delays, the flight that you\'re going to take out at 6 am may have come from a city where the plane only arrived at midnight. The flight crew needs the rest. They will not be able to leave on time. But if you switch crews and you have the flexibility because you have a sufficient number of crew members. It solves the problem. Is that going to exist in your city? So even though Southwest doesn\'t have the traditional hub and spoke system, they have airports that, in some sense, act like their hubs.</li><li>Mark: Sheldon, how much of this do you think is a function of the current tight labor market that airlines say they\'re operating in?</li><li>Sheldon: Now the situation we\'re in, which was brought on by COVID, of course, meant that they had a tremendous amount of layoffs and looking down the road, they were trying to survive financially. And now they\'re in a situation where they have to rehire but retrain all of these pilots. People think “Oh, you haven\'t flown for 8 months, 9 months? We’ll just put you in a cockpit and you’re fine.” It doesn\'t work that way. Once you\'ve been off for 6 months, it\'s as if you\'ve never flown. You still have the 1,500 hours which are required to fly, but you get rusty. And the pilots themselves say “I\'m really not as comfortable as I used to be,” especially on landings, which is the most critical activity that they do once they\'re in flight, it\'s pretty much status quo. Taking off is reasonably straightforward, but landing is the tricky part. And they just feel a little less comfortable unless they have the training. And the fact is they want to be safe as much as the passengers and the airline\'s want them to be safe. Getting these people back in the cockpit training and they have so many flight simulators. So much training that needs to be gone through. This is a non-trivial process.</li><li>Mark: Sheldon, thank you very much for that. That\'s very helpful. Any last thought, any last tips as people are looking to navigate through the back end of the summer season and into the holiday flying; things that you use to avoid airport chaos?</li><li>Sheldon: Well, we\'ve just now entered the post-summer/fall travel period and I check the numbers daily in terms of screenings at TSA checkpoints and the numbers are trying to come down, which means that there\'s gonna be a lot less stress and strain on the system. The airlines are starting to ramp up their schedules. I\'ve booked some things out for later in the fall and they\'re already changing the schedules. So, I know that they\'re starting to add more flights and more opportunities for people. For the holiday travel season this year, Christmas and New Year\'s fall on a Sunday. And that means that people are going to be traveling on Friday and Saturday. If you can travel on Thursday or Wednesday, you may find it a lot less taxing. So, thinking a little bit ahead in that regard may be very helpful. You can\'t predict weather storms, a nor’easter is going through, you know, it’s late in the year. The other strategy that I\'ve used because I\'ve mostly lived in non-hub cities is that there\'s always been a dominant airline and a non-dominant airline. And the strategy I\'ve always used is to always become loyal to the non-dominant airline. And the reason being is that when the non-dominant airline had problems, they were always gracious to put you on the dominant airline, which had much more choices. And as a result, I rarely got stuck because if I was on the dominant airline, trying to find a plane on the non-dominant one was much more difficult to get the seats available</li><li>Mark: That\'s an interesting strategy. Kind of counterintuitive, but as you explain it, it makes sense.</li><li>Sheldon: I have never gotten stuck because by flying the non-dominant, even out of a hub airport. You think of a place like Detroit where they have Delta as the dominant airline. If you fly American out of there, the people are working extra hard to get your business. And as a result of that, I\'ve always found service is better in the non-dominant airline, even in the hub cities where they\'re competing.</li><li>Mark: That\'s a good tip. Thanks for that Sheldon. Dr. Sheldon, Jacobson at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. Thank you very much for joining us on the TravelCommons podcast.</li><li>Sheldon: Thank you. It\'s wonderful to be with you.</li></ul></li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/scottaltham/20747\"> Hear Us Now (poptastic mix)</a> by Scott Altham (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/scottaltham/20747</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Why We Travel</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Some years ago, on some milestone birthday (I’m not saying which), my kids gave me the book <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3DHoiJC\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">1,000 Places to See Before You Die</a></em>. Hmm… was there a message somewhere in that gift? Not that they would admit. But it was a fun book flip through -- to remind me of past trips and give me ideas of places to go next. So when the TravelCommons inbox offered up an opportunity to interview the author, Patricia Schultz, about her new book, I jumped at it.<ul><li>Mark: Patricia, thanks for joining us on the TravelCommons podcast. Your new book is <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3BWnv6n\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Why We Travel: 100 Reasons to See the World</a></em>. That topic -- why we travel -- has been a common one here on TravelCommons; how travel expands our horizons, our perspectives, helps us connect with others and with ourselves as we lose ourselves in the “otherness” of a new place. So Patricia, help us. What\'s your take on why we travel?</li><li>Patricia: Well, I used this period of the pandemic to have that conversation with myself. This moment of COVID allowed me this unprecedented moment where suddenly I was very stationary. I thought it was very important for me, as a travel writer, to reassess all over again the importance of travel. But the “why” needs to be kept very forefront, so that we have that appreciation, and we understand that we\'re privileged and it\'s an honor and it\'s something that you need to travel meaningfully and not just on automatic pilot. And I think first and foremost it\'s, for me, it\'s food for my soul. And as you said, it opens our perspectives and it opens our heads, it opens our hearts. You mentioned connecting with other people. That\'s part of opening your heart with that exchange with your Uber driver or your guide or the lady in the open-air market who’s selling her tomatoes and whoever you have that moment with. It’s all the people along the way that you meet and accrue and collect all of these experiences that are life lessons. Not just the logistics and the details of trip planning, but life lessons as they pertain to what you bring home with you and how you deal with life and how you\'ve become more resourceful and the “daily-ness” of life is dealt with in a different way. I know I\'m more tolerant. I know I\'m more respectful in general. I know that I\'m more curious and that\'s what gets you out the front door at the end of the day, which is often usually the most difficult part of all of this -- getting going.</li><li>Mark: Absolutely. Patricia, the book is a great mix of beautiful photos and quotes about travel. Definitely a book that you need to have in your hand rather than on your tablet. What was your curation process? How did you pick the pictures and the quotes that went into the book?</li><li>Patricia: I\'m so glad that you touched on that because I myself thought that a book that seemingly this simplistic would just kind of write itself.</li><li>Mark: It\'s never that simple though. Right?</li><li>Patricia: No. One of the quotes I used is by Beverly Sills, the great operatic singer, who said there are no shortcuts to any place worth going to or anything worth doing, I might add as a postscript, and writing one of them. But the photos, which are not mine I\'m sorry to say, they\'re colorful and they\'re energetic and they\'re vibrant and there\'s a great sense of place and excitement to them, I think. And that\'s what we were aiming for to have this book, everything, kind of jump off the page at you because that\'s part of the message, the message of how exciting and exhilarating travel can be and then to match it with the appropriate message. The message that is embodied in a quotation or in an aphorism or in a list that I make up or in an anecdote that matches what the photograph recounts. So, it all was a real departure for me because my books until now have just been a kind of encyclopedia of 1,000 places around the world. But that same broad, comprehensive mix of experience and geography and message and importance of travel that I tried to infuse throughout <em>1,000 Places</em> is the same mix that I tried to embed in every aphorism and in every photo and in the sequence of the book. It\'s not a big book. It\'s a hardcover book. It\'s not oversized and it\'s not all that many pages; it\'s somewhere over 100 pages. But there\'s a lot that can be said because travel means many, many, many different things to many different people. But at the end of the day, it makes us better people and that\'s kind of Period, Amen!</li><li>Mark: And it\'s certainly more focused, as you said, on inspiring people to travel, to pull their bag out from under their bed rather than a tour guide\'s list of where to go, or some expert’s advice on how to pack that bag. But some might see this collide with the ethics, the concern about climate change. How do you square that circle?</li><li>Patricia: If you travel with respect and with that, conviction to see the world for all the right places, and not because you\'re checking off countries or you\'re filling empty time. But if you want to experience another culture and bring those experiences home with you, ultimately, probably the best thing we can hope to take away from travel is that when we return to our homes, we are equipped to make your best life for yourself and your neighbors and your community and the world at large. And also, the very notion that travel isn\'t inherently international or a 12-hour long haul flight to get you to the other side of the world. You know, you can walk out your front door and walk around the block in midtown Manhattan where I live and that\'s travel enough for many people. The people watching, the theater of the street or filling your car or charging your car and taking that road trip to the local state park. So, there are all kinds of ways that you can easily accommodate all of those concerns if you travel well. And I don\'t mean five-star deluxe and I don\'t mean remote dream destinations of Mongolia and Africa, although those are all pretty fantastic as well. Travel well in that you really maximize the time made available to you and the money that\'s in your budget. But I think you just need to go with the right head and the right head to me has always meant curiosity and respect. And if that\'s the case then you will travel respectfully, and you will address climate change in a way that as an individual we can.</li><li>Mark: Fantastic. Well, Patricia Schultz, author of the new book <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3S61BDa\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Why We Travel: 100 Reasons to See the World</a></em>. Patricia, thanks for stopping by the TravelCommons podcast to give us your thoughts on why we should travel. Really appreciate the time.</li><li>Patricia: Thank you very much. Thank you for having me.</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #189</li><li>A little change of pace; a lot less of my voice and more of others. I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. </li><li>And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social  -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>. And while you’re at TravelCommons.com, you can check out the show notes page for a transcript and any links I’ve mentioned. Or you can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page.</li><li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_189.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #189 —  Why We Travel; When The First Flight Isn\'t Best','','inherit','closed','closed','','4192-revision-v1','','','2022-09-21 22:22:24','2022-09-22 03:22:24','',4192,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4199',0,'revision','',0),
(4200,1,'2022-09-22 18:26:14','2022-09-22 23:26:14','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/IMG_5006.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/IMG_5006-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Person standing in front of a wall with the message stenciled No Selfies\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> There Are Rules About Why We Travel[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Lots of different voices in this episode. Listeners growing our list of travel tips , and conversations with <a href=\"http://shj.cs.illinois.edu/\">Dr. Sheldon Jacobson</a> about why one of my travel tips -- always catch the first flight out -- isn\'t always right, and <a href=\"http://1000Places.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Patricia Schultz</a> about her new book, <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3BWnv6n\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Why We Travel: 100 Reasons to See the World</a></em>. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_189.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #189: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in the Gulch neighborhood of Nashville, TN. Not a whole lot of travel since the last episode. Was back in Chicago after almost 2 months away. As a tourist this time, staying in a hotel just off the Michigan Avenue Mag Mile strip, a neighborhood we’d actively avoid when we lived in Chicago -- too crowded, too many tourists. But now that <em>we are</em> tourists, maybe it fits a little better. We ended up here more out of convenience than anything else. It was the furthest north in the city that I could find a place to burn off some Marriott points.&nbsp;</li><li>It’s been another month where I’ve spent more time planning travel than doing it; stitching together the itinerary for an almost 3-week trip -- Nashville, connecting through Chicago (‘cause I’m no longer in a hub city) and Frankfurt, to Split, Croatia; then over to Rome and a train to Naples to get to Positano; then back to Naples for a few days; then to Rome; then to Florence; then back down to Rome to fly home by way of Newark. That looks kinda silly just typing it out. TripIt ended up being a very valuable tool. I forwarded all the various confirmation emails to it, and it did a damn good job of sequencing everything into a single itinerary, which helped me spot holes where I’d screwed up, say, a departure date or had just completely forgot about a trip leg.&nbsp; But it’s all done; I leave next week. And writing this episode is giving me another good excuse to put off thinking about packing -- 3 weeks in a carryon. “Has a washing machine” might’ve been my most critical Airbnb search criteria.</li><li>Bridge Music --  <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/48915\">Like Music (cdk Mix</a>) by Analog By Nature (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/48915 Ft: Phasenwandler  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Yup, we have mail … and comments.</li><li>Let’s start with two comments on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">TravelCommons Facebook page</a>. First up, Jim McDonough tagged the post for <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/05/26/podcast-187-moving-to-a-non-hub-airport-what-makes-a-great-taproom/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Podcast #187 — Moving to a Non-Hub Airport; What Makes A Great Taproom?\">episode #187</a> with his experience moving to a non-hub airport. Jim writes…<ul><li>“We moved from a hub (DFW, 7 parallel runways plus one other) to a non-hub (SAN, 1 runway). Clearly we were tied to American at DFW (both lifetime Gold), and there really is no single dominant carrier at SAN. We do have some sneaky long non-stops from here, though, like to Hawaii, London, Munich, Boston, New York. None of these on American, though. We are trending towards Alaska Airlines, which has pretty good service and Boeing airplanes, and if there\'s an Admirals Club around we can use it flying Alaska. I was among the people who switched to cash-back credit cards during the pandemic when no flying was happening, but I\'m rethinking that position with an eye to using miles to go places.”</li><li>Jim, thanks for that. The American-Alaska relationship has always been good for West Coast fliers. I remember, years ago, flying Alaska from Long Beach up the coast to San Jose. I could never figure out why Alaska was flying that route, but it was handy with my American status.</li></ul></li><li>Next up, Thelma Smith adding a travel tip to the post for last month’s episode<ul><li>“Good episode. I don’t travel a lot but one thing I do is if I have to check a bag I use the sky cap. I don’t have to be lugging anything through the airport and the cash comes in handy to tip them.”</li><li>Thanks, Thelma, for that tip. I\'m a big sky cap fan when I have to check a bag -- like when I’m loaded up from a big wine country trip -- and, yes, cash is absolutely required for their tip!</li></ul></li><li>Moving to the TravelCommons website, Geoff Slater left this comment<ul><li>“Excellent return podcast! A very frequent traveler, I agreed with everything. A quibble however was the advice to take a nonstop. While I don’t disagree, I fly in and out of Burlington, VT, so that’s rarely an option. So for me, I also consider my options for connecting airports. As a United flier, Denver in the summer when it’s an option, and then IAD, and trying to avoid EWR. Getting a bit more esoteric for the non-frequent flier, I also consider plane type. And with United 1K status, I also take advantage of the same day change to avoid weather problems.”</li><li>Geoff, thanks for the comments. Kinda back to my pre-break episode about moving from to a non-hub airport -- most of your direct flight options are to hubs like DEN and IAD. Your strategy on hub selection is smart; pick hubs off by themselves with long well-separated runways. When I was doing work in north Jersey, we used to joke that anyone spitting on a runway at EWR would mean an hour delay; the runways are too close together to allow parallel take-offs and landings in all but the best of weather. Your comment about plane type -- rather than esoteric, I think it’s more of a graduate-level flight planning tip. The first cut is regional jet vs. main-line jet. I’ll always pick the, say, United Airbus 319 over the American Eagle Embraer. Making a choice between main-line jets can be a bit more subtle; different fliers will make different trade-offs between size -- flights with smaller capacity jets might be sacrificed when storms reduce flight slots but they’re quicker to get out of if a delay has tightened your connection. Again, graduate-level linear programming optimization algorithms for flight planning.</li></ul></li><li>On Twitter, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/PortaPocketGal\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Kendra Kroll</a> offered up a travel tip<ul><li>“Know names of cities in local vernacular. I\'ll never forget when folks on our Southbound train to Rome missed their stop by several hours as they didn\'t realize Firenze = Florence!”</li><li>Ouch! That’s a good tip; probably a next-level version of my <em>Know Your Geography</em> tip. For extra credit, be able to recognize your destination in the local non-Latin alphabet. I was in Tokyo back right before they moved the old Tsukiji Fish Market. The morning after I arrived, I was up early with jet lag and so walked over to the market. Someone had recommended a small sushi joint there, so I went looking for it. The recommendation gave the name in Latin characters but the signs in the market were only in Kanji. I eventually found a guy at an information desk who gave me directions to the place, but something to keep in mind when I travel to, say, Greece or Georgia -- the country, not the state.</li></ul></li><li>And finally, Aaron Woodlin responded to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1564695213217648642\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">my re-tweet of an ORD TSA post</a> with a picture of what one passenger pulled out of their carry-on and put in a bin to pass through the X-ray machine -- a meat cleaver, a couple of knives, a couple of saws… Somebody who’s definitely unclear on the concept of “no sharp objects in your carry-on.” Aaron’s cut -<ul><li>“What I really don\'t get are people who don\'t keep their range bags and carry-on luggage separate, and end up unintentionally packing heat at the checkpoint.&nbsp; If you can afford plane fare, guns and ammo, you can spring for separate bags!”</li><li>Range bag, tool box… I can just imagine being the TSA guy shaking his head as the image of a bin full of knives and saws comes across the monitor. The guy is aware enough to know that you need to pull metal stuff out of your bag, but not hip to the fact of why. And now you’re the TSA guy who has to explain it all to him.&nbsp;</li></ul></li><li>And as always, thanks to all of you for the comments! Some great stuff here.</li><li>I think I’ve mentioned in prior episodes that I’m on Apple’s iPhone upgrade plan. Every year I get the new phone, send in my old one, and it resets the payment clock. Kinda like leasing a car but with lower monthly payments. Anyhow, a few weeks back, I’m scrubbing through Apple’s hour-and-a-half long announcement video -- skip all the Apple Watch stuff, slow down on the new AirPods, and then settle in for the iPhone 14 walk through. Nothing earth-shaking; I’m liking the new purple color. But then, as they were wrapping up, I had a record-scratch moment -- no SIM tray! What, what? Yup, for US iPhones, no more SIM tray; it’s all internal eSIMs! Isn’t that great? No more searching for a paper clip to pop out the tray, losing the little nano-SIM, …. No, it’s <em>not</em> great, at least for those of us who travel internationally. I’ve talked many times over the years about using local SIMs. Most recently, in episode #181, I talked about, at the start of our Puglia bike trip, spending 15 minutes and $25 in a Telecom Italia store for a SIM that gave me a local phone number (very handy for restaurant reservations) and <em>70 GB</em> of data. And now next week, all I have to do is load some money onto that SIM through the Telecom Italia website, and I’m good to go when I connect thru Frankfurt, and land in Croatia and Italy. But what about an eSIM? I couldn’t find any mainline Italian mobile carrier that offered a prepaid eSIM. Same with the UK. When I <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1567661384875347969\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">bitch-tweeted about this</a>, <a href=\"https://alosim.com/\">aloSIM</a>, a company that sells eSIMs for many countries, quickly responded “Well, our Italy eSIM data packages start at $4.50 for a week of data…” I hit their website. Their $4.50/week gives 1 GB of data. For an extra 50¢, I can get 10x that -- 10 GB of data for $5/week. I <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1567856046328135683\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">tweeted that back</a>. As you might guess, no response from aloSIM’s social media team. So, I’ve dropped off the iPhone upgrade wheel. I know I’m an edge case, and I think this could accelerate the push toward eSIMs. But like when Apple dropped the headphone jack, I think they’re 12-18 months ahead of the curve for frequent international travelers and I need something that works <em>today</em>, where the curve is right now. So I’ll wait a bit, like TravelCommons listener Jerry Sarfati who said he’s waiting for the “iPhone 15… with a USB-C charger.” I really hope it comes in purple too.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/spinmeister/53428\">Somewhere</a> by spinmeister (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/spinmeister/53428 Ft: DJ Vadim </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>When <em>Not </em>To Take the First Flight Out</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Moving to the mail portion of the episode, a day after I published <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/08/18/podcast-188-my-top-tips-to-survive-travel-chaos/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Podcast #188 —  My Top Travel Tips to Survive Airport Chaos\">the last episode</a>, I saw an email in the TravelCommons inbox with the subject “Is the first flight of the day still the best one? No. – air travel scientist for interviews.” This caught my eye because the 5th of the 13 tips to avoid airport chaos I’d <em>just </em>published was “catch the earliest flight you can”. So I replied to the email “Tell me why I’m wrong!”</li><li>Which led to this conversation with <a href=\"http://shj.cs.illinois.edu/\">Dr. Sheldon Jacobson</a>, Professor in Computer Science at the University of Illinois. Over the years, Dr. Jacobson has done projects using operations research models to optimize aviation security. But most recently, he <a href=\"https://www.chicagotribune.com/opinion/commentary/ct-opinion-travel-delays-flight-bookings-pandemic-20220830-p64ax3a74vaxnnzqwts4nel3cy-story.html\">wrote about</a> how the received frequent flier wisdom about catching the first flight out might not always be right. So I started our discussion asking him “Where did I get it wrong?”<ul><li>Sheldon: When you\'re flying in and out of hub airports, conventional wisdom is, in fact, correct. You do want to take the first flight of the day because at a hub airport, there\'s a lot more flexibility once a plane arrives at the end of the day. It\'s going to be cleaned, it\'s going to be maintained. Its gonna be fresh for the new day. If it turns out that some of the crew members become unavailable, you have alternatives because so many people have bases. So, this is in Chicago and Dallas for American, For United, you also have Washington Dulles as well as Chicago. For Delta, of course, it\'s Atlanta, Minneapolis, Detroit. So that\'s a great strategy. But what if you\'re not in a hub airport and that\'s when things start to get more nuanced. And the best way to think of this is that every airplane as well as every crew when they fly from city to city, they are a link in a chain. At the end of the day, you think, “Okay, the chain ends.” Actually, it doesn\'t. because the first flight of the day is the connection and the link from the last flight of the previous day. And all of this comes out and starts to impact that decision of the first flight of the day. Because if that flight comes in late, remember the last flight of the day, that\'s going to be the first flight out of a regional airport. So as a result of that, you actually want to take the second flight of the day out of a regional airport or a smaller large airport. That\'s the best strategy when it comes to these secondary and tertiary airports.</li><li>Mark: Actually, what you\'ve said, I\'ve seen that happen in smaller regional airports, say Lexington Kentucky, Appleton, Wisconsin, where that first flight of the day is not on the ground, so it\'s got to come in from a hub. Is there a split where, say, larger non-hub airports, the conventional wisdom still holds? Say where I am now in Nashville, or something like in Indianapolis? Where do those fall as far as the conventional wisdom on catching the first flight out?</li><li>Sheldon: Yes, certainly when you come to Nashville, Indianapolis, Columbus,&nbsp; Ohio, Pittsburgh,&nbsp; Pennsylvania -- some of these have been de-hubbed over the years. You\'re getting into a point that you have a lot of choices available. So then it becomes a little more nuanced because you could book the first flight on, let\'s say American and that one may have difficulties because that plane came in overnight and it was delayed because of storms in Chicago. But on the other hand, if there are options on Delta which are coming from Atlanta where there were not storms, you can always then get switched over for it. So when you get into those middle airports, they\'re not full hubs, but they\'re not the small regionals that have two flights a day, then it becomes a little more nuanced. And then you start to look across airlines as opposed to just within the airline.</li><li>Mark: Now if we pivot just slightly and think about different types of airlines. So if I think about hub-centric airlines, like the traditional United, American, Delta versus, say, a Southwest, which I\'ve joked in the past feels like they\'re running milk runs across the country. So there\'s not necessarily a hub, just that plane is running a line. Is there a difference between those two types of airlines on that first flight out?</li><li>Sheldon: There is, for a variety of reasons. With Southwest, they\'re trying to pack as many segments or links per day for every airplane. That\'s how they stay profitable. Their turn times are tremendous, but it also makes them more vulnerable to any kind of mechanical or weather delays or air traffic control slowdowns because they don\'t have the slack built into their system in their links. As a result of that, when you get to the end of the day, they still have to abide by the FAA regulations in terms of crew rest. And the question is, even though they are in some sense of point to point airline, they have areas of the country that have a concentration of flights like Dallas Love for example, like Chicago, like Baltimore-Washington, where they traditionally had a lot of flights. So you do have to look then, even though they aren\'t traditional hubs, they operate similarly. Where is the crew located; where they choosing to live? And that\'s an important component because when you\'re trying to reschedule because of delays, the flight that you\'re going to take out at 6 am may have come from a city where the plane only arrived at midnight. The flight crew needs the rest. They will not be able to leave on time. But if you switch crews and you have the flexibility because you have a sufficient number of crew members. It solves the problem. Is that going to exist in your city? So even though Southwest doesn\'t have the traditional hub and spoke system, they have airports that, in some sense, act like their hubs.</li><li>Mark: Sheldon, how much of this do you think is a function of the current tight labor market that airlines say they\'re operating in?</li><li>Sheldon: Now the situation we\'re in, which was brought on by COVID, of course, meant that they had a tremendous amount of layoffs and looking down the road, they were trying to survive financially. And now they\'re in a situation where they have to rehire but retrain all of these pilots. People think “Oh, you haven\'t flown for 8 months, 9 months? We’ll just put you in a cockpit and you’re fine.” It doesn\'t work that way. Once you\'ve been off for 6 months, it\'s as if you\'ve never flown. You still have the 1,500 hours which are required to fly, but you get rusty. And the pilots themselves say “I\'m really not as comfortable as I used to be,” especially on landings, which is the most critical activity that they do once they\'re in flight, it\'s pretty much status quo. Taking off is reasonably straightforward, but landing is the tricky part. And they just feel a little less comfortable unless they have the training. And the fact is they want to be safe as much as the passengers and the airline\'s want them to be safe. Getting these people back in the cockpit training and they have so many flight simulators. So much training that needs to be gone through. This is a non-trivial process.</li><li>Mark: Sheldon, thank you very much for that. That\'s very helpful. Any last thought, any last tips as people are looking to navigate through the back end of the summer season and into the holiday flying; things that you use to avoid airport chaos?</li><li>Sheldon: Well, we\'ve just now entered the post-summer/fall travel period and I check the numbers daily in terms of screenings at TSA checkpoints and the numbers are trying to come down, which means that there\'s gonna be a lot less stress and strain on the system. The airlines are starting to ramp up their schedules. I\'ve booked some things out for later in the fall and they\'re already changing the schedules. So, I know that they\'re starting to add more flights and more opportunities for people. For the holiday travel season this year, Christmas and New Year\'s fall on a Sunday. And that means that people are going to be traveling on Friday and Saturday. If you can travel on Thursday or Wednesday, you may find it a lot less taxing. So, thinking a little bit ahead in that regard may be very helpful. You can\'t predict weather storms, a nor’easter is going through, you know, it’s late in the year. The other strategy that I\'ve used because I\'ve mostly lived in non-hub cities is that there\'s always been a dominant airline and a non-dominant airline. And the strategy I\'ve always used is to always become loyal to the non-dominant airline. And the reason being is that when the non-dominant airline had problems, they were always gracious to put you on the dominant airline, which had much more choices. And as a result, I rarely got stuck because if I was on the dominant airline, trying to find a plane on the non-dominant one was much more difficult to get the seats available</li><li>Mark: That\'s an interesting strategy. Kind of counterintuitive, but as you explain it, it makes sense.</li><li>Sheldon: I have never gotten stuck because by flying the non-dominant, even out of a hub airport. You think of a place like Detroit where they have Delta as the dominant airline. If you fly American out of there, the people are working extra hard to get your business. And as a result of that, I\'ve always found service is better in the non-dominant airline, even in the hub cities where they\'re competing.</li><li>Mark: That\'s a good tip. Thanks for that Sheldon. Dr. Sheldon, Jacobson at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. Thank you very much for joining us on the TravelCommons podcast.</li><li>Sheldon: Thank you. It\'s wonderful to be with you.</li></ul></li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/scottaltham/20747\"> Hear Us Now (poptastic mix)</a> by Scott Altham (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/scottaltham/20747</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Why We Travel</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Some years ago, on some milestone birthday (I’m not saying which), my kids gave me the book <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3DHoiJC\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">1,000 Places to See Before You Die</a></em>. Hmm… was there a message somewhere in that gift? Not that they would admit. But it was a fun book flip through -- to remind me of past trips and give me ideas of places to go next. So when the TravelCommons inbox offered up an opportunity to interview the author, <a href=\"http://1000Places.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Patricia Schultz</a>, about her new book, I jumped at it.<ul><li>Mark: Patricia, thanks for joining us on the TravelCommons podcast. Your new book is <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3BWnv6n\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Why We Travel: 100 Reasons to See the World</a></em>. That topic -- why we travel -- has been a common one here on TravelCommons; how travel expands our horizons, our perspectives, helps us connect with others and with ourselves as we lose ourselves in the “otherness” of a new place. So Patricia, help us. What\'s your take on why we travel?</li><li>Patricia: Well, I used this period of the pandemic to have that conversation with myself. This moment of COVID allowed me this unprecedented moment where suddenly I was very stationary. I thought it was very important for me, as a travel writer, to reassess all over again the importance of travel. But the “why” needs to be kept very forefront, so that we have that appreciation, and we understand that we\'re privileged and it\'s an honor and it\'s something that you need to travel meaningfully and not just on automatic pilot. And I think first and foremost it\'s, for me, it\'s food for my soul. And as you said, it opens our perspectives and it opens our heads, it opens our hearts. You mentioned connecting with other people. That\'s part of opening your heart with that exchange with your Uber driver or your guide or the lady in the open-air market who’s selling her tomatoes and whoever you have that moment with. It’s all the people along the way that you meet and accrue and collect all of these experiences that are life lessons. Not just the logistics and the details of trip planning, but life lessons as they pertain to what you bring home with you and how you deal with life and how you\'ve become more resourceful and the “daily-ness” of life is dealt with in a different way. I know I\'m more tolerant. I know I\'m more respectful in general. I know that I\'m more curious and that\'s what gets you out the front door at the end of the day, which is often usually the most difficult part of all of this -- getting going.</li><li>Mark: Absolutely. Patricia, the book is a great mix of beautiful photos and quotes about travel. Definitely a book that you need to have in your hand rather than on your tablet. What was your curation process? How did you pick the pictures and the quotes that went into the book?</li><li>Patricia: I\'m so glad that you touched on that because I myself thought that a book that seemingly this simplistic would just kind of write itself.</li><li>Mark: It\'s never that simple though. Right?</li><li>Patricia: No. One of the quotes I used is by Beverly Sills, the great operatic singer, who said there are no shortcuts to any place worth going to or anything worth doing, I might add as a postscript, and writing one of them. But the photos, which are not mine I\'m sorry to say, they\'re colorful and they\'re energetic and they\'re vibrant and there\'s a great sense of place and excitement to them, I think. And that\'s what we were aiming for to have this book, everything, kind of jump off the page at you because that\'s part of the message, the message of how exciting and exhilarating travel can be and then to match it with the appropriate message. The message that is embodied in a quotation or in an aphorism or in a list that I make up or in an anecdote that matches what the photograph recounts. So, it all was a real departure for me because my books until now have just been a kind of encyclopedia of 1,000 places around the world. But that same broad, comprehensive mix of experience and geography and message and importance of travel that I tried to infuse throughout <em>1,000 Places</em> is the same mix that I tried to embed in every aphorism and in every photo and in the sequence of the book. It\'s not a big book. It\'s a hardcover book. It\'s not oversized and it\'s not all that many pages; it\'s somewhere over 100 pages. But there\'s a lot that can be said because travel means many, many, many different things to many different people. But at the end of the day, it makes us better people and that\'s kind of Period, Amen!</li><li>Mark: And it\'s certainly more focused, as you said, on inspiring people to travel, to pull their bag out from under their bed rather than a tour guide\'s list of where to go, or some expert’s advice on how to pack that bag. But some might see this collide with the ethics, the concern about climate change. How do you square that circle?</li><li>Patricia: If you travel with respect and with that, conviction to see the world for all the right places, and not because you\'re checking off countries or you\'re filling empty time. But if you want to experience another culture and bring those experiences home with you, ultimately, probably the best thing we can hope to take away from travel is that when we return to our homes, we are equipped to make your best life for yourself and your neighbors and your community and the world at large. And also, the very notion that travel isn\'t inherently international or a 12-hour long haul flight to get you to the other side of the world. You know, you can walk out your front door and walk around the block in midtown Manhattan where I live and that\'s travel enough for many people. The people watching, the theater of the street or filling your car or charging your car and taking that road trip to the local state park. So, there are all kinds of ways that you can easily accommodate all of those concerns if you travel well. And I don\'t mean five-star deluxe and I don\'t mean remote dream destinations of Mongolia and Africa, although those are all pretty fantastic as well. Travel well in that you really maximize the time made available to you and the money that\'s in your budget. But I think you just need to go with the right head and the right head to me has always meant curiosity and respect. And if that\'s the case then you will travel respectfully, and you will address climate change in a way that as an individual we can.</li><li>Mark: Fantastic. Well, Patricia Schultz, author of the new book <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3S61BDa\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Why We Travel: 100 Reasons to See the World</a></em>. Patricia, thanks for stopping by the TravelCommons podcast to give us your thoughts on why we should travel. Really appreciate the time.</li><li>Patricia: Thank you very much. Thank you for having me.</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #189</li><li>A little change of pace; a lot less of my voice and more of others. I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. </li><li>And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>. And while you’re at TravelCommons.com, you can check out the show notes page for a transcript and any links I’ve mentioned. Or you can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page.</li><li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_189.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #189 —  Why We Travel; When The First Flight Isn\'t Best','','inherit','closed','closed','','4192-revision-v1','','','2022-09-22 18:26:14','2022-09-22 23:26:14','',4192,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4200',0,'revision','',0),
(4201,1,'2022-09-22 18:38:00','2022-09-22 23:38:00','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/IMG_5006.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/IMG_5006-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Person standing in front of a wall with the message stenciled No Selfies\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> There Are Rules About Why We Travel[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Lots of different voices in this episode. Listeners growing our list of travel tips, and conversations with <a href=\"http://shj.cs.illinois.edu/\">Dr. Sheldon Jacobson</a> about why one of those tips -- always catch the first flight out -- isn\'t always right, and <a href=\"http://1000Places.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Patricia Schultz</a> about her new book, <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3BWnv6n\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Why We Travel: 100 Reasons to See the World</a></em>. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_189.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #189: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in the Gulch neighborhood of Nashville, TN. Not a whole lot of travel since the last episode. Was back in Chicago after almost 2 months away. As a tourist this time, staying in a hotel just off the Michigan Avenue Mag Mile strip, a neighborhood we’d actively avoid when we lived in Chicago -- too crowded, too many tourists. But now that <em>we are</em> tourists, maybe it fits a little better. We ended up here more out of convenience than anything else. It was the furthest north in the city that I could find a place to burn off some Marriott points.&nbsp;</li><li>It’s been another month where I’ve spent more time planning travel than doing it; stitching together the itinerary for an almost 3-week trip -- Nashville, connecting through Chicago (‘cause I’m no longer in a hub city) and Frankfurt, to Split, Croatia; then over to Rome and a train to Naples to get to Positano; then back to Naples for a few days; then to Rome; then to Florence; then back down to Rome to fly home by way of Newark. That looks kinda silly just typing it out. TripIt ended up being a very valuable tool. I forwarded all the various confirmation emails to it, and it did a damn good job of sequencing everything into a single itinerary, which helped me spot holes where I’d screwed up, say, a departure date or had just completely forgot about a trip leg.&nbsp; But it’s all done; I leave next week. And writing this episode is giving me another good excuse to put off thinking about packing -- 3 weeks in a carryon. “Has a washing machine” might’ve been my most critical Airbnb search criteria.</li><li>Bridge Music --  <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/48915\">Like Music (cdk Mix</a>) by Analog By Nature (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/48915 Ft: Phasenwandler  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Yup, we have mail … and comments.</li><li>Let’s start with two comments on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">TravelCommons Facebook page</a>. First up, Jim McDonough tagged the post for <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/05/26/podcast-187-moving-to-a-non-hub-airport-what-makes-a-great-taproom/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Podcast #187 — Moving to a Non-Hub Airport; What Makes A Great Taproom?\">episode #187</a> with his experience moving to a non-hub airport. Jim writes…<ul><li>“We moved from a hub (DFW, 7 parallel runways plus one other) to a non-hub (SAN, 1 runway). Clearly we were tied to American at DFW (both lifetime Gold), and there really is no single dominant carrier at SAN. We do have some sneaky long non-stops from here, though, like to Hawaii, London, Munich, Boston, New York. None of these on American, though. We are trending towards Alaska Airlines, which has pretty good service and Boeing airplanes, and if there\'s an Admirals Club around we can use it flying Alaska. I was among the people who switched to cash-back credit cards during the pandemic when no flying was happening, but I\'m rethinking that position with an eye to using miles to go places.”</li><li>Jim, thanks for that. The American-Alaska relationship has always been good for West Coast fliers. I remember, years ago, flying Alaska from Long Beach up the coast to San Jose. I could never figure out why Alaska was flying that route, but it was handy with my American status.</li></ul></li><li>Next up, Thelma Smith adding a travel tip to the post for last month’s episode<ul><li>“Good episode. I don’t travel a lot but one thing I do is if I have to check a bag I use the sky cap. I don’t have to be lugging anything through the airport and the cash comes in handy to tip them.”</li><li>Thanks, Thelma, for that tip. I\'m a big sky cap fan when I have to check a bag -- like when I’m loaded up from a big wine country trip -- and, yes, cash is absolutely required for their tip!</li></ul></li><li>Moving to the TravelCommons website, Geoff Slater left this comment<ul><li>“Excellent return podcast! A very frequent traveler, I agreed with everything. A quibble however was the advice to take a nonstop. While I don’t disagree, I fly in and out of Burlington, VT, so that’s rarely an option. So for me, I also consider my options for connecting airports. As a United flier, Denver in the summer when it’s an option, and then IAD, and trying to avoid EWR. Getting a bit more esoteric for the non-frequent flier, I also consider plane type. And with United 1K status, I also take advantage of the same day change to avoid weather problems.”</li><li>Geoff, thanks for the comments. Kinda back to my pre-break episode about moving from to a non-hub airport -- most of your direct flight options are to hubs like DEN and IAD. Your strategy on hub selection is smart; pick hubs off by themselves with long well-separated runways. When I was doing work in north Jersey, we used to joke that anyone spitting on a runway at EWR would mean an hour delay; the runways are too close together to allow parallel take-offs and landings in all but the best of weather. Your comment about plane type -- rather than esoteric, I think it’s more of a graduate-level flight planning tip. The first cut is regional jet vs. main-line jet. I’ll always pick the, say, United Airbus 319 over the American Eagle Embraer. Making a choice between main-line jets can be a bit more subtle; different fliers will make different trade-offs between size -- flights with smaller capacity jets might be sacrificed when storms reduce flight slots but they’re quicker to get out of if a delay has tightened your connection. Again, graduate-level linear programming optimization algorithms for flight planning.</li></ul></li><li>On Twitter, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/PortaPocketGal\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Kendra Kroll</a> offered up a travel tip<ul><li>“Know names of cities in local vernacular. I\'ll never forget when folks on our Southbound train to Rome missed their stop by several hours as they didn\'t realize Firenze = Florence!”</li><li>Ouch! That’s a good tip; probably a next-level version of my <em>Know Your Geography</em> tip. For extra credit, be able to recognize your destination in the local non-Latin alphabet. I was in Tokyo back right before they moved the old Tsukiji Fish Market. The morning after I arrived, I was up early with jet lag and so walked over to the market. Someone had recommended a small sushi joint there, so I went looking for it. The recommendation gave the name in Latin characters but the signs in the market were only in Kanji. I eventually found a guy at an information desk who gave me directions to the place, but something to keep in mind when I travel to, say, Greece or Georgia -- the country, not the state.</li></ul></li><li>And finally, Aaron Woodlin responded to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1564695213217648642\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">my re-tweet of an ORD TSA post</a> with a picture of what one passenger pulled out of their carry-on and put in a bin to pass through the X-ray machine -- a meat cleaver, a couple of knives, a couple of saws… Somebody who’s definitely unclear on the concept of “no sharp objects in your carry-on.” Aaron’s cut -<ul><li>“What I really don\'t get are people who don\'t keep their range bags and carry-on luggage separate, and end up unintentionally packing heat at the checkpoint.&nbsp; If you can afford plane fare, guns and ammo, you can spring for separate bags!”</li><li>Range bag, tool box… I can just imagine being the TSA guy shaking his head as the image of a bin full of knives and saws comes across the monitor. The guy is aware enough to know that you need to pull metal stuff out of your bag, but not hip to the fact of why. And now you’re the TSA guy who has to explain it all to him.&nbsp;</li></ul></li><li>And as always, thanks to all of you for the comments! Some great stuff here.</li><li>I think I’ve mentioned in prior episodes that I’m on Apple’s iPhone upgrade plan. Every year I get the new phone, send in my old one, and it resets the payment clock. Kinda like leasing a car but with lower monthly payments. Anyhow, a few weeks back, I’m scrubbing through Apple’s hour-and-a-half long announcement video -- skip all the Apple Watch stuff, slow down on the new AirPods, and then settle in for the iPhone 14 walk through. Nothing earth-shaking; I’m liking the new purple color. But then, as they were wrapping up, I had a record-scratch moment -- no SIM tray! What, what? Yup, for US iPhones, no more SIM tray; it’s all internal eSIMs! Isn’t that great? No more searching for a paper clip to pop out the tray, losing the little nano-SIM, …. No, it’s <em>not</em> great, at least for those of us who travel internationally. I’ve talked many times over the years about using local SIMs. Most recently, in episode #181, I talked about, at the start of our Puglia bike trip, spending 15 minutes and $25 in a Telecom Italia store for a SIM that gave me a local phone number (very handy for restaurant reservations) and <em>70 GB</em> of data. And now next week, all I have to do is load some money onto that SIM through the Telecom Italia website, and I’m good to go when I connect thru Frankfurt, and land in Croatia and Italy. But what about an eSIM? I couldn’t find any mainline Italian mobile carrier that offered a prepaid eSIM. Same with the UK. When I <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1567661384875347969\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">bitch-tweeted about this</a>, <a href=\"https://alosim.com/\">aloSIM</a>, a company that sells eSIMs for many countries, quickly responded “Well, our Italy eSIM data packages start at $4.50 for a week of data…” I hit their website. Their $4.50/week gives 1 GB of data. For an extra 50¢, I can get 10x that -- 10 GB of data for $5/week. I <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1567856046328135683\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">tweeted that back</a>. As you might guess, no response from aloSIM’s social media team. So, I’ve dropped off the iPhone upgrade wheel. I know I’m an edge case, and I think this could accelerate the push toward eSIMs. But like when Apple dropped the headphone jack, I think they’re 12-18 months ahead of the curve for frequent international travelers and I need something that works <em>today</em>, where the curve is right now. So I’ll wait a bit, like TravelCommons listener Jerry Sarfati who said he’s waiting for the “iPhone 15… with a USB-C charger.” I really hope it comes in purple too.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/spinmeister/53428\">Somewhere</a> by spinmeister (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/spinmeister/53428 Ft: DJ Vadim </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>When <em>Not </em>To Take the First Flight Out</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Moving to the mail portion of the episode, a day after I published <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/08/18/podcast-188-my-top-tips-to-survive-travel-chaos/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Podcast #188 —  My Top Travel Tips to Survive Airport Chaos\">the last episode</a>, I saw an email in the TravelCommons inbox with the subject “Is the first flight of the day still the best one? No. – air travel scientist for interviews.” This caught my eye because the 5th of the 13 tips to avoid airport chaos I’d <em>just </em>published was “catch the earliest flight you can”. So I replied to the email “Tell me why I’m wrong!”</li><li>Which led to this conversation with <a href=\"http://shj.cs.illinois.edu/\">Dr. Sheldon Jacobson</a>, Professor in Computer Science at the University of Illinois. Over the years, Dr. Jacobson has done projects using operations research models to optimize aviation security. But most recently, he <a href=\"https://www.chicagotribune.com/opinion/commentary/ct-opinion-travel-delays-flight-bookings-pandemic-20220830-p64ax3a74vaxnnzqwts4nel3cy-story.html\">wrote about</a> how the received frequent flier wisdom about catching the first flight out might not always be right. So I started our discussion asking him “Where did I get it wrong?”<ul><li>Sheldon: When you\'re flying in and out of hub airports, conventional wisdom is, in fact, correct. You do want to take the first flight of the day because at a hub airport, there\'s a lot more flexibility once a plane arrives at the end of the day. It\'s going to be cleaned, it\'s going to be maintained. Its gonna be fresh for the new day. If it turns out that some of the crew members become unavailable, you have alternatives because so many people have bases. So, this is in Chicago and Dallas for American, For United, you also have Washington Dulles as well as Chicago. For Delta, of course, it\'s Atlanta, Minneapolis, Detroit. So that\'s a great strategy. But what if you\'re not in a hub airport and that\'s when things start to get more nuanced. And the best way to think of this is that every airplane as well as every crew when they fly from city to city, they are a link in a chain. At the end of the day, you think, “Okay, the chain ends.” Actually, it doesn\'t. because the first flight of the day is the connection and the link from the last flight of the previous day. And all of this comes out and starts to impact that decision of the first flight of the day. Because if that flight comes in late, remember the last flight of the day, that\'s going to be the first flight out of a regional airport. So as a result of that, you actually want to take the second flight of the day out of a regional airport or a smaller large airport. That\'s the best strategy when it comes to these secondary and tertiary airports.</li><li>Mark: Actually, what you\'ve said, I\'ve seen that happen in smaller regional airports, say Lexington Kentucky, Appleton, Wisconsin, where that first flight of the day is not on the ground, so it\'s got to come in from a hub. Is there a split where, say, larger non-hub airports, the conventional wisdom still holds? Say where I am now in Nashville, or something like in Indianapolis? Where do those fall as far as the conventional wisdom on catching the first flight out?</li><li>Sheldon: Yes, certainly when you come to Nashville, Indianapolis, Columbus,&nbsp; Ohio, Pittsburgh,&nbsp; Pennsylvania -- some of these have been de-hubbed over the years. You\'re getting into a point that you have a lot of choices available. So then it becomes a little more nuanced because you could book the first flight on, let\'s say American and that one may have difficulties because that plane came in overnight and it was delayed because of storms in Chicago. But on the other hand, if there are options on Delta which are coming from Atlanta where there were not storms, you can always then get switched over for it. So when you get into those middle airports, they\'re not full hubs, but they\'re not the small regionals that have two flights a day, then it becomes a little more nuanced. And then you start to look across airlines as opposed to just within the airline.</li><li>Mark: Now if we pivot just slightly and think about different types of airlines. So if I think about hub-centric airlines, like the traditional United, American, Delta versus, say, a Southwest, which I\'ve joked in the past feels like they\'re running milk runs across the country. So there\'s not necessarily a hub, just that plane is running a line. Is there a difference between those two types of airlines on that first flight out?</li><li>Sheldon: There is, for a variety of reasons. With Southwest, they\'re trying to pack as many segments or links per day for every airplane. That\'s how they stay profitable. Their turn times are tremendous, but it also makes them more vulnerable to any kind of mechanical or weather delays or air traffic control slowdowns because they don\'t have the slack built into their system in their links. As a result of that, when you get to the end of the day, they still have to abide by the FAA regulations in terms of crew rest. And the question is, even though they are in some sense of point to point airline, they have areas of the country that have a concentration of flights like Dallas Love for example, like Chicago, like Baltimore-Washington, where they traditionally had a lot of flights. So you do have to look then, even though they aren\'t traditional hubs, they operate similarly. Where is the crew located; where they choosing to live? And that\'s an important component because when you\'re trying to reschedule because of delays, the flight that you\'re going to take out at 6 am may have come from a city where the plane only arrived at midnight. The flight crew needs the rest. They will not be able to leave on time. But if you switch crews and you have the flexibility because you have a sufficient number of crew members. It solves the problem. Is that going to exist in your city? So even though Southwest doesn\'t have the traditional hub and spoke system, they have airports that, in some sense, act like their hubs.</li><li>Mark: Sheldon, how much of this do you think is a function of the current tight labor market that airlines say they\'re operating in?</li><li>Sheldon: Now the situation we\'re in, which was brought on by COVID, of course, meant that they had a tremendous amount of layoffs and looking down the road, they were trying to survive financially. And now they\'re in a situation where they have to rehire but retrain all of these pilots. People think “Oh, you haven\'t flown for 8 months, 9 months? We’ll just put you in a cockpit and you’re fine.” It doesn\'t work that way. Once you\'ve been off for 6 months, it\'s as if you\'ve never flown. You still have the 1,500 hours which are required to fly, but you get rusty. And the pilots themselves say “I\'m really not as comfortable as I used to be,” especially on landings, which is the most critical activity that they do once they\'re in flight, it\'s pretty much status quo. Taking off is reasonably straightforward, but landing is the tricky part. And they just feel a little less comfortable unless they have the training. And the fact is they want to be safe as much as the passengers and the airline\'s want them to be safe. Getting these people back in the cockpit training and they have so many flight simulators. So much training that needs to be gone through. This is a non-trivial process.</li><li>Mark: Sheldon, thank you very much for that. That\'s very helpful. Any last thought, any last tips as people are looking to navigate through the back end of the summer season and into the holiday flying; things that you use to avoid airport chaos?</li><li>Sheldon: Well, we\'ve just now entered the post-summer/fall travel period and I check the numbers daily in terms of screenings at TSA checkpoints and the numbers are trying to come down, which means that there\'s gonna be a lot less stress and strain on the system. The airlines are starting to ramp up their schedules. I\'ve booked some things out for later in the fall and they\'re already changing the schedules. So, I know that they\'re starting to add more flights and more opportunities for people. For the holiday travel season this year, Christmas and New Year\'s fall on a Sunday. And that means that people are going to be traveling on Friday and Saturday. If you can travel on Thursday or Wednesday, you may find it a lot less taxing. So, thinking a little bit ahead in that regard may be very helpful. You can\'t predict weather storms, a nor’easter is going through, you know, it’s late in the year. The other strategy that I\'ve used because I\'ve mostly lived in non-hub cities is that there\'s always been a dominant airline and a non-dominant airline. And the strategy I\'ve always used is to always become loyal to the non-dominant airline. And the reason being is that when the non-dominant airline had problems, they were always gracious to put you on the dominant airline, which had much more choices. And as a result, I rarely got stuck because if I was on the dominant airline, trying to find a plane on the non-dominant one was much more difficult to get the seats available</li><li>Mark: That\'s an interesting strategy. Kind of counterintuitive, but as you explain it, it makes sense.</li><li>Sheldon: I have never gotten stuck because by flying the non-dominant, even out of a hub airport. You think of a place like Detroit where they have Delta as the dominant airline. If you fly American out of there, the people are working extra hard to get your business. And as a result of that, I\'ve always found service is better in the non-dominant airline, even in the hub cities where they\'re competing.</li><li>Mark: That\'s a good tip. Thanks for that Sheldon. Dr. Sheldon, Jacobson at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. Thank you very much for joining us on the TravelCommons podcast.</li><li>Sheldon: Thank you. It\'s wonderful to be with you.</li></ul></li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/scottaltham/20747\"> Hear Us Now (poptastic mix)</a> by Scott Altham (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/scottaltham/20747</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Why We Travel</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Some years ago, on some milestone birthday (I’m not saying which), my kids gave me the book <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3DHoiJC\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">1,000 Places to See Before You Die</a></em>. Hmm… was there a message somewhere in that gift? Not that they would admit. But it was a fun book flip through -- to remind me of past trips and give me ideas of places to go next. So when the TravelCommons inbox offered up an opportunity to interview the author, <a href=\"http://1000Places.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Patricia Schultz</a>, about her new book, I jumped at it.<ul><li>Mark: Patricia, thanks for joining us on the TravelCommons podcast. Your new book is <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3BWnv6n\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Why We Travel: 100 Reasons to See the World</a></em>. That topic -- why we travel -- has been a common one here on TravelCommons; how travel expands our horizons, our perspectives, helps us connect with others and with ourselves as we lose ourselves in the “otherness” of a new place. So Patricia, help us. What\'s your take on why we travel?</li><li>Patricia: Well, I used this period of the pandemic to have that conversation with myself. This moment of COVID allowed me this unprecedented moment where suddenly I was very stationary. I thought it was very important for me, as a travel writer, to reassess all over again the importance of travel. But the “why” needs to be kept very forefront, so that we have that appreciation, and we understand that we\'re privileged and it\'s an honor and it\'s something that you need to travel meaningfully and not just on automatic pilot. And I think first and foremost it\'s, for me, it\'s food for my soul. And as you said, it opens our perspectives and it opens our heads, it opens our hearts. You mentioned connecting with other people. That\'s part of opening your heart with that exchange with your Uber driver or your guide or the lady in the open-air market who’s selling her tomatoes and whoever you have that moment with. It’s all the people along the way that you meet and accrue and collect all of these experiences that are life lessons. Not just the logistics and the details of trip planning, but life lessons as they pertain to what you bring home with you and how you deal with life and how you\'ve become more resourceful and the “daily-ness” of life is dealt with in a different way. I know I\'m more tolerant. I know I\'m more respectful in general. I know that I\'m more curious and that\'s what gets you out the front door at the end of the day, which is often usually the most difficult part of all of this -- getting going.</li><li>Mark: Absolutely. Patricia, the book is a great mix of beautiful photos and quotes about travel. Definitely a book that you need to have in your hand rather than on your tablet. What was your curation process? How did you pick the pictures and the quotes that went into the book?</li><li>Patricia: I\'m so glad that you touched on that because I myself thought that a book that seemingly this simplistic would just kind of write itself.</li><li>Mark: It\'s never that simple though. Right?</li><li>Patricia: No. One of the quotes I used is by Beverly Sills, the great operatic singer, who said there are no shortcuts to any place worth going to or anything worth doing, I might add as a postscript, and writing one of them. But the photos, which are not mine I\'m sorry to say, they\'re colorful and they\'re energetic and they\'re vibrant and there\'s a great sense of place and excitement to them, I think. And that\'s what we were aiming for to have this book, everything, kind of jump off the page at you because that\'s part of the message, the message of how exciting and exhilarating travel can be and then to match it with the appropriate message. The message that is embodied in a quotation or in an aphorism or in a list that I make up or in an anecdote that matches what the photograph recounts. So, it all was a real departure for me because my books until now have just been a kind of encyclopedia of 1,000 places around the world. But that same broad, comprehensive mix of experience and geography and message and importance of travel that I tried to infuse throughout <em>1,000 Places</em> is the same mix that I tried to embed in every aphorism and in every photo and in the sequence of the book. It\'s not a big book. It\'s a hardcover book. It\'s not oversized and it\'s not all that many pages; it\'s somewhere over 100 pages. But there\'s a lot that can be said because travel means many, many, many different things to many different people. But at the end of the day, it makes us better people and that\'s kind of Period, Amen!</li><li>Mark: And it\'s certainly more focused, as you said, on inspiring people to travel, to pull their bag out from under their bed rather than a tour guide\'s list of where to go, or some expert’s advice on how to pack that bag. But some might see this collide with the ethics, the concern about climate change. How do you square that circle?</li><li>Patricia: If you travel with respect and with that, conviction to see the world for all the right places, and not because you\'re checking off countries or you\'re filling empty time. But if you want to experience another culture and bring those experiences home with you, ultimately, probably the best thing we can hope to take away from travel is that when we return to our homes, we are equipped to make your best life for yourself and your neighbors and your community and the world at large. And also, the very notion that travel isn\'t inherently international or a 12-hour long haul flight to get you to the other side of the world. You know, you can walk out your front door and walk around the block in midtown Manhattan where I live and that\'s travel enough for many people. The people watching, the theater of the street or filling your car or charging your car and taking that road trip to the local state park. So, there are all kinds of ways that you can easily accommodate all of those concerns if you travel well. And I don\'t mean five-star deluxe and I don\'t mean remote dream destinations of Mongolia and Africa, although those are all pretty fantastic as well. Travel well in that you really maximize the time made available to you and the money that\'s in your budget. But I think you just need to go with the right head and the right head to me has always meant curiosity and respect. And if that\'s the case then you will travel respectfully, and you will address climate change in a way that as an individual we can.</li><li>Mark: Fantastic. Well, Patricia Schultz, author of the new book <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3S61BDa\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Why We Travel: 100 Reasons to See the World</a></em>. Patricia, thanks for stopping by the TravelCommons podcast to give us your thoughts on why we should travel. Really appreciate the time.</li><li>Patricia: Thank you very much. Thank you for having me.</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #189</li><li>A little change of pace; a lot less of my voice and more of others. I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. </li><li>And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>. And while you’re at TravelCommons.com, you can check out the show notes page for a transcript and any links I’ve mentioned. Or you can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page.</li><li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_189.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #189 —  Why We Travel; When The First Flight Isn\'t Best','Lots of different voices - listeners adding to our list of travel tips, Dr. Sheldon Jacobson on why one of our tips isn\'t always right, and Patricia Schultz on her new book \"Why We Travel\"','inherit','closed','closed','','4192-revision-v1','','','2022-09-22 18:38:00','2022-09-22 23:38:00','',4192,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4201',0,'revision','',0),
(4204,1,'2022-09-22 19:52:14','2022-09-23 00:52:14','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/IMG_5006.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/IMG_5006-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Person standing in front of a wall with the message stenciled No Selfies\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> There Are Rules About Why We Travel[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Lots of different voices in this episode. Listeners growing our list of travel tips, and conversations with <a href=\"http://shj.cs.illinois.edu/\">Dr. Sheldon Jacobson</a> about why one of those tips -- always catch the first flight out -- isn\'t always right, and <a href=\"https://www.workman.com/authors/patricia-schultz\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Patricia Schultz</a> about her new book, <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3BWnv6n\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Why We Travel: 100 Reasons to See the World</a></em>. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_189.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #189: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in the Gulch neighborhood of Nashville, TN. Not a whole lot of travel since the last episode. Was back in Chicago after almost 2 months away. As a tourist this time, staying in a hotel just off the Michigan Avenue Mag Mile strip, a neighborhood we’d actively avoid when we lived in Chicago -- too crowded, too many tourists. But now that <em>we are</em> tourists, maybe it fits a little better. We ended up here more out of convenience than anything else. It was the furthest north in the city that I could find a place to burn off some Marriott points.&nbsp;</li><li>It’s been another month where I’ve spent more time planning travel than doing it; stitching together the itinerary for an almost 3-week trip -- Nashville, connecting through Chicago (‘cause I’m no longer in a hub city) and Frankfurt, to Split, Croatia; then over to Rome and a train to Naples to get to Positano; then back to Naples for a few days; then to Rome; then to Florence; then back down to Rome to fly home by way of Newark. That looks kinda silly just typing it out. TripIt ended up being a very valuable tool. I forwarded all the various confirmation emails to it, and it did a damn good job of sequencing everything into a single itinerary, which helped me spot holes where I’d screwed up, say, a departure date or had just completely forgot about a trip leg.&nbsp; But it’s all done; I leave next week. And writing this episode is giving me another good excuse to put off thinking about packing -- 3 weeks in a carryon. “Has a washing machine” might’ve been my most critical Airbnb search criteria.</li><li>Bridge Music --  <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/48915\">Like Music (cdk Mix</a>) by Analog By Nature (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/48915 Ft: Phasenwandler  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Yup, we have mail … and comments.</li><li>Let’s start with two comments on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">TravelCommons Facebook page</a>. First up, Jim McDonough tagged the post for <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/05/26/podcast-187-moving-to-a-non-hub-airport-what-makes-a-great-taproom/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Podcast #187 — Moving to a Non-Hub Airport; What Makes A Great Taproom?\">episode #187</a> with his experience moving to a non-hub airport. Jim writes…<ul><li>“We moved from a hub (DFW, 7 parallel runways plus one other) to a non-hub (SAN, 1 runway). Clearly we were tied to American at DFW (both lifetime Gold), and there really is no single dominant carrier at SAN. We do have some sneaky long non-stops from here, though, like to Hawaii, London, Munich, Boston, New York. None of these on American, though. We are trending towards Alaska Airlines, which has pretty good service and Boeing airplanes, and if there\'s an Admirals Club around we can use it flying Alaska. I was among the people who switched to cash-back credit cards during the pandemic when no flying was happening, but I\'m rethinking that position with an eye to using miles to go places.”</li><li>Jim, thanks for that. The American-Alaska relationship has always been good for West Coast fliers. I remember, years ago, flying Alaska from Long Beach up the coast to San Jose. I could never figure out why Alaska was flying that route, but it was handy with my American status.</li></ul></li><li>Next up, Thelma Smith adding a travel tip to the post for last month’s episode<ul><li>“Good episode. I don’t travel a lot but one thing I do is if I have to check a bag I use the sky cap. I don’t have to be lugging anything through the airport and the cash comes in handy to tip them.”</li><li>Thanks, Thelma, for that tip. I\'m a big sky cap fan when I have to check a bag -- like when I’m loaded up from a big wine country trip -- and, yes, cash is absolutely required for their tip!</li></ul></li><li>Moving to the TravelCommons website, Geoff Slater left this comment<ul><li>“Excellent return podcast! A very frequent traveler, I agreed with everything. A quibble however was the advice to take a nonstop. While I don’t disagree, I fly in and out of Burlington, VT, so that’s rarely an option. So for me, I also consider my options for connecting airports. As a United flier, Denver in the summer when it’s an option, and then IAD, and trying to avoid EWR. Getting a bit more esoteric for the non-frequent flier, I also consider plane type. And with United 1K status, I also take advantage of the same day change to avoid weather problems.”</li><li>Geoff, thanks for the comments. Kinda back to my pre-break episode about moving from to a non-hub airport -- most of your direct flight options are to hubs like DEN and IAD. Your strategy on hub selection is smart; pick hubs off by themselves with long well-separated runways. When I was doing work in north Jersey, we used to joke that anyone spitting on a runway at EWR would mean an hour delay; the runways are too close together to allow parallel take-offs and landings in all but the best of weather. Your comment about plane type -- rather than esoteric, I think it’s more of a graduate-level flight planning tip. The first cut is regional jet vs. main-line jet. I’ll always pick the, say, United Airbus 319 over the American Eagle Embraer. Making a choice between main-line jets can be a bit more subtle; different fliers will make different trade-offs between size -- flights with smaller capacity jets might be sacrificed when storms reduce flight slots but they’re quicker to get out of if a delay has tightened your connection. Again, graduate-level linear programming optimization algorithms for flight planning.</li></ul></li><li>On Twitter, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/PortaPocketGal\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Kendra Kroll</a> offered up a travel tip<ul><li>“Know names of cities in local vernacular. I\'ll never forget when folks on our Southbound train to Rome missed their stop by several hours as they didn\'t realize Firenze = Florence!”</li><li>Ouch! That’s a good tip; probably a next-level version of my <em>Know Your Geography</em> tip. For extra credit, be able to recognize your destination in the local non-Latin alphabet. I was in Tokyo back right before they moved the old Tsukiji Fish Market. The morning after I arrived, I was up early with jet lag and so walked over to the market. Someone had recommended a small sushi joint there, so I went looking for it. The recommendation gave the name in Latin characters but the signs in the market were only in Kanji. I eventually found a guy at an information desk who gave me directions to the place, but something to keep in mind when I travel to, say, Greece or Georgia -- the country, not the state.</li></ul></li><li>And finally, Aaron Woodlin responded to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1564695213217648642\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">my re-tweet of an ORD TSA post</a> with a picture of what one passenger pulled out of their carry-on and put in a bin to pass through the X-ray machine -- a meat cleaver, a couple of knives, a couple of saws… Somebody who’s definitely unclear on the concept of “no sharp objects in your carry-on.” Aaron’s cut -<ul><li>“What I really don\'t get are people who don\'t keep their range bags and carry-on luggage separate, and end up unintentionally packing heat at the checkpoint.&nbsp; If you can afford plane fare, guns and ammo, you can spring for separate bags!”</li><li>Range bag, tool box… I can just imagine being the TSA guy shaking his head as the image of a bin full of knives and saws comes across the monitor. The guy is aware enough to know that you need to pull metal stuff out of your bag, but not hip to the fact of why. And now you’re the TSA guy who has to explain it all to him.&nbsp;</li></ul></li><li>And as always, thanks to all of you for the comments! Some great stuff here.</li><li>I think I’ve mentioned in prior episodes that I’m on Apple’s iPhone upgrade plan. Every year I get the new phone, send in my old one, and it resets the payment clock. Kinda like leasing a car but with lower monthly payments. Anyhow, a few weeks back, I’m scrubbing through Apple’s hour-and-a-half long announcement video -- skip all the Apple Watch stuff, slow down on the new AirPods, and then settle in for the iPhone 14 walk through. Nothing earth-shaking; I’m liking the new purple color. But then, as they were wrapping up, I had a record-scratch moment -- no SIM tray! What, what? Yup, for US iPhones, no more SIM tray; it’s all internal eSIMs! Isn’t that great? No more searching for a paper clip to pop out the tray, losing the little nano-SIM, …. No, it’s <em>not</em> great, at least for those of us who travel internationally. I’ve talked many times over the years about using local SIMs. Most recently, in episode #181, I talked about, at the start of our Puglia bike trip, spending 15 minutes and $25 in a Telecom Italia store for a SIM that gave me a local phone number (very handy for restaurant reservations) and <em>70 GB</em> of data. And now next week, all I have to do is load some money onto that SIM through the Telecom Italia website, and I’m good to go when I connect thru Frankfurt, and land in Croatia and Italy. But what about an eSIM? I couldn’t find any mainline Italian mobile carrier that offered a prepaid eSIM. Same with the UK. When I <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1567661384875347969\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">bitch-tweeted about this</a>, <a href=\"https://alosim.com/\">aloSIM</a>, a company that sells eSIMs for many countries, quickly responded “Well, our Italy eSIM data packages start at $4.50 for a week of data…” I hit their website. Their $4.50/week gives 1 GB of data. For an extra 50¢, I can get 10x that -- 10 GB of data for $5/week. I <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1567856046328135683\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">tweeted that back</a>. As you might guess, no response from aloSIM’s social media team. So, I’ve dropped off the iPhone upgrade wheel. I know I’m an edge case, and I think this could accelerate the push toward eSIMs. But like when Apple dropped the headphone jack, I think they’re 12-18 months ahead of the curve for frequent international travelers and I need something that works <em>today</em>, where the curve is right now. So I’ll wait a bit, like TravelCommons listener Jerry Sarfati who said he’s waiting for the “iPhone 15… with a USB-C charger.” I really hope it comes in purple too.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/spinmeister/53428\">Somewhere</a> by spinmeister (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/spinmeister/53428 Ft: DJ Vadim </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>When <em>Not </em>To Take the First Flight Out</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Moving to the mail portion of the episode, a day after I published <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/08/18/podcast-188-my-top-tips-to-survive-travel-chaos/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Podcast #188 —  My Top Travel Tips to Survive Airport Chaos\">the last episode</a>, I saw an email in the TravelCommons inbox with the subject “Is the first flight of the day still the best one? No. – air travel scientist for interviews.” This caught my eye because the 5th of the 13 tips to avoid airport chaos I’d <em>just </em>published was “catch the earliest flight you can”. So I replied to the email “Tell me why I’m wrong!”</li><li>Which led to this conversation with <a href=\"http://shj.cs.illinois.edu/\">Dr. Sheldon Jacobson</a>, Professor in Computer Science at the University of Illinois. Over the years, Dr. Jacobson has done projects using operations research models to optimize aviation security. But most recently, he <a href=\"https://www.chicagotribune.com/opinion/commentary/ct-opinion-travel-delays-flight-bookings-pandemic-20220830-p64ax3a74vaxnnzqwts4nel3cy-story.html\">wrote about</a> how the received frequent flier wisdom about catching the first flight out might not always be right. So I started our discussion asking him “Where did I get it wrong?”<ul><li>Sheldon: When you\'re flying in and out of hub airports, conventional wisdom is, in fact, correct. You do want to take the first flight of the day because at a hub airport, there\'s a lot more flexibility once a plane arrives at the end of the day. It\'s going to be cleaned, it\'s going to be maintained. Its gonna be fresh for the new day. If it turns out that some of the crew members become unavailable, you have alternatives because so many people have bases. So, this is in Chicago and Dallas for American, For United, you also have Washington Dulles as well as Chicago. For Delta, of course, it\'s Atlanta, Minneapolis, Detroit. So that\'s a great strategy. But what if you\'re not in a hub airport and that\'s when things start to get more nuanced. And the best way to think of this is that every airplane as well as every crew when they fly from city to city, they are a link in a chain. At the end of the day, you think, “Okay, the chain ends.” Actually, it doesn\'t. because the first flight of the day is the connection and the link from the last flight of the previous day. And all of this comes out and starts to impact that decision of the first flight of the day. Because if that flight comes in late, remember the last flight of the day, that\'s going to be the first flight out of a regional airport. So as a result of that, you actually want to take the second flight of the day out of a regional airport or a smaller large airport. That\'s the best strategy when it comes to these secondary and tertiary airports.</li><li>Mark: Actually, what you\'ve said, I\'ve seen that happen in smaller regional airports, say Lexington Kentucky, Appleton, Wisconsin, where that first flight of the day is not on the ground, so it\'s got to come in from a hub. Is there a split where, say, larger non-hub airports, the conventional wisdom still holds? Say where I am now in Nashville, or something like in Indianapolis? Where do those fall as far as the conventional wisdom on catching the first flight out?</li><li>Sheldon: Yes, certainly when you come to Nashville, Indianapolis, Columbus,&nbsp; Ohio, Pittsburgh,&nbsp; Pennsylvania -- some of these have been de-hubbed over the years. You\'re getting into a point that you have a lot of choices available. So then it becomes a little more nuanced because you could book the first flight on, let\'s say American and that one may have difficulties because that plane came in overnight and it was delayed because of storms in Chicago. But on the other hand, if there are options on Delta which are coming from Atlanta where there were not storms, you can always then get switched over for it. So when you get into those middle airports, they\'re not full hubs, but they\'re not the small regionals that have two flights a day, then it becomes a little more nuanced. And then you start to look across airlines as opposed to just within the airline.</li><li>Mark: Now if we pivot just slightly and think about different types of airlines. So if I think about hub-centric airlines, like the traditional United, American, Delta versus, say, a Southwest, which I\'ve joked in the past feels like they\'re running milk runs across the country. So there\'s not necessarily a hub, just that plane is running a line. Is there a difference between those two types of airlines on that first flight out?</li><li>Sheldon: There is, for a variety of reasons. With Southwest, they\'re trying to pack as many segments or links per day for every airplane. That\'s how they stay profitable. Their turn times are tremendous, but it also makes them more vulnerable to any kind of mechanical or weather delays or air traffic control slowdowns because they don\'t have the slack built into their system in their links. As a result of that, when you get to the end of the day, they still have to abide by the FAA regulations in terms of crew rest. And the question is, even though they are in some sense of point to point airline, they have areas of the country that have a concentration of flights like Dallas Love for example, like Chicago, like Baltimore-Washington, where they traditionally had a lot of flights. So you do have to look then, even though they aren\'t traditional hubs, they operate similarly. Where is the crew located; where they choosing to live? And that\'s an important component because when you\'re trying to reschedule because of delays, the flight that you\'re going to take out at 6 am may have come from a city where the plane only arrived at midnight. The flight crew needs the rest. They will not be able to leave on time. But if you switch crews and you have the flexibility because you have a sufficient number of crew members. It solves the problem. Is that going to exist in your city? So even though Southwest doesn\'t have the traditional hub and spoke system, they have airports that, in some sense, act like their hubs.</li><li>Mark: Sheldon, how much of this do you think is a function of the current tight labor market that airlines say they\'re operating in?</li><li>Sheldon: Now the situation we\'re in, which was brought on by COVID, of course, meant that they had a tremendous amount of layoffs and looking down the road, they were trying to survive financially. And now they\'re in a situation where they have to rehire but retrain all of these pilots. People think “Oh, you haven\'t flown for 8 months, 9 months? We’ll just put you in a cockpit and you’re fine.” It doesn\'t work that way. Once you\'ve been off for 6 months, it\'s as if you\'ve never flown. You still have the 1,500 hours which are required to fly, but you get rusty. And the pilots themselves say “I\'m really not as comfortable as I used to be,” especially on landings, which is the most critical activity that they do once they\'re in flight, it\'s pretty much status quo. Taking off is reasonably straightforward, but landing is the tricky part. And they just feel a little less comfortable unless they have the training. And the fact is they want to be safe as much as the passengers and the airline\'s want them to be safe. Getting these people back in the cockpit training and they have so many flight simulators. So much training that needs to be gone through. This is a non-trivial process.</li><li>Mark: Sheldon, thank you very much for that. That\'s very helpful. Any last thought, any last tips as people are looking to navigate through the back end of the summer season and into the holiday flying; things that you use to avoid airport chaos?</li><li>Sheldon: Well, we\'ve just now entered the post-summer/fall travel period and I check the numbers daily in terms of screenings at TSA checkpoints and the numbers are trying to come down, which means that there\'s gonna be a lot less stress and strain on the system. The airlines are starting to ramp up their schedules. I\'ve booked some things out for later in the fall and they\'re already changing the schedules. So, I know that they\'re starting to add more flights and more opportunities for people. For the holiday travel season this year, Christmas and New Year\'s fall on a Sunday. And that means that people are going to be traveling on Friday and Saturday. If you can travel on Thursday or Wednesday, you may find it a lot less taxing. So, thinking a little bit ahead in that regard may be very helpful. You can\'t predict weather storms, a nor’easter is going through, you know, it’s late in the year. The other strategy that I\'ve used because I\'ve mostly lived in non-hub cities is that there\'s always been a dominant airline and a non-dominant airline. And the strategy I\'ve always used is to always become loyal to the non-dominant airline. And the reason being is that when the non-dominant airline had problems, they were always gracious to put you on the dominant airline, which had much more choices. And as a result, I rarely got stuck because if I was on the dominant airline, trying to find a plane on the non-dominant one was much more difficult to get the seats available</li><li>Mark: That\'s an interesting strategy. Kind of counterintuitive, but as you explain it, it makes sense.</li><li>Sheldon: I have never gotten stuck because by flying the non-dominant, even out of a hub airport. You think of a place like Detroit where they have Delta as the dominant airline. If you fly American out of there, the people are working extra hard to get your business. And as a result of that, I\'ve always found service is better in the non-dominant airline, even in the hub cities where they\'re competing.</li><li>Mark: That\'s a good tip. Thanks for that Sheldon. Dr. Sheldon, Jacobson at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. Thank you very much for joining us on the TravelCommons podcast.</li><li>Sheldon: Thank you. It\'s wonderful to be with you.</li></ul></li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/scottaltham/20747\"> Hear Us Now (poptastic mix)</a> by Scott Altham (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/scottaltham/20747</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Why We Travel</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Some years ago, on some milestone birthday (I’m not saying which), my kids gave me the book <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3DHoiJC\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">1,000 Places to See Before You Die</a></em>. Hmm… was there a message somewhere in that gift? Not that they would admit. But it was a fun book flip through -- to remind me of past trips and give me ideas of places to go next. So when the TravelCommons inbox offered up an opportunity to interview the author, <a href=\"http://1000Places.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Patricia Schultz</a>, about her new book, I jumped at it.<ul><li>Mark: Patricia, thanks for joining us on the TravelCommons podcast. Your new book is <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3BWnv6n\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Why We Travel: 100 Reasons to See the World</a></em>. That topic -- why we travel -- has been a common one here on TravelCommons; how travel expands our horizons, our perspectives, helps us connect with others and with ourselves as we lose ourselves in the “otherness” of a new place. So Patricia, help us. What\'s your take on why we travel?</li><li>Patricia: Well, I used this period of the pandemic to have that conversation with myself. This moment of COVID allowed me this unprecedented moment where suddenly I was very stationary. I thought it was very important for me, as a travel writer, to reassess all over again the importance of travel. But the “why” needs to be kept very forefront, so that we have that appreciation, and we understand that we\'re privileged and it\'s an honor and it\'s something that you need to travel meaningfully and not just on automatic pilot. And I think first and foremost it\'s, for me, it\'s food for my soul. And as you said, it opens our perspectives and it opens our heads, it opens our hearts. You mentioned connecting with other people. That\'s part of opening your heart with that exchange with your Uber driver or your guide or the lady in the open-air market who’s selling her tomatoes and whoever you have that moment with. It’s all the people along the way that you meet and accrue and collect all of these experiences that are life lessons. Not just the logistics and the details of trip planning, but life lessons as they pertain to what you bring home with you and how you deal with life and how you\'ve become more resourceful and the “daily-ness” of life is dealt with in a different way. I know I\'m more tolerant. I know I\'m more respectful in general. I know that I\'m more curious and that\'s what gets you out the front door at the end of the day, which is often usually the most difficult part of all of this -- getting going.</li><li>Mark: Absolutely. Patricia, the book is a great mix of beautiful photos and quotes about travel. Definitely a book that you need to have in your hand rather than on your tablet. What was your curation process? How did you pick the pictures and the quotes that went into the book?</li><li>Patricia: I\'m so glad that you touched on that because I myself thought that a book that seemingly this simplistic would just kind of write itself.</li><li>Mark: It\'s never that simple though. Right?</li><li>Patricia: No. One of the quotes I used is by Beverly Sills, the great operatic singer, who said there are no shortcuts to any place worth going to or anything worth doing, I might add as a postscript, and writing one of them. But the photos, which are not mine I\'m sorry to say, they\'re colorful and they\'re energetic and they\'re vibrant and there\'s a great sense of place and excitement to them, I think. And that\'s what we were aiming for to have this book, everything, kind of jump off the page at you because that\'s part of the message, the message of how exciting and exhilarating travel can be and then to match it with the appropriate message. The message that is embodied in a quotation or in an aphorism or in a list that I make up or in an anecdote that matches what the photograph recounts. So, it all was a real departure for me because my books until now have just been a kind of encyclopedia of 1,000 places around the world. But that same broad, comprehensive mix of experience and geography and message and importance of travel that I tried to infuse throughout <em>1,000 Places</em> is the same mix that I tried to embed in every aphorism and in every photo and in the sequence of the book. It\'s not a big book. It\'s a hardcover book. It\'s not oversized and it\'s not all that many pages; it\'s somewhere over 100 pages. But there\'s a lot that can be said because travel means many, many, many different things to many different people. But at the end of the day, it makes us better people and that\'s kind of Period, Amen!</li><li>Mark: And it\'s certainly more focused, as you said, on inspiring people to travel, to pull their bag out from under their bed rather than a tour guide\'s list of where to go, or some expert’s advice on how to pack that bag. But some might see this collide with the ethics, the concern about climate change. How do you square that circle?</li><li>Patricia: If you travel with respect and with that, conviction to see the world for all the right places, and not because you\'re checking off countries or you\'re filling empty time. But if you want to experience another culture and bring those experiences home with you, ultimately, probably the best thing we can hope to take away from travel is that when we return to our homes, we are equipped to make your best life for yourself and your neighbors and your community and the world at large. And also, the very notion that travel isn\'t inherently international or a 12-hour long haul flight to get you to the other side of the world. You know, you can walk out your front door and walk around the block in midtown Manhattan where I live and that\'s travel enough for many people. The people watching, the theater of the street or filling your car or charging your car and taking that road trip to the local state park. So, there are all kinds of ways that you can easily accommodate all of those concerns if you travel well. And I don\'t mean five-star deluxe and I don\'t mean remote dream destinations of Mongolia and Africa, although those are all pretty fantastic as well. Travel well in that you really maximize the time made available to you and the money that\'s in your budget. But I think you just need to go with the right head and the right head to me has always meant curiosity and respect. And if that\'s the case then you will travel respectfully, and you will address climate change in a way that as an individual we can.</li><li>Mark: Fantastic. Well, Patricia Schultz, author of the new book <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3S61BDa\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Why We Travel: 100 Reasons to See the World</a></em>. Patricia, thanks for stopping by the TravelCommons podcast to give us your thoughts on why we should travel. Really appreciate the time.</li><li>Patricia: Thank you very much. Thank you for having me.</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #189</li><li>A little change of pace; a lot less of my voice and more of others. I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. </li><li>And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>. And while you’re at TravelCommons.com, you can check out the show notes page for a transcript and any links I’ve mentioned. Or you can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page.</li><li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_189.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #189 —  Why We Travel; When The First Flight Isn\'t Best','Lots of different voices - listeners adding to our list of travel tips, Dr. Sheldon Jacobson on why one of our tips isn\'t always right, and Patricia Schultz on her new book \"Why We Travel\"','inherit','closed','closed','','4192-revision-v1','','','2022-09-22 19:52:14','2022-09-23 00:52:14','',4192,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4204',0,'revision','',0),
(4208,1,'2022-10-31 16:44:41','2022-10-31 21:44:41','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/malort_face-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Malort bottle and a cow skull\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"> My Drinking Buddy Is The Quiet Type[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Back behind the mic after 3 week of travel in Croatia and Italy.  The trip went amazingly well up to the last leg, when United\'s Newark team couldn\'t get our bags on our plane. But, I\'d stuffed <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3k4rCUy\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Apple AirTags</a> into our luggage, so we were able to track their movements \'til they got home. That experience and a listener\'s tweet led to me re-visiting my travel tech stack. We then talk to Jeff Cioletti, author of the new book <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3sQelCQ\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Imbibing for Introverts</a></em>, about the art of drinking alone. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_190.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #190: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Happy Halloween! Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN. Finally got my body back on Central Time after 3 weeks in Europe that started in Split, Croatia and then ran up the Italian peninsula -- Amalfi Coast, Naples, Rome, Florence -- and then back down to Rome to fly home. And for a trip about a dozen potential points of failure between all the flights, the trains, and the Airbnb’s, it all went pretty smoothly except for the final leg -- the EWR-BNA flight home, where United somehow couldn’t manage to get our luggage on our plane. But by then, it wasn’t critical -- just suitcases of dirty clothes and some bottles of wine and limoncello. And United delivered them to us the next afternoon -- just in time for us to start doing laundry. Annoying, yes -- but not much more.</li><li>Which, after a summer of travel horror stories about canceled flights, lost luggage, hours-long security lines that fed our episode on <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/08/18/podcast-188-my-top-tips-to-survive-travel-chaos/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Podcast #188 — My Top Travel Tips to Survive Airport Chaos\">Top Tips to Avoid Travel Chaos</a>, I chalked it up to good luck and clean living or, what’s probably a more likely explanation, the airlines and airports are finally getting on the other side of the surprise snapback in leisure travel during a very tight labor market. Through Nashville, O’Hare, Frankfurt, even the Split airport -- 5-minute security lines at most, and on-time flights. In Italy, all our trains were on-time. And after all of that smooth travel, it wasn’t until our last day, for our flight home, that we got pulled up short. We walked into Terminal 3 at Rome’s Fiumicino airport and smack into a huge line. It took us a moment to figure out that the line wasn’t for us; it was the check-in line for Air Canada which seemed… weird. But no matter, we didn’t have to stand in it.&nbsp;</li><li>The next line, though, we did -- the separate security line for all direct flights to the US.&nbsp; We’ve talked in the past about how, post-9/11, direct international flights to the US tend to be segregated from the rest of the flights and put at the far end of departure terminals. That I’m used to. This was the first time, though, that I’ve seen a US-only security line. And on a Sunday morning at 9am, when everyone is there for the 10:30/11am bank of flights to the US. It tailed back almost the length of the terminal.&nbsp; But it kept moving. And when we made it up to the security area, we could see that they had every screening station manned and operational. We got through security and passport control in less than a half hour. Not world-class timing, but not anywhere near the summer horror stories.</li><li>I shouldn’t have been surprised at that US security line though because every place we went in Italy was jammed/crowded, mostly with Americans. It was revenge travel in action. I asked a few guys -- bartenders, shop owners, shuttle drivers -- how these October crowds compared to pre-pandemic. “It’s insane!” was the consensus. And I could feel it wearing on them. Even though all these people were giving them money, their patience seemed to be getting a little thin. Last year, last October when we were in Italy, in Puglia and Sicily, these same sort of folks were saying “Welcome! We’re so glad travelers are back!” This year? I think it’s a bit more like “when are you travelers <em>going </em>back… home?”</li><li>Bridge Music --  <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/snowflake/46164\">A Foolish Game</a> by Snowflake (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/snowflake/46164 Ft: Admiral Bob   </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I’m going to hold my thoughts about my Croatia and Italy trip for the next episode; do one of my stream-of-consciousness “Notes on a Location” topics. But I do want to follow up here on a couple of things from the last episode. First up, is <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/09/22/podcast-189-why-we-travel-when-the-first-flight-isnt-best/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Podcast #189 —  Why We Travel; When The First Flight Isn’t Best\">last episode’s</a> eSIM rant because, through watching with my travel companions and texting with Allan Marko, a long-time TravelCommons contributor, I sorta refined that rant, getting it down to two decision points.&nbsp;<ul><li>First, how much data do you expect to use? If you’re out of the US for a week or less, staying in a place with good WiFi, and can wait until the end of the day to do all your social media posting, you can probably be good with 5GB of data -- which gets you under T-Mobile’s non-throttled international data cap (which is what a couple of the folks traveling with me did), way under Google Fi’s 50 GB cap, and probably fits into a $15-20 eSIM from someone like aloSIM or Airalo. It’s the low-hassle solution. But for a longer stay, like my 3 week-er, or if you’re fully invested in building Instagram stories, like my wife, 5GB just isn’t going to cut it. I reset my iPhone data stats on the flight to Frankfurt and then looked at them as we were taxiing out to the runway in Rome. I used 77 GBs of data. Now, 11 GB was from hotspotting because the WiFi in our Florence Airbnb was pretty useless. But even pulling that out, 66 GBs is still a whackload of data. Which is probably because I didn’t really pay any attention to my data usage, because the Telecom Italia plan I was on gave me <em>600</em> GB of 5G data, essentially unlimited data, for $15. So while my T-Mobile-using companions were scrounging for a bar’s WiFi password to do Untappd check-ins, I was uploading pictures and refreshing my podcasts.</li><li>The second decision point&nbsp; -- do you need to make regular phone calls; do you need a local number? This is more and more of an edge case with people primarily texting, and when there was a specific need for a voice call, people rang me through WhatsApp and Telegram. But on this trip, I got us last-minute tables at a couple of good restaurants because I could call them over the regular phone network, something I couldn’t have done with a data-only eSIM. I’ve also run into the need for a local number when trying to register or create an account for an on-line service. My Telecom Italia SIM also came with a local Italian number and unlimited voice minutes.&nbsp;</li><li>So while I sharpened my thinking on this trip, my conclusion didn’t change. I know I’m an edge case -- I don’t want to have to think about data consumption and I want local phone service -- and until the in-country wireless carriers offer the same pre-paid plans on eSIMs that they do on physical SIMs, I’ll be keeping my phone with the SIM tray… and a straightened-out paper clip to pop it open.</li></ul></li><li>Second, following up to Kendra Kroll’s travel tip in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/09/22/podcast-189-why-we-travel-when-the-first-flight-isnt-best/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">the last episode</a> about knowing the names of cities in the local vernacular. Kendra talked about people missing their train stop because they didn’t realize that Florence, in Italian, is Firenze. So riding the train from Rome (Roma) to Florence (Firenze), I was on the lookout for this. All the train tickets used Italian city names -- Roma, Napoli, Firenze. But the signs on the platforms of the Florence train stations said “Florence”. Indeed, the real confusion wasn’t Florence vs Firenze, but which Florence train station to get off at. My group thought we had a direct train from downtown Rome&nbsp; (Roma Termini) to the downtown Florence station (Firenze Santa Maria Novella), so when the train stopped at a station with “Florence” in the sign, they all scrambled to get their bags and head for the station -- which would’ve left them hanging around in a suburban parking lot figuring out how get a ride downtown. So not only know the name of the city in the vernacular; know the full station name of your stop.</li><li>I mentioned earlier that the first leg of my trip was from BNA to ORD, and I was kinda surprised to realize that it was my first time in ORD in 10 months, since returning from the UK last November. Prior to moving down here to Nashville in July, I’d been flying Southwest out of Chicago Midway; easier to get to and Southwest fit my travel plans better. So as “Welcome Back,” I got the full ORD experience -- landing on the far north runway, which feels like it’s just short of the Wisconsin state line, with the requisite 20-min taxi to get within sight of the terminal. Then, just as you think you’re almost there, the plane stops across the road from the terminal and waits 5 minutes for a gate to open up. Then, once we get moving again, we take the scenic route, past all the American planes in Terminal 3 and the Delta planes in Terminal 2 until we finally get to the United terminal in Terminal 1. All told, at least 30 minutes from tires hitting the runway to the door opening and the agent saying “Welcome to ORD”. Yeah, thanks. Great to be back.</li><li>And in other “Great to be back” things, Irene and I used Lyft for the first time in forever to get home from the Nashville airport -- the wait time and the price were much lower than Uber; which is weird because I’d think, by now, the ride sharing market would be a bit more price efficient. But anyhow, Lyft is so excited to see me resurface in Nashville that the app is flooding my phone with notifications with ride offers and suggestions for things to do. Three days of this was enough to drive me into the hell that the iPhone Settings menu has become to figure out how to shut them up. Probably not the behavior Lyft was trying to prompt, but there you go.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/THE_CONCEPT_OF_ENERGY/55008\">ABANDONED BUTTERFLIES</a> by THE_CONCEPT_OF_ENERGY (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/THE_CONCEPT_OF_ENERGY/55008</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>My Travel Tech Stack</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Back to that problematic last leg of our trip -- the flight home to Nashville from Newark. I knew we had a lagging luggage problem even before we left the ground courtesy of the latest addition to my travel tech stack. I’d bought <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3k4rCUy\" title=\"\">Apple AirTags</a> just for this reason -- to track our luggage. When I had to check my bag on the Vueling flight from Split to Rome, I could see on my iPhone’s Find My app that my bag was on the plane; it looked almost right underneath me. But in Newark, my bag never left the terminal. Irene checked her app; same thing. As we taxied out, I took a screenshot showing the growing distance between me on the plane and my left-behind bag, and tweeted it out to United saying “I’m guessing I won’t be seeing my luggage in BNA.” </li><li>As I said earlier, I was pretty annoyed with United, but at least the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3k4rCUy\" title=\"\">AirTags</a> saved us the 30 minutes of suspense watching all the other bags come out. Instead, we went straight to the baggage service agent, filed our report, and headed home. And then, waking up the next morning, I could see that our bags made it on the late flight from Newark, and then could see them on the delivery truck heading to our flat. Saved a lot of agita. </li><li>It got me thinking back 6-7 years to <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/08/26/podcast-116-traveling-thru-japan-luggage-trends/\">the first wave</a> of <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/12/podcast-120-where-do-guidebooks-fit-in-i-hate-shopping-for-suitcases/\">smart luggage</a> -- Bluesmart, Away. I bought a Bluesmart bag off their Indiegogo campaign. Those bags also let you <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/05/30/podcast-121-tsa-lines-my-luggage-is-where/\">track their location</a>, along with charging your phone -- for about 2 years until <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">the airlines banned them</a>, or at least the ones with non-removable batteries. Those travel use cases haven’t changed -- “Where’s my bag?” and “I need to recharge my phone so I can rebook this canceled flight” -- but the tech has moved on -- replacing the smart bag with AirTags or Tile trackers and a <a href=\"https://amzn.to/34fcbON\" title=\"\">10,000 mAh battery pack</a>.</li><li>Long-time listener and Twitter follower @Ab3Fr0man pinged me during my summer move podcast pause with “question for the next podcast >> Are there any new devices or apps you are using for travel?” which is what got me spelunking through my travel tech stack, which then turned into a stroll through <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?s=what%27s+in+my+briefcase\" title=\"\">my past “What’s in My Briefcase” episodes</a>. And what struck me was, other than the AirTags and a small phone tripod for video calls, it hasn’t been what I’ve added to my kit as much as what I’ve been able to take away.</li><li>The consolidation to HDMI for video seems to be just about done and that’s let me drop all the VGA cables and dongles I used to carry around just in case I ran into an old conference room projector or hotel TV.  The slow and still in-progress consolidation to USB-C power supplies has let me do some subtraction by addition, dropping my MacBook Air power supply and an old dual USB-A charger for a single charger that’s smaller than either of them, a 100W gallium nitride charger that can charge my laptop, my phone, and my headphones all at once. Indeed, the only reason I still carry an old USB-A Apple Lightning cord is for plugging into the charging port on rental cars. </li><li>But the subtraction thing doesn’t always work. Last year, when we were traveling in Italy (Puglia and Sicily) for a couple of weeks, I wanted to leave the laptop home and run everything off my 8-inch Samsung tablet. That wouldn’t be a problem except for a couple of programs I run on my office PC, and I didn’t want to have to migrate to their cloud versions just for the trip. So instead I used Amazon Workspaces to set up a PC in the cloud. Not quite sure why I thought this would be easier. The Amazon setup was, let’s say, less than straightforward but I got it to work, and was able to run what I needed off my tablet, albeit a bit slower than usual. Getting ready for this last trip, I thought about it again, do I leave the laptop at home? Then I remembered the time sink the Amazon set up was, and tossed the laptop back into my backpack.</li><li>No new apps. Indeed, I tend to be brutal about deleting those I’m not using right now. I’ll download, say, the VRBO or Airbnb app when I need them for a trip and then dump them when I get home. I also just deleted the Clear app. I had a year free from some credit card and never used it. So I canceled it before they charged me for another year and deleted the app. Yelp is on the bubble right now. I also find myself using it less and less, just defaulting to Google Maps’ restaurant suggestions and ratings since I usually already have it open for directions.</li><li>The carriers’ apps continue to improve incrementally. I used to use an app that had maps of all the major airports, but found I was using it less and less as the carriers added similar maps to their apps. Indeed, while waiting to de-plane in EWR, I checked the United app and it had an animated step-by-step map showing the path from our arrival gate, through Customs, to our departure gate. Too bad the guys moving our luggage didn’t have the same map. </li><li>As I’ve mentioned in past episodes, I still use the free version of TripIt to consolidate all plane, train, hotel, and Airbnb confirmations into a single itinerary. I know Google Travel can do something similar if you live within the Google ecosystem, but I don’t so I use TripIt. TripIt keeps pushing their $50 Pro offering with real-time alerts and airport maps. I had the Pro offering once, but now I get all that stuff for free on the carrier apps. Now, if I <em>was</em> going to pop $50, I’d spend it on the Flighty app instead. I <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/04/21/podcast-186-mask-mandate-scramble-small-airport-survival/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">trialed Flighty back in the spring on a trip to Santa Fe</a> and thought it was a great app. If I was still flying every week, it would be a no-brainer. Indeed, I’d figure out a way to expense the $250 lifetime membership and be done with it. </li><li>But the one piece of travel that’s been with me since the beginning and that continues to earn its keep -- a bottle opener. Even as craft beer has moved to cans, that stamped metal New Belgium bottle opener has saved the corner of many a hotel dresser.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/49674\">H2O</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/49674</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Imbibing for Introverts</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>When frequent travelers are on the road, we spend a lot of time alone -- in our hotel rooms, and in spite of the advice from a former colleague who wrote a book titled <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3Uba60n\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Never Eat Alone</a></em>, we do… a lot. So when I saw an upcoming book about drinking alone, it seemed a perfect fit for the podcast. So I reached out to the author, Jeff Cioletti, editor-in-chief of <a href=\"https://craftspiritsmag.com/\"><em>Craft Spirits Magazine</em></a>.<ul><li>Mark: Jeff, thanks for joining us on the TravelCommons podcast today. Your upcoming book…</li><li>Jeff: Technically the release date is November 15, I tried to get them early for an event on October 20, but they got held up on a freight train somewhere in the United States, so it\'s like…</li><li>Mark: That damn supply chain. So anyhow, your upcoming book, <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3sQelCQ\"><em>Imbibing for Introverts: A Guide to Social Drinking for the Anti-Social</em></a>.</em> Over the years on the TravelCommons podcast, we\'ve <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?s=solo+dining\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">talked many times</a> about <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/19/podcast-149-dining-single-airlines-need-to-tell-us-more/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">solo eating</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/05/12/table-for-one-eating-alone-on-the-road/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">eating alone on the road</a>, what you might call eating for introverts. So when I saw the title of your book, it mapped right into things that we\'ve been doing. And again, in past episodes, we\'ve talked about the best ways to eat alone and so, what are your pro tips for the best ways to drink alone?</li><li>Jeff: It depends on the venue; it just depends on what your objectives are. If you want to quietly contemplate what you\'re drinking; if you\'re in one of these high-end whiskey bars or a brandy bar or something like that; where you\'re sitting and you really want to just contemplate. Sometimes you just want to be present and just be in your thoughts, think about what you\'re drinking, think about its connection to the point of origin, that kind of thing. When you\'re drinking alone, probably more often than not you\'re going to be sitting at the bar. A lot of times they\'re going to give you a 2-top, but sometimes I feel bad about taking it up, especially when things are busy and I just want to sit at the bar.</li><li>Mark: When I started traveling, which was a long time ago, you’d end up in that same situation, at a 2-top or a 4-top and then you\'re the sad person sitting in the corner table because you were taking up revenue space. “Look, I got spots for two and you\'re only taking up one.”</li><li>Jeff: And I think that if you\'re not sitting in a corner, if you do get to sit at the bar, that\'s a great opportunity to strike up a conversation with the bartender. Sometimes it just happens organically. I don\'t know whether they feel like they need to talk to you because you\'re not with anybody and they feel bad for you. But one thing that I do find is when you order something in a way that shows you know what you\'re talking about -- like you\'re at the bar and you say give me a gin and tonic, if you don\'t really specify what gin you want, they may not have a really broad selection, but a lot of these more sort of mixology oriented bars, they\'re going to have a selection and a good way to start is “What kind of gin you have; do you have anything that\'s not juniper- forward?” -- bartenders can be really primed to geek out with somebody that they detect maybe as passionate about the things they drink as they are, as they are about the things they mix. So when you show an inkling of interest or knowledge related to that spirit or whatever ingredient you\'re putting in the cocktail, that may pique their interest a little bit and they might get a sense that this person knows what they’re talking about. I\'ve been in situations where that snowballs to a point where the bartender says, “Hey, by the way, I\'m entering a cocktail competition, this was my creation, I want you to try and tell me honestly what you think about it.” It\'s moments like this that present themselves. Not always, but you know, sometimes they do. Sometimes a bartender will also have a secret stash behind the bar, could be a rare whiskey that\'s on their list. Sometimes they will sneak you some of that. It\'s not going to necessarily be free, but they\'ll give you a pour of something that they\'re protecting and hoarding and not really giving to just anybody. So moments like that are good. It\'s not necessarily that you\'re being antisocial. It\'s sometimes conversations can create themselves organically and so that\'s why it\'s sometimes good to be alone and sit at the bar rather than at the table because no one\'s really going to be spending the time with you to do that.</li><li>Mark: Eating alone sitting at the bar, it used to be that you couldn\'t get much more than a bar snack menu at a bar. Nowadays, though, you can get a full menu at a bar and so I\'m always eating at the bar. You\'re right about the bartenders. You get blips of human interaction. I think usually the bartender is good for, I don\'t know, 3-4 quick interchanges. Obviously they got a job to do, so you’re not going to have an ongoing conversation with them, but they\'ll come by and if they think you\'re interested or you\'re an interesting person, you\'ll get blips. I don\'t know, it\'s either they think you\'re interesting or they’re taking pity on you. I\'m not quite sure which...&nbsp; What drove you to write this book Imbibing for Introverts? What was the kernel on this one?</li><li>Jeff: I just been traveling a lot and I\'ve been doing a lot of solo travel, especially work-related stuff and, over time, I really just got comfortable in my own skin going out alone. It just became something I realized I actually enjoy my own company and it just came together in my head. One time I was sitting at a bar and I wasn\'t alone at the time. I was having a drink with a friend in a bar that I had often had a drink alone and I thought I\'d really love to do a book about just being an introvert and just enjoying being by yourself and drinking alone and normalizing that too because some people are just weird about going out alone.</li><li>Mark: When you do a lot of travel, you\'ve got to get comfortable with your own company because oftentimes that\'s it. You\'ve got clients, you\'ve got other people you\'re meeting and they\'re going home, they\'re going to coach their kid’s ballgame or do whatever. And if you don\'t get out of that hotel room, that hotel room turns into a cave after a while.</li><li>Jeff: And also sometimes you just want to decompress, especially when it is a work trip and you are having meetings. For instance, I got a lot of trade shows where I\'m just walking around the convention center going from booth to booth, talking to a person after person after person, always having to be on. Just having that energy, that kind of interpersonal energy, is frankly very exhausting. By the end of the day, after like seven or eight hours of doing that, sometimes you just want to be by yourself and you just want to quietly sip something in a place that\'s got the music\'s down low, it\'s a good mix that they\'re playing. It\'s low enough that you can hear yourself think, you can also eavesdrop on other people\'s conversations. That\'s kind of fun sometimes. A lot of people talk about people watching; I\'m more of a people listener because you can tell a lot more about a person by the conversations you hear than what they\'re wearing or what they look like.</li><li>Mark: Jeff, this has been great. I really appreciate it. I\'m looking forward to reading your book when it comes out. Jeff Cioletti, author of the new book, the upcoming book coming out November,<em> <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3sQelCQ\"><em>Imbibing for Introverts: A Guide to Social Drinking for the Anti-Social</em></a>.</em> Jeff, thanks very much for stopping by the TravelCommons podcast and chatting to us about drinking.</li><li>Jeff: Thank you so much for having me. This has been a lot of fun because it seems to be my people that listen to your podcasts.</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #190</li><li>I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. </li><li>And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>. And while you’re at TravelCommons.com, you can check out the show notes page for a transcript and any links I’ve mentioned. Or you can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page.</li><li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_190.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #190 — My Travel Tech Stack; Imbibing for Introverts','Tracking lost luggage with AirTags; what\'s changed in my travel tech stack; talking with Jeff Cioletti, author of the new book \"Imbibing for Introverts\", about the art of drinking alone','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-190-my-travel-tech-stack-imbibing-for-introverts','','','2023-01-14 16:31:44','2023-01-14 21:31:44','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4208',0,'post','',0),
(4209,1,'2022-10-30 18:13:38','2022-10-30 23:13:38','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/IMG_5006.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/IMG_5006-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Person standing in front of a wall with the message stenciled No Selfies\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> There Are Rules About Why We Travel[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Lots of different voices in this episode. Listeners growing our list of travel tips, and conversations with <a href=\"http://shj.cs.illinois.edu/\">Dr. Sheldon Jacobson</a> about why one of those tips -- always catch the first flight out -- isn\'t always right, and <a href=\"https://www.workman.com/authors/patricia-schultz\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Patricia Schultz</a> about her new book, <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3BWnv6n\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Why We Travel: 100 Reasons to See the World</a></em>. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_190.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #189: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Happy Halloween! Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN. Finally got my body back on Central Time after 3 weeks in Europe that started in Split, Croatia and then ran up the Italian peninsula -- Amalfi Coast, Naples, Rome, Florence -- and then back down to Rome to fly home. And for a trip about a dozen potential points of failure between all the flights, the trains, and the Airbnb’s, it all went pretty smoothly except for the final leg -- the EWR-BNA flight home, where United somehow couldn’t manage to get our luggage on our plane. But by then, it wasn’t critical -- just suitcases of dirty clothes and some bottles of wine and limoncello. And United delivered them to us the next afternoon -- just in time for us to start doing laundry. Annoying, yes -- but not much more.</li><li>Which, after a summer of travel horror stories about canceled flights, lost luggage, hours-long security lines that fed our episode on <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/08/18/podcast-188-my-top-tips-to-survive-travel-chaos/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Podcast #188 —  My Top Travel Tips to Survive Airport Chaos\">Top Tips to Avoid Travel Chaos</a>, I chalked it up to good luck and clean living or, what’s probably a more likely explanation, the airlines and airports are finally getting on the other side of the surprise snapback in leisure travel during a very tight labor market. Through Nashville, O’Hare, Frankfurt, even the Split airport -- 5-minute security lines at most, and on-time flights. In Italy, all our trains were on-time. And after all of that smooth travel, it wasn’t until our last day, for our flight home, that we got pulled up short. We walked into Terminal 3 at Rome’s Fiumicino airport and smack into a huge line. It took us a moment to figure out that the line wasn’t for us; it was the check-in line for Air Canada which seemed… weird. But no matter, we didn’t have to stand in it. </li><li>The next line, though, we did -- the separate security line for all direct flights to the US.  We’ve talked in the past about how, post-9/11, direct international flights to the US tend to be segregated from the rest of the flights and put at the far end of departure terminals. That I’m used to. This was the first time, though, that I’ve seen a US-only security line. And on a Sunday morning at 9am, when everyone is there for the 10:30/11am bank of flights to the US. It tailed back almost the length of the terminal.  But it kept moving. And when we made it up to the security area, we could see that they had every screening station manned and operational. We got through security and passport control in less than a half hour. Not world-class timing, but not anywhere near the summer horror stories.</li><li>I shouldn’t have been surprised at that US security line though because every place we went in Italy was jammed/crowded, mostly with Americans. It was revenge travel in action. I asked a few guys -- bartenders, shop owners, shuttle drivers -- how these October crowds compared to pre-pandemic. “It’s insane!” was the consensus. And I could feel it wearing on them. Even though all these people were giving them money, their patience seemed to be getting a little thin. Last year, last October when we were in Italy, in Puglia and Sicily, these same sort of folks were saying “Welcome! We’re so glad travelers are back!” This year? I think it’s a bit more like “when are you travelers <em>going </em>back… home?”</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Bridge Music --  <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/48915\">Like Music (cdk Mix</a>) by Analog By Nature (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/48915 Ft: Phasenwandler  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Yup, we have mail … and comments.</li><li>Let’s start with two comments on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">TravelCommons Facebook page</a>. First up, Jim McDonough tagged the post for <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/05/26/podcast-187-moving-to-a-non-hub-airport-what-makes-a-great-taproom/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Podcast #187 — Moving to a Non-Hub Airport; What Makes A Great Taproom?\">episode #187</a> with his experience moving to a non-hub airport. Jim writes…<ul><li>“We moved from a hub (DFW, 7 parallel runways plus one other) to a non-hub (SAN, 1 runway). Clearly we were tied to American at DFW (both lifetime Gold), and there really is no single dominant carrier at SAN. We do have some sneaky long non-stops from here, though, like to Hawaii, London, Munich, Boston, New York. None of these on American, though. We are trending towards Alaska Airlines, which has pretty good service and Boeing airplanes, and if there\'s an Admirals Club around we can use it flying Alaska. I was among the people who switched to cash-back credit cards during the pandemic when no flying was happening, but I\'m rethinking that position with an eye to using miles to go places.”</li><li>Jim, thanks for that. The American-Alaska relationship has always been good for West Coast fliers. I remember, years ago, flying Alaska from Long Beach up the coast to San Jose. I could never figure out why Alaska was flying that route, but it was handy with my American status.</li></ul></li><li>Next up, Thelma Smith adding a travel tip to the post for last month’s episode<ul><li>“Good episode. I don’t travel a lot but one thing I do is if I have to check a bag I use the sky cap. I don’t have to be lugging anything through the airport and the cash comes in handy to tip them.”</li><li>Thanks, Thelma, for that tip. I\'m a big sky cap fan when I have to check a bag -- like when I’m loaded up from a big wine country trip -- and, yes, cash is absolutely required for their tip!</li></ul></li><li>Moving to the TravelCommons website, Geoff Slater left this comment<ul><li>“Excellent return podcast! A very frequent traveler, I agreed with everything. A quibble however was the advice to take a nonstop. While I don’t disagree, I fly in and out of Burlington, VT, so that’s rarely an option. So for me, I also consider my options for connecting airports. As a United flier, Denver in the summer when it’s an option, and then IAD, and trying to avoid EWR. Getting a bit more esoteric for the non-frequent flier, I also consider plane type. And with United 1K status, I also take advantage of the same day change to avoid weather problems.”</li><li>Geoff, thanks for the comments. Kinda back to my pre-break episode about moving from to a non-hub airport -- most of your direct flight options are to hubs like DEN and IAD. Your strategy on hub selection is smart; pick hubs off by themselves with long well-separated runways. When I was doing work in north Jersey, we used to joke that anyone spitting on a runway at EWR would mean an hour delay; the runways are too close together to allow parallel take-offs and landings in all but the best of weather. Your comment about plane type -- rather than esoteric, I think it’s more of a graduate-level flight planning tip. The first cut is regional jet vs. main-line jet. I’ll always pick the, say, United Airbus 319 over the American Eagle Embraer. Making a choice between main-line jets can be a bit more subtle; different fliers will make different trade-offs between size -- flights with smaller capacity jets might be sacrificed when storms reduce flight slots but they’re quicker to get out of if a delay has tightened your connection. Again, graduate-level linear programming optimization algorithms for flight planning.</li></ul></li><li>On Twitter, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/PortaPocketGal\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Kendra Kroll</a> offered up a travel tip<ul><li>“Know names of cities in local vernacular. I\'ll never forget when folks on our Southbound train to Rome missed their stop by several hours as they didn\'t realize Firenze = Florence!”</li><li>Ouch! That’s a good tip; probably a next-level version of my <em>Know Your Geography</em> tip. For extra credit, be able to recognize your destination in the local non-Latin alphabet. I was in Tokyo back right before they moved the old Tsukiji Fish Market. The morning after I arrived, I was up early with jet lag and so walked over to the market. Someone had recommended a small sushi joint there, so I went looking for it. The recommendation gave the name in Latin characters but the signs in the market were only in Kanji. I eventually found a guy at an information desk who gave me directions to the place, but something to keep in mind when I travel to, say, Greece or Georgia -- the country, not the state.</li></ul></li><li>And finally, Aaron Woodlin responded to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1564695213217648642\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">my re-tweet of an ORD TSA post</a> with a picture of what one passenger pulled out of their carry-on and put in a bin to pass through the X-ray machine -- a meat cleaver, a couple of knives, a couple of saws… Somebody who’s definitely unclear on the concept of “no sharp objects in your carry-on.” Aaron’s cut -<ul><li>“What I really don\'t get are people who don\'t keep their range bags and carry-on luggage separate, and end up unintentionally packing heat at the checkpoint.&nbsp; If you can afford plane fare, guns and ammo, you can spring for separate bags!”</li><li>Range bag, tool box… I can just imagine being the TSA guy shaking his head as the image of a bin full of knives and saws comes across the monitor. The guy is aware enough to know that you need to pull metal stuff out of your bag, but not hip to the fact of why. And now you’re the TSA guy who has to explain it all to him.&nbsp;</li></ul></li><li>And as always, thanks to all of you for the comments! Some great stuff here.</li><li>I think I’ve mentioned in prior episodes that I’m on Apple’s iPhone upgrade plan. Every year I get the new phone, send in my old one, and it resets the payment clock. Kinda like leasing a car but with lower monthly payments. Anyhow, a few weeks back, I’m scrubbing through Apple’s hour-and-a-half long announcement video -- skip all the Apple Watch stuff, slow down on the new AirPods, and then settle in for the iPhone 14 walk through. Nothing earth-shaking; I’m liking the new purple color. But then, as they were wrapping up, I had a record-scratch moment -- no SIM tray! What, what? Yup, for US iPhones, no more SIM tray; it’s all internal eSIMs! Isn’t that great? No more searching for a paper clip to pop out the tray, losing the little nano-SIM, …. No, it’s <em>not</em> great, at least for those of us who travel internationally. I’ve talked many times over the years about using local SIMs. Most recently, in episode #181, I talked about, at the start of our Puglia bike trip, spending 15 minutes and $25 in a Telecom Italia store for a SIM that gave me a local phone number (very handy for restaurant reservations) and <em>70 GB</em> of data. And now next week, all I have to do is load some money onto that SIM through the Telecom Italia website, and I’m good to go when I connect thru Frankfurt, and land in Croatia and Italy. But what about an eSIM? I couldn’t find any mainline Italian mobile carrier that offered a prepaid eSIM. Same with the UK. When I <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1567661384875347969\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">bitch-tweeted about this</a>, <a href=\"https://alosim.com/\">aloSIM</a>, a company that sells eSIMs for many countries, quickly responded “Well, our Italy eSIM data packages start at $4.50 for a week of data…” I hit their website. Their $4.50/week gives 1 GB of data. For an extra 50¢, I can get 10x that -- 10 GB of data for $5/week. I <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1567856046328135683\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">tweeted that back</a>. As you might guess, no response from aloSIM’s social media team. So, I’ve dropped off the iPhone upgrade wheel. I know I’m an edge case, and I think this could accelerate the push toward eSIMs. But like when Apple dropped the headphone jack, I think they’re 12-18 months ahead of the curve for frequent international travelers and I need something that works <em>today</em>, where the curve is right now. So I’ll wait a bit, like TravelCommons listener Jerry Sarfati who said he’s waiting for the “iPhone 15… with a USB-C charger.” I really hope it comes in purple too.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/spinmeister/53428\">Somewhere</a> by spinmeister (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/spinmeister/53428 Ft: DJ Vadim </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>When <em>Not </em>To Take the First Flight Out</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Moving to the mail portion of the episode, a day after I published <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/08/18/podcast-188-my-top-tips-to-survive-travel-chaos/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Podcast #188 —  My Top Travel Tips to Survive Airport Chaos\">the last episode</a>, I saw an email in the TravelCommons inbox with the subject “Is the first flight of the day still the best one? No. – air travel scientist for interviews.” This caught my eye because the 5th of the 13 tips to avoid airport chaos I’d <em>just </em>published was “catch the earliest flight you can”. So I replied to the email “Tell me why I’m wrong!”</li><li>Which led to this conversation with <a href=\"http://shj.cs.illinois.edu/\">Dr. Sheldon Jacobson</a>, Professor in Computer Science at the University of Illinois. Over the years, Dr. Jacobson has done projects using operations research models to optimize aviation security. But most recently, he <a href=\"https://www.chicagotribune.com/opinion/commentary/ct-opinion-travel-delays-flight-bookings-pandemic-20220830-p64ax3a74vaxnnzqwts4nel3cy-story.html\">wrote about</a> how the received frequent flier wisdom about catching the first flight out might not always be right. So I started our discussion asking him “Where did I get it wrong?”<ul><li>Sheldon: When you\'re flying in and out of hub airports, conventional wisdom is, in fact, correct. You do want to take the first flight of the day because at a hub airport, there\'s a lot more flexibility once a plane arrives at the end of the day. It\'s going to be cleaned, it\'s going to be maintained. Its gonna be fresh for the new day. If it turns out that some of the crew members become unavailable, you have alternatives because so many people have bases. So, this is in Chicago and Dallas for American, For United, you also have Washington Dulles as well as Chicago. For Delta, of course, it\'s Atlanta, Minneapolis, Detroit. So that\'s a great strategy. But what if you\'re not in a hub airport and that\'s when things start to get more nuanced. And the best way to think of this is that every airplane as well as every crew when they fly from city to city, they are a link in a chain. At the end of the day, you think, “Okay, the chain ends.” Actually, it doesn\'t. because the first flight of the day is the connection and the link from the last flight of the previous day. And all of this comes out and starts to impact that decision of the first flight of the day. Because if that flight comes in late, remember the last flight of the day, that\'s going to be the first flight out of a regional airport. So as a result of that, you actually want to take the second flight of the day out of a regional airport or a smaller large airport. That\'s the best strategy when it comes to these secondary and tertiary airports.</li><li>Mark: Actually, what you\'ve said, I\'ve seen that happen in smaller regional airports, say Lexington Kentucky, Appleton, Wisconsin, where that first flight of the day is not on the ground, so it\'s got to come in from a hub. Is there a split where, say, larger non-hub airports, the conventional wisdom still holds? Say where I am now in Nashville, or something like in Indianapolis? Where do those fall as far as the conventional wisdom on catching the first flight out?</li><li>Sheldon: Yes, certainly when you come to Nashville, Indianapolis, Columbus,&nbsp; Ohio, Pittsburgh,&nbsp; Pennsylvania -- some of these have been de-hubbed over the years. You\'re getting into a point that you have a lot of choices available. So then it becomes a little more nuanced because you could book the first flight on, let\'s say American and that one may have difficulties because that plane came in overnight and it was delayed because of storms in Chicago. But on the other hand, if there are options on Delta which are coming from Atlanta where there were not storms, you can always then get switched over for it. So when you get into those middle airports, they\'re not full hubs, but they\'re not the small regionals that have two flights a day, then it becomes a little more nuanced. And then you start to look across airlines as opposed to just within the airline.</li><li>Mark: Now if we pivot just slightly and think about different types of airlines. So if I think about hub-centric airlines, like the traditional United, American, Delta versus, say, a Southwest, which I\'ve joked in the past feels like they\'re running milk runs across the country. So there\'s not necessarily a hub, just that plane is running a line. Is there a difference between those two types of airlines on that first flight out?</li><li>Sheldon: There is, for a variety of reasons. With Southwest, they\'re trying to pack as many segments or links per day for every airplane. That\'s how they stay profitable. Their turn times are tremendous, but it also makes them more vulnerable to any kind of mechanical or weather delays or air traffic control slowdowns because they don\'t have the slack built into their system in their links. As a result of that, when you get to the end of the day, they still have to abide by the FAA regulations in terms of crew rest. And the question is, even though they are in some sense of point to point airline, they have areas of the country that have a concentration of flights like Dallas Love for example, like Chicago, like Baltimore-Washington, where they traditionally had a lot of flights. So you do have to look then, even though they aren\'t traditional hubs, they operate similarly. Where is the crew located; where they choosing to live? And that\'s an important component because when you\'re trying to reschedule because of delays, the flight that you\'re going to take out at 6 am may have come from a city where the plane only arrived at midnight. The flight crew needs the rest. They will not be able to leave on time. But if you switch crews and you have the flexibility because you have a sufficient number of crew members. It solves the problem. Is that going to exist in your city? So even though Southwest doesn\'t have the traditional hub and spoke system, they have airports that, in some sense, act like their hubs.</li><li>Mark: Sheldon, how much of this do you think is a function of the current tight labor market that airlines say they\'re operating in?</li><li>Sheldon: Now the situation we\'re in, which was brought on by COVID, of course, meant that they had a tremendous amount of layoffs and looking down the road, they were trying to survive financially. And now they\'re in a situation where they have to rehire but retrain all of these pilots. People think “Oh, you haven\'t flown for 8 months, 9 months? We’ll just put you in a cockpit and you’re fine.” It doesn\'t work that way. Once you\'ve been off for 6 months, it\'s as if you\'ve never flown. You still have the 1,500 hours which are required to fly, but you get rusty. And the pilots themselves say “I\'m really not as comfortable as I used to be,” especially on landings, which is the most critical activity that they do once they\'re in flight, it\'s pretty much status quo. Taking off is reasonably straightforward, but landing is the tricky part. And they just feel a little less comfortable unless they have the training. And the fact is they want to be safe as much as the passengers and the airline\'s want them to be safe. Getting these people back in the cockpit training and they have so many flight simulators. So much training that needs to be gone through. This is a non-trivial process.</li><li>Mark: Sheldon, thank you very much for that. That\'s very helpful. Any last thought, any last tips as people are looking to navigate through the back end of the summer season and into the holiday flying; things that you use to avoid airport chaos?</li><li>Sheldon: Well, we\'ve just now entered the post-summer/fall travel period and I check the numbers daily in terms of screenings at TSA checkpoints and the numbers are trying to come down, which means that there\'s gonna be a lot less stress and strain on the system. The airlines are starting to ramp up their schedules. I\'ve booked some things out for later in the fall and they\'re already changing the schedules. So, I know that they\'re starting to add more flights and more opportunities for people. For the holiday travel season this year, Christmas and New Year\'s fall on a Sunday. And that means that people are going to be traveling on Friday and Saturday. If you can travel on Thursday or Wednesday, you may find it a lot less taxing. So, thinking a little bit ahead in that regard may be very helpful. You can\'t predict weather storms, a nor’easter is going through, you know, it’s late in the year. The other strategy that I\'ve used because I\'ve mostly lived in non-hub cities is that there\'s always been a dominant airline and a non-dominant airline. And the strategy I\'ve always used is to always become loyal to the non-dominant airline. And the reason being is that when the non-dominant airline had problems, they were always gracious to put you on the dominant airline, which had much more choices. And as a result, I rarely got stuck because if I was on the dominant airline, trying to find a plane on the non-dominant one was much more difficult to get the seats available</li><li>Mark: That\'s an interesting strategy. Kind of counterintuitive, but as you explain it, it makes sense.</li><li>Sheldon: I have never gotten stuck because by flying the non-dominant, even out of a hub airport. You think of a place like Detroit where they have Delta as the dominant airline. If you fly American out of there, the people are working extra hard to get your business. And as a result of that, I\'ve always found service is better in the non-dominant airline, even in the hub cities where they\'re competing.</li><li>Mark: That\'s a good tip. Thanks for that Sheldon. Dr. Sheldon, Jacobson at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. Thank you very much for joining us on the TravelCommons podcast.</li><li>Sheldon: Thank you. It\'s wonderful to be with you.</li></ul></li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/scottaltham/20747\"> Hear Us Now (poptastic mix)</a> by Scott Altham (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/scottaltham/20747</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Why We Travel</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Some years ago, on some milestone birthday (I’m not saying which), my kids gave me the book <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3DHoiJC\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">1,000 Places to See Before You Die</a></em>. Hmm… was there a message somewhere in that gift? Not that they would admit. But it was a fun book flip through -- to remind me of past trips and give me ideas of places to go next. So when the TravelCommons inbox offered up an opportunity to interview the author, <a href=\"http://1000Places.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Patricia Schultz</a>, about her new book, I jumped at it.<ul><li>Mark: Patricia, thanks for joining us on the TravelCommons podcast. Your new book is <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3BWnv6n\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Why We Travel: 100 Reasons to See the World</a></em>. That topic -- why we travel -- has been a common one here on TravelCommons; how travel expands our horizons, our perspectives, helps us connect with others and with ourselves as we lose ourselves in the “otherness” of a new place. So Patricia, help us. What\'s your take on why we travel?</li><li>Patricia: Well, I used this period of the pandemic to have that conversation with myself. This moment of COVID allowed me this unprecedented moment where suddenly I was very stationary. I thought it was very important for me, as a travel writer, to reassess all over again the importance of travel. But the “why” needs to be kept very forefront, so that we have that appreciation, and we understand that we\'re privileged and it\'s an honor and it\'s something that you need to travel meaningfully and not just on automatic pilot. And I think first and foremost it\'s, for me, it\'s food for my soul. And as you said, it opens our perspectives and it opens our heads, it opens our hearts. You mentioned connecting with other people. That\'s part of opening your heart with that exchange with your Uber driver or your guide or the lady in the open-air market who’s selling her tomatoes and whoever you have that moment with. It’s all the people along the way that you meet and accrue and collect all of these experiences that are life lessons. Not just the logistics and the details of trip planning, but life lessons as they pertain to what you bring home with you and how you deal with life and how you\'ve become more resourceful and the “daily-ness” of life is dealt with in a different way. I know I\'m more tolerant. I know I\'m more respectful in general. I know that I\'m more curious and that\'s what gets you out the front door at the end of the day, which is often usually the most difficult part of all of this -- getting going.</li><li>Mark: Absolutely. Patricia, the book is a great mix of beautiful photos and quotes about travel. Definitely a book that you need to have in your hand rather than on your tablet. What was your curation process? How did you pick the pictures and the quotes that went into the book?</li><li>Patricia: I\'m so glad that you touched on that because I myself thought that a book that seemingly this simplistic would just kind of write itself.</li><li>Mark: It\'s never that simple though. Right?</li><li>Patricia: No. One of the quotes I used is by Beverly Sills, the great operatic singer, who said there are no shortcuts to any place worth going to or anything worth doing, I might add as a postscript, and writing one of them. But the photos, which are not mine I\'m sorry to say, they\'re colorful and they\'re energetic and they\'re vibrant and there\'s a great sense of place and excitement to them, I think. And that\'s what we were aiming for to have this book, everything, kind of jump off the page at you because that\'s part of the message, the message of how exciting and exhilarating travel can be and then to match it with the appropriate message. The message that is embodied in a quotation or in an aphorism or in a list that I make up or in an anecdote that matches what the photograph recounts. So, it all was a real departure for me because my books until now have just been a kind of encyclopedia of 1,000 places around the world. But that same broad, comprehensive mix of experience and geography and message and importance of travel that I tried to infuse throughout <em>1,000 Places</em> is the same mix that I tried to embed in every aphorism and in every photo and in the sequence of the book. It\'s not a big book. It\'s a hardcover book. It\'s not oversized and it\'s not all that many pages; it\'s somewhere over 100 pages. But there\'s a lot that can be said because travel means many, many, many different things to many different people. But at the end of the day, it makes us better people and that\'s kind of Period, Amen!</li><li>Mark: And it\'s certainly more focused, as you said, on inspiring people to travel, to pull their bag out from under their bed rather than a tour guide\'s list of where to go, or some expert’s advice on how to pack that bag. But some might see this collide with the ethics, the concern about climate change. How do you square that circle?</li><li>Patricia: If you travel with respect and with that, conviction to see the world for all the right places, and not because you\'re checking off countries or you\'re filling empty time. But if you want to experience another culture and bring those experiences home with you, ultimately, probably the best thing we can hope to take away from travel is that when we return to our homes, we are equipped to make your best life for yourself and your neighbors and your community and the world at large. And also, the very notion that travel isn\'t inherently international or a 12-hour long haul flight to get you to the other side of the world. You know, you can walk out your front door and walk around the block in midtown Manhattan where I live and that\'s travel enough for many people. The people watching, the theater of the street or filling your car or charging your car and taking that road trip to the local state park. So, there are all kinds of ways that you can easily accommodate all of those concerns if you travel well. And I don\'t mean five-star deluxe and I don\'t mean remote dream destinations of Mongolia and Africa, although those are all pretty fantastic as well. Travel well in that you really maximize the time made available to you and the money that\'s in your budget. But I think you just need to go with the right head and the right head to me has always meant curiosity and respect. And if that\'s the case then you will travel respectfully, and you will address climate change in a way that as an individual we can.</li><li>Mark: Fantastic. Well, Patricia Schultz, author of the new book <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3S61BDa\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Why We Travel: 100 Reasons to See the World</a></em>. Patricia, thanks for stopping by the TravelCommons podcast to give us your thoughts on why we should travel. Really appreciate the time.</li><li>Patricia: Thank you very much. Thank you for having me.</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #189</li><li>A little change of pace; a lot less of my voice and more of others. I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. </li><li>And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>. And while you’re at TravelCommons.com, you can check out the show notes page for a transcript and any links I’ve mentioned. Or you can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page.</li><li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_190.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #190 —  My Travel Tech Stack; Imbibing for Introverts','','inherit','closed','closed','','4208-revision-v1','','','2022-10-30 18:13:38','2022-10-30 23:13:38','',4208,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4209',0,'revision','',0),
(4210,1,'2022-10-30 18:15:21','2022-10-30 23:15:21','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/IMG_5006.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/IMG_5006-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Person standing in front of a wall with the message stenciled No Selfies\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> There Are Rules About Why We Travel[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Lots of different voices in this episode. Listeners growing our list of travel tips, and conversations with <a href=\"http://shj.cs.illinois.edu/\">Dr. Sheldon Jacobson</a> about why one of those tips -- always catch the first flight out -- isn\'t always right, and <a href=\"https://www.workman.com/authors/patricia-schultz\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Patricia Schultz</a> about her new book, <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3BWnv6n\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Why We Travel: 100 Reasons to See the World</a></em>. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_190.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #190: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Happy Halloween! Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN. Finally got my body back on Central Time after 3 weeks in Europe that started in Split, Croatia and then ran up the Italian peninsula -- Amalfi Coast, Naples, Rome, Florence -- and then back down to Rome to fly home. And for a trip about a dozen potential points of failure between all the flights, the trains, and the Airbnb’s, it all went pretty smoothly except for the final leg -- the EWR-BNA flight home, where United somehow couldn’t manage to get our luggage on our plane. But by then, it wasn’t critical -- just suitcases of dirty clothes and some bottles of wine and limoncello. And United delivered them to us the next afternoon -- just in time for us to start doing laundry. Annoying, yes -- but not much more.</li><li>Which, after a summer of travel horror stories about canceled flights, lost luggage, hours-long security lines that fed our episode on <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/08/18/podcast-188-my-top-tips-to-survive-travel-chaos/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Podcast #188 — My Top Travel Tips to Survive Airport Chaos\">Top Tips to Avoid Travel Chaos</a>, I chalked it up to good luck and clean living or, what’s probably a more likely explanation, the airlines and airports are finally getting on the other side of the surprise snapback in leisure travel during a very tight labor market. Through Nashville, O’Hare, Frankfurt, even the Split airport -- 5-minute security lines at most, and on-time flights. In Italy, all our trains were on-time. And after all of that smooth travel, it wasn’t until our last day, for our flight home, that we got pulled up short. We walked into Terminal 3 at Rome’s Fiumicino airport and smack into a huge line. It took us a moment to figure out that the line wasn’t for us; it was the check-in line for Air Canada which seemed… weird. But no matter, we didn’t have to stand in it. </li><li>The next line, though, we did -- the separate security line for all direct flights to the US.  We’ve talked in the past about how, post-9/11, direct international flights to the US tend to be segregated from the rest of the flights and put at the far end of departure terminals. That I’m used to. This was the first time, though, that I’ve seen a US-only security line. And on a Sunday morning at 9am, when everyone is there for the 10:30/11am bank of flights to the US. It tailed back almost the length of the terminal.  But it kept moving. And when we made it up to the security area, we could see that they had every screening station manned and operational. We got through security and passport control in less than a half hour. Not world-class timing, but not anywhere near the summer horror stories.</li><li>I shouldn’t have been surprised at that US security line though because every place we went in Italy was jammed/crowded, mostly with Americans. It was revenge travel in action. I asked a few guys -- bartenders, shop owners, shuttle drivers -- how these October crowds compared to pre-pandemic. “It’s insane!” was the consensus. And I could feel it wearing on them. Even though all these people were giving them money, their patience seemed to be getting a little thin. Last year, last October when we were in Italy, in Puglia and Sicily, these same sort of folks were saying “Welcome! We’re so glad travelers are back!” This year? I think it’s a bit more like “when are you travelers <em>going </em>back… home?”</li><li>Bridge Music --  <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/48915\">Like Music (cdk Mix</a>) by Analog By Nature (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/48915 Ft: Phasenwandler  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Yup, we have mail … and comments.</li><li>Let’s start with two comments on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">TravelCommons Facebook page</a>. First up, Jim McDonough tagged the post for <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/05/26/podcast-187-moving-to-a-non-hub-airport-what-makes-a-great-taproom/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Podcast #187 — Moving to a Non-Hub Airport; What Makes A Great Taproom?\">episode #187</a> with his experience moving to a non-hub airport. Jim writes…<ul><li>“We moved from a hub (DFW, 7 parallel runways plus one other) to a non-hub (SAN, 1 runway). Clearly we were tied to American at DFW (both lifetime Gold), and there really is no single dominant carrier at SAN. We do have some sneaky long non-stops from here, though, like to Hawaii, London, Munich, Boston, New York. None of these on American, though. We are trending towards Alaska Airlines, which has pretty good service and Boeing airplanes, and if there\'s an Admirals Club around we can use it flying Alaska. I was among the people who switched to cash-back credit cards during the pandemic when no flying was happening, but I\'m rethinking that position with an eye to using miles to go places.”</li><li>Jim, thanks for that. The American-Alaska relationship has always been good for West Coast fliers. I remember, years ago, flying Alaska from Long Beach up the coast to San Jose. I could never figure out why Alaska was flying that route, but it was handy with my American status.</li></ul></li><li>Next up, Thelma Smith adding a travel tip to the post for last month’s episode<ul><li>“Good episode. I don’t travel a lot but one thing I do is if I have to check a bag I use the sky cap. I don’t have to be lugging anything through the airport and the cash comes in handy to tip them.”</li><li>Thanks, Thelma, for that tip. I\'m a big sky cap fan when I have to check a bag -- like when I’m loaded up from a big wine country trip -- and, yes, cash is absolutely required for their tip!</li></ul></li><li>Moving to the TravelCommons website, Geoff Slater left this comment<ul><li>“Excellent return podcast! A very frequent traveler, I agreed with everything. A quibble however was the advice to take a nonstop. While I don’t disagree, I fly in and out of Burlington, VT, so that’s rarely an option. So for me, I also consider my options for connecting airports. As a United flier, Denver in the summer when it’s an option, and then IAD, and trying to avoid EWR. Getting a bit more esoteric for the non-frequent flier, I also consider plane type. And with United 1K status, I also take advantage of the same day change to avoid weather problems.”</li><li>Geoff, thanks for the comments. Kinda back to my pre-break episode about moving from to a non-hub airport -- most of your direct flight options are to hubs like DEN and IAD. Your strategy on hub selection is smart; pick hubs off by themselves with long well-separated runways. When I was doing work in north Jersey, we used to joke that anyone spitting on a runway at EWR would mean an hour delay; the runways are too close together to allow parallel take-offs and landings in all but the best of weather. Your comment about plane type -- rather than esoteric, I think it’s more of a graduate-level flight planning tip. The first cut is regional jet vs. main-line jet. I’ll always pick the, say, United Airbus 319 over the American Eagle Embraer. Making a choice between main-line jets can be a bit more subtle; different fliers will make different trade-offs between size -- flights with smaller capacity jets might be sacrificed when storms reduce flight slots but they’re quicker to get out of if a delay has tightened your connection. Again, graduate-level linear programming optimization algorithms for flight planning.</li></ul></li><li>On Twitter, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/PortaPocketGal\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Kendra Kroll</a> offered up a travel tip<ul><li>“Know names of cities in local vernacular. I\'ll never forget when folks on our Southbound train to Rome missed their stop by several hours as they didn\'t realize Firenze = Florence!”</li><li>Ouch! That’s a good tip; probably a next-level version of my <em>Know Your Geography</em> tip. For extra credit, be able to recognize your destination in the local non-Latin alphabet. I was in Tokyo back right before they moved the old Tsukiji Fish Market. The morning after I arrived, I was up early with jet lag and so walked over to the market. Someone had recommended a small sushi joint there, so I went looking for it. The recommendation gave the name in Latin characters but the signs in the market were only in Kanji. I eventually found a guy at an information desk who gave me directions to the place, but something to keep in mind when I travel to, say, Greece or Georgia -- the country, not the state.</li></ul></li><li>And finally, Aaron Woodlin responded to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1564695213217648642\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">my re-tweet of an ORD TSA post</a> with a picture of what one passenger pulled out of their carry-on and put in a bin to pass through the X-ray machine -- a meat cleaver, a couple of knives, a couple of saws… Somebody who’s definitely unclear on the concept of “no sharp objects in your carry-on.” Aaron’s cut -<ul><li>“What I really don\'t get are people who don\'t keep their range bags and carry-on luggage separate, and end up unintentionally packing heat at the checkpoint.&nbsp; If you can afford plane fare, guns and ammo, you can spring for separate bags!”</li><li>Range bag, tool box… I can just imagine being the TSA guy shaking his head as the image of a bin full of knives and saws comes across the monitor. The guy is aware enough to know that you need to pull metal stuff out of your bag, but not hip to the fact of why. And now you’re the TSA guy who has to explain it all to him.&nbsp;</li></ul></li><li>And as always, thanks to all of you for the comments! Some great stuff here.</li><li>I think I’ve mentioned in prior episodes that I’m on Apple’s iPhone upgrade plan. Every year I get the new phone, send in my old one, and it resets the payment clock. Kinda like leasing a car but with lower monthly payments. Anyhow, a few weeks back, I’m scrubbing through Apple’s hour-and-a-half long announcement video -- skip all the Apple Watch stuff, slow down on the new AirPods, and then settle in for the iPhone 14 walk through. Nothing earth-shaking; I’m liking the new purple color. But then, as they were wrapping up, I had a record-scratch moment -- no SIM tray! What, what? Yup, for US iPhones, no more SIM tray; it’s all internal eSIMs! Isn’t that great? No more searching for a paper clip to pop out the tray, losing the little nano-SIM, …. No, it’s <em>not</em> great, at least for those of us who travel internationally. I’ve talked many times over the years about using local SIMs. Most recently, in episode #181, I talked about, at the start of our Puglia bike trip, spending 15 minutes and $25 in a Telecom Italia store for a SIM that gave me a local phone number (very handy for restaurant reservations) and <em>70 GB</em> of data. And now next week, all I have to do is load some money onto that SIM through the Telecom Italia website, and I’m good to go when I connect thru Frankfurt, and land in Croatia and Italy. But what about an eSIM? I couldn’t find any mainline Italian mobile carrier that offered a prepaid eSIM. Same with the UK. When I <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1567661384875347969\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">bitch-tweeted about this</a>, <a href=\"https://alosim.com/\">aloSIM</a>, a company that sells eSIMs for many countries, quickly responded “Well, our Italy eSIM data packages start at $4.50 for a week of data…” I hit their website. Their $4.50/week gives 1 GB of data. For an extra 50¢, I can get 10x that -- 10 GB of data for $5/week. I <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1567856046328135683\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">tweeted that back</a>. As you might guess, no response from aloSIM’s social media team. So, I’ve dropped off the iPhone upgrade wheel. I know I’m an edge case, and I think this could accelerate the push toward eSIMs. But like when Apple dropped the headphone jack, I think they’re 12-18 months ahead of the curve for frequent international travelers and I need something that works <em>today</em>, where the curve is right now. So I’ll wait a bit, like TravelCommons listener Jerry Sarfati who said he’s waiting for the “iPhone 15… with a USB-C charger.” I really hope it comes in purple too.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/spinmeister/53428\">Somewhere</a> by spinmeister (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/spinmeister/53428 Ft: DJ Vadim </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>When <em>Not </em>To Take the First Flight Out</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Moving to the mail portion of the episode, a day after I published <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/08/18/podcast-188-my-top-tips-to-survive-travel-chaos/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Podcast #188 —  My Top Travel Tips to Survive Airport Chaos\">the last episode</a>, I saw an email in the TravelCommons inbox with the subject “Is the first flight of the day still the best one? No. – air travel scientist for interviews.” This caught my eye because the 5th of the 13 tips to avoid airport chaos I’d <em>just </em>published was “catch the earliest flight you can”. So I replied to the email “Tell me why I’m wrong!”</li><li>Which led to this conversation with <a href=\"http://shj.cs.illinois.edu/\">Dr. Sheldon Jacobson</a>, Professor in Computer Science at the University of Illinois. Over the years, Dr. Jacobson has done projects using operations research models to optimize aviation security. But most recently, he <a href=\"https://www.chicagotribune.com/opinion/commentary/ct-opinion-travel-delays-flight-bookings-pandemic-20220830-p64ax3a74vaxnnzqwts4nel3cy-story.html\">wrote about</a> how the received frequent flier wisdom about catching the first flight out might not always be right. So I started our discussion asking him “Where did I get it wrong?”<ul><li>Sheldon: When you\'re flying in and out of hub airports, conventional wisdom is, in fact, correct. You do want to take the first flight of the day because at a hub airport, there\'s a lot more flexibility once a plane arrives at the end of the day. It\'s going to be cleaned, it\'s going to be maintained. Its gonna be fresh for the new day. If it turns out that some of the crew members become unavailable, you have alternatives because so many people have bases. So, this is in Chicago and Dallas for American, For United, you also have Washington Dulles as well as Chicago. For Delta, of course, it\'s Atlanta, Minneapolis, Detroit. So that\'s a great strategy. But what if you\'re not in a hub airport and that\'s when things start to get more nuanced. And the best way to think of this is that every airplane as well as every crew when they fly from city to city, they are a link in a chain. At the end of the day, you think, “Okay, the chain ends.” Actually, it doesn\'t. because the first flight of the day is the connection and the link from the last flight of the previous day. And all of this comes out and starts to impact that decision of the first flight of the day. Because if that flight comes in late, remember the last flight of the day, that\'s going to be the first flight out of a regional airport. So as a result of that, you actually want to take the second flight of the day out of a regional airport or a smaller large airport. That\'s the best strategy when it comes to these secondary and tertiary airports.</li><li>Mark: Actually, what you\'ve said, I\'ve seen that happen in smaller regional airports, say Lexington Kentucky, Appleton, Wisconsin, where that first flight of the day is not on the ground, so it\'s got to come in from a hub. Is there a split where, say, larger non-hub airports, the conventional wisdom still holds? Say where I am now in Nashville, or something like in Indianapolis? Where do those fall as far as the conventional wisdom on catching the first flight out?</li><li>Sheldon: Yes, certainly when you come to Nashville, Indianapolis, Columbus,&nbsp; Ohio, Pittsburgh,&nbsp; Pennsylvania -- some of these have been de-hubbed over the years. You\'re getting into a point that you have a lot of choices available. So then it becomes a little more nuanced because you could book the first flight on, let\'s say American and that one may have difficulties because that plane came in overnight and it was delayed because of storms in Chicago. But on the other hand, if there are options on Delta which are coming from Atlanta where there were not storms, you can always then get switched over for it. So when you get into those middle airports, they\'re not full hubs, but they\'re not the small regionals that have two flights a day, then it becomes a little more nuanced. And then you start to look across airlines as opposed to just within the airline.</li><li>Mark: Now if we pivot just slightly and think about different types of airlines. So if I think about hub-centric airlines, like the traditional United, American, Delta versus, say, a Southwest, which I\'ve joked in the past feels like they\'re running milk runs across the country. So there\'s not necessarily a hub, just that plane is running a line. Is there a difference between those two types of airlines on that first flight out?</li><li>Sheldon: There is, for a variety of reasons. With Southwest, they\'re trying to pack as many segments or links per day for every airplane. That\'s how they stay profitable. Their turn times are tremendous, but it also makes them more vulnerable to any kind of mechanical or weather delays or air traffic control slowdowns because they don\'t have the slack built into their system in their links. As a result of that, when you get to the end of the day, they still have to abide by the FAA regulations in terms of crew rest. And the question is, even though they are in some sense of point to point airline, they have areas of the country that have a concentration of flights like Dallas Love for example, like Chicago, like Baltimore-Washington, where they traditionally had a lot of flights. So you do have to look then, even though they aren\'t traditional hubs, they operate similarly. Where is the crew located; where they choosing to live? And that\'s an important component because when you\'re trying to reschedule because of delays, the flight that you\'re going to take out at 6 am may have come from a city where the plane only arrived at midnight. The flight crew needs the rest. They will not be able to leave on time. But if you switch crews and you have the flexibility because you have a sufficient number of crew members. It solves the problem. Is that going to exist in your city? So even though Southwest doesn\'t have the traditional hub and spoke system, they have airports that, in some sense, act like their hubs.</li><li>Mark: Sheldon, how much of this do you think is a function of the current tight labor market that airlines say they\'re operating in?</li><li>Sheldon: Now the situation we\'re in, which was brought on by COVID, of course, meant that they had a tremendous amount of layoffs and looking down the road, they were trying to survive financially. And now they\'re in a situation where they have to rehire but retrain all of these pilots. People think “Oh, you haven\'t flown for 8 months, 9 months? We’ll just put you in a cockpit and you’re fine.” It doesn\'t work that way. Once you\'ve been off for 6 months, it\'s as if you\'ve never flown. You still have the 1,500 hours which are required to fly, but you get rusty. And the pilots themselves say “I\'m really not as comfortable as I used to be,” especially on landings, which is the most critical activity that they do once they\'re in flight, it\'s pretty much status quo. Taking off is reasonably straightforward, but landing is the tricky part. And they just feel a little less comfortable unless they have the training. And the fact is they want to be safe as much as the passengers and the airline\'s want them to be safe. Getting these people back in the cockpit training and they have so many flight simulators. So much training that needs to be gone through. This is a non-trivial process.</li><li>Mark: Sheldon, thank you very much for that. That\'s very helpful. Any last thought, any last tips as people are looking to navigate through the back end of the summer season and into the holiday flying; things that you use to avoid airport chaos?</li><li>Sheldon: Well, we\'ve just now entered the post-summer/fall travel period and I check the numbers daily in terms of screenings at TSA checkpoints and the numbers are trying to come down, which means that there\'s gonna be a lot less stress and strain on the system. The airlines are starting to ramp up their schedules. I\'ve booked some things out for later in the fall and they\'re already changing the schedules. So, I know that they\'re starting to add more flights and more opportunities for people. For the holiday travel season this year, Christmas and New Year\'s fall on a Sunday. And that means that people are going to be traveling on Friday and Saturday. If you can travel on Thursday or Wednesday, you may find it a lot less taxing. So, thinking a little bit ahead in that regard may be very helpful. You can\'t predict weather storms, a nor’easter is going through, you know, it’s late in the year. The other strategy that I\'ve used because I\'ve mostly lived in non-hub cities is that there\'s always been a dominant airline and a non-dominant airline. And the strategy I\'ve always used is to always become loyal to the non-dominant airline. And the reason being is that when the non-dominant airline had problems, they were always gracious to put you on the dominant airline, which had much more choices. And as a result, I rarely got stuck because if I was on the dominant airline, trying to find a plane on the non-dominant one was much more difficult to get the seats available</li><li>Mark: That\'s an interesting strategy. Kind of counterintuitive, but as you explain it, it makes sense.</li><li>Sheldon: I have never gotten stuck because by flying the non-dominant, even out of a hub airport. You think of a place like Detroit where they have Delta as the dominant airline. If you fly American out of there, the people are working extra hard to get your business. And as a result of that, I\'ve always found service is better in the non-dominant airline, even in the hub cities where they\'re competing.</li><li>Mark: That\'s a good tip. Thanks for that Sheldon. Dr. Sheldon, Jacobson at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. Thank you very much for joining us on the TravelCommons podcast.</li><li>Sheldon: Thank you. It\'s wonderful to be with you.</li></ul></li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/scottaltham/20747\"> Hear Us Now (poptastic mix)</a> by Scott Altham (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/scottaltham/20747</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Why We Travel</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Some years ago, on some milestone birthday (I’m not saying which), my kids gave me the book <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3DHoiJC\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">1,000 Places to See Before You Die</a></em>. Hmm… was there a message somewhere in that gift? Not that they would admit. But it was a fun book flip through -- to remind me of past trips and give me ideas of places to go next. So when the TravelCommons inbox offered up an opportunity to interview the author, <a href=\"http://1000Places.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Patricia Schultz</a>, about her new book, I jumped at it.<ul><li>Mark: Patricia, thanks for joining us on the TravelCommons podcast. Your new book is <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3BWnv6n\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Why We Travel: 100 Reasons to See the World</a></em>. That topic -- why we travel -- has been a common one here on TravelCommons; how travel expands our horizons, our perspectives, helps us connect with others and with ourselves as we lose ourselves in the “otherness” of a new place. So Patricia, help us. What\'s your take on why we travel?</li><li>Patricia: Well, I used this period of the pandemic to have that conversation with myself. This moment of COVID allowed me this unprecedented moment where suddenly I was very stationary. I thought it was very important for me, as a travel writer, to reassess all over again the importance of travel. But the “why” needs to be kept very forefront, so that we have that appreciation, and we understand that we\'re privileged and it\'s an honor and it\'s something that you need to travel meaningfully and not just on automatic pilot. And I think first and foremost it\'s, for me, it\'s food for my soul. And as you said, it opens our perspectives and it opens our heads, it opens our hearts. You mentioned connecting with other people. That\'s part of opening your heart with that exchange with your Uber driver or your guide or the lady in the open-air market who’s selling her tomatoes and whoever you have that moment with. It’s all the people along the way that you meet and accrue and collect all of these experiences that are life lessons. Not just the logistics and the details of trip planning, but life lessons as they pertain to what you bring home with you and how you deal with life and how you\'ve become more resourceful and the “daily-ness” of life is dealt with in a different way. I know I\'m more tolerant. I know I\'m more respectful in general. I know that I\'m more curious and that\'s what gets you out the front door at the end of the day, which is often usually the most difficult part of all of this -- getting going.</li><li>Mark: Absolutely. Patricia, the book is a great mix of beautiful photos and quotes about travel. Definitely a book that you need to have in your hand rather than on your tablet. What was your curation process? How did you pick the pictures and the quotes that went into the book?</li><li>Patricia: I\'m so glad that you touched on that because I myself thought that a book that seemingly this simplistic would just kind of write itself.</li><li>Mark: It\'s never that simple though. Right?</li><li>Patricia: No. One of the quotes I used is by Beverly Sills, the great operatic singer, who said there are no shortcuts to any place worth going to or anything worth doing, I might add as a postscript, and writing one of them. But the photos, which are not mine I\'m sorry to say, they\'re colorful and they\'re energetic and they\'re vibrant and there\'s a great sense of place and excitement to them, I think. And that\'s what we were aiming for to have this book, everything, kind of jump off the page at you because that\'s part of the message, the message of how exciting and exhilarating travel can be and then to match it with the appropriate message. The message that is embodied in a quotation or in an aphorism or in a list that I make up or in an anecdote that matches what the photograph recounts. So, it all was a real departure for me because my books until now have just been a kind of encyclopedia of 1,000 places around the world. But that same broad, comprehensive mix of experience and geography and message and importance of travel that I tried to infuse throughout <em>1,000 Places</em> is the same mix that I tried to embed in every aphorism and in every photo and in the sequence of the book. It\'s not a big book. It\'s a hardcover book. It\'s not oversized and it\'s not all that many pages; it\'s somewhere over 100 pages. But there\'s a lot that can be said because travel means many, many, many different things to many different people. But at the end of the day, it makes us better people and that\'s kind of Period, Amen!</li><li>Mark: And it\'s certainly more focused, as you said, on inspiring people to travel, to pull their bag out from under their bed rather than a tour guide\'s list of where to go, or some expert’s advice on how to pack that bag. But some might see this collide with the ethics, the concern about climate change. How do you square that circle?</li><li>Patricia: If you travel with respect and with that, conviction to see the world for all the right places, and not because you\'re checking off countries or you\'re filling empty time. But if you want to experience another culture and bring those experiences home with you, ultimately, probably the best thing we can hope to take away from travel is that when we return to our homes, we are equipped to make your best life for yourself and your neighbors and your community and the world at large. And also, the very notion that travel isn\'t inherently international or a 12-hour long haul flight to get you to the other side of the world. You know, you can walk out your front door and walk around the block in midtown Manhattan where I live and that\'s travel enough for many people. The people watching, the theater of the street or filling your car or charging your car and taking that road trip to the local state park. So, there are all kinds of ways that you can easily accommodate all of those concerns if you travel well. And I don\'t mean five-star deluxe and I don\'t mean remote dream destinations of Mongolia and Africa, although those are all pretty fantastic as well. Travel well in that you really maximize the time made available to you and the money that\'s in your budget. But I think you just need to go with the right head and the right head to me has always meant curiosity and respect. And if that\'s the case then you will travel respectfully, and you will address climate change in a way that as an individual we can.</li><li>Mark: Fantastic. Well, Patricia Schultz, author of the new book <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3S61BDa\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Why We Travel: 100 Reasons to See the World</a></em>. Patricia, thanks for stopping by the TravelCommons podcast to give us your thoughts on why we should travel. Really appreciate the time.</li><li>Patricia: Thank you very much. Thank you for having me.</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #189</li><li>A little change of pace; a lot less of my voice and more of others. I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. </li><li>And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>. And while you’re at TravelCommons.com, you can check out the show notes page for a transcript and any links I’ve mentioned. Or you can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page.</li><li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_190.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #190 —  My Travel Tech Stack; Imbibing for Introverts','','inherit','closed','closed','','4208-revision-v1','','','2022-10-30 18:15:21','2022-10-30 23:15:21','',4208,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4210',0,'revision','',0),
(4212,1,'2022-10-30 18:25:54','2022-10-30 23:25:54','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/IMG_5006.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/IMG_5006-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Person standing in front of a wall with the message stenciled No Selfies\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> There Are Rules About Why We Travel[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Lots of different voices in this episode. Listeners growing our list of travel tips, and conversations with <a href=\"http://shj.cs.illinois.edu/\">Dr. Sheldon Jacobson</a> about why one of those tips -- always catch the first flight out -- isn\'t always right, and <a href=\"https://www.workman.com/authors/patricia-schultz\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Patricia Schultz</a> about her new book, <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3BWnv6n\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Why We Travel: 100 Reasons to See the World</a></em>. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_190.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #190: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Happy Halloween! Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN. Finally got my body back on Central Time after 3 weeks in Europe that started in Split, Croatia and then ran up the Italian peninsula -- Amalfi Coast, Naples, Rome, Florence -- and then back down to Rome to fly home. And for a trip about a dozen potential points of failure between all the flights, the trains, and the Airbnb’s, it all went pretty smoothly except for the final leg -- the EWR-BNA flight home, where United somehow couldn’t manage to get our luggage on our plane. But by then, it wasn’t critical -- just suitcases of dirty clothes and some bottles of wine and limoncello. And United delivered them to us the next afternoon -- just in time for us to start doing laundry. Annoying, yes -- but not much more.</li><li>Which, after a summer of travel horror stories about canceled flights, lost luggage, hours-long security lines that fed our episode on <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/08/18/podcast-188-my-top-tips-to-survive-travel-chaos/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Podcast #188 — My Top Travel Tips to Survive Airport Chaos\">Top Tips to Avoid Travel Chaos</a>, I chalked it up to good luck and clean living or, what’s probably a more likely explanation, the airlines and airports are finally getting on the other side of the surprise snapback in leisure travel during a very tight labor market. Through Nashville, O’Hare, Frankfurt, even the Split airport -- 5-minute security lines at most, and on-time flights. In Italy, all our trains were on-time. And after all of that smooth travel, it wasn’t until our last day, for our flight home, that we got pulled up short. We walked into Terminal 3 at Rome’s Fiumicino airport and smack into a huge line. It took us a moment to figure out that the line wasn’t for us; it was the check-in line for Air Canada which seemed… weird. But no matter, we didn’t have to stand in it. </li><li>The next line, though, we did -- the separate security line for all direct flights to the US.  We’ve talked in the past about how, post-9/11, direct international flights to the US tend to be segregated from the rest of the flights and put at the far end of departure terminals. That I’m used to. This was the first time, though, that I’ve seen a US-only security line. And on a Sunday morning at 9am, when everyone is there for the 10:30/11am bank of flights to the US. It tailed back almost the length of the terminal.  But it kept moving. And when we made it up to the security area, we could see that they had every screening station manned and operational. We got through security and passport control in less than a half hour. Not world-class timing, but not anywhere near the summer horror stories.</li><li>I shouldn’t have been surprised at that US security line though because every place we went in Italy was jammed/crowded, mostly with Americans. It was revenge travel in action. I asked a few guys -- bartenders, shop owners, shuttle drivers -- how these October crowds compared to pre-pandemic. “It’s insane!” was the consensus. And I could feel it wearing on them. Even though all these people were giving them money, their patience seemed to be getting a little thin. Last year, last October when we were in Italy, in Puglia and Sicily, these same sort of folks were saying “Welcome! We’re so glad travelers are back!” This year? I think it’s a bit more like “when are you travelers <em>going </em>back… home?”</li><li>Bridge Music --  <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/48915\">Like Music (cdk Mix</a>) by Analog By Nature (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/48915 Ft: Phasenwandler  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I’m going to hold my thoughts about my Croatia and Italy trip for the next episode; do one of my stream-of-consciousness “Notes on a Location” topics. But I do want to follow up here on a couple of things from the last episode. First up, is <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/09/22/podcast-189-why-we-travel-when-the-first-flight-isnt-best/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Podcast #189 —  Why We Travel; When The First Flight Isn’t Best\">last episode’s</a> eSIM rant because, through watching with my travel companions and texting with Allan Marko, a long-time TravelCommons contributor, I sorta refined that rant, getting it down to two decision points. <ul><li>First, how much data do you expect to use? If you’re out of the US for a week or less, staying in a place with good WiFi, and can wait until the end of the day to do all your social media posting, you can probably be good with 5GB of data -- which gets you under T-Mobile’s non-throttled international data cap (which is what a couple of the folks traveling with me did), way under Google Fi’s 50 GB cap, and probably fits into a $15-20 eSIM from someone like aloSIM or Airalo. It’s the low-hassle solution. But for a longer stay, like my 3 week-er, or if you’re fully invested in building Instagram stories, like my wife, 5GB just isn’t going to cut it. I reset my iPhone data stats on the flight to Frankfurt and then looked at them as we were taxiing out to the runway in Rome. I used 77 GBs of data. Now, 11 GB was from hotspotting because the WiFi in our Florence Airbnb was pretty useless. But even pulling that out, 66 GBs is still a whackload of data. Which is probably because I didn’t really pay any attention to my data usage, because the Telecom Italia plan I was on gave me <em>600</em> GB of 5G data, essentially unlimited data, for $15. So while my T-Mobile-using companions were scrounging for a bar’s WiFi password to do Untappd check-ins, I was uploading pictures and refreshing my podcasts.</li><li>The second decision point  -- do you need to make regular phone calls; do you need a local number? This is more and more of an edge case with people primarily texting, and when there was a specific need for a voice call, people rang me through WhatsApp and Telegram. But on this trip, I got us last-minute tables at a couple of good restaurants because I could call them over the regular phone network, something I couldn’t have done with a data-only eSIM. I’ve also run into the need for a local number when trying to register or create an account for an on-line service. My Telecom Italia SIM also came with a local Italian number and unlimited voice minutes. </li><li>So while I sharpened my thinking on this trip, my conclusion didn’t change. I know I’m an edge case -- I don’t want to have to think about data consumption and I want local phone service -- and until the in-country wireless carriers offer the same pre-paid plans on eSIMs that they do on physical SIMs, I’ll be keeping my phone with the SIM tray… and a straightened-out paper clip to pop it open.</li></ul></li><li>Second, following up to Kendra Kroll’s travel tip in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/09/22/podcast-189-why-we-travel-when-the-first-flight-isnt-best/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"the last episode\">the last episode</a> about knowing the names of cities in the local vernacular. Kendra talked about people missing their train stop because they didn’t realize that Florence, in Italian, is Firenze. So riding the train from Rome (Roma) to Florence (Firenze), I was on the lookout for this. All the train tickets used Italian city names -- Roma, Napoli, Firenze. But the signs on the platforms of the Florence train stations said “Florence”. Indeed, the real confusion wasn’t Florence vs Firenze, but which Florence train station to get off at. My group thought we had a direct train from downtown Rome  (Roma Termini) to the downtown Florence station (Firenze Santa Maria Novella), so when the train stopped at a station with “Florence” in the sign, they all scrambled to get their bags and head for the station -- which would’ve left them hanging around in a suburban parking lot figuring out how get a ride downtown. So not only know the name of the city in the vernacular; know the full station name of your stop.</li><li>I mentioned earlier that the first leg of my trip was from BNA to ORD, and I was kinda surprised to realize that it was my first time in ORD in 10 months, since returning from the UK last November. Prior to moving down here to Nashville in July, I’d been flying Southwest out of Chicago Midway; easier to get to and Southwest fit my travel plans better. So as “Welcome Back,” I got the full ORD experience -- landing on the far north runway, which feels like it’s just short of the Wisconsin state line, with the requisite 20-min taxi to get within sight of the terminal. Then, just as you think you’re almost there, the plane stops across the road from the terminal and waits 5 minutes for a gate to open up. Then, once we get moving again, we take the scenic route, past all the American planes in Terminal 3 and the Delta planes in Terminal 2 until we finally get to the United terminal in Terminal 1. All told, at least 30 minutes from tires hitting the runway to the door opening and the agent saying “Welcome to ORD”. Yeah, thanks. Great to be back.</li><li>And in other “Great to be back” things, Irene and I used Lyft for the first time in forever to get home from the Nashville airport -- the wait time and the price were much lower than Uber; which is weird because I’d think, by now, the ride sharing market would be a bit more price efficient. But anyhow, Lyft is so excited to see me resurface in Nashville that the app is flooding my phone with notifications with ride offers and suggestions for things to do. Three days of this was enough to drive me into the hell that the iPhone Settings menu has become to figure out how to shut them up. Probably not the behavior Lyft was trying to prompt, but there you go.</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Yup, we have mail … and comments.</li><li>Let’s start with two comments on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">TravelCommons Facebook page</a>. First up, Jim McDonough tagged the post for <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/05/26/podcast-187-moving-to-a-non-hub-airport-what-makes-a-great-taproom/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Podcast #187 — Moving to a Non-Hub Airport; What Makes A Great Taproom?\">episode #187</a> with his experience moving to a non-hub airport. Jim writes…<ul><li>“We moved from a hub (DFW, 7 parallel runways plus one other) to a non-hub (SAN, 1 runway). Clearly we were tied to American at DFW (both lifetime Gold), and there really is no single dominant carrier at SAN. We do have some sneaky long non-stops from here, though, like to Hawaii, London, Munich, Boston, New York. None of these on American, though. We are trending towards Alaska Airlines, which has pretty good service and Boeing airplanes, and if there\'s an Admirals Club around we can use it flying Alaska. I was among the people who switched to cash-back credit cards during the pandemic when no flying was happening, but I\'m rethinking that position with an eye to using miles to go places.”</li><li>Jim, thanks for that. The American-Alaska relationship has always been good for West Coast fliers. I remember, years ago, flying Alaska from Long Beach up the coast to San Jose. I could never figure out why Alaska was flying that route, but it was handy with my American status.</li></ul></li><li>Next up, Thelma Smith adding a travel tip to the post for last month’s episode<ul><li>“Good episode. I don’t travel a lot but one thing I do is if I have to check a bag I use the sky cap. I don’t have to be lugging anything through the airport and the cash comes in handy to tip them.”</li><li>Thanks, Thelma, for that tip. I\'m a big sky cap fan when I have to check a bag -- like when I’m loaded up from a big wine country trip -- and, yes, cash is absolutely required for their tip!</li></ul></li><li>Moving to the TravelCommons website, Geoff Slater left this comment<ul><li>“Excellent return podcast! A very frequent traveler, I agreed with everything. A quibble however was the advice to take a nonstop. While I don’t disagree, I fly in and out of Burlington, VT, so that’s rarely an option. So for me, I also consider my options for connecting airports. As a United flier, Denver in the summer when it’s an option, and then IAD, and trying to avoid EWR. Getting a bit more esoteric for the non-frequent flier, I also consider plane type. And with United 1K status, I also take advantage of the same day change to avoid weather problems.”</li><li>Geoff, thanks for the comments. Kinda back to my pre-break episode about moving from to a non-hub airport -- most of your direct flight options are to hubs like DEN and IAD. Your strategy on hub selection is smart; pick hubs off by themselves with long well-separated runways. When I was doing work in north Jersey, we used to joke that anyone spitting on a runway at EWR would mean an hour delay; the runways are too close together to allow parallel take-offs and landings in all but the best of weather. Your comment about plane type -- rather than esoteric, I think it’s more of a graduate-level flight planning tip. The first cut is regional jet vs. main-line jet. I’ll always pick the, say, United Airbus 319 over the American Eagle Embraer. Making a choice between main-line jets can be a bit more subtle; different fliers will make different trade-offs between size -- flights with smaller capacity jets might be sacrificed when storms reduce flight slots but they’re quicker to get out of if a delay has tightened your connection. Again, graduate-level linear programming optimization algorithms for flight planning.</li></ul></li><li>On Twitter, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/PortaPocketGal\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Kendra Kroll</a> offered up a travel tip<ul><li>“Know names of cities in local vernacular. I\'ll never forget when folks on our Southbound train to Rome missed their stop by several hours as they didn\'t realize Firenze = Florence!”</li><li>Ouch! That’s a good tip; probably a next-level version of my <em>Know Your Geography</em> tip. For extra credit, be able to recognize your destination in the local non-Latin alphabet. I was in Tokyo back right before they moved the old Tsukiji Fish Market. The morning after I arrived, I was up early with jet lag and so walked over to the market. Someone had recommended a small sushi joint there, so I went looking for it. The recommendation gave the name in Latin characters but the signs in the market were only in Kanji. I eventually found a guy at an information desk who gave me directions to the place, but something to keep in mind when I travel to, say, Greece or Georgia -- the country, not the state.</li></ul></li><li>And finally, Aaron Woodlin responded to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1564695213217648642\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">my re-tweet of an ORD TSA post</a> with a picture of what one passenger pulled out of their carry-on and put in a bin to pass through the X-ray machine -- a meat cleaver, a couple of knives, a couple of saws… Somebody who’s definitely unclear on the concept of “no sharp objects in your carry-on.” Aaron’s cut -<ul><li>“What I really don\'t get are people who don\'t keep their range bags and carry-on luggage separate, and end up unintentionally packing heat at the checkpoint.  If you can afford plane fare, guns and ammo, you can spring for separate bags!”</li><li>Range bag, tool box… I can just imagine being the TSA guy shaking his head as the image of a bin full of knives and saws comes across the monitor. The guy is aware enough to know that you need to pull metal stuff out of your bag, but not hip to the fact of why. And now you’re the TSA guy who has to explain it all to him. </li></ul></li><li>And as always, thanks to all of you for the comments! Some great stuff here.</li><li>I think I’ve mentioned in prior episodes that I’m on Apple’s iPhone upgrade plan. Every year I get the new phone, send in my old one, and it resets the payment clock. Kinda like leasing a car but with lower monthly payments. Anyhow, a few weeks back, I’m scrubbing through Apple’s hour-and-a-half long announcement video -- skip all the Apple Watch stuff, slow down on the new AirPods, and then settle in for the iPhone 14 walk through. Nothing earth-shaking; I’m liking the new purple color. But then, as they were wrapping up, I had a record-scratch moment -- no SIM tray! What, what? Yup, for US iPhones, no more SIM tray; it’s all internal eSIMs! Isn’t that great? No more searching for a paper clip to pop out the tray, losing the little nano-SIM, …. No, it’s <em>not</em> great, at least for those of us who travel internationally. I’ve talked many times over the years about using local SIMs. Most recently, in episode #181, I talked about, at the start of our Puglia bike trip, spending 15 minutes and $25 in a Telecom Italia store for a SIM that gave me a local phone number (very handy for restaurant reservations) and <em>70 GB</em> of data. And now next week, all I have to do is load some money onto that SIM through the Telecom Italia website, and I’m good to go when I connect thru Frankfurt, and land in Croatia and Italy. But what about an eSIM? I couldn’t find any mainline Italian mobile carrier that offered a prepaid eSIM. Same with the UK. When I <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1567661384875347969\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">bitch-tweeted about this</a>, <a href=\"https://alosim.com/\">aloSIM</a>, a company that sells eSIMs for many countries, quickly responded “Well, our Italy eSIM data packages start at $4.50 for a week of data…” I hit their website. Their $4.50/week gives 1 GB of data. For an extra 50¢, I can get 10x that -- 10 GB of data for $5/week. I <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1567856046328135683\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">tweeted that back</a>. As you might guess, no response from aloSIM’s social media team. So, I’ve dropped off the iPhone upgrade wheel. I know I’m an edge case, and I think this could accelerate the push toward eSIMs. But like when Apple dropped the headphone jack, I think they’re 12-18 months ahead of the curve for frequent international travelers and I need something that works <em>today</em>, where the curve is right now. So I’ll wait a bit, like TravelCommons listener Jerry Sarfati who said he’s waiting for the “iPhone 15… with a USB-C charger.” I really hope it comes in purple too.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/spinmeister/53428\">Somewhere</a> by spinmeister (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/spinmeister/53428 Ft: DJ Vadim </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>When <em>Not </em>To Take the First Flight Out</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Moving to the mail portion of the episode, a day after I published <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/08/18/podcast-188-my-top-tips-to-survive-travel-chaos/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Podcast #188 —  My Top Travel Tips to Survive Airport Chaos\">the last episode</a>, I saw an email in the TravelCommons inbox with the subject “Is the first flight of the day still the best one? No. – air travel scientist for interviews.” This caught my eye because the 5th of the 13 tips to avoid airport chaos I’d <em>just </em>published was “catch the earliest flight you can”. So I replied to the email “Tell me why I’m wrong!”</li><li>Which led to this conversation with <a href=\"http://shj.cs.illinois.edu/\">Dr. Sheldon Jacobson</a>, Professor in Computer Science at the University of Illinois. Over the years, Dr. Jacobson has done projects using operations research models to optimize aviation security. But most recently, he <a href=\"https://www.chicagotribune.com/opinion/commentary/ct-opinion-travel-delays-flight-bookings-pandemic-20220830-p64ax3a74vaxnnzqwts4nel3cy-story.html\">wrote about</a> how the received frequent flier wisdom about catching the first flight out might not always be right. So I started our discussion asking him “Where did I get it wrong?”<ul><li>Sheldon: When you\'re flying in and out of hub airports, conventional wisdom is, in fact, correct. You do want to take the first flight of the day because at a hub airport, there\'s a lot more flexibility once a plane arrives at the end of the day. It\'s going to be cleaned, it\'s going to be maintained. Its gonna be fresh for the new day. If it turns out that some of the crew members become unavailable, you have alternatives because so many people have bases. So, this is in Chicago and Dallas for American, For United, you also have Washington Dulles as well as Chicago. For Delta, of course, it\'s Atlanta, Minneapolis, Detroit. So that\'s a great strategy. But what if you\'re not in a hub airport and that\'s when things start to get more nuanced. And the best way to think of this is that every airplane as well as every crew when they fly from city to city, they are a link in a chain. At the end of the day, you think, “Okay, the chain ends.” Actually, it doesn\'t. because the first flight of the day is the connection and the link from the last flight of the previous day. And all of this comes out and starts to impact that decision of the first flight of the day. Because if that flight comes in late, remember the last flight of the day, that\'s going to be the first flight out of a regional airport. So as a result of that, you actually want to take the second flight of the day out of a regional airport or a smaller large airport. That\'s the best strategy when it comes to these secondary and tertiary airports.</li><li>Mark: Actually, what you\'ve said, I\'ve seen that happen in smaller regional airports, say Lexington Kentucky, Appleton, Wisconsin, where that first flight of the day is not on the ground, so it\'s got to come in from a hub. Is there a split where, say, larger non-hub airports, the conventional wisdom still holds? Say where I am now in Nashville, or something like in Indianapolis? Where do those fall as far as the conventional wisdom on catching the first flight out?</li><li>Sheldon: Yes, certainly when you come to Nashville, Indianapolis, Columbus,&nbsp; Ohio, Pittsburgh,&nbsp; Pennsylvania -- some of these have been de-hubbed over the years. You\'re getting into a point that you have a lot of choices available. So then it becomes a little more nuanced because you could book the first flight on, let\'s say American and that one may have difficulties because that plane came in overnight and it was delayed because of storms in Chicago. But on the other hand, if there are options on Delta which are coming from Atlanta where there were not storms, you can always then get switched over for it. So when you get into those middle airports, they\'re not full hubs, but they\'re not the small regionals that have two flights a day, then it becomes a little more nuanced. And then you start to look across airlines as opposed to just within the airline.</li><li>Mark: Now if we pivot just slightly and think about different types of airlines. So if I think about hub-centric airlines, like the traditional United, American, Delta versus, say, a Southwest, which I\'ve joked in the past feels like they\'re running milk runs across the country. So there\'s not necessarily a hub, just that plane is running a line. Is there a difference between those two types of airlines on that first flight out?</li><li>Sheldon: There is, for a variety of reasons. With Southwest, they\'re trying to pack as many segments or links per day for every airplane. That\'s how they stay profitable. Their turn times are tremendous, but it also makes them more vulnerable to any kind of mechanical or weather delays or air traffic control slowdowns because they don\'t have the slack built into their system in their links. As a result of that, when you get to the end of the day, they still have to abide by the FAA regulations in terms of crew rest. And the question is, even though they are in some sense of point to point airline, they have areas of the country that have a concentration of flights like Dallas Love for example, like Chicago, like Baltimore-Washington, where they traditionally had a lot of flights. So you do have to look then, even though they aren\'t traditional hubs, they operate similarly. Where is the crew located; where they choosing to live? And that\'s an important component because when you\'re trying to reschedule because of delays, the flight that you\'re going to take out at 6 am may have come from a city where the plane only arrived at midnight. The flight crew needs the rest. They will not be able to leave on time. But if you switch crews and you have the flexibility because you have a sufficient number of crew members. It solves the problem. Is that going to exist in your city? So even though Southwest doesn\'t have the traditional hub and spoke system, they have airports that, in some sense, act like their hubs.</li><li>Mark: Sheldon, how much of this do you think is a function of the current tight labor market that airlines say they\'re operating in?</li><li>Sheldon: Now the situation we\'re in, which was brought on by COVID, of course, meant that they had a tremendous amount of layoffs and looking down the road, they were trying to survive financially. And now they\'re in a situation where they have to rehire but retrain all of these pilots. People think “Oh, you haven\'t flown for 8 months, 9 months? We’ll just put you in a cockpit and you’re fine.” It doesn\'t work that way. Once you\'ve been off for 6 months, it\'s as if you\'ve never flown. You still have the 1,500 hours which are required to fly, but you get rusty. And the pilots themselves say “I\'m really not as comfortable as I used to be,” especially on landings, which is the most critical activity that they do once they\'re in flight, it\'s pretty much status quo. Taking off is reasonably straightforward, but landing is the tricky part. And they just feel a little less comfortable unless they have the training. And the fact is they want to be safe as much as the passengers and the airline\'s want them to be safe. Getting these people back in the cockpit training and they have so many flight simulators. So much training that needs to be gone through. This is a non-trivial process.</li><li>Mark: Sheldon, thank you very much for that. That\'s very helpful. Any last thought, any last tips as people are looking to navigate through the back end of the summer season and into the holiday flying; things that you use to avoid airport chaos?</li><li>Sheldon: Well, we\'ve just now entered the post-summer/fall travel period and I check the numbers daily in terms of screenings at TSA checkpoints and the numbers are trying to come down, which means that there\'s gonna be a lot less stress and strain on the system. The airlines are starting to ramp up their schedules. I\'ve booked some things out for later in the fall and they\'re already changing the schedules. So, I know that they\'re starting to add more flights and more opportunities for people. For the holiday travel season this year, Christmas and New Year\'s fall on a Sunday. And that means that people are going to be traveling on Friday and Saturday. If you can travel on Thursday or Wednesday, you may find it a lot less taxing. So, thinking a little bit ahead in that regard may be very helpful. You can\'t predict weather storms, a nor’easter is going through, you know, it’s late in the year. The other strategy that I\'ve used because I\'ve mostly lived in non-hub cities is that there\'s always been a dominant airline and a non-dominant airline. And the strategy I\'ve always used is to always become loyal to the non-dominant airline. And the reason being is that when the non-dominant airline had problems, they were always gracious to put you on the dominant airline, which had much more choices. And as a result, I rarely got stuck because if I was on the dominant airline, trying to find a plane on the non-dominant one was much more difficult to get the seats available</li><li>Mark: That\'s an interesting strategy. Kind of counterintuitive, but as you explain it, it makes sense.</li><li>Sheldon: I have never gotten stuck because by flying the non-dominant, even out of a hub airport. You think of a place like Detroit where they have Delta as the dominant airline. If you fly American out of there, the people are working extra hard to get your business. And as a result of that, I\'ve always found service is better in the non-dominant airline, even in the hub cities where they\'re competing.</li><li>Mark: That\'s a good tip. Thanks for that Sheldon. Dr. Sheldon, Jacobson at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. Thank you very much for joining us on the TravelCommons podcast.</li><li>Sheldon: Thank you. It\'s wonderful to be with you.</li></ul></li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/scottaltham/20747\"> Hear Us Now (poptastic mix)</a> by Scott Altham (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/scottaltham/20747</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Why We Travel</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Some years ago, on some milestone birthday (I’m not saying which), my kids gave me the book <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3DHoiJC\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">1,000 Places to See Before You Die</a></em>. Hmm… was there a message somewhere in that gift? Not that they would admit. But it was a fun book flip through -- to remind me of past trips and give me ideas of places to go next. So when the TravelCommons inbox offered up an opportunity to interview the author, <a href=\"http://1000Places.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Patricia Schultz</a>, about her new book, I jumped at it.<ul><li>Mark: Patricia, thanks for joining us on the TravelCommons podcast. Your new book is <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3BWnv6n\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Why We Travel: 100 Reasons to See the World</a></em>. That topic -- why we travel -- has been a common one here on TravelCommons; how travel expands our horizons, our perspectives, helps us connect with others and with ourselves as we lose ourselves in the “otherness” of a new place. So Patricia, help us. What\'s your take on why we travel?</li><li>Patricia: Well, I used this period of the pandemic to have that conversation with myself. This moment of COVID allowed me this unprecedented moment where suddenly I was very stationary. I thought it was very important for me, as a travel writer, to reassess all over again the importance of travel. But the “why” needs to be kept very forefront, so that we have that appreciation, and we understand that we\'re privileged and it\'s an honor and it\'s something that you need to travel meaningfully and not just on automatic pilot. And I think first and foremost it\'s, for me, it\'s food for my soul. And as you said, it opens our perspectives and it opens our heads, it opens our hearts. You mentioned connecting with other people. That\'s part of opening your heart with that exchange with your Uber driver or your guide or the lady in the open-air market who’s selling her tomatoes and whoever you have that moment with. It’s all the people along the way that you meet and accrue and collect all of these experiences that are life lessons. Not just the logistics and the details of trip planning, but life lessons as they pertain to what you bring home with you and how you deal with life and how you\'ve become more resourceful and the “daily-ness” of life is dealt with in a different way. I know I\'m more tolerant. I know I\'m more respectful in general. I know that I\'m more curious and that\'s what gets you out the front door at the end of the day, which is often usually the most difficult part of all of this -- getting going.</li><li>Mark: Absolutely. Patricia, the book is a great mix of beautiful photos and quotes about travel. Definitely a book that you need to have in your hand rather than on your tablet. What was your curation process? How did you pick the pictures and the quotes that went into the book?</li><li>Patricia: I\'m so glad that you touched on that because I myself thought that a book that seemingly this simplistic would just kind of write itself.</li><li>Mark: It\'s never that simple though. Right?</li><li>Patricia: No. One of the quotes I used is by Beverly Sills, the great operatic singer, who said there are no shortcuts to any place worth going to or anything worth doing, I might add as a postscript, and writing one of them. But the photos, which are not mine I\'m sorry to say, they\'re colorful and they\'re energetic and they\'re vibrant and there\'s a great sense of place and excitement to them, I think. And that\'s what we were aiming for to have this book, everything, kind of jump off the page at you because that\'s part of the message, the message of how exciting and exhilarating travel can be and then to match it with the appropriate message. The message that is embodied in a quotation or in an aphorism or in a list that I make up or in an anecdote that matches what the photograph recounts. So, it all was a real departure for me because my books until now have just been a kind of encyclopedia of 1,000 places around the world. But that same broad, comprehensive mix of experience and geography and message and importance of travel that I tried to infuse throughout <em>1,000 Places</em> is the same mix that I tried to embed in every aphorism and in every photo and in the sequence of the book. It\'s not a big book. It\'s a hardcover book. It\'s not oversized and it\'s not all that many pages; it\'s somewhere over 100 pages. But there\'s a lot that can be said because travel means many, many, many different things to many different people. But at the end of the day, it makes us better people and that\'s kind of Period, Amen!</li><li>Mark: And it\'s certainly more focused, as you said, on inspiring people to travel, to pull their bag out from under their bed rather than a tour guide\'s list of where to go, or some expert’s advice on how to pack that bag. But some might see this collide with the ethics, the concern about climate change. How do you square that circle?</li><li>Patricia: If you travel with respect and with that, conviction to see the world for all the right places, and not because you\'re checking off countries or you\'re filling empty time. But if you want to experience another culture and bring those experiences home with you, ultimately, probably the best thing we can hope to take away from travel is that when we return to our homes, we are equipped to make your best life for yourself and your neighbors and your community and the world at large. And also, the very notion that travel isn\'t inherently international or a 12-hour long haul flight to get you to the other side of the world. You know, you can walk out your front door and walk around the block in midtown Manhattan where I live and that\'s travel enough for many people. The people watching, the theater of the street or filling your car or charging your car and taking that road trip to the local state park. So, there are all kinds of ways that you can easily accommodate all of those concerns if you travel well. And I don\'t mean five-star deluxe and I don\'t mean remote dream destinations of Mongolia and Africa, although those are all pretty fantastic as well. Travel well in that you really maximize the time made available to you and the money that\'s in your budget. But I think you just need to go with the right head and the right head to me has always meant curiosity and respect. And if that\'s the case then you will travel respectfully, and you will address climate change in a way that as an individual we can.</li><li>Mark: Fantastic. Well, Patricia Schultz, author of the new book <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3S61BDa\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Why We Travel: 100 Reasons to See the World</a></em>. Patricia, thanks for stopping by the TravelCommons podcast to give us your thoughts on why we should travel. Really appreciate the time.</li><li>Patricia: Thank you very much. Thank you for having me.</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #189</li><li>A little change of pace; a lot less of my voice and more of others. I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. </li><li>And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>. And while you’re at TravelCommons.com, you can check out the show notes page for a transcript and any links I’ve mentioned. Or you can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page.</li><li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_190.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #190 —  My Travel Tech Stack; Imbibing for Introverts','','inherit','closed','closed','','4208-revision-v1','','','2022-10-30 18:25:54','2022-10-30 23:25:54','',4208,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4212',0,'revision','',0),
(4213,1,'2022-10-30 18:38:27','2022-10-30 23:38:27','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/IMG_5006.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/IMG_5006-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Person standing in front of a wall with the message stenciled No Selfies\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> There Are Rules About Why We Travel[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Lots of different voices in this episode. Listeners growing our list of travel tips, and conversations with <a href=\"http://shj.cs.illinois.edu/\">Dr. Sheldon Jacobson</a> about why one of those tips -- always catch the first flight out -- isn\'t always right, and <a href=\"https://www.workman.com/authors/patricia-schultz\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Patricia Schultz</a> about her new book, <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3BWnv6n\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Why We Travel: 100 Reasons to See the World</a></em>. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_190.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #190: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Happy Halloween! Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN. Finally got my body back on Central Time after 3 weeks in Europe that started in Split, Croatia and then ran up the Italian peninsula -- Amalfi Coast, Naples, Rome, Florence -- and then back down to Rome to fly home. And for a trip about a dozen potential points of failure between all the flights, the trains, and the Airbnb’s, it all went pretty smoothly except for the final leg -- the EWR-BNA flight home, where United somehow couldn’t manage to get our luggage on our plane. But by then, it wasn’t critical -- just suitcases of dirty clothes and some bottles of wine and limoncello. And United delivered them to us the next afternoon -- just in time for us to start doing laundry. Annoying, yes -- but not much more.</li><li>Which, after a summer of travel horror stories about canceled flights, lost luggage, hours-long security lines that fed our episode on <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/08/18/podcast-188-my-top-tips-to-survive-travel-chaos/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Podcast #188 — My Top Travel Tips to Survive Airport Chaos\">Top Tips to Avoid Travel Chaos</a>, I chalked it up to good luck and clean living or, what’s probably a more likely explanation, the airlines and airports are finally getting on the other side of the surprise snapback in leisure travel during a very tight labor market. Through Nashville, O’Hare, Frankfurt, even the Split airport -- 5-minute security lines at most, and on-time flights. In Italy, all our trains were on-time. And after all of that smooth travel, it wasn’t until our last day, for our flight home, that we got pulled up short. We walked into Terminal 3 at Rome’s Fiumicino airport and smack into a huge line. It took us a moment to figure out that the line wasn’t for us; it was the check-in line for Air Canada which seemed… weird. But no matter, we didn’t have to stand in it.&nbsp;</li><li>The next line, though, we did -- the separate security line for all direct flights to the US.&nbsp; We’ve talked in the past about how, post-9/11, direct international flights to the US tend to be segregated from the rest of the flights and put at the far end of departure terminals. That I’m used to. This was the first time, though, that I’ve seen a US-only security line. And on a Sunday morning at 9am, when everyone is there for the 10:30/11am bank of flights to the US. It tailed back almost the length of the terminal.&nbsp; But it kept moving. And when we made it up to the security area, we could see that they had every screening station manned and operational. We got through security and passport control in less than a half hour. Not world-class timing, but not anywhere near the summer horror stories.</li><li>I shouldn’t have been surprised at that US security line though because every place we went in Italy was jammed/crowded, mostly with Americans. It was revenge travel in action. I asked a few guys -- bartenders, shop owners, shuttle drivers -- how these October crowds compared to pre-pandemic. “It’s insane!” was the consensus. And I could feel it wearing on them. Even though all these people were giving them money, their patience seemed to be getting a little thin. Last year, last October when we were in Italy, in Puglia and Sicily, these same sort of folks were saying “Welcome! We’re so glad travelers are back!” This year? I think it’s a bit more like “when are you travelers <em>going </em>back… home?”</li><li>Bridge Music --  <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/48915\">Like Music (cdk Mix</a>) by Analog By Nature (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/48915 Ft: Phasenwandler  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I’m going to hold my thoughts about my Croatia and Italy trip for the next episode; do one of my stream-of-consciousness “Notes on a Location” topics. But I do want to follow up here on a couple of things from the last episode. First up, is <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/09/22/podcast-189-why-we-travel-when-the-first-flight-isnt-best/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Podcast #189 —  Why We Travel; When The First Flight Isn’t Best\">last episode’s</a> eSIM rant because, through watching with my travel companions and texting with Allan Marko, a long-time TravelCommons contributor, I sorta refined that rant, getting it down to two decision points. <ul><li>First, how much data do you expect to use? If you’re out of the US for a week or less, staying in a place with good WiFi, and can wait until the end of the day to do all your social media posting, you can probably be good with 5GB of data -- which gets you under T-Mobile’s non-throttled international data cap (which is what a couple of the folks traveling with me did), way under Google Fi’s 50 GB cap, and probably fits into a $15-20 eSIM from someone like aloSIM or Airalo. It’s the low-hassle solution. But for a longer stay, like my 3 week-er, or if you’re fully invested in building Instagram stories, like my wife, 5GB just isn’t going to cut it. I reset my iPhone data stats on the flight to Frankfurt and then looked at them as we were taxiing out to the runway in Rome. I used 77 GBs of data. Now, 11 GB was from hotspotting because the WiFi in our Florence Airbnb was pretty useless. But even pulling that out, 66 GBs is still a whackload of data. Which is probably because I didn’t really pay any attention to my data usage, because the Telecom Italia plan I was on gave me <em>600</em> GB of 5G data, essentially unlimited data, for $15. So while my T-Mobile-using companions were scrounging for a bar’s WiFi password to do Untappd check-ins, I was uploading pictures and refreshing my podcasts.</li><li>The second decision point  -- do you need to make regular phone calls; do you need a local number? This is more and more of an edge case with people primarily texting, and when there was a specific need for a voice call, people rang me through WhatsApp and Telegram. But on this trip, I got us last-minute tables at a couple of good restaurants because I could call them over the regular phone network, something I couldn’t have done with a data-only eSIM. I’ve also run into the need for a local number when trying to register or create an account for an on-line service. My Telecom Italia SIM also came with a local Italian number and unlimited voice minutes. </li><li>So while I sharpened my thinking on this trip, my conclusion didn’t change. I know I’m an edge case -- I don’t want to have to think about data consumption and I want local phone service -- and until the in-country wireless carriers offer the same pre-paid plans on eSIMs that they do on physical SIMs, I’ll be keeping my phone with the SIM tray… and a straightened-out paper clip to pop it open.</li></ul></li><li>Second, following up to Kendra Kroll’s travel tip in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/09/22/podcast-189-why-we-travel-when-the-first-flight-isnt-best/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">the last episode</a> about knowing the names of cities in the local vernacular. Kendra talked about people missing their train stop because they didn’t realize that Florence, in Italian, is Firenze. So riding the train from Rome (Roma) to Florence (Firenze), I was on the lookout for this. All the train tickets used Italian city names -- Roma, Napoli, Firenze. But the signs on the platforms of the Florence train stations said “Florence”. Indeed, the real confusion wasn’t Florence vs Firenze, but which Florence train station to get off at. My group thought we had a direct train from downtown Rome  (Roma Termini) to the downtown Florence station (Firenze Santa Maria Novella), so when the train stopped at a station with “Florence” in the sign, they all scrambled to get their bags and head for the station -- which would’ve left them hanging around in a suburban parking lot figuring out how get a ride downtown. So not only know the name of the city in the vernacular; know the full station name of your stop.</li><li>I mentioned earlier that the first leg of my trip was from BNA to ORD, and I was kinda surprised to realize that it was my first time in ORD in 10 months, since returning from the UK last November. Prior to moving down here to Nashville in July, I’d been flying Southwest out of Chicago Midway; easier to get to and Southwest fit my travel plans better. So as “Welcome Back,” I got the full ORD experience -- landing on the far north runway, which feels like it’s just short of the Wisconsin state line, with the requisite 20-min taxi to get within sight of the terminal. Then, just as you think you’re almost there, the plane stops across the road from the terminal and waits 5 minutes for a gate to open up. Then, once we get moving again, we take the scenic route, past all the American planes in Terminal 3 and the Delta planes in Terminal 2 until we finally get to the United terminal in Terminal 1. All told, at least 30 minutes from tires hitting the runway to the door opening and the agent saying “Welcome to ORD”. Yeah, thanks. Great to be back.</li><li>And in other “Great to be back” things, Irene and I used Lyft for the first time in forever to get home from the Nashville airport -- the wait time and the price were much lower than Uber; which is weird because I’d think, by now, the ride sharing market would be a bit more price efficient. But anyhow, Lyft is so excited to see me resurface in Nashville that the app is flooding my phone with notifications with ride offers and suggestions for things to do. Three days of this was enough to drive me into the hell that the iPhone Settings menu has become to figure out how to shut them up. Probably not the behavior Lyft was trying to prompt, but there you go.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/spinmeister/53428\">Somewhere</a> by spinmeister (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/spinmeister/53428 Ft: DJ Vadim </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>My Travel Tech Stack</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Back to that problematic last leg of our trip -- the flight home to Nashville from Newark. I knew we had a lagging luggage problem even before we left the ground courtesy of the latest addition to my travel tech stack. I’d bought <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3k4rCUy\" title=\"\">Apple AirTags</a> just for this reason -- to track our luggage. When I had to check my bag on the Vueling flight from Split to Rome, I could see on my iPhone’s Find My app that my bag was on the plane; it looked almost right underneath me. But in Newark, my bag never left the terminal. Irene checked her app; same thing. As we taxied out, I took a screenshot showing the growing distance between me on the plane and my left-behind bag, and tweeted it out to United saying “I’m guessing I won’t be seeing my luggage in BNA.” </li><li>As I said earlier, I was pretty annoyed with United, but at least the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3k4rCUy\" title=\"\">AirTags</a> saved us the 30 minutes of suspense watching all the other bags come out. Instead, we went straight to the baggage service agent, filed our report, and headed home. And then, waking up the next morning, I could see that our bags made it on the late flight from Newark, and then could see them on the delivery truck heading to our flat. Saved a lot of agita. </li><li>It got me thinking back 6-7 years to <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/08/26/podcast-116-traveling-thru-japan-luggage-trends/\">the first wave</a> of <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/12/podcast-120-where-do-guidebooks-fit-in-i-hate-shopping-for-suitcases/\">smart luggage</a> -- Bluesmart, Away. I bought a Bluesmart bag off their Indiegogo campaign. Those bags also let you <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/05/30/podcast-121-tsa-lines-my-luggage-is-where/\">track their location</a>, along with charging your phone -- for about 2 years until <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">the airlines banned them</a>, or at least the ones with non-removable batteries. Those travel use cases haven’t changed -- “Where’s my bag?” and “I need to recharge my phone so I can rebook this canceled flight” -- but the tech has moved on -- replacing the smart bag with AirTags or Tile trackers and a <a href=\"https://amzn.to/34fcbON\" title=\"\">10,000 mAh battery pack</a>.</li><li>Long-time listener and Twitter follower @Ab3Fr0man pinged me during my summer move podcast pause with “question for the next podcast >> Are there any new devices or apps you are using for travel?” which is what got me spelunking through my travel tech stack, which then turned into a stroll through my past “What’s in My Briefcase” episodes. And what struck me was, other than the AirTags and a small phone tripod for video calls, it hasn’t been what I’ve added to my kit as much as what I’ve been able to take away.</li><li>The consolidation to HDMI for video seems to be just about done and that’s let me drop all the VGA cables and dongles I used to carry around just in case I ran into an old conference room projector or hotel TV.  The slow and still in-progress consolidation to USB-C power supplies has let me do some subtraction by addition, dropping my MacBook Air power supply and an old dual USB-A charger for a single charger that’s smaller than either of them, a 100W gallium nitride charger that can charge my laptop, my phone, and my headphones all at once. Indeed, the only reason I still carry an old USB-A Apple Lightning cord is for plugging into the charging port on rental cars. </li><li>But the subtraction thing doesn’t always work. Last year, when we were traveling in Italy (Puglia and Sicily) for a couple of weeks, I wanted to leave the laptop home and run everything off my 8-inch Samsung tablet. That wouldn’t be a problem except for a couple of programs I run on my office PC, and I didn’t want to have to migrate to their cloud versions just for the trip. So instead I used Amazon Workspaces to set up a PC in the cloud. Not quite sure why I thought this would be easier. The Amazon setup was, let’s say, less than straightforward but I got it to work, and was able to run what I needed off my tablet, albeit a bit slower than usual. Getting ready for this last trip, I thought about it again, do I leave the laptop at home? Then I remembered the time sink the Amazon set up was, and tossed the laptop back into my backpack.</li><li>No new apps. Indeed, I tend to be brutal about deleting those I’m not using right now. I’ll download, say, the VRBO or Airbnb app when I need them for a trip and then dump them when I get home. I also just deleted the Clear app. I had a year free from some credit card and never used it. So I canceled it before they charged me for another year and deleted the app. Yelp is on the bubble right now. I also find myself using it less and less, just defaulting to Google Maps’ restaurant suggestions and ratings since I usually already have it open for directions.</li><li>The carriers’ apps continue to improve incrementally. I used to use an app that had maps of all the major airports, but found I was using it less and less as the carriers added similar maps to their apps. Indeed, while waiting to de-plane in EWR, I checked the United app and it had an animated step-by-step map showing the path from our arrival gate, through Customs, to our departure gate. Too bad the guys moving our luggage didn’t have the same map. </li><li>As I’ve mentioned in past episodes, I still use the free version of TripIt to consolidate all plane, train, hotel, and Airbnb confirmations into a single itinerary. I know Google Travel can do something similar if you live within the Google ecosystem, but I don’t so I use TripIt. TripIt keeps pushing their $50 Pro offering with real-time alerts and airport maps. I had the Pro offering once, but now I get all that stuff for free on the carrier apps. Now, if I <em>was</em> going to pop $50, I’d spend it on the Flighty app instead. I trialed Flighty back in the spring on a trip to Santa Fe and thought it was a great app. If I was still flying every week, it would be a no-brainer. Indeed, I’d figure out a way to expense the $250 lifetime membership and be done with it. </li><li>But the one piece of travel that’s been with me since the beginning and that continues to earn its keep -- a bottle opener. Even as craft beer has moved to cans, that stamped metal New Belgium bottle opener has saved the corner of many a hotel dresser.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/scottaltham/20747\"> Hear Us Now (poptastic mix)</a> by Scott Altham (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/scottaltham/20747</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Imbibing for Introverts</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro blurb<ul><li>Mark: Jeff, thanks for joining us on the TravelCommons podcast today. Your upcoming book…</li><li>Jeff: Technically the release date is November 15, I tried to get them early for an event on October 20, but they got held up on a freight train somewhere in the United States, so it\'s like…</li><li>Mark: That damn supply chain. So anyhow, your upcoming book, Imbibing for <em>Imbibing for Introverts: A Guide to Social Drinking for the Anti-Social</em>. Over the years on the TravelCommons podcast, we\'ve talked many times about solo eating, eating alone on the road, what you might call eating for introverts. So when I saw the title of your book, it mapped right into things that we\'ve been doing. And again, in past episodes, we\'ve talked about the best ways to eat alone and so, what are your pro tips for the best ways to drink alone?</li><li>Jeff: It depends on the venue; it just depends on what your objectives are. If you want to quietly contemplate what you\'re drinking; if you\'re in one of these high-end whiskey bars or a brandy bar or something like that; where you\'re sitting and you really want to just contemplate. Sometimes you just want to be present and just be in your thoughts, think about what you\'re drinking, think about its connection to the point of origin, that kind of thing. When you\'re drinking alone, probably more often than not you\'re going to be sitting at the bar. A lot of times they\'re going to give you a 2-top, but sometimes I feel bad about taking it up, especially when things are busy and I just want to sit at the bar.</li><li>Mark: When I started traveling, which was a long time ago, you’d end up in that same situation, at a 2-top or a 4-top and then you\'re the sad person sitting in the corner table because you were taking up revenue space. “Look, I got spots for two and you\'re only taking up one.”</li><li>Jeff: And I think that if you\'re not sitting in a corner, if you do get to sit at the bar, that\'s a great opportunity to strike up a conversation with the bartender. Sometimes it just happens organically. I don\'t know whether they feel like they need to talk to you because you\'re not with anybody and they feel bad for you. But one thing that I do find is when you order something in a way that shows you know what you\'re talking about -- like you\'re at the bar and you say give me a gin and tonic, if you don\'t really specify what gin you want, they may not have a really broad selection, but a lot of these more sort of mixology oriented bars, they\'re going to have a selection and a good way to start is “What kind of gin you have; do you have anything that\'s not juniper- forward?” -- bartenders can be really primed to geek out with somebody that they detect maybe as passionate about the things they drink as they are, as they are about the things they mix. So when you show an inkling of interest or knowledge related to that spirit or whatever ingredient you\'re putting in the cocktail, that may pique their interest a little bit and they might get a sense that this person knows what they’re talking about. I\'ve been in situations where that snowballs to a point where the bartender says, “Hey, by the way, I\'m entering a cocktail competition, this was my creation, I want you to try and tell me honestly what you think about it.” It\'s moments like this that present themselves. Not always, but you know, sometimes they do. Sometimes a bartender will also have a secret stash behind the bar, could be a rare whiskey that\'s on their list. Sometimes they will sneak you some of that. It\'s not going to necessarily be free, but they\'ll give you a pour of something that they\'re protecting and hoarding and not really giving to just anybody. So moments like that are good. It\'s not necessarily that you\'re being antisocial. It\'s sometimes conversations can create themselves organically and so that\'s why it\'s sometimes good to be alone and sit at the bar rather than at the table because no one\'s really going to be spending the time with you to do that.</li><li>Mark: Eating alone sitting at the bar, it used to be that you couldn\'t get much more than a bar snack menu at a bar. Nowadays, though, you can get a full menu at a bar and so I\'m always eating at the bar. You\'re right about the bartenders. You get blips of human interaction. I think usually the bartender is good for, I don\'t know, 3-4 quick interchanges. Obviously they got a job to do, so you’re not going to have an ongoing conversation with them, but they\'ll come by and if they think you\'re interested or you\'re an interesting person, you\'ll get blips. I don\'t know, it\'s either they think you\'re interesting or they’re taking pity on you. I\'m not quite sure which...&nbsp; What drove you to write this book Imbibing for Introverts? What was the kernel on this one?</li><li>Jeff: I just been traveling a lot and I\'ve been doing a lot of solo travel, especially work-related stuff and, over time, I really just got comfortable in my own skin going out alone. It just became something I realized I actually enjoy my own company and it just came together in my head. One time I was sitting at a bar and I wasn\'t alone at the time. I was having a drink with a friend in a bar that I had often had a drink alone and I thought I\'d really love to do a book about just being an introvert and just enjoying being by yourself and drinking alone and normalizing that too because some people are just weird about going out alone.</li><li>Mark: When you do a lot of travel, you\'ve got to get comfortable with your own company because oftentimes that\'s it. You\'ve got clients, you\'ve got other people you\'re meeting and they\'re going home, they\'re going to coach their kid’s ballgame or do whatever. And if you don\'t get out of that hotel room, that hotel room turns into a cave after a while.</li><li>Jeff: And also sometimes you just want to decompress, especially when it is a work trip and you are having meetings. For instance, I got a lot of trade shows where I\'m just walking around the convention center going from booth to booth, talking to a person after person after person, always having to be on. Just having that energy, that kind of interpersonal energy, is frankly very exhausting. By the end of the day, after like seven or eight hours of doing that, sometimes you just want to be by yourself and you just want to quietly sip something in a place that\'s got the music\'s down low, it\'s a good mix that they\'re playing. It\'s low enough that you can hear yourself think, you can also eavesdrop on other people\'s conversations. That\'s kind of fun sometimes. A lot of people talk about people watching; I\'m more of a people listener because you can tell a lot more about a person by the conversations you hear than what they\'re wearing or what they look like.</li><li>Mark: Jeff, this has been great. I really appreciate it. I\'m looking forward to reading your book when it comes out. Jeff Cioletti, author of the new book, the upcoming book coming out November,<em> Imbibing for Introverts: A Guide to Social Drinking for the Anti-Social</em>. Jeff, thanks very much for stopping by the TravelCommons podcast and chatting to us about drinking.</li><li>Jeff: Thank you so much for having me. This has been a lot of fun because it seems to be my people that listen to your podcasts.</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #190</li><li>I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. </li><li>And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social  -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>. And while you’re at TravelCommons.com, you can check out the show notes page for a transcript and any links I’ve mentioned. Or you can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page.</li><li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_190.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #190 —  My Travel Tech Stack; Imbibing for Introverts','','inherit','closed','closed','','4208-revision-v1','','','2022-10-30 18:38:27','2022-10-30 23:38:27','',4208,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4213',0,'revision','',0),
(4214,1,'2022-10-30 18:46:54','2022-10-30 23:46:54','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/IMG_5006.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/IMG_5006-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Person standing in front of a wall with the message stenciled No Selfies\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> There Are Rules About Why We Travel[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Lots of different voices in this episode. Listeners growing our list of travel tips, and conversations with <a href=\"http://shj.cs.illinois.edu/\">Dr. Sheldon Jacobson</a> about why one of those tips -- always catch the first flight out -- isn\'t always right, and <a href=\"https://www.workman.com/authors/patricia-schultz\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Patricia Schultz</a> about her new book, <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3BWnv6n\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Why We Travel: 100 Reasons to See the World</a></em>. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_190.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #190: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Happy Halloween! Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN. Finally got my body back on Central Time after 3 weeks in Europe that started in Split, Croatia and then ran up the Italian peninsula -- Amalfi Coast, Naples, Rome, Florence -- and then back down to Rome to fly home. And for a trip about a dozen potential points of failure between all the flights, the trains, and the Airbnb’s, it all went pretty smoothly except for the final leg -- the EWR-BNA flight home, where United somehow couldn’t manage to get our luggage on our plane. But by then, it wasn’t critical -- just suitcases of dirty clothes and some bottles of wine and limoncello. And United delivered them to us the next afternoon -- just in time for us to start doing laundry. Annoying, yes -- but not much more.</li><li>Which, after a summer of travel horror stories about canceled flights, lost luggage, hours-long security lines that fed our episode on <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/08/18/podcast-188-my-top-tips-to-survive-travel-chaos/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Podcast #188 — My Top Travel Tips to Survive Airport Chaos\">Top Tips to Avoid Travel Chaos</a>, I chalked it up to good luck and clean living or, what’s probably a more likely explanation, the airlines and airports are finally getting on the other side of the surprise snapback in leisure travel during a very tight labor market. Through Nashville, O’Hare, Frankfurt, even the Split airport -- 5-minute security lines at most, and on-time flights. In Italy, all our trains were on-time. And after all of that smooth travel, it wasn’t until our last day, for our flight home, that we got pulled up short. We walked into Terminal 3 at Rome’s Fiumicino airport and smack into a huge line. It took us a moment to figure out that the line wasn’t for us; it was the check-in line for Air Canada which seemed… weird. But no matter, we didn’t have to stand in it.&nbsp;</li><li>The next line, though, we did -- the separate security line for all direct flights to the US.&nbsp; We’ve talked in the past about how, post-9/11, direct international flights to the US tend to be segregated from the rest of the flights and put at the far end of departure terminals. That I’m used to. This was the first time, though, that I’ve seen a US-only security line. And on a Sunday morning at 9am, when everyone is there for the 10:30/11am bank of flights to the US. It tailed back almost the length of the terminal.&nbsp; But it kept moving. And when we made it up to the security area, we could see that they had every screening station manned and operational. We got through security and passport control in less than a half hour. Not world-class timing, but not anywhere near the summer horror stories.</li><li>I shouldn’t have been surprised at that US security line though because every place we went in Italy was jammed/crowded, mostly with Americans. It was revenge travel in action. I asked a few guys -- bartenders, shop owners, shuttle drivers -- how these October crowds compared to pre-pandemic. “It’s insane!” was the consensus. And I could feel it wearing on them. Even though all these people were giving them money, their patience seemed to be getting a little thin. Last year, last October when we were in Italy, in Puglia and Sicily, these same sort of folks were saying “Welcome! We’re so glad travelers are back!” This year? I think it’s a bit more like “when are you travelers <em>going </em>back… home?”</li><li>Bridge Music --  <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/snowflake/46164\">A Foolish Game</a> by Snowflake (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/snowflake/46164 Ft: Admiral Bob   </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I’m going to hold my thoughts about my Croatia and Italy trip for the next episode; do one of my stream-of-consciousness “Notes on a Location” topics. But I do want to follow up here on a couple of things from the last episode. First up, is <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/09/22/podcast-189-why-we-travel-when-the-first-flight-isnt-best/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Podcast #189 —  Why We Travel; When The First Flight Isn’t Best\">last episode’s</a> eSIM rant because, through watching with my travel companions and texting with Allan Marko, a long-time TravelCommons contributor, I sorta refined that rant, getting it down to two decision points. <ul><li>First, how much data do you expect to use? If you’re out of the US for a week or less, staying in a place with good WiFi, and can wait until the end of the day to do all your social media posting, you can probably be good with 5GB of data -- which gets you under T-Mobile’s non-throttled international data cap (which is what a couple of the folks traveling with me did), way under Google Fi’s 50 GB cap, and probably fits into a $15-20 eSIM from someone like aloSIM or Airalo. It’s the low-hassle solution. But for a longer stay, like my 3 week-er, or if you’re fully invested in building Instagram stories, like my wife, 5GB just isn’t going to cut it. I reset my iPhone data stats on the flight to Frankfurt and then looked at them as we were taxiing out to the runway in Rome. I used 77 GBs of data. Now, 11 GB was from hotspotting because the WiFi in our Florence Airbnb was pretty useless. But even pulling that out, 66 GBs is still a whackload of data. Which is probably because I didn’t really pay any attention to my data usage, because the Telecom Italia plan I was on gave me <em>600</em> GB of 5G data, essentially unlimited data, for $15. So while my T-Mobile-using companions were scrounging for a bar’s WiFi password to do Untappd check-ins, I was uploading pictures and refreshing my podcasts.</li><li>The second decision point  -- do you need to make regular phone calls; do you need a local number? This is more and more of an edge case with people primarily texting, and when there was a specific need for a voice call, people rang me through WhatsApp and Telegram. But on this trip, I got us last-minute tables at a couple of good restaurants because I could call them over the regular phone network, something I couldn’t have done with a data-only eSIM. I’ve also run into the need for a local number when trying to register or create an account for an on-line service. My Telecom Italia SIM also came with a local Italian number and unlimited voice minutes. </li><li>So while I sharpened my thinking on this trip, my conclusion didn’t change. I know I’m an edge case -- I don’t want to have to think about data consumption and I want local phone service -- and until the in-country wireless carriers offer the same pre-paid plans on eSIMs that they do on physical SIMs, I’ll be keeping my phone with the SIM tray… and a straightened-out paper clip to pop it open.</li></ul></li><li>Second, following up to Kendra Kroll’s travel tip in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/09/22/podcast-189-why-we-travel-when-the-first-flight-isnt-best/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">the last episode</a> about knowing the names of cities in the local vernacular. Kendra talked about people missing their train stop because they didn’t realize that Florence, in Italian, is Firenze. So riding the train from Rome (Roma) to Florence (Firenze), I was on the lookout for this. All the train tickets used Italian city names -- Roma, Napoli, Firenze. But the signs on the platforms of the Florence train stations said “Florence”. Indeed, the real confusion wasn’t Florence vs Firenze, but which Florence train station to get off at. My group thought we had a direct train from downtown Rome  (Roma Termini) to the downtown Florence station (Firenze Santa Maria Novella), so when the train stopped at a station with “Florence” in the sign, they all scrambled to get their bags and head for the station -- which would’ve left them hanging around in a suburban parking lot figuring out how get a ride downtown. So not only know the name of the city in the vernacular; know the full station name of your stop.</li><li>I mentioned earlier that the first leg of my trip was from BNA to ORD, and I was kinda surprised to realize that it was my first time in ORD in 10 months, since returning from the UK last November. Prior to moving down here to Nashville in July, I’d been flying Southwest out of Chicago Midway; easier to get to and Southwest fit my travel plans better. So as “Welcome Back,” I got the full ORD experience -- landing on the far north runway, which feels like it’s just short of the Wisconsin state line, with the requisite 20-min taxi to get within sight of the terminal. Then, just as you think you’re almost there, the plane stops across the road from the terminal and waits 5 minutes for a gate to open up. Then, once we get moving again, we take the scenic route, past all the American planes in Terminal 3 and the Delta planes in Terminal 2 until we finally get to the United terminal in Terminal 1. All told, at least 30 minutes from tires hitting the runway to the door opening and the agent saying “Welcome to ORD”. Yeah, thanks. Great to be back.</li><li>And in other “Great to be back” things, Irene and I used Lyft for the first time in forever to get home from the Nashville airport -- the wait time and the price were much lower than Uber; which is weird because I’d think, by now, the ride sharing market would be a bit more price efficient. But anyhow, Lyft is so excited to see me resurface in Nashville that the app is flooding my phone with notifications with ride offers and suggestions for things to do. Three days of this was enough to drive me into the hell that the iPhone Settings menu has become to figure out how to shut them up. Probably not the behavior Lyft was trying to prompt, but there you go.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/THE_CONCEPT_OF_ENERGY/55008\">ABANDONED BUTTERFLIES</a> by THE_CONCEPT_OF_ENERGY (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/THE_CONCEPT_OF_ENERGY/55008</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>My Travel Tech Stack</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Back to that problematic last leg of our trip -- the flight home to Nashville from Newark. I knew we had a lagging luggage problem even before we left the ground courtesy of the latest addition to my travel tech stack. I’d bought <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3k4rCUy\" title=\"\">Apple AirTags</a> just for this reason -- to track our luggage. When I had to check my bag on the Vueling flight from Split to Rome, I could see on my iPhone’s Find My app that my bag was on the plane; it looked almost right underneath me. But in Newark, my bag never left the terminal. Irene checked her app; same thing. As we taxied out, I took a screenshot showing the growing distance between me on the plane and my left-behind bag, and tweeted it out to United saying “I’m guessing I won’t be seeing my luggage in BNA.” </li><li>As I said earlier, I was pretty annoyed with United, but at least the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3k4rCUy\" title=\"\">AirTags</a> saved us the 30 minutes of suspense watching all the other bags come out. Instead, we went straight to the baggage service agent, filed our report, and headed home. And then, waking up the next morning, I could see that our bags made it on the late flight from Newark, and then could see them on the delivery truck heading to our flat. Saved a lot of agita. </li><li>It got me thinking back 6-7 years to <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/08/26/podcast-116-traveling-thru-japan-luggage-trends/\">the first wave</a> of <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/12/podcast-120-where-do-guidebooks-fit-in-i-hate-shopping-for-suitcases/\">smart luggage</a> -- Bluesmart, Away. I bought a Bluesmart bag off their Indiegogo campaign. Those bags also let you <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/05/30/podcast-121-tsa-lines-my-luggage-is-where/\">track their location</a>, along with charging your phone -- for about 2 years until <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">the airlines banned them</a>, or at least the ones with non-removable batteries. Those travel use cases haven’t changed -- “Where’s my bag?” and “I need to recharge my phone so I can rebook this canceled flight” -- but the tech has moved on -- replacing the smart bag with AirTags or Tile trackers and a <a href=\"https://amzn.to/34fcbON\" title=\"\">10,000 mAh battery pack</a>.</li><li>Long-time listener and Twitter follower @Ab3Fr0man pinged me during my summer move podcast pause with “question for the next podcast >> Are there any new devices or apps you are using for travel?” which is what got me spelunking through my travel tech stack, which then turned into a stroll through my past “What’s in My Briefcase” episodes. And what struck me was, other than the AirTags and a small phone tripod for video calls, it hasn’t been what I’ve added to my kit as much as what I’ve been able to take away.</li><li>The consolidation to HDMI for video seems to be just about done and that’s let me drop all the VGA cables and dongles I used to carry around just in case I ran into an old conference room projector or hotel TV.  The slow and still in-progress consolidation to USB-C power supplies has let me do some subtraction by addition, dropping my MacBook Air power supply and an old dual USB-A charger for a single charger that’s smaller than either of them, a 100W gallium nitride charger that can charge my laptop, my phone, and my headphones all at once. Indeed, the only reason I still carry an old USB-A Apple Lightning cord is for plugging into the charging port on rental cars. </li><li>But the subtraction thing doesn’t always work. Last year, when we were traveling in Italy (Puglia and Sicily) for a couple of weeks, I wanted to leave the laptop home and run everything off my 8-inch Samsung tablet. That wouldn’t be a problem except for a couple of programs I run on my office PC, and I didn’t want to have to migrate to their cloud versions just for the trip. So instead I used Amazon Workspaces to set up a PC in the cloud. Not quite sure why I thought this would be easier. The Amazon setup was, let’s say, less than straightforward but I got it to work, and was able to run what I needed off my tablet, albeit a bit slower than usual. Getting ready for this last trip, I thought about it again, do I leave the laptop at home? Then I remembered the time sink the Amazon set up was, and tossed the laptop back into my backpack.</li><li>No new apps. Indeed, I tend to be brutal about deleting those I’m not using right now. I’ll download, say, the VRBO or Airbnb app when I need them for a trip and then dump them when I get home. I also just deleted the Clear app. I had a year free from some credit card and never used it. So I canceled it before they charged me for another year and deleted the app. Yelp is on the bubble right now. I also find myself using it less and less, just defaulting to Google Maps’ restaurant suggestions and ratings since I usually already have it open for directions.</li><li>The carriers’ apps continue to improve incrementally. I used to use an app that had maps of all the major airports, but found I was using it less and less as the carriers added similar maps to their apps. Indeed, while waiting to de-plane in EWR, I checked the United app and it had an animated step-by-step map showing the path from our arrival gate, through Customs, to our departure gate. Too bad the guys moving our luggage didn’t have the same map. </li><li>As I’ve mentioned in past episodes, I still use the free version of TripIt to consolidate all plane, train, hotel, and Airbnb confirmations into a single itinerary. I know Google Travel can do something similar if you live within the Google ecosystem, but I don’t so I use TripIt. TripIt keeps pushing their $50 Pro offering with real-time alerts and airport maps. I had the Pro offering once, but now I get all that stuff for free on the carrier apps. Now, if I <em>was</em> going to pop $50, I’d spend it on the Flighty app instead. I trialed Flighty back in the spring on a trip to Santa Fe and thought it was a great app. If I was still flying every week, it would be a no-brainer. Indeed, I’d figure out a way to expense the $250 lifetime membership and be done with it. </li><li>But the one piece of travel that’s been with me since the beginning and that continues to earn its keep -- a bottle opener. Even as craft beer has moved to cans, that stamped metal New Belgium bottle opener has saved the corner of many a hotel dresser.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/49674\">H2O</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/49674</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Imbibing for Introverts</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro blurb<ul><li>Mark: Jeff, thanks for joining us on the TravelCommons podcast today. Your upcoming book…</li><li>Jeff: Technically the release date is November 15, I tried to get them early for an event on October 20, but they got held up on a freight train somewhere in the United States, so it\'s like…</li><li>Mark: That damn supply chain. So anyhow, your upcoming book, Imbibing for <em>Imbibing for Introverts: A Guide to Social Drinking for the Anti-Social</em>. Over the years on the TravelCommons podcast, we\'ve talked many times about solo eating, eating alone on the road, what you might call eating for introverts. So when I saw the title of your book, it mapped right into things that we\'ve been doing. And again, in past episodes, we\'ve talked about the best ways to eat alone and so, what are your pro tips for the best ways to drink alone?</li><li>Jeff: It depends on the venue; it just depends on what your objectives are. If you want to quietly contemplate what you\'re drinking; if you\'re in one of these high-end whiskey bars or a brandy bar or something like that; where you\'re sitting and you really want to just contemplate. Sometimes you just want to be present and just be in your thoughts, think about what you\'re drinking, think about its connection to the point of origin, that kind of thing. When you\'re drinking alone, probably more often than not you\'re going to be sitting at the bar. A lot of times they\'re going to give you a 2-top, but sometimes I feel bad about taking it up, especially when things are busy and I just want to sit at the bar.</li><li>Mark: When I started traveling, which was a long time ago, you’d end up in that same situation, at a 2-top or a 4-top and then you\'re the sad person sitting in the corner table because you were taking up revenue space. “Look, I got spots for two and you\'re only taking up one.”</li><li>Jeff: And I think that if you\'re not sitting in a corner, if you do get to sit at the bar, that\'s a great opportunity to strike up a conversation with the bartender. Sometimes it just happens organically. I don\'t know whether they feel like they need to talk to you because you\'re not with anybody and they feel bad for you. But one thing that I do find is when you order something in a way that shows you know what you\'re talking about -- like you\'re at the bar and you say give me a gin and tonic, if you don\'t really specify what gin you want, they may not have a really broad selection, but a lot of these more sort of mixology oriented bars, they\'re going to have a selection and a good way to start is “What kind of gin you have; do you have anything that\'s not juniper- forward?” -- bartenders can be really primed to geek out with somebody that they detect maybe as passionate about the things they drink as they are, as they are about the things they mix. So when you show an inkling of interest or knowledge related to that spirit or whatever ingredient you\'re putting in the cocktail, that may pique their interest a little bit and they might get a sense that this person knows what they’re talking about. I\'ve been in situations where that snowballs to a point where the bartender says, “Hey, by the way, I\'m entering a cocktail competition, this was my creation, I want you to try and tell me honestly what you think about it.” It\'s moments like this that present themselves. Not always, but you know, sometimes they do. Sometimes a bartender will also have a secret stash behind the bar, could be a rare whiskey that\'s on their list. Sometimes they will sneak you some of that. It\'s not going to necessarily be free, but they\'ll give you a pour of something that they\'re protecting and hoarding and not really giving to just anybody. So moments like that are good. It\'s not necessarily that you\'re being antisocial. It\'s sometimes conversations can create themselves organically and so that\'s why it\'s sometimes good to be alone and sit at the bar rather than at the table because no one\'s really going to be spending the time with you to do that.</li><li>Mark: Eating alone sitting at the bar, it used to be that you couldn\'t get much more than a bar snack menu at a bar. Nowadays, though, you can get a full menu at a bar and so I\'m always eating at the bar. You\'re right about the bartenders. You get blips of human interaction. I think usually the bartender is good for, I don\'t know, 3-4 quick interchanges. Obviously they got a job to do, so you’re not going to have an ongoing conversation with them, but they\'ll come by and if they think you\'re interested or you\'re an interesting person, you\'ll get blips. I don\'t know, it\'s either they think you\'re interesting or they’re taking pity on you. I\'m not quite sure which...&nbsp; What drove you to write this book Imbibing for Introverts? What was the kernel on this one?</li><li>Jeff: I just been traveling a lot and I\'ve been doing a lot of solo travel, especially work-related stuff and, over time, I really just got comfortable in my own skin going out alone. It just became something I realized I actually enjoy my own company and it just came together in my head. One time I was sitting at a bar and I wasn\'t alone at the time. I was having a drink with a friend in a bar that I had often had a drink alone and I thought I\'d really love to do a book about just being an introvert and just enjoying being by yourself and drinking alone and normalizing that too because some people are just weird about going out alone.</li><li>Mark: When you do a lot of travel, you\'ve got to get comfortable with your own company because oftentimes that\'s it. You\'ve got clients, you\'ve got other people you\'re meeting and they\'re going home, they\'re going to coach their kid’s ballgame or do whatever. And if you don\'t get out of that hotel room, that hotel room turns into a cave after a while.</li><li>Jeff: And also sometimes you just want to decompress, especially when it is a work trip and you are having meetings. For instance, I got a lot of trade shows where I\'m just walking around the convention center going from booth to booth, talking to a person after person after person, always having to be on. Just having that energy, that kind of interpersonal energy, is frankly very exhausting. By the end of the day, after like seven or eight hours of doing that, sometimes you just want to be by yourself and you just want to quietly sip something in a place that\'s got the music\'s down low, it\'s a good mix that they\'re playing. It\'s low enough that you can hear yourself think, you can also eavesdrop on other people\'s conversations. That\'s kind of fun sometimes. A lot of people talk about people watching; I\'m more of a people listener because you can tell a lot more about a person by the conversations you hear than what they\'re wearing or what they look like.</li><li>Mark: Jeff, this has been great. I really appreciate it. I\'m looking forward to reading your book when it comes out. Jeff Cioletti, author of the new book, the upcoming book coming out November,<em> Imbibing for Introverts: A Guide to Social Drinking for the Anti-Social</em>. Jeff, thanks very much for stopping by the TravelCommons podcast and chatting to us about drinking.</li><li>Jeff: Thank you so much for having me. This has been a lot of fun because it seems to be my people that listen to your podcasts.</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #190</li><li>I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. </li><li>And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>. And while you’re at TravelCommons.com, you can check out the show notes page for a transcript and any links I’ve mentioned. Or you can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page.</li><li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_190.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #190 —  My Travel Tech Stack; Imbibing for Introverts','','inherit','closed','closed','','4208-revision-v1','','','2022-10-30 18:46:54','2022-10-30 23:46:54','',4208,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4214',0,'revision','',0),
(4215,1,'2022-10-30 20:51:56','2022-10-31 01:51:56','','malort_face','','inherit','open','closed','','malort_face','','','2022-10-30 20:51:56','2022-10-31 01:51:56','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/malort_face.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(4216,1,'2022-10-30 21:06:33','2022-10-31 02:06:33','[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/malort_face.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/malort_face-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Malort bottle and a cow skull\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> My Drinking Buddy Is The Quiet Type[/caption]\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Lots of different voices in this episode. Listeners growing our list of travel tips, and conversations with <a href=\"http://shj.cs.illinois.edu/\">Dr. Sheldon Jacobson</a> about why one of those tips -- always catch the first flight out -- isn\'t always right, and <a href=\"https://www.workman.com/authors/patricia-schultz\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Patricia Schultz</a> about her new book, <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3BWnv6n\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Why We Travel: 100 Reasons to See the World</a></em>. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_190.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #190: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Happy Halloween! Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN. Finally got my body back on Central Time after 3 weeks in Europe that started in Split, Croatia and then ran up the Italian peninsula -- Amalfi Coast, Naples, Rome, Florence -- and then back down to Rome to fly home. And for a trip about a dozen potential points of failure between all the flights, the trains, and the Airbnb’s, it all went pretty smoothly except for the final leg -- the EWR-BNA flight home, where United somehow couldn’t manage to get our luggage on our plane. But by then, it wasn’t critical -- just suitcases of dirty clothes and some bottles of wine and limoncello. And United delivered them to us the next afternoon -- just in time for us to start doing laundry. Annoying, yes -- but not much more.</li><li>Which, after a summer of travel horror stories about canceled flights, lost luggage, hours-long security lines that fed our episode on <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/08/18/podcast-188-my-top-tips-to-survive-travel-chaos/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Podcast #188 — My Top Travel Tips to Survive Airport Chaos\">Top Tips to Avoid Travel Chaos</a>, I chalked it up to good luck and clean living or, what’s probably a more likely explanation, the airlines and airports are finally getting on the other side of the surprise snapback in leisure travel during a very tight labor market. Through Nashville, O’Hare, Frankfurt, even the Split airport -- 5-minute security lines at most, and on-time flights. In Italy, all our trains were on-time. And after all of that smooth travel, it wasn’t until our last day, for our flight home, that we got pulled up short. We walked into Terminal 3 at Rome’s Fiumicino airport and smack into a huge line. It took us a moment to figure out that the line wasn’t for us; it was the check-in line for Air Canada which seemed… weird. But no matter, we didn’t have to stand in it.&nbsp;</li><li>The next line, though, we did -- the separate security line for all direct flights to the US.&nbsp; We’ve talked in the past about how, post-9/11, direct international flights to the US tend to be segregated from the rest of the flights and put at the far end of departure terminals. That I’m used to. This was the first time, though, that I’ve seen a US-only security line. And on a Sunday morning at 9am, when everyone is there for the 10:30/11am bank of flights to the US. It tailed back almost the length of the terminal.&nbsp; But it kept moving. And when we made it up to the security area, we could see that they had every screening station manned and operational. We got through security and passport control in less than a half hour. Not world-class timing, but not anywhere near the summer horror stories.</li><li>I shouldn’t have been surprised at that US security line though because every place we went in Italy was jammed/crowded, mostly with Americans. It was revenge travel in action. I asked a few guys -- bartenders, shop owners, shuttle drivers -- how these October crowds compared to pre-pandemic. “It’s insane!” was the consensus. And I could feel it wearing on them. Even though all these people were giving them money, their patience seemed to be getting a little thin. Last year, last October when we were in Italy, in Puglia and Sicily, these same sort of folks were saying “Welcome! We’re so glad travelers are back!” This year? I think it’s a bit more like “when are you travelers <em>going </em>back… home?”</li><li>Bridge Music --  <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/snowflake/46164\">A Foolish Game</a> by Snowflake (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/snowflake/46164 Ft: Admiral Bob   </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I’m going to hold my thoughts about my Croatia and Italy trip for the next episode; do one of my stream-of-consciousness “Notes on a Location” topics. But I do want to follow up here on a couple of things from the last episode. First up, is <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/09/22/podcast-189-why-we-travel-when-the-first-flight-isnt-best/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Podcast #189 —  Why We Travel; When The First Flight Isn’t Best\">last episode’s</a> eSIM rant because, through watching with my travel companions and texting with Allan Marko, a long-time TravelCommons contributor, I sorta refined that rant, getting it down to two decision points.&nbsp;<ul><li>First, how much data do you expect to use? If you’re out of the US for a week or less, staying in a place with good WiFi, and can wait until the end of the day to do all your social media posting, you can probably be good with 5GB of data -- which gets you under T-Mobile’s non-throttled international data cap (which is what a couple of the folks traveling with me did), way under Google Fi’s 50 GB cap, and probably fits into a $15-20 eSIM from someone like aloSIM or Airalo. It’s the low-hassle solution. But for a longer stay, like my 3 week-er, or if you’re fully invested in building Instagram stories, like my wife, 5GB just isn’t going to cut it. I reset my iPhone data stats on the flight to Frankfurt and then looked at them as we were taxiing out to the runway in Rome. I used 77 GBs of data. Now, 11 GB was from hotspotting because the WiFi in our Florence Airbnb was pretty useless. But even pulling that out, 66 GBs is still a whackload of data. Which is probably because I didn’t really pay any attention to my data usage, because the Telecom Italia plan I was on gave me <em>600</em> GB of 5G data, essentially unlimited data, for $15. So while my T-Mobile-using companions were scrounging for a bar’s WiFi password to do Untappd check-ins, I was uploading pictures and refreshing my podcasts.</li><li>The second decision point&nbsp; -- do you need to make regular phone calls; do you need a local number? This is more and more of an edge case with people primarily texting, and when there was a specific need for a voice call, people rang me through WhatsApp and Telegram. But on this trip, I got us last-minute tables at a couple of good restaurants because I could call them over the regular phone network, something I couldn’t have done with a data-only eSIM. I’ve also run into the need for a local number when trying to register or create an account for an on-line service. My Telecom Italia SIM also came with a local Italian number and unlimited voice minutes.&nbsp;</li><li>So while I sharpened my thinking on this trip, my conclusion didn’t change. I know I’m an edge case -- I don’t want to have to think about data consumption and I want local phone service -- and until the in-country wireless carriers offer the same pre-paid plans on eSIMs that they do on physical SIMs, I’ll be keeping my phone with the SIM tray… and a straightened-out paper clip to pop it open.</li></ul></li><li>Second, following up to Kendra Kroll’s travel tip in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/09/22/podcast-189-why-we-travel-when-the-first-flight-isnt-best/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">the last episode</a> about knowing the names of cities in the local vernacular. Kendra talked about people missing their train stop because they didn’t realize that Florence, in Italian, is Firenze. So riding the train from Rome (Roma) to Florence (Firenze), I was on the lookout for this. All the train tickets used Italian city names -- Roma, Napoli, Firenze. But the signs on the platforms of the Florence train stations said “Florence”. Indeed, the real confusion wasn’t Florence vs Firenze, but which Florence train station to get off at. My group thought we had a direct train from downtown Rome&nbsp; (Roma Termini) to the downtown Florence station (Firenze Santa Maria Novella), so when the train stopped at a station with “Florence” in the sign, they all scrambled to get their bags and head for the station -- which would’ve left them hanging around in a suburban parking lot figuring out how get a ride downtown. So not only know the name of the city in the vernacular; know the full station name of your stop.</li><li>I mentioned earlier that the first leg of my trip was from BNA to ORD, and I was kinda surprised to realize that it was my first time in ORD in 10 months, since returning from the UK last November. Prior to moving down here to Nashville in July, I’d been flying Southwest out of Chicago Midway; easier to get to and Southwest fit my travel plans better. So as “Welcome Back,” I got the full ORD experience -- landing on the far north runway, which feels like it’s just short of the Wisconsin state line, with the requisite 20-min taxi to get within sight of the terminal. Then, just as you think you’re almost there, the plane stops across the road from the terminal and waits 5 minutes for a gate to open up. Then, once we get moving again, we take the scenic route, past all the American planes in Terminal 3 and the Delta planes in Terminal 2 until we finally get to the United terminal in Terminal 1. All told, at least 30 minutes from tires hitting the runway to the door opening and the agent saying “Welcome to ORD”. Yeah, thanks. Great to be back.</li><li>And in other “Great to be back” things, Irene and I used Lyft for the first time in forever to get home from the Nashville airport -- the wait time and the price were much lower than Uber; which is weird because I’d think, by now, the ride sharing market would be a bit more price efficient. But anyhow, Lyft is so excited to see me resurface in Nashville that the app is flooding my phone with notifications with ride offers and suggestions for things to do. Three days of this was enough to drive me into the hell that the iPhone Settings menu has become to figure out how to shut them up. Probably not the behavior Lyft was trying to prompt, but there you go.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/THE_CONCEPT_OF_ENERGY/55008\">ABANDONED BUTTERFLIES</a> by THE_CONCEPT_OF_ENERGY (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/THE_CONCEPT_OF_ENERGY/55008</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>My Travel Tech Stack</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Back to that problematic last leg of our trip -- the flight home to Nashville from Newark. I knew we had a lagging luggage problem even before we left the ground courtesy of the latest addition to my travel tech stack. I’d bought <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3k4rCUy\" title=\"\">Apple AirTags</a> just for this reason -- to track our luggage. When I had to check my bag on the Vueling flight from Split to Rome, I could see on my iPhone’s Find My app that my bag was on the plane; it looked almost right underneath me. But in Newark, my bag never left the terminal. Irene checked her app; same thing. As we taxied out, I took a screenshot showing the growing distance between me on the plane and my left-behind bag, and tweeted it out to United saying “I’m guessing I won’t be seeing my luggage in BNA.”&nbsp;</li><li>As I said earlier, I was pretty annoyed with United, but at least the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3k4rCUy\" title=\"\">AirTags</a> saved us the 30 minutes of suspense watching all the other bags come out. Instead, we went straight to the baggage service agent, filed our report, and headed home. And then, waking up the next morning, I could see that our bags made it on the late flight from Newark, and then could see them on the delivery truck heading to our flat. Saved a lot of agita.&nbsp;</li><li>It got me thinking back 6-7 years to <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/08/26/podcast-116-traveling-thru-japan-luggage-trends/\">the first wave</a> of <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/12/podcast-120-where-do-guidebooks-fit-in-i-hate-shopping-for-suitcases/\">smart luggage</a> -- Bluesmart, Away. I bought a Bluesmart bag off their Indiegogo campaign. Those bags also let you <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/05/30/podcast-121-tsa-lines-my-luggage-is-where/\">track their location</a>, along with charging your phone -- for about 2 years until <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">the airlines banned them</a>, or at least the ones with non-removable batteries. Those travel use cases haven’t changed -- “Where’s my bag?” and “I need to recharge my phone so I can rebook this canceled flight” -- but the tech has moved on -- replacing the smart bag with AirTags or Tile trackers and a <a href=\"https://amzn.to/34fcbON\" title=\"\">10,000 mAh battery pack</a>.</li><li>Long-time listener and Twitter follower @Ab3Fr0man pinged me during my summer move podcast pause with “question for the next podcast &gt;&gt; Are there any new devices or apps you are using for travel?” which is what got me spelunking through my travel tech stack, which then turned into a stroll through my past “What’s in My Briefcase” episodes. And what struck me was, other than the AirTags and a small phone tripod for video calls, it hasn’t been what I’ve added to my kit as much as what I’ve been able to take away.</li><li>The consolidation to HDMI for video seems to be just about done and that’s let me drop all the VGA cables and dongles I used to carry around just in case I ran into an old conference room projector or hotel TV.&nbsp; The slow and still in-progress consolidation to USB-C power supplies has let me do some subtraction by addition, dropping my MacBook Air power supply and an old dual USB-A charger for a single charger that’s smaller than either of them, a 100W gallium nitride charger that can charge my laptop, my phone, and my headphones all at once. Indeed, the only reason I still carry an old USB-A Apple Lightning cord is for plugging into the charging port on rental cars.&nbsp;</li><li>But the subtraction thing doesn’t always work. Last year, when we were traveling in Italy (Puglia and Sicily) for a couple of weeks, I wanted to leave the laptop home and run everything off my 8-inch Samsung tablet. That wouldn’t be a problem except for a couple of programs I run on my office PC, and I didn’t want to have to migrate to their cloud versions just for the trip. So instead I used Amazon Workspaces to set up a PC in the cloud. Not quite sure why I thought this would be easier. The Amazon setup was, let’s say, less than straightforward but I got it to work, and was able to run what I needed off my tablet, albeit a bit slower than usual. Getting ready for this last trip, I thought about it again, do I leave the laptop at home? Then I remembered the time sink the Amazon set up was, and tossed the laptop back into my backpack.</li><li>No new apps. Indeed, I tend to be brutal about deleting those I’m not using right now. I’ll download, say, the VRBO or Airbnb app when I need them for a trip and then dump them when I get home. I also just deleted the Clear app. I had a year free from some credit card and never used it. So I canceled it before they charged me for another year and deleted the app. Yelp is on the bubble right now. I also find myself using it less and less, just defaulting to Google Maps’ restaurant suggestions and ratings since I usually already have it open for directions.</li><li>The carriers’ apps continue to improve incrementally. I used to use an app that had maps of all the major airports, but found I was using it less and less as the carriers added similar maps to their apps. Indeed, while waiting to de-plane in EWR, I checked the United app and it had an animated step-by-step map showing the path from our arrival gate, through Customs, to our departure gate. Too bad the guys moving our luggage didn’t have the same map.&nbsp;</li><li>As I’ve mentioned in past episodes, I still use the free version of TripIt to consolidate all plane, train, hotel, and Airbnb confirmations into a single itinerary. I know Google Travel can do something similar if you live within the Google ecosystem, but I don’t so I use TripIt. TripIt keeps pushing their $50 Pro offering with real-time alerts and airport maps. I had the Pro offering once, but now I get all that stuff for free on the carrier apps. Now, if I <em>was</em> going to pop $50, I’d spend it on the Flighty app instead. I trialed Flighty back in the spring on a trip to Santa Fe and thought it was a great app. If I was still flying every week, it would be a no-brainer. Indeed, I’d figure out a way to expense the $250 lifetime membership and be done with it.&nbsp;</li><li>But the one piece of travel that’s been with me since the beginning and that continues to earn its keep -- a bottle opener. Even as craft beer has moved to cans, that stamped metal New Belgium bottle opener has saved the corner of many a hotel dresser.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/49674\">H2O</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/49674</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Imbibing for Introverts</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro blurb<ul><li>Mark: Jeff, thanks for joining us on the TravelCommons podcast today. Your upcoming book…</li><li>Jeff: Technically the release date is November 15, I tried to get them early for an event on October 20, but they got held up on a freight train somewhere in the United States, so it\'s like…</li><li>Mark: That damn supply chain. So anyhow, your upcoming book, Imbibing for <em>Imbibing for Introverts: A Guide to Social Drinking for the Anti-Social</em>. Over the years on the TravelCommons podcast, we\'ve talked many times about solo eating, eating alone on the road, what you might call eating for introverts. So when I saw the title of your book, it mapped right into things that we\'ve been doing. And again, in past episodes, we\'ve talked about the best ways to eat alone and so, what are your pro tips for the best ways to drink alone?</li><li>Jeff: It depends on the venue; it just depends on what your objectives are. If you want to quietly contemplate what you\'re drinking; if you\'re in one of these high-end whiskey bars or a brandy bar or something like that; where you\'re sitting and you really want to just contemplate. Sometimes you just want to be present and just be in your thoughts, think about what you\'re drinking, think about its connection to the point of origin, that kind of thing. When you\'re drinking alone, probably more often than not you\'re going to be sitting at the bar. A lot of times they\'re going to give you a 2-top, but sometimes I feel bad about taking it up, especially when things are busy and I just want to sit at the bar.</li><li>Mark: When I started traveling, which was a long time ago, you’d end up in that same situation, at a 2-top or a 4-top and then you\'re the sad person sitting in the corner table because you were taking up revenue space. “Look, I got spots for two and you\'re only taking up one.”</li><li>Jeff: And I think that if you\'re not sitting in a corner, if you do get to sit at the bar, that\'s a great opportunity to strike up a conversation with the bartender. Sometimes it just happens organically. I don\'t know whether they feel like they need to talk to you because you\'re not with anybody and they feel bad for you. But one thing that I do find is when you order something in a way that shows you know what you\'re talking about -- like you\'re at the bar and you say give me a gin and tonic, if you don\'t really specify what gin you want, they may not have a really broad selection, but a lot of these more sort of mixology oriented bars, they\'re going to have a selection and a good way to start is “What kind of gin you have; do you have anything that\'s not juniper- forward?” -- bartenders can be really primed to geek out with somebody that they detect maybe as passionate about the things they drink as they are, as they are about the things they mix. So when you show an inkling of interest or knowledge related to that spirit or whatever ingredient you\'re putting in the cocktail, that may pique their interest a little bit and they might get a sense that this person knows what they’re talking about. I\'ve been in situations where that snowballs to a point where the bartender says, “Hey, by the way, I\'m entering a cocktail competition, this was my creation, I want you to try and tell me honestly what you think about it.” It\'s moments like this that present themselves. Not always, but you know, sometimes they do. Sometimes a bartender will also have a secret stash behind the bar, could be a rare whiskey that\'s on their list. Sometimes they will sneak you some of that. It\'s not going to necessarily be free, but they\'ll give you a pour of something that they\'re protecting and hoarding and not really giving to just anybody. So moments like that are good. It\'s not necessarily that you\'re being antisocial. It\'s sometimes conversations can create themselves organically and so that\'s why it\'s sometimes good to be alone and sit at the bar rather than at the table because no one\'s really going to be spending the time with you to do that.</li><li>Mark: Eating alone sitting at the bar, it used to be that you couldn\'t get much more than a bar snack menu at a bar. Nowadays, though, you can get a full menu at a bar and so I\'m always eating at the bar. You\'re right about the bartenders. You get blips of human interaction. I think usually the bartender is good for, I don\'t know, 3-4 quick interchanges. Obviously they got a job to do, so you’re not going to have an ongoing conversation with them, but they\'ll come by and if they think you\'re interested or you\'re an interesting person, you\'ll get blips. I don\'t know, it\'s either they think you\'re interesting or they’re taking pity on you. I\'m not quite sure which...&nbsp; What drove you to write this book Imbibing for Introverts? What was the kernel on this one?</li><li>Jeff: I just been traveling a lot and I\'ve been doing a lot of solo travel, especially work-related stuff and, over time, I really just got comfortable in my own skin going out alone. It just became something I realized I actually enjoy my own company and it just came together in my head. One time I was sitting at a bar and I wasn\'t alone at the time. I was having a drink with a friend in a bar that I had often had a drink alone and I thought I\'d really love to do a book about just being an introvert and just enjoying being by yourself and drinking alone and normalizing that too because some people are just weird about going out alone.</li><li>Mark: When you do a lot of travel, you\'ve got to get comfortable with your own company because oftentimes that\'s it. You\'ve got clients, you\'ve got other people you\'re meeting and they\'re going home, they\'re going to coach their kid’s ballgame or do whatever. And if you don\'t get out of that hotel room, that hotel room turns into a cave after a while.</li><li>Jeff: And also sometimes you just want to decompress, especially when it is a work trip and you are having meetings. For instance, I got a lot of trade shows where I\'m just walking around the convention center going from booth to booth, talking to a person after person after person, always having to be on. Just having that energy, that kind of interpersonal energy, is frankly very exhausting. By the end of the day, after like seven or eight hours of doing that, sometimes you just want to be by yourself and you just want to quietly sip something in a place that\'s got the music\'s down low, it\'s a good mix that they\'re playing. It\'s low enough that you can hear yourself think, you can also eavesdrop on other people\'s conversations. That\'s kind of fun sometimes. A lot of people talk about people watching; I\'m more of a people listener because you can tell a lot more about a person by the conversations you hear than what they\'re wearing or what they look like.</li><li>Mark: Jeff, this has been great. I really appreciate it. I\'m looking forward to reading your book when it comes out. Jeff Cioletti, author of the new book, the upcoming book coming out November,<em> Imbibing for Introverts: A Guide to Social Drinking for the Anti-Social</em>. Jeff, thanks very much for stopping by the TravelCommons podcast and chatting to us about drinking.</li><li>Jeff: Thank you so much for having me. This has been a lot of fun because it seems to be my people that listen to your podcasts.</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #190</li><li>I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. </li><li>And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>. And while you’re at TravelCommons.com, you can check out the show notes page for a transcript and any links I’ve mentioned. Or you can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page.</li><li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_190.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #190 —  My Travel Tech Stack; Imbibing for Introverts','','inherit','closed','closed','','4208-revision-v1','','','2022-10-30 21:06:33','2022-10-31 02:06:33','',4208,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4216',0,'revision','',0),
(4217,1,'2022-10-30 21:11:21','2022-10-31 02:11:21','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/malort_face.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/malort_face-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Malort bottle and a cow skull\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> My Drinking Buddy Is The Quiet Type[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Lots of different voices in this episode. Listeners growing our list of travel tips, and conversations with <a href=\"http://shj.cs.illinois.edu/\">Dr. Sheldon Jacobson</a> about why one of those tips -- always catch the first flight out -- isn\'t always right, and <a href=\"https://www.workman.com/authors/patricia-schultz\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Patricia Schultz</a> about her new book, <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3BWnv6n\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Why We Travel: 100 Reasons to See the World</a></em>. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_190.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #190: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Happy Halloween! Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN. Finally got my body back on Central Time after 3 weeks in Europe that started in Split, Croatia and then ran up the Italian peninsula -- Amalfi Coast, Naples, Rome, Florence -- and then back down to Rome to fly home. And for a trip about a dozen potential points of failure between all the flights, the trains, and the Airbnb’s, it all went pretty smoothly except for the final leg -- the EWR-BNA flight home, where United somehow couldn’t manage to get our luggage on our plane. But by then, it wasn’t critical -- just suitcases of dirty clothes and some bottles of wine and limoncello. And United delivered them to us the next afternoon -- just in time for us to start doing laundry. Annoying, yes -- but not much more.</li><li>Which, after a summer of travel horror stories about canceled flights, lost luggage, hours-long security lines that fed our episode on <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/08/18/podcast-188-my-top-tips-to-survive-travel-chaos/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Podcast #188 — My Top Travel Tips to Survive Airport Chaos\">Top Tips to Avoid Travel Chaos</a>, I chalked it up to good luck and clean living or, what’s probably a more likely explanation, the airlines and airports are finally getting on the other side of the surprise snapback in leisure travel during a very tight labor market. Through Nashville, O’Hare, Frankfurt, even the Split airport -- 5-minute security lines at most, and on-time flights. In Italy, all our trains were on-time. And after all of that smooth travel, it wasn’t until our last day, for our flight home, that we got pulled up short. We walked into Terminal 3 at Rome’s Fiumicino airport and smack into a huge line. It took us a moment to figure out that the line wasn’t for us; it was the check-in line for Air Canada which seemed… weird. But no matter, we didn’t have to stand in it.&nbsp;</li><li>The next line, though, we did -- the separate security line for all direct flights to the US.&nbsp; We’ve talked in the past about how, post-9/11, direct international flights to the US tend to be segregated from the rest of the flights and put at the far end of departure terminals. That I’m used to. This was the first time, though, that I’ve seen a US-only security line. And on a Sunday morning at 9am, when everyone is there for the 10:30/11am bank of flights to the US. It tailed back almost the length of the terminal.&nbsp; But it kept moving. And when we made it up to the security area, we could see that they had every screening station manned and operational. We got through security and passport control in less than a half hour. Not world-class timing, but not anywhere near the summer horror stories.</li><li>I shouldn’t have been surprised at that US security line though because every place we went in Italy was jammed/crowded, mostly with Americans. It was revenge travel in action. I asked a few guys -- bartenders, shop owners, shuttle drivers -- how these October crowds compared to pre-pandemic. “It’s insane!” was the consensus. And I could feel it wearing on them. Even though all these people were giving them money, their patience seemed to be getting a little thin. Last year, last October when we were in Italy, in Puglia and Sicily, these same sort of folks were saying “Welcome! We’re so glad travelers are back!” This year? I think it’s a bit more like “when are you travelers <em>going </em>back… home?”</li><li>Bridge Music --  <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/snowflake/46164\">A Foolish Game</a> by Snowflake (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/snowflake/46164 Ft: Admiral Bob   </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I’m going to hold my thoughts about my Croatia and Italy trip for the next episode; do one of my stream-of-consciousness “Notes on a Location” topics. But I do want to follow up here on a couple of things from the last episode. First up, is <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/09/22/podcast-189-why-we-travel-when-the-first-flight-isnt-best/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Podcast #189 —  Why We Travel; When The First Flight Isn’t Best\">last episode’s</a> eSIM rant because, through watching with my travel companions and texting with Allan Marko, a long-time TravelCommons contributor, I sorta refined that rant, getting it down to two decision points.&nbsp;<ul><li>First, how much data do you expect to use? If you’re out of the US for a week or less, staying in a place with good WiFi, and can wait until the end of the day to do all your social media posting, you can probably be good with 5GB of data -- which gets you under T-Mobile’s non-throttled international data cap (which is what a couple of the folks traveling with me did), way under Google Fi’s 50 GB cap, and probably fits into a $15-20 eSIM from someone like aloSIM or Airalo. It’s the low-hassle solution. But for a longer stay, like my 3 week-er, or if you’re fully invested in building Instagram stories, like my wife, 5GB just isn’t going to cut it. I reset my iPhone data stats on the flight to Frankfurt and then looked at them as we were taxiing out to the runway in Rome. I used 77 GBs of data. Now, 11 GB was from hotspotting because the WiFi in our Florence Airbnb was pretty useless. But even pulling that out, 66 GBs is still a whackload of data. Which is probably because I didn’t really pay any attention to my data usage, because the Telecom Italia plan I was on gave me <em>600</em> GB of 5G data, essentially unlimited data, for $15. So while my T-Mobile-using companions were scrounging for a bar’s WiFi password to do Untappd check-ins, I was uploading pictures and refreshing my podcasts.</li><li>The second decision point&nbsp; -- do you need to make regular phone calls; do you need a local number? This is more and more of an edge case with people primarily texting, and when there was a specific need for a voice call, people rang me through WhatsApp and Telegram. But on this trip, I got us last-minute tables at a couple of good restaurants because I could call them over the regular phone network, something I couldn’t have done with a data-only eSIM. I’ve also run into the need for a local number when trying to register or create an account for an on-line service. My Telecom Italia SIM also came with a local Italian number and unlimited voice minutes.&nbsp;</li><li>So while I sharpened my thinking on this trip, my conclusion didn’t change. I know I’m an edge case -- I don’t want to have to think about data consumption and I want local phone service -- and until the in-country wireless carriers offer the same pre-paid plans on eSIMs that they do on physical SIMs, I’ll be keeping my phone with the SIM tray… and a straightened-out paper clip to pop it open.</li></ul></li><li>Second, following up to Kendra Kroll’s travel tip in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/09/22/podcast-189-why-we-travel-when-the-first-flight-isnt-best/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">the last episode</a> about knowing the names of cities in the local vernacular. Kendra talked about people missing their train stop because they didn’t realize that Florence, in Italian, is Firenze. So riding the train from Rome (Roma) to Florence (Firenze), I was on the lookout for this. All the train tickets used Italian city names -- Roma, Napoli, Firenze. But the signs on the platforms of the Florence train stations said “Florence”. Indeed, the real confusion wasn’t Florence vs Firenze, but which Florence train station to get off at. My group thought we had a direct train from downtown Rome&nbsp; (Roma Termini) to the downtown Florence station (Firenze Santa Maria Novella), so when the train stopped at a station with “Florence” in the sign, they all scrambled to get their bags and head for the station -- which would’ve left them hanging around in a suburban parking lot figuring out how get a ride downtown. So not only know the name of the city in the vernacular; know the full station name of your stop.</li><li>I mentioned earlier that the first leg of my trip was from BNA to ORD, and I was kinda surprised to realize that it was my first time in ORD in 10 months, since returning from the UK last November. Prior to moving down here to Nashville in July, I’d been flying Southwest out of Chicago Midway; easier to get to and Southwest fit my travel plans better. So as “Welcome Back,” I got the full ORD experience -- landing on the far north runway, which feels like it’s just short of the Wisconsin state line, with the requisite 20-min taxi to get within sight of the terminal. Then, just as you think you’re almost there, the plane stops across the road from the terminal and waits 5 minutes for a gate to open up. Then, once we get moving again, we take the scenic route, past all the American planes in Terminal 3 and the Delta planes in Terminal 2 until we finally get to the United terminal in Terminal 1. All told, at least 30 minutes from tires hitting the runway to the door opening and the agent saying “Welcome to ORD”. Yeah, thanks. Great to be back.</li><li>And in other “Great to be back” things, Irene and I used Lyft for the first time in forever to get home from the Nashville airport -- the wait time and the price were much lower than Uber; which is weird because I’d think, by now, the ride sharing market would be a bit more price efficient. But anyhow, Lyft is so excited to see me resurface in Nashville that the app is flooding my phone with notifications with ride offers and suggestions for things to do. Three days of this was enough to drive me into the hell that the iPhone Settings menu has become to figure out how to shut them up. Probably not the behavior Lyft was trying to prompt, but there you go.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/THE_CONCEPT_OF_ENERGY/55008\">ABANDONED BUTTERFLIES</a> by THE_CONCEPT_OF_ENERGY (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/THE_CONCEPT_OF_ENERGY/55008</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>My Travel Tech Stack</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Back to that problematic last leg of our trip -- the flight home to Nashville from Newark. I knew we had a lagging luggage problem even before we left the ground courtesy of the latest addition to my travel tech stack. I’d bought <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3k4rCUy\" title=\"\">Apple AirTags</a> just for this reason -- to track our luggage. When I had to check my bag on the Vueling flight from Split to Rome, I could see on my iPhone’s Find My app that my bag was on the plane; it looked almost right underneath me. But in Newark, my bag never left the terminal. Irene checked her app; same thing. As we taxied out, I took a screenshot showing the growing distance between me on the plane and my left-behind bag, and tweeted it out to United saying “I’m guessing I won’t be seeing my luggage in BNA.”&nbsp;</li><li>As I said earlier, I was pretty annoyed with United, but at least the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3k4rCUy\" title=\"\">AirTags</a> saved us the 30 minutes of suspense watching all the other bags come out. Instead, we went straight to the baggage service agent, filed our report, and headed home. And then, waking up the next morning, I could see that our bags made it on the late flight from Newark, and then could see them on the delivery truck heading to our flat. Saved a lot of agita.&nbsp;</li><li>It got me thinking back 6-7 years to <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/08/26/podcast-116-traveling-thru-japan-luggage-trends/\">the first wave</a> of <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/12/podcast-120-where-do-guidebooks-fit-in-i-hate-shopping-for-suitcases/\">smart luggage</a> -- Bluesmart, Away. I bought a Bluesmart bag off their Indiegogo campaign. Those bags also let you <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/05/30/podcast-121-tsa-lines-my-luggage-is-where/\">track their location</a>, along with charging your phone -- for about 2 years until <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">the airlines banned them</a>, or at least the ones with non-removable batteries. Those travel use cases haven’t changed -- “Where’s my bag?” and “I need to recharge my phone so I can rebook this canceled flight” -- but the tech has moved on -- replacing the smart bag with AirTags or Tile trackers and a <a href=\"https://amzn.to/34fcbON\" title=\"\">10,000 mAh battery pack</a>.</li><li>Long-time listener and Twitter follower @Ab3Fr0man pinged me during my summer move podcast pause with “question for the next podcast &gt;&gt; Are there any new devices or apps you are using for travel?” which is what got me spelunking through my travel tech stack, which then turned into a stroll through my past “What’s in My Briefcase” episodes. And what struck me was, other than the AirTags and a small phone tripod for video calls, it hasn’t been what I’ve added to my kit as much as what I’ve been able to take away.</li><li>The consolidation to HDMI for video seems to be just about done and that’s let me drop all the VGA cables and dongles I used to carry around just in case I ran into an old conference room projector or hotel TV.&nbsp; The slow and still in-progress consolidation to USB-C power supplies has let me do some subtraction by addition, dropping my MacBook Air power supply and an old dual USB-A charger for a single charger that’s smaller than either of them, a 100W gallium nitride charger that can charge my laptop, my phone, and my headphones all at once. Indeed, the only reason I still carry an old USB-A Apple Lightning cord is for plugging into the charging port on rental cars.&nbsp;</li><li>But the subtraction thing doesn’t always work. Last year, when we were traveling in Italy (Puglia and Sicily) for a couple of weeks, I wanted to leave the laptop home and run everything off my 8-inch Samsung tablet. That wouldn’t be a problem except for a couple of programs I run on my office PC, and I didn’t want to have to migrate to their cloud versions just for the trip. So instead I used Amazon Workspaces to set up a PC in the cloud. Not quite sure why I thought this would be easier. The Amazon setup was, let’s say, less than straightforward but I got it to work, and was able to run what I needed off my tablet, albeit a bit slower than usual. Getting ready for this last trip, I thought about it again, do I leave the laptop at home? Then I remembered the time sink the Amazon set up was, and tossed the laptop back into my backpack.</li><li>No new apps. Indeed, I tend to be brutal about deleting those I’m not using right now. I’ll download, say, the VRBO or Airbnb app when I need them for a trip and then dump them when I get home. I also just deleted the Clear app. I had a year free from some credit card and never used it. So I canceled it before they charged me for another year and deleted the app. Yelp is on the bubble right now. I also find myself using it less and less, just defaulting to Google Maps’ restaurant suggestions and ratings since I usually already have it open for directions.</li><li>The carriers’ apps continue to improve incrementally. I used to use an app that had maps of all the major airports, but found I was using it less and less as the carriers added similar maps to their apps. Indeed, while waiting to de-plane in EWR, I checked the United app and it had an animated step-by-step map showing the path from our arrival gate, through Customs, to our departure gate. Too bad the guys moving our luggage didn’t have the same map.&nbsp;</li><li>As I’ve mentioned in past episodes, I still use the free version of TripIt to consolidate all plane, train, hotel, and Airbnb confirmations into a single itinerary. I know Google Travel can do something similar if you live within the Google ecosystem, but I don’t so I use TripIt. TripIt keeps pushing their $50 Pro offering with real-time alerts and airport maps. I had the Pro offering once, but now I get all that stuff for free on the carrier apps. Now, if I <em>was</em> going to pop $50, I’d spend it on the Flighty app instead. I trialed Flighty back in the spring on a trip to Santa Fe and thought it was a great app. If I was still flying every week, it would be a no-brainer. Indeed, I’d figure out a way to expense the $250 lifetime membership and be done with it.&nbsp;</li><li>But the one piece of travel that’s been with me since the beginning and that continues to earn its keep -- a bottle opener. Even as craft beer has moved to cans, that stamped metal New Belgium bottle opener has saved the corner of many a hotel dresser.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/49674\">H2O</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/49674</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Imbibing for Introverts</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro blurb<ul><li>Mark: Jeff, thanks for joining us on the TravelCommons podcast today. Your upcoming book…</li><li>Jeff: Technically the release date is November 15, I tried to get them early for an event on October 20, but they got held up on a freight train somewhere in the United States, so it\'s like…</li><li>Mark: That damn supply chain. So anyhow, your upcoming book, Imbibing for <em>Imbibing for Introverts: A Guide to Social Drinking for the Anti-Social</em>. Over the years on the TravelCommons podcast, we\'ve talked many times about solo eating, eating alone on the road, what you might call eating for introverts. So when I saw the title of your book, it mapped right into things that we\'ve been doing. And again, in past episodes, we\'ve talked about the best ways to eat alone and so, what are your pro tips for the best ways to drink alone?</li><li>Jeff: It depends on the venue; it just depends on what your objectives are. If you want to quietly contemplate what you\'re drinking; if you\'re in one of these high-end whiskey bars or a brandy bar or something like that; where you\'re sitting and you really want to just contemplate. Sometimes you just want to be present and just be in your thoughts, think about what you\'re drinking, think about its connection to the point of origin, that kind of thing. When you\'re drinking alone, probably more often than not you\'re going to be sitting at the bar. A lot of times they\'re going to give you a 2-top, but sometimes I feel bad about taking it up, especially when things are busy and I just want to sit at the bar.</li><li>Mark: When I started traveling, which was a long time ago, you’d end up in that same situation, at a 2-top or a 4-top and then you\'re the sad person sitting in the corner table because you were taking up revenue space. “Look, I got spots for two and you\'re only taking up one.”</li><li>Jeff: And I think that if you\'re not sitting in a corner, if you do get to sit at the bar, that\'s a great opportunity to strike up a conversation with the bartender. Sometimes it just happens organically. I don\'t know whether they feel like they need to talk to you because you\'re not with anybody and they feel bad for you. But one thing that I do find is when you order something in a way that shows you know what you\'re talking about -- like you\'re at the bar and you say give me a gin and tonic, if you don\'t really specify what gin you want, they may not have a really broad selection, but a lot of these more sort of mixology oriented bars, they\'re going to have a selection and a good way to start is “What kind of gin you have; do you have anything that\'s not juniper- forward?” -- bartenders can be really primed to geek out with somebody that they detect maybe as passionate about the things they drink as they are, as they are about the things they mix. So when you show an inkling of interest or knowledge related to that spirit or whatever ingredient you\'re putting in the cocktail, that may pique their interest a little bit and they might get a sense that this person knows what they’re talking about. I\'ve been in situations where that snowballs to a point where the bartender says, “Hey, by the way, I\'m entering a cocktail competition, this was my creation, I want you to try and tell me honestly what you think about it.” It\'s moments like this that present themselves. Not always, but you know, sometimes they do. Sometimes a bartender will also have a secret stash behind the bar, could be a rare whiskey that\'s on their list. Sometimes they will sneak you some of that. It\'s not going to necessarily be free, but they\'ll give you a pour of something that they\'re protecting and hoarding and not really giving to just anybody. So moments like that are good. It\'s not necessarily that you\'re being antisocial. It\'s sometimes conversations can create themselves organically and so that\'s why it\'s sometimes good to be alone and sit at the bar rather than at the table because no one\'s really going to be spending the time with you to do that.</li><li>Mark: Eating alone sitting at the bar, it used to be that you couldn\'t get much more than a bar snack menu at a bar. Nowadays, though, you can get a full menu at a bar and so I\'m always eating at the bar. You\'re right about the bartenders. You get blips of human interaction. I think usually the bartender is good for, I don\'t know, 3-4 quick interchanges. Obviously they got a job to do, so you’re not going to have an ongoing conversation with them, but they\'ll come by and if they think you\'re interested or you\'re an interesting person, you\'ll get blips. I don\'t know, it\'s either they think you\'re interesting or they’re taking pity on you. I\'m not quite sure which...&nbsp; What drove you to write this book Imbibing for Introverts? What was the kernel on this one?</li><li>Jeff: I just been traveling a lot and I\'ve been doing a lot of solo travel, especially work-related stuff and, over time, I really just got comfortable in my own skin going out alone. It just became something I realized I actually enjoy my own company and it just came together in my head. One time I was sitting at a bar and I wasn\'t alone at the time. I was having a drink with a friend in a bar that I had often had a drink alone and I thought I\'d really love to do a book about just being an introvert and just enjoying being by yourself and drinking alone and normalizing that too because some people are just weird about going out alone.</li><li>Mark: When you do a lot of travel, you\'ve got to get comfortable with your own company because oftentimes that\'s it. You\'ve got clients, you\'ve got other people you\'re meeting and they\'re going home, they\'re going to coach their kid’s ballgame or do whatever. And if you don\'t get out of that hotel room, that hotel room turns into a cave after a while.</li><li>Jeff: And also sometimes you just want to decompress, especially when it is a work trip and you are having meetings. For instance, I got a lot of trade shows where I\'m just walking around the convention center going from booth to booth, talking to a person after person after person, always having to be on. Just having that energy, that kind of interpersonal energy, is frankly very exhausting. By the end of the day, after like seven or eight hours of doing that, sometimes you just want to be by yourself and you just want to quietly sip something in a place that\'s got the music\'s down low, it\'s a good mix that they\'re playing. It\'s low enough that you can hear yourself think, you can also eavesdrop on other people\'s conversations. That\'s kind of fun sometimes. A lot of people talk about people watching; I\'m more of a people listener because you can tell a lot more about a person by the conversations you hear than what they\'re wearing or what they look like.</li><li>Mark: Jeff, this has been great. I really appreciate it. I\'m looking forward to reading your book when it comes out. Jeff Cioletti, author of the new book, the upcoming book coming out November,<em> Imbibing for Introverts: A Guide to Social Drinking for the Anti-Social</em>. Jeff, thanks very much for stopping by the TravelCommons podcast and chatting to us about drinking.</li><li>Jeff: Thank you so much for having me. This has been a lot of fun because it seems to be my people that listen to your podcasts.</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #190</li><li>I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. </li><li>And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>. And while you’re at TravelCommons.com, you can check out the show notes page for a transcript and any links I’ve mentioned. Or you can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page.</li><li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_190.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #190 — My Travel Tech Stack; Imbibing for Introverts','','inherit','closed','closed','','4208-revision-v1','','','2022-10-30 21:11:21','2022-10-31 02:11:21','',4208,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4217',0,'revision','',0),
(4218,1,'2022-10-31 11:26:31','2022-10-31 16:26:31','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/malort_face.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/malort_face-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Malort bottle and a cow skull\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> My Drinking Buddy Is The Quiet Type[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Lots of different voices in this episode. Listeners growing our list of travel tips, and conversations with <a href=\"http://shj.cs.illinois.edu/\">Dr. Sheldon Jacobson</a> about why one of those tips -- always catch the first flight out -- isn\'t always right, and <a href=\"https://www.workman.com/authors/patricia-schultz\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Patricia Schultz</a> about her new book, <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3BWnv6n\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Why We Travel: 100 Reasons to See the World</a></em>. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_190.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #190: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Happy Halloween! Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN. Finally got my body back on Central Time after 3 weeks in Europe that started in Split, Croatia and then ran up the Italian peninsula -- Amalfi Coast, Naples, Rome, Florence -- and then back down to Rome to fly home. And for a trip about a dozen potential points of failure between all the flights, the trains, and the Airbnb’s, it all went pretty smoothly except for the final leg -- the EWR-BNA flight home, where United somehow couldn’t manage to get our luggage on our plane. But by then, it wasn’t critical -- just suitcases of dirty clothes and some bottles of wine and limoncello. And United delivered them to us the next afternoon -- just in time for us to start doing laundry. Annoying, yes -- but not much more.</li><li>Which, after a summer of travel horror stories about canceled flights, lost luggage, hours-long security lines that fed our episode on <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/08/18/podcast-188-my-top-tips-to-survive-travel-chaos/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Podcast #188 — My Top Travel Tips to Survive Airport Chaos\">Top Tips to Avoid Travel Chaos</a>, I chalked it up to good luck and clean living or, what’s probably a more likely explanation, the airlines and airports are finally getting on the other side of the surprise snapback in leisure travel during a very tight labor market. Through Nashville, O’Hare, Frankfurt, even the Split airport -- 5-minute security lines at most, and on-time flights. In Italy, all our trains were on-time. And after all of that smooth travel, it wasn’t until our last day, for our flight home, that we got pulled up short. We walked into Terminal 3 at Rome’s Fiumicino airport and smack into a huge line. It took us a moment to figure out that the line wasn’t for us; it was the check-in line for Air Canada which seemed… weird. But no matter, we didn’t have to stand in it.&nbsp;</li><li>The next line, though, we did -- the separate security line for all direct flights to the US.&nbsp; We’ve talked in the past about how, post-9/11, direct international flights to the US tend to be segregated from the rest of the flights and put at the far end of departure terminals. That I’m used to. This was the first time, though, that I’ve seen a US-only security line. And on a Sunday morning at 9am, when everyone is there for the 10:30/11am bank of flights to the US. It tailed back almost the length of the terminal.&nbsp; But it kept moving. And when we made it up to the security area, we could see that they had every screening station manned and operational. We got through security and passport control in less than a half hour. Not world-class timing, but not anywhere near the summer horror stories.</li><li>I shouldn’t have been surprised at that US security line though because every place we went in Italy was jammed/crowded, mostly with Americans. It was revenge travel in action. I asked a few guys -- bartenders, shop owners, shuttle drivers -- how these October crowds compared to pre-pandemic. “It’s insane!” was the consensus. And I could feel it wearing on them. Even though all these people were giving them money, their patience seemed to be getting a little thin. Last year, last October when we were in Italy, in Puglia and Sicily, these same sort of folks were saying “Welcome! We’re so glad travelers are back!” This year? I think it’s a bit more like “when are you travelers <em>going </em>back… home?”</li><li>Bridge Music --  <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/snowflake/46164\">A Foolish Game</a> by Snowflake (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/snowflake/46164 Ft: Admiral Bob   </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I’m going to hold my thoughts about my Croatia and Italy trip for the next episode; do one of my stream-of-consciousness “Notes on a Location” topics. But I do want to follow up here on a couple of things from the last episode. First up, is <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/09/22/podcast-189-why-we-travel-when-the-first-flight-isnt-best/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Podcast #189 —  Why We Travel; When The First Flight Isn’t Best\">last episode’s</a> eSIM rant because, through watching with my travel companions and texting with Allan Marko, a long-time TravelCommons contributor, I sorta refined that rant, getting it down to two decision points.&nbsp;<ul><li>First, how much data do you expect to use? If you’re out of the US for a week or less, staying in a place with good WiFi, and can wait until the end of the day to do all your social media posting, you can probably be good with 5GB of data -- which gets you under T-Mobile’s non-throttled international data cap (which is what a couple of the folks traveling with me did), way under Google Fi’s 50 GB cap, and probably fits into a $15-20 eSIM from someone like aloSIM or Airalo. It’s the low-hassle solution. But for a longer stay, like my 3 week-er, or if you’re fully invested in building Instagram stories, like my wife, 5GB just isn’t going to cut it. I reset my iPhone data stats on the flight to Frankfurt and then looked at them as we were taxiing out to the runway in Rome. I used 77 GBs of data. Now, 11 GB was from hotspotting because the WiFi in our Florence Airbnb was pretty useless. But even pulling that out, 66 GBs is still a whackload of data. Which is probably because I didn’t really pay any attention to my data usage, because the Telecom Italia plan I was on gave me <em>600</em> GB of 5G data, essentially unlimited data, for $15. So while my T-Mobile-using companions were scrounging for a bar’s WiFi password to do Untappd check-ins, I was uploading pictures and refreshing my podcasts.</li><li>The second decision point&nbsp; -- do you need to make regular phone calls; do you need a local number? This is more and more of an edge case with people primarily texting, and when there was a specific need for a voice call, people rang me through WhatsApp and Telegram. But on this trip, I got us last-minute tables at a couple of good restaurants because I could call them over the regular phone network, something I couldn’t have done with a data-only eSIM. I’ve also run into the need for a local number when trying to register or create an account for an on-line service. My Telecom Italia SIM also came with a local Italian number and unlimited voice minutes.&nbsp;</li><li>So while I sharpened my thinking on this trip, my conclusion didn’t change. I know I’m an edge case -- I don’t want to have to think about data consumption and I want local phone service -- and until the in-country wireless carriers offer the same pre-paid plans on eSIMs that they do on physical SIMs, I’ll be keeping my phone with the SIM tray… and a straightened-out paper clip to pop it open.</li></ul></li><li>Second, following up to Kendra Kroll’s travel tip in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/09/22/podcast-189-why-we-travel-when-the-first-flight-isnt-best/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">the last episode</a> about knowing the names of cities in the local vernacular. Kendra talked about people missing their train stop because they didn’t realize that Florence, in Italian, is Firenze. So riding the train from Rome (Roma) to Florence (Firenze), I was on the lookout for this. All the train tickets used Italian city names -- Roma, Napoli, Firenze. But the signs on the platforms of the Florence train stations said “Florence”. Indeed, the real confusion wasn’t Florence vs Firenze, but which Florence train station to get off at. My group thought we had a direct train from downtown Rome&nbsp; (Roma Termini) to the downtown Florence station (Firenze Santa Maria Novella), so when the train stopped at a station with “Florence” in the sign, they all scrambled to get their bags and head for the station -- which would’ve left them hanging around in a suburban parking lot figuring out how get a ride downtown. So not only know the name of the city in the vernacular; know the full station name of your stop.</li><li>I mentioned earlier that the first leg of my trip was from BNA to ORD, and I was kinda surprised to realize that it was my first time in ORD in 10 months, since returning from the UK last November. Prior to moving down here to Nashville in July, I’d been flying Southwest out of Chicago Midway; easier to get to and Southwest fit my travel plans better. So as “Welcome Back,” I got the full ORD experience -- landing on the far north runway, which feels like it’s just short of the Wisconsin state line, with the requisite 20-min taxi to get within sight of the terminal. Then, just as you think you’re almost there, the plane stops across the road from the terminal and waits 5 minutes for a gate to open up. Then, once we get moving again, we take the scenic route, past all the American planes in Terminal 3 and the Delta planes in Terminal 2 until we finally get to the United terminal in Terminal 1. All told, at least 30 minutes from tires hitting the runway to the door opening and the agent saying “Welcome to ORD”. Yeah, thanks. Great to be back.</li><li>And in other “Great to be back” things, Irene and I used Lyft for the first time in forever to get home from the Nashville airport -- the wait time and the price were much lower than Uber; which is weird because I’d think, by now, the ride sharing market would be a bit more price efficient. But anyhow, Lyft is so excited to see me resurface in Nashville that the app is flooding my phone with notifications with ride offers and suggestions for things to do. Three days of this was enough to drive me into the hell that the iPhone Settings menu has become to figure out how to shut them up. Probably not the behavior Lyft was trying to prompt, but there you go.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/THE_CONCEPT_OF_ENERGY/55008\">ABANDONED BUTTERFLIES</a> by THE_CONCEPT_OF_ENERGY (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/THE_CONCEPT_OF_ENERGY/55008</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>My Travel Tech Stack</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Back to that problematic last leg of our trip -- the flight home to Nashville from Newark. I knew we had a lagging luggage problem even before we left the ground courtesy of the latest addition to my travel tech stack. I’d bought <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3k4rCUy\" title=\"\">Apple AirTags</a> just for this reason -- to track our luggage. When I had to check my bag on the Vueling flight from Split to Rome, I could see on my iPhone’s Find My app that my bag was on the plane; it looked almost right underneath me. But in Newark, my bag never left the terminal. Irene checked her app; same thing. As we taxied out, I took a screenshot showing the growing distance between me on the plane and my left-behind bag, and tweeted it out to United saying “I’m guessing I won’t be seeing my luggage in BNA.”&nbsp;</li><li>As I said earlier, I was pretty annoyed with United, but at least the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3k4rCUy\" title=\"\">AirTags</a> saved us the 30 minutes of suspense watching all the other bags come out. Instead, we went straight to the baggage service agent, filed our report, and headed home. And then, waking up the next morning, I could see that our bags made it on the late flight from Newark, and then could see them on the delivery truck heading to our flat. Saved a lot of agita.&nbsp;</li><li>It got me thinking back 6-7 years to <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/08/26/podcast-116-traveling-thru-japan-luggage-trends/\">the first wave</a> of <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/12/podcast-120-where-do-guidebooks-fit-in-i-hate-shopping-for-suitcases/\">smart luggage</a> -- Bluesmart, Away. I bought a Bluesmart bag off their Indiegogo campaign. Those bags also let you <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/05/30/podcast-121-tsa-lines-my-luggage-is-where/\">track their location</a>, along with charging your phone -- for about 2 years until <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">the airlines banned them</a>, or at least the ones with non-removable batteries. Those travel use cases haven’t changed -- “Where’s my bag?” and “I need to recharge my phone so I can rebook this canceled flight” -- but the tech has moved on -- replacing the smart bag with AirTags or Tile trackers and a <a href=\"https://amzn.to/34fcbON\" title=\"\">10,000 mAh battery pack</a>.</li><li>Long-time listener and Twitter follower @Ab3Fr0man pinged me during my summer move podcast pause with “question for the next podcast &gt;&gt; Are there any new devices or apps you are using for travel?” which is what got me spelunking through my travel tech stack, which then turned into a stroll through my past “What’s in My Briefcase” episodes. And what struck me was, other than the AirTags and a small phone tripod for video calls, it hasn’t been what I’ve added to my kit as much as what I’ve been able to take away.</li><li>The consolidation to HDMI for video seems to be just about done and that’s let me drop all the VGA cables and dongles I used to carry around just in case I ran into an old conference room projector or hotel TV.&nbsp; The slow and still in-progress consolidation to USB-C power supplies has let me do some subtraction by addition, dropping my MacBook Air power supply and an old dual USB-A charger for a single charger that’s smaller than either of them, a 100W gallium nitride charger that can charge my laptop, my phone, and my headphones all at once. Indeed, the only reason I still carry an old USB-A Apple Lightning cord is for plugging into the charging port on rental cars.&nbsp;</li><li>But the subtraction thing doesn’t always work. Last year, when we were traveling in Italy (Puglia and Sicily) for a couple of weeks, I wanted to leave the laptop home and run everything off my 8-inch Samsung tablet. That wouldn’t be a problem except for a couple of programs I run on my office PC, and I didn’t want to have to migrate to their cloud versions just for the trip. So instead I used Amazon Workspaces to set up a PC in the cloud. Not quite sure why I thought this would be easier. The Amazon setup was, let’s say, less than straightforward but I got it to work, and was able to run what I needed off my tablet, albeit a bit slower than usual. Getting ready for this last trip, I thought about it again, do I leave the laptop at home? Then I remembered the time sink the Amazon set up was, and tossed the laptop back into my backpack.</li><li>No new apps. Indeed, I tend to be brutal about deleting those I’m not using right now. I’ll download, say, the VRBO or Airbnb app when I need them for a trip and then dump them when I get home. I also just deleted the Clear app. I had a year free from some credit card and never used it. So I canceled it before they charged me for another year and deleted the app. Yelp is on the bubble right now. I also find myself using it less and less, just defaulting to Google Maps’ restaurant suggestions and ratings since I usually already have it open for directions.</li><li>The carriers’ apps continue to improve incrementally. I used to use an app that had maps of all the major airports, but found I was using it less and less as the carriers added similar maps to their apps. Indeed, while waiting to de-plane in EWR, I checked the United app and it had an animated step-by-step map showing the path from our arrival gate, through Customs, to our departure gate. Too bad the guys moving our luggage didn’t have the same map.&nbsp;</li><li>As I’ve mentioned in past episodes, I still use the free version of TripIt to consolidate all plane, train, hotel, and Airbnb confirmations into a single itinerary. I know Google Travel can do something similar if you live within the Google ecosystem, but I don’t so I use TripIt. TripIt keeps pushing their $50 Pro offering with real-time alerts and airport maps. I had the Pro offering once, but now I get all that stuff for free on the carrier apps. Now, if I <em>was</em> going to pop $50, I’d spend it on the Flighty app instead. I trialed Flighty back in the spring on a trip to Santa Fe and thought it was a great app. If I was still flying every week, it would be a no-brainer. Indeed, I’d figure out a way to expense the $250 lifetime membership and be done with it.&nbsp;</li><li>But the one piece of travel that’s been with me since the beginning and that continues to earn its keep -- a bottle opener. Even as craft beer has moved to cans, that stamped metal New Belgium bottle opener has saved the corner of many a hotel dresser.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/49674\">H2O</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/49674</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Imbibing for Introverts</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>When frequent travelers are on the road, we spend a lot of time alone -- in our hotel rooms, and in spite of the advice from a former colleague who wrote a book titled <em>Never Eat Alone</em>, we do… a lot. So when I saw an upcoming book about drinking alone, it seemed a perfect fit for the podcast. So I reached out to the author, Jeff Cioletti, editor-in-chief of <a href=\"https://craftspiritsmag.com/\"><em>Craft Spirits Magazine</em></a>.<ul><li>Mark: Jeff, thanks for joining us on the TravelCommons podcast today. Your upcoming book…</li><li>Jeff: Technically the release date is November 15, I tried to get them early for an event on October 20, but they got held up on a freight train somewhere in the United States, so it\'s like…</li><li>Mark: That damn supply chain. So anyhow, your upcoming book, <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3sQelCQ\"><em>Imbibing for Introverts: A Guide to Social Drinking for the Anti-Social</em></a>.</em> Over the years on the TravelCommons podcast, we\'ve <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?s=solo+dining\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">talked many times</a> about <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/19/podcast-149-dining-single-airlines-need-to-tell-us-more/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">solo eating</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/05/12/table-for-one-eating-alone-on-the-road/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">eating alone on the road</a>, what you might call eating for introverts. So when I saw the title of your book, it mapped right into things that we\'ve been doing. And again, in past episodes, we\'ve talked about the best ways to eat alone and so, what are your pro tips for the best ways to drink alone?</li><li>Jeff: It depends on the venue; it just depends on what your objectives are. If you want to quietly contemplate what you\'re drinking; if you\'re in one of these high-end whiskey bars or a brandy bar or something like that; where you\'re sitting and you really want to just contemplate. Sometimes you just want to be present and just be in your thoughts, think about what you\'re drinking, think about its connection to the point of origin, that kind of thing. When you\'re drinking alone, probably more often than not you\'re going to be sitting at the bar. A lot of times they\'re going to give you a 2-top, but sometimes I feel bad about taking it up, especially when things are busy and I just want to sit at the bar.</li><li>Mark: When I started traveling, which was a long time ago, you’d end up in that same situation, at a 2-top or a 4-top and then you\'re the sad person sitting in the corner table because you were taking up revenue space. “Look, I got spots for two and you\'re only taking up one.”</li><li>Jeff: And I think that if you\'re not sitting in a corner, if you do get to sit at the bar, that\'s a great opportunity to strike up a conversation with the bartender. Sometimes it just happens organically. I don\'t know whether they feel like they need to talk to you because you\'re not with anybody and they feel bad for you. But one thing that I do find is when you order something in a way that shows you know what you\'re talking about -- like you\'re at the bar and you say give me a gin and tonic, if you don\'t really specify what gin you want, they may not have a really broad selection, but a lot of these more sort of mixology oriented bars, they\'re going to have a selection and a good way to start is “What kind of gin you have; do you have anything that\'s not juniper- forward?” -- bartenders can be really primed to geek out with somebody that they detect maybe as passionate about the things they drink as they are, as they are about the things they mix. So when you show an inkling of interest or knowledge related to that spirit or whatever ingredient you\'re putting in the cocktail, that may pique their interest a little bit and they might get a sense that this person knows what they’re talking about. I\'ve been in situations where that snowballs to a point where the bartender says, “Hey, by the way, I\'m entering a cocktail competition, this was my creation, I want you to try and tell me honestly what you think about it.” It\'s moments like this that present themselves. Not always, but you know, sometimes they do. Sometimes a bartender will also have a secret stash behind the bar, could be a rare whiskey that\'s on their list. Sometimes they will sneak you some of that. It\'s not going to necessarily be free, but they\'ll give you a pour of something that they\'re protecting and hoarding and not really giving to just anybody. So moments like that are good. It\'s not necessarily that you\'re being antisocial. It\'s sometimes conversations can create themselves organically and so that\'s why it\'s sometimes good to be alone and sit at the bar rather than at the table because no one\'s really going to be spending the time with you to do that.</li><li>Mark: Eating alone sitting at the bar, it used to be that you couldn\'t get much more than a bar snack menu at a bar. Nowadays, though, you can get a full menu at a bar and so I\'m always eating at the bar. You\'re right about the bartenders. You get blips of human interaction. I think usually the bartender is good for, I don\'t know, 3-4 quick interchanges. Obviously they got a job to do, so you’re not going to have an ongoing conversation with them, but they\'ll come by and if they think you\'re interested or you\'re an interesting person, you\'ll get blips. I don\'t know, it\'s either they think you\'re interesting or they’re taking pity on you. I\'m not quite sure which...  What drove you to write this book Imbibing for Introverts? What was the kernel on this one?</li><li>Jeff: I just been traveling a lot and I\'ve been doing a lot of solo travel, especially work-related stuff and, over time, I really just got comfortable in my own skin going out alone. It just became something I realized I actually enjoy my own company and it just came together in my head. One time I was sitting at a bar and I wasn\'t alone at the time. I was having a drink with a friend in a bar that I had often had a drink alone and I thought I\'d really love to do a book about just being an introvert and just enjoying being by yourself and drinking alone and normalizing that too because some people are just weird about going out alone.</li><li>Mark: When you do a lot of travel, you\'ve got to get comfortable with your own company because oftentimes that\'s it. You\'ve got clients, you\'ve got other people you\'re meeting and they\'re going home, they\'re going to coach their kid’s ballgame or do whatever. And if you don\'t get out of that hotel room, that hotel room turns into a cave after a while.</li><li>Jeff: And also sometimes you just want to decompress, especially when it is a work trip and you are having meetings. For instance, I got a lot of trade shows where I\'m just walking around the convention center going from booth to booth, talking to a person after person after person, always having to be on. Just having that energy, that kind of interpersonal energy, is frankly very exhausting. By the end of the day, after like seven or eight hours of doing that, sometimes you just want to be by yourself and you just want to quietly sip something in a place that\'s got the music\'s down low, it\'s a good mix that they\'re playing. It\'s low enough that you can hear yourself think, you can also eavesdrop on other people\'s conversations. That\'s kind of fun sometimes. A lot of people talk about people watching; I\'m more of a people listener because you can tell a lot more about a person by the conversations you hear than what they\'re wearing or what they look like.</li><li>Mark: Jeff, this has been great. I really appreciate it. I\'m looking forward to reading your book when it comes out. Jeff Cioletti, author of the new book, the upcoming book coming out November,<em> <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3sQelCQ\"><em>Imbibing for Introverts: A Guide to Social Drinking for the Anti-Social</em></a>.</em> Jeff, thanks very much for stopping by the TravelCommons podcast and chatting to us about drinking.</li><li>Jeff: Thank you so much for having me. This has been a lot of fun because it seems to be my people that listen to your podcasts.</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #190</li><li>I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. </li><li>And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>. And while you’re at TravelCommons.com, you can check out the show notes page for a transcript and any links I’ve mentioned. Or you can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page.</li><li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_190.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #190 — My Travel Tech Stack; Imbibing for Introverts','','inherit','closed','closed','','4208-revision-v1','','','2022-10-31 11:26:31','2022-10-31 16:26:31','',4208,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4218',0,'revision','',0),
(4220,1,'2022-10-31 16:16:28','2022-10-31 21:16:28','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/malort_face.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/malort_face-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Malort bottle and a cow skull\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> My Drinking Buddy Is The Quiet Type[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Back behind the mic after 3 week of wandering around Croatia and Italy.  All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_190.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #190: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Happy Halloween! Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN. Finally got my body back on Central Time after 3 weeks in Europe that started in Split, Croatia and then ran up the Italian peninsula -- Amalfi Coast, Naples, Rome, Florence -- and then back down to Rome to fly home. And for a trip about a dozen potential points of failure between all the flights, the trains, and the Airbnb’s, it all went pretty smoothly except for the final leg -- the EWR-BNA flight home, where United somehow couldn’t manage to get our luggage on our plane. But by then, it wasn’t critical -- just suitcases of dirty clothes and some bottles of wine and limoncello. And United delivered them to us the next afternoon -- just in time for us to start doing laundry. Annoying, yes -- but not much more.</li><li>Which, after a summer of travel horror stories about canceled flights, lost luggage, hours-long security lines that fed our episode on <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/08/18/podcast-188-my-top-tips-to-survive-travel-chaos/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Podcast #188 — My Top Travel Tips to Survive Airport Chaos\">Top Tips to Avoid Travel Chaos</a>, I chalked it up to good luck and clean living or, what’s probably a more likely explanation, the airlines and airports are finally getting on the other side of the surprise snapback in leisure travel during a very tight labor market. Through Nashville, O’Hare, Frankfurt, even the Split airport -- 5-minute security lines at most, and on-time flights. In Italy, all our trains were on-time. And after all of that smooth travel, it wasn’t until our last day, for our flight home, that we got pulled up short. We walked into Terminal 3 at Rome’s Fiumicino airport and smack into a huge line. It took us a moment to figure out that the line wasn’t for us; it was the check-in line for Air Canada which seemed… weird. But no matter, we didn’t have to stand in it.&nbsp;</li><li>The next line, though, we did -- the separate security line for all direct flights to the US.&nbsp; We’ve talked in the past about how, post-9/11, direct international flights to the US tend to be segregated from the rest of the flights and put at the far end of departure terminals. That I’m used to. This was the first time, though, that I’ve seen a US-only security line. And on a Sunday morning at 9am, when everyone is there for the 10:30/11am bank of flights to the US. It tailed back almost the length of the terminal.&nbsp; But it kept moving. And when we made it up to the security area, we could see that they had every screening station manned and operational. We got through security and passport control in less than a half hour. Not world-class timing, but not anywhere near the summer horror stories.</li><li>I shouldn’t have been surprised at that US security line though because every place we went in Italy was jammed/crowded, mostly with Americans. It was revenge travel in action. I asked a few guys -- bartenders, shop owners, shuttle drivers -- how these October crowds compared to pre-pandemic. “It’s insane!” was the consensus. And I could feel it wearing on them. Even though all these people were giving them money, their patience seemed to be getting a little thin. Last year, last October when we were in Italy, in Puglia and Sicily, these same sort of folks were saying “Welcome! We’re so glad travelers are back!” This year? I think it’s a bit more like “when are you travelers <em>going </em>back… home?”</li><li>Bridge Music --  <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/snowflake/46164\">A Foolish Game</a> by Snowflake (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/snowflake/46164 Ft: Admiral Bob   </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I’m going to hold my thoughts about my Croatia and Italy trip for the next episode; do one of my stream-of-consciousness “Notes on a Location” topics. But I do want to follow up here on a couple of things from the last episode. First up, is <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/09/22/podcast-189-why-we-travel-when-the-first-flight-isnt-best/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Podcast #189 —  Why We Travel; When The First Flight Isn’t Best\">last episode’s</a> eSIM rant because, through watching with my travel companions and texting with Allan Marko, a long-time TravelCommons contributor, I sorta refined that rant, getting it down to two decision points.&nbsp;<ul><li>First, how much data do you expect to use? If you’re out of the US for a week or less, staying in a place with good WiFi, and can wait until the end of the day to do all your social media posting, you can probably be good with 5GB of data -- which gets you under T-Mobile’s non-throttled international data cap (which is what a couple of the folks traveling with me did), way under Google Fi’s 50 GB cap, and probably fits into a $15-20 eSIM from someone like aloSIM or Airalo. It’s the low-hassle solution. But for a longer stay, like my 3 week-er, or if you’re fully invested in building Instagram stories, like my wife, 5GB just isn’t going to cut it. I reset my iPhone data stats on the flight to Frankfurt and then looked at them as we were taxiing out to the runway in Rome. I used 77 GBs of data. Now, 11 GB was from hotspotting because the WiFi in our Florence Airbnb was pretty useless. But even pulling that out, 66 GBs is still a whackload of data. Which is probably because I didn’t really pay any attention to my data usage, because the Telecom Italia plan I was on gave me <em>600</em> GB of 5G data, essentially unlimited data, for $15. So while my T-Mobile-using companions were scrounging for a bar’s WiFi password to do Untappd check-ins, I was uploading pictures and refreshing my podcasts.</li><li>The second decision point&nbsp; -- do you need to make regular phone calls; do you need a local number? This is more and more of an edge case with people primarily texting, and when there was a specific need for a voice call, people rang me through WhatsApp and Telegram. But on this trip, I got us last-minute tables at a couple of good restaurants because I could call them over the regular phone network, something I couldn’t have done with a data-only eSIM. I’ve also run into the need for a local number when trying to register or create an account for an on-line service. My Telecom Italia SIM also came with a local Italian number and unlimited voice minutes.&nbsp;</li><li>So while I sharpened my thinking on this trip, my conclusion didn’t change. I know I’m an edge case -- I don’t want to have to think about data consumption and I want local phone service -- and until the in-country wireless carriers offer the same pre-paid plans on eSIMs that they do on physical SIMs, I’ll be keeping my phone with the SIM tray… and a straightened-out paper clip to pop it open.</li></ul></li><li>Second, following up to Kendra Kroll’s travel tip in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/09/22/podcast-189-why-we-travel-when-the-first-flight-isnt-best/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">the last episode</a> about knowing the names of cities in the local vernacular. Kendra talked about people missing their train stop because they didn’t realize that Florence, in Italian, is Firenze. So riding the train from Rome (Roma) to Florence (Firenze), I was on the lookout for this. All the train tickets used Italian city names -- Roma, Napoli, Firenze. But the signs on the platforms of the Florence train stations said “Florence”. Indeed, the real confusion wasn’t Florence vs Firenze, but which Florence train station to get off at. My group thought we had a direct train from downtown Rome&nbsp; (Roma Termini) to the downtown Florence station (Firenze Santa Maria Novella), so when the train stopped at a station with “Florence” in the sign, they all scrambled to get their bags and head for the station -- which would’ve left them hanging around in a suburban parking lot figuring out how get a ride downtown. So not only know the name of the city in the vernacular; know the full station name of your stop.</li><li>I mentioned earlier that the first leg of my trip was from BNA to ORD, and I was kinda surprised to realize that it was my first time in ORD in 10 months, since returning from the UK last November. Prior to moving down here to Nashville in July, I’d been flying Southwest out of Chicago Midway; easier to get to and Southwest fit my travel plans better. So as “Welcome Back,” I got the full ORD experience -- landing on the far north runway, which feels like it’s just short of the Wisconsin state line, with the requisite 20-min taxi to get within sight of the terminal. Then, just as you think you’re almost there, the plane stops across the road from the terminal and waits 5 minutes for a gate to open up. Then, once we get moving again, we take the scenic route, past all the American planes in Terminal 3 and the Delta planes in Terminal 2 until we finally get to the United terminal in Terminal 1. All told, at least 30 minutes from tires hitting the runway to the door opening and the agent saying “Welcome to ORD”. Yeah, thanks. Great to be back.</li><li>And in other “Great to be back” things, Irene and I used Lyft for the first time in forever to get home from the Nashville airport -- the wait time and the price were much lower than Uber; which is weird because I’d think, by now, the ride sharing market would be a bit more price efficient. But anyhow, Lyft is so excited to see me resurface in Nashville that the app is flooding my phone with notifications with ride offers and suggestions for things to do. Three days of this was enough to drive me into the hell that the iPhone Settings menu has become to figure out how to shut them up. Probably not the behavior Lyft was trying to prompt, but there you go.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/THE_CONCEPT_OF_ENERGY/55008\">ABANDONED BUTTERFLIES</a> by THE_CONCEPT_OF_ENERGY (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/THE_CONCEPT_OF_ENERGY/55008</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>My Travel Tech Stack</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Back to that problematic last leg of our trip -- the flight home to Nashville from Newark. I knew we had a lagging luggage problem even before we left the ground courtesy of the latest addition to my travel tech stack. I’d bought <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3k4rCUy\" title=\"\">Apple AirTags</a> just for this reason -- to track our luggage. When I had to check my bag on the Vueling flight from Split to Rome, I could see on my iPhone’s Find My app that my bag was on the plane; it looked almost right underneath me. But in Newark, my bag never left the terminal. Irene checked her app; same thing. As we taxied out, I took a screenshot showing the growing distance between me on the plane and my left-behind bag, and tweeted it out to United saying “I’m guessing I won’t be seeing my luggage in BNA.”&nbsp;</li><li>As I said earlier, I was pretty annoyed with United, but at least the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3k4rCUy\" title=\"\">AirTags</a> saved us the 30 minutes of suspense watching all the other bags come out. Instead, we went straight to the baggage service agent, filed our report, and headed home. And then, waking up the next morning, I could see that our bags made it on the late flight from Newark, and then could see them on the delivery truck heading to our flat. Saved a lot of agita.&nbsp;</li><li>It got me thinking back 6-7 years to <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/08/26/podcast-116-traveling-thru-japan-luggage-trends/\">the first wave</a> of <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/12/podcast-120-where-do-guidebooks-fit-in-i-hate-shopping-for-suitcases/\">smart luggage</a> -- Bluesmart, Away. I bought a Bluesmart bag off their Indiegogo campaign. Those bags also let you <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/05/30/podcast-121-tsa-lines-my-luggage-is-where/\">track their location</a>, along with charging your phone -- for about 2 years until <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">the airlines banned them</a>, or at least the ones with non-removable batteries. Those travel use cases haven’t changed -- “Where’s my bag?” and “I need to recharge my phone so I can rebook this canceled flight” -- but the tech has moved on -- replacing the smart bag with AirTags or Tile trackers and a <a href=\"https://amzn.to/34fcbON\" title=\"\">10,000 mAh battery pack</a>.</li><li>Long-time listener and Twitter follower @Ab3Fr0man pinged me during my summer move podcast pause with “question for the next podcast &gt;&gt; Are there any new devices or apps you are using for travel?” which is what got me spelunking through my travel tech stack, which then turned into a stroll through my past “What’s in My Briefcase” episodes. And what struck me was, other than the AirTags and a small phone tripod for video calls, it hasn’t been what I’ve added to my kit as much as what I’ve been able to take away.</li><li>The consolidation to HDMI for video seems to be just about done and that’s let me drop all the VGA cables and dongles I used to carry around just in case I ran into an old conference room projector or hotel TV.&nbsp; The slow and still in-progress consolidation to USB-C power supplies has let me do some subtraction by addition, dropping my MacBook Air power supply and an old dual USB-A charger for a single charger that’s smaller than either of them, a 100W gallium nitride charger that can charge my laptop, my phone, and my headphones all at once. Indeed, the only reason I still carry an old USB-A Apple Lightning cord is for plugging into the charging port on rental cars.&nbsp;</li><li>But the subtraction thing doesn’t always work. Last year, when we were traveling in Italy (Puglia and Sicily) for a couple of weeks, I wanted to leave the laptop home and run everything off my 8-inch Samsung tablet. That wouldn’t be a problem except for a couple of programs I run on my office PC, and I didn’t want to have to migrate to their cloud versions just for the trip. So instead I used Amazon Workspaces to set up a PC in the cloud. Not quite sure why I thought this would be easier. The Amazon setup was, let’s say, less than straightforward but I got it to work, and was able to run what I needed off my tablet, albeit a bit slower than usual. Getting ready for this last trip, I thought about it again, do I leave the laptop at home? Then I remembered the time sink the Amazon set up was, and tossed the laptop back into my backpack.</li><li>No new apps. Indeed, I tend to be brutal about deleting those I’m not using right now. I’ll download, say, the VRBO or Airbnb app when I need them for a trip and then dump them when I get home. I also just deleted the Clear app. I had a year free from some credit card and never used it. So I canceled it before they charged me for another year and deleted the app. Yelp is on the bubble right now. I also find myself using it less and less, just defaulting to Google Maps’ restaurant suggestions and ratings since I usually already have it open for directions.</li><li>The carriers’ apps continue to improve incrementally. I used to use an app that had maps of all the major airports, but found I was using it less and less as the carriers added similar maps to their apps. Indeed, while waiting to de-plane in EWR, I checked the United app and it had an animated step-by-step map showing the path from our arrival gate, through Customs, to our departure gate. Too bad the guys moving our luggage didn’t have the same map.&nbsp;</li><li>As I’ve mentioned in past episodes, I still use the free version of TripIt to consolidate all plane, train, hotel, and Airbnb confirmations into a single itinerary. I know Google Travel can do something similar if you live within the Google ecosystem, but I don’t so I use TripIt. TripIt keeps pushing their $50 Pro offering with real-time alerts and airport maps. I had the Pro offering once, but now I get all that stuff for free on the carrier apps. Now, if I <em>was</em> going to pop $50, I’d spend it on the Flighty app instead. I trialed Flighty back in the spring on a trip to Santa Fe and thought it was a great app. If I was still flying every week, it would be a no-brainer. Indeed, I’d figure out a way to expense the $250 lifetime membership and be done with it.&nbsp;</li><li>But the one piece of travel that’s been with me since the beginning and that continues to earn its keep -- a bottle opener. Even as craft beer has moved to cans, that stamped metal New Belgium bottle opener has saved the corner of many a hotel dresser.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/49674\">H2O</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/49674</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Imbibing for Introverts</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>When frequent travelers are on the road, we spend a lot of time alone -- in our hotel rooms, and in spite of the advice from a former colleague who wrote a book titled <em>Never Eat Alone</em>, we do… a lot. So when I saw an upcoming book about drinking alone, it seemed a perfect fit for the podcast. So I reached out to the author, Jeff Cioletti, editor-in-chief of <a href=\"https://craftspiritsmag.com/\"><em>Craft Spirits Magazine</em></a>.<ul><li>Mark: Jeff, thanks for joining us on the TravelCommons podcast today. Your upcoming book…</li><li>Jeff: Technically the release date is November 15, I tried to get them early for an event on October 20, but they got held up on a freight train somewhere in the United States, so it\'s like…</li><li>Mark: That damn supply chain. So anyhow, your upcoming book, <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3sQelCQ\"><em>Imbibing for Introverts: A Guide to Social Drinking for the Anti-Social</em></a>.</em> Over the years on the TravelCommons podcast, we\'ve <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?s=solo+dining\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">talked many times</a> about <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/19/podcast-149-dining-single-airlines-need-to-tell-us-more/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">solo eating</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/05/12/table-for-one-eating-alone-on-the-road/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">eating alone on the road</a>, what you might call eating for introverts. So when I saw the title of your book, it mapped right into things that we\'ve been doing. And again, in past episodes, we\'ve talked about the best ways to eat alone and so, what are your pro tips for the best ways to drink alone?</li><li>Jeff: It depends on the venue; it just depends on what your objectives are. If you want to quietly contemplate what you\'re drinking; if you\'re in one of these high-end whiskey bars or a brandy bar or something like that; where you\'re sitting and you really want to just contemplate. Sometimes you just want to be present and just be in your thoughts, think about what you\'re drinking, think about its connection to the point of origin, that kind of thing. When you\'re drinking alone, probably more often than not you\'re going to be sitting at the bar. A lot of times they\'re going to give you a 2-top, but sometimes I feel bad about taking it up, especially when things are busy and I just want to sit at the bar.</li><li>Mark: When I started traveling, which was a long time ago, you’d end up in that same situation, at a 2-top or a 4-top and then you\'re the sad person sitting in the corner table because you were taking up revenue space. “Look, I got spots for two and you\'re only taking up one.”</li><li>Jeff: And I think that if you\'re not sitting in a corner, if you do get to sit at the bar, that\'s a great opportunity to strike up a conversation with the bartender. Sometimes it just happens organically. I don\'t know whether they feel like they need to talk to you because you\'re not with anybody and they feel bad for you. But one thing that I do find is when you order something in a way that shows you know what you\'re talking about -- like you\'re at the bar and you say give me a gin and tonic, if you don\'t really specify what gin you want, they may not have a really broad selection, but a lot of these more sort of mixology oriented bars, they\'re going to have a selection and a good way to start is “What kind of gin you have; do you have anything that\'s not juniper- forward?” -- bartenders can be really primed to geek out with somebody that they detect maybe as passionate about the things they drink as they are, as they are about the things they mix. So when you show an inkling of interest or knowledge related to that spirit or whatever ingredient you\'re putting in the cocktail, that may pique their interest a little bit and they might get a sense that this person knows what they’re talking about. I\'ve been in situations where that snowballs to a point where the bartender says, “Hey, by the way, I\'m entering a cocktail competition, this was my creation, I want you to try and tell me honestly what you think about it.” It\'s moments like this that present themselves. Not always, but you know, sometimes they do. Sometimes a bartender will also have a secret stash behind the bar, could be a rare whiskey that\'s on their list. Sometimes they will sneak you some of that. It\'s not going to necessarily be free, but they\'ll give you a pour of something that they\'re protecting and hoarding and not really giving to just anybody. So moments like that are good. It\'s not necessarily that you\'re being antisocial. It\'s sometimes conversations can create themselves organically and so that\'s why it\'s sometimes good to be alone and sit at the bar rather than at the table because no one\'s really going to be spending the time with you to do that.</li><li>Mark: Eating alone sitting at the bar, it used to be that you couldn\'t get much more than a bar snack menu at a bar. Nowadays, though, you can get a full menu at a bar and so I\'m always eating at the bar. You\'re right about the bartenders. You get blips of human interaction. I think usually the bartender is good for, I don\'t know, 3-4 quick interchanges. Obviously they got a job to do, so you’re not going to have an ongoing conversation with them, but they\'ll come by and if they think you\'re interested or you\'re an interesting person, you\'ll get blips. I don\'t know, it\'s either they think you\'re interesting or they’re taking pity on you. I\'m not quite sure which...  What drove you to write this book Imbibing for Introverts? What was the kernel on this one?</li><li>Jeff: I just been traveling a lot and I\'ve been doing a lot of solo travel, especially work-related stuff and, over time, I really just got comfortable in my own skin going out alone. It just became something I realized I actually enjoy my own company and it just came together in my head. One time I was sitting at a bar and I wasn\'t alone at the time. I was having a drink with a friend in a bar that I had often had a drink alone and I thought I\'d really love to do a book about just being an introvert and just enjoying being by yourself and drinking alone and normalizing that too because some people are just weird about going out alone.</li><li>Mark: When you do a lot of travel, you\'ve got to get comfortable with your own company because oftentimes that\'s it. You\'ve got clients, you\'ve got other people you\'re meeting and they\'re going home, they\'re going to coach their kid’s ballgame or do whatever. And if you don\'t get out of that hotel room, that hotel room turns into a cave after a while.</li><li>Jeff: And also sometimes you just want to decompress, especially when it is a work trip and you are having meetings. For instance, I got a lot of trade shows where I\'m just walking around the convention center going from booth to booth, talking to a person after person after person, always having to be on. Just having that energy, that kind of interpersonal energy, is frankly very exhausting. By the end of the day, after like seven or eight hours of doing that, sometimes you just want to be by yourself and you just want to quietly sip something in a place that\'s got the music\'s down low, it\'s a good mix that they\'re playing. It\'s low enough that you can hear yourself think, you can also eavesdrop on other people\'s conversations. That\'s kind of fun sometimes. A lot of people talk about people watching; I\'m more of a people listener because you can tell a lot more about a person by the conversations you hear than what they\'re wearing or what they look like.</li><li>Mark: Jeff, this has been great. I really appreciate it. I\'m looking forward to reading your book when it comes out. Jeff Cioletti, author of the new book, the upcoming book coming out November,<em> <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3sQelCQ\"><em>Imbibing for Introverts: A Guide to Social Drinking for the Anti-Social</em></a>.</em> Jeff, thanks very much for stopping by the TravelCommons podcast and chatting to us about drinking.</li><li>Jeff: Thank you so much for having me. This has been a lot of fun because it seems to be my people that listen to your podcasts.</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #190</li><li>I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. </li><li>And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>. And while you’re at TravelCommons.com, you can check out the show notes page for a transcript and any links I’ve mentioned. Or you can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page.</li><li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_190.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #190 — My Travel Tech Stack; Imbibing for Introverts','','inherit','closed','closed','','4208-revision-v1','','','2022-10-31 16:16:28','2022-10-31 21:16:28','',4208,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4220',0,'revision','',0),
(4221,1,'2022-10-31 16:35:02','2022-10-31 21:35:02','[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/malort_face-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Malort bottle and a cow skull\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /> My Drinking Buddy Is The Quiet Type[/caption]\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Back behind the mic after 3 week of travel in Croatia and Italy.  The trip went amazingly well up to the last leg, when United\'s Newark team couldn\'t get our bags on our plane. But, I\'d stuffed <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3k4rCUy\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Apple AirTags</a> into our luggage, so we were able to track their movements \'til they got home. That experience and a listener\'s tweet led to me re-visiting my travel tech stack. We then talk to Jeff Cioletti, author of the new book <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3sQelCQ\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Imbibing for Introverts</a></em>, about the art of drinking alone. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_190.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #190: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Happy Halloween! Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN. Finally got my body back on Central Time after 3 weeks in Europe that started in Split, Croatia and then ran up the Italian peninsula -- Amalfi Coast, Naples, Rome, Florence -- and then back down to Rome to fly home. And for a trip about a dozen potential points of failure between all the flights, the trains, and the Airbnb’s, it all went pretty smoothly except for the final leg -- the EWR-BNA flight home, where United somehow couldn’t manage to get our luggage on our plane. But by then, it wasn’t critical -- just suitcases of dirty clothes and some bottles of wine and limoncello. And United delivered them to us the next afternoon -- just in time for us to start doing laundry. Annoying, yes -- but not much more.</li><li>Which, after a summer of travel horror stories about canceled flights, lost luggage, hours-long security lines that fed our episode on <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/08/18/podcast-188-my-top-tips-to-survive-travel-chaos/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Podcast #188 — My Top Travel Tips to Survive Airport Chaos\">Top Tips to Avoid Travel Chaos</a>, I chalked it up to good luck and clean living or, what’s probably a more likely explanation, the airlines and airports are finally getting on the other side of the surprise snapback in leisure travel during a very tight labor market. Through Nashville, O’Hare, Frankfurt, even the Split airport -- 5-minute security lines at most, and on-time flights. In Italy, all our trains were on-time. And after all of that smooth travel, it wasn’t until our last day, for our flight home, that we got pulled up short. We walked into Terminal 3 at Rome’s Fiumicino airport and smack into a huge line. It took us a moment to figure out that the line wasn’t for us; it was the check-in line for Air Canada which seemed… weird. But no matter, we didn’t have to stand in it.&nbsp;</li><li>The next line, though, we did -- the separate security line for all direct flights to the US.&nbsp; We’ve talked in the past about how, post-9/11, direct international flights to the US tend to be segregated from the rest of the flights and put at the far end of departure terminals. That I’m used to. This was the first time, though, that I’ve seen a US-only security line. And on a Sunday morning at 9am, when everyone is there for the 10:30/11am bank of flights to the US. It tailed back almost the length of the terminal.&nbsp; But it kept moving. And when we made it up to the security area, we could see that they had every screening station manned and operational. We got through security and passport control in less than a half hour. Not world-class timing, but not anywhere near the summer horror stories.</li><li>I shouldn’t have been surprised at that US security line though because every place we went in Italy was jammed/crowded, mostly with Americans. It was revenge travel in action. I asked a few guys -- bartenders, shop owners, shuttle drivers -- how these October crowds compared to pre-pandemic. “It’s insane!” was the consensus. And I could feel it wearing on them. Even though all these people were giving them money, their patience seemed to be getting a little thin. Last year, last October when we were in Italy, in Puglia and Sicily, these same sort of folks were saying “Welcome! We’re so glad travelers are back!” This year? I think it’s a bit more like “when are you travelers <em>going </em>back… home?”</li><li>Bridge Music --  <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/snowflake/46164\">A Foolish Game</a> by Snowflake (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/snowflake/46164 Ft: Admiral Bob   </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I’m going to hold my thoughts about my Croatia and Italy trip for the next episode; do one of my stream-of-consciousness “Notes on a Location” topics. But I do want to follow up here on a couple of things from the last episode. First up, is <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/09/22/podcast-189-why-we-travel-when-the-first-flight-isnt-best/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Podcast #189 —  Why We Travel; When The First Flight Isn’t Best\">last episode’s</a> eSIM rant because, through watching with my travel companions and texting with Allan Marko, a long-time TravelCommons contributor, I sorta refined that rant, getting it down to two decision points.&nbsp;<ul><li>First, how much data do you expect to use? If you’re out of the US for a week or less, staying in a place with good WiFi, and can wait until the end of the day to do all your social media posting, you can probably be good with 5GB of data -- which gets you under T-Mobile’s non-throttled international data cap (which is what a couple of the folks traveling with me did), way under Google Fi’s 50 GB cap, and probably fits into a $15-20 eSIM from someone like aloSIM or Airalo. It’s the low-hassle solution. But for a longer stay, like my 3 week-er, or if you’re fully invested in building Instagram stories, like my wife, 5GB just isn’t going to cut it. I reset my iPhone data stats on the flight to Frankfurt and then looked at them as we were taxiing out to the runway in Rome. I used 77 GBs of data. Now, 11 GB was from hotspotting because the WiFi in our Florence Airbnb was pretty useless. But even pulling that out, 66 GBs is still a whackload of data. Which is probably because I didn’t really pay any attention to my data usage, because the Telecom Italia plan I was on gave me <em>600</em> GB of 5G data, essentially unlimited data, for $15. So while my T-Mobile-using companions were scrounging for a bar’s WiFi password to do Untappd check-ins, I was uploading pictures and refreshing my podcasts.</li><li>The second decision point&nbsp; -- do you need to make regular phone calls; do you need a local number? This is more and more of an edge case with people primarily texting, and when there was a specific need for a voice call, people rang me through WhatsApp and Telegram. But on this trip, I got us last-minute tables at a couple of good restaurants because I could call them over the regular phone network, something I couldn’t have done with a data-only eSIM. I’ve also run into the need for a local number when trying to register or create an account for an on-line service. My Telecom Italia SIM also came with a local Italian number and unlimited voice minutes.&nbsp;</li><li>So while I sharpened my thinking on this trip, my conclusion didn’t change. I know I’m an edge case -- I don’t want to have to think about data consumption and I want local phone service -- and until the in-country wireless carriers offer the same pre-paid plans on eSIMs that they do on physical SIMs, I’ll be keeping my phone with the SIM tray… and a straightened-out paper clip to pop it open.</li></ul></li><li>Second, following up to Kendra Kroll’s travel tip in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/09/22/podcast-189-why-we-travel-when-the-first-flight-isnt-best/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">the last episode</a> about knowing the names of cities in the local vernacular. Kendra talked about people missing their train stop because they didn’t realize that Florence, in Italian, is Firenze. So riding the train from Rome (Roma) to Florence (Firenze), I was on the lookout for this. All the train tickets used Italian city names -- Roma, Napoli, Firenze. But the signs on the platforms of the Florence train stations said “Florence”. Indeed, the real confusion wasn’t Florence vs Firenze, but which Florence train station to get off at. My group thought we had a direct train from downtown Rome&nbsp; (Roma Termini) to the downtown Florence station (Firenze Santa Maria Novella), so when the train stopped at a station with “Florence” in the sign, they all scrambled to get their bags and head for the station -- which would’ve left them hanging around in a suburban parking lot figuring out how get a ride downtown. So not only know the name of the city in the vernacular; know the full station name of your stop.</li><li>I mentioned earlier that the first leg of my trip was from BNA to ORD, and I was kinda surprised to realize that it was my first time in ORD in 10 months, since returning from the UK last November. Prior to moving down here to Nashville in July, I’d been flying Southwest out of Chicago Midway; easier to get to and Southwest fit my travel plans better. So as “Welcome Back,” I got the full ORD experience -- landing on the far north runway, which feels like it’s just short of the Wisconsin state line, with the requisite 20-min taxi to get within sight of the terminal. Then, just as you think you’re almost there, the plane stops across the road from the terminal and waits 5 minutes for a gate to open up. Then, once we get moving again, we take the scenic route, past all the American planes in Terminal 3 and the Delta planes in Terminal 2 until we finally get to the United terminal in Terminal 1. All told, at least 30 minutes from tires hitting the runway to the door opening and the agent saying “Welcome to ORD”. Yeah, thanks. Great to be back.</li><li>And in other “Great to be back” things, Irene and I used Lyft for the first time in forever to get home from the Nashville airport -- the wait time and the price were much lower than Uber; which is weird because I’d think, by now, the ride sharing market would be a bit more price efficient. But anyhow, Lyft is so excited to see me resurface in Nashville that the app is flooding my phone with notifications with ride offers and suggestions for things to do. Three days of this was enough to drive me into the hell that the iPhone Settings menu has become to figure out how to shut them up. Probably not the behavior Lyft was trying to prompt, but there you go.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/THE_CONCEPT_OF_ENERGY/55008\">ABANDONED BUTTERFLIES</a> by THE_CONCEPT_OF_ENERGY (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/THE_CONCEPT_OF_ENERGY/55008</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>My Travel Tech Stack</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Back to that problematic last leg of our trip -- the flight home to Nashville from Newark. I knew we had a lagging luggage problem even before we left the ground courtesy of the latest addition to my travel tech stack. I’d bought <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3k4rCUy\" title=\"\">Apple AirTags</a> just for this reason -- to track our luggage. When I had to check my bag on the Vueling flight from Split to Rome, I could see on my iPhone’s Find My app that my bag was on the plane; it looked almost right underneath me. But in Newark, my bag never left the terminal. Irene checked her app; same thing. As we taxied out, I took a screenshot showing the growing distance between me on the plane and my left-behind bag, and tweeted it out to United saying “I’m guessing I won’t be seeing my luggage in BNA.”&nbsp;</li><li>As I said earlier, I was pretty annoyed with United, but at least the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3k4rCUy\" title=\"\">AirTags</a> saved us the 30 minutes of suspense watching all the other bags come out. Instead, we went straight to the baggage service agent, filed our report, and headed home. And then, waking up the next morning, I could see that our bags made it on the late flight from Newark, and then could see them on the delivery truck heading to our flat. Saved a lot of agita.&nbsp;</li><li>It got me thinking back 6-7 years to <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/08/26/podcast-116-traveling-thru-japan-luggage-trends/\">the first wave</a> of <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/12/podcast-120-where-do-guidebooks-fit-in-i-hate-shopping-for-suitcases/\">smart luggage</a> -- Bluesmart, Away. I bought a Bluesmart bag off their Indiegogo campaign. Those bags also let you <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/05/30/podcast-121-tsa-lines-my-luggage-is-where/\">track their location</a>, along with charging your phone -- for about 2 years until <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">the airlines banned them</a>, or at least the ones with non-removable batteries. Those travel use cases haven’t changed -- “Where’s my bag?” and “I need to recharge my phone so I can rebook this canceled flight” -- but the tech has moved on -- replacing the smart bag with AirTags or Tile trackers and a <a href=\"https://amzn.to/34fcbON\" title=\"\">10,000 mAh battery pack</a>.</li><li>Long-time listener and Twitter follower @Ab3Fr0man pinged me during my summer move podcast pause with “question for the next podcast &gt;&gt; Are there any new devices or apps you are using for travel?” which is what got me spelunking through my travel tech stack, which then turned into a stroll through my past “What’s in My Briefcase” episodes. And what struck me was, other than the AirTags and a small phone tripod for video calls, it hasn’t been what I’ve added to my kit as much as what I’ve been able to take away.</li><li>The consolidation to HDMI for video seems to be just about done and that’s let me drop all the VGA cables and dongles I used to carry around just in case I ran into an old conference room projector or hotel TV.&nbsp; The slow and still in-progress consolidation to USB-C power supplies has let me do some subtraction by addition, dropping my MacBook Air power supply and an old dual USB-A charger for a single charger that’s smaller than either of them, a 100W gallium nitride charger that can charge my laptop, my phone, and my headphones all at once. Indeed, the only reason I still carry an old USB-A Apple Lightning cord is for plugging into the charging port on rental cars.&nbsp;</li><li>But the subtraction thing doesn’t always work. Last year, when we were traveling in Italy (Puglia and Sicily) for a couple of weeks, I wanted to leave the laptop home and run everything off my 8-inch Samsung tablet. That wouldn’t be a problem except for a couple of programs I run on my office PC, and I didn’t want to have to migrate to their cloud versions just for the trip. So instead I used Amazon Workspaces to set up a PC in the cloud. Not quite sure why I thought this would be easier. The Amazon setup was, let’s say, less than straightforward but I got it to work, and was able to run what I needed off my tablet, albeit a bit slower than usual. Getting ready for this last trip, I thought about it again, do I leave the laptop at home? Then I remembered the time sink the Amazon set up was, and tossed the laptop back into my backpack.</li><li>No new apps. Indeed, I tend to be brutal about deleting those I’m not using right now. I’ll download, say, the VRBO or Airbnb app when I need them for a trip and then dump them when I get home. I also just deleted the Clear app. I had a year free from some credit card and never used it. So I canceled it before they charged me for another year and deleted the app. Yelp is on the bubble right now. I also find myself using it less and less, just defaulting to Google Maps’ restaurant suggestions and ratings since I usually already have it open for directions.</li><li>The carriers’ apps continue to improve incrementally. I used to use an app that had maps of all the major airports, but found I was using it less and less as the carriers added similar maps to their apps. Indeed, while waiting to de-plane in EWR, I checked the United app and it had an animated step-by-step map showing the path from our arrival gate, through Customs, to our departure gate. Too bad the guys moving our luggage didn’t have the same map.&nbsp;</li><li>As I’ve mentioned in past episodes, I still use the free version of TripIt to consolidate all plane, train, hotel, and Airbnb confirmations into a single itinerary. I know Google Travel can do something similar if you live within the Google ecosystem, but I don’t so I use TripIt. TripIt keeps pushing their $50 Pro offering with real-time alerts and airport maps. I had the Pro offering once, but now I get all that stuff for free on the carrier apps. Now, if I <em>was</em> going to pop $50, I’d spend it on the Flighty app instead. I trialed Flighty back in the spring on a trip to Santa Fe and thought it was a great app. If I was still flying every week, it would be a no-brainer. Indeed, I’d figure out a way to expense the $250 lifetime membership and be done with it.&nbsp;</li><li>But the one piece of travel that’s been with me since the beginning and that continues to earn its keep -- a bottle opener. Even as craft beer has moved to cans, that stamped metal New Belgium bottle opener has saved the corner of many a hotel dresser.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/49674\">H2O</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/49674</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Imbibing for Introverts</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>When frequent travelers are on the road, we spend a lot of time alone -- in our hotel rooms, and in spite of the advice from a former colleague who wrote a book titled <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3Uba60n\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Never Eat Alone</a></em>, we do… a lot. So when I saw an upcoming book about drinking alone, it seemed a perfect fit for the podcast. So I reached out to the author, Jeff Cioletti, editor-in-chief of <a href=\"https://craftspiritsmag.com/\"><em>Craft Spirits Magazine</em></a>.<ul><li>Mark: Jeff, thanks for joining us on the TravelCommons podcast today. Your upcoming book…</li><li>Jeff: Technically the release date is November 15, I tried to get them early for an event on October 20, but they got held up on a freight train somewhere in the United States, so it\'s like…</li><li>Mark: That damn supply chain. So anyhow, your upcoming book, <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3sQelCQ\"><em>Imbibing for Introverts: A Guide to Social Drinking for the Anti-Social</em></a>.</em> Over the years on the TravelCommons podcast, we\'ve <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?s=solo+dining\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">talked many times</a> about <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/19/podcast-149-dining-single-airlines-need-to-tell-us-more/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">solo eating</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/05/12/table-for-one-eating-alone-on-the-road/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">eating alone on the road</a>, what you might call eating for introverts. So when I saw the title of your book, it mapped right into things that we\'ve been doing. And again, in past episodes, we\'ve talked about the best ways to eat alone and so, what are your pro tips for the best ways to drink alone?</li><li>Jeff: It depends on the venue; it just depends on what your objectives are. If you want to quietly contemplate what you\'re drinking; if you\'re in one of these high-end whiskey bars or a brandy bar or something like that; where you\'re sitting and you really want to just contemplate. Sometimes you just want to be present and just be in your thoughts, think about what you\'re drinking, think about its connection to the point of origin, that kind of thing. When you\'re drinking alone, probably more often than not you\'re going to be sitting at the bar. A lot of times they\'re going to give you a 2-top, but sometimes I feel bad about taking it up, especially when things are busy and I just want to sit at the bar.</li><li>Mark: When I started traveling, which was a long time ago, you’d end up in that same situation, at a 2-top or a 4-top and then you\'re the sad person sitting in the corner table because you were taking up revenue space. “Look, I got spots for two and you\'re only taking up one.”</li><li>Jeff: And I think that if you\'re not sitting in a corner, if you do get to sit at the bar, that\'s a great opportunity to strike up a conversation with the bartender. Sometimes it just happens organically. I don\'t know whether they feel like they need to talk to you because you\'re not with anybody and they feel bad for you. But one thing that I do find is when you order something in a way that shows you know what you\'re talking about -- like you\'re at the bar and you say give me a gin and tonic, if you don\'t really specify what gin you want, they may not have a really broad selection, but a lot of these more sort of mixology oriented bars, they\'re going to have a selection and a good way to start is “What kind of gin you have; do you have anything that\'s not juniper- forward?” -- bartenders can be really primed to geek out with somebody that they detect maybe as passionate about the things they drink as they are, as they are about the things they mix. So when you show an inkling of interest or knowledge related to that spirit or whatever ingredient you\'re putting in the cocktail, that may pique their interest a little bit and they might get a sense that this person knows what they’re talking about. I\'ve been in situations where that snowballs to a point where the bartender says, “Hey, by the way, I\'m entering a cocktail competition, this was my creation, I want you to try and tell me honestly what you think about it.” It\'s moments like this that present themselves. Not always, but you know, sometimes they do. Sometimes a bartender will also have a secret stash behind the bar, could be a rare whiskey that\'s on their list. Sometimes they will sneak you some of that. It\'s not going to necessarily be free, but they\'ll give you a pour of something that they\'re protecting and hoarding and not really giving to just anybody. So moments like that are good. It\'s not necessarily that you\'re being antisocial. It\'s sometimes conversations can create themselves organically and so that\'s why it\'s sometimes good to be alone and sit at the bar rather than at the table because no one\'s really going to be spending the time with you to do that.</li><li>Mark: Eating alone sitting at the bar, it used to be that you couldn\'t get much more than a bar snack menu at a bar. Nowadays, though, you can get a full menu at a bar and so I\'m always eating at the bar. You\'re right about the bartenders. You get blips of human interaction. I think usually the bartender is good for, I don\'t know, 3-4 quick interchanges. Obviously they got a job to do, so you’re not going to have an ongoing conversation with them, but they\'ll come by and if they think you\'re interested or you\'re an interesting person, you\'ll get blips. I don\'t know, it\'s either they think you\'re interesting or they’re taking pity on you. I\'m not quite sure which...  What drove you to write this book Imbibing for Introverts? What was the kernel on this one?</li><li>Jeff: I just been traveling a lot and I\'ve been doing a lot of solo travel, especially work-related stuff and, over time, I really just got comfortable in my own skin going out alone. It just became something I realized I actually enjoy my own company and it just came together in my head. One time I was sitting at a bar and I wasn\'t alone at the time. I was having a drink with a friend in a bar that I had often had a drink alone and I thought I\'d really love to do a book about just being an introvert and just enjoying being by yourself and drinking alone and normalizing that too because some people are just weird about going out alone.</li><li>Mark: When you do a lot of travel, you\'ve got to get comfortable with your own company because oftentimes that\'s it. You\'ve got clients, you\'ve got other people you\'re meeting and they\'re going home, they\'re going to coach their kid’s ballgame or do whatever. And if you don\'t get out of that hotel room, that hotel room turns into a cave after a while.</li><li>Jeff: And also sometimes you just want to decompress, especially when it is a work trip and you are having meetings. For instance, I got a lot of trade shows where I\'m just walking around the convention center going from booth to booth, talking to a person after person after person, always having to be on. Just having that energy, that kind of interpersonal energy, is frankly very exhausting. By the end of the day, after like seven or eight hours of doing that, sometimes you just want to be by yourself and you just want to quietly sip something in a place that\'s got the music\'s down low, it\'s a good mix that they\'re playing. It\'s low enough that you can hear yourself think, you can also eavesdrop on other people\'s conversations. That\'s kind of fun sometimes. A lot of people talk about people watching; I\'m more of a people listener because you can tell a lot more about a person by the conversations you hear than what they\'re wearing or what they look like.</li><li>Mark: Jeff, this has been great. I really appreciate it. I\'m looking forward to reading your book when it comes out. Jeff Cioletti, author of the new book, the upcoming book coming out November,<em> <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3sQelCQ\"><em>Imbibing for Introverts: A Guide to Social Drinking for the Anti-Social</em></a>.</em> Jeff, thanks very much for stopping by the TravelCommons podcast and chatting to us about drinking.</li><li>Jeff: Thank you so much for having me. This has been a lot of fun because it seems to be my people that listen to your podcasts.</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #190</li><li>I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. </li><li>And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>. And while you’re at TravelCommons.com, you can check out the show notes page for a transcript and any links I’ve mentioned. Or you can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page.</li><li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_190.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #190 — My Travel Tech Stack; Imbibing for Introverts','','inherit','closed','closed','','4208-revision-v1','','','2022-10-31 16:35:02','2022-10-31 21:35:02','',4208,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4221',0,'revision','',0),
(4223,1,'2022-10-31 16:42:21','2022-10-31 21:42:21','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/IMG_5006.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/IMG_5006-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Person standing in front of a wall with the message stenciled No Selfies\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> There Are Rules About Why We Travel[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Lots of different voices in this episode. Listeners adding to our list of travel tips, and conversations with <a href=\"http://shj.cs.illinois.edu/\">Dr. Sheldon Jacobson</a> about why one of those tips -- always catch the first flight out -- isn\'t always right, and <a href=\"https://www.workman.com/authors/patricia-schultz\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Patricia Schultz</a> about her new book, <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3BWnv6n\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Why We Travel: 100 Reasons to See the World</a></em>. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_189.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #189: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in the Gulch neighborhood of Nashville, TN. Not a whole lot of travel since the last episode. Was back in Chicago after almost 2 months away. As a tourist this time, staying in a hotel just off the Michigan Avenue Mag Mile strip, a neighborhood we’d actively avoid when we lived in Chicago -- too crowded, too many tourists. But now that <em>we are</em> tourists, maybe it fits a little better. We ended up here more out of convenience than anything else. It was the furthest north in the city that I could find a place to burn off some Marriott points.&nbsp;</li><li>It’s been another month where I’ve spent more time planning travel than doing it; stitching together the itinerary for an almost 3-week trip -- Nashville, connecting through Chicago (‘cause I’m no longer in a hub city) and Frankfurt, to Split, Croatia; then over to Rome and a train to Naples to get to Positano; then back to Naples for a few days; then to Rome; then to Florence; then back down to Rome to fly home by way of Newark. That looks kinda silly just typing it out. TripIt ended up being a very valuable tool. I forwarded all the various confirmation emails to it, and it did a damn good job of sequencing everything into a single itinerary, which helped me spot holes where I’d screwed up, say, a departure date or had just completely forgot about a trip leg.&nbsp; But it’s all done; I leave next week. And writing this episode is giving me another good excuse to put off thinking about packing -- 3 weeks in a carryon. “Has a washing machine” might’ve been my most critical Airbnb search criteria.</li><li>Bridge Music --  <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/48915\">Like Music (cdk Mix</a>) by Analog By Nature (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/48915 Ft: Phasenwandler  </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Yup, we have mail … and comments.</li><li>Let’s start with two comments on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">TravelCommons Facebook page</a>. First up, Jim McDonough tagged the post for <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/05/26/podcast-187-moving-to-a-non-hub-airport-what-makes-a-great-taproom/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Podcast #187 — Moving to a Non-Hub Airport; What Makes A Great Taproom?\">episode #187</a> with his experience moving to a non-hub airport. Jim writes…<ul><li>“We moved from a hub (DFW, 7 parallel runways plus one other) to a non-hub (SAN, 1 runway). Clearly we were tied to American at DFW (both lifetime Gold), and there really is no single dominant carrier at SAN. We do have some sneaky long non-stops from here, though, like to Hawaii, London, Munich, Boston, New York. None of these on American, though. We are trending towards Alaska Airlines, which has pretty good service and Boeing airplanes, and if there\'s an Admirals Club around we can use it flying Alaska. I was among the people who switched to cash-back credit cards during the pandemic when no flying was happening, but I\'m rethinking that position with an eye to using miles to go places.”</li><li>Jim, thanks for that. The American-Alaska relationship has always been good for West Coast fliers. I remember, years ago, flying Alaska from Long Beach up the coast to San Jose. I could never figure out why Alaska was flying that route, but it was handy with my American status.</li></ul></li><li>Next up, Thelma Smith adding a travel tip to the post for last month’s episode<ul><li>“Good episode. I don’t travel a lot but one thing I do is if I have to check a bag I use the sky cap. I don’t have to be lugging anything through the airport and the cash comes in handy to tip them.”</li><li>Thanks, Thelma, for that tip. I\'m a big sky cap fan when I have to check a bag -- like when I’m loaded up from a big wine country trip -- and, yes, cash is absolutely required for their tip!</li></ul></li><li>Moving to the TravelCommons website, Geoff Slater left this comment<ul><li>“Excellent return podcast! A very frequent traveler, I agreed with everything. A quibble however was the advice to take a nonstop. While I don’t disagree, I fly in and out of Burlington, VT, so that’s rarely an option. So for me, I also consider my options for connecting airports. As a United flier, Denver in the summer when it’s an option, and then IAD, and trying to avoid EWR. Getting a bit more esoteric for the non-frequent flier, I also consider plane type. And with United 1K status, I also take advantage of the same day change to avoid weather problems.”</li><li>Geoff, thanks for the comments. Kinda back to my pre-break episode about moving from to a non-hub airport -- most of your direct flight options are to hubs like DEN and IAD. Your strategy on hub selection is smart; pick hubs off by themselves with long well-separated runways. When I was doing work in north Jersey, we used to joke that anyone spitting on a runway at EWR would mean an hour delay; the runways are too close together to allow parallel take-offs and landings in all but the best of weather. Your comment about plane type -- rather than esoteric, I think it’s more of a graduate-level flight planning tip. The first cut is regional jet vs. main-line jet. I’ll always pick the, say, United Airbus 319 over the American Eagle Embraer. Making a choice between main-line jets can be a bit more subtle; different fliers will make different trade-offs between size -- flights with smaller capacity jets might be sacrificed when storms reduce flight slots but they’re quicker to get out of if a delay has tightened your connection. Again, graduate-level linear programming optimization algorithms for flight planning.</li></ul></li><li>On Twitter, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/PortaPocketGal\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Kendra Kroll</a> offered up a travel tip<ul><li>“Know names of cities in local vernacular. I\'ll never forget when folks on our Southbound train to Rome missed their stop by several hours as they didn\'t realize Firenze = Florence!”</li><li>Ouch! That’s a good tip; probably a next-level version of my <em>Know Your Geography</em> tip. For extra credit, be able to recognize your destination in the local non-Latin alphabet. I was in Tokyo back right before they moved the old Tsukiji Fish Market. The morning after I arrived, I was up early with jet lag and so walked over to the market. Someone had recommended a small sushi joint there, so I went looking for it. The recommendation gave the name in Latin characters but the signs in the market were only in Kanji. I eventually found a guy at an information desk who gave me directions to the place, but something to keep in mind when I travel to, say, Greece or Georgia -- the country, not the state.</li></ul></li><li>And finally, Aaron Woodlin responded to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1564695213217648642\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">my re-tweet of an ORD TSA post</a> with a picture of what one passenger pulled out of their carry-on and put in a bin to pass through the X-ray machine -- a meat cleaver, a couple of knives, a couple of saws… Somebody who’s definitely unclear on the concept of “no sharp objects in your carry-on.” Aaron’s cut -<ul><li>“What I really don\'t get are people who don\'t keep their range bags and carry-on luggage separate, and end up unintentionally packing heat at the checkpoint.&nbsp; If you can afford plane fare, guns and ammo, you can spring for separate bags!”</li><li>Range bag, tool box… I can just imagine being the TSA guy shaking his head as the image of a bin full of knives and saws comes across the monitor. The guy is aware enough to know that you need to pull metal stuff out of your bag, but not hip to the fact of why. And now you’re the TSA guy who has to explain it all to him.&nbsp;</li></ul></li><li>And as always, thanks to all of you for the comments! Some great stuff here.</li><li>I think I’ve mentioned in prior episodes that I’m on Apple’s iPhone upgrade plan. Every year I get the new phone, send in my old one, and it resets the payment clock. Kinda like leasing a car but with lower monthly payments. Anyhow, a few weeks back, I’m scrubbing through Apple’s hour-and-a-half long announcement video -- skip all the Apple Watch stuff, slow down on the new AirPods, and then settle in for the iPhone 14 walk through. Nothing earth-shaking; I’m liking the new purple color. But then, as they were wrapping up, I had a record-scratch moment -- no SIM tray! What, what? Yup, for US iPhones, no more SIM tray; it’s all internal eSIMs! Isn’t that great? No more searching for a paper clip to pop out the tray, losing the little nano-SIM, …. No, it’s <em>not</em> great, at least for those of us who travel internationally. I’ve talked many times over the years about using local SIMs. Most recently, in episode #181, I talked about, at the start of our Puglia bike trip, spending 15 minutes and $25 in a Telecom Italia store for a SIM that gave me a local phone number (very handy for restaurant reservations) and <em>70 GB</em> of data. And now next week, all I have to do is load some money onto that SIM through the Telecom Italia website, and I’m good to go when I connect thru Frankfurt, and land in Croatia and Italy. But what about an eSIM? I couldn’t find any mainline Italian mobile carrier that offered a prepaid eSIM. Same with the UK. When I <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1567661384875347969\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">bitch-tweeted about this</a>, <a href=\"https://alosim.com/\">aloSIM</a>, a company that sells eSIMs for many countries, quickly responded “Well, our Italy eSIM data packages start at $4.50 for a week of data…” I hit their website. Their $4.50/week gives 1 GB of data. For an extra 50¢, I can get 10x that -- 10 GB of data for $5/week. I <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1567856046328135683\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">tweeted that back</a>. As you might guess, no response from aloSIM’s social media team. So, I’ve dropped off the iPhone upgrade wheel. I know I’m an edge case, and I think this could accelerate the push toward eSIMs. But like when Apple dropped the headphone jack, I think they’re 12-18 months ahead of the curve for frequent international travelers and I need something that works <em>today</em>, where the curve is right now. So I’ll wait a bit, like TravelCommons listener Jerry Sarfati who said he’s waiting for the “iPhone 15… with a USB-C charger.” I really hope it comes in purple too.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/spinmeister/53428\">Somewhere</a> by spinmeister (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/spinmeister/53428 Ft: DJ Vadim </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>When <em>Not </em>To Take the First Flight Out</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Moving to the mail portion of the episode, a day after I published <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/08/18/podcast-188-my-top-tips-to-survive-travel-chaos/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Podcast #188 —  My Top Travel Tips to Survive Airport Chaos\">the last episode</a>, I saw an email in the TravelCommons inbox with the subject “Is the first flight of the day still the best one? No. – air travel scientist for interviews.” This caught my eye because the 5th of the 13 tips to avoid airport chaos I’d <em>just </em>published was “catch the earliest flight you can”. So I replied to the email “Tell me why I’m wrong!”</li><li>Which led to this conversation with <a href=\"http://shj.cs.illinois.edu/\">Dr. Sheldon Jacobson</a>, Professor in Computer Science at the University of Illinois. Over the years, Dr. Jacobson has done projects using operations research models to optimize aviation security. But most recently, he <a href=\"https://www.chicagotribune.com/opinion/commentary/ct-opinion-travel-delays-flight-bookings-pandemic-20220830-p64ax3a74vaxnnzqwts4nel3cy-story.html\">wrote about</a> how the received frequent flier wisdom about catching the first flight out might not always be right. So I started our discussion asking him “Where did I get it wrong?”<ul><li>Sheldon: When you\'re flying in and out of hub airports, conventional wisdom is, in fact, correct. You do want to take the first flight of the day because at a hub airport, there\'s a lot more flexibility once a plane arrives at the end of the day. It\'s going to be cleaned, it\'s going to be maintained. Its gonna be fresh for the new day. If it turns out that some of the crew members become unavailable, you have alternatives because so many people have bases. So, this is in Chicago and Dallas for American, For United, you also have Washington Dulles as well as Chicago. For Delta, of course, it\'s Atlanta, Minneapolis, Detroit. So that\'s a great strategy. But what if you\'re not in a hub airport and that\'s when things start to get more nuanced. And the best way to think of this is that every airplane as well as every crew when they fly from city to city, they are a link in a chain. At the end of the day, you think, “Okay, the chain ends.” Actually, it doesn\'t. because the first flight of the day is the connection and the link from the last flight of the previous day. And all of this comes out and starts to impact that decision of the first flight of the day. Because if that flight comes in late, remember the last flight of the day, that\'s going to be the first flight out of a regional airport. So as a result of that, you actually want to take the second flight of the day out of a regional airport or a smaller large airport. That\'s the best strategy when it comes to these secondary and tertiary airports.</li><li>Mark: Actually, what you\'ve said, I\'ve seen that happen in smaller regional airports, say Lexington Kentucky, Appleton, Wisconsin, where that first flight of the day is not on the ground, so it\'s got to come in from a hub. Is there a split where, say, larger non-hub airports, the conventional wisdom still holds? Say where I am now in Nashville, or something like in Indianapolis? Where do those fall as far as the conventional wisdom on catching the first flight out?</li><li>Sheldon: Yes, certainly when you come to Nashville, Indianapolis, Columbus,&nbsp; Ohio, Pittsburgh,&nbsp; Pennsylvania -- some of these have been de-hubbed over the years. You\'re getting into a point that you have a lot of choices available. So then it becomes a little more nuanced because you could book the first flight on, let\'s say American and that one may have difficulties because that plane came in overnight and it was delayed because of storms in Chicago. But on the other hand, if there are options on Delta which are coming from Atlanta where there were not storms, you can always then get switched over for it. So when you get into those middle airports, they\'re not full hubs, but they\'re not the small regionals that have two flights a day, then it becomes a little more nuanced. And then you start to look across airlines as opposed to just within the airline.</li><li>Mark: Now if we pivot just slightly and think about different types of airlines. So if I think about hub-centric airlines, like the traditional United, American, Delta versus, say, a Southwest, which I\'ve joked in the past feels like they\'re running milk runs across the country. So there\'s not necessarily a hub, just that plane is running a line. Is there a difference between those two types of airlines on that first flight out?</li><li>Sheldon: There is, for a variety of reasons. With Southwest, they\'re trying to pack as many segments or links per day for every airplane. That\'s how they stay profitable. Their turn times are tremendous, but it also makes them more vulnerable to any kind of mechanical or weather delays or air traffic control slowdowns because they don\'t have the slack built into their system in their links. As a result of that, when you get to the end of the day, they still have to abide by the FAA regulations in terms of crew rest. And the question is, even though they are in some sense of point to point airline, they have areas of the country that have a concentration of flights like Dallas Love for example, like Chicago, like Baltimore-Washington, where they traditionally had a lot of flights. So you do have to look then, even though they aren\'t traditional hubs, they operate similarly. Where is the crew located; where they choosing to live? And that\'s an important component because when you\'re trying to reschedule because of delays, the flight that you\'re going to take out at 6 am may have come from a city where the plane only arrived at midnight. The flight crew needs the rest. They will not be able to leave on time. But if you switch crews and you have the flexibility because you have a sufficient number of crew members. It solves the problem. Is that going to exist in your city? So even though Southwest doesn\'t have the traditional hub and spoke system, they have airports that, in some sense, act like their hubs.</li><li>Mark: Sheldon, how much of this do you think is a function of the current tight labor market that airlines say they\'re operating in?</li><li>Sheldon: Now the situation we\'re in, which was brought on by COVID, of course, meant that they had a tremendous amount of layoffs and looking down the road, they were trying to survive financially. And now they\'re in a situation where they have to rehire but retrain all of these pilots. People think “Oh, you haven\'t flown for 8 months, 9 months? We’ll just put you in a cockpit and you’re fine.” It doesn\'t work that way. Once you\'ve been off for 6 months, it\'s as if you\'ve never flown. You still have the 1,500 hours which are required to fly, but you get rusty. And the pilots themselves say “I\'m really not as comfortable as I used to be,” especially on landings, which is the most critical activity that they do once they\'re in flight, it\'s pretty much status quo. Taking off is reasonably straightforward, but landing is the tricky part. And they just feel a little less comfortable unless they have the training. And the fact is they want to be safe as much as the passengers and the airline\'s want them to be safe. Getting these people back in the cockpit training and they have so many flight simulators. So much training that needs to be gone through. This is a non-trivial process.</li><li>Mark: Sheldon, thank you very much for that. That\'s very helpful. Any last thought, any last tips as people are looking to navigate through the back end of the summer season and into the holiday flying; things that you use to avoid airport chaos?</li><li>Sheldon: Well, we\'ve just now entered the post-summer/fall travel period and I check the numbers daily in terms of screenings at TSA checkpoints and the numbers are trying to come down, which means that there\'s gonna be a lot less stress and strain on the system. The airlines are starting to ramp up their schedules. I\'ve booked some things out for later in the fall and they\'re already changing the schedules. So, I know that they\'re starting to add more flights and more opportunities for people. For the holiday travel season this year, Christmas and New Year\'s fall on a Sunday. And that means that people are going to be traveling on Friday and Saturday. If you can travel on Thursday or Wednesday, you may find it a lot less taxing. So, thinking a little bit ahead in that regard may be very helpful. You can\'t predict weather storms, a nor’easter is going through, you know, it’s late in the year. The other strategy that I\'ve used because I\'ve mostly lived in non-hub cities is that there\'s always been a dominant airline and a non-dominant airline. And the strategy I\'ve always used is to always become loyal to the non-dominant airline. And the reason being is that when the non-dominant airline had problems, they were always gracious to put you on the dominant airline, which had much more choices. And as a result, I rarely got stuck because if I was on the dominant airline, trying to find a plane on the non-dominant one was much more difficult to get the seats available</li><li>Mark: That\'s an interesting strategy. Kind of counterintuitive, but as you explain it, it makes sense.</li><li>Sheldon: I have never gotten stuck because by flying the non-dominant, even out of a hub airport. You think of a place like Detroit where they have Delta as the dominant airline. If you fly American out of there, the people are working extra hard to get your business. And as a result of that, I\'ve always found service is better in the non-dominant airline, even in the hub cities where they\'re competing.</li><li>Mark: That\'s a good tip. Thanks for that Sheldon. Dr. Sheldon, Jacobson at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. Thank you very much for joining us on the TravelCommons podcast.</li><li>Sheldon: Thank you. It\'s wonderful to be with you.</li></ul></li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/scottaltham/20747\"> Hear Us Now (poptastic mix)</a> by Scott Altham (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/scottaltham/20747</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Why We Travel</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Some years ago, on some milestone birthday (I’m not saying which), my kids gave me the book <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3DHoiJC\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">1,000 Places to See Before You Die</a></em>. Hmm… was there a message somewhere in that gift? Not that they would admit. But it was a fun book flip through -- to remind me of past trips and give me ideas of places to go next. So when the TravelCommons inbox offered up an opportunity to interview the author, <a href=\"http://1000Places.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Patricia Schultz</a>, about her new book, I jumped at it.<ul><li>Mark: Patricia, thanks for joining us on the TravelCommons podcast. Your new book is <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3BWnv6n\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Why We Travel: 100 Reasons to See the World</a></em>. That topic -- why we travel -- has been a common one here on TravelCommons; how travel expands our horizons, our perspectives, helps us connect with others and with ourselves as we lose ourselves in the “otherness” of a new place. So Patricia, help us. What\'s your take on why we travel?</li><li>Patricia: Well, I used this period of the pandemic to have that conversation with myself. This moment of COVID allowed me this unprecedented moment where suddenly I was very stationary. I thought it was very important for me, as a travel writer, to reassess all over again the importance of travel. But the “why” needs to be kept very forefront, so that we have that appreciation, and we understand that we\'re privileged and it\'s an honor and it\'s something that you need to travel meaningfully and not just on automatic pilot. And I think first and foremost it\'s, for me, it\'s food for my soul. And as you said, it opens our perspectives and it opens our heads, it opens our hearts. You mentioned connecting with other people. That\'s part of opening your heart with that exchange with your Uber driver or your guide or the lady in the open-air market who’s selling her tomatoes and whoever you have that moment with. It’s all the people along the way that you meet and accrue and collect all of these experiences that are life lessons. Not just the logistics and the details of trip planning, but life lessons as they pertain to what you bring home with you and how you deal with life and how you\'ve become more resourceful and the “daily-ness” of life is dealt with in a different way. I know I\'m more tolerant. I know I\'m more respectful in general. I know that I\'m more curious and that\'s what gets you out the front door at the end of the day, which is often usually the most difficult part of all of this -- getting going.</li><li>Mark: Absolutely. Patricia, the book is a great mix of beautiful photos and quotes about travel. Definitely a book that you need to have in your hand rather than on your tablet. What was your curation process? How did you pick the pictures and the quotes that went into the book?</li><li>Patricia: I\'m so glad that you touched on that because I myself thought that a book that seemingly this simplistic would just kind of write itself.</li><li>Mark: It\'s never that simple though. Right?</li><li>Patricia: No. One of the quotes I used is by Beverly Sills, the great operatic singer, who said there are no shortcuts to any place worth going to or anything worth doing, I might add as a postscript, and writing one of them. But the photos, which are not mine I\'m sorry to say, they\'re colorful and they\'re energetic and they\'re vibrant and there\'s a great sense of place and excitement to them, I think. And that\'s what we were aiming for to have this book, everything, kind of jump off the page at you because that\'s part of the message, the message of how exciting and exhilarating travel can be and then to match it with the appropriate message. The message that is embodied in a quotation or in an aphorism or in a list that I make up or in an anecdote that matches what the photograph recounts. So, it all was a real departure for me because my books until now have just been a kind of encyclopedia of 1,000 places around the world. But that same broad, comprehensive mix of experience and geography and message and importance of travel that I tried to infuse throughout <em>1,000 Places</em> is the same mix that I tried to embed in every aphorism and in every photo and in the sequence of the book. It\'s not a big book. It\'s a hardcover book. It\'s not oversized and it\'s not all that many pages; it\'s somewhere over 100 pages. But there\'s a lot that can be said because travel means many, many, many different things to many different people. But at the end of the day, it makes us better people and that\'s kind of Period, Amen!</li><li>Mark: And it\'s certainly more focused, as you said, on inspiring people to travel, to pull their bag out from under their bed rather than a tour guide\'s list of where to go, or some expert’s advice on how to pack that bag. But some might see this collide with the ethics, the concern about climate change. How do you square that circle?</li><li>Patricia: If you travel with respect and with that, conviction to see the world for all the right places, and not because you\'re checking off countries or you\'re filling empty time. But if you want to experience another culture and bring those experiences home with you, ultimately, probably the best thing we can hope to take away from travel is that when we return to our homes, we are equipped to make your best life for yourself and your neighbors and your community and the world at large. And also, the very notion that travel isn\'t inherently international or a 12-hour long haul flight to get you to the other side of the world. You know, you can walk out your front door and walk around the block in midtown Manhattan where I live and that\'s travel enough for many people. The people watching, the theater of the street or filling your car or charging your car and taking that road trip to the local state park. So, there are all kinds of ways that you can easily accommodate all of those concerns if you travel well. And I don\'t mean five-star deluxe and I don\'t mean remote dream destinations of Mongolia and Africa, although those are all pretty fantastic as well. Travel well in that you really maximize the time made available to you and the money that\'s in your budget. But I think you just need to go with the right head and the right head to me has always meant curiosity and respect. And if that\'s the case then you will travel respectfully, and you will address climate change in a way that as an individual we can.</li><li>Mark: Fantastic. Well, Patricia Schultz, author of the new book <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3S61BDa\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Why We Travel: 100 Reasons to See the World</a></em>. Patricia, thanks for stopping by the TravelCommons podcast to give us your thoughts on why we should travel. Really appreciate the time.</li><li>Patricia: Thank you very much. Thank you for having me.</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #189</li><li>A little change of pace; a lot less of my voice and more of others. I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. </li><li>And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>. And while you’re at TravelCommons.com, you can check out the show notes page for a transcript and any links I’ve mentioned. Or you can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page.</li><li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_189.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #189 — Why We Travel; When The First Flight Isn\'t Best','Lots of different voices - listeners adding to our list of travel tips, Dr. Sheldon Jacobson on why one of our tips isn\'t always right, and Patricia Schultz on her new book \"Why We Travel\"','inherit','closed','closed','','4192-revision-v1','','','2022-10-31 16:42:21','2022-10-31 21:42:21','',4192,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4223',0,'revision','',0),
(4224,1,'2022-10-31 16:44:41','2022-10-31 21:44:41','[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/malort_face-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Malort bottle and a cow skull\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /> My Drinking Buddy Is The Quiet Type[/caption]\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Back behind the mic after 3 week of travel in Croatia and Italy.  The trip went amazingly well up to the last leg, when United\'s Newark team couldn\'t get our bags on our plane. But, I\'d stuffed <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3k4rCUy\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Apple AirTags</a> into our luggage, so we were able to track their movements \'til they got home. That experience and a listener\'s tweet led to me re-visiting my travel tech stack. We then talk to Jeff Cioletti, author of the new book <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3sQelCQ\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Imbibing for Introverts</a></em>, about the art of drinking alone. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_190.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #190: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Happy Halloween! Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN. Finally got my body back on Central Time after 3 weeks in Europe that started in Split, Croatia and then ran up the Italian peninsula -- Amalfi Coast, Naples, Rome, Florence -- and then back down to Rome to fly home. And for a trip about a dozen potential points of failure between all the flights, the trains, and the Airbnb’s, it all went pretty smoothly except for the final leg -- the EWR-BNA flight home, where United somehow couldn’t manage to get our luggage on our plane. But by then, it wasn’t critical -- just suitcases of dirty clothes and some bottles of wine and limoncello. And United delivered them to us the next afternoon -- just in time for us to start doing laundry. Annoying, yes -- but not much more.</li><li>Which, after a summer of travel horror stories about canceled flights, lost luggage, hours-long security lines that fed our episode on <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/08/18/podcast-188-my-top-tips-to-survive-travel-chaos/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Podcast #188 — My Top Travel Tips to Survive Airport Chaos\">Top Tips to Avoid Travel Chaos</a>, I chalked it up to good luck and clean living or, what’s probably a more likely explanation, the airlines and airports are finally getting on the other side of the surprise snapback in leisure travel during a very tight labor market. Through Nashville, O’Hare, Frankfurt, even the Split airport -- 5-minute security lines at most, and on-time flights. In Italy, all our trains were on-time. And after all of that smooth travel, it wasn’t until our last day, for our flight home, that we got pulled up short. We walked into Terminal 3 at Rome’s Fiumicino airport and smack into a huge line. It took us a moment to figure out that the line wasn’t for us; it was the check-in line for Air Canada which seemed… weird. But no matter, we didn’t have to stand in it.&nbsp;</li><li>The next line, though, we did -- the separate security line for all direct flights to the US.&nbsp; We’ve talked in the past about how, post-9/11, direct international flights to the US tend to be segregated from the rest of the flights and put at the far end of departure terminals. That I’m used to. This was the first time, though, that I’ve seen a US-only security line. And on a Sunday morning at 9am, when everyone is there for the 10:30/11am bank of flights to the US. It tailed back almost the length of the terminal.&nbsp; But it kept moving. And when we made it up to the security area, we could see that they had every screening station manned and operational. We got through security and passport control in less than a half hour. Not world-class timing, but not anywhere near the summer horror stories.</li><li>I shouldn’t have been surprised at that US security line though because every place we went in Italy was jammed/crowded, mostly with Americans. It was revenge travel in action. I asked a few guys -- bartenders, shop owners, shuttle drivers -- how these October crowds compared to pre-pandemic. “It’s insane!” was the consensus. And I could feel it wearing on them. Even though all these people were giving them money, their patience seemed to be getting a little thin. Last year, last October when we were in Italy, in Puglia and Sicily, these same sort of folks were saying “Welcome! We’re so glad travelers are back!” This year? I think it’s a bit more like “when are you travelers <em>going </em>back… home?”</li><li>Bridge Music --  <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/snowflake/46164\">A Foolish Game</a> by Snowflake (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/snowflake/46164 Ft: Admiral Bob   </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I’m going to hold my thoughts about my Croatia and Italy trip for the next episode; do one of my stream-of-consciousness “Notes on a Location” topics. But I do want to follow up here on a couple of things from the last episode. First up, is <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/09/22/podcast-189-why-we-travel-when-the-first-flight-isnt-best/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Podcast #189 —  Why We Travel; When The First Flight Isn’t Best\">last episode’s</a> eSIM rant because, through watching with my travel companions and texting with Allan Marko, a long-time TravelCommons contributor, I sorta refined that rant, getting it down to two decision points.&nbsp;<ul><li>First, how much data do you expect to use? If you’re out of the US for a week or less, staying in a place with good WiFi, and can wait until the end of the day to do all your social media posting, you can probably be good with 5GB of data -- which gets you under T-Mobile’s non-throttled international data cap (which is what a couple of the folks traveling with me did), way under Google Fi’s 50 GB cap, and probably fits into a $15-20 eSIM from someone like aloSIM or Airalo. It’s the low-hassle solution. But for a longer stay, like my 3 week-er, or if you’re fully invested in building Instagram stories, like my wife, 5GB just isn’t going to cut it. I reset my iPhone data stats on the flight to Frankfurt and then looked at them as we were taxiing out to the runway in Rome. I used 77 GBs of data. Now, 11 GB was from hotspotting because the WiFi in our Florence Airbnb was pretty useless. But even pulling that out, 66 GBs is still a whackload of data. Which is probably because I didn’t really pay any attention to my data usage, because the Telecom Italia plan I was on gave me <em>600</em> GB of 5G data, essentially unlimited data, for $15. So while my T-Mobile-using companions were scrounging for a bar’s WiFi password to do Untappd check-ins, I was uploading pictures and refreshing my podcasts.</li><li>The second decision point&nbsp; -- do you need to make regular phone calls; do you need a local number? This is more and more of an edge case with people primarily texting, and when there was a specific need for a voice call, people rang me through WhatsApp and Telegram. But on this trip, I got us last-minute tables at a couple of good restaurants because I could call them over the regular phone network, something I couldn’t have done with a data-only eSIM. I’ve also run into the need for a local number when trying to register or create an account for an on-line service. My Telecom Italia SIM also came with a local Italian number and unlimited voice minutes.&nbsp;</li><li>So while I sharpened my thinking on this trip, my conclusion didn’t change. I know I’m an edge case -- I don’t want to have to think about data consumption and I want local phone service -- and until the in-country wireless carriers offer the same pre-paid plans on eSIMs that they do on physical SIMs, I’ll be keeping my phone with the SIM tray… and a straightened-out paper clip to pop it open.</li></ul></li><li>Second, following up to Kendra Kroll’s travel tip in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/09/22/podcast-189-why-we-travel-when-the-first-flight-isnt-best/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">the last episode</a> about knowing the names of cities in the local vernacular. Kendra talked about people missing their train stop because they didn’t realize that Florence, in Italian, is Firenze. So riding the train from Rome (Roma) to Florence (Firenze), I was on the lookout for this. All the train tickets used Italian city names -- Roma, Napoli, Firenze. But the signs on the platforms of the Florence train stations said “Florence”. Indeed, the real confusion wasn’t Florence vs Firenze, but which Florence train station to get off at. My group thought we had a direct train from downtown Rome&nbsp; (Roma Termini) to the downtown Florence station (Firenze Santa Maria Novella), so when the train stopped at a station with “Florence” in the sign, they all scrambled to get their bags and head for the station -- which would’ve left them hanging around in a suburban parking lot figuring out how get a ride downtown. So not only know the name of the city in the vernacular; know the full station name of your stop.</li><li>I mentioned earlier that the first leg of my trip was from BNA to ORD, and I was kinda surprised to realize that it was my first time in ORD in 10 months, since returning from the UK last November. Prior to moving down here to Nashville in July, I’d been flying Southwest out of Chicago Midway; easier to get to and Southwest fit my travel plans better. So as “Welcome Back,” I got the full ORD experience -- landing on the far north runway, which feels like it’s just short of the Wisconsin state line, with the requisite 20-min taxi to get within sight of the terminal. Then, just as you think you’re almost there, the plane stops across the road from the terminal and waits 5 minutes for a gate to open up. Then, once we get moving again, we take the scenic route, past all the American planes in Terminal 3 and the Delta planes in Terminal 2 until we finally get to the United terminal in Terminal 1. All told, at least 30 minutes from tires hitting the runway to the door opening and the agent saying “Welcome to ORD”. Yeah, thanks. Great to be back.</li><li>And in other “Great to be back” things, Irene and I used Lyft for the first time in forever to get home from the Nashville airport -- the wait time and the price were much lower than Uber; which is weird because I’d think, by now, the ride sharing market would be a bit more price efficient. But anyhow, Lyft is so excited to see me resurface in Nashville that the app is flooding my phone with notifications with ride offers and suggestions for things to do. Three days of this was enough to drive me into the hell that the iPhone Settings menu has become to figure out how to shut them up. Probably not the behavior Lyft was trying to prompt, but there you go.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/THE_CONCEPT_OF_ENERGY/55008\">ABANDONED BUTTERFLIES</a> by THE_CONCEPT_OF_ENERGY (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/THE_CONCEPT_OF_ENERGY/55008</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>My Travel Tech Stack</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Back to that problematic last leg of our trip -- the flight home to Nashville from Newark. I knew we had a lagging luggage problem even before we left the ground courtesy of the latest addition to my travel tech stack. I’d bought <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3k4rCUy\" title=\"\">Apple AirTags</a> just for this reason -- to track our luggage. When I had to check my bag on the Vueling flight from Split to Rome, I could see on my iPhone’s Find My app that my bag was on the plane; it looked almost right underneath me. But in Newark, my bag never left the terminal. Irene checked her app; same thing. As we taxied out, I took a screenshot showing the growing distance between me on the plane and my left-behind bag, and tweeted it out to United saying “I’m guessing I won’t be seeing my luggage in BNA.”&nbsp;</li><li>As I said earlier, I was pretty annoyed with United, but at least the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3k4rCUy\" title=\"\">AirTags</a> saved us the 30 minutes of suspense watching all the other bags come out. Instead, we went straight to the baggage service agent, filed our report, and headed home. And then, waking up the next morning, I could see that our bags made it on the late flight from Newark, and then could see them on the delivery truck heading to our flat. Saved a lot of agita.&nbsp;</li><li>It got me thinking back 6-7 years to <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/08/26/podcast-116-traveling-thru-japan-luggage-trends/\">the first wave</a> of <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/12/podcast-120-where-do-guidebooks-fit-in-i-hate-shopping-for-suitcases/\">smart luggage</a> -- Bluesmart, Away. I bought a Bluesmart bag off their Indiegogo campaign. Those bags also let you <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/05/30/podcast-121-tsa-lines-my-luggage-is-where/\">track their location</a>, along with charging your phone -- for about 2 years until <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">the airlines banned them</a>, or at least the ones with non-removable batteries. Those travel use cases haven’t changed -- “Where’s my bag?” and “I need to recharge my phone so I can rebook this canceled flight” -- but the tech has moved on -- replacing the smart bag with AirTags or Tile trackers and a <a href=\"https://amzn.to/34fcbON\" title=\"\">10,000 mAh battery pack</a>.</li><li>Long-time listener and Twitter follower @Ab3Fr0man pinged me during my summer move podcast pause with “question for the next podcast &gt;&gt; Are there any new devices or apps you are using for travel?” which is what got me spelunking through my travel tech stack, which then turned into a stroll through my past “What’s in My Briefcase” episodes. And what struck me was, other than the AirTags and a small phone tripod for video calls, it hasn’t been what I’ve added to my kit as much as what I’ve been able to take away.</li><li>The consolidation to HDMI for video seems to be just about done and that’s let me drop all the VGA cables and dongles I used to carry around just in case I ran into an old conference room projector or hotel TV.&nbsp; The slow and still in-progress consolidation to USB-C power supplies has let me do some subtraction by addition, dropping my MacBook Air power supply and an old dual USB-A charger for a single charger that’s smaller than either of them, a 100W gallium nitride charger that can charge my laptop, my phone, and my headphones all at once. Indeed, the only reason I still carry an old USB-A Apple Lightning cord is for plugging into the charging port on rental cars.&nbsp;</li><li>But the subtraction thing doesn’t always work. Last year, when we were traveling in Italy (Puglia and Sicily) for a couple of weeks, I wanted to leave the laptop home and run everything off my 8-inch Samsung tablet. That wouldn’t be a problem except for a couple of programs I run on my office PC, and I didn’t want to have to migrate to their cloud versions just for the trip. So instead I used Amazon Workspaces to set up a PC in the cloud. Not quite sure why I thought this would be easier. The Amazon setup was, let’s say, less than straightforward but I got it to work, and was able to run what I needed off my tablet, albeit a bit slower than usual. Getting ready for this last trip, I thought about it again, do I leave the laptop at home? Then I remembered the time sink the Amazon set up was, and tossed the laptop back into my backpack.</li><li>No new apps. Indeed, I tend to be brutal about deleting those I’m not using right now. I’ll download, say, the VRBO or Airbnb app when I need them for a trip and then dump them when I get home. I also just deleted the Clear app. I had a year free from some credit card and never used it. So I canceled it before they charged me for another year and deleted the app. Yelp is on the bubble right now. I also find myself using it less and less, just defaulting to Google Maps’ restaurant suggestions and ratings since I usually already have it open for directions.</li><li>The carriers’ apps continue to improve incrementally. I used to use an app that had maps of all the major airports, but found I was using it less and less as the carriers added similar maps to their apps. Indeed, while waiting to de-plane in EWR, I checked the United app and it had an animated step-by-step map showing the path from our arrival gate, through Customs, to our departure gate. Too bad the guys moving our luggage didn’t have the same map.&nbsp;</li><li>As I’ve mentioned in past episodes, I still use the free version of TripIt to consolidate all plane, train, hotel, and Airbnb confirmations into a single itinerary. I know Google Travel can do something similar if you live within the Google ecosystem, but I don’t so I use TripIt. TripIt keeps pushing their $50 Pro offering with real-time alerts and airport maps. I had the Pro offering once, but now I get all that stuff for free on the carrier apps. Now, if I <em>was</em> going to pop $50, I’d spend it on the Flighty app instead. I trialed Flighty back in the spring on a trip to Santa Fe and thought it was a great app. If I was still flying every week, it would be a no-brainer. Indeed, I’d figure out a way to expense the $250 lifetime membership and be done with it.&nbsp;</li><li>But the one piece of travel that’s been with me since the beginning and that continues to earn its keep -- a bottle opener. Even as craft beer has moved to cans, that stamped metal New Belgium bottle opener has saved the corner of many a hotel dresser.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/49674\">H2O</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/49674</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Imbibing for Introverts</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>When frequent travelers are on the road, we spend a lot of time alone -- in our hotel rooms, and in spite of the advice from a former colleague who wrote a book titled <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3Uba60n\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Never Eat Alone</a></em>, we do… a lot. So when I saw an upcoming book about drinking alone, it seemed a perfect fit for the podcast. So I reached out to the author, Jeff Cioletti, editor-in-chief of <a href=\"https://craftspiritsmag.com/\"><em>Craft Spirits Magazine</em></a>.<ul><li>Mark: Jeff, thanks for joining us on the TravelCommons podcast today. Your upcoming book…</li><li>Jeff: Technically the release date is November 15, I tried to get them early for an event on October 20, but they got held up on a freight train somewhere in the United States, so it\'s like…</li><li>Mark: That damn supply chain. So anyhow, your upcoming book, <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3sQelCQ\"><em>Imbibing for Introverts: A Guide to Social Drinking for the Anti-Social</em></a>.</em> Over the years on the TravelCommons podcast, we\'ve <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?s=solo+dining\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">talked many times</a> about <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/19/podcast-149-dining-single-airlines-need-to-tell-us-more/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">solo eating</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/05/12/table-for-one-eating-alone-on-the-road/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">eating alone on the road</a>, what you might call eating for introverts. So when I saw the title of your book, it mapped right into things that we\'ve been doing. And again, in past episodes, we\'ve talked about the best ways to eat alone and so, what are your pro tips for the best ways to drink alone?</li><li>Jeff: It depends on the venue; it just depends on what your objectives are. If you want to quietly contemplate what you\'re drinking; if you\'re in one of these high-end whiskey bars or a brandy bar or something like that; where you\'re sitting and you really want to just contemplate. Sometimes you just want to be present and just be in your thoughts, think about what you\'re drinking, think about its connection to the point of origin, that kind of thing. When you\'re drinking alone, probably more often than not you\'re going to be sitting at the bar. A lot of times they\'re going to give you a 2-top, but sometimes I feel bad about taking it up, especially when things are busy and I just want to sit at the bar.</li><li>Mark: When I started traveling, which was a long time ago, you’d end up in that same situation, at a 2-top or a 4-top and then you\'re the sad person sitting in the corner table because you were taking up revenue space. “Look, I got spots for two and you\'re only taking up one.”</li><li>Jeff: And I think that if you\'re not sitting in a corner, if you do get to sit at the bar, that\'s a great opportunity to strike up a conversation with the bartender. Sometimes it just happens organically. I don\'t know whether they feel like they need to talk to you because you\'re not with anybody and they feel bad for you. But one thing that I do find is when you order something in a way that shows you know what you\'re talking about -- like you\'re at the bar and you say give me a gin and tonic, if you don\'t really specify what gin you want, they may not have a really broad selection, but a lot of these more sort of mixology oriented bars, they\'re going to have a selection and a good way to start is “What kind of gin you have; do you have anything that\'s not juniper- forward?” -- bartenders can be really primed to geek out with somebody that they detect maybe as passionate about the things they drink as they are, as they are about the things they mix. So when you show an inkling of interest or knowledge related to that spirit or whatever ingredient you\'re putting in the cocktail, that may pique their interest a little bit and they might get a sense that this person knows what they’re talking about. I\'ve been in situations where that snowballs to a point where the bartender says, “Hey, by the way, I\'m entering a cocktail competition, this was my creation, I want you to try and tell me honestly what you think about it.” It\'s moments like this that present themselves. Not always, but you know, sometimes they do. Sometimes a bartender will also have a secret stash behind the bar, could be a rare whiskey that\'s on their list. Sometimes they will sneak you some of that. It\'s not going to necessarily be free, but they\'ll give you a pour of something that they\'re protecting and hoarding and not really giving to just anybody. So moments like that are good. It\'s not necessarily that you\'re being antisocial. It\'s sometimes conversations can create themselves organically and so that\'s why it\'s sometimes good to be alone and sit at the bar rather than at the table because no one\'s really going to be spending the time with you to do that.</li><li>Mark: Eating alone sitting at the bar, it used to be that you couldn\'t get much more than a bar snack menu at a bar. Nowadays, though, you can get a full menu at a bar and so I\'m always eating at the bar. You\'re right about the bartenders. You get blips of human interaction. I think usually the bartender is good for, I don\'t know, 3-4 quick interchanges. Obviously they got a job to do, so you’re not going to have an ongoing conversation with them, but they\'ll come by and if they think you\'re interested or you\'re an interesting person, you\'ll get blips. I don\'t know, it\'s either they think you\'re interesting or they’re taking pity on you. I\'m not quite sure which...  What drove you to write this book Imbibing for Introverts? What was the kernel on this one?</li><li>Jeff: I just been traveling a lot and I\'ve been doing a lot of solo travel, especially work-related stuff and, over time, I really just got comfortable in my own skin going out alone. It just became something I realized I actually enjoy my own company and it just came together in my head. One time I was sitting at a bar and I wasn\'t alone at the time. I was having a drink with a friend in a bar that I had often had a drink alone and I thought I\'d really love to do a book about just being an introvert and just enjoying being by yourself and drinking alone and normalizing that too because some people are just weird about going out alone.</li><li>Mark: When you do a lot of travel, you\'ve got to get comfortable with your own company because oftentimes that\'s it. You\'ve got clients, you\'ve got other people you\'re meeting and they\'re going home, they\'re going to coach their kid’s ballgame or do whatever. And if you don\'t get out of that hotel room, that hotel room turns into a cave after a while.</li><li>Jeff: And also sometimes you just want to decompress, especially when it is a work trip and you are having meetings. For instance, I got a lot of trade shows where I\'m just walking around the convention center going from booth to booth, talking to a person after person after person, always having to be on. Just having that energy, that kind of interpersonal energy, is frankly very exhausting. By the end of the day, after like seven or eight hours of doing that, sometimes you just want to be by yourself and you just want to quietly sip something in a place that\'s got the music\'s down low, it\'s a good mix that they\'re playing. It\'s low enough that you can hear yourself think, you can also eavesdrop on other people\'s conversations. That\'s kind of fun sometimes. A lot of people talk about people watching; I\'m more of a people listener because you can tell a lot more about a person by the conversations you hear than what they\'re wearing or what they look like.</li><li>Mark: Jeff, this has been great. I really appreciate it. I\'m looking forward to reading your book when it comes out. Jeff Cioletti, author of the new book, the upcoming book coming out November,<em> <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3sQelCQ\"><em>Imbibing for Introverts: A Guide to Social Drinking for the Anti-Social</em></a>.</em> Jeff, thanks very much for stopping by the TravelCommons podcast and chatting to us about drinking.</li><li>Jeff: Thank you so much for having me. This has been a lot of fun because it seems to be my people that listen to your podcasts.</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #190</li><li>I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. </li><li>And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>. And while you’re at TravelCommons.com, you can check out the show notes page for a transcript and any links I’ve mentioned. Or you can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page.</li><li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_190.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #190 — My Travel Tech Stack; Imbibing for Introverts','Tracking lost luggage with AirTags; what\'s changed in my travel tech stack; talking with Jeff Cioletti, author of the new book \"Imbibing for Introverts\", about the art of drinking alone','inherit','closed','closed','','4208-revision-v1','','','2022-10-31 16:44:41','2022-10-31 21:44:41','',4208,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4224',0,'revision','',0),
(4225,1,'2022-10-31 16:48:39','2022-10-31 21:48:39','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/malort_face-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Malort bottle and a cow skull\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"> My Drinking Buddy Is The Quiet Type[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Back behind the mic after 3 week of travel in Croatia and Italy.  The trip went amazingly well up to the last leg, when United\'s Newark team couldn\'t get our bags on our plane. But, I\'d stuffed <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3k4rCUy\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Apple AirTags</a> into our luggage, so we were able to track their movements \'til they got home. That experience and a listener\'s tweet led to me re-visiting my travel tech stack. We then talk to Jeff Cioletti, author of the new book <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3sQelCQ\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Imbibing for Introverts</a></em>, about the art of drinking alone. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_190.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #190: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Happy Halloween! Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN. Finally got my body back on Central Time after 3 weeks in Europe that started in Split, Croatia and then ran up the Italian peninsula -- Amalfi Coast, Naples, Rome, Florence -- and then back down to Rome to fly home. And for a trip about a dozen potential points of failure between all the flights, the trains, and the Airbnb’s, it all went pretty smoothly except for the final leg -- the EWR-BNA flight home, where United somehow couldn’t manage to get our luggage on our plane. But by then, it wasn’t critical -- just suitcases of dirty clothes and some bottles of wine and limoncello. And United delivered them to us the next afternoon -- just in time for us to start doing laundry. Annoying, yes -- but not much more.</li><li>Which, after a summer of travel horror stories about canceled flights, lost luggage, hours-long security lines that fed our episode on <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/08/18/podcast-188-my-top-tips-to-survive-travel-chaos/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Podcast #188 — My Top Travel Tips to Survive Airport Chaos\">Top Tips to Avoid Travel Chaos</a>, I chalked it up to good luck and clean living or, what’s probably a more likely explanation, the airlines and airports are finally getting on the other side of the surprise snapback in leisure travel during a very tight labor market. Through Nashville, O’Hare, Frankfurt, even the Split airport -- 5-minute security lines at most, and on-time flights. In Italy, all our trains were on-time. And after all of that smooth travel, it wasn’t until our last day, for our flight home, that we got pulled up short. We walked into Terminal 3 at Rome’s Fiumicino airport and smack into a huge line. It took us a moment to figure out that the line wasn’t for us; it was the check-in line for Air Canada which seemed… weird. But no matter, we didn’t have to stand in it.&nbsp;</li><li>The next line, though, we did -- the separate security line for all direct flights to the US.&nbsp; We’ve talked in the past about how, post-9/11, direct international flights to the US tend to be segregated from the rest of the flights and put at the far end of departure terminals. That I’m used to. This was the first time, though, that I’ve seen a US-only security line. And on a Sunday morning at 9am, when everyone is there for the 10:30/11am bank of flights to the US. It tailed back almost the length of the terminal.&nbsp; But it kept moving. And when we made it up to the security area, we could see that they had every screening station manned and operational. We got through security and passport control in less than a half hour. Not world-class timing, but not anywhere near the summer horror stories.</li><li>I shouldn’t have been surprised at that US security line though because every place we went in Italy was jammed/crowded, mostly with Americans. It was revenge travel in action. I asked a few guys -- bartenders, shop owners, shuttle drivers -- how these October crowds compared to pre-pandemic. “It’s insane!” was the consensus. And I could feel it wearing on them. Even though all these people were giving them money, their patience seemed to be getting a little thin. Last year, last October when we were in Italy, in Puglia and Sicily, these same sort of folks were saying “Welcome! We’re so glad travelers are back!” This year? I think it’s a bit more like “when are you travelers <em>going </em>back… home?”</li><li>Bridge Music --  <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/snowflake/46164\">A Foolish Game</a> by Snowflake (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/snowflake/46164 Ft: Admiral Bob   </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I’m going to hold my thoughts about my Croatia and Italy trip for the next episode; do one of my stream-of-consciousness “Notes on a Location” topics. But I do want to follow up here on a couple of things from the last episode. First up, is <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/09/22/podcast-189-why-we-travel-when-the-first-flight-isnt-best/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Podcast #189 —  Why We Travel; When The First Flight Isn’t Best\">last episode’s</a> eSIM rant because, through watching with my travel companions and texting with Allan Marko, a long-time TravelCommons contributor, I sorta refined that rant, getting it down to two decision points.&nbsp;<ul><li>First, how much data do you expect to use? If you’re out of the US for a week or less, staying in a place with good WiFi, and can wait until the end of the day to do all your social media posting, you can probably be good with 5GB of data -- which gets you under T-Mobile’s non-throttled international data cap (which is what a couple of the folks traveling with me did), way under Google Fi’s 50 GB cap, and probably fits into a $15-20 eSIM from someone like aloSIM or Airalo. It’s the low-hassle solution. But for a longer stay, like my 3 week-er, or if you’re fully invested in building Instagram stories, like my wife, 5GB just isn’t going to cut it. I reset my iPhone data stats on the flight to Frankfurt and then looked at them as we were taxiing out to the runway in Rome. I used 77 GBs of data. Now, 11 GB was from hotspotting because the WiFi in our Florence Airbnb was pretty useless. But even pulling that out, 66 GBs is still a whackload of data. Which is probably because I didn’t really pay any attention to my data usage, because the Telecom Italia plan I was on gave me <em>600</em> GB of 5G data, essentially unlimited data, for $15. So while my T-Mobile-using companions were scrounging for a bar’s WiFi password to do Untappd check-ins, I was uploading pictures and refreshing my podcasts.</li><li>The second decision point&nbsp; -- do you need to make regular phone calls; do you need a local number? This is more and more of an edge case with people primarily texting, and when there was a specific need for a voice call, people rang me through WhatsApp and Telegram. But on this trip, I got us last-minute tables at a couple of good restaurants because I could call them over the regular phone network, something I couldn’t have done with a data-only eSIM. I’ve also run into the need for a local number when trying to register or create an account for an on-line service. My Telecom Italia SIM also came with a local Italian number and unlimited voice minutes.&nbsp;</li><li>So while I sharpened my thinking on this trip, my conclusion didn’t change. I know I’m an edge case -- I don’t want to have to think about data consumption and I want local phone service -- and until the in-country wireless carriers offer the same pre-paid plans on eSIMs that they do on physical SIMs, I’ll be keeping my phone with the SIM tray… and a straightened-out paper clip to pop it open.</li></ul></li><li>Second, following up to Kendra Kroll’s travel tip in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/09/22/podcast-189-why-we-travel-when-the-first-flight-isnt-best/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">the last episode</a> about knowing the names of cities in the local vernacular. Kendra talked about people missing their train stop because they didn’t realize that Florence, in Italian, is Firenze. So riding the train from Rome (Roma) to Florence (Firenze), I was on the lookout for this. All the train tickets used Italian city names -- Roma, Napoli, Firenze. But the signs on the platforms of the Florence train stations said “Florence”. Indeed, the real confusion wasn’t Florence vs Firenze, but which Florence train station to get off at. My group thought we had a direct train from downtown Rome&nbsp; (Roma Termini) to the downtown Florence station (Firenze Santa Maria Novella), so when the train stopped at a station with “Florence” in the sign, they all scrambled to get their bags and head for the station -- which would’ve left them hanging around in a suburban parking lot figuring out how get a ride downtown. So not only know the name of the city in the vernacular; know the full station name of your stop.</li><li>I mentioned earlier that the first leg of my trip was from BNA to ORD, and I was kinda surprised to realize that it was my first time in ORD in 10 months, since returning from the UK last November. Prior to moving down here to Nashville in July, I’d been flying Southwest out of Chicago Midway; easier to get to and Southwest fit my travel plans better. So as “Welcome Back,” I got the full ORD experience -- landing on the far north runway, which feels like it’s just short of the Wisconsin state line, with the requisite 20-min taxi to get within sight of the terminal. Then, just as you think you’re almost there, the plane stops across the road from the terminal and waits 5 minutes for a gate to open up. Then, once we get moving again, we take the scenic route, past all the American planes in Terminal 3 and the Delta planes in Terminal 2 until we finally get to the United terminal in Terminal 1. All told, at least 30 minutes from tires hitting the runway to the door opening and the agent saying “Welcome to ORD”. Yeah, thanks. Great to be back.</li><li>And in other “Great to be back” things, Irene and I used Lyft for the first time in forever to get home from the Nashville airport -- the wait time and the price were much lower than Uber; which is weird because I’d think, by now, the ride sharing market would be a bit more price efficient. But anyhow, Lyft is so excited to see me resurface in Nashville that the app is flooding my phone with notifications with ride offers and suggestions for things to do. Three days of this was enough to drive me into the hell that the iPhone Settings menu has become to figure out how to shut them up. Probably not the behavior Lyft was trying to prompt, but there you go.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/THE_CONCEPT_OF_ENERGY/55008\">ABANDONED BUTTERFLIES</a> by THE_CONCEPT_OF_ENERGY (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/THE_CONCEPT_OF_ENERGY/55008</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>My Travel Tech Stack</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Back to that problematic last leg of our trip -- the flight home to Nashville from Newark. I knew we had a lagging luggage problem even before we left the ground courtesy of the latest addition to my travel tech stack. I’d bought <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3k4rCUy\" title=\"\">Apple AirTags</a> just for this reason -- to track our luggage. When I had to check my bag on the Vueling flight from Split to Rome, I could see on my iPhone’s Find My app that my bag was on the plane; it looked almost right underneath me. But in Newark, my bag never left the terminal. Irene checked her app; same thing. As we taxied out, I took a screenshot showing the growing distance between me on the plane and my left-behind bag, and tweeted it out to United saying “I’m guessing I won’t be seeing my luggage in BNA.” </li><li>As I said earlier, I was pretty annoyed with United, but at least the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3k4rCUy\" title=\"\">AirTags</a> saved us the 30 minutes of suspense watching all the other bags come out. Instead, we went straight to the baggage service agent, filed our report, and headed home. And then, waking up the next morning, I could see that our bags made it on the late flight from Newark, and then could see them on the delivery truck heading to our flat. Saved a lot of agita. </li><li>It got me thinking back 6-7 years to <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/08/26/podcast-116-traveling-thru-japan-luggage-trends/\">the first wave</a> of <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/12/podcast-120-where-do-guidebooks-fit-in-i-hate-shopping-for-suitcases/\">smart luggage</a> -- Bluesmart, Away. I bought a Bluesmart bag off their Indiegogo campaign. Those bags also let you <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/05/30/podcast-121-tsa-lines-my-luggage-is-where/\">track their location</a>, along with charging your phone -- for about 2 years until <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">the airlines banned them</a>, or at least the ones with non-removable batteries. Those travel use cases haven’t changed -- “Where’s my bag?” and “I need to recharge my phone so I can rebook this canceled flight” -- but the tech has moved on -- replacing the smart bag with AirTags or Tile trackers and a <a href=\"https://amzn.to/34fcbON\" title=\"\">10,000 mAh battery pack</a>.</li><li>Long-time listener and Twitter follower @Ab3Fr0man pinged me during my summer move podcast pause with “question for the next podcast >> Are there any new devices or apps you are using for travel?” which is what got me spelunking through my travel tech stack, which then turned into a stroll through my past “What’s in My Briefcase” episodes. And what struck me was, other than the AirTags and a small phone tripod for video calls, it hasn’t been what I’ve added to my kit as much as what I’ve been able to take away.</li><li>The consolidation to HDMI for video seems to be just about done and that’s let me drop all the VGA cables and dongles I used to carry around just in case I ran into an old conference room projector or hotel TV.  The slow and still in-progress consolidation to USB-C power supplies has let me do some subtraction by addition, dropping my MacBook Air power supply and an old dual USB-A charger for a single charger that’s smaller than either of them, a 100W gallium nitride charger that can charge my laptop, my phone, and my headphones all at once. Indeed, the only reason I still carry an old USB-A Apple Lightning cord is for plugging into the charging port on rental cars. </li><li>But the subtraction thing doesn’t always work. Last year, when we were traveling in Italy (Puglia and Sicily) for a couple of weeks, I wanted to leave the laptop home and run everything off my 8-inch Samsung tablet. That wouldn’t be a problem except for a couple of programs I run on my office PC, and I didn’t want to have to migrate to their cloud versions just for the trip. So instead I used Amazon Workspaces to set up a PC in the cloud. Not quite sure why I thought this would be easier. The Amazon setup was, let’s say, less than straightforward but I got it to work, and was able to run what I needed off my tablet, albeit a bit slower than usual. Getting ready for this last trip, I thought about it again, do I leave the laptop at home? Then I remembered the time sink the Amazon set up was, and tossed the laptop back into my backpack.</li><li>No new apps. Indeed, I tend to be brutal about deleting those I’m not using right now. I’ll download, say, the VRBO or Airbnb app when I need them for a trip and then dump them when I get home. I also just deleted the Clear app. I had a year free from some credit card and never used it. So I canceled it before they charged me for another year and deleted the app. Yelp is on the bubble right now. I also find myself using it less and less, just defaulting to Google Maps’ restaurant suggestions and ratings since I usually already have it open for directions.</li><li>The carriers’ apps continue to improve incrementally. I used to use an app that had maps of all the major airports, but found I was using it less and less as the carriers added similar maps to their apps. Indeed, while waiting to de-plane in EWR, I checked the United app and it had an animated step-by-step map showing the path from our arrival gate, through Customs, to our departure gate. Too bad the guys moving our luggage didn’t have the same map. </li><li>As I’ve mentioned in past episodes, I still use the free version of TripIt to consolidate all plane, train, hotel, and Airbnb confirmations into a single itinerary. I know Google Travel can do something similar if you live within the Google ecosystem, but I don’t so I use TripIt. TripIt keeps pushing their $50 Pro offering with real-time alerts and airport maps. I had the Pro offering once, but now I get all that stuff for free on the carrier apps. Now, if I <em>was</em> going to pop $50, I’d spend it on the Flighty app instead. I <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/04/21/podcast-186-mask-mandate-scramble-small-airport-survival/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">trialed Flighty back in the spring on a trip to Santa Fe</a> and thought it was a great app. If I was still flying every week, it would be a no-brainer. Indeed, I’d figure out a way to expense the $250 lifetime membership and be done with it. </li><li>But the one piece of travel that’s been with me since the beginning and that continues to earn its keep -- a bottle opener. Even as craft beer has moved to cans, that stamped metal New Belgium bottle opener has saved the corner of many a hotel dresser.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/49674\">H2O</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/49674</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Imbibing for Introverts</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>When frequent travelers are on the road, we spend a lot of time alone -- in our hotel rooms, and in spite of the advice from a former colleague who wrote a book titled <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3Uba60n\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Never Eat Alone</a></em>, we do… a lot. So when I saw an upcoming book about drinking alone, it seemed a perfect fit for the podcast. So I reached out to the author, Jeff Cioletti, editor-in-chief of <a href=\"https://craftspiritsmag.com/\"><em>Craft Spirits Magazine</em></a>.<ul><li>Mark: Jeff, thanks for joining us on the TravelCommons podcast today. Your upcoming book…</li><li>Jeff: Technically the release date is November 15, I tried to get them early for an event on October 20, but they got held up on a freight train somewhere in the United States, so it\'s like…</li><li>Mark: That damn supply chain. So anyhow, your upcoming book, <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3sQelCQ\"><em>Imbibing for Introverts: A Guide to Social Drinking for the Anti-Social</em></a>.</em> Over the years on the TravelCommons podcast, we\'ve <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?s=solo+dining\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">talked many times</a> about <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/19/podcast-149-dining-single-airlines-need-to-tell-us-more/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">solo eating</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/05/12/table-for-one-eating-alone-on-the-road/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">eating alone on the road</a>, what you might call eating for introverts. So when I saw the title of your book, it mapped right into things that we\'ve been doing. And again, in past episodes, we\'ve talked about the best ways to eat alone and so, what are your pro tips for the best ways to drink alone?</li><li>Jeff: It depends on the venue; it just depends on what your objectives are. If you want to quietly contemplate what you\'re drinking; if you\'re in one of these high-end whiskey bars or a brandy bar or something like that; where you\'re sitting and you really want to just contemplate. Sometimes you just want to be present and just be in your thoughts, think about what you\'re drinking, think about its connection to the point of origin, that kind of thing. When you\'re drinking alone, probably more often than not you\'re going to be sitting at the bar. A lot of times they\'re going to give you a 2-top, but sometimes I feel bad about taking it up, especially when things are busy and I just want to sit at the bar.</li><li>Mark: When I started traveling, which was a long time ago, you’d end up in that same situation, at a 2-top or a 4-top and then you\'re the sad person sitting in the corner table because you were taking up revenue space. “Look, I got spots for two and you\'re only taking up one.”</li><li>Jeff: And I think that if you\'re not sitting in a corner, if you do get to sit at the bar, that\'s a great opportunity to strike up a conversation with the bartender. Sometimes it just happens organically. I don\'t know whether they feel like they need to talk to you because you\'re not with anybody and they feel bad for you. But one thing that I do find is when you order something in a way that shows you know what you\'re talking about -- like you\'re at the bar and you say give me a gin and tonic, if you don\'t really specify what gin you want, they may not have a really broad selection, but a lot of these more sort of mixology oriented bars, they\'re going to have a selection and a good way to start is “What kind of gin you have; do you have anything that\'s not juniper- forward?” -- bartenders can be really primed to geek out with somebody that they detect maybe as passionate about the things they drink as they are, as they are about the things they mix. So when you show an inkling of interest or knowledge related to that spirit or whatever ingredient you\'re putting in the cocktail, that may pique their interest a little bit and they might get a sense that this person knows what they’re talking about. I\'ve been in situations where that snowballs to a point where the bartender says, “Hey, by the way, I\'m entering a cocktail competition, this was my creation, I want you to try and tell me honestly what you think about it.” It\'s moments like this that present themselves. Not always, but you know, sometimes they do. Sometimes a bartender will also have a secret stash behind the bar, could be a rare whiskey that\'s on their list. Sometimes they will sneak you some of that. It\'s not going to necessarily be free, but they\'ll give you a pour of something that they\'re protecting and hoarding and not really giving to just anybody. So moments like that are good. It\'s not necessarily that you\'re being antisocial. It\'s sometimes conversations can create themselves organically and so that\'s why it\'s sometimes good to be alone and sit at the bar rather than at the table because no one\'s really going to be spending the time with you to do that.</li><li>Mark: Eating alone sitting at the bar, it used to be that you couldn\'t get much more than a bar snack menu at a bar. Nowadays, though, you can get a full menu at a bar and so I\'m always eating at the bar. You\'re right about the bartenders. You get blips of human interaction. I think usually the bartender is good for, I don\'t know, 3-4 quick interchanges. Obviously they got a job to do, so you’re not going to have an ongoing conversation with them, but they\'ll come by and if they think you\'re interested or you\'re an interesting person, you\'ll get blips. I don\'t know, it\'s either they think you\'re interesting or they’re taking pity on you. I\'m not quite sure which...&nbsp; What drove you to write this book Imbibing for Introverts? What was the kernel on this one?</li><li>Jeff: I just been traveling a lot and I\'ve been doing a lot of solo travel, especially work-related stuff and, over time, I really just got comfortable in my own skin going out alone. It just became something I realized I actually enjoy my own company and it just came together in my head. One time I was sitting at a bar and I wasn\'t alone at the time. I was having a drink with a friend in a bar that I had often had a drink alone and I thought I\'d really love to do a book about just being an introvert and just enjoying being by yourself and drinking alone and normalizing that too because some people are just weird about going out alone.</li><li>Mark: When you do a lot of travel, you\'ve got to get comfortable with your own company because oftentimes that\'s it. You\'ve got clients, you\'ve got other people you\'re meeting and they\'re going home, they\'re going to coach their kid’s ballgame or do whatever. And if you don\'t get out of that hotel room, that hotel room turns into a cave after a while.</li><li>Jeff: And also sometimes you just want to decompress, especially when it is a work trip and you are having meetings. For instance, I got a lot of trade shows where I\'m just walking around the convention center going from booth to booth, talking to a person after person after person, always having to be on. Just having that energy, that kind of interpersonal energy, is frankly very exhausting. By the end of the day, after like seven or eight hours of doing that, sometimes you just want to be by yourself and you just want to quietly sip something in a place that\'s got the music\'s down low, it\'s a good mix that they\'re playing. It\'s low enough that you can hear yourself think, you can also eavesdrop on other people\'s conversations. That\'s kind of fun sometimes. A lot of people talk about people watching; I\'m more of a people listener because you can tell a lot more about a person by the conversations you hear than what they\'re wearing or what they look like.</li><li>Mark: Jeff, this has been great. I really appreciate it. I\'m looking forward to reading your book when it comes out. Jeff Cioletti, author of the new book, the upcoming book coming out November,<em> <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3sQelCQ\"><em>Imbibing for Introverts: A Guide to Social Drinking for the Anti-Social</em></a>.</em> Jeff, thanks very much for stopping by the TravelCommons podcast and chatting to us about drinking.</li><li>Jeff: Thank you so much for having me. This has been a lot of fun because it seems to be my people that listen to your podcasts.</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #190</li><li>I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. </li><li>And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>. And while you’re at TravelCommons.com, you can check out the show notes page for a transcript and any links I’ve mentioned. Or you can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page.</li><li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_190.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #190 — My Travel Tech Stack; Imbibing for Introverts','Tracking lost luggage with AirTags; what\'s changed in my travel tech stack; talking with Jeff Cioletti, author of the new book \"Imbibing for Introverts\", about the art of drinking alone','inherit','closed','closed','','4208-revision-v1','','','2022-10-31 16:48:39','2022-10-31 21:48:39','',4208,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4225',0,'revision','',0);
INSERT INTO `wp_posts` VALUES
(4226,1,'2022-10-31 16:56:17','2022-10-31 21:56:17','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/malort_face-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Malort bottle and a cow skull\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"> My Drinking Buddy Is The Quiet Type[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Back behind the mic after 3 week of travel in Croatia and Italy.  The trip went amazingly well up to the last leg, when United\'s Newark team couldn\'t get our bags on our plane. But, I\'d stuffed <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3k4rCUy\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Apple AirTags</a> into our luggage, so we were able to track their movements \'til they got home. That experience and a listener\'s tweet led to me re-visiting my travel tech stack. We then talk to Jeff Cioletti, author of the new book <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3sQelCQ\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Imbibing for Introverts</a></em>, about the art of drinking alone. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_190.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #190: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Happy Halloween! Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN. Finally got my body back on Central Time after 3 weeks in Europe that started in Split, Croatia and then ran up the Italian peninsula -- Amalfi Coast, Naples, Rome, Florence -- and then back down to Rome to fly home. And for a trip about a dozen potential points of failure between all the flights, the trains, and the Airbnb’s, it all went pretty smoothly except for the final leg -- the EWR-BNA flight home, where United somehow couldn’t manage to get our luggage on our plane. But by then, it wasn’t critical -- just suitcases of dirty clothes and some bottles of wine and limoncello. And United delivered them to us the next afternoon -- just in time for us to start doing laundry. Annoying, yes -- but not much more.</li><li>Which, after a summer of travel horror stories about canceled flights, lost luggage, hours-long security lines that fed our episode on <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/08/18/podcast-188-my-top-tips-to-survive-travel-chaos/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Podcast #188 — My Top Travel Tips to Survive Airport Chaos\">Top Tips to Avoid Travel Chaos</a>, I chalked it up to good luck and clean living or, what’s probably a more likely explanation, the airlines and airports are finally getting on the other side of the surprise snapback in leisure travel during a very tight labor market. Through Nashville, O’Hare, Frankfurt, even the Split airport -- 5-minute security lines at most, and on-time flights. In Italy, all our trains were on-time. And after all of that smooth travel, it wasn’t until our last day, for our flight home, that we got pulled up short. We walked into Terminal 3 at Rome’s Fiumicino airport and smack into a huge line. It took us a moment to figure out that the line wasn’t for us; it was the check-in line for Air Canada which seemed… weird. But no matter, we didn’t have to stand in it.&nbsp;</li><li>The next line, though, we did -- the separate security line for all direct flights to the US.&nbsp; We’ve talked in the past about how, post-9/11, direct international flights to the US tend to be segregated from the rest of the flights and put at the far end of departure terminals. That I’m used to. This was the first time, though, that I’ve seen a US-only security line. And on a Sunday morning at 9am, when everyone is there for the 10:30/11am bank of flights to the US. It tailed back almost the length of the terminal.&nbsp; But it kept moving. And when we made it up to the security area, we could see that they had every screening station manned and operational. We got through security and passport control in less than a half hour. Not world-class timing, but not anywhere near the summer horror stories.</li><li>I shouldn’t have been surprised at that US security line though because every place we went in Italy was jammed/crowded, mostly with Americans. It was revenge travel in action. I asked a few guys -- bartenders, shop owners, shuttle drivers -- how these October crowds compared to pre-pandemic. “It’s insane!” was the consensus. And I could feel it wearing on them. Even though all these people were giving them money, their patience seemed to be getting a little thin. Last year, last October when we were in Italy, in Puglia and Sicily, these same sort of folks were saying “Welcome! We’re so glad travelers are back!” This year? I think it’s a bit more like “when are you travelers <em>going </em>back… home?”</li><li>Bridge Music --  <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/snowflake/46164\">A Foolish Game</a> by Snowflake (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/snowflake/46164 Ft: Admiral Bob   </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I’m going to hold my thoughts about my Croatia and Italy trip for the next episode; do one of my stream-of-consciousness “Notes on a Location” topics. But I do want to follow up here on a couple of things from the last episode. First up, is <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/09/22/podcast-189-why-we-travel-when-the-first-flight-isnt-best/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Podcast #189 —  Why We Travel; When The First Flight Isn’t Best\">last episode’s</a> eSIM rant because, through watching with my travel companions and texting with Allan Marko, a long-time TravelCommons contributor, I sorta refined that rant, getting it down to two decision points.&nbsp;<ul><li>First, how much data do you expect to use? If you’re out of the US for a week or less, staying in a place with good WiFi, and can wait until the end of the day to do all your social media posting, you can probably be good with 5GB of data -- which gets you under T-Mobile’s non-throttled international data cap (which is what a couple of the folks traveling with me did), way under Google Fi’s 50 GB cap, and probably fits into a $15-20 eSIM from someone like aloSIM or Airalo. It’s the low-hassle solution. But for a longer stay, like my 3 week-er, or if you’re fully invested in building Instagram stories, like my wife, 5GB just isn’t going to cut it. I reset my iPhone data stats on the flight to Frankfurt and then looked at them as we were taxiing out to the runway in Rome. I used 77 GBs of data. Now, 11 GB was from hotspotting because the WiFi in our Florence Airbnb was pretty useless. But even pulling that out, 66 GBs is still a whackload of data. Which is probably because I didn’t really pay any attention to my data usage, because the Telecom Italia plan I was on gave me <em>600</em> GB of 5G data, essentially unlimited data, for $15. So while my T-Mobile-using companions were scrounging for a bar’s WiFi password to do Untappd check-ins, I was uploading pictures and refreshing my podcasts.</li><li>The second decision point&nbsp; -- do you need to make regular phone calls; do you need a local number? This is more and more of an edge case with people primarily texting, and when there was a specific need for a voice call, people rang me through WhatsApp and Telegram. But on this trip, I got us last-minute tables at a couple of good restaurants because I could call them over the regular phone network, something I couldn’t have done with a data-only eSIM. I’ve also run into the need for a local number when trying to register or create an account for an on-line service. My Telecom Italia SIM also came with a local Italian number and unlimited voice minutes.&nbsp;</li><li>So while I sharpened my thinking on this trip, my conclusion didn’t change. I know I’m an edge case -- I don’t want to have to think about data consumption and I want local phone service -- and until the in-country wireless carriers offer the same pre-paid plans on eSIMs that they do on physical SIMs, I’ll be keeping my phone with the SIM tray… and a straightened-out paper clip to pop it open.</li></ul></li><li>Second, following up to Kendra Kroll’s travel tip in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/09/22/podcast-189-why-we-travel-when-the-first-flight-isnt-best/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">the last episode</a> about knowing the names of cities in the local vernacular. Kendra talked about people missing their train stop because they didn’t realize that Florence, in Italian, is Firenze. So riding the train from Rome (Roma) to Florence (Firenze), I was on the lookout for this. All the train tickets used Italian city names -- Roma, Napoli, Firenze. But the signs on the platforms of the Florence train stations said “Florence”. Indeed, the real confusion wasn’t Florence vs Firenze, but which Florence train station to get off at. My group thought we had a direct train from downtown Rome&nbsp; (Roma Termini) to the downtown Florence station (Firenze Santa Maria Novella), so when the train stopped at a station with “Florence” in the sign, they all scrambled to get their bags and head for the station -- which would’ve left them hanging around in a suburban parking lot figuring out how get a ride downtown. So not only know the name of the city in the vernacular; know the full station name of your stop.</li><li>I mentioned earlier that the first leg of my trip was from BNA to ORD, and I was kinda surprised to realize that it was my first time in ORD in 10 months, since returning from the UK last November. Prior to moving down here to Nashville in July, I’d been flying Southwest out of Chicago Midway; easier to get to and Southwest fit my travel plans better. So as “Welcome Back,” I got the full ORD experience -- landing on the far north runway, which feels like it’s just short of the Wisconsin state line, with the requisite 20-min taxi to get within sight of the terminal. Then, just as you think you’re almost there, the plane stops across the road from the terminal and waits 5 minutes for a gate to open up. Then, once we get moving again, we take the scenic route, past all the American planes in Terminal 3 and the Delta planes in Terminal 2 until we finally get to the United terminal in Terminal 1. All told, at least 30 minutes from tires hitting the runway to the door opening and the agent saying “Welcome to ORD”. Yeah, thanks. Great to be back.</li><li>And in other “Great to be back” things, Irene and I used Lyft for the first time in forever to get home from the Nashville airport -- the wait time and the price were much lower than Uber; which is weird because I’d think, by now, the ride sharing market would be a bit more price efficient. But anyhow, Lyft is so excited to see me resurface in Nashville that the app is flooding my phone with notifications with ride offers and suggestions for things to do. Three days of this was enough to drive me into the hell that the iPhone Settings menu has become to figure out how to shut them up. Probably not the behavior Lyft was trying to prompt, but there you go.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/THE_CONCEPT_OF_ENERGY/55008\">ABANDONED BUTTERFLIES</a> by THE_CONCEPT_OF_ENERGY (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/THE_CONCEPT_OF_ENERGY/55008</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>My Travel Tech Stack</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Back to that problematic last leg of our trip -- the flight home to Nashville from Newark. I knew we had a lagging luggage problem even before we left the ground courtesy of the latest addition to my travel tech stack. I’d bought <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3k4rCUy\" title=\"\">Apple AirTags</a> just for this reason -- to track our luggage. When I had to check my bag on the Vueling flight from Split to Rome, I could see on my iPhone’s Find My app that my bag was on the plane; it looked almost right underneath me. But in Newark, my bag never left the terminal. Irene checked her app; same thing. As we taxied out, I took a screenshot showing the growing distance between me on the plane and my left-behind bag, and tweeted it out to United saying “I’m guessing I won’t be seeing my luggage in BNA.”&nbsp;</li><li>As I said earlier, I was pretty annoyed with United, but at least the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3k4rCUy\" title=\"\">AirTags</a> saved us the 30 minutes of suspense watching all the other bags come out. Instead, we went straight to the baggage service agent, filed our report, and headed home. And then, waking up the next morning, I could see that our bags made it on the late flight from Newark, and then could see them on the delivery truck heading to our flat. Saved a lot of agita.&nbsp;</li><li>It got me thinking back 6-7 years to <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/08/26/podcast-116-traveling-thru-japan-luggage-trends/\">the first wave</a> of <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/12/podcast-120-where-do-guidebooks-fit-in-i-hate-shopping-for-suitcases/\">smart luggage</a> -- Bluesmart, Away. I bought a Bluesmart bag off their Indiegogo campaign. Those bags also let you <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/05/30/podcast-121-tsa-lines-my-luggage-is-where/\">track their location</a>, along with charging your phone -- for about 2 years until <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">the airlines banned them</a>, or at least the ones with non-removable batteries. Those travel use cases haven’t changed -- “Where’s my bag?” and “I need to recharge my phone so I can rebook this canceled flight” -- but the tech has moved on -- replacing the smart bag with AirTags or Tile trackers and a <a href=\"https://amzn.to/34fcbON\" title=\"\">10,000 mAh battery pack</a>.</li><li>Long-time listener and Twitter follower @Ab3Fr0man pinged me during my summer move podcast pause with “question for the next podcast &gt;&gt; Are there any new devices or apps you are using for travel?” which is what got me spelunking through my travel tech stack, which then turned into a stroll through my past “What’s in My Briefcase” episodes. And what struck me was, other than the AirTags and a small phone tripod for video calls, it hasn’t been what I’ve added to my kit as much as what I’ve been able to take away.</li><li>The consolidation to HDMI for video seems to be just about done and that’s let me drop all the VGA cables and dongles I used to carry around just in case I ran into an old conference room projector or hotel TV.&nbsp; The slow and still in-progress consolidation to USB-C power supplies has let me do some subtraction by addition, dropping my MacBook Air power supply and an old dual USB-A charger for a single charger that’s smaller than either of them, a 100W gallium nitride charger that can charge my laptop, my phone, and my headphones all at once. Indeed, the only reason I still carry an old USB-A Apple Lightning cord is for plugging into the charging port on rental cars.&nbsp;</li><li>But the subtraction thing doesn’t always work. Last year, when we were traveling in Italy (Puglia and Sicily) for a couple of weeks, I wanted to leave the laptop home and run everything off my 8-inch Samsung tablet. That wouldn’t be a problem except for a couple of programs I run on my office PC, and I didn’t want to have to migrate to their cloud versions just for the trip. So instead I used Amazon Workspaces to set up a PC in the cloud. Not quite sure why I thought this would be easier. The Amazon setup was, let’s say, less than straightforward but I got it to work, and was able to run what I needed off my tablet, albeit a bit slower than usual. Getting ready for this last trip, I thought about it again, do I leave the laptop at home? Then I remembered the time sink the Amazon set up was, and tossed the laptop back into my backpack.</li><li>No new apps. Indeed, I tend to be brutal about deleting those I’m not using right now. I’ll download, say, the VRBO or Airbnb app when I need them for a trip and then dump them when I get home. I also just deleted the Clear app. I had a year free from some credit card and never used it. So I canceled it before they charged me for another year and deleted the app. Yelp is on the bubble right now. I also find myself using it less and less, just defaulting to Google Maps’ restaurant suggestions and ratings since I usually already have it open for directions.</li><li>The carriers’ apps continue to improve incrementally. I used to use an app that had maps of all the major airports, but found I was using it less and less as the carriers added similar maps to their apps. Indeed, while waiting to de-plane in EWR, I checked the United app and it had an animated step-by-step map showing the path from our arrival gate, through Customs, to our departure gate. Too bad the guys moving our luggage didn’t have the same map.&nbsp;</li><li>As I’ve mentioned in past episodes, I still use the free version of TripIt to consolidate all plane, train, hotel, and Airbnb confirmations into a single itinerary. I know Google Travel can do something similar if you live within the Google ecosystem, but I don’t so I use TripIt. TripIt keeps pushing their $50 Pro offering with real-time alerts and airport maps. I had the Pro offering once, but now I get all that stuff for free on the carrier apps. Now, if I <em>was</em> going to pop $50, I’d spend it on the Flighty app instead. I <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/04/21/podcast-186-mask-mandate-scramble-small-airport-survival/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">trialed Flighty back in the spring on a trip to Santa Fe</a> and thought it was a great app. If I was still flying every week, it would be a no-brainer. Indeed, I’d figure out a way to expense the $250 lifetime membership and be done with it.&nbsp;</li><li>But the one piece of travel that’s been with me since the beginning and that continues to earn its keep -- a bottle opener. Even as craft beer has moved to cans, that stamped metal New Belgium bottle opener has saved the corner of many a hotel dresser.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/49674\">H2O</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/49674</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Imbibing for Introverts</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>When frequent travelers are on the road, we spend a lot of time alone -- in our hotel rooms, and in spite of the advice from a former colleague who wrote a book titled <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3Uba60n\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Never Eat Alone</a></em>, we do… a lot. So when I saw an upcoming book about drinking alone, it seemed a perfect fit for the podcast. So I reached out to the author, Jeff Cioletti, editor-in-chief of <a href=\"https://craftspiritsmag.com/\"><em>Craft Spirits Magazine</em></a>.<ul><li>Mark: Jeff, thanks for joining us on the TravelCommons podcast today. Your upcoming book…</li><li>Jeff: Technically the release date is November 15, I tried to get them early for an event on October 20, but they got held up on a freight train somewhere in the United States, so it\'s like…</li><li>Mark: That damn supply chain. So anyhow, your upcoming book, <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3sQelCQ\"><em>Imbibing for Introverts: A Guide to Social Drinking for the Anti-Social</em></a>.</em> Over the years on the TravelCommons podcast, we\'ve <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?s=solo+dining\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">talked many times</a> about <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/19/podcast-149-dining-single-airlines-need-to-tell-us-more/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">solo eating</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/05/12/table-for-one-eating-alone-on-the-road/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">eating alone on the road</a>, what you might call eating for introverts. So when I saw the title of your book, it mapped right into things that we\'ve been doing. And again, in past episodes, we\'ve talked about the best ways to eat alone and so, what are your pro tips for the best ways to drink alone?</li><li>Jeff: It depends on the venue; it just depends on what your objectives are. If you want to quietly contemplate what you\'re drinking; if you\'re in one of these high-end whiskey bars or a brandy bar or something like that; where you\'re sitting and you really want to just contemplate. Sometimes you just want to be present and just be in your thoughts, think about what you\'re drinking, think about its connection to the point of origin, that kind of thing. When you\'re drinking alone, probably more often than not you\'re going to be sitting at the bar. A lot of times they\'re going to give you a 2-top, but sometimes I feel bad about taking it up, especially when things are busy and I just want to sit at the bar.</li><li>Mark: When I started traveling, which was a long time ago, you’d end up in that same situation, at a 2-top or a 4-top and then you\'re the sad person sitting in the corner table because you were taking up revenue space. “Look, I got spots for two and you\'re only taking up one.”</li><li>Jeff: And I think that if you\'re not sitting in a corner, if you do get to sit at the bar, that\'s a great opportunity to strike up a conversation with the bartender. Sometimes it just happens organically. I don\'t know whether they feel like they need to talk to you because you\'re not with anybody and they feel bad for you. But one thing that I do find is when you order something in a way that shows you know what you\'re talking about -- like you\'re at the bar and you say give me a gin and tonic, if you don\'t really specify what gin you want, they may not have a really broad selection, but a lot of these more sort of mixology oriented bars, they\'re going to have a selection and a good way to start is “What kind of gin you have; do you have anything that\'s not juniper- forward?” -- bartenders can be really primed to geek out with somebody that they detect maybe as passionate about the things they drink as they are, as they are about the things they mix. So when you show an inkling of interest or knowledge related to that spirit or whatever ingredient you\'re putting in the cocktail, that may pique their interest a little bit and they might get a sense that this person knows what they’re talking about. I\'ve been in situations where that snowballs to a point where the bartender says, “Hey, by the way, I\'m entering a cocktail competition, this was my creation, I want you to try and tell me honestly what you think about it.” It\'s moments like this that present themselves. Not always, but you know, sometimes they do. Sometimes a bartender will also have a secret stash behind the bar, could be a rare whiskey that\'s on their list. Sometimes they will sneak you some of that. It\'s not going to necessarily be free, but they\'ll give you a pour of something that they\'re protecting and hoarding and not really giving to just anybody. So moments like that are good. It\'s not necessarily that you\'re being antisocial. It\'s sometimes conversations can create themselves organically and so that\'s why it\'s sometimes good to be alone and sit at the bar rather than at the table because no one\'s really going to be spending the time with you to do that.</li><li>Mark: Eating alone sitting at the bar, it used to be that you couldn\'t get much more than a bar snack menu at a bar. Nowadays, though, you can get a full menu at a bar and so I\'m always eating at the bar. You\'re right about the bartenders. You get blips of human interaction. I think usually the bartender is good for, I don\'t know, 3-4 quick interchanges. Obviously they got a job to do, so you’re not going to have an ongoing conversation with them, but they\'ll come by and if they think you\'re interested or you\'re an interesting person, you\'ll get blips. I don\'t know, it\'s either they think you\'re interesting or they’re taking pity on you. I\'m not quite sure which...&nbsp; What drove you to write this book Imbibing for Introverts? What was the kernel on this one?</li><li>Jeff: I just been traveling a lot and I\'ve been doing a lot of solo travel, especially work-related stuff and, over time, I really just got comfortable in my own skin going out alone. It just became something I realized I actually enjoy my own company and it just came together in my head. One time I was sitting at a bar and I wasn\'t alone at the time. I was having a drink with a friend in a bar that I had often had a drink alone and I thought I\'d really love to do a book about just being an introvert and just enjoying being by yourself and drinking alone and normalizing that too because some people are just weird about going out alone.</li><li>Mark: When you do a lot of travel, you\'ve got to get comfortable with your own company because oftentimes that\'s it. You\'ve got clients, you\'ve got other people you\'re meeting and they\'re going home, they\'re going to coach their kid’s ballgame or do whatever. And if you don\'t get out of that hotel room, that hotel room turns into a cave after a while.</li><li>Jeff: And also sometimes you just want to decompress, especially when it is a work trip and you are having meetings. For instance, I got a lot of trade shows where I\'m just walking around the convention center going from booth to booth, talking to a person after person after person, always having to be on. Just having that energy, that kind of interpersonal energy, is frankly very exhausting. By the end of the day, after like seven or eight hours of doing that, sometimes you just want to be by yourself and you just want to quietly sip something in a place that\'s got the music\'s down low, it\'s a good mix that they\'re playing. It\'s low enough that you can hear yourself think, you can also eavesdrop on other people\'s conversations. That\'s kind of fun sometimes. A lot of people talk about people watching; I\'m more of a people listener because you can tell a lot more about a person by the conversations you hear than what they\'re wearing or what they look like.</li><li>Mark: Jeff, this has been great. I really appreciate it. I\'m looking forward to reading your book when it comes out. Jeff Cioletti, author of the new book, the upcoming book coming out November,<em> <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3sQelCQ\"><em>Imbibing for Introverts: A Guide to Social Drinking for the Anti-Social</em></a>.</em> Jeff, thanks very much for stopping by the TravelCommons podcast and chatting to us about drinking.</li><li>Jeff: Thank you so much for having me. This has been a lot of fun because it seems to be my people that listen to your podcasts.</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #190</li><li>I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. </li><li>And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>. And while you’re at TravelCommons.com, you can check out the show notes page for a transcript and any links I’ve mentioned. Or you can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page.</li><li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_190.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #190 — My Travel Tech Stack; Imbibing for Introverts','Tracking lost luggage with AirTags; what\'s changed in my travel tech stack; talking with Jeff Cioletti, author of the new book \"Imbibing for Introverts\", about the art of drinking alone','inherit','closed','closed','','4208-revision-v1','','','2022-10-31 16:56:17','2022-10-31 21:56:17','',4208,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4226',0,'revision','',0),
(4227,1,'2022-10-31 17:48:47','2022-10-31 22:48:47','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/malort_face-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Malort bottle and a cow skull\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"> My Drinking Buddy Is The Quiet Type[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Back behind the mic after 3 week of travel in Croatia and Italy.  The trip went amazingly well up to the last leg, when United\'s Newark team couldn\'t get our bags on our plane. But, I\'d stuffed <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3k4rCUy\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Apple AirTags</a> into our luggage, so we were able to track their movements \'til they got home. That experience and a listener\'s tweet led to me re-visiting my travel tech stack. We then talk to Jeff Cioletti, author of the new book <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3sQelCQ\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Imbibing for Introverts</a></em>, about the art of drinking alone. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_190.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #190: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li><li>Happy Halloween! Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN. Finally got my body back on Central Time after 3 weeks in Europe that started in Split, Croatia and then ran up the Italian peninsula -- Amalfi Coast, Naples, Rome, Florence -- and then back down to Rome to fly home. And for a trip about a dozen potential points of failure between all the flights, the trains, and the Airbnb’s, it all went pretty smoothly except for the final leg -- the EWR-BNA flight home, where United somehow couldn’t manage to get our luggage on our plane. But by then, it wasn’t critical -- just suitcases of dirty clothes and some bottles of wine and limoncello. And United delivered them to us the next afternoon -- just in time for us to start doing laundry. Annoying, yes -- but not much more.</li><li>Which, after a summer of travel horror stories about canceled flights, lost luggage, hours-long security lines that fed our episode on <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/08/18/podcast-188-my-top-tips-to-survive-travel-chaos/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Podcast #188 — My Top Travel Tips to Survive Airport Chaos\">Top Tips to Avoid Travel Chaos</a>, I chalked it up to good luck and clean living or, what’s probably a more likely explanation, the airlines and airports are finally getting on the other side of the surprise snapback in leisure travel during a very tight labor market. Through Nashville, O’Hare, Frankfurt, even the Split airport -- 5-minute security lines at most, and on-time flights. In Italy, all our trains were on-time. And after all of that smooth travel, it wasn’t until our last day, for our flight home, that we got pulled up short. We walked into Terminal 3 at Rome’s Fiumicino airport and smack into a huge line. It took us a moment to figure out that the line wasn’t for us; it was the check-in line for Air Canada which seemed… weird. But no matter, we didn’t have to stand in it.&nbsp;</li><li>The next line, though, we did -- the separate security line for all direct flights to the US.&nbsp; We’ve talked in the past about how, post-9/11, direct international flights to the US tend to be segregated from the rest of the flights and put at the far end of departure terminals. That I’m used to. This was the first time, though, that I’ve seen a US-only security line. And on a Sunday morning at 9am, when everyone is there for the 10:30/11am bank of flights to the US. It tailed back almost the length of the terminal.&nbsp; But it kept moving. And when we made it up to the security area, we could see that they had every screening station manned and operational. We got through security and passport control in less than a half hour. Not world-class timing, but not anywhere near the summer horror stories.</li><li>I shouldn’t have been surprised at that US security line though because every place we went in Italy was jammed/crowded, mostly with Americans. It was revenge travel in action. I asked a few guys -- bartenders, shop owners, shuttle drivers -- how these October crowds compared to pre-pandemic. “It’s insane!” was the consensus. And I could feel it wearing on them. Even though all these people were giving them money, their patience seemed to be getting a little thin. Last year, last October when we were in Italy, in Puglia and Sicily, these same sort of folks were saying “Welcome! We’re so glad travelers are back!” This year? I think it’s a bit more like “when are you travelers <em>going </em>back… home?”</li><li>Bridge Music --  <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/snowflake/46164\">A Foolish Game</a> by Snowflake (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/snowflake/46164 Ft: Admiral Bob   </li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>I’m going to hold my thoughts about my Croatia and Italy trip for the next episode; do one of my stream-of-consciousness “Notes on a Location” topics. But I do want to follow up here on a couple of things from the last episode. First up, is <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/09/22/podcast-189-why-we-travel-when-the-first-flight-isnt-best/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Podcast #189 —  Why We Travel; When The First Flight Isn’t Best\">last episode’s</a> eSIM rant because, through watching with my travel companions and texting with Allan Marko, a long-time TravelCommons contributor, I sorta refined that rant, getting it down to two decision points.&nbsp;<ul><li>First, how much data do you expect to use? If you’re out of the US for a week or less, staying in a place with good WiFi, and can wait until the end of the day to do all your social media posting, you can probably be good with 5GB of data -- which gets you under T-Mobile’s non-throttled international data cap (which is what a couple of the folks traveling with me did), way under Google Fi’s 50 GB cap, and probably fits into a $15-20 eSIM from someone like aloSIM or Airalo. It’s the low-hassle solution. But for a longer stay, like my 3 week-er, or if you’re fully invested in building Instagram stories, like my wife, 5GB just isn’t going to cut it. I reset my iPhone data stats on the flight to Frankfurt and then looked at them as we were taxiing out to the runway in Rome. I used 77 GBs of data. Now, 11 GB was from hotspotting because the WiFi in our Florence Airbnb was pretty useless. But even pulling that out, 66 GBs is still a whackload of data. Which is probably because I didn’t really pay any attention to my data usage, because the Telecom Italia plan I was on gave me <em>600</em> GB of 5G data, essentially unlimited data, for $15. So while my T-Mobile-using companions were scrounging for a bar’s WiFi password to do Untappd check-ins, I was uploading pictures and refreshing my podcasts.</li><li>The second decision point&nbsp; -- do you need to make regular phone calls; do you need a local number? This is more and more of an edge case with people primarily texting, and when there was a specific need for a voice call, people rang me through WhatsApp and Telegram. But on this trip, I got us last-minute tables at a couple of good restaurants because I could call them over the regular phone network, something I couldn’t have done with a data-only eSIM. I’ve also run into the need for a local number when trying to register or create an account for an on-line service. My Telecom Italia SIM also came with a local Italian number and unlimited voice minutes.&nbsp;</li><li>So while I sharpened my thinking on this trip, my conclusion didn’t change. I know I’m an edge case -- I don’t want to have to think about data consumption and I want local phone service -- and until the in-country wireless carriers offer the same pre-paid plans on eSIMs that they do on physical SIMs, I’ll be keeping my phone with the SIM tray… and a straightened-out paper clip to pop it open.</li></ul></li><li>Second, following up to Kendra Kroll’s travel tip in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/09/22/podcast-189-why-we-travel-when-the-first-flight-isnt-best/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">the last episode</a> about knowing the names of cities in the local vernacular. Kendra talked about people missing their train stop because they didn’t realize that Florence, in Italian, is Firenze. So riding the train from Rome (Roma) to Florence (Firenze), I was on the lookout for this. All the train tickets used Italian city names -- Roma, Napoli, Firenze. But the signs on the platforms of the Florence train stations said “Florence”. Indeed, the real confusion wasn’t Florence vs Firenze, but which Florence train station to get off at. My group thought we had a direct train from downtown Rome&nbsp; (Roma Termini) to the downtown Florence station (Firenze Santa Maria Novella), so when the train stopped at a station with “Florence” in the sign, they all scrambled to get their bags and head for the station -- which would’ve left them hanging around in a suburban parking lot figuring out how get a ride downtown. So not only know the name of the city in the vernacular; know the full station name of your stop.</li><li>I mentioned earlier that the first leg of my trip was from BNA to ORD, and I was kinda surprised to realize that it was my first time in ORD in 10 months, since returning from the UK last November. Prior to moving down here to Nashville in July, I’d been flying Southwest out of Chicago Midway; easier to get to and Southwest fit my travel plans better. So as “Welcome Back,” I got the full ORD experience -- landing on the far north runway, which feels like it’s just short of the Wisconsin state line, with the requisite 20-min taxi to get within sight of the terminal. Then, just as you think you’re almost there, the plane stops across the road from the terminal and waits 5 minutes for a gate to open up. Then, once we get moving again, we take the scenic route, past all the American planes in Terminal 3 and the Delta planes in Terminal 2 until we finally get to the United terminal in Terminal 1. All told, at least 30 minutes from tires hitting the runway to the door opening and the agent saying “Welcome to ORD”. Yeah, thanks. Great to be back.</li><li>And in other “Great to be back” things, Irene and I used Lyft for the first time in forever to get home from the Nashville airport -- the wait time and the price were much lower than Uber; which is weird because I’d think, by now, the ride sharing market would be a bit more price efficient. But anyhow, Lyft is so excited to see me resurface in Nashville that the app is flooding my phone with notifications with ride offers and suggestions for things to do. Three days of this was enough to drive me into the hell that the iPhone Settings menu has become to figure out how to shut them up. Probably not the behavior Lyft was trying to prompt, but there you go.</li><li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/THE_CONCEPT_OF_ENERGY/55008\">ABANDONED BUTTERFLIES</a> by THE_CONCEPT_OF_ENERGY (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/THE_CONCEPT_OF_ENERGY/55008</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>My Travel Tech Stack</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Back to that problematic last leg of our trip -- the flight home to Nashville from Newark. I knew we had a lagging luggage problem even before we left the ground courtesy of the latest addition to my travel tech stack. I’d bought <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3k4rCUy\" title=\"\">Apple AirTags</a> just for this reason -- to track our luggage. When I had to check my bag on the Vueling flight from Split to Rome, I could see on my iPhone’s Find My app that my bag was on the plane; it looked almost right underneath me. But in Newark, my bag never left the terminal. Irene checked her app; same thing. As we taxied out, I took a screenshot showing the growing distance between me on the plane and my left-behind bag, and tweeted it out to United saying “I’m guessing I won’t be seeing my luggage in BNA.” </li><li>As I said earlier, I was pretty annoyed with United, but at least the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3k4rCUy\" title=\"\">AirTags</a> saved us the 30 minutes of suspense watching all the other bags come out. Instead, we went straight to the baggage service agent, filed our report, and headed home. And then, waking up the next morning, I could see that our bags made it on the late flight from Newark, and then could see them on the delivery truck heading to our flat. Saved a lot of agita. </li><li>It got me thinking back 6-7 years to <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/08/26/podcast-116-traveling-thru-japan-luggage-trends/\">the first wave</a> of <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/12/podcast-120-where-do-guidebooks-fit-in-i-hate-shopping-for-suitcases/\">smart luggage</a> -- Bluesmart, Away. I bought a Bluesmart bag off their Indiegogo campaign. Those bags also let you <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/05/30/podcast-121-tsa-lines-my-luggage-is-where/\">track their location</a>, along with charging your phone -- for about 2 years until <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">the airlines banned them</a>, or at least the ones with non-removable batteries. Those travel use cases haven’t changed -- “Where’s my bag?” and “I need to recharge my phone so I can rebook this canceled flight” -- but the tech has moved on -- replacing the smart bag with AirTags or Tile trackers and a <a href=\"https://amzn.to/34fcbON\" title=\"\">10,000 mAh battery pack</a>.</li><li>Long-time listener and Twitter follower @Ab3Fr0man pinged me during my summer move podcast pause with “question for the next podcast >> Are there any new devices or apps you are using for travel?” which is what got me spelunking through my travel tech stack, which then turned into a stroll through <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?s=what%27s+in+my+briefcase\" title=\"\">my past “What’s in My Briefcase” episodes</a>. And what struck me was, other than the AirTags and a small phone tripod for video calls, it hasn’t been what I’ve added to my kit as much as what I’ve been able to take away.</li><li>The consolidation to HDMI for video seems to be just about done and that’s let me drop all the VGA cables and dongles I used to carry around just in case I ran into an old conference room projector or hotel TV.  The slow and still in-progress consolidation to USB-C power supplies has let me do some subtraction by addition, dropping my MacBook Air power supply and an old dual USB-A charger for a single charger that’s smaller than either of them, a 100W gallium nitride charger that can charge my laptop, my phone, and my headphones all at once. Indeed, the only reason I still carry an old USB-A Apple Lightning cord is for plugging into the charging port on rental cars. </li><li>But the subtraction thing doesn’t always work. Last year, when we were traveling in Italy (Puglia and Sicily) for a couple of weeks, I wanted to leave the laptop home and run everything off my 8-inch Samsung tablet. That wouldn’t be a problem except for a couple of programs I run on my office PC, and I didn’t want to have to migrate to their cloud versions just for the trip. So instead I used Amazon Workspaces to set up a PC in the cloud. Not quite sure why I thought this would be easier. The Amazon setup was, let’s say, less than straightforward but I got it to work, and was able to run what I needed off my tablet, albeit a bit slower than usual. Getting ready for this last trip, I thought about it again, do I leave the laptop at home? Then I remembered the time sink the Amazon set up was, and tossed the laptop back into my backpack.</li><li>No new apps. Indeed, I tend to be brutal about deleting those I’m not using right now. I’ll download, say, the VRBO or Airbnb app when I need them for a trip and then dump them when I get home. I also just deleted the Clear app. I had a year free from some credit card and never used it. So I canceled it before they charged me for another year and deleted the app. Yelp is on the bubble right now. I also find myself using it less and less, just defaulting to Google Maps’ restaurant suggestions and ratings since I usually already have it open for directions.</li><li>The carriers’ apps continue to improve incrementally. I used to use an app that had maps of all the major airports, but found I was using it less and less as the carriers added similar maps to their apps. Indeed, while waiting to de-plane in EWR, I checked the United app and it had an animated step-by-step map showing the path from our arrival gate, through Customs, to our departure gate. Too bad the guys moving our luggage didn’t have the same map. </li><li>As I’ve mentioned in past episodes, I still use the free version of TripIt to consolidate all plane, train, hotel, and Airbnb confirmations into a single itinerary. I know Google Travel can do something similar if you live within the Google ecosystem, but I don’t so I use TripIt. TripIt keeps pushing their $50 Pro offering with real-time alerts and airport maps. I had the Pro offering once, but now I get all that stuff for free on the carrier apps. Now, if I <em>was</em> going to pop $50, I’d spend it on the Flighty app instead. I <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/04/21/podcast-186-mask-mandate-scramble-small-airport-survival/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">trialed Flighty back in the spring on a trip to Santa Fe</a> and thought it was a great app. If I was still flying every week, it would be a no-brainer. Indeed, I’d figure out a way to expense the $250 lifetime membership and be done with it. </li><li>But the one piece of travel that’s been with me since the beginning and that continues to earn its keep -- a bottle opener. Even as craft beer has moved to cans, that stamped metal New Belgium bottle opener has saved the corner of many a hotel dresser.</li><li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/49674\">H2O</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/49674</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Imbibing for Introverts</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>When frequent travelers are on the road, we spend a lot of time alone -- in our hotel rooms, and in spite of the advice from a former colleague who wrote a book titled <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3Uba60n\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Never Eat Alone</a></em>, we do… a lot. So when I saw an upcoming book about drinking alone, it seemed a perfect fit for the podcast. So I reached out to the author, Jeff Cioletti, editor-in-chief of <a href=\"https://craftspiritsmag.com/\"><em>Craft Spirits Magazine</em></a>.<ul><li>Mark: Jeff, thanks for joining us on the TravelCommons podcast today. Your upcoming book…</li><li>Jeff: Technically the release date is November 15, I tried to get them early for an event on October 20, but they got held up on a freight train somewhere in the United States, so it\'s like…</li><li>Mark: That damn supply chain. So anyhow, your upcoming book, <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3sQelCQ\"><em>Imbibing for Introverts: A Guide to Social Drinking for the Anti-Social</em></a>.</em> Over the years on the TravelCommons podcast, we\'ve <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?s=solo+dining\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">talked many times</a> about <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/19/podcast-149-dining-single-airlines-need-to-tell-us-more/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">solo eating</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/05/12/table-for-one-eating-alone-on-the-road/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">eating alone on the road</a>, what you might call eating for introverts. So when I saw the title of your book, it mapped right into things that we\'ve been doing. And again, in past episodes, we\'ve talked about the best ways to eat alone and so, what are your pro tips for the best ways to drink alone?</li><li>Jeff: It depends on the venue; it just depends on what your objectives are. If you want to quietly contemplate what you\'re drinking; if you\'re in one of these high-end whiskey bars or a brandy bar or something like that; where you\'re sitting and you really want to just contemplate. Sometimes you just want to be present and just be in your thoughts, think about what you\'re drinking, think about its connection to the point of origin, that kind of thing. When you\'re drinking alone, probably more often than not you\'re going to be sitting at the bar. A lot of times they\'re going to give you a 2-top, but sometimes I feel bad about taking it up, especially when things are busy and I just want to sit at the bar.</li><li>Mark: When I started traveling, which was a long time ago, you’d end up in that same situation, at a 2-top or a 4-top and then you\'re the sad person sitting in the corner table because you were taking up revenue space. “Look, I got spots for two and you\'re only taking up one.”</li><li>Jeff: And I think that if you\'re not sitting in a corner, if you do get to sit at the bar, that\'s a great opportunity to strike up a conversation with the bartender. Sometimes it just happens organically. I don\'t know whether they feel like they need to talk to you because you\'re not with anybody and they feel bad for you. But one thing that I do find is when you order something in a way that shows you know what you\'re talking about -- like you\'re at the bar and you say give me a gin and tonic, if you don\'t really specify what gin you want, they may not have a really broad selection, but a lot of these more sort of mixology oriented bars, they\'re going to have a selection and a good way to start is “What kind of gin you have; do you have anything that\'s not juniper- forward?” -- bartenders can be really primed to geek out with somebody that they detect maybe as passionate about the things they drink as they are, as they are about the things they mix. So when you show an inkling of interest or knowledge related to that spirit or whatever ingredient you\'re putting in the cocktail, that may pique their interest a little bit and they might get a sense that this person knows what they’re talking about. I\'ve been in situations where that snowballs to a point where the bartender says, “Hey, by the way, I\'m entering a cocktail competition, this was my creation, I want you to try and tell me honestly what you think about it.” It\'s moments like this that present themselves. Not always, but you know, sometimes they do. Sometimes a bartender will also have a secret stash behind the bar, could be a rare whiskey that\'s on their list. Sometimes they will sneak you some of that. It\'s not going to necessarily be free, but they\'ll give you a pour of something that they\'re protecting and hoarding and not really giving to just anybody. So moments like that are good. It\'s not necessarily that you\'re being antisocial. It\'s sometimes conversations can create themselves organically and so that\'s why it\'s sometimes good to be alone and sit at the bar rather than at the table because no one\'s really going to be spending the time with you to do that.</li><li>Mark: Eating alone sitting at the bar, it used to be that you couldn\'t get much more than a bar snack menu at a bar. Nowadays, though, you can get a full menu at a bar and so I\'m always eating at the bar. You\'re right about the bartenders. You get blips of human interaction. I think usually the bartender is good for, I don\'t know, 3-4 quick interchanges. Obviously they got a job to do, so you’re not going to have an ongoing conversation with them, but they\'ll come by and if they think you\'re interested or you\'re an interesting person, you\'ll get blips. I don\'t know, it\'s either they think you\'re interesting or they’re taking pity on you. I\'m not quite sure which...&nbsp; What drove you to write this book Imbibing for Introverts? What was the kernel on this one?</li><li>Jeff: I just been traveling a lot and I\'ve been doing a lot of solo travel, especially work-related stuff and, over time, I really just got comfortable in my own skin going out alone. It just became something I realized I actually enjoy my own company and it just came together in my head. One time I was sitting at a bar and I wasn\'t alone at the time. I was having a drink with a friend in a bar that I had often had a drink alone and I thought I\'d really love to do a book about just being an introvert and just enjoying being by yourself and drinking alone and normalizing that too because some people are just weird about going out alone.</li><li>Mark: When you do a lot of travel, you\'ve got to get comfortable with your own company because oftentimes that\'s it. You\'ve got clients, you\'ve got other people you\'re meeting and they\'re going home, they\'re going to coach their kid’s ballgame or do whatever. And if you don\'t get out of that hotel room, that hotel room turns into a cave after a while.</li><li>Jeff: And also sometimes you just want to decompress, especially when it is a work trip and you are having meetings. For instance, I got a lot of trade shows where I\'m just walking around the convention center going from booth to booth, talking to a person after person after person, always having to be on. Just having that energy, that kind of interpersonal energy, is frankly very exhausting. By the end of the day, after like seven or eight hours of doing that, sometimes you just want to be by yourself and you just want to quietly sip something in a place that\'s got the music\'s down low, it\'s a good mix that they\'re playing. It\'s low enough that you can hear yourself think, you can also eavesdrop on other people\'s conversations. That\'s kind of fun sometimes. A lot of people talk about people watching; I\'m more of a people listener because you can tell a lot more about a person by the conversations you hear than what they\'re wearing or what they look like.</li><li>Mark: Jeff, this has been great. I really appreciate it. I\'m looking forward to reading your book when it comes out. Jeff Cioletti, author of the new book, the upcoming book coming out November,<em> <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3sQelCQ\"><em>Imbibing for Introverts: A Guide to Social Drinking for the Anti-Social</em></a>.</em> Jeff, thanks very much for stopping by the TravelCommons podcast and chatting to us about drinking.</li><li>Jeff: Thank you so much for having me. This has been a lot of fun because it seems to be my people that listen to your podcasts.</li></ul></li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li><li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #190</li><li>I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li><li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. </li><li>And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>. And while you’re at TravelCommons.com, you can check out the show notes page for a transcript and any links I’ve mentioned. Or you can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page.</li><li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li><li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li><li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li><li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li><li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_190.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #190 — My Travel Tech Stack; Imbibing for Introverts','Tracking lost luggage with AirTags; what\'s changed in my travel tech stack; talking with Jeff Cioletti, author of the new book \"Imbibing for Introverts\", about the art of drinking alone','inherit','closed','closed','','4208-revision-v1','','','2022-10-31 17:48:47','2022-10-31 22:48:47','',4208,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4227',0,'revision','',0),
(4232,1,'2022-12-12 19:36:15','2022-12-13 00:36:15','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChatGPT\" title=\"\">ChatGPT</a> was <a href=\"https://twitter.com/sama/status/1598038815599661056\" title=\"\">released into the wild</a> after Thanksgiving and within a week was <a href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/10/technology/ai-chat-bot-chatgpt.html\" title=\"\">heralded</a> as the opening salvo of the AI <a href=\"https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1599128577068650498\" title=\"\">apocalypse</a> -- or at the very least, a <a href=\"https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/12/chatgpt-question-creative-human-robotos\" title=\"\">cheap replacement for fair-to-middlin\' writers</a>. And so, like <a href=\"https://www.eater.com/23500787/openai-chatgpt-ai-chatbot-generates-diaspora-food-writing-tropes-stinky-lunchbox-moment\" title=\"\">many</a> <a href=\"https://forward.com/culture/527473/artificial-intelligence-bot-hanukkah-hallmark-movie-openai-chatgpt/\" title=\"\">writers</a>, I decided to test out this new competitor. I used a very simple request -- write a blog post with the top holiday travel tips.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":4240,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/DALL·E-2022-12-12-17.30.33.png\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/DALL·E-2022-12-12-17.30.33-300x300.png\" alt=\"Travel tips from ChatGPT\" class=\"wp-image-4240\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\"><em>AI Travel Assistant</em></figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I noticed a couple of things right away:    ChatGPT is a <em>lot</em> faster than me, and it would spit out a slightly different take at the blog post each time I clicked the <em>Try Again</em> button. So I squinted my eyes and mashed together a half-dozen outputs to come up with this \"consensus\" version of ChatGPT\'s top 5 holiday travel tips:</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list {\"ordered\":true} -->\n<ol><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Plan ahead:</strong> The holiday season is a busy time for travel, so it\'s important to plan your trip in advance. Book your flights, train tickets, or rental car early to get the best prices and availability. This will not only save you money, but it will also give you peace of mind knowing that everything is taken care of.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Pack light:</strong> Packing light can make your holiday travel much easier. Avoid bringing unnecessary items and focus on packing the essentials. Keep in mind that most airlines have strict weight limits for luggage, and you\'ll have to carry your bags to and from the airport or train station.  Consider packing items that can serve multiple purposes, such as a scarf that can double as a blanket or a versatile piece of clothing that can be dressed up or down.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Stay organized:</strong> Keep all of your travel documents, such as your passport and boarding passes, organized and easily accessible. This will save you time and stress at the airport. Consider using a travel organizer or wallet to keep everything in one place.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Be flexible:</strong> Flexibility is key when it comes to holiday travel. Be prepared for the unexpected and try to stay flexible. If your flight is delayed or canceled, or if you encounter other unexpected issues, try to remain calm and focus on finding a solution.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Stay connected: </strong>It\'s important to stay connected while you\'re traveling, especially if you\'re traveling internationally. Make sure to keep your family and friends informed of your travel plans and let them know if anything changes. It\'s also a good idea to have a plan for staying connected, whether that means purchasing a local SIM card for your phone or using a portable WiFi device.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ol>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Verdict? Not bad. Nothing egregiously wrong, but it\'s at a basic \"Traveler 101\" level. There\'s nothing that even the occasional traveler, someone taking just a couple of flights a year, wouldn\'t already know. To compare AI-generated tips with those generated by 35 years and a few million miles of road warrior experience, here are TravelCommons\' top 5 holiday travel tips:</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list {\"ordered\":true} -->\n<ol><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Figure out if you want to fly or drive:</strong> My normal&nbsp;fly-vs.-drive tipping point&nbsp;is 350 miles; anything less and I’ll drive it. If you fly, expect that all the airport logistics (security, lines, crowds) will add 2 hours to your in-flight time. When you arrive, it could take you another hour to de-plane, collect your luggage, and find your rental car or wait for an Uber. And that’s if there are no flight delays.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Fly Non-Stop</strong>:&nbsp;It\'s the cardinal rule of air travel. Holiday travel stacks up problems — high passenger load factors combined with winter weather disruptions almost guarantees late arrivals and missed connections. Even if you’re connecting through a warm-weather airport like Houston, an intermediate stop adds one more point of failure, one more opportunity for the airlines to screw up. Pay the extra $100 for a non-stop flight.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Catch the Early Flight</strong>: &nbsp;Delays stack up as the day wears on.&nbsp; As your airplane goes from airport to airport, the probability of it getting stuck increases. &nbsp;Overnight, airlines have a chance to recover – late planes finally get their destinations and operations groups can reassign planes.&nbsp; <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/09/22/podcast-189-why-we-travel-when-the-first-flight-isnt-best/\" title=\"\">A recent TravelCommons\' guest has a different opinion</a>, but I rarely hit a delay on the first flight out.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Carry On Your Luggage</strong>:  Unless you\'re heading to the slopes for Christmas, everyone in your travel party should be able to fit into a carry-on bag. You can save $25/bag and increase the probability of having clean clothes at your destination. But if for some reason you need to check your bags -- maybe you\'re bringing pre-wrapped gifts or a special bottle of wine for Christmas dinner --&nbsp; split everyone\'s clothes across all the bags. It\'s rare for an airline to lose&nbsp;<em>all</em> of your checked bags. This way no one sits down at Christmas dinner in sweats from the nearest Walmart.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Bring a Battery Pack:</strong> It\'s tough to travel today without a working mobile phone. It holds our boarding passes, gives us gate change and flight delay notifications, and routes us around traffic jams. A dead phone while flights are being canceled is more than a minor inconvenience. Having that second or third charge immediately available is critical when trying to swerve a long delay.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ol>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>You be the judge, but I\'m feeling pretty good about keeping this unpaid travel blogger gig -- at least until ChatGPT gets its next upgrade.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','How Good Are ChatGPT\'s Top 5 Holiday Travel Tips?','Comparing ChatGPT\'s AI-generated travel tips with my travel tips that are generated by 35 years and a few million miles of road warrior experience','publish','closed','closed','','how-good-are-chatgpts-top-5-holiday-travel-tips','','','2023-02-27 18:24:39','2023-02-27 23:24:39','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4232',0,'post','',0),
(4233,1,'2022-12-12 18:09:55','2022-12-12 23:09:55','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChatGPT\" title=\"\">ChatGPT</a> was <a href=\"https://twitter.com/sama/status/1598038815599661056\" title=\"\">released into the wild</a> after Thanksgiving and within a week was <a href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/10/technology/ai-chat-bot-chatgpt.html\" title=\"\">heralded</a> as the opening salvo of the AI <a href=\"https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1599128577068650498\" title=\"\">apocalypse</a> -- or at least the <a href=\"https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/12/chatgpt-question-creative-human-robotos\" title=\"\">cheap replacement for fair-to-middlin\' writers</a>. And so, like <a href=\"https://www.eater.com/23500787/openai-chatgpt-ai-chatbot-generates-diaspora-food-writing-tropes-stinky-lunchbox-moment\" title=\"\">many</a> <a href=\"https://forward.com/culture/527473/artificial-intelligence-bot-hanukkah-hallmark-movie-openai-chatgpt/\" title=\"\">writers</a>, I decided to test out this new competitor with a simple request -- write a blog post with the top holiday travel tips.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I noticed a couple of things right away:  ChatGPT is a lot faster than me, and it would spit out a slightly different take at the blog post each time I clicked the <em>Try Again</em> button. Mashing together a half-dozen takes to create a \"consensus\" blog post, here\'s ChatGPT\'s top 5 holiday tips:</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list {\"ordered\":true} -->\n<ol><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Plan ahead: The holiday season is a busy time for travel, so it\'s important to plan your trip in advance. Book your flights, train tickets, or rental car early to get the best prices and availability. This will not only save you money, but it will also give you peace of mind knowing that everything is taken care of.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Pack light: Packing light can make your holiday travel much easier. Avoid bringing unnecessary items and focus on packing the essentials. Keep in mind that most airlines have strict weight limits for luggage, and you\'ll have to carry your bags to and from the airport or train station.  Consider packing items that can serve multiple purposes, such as a scarf that can double as a blanket or a versatile piece of clothing that can be dressed up or down.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Stay organized: Keep all of your travel documents, such as your passport and boarding passes, organized and easily accessible. This will save you time and stress at the airport. Consider using a travel organizer or wallet to keep everything in one place.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Be flexible: Flexibility is key when it comes to holiday travel. Expect that things might not go as planned, and be prepared to roll with the punches. This will help you stay calm and enjoy your trip, even if unexpected challenges arise.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Stay flexible: Despite your best planning efforts, things may not always go according to plan. Be prepared for the unexpected and try to stay flexible. If your flight is delayed or canceled, or if you encounter other unexpected issues, try to remain calm and focus on finding a solution.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ol>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','How Good Are ChatGPT\'s Top 5 Holiday Travel Tips?','','inherit','closed','closed','','4232-revision-v1','','','2022-12-12 18:09:55','2022-12-12 23:09:55','',4232,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4233',0,'revision','',0),
(4234,1,'2022-12-12 18:13:51','2022-12-12 23:13:51','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChatGPT\" title=\"\">ChatGPT</a> was <a href=\"https://twitter.com/sama/status/1598038815599661056\" title=\"\">released into the wild</a> after Thanksgiving and within a week was <a href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/10/technology/ai-chat-bot-chatgpt.html\" title=\"\">heralded</a> as the opening salvo of the AI <a href=\"https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1599128577068650498\" title=\"\">apocalypse</a> -- or at least the <a href=\"https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/12/chatgpt-question-creative-human-robotos\" title=\"\">cheap replacement for fair-to-middlin\' writers</a>. And so, like <a href=\"https://www.eater.com/23500787/openai-chatgpt-ai-chatbot-generates-diaspora-food-writing-tropes-stinky-lunchbox-moment\" title=\"\">many</a> <a href=\"https://forward.com/culture/527473/artificial-intelligence-bot-hanukkah-hallmark-movie-openai-chatgpt/\" title=\"\">writers</a>, I decided to test out this new competitor with a simple request -- write a blog post with the top holiday travel tips.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I noticed a couple of things right away:  ChatGPT is a lot faster than me, and it would spit out a slightly different take at the blog post each time I clicked the <em>Try Again</em> button. Mashing together a half-dozen takes to create a \"consensus\" blog post, here\'s ChatGPT\'s top 5 holiday tips:</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list {\"ordered\":true} -->\n<ol><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Plan ahead: The holiday season is a busy time for travel, so it\'s important to plan your trip in advance. Book your flights, train tickets, or rental car early to get the best prices and availability. This will not only save you money, but it will also give you peace of mind knowing that everything is taken care of.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Pack light: Packing light can make your holiday travel much easier. Avoid bringing unnecessary items and focus on packing the essentials. Keep in mind that most airlines have strict weight limits for luggage, and you\'ll have to carry your bags to and from the airport or train station.  Consider packing items that can serve multiple purposes, such as a scarf that can double as a blanket or a versatile piece of clothing that can be dressed up or down.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Stay organized: Keep all of your travel documents, such as your passport and boarding passes, organized and easily accessible. This will save you time and stress at the airport. Consider using a travel organizer or wallet to keep everything in one place.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Be flexible: Flexibility is key when it comes to holiday travel. Be prepared for the unexpected and try to stay flexible. If your flight is delayed or canceled, or if you encounter other unexpected issues, try to remain calm and focus on finding a solution.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Stay connected. It\'s important to stay connected while you\'re traveling, especially if you\'re traveling internationally. Make sure you have a plan for staying connected, whether that means purchasing a local SIM card for your phone or using a portable WiFi device.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Stay connected: It\'s important to stay connected while you\'re traveling, especially if you\'re traveling internationally. Make sure to keep your family and friends informed of your travel plans and let them know if anything changes. It\'s also a good idea to have a plan for staying connected, whether that means purchasing a local SIM card for your phone or using a portable WiFi device.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ol>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','How Good Are ChatGPT\'s Top 5 Holiday Travel Tips?','','inherit','closed','closed','','4232-revision-v1','','','2022-12-12 18:13:51','2022-12-12 23:13:51','',4232,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4234',0,'revision','',0),
(4235,1,'2022-12-12 18:18:56','2022-12-12 23:18:56','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChatGPT\" title=\"\">ChatGPT</a> was <a href=\"https://twitter.com/sama/status/1598038815599661056\" title=\"\">released into the wild</a> after Thanksgiving and within a week was <a href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/10/technology/ai-chat-bot-chatgpt.html\" title=\"\">heralded</a> as the opening salvo of the AI <a href=\"https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1599128577068650498\" title=\"\">apocalypse</a> -- or at the very least, a <a href=\"https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/12/chatgpt-question-creative-human-robotos\" title=\"\">cheap replacement for fair-to-middlin\' writers</a>. And so, like <a href=\"https://www.eater.com/23500787/openai-chatgpt-ai-chatbot-generates-diaspora-food-writing-tropes-stinky-lunchbox-moment\" title=\"\">many</a> <a href=\"https://forward.com/culture/527473/artificial-intelligence-bot-hanukkah-hallmark-movie-openai-chatgpt/\" title=\"\">writers</a>, I decided to test out this new competitor. I had a simple request -- write a blog post with the top holiday travel tips.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I noticed a couple of things right away:  ChatGPT is a lot faster than me, and it would spit out a slightly different take at the blog post each time I clicked the <em>Try Again</em> button. So I squinted my eyes and mashed together a half-dozen outputs to come up with this \"consensus\" version of ChatGPT\'s top 5 holiday tips:</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list {\"ordered\":true} -->\n<ol><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Plan ahead: The holiday season is a busy time for travel, so it\'s important to plan your trip in advance. Book your flights, train tickets, or rental car early to get the best prices and availability. This will not only save you money, but it will also give you peace of mind knowing that everything is taken care of.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Pack light: Packing light can make your holiday travel much easier. Avoid bringing unnecessary items and focus on packing the essentials. Keep in mind that most airlines have strict weight limits for luggage, and you\'ll have to carry your bags to and from the airport or train station.  Consider packing items that can serve multiple purposes, such as a scarf that can double as a blanket or a versatile piece of clothing that can be dressed up or down.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Stay organized: Keep all of your travel documents, such as your passport and boarding passes, organized and easily accessible. This will save you time and stress at the airport. Consider using a travel organizer or wallet to keep everything in one place.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Be flexible: Flexibility is key when it comes to holiday travel. Be prepared for the unexpected and try to stay flexible. If your flight is delayed or canceled, or if you encounter other unexpected issues, try to remain calm and focus on finding a solution.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Stay connected. It\'s important to stay connected while you\'re traveling, especially if you\'re traveling internationally. Make sure you have a plan for staying connected, whether that means purchasing a local SIM card for your phone or using a portable WiFi device.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Stay connected: It\'s important to stay connected while you\'re traveling, especially if you\'re traveling internationally. Make sure to keep your family and friends informed of your travel plans and let them know if anything changes. It\'s also a good idea to have a plan for staying connected, whether that means purchasing a local SIM card for your phone or using a portable WiFi device.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ol>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','How Good Are ChatGPT\'s Top 5 Holiday Travel Tips?','','inherit','closed','closed','','4232-revision-v1','','','2022-12-12 18:18:56','2022-12-12 23:18:56','',4232,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4235',0,'revision','',0),
(4236,1,'2022-12-12 18:50:03','2022-12-12 23:50:03','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChatGPT\" title=\"\">ChatGPT</a> was <a href=\"https://twitter.com/sama/status/1598038815599661056\" title=\"\">released into the wild</a> after Thanksgiving and within a week was <a href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/10/technology/ai-chat-bot-chatgpt.html\" title=\"\">heralded</a> as the opening salvo of the AI <a href=\"https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1599128577068650498\" title=\"\">apocalypse</a> -- or at the very least, a <a href=\"https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/12/chatgpt-question-creative-human-robotos\" title=\"\">cheap replacement for fair-to-middlin\' writers</a>. And so, like <a href=\"https://www.eater.com/23500787/openai-chatgpt-ai-chatbot-generates-diaspora-food-writing-tropes-stinky-lunchbox-moment\" title=\"\">many</a> <a href=\"https://forward.com/culture/527473/artificial-intelligence-bot-hanukkah-hallmark-movie-openai-chatgpt/\" title=\"\">writers</a>, I decided to test out this new competitor. I had a simple request -- write a blog post with the top holiday travel tips.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I noticed a couple of things right away:  ChatGPT is a lot faster than me, and it would spit out a slightly different take at the blog post each time I clicked the <em>Try Again</em> button. So I squinted my eyes and mashed together a half-dozen outputs to come up with this \"consensus\" version of ChatGPT\'s top 5 holiday travel tips:</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list {\"ordered\":true} -->\n<ol><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Plan ahead:</strong> The holiday season is a busy time for travel, so it\'s important to plan your trip in advance. Book your flights, train tickets, or rental car early to get the best prices and availability. This will not only save you money, but it will also give you peace of mind knowing that everything is taken care of.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Pack light:</strong> Packing light can make your holiday travel much easier. Avoid bringing unnecessary items and focus on packing the essentials. Keep in mind that most airlines have strict weight limits for luggage, and you\'ll have to carry your bags to and from the airport or train station.  Consider packing items that can serve multiple purposes, such as a scarf that can double as a blanket or a versatile piece of clothing that can be dressed up or down.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Stay organized:</strong> Keep all of your travel documents, such as your passport and boarding passes, organized and easily accessible. This will save you time and stress at the airport. Consider using a travel organizer or wallet to keep everything in one place.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Be flexible:</strong> Flexibility is key when it comes to holiday travel. Be prepared for the unexpected and try to stay flexible. If your flight is delayed or canceled, or if you encounter other unexpected issues, try to remain calm and focus on finding a solution.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Stay connected: </strong>It\'s important to stay connected while you\'re traveling, especially if you\'re traveling internationally. Make sure to keep your family and friends informed of your travel plans and let them know if anything changes. It\'s also a good idea to have a plan for staying connected, whether that means purchasing a local SIM card for your phone or using a portable WiFi device.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ol>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Verdict? Not bad. Nothing egregiously wrong, but it\'s at a basic \"Traveler 101\" level. There\'s nothing that even the occasional traveler, someone taking a couple of flights a year, wouldn\'t already know. To compare, here are my top 5 holiday travel tips:</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list {\"ordered\":true} -->\n<ol><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Figure out if you want to fly or drive:</strong> My normal fly-vs.-drive tipping point is 350 miles; anything less and I’ll drive it. If you fly, expect that all the airport logistics (security, lines, crowds) will add 3 hours to your in-flight time. And that’s if there are no flight delays.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Fly Non-Stop</strong>: It\'s the cardinal rule of air travel. Holiday travel stacks up problems —  high passenger load factors combined with winter weather disruptions almost guarantees late arrivals and missed connections. Even if you’re connecting through Houston, an intermediate stop adds one more point of failure, one more opportunity for the airlines to screw up. Pay the extra $100 for a non-stop flight.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Catch the Early Flight</strong>: Delays stack up as the day wears on.  As your airplane goes from airport to airport, the probability of it getting stuck increases.  Overnight, airlines have a chance to recover – late planes finally get their destinations and operations groups can reassign planes.  So while the last flight out can be a crap shoot, I rarely hit a delay on the first flight out.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ol>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','How Good Are ChatGPT\'s Top 5 Holiday Travel Tips?','','inherit','closed','closed','','4232-revision-v1','','','2022-12-12 18:50:03','2022-12-12 23:50:03','',4232,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4236',0,'revision','',0),
(4237,1,'2022-12-12 18:51:28','2022-12-12 23:51:28','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChatGPT\" title=\"\">ChatGPT</a> was <a href=\"https://twitter.com/sama/status/1598038815599661056\" title=\"\">released into the wild</a> after Thanksgiving and within a week was <a href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/10/technology/ai-chat-bot-chatgpt.html\" title=\"\">heralded</a> as the opening salvo of the AI <a href=\"https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1599128577068650498\" title=\"\">apocalypse</a> -- or at the very least, a <a href=\"https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/12/chatgpt-question-creative-human-robotos\" title=\"\">cheap replacement for fair-to-middlin\' writers</a>. And so, like <a href=\"https://www.eater.com/23500787/openai-chatgpt-ai-chatbot-generates-diaspora-food-writing-tropes-stinky-lunchbox-moment\" title=\"\">many</a> <a href=\"https://forward.com/culture/527473/artificial-intelligence-bot-hanukkah-hallmark-movie-openai-chatgpt/\" title=\"\">writers</a>, I decided to test out this new competitor. I had a simple request -- write a blog post with the top holiday travel tips.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I noticed a couple of things right away:  ChatGPT is a lot faster than me, and it would spit out a slightly different take at the blog post each time I clicked the <em>Try Again</em> button. So I squinted my eyes and mashed together a half-dozen outputs to come up with this \"consensus\" version of ChatGPT\'s top 5 holiday travel tips:</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list {\"ordered\":true} -->\n<ol><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Plan ahead:</strong> The holiday season is a busy time for travel, so it\'s important to plan your trip in advance. Book your flights, train tickets, or rental car early to get the best prices and availability. This will not only save you money, but it will also give you peace of mind knowing that everything is taken care of.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Pack light:</strong> Packing light can make your holiday travel much easier. Avoid bringing unnecessary items and focus on packing the essentials. Keep in mind that most airlines have strict weight limits for luggage, and you\'ll have to carry your bags to and from the airport or train station.  Consider packing items that can serve multiple purposes, such as a scarf that can double as a blanket or a versatile piece of clothing that can be dressed up or down.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Stay organized:</strong> Keep all of your travel documents, such as your passport and boarding passes, organized and easily accessible. This will save you time and stress at the airport. Consider using a travel organizer or wallet to keep everything in one place.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Be flexible:</strong> Flexibility is key when it comes to holiday travel. Be prepared for the unexpected and try to stay flexible. If your flight is delayed or canceled, or if you encounter other unexpected issues, try to remain calm and focus on finding a solution.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Stay connected: </strong>It\'s important to stay connected while you\'re traveling, especially if you\'re traveling internationally. Make sure to keep your family and friends informed of your travel plans and let them know if anything changes. It\'s also a good idea to have a plan for staying connected, whether that means purchasing a local SIM card for your phone or using a portable WiFi device.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ol>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Verdict? Not bad. Nothing egregiously wrong, but it\'s at a basic \"Traveler 101\" level. There\'s nothing that even the occasional traveler, someone taking a couple of flights a year, wouldn\'t already know. To compare, here are TravelCommons\' top 5 holiday travel tips:</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list {\"ordered\":true} -->\n<ol><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Figure out if you want to fly or drive:</strong> My normal fly-vs.-drive tipping point is 350 miles; anything less and I’ll drive it. If you fly, expect that all the airport logistics (security, lines, crowds) will add 3 hours to your in-flight time. And that’s if there are no flight delays.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Fly Non-Stop</strong>: It\'s the cardinal rule of air travel. Holiday travel stacks up problems —  high passenger load factors combined with winter weather disruptions almost guarantees late arrivals and missed connections. Even if you’re connecting through Houston, an intermediate stop adds one more point of failure, one more opportunity for the airlines to screw up. Pay the extra $100 for a non-stop flight.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Catch the Early Flight</strong>: Delays stack up as the day wears on.  As your airplane goes from airport to airport, the probability of it getting stuck increases.  Overnight, airlines have a chance to recover – late planes finally get their destinations and operations groups can reassign planes.  So while the last flight out can be a crap shoot, I rarely hit a delay on the first flight out.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ol>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','How Good Are ChatGPT\'s Top 5 Holiday Travel Tips?','','inherit','closed','closed','','4232-revision-v1','','','2022-12-12 18:51:28','2022-12-12 23:51:28','',4232,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4237',0,'revision','',0),
(4238,1,'2022-12-12 18:52:52','2022-12-12 23:52:52','[caption id=\"attachment_2186\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/IMG_0205.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2186\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/IMG_0205-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /></a> I Think That\'s the Uber Pick-Up Spot[/caption]\n\nIt seems that the snow and cold temperatures settled into the northern part of the Northern Hemisphere a bit earlier than last year. With the crush of Christmas/New Years travel starting in a few weeks, here are the TravelCommons\' top holiday travel tips to get you started early on your travel prep...\n<ol>\n 	<li><strong>Fly Non-Stop —</strong> It\'s obvious because it\'s the cardinal rule of air travel. Holiday travel stacks up problems —  high passenger load factors combined with winter weather disruptions almost guarantees late arrivals and missed connections. Even if you’re connecting through Houston, an intermediate stop adds one more point of failure, one more opportunity for the airlines to screw up. Pay the extra $100 for a non-stop flight.</li>\n 	<li><strong>Sign Up for TSA PreCheck — </strong>Gift yourself and spend the $85 on 5 years of time and hassle reduction.</li>\n 	<li><strong>Skip the Tight Connection —  </strong>If you can’t fly non-stop, step away from any connection that’s less than 60 minutes.  Yes, we usually want to get to our destination in the shortest possible time, but accepting a connection of 1 hour or less…. Think about it – a 15-minute delay on your flight into a big hub like <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27hare_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Chicago</a> or <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denver_International_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Denver</a> or <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detroit_Metropolitan_Wayne_County_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Detroit</a> (as good as on-time in the winter for most airlines) and you’re sprinting across terminals and concourses just to beat the closing door.  A 1-hr connection is just asking for a stress attack and/or an overnight stay at the airport branch of the <a title=\"Bates Motel\" href=\"http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092622/\" rel=\"imdb\">Bates Motel</a>.</li>\n 	<li><strong>Catch the Early Flight </strong>— Delays stack up as the day wears on.  As your airplane goes from airport to airport, the probability of it getting stuck increases.  Overnight, airlines have a chance to recover – late planes finally get their destinations and operations groups can reassign planes.  So while the last flight out can be a crap shoot, I rarely hit a delay on the first flight out.</li>\n 	<li><strong>Use Twitter as a Concierge Service</strong> — Most airlines have social media teams monitoring Twitter. Before you leave, find and follow your airline’s Twitter customer service account. “At naming” them in a Tweet (e.g., “<a dir=\"ltr\" href=\"https://twitter.com/united\">@united</a> what’s happening with UA 4286 MSY-ORD that it’s 1:45 hr delayed?”) usually gets a response in a couple of minutes. Following them allows you to exchange personal information such as record locator numbers via direct message (DM). It’s usually faster than queuing up for a frazzled gate agent and the results can be better.</li>\n 	<li><strong>Use Multiple Flight Tracking Apps</strong> — Use your smartphone to keep track of gate changes and flight delays. Sign up for text notifications from your airline when you book your ticket. However,  I’ve often experienced long delays with the airlines’ services or notices that were never sent out. So I also use <a href=\"http://tripit.com/\">TripIt</a>, <a href=\"http://flightaware.com/\">FlightAware</a>, and <a href=\"http://flightstats.com\">FlightStats</a>. It means multiple notices, but it also means I don’t miss anything.</li>\n 	<li><strong>Bring a Battery Pack </strong>— Whatever the size or form factor -- slimline, lipstick, high-capacity brick -- having that second or third charge readily available is critical to get last-minute gate change notifications and when you’re using electronic boarding passes. It saves you from stalking cleaning crews to find a live power outlet on your layover, or negotiating with your seatmate for possession of outlet between you. It’s cheap peace of mind.</li>\n 	<li><strong>Carry On your Luggage</strong> -- Unless you\'re heading to the slopes for Christmas, everyone in your travel party should be able to fit into a carry-on sized bag. You can save $25/bag and increase the probability of having clean clothes at your destination. If you’re seating area 4 or higher, odds are there’s no overhead bin space for you. Let the agent gate-check the bag for you. You won’t have to pay a checked bag fee and it’s very unlikely that they’ll lose your bag – it’s only traveling a couple hundred feet from the jet bridge to the luggage hold.</li>\n 	<li><strong>Spread Clothes Across All Bags</strong> -- If you need to check your bags -- maybe you have to bring pre-wrapped gifts or a special bottle of wine for Christmas dinner --  split everyone\'s clothes across all the bags. It\'s rare for an airline to lose <em>all</em> of your checked bags.</li>\n 	<li><strong>Know Your Geography </strong>-- Knowing alternatives to your destination airport gives you more flexibility dealing with cancelled flights or missed connections. In New York, the LaGuardia to Newark pivot is easy, but others aren\'t so obvious.  Everyone knows that Chicago has two airports – O\'Hare and Midway.  But what about Milwaukee\'s Mitchell Field 80 miles north?  If PHL is in trouble, how many folks think about Harrisburg or Allentown?  Or Sacramento as an alternative to SFO?  I think about alternatives in two rings – within 60 miles – SNA and LGB for LAX; and then within 100-120 miles, which now picks up Palm Springs and San Diego for LAX.  Someone will drive a couple of hours to pick you up if it means getting you to Christmas dinner on time.</li>\n</ol>\nBut above all, be realistic. It’s gonna be a zoo. Steel yourself; get your inner karma tuned for it. Pack a snack and a book, and practice deep cleansing breaths.','Top 10 Holiday Travel Tips','','inherit','closed','closed','','2185-autosave-v1','','','2022-12-12 18:52:52','2022-12-12 23:52:52','',2185,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4238',0,'revision','',0),
(4239,1,'2022-12-12 18:53:02','2022-12-12 23:53:02','','DALL·E 2022-12-12 17.29.28 - A 3d version of an AI travel assistant','','inherit','open','closed','','dall%c2%b7e-2022-12-12-17-29-28-a-3d-version-of-an-ai-travel-assistant','','','2022-12-12 18:53:02','2022-12-12 23:53:02','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/DALL·E-2022-12-12-17.29.28-A-3d-version-of-an-AI-travel-assistant.png',0,'attachment','image/png',0),
(4240,1,'2022-12-12 18:53:49','2022-12-12 23:53:49','','DALL·E 2022-12-12 17.30.33','','inherit','open','closed','','dall%c2%b7e-2022-12-12-17-30-33','','','2022-12-12 18:53:49','2022-12-12 23:53:49','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/DALL·E-2022-12-12-17.30.33.png',0,'attachment','image/png',0),
(4241,1,'2022-12-12 18:57:05','2022-12-12 23:57:05','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChatGPT\" title=\"\">ChatGPT</a> was <a href=\"https://twitter.com/sama/status/1598038815599661056\" title=\"\">released into the wild</a> after Thanksgiving and within a week was <a href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/10/technology/ai-chat-bot-chatgpt.html\" title=\"\">heralded</a> as the opening salvo of the AI <a href=\"https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1599128577068650498\" title=\"\">apocalypse</a> -- or at the very least, a <a href=\"https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/12/chatgpt-question-creative-human-robotos\" title=\"\">cheap replacement for fair-to-middlin\' writers</a>. And so, like <a href=\"https://www.eater.com/23500787/openai-chatgpt-ai-chatbot-generates-diaspora-food-writing-tropes-stinky-lunchbox-moment\" title=\"\">many</a> <a href=\"https://forward.com/culture/527473/artificial-intelligence-bot-hanukkah-hallmark-movie-openai-chatgpt/\" title=\"\">writers</a>, I decided to test out this new competitor. I had a simple request -- write a blog post with the top holiday travel tips.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":4240,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/DALL·E-2022-12-12-17.30.33.png\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/DALL·E-2022-12-12-17.30.33-300x300.png\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-4240\"/></a></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I noticed a couple of things right away:  ChatGPT is a lot faster than me, and it would spit out a slightly different take at the blog post each time I clicked the <em>Try Again</em> button. So I squinted my eyes and mashed together a half-dozen outputs to come up with this \"consensus\" version of ChatGPT\'s top 5 holiday travel tips:</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list {\"ordered\":true} -->\n<ol><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Plan ahead:</strong> The holiday season is a busy time for travel, so it\'s important to plan your trip in advance. Book your flights, train tickets, or rental car early to get the best prices and availability. This will not only save you money, but it will also give you peace of mind knowing that everything is taken care of.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Pack light:</strong> Packing light can make your holiday travel much easier. Avoid bringing unnecessary items and focus on packing the essentials. Keep in mind that most airlines have strict weight limits for luggage, and you\'ll have to carry your bags to and from the airport or train station.  Consider packing items that can serve multiple purposes, such as a scarf that can double as a blanket or a versatile piece of clothing that can be dressed up or down.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Stay organized:</strong> Keep all of your travel documents, such as your passport and boarding passes, organized and easily accessible. This will save you time and stress at the airport. Consider using a travel organizer or wallet to keep everything in one place.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Be flexible:</strong> Flexibility is key when it comes to holiday travel. Be prepared for the unexpected and try to stay flexible. If your flight is delayed or canceled, or if you encounter other unexpected issues, try to remain calm and focus on finding a solution.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Stay connected: </strong>It\'s important to stay connected while you\'re traveling, especially if you\'re traveling internationally. Make sure to keep your family and friends informed of your travel plans and let them know if anything changes. It\'s also a good idea to have a plan for staying connected, whether that means purchasing a local SIM card for your phone or using a portable WiFi device.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ol>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Verdict? Not bad. Nothing egregiously wrong, but it\'s at a basic \"Traveler 101\" level. There\'s nothing that even the occasional traveler, someone taking a couple of flights a year, wouldn\'t already know. To compare, here are TravelCommons\' top 5 holiday travel tips:</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list {\"ordered\":true} -->\n<ol><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Figure out if you want to fly or drive:</strong> My normal&nbsp;fly-vs.-drive tipping point&nbsp;is 350 miles; anything less and I’ll drive it. If you fly, expect that all the airport logistics (security, lines, crowds) will add 3 hours to your in-flight time. And that’s if there are no flight delays.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Fly Non-Stop</strong>:&nbsp;It\'s the cardinal rule of air travel. Holiday travel stacks up problems — &nbsp;high passenger load factors combined with winter weather disruptions almost guarantees late arrivals and missed connections. Even if you’re connecting through Houston, an intermediate stop adds one more point of failure, one more opportunity for the airlines to screw up. Pay the extra $100 for a non-stop flight.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Catch the Early Flight</strong>:&nbsp;Delays stack up as the day wears on.&nbsp; As your airplane goes from airport to airport, the probability of it getting stuck increases. &nbsp;Overnight, airlines have a chance to recover – late planes finally get their destinations and operations groups can reassign planes.&nbsp; So while the last flight out can be a crap shoot, I rarely hit a delay on the first flight out.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ol>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','How Good Are ChatGPT\'s Top 5 Holiday Travel Tips?','','inherit','closed','closed','','4232-revision-v1','','','2022-12-12 18:57:05','2022-12-12 23:57:05','',4232,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4241',0,'revision','',0),
(4242,1,'2022-12-12 18:59:47','2022-12-12 23:59:47','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChatGPT\" title=\"\">ChatGPT</a> was <a href=\"https://twitter.com/sama/status/1598038815599661056\" title=\"\">released into the wild</a> after Thanksgiving and within a week was <a href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/10/technology/ai-chat-bot-chatgpt.html\" title=\"\">heralded</a> as the opening salvo of the AI <a href=\"https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1599128577068650498\" title=\"\">apocalypse</a> -- or at the very least, a <a href=\"https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/12/chatgpt-question-creative-human-robotos\" title=\"\">cheap replacement for fair-to-middlin\' writers</a>. And so, like <a href=\"https://www.eater.com/23500787/openai-chatgpt-ai-chatbot-generates-diaspora-food-writing-tropes-stinky-lunchbox-moment\" title=\"\">many</a> <a href=\"https://forward.com/culture/527473/artificial-intelligence-bot-hanukkah-hallmark-movie-openai-chatgpt/\" title=\"\">writers</a>, I decided to test out this new competitor. I had a simple request -- write a blog post with the top holiday travel tips.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":4240,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/DALL·E-2022-12-12-17.30.33.png\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/DALL·E-2022-12-12-17.30.33-300x300.png\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-4240\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">The Future of AI-Enabled Travel Assistants</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I noticed a couple of things right away:  ChatGPT is a lot faster than me, and it would spit out a slightly different take at the blog post each time I clicked the <em>Try Again</em> button. So I squinted my eyes and mashed together a half-dozen outputs to come up with this \"consensus\" version of ChatGPT\'s top 5 holiday travel tips:</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list {\"ordered\":true} -->\n<ol><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Plan ahead:</strong> The holiday season is a busy time for travel, so it\'s important to plan your trip in advance. Book your flights, train tickets, or rental car early to get the best prices and availability. This will not only save you money, but it will also give you peace of mind knowing that everything is taken care of.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Pack light:</strong> Packing light can make your holiday travel much easier. Avoid bringing unnecessary items and focus on packing the essentials. Keep in mind that most airlines have strict weight limits for luggage, and you\'ll have to carry your bags to and from the airport or train station.  Consider packing items that can serve multiple purposes, such as a scarf that can double as a blanket or a versatile piece of clothing that can be dressed up or down.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Stay organized:</strong> Keep all of your travel documents, such as your passport and boarding passes, organized and easily accessible. This will save you time and stress at the airport. Consider using a travel organizer or wallet to keep everything in one place.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Be flexible:</strong> Flexibility is key when it comes to holiday travel. Be prepared for the unexpected and try to stay flexible. If your flight is delayed or canceled, or if you encounter other unexpected issues, try to remain calm and focus on finding a solution.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Stay connected: </strong>It\'s important to stay connected while you\'re traveling, especially if you\'re traveling internationally. Make sure to keep your family and friends informed of your travel plans and let them know if anything changes. It\'s also a good idea to have a plan for staying connected, whether that means purchasing a local SIM card for your phone or using a portable WiFi device.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ol>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Verdict? Not bad. Nothing egregiously wrong, but it\'s at a basic \"Traveler 101\" level. There\'s nothing that even the occasional traveler, someone taking a couple of flights a year, wouldn\'t already know. To compare, here are TravelCommons\' top 5 holiday travel tips:</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list {\"ordered\":true} -->\n<ol><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Figure out if you want to fly or drive:</strong> My normal&nbsp;fly-vs.-drive tipping point&nbsp;is 350 miles; anything less and I’ll drive it. If you fly, expect that all the airport logistics (security, lines, crowds) will add 3 hours to your in-flight time. And that’s if there are no flight delays.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Fly Non-Stop</strong>:&nbsp;It\'s the cardinal rule of air travel. Holiday travel stacks up problems — &nbsp;high passenger load factors combined with winter weather disruptions almost guarantees late arrivals and missed connections. Even if you’re connecting through Houston, an intermediate stop adds one more point of failure, one more opportunity for the airlines to screw up. Pay the extra $100 for a non-stop flight.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Catch the Early Flight</strong>:&nbsp;Delays stack up as the day wears on.&nbsp; As your airplane goes from airport to airport, the probability of it getting stuck increases. &nbsp;Overnight, airlines have a chance to recover – late planes finally get their destinations and operations groups can reassign planes.&nbsp; So while the last flight out can be a crap shoot, I rarely hit a delay on the first flight out.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ol>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','How Good Are ChatGPT\'s Top 5 Holiday Travel Tips?','','inherit','closed','closed','','4232-revision-v1','','','2022-12-12 18:59:47','2022-12-12 23:59:47','',4232,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4242',0,'revision','',0),
(4243,1,'2022-12-12 19:00:52','2022-12-13 00:00:52','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChatGPT\" title=\"\">ChatGPT</a> was <a href=\"https://twitter.com/sama/status/1598038815599661056\" title=\"\">released into the wild</a> after Thanksgiving and within a week was <a href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/10/technology/ai-chat-bot-chatgpt.html\" title=\"\">heralded</a> as the opening salvo of the AI <a href=\"https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1599128577068650498\" title=\"\">apocalypse</a> -- or at the very least, a <a href=\"https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/12/chatgpt-question-creative-human-robotos\" title=\"\">cheap replacement for fair-to-middlin\' writers</a>. And so, like <a href=\"https://www.eater.com/23500787/openai-chatgpt-ai-chatbot-generates-diaspora-food-writing-tropes-stinky-lunchbox-moment\" title=\"\">many</a> <a href=\"https://forward.com/culture/527473/artificial-intelligence-bot-hanukkah-hallmark-movie-openai-chatgpt/\" title=\"\">writers</a>, I decided to test out this new competitor. I had a simple request -- write a blog post with the top holiday travel tips.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":4240,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/DALL·E-2022-12-12-17.30.33.png\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/DALL·E-2022-12-12-17.30.33-300x300.png\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-4240\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\"><em>AI Travel Assistant</em></figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I noticed a couple of things right away:  ChatGPT is a lot faster than me, and it would spit out a slightly different take at the blog post each time I clicked the <em>Try Again</em> button. So I squinted my eyes and mashed together a half-dozen outputs to come up with this \"consensus\" version of ChatGPT\'s top 5 holiday travel tips:</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list {\"ordered\":true} -->\n<ol><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Plan ahead:</strong> The holiday season is a busy time for travel, so it\'s important to plan your trip in advance. Book your flights, train tickets, or rental car early to get the best prices and availability. This will not only save you money, but it will also give you peace of mind knowing that everything is taken care of.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Pack light:</strong> Packing light can make your holiday travel much easier. Avoid bringing unnecessary items and focus on packing the essentials. Keep in mind that most airlines have strict weight limits for luggage, and you\'ll have to carry your bags to and from the airport or train station.  Consider packing items that can serve multiple purposes, such as a scarf that can double as a blanket or a versatile piece of clothing that can be dressed up or down.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Stay organized:</strong> Keep all of your travel documents, such as your passport and boarding passes, organized and easily accessible. This will save you time and stress at the airport. Consider using a travel organizer or wallet to keep everything in one place.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Be flexible:</strong> Flexibility is key when it comes to holiday travel. Be prepared for the unexpected and try to stay flexible. If your flight is delayed or canceled, or if you encounter other unexpected issues, try to remain calm and focus on finding a solution.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Stay connected: </strong>It\'s important to stay connected while you\'re traveling, especially if you\'re traveling internationally. Make sure to keep your family and friends informed of your travel plans and let them know if anything changes. It\'s also a good idea to have a plan for staying connected, whether that means purchasing a local SIM card for your phone or using a portable WiFi device.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ol>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Verdict? Not bad. Nothing egregiously wrong, but it\'s at a basic \"Traveler 101\" level. There\'s nothing that even the occasional traveler, someone taking a couple of flights a year, wouldn\'t already know. To compare, here are TravelCommons\' top 5 holiday travel tips:</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list {\"ordered\":true} -->\n<ol><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Figure out if you want to fly or drive:</strong> My normal&nbsp;fly-vs.-drive tipping point&nbsp;is 350 miles; anything less and I’ll drive it. If you fly, expect that all the airport logistics (security, lines, crowds) will add 3 hours to your in-flight time. And that’s if there are no flight delays.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Fly Non-Stop</strong>:&nbsp;It\'s the cardinal rule of air travel. Holiday travel stacks up problems — &nbsp;high passenger load factors combined with winter weather disruptions almost guarantees late arrivals and missed connections. Even if you’re connecting through Houston, an intermediate stop adds one more point of failure, one more opportunity for the airlines to screw up. Pay the extra $100 for a non-stop flight.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Catch the Early Flight</strong>:&nbsp;Delays stack up as the day wears on.&nbsp; As your airplane goes from airport to airport, the probability of it getting stuck increases. &nbsp;Overnight, airlines have a chance to recover – late planes finally get their destinations and operations groups can reassign planes.&nbsp; So while the last flight out can be a crap shoot, I rarely hit a delay on the first flight out.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ol>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','How Good Are ChatGPT\'s Top 5 Holiday Travel Tips?','','inherit','closed','closed','','4232-revision-v1','','','2022-12-12 19:00:52','2022-12-13 00:00:52','',4232,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4243',0,'revision','',0),
(4244,1,'2022-12-12 19:27:27','2022-12-13 00:27:27','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChatGPT\" title=\"\">ChatGPT</a> was <a href=\"https://twitter.com/sama/status/1598038815599661056\" title=\"\">released into the wild</a> after Thanksgiving and within a week was <a href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/10/technology/ai-chat-bot-chatgpt.html\" title=\"\">heralded</a> as the opening salvo of the AI <a href=\"https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1599128577068650498\" title=\"\">apocalypse</a> -- or at the very least, a <a href=\"https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/12/chatgpt-question-creative-human-robotos\" title=\"\">cheap replacement for fair-to-middlin\' writers</a>. And so, like <a href=\"https://www.eater.com/23500787/openai-chatgpt-ai-chatbot-generates-diaspora-food-writing-tropes-stinky-lunchbox-moment\" title=\"\">many</a> <a href=\"https://forward.com/culture/527473/artificial-intelligence-bot-hanukkah-hallmark-movie-openai-chatgpt/\" title=\"\">writers</a>, I decided to test out this new competitor. I used a very simple request -- write a blog post with the top holiday travel tips.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":4240,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/DALL·E-2022-12-12-17.30.33.png\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/DALL·E-2022-12-12-17.30.33-300x300.png\" alt=\"Travel tips from ChatGPT\" class=\"wp-image-4240\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\"><em>AI Travel Assistant</em></figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I noticed a couple of things right away:    ChatGPT is a <em>lot</em> faster than me, and it would spit out a slightly different take at the blog post each time I clicked the <em>Try Again</em> button. So I squinted my eyes and mashed together a half-dozen outputs to come up with this \"consensus\" version of ChatGPT\'s top 5 holiday travel tips:</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list {\"ordered\":true} -->\n<ol><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Plan ahead:</strong> The holiday season is a busy time for travel, so it\'s important to plan your trip in advance. Book your flights, train tickets, or rental car early to get the best prices and availability. This will not only save you money, but it will also give you peace of mind knowing that everything is taken care of.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Pack light:</strong> Packing light can make your holiday travel much easier. Avoid bringing unnecessary items and focus on packing the essentials. Keep in mind that most airlines have strict weight limits for luggage, and you\'ll have to carry your bags to and from the airport or train station.  Consider packing items that can serve multiple purposes, such as a scarf that can double as a blanket or a versatile piece of clothing that can be dressed up or down.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Stay organized:</strong> Keep all of your travel documents, such as your passport and boarding passes, organized and easily accessible. This will save you time and stress at the airport. Consider using a travel organizer or wallet to keep everything in one place.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Be flexible:</strong> Flexibility is key when it comes to holiday travel. Be prepared for the unexpected and try to stay flexible. If your flight is delayed or canceled, or if you encounter other unexpected issues, try to remain calm and focus on finding a solution.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Stay connected: </strong>It\'s important to stay connected while you\'re traveling, especially if you\'re traveling internationally. Make sure to keep your family and friends informed of your travel plans and let them know if anything changes. It\'s also a good idea to have a plan for staying connected, whether that means purchasing a local SIM card for your phone or using a portable WiFi device.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ol>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Verdict? Not bad. Nothing egregiously wrong, but it\'s at a basic \"Traveler 101\" level. There\'s nothing that even the occasional traveler, someone taking just a couple of flights a year, wouldn\'t already know. To compare AI-generated tips with those generated by 35 years and a few million miles of road warrior experience, here are TravelCommons\' top 5 holiday travel tips:</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list {\"ordered\":true} -->\n<ol><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Figure out if you want to fly or drive:</strong> My normal fly-vs.-drive tipping point is 350 miles; anything less and I’ll drive it. If you fly, expect that all the airport logistics (security, lines, crowds) will add 2 hours to your in-flight time. When you arrive, it could take you another hour to de-plane, collect your luggage, and find your rental car or wait for an Uber. And that’s if there are no flight delays.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Fly Non-Stop</strong>: It\'s the cardinal rule of air travel. Holiday travel stacks up problems —high passenger load factors combined with winter weather disruptions almost guarantees late arrivals and missed connections. Even if you’re connecting through Houston, an intermediate stop adds one more point of failure, one more opportunity for the airlines to screw up. Pay the extra $100 for a non-stop flight.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Catch the Early Flight</strong>:  Delays stack up as the day wears on.  As your airplane goes from airport to airport, the probability of it getting stuck increases.  Overnight, airlines have a chance to recover – late planes finally get their destinations and operations groups can reassign planes.  <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/09/22/podcast-189-why-we-travel-when-the-first-flight-isnt-best/\" title=\"\">A recent TravelCommons\' guest has a different opinion</a>, but I rarely hit a delay on the first flight out.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Carry On Your Luggage</strong>:  Unless you\'re heading to the slopes for Christmas, everyone in your travel party should be able to fit into a carry-on sized bag. You can save $25/bag and increase the probability of having clean clothes at your destination. But if for some reason you need to check your bags -- maybe you have to bring pre-wrapped gifts or a special bottle of wine for Christmas dinner --  split everyone\'s clothes across all the bags. It\'s rare for an airline to lose <em>all</em> of your checked bags. This way no one sits down at Christmas dinner in sweats from the nearest Walmart.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Bring a Battery Pack:</strong> It\'s tough to travel anymore without a working mobile phone. It holds our boarding passes, gives us gate change and flight delay notifications, and routes us around traffic jams. A dead phone while flights are being canceled is more than a minor inconvenience; having that second or third charge immediately available is critical when trying to swerve a long delay.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ol>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>You be the judge, but I\'m feeling pretty good about keeping this unpaid travel blogger gig -- at least until ChatGPT gets its next upgrade.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','How Good Are ChatGPT\'s Top 5 Holiday Travel Tips?','','inherit','closed','closed','','4232-revision-v1','','','2022-12-12 19:27:27','2022-12-13 00:27:27','',4232,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4244',0,'revision','',0),
(4245,1,'2022-12-12 19:29:29','2022-12-13 00:29:29','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChatGPT\" title=\"\">ChatGPT</a> was <a href=\"https://twitter.com/sama/status/1598038815599661056\" title=\"\">released into the wild</a> after Thanksgiving and within a week was <a href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/10/technology/ai-chat-bot-chatgpt.html\" title=\"\">heralded</a> as the opening salvo of the AI <a href=\"https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1599128577068650498\" title=\"\">apocalypse</a> -- or at the very least, a <a href=\"https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/12/chatgpt-question-creative-human-robotos\" title=\"\">cheap replacement for fair-to-middlin\' writers</a>. And so, like <a href=\"https://www.eater.com/23500787/openai-chatgpt-ai-chatbot-generates-diaspora-food-writing-tropes-stinky-lunchbox-moment\" title=\"\">many</a> <a href=\"https://forward.com/culture/527473/artificial-intelligence-bot-hanukkah-hallmark-movie-openai-chatgpt/\" title=\"\">writers</a>, I decided to test out this new competitor. I used a very simple request -- write a blog post with the top holiday travel tips.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":4240,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/DALL·E-2022-12-12-17.30.33.png\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/DALL·E-2022-12-12-17.30.33-300x300.png\" alt=\"Travel tips from ChatGPT\" class=\"wp-image-4240\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\"><em>AI Travel Assistant</em></figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I noticed a couple of things right away:    ChatGPT is a <em>lot</em> faster than me, and it would spit out a slightly different take at the blog post each time I clicked the <em>Try Again</em> button. So I squinted my eyes and mashed together a half-dozen outputs to come up with this \"consensus\" version of ChatGPT\'s top 5 holiday travel tips:</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list {\"ordered\":true} -->\n<ol><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Plan ahead:</strong> The holiday season is a busy time for travel, so it\'s important to plan your trip in advance. Book your flights, train tickets, or rental car early to get the best prices and availability. This will not only save you money, but it will also give you peace of mind knowing that everything is taken care of.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Pack light:</strong> Packing light can make your holiday travel much easier. Avoid bringing unnecessary items and focus on packing the essentials. Keep in mind that most airlines have strict weight limits for luggage, and you\'ll have to carry your bags to and from the airport or train station.  Consider packing items that can serve multiple purposes, such as a scarf that can double as a blanket or a versatile piece of clothing that can be dressed up or down.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Stay organized:</strong> Keep all of your travel documents, such as your passport and boarding passes, organized and easily accessible. This will save you time and stress at the airport. Consider using a travel organizer or wallet to keep everything in one place.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Be flexible:</strong> Flexibility is key when it comes to holiday travel. Be prepared for the unexpected and try to stay flexible. If your flight is delayed or canceled, or if you encounter other unexpected issues, try to remain calm and focus on finding a solution.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Stay connected: </strong>It\'s important to stay connected while you\'re traveling, especially if you\'re traveling internationally. Make sure to keep your family and friends informed of your travel plans and let them know if anything changes. It\'s also a good idea to have a plan for staying connected, whether that means purchasing a local SIM card for your phone or using a portable WiFi device.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ol>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Verdict? Not bad. Nothing egregiously wrong, but it\'s at a basic \"Traveler 101\" level. There\'s nothing that even the occasional traveler, someone taking just a couple of flights a year, wouldn\'t already know. To compare AI-generated tips with those generated by 35 years and a few million miles of road warrior experience, here are TravelCommons\' top 5 holiday travel tips:</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list {\"ordered\":true} -->\n<ol><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Figure out if you want to fly or drive:</strong> My normal fly-vs.-drive tipping point is 350 miles; anything less and I’ll drive it. If you fly, expect that all the airport logistics (security, lines, crowds) will add 2 hours to your in-flight time. When you arrive, it could take you another hour to de-plane, collect your luggage, and find your rental car or wait for an Uber. And that’s if there are no flight delays.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Fly Non-Stop</strong>: It\'s the cardinal rule of air travel. Holiday travel stacks up problems — high passenger load factors combined with winter weather disruptions almost guarantees late arrivals and missed connections. Even if you’re connecting through a warm-weather airport like Houston, an intermediate stop adds one more point of failure, one more opportunity for the airlines to screw up. Pay the extra $100 for a non-stop flight.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Catch the Early Flight</strong>:  Delays stack up as the day wears on.  As your airplane goes from airport to airport, the probability of it getting stuck increases.  Overnight, airlines have a chance to recover – late planes finally get their destinations and operations groups can reassign planes.  <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/09/22/podcast-189-why-we-travel-when-the-first-flight-isnt-best/\" title=\"\">A recent TravelCommons\' guest has a different opinion</a>, but I rarely hit a delay on the first flight out.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Carry On Your Luggage</strong>:  Unless you\'re heading to the slopes for Christmas, everyone in your travel party should be able to fit into a carry-on sized bag. You can save $25/bag and increase the probability of having clean clothes at your destination. But if for some reason you need to check your bags -- maybe you have to bring pre-wrapped gifts or a special bottle of wine for Christmas dinner --  split everyone\'s clothes across all the bags. It\'s rare for an airline to lose <em>all</em> of your checked bags. This way no one sits down at Christmas dinner in sweats from the nearest Walmart.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Bring a Battery Pack:</strong> It\'s tough to travel anymore without a working mobile phone. It holds our boarding passes, gives us gate change and flight delay notifications, and routes us around traffic jams. A dead phone while flights are being canceled is more than a minor inconvenience; having that second or third charge immediately available is critical when trying to swerve a long delay.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ol>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>You be the judge, but I\'m feeling pretty good about keeping this unpaid travel blogger gig -- at least until ChatGPT gets its next upgrade.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','How Good Are ChatGPT\'s Top 5 Holiday Travel Tips?','','inherit','closed','closed','','4232-revision-v1','','','2022-12-12 19:29:29','2022-12-13 00:29:29','',4232,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4245',0,'revision','',0),
(4246,1,'2022-12-12 19:36:15','2022-12-13 00:36:15','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChatGPT\" title=\"\">ChatGPT</a> was <a href=\"https://twitter.com/sama/status/1598038815599661056\" title=\"\">released into the wild</a> after Thanksgiving and within a week was <a href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/10/technology/ai-chat-bot-chatgpt.html\" title=\"\">heralded</a> as the opening salvo of the AI <a href=\"https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1599128577068650498\" title=\"\">apocalypse</a> -- or at the very least, a <a href=\"https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/12/chatgpt-question-creative-human-robotos\" title=\"\">cheap replacement for fair-to-middlin\' writers</a>. And so, like <a href=\"https://www.eater.com/23500787/openai-chatgpt-ai-chatbot-generates-diaspora-food-writing-tropes-stinky-lunchbox-moment\" title=\"\">many</a> <a href=\"https://forward.com/culture/527473/artificial-intelligence-bot-hanukkah-hallmark-movie-openai-chatgpt/\" title=\"\">writers</a>, I decided to test out this new competitor. I used a very simple request -- write a blog post with the top holiday travel tips.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":4240,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/DALL·E-2022-12-12-17.30.33.png\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/DALL·E-2022-12-12-17.30.33-300x300.png\" alt=\"Travel tips from ChatGPT\" class=\"wp-image-4240\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\"><em>AI Travel Assistant</em></figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I noticed a couple of things right away:    ChatGPT is a <em>lot</em> faster than me, and it would spit out a slightly different take at the blog post each time I clicked the <em>Try Again</em> button. So I squinted my eyes and mashed together a half-dozen outputs to come up with this \"consensus\" version of ChatGPT\'s top 5 holiday travel tips:</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list {\"ordered\":true} -->\n<ol><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Plan ahead:</strong> The holiday season is a busy time for travel, so it\'s important to plan your trip in advance. Book your flights, train tickets, or rental car early to get the best prices and availability. This will not only save you money, but it will also give you peace of mind knowing that everything is taken care of.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Pack light:</strong> Packing light can make your holiday travel much easier. Avoid bringing unnecessary items and focus on packing the essentials. Keep in mind that most airlines have strict weight limits for luggage, and you\'ll have to carry your bags to and from the airport or train station.  Consider packing items that can serve multiple purposes, such as a scarf that can double as a blanket or a versatile piece of clothing that can be dressed up or down.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Stay organized:</strong> Keep all of your travel documents, such as your passport and boarding passes, organized and easily accessible. This will save you time and stress at the airport. Consider using a travel organizer or wallet to keep everything in one place.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Be flexible:</strong> Flexibility is key when it comes to holiday travel. Be prepared for the unexpected and try to stay flexible. If your flight is delayed or canceled, or if you encounter other unexpected issues, try to remain calm and focus on finding a solution.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Stay connected: </strong>It\'s important to stay connected while you\'re traveling, especially if you\'re traveling internationally. Make sure to keep your family and friends informed of your travel plans and let them know if anything changes. It\'s also a good idea to have a plan for staying connected, whether that means purchasing a local SIM card for your phone or using a portable WiFi device.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ol>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Verdict? Not bad. Nothing egregiously wrong, but it\'s at a basic \"Traveler 101\" level. There\'s nothing that even the occasional traveler, someone taking just a couple of flights a year, wouldn\'t already know. To compare AI-generated tips with those generated by 35 years and a few million miles of road warrior experience, here are TravelCommons\' top 5 holiday travel tips:</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list {\"ordered\":true} -->\n<ol><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Figure out if you want to fly or drive:</strong> My normal fly-vs.-drive tipping point is 350 miles; anything less and I’ll drive it. If you fly, expect that all the airport logistics (security, lines, crowds) will add 2 hours to your in-flight time. When you arrive, it could take you another hour to de-plane, collect your luggage, and find your rental car or wait for an Uber. And that’s if there are no flight delays.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Fly Non-Stop</strong>: It\'s the cardinal rule of air travel. Holiday travel stacks up problems — high passenger load factors combined with winter weather disruptions almost guarantees late arrivals and missed connections. Even if you’re connecting through a warm-weather airport like Houston, an intermediate stop adds one more point of failure, one more opportunity for the airlines to screw up. Pay the extra $100 for a non-stop flight.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Catch the Early Flight</strong>:  Delays stack up as the day wears on.  As your airplane goes from airport to airport, the probability of it getting stuck increases.  Overnight, airlines have a chance to recover – late planes finally get their destinations and operations groups can reassign planes.  <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/09/22/podcast-189-why-we-travel-when-the-first-flight-isnt-best/\" title=\"\">A recent TravelCommons\' guest has a different opinion</a>, but I rarely hit a delay on the first flight out.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Carry On Your Luggage</strong>:  Unless you\'re heading to the slopes for Christmas, everyone in your travel party should be able to fit into a carry-on bag. You can save $25/bag and increase the probability of having clean clothes at your destination. But if for some reason you need to check your bags -- maybe you\'re bringing pre-wrapped gifts or a special bottle of wine for Christmas dinner --  split everyone\'s clothes across all the bags. It\'s rare for an airline to lose <em>all</em> of your checked bags. This way no one sits down at Christmas dinner in sweats from the nearest Walmart.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Bring a Battery Pack:</strong> It\'s tough to travel today without a working mobile phone. It holds our boarding passes, gives us gate change and flight delay notifications, and routes us around traffic jams. A dead phone while flights are being canceled is more than a minor inconvenience. Having that second or third charge immediately available is critical when trying to swerve a long delay.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ol>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>You be the judge, but I\'m feeling pretty good about keeping this unpaid travel blogger gig -- at least until ChatGPT gets its next upgrade.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','How Good Are ChatGPT\'s Top 5 Holiday Travel Tips?','Comparing ChatGPT\'s AI-generated travel tips with my travel tips that are generated by 35 years and a few million miles of road warrior experience','inherit','closed','closed','','4232-revision-v1','','','2022-12-12 19:36:15','2022-12-13 00:36:15','',4232,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4246',0,'revision','',0),
(4247,1,'2022-12-12 19:50:21','2022-12-13 00:50:21','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChatGPT\" title=\"\">ChatGPT</a> was <a href=\"https://twitter.com/sama/status/1598038815599661056\" title=\"\">released into the wild</a> after Thanksgiving and within a week was <a href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/10/technology/ai-chat-bot-chatgpt.html\" title=\"\">heralded</a> as the opening salvo of the AI <a href=\"https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1599128577068650498\" title=\"\">apocalypse</a> -- or at the very least, a <a href=\"https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/12/chatgpt-question-creative-human-robotos\" title=\"\">cheap replacement for fair-to-middlin\' writers</a>. And so, like <a href=\"https://www.eater.com/23500787/openai-chatgpt-ai-chatbot-generates-diaspora-food-writing-tropes-stinky-lunchbox-moment\" title=\"\">many</a> <a href=\"https://forward.com/culture/527473/artificial-intelligence-bot-hanukkah-hallmark-movie-openai-chatgpt/\" title=\"\">writers</a>, I decided to test out this new competitor. I used a very simple request -- write a blog post with the top holiday travel tips.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":4240,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/DALL·E-2022-12-12-17.30.33.png\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/DALL·E-2022-12-12-17.30.33-300x300.png\" alt=\"Travel tips from ChatGPT\" class=\"wp-image-4240\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\"><em>AI Travel Assistant</em></figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I noticed a couple of things right away:    ChatGPT is a <em>lot</em> faster than me, and it would spit out a slightly different take at the blog post each time I clicked the <em>Try Again</em> button. So I squinted my eyes and mashed together a half-dozen outputs to come up with this \"consensus\" version of ChatGPT\'s top 5 holiday travel tips:</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list {\"ordered\":true} -->\n<ol><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Plan ahead:</strong> The holiday season is a busy time for travel, so it\'s important to plan your trip in advance. Book your flights, train tickets, or rental car early to get the best prices and availability. This will not only save you money, but it will also give you peace of mind knowing that everything is taken care of.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Pack light:</strong> Packing light can make your holiday travel much easier. Avoid bringing unnecessary items and focus on packing the essentials. Keep in mind that most airlines have strict weight limits for luggage, and you\'ll have to carry your bags to and from the airport or train station.  Consider packing items that can serve multiple purposes, such as a scarf that can double as a blanket or a versatile piece of clothing that can be dressed up or down.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Stay organized:</strong> Keep all of your travel documents, such as your passport and boarding passes, organized and easily accessible. This will save you time and stress at the airport. Consider using a travel organizer or wallet to keep everything in one place.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Be flexible:</strong> Flexibility is key when it comes to holiday travel. Be prepared for the unexpected and try to stay flexible. If your flight is delayed or canceled, or if you encounter other unexpected issues, try to remain calm and focus on finding a solution.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Stay connected: </strong>It\'s important to stay connected while you\'re traveling, especially if you\'re traveling internationally. Make sure to keep your family and friends informed of your travel plans and let them know if anything changes. It\'s also a good idea to have a plan for staying connected, whether that means purchasing a local SIM card for your phone or using a portable WiFi device.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ol>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Verdict? Not bad. Nothing egregiously wrong, but it\'s at a basic \"Traveler 101\" level. There\'s nothing that even the occasional traveler, someone taking just a couple of flights a year, wouldn\'t already know. To compare AI-generated tips with those generated by 35 years and a few million miles of road warrior experience, here are TravelCommons\' top 5 holiday travel tips:</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list {\"ordered\":true} -->\n<ol><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Figure out if you want to fly or drive:</strong> My normal&nbsp;fly-vs.-drive tipping point&nbsp;is 350 miles; anything less and I’ll drive it. If you fly, expect that all the airport logistics (security, lines, crowds) will add 2 hours to your in-flight time. When you arrive, it could take you another hour to de-plane, collect your luggage, and find your rental car or wait for an Uber. And that’s if there are no flight delays.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Fly Non-Stop</strong>:&nbsp;It\'s the cardinal rule of air travel. Holiday travel stacks up problems — high passenger load factors combined with winter weather disruptions almost guarantees late arrivals and missed connections. Even if you’re connecting through a warm-weather airport like Houston, an intermediate stop adds one more point of failure, one more opportunity for the airlines to screw up. Pay the extra $100 for a non-stop flight.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Catch the Early Flight</strong>: &nbsp;Delays stack up as the day wears on.&nbsp; As your airplane goes from airport to airport, the probability of it getting stuck increases. &nbsp;Overnight, airlines have a chance to recover – late planes finally get their destinations and operations groups can reassign planes.&nbsp; <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/09/22/podcast-189-why-we-travel-when-the-first-flight-isnt-best/\" title=\"\">A recent TravelCommons\' guest has a different opinion</a>, but I rarely hit a delay on the first flight out.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Carry On Your Luggage</strong>:  Unless you\'re heading to the slopes for Christmas, everyone in your travel party should be able to fit into a carry-on bag. You can save $25/bag and increase the probability of having clean clothes at your destination. But if for some reason you need to check your bags -- maybe you\'re bringing pre-wrapped gifts or a special bottle of wine for Christmas dinner --&nbsp; split everyone\'s clothes across all the bags. It\'s rare for an airline to lose&nbsp;<em>all</em> of your checked bags. This way no one sits down at Christmas dinner in sweats from the nearest Walmart.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Bring a Battery Pack:</strong> It\'s tough to travel today without a working mobile phone. It holds our boarding passes, gives us gate change and flight delay notifications, and routes us around traffic jams. A dead phone while flights are being canceled is more than a minor inconvenience. Having that second or third charge immediately available is critical when trying to swerve a long delay.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ol>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>You be the judge, but I\'m feeling pretty good about keeping this unpaid travel blogger gig -- at least until ChatGPT gets its next upgrade.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','How Good Are ChatGPT\'s Top 5 Holiday Travel Tips?','Comparing ChatGPT\'s AI-generated travel tips with my travel tips that are generated by 35 years and a few million miles of road warrior experience','inherit','closed','closed','','4232-revision-v1','','','2022-12-12 19:50:21','2022-12-13 00:50:21','',4232,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4247',0,'revision','',0),
(4249,1,'2022-12-20 17:01:00','2022-12-20 22:01:00','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/IMG_3929-scaled.jpeg\"><img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/IMG_3929-300x300.jpeg\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a>Post-dinner pic complete with gang sign[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>No travel since the last episode, but lots of travel planning. Are we making our way back to pre-COVID travel planning patterns? Omicron has lots of people worried about testing positive and getting stuck abroad. Michael Giusti of&nbsp;<a href=\"https://insurancequotes.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">InsuranceQuotes.com</a> talks about how travel insurance can help. A blogger’s <a href=\"https://everywhereist.com/2021/12/bros-restaurant-lecce-we-eat-at-the-worst-michelin-starred-restaurant-ever/\">brutal review</a> of a Michelin-starred restaurant where we ate in October gets me thinking about food as an adventure.  All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_183.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #183: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois. Hope everyone had a great New Year’s. No travel since the last episode, which has turned out to be a good thing given the, what?, two weeks straight of over 1,000 cancelled flights a day. I’ve always tried to avoid traveling during the Christmas holidays; crowded planes, lots of not-very-experienced travelers, and the inevitable winter storm or two has never resulted in smooth travel experiences. Add to that airlines struggling to staff back up to passenger loads and then omicron comes ripping through their ranks…. The two folks I knew flying last week both got home a day late which, given all this, could’ve been a lot worse. Like being trapped in that 27-hour mess on I-95 in Northern Virginia. Definitely a reminder never to let yourself get below a quarter tank.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>So while I haven’t been traveling, I <em>have</em> been travel <em>planning</em>, which is not unusual. January has traditionally been <em>the</em> big travel planning month; pack up the Christmas decorations, figure out where you want to go this year and then put in your time off requests. And because January is just the worst month of the year, at least in the upper Northern Hemisphere when it’s the coldest month of the year and the sun sets early; so you need something, anything to look forward to.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But COVID changed all that, of course, especially the planning timeline. We’ve talked in prior episodes how last-minute travel restrictions have made that planning timeline, what the travel industry calls the <em>booking window</em>, a lot shorter. Last year, in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"January 2021 episode\">January 2021 episode</a>, I talked about having to make a last-minute pivot away from a San Diego trip I’d booked just the month before because California was still in their post-holiday lock down and not letting out-of-state visitors make hotel reservations.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I thought this year I’d revert back to the old patterns and do a bit more longer-term travel planning. Looking at <a href=\"https://www.kayak.com/flight-trends\">Kayak’s flight search trends</a>, where they now compare current flight search volumes to pre-pandemic levels, so comparing 2021 to 2019, seem to be an optimistic outlier because their search volumes have cratered vs. 2 year ago. Eyeballing their trend chart, I’d say it’s down something like 50%. Though switching over and looking at Google’s Hotel Insights page, I might not be too far out of the fat part of the curve; their hotel search trends seem to be recovering. Which sorta maps into our plans. In February, we’re driving down to Louisville rather than flying, giving the airlines a couple of months to unscramble their operations, and then getting on planes -- to New York in March, Santa Fe, NM in April, maybe DC in May. But for that February drive down I-65, across the frozen tundra of central Indiana, we’re definitely packing a couple of blankets -- and snacks -- and keeping the gas tank topped off just in case. News reports of that I-95 jam up talked about a Good Samaritan family going car to car, passing out oranges they were bringing back from Florida. Coming back from Louisville, I’m guessing any Good Samaritan would be going car to car with a couple bottles of bourbon and a sleeve of plastic shot glasses -- which is not a bad thing. Would definitely warm you up for at least a little bit.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — &nbsp;<em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/content/Per/Per_-_DLDN_Instrumental.mp3\" target=\"_blank\">DLDN Instrumental</a></em>&nbsp;by St Paul</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Last April, the Department of Homeland Security <a href=\"https://www.dhs.gov/real-id/news/2021/04/27/dhs-announces-extension-real-id-full-enforcement-deadline\">kicked the Real ID can down the road</a> -- again -- so now we have until May 2023 before we’ll need Real ID-compliant identification to get through a TSA checkpoint. We don’t <em>have</em> to get a Real ID driver’s license; <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/travel/security-screening/identification\">a passport or a Global Entry card</a> would work also. But, last month, since I had to visit the 5th Circle of Hell also known as the Dept of Motor Vehicles, to renew my expiring driver’s license, I figured I might as well get the Real ID version. And why not? In Illinois, the Real and non-Real ID driver\'s licenses cost the same, you go through the same lines…. The only difference was it took maybe an extra 3 minutes for them to scan in my social security card and the documents I used to prove my address. Which, if I’d kept in mind the Distributive Property of Cybersecurity, “Any data entered into a system will eventually be hacked and distributed on the dark web” -- I would’ve used something a bit more innocuous than my bank statement.  But, I now have a driver’s license with a requisite gold star in the upper right corner just in case DHS is really serious this time about the Real ID deadline.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/10/podcast-182-more-covid-changes-words-that-mean-adventure/\">the last episode</a>, I talked about finishing up my Global Entry renewal. And so with that done, last week I sent my passport into the void that is the US Passport Agency for renewal. I don’t have any international travel planned right now, but I’m very uncomfortable to be without my passport. I don’t know why, but I am. And the discomfort is only amplified by the 8-11 week processing time the State Department is now quoting. It also reminded me that it’s been 10 years since my most embarrassing cock-up - letting my backpack with my son’s and my passports get stolen from the overhead rack of the train to Brussels airport. I told the whole story in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/05/20/podcast-98-stolen-luggage-restaurants-want-your-smartphone/\">episode #98</a>, about what a stupid, what I called “the rookie-est of rookie mistakes” it was, and how it could’ve been worse, but for the very pleasant and helpful Brussels airport police and US Embassy staff, and that my son and I then got in a couple extra days of Belgian beer drinking.&nbsp; Lesson learned, though; I’ve kept my passport on my person when traveling ever since.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>It’s funny, sometimes, how travel can prepare you for things back home. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/10/28/podcast-180-tracking-covid-travel-requirements-cycling-thru-puglia/\">episode #180</a>, talking about our travels through Italy, I walked through what were back then the most stringent vaccine passport requirements around; you need to show an EU Green Pass on your phone or, for us, our CDC vaccination cards to get into restaurants, bars, airports, train stations,.... And so when Chicago started doing the same thing on January 1st, we were ready. In some ways Chicago is easier than Italy -- showing a picture of my CDC card is quicker than waiting for someone to scan a QR code; but here, and New York City and Washington, DC, we’ve added the extra step -- having to show a picture ID that matches to the vax card. We didn’t have to do that in Italy. You know, if I hadn’t had to send my passport in, maybe I’d just do what I did in Italy, carry my CDC card in my passport; I could pull ‘em both out in one hopefully suave and graceful move and be done with it.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/11/13/podcast-181-travel-potpourri-2021-travelers-gift-guide/\">November episode</a>, I said that I’d already gotten status roll-overs from Marriott, Hilton, and IHG, extending my current level in their frequent sleeper programs for the third time -- now they expire in February or March 2023. I figured that was the end of it, so when I received a note from Southwest in mid-December with the subject line “Surprise: A-List status extended,” it was pretty accurate. I was very surprised! I hadn’t expected any airlines to extend status; they all seemed to be lowering the qualification clip levels instead. So, thanks Southwest! I’ll be using this status on my flights to LGA and ABQ -- also because I still have some 2020 pandemic cancellation credits that are about to hit their disappearing 2-year birthday. Any chance you can extend that expiration data too?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Just to spin the propeller on top of the travel tech beanie hat for a sec…. Over the past couple of trips, I’ve noticed my briefcase/messenger bag has finally passed a tipping point -- I now have more electronic devices needing a newer USB-C cord than an original USB-A cord. (I told you this would be a propeller spin). The USB-C cord invasion started with the iPhone 11 Pro; another cord to carry, but it occasionally came in handy, like when Hertz gave me a birthday upgrade a few years back to a Mercedes A220; it only had the smaller USB-C plugs. But the invasion picked up speed with each upgrade -- first it was my new Bose headphones, then when I upgraded my battery pack, my power bank; then again when I got my MacBook Air, and again squared when I got a pair of cheap Anker earbuds last Prime Day. Which led me, finally, to replacing my dual USB-A power adapter for one with two USB-C plugs and one USB-A for my old Samsung tablet that just won’t die. But I still have to carry an old iPhone USB-A cord for those times when all that’s left on the Hertz lot is a 3-year old Chevy Malibu.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music —  <em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/content/oldDog/oldDog_-_Goodbye_sooner_or_later.mp3\" target=\"_blank\">Goodbye Sooner or Later</a></em>&nbsp;by oldDog</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>COVID Test Anxiety</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>A friend of mine said he wanted to get together this month. “Sure,” I said, “but if we can’t, we’ll be together for a weekend in February in Louisville at a wedding.” “Uh, no,” he said, “I’m not going.” “Why not?” “I’m going to isolate, kinda like a soft quarantine in February, don’t go outside except to walk the dog so I don’t screw up my trip to Egypt. It’s non-refundable, so I’ll be out a lot of money if I test positive for COVID before leaving and can’t go.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And last month, in early December, right when everyone was tightening travel restrictions in what turned out to be a futile effort to keep omicron out of their country, another friend cancelled a long-planned trip to Scotland. “I just don’t want to get trapped, away from home,” he said.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>COVID test anxiety. I understand it, especially around test-on-arrival rules. The week before our flight to London in November, I got a text from my doctor group -- time to get your COVID booster. I clicked through to the appointment website, started looking at slots, but then stopped. I have to take a COVID test by our second day in London. What if that spike of antibodies from the booster lingers long enough to turn that test positive? I clicked onto the next page of the website and booked my booster for December, after we got back home.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As I mentioned in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/10/podcast-182-more-covid-changes-words-that-mean-adventure/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"last episode\">last episode</a>, we tested negative on our test in London and went about our vacation. But as we got close to our return date, that anxiety crept back in. This was before the US tightened the testing window, so we took our Abbott tests 2 days before departure, both to give us some wiggle room, some time to retest if one came up positive, but also to calm those worries. I remember on that trip talking to an American guy in the elevator of our hotel in London. He had an Abbott rapid test sticking out of his briefcase. “Getting ready to head home?” I asked. “No,” he said, “I just test myself every 2 days.” I kinda laughed at that, thinking it was a bit over-rotation. But thinking back on it now, maybe he had it right -- test yourself every couple of days to relieve that uncertainty rather than waiting for the night before departure.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But even that might not be enough. I tweeted out <a href=\"https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/covid-in-koh-samui-its-scary-0hs7h0pk9\">an article</a> from the UK Times newspaper written by a guy who visited Thailand last month. The article starts “On December 19, after a week of near-hourly negative lateral flow and PCR tests, I flew to Thailand.” The next sentence (you know where this is going): “On December 20 I stepped off the plane, took another PCR, and headed to my hotel. The next morning I received a text informing me I had tested positive.” And then he tells the story of his 10 days of solo isolation in a Thai hospital. He did everything right and it still went wrong.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>One big anxiety driver is the cost for those extra days quarantined in a hotel somewhere. This should be the kind of risk that trip insurance could help you manage. So I rang up Michael Giusti, senior writer at <a href=\"https://insurancequotes.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"InsuranceQuotes.com\">InsuranceQuotes.com</a> -- he was with us on <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/12/podcast-173-whats-new-in-travel-insurance-keeping-ahead-of-expiring-miles/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"episode #173\">episode #173</a> last March, talking about travel insurance one year after the pandemic lockdowns -- to ask him about this.<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Michael: So from a travel insurance policy perspective that scenario you just said is actually almost the better scenario because that\'s what travel insurance is built for. So you come up with a positive test -- that kicks in the policy language. Now they can hit their contingency plans, whether that\'s paying you per day for the extended stay or finding alternative ways home. What scares me is the no man\'s land where you can\'t find a test. A lot of these policies have language that excludes government mandates and so if you just can\'t find a test and now can\'t get in not because you\'re sick, because being sick would trigger the policy, but because the government mandate has got you in limbo, that\'s the scary part and that\'s really gonna come down to a policy-by-policy view to see how they\'re gonna handle it.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Is this standard travel insurance coverage or is there something special you need to look for?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Michael: When you\'re buying your policy, you do need to pay attention, but there are the three buckets you want to make sure are included. One is the cancellation that\'s going to protect you if you get sick before the trip. One is health and that\'s going to pay for care while you\'re abroad or outside of your normal healthcare network. But the other is interruption and that\'s the piece that I was just talking about. The interruption policy is going to be standard in their baseline, we\'ll call it the silver plan -- not the platinum, not the bronze -- that standard baseline plan should have all three of those buckets. But know what you\'re buying because I was reading through some policies over the weekend and there were definitely some that were peeling one or more buckets out to save some costs. That\'s great if you want to take that risk but do it with open eyes, knowing what you\'re doing. Insurance is there to protect you from unknown risks, unknowable risks. All of these policies, when you start reading the language, they\'re quick to point out “COVID-19 became a global pandemic in January of 2020.” They want you to know this is a known risk and then that sets the table -- with this being known, how are you going to protect yourself? Some of them are built into the standard policies but some require that COVID rider, some different policy language which most of them are offering. But you can\'t just assume it\'s gonna be wrapped into standard coverage. You need to be asking the COVID question.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Thanks to Michael Giusti for joining us. Interesting point he makes about test access being a grey area for coverage. As I mentioned earlier, Irene and I brought our own Abbott tests with us to Italy and the UK, but more for convenience than concern about availability. I wrote up a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/30/easy-way-to-do-1-day-testing-for-returning-to-us/\">detailed \"how to\"</a> on ordering and using the Abbott BinaxNOW testing kit. It’s on the TravelCommons website in case you want to sidestep Michael’s addition to&nbsp; COVID test anxiety.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music —  &nbsp;<em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/content/Zapac/Zapac_-_Test_Drive.mp3\" target=\"_blank\">Test Drive</a>&nbsp;</em>by Zapac</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Michelin Dining Adventures</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Last month, I picked up on the buzz around a blogger’s <a href=\"https://everywhereist.com/2021/12/bros-restaurant-lecce-we-eat-at-the-worst-michelin-starred-restaurant-ever/\">brutal review</a> of a 1-star Michelin restaurant in Italy. It initially caught my eye because Irene and I like to hit a Michelin star or two when we’re traveling. Indeed, a 1-star place called <a href=\"https://www.behindrestaurant.co.uk/\"><em>Behind</em></a> as in “ it’s an open kitchen so there’s nothing to hide behind” got us figuring out how to get from central London to Hackney, a neighborhood we would’ve had no reason to explore otherwise. It was a great lunch; a great experience talking to the chef, and it\'s going on my final Best of 2021 list -- which is on my to-do list to update right after I finish this podcast. Having said that, we’ve also had some meals that weren’t great, like our 25th anniversary dinner at a 3-star place in Florence, or a 2-star in Spain that we loved -- until the next morning when we both came down with food poisoning. But on balance, we’ve had more really good meals than bad, and they’ve often taken us out of the travel bubble to parts of cities we wouldn’t normally go -- kinda like my microbrewery taprooms, only a <strong><em>lot</em></strong> more expensive.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>So when I saw the title “We Eat at The Worst Michelin Starred Restaurant, Ever,” it got my attention. First, what restaurant is it, so we can avoid it, and second, what made it the worst ever because that’s a big claim. But then I see the <em>full</em> title, with the restaurant, Bros in Lecce, Italy. We won’t be able to skip it because we ate there in mid-October, the night after our Puglia bike tour ended.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I read through the reviews and looked closely at the pictures. A couple of courses look familiar, but others -- like the now-famous (infamous?) grey foam oozing out of a plaster replica of the chef’s mouth was (thankfully) not on our menu. I have to say that I was on the fence about eating at Bros when Irene brought it up when we were planning our Puglia trip. The reviews I could find were <em>very</em> mixed, and it wasn’t a cheap ticket. We decided to go, but with the understanding that it could be a high-variance meal, with some courses that might not work out. I think the oyster with rancid fat was that dish for Irene. I didn’t love it, but it didn’t trigger a gag reflex like it did for Irene. Certainly not what you hope for, and it was only that dish, the rest was fine. But like I said, we went into Bros eye wide open, expecting an edgy experimental food experience -- and definitely not a standard 3-course fine dining Italian meal. We walked out thinking “Well, that was interesting” -- not bad, but not the worst 1-star meal I’ve had; probably in the bottom quartile, though. As you might guess, Bros <em>won’t</em> make it on that Best of 2021 list update.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>So why didn’t this blogger, a James Beard-award winning writer, come in with similar expectations? Who knows, though we do know that outrage porn drives clicks which, for her, also drove some high-profile TV interviews which probably helped move a few copies of her book. And, since no publicity is bad publicity, I’m guessing it was <a href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/23/world/europe/bros-restaurant-review.html\">a net positive for the restaurant</a> too.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But why pay what was about a lot of money for a meal that I think might be a complete train wreck? I walked past a lot of places in Lecce that I know would put a good meal down in front of us for a lot less. It becomes a bit less about food and a bit more about the experience; less about stomach and more about the brain. It reminded me of something Josh Glenn said in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/12/10/podcast-182-more-covid-changes-words-that-mean-adventure/\" title=\"the last episode\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the last episode</a> when I was talking with him about the language of adventure<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Josh: I mean an adventure is, and that word comes from the Latin meaning <em>to arrive unexpectedly</em>. That\'s actually really an important philosophical piece for me as I was going through this, the idea that you can have a trip is not an adventure if nothing unexpected happens and if you don\'t take enough risks to allow things unexpected to happen.... The word <em>chance </em>comes from the Latin <em>cadentia </em>meaning <em>falling</em>. So just when we think about how we use the words of “let the chips fall where they may” or “something befalls you”, this idea of having our feet off the ground, falling through space, we can\'t grasp anything, what do you do with that? If you’re someone who likes, in some kind of existential way, that feeling of falling, then you\'re an adventurer. You\'re going to get more out of your travel experiences than someone who wants everything to be exactly the same way every time and never have any hiccups.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I always say to Irene “If every meal we have is a great one, then we’re not trying enough weird places.” After food poisoning has befallen you a couple times, how bad can a little rancid fat be?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #183</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_183.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #183 — COVID Test Anxiety; Michelin Food Adventures','','inherit','closed','closed','','4063-revision-v1','','','2022-12-20 17:01:00','2022-12-20 22:01:00','',4063,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4249',0,'revision','',0),
(4250,1,'2022-12-24 23:26:09','2022-12-25 04:26:09','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/AA263071-7820-499A-BBF9-DAB2E122A703-1-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Malort bottle and a cow skull\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\">After the Positano ferries go home[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Hard up against the Christmas deadline, we compare long-distance drive times between gas and electric cars, and my travel tips vs. those from the ChatGPT AI chatbot. We talk about the latest Real ID deadline delay, and impressions from my trip to Positano, Rome, Florence, and Split, Croatia. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_191.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #191: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN at the tail end of the “bomb cyclone” that blew up a huge number of Christmas holiday plans for a huge number of families -- including ours. Our daughter Claire beat the bomb by flying down at the beginning of the week out of LaGuardia; thank you, hybrid working arrangements. Our son and his wife were going to head down from Chicago on Thursday, but near-white-out blizzard conditions canceled that. So now we’re recalibrating the size of Christmas dinner and figuring out how to get presents to the right places.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>While our usual “Not traveling at Christmas” rule has served us well, we did hit the road earlier for some Thanksgiving triangulation travel&nbsp; -- from Nashville to Annapolis, MD for a week to celebrate Thanksgiving with some friends, then from there to Chicago for another week to visit family, and then finally back home. The drive out to Annapolis was the best. We swerved the holiday traffic by driving out Monday instead of waiting for the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, and leaving a bit later in the morning so we could miss the agony that is Washington, DC rush hour. It was certainly the most scenic of the 3 drives, skirting the Great Smoky Mountains and then up the Blue Ridge Mountains. It reminded me of my drives to and from college, between Memphis and DC, though a lot more enjoyable not having to worry if my ‘72 Buick Electra was going to overheat hauling itself over the mountains.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The drive to Chicago was the most boring; a 12-hour drive with most of it being through the extended flatlands of the Ohio and Indiana Turnpikes. It would’ve put me right to sleep if I hadn’t figured out how to stream the BBC Radio’s World Cup play-by-play from my phone through the BMW’s speakers. What would’ve been worse, though, is if I’d tried to do that drive in an electric vehicle. California will ban new gas cars in 12 years, and New York and other states are looking to follow suit, so I wanted to see what my driving future will be. <a href=\"https://electrek.co/2022/10/18/us-electric-vehicle-sales-by-maker-and-ev-model-through-q3-2022/\">Cox Automotive says</a> the Tesla Model Y was the best selling car through Q3, the end of September this year. So I hit the Tesla trip planner to see what my trip would look like if I swapped my BMW X3 for a Tesla Model Y Long Range. The trip would be almost 2½ hours longer due to the 4 supercharger stops I’d need -- 2 45-minute charges in PA and OH and 2 25-minute charges in Indiana -- a bit longer than the couple of 20-minute restroom/gas-up pit stops we made on the turnpikes. The first stop in PA and the last one in IN would be in turnpike rest stops. The other two would require leaving the turnpike, winding through the ticket booths to find the chargers. Actually, I’m not sure which is worse. Hanging out for 45 minutes at the North Somerset, PA rest stop Roy Rogers or leaving the Ohio Turnpike to find my way to Strongsville, OH, plug into the supercharger behind the Sheetz convenience store, and then walk over to the Applebee’s knock-off to kill the 45-minute charge time with a Bud Light and some chicken tenders nachos.&nbsp; They got 12 years to either cut that charge time in half or significantly improve the food and beer options at those superchargers.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music --&nbsp;<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/copperhead/40520\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen</a> by copperhead (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: Admiral Bob, Javolenus , Sackjo22  </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The last half of our Chicago visit we stayed downtown at the Hyatt Regency, a big convention hotel that, in pre-COVID times, always had all sorts of&nbsp; mid-sized business conventions; things like the Midwest Dell Computer Users Group meeting, the IAAO (Int’l Association of Assessing Officers) National Conference. Now I’m old enough to remember way back to 2020 when “everything changed” and “this is the new normal” meant these mid-level gatherings were past history, that in the new normal, we’d all meet over video or in the metaverse -- which kinda spooked me because everybody seemed cut off below the navel -- and so never be tempted to shake hands. So when I walked into the lobby one morning to see signs welcoming ASTA, the American Seed Trade Association and the elevator doors wrapped in signs pitching BASF’s Poncho Votivo seed treatment, it reminded me once again that reversion to the mean is a strong, almost irresistible force. I walked into the elevator with a guy wearing a vendor badge around his neck. “Conference travel back?” I asked. “With a vengeance,” he sighed. Business travel may still be a bit below 2019 levels, but it’s clawing its way back.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Last May, back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/05/26/podcast-187-moving-to-a-non-hub-airport-what-makes-a-great-taproom/\">episode #187</a>, I said “A quick public service announcement — the COVID Real ID extension expires in less than a year.” Well, scratch that. The beginning of this month, DHS, the Department of Homeland Security, kicked the Real ID deadline down the road again, 2 years this time to May 7, 2025. Good news for procrastinators everywhere. They said the extension was necessary because the pandemic has made getting a REAL ID more difficult. I have to tell you; I just don’t buy it. Last year, December 2021, I had to go to a Chicago DMV site to get a new driver’s license. I made an appointment, showed up on-time, and was in and out in 30, maybe 40 minutes, including <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/01/16/podcast-183-covid-test-anxiety-michelin-food-adventures/\">the 3 extra minutes</a> it took them to scan my social security card and the documents to prove my address. I mean, come on, it’s been 17 years since the Real ID act was passed. It’s a law no one thinks is needed any more. Somebody just man up (in a completely gender-neutral way) and cancel at least <em>this</em> act in the long-running post-9/11 security theater.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>In more travel document good news, right before Thanksgiving, the US State Department opened up a portal for on-line passport renewals on what they’re calling a “limited release”, which sounds like government speak for a beta product -- limited volume and possibly not the smoothest user experience. But you gotta give them credit for getting this far. I renewed my passport last February the old-fashioned way -- finding a Walgreens that still takes passport photos, stapling them and a check to the renewal form. I’m hoping that in 9 years’ time, all the sharp edges will be buffed off this limited release and ready for prime time. I know, it’s the government; but a guy can dream…</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I’ve never been too proud not to chase a trend in the service of search engine optimization and so I wrote <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/12/12/how-good-are-chatgpts-top-5-holiday-travel-tips/\">a blog post</a> last week on <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChatGPT\">ChatGPT</a>, the AI chatbot that was <a href=\"https://twitter.com/sama/status/1598038815599661056\">released after Thanksgiving</a> and simultaneously thrilled and horrified people -- mostly thrilling students and mostly horrifying teachers and writers. I decided to give it a try, typing into the prompt box -- “write a blog post with the top holiday travel tips.” One thing that was immediately obvious -- ChatGPT is <strong>a lot</strong> faster than me. It cranked out 350 words and 5 travel tips in a second or two. The tips, though, “Plan Ahead,” “Pack Light,” “Stay Organized,” “Be Flexible,” and “Stay Connected” weren’t wrong, but they weren’t all that insightful; they weren’t anything that even the occasional traveler, someone taking just a couple of flights a year, wouldn’t already know. So then the next step is to compare those tips, generated by artificial intelligence, to 5 tips generated by my 35 years and a few million miles of travel experience -- “Figure out if you want to fly or drive,” “Fly Non-Stop,” “Catch the Early Flight,” “Carry On Your Luggage,” and “Bring a Battery Pack.” You be the judge, but I think my tips are a bit more specific, a bit more actionable; probably just good enough to keep me in this unpaid travel podcaster/blogger gig — at least until ChatGPT gets its next upgrade.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>In the Travel Tech Stack topic in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/10/31/podcast-190-my-travel-tech-stack-imbibing-for-introverts/\">the last episode</a>, I talked about travel apps I use, and specifically Tripit which I use to consolidate all the plane, train, hotel, and Airbnb confirmations into a single itinerary. The Monday before Thanksgiving, I started getting e-mails from them -- 50% off TripIt Pro; $24 instead of the usual $49. That first one was targeted at Thanksgiving fliers. Then came another 50% off email, but this time it was a Black Friday e-mail. Then came the Cyber Monday pitch, again 50% off. I got a message from Allan Marko, long-time TravelCommons listener. “What do you think?” he asked, “Do you use it?”&nbsp; I quickly responded “Nope. Haven’t used Pro for many years. Don’t see the value of the additional features. If I was going to pay for one, I’d go for Flighty.” I was able to respond at near-ChatGPT speed because that text was pretty much verbatim what I said about Tripit Pro in the Travel Tech segment. The next day, Allan messaged me back “Just listened to the episode. You went through exactly what I was asking about TripIt.” TripIt ran that 50% off e-mail campaign right through last week, so almost a month -- which leads me to believe that there are a lot of other travelers who share my views.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And if you have any travel stories, comments, tips, rants, or a question like Allan or like Twitter follower @Ab3Fr0man (I’m always a sucker for a Ferris Bueller reference) whose question back in June led to last episode’s Travel Tech Stack topic, send it to <a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a>, ping me at @mpeacock on Twitter message or post a comment on the TravelCommons website for the quickest response. I’m a little slower responding to Facebook and Instagram. And if you don’t want your name mentioned on the podcast, let me know. Everyone’s got different sensitivities around privacy nowadays.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/NiGiD/48586\">O Tannenbaum / Oh Christmas Tree</a> by Martijn de Boer (NiGiD) (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial &nbsp;(3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: Admiral Bob (admiralbob77)</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Notes on Split, Croatia and Italy</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I mentioned at the start of the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/10/31/podcast-190-my-travel-tech-stack-imbibing-for-introverts/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Podcast #190 — My Travel Tech Stack; Imbibing for Introverts\">last episode</a> that I rummaged around Croatia and Italy for 3 weeks at the beginning of October, starting in Split, Croatia and then running up the Italian peninsula -- Amalfi Coast, Naples, Rome, Florence. When I’ve talked to folks about this trip, most everyone is much more interested in our time in Split and in Italy. Which makes sense if I think about it; lots of people interested in travel will have hit those Italy highlights -- Rome, Florence, the Amalfi Coast -- early on in their travels, but not so many Croatia (at least travelers from the US). But they’ve heard a lot about it, especially the Game of Thrones stans, which maybe has bumped it up on their list of places to visit; maybe high on the “B” list. And so the interest I was getting might’ve been a combination of a polite “How was your trip” with a dash of&nbsp; “Hmm, any reason I should bump it up to my ‘A’ list?” I found myself summing up our Split visit saying “Good times, good wine, good seafood; though I’m not sure I know anything more about Croatia having spent 4 days there.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I felt like I was another one of those guys who hop a cheap Ryanair flight to some city like Budapest or Tallinn for a lads’ weekend -- which was pretty close to what we did. But even when we ventured out of the old city (which is very cool and very pretty), out of the cruise passenger blast zone that would jam up those cool, pretty, but very narrow streets and alleys between, say, 10am and 5pm every day, I still couldn’t get a deeper feel for the place. We’d post up at some bars, but got much less conversation with the bartenders than I would in, say, Italy. I dunno -- maybe Croatians are more taciturn than Italians, or the folks in Split have to deal with so many tourists every day that they need a break and just want to chat with their fellow Croatians. Either -- or both -- would be very reasonable explanations. Indeed, the closest I came was a <em>non-conversation</em> in the main farmers’ market on Saturday morning. I was walking up and down the rows of stalls -- fresh vegetables, sundries, other random bits and bobs -- and noticed an older guy by himself in a small stall off to the side. Walking up, I could see he was selling smoked pork loin and some aged sheep’s cheese. He spoke no English; I spoke no Croatian, but with a bunch of gestures and finger measurements, I managed to buy some of everything he had on offer. I must’ve paid a good price because he pulled out a plastic 1-liter bottle and poured me a capful of what I figured was home-made rakija, a Croatian fruit brandy. It was good, very smooth; a nice 11am eye opener.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>After 4 days of wandering around, Split seemed a pretty standard European large town/small city with fresh seafood and good wine for, if not cheap, then a reasonable price. The only kinda wacky thing was the Croatian currency, the kuna. The exchange rate was around 7.50 to the dollar; a slightly awkward exchange rate to do in your head on the fly -- which we didn’t need to do because everything was dual priced in kuna and euro in preparation for their move next month (January 2023) to the euro. So you’d think (or at least I thought) that there’d be parallel usage of kunas and euros in the lead-up. But you (and me) would be wrong. There were signs everywhere “Kuna only” and “Cash only”. Which meant a lot of hunting down ATMs and a last-minute spending spree in the Split Airport bar and duty-free shop.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Just short of 70 years ago, John Steinbeck wrote an <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/positano-john-steinbeck/mode/2up\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">article about Positano, Italy for Harper’s Bazaar magazine</a>. The most popular pull quote is “Positano bites deep. It is a dream place that isn’t quite real...” He then goes on to say that Positano would never be overrun by tourists; it’s too steep, there’s no room for visitors, and the locals don’t give a damn. Steinbeck was right about it being steep, but he was dead wrong about the rest. The view from our balcony was beautiful when I looked up at the hills and out at the water. But then my eyes would drop a bit and I’d see the stream of ferries docking and disgorging full loads of daytrippers. I waded into it one morning to see the local church and got stuck in a conga line of tourists walking one of the narrow streets -- one single-file of people walking up from the beach, another single-file walking down; a young couple carrying a stroller up the sets of stone steps; the almost-Three Stooges-like people bumping into the back of each other when someone in the single-file stopped to look at a shop and didn’t step into the doorway. That was it for me. I was one and done. After that, I’d just sit on our balcony with a bottle of local wine, situated so my eyes wouldn’t drop from the beautiful view.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I don’t want to bang on about the crowds too much, but it’s a major through-line of this trip. Maybe the combination of the strong dollar, no COVID restrictions, and no mask rules was all it took to uncork 2 years of pent-up travel demand. In Rome, I made the mistake of meeting someone at the Trevi Fountain and got trapped in a horde. The Trastevere neighborhood where we stayed -- the streets were a bit thick with tourists during the day, but was complete gridlock at night with people overflowing out of the bars, into the plazas drinking what must’ve been truckloads of Peronis.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Having said this, I really liked Rome. Before this, I was always a bit ambivalent about Rome; would always tend to head north -- to Tuscany, to Milan. But this trip, maybe because we’d spent the prior week or so in smaller places, the big city energy of Rome was a pleasant, an energizing change. People talk about Rome being chaotic; I didn’t think it was any more chaotic than any other big city. Maybe because I wasn’t driving -- just walking or taking a cab or trying to kill Irene while driving a Vespa scooter.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Could also be that there was more space to spread out, to swerve the crowds. I found a walking and bike path sunk down below street level along the banks of the Tiber River. There was fairly steady bike traffic, but I could walk freely, no dodging on-coming tourists. I made my way through the Testaccio neighborhood -- definitely no tourist traffic here -- to a local market that was full, but not crowded; I was able to get a table with my beer and porchetta sandwich.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But I picked up a verve in Rome -- some combination of the energy and “don’t screw with me” of a big city, but also something more welcoming, a bit warmer than I’d get in, say Manhattan or London or Frankfurt or Paris. Maybe a bit more down-to-earth, something you get in the outer boroughs of New York and London; a friendly confidence. I liked it a lot more than I thought I would.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But not every crowd was bad. The last stop on our Italian tour was Florence. While I’d never been to Rome before, this was our fourth time in Florence. Irene and Claire wanted to shop for jewelry on Ponte Vecchio; the thought of wading back into those crowds sent me in the complete opposite direction, toward the Basilica of Santa Croce. Walking down the road, I noticed more and more guys wearing the same soccer jerseys funneling onto the road, some with plastic bags full of beer bottles. When the street ended at the Piazza di Santa Croce, the big open plaza in front of the basilica, it had been taken over by a huge crowd of Scottish soccer fans who’d followed their club, Hearts of Midlothian, from Edinburgh here to Florence to play the local team. They’d set up camp in the plaza, hung their club supporters flags from plaza railings, building scaffolds, and pretty much anything else with a vertical structure. And they were having a great time pre-gaming the match -- drinking beers, banging drums, and most of all, singing songs. At the other end of the plaza, about 6 carabinieri were standing in front of what looked like a paddy wagon. As I rounded the corner of the basilica, a couple of Florence metro cop cars joined them. They weren’t doing anything; just hanging back, just in case.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I left the drums and singing behind and wound my way up to a craft beer bar. I bought a beer and sat on a stool just outside the bar door -- just in time to see a stream of Hearts supporters take over the street which was, I soon found out, the main path from their pre-game piazza to the stadium. I have to say that, after 5+ hours of drinking, I was a bit nervous about this crowd, but I didn’t need be. They were loud, enthusiastic, maybe a bit bumptious, but never nasty or threatening. They were just there to have fun with their fellow supporters and watch the match which, one guy told me, they fully expected to lose (and which they did 5-1). Through it all, I was most impressed by the Florentine bar owner. Amid all the drunk Scotsmen singing and yelling and drinking, he was unflappable -- serving beers, keeping glasses out of the street, and occasionally taking group photos. He smiled and told me, “The boys just want to have some fun.” And they did. And they dragged me along with them -- not to the stadium, I had other plans, to meet up with a big slab of beef, a bistecca alla fiorentina-- but to enjoy a crowd rather than fight it. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #191</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Merry Christmas to everyone who celebrates it and hope you all have a great new year. Sorry I couldn’t get this out earlier to give any of you trapped in an airport this week something to listen to, but hey, now you have something for Christmas dinner clean-up.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page at TravelCommons.com for a transcript of the episode and any links I’ve mentioned. If you’re not yet subscribed, there’s a drop down Subscribe menu at the top of the page and along the side of the page, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ socials.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_191.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #191 — My Notes on Italy and Split, Croatia','Comparing long-distance drive times between gas and electric cars, and ChatGPT\'s travel tips with mine; Talking about another Real ID delay, and my travel notes from Positano, Rome, and Split, Croatia. ','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-191-my-notes-on-italy-and-split-croatia','','','2023-03-31 19:21:50','2023-04-01 00:21:50','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4250',0,'post','',0),
(4252,1,'2022-12-24 14:35:24','2022-12-24 19:35:24','','AA263071-7820-499A-BBF9-DAB2E122A703 (1)','','inherit','open','closed','','aa263071-7820-499a-bbf9-dab2e122a703-1','','','2022-12-24 14:35:24','2022-12-24 19:35:24','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/AA263071-7820-499A-BBF9-DAB2E122A703-1.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(4253,1,'2022-12-24 14:53:26','2022-12-24 19:53:26','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/AA263071-7820-499A-BBF9-DAB2E122A703-1-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Malort bottle and a cow skull\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\">After the Positano ferries go home[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Back behind the mic after 3 week of travel in Croatia and Italy.  The trip went amazingly well up to the last leg, when United\'s Newark team couldn\'t get our bags on our plane. But, I\'d stuffed <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3k4rCUy\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Apple AirTags</a> into our luggage, so we were able to track their movements \'til they got home. That experience and a listener\'s tweet led to me re-visiting my travel tech stack. We then talk to Jeff Cioletti, author of the new book <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3sQelCQ\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Imbibing for Introverts</a></em>, about the art of drinking alone. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_191.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #191: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN at the tail end of the “bomb cyclone” that blew up a huge number of Christmas holiday plans for a huge number of families -- including ours. Our daughter Claire beat the bomb by flying down at the beginning of the week out of LaGuardia; thank you, hybrid working arrangements. Our son and his wife were going to head down from Chicago on Thursday, but near-white-out blizzard conditions canceled that. So now we’re recalibrating the size of Christmas dinner and figuring out how to get presents to the right places.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>While our usual “Not traveling at Christmas” rule has served us well, we did hit the road earlier for some Thanksgiving triangulation travel&nbsp; -- from Nashville to Annapolis, MD for a week to celebrate Thanksgiving with some friends, then from there to Chicago for another week to visit family, and then finally back home. The drive out to Annapolis was the best. We swerved the holiday traffic by driving out Monday instead of waiting for the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, and leaving a bit later in the morning so we could miss the agony that is Washington, DC rush hour. It was certainly the most scenic of the 3 drives, skirting the Great Smoky Mountains and then up the Blue Ridge Mountains. It reminded me of my drives to and from college, between Memphis and DC, though a lot more enjoyable not having to worry if my ‘72 Buick Electra was going to overheat hauling itself over the mountains.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The drive to Chicago was the most boring; a 12-hour drive with most of it being through the extended flatlands of the Ohio and Indiana Turnpikes. It would’ve put me right to sleep if I hadn’t figured out how to stream the BBC Radio’s World Cup play-by-play from my phone through the BMW’s speakers. What would’ve been worse, though, is if I’d tried to do that drive in an electric vehicle. California will ban new gas cars in 12 years, and New York and other states are looking to follow suit, so I wanted to see what my driving future will be. <a href=\"https://electrek.co/2022/10/18/us-electric-vehicle-sales-by-maker-and-ev-model-through-q3-2022/\">Cox Automotive says</a> the Tesla Model Y was the best selling car through Q3, the end of September this year. So I hit the Tesla trip planner to see what my trip would look like if I swapped my BMW X3 for a Tesla Model Y Long Range. The trip would be almost 2½ hours longer due to the 4 supercharger stops I’d need -- 2 45-minute charges in PA and OH and 2 25-minute charges in Indiana -- a bit longer than the couple of 20-minute restroom/gas-up pit stops we made on the turnpikes. The first stop in PA and the last one in IN would be in turnpike rest stops. The other two would require leaving the turnpike, winding through the ticket booths to find the chargers. Actually, I’m not sure which is worse. Hanging out for 45 minutes at the North Somerset, PA rest stop Roy Rogers or leaving the Ohio Turnpike to find my way to Strongsville, OH, plug into the supercharger behind the Sheetz convenience store, and then walk over to the Applebee’s knock-off to kill the 45-minute charge time with a Bud Light and some chicken tenders nachos.  They got 12 years to either cut that charge time in half or significantly improve the food and beer options at those superchargers.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music --  <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/snowflake/46164\">A Foolish Game</a> by Snowflake (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/snowflake/46164 Ft: Admiral Bob   </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The last half of our Chicago visit we stayed downtown at the Hyatt Regency, a big convention hotel that, in pre-COVID times, always had all sorts of&nbsp; mid-sized business conventions; things like the Midwest Dell Computer Users Group meeting, the IAAO (Int’l Association of Assessing Officers) National Conference. Now I’m old enough to remember way back to 2020 when “everything changed” and “this is the new normal” meant these mid-level gatherings were past history, that in the new normal, we’d all meet over video or in the metaverse -- which kinda spooked me because everybody seemed cut off below the navel -- and so never be tempted to shake hands. So when I walked into the lobby one morning to see signs welcoming ASTA, the American Seed Trade Association and the elevator doors wrapped in signs pitching BASF’s Poncho Votivo seed treatment, it reminded me once again that reversion to the mean is a strong, almost irresistible force. I walked into the elevator with a guy wearing a vendor badge around his neck. “Conference travel back?” I asked. “With a vengeance,” he sighed. Business travel may still be a bit below 2019 levels, but it’s clawing its way back.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Last May, back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/05/26/podcast-187-moving-to-a-non-hub-airport-what-makes-a-great-taproom/\">episode #187</a>, I said “A quick public service announcement — the COVID Real ID extension expires in less than a year.” Well, scratch that. The beginning of this month, DHS, the Dept of Homeland Security, kicked the Real ID deadline down the road again, 2 years this time to May 7, 2025. Good news for procrastinators everywhere. They said the extension was necessary because the pandemic has made getting a REAL ID more difficult. I have to tell you; I just don’t buy it. Last year, December 2021, I had to go to a Chicago DMV site to get a new driver’s license. I made an appointment, showed up on-time, and was in and out in 30, maybe 40 minutes, including <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/01/16/podcast-183-covid-test-anxiety-michelin-food-adventures/\">the 3 extra minutes</a> it took them to scan my social security card and the documents to prove my address. I mean, come on, it’s been 17 years since the Real ID act was passed. It’s a law no one thinks is needed any more. Somebody just man up (in a completely gender-neutral way) and cancel at least <em>this</em> act in the long-running post-9/11 security theater.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>In more travel document good news, right before Thanksgiving, the US State Dept opened up a portal for on-line passport renewals on what they’re calling a “limited release”, which sounds like government speak for a beta product -- limited volume and possibly not the smoothest user experience. But you gotta give them credit for getting this far. I renewed my passport last February the old-fashioned way -- finding a Walgreens that still takes passport photos, stapling them and a check to the renewal form. I’m hoping that in 9 years’ time, all the sharp edges will be buffed off this limited release and ready for prime time. I know, it’s the government; but a guy can dream…</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I’ve never been too proud to chase a trend in the service of search engine optimization and so I wrote <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/12/12/how-good-are-chatgpts-top-5-holiday-travel-tips/\">a blog post</a> last week on <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChatGPT\">ChatGPT</a>, the AI chatbot that was <a href=\"https://twitter.com/sama/status/1598038815599661056\">released after Thanksgiving</a> and simultaneously thrilled and horrified people -- mostly thrilling students and mostly horrifying teachers and writers. I decided to give it a try, typing into the prompt box -- “write a blog post with the top holiday travel tips.” One thing that was immediately obvious -- ChatGPT is <strong>a lot</strong> faster than me. It cranked out 350 words and 5 travel tips in a second or two. The tips, though, “Plan Ahead,” “Pack Light,” “Stay Organized,” “Be Flexible,” and “Stay Connected” weren’t wrong, but they weren’t all that insightful; they weren’t anything that even the occasional traveler, someone taking just a couple of flights a year, wouldn’t already know. So then the next step is to compare those tips, generated by artificial intelligence, to 5 tips generated by my 35 years and a few million miles of travel experience -- “Figure out if you want to fly or drive,” “Fly Non-Stop,” “Catch the Early Flight,” “Carry On Your Luggage,” and “Bring a Battery Pack.” You be the judge, but I think my tips are a bit more specific, a bit more actionable; probably just good enough to keep me in this unpaid travel podcaster/blogger gig — at least until ChatGPT gets its next upgrade.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>In the Travel Tech Stack topic in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/10/31/podcast-190-my-travel-tech-stack-imbibing-for-introverts/\">the last episode</a>, I talked about travel apps I use, and specifically Tripit which I use to consolidate all the plane, train, hotel, and Airbnb confirmations into a single itinerary. The Monday before Thanksgiving, I started getting e-mails from them -- 50% off TripIt Pro; $24 instead of the usual $49. That first one was targeted at Thanksgiving fliers. Then came another 50% off email, but this time it was a Black Friday e-mail. Then came the Cyber Monday pitch, again 50% off. I got a message from Allan Marko, long-time TravelCommons listener. “What do you think?” he asked, “Do you use it?”&nbsp; I quickly responded “Nope. Haven’t used Pro for many years. Don’t see the value of the additional features. If I was going to pay for one, I’d go for Flighty.” I was able to respond at near-ChatGPT speed because that text was pretty much verbatim what I said about Tripit Pro in the Travel Tech segment. The next day, Allan messaged me back “Just listened to the episode. You went through exactly what I was asking about TripIt.” TripIt ran that 50% off e-mail campaign right through last week, so almost a month -- which leads me to believe that there are a lot of other travelers who share my views.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And if you have any travel stories, comments, tips, rants, or a question like Allan or like Twitter follower @Ab3Fr0man (I’m always a sucker for a Ferris Bueller reference) whose question back in June led to last episode’s Travel Tech Stack topic, send it to <a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a>, ping me at @mpeacock on Twitter message or post a comment on the TravelCommons website for the quickest response. I’m a little slower responding to Facebook and Instagram. And if you don’t want your name mentioned on the podcast, let me know. Everyone’s got different sensitivities around privacy nowadays.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/THE_CONCEPT_OF_ENERGY/55008\">ABANDONED BUTTERFLIES</a> by THE_CONCEPT_OF_ENERGY (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/THE_CONCEPT_OF_ENERGY/55008</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Notes on Split, Croatia and Italy</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I mentioned at the start of the last episode that I rummaged around Croatia and Italy for 3 weeks at the beginning of October, starting in Split, Croatia and then running up the Italian peninsula -- Amalfi Coast, Naples, Rome, Florence. When I’ve talked to folks about this trip, most everyone is much more interested in our time in Split and in Italy. Which makes sense if I think about it; lots of people interested in travel will have hit those Italy highlights -- Rome, Florence, the Amalfi Coast -- early on in their travels, but not so many Croatia (at least travelers from the US). But they’ve heard a lot about it, especially the Game of Thrones stans, which maybe has bumped it up on their list of places to visit; maybe high on the “B” list. And so the interest I was getting might’ve been a combination of a polite “How was your trip” with a dash of&nbsp; “Hmm, any reason I should bump it up to my ‘A’ list?” I found myself summing up our Split visit saying “Good times, good wine, good seafood; though I’m not sure I know anything more about Croatia having spent 4 days there.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I felt like I was another one of those guys who hop a cheap Ryanair flight to some city like Budapest or Tallinn for a lads’ weekend -- which was pretty close to what we did. But even when we ventured out of the old city (which is very cool and very pretty), out of the cruise passenger blast zone that would jam up those cool, pretty, but very narrow streets and alleys between, say, 10am and 5pm every day, I still couldn’t get a deeper feel for the place. We’d post up at some bars, but got much less conversation with the bartenders than I would in, say, Italy. I dunno -- maybe Croatians are more taciturn than Italians, or the folks in Split have to deal with so many tourists every day that they need a break and just want to chat with their fellow Croatians. Either -- or both -- would be very reasonable explanations. Indeed, the closest I came was a <em>non-conversation</em> in the main farmers’ market on Saturday morning. I was walking up and down the rows of stalls -- fresh vegetables, sundries, other random bits and bobs -- and noticed an older guy by himself in a small stall off to the side. Walking up, I could see he was selling smoked pork loin and some aged sheep’s cheese. He spoke no English; I spoke no Croatian, but with a bunch of gestures and finger measurements, I managed to buy some of everything he had on offer. I must’ve paid a good price because he pulled out a plastic 1-liter bottle and poured me a capful of what I figured was home-made rakija, a Croatian fruit brandy. It was good, very smooth; a nice 11am eye opener.  </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>After 4 days of wandering around, Split seemed a pretty standard European large town/small city with fresh seafood and good wine for, if not cheap, then a reasonable price. The only kinda wacky thing was the Croatian currency, the kuna. The exchange rate was around 7.50 to the dollar; a slightly awkward exchange rate to do in your head on the fly -- which we didn’t need to do because everything was dual priced in kuna and euro in preparation for their move next month (January 2023) to the euro. So you’d think (or at least I thought) that there’d be parallel usage of kunas and euros in the lead-up. But you (and me) would be wrong. There were signs everywhere “Kuna only” and “Cash only”. Which meant a lot of hunting down ATMs and a last-minute spending spree in the Split Airport bar and duty-free shop.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Just short of 70 years ago, John Steinbeck wrote an article about Positano, Italy for Harper’s Bazaar magazine. The most popular pull quote is “Positano bites deep. It is a dream place that isn’t quite real...” He then goes on to say that Positano would never be overrun by tourists; it’s too steep, there’s no room for visitors, and the locals don’t give a damn. Steinbeck was right about it being steep, but he was dead wrong about the rest. The view from our balcony was beautiful when I looked up at the hills and out at the water. But then my eyes would drop a bit and I’d see the stream of ferries docking and disgorging full loads of daytrippers. I waded into it one morning to see the local church and got stuck in a conga line of tourists walking one of the narrow streets -- one single-file of people walking up from the beach, another single-file walking down; a young couple carrying a stroller up the sets of stone steps; the almost-Three Stooges-like people bumping into the back of each other when someone in the single-file stopped to look at a shop and didn’t step into the doorway. That was it for me. I was one and done. After that, I’d just sit on our balcony with a bottle of local wine, situated so my eyes wouldn’t drop from the beautiful view.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I don’t want to bang on about the crowds too much, but it’s a major through-line of this trip. Maybe the combination of the strong dollar, no COVID restrictions, and no mask rules was all it took to uncork 2 years of pent-up travel demand. In Rome, I made the mistake of meeting someone at the Trevi Fountain and got trapped in a horde. The Trastevere neighborhood where we stayed -- the streets were a bit thick with tourists during the day, but was complete gridlock at night with people overflowing out of the bars, into the plazas drinking what must’ve been truckloads of Peronis.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Having said this, I really liked Rome. Before this, I was always a bit ambivalent about Rome; would always tend to head north -- to Tuscany, to Milan. But this trip, maybe because we’d spent the prior week or so in smaller places, the big city energy of Rome was a pleasant, an energizing change. People talk about Rome being chaotic; I didn’t think it was any more chaotic than any other big city. Maybe because I wasn’t driving -- just walking or taking a cab or trying to kill Irene while driving a Vespa scooter.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Could also be that there was more space to spread out, to swerve the crowds. I found a walking and bike path sunk down below street level along the banks of the Tiber River. There was fairly steady bike traffic, but I could walk freely, no dodging on-coming tourists. I made my way through the Testaccio neighborhood -- definitely no tourist traffic here -- to a local market that was full, but not crowded; I was able to get a table with my beer and porchetta sandwich.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But I picked up a verve in Rome -- some combination of the energy and “don’t screw with me” of a big city, but also something more welcoming, a bit warmer than I’d get in, say Manhattan or London or Frankfurt or Paris. Maybe a bit more down-to-earth, something you get in the outer boroughs of New York and London; a friendly confidence. I liked it a lot more than I thought I would.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But not every crowd was bad. The last stop on our Italian tour was Florence. While I’d never been to Rome before, this was our fourth time in Florence. Irene and Claire wanted to shop for jewelry on Ponte Vecchio; the thought of wading back into those crowds sent me in the complete opposite direction, toward the Basilica of Santa Croce. Walking down the road, I noticed more and more guys wearing the same soccer jerseys funneling onto the road, some with plastic bags full of beer bottles. When the street ended at the Piazza di Santa Croce, the big open plaza in front of the basilica, it had been taken over by a huge crowd of Scottish soccer fans who’d followed their club, Hearts of Midlothian, from Edinburgh here to Florence to play the local team. They’d set up camp in the plaza, hung their club supporters flags from plaza railings, building scaffolds, and pretty much anything else with a vertical structure. And they were having a great time pre-gaming the match -- drinking beers, banging drums, and most of all, singing songs. At the other end of the plaza, about 6 carabinieri were standing in front of what looked like a paddy wagon. As I rounded the corner of the basilica, a couple of Florence metro cop cars joined them. They weren’t doing anything; just hanging back, just in case.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I left the drums and singing behind and wound my way up to a craft beer bar. I bought a beer and sat on a stool just outside the bar door -- just in time to see a stream of Hearts supporters take over the street which was, I soon found out, the main path from their pre-game piazza to the stadium. I have to say that, after 5+ hours of drinking, I was a bit nervous about this crowd, but I didn’t need be. They were loud, enthusiastic, maybe a bit bumptious, but never nasty or threatening. They were just there to have fun with their fellow supporters and watch the match which, one guy told me, they fully expected to lose (and which they did 5-1). Through it all, I was most impressed by the Florentine bar owner. Amid all the drunk Scotsmen singing and yelling and drinking, he was unflappable -- serving beers, keeping glasses out of the street, and occasionally taking group photos. He smiled and told me, “The boys just want to have some fun.” And they did. And they dragged me along with them -- not to the stadium, I had other plans, to meet up with a big slab of beef, a bistecca alla fiorentina-- but to enjoy a crowd rather than fight it. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #191</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Merry Christmas to everyone who celebrates it and hope you all have a great new year. Sorry I couldn’t get this out earlier to give any of you trapped in an airport this week something to listen to, but hey, now you have something for Christmas dinner clean-up.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page at TravelCommons.com for a transcript of the episode and any links I’ve mentioned. If you’re not yet subscribed, there’s a drop down Subscribe menu at the top of the page and along the side of the page, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ socials.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_191.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #191 — Notes on Italy and Split, Croatia','','inherit','closed','closed','','4250-revision-v1','','','2022-12-24 14:53:26','2022-12-24 19:53:26','',4250,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4253',0,'revision','',0),
(4254,1,'2022-12-24 23:14:31','2022-12-25 04:14:31','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/AA263071-7820-499A-BBF9-DAB2E122A703-1-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Malort bottle and a cow skull\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\">After the Positano ferries go home[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Hard up against the Christmas deadline, we compare long-distance drive times for gas and electric cars, and my travel tips vs. the ChatGPT AI chatbot. We talk about the latest Real ID deadline delay, and impressions from my trip to Positano, Rome, Florence, and Split, Croatia. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_191.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #191: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN at the tail end of the “bomb cyclone” that blew up a huge number of Christmas holiday plans for a huge number of families -- including ours. Our daughter Claire beat the bomb by flying down at the beginning of the week out of LaGuardia; thank you, hybrid working arrangements. Our son and his wife were going to head down from Chicago on Thursday, but near-white-out blizzard conditions canceled that. So now we’re recalibrating the size of Christmas dinner and figuring out how to get presents to the right places.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>While our usual “Not traveling at Christmas” rule has served us well, we did hit the road earlier for some Thanksgiving triangulation travel&nbsp; -- from Nashville to Annapolis, MD for a week to celebrate Thanksgiving with some friends, then from there to Chicago for another week to visit family, and then finally back home. The drive out to Annapolis was the best. We swerved the holiday traffic by driving out Monday instead of waiting for the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, and leaving a bit later in the morning so we could miss the agony that is Washington, DC rush hour. It was certainly the most scenic of the 3 drives, skirting the Great Smoky Mountains and then up the Blue Ridge Mountains. It reminded me of my drives to and from college, between Memphis and DC, though a lot more enjoyable not having to worry if my ‘72 Buick Electra was going to overheat hauling itself over the mountains.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The drive to Chicago was the most boring; a 12-hour drive with most of it being through the extended flatlands of the Ohio and Indiana Turnpikes. It would’ve put me right to sleep if I hadn’t figured out how to stream the BBC Radio’s World Cup play-by-play from my phone through the BMW’s speakers. What would’ve been worse, though, is if I’d tried to do that drive in an electric vehicle. California will ban new gas cars in 12 years, and New York and other states are looking to follow suit, so I wanted to see what my driving future will be. <a href=\"https://electrek.co/2022/10/18/us-electric-vehicle-sales-by-maker-and-ev-model-through-q3-2022/\">Cox Automotive says</a> the Tesla Model Y was the best selling car through Q3, the end of September this year. So I hit the Tesla trip planner to see what my trip would look like if I swapped my BMW X3 for a Tesla Model Y Long Range. The trip would be almost 2½ hours longer due to the 4 supercharger stops I’d need -- 2 45-minute charges in PA and OH and 2 25-minute charges in Indiana -- a bit longer than the couple of 20-minute restroom/gas-up pit stops we made on the turnpikes. The first stop in PA and the last one in IN would be in turnpike rest stops. The other two would require leaving the turnpike, winding through the ticket booths to find the chargers. Actually, I’m not sure which is worse. Hanging out for 45 minutes at the North Somerset, PA rest stop Roy Rogers or leaving the Ohio Turnpike to find my way to Strongsville, OH, plug into the supercharger behind the Sheetz convenience store, and then walk over to the Applebee’s knock-off to kill the 45-minute charge time with a Bud Light and some chicken tenders nachos.  They got 12 years to either cut that charge time in half or significantly improve the food and beer options at those superchargers.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music --  <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/snowflake/46164\">A Foolish Game</a> by Snowflake (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/snowflake/46164 Ft: Admiral Bob   </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The last half of our Chicago visit we stayed downtown at the Hyatt Regency, a big convention hotel that, in pre-COVID times, always had all sorts of&nbsp; mid-sized business conventions; things like the Midwest Dell Computer Users Group meeting, the IAAO (Int’l Association of Assessing Officers) National Conference. Now I’m old enough to remember way back to 2020 when “everything changed” and “this is the new normal” meant these mid-level gatherings were past history, that in the new normal, we’d all meet over video or in the metaverse -- which kinda spooked me because everybody seemed cut off below the navel -- and so never be tempted to shake hands. So when I walked into the lobby one morning to see signs welcoming ASTA, the American Seed Trade Association and the elevator doors wrapped in signs pitching BASF’s Poncho Votivo seed treatment, it reminded me once again that reversion to the mean is a strong, almost irresistible force. I walked into the elevator with a guy wearing a vendor badge around his neck. “Conference travel back?” I asked. “With a vengeance,” he sighed. Business travel may still be a bit below 2019 levels, but it’s clawing its way back.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Last May, back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/05/26/podcast-187-moving-to-a-non-hub-airport-what-makes-a-great-taproom/\">episode #187</a>, I said “A quick public service announcement — the COVID Real ID extension expires in less than a year.” Well, scratch that. The beginning of this month, DHS, the Department of Homeland Security, kicked the Real ID deadline down the road again, 2 years this time to May 7, 2025. Good news for procrastinators everywhere. They said the extension was necessary because the pandemic has made getting a REAL ID more difficult. I have to tell you; I just don’t buy it. Last year, December 2021, I had to go to a Chicago DMV site to get a new driver’s license. I made an appointment, showed up on-time, and was in and out in 30, maybe 40 minutes, including <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/01/16/podcast-183-covid-test-anxiety-michelin-food-adventures/\">the 3 extra minutes</a> it took them to scan my social security card and the documents to prove my address. I mean, come on, it’s been 17 years since the Real ID act was passed. It’s a law no one thinks is needed any more. Somebody just man up (in a completely gender-neutral way) and cancel at least <em>this</em> act in the long-running post-9/11 security theater.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>In more travel document good news, right before Thanksgiving, the US State Dept opened up a portal for on-line passport renewals on what they’re calling a “limited release”, which sounds like government speak for a beta product -- limited volume and possibly not the smoothest user experience. But you gotta give them credit for getting this far. I renewed my passport last February the old-fashioned way -- finding a Walgreens that still takes passport photos, stapling them and a check to the renewal form. I’m hoping that in 9 years’ time, all the sharp edges will be buffed off this limited release and ready for prime time. I know, it’s the government; but a guy can dream…</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I’ve never been too proud to chase a trend in the service of search engine optimization and so I wrote <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/12/12/how-good-are-chatgpts-top-5-holiday-travel-tips/\">a blog post</a> last week on <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChatGPT\">ChatGPT</a>, the AI chatbot that was <a href=\"https://twitter.com/sama/status/1598038815599661056\">released after Thanksgiving</a> and simultaneously thrilled and horrified people -- mostly thrilling students and mostly horrifying teachers and writers. I decided to give it a try, typing into the prompt box -- “write a blog post with the top holiday travel tips.” One thing that was immediately obvious -- ChatGPT is <strong>a lot</strong> faster than me. It cranked out 350 words and 5 travel tips in a second or two. The tips, though, “Plan Ahead,” “Pack Light,” “Stay Organized,” “Be Flexible,” and “Stay Connected” weren’t wrong, but they weren’t all that insightful; they weren’t anything that even the occasional traveler, someone taking just a couple of flights a year, wouldn’t already know. So then the next step is to compare those tips, generated by artificial intelligence, to 5 tips generated by my 35 years and a few million miles of travel experience -- “Figure out if you want to fly or drive,” “Fly Non-Stop,” “Catch the Early Flight,” “Carry On Your Luggage,” and “Bring a Battery Pack.” You be the judge, but I think my tips are a bit more specific, a bit more actionable; probably just good enough to keep me in this unpaid travel podcaster/blogger gig — at least until ChatGPT gets its next upgrade.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>In the Travel Tech Stack topic in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/10/31/podcast-190-my-travel-tech-stack-imbibing-for-introverts/\">the last episode</a>, I talked about travel apps I use, and specifically Tripit which I use to consolidate all the plane, train, hotel, and Airbnb confirmations into a single itinerary. The Monday before Thanksgiving, I started getting e-mails from them -- 50% off TripIt Pro; $24 instead of the usual $49. That first one was targeted at Thanksgiving fliers. Then came another 50% off email, but this time it was a Black Friday e-mail. Then came the Cyber Monday pitch, again 50% off. I got a message from Allan Marko, long-time TravelCommons listener. “What do you think?” he asked, “Do you use it?”&nbsp; I quickly responded “Nope. Haven’t used Pro for many years. Don’t see the value of the additional features. If I was going to pay for one, I’d go for Flighty.” I was able to respond at near-ChatGPT speed because that text was pretty much verbatim what I said about Tripit Pro in the Travel Tech segment. The next day, Allan messaged me back “Just listened to the episode. You went through exactly what I was asking about TripIt.” TripIt ran that 50% off e-mail campaign right through last week, so almost a month -- which leads me to believe that there are a lot of other travelers who share my views.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And if you have any travel stories, comments, tips, rants, or a question like Allan or like Twitter follower @Ab3Fr0man (I’m always a sucker for a Ferris Bueller reference) whose question back in June led to last episode’s Travel Tech Stack topic, send it to <a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a>, ping me at @mpeacock on Twitter message or post a comment on the TravelCommons website for the quickest response. I’m a little slower responding to Facebook and Instagram. And if you don’t want your name mentioned on the podcast, let me know. Everyone’s got different sensitivities around privacy nowadays.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/THE_CONCEPT_OF_ENERGY/55008\">ABANDONED BUTTERFLIES</a> by THE_CONCEPT_OF_ENERGY (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/THE_CONCEPT_OF_ENERGY/55008</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Notes on Split, Croatia and Italy</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I mentioned at the start of the last episode that I rummaged around Croatia and Italy for 3 weeks at the beginning of October, starting in Split, Croatia and then running up the Italian peninsula -- Amalfi Coast, Naples, Rome, Florence. When I’ve talked to folks about this trip, most everyone is much more interested in our time in Split and in Italy. Which makes sense if I think about it; lots of people interested in travel will have hit those Italy highlights -- Rome, Florence, the Amalfi Coast -- early on in their travels, but not so many Croatia (at least travelers from the US). But they’ve heard a lot about it, especially the Game of Thrones stans, which maybe has bumped it up on their list of places to visit; maybe high on the “B” list. And so the interest I was getting might’ve been a combination of a polite “How was your trip” with a dash of&nbsp; “Hmm, any reason I should bump it up to my ‘A’ list?” I found myself summing up our Split visit saying “Good times, good wine, good seafood; though I’m not sure I know anything more about Croatia having spent 4 days there.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I felt like I was another one of those guys who hop a cheap Ryanair flight to some city like Budapest or Tallinn for a lads’ weekend -- which was pretty close to what we did. But even when we ventured out of the old city (which is very cool and very pretty), out of the cruise passenger blast zone that would jam up those cool, pretty, but very narrow streets and alleys between, say, 10am and 5pm every day, I still couldn’t get a deeper feel for the place. We’d post up at some bars, but got much less conversation with the bartenders than I would in, say, Italy. I dunno -- maybe Croatians are more taciturn than Italians, or the folks in Split have to deal with so many tourists every day that they need a break and just want to chat with their fellow Croatians. Either -- or both -- would be very reasonable explanations. Indeed, the closest I came was a <em>non-conversation</em> in the main farmers’ market on Saturday morning. I was walking up and down the rows of stalls -- fresh vegetables, sundries, other random bits and bobs -- and noticed an older guy by himself in a small stall off to the side. Walking up, I could see he was selling smoked pork loin and some aged sheep’s cheese. He spoke no English; I spoke no Croatian, but with a bunch of gestures and finger measurements, I managed to buy some of everything he had on offer. I must’ve paid a good price because he pulled out a plastic 1-liter bottle and poured me a capful of what I figured was home-made rakija, a Croatian fruit brandy. It was good, very smooth; a nice 11am eye opener.  </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>After 4 days of wandering around, Split seemed a pretty standard European large town/small city with fresh seafood and good wine for, if not cheap, then a reasonable price. The only kinda wacky thing was the Croatian currency, the kuna. The exchange rate was around 7.50 to the dollar; a slightly awkward exchange rate to do in your head on the fly -- which we didn’t need to do because everything was dual priced in kuna and euro in preparation for their move next month (January 2023) to the euro. So you’d think (or at least I thought) that there’d be parallel usage of kunas and euros in the lead-up. But you (and me) would be wrong. There were signs everywhere “Kuna only” and “Cash only”. Which meant a lot of hunting down ATMs and a last-minute spending spree in the Split Airport bar and duty-free shop.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Just short of 70 years ago, John Steinbeck wrote an article about Positano, Italy for Harper’s Bazaar magazine. The most popular pull quote is “Positano bites deep. It is a dream place that isn’t quite real...” He then goes on to say that Positano would never be overrun by tourists; it’s too steep, there’s no room for visitors, and the locals don’t give a damn. Steinbeck was right about it being steep, but he was dead wrong about the rest. The view from our balcony was beautiful when I looked up at the hills and out at the water. But then my eyes would drop a bit and I’d see the stream of ferries docking and disgorging full loads of daytrippers. I waded into it one morning to see the local church and got stuck in a conga line of tourists walking one of the narrow streets -- one single-file of people walking up from the beach, another single-file walking down; a young couple carrying a stroller up the sets of stone steps; the almost-Three Stooges-like people bumping into the back of each other when someone in the single-file stopped to look at a shop and didn’t step into the doorway. That was it for me. I was one and done. After that, I’d just sit on our balcony with a bottle of local wine, situated so my eyes wouldn’t drop from the beautiful view.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I don’t want to bang on about the crowds too much, but it’s a major through-line of this trip. Maybe the combination of the strong dollar, no COVID restrictions, and no mask rules was all it took to uncork 2 years of pent-up travel demand. In Rome, I made the mistake of meeting someone at the Trevi Fountain and got trapped in a horde. The Trastevere neighborhood where we stayed -- the streets were a bit thick with tourists during the day, but was complete gridlock at night with people overflowing out of the bars, into the plazas drinking what must’ve been truckloads of Peronis.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Having said this, I really liked Rome. Before this, I was always a bit ambivalent about Rome; would always tend to head north -- to Tuscany, to Milan. But this trip, maybe because we’d spent the prior week or so in smaller places, the big city energy of Rome was a pleasant, an energizing change. People talk about Rome being chaotic; I didn’t think it was any more chaotic than any other big city. Maybe because I wasn’t driving -- just walking or taking a cab or trying to kill Irene while driving a Vespa scooter.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Could also be that there was more space to spread out, to swerve the crowds. I found a walking and bike path sunk down below street level along the banks of the Tiber River. There was fairly steady bike traffic, but I could walk freely, no dodging on-coming tourists. I made my way through the Testaccio neighborhood -- definitely no tourist traffic here -- to a local market that was full, but not crowded; I was able to get a table with my beer and porchetta sandwich.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But I picked up a verve in Rome -- some combination of the energy and “don’t screw with me” of a big city, but also something more welcoming, a bit warmer than I’d get in, say Manhattan or London or Frankfurt or Paris. Maybe a bit more down-to-earth, something you get in the outer boroughs of New York and London; a friendly confidence. I liked it a lot more than I thought I would.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But not every crowd was bad. The last stop on our Italian tour was Florence. While I’d never been to Rome before, this was our fourth time in Florence. Irene and Claire wanted to shop for jewelry on Ponte Vecchio; the thought of wading back into those crowds sent me in the complete opposite direction, toward the Basilica of Santa Croce. Walking down the road, I noticed more and more guys wearing the same soccer jerseys funneling onto the road, some with plastic bags full of beer bottles. When the street ended at the Piazza di Santa Croce, the big open plaza in front of the basilica, it had been taken over by a huge crowd of Scottish soccer fans who’d followed their club, Hearts of Midlothian, from Edinburgh here to Florence to play the local team. They’d set up camp in the plaza, hung their club supporters flags from plaza railings, building scaffolds, and pretty much anything else with a vertical structure. And they were having a great time pre-gaming the match -- drinking beers, banging drums, and most of all, singing songs. At the other end of the plaza, about 6 carabinieri were standing in front of what looked like a paddy wagon. As I rounded the corner of the basilica, a couple of Florence metro cop cars joined them. They weren’t doing anything; just hanging back, just in case.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I left the drums and singing behind and wound my way up to a craft beer bar. I bought a beer and sat on a stool just outside the bar door -- just in time to see a stream of Hearts supporters take over the street which was, I soon found out, the main path from their pre-game piazza to the stadium. I have to say that, after 5+ hours of drinking, I was a bit nervous about this crowd, but I didn’t need be. They were loud, enthusiastic, maybe a bit bumptious, but never nasty or threatening. They were just there to have fun with their fellow supporters and watch the match which, one guy told me, they fully expected to lose (and which they did 5-1). Through it all, I was most impressed by the Florentine bar owner. Amid all the drunk Scotsmen singing and yelling and drinking, he was unflappable -- serving beers, keeping glasses out of the street, and occasionally taking group photos. He smiled and told me, “The boys just want to have some fun.” And they did. And they dragged me along with them -- not to the stadium, I had other plans, to meet up with a big slab of beef, a bistecca alla fiorentina-- but to enjoy a crowd rather than fight it. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #191</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Merry Christmas to everyone who celebrates it and hope you all have a great new year. Sorry I couldn’t get this out earlier to give any of you trapped in an airport this week something to listen to, but hey, now you have something for Christmas dinner clean-up.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page at TravelCommons.com for a transcript of the episode and any links I’ve mentioned. If you’re not yet subscribed, there’s a drop down Subscribe menu at the top of the page and along the side of the page, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ socials.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_191.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #191 — My Notes on Italy and Split, Croatia','','inherit','closed','closed','','4250-revision-v1','','','2022-12-24 23:14:31','2022-12-25 04:14:31','',4250,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4254',0,'revision','',0),
(4255,1,'2022-12-24 23:16:19','2022-12-25 04:16:19','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/AA263071-7820-499A-BBF9-DAB2E122A703-1-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Malort bottle and a cow skull\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\">After the Positano ferries go home[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Hard up against the Christmas deadline, we compare long-distance drive times for gas and electric cars, and my travel tips vs. the ChatGPT AI chatbot. We talk about the latest Real ID deadline delay, and impressions from my trip to Positano, Rome, Florence, and Split, Croatia. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_191.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #191: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN at the tail end of the “bomb cyclone” that blew up a huge number of Christmas holiday plans for a huge number of families -- including ours. Our daughter Claire beat the bomb by flying down at the beginning of the week out of LaGuardia; thank you, hybrid working arrangements. Our son and his wife were going to head down from Chicago on Thursday, but near-white-out blizzard conditions canceled that. So now we’re recalibrating the size of Christmas dinner and figuring out how to get presents to the right places.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>While our usual “Not traveling at Christmas” rule has served us well, we did hit the road earlier for some Thanksgiving triangulation travel&nbsp; -- from Nashville to Annapolis, MD for a week to celebrate Thanksgiving with some friends, then from there to Chicago for another week to visit family, and then finally back home. The drive out to Annapolis was the best. We swerved the holiday traffic by driving out Monday instead of waiting for the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, and leaving a bit later in the morning so we could miss the agony that is Washington, DC rush hour. It was certainly the most scenic of the 3 drives, skirting the Great Smoky Mountains and then up the Blue Ridge Mountains. It reminded me of my drives to and from college, between Memphis and DC, though a lot more enjoyable not having to worry if my ‘72 Buick Electra was going to overheat hauling itself over the mountains.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The drive to Chicago was the most boring; a 12-hour drive with most of it being through the extended flatlands of the Ohio and Indiana Turnpikes. It would’ve put me right to sleep if I hadn’t figured out how to stream the BBC Radio’s World Cup play-by-play from my phone through the BMW’s speakers. What would’ve been worse, though, is if I’d tried to do that drive in an electric vehicle. California will ban new gas cars in 12 years, and New York and other states are looking to follow suit, so I wanted to see what my driving future will be. <a href=\"https://electrek.co/2022/10/18/us-electric-vehicle-sales-by-maker-and-ev-model-through-q3-2022/\">Cox Automotive says</a> the Tesla Model Y was the best selling car through Q3, the end of September this year. So I hit the Tesla trip planner to see what my trip would look like if I swapped my BMW X3 for a Tesla Model Y Long Range. The trip would be almost 2½ hours longer due to the 4 supercharger stops I’d need -- 2 45-minute charges in PA and OH and 2 25-minute charges in Indiana -- a bit longer than the couple of 20-minute restroom/gas-up pit stops we made on the turnpikes. The first stop in PA and the last one in IN would be in turnpike rest stops. The other two would require leaving the turnpike, winding through the ticket booths to find the chargers. Actually, I’m not sure which is worse. Hanging out for 45 minutes at the North Somerset, PA rest stop Roy Rogers or leaving the Ohio Turnpike to find my way to Strongsville, OH, plug into the supercharger behind the Sheetz convenience store, and then walk over to the Applebee’s knock-off to kill the 45-minute charge time with a Bud Light and some chicken tenders nachos.  They got 12 years to either cut that charge time in half or significantly improve the food and beer options at those superchargers.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music --  <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/snowflake/46164\">A Foolish Game</a> by Snowflake (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/snowflake/46164 Ft: Admiral Bob   </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The last half of our Chicago visit we stayed downtown at the Hyatt Regency, a big convention hotel that, in pre-COVID times, always had all sorts of&nbsp; mid-sized business conventions; things like the Midwest Dell Computer Users Group meeting, the IAAO (Int’l Association of Assessing Officers) National Conference. Now I’m old enough to remember way back to 2020 when “everything changed” and “this is the new normal” meant these mid-level gatherings were past history, that in the new normal, we’d all meet over video or in the metaverse -- which kinda spooked me because everybody seemed cut off below the navel -- and so never be tempted to shake hands. So when I walked into the lobby one morning to see signs welcoming ASTA, the American Seed Trade Association and the elevator doors wrapped in signs pitching BASF’s Poncho Votivo seed treatment, it reminded me once again that reversion to the mean is a strong, almost irresistible force. I walked into the elevator with a guy wearing a vendor badge around his neck. “Conference travel back?” I asked. “With a vengeance,” he sighed. Business travel may still be a bit below 2019 levels, but it’s clawing its way back.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Last May, back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/05/26/podcast-187-moving-to-a-non-hub-airport-what-makes-a-great-taproom/\">episode #187</a>, I said “A quick public service announcement — the COVID Real ID extension expires in less than a year.” Well, scratch that. The beginning of this month, DHS, the Department of Homeland Security, kicked the Real ID deadline down the road again, 2 years this time to May 7, 2025. Good news for procrastinators everywhere. They said the extension was necessary because the pandemic has made getting a REAL ID more difficult. I have to tell you; I just don’t buy it. Last year, December 2021, I had to go to a Chicago DMV site to get a new driver’s license. I made an appointment, showed up on-time, and was in and out in 30, maybe 40 minutes, including <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/01/16/podcast-183-covid-test-anxiety-michelin-food-adventures/\">the 3 extra minutes</a> it took them to scan my social security card and the documents to prove my address. I mean, come on, it’s been 17 years since the Real ID act was passed. It’s a law no one thinks is needed any more. Somebody just man up (in a completely gender-neutral way) and cancel at least <em>this</em> act in the long-running post-9/11 security theater.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>In more travel document good news, right before Thanksgiving, the US State Dept opened up a portal for on-line passport renewals on what they’re calling a “limited release”, which sounds like government speak for a beta product -- limited volume and possibly not the smoothest user experience. But you gotta give them credit for getting this far. I renewed my passport last February the old-fashioned way -- finding a Walgreens that still takes passport photos, stapling them and a check to the renewal form. I’m hoping that in 9 years’ time, all the sharp edges will be buffed off this limited release and ready for prime time. I know, it’s the government; but a guy can dream…</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I’ve never been too proud to chase a trend in the service of search engine optimization and so I wrote <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/12/12/how-good-are-chatgpts-top-5-holiday-travel-tips/\">a blog post</a> last week on <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChatGPT\">ChatGPT</a>, the AI chatbot that was <a href=\"https://twitter.com/sama/status/1598038815599661056\">released after Thanksgiving</a> and simultaneously thrilled and horrified people -- mostly thrilling students and mostly horrifying teachers and writers. I decided to give it a try, typing into the prompt box -- “write a blog post with the top holiday travel tips.” One thing that was immediately obvious -- ChatGPT is <strong>a lot</strong> faster than me. It cranked out 350 words and 5 travel tips in a second or two. The tips, though, “Plan Ahead,” “Pack Light,” “Stay Organized,” “Be Flexible,” and “Stay Connected” weren’t wrong, but they weren’t all that insightful; they weren’t anything that even the occasional traveler, someone taking just a couple of flights a year, wouldn’t already know. So then the next step is to compare those tips, generated by artificial intelligence, to 5 tips generated by my 35 years and a few million miles of travel experience -- “Figure out if you want to fly or drive,” “Fly Non-Stop,” “Catch the Early Flight,” “Carry On Your Luggage,” and “Bring a Battery Pack.” You be the judge, but I think my tips are a bit more specific, a bit more actionable; probably just good enough to keep me in this unpaid travel podcaster/blogger gig — at least until ChatGPT gets its next upgrade.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>In the Travel Tech Stack topic in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/10/31/podcast-190-my-travel-tech-stack-imbibing-for-introverts/\">the last episode</a>, I talked about travel apps I use, and specifically Tripit which I use to consolidate all the plane, train, hotel, and Airbnb confirmations into a single itinerary. The Monday before Thanksgiving, I started getting e-mails from them -- 50% off TripIt Pro; $24 instead of the usual $49. That first one was targeted at Thanksgiving fliers. Then came another 50% off email, but this time it was a Black Friday e-mail. Then came the Cyber Monday pitch, again 50% off. I got a message from Allan Marko, long-time TravelCommons listener. “What do you think?” he asked, “Do you use it?”&nbsp; I quickly responded “Nope. Haven’t used Pro for many years. Don’t see the value of the additional features. If I was going to pay for one, I’d go for Flighty.” I was able to respond at near-ChatGPT speed because that text was pretty much verbatim what I said about Tripit Pro in the Travel Tech segment. The next day, Allan messaged me back “Just listened to the episode. You went through exactly what I was asking about TripIt.” TripIt ran that 50% off e-mail campaign right through last week, so almost a month -- which leads me to believe that there are a lot of other travelers who share my views.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And if you have any travel stories, comments, tips, rants, or a question like Allan or like Twitter follower @Ab3Fr0man (I’m always a sucker for a Ferris Bueller reference) whose question back in June led to last episode’s Travel Tech Stack topic, send it to <a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a>, ping me at @mpeacock on Twitter message or post a comment on the TravelCommons website for the quickest response. I’m a little slower responding to Facebook and Instagram. And if you don’t want your name mentioned on the podcast, let me know. Everyone’s got different sensitivities around privacy nowadays.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/THE_CONCEPT_OF_ENERGY/55008\">ABANDONED BUTTERFLIES</a> by THE_CONCEPT_OF_ENERGY (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/THE_CONCEPT_OF_ENERGY/55008</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Notes on Split, Croatia and Italy</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I mentioned at the start of the last episode that I rummaged around Croatia and Italy for 3 weeks at the beginning of October, starting in Split, Croatia and then running up the Italian peninsula -- Amalfi Coast, Naples, Rome, Florence. When I’ve talked to folks about this trip, most everyone is much more interested in our time in Split and in Italy. Which makes sense if I think about it; lots of people interested in travel will have hit those Italy highlights -- Rome, Florence, the Amalfi Coast -- early on in their travels, but not so many Croatia (at least travelers from the US). But they’ve heard a lot about it, especially the Game of Thrones stans, which maybe has bumped it up on their list of places to visit; maybe high on the “B” list. And so the interest I was getting might’ve been a combination of a polite “How was your trip” with a dash of&nbsp; “Hmm, any reason I should bump it up to my ‘A’ list?” I found myself summing up our Split visit saying “Good times, good wine, good seafood; though I’m not sure I know anything more about Croatia having spent 4 days there.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I felt like I was another one of those guys who hop a cheap Ryanair flight to some city like Budapest or Tallinn for a lads’ weekend -- which was pretty close to what we did. But even when we ventured out of the old city (which is very cool and very pretty), out of the cruise passenger blast zone that would jam up those cool, pretty, but very narrow streets and alleys between, say, 10am and 5pm every day, I still couldn’t get a deeper feel for the place. We’d post up at some bars, but got much less conversation with the bartenders than I would in, say, Italy. I dunno -- maybe Croatians are more taciturn than Italians, or the folks in Split have to deal with so many tourists every day that they need a break and just want to chat with their fellow Croatians. Either -- or both -- would be very reasonable explanations. Indeed, the closest I came was a <em>non-conversation</em> in the main farmers’ market on Saturday morning. I was walking up and down the rows of stalls -- fresh vegetables, sundries, other random bits and bobs -- and noticed an older guy by himself in a small stall off to the side. Walking up, I could see he was selling smoked pork loin and some aged sheep’s cheese. He spoke no English; I spoke no Croatian, but with a bunch of gestures and finger measurements, I managed to buy some of everything he had on offer. I must’ve paid a good price because he pulled out a plastic 1-liter bottle and poured me a capful of what I figured was home-made rakija, a Croatian fruit brandy. It was good, very smooth; a nice 11am eye opener.  </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>After 4 days of wandering around, Split seemed a pretty standard European large town/small city with fresh seafood and good wine for, if not cheap, then a reasonable price. The only kinda wacky thing was the Croatian currency, the kuna. The exchange rate was around 7.50 to the dollar; a slightly awkward exchange rate to do in your head on the fly -- which we didn’t need to do because everything was dual priced in kuna and euro in preparation for their move next month (January 2023) to the euro. So you’d think (or at least I thought) that there’d be parallel usage of kunas and euros in the lead-up. But you (and me) would be wrong. There were signs everywhere “Kuna only” and “Cash only”. Which meant a lot of hunting down ATMs and a last-minute spending spree in the Split Airport bar and duty-free shop.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Just short of 70 years ago, John Steinbeck wrote an article about Positano, Italy for Harper’s Bazaar magazine. The most popular pull quote is “Positano bites deep. It is a dream place that isn’t quite real...” He then goes on to say that Positano would never be overrun by tourists; it’s too steep, there’s no room for visitors, and the locals don’t give a damn. Steinbeck was right about it being steep, but he was dead wrong about the rest. The view from our balcony was beautiful when I looked up at the hills and out at the water. But then my eyes would drop a bit and I’d see the stream of ferries docking and disgorging full loads of daytrippers. I waded into it one morning to see the local church and got stuck in a conga line of tourists walking one of the narrow streets -- one single-file of people walking up from the beach, another single-file walking down; a young couple carrying a stroller up the sets of stone steps; the almost-Three Stooges-like people bumping into the back of each other when someone in the single-file stopped to look at a shop and didn’t step into the doorway. That was it for me. I was one and done. After that, I’d just sit on our balcony with a bottle of local wine, situated so my eyes wouldn’t drop from the beautiful view.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I don’t want to bang on about the crowds too much, but it’s a major through-line of this trip. Maybe the combination of the strong dollar, no COVID restrictions, and no mask rules was all it took to uncork 2 years of pent-up travel demand. In Rome, I made the mistake of meeting someone at the Trevi Fountain and got trapped in a horde. The Trastevere neighborhood where we stayed -- the streets were a bit thick with tourists during the day, but was complete gridlock at night with people overflowing out of the bars, into the plazas drinking what must’ve been truckloads of Peronis.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Having said this, I really liked Rome. Before this, I was always a bit ambivalent about Rome; would always tend to head north -- to Tuscany, to Milan. But this trip, maybe because we’d spent the prior week or so in smaller places, the big city energy of Rome was a pleasant, an energizing change. People talk about Rome being chaotic; I didn’t think it was any more chaotic than any other big city. Maybe because I wasn’t driving -- just walking or taking a cab or trying to kill Irene while driving a Vespa scooter.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Could also be that there was more space to spread out, to swerve the crowds. I found a walking and bike path sunk down below street level along the banks of the Tiber River. There was fairly steady bike traffic, but I could walk freely, no dodging on-coming tourists. I made my way through the Testaccio neighborhood -- definitely no tourist traffic here -- to a local market that was full, but not crowded; I was able to get a table with my beer and porchetta sandwich.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But I picked up a verve in Rome -- some combination of the energy and “don’t screw with me” of a big city, but also something more welcoming, a bit warmer than I’d get in, say Manhattan or London or Frankfurt or Paris. Maybe a bit more down-to-earth, something you get in the outer boroughs of New York and London; a friendly confidence. I liked it a lot more than I thought I would.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But not every crowd was bad. The last stop on our Italian tour was Florence. While I’d never been to Rome before, this was our fourth time in Florence. Irene and Claire wanted to shop for jewelry on Ponte Vecchio; the thought of wading back into those crowds sent me in the complete opposite direction, toward the Basilica of Santa Croce. Walking down the road, I noticed more and more guys wearing the same soccer jerseys funneling onto the road, some with plastic bags full of beer bottles. When the street ended at the Piazza di Santa Croce, the big open plaza in front of the basilica, it had been taken over by a huge crowd of Scottish soccer fans who’d followed their club, Hearts of Midlothian, from Edinburgh here to Florence to play the local team. They’d set up camp in the plaza, hung their club supporters flags from plaza railings, building scaffolds, and pretty much anything else with a vertical structure. And they were having a great time pre-gaming the match -- drinking beers, banging drums, and most of all, singing songs. At the other end of the plaza, about 6 carabinieri were standing in front of what looked like a paddy wagon. As I rounded the corner of the basilica, a couple of Florence metro cop cars joined them. They weren’t doing anything; just hanging back, just in case.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I left the drums and singing behind and wound my way up to a craft beer bar. I bought a beer and sat on a stool just outside the bar door -- just in time to see a stream of Hearts supporters take over the street which was, I soon found out, the main path from their pre-game piazza to the stadium. I have to say that, after 5+ hours of drinking, I was a bit nervous about this crowd, but I didn’t need be. They were loud, enthusiastic, maybe a bit bumptious, but never nasty or threatening. They were just there to have fun with their fellow supporters and watch the match which, one guy told me, they fully expected to lose (and which they did 5-1). Through it all, I was most impressed by the Florentine bar owner. Amid all the drunk Scotsmen singing and yelling and drinking, he was unflappable -- serving beers, keeping glasses out of the street, and occasionally taking group photos. He smiled and told me, “The boys just want to have some fun.” And they did. And they dragged me along with them -- not to the stadium, I had other plans, to meet up with a big slab of beef, a bistecca alla fiorentina-- but to enjoy a crowd rather than fight it. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #191</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Merry Christmas to everyone who celebrates it and hope you all have a great new year. Sorry I couldn’t get this out earlier to give any of you trapped in an airport this week something to listen to, but hey, now you have something for Christmas dinner clean-up.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page at TravelCommons.com for a transcript of the episode and any links I’ve mentioned. If you’re not yet subscribed, there’s a drop down Subscribe menu at the top of the page and along the side of the page, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ socials.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_191.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #191 — My Notes on Italy and Split, Croatia','Comparing long-distance drive times between gas and electric cars, and ChatGPT\'s travel tips with mine; Talking about another Real ID delay, and my travel notes from Positano, Rome, and Split, Croatia. ','inherit','closed','closed','','4250-revision-v1','','','2022-12-24 23:16:19','2022-12-25 04:16:19','',4250,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4255',0,'revision','',0),
(4256,1,'2022-12-24 23:21:16','2022-12-25 04:21:16','','Screenshot 2022-12-12 at 3.26.25 PM','','inherit','open','closed','','screenshot-2022-12-12-at-3-26-25-pm','','','2022-12-24 23:21:16','2022-12-25 04:21:16','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Screenshot-2022-12-12-at-3.26.25-PM.png',0,'attachment','image/png',0),
(4257,1,'2022-12-24 23:25:34','2022-12-25 04:25:34','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/AA263071-7820-499A-BBF9-DAB2E122A703-1-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Malort bottle and a cow skull\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\">After the Positano ferries go home[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Hard up against the Christmas deadline, we compare long-distance drive times for gas and electric cars, and my travel tips vs. the ChatGPT AI chatbot. We talk about the latest Real ID deadline delay, and impressions from my trip to Positano, Rome, Florence, and Split, Croatia. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_191.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #191: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN at the tail end of the “bomb cyclone” that blew up a huge number of Christmas holiday plans for a huge number of families -- including ours. Our daughter Claire beat the bomb by flying down at the beginning of the week out of LaGuardia; thank you, hybrid working arrangements. Our son and his wife were going to head down from Chicago on Thursday, but near-white-out blizzard conditions canceled that. So now we’re recalibrating the size of Christmas dinner and figuring out how to get presents to the right places.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>While our usual “Not traveling at Christmas” rule has served us well, we did hit the road earlier for some Thanksgiving triangulation travel&nbsp; -- from Nashville to Annapolis, MD for a week to celebrate Thanksgiving with some friends, then from there to Chicago for another week to visit family, and then finally back home. The drive out to Annapolis was the best. We swerved the holiday traffic by driving out Monday instead of waiting for the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, and leaving a bit later in the morning so we could miss the agony that is Washington, DC rush hour. It was certainly the most scenic of the 3 drives, skirting the Great Smoky Mountains and then up the Blue Ridge Mountains. It reminded me of my drives to and from college, between Memphis and DC, though a lot more enjoyable not having to worry if my ‘72 Buick Electra was going to overheat hauling itself over the mountains.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The drive to Chicago was the most boring; a 12-hour drive with most of it being through the extended flatlands of the Ohio and Indiana Turnpikes. It would’ve put me right to sleep if I hadn’t figured out how to stream the BBC Radio’s World Cup play-by-play from my phone through the BMW’s speakers. What would’ve been worse, though, is if I’d tried to do that drive in an electric vehicle. California will ban new gas cars in 12 years, and New York and other states are looking to follow suit, so I wanted to see what my driving future will be. <a href=\"https://electrek.co/2022/10/18/us-electric-vehicle-sales-by-maker-and-ev-model-through-q3-2022/\">Cox Automotive says</a> the Tesla Model Y was the best selling car through Q3, the end of September this year. So I hit the Tesla trip planner to see what my trip would look like if I swapped my BMW X3 for a Tesla Model Y Long Range. The trip would be almost 2½ hours longer due to the 4 supercharger stops I’d need -- 2 45-minute charges in PA and OH and 2 25-minute charges in Indiana -- a bit longer than the couple of 20-minute restroom/gas-up pit stops we made on the turnpikes. The first stop in PA and the last one in IN would be in turnpike rest stops. The other two would require leaving the turnpike, winding through the ticket booths to find the chargers. Actually, I’m not sure which is worse. Hanging out for 45 minutes at the North Somerset, PA rest stop Roy Rogers or leaving the Ohio Turnpike to find my way to Strongsville, OH, plug into the supercharger behind the Sheetz convenience store, and then walk over to the Applebee’s knock-off to kill the 45-minute charge time with a Bud Light and some chicken tenders nachos.  They got 12 years to either cut that charge time in half or significantly improve the food and beer options at those superchargers.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/copperhead/40520\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen</a> by copperhead (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: Admiral Bob, Javolenus , Sackjo22  </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The last half of our Chicago visit we stayed downtown at the Hyatt Regency, a big convention hotel that, in pre-COVID times, always had all sorts of&nbsp; mid-sized business conventions; things like the Midwest Dell Computer Users Group meeting, the IAAO (Int’l Association of Assessing Officers) National Conference. Now I’m old enough to remember way back to 2020 when “everything changed” and “this is the new normal” meant these mid-level gatherings were past history, that in the new normal, we’d all meet over video or in the metaverse -- which kinda spooked me because everybody seemed cut off below the navel -- and so never be tempted to shake hands. So when I walked into the lobby one morning to see signs welcoming ASTA, the American Seed Trade Association and the elevator doors wrapped in signs pitching BASF’s Poncho Votivo seed treatment, it reminded me once again that reversion to the mean is a strong, almost irresistible force. I walked into the elevator with a guy wearing a vendor badge around his neck. “Conference travel back?” I asked. “With a vengeance,” he sighed. Business travel may still be a bit below 2019 levels, but it’s clawing its way back.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Last May, back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/05/26/podcast-187-moving-to-a-non-hub-airport-what-makes-a-great-taproom/\">episode #187</a>, I said “A quick public service announcement — the COVID Real ID extension expires in less than a year.” Well, scratch that. The beginning of this month, DHS, the Department of Homeland Security, kicked the Real ID deadline down the road again, 2 years this time to May 7, 2025. Good news for procrastinators everywhere. They said the extension was necessary because the pandemic has made getting a REAL ID more difficult. I have to tell you; I just don’t buy it. Last year, December 2021, I had to go to a Chicago DMV site to get a new driver’s license. I made an appointment, showed up on-time, and was in and out in 30, maybe 40 minutes, including <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/01/16/podcast-183-covid-test-anxiety-michelin-food-adventures/\">the 3 extra minutes</a> it took them to scan my social security card and the documents to prove my address. I mean, come on, it’s been 17 years since the Real ID act was passed. It’s a law no one thinks is needed any more. Somebody just man up (in a completely gender-neutral way) and cancel at least <em>this</em> act in the long-running post-9/11 security theater.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>In more travel document good news, right before Thanksgiving, the US State Department opened up a portal for on-line passport renewals on what they’re calling a “limited release”, which sounds like government speak for a beta product -- limited volume and possibly not the smoothest user experience. But you gotta give them credit for getting this far. I renewed my passport last February the old-fashioned way -- finding a Walgreens that still takes passport photos, stapling them and a check to the renewal form. I’m hoping that in 9 years’ time, all the sharp edges will be buffed off this limited release and ready for prime time. I know, it’s the government; but a guy can dream…</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I’ve never been too proud not to chase a trend in the service of search engine optimization and so I wrote <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/12/12/how-good-are-chatgpts-top-5-holiday-travel-tips/\">a blog post</a> last week on <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChatGPT\">ChatGPT</a>, the AI chatbot that was <a href=\"https://twitter.com/sama/status/1598038815599661056\">released after Thanksgiving</a> and simultaneously thrilled and horrified people -- mostly thrilling students and mostly horrifying teachers and writers. I decided to give it a try, typing into the prompt box -- “write a blog post with the top holiday travel tips.” One thing that was immediately obvious -- ChatGPT is <strong>a lot</strong> faster than me. It cranked out 350 words and 5 travel tips in a second or two. The tips, though, “Plan Ahead,” “Pack Light,” “Stay Organized,” “Be Flexible,” and “Stay Connected” weren’t wrong, but they weren’t all that insightful; they weren’t anything that even the occasional traveler, someone taking just a couple of flights a year, wouldn’t already know. So then the next step is to compare those tips, generated by artificial intelligence, to 5 tips generated by my 35 years and a few million miles of travel experience -- “Figure out if you want to fly or drive,” “Fly Non-Stop,” “Catch the Early Flight,” “Carry On Your Luggage,” and “Bring a Battery Pack.” You be the judge, but I think my tips are a bit more specific, a bit more actionable; probably just good enough to keep me in this unpaid travel podcaster/blogger gig — at least until ChatGPT gets its next upgrade.<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>In the Travel Tech Stack topic in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/10/31/podcast-190-my-travel-tech-stack-imbibing-for-introverts/\">the last episode</a>, I talked about travel apps I use, and specifically Tripit which I use to consolidate all the plane, train, hotel, and Airbnb confirmations into a single itinerary. The Monday before Thanksgiving, I started getting e-mails from them -- 50% off TripIt Pro; $24 instead of the usual $49. That first one was targeted at Thanksgiving fliers. Then came another 50% off email, but this time it was a Black Friday e-mail. Then came the Cyber Monday pitch, again 50% off. I got a message from Allan Marko, long-time TravelCommons listener. “What do you think?” he asked, “Do you use it?”&nbsp; I quickly responded “Nope. Haven’t used Pro for many years. Don’t see the value of the additional features. If I was going to pay for one, I’d go for Flighty.” I was able to respond at near-ChatGPT speed because that text was pretty much verbatim what I said about Tripit Pro in the Travel Tech segment. The next day, Allan messaged me back “Just listened to the episode. You went through exactly what I was asking about TripIt.” TripIt ran that 50% off e-mail campaign right through last week, so almost a month -- which leads me to believe that there are a lot of other travelers who share my views.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And if you have any travel stories, comments, tips, rants, or a question like Allan or like Twitter follower @Ab3Fr0man (I’m always a sucker for a Ferris Bueller reference) whose question back in June led to last episode’s Travel Tech Stack topic, send it to <a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a>, ping me at @mpeacock on Twitter message or post a comment on the TravelCommons website for the quickest response. I’m a little slower responding to Facebook and Instagram. And if you don’t want your name mentioned on the podcast, let me know. Everyone’s got different sensitivities around privacy nowadays.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/NiGiD/48586\">O Tannenbaum / Oh Christmas Tree</a> by Martijn de Boer (NiGiD) (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license.  Ft: Admiral Bob (admiralbob77)</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Notes on Split, Croatia and Italy</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I mentioned at the start of the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/10/31/podcast-190-my-travel-tech-stack-imbibing-for-introverts/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Podcast #190 — My Travel Tech Stack; Imbibing for Introverts\">last episode</a> that I rummaged around Croatia and Italy for 3 weeks at the beginning of October, starting in Split, Croatia and then running up the Italian peninsula -- Amalfi Coast, Naples, Rome, Florence. When I’ve talked to folks about this trip, most everyone is much more interested in our time in Split and in Italy. Which makes sense if I think about it; lots of people interested in travel will have hit those Italy highlights -- Rome, Florence, the Amalfi Coast -- early on in their travels, but not so many Croatia (at least travelers from the US). But they’ve heard a lot about it, especially the Game of Thrones stans, which maybe has bumped it up on their list of places to visit; maybe high on the “B” list. And so the interest I was getting might’ve been a combination of a polite “How was your trip” with a dash of  “Hmm, any reason I should bump it up to my ‘A’ list?” I found myself summing up our Split visit saying “Good times, good wine, good seafood; though I’m not sure I know anything more about Croatia having spent 4 days there.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I felt like I was another one of those guys who hop a cheap Ryanair flight to some city like Budapest or Tallinn for a lads’ weekend -- which was pretty close to what we did. But even when we ventured out of the old city (which is very cool and very pretty), out of the cruise passenger blast zone that would jam up those cool, pretty, but very narrow streets and alleys between, say, 10am and 5pm every day, I still couldn’t get a deeper feel for the place. We’d post up at some bars, but got much less conversation with the bartenders than I would in, say, Italy. I dunno -- maybe Croatians are more taciturn than Italians, or the folks in Split have to deal with so many tourists every day that they need a break and just want to chat with their fellow Croatians. Either -- or both -- would be very reasonable explanations. Indeed, the closest I came was a <em>non-conversation</em> in the main farmers’ market on Saturday morning. I was walking up and down the rows of stalls -- fresh vegetables, sundries, other random bits and bobs -- and noticed an older guy by himself in a small stall off to the side. Walking up, I could see he was selling smoked pork loin and some aged sheep’s cheese. He spoke no English; I spoke no Croatian, but with a bunch of gestures and finger measurements, I managed to buy some of everything he had on offer. I must’ve paid a good price because he pulled out a plastic 1-liter bottle and poured me a capful of what I figured was home-made rakija, a Croatian fruit brandy. It was good, very smooth; a nice 11am eye opener.  </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>After 4 days of wandering around, Split seemed a pretty standard European large town/small city with fresh seafood and good wine for, if not cheap, then a reasonable price. The only kinda wacky thing was the Croatian currency, the kuna. The exchange rate was around 7.50 to the dollar; a slightly awkward exchange rate to do in your head on the fly -- which we didn’t need to do because everything was dual priced in kuna and euro in preparation for their move next month (January 2023) to the euro. So you’d think (or at least I thought) that there’d be parallel usage of kunas and euros in the lead-up. But you (and me) would be wrong. There were signs everywhere “Kuna only” and “Cash only”. Which meant a lot of hunting down ATMs and a last-minute spending spree in the Split Airport bar and duty-free shop.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Just short of 70 years ago, John Steinbeck wrote an <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/positano-john-steinbeck/mode/2up\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">article about Positano, Italy for Harper’s Bazaar magazine</a>. The most popular pull quote is “Positano bites deep. It is a dream place that isn’t quite real...” He then goes on to say that Positano would never be overrun by tourists; it’s too steep, there’s no room for visitors, and the locals don’t give a damn. Steinbeck was right about it being steep, but he was dead wrong about the rest. The view from our balcony was beautiful when I looked up at the hills and out at the water. But then my eyes would drop a bit and I’d see the stream of ferries docking and disgorging full loads of daytrippers. I waded into it one morning to see the local church and got stuck in a conga line of tourists walking one of the narrow streets -- one single-file of people walking up from the beach, another single-file walking down; a young couple carrying a stroller up the sets of stone steps; the almost-Three Stooges-like people bumping into the back of each other when someone in the single-file stopped to look at a shop and didn’t step into the doorway. That was it for me. I was one and done. After that, I’d just sit on our balcony with a bottle of local wine, situated so my eyes wouldn’t drop from the beautiful view.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I don’t want to bang on about the crowds too much, but it’s a major through-line of this trip. Maybe the combination of the strong dollar, no COVID restrictions, and no mask rules was all it took to uncork 2 years of pent-up travel demand. In Rome, I made the mistake of meeting someone at the Trevi Fountain and got trapped in a horde. The Trastevere neighborhood where we stayed -- the streets were a bit thick with tourists during the day, but was complete gridlock at night with people overflowing out of the bars, into the plazas drinking what must’ve been truckloads of Peronis.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Having said this, I really liked Rome. Before this, I was always a bit ambivalent about Rome; would always tend to head north -- to Tuscany, to Milan. But this trip, maybe because we’d spent the prior week or so in smaller places, the big city energy of Rome was a pleasant, an energizing change. People talk about Rome being chaotic; I didn’t think it was any more chaotic than any other big city. Maybe because I wasn’t driving -- just walking or taking a cab or trying to kill Irene while driving a Vespa scooter.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Could also be that there was more space to spread out, to swerve the crowds. I found a walking and bike path sunk down below street level along the banks of the Tiber River. There was fairly steady bike traffic, but I could walk freely, no dodging on-coming tourists. I made my way through the Testaccio neighborhood -- definitely no tourist traffic here -- to a local market that was full, but not crowded; I was able to get a table with my beer and porchetta sandwich.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But I picked up a verve in Rome -- some combination of the energy and “don’t screw with me” of a big city, but also something more welcoming, a bit warmer than I’d get in, say Manhattan or London or Frankfurt or Paris. Maybe a bit more down-to-earth, something you get in the outer boroughs of New York and London; a friendly confidence. I liked it a lot more than I thought I would.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But not every crowd was bad. The last stop on our Italian tour was Florence. While I’d never been to Rome before, this was our fourth time in Florence. Irene and Claire wanted to shop for jewelry on Ponte Vecchio; the thought of wading back into those crowds sent me in the complete opposite direction, toward the Basilica of Santa Croce. Walking down the road, I noticed more and more guys wearing the same soccer jerseys funneling onto the road, some with plastic bags full of beer bottles. When the street ended at the Piazza di Santa Croce, the big open plaza in front of the basilica, it had been taken over by a huge crowd of Scottish soccer fans who’d followed their club, Hearts of Midlothian, from Edinburgh here to Florence to play the local team. They’d set up camp in the plaza, hung their club supporters flags from plaza railings, building scaffolds, and pretty much anything else with a vertical structure. And they were having a great time pre-gaming the match -- drinking beers, banging drums, and most of all, singing songs. At the other end of the plaza, about 6 carabinieri were standing in front of what looked like a paddy wagon. As I rounded the corner of the basilica, a couple of Florence metro cop cars joined them. They weren’t doing anything; just hanging back, just in case.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I left the drums and singing behind and wound my way up to a craft beer bar. I bought a beer and sat on a stool just outside the bar door -- just in time to see a stream of Hearts supporters take over the street which was, I soon found out, the main path from their pre-game piazza to the stadium. I have to say that, after 5+ hours of drinking, I was a bit nervous about this crowd, but I didn’t need be. They were loud, enthusiastic, maybe a bit bumptious, but never nasty or threatening. They were just there to have fun with their fellow supporters and watch the match which, one guy told me, they fully expected to lose (and which they did 5-1). Through it all, I was most impressed by the Florentine bar owner. Amid all the drunk Scotsmen singing and yelling and drinking, he was unflappable -- serving beers, keeping glasses out of the street, and occasionally taking group photos. He smiled and told me, “The boys just want to have some fun.” And they did. And they dragged me along with them -- not to the stadium, I had other plans, to meet up with a big slab of beef, a bistecca alla fiorentina-- but to enjoy a crowd rather than fight it. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #191</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Merry Christmas to everyone who celebrates it and hope you all have a great new year. Sorry I couldn’t get this out earlier to give any of you trapped in an airport this week something to listen to, but hey, now you have something for Christmas dinner clean-up.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page at TravelCommons.com for a transcript of the episode and any links I’ve mentioned. If you’re not yet subscribed, there’s a drop down Subscribe menu at the top of the page and along the side of the page, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ socials.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_191.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #191 — My Notes on Italy and Split, Croatia','Comparing long-distance drive times between gas and electric cars, and ChatGPT\'s travel tips with mine; Talking about another Real ID delay, and my travel notes from Positano, Rome, and Split, Croatia. ','inherit','closed','closed','','4250-revision-v1','','','2022-12-24 23:25:34','2022-12-25 04:25:34','',4250,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4257',0,'revision','',0),
(4259,1,'2022-12-24 23:49:06','2022-12-25 04:49:06','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/AA263071-7820-499A-BBF9-DAB2E122A703-1-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Malort bottle and a cow skull\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\">After the Positano ferries go home[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Hard up against the Christmas deadline, we compare long-distance drive times between gas and electric cars, and my travel tips vs. those from the ChatGPT AI chatbot. We talk about the latest Real ID deadline delay, and impressions from my trip to Positano, Rome, Florence, and Split, Croatia. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_191.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #191: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN at the tail end of the “bomb cyclone” that blew up a huge number of Christmas holiday plans for a huge number of families -- including ours. Our daughter Claire beat the bomb by flying down at the beginning of the week out of LaGuardia; thank you, hybrid working arrangements. Our son and his wife were going to head down from Chicago on Thursday, but near-white-out blizzard conditions canceled that. So now we’re recalibrating the size of Christmas dinner and figuring out how to get presents to the right places.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>While our usual “Not traveling at Christmas” rule has served us well, we did hit the road earlier for some Thanksgiving triangulation travel&nbsp; -- from Nashville to Annapolis, MD for a week to celebrate Thanksgiving with some friends, then from there to Chicago for another week to visit family, and then finally back home. The drive out to Annapolis was the best. We swerved the holiday traffic by driving out Monday instead of waiting for the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, and leaving a bit later in the morning so we could miss the agony that is Washington, DC rush hour. It was certainly the most scenic of the 3 drives, skirting the Great Smoky Mountains and then up the Blue Ridge Mountains. It reminded me of my drives to and from college, between Memphis and DC, though a lot more enjoyable not having to worry if my ‘72 Buick Electra was going to overheat hauling itself over the mountains.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The drive to Chicago was the most boring; a 12-hour drive with most of it being through the extended flatlands of the Ohio and Indiana Turnpikes. It would’ve put me right to sleep if I hadn’t figured out how to stream the BBC Radio’s World Cup play-by-play from my phone through the BMW’s speakers. What would’ve been worse, though, is if I’d tried to do that drive in an electric vehicle. California will ban new gas cars in 12 years, and New York and other states are looking to follow suit, so I wanted to see what my driving future will be. <a href=\"https://electrek.co/2022/10/18/us-electric-vehicle-sales-by-maker-and-ev-model-through-q3-2022/\">Cox Automotive says</a> the Tesla Model Y was the best selling car through Q3, the end of September this year. So I hit the Tesla trip planner to see what my trip would look like if I swapped my BMW X3 for a Tesla Model Y Long Range. The trip would be almost 2½ hours longer due to the 4 supercharger stops I’d need -- 2 45-minute charges in PA and OH and 2 25-minute charges in Indiana -- a bit longer than the couple of 20-minute restroom/gas-up pit stops we made on the turnpikes. The first stop in PA and the last one in IN would be in turnpike rest stops. The other two would require leaving the turnpike, winding through the ticket booths to find the chargers. Actually, I’m not sure which is worse. Hanging out for 45 minutes at the North Somerset, PA rest stop Roy Rogers or leaving the Ohio Turnpike to find my way to Strongsville, OH, plug into the supercharger behind the Sheetz convenience store, and then walk over to the Applebee’s knock-off to kill the 45-minute charge time with a Bud Light and some chicken tenders nachos.  They got 12 years to either cut that charge time in half or significantly improve the food and beer options at those superchargers.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/copperhead/40520\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen</a> by copperhead (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: Admiral Bob, Javolenus , Sackjo22  </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The last half of our Chicago visit we stayed downtown at the Hyatt Regency, a big convention hotel that, in pre-COVID times, always had all sorts of&nbsp; mid-sized business conventions; things like the Midwest Dell Computer Users Group meeting, the IAAO (Int’l Association of Assessing Officers) National Conference. Now I’m old enough to remember way back to 2020 when “everything changed” and “this is the new normal” meant these mid-level gatherings were past history, that in the new normal, we’d all meet over video or in the metaverse -- which kinda spooked me because everybody seemed cut off below the navel -- and so never be tempted to shake hands. So when I walked into the lobby one morning to see signs welcoming ASTA, the American Seed Trade Association and the elevator doors wrapped in signs pitching BASF’s Poncho Votivo seed treatment, it reminded me once again that reversion to the mean is a strong, almost irresistible force. I walked into the elevator with a guy wearing a vendor badge around his neck. “Conference travel back?” I asked. “With a vengeance,” he sighed. Business travel may still be a bit below 2019 levels, but it’s clawing its way back.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Last May, back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/05/26/podcast-187-moving-to-a-non-hub-airport-what-makes-a-great-taproom/\">episode #187</a>, I said “A quick public service announcement — the COVID Real ID extension expires in less than a year.” Well, scratch that. The beginning of this month, DHS, the Department of Homeland Security, kicked the Real ID deadline down the road again, 2 years this time to May 7, 2025. Good news for procrastinators everywhere. They said the extension was necessary because the pandemic has made getting a REAL ID more difficult. I have to tell you; I just don’t buy it. Last year, December 2021, I had to go to a Chicago DMV site to get a new driver’s license. I made an appointment, showed up on-time, and was in and out in 30, maybe 40 minutes, including <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/01/16/podcast-183-covid-test-anxiety-michelin-food-adventures/\">the 3 extra minutes</a> it took them to scan my social security card and the documents to prove my address. I mean, come on, it’s been 17 years since the Real ID act was passed. It’s a law no one thinks is needed any more. Somebody just man up (in a completely gender-neutral way) and cancel at least <em>this</em> act in the long-running post-9/11 security theater.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>In more travel document good news, right before Thanksgiving, the US State Department opened up a portal for on-line passport renewals on what they’re calling a “limited release”, which sounds like government speak for a beta product -- limited volume and possibly not the smoothest user experience. But you gotta give them credit for getting this far. I renewed my passport last February the old-fashioned way -- finding a Walgreens that still takes passport photos, stapling them and a check to the renewal form. I’m hoping that in 9 years’ time, all the sharp edges will be buffed off this limited release and ready for prime time. I know, it’s the government; but a guy can dream…</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I’ve never been too proud not to chase a trend in the service of search engine optimization and so I wrote <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/12/12/how-good-are-chatgpts-top-5-holiday-travel-tips/\">a blog post</a> last week on <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChatGPT\">ChatGPT</a>, the AI chatbot that was <a href=\"https://twitter.com/sama/status/1598038815599661056\">released after Thanksgiving</a> and simultaneously thrilled and horrified people -- mostly thrilling students and mostly horrifying teachers and writers. I decided to give it a try, typing into the prompt box -- “write a blog post with the top holiday travel tips.” One thing that was immediately obvious -- ChatGPT is <strong>a lot</strong> faster than me. It cranked out 350 words and 5 travel tips in a second or two. The tips, though, “Plan Ahead,” “Pack Light,” “Stay Organized,” “Be Flexible,” and “Stay Connected” weren’t wrong, but they weren’t all that insightful; they weren’t anything that even the occasional traveler, someone taking just a couple of flights a year, wouldn’t already know. So then the next step is to compare those tips, generated by artificial intelligence, to 5 tips generated by my 35 years and a few million miles of travel experience -- “Figure out if you want to fly or drive,” “Fly Non-Stop,” “Catch the Early Flight,” “Carry On Your Luggage,” and “Bring a Battery Pack.” You be the judge, but I think my tips are a bit more specific, a bit more actionable; probably just good enough to keep me in this unpaid travel podcaster/blogger gig — at least until ChatGPT gets its next upgrade.<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>In the Travel Tech Stack topic in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/10/31/podcast-190-my-travel-tech-stack-imbibing-for-introverts/\">the last episode</a>, I talked about travel apps I use, and specifically Tripit which I use to consolidate all the plane, train, hotel, and Airbnb confirmations into a single itinerary. The Monday before Thanksgiving, I started getting e-mails from them -- 50% off TripIt Pro; $24 instead of the usual $49. That first one was targeted at Thanksgiving fliers. Then came another 50% off email, but this time it was a Black Friday e-mail. Then came the Cyber Monday pitch, again 50% off. I got a message from Allan Marko, long-time TravelCommons listener. “What do you think?” he asked, “Do you use it?”&nbsp; I quickly responded “Nope. Haven’t used Pro for many years. Don’t see the value of the additional features. If I was going to pay for one, I’d go for Flighty.” I was able to respond at near-ChatGPT speed because that text was pretty much verbatim what I said about Tripit Pro in the Travel Tech segment. The next day, Allan messaged me back “Just listened to the episode. You went through exactly what I was asking about TripIt.” TripIt ran that 50% off e-mail campaign right through last week, so almost a month -- which leads me to believe that there are a lot of other travelers who share my views.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And if you have any travel stories, comments, tips, rants, or a question like Allan or like Twitter follower @Ab3Fr0man (I’m always a sucker for a Ferris Bueller reference) whose question back in June led to last episode’s Travel Tech Stack topic, send it to <a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a>, ping me at @mpeacock on Twitter message or post a comment on the TravelCommons website for the quickest response. I’m a little slower responding to Facebook and Instagram. And if you don’t want your name mentioned on the podcast, let me know. Everyone’s got different sensitivities around privacy nowadays.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/NiGiD/48586\">O Tannenbaum / Oh Christmas Tree</a> by Martijn de Boer (NiGiD) (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license.  Ft: Admiral Bob (admiralbob77)</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Notes on Split, Croatia and Italy</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I mentioned at the start of the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/10/31/podcast-190-my-travel-tech-stack-imbibing-for-introverts/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Podcast #190 — My Travel Tech Stack; Imbibing for Introverts\">last episode</a> that I rummaged around Croatia and Italy for 3 weeks at the beginning of October, starting in Split, Croatia and then running up the Italian peninsula -- Amalfi Coast, Naples, Rome, Florence. When I’ve talked to folks about this trip, most everyone is much more interested in our time in Split and in Italy. Which makes sense if I think about it; lots of people interested in travel will have hit those Italy highlights -- Rome, Florence, the Amalfi Coast -- early on in their travels, but not so many Croatia (at least travelers from the US). But they’ve heard a lot about it, especially the Game of Thrones stans, which maybe has bumped it up on their list of places to visit; maybe high on the “B” list. And so the interest I was getting might’ve been a combination of a polite “How was your trip” with a dash of  “Hmm, any reason I should bump it up to my ‘A’ list?” I found myself summing up our Split visit saying “Good times, good wine, good seafood; though I’m not sure I know anything more about Croatia having spent 4 days there.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I felt like I was another one of those guys who hop a cheap Ryanair flight to some city like Budapest or Tallinn for a lads’ weekend -- which was pretty close to what we did. But even when we ventured out of the old city (which is very cool and very pretty), out of the cruise passenger blast zone that would jam up those cool, pretty, but very narrow streets and alleys between, say, 10am and 5pm every day, I still couldn’t get a deeper feel for the place. We’d post up at some bars, but got much less conversation with the bartenders than I would in, say, Italy. I dunno -- maybe Croatians are more taciturn than Italians, or the folks in Split have to deal with so many tourists every day that they need a break and just want to chat with their fellow Croatians. Either -- or both -- would be very reasonable explanations. Indeed, the closest I came was a <em>non-conversation</em> in the main farmers’ market on Saturday morning. I was walking up and down the rows of stalls -- fresh vegetables, sundries, other random bits and bobs -- and noticed an older guy by himself in a small stall off to the side. Walking up, I could see he was selling smoked pork loin and some aged sheep’s cheese. He spoke no English; I spoke no Croatian, but with a bunch of gestures and finger measurements, I managed to buy some of everything he had on offer. I must’ve paid a good price because he pulled out a plastic 1-liter bottle and poured me a capful of what I figured was home-made rakija, a Croatian fruit brandy. It was good, very smooth; a nice 11am eye opener.  </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>After 4 days of wandering around, Split seemed a pretty standard European large town/small city with fresh seafood and good wine for, if not cheap, then a reasonable price. The only kinda wacky thing was the Croatian currency, the kuna. The exchange rate was around 7.50 to the dollar; a slightly awkward exchange rate to do in your head on the fly -- which we didn’t need to do because everything was dual priced in kuna and euro in preparation for their move next month (January 2023) to the euro. So you’d think (or at least I thought) that there’d be parallel usage of kunas and euros in the lead-up. But you (and me) would be wrong. There were signs everywhere “Kuna only” and “Cash only”. Which meant a lot of hunting down ATMs and a last-minute spending spree in the Split Airport bar and duty-free shop.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Just short of 70 years ago, John Steinbeck wrote an <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/positano-john-steinbeck/mode/2up\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">article about Positano, Italy for Harper’s Bazaar magazine</a>. The most popular pull quote is “Positano bites deep. It is a dream place that isn’t quite real...” He then goes on to say that Positano would never be overrun by tourists; it’s too steep, there’s no room for visitors, and the locals don’t give a damn. Steinbeck was right about it being steep, but he was dead wrong about the rest. The view from our balcony was beautiful when I looked up at the hills and out at the water. But then my eyes would drop a bit and I’d see the stream of ferries docking and disgorging full loads of daytrippers. I waded into it one morning to see the local church and got stuck in a conga line of tourists walking one of the narrow streets -- one single-file of people walking up from the beach, another single-file walking down; a young couple carrying a stroller up the sets of stone steps; the almost-Three Stooges-like people bumping into the back of each other when someone in the single-file stopped to look at a shop and didn’t step into the doorway. That was it for me. I was one and done. After that, I’d just sit on our balcony with a bottle of local wine, situated so my eyes wouldn’t drop from the beautiful view.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I don’t want to bang on about the crowds too much, but it’s a major through-line of this trip. Maybe the combination of the strong dollar, no COVID restrictions, and no mask rules was all it took to uncork 2 years of pent-up travel demand. In Rome, I made the mistake of meeting someone at the Trevi Fountain and got trapped in a horde. The Trastevere neighborhood where we stayed -- the streets were a bit thick with tourists during the day, but was complete gridlock at night with people overflowing out of the bars, into the plazas drinking what must’ve been truckloads of Peronis.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Having said this, I really liked Rome. Before this, I was always a bit ambivalent about Rome; would always tend to head north -- to Tuscany, to Milan. But this trip, maybe because we’d spent the prior week or so in smaller places, the big city energy of Rome was a pleasant, an energizing change. People talk about Rome being chaotic; I didn’t think it was any more chaotic than any other big city. Maybe because I wasn’t driving -- just walking or taking a cab or trying to kill Irene while driving a Vespa scooter.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Could also be that there was more space to spread out, to swerve the crowds. I found a walking and bike path sunk down below street level along the banks of the Tiber River. There was fairly steady bike traffic, but I could walk freely, no dodging on-coming tourists. I made my way through the Testaccio neighborhood -- definitely no tourist traffic here -- to a local market that was full, but not crowded; I was able to get a table with my beer and porchetta sandwich.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But I picked up a verve in Rome -- some combination of the energy and “don’t screw with me” of a big city, but also something more welcoming, a bit warmer than I’d get in, say Manhattan or London or Frankfurt or Paris. Maybe a bit more down-to-earth, something you get in the outer boroughs of New York and London; a friendly confidence. I liked it a lot more than I thought I would.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But not every crowd was bad. The last stop on our Italian tour was Florence. While I’d never been to Rome before, this was our fourth time in Florence. Irene and Claire wanted to shop for jewelry on Ponte Vecchio; the thought of wading back into those crowds sent me in the complete opposite direction, toward the Basilica of Santa Croce. Walking down the road, I noticed more and more guys wearing the same soccer jerseys funneling onto the road, some with plastic bags full of beer bottles. When the street ended at the Piazza di Santa Croce, the big open plaza in front of the basilica, it had been taken over by a huge crowd of Scottish soccer fans who’d followed their club, Hearts of Midlothian, from Edinburgh here to Florence to play the local team. They’d set up camp in the plaza, hung their club supporters flags from plaza railings, building scaffolds, and pretty much anything else with a vertical structure. And they were having a great time pre-gaming the match -- drinking beers, banging drums, and most of all, singing songs. At the other end of the plaza, about 6 carabinieri were standing in front of what looked like a paddy wagon. As I rounded the corner of the basilica, a couple of Florence metro cop cars joined them. They weren’t doing anything; just hanging back, just in case.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I left the drums and singing behind and wound my way up to a craft beer bar. I bought a beer and sat on a stool just outside the bar door -- just in time to see a stream of Hearts supporters take over the street which was, I soon found out, the main path from their pre-game piazza to the stadium. I have to say that, after 5+ hours of drinking, I was a bit nervous about this crowd, but I didn’t need be. They were loud, enthusiastic, maybe a bit bumptious, but never nasty or threatening. They were just there to have fun with their fellow supporters and watch the match which, one guy told me, they fully expected to lose (and which they did 5-1). Through it all, I was most impressed by the Florentine bar owner. Amid all the drunk Scotsmen singing and yelling and drinking, he was unflappable -- serving beers, keeping glasses out of the street, and occasionally taking group photos. He smiled and told me, “The boys just want to have some fun.” And they did. And they dragged me along with them -- not to the stadium, I had other plans, to meet up with a big slab of beef, a bistecca alla fiorentina-- but to enjoy a crowd rather than fight it. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #191</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Merry Christmas to everyone who celebrates it and hope you all have a great new year. Sorry I couldn’t get this out earlier to give any of you trapped in an airport this week something to listen to, but hey, now you have something for Christmas dinner clean-up.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page at TravelCommons.com for a transcript of the episode and any links I’ve mentioned. If you’re not yet subscribed, there’s a drop down Subscribe menu at the top of the page and along the side of the page, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ socials.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_191.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #191 — My Notes on Italy and Split, Croatia','Comparing long-distance drive times between gas and electric cars, and ChatGPT\'s travel tips with mine; Talking about another Real ID delay, and my travel notes from Positano, Rome, and Split, Croatia. ','inherit','closed','closed','','4250-revision-v1','','','2022-12-24 23:49:06','2022-12-25 04:49:06','',4250,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4259',0,'revision','',0),
(4264,1,'2023-01-26 19:27:49','2023-01-27 00:27:49','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/DALL·E-2023-01-25-22.53.11-e1674709008862-300x300.png\" alt=\"Cat with paw on the rim of a gin tonic glass\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\">Can\'t get to the artisanal garnish[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>With COVID travel restrictions gone, I expect people to revert back to their old ways where January is the biggest travel planning month. I wade into the debate between booking direct with travel providers vs. booking with agents and 3rd-party sites. I see how well my travel tips did during the Southwest cancellation chaos, and then pull out a little more of my conversation with Jeff Cioletti, author of the new book <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3sQelCQ\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Imbibing for Introverts</a></em>; this time about how gin is going global with a local twist. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_192.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #192: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN. Haven’t done any travel since the last episode. Instead, I’m starting the year off, as many others do, by doing travel planning, trying to lay out a 2023 travel calendar so we don’t slouch past the days and then, in say August, look back and say “Where’d the year go?”&nbsp; Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/01/25/podcast-159-planning-the-trip-of-a-lifetime-in-southeast-asia/\">episode #159</a>, I talked about how travel planning would traditionally kick in the week after Christmas -- although I’ll say that given <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/01/25/podcast-159-planning-the-trip-of-a-lifetime-in-southeast-asia/\">episode #159</a> was posted in January 2020, 2 months before the first wave of COVID lockdowns, my timing on that probably wasn’t the greatest. A year later, January 2021, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">episode #171</a>, I tried it again, ticking through 5 travel planning tips for COVID times. They were all about agility -- paying attention to cancellation rules, monitoring last-minutes changes in lockdowns and health requirements….&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But now two years later, with COVID cases down and <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/travel/passenger-volumes\">travel volumes pretty much back up to 2019 levels</a>, I expect folks will revert back to their old travel planning patterns. Back in my travel tech CIO days, right before Christmas, we’d always lock down our systems and put on extra capacity (which, let me tell you kids, back in the pre-cloud days, meant rolling actual servers, real live physical equipment uphill, through the snow, onto the data center’s raised floor) so we could handle the spikes in search volume. And while we’d see some minor spikes from the systems that travel agents used, the biggest volumes came from on-line sites like Expedia and Booking.com, sites more popular with leisure travelers than business travelers.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But now in 2023, I’m guessing that the Chinese are chief among those rushing back to their pre-COVID travel planning after the government quit their zero COVID policies. Indeed, on December 26, within a half an hour of the announcement that China’s borders were fully reopening,<a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/2022/12/27/here-are-the-countries-chinese-tourists-want-to-visit-the-most.html\"> searches for international travel on China’s biggest on-line site, Trip.com</a>, surged back to pre-COVID levels. The top search destinations were Southeast Asian countries, the US, and the UK. Now remember, before the lockdowns, <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/video/series/news-explainers/big-spending-chinese-tourists-are-coming-back-but-slowly/38552637-24FC-484A-B8A9-B6022BF9AEF0\">the Chinese were by far the largest source of international tourism spending</a> -- $255B, 70% more than second-place US, which was at $150B. So if you, like me, thought popular vacation destinations were crowded last year, just wait for this summer -- for what I’m guessing will be a second wave, maybe a Chinese tsunami of “revenge travel.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music --  Earth Soda by septahelix (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial Share-Alike  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/septahelix/34050</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Back in August, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/08/18/podcast-188-my-top-tips-to-survive-travel-chaos/\">episode #188</a> was all about tips for avoiding travel chaos. I recorded it at the tail end of a summer of travel woes, after a July 4th holiday weekend that was seen as a <em>complete train wreck</em> with 1,100 canceled flights and 4,000 delays -- to which, as we all know, Southwest said “Hold my beer” and canceled almost <em>16,000</em> flights between Christmas and New Year’s -- to which the FAA said “Wait, I wanna play too” and disrupted over 11,000 flights in o<em>ne morning</em>. And when the root cause for both was found to be old technology, all the gray-haired IT guys nodded to each other and repeated their mantra -- “technical debt is a bitch.”&nbsp; Southwest has <a href=\"https://skift.com/2023/01/14/u-s-senate-demands-southwest-explain-holiday-meltdown/\">estimated a profit hit of as much as $825 million</a> from their debacle. Just sayin’-- even just half that would’ve funded a whole lot of fixes to their old scheduling system.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But looking back at those summer tips, <em>pack so you can carry on </em>and if you can’t, then <em>spread everyone’s clothes across all your checked bags</em> were pretty much spot-on. As was the discussion in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/10/31/podcast-190-my-travel-tech-stack-imbibing-for-introverts/\">episode #190</a> about how adding <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3k4rCUy\">Apple AirTags</a> to my travel tech stack saved me time and agita when United lost my luggage. With all the stories about piles of stranded luggage from the bomb cyclone and Southwest cancellations, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3k4rCUy\">AirTags</a> have proven to be a critical “must-have” if you have to check a bag, and have an iPhone. For Android users, you’ll have to wait a bit longer; people who spelunk through new Android code think <a href=\"https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/01/google-plans-airtag-clone-will-track-devices-with-3-billion-android-phones/\">Google is working on its own AirTag-like tracker</a>.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But I think I missed a couple of things. First, I should’ve pointed back to and recapped my conversation in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/06/09/podcast-164-first-post-lockdown-trips-travel-credit-cards/\">episode #164</a> with <a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/brett-holzhauer/\">Brett Holzhauer</a>, a travel credit card analyst now at CNBC, about the trip cancellation, trip interruption, and baggage insurance that many people don’t realize they get by charging their trip on a travel credit card. Maybe the tip there is, before you book your trip, pull out the credit card benefit summaries so you know which card will give you the best protection.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The second tip I’d add is -- <em>take pictures of your checked luggage</em>, outside and the contents inside. The pictures of the bags will help you answer the “describe what your bag looks like” question on the airline’s lost baggage form. The pictures of the inside will help with that baggage insurance claim. But just the fact that we’ve got to think about all this just to have someone take us and our stuff from Point A to Point B… Jesus, what a broken system.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>In what has become a going on 2-year thread about international travel planning, I’ve talked about COVID travel rules, testing, Global Entry, passport applications… And so one of the trips we’ve been planning is to hit the tulip festival in Holland -- the country, the Netherlands, not the town in Michigan, which can screw you up if you don’t look closely at your Google search results. The tulip festival in the Netherlands is in April while the one in western Michigan is in May.&nbsp; And that initial lack of Google input box precision, using Holland rather than the Netherlands, which surfaced the May date, sent me down a whole ‘nother search path because, deep in some random brain fold, I remembered a May start date for ETIAS -- the European Travel Information and Authorisation System which is the EU’s version of the US’s ESTA, the Electronic System for Travel Authorization. Now this whole E-acronym soup is pretty much just electronically plugging the travel information gap for folks who don’t need a visa to enter a country. The US started it first, another recommendation from the 9/11 Commission, but unlike Real ID, ESTA actually got implemented -- in 2009. It started off free but is now $21 per person for two years, with most of that going to fund Brand USA, the US tourist promotion agency. The EU’s <a href=\"https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/MEMO_18_4362\">ETIAS</a> is cheaper - €7 per person for three years. It got started later, in 2018, and its go-live date has been kicked down the road a few times now -- from 2022 to May 2023 as that random neuron of mine recalled, but I guess I missed the <a href=\"https://thepointsguy.com/news/europe-new-etias-entry-fee-launch-2023/\">latest push</a>, which happened back in August, that delayed ETIAS another 6 months. So now go-live is November 2023 -- still nothing like the 17-year-and-counting delay for Real ID. So, as it turns out after losing a couple of hours of my life in a click spiral, nothing to worry about ‘til next year.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And if you have any travel worries… or stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music -- Generic Apologies by Speck (c) copyright 2022 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/speck/65664 Ft: jaspertine, Zenboy1955, Admiral Bob, Apoxode</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Travel Planning -- Book Direct or through a Third-Party?</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Chris Chufo, long-time friend of the podcast, pointed me to a <a href=\"https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/tips/booking-direct-travel-websites-flights-hotels/\">Washington Post column</a> by Christopher Elliot on the “great debate” (as he put it) between booking direct with an airline or hotel or car rental company vs. using a 3rd party, a travel agent or an on-line site like Booking.com or Airbnb. It’s an ongoing debate because there’s not a straight-forward answer, and it’s one that I personally straddle when booking travel. But when I think about it, and what the Post column didn’t really articulate, is that the decision point hinges on relationships and leverage.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>When booking flights, trains, rental cars, I almost always book direct because if there\'s a problem -- a delay, a cancellation -- I can work directly with the airline or rental company to figure out an alternative. When I booked through a 3rd party -- most recently, back in 2019 when Amex was giving a 5x multiplier on Membership Rewards points for booking through them -- and then had a flight cancellation in Charlottesville, VA, the carrier wouldn’t talk to me -- “You need to call your agent.”&nbsp; Which I did, while standing in front of the ticket counter at the airport, looking at the flight status display saying “Canceled” and telling the Amex agent the current situation because the flight status has been updated in their system yet. After which the agent said “Hold on, I need to call the airline because it’s so close to departure, I can’t do anything in the system” -- basically making the same call I just got off of. Third parties really don’t have much leverage over carriers -- airlines, trains, or even rental cars -- and there’s no real value in putting them between me and the carrier when I’m trying to move fast to swerve a delay or cancellation. Especially a carrier where I’ve got status; that marker of a relationship often delivers more than an agent can.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Hotels can be a bit different. I’ll book directly with the big chains -- Marriott, Hilton -- again, places where I have status. My experience has been that the reservation agents are more flexible when I need to make a change, and it feels like (though I don’t have hard data on this) I get upgraded more often by the front desk. And if I have, say, a billing issue with a Marriott property, Corporate Marriott will look at my lifetime titanium status and give me the benefit of the doubt. However, with independent properties where I haven’t stayed before and this is a one-time transaction, and so don’t have any leverage from an on-going relationship or, say, the potential for future business, the situation is murkier. An Airbnb or an Expedia, who <em>can</em> see future revenue from me, might be more willing to help me out with a problem. But the property has a financial incentive for me to book directly with them -- it saves them commission that could be as high as 40%.&nbsp; So if I’m going someplace new, I usually start off searching on a 3rd-party site -- Airbnb, Booking.com -- to see what’s available. If I narrow down to an independent place and I’m going to stay there for more than a day or two, I’ll flip over to their web site -- can I get a better price booking direct? I check out TripAdvisor -- can I trust them? If both are “yes’s”, then I’ll book direct -- because I still have one fall-back protector, my credit card company.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Last year, our last night in Sicily, we booked a hotel room that was maybe a 5-minute walk from Catania airport because we had an early flight out the next morning. We found it and booked it on Booking.com -- the path of least resistance. So on that last night, driving back with our friends from Taormina (before <a href=\"https://www.travelweekly.com/Travel-News/Hotel-News/White-Lotus-series-generates-interest-Sicily\"><em>The White Lotus</em> put it on the map</a>), we got to the airport but couldn’t find the hotel. Google Maps landed us in front of some apartment buildings and a big dirt parking lot. A couple of laps around the block and a long WhatsApp message stream later, we found out that what we booked wasn’t a hotel room, but one of these apartments; and when someone remotely unlocked the door, it looked a bit (no, a lot) like a <em><a href=\"https://youtu.be/pLz6nIvqB2c\" title=\"\">Third Rate Romance, Low Rent Rendezvous</a></em> sorta place. Our friends said “We’re <strong>not</strong> leaving you here” and we bee-lined over to a <em>real</em> airport hotel where I grabbed one of their last rooms while Irene canceled the Love Shack on Booking.com. Now, as you might imagine with the late cancellation, the Shack didn’t want to refund our payment. Not surprising. However, I was a bit surprised when Booking.com didn’t help us -- in spite of me pointing out the property description on their site was completely false.&nbsp; So, last resort, I disputed the charge with Chase. They called me. I told them the story, sent them screenshots of the property listing (which surprising(?)/ unsurprisingly(?) was still up, unchanged, on Booking.com) along with a couple of pictures I’d taken -- just in case. We’ve had this Chase card for over 10 years; it’s our main credit card so we spend <em>a lot</em> on it; and we’ve never disputed a hotel stay on it before. Leverage from what, for Chase, has been a profitable relationship. Two weeks later, we got our money back.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li> Bridge Music -- Absolutely Clear (ft Jeris &amp; Goldfish) by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/45578 Ft: Jeris, Goldfish</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Gin Conquers the World</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Here’s a bit of a change-up. Usually, when I talk about drinking on this podcast, it’s about craft beer. There’s even a Beer tab on the top of the TravelCommons website that takes you to a page with all the podcast episodes and blog posts that talk about beer -- “What Makes a Great Taproom”, “My Best Restaurants, Bars and Taprooms of 2021” (note to self, gotta write the 2022 version of that). But back in October, when interviewing Jeff Cioletti, editor-in-chief of <a href=\"https://craftspiritsmag.com/\"><em>Craft Spirits Magazine</em></a> about his new book <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3sQelCQ\"><em>Imbibing for Introverts</em></a> for <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/10/31/podcast-190-my-travel-tech-stack-imbibing-for-introverts/\" title=\"Podcast #190 — My Travel Tech Stack; Imbibing for Introverts\">episode #190</a>, we got talking about how gin has spread across the globe:<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Let me ask you this... Through your travels, have you noticed any changes, any trends over the past few years as you\'ve been sitting at bars drinking alone?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Jeff: One thing that I find incredibly striking, and this is worldwide, I had mentioned, gin.&nbsp; Gin has reconquered Europe. I was in Berlin, and I was on a panel with somebody, he said that now Germany has got 1,000 gin brands. Like five years ago, they had barely any.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: I\'ll tell you, for me it\'s gonna either be craft beer or gin. I just think about it, in Scotland and Spain.... I was just in Croatia a few weeks ago; a guy walks out, has some Croatian gin. They were doing gin tonics, so the big Spanish goblet style. I said, “Well, I\'d really like to taste that gin without all the tonic and everything. I want to see what you guys are doing with it.” And back to your point about endearing yourself sometimes, the guy was like “Really? You really want it”, and I said, “Yeah, absolutely. Just gin and glass, just give me a little bit” and he said, “Oh no, that\'s great.” And off he came and brought the regular gin tonic and then there was a little sidecar of just gin neat so I could taste it along.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Jeff: I was just in a bar in Stuttgart on Saturday night. It was called Botanical Affairs, a tiny kind of corner pocket little bar and all they have is gin. I mean it\'s not even like you go in there or you can have a beer, but they specialize in gin. I mean everything was a gin cocktail; that\'s all you could order, and they had so many different brands from all over the world. And you mentioned Spain; they get most of the credit for elevating the gin cocktail and turning it into kind of a luxurious drink. It really is, it\'s an experience now.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Yes, it\'s something, with the goblet glass and the garnish and all stuff.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Jeff: Yes, and a lot of people have adopted that; even places here in the States that are using it now. I\'ve found it in a lot of places in the UK that use it And the Spanish get all the credit for that. They didn\'t use it in Germany though, which I found interesting but everywhere else seems to.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Now there are always local/regional spirits to drink -- bourbon in Kentucky, malt whisky in Scotland and Ireland, soju in Korea, the whole range of Eastern European fruit brandies; palinka in Hungary, I mentioned Croatian rakija (pronounced rakiya) in the last episode. But it seems that gin has become the canvas, the freshly painted side of a building that younger distillers want to tag with their sense of what’s local. Maybe because it’s easier -- they don’t have to wrestle with expectations or regulations about what the local traditional spirit is.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Also maybe because it’s easier to make. Back in 2013 on our first visit to University of St Andrews with our then-high-school junior Claire, I found a local microbrewery, Eden Mill. Their story was that they wanted to be a Scotch whisky distillery, but since whisky is legally required to age in an oak barrel for at least 3 years, they needed something else to generate cash now. And since the front-end of making beer and malt whisky are pretty much the same, craft beer seemed a pretty logical way to bridge their cash gap. Fast forward a couple of years to Claire’s first year at St Andrews, Eden Mill is still making beer, still waiting for their whisky to come of age, but now they’ve added gin. The updated story -- since they already had a distillation column to make whisky, they had everything they needed to make gin. They trucked in neutral spirits -- similar to the Everclear of <em>my</em> college days, but I’m sure a bit classier -- run it through the distillation column over a basket of botanicals, dilute it to the right strength, bottle it, and sell it -- right away. If I’m an artisanal producer, maybe I don’t have to think as much about funding stainless steel and storage, and so can think more about how I want to express my locality, my culture in that basket of botanicals. Eden Mill, for example, sitting on the east coast of Scotland, uses local sea buckthorn berries. On a trip to Spain, I was served Nordés gin from Galicia, the most northwest part of Spain, the bit that sits on top of Portugal; it tasted of lemon verbena and eucalyptus and bay leaf, botanicals native to the Galician forests. The Croatian gin I talked about with Jeff Cioletti was all about the local, native juniper berries.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>It’s an interesting twist on the complaint about global homogenization, that the world has been becoming more the same now because of -- pick your favorite bugbear: the spread of global brands, Instagram, the ubiquity of English…. Gin is the latest; starting to crowd out the local native spirit, but with a twist with the focus on native flavors. And so with all the effort put into expressing these local botanicals, I’m always surprised when bartenders want to serve them in the Spanish-style gin tonic that Jeff rightly notes seems to have taken over. After giving me a whole spiel about the care the distiller has taken to infuse the locality into the gin, they then smother the one-and-a-half ounces of that locality with 6 or 7 ounces of imported tonic and a slice or two of imported orange or lemon or lime. So no, for me, give me that local gin straight, maybe over one of those huge ice cubes so I can taste that local flavor the distiller has been working to present. I guess I’m swimming upstream against today’s cocktail culture -- more interested in the distiller’s art than the mixologist’s.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #192</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>. And while you’re at TravelCommons.com, you can check out the show notes page for a transcript and any links I’ve mentioned. Or you can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_192.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #192 — New Year Travel Planning Tips; Gin Conquers the World','Are people going back to their old travel planning ways? Should you book direct with travel providers or use a 3rd-party? Unpacking Southwest\'s cancellation chaos. Gin goes global with a local twist.','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-192-new-year-travel-planning-tips-gin-conquers-the-world','','','2023-03-31 19:20:59','2023-04-01 00:20:59','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4264',0,'post','',0),
(4265,1,'2023-01-25 23:23:04','2023-01-26 04:23:04','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/malort_face-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Malort bottle and a cow skull\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"> My Drinking Buddy Is The Quiet Type[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Back behind the mic after 3 week of travel in Croatia and Italy.  The trip went amazingly well up to the last leg, when United\'s Newark team couldn\'t get our bags on our plane. But, I\'d stuffed <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3k4rCUy\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Apple AirTags</a> into our luggage, so we were able to track their movements \'til they got home. That experience and a listener\'s tweet led to me re-visiting my travel tech stack. We then talk to Jeff Cioletti, author of the new book <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3sQelCQ\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Imbibing for Introverts</a></em>, about the art of drinking alone. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_190.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #192: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Happy Halloween! Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN. Finally got my body back on Central Time after 3 weeks in Europe that started in Split, Croatia and then ran up the Italian peninsula -- Amalfi Coast, Naples, Rome, Florence -- and then back down to Rome to fly home. And for a trip about a dozen potential points of failure between all the flights, the trains, and the Airbnb’s, it all went pretty smoothly except for the final leg -- the EWR-BNA flight home, where United somehow couldn’t manage to get our luggage on our plane. But by then, it wasn’t critical -- just suitcases of dirty clothes and some bottles of wine and limoncello. And United delivered them to us the next afternoon -- just in time for us to start doing laundry. Annoying, yes -- but not much more.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Which, after a summer of travel horror stories about canceled flights, lost luggage, hours-long security lines that fed our episode on <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/08/18/podcast-188-my-top-tips-to-survive-travel-chaos/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Podcast #188 — My Top Travel Tips to Survive Airport Chaos\">Top Tips to Avoid Travel Chaos</a>, I chalked it up to good luck and clean living or, what’s probably a more likely explanation, the airlines and airports are finally getting on the other side of the surprise snapback in leisure travel during a very tight labor market. Through Nashville, O’Hare, Frankfurt, even the Split airport -- 5-minute security lines at most, and on-time flights. In Italy, all our trains were on-time. And after all of that smooth travel, it wasn’t until our last day, for our flight home, that we got pulled up short. We walked into Terminal 3 at Rome’s Fiumicino airport and smack into a huge line. It took us a moment to figure out that the line wasn’t for us; it was the check-in line for Air Canada which seemed… weird. But no matter, we didn’t have to stand in it.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The next line, though, we did -- the separate security line for all direct flights to the US.&nbsp; We’ve talked in the past about how, post-9/11, direct international flights to the US tend to be segregated from the rest of the flights and put at the far end of departure terminals. That I’m used to. This was the first time, though, that I’ve seen a US-only security line. And on a Sunday morning at 9am, when everyone is there for the 10:30/11am bank of flights to the US. It tailed back almost the length of the terminal.&nbsp; But it kept moving. And when we made it up to the security area, we could see that they had every screening station manned and operational. We got through security and passport control in less than a half hour. Not world-class timing, but not anywhere near the summer horror stories.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I shouldn’t have been surprised at that US security line though because every place we went in Italy was jammed/crowded, mostly with Americans. It was revenge travel in action. I asked a few guys -- bartenders, shop owners, shuttle drivers -- how these October crowds compared to pre-pandemic. “It’s insane!” was the consensus. And I could feel it wearing on them. Even though all these people were giving them money, their patience seemed to be getting a little thin. Last year, last October when we were in Italy, in Puglia and Sicily, these same sort of folks were saying “Welcome! We’re so glad travelers are back!” This year? I think it’s a bit more like “when are you travelers <em>going </em>back… home?”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music --  <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/snowflake/46164\">A Foolish Game</a> by Snowflake (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/snowflake/46164 Ft: Admiral Bob   </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I’m going to hold my thoughts about my Croatia and Italy trip for the next episode; do one of my stream-of-consciousness “Notes on a Location” topics. But I do want to follow up here on a couple of things from the last episode. First up, is <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/09/22/podcast-189-why-we-travel-when-the-first-flight-isnt-best/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Podcast #189 —  Why We Travel; When The First Flight Isn’t Best\">last episode’s</a> eSIM rant because, through watching with my travel companions and texting with Allan Marko, a long-time TravelCommons contributor, I sorta refined that rant, getting it down to two decision points.<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>First, how much data do you expect to use? If you’re out of the US for a week or less, staying in a place with good WiFi, and can wait until the end of the day to do all your social media posting, you can probably be good with 5GB of data -- which gets you under T-Mobile’s non-throttled international data cap (which is what a couple of the folks traveling with me did), way under Google Fi’s 50 GB cap, and probably fits into a $15-20 eSIM from someone like aloSIM or Airalo. It’s the low-hassle solution. But for a longer stay, like my 3 week-er, or if you’re fully invested in building Instagram stories, like my wife, 5GB just isn’t going to cut it. I reset my iPhone data stats on the flight to Frankfurt and then looked at them as we were taxiing out to the runway in Rome. I used 77 GBs of data. Now, 11 GB was from hotspotting because the WiFi in our Florence Airbnb was pretty useless. But even pulling that out, 66 GBs is still a whackload of data. Which is probably because I didn’t really pay any attention to my data usage, because the Telecom Italia plan I was on gave me <em>600</em> GB of 5G data, essentially unlimited data, for $15. So while my T-Mobile-using companions were scrounging for a bar’s WiFi password to do Untappd check-ins, I was uploading pictures and refreshing my podcasts.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The second decision point&nbsp; -- do you need to make regular phone calls; do you need a local number? This is more and more of an edge case with people primarily texting, and when there was a specific need for a voice call, people rang me through WhatsApp and Telegram. But on this trip, I got us last-minute tables at a couple of good restaurants because I could call them over the regular phone network, something I couldn’t have done with a data-only eSIM. I’ve also run into the need for a local number when trying to register or create an account for an on-line service. My Telecom Italia SIM also came with a local Italian number and unlimited voice minutes.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>So while I sharpened my thinking on this trip, my conclusion didn’t change. I know I’m an edge case -- I don’t want to have to think about data consumption and I want local phone service -- and until the in-country wireless carriers offer the same pre-paid plans on eSIMs that they do on physical SIMs, I’ll be keeping my phone with the SIM tray… and a straightened-out paper clip to pop it open.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Second, following up to Kendra Kroll’s travel tip in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/09/22/podcast-189-why-we-travel-when-the-first-flight-isnt-best/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">the last episode</a> about knowing the names of cities in the local vernacular. Kendra talked about people missing their train stop because they didn’t realize that Florence, in Italian, is Firenze. So riding the train from Rome (Roma) to Florence (Firenze), I was on the lookout for this. All the train tickets used Italian city names -- Roma, Napoli, Firenze. But the signs on the platforms of the Florence train stations said “Florence”. Indeed, the real confusion wasn’t Florence vs Firenze, but which Florence train station to get off at. My group thought we had a direct train from downtown Rome&nbsp; (Roma Termini) to the downtown Florence station (Firenze Santa Maria Novella), so when the train stopped at a station with “Florence” in the sign, they all scrambled to get their bags and head for the station -- which would’ve left them hanging around in a suburban parking lot figuring out how get a ride downtown. So not only know the name of the city in the vernacular; know the full station name of your stop.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I mentioned earlier that the first leg of my trip was from BNA to ORD, and I was kinda surprised to realize that it was my first time in ORD in 10 months, since returning from the UK last November. Prior to moving down here to Nashville in July, I’d been flying Southwest out of Chicago Midway; easier to get to and Southwest fit my travel plans better. So as “Welcome Back,” I got the full ORD experience -- landing on the far north runway, which feels like it’s just short of the Wisconsin state line, with the requisite 20-min taxi to get within sight of the terminal. Then, just as you think you’re almost there, the plane stops across the road from the terminal and waits 5 minutes for a gate to open up. Then, once we get moving again, we take the scenic route, past all the American planes in Terminal 3 and the Delta planes in Terminal 2 until we finally get to the United terminal in Terminal 1. All told, at least 30 minutes from tires hitting the runway to the door opening and the agent saying “Welcome to ORD”. Yeah, thanks. Great to be back.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And in other “Great to be back” things, Irene and I used Lyft for the first time in forever to get home from the Nashville airport -- the wait time and the price were much lower than Uber; which is weird because I’d think, by now, the ride sharing market would be a bit more price efficient. But anyhow, Lyft is so excited to see me resurface in Nashville that the app is flooding my phone with notifications with ride offers and suggestions for things to do. Three days of this was enough to drive me into the hell that the iPhone Settings menu has become to figure out how to shut them up. Probably not the behavior Lyft was trying to prompt, but there you go.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/THE_CONCEPT_OF_ENERGY/55008\">ABANDONED BUTTERFLIES</a> by THE_CONCEPT_OF_ENERGY (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/THE_CONCEPT_OF_ENERGY/55008</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>My Travel Tech Stack</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Back to that problematic last leg of our trip -- the flight home to Nashville from Newark. I knew we had a lagging luggage problem even before we left the ground courtesy of the latest addition to my travel tech stack. I’d bought <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3k4rCUy\" title=\"\">Apple AirTags</a> just for this reason -- to track our luggage. When I had to check my bag on the Vueling flight from Split to Rome, I could see on my iPhone’s Find My app that my bag was on the plane; it looked almost right underneath me. But in Newark, my bag never left the terminal. Irene checked her app; same thing. As we taxied out, I took a screenshot showing the growing distance between me on the plane and my left-behind bag, and tweeted it out to United saying “I’m guessing I won’t be seeing my luggage in BNA.”&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As I said earlier, I was pretty annoyed with United, but at least the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3k4rCUy\" title=\"\">AirTags</a> saved us the 30 minutes of suspense watching all the other bags come out. Instead, we went straight to the baggage service agent, filed our report, and headed home. And then, waking up the next morning, I could see that our bags made it on the late flight from Newark, and then could see them on the delivery truck heading to our flat. Saved a lot of agita.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>It got me thinking back 6-7 years to <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/08/26/podcast-116-traveling-thru-japan-luggage-trends/\">the first wave</a> of <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/12/podcast-120-where-do-guidebooks-fit-in-i-hate-shopping-for-suitcases/\">smart luggage</a> -- Bluesmart, Away. I bought a Bluesmart bag off their Indiegogo campaign. Those bags also let you <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/05/30/podcast-121-tsa-lines-my-luggage-is-where/\">track their location</a>, along with charging your phone -- for about 2 years until <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">the airlines banned them</a>, or at least the ones with non-removable batteries. Those travel use cases haven’t changed -- “Where’s my bag?” and “I need to recharge my phone so I can rebook this canceled flight” -- but the tech has moved on -- replacing the smart bag with AirTags or Tile trackers and a <a href=\"https://amzn.to/34fcbON\" title=\"\">10,000 mAh battery pack</a>.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Long-time listener and Twitter follower @Ab3Fr0man pinged me during my summer move podcast pause with “question for the next podcast &gt;&gt; Are there any new devices or apps you are using for travel?” which is what got me spelunking through my travel tech stack, which then turned into a stroll through <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?s=what%27s+in+my+briefcase\" title=\"\">my past “What’s in My Briefcase” episodes</a>. And what struck me was, other than the AirTags and a small phone tripod for video calls, it hasn’t been what I’ve added to my kit as much as what I’ve been able to take away.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The consolidation to HDMI for video seems to be just about done and that’s let me drop all the VGA cables and dongles I used to carry around just in case I ran into an old conference room projector or hotel TV.&nbsp; The slow and still in-progress consolidation to USB-C power supplies has let me do some subtraction by addition, dropping my MacBook Air power supply and an old dual USB-A charger for a single charger that’s smaller than either of them, a 100W gallium nitride charger that can charge my laptop, my phone, and my headphones all at once. Indeed, the only reason I still carry an old USB-A Apple Lightning cord is for plugging into the charging port on rental cars.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But the subtraction thing doesn’t always work. Last year, when we were traveling in Italy (Puglia and Sicily) for a couple of weeks, I wanted to leave the laptop home and run everything off my 8-inch Samsung tablet. That wouldn’t be a problem except for a couple of programs I run on my office PC, and I didn’t want to have to migrate to their cloud versions just for the trip. So instead I used Amazon Workspaces to set up a PC in the cloud. Not quite sure why I thought this would be easier. The Amazon setup was, let’s say, less than straightforward but I got it to work, and was able to run what I needed off my tablet, albeit a bit slower than usual. Getting ready for this last trip, I thought about it again, do I leave the laptop at home? Then I remembered the time sink the Amazon set up was, and tossed the laptop back into my backpack.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>No new apps. Indeed, I tend to be brutal about deleting those I’m not using right now. I’ll download, say, the VRBO or Airbnb app when I need them for a trip and then dump them when I get home. I also just deleted the Clear app. I had a year free from some credit card and never used it. So I canceled it before they charged me for another year and deleted the app. Yelp is on the bubble right now. I also find myself using it less and less, just defaulting to Google Maps’ restaurant suggestions and ratings since I usually already have it open for directions.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The carriers’ apps continue to improve incrementally. I used to use an app that had maps of all the major airports, but found I was using it less and less as the carriers added similar maps to their apps. Indeed, while waiting to de-plane in EWR, I checked the United app and it had an animated step-by-step map showing the path from our arrival gate, through Customs, to our departure gate. Too bad the guys moving our luggage didn’t have the same map.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As I’ve mentioned in past episodes, I still use the free version of TripIt to consolidate all plane, train, hotel, and Airbnb confirmations into a single itinerary. I know Google Travel can do something similar if you live within the Google ecosystem, but I don’t so I use TripIt. TripIt keeps pushing their $50 Pro offering with real-time alerts and airport maps. I had the Pro offering once, but now I get all that stuff for free on the carrier apps. Now, if I <em>was</em> going to pop $50, I’d spend it on the Flighty app instead. I <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/04/21/podcast-186-mask-mandate-scramble-small-airport-survival/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">trialed Flighty back in the spring on a trip to Santa Fe</a> and thought it was a great app. If I was still flying every week, it would be a no-brainer. Indeed, I’d figure out a way to expense the $250 lifetime membership and be done with it.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But the one piece of travel that’s been with me since the beginning and that continues to earn its keep -- a bottle opener. Even as craft beer has moved to cans, that stamped metal New Belgium bottle opener has saved the corner of many a hotel dresser.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/49674\">H2O</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/49674</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Imbibing for Introverts</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>When frequent travelers are on the road, we spend a lot of time alone -- in our hotel rooms, and in spite of the advice from a former colleague who wrote a book titled <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3Uba60n\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Never Eat Alone</a></em>, we do… a lot. So when I saw an upcoming book about drinking alone, it seemed a perfect fit for the podcast. So I reached out to the author, Jeff Cioletti, editor-in-chief of <a href=\"https://craftspiritsmag.com/\"><em>Craft Spirits Magazine</em></a>.<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Jeff, thanks for joining us on the TravelCommons podcast today. Your upcoming book…</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Jeff: Technically the release date is November 15, I tried to get them early for an event on October 20, but they got held up on a freight train somewhere in the United States, so it\'s like…</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: That damn supply chain. So anyhow, your upcoming book, <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3sQelCQ\"><em>Imbibing for Introverts: A Guide to Social Drinking for the Anti-Social</em></a>.</em> Over the years on the TravelCommons podcast, we\'ve <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?s=solo+dining\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">talked many times</a> about <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/19/podcast-149-dining-single-airlines-need-to-tell-us-more/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">solo eating</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/05/12/table-for-one-eating-alone-on-the-road/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">eating alone on the road</a>, what you might call eating for introverts. So when I saw the title of your book, it mapped right into things that we\'ve been doing. And again, in past episodes, we\'ve talked about the best ways to eat alone and so, what are your pro tips for the best ways to drink alone?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Jeff: It depends on the venue; it just depends on what your objectives are. If you want to quietly contemplate what you\'re drinking; if you\'re in one of these high-end whiskey bars or a brandy bar or something like that; where you\'re sitting and you really want to just contemplate. Sometimes you just want to be present and just be in your thoughts, think about what you\'re drinking, think about its connection to the point of origin, that kind of thing. When you\'re drinking alone, probably more often than not you\'re going to be sitting at the bar. A lot of times they\'re going to give you a 2-top, but sometimes I feel bad about taking it up, especially when things are busy and I just want to sit at the bar.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: When I started traveling, which was a long time ago, you’d end up in that same situation, at a 2-top or a 4-top and then you\'re the sad person sitting in the corner table because you were taking up revenue space. “Look, I got spots for two and you\'re only taking up one.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Jeff: And I think that if you\'re not sitting in a corner, if you do get to sit at the bar, that\'s a great opportunity to strike up a conversation with the bartender. Sometimes it just happens organically. I don\'t know whether they feel like they need to talk to you because you\'re not with anybody and they feel bad for you. But one thing that I do find is when you order something in a way that shows you know what you\'re talking about -- like you\'re at the bar and you say give me a gin and tonic, if you don\'t really specify what gin you want, they may not have a really broad selection, but a lot of these more sort of mixology oriented bars, they\'re going to have a selection and a good way to start is “What kind of gin you have; do you have anything that\'s not juniper- forward?” -- bartenders can be really primed to geek out with somebody that they detect maybe as passionate about the things they drink as they are, as they are about the things they mix. So when you show an inkling of interest or knowledge related to that spirit or whatever ingredient you\'re putting in the cocktail, that may pique their interest a little bit and they might get a sense that this person knows what they’re talking about. I\'ve been in situations where that snowballs to a point where the bartender says, “Hey, by the way, I\'m entering a cocktail competition, this was my creation, I want you to try and tell me honestly what you think about it.” It\'s moments like this that present themselves. Not always, but you know, sometimes they do. Sometimes a bartender will also have a secret stash behind the bar, could be a rare whiskey that\'s on their list. Sometimes they will sneak you some of that. It\'s not going to necessarily be free, but they\'ll give you a pour of something that they\'re protecting and hoarding and not really giving to just anybody. So moments like that are good. It\'s not necessarily that you\'re being antisocial. It\'s sometimes conversations can create themselves organically and so that\'s why it\'s sometimes good to be alone and sit at the bar rather than at the table because no one\'s really going to be spending the time with you to do that.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Eating alone sitting at the bar, it used to be that you couldn\'t get much more than a bar snack menu at a bar. Nowadays, though, you can get a full menu at a bar and so I\'m always eating at the bar. You\'re right about the bartenders. You get blips of human interaction. I think usually the bartender is good for, I don\'t know, 3-4 quick interchanges. Obviously they got a job to do, so you’re not going to have an ongoing conversation with them, but they\'ll come by and if they think you\'re interested or you\'re an interesting person, you\'ll get blips. I don\'t know, it\'s either they think you\'re interesting or they’re taking pity on you. I\'m not quite sure which...&nbsp; What drove you to write this book Imbibing for Introverts? What was the kernel on this one?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Jeff: I just been traveling a lot and I\'ve been doing a lot of solo travel, especially work-related stuff and, over time, I really just got comfortable in my own skin going out alone. It just became something I realized I actually enjoy my own company and it just came together in my head. One time I was sitting at a bar and I wasn\'t alone at the time. I was having a drink with a friend in a bar that I had often had a drink alone and I thought I\'d really love to do a book about just being an introvert and just enjoying being by yourself and drinking alone and normalizing that too because some people are just weird about going out alone.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: When you do a lot of travel, you\'ve got to get comfortable with your own company because oftentimes that\'s it. You\'ve got clients, you\'ve got other people you\'re meeting and they\'re going home, they\'re going to coach their kid’s ballgame or do whatever. And if you don\'t get out of that hotel room, that hotel room turns into a cave after a while.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Jeff: And also sometimes you just want to decompress, especially when it is a work trip and you are having meetings. For instance, I got a lot of trade shows where I\'m just walking around the convention center going from booth to booth, talking to a person after person after person, always having to be on. Just having that energy, that kind of interpersonal energy, is frankly very exhausting. By the end of the day, after like seven or eight hours of doing that, sometimes you just want to be by yourself and you just want to quietly sip something in a place that\'s got the music\'s down low, it\'s a good mix that they\'re playing. It\'s low enough that you can hear yourself think, you can also eavesdrop on other people\'s conversations. That\'s kind of fun sometimes. A lot of people talk about people watching; I\'m more of a people listener because you can tell a lot more about a person by the conversations you hear than what they\'re wearing or what they look like.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Jeff, this has been great. I really appreciate it. I\'m looking forward to reading your book when it comes out. Jeff Cioletti, author of the new book, the upcoming book coming out November,<em> <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3sQelCQ\"><em>Imbibing for Introverts: A Guide to Social Drinking for the Anti-Social</em></a>.</em> Jeff, thanks very much for stopping by the TravelCommons podcast and chatting to us about drinking.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Jeff: Thank you so much for having me. This has been a lot of fun because it seems to be my people that listen to your podcasts.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #190</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>. And while you’re at TravelCommons.com, you can check out the show notes page for a transcript and any links I’ve mentioned. Or you can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_190.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #192 — Booking Direct vs. 3rd Party; Gin Conquers the World','','inherit','closed','closed','','4264-revision-v1','','','2023-01-25 23:23:04','2023-01-26 04:23:04','',4264,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4265',0,'revision','',0),
(4266,1,'2023-01-25 23:25:21','2023-01-26 04:25:21','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/malort_face-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Malort bottle and a cow skull\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"> My Drinking Buddy Is The Quiet Type[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Back behind the mic after 3 week of travel in Croatia and Italy.  The trip went amazingly well up to the last leg, when United\'s Newark team couldn\'t get our bags on our plane. But, I\'d stuffed <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3k4rCUy\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Apple AirTags</a> into our luggage, so we were able to track their movements \'til they got home. That experience and a listener\'s tweet led to me re-visiting my travel tech stack. We then talk to Jeff Cioletti, author of the new book <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3sQelCQ\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Imbibing for Introverts</a></em>, about the art of drinking alone. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_190.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #192: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN. Haven’t done any travel since the last episode. Instead, I’m starting the year off, as many others do, by doing travel planning, trying to lay out a 2023 travel calendar so we don’t slouch past the days and then, in say August, look back and say “Where’d the year go?”&nbsp; Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/01/25/podcast-159-planning-the-trip-of-a-lifetime-in-southeast-asia/\">episode #159</a>, I talked about how travel planning would traditionally kick in the week after Christmas -- although I’ll say that given <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/01/25/podcast-159-planning-the-trip-of-a-lifetime-in-southeast-asia/\">episode #159</a> was posted in January 2020, 2 months before the first wave of COVID lockdowns, my timing on that probably wasn’t the greatest. A year later, January 2021, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">episode #171</a>, I tried it again, ticking through 5 travel planning tips for COVID times. They were all about agility -- paying attention to cancellation rules, monitoring last-minutes changes in lockdowns and health requirements….&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But now two years later, with COVID cases down and&nbsp; <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/travel/passenger-volumes\">travel volumes pretty much back up to 2019 levels</a>, I expect folks will revert back to their old travel planning patterns. Back in my travel tech CIO days, right before Christmas, we’d always lock down our systems and put on extra capacity (which, let me tell you kids, back in the pre-cloud days, meant rolling actual servers, real live physical equipment uphill, through the snow, onto the data center’s raised floor) so we could handle the spikes in search volume. And while we’d see some minor spikes from the systems that travel agents used, the biggest volumes came from on-line sites like Expedia and Booking.com, sites more popular with leisure travelers than business travelers.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But now in 2023, I’m guessing that the Chinese are chief among those rushing back to their pre-COVID travel planning after the government quit their zero COVID policies. Indeed, on December 26, within a half an hour of the announcement that China’s borders were fully reopening,<a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/2022/12/27/here-are-the-countries-chinese-tourists-want-to-visit-the-most.html\"> searches for international travel on China’s biggest on-line site, Trip.com</a>, surged back to pre-COVID levels. The top search destinations were Southeast Asian countries, the US, and the UK. Now remember, before the lockdowns, <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/video/series/news-explainers/big-spending-chinese-tourists-are-coming-back-but-slowly/38552637-24FC-484A-B8A9-B6022BF9AEF0\">the Chinese were by far the largest source of international tourism spending</a> -- $255B, 70% more than second-place US, which was at $150B. So if you, like me, thought popular vacation destinations were crowded last year, just wait for this summer -- for what I’m guessing will be a second wave, maybe a Chinese tsunami of “revenge travel.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music --  <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/snowflake/46164\">A Foolish Game</a> by Snowflake (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/snowflake/46164 Ft: Admiral Bob   </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I’m going to hold my thoughts about my Croatia and Italy trip for the next episode; do one of my stream-of-consciousness “Notes on a Location” topics. But I do want to follow up here on a couple of things from the last episode. First up, is <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/09/22/podcast-189-why-we-travel-when-the-first-flight-isnt-best/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Podcast #189 —  Why We Travel; When The First Flight Isn’t Best\">last episode’s</a> eSIM rant because, through watching with my travel companions and texting with Allan Marko, a long-time TravelCommons contributor, I sorta refined that rant, getting it down to two decision points.<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>First, how much data do you expect to use? If you’re out of the US for a week or less, staying in a place with good WiFi, and can wait until the end of the day to do all your social media posting, you can probably be good with 5GB of data -- which gets you under T-Mobile’s non-throttled international data cap (which is what a couple of the folks traveling with me did), way under Google Fi’s 50 GB cap, and probably fits into a $15-20 eSIM from someone like aloSIM or Airalo. It’s the low-hassle solution. But for a longer stay, like my 3 week-er, or if you’re fully invested in building Instagram stories, like my wife, 5GB just isn’t going to cut it. I reset my iPhone data stats on the flight to Frankfurt and then looked at them as we were taxiing out to the runway in Rome. I used 77 GBs of data. Now, 11 GB was from hotspotting because the WiFi in our Florence Airbnb was pretty useless. But even pulling that out, 66 GBs is still a whackload of data. Which is probably because I didn’t really pay any attention to my data usage, because the Telecom Italia plan I was on gave me <em>600</em> GB of 5G data, essentially unlimited data, for $15. So while my T-Mobile-using companions were scrounging for a bar’s WiFi password to do Untappd check-ins, I was uploading pictures and refreshing my podcasts.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The second decision point&nbsp; -- do you need to make regular phone calls; do you need a local number? This is more and more of an edge case with people primarily texting, and when there was a specific need for a voice call, people rang me through WhatsApp and Telegram. But on this trip, I got us last-minute tables at a couple of good restaurants because I could call them over the regular phone network, something I couldn’t have done with a data-only eSIM. I’ve also run into the need for a local number when trying to register or create an account for an on-line service. My Telecom Italia SIM also came with a local Italian number and unlimited voice minutes.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>So while I sharpened my thinking on this trip, my conclusion didn’t change. I know I’m an edge case -- I don’t want to have to think about data consumption and I want local phone service -- and until the in-country wireless carriers offer the same pre-paid plans on eSIMs that they do on physical SIMs, I’ll be keeping my phone with the SIM tray… and a straightened-out paper clip to pop it open.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Second, following up to Kendra Kroll’s travel tip in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/09/22/podcast-189-why-we-travel-when-the-first-flight-isnt-best/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">the last episode</a> about knowing the names of cities in the local vernacular. Kendra talked about people missing their train stop because they didn’t realize that Florence, in Italian, is Firenze. So riding the train from Rome (Roma) to Florence (Firenze), I was on the lookout for this. All the train tickets used Italian city names -- Roma, Napoli, Firenze. But the signs on the platforms of the Florence train stations said “Florence”. Indeed, the real confusion wasn’t Florence vs Firenze, but which Florence train station to get off at. My group thought we had a direct train from downtown Rome&nbsp; (Roma Termini) to the downtown Florence station (Firenze Santa Maria Novella), so when the train stopped at a station with “Florence” in the sign, they all scrambled to get their bags and head for the station -- which would’ve left them hanging around in a suburban parking lot figuring out how get a ride downtown. So not only know the name of the city in the vernacular; know the full station name of your stop.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I mentioned earlier that the first leg of my trip was from BNA to ORD, and I was kinda surprised to realize that it was my first time in ORD in 10 months, since returning from the UK last November. Prior to moving down here to Nashville in July, I’d been flying Southwest out of Chicago Midway; easier to get to and Southwest fit my travel plans better. So as “Welcome Back,” I got the full ORD experience -- landing on the far north runway, which feels like it’s just short of the Wisconsin state line, with the requisite 20-min taxi to get within sight of the terminal. Then, just as you think you’re almost there, the plane stops across the road from the terminal and waits 5 minutes for a gate to open up. Then, once we get moving again, we take the scenic route, past all the American planes in Terminal 3 and the Delta planes in Terminal 2 until we finally get to the United terminal in Terminal 1. All told, at least 30 minutes from tires hitting the runway to the door opening and the agent saying “Welcome to ORD”. Yeah, thanks. Great to be back.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And in other “Great to be back” things, Irene and I used Lyft for the first time in forever to get home from the Nashville airport -- the wait time and the price were much lower than Uber; which is weird because I’d think, by now, the ride sharing market would be a bit more price efficient. But anyhow, Lyft is so excited to see me resurface in Nashville that the app is flooding my phone with notifications with ride offers and suggestions for things to do. Three days of this was enough to drive me into the hell that the iPhone Settings menu has become to figure out how to shut them up. Probably not the behavior Lyft was trying to prompt, but there you go.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/THE_CONCEPT_OF_ENERGY/55008\">ABANDONED BUTTERFLIES</a> by THE_CONCEPT_OF_ENERGY (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/THE_CONCEPT_OF_ENERGY/55008</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>My Travel Tech Stack</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Back to that problematic last leg of our trip -- the flight home to Nashville from Newark. I knew we had a lagging luggage problem even before we left the ground courtesy of the latest addition to my travel tech stack. I’d bought <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3k4rCUy\" title=\"\">Apple AirTags</a> just for this reason -- to track our luggage. When I had to check my bag on the Vueling flight from Split to Rome, I could see on my iPhone’s Find My app that my bag was on the plane; it looked almost right underneath me. But in Newark, my bag never left the terminal. Irene checked her app; same thing. As we taxied out, I took a screenshot showing the growing distance between me on the plane and my left-behind bag, and tweeted it out to United saying “I’m guessing I won’t be seeing my luggage in BNA.”&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As I said earlier, I was pretty annoyed with United, but at least the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3k4rCUy\" title=\"\">AirTags</a> saved us the 30 minutes of suspense watching all the other bags come out. Instead, we went straight to the baggage service agent, filed our report, and headed home. And then, waking up the next morning, I could see that our bags made it on the late flight from Newark, and then could see them on the delivery truck heading to our flat. Saved a lot of agita.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>It got me thinking back 6-7 years to <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/08/26/podcast-116-traveling-thru-japan-luggage-trends/\">the first wave</a> of <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/12/podcast-120-where-do-guidebooks-fit-in-i-hate-shopping-for-suitcases/\">smart luggage</a> -- Bluesmart, Away. I bought a Bluesmart bag off their Indiegogo campaign. Those bags also let you <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/05/30/podcast-121-tsa-lines-my-luggage-is-where/\">track their location</a>, along with charging your phone -- for about 2 years until <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">the airlines banned them</a>, or at least the ones with non-removable batteries. Those travel use cases haven’t changed -- “Where’s my bag?” and “I need to recharge my phone so I can rebook this canceled flight” -- but the tech has moved on -- replacing the smart bag with AirTags or Tile trackers and a <a href=\"https://amzn.to/34fcbON\" title=\"\">10,000 mAh battery pack</a>.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Long-time listener and Twitter follower @Ab3Fr0man pinged me during my summer move podcast pause with “question for the next podcast &gt;&gt; Are there any new devices or apps you are using for travel?” which is what got me spelunking through my travel tech stack, which then turned into a stroll through <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?s=what%27s+in+my+briefcase\" title=\"\">my past “What’s in My Briefcase” episodes</a>. And what struck me was, other than the AirTags and a small phone tripod for video calls, it hasn’t been what I’ve added to my kit as much as what I’ve been able to take away.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The consolidation to HDMI for video seems to be just about done and that’s let me drop all the VGA cables and dongles I used to carry around just in case I ran into an old conference room projector or hotel TV.&nbsp; The slow and still in-progress consolidation to USB-C power supplies has let me do some subtraction by addition, dropping my MacBook Air power supply and an old dual USB-A charger for a single charger that’s smaller than either of them, a 100W gallium nitride charger that can charge my laptop, my phone, and my headphones all at once. Indeed, the only reason I still carry an old USB-A Apple Lightning cord is for plugging into the charging port on rental cars.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But the subtraction thing doesn’t always work. Last year, when we were traveling in Italy (Puglia and Sicily) for a couple of weeks, I wanted to leave the laptop home and run everything off my 8-inch Samsung tablet. That wouldn’t be a problem except for a couple of programs I run on my office PC, and I didn’t want to have to migrate to their cloud versions just for the trip. So instead I used Amazon Workspaces to set up a PC in the cloud. Not quite sure why I thought this would be easier. The Amazon setup was, let’s say, less than straightforward but I got it to work, and was able to run what I needed off my tablet, albeit a bit slower than usual. Getting ready for this last trip, I thought about it again, do I leave the laptop at home? Then I remembered the time sink the Amazon set up was, and tossed the laptop back into my backpack.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>No new apps. Indeed, I tend to be brutal about deleting those I’m not using right now. I’ll download, say, the VRBO or Airbnb app when I need them for a trip and then dump them when I get home. I also just deleted the Clear app. I had a year free from some credit card and never used it. So I canceled it before they charged me for another year and deleted the app. Yelp is on the bubble right now. I also find myself using it less and less, just defaulting to Google Maps’ restaurant suggestions and ratings since I usually already have it open for directions.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The carriers’ apps continue to improve incrementally. I used to use an app that had maps of all the major airports, but found I was using it less and less as the carriers added similar maps to their apps. Indeed, while waiting to de-plane in EWR, I checked the United app and it had an animated step-by-step map showing the path from our arrival gate, through Customs, to our departure gate. Too bad the guys moving our luggage didn’t have the same map.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As I’ve mentioned in past episodes, I still use the free version of TripIt to consolidate all plane, train, hotel, and Airbnb confirmations into a single itinerary. I know Google Travel can do something similar if you live within the Google ecosystem, but I don’t so I use TripIt. TripIt keeps pushing their $50 Pro offering with real-time alerts and airport maps. I had the Pro offering once, but now I get all that stuff for free on the carrier apps. Now, if I <em>was</em> going to pop $50, I’d spend it on the Flighty app instead. I <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/04/21/podcast-186-mask-mandate-scramble-small-airport-survival/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">trialed Flighty back in the spring on a trip to Santa Fe</a> and thought it was a great app. If I was still flying every week, it would be a no-brainer. Indeed, I’d figure out a way to expense the $250 lifetime membership and be done with it.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But the one piece of travel that’s been with me since the beginning and that continues to earn its keep -- a bottle opener. Even as craft beer has moved to cans, that stamped metal New Belgium bottle opener has saved the corner of many a hotel dresser.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/49674\">H2O</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/49674</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Imbibing for Introverts</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>When frequent travelers are on the road, we spend a lot of time alone -- in our hotel rooms, and in spite of the advice from a former colleague who wrote a book titled <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3Uba60n\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Never Eat Alone</a></em>, we do… a lot. So when I saw an upcoming book about drinking alone, it seemed a perfect fit for the podcast. So I reached out to the author, Jeff Cioletti, editor-in-chief of <a href=\"https://craftspiritsmag.com/\"><em>Craft Spirits Magazine</em></a>.<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Jeff, thanks for joining us on the TravelCommons podcast today. Your upcoming book…</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Jeff: Technically the release date is November 15, I tried to get them early for an event on October 20, but they got held up on a freight train somewhere in the United States, so it\'s like…</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: That damn supply chain. So anyhow, your upcoming book, <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3sQelCQ\"><em>Imbibing for Introverts: A Guide to Social Drinking for the Anti-Social</em></a>.</em> Over the years on the TravelCommons podcast, we\'ve <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?s=solo+dining\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">talked many times</a> about <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/03/19/podcast-149-dining-single-airlines-need-to-tell-us-more/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">solo eating</a>, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/05/12/table-for-one-eating-alone-on-the-road/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">eating alone on the road</a>, what you might call eating for introverts. So when I saw the title of your book, it mapped right into things that we\'ve been doing. And again, in past episodes, we\'ve talked about the best ways to eat alone and so, what are your pro tips for the best ways to drink alone?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Jeff: It depends on the venue; it just depends on what your objectives are. If you want to quietly contemplate what you\'re drinking; if you\'re in one of these high-end whiskey bars or a brandy bar or something like that; where you\'re sitting and you really want to just contemplate. Sometimes you just want to be present and just be in your thoughts, think about what you\'re drinking, think about its connection to the point of origin, that kind of thing. When you\'re drinking alone, probably more often than not you\'re going to be sitting at the bar. A lot of times they\'re going to give you a 2-top, but sometimes I feel bad about taking it up, especially when things are busy and I just want to sit at the bar.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: When I started traveling, which was a long time ago, you’d end up in that same situation, at a 2-top or a 4-top and then you\'re the sad person sitting in the corner table because you were taking up revenue space. “Look, I got spots for two and you\'re only taking up one.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Jeff: And I think that if you\'re not sitting in a corner, if you do get to sit at the bar, that\'s a great opportunity to strike up a conversation with the bartender. Sometimes it just happens organically. I don\'t know whether they feel like they need to talk to you because you\'re not with anybody and they feel bad for you. But one thing that I do find is when you order something in a way that shows you know what you\'re talking about -- like you\'re at the bar and you say give me a gin and tonic, if you don\'t really specify what gin you want, they may not have a really broad selection, but a lot of these more sort of mixology oriented bars, they\'re going to have a selection and a good way to start is “What kind of gin you have; do you have anything that\'s not juniper- forward?” -- bartenders can be really primed to geek out with somebody that they detect maybe as passionate about the things they drink as they are, as they are about the things they mix. So when you show an inkling of interest or knowledge related to that spirit or whatever ingredient you\'re putting in the cocktail, that may pique their interest a little bit and they might get a sense that this person knows what they’re talking about. I\'ve been in situations where that snowballs to a point where the bartender says, “Hey, by the way, I\'m entering a cocktail competition, this was my creation, I want you to try and tell me honestly what you think about it.” It\'s moments like this that present themselves. Not always, but you know, sometimes they do. Sometimes a bartender will also have a secret stash behind the bar, could be a rare whiskey that\'s on their list. Sometimes they will sneak you some of that. It\'s not going to necessarily be free, but they\'ll give you a pour of something that they\'re protecting and hoarding and not really giving to just anybody. So moments like that are good. It\'s not necessarily that you\'re being antisocial. It\'s sometimes conversations can create themselves organically and so that\'s why it\'s sometimes good to be alone and sit at the bar rather than at the table because no one\'s really going to be spending the time with you to do that.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Eating alone sitting at the bar, it used to be that you couldn\'t get much more than a bar snack menu at a bar. Nowadays, though, you can get a full menu at a bar and so I\'m always eating at the bar. You\'re right about the bartenders. You get blips of human interaction. I think usually the bartender is good for, I don\'t know, 3-4 quick interchanges. Obviously they got a job to do, so you’re not going to have an ongoing conversation with them, but they\'ll come by and if they think you\'re interested or you\'re an interesting person, you\'ll get blips. I don\'t know, it\'s either they think you\'re interesting or they’re taking pity on you. I\'m not quite sure which...&nbsp; What drove you to write this book Imbibing for Introverts? What was the kernel on this one?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Jeff: I just been traveling a lot and I\'ve been doing a lot of solo travel, especially work-related stuff and, over time, I really just got comfortable in my own skin going out alone. It just became something I realized I actually enjoy my own company and it just came together in my head. One time I was sitting at a bar and I wasn\'t alone at the time. I was having a drink with a friend in a bar that I had often had a drink alone and I thought I\'d really love to do a book about just being an introvert and just enjoying being by yourself and drinking alone and normalizing that too because some people are just weird about going out alone.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: When you do a lot of travel, you\'ve got to get comfortable with your own company because oftentimes that\'s it. You\'ve got clients, you\'ve got other people you\'re meeting and they\'re going home, they\'re going to coach their kid’s ballgame or do whatever. And if you don\'t get out of that hotel room, that hotel room turns into a cave after a while.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Jeff: And also sometimes you just want to decompress, especially when it is a work trip and you are having meetings. For instance, I got a lot of trade shows where I\'m just walking around the convention center going from booth to booth, talking to a person after person after person, always having to be on. Just having that energy, that kind of interpersonal energy, is frankly very exhausting. By the end of the day, after like seven or eight hours of doing that, sometimes you just want to be by yourself and you just want to quietly sip something in a place that\'s got the music\'s down low, it\'s a good mix that they\'re playing. It\'s low enough that you can hear yourself think, you can also eavesdrop on other people\'s conversations. That\'s kind of fun sometimes. A lot of people talk about people watching; I\'m more of a people listener because you can tell a lot more about a person by the conversations you hear than what they\'re wearing or what they look like.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Jeff, this has been great. I really appreciate it. I\'m looking forward to reading your book when it comes out. Jeff Cioletti, author of the new book, the upcoming book coming out November,<em> <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3sQelCQ\"><em>Imbibing for Introverts: A Guide to Social Drinking for the Anti-Social</em></a>.</em> Jeff, thanks very much for stopping by the TravelCommons podcast and chatting to us about drinking.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Jeff: Thank you so much for having me. This has been a lot of fun because it seems to be my people that listen to your podcasts.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #190</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>. And while you’re at TravelCommons.com, you can check out the show notes page for a transcript and any links I’ve mentioned. Or you can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_190.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #192 — Booking Direct vs. 3rd Party; Gin Conquers the World','','inherit','closed','closed','','4264-revision-v1','','','2023-01-25 23:25:21','2023-01-26 04:25:21','',4264,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4266',0,'revision','',0),
(4267,1,'2023-01-25 23:53:36','2023-01-26 04:53:36','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/malort_face-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Malort bottle and a cow skull\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"> My Drinking Buddy Is The Quiet Type[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Back behind the mic after 3 week of travel in Croatia and Italy.  The trip went amazingly well up to the last leg, when United\'s Newark team couldn\'t get our bags on our plane. But, I\'d stuffed <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3k4rCUy\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Apple AirTags</a> into our luggage, so we were able to track their movements \'til they got home. That experience and a listener\'s tweet led to me re-visiting my travel tech stack. We then talk to Jeff Cioletti, author of the new book <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3sQelCQ\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Imbibing for Introverts</a></em>, about the art of drinking alone. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_190.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here</strong></a><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_192.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\"> </a></strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_190.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #192: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN. Haven’t done any travel since the last episode. Instead, I’m starting the year off, as many others do, by doing travel planning, trying to lay out a 2023 travel calendar so we don’t slouch past the days and then, in say August, look back and say “Where’d the year go?”&nbsp; Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/01/25/podcast-159-planning-the-trip-of-a-lifetime-in-southeast-asia/\">episode #159</a>, I talked about how travel planning would traditionally kick in the week after Christmas -- although I’ll say that given <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/01/25/podcast-159-planning-the-trip-of-a-lifetime-in-southeast-asia/\">episode #159</a> was posted in January 2020, 2 months before the first wave of COVID lockdowns, my timing on that probably wasn’t the greatest. A year later, January 2021, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">episode #171</a>, I tried it again, ticking through 5 travel planning tips for COVID times. They were all about agility -- paying attention to cancellation rules, monitoring last-minutes changes in lockdowns and health requirements….&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But now two years later, with COVID cases down and <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/travel/passenger-volumes\">travel volumes pretty much back up to 2019 levels</a>, I expect folks will revert back to their old travel planning patterns. Back in my travel tech CIO days, right before Christmas, we’d always lock down our systems and put on extra capacity (which, let me tell you kids, back in the pre-cloud days, meant rolling actual servers, real live physical equipment uphill, through the snow, onto the data center’s raised floor) so we could handle the spikes in search volume. And while we’d see some minor spikes from the systems that travel agents used, the biggest volumes came from on-line sites like Expedia and Booking.com, sites more popular with leisure travelers than business travelers.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But now in 2023, I’m guessing that the Chinese are chief among those rushing back to their pre-COVID travel planning after the government quit their zero COVID policies. Indeed, on December 26, within a half an hour of the announcement that China’s borders were fully reopening,<a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/2022/12/27/here-are-the-countries-chinese-tourists-want-to-visit-the-most.html\"> searches for international travel on China’s biggest on-line site, Trip.com</a>, surged back to pre-COVID levels. The top search destinations were Southeast Asian countries, the US, and the UK. Now remember, before the lockdowns, <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/video/series/news-explainers/big-spending-chinese-tourists-are-coming-back-but-slowly/38552637-24FC-484A-B8A9-B6022BF9AEF0\">the Chinese were by far the largest source of international tourism spending</a> -- $255B, 70% more than second-place US, which was at $150B. So if you, like me, thought popular vacation destinations were crowded last year, just wait for this summer -- for what I’m guessing will be a second wave, maybe a Chinese tsunami of “revenge travel.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music --  <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/snowflake/46164\">A Foolish Game</a> by Snowflake (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/snowflake/46164 Ft: Admiral Bob   </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Back in August, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/08/18/podcast-188-my-top-tips-to-survive-travel-chaos/\">episode #188</a> was all about tips for avoiding travel chaos. I recorded it at the tail end of a summer of travel woes, after a July 4th holiday weekend that was seen as a <em>complete train wreck</em> with 1,100 canceled flights and 4,000 delays -- to which, as we all know, Southwest said “Hold my beer” and canceled almost <em>16,000</em> flights between Christmas and New Year’s -- to which the FAA said “Wait, I wanna play too” and disrupted over 11,000 flights in o<em>ne morning</em>. And when the root cause for both was found to be old technology, all the gray-haired IT guys nodded to each other and repeated their mantra -- “technical debt is a bitch.”&nbsp; Southwest has <a href=\"https://skift.com/2023/01/14/u-s-senate-demands-southwest-explain-holiday-meltdown/\">estimated a profit hit of as much as $825 million</a> from their debacle. Just sayin’-- even just half that would’ve funded a whole lot of fixes to their old scheduling system.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But looking back at those summer tips, <em>pack so you can carry on </em>and if you can’t, then <em>spread everyone’s clothes across all your checked bags</em> were pretty much spot-on. As was the discussion in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/10/31/podcast-190-my-travel-tech-stack-imbibing-for-introverts/\">episode #190</a> about how adding <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3k4rCUy\">Apple AirTags</a> to my travel tech stack saved me time and agita when United lost my luggage. With all the stories about piles of stranded luggage from the bomb cyclone and Southwest cancellations, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3k4rCUy\">AirTags</a> have proven to be a critical “must-have” if you have to check a bag, and have an iPhone. For Android users, you’ll have to wait a bit longer; people who spelunk through new Android code think <a href=\"https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/01/google-plans-airtag-clone-will-track-devices-with-3-billion-android-phones/\">Google is working on its own AirTag-like tracker</a>.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But I think I missed a couple of things. First, I should’ve pointed back to and recapped my conversation in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/06/09/podcast-164-first-post-lockdown-trips-travel-credit-cards/\">episode #164</a> with <a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/brett-holzhauer/\">Brett Holzhauer</a>, a travel credit card analyst now at CNBC, about the trip cancellation, trip interruption, and baggage insurance that many people don’t realize they get by charging their trip on a travel credit card. Maybe the tip there is, before you book your trip, pull out the credit card benefit summaries so you know which card will give you the best protection.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The second tip I’d add is -- <em>take pictures of your checked luggage</em>, outside and the contents inside. The pictures of the bags will help you answer the “describe what your bag looks like” question on the airline’s lost baggage form. The pictures of the inside will help with that baggage insurance claim. But just the fact that we’ve got to think about all this just to have someone take us and our stuff from Point A to Point B… Jesus, what a broken system.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>In what has become a going on 2-year thread about international travel planning, I’ve talked about COVID travel rules, testing, Global Entry, passport applications… And so one of the trips we’ve been planning is to hit the tulip festival in Holland -- the country, the Netherlands, not the town in Michigan, which can screw you up if you don’t look closely at your Google search results. The tulip festival in the Netherlands is in April while the one in western Michigan is in May.&nbsp; And that initial lack of Google input box precision, using Holland rather than the Netherlands, which surfaced the May date, sent me down a whole ‘nother search path because, deep in some random brain fold, I remembered a May start date for ETIAS -- the European Travel Information and Authorisation System which is the EU’s version of the US’s ESTA, the Electronic System for Travel Authorization. Now this whole E-acronym soup is pretty much just electronically plugging the travel information gap for folks who don’t need a visa to enter a country. The US started it first, another recommendation from the 9/11 Commission, but unlike Real ID, ESTA actually got implemented -- in 2009. It started off free but is now $21 per person for two years, with most of that going to fund Brand USA, the US tourist promotion agency. The EU’s <a href=\"https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/MEMO_18_4362\">ETIAS</a> is cheaper - €7 per person for three years. It got started later, in 2018, and its go-live date has been kicked down the road a few times now -- from 2022 to May 2023 as that random neuron of mine recalled, but I guess I missed the <a href=\"https://thepointsguy.com/news/europe-new-etias-entry-fee-launch-2023/\">latest push</a>, which happened back in August, that delayed ETIAS another 6 months. So now go-live is November 2023 -- still nothing like the 17-year-and-counting delay for Real ID. So, as it turns out after losing a couple of hours of my life in a click spiral, nothing to worry about ‘til next year.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And if you have any travel worries… or stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/THE_CONCEPT_OF_ENERGY/55008\">ABANDONED BUTTERFLIES</a> by THE_CONCEPT_OF_ENERGY (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/THE_CONCEPT_OF_ENERGY/55008</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Travel Planning -- Book Direct or through a Third-Party?</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Chris Chufo, long-time friend of the podcast, pointed me to a <a href=\"https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/tips/booking-direct-travel-websites-flights-hotels/\">Washington Post column</a> by Christopher Elliot on the “great debate” (as he put it) between booking direct with an airline or hotel or car rental company vs. using a 3rd party, a travel agent or an on-line site like Booking.com or Airbnb. It’s an ongoing debate because there’s not a straight-forward answer, and it’s one that I personally straddle when booking travel. But when I think about it, and what the Post column didn’t really articulate, is that the decision point hinges on relationships and leverage.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>When booking flights, trains, rental cars, I almost always book direct because if there\'s a problem -- a delay, a cancellation -- I can work directly with the airline or rental company to figure out an alternative. When I booked through a 3rd party -- most recently, back in 2019 when Amex was giving a 5x multiplier on Membership Rewards points for booking through them -- and then had a flight cancellation in Charlottesville, VA, the carrier wouldn’t talk to me -- “You need to call your agent.”&nbsp; Which I did, while standing in front of the ticket counter at the airport, looking at the flight status display saying “Canceled” and telling the Amex agent the current situation because the flight status has been updated in their system yet. After which the agent said “Hold on, I need to call the airline because it’s so close to departure, I can’t do anything in the system” -- basically making the same call I just got off of. Third parties really don’t have much leverage over carriers -- airlines, trains, or even rental cars -- and there’s no real value in putting them between me and the carrier when I’m trying to move fast to swerve a delay or cancellation. Especially a carrier where I’ve got status; that marker of a relationship often delivers more than an agent can.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Hotels can be a bit different. I’ll book directly with the big chains -- Marriott, Hilton -- again, places where I have status. My experience has been that the reservation agents are more flexible when I need to make a change, and it feels like (though I don’t have hard data on this) I get upgraded more often by the front desk. And if I have, say, a billing issue with a Marriott property, Corporate Marriott will look at my lifetime titanium status and give me the benefit of the doubt. However, with independent properties where I haven’t stayed before and this is a one-time transaction, and so don’t have any leverage from an on-going relationship or, say, the potential for future business, the situation is murkier. An Airbnb or an Expedia, who <em>can</em> see future revenue from me, might be more willing to help me out with a problem. But the property has a financial incentive for me to book directly with them -- it saves them commission that could be as high as 40%.&nbsp; So if I’m going someplace new, I usually start off searching on a 3rd-party site -- Airbnb, Booking.com -- to see what’s available. If I narrow down to an independent place and I’m going to stay there for more than a day or two, I’ll flip over to their web site -- can I get a better price booking direct? I check out TripAdvisor -- can I trust them? If both are “yes’s”, then I’ll book direct -- because I still have one fall-back protector, my credit card company.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Last year, our last night in Sicily, we booked a hotel room that was maybe a 5-minute walk from Catania airport because we had an early flight out the next morning. We found it and booked it on Booking.com -- the path of least resistance. So on that last night, driving back with our friends from Taormina (before <a href=\"https://www.travelweekly.com/Travel-News/Hotel-News/White-Lotus-series-generates-interest-Sicily\"><em>The White Lotus</em> put it on the map</a>), we got to the airport but couldn’t find the hotel. Google Maps landed us in front of some apartment buildings and a big dirt parking lot. A couple of laps around the block and a long WhatsApp message stream later, we found out that what we booked wasn’t a hotel room, but one of these apartments; and when someone remotely unlocked the door, it looked a bit (no, a lot) like a <em>Third Rate Romance, Low Rent Rendezvous</em> sorta place. Our friends said “We’re <strong>not</strong> leaving you here” and we bee-lined over to a <em>real</em> airport hotel where I grabbed one of their last rooms while Irene canceled the Love Shack on Booking.com. Now, as you might imagine with the late cancellation, the Shack didn’t want to refund our payment. Not surprising. However, I was a bit surprised when Booking.com didn’t help us -- in spite of me pointing out the property description on their site was completely false.  So, last resort, I disputed the charge with Chase. They called me. I told them the story, sent them screenshots of the property listing (which surprising(?)/ unsurprisingly(?) was still up, unchanged, on Booking.com) along with a couple of pictures I’d taken -- just in case. We’ve had this Chase card for over 10 years; it’s our main credit card so we spend <em>a lot</em> on it; and we’ve never disputed a hotel stay on it before. Leverage from what, for Chase, has been a profitable relationship. Two weeks later, we got our money back.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/49674\">H2O</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/49674</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Gin Conquers the World</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Here’s a bit of a change-up. Usually, when I talk about drinking on this podcast, it’s about craft beer. There’s even a Beer tab on the top of the TravelCommons website that takes you to a page with all the podcast episodes and blog posts that talk about beer -- “What Makes a Great Taproom”, “My Best Restaurants, Bars and Taprooms of 2021” (note to self, gotta write the 2022 version of that). But back in October, when interviewing Jeff Cioletti, editor-in-chief of <a href=\"https://craftspiritsmag.com/\"><em>Craft Spirits Magazine</em></a> about his new book <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3sQelCQ\"><em>Imbibing for Introverts</em></a> for <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/10/31/podcast-190-my-travel-tech-stack-imbibing-for-introverts/\" title=\"Podcast #190 — My Travel Tech Stack; Imbibing for Introverts\">episode #190</a>, we got talking about how gin has spread across the globe:<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Let me ask you this... Through your travels, have you noticed any changes, any trends over the past few years as you\'ve been sitting at bars drinking alone?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Jeff: One thing that I find incredibly striking, and this is worldwide, I had mentioned, gin.&nbsp; Gin has reconquered Europe. I was in Berlin, and I was on a panel with somebody, he said that now Germany has got 1,000 gin brands. Like five years ago, they had barely any.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: I\'ll tell you, for me it\'s gonna either be craft beer or gin. I just think about it, in Scotland and Spain.... I was just in Croatia a few weeks ago; a guy walks out, has some Croatian gin. They were doing gin tonics, so the big Spanish goblet style. I said, “Well, I\'d really like to taste that gin without all the tonic and everything. I want to see what you guys are doing with it.” And back to your point about endearing yourself sometimes, the guy was like “Really? You really want it”, and I said, “Yeah, absolutely. Just gin and glass, just give me a little bit” and he said, “Oh no, that\'s great.” And off he came and brought the regular gin tonic and then there was a little sidecar of just gin neat so I could taste it along.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Jeff: I was just in a bar in Stuttgart on Saturday night. It was called Botanical Affairs, a tiny kind of corner pocket little bar and all they have is gin. I mean it\'s not even like you go in there or you can have a beer, but they specialize in gin. I mean everything was a gin cocktail; that\'s all you could order, and they had so many different brands from all over the world. And you mentioned Spain; they get most of the credit for elevating the gin cocktail and turning it into kind of a luxurious drink. It really is, it\'s an experience now.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Yes, it\'s something, with the goblet glass and the garnish and all stuff.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Jeff: Yes, and a lot of people have adopted that; even places here in the States that are using it now. I\'ve found it in a lot of places in the UK that use it And the Spanish get all the credit for that. They didn\'t use it in Germany though, which I found interesting but everywhere else seems to.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Now there are always local/regional spirits to drink -- bourbon in Kentucky, malt whisky in Scotland and Ireland, soju in Korea, the whole range of Eastern European fruit brandies; palinka in Hungary, I mentioned Croatian rakija (pronounced rakiya) in the last episode. But it seems that gin has become the canvas, the freshly painted side of a building that younger distillers want to tag with their sense of what’s local. Maybe because it’s easier -- they don’t have to wrestle with expectations or regulations about what the local traditional spirit is.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Also maybe because it’s easier to make. Back in 2013 on our first visit to University of St Andrews with our then-high-school junior Claire, I found a local microbrewery, Eden Mill. Their story was that they wanted to be a Scotch whisky distillery, but since whisky is legally required to age in an oak barrel for at least 3 years, they needed something else to generate cash now. And since the front-end of making beer and malt whisky are pretty much the same, craft beer seemed a pretty logical way to bridge their cash gap. Fast forward a couple of years to Claire’s first year at St Andrews, Eden Mill is still making beer, still waiting for their whisky to come of age, but now they’ve added gin. The updated story -- since they already had a distillation column to make whisky, they had everything they needed to make gin. They trucked in neutral spirits -- similar to the Everclear of <em>my</em> college days, but I’m sure a bit classier -- run it through the distillation column over a basket of botanicals, dilute it to the right strength, bottle it, and sell it -- right away. If I’m an artisanal producer, maybe I don’t have to think as much about funding stainless steel and storage, and so can think more about how I want to express my locality, my culture in that basket of botanicals. Eden Mill, for example, sitting on the east coast of Scotland, uses local sea buckthorn berries. On a trip to Spain, I was served Nordés gin from Galicia, the most northwest part of Spain, the bit that sits on top of Portugal; it tasted of lemon verbena and eucalyptus and bay leaf, botanicals native to the Galician forests. The Croatian gin I talked about with Jeff Cioletti was all about the local, native juniper berries.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>It’s an interesting twist on the complaint about global homogenization, that the world has been becoming more the same now because of -- pick your favorite bugbear: the spread of global brands, Instagram, the ubiquity of English…. Gin is the latest; starting to crowd out the local native spirit, but with a twist with the focus on native flavors. And so with all the effort put into expressing these local botanicals, I’m always surprised when bartenders want to serve them in the Spanish-style gin tonic that Jeff rightly notes seems to have taken over. After giving me a whole spiel about the care the distiller has taken to infuse the locality into the gin, they then smother the one-and-a-half ounces of that locality with 6 or 7 ounces of imported tonic and a slice or two of imported orange or lemon or lime. So no, for me, give me that local gin straight, maybe over one of those huge ice cubes so I can taste that local flavor the distiller has been working to present. I guess I’m swimming upstream against today’s cocktail culture -- more interested in the distiller’s art than the mixologist’s.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #192</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>. And while you’re at TravelCommons.com, you can check out the show notes page for a transcript and any links I’ve mentioned. Or you can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_192.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #192 — Booking Direct vs. 3rd Party; Gin Conquers the World','','inherit','closed','closed','','4264-revision-v1','','','2023-01-25 23:53:36','2023-01-26 04:53:36','',4264,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4267',0,'revision','',0),
(4268,1,'2023-01-25 23:54:17','2023-01-26 04:54:17','','DALL·E 2023-01-25 22.53.11','','inherit','open','closed','','dall%c2%b7e-2023-01-25-22-53-11','','','2023-01-25 23:55:11','2023-01-26 04:55:11','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/DALL·E-2023-01-25-22.53.11.png',0,'attachment','image/png',0),
(4269,1,'2023-01-26 00:03:53','2023-01-26 05:03:53','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/DALL·E-2023-01-25-22.53.11-e1674709008862-300x300.png\" alt=\"Cat with paw on the rim of a gin tonic glass\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\">Can\'t get to the artisanal garnish[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Back behind the mic after 3 week of travel in Croatia and Italy.  The trip went amazingly well up to the last leg, when United\'s Newark team couldn\'t get our bags on our plane. But, I\'d stuffed <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3k4rCUy\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Apple AirTags</a> into our luggage, so we were able to track their movements \'til they got home. That experience and a listener\'s tweet led to me re-visiting my travel tech stack. We then talk to Jeff Cioletti, author of the new book <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3sQelCQ\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Imbibing for Introverts</a></em>, about the art of drinking alone. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_190.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here</strong></a><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_192.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\"> </a></strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_190.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #192: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN. Haven’t done any travel since the last episode. Instead, I’m starting the year off, as many others do, by doing travel planning, trying to lay out a 2023 travel calendar so we don’t slouch past the days and then, in say August, look back and say “Where’d the year go?”&nbsp; Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/01/25/podcast-159-planning-the-trip-of-a-lifetime-in-southeast-asia/\">episode #159</a>, I talked about how travel planning would traditionally kick in the week after Christmas -- although I’ll say that given <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/01/25/podcast-159-planning-the-trip-of-a-lifetime-in-southeast-asia/\">episode #159</a> was posted in January 2020, 2 months before the first wave of COVID lockdowns, my timing on that probably wasn’t the greatest. A year later, January 2021, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">episode #171</a>, I tried it again, ticking through 5 travel planning tips for COVID times. They were all about agility -- paying attention to cancellation rules, monitoring last-minutes changes in lockdowns and health requirements….&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But now two years later, with COVID cases down and <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/travel/passenger-volumes\">travel volumes pretty much back up to 2019 levels</a>, I expect folks will revert back to their old travel planning patterns. Back in my travel tech CIO days, right before Christmas, we’d always lock down our systems and put on extra capacity (which, let me tell you kids, back in the pre-cloud days, meant rolling actual servers, real live physical equipment uphill, through the snow, onto the data center’s raised floor) so we could handle the spikes in search volume. And while we’d see some minor spikes from the systems that travel agents used, the biggest volumes came from on-line sites like Expedia and Booking.com, sites more popular with leisure travelers than business travelers.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But now in 2023, I’m guessing that the Chinese are chief among those rushing back to their pre-COVID travel planning after the government quit their zero COVID policies. Indeed, on December 26, within a half an hour of the announcement that China’s borders were fully reopening,<a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/2022/12/27/here-are-the-countries-chinese-tourists-want-to-visit-the-most.html\"> searches for international travel on China’s biggest on-line site, Trip.com</a>, surged back to pre-COVID levels. The top search destinations were Southeast Asian countries, the US, and the UK. Now remember, before the lockdowns, <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/video/series/news-explainers/big-spending-chinese-tourists-are-coming-back-but-slowly/38552637-24FC-484A-B8A9-B6022BF9AEF0\">the Chinese were by far the largest source of international tourism spending</a> -- $255B, 70% more than second-place US, which was at $150B. So if you, like me, thought popular vacation destinations were crowded last year, just wait for this summer -- for what I’m guessing will be a second wave, maybe a Chinese tsunami of “revenge travel.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music --  <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/snowflake/46164\">A Foolish Game</a> by Snowflake (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/snowflake/46164 Ft: Admiral Bob   </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Back in August, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/08/18/podcast-188-my-top-tips-to-survive-travel-chaos/\">episode #188</a> was all about tips for avoiding travel chaos. I recorded it at the tail end of a summer of travel woes, after a July 4th holiday weekend that was seen as a <em>complete train wreck</em> with 1,100 canceled flights and 4,000 delays -- to which, as we all know, Southwest said “Hold my beer” and canceled almost <em>16,000</em> flights between Christmas and New Year’s -- to which the FAA said “Wait, I wanna play too” and disrupted over 11,000 flights in o<em>ne morning</em>. And when the root cause for both was found to be old technology, all the gray-haired IT guys nodded to each other and repeated their mantra -- “technical debt is a bitch.”&nbsp; Southwest has <a href=\"https://skift.com/2023/01/14/u-s-senate-demands-southwest-explain-holiday-meltdown/\">estimated a profit hit of as much as $825 million</a> from their debacle. Just sayin’-- even just half that would’ve funded a whole lot of fixes to their old scheduling system.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But looking back at those summer tips, <em>pack so you can carry on </em>and if you can’t, then <em>spread everyone’s clothes across all your checked bags</em> were pretty much spot-on. As was the discussion in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/10/31/podcast-190-my-travel-tech-stack-imbibing-for-introverts/\">episode #190</a> about how adding <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3k4rCUy\">Apple AirTags</a> to my travel tech stack saved me time and agita when United lost my luggage. With all the stories about piles of stranded luggage from the bomb cyclone and Southwest cancellations, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3k4rCUy\">AirTags</a> have proven to be a critical “must-have” if you have to check a bag, and have an iPhone. For Android users, you’ll have to wait a bit longer; people who spelunk through new Android code think <a href=\"https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/01/google-plans-airtag-clone-will-track-devices-with-3-billion-android-phones/\">Google is working on its own AirTag-like tracker</a>.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But I think I missed a couple of things. First, I should’ve pointed back to and recapped my conversation in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/06/09/podcast-164-first-post-lockdown-trips-travel-credit-cards/\">episode #164</a> with <a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/brett-holzhauer/\">Brett Holzhauer</a>, a travel credit card analyst now at CNBC, about the trip cancellation, trip interruption, and baggage insurance that many people don’t realize they get by charging their trip on a travel credit card. Maybe the tip there is, before you book your trip, pull out the credit card benefit summaries so you know which card will give you the best protection.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The second tip I’d add is -- <em>take pictures of your checked luggage</em>, outside and the contents inside. The pictures of the bags will help you answer the “describe what your bag looks like” question on the airline’s lost baggage form. The pictures of the inside will help with that baggage insurance claim. But just the fact that we’ve got to think about all this just to have someone take us and our stuff from Point A to Point B… Jesus, what a broken system.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>In what has become a going on 2-year thread about international travel planning, I’ve talked about COVID travel rules, testing, Global Entry, passport applications… And so one of the trips we’ve been planning is to hit the tulip festival in Holland -- the country, the Netherlands, not the town in Michigan, which can screw you up if you don’t look closely at your Google search results. The tulip festival in the Netherlands is in April while the one in western Michigan is in May.&nbsp; And that initial lack of Google input box precision, using Holland rather than the Netherlands, which surfaced the May date, sent me down a whole ‘nother search path because, deep in some random brain fold, I remembered a May start date for ETIAS -- the European Travel Information and Authorisation System which is the EU’s version of the US’s ESTA, the Electronic System for Travel Authorization. Now this whole E-acronym soup is pretty much just electronically plugging the travel information gap for folks who don’t need a visa to enter a country. The US started it first, another recommendation from the 9/11 Commission, but unlike Real ID, ESTA actually got implemented -- in 2009. It started off free but is now $21 per person for two years, with most of that going to fund Brand USA, the US tourist promotion agency. The EU’s <a href=\"https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/MEMO_18_4362\">ETIAS</a> is cheaper - €7 per person for three years. It got started later, in 2018, and its go-live date has been kicked down the road a few times now -- from 2022 to May 2023 as that random neuron of mine recalled, but I guess I missed the <a href=\"https://thepointsguy.com/news/europe-new-etias-entry-fee-launch-2023/\">latest push</a>, which happened back in August, that delayed ETIAS another 6 months. So now go-live is November 2023 -- still nothing like the 17-year-and-counting delay for Real ID. So, as it turns out after losing a couple of hours of my life in a click spiral, nothing to worry about ‘til next year.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And if you have any travel worries… or stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/THE_CONCEPT_OF_ENERGY/55008\">ABANDONED BUTTERFLIES</a> by THE_CONCEPT_OF_ENERGY (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/THE_CONCEPT_OF_ENERGY/55008</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Travel Planning -- Book Direct or through a Third-Party?</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Chris Chufo, long-time friend of the podcast, pointed me to a <a href=\"https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/tips/booking-direct-travel-websites-flights-hotels/\">Washington Post column</a> by Christopher Elliot on the “great debate” (as he put it) between booking direct with an airline or hotel or car rental company vs. using a 3rd party, a travel agent or an on-line site like Booking.com or Airbnb. It’s an ongoing debate because there’s not a straight-forward answer, and it’s one that I personally straddle when booking travel. But when I think about it, and what the Post column didn’t really articulate, is that the decision point hinges on relationships and leverage.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>When booking flights, trains, rental cars, I almost always book direct because if there\'s a problem -- a delay, a cancellation -- I can work directly with the airline or rental company to figure out an alternative. When I booked through a 3rd party -- most recently, back in 2019 when Amex was giving a 5x multiplier on Membership Rewards points for booking through them -- and then had a flight cancellation in Charlottesville, VA, the carrier wouldn’t talk to me -- “You need to call your agent.”&nbsp; Which I did, while standing in front of the ticket counter at the airport, looking at the flight status display saying “Canceled” and telling the Amex agent the current situation because the flight status has been updated in their system yet. After which the agent said “Hold on, I need to call the airline because it’s so close to departure, I can’t do anything in the system” -- basically making the same call I just got off of. Third parties really don’t have much leverage over carriers -- airlines, trains, or even rental cars -- and there’s no real value in putting them between me and the carrier when I’m trying to move fast to swerve a delay or cancellation. Especially a carrier where I’ve got status; that marker of a relationship often delivers more than an agent can.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Hotels can be a bit different. I’ll book directly with the big chains -- Marriott, Hilton -- again, places where I have status. My experience has been that the reservation agents are more flexible when I need to make a change, and it feels like (though I don’t have hard data on this) I get upgraded more often by the front desk. And if I have, say, a billing issue with a Marriott property, Corporate Marriott will look at my lifetime titanium status and give me the benefit of the doubt. However, with independent properties where I haven’t stayed before and this is a one-time transaction, and so don’t have any leverage from an on-going relationship or, say, the potential for future business, the situation is murkier. An Airbnb or an Expedia, who <em>can</em> see future revenue from me, might be more willing to help me out with a problem. But the property has a financial incentive for me to book directly with them -- it saves them commission that could be as high as 40%.&nbsp; So if I’m going someplace new, I usually start off searching on a 3rd-party site -- Airbnb, Booking.com -- to see what’s available. If I narrow down to an independent place and I’m going to stay there for more than a day or two, I’ll flip over to their web site -- can I get a better price booking direct? I check out TripAdvisor -- can I trust them? If both are “yes’s”, then I’ll book direct -- because I still have one fall-back protector, my credit card company.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Last year, our last night in Sicily, we booked a hotel room that was maybe a 5-minute walk from Catania airport because we had an early flight out the next morning. We found it and booked it on Booking.com -- the path of least resistance. So on that last night, driving back with our friends from Taormina (before <a href=\"https://www.travelweekly.com/Travel-News/Hotel-News/White-Lotus-series-generates-interest-Sicily\"><em>The White Lotus</em> put it on the map</a>), we got to the airport but couldn’t find the hotel. Google Maps landed us in front of some apartment buildings and a big dirt parking lot. A couple of laps around the block and a long WhatsApp message stream later, we found out that what we booked wasn’t a hotel room, but one of these apartments; and when someone remotely unlocked the door, it looked a bit (no, a lot) like a <em>Third Rate Romance, Low Rent Rendezvous</em> sorta place. Our friends said “We’re <strong>not</strong> leaving you here” and we bee-lined over to a <em>real</em> airport hotel where I grabbed one of their last rooms while Irene canceled the Love Shack on Booking.com. Now, as you might imagine with the late cancellation, the Shack didn’t want to refund our payment. Not surprising. However, I was a bit surprised when Booking.com didn’t help us -- in spite of me pointing out the property description on their site was completely false.&nbsp; So, last resort, I disputed the charge with Chase. They called me. I told them the story, sent them screenshots of the property listing (which surprising(?)/ unsurprisingly(?) was still up, unchanged, on Booking.com) along with a couple of pictures I’d taken -- just in case. We’ve had this Chase card for over 10 years; it’s our main credit card so we spend <em>a lot</em> on it; and we’ve never disputed a hotel stay on it before. Leverage from what, for Chase, has been a profitable relationship. Two weeks later, we got our money back.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/49674\">H2O</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/49674</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Gin Conquers the World</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Here’s a bit of a change-up. Usually, when I talk about drinking on this podcast, it’s about craft beer. There’s even a Beer tab on the top of the TravelCommons website that takes you to a page with all the podcast episodes and blog posts that talk about beer -- “What Makes a Great Taproom”, “My Best Restaurants, Bars and Taprooms of 2021” (note to self, gotta write the 2022 version of that). But back in October, when interviewing Jeff Cioletti, editor-in-chief of <a href=\"https://craftspiritsmag.com/\"><em>Craft Spirits Magazine</em></a> about his new book <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3sQelCQ\"><em>Imbibing for Introverts</em></a> for <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/10/31/podcast-190-my-travel-tech-stack-imbibing-for-introverts/\" title=\"Podcast #190 — My Travel Tech Stack; Imbibing for Introverts\">episode #190</a>, we got talking about how gin has spread across the globe:<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Let me ask you this... Through your travels, have you noticed any changes, any trends over the past few years as you\'ve been sitting at bars drinking alone?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Jeff: One thing that I find incredibly striking, and this is worldwide, I had mentioned, gin.&nbsp; Gin has reconquered Europe. I was in Berlin, and I was on a panel with somebody, he said that now Germany has got 1,000 gin brands. Like five years ago, they had barely any.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: I\'ll tell you, for me it\'s gonna either be craft beer or gin. I just think about it, in Scotland and Spain.... I was just in Croatia a few weeks ago; a guy walks out, has some Croatian gin. They were doing gin tonics, so the big Spanish goblet style. I said, “Well, I\'d really like to taste that gin without all the tonic and everything. I want to see what you guys are doing with it.” And back to your point about endearing yourself sometimes, the guy was like “Really? You really want it”, and I said, “Yeah, absolutely. Just gin and glass, just give me a little bit” and he said, “Oh no, that\'s great.” And off he came and brought the regular gin tonic and then there was a little sidecar of just gin neat so I could taste it along.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Jeff: I was just in a bar in Stuttgart on Saturday night. It was called Botanical Affairs, a tiny kind of corner pocket little bar and all they have is gin. I mean it\'s not even like you go in there or you can have a beer, but they specialize in gin. I mean everything was a gin cocktail; that\'s all you could order, and they had so many different brands from all over the world. And you mentioned Spain; they get most of the credit for elevating the gin cocktail and turning it into kind of a luxurious drink. It really is, it\'s an experience now.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Yes, it\'s something, with the goblet glass and the garnish and all stuff.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Jeff: Yes, and a lot of people have adopted that; even places here in the States that are using it now. I\'ve found it in a lot of places in the UK that use it And the Spanish get all the credit for that. They didn\'t use it in Germany though, which I found interesting but everywhere else seems to.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Now there are always local/regional spirits to drink -- bourbon in Kentucky, malt whisky in Scotland and Ireland, soju in Korea, the whole range of Eastern European fruit brandies; palinka in Hungary, I mentioned Croatian rakija (pronounced rakiya) in the last episode. But it seems that gin has become the canvas, the freshly painted side of a building that younger distillers want to tag with their sense of what’s local. Maybe because it’s easier -- they don’t have to wrestle with expectations or regulations about what the local traditional spirit is.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Also maybe because it’s easier to make. Back in 2013 on our first visit to University of St Andrews with our then-high-school junior Claire, I found a local microbrewery, Eden Mill. Their story was that they wanted to be a Scotch whisky distillery, but since whisky is legally required to age in an oak barrel for at least 3 years, they needed something else to generate cash now. And since the front-end of making beer and malt whisky are pretty much the same, craft beer seemed a pretty logical way to bridge their cash gap. Fast forward a couple of years to Claire’s first year at St Andrews, Eden Mill is still making beer, still waiting for their whisky to come of age, but now they’ve added gin. The updated story -- since they already had a distillation column to make whisky, they had everything they needed to make gin. They trucked in neutral spirits -- similar to the Everclear of <em>my</em> college days, but I’m sure a bit classier -- run it through the distillation column over a basket of botanicals, dilute it to the right strength, bottle it, and sell it -- right away. If I’m an artisanal producer, maybe I don’t have to think as much about funding stainless steel and storage, and so can think more about how I want to express my locality, my culture in that basket of botanicals. Eden Mill, for example, sitting on the east coast of Scotland, uses local sea buckthorn berries. On a trip to Spain, I was served Nordés gin from Galicia, the most northwest part of Spain, the bit that sits on top of Portugal; it tasted of lemon verbena and eucalyptus and bay leaf, botanicals native to the Galician forests. The Croatian gin I talked about with Jeff Cioletti was all about the local, native juniper berries.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>It’s an interesting twist on the complaint about global homogenization, that the world has been becoming more the same now because of -- pick your favorite bugbear: the spread of global brands, Instagram, the ubiquity of English…. Gin is the latest; starting to crowd out the local native spirit, but with a twist with the focus on native flavors. And so with all the effort put into expressing these local botanicals, I’m always surprised when bartenders want to serve them in the Spanish-style gin tonic that Jeff rightly notes seems to have taken over. After giving me a whole spiel about the care the distiller has taken to infuse the locality into the gin, they then smother the one-and-a-half ounces of that locality with 6 or 7 ounces of imported tonic and a slice or two of imported orange or lemon or lime. So no, for me, give me that local gin straight, maybe over one of those huge ice cubes so I can taste that local flavor the distiller has been working to present. I guess I’m swimming upstream against today’s cocktail culture -- more interested in the distiller’s art than the mixologist’s.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #192</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>. And while you’re at TravelCommons.com, you can check out the show notes page for a transcript and any links I’ve mentioned. Or you can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_192.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #192 — New Year Travel Planning Tips; Gin Conquers the World','','inherit','closed','closed','','4264-revision-v1','','','2023-01-26 00:03:53','2023-01-26 05:03:53','',4264,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4269',0,'revision','',0),
(4270,1,'2023-01-26 12:24:48','2023-01-26 17:24:48','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/DALL·E-2023-01-25-22.53.11-e1674709008862-300x300.png\" alt=\"Cat with paw on the rim of a gin tonic glass\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\">Can\'t get to the artisanal garnish[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Back behind the mic after 3 week of travel in Croatia and Italy.  The trip went amazingly well up to the last leg, when United\'s Newark team couldn\'t get our bags on our plane. But, I\'d stuffed <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3k4rCUy\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Apple AirTags</a> into our luggage, so we were able to track their movements \'til they got home. That experience and a listener\'s tweet led to me re-visiting my travel tech stack. We then talk to Jeff Cioletti, author of the new book <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3sQelCQ\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Imbibing for Introverts</a></em>, about the art of drinking alone. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_190.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here</strong></a><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_192.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\"> </a></strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_190.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #192: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN. Haven’t done any travel since the last episode. Instead, I’m starting the year off, as many others do, by doing travel planning, trying to lay out a 2023 travel calendar so we don’t slouch past the days and then, in say August, look back and say “Where’d the year go?”&nbsp; Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/01/25/podcast-159-planning-the-trip-of-a-lifetime-in-southeast-asia/\">episode #159</a>, I talked about how travel planning would traditionally kick in the week after Christmas -- although I’ll say that given <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/01/25/podcast-159-planning-the-trip-of-a-lifetime-in-southeast-asia/\">episode #159</a> was posted in January 2020, 2 months before the first wave of COVID lockdowns, my timing on that probably wasn’t the greatest. A year later, January 2021, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">episode #171</a>, I tried it again, ticking through 5 travel planning tips for COVID times. They were all about agility -- paying attention to cancellation rules, monitoring last-minutes changes in lockdowns and health requirements….&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But now two years later, with COVID cases down and <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/travel/passenger-volumes\">travel volumes pretty much back up to 2019 levels</a>, I expect folks will revert back to their old travel planning patterns. Back in my travel tech CIO days, right before Christmas, we’d always lock down our systems and put on extra capacity (which, let me tell you kids, back in the pre-cloud days, meant rolling actual servers, real live physical equipment uphill, through the snow, onto the data center’s raised floor) so we could handle the spikes in search volume. And while we’d see some minor spikes from the systems that travel agents used, the biggest volumes came from on-line sites like Expedia and Booking.com, sites more popular with leisure travelers than business travelers.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But now in 2023, I’m guessing that the Chinese are chief among those rushing back to their pre-COVID travel planning after the government quit their zero COVID policies. Indeed, on December 26, within a half an hour of the announcement that China’s borders were fully reopening,<a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/2022/12/27/here-are-the-countries-chinese-tourists-want-to-visit-the-most.html\"> searches for international travel on China’s biggest on-line site, Trip.com</a>, surged back to pre-COVID levels. The top search destinations were Southeast Asian countries, the US, and the UK. Now remember, before the lockdowns, <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/video/series/news-explainers/big-spending-chinese-tourists-are-coming-back-but-slowly/38552637-24FC-484A-B8A9-B6022BF9AEF0\">the Chinese were by far the largest source of international tourism spending</a> -- $255B, 70% more than second-place US, which was at $150B. So if you, like me, thought popular vacation destinations were crowded last year, just wait for this summer -- for what I’m guessing will be a second wave, maybe a Chinese tsunami of “revenge travel.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music --  Earth Soda by septahelix (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial Share-Alike  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/septahelix/34050</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Back in August, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/08/18/podcast-188-my-top-tips-to-survive-travel-chaos/\">episode #188</a> was all about tips for avoiding travel chaos. I recorded it at the tail end of a summer of travel woes, after a July 4th holiday weekend that was seen as a <em>complete train wreck</em> with 1,100 canceled flights and 4,000 delays -- to which, as we all know, Southwest said “Hold my beer” and canceled almost <em>16,000</em> flights between Christmas and New Year’s -- to which the FAA said “Wait, I wanna play too” and disrupted over 11,000 flights in o<em>ne morning</em>. And when the root cause for both was found to be old technology, all the gray-haired IT guys nodded to each other and repeated their mantra -- “technical debt is a bitch.”&nbsp; Southwest has <a href=\"https://skift.com/2023/01/14/u-s-senate-demands-southwest-explain-holiday-meltdown/\">estimated a profit hit of as much as $825 million</a> from their debacle. Just sayin’-- even just half that would’ve funded a whole lot of fixes to their old scheduling system.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But looking back at those summer tips, <em>pack so you can carry on </em>and if you can’t, then <em>spread everyone’s clothes across all your checked bags</em> were pretty much spot-on. As was the discussion in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/10/31/podcast-190-my-travel-tech-stack-imbibing-for-introverts/\">episode #190</a> about how adding <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3k4rCUy\">Apple AirTags</a> to my travel tech stack saved me time and agita when United lost my luggage. With all the stories about piles of stranded luggage from the bomb cyclone and Southwest cancellations, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3k4rCUy\">AirTags</a> have proven to be a critical “must-have” if you have to check a bag, and have an iPhone. For Android users, you’ll have to wait a bit longer; people who spelunk through new Android code think <a href=\"https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/01/google-plans-airtag-clone-will-track-devices-with-3-billion-android-phones/\">Google is working on its own AirTag-like tracker</a>.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But I think I missed a couple of things. First, I should’ve pointed back to and recapped my conversation in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/06/09/podcast-164-first-post-lockdown-trips-travel-credit-cards/\">episode #164</a> with <a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/brett-holzhauer/\">Brett Holzhauer</a>, a travel credit card analyst now at CNBC, about the trip cancellation, trip interruption, and baggage insurance that many people don’t realize they get by charging their trip on a travel credit card. Maybe the tip there is, before you book your trip, pull out the credit card benefit summaries so you know which card will give you the best protection.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The second tip I’d add is -- <em>take pictures of your checked luggage</em>, outside and the contents inside. The pictures of the bags will help you answer the “describe what your bag looks like” question on the airline’s lost baggage form. The pictures of the inside will help with that baggage insurance claim. But just the fact that we’ve got to think about all this just to have someone take us and our stuff from Point A to Point B… Jesus, what a broken system.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>In what has become a going on 2-year thread about international travel planning, I’ve talked about COVID travel rules, testing, Global Entry, passport applications… And so one of the trips we’ve been planning is to hit the tulip festival in Holland -- the country, the Netherlands, not the town in Michigan, which can screw you up if you don’t look closely at your Google search results. The tulip festival in the Netherlands is in April while the one in western Michigan is in May.&nbsp; And that initial lack of Google input box precision, using Holland rather than the Netherlands, which surfaced the May date, sent me down a whole ‘nother search path because, deep in some random brain fold, I remembered a May start date for ETIAS -- the European Travel Information and Authorisation System which is the EU’s version of the US’s ESTA, the Electronic System for Travel Authorization. Now this whole E-acronym soup is pretty much just electronically plugging the travel information gap for folks who don’t need a visa to enter a country. The US started it first, another recommendation from the 9/11 Commission, but unlike Real ID, ESTA actually got implemented -- in 2009. It started off free but is now $21 per person for two years, with most of that going to fund Brand USA, the US tourist promotion agency. The EU’s <a href=\"https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/MEMO_18_4362\">ETIAS</a> is cheaper - €7 per person for three years. It got started later, in 2018, and its go-live date has been kicked down the road a few times now -- from 2022 to May 2023 as that random neuron of mine recalled, but I guess I missed the <a href=\"https://thepointsguy.com/news/europe-new-etias-entry-fee-launch-2023/\">latest push</a>, which happened back in August, that delayed ETIAS another 6 months. So now go-live is November 2023 -- still nothing like the 17-year-and-counting delay for Real ID. So, as it turns out after losing a couple of hours of my life in a click spiral, nothing to worry about ‘til next year.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And if you have any travel worries… or stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music -- Generic Apologies by Speck (c) copyright 2022 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/speck/65664 Ft: jaspertine, Zenboy1955, Admiral Bob, Apoxode</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Travel Planning -- Book Direct or through a Third-Party?</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Chris Chufo, long-time friend of the podcast, pointed me to a <a href=\"https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/tips/booking-direct-travel-websites-flights-hotels/\">Washington Post column</a> by Christopher Elliot on the “great debate” (as he put it) between booking direct with an airline or hotel or car rental company vs. using a 3rd party, a travel agent or an on-line site like Booking.com or Airbnb. It’s an ongoing debate because there’s not a straight-forward answer, and it’s one that I personally straddle when booking travel. But when I think about it, and what the Post column didn’t really articulate, is that the decision point hinges on relationships and leverage.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>When booking flights, trains, rental cars, I almost always book direct because if there\'s a problem -- a delay, a cancellation -- I can work directly with the airline or rental company to figure out an alternative. When I booked through a 3rd party -- most recently, back in 2019 when Amex was giving a 5x multiplier on Membership Rewards points for booking through them -- and then had a flight cancellation in Charlottesville, VA, the carrier wouldn’t talk to me -- “You need to call your agent.”&nbsp; Which I did, while standing in front of the ticket counter at the airport, looking at the flight status display saying “Canceled” and telling the Amex agent the current situation because the flight status has been updated in their system yet. After which the agent said “Hold on, I need to call the airline because it’s so close to departure, I can’t do anything in the system” -- basically making the same call I just got off of. Third parties really don’t have much leverage over carriers -- airlines, trains, or even rental cars -- and there’s no real value in putting them between me and the carrier when I’m trying to move fast to swerve a delay or cancellation. Especially a carrier where I’ve got status; that marker of a relationship often delivers more than an agent can.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Hotels can be a bit different. I’ll book directly with the big chains -- Marriott, Hilton -- again, places where I have status. My experience has been that the reservation agents are more flexible when I need to make a change, and it feels like (though I don’t have hard data on this) I get upgraded more often by the front desk. And if I have, say, a billing issue with a Marriott property, Corporate Marriott will look at my lifetime titanium status and give me the benefit of the doubt. However, with independent properties where I haven’t stayed before and this is a one-time transaction, and so don’t have any leverage from an on-going relationship or, say, the potential for future business, the situation is murkier. An Airbnb or an Expedia, who <em>can</em> see future revenue from me, might be more willing to help me out with a problem. But the property has a financial incentive for me to book directly with them -- it saves them commission that could be as high as 40%.&nbsp; So if I’m going someplace new, I usually start off searching on a 3rd-party site -- Airbnb, Booking.com -- to see what’s available. If I narrow down to an independent place and I’m going to stay there for more than a day or two, I’ll flip over to their web site -- can I get a better price booking direct? I check out TripAdvisor -- can I trust them? If both are “yes’s”, then I’ll book direct -- because I still have one fall-back protector, my credit card company.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Last year, our last night in Sicily, we booked a hotel room that was maybe a 5-minute walk from Catania airport because we had an early flight out the next morning. We found it and booked it on Booking.com -- the path of least resistance. So on that last night, driving back with our friends from Taormina (before <a href=\"https://www.travelweekly.com/Travel-News/Hotel-News/White-Lotus-series-generates-interest-Sicily\"><em>The White Lotus</em> put it on the map</a>), we got to the airport but couldn’t find the hotel. Google Maps landed us in front of some apartment buildings and a big dirt parking lot. A couple of laps around the block and a long WhatsApp message stream later, we found out that what we booked wasn’t a hotel room, but one of these apartments; and when someone remotely unlocked the door, it looked a bit (no, a lot) like a <em>Third Rate Romance, Low Rent Rendezvous</em> sorta place. Our friends said “We’re <strong>not</strong> leaving you here” and we bee-lined over to a <em>real</em> airport hotel where I grabbed one of their last rooms while Irene canceled the Love Shack on Booking.com. Now, as you might imagine with the late cancellation, the Shack didn’t want to refund our payment. Not surprising. However, I was a bit surprised when Booking.com didn’t help us -- in spite of me pointing out the property description on their site was completely false.&nbsp; So, last resort, I disputed the charge with Chase. They called me. I told them the story, sent them screenshots of the property listing (which surprising(?)/ unsurprisingly(?) was still up, unchanged, on Booking.com) along with a couple of pictures I’d taken -- just in case. We’ve had this Chase card for over 10 years; it’s our main credit card so we spend <em>a lot</em> on it; and we’ve never disputed a hotel stay on it before. Leverage from what, for Chase, has been a profitable relationship. Two weeks later, we got our money back.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li> Bridge Music -- Absolutely Clear (ft Jeris &amp; Goldfish) by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/45578 Ft: Jeris, Goldfish</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Gin Conquers the World</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Here’s a bit of a change-up. Usually, when I talk about drinking on this podcast, it’s about craft beer. There’s even a Beer tab on the top of the TravelCommons website that takes you to a page with all the podcast episodes and blog posts that talk about beer -- “What Makes a Great Taproom”, “My Best Restaurants, Bars and Taprooms of 2021” (note to self, gotta write the 2022 version of that). But back in October, when interviewing Jeff Cioletti, editor-in-chief of <a href=\"https://craftspiritsmag.com/\"><em>Craft Spirits Magazine</em></a> about his new book <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3sQelCQ\"><em>Imbibing for Introverts</em></a> for <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/10/31/podcast-190-my-travel-tech-stack-imbibing-for-introverts/\" title=\"Podcast #190 — My Travel Tech Stack; Imbibing for Introverts\">episode #190</a>, we got talking about how gin has spread across the globe:<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Let me ask you this... Through your travels, have you noticed any changes, any trends over the past few years as you\'ve been sitting at bars drinking alone?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Jeff: One thing that I find incredibly striking, and this is worldwide, I had mentioned, gin.&nbsp; Gin has reconquered Europe. I was in Berlin, and I was on a panel with somebody, he said that now Germany has got 1,000 gin brands. Like five years ago, they had barely any.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: I\'ll tell you, for me it\'s gonna either be craft beer or gin. I just think about it, in Scotland and Spain.... I was just in Croatia a few weeks ago; a guy walks out, has some Croatian gin. They were doing gin tonics, so the big Spanish goblet style. I said, “Well, I\'d really like to taste that gin without all the tonic and everything. I want to see what you guys are doing with it.” And back to your point about endearing yourself sometimes, the guy was like “Really? You really want it”, and I said, “Yeah, absolutely. Just gin and glass, just give me a little bit” and he said, “Oh no, that\'s great.” And off he came and brought the regular gin tonic and then there was a little sidecar of just gin neat so I could taste it along.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Jeff: I was just in a bar in Stuttgart on Saturday night. It was called Botanical Affairs, a tiny kind of corner pocket little bar and all they have is gin. I mean it\'s not even like you go in there or you can have a beer, but they specialize in gin. I mean everything was a gin cocktail; that\'s all you could order, and they had so many different brands from all over the world. And you mentioned Spain; they get most of the credit for elevating the gin cocktail and turning it into kind of a luxurious drink. It really is, it\'s an experience now.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Yes, it\'s something, with the goblet glass and the garnish and all stuff.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Jeff: Yes, and a lot of people have adopted that; even places here in the States that are using it now. I\'ve found it in a lot of places in the UK that use it And the Spanish get all the credit for that. They didn\'t use it in Germany though, which I found interesting but everywhere else seems to.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Now there are always local/regional spirits to drink -- bourbon in Kentucky, malt whisky in Scotland and Ireland, soju in Korea, the whole range of Eastern European fruit brandies; palinka in Hungary, I mentioned Croatian rakija (pronounced rakiya) in the last episode. But it seems that gin has become the canvas, the freshly painted side of a building that younger distillers want to tag with their sense of what’s local. Maybe because it’s easier -- they don’t have to wrestle with expectations or regulations about what the local traditional spirit is.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Also maybe because it’s easier to make. Back in 2013 on our first visit to University of St Andrews with our then-high-school junior Claire, I found a local microbrewery, Eden Mill. Their story was that they wanted to be a Scotch whisky distillery, but since whisky is legally required to age in an oak barrel for at least 3 years, they needed something else to generate cash now. And since the front-end of making beer and malt whisky are pretty much the same, craft beer seemed a pretty logical way to bridge their cash gap. Fast forward a couple of years to Claire’s first year at St Andrews, Eden Mill is still making beer, still waiting for their whisky to come of age, but now they’ve added gin. The updated story -- since they already had a distillation column to make whisky, they had everything they needed to make gin. They trucked in neutral spirits -- similar to the Everclear of <em>my</em> college days, but I’m sure a bit classier -- run it through the distillation column over a basket of botanicals, dilute it to the right strength, bottle it, and sell it -- right away. If I’m an artisanal producer, maybe I don’t have to think as much about funding stainless steel and storage, and so can think more about how I want to express my locality, my culture in that basket of botanicals. Eden Mill, for example, sitting on the east coast of Scotland, uses local sea buckthorn berries. On a trip to Spain, I was served Nordés gin from Galicia, the most northwest part of Spain, the bit that sits on top of Portugal; it tasted of lemon verbena and eucalyptus and bay leaf, botanicals native to the Galician forests. The Croatian gin I talked about with Jeff Cioletti was all about the local, native juniper berries.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>It’s an interesting twist on the complaint about global homogenization, that the world has been becoming more the same now because of -- pick your favorite bugbear: the spread of global brands, Instagram, the ubiquity of English…. Gin is the latest; starting to crowd out the local native spirit, but with a twist with the focus on native flavors. And so with all the effort put into expressing these local botanicals, I’m always surprised when bartenders want to serve them in the Spanish-style gin tonic that Jeff rightly notes seems to have taken over. After giving me a whole spiel about the care the distiller has taken to infuse the locality into the gin, they then smother the one-and-a-half ounces of that locality with 6 or 7 ounces of imported tonic and a slice or two of imported orange or lemon or lime. So no, for me, give me that local gin straight, maybe over one of those huge ice cubes so I can taste that local flavor the distiller has been working to present. I guess I’m swimming upstream against today’s cocktail culture -- more interested in the distiller’s art than the mixologist’s.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #192</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>. And while you’re at TravelCommons.com, you can check out the show notes page for a transcript and any links I’ve mentioned. Or you can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_192.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #192 — New Year Travel Planning Tips; Gin Conquers the World','','inherit','closed','closed','','4264-revision-v1','','','2023-01-26 12:24:48','2023-01-26 17:24:48','',4264,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4270',0,'revision','',0),
(4271,1,'2023-01-26 19:27:49','2023-01-27 00:27:49','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/DALL·E-2023-01-25-22.53.11-e1674709008862-300x300.png\" alt=\"Cat with paw on the rim of a gin tonic glass\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\">Can\'t get to the artisanal garnish[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>With COVID travel restrictions gone, I expect people to revert back to the pattern where January is a big travel planning month. I wade into the debate between booking direct with travel providers vs. booking with agents and 3rd-party sites. I see how well my travel tips did during the Southwest cancellation chaos, and then pull out a little more of my conversation with Jeff Cioletti, author of the new book <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3sQelCQ\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Imbibing for Introverts</a></em>; this time about how gin is going global with a local twist. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_190.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here</strong></a><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_192.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\"> </a></strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_190.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #192: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN. Haven’t done any travel since the last episode. Instead, I’m starting the year off, as many others do, by doing travel planning, trying to lay out a 2023 travel calendar so we don’t slouch past the days and then, in say August, look back and say “Where’d the year go?”&nbsp; Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/01/25/podcast-159-planning-the-trip-of-a-lifetime-in-southeast-asia/\">episode #159</a>, I talked about how travel planning would traditionally kick in the week after Christmas -- although I’ll say that given <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/01/25/podcast-159-planning-the-trip-of-a-lifetime-in-southeast-asia/\">episode #159</a> was posted in January 2020, 2 months before the first wave of COVID lockdowns, my timing on that probably wasn’t the greatest. A year later, January 2021, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">episode #171</a>, I tried it again, ticking through 5 travel planning tips for COVID times. They were all about agility -- paying attention to cancellation rules, monitoring last-minutes changes in lockdowns and health requirements….&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But now two years later, with COVID cases down and <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/travel/passenger-volumes\">travel volumes pretty much back up to 2019 levels</a>, I expect folks will revert back to their old travel planning patterns. Back in my travel tech CIO days, right before Christmas, we’d always lock down our systems and put on extra capacity (which, let me tell you kids, back in the pre-cloud days, meant rolling actual servers, real live physical equipment uphill, through the snow, onto the data center’s raised floor) so we could handle the spikes in search volume. And while we’d see some minor spikes from the systems that travel agents used, the biggest volumes came from on-line sites like Expedia and Booking.com, sites more popular with leisure travelers than business travelers.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But now in 2023, I’m guessing that the Chinese are chief among those rushing back to their pre-COVID travel planning after the government quit their zero COVID policies. Indeed, on December 26, within a half an hour of the announcement that China’s borders were fully reopening,<a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/2022/12/27/here-are-the-countries-chinese-tourists-want-to-visit-the-most.html\"> searches for international travel on China’s biggest on-line site, Trip.com</a>, surged back to pre-COVID levels. The top search destinations were Southeast Asian countries, the US, and the UK. Now remember, before the lockdowns, <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/video/series/news-explainers/big-spending-chinese-tourists-are-coming-back-but-slowly/38552637-24FC-484A-B8A9-B6022BF9AEF0\">the Chinese were by far the largest source of international tourism spending</a> -- $255B, 70% more than second-place US, which was at $150B. So if you, like me, thought popular vacation destinations were crowded last year, just wait for this summer -- for what I’m guessing will be a second wave, maybe a Chinese tsunami of “revenge travel.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music --  Earth Soda by septahelix (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial Share-Alike  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/septahelix/34050</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Back in August, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/08/18/podcast-188-my-top-tips-to-survive-travel-chaos/\">episode #188</a> was all about tips for avoiding travel chaos. I recorded it at the tail end of a summer of travel woes, after a July 4th holiday weekend that was seen as a <em>complete train wreck</em> with 1,100 canceled flights and 4,000 delays -- to which, as we all know, Southwest said “Hold my beer” and canceled almost <em>16,000</em> flights between Christmas and New Year’s -- to which the FAA said “Wait, I wanna play too” and disrupted over 11,000 flights in o<em>ne morning</em>. And when the root cause for both was found to be old technology, all the gray-haired IT guys nodded to each other and repeated their mantra -- “technical debt is a bitch.”&nbsp; Southwest has <a href=\"https://skift.com/2023/01/14/u-s-senate-demands-southwest-explain-holiday-meltdown/\">estimated a profit hit of as much as $825 million</a> from their debacle. Just sayin’-- even just half that would’ve funded a whole lot of fixes to their old scheduling system.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But looking back at those summer tips, <em>pack so you can carry on </em>and if you can’t, then <em>spread everyone’s clothes across all your checked bags</em> were pretty much spot-on. As was the discussion in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/10/31/podcast-190-my-travel-tech-stack-imbibing-for-introverts/\">episode #190</a> about how adding <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3k4rCUy\">Apple AirTags</a> to my travel tech stack saved me time and agita when United lost my luggage. With all the stories about piles of stranded luggage from the bomb cyclone and Southwest cancellations, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3k4rCUy\">AirTags</a> have proven to be a critical “must-have” if you have to check a bag, and have an iPhone. For Android users, you’ll have to wait a bit longer; people who spelunk through new Android code think <a href=\"https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/01/google-plans-airtag-clone-will-track-devices-with-3-billion-android-phones/\">Google is working on its own AirTag-like tracker</a>.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But I think I missed a couple of things. First, I should’ve pointed back to and recapped my conversation in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/06/09/podcast-164-first-post-lockdown-trips-travel-credit-cards/\">episode #164</a> with <a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/brett-holzhauer/\">Brett Holzhauer</a>, a travel credit card analyst now at CNBC, about the trip cancellation, trip interruption, and baggage insurance that many people don’t realize they get by charging their trip on a travel credit card. Maybe the tip there is, before you book your trip, pull out the credit card benefit summaries so you know which card will give you the best protection.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The second tip I’d add is -- <em>take pictures of your checked luggage</em>, outside and the contents inside. The pictures of the bags will help you answer the “describe what your bag looks like” question on the airline’s lost baggage form. The pictures of the inside will help with that baggage insurance claim. But just the fact that we’ve got to think about all this just to have someone take us and our stuff from Point A to Point B… Jesus, what a broken system.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>In what has become a going on 2-year thread about international travel planning, I’ve talked about COVID travel rules, testing, Global Entry, passport applications… And so one of the trips we’ve been planning is to hit the tulip festival in Holland -- the country, the Netherlands, not the town in Michigan, which can screw you up if you don’t look closely at your Google search results. The tulip festival in the Netherlands is in April while the one in western Michigan is in May.&nbsp; And that initial lack of Google input box precision, using Holland rather than the Netherlands, which surfaced the May date, sent me down a whole ‘nother search path because, deep in some random brain fold, I remembered a May start date for ETIAS -- the European Travel Information and Authorisation System which is the EU’s version of the US’s ESTA, the Electronic System for Travel Authorization. Now this whole E-acronym soup is pretty much just electronically plugging the travel information gap for folks who don’t need a visa to enter a country. The US started it first, another recommendation from the 9/11 Commission, but unlike Real ID, ESTA actually got implemented -- in 2009. It started off free but is now $21 per person for two years, with most of that going to fund Brand USA, the US tourist promotion agency. The EU’s <a href=\"https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/MEMO_18_4362\">ETIAS</a> is cheaper - €7 per person for three years. It got started later, in 2018, and its go-live date has been kicked down the road a few times now -- from 2022 to May 2023 as that random neuron of mine recalled, but I guess I missed the <a href=\"https://thepointsguy.com/news/europe-new-etias-entry-fee-launch-2023/\">latest push</a>, which happened back in August, that delayed ETIAS another 6 months. So now go-live is November 2023 -- still nothing like the 17-year-and-counting delay for Real ID. So, as it turns out after losing a couple of hours of my life in a click spiral, nothing to worry about ‘til next year.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And if you have any travel worries… or stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music -- Generic Apologies by Speck (c) copyright 2022 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/speck/65664 Ft: jaspertine, Zenboy1955, Admiral Bob, Apoxode</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Travel Planning -- Book Direct or through a Third-Party?</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Chris Chufo, long-time friend of the podcast, pointed me to a <a href=\"https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/tips/booking-direct-travel-websites-flights-hotels/\">Washington Post column</a> by Christopher Elliot on the “great debate” (as he put it) between booking direct with an airline or hotel or car rental company vs. using a 3rd party, a travel agent or an on-line site like Booking.com or Airbnb. It’s an ongoing debate because there’s not a straight-forward answer, and it’s one that I personally straddle when booking travel. But when I think about it, and what the Post column didn’t really articulate, is that the decision point hinges on relationships and leverage.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>When booking flights, trains, rental cars, I almost always book direct because if there\'s a problem -- a delay, a cancellation -- I can work directly with the airline or rental company to figure out an alternative. When I booked through a 3rd party -- most recently, back in 2019 when Amex was giving a 5x multiplier on Membership Rewards points for booking through them -- and then had a flight cancellation in Charlottesville, VA, the carrier wouldn’t talk to me -- “You need to call your agent.”&nbsp; Which I did, while standing in front of the ticket counter at the airport, looking at the flight status display saying “Canceled” and telling the Amex agent the current situation because the flight status has been updated in their system yet. After which the agent said “Hold on, I need to call the airline because it’s so close to departure, I can’t do anything in the system” -- basically making the same call I just got off of. Third parties really don’t have much leverage over carriers -- airlines, trains, or even rental cars -- and there’s no real value in putting them between me and the carrier when I’m trying to move fast to swerve a delay or cancellation. Especially a carrier where I’ve got status; that marker of a relationship often delivers more than an agent can.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Hotels can be a bit different. I’ll book directly with the big chains -- Marriott, Hilton -- again, places where I have status. My experience has been that the reservation agents are more flexible when I need to make a change, and it feels like (though I don’t have hard data on this) I get upgraded more often by the front desk. And if I have, say, a billing issue with a Marriott property, Corporate Marriott will look at my lifetime titanium status and give me the benefit of the doubt. However, with independent properties where I haven’t stayed before and this is a one-time transaction, and so don’t have any leverage from an on-going relationship or, say, the potential for future business, the situation is murkier. An Airbnb or an Expedia, who <em>can</em> see future revenue from me, might be more willing to help me out with a problem. But the property has a financial incentive for me to book directly with them -- it saves them commission that could be as high as 40%.&nbsp; So if I’m going someplace new, I usually start off searching on a 3rd-party site -- Airbnb, Booking.com -- to see what’s available. If I narrow down to an independent place and I’m going to stay there for more than a day or two, I’ll flip over to their web site -- can I get a better price booking direct? I check out TripAdvisor -- can I trust them? If both are “yes’s”, then I’ll book direct -- because I still have one fall-back protector, my credit card company.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Last year, our last night in Sicily, we booked a hotel room that was maybe a 5-minute walk from Catania airport because we had an early flight out the next morning. We found it and booked it on Booking.com -- the path of least resistance. So on that last night, driving back with our friends from Taormina (before <a href=\"https://www.travelweekly.com/Travel-News/Hotel-News/White-Lotus-series-generates-interest-Sicily\"><em>The White Lotus</em> put it on the map</a>), we got to the airport but couldn’t find the hotel. Google Maps landed us in front of some apartment buildings and a big dirt parking lot. A couple of laps around the block and a long WhatsApp message stream later, we found out that what we booked wasn’t a hotel room, but one of these apartments; and when someone remotely unlocked the door, it looked a bit (no, a lot) like a <em>Third Rate Romance, Low Rent Rendezvous</em> sorta place. Our friends said “We’re <strong>not</strong> leaving you here” and we bee-lined over to a <em>real</em> airport hotel where I grabbed one of their last rooms while Irene canceled the Love Shack on Booking.com. Now, as you might imagine with the late cancellation, the Shack didn’t want to refund our payment. Not surprising. However, I was a bit surprised when Booking.com didn’t help us -- in spite of me pointing out the property description on their site was completely false.&nbsp; So, last resort, I disputed the charge with Chase. They called me. I told them the story, sent them screenshots of the property listing (which surprising(?)/ unsurprisingly(?) was still up, unchanged, on Booking.com) along with a couple of pictures I’d taken -- just in case. We’ve had this Chase card for over 10 years; it’s our main credit card so we spend <em>a lot</em> on it; and we’ve never disputed a hotel stay on it before. Leverage from what, for Chase, has been a profitable relationship. Two weeks later, we got our money back.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li> Bridge Music -- Absolutely Clear (ft Jeris &amp; Goldfish) by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/45578 Ft: Jeris, Goldfish</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Gin Conquers the World</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Here’s a bit of a change-up. Usually, when I talk about drinking on this podcast, it’s about craft beer. There’s even a Beer tab on the top of the TravelCommons website that takes you to a page with all the podcast episodes and blog posts that talk about beer -- “What Makes a Great Taproom”, “My Best Restaurants, Bars and Taprooms of 2021” (note to self, gotta write the 2022 version of that). But back in October, when interviewing Jeff Cioletti, editor-in-chief of <a href=\"https://craftspiritsmag.com/\"><em>Craft Spirits Magazine</em></a> about his new book <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3sQelCQ\"><em>Imbibing for Introverts</em></a> for <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/10/31/podcast-190-my-travel-tech-stack-imbibing-for-introverts/\" title=\"Podcast #190 — My Travel Tech Stack; Imbibing for Introverts\">episode #190</a>, we got talking about how gin has spread across the globe:<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Let me ask you this... Through your travels, have you noticed any changes, any trends over the past few years as you\'ve been sitting at bars drinking alone?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Jeff: One thing that I find incredibly striking, and this is worldwide, I had mentioned, gin.&nbsp; Gin has reconquered Europe. I was in Berlin, and I was on a panel with somebody, he said that now Germany has got 1,000 gin brands. Like five years ago, they had barely any.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: I\'ll tell you, for me it\'s gonna either be craft beer or gin. I just think about it, in Scotland and Spain.... I was just in Croatia a few weeks ago; a guy walks out, has some Croatian gin. They were doing gin tonics, so the big Spanish goblet style. I said, “Well, I\'d really like to taste that gin without all the tonic and everything. I want to see what you guys are doing with it.” And back to your point about endearing yourself sometimes, the guy was like “Really? You really want it”, and I said, “Yeah, absolutely. Just gin and glass, just give me a little bit” and he said, “Oh no, that\'s great.” And off he came and brought the regular gin tonic and then there was a little sidecar of just gin neat so I could taste it along.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Jeff: I was just in a bar in Stuttgart on Saturday night. It was called Botanical Affairs, a tiny kind of corner pocket little bar and all they have is gin. I mean it\'s not even like you go in there or you can have a beer, but they specialize in gin. I mean everything was a gin cocktail; that\'s all you could order, and they had so many different brands from all over the world. And you mentioned Spain; they get most of the credit for elevating the gin cocktail and turning it into kind of a luxurious drink. It really is, it\'s an experience now.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Yes, it\'s something, with the goblet glass and the garnish and all stuff.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Jeff: Yes, and a lot of people have adopted that; even places here in the States that are using it now. I\'ve found it in a lot of places in the UK that use it And the Spanish get all the credit for that. They didn\'t use it in Germany though, which I found interesting but everywhere else seems to.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Now there are always local/regional spirits to drink -- bourbon in Kentucky, malt whisky in Scotland and Ireland, soju in Korea, the whole range of Eastern European fruit brandies; palinka in Hungary, I mentioned Croatian rakija (pronounced rakiya) in the last episode. But it seems that gin has become the canvas, the freshly painted side of a building that younger distillers want to tag with their sense of what’s local. Maybe because it’s easier -- they don’t have to wrestle with expectations or regulations about what the local traditional spirit is.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Also maybe because it’s easier to make. Back in 2013 on our first visit to University of St Andrews with our then-high-school junior Claire, I found a local microbrewery, Eden Mill. Their story was that they wanted to be a Scotch whisky distillery, but since whisky is legally required to age in an oak barrel for at least 3 years, they needed something else to generate cash now. And since the front-end of making beer and malt whisky are pretty much the same, craft beer seemed a pretty logical way to bridge their cash gap. Fast forward a couple of years to Claire’s first year at St Andrews, Eden Mill is still making beer, still waiting for their whisky to come of age, but now they’ve added gin. The updated story -- since they already had a distillation column to make whisky, they had everything they needed to make gin. They trucked in neutral spirits -- similar to the Everclear of <em>my</em> college days, but I’m sure a bit classier -- run it through the distillation column over a basket of botanicals, dilute it to the right strength, bottle it, and sell it -- right away. If I’m an artisanal producer, maybe I don’t have to think as much about funding stainless steel and storage, and so can think more about how I want to express my locality, my culture in that basket of botanicals. Eden Mill, for example, sitting on the east coast of Scotland, uses local sea buckthorn berries. On a trip to Spain, I was served Nordés gin from Galicia, the most northwest part of Spain, the bit that sits on top of Portugal; it tasted of lemon verbena and eucalyptus and bay leaf, botanicals native to the Galician forests. The Croatian gin I talked about with Jeff Cioletti was all about the local, native juniper berries.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>It’s an interesting twist on the complaint about global homogenization, that the world has been becoming more the same now because of -- pick your favorite bugbear: the spread of global brands, Instagram, the ubiquity of English…. Gin is the latest; starting to crowd out the local native spirit, but with a twist with the focus on native flavors. And so with all the effort put into expressing these local botanicals, I’m always surprised when bartenders want to serve them in the Spanish-style gin tonic that Jeff rightly notes seems to have taken over. After giving me a whole spiel about the care the distiller has taken to infuse the locality into the gin, they then smother the one-and-a-half ounces of that locality with 6 or 7 ounces of imported tonic and a slice or two of imported orange or lemon or lime. So no, for me, give me that local gin straight, maybe over one of those huge ice cubes so I can taste that local flavor the distiller has been working to present. I guess I’m swimming upstream against today’s cocktail culture -- more interested in the distiller’s art than the mixologist’s.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #192</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>. And while you’re at TravelCommons.com, you can check out the show notes page for a transcript and any links I’ve mentioned. Or you can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_192.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #192 — New Year Travel Planning Tips; Gin Conquers the World','Back to regular travel planning patterns? Book direct with travel providers or use a 3rd-party? Unpacking Southwest\'s cancellation chaos. Gin goes global with a local twist.','inherit','closed','closed','','4264-revision-v1','','','2023-01-26 19:27:49','2023-01-27 00:27:49','',4264,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4271',0,'revision','',0),
(4273,1,'2023-01-26 20:00:51','2023-01-27 01:00:51','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/DALL·E-2023-01-25-22.53.11-e1674709008862-300x300.png\" alt=\"Cat with paw on the rim of a gin tonic glass\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\">Can\'t get to the artisanal garnish[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>With COVID travel restrictions gone, I expect people to revert back to their old ways where January is the biggest travel planning month. I wade into the debate between booking direct with travel providers vs. booking with agents and 3rd-party sites. I see how well my travel tips did during the Southwest cancellation chaos, and then pull out a little more of my conversation with Jeff Cioletti, author of the new book <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3sQelCQ\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Imbibing for Introverts</a></em>; this time about how gin is going global with a local twist. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_190.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here</strong></a><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_192.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\"> </a></strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_190.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #192: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN. Haven’t done any travel since the last episode. Instead, I’m starting the year off, as many others do, by doing travel planning, trying to lay out a 2023 travel calendar so we don’t slouch past the days and then, in say August, look back and say “Where’d the year go?”&nbsp; Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/01/25/podcast-159-planning-the-trip-of-a-lifetime-in-southeast-asia/\">episode #159</a>, I talked about how travel planning would traditionally kick in the week after Christmas -- although I’ll say that given <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/01/25/podcast-159-planning-the-trip-of-a-lifetime-in-southeast-asia/\">episode #159</a> was posted in January 2020, 2 months before the first wave of COVID lockdowns, my timing on that probably wasn’t the greatest. A year later, January 2021, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">episode #171</a>, I tried it again, ticking through 5 travel planning tips for COVID times. They were all about agility -- paying attention to cancellation rules, monitoring last-minutes changes in lockdowns and health requirements….&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But now two years later, with COVID cases down and <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/travel/passenger-volumes\">travel volumes pretty much back up to 2019 levels</a>, I expect folks will revert back to their old travel planning patterns. Back in my travel tech CIO days, right before Christmas, we’d always lock down our systems and put on extra capacity (which, let me tell you kids, back in the pre-cloud days, meant rolling actual servers, real live physical equipment uphill, through the snow, onto the data center’s raised floor) so we could handle the spikes in search volume. And while we’d see some minor spikes from the systems that travel agents used, the biggest volumes came from on-line sites like Expedia and Booking.com, sites more popular with leisure travelers than business travelers.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But now in 2023, I’m guessing that the Chinese are chief among those rushing back to their pre-COVID travel planning after the government quit their zero COVID policies. Indeed, on December 26, within a half an hour of the announcement that China’s borders were fully reopening,<a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/2022/12/27/here-are-the-countries-chinese-tourists-want-to-visit-the-most.html\"> searches for international travel on China’s biggest on-line site, Trip.com</a>, surged back to pre-COVID levels. The top search destinations were Southeast Asian countries, the US, and the UK. Now remember, before the lockdowns, <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/video/series/news-explainers/big-spending-chinese-tourists-are-coming-back-but-slowly/38552637-24FC-484A-B8A9-B6022BF9AEF0\">the Chinese were by far the largest source of international tourism spending</a> -- $255B, 70% more than second-place US, which was at $150B. So if you, like me, thought popular vacation destinations were crowded last year, just wait for this summer -- for what I’m guessing will be a second wave, maybe a Chinese tsunami of “revenge travel.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music --  Earth Soda by septahelix (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial Share-Alike  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/septahelix/34050</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Back in August, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/08/18/podcast-188-my-top-tips-to-survive-travel-chaos/\">episode #188</a> was all about tips for avoiding travel chaos. I recorded it at the tail end of a summer of travel woes, after a July 4th holiday weekend that was seen as a <em>complete train wreck</em> with 1,100 canceled flights and 4,000 delays -- to which, as we all know, Southwest said “Hold my beer” and canceled almost <em>16,000</em> flights between Christmas and New Year’s -- to which the FAA said “Wait, I wanna play too” and disrupted over 11,000 flights in o<em>ne morning</em>. And when the root cause for both was found to be old technology, all the gray-haired IT guys nodded to each other and repeated their mantra -- “technical debt is a bitch.”&nbsp; Southwest has <a href=\"https://skift.com/2023/01/14/u-s-senate-demands-southwest-explain-holiday-meltdown/\">estimated a profit hit of as much as $825 million</a> from their debacle. Just sayin’-- even just half that would’ve funded a whole lot of fixes to their old scheduling system.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But looking back at those summer tips, <em>pack so you can carry on </em>and if you can’t, then <em>spread everyone’s clothes across all your checked bags</em> were pretty much spot-on. As was the discussion in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/10/31/podcast-190-my-travel-tech-stack-imbibing-for-introverts/\">episode #190</a> about how adding <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3k4rCUy\">Apple AirTags</a> to my travel tech stack saved me time and agita when United lost my luggage. With all the stories about piles of stranded luggage from the bomb cyclone and Southwest cancellations, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3k4rCUy\">AirTags</a> have proven to be a critical “must-have” if you have to check a bag, and have an iPhone. For Android users, you’ll have to wait a bit longer; people who spelunk through new Android code think <a href=\"https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/01/google-plans-airtag-clone-will-track-devices-with-3-billion-android-phones/\">Google is working on its own AirTag-like tracker</a>.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But I think I missed a couple of things. First, I should’ve pointed back to and recapped my conversation in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/06/09/podcast-164-first-post-lockdown-trips-travel-credit-cards/\">episode #164</a> with <a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/brett-holzhauer/\">Brett Holzhauer</a>, a travel credit card analyst now at CNBC, about the trip cancellation, trip interruption, and baggage insurance that many people don’t realize they get by charging their trip on a travel credit card. Maybe the tip there is, before you book your trip, pull out the credit card benefit summaries so you know which card will give you the best protection.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The second tip I’d add is -- <em>take pictures of your checked luggage</em>, outside and the contents inside. The pictures of the bags will help you answer the “describe what your bag looks like” question on the airline’s lost baggage form. The pictures of the inside will help with that baggage insurance claim. But just the fact that we’ve got to think about all this just to have someone take us and our stuff from Point A to Point B… Jesus, what a broken system.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>In what has become a going on 2-year thread about international travel planning, I’ve talked about COVID travel rules, testing, Global Entry, passport applications… And so one of the trips we’ve been planning is to hit the tulip festival in Holland -- the country, the Netherlands, not the town in Michigan, which can screw you up if you don’t look closely at your Google search results. The tulip festival in the Netherlands is in April while the one in western Michigan is in May.&nbsp; And that initial lack of Google input box precision, using Holland rather than the Netherlands, which surfaced the May date, sent me down a whole ‘nother search path because, deep in some random brain fold, I remembered a May start date for ETIAS -- the European Travel Information and Authorisation System which is the EU’s version of the US’s ESTA, the Electronic System for Travel Authorization. Now this whole E-acronym soup is pretty much just electronically plugging the travel information gap for folks who don’t need a visa to enter a country. The US started it first, another recommendation from the 9/11 Commission, but unlike Real ID, ESTA actually got implemented -- in 2009. It started off free but is now $21 per person for two years, with most of that going to fund Brand USA, the US tourist promotion agency. The EU’s <a href=\"https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/MEMO_18_4362\">ETIAS</a> is cheaper - €7 per person for three years. It got started later, in 2018, and its go-live date has been kicked down the road a few times now -- from 2022 to May 2023 as that random neuron of mine recalled, but I guess I missed the <a href=\"https://thepointsguy.com/news/europe-new-etias-entry-fee-launch-2023/\">latest push</a>, which happened back in August, that delayed ETIAS another 6 months. So now go-live is November 2023 -- still nothing like the 17-year-and-counting delay for Real ID. So, as it turns out after losing a couple of hours of my life in a click spiral, nothing to worry about ‘til next year.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And if you have any travel worries… or stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music -- Generic Apologies by Speck (c) copyright 2022 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/speck/65664 Ft: jaspertine, Zenboy1955, Admiral Bob, Apoxode</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Travel Planning -- Book Direct or through a Third-Party?</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Chris Chufo, long-time friend of the podcast, pointed me to a <a href=\"https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/tips/booking-direct-travel-websites-flights-hotels/\">Washington Post column</a> by Christopher Elliot on the “great debate” (as he put it) between booking direct with an airline or hotel or car rental company vs. using a 3rd party, a travel agent or an on-line site like Booking.com or Airbnb. It’s an ongoing debate because there’s not a straight-forward answer, and it’s one that I personally straddle when booking travel. But when I think about it, and what the Post column didn’t really articulate, is that the decision point hinges on relationships and leverage.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>When booking flights, trains, rental cars, I almost always book direct because if there\'s a problem -- a delay, a cancellation -- I can work directly with the airline or rental company to figure out an alternative. When I booked through a 3rd party -- most recently, back in 2019 when Amex was giving a 5x multiplier on Membership Rewards points for booking through them -- and then had a flight cancellation in Charlottesville, VA, the carrier wouldn’t talk to me -- “You need to call your agent.”&nbsp; Which I did, while standing in front of the ticket counter at the airport, looking at the flight status display saying “Canceled” and telling the Amex agent the current situation because the flight status has been updated in their system yet. After which the agent said “Hold on, I need to call the airline because it’s so close to departure, I can’t do anything in the system” -- basically making the same call I just got off of. Third parties really don’t have much leverage over carriers -- airlines, trains, or even rental cars -- and there’s no real value in putting them between me and the carrier when I’m trying to move fast to swerve a delay or cancellation. Especially a carrier where I’ve got status; that marker of a relationship often delivers more than an agent can.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Hotels can be a bit different. I’ll book directly with the big chains -- Marriott, Hilton -- again, places where I have status. My experience has been that the reservation agents are more flexible when I need to make a change, and it feels like (though I don’t have hard data on this) I get upgraded more often by the front desk. And if I have, say, a billing issue with a Marriott property, Corporate Marriott will look at my lifetime titanium status and give me the benefit of the doubt. However, with independent properties where I haven’t stayed before and this is a one-time transaction, and so don’t have any leverage from an on-going relationship or, say, the potential for future business, the situation is murkier. An Airbnb or an Expedia, who <em>can</em> see future revenue from me, might be more willing to help me out with a problem. But the property has a financial incentive for me to book directly with them -- it saves them commission that could be as high as 40%.&nbsp; So if I’m going someplace new, I usually start off searching on a 3rd-party site -- Airbnb, Booking.com -- to see what’s available. If I narrow down to an independent place and I’m going to stay there for more than a day or two, I’ll flip over to their web site -- can I get a better price booking direct? I check out TripAdvisor -- can I trust them? If both are “yes’s”, then I’ll book direct -- because I still have one fall-back protector, my credit card company.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Last year, our last night in Sicily, we booked a hotel room that was maybe a 5-minute walk from Catania airport because we had an early flight out the next morning. We found it and booked it on Booking.com -- the path of least resistance. So on that last night, driving back with our friends from Taormina (before <a href=\"https://www.travelweekly.com/Travel-News/Hotel-News/White-Lotus-series-generates-interest-Sicily\"><em>The White Lotus</em> put it on the map</a>), we got to the airport but couldn’t find the hotel. Google Maps landed us in front of some apartment buildings and a big dirt parking lot. A couple of laps around the block and a long WhatsApp message stream later, we found out that what we booked wasn’t a hotel room, but one of these apartments; and when someone remotely unlocked the door, it looked a bit (no, a lot) like a <em>Third Rate Romance, Low Rent Rendezvous</em> sorta place. Our friends said “We’re <strong>not</strong> leaving you here” and we bee-lined over to a <em>real</em> airport hotel where I grabbed one of their last rooms while Irene canceled the Love Shack on Booking.com. Now, as you might imagine with the late cancellation, the Shack didn’t want to refund our payment. Not surprising. However, I was a bit surprised when Booking.com didn’t help us -- in spite of me pointing out the property description on their site was completely false.&nbsp; So, last resort, I disputed the charge with Chase. They called me. I told them the story, sent them screenshots of the property listing (which surprising(?)/ unsurprisingly(?) was still up, unchanged, on Booking.com) along with a couple of pictures I’d taken -- just in case. We’ve had this Chase card for over 10 years; it’s our main credit card so we spend <em>a lot</em> on it; and we’ve never disputed a hotel stay on it before. Leverage from what, for Chase, has been a profitable relationship. Two weeks later, we got our money back.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li> Bridge Music -- Absolutely Clear (ft Jeris &amp; Goldfish) by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/45578 Ft: Jeris, Goldfish</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Gin Conquers the World</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Here’s a bit of a change-up. Usually, when I talk about drinking on this podcast, it’s about craft beer. There’s even a Beer tab on the top of the TravelCommons website that takes you to a page with all the podcast episodes and blog posts that talk about beer -- “What Makes a Great Taproom”, “My Best Restaurants, Bars and Taprooms of 2021” (note to self, gotta write the 2022 version of that). But back in October, when interviewing Jeff Cioletti, editor-in-chief of <a href=\"https://craftspiritsmag.com/\"><em>Craft Spirits Magazine</em></a> about his new book <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3sQelCQ\"><em>Imbibing for Introverts</em></a> for <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/10/31/podcast-190-my-travel-tech-stack-imbibing-for-introverts/\" title=\"Podcast #190 — My Travel Tech Stack; Imbibing for Introverts\">episode #190</a>, we got talking about how gin has spread across the globe:<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Let me ask you this... Through your travels, have you noticed any changes, any trends over the past few years as you\'ve been sitting at bars drinking alone?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Jeff: One thing that I find incredibly striking, and this is worldwide, I had mentioned, gin.&nbsp; Gin has reconquered Europe. I was in Berlin, and I was on a panel with somebody, he said that now Germany has got 1,000 gin brands. Like five years ago, they had barely any.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: I\'ll tell you, for me it\'s gonna either be craft beer or gin. I just think about it, in Scotland and Spain.... I was just in Croatia a few weeks ago; a guy walks out, has some Croatian gin. They were doing gin tonics, so the big Spanish goblet style. I said, “Well, I\'d really like to taste that gin without all the tonic and everything. I want to see what you guys are doing with it.” And back to your point about endearing yourself sometimes, the guy was like “Really? You really want it”, and I said, “Yeah, absolutely. Just gin and glass, just give me a little bit” and he said, “Oh no, that\'s great.” And off he came and brought the regular gin tonic and then there was a little sidecar of just gin neat so I could taste it along.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Jeff: I was just in a bar in Stuttgart on Saturday night. It was called Botanical Affairs, a tiny kind of corner pocket little bar and all they have is gin. I mean it\'s not even like you go in there or you can have a beer, but they specialize in gin. I mean everything was a gin cocktail; that\'s all you could order, and they had so many different brands from all over the world. And you mentioned Spain; they get most of the credit for elevating the gin cocktail and turning it into kind of a luxurious drink. It really is, it\'s an experience now.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Yes, it\'s something, with the goblet glass and the garnish and all stuff.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Jeff: Yes, and a lot of people have adopted that; even places here in the States that are using it now. I\'ve found it in a lot of places in the UK that use it And the Spanish get all the credit for that. They didn\'t use it in Germany though, which I found interesting but everywhere else seems to.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Now there are always local/regional spirits to drink -- bourbon in Kentucky, malt whisky in Scotland and Ireland, soju in Korea, the whole range of Eastern European fruit brandies; palinka in Hungary, I mentioned Croatian rakija (pronounced rakiya) in the last episode. But it seems that gin has become the canvas, the freshly painted side of a building that younger distillers want to tag with their sense of what’s local. Maybe because it’s easier -- they don’t have to wrestle with expectations or regulations about what the local traditional spirit is.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Also maybe because it’s easier to make. Back in 2013 on our first visit to University of St Andrews with our then-high-school junior Claire, I found a local microbrewery, Eden Mill. Their story was that they wanted to be a Scotch whisky distillery, but since whisky is legally required to age in an oak barrel for at least 3 years, they needed something else to generate cash now. And since the front-end of making beer and malt whisky are pretty much the same, craft beer seemed a pretty logical way to bridge their cash gap. Fast forward a couple of years to Claire’s first year at St Andrews, Eden Mill is still making beer, still waiting for their whisky to come of age, but now they’ve added gin. The updated story -- since they already had a distillation column to make whisky, they had everything they needed to make gin. They trucked in neutral spirits -- similar to the Everclear of <em>my</em> college days, but I’m sure a bit classier -- run it through the distillation column over a basket of botanicals, dilute it to the right strength, bottle it, and sell it -- right away. If I’m an artisanal producer, maybe I don’t have to think as much about funding stainless steel and storage, and so can think more about how I want to express my locality, my culture in that basket of botanicals. Eden Mill, for example, sitting on the east coast of Scotland, uses local sea buckthorn berries. On a trip to Spain, I was served Nordés gin from Galicia, the most northwest part of Spain, the bit that sits on top of Portugal; it tasted of lemon verbena and eucalyptus and bay leaf, botanicals native to the Galician forests. The Croatian gin I talked about with Jeff Cioletti was all about the local, native juniper berries.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>It’s an interesting twist on the complaint about global homogenization, that the world has been becoming more the same now because of -- pick your favorite bugbear: the spread of global brands, Instagram, the ubiquity of English…. Gin is the latest; starting to crowd out the local native spirit, but with a twist with the focus on native flavors. And so with all the effort put into expressing these local botanicals, I’m always surprised when bartenders want to serve them in the Spanish-style gin tonic that Jeff rightly notes seems to have taken over. After giving me a whole spiel about the care the distiller has taken to infuse the locality into the gin, they then smother the one-and-a-half ounces of that locality with 6 or 7 ounces of imported tonic and a slice or two of imported orange or lemon or lime. So no, for me, give me that local gin straight, maybe over one of those huge ice cubes so I can taste that local flavor the distiller has been working to present. I guess I’m swimming upstream against today’s cocktail culture -- more interested in the distiller’s art than the mixologist’s.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #192</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>. And while you’re at TravelCommons.com, you can check out the show notes page for a transcript and any links I’ve mentioned. Or you can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_192.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #192 — New Year Travel Planning Tips; Gin Conquers the World','Are people going back to their old travel planning ways? Should you book direct with travel providers or use a 3rd-party? Unpacking Southwest\'s cancellation chaos. Gin goes global with a local twist.','inherit','closed','closed','','4264-revision-v1','','','2023-01-26 20:00:51','2023-01-27 01:00:51','',4264,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4273',0,'revision','',0),
(4276,1,'2023-02-27 18:28:21','2023-02-27 23:28:21','[caption id=\"attachment_1616\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"225\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/IMAG0569_1.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1616\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/IMAG0569_1-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"This should be interesting...\" width=\"225\" height=\"300\"></a> This should be interesting...[/caption]\n\nAfter two vacations to Europe and some full-contact business travel in-between, I found my way back into the TravelCommons studios. I talk about these recent trips -- the awful timeliness of an <a href=\"http://aa.com\">American Airlines</a>\' regional jet partner, an incredible string of lost luggage, a meaningless baggage strip tease with <a href=\"http://wowair.us\">Wow Air</a>, and being surprised to still find some quirks when using ATMs and credit cards in Europe. And it wouldn\'t be a travel podcast if I didn\'t weigh in on the TSA\'s \"line-mageddon\" -- their <a href=\"http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-tsa-airport-security-lines-met-0517-20160516-story.html\">meltdown at O\'Hare</a>. All this and more at the&nbsp;<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_121.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n<hr>\n\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #121:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Coming to you once again from the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago, IL, after rewriting an episode I’d hoped to get done 3 weeks ago. I’d even posted on the TravelCommons Facebook wall on May 1st about having a new episode next weekend -- a post I’ve since deleted. Seems to be a trend with me. I get started on a new episode, but then it gets elbowed aside by other things -- like work. Maybe if I could just figure out a way to monetize this thing…</li>\n 	<li>I had hoped to record this episode halfway between two European trips. As I mentioned in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/12/podcast-120-where-do-guidebooks-fit-in-i-hate-shopping-for-suitcases/\">the last episode</a>, I had a weird Spring Break itinerary in April right before Easter -- Chicago to Reykjavik, Iceland for a 4-day long weekend with my son, and then, as he headed back to Chicago, I flew down to Spain to meet my wife and daughter and some friends for a week in Andalucia. As you can imagine, packing for that trip in a 22-inch carry on required equal amounts of editing and physical force. And then in mid-May, we all headed over to Portugal for a week. The excuse being that we needed to shove all my daughter’s belongings into storage after her first year at university in Scotland, but decided that Portugal would have better food and wine than Scotland. So we headed to Lisbon as a family, and then my wife and daughter flew back up to St Andrews to do all the packing stuff. I think I came out of this pretty good.</li>\n 	<li>Where this episode got shoved off the rails was the week before I left for Portugal. We all know that vacations aren’t free -- that we pay for them the week before we leave and the week after. I was blissfully in denial of this immutable law, thinking that I could write, record, produce, and post this episode then. Cramming two weeks of business travel into 4 days (we were leaving for Lisbon Friday afternoon), that week’s travel itinerary was New Jersey on Monday, Boston on Tuesday, New Orleans on Wednesday, and Atlanta on Thursday. Across four airlines -- United ORD-EWR-BOS, JetBlue BOS-MSY, Southwest MSY-ATL, and American ATL-ORD -- I racked up about 2:30 hrs in flight delays with JetBlue being the only carrier without a black mark.</li>\n 	<li>Over April and May, what’s been particularly awful has been my run on one of American Airline’s regional jet partners Skywest. One Monday in April, Skywest lost voice and data connectivity at its Dallas dispatch center causing a ground stop of its planes. After two hours of hanging around the Admirals Club, watching my Newark departure time get pushed out every 30 minutes, I called Amex to get switched over to a real American plane flying into LGA. It added about 45 minutes to my drive after I landed, but at least I got there, especially since Skywest ended up canceling my original Newark flight. The next Monday, I ended up on another Skywest American flight; this time to Charlottesville, VA. Again, another 1+ hr delay. This time it was plane maintenance. Then that Friday, I get a text after lunch -- my flight home was delayed over 2 hours. That was it. Three Skywest flights in a row that couldn’t get close to on-schedule. I called Amex again. Got on a United flight out of Richmond. After an hour-and-a-half drag race down I-64, I landed at ORD, drove home, ate dinner with my wife, and had a couple of glasses of wine before my original Skywest plane finally made it to Chicago.</li>\n 	<li>Now I’m not an airline ops expert, but when the women behind the desks in the Admirals Club tell you about SkyWest “They’re not our favorite”, you might think about finding a new partner.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://cyberset.cc/artists2.php?tr_release_id=104\"><em>Heaven</em></a> by <a href=\"http://redirect.iodalliance.com/artist.php?id=A951998E6011FA9B2D22387EB3CAC0B5EB05A36360E7FDA122C8D7A5C140F8DC\" rel=\"nofollow\">Electric Skychurch</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Steve Frick asked in a comment on the TravelCommons website about how I use Evernote. In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/12/podcast-120-where-do-guidebooks-fit-in-i-hate-shopping-for-suitcases/\">the last episode</a>, I talked about how I use it to in my vacation travel planning. I used to store all sorts of things in Evernote — scanned receipts, recipes, etc. Now I mostly just use it to store on-line travel articles using its Web Clipper Chrome extension which I really like. A couple of days ago, I was reading a 36 Hours in Philadelphia article in the NYTimes. I clicked the little elephant head on the Chrome bar and now I have it saved, and synced across all my devices. I know a bunch of folks who are big OneNote users. I’ve been thinking of looking at it, but it’s pretty low on the priority list since I’m good in Evernote’s free tier.</li>\n 	<li>Peter Zurich sent in <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEyFH-a-XoQ\">a link</a> to an Onion YouTube video about the Franz Kafka Airport in Prague. Now, the Onion is talented/notorious for writing absurd articles in a straight voice that’s just close enough to the truth to make people accept that it is true. This video is well done. Anyone who read Kafka in high school or college will get a kick out of it, and remind you how close to Kafka-esque absurdity the modern travel experience gets. And it did make me look up the Prague airport -- did they really name it after Kafka? As great as that would be, the airport has been called Václav Havel Airport Prague since 2012 in honor of the Czech’s former president and leader of the Velvet Revolution.</li>\n 	<li>Dan Gradwohl dropped me a note regarding the “I Hate Shopping for a Suitcase” topic in the last episode where I talked about my difficulties in replacing my worn backpack.\n<ul>\n 	<li>As for the backpack search, Sara feels your pain as she searched long and hard for a new backpack before settling on a Gregory for her upcoming trip on The Camino in northern Spain. Of course, her backpack needs differ from yours! For baggage, she uses the REI Tech Beast and loves it. She\'s had it for 8 years, still going strong with 100,000+ miles per year easily on it. She has not found an overhead bin it does not fit in, from a CR9/170 to an A380/744.</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Dan, thanks for that. I just got a couple of REI coupons in the mail. I’ll have to go check out the Tech Beast</li>\n 	<li>In that same segment, I talked about my “smart” luggage bag from<a href=\"http://bluesmart.com/\"> Bluesmart</a>. I think I summarized my review as “meh” -- nice enough bag, but all the electronics felt more like a gimmick than something I needed. I’m going to backtrack a bit on that -- specifically with regards to its location finder capability. The bag has a GPS and global SIM card and through a deal with Telefonica transmits its location periodically which you can see on the smartphone app. As I mentioned in the last episode, the Bluesmart is the perfect carry-on size, it’s usually right above me in the plane cabin, so the location finder isn’t that valuable. Except recently, I’ve been flying regional jets a lot where I’ve had to gate check (“valet”) my bag. Normally I don’t worry about this -- I’ve never had an airline lose my bag in the couple of hundred feet between the jetway and the plane. But one on of these recent Skywest flights, it was taking my bag a long time to show up at the gate after arriving. Hmmm, I pulled out my iPhone, hit the Location button on the Bluesmart app, and it showed me that my bag had updated its location a couple of minutes prior and was indeed here. A few minutes later, it showed up in the last tranche of bags heaved up into the jet bridge. Not critical functionality, but it moves up from “meh” to “kinda handy”.</li>\n 	<li>Which I guess would’ve been handy but not necessarily useful in the string of bad luggage karma that my daughter and her friends have experienced over the past couple of month. My daughter’s luggage has been lost on 3 out of 4 trips -- Air Brussels lost it between EDI and MAD through BRU, KLM lost it on her return through AMS, and then AirFrance lost it between LIS and EDI through DeGaulle. And a friend of her had Ibera lose a bag between Seville and MAD. How does that happen? You have to really work hard to lose anything in an airport the size of Seville. And it’s not that my daughter wanted to check her bag. She wanted to carry on, But she has this short light blue roller bag that seems to pull gate agent eyes toward it. I gotta get her something more nondescript, like a black hardshell roller.</li>\n 	<li>But the thing that will catch you in Europe is that carry-on bags often have a weight limit as well as a size limit. Checking in for my <a href=\"http://wowair.us/\">Wow Air</a> flight from Reykjavik to London, I arrived 2 hrs before check in to see what appeared to be a stationary check in line of a couple of hundred people. Reykjavik is Wow’s hub and, near as I could see, they have 4 agents checking people in with luggage. I hadn’t wanted to check my luggage since I had a weird connection in London en route to Madrid -- no interlining between Wow and Ibera, so I would have to claim luggage in Gatwick, pass through Customs, and then recheck the bag with Iberia. And checking in with carry on was a separate and much shorter line. My bag fit -- snuggly -- in the sizer, so I figured I was good to go. No so fast. Wow also has a 7kg/15 lbs weight limit for carryons! Not even Spirit Airlines pulls that stunt. So I take my bag off the scale, pull some clothes out, zip it back up, and put it back on the scale. Not enough, the agent says. I do this 3 or 4 more times. The agent finally takes pity -- or gets tired of me -- and gives me the approval tag to put on my bag (saying “You shall pass” -- Wow Air definitely pushes the “we’re quirky” image). I walk about 10 feet with my tagged bag and armful of clothes, open my bag and put my clothes back in. When I got on the plane, a brand new Airbus A321, my carry on fit perfectly in the overhead bin, just like it does for every other Airbus A321, A320, and A319 I fly in the US and Europe. So I’m not quite sure what the Wow agent and I accomplished with that baggage strip tease, but I got what I wanted -- my bag right above me rather than trundling around Keflavik airport for the next couple of days.</li>\n 	<li>In the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/12/20/podcast-119-digital-security-on-the-road-us-airports-getting-better/\">last</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/03/12/podcast-120-where-do-guidebooks-fit-in-i-hate-shopping-for-suitcases/\">couple </a>of episodes, I’ve talked about the <a href=\"https://revolut.com/\">Revolut</a> card which is a Mastercard pre-paid debit card with some very nice foreign exchange functionality. I loved this card when it first came out -- first when I was traveling in the UK and then cheaply transfer money to my daughter studying in Scotland. Then I went very cold when they blew up the “cheaply” component , when they added a 3% fee when you added money/”topped up” your Revolut account using a US debit card. This episode, I’ve warmed up a bit. First, I discovered a way to bypass that 3% debit charge --I topped up my account in Euros with my US debit card. This avoids the 3% charge from Revolut, though the app does note that you’re not using the right currency with your card and asks you if you really mean to do this. My bank charges me less than 1% for the conversion, and though the exchange rate isn’t as good as Revolut’s, it’s not bad enough to cost-justify the 3% charge that USD top-ups attract. So, we’re back to a reasonably priced conversion -- in a roundabout way.</li>\n 	<li>Which is good because, for some reason, my US ATM card never worked the whole time I was in Iceland. And I could never figure out why. I traded notes with my bank. They weren’t denying anything; they weren’t ever seeing the transaction show up at their end. I dunno, maybe it’s some residual wonkiness left over from their banking meltdown. I can’t remember the last time I had problems like that. Which, before I left for Iceland, made me wonder if I still needed to carry a wad of backup USD with me on this trip -- given how ubiquitous and seamless ATMs are nowadays. I still didn’t need the Jacksons though because my Revolut card had no problem pulling krona from any ATM. In Portugal, I did hit a couple of different quirks. First, the train and Lisbon subway ticket machines don’t accept pre-paid debit cards which left me scrambling for exact change a surprising number of times. Second, a number of shops only accepted Visa cards, which blocked out Revolut’s MasterCard-based card. I used to see this more often in the past -- shops only accepted cards on one network -- Visa or MasterCard, and often didn’t take American Express -- which has led me to always carry one of each card, but I thought the need for that backup had also faded. So I guess I’ll keep carrying a fist full of credit cards and USD for at least a couple more years.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any thoughts, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">mpeacock</a>, or you can post your thoughts on the <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">TravelCommons’ Facebook page</a> -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Rocky Road</em> by <a href=\"http://www.kcentricity.com/\">KCentric</a></li>\n</ul>\n<b>TSA Lines</b>\n<ul>\n 	<li>For much of March and April, I’d been traveling in and out of Newark pretty much every week which, I have to say, if you’re using Terminal A, is the worst airport in the country. Now, I know that Terminal B in LaGuardia gives it a good run with the ceiling tarps drained by garden hoses into trash cans in the middle of the terminal, but the TSA security set up in Newark Terminal A beats that. They’ve split the corridor, the hallway down to gates in two -- the right side has the TSA stations, the left side the line for passengers waiting to be screened and the walkway for exiting passengers. The screening line is usually a bit of a cluster -- you can never quite tell which screening station you’re waiting for -- maybe #3 or should I scoot around to get in the line for #4. The really special feature of this configuration -- what wins it the prize -- is that you often have to wait in line to leave the terminal. Yup, more than a few times there’s a TSA agent holding up a line of departing passengers because of some confusion in the screening lines. It’s just awful.</li>\n 	<li>I just missed the TSA’s line-mageddon in O’Hare (I flew out the Friday before) where 450 American Airlines passengers got to experience Camp O’Hare cots after missing their flights because of 2-3 hour long TSA screening lines. But you could see it coming. My wife had spend 45 minutes in line in March, and the Monday morning rush hour had become a jumble of lines extending the length of the concourse. With summer travel volumes starting to build, it was a matter of when, not if, the whole thing imploded. And if I could tell this from my weekly flight out of ORD, you know the TSA folks on the ground knew it and were dreading it. So why didn’t they get in front of this instead of waiting until after the meltdown and the screaming headlines to replace management and add staff.</li>\n 	<li>Wading through recriminations about incompetence, baggage fees, gross misforecasting of PreCheck sign-ups, and the general <a href=\"http://www.travelandleisure.com/travel-tips/travel-warnings/tsa-blames-passengers\">cluelessness of infrequent fliers</a>, I think a couple of economists get to the real answer in an <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/737290917220995075\">article</a> in Sunday’s New York Times -- “the TSA has been acting as if there were no cost to tying people up for hours in security lines. In effect, all that time on line is “free” to the T.S.A.” “This glaring omission creates perverse incentives for government agencies. Cutting staff improves an agency’s bottom line, while wasting citizens’ time has little material consequence for it aside from expressions of annoyance and outrage in tweets and (newspaper) articles”</li>\n 	<li>I think that pretty much nails it. I retweeted a <a href=\"http://qz.com/659461/tsa-is-our-no-1-problem-right-now-long-security-lines-are-frustrating-us-airlines-too/\">link </a>to a Quartz article with a pretty self-explanatory graph. Air traveller volume has increased more than 10% over the past 12 months while the number of TSA screeners has decreased by more than that. Everyone knew this train wreck was coming, but there was no incentive to fix it -- until the wreck happened and the volume of complaints and outrage became impossible to ignore.</li>\n 	<li>In the immediate term, the spectacle of those 450 filled cots at ORD spurred some good action -- Congress let the TSA move some money around to hire more personnel, the TSA head of security got sacked, lines at ORD have shrunk, and a lot more people are ponying up the $85 for PreCheck (which is causing a whole other set of lines that I’m not going into).\nIn the short to medium term, maybe some new technology will help -- automating checkpoints like they do in London Heathrow, posting real-time wait times so travelers can “self-balance” security lines.</li>\n 	<li>But not until the TSA explicitly considers the value of travelers time will we get to some semblance of realistic balance between the cost and risk of travel.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #121</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Find TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, and <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a></li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_121.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #121 — TSA Lines, My Luggage is Where?','','inherit','closed','closed','','1615-revision-v1','','','2023-02-27 18:28:21','2023-02-27 23:28:21','',1615,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4276',0,'revision','',0),
(4279,1,'2023-03-21 16:51:09','2023-03-21 21:51:09','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/AA263071-7820-499A-BBF9-DAB2E122A703-1-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Malort bottle and a cow skull\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\">After the Positano ferries go home[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Hard up against the Christmas deadline, we compare long-distance drive times between gas and electric cars, and my travel tips vs. those from the ChatGPT AI chatbot. We talk about the latest Real ID deadline delay, and impressions from my trip to Positano, Rome, Florence, and Split, Croatia. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_191.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #191: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN at the tail end of the “bomb cyclone” that blew up a huge number of Christmas holiday plans for a huge number of families -- including ours. Our daughter Claire beat the bomb by flying down at the beginning of the week out of LaGuardia; thank you, hybrid working arrangements. Our son and his wife were going to head down from Chicago on Thursday, but near-white-out blizzard conditions canceled that. So now we’re recalibrating the size of Christmas dinner and figuring out how to get presents to the right places.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>While our usual “Not traveling at Christmas” rule has served us well, we did hit the road earlier for some Thanksgiving triangulation travel&nbsp; -- from Nashville to Annapolis, MD for a week to celebrate Thanksgiving with some friends, then from there to Chicago for another week to visit family, and then finally back home. The drive out to Annapolis was the best. We swerved the holiday traffic by driving out Monday instead of waiting for the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, and leaving a bit later in the morning so we could miss the agony that is Washington, DC rush hour. It was certainly the most scenic of the 3 drives, skirting the Great Smoky Mountains and then up the Blue Ridge Mountains. It reminded me of my drives to and from college, between Memphis and DC, though a lot more enjoyable not having to worry if my ‘72 Buick Electra was going to overheat hauling itself over the mountains.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The drive to Chicago was the most boring; a 12-hour drive with most of it being through the extended flatlands of the Ohio and Indiana Turnpikes. It would’ve put me right to sleep if I hadn’t figured out how to stream the BBC Radio’s World Cup play-by-play from my phone through the BMW’s speakers. What would’ve been worse, though, is if I’d tried to do that drive in an electric vehicle. California will ban new gas cars in 12 years, and New York and other states are looking to follow suit, so I wanted to see what my driving future will be. <a href=\"https://electrek.co/2022/10/18/us-electric-vehicle-sales-by-maker-and-ev-model-through-q3-2022/\">Cox Automotive says</a> the Tesla Model Y was the best selling car through Q3, the end of September this year. So I hit the Tesla trip planner to see what my trip would look like if I swapped my BMW X3 for a Tesla Model Y Long Range. The trip would be almost 2½ hours longer due to the 4 supercharger stops I’d need -- 2 45-minute charges in PA and OH and 2 25-minute charges in Indiana -- a bit longer than the couple of 20-minute restroom/gas-up pit stops we made on the turnpikes. The first stop in PA and the last one in IN would be in turnpike rest stops. The other two would require leaving the turnpike, winding through the ticket booths to find the chargers. Actually, I’m not sure which is worse. Hanging out for 45 minutes at the North Somerset, PA rest stop Roy Rogers or leaving the Ohio Turnpike to find my way to Strongsville, OH, plug into the supercharger behind the Sheetz convenience store, and then walk over to the Applebee’s knock-off to kill the 45-minute charge time with a Bud Light and some chicken tenders nachos.&nbsp; They got 12 years to either cut that charge time in half or significantly improve the food and beer options at those superchargers.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music --&nbsp;<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/copperhead/40520\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen</a> by copperhead (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: Admiral Bob, Javolenus , Sackjo22  </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The last half of our Chicago visit we stayed downtown at the Hyatt Regency, a big convention hotel that, in pre-COVID times, always had all sorts of&nbsp; mid-sized business conventions; things like the Midwest Dell Computer Users Group meeting, the IAAO (Int’l Association of Assessing Officers) National Conference. Now I’m old enough to remember way back to 2020 when “everything changed” and “this is the new normal” meant these mid-level gatherings were past history, that in the new normal, we’d all meet over video or in the metaverse -- which kinda spooked me because everybody seemed cut off below the navel -- and so never be tempted to shake hands. So when I walked into the lobby one morning to see signs welcoming ASTA, the American Seed Trade Association and the elevator doors wrapped in signs pitching BASF’s Poncho Votivo seed treatment, it reminded me once again that reversion to the mean is a strong, almost irresistible force. I walked into the elevator with a guy wearing a vendor badge around his neck. “Conference travel back?” I asked. “With a vengeance,” he sighed. Business travel may still be a bit below 2019 levels, but it’s clawing its way back.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Last May, back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/05/26/podcast-187-moving-to-a-non-hub-airport-what-makes-a-great-taproom/\">episode #187</a>, I said “A quick public service announcement — the COVID Real ID extension expires in less than a year.” Well, scratch that. The beginning of this month, DHS, the Department of Homeland Security, kicked the Real ID deadline down the road again, 2 years this time to May 7, 2025. Good news for procrastinators everywhere. They said the extension was necessary because the pandemic has made getting a REAL ID more difficult. I have to tell you; I just don’t buy it. Last year, December 2021, I had to go to a Chicago DMV site to get a new driver’s license. I made an appointment, showed up on-time, and was in and out in 30, maybe 40 minutes, including <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/01/16/podcast-183-covid-test-anxiety-michelin-food-adventures/\">the 3 extra minutes</a> it took them to scan my social security card and the documents to prove my address. I mean, come on, it’s been 17 years since the Real ID act was passed. It’s a law no one thinks is needed any more. Somebody just man up (in a completely gender-neutral way) and cancel at least <em>this</em> act in the long-running post-9/11 security theater.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>In more travel document good news, right before Thanksgiving, the US State Department opened up a portal for on-line passport renewals on what they’re calling a “limited release”, which sounds like government speak for a beta product -- limited volume and possibly not the smoothest user experience. But you gotta give them credit for getting this far. I renewed my passport last February the old-fashioned way -- finding a Walgreens that still takes passport photos, stapling them and a check to the renewal form. I’m hoping that in 9 years’ time, all the sharp edges will be buffed off this limited release and ready for prime time. I know, it’s the government; but a guy can dream…</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I’ve never been too proud not to chase a trend in the service of search engine optimization and so I wrote <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/12/12/how-good-are-chatgpts-top-5-holiday-travel-tips/\">a blog post</a> last week on <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChatGPT\">ChatGPT</a>, the AI chatbot that was <a href=\"https://twitter.com/sama/status/1598038815599661056\">released after Thanksgiving</a> and simultaneously thrilled and horrified people -- mostly thrilling students and mostly horrifying teachers and writers. I decided to give it a try, typing into the prompt box -- “write a blog post with the top holiday travel tips.” One thing that was immediately obvious -- ChatGPT is <strong>a lot</strong> faster than me. It cranked out 350 words and 5 travel tips in a second or two. The tips, though, “Plan Ahead,” “Pack Light,” “Stay Organized,” “Be Flexible,” and “Stay Connected” weren’t wrong, but they weren’t all that insightful; they weren’t anything that even the occasional traveler, someone taking just a couple of flights a year, wouldn’t already know. So then the next step is to compare those tips, generated by artificial intelligence, to 5 tips generated by my 35 years and a few million miles of travel experience -- “Figure out if you want to fly or drive,” “Fly Non-Stop,” “Catch the Early Flight,” “Carry On Your Luggage,” and “Bring a Battery Pack.” You be the judge, but I think my tips are a bit more specific, a bit more actionable; probably just good enough to keep me in this unpaid travel podcaster/blogger gig — at least until ChatGPT gets its next upgrade.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>In the Travel Tech Stack topic in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/10/31/podcast-190-my-travel-tech-stack-imbibing-for-introverts/\">the last episode</a>, I talked about travel apps I use, and specifically Tripit which I use to consolidate all the plane, train, hotel, and Airbnb confirmations into a single itinerary. The Monday before Thanksgiving, I started getting e-mails from them -- 50% off TripIt Pro; $24 instead of the usual $49. That first one was targeted at Thanksgiving fliers. Then came another 50% off email, but this time it was a Black Friday e-mail. Then came the Cyber Monday pitch, again 50% off. I got a message from Allan Marko, long-time TravelCommons listener. “What do you think?” he asked, “Do you use it?”&nbsp; I quickly responded “Nope. Haven’t used Pro for many years. Don’t see the value of the additional features. If I was going to pay for one, I’d go for Flighty.” I was able to respond at near-ChatGPT speed because that text was pretty much verbatim what I said about Tripit Pro in the Travel Tech segment. The next day, Allan messaged me back “Just listened to the episode. You went through exactly what I was asking about TripIt.” TripIt ran that 50% off e-mail campaign right through last week, so almost a month -- which leads me to believe that there are a lot of other travelers who share my views.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And if you have any travel stories, comments, tips, rants, or a question like Allan or like Twitter follower @Ab3Fr0man (I’m always a sucker for a Ferris Bueller reference) whose question back in June led to last episode’s Travel Tech Stack topic, send it to <a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a>, ping me at @mpeacock on Twitter message or post a comment on the TravelCommons website for the quickest response. I’m a little slower responding to Facebook and Instagram. And if you don’t want your name mentioned on the podcast, let me know. Everyone’s got different sensitivities around privacy nowadays.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/NiGiD/48586\">O Tannenbaum / Oh Christmas Tree</a> by Martijn de Boer (NiGiD) (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial &nbsp;(3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: Admiral Bob (admiralbob77)</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Notes on Split, Croatia and Italy</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I mentioned at the start of the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/10/31/podcast-190-my-travel-tech-stack-imbibing-for-introverts/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Podcast #190 — My Travel Tech Stack; Imbibing for Introverts\">last episode</a> that I rummaged around Croatia and Italy for 3 weeks at the beginning of October, starting in Split, Croatia and then running up the Italian peninsula -- Amalfi Coast, Naples, Rome, Florence. When I’ve talked to folks about this trip, most everyone is much more interested in our time in Split and in Italy. Which makes sense if I think about it; lots of people interested in travel will have hit those Italy highlights -- Rome, Florence, the Amalfi Coast -- early on in their travels, but not so many Croatia (at least travelers from the US). But they’ve heard a lot about it, especially the Game of Thrones stans, which maybe has bumped it up on their list of places to visit; maybe high on the “B” list. And so the interest I was getting might’ve been a combination of a polite “How was your trip” with a dash of&nbsp; “Hmm, any reason I should bump it up to my ‘A’ list?” I found myself summing up our Split visit saying “Good times, good wine, good seafood; though I’m not sure I know anything more about Croatia having spent 4 days there.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I felt like I was another one of those guys who hop a cheap Ryanair flight to some city like Budapest or Tallinn for a lads’ weekend -- which was pretty close to what we did. But even when we ventured out of the old city (which is very cool and very pretty), out of the cruise passenger blast zone that would jam up those cool, pretty, but very narrow streets and alleys between, say, 10am and 5pm every day, I still couldn’t get a deeper feel for the place. We’d post up at some bars, but got much less conversation with the bartenders than I would in, say, Italy. I dunno -- maybe Croatians are more taciturn than Italians, or the folks in Split have to deal with so many tourists every day that they need a break and just want to chat with their fellow Croatians. Either -- or both -- would be very reasonable explanations. Indeed, the closest I came was a <em>non-conversation</em> in the main farmers’ market on Saturday morning. I was walking up and down the rows of stalls -- fresh vegetables, sundries, other random bits and bobs -- and noticed an older guy by himself in a small stall off to the side. Walking up, I could see he was selling smoked pork loin and some aged sheep’s cheese. He spoke no English; I spoke no Croatian, but with a bunch of gestures and finger measurements, I managed to buy some of everything he had on offer. I must’ve paid a good price because he pulled out a plastic 1-liter bottle and poured me a capful of what I figured was home-made rakija, a Croatian fruit brandy. It was good, very smooth; a nice 11am eye opener.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>After 4 days of wandering around, Split seemed a pretty standard European large town/small city with fresh seafood and good wine for, if not cheap, then a reasonable price. The only kinda wacky thing was the Croatian currency, the kuna. The exchange rate was around 7.50 to the dollar; a slightly awkward exchange rate to do in your head on the fly -- which we didn’t need to do because everything was dual priced in kuna and euro in preparation for their move next month (January 2023) to the euro. So you’d think (or at least I thought) that there’d be parallel usage of kunas and euros in the lead-up. But you (and me) would be wrong. There were signs everywhere “Kuna only” and “Cash only”. Which meant a lot of hunting down ATMs and a last-minute spending spree in the Split Airport bar and duty-free shop.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Just short of 70 years ago, John Steinbeck wrote an <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/positano-john-steinbeck/mode/2up\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">article about Positano, Italy for Harper’s Bazaar magazine</a>. The most popular pull quote is “Positano bites deep. It is a dream place that isn’t quite real...” He then goes on to say that Positano would never be overrun by tourists; it’s too steep, there’s no room for visitors, and the locals don’t give a damn. Steinbeck was right about it being steep, but he was dead wrong about the rest. The view from our balcony was beautiful when I looked up at the hills and out at the water. But then my eyes would drop a bit and I’d see the stream of ferries docking and disgorging full loads of daytrippers. I waded into it one morning to see the local church and got stuck in a conga line of tourists walking one of the narrow streets -- one single-file of people walking up from the beach, another single-file walking down; a young couple carrying a stroller up the sets of stone steps; the almost-Three Stooges-like people bumping into the back of each other when someone in the single-file stopped to look at a shop and didn’t step into the doorway. That was it for me. I was one and done. After that, I’d just sit on our balcony with a bottle of local wine, situated so my eyes wouldn’t drop from the beautiful view.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I don’t want to bang on about the crowds too much, but it’s a major through-line of this trip. Maybe the combination of the strong dollar, no COVID restrictions, and no mask rules was all it took to uncork 2 years of pent-up travel demand. In Rome, I made the mistake of meeting someone at the Trevi Fountain and got trapped in a horde. The Trastevere neighborhood where we stayed -- the streets were a bit thick with tourists during the day, but was complete gridlock at night with people overflowing out of the bars, into the plazas drinking what must’ve been truckloads of Peronis.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Having said this, I really liked Rome. Before this, I was always a bit ambivalent about Rome; would always tend to head north -- to Tuscany, to Milan. But this trip, maybe because we’d spent the prior week or so in smaller places, the big city energy of Rome was a pleasant, an energizing change. People talk about Rome being chaotic; I didn’t think it was any more chaotic than any other big city. Maybe because I wasn’t driving -- just walking or taking a cab or trying to kill Irene while driving a Vespa scooter.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Could also be that there was more space to spread out, to swerve the crowds. I found a walking and bike path sunk down below street level along the banks of the Tiber River. There was fairly steady bike traffic, but I could walk freely, no dodging on-coming tourists. I made my way through the Testaccio neighborhood -- definitely no tourist traffic here -- to a local market that was full, but not crowded; I was able to get a table with my beer and porchetta sandwich.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But I picked up a verve in Rome -- some combination of the energy and “don’t screw with me” of a big city, but also something more welcoming, a bit warmer than I’d get in, say Manhattan or London or Frankfurt or Paris. Maybe a bit more down-to-earth, something you get in the outer boroughs of New York and London; a friendly confidence. I liked it a lot more than I thought I would.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But not every crowd was bad. The last stop on our Italian tour was Florence. While I’d never been to Rome before, this was our fourth time in Florence. Irene and Claire wanted to shop for jewelry on Ponte Vecchio; the thought of wading back into those crowds sent me in the complete opposite direction, toward the Basilica of Santa Croce. Walking down the road, I noticed more and more guys wearing the same soccer jerseys funneling onto the road, some with plastic bags full of beer bottles. When the street ended at the Piazza di Santa Croce, the big open plaza in front of the basilica, it had been taken over by a huge crowd of Scottish soccer fans who’d followed their club, Hearts of Midlothian, from Edinburgh here to Florence to play the local team. They’d set up camp in the plaza, hung their club supporters flags from plaza railings, building scaffolds, and pretty much anything else with a vertical structure. And they were having a great time pre-gaming the match -- drinking beers, banging drums, and most of all, singing songs. At the other end of the plaza, about 6 carabinieri were standing in front of what looked like a paddy wagon. As I rounded the corner of the basilica, a couple of Florence metro cop cars joined them. They weren’t doing anything; just hanging back, just in case.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I left the drums and singing behind and wound my way up to a craft beer bar. I bought a beer and sat on a stool just outside the bar door -- just in time to see a stream of Hearts supporters take over the street which was, I soon found out, the main path from their pre-game piazza to the stadium. I have to say that, after 5+ hours of drinking, I was a bit nervous about this crowd, but I didn’t need be. They were loud, enthusiastic, maybe a bit bumptious, but never nasty or threatening. They were just there to have fun with their fellow supporters and watch the match which, one guy told me, they fully expected to lose (and which they did 5-1). Through it all, I was most impressed by the Florentine bar owner. Amid all the drunk Scotsmen singing and yelling and drinking, he was unflappable -- serving beers, keeping glasses out of the street, and occasionally taking group photos. He smiled and told me, “The boys just want to have some fun.” And they did. And they dragged me along with them -- not to the stadium, I had other plans, to meet up with a big slab of beef, a bistecca alla fiorentina-- but to enjoy a crowd rather than fight it.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #191</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Merry Christmas to everyone who celebrates it and hope you all have a great new year. Sorry I couldn’t get this out earlier to give any of you trapped in an airport this week something to listen to, but hey, now you have something for Christmas dinner clean-up.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page at TravelCommons.com for a transcript of the episode and any links I’ve mentioned. If you’re not yet subscribed, there’s a drop down Subscribe menu at the top of the page and along the side of the page, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ socials.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_191.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #191 — My Notes on Italy and Split, Croatia','Comparing long-distance drive times between gas and electric cars, and ChatGPT\'s travel tips with mine; Talking about another Real ID delay, and my travel notes from Positano, Rome, and Split, Croatia. ','inherit','closed','closed','','4250-revision-v1','','','2023-03-21 16:51:09','2023-03-21 21:51:09','',4250,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4279',0,'revision','',0),
(4280,1,'2023-03-21 16:53:36','2023-03-21 21:53:36','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/AA263071-7820-499A-BBF9-DAB2E122A703-1-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Malort bottle and a cow skull\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\">After the Positano ferries go home[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Hard up against the Christmas deadline, we compare long-distance drive times between gas and electric cars, and my travel tips vs. those from the ChatGPT AI chatbot. We talk about the latest Real ID deadline delay, and impressions from my trip to Positano, Rome, Florence, and Split, Croatia. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_191.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #191: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN at the tail end of the “bomb cyclone” that blew up a huge number of Christmas holiday plans for a huge number of families -- including ours. Our daughter Claire beat the bomb by flying down at the beginning of the week out of LaGuardia; thank you, hybrid working arrangements. Our son and his wife were going to head down from Chicago on Thursday, but near-white-out blizzard conditions canceled that. So now we’re recalibrating the size of Christmas dinner and figuring out how to get presents to the right places.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>While our usual “Not traveling at Christmas” rule has served us well, we did hit the road earlier for some Thanksgiving triangulation travel&nbsp; -- from Nashville to Annapolis, MD for a week to celebrate Thanksgiving with some friends, then from there to Chicago for another week to visit family, and then finally back home. The drive out to Annapolis was the best. We swerved the holiday traffic by driving out Monday instead of waiting for the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, and leaving a bit later in the morning so we could miss the agony that is Washington, DC rush hour. It was certainly the most scenic of the 3 drives, skirting the Great Smoky Mountains and then up the Blue Ridge Mountains. It reminded me of my drives to and from college, between Memphis and DC, though a lot more enjoyable not having to worry if my ‘72 Buick Electra was going to overheat hauling itself over the mountains.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The drive to Chicago was the most boring; a 12-hour drive with most of it being through the extended flatlands of the Ohio and Indiana Turnpikes. It would’ve put me right to sleep if I hadn’t figured out how to stream the BBC Radio’s World Cup play-by-play from my phone through the BMW’s speakers. What would’ve been worse, though, is if I’d tried to do that drive in an electric vehicle. California will ban new gas cars in 12 years, and New York and other states are looking to follow suit, so I wanted to see what my driving future will be. <a href=\"https://electrek.co/2022/10/18/us-electric-vehicle-sales-by-maker-and-ev-model-through-q3-2022/\">Cox Automotive says</a> the Tesla Model Y was the best selling car through Q3, the end of September this year. So I hit the Tesla trip planner to see what my trip would look like if I swapped my BMW X3 for a Tesla Model Y Long Range. The trip would be almost 2½ hours longer due to the 4 supercharger stops I’d need -- 2 45-minute charges in PA and OH and 2 25-minute charges in Indiana -- a bit longer than the couple of 20-minute restroom/gas-up pit stops we made on the turnpikes. The first stop in PA and the last one in IN would be in turnpike rest stops. The other two would require leaving the turnpike, winding through the ticket booths to find the chargers. Actually, I’m not sure which is worse. Hanging out for 45 minutes at the North Somerset, PA rest stop Roy Rogers or leaving the Ohio Turnpike to find my way to Strongsville, OH, plug into the supercharger behind the Sheetz convenience store, and then walk over to the Applebee’s knock-off to kill the 45-minute charge time with a Bud Light and some chicken tenders nachos.&nbsp; They got 12 years to either cut that charge time in half or significantly improve the food and beer options at those superchargers.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music --&nbsp;<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/copperhead/40520\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen</a> by copperhead (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: Admiral Bob, Javolenus , Sackjo22  </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The last half of our Chicago visit we stayed downtown at the Hyatt Regency, a big convention hotel that, in pre-COVID times, always had all sorts of&nbsp; mid-sized business conventions; things like the Midwest Dell Computer Users Group meeting, the IAAO (Int’l Association of Assessing Officers) National Conference. Now I’m old enough to remember way back to 2020 when “everything changed” and “this is the new normal” meant these mid-level gatherings were past history, that in the new normal, we’d all meet over video or in the metaverse -- which kinda spooked me because everybody seemed cut off below the navel -- and so never be tempted to shake hands. So when I walked into the lobby one morning to see signs welcoming ASTA, the American Seed Trade Association and the elevator doors wrapped in signs pitching BASF’s Poncho Votivo seed treatment, it reminded me once again that reversion to the mean is a strong, almost irresistible force. I walked into the elevator with a guy wearing a vendor badge around his neck. “Conference travel back?” I asked. “With a vengeance,” he sighed. Business travel may still be a bit below 2019 levels, but it’s clawing its way back.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Last May, back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/05/26/podcast-187-moving-to-a-non-hub-airport-what-makes-a-great-taproom/\">episode #187</a>, I said “A quick public service announcement — the COVID Real ID extension expires in less than a year.” Well, scratch that. The beginning of this month, DHS, the Department of Homeland Security, kicked the Real ID deadline down the road again, 2 years this time to May 7, 2025. Good news for procrastinators everywhere. They said the extension was necessary because the pandemic has made getting a REAL ID more difficult. I have to tell you; I just don’t buy it. Last year, December 2021, I had to go to a Chicago DMV site to get a new driver’s license. I made an appointment, showed up on-time, and was in and out in 30, maybe 40 minutes, including <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/01/16/podcast-183-covid-test-anxiety-michelin-food-adventures/\">the 3 extra minutes</a> it took them to scan my social security card and the documents to prove my address. I mean, come on, it’s been 17 years since the Real ID act was passed. It’s a law no one thinks is needed any more. Somebody just man up (in a completely gender-neutral way) and cancel at least <em>this</em> act in the long-running post-9/11 security theater.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>In more travel document good news, right before Thanksgiving, the US State Department opened up a portal for on-line passport renewals on what they’re calling a “limited release”, which sounds like government speak for a beta product -- limited volume and possibly not the smoothest user experience. But you gotta give them credit for getting this far. I renewed my passport last February the old-fashioned way -- finding a Walgreens that still takes passport photos, stapling them and a check to the renewal form. I’m hoping that in 9 years’ time, all the sharp edges will be buffed off this limited release and ready for prime time. I know, it’s the government; but a guy can dream…</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I’ve never been too proud not to chase a trend in the service of search engine optimization and so I wrote <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/12/12/how-good-are-chatgpts-top-5-holiday-travel-tips/\">a blog post</a> last week on <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChatGPT\">ChatGPT</a>, the AI chatbot that was <a href=\"https://twitter.com/sama/status/1598038815599661056\">released after Thanksgiving</a> and simultaneously thrilled and horrified people -- mostly thrilling students and mostly horrifying teachers and writers. I decided to give it a try, typing into the prompt box -- “write a blog post with the top holiday travel tips.” One thing that was immediately obvious -- ChatGPT is <strong>a lot</strong> faster than me. It cranked out 350 words and 5 travel tips in a second or two. The tips, though, “Plan Ahead,” “Pack Light,” “Stay Organized,” “Be Flexible,” and “Stay Connected” weren’t wrong, but they weren’t all that insightful; they weren’t anything that even the occasional traveler, someone taking just a couple of flights a year, wouldn’t already know. So then the next step is to compare those tips, generated by artificial intelligence, to 5 tips generated by my 35 years and a few million miles of travel experience -- “Figure out if you want to fly or drive,” “Fly Non-Stop,” “Catch the Early Flight,” “Carry On Your Luggage,” and “Bring a Battery Pack.” You be the judge, but I think my tips are a bit more specific, a bit more actionable; probably just good enough to keep me in this unpaid travel podcaster/blogger gig — at least until ChatGPT gets its next upgrade.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>In the Travel Tech Stack topic in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/10/31/podcast-190-my-travel-tech-stack-imbibing-for-introverts/\">the last episode</a>, I talked about travel apps I use, and specifically Tripit which I use to consolidate all the plane, train, hotel, and Airbnb confirmations into a single itinerary. The Monday before Thanksgiving, I started getting e-mails from them -- 50% off TripIt Pro; $24 instead of the usual $49. That first one was targeted at Thanksgiving fliers. Then came another 50% off email, but this time it was a Black Friday e-mail. Then came the Cyber Monday pitch, again 50% off. I got a message from Allan Marko, long-time TravelCommons listener. “What do you think?” he asked, “Do you use it?”&nbsp; I quickly responded “Nope. Haven’t used Pro for many years. Don’t see the value of the additional features. If I was going to pay for one, I’d go for Flighty.” I was able to respond at near-ChatGPT speed because that text was pretty much verbatim what I said about Tripit Pro in the Travel Tech segment. The next day, Allan messaged me back “Just listened to the episode. You went through exactly what I was asking about TripIt.” TripIt ran that 50% off e-mail campaign right through last week, so almost a month -- which leads me to believe that there are a lot of other travelers who share my views.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And if you have any travel stories, comments, tips, rants, or a question like Allan or like Twitter follower @Ab3Fr0man (I’m always a sucker for a Ferris Bueller reference) whose question back in June led to last episode’s Travel Tech Stack topic, send it to <a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a>, ping me at @mpeacock on Twitter message or post a comment on the TravelCommons website for the quickest response. I’m a little slower responding to Facebook and Instagram. And if you don’t want your name mentioned on the podcast, let me know. Everyone’s got different sensitivities around privacy nowadays.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/NiGiD/48586\">O Tannenbaum / Oh Christmas Tree</a> by Martijn de Boer (NiGiD) (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial &nbsp;(3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: Admiral Bob (admiralbob77)</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Notes on Split, Croatia and Italy</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I mentioned at the start of the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/10/31/podcast-190-my-travel-tech-stack-imbibing-for-introverts/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Podcast #190 — My Travel Tech Stack; Imbibing for Introverts\">last episode</a> that I rummaged around Croatia and Italy for 3 weeks at the beginning of October, starting in Split, Croatia and then running up the Italian peninsula -- Amalfi Coast, Naples, Rome, Florence. When I’ve talked to folks about this trip, most everyone is much more interested in our time in Split and in Italy. Which makes sense if I think about it; lots of people interested in travel will have hit those Italy highlights -- Rome, Florence, the Amalfi Coast -- early on in their travels, but not so many Croatia (at least travelers from the US). But they’ve heard a lot about it, especially the Game of Thrones stans, which maybe has bumped it up on their list of places to visit; maybe high on the “B” list. And so the interest I was getting might’ve been a combination of a polite “How was your trip” with a dash of&nbsp; “Hmm, any reason I should bump it up to my ‘A’ list?” I found myself summing up our Split visit saying “Good times, good wine, good seafood; though I’m not sure I know anything more about Croatia having spent 4 days there.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I felt like I was another one of those guys who hop a cheap Ryanair flight to some city like Budapest or Tallinn for a lads’ weekend -- which was pretty close to what we did. But even when we ventured out of the old city (which is very cool and very pretty), out of the cruise passenger blast zone that would jam up those cool, pretty, but very narrow streets and alleys between, say, 10am and 5pm every day, I still couldn’t get a deeper feel for the place. We’d post up at some bars, but got much less conversation with the bartenders than I would in, say, Italy. I dunno -- maybe Croatians are more taciturn than Italians, or the folks in Split have to deal with so many tourists every day that they need a break and just want to chat with their fellow Croatians. Either -- or both -- would be very reasonable explanations. Indeed, the closest I came was a <em>non-conversation</em> in the main farmers’ market on Saturday morning. I was walking up and down the rows of stalls -- fresh vegetables, sundries, other random bits and bobs -- and noticed an older guy by himself in a small stall off to the side. Walking up, I could see he was selling smoked pork loin and some aged sheep’s cheese. He spoke no English; I spoke no Croatian, but with a bunch of gestures and finger measurements, I managed to buy some of everything he had on offer. I must’ve paid a good price because he pulled out a plastic 1-liter bottle and poured me a capful of what I figured was home-made rakija, a Croatian fruit brandy. It was good, very smooth; a nice 11am eye opener.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>After 4 days of wandering around, Split seemed a pretty standard European large town/small city with fresh seafood and good wine for, if not cheap, then a reasonable price. The only kinda wacky thing was the Croatian currency, the kuna. The exchange rate was around 7.50 to the dollar; a slightly awkward exchange rate to do in your head on the fly -- which we didn’t need to do because everything was dual priced in kuna and euro in preparation for their move next month (January 2023) to the euro. So you’d think (or at least I thought) that there’d be parallel usage of kunas and euros in the lead-up. But you (and me) would be wrong. There were signs everywhere “Kuna only” and “Cash only”. Which meant a lot of hunting down ATMs and a last-minute spending spree in the Split Airport bar and duty-free shop.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Just short of 70 years ago, John Steinbeck wrote an <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/positano-john-steinbeck/mode/2up\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">article about Positano, Italy for Harper’s Bazaar magazine</a>. The most popular pull quote is “Positano bites deep. It is a dream place that isn’t quite real...” He then goes on to say that Positano would never be overrun by tourists; it’s too steep, there’s no room for visitors, and the locals don’t give a damn. Steinbeck was right about it being steep, but he was dead wrong about the rest. The view from our balcony was beautiful when I looked up at the hills and out at the water. But then my eyes would drop a bit and I’d see the stream of ferries docking and disgorging full loads of daytrippers. I waded into it one morning to see the local church and got stuck in a conga line of tourists walking one of the narrow streets -- one single-file of people walking up from the beach, another single-file walking down; a young couple carrying a stroller up the sets of stone steps; the almost-Three Stooges-like people bumping into the back of each other when someone in the single-file stopped to look at a shop and didn’t step into the doorway. That was it for me. I was one and done. After that, I’d just sit on our balcony with a bottle of local wine, situated so my eyes wouldn’t drop from the beautiful view.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I don’t want to bang on about the crowds too much, but it’s a major through-line of this trip. Maybe the combination of the strong dollar, no COVID restrictions, and no mask rules was all it took to uncork 2 years of pent-up travel demand. In Rome, I made the mistake of meeting someone at the Trevi Fountain and got trapped in a horde. The Trastevere neighborhood where we stayed -- the streets were a bit thick with tourists during the day, but was complete gridlock at night with people overflowing out of the bars, into the plazas drinking what must’ve been truckloads of Peronis.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Having said this, I really liked Rome. Before this, I was always a bit ambivalent about Rome; would always tend to head north -- to Tuscany, to Milan. But this trip, maybe because we’d spent the prior week or so in smaller places, the big city energy of Rome was a pleasant, an energizing change. People talk about Rome being chaotic; I didn’t think it was any more chaotic than any other big city. Maybe because I wasn’t driving -- just walking or taking a cab or trying to kill Irene while driving a Vespa scooter.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Could also be that there was more space to spread out, to swerve the crowds. I found a walking and bike path sunk down below street level along the banks of the Tiber River. There was fairly steady bike traffic, but I could walk freely, no dodging on-coming tourists. I made my way through the Testaccio neighborhood -- definitely no tourist traffic here -- to a local market that was full, but not crowded; I was able to get a table with my beer and porchetta sandwich.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But I picked up a verve in Rome -- some combination of the energy and “don’t screw with me” of a big city, but also something more welcoming, a bit warmer than I’d get in, say Manhattan or London or Frankfurt or Paris. Maybe a bit more down-to-earth, something you get in the outer boroughs of New York and London; a friendly confidence. I liked it a lot more than I thought I would.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But not every crowd was bad. The last stop on our Italian tour was Florence. While I’d never been to Rome before, this was our fourth time in Florence. Irene and Claire wanted to shop for jewelry on Ponte Vecchio; the thought of wading back into those crowds sent me in the complete opposite direction, toward the Basilica of Santa Croce. Walking down the road, I noticed more and more guys wearing the same soccer jerseys funneling onto the road, some with plastic bags full of beer bottles. When the street ended at the Piazza di Santa Croce, the big open plaza in front of the basilica, it had been taken over by a huge crowd of Scottish soccer fans who’d followed their club, Hearts of Midlothian, from Edinburgh here to Florence to play the local team. They’d set up camp in the plaza, hung their club supporters flags from plaza railings, building scaffolds, and pretty much anything else with a vertical structure. And they were having a great time pre-gaming the match -- drinking beers, banging drums, and most of all, singing songs. At the other end of the plaza, about 6 carabinieri were standing in front of what looked like a paddy wagon. As I rounded the corner of the basilica, a couple of Florence metro cop cars joined them. They weren’t doing anything; just hanging back, just in case.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I left the drums and singing behind and wound my way up to a craft beer bar. I bought a beer and sat on a stool just outside the bar door -- just in time to see a stream of Hearts supporters take over the street which was, I soon found out, the main path from their pre-game piazza to the stadium. I have to say that, after 5+ hours of drinking, I was a bit nervous about this crowd, but I didn’t need be. They were loud, enthusiastic, maybe a bit bumptious, but never nasty or threatening. They were just there to have fun with their fellow supporters and watch the match which, one guy told me, they fully expected to lose (and which they did 5-1). Through it all, I was most impressed by the Florentine bar owner. Amid all the drunk Scotsmen singing and yelling and drinking, he was unflappable -- serving beers, keeping glasses out of the street, and occasionally taking group photos. He smiled and told me, “The boys just want to have some fun.” And they did. And they dragged me along with them -- not to the stadium, I had other plans, to meet up with a big slab of beef, a bistecca alla fiorentina-- but to enjoy a crowd rather than fight it. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #191</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Merry Christmas to everyone who celebrates it and hope you all have a great new year. Sorry I couldn’t get this out earlier to give any of you trapped in an airport this week something to listen to, but hey, now you have something for Christmas dinner clean-up.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page at TravelCommons.com for a transcript of the episode and any links I’ve mentioned. If you’re not yet subscribed, there’s a drop down Subscribe menu at the top of the page and along the side of the page, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ socials.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_191.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #191 — My Notes on Italy and Split, Croatia','Comparing long-distance drive times between gas and electric cars, and ChatGPT\'s travel tips with mine; Talking about another Real ID delay, and my travel notes from Positano, Rome, and Split, Croatia. ','inherit','closed','closed','','4250-revision-v1','','','2023-03-21 16:53:36','2023-03-21 21:53:36','',4250,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4280',0,'revision','',0),
(4281,1,'2023-03-22 14:13:51','2023-03-22 19:13:51','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/DALL·E-2023-01-25-22.53.11-e1674709008862-300x300.png\" alt=\"Cat with paw on the rim of a gin tonic glass\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\">Can\'t get to the artisanal garnish[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>With COVID travel restrictions gone, I expect people to revert back to their old ways where January is the biggest travel planning month. I wade into the debate between booking direct with travel providers vs. booking with agents and 3rd-party sites. I see how well my travel tips did during the Southwest cancellation chaos, and then pull out a little more of my conversation with Jeff Cioletti, author of the new book <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3sQelCQ\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Imbibing for Introverts</a></em>; this time about how gin is going global with a local twist. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_190.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here</strong></a><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_192.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\"> </a></strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_190.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #192: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN. Haven’t done any travel since the last episode. Instead, I’m starting the year off, as many others do, by doing travel planning, trying to lay out a 2023 travel calendar so we don’t slouch past the days and then, in say August, look back and say “Where’d the year go?”&nbsp; Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/01/25/podcast-159-planning-the-trip-of-a-lifetime-in-southeast-asia/\">episode #159</a>, I talked about how travel planning would traditionally kick in the week after Christmas -- although I’ll say that given <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/01/25/podcast-159-planning-the-trip-of-a-lifetime-in-southeast-asia/\">episode #159</a> was posted in January 2020, 2 months before the first wave of COVID lockdowns, my timing on that probably wasn’t the greatest. A year later, January 2021, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">episode #171</a>, I tried it again, ticking through 5 travel planning tips for COVID times. They were all about agility -- paying attention to cancellation rules, monitoring last-minutes changes in lockdowns and health requirements….&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But now two years later, with COVID cases down and <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/travel/passenger-volumes\">travel volumes pretty much back up to 2019 levels</a>, I expect folks will revert back to their old travel planning patterns. Back in my travel tech CIO days, right before Christmas, we’d always lock down our systems and put on extra capacity (which, let me tell you kids, back in the pre-cloud days, meant rolling actual servers, real live physical equipment uphill, through the snow, onto the data center’s raised floor) so we could handle the spikes in search volume. And while we’d see some minor spikes from the systems that travel agents used, the biggest volumes came from on-line sites like Expedia and Booking.com, sites more popular with leisure travelers than business travelers.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But now in 2023, I’m guessing that the Chinese are chief among those rushing back to their pre-COVID travel planning after the government quit their zero COVID policies. Indeed, on December 26, within a half an hour of the announcement that China’s borders were fully reopening,<a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/2022/12/27/here-are-the-countries-chinese-tourists-want-to-visit-the-most.html\"> searches for international travel on China’s biggest on-line site, Trip.com</a>, surged back to pre-COVID levels. The top search destinations were Southeast Asian countries, the US, and the UK. Now remember, before the lockdowns, <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/video/series/news-explainers/big-spending-chinese-tourists-are-coming-back-but-slowly/38552637-24FC-484A-B8A9-B6022BF9AEF0\">the Chinese were by far the largest source of international tourism spending</a> -- $255B, 70% more than second-place US, which was at $150B. So if you, like me, thought popular vacation destinations were crowded last year, just wait for this summer -- for what I’m guessing will be a second wave, maybe a Chinese tsunami of “revenge travel.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music --  Earth Soda by septahelix (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial Share-Alike  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/septahelix/34050</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Back in August, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/08/18/podcast-188-my-top-tips-to-survive-travel-chaos/\">episode #188</a> was all about tips for avoiding travel chaos. I recorded it at the tail end of a summer of travel woes, after a July 4th holiday weekend that was seen as a <em>complete train wreck</em> with 1,100 canceled flights and 4,000 delays -- to which, as we all know, Southwest said “Hold my beer” and canceled almost <em>16,000</em> flights between Christmas and New Year’s -- to which the FAA said “Wait, I wanna play too” and disrupted over 11,000 flights in o<em>ne morning</em>. And when the root cause for both was found to be old technology, all the gray-haired IT guys nodded to each other and repeated their mantra -- “technical debt is a bitch.”&nbsp; Southwest has <a href=\"https://skift.com/2023/01/14/u-s-senate-demands-southwest-explain-holiday-meltdown/\">estimated a profit hit of as much as $825 million</a> from their debacle. Just sayin’-- even just half that would’ve funded a whole lot of fixes to their old scheduling system.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But looking back at those summer tips, <em>pack so you can carry on </em>and if you can’t, then <em>spread everyone’s clothes across all your checked bags</em> were pretty much spot-on. As was the discussion in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/10/31/podcast-190-my-travel-tech-stack-imbibing-for-introverts/\">episode #190</a> about how adding <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3k4rCUy\">Apple AirTags</a> to my travel tech stack saved me time and agita when United lost my luggage. With all the stories about piles of stranded luggage from the bomb cyclone and Southwest cancellations, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3k4rCUy\">AirTags</a> have proven to be a critical “must-have” if you have to check a bag, and have an iPhone. For Android users, you’ll have to wait a bit longer; people who spelunk through new Android code think <a href=\"https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/01/google-plans-airtag-clone-will-track-devices-with-3-billion-android-phones/\">Google is working on its own AirTag-like tracker</a>.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But I think I missed a couple of things. First, I should’ve pointed back to and recapped my conversation in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/06/09/podcast-164-first-post-lockdown-trips-travel-credit-cards/\">episode #164</a> with <a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/brett-holzhauer/\">Brett Holzhauer</a>, a travel credit card analyst now at CNBC, about the trip cancellation, trip interruption, and baggage insurance that many people don’t realize they get by charging their trip on a travel credit card. Maybe the tip there is, before you book your trip, pull out the credit card benefit summaries so you know which card will give you the best protection.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The second tip I’d add is -- <em>take pictures of your checked luggage</em>, outside and the contents inside. The pictures of the bags will help you answer the “describe what your bag looks like” question on the airline’s lost baggage form. The pictures of the inside will help with that baggage insurance claim. But just the fact that we’ve got to think about all this just to have someone take us and our stuff from Point A to Point B… Jesus, what a broken system.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>In what has become a going on 2-year thread about international travel planning, I’ve talked about COVID travel rules, testing, Global Entry, passport applications… And so one of the trips we’ve been planning is to hit the tulip festival in Holland -- the country, the Netherlands, not the town in Michigan, which can screw you up if you don’t look closely at your Google search results. The tulip festival in the Netherlands is in April while the one in western Michigan is in May.&nbsp; And that initial lack of Google input box precision, using Holland rather than the Netherlands, which surfaced the May date, sent me down a whole ‘nother search path because, deep in some random brain fold, I remembered a May start date for ETIAS -- the European Travel Information and Authorisation System which is the EU’s version of the US’s ESTA, the Electronic System for Travel Authorization. Now this whole E-acronym soup is pretty much just electronically plugging the travel information gap for folks who don’t need a visa to enter a country. The US started it first, another recommendation from the 9/11 Commission, but unlike Real ID, ESTA actually got implemented -- in 2009. It started off free but is now $21 per person for two years, with most of that going to fund Brand USA, the US tourist promotion agency. The EU’s <a href=\"https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/MEMO_18_4362\">ETIAS</a> is cheaper - €7 per person for three years. It got started later, in 2018, and its go-live date has been kicked down the road a few times now -- from 2022 to May 2023 as that random neuron of mine recalled, but I guess I missed the <a href=\"https://thepointsguy.com/news/europe-new-etias-entry-fee-launch-2023/\">latest push</a>, which happened back in August, that delayed ETIAS another 6 months. So now go-live is November 2023 -- still nothing like the 17-year-and-counting delay for Real ID. So, as it turns out after losing a couple of hours of my life in a click spiral, nothing to worry about ‘til next year.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And if you have any travel worries… or stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music -- Generic Apologies by Speck (c) copyright 2022 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/speck/65664 Ft: jaspertine, Zenboy1955, Admiral Bob, Apoxode</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Travel Planning -- Book Direct or through a Third-Party?</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Chris Chufo, long-time friend of the podcast, pointed me to a <a href=\"https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/tips/booking-direct-travel-websites-flights-hotels/\">Washington Post column</a> by Christopher Elliot on the “great debate” (as he put it) between booking direct with an airline or hotel or car rental company vs. using a 3rd party, a travel agent or an on-line site like Booking.com or Airbnb. It’s an ongoing debate because there’s not a straight-forward answer, and it’s one that I personally straddle when booking travel. But when I think about it, and what the Post column didn’t really articulate, is that the decision point hinges on relationships and leverage.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>When booking flights, trains, rental cars, I almost always book direct because if there\'s a problem -- a delay, a cancellation -- I can work directly with the airline or rental company to figure out an alternative. When I booked through a 3rd party -- most recently, back in 2019 when Amex was giving a 5x multiplier on Membership Rewards points for booking through them -- and then had a flight cancellation in Charlottesville, VA, the carrier wouldn’t talk to me -- “You need to call your agent.”&nbsp; Which I did, while standing in front of the ticket counter at the airport, looking at the flight status display saying “Canceled” and telling the Amex agent the current situation because the flight status has been updated in their system yet. After which the agent said “Hold on, I need to call the airline because it’s so close to departure, I can’t do anything in the system” -- basically making the same call I just got off of. Third parties really don’t have much leverage over carriers -- airlines, trains, or even rental cars -- and there’s no real value in putting them between me and the carrier when I’m trying to move fast to swerve a delay or cancellation. Especially a carrier where I’ve got status; that marker of a relationship often delivers more than an agent can.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Hotels can be a bit different. I’ll book directly with the big chains -- Marriott, Hilton -- again, places where I have status. My experience has been that the reservation agents are more flexible when I need to make a change, and it feels like (though I don’t have hard data on this) I get upgraded more often by the front desk. And if I have, say, a billing issue with a Marriott property, Corporate Marriott will look at my lifetime titanium status and give me the benefit of the doubt. However, with independent properties where I haven’t stayed before and this is a one-time transaction, and so don’t have any leverage from an on-going relationship or, say, the potential for future business, the situation is murkier. An Airbnb or an Expedia, who <em>can</em> see future revenue from me, might be more willing to help me out with a problem. But the property has a financial incentive for me to book directly with them -- it saves them commission that could be as high as 40%.&nbsp; So if I’m going someplace new, I usually start off searching on a 3rd-party site -- Airbnb, Booking.com -- to see what’s available. If I narrow down to an independent place and I’m going to stay there for more than a day or two, I’ll flip over to their web site -- can I get a better price booking direct? I check out TripAdvisor -- can I trust them? If both are “yes’s”, then I’ll book direct -- because I still have one fall-back protector, my credit card company.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Last year, our last night in Sicily, we booked a hotel room that was maybe a 5-minute walk from Catania airport because we had an early flight out the next morning. We found it and booked it on Booking.com -- the path of least resistance. So on that last night, driving back with our friends from Taormina (before <a href=\"https://www.travelweekly.com/Travel-News/Hotel-News/White-Lotus-series-generates-interest-Sicily\"><em>The White Lotus</em> put it on the map</a>), we got to the airport but couldn’t find the hotel. Google Maps landed us in front of some apartment buildings and a big dirt parking lot. A couple of laps around the block and a long WhatsApp message stream later, we found out that what we booked wasn’t a hotel room, but one of these apartments; and when someone remotely unlocked the door, it looked a bit (no, a lot) like a <em><a href=\"https://youtu.be/pLz6nIvqB2c\" title=\"\">Third Rate Romance, Low Rent Rendezvous</a></em> sorta place. Our friends said “We’re <strong>not</strong> leaving you here” and we bee-lined over to a <em>real</em> airport hotel where I grabbed one of their last rooms while Irene canceled the Love Shack on Booking.com. Now, as you might imagine with the late cancellation, the Shack didn’t want to refund our payment. Not surprising. However, I was a bit surprised when Booking.com didn’t help us -- in spite of me pointing out the property description on their site was completely false.  So, last resort, I disputed the charge with Chase. They called me. I told them the story, sent them screenshots of the property listing (which surprising(?)/ unsurprisingly(?) was still up, unchanged, on Booking.com) along with a couple of pictures I’d taken -- just in case. We’ve had this Chase card for over 10 years; it’s our main credit card so we spend <em>a lot</em> on it; and we’ve never disputed a hotel stay on it before. Leverage from what, for Chase, has been a profitable relationship. Two weeks later, we got our money back.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li> Bridge Music -- Absolutely Clear (ft Jeris &amp; Goldfish) by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/45578 Ft: Jeris, Goldfish</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Gin Conquers the World</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Here’s a bit of a change-up. Usually, when I talk about drinking on this podcast, it’s about craft beer. There’s even a Beer tab on the top of the TravelCommons website that takes you to a page with all the podcast episodes and blog posts that talk about beer -- “What Makes a Great Taproom”, “My Best Restaurants, Bars and Taprooms of 2021” (note to self, gotta write the 2022 version of that). But back in October, when interviewing Jeff Cioletti, editor-in-chief of <a href=\"https://craftspiritsmag.com/\"><em>Craft Spirits Magazine</em></a> about his new book <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3sQelCQ\"><em>Imbibing for Introverts</em></a> for <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/10/31/podcast-190-my-travel-tech-stack-imbibing-for-introverts/\" title=\"Podcast #190 — My Travel Tech Stack; Imbibing for Introverts\">episode #190</a>, we got talking about how gin has spread across the globe:<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Let me ask you this... Through your travels, have you noticed any changes, any trends over the past few years as you\'ve been sitting at bars drinking alone?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Jeff: One thing that I find incredibly striking, and this is worldwide, I had mentioned, gin.&nbsp; Gin has reconquered Europe. I was in Berlin, and I was on a panel with somebody, he said that now Germany has got 1,000 gin brands. Like five years ago, they had barely any.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: I\'ll tell you, for me it\'s gonna either be craft beer or gin. I just think about it, in Scotland and Spain.... I was just in Croatia a few weeks ago; a guy walks out, has some Croatian gin. They were doing gin tonics, so the big Spanish goblet style. I said, “Well, I\'d really like to taste that gin without all the tonic and everything. I want to see what you guys are doing with it.” And back to your point about endearing yourself sometimes, the guy was like “Really? You really want it”, and I said, “Yeah, absolutely. Just gin and glass, just give me a little bit” and he said, “Oh no, that\'s great.” And off he came and brought the regular gin tonic and then there was a little sidecar of just gin neat so I could taste it along.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Jeff: I was just in a bar in Stuttgart on Saturday night. It was called Botanical Affairs, a tiny kind of corner pocket little bar and all they have is gin. I mean it\'s not even like you go in there or you can have a beer, but they specialize in gin. I mean everything was a gin cocktail; that\'s all you could order, and they had so many different brands from all over the world. And you mentioned Spain; they get most of the credit for elevating the gin cocktail and turning it into kind of a luxurious drink. It really is, it\'s an experience now.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Yes, it\'s something, with the goblet glass and the garnish and all stuff.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Jeff: Yes, and a lot of people have adopted that; even places here in the States that are using it now. I\'ve found it in a lot of places in the UK that use it And the Spanish get all the credit for that. They didn\'t use it in Germany though, which I found interesting but everywhere else seems to.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Now there are always local/regional spirits to drink -- bourbon in Kentucky, malt whisky in Scotland and Ireland, soju in Korea, the whole range of Eastern European fruit brandies; palinka in Hungary, I mentioned Croatian rakija (pronounced rakiya) in the last episode. But it seems that gin has become the canvas, the freshly painted side of a building that younger distillers want to tag with their sense of what’s local. Maybe because it’s easier -- they don’t have to wrestle with expectations or regulations about what the local traditional spirit is.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Also maybe because it’s easier to make. Back in 2013 on our first visit to University of St Andrews with our then-high-school junior Claire, I found a local microbrewery, Eden Mill. Their story was that they wanted to be a Scotch whisky distillery, but since whisky is legally required to age in an oak barrel for at least 3 years, they needed something else to generate cash now. And since the front-end of making beer and malt whisky are pretty much the same, craft beer seemed a pretty logical way to bridge their cash gap. Fast forward a couple of years to Claire’s first year at St Andrews, Eden Mill is still making beer, still waiting for their whisky to come of age, but now they’ve added gin. The updated story -- since they already had a distillation column to make whisky, they had everything they needed to make gin. They trucked in neutral spirits -- similar to the Everclear of <em>my</em> college days, but I’m sure a bit classier -- run it through the distillation column over a basket of botanicals, dilute it to the right strength, bottle it, and sell it -- right away. If I’m an artisanal producer, maybe I don’t have to think as much about funding stainless steel and storage, and so can think more about how I want to express my locality, my culture in that basket of botanicals. Eden Mill, for example, sitting on the east coast of Scotland, uses local sea buckthorn berries. On a trip to Spain, I was served Nordés gin from Galicia, the most northwest part of Spain, the bit that sits on top of Portugal; it tasted of lemon verbena and eucalyptus and bay leaf, botanicals native to the Galician forests. The Croatian gin I talked about with Jeff Cioletti was all about the local, native juniper berries.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>It’s an interesting twist on the complaint about global homogenization, that the world has been becoming more the same now because of -- pick your favorite bugbear: the spread of global brands, Instagram, the ubiquity of English…. Gin is the latest; starting to crowd out the local native spirit, but with a twist with the focus on native flavors. And so with all the effort put into expressing these local botanicals, I’m always surprised when bartenders want to serve them in the Spanish-style gin tonic that Jeff rightly notes seems to have taken over. After giving me a whole spiel about the care the distiller has taken to infuse the locality into the gin, they then smother the one-and-a-half ounces of that locality with 6 or 7 ounces of imported tonic and a slice or two of imported orange or lemon or lime. So no, for me, give me that local gin straight, maybe over one of those huge ice cubes so I can taste that local flavor the distiller has been working to present. I guess I’m swimming upstream against today’s cocktail culture -- more interested in the distiller’s art than the mixologist’s.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #192</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>. And while you’re at TravelCommons.com, you can check out the show notes page for a transcript and any links I’ve mentioned. Or you can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_192.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #192 — New Year Travel Planning Tips; Gin Conquers the World','Are people going back to their old travel planning ways? Should you book direct with travel providers or use a 3rd-party? Unpacking Southwest\'s cancellation chaos. Gin goes global with a local twist.','inherit','closed','closed','','4264-revision-v1','','','2023-03-22 14:13:51','2023-03-22 19:13:51','',4264,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4281',0,'revision','',0),
(4284,1,'2023-03-31 19:19:32','2023-04-01 00:19:32','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Nash-vegas-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Honky Tonk signs on Broadway in Nashville\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\">Trapped in Nash-Vegas[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Doing a bit of winter travel, the bar tab from waiting out a weather delay got me rethinking the economics of airport lounge memberships. Doing yet more travel planning but with a focus on making the most of the points and miles we accumulated on credit cards during the pandemic. And after eight months in Nashville, I compare the two sides of the local music scene -- the Nash-Vegas honky tonks vs the smaller, eclectic off-Broadway scene. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_193.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:audio -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-audio\"><audio controls src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_193.mp3\"></audio></figure>\n<!-- /wp:audio -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #193: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN after a couple of bits of travel; to Chicago at the end of January because, really, that’s the garden time of the year in Chicago -- waking up to subzero temperatures, wind howling off the lake. Yup, good times; really missed it.&nbsp; But the next month, flying to and from Albuquerque, NM for some skiing in Taos, reminded me of something I <em>really</em> miss about Chicago -- direct flights to almost everywhere in the US. ABQ is about the same distance from Chicago as it is from Nashville. But what’s a 3¼ hour direct flight from Chicago turned out to be a 6½ hour journey from Nashville, complete with a coffee stop in Houston. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/05/26/podcast-187-moving-to-a-non-hub-airport-what-makes-a-great-taproom/\">episode #187</a>, I talked about having to adjust my mental travel calculus, my travel reflexes, to <em>not</em> living in an airport hub city -- for the first time in about 40 years. Those extra 3 hours made that adjustment very real.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>When we landed, we met up with our daughter Claire and hopped the bus to the rental car center to see what Hertz had waiting for us. There were 5 of us skiing, so I wanted to get the biggest vehicle they had, but I was playing a bit of chicken with Hertz. I had enough Hertz points to cover a large car for the week, but they’d only let me cover 1 day of a specialty class like an SUV. With all the car rentals quoting $100/day, I slammed my points down on the large car and hoped there was some sort of an SUV in the Five Star row when we got there. So when we rocked up to the Hertz lot, my heart sank just a bit; there was nothing in the Five Star row. After a minute of staring at the empty spaces, a woman came out of the office “Oh, we’ve upgraded you to President’s Circle. I turn 90 degrees and see an entire row of SUVs. We picked the biggest one, a Ford Explorer with 16,000 miles and captain’s chairs for everyone. Started the trip off on the right note.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The trip home at the end of the week, everyone’s flight was blown sideways by the big winter storm two days before. It didn’t surprise us; it had blown off the mountain with 50-70 mph winds, so we weren’t surprised when the flight delay notices started dinging our iPhones. United hit us with a 2-hour delay (our plane didn’t make it out of Fresno the night before), but since we had a 3-hr layover in DEN, the only thing that changed was which airport bar we were killing time in.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Claire caught the worst of it, though, trying to get home to New York. With no direct flights between ABQ and LGA, she had to connect through ORD. The flight out went without a hitch. The flight back… the first leg, ABQ-ORD, was fine. It was the ORD-LGA leg that went badly wrong, which surprised me because those flights, between ORD and LGA, are like a shuttle, every hour, like clockwork. But for Claire, the shuttle broke… literally. After an hour delay, they loaded up the plane, de-iced the wings, and then found out an engine was broken, so back to the gate where -- you guessed it -- it can’t be fixed. 2½ hours past departure time, Claire pings me -- “it’s starting to snow; I doubt I’m getting on any plane tonight.” “Don’t write it off yet”, I told her. “It’s not a weather issue, so American will have to pay for a hotel and breakfast for the 120 or so people on that plane. That fact alone will cause them to look hard for another plane for you.” And that’s exactly what they did. It took them a few hours to scrounge one up but Claire got home that night… or rather that morning, at 3am. Always amazes me how an airline can figure out a solution when it’s <em>their</em> money on the line.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Javolenus/41932\">Ianiscus</a> by Javolenus (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. Ft: Wired_Ant</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Back to waiting out that flight delay in ABQ, my bar tab from waiting out the 2-hr delay got me re-thinking my stance on airport lounges, especially now that the US ones have upped their game on food and alcohol. It wouldn’t have changed anything in ABQ. It’s too small; no lounges. Indeed, I think we were at the only bar. But elsewhere… when we fly internationally, I usually get lounge access through my United or American status. In the US, I gave up my American and then United lounge memberships years ago because I wasn’t using them. I love American Express’s Centurion Lounges but charging $50 to bring a guest in and hiking the annual fee for the Platinum card to $695, the math just didn’t work for me. I could just do day passes; maybe use Loungebuddy for that. Or run the math on the not-quite-Platinum cards from Chase and Capital One, the ones that include Priority Pass membership. I dunno; a couple of avoided bar tabs may cover their annual fees.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/01/26/podcast-192-new-year-travel-planning-tips-gin-conquers-the-world/\">the last episode</a>, wading into the debate between booking direct with an airline or hotel or through a 3rd party, I told the story about how a -- <em>how do I say this politely?</em> -- false/misleading/just plain wrong property listing on Booking.com tricked us into booking a night in a place that looked to be much more geared to hourly stays, if you know what I mean. And how Booking.com did absolutely nothing to resolve our dispute. Long-time listener Nick Gassman pointed me to a <a href=\"https://www.theguardian.com/money/2023/jan/11/a-glossy-bookingcom-flat-turned-out-to-be-a-squalid-loft\">Guardian article</a> where a Booking.com customer wrote to the consumer affairs reporter with a very similar experience (dare I say “scam”?) -- misleading listing, shock when opening the door to the actual place, walking/running away to find another place to stay, getting dinged with a night’s charge for being a “no show”, and then Booking.com going “palms up” when asked to fix it. The interesting twist on this one was -- with the host reporting them as “no shows”, they couldn’t leave a review on the property to warn others. Nick also sent me a link to a <a href=\"https://www.reddit.com/r/BestofRedditorUpdates/comments/11saoz0/new_update_from_court_in_ongoing_case_airbnb/\">Reddit post</a> about a guy going to arbitration with Airbnb, also disputing a “no show” when he canceled a place that had security cameras on the inside of a studio apartment. These are reminders that, for all their <a href=\"https://www.booking.com/trust_and_safety.html\">web pages</a> and <a href=\"https://news.airbnb.com/airbnb-launches-trust-safety-advisory-coalition/\">press releases</a> with large boldface headlines, “trust and safety”, their legal terms &amp; conditions in a much smaller font says that all they do is connect hosts and guests; they’re not party to that transaction and don’t have any control over the quality or safety of your experience. I’m not saying don’t use them. We use Booking and Airbnb all the time, and have had 1, maybe 2 or 3, bad experiences. What I am saying is, go in eyes wide open. In this very hot travel market, Booking and Airbnb feel they need to take care of hosts right now more than they do guests.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/12/24/podcast-191-my-notes-on-italy-and-split-croatia/\">episode #191</a>, I said “In more travel document good news, the US State Department opened up on-line passport renewals on what they’re calling a ‘limited release’.” Well, listener Rob Holbrook isn’t feeling the good vibes. Rob said “I tried the renewal portal but it was constantly down, and then they shut it down completely. I’m not sure if the pilot outlived its usefulness, if passport renewal is too complex to do on-line, or if it opened up unexpected security risks.” The State Department shut down the renewal portal in early February to “implement customer feedback to improve the process.”&nbsp; Back then, they said it would be back up in March; now they’re saying “TBD” I’m just hoping they’re not using the same IT gang that coded up the first version of the Obamacare HealthCare.gov site. So we’re back to sending paper forms in, and the wait time is slowly creeping up -- before spring break season, State was saying 8-11 weeks; <a href=\"https://www.state.gov/update-on-passport-processing-times/\">last week, they added 2 weeks</a>; now estimating 10-13 weeks. If you’re planning to hit Europe this summer, you need to sprint down to Walgreens for that passport photo <em>right now</em>!</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to like Nick and Rob did to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/48914\">In Peace (Somewhere Else Mix)</a> by cdk (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. Ft: Snowflake</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Still Overthinking Travel Planning</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Last summer, back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/08/18/podcast-188-my-top-tips-to-survive-travel-chaos/\">episode #188</a>, I talked about getting a great frequent flier deal on my Croatia-Italy flights, completely busting through the traditional 2¢/mile benchmark. It got me thinking that maybe the inflation in award redemption requirements hadn’t kept up with the real dollar cost increases for flights, and that I was shooting that gap to get a smokin’ deal. Well, when booking flights to go over to the Netherlands next month, I’m here to tell you -- that gap has snapped shut. I first started looking at KLM, the Dutch airline, and its SkyTeam partner Delta in hopes of a decent flight selection <em>and</em>, as importantly, I have a slug of Amex Membership Rewards points I’m looking to burn off, and KLM and Delta are transfer partners. But after a couple of hours of twisting our travel plans in knots around their flight matrices, the best I could get was ¾ of a cent/mile -- so those Amex points are still there. Next up, British Airways because they have a direct flight to LHR from Nashville, but I quickly ran into the same problem I always have with BA Avios points -- they don’t cover fuel surcharges and, for some reason, BA prices their fares low and slams a big fuel surcharge on top of it. I dunno why they do it -- maybe there’s a tax angle there somewhere. The final ticket price comes out the same as other carriers, but a flight booked with a similar amount of miles ends up requiring a huge cash payment, like 2-3 times what other carriers want. So the Avios points also stay put; maybe I’ll push them over to Iberia for a trip to Spain or Portugal next year. What started with a couple of numbers scrawled on a piece of paper quickly turned into a spreadsheet with columns for the different possible travel windows -- leaving on a Weds vs. a Thurs, returning on a Fri vs. Saturday -- 3 rows for each carrier, the first cell in the matrix the cost of buying the ticket straight out, the second cell split between miles and cash payment, the third cell the cents per mile calc -- is it worth burning the points or just buying the ticket. After all that, the best deal was on United at 1.54¢/mile -- a bit off 2¢/mile, but looking at valuation tables on <a href=\"https://thepointsguy.com/guide/monthly-valuations/\">The Points Guy</a>, <a href=\"https://www.bankrate.com/finance/credit-cards/points-and-miles-valuations/#airline-rewards\">Bankrate</a>, and <a href=\"https://frequentmiler.com/airline-miles-worth/\">Frequent Miler</a> websites, I could see it was a solid deal and booked it.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Although, I have to say that I paid more attention than usual to the United routings after reading a <a href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/21/travel/lufthansa-refunds-collect.html\">NY Times article</a> that long-time listener and contributor Chris Chufo sent me about the hassles people are having getting refunds or compensation from Lufthansa, United’s trans-Atlantic Star Alliance partner. Reading through the litany of complaints surprised me. I’ve flown Lufthansa <em>a lot</em> -- I feel I know their hub, Frankfurt Airport, better than any other European airport -- and I can’t recall any big issue I’ve had with their service. Indeed, back in 2013 when flying Lufthansa home from a family vacation, a weather delay in… <em>Amsterdam</em> caused us to miss our connection home from Frankfurt. I talked about it in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2013/09/06/podcast-106-summer-vacation-in-amsterdam-restaurant-trends/\">episode #106</a>; we had no problem getting hotel and food vouchers and getting re-booked on the next morning’s flight out. Great service, no arguments -- and we were flying on United miles. It was the complete opposite treatment we’d expect from, say, United. But that was then. This NY Times article quotes a German travel industry exec saying that Lufthansa got aggressive about swerving EU customer protection laws during COVID. Was this just their reaction to a pandemic-caused cash crunch? Or is it a new set point, cutting costs in customer service to fund lower fares to match up better with European budgeteers like Ryanair and WizzAir and Easyjet? I hope not. But still, when booking this trip to Amsterdam, I clicked through to the flight details to make sure I hadn’t booked a Lufthansa code-share, that I was flying on United metal. Which is quite the change; 10 years ago, it was the other way around; when I was looking for what I thought was much better Lufthansa service.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music --<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/35724\">Blue Like Venus</a> by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. Ft: Admiral Bob</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Nashville vs. Nash-Vegas</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As I mentioned at the start of <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/08/18/podcast-188-my-top-tips-to-survive-travel-chaos/\">episode #188</a>,&nbsp; in July we relocated the TravelCommons studio -- and the rest of our worldly belongings -- from Chicago to Nashville. After 25 years into my 4th tour of duty in Chicago, I&nbsp; wanted a change of scenery. And it definitely has been that -- moving from the <a href=\"https://worldpopulationreview.com/us-cities\">3rd most populous city in the US to the 20th</a>; from the 8th highest population density to the 178th most dense of the US’s top 200 cities. We joke that whenever we put an address into Google Maps, it could be completely on the other side of the city, but no matter how far away it looks, we’d hit the Directions button and be told it’s only a 15-minute drive. It took us 15 minutes just to get out of our neighborhood in Chicago.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>When we told friends our move plans, just about everyone replied, “Oh, we love Nashville. We look forward to visiting.” Once we got down here and started knocking around, we realized that what they were all talking about was “Nash-Vegas” -- the 5 blocks of honky tonks on Lower Broadway, the 3 blocks over to the Country Music Hall of Fame, the open-air party buses cruising the perimeter full of bachelorette partiers yelling out at every red light. It’s definitely something to be seen, and it brings a steady stream of tourists. I’m always amazed how full the Broadway sidewalks are at, say, 11:30am on a Tuesday. As you might’ve guessed, we’re not often on Broadway.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But that’s not to say the tourists have it completely wrong; Nashville <em>is</em> Music City with a capital “M”. If you fly in on Southwest or American, it starts with walking past live music at Tootsie’s as you walk up Concourse C. And then it just continues. Irene and I are convinced that there’s a law requiring any gathering of 10 or more people to have a stage with a live performer. The first couple of months we were down here, we hit all the area farmers’ markets we could find, and just about every one had a stage with a singer/songwriter and a guitar or a full-on band. Peak Nashville for us was when we were in line at a local hot chicken joint watching a guy with a guitar set up his gear and start to place just inside the entry door. It was like having live music at a McDonald’s. I was talking to a bartender at an East Nashville place called <a href=\"http://www.vinyltapnashville.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Vinyl Tap</a> -- a beer bar/vinyl record store/live music venue (of course). We got talking; he’d moved down from New York City to be a session trombone player. And that’s not an uncommon conversation. In New York and LA, bartenders are working between acting gigs. In Nashville, they’re musicians between sessions.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And so we’ve waded into the live music scene, much more than we did in Chicago. In January, we made the rounds of Monday night singer/songwriter open mic nights. Some were pretty informal - at a microbrewery, <a href=\"https://www.tnbrew.com/livemusic\" title=\"\">Tennessee Brew Works</a>, the MC put out a legal pad at 5pm for people to sign up and then took them in that order, each person doing 2 songs. At <a href=\"https://bluebirdcafe.com/how-to-play/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Bluebird Cafe</a>, very famous place, a bit more structure -- on-line sign-ups opened at 11am. That night, there were two lines to get in -- to the left of the front door, the folks who made it on the list, lined up to play their best song to the people who lined up to the right of the door, who showed up to listen. And everyone, listeners and signers, sat together in the audience. Irene and I ended up at a two-top right in front of the stage. On our left was a guy who drove in from Clarksville, TN to play and his wife. Behind us was a table full of Canadians including a woman from Quebec who sang in French, and a guy who’d flown in from Vancouver that morning just to play his song on that stage. And he wasn’t the only one; there were people on the stage who had driven in from Houston, Little Rock, Michigan, Nebraska…. I hadn’t realized how big a draw this music scene is.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Maybe 3 weeks ago, I saw a blurb on Twitter about <a href=\"https://thirdmanrecords.com/products/nashville-steel-guitar-arts-council-live-at-third-man-records\" title=\"\">a show</a> put on by the “Pedal Steel Guitar Arts Council.” Now that felt very Nashville. At $15/ticket, how could we go wrong? Plus, it was at the performance space at Jack White’s Third Man Records which had been on Irene’s list of places to check out. So, we went. Back to my bartender discussions, one thing I noticed early on going to shows in Nashville is how many working musicians there are here -- not hobbyists, not passion project people, but people whose main paying job is to play music -- session musicians, live backing musicians. And some of these smaller shows are session musicians getting up on stage with their friends to play, often to an audience of other friends and family. At this show, when the first steel guitar player hit the stage, a little girl behind us called out “Hey, grandpa!” It ended up being a very interesting show, one that immediately attacked the stereotype of pedal steel guitars as twangy country music instruments. Grandpa was followed by a father-and-son pedal steel-and-cello duo, who were followed by a guy doing pedal steel ambient music. Very interesting stuff, and stuff I’m not sure I’d see anywhere else.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Maybe it’s those Broadway honky tonk cover bands and the mainstream country music recording sessions that pay the bills, and so let’s these musicians play different (some might say “weird”) stuff on their own time. But if/when you get down to Nashville, spend an afternoon, a night on Lower Broadway -- because how can you say you’ve been here and <em>not</em> do that -- but save some time to check out the smaller places, the open mic nights. Make sure you see the Nashville music scene, not just the Nash-Vegas one.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #193</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>. And while you’re at TravelCommons.com, you can check out the show notes page for a transcript and any links I’ve mentioned. Or you can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_193.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #193 — Making the Most of Miles; Nashville vs Nash-Vegas','Weather delay bar tab got me rethinking the economics of airport lounge memberships. Continuing to plan travel but focusing on making the most of the miles we accumulated on credit cards during the pandemic. And comparing Nashville’s music scene: Nash-Vegas honky tonks vs the smaller, eclectic off-Broadway scene.','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-193-making-the-most-of-miles-nashville-vs-nash-vegas','','\nhttps://frequentmiler.com/airline-miles-worth/','2026-01-28 10:51:55','2026-01-28 16:51:55','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4284',0,'post','',1),
(4285,1,'2023-03-31 09:19:25','2023-03-31 14:19:25','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/DALL·E-2023-01-25-22.53.11-e1674709008862-300x300.png\" alt=\"Cat with paw on the rim of a gin tonic glass\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\">Can\'t get to the artisanal garnish[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>With COVID travel restrictions gone, I expect people to revert back to their old ways where January is the biggest travel planning month. I wade into the debate between booking direct with travel providers vs. booking with agents and 3rd-party sites. I see how well my travel tips did during the Southwest cancellation chaos, and then pull out a little more of my conversation with Jeff Cioletti, author of the new book <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3sQelCQ\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Imbibing for Introverts</a></em>; this time about how gin is going global with a local twist. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_190.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here</strong></a><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_192.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\"> </a></strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_190.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #193: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN after a couple of bits of travel; to Chicago at the end of January because, really, that’s the garden time of the year in Chicago -- waking up to subzero temperatures, wind howling off the lake. Yup, good times; really missed it.&nbsp; But the next month, flying to and from Albuquerque, NM for some skiing in Taos, reminded me of something I <em>really</em> miss about Chicago -- direct flights to almost everywhere in the US. ABQ is about the same distance from Chicago as it is from Nashville. But what’s a 3¼ hour direct flight from Chicago turned out to be a 6½ hour journey from Nashville, complete with a coffee stop in Houston. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/05/26/podcast-187-moving-to-a-non-hub-airport-what-makes-a-great-taproom/\">episode #187</a>, I talked about having to adjust my mental travel calculus, my travel reflexes, to <em>not</em> living in an airport hub city -- for the first time in about 40 years. Those extra 3 hours made that adjustment very real.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>When we landed, we met up with our daughter Claire and hopped the bus to the rental car center to see what Hertz had waiting for us. There were 5 of us skiing, so I wanted to get the biggest vehicle they had, but I was playing a bit of chicken with Hertz. I had enough Hertz points to cover a large car for the week, but they’d only let me cover 1 day of a specialty class like an SUV. With all the car rentals quoting $100/day, I slammed my points down on the large car and hoped there was some sort of an SUV in the Five Star row when we got there. So when we rocked up to the Hertz lot, my heart sank just a bit; there was nothing in the Five Star row. After a minute of staring at the empty spaces, a woman came out of the office “Oh, we’ve upgraded you to President’s Circle. I turn 90 degrees and see an entire row of SUVs. We picked the biggest one, a Ford Explorer with 16,000 miles and captain’s chairs for everyone. Started the trip off on the right note.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The trip home at the end of the week, everyone’s flight was blown sideways by the big winter storm two days before. It didn’t surprise us; it had blown off the mountain with 50-70 mph winds, so we weren’t surprised when the flight delay notices started dinging our iPhones. United hit us with a 2-hour delay (our plane didn’t make it out of Fresno the night before), but since we had a 3-hr layover in DEN, the only thing that changed was which airport bar we were killing time in.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Claire caught the worst of it, though, trying to get home to New York. With no direct flights between ABQ and LGA, she had to connect through ORD. The flight out went without a hitch. The flight back… the first leg, ABQ-ORD, was fine. It was the ORD-LGA leg that went badly wrong, which surprised me because those flights, between ORD and LGA, are like a shuttle, every hour, like clockwork. But for Claire, the shuttle broke… literally. After an hour delay, they loaded up the plane, de-iced the wings, and then found out an engine was broken, so back to the gate where -- you guessed it -- it can’t be fixed. 2½ hours past departure time, Claire pings me -- “it’s starting to snow; I doubt I’m getting on any plane tonight.” “Don’t write it off yet”, I told her. “It’s not a weather issue, so American will have to pay for a hotel and breakfast for the 120 or so people on that plane. That fact alone will cause them to look hard for another plane for you.” And that’s exactly what they did. It took them a few hours to scrounge one up but Claire got home that night… or rather that morning, at 3am. Always amazes me how an airline can figure out a solution when it’s <em>their</em> money on the line.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music --  Earth Soda by septahelix (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial Share-Alike  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/septahelix/34050</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Back to waiting out that flight delay in ABQ, my bar tab from waiting out the 2-hr delay got me re-thinking my stance on airport lounges, especially now that the US ones have upped their game on food and alcohol. It wouldn’t have changed anything in ABQ. It’s too small; no lounges. Indeed, I think we were at the only bar. But elsewhere… when we fly internationally, I usually get lounge access through my United or American status. In the US, I gave up my American and then United lounge memberships years ago because I wasn’t using them. I love American Express’s Centurion Lounges but charging $50 to bring a guest in and hiking the annual fee for the Platinum card to $695, the math just didn’t work for me. I could just do day passes; maybe use Loungebuddy for that. Or run the math on the not-quite-Platinum cards from Chase and Capital One, the ones that include Priority Pass membership. I dunno; a couple of avoided bar tabs may cover their annual fees.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/01/26/podcast-192-new-year-travel-planning-tips-gin-conquers-the-world/\">the last episode</a>, wading into the debate between booking direct with an airline or hotel or through a 3rd party, I told the story about how a -- <em>how do I say this politely?</em> -- false/misleading/just plain wrong property listing on Booking.com tricked us into booking a night in a place that looked to be much more geared to hourly stays, if you know what I mean. And how Booking.com did absolutely nothing to resolve our dispute. Long-time listener Nick Gassman pointed me to a <a href=\"https://www.theguardian.com/money/2023/jan/11/a-glossy-bookingcom-flat-turned-out-to-be-a-squalid-loft\">Guardian article</a> where a Booking.com customer wrote to the consumer affairs reporter with a very similar experience (dare I say “scam”?) -- misleading listing, shock when opening the door to the actual place, walking/running away to find another place to stay, getting dinged with a night’s charge for being a “no show”, and then Booking.com going “palms up” when asked to fix it. The interesting twist on this one was -- with the host reporting them as “no shows”, they couldn’t leave a review on the property to warn others. Nick also sent me a link to a <a href=\"https://www.reddit.com/r/BestofRedditorUpdates/comments/11saoz0/new_update_from_court_in_ongoing_case_airbnb/\">Reddit post</a> about a guy going to arbitration with Airbnb, also disputing a “no show” when he canceled a place that had security cameras on the inside of a studio apartment. These are reminders that, for all their <a href=\"https://www.booking.com/trust_and_safety.html\">web pages</a> and <a href=\"https://news.airbnb.com/airbnb-launches-trust-safety-advisory-coalition/\">press releases</a> with large boldface headlines, “trust and safety”, their legal terms &amp; conditions in a much smaller font says that all they do is connect hosts and guests; they’re not party to that transaction and don’t have any control over the quality or safety of your experience. I’m not saying don’t use them. We use Booking and Airbnb all the time, and have had 1, maybe 2 or 3, bad experiences. What I am saying is, go in eyes wide open. In this very hot travel market, Booking and Airbnb feel they need to take care of hosts right now more than they do guests.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/12/24/podcast-191-my-notes-on-italy-and-split-croatia/\">episode #191</a>, I said “In more travel document good news, the US State Department opened up on-line passport renewals on what they’re calling a ‘limited release’.” Well, listener Rob Holbrook isn’t feeling the good vibes. Rob said “I tried the renewal portal but it was constantly down, and then they shut it down completely. I’m not sure if the pilot outlived its usefulness, if passport renewal is too complex to do on-line, or if it opened up unexpected security risks.” The State Department shut down the renewal portal in early February to “implement customer feedback to improve the process.”&nbsp; Back then, they said it would be back up in March; now they’re saying “TBD” I’m just hoping they’re not using the same IT gang that coded up the first version of the Obamacare HealthCare.gov site. So we’re back to sending paper forms in, and the wait time is slowly creeping up -- before spring break season, State was saying 8-11 weeks; <a href=\"https://www.state.gov/update-on-passport-processing-times/\">last week, they added 2 weeks</a>; now estimating 10-13 weeks. If you’re planning to hit Europe this summer, you need to sprint down to Walgreens for that passport photo <em>right now</em>!</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to like Nick and Rob did to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music -- Generic Apologies by Speck (c) copyright 2022 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/speck/65664 Ft: jaspertine, Zenboy1955, Admiral Bob, Apoxode</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Still Overthinking Travel Planning</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Last summer, back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/08/18/podcast-188-my-top-tips-to-survive-travel-chaos/\">episode #188</a>, I talked about getting a great frequent flier deal on my Croatia-Italy flights, completely busting through the traditional 2¢/mile benchmark. It got me thinking that maybe the inflation in award redemption requirements hadn’t kept up with the real dollar cost increases for flights, and that I was shooting that gap to get a smokin’ deal. Well, when booking flights to go over to the Netherlands next month, I’m here to tell you -- that gap has snapped shut. I first started looking at KLM, the Dutch airline, and its SkyTeam partner Delta in hopes of a decent flight selection <em>and</em>, as importantly, I have a slug of Amex Membership Rewards points I’m looking to burn off, and KLM and Delta are transfer partners. But after a couple of hours of twisting our travel plans in knots around their flight matrices, the best I could get was ¾ of a cent/mile -- so those Amex points are still there. Next up, British Airways because they have a direct flight to LHR from Nashville, but I quickly ran into the same problem I always have with BA Avios points -- they don’t cover fuel surcharges and, for some reason, BA prices their fares low and slams a big fuel surcharge on top of it. I dunno why they do it -- maybe there’s a tax angle there somewhere. The final ticket price comes out the same as other carriers, but a flight booked with a similar amount of miles ends up requiring a huge cash payment, like 2-3 times what other carriers want. So the Avios points also stay put; maybe I’ll push them over to Iberia for a trip to Spain or Portugal next year. What started with a couple of numbers scrawled on a piece of paper quickly turned into a spreadsheet with columns for the different possible travel windows -- leaving on a Weds vs. a Thurs, returning on a Fri vs. Saturday -- 3 rows for each carrier, the first cell in the matrix the cost of buying the ticket straight out, the second cell split between miles and cash payment, the third cell the cents per mile calc -- is it worth burning the points or just buying the ticket. After all that, the best deal was on United at 1.54¢/mile -- a bit off 2¢/mile, but looking at valuation tables on <a href=\"https://thepointsguy.com/guide/monthly-valuations/\">The Points Guy</a>, <a href=\"https://www.bankrate.com/finance/credit-cards/points-and-miles-valuations/#airline-rewards\">Bankrate</a>, and <a href=\"https://frequentmiler.com/airline-miles-worth/\">Frequent Miler</a> websites, I could see it was a solid deal and booked it.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Although, I have to say that I paid more attention than usual to the United routings after reading a <a href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/21/travel/lufthansa-refunds-collect.html\">NY Times article</a> that long-time listener, sometime contributor Chris Chufo sent me about the hassles people are having getting refunds or compensation from Lufthansa, United’s trans-Atlantic Star Alliance partner. Reading through the litany of complaints surprised me. I can’t recall any issue I’ve had with Lufthansa service. Indeed, back in 2013 when flying home from a family vacation, a weather delay in… <em>Amsterdam</em> caused us to miss our connection home from Frankfurt. I talked about it in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2013/09/06/podcast-106-summer-vacation-in-amsterdam-restaurant-trends/\">episode #106</a>; we had no problem getting hotel and food vouchers and getting re-booked on the next morning’s flight out -- the complete opposite treatment of what we’d expect in the US. The article quotes a German travel industry exec saying that Lufthansa got aggressive about swerving EU customer protection laws during COVID. I’m hoping it was only an overreaction to the pandemic cash crunch and that it’s not a new set point for a much lower level of customer service going forward.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li> Bridge Music -- Absolutely Clear (ft Jeris &amp; Goldfish) by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/45578 Ft: Jeris, Goldfish</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Nashville vs. Nash-Vegas</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As I mentioned at the start of <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/08/18/podcast-188-my-top-tips-to-survive-travel-chaos/\">episode #188</a>,&nbsp; in July we relocated the TravelCommons studio -- and the rest of our worldly belongings -- from Chicago to Nashville. After 25 years into my 4th tour of duty in Chicago, I&nbsp; wanted a change of scenery. And it definitely has been that -- moving from the <a href=\"https://worldpopulationreview.com/us-cities\">3rd most populous city in the US to the 20th</a>; from the 8th highest population density to the 178th most dense of the US’s top 200 cities. We joke that whenever we put an address into Google Maps, it could be completely on the other side of the city, but no matter how far away it looks, we’d hit the Directions button and be told it’s only a 15-minute drive. It took us 15 minutes just to get out of our neighborhood in Chicago.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>When we told friends our move plans, just about everyone replied, “Oh, we love Nashville. We look forward to visiting.” Once we got down here and started knocking around, we realized that what they were all talking about was “Nash-Vegas” -- the 5 blocks of honky tonks on Lower Broadway, the 3 blocks over to the Country Music Hall of Fame, the open-air party buses cruising the perimeter full of bachelorette partiers yelling out at every red light. It’s definitely something to be seen, and it brings a steady stream of tourists. I’m always amazed how full the Broadway sidewalks are at, say, 11:30am on a Tuesday. As you might’ve guessed, we’re not often on Broadway.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But that’s not to say the tourists have it completely wrong; Nashville <em>is</em> Music City with a capital “M”. If you fly in on Southwest or American, it starts with walking past live music at Tootsie’s as you walk up Concourse C. And then it just continues. Irene and I are convinced that there’s a law requiring any gathering of 10 or more people to have a stage with a live performer. The first couple of months we were down here, we hit all the area farmers’ markets we could find, and just about every one had a stage with a singer/songwriter and a guitar or a full-on band. Peak Nashville for us was when we were in line at a local hot chicken joint watching a guy with a guitar set up his gear and start to place just inside the entry door. It was like having live music at a McDonald’s. I was talking to a bartender at an East Nashville place called Vinyl Tap -- a beer bar/vinyl record store/live music venue (of course). We got talking; he’d moved down from New York City to be a session trombone player. And that’s not an uncommon conversation. In New York and LA, bartenders are working between acting gigs. In Nashville, they’re musicians between sessions.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And so we’ve waded into the live music scene, much more than we did in Chicago. In January, we made the rounds of Monday night singer/songwriter open mic nights. Some were pretty informal - at a microbrewery, Tennessee Brew Works, the MC put out a legal pad at 5pm for people to sign up and then took them in that order, each person doing 2 songs. At Bluebird Cafe, very famous place, a bit more structure -- on-line sign-ups opened at 11am. That night, there were two lines to get in -- to the left of the front door, the folks who made it on the list, lined up to play their best song to the people who lined up to the right of the door, who showed up to listen. And everyone, listeners and signers, sat together in the audience. Irene and I ended up at a two-top right in front of the stage. On our left was a guy who drove in from Clarksville, TN to play and his wife. Behind us was a table full of Canadians including a woman from Quebec who sang in French, and a guy who’d flown in from Vancouver that morning just to play his song on that stage. And he wasn’t the only one; there were people on the stage who had driven in from Houston, Little Rock, Michigan, Nebraska…. I hadn’t realized how big a draw this music scene is.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Maybe 3 weeks ago, I saw a blurb on Twitter about a show put on by the “Pedal Steel Guitar Arts Council.” Now that felt very Nashville. At $15/ticket, how could we go wrong? Plus, it was at the performance space at Jack White’s Third Man Records which had been on Irene’s list of places to check out. So, we went. Back to my bartender discussions, one thing I noticed early on going to shows in Nashville is how many working musicians there are here -- not hobbyists, not passion project people, but people whose main paying job is to play music -- session musicians, live backing musicians. And some of these smaller shows are session musicians getting up on stage with their friends to play, often to an audience of other friends and family. At this show, when the first steel guitar player hit the stage, a little girl behind us called out “Hey, grandpa!” It ended up being a very interesting show, one that immediately attacked the stereotype of pedal steel guitars as twangy country music instruments. Grandpa was followed by a father-and-son pedal steel-and-cello duo, who were followed by a guy doing pedal steel ambient music. Very interesting stuff, and stuff I’m not sure I’d see anywhere else.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Maybe it’s those Broadway honky tonk cover bands and the mainstream country music recording sessions that pay the bills, and so let’s these musicians play different (some might say “weird”) stuff on their own time. But if/when you get down to Nashville, spend an afternoon, a night on Lower Broadway -- because how can you say you’ve been here and <em>not</em> do that -- but save some time to check out the smaller places, the open mic nights. Make sure you see the Nashville music scene, not just the Nash-Vegas one.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #193</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>. And while you’re at TravelCommons.com, you can check out the show notes page for a transcript and any links I’ve mentioned. Or you can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_192.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #193 — Yet More Travel Planning; Nashville vs Nash-Vegas','','inherit','closed','closed','','4284-revision-v1','','','2023-03-31 09:19:25','2023-03-31 14:19:25','',4284,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4285',0,'revision','',0),
(4286,1,'2023-03-31 10:04:34','2023-03-31 15:04:34','','Nash-vegas','','inherit','open','closed','','nash-vegas','','','2023-03-31 10:04:34','2023-03-31 15:04:34','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Nash-vegas.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(4287,1,'2023-03-31 10:18:24','2023-03-31 15:18:24','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Nash-vegas-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Cat with paw on the rim of a gin tonic glass\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\">Can\'t get to the artisanal garnish[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>With COVID travel restrictions gone, I expect people to revert back to their old ways where January is the biggest travel planning month. I wade into the debate between booking direct with travel providers vs. booking with agents and 3rd-party sites. I see how well my travel tips did during the Southwest cancellation chaos, and then pull out a little more of my conversation with Jeff Cioletti, author of the new book <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3sQelCQ\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Imbibing for Introverts</a></em>; this time about how gin is going global with a local twist. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_190.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here</strong></a><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_192.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\"> </a></strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_190.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #193: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN after a couple of bits of travel; to Chicago at the end of January because, really, that’s the garden time of the year in Chicago -- waking up to subzero temperatures, wind howling off the lake. Yup, good times; really missed it.&nbsp; But the next month, flying to and from Albuquerque, NM for some skiing in Taos, reminded me of something I <em>really</em> miss about Chicago -- direct flights to almost everywhere in the US. ABQ is about the same distance from Chicago as it is from Nashville. But what’s a 3¼ hour direct flight from Chicago turned out to be a 6½ hour journey from Nashville, complete with a coffee stop in Houston. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/05/26/podcast-187-moving-to-a-non-hub-airport-what-makes-a-great-taproom/\">episode #187</a>, I talked about having to adjust my mental travel calculus, my travel reflexes, to <em>not</em> living in an airport hub city -- for the first time in about 40 years. Those extra 3 hours made that adjustment very real.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>When we landed, we met up with our daughter Claire and hopped the bus to the rental car center to see what Hertz had waiting for us. There were 5 of us skiing, so I wanted to get the biggest vehicle they had, but I was playing a bit of chicken with Hertz. I had enough Hertz points to cover a large car for the week, but they’d only let me cover 1 day of a specialty class like an SUV. With all the car rentals quoting $100/day, I slammed my points down on the large car and hoped there was some sort of an SUV in the Five Star row when we got there. So when we rocked up to the Hertz lot, my heart sank just a bit; there was nothing in the Five Star row. After a minute of staring at the empty spaces, a woman came out of the office “Oh, we’ve upgraded you to President’s Circle. I turn 90 degrees and see an entire row of SUVs. We picked the biggest one, a Ford Explorer with 16,000 miles and captain’s chairs for everyone. Started the trip off on the right note.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The trip home at the end of the week, everyone’s flight was blown sideways by the big winter storm two days before. It didn’t surprise us; it had blown off the mountain with 50-70 mph winds, so we weren’t surprised when the flight delay notices started dinging our iPhones. United hit us with a 2-hour delay (our plane didn’t make it out of Fresno the night before), but since we had a 3-hr layover in DEN, the only thing that changed was which airport bar we were killing time in.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Claire caught the worst of it, though, trying to get home to New York. With no direct flights between ABQ and LGA, she had to connect through ORD. The flight out went without a hitch. The flight back… the first leg, ABQ-ORD, was fine. It was the ORD-LGA leg that went badly wrong, which surprised me because those flights, between ORD and LGA, are like a shuttle, every hour, like clockwork. But for Claire, the shuttle broke… literally. After an hour delay, they loaded up the plane, de-iced the wings, and then found out an engine was broken, so back to the gate where -- you guessed it -- it can’t be fixed. 2½ hours past departure time, Claire pings me -- “it’s starting to snow; I doubt I’m getting on any plane tonight.” “Don’t write it off yet”, I told her. “It’s not a weather issue, so American will have to pay for a hotel and breakfast for the 120 or so people on that plane. That fact alone will cause them to look hard for another plane for you.” And that’s exactly what they did. It took them a few hours to scrounge one up but Claire got home that night… or rather that morning, at 3am. Always amazes me how an airline can figure out a solution when it’s <em>their</em> money on the line.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music --  Earth Soda by septahelix (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial Share-Alike  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/septahelix/34050</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Back to waiting out that flight delay in ABQ, my bar tab from waiting out the 2-hr delay got me re-thinking my stance on airport lounges, especially now that the US ones have upped their game on food and alcohol. It wouldn’t have changed anything in ABQ. It’s too small; no lounges. Indeed, I think we were at the only bar. But elsewhere… when we fly internationally, I usually get lounge access through my United or American status. In the US, I gave up my American and then United lounge memberships years ago because I wasn’t using them. I love American Express’s Centurion Lounges but charging $50 to bring a guest in and hiking the annual fee for the Platinum card to $695, the math just didn’t work for me. I could just do day passes; maybe use Loungebuddy for that. Or run the math on the not-quite-Platinum cards from Chase and Capital One, the ones that include Priority Pass membership. I dunno; a couple of avoided bar tabs may cover their annual fees.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/01/26/podcast-192-new-year-travel-planning-tips-gin-conquers-the-world/\">the last episode</a>, wading into the debate between booking direct with an airline or hotel or through a 3rd party, I told the story about how a -- <em>how do I say this politely?</em> -- false/misleading/just plain wrong property listing on Booking.com tricked us into booking a night in a place that looked to be much more geared to hourly stays, if you know what I mean. And how Booking.com did absolutely nothing to resolve our dispute. Long-time listener Nick Gassman pointed me to a <a href=\"https://www.theguardian.com/money/2023/jan/11/a-glossy-bookingcom-flat-turned-out-to-be-a-squalid-loft\">Guardian article</a> where a Booking.com customer wrote to the consumer affairs reporter with a very similar experience (dare I say “scam”?) -- misleading listing, shock when opening the door to the actual place, walking/running away to find another place to stay, getting dinged with a night’s charge for being a “no show”, and then Booking.com going “palms up” when asked to fix it. The interesting twist on this one was -- with the host reporting them as “no shows”, they couldn’t leave a review on the property to warn others. Nick also sent me a link to a <a href=\"https://www.reddit.com/r/BestofRedditorUpdates/comments/11saoz0/new_update_from_court_in_ongoing_case_airbnb/\">Reddit post</a> about a guy going to arbitration with Airbnb, also disputing a “no show” when he canceled a place that had security cameras on the inside of a studio apartment. These are reminders that, for all their <a href=\"https://www.booking.com/trust_and_safety.html\">web pages</a> and <a href=\"https://news.airbnb.com/airbnb-launches-trust-safety-advisory-coalition/\">press releases</a> with large boldface headlines, “trust and safety”, their legal terms &amp; conditions in a much smaller font says that all they do is connect hosts and guests; they’re not party to that transaction and don’t have any control over the quality or safety of your experience. I’m not saying don’t use them. We use Booking and Airbnb all the time, and have had 1, maybe 2 or 3, bad experiences. What I am saying is, go in eyes wide open. In this very hot travel market, Booking and Airbnb feel they need to take care of hosts right now more than they do guests.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/12/24/podcast-191-my-notes-on-italy-and-split-croatia/\">episode #191</a>, I said “In more travel document good news, the US State Department opened up on-line passport renewals on what they’re calling a ‘limited release’.” Well, listener Rob Holbrook isn’t feeling the good vibes. Rob said “I tried the renewal portal but it was constantly down, and then they shut it down completely. I’m not sure if the pilot outlived its usefulness, if passport renewal is too complex to do on-line, or if it opened up unexpected security risks.” The State Department shut down the renewal portal in early February to “implement customer feedback to improve the process.”&nbsp; Back then, they said it would be back up in March; now they’re saying “TBD” I’m just hoping they’re not using the same IT gang that coded up the first version of the Obamacare HealthCare.gov site. So we’re back to sending paper forms in, and the wait time is slowly creeping up -- before spring break season, State was saying 8-11 weeks; <a href=\"https://www.state.gov/update-on-passport-processing-times/\">last week, they added 2 weeks</a>; now estimating 10-13 weeks. If you’re planning to hit Europe this summer, you need to sprint down to Walgreens for that passport photo <em>right now</em>!</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to like Nick and Rob did to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music -- Generic Apologies by Speck (c) copyright 2022 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/speck/65664 Ft: jaspertine, Zenboy1955, Admiral Bob, Apoxode</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Still Overthinking Travel Planning</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Last summer, back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/08/18/podcast-188-my-top-tips-to-survive-travel-chaos/\">episode #188</a>, I talked about getting a great frequent flier deal on my Croatia-Italy flights, completely busting through the traditional 2¢/mile benchmark. It got me thinking that maybe the inflation in award redemption requirements hadn’t kept up with the real dollar cost increases for flights, and that I was shooting that gap to get a smokin’ deal. Well, when booking flights to go over to the Netherlands next month, I’m here to tell you -- that gap has snapped shut. I first started looking at KLM, the Dutch airline, and its SkyTeam partner Delta in hopes of a decent flight selection <em>and</em>, as importantly, I have a slug of Amex Membership Rewards points I’m looking to burn off, and KLM and Delta are transfer partners. But after a couple of hours of twisting our travel plans in knots around their flight matrices, the best I could get was ¾ of a cent/mile -- so those Amex points are still there. Next up, British Airways because they have a direct flight to LHR from Nashville, but I quickly ran into the same problem I always have with BA Avios points -- they don’t cover fuel surcharges and, for some reason, BA prices their fares low and slams a big fuel surcharge on top of it. I dunno why they do it -- maybe there’s a tax angle there somewhere. The final ticket price comes out the same as other carriers, but a flight booked with a similar amount of miles ends up requiring a huge cash payment, like 2-3 times what other carriers want. So the Avios points also stay put; maybe I’ll push them over to Iberia for a trip to Spain or Portugal next year. What started with a couple of numbers scrawled on a piece of paper quickly turned into a spreadsheet with columns for the different possible travel windows -- leaving on a Weds vs. a Thurs, returning on a Fri vs. Saturday -- 3 rows for each carrier, the first cell in the matrix the cost of buying the ticket straight out, the second cell split between miles and cash payment, the third cell the cents per mile calc -- is it worth burning the points or just buying the ticket. After all that, the best deal was on United at 1.54¢/mile -- a bit off 2¢/mile, but looking at valuation tables on <a href=\"https://thepointsguy.com/guide/monthly-valuations/\">The Points Guy</a>, <a href=\"https://www.bankrate.com/finance/credit-cards/points-and-miles-valuations/#airline-rewards\">Bankrate</a>, and <a href=\"https://frequentmiler.com/airline-miles-worth/\">Frequent Miler</a> websites, I could see it was a solid deal and booked it.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Although, I have to say that I paid more attention than usual to the United routings after reading a <a href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/21/travel/lufthansa-refunds-collect.html\">NY Times article</a> that long-time listener, sometime contributor Chris Chufo sent me about the hassles people are having getting refunds or compensation from Lufthansa, United’s trans-Atlantic Star Alliance partner. Reading through the litany of complaints surprised me. I can’t recall any issue I’ve had with Lufthansa service. Indeed, back in 2013 when flying home from a family vacation, a weather delay in… <em>Amsterdam</em> caused us to miss our connection home from Frankfurt. I talked about it in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2013/09/06/podcast-106-summer-vacation-in-amsterdam-restaurant-trends/\">episode #106</a>; we had no problem getting hotel and food vouchers and getting re-booked on the next morning’s flight out -- the complete opposite treatment of what we’d expect in the US. The article quotes a German travel industry exec saying that Lufthansa got aggressive about swerving EU customer protection laws during COVID. I’m hoping it was only an overreaction to the pandemic cash crunch and that it’s not a new set point for a much lower level of customer service going forward.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li> Bridge Music -- Absolutely Clear (ft Jeris &amp; Goldfish) by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/45578 Ft: Jeris, Goldfish</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Nashville vs. Nash-Vegas</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As I mentioned at the start of <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/08/18/podcast-188-my-top-tips-to-survive-travel-chaos/\">episode #188</a>,&nbsp; in July we relocated the TravelCommons studio -- and the rest of our worldly belongings -- from Chicago to Nashville. After 25 years into my 4th tour of duty in Chicago, I&nbsp; wanted a change of scenery. And it definitely has been that -- moving from the <a href=\"https://worldpopulationreview.com/us-cities\">3rd most populous city in the US to the 20th</a>; from the 8th highest population density to the 178th most dense of the US’s top 200 cities. We joke that whenever we put an address into Google Maps, it could be completely on the other side of the city, but no matter how far away it looks, we’d hit the Directions button and be told it’s only a 15-minute drive. It took us 15 minutes just to get out of our neighborhood in Chicago.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>When we told friends our move plans, just about everyone replied, “Oh, we love Nashville. We look forward to visiting.” Once we got down here and started knocking around, we realized that what they were all talking about was “Nash-Vegas” -- the 5 blocks of honky tonks on Lower Broadway, the 3 blocks over to the Country Music Hall of Fame, the open-air party buses cruising the perimeter full of bachelorette partiers yelling out at every red light. It’s definitely something to be seen, and it brings a steady stream of tourists. I’m always amazed how full the Broadway sidewalks are at, say, 11:30am on a Tuesday. As you might’ve guessed, we’re not often on Broadway.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But that’s not to say the tourists have it completely wrong; Nashville <em>is</em> Music City with a capital “M”. If you fly in on Southwest or American, it starts with walking past live music at Tootsie’s as you walk up Concourse C. And then it just continues. Irene and I are convinced that there’s a law requiring any gathering of 10 or more people to have a stage with a live performer. The first couple of months we were down here, we hit all the area farmers’ markets we could find, and just about every one had a stage with a singer/songwriter and a guitar or a full-on band. Peak Nashville for us was when we were in line at a local hot chicken joint watching a guy with a guitar set up his gear and start to place just inside the entry door. It was like having live music at a McDonald’s. I was talking to a bartender at an East Nashville place called Vinyl Tap -- a beer bar/vinyl record store/live music venue (of course). We got talking; he’d moved down from New York City to be a session trombone player. And that’s not an uncommon conversation. In New York and LA, bartenders are working between acting gigs. In Nashville, they’re musicians between sessions.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And so we’ve waded into the live music scene, much more than we did in Chicago. In January, we made the rounds of Monday night singer/songwriter open mic nights. Some were pretty informal - at a microbrewery, Tennessee Brew Works, the MC put out a legal pad at 5pm for people to sign up and then took them in that order, each person doing 2 songs. At Bluebird Cafe, very famous place, a bit more structure -- on-line sign-ups opened at 11am. That night, there were two lines to get in -- to the left of the front door, the folks who made it on the list, lined up to play their best song to the people who lined up to the right of the door, who showed up to listen. And everyone, listeners and signers, sat together in the audience. Irene and I ended up at a two-top right in front of the stage. On our left was a guy who drove in from Clarksville, TN to play and his wife. Behind us was a table full of Canadians including a woman from Quebec who sang in French, and a guy who’d flown in from Vancouver that morning just to play his song on that stage. And he wasn’t the only one; there were people on the stage who had driven in from Houston, Little Rock, Michigan, Nebraska…. I hadn’t realized how big a draw this music scene is.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Maybe 3 weeks ago, I saw a blurb on Twitter about a show put on by the “Pedal Steel Guitar Arts Council.” Now that felt very Nashville. At $15/ticket, how could we go wrong? Plus, it was at the performance space at Jack White’s Third Man Records which had been on Irene’s list of places to check out. So, we went. Back to my bartender discussions, one thing I noticed early on going to shows in Nashville is how many working musicians there are here -- not hobbyists, not passion project people, but people whose main paying job is to play music -- session musicians, live backing musicians. And some of these smaller shows are session musicians getting up on stage with their friends to play, often to an audience of other friends and family. At this show, when the first steel guitar player hit the stage, a little girl behind us called out “Hey, grandpa!” It ended up being a very interesting show, one that immediately attacked the stereotype of pedal steel guitars as twangy country music instruments. Grandpa was followed by a father-and-son pedal steel-and-cello duo, who were followed by a guy doing pedal steel ambient music. Very interesting stuff, and stuff I’m not sure I’d see anywhere else.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Maybe it’s those Broadway honky tonk cover bands and the mainstream country music recording sessions that pay the bills, and so let’s these musicians play different (some might say “weird”) stuff on their own time. But if/when you get down to Nashville, spend an afternoon, a night on Lower Broadway -- because how can you say you’ve been here and <em>not</em> do that -- but save some time to check out the smaller places, the open mic nights. Make sure you see the Nashville music scene, not just the Nash-Vegas one.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #193</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>. And while you’re at TravelCommons.com, you can check out the show notes page for a transcript and any links I’ve mentioned. Or you can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_192.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #193 — Yet More Travel Planning; Nashville vs Nash-Vegas','','inherit','closed','closed','','4284-revision-v1','','','2023-03-31 10:18:24','2023-03-31 15:18:24','',4284,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4287',0,'revision','',0),
(4288,1,'2023-03-31 10:28:37','2023-03-31 15:28:37','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Nash-vegas-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Cat with paw on the rim of a gin tonic glass\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\">Can\'t get to the artisanal garnish[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>With COVID travel restrictions gone, I expect people to revert back to their old ways where January is the biggest travel planning month. I wade into the debate between booking direct with travel providers vs. booking with agents and 3rd-party sites. I see how well my travel tips did during the Southwest cancellation chaos, and then pull out a little more of my conversation with Jeff Cioletti, author of the new book <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3sQelCQ\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Imbibing for Introverts</a></em>; this time about how gin is going global with a local twist. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_190.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here</strong></a><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_192.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\"> </a></strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_190.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #193: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN after a couple of bits of travel; to Chicago at the end of January because, really, that’s the garden time of the year in Chicago -- waking up to subzero temperatures, wind howling off the lake. Yup, good times; really missed it.&nbsp; But the next month, flying to and from Albuquerque, NM for some skiing in Taos, reminded me of something I <em>really</em> miss about Chicago -- direct flights to almost everywhere in the US. ABQ is about the same distance from Chicago as it is from Nashville. But what’s a 3¼ hour direct flight from Chicago turned out to be a 6½ hour journey from Nashville, complete with a coffee stop in Houston. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/05/26/podcast-187-moving-to-a-non-hub-airport-what-makes-a-great-taproom/\">episode #187</a>, I talked about having to adjust my mental travel calculus, my travel reflexes, to <em>not</em> living in an airport hub city -- for the first time in about 40 years. Those extra 3 hours made that adjustment very real.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>When we landed, we met up with our daughter Claire and hopped the bus to the rental car center to see what Hertz had waiting for us. There were 5 of us skiing, so I wanted to get the biggest vehicle they had, but I was playing a bit of chicken with Hertz. I had enough Hertz points to cover a large car for the week, but they’d only let me cover 1 day of a specialty class like an SUV. With all the car rentals quoting $100/day, I slammed my points down on the large car and hoped there was some sort of an SUV in the Five Star row when we got there. So when we rocked up to the Hertz lot, my heart sank just a bit; there was nothing in the Five Star row. After a minute of staring at the empty spaces, a woman came out of the office “Oh, we’ve upgraded you to President’s Circle. I turn 90 degrees and see an entire row of SUVs. We picked the biggest one, a Ford Explorer with 16,000 miles and captain’s chairs for everyone. Started the trip off on the right note.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The trip home at the end of the week, everyone’s flight was blown sideways by the big winter storm two days before. It didn’t surprise us; it had blown off the mountain with 50-70 mph winds, so we weren’t surprised when the flight delay notices started dinging our iPhones. United hit us with a 2-hour delay (our plane didn’t make it out of Fresno the night before), but since we had a 3-hr layover in DEN, the only thing that changed was which airport bar we were killing time in.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Claire caught the worst of it, though, trying to get home to New York. With no direct flights between ABQ and LGA, she had to connect through ORD. The flight out went without a hitch. The flight back… the first leg, ABQ-ORD, was fine. It was the ORD-LGA leg that went badly wrong, which surprised me because those flights, between ORD and LGA, are like a shuttle, every hour, like clockwork. But for Claire, the shuttle broke… literally. After an hour delay, they loaded up the plane, de-iced the wings, and then found out an engine was broken, so back to the gate where -- you guessed it -- it can’t be fixed. 2½ hours past departure time, Claire pings me -- “it’s starting to snow; I doubt I’m getting on any plane tonight.” “Don’t write it off yet”, I told her. “It’s not a weather issue, so American will have to pay for a hotel and breakfast for the 120 or so people on that plane. That fact alone will cause them to look hard for another plane for you.” And that’s exactly what they did. It took them a few hours to scrounge one up but Claire got home that night… or rather that morning, at 3am. Always amazes me how an airline can figure out a solution when it’s <em>their</em> money on the line.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music --  Earth Soda by septahelix (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial Share-Alike  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/septahelix/34050</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Back to waiting out that flight delay in ABQ, my bar tab from waiting out the 2-hr delay got me re-thinking my stance on airport lounges, especially now that the US ones have upped their game on food and alcohol. It wouldn’t have changed anything in ABQ. It’s too small; no lounges. Indeed, I think we were at the only bar. But elsewhere… when we fly internationally, I usually get lounge access through my United or American status. In the US, I gave up my American and then United lounge memberships years ago because I wasn’t using them. I love American Express’s Centurion Lounges but charging $50 to bring a guest in and hiking the annual fee for the Platinum card to $695, the math just didn’t work for me. I could just do day passes; maybe use Loungebuddy for that. Or run the math on the not-quite-Platinum cards from Chase and Capital One, the ones that include Priority Pass membership. I dunno; a couple of avoided bar tabs may cover their annual fees.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/01/26/podcast-192-new-year-travel-planning-tips-gin-conquers-the-world/\">the last episode</a>, wading into the debate between booking direct with an airline or hotel or through a 3rd party, I told the story about how a -- <em>how do I say this politely?</em> -- false/misleading/just plain wrong property listing on Booking.com tricked us into booking a night in a place that looked to be much more geared to hourly stays, if you know what I mean. And how Booking.com did absolutely nothing to resolve our dispute. Long-time listener Nick Gassman pointed me to a <a href=\"https://www.theguardian.com/money/2023/jan/11/a-glossy-bookingcom-flat-turned-out-to-be-a-squalid-loft\">Guardian article</a> where a Booking.com customer wrote to the consumer affairs reporter with a very similar experience (dare I say “scam”?) -- misleading listing, shock when opening the door to the actual place, walking/running away to find another place to stay, getting dinged with a night’s charge for being a “no show”, and then Booking.com going “palms up” when asked to fix it. The interesting twist on this one was -- with the host reporting them as “no shows”, they couldn’t leave a review on the property to warn others. Nick also sent me a link to a <a href=\"https://www.reddit.com/r/BestofRedditorUpdates/comments/11saoz0/new_update_from_court_in_ongoing_case_airbnb/\">Reddit post</a> about a guy going to arbitration with Airbnb, also disputing a “no show” when he canceled a place that had security cameras on the inside of a studio apartment. These are reminders that, for all their <a href=\"https://www.booking.com/trust_and_safety.html\">web pages</a> and <a href=\"https://news.airbnb.com/airbnb-launches-trust-safety-advisory-coalition/\">press releases</a> with large boldface headlines, “trust and safety”, their legal terms &amp; conditions in a much smaller font says that all they do is connect hosts and guests; they’re not party to that transaction and don’t have any control over the quality or safety of your experience. I’m not saying don’t use them. We use Booking and Airbnb all the time, and have had 1, maybe 2 or 3, bad experiences. What I am saying is, go in eyes wide open. In this very hot travel market, Booking and Airbnb feel they need to take care of hosts right now more than they do guests.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/12/24/podcast-191-my-notes-on-italy-and-split-croatia/\">episode #191</a>, I said “In more travel document good news, the US State Department opened up on-line passport renewals on what they’re calling a ‘limited release’.” Well, listener Rob Holbrook isn’t feeling the good vibes. Rob said “I tried the renewal portal but it was constantly down, and then they shut it down completely. I’m not sure if the pilot outlived its usefulness, if passport renewal is too complex to do on-line, or if it opened up unexpected security risks.” The State Department shut down the renewal portal in early February to “implement customer feedback to improve the process.”&nbsp; Back then, they said it would be back up in March; now they’re saying “TBD” I’m just hoping they’re not using the same IT gang that coded up the first version of the Obamacare HealthCare.gov site. So we’re back to sending paper forms in, and the wait time is slowly creeping up -- before spring break season, State was saying 8-11 weeks; <a href=\"https://www.state.gov/update-on-passport-processing-times/\">last week, they added 2 weeks</a>; now estimating 10-13 weeks. If you’re planning to hit Europe this summer, you need to sprint down to Walgreens for that passport photo <em>right now</em>!</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to like Nick and Rob did to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music -- Generic Apologies by Speck (c) copyright 2022 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/speck/65664 Ft: jaspertine, Zenboy1955, Admiral Bob, Apoxode</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Still Overthinking Travel Planning</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Last summer, back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/08/18/podcast-188-my-top-tips-to-survive-travel-chaos/\">episode #188</a>, I talked about getting a great frequent flier deal on my Croatia-Italy flights, completely busting through the traditional 2¢/mile benchmark. It got me thinking that maybe the inflation in award redemption requirements hadn’t kept up with the real dollar cost increases for flights, and that I was shooting that gap to get a smokin’ deal. Well, when booking flights to go over to the Netherlands next month, I’m here to tell you -- that gap has snapped shut. I first started looking at KLM, the Dutch airline, and its SkyTeam partner Delta in hopes of a decent flight selection <em>and</em>, as importantly, I have a slug of Amex Membership Rewards points I’m looking to burn off, and KLM and Delta are transfer partners. But after a couple of hours of twisting our travel plans in knots around their flight matrices, the best I could get was ¾ of a cent/mile -- so those Amex points are still there. Next up, British Airways because they have a direct flight to LHR from Nashville, but I quickly ran into the same problem I always have with BA Avios points -- they don’t cover fuel surcharges and, for some reason, BA prices their fares low and slams a big fuel surcharge on top of it. I dunno why they do it -- maybe there’s a tax angle there somewhere. The final ticket price comes out the same as other carriers, but a flight booked with a similar amount of miles ends up requiring a huge cash payment, like 2-3 times what other carriers want. So the Avios points also stay put; maybe I’ll push them over to Iberia for a trip to Spain or Portugal next year. What started with a couple of numbers scrawled on a piece of paper quickly turned into a spreadsheet with columns for the different possible travel windows -- leaving on a Weds vs. a Thurs, returning on a Fri vs. Saturday -- 3 rows for each carrier, the first cell in the matrix the cost of buying the ticket straight out, the second cell split between miles and cash payment, the third cell the cents per mile calc -- is it worth burning the points or just buying the ticket. After all that, the best deal was on United at 1.54¢/mile -- a bit off 2¢/mile, but looking at valuation tables on <a href=\"https://thepointsguy.com/guide/monthly-valuations/\">The Points Guy</a>, <a href=\"https://www.bankrate.com/finance/credit-cards/points-and-miles-valuations/#airline-rewards\">Bankrate</a>, and <a href=\"https://frequentmiler.com/airline-miles-worth/\">Frequent Miler</a> websites, I could see it was a solid deal and booked it.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Although, I have to say that I paid more attention than usual to the United routings after reading a <a href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/21/travel/lufthansa-refunds-collect.html\">NY Times article</a> that long-time listener, sometime contributor Chris Chufo sent me about the hassles people are having getting refunds or compensation from Lufthansa, United’s trans-Atlantic Star Alliance partner. Reading through the litany of complaints surprised me. I can’t recall any issue I’ve had with Lufthansa service. Indeed, back in 2013 when flying home from a family vacation, a weather delay in… <em>Amsterdam</em> caused us to miss our connection home from Frankfurt. I talked about it in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2013/09/06/podcast-106-summer-vacation-in-amsterdam-restaurant-trends/\">episode #106</a>; we had no problem getting hotel and food vouchers and getting re-booked on the next morning’s flight out -- the complete opposite treatment of what we’d expect in the US. The article quotes a German travel industry exec saying that Lufthansa got aggressive about swerving EU customer protection laws during COVID. I’m hoping it was only an overreaction to the pandemic cash crunch and that it’s not a new set point for a much lower level of customer service going forward.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li> Bridge Music -- Absolutely Clear (ft Jeris &amp; Goldfish) by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/45578 Ft: Jeris, Goldfish</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Nashville vs. Nash-Vegas</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As I mentioned at the start of <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/08/18/podcast-188-my-top-tips-to-survive-travel-chaos/\">episode #188</a>,&nbsp; in July we relocated the TravelCommons studio -- and the rest of our worldly belongings -- from Chicago to Nashville. After 25 years into my 4th tour of duty in Chicago, I&nbsp; wanted a change of scenery. And it definitely has been that -- moving from the <a href=\"https://worldpopulationreview.com/us-cities\">3rd most populous city in the US to the 20th</a>; from the 8th highest population density to the 178th most dense of the US’s top 200 cities. We joke that whenever we put an address into Google Maps, it could be completely on the other side of the city, but no matter how far away it looks, we’d hit the Directions button and be told it’s only a 15-minute drive. It took us 15 minutes just to get out of our neighborhood in Chicago.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>When we told friends our move plans, just about everyone replied, “Oh, we love Nashville. We look forward to visiting.” Once we got down here and started knocking around, we realized that what they were all talking about was “Nash-Vegas” -- the 5 blocks of honky tonks on Lower Broadway, the 3 blocks over to the Country Music Hall of Fame, the open-air party buses cruising the perimeter full of bachelorette partiers yelling out at every red light. It’s definitely something to be seen, and it brings a steady stream of tourists. I’m always amazed how full the Broadway sidewalks are at, say, 11:30am on a Tuesday. As you might’ve guessed, we’re not often on Broadway.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But that’s not to say the tourists have it completely wrong; Nashville <em>is</em> Music City with a capital “M”. If you fly in on Southwest or American, it starts with walking past live music at Tootsie’s as you walk up Concourse C. And then it just continues. Irene and I are convinced that there’s a law requiring any gathering of 10 or more people to have a stage with a live performer. The first couple of months we were down here, we hit all the area farmers’ markets we could find, and just about every one had a stage with a singer/songwriter and a guitar or a full-on band. Peak Nashville for us was when we were in line at a local hot chicken joint watching a guy with a guitar set up his gear and start to place just inside the entry door. It was like having live music at a McDonald’s. I was talking to a bartender at an East Nashville place called <a href=\"http://www.vinyltapnashville.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Vinyl Tap</a> -- a beer bar/vinyl record store/live music venue (of course). We got talking; he’d moved down from New York City to be a session trombone player. And that’s not an uncommon conversation. In New York and LA, bartenders are working between acting gigs. In Nashville, they’re musicians between sessions.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And so we’ve waded into the live music scene, much more than we did in Chicago. In January, we made the rounds of Monday night singer/songwriter open mic nights. Some were pretty informal - at a microbrewery, <a href=\"https://www.tnbrew.com/livemusic\" title=\"\">Tennessee Brew Works</a>, the MC put out a legal pad at 5pm for people to sign up and then took them in that order, each person doing 2 songs. At <a href=\"https://bluebirdcafe.com/how-to-play/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Bluebird Cafe</a>, very famous place, a bit more structure -- on-line sign-ups opened at 11am. That night, there were two lines to get in -- to the left of the front door, the folks who made it on the list, lined up to play their best song to the people who lined up to the right of the door, who showed up to listen. And everyone, listeners and signers, sat together in the audience. Irene and I ended up at a two-top right in front of the stage. On our left was a guy who drove in from Clarksville, TN to play and his wife. Behind us was a table full of Canadians including a woman from Quebec who sang in French, and a guy who’d flown in from Vancouver that morning just to play his song on that stage. And he wasn’t the only one; there were people on the stage who had driven in from Houston, Little Rock, Michigan, Nebraska…. I hadn’t realized how big a draw this music scene is.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Maybe 3 weeks ago, I saw a blurb on Twitter about <a href=\"https://thirdmanrecords.com/products/nashville-steel-guitar-arts-council-live-at-third-man-records\" title=\"\">a show</a> put on by the “Pedal Steel Guitar Arts Council.” Now that felt very Nashville. At $15/ticket, how could we go wrong? Plus, it was at the performance space at Jack White’s Third Man Records which had been on Irene’s list of places to check out. So, we went. Back to my bartender discussions, one thing I noticed early on going to shows in Nashville is how many working musicians there are here -- not hobbyists, not passion project people, but people whose main paying job is to play music -- session musicians, live backing musicians. And some of these smaller shows are session musicians getting up on stage with their friends to play, often to an audience of other friends and family. At this show, when the first steel guitar player hit the stage, a little girl behind us called out “Hey, grandpa!” It ended up being a very interesting show, one that immediately attacked the stereotype of pedal steel guitars as twangy country music instruments. Grandpa was followed by a father-and-son pedal steel-and-cello duo, who were followed by a guy doing pedal steel ambient music. Very interesting stuff, and stuff I’m not sure I’d see anywhere else.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Maybe it’s those Broadway honky tonk cover bands and the mainstream country music recording sessions that pay the bills, and so let’s these musicians play different (some might say “weird”) stuff on their own time. But if/when you get down to Nashville, spend an afternoon, a night on Lower Broadway -- because how can you say you’ve been here and <em>not</em> do that -- but save some time to check out the smaller places, the open mic nights. Make sure you see the Nashville music scene, not just the Nash-Vegas one.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #193</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>. And while you’re at TravelCommons.com, you can check out the show notes page for a transcript and any links I’ve mentioned. Or you can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_192.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #193 — Yet More Travel Planning; Nashville vs Nash-Vegas','','inherit','closed','closed','','4284-revision-v1','','','2023-03-31 10:28:37','2023-03-31 15:28:37','',4284,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4288',0,'revision','',0),
(4290,1,'2023-03-31 10:33:23','2023-03-31 15:33:23','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/DALL·E-2023-01-25-22.53.11-e1674709008862-300x300.png\" alt=\"Cat with paw on the rim of a gin tonic glass\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\">Can\'t get to the artisanal garnish[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>With COVID travel restrictions gone, I expect people to revert back to their old ways where January is the biggest travel planning month. I wade into the debate between booking direct with travel providers vs. booking with agents and 3rd-party sites. I see how well my travel tips did during the Southwest cancellation chaos, and then pull out a little more of my conversation with Jeff Cioletti, author of the new book <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3sQelCQ\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Imbibing for Introverts</a></em>; this time about how gin is going global with a local twist. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_192.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #192: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN. Haven’t done any travel since the last episode. Instead, I’m starting the year off, as many others do, by doing travel planning, trying to lay out a 2023 travel calendar so we don’t slouch past the days and then, in say August, look back and say “Where’d the year go?”&nbsp; Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/01/25/podcast-159-planning-the-trip-of-a-lifetime-in-southeast-asia/\">episode #159</a>, I talked about how travel planning would traditionally kick in the week after Christmas -- although I’ll say that given <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/01/25/podcast-159-planning-the-trip-of-a-lifetime-in-southeast-asia/\">episode #159</a> was posted in January 2020, 2 months before the first wave of COVID lockdowns, my timing on that probably wasn’t the greatest. A year later, January 2021, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/01/14/podcast-171-data-privacy-and-rental-cars-2021-travel-planning-tips/\">episode #171</a>, I tried it again, ticking through 5 travel planning tips for COVID times. They were all about agility -- paying attention to cancellation rules, monitoring last-minutes changes in lockdowns and health requirements….&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But now two years later, with COVID cases down and <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/travel/passenger-volumes\">travel volumes pretty much back up to 2019 levels</a>, I expect folks will revert back to their old travel planning patterns. Back in my travel tech CIO days, right before Christmas, we’d always lock down our systems and put on extra capacity (which, let me tell you kids, back in the pre-cloud days, meant rolling actual servers, real live physical equipment uphill, through the snow, onto the data center’s raised floor) so we could handle the spikes in search volume. And while we’d see some minor spikes from the systems that travel agents used, the biggest volumes came from on-line sites like Expedia and Booking.com, sites more popular with leisure travelers than business travelers.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But now in 2023, I’m guessing that the Chinese are chief among those rushing back to their pre-COVID travel planning after the government quit their zero COVID policies. Indeed, on December 26, within a half an hour of the announcement that China’s borders were fully reopening,<a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/2022/12/27/here-are-the-countries-chinese-tourists-want-to-visit-the-most.html\"> searches for international travel on China’s biggest on-line site, Trip.com</a>, surged back to pre-COVID levels. The top search destinations were Southeast Asian countries, the US, and the UK. Now remember, before the lockdowns, <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/video/series/news-explainers/big-spending-chinese-tourists-are-coming-back-but-slowly/38552637-24FC-484A-B8A9-B6022BF9AEF0\">the Chinese were by far the largest source of international tourism spending</a> -- $255B, 70% more than second-place US, which was at $150B. So if you, like me, thought popular vacation destinations were crowded last year, just wait for this summer -- for what I’m guessing will be a second wave, maybe a Chinese tsunami of “revenge travel.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music --  Earth Soda by septahelix (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial Share-Alike  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/septahelix/34050</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Back in August, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/08/18/podcast-188-my-top-tips-to-survive-travel-chaos/\">episode #188</a> was all about tips for avoiding travel chaos. I recorded it at the tail end of a summer of travel woes, after a July 4th holiday weekend that was seen as a <em>complete train wreck</em> with 1,100 canceled flights and 4,000 delays -- to which, as we all know, Southwest said “Hold my beer” and canceled almost <em>16,000</em> flights between Christmas and New Year’s -- to which the FAA said “Wait, I wanna play too” and disrupted over 11,000 flights in o<em>ne morning</em>. And when the root cause for both was found to be old technology, all the gray-haired IT guys nodded to each other and repeated their mantra -- “technical debt is a bitch.”&nbsp; Southwest has <a href=\"https://skift.com/2023/01/14/u-s-senate-demands-southwest-explain-holiday-meltdown/\">estimated a profit hit of as much as $825 million</a> from their debacle. Just sayin’-- even just half that would’ve funded a whole lot of fixes to their old scheduling system.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But looking back at those summer tips, <em>pack so you can carry on </em>and if you can’t, then <em>spread everyone’s clothes across all your checked bags</em> were pretty much spot-on. As was the discussion in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/10/31/podcast-190-my-travel-tech-stack-imbibing-for-introverts/\">episode #190</a> about how adding <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3k4rCUy\">Apple AirTags</a> to my travel tech stack saved me time and agita when United lost my luggage. With all the stories about piles of stranded luggage from the bomb cyclone and Southwest cancellations, <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3k4rCUy\">AirTags</a> have proven to be a critical “must-have” if you have to check a bag, and have an iPhone. For Android users, you’ll have to wait a bit longer; people who spelunk through new Android code think <a href=\"https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/01/google-plans-airtag-clone-will-track-devices-with-3-billion-android-phones/\">Google is working on its own AirTag-like tracker</a>.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But I think I missed a couple of things. First, I should’ve pointed back to and recapped my conversation in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/06/09/podcast-164-first-post-lockdown-trips-travel-credit-cards/\">episode #164</a> with <a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/brett-holzhauer/\">Brett Holzhauer</a>, a travel credit card analyst now at CNBC, about the trip cancellation, trip interruption, and baggage insurance that many people don’t realize they get by charging their trip on a travel credit card. Maybe the tip there is, before you book your trip, pull out the credit card benefit summaries so you know which card will give you the best protection.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The second tip I’d add is -- <em>take pictures of your checked luggage</em>, outside and the contents inside. The pictures of the bags will help you answer the “describe what your bag looks like” question on the airline’s lost baggage form. The pictures of the inside will help with that baggage insurance claim. But just the fact that we’ve got to think about all this just to have someone take us and our stuff from Point A to Point B… Jesus, what a broken system.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>In what has become a going on 2-year thread about international travel planning, I’ve talked about COVID travel rules, testing, Global Entry, passport applications… And so one of the trips we’ve been planning is to hit the tulip festival in Holland -- the country, the Netherlands, not the town in Michigan, which can screw you up if you don’t look closely at your Google search results. The tulip festival in the Netherlands is in April while the one in western Michigan is in May.&nbsp; And that initial lack of Google input box precision, using Holland rather than the Netherlands, which surfaced the May date, sent me down a whole ‘nother search path because, deep in some random brain fold, I remembered a May start date for ETIAS -- the European Travel Information and Authorisation System which is the EU’s version of the US’s ESTA, the Electronic System for Travel Authorization. Now this whole E-acronym soup is pretty much just electronically plugging the travel information gap for folks who don’t need a visa to enter a country. The US started it first, another recommendation from the 9/11 Commission, but unlike Real ID, ESTA actually got implemented -- in 2009. It started off free but is now $21 per person for two years, with most of that going to fund Brand USA, the US tourist promotion agency. The EU’s <a href=\"https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/MEMO_18_4362\">ETIAS</a> is cheaper - €7 per person for three years. It got started later, in 2018, and its go-live date has been kicked down the road a few times now -- from 2022 to May 2023 as that random neuron of mine recalled, but I guess I missed the <a href=\"https://thepointsguy.com/news/europe-new-etias-entry-fee-launch-2023/\">latest push</a>, which happened back in August, that delayed ETIAS another 6 months. So now go-live is November 2023 -- still nothing like the 17-year-and-counting delay for Real ID. So, as it turns out after losing a couple of hours of my life in a click spiral, nothing to worry about ‘til next year.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And if you have any travel worries… or stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music -- Generic Apologies by Speck (c) copyright 2022 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/speck/65664 Ft: jaspertine, Zenboy1955, Admiral Bob, Apoxode</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Travel Planning -- Book Direct or through a Third-Party?</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Chris Chufo, long-time friend of the podcast, pointed me to a <a href=\"https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/tips/booking-direct-travel-websites-flights-hotels/\">Washington Post column</a> by Christopher Elliot on the “great debate” (as he put it) between booking direct with an airline or hotel or car rental company vs. using a 3rd party, a travel agent or an on-line site like Booking.com or Airbnb. It’s an ongoing debate because there’s not a straight-forward answer, and it’s one that I personally straddle when booking travel. But when I think about it, and what the Post column didn’t really articulate, is that the decision point hinges on relationships and leverage.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>When booking flights, trains, rental cars, I almost always book direct because if there\'s a problem -- a delay, a cancellation -- I can work directly with the airline or rental company to figure out an alternative. When I booked through a 3rd party -- most recently, back in 2019 when Amex was giving a 5x multiplier on Membership Rewards points for booking through them -- and then had a flight cancellation in Charlottesville, VA, the carrier wouldn’t talk to me -- “You need to call your agent.”&nbsp; Which I did, while standing in front of the ticket counter at the airport, looking at the flight status display saying “Canceled” and telling the Amex agent the current situation because the flight status has been updated in their system yet. After which the agent said “Hold on, I need to call the airline because it’s so close to departure, I can’t do anything in the system” -- basically making the same call I just got off of. Third parties really don’t have much leverage over carriers -- airlines, trains, or even rental cars -- and there’s no real value in putting them between me and the carrier when I’m trying to move fast to swerve a delay or cancellation. Especially a carrier where I’ve got status; that marker of a relationship often delivers more than an agent can.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Hotels can be a bit different. I’ll book directly with the big chains -- Marriott, Hilton -- again, places where I have status. My experience has been that the reservation agents are more flexible when I need to make a change, and it feels like (though I don’t have hard data on this) I get upgraded more often by the front desk. And if I have, say, a billing issue with a Marriott property, Corporate Marriott will look at my lifetime titanium status and give me the benefit of the doubt. However, with independent properties where I haven’t stayed before and this is a one-time transaction, and so don’t have any leverage from an on-going relationship or, say, the potential for future business, the situation is murkier. An Airbnb or an Expedia, who <em>can</em> see future revenue from me, might be more willing to help me out with a problem. But the property has a financial incentive for me to book directly with them -- it saves them commission that could be as high as 40%.&nbsp; So if I’m going someplace new, I usually start off searching on a 3rd-party site -- Airbnb, Booking.com -- to see what’s available. If I narrow down to an independent place and I’m going to stay there for more than a day or two, I’ll flip over to their web site -- can I get a better price booking direct? I check out TripAdvisor -- can I trust them? If both are “yes’s”, then I’ll book direct -- because I still have one fall-back protector, my credit card company.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Last year, our last night in Sicily, we booked a hotel room that was maybe a 5-minute walk from Catania airport because we had an early flight out the next morning. We found it and booked it on Booking.com -- the path of least resistance. So on that last night, driving back with our friends from Taormina (before <a href=\"https://www.travelweekly.com/Travel-News/Hotel-News/White-Lotus-series-generates-interest-Sicily\"><em>The White Lotus</em> put it on the map</a>), we got to the airport but couldn’t find the hotel. Google Maps landed us in front of some apartment buildings and a big dirt parking lot. A couple of laps around the block and a long WhatsApp message stream later, we found out that what we booked wasn’t a hotel room, but one of these apartments; and when someone remotely unlocked the door, it looked a bit (no, a lot) like a <em><a href=\"https://youtu.be/pLz6nIvqB2c\" title=\"\">Third Rate Romance, Low Rent Rendezvous</a></em> sorta place. Our friends said “We’re <strong>not</strong> leaving you here” and we bee-lined over to a <em>real</em> airport hotel where I grabbed one of their last rooms while Irene canceled the Love Shack on Booking.com. Now, as you might imagine with the late cancellation, the Shack didn’t want to refund our payment. Not surprising. However, I was a bit surprised when Booking.com didn’t help us -- in spite of me pointing out the property description on their site was completely false.&nbsp; So, last resort, I disputed the charge with Chase. They called me. I told them the story, sent them screenshots of the property listing (which surprising(?)/ unsurprisingly(?) was still up, unchanged, on Booking.com) along with a couple of pictures I’d taken -- just in case. We’ve had this Chase card for over 10 years; it’s our main credit card so we spend <em>a lot</em> on it; and we’ve never disputed a hotel stay on it before. Leverage from what, for Chase, has been a profitable relationship. Two weeks later, we got our money back.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li> Bridge Music -- Absolutely Clear (ft Jeris &amp; Goldfish) by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/45578 Ft: Jeris, Goldfish</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Gin Conquers the World</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Here’s a bit of a change-up. Usually, when I talk about drinking on this podcast, it’s about craft beer. There’s even a Beer tab on the top of the TravelCommons website that takes you to a page with all the podcast episodes and blog posts that talk about beer -- “What Makes a Great Taproom”, “My Best Restaurants, Bars and Taprooms of 2021” (note to self, gotta write the 2022 version of that). But back in October, when interviewing Jeff Cioletti, editor-in-chief of <a href=\"https://craftspiritsmag.com/\"><em>Craft Spirits Magazine</em></a> about his new book <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3sQelCQ\"><em>Imbibing for Introverts</em></a> for <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/10/31/podcast-190-my-travel-tech-stack-imbibing-for-introverts/\" title=\"Podcast #190 — My Travel Tech Stack; Imbibing for Introverts\">episode #190</a>, we got talking about how gin has spread across the globe:<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Let me ask you this... Through your travels, have you noticed any changes, any trends over the past few years as you\'ve been sitting at bars drinking alone?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Jeff: One thing that I find incredibly striking, and this is worldwide, I had mentioned, gin.&nbsp; Gin has reconquered Europe. I was in Berlin, and I was on a panel with somebody, he said that now Germany has got 1,000 gin brands. Like five years ago, they had barely any.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: I\'ll tell you, for me it\'s gonna either be craft beer or gin. I just think about it, in Scotland and Spain.... I was just in Croatia a few weeks ago; a guy walks out, has some Croatian gin. They were doing gin tonics, so the big Spanish goblet style. I said, “Well, I\'d really like to taste that gin without all the tonic and everything. I want to see what you guys are doing with it.” And back to your point about endearing yourself sometimes, the guy was like “Really? You really want it”, and I said, “Yeah, absolutely. Just gin and glass, just give me a little bit” and he said, “Oh no, that\'s great.” And off he came and brought the regular gin tonic and then there was a little sidecar of just gin neat so I could taste it along.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Jeff: I was just in a bar in Stuttgart on Saturday night. It was called Botanical Affairs, a tiny kind of corner pocket little bar and all they have is gin. I mean it\'s not even like you go in there or you can have a beer, but they specialize in gin. I mean everything was a gin cocktail; that\'s all you could order, and they had so many different brands from all over the world. And you mentioned Spain; they get most of the credit for elevating the gin cocktail and turning it into kind of a luxurious drink. It really is, it\'s an experience now.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Yes, it\'s something, with the goblet glass and the garnish and all stuff.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Jeff: Yes, and a lot of people have adopted that; even places here in the States that are using it now. I\'ve found it in a lot of places in the UK that use it And the Spanish get all the credit for that. They didn\'t use it in Germany though, which I found interesting but everywhere else seems to.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Now there are always local/regional spirits to drink -- bourbon in Kentucky, malt whisky in Scotland and Ireland, soju in Korea, the whole range of Eastern European fruit brandies; palinka in Hungary, I mentioned Croatian rakija (pronounced rakiya) in the last episode. But it seems that gin has become the canvas, the freshly painted side of a building that younger distillers want to tag with their sense of what’s local. Maybe because it’s easier -- they don’t have to wrestle with expectations or regulations about what the local traditional spirit is.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Also maybe because it’s easier to make. Back in 2013 on our first visit to University of St Andrews with our then-high-school junior Claire, I found a local microbrewery, Eden Mill. Their story was that they wanted to be a Scotch whisky distillery, but since whisky is legally required to age in an oak barrel for at least 3 years, they needed something else to generate cash now. And since the front-end of making beer and malt whisky are pretty much the same, craft beer seemed a pretty logical way to bridge their cash gap. Fast forward a couple of years to Claire’s first year at St Andrews, Eden Mill is still making beer, still waiting for their whisky to come of age, but now they’ve added gin. The updated story -- since they already had a distillation column to make whisky, they had everything they needed to make gin. They trucked in neutral spirits -- similar to the Everclear of <em>my</em> college days, but I’m sure a bit classier -- run it through the distillation column over a basket of botanicals, dilute it to the right strength, bottle it, and sell it -- right away. If I’m an artisanal producer, maybe I don’t have to think as much about funding stainless steel and storage, and so can think more about how I want to express my locality, my culture in that basket of botanicals. Eden Mill, for example, sitting on the east coast of Scotland, uses local sea buckthorn berries. On a trip to Spain, I was served Nordés gin from Galicia, the most northwest part of Spain, the bit that sits on top of Portugal; it tasted of lemon verbena and eucalyptus and bay leaf, botanicals native to the Galician forests. The Croatian gin I talked about with Jeff Cioletti was all about the local, native juniper berries.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>It’s an interesting twist on the complaint about global homogenization, that the world has been becoming more the same now because of -- pick your favorite bugbear: the spread of global brands, Instagram, the ubiquity of English…. Gin is the latest; starting to crowd out the local native spirit, but with a twist with the focus on native flavors. And so with all the effort put into expressing these local botanicals, I’m always surprised when bartenders want to serve them in the Spanish-style gin tonic that Jeff rightly notes seems to have taken over. After giving me a whole spiel about the care the distiller has taken to infuse the locality into the gin, they then smother the one-and-a-half ounces of that locality with 6 or 7 ounces of imported tonic and a slice or two of imported orange or lemon or lime. So no, for me, give me that local gin straight, maybe over one of those huge ice cubes so I can taste that local flavor the distiller has been working to present. I guess I’m swimming upstream against today’s cocktail culture -- more interested in the distiller’s art than the mixologist’s.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #192</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>. And while you’re at TravelCommons.com, you can check out the show notes page for a transcript and any links I’ve mentioned. Or you can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_192.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #192 — New Year Travel Planning Tips; Gin Conquers the World','Are people going back to their old travel planning ways? Should you book direct with travel providers or use a 3rd-party? Unpacking Southwest\'s cancellation chaos. Gin goes global with a local twist.','inherit','closed','closed','','4264-revision-v1','','','2023-03-31 10:33:23','2023-03-31 15:33:23','',4264,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4290',0,'revision','',0),
(4291,1,'2023-03-31 10:35:32','2023-03-31 15:35:32','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Nash-vegas-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Cat with paw on the rim of a gin tonic glass\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\">Can\'t get to the artisanal garnish[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>With COVID travel restrictions gone, I expect people to revert back to their old ways where January is the biggest travel planning month. I wade into the debate between booking direct with travel providers vs. booking with agents and 3rd-party sites. I see how well my travel tips did during the Southwest cancellation chaos, and then pull out a little more of my conversation with Jeff Cioletti, author of the new book <em><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3sQelCQ\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Imbibing for Introverts</a></em>; this time about how gin is going global with a local twist. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_193.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #193: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN after a couple of bits of travel; to Chicago at the end of January because, really, that’s the garden time of the year in Chicago -- waking up to subzero temperatures, wind howling off the lake. Yup, good times; really missed it.&nbsp; But the next month, flying to and from Albuquerque, NM for some skiing in Taos, reminded me of something I <em>really</em> miss about Chicago -- direct flights to almost everywhere in the US. ABQ is about the same distance from Chicago as it is from Nashville. But what’s a 3¼ hour direct flight from Chicago turned out to be a 6½ hour journey from Nashville, complete with a coffee stop in Houston. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/05/26/podcast-187-moving-to-a-non-hub-airport-what-makes-a-great-taproom/\">episode #187</a>, I talked about having to adjust my mental travel calculus, my travel reflexes, to <em>not</em> living in an airport hub city -- for the first time in about 40 years. Those extra 3 hours made that adjustment very real.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>When we landed, we met up with our daughter Claire and hopped the bus to the rental car center to see what Hertz had waiting for us. There were 5 of us skiing, so I wanted to get the biggest vehicle they had, but I was playing a bit of chicken with Hertz. I had enough Hertz points to cover a large car for the week, but they’d only let me cover 1 day of a specialty class like an SUV. With all the car rentals quoting $100/day, I slammed my points down on the large car and hoped there was some sort of an SUV in the Five Star row when we got there. So when we rocked up to the Hertz lot, my heart sank just a bit; there was nothing in the Five Star row. After a minute of staring at the empty spaces, a woman came out of the office “Oh, we’ve upgraded you to President’s Circle. I turn 90 degrees and see an entire row of SUVs. We picked the biggest one, a Ford Explorer with 16,000 miles and captain’s chairs for everyone. Started the trip off on the right note.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The trip home at the end of the week, everyone’s flight was blown sideways by the big winter storm two days before. It didn’t surprise us; it had blown off the mountain with 50-70 mph winds, so we weren’t surprised when the flight delay notices started dinging our iPhones. United hit us with a 2-hour delay (our plane didn’t make it out of Fresno the night before), but since we had a 3-hr layover in DEN, the only thing that changed was which airport bar we were killing time in.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Claire caught the worst of it, though, trying to get home to New York. With no direct flights between ABQ and LGA, she had to connect through ORD. The flight out went without a hitch. The flight back… the first leg, ABQ-ORD, was fine. It was the ORD-LGA leg that went badly wrong, which surprised me because those flights, between ORD and LGA, are like a shuttle, every hour, like clockwork. But for Claire, the shuttle broke… literally. After an hour delay, they loaded up the plane, de-iced the wings, and then found out an engine was broken, so back to the gate where -- you guessed it -- it can’t be fixed. 2½ hours past departure time, Claire pings me -- “it’s starting to snow; I doubt I’m getting on any plane tonight.” “Don’t write it off yet”, I told her. “It’s not a weather issue, so American will have to pay for a hotel and breakfast for the 120 or so people on that plane. That fact alone will cause them to look hard for another plane for you.” And that’s exactly what they did. It took them a few hours to scrounge one up but Claire got home that night… or rather that morning, at 3am. Always amazes me how an airline can figure out a solution when it’s <em>their</em> money on the line.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music --  Earth Soda by septahelix (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial Share-Alike  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/septahelix/34050</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Back to waiting out that flight delay in ABQ, my bar tab from waiting out the 2-hr delay got me re-thinking my stance on airport lounges, especially now that the US ones have upped their game on food and alcohol. It wouldn’t have changed anything in ABQ. It’s too small; no lounges. Indeed, I think we were at the only bar. But elsewhere… when we fly internationally, I usually get lounge access through my United or American status. In the US, I gave up my American and then United lounge memberships years ago because I wasn’t using them. I love American Express’s Centurion Lounges but charging $50 to bring a guest in and hiking the annual fee for the Platinum card to $695, the math just didn’t work for me. I could just do day passes; maybe use Loungebuddy for that. Or run the math on the not-quite-Platinum cards from Chase and Capital One, the ones that include Priority Pass membership. I dunno; a couple of avoided bar tabs may cover their annual fees.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/01/26/podcast-192-new-year-travel-planning-tips-gin-conquers-the-world/\">the last episode</a>, wading into the debate between booking direct with an airline or hotel or through a 3rd party, I told the story about how a -- <em>how do I say this politely?</em> -- false/misleading/just plain wrong property listing on Booking.com tricked us into booking a night in a place that looked to be much more geared to hourly stays, if you know what I mean. And how Booking.com did absolutely nothing to resolve our dispute. Long-time listener Nick Gassman pointed me to a <a href=\"https://www.theguardian.com/money/2023/jan/11/a-glossy-bookingcom-flat-turned-out-to-be-a-squalid-loft\">Guardian article</a> where a Booking.com customer wrote to the consumer affairs reporter with a very similar experience (dare I say “scam”?) -- misleading listing, shock when opening the door to the actual place, walking/running away to find another place to stay, getting dinged with a night’s charge for being a “no show”, and then Booking.com going “palms up” when asked to fix it. The interesting twist on this one was -- with the host reporting them as “no shows”, they couldn’t leave a review on the property to warn others. Nick also sent me a link to a <a href=\"https://www.reddit.com/r/BestofRedditorUpdates/comments/11saoz0/new_update_from_court_in_ongoing_case_airbnb/\">Reddit post</a> about a guy going to arbitration with Airbnb, also disputing a “no show” when he canceled a place that had security cameras on the inside of a studio apartment. These are reminders that, for all their <a href=\"https://www.booking.com/trust_and_safety.html\">web pages</a> and <a href=\"https://news.airbnb.com/airbnb-launches-trust-safety-advisory-coalition/\">press releases</a> with large boldface headlines, “trust and safety”, their legal terms &amp; conditions in a much smaller font says that all they do is connect hosts and guests; they’re not party to that transaction and don’t have any control over the quality or safety of your experience. I’m not saying don’t use them. We use Booking and Airbnb all the time, and have had 1, maybe 2 or 3, bad experiences. What I am saying is, go in eyes wide open. In this very hot travel market, Booking and Airbnb feel they need to take care of hosts right now more than they do guests.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/12/24/podcast-191-my-notes-on-italy-and-split-croatia/\">episode #191</a>, I said “In more travel document good news, the US State Department opened up on-line passport renewals on what they’re calling a ‘limited release’.” Well, listener Rob Holbrook isn’t feeling the good vibes. Rob said “I tried the renewal portal but it was constantly down, and then they shut it down completely. I’m not sure if the pilot outlived its usefulness, if passport renewal is too complex to do on-line, or if it opened up unexpected security risks.” The State Department shut down the renewal portal in early February to “implement customer feedback to improve the process.”&nbsp; Back then, they said it would be back up in March; now they’re saying “TBD” I’m just hoping they’re not using the same IT gang that coded up the first version of the Obamacare HealthCare.gov site. So we’re back to sending paper forms in, and the wait time is slowly creeping up -- before spring break season, State was saying 8-11 weeks; <a href=\"https://www.state.gov/update-on-passport-processing-times/\">last week, they added 2 weeks</a>; now estimating 10-13 weeks. If you’re planning to hit Europe this summer, you need to sprint down to Walgreens for that passport photo <em>right now</em>!</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to like Nick and Rob did to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music -- Generic Apologies by Speck (c) copyright 2022 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/speck/65664 Ft: jaspertine, Zenboy1955, Admiral Bob, Apoxode</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Still Overthinking Travel Planning</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Last summer, back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/08/18/podcast-188-my-top-tips-to-survive-travel-chaos/\">episode #188</a>, I talked about getting a great frequent flier deal on my Croatia-Italy flights, completely busting through the traditional 2¢/mile benchmark. It got me thinking that maybe the inflation in award redemption requirements hadn’t kept up with the real dollar cost increases for flights, and that I was shooting that gap to get a smokin’ deal. Well, when booking flights to go over to the Netherlands next month, I’m here to tell you -- that gap has snapped shut. I first started looking at KLM, the Dutch airline, and its SkyTeam partner Delta in hopes of a decent flight selection <em>and</em>, as importantly, I have a slug of Amex Membership Rewards points I’m looking to burn off, and KLM and Delta are transfer partners. But after a couple of hours of twisting our travel plans in knots around their flight matrices, the best I could get was ¾ of a cent/mile -- so those Amex points are still there. Next up, British Airways because they have a direct flight to LHR from Nashville, but I quickly ran into the same problem I always have with BA Avios points -- they don’t cover fuel surcharges and, for some reason, BA prices their fares low and slams a big fuel surcharge on top of it. I dunno why they do it -- maybe there’s a tax angle there somewhere. The final ticket price comes out the same as other carriers, but a flight booked with a similar amount of miles ends up requiring a huge cash payment, like 2-3 times what other carriers want. So the Avios points also stay put; maybe I’ll push them over to Iberia for a trip to Spain or Portugal next year. What started with a couple of numbers scrawled on a piece of paper quickly turned into a spreadsheet with columns for the different possible travel windows -- leaving on a Weds vs. a Thurs, returning on a Fri vs. Saturday -- 3 rows for each carrier, the first cell in the matrix the cost of buying the ticket straight out, the second cell split between miles and cash payment, the third cell the cents per mile calc -- is it worth burning the points or just buying the ticket. After all that, the best deal was on United at 1.54¢/mile -- a bit off 2¢/mile, but looking at valuation tables on <a href=\"https://thepointsguy.com/guide/monthly-valuations/\">The Points Guy</a>, <a href=\"https://www.bankrate.com/finance/credit-cards/points-and-miles-valuations/#airline-rewards\">Bankrate</a>, and <a href=\"https://frequentmiler.com/airline-miles-worth/\">Frequent Miler</a> websites, I could see it was a solid deal and booked it.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Although, I have to say that I paid more attention than usual to the United routings after reading a <a href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/21/travel/lufthansa-refunds-collect.html\">NY Times article</a> that long-time listener, sometime contributor Chris Chufo sent me about the hassles people are having getting refunds or compensation from Lufthansa, United’s trans-Atlantic Star Alliance partner. Reading through the litany of complaints surprised me. I can’t recall any issue I’ve had with Lufthansa service. Indeed, back in 2013 when flying home from a family vacation, a weather delay in… <em>Amsterdam</em> caused us to miss our connection home from Frankfurt. I talked about it in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2013/09/06/podcast-106-summer-vacation-in-amsterdam-restaurant-trends/\">episode #106</a>; we had no problem getting hotel and food vouchers and getting re-booked on the next morning’s flight out -- the complete opposite treatment of what we’d expect in the US. The article quotes a German travel industry exec saying that Lufthansa got aggressive about swerving EU customer protection laws during COVID. I’m hoping it was only an overreaction to the pandemic cash crunch and that it’s not a new set point for a much lower level of customer service going forward.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li> Bridge Music -- Absolutely Clear (ft Jeris &amp; Goldfish) by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/45578 Ft: Jeris, Goldfish</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Nashville vs. Nash-Vegas</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As I mentioned at the start of <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/08/18/podcast-188-my-top-tips-to-survive-travel-chaos/\">episode #188</a>,&nbsp; in July we relocated the TravelCommons studio -- and the rest of our worldly belongings -- from Chicago to Nashville. After 25 years into my 4th tour of duty in Chicago, I&nbsp; wanted a change of scenery. And it definitely has been that -- moving from the <a href=\"https://worldpopulationreview.com/us-cities\">3rd most populous city in the US to the 20th</a>; from the 8th highest population density to the 178th most dense of the US’s top 200 cities. We joke that whenever we put an address into Google Maps, it could be completely on the other side of the city, but no matter how far away it looks, we’d hit the Directions button and be told it’s only a 15-minute drive. It took us 15 minutes just to get out of our neighborhood in Chicago.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>When we told friends our move plans, just about everyone replied, “Oh, we love Nashville. We look forward to visiting.” Once we got down here and started knocking around, we realized that what they were all talking about was “Nash-Vegas” -- the 5 blocks of honky tonks on Lower Broadway, the 3 blocks over to the Country Music Hall of Fame, the open-air party buses cruising the perimeter full of bachelorette partiers yelling out at every red light. It’s definitely something to be seen, and it brings a steady stream of tourists. I’m always amazed how full the Broadway sidewalks are at, say, 11:30am on a Tuesday. As you might’ve guessed, we’re not often on Broadway.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But that’s not to say the tourists have it completely wrong; Nashville <em>is</em> Music City with a capital “M”. If you fly in on Southwest or American, it starts with walking past live music at Tootsie’s as you walk up Concourse C. And then it just continues. Irene and I are convinced that there’s a law requiring any gathering of 10 or more people to have a stage with a live performer. The first couple of months we were down here, we hit all the area farmers’ markets we could find, and just about every one had a stage with a singer/songwriter and a guitar or a full-on band. Peak Nashville for us was when we were in line at a local hot chicken joint watching a guy with a guitar set up his gear and start to place just inside the entry door. It was like having live music at a McDonald’s. I was talking to a bartender at an East Nashville place called <a href=\"http://www.vinyltapnashville.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Vinyl Tap</a> -- a beer bar/vinyl record store/live music venue (of course). We got talking; he’d moved down from New York City to be a session trombone player. And that’s not an uncommon conversation. In New York and LA, bartenders are working between acting gigs. In Nashville, they’re musicians between sessions.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And so we’ve waded into the live music scene, much more than we did in Chicago. In January, we made the rounds of Monday night singer/songwriter open mic nights. Some were pretty informal - at a microbrewery, <a href=\"https://www.tnbrew.com/livemusic\" title=\"\">Tennessee Brew Works</a>, the MC put out a legal pad at 5pm for people to sign up and then took them in that order, each person doing 2 songs. At <a href=\"https://bluebirdcafe.com/how-to-play/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Bluebird Cafe</a>, very famous place, a bit more structure -- on-line sign-ups opened at 11am. That night, there were two lines to get in -- to the left of the front door, the folks who made it on the list, lined up to play their best song to the people who lined up to the right of the door, who showed up to listen. And everyone, listeners and signers, sat together in the audience. Irene and I ended up at a two-top right in front of the stage. On our left was a guy who drove in from Clarksville, TN to play and his wife. Behind us was a table full of Canadians including a woman from Quebec who sang in French, and a guy who’d flown in from Vancouver that morning just to play his song on that stage. And he wasn’t the only one; there were people on the stage who had driven in from Houston, Little Rock, Michigan, Nebraska…. I hadn’t realized how big a draw this music scene is.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Maybe 3 weeks ago, I saw a blurb on Twitter about <a href=\"https://thirdmanrecords.com/products/nashville-steel-guitar-arts-council-live-at-third-man-records\" title=\"\">a show</a> put on by the “Pedal Steel Guitar Arts Council.” Now that felt very Nashville. At $15/ticket, how could we go wrong? Plus, it was at the performance space at Jack White’s Third Man Records which had been on Irene’s list of places to check out. So, we went. Back to my bartender discussions, one thing I noticed early on going to shows in Nashville is how many working musicians there are here -- not hobbyists, not passion project people, but people whose main paying job is to play music -- session musicians, live backing musicians. And some of these smaller shows are session musicians getting up on stage with their friends to play, often to an audience of other friends and family. At this show, when the first steel guitar player hit the stage, a little girl behind us called out “Hey, grandpa!” It ended up being a very interesting show, one that immediately attacked the stereotype of pedal steel guitars as twangy country music instruments. Grandpa was followed by a father-and-son pedal steel-and-cello duo, who were followed by a guy doing pedal steel ambient music. Very interesting stuff, and stuff I’m not sure I’d see anywhere else.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Maybe it’s those Broadway honky tonk cover bands and the mainstream country music recording sessions that pay the bills, and so let’s these musicians play different (some might say “weird”) stuff on their own time. But if/when you get down to Nashville, spend an afternoon, a night on Lower Broadway -- because how can you say you’ve been here and <em>not</em> do that -- but save some time to check out the smaller places, the open mic nights. Make sure you see the Nashville music scene, not just the Nash-Vegas one.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #193</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>. And while you’re at TravelCommons.com, you can check out the show notes page for a transcript and any links I’ve mentioned. Or you can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_192.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #193 — Yet More Travel Planning; Nashville vs Nash-Vegas','','inherit','closed','closed','','4284-revision-v1','','','2023-03-31 10:35:32','2023-03-31 15:35:32','',4284,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4291',0,'revision','',0),
(4292,1,'2023-03-31 11:47:37','2023-03-31 16:47:37','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Nash-vegas-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Honky Tonk signs on Broadway in Nashville\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\">Trapped in Nash-Vegas[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Doing a bit of winter travel, the bar tab while waiting out a weather delay got me rethinking the economics of airport lounges. Doing yet travel planning  but with a focus on making the most the points and miles we accumulated during the pandemic. And after eight months in Nashville, I compare the two sides of the local music scene -- the Nash-Vegas honky tonks and the smaller, eclectic off-Broadway scene. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_193.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #193: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN after a couple of bits of travel; to Chicago at the end of January because, really, that’s the garden time of the year in Chicago -- waking up to subzero temperatures, wind howling off the lake. Yup, good times; really missed it.&nbsp; But the next month, flying to and from Albuquerque, NM for some skiing in Taos, reminded me of something I <em>really</em> miss about Chicago -- direct flights to almost everywhere in the US. ABQ is about the same distance from Chicago as it is from Nashville. But what’s a 3¼ hour direct flight from Chicago turned out to be a 6½ hour journey from Nashville, complete with a coffee stop in Houston. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/05/26/podcast-187-moving-to-a-non-hub-airport-what-makes-a-great-taproom/\">episode #187</a>, I talked about having to adjust my mental travel calculus, my travel reflexes, to <em>not</em> living in an airport hub city -- for the first time in about 40 years. Those extra 3 hours made that adjustment very real.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>When we landed, we met up with our daughter Claire and hopped the bus to the rental car center to see what Hertz had waiting for us. There were 5 of us skiing, so I wanted to get the biggest vehicle they had, but I was playing a bit of chicken with Hertz. I had enough Hertz points to cover a large car for the week, but they’d only let me cover 1 day of a specialty class like an SUV. With all the car rentals quoting $100/day, I slammed my points down on the large car and hoped there was some sort of an SUV in the Five Star row when we got there. So when we rocked up to the Hertz lot, my heart sank just a bit; there was nothing in the Five Star row. After a minute of staring at the empty spaces, a woman came out of the office “Oh, we’ve upgraded you to President’s Circle. I turn 90 degrees and see an entire row of SUVs. We picked the biggest one, a Ford Explorer with 16,000 miles and captain’s chairs for everyone. Started the trip off on the right note.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The trip home at the end of the week, everyone’s flight was blown sideways by the big winter storm two days before. It didn’t surprise us; it had blown off the mountain with 50-70 mph winds, so we weren’t surprised when the flight delay notices started dinging our iPhones. United hit us with a 2-hour delay (our plane didn’t make it out of Fresno the night before), but since we had a 3-hr layover in DEN, the only thing that changed was which airport bar we were killing time in.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Claire caught the worst of it, though, trying to get home to New York. With no direct flights between ABQ and LGA, she had to connect through ORD. The flight out went without a hitch. The flight back… the first leg, ABQ-ORD, was fine. It was the ORD-LGA leg that went badly wrong, which surprised me because those flights, between ORD and LGA, are like a shuttle, every hour, like clockwork. But for Claire, the shuttle broke… literally. After an hour delay, they loaded up the plane, de-iced the wings, and then found out an engine was broken, so back to the gate where -- you guessed it -- it can’t be fixed. 2½ hours past departure time, Claire pings me -- “it’s starting to snow; I doubt I’m getting on any plane tonight.” “Don’t write it off yet”, I told her. “It’s not a weather issue, so American will have to pay for a hotel and breakfast for the 120 or so people on that plane. That fact alone will cause them to look hard for another plane for you.” And that’s exactly what they did. It took them a few hours to scrounge one up but Claire got home that night… or rather that morning, at 3am. Always amazes me how an airline can figure out a solution when it’s <em>their</em> money on the line.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music --  Earth Soda by septahelix (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial Share-Alike  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/septahelix/34050</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Back to waiting out that flight delay in ABQ, my bar tab from waiting out the 2-hr delay got me re-thinking my stance on airport lounges, especially now that the US ones have upped their game on food and alcohol. It wouldn’t have changed anything in ABQ. It’s too small; no lounges. Indeed, I think we were at the only bar. But elsewhere… when we fly internationally, I usually get lounge access through my United or American status. In the US, I gave up my American and then United lounge memberships years ago because I wasn’t using them. I love American Express’s Centurion Lounges but charging $50 to bring a guest in and hiking the annual fee for the Platinum card to $695, the math just didn’t work for me. I could just do day passes; maybe use Loungebuddy for that. Or run the math on the not-quite-Platinum cards from Chase and Capital One, the ones that include Priority Pass membership. I dunno; a couple of avoided bar tabs may cover their annual fees.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/01/26/podcast-192-new-year-travel-planning-tips-gin-conquers-the-world/\">the last episode</a>, wading into the debate between booking direct with an airline or hotel or through a 3rd party, I told the story about how a -- <em>how do I say this politely?</em> -- false/misleading/just plain wrong property listing on Booking.com tricked us into booking a night in a place that looked to be much more geared to hourly stays, if you know what I mean. And how Booking.com did absolutely nothing to resolve our dispute. Long-time listener Nick Gassman pointed me to a <a href=\"https://www.theguardian.com/money/2023/jan/11/a-glossy-bookingcom-flat-turned-out-to-be-a-squalid-loft\">Guardian article</a> where a Booking.com customer wrote to the consumer affairs reporter with a very similar experience (dare I say “scam”?) -- misleading listing, shock when opening the door to the actual place, walking/running away to find another place to stay, getting dinged with a night’s charge for being a “no show”, and then Booking.com going “palms up” when asked to fix it. The interesting twist on this one was -- with the host reporting them as “no shows”, they couldn’t leave a review on the property to warn others. Nick also sent me a link to a <a href=\"https://www.reddit.com/r/BestofRedditorUpdates/comments/11saoz0/new_update_from_court_in_ongoing_case_airbnb/\">Reddit post</a> about a guy going to arbitration with Airbnb, also disputing a “no show” when he canceled a place that had security cameras on the inside of a studio apartment. These are reminders that, for all their <a href=\"https://www.booking.com/trust_and_safety.html\">web pages</a> and <a href=\"https://news.airbnb.com/airbnb-launches-trust-safety-advisory-coalition/\">press releases</a> with large boldface headlines, “trust and safety”, their legal terms &amp; conditions in a much smaller font says that all they do is connect hosts and guests; they’re not party to that transaction and don’t have any control over the quality or safety of your experience. I’m not saying don’t use them. We use Booking and Airbnb all the time, and have had 1, maybe 2 or 3, bad experiences. What I am saying is, go in eyes wide open. In this very hot travel market, Booking and Airbnb feel they need to take care of hosts right now more than they do guests.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/12/24/podcast-191-my-notes-on-italy-and-split-croatia/\">episode #191</a>, I said “In more travel document good news, the US State Department opened up on-line passport renewals on what they’re calling a ‘limited release’.” Well, listener Rob Holbrook isn’t feeling the good vibes. Rob said “I tried the renewal portal but it was constantly down, and then they shut it down completely. I’m not sure if the pilot outlived its usefulness, if passport renewal is too complex to do on-line, or if it opened up unexpected security risks.” The State Department shut down the renewal portal in early February to “implement customer feedback to improve the process.”&nbsp; Back then, they said it would be back up in March; now they’re saying “TBD” I’m just hoping they’re not using the same IT gang that coded up the first version of the Obamacare HealthCare.gov site. So we’re back to sending paper forms in, and the wait time is slowly creeping up -- before spring break season, State was saying 8-11 weeks; <a href=\"https://www.state.gov/update-on-passport-processing-times/\">last week, they added 2 weeks</a>; now estimating 10-13 weeks. If you’re planning to hit Europe this summer, you need to sprint down to Walgreens for that passport photo <em>right now</em>!</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to like Nick and Rob did to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music -- Generic Apologies by Speck (c) copyright 2022 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/speck/65664 Ft: jaspertine, Zenboy1955, Admiral Bob, Apoxode</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Still Overthinking Travel Planning</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Last summer, back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/08/18/podcast-188-my-top-tips-to-survive-travel-chaos/\">episode #188</a>, I talked about getting a great frequent flier deal on my Croatia-Italy flights, completely busting through the traditional 2¢/mile benchmark. It got me thinking that maybe the inflation in award redemption requirements hadn’t kept up with the real dollar cost increases for flights, and that I was shooting that gap to get a smokin’ deal. Well, when booking flights to go over to the Netherlands next month, I’m here to tell you -- that gap has snapped shut. I first started looking at KLM, the Dutch airline, and its SkyTeam partner Delta in hopes of a decent flight selection <em>and</em>, as importantly, I have a slug of Amex Membership Rewards points I’m looking to burn off, and KLM and Delta are transfer partners. But after a couple of hours of twisting our travel plans in knots around their flight matrices, the best I could get was ¾ of a cent/mile -- so those Amex points are still there. Next up, British Airways because they have a direct flight to LHR from Nashville, but I quickly ran into the same problem I always have with BA Avios points -- they don’t cover fuel surcharges and, for some reason, BA prices their fares low and slams a big fuel surcharge on top of it. I dunno why they do it -- maybe there’s a tax angle there somewhere. The final ticket price comes out the same as other carriers, but a flight booked with a similar amount of miles ends up requiring a huge cash payment, like 2-3 times what other carriers want. So the Avios points also stay put; maybe I’ll push them over to Iberia for a trip to Spain or Portugal next year. What started with a couple of numbers scrawled on a piece of paper quickly turned into a spreadsheet with columns for the different possible travel windows -- leaving on a Weds vs. a Thurs, returning on a Fri vs. Saturday -- 3 rows for each carrier, the first cell in the matrix the cost of buying the ticket straight out, the second cell split between miles and cash payment, the third cell the cents per mile calc -- is it worth burning the points or just buying the ticket. After all that, the best deal was on United at 1.54¢/mile -- a bit off 2¢/mile, but looking at valuation tables on <a href=\"https://thepointsguy.com/guide/monthly-valuations/\">The Points Guy</a>, <a href=\"https://www.bankrate.com/finance/credit-cards/points-and-miles-valuations/#airline-rewards\">Bankrate</a>, and <a href=\"https://frequentmiler.com/airline-miles-worth/\">Frequent Miler</a> websites, I could see it was a solid deal and booked it.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Although, I have to say that I paid more attention than usual to the United routings after reading a <a href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/21/travel/lufthansa-refunds-collect.html\">NY Times article</a> that long-time listener, sometime contributor Chris Chufo sent me about the hassles people are having getting refunds or compensation from Lufthansa, United’s trans-Atlantic Star Alliance partner. Reading through the litany of complaints surprised me. I can’t recall any issue I’ve had with Lufthansa service. Indeed, back in 2013 when flying home from a family vacation, a weather delay in… <em>Amsterdam</em> caused us to miss our connection home from Frankfurt. I talked about it in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2013/09/06/podcast-106-summer-vacation-in-amsterdam-restaurant-trends/\">episode #106</a>; we had no problem getting hotel and food vouchers and getting re-booked on the next morning’s flight out -- the complete opposite treatment of what we’d expect in the US. The article quotes a German travel industry exec saying that Lufthansa got aggressive about swerving EU customer protection laws during COVID. I’m hoping it was only an overreaction to the pandemic cash crunch and that it’s not a new set point for a much lower level of customer service going forward.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li> Bridge Music -- Absolutely Clear (ft Jeris &amp; Goldfish) by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/45578 Ft: Jeris, Goldfish</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Nashville vs. Nash-Vegas</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As I mentioned at the start of <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/08/18/podcast-188-my-top-tips-to-survive-travel-chaos/\">episode #188</a>,&nbsp; in July we relocated the TravelCommons studio -- and the rest of our worldly belongings -- from Chicago to Nashville. After 25 years into my 4th tour of duty in Chicago, I&nbsp; wanted a change of scenery. And it definitely has been that -- moving from the <a href=\"https://worldpopulationreview.com/us-cities\">3rd most populous city in the US to the 20th</a>; from the 8th highest population density to the 178th most dense of the US’s top 200 cities. We joke that whenever we put an address into Google Maps, it could be completely on the other side of the city, but no matter how far away it looks, we’d hit the Directions button and be told it’s only a 15-minute drive. It took us 15 minutes just to get out of our neighborhood in Chicago.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>When we told friends our move plans, just about everyone replied, “Oh, we love Nashville. We look forward to visiting.” Once we got down here and started knocking around, we realized that what they were all talking about was “Nash-Vegas” -- the 5 blocks of honky tonks on Lower Broadway, the 3 blocks over to the Country Music Hall of Fame, the open-air party buses cruising the perimeter full of bachelorette partiers yelling out at every red light. It’s definitely something to be seen, and it brings a steady stream of tourists. I’m always amazed how full the Broadway sidewalks are at, say, 11:30am on a Tuesday. As you might’ve guessed, we’re not often on Broadway.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But that’s not to say the tourists have it completely wrong; Nashville <em>is</em> Music City with a capital “M”. If you fly in on Southwest or American, it starts with walking past live music at Tootsie’s as you walk up Concourse C. And then it just continues. Irene and I are convinced that there’s a law requiring any gathering of 10 or more people to have a stage with a live performer. The first couple of months we were down here, we hit all the area farmers’ markets we could find, and just about every one had a stage with a singer/songwriter and a guitar or a full-on band. Peak Nashville for us was when we were in line at a local hot chicken joint watching a guy with a guitar set up his gear and start to place just inside the entry door. It was like having live music at a McDonald’s. I was talking to a bartender at an East Nashville place called <a href=\"http://www.vinyltapnashville.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Vinyl Tap</a> -- a beer bar/vinyl record store/live music venue (of course). We got talking; he’d moved down from New York City to be a session trombone player. And that’s not an uncommon conversation. In New York and LA, bartenders are working between acting gigs. In Nashville, they’re musicians between sessions.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And so we’ve waded into the live music scene, much more than we did in Chicago. In January, we made the rounds of Monday night singer/songwriter open mic nights. Some were pretty informal - at a microbrewery, <a href=\"https://www.tnbrew.com/livemusic\" title=\"\">Tennessee Brew Works</a>, the MC put out a legal pad at 5pm for people to sign up and then took them in that order, each person doing 2 songs. At <a href=\"https://bluebirdcafe.com/how-to-play/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Bluebird Cafe</a>, very famous place, a bit more structure -- on-line sign-ups opened at 11am. That night, there were two lines to get in -- to the left of the front door, the folks who made it on the list, lined up to play their best song to the people who lined up to the right of the door, who showed up to listen. And everyone, listeners and signers, sat together in the audience. Irene and I ended up at a two-top right in front of the stage. On our left was a guy who drove in from Clarksville, TN to play and his wife. Behind us was a table full of Canadians including a woman from Quebec who sang in French, and a guy who’d flown in from Vancouver that morning just to play his song on that stage. And he wasn’t the only one; there were people on the stage who had driven in from Houston, Little Rock, Michigan, Nebraska…. I hadn’t realized how big a draw this music scene is.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Maybe 3 weeks ago, I saw a blurb on Twitter about <a href=\"https://thirdmanrecords.com/products/nashville-steel-guitar-arts-council-live-at-third-man-records\" title=\"\">a show</a> put on by the “Pedal Steel Guitar Arts Council.” Now that felt very Nashville. At $15/ticket, how could we go wrong? Plus, it was at the performance space at Jack White’s Third Man Records which had been on Irene’s list of places to check out. So, we went. Back to my bartender discussions, one thing I noticed early on going to shows in Nashville is how many working musicians there are here -- not hobbyists, not passion project people, but people whose main paying job is to play music -- session musicians, live backing musicians. And some of these smaller shows are session musicians getting up on stage with their friends to play, often to an audience of other friends and family. At this show, when the first steel guitar player hit the stage, a little girl behind us called out “Hey, grandpa!” It ended up being a very interesting show, one that immediately attacked the stereotype of pedal steel guitars as twangy country music instruments. Grandpa was followed by a father-and-son pedal steel-and-cello duo, who were followed by a guy doing pedal steel ambient music. Very interesting stuff, and stuff I’m not sure I’d see anywhere else.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Maybe it’s those Broadway honky tonk cover bands and the mainstream country music recording sessions that pay the bills, and so let’s these musicians play different (some might say “weird”) stuff on their own time. But if/when you get down to Nashville, spend an afternoon, a night on Lower Broadway -- because how can you say you’ve been here and <em>not</em> do that -- but save some time to check out the smaller places, the open mic nights. Make sure you see the Nashville music scene, not just the Nash-Vegas one.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #193</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>. And while you’re at TravelCommons.com, you can check out the show notes page for a transcript and any links I’ve mentioned. Or you can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_192.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #193 — Making the Most of Miles; Nashville vs Nash-Vegas','','inherit','closed','closed','','4284-revision-v1','','','2023-03-31 11:47:37','2023-03-31 16:47:37','',4284,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4292',0,'revision','',0),
(4293,1,'2023-03-31 11:59:05','2023-03-31 16:59:05','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Nash-vegas-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Honky Tonk signs on Broadway in Nashville\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\">Trapped in Nash-Vegas[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Doing a bit of winter travel, the bar tab while waiting out a weather delay got me rethinking the economics of airport lounges. Doing yet travel planning  but with a focus on making the most the points and miles we accumulated during the pandemic. And after eight months in Nashville, I compare the two sides of the local music scene -- the Nash-Vegas honky tonks and the smaller, eclectic off-Broadway scene. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_193.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #193: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN after a couple of bits of travel; to Chicago at the end of January because, really, that’s the garden time of the year in Chicago -- waking up to subzero temperatures, wind howling off the lake. Yup, good times; really missed it.&nbsp; But the next month, flying to and from Albuquerque, NM for some skiing in Taos, reminded me of something I <em>really</em> miss about Chicago -- direct flights to almost everywhere in the US. ABQ is about the same distance from Chicago as it is from Nashville. But what’s a 3¼ hour direct flight from Chicago turned out to be a 6½ hour journey from Nashville, complete with a coffee stop in Houston. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/05/26/podcast-187-moving-to-a-non-hub-airport-what-makes-a-great-taproom/\">episode #187</a>, I talked about having to adjust my mental travel calculus, my travel reflexes, to <em>not</em> living in an airport hub city -- for the first time in about 40 years. Those extra 3 hours made that adjustment very real.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>When we landed, we met up with our daughter Claire and hopped the bus to the rental car center to see what Hertz had waiting for us. There were 5 of us skiing, so I wanted to get the biggest vehicle they had, but I was playing a bit of chicken with Hertz. I had enough Hertz points to cover a large car for the week, but they’d only let me cover 1 day of a specialty class like an SUV. With all the car rentals quoting $100/day, I slammed my points down on the large car and hoped there was some sort of an SUV in the Five Star row when we got there. So when we rocked up to the Hertz lot, my heart sank just a bit; there was nothing in the Five Star row. After a minute of staring at the empty spaces, a woman came out of the office “Oh, we’ve upgraded you to President’s Circle. I turn 90 degrees and see an entire row of SUVs. We picked the biggest one, a Ford Explorer with 16,000 miles and captain’s chairs for everyone. Started the trip off on the right note.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The trip home at the end of the week, everyone’s flight was blown sideways by the big winter storm two days before. It didn’t surprise us; it had blown off the mountain with 50-70 mph winds, so we weren’t surprised when the flight delay notices started dinging our iPhones. United hit us with a 2-hour delay (our plane didn’t make it out of Fresno the night before), but since we had a 3-hr layover in DEN, the only thing that changed was which airport bar we were killing time in.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Claire caught the worst of it, though, trying to get home to New York. With no direct flights between ABQ and LGA, she had to connect through ORD. The flight out went without a hitch. The flight back… the first leg, ABQ-ORD, was fine. It was the ORD-LGA leg that went badly wrong, which surprised me because those flights, between ORD and LGA, are like a shuttle, every hour, like clockwork. But for Claire, the shuttle broke… literally. After an hour delay, they loaded up the plane, de-iced the wings, and then found out an engine was broken, so back to the gate where -- you guessed it -- it can’t be fixed. 2½ hours past departure time, Claire pings me -- “it’s starting to snow; I doubt I’m getting on any plane tonight.” “Don’t write it off yet”, I told her. “It’s not a weather issue, so American will have to pay for a hotel and breakfast for the 120 or so people on that plane. That fact alone will cause them to look hard for another plane for you.” And that’s exactly what they did. It took them a few hours to scrounge one up but Claire got home that night… or rather that morning, at 3am. Always amazes me how an airline can figure out a solution when it’s <em>their</em> money on the line.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music --  Earth Soda by septahelix (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial Share-Alike  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/septahelix/34050</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Back to waiting out that flight delay in ABQ, my bar tab from waiting out the 2-hr delay got me re-thinking my stance on airport lounges, especially now that the US ones have upped their game on food and alcohol. It wouldn’t have changed anything in ABQ. It’s too small; no lounges. Indeed, I think we were at the only bar. But elsewhere… when we fly internationally, I usually get lounge access through my United or American status. In the US, I gave up my American and then United lounge memberships years ago because I wasn’t using them. I love American Express’s Centurion Lounges but charging $50 to bring a guest in and hiking the annual fee for the Platinum card to $695, the math just didn’t work for me. I could just do day passes; maybe use Loungebuddy for that. Or run the math on the not-quite-Platinum cards from Chase and Capital One, the ones that include Priority Pass membership. I dunno; a couple of avoided bar tabs may cover their annual fees.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/01/26/podcast-192-new-year-travel-planning-tips-gin-conquers-the-world/\">the last episode</a>, wading into the debate between booking direct with an airline or hotel or through a 3rd party, I told the story about how a -- <em>how do I say this politely?</em> -- false/misleading/just plain wrong property listing on Booking.com tricked us into booking a night in a place that looked to be much more geared to hourly stays, if you know what I mean. And how Booking.com did absolutely nothing to resolve our dispute. Long-time listener Nick Gassman pointed me to a <a href=\"https://www.theguardian.com/money/2023/jan/11/a-glossy-bookingcom-flat-turned-out-to-be-a-squalid-loft\">Guardian article</a> where a Booking.com customer wrote to the consumer affairs reporter with a very similar experience (dare I say “scam”?) -- misleading listing, shock when opening the door to the actual place, walking/running away to find another place to stay, getting dinged with a night’s charge for being a “no show”, and then Booking.com going “palms up” when asked to fix it. The interesting twist on this one was -- with the host reporting them as “no shows”, they couldn’t leave a review on the property to warn others. Nick also sent me a link to a <a href=\"https://www.reddit.com/r/BestofRedditorUpdates/comments/11saoz0/new_update_from_court_in_ongoing_case_airbnb/\">Reddit post</a> about a guy going to arbitration with Airbnb, also disputing a “no show” when he canceled a place that had security cameras on the inside of a studio apartment. These are reminders that, for all their <a href=\"https://www.booking.com/trust_and_safety.html\">web pages</a> and <a href=\"https://news.airbnb.com/airbnb-launches-trust-safety-advisory-coalition/\">press releases</a> with large boldface headlines, “trust and safety”, their legal terms &amp; conditions in a much smaller font says that all they do is connect hosts and guests; they’re not party to that transaction and don’t have any control over the quality or safety of your experience. I’m not saying don’t use them. We use Booking and Airbnb all the time, and have had 1, maybe 2 or 3, bad experiences. What I am saying is, go in eyes wide open. In this very hot travel market, Booking and Airbnb feel they need to take care of hosts right now more than they do guests.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/12/24/podcast-191-my-notes-on-italy-and-split-croatia/\">episode #191</a>, I said “In more travel document good news, the US State Department opened up on-line passport renewals on what they’re calling a ‘limited release’.” Well, listener Rob Holbrook isn’t feeling the good vibes. Rob said “I tried the renewal portal but it was constantly down, and then they shut it down completely. I’m not sure if the pilot outlived its usefulness, if passport renewal is too complex to do on-line, or if it opened up unexpected security risks.” The State Department shut down the renewal portal in early February to “implement customer feedback to improve the process.”&nbsp; Back then, they said it would be back up in March; now they’re saying “TBD” I’m just hoping they’re not using the same IT gang that coded up the first version of the Obamacare HealthCare.gov site. So we’re back to sending paper forms in, and the wait time is slowly creeping up -- before spring break season, State was saying 8-11 weeks; <a href=\"https://www.state.gov/update-on-passport-processing-times/\">last week, they added 2 weeks</a>; now estimating 10-13 weeks. If you’re planning to hit Europe this summer, you need to sprint down to Walgreens for that passport photo <em>right now</em>!</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to like Nick and Rob did to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music -- Generic Apologies by Speck (c) copyright 2022 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/speck/65664 Ft: jaspertine, Zenboy1955, Admiral Bob, Apoxode</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Still Overthinking Travel Planning</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Last summer, back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/08/18/podcast-188-my-top-tips-to-survive-travel-chaos/\">episode #188</a>, I talked about getting a great frequent flier deal on my Croatia-Italy flights, completely busting through the traditional 2¢/mile benchmark. It got me thinking that maybe the inflation in award redemption requirements hadn’t kept up with the real dollar cost increases for flights, and that I was shooting that gap to get a smokin’ deal. Well, when booking flights to go over to the Netherlands next month, I’m here to tell you -- that gap has snapped shut. I first started looking at KLM, the Dutch airline, and its SkyTeam partner Delta in hopes of a decent flight selection <em>and</em>, as importantly, I have a slug of Amex Membership Rewards points I’m looking to burn off, and KLM and Delta are transfer partners. But after a couple of hours of twisting our travel plans in knots around their flight matrices, the best I could get was ¾ of a cent/mile -- so those Amex points are still there. Next up, British Airways because they have a direct flight to LHR from Nashville, but I quickly ran into the same problem I always have with BA Avios points -- they don’t cover fuel surcharges and, for some reason, BA prices their fares low and slams a big fuel surcharge on top of it. I dunno why they do it -- maybe there’s a tax angle there somewhere. The final ticket price comes out the same as other carriers, but a flight booked with a similar amount of miles ends up requiring a huge cash payment, like 2-3 times what other carriers want. So the Avios points also stay put; maybe I’ll push them over to Iberia for a trip to Spain or Portugal next year. What started with a couple of numbers scrawled on a piece of paper quickly turned into a spreadsheet with columns for the different possible travel windows -- leaving on a Weds vs. a Thurs, returning on a Fri vs. Saturday -- 3 rows for each carrier, the first cell in the matrix the cost of buying the ticket straight out, the second cell split between miles and cash payment, the third cell the cents per mile calc -- is it worth burning the points or just buying the ticket. After all that, the best deal was on United at 1.54¢/mile -- a bit off 2¢/mile, but looking at valuation tables on <a href=\"https://thepointsguy.com/guide/monthly-valuations/\">The Points Guy</a>, <a href=\"https://www.bankrate.com/finance/credit-cards/points-and-miles-valuations/#airline-rewards\">Bankrate</a>, and <a href=\"https://frequentmiler.com/airline-miles-worth/\">Frequent Miler</a> websites, I could see it was a solid deal and booked it. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Although, I have to say that I paid more attention than usual to the United routings after reading a <a href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/21/travel/lufthansa-refunds-collect.html\">NY Times article</a> that long-time listener and contributor Chris Chufo sent me about the hassles people are having getting refunds or compensation from Lufthansa, United’s trans-Atlantic Star Alliance partner. Reading through the litany of complaints surprised me. I’ve flown Lufthansa <em>a lot</em> -- I feel I know their hub, Frankfurt Airport, better than any other European airport -- and I can’t recall any big issue I’ve had with their service. Indeed, back in 2013 when flying Lufthansa home from a family vacation, a weather delay in… <em>Amsterdam</em> caused us to miss our connection home from Frankfurt. I talked about it in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2013/09/06/podcast-106-summer-vacation-in-amsterdam-restaurant-trends/\">episode #106</a>; we had no problem getting hotel and food vouchers and getting re-booked on the next morning’s flight out. Great service, no arguments -- and we were flying on United miles. It was the complete opposite treatment we’d expect from, say, United. But that was then. This NY Times article quotes a German travel industry exec saying that Lufthansa got aggressive about swerving EU customer protection laws during COVID. Was this just their reaction to a pandemic-caused cash crunch? Or is it a new set point, cutting costs in customer service to fund lower fares to match up better with European budgeteers like Ryanair and WizzAir and Easyjet? I hope not. But still, when booking this trip to Amsterdam, I clicked through to the flight details to make sure I hadn’t booked a Lufthansa code-share, that I was flying on United metal. Which is quite the change; 10 years ago, it was the other way around; when I was looking for what I thought was much better Lufthansa service.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li> Bridge Music -- Absolutely Clear (ft Jeris &amp; Goldfish) by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/45578 Ft: Jeris, Goldfish</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Nashville vs. Nash-Vegas</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As I mentioned at the start of <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/08/18/podcast-188-my-top-tips-to-survive-travel-chaos/\">episode #188</a>,&nbsp; in July we relocated the TravelCommons studio -- and the rest of our worldly belongings -- from Chicago to Nashville. After 25 years into my 4th tour of duty in Chicago, I&nbsp; wanted a change of scenery. And it definitely has been that -- moving from the <a href=\"https://worldpopulationreview.com/us-cities\">3rd most populous city in the US to the 20th</a>; from the 8th highest population density to the 178th most dense of the US’s top 200 cities. We joke that whenever we put an address into Google Maps, it could be completely on the other side of the city, but no matter how far away it looks, we’d hit the Directions button and be told it’s only a 15-minute drive. It took us 15 minutes just to get out of our neighborhood in Chicago.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>When we told friends our move plans, just about everyone replied, “Oh, we love Nashville. We look forward to visiting.” Once we got down here and started knocking around, we realized that what they were all talking about was “Nash-Vegas” -- the 5 blocks of honky tonks on Lower Broadway, the 3 blocks over to the Country Music Hall of Fame, the open-air party buses cruising the perimeter full of bachelorette partiers yelling out at every red light. It’s definitely something to be seen, and it brings a steady stream of tourists. I’m always amazed how full the Broadway sidewalks are at, say, 11:30am on a Tuesday. As you might’ve guessed, we’re not often on Broadway.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But that’s not to say the tourists have it completely wrong; Nashville <em>is</em> Music City with a capital “M”. If you fly in on Southwest or American, it starts with walking past live music at Tootsie’s as you walk up Concourse C. And then it just continues. Irene and I are convinced that there’s a law requiring any gathering of 10 or more people to have a stage with a live performer. The first couple of months we were down here, we hit all the area farmers’ markets we could find, and just about every one had a stage with a singer/songwriter and a guitar or a full-on band. Peak Nashville for us was when we were in line at a local hot chicken joint watching a guy with a guitar set up his gear and start to place just inside the entry door. It was like having live music at a McDonald’s. I was talking to a bartender at an East Nashville place called <a href=\"http://www.vinyltapnashville.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Vinyl Tap</a> -- a beer bar/vinyl record store/live music venue (of course). We got talking; he’d moved down from New York City to be a session trombone player. And that’s not an uncommon conversation. In New York and LA, bartenders are working between acting gigs. In Nashville, they’re musicians between sessions.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And so we’ve waded into the live music scene, much more than we did in Chicago. In January, we made the rounds of Monday night singer/songwriter open mic nights. Some were pretty informal - at a microbrewery, <a href=\"https://www.tnbrew.com/livemusic\" title=\"\">Tennessee Brew Works</a>, the MC put out a legal pad at 5pm for people to sign up and then took them in that order, each person doing 2 songs. At <a href=\"https://bluebirdcafe.com/how-to-play/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Bluebird Cafe</a>, very famous place, a bit more structure -- on-line sign-ups opened at 11am. That night, there were two lines to get in -- to the left of the front door, the folks who made it on the list, lined up to play their best song to the people who lined up to the right of the door, who showed up to listen. And everyone, listeners and signers, sat together in the audience. Irene and I ended up at a two-top right in front of the stage. On our left was a guy who drove in from Clarksville, TN to play and his wife. Behind us was a table full of Canadians including a woman from Quebec who sang in French, and a guy who’d flown in from Vancouver that morning just to play his song on that stage. And he wasn’t the only one; there were people on the stage who had driven in from Houston, Little Rock, Michigan, Nebraska…. I hadn’t realized how big a draw this music scene is.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Maybe 3 weeks ago, I saw a blurb on Twitter about <a href=\"https://thirdmanrecords.com/products/nashville-steel-guitar-arts-council-live-at-third-man-records\" title=\"\">a show</a> put on by the “Pedal Steel Guitar Arts Council.” Now that felt very Nashville. At $15/ticket, how could we go wrong? Plus, it was at the performance space at Jack White’s Third Man Records which had been on Irene’s list of places to check out. So, we went. Back to my bartender discussions, one thing I noticed early on going to shows in Nashville is how many working musicians there are here -- not hobbyists, not passion project people, but people whose main paying job is to play music -- session musicians, live backing musicians. And some of these smaller shows are session musicians getting up on stage with their friends to play, often to an audience of other friends and family. At this show, when the first steel guitar player hit the stage, a little girl behind us called out “Hey, grandpa!” It ended up being a very interesting show, one that immediately attacked the stereotype of pedal steel guitars as twangy country music instruments. Grandpa was followed by a father-and-son pedal steel-and-cello duo, who were followed by a guy doing pedal steel ambient music. Very interesting stuff, and stuff I’m not sure I’d see anywhere else.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Maybe it’s those Broadway honky tonk cover bands and the mainstream country music recording sessions that pay the bills, and so let’s these musicians play different (some might say “weird”) stuff on their own time. But if/when you get down to Nashville, spend an afternoon, a night on Lower Broadway -- because how can you say you’ve been here and <em>not</em> do that -- but save some time to check out the smaller places, the open mic nights. Make sure you see the Nashville music scene, not just the Nash-Vegas one.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #193</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>. And while you’re at TravelCommons.com, you can check out the show notes page for a transcript and any links I’ve mentioned. Or you can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_192.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #193 — Making the Most of Miles; Nashville vs Nash-Vegas','','inherit','closed','closed','','4284-revision-v1','','','2023-03-31 11:59:05','2023-03-31 16:59:05','',4284,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4293',0,'revision','',0),
(4294,1,'2023-03-31 16:50:45','2023-03-31 21:50:45','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Nash-vegas-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Honky Tonk signs on Broadway in Nashville\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\">Trapped in Nash-Vegas[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Doing a bit of winter travel, the bar tab while waiting out a weather delay got me rethinking the economics of airport lounges. Doing yet travel planning  but with a focus on making the most the points and miles we accumulated during the pandemic. And after eight months in Nashville, I compare the two sides of the local music scene -- the Nash-Vegas honky tonks and the smaller, eclectic off-Broadway scene. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_193.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #193: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN after a couple of bits of travel; to Chicago at the end of January because, really, that’s the garden time of the year in Chicago -- waking up to subzero temperatures, wind howling off the lake. Yup, good times; really missed it.&nbsp; But the next month, flying to and from Albuquerque, NM for some skiing in Taos, reminded me of something I <em>really</em> miss about Chicago -- direct flights to almost everywhere in the US. ABQ is about the same distance from Chicago as it is from Nashville. But what’s a 3¼ hour direct flight from Chicago turned out to be a 6½ hour journey from Nashville, complete with a coffee stop in Houston. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/05/26/podcast-187-moving-to-a-non-hub-airport-what-makes-a-great-taproom/\">episode #187</a>, I talked about having to adjust my mental travel calculus, my travel reflexes, to <em>not</em> living in an airport hub city -- for the first time in about 40 years. Those extra 3 hours made that adjustment very real.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>When we landed, we met up with our daughter Claire and hopped the bus to the rental car center to see what Hertz had waiting for us. There were 5 of us skiing, so I wanted to get the biggest vehicle they had, but I was playing a bit of chicken with Hertz. I had enough Hertz points to cover a large car for the week, but they’d only let me cover 1 day of a specialty class like an SUV. With all the car rentals quoting $100/day, I slammed my points down on the large car and hoped there was some sort of an SUV in the Five Star row when we got there. So when we rocked up to the Hertz lot, my heart sank just a bit; there was nothing in the Five Star row. After a minute of staring at the empty spaces, a woman came out of the office “Oh, we’ve upgraded you to President’s Circle. I turn 90 degrees and see an entire row of SUVs. We picked the biggest one, a Ford Explorer with 16,000 miles and captain’s chairs for everyone. Started the trip off on the right note.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The trip home at the end of the week, everyone’s flight was blown sideways by the big winter storm two days before. It didn’t surprise us; it had blown off the mountain with 50-70 mph winds, so we weren’t surprised when the flight delay notices started dinging our iPhones. United hit us with a 2-hour delay (our plane didn’t make it out of Fresno the night before), but since we had a 3-hr layover in DEN, the only thing that changed was which airport bar we were killing time in.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Claire caught the worst of it, though, trying to get home to New York. With no direct flights between ABQ and LGA, she had to connect through ORD. The flight out went without a hitch. The flight back… the first leg, ABQ-ORD, was fine. It was the ORD-LGA leg that went badly wrong, which surprised me because those flights, between ORD and LGA, are like a shuttle, every hour, like clockwork. But for Claire, the shuttle broke… literally. After an hour delay, they loaded up the plane, de-iced the wings, and then found out an engine was broken, so back to the gate where -- you guessed it -- it can’t be fixed. 2½ hours past departure time, Claire pings me -- “it’s starting to snow; I doubt I’m getting on any plane tonight.” “Don’t write it off yet”, I told her. “It’s not a weather issue, so American will have to pay for a hotel and breakfast for the 120 or so people on that plane. That fact alone will cause them to look hard for another plane for you.” And that’s exactly what they did. It took them a few hours to scrounge one up but Claire got home that night… or rather that morning, at 3am. Always amazes me how an airline can figure out a solution when it’s <em>their</em> money on the line.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Javolenus/41932\">Ianiscus</a> by Javolenus (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. Ft: Wired_Ant</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Back to waiting out that flight delay in ABQ, my bar tab from waiting out the 2-hr delay got me re-thinking my stance on airport lounges, especially now that the US ones have upped their game on food and alcohol. It wouldn’t have changed anything in ABQ. It’s too small; no lounges. Indeed, I think we were at the only bar. But elsewhere… when we fly internationally, I usually get lounge access through my United or American status. In the US, I gave up my American and then United lounge memberships years ago because I wasn’t using them. I love American Express’s Centurion Lounges but charging $50 to bring a guest in and hiking the annual fee for the Platinum card to $695, the math just didn’t work for me. I could just do day passes; maybe use Loungebuddy for that. Or run the math on the not-quite-Platinum cards from Chase and Capital One, the ones that include Priority Pass membership. I dunno; a couple of avoided bar tabs may cover their annual fees.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/01/26/podcast-192-new-year-travel-planning-tips-gin-conquers-the-world/\">the last episode</a>, wading into the debate between booking direct with an airline or hotel or through a 3rd party, I told the story about how a -- <em>how do I say this politely?</em> -- false/misleading/just plain wrong property listing on Booking.com tricked us into booking a night in a place that looked to be much more geared to hourly stays, if you know what I mean. And how Booking.com did absolutely nothing to resolve our dispute. Long-time listener Nick Gassman pointed me to a <a href=\"https://www.theguardian.com/money/2023/jan/11/a-glossy-bookingcom-flat-turned-out-to-be-a-squalid-loft\">Guardian article</a> where a Booking.com customer wrote to the consumer affairs reporter with a very similar experience (dare I say “scam”?) -- misleading listing, shock when opening the door to the actual place, walking/running away to find another place to stay, getting dinged with a night’s charge for being a “no show”, and then Booking.com going “palms up” when asked to fix it. The interesting twist on this one was -- with the host reporting them as “no shows”, they couldn’t leave a review on the property to warn others. Nick also sent me a link to a <a href=\"https://www.reddit.com/r/BestofRedditorUpdates/comments/11saoz0/new_update_from_court_in_ongoing_case_airbnb/\">Reddit post</a> about a guy going to arbitration with Airbnb, also disputing a “no show” when he canceled a place that had security cameras on the inside of a studio apartment. These are reminders that, for all their <a href=\"https://www.booking.com/trust_and_safety.html\">web pages</a> and <a href=\"https://news.airbnb.com/airbnb-launches-trust-safety-advisory-coalition/\">press releases</a> with large boldface headlines, “trust and safety”, their legal terms &amp; conditions in a much smaller font says that all they do is connect hosts and guests; they’re not party to that transaction and don’t have any control over the quality or safety of your experience. I’m not saying don’t use them. We use Booking and Airbnb all the time, and have had 1, maybe 2 or 3, bad experiences. What I am saying is, go in eyes wide open. In this very hot travel market, Booking and Airbnb feel they need to take care of hosts right now more than they do guests.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/12/24/podcast-191-my-notes-on-italy-and-split-croatia/\">episode #191</a>, I said “In more travel document good news, the US State Department opened up on-line passport renewals on what they’re calling a ‘limited release’.” Well, listener Rob Holbrook isn’t feeling the good vibes. Rob said “I tried the renewal portal but it was constantly down, and then they shut it down completely. I’m not sure if the pilot outlived its usefulness, if passport renewal is too complex to do on-line, or if it opened up unexpected security risks.” The State Department shut down the renewal portal in early February to “implement customer feedback to improve the process.”&nbsp; Back then, they said it would be back up in March; now they’re saying “TBD” I’m just hoping they’re not using the same IT gang that coded up the first version of the Obamacare HealthCare.gov site. So we’re back to sending paper forms in, and the wait time is slowly creeping up -- before spring break season, State was saying 8-11 weeks; <a href=\"https://www.state.gov/update-on-passport-processing-times/\">last week, they added 2 weeks</a>; now estimating 10-13 weeks. If you’re planning to hit Europe this summer, you need to sprint down to Walgreens for that passport photo <em>right now</em>!</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to like Nick and Rob did to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/48914\">In Peace (Somewhere Else Mix)</a> by cdk (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. Ft: Snowflake</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Still Overthinking Travel Planning</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Last summer, back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/08/18/podcast-188-my-top-tips-to-survive-travel-chaos/\">episode #188</a>, I talked about getting a great frequent flier deal on my Croatia-Italy flights, completely busting through the traditional 2¢/mile benchmark. It got me thinking that maybe the inflation in award redemption requirements hadn’t kept up with the real dollar cost increases for flights, and that I was shooting that gap to get a smokin’ deal. Well, when booking flights to go over to the Netherlands next month, I’m here to tell you -- that gap has snapped shut. I first started looking at KLM, the Dutch airline, and its SkyTeam partner Delta in hopes of a decent flight selection <em>and</em>, as importantly, I have a slug of Amex Membership Rewards points I’m looking to burn off, and KLM and Delta are transfer partners. But after a couple of hours of twisting our travel plans in knots around their flight matrices, the best I could get was ¾ of a cent/mile -- so those Amex points are still there. Next up, British Airways because they have a direct flight to LHR from Nashville, but I quickly ran into the same problem I always have with BA Avios points -- they don’t cover fuel surcharges and, for some reason, BA prices their fares low and slams a big fuel surcharge on top of it. I dunno why they do it -- maybe there’s a tax angle there somewhere. The final ticket price comes out the same as other carriers, but a flight booked with a similar amount of miles ends up requiring a huge cash payment, like 2-3 times what other carriers want. So the Avios points also stay put; maybe I’ll push them over to Iberia for a trip to Spain or Portugal next year. What started with a couple of numbers scrawled on a piece of paper quickly turned into a spreadsheet with columns for the different possible travel windows -- leaving on a Weds vs. a Thurs, returning on a Fri vs. Saturday -- 3 rows for each carrier, the first cell in the matrix the cost of buying the ticket straight out, the second cell split between miles and cash payment, the third cell the cents per mile calc -- is it worth burning the points or just buying the ticket. After all that, the best deal was on United at 1.54¢/mile -- a bit off 2¢/mile, but looking at valuation tables on <a href=\"https://thepointsguy.com/guide/monthly-valuations/\">The Points Guy</a>, <a href=\"https://www.bankrate.com/finance/credit-cards/points-and-miles-valuations/#airline-rewards\">Bankrate</a>, and <a href=\"https://frequentmiler.com/airline-miles-worth/\">Frequent Miler</a> websites, I could see it was a solid deal and booked it.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Although, I have to say that I paid more attention than usual to the United routings after reading a <a href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/21/travel/lufthansa-refunds-collect.html\">NY Times article</a> that long-time listener and contributor Chris Chufo sent me about the hassles people are having getting refunds or compensation from Lufthansa, United’s trans-Atlantic Star Alliance partner. Reading through the litany of complaints surprised me. I’ve flown Lufthansa <em>a lot</em> -- I feel I know their hub, Frankfurt Airport, better than any other European airport -- and I can’t recall any big issue I’ve had with their service. Indeed, back in 2013 when flying Lufthansa home from a family vacation, a weather delay in… <em>Amsterdam</em> caused us to miss our connection home from Frankfurt. I talked about it in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2013/09/06/podcast-106-summer-vacation-in-amsterdam-restaurant-trends/\">episode #106</a>; we had no problem getting hotel and food vouchers and getting re-booked on the next morning’s flight out. Great service, no arguments -- and we were flying on United miles. It was the complete opposite treatment we’d expect from, say, United. But that was then. This NY Times article quotes a German travel industry exec saying that Lufthansa got aggressive about swerving EU customer protection laws during COVID. Was this just their reaction to a pandemic-caused cash crunch? Or is it a new set point, cutting costs in customer service to fund lower fares to match up better with European budgeteers like Ryanair and WizzAir and Easyjet? I hope not. But still, when booking this trip to Amsterdam, I clicked through to the flight details to make sure I hadn’t booked a Lufthansa code-share, that I was flying on United metal. Which is quite the change; 10 years ago, it was the other way around; when I was looking for what I thought was much better Lufthansa service.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music --<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/35724\">Blue Like Venus</a> by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. Ft: Admiral Bob</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Nashville vs. Nash-Vegas</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As I mentioned at the start of <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/08/18/podcast-188-my-top-tips-to-survive-travel-chaos/\">episode #188</a>,&nbsp; in July we relocated the TravelCommons studio -- and the rest of our worldly belongings -- from Chicago to Nashville. After 25 years into my 4th tour of duty in Chicago, I&nbsp; wanted a change of scenery. And it definitely has been that -- moving from the <a href=\"https://worldpopulationreview.com/us-cities\">3rd most populous city in the US to the 20th</a>; from the 8th highest population density to the 178th most dense of the US’s top 200 cities. We joke that whenever we put an address into Google Maps, it could be completely on the other side of the city, but no matter how far away it looks, we’d hit the Directions button and be told it’s only a 15-minute drive. It took us 15 minutes just to get out of our neighborhood in Chicago.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>When we told friends our move plans, just about everyone replied, “Oh, we love Nashville. We look forward to visiting.” Once we got down here and started knocking around, we realized that what they were all talking about was “Nash-Vegas” -- the 5 blocks of honky tonks on Lower Broadway, the 3 blocks over to the Country Music Hall of Fame, the open-air party buses cruising the perimeter full of bachelorette partiers yelling out at every red light. It’s definitely something to be seen, and it brings a steady stream of tourists. I’m always amazed how full the Broadway sidewalks are at, say, 11:30am on a Tuesday. As you might’ve guessed, we’re not often on Broadway.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But that’s not to say the tourists have it completely wrong; Nashville <em>is</em> Music City with a capital “M”. If you fly in on Southwest or American, it starts with walking past live music at Tootsie’s as you walk up Concourse C. And then it just continues. Irene and I are convinced that there’s a law requiring any gathering of 10 or more people to have a stage with a live performer. The first couple of months we were down here, we hit all the area farmers’ markets we could find, and just about every one had a stage with a singer/songwriter and a guitar or a full-on band. Peak Nashville for us was when we were in line at a local hot chicken joint watching a guy with a guitar set up his gear and start to place just inside the entry door. It was like having live music at a McDonald’s. I was talking to a bartender at an East Nashville place called <a href=\"http://www.vinyltapnashville.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Vinyl Tap</a> -- a beer bar/vinyl record store/live music venue (of course). We got talking; he’d moved down from New York City to be a session trombone player. And that’s not an uncommon conversation. In New York and LA, bartenders are working between acting gigs. In Nashville, they’re musicians between sessions.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And so we’ve waded into the live music scene, much more than we did in Chicago. In January, we made the rounds of Monday night singer/songwriter open mic nights. Some were pretty informal - at a microbrewery, <a href=\"https://www.tnbrew.com/livemusic\" title=\"\">Tennessee Brew Works</a>, the MC put out a legal pad at 5pm for people to sign up and then took them in that order, each person doing 2 songs. At <a href=\"https://bluebirdcafe.com/how-to-play/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Bluebird Cafe</a>, very famous place, a bit more structure -- on-line sign-ups opened at 11am. That night, there were two lines to get in -- to the left of the front door, the folks who made it on the list, lined up to play their best song to the people who lined up to the right of the door, who showed up to listen. And everyone, listeners and signers, sat together in the audience. Irene and I ended up at a two-top right in front of the stage. On our left was a guy who drove in from Clarksville, TN to play and his wife. Behind us was a table full of Canadians including a woman from Quebec who sang in French, and a guy who’d flown in from Vancouver that morning just to play his song on that stage. And he wasn’t the only one; there were people on the stage who had driven in from Houston, Little Rock, Michigan, Nebraska…. I hadn’t realized how big a draw this music scene is.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Maybe 3 weeks ago, I saw a blurb on Twitter about <a href=\"https://thirdmanrecords.com/products/nashville-steel-guitar-arts-council-live-at-third-man-records\" title=\"\">a show</a> put on by the “Pedal Steel Guitar Arts Council.” Now that felt very Nashville. At $15/ticket, how could we go wrong? Plus, it was at the performance space at Jack White’s Third Man Records which had been on Irene’s list of places to check out. So, we went. Back to my bartender discussions, one thing I noticed early on going to shows in Nashville is how many working musicians there are here -- not hobbyists, not passion project people, but people whose main paying job is to play music -- session musicians, live backing musicians. And some of these smaller shows are session musicians getting up on stage with their friends to play, often to an audience of other friends and family. At this show, when the first steel guitar player hit the stage, a little girl behind us called out “Hey, grandpa!” It ended up being a very interesting show, one that immediately attacked the stereotype of pedal steel guitars as twangy country music instruments. Grandpa was followed by a father-and-son pedal steel-and-cello duo, who were followed by a guy doing pedal steel ambient music. Very interesting stuff, and stuff I’m not sure I’d see anywhere else.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Maybe it’s those Broadway honky tonk cover bands and the mainstream country music recording sessions that pay the bills, and so let’s these musicians play different (some might say “weird”) stuff on their own time. But if/when you get down to Nashville, spend an afternoon, a night on Lower Broadway -- because how can you say you’ve been here and <em>not</em> do that -- but save some time to check out the smaller places, the open mic nights. Make sure you see the Nashville music scene, not just the Nash-Vegas one.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #193</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>. And while you’re at TravelCommons.com, you can check out the show notes page for a transcript and any links I’ve mentioned. Or you can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_192.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #193 — Making the Most of Miles; Nashville vs Nash-Vegas','','inherit','closed','closed','','4284-revision-v1','','','2023-03-31 16:50:45','2023-03-31 21:50:45','',4284,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4294',0,'revision','',0),
(4295,1,'2023-03-31 19:09:13','2023-04-01 00:09:13','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Nash-vegas-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Honky Tonk signs on Broadway in Nashville\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\">Trapped in Nash-Vegas[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Doing a bit of winter travel, the bar tab from waiting out a weather delay got me rethinking the economics of airport lounge memberships. Doing yet more travel planning but with a focus on making the most of the points and miles we accumulated on credit cards during the pandemic. And after eight months in Nashville, I compare the two sides of the local music scene -- the Nash-Vegas honky tonks vs the smaller, eclectic off-Broadway scene. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_193.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #193: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN after a couple of bits of travel; to Chicago at the end of January because, really, that’s the garden time of the year in Chicago -- waking up to subzero temperatures, wind howling off the lake. Yup, good times; really missed it.&nbsp; But the next month, flying to and from Albuquerque, NM for some skiing in Taos, reminded me of something I <em>really</em> miss about Chicago -- direct flights to almost everywhere in the US. ABQ is about the same distance from Chicago as it is from Nashville. But what’s a 3¼ hour direct flight from Chicago turned out to be a 6½ hour journey from Nashville, complete with a coffee stop in Houston. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/05/26/podcast-187-moving-to-a-non-hub-airport-what-makes-a-great-taproom/\">episode #187</a>, I talked about having to adjust my mental travel calculus, my travel reflexes, to <em>not</em> living in an airport hub city -- for the first time in about 40 years. Those extra 3 hours made that adjustment very real.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>When we landed, we met up with our daughter Claire and hopped the bus to the rental car center to see what Hertz had waiting for us. There were 5 of us skiing, so I wanted to get the biggest vehicle they had, but I was playing a bit of chicken with Hertz. I had enough Hertz points to cover a large car for the week, but they’d only let me cover 1 day of a specialty class like an SUV. With all the car rentals quoting $100/day, I slammed my points down on the large car and hoped there was some sort of an SUV in the Five Star row when we got there. So when we rocked up to the Hertz lot, my heart sank just a bit; there was nothing in the Five Star row. After a minute of staring at the empty spaces, a woman came out of the office “Oh, we’ve upgraded you to President’s Circle. I turn 90 degrees and see an entire row of SUVs. We picked the biggest one, a Ford Explorer with 16,000 miles and captain’s chairs for everyone. Started the trip off on the right note.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The trip home at the end of the week, everyone’s flight was blown sideways by the big winter storm two days before. It didn’t surprise us; it had blown off the mountain with 50-70 mph winds, so we weren’t surprised when the flight delay notices started dinging our iPhones. United hit us with a 2-hour delay (our plane didn’t make it out of Fresno the night before), but since we had a 3-hr layover in DEN, the only thing that changed was which airport bar we were killing time in.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Claire caught the worst of it, though, trying to get home to New York. With no direct flights between ABQ and LGA, she had to connect through ORD. The flight out went without a hitch. The flight back… the first leg, ABQ-ORD, was fine. It was the ORD-LGA leg that went badly wrong, which surprised me because those flights, between ORD and LGA, are like a shuttle, every hour, like clockwork. But for Claire, the shuttle broke… literally. After an hour delay, they loaded up the plane, de-iced the wings, and then found out an engine was broken, so back to the gate where -- you guessed it -- it can’t be fixed. 2½ hours past departure time, Claire pings me -- “it’s starting to snow; I doubt I’m getting on any plane tonight.” “Don’t write it off yet”, I told her. “It’s not a weather issue, so American will have to pay for a hotel and breakfast for the 120 or so people on that plane. That fact alone will cause them to look hard for another plane for you.” And that’s exactly what they did. It took them a few hours to scrounge one up but Claire got home that night… or rather that morning, at 3am. Always amazes me how an airline can figure out a solution when it’s <em>their</em> money on the line.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Javolenus/41932\">Ianiscus</a> by Javolenus (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. Ft: Wired_Ant</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Back to waiting out that flight delay in ABQ, my bar tab from waiting out the 2-hr delay got me re-thinking my stance on airport lounges, especially now that the US ones have upped their game on food and alcohol. It wouldn’t have changed anything in ABQ. It’s too small; no lounges. Indeed, I think we were at the only bar. But elsewhere… when we fly internationally, I usually get lounge access through my United or American status. In the US, I gave up my American and then United lounge memberships years ago because I wasn’t using them. I love American Express’s Centurion Lounges but charging $50 to bring a guest in and hiking the annual fee for the Platinum card to $695, the math just didn’t work for me. I could just do day passes; maybe use Loungebuddy for that. Or run the math on the not-quite-Platinum cards from Chase and Capital One, the ones that include Priority Pass membership. I dunno; a couple of avoided bar tabs may cover their annual fees.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/01/26/podcast-192-new-year-travel-planning-tips-gin-conquers-the-world/\">the last episode</a>, wading into the debate between booking direct with an airline or hotel or through a 3rd party, I told the story about how a -- <em>how do I say this politely?</em> -- false/misleading/just plain wrong property listing on Booking.com tricked us into booking a night in a place that looked to be much more geared to hourly stays, if you know what I mean. And how Booking.com did absolutely nothing to resolve our dispute. Long-time listener Nick Gassman pointed me to a <a href=\"https://www.theguardian.com/money/2023/jan/11/a-glossy-bookingcom-flat-turned-out-to-be-a-squalid-loft\">Guardian article</a> where a Booking.com customer wrote to the consumer affairs reporter with a very similar experience (dare I say “scam”?) -- misleading listing, shock when opening the door to the actual place, walking/running away to find another place to stay, getting dinged with a night’s charge for being a “no show”, and then Booking.com going “palms up” when asked to fix it. The interesting twist on this one was -- with the host reporting them as “no shows”, they couldn’t leave a review on the property to warn others. Nick also sent me a link to a <a href=\"https://www.reddit.com/r/BestofRedditorUpdates/comments/11saoz0/new_update_from_court_in_ongoing_case_airbnb/\">Reddit post</a> about a guy going to arbitration with Airbnb, also disputing a “no show” when he canceled a place that had security cameras on the inside of a studio apartment. These are reminders that, for all their <a href=\"https://www.booking.com/trust_and_safety.html\">web pages</a> and <a href=\"https://news.airbnb.com/airbnb-launches-trust-safety-advisory-coalition/\">press releases</a> with large boldface headlines, “trust and safety”, their legal terms &amp; conditions in a much smaller font says that all they do is connect hosts and guests; they’re not party to that transaction and don’t have any control over the quality or safety of your experience. I’m not saying don’t use them. We use Booking and Airbnb all the time, and have had 1, maybe 2 or 3, bad experiences. What I am saying is, go in eyes wide open. In this very hot travel market, Booking and Airbnb feel they need to take care of hosts right now more than they do guests.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/12/24/podcast-191-my-notes-on-italy-and-split-croatia/\">episode #191</a>, I said “In more travel document good news, the US State Department opened up on-line passport renewals on what they’re calling a ‘limited release’.” Well, listener Rob Holbrook isn’t feeling the good vibes. Rob said “I tried the renewal portal but it was constantly down, and then they shut it down completely. I’m not sure if the pilot outlived its usefulness, if passport renewal is too complex to do on-line, or if it opened up unexpected security risks.” The State Department shut down the renewal portal in early February to “implement customer feedback to improve the process.”&nbsp; Back then, they said it would be back up in March; now they’re saying “TBD” I’m just hoping they’re not using the same IT gang that coded up the first version of the Obamacare HealthCare.gov site. So we’re back to sending paper forms in, and the wait time is slowly creeping up -- before spring break season, State was saying 8-11 weeks; <a href=\"https://www.state.gov/update-on-passport-processing-times/\">last week, they added 2 weeks</a>; now estimating 10-13 weeks. If you’re planning to hit Europe this summer, you need to sprint down to Walgreens for that passport photo <em>right now</em>!</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to like Nick and Rob did to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/48914\">In Peace (Somewhere Else Mix)</a> by cdk (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. Ft: Snowflake</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Still Overthinking Travel Planning</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Last summer, back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/08/18/podcast-188-my-top-tips-to-survive-travel-chaos/\">episode #188</a>, I talked about getting a great frequent flier deal on my Croatia-Italy flights, completely busting through the traditional 2¢/mile benchmark. It got me thinking that maybe the inflation in award redemption requirements hadn’t kept up with the real dollar cost increases for flights, and that I was shooting that gap to get a smokin’ deal. Well, when booking flights to go over to the Netherlands next month, I’m here to tell you -- that gap has snapped shut. I first started looking at KLM, the Dutch airline, and its SkyTeam partner Delta in hopes of a decent flight selection <em>and</em>, as importantly, I have a slug of Amex Membership Rewards points I’m looking to burn off, and KLM and Delta are transfer partners. But after a couple of hours of twisting our travel plans in knots around their flight matrices, the best I could get was ¾ of a cent/mile -- so those Amex points are still there. Next up, British Airways because they have a direct flight to LHR from Nashville, but I quickly ran into the same problem I always have with BA Avios points -- they don’t cover fuel surcharges and, for some reason, BA prices their fares low and slams a big fuel surcharge on top of it. I dunno why they do it -- maybe there’s a tax angle there somewhere. The final ticket price comes out the same as other carriers, but a flight booked with a similar amount of miles ends up requiring a huge cash payment, like 2-3 times what other carriers want. So the Avios points also stay put; maybe I’ll push them over to Iberia for a trip to Spain or Portugal next year. What started with a couple of numbers scrawled on a piece of paper quickly turned into a spreadsheet with columns for the different possible travel windows -- leaving on a Weds vs. a Thurs, returning on a Fri vs. Saturday -- 3 rows for each carrier, the first cell in the matrix the cost of buying the ticket straight out, the second cell split between miles and cash payment, the third cell the cents per mile calc -- is it worth burning the points or just buying the ticket. After all that, the best deal was on United at 1.54¢/mile -- a bit off 2¢/mile, but looking at valuation tables on <a href=\"https://thepointsguy.com/guide/monthly-valuations/\">The Points Guy</a>, <a href=\"https://www.bankrate.com/finance/credit-cards/points-and-miles-valuations/#airline-rewards\">Bankrate</a>, and <a href=\"https://frequentmiler.com/airline-miles-worth/\">Frequent Miler</a> websites, I could see it was a solid deal and booked it.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Although, I have to say that I paid more attention than usual to the United routings after reading a <a href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/21/travel/lufthansa-refunds-collect.html\">NY Times article</a> that long-time listener and contributor Chris Chufo sent me about the hassles people are having getting refunds or compensation from Lufthansa, United’s trans-Atlantic Star Alliance partner. Reading through the litany of complaints surprised me. I’ve flown Lufthansa <em>a lot</em> -- I feel I know their hub, Frankfurt Airport, better than any other European airport -- and I can’t recall any big issue I’ve had with their service. Indeed, back in 2013 when flying Lufthansa home from a family vacation, a weather delay in… <em>Amsterdam</em> caused us to miss our connection home from Frankfurt. I talked about it in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2013/09/06/podcast-106-summer-vacation-in-amsterdam-restaurant-trends/\">episode #106</a>; we had no problem getting hotel and food vouchers and getting re-booked on the next morning’s flight out. Great service, no arguments -- and we were flying on United miles. It was the complete opposite treatment we’d expect from, say, United. But that was then. This NY Times article quotes a German travel industry exec saying that Lufthansa got aggressive about swerving EU customer protection laws during COVID. Was this just their reaction to a pandemic-caused cash crunch? Or is it a new set point, cutting costs in customer service to fund lower fares to match up better with European budgeteers like Ryanair and WizzAir and Easyjet? I hope not. But still, when booking this trip to Amsterdam, I clicked through to the flight details to make sure I hadn’t booked a Lufthansa code-share, that I was flying on United metal. Which is quite the change; 10 years ago, it was the other way around; when I was looking for what I thought was much better Lufthansa service.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music --<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/35724\">Blue Like Venus</a> by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. Ft: Admiral Bob</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Nashville vs. Nash-Vegas</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As I mentioned at the start of <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/08/18/podcast-188-my-top-tips-to-survive-travel-chaos/\">episode #188</a>,&nbsp; in July we relocated the TravelCommons studio -- and the rest of our worldly belongings -- from Chicago to Nashville. After 25 years into my 4th tour of duty in Chicago, I&nbsp; wanted a change of scenery. And it definitely has been that -- moving from the <a href=\"https://worldpopulationreview.com/us-cities\">3rd most populous city in the US to the 20th</a>; from the 8th highest population density to the 178th most dense of the US’s top 200 cities. We joke that whenever we put an address into Google Maps, it could be completely on the other side of the city, but no matter how far away it looks, we’d hit the Directions button and be told it’s only a 15-minute drive. It took us 15 minutes just to get out of our neighborhood in Chicago.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>When we told friends our move plans, just about everyone replied, “Oh, we love Nashville. We look forward to visiting.” Once we got down here and started knocking around, we realized that what they were all talking about was “Nash-Vegas” -- the 5 blocks of honky tonks on Lower Broadway, the 3 blocks over to the Country Music Hall of Fame, the open-air party buses cruising the perimeter full of bachelorette partiers yelling out at every red light. It’s definitely something to be seen, and it brings a steady stream of tourists. I’m always amazed how full the Broadway sidewalks are at, say, 11:30am on a Tuesday. As you might’ve guessed, we’re not often on Broadway.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But that’s not to say the tourists have it completely wrong; Nashville <em>is</em> Music City with a capital “M”. If you fly in on Southwest or American, it starts with walking past live music at Tootsie’s as you walk up Concourse C. And then it just continues. Irene and I are convinced that there’s a law requiring any gathering of 10 or more people to have a stage with a live performer. The first couple of months we were down here, we hit all the area farmers’ markets we could find, and just about every one had a stage with a singer/songwriter and a guitar or a full-on band. Peak Nashville for us was when we were in line at a local hot chicken joint watching a guy with a guitar set up his gear and start to place just inside the entry door. It was like having live music at a McDonald’s. I was talking to a bartender at an East Nashville place called <a href=\"http://www.vinyltapnashville.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Vinyl Tap</a> -- a beer bar/vinyl record store/live music venue (of course). We got talking; he’d moved down from New York City to be a session trombone player. And that’s not an uncommon conversation. In New York and LA, bartenders are working between acting gigs. In Nashville, they’re musicians between sessions.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And so we’ve waded into the live music scene, much more than we did in Chicago. In January, we made the rounds of Monday night singer/songwriter open mic nights. Some were pretty informal - at a microbrewery, <a href=\"https://www.tnbrew.com/livemusic\" title=\"\">Tennessee Brew Works</a>, the MC put out a legal pad at 5pm for people to sign up and then took them in that order, each person doing 2 songs. At <a href=\"https://bluebirdcafe.com/how-to-play/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Bluebird Cafe</a>, very famous place, a bit more structure -- on-line sign-ups opened at 11am. That night, there were two lines to get in -- to the left of the front door, the folks who made it on the list, lined up to play their best song to the people who lined up to the right of the door, who showed up to listen. And everyone, listeners and signers, sat together in the audience. Irene and I ended up at a two-top right in front of the stage. On our left was a guy who drove in from Clarksville, TN to play and his wife. Behind us was a table full of Canadians including a woman from Quebec who sang in French, and a guy who’d flown in from Vancouver that morning just to play his song on that stage. And he wasn’t the only one; there were people on the stage who had driven in from Houston, Little Rock, Michigan, Nebraska…. I hadn’t realized how big a draw this music scene is.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Maybe 3 weeks ago, I saw a blurb on Twitter about <a href=\"https://thirdmanrecords.com/products/nashville-steel-guitar-arts-council-live-at-third-man-records\" title=\"\">a show</a> put on by the “Pedal Steel Guitar Arts Council.” Now that felt very Nashville. At $15/ticket, how could we go wrong? Plus, it was at the performance space at Jack White’s Third Man Records which had been on Irene’s list of places to check out. So, we went. Back to my bartender discussions, one thing I noticed early on going to shows in Nashville is how many working musicians there are here -- not hobbyists, not passion project people, but people whose main paying job is to play music -- session musicians, live backing musicians. And some of these smaller shows are session musicians getting up on stage with their friends to play, often to an audience of other friends and family. At this show, when the first steel guitar player hit the stage, a little girl behind us called out “Hey, grandpa!” It ended up being a very interesting show, one that immediately attacked the stereotype of pedal steel guitars as twangy country music instruments. Grandpa was followed by a father-and-son pedal steel-and-cello duo, who were followed by a guy doing pedal steel ambient music. Very interesting stuff, and stuff I’m not sure I’d see anywhere else.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Maybe it’s those Broadway honky tonk cover bands and the mainstream country music recording sessions that pay the bills, and so let’s these musicians play different (some might say “weird”) stuff on their own time. But if/when you get down to Nashville, spend an afternoon, a night on Lower Broadway -- because how can you say you’ve been here and <em>not</em> do that -- but save some time to check out the smaller places, the open mic nights. Make sure you see the Nashville music scene, not just the Nash-Vegas one.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #193</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>. And while you’re at TravelCommons.com, you can check out the show notes page for a transcript and any links I’ve mentioned. Or you can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_192.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #193 — Making the Most of Miles; Nashville vs Nash-Vegas','Weather delay bar tab got me rethinking the economics of airport lounge memberships. Continuing to plan travel but focusing on making the most of the miles we accumulated on credit cards during the pandemic. And comparing Nashville’s music scene: Nash-Vegas honky tonks vs the smaller, eclectic off-Broadway scene.','inherit','closed','closed','','4284-revision-v1','','','2023-03-31 19:09:13','2023-04-01 00:09:13','',4284,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4295',0,'revision','',0),
(4296,1,'2023-03-31 19:19:32','2023-04-01 00:19:32','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Nash-vegas-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Honky Tonk signs on Broadway in Nashville\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\">Trapped in Nash-Vegas[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Doing a bit of winter travel, the bar tab from waiting out a weather delay got me rethinking the economics of airport lounge memberships. Doing yet more travel planning but with a focus on making the most of the points and miles we accumulated on credit cards during the pandemic. And after eight months in Nashville, I compare the two sides of the local music scene -- the Nash-Vegas honky tonks vs the smaller, eclectic off-Broadway scene. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_193.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #193: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN after a couple of bits of travel; to Chicago at the end of January because, really, that’s the garden time of the year in Chicago -- waking up to subzero temperatures, wind howling off the lake. Yup, good times; really missed it.&nbsp; But the next month, flying to and from Albuquerque, NM for some skiing in Taos, reminded me of something I <em>really</em> miss about Chicago -- direct flights to almost everywhere in the US. ABQ is about the same distance from Chicago as it is from Nashville. But what’s a 3¼ hour direct flight from Chicago turned out to be a 6½ hour journey from Nashville, complete with a coffee stop in Houston. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/05/26/podcast-187-moving-to-a-non-hub-airport-what-makes-a-great-taproom/\">episode #187</a>, I talked about having to adjust my mental travel calculus, my travel reflexes, to <em>not</em> living in an airport hub city -- for the first time in about 40 years. Those extra 3 hours made that adjustment very real.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>When we landed, we met up with our daughter Claire and hopped the bus to the rental car center to see what Hertz had waiting for us. There were 5 of us skiing, so I wanted to get the biggest vehicle they had, but I was playing a bit of chicken with Hertz. I had enough Hertz points to cover a large car for the week, but they’d only let me cover 1 day of a specialty class like an SUV. With all the car rentals quoting $100/day, I slammed my points down on the large car and hoped there was some sort of an SUV in the Five Star row when we got there. So when we rocked up to the Hertz lot, my heart sank just a bit; there was nothing in the Five Star row. After a minute of staring at the empty spaces, a woman came out of the office “Oh, we’ve upgraded you to President’s Circle. I turn 90 degrees and see an entire row of SUVs. We picked the biggest one, a Ford Explorer with 16,000 miles and captain’s chairs for everyone. Started the trip off on the right note.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The trip home at the end of the week, everyone’s flight was blown sideways by the big winter storm two days before. It didn’t surprise us; it had blown off the mountain with 50-70 mph winds, so we weren’t surprised when the flight delay notices started dinging our iPhones. United hit us with a 2-hour delay (our plane didn’t make it out of Fresno the night before), but since we had a 3-hr layover in DEN, the only thing that changed was which airport bar we were killing time in.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Claire caught the worst of it, though, trying to get home to New York. With no direct flights between ABQ and LGA, she had to connect through ORD. The flight out went without a hitch. The flight back… the first leg, ABQ-ORD, was fine. It was the ORD-LGA leg that went badly wrong, which surprised me because those flights, between ORD and LGA, are like a shuttle, every hour, like clockwork. But for Claire, the shuttle broke… literally. After an hour delay, they loaded up the plane, de-iced the wings, and then found out an engine was broken, so back to the gate where -- you guessed it -- it can’t be fixed. 2½ hours past departure time, Claire pings me -- “it’s starting to snow; I doubt I’m getting on any plane tonight.” “Don’t write it off yet”, I told her. “It’s not a weather issue, so American will have to pay for a hotel and breakfast for the 120 or so people on that plane. That fact alone will cause them to look hard for another plane for you.” And that’s exactly what they did. It took them a few hours to scrounge one up but Claire got home that night… or rather that morning, at 3am. Always amazes me how an airline can figure out a solution when it’s <em>their</em> money on the line.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Javolenus/41932\">Ianiscus</a> by Javolenus (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. Ft: Wired_Ant</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Back to waiting out that flight delay in ABQ, my bar tab from waiting out the 2-hr delay got me re-thinking my stance on airport lounges, especially now that the US ones have upped their game on food and alcohol. It wouldn’t have changed anything in ABQ. It’s too small; no lounges. Indeed, I think we were at the only bar. But elsewhere… when we fly internationally, I usually get lounge access through my United or American status. In the US, I gave up my American and then United lounge memberships years ago because I wasn’t using them. I love American Express’s Centurion Lounges but charging $50 to bring a guest in and hiking the annual fee for the Platinum card to $695, the math just didn’t work for me. I could just do day passes; maybe use Loungebuddy for that. Or run the math on the not-quite-Platinum cards from Chase and Capital One, the ones that include Priority Pass membership. I dunno; a couple of avoided bar tabs may cover their annual fees.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/01/26/podcast-192-new-year-travel-planning-tips-gin-conquers-the-world/\">the last episode</a>, wading into the debate between booking direct with an airline or hotel or through a 3rd party, I told the story about how a -- <em>how do I say this politely?</em> -- false/misleading/just plain wrong property listing on Booking.com tricked us into booking a night in a place that looked to be much more geared to hourly stays, if you know what I mean. And how Booking.com did absolutely nothing to resolve our dispute. Long-time listener Nick Gassman pointed me to a <a href=\"https://www.theguardian.com/money/2023/jan/11/a-glossy-bookingcom-flat-turned-out-to-be-a-squalid-loft\">Guardian article</a> where a Booking.com customer wrote to the consumer affairs reporter with a very similar experience (dare I say “scam”?) -- misleading listing, shock when opening the door to the actual place, walking/running away to find another place to stay, getting dinged with a night’s charge for being a “no show”, and then Booking.com going “palms up” when asked to fix it. The interesting twist on this one was -- with the host reporting them as “no shows”, they couldn’t leave a review on the property to warn others. Nick also sent me a link to a <a href=\"https://www.reddit.com/r/BestofRedditorUpdates/comments/11saoz0/new_update_from_court_in_ongoing_case_airbnb/\">Reddit post</a> about a guy going to arbitration with Airbnb, also disputing a “no show” when he canceled a place that had security cameras on the inside of a studio apartment. These are reminders that, for all their <a href=\"https://www.booking.com/trust_and_safety.html\">web pages</a> and <a href=\"https://news.airbnb.com/airbnb-launches-trust-safety-advisory-coalition/\">press releases</a> with large boldface headlines, “trust and safety”, their legal terms &amp; conditions in a much smaller font says that all they do is connect hosts and guests; they’re not party to that transaction and don’t have any control over the quality or safety of your experience. I’m not saying don’t use them. We use Booking and Airbnb all the time, and have had 1, maybe 2 or 3, bad experiences. What I am saying is, go in eyes wide open. In this very hot travel market, Booking and Airbnb feel they need to take care of hosts right now more than they do guests.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/12/24/podcast-191-my-notes-on-italy-and-split-croatia/\">episode #191</a>, I said “In more travel document good news, the US State Department opened up on-line passport renewals on what they’re calling a ‘limited release’.” Well, listener Rob Holbrook isn’t feeling the good vibes. Rob said “I tried the renewal portal but it was constantly down, and then they shut it down completely. I’m not sure if the pilot outlived its usefulness, if passport renewal is too complex to do on-line, or if it opened up unexpected security risks.” The State Department shut down the renewal portal in early February to “implement customer feedback to improve the process.”&nbsp; Back then, they said it would be back up in March; now they’re saying “TBD” I’m just hoping they’re not using the same IT gang that coded up the first version of the Obamacare HealthCare.gov site. So we’re back to sending paper forms in, and the wait time is slowly creeping up -- before spring break season, State was saying 8-11 weeks; <a href=\"https://www.state.gov/update-on-passport-processing-times/\">last week, they added 2 weeks</a>; now estimating 10-13 weeks. If you’re planning to hit Europe this summer, you need to sprint down to Walgreens for that passport photo <em>right now</em>!</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to like Nick and Rob did to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/48914\">In Peace (Somewhere Else Mix)</a> by cdk (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. Ft: Snowflake</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Still Overthinking Travel Planning</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Last summer, back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/08/18/podcast-188-my-top-tips-to-survive-travel-chaos/\">episode #188</a>, I talked about getting a great frequent flier deal on my Croatia-Italy flights, completely busting through the traditional 2¢/mile benchmark. It got me thinking that maybe the inflation in award redemption requirements hadn’t kept up with the real dollar cost increases for flights, and that I was shooting that gap to get a smokin’ deal. Well, when booking flights to go over to the Netherlands next month, I’m here to tell you -- that gap has snapped shut. I first started looking at KLM, the Dutch airline, and its SkyTeam partner Delta in hopes of a decent flight selection <em>and</em>, as importantly, I have a slug of Amex Membership Rewards points I’m looking to burn off, and KLM and Delta are transfer partners. But after a couple of hours of twisting our travel plans in knots around their flight matrices, the best I could get was ¾ of a cent/mile -- so those Amex points are still there. Next up, British Airways because they have a direct flight to LHR from Nashville, but I quickly ran into the same problem I always have with BA Avios points -- they don’t cover fuel surcharges and, for some reason, BA prices their fares low and slams a big fuel surcharge on top of it. I dunno why they do it -- maybe there’s a tax angle there somewhere. The final ticket price comes out the same as other carriers, but a flight booked with a similar amount of miles ends up requiring a huge cash payment, like 2-3 times what other carriers want. So the Avios points also stay put; maybe I’ll push them over to Iberia for a trip to Spain or Portugal next year. What started with a couple of numbers scrawled on a piece of paper quickly turned into a spreadsheet with columns for the different possible travel windows -- leaving on a Weds vs. a Thurs, returning on a Fri vs. Saturday -- 3 rows for each carrier, the first cell in the matrix the cost of buying the ticket straight out, the second cell split between miles and cash payment, the third cell the cents per mile calc -- is it worth burning the points or just buying the ticket. After all that, the best deal was on United at 1.54¢/mile -- a bit off 2¢/mile, but looking at valuation tables on <a href=\"https://thepointsguy.com/guide/monthly-valuations/\">The Points Guy</a>, <a href=\"https://www.bankrate.com/finance/credit-cards/points-and-miles-valuations/#airline-rewards\">Bankrate</a>, and <a href=\"https://frequentmiler.com/airline-miles-worth/\">Frequent Miler</a> websites, I could see it was a solid deal and booked it.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Although, I have to say that I paid more attention than usual to the United routings after reading a <a href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/21/travel/lufthansa-refunds-collect.html\">NY Times article</a> that long-time listener and contributor Chris Chufo sent me about the hassles people are having getting refunds or compensation from Lufthansa, United’s trans-Atlantic Star Alliance partner. Reading through the litany of complaints surprised me. I’ve flown Lufthansa <em>a lot</em> -- I feel I know their hub, Frankfurt Airport, better than any other European airport -- and I can’t recall any big issue I’ve had with their service. Indeed, back in 2013 when flying Lufthansa home from a family vacation, a weather delay in… <em>Amsterdam</em> caused us to miss our connection home from Frankfurt. I talked about it in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2013/09/06/podcast-106-summer-vacation-in-amsterdam-restaurant-trends/\">episode #106</a>; we had no problem getting hotel and food vouchers and getting re-booked on the next morning’s flight out. Great service, no arguments -- and we were flying on United miles. It was the complete opposite treatment we’d expect from, say, United. But that was then. This NY Times article quotes a German travel industry exec saying that Lufthansa got aggressive about swerving EU customer protection laws during COVID. Was this just their reaction to a pandemic-caused cash crunch? Or is it a new set point, cutting costs in customer service to fund lower fares to match up better with European budgeteers like Ryanair and WizzAir and Easyjet? I hope not. But still, when booking this trip to Amsterdam, I clicked through to the flight details to make sure I hadn’t booked a Lufthansa code-share, that I was flying on United metal. Which is quite the change; 10 years ago, it was the other way around; when I was looking for what I thought was much better Lufthansa service.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music --<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/35724\">Blue Like Venus</a> by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. Ft: Admiral Bob</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Nashville vs. Nash-Vegas</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As I mentioned at the start of <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/08/18/podcast-188-my-top-tips-to-survive-travel-chaos/\">episode #188</a>,&nbsp; in July we relocated the TravelCommons studio -- and the rest of our worldly belongings -- from Chicago to Nashville. After 25 years into my 4th tour of duty in Chicago, I&nbsp; wanted a change of scenery. And it definitely has been that -- moving from the <a href=\"https://worldpopulationreview.com/us-cities\">3rd most populous city in the US to the 20th</a>; from the 8th highest population density to the 178th most dense of the US’s top 200 cities. We joke that whenever we put an address into Google Maps, it could be completely on the other side of the city, but no matter how far away it looks, we’d hit the Directions button and be told it’s only a 15-minute drive. It took us 15 minutes just to get out of our neighborhood in Chicago.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>When we told friends our move plans, just about everyone replied, “Oh, we love Nashville. We look forward to visiting.” Once we got down here and started knocking around, we realized that what they were all talking about was “Nash-Vegas” -- the 5 blocks of honky tonks on Lower Broadway, the 3 blocks over to the Country Music Hall of Fame, the open-air party buses cruising the perimeter full of bachelorette partiers yelling out at every red light. It’s definitely something to be seen, and it brings a steady stream of tourists. I’m always amazed how full the Broadway sidewalks are at, say, 11:30am on a Tuesday. As you might’ve guessed, we’re not often on Broadway.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But that’s not to say the tourists have it completely wrong; Nashville <em>is</em> Music City with a capital “M”. If you fly in on Southwest or American, it starts with walking past live music at Tootsie’s as you walk up Concourse C. And then it just continues. Irene and I are convinced that there’s a law requiring any gathering of 10 or more people to have a stage with a live performer. The first couple of months we were down here, we hit all the area farmers’ markets we could find, and just about every one had a stage with a singer/songwriter and a guitar or a full-on band. Peak Nashville for us was when we were in line at a local hot chicken joint watching a guy with a guitar set up his gear and start to place just inside the entry door. It was like having live music at a McDonald’s. I was talking to a bartender at an East Nashville place called <a href=\"http://www.vinyltapnashville.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Vinyl Tap</a> -- a beer bar/vinyl record store/live music venue (of course). We got talking; he’d moved down from New York City to be a session trombone player. And that’s not an uncommon conversation. In New York and LA, bartenders are working between acting gigs. In Nashville, they’re musicians between sessions.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And so we’ve waded into the live music scene, much more than we did in Chicago. In January, we made the rounds of Monday night singer/songwriter open mic nights. Some were pretty informal - at a microbrewery, <a href=\"https://www.tnbrew.com/livemusic\" title=\"\">Tennessee Brew Works</a>, the MC put out a legal pad at 5pm for people to sign up and then took them in that order, each person doing 2 songs. At <a href=\"https://bluebirdcafe.com/how-to-play/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Bluebird Cafe</a>, very famous place, a bit more structure -- on-line sign-ups opened at 11am. That night, there were two lines to get in -- to the left of the front door, the folks who made it on the list, lined up to play their best song to the people who lined up to the right of the door, who showed up to listen. And everyone, listeners and signers, sat together in the audience. Irene and I ended up at a two-top right in front of the stage. On our left was a guy who drove in from Clarksville, TN to play and his wife. Behind us was a table full of Canadians including a woman from Quebec who sang in French, and a guy who’d flown in from Vancouver that morning just to play his song on that stage. And he wasn’t the only one; there were people on the stage who had driven in from Houston, Little Rock, Michigan, Nebraska…. I hadn’t realized how big a draw this music scene is.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Maybe 3 weeks ago, I saw a blurb on Twitter about <a href=\"https://thirdmanrecords.com/products/nashville-steel-guitar-arts-council-live-at-third-man-records\" title=\"\">a show</a> put on by the “Pedal Steel Guitar Arts Council.” Now that felt very Nashville. At $15/ticket, how could we go wrong? Plus, it was at the performance space at Jack White’s Third Man Records which had been on Irene’s list of places to check out. So, we went. Back to my bartender discussions, one thing I noticed early on going to shows in Nashville is how many working musicians there are here -- not hobbyists, not passion project people, but people whose main paying job is to play music -- session musicians, live backing musicians. And some of these smaller shows are session musicians getting up on stage with their friends to play, often to an audience of other friends and family. At this show, when the first steel guitar player hit the stage, a little girl behind us called out “Hey, grandpa!” It ended up being a very interesting show, one that immediately attacked the stereotype of pedal steel guitars as twangy country music instruments. Grandpa was followed by a father-and-son pedal steel-and-cello duo, who were followed by a guy doing pedal steel ambient music. Very interesting stuff, and stuff I’m not sure I’d see anywhere else.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Maybe it’s those Broadway honky tonk cover bands and the mainstream country music recording sessions that pay the bills, and so let’s these musicians play different (some might say “weird”) stuff on their own time. But if/when you get down to Nashville, spend an afternoon, a night on Lower Broadway -- because how can you say you’ve been here and <em>not</em> do that -- but save some time to check out the smaller places, the open mic nights. Make sure you see the Nashville music scene, not just the Nash-Vegas one.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #193</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>. And while you’re at TravelCommons.com, you can check out the show notes page for a transcript and any links I’ve mentioned. Or you can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_193.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #193 — Making the Most of Miles; Nashville vs Nash-Vegas','Weather delay bar tab got me rethinking the economics of airport lounge memberships. Continuing to plan travel but focusing on making the most of the miles we accumulated on credit cards during the pandemic. And comparing Nashville’s music scene: Nash-Vegas honky tonks vs the smaller, eclectic off-Broadway scene.','inherit','closed','closed','','4284-revision-v1','','','2023-03-31 19:19:32','2023-04-01 00:19:32','',4284,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4296',0,'revision','',0);
INSERT INTO `wp_posts` VALUES
(4312,1,'2023-06-20 15:22:06','2023-06-20 20:22:06','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/replicate-prediction-57paxyjb7xj7hm5kqombv3ecdy-300x300.png\" alt=\"Robot using a laptop to make travel plans while on a beach\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"> Future of Travel Planning[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Back behind the microphone after, despite my finely tuned travel plans, I had to resort to being stubbornly cranky to fix a ORD connection drama when coming home from a tulip-peeping trip in Holland. We also wander into the world of flâneuring, aimlessly walking around a city as a way to swerve over-tourism. Listeners weigh in on Priority Pass lounge access and online passport renewal experiences, and I count all the apps I needed to go cashless in Holland. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_194.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:audio -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-audio\"><audio controls src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_194.mp3\"></audio></figure>\n<!-- /wp:audio -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #194: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN after a good bit of travel - 10 days in the Netherlands bracketed by road trips to Louisville, Savannah, GA, and Chicago, and then a tough week of beer drinking here in Nashville when the Craft Brewers Conference touched down. So, I’ve been keeping occupied since the last episode. But it’s all been personal travel; all of my business travel has been replaced with Zoom and Teams sessions. I may be a bit of an outlier, but none of the US airlines’ Q1 earnings announcements were great, in no small part because business travel still isn’t back to pre-pandemic levels. Delta is hoping it’ll settle at 75% of 2019 levels while <a href=\"https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-04-21/industrial-strength-business-travel-recovery-is-showing-cracks-lgqvl4n3?utm_source=website&amp;utm_medium=share\">United’s CEO said</a>&nbsp; “We believe demand is just structurally different than it was pre-pandemic, and we’re still figuring out that new normal.” Maybe not quite the Bill Gates “over 50 percent of business travel… will go away” prediction, but with our 2-year crash course in virtual work, having the post-pandemic setpoint for business travel volume be 20-25% lower doesn’t seem too far fetched.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And even with the non-business “revenge” travel boom filling seats, personal travel is a lot more price sensitive, or elastic as economists like to say, than business travel. My travel patterns are a testament to that -- with higher airfares but a more flexible schedule (I can Zoom from anywhere), it’s been more road trips than plane flights. I’ve had some pretty drives, like through East Tennessee and central Kentucky, but also some real grind-outs, like I-75 pretty much from the Tennessee-Georgia border through Atlanta, all the way down to Macon.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But driving <em>does</em> make packing easier, without the space constraints of a carry-on bag. Which caught up with me, I think, on our Netherlands trip. I was out of practice, sloppy; forgetting to pack so much of what would be my normal kit -- collapsible umbrella, gloves, hat -- so that when the cold rain shifted to snow our first day in Amsterdam (it had been in the 70’s when we left Nashville), our standard throwaway line “If we’ve forgotten it, we’ll just buy it there” became very real. I was very happy to find a couple of sporting goods stores a block down from our hotel. I gotta do some remedial packing training before my next flight.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/50485\">Sunset Boulevard</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Siobhan Dakay, unreal_dm</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Robert Fenerty hit the TravelCommons website to comment on last episode’s thoughts about ponying up for a not-quite-Amex Platinum card from Chase or Capital One, one that includes a Priority Pass membership. He said<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“You need to fix the cert on travelcommons.com, Safari is complaining.” Yup, I know. Converting the site to https has been on my to-do list for a long time. I’ll get to it, I promise… some day.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“Given the paucity of direct flights from Nashville, I suppose lounge access makes sense. But please don’t get a credit card just for Priority Pass access. I’ve had one for years through my Chase Sapphire Reserve card. But even as a 1K flier, I rarely use it. With Priority Pass, you’ll encounter capacity-controlled second-rate lounges where travelers on certain flights stroll past you while you’re being added to the 45-minute wait list. And after your 45 minute wait you’ll be treated to a sardine-packed lounge where the primary benefits are lack of blaring TVs, cat food sandwiches, and a second-rate chair that might adjoin an electrical outlet.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“Every time I buy a bold $20 glass of Cabernet at a Vino Volo or sip a remarkable east coast hazy at an airport bar with 20 taps, I think about how happy I am to not be begging for a second rate drink at a second rate lounge.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Agree that Priority Pass members definitely seem to be on the bottom of the “priority” list. I’ve been on the other side of that 45-minute wait list, walking into a lounge in ORD’s international terminal, bypassing the queue of Priority Pass holders because I had an AirFrance business class ticket. I’ve also encountered the cat-food sandwich phenomenon. I guess that’s why Amex’s Centurion Lounge is so popular -- great food, nice local beers and top-shelf liquor -- and so crowded and now charging for each guest. Food and drink costs during connections -- another thing I forgot to factor in when I moved to a non-hub city.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Jim McDonough hit the TravelCommons Facebook page to pile onto my rant about the US’s stop-start on-line passport renewal efforts.<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I have dual citizenship with the US and Ireland. Getting an Irish passport was a bureaucratic nightmare and took a couple of years from beginning to end. I saw it was expiring at the end of 2022 and went on-line to see how to renew it. Turns out there was a simple application to fill out on-line, got my wife to take a photo of me against a neutral background and uploaded it, paid by credit card, and had a new Irish passport in my mailbox five business days later. It can be done, USA. Try harder.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Jim’s comment got me looking… and sure enough, I can renew my UK passport online also. And checking the US passport renewal page just before recording says the online renewal portal is still <em>paused</em> -- we’re coming up on the 4th month of that pause. Maybe the US State Dept just needs to buy Ireland\'s or the UK\'s system rather than trying to build their own.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>One of the TravelCommons’ thru lines over the past 5-6 years has been the move to a cashless society and me being <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">a bit of a knuckle dragger </a>about it. It’s a stuttering progress -- tripping over small cash-only family-run restaurants in Chicago and here in Nashville, card-only places in Amsterdam; <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/12/24/podcast-191-my-notes-on-italy-and-split-croatia/\">a long weekend in Croatia last fall</a>, before they switched to the euro, that had me hunting down ATMs because not only were there signs saying “Cash Only” but also “Kuna Only” -- the currency that would be defunct in a couple of months. The Netherlands, like I said, was all about the tap -- double-click the iPhone, tap the little block, and hear the ding. I hit an ATM for €200 through force of habit and after 10 days, came home with €40-50 of it. But looking at my iPhone halfway through the trip, it looked like I’d traded cash for apps. I tweeted a screenshot of my phone; I’d added 9 apps to my phone just for those 10 days. Four were for different transit systems - one for Amsterdam, one for Rotterdam, one for the bus from Haarlem down to the tulip gardens, and one for the trains between them. There was Bolt, the Uber/taxicab mash-up, and Donkey Republic to unlock rental bikes. I can go cashless -- as long as my phone battery holds out.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Back in December, right after ChatGPT was released/unleashed (?) on the world, I wrote a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/12/12/how-good-are-chatgpts-top-5-holiday-travel-tips/\">blog post</a> comparing its holiday travel tips to mine. I thought the ChatGPT recommendations were <em>fine</em>, but mine were way more insightful. Now that Google and Microsoft have joined the AI chat game, I thought I’d ask all three “What’s the TravelCommons Podcast like”<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>First, ChatGPT’s response: “The TravelCommons podcast is a podcast that focuses on travel experiences and insights. Hosted by travel enthusiast and former consultant Mark Peacock, the podcast covers a range of topics related to travel, from the latest news and trends to personal travel stories and tips.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“Listeners can expect to hear Peacock\'s own experiences and anecdotes about his travels, as well as interviews with other travel experts and enthusiasts. The podcast often covers topics related to technology and travel, such as the latest travel apps and gadgets, as well as discussions about travel safety, sustainable travel, and more.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“One of the unique aspects of the TravelCommons podcast is that Peacock often records episodes while he\'s on the road, providing listeners with a firsthand account of his travel experiences. This adds an element of excitement and immediacy to the podcast, making it feel like you\'re right there with Peacock as he explores new destinations.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“Overall, if you\'re a travel enthusiast or just looking for some inspiration for your next trip, the TravelCommons podcast is definitely worth checking out.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Not bad, though it’s been a while since I’ve recorded on the road. Maybe I need to get back to that to recapture some of the “excitement and immediacy” of the older episodes.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Next up, Google’s Bard: “The TravelCommons podcast is a weekly podcast for frequent travelers. The host, Matt Kepnes, shares his insights and advice on all things travel, from planning and booking trips to navigating airports and hotels. He also interviews experts in the travel industry, such as airline pilots, hoteliers, and travel writers.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“The podcast is well-produced and informative, and Matt\'s enthusiasm for travel is contagious. He makes even the most mundane travel topics interesting, and he always has a few tips up his sleeve to help you make the most of your trips.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Uh, no. Somehow Bard has transferred TravelCommons to Nomadic Matt. I think I need to check and make sure I still own the travelcommons.com domain name.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And finally, Microsoft’s Bing Chat which is powered by the most recent version of ChatGPT: “TravelCommons is a podcast that focuses on the experience of travel. It is hosted by Mark Peacock, who is a frequent traveler himself. The podcast covers a wide range of topics related to travel, including tips for packing and planning, reviews of airlines and hotels, and discussions about the latest trends in travel. The podcast has been around since 2005 and has a loyal following of listeners who appreciate its honest and informative approach to travel.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>That’s pretty spot on! I may have to update the TravelCommons media guide with that.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page like Jim or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or, if you can fight thru the Safari security warnings like Robert did, you can post your comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Vidian/52190\">Memories (infiniti loop)</a> by Vidian (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license. Ft: TheDice</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Best Laid Travel Plans...</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The first topic in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/03/31/podcast-193-making-the-most-of-miles-nashville-vs-nash-vegas/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Podcast #193 — Making the Most of Miles; Nashville vs Nash-Vegas\">the last episode</a> was “Still Overthinking Travel Planning” -- which I do because, well, I’ve spent a good bit of my waking life traveling. But kinda like how generals always fight the last war, I’m probably not doing a great job of accounting for the changes in today’s travel landscape -- full planes and hotels, limited flexibility, taking what you can get.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Living in Nashville, a non-hub city, means, more often than not, I have to plan for a connection, especially when choosing our flight home from Amsterdam in April, having to factor in the time needed to pass through Customs, maybe having to transit from an international to a domestic terminal, having to clear TSA security again -- all in addition to some cushion for a late flight. But when I looked across all our possible connections, the times were either snug, less than 2 hours, or boringly long, 4-6 hours. So I decided to risk it, taking the snug layover through ORD. I figured we knew the airport, so no time lost trying to figure out the terminal connection, and most importantly, if we <em>did</em> get caught up somewhere and missed our connection, there was another flight to Nashville at 6pm, some 4 hours later.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As you might guess, all didn’t go smoothly because if it did, I wouldn’t be talking about it on the podcast. There’s not much interesting about “I booked a snug connection and everything was fine.” It actually started to go off the rails a few days before our departure, on our last night in Rotterdam. We stayed at the <a href=\"https://www.hotelpincoffs.nl/en\">Hotel Pincoffs</a> on the left bank -- highly recommended -- and after dinner, we hit the lounge where ordered a glass of what was labeled a Dutch coastal gin called <a href=\"https://hermitgin.com/\">Hermit</a>, skipping the tonic as I talked about in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/01/26/podcast-192-new-year-travel-planning-tips-gin-conquers-the-world/\">episode #192</a>, so I could taste the botanicals and the salty water they plugged on the label.&nbsp; I liked it <em>a lot</em>, so much so that I ordered another glass, and then spent 3 hours the next day rummaging through Amsterdam liquor stores ‘til I found a bottle to take home. Which meant I was now checking my bag on my flight to ORD.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Two days later, our snug connection begins to decay. The inbound United flight was late which dominoed out our departure time by 20 minutes. The captain said not to worry, he’d push the throttle and make it up in the air. I’ve heard that promise before, and sure enough, we hit the gate 20 minutes late. OK, snug-ger, but still doable. The Global Entry kiosk was fast, almost too fast. ORD has <a href=\"https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/local-media-release/global-entry-begins-touchless-receipt-less-processing-ord\">new facial biometric kiosks</a>. I walked up and before I figured out how to use it, it had recognized my face and told me to move on. Slightly creepy, but that’s a topic for another episode.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>We find the luggage carousel just as the bags with the orange Priority tags start popping out. I let myself feel a bit optimistic. I’m watching for my gin-bearing bag. And watch. And watch. Non-priority bags come out. Still I’m watching. And feeling optimism decay. We work through the Customs exit line only to walk straight into an even longer line to recheck our bags for our Nashville flight. Only 2, 3 people are working it. I’m feeling like <a href=\"https://youtu.be/N8uUTW9zPbM\">Stevie Ray Vaughn when he sings</a> “tick tock, people, time’s ticking away.” I tweet a picture to United saying “I’d be pretty thrilled if I made my ORD-BNA connection after our AMS-ORD flight arrived late.” No response. We finally get up to the bag checker. She scans the bag tag; I can see her screen flash red. “Nope,” she says, “You won’t make your flight” and then turns to the next person in line.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>We stand there for a moment and then drag our bags over to the line for the re-booking agent. But as I’ve said many times on this podcast, work all the channels. My usual Twitter play didn’t seem to be working (United’s social media hub must be short-staffed), so I dial up the Premiere line and tell my entire tale of woe to the phone agent while still in line for the in-person one. Getting up to the ORD agent, I tell her the same thing; United’s delay caused me to miss my connection, so just book me on the 6pm to Nashville. Seems easy enough -- but not in today’s travel world. The rebooking agent tells me there are no seats left to Nashville today… on any carrier. “This is unacceptable,” I said. She goes palms up and turns to the next person in line. “Wait,” I said, “if you can’t get me home tonight, United owes me overnight accommodations.” She stopped, thought for a moment, and then wrote down a number. “You need to call them.” It was the same number I’d called while in line.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But though all that, I hadn’t hung up on that phone agent; she was still there. “I’m sorry but there are no seats to Nashville, but I can get you to Memphis.” She’s trying to help, but I don’t think she realizes that Tennessee is a long state -- Memphis is a 3-hour drive to Nashville. “This is unacceptable,” I said. She apologizes again. 15 minutes into the call, she offers to transfer me to her supervisor. I tell her my story with perhaps a little frustration creeping into my tone. “Can I put you on hold?” she asks. Sure, why not? In the meantime, Irene is checking on Southwest flight; apparently United agents can’t see them. The supervisor eventually comes back, “Would the 6pm flight be OK for you?” 6pm <em>today</em>? After 36 minutes on the phone and saying “This is unacceptable” 2 or 3 times, they scrounged up the seats I’d been asking for all along. We hopped on the AirTrain to get over to Terminal 1 and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/tortas.frontera/\" title=\"\">Tortas Frontera</a>, my favorite ORD restaurant, for a couple of unplanned margaritas. While checking the United app for my new boarding pass, I saw that United twitter had finally responded. “We\'re sorry about the stressful day you\'ve had today. As a gesture of goodwill, we\'re able to deposit 2,500 miles into each of your accounts.” Using a 1.5¢/mile conversion rate, that just about covered our Frontera tab. In today’s travel world, that’s probably the best outcome I could’ve hoped for.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music --<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/ramblinglibrarian/55007\">Dawn at the Top of the World ft. copperhead &amp; Robert Seikawitch</a> by Ivan Chew (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Roaming Entropy</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Well before this “revenge” travel boom, over-tourism was a trending topic. I talked about it on many past episodes - biking up to Delicate Arch in Moab, Utah to find a swarm of photographers setting up to get their “golden hour shot” at sunset; trying to get in front of unloading tour buses along Iceland’s Golden Circle, and most recently squeezing through narrow streets in Rome when I made the mistake of agreeing to meet a friend at Trevi Fountain.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But, as you might guess, that’s not my preferred touring style. Instead, I tend to do what my family calls my “solo toro” routine -- going off on my own to wander a city, randomly walking, letting traffic lights make the call when it’s time to make a turn. Often I’ll have some end-point in mind -- a taproom, a church -- but my path getting there won’t be the most direct.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I didn’t think this was unique, but still, I’ve been pleasantly surprised to run across <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-emotional-benefits-of-wandering-11671131450?st=mmqyql6e1cktnub&amp;reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink\" title=\"\">a couple of articles</a> that put a proper name to this -- flâneuring, from <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fl%C3%A2neur\" title=\"\">flâneur</a>, the (of course) French word from the 19th Century that means \"a stroller, a loafer, a wanderer,\" someone who walks around a city without a fixed destination or purpose, just observing and enjoying the sights, sounds and smells. The English author Virginia Woolfe called it “street haunting” which I like, but I think my favorite term is “roaming entropy,” coined by some <a href=\"https://www.hartleylab.org/uploads/5/3/1/0/53101939/heller%E2%80%8A_et_al._2020.pdf\" title=\"\">NYU researchers</a> whose work showed a positive correlation between someone’s mood and how many new/varied/unexpected locations they visited.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“Roaming entropy,” “experiential diversity,” they say, promotes cognitive development -- which makes sense to me. In many ways, this is one of the main reasons people travel, to experience something new. Way back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\">episode #166</a>, Emily Thomas talked about how philosophers such as Descartes and Montagne thought experiencing “otherness of travel” was important to broadening your mind, forcing you to think past your familiar experiences. But many folks want to experience something new, but without the risk of disappointment -- or something worse -- that the term “roaming entropy” implies. And there’s nothing new to that. Guidebooks have been around forever. When Irene and I started traveling through Europe, we’d always carry a Green Michelin guide, and we’d check off the 1-, 2-, and 3-star sites as we’d hit them. Not really all that different from people today queuing up for selfies at an Instagram-famous spot.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But ticking off a list of Insta-sites or starred spots doesn’t open you to the possibility of serendipitous delight, the joy of discovering something unexpected. On the flip side, it does tend to keep you out of serendipitous disaster. I don’t recall my wanders putting me in harm’s way, but there have been a few times where I felt I’d pushed the envelope a bit far -- in Cape Town, J’burg; in Brussels -- and so beat a very direct, non-random retreat to someplace safer.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The NYU researchers also talked about “sociodemographic experiential variability,” which is their polysyllabic way of describing walking around in different ethnic/cultural neighborhoods during flâneuring. I’m always hitting up food carts for, say, tamales in Mexican neighborhoods, or not-really-well-defined meats on skewers in Asian night markets, or Cuban coffee joints in Miami. Come to think of it, a lot of my sociodemographic experiential variability involves food or booze. Though in my defense, if you keep stopping to buy stuff, you then have to carry it around with you the rest of the day, weighing you down, maybe forcing you to shorten your walk. And that’s not what “roaming entropy” is about. It’s all about riding the random wave.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #194</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>. And while you’re at TravelCommons.com, you can check out the show notes page for a transcript and any links I’ve mentioned. Or you can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_194.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #194 — Best Laid Travel Plans; Roaming Entropy','Stubbornness fixed some ORD connection drama when coming home from a tulip-peeping trip in Holland, even after all my travel planning. We wander into the world of flâneuring, aimlessly walking around a city as a way to swerve overtourism. Listeners weigh in on Priority Pass lounge access and online passport renewal experiences, and I count all the apps I needed to go cashless.','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-194-best-laid-travel-plans-roaming-entropy','','','2026-01-28 10:51:21','2026-01-28 16:51:21','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4312',0,'post','',0),
(4313,1,'2023-06-17 12:17:43','2023-06-17 17:17:43','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Nash-vegas-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Honky Tonk signs on Broadway in Nashville\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\">Trapped in Nash-Vegas[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Doing a bit of winter travel, the bar tab from waiting out a weather delay got me rethinking the economics of airport lounge memberships. Doing yet more travel planning but with a focus on making the most of the points and miles we accumulated on credit cards during the pandemic. And after eight months in Nashville, I compare the two sides of the local music scene -- the Nash-Vegas honky tonks vs the smaller, eclectic off-Broadway scene. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_194.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #193: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN after a good bit of travel - 10 days in the Netherlands bracketed by road trips to Louisville, Savannah, GA, and Chicago, and then a tough week of beer drinking here in Nashville when the Craft Brewers Conference touched down. So, I’ve been keeping occupied since the last episode. But it’s all been personal travel; all of my business travel has been replaced with Zoom and Teams sessions. I may be a bit of an outlier, but none of the US airlines’ Q1 earnings announcements were great, in no small part because business travel still isn’t back to pre-pandemic levels. Delta is hoping it’ll settle at 75% of 2019 levels while <a href=\"https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-04-21/industrial-strength-business-travel-recovery-is-showing-cracks-lgqvl4n3?utm_source=website&amp;utm_medium=share\">United’s CEO said</a>&nbsp; “We believe demand is just structurally different than it was pre-pandemic, and we’re still figuring out that new normal.” Maybe not quite the Bill Gates “over 50 percent of business travel… will go away” prediction, but with our 2-year crash course in virtual work, having the post-pandemic setpoint for business travel volume be 20-25% lower doesn’t seem too far fetched.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And even with the non-business “revenge” travel boom filling seats, personal travel is a lot more price sensitive, or elastic as economists like to say, than business travel. My travel patterns are a testament to that -- with higher airfares but a more flexible schedule (I can Zoom from anywhere), it’s been more road trips than plane flights. I’ve had some pretty drives, like through East Tennessee and central Kentucky, but also some real grind-outs, like I-75 pretty much from the Tennessee-Georgia border through Atlanta, all the way down to Macon.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But driving <em>does</em> make packing easier, without the space constraints of a carry-on bag. Which caught up with me, I think, on our Netherlands trip. I was out of practice, sloppy; forgetting to pack so much of what would be my normal kit -- collapsible umbrella, gloves, hat -- so that when the cold rain shifted to snow our first day in Amsterdam (it had been in the 70’s when we left Nashville), our standard throwaway line “If we’ve forgotten it, we’ll just buy it there” became very real. I was very happy to find a couple of sporting goods stores a block down from our hotel. I gotta do some remedial packing training before my next flight.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Javolenus/41932\">Ianiscus</a> by Javolenus (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. Ft: Wired_Ant</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Robert Fenerty hit the TravelCommons website to comment on last episode’s thoughts about ponying up for a not-quite-Amex Platinum card from Chase or Capital One, one that includes a Priority Pass membership. He said<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“You need to fix the cert on travelcommons.com, Safari is complaining.” Yup, I know. Converting the site to https has been on my to-do list for a long time. I’ll get to it, I promise… some day.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“Given the paucity of direct flights from Nashville, I suppose lounge access makes sense. But please don’t get a credit card just for Priority Pass access. I’ve had one for years through my Chase Sapphire Reserve card. But even as a 1K flier, I rarely use it. With Priority Pass, you’ll encounter capacity-controlled second-rate lounges where travelers on certain flights stroll past you while you’re being added to the 45-minute wait list. And after your 45 minute wait you’ll be treated to a sardine-packed lounge where the primary benefits are lack of blaring TVs, cat food sandwiches, and a second-rate chair that might adjoin an electrical outlet.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“Every time I buy a bold $20 glass of Cabernet at a Vino Volo or sip a remarkable east coast hazy at an airport bar with 20 taps, I think about how happy I am to not be begging for a second rate drink at a second rate lounge.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Agree that Priority Pass members definitely seem to be on the bottom of the “priority” list. I’ve been on the other side of that 45-minute wait list, walking into a lounge in ORD’s international terminal, bypassing the queue of Priority Pass holders because I had an AirFrance business class ticket. I’ve also encountered the cat-food sandwich phenomenon. I guess that’s why Amex’s Centurion Lounge is so popular -- great food, nice local beers and top-shelf liquor -- and so crowded and now charging for each guest. Food and drink costs during connections -- another thing I forgot to factor in when I moved to a non-hub city.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Jim McMcDonough hit the TravelCommons Facebook page to pile onto my rant about the US’s stop-start on-line passport renewal efforts.<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I have dual citizenship with the US and Ireland. Getting an Irish passport was a bureaucratic nightmare and took a couple of years from beginning to end. I saw it was expiring at the end of 2022 and went on-line to see how to renew it. Turns out there was a simple application to fill out on-line, got my wife to take a photo of me against a neutral background and uploaded it, paid by credit card, and had a new Irish passport in my mailbox five business days later. It can be done, USA. Try harder.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Jim’s comment got me looking… and sure enough, I can renew my UK passport online also. And checking the US passport renewal page just before recording says the online renewal portal is still <em>paused</em> -- we’re coming up on the 4th month of that pause. Maybe the US State Dept just needs to buy Ireland\'s or the UK\'s system rather than trying to build their own.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>One of the TravelCommons’ thru lines over the past 5-6 years has been the move to a cashless society and me being <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">a bit of a knuckle dragger </a>about it. It’s a stuttering progress -- tripping over small cash-only family-run restaurants in Chicago and here in Nashville, card-only places in Amsterdam; <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/12/24/podcast-191-my-notes-on-italy-and-split-croatia/\">a long weekend in Croatia last fall</a>, before they switched to the euro, that had me hunting down ATMs because not only were there signs saying “Cash Only” but also “Kuna Only” -- the currency that would be defunct in a couple of months. The Netherlands, like I said, was all about the tap -- double-click the iPhone, tap the little block, and hear the ding. I hit an ATM for €200 through force of habit and after 10 days, came home with €40-50 of it. But looking at my iPhone halfway through the trip, it looked like I’d traded cash for apps. I tweeted a screenshot of my phone; I’d added 9 apps to my phone just for those 10 days. Four were for different transit systems - one for Amsterdam, one for Rotterdam, one for the bus from Haarlem down to the tulip gardens, and one for the trains between them. There was Bolt, the Uber/taxicab mash-up, and Donkey Republic to unlock rental bikes. I can go cashless -- as long as my phone battery holds out.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Back in December, right after ChatGPT was released/unleashed (?) on the world, I wrote a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/12/12/how-good-are-chatgpts-top-5-holiday-travel-tips/\">blog post</a> comparing its holiday travel tips to mine. I thought the ChatGPT recommendations were <em>fine</em>, but mine were way more insightful. Now that Google and Microsoft have joined the AI chat game, I thought I’d ask all three “What’s the TravelCommons Podcast like”<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>First, ChatGPT’s response: “The TravelCommons podcast is a podcast that focuses on travel experiences and insights. Hosted by travel enthusiast and former consultant Mark Peacock, the podcast covers a range of topics related to travel, from the latest news and trends to personal travel stories and tips.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“Listeners can expect to hear Peacock\'s own experiences and anecdotes about his travels, as well as interviews with other travel experts and enthusiasts. The podcast often covers topics related to technology and travel, such as the latest travel apps and gadgets, as well as discussions about travel safety, sustainable travel, and more.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“One of the unique aspects of the TravelCommons podcast is that Peacock often records episodes while he\'s on the road, providing listeners with a firsthand account of his travel experiences. This adds an element of excitement and immediacy to the podcast, making it feel like you\'re right there with Peacock as he explores new destinations.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“Overall, if you\'re a travel enthusiast or just looking for some inspiration for your next trip, the TravelCommons podcast is definitely worth checking out.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Not bad, though it’s been a while since I’ve recorded on the road. Maybe I need to get back to that to recapture some of the “excitement and immediacy” of the older episodes.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Next up, Google’s Bard: “The TravelCommons podcast is a weekly podcast for frequent travelers. The host, Matt Kepnes, shares his insights and advice on all things travel, from planning and booking trips to navigating airports and hotels. He also interviews experts in the travel industry, such as airline pilots, hoteliers, and travel writers.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“The podcast is well-produced and informative, and Matt\'s enthusiasm for travel is contagious. He makes even the most mundane travel topics interesting, and he always has a few tips up his sleeve to help you make the most of your trips.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Uh, no. Somehow Bard has transferred TravelCommons to Nomadic Matt. I think I need to check and make sure I still own the travelcommons.com domain name.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And finally, Microsoft’s Bing Chat which is powered by the most recent version of ChatGPT: “TravelCommons is a podcast that focuses on the experience of travel. It is hosted by Mark Peacock, who is a frequent traveler himself. The podcast covers a wide range of topics related to travel, including tips for packing and planning, reviews of airlines and hotels, and discussions about the latest trends in travel. The podcast has been around since 2005 and has a loyal following of listeners who appreciate its honest and informative approach to travel.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>That’s pretty spot on! I may have to update the TravelCommons media guide with that.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page like Jim or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or, if you can fight thru the Safari security warnings like Robert did, you can post your comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/48914\">In Peace (Somewhere Else Mix)</a> by cdk (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. Ft: Snowflake</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Best Laid Travel Plans...</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The first topic in the last episode was “Still Overthinking Travel Planning” -- which I do because, well, I’ve spent a good bit of my waking life traveling. But kinda like how generals always fight the last war, I’m probably not doing a great job of accounting for the changes in today’s travel landscape -- full planes and hotels, limited flexibility, taking what you can get.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Living in Nashville, a non-hub city, means, more often than not, I have to plan for a connection, especially when choosing our flight home from Amsterdam in April, having to factor in the time needed to pass through Customs, maybe having to transit from an international to a domestic terminal, having to clear TSA security again -- all in addition to some cushion for a late flight. But when I looked across all our possible connections, the times were either snug, less than 2 hours, or boringly long, 4-6 hours. So I decided to risk it, taking the snug layover through ORD. I figured we knew the airport, so no time lost trying to figure out the terminal connection, and most importantly, if we <em>did</em> get caught up somewhere and missed our connection, there was another flight to Nashville at 6pm, some 4 hours later.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As you might guess, all didn’t go smoothly because if it did, I wouldn’t be talking about it on the podcast. There’s not much interesting about “I booked a snug connection and everything was fine.” It actually started to go off the rails a few days before our departure, on our last night in Rotterdam. We stayed at the <a href=\"https://www.hotelpincoffs.nl/en\">Hotel Pincoffs</a> on the left bank -- highly recommended -- and after dinner, we hit the lounge where ordered a glass of what was labeled a Dutch coastal gin called <a href=\"https://hermitgin.com/\">Hermit</a>, skipping the tonic as I talked about in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/01/26/podcast-192-new-year-travel-planning-tips-gin-conquers-the-world/\">episode #192</a>, so I could taste the botanicals and the salty water they plugged on the label.&nbsp; I liked it <em>a lot</em>, so much so that I ordered another glass, and then spent 3 hours the next day rummaging through Amsterdam liquor stores ‘til I found a bottle to take home. Which meant I was now checking my bag on my flight to ORD.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Two days later, our snug connection begins to decay. The inbound United flight was late which dominoed out our departure time by 20 minutes. The captain said not to worry, he’d push the throttle and make it up in the air. I’ve heard that promise before, and sure enough, we hit the gate 20 minutes late. OK, snug-ger, but still doable. The Global Entry kiosk was fast, almost too fast. ORD has <a href=\"https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/local-media-release/global-entry-begins-touchless-receipt-less-processing-ord\">new facial biometric kiosks</a>. I walked up and before I figured out how to use it, it had recognized my face and told me to move on. Slightly creepy, but that’s a topic for another episode.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>We find the luggage carousel just as the bags with the orange Priority tags start popping out. I let myself feel a bit optimistic. I’m watching for my gin-bearing bag. And watch. And watch. Non-priority bags come out. Still I’m watching. And feeling optimism decay. We work through the Customs exit line only to walk straight into an even longer line to recheck our bags for our Nashville flight. Only 2, 3 people are working it. I’m feeling like <a href=\"https://youtu.be/N8uUTW9zPbM\">Stevie Ray Vaughn when he sings</a> “tick tock, people, time’s ticking away.” I tweet a picture to United saying “I’d be pretty thrilled if I made my ORD-BNA connection after our AMS-ORD flight arrived late.” No response. We finally get up to the bag checker. She scans the bag tag; I can see her screen flash red. “Nope,” she says, “You won’t make your flight” and then turns to the next person in line.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>We stand there for a moment and then drag our bags over to the line for the re-booking agent. But as I’ve said many times on this podcast, work all the channels. My usual Twitter play didn’t seem to be working (United’s social media hub must be short-staffed), so I dial up the Premiere line and tell my entire tale of woe to the phone agent while still in line for the in-person one. Getting up to the ORD agent, I tell her the same thing; United’s delay caused me to miss my connection, so just book me on the 6pm to Nashville. Seems easy enough -- but not in today’s travel world. The rebooking agent tells me there are no seats left to Nashville today… on any carrier. “This is unacceptable,” I said. She goes palms up and turns to the next person in line. “Wait,” I said, “if you can’t get me home tonight, United owes me overnight accommodations.” She stopped, thought for a moment, and then wrote down a number. “You need to call them.” It was the same number I’d called while in line.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But though all that, I hadn’t hung up on that phone agent; she was still there. “I’m sorry but there are no seats to Nashville, but I can get you to Memphis.” She’s trying to help, but I don’t think she realizes that Tennessee is a long state -- Memphis is a 3-hour drive to Nashville. “This is unacceptable,” I said. She apologizes again. 15 minutes into the call, she offers to transfer me to her supervisor. I tell her my story with perhaps a little frustration creeping into my tone. “Can I put you on hold?” she asks. Sure, why not? In the meantime, Irene is checking on Southwest flight; apparently United agents can’t see them. The supervisor eventually comes back, “Would the 6pm flight be OK for you?” 6pm <em>today</em>? After 36 minutes on the phone and saying “This is unacceptable” 2 or 3 times, they scrounged up the seats I’d been asking for all along. We hopped on the AirTrain to get over to Terminal 1 and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/tortas.frontera/\" title=\"\">Tortas Frontera</a>, my favorite ORD restaurant, for a couple of unplanned margaritas. While checking the United app for my new boarding pass, I saw that United twitter had finally responded. “We\'re sorry about the stressful day you\'ve had today. As a gesture of goodwill, we\'re able to deposit 2,500 miles into each of your accounts.” Using a 1.5¢/mile conversion rate, that just about covered our Frontera tab. In today’s travel world, that’s probably the best outcome I could’ve hoped for.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music --<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/35724\">Blue Like Venus</a> by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. Ft: Admiral Bob</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Roaming Entropy</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Well before this “revenge” travel boom, over-tourism was a trending topic. I talked about it on many past episodes - biking up to Delicate Arch in Moab, Utah to find a swarm of photographers setting up to get their “golden hour shot” at sunset; trying to get in front of unloading tour buses along Iceland’s Golden Circle, and most recently squeezing through narrow streets in Rome when I made the mistake of agreeing to meet a friend at Trevi Fountain.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But, as you might guess, that’s not my preferred touring style. Instead, I tend to do what my family calls my “solo toro” routine -- going off on my own to wander a city, randomly walking, letting traffic lights make the call when it’s time to make a turn. Often I’ll have some end-point in mind -- a taproom, a church -- but my path getting there won’t be the most direct.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I didn’t think this was unique, but still, I’ve been pleasantly surprised to run across a couple of articles that put a proper name to this -- flâneuring, from flâneur, the (of course) French word from the 19th Century that means \"a stroller, a loafer, a wanderer,\" someone who walks around a city without a fixed destination or purpose, just observing and enjoying the sights, sounds and smells. The English author Virginia Woolfe called it “street haunting” which I like, but I think my favorite term is “roaming entropy,” coined by some NYU researchers whose work showed a positive correlation between someone’s mood and how many new/varied/unexpected locations they visited.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“Roaming entropy,” “experiential diversity,” they say, promotes cognitive development -- which makes sense to me. In many ways, this is one of the main reasons people travel, to experience something new. Way back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\">episode #166</a>, Emily Thomas talked about how philosophers such as Descartes and Montagne thought experiencing “otherness of travel” was important to broadening your mind, forcing you to think past your familiar experiences. But many folks want to experience something new, but without the risk of disappointment -- or something worse -- that the term “roaming entropy” implies. And there’s nothing new to that. Guidebooks have been around forever. When Irene and I started traveling through Europe, we’d always carry a Green Michelin guide, and we’d check off the 1-, 2-, and 3-star sites as we’d hit them. Not really all that different from people today queuing up for selfies at an Instagram-famous spot.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But ticking off a list of Insta-sites or starred spots doesn’t open you to the possibility of serendipitous delight, the joy of discovering something unexpected. On the flip side, it does tend to keep you out of serendipitous disaster. I don’t recall my wanders putting me in harm’s way, but there have been a few times where I felt I’d pushed the envelope a bit far -- in Cape Town, J’burg; in Brussels -- and so beat a very direct, non-random retreat to someplace safer.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The NYU researchers also talked about “sociodemographic experiential variability,” which is their polysyllabic way of describing walking around in different ethnic/cultural neighborhoods during flâneuring. I’m always hitting up food carts for, say, tamales in Mexican neighborhoods, or not-really-well-defined meats on skewers in Asian night markets, or Cuban coffee joints in Miami. Come to think of it, a lot of my sociodemographic experiential variability involves food or booze. Though in my defense, if you keep stopping to buy stuff, you then have to carry it around with you the rest of the day, weighing you down, maybe forcing you to shorten your walk. And that’s not what “roaming entropy” is about. It’s all about riding the random wave.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #193</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>. And while you’re at TravelCommons.com, you can check out the show notes page for a transcript and any links I’ve mentioned. Or you can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_194.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #194 — Best Laid Travel Plans; Roaming Entropy','','inherit','closed','closed','','4312-revision-v1','','','2023-06-17 12:17:43','2023-06-17 17:17:43','',4312,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4313',0,'revision','',0),
(4314,1,'2023-06-17 12:33:15','2023-06-17 17:33:15','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Nash-vegas-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Honky Tonk signs on Broadway in Nashville\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\">Trapped in Nash-Vegas[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Doing a bit of winter travel, the bar tab from waiting out a weather delay got me rethinking the economics of airport lounge memberships. Doing yet more travel planning but with a focus on making the most of the points and miles we accumulated on credit cards during the pandemic. And after eight months in Nashville, I compare the two sides of the local music scene -- the Nash-Vegas honky tonks vs the smaller, eclectic off-Broadway scene. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_194.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #193: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN after a good bit of travel - 10 days in the Netherlands bracketed by road trips to Louisville, Savannah, GA, and Chicago, and then a tough week of beer drinking here in Nashville when the Craft Brewers Conference touched down. So, I’ve been keeping occupied since the last episode. But it’s all been personal travel; all of my business travel has been replaced with Zoom and Teams sessions. I may be a bit of an outlier, but none of the US airlines’ Q1 earnings announcements were great, in no small part because business travel still isn’t back to pre-pandemic levels. Delta is hoping it’ll settle at 75% of 2019 levels while <a href=\"https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-04-21/industrial-strength-business-travel-recovery-is-showing-cracks-lgqvl4n3?utm_source=website&amp;utm_medium=share\">United’s CEO said</a>&nbsp; “We believe demand is just structurally different than it was pre-pandemic, and we’re still figuring out that new normal.” Maybe not quite the Bill Gates “over 50 percent of business travel… will go away” prediction, but with our 2-year crash course in virtual work, having the post-pandemic setpoint for business travel volume be 20-25% lower doesn’t seem too far fetched.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And even with the non-business “revenge” travel boom filling seats, personal travel is a lot more price sensitive, or elastic as economists like to say, than business travel. My travel patterns are a testament to that -- with higher airfares but a more flexible schedule (I can Zoom from anywhere), it’s been more road trips than plane flights. I’ve had some pretty drives, like through East Tennessee and central Kentucky, but also some real grind-outs, like I-75 pretty much from the Tennessee-Georgia border through Atlanta, all the way down to Macon.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But driving <em>does</em> make packing easier, without the space constraints of a carry-on bag. Which caught up with me, I think, on our Netherlands trip. I was out of practice, sloppy; forgetting to pack so much of what would be my normal kit -- collapsible umbrella, gloves, hat -- so that when the cold rain shifted to snow our first day in Amsterdam (it had been in the 70’s when we left Nashville), our standard throwaway line “If we’ve forgotten it, we’ll just buy it there” became very real. I was very happy to find a couple of sporting goods stores a block down from our hotel. I gotta do some remedial packing training before my next flight.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Javolenus/41932\">Ianiscus</a> by Javolenus (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. Ft: Wired_Ant</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Robert Fenerty hit the TravelCommons website to comment on last episode’s thoughts about ponying up for a not-quite-Amex Platinum card from Chase or Capital One, one that includes a Priority Pass membership. He said<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“You need to fix the cert on travelcommons.com, Safari is complaining.” Yup, I know. Converting the site to https has been on my to-do list for a long time. I’ll get to it, I promise… some day.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“Given the paucity of direct flights from Nashville, I suppose lounge access makes sense. But please don’t get a credit card just for Priority Pass access. I’ve had one for years through my Chase Sapphire Reserve card. But even as a 1K flier, I rarely use it. With Priority Pass, you’ll encounter capacity-controlled second-rate lounges where travelers on certain flights stroll past you while you’re being added to the 45-minute wait list. And after your 45 minute wait you’ll be treated to a sardine-packed lounge where the primary benefits are lack of blaring TVs, cat food sandwiches, and a second-rate chair that might adjoin an electrical outlet.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“Every time I buy a bold $20 glass of Cabernet at a Vino Volo or sip a remarkable east coast hazy at an airport bar with 20 taps, I think about how happy I am to not be begging for a second rate drink at a second rate lounge.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Agree that Priority Pass members definitely seem to be on the bottom of the “priority” list. I’ve been on the other side of that 45-minute wait list, walking into a lounge in ORD’s international terminal, bypassing the queue of Priority Pass holders because I had an AirFrance business class ticket. I’ve also encountered the cat-food sandwich phenomenon. I guess that’s why Amex’s Centurion Lounge is so popular -- great food, nice local beers and top-shelf liquor -- and so crowded and now charging for each guest. Food and drink costs during connections -- another thing I forgot to factor in when I moved to a non-hub city.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Jim McMcDonough hit the TravelCommons Facebook page to pile onto my rant about the US’s stop-start on-line passport renewal efforts.<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I have dual citizenship with the US and Ireland. Getting an Irish passport was a bureaucratic nightmare and took a couple of years from beginning to end. I saw it was expiring at the end of 2022 and went on-line to see how to renew it. Turns out there was a simple application to fill out on-line, got my wife to take a photo of me against a neutral background and uploaded it, paid by credit card, and had a new Irish passport in my mailbox five business days later. It can be done, USA. Try harder.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Jim’s comment got me looking… and sure enough, I can renew my UK passport online also. And checking the US passport renewal page just before recording says the online renewal portal is still <em>paused</em> -- we’re coming up on the 4th month of that pause. Maybe the US State Dept just needs to buy Ireland\'s or the UK\'s system rather than trying to build their own.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>One of the TravelCommons’ thru lines over the past 5-6 years has been the move to a cashless society and me being <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">a bit of a knuckle dragger </a>about it. It’s a stuttering progress -- tripping over small cash-only family-run restaurants in Chicago and here in Nashville, card-only places in Amsterdam; <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/12/24/podcast-191-my-notes-on-italy-and-split-croatia/\">a long weekend in Croatia last fall</a>, before they switched to the euro, that had me hunting down ATMs because not only were there signs saying “Cash Only” but also “Kuna Only” -- the currency that would be defunct in a couple of months. The Netherlands, like I said, was all about the tap -- double-click the iPhone, tap the little block, and hear the ding. I hit an ATM for €200 through force of habit and after 10 days, came home with €40-50 of it. But looking at my iPhone halfway through the trip, it looked like I’d traded cash for apps. I tweeted a screenshot of my phone; I’d added 9 apps to my phone just for those 10 days. Four were for different transit systems - one for Amsterdam, one for Rotterdam, one for the bus from Haarlem down to the tulip gardens, and one for the trains between them. There was Bolt, the Uber/taxicab mash-up, and Donkey Republic to unlock rental bikes. I can go cashless -- as long as my phone battery holds out.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Back in December, right after ChatGPT was released/unleashed (?) on the world, I wrote a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/12/12/how-good-are-chatgpts-top-5-holiday-travel-tips/\">blog post</a> comparing its holiday travel tips to mine. I thought the ChatGPT recommendations were <em>fine</em>, but mine were way more insightful. Now that Google and Microsoft have joined the AI chat game, I thought I’d ask all three “What’s the TravelCommons Podcast like”<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>First, ChatGPT’s response: “The TravelCommons podcast is a podcast that focuses on travel experiences and insights. Hosted by travel enthusiast and former consultant Mark Peacock, the podcast covers a range of topics related to travel, from the latest news and trends to personal travel stories and tips.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“Listeners can expect to hear Peacock\'s own experiences and anecdotes about his travels, as well as interviews with other travel experts and enthusiasts. The podcast often covers topics related to technology and travel, such as the latest travel apps and gadgets, as well as discussions about travel safety, sustainable travel, and more.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“One of the unique aspects of the TravelCommons podcast is that Peacock often records episodes while he\'s on the road, providing listeners with a firsthand account of his travel experiences. This adds an element of excitement and immediacy to the podcast, making it feel like you\'re right there with Peacock as he explores new destinations.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“Overall, if you\'re a travel enthusiast or just looking for some inspiration for your next trip, the TravelCommons podcast is definitely worth checking out.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Not bad, though it’s been a while since I’ve recorded on the road. Maybe I need to get back to that to recapture some of the “excitement and immediacy” of the older episodes.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Next up, Google’s Bard: “The TravelCommons podcast is a weekly podcast for frequent travelers. The host, Matt Kepnes, shares his insights and advice on all things travel, from planning and booking trips to navigating airports and hotels. He also interviews experts in the travel industry, such as airline pilots, hoteliers, and travel writers.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“The podcast is well-produced and informative, and Matt\'s enthusiasm for travel is contagious. He makes even the most mundane travel topics interesting, and he always has a few tips up his sleeve to help you make the most of your trips.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Uh, no. Somehow Bard has transferred TravelCommons to Nomadic Matt. I think I need to check and make sure I still own the travelcommons.com domain name.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And finally, Microsoft’s Bing Chat which is powered by the most recent version of ChatGPT: “TravelCommons is a podcast that focuses on the experience of travel. It is hosted by Mark Peacock, who is a frequent traveler himself. The podcast covers a wide range of topics related to travel, including tips for packing and planning, reviews of airlines and hotels, and discussions about the latest trends in travel. The podcast has been around since 2005 and has a loyal following of listeners who appreciate its honest and informative approach to travel.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>That’s pretty spot on! I may have to update the TravelCommons media guide with that.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page like Jim or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or, if you can fight thru the Safari security warnings like Robert did, you can post your comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/48914\">In Peace (Somewhere Else Mix)</a> by cdk (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. Ft: Snowflake</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Best Laid Travel Plans...</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The first topic in the last episode was “Still Overthinking Travel Planning” -- which I do because, well, I’ve spent a good bit of my waking life traveling. But kinda like how generals always fight the last war, I’m probably not doing a great job of accounting for the changes in today’s travel landscape -- full planes and hotels, limited flexibility, taking what you can get.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Living in Nashville, a non-hub city, means, more often than not, I have to plan for a connection, especially when choosing our flight home from Amsterdam in April, having to factor in the time needed to pass through Customs, maybe having to transit from an international to a domestic terminal, having to clear TSA security again -- all in addition to some cushion for a late flight. But when I looked across all our possible connections, the times were either snug, less than 2 hours, or boringly long, 4-6 hours. So I decided to risk it, taking the snug layover through ORD. I figured we knew the airport, so no time lost trying to figure out the terminal connection, and most importantly, if we <em>did</em> get caught up somewhere and missed our connection, there was another flight to Nashville at 6pm, some 4 hours later.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As you might guess, all didn’t go smoothly because if it did, I wouldn’t be talking about it on the podcast. There’s not much interesting about “I booked a snug connection and everything was fine.” It actually started to go off the rails a few days before our departure, on our last night in Rotterdam. We stayed at the <a href=\"https://www.hotelpincoffs.nl/en\">Hotel Pincoffs</a> on the left bank -- highly recommended -- and after dinner, we hit the lounge where ordered a glass of what was labeled a Dutch coastal gin called <a href=\"https://hermitgin.com/\">Hermit</a>, skipping the tonic as I talked about in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/01/26/podcast-192-new-year-travel-planning-tips-gin-conquers-the-world/\">episode #192</a>, so I could taste the botanicals and the salty water they plugged on the label.&nbsp; I liked it <em>a lot</em>, so much so that I ordered another glass, and then spent 3 hours the next day rummaging through Amsterdam liquor stores ‘til I found a bottle to take home. Which meant I was now checking my bag on my flight to ORD.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Two days later, our snug connection begins to decay. The inbound United flight was late which dominoed out our departure time by 20 minutes. The captain said not to worry, he’d push the throttle and make it up in the air. I’ve heard that promise before, and sure enough, we hit the gate 20 minutes late. OK, snug-ger, but still doable. The Global Entry kiosk was fast, almost too fast. ORD has <a href=\"https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/local-media-release/global-entry-begins-touchless-receipt-less-processing-ord\">new facial biometric kiosks</a>. I walked up and before I figured out how to use it, it had recognized my face and told me to move on. Slightly creepy, but that’s a topic for another episode.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>We find the luggage carousel just as the bags with the orange Priority tags start popping out. I let myself feel a bit optimistic. I’m watching for my gin-bearing bag. And watch. And watch. Non-priority bags come out. Still I’m watching. And feeling optimism decay. We work through the Customs exit line only to walk straight into an even longer line to recheck our bags for our Nashville flight. Only 2, 3 people are working it. I’m feeling like <a href=\"https://youtu.be/N8uUTW9zPbM\">Stevie Ray Vaughn when he sings</a> “tick tock, people, time’s ticking away.” I tweet a picture to United saying “I’d be pretty thrilled if I made my ORD-BNA connection after our AMS-ORD flight arrived late.” No response. We finally get up to the bag checker. She scans the bag tag; I can see her screen flash red. “Nope,” she says, “You won’t make your flight” and then turns to the next person in line.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>We stand there for a moment and then drag our bags over to the line for the re-booking agent. But as I’ve said many times on this podcast, work all the channels. My usual Twitter play didn’t seem to be working (United’s social media hub must be short-staffed), so I dial up the Premiere line and tell my entire tale of woe to the phone agent while still in line for the in-person one. Getting up to the ORD agent, I tell her the same thing; United’s delay caused me to miss my connection, so just book me on the 6pm to Nashville. Seems easy enough -- but not in today’s travel world. The rebooking agent tells me there are no seats left to Nashville today… on any carrier. “This is unacceptable,” I said. She goes palms up and turns to the next person in line. “Wait,” I said, “if you can’t get me home tonight, United owes me overnight accommodations.” She stopped, thought for a moment, and then wrote down a number. “You need to call them.” It was the same number I’d called while in line.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But though all that, I hadn’t hung up on that phone agent; she was still there. “I’m sorry but there are no seats to Nashville, but I can get you to Memphis.” She’s trying to help, but I don’t think she realizes that Tennessee is a long state -- Memphis is a 3-hour drive to Nashville. “This is unacceptable,” I said. She apologizes again. 15 minutes into the call, she offers to transfer me to her supervisor. I tell her my story with perhaps a little frustration creeping into my tone. “Can I put you on hold?” she asks. Sure, why not? In the meantime, Irene is checking on Southwest flight; apparently United agents can’t see them. The supervisor eventually comes back, “Would the 6pm flight be OK for you?” 6pm <em>today</em>? After 36 minutes on the phone and saying “This is unacceptable” 2 or 3 times, they scrounged up the seats I’d been asking for all along. We hopped on the AirTrain to get over to Terminal 1 and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/tortas.frontera/\" title=\"\">Tortas Frontera</a>, my favorite ORD restaurant, for a couple of unplanned margaritas. While checking the United app for my new boarding pass, I saw that United twitter had finally responded. “We\'re sorry about the stressful day you\'ve had today. As a gesture of goodwill, we\'re able to deposit 2,500 miles into each of your accounts.” Using a 1.5¢/mile conversion rate, that just about covered our Frontera tab. In today’s travel world, that’s probably the best outcome I could’ve hoped for.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music --<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/35724\">Blue Like Venus</a> by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. Ft: Admiral Bob</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Roaming Entropy</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Well before this “revenge” travel boom, over-tourism was a trending topic. I talked about it on many past episodes - biking up to Delicate Arch in Moab, Utah to find a swarm of photographers setting up to get their “golden hour shot” at sunset; trying to get in front of unloading tour buses along Iceland’s Golden Circle, and most recently squeezing through narrow streets in Rome when I made the mistake of agreeing to meet a friend at Trevi Fountain.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But, as you might guess, that’s not my preferred touring style. Instead, I tend to do what my family calls my “solo toro” routine -- going off on my own to wander a city, randomly walking, letting traffic lights make the call when it’s time to make a turn. Often I’ll have some end-point in mind -- a taproom, a church -- but my path getting there won’t be the most direct.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I didn’t think this was unique, but still, I’ve been pleasantly surprised to run across a couple of articles that put a proper name to this -- flâneuring, from <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fl%C3%A2neur\" title=\"\">flâneur</a>, the (of course) French word from the 19th Century that means \"a stroller, a loafer, a wanderer,\" someone who walks around a city without a fixed destination or purpose, just observing and enjoying the sights, sounds and smells. The English author Virginia Woolfe called it “street haunting” which I like, but I think my favorite term is “roaming entropy,” coined by some <a href=\"https://www.hartleylab.org/uploads/5/3/1/0/53101939/heller%E2%80%8A_et_al._2020.pdf\" title=\"\">NYU researchers</a> whose work showed a positive correlation between someone’s mood and how many new/varied/unexpected locations they visited.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“Roaming entropy,” “experiential diversity,” they say, promotes cognitive development -- which makes sense to me. In many ways, this is one of the main reasons people travel, to experience something new. Way back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\">episode #166</a>, Emily Thomas talked about how philosophers such as Descartes and Montagne thought experiencing “otherness of travel” was important to broadening your mind, forcing you to think past your familiar experiences. But many folks want to experience something new, but without the risk of disappointment -- or something worse -- that the term “roaming entropy” implies. And there’s nothing new to that. Guidebooks have been around forever. When Irene and I started traveling through Europe, we’d always carry a Green Michelin guide, and we’d check off the 1-, 2-, and 3-star sites as we’d hit them. Not really all that different from people today queuing up for selfies at an Instagram-famous spot.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But ticking off a list of Insta-sites or starred spots doesn’t open you to the possibility of serendipitous delight, the joy of discovering something unexpected. On the flip side, it does tend to keep you out of serendipitous disaster. I don’t recall my wanders putting me in harm’s way, but there have been a few times where I felt I’d pushed the envelope a bit far -- in Cape Town, J’burg; in Brussels -- and so beat a very direct, non-random retreat to someplace safer.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The NYU researchers also talked about “sociodemographic experiential variability,” which is their polysyllabic way of describing walking around in different ethnic/cultural neighborhoods during flâneuring. I’m always hitting up food carts for, say, tamales in Mexican neighborhoods, or not-really-well-defined meats on skewers in Asian night markets, or Cuban coffee joints in Miami. Come to think of it, a lot of my sociodemographic experiential variability involves food or booze. Though in my defense, if you keep stopping to buy stuff, you then have to carry it around with you the rest of the day, weighing you down, maybe forcing you to shorten your walk. And that’s not what “roaming entropy” is about. It’s all about riding the random wave.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #193</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>. And while you’re at TravelCommons.com, you can check out the show notes page for a transcript and any links I’ve mentioned. Or you can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_194.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #194 — Best Laid Travel Plans; Roaming Entropy','','inherit','closed','closed','','4312-revision-v1','','','2023-06-17 12:33:15','2023-06-17 17:33:15','',4312,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4314',0,'revision','',0),
(4315,1,'2023-06-17 12:34:06','2023-06-17 17:34:06','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Nash-vegas-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Honky Tonk signs on Broadway in Nashville\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\">Trapped in Nash-Vegas[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Doing a bit of winter travel, the bar tab from waiting out a weather delay got me rethinking the economics of airport lounge memberships. Doing yet more travel planning but with a focus on making the most of the points and miles we accumulated on credit cards during the pandemic. And after eight months in Nashville, I compare the two sides of the local music scene -- the Nash-Vegas honky tonks vs the smaller, eclectic off-Broadway scene. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_194.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #193: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN after a good bit of travel - 10 days in the Netherlands bracketed by road trips to Louisville, Savannah, GA, and Chicago, and then a tough week of beer drinking here in Nashville when the Craft Brewers Conference touched down. So, I’ve been keeping occupied since the last episode. But it’s all been personal travel; all of my business travel has been replaced with Zoom and Teams sessions. I may be a bit of an outlier, but none of the US airlines’ Q1 earnings announcements were great, in no small part because business travel still isn’t back to pre-pandemic levels. Delta is hoping it’ll settle at 75% of 2019 levels while <a href=\"https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-04-21/industrial-strength-business-travel-recovery-is-showing-cracks-lgqvl4n3?utm_source=website&amp;utm_medium=share\">United’s CEO said</a>&nbsp; “We believe demand is just structurally different than it was pre-pandemic, and we’re still figuring out that new normal.” Maybe not quite the Bill Gates “over 50 percent of business travel… will go away” prediction, but with our 2-year crash course in virtual work, having the post-pandemic setpoint for business travel volume be 20-25% lower doesn’t seem too far fetched.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And even with the non-business “revenge” travel boom filling seats, personal travel is a lot more price sensitive, or elastic as economists like to say, than business travel. My travel patterns are a testament to that -- with higher airfares but a more flexible schedule (I can Zoom from anywhere), it’s been more road trips than plane flights. I’ve had some pretty drives, like through East Tennessee and central Kentucky, but also some real grind-outs, like I-75 pretty much from the Tennessee-Georgia border through Atlanta, all the way down to Macon.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But driving <em>does</em> make packing easier, without the space constraints of a carry-on bag. Which caught up with me, I think, on our Netherlands trip. I was out of practice, sloppy; forgetting to pack so much of what would be my normal kit -- collapsible umbrella, gloves, hat -- so that when the cold rain shifted to snow our first day in Amsterdam (it had been in the 70’s when we left Nashville), our standard throwaway line “If we’ve forgotten it, we’ll just buy it there” became very real. I was very happy to find a couple of sporting goods stores a block down from our hotel. I gotta do some remedial packing training before my next flight.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Javolenus/41932\">Ianiscus</a> by Javolenus (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. Ft: Wired_Ant</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Robert Fenerty hit the TravelCommons website to comment on last episode’s thoughts about ponying up for a not-quite-Amex Platinum card from Chase or Capital One, one that includes a Priority Pass membership. He said<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“You need to fix the cert on travelcommons.com, Safari is complaining.” Yup, I know. Converting the site to https has been on my to-do list for a long time. I’ll get to it, I promise… some day.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“Given the paucity of direct flights from Nashville, I suppose lounge access makes sense. But please don’t get a credit card just for Priority Pass access. I’ve had one for years through my Chase Sapphire Reserve card. But even as a 1K flier, I rarely use it. With Priority Pass, you’ll encounter capacity-controlled second-rate lounges where travelers on certain flights stroll past you while you’re being added to the 45-minute wait list. And after your 45 minute wait you’ll be treated to a sardine-packed lounge where the primary benefits are lack of blaring TVs, cat food sandwiches, and a second-rate chair that might adjoin an electrical outlet.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“Every time I buy a bold $20 glass of Cabernet at a Vino Volo or sip a remarkable east coast hazy at an airport bar with 20 taps, I think about how happy I am to not be begging for a second rate drink at a second rate lounge.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Agree that Priority Pass members definitely seem to be on the bottom of the “priority” list. I’ve been on the other side of that 45-minute wait list, walking into a lounge in ORD’s international terminal, bypassing the queue of Priority Pass holders because I had an AirFrance business class ticket. I’ve also encountered the cat-food sandwich phenomenon. I guess that’s why Amex’s Centurion Lounge is so popular -- great food, nice local beers and top-shelf liquor -- and so crowded and now charging for each guest. Food and drink costs during connections -- another thing I forgot to factor in when I moved to a non-hub city.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Jim McMcDonough hit the TravelCommons Facebook page to pile onto my rant about the US’s stop-start on-line passport renewal efforts.<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I have dual citizenship with the US and Ireland. Getting an Irish passport was a bureaucratic nightmare and took a couple of years from beginning to end. I saw it was expiring at the end of 2022 and went on-line to see how to renew it. Turns out there was a simple application to fill out on-line, got my wife to take a photo of me against a neutral background and uploaded it, paid by credit card, and had a new Irish passport in my mailbox five business days later. It can be done, USA. Try harder.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Jim’s comment got me looking… and sure enough, I can renew my UK passport online also. And checking the US passport renewal page just before recording says the online renewal portal is still <em>paused</em> -- we’re coming up on the 4th month of that pause. Maybe the US State Dept just needs to buy Ireland\'s or the UK\'s system rather than trying to build their own.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>One of the TravelCommons’ thru lines over the past 5-6 years has been the move to a cashless society and me being <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">a bit of a knuckle dragger </a>about it. It’s a stuttering progress -- tripping over small cash-only family-run restaurants in Chicago and here in Nashville, card-only places in Amsterdam; <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/12/24/podcast-191-my-notes-on-italy-and-split-croatia/\">a long weekend in Croatia last fall</a>, before they switched to the euro, that had me hunting down ATMs because not only were there signs saying “Cash Only” but also “Kuna Only” -- the currency that would be defunct in a couple of months. The Netherlands, like I said, was all about the tap -- double-click the iPhone, tap the little block, and hear the ding. I hit an ATM for €200 through force of habit and after 10 days, came home with €40-50 of it. But looking at my iPhone halfway through the trip, it looked like I’d traded cash for apps. I tweeted a screenshot of my phone; I’d added 9 apps to my phone just for those 10 days. Four were for different transit systems - one for Amsterdam, one for Rotterdam, one for the bus from Haarlem down to the tulip gardens, and one for the trains between them. There was Bolt, the Uber/taxicab mash-up, and Donkey Republic to unlock rental bikes. I can go cashless -- as long as my phone battery holds out.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Back in December, right after ChatGPT was released/unleashed (?) on the world, I wrote a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/12/12/how-good-are-chatgpts-top-5-holiday-travel-tips/\">blog post</a> comparing its holiday travel tips to mine. I thought the ChatGPT recommendations were <em>fine</em>, but mine were way more insightful. Now that Google and Microsoft have joined the AI chat game, I thought I’d ask all three “What’s the TravelCommons Podcast like”<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>First, ChatGPT’s response: “The TravelCommons podcast is a podcast that focuses on travel experiences and insights. Hosted by travel enthusiast and former consultant Mark Peacock, the podcast covers a range of topics related to travel, from the latest news and trends to personal travel stories and tips.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“Listeners can expect to hear Peacock\'s own experiences and anecdotes about his travels, as well as interviews with other travel experts and enthusiasts. The podcast often covers topics related to technology and travel, such as the latest travel apps and gadgets, as well as discussions about travel safety, sustainable travel, and more.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“One of the unique aspects of the TravelCommons podcast is that Peacock often records episodes while he\'s on the road, providing listeners with a firsthand account of his travel experiences. This adds an element of excitement and immediacy to the podcast, making it feel like you\'re right there with Peacock as he explores new destinations.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“Overall, if you\'re a travel enthusiast or just looking for some inspiration for your next trip, the TravelCommons podcast is definitely worth checking out.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Not bad, though it’s been a while since I’ve recorded on the road. Maybe I need to get back to that to recapture some of the “excitement and immediacy” of the older episodes.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Next up, Google’s Bard: “The TravelCommons podcast is a weekly podcast for frequent travelers. The host, Matt Kepnes, shares his insights and advice on all things travel, from planning and booking trips to navigating airports and hotels. He also interviews experts in the travel industry, such as airline pilots, hoteliers, and travel writers.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“The podcast is well-produced and informative, and Matt\'s enthusiasm for travel is contagious. He makes even the most mundane travel topics interesting, and he always has a few tips up his sleeve to help you make the most of your trips.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Uh, no. Somehow Bard has transferred TravelCommons to Nomadic Matt. I think I need to check and make sure I still own the travelcommons.com domain name.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And finally, Microsoft’s Bing Chat which is powered by the most recent version of ChatGPT: “TravelCommons is a podcast that focuses on the experience of travel. It is hosted by Mark Peacock, who is a frequent traveler himself. The podcast covers a wide range of topics related to travel, including tips for packing and planning, reviews of airlines and hotels, and discussions about the latest trends in travel. The podcast has been around since 2005 and has a loyal following of listeners who appreciate its honest and informative approach to travel.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>That’s pretty spot on! I may have to update the TravelCommons media guide with that.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page like Jim or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or, if you can fight thru the Safari security warnings like Robert did, you can post your comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/48914\">In Peace (Somewhere Else Mix)</a> by cdk (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. Ft: Snowflake</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Best Laid Travel Plans...</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The first topic in the last episode was “Still Overthinking Travel Planning” -- which I do because, well, I’ve spent a good bit of my waking life traveling. But kinda like how generals always fight the last war, I’m probably not doing a great job of accounting for the changes in today’s travel landscape -- full planes and hotels, limited flexibility, taking what you can get.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Living in Nashville, a non-hub city, means, more often than not, I have to plan for a connection, especially when choosing our flight home from Amsterdam in April, having to factor in the time needed to pass through Customs, maybe having to transit from an international to a domestic terminal, having to clear TSA security again -- all in addition to some cushion for a late flight. But when I looked across all our possible connections, the times were either snug, less than 2 hours, or boringly long, 4-6 hours. So I decided to risk it, taking the snug layover through ORD. I figured we knew the airport, so no time lost trying to figure out the terminal connection, and most importantly, if we <em>did</em> get caught up somewhere and missed our connection, there was another flight to Nashville at 6pm, some 4 hours later.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As you might guess, all didn’t go smoothly because if it did, I wouldn’t be talking about it on the podcast. There’s not much interesting about “I booked a snug connection and everything was fine.” It actually started to go off the rails a few days before our departure, on our last night in Rotterdam. We stayed at the <a href=\"https://www.hotelpincoffs.nl/en\">Hotel Pincoffs</a> on the left bank -- highly recommended -- and after dinner, we hit the lounge where ordered a glass of what was labeled a Dutch coastal gin called <a href=\"https://hermitgin.com/\">Hermit</a>, skipping the tonic as I talked about in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/01/26/podcast-192-new-year-travel-planning-tips-gin-conquers-the-world/\">episode #192</a>, so I could taste the botanicals and the salty water they plugged on the label.&nbsp; I liked it <em>a lot</em>, so much so that I ordered another glass, and then spent 3 hours the next day rummaging through Amsterdam liquor stores ‘til I found a bottle to take home. Which meant I was now checking my bag on my flight to ORD.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Two days later, our snug connection begins to decay. The inbound United flight was late which dominoed out our departure time by 20 minutes. The captain said not to worry, he’d push the throttle and make it up in the air. I’ve heard that promise before, and sure enough, we hit the gate 20 minutes late. OK, snug-ger, but still doable. The Global Entry kiosk was fast, almost too fast. ORD has <a href=\"https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/local-media-release/global-entry-begins-touchless-receipt-less-processing-ord\">new facial biometric kiosks</a>. I walked up and before I figured out how to use it, it had recognized my face and told me to move on. Slightly creepy, but that’s a topic for another episode.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>We find the luggage carousel just as the bags with the orange Priority tags start popping out. I let myself feel a bit optimistic. I’m watching for my gin-bearing bag. And watch. And watch. Non-priority bags come out. Still I’m watching. And feeling optimism decay. We work through the Customs exit line only to walk straight into an even longer line to recheck our bags for our Nashville flight. Only 2, 3 people are working it. I’m feeling like <a href=\"https://youtu.be/N8uUTW9zPbM\">Stevie Ray Vaughn when he sings</a> “tick tock, people, time’s ticking away.” I tweet a picture to United saying “I’d be pretty thrilled if I made my ORD-BNA connection after our AMS-ORD flight arrived late.” No response. We finally get up to the bag checker. She scans the bag tag; I can see her screen flash red. “Nope,” she says, “You won’t make your flight” and then turns to the next person in line.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>We stand there for a moment and then drag our bags over to the line for the re-booking agent. But as I’ve said many times on this podcast, work all the channels. My usual Twitter play didn’t seem to be working (United’s social media hub must be short-staffed), so I dial up the Premiere line and tell my entire tale of woe to the phone agent while still in line for the in-person one. Getting up to the ORD agent, I tell her the same thing; United’s delay caused me to miss my connection, so just book me on the 6pm to Nashville. Seems easy enough -- but not in today’s travel world. The rebooking agent tells me there are no seats left to Nashville today… on any carrier. “This is unacceptable,” I said. She goes palms up and turns to the next person in line. “Wait,” I said, “if you can’t get me home tonight, United owes me overnight accommodations.” She stopped, thought for a moment, and then wrote down a number. “You need to call them.” It was the same number I’d called while in line.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But though all that, I hadn’t hung up on that phone agent; she was still there. “I’m sorry but there are no seats to Nashville, but I can get you to Memphis.” She’s trying to help, but I don’t think she realizes that Tennessee is a long state -- Memphis is a 3-hour drive to Nashville. “This is unacceptable,” I said. She apologizes again. 15 minutes into the call, she offers to transfer me to her supervisor. I tell her my story with perhaps a little frustration creeping into my tone. “Can I put you on hold?” she asks. Sure, why not? In the meantime, Irene is checking on Southwest flight; apparently United agents can’t see them. The supervisor eventually comes back, “Would the 6pm flight be OK for you?” 6pm <em>today</em>? After 36 minutes on the phone and saying “This is unacceptable” 2 or 3 times, they scrounged up the seats I’d been asking for all along. We hopped on the AirTrain to get over to Terminal 1 and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/tortas.frontera/\" title=\"\">Tortas Frontera</a>, my favorite ORD restaurant, for a couple of unplanned margaritas. While checking the United app for my new boarding pass, I saw that United twitter had finally responded. “We\'re sorry about the stressful day you\'ve had today. As a gesture of goodwill, we\'re able to deposit 2,500 miles into each of your accounts.” Using a 1.5¢/mile conversion rate, that just about covered our Frontera tab. In today’s travel world, that’s probably the best outcome I could’ve hoped for.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music --<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/35724\">Blue Like Venus</a> by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. Ft: Admiral Bob</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Roaming Entropy</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Well before this “revenge” travel boom, over-tourism was a trending topic. I talked about it on many past episodes - biking up to Delicate Arch in Moab, Utah to find a swarm of photographers setting up to get their “golden hour shot” at sunset; trying to get in front of unloading tour buses along Iceland’s Golden Circle, and most recently squeezing through narrow streets in Rome when I made the mistake of agreeing to meet a friend at Trevi Fountain.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But, as you might guess, that’s not my preferred touring style. Instead, I tend to do what my family calls my “solo toro” routine -- going off on my own to wander a city, randomly walking, letting traffic lights make the call when it’s time to make a turn. Often I’ll have some end-point in mind -- a taproom, a church -- but my path getting there won’t be the most direct.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I didn’t think this was unique, but still, I’ve been pleasantly surprised to run across <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-emotional-benefits-of-wandering-11671131450?st=mmqyql6e1cktnub&amp;reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink\" title=\"\">a couple of articles</a> that put a proper name to this -- flâneuring, from <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fl%C3%A2neur\" title=\"\">flâneur</a>, the (of course) French word from the 19th Century that means \"a stroller, a loafer, a wanderer,\" someone who walks around a city without a fixed destination or purpose, just observing and enjoying the sights, sounds and smells. The English author Virginia Woolfe called it “street haunting” which I like, but I think my favorite term is “roaming entropy,” coined by some <a href=\"https://www.hartleylab.org/uploads/5/3/1/0/53101939/heller%E2%80%8A_et_al._2020.pdf\" title=\"\">NYU researchers</a> whose work showed a positive correlation between someone’s mood and how many new/varied/unexpected locations they visited.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“Roaming entropy,” “experiential diversity,” they say, promotes cognitive development -- which makes sense to me. In many ways, this is one of the main reasons people travel, to experience something new. Way back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\">episode #166</a>, Emily Thomas talked about how philosophers such as Descartes and Montagne thought experiencing “otherness of travel” was important to broadening your mind, forcing you to think past your familiar experiences. But many folks want to experience something new, but without the risk of disappointment -- or something worse -- that the term “roaming entropy” implies. And there’s nothing new to that. Guidebooks have been around forever. When Irene and I started traveling through Europe, we’d always carry a Green Michelin guide, and we’d check off the 1-, 2-, and 3-star sites as we’d hit them. Not really all that different from people today queuing up for selfies at an Instagram-famous spot.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But ticking off a list of Insta-sites or starred spots doesn’t open you to the possibility of serendipitous delight, the joy of discovering something unexpected. On the flip side, it does tend to keep you out of serendipitous disaster. I don’t recall my wanders putting me in harm’s way, but there have been a few times where I felt I’d pushed the envelope a bit far -- in Cape Town, J’burg; in Brussels -- and so beat a very direct, non-random retreat to someplace safer.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The NYU researchers also talked about “sociodemographic experiential variability,” which is their polysyllabic way of describing walking around in different ethnic/cultural neighborhoods during flâneuring. I’m always hitting up food carts for, say, tamales in Mexican neighborhoods, or not-really-well-defined meats on skewers in Asian night markets, or Cuban coffee joints in Miami. Come to think of it, a lot of my sociodemographic experiential variability involves food or booze. Though in my defense, if you keep stopping to buy stuff, you then have to carry it around with you the rest of the day, weighing you down, maybe forcing you to shorten your walk. And that’s not what “roaming entropy” is about. It’s all about riding the random wave.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #193</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>. And while you’re at TravelCommons.com, you can check out the show notes page for a transcript and any links I’ve mentioned. Or you can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_194.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #194 — Best Laid Travel Plans; Roaming Entropy','','inherit','closed','closed','','4312-revision-v1','','','2023-06-17 12:34:06','2023-06-17 17:34:06','',4312,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4315',0,'revision','',0),
(4317,1,'2023-06-19 11:35:38','2023-06-19 16:35:38','','DALL·E 2023-06-19 11.34.33','','inherit','open','closed','','dall%c2%b7e-2023-06-19-11-34-33','','','2023-06-19 11:35:38','2023-06-19 16:35:38','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/DALL·E-2023-06-19-11.34.33.png',0,'attachment','image/png',0),
(4318,1,'2023-06-19 12:48:45','2023-06-19 17:48:45','','replicate-prediction-57paxyjb7xj7hm5kqombv3ecdy','','inherit','open','closed','','replicate-prediction-57paxyjb7xj7hm5kqombv3ecdy','','','2023-06-19 12:52:00','2023-06-19 17:52:00','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/replicate-prediction-57paxyjb7xj7hm5kqombv3ecdy.png',0,'attachment','image/png',0),
(4319,1,'2023-06-19 12:53:28','2023-06-19 17:53:28','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/replicate-prediction-57paxyjb7xj7hm5kqombv3ecdy-300x300.png\" alt=\"Robot using a laptop doing travel planning while on a beach\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\">Future of Travel Planning[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Doing a bit of winter travel, the bar tab from waiting out a weather delay got me rethinking the economics of airport lounge memberships. Doing yet more travel planning but with a focus on making the most of the points and miles we accumulated on credit cards during the pandemic. And after eight months in Nashville, I compare the two sides of the local music scene -- the Nash-Vegas honky tonks vs the smaller, eclectic off-Broadway scene. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_194.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #194: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN after a good bit of travel - 10 days in the Netherlands bracketed by road trips to Louisville, Savannah, GA, and Chicago, and then a tough week of beer drinking here in Nashville when the Craft Brewers Conference touched down. So, I’ve been keeping occupied since the last episode. But it’s all been personal travel; all of my business travel has been replaced with Zoom and Teams sessions. I may be a bit of an outlier, but none of the US airlines’ Q1 earnings announcements were great, in no small part because business travel still isn’t back to pre-pandemic levels. Delta is hoping it’ll settle at 75% of 2019 levels while <a href=\"https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-04-21/industrial-strength-business-travel-recovery-is-showing-cracks-lgqvl4n3?utm_source=website&amp;utm_medium=share\">United’s CEO said</a>&nbsp; “We believe demand is just structurally different than it was pre-pandemic, and we’re still figuring out that new normal.” Maybe not quite the Bill Gates “over 50 percent of business travel… will go away” prediction, but with our 2-year crash course in virtual work, having the post-pandemic setpoint for business travel volume be 20-25% lower doesn’t seem too far fetched.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And even with the non-business “revenge” travel boom filling seats, personal travel is a lot more price sensitive, or elastic as economists like to say, than business travel. My travel patterns are a testament to that -- with higher airfares but a more flexible schedule (I can Zoom from anywhere), it’s been more road trips than plane flights. I’ve had some pretty drives, like through East Tennessee and central Kentucky, but also some real grind-outs, like I-75 pretty much from the Tennessee-Georgia border through Atlanta, all the way down to Macon.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But driving <em>does</em> make packing easier, without the space constraints of a carry-on bag. Which caught up with me, I think, on our Netherlands trip. I was out of practice, sloppy; forgetting to pack so much of what would be my normal kit -- collapsible umbrella, gloves, hat -- so that when the cold rain shifted to snow our first day in Amsterdam (it had been in the 70’s when we left Nashville), our standard throwaway line “If we’ve forgotten it, we’ll just buy it there” became very real. I was very happy to find a couple of sporting goods stores a block down from our hotel. I gotta do some remedial packing training before my next flight.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Javolenus/41932\">Ianiscus</a> by Javolenus (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. Ft: Wired_Ant</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Robert Fenerty hit the TravelCommons website to comment on last episode’s thoughts about ponying up for a not-quite-Amex Platinum card from Chase or Capital One, one that includes a Priority Pass membership. He said<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“You need to fix the cert on travelcommons.com, Safari is complaining.” Yup, I know. Converting the site to https has been on my to-do list for a long time. I’ll get to it, I promise… some day.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“Given the paucity of direct flights from Nashville, I suppose lounge access makes sense. But please don’t get a credit card just for Priority Pass access. I’ve had one for years through my Chase Sapphire Reserve card. But even as a 1K flier, I rarely use it. With Priority Pass, you’ll encounter capacity-controlled second-rate lounges where travelers on certain flights stroll past you while you’re being added to the 45-minute wait list. And after your 45 minute wait you’ll be treated to a sardine-packed lounge where the primary benefits are lack of blaring TVs, cat food sandwiches, and a second-rate chair that might adjoin an electrical outlet.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“Every time I buy a bold $20 glass of Cabernet at a Vino Volo or sip a remarkable east coast hazy at an airport bar with 20 taps, I think about how happy I am to not be begging for a second rate drink at a second rate lounge.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Agree that Priority Pass members definitely seem to be on the bottom of the “priority” list. I’ve been on the other side of that 45-minute wait list, walking into a lounge in ORD’s international terminal, bypassing the queue of Priority Pass holders because I had an AirFrance business class ticket. I’ve also encountered the cat-food sandwich phenomenon. I guess that’s why Amex’s Centurion Lounge is so popular -- great food, nice local beers and top-shelf liquor -- and so crowded and now charging for each guest. Food and drink costs during connections -- another thing I forgot to factor in when I moved to a non-hub city.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Jim McMcDonough hit the TravelCommons Facebook page to pile onto my rant about the US’s stop-start on-line passport renewal efforts.<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I have dual citizenship with the US and Ireland. Getting an Irish passport was a bureaucratic nightmare and took a couple of years from beginning to end. I saw it was expiring at the end of 2022 and went on-line to see how to renew it. Turns out there was a simple application to fill out on-line, got my wife to take a photo of me against a neutral background and uploaded it, paid by credit card, and had a new Irish passport in my mailbox five business days later. It can be done, USA. Try harder.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Jim’s comment got me looking… and sure enough, I can renew my UK passport online also. And checking the US passport renewal page just before recording says the online renewal portal is still <em>paused</em> -- we’re coming up on the 4th month of that pause. Maybe the US State Dept just needs to buy Ireland\'s or the UK\'s system rather than trying to build their own.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>One of the TravelCommons’ thru lines over the past 5-6 years has been the move to a cashless society and me being <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">a bit of a knuckle dragger </a>about it. It’s a stuttering progress -- tripping over small cash-only family-run restaurants in Chicago and here in Nashville, card-only places in Amsterdam; <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/12/24/podcast-191-my-notes-on-italy-and-split-croatia/\">a long weekend in Croatia last fall</a>, before they switched to the euro, that had me hunting down ATMs because not only were there signs saying “Cash Only” but also “Kuna Only” -- the currency that would be defunct in a couple of months. The Netherlands, like I said, was all about the tap -- double-click the iPhone, tap the little block, and hear the ding. I hit an ATM for €200 through force of habit and after 10 days, came home with €40-50 of it. But looking at my iPhone halfway through the trip, it looked like I’d traded cash for apps. I tweeted a screenshot of my phone; I’d added 9 apps to my phone just for those 10 days. Four were for different transit systems - one for Amsterdam, one for Rotterdam, one for the bus from Haarlem down to the tulip gardens, and one for the trains between them. There was Bolt, the Uber/taxicab mash-up, and Donkey Republic to unlock rental bikes. I can go cashless -- as long as my phone battery holds out.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Back in December, right after ChatGPT was released/unleashed (?) on the world, I wrote a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/12/12/how-good-are-chatgpts-top-5-holiday-travel-tips/\">blog post</a> comparing its holiday travel tips to mine. I thought the ChatGPT recommendations were <em>fine</em>, but mine were way more insightful. Now that Google and Microsoft have joined the AI chat game, I thought I’d ask all three “What’s the TravelCommons Podcast like”<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>First, ChatGPT’s response: “The TravelCommons podcast is a podcast that focuses on travel experiences and insights. Hosted by travel enthusiast and former consultant Mark Peacock, the podcast covers a range of topics related to travel, from the latest news and trends to personal travel stories and tips.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“Listeners can expect to hear Peacock\'s own experiences and anecdotes about his travels, as well as interviews with other travel experts and enthusiasts. The podcast often covers topics related to technology and travel, such as the latest travel apps and gadgets, as well as discussions about travel safety, sustainable travel, and more.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“One of the unique aspects of the TravelCommons podcast is that Peacock often records episodes while he\'s on the road, providing listeners with a firsthand account of his travel experiences. This adds an element of excitement and immediacy to the podcast, making it feel like you\'re right there with Peacock as he explores new destinations.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“Overall, if you\'re a travel enthusiast or just looking for some inspiration for your next trip, the TravelCommons podcast is definitely worth checking out.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Not bad, though it’s been a while since I’ve recorded on the road. Maybe I need to get back to that to recapture some of the “excitement and immediacy” of the older episodes.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Next up, Google’s Bard: “The TravelCommons podcast is a weekly podcast for frequent travelers. The host, Matt Kepnes, shares his insights and advice on all things travel, from planning and booking trips to navigating airports and hotels. He also interviews experts in the travel industry, such as airline pilots, hoteliers, and travel writers.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“The podcast is well-produced and informative, and Matt\'s enthusiasm for travel is contagious. He makes even the most mundane travel topics interesting, and he always has a few tips up his sleeve to help you make the most of your trips.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Uh, no. Somehow Bard has transferred TravelCommons to Nomadic Matt. I think I need to check and make sure I still own the travelcommons.com domain name.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And finally, Microsoft’s Bing Chat which is powered by the most recent version of ChatGPT: “TravelCommons is a podcast that focuses on the experience of travel. It is hosted by Mark Peacock, who is a frequent traveler himself. The podcast covers a wide range of topics related to travel, including tips for packing and planning, reviews of airlines and hotels, and discussions about the latest trends in travel. The podcast has been around since 2005 and has a loyal following of listeners who appreciate its honest and informative approach to travel.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>That’s pretty spot on! I may have to update the TravelCommons media guide with that.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page like Jim or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or, if you can fight thru the Safari security warnings like Robert did, you can post your comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/48914\">In Peace (Somewhere Else Mix)</a> by cdk (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. Ft: Snowflake</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Best Laid Travel Plans...</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The first topic in the last episode was “Still Overthinking Travel Planning” -- which I do because, well, I’ve spent a good bit of my waking life traveling. But kinda like how generals always fight the last war, I’m probably not doing a great job of accounting for the changes in today’s travel landscape -- full planes and hotels, limited flexibility, taking what you can get.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Living in Nashville, a non-hub city, means, more often than not, I have to plan for a connection, especially when choosing our flight home from Amsterdam in April, having to factor in the time needed to pass through Customs, maybe having to transit from an international to a domestic terminal, having to clear TSA security again -- all in addition to some cushion for a late flight. But when I looked across all our possible connections, the times were either snug, less than 2 hours, or boringly long, 4-6 hours. So I decided to risk it, taking the snug layover through ORD. I figured we knew the airport, so no time lost trying to figure out the terminal connection, and most importantly, if we <em>did</em> get caught up somewhere and missed our connection, there was another flight to Nashville at 6pm, some 4 hours later.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As you might guess, all didn’t go smoothly because if it did, I wouldn’t be talking about it on the podcast. There’s not much interesting about “I booked a snug connection and everything was fine.” It actually started to go off the rails a few days before our departure, on our last night in Rotterdam. We stayed at the <a href=\"https://www.hotelpincoffs.nl/en\">Hotel Pincoffs</a> on the left bank -- highly recommended -- and after dinner, we hit the lounge where ordered a glass of what was labeled a Dutch coastal gin called <a href=\"https://hermitgin.com/\">Hermit</a>, skipping the tonic as I talked about in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/01/26/podcast-192-new-year-travel-planning-tips-gin-conquers-the-world/\">episode #192</a>, so I could taste the botanicals and the salty water they plugged on the label.&nbsp; I liked it <em>a lot</em>, so much so that I ordered another glass, and then spent 3 hours the next day rummaging through Amsterdam liquor stores ‘til I found a bottle to take home. Which meant I was now checking my bag on my flight to ORD.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Two days later, our snug connection begins to decay. The inbound United flight was late which dominoed out our departure time by 20 minutes. The captain said not to worry, he’d push the throttle and make it up in the air. I’ve heard that promise before, and sure enough, we hit the gate 20 minutes late. OK, snug-ger, but still doable. The Global Entry kiosk was fast, almost too fast. ORD has <a href=\"https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/local-media-release/global-entry-begins-touchless-receipt-less-processing-ord\">new facial biometric kiosks</a>. I walked up and before I figured out how to use it, it had recognized my face and told me to move on. Slightly creepy, but that’s a topic for another episode.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>We find the luggage carousel just as the bags with the orange Priority tags start popping out. I let myself feel a bit optimistic. I’m watching for my gin-bearing bag. And watch. And watch. Non-priority bags come out. Still I’m watching. And feeling optimism decay. We work through the Customs exit line only to walk straight into an even longer line to recheck our bags for our Nashville flight. Only 2, 3 people are working it. I’m feeling like <a href=\"https://youtu.be/N8uUTW9zPbM\">Stevie Ray Vaughn when he sings</a> “tick tock, people, time’s ticking away.” I tweet a picture to United saying “I’d be pretty thrilled if I made my ORD-BNA connection after our AMS-ORD flight arrived late.” No response. We finally get up to the bag checker. She scans the bag tag; I can see her screen flash red. “Nope,” she says, “You won’t make your flight” and then turns to the next person in line.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>We stand there for a moment and then drag our bags over to the line for the re-booking agent. But as I’ve said many times on this podcast, work all the channels. My usual Twitter play didn’t seem to be working (United’s social media hub must be short-staffed), so I dial up the Premiere line and tell my entire tale of woe to the phone agent while still in line for the in-person one. Getting up to the ORD agent, I tell her the same thing; United’s delay caused me to miss my connection, so just book me on the 6pm to Nashville. Seems easy enough -- but not in today’s travel world. The rebooking agent tells me there are no seats left to Nashville today… on any carrier. “This is unacceptable,” I said. She goes palms up and turns to the next person in line. “Wait,” I said, “if you can’t get me home tonight, United owes me overnight accommodations.” She stopped, thought for a moment, and then wrote down a number. “You need to call them.” It was the same number I’d called while in line.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But though all that, I hadn’t hung up on that phone agent; she was still there. “I’m sorry but there are no seats to Nashville, but I can get you to Memphis.” She’s trying to help, but I don’t think she realizes that Tennessee is a long state -- Memphis is a 3-hour drive to Nashville. “This is unacceptable,” I said. She apologizes again. 15 minutes into the call, she offers to transfer me to her supervisor. I tell her my story with perhaps a little frustration creeping into my tone. “Can I put you on hold?” she asks. Sure, why not? In the meantime, Irene is checking on Southwest flight; apparently United agents can’t see them. The supervisor eventually comes back, “Would the 6pm flight be OK for you?” 6pm <em>today</em>? After 36 minutes on the phone and saying “This is unacceptable” 2 or 3 times, they scrounged up the seats I’d been asking for all along. We hopped on the AirTrain to get over to Terminal 1 and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/tortas.frontera/\" title=\"\">Tortas Frontera</a>, my favorite ORD restaurant, for a couple of unplanned margaritas. While checking the United app for my new boarding pass, I saw that United twitter had finally responded. “We\'re sorry about the stressful day you\'ve had today. As a gesture of goodwill, we\'re able to deposit 2,500 miles into each of your accounts.” Using a 1.5¢/mile conversion rate, that just about covered our Frontera tab. In today’s travel world, that’s probably the best outcome I could’ve hoped for.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music --<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/35724\">Blue Like Venus</a> by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. Ft: Admiral Bob</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Roaming Entropy</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Well before this “revenge” travel boom, over-tourism was a trending topic. I talked about it on many past episodes - biking up to Delicate Arch in Moab, Utah to find a swarm of photographers setting up to get their “golden hour shot” at sunset; trying to get in front of unloading tour buses along Iceland’s Golden Circle, and most recently squeezing through narrow streets in Rome when I made the mistake of agreeing to meet a friend at Trevi Fountain.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But, as you might guess, that’s not my preferred touring style. Instead, I tend to do what my family calls my “solo toro” routine -- going off on my own to wander a city, randomly walking, letting traffic lights make the call when it’s time to make a turn. Often I’ll have some end-point in mind -- a taproom, a church -- but my path getting there won’t be the most direct.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I didn’t think this was unique, but still, I’ve been pleasantly surprised to run across <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-emotional-benefits-of-wandering-11671131450?st=mmqyql6e1cktnub&amp;reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink\" title=\"\">a couple of articles</a> that put a proper name to this -- flâneuring, from <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fl%C3%A2neur\" title=\"\">flâneur</a>, the (of course) French word from the 19th Century that means \"a stroller, a loafer, a wanderer,\" someone who walks around a city without a fixed destination or purpose, just observing and enjoying the sights, sounds and smells. The English author Virginia Woolfe called it “street haunting” which I like, but I think my favorite term is “roaming entropy,” coined by some <a href=\"https://www.hartleylab.org/uploads/5/3/1/0/53101939/heller%E2%80%8A_et_al._2020.pdf\" title=\"\">NYU researchers</a> whose work showed a positive correlation between someone’s mood and how many new/varied/unexpected locations they visited.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“Roaming entropy,” “experiential diversity,” they say, promotes cognitive development -- which makes sense to me. In many ways, this is one of the main reasons people travel, to experience something new. Way back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\">episode #166</a>, Emily Thomas talked about how philosophers such as Descartes and Montagne thought experiencing “otherness of travel” was important to broadening your mind, forcing you to think past your familiar experiences. But many folks want to experience something new, but without the risk of disappointment -- or something worse -- that the term “roaming entropy” implies. And there’s nothing new to that. Guidebooks have been around forever. When Irene and I started traveling through Europe, we’d always carry a Green Michelin guide, and we’d check off the 1-, 2-, and 3-star sites as we’d hit them. Not really all that different from people today queuing up for selfies at an Instagram-famous spot.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But ticking off a list of Insta-sites or starred spots doesn’t open you to the possibility of serendipitous delight, the joy of discovering something unexpected. On the flip side, it does tend to keep you out of serendipitous disaster. I don’t recall my wanders putting me in harm’s way, but there have been a few times where I felt I’d pushed the envelope a bit far -- in Cape Town, J’burg; in Brussels -- and so beat a very direct, non-random retreat to someplace safer.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The NYU researchers also talked about “sociodemographic experiential variability,” which is their polysyllabic way of describing walking around in different ethnic/cultural neighborhoods during flâneuring. I’m always hitting up food carts for, say, tamales in Mexican neighborhoods, or not-really-well-defined meats on skewers in Asian night markets, or Cuban coffee joints in Miami. Come to think of it, a lot of my sociodemographic experiential variability involves food or booze. Though in my defense, if you keep stopping to buy stuff, you then have to carry it around with you the rest of the day, weighing you down, maybe forcing you to shorten your walk. And that’s not what “roaming entropy” is about. It’s all about riding the random wave.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #193</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>. And while you’re at TravelCommons.com, you can check out the show notes page for a transcript and any links I’ve mentioned. Or you can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_194.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #194 — Best Laid Travel Plans; Roaming Entropy','','inherit','closed','closed','','4312-revision-v1','','','2023-06-19 12:53:28','2023-06-19 17:53:28','',4312,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4319',0,'revision','',0),
(4320,1,'2023-06-19 12:59:19','2023-06-19 17:59:19','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/replicate-prediction-57paxyjb7xj7hm5kqombv3ecdy-300x300.png\" alt=\"Robot using a laptop doing travel planning while on a beach\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\">Future of Travel Planning[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Doing a bit of winter travel, the bar tab from waiting out a weather delay got me rethinking the economics of airport lounge memberships. Doing yet more travel planning but with a focus on making the most of the points and miles we accumulated on credit cards during the pandemic. And after eight months in Nashville, I compare the two sides of the local music scene -- the Nash-Vegas honky tonks vs the smaller, eclectic off-Broadway scene. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_194.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #194: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN after a good bit of travel - 10 days in the Netherlands bracketed by road trips to Louisville, Savannah, GA, and Chicago, and then a tough week of beer drinking here in Nashville when the Craft Brewers Conference touched down. So, I’ve been keeping occupied since the last episode. But it’s all been personal travel; all of my business travel has been replaced with Zoom and Teams sessions. I may be a bit of an outlier, but none of the US airlines’ Q1 earnings announcements were great, in no small part because business travel still isn’t back to pre-pandemic levels. Delta is hoping it’ll settle at 75% of 2019 levels while <a href=\"https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-04-21/industrial-strength-business-travel-recovery-is-showing-cracks-lgqvl4n3?utm_source=website&amp;utm_medium=share\">United’s CEO said</a>&nbsp; “We believe demand is just structurally different than it was pre-pandemic, and we’re still figuring out that new normal.” Maybe not quite the Bill Gates “over 50 percent of business travel… will go away” prediction, but with our 2-year crash course in virtual work, having the post-pandemic setpoint for business travel volume be 20-25% lower doesn’t seem too far fetched.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And even with the non-business “revenge” travel boom filling seats, personal travel is a lot more price sensitive, or elastic as economists like to say, than business travel. My travel patterns are a testament to that -- with higher airfares but a more flexible schedule (I can Zoom from anywhere), it’s been more road trips than plane flights. I’ve had some pretty drives, like through East Tennessee and central Kentucky, but also some real grind-outs, like I-75 pretty much from the Tennessee-Georgia border through Atlanta, all the way down to Macon.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But driving <em>does</em> make packing easier, without the space constraints of a carry-on bag. Which caught up with me, I think, on our Netherlands trip. I was out of practice, sloppy; forgetting to pack so much of what would be my normal kit -- collapsible umbrella, gloves, hat -- so that when the cold rain shifted to snow our first day in Amsterdam (it had been in the 70’s when we left Nashville), our standard throwaway line “If we’ve forgotten it, we’ll just buy it there” became very real. I was very happy to find a couple of sporting goods stores a block down from our hotel. I gotta do some remedial packing training before my next flight.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Javolenus/41932\">Ianiscus</a> by Javolenus (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. Ft: Wired_Ant</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Robert Fenerty hit the TravelCommons website to comment on last episode’s thoughts about ponying up for a not-quite-Amex Platinum card from Chase or Capital One, one that includes a Priority Pass membership. He said<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“You need to fix the cert on travelcommons.com, Safari is complaining.” Yup, I know. Converting the site to https has been on my to-do list for a long time. I’ll get to it, I promise… some day.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“Given the paucity of direct flights from Nashville, I suppose lounge access makes sense. But please don’t get a credit card just for Priority Pass access. I’ve had one for years through my Chase Sapphire Reserve card. But even as a 1K flier, I rarely use it. With Priority Pass, you’ll encounter capacity-controlled second-rate lounges where travelers on certain flights stroll past you while you’re being added to the 45-minute wait list. And after your 45 minute wait you’ll be treated to a sardine-packed lounge where the primary benefits are lack of blaring TVs, cat food sandwiches, and a second-rate chair that might adjoin an electrical outlet.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“Every time I buy a bold $20 glass of Cabernet at a Vino Volo or sip a remarkable east coast hazy at an airport bar with 20 taps, I think about how happy I am to not be begging for a second rate drink at a second rate lounge.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Agree that Priority Pass members definitely seem to be on the bottom of the “priority” list. I’ve been on the other side of that 45-minute wait list, walking into a lounge in ORD’s international terminal, bypassing the queue of Priority Pass holders because I had an AirFrance business class ticket. I’ve also encountered the cat-food sandwich phenomenon. I guess that’s why Amex’s Centurion Lounge is so popular -- great food, nice local beers and top-shelf liquor -- and so crowded and now charging for each guest. Food and drink costs during connections -- another thing I forgot to factor in when I moved to a non-hub city.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Jim McMcDonough hit the TravelCommons Facebook page to pile onto my rant about the US’s stop-start on-line passport renewal efforts.<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I have dual citizenship with the US and Ireland. Getting an Irish passport was a bureaucratic nightmare and took a couple of years from beginning to end. I saw it was expiring at the end of 2022 and went on-line to see how to renew it. Turns out there was a simple application to fill out on-line, got my wife to take a photo of me against a neutral background and uploaded it, paid by credit card, and had a new Irish passport in my mailbox five business days later. It can be done, USA. Try harder.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Jim’s comment got me looking… and sure enough, I can renew my UK passport online also. And checking the US passport renewal page just before recording says the online renewal portal is still <em>paused</em> -- we’re coming up on the 4th month of that pause. Maybe the US State Dept just needs to buy Ireland\'s or the UK\'s system rather than trying to build their own.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>One of the TravelCommons’ thru lines over the past 5-6 years has been the move to a cashless society and me being <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">a bit of a knuckle dragger </a>about it. It’s a stuttering progress -- tripping over small cash-only family-run restaurants in Chicago and here in Nashville, card-only places in Amsterdam; <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/12/24/podcast-191-my-notes-on-italy-and-split-croatia/\">a long weekend in Croatia last fall</a>, before they switched to the euro, that had me hunting down ATMs because not only were there signs saying “Cash Only” but also “Kuna Only” -- the currency that would be defunct in a couple of months. The Netherlands, like I said, was all about the tap -- double-click the iPhone, tap the little block, and hear the ding. I hit an ATM for €200 through force of habit and after 10 days, came home with €40-50 of it. But looking at my iPhone halfway through the trip, it looked like I’d traded cash for apps. I tweeted a screenshot of my phone; I’d added 9 apps to my phone just for those 10 days. Four were for different transit systems - one for Amsterdam, one for Rotterdam, one for the bus from Haarlem down to the tulip gardens, and one for the trains between them. There was Bolt, the Uber/taxicab mash-up, and Donkey Republic to unlock rental bikes. I can go cashless -- as long as my phone battery holds out.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Back in December, right after ChatGPT was released/unleashed (?) on the world, I wrote a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/12/12/how-good-are-chatgpts-top-5-holiday-travel-tips/\">blog post</a> comparing its holiday travel tips to mine. I thought the ChatGPT recommendations were <em>fine</em>, but mine were way more insightful. Now that Google and Microsoft have joined the AI chat game, I thought I’d ask all three “What’s the TravelCommons Podcast like”<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>First, ChatGPT’s response: “The TravelCommons podcast is a podcast that focuses on travel experiences and insights. Hosted by travel enthusiast and former consultant Mark Peacock, the podcast covers a range of topics related to travel, from the latest news and trends to personal travel stories and tips.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“Listeners can expect to hear Peacock\'s own experiences and anecdotes about his travels, as well as interviews with other travel experts and enthusiasts. The podcast often covers topics related to technology and travel, such as the latest travel apps and gadgets, as well as discussions about travel safety, sustainable travel, and more.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“One of the unique aspects of the TravelCommons podcast is that Peacock often records episodes while he\'s on the road, providing listeners with a firsthand account of his travel experiences. This adds an element of excitement and immediacy to the podcast, making it feel like you\'re right there with Peacock as he explores new destinations.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“Overall, if you\'re a travel enthusiast or just looking for some inspiration for your next trip, the TravelCommons podcast is definitely worth checking out.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Not bad, though it’s been a while since I’ve recorded on the road. Maybe I need to get back to that to recapture some of the “excitement and immediacy” of the older episodes.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Next up, Google’s Bard: “The TravelCommons podcast is a weekly podcast for frequent travelers. The host, Matt Kepnes, shares his insights and advice on all things travel, from planning and booking trips to navigating airports and hotels. He also interviews experts in the travel industry, such as airline pilots, hoteliers, and travel writers.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“The podcast is well-produced and informative, and Matt\'s enthusiasm for travel is contagious. He makes even the most mundane travel topics interesting, and he always has a few tips up his sleeve to help you make the most of your trips.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Uh, no. Somehow Bard has transferred TravelCommons to Nomadic Matt. I think I need to check and make sure I still own the travelcommons.com domain name.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And finally, Microsoft’s Bing Chat which is powered by the most recent version of ChatGPT: “TravelCommons is a podcast that focuses on the experience of travel. It is hosted by Mark Peacock, who is a frequent traveler himself. The podcast covers a wide range of topics related to travel, including tips for packing and planning, reviews of airlines and hotels, and discussions about the latest trends in travel. The podcast has been around since 2005 and has a loyal following of listeners who appreciate its honest and informative approach to travel.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>That’s pretty spot on! I may have to update the TravelCommons media guide with that.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page like Jim or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or, if you can fight thru the Safari security warnings like Robert did, you can post your comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/48914\">In Peace (Somewhere Else Mix)</a> by cdk (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. Ft: Snowflake</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Best Laid Travel Plans...</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The first topic in the last episode was “Still Overthinking Travel Planning” -- which I do because, well, I’ve spent a good bit of my waking life traveling. But kinda like how generals always fight the last war, I’m probably not doing a great job of accounting for the changes in today’s travel landscape -- full planes and hotels, limited flexibility, taking what you can get.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Living in Nashville, a non-hub city, means, more often than not, I have to plan for a connection, especially when choosing our flight home from Amsterdam in April, having to factor in the time needed to pass through Customs, maybe having to transit from an international to a domestic terminal, having to clear TSA security again -- all in addition to some cushion for a late flight. But when I looked across all our possible connections, the times were either snug, less than 2 hours, or boringly long, 4-6 hours. So I decided to risk it, taking the snug layover through ORD. I figured we knew the airport, so no time lost trying to figure out the terminal connection, and most importantly, if we <em>did</em> get caught up somewhere and missed our connection, there was another flight to Nashville at 6pm, some 4 hours later.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As you might guess, all didn’t go smoothly because if it did, I wouldn’t be talking about it on the podcast. There’s not much interesting about “I booked a snug connection and everything was fine.” It actually started to go off the rails a few days before our departure, on our last night in Rotterdam. We stayed at the <a href=\"https://www.hotelpincoffs.nl/en\">Hotel Pincoffs</a> on the left bank -- highly recommended -- and after dinner, we hit the lounge where ordered a glass of what was labeled a Dutch coastal gin called <a href=\"https://hermitgin.com/\">Hermit</a>, skipping the tonic as I talked about in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/01/26/podcast-192-new-year-travel-planning-tips-gin-conquers-the-world/\">episode #192</a>, so I could taste the botanicals and the salty water they plugged on the label.&nbsp; I liked it <em>a lot</em>, so much so that I ordered another glass, and then spent 3 hours the next day rummaging through Amsterdam liquor stores ‘til I found a bottle to take home. Which meant I was now checking my bag on my flight to ORD.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Two days later, our snug connection begins to decay. The inbound United flight was late which dominoed out our departure time by 20 minutes. The captain said not to worry, he’d push the throttle and make it up in the air. I’ve heard that promise before, and sure enough, we hit the gate 20 minutes late. OK, snug-ger, but still doable. The Global Entry kiosk was fast, almost too fast. ORD has <a href=\"https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/local-media-release/global-entry-begins-touchless-receipt-less-processing-ord\">new facial biometric kiosks</a>. I walked up and before I figured out how to use it, it had recognized my face and told me to move on. Slightly creepy, but that’s a topic for another episode.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>We find the luggage carousel just as the bags with the orange Priority tags start popping out. I let myself feel a bit optimistic. I’m watching for my gin-bearing bag. And watch. And watch. Non-priority bags come out. Still I’m watching. And feeling optimism decay. We work through the Customs exit line only to walk straight into an even longer line to recheck our bags for our Nashville flight. Only 2, 3 people are working it. I’m feeling like <a href=\"https://youtu.be/N8uUTW9zPbM\">Stevie Ray Vaughn when he sings</a> “tick tock, people, time’s ticking away.” I tweet a picture to United saying “I’d be pretty thrilled if I made my ORD-BNA connection after our AMS-ORD flight arrived late.” No response. We finally get up to the bag checker. She scans the bag tag; I can see her screen flash red. “Nope,” she says, “You won’t make your flight” and then turns to the next person in line.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>We stand there for a moment and then drag our bags over to the line for the re-booking agent. But as I’ve said many times on this podcast, work all the channels. My usual Twitter play didn’t seem to be working (United’s social media hub must be short-staffed), so I dial up the Premiere line and tell my entire tale of woe to the phone agent while still in line for the in-person one. Getting up to the ORD agent, I tell her the same thing; United’s delay caused me to miss my connection, so just book me on the 6pm to Nashville. Seems easy enough -- but not in today’s travel world. The rebooking agent tells me there are no seats left to Nashville today… on any carrier. “This is unacceptable,” I said. She goes palms up and turns to the next person in line. “Wait,” I said, “if you can’t get me home tonight, United owes me overnight accommodations.” She stopped, thought for a moment, and then wrote down a number. “You need to call them.” It was the same number I’d called while in line.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But though all that, I hadn’t hung up on that phone agent; she was still there. “I’m sorry but there are no seats to Nashville, but I can get you to Memphis.” She’s trying to help, but I don’t think she realizes that Tennessee is a long state -- Memphis is a 3-hour drive to Nashville. “This is unacceptable,” I said. She apologizes again. 15 minutes into the call, she offers to transfer me to her supervisor. I tell her my story with perhaps a little frustration creeping into my tone. “Can I put you on hold?” she asks. Sure, why not? In the meantime, Irene is checking on Southwest flight; apparently United agents can’t see them. The supervisor eventually comes back, “Would the 6pm flight be OK for you?” 6pm <em>today</em>? After 36 minutes on the phone and saying “This is unacceptable” 2 or 3 times, they scrounged up the seats I’d been asking for all along. We hopped on the AirTrain to get over to Terminal 1 and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/tortas.frontera/\" title=\"\">Tortas Frontera</a>, my favorite ORD restaurant, for a couple of unplanned margaritas. While checking the United app for my new boarding pass, I saw that United twitter had finally responded. “We\'re sorry about the stressful day you\'ve had today. As a gesture of goodwill, we\'re able to deposit 2,500 miles into each of your accounts.” Using a 1.5¢/mile conversion rate, that just about covered our Frontera tab. In today’s travel world, that’s probably the best outcome I could’ve hoped for.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music --<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/35724\">Blue Like Venus</a> by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. Ft: Admiral Bob</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Roaming Entropy</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Well before this “revenge” travel boom, over-tourism was a trending topic. I talked about it on many past episodes - biking up to Delicate Arch in Moab, Utah to find a swarm of photographers setting up to get their “golden hour shot” at sunset; trying to get in front of unloading tour buses along Iceland’s Golden Circle, and most recently squeezing through narrow streets in Rome when I made the mistake of agreeing to meet a friend at Trevi Fountain.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But, as you might guess, that’s not my preferred touring style. Instead, I tend to do what my family calls my “solo toro” routine -- going off on my own to wander a city, randomly walking, letting traffic lights make the call when it’s time to make a turn. Often I’ll have some end-point in mind -- a taproom, a church -- but my path getting there won’t be the most direct.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I didn’t think this was unique, but still, I’ve been pleasantly surprised to run across <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-emotional-benefits-of-wandering-11671131450?st=mmqyql6e1cktnub&amp;reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink\" title=\"\">a couple of articles</a> that put a proper name to this -- flâneuring, from <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fl%C3%A2neur\" title=\"\">flâneur</a>, the (of course) French word from the 19th Century that means \"a stroller, a loafer, a wanderer,\" someone who walks around a city without a fixed destination or purpose, just observing and enjoying the sights, sounds and smells. The English author Virginia Woolfe called it “street haunting” which I like, but I think my favorite term is “roaming entropy,” coined by some <a href=\"https://www.hartleylab.org/uploads/5/3/1/0/53101939/heller%E2%80%8A_et_al._2020.pdf\" title=\"\">NYU researchers</a> whose work showed a positive correlation between someone’s mood and how many new/varied/unexpected locations they visited.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“Roaming entropy,” “experiential diversity,” they say, promotes cognitive development -- which makes sense to me. In many ways, this is one of the main reasons people travel, to experience something new. Way back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\">episode #166</a>, Emily Thomas talked about how philosophers such as Descartes and Montagne thought experiencing “otherness of travel” was important to broadening your mind, forcing you to think past your familiar experiences. But many folks want to experience something new, but without the risk of disappointment -- or something worse -- that the term “roaming entropy” implies. And there’s nothing new to that. Guidebooks have been around forever. When Irene and I started traveling through Europe, we’d always carry a Green Michelin guide, and we’d check off the 1-, 2-, and 3-star sites as we’d hit them. Not really all that different from people today queuing up for selfies at an Instagram-famous spot.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But ticking off a list of Insta-sites or starred spots doesn’t open you to the possibility of serendipitous delight, the joy of discovering something unexpected. On the flip side, it does tend to keep you out of serendipitous disaster. I don’t recall my wanders putting me in harm’s way, but there have been a few times where I felt I’d pushed the envelope a bit far -- in Cape Town, J’burg; in Brussels -- and so beat a very direct, non-random retreat to someplace safer.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The NYU researchers also talked about “sociodemographic experiential variability,” which is their polysyllabic way of describing walking around in different ethnic/cultural neighborhoods during flâneuring. I’m always hitting up food carts for, say, tamales in Mexican neighborhoods, or not-really-well-defined meats on skewers in Asian night markets, or Cuban coffee joints in Miami. Come to think of it, a lot of my sociodemographic experiential variability involves food or booze. Though in my defense, if you keep stopping to buy stuff, you then have to carry it around with you the rest of the day, weighing you down, maybe forcing you to shorten your walk. And that’s not what “roaming entropy” is about. It’s all about riding the random wave.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #194</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>. And while you’re at TravelCommons.com, you can check out the show notes page for a transcript and any links I’ve mentioned. Or you can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_194.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #194 — Best Laid Travel Plans; Roaming Entropy','','inherit','closed','closed','','4312-revision-v1','','','2023-06-19 12:59:19','2023-06-19 17:59:19','',4312,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4320',0,'revision','',0),
(4321,1,'2023-06-19 13:27:24','2023-06-19 18:27:24','[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/replicate-prediction-57paxyjb7xj7hm5kqombv3ecdy-300x300.png\" alt=\"Robot using a laptop doing travel planning while on a beach\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /> Future of Travel Planning[/caption]\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Back behind the microphone after some ORD connection drama coming home from a tulip-peeping trip in Holland, even after all my travel planning efforts. Then we wander into the world of flâneuring, the aimless walking around a city, as a way to swerve overtourism. Listeners weigh in on Priority Pass lounge access and online passport renewal experiences, and I whine about my latest experience with a cashless society. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_194.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #194: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN after a good bit of travel - 10 days in the Netherlands bracketed by road trips to Louisville, Savannah, GA, and Chicago, and then a tough week of beer drinking here in Nashville when the Craft Brewers Conference touched down. So, I’ve been keeping occupied since the last episode. But it’s all been personal travel; all of my business travel has been replaced with Zoom and Teams sessions. I may be a bit of an outlier, but none of the US airlines’ Q1 earnings announcements were great, in no small part because business travel still isn’t back to pre-pandemic levels. Delta is hoping it’ll settle at 75% of 2019 levels while <a href=\"https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-04-21/industrial-strength-business-travel-recovery-is-showing-cracks-lgqvl4n3?utm_source=website&amp;utm_medium=share\">United’s CEO said</a>&nbsp; “We believe demand is just structurally different than it was pre-pandemic, and we’re still figuring out that new normal.” Maybe not quite the Bill Gates “over 50 percent of business travel… will go away” prediction, but with our 2-year crash course in virtual work, having the post-pandemic setpoint for business travel volume be 20-25% lower doesn’t seem too far fetched.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And even with the non-business “revenge” travel boom filling seats, personal travel is a lot more price sensitive, or elastic as economists like to say, than business travel. My travel patterns are a testament to that -- with higher airfares but a more flexible schedule (I can Zoom from anywhere), it’s been more road trips than plane flights. I’ve had some pretty drives, like through East Tennessee and central Kentucky, but also some real grind-outs, like I-75 pretty much from the Tennessee-Georgia border through Atlanta, all the way down to Macon.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But driving <em>does</em> make packing easier, without the space constraints of a carry-on bag. Which caught up with me, I think, on our Netherlands trip. I was out of practice, sloppy; forgetting to pack so much of what would be my normal kit -- collapsible umbrella, gloves, hat -- so that when the cold rain shifted to snow our first day in Amsterdam (it had been in the 70’s when we left Nashville), our standard throwaway line “If we’ve forgotten it, we’ll just buy it there” became very real. I was very happy to find a couple of sporting goods stores a block down from our hotel. I gotta do some remedial packing training before my next flight.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Javolenus/41932\">Ianiscus</a> by Javolenus (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. Ft: Wired_Ant</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Robert Fenerty hit the TravelCommons website to comment on last episode’s thoughts about ponying up for a not-quite-Amex Platinum card from Chase or Capital One, one that includes a Priority Pass membership. He said<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“You need to fix the cert on travelcommons.com, Safari is complaining.” Yup, I know. Converting the site to https has been on my to-do list for a long time. I’ll get to it, I promise… some day.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“Given the paucity of direct flights from Nashville, I suppose lounge access makes sense. But please don’t get a credit card just for Priority Pass access. I’ve had one for years through my Chase Sapphire Reserve card. But even as a 1K flier, I rarely use it. With Priority Pass, you’ll encounter capacity-controlled second-rate lounges where travelers on certain flights stroll past you while you’re being added to the 45-minute wait list. And after your 45 minute wait you’ll be treated to a sardine-packed lounge where the primary benefits are lack of blaring TVs, cat food sandwiches, and a second-rate chair that might adjoin an electrical outlet.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“Every time I buy a bold $20 glass of Cabernet at a Vino Volo or sip a remarkable east coast hazy at an airport bar with 20 taps, I think about how happy I am to not be begging for a second rate drink at a second rate lounge.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Agree that Priority Pass members definitely seem to be on the bottom of the “priority” list. I’ve been on the other side of that 45-minute wait list, walking into a lounge in ORD’s international terminal, bypassing the queue of Priority Pass holders because I had an AirFrance business class ticket. I’ve also encountered the cat-food sandwich phenomenon. I guess that’s why Amex’s Centurion Lounge is so popular -- great food, nice local beers and top-shelf liquor -- and so crowded and now charging for each guest. Food and drink costs during connections -- another thing I forgot to factor in when I moved to a non-hub city.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Jim McMcDonough hit the TravelCommons Facebook page to pile onto my rant about the US’s stop-start on-line passport renewal efforts.<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I have dual citizenship with the US and Ireland. Getting an Irish passport was a bureaucratic nightmare and took a couple of years from beginning to end. I saw it was expiring at the end of 2022 and went on-line to see how to renew it. Turns out there was a simple application to fill out on-line, got my wife to take a photo of me against a neutral background and uploaded it, paid by credit card, and had a new Irish passport in my mailbox five business days later. It can be done, USA. Try harder.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Jim’s comment got me looking… and sure enough, I can renew my UK passport online also. And checking the US passport renewal page just before recording says the online renewal portal is still <em>paused</em> -- we’re coming up on the 4th month of that pause. Maybe the US State Dept just needs to buy Ireland\'s or the UK\'s system rather than trying to build their own.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>One of the TravelCommons’ thru lines over the past 5-6 years has been the move to a cashless society and me being <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">a bit of a knuckle dragger </a>about it. It’s a stuttering progress -- tripping over small cash-only family-run restaurants in Chicago and here in Nashville, card-only places in Amsterdam; <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/12/24/podcast-191-my-notes-on-italy-and-split-croatia/\">a long weekend in Croatia last fall</a>, before they switched to the euro, that had me hunting down ATMs because not only were there signs saying “Cash Only” but also “Kuna Only” -- the currency that would be defunct in a couple of months. The Netherlands, like I said, was all about the tap -- double-click the iPhone, tap the little block, and hear the ding. I hit an ATM for €200 through force of habit and after 10 days, came home with €40-50 of it. But looking at my iPhone halfway through the trip, it looked like I’d traded cash for apps. I tweeted a screenshot of my phone; I’d added 9 apps to my phone just for those 10 days. Four were for different transit systems - one for Amsterdam, one for Rotterdam, one for the bus from Haarlem down to the tulip gardens, and one for the trains between them. There was Bolt, the Uber/taxicab mash-up, and Donkey Republic to unlock rental bikes. I can go cashless -- as long as my phone battery holds out.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Back in December, right after ChatGPT was released/unleashed (?) on the world, I wrote a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/12/12/how-good-are-chatgpts-top-5-holiday-travel-tips/\">blog post</a> comparing its holiday travel tips to mine. I thought the ChatGPT recommendations were <em>fine</em>, but mine were way more insightful. Now that Google and Microsoft have joined the AI chat game, I thought I’d ask all three “What’s the TravelCommons Podcast like”<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>First, ChatGPT’s response: “The TravelCommons podcast is a podcast that focuses on travel experiences and insights. Hosted by travel enthusiast and former consultant Mark Peacock, the podcast covers a range of topics related to travel, from the latest news and trends to personal travel stories and tips.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“Listeners can expect to hear Peacock\'s own experiences and anecdotes about his travels, as well as interviews with other travel experts and enthusiasts. The podcast often covers topics related to technology and travel, such as the latest travel apps and gadgets, as well as discussions about travel safety, sustainable travel, and more.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“One of the unique aspects of the TravelCommons podcast is that Peacock often records episodes while he\'s on the road, providing listeners with a firsthand account of his travel experiences. This adds an element of excitement and immediacy to the podcast, making it feel like you\'re right there with Peacock as he explores new destinations.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“Overall, if you\'re a travel enthusiast or just looking for some inspiration for your next trip, the TravelCommons podcast is definitely worth checking out.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Not bad, though it’s been a while since I’ve recorded on the road. Maybe I need to get back to that to recapture some of the “excitement and immediacy” of the older episodes.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Next up, Google’s Bard: “The TravelCommons podcast is a weekly podcast for frequent travelers. The host, Matt Kepnes, shares his insights and advice on all things travel, from planning and booking trips to navigating airports and hotels. He also interviews experts in the travel industry, such as airline pilots, hoteliers, and travel writers.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“The podcast is well-produced and informative, and Matt\'s enthusiasm for travel is contagious. He makes even the most mundane travel topics interesting, and he always has a few tips up his sleeve to help you make the most of your trips.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Uh, no. Somehow Bard has transferred TravelCommons to Nomadic Matt. I think I need to check and make sure I still own the travelcommons.com domain name.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And finally, Microsoft’s Bing Chat which is powered by the most recent version of ChatGPT: “TravelCommons is a podcast that focuses on the experience of travel. It is hosted by Mark Peacock, who is a frequent traveler himself. The podcast covers a wide range of topics related to travel, including tips for packing and planning, reviews of airlines and hotels, and discussions about the latest trends in travel. The podcast has been around since 2005 and has a loyal following of listeners who appreciate its honest and informative approach to travel.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>That’s pretty spot on! I may have to update the TravelCommons media guide with that.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page like Jim or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or, if you can fight thru the Safari security warnings like Robert did, you can post your comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/48914\">In Peace (Somewhere Else Mix)</a> by cdk (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. Ft: Snowflake</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Best Laid Travel Plans...</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The first topic in the last episode was “Still Overthinking Travel Planning” -- which I do because, well, I’ve spent a good bit of my waking life traveling. But kinda like how generals always fight the last war, I’m probably not doing a great job of accounting for the changes in today’s travel landscape -- full planes and hotels, limited flexibility, taking what you can get.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Living in Nashville, a non-hub city, means, more often than not, I have to plan for a connection, especially when choosing our flight home from Amsterdam in April, having to factor in the time needed to pass through Customs, maybe having to transit from an international to a domestic terminal, having to clear TSA security again -- all in addition to some cushion for a late flight. But when I looked across all our possible connections, the times were either snug, less than 2 hours, or boringly long, 4-6 hours. So I decided to risk it, taking the snug layover through ORD. I figured we knew the airport, so no time lost trying to figure out the terminal connection, and most importantly, if we <em>did</em> get caught up somewhere and missed our connection, there was another flight to Nashville at 6pm, some 4 hours later.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As you might guess, all didn’t go smoothly because if it did, I wouldn’t be talking about it on the podcast. There’s not much interesting about “I booked a snug connection and everything was fine.” It actually started to go off the rails a few days before our departure, on our last night in Rotterdam. We stayed at the <a href=\"https://www.hotelpincoffs.nl/en\">Hotel Pincoffs</a> on the left bank -- highly recommended -- and after dinner, we hit the lounge where ordered a glass of what was labeled a Dutch coastal gin called <a href=\"https://hermitgin.com/\">Hermit</a>, skipping the tonic as I talked about in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/01/26/podcast-192-new-year-travel-planning-tips-gin-conquers-the-world/\">episode #192</a>, so I could taste the botanicals and the salty water they plugged on the label.&nbsp; I liked it <em>a lot</em>, so much so that I ordered another glass, and then spent 3 hours the next day rummaging through Amsterdam liquor stores ‘til I found a bottle to take home. Which meant I was now checking my bag on my flight to ORD.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Two days later, our snug connection begins to decay. The inbound United flight was late which dominoed out our departure time by 20 minutes. The captain said not to worry, he’d push the throttle and make it up in the air. I’ve heard that promise before, and sure enough, we hit the gate 20 minutes late. OK, snug-ger, but still doable. The Global Entry kiosk was fast, almost too fast. ORD has <a href=\"https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/local-media-release/global-entry-begins-touchless-receipt-less-processing-ord\">new facial biometric kiosks</a>. I walked up and before I figured out how to use it, it had recognized my face and told me to move on. Slightly creepy, but that’s a topic for another episode.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>We find the luggage carousel just as the bags with the orange Priority tags start popping out. I let myself feel a bit optimistic. I’m watching for my gin-bearing bag. And watch. And watch. Non-priority bags come out. Still I’m watching. And feeling optimism decay. We work through the Customs exit line only to walk straight into an even longer line to recheck our bags for our Nashville flight. Only 2, 3 people are working it. I’m feeling like <a href=\"https://youtu.be/N8uUTW9zPbM\">Stevie Ray Vaughn when he sings</a> “tick tock, people, time’s ticking away.” I tweet a picture to United saying “I’d be pretty thrilled if I made my ORD-BNA connection after our AMS-ORD flight arrived late.” No response. We finally get up to the bag checker. She scans the bag tag; I can see her screen flash red. “Nope,” she says, “You won’t make your flight” and then turns to the next person in line.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>We stand there for a moment and then drag our bags over to the line for the re-booking agent. But as I’ve said many times on this podcast, work all the channels. My usual Twitter play didn’t seem to be working (United’s social media hub must be short-staffed), so I dial up the Premiere line and tell my entire tale of woe to the phone agent while still in line for the in-person one. Getting up to the ORD agent, I tell her the same thing; United’s delay caused me to miss my connection, so just book me on the 6pm to Nashville. Seems easy enough -- but not in today’s travel world. The rebooking agent tells me there are no seats left to Nashville today… on any carrier. “This is unacceptable,” I said. She goes palms up and turns to the next person in line. “Wait,” I said, “if you can’t get me home tonight, United owes me overnight accommodations.” She stopped, thought for a moment, and then wrote down a number. “You need to call them.” It was the same number I’d called while in line.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But though all that, I hadn’t hung up on that phone agent; she was still there. “I’m sorry but there are no seats to Nashville, but I can get you to Memphis.” She’s trying to help, but I don’t think she realizes that Tennessee is a long state -- Memphis is a 3-hour drive to Nashville. “This is unacceptable,” I said. She apologizes again. 15 minutes into the call, she offers to transfer me to her supervisor. I tell her my story with perhaps a little frustration creeping into my tone. “Can I put you on hold?” she asks. Sure, why not? In the meantime, Irene is checking on Southwest flight; apparently United agents can’t see them. The supervisor eventually comes back, “Would the 6pm flight be OK for you?” 6pm <em>today</em>? After 36 minutes on the phone and saying “This is unacceptable” 2 or 3 times, they scrounged up the seats I’d been asking for all along. We hopped on the AirTrain to get over to Terminal 1 and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/tortas.frontera/\" title=\"\">Tortas Frontera</a>, my favorite ORD restaurant, for a couple of unplanned margaritas. While checking the United app for my new boarding pass, I saw that United twitter had finally responded. “We\'re sorry about the stressful day you\'ve had today. As a gesture of goodwill, we\'re able to deposit 2,500 miles into each of your accounts.” Using a 1.5¢/mile conversion rate, that just about covered our Frontera tab. In today’s travel world, that’s probably the best outcome I could’ve hoped for.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music --<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/35724\">Blue Like Venus</a> by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. Ft: Admiral Bob</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Roaming Entropy</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Well before this “revenge” travel boom, over-tourism was a trending topic. I talked about it on many past episodes - biking up to Delicate Arch in Moab, Utah to find a swarm of photographers setting up to get their “golden hour shot” at sunset; trying to get in front of unloading tour buses along Iceland’s Golden Circle, and most recently squeezing through narrow streets in Rome when I made the mistake of agreeing to meet a friend at Trevi Fountain.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But, as you might guess, that’s not my preferred touring style. Instead, I tend to do what my family calls my “solo toro” routine -- going off on my own to wander a city, randomly walking, letting traffic lights make the call when it’s time to make a turn. Often I’ll have some end-point in mind -- a taproom, a church -- but my path getting there won’t be the most direct.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I didn’t think this was unique, but still, I’ve been pleasantly surprised to run across <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-emotional-benefits-of-wandering-11671131450?st=mmqyql6e1cktnub&amp;reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink\" title=\"\">a couple of articles</a> that put a proper name to this -- flâneuring, from <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fl%C3%A2neur\" title=\"\">flâneur</a>, the (of course) French word from the 19th Century that means \"a stroller, a loafer, a wanderer,\" someone who walks around a city without a fixed destination or purpose, just observing and enjoying the sights, sounds and smells. The English author Virginia Woolfe called it “street haunting” which I like, but I think my favorite term is “roaming entropy,” coined by some <a href=\"https://www.hartleylab.org/uploads/5/3/1/0/53101939/heller%E2%80%8A_et_al._2020.pdf\" title=\"\">NYU researchers</a> whose work showed a positive correlation between someone’s mood and how many new/varied/unexpected locations they visited.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“Roaming entropy,” “experiential diversity,” they say, promotes cognitive development -- which makes sense to me. In many ways, this is one of the main reasons people travel, to experience something new. Way back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\">episode #166</a>, Emily Thomas talked about how philosophers such as Descartes and Montagne thought experiencing “otherness of travel” was important to broadening your mind, forcing you to think past your familiar experiences. But many folks want to experience something new, but without the risk of disappointment -- or something worse -- that the term “roaming entropy” implies. And there’s nothing new to that. Guidebooks have been around forever. When Irene and I started traveling through Europe, we’d always carry a Green Michelin guide, and we’d check off the 1-, 2-, and 3-star sites as we’d hit them. Not really all that different from people today queuing up for selfies at an Instagram-famous spot.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But ticking off a list of Insta-sites or starred spots doesn’t open you to the possibility of serendipitous delight, the joy of discovering something unexpected. On the flip side, it does tend to keep you out of serendipitous disaster. I don’t recall my wanders putting me in harm’s way, but there have been a few times where I felt I’d pushed the envelope a bit far -- in Cape Town, J’burg; in Brussels -- and so beat a very direct, non-random retreat to someplace safer.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The NYU researchers also talked about “sociodemographic experiential variability,” which is their polysyllabic way of describing walking around in different ethnic/cultural neighborhoods during flâneuring. I’m always hitting up food carts for, say, tamales in Mexican neighborhoods, or not-really-well-defined meats on skewers in Asian night markets, or Cuban coffee joints in Miami. Come to think of it, a lot of my sociodemographic experiential variability involves food or booze. Though in my defense, if you keep stopping to buy stuff, you then have to carry it around with you the rest of the day, weighing you down, maybe forcing you to shorten your walk. And that’s not what “roaming entropy” is about. It’s all about riding the random wave.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #194</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>. And while you’re at TravelCommons.com, you can check out the show notes page for a transcript and any links I’ve mentioned. Or you can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_194.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #194 — Best Laid Travel Plans; Roaming Entropy','','inherit','closed','closed','','4312-revision-v1','','','2023-06-19 13:27:24','2023-06-19 18:27:24','',4312,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4321',0,'revision','',0),
(4322,1,'2023-06-19 13:34:58','2023-06-19 18:34:58','[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/replicate-prediction-57paxyjb7xj7hm5kqombv3ecdy-300x300.png\" alt=\"Robot using a laptop doing travel planning while on a beach\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /> Future of Travel Planning[/caption]\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Back behind the microphone after stubbornness fixed some ORD connection drama when coming home from a tulip-peeping trip in Holland, even after all my travel planning efforts. Then we wander into the world of flâneuring, the aimless walking around a city, as a way to swerve overtourism. Listeners weigh in on Priority Pass lounge access and online passport renewal experiences, and I whine about my latest experience with a cashless society. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_194.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #194: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN after a good bit of travel - 10 days in the Netherlands bracketed by road trips to Louisville, Savannah, GA, and Chicago, and then a tough week of beer drinking here in Nashville when the Craft Brewers Conference touched down. So, I’ve been keeping occupied since the last episode. But it’s all been personal travel; all of my business travel has been replaced with Zoom and Teams sessions. I may be a bit of an outlier, but none of the US airlines’ Q1 earnings announcements were great, in no small part because business travel still isn’t back to pre-pandemic levels. Delta is hoping it’ll settle at 75% of 2019 levels while <a href=\"https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-04-21/industrial-strength-business-travel-recovery-is-showing-cracks-lgqvl4n3?utm_source=website&amp;utm_medium=share\">United’s CEO said</a>&nbsp; “We believe demand is just structurally different than it was pre-pandemic, and we’re still figuring out that new normal.” Maybe not quite the Bill Gates “over 50 percent of business travel… will go away” prediction, but with our 2-year crash course in virtual work, having the post-pandemic setpoint for business travel volume be 20-25% lower doesn’t seem too far fetched.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And even with the non-business “revenge” travel boom filling seats, personal travel is a lot more price sensitive, or elastic as economists like to say, than business travel. My travel patterns are a testament to that -- with higher airfares but a more flexible schedule (I can Zoom from anywhere), it’s been more road trips than plane flights. I’ve had some pretty drives, like through East Tennessee and central Kentucky, but also some real grind-outs, like I-75 pretty much from the Tennessee-Georgia border through Atlanta, all the way down to Macon.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But driving <em>does</em> make packing easier, without the space constraints of a carry-on bag. Which caught up with me, I think, on our Netherlands trip. I was out of practice, sloppy; forgetting to pack so much of what would be my normal kit -- collapsible umbrella, gloves, hat -- so that when the cold rain shifted to snow our first day in Amsterdam (it had been in the 70’s when we left Nashville), our standard throwaway line “If we’ve forgotten it, we’ll just buy it there” became very real. I was very happy to find a couple of sporting goods stores a block down from our hotel. I gotta do some remedial packing training before my next flight.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Javolenus/41932\">Ianiscus</a> by Javolenus (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. Ft: Wired_Ant</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Robert Fenerty hit the TravelCommons website to comment on last episode’s thoughts about ponying up for a not-quite-Amex Platinum card from Chase or Capital One, one that includes a Priority Pass membership. He said<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“You need to fix the cert on travelcommons.com, Safari is complaining.” Yup, I know. Converting the site to https has been on my to-do list for a long time. I’ll get to it, I promise… some day.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“Given the paucity of direct flights from Nashville, I suppose lounge access makes sense. But please don’t get a credit card just for Priority Pass access. I’ve had one for years through my Chase Sapphire Reserve card. But even as a 1K flier, I rarely use it. With Priority Pass, you’ll encounter capacity-controlled second-rate lounges where travelers on certain flights stroll past you while you’re being added to the 45-minute wait list. And after your 45 minute wait you’ll be treated to a sardine-packed lounge where the primary benefits are lack of blaring TVs, cat food sandwiches, and a second-rate chair that might adjoin an electrical outlet.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“Every time I buy a bold $20 glass of Cabernet at a Vino Volo or sip a remarkable east coast hazy at an airport bar with 20 taps, I think about how happy I am to not be begging for a second rate drink at a second rate lounge.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Agree that Priority Pass members definitely seem to be on the bottom of the “priority” list. I’ve been on the other side of that 45-minute wait list, walking into a lounge in ORD’s international terminal, bypassing the queue of Priority Pass holders because I had an AirFrance business class ticket. I’ve also encountered the cat-food sandwich phenomenon. I guess that’s why Amex’s Centurion Lounge is so popular -- great food, nice local beers and top-shelf liquor -- and so crowded and now charging for each guest. Food and drink costs during connections -- another thing I forgot to factor in when I moved to a non-hub city.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Jim McMcDonough hit the TravelCommons Facebook page to pile onto my rant about the US’s stop-start on-line passport renewal efforts.<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I have dual citizenship with the US and Ireland. Getting an Irish passport was a bureaucratic nightmare and took a couple of years from beginning to end. I saw it was expiring at the end of 2022 and went on-line to see how to renew it. Turns out there was a simple application to fill out on-line, got my wife to take a photo of me against a neutral background and uploaded it, paid by credit card, and had a new Irish passport in my mailbox five business days later. It can be done, USA. Try harder.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Jim’s comment got me looking… and sure enough, I can renew my UK passport online also. And checking the US passport renewal page just before recording says the online renewal portal is still <em>paused</em> -- we’re coming up on the 4th month of that pause. Maybe the US State Dept just needs to buy Ireland\'s or the UK\'s system rather than trying to build their own.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>One of the TravelCommons’ thru lines over the past 5-6 years has been the move to a cashless society and me being <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">a bit of a knuckle dragger </a>about it. It’s a stuttering progress -- tripping over small cash-only family-run restaurants in Chicago and here in Nashville, card-only places in Amsterdam; <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/12/24/podcast-191-my-notes-on-italy-and-split-croatia/\">a long weekend in Croatia last fall</a>, before they switched to the euro, that had me hunting down ATMs because not only were there signs saying “Cash Only” but also “Kuna Only” -- the currency that would be defunct in a couple of months. The Netherlands, like I said, was all about the tap -- double-click the iPhone, tap the little block, and hear the ding. I hit an ATM for €200 through force of habit and after 10 days, came home with €40-50 of it. But looking at my iPhone halfway through the trip, it looked like I’d traded cash for apps. I tweeted a screenshot of my phone; I’d added 9 apps to my phone just for those 10 days. Four were for different transit systems - one for Amsterdam, one for Rotterdam, one for the bus from Haarlem down to the tulip gardens, and one for the trains between them. There was Bolt, the Uber/taxicab mash-up, and Donkey Republic to unlock rental bikes. I can go cashless -- as long as my phone battery holds out.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Back in December, right after ChatGPT was released/unleashed (?) on the world, I wrote a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/12/12/how-good-are-chatgpts-top-5-holiday-travel-tips/\">blog post</a> comparing its holiday travel tips to mine. I thought the ChatGPT recommendations were <em>fine</em>, but mine were way more insightful. Now that Google and Microsoft have joined the AI chat game, I thought I’d ask all three “What’s the TravelCommons Podcast like”<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>First, ChatGPT’s response: “The TravelCommons podcast is a podcast that focuses on travel experiences and insights. Hosted by travel enthusiast and former consultant Mark Peacock, the podcast covers a range of topics related to travel, from the latest news and trends to personal travel stories and tips.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“Listeners can expect to hear Peacock\'s own experiences and anecdotes about his travels, as well as interviews with other travel experts and enthusiasts. The podcast often covers topics related to technology and travel, such as the latest travel apps and gadgets, as well as discussions about travel safety, sustainable travel, and more.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“One of the unique aspects of the TravelCommons podcast is that Peacock often records episodes while he\'s on the road, providing listeners with a firsthand account of his travel experiences. This adds an element of excitement and immediacy to the podcast, making it feel like you\'re right there with Peacock as he explores new destinations.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“Overall, if you\'re a travel enthusiast or just looking for some inspiration for your next trip, the TravelCommons podcast is definitely worth checking out.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Not bad, though it’s been a while since I’ve recorded on the road. Maybe I need to get back to that to recapture some of the “excitement and immediacy” of the older episodes.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Next up, Google’s Bard: “The TravelCommons podcast is a weekly podcast for frequent travelers. The host, Matt Kepnes, shares his insights and advice on all things travel, from planning and booking trips to navigating airports and hotels. He also interviews experts in the travel industry, such as airline pilots, hoteliers, and travel writers.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“The podcast is well-produced and informative, and Matt\'s enthusiasm for travel is contagious. He makes even the most mundane travel topics interesting, and he always has a few tips up his sleeve to help you make the most of your trips.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Uh, no. Somehow Bard has transferred TravelCommons to Nomadic Matt. I think I need to check and make sure I still own the travelcommons.com domain name.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And finally, Microsoft’s Bing Chat which is powered by the most recent version of ChatGPT: “TravelCommons is a podcast that focuses on the experience of travel. It is hosted by Mark Peacock, who is a frequent traveler himself. The podcast covers a wide range of topics related to travel, including tips for packing and planning, reviews of airlines and hotels, and discussions about the latest trends in travel. The podcast has been around since 2005 and has a loyal following of listeners who appreciate its honest and informative approach to travel.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>That’s pretty spot on! I may have to update the TravelCommons media guide with that.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page like Jim or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or, if you can fight thru the Safari security warnings like Robert did, you can post your comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/48914\">In Peace (Somewhere Else Mix)</a> by cdk (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. Ft: Snowflake</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Best Laid Travel Plans...</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The first topic in the last episode was “Still Overthinking Travel Planning” -- which I do because, well, I’ve spent a good bit of my waking life traveling. But kinda like how generals always fight the last war, I’m probably not doing a great job of accounting for the changes in today’s travel landscape -- full planes and hotels, limited flexibility, taking what you can get.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Living in Nashville, a non-hub city, means, more often than not, I have to plan for a connection, especially when choosing our flight home from Amsterdam in April, having to factor in the time needed to pass through Customs, maybe having to transit from an international to a domestic terminal, having to clear TSA security again -- all in addition to some cushion for a late flight. But when I looked across all our possible connections, the times were either snug, less than 2 hours, or boringly long, 4-6 hours. So I decided to risk it, taking the snug layover through ORD. I figured we knew the airport, so no time lost trying to figure out the terminal connection, and most importantly, if we <em>did</em> get caught up somewhere and missed our connection, there was another flight to Nashville at 6pm, some 4 hours later.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As you might guess, all didn’t go smoothly because if it did, I wouldn’t be talking about it on the podcast. There’s not much interesting about “I booked a snug connection and everything was fine.” It actually started to go off the rails a few days before our departure, on our last night in Rotterdam. We stayed at the <a href=\"https://www.hotelpincoffs.nl/en\">Hotel Pincoffs</a> on the left bank -- highly recommended -- and after dinner, we hit the lounge where ordered a glass of what was labeled a Dutch coastal gin called <a href=\"https://hermitgin.com/\">Hermit</a>, skipping the tonic as I talked about in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/01/26/podcast-192-new-year-travel-planning-tips-gin-conquers-the-world/\">episode #192</a>, so I could taste the botanicals and the salty water they plugged on the label.&nbsp; I liked it <em>a lot</em>, so much so that I ordered another glass, and then spent 3 hours the next day rummaging through Amsterdam liquor stores ‘til I found a bottle to take home. Which meant I was now checking my bag on my flight to ORD.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Two days later, our snug connection begins to decay. The inbound United flight was late which dominoed out our departure time by 20 minutes. The captain said not to worry, he’d push the throttle and make it up in the air. I’ve heard that promise before, and sure enough, we hit the gate 20 minutes late. OK, snug-ger, but still doable. The Global Entry kiosk was fast, almost too fast. ORD has <a href=\"https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/local-media-release/global-entry-begins-touchless-receipt-less-processing-ord\">new facial biometric kiosks</a>. I walked up and before I figured out how to use it, it had recognized my face and told me to move on. Slightly creepy, but that’s a topic for another episode.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>We find the luggage carousel just as the bags with the orange Priority tags start popping out. I let myself feel a bit optimistic. I’m watching for my gin-bearing bag. And watch. And watch. Non-priority bags come out. Still I’m watching. And feeling optimism decay. We work through the Customs exit line only to walk straight into an even longer line to recheck our bags for our Nashville flight. Only 2, 3 people are working it. I’m feeling like <a href=\"https://youtu.be/N8uUTW9zPbM\">Stevie Ray Vaughn when he sings</a> “tick tock, people, time’s ticking away.” I tweet a picture to United saying “I’d be pretty thrilled if I made my ORD-BNA connection after our AMS-ORD flight arrived late.” No response. We finally get up to the bag checker. She scans the bag tag; I can see her screen flash red. “Nope,” she says, “You won’t make your flight” and then turns to the next person in line.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>We stand there for a moment and then drag our bags over to the line for the re-booking agent. But as I’ve said many times on this podcast, work all the channels. My usual Twitter play didn’t seem to be working (United’s social media hub must be short-staffed), so I dial up the Premiere line and tell my entire tale of woe to the phone agent while still in line for the in-person one. Getting up to the ORD agent, I tell her the same thing; United’s delay caused me to miss my connection, so just book me on the 6pm to Nashville. Seems easy enough -- but not in today’s travel world. The rebooking agent tells me there are no seats left to Nashville today… on any carrier. “This is unacceptable,” I said. She goes palms up and turns to the next person in line. “Wait,” I said, “if you can’t get me home tonight, United owes me overnight accommodations.” She stopped, thought for a moment, and then wrote down a number. “You need to call them.” It was the same number I’d called while in line.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But though all that, I hadn’t hung up on that phone agent; she was still there. “I’m sorry but there are no seats to Nashville, but I can get you to Memphis.” She’s trying to help, but I don’t think she realizes that Tennessee is a long state -- Memphis is a 3-hour drive to Nashville. “This is unacceptable,” I said. She apologizes again. 15 minutes into the call, she offers to transfer me to her supervisor. I tell her my story with perhaps a little frustration creeping into my tone. “Can I put you on hold?” she asks. Sure, why not? In the meantime, Irene is checking on Southwest flight; apparently United agents can’t see them. The supervisor eventually comes back, “Would the 6pm flight be OK for you?” 6pm <em>today</em>? After 36 minutes on the phone and saying “This is unacceptable” 2 or 3 times, they scrounged up the seats I’d been asking for all along. We hopped on the AirTrain to get over to Terminal 1 and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/tortas.frontera/\" title=\"\">Tortas Frontera</a>, my favorite ORD restaurant, for a couple of unplanned margaritas. While checking the United app for my new boarding pass, I saw that United twitter had finally responded. “We\'re sorry about the stressful day you\'ve had today. As a gesture of goodwill, we\'re able to deposit 2,500 miles into each of your accounts.” Using a 1.5¢/mile conversion rate, that just about covered our Frontera tab. In today’s travel world, that’s probably the best outcome I could’ve hoped for.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music --<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/35724\">Blue Like Venus</a> by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. Ft: Admiral Bob</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Roaming Entropy</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Well before this “revenge” travel boom, over-tourism was a trending topic. I talked about it on many past episodes - biking up to Delicate Arch in Moab, Utah to find a swarm of photographers setting up to get their “golden hour shot” at sunset; trying to get in front of unloading tour buses along Iceland’s Golden Circle, and most recently squeezing through narrow streets in Rome when I made the mistake of agreeing to meet a friend at Trevi Fountain.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But, as you might guess, that’s not my preferred touring style. Instead, I tend to do what my family calls my “solo toro” routine -- going off on my own to wander a city, randomly walking, letting traffic lights make the call when it’s time to make a turn. Often I’ll have some end-point in mind -- a taproom, a church -- but my path getting there won’t be the most direct.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I didn’t think this was unique, but still, I’ve been pleasantly surprised to run across <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-emotional-benefits-of-wandering-11671131450?st=mmqyql6e1cktnub&amp;reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink\" title=\"\">a couple of articles</a> that put a proper name to this -- flâneuring, from <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fl%C3%A2neur\" title=\"\">flâneur</a>, the (of course) French word from the 19th Century that means \"a stroller, a loafer, a wanderer,\" someone who walks around a city without a fixed destination or purpose, just observing and enjoying the sights, sounds and smells. The English author Virginia Woolfe called it “street haunting” which I like, but I think my favorite term is “roaming entropy,” coined by some <a href=\"https://www.hartleylab.org/uploads/5/3/1/0/53101939/heller%E2%80%8A_et_al._2020.pdf\" title=\"\">NYU researchers</a> whose work showed a positive correlation between someone’s mood and how many new/varied/unexpected locations they visited.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“Roaming entropy,” “experiential diversity,” they say, promotes cognitive development -- which makes sense to me. In many ways, this is one of the main reasons people travel, to experience something new. Way back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\">episode #166</a>, Emily Thomas talked about how philosophers such as Descartes and Montagne thought experiencing “otherness of travel” was important to broadening your mind, forcing you to think past your familiar experiences. But many folks want to experience something new, but without the risk of disappointment -- or something worse -- that the term “roaming entropy” implies. And there’s nothing new to that. Guidebooks have been around forever. When Irene and I started traveling through Europe, we’d always carry a Green Michelin guide, and we’d check off the 1-, 2-, and 3-star sites as we’d hit them. Not really all that different from people today queuing up for selfies at an Instagram-famous spot.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But ticking off a list of Insta-sites or starred spots doesn’t open you to the possibility of serendipitous delight, the joy of discovering something unexpected. On the flip side, it does tend to keep you out of serendipitous disaster. I don’t recall my wanders putting me in harm’s way, but there have been a few times where I felt I’d pushed the envelope a bit far -- in Cape Town, J’burg; in Brussels -- and so beat a very direct, non-random retreat to someplace safer.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The NYU researchers also talked about “sociodemographic experiential variability,” which is their polysyllabic way of describing walking around in different ethnic/cultural neighborhoods during flâneuring. I’m always hitting up food carts for, say, tamales in Mexican neighborhoods, or not-really-well-defined meats on skewers in Asian night markets, or Cuban coffee joints in Miami. Come to think of it, a lot of my sociodemographic experiential variability involves food or booze. Though in my defense, if you keep stopping to buy stuff, you then have to carry it around with you the rest of the day, weighing you down, maybe forcing you to shorten your walk. And that’s not what “roaming entropy” is about. It’s all about riding the random wave.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #194</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>. And while you’re at TravelCommons.com, you can check out the show notes page for a transcript and any links I’ve mentioned. Or you can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_194.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #194 — Best Laid Travel Plans; Roaming Entropy','','inherit','closed','closed','','4312-revision-v1','','','2023-06-19 13:34:58','2023-06-19 18:34:58','',4312,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4322',0,'revision','',0),
(4323,1,'2023-06-19 13:45:56','2023-06-19 18:45:56','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/replicate-prediction-57paxyjb7xj7hm5kqombv3ecdy-300x300.png\" alt=\"Robot using a laptop to make travel plans while on a beach\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"> Future of Travel Planning[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Back behind the microphone after stubbornness fixed some ORD connection drama when coming home from a tulip-peeping trip in Holland, despite all my finely tuned travel plans. Then we wander into the world of flâneuring, aimlessly walking around a city as a way to swerve overtourism. Listeners weigh in on Priority Pass lounge access and online passport renewal experiences, and I count all the apps I needed to go cashless in Holland. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_194.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #194: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN after a good bit of travel - 10 days in the Netherlands bracketed by road trips to Louisville, Savannah, GA, and Chicago, and then a tough week of beer drinking here in Nashville when the Craft Brewers Conference touched down. So, I’ve been keeping occupied since the last episode. But it’s all been personal travel; all of my business travel has been replaced with Zoom and Teams sessions. I may be a bit of an outlier, but none of the US airlines’ Q1 earnings announcements were great, in no small part because business travel still isn’t back to pre-pandemic levels. Delta is hoping it’ll settle at 75% of 2019 levels while <a href=\"https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-04-21/industrial-strength-business-travel-recovery-is-showing-cracks-lgqvl4n3?utm_source=website&amp;utm_medium=share\">United’s CEO said</a>&nbsp; “We believe demand is just structurally different than it was pre-pandemic, and we’re still figuring out that new normal.” Maybe not quite the Bill Gates “over 50 percent of business travel… will go away” prediction, but with our 2-year crash course in virtual work, having the post-pandemic setpoint for business travel volume be 20-25% lower doesn’t seem too far fetched.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And even with the non-business “revenge” travel boom filling seats, personal travel is a lot more price sensitive, or elastic as economists like to say, than business travel. My travel patterns are a testament to that -- with higher airfares but a more flexible schedule (I can Zoom from anywhere), it’s been more road trips than plane flights. I’ve had some pretty drives, like through East Tennessee and central Kentucky, but also some real grind-outs, like I-75 pretty much from the Tennessee-Georgia border through Atlanta, all the way down to Macon.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But driving <em>does</em> make packing easier, without the space constraints of a carry-on bag. Which caught up with me, I think, on our Netherlands trip. I was out of practice, sloppy; forgetting to pack so much of what would be my normal kit -- collapsible umbrella, gloves, hat -- so that when the cold rain shifted to snow our first day in Amsterdam (it had been in the 70’s when we left Nashville), our standard throwaway line “If we’ve forgotten it, we’ll just buy it there” became very real. I was very happy to find a couple of sporting goods stores a block down from our hotel. I gotta do some remedial packing training before my next flight.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Javolenus/41932\">Ianiscus</a> by Javolenus (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. Ft: Wired_Ant</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Robert Fenerty hit the TravelCommons website to comment on last episode’s thoughts about ponying up for a not-quite-Amex Platinum card from Chase or Capital One, one that includes a Priority Pass membership. He said<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“You need to fix the cert on travelcommons.com, Safari is complaining.” Yup, I know. Converting the site to https has been on my to-do list for a long time. I’ll get to it, I promise… some day.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“Given the paucity of direct flights from Nashville, I suppose lounge access makes sense. But please don’t get a credit card just for Priority Pass access. I’ve had one for years through my Chase Sapphire Reserve card. But even as a 1K flier, I rarely use it. With Priority Pass, you’ll encounter capacity-controlled second-rate lounges where travelers on certain flights stroll past you while you’re being added to the 45-minute wait list. And after your 45 minute wait you’ll be treated to a sardine-packed lounge where the primary benefits are lack of blaring TVs, cat food sandwiches, and a second-rate chair that might adjoin an electrical outlet.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“Every time I buy a bold $20 glass of Cabernet at a Vino Volo or sip a remarkable east coast hazy at an airport bar with 20 taps, I think about how happy I am to not be begging for a second rate drink at a second rate lounge.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Agree that Priority Pass members definitely seem to be on the bottom of the “priority” list. I’ve been on the other side of that 45-minute wait list, walking into a lounge in ORD’s international terminal, bypassing the queue of Priority Pass holders because I had an AirFrance business class ticket. I’ve also encountered the cat-food sandwich phenomenon. I guess that’s why Amex’s Centurion Lounge is so popular -- great food, nice local beers and top-shelf liquor -- and so crowded and now charging for each guest. Food and drink costs during connections -- another thing I forgot to factor in when I moved to a non-hub city.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Jim McMcDonough hit the TravelCommons Facebook page to pile onto my rant about the US’s stop-start on-line passport renewal efforts.<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I have dual citizenship with the US and Ireland. Getting an Irish passport was a bureaucratic nightmare and took a couple of years from beginning to end. I saw it was expiring at the end of 2022 and went on-line to see how to renew it. Turns out there was a simple application to fill out on-line, got my wife to take a photo of me against a neutral background and uploaded it, paid by credit card, and had a new Irish passport in my mailbox five business days later. It can be done, USA. Try harder.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Jim’s comment got me looking… and sure enough, I can renew my UK passport online also. And checking the US passport renewal page just before recording says the online renewal portal is still <em>paused</em> -- we’re coming up on the 4th month of that pause. Maybe the US State Dept just needs to buy Ireland\'s or the UK\'s system rather than trying to build their own.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>One of the TravelCommons’ thru lines over the past 5-6 years has been the move to a cashless society and me being <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">a bit of a knuckle dragger </a>about it. It’s a stuttering progress -- tripping over small cash-only family-run restaurants in Chicago and here in Nashville, card-only places in Amsterdam; <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/12/24/podcast-191-my-notes-on-italy-and-split-croatia/\">a long weekend in Croatia last fall</a>, before they switched to the euro, that had me hunting down ATMs because not only were there signs saying “Cash Only” but also “Kuna Only” -- the currency that would be defunct in a couple of months. The Netherlands, like I said, was all about the tap -- double-click the iPhone, tap the little block, and hear the ding. I hit an ATM for €200 through force of habit and after 10 days, came home with €40-50 of it. But looking at my iPhone halfway through the trip, it looked like I’d traded cash for apps. I tweeted a screenshot of my phone; I’d added 9 apps to my phone just for those 10 days. Four were for different transit systems - one for Amsterdam, one for Rotterdam, one for the bus from Haarlem down to the tulip gardens, and one for the trains between them. There was Bolt, the Uber/taxicab mash-up, and Donkey Republic to unlock rental bikes. I can go cashless -- as long as my phone battery holds out.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Back in December, right after ChatGPT was released/unleashed (?) on the world, I wrote a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/12/12/how-good-are-chatgpts-top-5-holiday-travel-tips/\">blog post</a> comparing its holiday travel tips to mine. I thought the ChatGPT recommendations were <em>fine</em>, but mine were way more insightful. Now that Google and Microsoft have joined the AI chat game, I thought I’d ask all three “What’s the TravelCommons Podcast like”<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>First, ChatGPT’s response: “The TravelCommons podcast is a podcast that focuses on travel experiences and insights. Hosted by travel enthusiast and former consultant Mark Peacock, the podcast covers a range of topics related to travel, from the latest news and trends to personal travel stories and tips.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“Listeners can expect to hear Peacock\'s own experiences and anecdotes about his travels, as well as interviews with other travel experts and enthusiasts. The podcast often covers topics related to technology and travel, such as the latest travel apps and gadgets, as well as discussions about travel safety, sustainable travel, and more.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“One of the unique aspects of the TravelCommons podcast is that Peacock often records episodes while he\'s on the road, providing listeners with a firsthand account of his travel experiences. This adds an element of excitement and immediacy to the podcast, making it feel like you\'re right there with Peacock as he explores new destinations.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“Overall, if you\'re a travel enthusiast or just looking for some inspiration for your next trip, the TravelCommons podcast is definitely worth checking out.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Not bad, though it’s been a while since I’ve recorded on the road. Maybe I need to get back to that to recapture some of the “excitement and immediacy” of the older episodes.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Next up, Google’s Bard: “The TravelCommons podcast is a weekly podcast for frequent travelers. The host, Matt Kepnes, shares his insights and advice on all things travel, from planning and booking trips to navigating airports and hotels. He also interviews experts in the travel industry, such as airline pilots, hoteliers, and travel writers.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“The podcast is well-produced and informative, and Matt\'s enthusiasm for travel is contagious. He makes even the most mundane travel topics interesting, and he always has a few tips up his sleeve to help you make the most of your trips.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Uh, no. Somehow Bard has transferred TravelCommons to Nomadic Matt. I think I need to check and make sure I still own the travelcommons.com domain name.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And finally, Microsoft’s Bing Chat which is powered by the most recent version of ChatGPT: “TravelCommons is a podcast that focuses on the experience of travel. It is hosted by Mark Peacock, who is a frequent traveler himself. The podcast covers a wide range of topics related to travel, including tips for packing and planning, reviews of airlines and hotels, and discussions about the latest trends in travel. The podcast has been around since 2005 and has a loyal following of listeners who appreciate its honest and informative approach to travel.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>That’s pretty spot on! I may have to update the TravelCommons media guide with that.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page like Jim or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or, if you can fight thru the Safari security warnings like Robert did, you can post your comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/48914\">In Peace (Somewhere Else Mix)</a> by cdk (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. Ft: Snowflake</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Best Laid Travel Plans...</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The first topic in the last episode was “Still Overthinking Travel Planning” -- which I do because, well, I’ve spent a good bit of my waking life traveling. But kinda like how generals always fight the last war, I’m probably not doing a great job of accounting for the changes in today’s travel landscape -- full planes and hotels, limited flexibility, taking what you can get.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Living in Nashville, a non-hub city, means, more often than not, I have to plan for a connection, especially when choosing our flight home from Amsterdam in April, having to factor in the time needed to pass through Customs, maybe having to transit from an international to a domestic terminal, having to clear TSA security again -- all in addition to some cushion for a late flight. But when I looked across all our possible connections, the times were either snug, less than 2 hours, or boringly long, 4-6 hours. So I decided to risk it, taking the snug layover through ORD. I figured we knew the airport, so no time lost trying to figure out the terminal connection, and most importantly, if we <em>did</em> get caught up somewhere and missed our connection, there was another flight to Nashville at 6pm, some 4 hours later.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As you might guess, all didn’t go smoothly because if it did, I wouldn’t be talking about it on the podcast. There’s not much interesting about “I booked a snug connection and everything was fine.” It actually started to go off the rails a few days before our departure, on our last night in Rotterdam. We stayed at the <a href=\"https://www.hotelpincoffs.nl/en\">Hotel Pincoffs</a> on the left bank -- highly recommended -- and after dinner, we hit the lounge where ordered a glass of what was labeled a Dutch coastal gin called <a href=\"https://hermitgin.com/\">Hermit</a>, skipping the tonic as I talked about in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/01/26/podcast-192-new-year-travel-planning-tips-gin-conquers-the-world/\">episode #192</a>, so I could taste the botanicals and the salty water they plugged on the label.&nbsp; I liked it <em>a lot</em>, so much so that I ordered another glass, and then spent 3 hours the next day rummaging through Amsterdam liquor stores ‘til I found a bottle to take home. Which meant I was now checking my bag on my flight to ORD.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Two days later, our snug connection begins to decay. The inbound United flight was late which dominoed out our departure time by 20 minutes. The captain said not to worry, he’d push the throttle and make it up in the air. I’ve heard that promise before, and sure enough, we hit the gate 20 minutes late. OK, snug-ger, but still doable. The Global Entry kiosk was fast, almost too fast. ORD has <a href=\"https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/local-media-release/global-entry-begins-touchless-receipt-less-processing-ord\">new facial biometric kiosks</a>. I walked up and before I figured out how to use it, it had recognized my face and told me to move on. Slightly creepy, but that’s a topic for another episode.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>We find the luggage carousel just as the bags with the orange Priority tags start popping out. I let myself feel a bit optimistic. I’m watching for my gin-bearing bag. And watch. And watch. Non-priority bags come out. Still I’m watching. And feeling optimism decay. We work through the Customs exit line only to walk straight into an even longer line to recheck our bags for our Nashville flight. Only 2, 3 people are working it. I’m feeling like <a href=\"https://youtu.be/N8uUTW9zPbM\">Stevie Ray Vaughn when he sings</a> “tick tock, people, time’s ticking away.” I tweet a picture to United saying “I’d be pretty thrilled if I made my ORD-BNA connection after our AMS-ORD flight arrived late.” No response. We finally get up to the bag checker. She scans the bag tag; I can see her screen flash red. “Nope,” she says, “You won’t make your flight” and then turns to the next person in line.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>We stand there for a moment and then drag our bags over to the line for the re-booking agent. But as I’ve said many times on this podcast, work all the channels. My usual Twitter play didn’t seem to be working (United’s social media hub must be short-staffed), so I dial up the Premiere line and tell my entire tale of woe to the phone agent while still in line for the in-person one. Getting up to the ORD agent, I tell her the same thing; United’s delay caused me to miss my connection, so just book me on the 6pm to Nashville. Seems easy enough -- but not in today’s travel world. The rebooking agent tells me there are no seats left to Nashville today… on any carrier. “This is unacceptable,” I said. She goes palms up and turns to the next person in line. “Wait,” I said, “if you can’t get me home tonight, United owes me overnight accommodations.” She stopped, thought for a moment, and then wrote down a number. “You need to call them.” It was the same number I’d called while in line.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But though all that, I hadn’t hung up on that phone agent; she was still there. “I’m sorry but there are no seats to Nashville, but I can get you to Memphis.” She’s trying to help, but I don’t think she realizes that Tennessee is a long state -- Memphis is a 3-hour drive to Nashville. “This is unacceptable,” I said. She apologizes again. 15 minutes into the call, she offers to transfer me to her supervisor. I tell her my story with perhaps a little frustration creeping into my tone. “Can I put you on hold?” she asks. Sure, why not? In the meantime, Irene is checking on Southwest flight; apparently United agents can’t see them. The supervisor eventually comes back, “Would the 6pm flight be OK for you?” 6pm <em>today</em>? After 36 minutes on the phone and saying “This is unacceptable” 2 or 3 times, they scrounged up the seats I’d been asking for all along. We hopped on the AirTrain to get over to Terminal 1 and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/tortas.frontera/\" title=\"\">Tortas Frontera</a>, my favorite ORD restaurant, for a couple of unplanned margaritas. While checking the United app for my new boarding pass, I saw that United twitter had finally responded. “We\'re sorry about the stressful day you\'ve had today. As a gesture of goodwill, we\'re able to deposit 2,500 miles into each of your accounts.” Using a 1.5¢/mile conversion rate, that just about covered our Frontera tab. In today’s travel world, that’s probably the best outcome I could’ve hoped for.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music --<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/35724\">Blue Like Venus</a> by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. Ft: Admiral Bob</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Roaming Entropy</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Well before this “revenge” travel boom, over-tourism was a trending topic. I talked about it on many past episodes - biking up to Delicate Arch in Moab, Utah to find a swarm of photographers setting up to get their “golden hour shot” at sunset; trying to get in front of unloading tour buses along Iceland’s Golden Circle, and most recently squeezing through narrow streets in Rome when I made the mistake of agreeing to meet a friend at Trevi Fountain.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But, as you might guess, that’s not my preferred touring style. Instead, I tend to do what my family calls my “solo toro” routine -- going off on my own to wander a city, randomly walking, letting traffic lights make the call when it’s time to make a turn. Often I’ll have some end-point in mind -- a taproom, a church -- but my path getting there won’t be the most direct.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I didn’t think this was unique, but still, I’ve been pleasantly surprised to run across <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-emotional-benefits-of-wandering-11671131450?st=mmqyql6e1cktnub&amp;reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink\" title=\"\">a couple of articles</a> that put a proper name to this -- flâneuring, from <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fl%C3%A2neur\" title=\"\">flâneur</a>, the (of course) French word from the 19th Century that means \"a stroller, a loafer, a wanderer,\" someone who walks around a city without a fixed destination or purpose, just observing and enjoying the sights, sounds and smells. The English author Virginia Woolfe called it “street haunting” which I like, but I think my favorite term is “roaming entropy,” coined by some <a href=\"https://www.hartleylab.org/uploads/5/3/1/0/53101939/heller%E2%80%8A_et_al._2020.pdf\" title=\"\">NYU researchers</a> whose work showed a positive correlation between someone’s mood and how many new/varied/unexpected locations they visited.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“Roaming entropy,” “experiential diversity,” they say, promotes cognitive development -- which makes sense to me. In many ways, this is one of the main reasons people travel, to experience something new. Way back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\">episode #166</a>, Emily Thomas talked about how philosophers such as Descartes and Montagne thought experiencing “otherness of travel” was important to broadening your mind, forcing you to think past your familiar experiences. But many folks want to experience something new, but without the risk of disappointment -- or something worse -- that the term “roaming entropy” implies. And there’s nothing new to that. Guidebooks have been around forever. When Irene and I started traveling through Europe, we’d always carry a Green Michelin guide, and we’d check off the 1-, 2-, and 3-star sites as we’d hit them. Not really all that different from people today queuing up for selfies at an Instagram-famous spot.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But ticking off a list of Insta-sites or starred spots doesn’t open you to the possibility of serendipitous delight, the joy of discovering something unexpected. On the flip side, it does tend to keep you out of serendipitous disaster. I don’t recall my wanders putting me in harm’s way, but there have been a few times where I felt I’d pushed the envelope a bit far -- in Cape Town, J’burg; in Brussels -- and so beat a very direct, non-random retreat to someplace safer.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The NYU researchers also talked about “sociodemographic experiential variability,” which is their polysyllabic way of describing walking around in different ethnic/cultural neighborhoods during flâneuring. I’m always hitting up food carts for, say, tamales in Mexican neighborhoods, or not-really-well-defined meats on skewers in Asian night markets, or Cuban coffee joints in Miami. Come to think of it, a lot of my sociodemographic experiential variability involves food or booze. Though in my defense, if you keep stopping to buy stuff, you then have to carry it around with you the rest of the day, weighing you down, maybe forcing you to shorten your walk. And that’s not what “roaming entropy” is about. It’s all about riding the random wave.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #194</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>. And while you’re at TravelCommons.com, you can check out the show notes page for a transcript and any links I’ve mentioned. Or you can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_194.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #194 — Best Laid Travel Plans; Roaming Entropy','Stubbornness fixed some ORD connection drama when coming home from a tulip-peeping trip in Holland, even after all my travel planning. We wander into the world of flâneuring, aimlessly walking around a city as a way to swerve overtourism. Listeners weigh in on Priority Pass lounge access and online passport renewal experiences, and I count all the apps I needed to go cashless.','inherit','closed','closed','','4312-revision-v1','','','2023-06-19 13:45:56','2023-06-19 18:45:56','',4312,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4323',0,'revision','',0),
(4324,1,'2023-06-19 13:47:21','2023-06-19 18:47:21','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/replicate-prediction-57paxyjb7xj7hm5kqombv3ecdy-300x300.png\" alt=\"Robot using a laptop to make travel plans while on a beach\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"> Future of Travel Planning[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Back behind the microphone after stubbornness fixed some ORD connection drama when coming home from a tulip-peeping trip in Holland, despite all my finely tuned travel plans. Then we wander into the world of flâneuring, aimlessly walking around a city as a way to swerve overtourism. Listeners weigh in on Priority Pass lounge access and online passport renewal experiences, and I count all the apps I needed to go cashless in Holland. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_194.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #194: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN after a good bit of travel - 10 days in the Netherlands bracketed by road trips to Louisville, Savannah, GA, and Chicago, and then a tough week of beer drinking here in Nashville when the Craft Brewers Conference touched down. So, I’ve been keeping occupied since the last episode. But it’s all been personal travel; all of my business travel has been replaced with Zoom and Teams sessions. I may be a bit of an outlier, but none of the US airlines’ Q1 earnings announcements were great, in no small part because business travel still isn’t back to pre-pandemic levels. Delta is hoping it’ll settle at 75% of 2019 levels while <a href=\"https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-04-21/industrial-strength-business-travel-recovery-is-showing-cracks-lgqvl4n3?utm_source=website&amp;utm_medium=share\">United’s CEO said</a>&nbsp; “We believe demand is just structurally different than it was pre-pandemic, and we’re still figuring out that new normal.” Maybe not quite the Bill Gates “over 50 percent of business travel… will go away” prediction, but with our 2-year crash course in virtual work, having the post-pandemic setpoint for business travel volume be 20-25% lower doesn’t seem too far fetched.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And even with the non-business “revenge” travel boom filling seats, personal travel is a lot more price sensitive, or elastic as economists like to say, than business travel. My travel patterns are a testament to that -- with higher airfares but a more flexible schedule (I can Zoom from anywhere), it’s been more road trips than plane flights. I’ve had some pretty drives, like through East Tennessee and central Kentucky, but also some real grind-outs, like I-75 pretty much from the Tennessee-Georgia border through Atlanta, all the way down to Macon.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But driving <em>does</em> make packing easier, without the space constraints of a carry-on bag. Which caught up with me, I think, on our Netherlands trip. I was out of practice, sloppy; forgetting to pack so much of what would be my normal kit -- collapsible umbrella, gloves, hat -- so that when the cold rain shifted to snow our first day in Amsterdam (it had been in the 70’s when we left Nashville), our standard throwaway line “If we’ve forgotten it, we’ll just buy it there” became very real. I was very happy to find a couple of sporting goods stores a block down from our hotel. I gotta do some remedial packing training before my next flight.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/50485\">Sunset Boulevard</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Siobhan Dakay, unreal_dm</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Robert Fenerty hit the TravelCommons website to comment on last episode’s thoughts about ponying up for a not-quite-Amex Platinum card from Chase or Capital One, one that includes a Priority Pass membership. He said<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“You need to fix the cert on travelcommons.com, Safari is complaining.” Yup, I know. Converting the site to https has been on my to-do list for a long time. I’ll get to it, I promise… some day.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“Given the paucity of direct flights from Nashville, I suppose lounge access makes sense. But please don’t get a credit card just for Priority Pass access. I’ve had one for years through my Chase Sapphire Reserve card. But even as a 1K flier, I rarely use it. With Priority Pass, you’ll encounter capacity-controlled second-rate lounges where travelers on certain flights stroll past you while you’re being added to the 45-minute wait list. And after your 45 minute wait you’ll be treated to a sardine-packed lounge where the primary benefits are lack of blaring TVs, cat food sandwiches, and a second-rate chair that might adjoin an electrical outlet.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“Every time I buy a bold $20 glass of Cabernet at a Vino Volo or sip a remarkable east coast hazy at an airport bar with 20 taps, I think about how happy I am to not be begging for a second rate drink at a second rate lounge.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Agree that Priority Pass members definitely seem to be on the bottom of the “priority” list. I’ve been on the other side of that 45-minute wait list, walking into a lounge in ORD’s international terminal, bypassing the queue of Priority Pass holders because I had an AirFrance business class ticket. I’ve also encountered the cat-food sandwich phenomenon. I guess that’s why Amex’s Centurion Lounge is so popular -- great food, nice local beers and top-shelf liquor -- and so crowded and now charging for each guest. Food and drink costs during connections -- another thing I forgot to factor in when I moved to a non-hub city.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Jim McMcDonough hit the TravelCommons Facebook page to pile onto my rant about the US’s stop-start on-line passport renewal efforts.<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I have dual citizenship with the US and Ireland. Getting an Irish passport was a bureaucratic nightmare and took a couple of years from beginning to end. I saw it was expiring at the end of 2022 and went on-line to see how to renew it. Turns out there was a simple application to fill out on-line, got my wife to take a photo of me against a neutral background and uploaded it, paid by credit card, and had a new Irish passport in my mailbox five business days later. It can be done, USA. Try harder.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Jim’s comment got me looking… and sure enough, I can renew my UK passport online also. And checking the US passport renewal page just before recording says the online renewal portal is still <em>paused</em> -- we’re coming up on the 4th month of that pause. Maybe the US State Dept just needs to buy Ireland\'s or the UK\'s system rather than trying to build their own.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>One of the TravelCommons’ thru lines over the past 5-6 years has been the move to a cashless society and me being <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">a bit of a knuckle dragger </a>about it. It’s a stuttering progress -- tripping over small cash-only family-run restaurants in Chicago and here in Nashville, card-only places in Amsterdam; <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/12/24/podcast-191-my-notes-on-italy-and-split-croatia/\">a long weekend in Croatia last fall</a>, before they switched to the euro, that had me hunting down ATMs because not only were there signs saying “Cash Only” but also “Kuna Only” -- the currency that would be defunct in a couple of months. The Netherlands, like I said, was all about the tap -- double-click the iPhone, tap the little block, and hear the ding. I hit an ATM for €200 through force of habit and after 10 days, came home with €40-50 of it. But looking at my iPhone halfway through the trip, it looked like I’d traded cash for apps. I tweeted a screenshot of my phone; I’d added 9 apps to my phone just for those 10 days. Four were for different transit systems - one for Amsterdam, one for Rotterdam, one for the bus from Haarlem down to the tulip gardens, and one for the trains between them. There was Bolt, the Uber/taxicab mash-up, and Donkey Republic to unlock rental bikes. I can go cashless -- as long as my phone battery holds out.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Back in December, right after ChatGPT was released/unleashed (?) on the world, I wrote a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/12/12/how-good-are-chatgpts-top-5-holiday-travel-tips/\">blog post</a> comparing its holiday travel tips to mine. I thought the ChatGPT recommendations were <em>fine</em>, but mine were way more insightful. Now that Google and Microsoft have joined the AI chat game, I thought I’d ask all three “What’s the TravelCommons Podcast like”<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>First, ChatGPT’s response: “The TravelCommons podcast is a podcast that focuses on travel experiences and insights. Hosted by travel enthusiast and former consultant Mark Peacock, the podcast covers a range of topics related to travel, from the latest news and trends to personal travel stories and tips.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“Listeners can expect to hear Peacock\'s own experiences and anecdotes about his travels, as well as interviews with other travel experts and enthusiasts. The podcast often covers topics related to technology and travel, such as the latest travel apps and gadgets, as well as discussions about travel safety, sustainable travel, and more.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“One of the unique aspects of the TravelCommons podcast is that Peacock often records episodes while he\'s on the road, providing listeners with a firsthand account of his travel experiences. This adds an element of excitement and immediacy to the podcast, making it feel like you\'re right there with Peacock as he explores new destinations.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“Overall, if you\'re a travel enthusiast or just looking for some inspiration for your next trip, the TravelCommons podcast is definitely worth checking out.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Not bad, though it’s been a while since I’ve recorded on the road. Maybe I need to get back to that to recapture some of the “excitement and immediacy” of the older episodes.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Next up, Google’s Bard: “The TravelCommons podcast is a weekly podcast for frequent travelers. The host, Matt Kepnes, shares his insights and advice on all things travel, from planning and booking trips to navigating airports and hotels. He also interviews experts in the travel industry, such as airline pilots, hoteliers, and travel writers.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“The podcast is well-produced and informative, and Matt\'s enthusiasm for travel is contagious. He makes even the most mundane travel topics interesting, and he always has a few tips up his sleeve to help you make the most of your trips.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Uh, no. Somehow Bard has transferred TravelCommons to Nomadic Matt. I think I need to check and make sure I still own the travelcommons.com domain name.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And finally, Microsoft’s Bing Chat which is powered by the most recent version of ChatGPT: “TravelCommons is a podcast that focuses on the experience of travel. It is hosted by Mark Peacock, who is a frequent traveler himself. The podcast covers a wide range of topics related to travel, including tips for packing and planning, reviews of airlines and hotels, and discussions about the latest trends in travel. The podcast has been around since 2005 and has a loyal following of listeners who appreciate its honest and informative approach to travel.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>That’s pretty spot on! I may have to update the TravelCommons media guide with that.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page like Jim or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or, if you can fight thru the Safari security warnings like Robert did, you can post your comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Vidian/52190\">Memories (infiniti loop)</a> by Vidian (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license. Ft: TheDice</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Best Laid Travel Plans...</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The first topic in the last episode was “Still Overthinking Travel Planning” -- which I do because, well, I’ve spent a good bit of my waking life traveling. But kinda like how generals always fight the last war, I’m probably not doing a great job of accounting for the changes in today’s travel landscape -- full planes and hotels, limited flexibility, taking what you can get.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Living in Nashville, a non-hub city, means, more often than not, I have to plan for a connection, especially when choosing our flight home from Amsterdam in April, having to factor in the time needed to pass through Customs, maybe having to transit from an international to a domestic terminal, having to clear TSA security again -- all in addition to some cushion for a late flight. But when I looked across all our possible connections, the times were either snug, less than 2 hours, or boringly long, 4-6 hours. So I decided to risk it, taking the snug layover through ORD. I figured we knew the airport, so no time lost trying to figure out the terminal connection, and most importantly, if we <em>did</em> get caught up somewhere and missed our connection, there was another flight to Nashville at 6pm, some 4 hours later.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As you might guess, all didn’t go smoothly because if it did, I wouldn’t be talking about it on the podcast. There’s not much interesting about “I booked a snug connection and everything was fine.” It actually started to go off the rails a few days before our departure, on our last night in Rotterdam. We stayed at the <a href=\"https://www.hotelpincoffs.nl/en\">Hotel Pincoffs</a> on the left bank -- highly recommended -- and after dinner, we hit the lounge where ordered a glass of what was labeled a Dutch coastal gin called <a href=\"https://hermitgin.com/\">Hermit</a>, skipping the tonic as I talked about in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/01/26/podcast-192-new-year-travel-planning-tips-gin-conquers-the-world/\">episode #192</a>, so I could taste the botanicals and the salty water they plugged on the label.&nbsp; I liked it <em>a lot</em>, so much so that I ordered another glass, and then spent 3 hours the next day rummaging through Amsterdam liquor stores ‘til I found a bottle to take home. Which meant I was now checking my bag on my flight to ORD.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Two days later, our snug connection begins to decay. The inbound United flight was late which dominoed out our departure time by 20 minutes. The captain said not to worry, he’d push the throttle and make it up in the air. I’ve heard that promise before, and sure enough, we hit the gate 20 minutes late. OK, snug-ger, but still doable. The Global Entry kiosk was fast, almost too fast. ORD has <a href=\"https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/local-media-release/global-entry-begins-touchless-receipt-less-processing-ord\">new facial biometric kiosks</a>. I walked up and before I figured out how to use it, it had recognized my face and told me to move on. Slightly creepy, but that’s a topic for another episode.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>We find the luggage carousel just as the bags with the orange Priority tags start popping out. I let myself feel a bit optimistic. I’m watching for my gin-bearing bag. And watch. And watch. Non-priority bags come out. Still I’m watching. And feeling optimism decay. We work through the Customs exit line only to walk straight into an even longer line to recheck our bags for our Nashville flight. Only 2, 3 people are working it. I’m feeling like <a href=\"https://youtu.be/N8uUTW9zPbM\">Stevie Ray Vaughn when he sings</a> “tick tock, people, time’s ticking away.” I tweet a picture to United saying “I’d be pretty thrilled if I made my ORD-BNA connection after our AMS-ORD flight arrived late.” No response. We finally get up to the bag checker. She scans the bag tag; I can see her screen flash red. “Nope,” she says, “You won’t make your flight” and then turns to the next person in line.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>We stand there for a moment and then drag our bags over to the line for the re-booking agent. But as I’ve said many times on this podcast, work all the channels. My usual Twitter play didn’t seem to be working (United’s social media hub must be short-staffed), so I dial up the Premiere line and tell my entire tale of woe to the phone agent while still in line for the in-person one. Getting up to the ORD agent, I tell her the same thing; United’s delay caused me to miss my connection, so just book me on the 6pm to Nashville. Seems easy enough -- but not in today’s travel world. The rebooking agent tells me there are no seats left to Nashville today… on any carrier. “This is unacceptable,” I said. She goes palms up and turns to the next person in line. “Wait,” I said, “if you can’t get me home tonight, United owes me overnight accommodations.” She stopped, thought for a moment, and then wrote down a number. “You need to call them.” It was the same number I’d called while in line.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But though all that, I hadn’t hung up on that phone agent; she was still there. “I’m sorry but there are no seats to Nashville, but I can get you to Memphis.” She’s trying to help, but I don’t think she realizes that Tennessee is a long state -- Memphis is a 3-hour drive to Nashville. “This is unacceptable,” I said. She apologizes again. 15 minutes into the call, she offers to transfer me to her supervisor. I tell her my story with perhaps a little frustration creeping into my tone. “Can I put you on hold?” she asks. Sure, why not? In the meantime, Irene is checking on Southwest flight; apparently United agents can’t see them. The supervisor eventually comes back, “Would the 6pm flight be OK for you?” 6pm <em>today</em>? After 36 minutes on the phone and saying “This is unacceptable” 2 or 3 times, they scrounged up the seats I’d been asking for all along. We hopped on the AirTrain to get over to Terminal 1 and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/tortas.frontera/\" title=\"\">Tortas Frontera</a>, my favorite ORD restaurant, for a couple of unplanned margaritas. While checking the United app for my new boarding pass, I saw that United twitter had finally responded. “We\'re sorry about the stressful day you\'ve had today. As a gesture of goodwill, we\'re able to deposit 2,500 miles into each of your accounts.” Using a 1.5¢/mile conversion rate, that just about covered our Frontera tab. In today’s travel world, that’s probably the best outcome I could’ve hoped for.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music --<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/ramblinglibrarian/55007\">Dawn at the Top of the World ft. copperhead &amp; Robert Seikawitch</a> by Ivan Chew (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Roaming Entropy</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Well before this “revenge” travel boom, over-tourism was a trending topic. I talked about it on many past episodes - biking up to Delicate Arch in Moab, Utah to find a swarm of photographers setting up to get their “golden hour shot” at sunset; trying to get in front of unloading tour buses along Iceland’s Golden Circle, and most recently squeezing through narrow streets in Rome when I made the mistake of agreeing to meet a friend at Trevi Fountain.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But, as you might guess, that’s not my preferred touring style. Instead, I tend to do what my family calls my “solo toro” routine -- going off on my own to wander a city, randomly walking, letting traffic lights make the call when it’s time to make a turn. Often I’ll have some end-point in mind -- a taproom, a church -- but my path getting there won’t be the most direct.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I didn’t think this was unique, but still, I’ve been pleasantly surprised to run across <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-emotional-benefits-of-wandering-11671131450?st=mmqyql6e1cktnub&amp;reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink\" title=\"\">a couple of articles</a> that put a proper name to this -- flâneuring, from <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fl%C3%A2neur\" title=\"\">flâneur</a>, the (of course) French word from the 19th Century that means \"a stroller, a loafer, a wanderer,\" someone who walks around a city without a fixed destination or purpose, just observing and enjoying the sights, sounds and smells. The English author Virginia Woolfe called it “street haunting” which I like, but I think my favorite term is “roaming entropy,” coined by some <a href=\"https://www.hartleylab.org/uploads/5/3/1/0/53101939/heller%E2%80%8A_et_al._2020.pdf\" title=\"\">NYU researchers</a> whose work showed a positive correlation between someone’s mood and how many new/varied/unexpected locations they visited.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“Roaming entropy,” “experiential diversity,” they say, promotes cognitive development -- which makes sense to me. In many ways, this is one of the main reasons people travel, to experience something new. Way back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\">episode #166</a>, Emily Thomas talked about how philosophers such as Descartes and Montagne thought experiencing “otherness of travel” was important to broadening your mind, forcing you to think past your familiar experiences. But many folks want to experience something new, but without the risk of disappointment -- or something worse -- that the term “roaming entropy” implies. And there’s nothing new to that. Guidebooks have been around forever. When Irene and I started traveling through Europe, we’d always carry a Green Michelin guide, and we’d check off the 1-, 2-, and 3-star sites as we’d hit them. Not really all that different from people today queuing up for selfies at an Instagram-famous spot.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But ticking off a list of Insta-sites or starred spots doesn’t open you to the possibility of serendipitous delight, the joy of discovering something unexpected. On the flip side, it does tend to keep you out of serendipitous disaster. I don’t recall my wanders putting me in harm’s way, but there have been a few times where I felt I’d pushed the envelope a bit far -- in Cape Town, J’burg; in Brussels -- and so beat a very direct, non-random retreat to someplace safer.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The NYU researchers also talked about “sociodemographic experiential variability,” which is their polysyllabic way of describing walking around in different ethnic/cultural neighborhoods during flâneuring. I’m always hitting up food carts for, say, tamales in Mexican neighborhoods, or not-really-well-defined meats on skewers in Asian night markets, or Cuban coffee joints in Miami. Come to think of it, a lot of my sociodemographic experiential variability involves food or booze. Though in my defense, if you keep stopping to buy stuff, you then have to carry it around with you the rest of the day, weighing you down, maybe forcing you to shorten your walk. And that’s not what “roaming entropy” is about. It’s all about riding the random wave.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #194</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>. And while you’re at TravelCommons.com, you can check out the show notes page for a transcript and any links I’ve mentioned. Or you can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_194.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #194 — Best Laid Travel Plans; Roaming Entropy','Stubbornness fixed some ORD connection drama when coming home from a tulip-peeping trip in Holland, even after all my travel planning. We wander into the world of flâneuring, aimlessly walking around a city as a way to swerve overtourism. Listeners weigh in on Priority Pass lounge access and online passport renewal experiences, and I count all the apps I needed to go cashless.','inherit','closed','closed','','4312-revision-v1','','','2023-06-19 13:47:21','2023-06-19 18:47:21','',4312,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4324',0,'revision','',0),
(4325,1,'2023-06-20 11:22:45','2023-06-20 16:22:45','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/replicate-prediction-57paxyjb7xj7hm5kqombv3ecdy-300x300.png\" alt=\"Robot using a laptop to make travel plans while on a beach\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"> Future of Travel Planning[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Back behind the microphone after, despite my finely tuned travel plans, I had to resort to being stubbornly cranky to fix a ORD connection drama when coming home from a tulip-peeping trip in Holland. We also wander into the world of flâneuring, aimlessly walking around a city as a way to swerve overtourism. Listeners weigh in on Priority Pass lounge access and online passport renewal experiences, and I count all the apps I needed to go cashless in Holland. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_194.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #194: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN after a good bit of travel - 10 days in the Netherlands bracketed by road trips to Louisville, Savannah, GA, and Chicago, and then a tough week of beer drinking here in Nashville when the Craft Brewers Conference touched down. So, I’ve been keeping occupied since the last episode. But it’s all been personal travel; all of my business travel has been replaced with Zoom and Teams sessions. I may be a bit of an outlier, but none of the US airlines’ Q1 earnings announcements were great, in no small part because business travel still isn’t back to pre-pandemic levels. Delta is hoping it’ll settle at 75% of 2019 levels while <a href=\"https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-04-21/industrial-strength-business-travel-recovery-is-showing-cracks-lgqvl4n3?utm_source=website&amp;utm_medium=share\">United’s CEO said</a>&nbsp; “We believe demand is just structurally different than it was pre-pandemic, and we’re still figuring out that new normal.” Maybe not quite the Bill Gates “over 50 percent of business travel… will go away” prediction, but with our 2-year crash course in virtual work, having the post-pandemic setpoint for business travel volume be 20-25% lower doesn’t seem too far fetched.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And even with the non-business “revenge” travel boom filling seats, personal travel is a lot more price sensitive, or elastic as economists like to say, than business travel. My travel patterns are a testament to that -- with higher airfares but a more flexible schedule (I can Zoom from anywhere), it’s been more road trips than plane flights. I’ve had some pretty drives, like through East Tennessee and central Kentucky, but also some real grind-outs, like I-75 pretty much from the Tennessee-Georgia border through Atlanta, all the way down to Macon.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But driving <em>does</em> make packing easier, without the space constraints of a carry-on bag. Which caught up with me, I think, on our Netherlands trip. I was out of practice, sloppy; forgetting to pack so much of what would be my normal kit -- collapsible umbrella, gloves, hat -- so that when the cold rain shifted to snow our first day in Amsterdam (it had been in the 70’s when we left Nashville), our standard throwaway line “If we’ve forgotten it, we’ll just buy it there” became very real. I was very happy to find a couple of sporting goods stores a block down from our hotel. I gotta do some remedial packing training before my next flight.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/50485\">Sunset Boulevard</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Siobhan Dakay, unreal_dm</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Robert Fenerty hit the TravelCommons website to comment on last episode’s thoughts about ponying up for a not-quite-Amex Platinum card from Chase or Capital One, one that includes a Priority Pass membership. He said<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“You need to fix the cert on travelcommons.com, Safari is complaining.” Yup, I know. Converting the site to https has been on my to-do list for a long time. I’ll get to it, I promise… some day.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“Given the paucity of direct flights from Nashville, I suppose lounge access makes sense. But please don’t get a credit card just for Priority Pass access. I’ve had one for years through my Chase Sapphire Reserve card. But even as a 1K flier, I rarely use it. With Priority Pass, you’ll encounter capacity-controlled second-rate lounges where travelers on certain flights stroll past you while you’re being added to the 45-minute wait list. And after your 45 minute wait you’ll be treated to a sardine-packed lounge where the primary benefits are lack of blaring TVs, cat food sandwiches, and a second-rate chair that might adjoin an electrical outlet.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“Every time I buy a bold $20 glass of Cabernet at a Vino Volo or sip a remarkable east coast hazy at an airport bar with 20 taps, I think about how happy I am to not be begging for a second rate drink at a second rate lounge.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Agree that Priority Pass members definitely seem to be on the bottom of the “priority” list. I’ve been on the other side of that 45-minute wait list, walking into a lounge in ORD’s international terminal, bypassing the queue of Priority Pass holders because I had an AirFrance business class ticket. I’ve also encountered the cat-food sandwich phenomenon. I guess that’s why Amex’s Centurion Lounge is so popular -- great food, nice local beers and top-shelf liquor -- and so crowded and now charging for each guest. Food and drink costs during connections -- another thing I forgot to factor in when I moved to a non-hub city.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Jim McMcDonough hit the TravelCommons Facebook page to pile onto my rant about the US’s stop-start on-line passport renewal efforts.<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I have dual citizenship with the US and Ireland. Getting an Irish passport was a bureaucratic nightmare and took a couple of years from beginning to end. I saw it was expiring at the end of 2022 and went on-line to see how to renew it. Turns out there was a simple application to fill out on-line, got my wife to take a photo of me against a neutral background and uploaded it, paid by credit card, and had a new Irish passport in my mailbox five business days later. It can be done, USA. Try harder.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Jim’s comment got me looking… and sure enough, I can renew my UK passport online also. And checking the US passport renewal page just before recording says the online renewal portal is still <em>paused</em> -- we’re coming up on the 4th month of that pause. Maybe the US State Dept just needs to buy Ireland\'s or the UK\'s system rather than trying to build their own.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>One of the TravelCommons’ thru lines over the past 5-6 years has been the move to a cashless society and me being <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">a bit of a knuckle dragger </a>about it. It’s a stuttering progress -- tripping over small cash-only family-run restaurants in Chicago and here in Nashville, card-only places in Amsterdam; <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/12/24/podcast-191-my-notes-on-italy-and-split-croatia/\">a long weekend in Croatia last fall</a>, before they switched to the euro, that had me hunting down ATMs because not only were there signs saying “Cash Only” but also “Kuna Only” -- the currency that would be defunct in a couple of months. The Netherlands, like I said, was all about the tap -- double-click the iPhone, tap the little block, and hear the ding. I hit an ATM for €200 through force of habit and after 10 days, came home with €40-50 of it. But looking at my iPhone halfway through the trip, it looked like I’d traded cash for apps. I tweeted a screenshot of my phone; I’d added 9 apps to my phone just for those 10 days. Four were for different transit systems - one for Amsterdam, one for Rotterdam, one for the bus from Haarlem down to the tulip gardens, and one for the trains between them. There was Bolt, the Uber/taxicab mash-up, and Donkey Republic to unlock rental bikes. I can go cashless -- as long as my phone battery holds out.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Back in December, right after ChatGPT was released/unleashed (?) on the world, I wrote a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/12/12/how-good-are-chatgpts-top-5-holiday-travel-tips/\">blog post</a> comparing its holiday travel tips to mine. I thought the ChatGPT recommendations were <em>fine</em>, but mine were way more insightful. Now that Google and Microsoft have joined the AI chat game, I thought I’d ask all three “What’s the TravelCommons Podcast like”<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>First, ChatGPT’s response: “The TravelCommons podcast is a podcast that focuses on travel experiences and insights. Hosted by travel enthusiast and former consultant Mark Peacock, the podcast covers a range of topics related to travel, from the latest news and trends to personal travel stories and tips.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“Listeners can expect to hear Peacock\'s own experiences and anecdotes about his travels, as well as interviews with other travel experts and enthusiasts. The podcast often covers topics related to technology and travel, such as the latest travel apps and gadgets, as well as discussions about travel safety, sustainable travel, and more.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“One of the unique aspects of the TravelCommons podcast is that Peacock often records episodes while he\'s on the road, providing listeners with a firsthand account of his travel experiences. This adds an element of excitement and immediacy to the podcast, making it feel like you\'re right there with Peacock as he explores new destinations.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“Overall, if you\'re a travel enthusiast or just looking for some inspiration for your next trip, the TravelCommons podcast is definitely worth checking out.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Not bad, though it’s been a while since I’ve recorded on the road. Maybe I need to get back to that to recapture some of the “excitement and immediacy” of the older episodes.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Next up, Google’s Bard: “The TravelCommons podcast is a weekly podcast for frequent travelers. The host, Matt Kepnes, shares his insights and advice on all things travel, from planning and booking trips to navigating airports and hotels. He also interviews experts in the travel industry, such as airline pilots, hoteliers, and travel writers.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“The podcast is well-produced and informative, and Matt\'s enthusiasm for travel is contagious. He makes even the most mundane travel topics interesting, and he always has a few tips up his sleeve to help you make the most of your trips.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Uh, no. Somehow Bard has transferred TravelCommons to Nomadic Matt. I think I need to check and make sure I still own the travelcommons.com domain name.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And finally, Microsoft’s Bing Chat which is powered by the most recent version of ChatGPT: “TravelCommons is a podcast that focuses on the experience of travel. It is hosted by Mark Peacock, who is a frequent traveler himself. The podcast covers a wide range of topics related to travel, including tips for packing and planning, reviews of airlines and hotels, and discussions about the latest trends in travel. The podcast has been around since 2005 and has a loyal following of listeners who appreciate its honest and informative approach to travel.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>That’s pretty spot on! I may have to update the TravelCommons media guide with that.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page like Jim or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or, if you can fight thru the Safari security warnings like Robert did, you can post your comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Vidian/52190\">Memories (infiniti loop)</a> by Vidian (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license. Ft: TheDice</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Best Laid Travel Plans...</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The first topic in the last episode was “Still Overthinking Travel Planning” -- which I do because, well, I’ve spent a good bit of my waking life traveling. But kinda like how generals always fight the last war, I’m probably not doing a great job of accounting for the changes in today’s travel landscape -- full planes and hotels, limited flexibility, taking what you can get.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Living in Nashville, a non-hub city, means, more often than not, I have to plan for a connection, especially when choosing our flight home from Amsterdam in April, having to factor in the time needed to pass through Customs, maybe having to transit from an international to a domestic terminal, having to clear TSA security again -- all in addition to some cushion for a late flight. But when I looked across all our possible connections, the times were either snug, less than 2 hours, or boringly long, 4-6 hours. So I decided to risk it, taking the snug layover through ORD. I figured we knew the airport, so no time lost trying to figure out the terminal connection, and most importantly, if we <em>did</em> get caught up somewhere and missed our connection, there was another flight to Nashville at 6pm, some 4 hours later.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As you might guess, all didn’t go smoothly because if it did, I wouldn’t be talking about it on the podcast. There’s not much interesting about “I booked a snug connection and everything was fine.” It actually started to go off the rails a few days before our departure, on our last night in Rotterdam. We stayed at the <a href=\"https://www.hotelpincoffs.nl/en\">Hotel Pincoffs</a> on the left bank -- highly recommended -- and after dinner, we hit the lounge where ordered a glass of what was labeled a Dutch coastal gin called <a href=\"https://hermitgin.com/\">Hermit</a>, skipping the tonic as I talked about in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/01/26/podcast-192-new-year-travel-planning-tips-gin-conquers-the-world/\">episode #192</a>, so I could taste the botanicals and the salty water they plugged on the label.&nbsp; I liked it <em>a lot</em>, so much so that I ordered another glass, and then spent 3 hours the next day rummaging through Amsterdam liquor stores ‘til I found a bottle to take home. Which meant I was now checking my bag on my flight to ORD.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Two days later, our snug connection begins to decay. The inbound United flight was late which dominoed out our departure time by 20 minutes. The captain said not to worry, he’d push the throttle and make it up in the air. I’ve heard that promise before, and sure enough, we hit the gate 20 minutes late. OK, snug-ger, but still doable. The Global Entry kiosk was fast, almost too fast. ORD has <a href=\"https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/local-media-release/global-entry-begins-touchless-receipt-less-processing-ord\">new facial biometric kiosks</a>. I walked up and before I figured out how to use it, it had recognized my face and told me to move on. Slightly creepy, but that’s a topic for another episode.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>We find the luggage carousel just as the bags with the orange Priority tags start popping out. I let myself feel a bit optimistic. I’m watching for my gin-bearing bag. And watch. And watch. Non-priority bags come out. Still I’m watching. And feeling optimism decay. We work through the Customs exit line only to walk straight into an even longer line to recheck our bags for our Nashville flight. Only 2, 3 people are working it. I’m feeling like <a href=\"https://youtu.be/N8uUTW9zPbM\">Stevie Ray Vaughn when he sings</a> “tick tock, people, time’s ticking away.” I tweet a picture to United saying “I’d be pretty thrilled if I made my ORD-BNA connection after our AMS-ORD flight arrived late.” No response. We finally get up to the bag checker. She scans the bag tag; I can see her screen flash red. “Nope,” she says, “You won’t make your flight” and then turns to the next person in line.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>We stand there for a moment and then drag our bags over to the line for the re-booking agent. But as I’ve said many times on this podcast, work all the channels. My usual Twitter play didn’t seem to be working (United’s social media hub must be short-staffed), so I dial up the Premiere line and tell my entire tale of woe to the phone agent while still in line for the in-person one. Getting up to the ORD agent, I tell her the same thing; United’s delay caused me to miss my connection, so just book me on the 6pm to Nashville. Seems easy enough -- but not in today’s travel world. The rebooking agent tells me there are no seats left to Nashville today… on any carrier. “This is unacceptable,” I said. She goes palms up and turns to the next person in line. “Wait,” I said, “if you can’t get me home tonight, United owes me overnight accommodations.” She stopped, thought for a moment, and then wrote down a number. “You need to call them.” It was the same number I’d called while in line.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But though all that, I hadn’t hung up on that phone agent; she was still there. “I’m sorry but there are no seats to Nashville, but I can get you to Memphis.” She’s trying to help, but I don’t think she realizes that Tennessee is a long state -- Memphis is a 3-hour drive to Nashville. “This is unacceptable,” I said. She apologizes again. 15 minutes into the call, she offers to transfer me to her supervisor. I tell her my story with perhaps a little frustration creeping into my tone. “Can I put you on hold?” she asks. Sure, why not? In the meantime, Irene is checking on Southwest flight; apparently United agents can’t see them. The supervisor eventually comes back, “Would the 6pm flight be OK for you?” 6pm <em>today</em>? After 36 minutes on the phone and saying “This is unacceptable” 2 or 3 times, they scrounged up the seats I’d been asking for all along. We hopped on the AirTrain to get over to Terminal 1 and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/tortas.frontera/\" title=\"\">Tortas Frontera</a>, my favorite ORD restaurant, for a couple of unplanned margaritas. While checking the United app for my new boarding pass, I saw that United twitter had finally responded. “We\'re sorry about the stressful day you\'ve had today. As a gesture of goodwill, we\'re able to deposit 2,500 miles into each of your accounts.” Using a 1.5¢/mile conversion rate, that just about covered our Frontera tab. In today’s travel world, that’s probably the best outcome I could’ve hoped for.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music --<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/ramblinglibrarian/55007\">Dawn at the Top of the World ft. copperhead &amp; Robert Seikawitch</a> by Ivan Chew (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Roaming Entropy</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Well before this “revenge” travel boom, over-tourism was a trending topic. I talked about it on many past episodes - biking up to Delicate Arch in Moab, Utah to find a swarm of photographers setting up to get their “golden hour shot” at sunset; trying to get in front of unloading tour buses along Iceland’s Golden Circle, and most recently squeezing through narrow streets in Rome when I made the mistake of agreeing to meet a friend at Trevi Fountain.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But, as you might guess, that’s not my preferred touring style. Instead, I tend to do what my family calls my “solo toro” routine -- going off on my own to wander a city, randomly walking, letting traffic lights make the call when it’s time to make a turn. Often I’ll have some end-point in mind -- a taproom, a church -- but my path getting there won’t be the most direct.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I didn’t think this was unique, but still, I’ve been pleasantly surprised to run across <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-emotional-benefits-of-wandering-11671131450?st=mmqyql6e1cktnub&amp;reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink\" title=\"\">a couple of articles</a> that put a proper name to this -- flâneuring, from <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fl%C3%A2neur\" title=\"\">flâneur</a>, the (of course) French word from the 19th Century that means \"a stroller, a loafer, a wanderer,\" someone who walks around a city without a fixed destination or purpose, just observing and enjoying the sights, sounds and smells. The English author Virginia Woolfe called it “street haunting” which I like, but I think my favorite term is “roaming entropy,” coined by some <a href=\"https://www.hartleylab.org/uploads/5/3/1/0/53101939/heller%E2%80%8A_et_al._2020.pdf\" title=\"\">NYU researchers</a> whose work showed a positive correlation between someone’s mood and how many new/varied/unexpected locations they visited.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“Roaming entropy,” “experiential diversity,” they say, promotes cognitive development -- which makes sense to me. In many ways, this is one of the main reasons people travel, to experience something new. Way back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\">episode #166</a>, Emily Thomas talked about how philosophers such as Descartes and Montagne thought experiencing “otherness of travel” was important to broadening your mind, forcing you to think past your familiar experiences. But many folks want to experience something new, but without the risk of disappointment -- or something worse -- that the term “roaming entropy” implies. And there’s nothing new to that. Guidebooks have been around forever. When Irene and I started traveling through Europe, we’d always carry a Green Michelin guide, and we’d check off the 1-, 2-, and 3-star sites as we’d hit them. Not really all that different from people today queuing up for selfies at an Instagram-famous spot.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But ticking off a list of Insta-sites or starred spots doesn’t open you to the possibility of serendipitous delight, the joy of discovering something unexpected. On the flip side, it does tend to keep you out of serendipitous disaster. I don’t recall my wanders putting me in harm’s way, but there have been a few times where I felt I’d pushed the envelope a bit far -- in Cape Town, J’burg; in Brussels -- and so beat a very direct, non-random retreat to someplace safer.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The NYU researchers also talked about “sociodemographic experiential variability,” which is their polysyllabic way of describing walking around in different ethnic/cultural neighborhoods during flâneuring. I’m always hitting up food carts for, say, tamales in Mexican neighborhoods, or not-really-well-defined meats on skewers in Asian night markets, or Cuban coffee joints in Miami. Come to think of it, a lot of my sociodemographic experiential variability involves food or booze. Though in my defense, if you keep stopping to buy stuff, you then have to carry it around with you the rest of the day, weighing you down, maybe forcing you to shorten your walk. And that’s not what “roaming entropy” is about. It’s all about riding the random wave.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #194</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>. And while you’re at TravelCommons.com, you can check out the show notes page for a transcript and any links I’ve mentioned. Or you can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_194.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #194 — Best Laid Travel Plans; Roaming Entropy','Stubbornness fixed some ORD connection drama when coming home from a tulip-peeping trip in Holland, even after all my travel planning. We wander into the world of flâneuring, aimlessly walking around a city as a way to swerve overtourism. Listeners weigh in on Priority Pass lounge access and online passport renewal experiences, and I count all the apps I needed to go cashless.','inherit','closed','closed','','4312-revision-v1','','','2023-06-20 11:22:45','2023-06-20 16:22:45','',4312,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4325',0,'revision','',0),
(4326,1,'2023-06-20 15:22:06','2023-06-20 20:22:06','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/replicate-prediction-57paxyjb7xj7hm5kqombv3ecdy-300x300.png\" alt=\"Robot using a laptop to make travel plans while on a beach\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"> Future of Travel Planning[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Back behind the microphone after, despite my finely tuned travel plans, I had to resort to being stubbornly cranky to fix a ORD connection drama when coming home from a tulip-peeping trip in Holland. We also wander into the world of flâneuring, aimlessly walking around a city as a way to swerve over-tourism. Listeners weigh in on Priority Pass lounge access and online passport renewal experiences, and I count all the apps I needed to go cashless in Holland. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_194.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #194: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN after a good bit of travel - 10 days in the Netherlands bracketed by road trips to Louisville, Savannah, GA, and Chicago, and then a tough week of beer drinking here in Nashville when the Craft Brewers Conference touched down. So, I’ve been keeping occupied since the last episode. But it’s all been personal travel; all of my business travel has been replaced with Zoom and Teams sessions. I may be a bit of an outlier, but none of the US airlines’ Q1 earnings announcements were great, in no small part because business travel still isn’t back to pre-pandemic levels. Delta is hoping it’ll settle at 75% of 2019 levels while <a href=\"https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-04-21/industrial-strength-business-travel-recovery-is-showing-cracks-lgqvl4n3?utm_source=website&amp;utm_medium=share\">United’s CEO said</a>&nbsp; “We believe demand is just structurally different than it was pre-pandemic, and we’re still figuring out that new normal.” Maybe not quite the Bill Gates “over 50 percent of business travel… will go away” prediction, but with our 2-year crash course in virtual work, having the post-pandemic setpoint for business travel volume be 20-25% lower doesn’t seem too far fetched.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And even with the non-business “revenge” travel boom filling seats, personal travel is a lot more price sensitive, or elastic as economists like to say, than business travel. My travel patterns are a testament to that -- with higher airfares but a more flexible schedule (I can Zoom from anywhere), it’s been more road trips than plane flights. I’ve had some pretty drives, like through East Tennessee and central Kentucky, but also some real grind-outs, like I-75 pretty much from the Tennessee-Georgia border through Atlanta, all the way down to Macon.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But driving <em>does</em> make packing easier, without the space constraints of a carry-on bag. Which caught up with me, I think, on our Netherlands trip. I was out of practice, sloppy; forgetting to pack so much of what would be my normal kit -- collapsible umbrella, gloves, hat -- so that when the cold rain shifted to snow our first day in Amsterdam (it had been in the 70’s when we left Nashville), our standard throwaway line “If we’ve forgotten it, we’ll just buy it there” became very real. I was very happy to find a couple of sporting goods stores a block down from our hotel. I gotta do some remedial packing training before my next flight.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/50485\">Sunset Boulevard</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Siobhan Dakay, unreal_dm</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Robert Fenerty hit the TravelCommons website to comment on last episode’s thoughts about ponying up for a not-quite-Amex Platinum card from Chase or Capital One, one that includes a Priority Pass membership. He said<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“You need to fix the cert on travelcommons.com, Safari is complaining.” Yup, I know. Converting the site to https has been on my to-do list for a long time. I’ll get to it, I promise… some day.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“Given the paucity of direct flights from Nashville, I suppose lounge access makes sense. But please don’t get a credit card just for Priority Pass access. I’ve had one for years through my Chase Sapphire Reserve card. But even as a 1K flier, I rarely use it. With Priority Pass, you’ll encounter capacity-controlled second-rate lounges where travelers on certain flights stroll past you while you’re being added to the 45-minute wait list. And after your 45 minute wait you’ll be treated to a sardine-packed lounge where the primary benefits are lack of blaring TVs, cat food sandwiches, and a second-rate chair that might adjoin an electrical outlet.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“Every time I buy a bold $20 glass of Cabernet at a Vino Volo or sip a remarkable east coast hazy at an airport bar with 20 taps, I think about how happy I am to not be begging for a second rate drink at a second rate lounge.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Agree that Priority Pass members definitely seem to be on the bottom of the “priority” list. I’ve been on the other side of that 45-minute wait list, walking into a lounge in ORD’s international terminal, bypassing the queue of Priority Pass holders because I had an AirFrance business class ticket. I’ve also encountered the cat-food sandwich phenomenon. I guess that’s why Amex’s Centurion Lounge is so popular -- great food, nice local beers and top-shelf liquor -- and so crowded and now charging for each guest. Food and drink costs during connections -- another thing I forgot to factor in when I moved to a non-hub city.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Jim McDonough hit the TravelCommons Facebook page to pile onto my rant about the US’s stop-start on-line passport renewal efforts.<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I have dual citizenship with the US and Ireland. Getting an Irish passport was a bureaucratic nightmare and took a couple of years from beginning to end. I saw it was expiring at the end of 2022 and went on-line to see how to renew it. Turns out there was a simple application to fill out on-line, got my wife to take a photo of me against a neutral background and uploaded it, paid by credit card, and had a new Irish passport in my mailbox five business days later. It can be done, USA. Try harder.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Jim’s comment got me looking… and sure enough, I can renew my UK passport online also. And checking the US passport renewal page just before recording says the online renewal portal is still <em>paused</em> -- we’re coming up on the 4th month of that pause. Maybe the US State Dept just needs to buy Ireland\'s or the UK\'s system rather than trying to build their own.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>One of the TravelCommons’ thru lines over the past 5-6 years has been the move to a cashless society and me being <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">a bit of a knuckle dragger </a>about it. It’s a stuttering progress -- tripping over small cash-only family-run restaurants in Chicago and here in Nashville, card-only places in Amsterdam; <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/12/24/podcast-191-my-notes-on-italy-and-split-croatia/\">a long weekend in Croatia last fall</a>, before they switched to the euro, that had me hunting down ATMs because not only were there signs saying “Cash Only” but also “Kuna Only” -- the currency that would be defunct in a couple of months. The Netherlands, like I said, was all about the tap -- double-click the iPhone, tap the little block, and hear the ding. I hit an ATM for €200 through force of habit and after 10 days, came home with €40-50 of it. But looking at my iPhone halfway through the trip, it looked like I’d traded cash for apps. I tweeted a screenshot of my phone; I’d added 9 apps to my phone just for those 10 days. Four were for different transit systems - one for Amsterdam, one for Rotterdam, one for the bus from Haarlem down to the tulip gardens, and one for the trains between them. There was Bolt, the Uber/taxicab mash-up, and Donkey Republic to unlock rental bikes. I can go cashless -- as long as my phone battery holds out.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Back in December, right after ChatGPT was released/unleashed (?) on the world, I wrote a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/12/12/how-good-are-chatgpts-top-5-holiday-travel-tips/\">blog post</a> comparing its holiday travel tips to mine. I thought the ChatGPT recommendations were <em>fine</em>, but mine were way more insightful. Now that Google and Microsoft have joined the AI chat game, I thought I’d ask all three “What’s the TravelCommons Podcast like”<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>First, ChatGPT’s response: “The TravelCommons podcast is a podcast that focuses on travel experiences and insights. Hosted by travel enthusiast and former consultant Mark Peacock, the podcast covers a range of topics related to travel, from the latest news and trends to personal travel stories and tips.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“Listeners can expect to hear Peacock\'s own experiences and anecdotes about his travels, as well as interviews with other travel experts and enthusiasts. The podcast often covers topics related to technology and travel, such as the latest travel apps and gadgets, as well as discussions about travel safety, sustainable travel, and more.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“One of the unique aspects of the TravelCommons podcast is that Peacock often records episodes while he\'s on the road, providing listeners with a firsthand account of his travel experiences. This adds an element of excitement and immediacy to the podcast, making it feel like you\'re right there with Peacock as he explores new destinations.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“Overall, if you\'re a travel enthusiast or just looking for some inspiration for your next trip, the TravelCommons podcast is definitely worth checking out.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Not bad, though it’s been a while since I’ve recorded on the road. Maybe I need to get back to that to recapture some of the “excitement and immediacy” of the older episodes.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Next up, Google’s Bard: “The TravelCommons podcast is a weekly podcast for frequent travelers. The host, Matt Kepnes, shares his insights and advice on all things travel, from planning and booking trips to navigating airports and hotels. He also interviews experts in the travel industry, such as airline pilots, hoteliers, and travel writers.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“The podcast is well-produced and informative, and Matt\'s enthusiasm for travel is contagious. He makes even the most mundane travel topics interesting, and he always has a few tips up his sleeve to help you make the most of your trips.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Uh, no. Somehow Bard has transferred TravelCommons to Nomadic Matt. I think I need to check and make sure I still own the travelcommons.com domain name.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And finally, Microsoft’s Bing Chat which is powered by the most recent version of ChatGPT: “TravelCommons is a podcast that focuses on the experience of travel. It is hosted by Mark Peacock, who is a frequent traveler himself. The podcast covers a wide range of topics related to travel, including tips for packing and planning, reviews of airlines and hotels, and discussions about the latest trends in travel. The podcast has been around since 2005 and has a loyal following of listeners who appreciate its honest and informative approach to travel.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>That’s pretty spot on! I may have to update the TravelCommons media guide with that.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page like Jim or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or, if you can fight thru the Safari security warnings like Robert did, you can post your comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Vidian/52190\">Memories (infiniti loop)</a> by Vidian (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license. Ft: TheDice</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Best Laid Travel Plans...</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The first topic in the last episode was “Still Overthinking Travel Planning” -- which I do because, well, I’ve spent a good bit of my waking life traveling. But kinda like how generals always fight the last war, I’m probably not doing a great job of accounting for the changes in today’s travel landscape -- full planes and hotels, limited flexibility, taking what you can get.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Living in Nashville, a non-hub city, means, more often than not, I have to plan for a connection, especially when choosing our flight home from Amsterdam in April, having to factor in the time needed to pass through Customs, maybe having to transit from an international to a domestic terminal, having to clear TSA security again -- all in addition to some cushion for a late flight. But when I looked across all our possible connections, the times were either snug, less than 2 hours, or boringly long, 4-6 hours. So I decided to risk it, taking the snug layover through ORD. I figured we knew the airport, so no time lost trying to figure out the terminal connection, and most importantly, if we <em>did</em> get caught up somewhere and missed our connection, there was another flight to Nashville at 6pm, some 4 hours later.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As you might guess, all didn’t go smoothly because if it did, I wouldn’t be talking about it on the podcast. There’s not much interesting about “I booked a snug connection and everything was fine.” It actually started to go off the rails a few days before our departure, on our last night in Rotterdam. We stayed at the <a href=\"https://www.hotelpincoffs.nl/en\">Hotel Pincoffs</a> on the left bank -- highly recommended -- and after dinner, we hit the lounge where ordered a glass of what was labeled a Dutch coastal gin called <a href=\"https://hermitgin.com/\">Hermit</a>, skipping the tonic as I talked about in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/01/26/podcast-192-new-year-travel-planning-tips-gin-conquers-the-world/\">episode #192</a>, so I could taste the botanicals and the salty water they plugged on the label.&nbsp; I liked it <em>a lot</em>, so much so that I ordered another glass, and then spent 3 hours the next day rummaging through Amsterdam liquor stores ‘til I found a bottle to take home. Which meant I was now checking my bag on my flight to ORD.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Two days later, our snug connection begins to decay. The inbound United flight was late which dominoed out our departure time by 20 minutes. The captain said not to worry, he’d push the throttle and make it up in the air. I’ve heard that promise before, and sure enough, we hit the gate 20 minutes late. OK, snug-ger, but still doable. The Global Entry kiosk was fast, almost too fast. ORD has <a href=\"https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/local-media-release/global-entry-begins-touchless-receipt-less-processing-ord\">new facial biometric kiosks</a>. I walked up and before I figured out how to use it, it had recognized my face and told me to move on. Slightly creepy, but that’s a topic for another episode.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>We find the luggage carousel just as the bags with the orange Priority tags start popping out. I let myself feel a bit optimistic. I’m watching for my gin-bearing bag. And watch. And watch. Non-priority bags come out. Still I’m watching. And feeling optimism decay. We work through the Customs exit line only to walk straight into an even longer line to recheck our bags for our Nashville flight. Only 2, 3 people are working it. I’m feeling like <a href=\"https://youtu.be/N8uUTW9zPbM\">Stevie Ray Vaughn when he sings</a> “tick tock, people, time’s ticking away.” I tweet a picture to United saying “I’d be pretty thrilled if I made my ORD-BNA connection after our AMS-ORD flight arrived late.” No response. We finally get up to the bag checker. She scans the bag tag; I can see her screen flash red. “Nope,” she says, “You won’t make your flight” and then turns to the next person in line.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>We stand there for a moment and then drag our bags over to the line for the re-booking agent. But as I’ve said many times on this podcast, work all the channels. My usual Twitter play didn’t seem to be working (United’s social media hub must be short-staffed), so I dial up the Premiere line and tell my entire tale of woe to the phone agent while still in line for the in-person one. Getting up to the ORD agent, I tell her the same thing; United’s delay caused me to miss my connection, so just book me on the 6pm to Nashville. Seems easy enough -- but not in today’s travel world. The rebooking agent tells me there are no seats left to Nashville today… on any carrier. “This is unacceptable,” I said. She goes palms up and turns to the next person in line. “Wait,” I said, “if you can’t get me home tonight, United owes me overnight accommodations.” She stopped, thought for a moment, and then wrote down a number. “You need to call them.” It was the same number I’d called while in line.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But though all that, I hadn’t hung up on that phone agent; she was still there. “I’m sorry but there are no seats to Nashville, but I can get you to Memphis.” She’s trying to help, but I don’t think she realizes that Tennessee is a long state -- Memphis is a 3-hour drive to Nashville. “This is unacceptable,” I said. She apologizes again. 15 minutes into the call, she offers to transfer me to her supervisor. I tell her my story with perhaps a little frustration creeping into my tone. “Can I put you on hold?” she asks. Sure, why not? In the meantime, Irene is checking on Southwest flight; apparently United agents can’t see them. The supervisor eventually comes back, “Would the 6pm flight be OK for you?” 6pm <em>today</em>? After 36 minutes on the phone and saying “This is unacceptable” 2 or 3 times, they scrounged up the seats I’d been asking for all along. We hopped on the AirTrain to get over to Terminal 1 and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/tortas.frontera/\" title=\"\">Tortas Frontera</a>, my favorite ORD restaurant, for a couple of unplanned margaritas. While checking the United app for my new boarding pass, I saw that United twitter had finally responded. “We\'re sorry about the stressful day you\'ve had today. As a gesture of goodwill, we\'re able to deposit 2,500 miles into each of your accounts.” Using a 1.5¢/mile conversion rate, that just about covered our Frontera tab. In today’s travel world, that’s probably the best outcome I could’ve hoped for.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music --<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/ramblinglibrarian/55007\">Dawn at the Top of the World ft. copperhead &amp; Robert Seikawitch</a> by Ivan Chew (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Roaming Entropy</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Well before this “revenge” travel boom, over-tourism was a trending topic. I talked about it on many past episodes - biking up to Delicate Arch in Moab, Utah to find a swarm of photographers setting up to get their “golden hour shot” at sunset; trying to get in front of unloading tour buses along Iceland’s Golden Circle, and most recently squeezing through narrow streets in Rome when I made the mistake of agreeing to meet a friend at Trevi Fountain.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But, as you might guess, that’s not my preferred touring style. Instead, I tend to do what my family calls my “solo toro” routine -- going off on my own to wander a city, randomly walking, letting traffic lights make the call when it’s time to make a turn. Often I’ll have some end-point in mind -- a taproom, a church -- but my path getting there won’t be the most direct.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I didn’t think this was unique, but still, I’ve been pleasantly surprised to run across <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-emotional-benefits-of-wandering-11671131450?st=mmqyql6e1cktnub&amp;reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink\" title=\"\">a couple of articles</a> that put a proper name to this -- flâneuring, from <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fl%C3%A2neur\" title=\"\">flâneur</a>, the (of course) French word from the 19th Century that means \"a stroller, a loafer, a wanderer,\" someone who walks around a city without a fixed destination or purpose, just observing and enjoying the sights, sounds and smells. The English author Virginia Woolfe called it “street haunting” which I like, but I think my favorite term is “roaming entropy,” coined by some <a href=\"https://www.hartleylab.org/uploads/5/3/1/0/53101939/heller%E2%80%8A_et_al._2020.pdf\" title=\"\">NYU researchers</a> whose work showed a positive correlation between someone’s mood and how many new/varied/unexpected locations they visited.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“Roaming entropy,” “experiential diversity,” they say, promotes cognitive development -- which makes sense to me. In many ways, this is one of the main reasons people travel, to experience something new. Way back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\">episode #166</a>, Emily Thomas talked about how philosophers such as Descartes and Montagne thought experiencing “otherness of travel” was important to broadening your mind, forcing you to think past your familiar experiences. But many folks want to experience something new, but without the risk of disappointment -- or something worse -- that the term “roaming entropy” implies. And there’s nothing new to that. Guidebooks have been around forever. When Irene and I started traveling through Europe, we’d always carry a Green Michelin guide, and we’d check off the 1-, 2-, and 3-star sites as we’d hit them. Not really all that different from people today queuing up for selfies at an Instagram-famous spot.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But ticking off a list of Insta-sites or starred spots doesn’t open you to the possibility of serendipitous delight, the joy of discovering something unexpected. On the flip side, it does tend to keep you out of serendipitous disaster. I don’t recall my wanders putting me in harm’s way, but there have been a few times where I felt I’d pushed the envelope a bit far -- in Cape Town, J’burg; in Brussels -- and so beat a very direct, non-random retreat to someplace safer.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The NYU researchers also talked about “sociodemographic experiential variability,” which is their polysyllabic way of describing walking around in different ethnic/cultural neighborhoods during flâneuring. I’m always hitting up food carts for, say, tamales in Mexican neighborhoods, or not-really-well-defined meats on skewers in Asian night markets, or Cuban coffee joints in Miami. Come to think of it, a lot of my sociodemographic experiential variability involves food or booze. Though in my defense, if you keep stopping to buy stuff, you then have to carry it around with you the rest of the day, weighing you down, maybe forcing you to shorten your walk. And that’s not what “roaming entropy” is about. It’s all about riding the random wave.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #194</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>. And while you’re at TravelCommons.com, you can check out the show notes page for a transcript and any links I’ve mentioned. Or you can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_194.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #194 — Best Laid Travel Plans; Roaming Entropy','Stubbornness fixed some ORD connection drama when coming home from a tulip-peeping trip in Holland, even after all my travel planning. We wander into the world of flâneuring, aimlessly walking around a city as a way to swerve overtourism. Listeners weigh in on Priority Pass lounge access and online passport renewal experiences, and I count all the apps I needed to go cashless.','inherit','closed','closed','','4312-revision-v1','','','2023-06-20 15:22:06','2023-06-20 20:22:06','',4312,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4326',0,'revision','',0),
(4327,1,'2023-06-20 15:54:04','2023-06-20 20:54:04','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/replicate-prediction-57paxyjb7xj7hm5kqombv3ecdy-300x300.png\" alt=\"Robot using a laptop to make travel plans while on a beach\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"> Future of Travel Planning[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Back behind the microphone after, despite my finely tuned travel plans, I had to resort to being stubbornly cranky to fix a ORD connection drama when coming home from a tulip-peeping trip in Holland. We also wander into the world of flâneuring, aimlessly walking around a city as a way to swerve over-tourism. Listeners weigh in on Priority Pass lounge access and online passport renewal experiences, and I count all the apps I needed to go cashless in Holland. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_194.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #194: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN after a good bit of travel - 10 days in the Netherlands bracketed by road trips to Louisville, Savannah, GA, and Chicago, and then a tough week of beer drinking here in Nashville when the Craft Brewers Conference touched down. So, I’ve been keeping occupied since the last episode. But it’s all been personal travel; all of my business travel has been replaced with Zoom and Teams sessions. I may be a bit of an outlier, but none of the US airlines’ Q1 earnings announcements were great, in no small part because business travel still isn’t back to pre-pandemic levels. Delta is hoping it’ll settle at 75% of 2019 levels while <a href=\"https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-04-21/industrial-strength-business-travel-recovery-is-showing-cracks-lgqvl4n3?utm_source=website&amp;utm_medium=share\">United’s CEO said</a>&nbsp; “We believe demand is just structurally different than it was pre-pandemic, and we’re still figuring out that new normal.” Maybe not quite the Bill Gates “over 50 percent of business travel… will go away” prediction, but with our 2-year crash course in virtual work, having the post-pandemic setpoint for business travel volume be 20-25% lower doesn’t seem too far fetched.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And even with the non-business “revenge” travel boom filling seats, personal travel is a lot more price sensitive, or elastic as economists like to say, than business travel. My travel patterns are a testament to that -- with higher airfares but a more flexible schedule (I can Zoom from anywhere), it’s been more road trips than plane flights. I’ve had some pretty drives, like through East Tennessee and central Kentucky, but also some real grind-outs, like I-75 pretty much from the Tennessee-Georgia border through Atlanta, all the way down to Macon.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But driving <em>does</em> make packing easier, without the space constraints of a carry-on bag. Which caught up with me, I think, on our Netherlands trip. I was out of practice, sloppy; forgetting to pack so much of what would be my normal kit -- collapsible umbrella, gloves, hat -- so that when the cold rain shifted to snow our first day in Amsterdam (it had been in the 70’s when we left Nashville), our standard throwaway line “If we’ve forgotten it, we’ll just buy it there” became very real. I was very happy to find a couple of sporting goods stores a block down from our hotel. I gotta do some remedial packing training before my next flight.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/50485\">Sunset Boulevard</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Siobhan Dakay, unreal_dm</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Robert Fenerty hit the TravelCommons website to comment on last episode’s thoughts about ponying up for a not-quite-Amex Platinum card from Chase or Capital One, one that includes a Priority Pass membership. He said<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“You need to fix the cert on travelcommons.com, Safari is complaining.” Yup, I know. Converting the site to https has been on my to-do list for a long time. I’ll get to it, I promise… some day.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“Given the paucity of direct flights from Nashville, I suppose lounge access makes sense. But please don’t get a credit card just for Priority Pass access. I’ve had one for years through my Chase Sapphire Reserve card. But even as a 1K flier, I rarely use it. With Priority Pass, you’ll encounter capacity-controlled second-rate lounges where travelers on certain flights stroll past you while you’re being added to the 45-minute wait list. And after your 45 minute wait you’ll be treated to a sardine-packed lounge where the primary benefits are lack of blaring TVs, cat food sandwiches, and a second-rate chair that might adjoin an electrical outlet.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“Every time I buy a bold $20 glass of Cabernet at a Vino Volo or sip a remarkable east coast hazy at an airport bar with 20 taps, I think about how happy I am to not be begging for a second rate drink at a second rate lounge.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Agree that Priority Pass members definitely seem to be on the bottom of the “priority” list. I’ve been on the other side of that 45-minute wait list, walking into a lounge in ORD’s international terminal, bypassing the queue of Priority Pass holders because I had an AirFrance business class ticket. I’ve also encountered the cat-food sandwich phenomenon. I guess that’s why Amex’s Centurion Lounge is so popular -- great food, nice local beers and top-shelf liquor -- and so crowded and now charging for each guest. Food and drink costs during connections -- another thing I forgot to factor in when I moved to a non-hub city.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Jim McDonough hit the TravelCommons Facebook page to pile onto my rant about the US’s stop-start on-line passport renewal efforts.<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I have dual citizenship with the US and Ireland. Getting an Irish passport was a bureaucratic nightmare and took a couple of years from beginning to end. I saw it was expiring at the end of 2022 and went on-line to see how to renew it. Turns out there was a simple application to fill out on-line, got my wife to take a photo of me against a neutral background and uploaded it, paid by credit card, and had a new Irish passport in my mailbox five business days later. It can be done, USA. Try harder.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Jim’s comment got me looking… and sure enough, I can renew my UK passport online also. And checking the US passport renewal page just before recording says the online renewal portal is still <em>paused</em> -- we’re coming up on the 4th month of that pause. Maybe the US State Dept just needs to buy Ireland\'s or the UK\'s system rather than trying to build their own.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>One of the TravelCommons’ thru lines over the past 5-6 years has been the move to a cashless society and me being <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">a bit of a knuckle dragger </a>about it. It’s a stuttering progress -- tripping over small cash-only family-run restaurants in Chicago and here in Nashville, card-only places in Amsterdam; <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/12/24/podcast-191-my-notes-on-italy-and-split-croatia/\">a long weekend in Croatia last fall</a>, before they switched to the euro, that had me hunting down ATMs because not only were there signs saying “Cash Only” but also “Kuna Only” -- the currency that would be defunct in a couple of months. The Netherlands, like I said, was all about the tap -- double-click the iPhone, tap the little block, and hear the ding. I hit an ATM for €200 through force of habit and after 10 days, came home with €40-50 of it. But looking at my iPhone halfway through the trip, it looked like I’d traded cash for apps. I tweeted a screenshot of my phone; I’d added 9 apps to my phone just for those 10 days. Four were for different transit systems - one for Amsterdam, one for Rotterdam, one for the bus from Haarlem down to the tulip gardens, and one for the trains between them. There was Bolt, the Uber/taxicab mash-up, and Donkey Republic to unlock rental bikes. I can go cashless -- as long as my phone battery holds out.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Back in December, right after ChatGPT was released/unleashed (?) on the world, I wrote a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/12/12/how-good-are-chatgpts-top-5-holiday-travel-tips/\">blog post</a> comparing its holiday travel tips to mine. I thought the ChatGPT recommendations were <em>fine</em>, but mine were way more insightful. Now that Google and Microsoft have joined the AI chat game, I thought I’d ask all three “What’s the TravelCommons Podcast like”<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>First, ChatGPT’s response: “The TravelCommons podcast is a podcast that focuses on travel experiences and insights. Hosted by travel enthusiast and former consultant Mark Peacock, the podcast covers a range of topics related to travel, from the latest news and trends to personal travel stories and tips.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“Listeners can expect to hear Peacock\'s own experiences and anecdotes about his travels, as well as interviews with other travel experts and enthusiasts. The podcast often covers topics related to technology and travel, such as the latest travel apps and gadgets, as well as discussions about travel safety, sustainable travel, and more.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“One of the unique aspects of the TravelCommons podcast is that Peacock often records episodes while he\'s on the road, providing listeners with a firsthand account of his travel experiences. This adds an element of excitement and immediacy to the podcast, making it feel like you\'re right there with Peacock as he explores new destinations.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“Overall, if you\'re a travel enthusiast or just looking for some inspiration for your next trip, the TravelCommons podcast is definitely worth checking out.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Not bad, though it’s been a while since I’ve recorded on the road. Maybe I need to get back to that to recapture some of the “excitement and immediacy” of the older episodes.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Next up, Google’s Bard: “The TravelCommons podcast is a weekly podcast for frequent travelers. The host, Matt Kepnes, shares his insights and advice on all things travel, from planning and booking trips to navigating airports and hotels. He also interviews experts in the travel industry, such as airline pilots, hoteliers, and travel writers.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“The podcast is well-produced and informative, and Matt\'s enthusiasm for travel is contagious. He makes even the most mundane travel topics interesting, and he always has a few tips up his sleeve to help you make the most of your trips.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Uh, no. Somehow Bard has transferred TravelCommons to Nomadic Matt. I think I need to check and make sure I still own the travelcommons.com domain name.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And finally, Microsoft’s Bing Chat which is powered by the most recent version of ChatGPT: “TravelCommons is a podcast that focuses on the experience of travel. It is hosted by Mark Peacock, who is a frequent traveler himself. The podcast covers a wide range of topics related to travel, including tips for packing and planning, reviews of airlines and hotels, and discussions about the latest trends in travel. The podcast has been around since 2005 and has a loyal following of listeners who appreciate its honest and informative approach to travel.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>That’s pretty spot on! I may have to update the TravelCommons media guide with that.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page like Jim or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or, if you can fight thru the Safari security warnings like Robert did, you can post your comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Vidian/52190\">Memories (infiniti loop)</a> by Vidian (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license. Ft: TheDice</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Best Laid Travel Plans...</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The first topic in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/03/31/podcast-193-making-the-most-of-miles-nashville-vs-nash-vegas/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Podcast #193 — Making the Most of Miles; Nashville vs Nash-Vegas\">the last episode</a> was “Still Overthinking Travel Planning” -- which I do because, well, I’ve spent a good bit of my waking life traveling. But kinda like how generals always fight the last war, I’m probably not doing a great job of accounting for the changes in today’s travel landscape -- full planes and hotels, limited flexibility, taking what you can get.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Living in Nashville, a non-hub city, means, more often than not, I have to plan for a connection, especially when choosing our flight home from Amsterdam in April, having to factor in the time needed to pass through Customs, maybe having to transit from an international to a domestic terminal, having to clear TSA security again -- all in addition to some cushion for a late flight. But when I looked across all our possible connections, the times were either snug, less than 2 hours, or boringly long, 4-6 hours. So I decided to risk it, taking the snug layover through ORD. I figured we knew the airport, so no time lost trying to figure out the terminal connection, and most importantly, if we <em>did</em> get caught up somewhere and missed our connection, there was another flight to Nashville at 6pm, some 4 hours later.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As you might guess, all didn’t go smoothly because if it did, I wouldn’t be talking about it on the podcast. There’s not much interesting about “I booked a snug connection and everything was fine.” It actually started to go off the rails a few days before our departure, on our last night in Rotterdam. We stayed at the <a href=\"https://www.hotelpincoffs.nl/en\">Hotel Pincoffs</a> on the left bank -- highly recommended -- and after dinner, we hit the lounge where ordered a glass of what was labeled a Dutch coastal gin called <a href=\"https://hermitgin.com/\">Hermit</a>, skipping the tonic as I talked about in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/01/26/podcast-192-new-year-travel-planning-tips-gin-conquers-the-world/\">episode #192</a>, so I could taste the botanicals and the salty water they plugged on the label.&nbsp; I liked it <em>a lot</em>, so much so that I ordered another glass, and then spent 3 hours the next day rummaging through Amsterdam liquor stores ‘til I found a bottle to take home. Which meant I was now checking my bag on my flight to ORD.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Two days later, our snug connection begins to decay. The inbound United flight was late which dominoed out our departure time by 20 minutes. The captain said not to worry, he’d push the throttle and make it up in the air. I’ve heard that promise before, and sure enough, we hit the gate 20 minutes late. OK, snug-ger, but still doable. The Global Entry kiosk was fast, almost too fast. ORD has <a href=\"https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/local-media-release/global-entry-begins-touchless-receipt-less-processing-ord\">new facial biometric kiosks</a>. I walked up and before I figured out how to use it, it had recognized my face and told me to move on. Slightly creepy, but that’s a topic for another episode.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>We find the luggage carousel just as the bags with the orange Priority tags start popping out. I let myself feel a bit optimistic. I’m watching for my gin-bearing bag. And watch. And watch. Non-priority bags come out. Still I’m watching. And feeling optimism decay. We work through the Customs exit line only to walk straight into an even longer line to recheck our bags for our Nashville flight. Only 2, 3 people are working it. I’m feeling like <a href=\"https://youtu.be/N8uUTW9zPbM\">Stevie Ray Vaughn when he sings</a> “tick tock, people, time’s ticking away.” I tweet a picture to United saying “I’d be pretty thrilled if I made my ORD-BNA connection after our AMS-ORD flight arrived late.” No response. We finally get up to the bag checker. She scans the bag tag; I can see her screen flash red. “Nope,” she says, “You won’t make your flight” and then turns to the next person in line.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>We stand there for a moment and then drag our bags over to the line for the re-booking agent. But as I’ve said many times on this podcast, work all the channels. My usual Twitter play didn’t seem to be working (United’s social media hub must be short-staffed), so I dial up the Premiere line and tell my entire tale of woe to the phone agent while still in line for the in-person one. Getting up to the ORD agent, I tell her the same thing; United’s delay caused me to miss my connection, so just book me on the 6pm to Nashville. Seems easy enough -- but not in today’s travel world. The rebooking agent tells me there are no seats left to Nashville today… on any carrier. “This is unacceptable,” I said. She goes palms up and turns to the next person in line. “Wait,” I said, “if you can’t get me home tonight, United owes me overnight accommodations.” She stopped, thought for a moment, and then wrote down a number. “You need to call them.” It was the same number I’d called while in line.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But though all that, I hadn’t hung up on that phone agent; she was still there. “I’m sorry but there are no seats to Nashville, but I can get you to Memphis.” She’s trying to help, but I don’t think she realizes that Tennessee is a long state -- Memphis is a 3-hour drive to Nashville. “This is unacceptable,” I said. She apologizes again. 15 minutes into the call, she offers to transfer me to her supervisor. I tell her my story with perhaps a little frustration creeping into my tone. “Can I put you on hold?” she asks. Sure, why not? In the meantime, Irene is checking on Southwest flight; apparently United agents can’t see them. The supervisor eventually comes back, “Would the 6pm flight be OK for you?” 6pm <em>today</em>? After 36 minutes on the phone and saying “This is unacceptable” 2 or 3 times, they scrounged up the seats I’d been asking for all along. We hopped on the AirTrain to get over to Terminal 1 and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/tortas.frontera/\" title=\"\">Tortas Frontera</a>, my favorite ORD restaurant, for a couple of unplanned margaritas. While checking the United app for my new boarding pass, I saw that United twitter had finally responded. “We\'re sorry about the stressful day you\'ve had today. As a gesture of goodwill, we\'re able to deposit 2,500 miles into each of your accounts.” Using a 1.5¢/mile conversion rate, that just about covered our Frontera tab. In today’s travel world, that’s probably the best outcome I could’ve hoped for.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music --<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/ramblinglibrarian/55007\">Dawn at the Top of the World ft. copperhead &amp; Robert Seikawitch</a> by Ivan Chew (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Roaming Entropy</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Well before this “revenge” travel boom, over-tourism was a trending topic. I talked about it on many past episodes - biking up to Delicate Arch in Moab, Utah to find a swarm of photographers setting up to get their “golden hour shot” at sunset; trying to get in front of unloading tour buses along Iceland’s Golden Circle, and most recently squeezing through narrow streets in Rome when I made the mistake of agreeing to meet a friend at Trevi Fountain.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But, as you might guess, that’s not my preferred touring style. Instead, I tend to do what my family calls my “solo toro” routine -- going off on my own to wander a city, randomly walking, letting traffic lights make the call when it’s time to make a turn. Often I’ll have some end-point in mind -- a taproom, a church -- but my path getting there won’t be the most direct.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I didn’t think this was unique, but still, I’ve been pleasantly surprised to run across <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-emotional-benefits-of-wandering-11671131450?st=mmqyql6e1cktnub&amp;reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink\" title=\"\">a couple of articles</a> that put a proper name to this -- flâneuring, from <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fl%C3%A2neur\" title=\"\">flâneur</a>, the (of course) French word from the 19th Century that means \"a stroller, a loafer, a wanderer,\" someone who walks around a city without a fixed destination or purpose, just observing and enjoying the sights, sounds and smells. The English author Virginia Woolfe called it “street haunting” which I like, but I think my favorite term is “roaming entropy,” coined by some <a href=\"https://www.hartleylab.org/uploads/5/3/1/0/53101939/heller%E2%80%8A_et_al._2020.pdf\" title=\"\">NYU researchers</a> whose work showed a positive correlation between someone’s mood and how many new/varied/unexpected locations they visited.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“Roaming entropy,” “experiential diversity,” they say, promotes cognitive development -- which makes sense to me. In many ways, this is one of the main reasons people travel, to experience something new. Way back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\">episode #166</a>, Emily Thomas talked about how philosophers such as Descartes and Montagne thought experiencing “otherness of travel” was important to broadening your mind, forcing you to think past your familiar experiences. But many folks want to experience something new, but without the risk of disappointment -- or something worse -- that the term “roaming entropy” implies. And there’s nothing new to that. Guidebooks have been around forever. When Irene and I started traveling through Europe, we’d always carry a Green Michelin guide, and we’d check off the 1-, 2-, and 3-star sites as we’d hit them. Not really all that different from people today queuing up for selfies at an Instagram-famous spot.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But ticking off a list of Insta-sites or starred spots doesn’t open you to the possibility of serendipitous delight, the joy of discovering something unexpected. On the flip side, it does tend to keep you out of serendipitous disaster. I don’t recall my wanders putting me in harm’s way, but there have been a few times where I felt I’d pushed the envelope a bit far -- in Cape Town, J’burg; in Brussels -- and so beat a very direct, non-random retreat to someplace safer.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The NYU researchers also talked about “sociodemographic experiential variability,” which is their polysyllabic way of describing walking around in different ethnic/cultural neighborhoods during flâneuring. I’m always hitting up food carts for, say, tamales in Mexican neighborhoods, or not-really-well-defined meats on skewers in Asian night markets, or Cuban coffee joints in Miami. Come to think of it, a lot of my sociodemographic experiential variability involves food or booze. Though in my defense, if you keep stopping to buy stuff, you then have to carry it around with you the rest of the day, weighing you down, maybe forcing you to shorten your walk. And that’s not what “roaming entropy” is about. It’s all about riding the random wave.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #194</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>. And while you’re at TravelCommons.com, you can check out the show notes page for a transcript and any links I’ve mentioned. Or you can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_194.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #194 — Best Laid Travel Plans; Roaming Entropy','Stubbornness fixed some ORD connection drama when coming home from a tulip-peeping trip in Holland, even after all my travel planning. We wander into the world of flâneuring, aimlessly walking around a city as a way to swerve overtourism. Listeners weigh in on Priority Pass lounge access and online passport renewal experiences, and I count all the apps I needed to go cashless.','inherit','closed','closed','','4312-revision-v1','','','2023-06-20 15:54:04','2023-06-20 20:54:04','',4312,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4327',0,'revision','',0),
(4342,1,'2023-08-23 18:44:39','2023-08-23 23:44:39','[caption id=\"attachment_1273\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/IMG_2455.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-1273 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/IMG_2455-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Morning-Prince Canal, Jordaan\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> Quiet Sunday Morning Before the Tour Boats Invade the Prinsengracht[/caption]\n\nBack in front of the mic after summer vacation, I\'ve continued the heavy travel schedule -- New Orleans mostly with a week in Amsterdam for a family vacation. I talk about the exposure of staying in a houseboat on an Amsterdam canal and run through my personal \"Best of\" list. Flying out of the Gulf Coast in the summer with its afternoon thunderstorms has forced me to become a weather geek. I run through the weather apps I religiously use. Bad weather also caught up with me in Europe, but Lufthansa did a great job of taking care of us. I\'m still in love with TSA\'s PreCheck. I may make Southwest\'s A-List once PreCheck comes to <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Chicago Midway International Airport\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Midway_International_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener wikipedia noreferrer\">Chicago-Midway airport</a>. And we wrap with restaurant trends seen at this year\'s National Restaurant Association show. All this and more &nbsp;at the&nbsp;<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_106.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.\n\n<hr>\n\nHere are the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #106:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&amp;friendID=2973937\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Back in the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago. I sorta took the summer off -- working, biking, reading, drinking beer. Nothing really exciting, which meant, I guess, that I didn\'t have anything new to podcast about.</li>\n 	<li>Which doesn\'t mean I haven\'t been traveling. I\'ve been in the air almost every week since the last episode -- New Orleans mostly, with a few trips to Houston, and a week in Amsterdam for a family vacation.</li>\n 	<li>The New Orleans trips have taught me a key life lesson -- don’t try to fly out of the Gulf Coast after 4:30pm in the summer. New Orleans in the summer is 91 degrees and 91% humidity. And so you sit in the airport terminal and watch the line of thunderstorms cross the runway at about 4pm -- just bucketing down rain with lightning strikes that keep the ground crews inside. That’s about the time you walk over and get another beer ‘cause you’re going to be there for a while.</li>\n 	<li>Of course, it could be worse. You could be on one of the planes that managed to land right before the squall line hit. You’re sitting on a plane that’s pulled up to the gate, but you can get off because there’s no one to pull the jet bridge up because of the lighting. You get the same wait, but no beer.</li>\n 	<li>So if you don’t want to torture yourself, you don’t fly out late afternoon, but the other problem is that, after 7pm, MSY is a ghost town. The last flight that will get me to Chicago -- even with a connection, leaves at 6:30. Save for the odd SW hop to Houston, there’s nothing going.</li>\n 	<li>So, if I have a late afternoon meeting, I have to stay overnight. And then head over to the French Quarter, or the Garden District, or the Bywater district for a cocktail and some fresh oysters, maybe a bit of gumbo or cochon… OK, so maybe the lack of late night flights home isn\'t so bad after all.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music --&nbsp;<em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/djlang59/37792\">Drops of H2O (The Filtered Water Treatment)</a></em>&nbsp;by J Lang</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>So all this dodging summer Gulf storms has made weather apps join airline and trip mgmt apps in the critical travel apps folder on my <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"iPhone\" href=\"http://www.apple.com/iphone\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"homepage noopener noreferrer\">iPhone</a> and Nexus 7. Actually, it starts on my laptop where I have <a href=\"http://weatherspark.com/#!dashboard;a=USA/LA/New_Orleans\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">WeatherSpark </a>on an open tab at all times. In one browser window, I get radar, temperature and precipitation forecasts. On my iPhone, it’s <a href=\"http://forecast.io/#/f/40.7142,-74.0064\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Forecast</a> and the rebuilt Yahoo Weather apps which really represent two ends of the design spectrum. Forecast has very minimal aesthetic -- lot of white space; focused quickly giving you what it thinks most people want to know -- what’s the forecast for the next hour; and the next 24 hours. Tapping and reveals current weather conditions -- humidity, pressure, wind; another tap the 7 day forecast; tap one of those days drills down to its hourly temperature and precip forecast. Yahoo Weather is less tappy -- you start with current conditions and a big picture from Flickr and then scroll down for forecasts and a radar map. On my Nexus 7, <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Skymotion\" href=\"http://skymotion.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"homepage noopener noreferrer\">SkyMotion</a> is focused on short-term forecasting -- it gives me current conditions and a forecast as far ahead as it can see (No Rain for the next 115 min) and then counts down the next forecast -- I have mine set to update every 5 minutes. I tend to triangulate across all of them for sort of a consensus forecast, but that’s because, in trying to get home at a reasonable time every week, I\'ve become a bit obsessive about the weather.</li>\n 	<li>Maps, of course, are the critical travel app. And I don\'t know about you guys, but for me Apple Maps is still lousy. I hadn\'t used Apple Maps ever since Google launched their IOS Maps app, but a few weeks back, landing at ORD, I was in a rush to get directions and travel time to a meeting. The address was in the appt so I just clicked on it and it popped up Apple Maps. A couple of clicks and I had directions, or so I thought. As I skimmed the turns, I thought \"This can\'t be right\". I looked at the address in the pin -- it was Michigan Ave in <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Evanston, Illinois\" href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evanston%2C_Illinois\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener wikipedia noreferrer\">Evanston, IL</a> not Chicago -- even though the address on the appointment included Chicago. So I manually edited the address, specifically typing in Chicago and hit Return. But Apple still wanted to send me to Evanston. I re-opened the appointment, copied the address, pasted it into Google Maps and I headed to Chicago.</li>\n 	<li>Playing around later that day, I found that Apple Maps just isn\'t as smart as Google Maps about my location. Standing in the Loop, I put a street address into Google Maps -- 525 Monroe -- and Google assumes that, since I\'m in standing in downtown Chicago, I want to find 525 W Monroe in Chicago. Apple Maps will tell me \"Address not found\" if I don\'t specify Chicago. Remember when this whole debacle started -- Tim Cook said Maps would get better the more people used it. I haven\'t seen it, but thanks to Google, I\'m not too worried.</li>\n 	<li>In the last <a title=\"Podcast #105 — Traveling in Spain; Return of the Hotel Lobby?\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2013/05/30/podcast-105-traveling-in-spain-return-of-the-hotel-lobby/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">two</a> <a title=\"Podcast #104 — Status Free Fall; TSA Knife Fight\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2013/03/19/podcast-104-status-free-fall-tsa-knife-fight/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">episodes</a>, I talked about, when traveling internationally, buying a SIM card in country to save on voice and data roaming charges. In Amsterdam, the story was no different. After landing in <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amsterdam_Airport_Schiphol\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Schiphol</a>, I searched out the <a href=\"http://www.lebara.nl/?isoCode=en_GB\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Lebara Mobile</a> booth in the shadow of the Burger King. It wasn\'t the biggest booth, so it took me a bit. But once I found it, it took the guy all of 5 minutes to get my unlocked AT&amp;T iPhone 4 registered on the KPN network. For €20 (about $26) I got 1 GB of data, unlimited texts, and enough voice minutes to make a half-dozen restaurant reservations. Compare that to $30 for 120 MB of international data. &nbsp;The web site <a href=\"http://prepaidwithdata.wikia.com/\">http://prepaidwithdata.wikia.com</a> is a great site to prepaid plan comparisons. Should be a top bookmark for any international traveler.</li>\n 	<li>The Saturday we flew back from Amsterdam was the one day of bad weather -- rain and low clouds. I’d booked our flights using United miles, so while the flight over from Chicago was a non-stop United flight, the flight back was on Lufthansa with a connection through Frankfurt. We got to Schiphol a bit early, and seeing delays, we tried to get on an earlier flight to Frankfurt. We weren\'t the only ones with idea; the flight was full. “No worries,” said the counter agent, “your flight is only delayed 20 minutes. You’ll still have an hour to make your connection.” 45 minutes later, the delay is now an hour. “No worries,” the gate agent said, “you’ll still have 20 minutes to make your connection.” I study her face for signs of irony or sarcasm, but I don’t detect any. Boarding time comes and goes and we’re still in the gate area. The fuel truck is MIA and we can’t board while the plane is being fueled. I’d already talked to United. The connection we will now miss is the last flight to the US from Frankfurt and there’s no room on any nearby United flights to the US until Monday. I figure there’s a better chance of us getting to the US from Frankfurt, Lufthansa’s main hub, than Schiphol. We board the flight knowing we’ll be overnighting in Frankfurt.</li>\n 	<li>On approach to Frankfurt, the flight attendant reads off all the connecting flights -- the gates for the connections that are still make-able, and the rebookings for those that weren\'t -- more information than I typically hear on a delayed flight into ORD. According to this, we were rebooked on the next morning’s flight to ORD, which was great news because United said it was booked up. We head over to Lufthansa’s customer service desk. Not much of a line. The agent quickly finds us in the system, looks at me, my wife and my two kids and says, “So you’ll need two or four rooms this evening?” “Two will be fine,” I tell him. He gives us vouchers for two rooms at an airport hotel, which includes €20 a piece for dinner, and also includes breakfast. All on Lufthansa. And remember, we were flying on award miles. Now think about this for a minute. If this was the US, we would’ve been told “It’s weather. Not our fault. You’re on your own.” And re-booking on award miles? I think we would’ve ranked lower than non-revenue employees. All of this, plus the really nice service in coach on the way back to Chicago has my wife telling me -- the next time we book flights with United miles, avoid them; book all the legs on Lufthansa.</li>\n 	<li>One thing United does do right, though, is TSA PreCheck. As I’ve said in previous podcasts, PreCheck is wonderful thing -- keep your shoes and belt on, keep your liquids and PC in your bag, stroll through the metal detector; no full body irradiation, everybody -- the passengers and the TSA agents -- are happy and smiling, there’s a rainbow over the exit of the X-ray machine, and a sparkly unicorn happily gives you your bags at the end. OK, I exaggerate -- but just a bit. Anyhow, TSA PreCheck is a wonderful thing and United does a good job of it in ORD and IAH. American, though, seems to have its challenges. Their PreCheck line at ORD can get very long -- not quite sure why -- and now somehow, they’ve screwed up my PreCheck status because on my last 3 flights to New Orleans, I’ve been shunted over to the regular status line. Missing the unicorns and rainbows, I called up American. Yes, I know that PreCheck is not guaranteed and that randomly I’ll have to go through the regular line -- it’s happened before, but not three trips in a row. I got shunted between Customer Service and the Platinum Desk -- don’t understand it; everything looks fine. A Twitter conversation with American earlier this week asked that I compare the name on my AAdvantage account with my Global Entry account. I also looked at my United account. Both Global Entry and United have my middle name spelled out; my American account just has my middle initial. I updated my American account -- we’ll see if this solves the problem.</li>\n 	<li>On a recent flight down to New Orleans, I took Southwest out of MDW. No PreCheck there. And with all the families and leisure travelers who use MDW, and the way security is configured -- everyone funnels into a single massive multi-lane security checkpoint -- I avoid MDW at all costs. So during this rare flight through, I asked a TSA guy when they’d be getting PreCheck. “End of the year,” he said. “They’ve been reconfiguring a bunch of lanes on the right hand side to handle it.” Well, now. I had just spent 20 minutes getting through security vs. what is usually 5 minutes in United’s ORD PreCheck line. I might be a lot more accepting of a Southwest flight with PreCheck. &nbsp;Provided that Southwest doesn’t do PreCheck just for its A List members.</li>\n 	<li>And finally, I had a nice social media serendipity moment last month. I was at the Oak Park Microbrew and Food Review. I think this was the 6th year was on, but the first time I’d gone. It was a spur of the moment thing, so I was by myself. I was checking in my first couple of beers on Untappd, which is something like beer geek Foursquare. And up pops a comment on one of my check-ins -- “Come find me, I’m in a Red Hat Linux hat”. Another <a href=\"http://www.untappd.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Untappd </a>friend, and long time podcast listener Rob Auch was there too. It wasn’t too crowded yet, so we managed to find each other fairly quickly, and then hung out for an hour or so tasting beer together. It’s kinda fun when the virtual world intersects the real world.</li>\n 	<li>And if you have any travel observations, questions, a story, a comment, a travel tip – the voice of the traveler, send it along. &nbsp;The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com -- you can use your smartphone to record and send in an audio comment; send a Twitter message to mpeacock, or you can post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page -- or you can always go old-school and post your thoughts on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music --&nbsp;<em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/Zapac/26047\">Test Drive</a></em>&nbsp;by Zapac</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Summer Vacation in Amsterdam</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>I\'ve been burning through the award miles recently -- I drained the American bank for a spring break trip to Spain, so it was United’s turn for summer vacation. Since my daughter got to choose the spring break location, my son got the choice for summer. We could only carve out a week, so Asia was out which nixed his usual choice of Japan. Let’s look at Europe “but”, I said as he was opening his mouth, “not Russia. I might be interested in St Petersburg as part of a Baltic thing, but for the rest of Russia, no thanks. You can do that on your own dime.” “Fine,” he said, “then Amsterdam”.</li>\n 	<li>Really? Why? “I dunno; just a place I want to go.” OK. Actually, as I thought about it, I got more interested in it. I’ve done a good bit of work around Amsterdam -- in Haarlem, Utrecht. I’ve flown in and out of Schiphol a bunch of times, but save for one windy afternoon, never really spent any time in the city itself. This could be fun.</li>\n 	<li>As I mentioned in the <a title=\"Podcast #105 — Traveling in Spain; Return of the Hotel Lobby?\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2013/05/30/podcast-105-traveling-in-spain-return-of-the-hotel-lobby/\">last episode</a>, we’ve pretty much converted from hotel rooms to vacation rentals for our family vacations. For about the same price as two hotel rooms, we get that and more -- a kitchen, living room -- places to sit and hang out other than beds and concierge lounges. We also like to shop in local markets. And with a kitchen, this is a lot more fun. We get to buy and try things rather than just doing grocery tourism.</li>\n 	<li>Normally, this works out very well. But the end of July was warmer than normal in Europe. We had expected weather in the mid-70’s -- we got high 80’s during the day and maybe dipping into the mid-70’s at night. Wouldn’t be bad if we were staying at a hotel with air conditioning, but we had decided to do something a bit more local -- we rented a houseboat on the Prince’s Canal. Which didn’t come with air conditioning -- nor great cross-ventilation since you’re kinda down below street -- and breeze level in the canals.</li>\n 	<li>The first morning in the houseboat, I woke up and headed to the kitchen to figure out the Nespresso coffee machine. I opened the canal side door and windows to let in the morning breeze and started rummaging around for the coffee capsules. I heard a noise behind me; I turned and saw one of those big canal tour boats passing within a couple feet of our houseboat; full of tourists, wielding cameras, many pointed through our open door, looking straight at me in my boxers. I waved -- really, what else could I do? -- pressed the Brew button on the Nespresso, and headed back to the bedroom for a t-shirt and a pair of shorts. A bit of a shock at first, it became a game for us the rest of the trip. Now purposely walking around in the most colorful boxers my son and I could find; pointing our cameras back at the tour boats. The tour boat traffic on the Canal was heavy -- I posted a Vine video on my Twitter feed of passing tour boats &nbsp;-- but that was part of the fun. We would hang out on the little porch at the end of the day, eating some cheese, drinking a beer. It felt like we were part of the Amsterdam vibe, not just observing it.</li>\n 	<li>One of the best days of the week, though, was spent turning the tables -- piloting ourselves through the canals and peeping into the other houseboats. Social media serendipity hit again, this time through Twitter -- by way of Untappd, again. Arnoud Heijnis, a long-time TravelCommons listener, follows me on Twitter. Untappd pushes beer drinking badges to Twitter. Arnoud sees the Weiss beer badge I earned from a check-in at some canal-side bar and shoots me a great e-mail with a fantastic list of suggestions. The one that immediately catches my eye is renting a boat for your own canal tour. I get on line, book a boat, hit the grocery store from some snacks and walk to the rental place in Westerpark. We hop in an aluminum boat with an electric outboard motor, lay on the bottom of the boat to clear what we’re told is the lowest canal bridge in Amsterdam, and then go out for a 3-hr cruise. Bopping around the canals, dodging the big tour boats -- it was a great time.</li>\n 	<li>We also spent a couple of days being part of the bicycling culture in Amsterdam. I think it’s impossible to say you’ve truly visited Amsterdam without renting a bike and spending the day cycling around. I’ve spent time in Portland, OR, Seattle, and Boulder, CO -- three of the top US biking cities in US -- and they pale compared to Amsterdam. Until you get in the midst of it, you can’t really appreciate that bicycles are on the top of the Amsterdam transit pyramid -- cyclists, then motorists, then pedestrians.The bicycle lanes near the Central Station are the craziest -- a mosh pit of cyclists and foreign pedestrians coming out of the train station sprinting for their lives across car and bike lines, chased by honking horns and ringing bells. But get outside town a bit, as we did biking up to Marken Island, and it settles down a lot. And it’s pretty easy cycling -- except for bridges, the country is pancake flat.</li>\n 	<li>Other tips?\n<ul>\n 	<li>I already mentioned hitting the Lebara stand in Schiphol for the “€20 for a gig of mobile data” plan</li>\n 	<li>The train into Amsterdam from Schiphol is dead simple -- take it if you’re staying in the city, but be ready -- it’s so dead simple that it gets crowded.</li>\n 	<li>The family and I loved the Van Gogh Museum -- it’s rare to be able to trace an artist’s development in such detail. But understand that a lot of other people love it too. Go on-line and book a specific date and time for your visit. It’s a lot shorter wait.</li>\n 	<li>Skip the new “Heineken Experience”. It’s just not worth the money. Hit <a href=\"http://www.brouwerijhetij.nl/homepage/zomerblond-6/\">Brouwerij \'t IJ</a> on one of your bike rides. Drink better beer outside under a windmill. Or hit <a href=\"http://www.arendsnest.nl/\">Proeflokaal Arendsnest</a> in the Jordaan district for their selection of Dutch microbrews</li>\n 	<li>We stayed in the Jordaan district and definitely recommend it. We hit the <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noordermarkt\">Noordermarkt</a> farmers’ market on Saturday to stock the houseboat kitchen, shopped down <a href=\"http://www.iamsterdam.com/en-GB/experience/about-amsterdam/areas/featured-areas/haarlemmerstraat-haarlemmerdijk\">Haarlemmerstraat </a>, stopped in at the neighborhood restaurants and bars. We found it the right mix of happening but not too raucous -- which, from walking down the Damrak or around the Red Light district, seem to put us in the minority.</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music --&nbsp;<em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/Pitx/19513\">Black Rainbow</a></em>&nbsp;by Pitx</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Restaurant Trends</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>This week’s trip to Atlanta will make it 9 straight weeks that I’ve been on travel. So not only do I get to know airports, and airplanes, and hotels, but also restaurants. And for the past couple of years, I’ve attended the<a href=\"http://www.restaurant.org/Home\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"> National Restaurant Association</a>\'s’ <a href=\"http://show.restaurant.org/Home\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">annual show</a> in Chicago to walk the floor and see what trends we can expect to see when we’re eating on the road.</li>\n 	<li>In <a title=\"Podcast #98 — Stolen Luggage &amp; Passports; Restaurants Want Your Smartphone\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/05/20/podcast-98-stolen-luggage-restaurants-want-your-smartphone/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">episode #98</a>, I talked about last year’s show, where technology seemed to be the trend -- mobile apps to let you pay your tab, iPad digital menus, smartphones replacing pagers for queued-up guests,.... This year there was still a technology bent -- yet more permutations on digital menus (though this time featuring cheaper Android tablets as well as iPads) and a whole lot of social apps -- seems everyone wants me to check-in, upload pictures, and leave comments (good ones, I assume) on their site. I gotta tell you, though, I sorta full up with social networks. Personally, I have zero interest in donating free content to yet another social network. &nbsp;Twitter, Facebook, Untappd, Foodspotting, TripAdvisor, and now a friend just talked me into Yelp. That’s it -- I’m over-socialed.</li>\n 	<li>Luckily this year’s NRA floor -- remember, I said Restaurant, not Rifle Association -- had, well maybe not new food trends, but some clearer, perhaps more consensus trends. Two that jumped out at me were Mediterranean and Japanese foods. Now, I know, how new is Mediterranean? But if in years past, Mediterranean was a label used to push more expensive Italian food, I felt like I saw more of the Mediterranean this year -- specifically, more of the Eastern Mediterranean -- Greek, Turkish, Lebanese. Different, interesting flavors -- sumac, pomegranate, tahini; less basil, more oregano; less pork, more lamb. Nothing against Italian -- I love it -- but anything that brings more flavor choices, I’m all for.</li>\n 	<li>Japanese flavors also had a big presence this year. But not sushi -- although someone was demoing a very cool automatic sushi maker. Instead, it was about the broader spectrum of Japanese flavors -- noodles, green teas, and umami -- the newest basic taste -- sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and now umami -- sort of a meaty, savory taste that is at the core of many Japanese flavors. Japanese noodles seem to be all the rage now -- ramen, udon, soba, …. On the floor of the show, a Japanese company had an entire automated noodle making assembly line running. Watching those big fat udon noodle roll off made me hungry.</li>\n 	<li>Anything that adds variety is a great thing. I remember some years back traveling every week to <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_John,_New_Brunswick\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">St John, NB</a>. I won’t bore you with the hassles of getting there from Chicago -- suffice it to say that, with no customs in St John airport, it wasn’t a simple trip. St John is a nice town, but the choices were a bit limited. Monday night, we’d have salmon -- very fresh, very good. Tuesday, we’d have mussels -- over from nearby Prince Edward’s Island, again very fresh, very good. Wednesday, we’d have a hamburger -- less fresh, but washed down with fresh Moosehead beer from next door Nova Scotia. Thursday -- well, it was back to the salmon -- still fresh, perhaps a little less good.</li>\n 	<li>I’m certainly not having that problem on my weekly commutes to New Orleans, but for those travelers heading to less culinarily interesting destinations, I hope the variety I saw on the floor of the Restaurant show reaches you real soon.</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Closing</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #106</li>\n 	<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from&nbsp;<a href=\"http://ccmixter.org\">ccMixter</a></li>\n 	<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n 	<li>Follow me on <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n 	<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/pages/TravelCommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fan page</a> on Facebook</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_106.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #106 — Summer Vacation in Amsterdam; Restaurant Trends','','inherit','closed','closed','','1265-revision-v1','','','2023-08-23 18:44:39','2023-08-23 23:44:39','',1265,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4342',0,'revision','',0),
(4343,1,'2023-08-24 19:22:44','2023-08-25 00:22:44','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/IMG_6301-EDIT-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Field of orange tulips during Holland\'s Tulip Festival\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /> Just Another Tulip Field[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>In this episode, I dive deep into our Dutch tulip-themed trip last April. Before the tulip festival stories, I randomly wander through a potpourri of travel topics -- TSA passenger volumes returning to pre-COVID levels, having a surprisingly satisfying customer service experience with American Airlines, Hertz\'s EV push, and a bit of a chuckle about the misplaced visa panic in the news coverage of the EU\'s impending ETIAS system. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_195.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:audio -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-audio\"><audio controls src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_195.mp3\"></audio></figure>\n<!-- /wp:audio -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #195: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN after a triangulating drive -- Nashville to Annapolis, MD to New York City and then home. And in doing so, I have managed to miss/skip(?) the completion of the post-COVID travel recovery -- at least according to <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/travel/passenger-volumes\">TSA checkpoint passenger volumes</a>. The TSA website continues to update a website page with numbers from 2019 to yesterday 2023 in a convenient table format for easy copy-pasting into Excel. Crunching the TSA numbers starting the Friday before Memorial Day, the generally accepted start of the summer travel season, passenger volumes are up, on average, 11% over last year and equal to pre-COVID 2019.&nbsp; So volumes have recovered, but on the airlines’ Q2 earnings calls, the CEOs again reminded their listeners that not all passengers are equal. <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/southwest-airlines-luv-q2-earnings-report-2023-83811808?st=ivs07m9d98qw5ot&amp;reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink\">Southwest’s CEO said</a> “It’s clear that travel patterns post-pandemic are not what they were pre-pandemic,” as the airline said they’d shift planes from business-oriented short-haul routes to longer routes aimed at leisure travelers, and move some flights from start and end-of-the-day departures that flyers like me would book for same-day out-and-back trips.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I’ve talked in previous episodes about how one of the things I really miss moving from Nashville to Chicago is direct flights to places. The other thing I miss -- and pretty much on an equal weighting -- is good Chinese food. I’ve found good Vietnamese food, solid Mexican -- but haven’t found anything like what we would get in Chicago’s Chinatown. So when we hit New York City, we quickly found our way deep into Chinatown, joining the 20-30-person queue in front of a storefront bakery, <a href=\"https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/mei-lai-wah-bakery\">Mei Lai Wah</a>, for <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cha_siu_bao\">char siu bao</a>, BBQ pork buns, one of our favorites -- hoping they wouldn’t sell out before we got to the front of the line. Minutes tick by; the lines not moving. Then someone pops out of the bakery and yells “Anyone paying with cash, come up to the front!” As regular listeners know, I’m a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">knuckle-dragging cash carrier</a>. My wallet full of twenties and I sprinted to the front. I studied the menu; the cashier said “All we have left is #1, #5, and #20.” “Fine, I’ll take two of each.” I gave her one of my twenties and walked back out to the street where my wife, my daughter, and I inhaled those fresh buns while the credit card gang kept waiting. It’s good to have options.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — Brilliant Day by Hans Atom (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hansatom/47919 Ft: Lisa DeBenedictis</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Long time listener Aaron Woodin left a comment on Twitter, or X, or whatever Elon is calling it this week…<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>&nbsp;“Excellent podcast, Mark. I agree about Rotterdam - amazing city, underrated by tourists. I took a freighter cruise from there 5 yrs ago. Love that word Flâneuring - my pet term is \"walk and gawk.\"</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Aaron, thanks for that. A freighter cruise… that’s gotta be very cool. And “walk and galk” -- I like that. But I think I like it even better if I can shoehorn the word “entropy” in there because it makes me feel that suffering through engineering thermodynamics was worth something. Maybe “entropic walking and galking.” Yeah, I like that!</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>TravelCommons contributor Chris Chufo forwarded me a tweet saying “The way you say ‘representative’ to an automated system is the real you” and, as folks say nowadays, I felt seen. Mine is a crisp, demanding “Agent”, trying to pitch the tone and volume in just the right way to interrupt rather than wait through the 3 minutes of recorded verbiage. So when I had to call into American Airlines last week, it pulled me up short “Hi, Mark. In a few words, tell us what we can do for you?” And that was it. No long announcement, no litany of number presses, just silence… waiting…. “Uhh, I’d like to talk to an agent about a reservation.” “I’ll connect you to an agent. Your expected wait time is 1 hr… and 14 minutes.” OK, some things will never change.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I had to call American because in their most recent retumbling of their JFK flight schedules, they’d shrunk the connection time to our flight from JFK to LHR from 6 hours (way too long!) to 1 hour -- a bit too snug for my liking, especially given the delays at JFK -- and LGA and EWR -- caused by the ongoing shortage of air traffic controllers. In the last episode, I talked about the cascade of tiny delays that caused me to lose my wager on a snug sub-2 hr connection on our way home from AMS. But it was the end of our trip, so annoying, but not critical. Here, though, missing our outbound flight would absolutely <em>not</em> be a great way to start the trip. Though after reading about <a href=\"https://www.insider.com/laguardia-airport-thousands-passengers-got-stuck-on-planes-for-hours-2023-7\">last weekend’s 60-plane departure queue at LGA</a>, even a more reasonable 2½-hr connection time didn’t feel safe.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>So I skipped the hour-plus live agent queue for the chat feature in American’s app. I was pleasantly surprised to get connected to an agent in just a couple of minutes. I banged in my confirmation code and my ask -- put us back on our original flight to JFK; I’d prefer to entertain myself for 6 hours rather than miss our flight. “Please give me 3-5 minutes to review your reservation.” Felt like a canned response the agent hit a button to send -- which was fine with me. Being on chat rather than a live call, I could wander around, get other things done while checking the screen every now and again for a response. Which I eventually got -- “I’ll have to transfer you to one of my colleagues”. That’s fine. We’re 20 minutes in, so even with this, I’m still doing better than the live call queue. And, in a couple of minutes when the next agent popped on, asking me how he could help, I just copy-pasted my answers to the same questions from the first agent. And then I waited for it -- one second, two seconds, “Please give me 3-5 minutes to review your reservation.” Just like clockwork. Eventually he came back “As your original flight isn’t available, would the direct BNA-LHR flight work?” Uh, yes, but it’s actually a British Airways flight. I’d looked at that flight, but it has a boatload more fees -- fuel surcharges, landing taxes. “No additional charges?” I asked. “No, it’s free of cost,” he replied. I screenshotted the chat screen and told him I’d take it. Problem solved with an even better option -- a direct flight -- and all in less than the hour hold time for a live agent. Maybe not quite as personal as talking to someone, but it got it done.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I’m flying up to Portland, Maine and need a rental car for a side trip further up the coast, to Bar Harbor, to Acadia National Forest for a bit of hiking. So I hit the Hertz site and got a big push to rent an EV, an electric vehicle. Looking at the prices, it was more than a standard car, but not <em>that</em> much more. So I was intrigued. But as I walked down the booking path, it was the same as a regular car; no guidance on what I think of as EV-specific things, like how do I pay for charging -- do I need to set up an account with someone, maybe download an app -- and what’s the EV equivalent to having to return the car with a full tank? So I backed out, did a Google search which, as I’d expected, did a better job of landing me on the right pages on Hertz’s website than Hertz did. It’s interesting. If you use a Tesla Supercharger, Hertz passes through the charge to your card, but <em>without</em> a mark-up -- unlike what they do with toll charge transponders. And returning the car full? Hertz wants it above 70% or they’ll charge you $35 for the EV version of a refill charge -- which I didn’t think was unreasonable. So now I hit Tesla’s website looking for chargers. There’s one at a shopping mall in Portland, but nothing near my hotel downtown. And the ones around Bar Harbor are at hotels that I’m not staying at. I’m tempted, but it feels a bit more of a hassle than I want to sign up for. But it feels like they’re getting close, at least Hertz is. Maybe it’ll work out for my next rental.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I got a bit of a chuckle out of the recent flurry of travel stories about the coming of ETIAS -- the European Travel Information and Authorization System, the EU’s version of the US’s ESTA, the Electronic System for Travel Authorization, a pre-departure authorization for travelers who aren’t required to have a visa. I chuckled because we talked about this back in January, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/01/26/podcast-192-new-year-travel-planning-tips-gin-conquers-the-world/\">episode #192</a>, when I dug into ETIAS in case we needed it for our April tulip festival trip to the Netherlands. I found out we didn’t -- by that point, the May 2023 go-live had been pushed back to November 2023, and looking at the ETIAS website now, it’s been pushed again, now to much more ambiguous “sometime in 2024.” So I’m not sure what caused the sudden interest, but the number of news stories that were just plain wrong -- incorrectly wailing “Oh, now we’ll need a visa to go to Europe” in spite of what is said in the first paragraphs of just about every <a href=\"https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/MEMO_18_4362\">EU website page about ETIAS</a> (phrases like “The ETIAS authorization is not a visa”) -- just makes me shake my head.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter (X?) message to mpeacock like Aaron did, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can skip all that social media stuff and post your comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And a quick program note - at the end of this episode, there’ll be a bit of a meta-discussion -- the podcast talking about the podcast -- about having to DIY my own podcast metrics reporting. Probably not terribly interesting for most folks, hence me stuffing it in the ending, the part most folks skip over. But if you’re interested, hold off on hitting the “skip track” button when you hear the “Pictures of You” wrap-up music.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — &nbsp;<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Suenjo/11162\">Natchoongi (New Hope Remix)</a>&nbsp;by Suenjo (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Notes on Holland’s Tulip Festival</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As I mentioned in the last couple of episodes, Irene and I did a 10-day swing through the Netherlands in April, all centered around the tulip festival -- the tulip parade, the tulip gardens -- and then building other stuff around that. Which meant that the usual Holland tourist destination, Amsterdam, wasn’t; and instead our entry and exit point with a night or two tacked on to make the logistics easier; especially after we couldn’t score tickets to the big Vermeer (Girl with the Pearl Earring) exhibit at the Rijksmuseum. Having said that, we still managed to hit a couple of places for some unique Dutch-ness -- <a href=\"https://goo.gl/maps/7sjkC4sJ5KhrPnS9A\">Van Dobben</a>, a 70-some-year-old sandwich joint that’s known for their <a href=\"https://thingstodoinamsterdam.com/blog/dutch-croquettes/\">beef croquettes</a> which, I’m told, is classic Dutch bar food --&nbsp; a 3-4 inch long rectangle of deep-fried, breaded creamed beef served on a bun with mustard. They were fine, though they seem like the kind of food best&nbsp; appreciated at 2 in the morning rather than noon. The better thing about Van Dobben was sitting at the counter, watching the waitresses give their customers -- a mix of construction workers, local shop owners, office workers, and not too many tourists -- a good natured hard time. We then had to walk off those little gastric depth charges because we had dinner that night at <a href=\"https://www.vinkeles.com/\">Vinkeles</a>, a great restaurant that received its second Michelin star the week we visited. The food was great -- highly recommended. We showed up early for a pre-dinner cocktail at the bar, which Irene did. But I audibled at the last minute, telling the bartender I’d never had genever -- the Dutch ancestor to gin -- and asked for his direction. He brought over two small tulip glasses filled to the rim, one with a clear liquid, the other a light amber, a barrel-aged genever. There was no room for ice in those little tulips; the genevers were served neat, at room temperature. It was a nice introduction. I managed to fit in a few more of those full little tulip glasses before the end of our trip.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>We actually organized the whole itinerary around Haarlem because it seemed more or less ground-zero for our tulip-ing: the Tulip Parade, kinda the Dutch version of the Rose Parade, ended there Saturday night after an all-day wander through villages to the south; and it wasn’t far from the big tulip displays at the Keukenhof Gardens. Heading down to the Keukenhof was the only time app-based travel payment didn’t work. The bus line had an app, but it didn’t seem completely connected to their web site, which is where I bought our tickets. And the web site said we had to have physical printed tickets; showing the PDF on our phone wouldn’t work. Lucky for us we were staying at a hotel in Haarlem rather than an Airbnb. The desk clerk happily printed our tickets for us.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Ticket hassles aside, the Gardens were great. Walking through the parking lot, through the ranks of tour buses; I started to appreciate what a big thing this tulip festival is. But I also had a building sense of dread. Is this going to be a repeat of last year’s shoulder-to-shoulder crowds in Italy? No, it wasn’t. The Keukenhof was a big enough place to absorb everyone, with tulip beds everywhere, to spread everyone out across the grounds.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But we didn’t <em>really</em> need to stay in Haarlem just to see these gardens; half the tour buses in the parking lot were day trips from Amsterdam. The next day, Saturday, we took advantage of Haarlem’s location, renting bikes and riding back down toward Tulip Ground Zero. Doing a spur-of-the-moment bike ride in the Netherlands is so easy -- lots of bike rental places with reasonable day rates, lots of bike lanes (and bike-aware drivers), and mostly flat terrain -- means you can have a good day out without needing to pack the whole Mamil -- middle-aged men in lycra -- kit. We headed southwest, pointed vaguely in the direction of the <a href=\"https://thetulipbarn.com/\">Tulip Barn</a>, a tulip farm where you can pay to go wander and Instagram your way through their tulip fields. But a couple of miles from the Tulip Barn, I stopped at a big cycle network map to figure out our next turn. I could figure out that the red arrow labeled “U Staat Hier” meant “You Are Here”, but was taking a little longer to figure out the rest. In the meantime, Irene looked past the trees down one of the streets and saw a huge tulip field. We parked our bikes and joined, for free, the maybe 30 other people -- families, couples -- wandering around the tulip beds. Pink, red, orange, yellow, white -- it was rows of tulips to the horizon. But it was also a working tulip field. Guys were putting on and pulling off bed covers, and, wildest thing, driving a little machine through the beds that snipped off the tulip flowers, leaving the tall stems; friend-of-the-show Chris Chufo said it looked like a tulip zamboni. I mean, “What the hell?” Turns out that this field and all the outdoor fields we saw, raise tulip <em>bulbs</em>, not flowers. The cut flowers are grown in covered fields and greenhouses. The tulip zamboni knocks off the outdoor blooms so the plant puts its energy into growing the bulb. I’m glad we got there when we did, and that there was only one guy running the zamboni. Check the show notes; I’ll see if I can post my video of the tulip topping.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Later that night -- <em>much</em> later, the Tulip Parade finally made it to Haarlem. A band warmed up the waiting crowd playing ‘50’s and early ‘60’s rock-and-roll using a vintage Cadillac convertible as their stage -- which would’ve fit in in, say, Nashville, but seemed a bit odd in western Holland. But only to me, I guess, because the crowd loved it. When the floats finally arrived, they did not disappoint. The craftsmanship was excellent; they were all decorated, their surfaces completely covered with floral materials -- tulips, daffodils, hyacinths, even cut-up bulbs and nut shells for brown and black colors, hence my earlier comparison to the Rose Parade. It also reminded me of smaller Mardi Gras parades in New Orleans -- the float sponsors seemed very local -- nearby car and farm equipment dealerships -- local marching bands. No bead tossing, but a lot of folks running over to hand out things to the people lined up along the route. It was just the right size -- big enough to support the craftsmanship needed for high-quality floats, but not so big that the local sponsors get elbowed out by big multinational corporations. One more advantage of our Haarlem location -- at the end of the parade, they parked the floats along the road at the end of the route. At the end of the night and again the next morning, we were able to walk up close to them, which made me appreciate the craftsmanship even more.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I’m in no way, shape, or form, any sort of gardener. I have, at best, a black thumb. And I’m not a big flower guy. I saw lots of guys with big full-frame digital cameras setting up tripods over tulip beds for what I can only imagine was an effort to capture the perfect flower pic -- whatever that may be. But I came back way more impressed than I expected to be with the beauty of the flat Dutch countryside in bloom.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #195</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>. And while you’re at TravelCommons.com, you can check out the show notes page for a transcript and any links I’ve mentioned. Or you can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, now to the promised meta-content. I’ve used Chartable for a couple of years now to give me some basic episode download metrics -- how many downloads in the first 7 days, in the first 30 days of an episode posting, in total -- whatever comes with the free version. Nothing fancy -- I’m not trying to sell ads; it’s for my own edification and enjoyment. The standard pattern is a big spike in downloads on the day I post the episode and then a steady growth after that. Usually the total downloads after 7 days number is 40-45% of an episode’s total downloads after a year. So anyhow, for the last episode, the Day 1 number was 6. Huh. Maybe Chartable is having some backend hiccups; I’ve seen it take a day for numbers to start populating. So I look again the next day -- same thing. Huh. Same thing <em>every</em> day that week. Now <em>this</em> behavior I haven’t seen before. Where did everyone go? I recheck all my podcast apps -- Overcast, Apple Podcasts, Pocket Casts, Podcast Addict -- yup, the episode is there. So what happened? Since I self-host TravelCommons -- because back in 2005 when I started, there was no other alternative -- I can look at the server logs. So look at the June and July logs -- yup, I can see more than 6 downloads of <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/06/20/podcast-194-best-laid-travel-plans-roaming-entropy/\" title=\"Podcast #194 — Best Laid Travel Plans; Roaming Entropy\">episode #194</a>. Which then sends me down a new rabbit hole -- why rely on Chartable when I can do it myself, maybe write my own download counting program? But I’m not any sort of programmer… which led me again to ChatGPT. Everyone’s talking about how generative AI will replace programmers, so I thought I’d give it a go. I typed “Write a python program to print out total counts of downloaded podcasts reported in an Apache web log file” into the box at the bottom of the ChatGPT web page, clicked the little arrow icon, and Boom!, out burped a program. And it actually ran, and did what I asked. Turns out my ask needed a bit of refinement, but after maybe 30-45 minutes, I had a pretty solid output, which I then pulled into Excel to slice and dice and graph and pivot because I kinda got tired of torturing ChatGPT… or myself; I’m not sure which. But anyhow, generative AI won’t completely replace programmers and the like (at least not yet), but it does work… at, maybe, 80% of its current hype. Just thought I’d share a little of my own personal experience.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter/(X?), or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_195.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #195 — Checking Out Holland\'s Tulip Festival','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-195-checking-out-hollands-tulip-festival','','','2026-01-28 10:50:42','2026-01-28 16:50:42','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4343',0,'post','',0),
(4344,1,'2023-08-24 12:42:53','2023-08-24 17:42:53','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/replicate-prediction-57paxyjb7xj7hm5kqombv3ecdy-300x300.png\" alt=\"Robot using a laptop to make travel plans while on a beach\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"> Future of Travel Planning[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Back behind the microphone after, despite my finely tuned travel plans, I had to resort to being stubbornly cranky to fix a ORD connection drama when coming home from a tulip-peeping trip in Holland. We also wander into the world of flâneuring, aimlessly walking around a city as a way to swerve over-tourism. Listeners weigh in on Priority Pass lounge access and online passport renewal experiences, and I count all the apps I needed to go cashless in Holland. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_195.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #194: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN after a triangulating drive -- Nashville to Annapolis, MD to New York City and then home. And in doing so, I have managed to miss/skip(?) the completion of the post-COVID travel recovery -- at least according to <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/travel/passenger-volumes\">TSA checkpoint passenger volumes</a>. The TSA website continues to update a website page with numbers from 2019 to yesterday 2023 in a convenient table format for easy copy-pasting into Excel. Crunching the TSA numbers starting the Friday before Memorial Day, the generally accepted start of the summer travel season, passenger volumes are up, on average, 11% over last year and equal to pre-COVID 2019.&nbsp; So volumes have recovered, but on the airlines’ Q2 earnings calls, the CEOs again reminded their listeners that not all passengers are equal. <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/southwest-airlines-luv-q2-earnings-report-2023-83811808?st=ivs07m9d98qw5ot&amp;reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink\">Southwest’s CEO said</a> “It’s clear that travel patterns post-pandemic are not what they were pre-pandemic,” as the airline said they’d shift planes from business-oriented short-haul routes to longer routes aimed at leisure travelers, and move some flights from start and end-of-the-day departures that flyers like me would book for same-day out-and-back trips.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I’ve talked in previous episodes about how one of the things I really miss moving from Nashville to Chicago is direct flights to places. The other thing I miss -- and pretty much on an equal weighting -- is good Chinese food. I’ve found good Vietnamese food, solid Mexican -- but haven’t found anything like what we would get in Chicago’s Chinatown. So when we hit New York City, we quickly found our way deep into Chinatown, joining the 20-30-person queue in front of a storefront bakery, <a href=\"https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/mei-lai-wah-bakery\">Mei Lai Wah</a>, for <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cha_siu_bao\">char siu bao</a>, BBQ pork buns, one of our favorites -- hoping they wouldn’t sell out before we got to the front of the line. Minutes tick by; the lines not moving. Then someone pops out of the bakery and yells “Anyone paying with cash, come up to the front!” As regular listeners know, I’m a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">knuckle-dragging cash carrier</a>. My wallet full of twenties and I sprinted to the front. I studied the menu; the cashier said “All we have left is #1, #5, and #20.” “Fine, I’ll take two of each.” I gave her one of my twenties and walked back out to the street where my wife, my daughter, and I inhaled those fresh buns while the credit card gang kept waiting. It’s good to have options.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/50485\">Sunset Boulevard</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Siobhan Dakay, unreal_dm</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Long time listener Aaron Woodin left a comment on Twitter, or X, or whatever Elon is calling it this week…<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>&nbsp;“Excellent podcast, Mark. I agree about Rotterdam - amazing city, underrated by tourists. I took a freighter cruise from there 5 yrs ago. Love that word Flâneuring - my pet term is \"walk and gawk.\"</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Aaron, thanks for that. A freighter cruise… that’s gotta be very cool. And “walk and galk” -- I like that. But I think I like it even better if I can shoehorn the word “entropy” in there because it makes me feel that suffering through engineering thermodynamics was worth something. Maybe “entropic walking and galking.” Yeah, I like that!</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>TravelCommons contributor Chris Chufo forwarded me a tweet saying “The way you say ‘representative’ to an automated system is the real you” and, as folks say nowadays, I felt seen. Mine is a crisp, demanding “Agent”, trying to pitch the tone and volume in just the right way to interrupt rather than wait through the 3 minutes of recorded verbiage. So when I had to call into American Airlines last week, it pulled me up short “Hi, Mark. In a few words, tell us what we can do for you?” And that was it. No long announcement, no litany of number presses, just silence… waiting…. “Uhh, I’d like to talk to an agent about a reservation.” “I’ll connect you to an agent. Your expected wait time is 1 hr… and 14 minutes.” OK, some things will never change.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I had to call American because in their most recent retumbling of their JFK flight schedules, they’d shrunk the connection time to our flight from JFK to LHR from 6 hours (way too long!) to 1 hour -- a bit too snug for my liking, especially given the delays at JFK -- and LGA and EWR -- caused by the ongoing shortage of air traffic controllers. In the last episode, I talked about the cascade of tiny delays that caused me to lose my wager on a snug sub-2 hr connection on our way home from AMS. But it was the end of our trip, so annoying, but not critical. Here, though, missing our outbound flight would absolutely <em>not</em> be a great way to start the trip. Though after reading about <a href=\"https://www.insider.com/laguardia-airport-thousands-passengers-got-stuck-on-planes-for-hours-2023-7\">last weekend’s 60-plane departure queue at LGA</a>, even a more reasonable 2½-hr connection time didn’t feel safe.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>So I skipped the hour-plus live agent queue for the chat feature in American’s app. I was pleasantly surprised to get connected to an agent in just a couple of minutes. I banged in my confirmation code and my ask -- put us back on our original flight to JFK; I’d prefer to entertain myself for 6 hours rather than miss our flight. “Please give me 3-5 minutes to review your reservation.” Felt like a canned response the agent hit a button to send -- which was fine with me. Being on chat rather than a live call, I could wander around, get other things done while checking the screen every now and again for a response. Which I eventually got -- “I’ll have to transfer you to one of my colleagues”. That’s fine. We’re 20 minutes in, so even with this, I’m still doing better than the live call queue. And, in a couple of minutes when the next agent popped on, asking me how he could help, I just copy-pasted my answers to the same questions from the first agent. And then I waited for it -- one second, two seconds, “Please give me 3-5 minutes to review your reservation.” Just like clockwork. Eventually he came back “As your original flight isn’t available, would the direct BNA-LHR flight work?” Uh, yes, but it’s actually a British Airways flight. I’d looked at that flight, but it has a boatload more fees -- fuel surcharges, landing taxes. “No additional charges?” I asked. “No, it’s free of cost,” he replied. I screenshotted the chat screen and told him I’d take it. Problem solved with an even better option -- a direct flight -- and all in less than the hour hold time for a live agent. Maybe not quite as personal as talking to someone, but it got it done.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I’m flying up to Portland, Maine and need a rental car for a side trip further up the coast, to Bar Harbor, to Acadia National Forest for a bit of hiking. So I hit the Hertz site and got a big push to rent an EV, an electric vehicle. Looking at the prices, it was more than a standard car, but not <em>that</em> much more. So I was intrigued. But as I walked down the booking path, it was the same as a regular car; no guidance on what I think of as EV-specific things, like how do I pay for charging -- do I need to set up an account with someone, maybe download an app -- and what’s the EV equivalent to having to return the car with a full tank? So I backed out, did a Google search which, as I’d expected, did a better job of landing me on the right pages on Hertz’s website than Hertz did. It’s interesting. If you use a Tesla Supercharger, Hertz passes through the charge to your card, but <em>without</em> a mark-up -- unlike what they do with toll charge transponders. And returning the car full? Hertz wants it above 70% or they’ll charge you $35 for the EV version of a refill charge -- which I didn’t think was unreasonable. So now I hit Tesla’s website looking for chargers. There’s one at a shopping mall in Portland, but nothing near my hotel downtown. And the ones around Bar Harbor are at hotels that I’m not staying at. I’m tempted, but it feels a bit more of a hassle than I want to sign up for. But it feels like they’re getting close, at least Hertz is. Maybe it’ll work out for my next rental.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I got a bit of a chuckle out of the recent flurry of travel stories about the coming of ETIAS -- the European Travel Information and Authorisation System, the EU’s version of the US’s ESTA, the Electronic System for Travel Authorization, a pre-departure authorization for travelers who aren’t required to have a visa. I chuckled because we talked about this back in January, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/01/26/podcast-192-new-year-travel-planning-tips-gin-conquers-the-world/\">episode #192</a>, when I dug into ETIAS in case we needed it for our April tulip festival trip to the Netherlands. I found out we didn’t -- by that point, the May 2023 go-live had been pushed back to November 2023, and looking at the ETIAS website now, it’s been pushed again, now to much more ambiguous“sometime in 2024.” So I’m not sure what caused the sudden interest, but the number of news stories that were just plain wrong -- incorrectly wailing “Oh, now we’ll need a visa to go to Europe” in spite of what is said in the first paragraphs of just about every <a href=\"https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/MEMO_18_4362\">EU website page about ETIAS</a> (phrases like “The ETIAS authorisation is not a visa”) -- just makes me shake my head.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter (X?) message to mpeacock like Aaron did, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can skip all that social media stuff and post your comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And a quick program note - at the end of this episode, there’ll be a bit of a meta-discussion -- the podcast talking about the podcast -- about having to DIY my own podcast metrics reporting. Probably not terribly interesting for most folks, hence me stuffing it in the ending, the part most folks skip over. But if you’re interested, hold off on hitting the “skip track” button when you hear the “Pictures of You” wrap-up music.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Vidian/52190\">Memories (infiniti loop)</a> by Vidian (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license. Ft: TheDice</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Notes on Holland’s Tulip Festival</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As I mentioned in the last couple of episodes, Irene and I did a 10-day swing through the Netherlands in April, all centered around the tulip festival -- the tulip parade, the tulip gardens -- and then building other stuff around that. Which meant that the usual Holland tourist destination, Amsterdam, wasn’t; and instead our entry and exit point with a night or two tacked on to make the logistics easier; especially after we couldn’t score tickets to the big Vermeer (Girl with the Pearl Earring) exhibit at the Rijksmuseum. Having said that, we still managed to hit a couple of places for some unique Dutch-ness -- <a href=\"https://goo.gl/maps/7sjkC4sJ5KhrPnS9A\">Van Dobben</a>, a 70-some-year-old sandwich joint that’s known for their <a href=\"https://thingstodoinamsterdam.com/blog/dutch-croquettes/\">beef croquettes</a> which, I’m told, is classic Dutch bar food --&nbsp; a 3-4 inch long rectangle of deep-fried, breaded creamed beef served on a bun with mustard. They were fine, though they seem like the kind of food best&nbsp; appreciated at 2 in the morning rather than noon. The better thing about Van Dobben was sitting at the counter, watching the waitresses give their customers -- a mix of construction workers, local shop owners, office workers, and not too many tourists -- a good natured hard time. We then had to walk off those little gastric depth charges because we had dinner that night at <a href=\"https://www.vinkeles.com/\">Vinkeles</a>, a great restaurant that received its second Michelin star the week we visited. The food was great -- highly recommended. We showed up early for a pre-dinner cocktail at the bar, which Irene did. But I audibled at the last minute, telling the bartender I’d never had genever -- the Dutch ancestor to gin -- and asked for his direction. He brought over two small tulip glasses filled to the rim, one with a clear liquid, the other a light amber, a barrel-aged genever. There was no room for ice in those little tulips; the genevers were served neat, at room temperature. It was a nice introduction. I managed to fit in a few more of those full little tulip glasses before the end of our trip.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>We actually organized the whole itinerary around Haarlem because it seemed more or less ground-zero for our tulip-ing: the Tulip Parade, kinda the Dutch version of the Rose Parade, ended there Saturday night after an all-day wander through villages to the south; and it wasn’t far from the big tulip displays at the Keukenhof Gardens. Heading down to the Keukenhof was the only time app-based travel payment didn’t work. The bus line had an app, but it didn’t seem completely connected to their web site, which is where I bought our tickets. And the web site said we had to have physical printed tickets; showing the PDF on our phone wouldn’t work. Lucky for us we were staying at a hotel in Haarlem rather than an Airbnb. The desk clerk happily printed our tickets for us.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Ticket hassles aside, the Gardens were great. Walking through the parking lot, through the ranks of tour buses; I started to appreciate what a big thing this tulip festival is. But I also had a building sense of dread. Is this going to be a repeat of last year’s shoulder-to-shoulder crowds in Italy? No, it wasn’t. The Keukenhof was a big enough place to absorb everyone, with tulip beds everywhere, to spread everyone out across the grounds.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But we didn’t <em>really</em> need to stay in Haarlem just to see these gardens; half the tour buses in the parking lot were day trips from Amsterdam. The next day, Saturday, we took advantage of Haarlem’s location, renting bikes and riding back down toward Tulip Ground Zero. Doing a spur-of-the-moment bike ride in the Netherlands is so easy -- lots of bike rental places with reasonable day rates, lots of bike lanes (and bike-aware drivers), and mostly flat terrain -- means you can have a good day out without needing to pack the whole Mamil -- middle-aged men in lycra -- kit. We headed southwest, pointed vaguely in the direction of the <a href=\"https://thetulipbarn.com/\">Tulip Barn</a>, a tulip farm where you can pay to go wander and Instagram your way through their tulip fields. But a couple of miles from the Tulip Barn, I stopped at a big cycle network map to figure out our next turn. I could figure out that the red arrow labeled “U Staat Hier” meant “You Are Here”, but was taking a little longer to figure out the rest. In the meantime, Irene looked past the trees down one of the streets and saw a huge tulip field. We parked our bikes and joined, for free, the maybe 30 other people -- families, couples -- wandering around the tulip beds. Pink, red, orange, yellow, white -- it was rows of tulips to the horizon. But it was also a working tulip field. Guys were putting on and pulling off bed covers, and, wildest thing, driving a little machine through the beds that snipped off the tulip flowers, leaving the tall stems; friend-of-the-show Chris Chufo said it looked like a tulip zamboni. I mean, “What the hell?” Turns out that this field and all the outdoor fields we saw, raise tulip <em>bulbs</em>, not flowers. The cut flowers are grown in covered fields and greenhouses. The tulip zamboni knocks off the outdoor blooms so the plant puts its energy into growing the bulb. I’m glad we got there when we did, and that there was only one guy running the zamboni. Check the show notes; I’ll see if I can post my video of the tulip topping.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Later that night -- <em>much</em> later, the Tulip Parade finally made it to Haarlem. A band warmed up the waiting crowd playing ‘50’s and early ‘60’s rock-and-roll using a vintage Cadillac convertible as their stage -- which would’ve fit in in, say, Nashville, but seemed a bit odd in western Holland. But only to me, I guess, because the crowd loved it. When the floats finally arrived, they did not disappoint. The craftsmanship was excellent; they were all decorated, their surfaces completely covered with floral materials -- tulips, daffodils, hyacinths, even cut-up bulbs and nut shells for brown and black colors, hence my earlier comparison to the Rose Parade. It also reminded me of smaller Mardi Gras parades in New Orleans -- the float sponsors seemed very local -- nearby car and farm equipment dealerships -- local marching bands. No bead tossing, but a lot of folks running over to hand out things to the people lined up along the route. It was just the right size -- big enough to support the craftsmanship needed for high-quality floats, but not so big that the local sponsors get elbowed out by big multinational corporations. One more advantage of our Haarlem location -- at the end of the parade, they parked the floats along the road at the end of the route. At the end of the night and again the next morning, we were able to walk up close to them, which made me appreciate the craftsmanship even more.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I’m in no way, shape, or form, any sort of gardener. I have, at best, a black thumb. And I’m not a big flower guy. I saw lots of guys with big full-frame digital cameras setting up tripods over tulip beds for what I can only imagine was an effort to capture the perfect flower pic -- whatever that may be. But I came back way more impressed than I expected to be with the beauty of the flat Dutch countryside in bloom.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music --<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/ramblinglibrarian/55007\">Dawn at the Top of the World ft. copperhead &amp; Robert Seikawitch</a> by Ivan Chew (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #195</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>. And while you’re at TravelCommons.com, you can check out the show notes page for a transcript and any links I’ve mentioned. Or you can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, now to the promised meta-content. I’ve used Chartable for a couple of years now to give me some basic episode download metrics -- how many downloads in the first 7 days, in the first 30 days of an episode posting, in total -- whatever comes with the free version. Nothing fancy -- I’m not trying to sell ads; it’s for my own edification and enjoyment. The standard pattern is a big spike in downloads on the day I post the episode and then a steady growth after that. Usually the total downloads after 7 days number is 40-45% of an episode’s total downloads after a year. So anyhow, for the last episode, the Day 1 number was 6. Huh. Maybe Chartable is having some backend hiccups; I’ve seen it take a day for numbers to start populating. So I look again the next day -- same thing. Huh. Same thing <em>every</em> day that week. Now <em>this</em> behavior I haven’t seen before. Where did everyone go? I recheck all my podcast apps -- Overcast, Apple Podcasts, Pocket Casts, Podcast Addict -- yup, the episode is there. So what happened? Since I self-host TravelCommons -- because back in 2005 when I started, there was no other alternative -- I can look at the server logs. So look at the June and July logs -- yup, I can see more than 6 downloads of episode #194. Which then sends me down a new rabbit hole -- why rely on Chartable when I can do it myself, maybe write my own download counting program? But I’m not any sort of programmer… which led me again to ChatGPT. Everyone’s talking about how generative AI will replace programmers, so I thought I’d give it a go. I typed “Write a python program to print out total counts of downloaded podcasts reported in an Apache web log file” into the box at the bottom of the ChatGPT web page, clicked the little arrow icon, and Boom!, out burped a program. And it actually ran, and did what I asked. Turns out my ask needed a bit of refinement, but after maybe 30-45 minutes, I had a pretty solid output, which I then pulled into Excel to slice and dice and graph and pivot because I kinda got tired of torturing ChatGPT… or myself; I’m not sure which. But anyhow, generative AI won’t completely replace programmers and the like (at least not yet), but it does work… at, maybe, 80% of its current hype. Just thought I’d share a little of my own personal experience.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter/(X?), or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_195.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #195 — Checking Out Holland\'s Tulip Festival','','inherit','closed','closed','','4343-revision-v1','','','2023-08-24 12:42:53','2023-08-24 17:42:53','',4343,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4344',0,'revision','',0),
(4345,1,'2023-08-24 15:07:51','2023-08-24 20:07:51','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/replicate-prediction-57paxyjb7xj7hm5kqombv3ecdy-300x300.png\" alt=\"Robot using a laptop to make travel plans while on a beach\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"> Future of Travel Planning[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Back behind the microphone after, despite my finely tuned travel plans, I had to resort to being stubbornly cranky to fix a ORD connection drama when coming home from a tulip-peeping trip in Holland. We also wander into the world of flâneuring, aimlessly walking around a city as a way to swerve over-tourism. Listeners weigh in on Priority Pass lounge access and online passport renewal experiences, and I count all the apps I needed to go cashless in Holland. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_195.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #194: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN after a triangulating drive -- Nashville to Annapolis, MD to New York City and then home. And in doing so, I have managed to miss/skip(?) the completion of the post-COVID travel recovery -- at least according to <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/travel/passenger-volumes\">TSA checkpoint passenger volumes</a>. The TSA website continues to update a website page with numbers from 2019 to yesterday 2023 in a convenient table format for easy copy-pasting into Excel. Crunching the TSA numbers starting the Friday before Memorial Day, the generally accepted start of the summer travel season, passenger volumes are up, on average, 11% over last year and equal to pre-COVID 2019.&nbsp; So volumes have recovered, but on the airlines’ Q2 earnings calls, the CEOs again reminded their listeners that not all passengers are equal. <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/southwest-airlines-luv-q2-earnings-report-2023-83811808?st=ivs07m9d98qw5ot&amp;reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink\">Southwest’s CEO said</a> “It’s clear that travel patterns post-pandemic are not what they were pre-pandemic,” as the airline said they’d shift planes from business-oriented short-haul routes to longer routes aimed at leisure travelers, and move some flights from start and end-of-the-day departures that flyers like me would book for same-day out-and-back trips.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I’ve talked in previous episodes about how one of the things I really miss moving from Nashville to Chicago is direct flights to places. The other thing I miss -- and pretty much on an equal weighting -- is good Chinese food. I’ve found good Vietnamese food, solid Mexican -- but haven’t found anything like what we would get in Chicago’s Chinatown. So when we hit New York City, we quickly found our way deep into Chinatown, joining the 20-30-person queue in front of a storefront bakery, <a href=\"https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/mei-lai-wah-bakery\">Mei Lai Wah</a>, for <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cha_siu_bao\">char siu bao</a>, BBQ pork buns, one of our favorites -- hoping they wouldn’t sell out before we got to the front of the line. Minutes tick by; the lines not moving. Then someone pops out of the bakery and yells “Anyone paying with cash, come up to the front!” As regular listeners know, I’m a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">knuckle-dragging cash carrier</a>. My wallet full of twenties and I sprinted to the front. I studied the menu; the cashier said “All we have left is #1, #5, and #20.” “Fine, I’ll take two of each.” I gave her one of my twenties and walked back out to the street where my wife, my daughter, and I inhaled those fresh buns while the credit card gang kept waiting. It’s good to have options.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — Brilliant Day by Hans Atom (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hansatom/47919 Ft: Lisa DeBenedictis</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Long time listener Aaron Woodin left a comment on Twitter, or X, or whatever Elon is calling it this week…<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>&nbsp;“Excellent podcast, Mark. I agree about Rotterdam - amazing city, underrated by tourists. I took a freighter cruise from there 5 yrs ago. Love that word Flâneuring - my pet term is \"walk and gawk.\"</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Aaron, thanks for that. A freighter cruise… that’s gotta be very cool. And “walk and galk” -- I like that. But I think I like it even better if I can shoehorn the word “entropy” in there because it makes me feel that suffering through engineering thermodynamics was worth something. Maybe “entropic walking and galking.” Yeah, I like that!</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>TravelCommons contributor Chris Chufo forwarded me a tweet saying “The way you say ‘representative’ to an automated system is the real you” and, as folks say nowadays, I felt seen. Mine is a crisp, demanding “Agent”, trying to pitch the tone and volume in just the right way to interrupt rather than wait through the 3 minutes of recorded verbiage. So when I had to call into American Airlines last week, it pulled me up short “Hi, Mark. In a few words, tell us what we can do for you?” And that was it. No long announcement, no litany of number presses, just silence… waiting…. “Uhh, I’d like to talk to an agent about a reservation.” “I’ll connect you to an agent. Your expected wait time is 1 hr… and 14 minutes.” OK, some things will never change.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I had to call American because in their most recent retumbling of their JFK flight schedules, they’d shrunk the connection time to our flight from JFK to LHR from 6 hours (way too long!) to 1 hour -- a bit too snug for my liking, especially given the delays at JFK -- and LGA and EWR -- caused by the ongoing shortage of air traffic controllers. In the last episode, I talked about the cascade of tiny delays that caused me to lose my wager on a snug sub-2 hr connection on our way home from AMS. But it was the end of our trip, so annoying, but not critical. Here, though, missing our outbound flight would absolutely <em>not</em> be a great way to start the trip. Though after reading about <a href=\"https://www.insider.com/laguardia-airport-thousands-passengers-got-stuck-on-planes-for-hours-2023-7\">last weekend’s 60-plane departure queue at LGA</a>, even a more reasonable 2½-hr connection time didn’t feel safe.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>So I skipped the hour-plus live agent queue for the chat feature in American’s app. I was pleasantly surprised to get connected to an agent in just a couple of minutes. I banged in my confirmation code and my ask -- put us back on our original flight to JFK; I’d prefer to entertain myself for 6 hours rather than miss our flight. “Please give me 3-5 minutes to review your reservation.” Felt like a canned response the agent hit a button to send -- which was fine with me. Being on chat rather than a live call, I could wander around, get other things done while checking the screen every now and again for a response. Which I eventually got -- “I’ll have to transfer you to one of my colleagues”. That’s fine. We’re 20 minutes in, so even with this, I’m still doing better than the live call queue. And, in a couple of minutes when the next agent popped on, asking me how he could help, I just copy-pasted my answers to the same questions from the first agent. And then I waited for it -- one second, two seconds, “Please give me 3-5 minutes to review your reservation.” Just like clockwork. Eventually he came back “As your original flight isn’t available, would the direct BNA-LHR flight work?” Uh, yes, but it’s actually a British Airways flight. I’d looked at that flight, but it has a boatload more fees -- fuel surcharges, landing taxes. “No additional charges?” I asked. “No, it’s free of cost,” he replied. I screenshotted the chat screen and told him I’d take it. Problem solved with an even better option -- a direct flight -- and all in less than the hour hold time for a live agent. Maybe not quite as personal as talking to someone, but it got it done.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I’m flying up to Portland, Maine and need a rental car for a side trip further up the coast, to Bar Harbor, to Acadia National Forest for a bit of hiking. So I hit the Hertz site and got a big push to rent an EV, an electric vehicle. Looking at the prices, it was more than a standard car, but not <em>that</em> much more. So I was intrigued. But as I walked down the booking path, it was the same as a regular car; no guidance on what I think of as EV-specific things, like how do I pay for charging -- do I need to set up an account with someone, maybe download an app -- and what’s the EV equivalent to having to return the car with a full tank? So I backed out, did a Google search which, as I’d expected, did a better job of landing me on the right pages on Hertz’s website than Hertz did. It’s interesting. If you use a Tesla Supercharger, Hertz passes through the charge to your card, but <em>without</em> a mark-up -- unlike what they do with toll charge transponders. And returning the car full? Hertz wants it above 70% or they’ll charge you $35 for the EV version of a refill charge -- which I didn’t think was unreasonable. So now I hit Tesla’s website looking for chargers. There’s one at a shopping mall in Portland, but nothing near my hotel downtown. And the ones around Bar Harbor are at hotels that I’m not staying at. I’m tempted, but it feels a bit more of a hassle than I want to sign up for. But it feels like they’re getting close, at least Hertz is. Maybe it’ll work out for my next rental.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I got a bit of a chuckle out of the recent flurry of travel stories about the coming of ETIAS -- the European Travel Information and Authorisation System, the EU’s version of the US’s ESTA, the Electronic System for Travel Authorization, a pre-departure authorization for travelers who aren’t required to have a visa. I chuckled because we talked about this back in January, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/01/26/podcast-192-new-year-travel-planning-tips-gin-conquers-the-world/\">episode #192</a>, when I dug into ETIAS in case we needed it for our April tulip festival trip to the Netherlands. I found out we didn’t -- by that point, the May 2023 go-live had been pushed back to November 2023, and looking at the ETIAS website now, it’s been pushed again, now to much more ambiguous“sometime in 2024.” So I’m not sure what caused the sudden interest, but the number of news stories that were just plain wrong -- incorrectly wailing “Oh, now we’ll need a visa to go to Europe” in spite of what is said in the first paragraphs of just about every <a href=\"https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/MEMO_18_4362\">EU website page about ETIAS</a> (phrases like “The ETIAS authorisation is not a visa”) -- just makes me shake my head.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter (X?) message to mpeacock like Aaron did, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can skip all that social media stuff and post your comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And a quick program note - at the end of this episode, there’ll be a bit of a meta-discussion -- the podcast talking about the podcast -- about having to DIY my own podcast metrics reporting. Probably not terribly interesting for most folks, hence me stuffing it in the ending, the part most folks skip over. But if you’re interested, hold off on hitting the “skip track” button when you hear the “Pictures of You” wrap-up music.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music —  <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Suenjo/11162\">Natchoongi (New Hope Remix)</a> by Suenjo (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Notes on Holland’s Tulip Festival</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As I mentioned in the last couple of episodes, Irene and I did a 10-day swing through the Netherlands in April, all centered around the tulip festival -- the tulip parade, the tulip gardens -- and then building other stuff around that. Which meant that the usual Holland tourist destination, Amsterdam, wasn’t; and instead our entry and exit point with a night or two tacked on to make the logistics easier; especially after we couldn’t score tickets to the big Vermeer (Girl with the Pearl Earring) exhibit at the Rijksmuseum. Having said that, we still managed to hit a couple of places for some unique Dutch-ness -- <a href=\"https://goo.gl/maps/7sjkC4sJ5KhrPnS9A\">Van Dobben</a>, a 70-some-year-old sandwich joint that’s known for their <a href=\"https://thingstodoinamsterdam.com/blog/dutch-croquettes/\">beef croquettes</a> which, I’m told, is classic Dutch bar food --&nbsp; a 3-4 inch long rectangle of deep-fried, breaded creamed beef served on a bun with mustard. They were fine, though they seem like the kind of food best&nbsp; appreciated at 2 in the morning rather than noon. The better thing about Van Dobben was sitting at the counter, watching the waitresses give their customers -- a mix of construction workers, local shop owners, office workers, and not too many tourists -- a good natured hard time. We then had to walk off those little gastric depth charges because we had dinner that night at <a href=\"https://www.vinkeles.com/\">Vinkeles</a>, a great restaurant that received its second Michelin star the week we visited. The food was great -- highly recommended. We showed up early for a pre-dinner cocktail at the bar, which Irene did. But I audibled at the last minute, telling the bartender I’d never had genever -- the Dutch ancestor to gin -- and asked for his direction. He brought over two small tulip glasses filled to the rim, one with a clear liquid, the other a light amber, a barrel-aged genever. There was no room for ice in those little tulips; the genevers were served neat, at room temperature. It was a nice introduction. I managed to fit in a few more of those full little tulip glasses before the end of our trip.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>We actually organized the whole itinerary around Haarlem because it seemed more or less ground-zero for our tulip-ing: the Tulip Parade, kinda the Dutch version of the Rose Parade, ended there Saturday night after an all-day wander through villages to the south; and it wasn’t far from the big tulip displays at the Keukenhof Gardens. Heading down to the Keukenhof was the only time app-based travel payment didn’t work. The bus line had an app, but it didn’t seem completely connected to their web site, which is where I bought our tickets. And the web site said we had to have physical printed tickets; showing the PDF on our phone wouldn’t work. Lucky for us we were staying at a hotel in Haarlem rather than an Airbnb. The desk clerk happily printed our tickets for us.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Ticket hassles aside, the Gardens were great. Walking through the parking lot, through the ranks of tour buses; I started to appreciate what a big thing this tulip festival is. But I also had a building sense of dread. Is this going to be a repeat of last year’s shoulder-to-shoulder crowds in Italy? No, it wasn’t. The Keukenhof was a big enough place to absorb everyone, with tulip beds everywhere, to spread everyone out across the grounds.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But we didn’t <em>really</em> need to stay in Haarlem just to see these gardens; half the tour buses in the parking lot were day trips from Amsterdam. The next day, Saturday, we took advantage of Haarlem’s location, renting bikes and riding back down toward Tulip Ground Zero. Doing a spur-of-the-moment bike ride in the Netherlands is so easy -- lots of bike rental places with reasonable day rates, lots of bike lanes (and bike-aware drivers), and mostly flat terrain -- means you can have a good day out without needing to pack the whole Mamil -- middle-aged men in lycra -- kit. We headed southwest, pointed vaguely in the direction of the <a href=\"https://thetulipbarn.com/\">Tulip Barn</a>, a tulip farm where you can pay to go wander and Instagram your way through their tulip fields. But a couple of miles from the Tulip Barn, I stopped at a big cycle network map to figure out our next turn. I could figure out that the red arrow labeled “U Staat Hier” meant “You Are Here”, but was taking a little longer to figure out the rest. In the meantime, Irene looked past the trees down one of the streets and saw a huge tulip field. We parked our bikes and joined, for free, the maybe 30 other people -- families, couples -- wandering around the tulip beds. Pink, red, orange, yellow, white -- it was rows of tulips to the horizon. But it was also a working tulip field. Guys were putting on and pulling off bed covers, and, wildest thing, driving a little machine through the beds that snipped off the tulip flowers, leaving the tall stems; friend-of-the-show Chris Chufo said it looked like a tulip zamboni. I mean, “What the hell?” Turns out that this field and all the outdoor fields we saw, raise tulip <em>bulbs</em>, not flowers. The cut flowers are grown in covered fields and greenhouses. The tulip zamboni knocks off the outdoor blooms so the plant puts its energy into growing the bulb. I’m glad we got there when we did, and that there was only one guy running the zamboni. Check the show notes; I’ll see if I can post my video of the tulip topping.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Later that night -- <em>much</em> later, the Tulip Parade finally made it to Haarlem. A band warmed up the waiting crowd playing ‘50’s and early ‘60’s rock-and-roll using a vintage Cadillac convertible as their stage -- which would’ve fit in in, say, Nashville, but seemed a bit odd in western Holland. But only to me, I guess, because the crowd loved it. When the floats finally arrived, they did not disappoint. The craftsmanship was excellent; they were all decorated, their surfaces completely covered with floral materials -- tulips, daffodils, hyacinths, even cut-up bulbs and nut shells for brown and black colors, hence my earlier comparison to the Rose Parade. It also reminded me of smaller Mardi Gras parades in New Orleans -- the float sponsors seemed very local -- nearby car and farm equipment dealerships -- local marching bands. No bead tossing, but a lot of folks running over to hand out things to the people lined up along the route. It was just the right size -- big enough to support the craftsmanship needed for high-quality floats, but not so big that the local sponsors get elbowed out by big multinational corporations. One more advantage of our Haarlem location -- at the end of the parade, they parked the floats along the road at the end of the route. At the end of the night and again the next morning, we were able to walk up close to them, which made me appreciate the craftsmanship even more.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I’m in no way, shape, or form, any sort of gardener. I have, at best, a black thumb. And I’m not a big flower guy. I saw lots of guys with big full-frame digital cameras setting up tripods over tulip beds for what I can only imagine was an effort to capture the perfect flower pic -- whatever that may be. But I came back way more impressed than I expected to be with the beauty of the flat Dutch countryside in bloom.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #195</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>. And while you’re at TravelCommons.com, you can check out the show notes page for a transcript and any links I’ve mentioned. Or you can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, now to the promised meta-content. I’ve used Chartable for a couple of years now to give me some basic episode download metrics -- how many downloads in the first 7 days, in the first 30 days of an episode posting, in total -- whatever comes with the free version. Nothing fancy -- I’m not trying to sell ads; it’s for my own edification and enjoyment. The standard pattern is a big spike in downloads on the day I post the episode and then a steady growth after that. Usually the total downloads after 7 days number is 40-45% of an episode’s total downloads after a year. So anyhow, for the last episode, the Day 1 number was 6. Huh. Maybe Chartable is having some backend hiccups; I’ve seen it take a day for numbers to start populating. So I look again the next day -- same thing. Huh. Same thing <em>every</em> day that week. Now <em>this</em> behavior I haven’t seen before. Where did everyone go? I recheck all my podcast apps -- Overcast, Apple Podcasts, Pocket Casts, Podcast Addict -- yup, the episode is there. So what happened? Since I self-host TravelCommons -- because back in 2005 when I started, there was no other alternative -- I can look at the server logs. So look at the June and July logs -- yup, I can see more than 6 downloads of episode #194. Which then sends me down a new rabbit hole -- why rely on Chartable when I can do it myself, maybe write my own download counting program? But I’m not any sort of programmer… which led me again to ChatGPT. Everyone’s talking about how generative AI will replace programmers, so I thought I’d give it a go. I typed “Write a python program to print out total counts of downloaded podcasts reported in an Apache web log file” into the box at the bottom of the ChatGPT web page, clicked the little arrow icon, and Boom!, out burped a program. And it actually ran, and did what I asked. Turns out my ask needed a bit of refinement, but after maybe 30-45 minutes, I had a pretty solid output, which I then pulled into Excel to slice and dice and graph and pivot because I kinda got tired of torturing ChatGPT… or myself; I’m not sure which. But anyhow, generative AI won’t completely replace programmers and the like (at least not yet), but it does work… at, maybe, 80% of its current hype. Just thought I’d share a little of my own personal experience.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter/(X?), or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_195.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #195 — Checking Out Holland\'s Tulip Festival','','inherit','closed','closed','','4343-revision-v1','','','2023-08-24 15:07:51','2023-08-24 20:07:51','',4343,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4345',0,'revision','',0),
(4346,1,'2023-08-24 18:40:54','2023-08-24 23:40:54','','IMG_6301-EDIT','','inherit','open','closed','','img_6301-edit','','','2023-08-24 18:40:54','2023-08-24 23:40:54','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/IMG_6301-EDIT.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(4348,1,'2023-08-24 19:21:30','2023-08-25 00:21:30','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/IMG_6301-EDIT-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Field of orange tulips during Holland\'s Tulip Festival\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\">Just Another Tulip Field[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>In this episode, I dive deep into our Dutch tulip-themed trip last April. Before the tulip festival stories, I randomly wander through a potpourri of travel topics -- TSA passenger volumes returning to pre-COVID levels, having a surprisingly satisfying customer service experience with American Airlines, Hertz\'s EV push, and a bit of a chuckle about the misplaced visa panic in the news coverage of the EU\'s impending ETIAS system. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_195.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #195: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN after a triangulating drive -- Nashville to Annapolis, MD to New York City and then home. And in doing so, I have managed to miss/skip(?) the completion of the post-COVID travel recovery -- at least according to <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/travel/passenger-volumes\">TSA checkpoint passenger volumes</a>. The TSA website continues to update a website page with numbers from 2019 to yesterday 2023 in a convenient table format for easy copy-pasting into Excel. Crunching the TSA numbers starting the Friday before Memorial Day, the generally accepted start of the summer travel season, passenger volumes are up, on average, 11% over last year and equal to pre-COVID 2019.&nbsp; So volumes have recovered, but on the airlines’ Q2 earnings calls, the CEOs again reminded their listeners that not all passengers are equal. <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/southwest-airlines-luv-q2-earnings-report-2023-83811808?st=ivs07m9d98qw5ot&amp;reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink\">Southwest’s CEO said</a> “It’s clear that travel patterns post-pandemic are not what they were pre-pandemic,” as the airline said they’d shift planes from business-oriented short-haul routes to longer routes aimed at leisure travelers, and move some flights from start and end-of-the-day departures that flyers like me would book for same-day out-and-back trips.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I’ve talked in previous episodes about how one of the things I really miss moving from Nashville to Chicago is direct flights to places. The other thing I miss -- and pretty much on an equal weighting -- is good Chinese food. I’ve found good Vietnamese food, solid Mexican -- but haven’t found anything like what we would get in Chicago’s Chinatown. So when we hit New York City, we quickly found our way deep into Chinatown, joining the 20-30-person queue in front of a storefront bakery, <a href=\"https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/mei-lai-wah-bakery\">Mei Lai Wah</a>, for <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cha_siu_bao\">char siu bao</a>, BBQ pork buns, one of our favorites -- hoping they wouldn’t sell out before we got to the front of the line. Minutes tick by; the lines not moving. Then someone pops out of the bakery and yells “Anyone paying with cash, come up to the front!” As regular listeners know, I’m a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">knuckle-dragging cash carrier</a>. My wallet full of twenties and I sprinted to the front. I studied the menu; the cashier said “All we have left is #1, #5, and #20.” “Fine, I’ll take two of each.” I gave her one of my twenties and walked back out to the street where my wife, my daughter, and I inhaled those fresh buns while the credit card gang kept waiting. It’s good to have options.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — Brilliant Day by Hans Atom (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hansatom/47919 Ft: Lisa DeBenedictis</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Long time listener Aaron Woodin left a comment on Twitter, or X, or whatever Elon is calling it this week…<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>&nbsp;“Excellent podcast, Mark. I agree about Rotterdam - amazing city, underrated by tourists. I took a freighter cruise from there 5 yrs ago. Love that word Flâneuring - my pet term is \"walk and gawk.\"</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Aaron, thanks for that. A freighter cruise… that’s gotta be very cool. And “walk and galk” -- I like that. But I think I like it even better if I can shoehorn the word “entropy” in there because it makes me feel that suffering through engineering thermodynamics was worth something. Maybe “entropic walking and galking.” Yeah, I like that!</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>TravelCommons contributor Chris Chufo forwarded me a tweet saying “The way you say ‘representative’ to an automated system is the real you” and, as folks say nowadays, I felt seen. Mine is a crisp, demanding “Agent”, trying to pitch the tone and volume in just the right way to interrupt rather than wait through the 3 minutes of recorded verbiage. So when I had to call into American Airlines last week, it pulled me up short “Hi, Mark. In a few words, tell us what we can do for you?” And that was it. No long announcement, no litany of number presses, just silence… waiting…. “Uhh, I’d like to talk to an agent about a reservation.” “I’ll connect you to an agent. Your expected wait time is 1 hr… and 14 minutes.” OK, some things will never change.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I had to call American because in their most recent retumbling of their JFK flight schedules, they’d shrunk the connection time to our flight from JFK to LHR from 6 hours (way too long!) to 1 hour -- a bit too snug for my liking, especially given the delays at JFK -- and LGA and EWR -- caused by the ongoing shortage of air traffic controllers. In the last episode, I talked about the cascade of tiny delays that caused me to lose my wager on a snug sub-2 hr connection on our way home from AMS. But it was the end of our trip, so annoying, but not critical. Here, though, missing our outbound flight would absolutely <em>not</em> be a great way to start the trip. Though after reading about <a href=\"https://www.insider.com/laguardia-airport-thousands-passengers-got-stuck-on-planes-for-hours-2023-7\">last weekend’s 60-plane departure queue at LGA</a>, even a more reasonable 2½-hr connection time didn’t feel safe.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>So I skipped the hour-plus live agent queue for the chat feature in American’s app. I was pleasantly surprised to get connected to an agent in just a couple of minutes. I banged in my confirmation code and my ask -- put us back on our original flight to JFK; I’d prefer to entertain myself for 6 hours rather than miss our flight. “Please give me 3-5 minutes to review your reservation.” Felt like a canned response the agent hit a button to send -- which was fine with me. Being on chat rather than a live call, I could wander around, get other things done while checking the screen every now and again for a response. Which I eventually got -- “I’ll have to transfer you to one of my colleagues”. That’s fine. We’re 20 minutes in, so even with this, I’m still doing better than the live call queue. And, in a couple of minutes when the next agent popped on, asking me how he could help, I just copy-pasted my answers to the same questions from the first agent. And then I waited for it -- one second, two seconds, “Please give me 3-5 minutes to review your reservation.” Just like clockwork. Eventually he came back “As your original flight isn’t available, would the direct BNA-LHR flight work?” Uh, yes, but it’s actually a British Airways flight. I’d looked at that flight, but it has a boatload more fees -- fuel surcharges, landing taxes. “No additional charges?” I asked. “No, it’s free of cost,” he replied. I screenshotted the chat screen and told him I’d take it. Problem solved with an even better option -- a direct flight -- and all in less than the hour hold time for a live agent. Maybe not quite as personal as talking to someone, but it got it done.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I’m flying up to Portland, Maine and need a rental car for a side trip further up the coast, to Bar Harbor, to Acadia National Forest for a bit of hiking. So I hit the Hertz site and got a big push to rent an EV, an electric vehicle. Looking at the prices, it was more than a standard car, but not <em>that</em> much more. So I was intrigued. But as I walked down the booking path, it was the same as a regular car; no guidance on what I think of as EV-specific things, like how do I pay for charging -- do I need to set up an account with someone, maybe download an app -- and what’s the EV equivalent to having to return the car with a full tank? So I backed out, did a Google search which, as I’d expected, did a better job of landing me on the right pages on Hertz’s website than Hertz did. It’s interesting. If you use a Tesla Supercharger, Hertz passes through the charge to your card, but <em>without</em> a mark-up -- unlike what they do with toll charge transponders. And returning the car full? Hertz wants it above 70% or they’ll charge you $35 for the EV version of a refill charge -- which I didn’t think was unreasonable. So now I hit Tesla’s website looking for chargers. There’s one at a shopping mall in Portland, but nothing near my hotel downtown. And the ones around Bar Harbor are at hotels that I’m not staying at. I’m tempted, but it feels a bit more of a hassle than I want to sign up for. But it feels like they’re getting close, at least Hertz is. Maybe it’ll work out for my next rental.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I got a bit of a chuckle out of the recent flurry of travel stories about the coming of ETIAS -- the European Travel Information and Authorization System, the EU’s version of the US’s ESTA, the Electronic System for Travel Authorization, a pre-departure authorization for travelers who aren’t required to have a visa. I chuckled because we talked about this back in January, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/01/26/podcast-192-new-year-travel-planning-tips-gin-conquers-the-world/\">episode #192</a>, when I dug into ETIAS in case we needed it for our April tulip festival trip to the Netherlands. I found out we didn’t -- by that point, the May 2023 go-live had been pushed back to November 2023, and looking at the ETIAS website now, it’s been pushed again, now to much more ambiguous “sometime in 2024.” So I’m not sure what caused the sudden interest, but the number of news stories that were just plain wrong -- incorrectly wailing “Oh, now we’ll need a visa to go to Europe” in spite of what is said in the first paragraphs of just about every <a href=\"https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/MEMO_18_4362\">EU website page about ETIAS</a> (phrases like “The ETIAS authorization is not a visa”) -- just makes me shake my head.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter (X?) message to mpeacock like Aaron did, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can skip all that social media stuff and post your comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And a quick program note - at the end of this episode, there’ll be a bit of a meta-discussion -- the podcast talking about the podcast -- about having to DIY my own podcast metrics reporting. Probably not terribly interesting for most folks, hence me stuffing it in the ending, the part most folks skip over. But if you’re interested, hold off on hitting the “skip track” button when you hear the “Pictures of You” wrap-up music.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — &nbsp;<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Suenjo/11162\">Natchoongi (New Hope Remix)</a>&nbsp;by Suenjo (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Notes on Holland’s Tulip Festival</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As I mentioned in the last couple of episodes, Irene and I did a 10-day swing through the Netherlands in April, all centered around the tulip festival -- the tulip parade, the tulip gardens -- and then building other stuff around that. Which meant that the usual Holland tourist destination, Amsterdam, wasn’t; and instead our entry and exit point with a night or two tacked on to make the logistics easier; especially after we couldn’t score tickets to the big Vermeer (Girl with the Pearl Earring) exhibit at the Rijksmuseum. Having said that, we still managed to hit a couple of places for some unique Dutch-ness -- <a href=\"https://goo.gl/maps/7sjkC4sJ5KhrPnS9A\">Van Dobben</a>, a 70-some-year-old sandwich joint that’s known for their <a href=\"https://thingstodoinamsterdam.com/blog/dutch-croquettes/\">beef croquettes</a> which, I’m told, is classic Dutch bar food --&nbsp; a 3-4 inch long rectangle of deep-fried, breaded creamed beef served on a bun with mustard. They were fine, though they seem like the kind of food best&nbsp; appreciated at 2 in the morning rather than noon. The better thing about Van Dobben was sitting at the counter, watching the waitresses give their customers -- a mix of construction workers, local shop owners, office workers, and not too many tourists -- a good natured hard time. We then had to walk off those little gastric depth charges because we had dinner that night at <a href=\"https://www.vinkeles.com/\">Vinkeles</a>, a great restaurant that received its second Michelin star the week we visited. The food was great -- highly recommended. We showed up early for a pre-dinner cocktail at the bar, which Irene did. But I audibled at the last minute, telling the bartender I’d never had genever -- the Dutch ancestor to gin -- and asked for his direction. He brought over two small tulip glasses filled to the rim, one with a clear liquid, the other a light amber, a barrel-aged genever. There was no room for ice in those little tulips; the genevers were served neat, at room temperature. It was a nice introduction. I managed to fit in a few more of those full little tulip glasses before the end of our trip.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>We actually organized the whole itinerary around Haarlem because it seemed more or less ground-zero for our tulip-ing: the Tulip Parade, kinda the Dutch version of the Rose Parade, ended there Saturday night after an all-day wander through villages to the south; and it wasn’t far from the big tulip displays at the Keukenhof Gardens. Heading down to the Keukenhof was the only time app-based travel payment didn’t work. The bus line had an app, but it didn’t seem completely connected to their web site, which is where I bought our tickets. And the web site said we had to have physical printed tickets; showing the PDF on our phone wouldn’t work. Lucky for us we were staying at a hotel in Haarlem rather than an Airbnb. The desk clerk happily printed our tickets for us.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Ticket hassles aside, the Gardens were great. Walking through the parking lot, through the ranks of tour buses; I started to appreciate what a big thing this tulip festival is. But I also had a building sense of dread. Is this going to be a repeat of last year’s shoulder-to-shoulder crowds in Italy? No, it wasn’t. The Keukenhof was a big enough place to absorb everyone, with tulip beds everywhere, to spread everyone out across the grounds.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But we didn’t <em>really</em> need to stay in Haarlem just to see these gardens; half the tour buses in the parking lot were day trips from Amsterdam. The next day, Saturday, we took advantage of Haarlem’s location, renting bikes and riding back down toward Tulip Ground Zero. Doing a spur-of-the-moment bike ride in the Netherlands is so easy -- lots of bike rental places with reasonable day rates, lots of bike lanes (and bike-aware drivers), and mostly flat terrain -- means you can have a good day out without needing to pack the whole Mamil -- middle-aged men in lycra -- kit. We headed southwest, pointed vaguely in the direction of the <a href=\"https://thetulipbarn.com/\">Tulip Barn</a>, a tulip farm where you can pay to go wander and Instagram your way through their tulip fields. But a couple of miles from the Tulip Barn, I stopped at a big cycle network map to figure out our next turn. I could figure out that the red arrow labeled “U Staat Hier” meant “You Are Here”, but was taking a little longer to figure out the rest. In the meantime, Irene looked past the trees down one of the streets and saw a huge tulip field. We parked our bikes and joined, for free, the maybe 30 other people -- families, couples -- wandering around the tulip beds. Pink, red, orange, yellow, white -- it was rows of tulips to the horizon. But it was also a working tulip field. Guys were putting on and pulling off bed covers, and, wildest thing, driving a little machine through the beds that snipped off the tulip flowers, leaving the tall stems; friend-of-the-show Chris Chufo said it looked like a tulip zamboni. I mean, “What the hell?” Turns out that this field and all the outdoor fields we saw, raise tulip <em>bulbs</em>, not flowers. The cut flowers are grown in covered fields and greenhouses. The tulip zamboni knocks off the outdoor blooms so the plant puts its energy into growing the bulb. I’m glad we got there when we did, and that there was only one guy running the zamboni. Check the show notes; I’ll see if I can post my video of the tulip topping.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Later that night -- <em>much</em> later, the Tulip Parade finally made it to Haarlem. A band warmed up the waiting crowd playing ‘50’s and early ‘60’s rock-and-roll using a vintage Cadillac convertible as their stage -- which would’ve fit in in, say, Nashville, but seemed a bit odd in western Holland. But only to me, I guess, because the crowd loved it. When the floats finally arrived, they did not disappoint. The craftsmanship was excellent; they were all decorated, their surfaces completely covered with floral materials -- tulips, daffodils, hyacinths, even cut-up bulbs and nut shells for brown and black colors, hence my earlier comparison to the Rose Parade. It also reminded me of smaller Mardi Gras parades in New Orleans -- the float sponsors seemed very local -- nearby car and farm equipment dealerships -- local marching bands. No bead tossing, but a lot of folks running over to hand out things to the people lined up along the route. It was just the right size -- big enough to support the craftsmanship needed for high-quality floats, but not so big that the local sponsors get elbowed out by big multinational corporations. One more advantage of our Haarlem location -- at the end of the parade, they parked the floats along the road at the end of the route. At the end of the night and again the next morning, we were able to walk up close to them, which made me appreciate the craftsmanship even more.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I’m in no way, shape, or form, any sort of gardener. I have, at best, a black thumb. And I’m not a big flower guy. I saw lots of guys with big full-frame digital cameras setting up tripods over tulip beds for what I can only imagine was an effort to capture the perfect flower pic -- whatever that may be. But I came back way more impressed than I expected to be with the beauty of the flat Dutch countryside in bloom.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #195</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>. And while you’re at TravelCommons.com, you can check out the show notes page for a transcript and any links I’ve mentioned. Or you can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, now to the promised meta-content. I’ve used Chartable for a couple of years now to give me some basic episode download metrics -- how many downloads in the first 7 days, in the first 30 days of an episode posting, in total -- whatever comes with the free version. Nothing fancy -- I’m not trying to sell ads; it’s for my own edification and enjoyment. The standard pattern is a big spike in downloads on the day I post the episode and then a steady growth after that. Usually the total downloads after 7 days number is 40-45% of an episode’s total downloads after a year. So anyhow, for the last episode, the Day 1 number was 6. Huh. Maybe Chartable is having some backend hiccups; I’ve seen it take a day for numbers to start populating. So I look again the next day -- same thing. Huh. Same thing <em>every</em> day that week. Now <em>this</em> behavior I haven’t seen before. Where did everyone go? I recheck all my podcast apps -- Overcast, Apple Podcasts, Pocket Casts, Podcast Addict -- yup, the episode is there. So what happened? Since I self-host TravelCommons -- because back in 2005 when I started, there was no other alternative -- I can look at the server logs. So look at the June and July logs -- yup, I can see more than 6 downloads of <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/06/20/podcast-194-best-laid-travel-plans-roaming-entropy/\" title=\"Podcast #194 — Best Laid Travel Plans; Roaming Entropy\">episode #194</a>. Which then sends me down a new rabbit hole -- why rely on Chartable when I can do it myself, maybe write my own download counting program? But I’m not any sort of programmer… which led me again to ChatGPT. Everyone’s talking about how generative AI will replace programmers, so I thought I’d give it a go. I typed “Write a python program to print out total counts of downloaded podcasts reported in an Apache web log file” into the box at the bottom of the ChatGPT web page, clicked the little arrow icon, and Boom!, out burped a program. And it actually ran, and did what I asked. Turns out my ask needed a bit of refinement, but after maybe 30-45 minutes, I had a pretty solid output, which I then pulled into Excel to slice and dice and graph and pivot because I kinda got tired of torturing ChatGPT… or myself; I’m not sure which. But anyhow, generative AI won’t completely replace programmers and the like (at least not yet), but it does work… at, maybe, 80% of its current hype. Just thought I’d share a little of my own personal experience.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter/(X?), or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_195.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #195 — Checking Out Holland\'s Tulip Festival','','inherit','closed','closed','','4343-revision-v1','','','2023-08-24 19:21:30','2023-08-25 00:21:30','',4343,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4348',0,'revision','',0),
(4349,1,'2023-08-24 19:22:44','2023-08-25 00:22:44','[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/IMG_6301-EDIT-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Field of orange tulips during Holland\'s Tulip Festival\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /> Just Another Tulip Field[/caption]\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>In this episode, I dive deep into our Dutch tulip-themed trip last April. Before the tulip festival stories, I randomly wander through a potpourri of travel topics -- TSA passenger volumes returning to pre-COVID levels, having a surprisingly satisfying customer service experience with American Airlines, Hertz\'s EV push, and a bit of a chuckle about the misplaced visa panic in the news coverage of the EU\'s impending ETIAS system. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_195.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #195: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN after a triangulating drive -- Nashville to Annapolis, MD to New York City and then home. And in doing so, I have managed to miss/skip(?) the completion of the post-COVID travel recovery -- at least according to <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/travel/passenger-volumes\">TSA checkpoint passenger volumes</a>. The TSA website continues to update a website page with numbers from 2019 to yesterday 2023 in a convenient table format for easy copy-pasting into Excel. Crunching the TSA numbers starting the Friday before Memorial Day, the generally accepted start of the summer travel season, passenger volumes are up, on average, 11% over last year and equal to pre-COVID 2019.&nbsp; So volumes have recovered, but on the airlines’ Q2 earnings calls, the CEOs again reminded their listeners that not all passengers are equal. <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/southwest-airlines-luv-q2-earnings-report-2023-83811808?st=ivs07m9d98qw5ot&amp;reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink\">Southwest’s CEO said</a> “It’s clear that travel patterns post-pandemic are not what they were pre-pandemic,” as the airline said they’d shift planes from business-oriented short-haul routes to longer routes aimed at leisure travelers, and move some flights from start and end-of-the-day departures that flyers like me would book for same-day out-and-back trips.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I’ve talked in previous episodes about how one of the things I really miss moving from Nashville to Chicago is direct flights to places. The other thing I miss -- and pretty much on an equal weighting -- is good Chinese food. I’ve found good Vietnamese food, solid Mexican -- but haven’t found anything like what we would get in Chicago’s Chinatown. So when we hit New York City, we quickly found our way deep into Chinatown, joining the 20-30-person queue in front of a storefront bakery, <a href=\"https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/mei-lai-wah-bakery\">Mei Lai Wah</a>, for <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cha_siu_bao\">char siu bao</a>, BBQ pork buns, one of our favorites -- hoping they wouldn’t sell out before we got to the front of the line. Minutes tick by; the lines not moving. Then someone pops out of the bakery and yells “Anyone paying with cash, come up to the front!” As regular listeners know, I’m a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">knuckle-dragging cash carrier</a>. My wallet full of twenties and I sprinted to the front. I studied the menu; the cashier said “All we have left is #1, #5, and #20.” “Fine, I’ll take two of each.” I gave her one of my twenties and walked back out to the street where my wife, my daughter, and I inhaled those fresh buns while the credit card gang kept waiting. It’s good to have options.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — Brilliant Day by Hans Atom (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hansatom/47919 Ft: Lisa DeBenedictis</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Long time listener Aaron Woodin left a comment on Twitter, or X, or whatever Elon is calling it this week…<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>&nbsp;“Excellent podcast, Mark. I agree about Rotterdam - amazing city, underrated by tourists. I took a freighter cruise from there 5 yrs ago. Love that word Flâneuring - my pet term is \"walk and gawk.\"</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Aaron, thanks for that. A freighter cruise… that’s gotta be very cool. And “walk and galk” -- I like that. But I think I like it even better if I can shoehorn the word “entropy” in there because it makes me feel that suffering through engineering thermodynamics was worth something. Maybe “entropic walking and galking.” Yeah, I like that!</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>TravelCommons contributor Chris Chufo forwarded me a tweet saying “The way you say ‘representative’ to an automated system is the real you” and, as folks say nowadays, I felt seen. Mine is a crisp, demanding “Agent”, trying to pitch the tone and volume in just the right way to interrupt rather than wait through the 3 minutes of recorded verbiage. So when I had to call into American Airlines last week, it pulled me up short “Hi, Mark. In a few words, tell us what we can do for you?” And that was it. No long announcement, no litany of number presses, just silence… waiting…. “Uhh, I’d like to talk to an agent about a reservation.” “I’ll connect you to an agent. Your expected wait time is 1 hr… and 14 minutes.” OK, some things will never change.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I had to call American because in their most recent retumbling of their JFK flight schedules, they’d shrunk the connection time to our flight from JFK to LHR from 6 hours (way too long!) to 1 hour -- a bit too snug for my liking, especially given the delays at JFK -- and LGA and EWR -- caused by the ongoing shortage of air traffic controllers. In the last episode, I talked about the cascade of tiny delays that caused me to lose my wager on a snug sub-2 hr connection on our way home from AMS. But it was the end of our trip, so annoying, but not critical. Here, though, missing our outbound flight would absolutely <em>not</em> be a great way to start the trip. Though after reading about <a href=\"https://www.insider.com/laguardia-airport-thousands-passengers-got-stuck-on-planes-for-hours-2023-7\">last weekend’s 60-plane departure queue at LGA</a>, even a more reasonable 2½-hr connection time didn’t feel safe.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>So I skipped the hour-plus live agent queue for the chat feature in American’s app. I was pleasantly surprised to get connected to an agent in just a couple of minutes. I banged in my confirmation code and my ask -- put us back on our original flight to JFK; I’d prefer to entertain myself for 6 hours rather than miss our flight. “Please give me 3-5 minutes to review your reservation.” Felt like a canned response the agent hit a button to send -- which was fine with me. Being on chat rather than a live call, I could wander around, get other things done while checking the screen every now and again for a response. Which I eventually got -- “I’ll have to transfer you to one of my colleagues”. That’s fine. We’re 20 minutes in, so even with this, I’m still doing better than the live call queue. And, in a couple of minutes when the next agent popped on, asking me how he could help, I just copy-pasted my answers to the same questions from the first agent. And then I waited for it -- one second, two seconds, “Please give me 3-5 minutes to review your reservation.” Just like clockwork. Eventually he came back “As your original flight isn’t available, would the direct BNA-LHR flight work?” Uh, yes, but it’s actually a British Airways flight. I’d looked at that flight, but it has a boatload more fees -- fuel surcharges, landing taxes. “No additional charges?” I asked. “No, it’s free of cost,” he replied. I screenshotted the chat screen and told him I’d take it. Problem solved with an even better option -- a direct flight -- and all in less than the hour hold time for a live agent. Maybe not quite as personal as talking to someone, but it got it done.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I’m flying up to Portland, Maine and need a rental car for a side trip further up the coast, to Bar Harbor, to Acadia National Forest for a bit of hiking. So I hit the Hertz site and got a big push to rent an EV, an electric vehicle. Looking at the prices, it was more than a standard car, but not <em>that</em> much more. So I was intrigued. But as I walked down the booking path, it was the same as a regular car; no guidance on what I think of as EV-specific things, like how do I pay for charging -- do I need to set up an account with someone, maybe download an app -- and what’s the EV equivalent to having to return the car with a full tank? So I backed out, did a Google search which, as I’d expected, did a better job of landing me on the right pages on Hertz’s website than Hertz did. It’s interesting. If you use a Tesla Supercharger, Hertz passes through the charge to your card, but <em>without</em> a mark-up -- unlike what they do with toll charge transponders. And returning the car full? Hertz wants it above 70% or they’ll charge you $35 for the EV version of a refill charge -- which I didn’t think was unreasonable. So now I hit Tesla’s website looking for chargers. There’s one at a shopping mall in Portland, but nothing near my hotel downtown. And the ones around Bar Harbor are at hotels that I’m not staying at. I’m tempted, but it feels a bit more of a hassle than I want to sign up for. But it feels like they’re getting close, at least Hertz is. Maybe it’ll work out for my next rental.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I got a bit of a chuckle out of the recent flurry of travel stories about the coming of ETIAS -- the European Travel Information and Authorization System, the EU’s version of the US’s ESTA, the Electronic System for Travel Authorization, a pre-departure authorization for travelers who aren’t required to have a visa. I chuckled because we talked about this back in January, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/01/26/podcast-192-new-year-travel-planning-tips-gin-conquers-the-world/\">episode #192</a>, when I dug into ETIAS in case we needed it for our April tulip festival trip to the Netherlands. I found out we didn’t -- by that point, the May 2023 go-live had been pushed back to November 2023, and looking at the ETIAS website now, it’s been pushed again, now to much more ambiguous “sometime in 2024.” So I’m not sure what caused the sudden interest, but the number of news stories that were just plain wrong -- incorrectly wailing “Oh, now we’ll need a visa to go to Europe” in spite of what is said in the first paragraphs of just about every <a href=\"https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/MEMO_18_4362\">EU website page about ETIAS</a> (phrases like “The ETIAS authorization is not a visa”) -- just makes me shake my head.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter (X?) message to mpeacock like Aaron did, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can skip all that social media stuff and post your comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And a quick program note - at the end of this episode, there’ll be a bit of a meta-discussion -- the podcast talking about the podcast -- about having to DIY my own podcast metrics reporting. Probably not terribly interesting for most folks, hence me stuffing it in the ending, the part most folks skip over. But if you’re interested, hold off on hitting the “skip track” button when you hear the “Pictures of You” wrap-up music.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — &nbsp;<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Suenjo/11162\">Natchoongi (New Hope Remix)</a>&nbsp;by Suenjo (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Notes on Holland’s Tulip Festival</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As I mentioned in the last couple of episodes, Irene and I did a 10-day swing through the Netherlands in April, all centered around the tulip festival -- the tulip parade, the tulip gardens -- and then building other stuff around that. Which meant that the usual Holland tourist destination, Amsterdam, wasn’t; and instead our entry and exit point with a night or two tacked on to make the logistics easier; especially after we couldn’t score tickets to the big Vermeer (Girl with the Pearl Earring) exhibit at the Rijksmuseum. Having said that, we still managed to hit a couple of places for some unique Dutch-ness -- <a href=\"https://goo.gl/maps/7sjkC4sJ5KhrPnS9A\">Van Dobben</a>, a 70-some-year-old sandwich joint that’s known for their <a href=\"https://thingstodoinamsterdam.com/blog/dutch-croquettes/\">beef croquettes</a> which, I’m told, is classic Dutch bar food --&nbsp; a 3-4 inch long rectangle of deep-fried, breaded creamed beef served on a bun with mustard. They were fine, though they seem like the kind of food best&nbsp; appreciated at 2 in the morning rather than noon. The better thing about Van Dobben was sitting at the counter, watching the waitresses give their customers -- a mix of construction workers, local shop owners, office workers, and not too many tourists -- a good natured hard time. We then had to walk off those little gastric depth charges because we had dinner that night at <a href=\"https://www.vinkeles.com/\">Vinkeles</a>, a great restaurant that received its second Michelin star the week we visited. The food was great -- highly recommended. We showed up early for a pre-dinner cocktail at the bar, which Irene did. But I audibled at the last minute, telling the bartender I’d never had genever -- the Dutch ancestor to gin -- and asked for his direction. He brought over two small tulip glasses filled to the rim, one with a clear liquid, the other a light amber, a barrel-aged genever. There was no room for ice in those little tulips; the genevers were served neat, at room temperature. It was a nice introduction. I managed to fit in a few more of those full little tulip glasses before the end of our trip.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>We actually organized the whole itinerary around Haarlem because it seemed more or less ground-zero for our tulip-ing: the Tulip Parade, kinda the Dutch version of the Rose Parade, ended there Saturday night after an all-day wander through villages to the south; and it wasn’t far from the big tulip displays at the Keukenhof Gardens. Heading down to the Keukenhof was the only time app-based travel payment didn’t work. The bus line had an app, but it didn’t seem completely connected to their web site, which is where I bought our tickets. And the web site said we had to have physical printed tickets; showing the PDF on our phone wouldn’t work. Lucky for us we were staying at a hotel in Haarlem rather than an Airbnb. The desk clerk happily printed our tickets for us.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Ticket hassles aside, the Gardens were great. Walking through the parking lot, through the ranks of tour buses; I started to appreciate what a big thing this tulip festival is. But I also had a building sense of dread. Is this going to be a repeat of last year’s shoulder-to-shoulder crowds in Italy? No, it wasn’t. The Keukenhof was a big enough place to absorb everyone, with tulip beds everywhere, to spread everyone out across the grounds.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But we didn’t <em>really</em> need to stay in Haarlem just to see these gardens; half the tour buses in the parking lot were day trips from Amsterdam. The next day, Saturday, we took advantage of Haarlem’s location, renting bikes and riding back down toward Tulip Ground Zero. Doing a spur-of-the-moment bike ride in the Netherlands is so easy -- lots of bike rental places with reasonable day rates, lots of bike lanes (and bike-aware drivers), and mostly flat terrain -- means you can have a good day out without needing to pack the whole Mamil -- middle-aged men in lycra -- kit. We headed southwest, pointed vaguely in the direction of the <a href=\"https://thetulipbarn.com/\">Tulip Barn</a>, a tulip farm where you can pay to go wander and Instagram your way through their tulip fields. But a couple of miles from the Tulip Barn, I stopped at a big cycle network map to figure out our next turn. I could figure out that the red arrow labeled “U Staat Hier” meant “You Are Here”, but was taking a little longer to figure out the rest. In the meantime, Irene looked past the trees down one of the streets and saw a huge tulip field. We parked our bikes and joined, for free, the maybe 30 other people -- families, couples -- wandering around the tulip beds. Pink, red, orange, yellow, white -- it was rows of tulips to the horizon. But it was also a working tulip field. Guys were putting on and pulling off bed covers, and, wildest thing, driving a little machine through the beds that snipped off the tulip flowers, leaving the tall stems; friend-of-the-show Chris Chufo said it looked like a tulip zamboni. I mean, “What the hell?” Turns out that this field and all the outdoor fields we saw, raise tulip <em>bulbs</em>, not flowers. The cut flowers are grown in covered fields and greenhouses. The tulip zamboni knocks off the outdoor blooms so the plant puts its energy into growing the bulb. I’m glad we got there when we did, and that there was only one guy running the zamboni. Check the show notes; I’ll see if I can post my video of the tulip topping.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Later that night -- <em>much</em> later, the Tulip Parade finally made it to Haarlem. A band warmed up the waiting crowd playing ‘50’s and early ‘60’s rock-and-roll using a vintage Cadillac convertible as their stage -- which would’ve fit in in, say, Nashville, but seemed a bit odd in western Holland. But only to me, I guess, because the crowd loved it. When the floats finally arrived, they did not disappoint. The craftsmanship was excellent; they were all decorated, their surfaces completely covered with floral materials -- tulips, daffodils, hyacinths, even cut-up bulbs and nut shells for brown and black colors, hence my earlier comparison to the Rose Parade. It also reminded me of smaller Mardi Gras parades in New Orleans -- the float sponsors seemed very local -- nearby car and farm equipment dealerships -- local marching bands. No bead tossing, but a lot of folks running over to hand out things to the people lined up along the route. It was just the right size -- big enough to support the craftsmanship needed for high-quality floats, but not so big that the local sponsors get elbowed out by big multinational corporations. One more advantage of our Haarlem location -- at the end of the parade, they parked the floats along the road at the end of the route. At the end of the night and again the next morning, we were able to walk up close to them, which made me appreciate the craftsmanship even more.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I’m in no way, shape, or form, any sort of gardener. I have, at best, a black thumb. And I’m not a big flower guy. I saw lots of guys with big full-frame digital cameras setting up tripods over tulip beds for what I can only imagine was an effort to capture the perfect flower pic -- whatever that may be. But I came back way more impressed than I expected to be with the beauty of the flat Dutch countryside in bloom.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #195</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>. And while you’re at TravelCommons.com, you can check out the show notes page for a transcript and any links I’ve mentioned. Or you can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, now to the promised meta-content. I’ve used Chartable for a couple of years now to give me some basic episode download metrics -- how many downloads in the first 7 days, in the first 30 days of an episode posting, in total -- whatever comes with the free version. Nothing fancy -- I’m not trying to sell ads; it’s for my own edification and enjoyment. The standard pattern is a big spike in downloads on the day I post the episode and then a steady growth after that. Usually the total downloads after 7 days number is 40-45% of an episode’s total downloads after a year. So anyhow, for the last episode, the Day 1 number was 6. Huh. Maybe Chartable is having some backend hiccups; I’ve seen it take a day for numbers to start populating. So I look again the next day -- same thing. Huh. Same thing <em>every</em> day that week. Now <em>this</em> behavior I haven’t seen before. Where did everyone go? I recheck all my podcast apps -- Overcast, Apple Podcasts, Pocket Casts, Podcast Addict -- yup, the episode is there. So what happened? Since I self-host TravelCommons -- because back in 2005 when I started, there was no other alternative -- I can look at the server logs. So look at the June and July logs -- yup, I can see more than 6 downloads of <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/06/20/podcast-194-best-laid-travel-plans-roaming-entropy/\" title=\"Podcast #194 — Best Laid Travel Plans; Roaming Entropy\">episode #194</a>. Which then sends me down a new rabbit hole -- why rely on Chartable when I can do it myself, maybe write my own download counting program? But I’m not any sort of programmer… which led me again to ChatGPT. Everyone’s talking about how generative AI will replace programmers, so I thought I’d give it a go. I typed “Write a python program to print out total counts of downloaded podcasts reported in an Apache web log file” into the box at the bottom of the ChatGPT web page, clicked the little arrow icon, and Boom!, out burped a program. And it actually ran, and did what I asked. Turns out my ask needed a bit of refinement, but after maybe 30-45 minutes, I had a pretty solid output, which I then pulled into Excel to slice and dice and graph and pivot because I kinda got tired of torturing ChatGPT… or myself; I’m not sure which. But anyhow, generative AI won’t completely replace programmers and the like (at least not yet), but it does work… at, maybe, 80% of its current hype. Just thought I’d share a little of my own personal experience.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter/(X?), or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_195.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #195 — Checking Out Holland\'s Tulip Festival','','inherit','closed','closed','','4343-revision-v1','','','2023-08-24 19:22:44','2023-08-25 00:22:44','',4343,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4349',0,'revision','',0),
(4359,1,'2023-08-28 11:06:55','2023-08-28 16:06:55','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/DSC_7106-scaled.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2633\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/DSC_7106-300x293.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"293\"></a><figcaption>Just put my dragon\'s den on Airbnb</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>January is a big travel planning month; people thinking about about the places they want to visit, spending days on the Internet researching itineraries, and putting in their week\'s vacation requests. But what about a 9-week sabbatical you’ve worked 7 years for? In this episode, we talk about that kind of extreme travel planning. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_159.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #159: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois having finished 3 weeks of traveling down to Phoenix with one more to go. It’s been a mild winter -- for Chicago -- especially when compared to last winter, which means it’s been in the 20’s and 30’s as opposed to -23 as it was one morning last January. But even with a mild winter, I still appreciate the 70 degree days in Phoenix.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li> It’s a 4-hr flight between Chicago and Phoenix. I normally enjoy that amount of “unplugged” time to just read, listen to music, listen to podcasts. But a couple of weeks ago, I tweaked my back during a workout -- not a big thing, I’ve done it many times before. But this time, the pain didn’t go away, it’s hung around on my left side, moving from back to hip to thigh, making it very uncomfortable to sit for long periods of time -- like 4 hrs. Which has made me notice how long US carriers keep the “Fasten Seatbelt” sign on -- like, forever. By the time that seatbelt sign finally goes off, my back is screaming -- and the person next to me in the middle seat is pretty annoyed at my constant shifting. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/06/16/podcast-152-overwhelming-travel-new-old-restaurant-trends/\">episode #152</a>, I talked about Southwest flights between Chicago and Nashville keeping the seatbelt sign on the entire hour-and-20-minutes. It hasn’t been that bad, but it’s easily been 45 minutes. And it isn’t just Southwest; United is doing the same thing. Quite a difference from, say, when Andrew and I flew Air Baltic back in October. 10,000 ft and “bing” that seat belt sign would go off, and we’d still be climbing. It doesn’t need to turn off that fast, but there’s gotta be a happy medium there somewhere. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>With the mild winter and a little bit of luck, my flights to and from Phoenix have been pretty dependable -- except for this week. On Monday, I started getting delay notices for my United 7:40pm flight right after lunch. United was doing their typical rolling delay exercise -- it’s a 30 minutes; no, really an hour; no, we’re leaving at 9pm; just kidding, it’s really 9:40. I was OK with the 30 and 60-minute delays, but then when I get two more delays in a 40-minute span -- now, something’s up. I call United. I get the Premier desk, which the guy tells me is in Chicago. I tell him the story -- rolling delays have now gotten to 2 hrs; I don’t trust that this flight is going off, and I need to get to PHX tonight. The guy says, “Yup, I got it. Makes sense.” He tries to find me routings through LAX and SFO, but the connections don’t work. So he cancels and refunds my ticket -- no hassle, no questions, no change fee. I love this guy. I pivot to Southwest and American, which both have 8:40 flights. I look at American’s seat map -- nothing but middle seats. That’s just not going to work with my back, so it’s over to Southwest. I’m A-List, so I know with their open seating I’ll get an aisle seat. (Exhale) Haven’t done that dance in a while, so was a bit out of shape. But with one more trip to PHX left, I’m not looking to get back into that shape.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music --  <em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/hisboyelroy/430\" target=\"_blank\">Revolve</a> mix</em> by cinematrik (c) copyright 2005 Licensed under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hisboyelroy/430   </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Before writing a podcast, I go through all the interaction channels -- website comments, Facebook comments, Instagram comments, Twitter replies, e-mails, … and inevitably I miss something. Which I have done since October when Arnoud Heijnis and I traded Twitter direct messages about travel converters. In episode #155, I’d talked about having to rummage around for European plug adaptors before my Krakow and Budapest trip, and how I’m always leaving them behind. Arnoud wrote -<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Hi Mark, just caught up on your last two episodes. I also did the travel converter dance until someone recommended the Power Bagel. It\'s so small and comes in handy not only as a travel adapter but also in hotel rooms with not enough power plugs, conference tables with one outlet etc. Iit never leaves my bag so thought I\'d share.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>A very belated thanks, Arnoud! Clicking through the link that Arnoud sent, the Power Bagel is a compact circular power strip of universal plugs and a couple of USB ports. They say that the circular design keeps large power adapters, like a Macbook power supply, from blocking outlets like they do on straight power strips. And then in the center hole, they store a universal plug adapter so you can plug the Power Bagel in most international outlets. Cool design and Arnoud vouches for it. Clicking around the web site, the company MOGICS seems to be a 3-person design company based in Singapore. They got started a few years back on Kickstarter and are in the middle of a new campaign for an upgraded version of the Power Bagel, called, of course, the Super Bagel that upgrades the plug adapter and adds a on-trend USB-C port. Kickstarter says the campaign ends on Feb 25th. I’ll include a <a href=\"http://kck.st/354ozBx\">link</a> in the show notes for anyone interested.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Kickstarter seems to be the place for these things. I sent Arnoud a link to a travel adapter campaign that I joined. The Passport Go is a more traditional travel adapter -- a big cube that will plug into most international outlets and has 3 USB-A and 1 USB-C plugs and one universal plug receptacle. I used it on my Baltics trip. For personal travel, most of my power needs seem to now be driven by USB cords rather than plugs -- my iPhone did a rapid charge off the USB-C port, my tablet and headphones off the USB-A ports and since I don’t have enough hair to justify a blow dryer or curling iron, I never used the plug receptacle. Indeed, if I’d brought my Macbook Air, I could’ve powered that up off the USB-C port rather than bringing its power adapter. I’ll include a link to <a href=\"https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/zendure/passport-go-worlds-first-travel-adapter-w-gan-technology\"><em>their</em> Kickstarter page</a>.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/10/14/podcast-156-airport-satisfaction-escooters-smaller-luggage/\">episode #156,</a> I talked about how I really liked electric scooters, using them to run around in Chicago and Charlottesville and DC, and down here in Phoenix. Whereas Chicago wrapped up their e-scooter pilot in October -- which made sense; I don’t think those scooters would do well in the snow -- Phoenix seemed the perfect place with perfect weather -- no snow, not a lot of rain. And they seemed to have nailed one of the main problems with e-scooters -- people leaving them lying everywhere, especially in the middle of sidewalks. In downtown Phoenix, you have to park them in designated areas, typically near sidewalk corners, inside a painted box. So it surprised me when I started coming down here in December that I saw only 2 scooter companies -- Lime (which is partnered with Uber) and Spin (which is owned by the car company Ford). But then, a couple of weeks ago, Lime announced that they were pulling out -- that they couldn’t make money in Phoenix -- and a day or so later, all their scooters were gone. I don’t know what the right balance between scooter availability and public right-of-way is, but I hope Chicago and Phoenix and other cities can figure it out. This whole micro-mobility space -- bike shares, e-scooters -- is an important part of the urban transit mix. And, when the weather’s nice, they’re fun too!</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>In that <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/10/14/podcast-156-airport-satisfaction-escooters-smaller-luggage/\">same episode</a>, I talked about buying a smaller bag, a <a href=\"https://amzn.to/32lIURe\">TravelPro Maxlite 5 international carry-on size</a>, to meet the smaller carry-on size and weight requirements of AirBaltic, which Andrew and I would be using to hop between Riga, Tallinn, and Helsinki on our Baltics beer and sauna tour. I said back then that I didn’t want to spend a lot of money on it because I’d only be using it for this Baltics trip and maybe some short couple-of-day trips, that my big Victorinox 22-incher would remain my primary bag. But as it turns out, I’ve been using the smaller TravelPro for these 4-day/3-night trips to Phoenix. Now, with temperatures in 70’s, I’m not having to bring heavy, thick clothes with me, but still, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by what I can pack into that smaller TravelPro. But, I think I’ll be back to the Victorinox for next week’s trip -- I’m vectoring through Durango, CO for a ski weekend on the way home. Little colder, little more clothing; I think I’ll need all the space I can get. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along -- text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music -- Velvet Green of Mystery (Instrumental) by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/48114 Ft: Kthugha, Jeris, Martijn de Boer  </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong> </strong> <strong>Planning the Trip of a Lifetime</strong> </h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>We’ve talked on past episodes about trip planning -- using guidebooks, social media, Google algorithms, shooting the gaps between bipolar TripAdvisor reviews, casting runes, consulting tarot cards,... And all that for a week’s vacation, maybe two. What about a 9-week vacation, a paid sabbatical that you’ve worked and waited 7 years for? Well, that’s the extreme travel planning that long-time TravelCommons listener and even longer time friend Allan Marko and his wife Chris Chufo faced last year. And with January being a big travel planning month, I asked Allan to talk to us about how he and Chris planned for a trip of a lifetime.<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Allan. Thanks for joining us. It’s interesting that we’re having this conversation and this is the January episode because a lot of folks in January start to think start to make plans.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Allan: Yeah, it was a year ago. We left two days after Christmas, so we were gone from December 27th to February 27th, 2019. I\'m getting daily reminders from Facebook.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: So give us a little bit of background on the trip. It was a sabbatical. How long was it? What were some of your thoughts on it?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Allan: Well, her company allows, after seven years of employment, you could take a chunk of time off. In the case of her company, you\'re allowed to take a number of weeks off. And if you take it at a certain time of year, the Christmas holidays, you could get an extra week and you can clamp on two weeks of vacation. So that would give us a total of nine weeks, which was a very attractive option to take that much time off in one chunk, never having done anything longer than a three-week vacation.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Nine weeks; trip of a lifetime. There’re two sides of that one is Wow, that\'s pretty exciting: The other side of that is – Wow, what am I going to do? And how do I start to wrap my head around it?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Allan: It\'s like it\'s exciting to think about it first. Then it\'s kind of daunting to think about. It\'s kind of like -- it\'s this huge thing to plan. It\'s a mountain to climb. It\'s just almost overwhelming. When you start thinking about all the details that you\'re gonna have to figure out.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: So, unpack that. How did you start to climb that mountain?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Allan: We decided that we really wanted to do one big chunk of time like you said. Trip of a lifetime is a really good way to put it, because that\'s how we were thinking about it. We\'re also thinking about let\'s go someplace we haven\'t been before. We wanted to do something that would be more difficult to do when we\'re older, when we\'re retired, and we like warm weather vacations. So, knowing we had to take it during the holiday time, to get the advantage of those extra weeks. We decided that it\'s kind of naturally pointing towards Southeast Asia for us.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: So at least that sort of narrowed it down to a quarter of the globe. Right?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Allan: Yeah, it\'s also like, where could we go for that much time? Right? And so you\'ve got a lace a few destinations together, and through our planning, it kind of even made more sense to go through adjacent countries in Southeast Asia.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: So now we\'ve got it. We\'ve gone from a complete blank slate to at least an area. So after you\'ve got it narrowed down to an area to Southeast Asia, what was your what was your next thought process? So how did you then begin to piece the details together?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Allan: We definitely had a hit list of countries who wanted to visit. We knew we wanted to go to Vietnam. We knew we wanted to spend some time on the beaches in Thailand and speaking with some good friends of ours who have traveled extensively and lived for many years at a time in that part of the world. We had a few meetings with them where we did some brainstorming. Also, in part of my research, I found itinerary. I mean, there\'s a ton of information available online. I kept coming back to reference to banana pancake route that a lot of Backpackers took. And it\'s kind of this classic route through Vietnam and Cambodia, Laos and Thailand.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: So how did like banana pancake route, is that just Is that just the shape of the route? Or it was there. Is there a pancake house somewhere that like?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Allan: I think I looked that up originally, and I can\'t remember why it has that name, but it\'s quite interesting. I basically took that and modified it to our further discussions with our friends and between Chris and I. Some things we weren\'t really interested in. We didn\'t have enough time to do the complete routing. There were certain things I didn\'t want to do, like spending several days getting from Siem Reap in Cambodia into northern Thailand. I didn’t want to take bus travel. It was pretty primitive routing. So, there are certain things we opted to fly rather take a bus. Things like that like; a normal backpacker would take it. We\'re gonna be adult backpackers. Wanted a little bit higher level of comfort.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: There is a difference between your twenties and your fifties from a travel standpoint.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Allan: Although we wanted to travel with everything on our backs. We actually carried 40-liter backpacks on our back and 20-liter backpacks carried on the front.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: How did that work for you guys?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Allan: It was great. It was hard to get used to at first, but it\'s very efficient when you\'re traveling. Part of that is you can carry everything on when we were taking flight. It just gives you a lot of freedom. And you\'re kind of in control of your own destiny. So, you don\'t have to deal with lost luggage kind of thing, which is a major concern when you\'re that far away from home, losing everything.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: I think if you\'re doing point-to-point travel, that also could be a challenge. Because even if you lose something, somebody finds it, getting it caught up to you can be a challenge.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Allan: Right. As we were packing, when we were leaving the US, I started thinking about the luggage tags. We had luggage tags on our bags, of course, but we also had them inside the bags, and I start thinking -- it\'s not gonna help to have my home address on that, and my home phone number, because if it gets lost somewhere in Southeast Asia, they\'re not gonna be able to get a hold of me. So, I printed out our first set of tags with our hotel address and the phone number of the hotel on their email address. and my email address. So, as we progressed along the way, we had kind of this ritual at breakfast the morning we were leaving. We would redo our luggage tags with the information of the destination we were going to that day, so if it got lost somehow in transit, it knew where to find out, right? They knew where to find us. Think about the old steamer trunks that were on ocean liners. They always had the destination, not the home address.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: That\'s interesting. That\'s a good insight. Two questions... Were there some things you packed that, in hindsight, you didn\'t need? And then the flip side of that, were there a couple of things that you said, “Wow, I really wish I had packed that.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Allan: When you\'re only bringing that much stuff, which isn\'t that much for eight weeks, you\'ve got to think through a few things. You\'ve got to justify everything that you put in that pack we knew in advance. We\'re gonna be going to a cold weather location in Hanoi that time of year. It could be in the 40’s-low 50’s and we ended up bringing some light down jackets and base layers that we typically used for skiing, things like that. Never having been to Hanoi before, once we got there, you can literally buy any of that stuff on the streets for $5. It would have been something where you just buy it there and leave it there. But we have spent considerably more money on that, or we brought some of our ski base layers with us that took up valuable space when we didn\'t need to do that.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Flip side of that. Was there something that you didn\'t have that you said, “Damn, I wish I had that” <em>and</em> that you couldn\'t buy anywhere.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Allan: Right. We can\'t buy your way out of the jam. We have never said that. I don\'t remember saying that during the trip, that we ever wished we had something that we didn\'t have. I got to tell you, there was a lot of thought put into the packing. Multiple use, whether it be pants or shirts, you\'ve got to make sure almost everything is compatible with everything else. So you kind of keep it to a limited color range. A lot of black, you know, that kind of thing.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: I\'m a big fan of black.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Allan: You know, it works.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Goes with everything and it doesn\'t show stains.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Allan: And a lot of wool clothing. The 72-hour wool T shirts. We were going to be in very, very hot, humid climates for most of the trip. And we brought a lot of things that we could wash in our hotel. But also, when you get to Southeast Asia, hotel laundry is very inexpensive. So there were a couple of times where we would just send out our entire backpack. It was literally like US$5 to get it all cleaned.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: I had that same experience when we went thio. We went to Vietnam. We went in July. It was just, like, hugely hot. We did exactly the same thing. It was like, you know, let\'s ship all this stuff out. We took it across the street. It was probably about US$3-5. Everything came back amazingly clean, but amazingly stiff. Like they had just beat the hell out of it.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Allan: Yes, we’d be in Thailand on island after we just sent our laundry and you\'re driving down the street. And there\'s some garage where you see three industrial washers and all these clothes hanging on a line. It\'s like, I wonder if that’s our stuff.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: You didn\'t recognize your underwear or anything hanging. I guess that\'s a good thing.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Allan: You\'re going away for eight weeks. You certainly can\'t bring that many pairs of underwear. You know you\'re gonna be doing laundry in the hotel room sink, and you\'ve got a plan accordingly.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: When you are planning this, you know where you\'re gonna want to go. You said, “OK, I\'ve got a set of things and places I want to see. I\'ve got some sort of structure, some sort of sequence that other folks have done, so it sort of makes sense.” So the next step, then, is how much travel did you book ahead of time versus how much was just sort of <em>ad hoc</em>; that you sorta let flow.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Allan: We thought about this a lot before we left. And deliberately, we decided we wanted to have our travel booked for our outbound and inbound flights. For the beginning and the end of the trip, I wanted to use miles for business class seats. But in between, we decided we just wanted to keep some flexibility to the trip and book as we went. And that, as being people that are really focused on details, it was an interesting challenge for us to let go like that. But it was in the end, it was very liberating to do it that way.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Did that ever catch you any anywhere along the way?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Allan: We talked that through before we left, and we decided that might be the price we pay to keep flexibility. You know, there were plenty of places to stay. There was one accommodation in Thailand where we actually booked the last room that was available. But it did work to our advantage a few times, not having booked in advance because as, an example, when we were on a cruise in Halong Bay in Vietnam, our next destination was gonna be the Central Coast. And some folks that we were traveling with on the same cruise, we were chatting them up, and they told us that they had just come from that area and there were just torrential rainstorms. And we looked at the weather. It was gonna be the same way for a week or so we decided to just avoid that part of the country. And we just flew directly to Ho Chin Minh City instead. So there were a couple of things like that, where our initial thoughts on itinerary, we decided to reroute.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: That makes sense.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Allan: And so then we had our routing loosely established. We would spend a night every few days doing our advanced booking. So I always try to stay two steps ahead, about a week in advance. Sometimes your first choice accommodation would open up. We were just very loose that way. We\'re covering a lot of ground, and one of the major things realized as we were going is, even though we had 8 weeks, it was still a limited time to see what we wanted to see. So I determined that we didn\'t want to spend more than half a day transiting, if at all possible, between destinations. So, like I was saying earlier, instead of taking a 2-day bus ride where we would be in the middle of nowhere, we would just fly that and gain some time given the fact that in Southeast Asia, flights are very inexpensive and there are lots of flights going everywhere.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Was there a certain airline that you tended to use there? Was there one or did you just tend to use the national carriers?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Allan: I would do reviews of the national carriers and their safety records and things like that. The beginning of the trip, I was trying to use Vietnam Airlines. They have a fairly decent record, and they covered the first couple of countries we were in. When we got into Thailand, Thai was easy enough to use and they are Star Alliance. I\'ve got a lot of United miles, so I’d stay on that wherever possible. And also the type of plane they were flying. I didn\'t want to take a lot of regional jets if we could avoid doing that.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: That probably makes it easier from a carry-on standpoint.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Allan: Yeah, exactly</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Any visa issues that you had hopping between countries or did you line those all up before you left?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Allan: I did a lot of research on visas, and we had to get our visa before we left for Vietnam. We did that here in San Francisco. They give you a lot of options. I also decided to do a 2-entry/exit visa for Vietnam. You know, you never know what\'s gonna happen when you\'re in these countries that far away from home. And I wanted to have a way out if we had to exit into another country for whatever reason, political unrest or who knows what -- typhoon storms, whatever. So I had the availability to go back into Vietnam, which I thought would be fairly easy to get back to the US from should we have to do something like that. It cost a little more, but I thought that was a good insurance policy to have. Most of the visas that we needed we could just obtain upon arrival. Again, I did a lot of research to make sure that was the case.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: How much time do you think you invested in planning?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Allan: We knew we had a deadline as far as we knew what year we had to take the trip. And I knew in advance that I wanted to book our airline reservations for the business class seats approximately a year ahead of time. We were researching this trip for about 18 months. There\'s a lot of research that goes into figuring out how long you spend in each place. And I found that had to be managed as we were going along. I thought about what we wanted to see. We’d talk about how long we wanted to spend in certain places. And there weren\'t a lot of times where we said, “I wish we had an extra day here” because we had done that kind of legwork in advance, and we did the homework. But that comes with the time in the planning.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Well, Allan Marko, thank you very much. Thanks for sharing those stories with us on the TravelCommons podcast. Appreciate it.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Allan: It was fun. Thanks for having me. It was great to take the opportunity, doing research for this podcast to go through my old notes. And again, it was a year ago, and it\'s just bringing back a lot of great memories.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #159</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2010/09/06/video-1-impressions-of-vietnam/\">Link to TravelCommons Vietnam video</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find&nbsp;</span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_159.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #159 — Planning the Trip of a Lifetime in Southeast Asia','','inherit','closed','closed','','2626-revision-v1','','','2023-08-28 11:06:55','2023-08-28 16:06:55','',2626,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4359',0,'revision','',0),
(4371,1,'2023-09-26 10:44:42','2023-09-26 15:44:42','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/IMG_4803.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/IMG_4803-300x300.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" alt=\"Taproom Draft Beer Taps Arranged as a Smiley Face\"></a>I\'m Happy To See You Too![/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>The last episode recording in Chicago before we relocate the TravelCommons studios, and our lives, down to Nashville. We close out our threads on in-flight mask mandates and hotel housekeeping, and critique an academic paper about the moral hazard of frequent flier elite status. I talk through the changes I\'ll have to make when flying out of a non-hub airport. And then, as I\'m making a list of the Chicago breweries I want to re-visit before leaving, I think through the characteristics that makes a taproom great. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_187.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #187: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you, for the last time, from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois because we’re packing everything up and moving the 500 miles down I-65 to Nashville at the end of June. After 25 years here, we decided we needed a change of scenery. So with all the packing and everything, I don’t see a June episode in the offing.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Way back when I was doing heavy international travel -- Chicago on Monday, Toronto on Tuesday, New York to London on Wednesday, Zurich on Thursday, getting back to Chicago at Friday midnight -- what then seemed like necessary travel, but now, looking back on it, seems like stupid travel -- people would ask me my favorite city. I thought about it a lot, but would always end up with the same answer -- Chicago. And not just because it was my home; I was offering up that answer when we lived in Philadelphia. No, my explanation to the raised eyebrows that answer often generated was that Chicago was the right size -- big enough to support a wide range of interesting stuff (sports, culture, restaurants, microbreweries), but not so big that you couldn’t get your arms around it, and with enough Midwest pragmatism, from people moving in from Indiana and Iowa and Minnesota and Wisconsin, to keep everything grounded, to keep it from getting too wacky. And to their “But what about the weather?” question I’d say “yes, it can be -10° in Chicago in January, but it can be +110° in Phoenix in August; most every place has 3 months of lousy weather (save for maybe San Diego) sometime during the year; different people choose the 3 months they can endure.”&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But over the past few years, I realized my answer about Chicago didn’t hold up any more -- not about the weather, the winters still suck; it’s that the pragmatism seems to be gone, with violent crime -- robberies, shootings, carjackings -- and definitely not-pragmatic local government decisions filling the void. It has started to feel like a replay of the 1970’s, which were not a great time in Chicago.&nbsp; Now, I don’t think it’s permanent. It’s a pendulum. Just like the city came back from a bad stretch in the ‘70’s to be a great place in the mid/late ‘80’s. It’ll happen again; I just don’t want to hang around for the low point. And according to the half-dozen movers we talked to, we’re not the only ones.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Dive Deep (Loveshadow remix)</em> by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/50488 Ft: Loveshadow</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>A quick public service announcement -- the COVID Real ID extension expires in less than a year. <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/news/press/releases/2021/04/27/dhs-announces-extension-real-id-full-enforcement-deadline\">According to the TSA</a>, “Beginning May 3, 2023, every air traveler 18 years of age and older will need a REAL ID-compliant driver’s license or identification card… at airport security checkpoints for domestic air travel.”&nbsp; Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/01/16/podcast-183-covid-test-anxiety-michelin-food-adventures/\">episode #183</a> in January, I talked about getting a Real ID version of my Illinois driver’s license when I had to renew it. No additional cost and maybe 3 additional minutes of time. But if you can’t pick up a Real ID driver’s license before next May, you’ll have to remember to take along <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/travel/security-screening/identification\">your passport or your Global Entry card</a>.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>In the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/04/21/podcast-186-mask-mandate-scramble-small-airport-survival/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #186 — Mask Mandate Scramble; Small Airport Survival\">last episode</a>, we walked through the abrupt end of the US CDC’s transportation mask mandate -- on planes, buses, trains,....&nbsp; That news cycle lasted right at about a week, the last entry being the CDC asking the Dept of Justice to appeal the federal judge’s ruling that struck down the mandate that they had extended for 2 weeks to May 3rd. On May 3rd, the CDC posted a <a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2022/s0503-covid-19-travel.html\">press release reiterating their <em>recommendation</em></a> that everyone aged 2 and older wear masks on planes and trains, and in airports and stations -- but nothing about the status of that appeal. I’m guessing that they decided to accept the facts on the ground and quietly forget about any appeal -- which is probably the only real option they have.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And then this week, adding to those facts on the ground, the European CDC has dropped their transportation mask mandate recommendations. The difference, though, is the European CDC’s recommendations are just that, recommendations. The enforceable <em>rules</em> are made by each country, and Spain and Italy, many of the countries hardest hit by the initial wave of COVID, have extended their mask mandates to mid-June.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, I wasn’t going to say anything more about hotel housekeeping because <em>even I’m</em> bored with it, but then I ran across an <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/hotel-housekeepers-want-you-to-request-daily-room-cleaning-11652650925\">article</a> in the Wall Street Journal about how hotel housekeeping unions are pushing for a return to daily room service. Certainly a big part of the push is to drive more work, more hours for the union members. But also because rooms are dirtier and take longer to clean when they have gone a few days without service, especially with the current guest mix that’s still heavier with leisure travelers, who tend to have more people in the room than the road-warrior business traveler. As you’d guess, hotel owners disagree, but for changing reasons. Their arc of rationale has gone from the pre-pandemic “be green, save water, and we’ll give you an extra 500 points to skip housekeeping” to pandemic “we’re keeping everyone safe by staying out of your room” to the current “it’s your choice, and ‘labor shortage’”.&nbsp; OK, that’s it. I’m <em>really </em>not going to talk about room cleaning anymore.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But I <em>will</em> talk about TSA checkpoint passenger volumes again. <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/09/27/podcast-179-high-tech-airport-lines-business-travel-still-missing/\">Back in September 2021</a>, the last time I scraped the numbers off the TSA <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/coronavirus/passenger-throughput\">website</a>, average daily passenger volumes were bouncing around 1.7 million, down 20% from the July summer peak of over 2 million and down 24% from pre-pandemic September 2019 numbers. Six months later, looking at the last month-and-a-half -- April to mid-May -- the average daily volume is 2.1 million and growing, and now just 10-12% off the April/May 2019 numbers. So if those TSA checkpoints and airplanes are feeling a bit more crowded, it’s because they are. Tough to remember back to my first post-lockdown flight in June 2020, when daily passenger volumes were 5-600,000 and the Southwest boarding agent said “There’s 40 of you on a plane with 175 seats. So everyone gets their own row.” I, in no way, want to go back to those times, but having a bit more plane space <em>was</em> nice.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I get <em>a lot</em> of emails from public relations firms. I read the subject lines of all of them because every once in a rare while, there’s something that catches my eye, like the pitch that led to last episode’s interview about Daytona Beach airport trying to survive in the shadow of the behemoth that is Orlando Int’l. So when I read the subject line “Study Finds that Frequent-Flyer Programs Increase Cost of Business Travel” in my inbox a few weeks back, I just had to click through. The study, <a href=\"https://www.informs.org/About-INFORMS/News-Room/Press-Releases/Study-Finds-that-Frequent-Flyer-Programs-Increase-Cost-of-Business-Travel\">just published</a> in the journal <em>Marketing Science</em> which I admit I don’t read as often as I should because I get tied up pouring through the CDC’s <em>Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report</em>, is titled <em>Reaching for Gold: Frequent-Flyer Status Incentives and Moral Hazard</em>, written by professors from University of Michigan and Duke business schools. According to the press release, after “(analyzing) the transactional database of a leading U.S.-based airline’s frequent-flyer program (that) included the histories and point accumulations of 3.5 million frequent-flyer program members during the 2010 and 2011 point-earning cycles” their main insights were -- “‘Points Members’ are More Likely to Choose Higher Fares When Not Paying for It” and “the closer frequent-flyer program members get to ‘elite status’ the more likely they are to choose an airline even when it may be more expensive than a competitor’s flight”. Hmm, that feels a bit “Dawn breaking over Marblehead”. How can you be researching frequent flier programs and act like you’ve never heard of (let alone done) a mileage run. Maybe the press release overly summarized the research and just isn’t communicating its subtlety. So I hit Google to find the <a href=\"https://yesimorhun.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/18/2018/11/Orhun_Guo_2018.pdf\">actual paper</a>. 29 pages of text and equations, and 15 pages of bibliography and data tables later -- nope, the press release was pretty much it. If the moral hazard of business travelers using their employer’s money to pay for more expensive flights to make status is eliminated, the paper estimates that companies would save at least 7% of their travel costs. Looking at 2019 data, the <a href=\"https://www.statista.com/statistics/562804/us-air-traffic-domestic-average-ticket-price/\">average cost of a walk-up US domestic ticket</a> -- one booked less than a week in advance, so the typical road warrior ticket -- is about $500. 7% is $35. I dunno, maybe some full-contact procurement guy will get excited about that $35 savings, but I don\'t know any executive in his or her right mind is thinking to themselves “Oh yes, pissing off the people who are jamming themselves in to coach seats and spending nights away from their family for $35 a trip” is a great idea.&nbsp; Except at GM. I remember when frequent flier programs first came out, GM didn’t let their travelers keep the points from business trips, which led to all sorts of weird booking behavior. Until that policy died a quiet death a few years later. Kinda like this research -- I’m sure these professors are nice, smart people; but they gotta get out of their offices a bit more.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music - <em>Drops of H2O ( The Filtered Water Treatment )</em> by J.Lang (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djlang59/37792 Ft: Airtone</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Moving to a Non-Hub Airport</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>One thing that kinda snuck up on me about our move to Nashville -- it’ll be the first time in almost 40 years that I haven’t lived in an airport hub city: Chicago with American and United at ORD; San Francisco with their United hub; Dallas when I signed up for American’s Advantage program my first day of work; Philadelphia with US Air, though I avoided them as much as I could; Detroit with Northwest; and then back to Chicago, now a 3-hub town after Southwest took over MDW after the big expansion.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Nashville <em>was</em> a hub in the late ‘80’s/early ‘90’s -- well, a mini-hub, actually -- when American was playing around with their network. They built mini-hubs in Nashville, Raleigh/Durham, and San Jose. The experiment lasted maybe 10 years but never really made any money. I think the only thing of American left in those airports are Admirals Clubs; in Nashville, they’re down to 9% of the passenger volume.&nbsp; Today, Nashville’s direct flight distribution looks like any non-hub airport -- the top 4 destinations are Big 3 hubs -- ATL, DEN, DFW, ORD -- with the fifth being MCO, thanks to all that Mouseketeer traffic.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The #1 travel tip on my and any other experienced traveler’s list is “fly non-stop” -- much easier from a hub airport, of course, and then your frequent flier strategy just falls out from there. If you live in Atlanta, you’re doubling down on Delta’s SkyMiles; realistically, there’s not another option. Non-hub? It could be just as straight-forward -- if your flight patterns take you primarily to one of those hub cities -- Chicago, Atlanta, San Francisco -- then your choice too is made for you. But if you’re in sales or consulting -- or maybe slouching toward retirement -- and your flight patterns are a bit more scattershot, then you have to think -- what’s my objective? -- flying non-stop for the shortest flight times and lowest probability of disruption; making elite status because the perks make my travel easier; or is it building up points to help fund my vacations?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Thinking about my consulting colleagues who flew out of non-hub airports every week, they were all about status. One guy I worked with lived in Ft Myers, Florida and was all in on Delta. Even when flying every week to projects in, say, Dallas or Chicago, he’d always skip the direct American flights and connect through Atlanta, killing the time from all those missed connections with drinks in Delta’s Sky Club -- which was free with his Diamond Medallion status.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>My calculus is a little easier. One of the side benefits of flying <em>a lot</em> for over 35 years is that I stacked up enough mileage for lifetime mid-tier elite status on American and United. Not enough status to get into their clubs for free, but along with the usual early boarding and free bags, it’s gotten me free club entry to OneWorld and Star Alliance partners’ lounges -- which is very valuable when trying to navigate the rabbit warrens that are FRA and LHR after north Atlantic turbulence has screwed up your in-flight sleep plans.&nbsp; If I didn’t already have these metal levels or I was in striking distance of a new level -- say close to the 2 million I’d need to jump from United Premier Gold to lifetime Platinum -- then I’d probably suck it up like my colleagues do, and get, say, the top tier United credit card with free club access for a place to sit out ORD, DEN, and IAH weather delays.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Those lifetime statuses let me step off the elite hamster wheel, so I’m now looking at non-stop flights and earning miles. Out of Nashville, Southwest has the most non-stop flights, so I’ll probably be flying them a fair bit. But while Southwest’s Companion Pass perk -- their “buy a ticket, get one free” top tier status is phenomenal, I can’t BOGO Southwest to Europe, so I need to be banking miles on one of the Big 3 so I can book on their OneWorld, Star Alliance, or SkyTeam partners -- which is where travel credit cards come back into the picture. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/09/19/podcast-167-6-months-on-why-keep-travel-cards/\">episode #167</a> in September 2020, we talked about people replacing their mileage cards with cash-back cards since no one was flying. But that trend is reverting to the mean and credit card companies have big slugs of mileage to dole out after buying them cheap in 2020 when the airlines needed real cash real fast. So my non-hub strategy -- fly direct when I can, leverage those hard-earned lifetime statuses when I can, and charge everything I can on a mileage-earning card -- including any drinks I may need to see me through those missed connections.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music —  &nbsp;<em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/trifonic/445\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bored on Your Backside</a></em> by Trifonic (c) copyright 2005 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Sampling Plus 1.0 license. http://ccmixter.org/files/trifonic/445</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>What Makes a Great Taproom?</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>With a month left in Chicago, Irene and I have built a list of “Places to Hit Before Move” that’s some mix of greatest hits and places we’ve always wanted to go but have, for some reason or another, never gotten ‘round to. And then I have a separate list of Chicago taprooms I want to hit one more time -- Goose Island, Revolution Brewing, Off Color, Solemn Oath, Marz, Dovetail, and Metropolitan Brewing. Which then got me thinking -- why these and not other; what makes a good taproom for me?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>First thing to do is to open up Untappd, the beer social networking app that\'s been my beer diary for over 11 years now.&nbsp; I’ve checked beer in at over 1,900 locations and the #1 location category is -- a brewery taproom. I scrolled through the list on the app and jotted down the ones I thought “Yeah, I’d like to go back there.”&nbsp;&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Probably the smallest group is about unique brewery experiences; where I actually did the brewery tour and it was something more than just row after row of steel tanks. Cantillon in Brussels is everyone’s favorite; they send you off on your own guided with nothing but a paper brochure and tell you not to break anything. And then, after you’ve navigated coolships and barrel rooms, they pour you their amazing lambic beers. Or the original Lagunitas Brewery in Petaluma, CA where the tour guide tossed us just-filled IPA bottles he’d grabbed before they got to the packaging machine.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But except for these few exceptions, my favorite places have a wide beer selection (something more than 5 taps of IPAs) and/or a cool space and/or the chance to chat with the brewer. Labietis’ original place in Riga, Latvia hit the first two square on the head: a <em>diverse</em> beer menu -- a juniper beer inspired by Latvian folk songs, a wheat beer with meadowsweet, a lager with Latvian hops -- that’s located in the back courtyard of what looked like, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/11/30/podcast-157-notes-from-the-baltics-riga-latvia-and-tallinn-estonia/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #157 — Notes from the Baltics: Riga, Latvia and Tallinn, Estonia\">the fall of 2019</a>, a block of now slightly derelict early 20th Century manor houses. A little closer to home on my Chicago list, Metropolitan Brewing does nothing but German-style lagers which are a perfect fit for their taproom patio that looks out on the north branch of the Chicago River.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Going to a brewery’s taproom is kinda like seeing a band in concert -- I’m going to get a fuller picture of that band than I will just hearing their hit songs on the radio or a Spotify playlist. Hitting a good taproom can be similar -- getting past the high-volume core beers to see what the brewer can really do. When we were in Santa Fe last month, I went out of my way to hit Rowley Farmhouse Ales because I really liked their range during our last visit in 2018. So of course I ordered the Teosinte, a funky, earthy, grassy sour made from Oaxacan green dent corn grown a couple hundred miles east, near the Texas-New Mexico border. It was an incredibly interesting beer. I wouldn’t buy a six-pack of it, but I was more than happy to have a glass of it.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But probably the best time I have at taprooms is when I get to talk to the brewer. During one of my trips last year to Nashville, I found myself an hour south in Columbia, TN, which bills itself “Muletown.” I missed the 2021 “Mule Day” festival; it was canceled due to COVID. Instead, I wound my way through a light industrial neighborhood hard against some freight train tracks billed as Columbia’s Art District to find <a href=\"http://www.badideabrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bad Idea Brewing</a>. There were two other folks sitting at the bar; the brewer was behind it, serving. And we just got talking -- about the beer, about his brewery, about Columbia, about brewing in Columbia, about what kind of beer sells in Columbia. And through all that, taster glasses kept landing in front of me -- “try this,” “what do you think of that?” he’d ask. What was going to be a quick side trip for a beer turned into a nice afternoon of conversation… and beer.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I guess there’s one more thing that can make for a great taproom, or maybe more of a great taproom experience and that is -- it took me to a part of a city that I wouldn’t have otherwise gone. I talked a bit about this in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/04/10/podcast-174-how-the-pros-plan-their-taproom-tourism/\">episode #174</a> when I talked with Rob Cheshire of the UK podcast <a href=\"https://thisweekincraft.beer/podcast/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">This Week in Craft Beer</a> about planning taproom visits. Navigating the maze of a Beijing hutong to find Great Leap Brewing, or exiting a Paris Metro stop in a North African neighborhood on my way to <a href=\"http://deck-donohue.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Deck &amp; Donohue</a>, or riding an e-scooter through a questionable neighborhood in northeast DC to <a href=\"https://www.rightproperbrewing.com/brookland\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Right Proper Brewing</a>. These three were fine places with solid beers, but they’re more memorable for the trip to find them than for the places themselves.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But you can’t always tell this from Google search. So if you go to the show notes on travelcommons.com you’ll find my list of&nbsp; “Yeah, I’d like to go back there” taprooms.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>My<em> Yeah, I’d like to go back there</em>  Taproom List</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Chicago<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.gooseisland.com/fulton-brewery/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Goose Island Taproom</a>, 1800 W Fulton St — Yes, it\'s now owned by AB InBev, but it was the original Chicago microbrewery in the late \'80\'s and they created the whole barrel-aged stout category with Bourbon County Stout</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"http://www.revbrew.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Revolution Brewing Brewery &amp; Taproom</a>, 3340 N Kedzie Ave— Great beers; wide range of styles; bring your own food</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"http://maplewoodbrew.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Maplewood Brewery &amp; Distillery</a>, 2717 N Maplewood Ave (South of Diversey) — Small, neighborhood bar tucked up against the Kennedy Expressway</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"http://www.metrobrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Metropolitan Brewing</a>, 3057 N Rockwell St — Been brewing German-style lagers since 2009; great patio seating that looks out over the north branch of the Chicago River</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"http://dovetailbrewery.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Dovetail Brewery</a>, 1800 W Belle Plaine Ave — German lagers and spontaneously fermented beers; the best taproom on the Ravenswood neighborhood\'s <a href=\"https://ravenswoodchicago.org/neighborhood/malt-row/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">\"Malt Row\"</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"http://www.offcolorbrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Off Color Brewing</a>, 1460 N Kingsbury St — Great range of beer styles, all of which are well-done</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.solemnoathbrewery.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Solemn Oath Brewery</a>, 1661 Quincy Ave #179, Naperville, IL — In a <em>faaar</em> west neighborhood of Chicago, one of the OG suburban breweries. Great beers and a great outdoor space, especially in the winter.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>A couple of South Side taprooms featured on the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/07/15/video-chicago-mdw-layover-taproom-tour/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Chicago MDW Layover Taproom Tour</a> video<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"http://marzbrewing.com/\">Marz Community Brewing</a>, 3630 S Iron St</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"http://www.whinerbeer.com/\">Whiner Beer</a>, 1400 W 46th St</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Elsewhere in the US<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://oxbowbeer.com/location/portland/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Oxbow Blending &amp; Bottling</a>, 49 Washington Ave, Portland, ME — Great selection of farmhouse ales with an outpost of <a href=\"http://www.duckfatfriteshack.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Duckfat</a> serving up fries on the patio</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li> <a href=\"http://www.allagash.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Allagash Brewing Company</a>, 50 Industrial Way, Portland, ME — One of the OG Maine breweries; huge range of beers beyond Allagash White; nice outdoor space; two more taprooms across the street makes it a nice afternoon destination</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://otherhalfbrewing.com/location/domino-park/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Other Half Brewing Domino Park</a>, 34 River St, Brooklyn, NY — Great hazy IPAs; great views of Manhattan across the East River</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.rightproperbrewing.com/brookland\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Right Proper Brewing Brookland Production House + Tasting Room</a>, 920 Girard St NE, Washington, DC — A nice little taproom in a DC neighborhood that is <em>way</em> off the typical tourist track</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"http://www.thefermentorium.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">The Fermentorium Brewery and Tasting Room</a>, 7481 WI-60 Trunk, Cedarburg, WI — Well done range of beers just outside of a scenic small Wisconsin town</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"http://drifabrewing.beer/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Drífa Brewing Company</a>, 501 S Lake St, Marquette, MI — Great beer stop on the bike path along the shore of Lake Superior</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://beardedirisbrewing.com/location/germantown/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bearded Iris Brewing</a>, 101 Van Buren St, Nashville, TN — Original Germantown taproom with great hazy IPAs, pool tables and a nice patio</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.variousartistsbrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Various Artists Brewing</a>, 1011 Elm Hill Pike, Nashville, TN — Wide variety of beer styles; big patio; guest chefs working a big grill</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"http://www.faitlaforcebrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Fait la Force Brewing</a>, 1414 3rd Ave S, Nashville, TN — An unassuming place tucked away in the Chestnut Hill neighborhood; comfortable space; great range of beer styles; had a great conversation with the brewer behind the bar</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"http://www.badideabrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bad Idea Brewing Company</a>, 307 W 11th St, Columbia, TN — Comfortable taproom with well-executed beers in Columbia\'s Art District; another place I had a nice conversation with the brewer</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.rowleyfarmhouse.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Rowley Farmhouse Ales</a>, 1405 Maclovia St, Santa Fe, NM — Nice range of IPAs, saisons, and sours, and a solid green chile cheeseburger</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"http://www.lagunitas.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Lagunitas Brewing Company</a>, 1280 N McDowell Blvd, Petaluma, CA — Yes, they\'ve been bought out by Heineken, but the original brewery still has a bit of that old Cali anarchic feel</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.pueblovidabrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pueblo Vida Brewing Company</a>, 115 E Broadway Blvd, Tucson, AZ — A little joint in downtown Tucson that executes great beers with a focus on local ingredients</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"http://www.eppigbrewing.com/waterfront-biergarten\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Eppig Brewing Waterfront Biergarten</a>, 2817 Dickens St, San Diego, CA — It\'s all about drinking good beers outside in the sunshine along the marina</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Outside the US<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.thebarrelproject.co.uk/beer-menu/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">London Beer Factory - Barrel Project</a>, 80 Druid St, London SE1 2HQ — Great beers; very cool space in railway arch along London\'s <a href=\"https://www.londonxlondon.com/bermondsey-beer-mile/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bermondsey Beer Mile</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"http://www.cantillon.be/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Brasserie Cantillon</a>, Rue Gheude 56, 1070 Anderlecht, Belgium — Ground zero for spontaneously fermented lambic and gueuze beers; just follow the train of beer geeks to the door</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://mikkeller.com/locations/mikkeller-baghaven\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Mikkeller Baghaven</a>, Refshalevej 169B, 1432 København — Lots of spontaneously fermented sour beer on a converted industrial island</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"http://www.fmaravillas.com/\">Fábrica Maravillas</a>, C. de Valverde, 29, 28004 Madrid — Nice taproom tucked into Madrid\'s Malasaña neighborhood serving good pale ales and IPAs </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://deck-donohue.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Deck &amp; Donohue</a>, 1 Av. des Marronniers, 94380 Bonneuil-sur-Marne, France — Took me outside the usual Paris tourist circuit to a North African shopping street</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://labietis.lv/en/krogs/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Labietis Brewpub</a>, 2, Aristida Briāna iela 9a, Rīga, LV-1001, Latvia — Out-of-the-way taproom; interesting selection of beer styles, not just the usual IPAs, but herb beers, fruit beers, and meads; helpful bartenders do a good job of describing what\'s on tap</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #187</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As I said at the top of the show, there’s probably not going to be a June show, between packing up the Chicago studio and then unpacking it in Nashville. Good news, though -- the sound quality in Nashville might get a step-function improvement. Just about every apt building Irene and I looked at had a music studio as one of the amenities. The sound proofing, the sound deadening, and maybe a better microphone should make things sound a bit better. Quite a ways from those first episodes, recording with the iRiver MP3 player’s built-in mic while standing in a shower stall. Oh my!</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. You’ll have to go to the TravelCommons’ website if you want to torture your ears listening to those first bathroom-studio episodes; what one listener labelled a “pottycast”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_187.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #187 — Moving to a Non-Hub Airport; What Makes A Great Taproom?','','inherit','closed','closed','','4145-revision-v1','','','2023-09-26 10:44:42','2023-09-26 15:44:42','',4145,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4371',0,'revision','',0),
(4372,1,'2023-09-29 18:19:08','2023-09-29 23:19:08','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/stable-diffusion-xl-beer-3-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"robot in a microbrewery taproom drinking a beer\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" />What Prompt Will Get Me a Pilsner?[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>In this beer-focused episode, John Holl, editor of <a href=\"http://allaboutbeer.com\" title=\"All About Beer\"><em>All About Beer</em></a>, gives us his take on beer tourism and tips on how to beer travels. I talk about my experience planning my Asheville, NC taproom visits with ChatGPT. We also dive deep into the new <a href=\"https://www.jdpower.com/business/press-releases/2023-north-america-airport-satisfaction-study\" title=\"JD Power Airport Satisfaction Survey\">JD Power Airport Satisfaction Survey</a> and do a quick update about the EU\'s delayed ETIAS system. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_196.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:audio -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-audio\"><audio controls src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_196.mp3\"></audio></figure>\n<!-- /wp:audio -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #196: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN after trips to Portland, ME and Asheville, NC. We flew up to Portland International Jetport; I love that -- <em>jetport</em> -- it’s like a throwback to the ‘50’s and ‘60’s when jet airplanes weren’t assumed. Going down that clickhole, apparently Orlando International was originally called <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orlando_International_Airport\">Orlando Jetport</a>. Feels like they shouldn’t have changed; would’ve had a very EPCOT-y vibe. But anyhow, I think Portland Jetport missed a trick by not playing Steve Miller’s <a href=\"https://youtu.be/JHa1hiFYbFQ?si=3c8q9OhgdJM8YQNR\"><em>Jet Airliner</em></a> on a continuous loop in baggage claim. But they do have a <a href=\"https://youtu.be/Az5p4g_Eyf0?si=HEB3oEj3PCClOO-C\">big stuffed moose</a> there, which is probably more on-brand.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>More… interesting were the 7-foot signs we passed walking up to the TSA lines for our flight back. <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1693357760732111140\">I posted a picture on Twitter</a>. The one to the left said “Are you packing? Guns of any kind are not permitted in carry-on bags”. The one on the right, “Have you checked your firearms?” The small one in between reminded people to dump their oversized liquids. I mean, Really!? We\'re now 22 years on from the Sept 11th attacks and people still can\'t figure this out; that you can’t take a gun on a plane -- nor a sword, nor a knife. Long-time listeners will know that I am in no way an apologist for the TSA, but when I see pictures they post of some of the stuff people try to bring on -- a hatchet at O’Hare, throwing knives at Milwaukee -- I’m not sure how patient <em>I’d</em> be if I had to deal with that level of obliviousness day-in and day-out.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>On the upside, though, I did see that the TSA would allow me to carry-on a live lobster if I wanted to take a bit of Maine back home with me. According to the TSA website “A live lobster is allowed through security and must be transported in a clear, plastic, spill proof container. A TSA officer will visually inspect your lobster at the checkpoint.” I wonder if that visual inspection includes checking that the rubber bands around the lobster claws are intact. I’d think a traveler wielding “un-holstered” lobster claws might not be armed, but certainly could be dangerous.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/JeffSpeed68/54450\">Hula Hoop Party</a> by Stefan Kartenberg (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. &nbsp;Ft: Martijn de Boer, Blue Wave Theory</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>I</em> would’ve loved to play 15 seconds of <em>Jet Airliner</em> just now for the bridge music if I wasn’t about 99% positive I’d get slapped with some copyright fine.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Thelma Smith stopped by the TravelCommons Facebook page to leave a comment about last episode’s discussion of renting a Hertz EV for my Portland trip, which I backed away from as I looked at charging options in the city and up in Bar Harbor. Thelma wrote<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>&nbsp;Wanted to chime in on EVs. We have a Tesla Model 3. When planning out a trip of any length we use <a href=\"https://www.plugshare.com/\">PlugShare</a>. It helps in finding all sorts of chargers and not just Tesla fast chargers. Might help in seeing what’s out there.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Thelma, thanks for that. First I’ve heard of it; looks like a nice crowdsourced status map for chargers. If Hertz had referenced it, it might’ve tipped me to an EV. While it didn’t show many more Bar Harbor options, it showed a lot more chargers in Portland. Hertz continues to send me EV offers, so with this, maybe I give it a go on my next trip.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>JD Power released their <a href=\"https://www.jdpower.com/business/press-releases/2023-north-america-airport-satisfaction-study\">2023 North American Airport Satisfaction Survey</a> last week. We talked in the last episode that, according to TSA counts, we’ve gotten back to pre-COVID passenger volumes. And so it kinda makes sense then to compare JD Power’s 2023 numbers to their pre-COVID 2019 scores. And, conveniently enough, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/10/14/podcast-156-airport-satisfaction-escooters-smaller-luggage/\">episode #156</a>, we talked to the survey’s author, Michael Taylor, after the release of the <a href=\"https://www.jdpower.com/business/press-releases/2019-north-america-airport-satisfaction-study\">2019 survey</a>. Back then, Michael predicted:<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Michael: Everybody\'s phasing in and out of construction. They\'ve got all these various plans that are revolving on the inside and the outside of the airport. And so we\'re going to see this churn in the rankings quite a bit in the next few years as these projects phase in and out.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Well, yes and no. The top of the Mega category was pretty stable -- Detroit, Minneapolis/St Paul, and Las Vegas kept their top 3 positions. But there was a bit of churn under that. San Francisco jumped 7 spots from 13th to 6th, in large part, no doubt to their huge renovations while Orlando dropped 5 spots, from 4th to 9th, and Phoenix dropped 6, from 7th to 13th; neither of which surprised me given my most recent experiences at each.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The benefits of finally finishing big renovations really showed up in the next category, the Large Airports. LaGuardia and New Orleans, airports that I’ve spent way too much time in, finished multi-billion dollar renovations between the 2019 and 2023 survey and the results showed. LaGuardia jumped 13 places from 27th, the last spot on the 2019 survey to 14th, which given all the inherent problems with LaGuardia’s location and the mess that is the tri-state air traffic control, I’m not sure they could’ve gotten much better. New Orleans, though, went from not much better 23rd spot in 2019 to 8th, a 15-place move. Portland, Oregon, 2019’s top Large airport plummeted 11 spots to 12th, while San Diego and Oakland each dropped 10 spots, to 23rd and 24th respectively.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>More interesting than this, to me, was the increase in the average scores in what has been a difficult year for air travel -- on a thousand-point scale, the Mega average increased 16 points, from 756 to 772, while the Large average grew 24 points, from 765 to 789. So if an airport didn’t improve its score, like Orlando or Oakland, its ranking tumbled.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>In the last episode, I talked about the rolling delays for implementation of ETIAS, the EU’s impending version of the US’s ESTA, a pre-travel authorization system. What originally was supposed to go-live in 2021 got pushed to May 2023, which given COVID made sense, when then slipped 6 months to November 2023. Well, OK, maybe a little more testing is for the best. But then, to a more nebulous “sometime in 2024.” That’s never a good sign. And now, a month later, they’re saying <a href=\"https://www.schengenvisainfo.com/news/no-etias-wont-become-operational-in-2024-eu-sources-say/\">May 2025</a>. It feels like this is becoming the EU’s Real ID. Really! Because the new <a href=\"https://www.dhs.gov/news/2022/12/05/dhs-announces-extension-real-id-full-enforcement-deadline\">US Real ID deadline</a> is also May 2025 -- until they change it again.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter (X?) message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page like Thelma did, or on the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can skip all that social media stuff and post your comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/53277\">Fistful of Dub</a>&nbsp;(Feat. Snowflake and DJ Vadim) by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. &nbsp;Ft: snowflake and DJ Vadim</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Beer Tourism and Travel</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Scrolling through the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/episodes/\"><em>Episodes</em></a> section of the TravelCommons website, I saw that it’s been over a year since I’ve done any beer content, and immediately began working on rectifying it. I asked John Holl, long-time beer journalist, editor of <a href=\"https://allaboutbeer.com/\">All About Beer</a>, host of the <a href=\"https://allaboutbeer.com/podcast/drink-beer-think-beer/\">Drink Beer, Think Beer podcast</a>, to give us his thoughts about Beer Tourism…<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: John, thanks for coming on the podcast. We want to talk about beer tourism and travel. I\'m an old guy and for the longest time the idea of beer tourism seemed to start and end with renting lederhosen and heading to Munich for Oktoberfest. And then, in the early/mid-00’s, we got specialty beer releases that morphed into festivals like 3 Floyds’ <a href=\"https://darklordday.info/index.php/Home\">Dark Lord Day</a>. I was living in Chicago at the time and that went from a couple hundred people queuing for a bottle release to, in 2019, 13,000-15,000 people traveling around the country to see it.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>John: Gave people a lot of excuses to cross that Indiana border.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: I\'ve been to Munster Indiana and there\'s not a lot of other reason to go there other than 3 Floyds. And then they <a href=\"https://www.3floyds.com/taproom/\">shut the brew pub down</a> during COVID and now there\'s absolutely no reason to go there. And now, every town/region/state seems to have some sort of a beer trail. Last month, in August, I was in Portland Maine and it was the <a href=\"https://mainebrewersguild.org/visit-breweries/brewery-trail-challenge/\">Maine Beer Trail</a>. And then I was in Asheville, North Carolina at <a href=\"https://ashevillealetrail.com/\">Asheville Ale Trail </a>as well as their brewing district. It seems to be an area that\'s really grown. What are your thoughts on that? How significant is beer tourism for local economies now?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>John: I think it depends on the location. Where there\'s a concentration of breweries, it makes sense to have a beer trail. It makes sense for a guild or an organization to get together to try to convince not only the tourists but the locals to come out as well. There\'s 10,000 breweries thereabouts, maybe a little less, in the US these days and a lot of them are concentrated together. There\'s strength in numbers and hopefully they\'re all doing something that is diverse enough that can get folks to go from one place to the next, to the next without getting Hazy IPA fatigue. And I think Portland Maine is a great example of the breweries that are there. You have some of the old stalwarts, Geary\'s and Allagash. And some of the older, newer ones like Bissel Brothers. And then, there\'s some really cool ones like Belleflower that are there. So you get breweries of different sizes, of different scopes and I think it\'s important for the bottom line of these places so long as they\'re delivering good quality beer. But what\'s cool for me is being a tourist in a new city. I get to go to different areas. I get to go see a place that is not just the picturesque downtown, it\'s not just what\'s on the postcards for sale at the local travel kiosk. So you get to go into neighborhoods where people live and work. And for me, that\'s always a better sense of getting to know a city, of getting to know people, of getting to know a place because neighborhoods can change, especially some place like Chicago, from block to block. You\'re walking into neighborhoods that have different vibes, that have different histories to them, and that feel different. And so when I\'m traveling for beer, it\'s fun for me to not only go and set up at a tap room and spend some time there, but also to walk the neighborhoods as well. And I think that location informs a lot of what beer makers do. I\'ll keep going back to <a href=\"https://dovetailbrewery.com/\">Dovetail</a>; I\'ve spent more time there than I\'ll actually admit, and it\'s right up against the Brown Line and they use that to their advantage. They talk about their coolship; they talk about how their windows open up to the brown line and that the beer is inoculated with whatever the transit line brings them. And I think that\'s a fun thing. You\'re not necessarily tasting a sense of place, but you get the idea that it might be there.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: God only knows I\'ve written the Brown Line enough times. So maybe I\'ve helped Dovetail inoculate some of their coolship beers.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>John: And go to the Pacific Northwest at this time of year, in mid-September/late October when in Yakima and in parts of Oregon, they are harvesting the hops right now. You can bounce from brewery to brewery and the air is aromatic with fresh hops. The brewers are making fresh and wet hot beers. People are coming in from around the country, from around the world. There\'s an excitement and an energy that exists because of the agricultural product that is going into these beers and because of the harvest window as well. So, it doesn\'t always have to be a festival; it can be for a harvest season. And I think that that\'s another cool way that folks who aren\'t even in the beer industry can experience a different aspect of their pints.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: What\'s the best way to find out what\'s going on in a location? How do you think about where you\'re gonna go?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>John: I like not having firm plans when I\'m traveling because the other thing about beer tourism -- we\'re talking about beer trails -- is you start at one place and you say, “OK, we got five places on our list today.” So we say you\'re just having a pint at each. It\'s still five pints at the end of the day and even for a serious drinker like me, that\'s a lot. But if you\'re having a good time, I think it\'s great to not have structure because if you say, “OK, we\'re at stop number two and, and we have three more stops in front of us,” but we\'re really liking this, and they have this other beer that I want to try, and we\'re comfortable, and we\'re in good seats, and the food truck is awesome and all that -- just stay there, live in that moment. I feel I\'ve seen too many people get caught up in this sort of ticking culture where we have to hit all of these spots for whatever sort of weird list and you miss out on the fun experiences. Beer is about camaraderie. It\'s about being in the place. It\'s about experiencing flavor. And if you\'re rushing through it, it\'s not that much fun. I think beer in the way that it\'s grown over the last couple of decades -- it\'s not doing super-well volume-wise or sales-wise comparatively; it\'s like 12-13% of the overall marketplace -- but I think it has helped people appreciate flavors better. And to be a little bit more curious and to be a little bit more experimental.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: I think there\'s also a learning component too that I think you brought up, which is, you\'re going to push yourself outside your normal boundaries, outside of what I\'ve called a travel bubble…</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>John: That\'s the cool thing about travel, right? You talk to folks all the time about when they go to a new place and they want to have the local drink or they want to have the local food because they want to immerse themselves in that culture. You can do that with beer no matter where you go. So much of what brewers are doing these days too. When you travel, if you only drink American Light Lager, or you only drink Irish Stout. So you only drink something, you know, particular. If you\'re traveling, you might try the göse, you might try a lambic, you might try a barley wine or something like that because you\'re feeling a little bit more loose and unencumbered from the constraints of your daily life. And that, for me, is sort of the fun thing about beer. Usually it\'ll taste better from that place because you\'re surrounded by the people who made it, and the people who also were excited to be there. It\'s like folks who go on vacation to a tropical island and they\'re drinking mai tais, and it\'s the best mai tai they’ve ever had. They learn how to make the mai tai, and they come home and they do it on their back patio and they think “This doesn\'t taste as good.” And it\'s because you\'ve lost that sense of place. And so for me, I\'m always just trying to experience not just what\'s in my glass, but what\'s around me as well.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: John, I appreciate you coming on and talking to us about beer tourism and beer travel. It\'s something we\'ve talked a lot about on this podcast only just because I really like beer. It\'s been great talking to you. Thanks very much, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/John_Holl\" title=\"\">John Hall</a>, editor of <a href=\"https://allaboutbeer.com/\">All About Beer</a>. Both your <a href=\"https://allaboutbeer.com/podcast/\">podcast</a> and your website -- check it out. Thank you very much.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>John: Mark, thank you.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And, as always, check out the show notes on the TravelCommons podcast for links to read and listen to John.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/3lb3r3th/44072\">Misunderstood</a> by 3lb3r3th (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. &nbsp;Ft: Alchemistry</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>How To Plan a Beer Trip and Beer Tourism?</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If John Holl has you thinking about beer tourism, the next logical question -- how do you plan it? Here’s John’s approach…<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>John: I plan out travel, especially for specific events like hop harvest or Oktoberfest, which I\'m going to for the first time this year. I plan that out at least a year in advance because I want to make sure that when I can get hotels and transportation, and to budget out all of that. Social media is terrible in a lot of ways, but it can also be helpful in certain ways, getting you excited about traveling to new places. When I hear about annual beer festivals in Belgium or see folks who are out at hop harvest, picking hops, it gets me in a certain sort of way, if I\'m sitting at my desk at home. saying “Gosh, I wish I was there.”&nbsp; So then I put stuff on the calendar and start to say, “OK, well, think about this” and then go from there. When I\'m traveling to a city for work, I\'m usually going to visit specific breweries or specific people. But nine times out of 10, I will also call friends of mine and say, “Where are you drinking these days?” or “What\'s exciting you these days?” There\'s always going to be the one place that the serious beer nerd should go to,&nbsp; but then you peel that onion back just a little bit and all of a sudden, it\'s “Well, you know, I actually had a really fun experience at such and such place” or “I had this one beer” or “They\'re doing some cool stuff” and I start to say, “All right... Well, I trust them, so what do I have to lose?” It\'s either gonna be a great pint or it\'s not...</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>So there you go, advanced planning for the big stuff and have beer nerd friends in every city who can point you to the out-of-the-way nuggets. The latter is probably a <em>bit</em> easier for John, a well-known beer journalist, than for the rest of us.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/04/10/podcast-174-how-the-pros-plan-their-taproom-tourism/\">episode #174</a>, I talked about this with Rob Cheshire, a long time TravelCommons listener and, for the last 3+ years, a UK craft beer podcaster with his <a href=\"https://thisweekincraft.beer/this-week-in-craft-beer-podcasts/\">This Week in Craft Beer</a> podcast<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: How do you plan your taproom visits?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Rob: It\'s all driven through Google for me. I might have some idea based on previous reading about some big-name places that I want to visit in a particular city. But beyond that, I\'m just going to Google. First of all, I\'ll plot a Google map for the city. I\'ll end up with 50-60, maybe even 100 pins on the map. Pretty quickly, I\'ll go to <a href=\"https://untappd.com\">Untappd</a> and look at the average brewery rating. And this really makes brewers cross how much I rely on Untappd for this type of thing because I had this conversation a load of times on the podcast with them. But I do rely on brewery ratings on Untappd, and I find it very reliable. Quite frankly, if a brewery has an average rating of anything close to 4, then, obviously it\'s a massive generalization to say whatever they brew, but most of their beers are gonna be great. If the brewery rating is anywhere close to 3.5, it\'s going to be very mediocre at best. And somewhere in between is where most people land. So 3.6, eh...;&nbsp; 3.8, it\'s a good brewery; 3.9 is a terrific brewery; 4 is a great brewery. And so I\'m looking for those 3.8 and 3.9 average brewery ratings. But what I\'m looking for, really, is that district where I can walk from one to another and really make an afternoon of it.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Me? I kinda mash the two up. Like Rob, I’m a pretty solid Untappd user. Rob often says it’s his “beer diary” and that’s pretty much what it is for me too.&nbsp;When people ask me for recommendations for a city -- Budapest was the most recent ask -- I can quickly pop open the app and give people a list. And when <em>I’m</em> in a new city trying to find a good place for a beer, I’ll open it up and look at the Nearby Activity tab to see where (and what) folks are drinking. And back to <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/06/20/podcast-194-best-laid-travel-plans-roaming-entropy/\">episode #194</a>’s discussion of <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fl%C3%A2neur\">flâneuring</a>, or “roaming entropy” as I like to call it, some of my best “wanders” had, as their eventual end-point, a bar or taproom that I found that way.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But, as John says, if you let your friends know you’re deep into beer, they’ll be looking out for you. Visiting Savannah, GA back in May, our friends couldn’t wait to take me downtown to <a href=\"https://www.twotidesbrewing.com/\">Two Tides Brewing</a>, a microbrewery in a <a href=\"https://www.cntraveler.com/bars/savannah/two-tides-brewing-co\">100-year-old house</a> with great beers but no door onto the balcony because of a “door tax” way back when, where houses were taxed on the number of doors they had. So we ducked down and walked through a big window with our glasses… <em>multiple</em> times. Great beer and a history lesson; not sure I would’ve found that without a little help. Coming up in a couple of weeks, we’re heading back to New York City and our daughter already has an <em>ambitious</em> list for us.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Rob Cheshire and I have traded beer touring tips for our home towns. Rob took me to his favorite places in the railway arches of London’s Bermondsey Beer Mile. But when Rob hit Chicago three weeks after we’d moved to Nashville, I couldn’t reciprocate the personal tour, and so instead emailed him the couple of taproom circuits I <em>would’ve</em> taken him on if he’d showed up a month sooner. And actually, for all of you -- my friends and listeners -- since I can’t email it to you, I’ll put my Chicago taproom circuits in this episode’s show notes on travelcommons.com. Or check out my list of&nbsp; “Yeah, I’d like to go back there” taprooms in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/05/26/podcast-187-moving-to-a-non-hub-airport-what-makes-a-great-taproom/\">episode #187 show notes</a>. Maybe these can help you with your beer tourism planning.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The two tent poles for our Asheville trip were hiking and beer tourism. But we were the Asheville pioneers among our friend group, so I didn’t have anyone to build taproom circuits for me. So I started down Rob’s path, firing up Google Maps and Untappd, but then… wait a minute. Let’s see what AI can do. So I fired up <a href=\"https://chat.openai.com/\">ChatGPT</a> and typed in “Develop a taproom circuit of microbrewery taprooms in Asheville, NC starting at the Aloft Hotel in Asheville and optimized to minimize walking distance and maximize Untappd ratings. Present it in a table with the brewery name in the first column, the distance from the previous taproom in the second column, the Untappd rating in the third column, and the type of beers served in the fourth column.” The response started with a caveat that it can’t access real-time data and so the Untappd ratings and distances are based on its last update in 2022. After that throat-clearing, ChatGPT spit out a table with 8 taprooms. Eyeballing the list, the names didn’t seem too out of whack, so then I checked the Untappd ratings. None of them were right, and indeed, so far out of whack (all on the high side) that eight months of additional check-in couldn’t have moved the ratings that much. Chalk that up to GPT hallucination, or being a people pleaser and not wanting to say “I don’t know”. Then I plotted the circuit on a map, and it wasn’t -- a circuit, that is. It was a bit more of a random walk, doubling back a couple of times. And, rather than working us back to the Aloft, it ended at the farthest away brewery. So with no friend recommendations and not much help from ChatGPT, I fell back to my old ways --&nbsp; flâneuring. I figured with the beer density in Asheville, a random walk was more likely than not to land me in front of a beer tap. Which pretty much proved to be the case. We did what long-time listener Aaron Woodin called it in the last episode a “walk and gawk”, or maybe&nbsp; a “walk and gulp.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>My Chicago Taproom Circuits</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Here are the two Chicago taproom circuits I built for Rob Cheshire in the summer of 2022</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Logan Square/Palmer Circuit</strong> -- a kinda triangular circuit through 3-4 taprooms in Chicago\'s \"Hipster Ground Zero\" neighborhood with some good food options along the way.<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Take the Blue Line toward O\'Hare to the California St stop. Walk east on Adams to Monroe and then north a half-block. It\'s a $2.50 fare; like the Tube, you can tap on with a contactless credit card. It\'s way cheaper than an Uber and lets you bypass a load of traffic. Follow Google Maps walking directions; you\'re basically walking south on California (or one of the less-crowded neighborhood streets running parallel) down to Armitage and then west to...</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>Solemn Oath Still Life</em> -- This is kinda cheating. This is the Chicago outpost of one of my favorite suburban breweries. They have a good range of styles. They recently started up a second label, Hidden Hand, that goes deep into hazies. When you\'re done, walk out the door, turn right on Armitage (going back east), cross the street at some point, and end up at</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>Middle Brow Beer</em> -- The vibe here is a bit of a crunchy granola with Democratic Socialist/Labour Momentum sprinkles (or hundreds-and-thousands if you will), but they do some interesting wild beers fermented from yeast cultured from their garden. Good for one, maybe two beers.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Food -if you\'re getting peckish, there are some good options on Armitage on the way to the next stop.<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>Middle Brow</em> - While you\'re there, their bread and pizzas are great.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>90 Miles Cuban Cafe</em> - Very good Cuban food</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>Redhot Ranch</em> - Chicago street food; I get either a polish or a burger Chicago style</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>When you\'re done, continue walking east to Western, turn right (south), pass Margie\'s Candies and find the entrance to</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>Life On Marz</em> - Another cheat, the north side outpost of the south side Marz Brewing. It\'s a small place, but they do a nice selection of styles. When you\'re done, head left out the door and then over to the diagonal street, Milwaukee, not the north-south street (Western). The intersection is a bit tricky. Head northwest up Milwaukee to...</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>Pilot Project Brewing</em> - This is a brewing incubator, so there\'s usually some interesting stuff on offer. The last time I was in, they were serving Indian-inspired beers from Azadi Brewing. Brewer\'s Kitchen also does good stuff. Not everything works, but I\'ve had a surprisingly good hit rate. Take a left out the door, cross the street (watch out for the bicyclists; this is the most Amsterdam-ish street in Chicago) and head up a block to...</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>Navigator Taproom</em> - This is a pour-your-own, priced-by-the-ounce beer bar with a good selection of Chicago (they seem to have a lot from Pipeworks) and Midwest beers. Check out their beer menu on Untappd to see if there\'s anything that interests you. Continue up Milwaukee to the last stop</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>Revolution Brewing Brewpub</em> - This is the original Rev Brew joint; it opened before the brewery taproom a couple of miles north. If you\'re IPA\'d out and the temperatures aren\'t in the 90\'s, go for their Deep Woods offerings -- the variations on their Deth\'s Tar imperial stout (Josh Deth owns Rev Brew) or their Straight Jacket barleywine. If it\'s too hot (or you\'re too baked for those double-digit abv\'s), their Hero IPA series is good; lots of variants based on different hop combos.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And that\'s it. If you want to head straight back, you\'re a couple of blocks from the California Blue Line L stop. Get on the Forest Park Blue Line to Monroe stop in the Loop. If you\'re still walking straight, you can keep walking up Milwaukee through the neighborhood. It\'s an interesting neighborhood. The Blue Line runs parallel to Milwaukee. The next stop is the Logan Square stop, about a 15-20 minute walk. Or you can always just call an Uber.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Maplewood-Based Circuit</strong> -- this is less concentrated/less obvious, so I\'ll put in a few branches so you can choose your own adventure<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>Maplewood</em> -- Part of its charm (a little corner tavern at the end of a neighborhood street) makes it inconvenient to get there via public transportation. So to start here, it\'s probably best to Uber up.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Option - A bit of a walking circuit from Maplewood<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>Ravinia Brewing</em> -- Very optional. Not a bad place; I\'ve had a couple of good beers sitting out on their patio after a bike ride. I wouldn\'t go out of my way to go there, but it\'s two blocks from Maplewood</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>Metropolitan Brewing</em> -- This is ~10 min walk north from Maplewood through a little neighborhood. It\'s one of the original Chicago microbreweries, though a lager specialist which I know is not exactly on point for you. However, their patio looks down on the north branch of the Chicago River. So, if it\'s a nice day, this is worth a stop for the view -- and maybe a crisp palate cleanser.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>The Beer Temple</em> -- One of our favorite beer bars. It\'s what in Chicago is termed a \"slashie\" -- a bar and a liquor store. They always have a good beer selection and they\'re a verified venue on Untappd, so you can check out the menu to see if it\'s worth the 7-min walk from Metropolitan.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Food<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>Kuma\'s Corner</em> is about a 5-min walk west on Belmont from Beer Temple. Kuma\'s is a great burger place with a solid beer menu (an Untappd verified venue) and a heavy metal soundtrack.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>Honey Butter Fried Chicken</em> - Convenient if you\'re walking up to the Rev Brew Taproom</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>Revolution Brewing Taproom</em> -- If you didn\'t hit their brewpub on the Logan Square circuit, the brewery taproom is a 12-15-min walk from Beer Temple or Kuma\'s.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Option - Uber up to the Ravenswood neighborhood\'s Malt Row<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>Begyle Brewing</em> -- First brewery on Malt Row. Nice IPAs and a good barrel-aged imperial stout</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>Dovetail Brewing</em> -- The guys on the Steal This Beer podcast obsess over this brewery. Cool space; German lager-and-spontaneous ferm-focused. Walk down (south) Ravenswood Ave to the Irving Park Brown Line. Take it to two stops to the Paulina exit, walk south on Paulina St one block to...</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>Bitter Pops</em> -- Another great slashie and also an Untappd verified venue if you want to check out the tap list. Also a good place to buy a cold 4-pack to take back to your hotel room. Or cross Lincoln Ave and walk down a half block to...</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>The Green Lady</em> -- Old-time Chicago bar vibe with a great tap list.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Get back on the Brown Line and head down to the Loop, to the Quincy Stop which is ~1 block from the JW Marriott</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Option - Uber up to Half Acre Beer<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>Half Acre Beer</em> - Another original Chicago microbrewery. Augie Carton on Steal This Beer is a big fan of their Daisy Cutter pale ale, but I like their range of IPAs.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>Spiteful Brewing</em> - Next door to Half Acre. Good place; wouldn\'t make a special trip for it, but is worth the block walk if you\'re at Half Acre.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Probably best just to Uber back down to the JW from here.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"className\":\"has-medium-font-size\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #196</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As always, you can find us and listen to the current episodes on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. No longer Stitcher, though. SiriusXM pulled the plug on it, though I think you can find TravelCommons on the other Sirius platforms -- Pandora and maybe the Sirius app. But I know that you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page at TravelCommons.com for a transcript of the episode and links to places I’ve mentioned, and to John and Rob’s websites. If you’re not yet subscribed, there’s a drop down Subscribe menu at the top of TravelCommon’s home page. And along the side of the page, you’ll find links to all the TravelCommons’ socials.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to mpeacock on Twitter, write them on the TravelCommons page on Facebook or Instagram, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com.&nbsp; And thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in emails, Tweets and post comments on the website. I really appreciate it.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And until we talk again, safe travels; raise a cold (or cask-temperature) one; and thanks for stopping by the TravelCommons.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_196.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #196 — Cheers to Beer Tourism and Travel!','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-196-cheers-to-beer-tourism-and-travel','','','2026-01-28 10:49:51','2026-01-28 16:49:51','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4372',0,'post','',0),
(4373,1,'2023-09-29 08:13:54','2023-09-29 13:13:54','In the style of a manga comic, an ai-bot in a microbrewery taproom, drinking a beer, thinking about its next beer','stable-diffusion-xl-beer-3','The version of AI I\'d actually take travel advice from','inherit','open','closed','','stable-diffusion-xl-beer-3','','','2026-07-02 16:24:06','2026-07-02 21:24:06','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/stable-diffusion-xl-beer-3.jpeg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(4374,1,'2023-09-29 08:18:07','2023-09-29 13:18:07','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/stable-diffusion-xl-beer-3-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"robot in a microbrewery taproom drinking a beer\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" />What Prompt Will Get Me a Pilsner?[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>In this episode, I dive deep into our Dutch tulip-themed trip last April. Before the tulip festival stories, I randomly wander through a potpourri of travel topics -- TSA passenger volumes returning to pre-COVID levels, having a surprisingly satisfying customer service experience with American Airlines, Hertz\'s EV push, and a bit of a chuckle about the misplaced visa panic in the news coverage of the EU\'s impending ETIAS system. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_196.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #196: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN after a triangulating drive -- Nashville to Annapolis, MD to New York City and then home. And in doing so, I have managed to miss/skip(?) the completion of the post-COVID travel recovery -- at least according to <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/travel/passenger-volumes\">TSA checkpoint passenger volumes</a>. The TSA website continues to update a website page with numbers from 2019 to yesterday 2023 in a convenient table format for easy copy-pasting into Excel. Crunching the TSA numbers starting the Friday before Memorial Day, the generally accepted start of the summer travel season, passenger volumes are up, on average, 11% over last year and equal to pre-COVID 2019.&nbsp; So volumes have recovered, but on the airlines’ Q2 earnings calls, the CEOs again reminded their listeners that not all passengers are equal. <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/southwest-airlines-luv-q2-earnings-report-2023-83811808?st=ivs07m9d98qw5ot&amp;reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink\">Southwest’s CEO said</a> “It’s clear that travel patterns post-pandemic are not what they were pre-pandemic,” as the airline said they’d shift planes from business-oriented short-haul routes to longer routes aimed at leisure travelers, and move some flights from start and end-of-the-day departures that flyers like me would book for same-day out-and-back trips.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I’ve talked in previous episodes about how one of the things I really miss moving from Nashville to Chicago is direct flights to places. The other thing I miss -- and pretty much on an equal weighting -- is good Chinese food. I’ve found good Vietnamese food, solid Mexican -- but haven’t found anything like what we would get in Chicago’s Chinatown. So when we hit New York City, we quickly found our way deep into Chinatown, joining the 20-30-person queue in front of a storefront bakery, <a href=\"https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/mei-lai-wah-bakery\">Mei Lai Wah</a>, for <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cha_siu_bao\">char siu bao</a>, BBQ pork buns, one of our favorites -- hoping they wouldn’t sell out before we got to the front of the line. Minutes tick by; the lines not moving. Then someone pops out of the bakery and yells “Anyone paying with cash, come up to the front!” As regular listeners know, I’m a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">knuckle-dragging cash carrier</a>. My wallet full of twenties and I sprinted to the front. I studied the menu; the cashier said “All we have left is #1, #5, and #20.” “Fine, I’ll take two of each.” I gave her one of my twenties and walked back out to the street where my wife, my daughter, and I inhaled those fresh buns while the credit card gang kept waiting. It’s good to have options.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — Brilliant Day by Hans Atom (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hansatom/47919 Ft: Lisa DeBenedictis</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Long time listener Aaron Woodin left a comment on Twitter, or X, or whatever Elon is calling it this week…<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>&nbsp;“Excellent podcast, Mark. I agree about Rotterdam - amazing city, underrated by tourists. I took a freighter cruise from there 5 yrs ago. Love that word Flâneuring - my pet term is \"walk and gawk.\"</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Aaron, thanks for that. A freighter cruise… that’s gotta be very cool. And “walk and galk” -- I like that. But I think I like it even better if I can shoehorn the word “entropy” in there because it makes me feel that suffering through engineering thermodynamics was worth something. Maybe “entropic walking and galking.” Yeah, I like that!</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>TravelCommons contributor Chris Chufo forwarded me a tweet saying “The way you say ‘representative’ to an automated system is the real you” and, as folks say nowadays, I felt seen. Mine is a crisp, demanding “Agent”, trying to pitch the tone and volume in just the right way to interrupt rather than wait through the 3 minutes of recorded verbiage. So when I had to call into American Airlines last week, it pulled me up short “Hi, Mark. In a few words, tell us what we can do for you?” And that was it. No long announcement, no litany of number presses, just silence… waiting…. “Uhh, I’d like to talk to an agent about a reservation.” “I’ll connect you to an agent. Your expected wait time is 1 hr… and 14 minutes.” OK, some things will never change.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I had to call American because in their most recent retumbling of their JFK flight schedules, they’d shrunk the connection time to our flight from JFK to LHR from 6 hours (way too long!) to 1 hour -- a bit too snug for my liking, especially given the delays at JFK -- and LGA and EWR -- caused by the ongoing shortage of air traffic controllers. In the last episode, I talked about the cascade of tiny delays that caused me to lose my wager on a snug sub-2 hr connection on our way home from AMS. But it was the end of our trip, so annoying, but not critical. Here, though, missing our outbound flight would absolutely <em>not</em> be a great way to start the trip. Though after reading about <a href=\"https://www.insider.com/laguardia-airport-thousands-passengers-got-stuck-on-planes-for-hours-2023-7\">last weekend’s 60-plane departure queue at LGA</a>, even a more reasonable 2½-hr connection time didn’t feel safe.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>So I skipped the hour-plus live agent queue for the chat feature in American’s app. I was pleasantly surprised to get connected to an agent in just a couple of minutes. I banged in my confirmation code and my ask -- put us back on our original flight to JFK; I’d prefer to entertain myself for 6 hours rather than miss our flight. “Please give me 3-5 minutes to review your reservation.” Felt like a canned response the agent hit a button to send -- which was fine with me. Being on chat rather than a live call, I could wander around, get other things done while checking the screen every now and again for a response. Which I eventually got -- “I’ll have to transfer you to one of my colleagues”. That’s fine. We’re 20 minutes in, so even with this, I’m still doing better than the live call queue. And, in a couple of minutes when the next agent popped on, asking me how he could help, I just copy-pasted my answers to the same questions from the first agent. And then I waited for it -- one second, two seconds, “Please give me 3-5 minutes to review your reservation.” Just like clockwork. Eventually he came back “As your original flight isn’t available, would the direct BNA-LHR flight work?” Uh, yes, but it’s actually a British Airways flight. I’d looked at that flight, but it has a boatload more fees -- fuel surcharges, landing taxes. “No additional charges?” I asked. “No, it’s free of cost,” he replied. I screenshotted the chat screen and told him I’d take it. Problem solved with an even better option -- a direct flight -- and all in less than the hour hold time for a live agent. Maybe not quite as personal as talking to someone, but it got it done.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I’m flying up to Portland, Maine and need a rental car for a side trip further up the coast, to Bar Harbor, to Acadia National Forest for a bit of hiking. So I hit the Hertz site and got a big push to rent an EV, an electric vehicle. Looking at the prices, it was more than a standard car, but not <em>that</em> much more. So I was intrigued. But as I walked down the booking path, it was the same as a regular car; no guidance on what I think of as EV-specific things, like how do I pay for charging -- do I need to set up an account with someone, maybe download an app -- and what’s the EV equivalent to having to return the car with a full tank? So I backed out, did a Google search which, as I’d expected, did a better job of landing me on the right pages on Hertz’s website than Hertz did. It’s interesting. If you use a Tesla Supercharger, Hertz passes through the charge to your card, but <em>without</em> a mark-up -- unlike what they do with toll charge transponders. And returning the car full? Hertz wants it above 70% or they’ll charge you $35 for the EV version of a refill charge -- which I didn’t think was unreasonable. So now I hit Tesla’s website looking for chargers. There’s one at a shopping mall in Portland, but nothing near my hotel downtown. And the ones around Bar Harbor are at hotels that I’m not staying at. I’m tempted, but it feels a bit more of a hassle than I want to sign up for. But it feels like they’re getting close, at least Hertz is. Maybe it’ll work out for my next rental.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I got a bit of a chuckle out of the recent flurry of travel stories about the coming of ETIAS -- the European Travel Information and Authorization System, the EU’s version of the US’s ESTA, the Electronic System for Travel Authorization, a pre-departure authorization for travelers who aren’t required to have a visa. I chuckled because we talked about this back in January, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/01/26/podcast-192-new-year-travel-planning-tips-gin-conquers-the-world/\">episode #192</a>, when I dug into ETIAS in case we needed it for our April tulip festival trip to the Netherlands. I found out we didn’t -- by that point, the May 2023 go-live had been pushed back to November 2023, and looking at the ETIAS website now, it’s been pushed again, now to much more ambiguous “sometime in 2024.” So I’m not sure what caused the sudden interest, but the number of news stories that were just plain wrong -- incorrectly wailing “Oh, now we’ll need a visa to go to Europe” in spite of what is said in the first paragraphs of just about every <a href=\"https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/MEMO_18_4362\">EU website page about ETIAS</a> (phrases like “The ETIAS authorization is not a visa”) -- just makes me shake my head.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter (X?) message to mpeacock like Aaron did, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can skip all that social media stuff and post your comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And a quick program note - at the end of this episode, there’ll be a bit of a meta-discussion -- the podcast talking about the podcast -- about having to DIY my own podcast metrics reporting. Probably not terribly interesting for most folks, hence me stuffing it in the ending, the part most folks skip over. But if you’re interested, hold off on hitting the “skip track” button when you hear the “Pictures of You” wrap-up music.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — &nbsp;<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Suenjo/11162\">Natchoongi (New Hope Remix)</a>&nbsp;by Suenjo (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Notes on Holland’s Tulip Festival</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As I mentioned in the last couple of episodes, Irene and I did a 10-day swing through the Netherlands in April, all centered around the tulip festival -- the tulip parade, the tulip gardens -- and then building other stuff around that. Which meant that the usual Holland tourist destination, Amsterdam, wasn’t; and instead our entry and exit point with a night or two tacked on to make the logistics easier; especially after we couldn’t score tickets to the big Vermeer (Girl with the Pearl Earring) exhibit at the Rijksmuseum. Having said that, we still managed to hit a couple of places for some unique Dutch-ness -- <a href=\"https://goo.gl/maps/7sjkC4sJ5KhrPnS9A\">Van Dobben</a>, a 70-some-year-old sandwich joint that’s known for their <a href=\"https://thingstodoinamsterdam.com/blog/dutch-croquettes/\">beef croquettes</a> which, I’m told, is classic Dutch bar food --&nbsp; a 3-4 inch long rectangle of deep-fried, breaded creamed beef served on a bun with mustard. They were fine, though they seem like the kind of food best&nbsp; appreciated at 2 in the morning rather than noon. The better thing about Van Dobben was sitting at the counter, watching the waitresses give their customers -- a mix of construction workers, local shop owners, office workers, and not too many tourists -- a good natured hard time. We then had to walk off those little gastric depth charges because we had dinner that night at <a href=\"https://www.vinkeles.com/\">Vinkeles</a>, a great restaurant that received its second Michelin star the week we visited. The food was great -- highly recommended. We showed up early for a pre-dinner cocktail at the bar, which Irene did. But I audibled at the last minute, telling the bartender I’d never had genever -- the Dutch ancestor to gin -- and asked for his direction. He brought over two small tulip glasses filled to the rim, one with a clear liquid, the other a light amber, a barrel-aged genever. There was no room for ice in those little tulips; the genevers were served neat, at room temperature. It was a nice introduction. I managed to fit in a few more of those full little tulip glasses before the end of our trip.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>We actually organized the whole itinerary around Haarlem because it seemed more or less ground-zero for our tulip-ing: the Tulip Parade, kinda the Dutch version of the Rose Parade, ended there Saturday night after an all-day wander through villages to the south; and it wasn’t far from the big tulip displays at the Keukenhof Gardens. Heading down to the Keukenhof was the only time app-based travel payment didn’t work. The bus line had an app, but it didn’t seem completely connected to their web site, which is where I bought our tickets. And the web site said we had to have physical printed tickets; showing the PDF on our phone wouldn’t work. Lucky for us we were staying at a hotel in Haarlem rather than an Airbnb. The desk clerk happily printed our tickets for us.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Ticket hassles aside, the Gardens were great. Walking through the parking lot, through the ranks of tour buses; I started to appreciate what a big thing this tulip festival is. But I also had a building sense of dread. Is this going to be a repeat of last year’s shoulder-to-shoulder crowds in Italy? No, it wasn’t. The Keukenhof was a big enough place to absorb everyone, with tulip beds everywhere, to spread everyone out across the grounds.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But we didn’t <em>really</em> need to stay in Haarlem just to see these gardens; half the tour buses in the parking lot were day trips from Amsterdam. The next day, Saturday, we took advantage of Haarlem’s location, renting bikes and riding back down toward Tulip Ground Zero. Doing a spur-of-the-moment bike ride in the Netherlands is so easy -- lots of bike rental places with reasonable day rates, lots of bike lanes (and bike-aware drivers), and mostly flat terrain -- means you can have a good day out without needing to pack the whole Mamil -- middle-aged men in lycra -- kit. We headed southwest, pointed vaguely in the direction of the <a href=\"https://thetulipbarn.com/\">Tulip Barn</a>, a tulip farm where you can pay to go wander and Instagram your way through their tulip fields. But a couple of miles from the Tulip Barn, I stopped at a big cycle network map to figure out our next turn. I could figure out that the red arrow labeled “U Staat Hier” meant “You Are Here”, but was taking a little longer to figure out the rest. In the meantime, Irene looked past the trees down one of the streets and saw a huge tulip field. We parked our bikes and joined, for free, the maybe 30 other people -- families, couples -- wandering around the tulip beds. Pink, red, orange, yellow, white -- it was rows of tulips to the horizon. But it was also a working tulip field. Guys were putting on and pulling off bed covers, and, wildest thing, driving a little machine through the beds that snipped off the tulip flowers, leaving the tall stems; friend-of-the-show Chris Chufo said it looked like a tulip zamboni. I mean, “What the hell?” Turns out that this field and all the outdoor fields we saw, raise tulip <em>bulbs</em>, not flowers. The cut flowers are grown in covered fields and greenhouses. The tulip zamboni knocks off the outdoor blooms so the plant puts its energy into growing the bulb. I’m glad we got there when we did, and that there was only one guy running the zamboni. Check the show notes; I’ll see if I can post my video of the tulip topping.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Later that night -- <em>much</em> later, the Tulip Parade finally made it to Haarlem. A band warmed up the waiting crowd playing ‘50’s and early ‘60’s rock-and-roll using a vintage Cadillac convertible as their stage -- which would’ve fit in in, say, Nashville, but seemed a bit odd in western Holland. But only to me, I guess, because the crowd loved it. When the floats finally arrived, they did not disappoint. The craftsmanship was excellent; they were all decorated, their surfaces completely covered with floral materials -- tulips, daffodils, hyacinths, even cut-up bulbs and nut shells for brown and black colors, hence my earlier comparison to the Rose Parade. It also reminded me of smaller Mardi Gras parades in New Orleans -- the float sponsors seemed very local -- nearby car and farm equipment dealerships -- local marching bands. No bead tossing, but a lot of folks running over to hand out things to the people lined up along the route. It was just the right size -- big enough to support the craftsmanship needed for high-quality floats, but not so big that the local sponsors get elbowed out by big multinational corporations. One more advantage of our Haarlem location -- at the end of the parade, they parked the floats along the road at the end of the route. At the end of the night and again the next morning, we were able to walk up close to them, which made me appreciate the craftsmanship even more.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I’m in no way, shape, or form, any sort of gardener. I have, at best, a black thumb. And I’m not a big flower guy. I saw lots of guys with big full-frame digital cameras setting up tripods over tulip beds for what I can only imagine was an effort to capture the perfect flower pic -- whatever that may be. But I came back way more impressed than I expected to be with the beauty of the flat Dutch countryside in bloom.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #196</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>. And while you’re at TravelCommons.com, you can check out the show notes page for a transcript and any links I’ve mentioned. Or you can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, now to the promised meta-content. I’ve used Chartable for a couple of years now to give me some basic episode download metrics -- how many downloads in the first 7 days, in the first 30 days of an episode posting, in total -- whatever comes with the free version. Nothing fancy -- I’m not trying to sell ads; it’s for my own edification and enjoyment. The standard pattern is a big spike in downloads on the day I post the episode and then a steady growth after that. Usually the total downloads after 7 days number is 40-45% of an episode’s total downloads after a year. So anyhow, for the last episode, the Day 1 number was 6. Huh. Maybe Chartable is having some backend hiccups; I’ve seen it take a day for numbers to start populating. So I look again the next day -- same thing. Huh. Same thing <em>every</em> day that week. Now <em>this</em> behavior I haven’t seen before. Where did everyone go? I recheck all my podcast apps -- Overcast, Apple Podcasts, Pocket Casts, Podcast Addict -- yup, the episode is there. So what happened? Since I self-host TravelCommons -- because back in 2005 when I started, there was no other alternative -- I can look at the server logs. So look at the June and July logs -- yup, I can see more than 6 downloads of <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/06/20/podcast-194-best-laid-travel-plans-roaming-entropy/\" title=\"Podcast #194 — Best Laid Travel Plans; Roaming Entropy\">episode #194</a>. Which then sends me down a new rabbit hole -- why rely on Chartable when I can do it myself, maybe write my own download counting program? But I’m not any sort of programmer… which led me again to ChatGPT. Everyone’s talking about how generative AI will replace programmers, so I thought I’d give it a go. I typed “Write a python program to print out total counts of downloaded podcasts reported in an Apache web log file” into the box at the bottom of the ChatGPT web page, clicked the little arrow icon, and Boom!, out burped a program. And it actually ran, and did what I asked. Turns out my ask needed a bit of refinement, but after maybe 30-45 minutes, I had a pretty solid output, which I then pulled into Excel to slice and dice and graph and pivot because I kinda got tired of torturing ChatGPT… or myself; I’m not sure which. But anyhow, generative AI won’t completely replace programmers and the like (at least not yet), but it does work… at, maybe, 80% of its current hype. Just thought I’d share a little of my own personal experience.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter/(X?), or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_196.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #196 — Cheers to Beer Tourism and Travel','','inherit','closed','closed','','4372-revision-v1','','','2023-09-29 08:18:07','2023-09-29 13:18:07','',4372,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4374',0,'revision','',0),
(4375,1,'2023-09-29 08:31:19','2023-09-29 13:31:19','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/stable-diffusion-xl-beer-3-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"robot in a microbrewery taproom drinking a beer\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" />What Prompt Will Get Me a Pilsner?[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>In this episode, I dive deep into our Dutch tulip-themed trip last April. Before the tulip festival stories, I randomly wander through a potpourri of travel topics -- TSA passenger volumes returning to pre-COVID levels, having a surprisingly satisfying customer service experience with American Airlines, Hertz\'s EV push, and a bit of a chuckle about the misplaced visa panic in the news coverage of the EU\'s impending ETIAS system. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_196.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #196: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN after trips to Portland, ME and Asheville, NC. We flew up to Portland International Jetport; I love that -- <em>jetport</em> -- it’s like a throwback to the ‘50’s and ‘60’s when jet airplanes weren’t assumed. Going down that clickhole, apparently Orlando International was originally called <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orlando_International_Airport\">Orlando Jetport</a>. Feels like they shouldn’t have changed; would’ve had a very EPCOT-y vibe. But anyhow, I think Portland Jetport missed a trick by not playing Steve Miller’s <a href=\"https://youtu.be/JHa1hiFYbFQ?si=3c8q9OhgdJM8YQNR\"><em>Jet Airliner</em></a> on a continuous loop in baggage claim. But they do have a <a href=\"https://youtu.be/Az5p4g_Eyf0?si=HEB3oEj3PCClOO-C\">big stuffed moose</a> there, which is probably more on-brand.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>More… interesting were the 7-foot signs we passed walking up to the TSA lines for our flight back. <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1693357760732111140\">I posted a picture on Twitter</a>. The one to the left said “Are you packing? Guns of any kind are not permitted in carry-on bags”. The one on the right, “Have you checked your firearms?” The small one in between reminded people to dump their oversized liquids. I mean, Really!? We\'re now 22 years on from the Sept 11th attacks and people still can\'t figure this out; that you can’t take a gun on a plane -- nor a sword, nor a knife. Long-time listeners will know that I am in no way an apologist for the TSA, but when I see pictures they post of some of the stuff people try to bring on -- a hatchet at O’Hare, throwing knives at Milwaukee -- I’m not sure how patient <em>I’d</em> be if I had to deal with that level of obliviousness day-in and day-out.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>On the upside, though, I did see that the TSA would allow me to carry-on a live lobster if I wanted to take a bit of Maine back home with me. According to the TSA website “A live lobster is allowed through security and must be transported in a clear, plastic, spill proof container. A TSA officer will visually inspect your lobster at the checkpoint.” I wonder if that visual inspection includes checking that the rubber bands around the lobster claws are intact. I’d think a traveler wielding “un-holstered” lobster claws might not be armed, but certainly could be dangerous.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — Brilliant Day by Hans Atom (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hansatom/47919 Ft: Lisa DeBenedictis</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>I</em> would’ve loved to play 15 seconds of <em>Jet Airliner</em> just now for the bridge music if I wasn’t about 99% positive I’d get slapped with some copyright fine.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Thelma Smith stopped by the TravelCommons Facebook page to leave a comment about last episode’s discussion of renting a Hertz EV for my Portland trip, which I backed away from as I looked at charging options in the city and up in Bar Harbor. Thelma wrote<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>&nbsp;Wanted to chime in on EVs. We have a Tesla Model 3. When planning out a trip of any length we use <a href=\"https://www.plugshare.com/\">PlugShare</a>. It helps in finding all sorts of chargers and not just Tesla fast chargers. Might help in seeing what’s out there.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Thelma, thanks for that. First I’ve heard of it; looks like a nice crowdsourced status map for chargers. If Hertz had referenced it, it might’ve tipped me to an EV. While it didn’t show many more Bar Harbor options, it showed a lot more chargers in Portland. Hertz continues to send me EV offers, so with this, maybe I give it a go on my next trip.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>JD Power released their <a href=\"https://www.jdpower.com/business/press-releases/2023-north-america-airport-satisfaction-study\">2023 North American Airport Satisfaction Survey</a> last week. We talked in the last episode that, according to TSA counts, we’ve gotten back to pre-COVID passenger volumes. And so it kinda makes sense then to compare JD Power’s 2023 numbers to their pre-COVID 2019 scores. And, conveniently enough, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/10/14/podcast-156-airport-satisfaction-escooters-smaller-luggage/\">episode #156</a>, we talked to the survey’s author, Michael Taylor, after the release of the <a href=\"https://www.jdpower.com/business/press-releases/2019-north-america-airport-satisfaction-study\">2019 survey</a>. Back then, Michael predicted:<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Michael: Everybody\'s phasing in and out of construction. They\'ve got all these various plans that are revolving on the inside and the outside of the airport. And so we\'re going to see this churn in the rankings quite a bit in the next few years as these projects phase in and out.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Well, yes and no. The top of the Mega category was pretty stable -- Detroit, Minneapolis/St Paul, and Las Vegas kept their top 3 positions. But there was a bit of churn under that. San Francisco jumped 7 spots from 13th to 6th, in large part, no doubt to their huge renovations while Orlando dropped 5 spots, from 4th to 9th, and Phoenix dropped 6, from 7th to 13th; neither of which surprised me given my most recent experiences at each.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The benefits of finally finishing big renovations really showed up in the next category, the Large Airports. LaGuardia and New Orleans, airports that I’ve spent way too much time in, finished multi-billion dollar renovations between the 2019 and 2023 survey and the results showed. LaGuardia jumped 13 places from 27th, the last spot on the 2019 survey to 14th, which given all the inherent problems with LaGuardia’s location and the mess that is the tri-state air traffic control, I’m not sure they could’ve gotten much better. New Orleans, though, went from not much better 23rd spot in 2019 to 8th, a 15-place move. Portland, Oregon, 2019’s top Large airport plummeted 11 spots to 12th, while San Diego and Oakland each dropped 10 spots, to 23rd and 24th respectively.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>More interesting than this, to me, was the increase in the average scores in what has been a difficult year for air travel -- on a thousand-point scale, the Mega average increased 16 points, from 756 to 772, while the Large average grew 24 points, from 765 to 789. So if an airport didn’t improve its score, like Orlando or Oakland, its ranking tumbled.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>In the last episode, I talked about the rolling delays for implementation of ETIAS, the EU’s impending version of the US’s ESTA, a pre-travel authorization system. What originally was supposed to go-live in 2021 got pushed to May 2023, which given COVID made sense, when then slipped 6 months to November 2023. Well, OK, maybe a little more testing is for the best. But then, to a more nebulous “sometime in 2024.” That’s never a good sign. And now, a month later, they’re saying <a href=\"https://www.schengenvisainfo.com/news/no-etias-wont-become-operational-in-2024-eu-sources-say/\">May 2025</a>. It feels like this is becoming the EU’s Real ID. Really! Because the new <a href=\"https://www.dhs.gov/news/2022/12/05/dhs-announces-extension-real-id-full-enforcement-deadline\">US Real ID deadline</a> is also May 2025 -- until they change it again.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter (X?) message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page like Thelma did, or on the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can skip all that social media stuff and post your comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — &nbsp;<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Suenjo/11162\">Natchoongi (New Hope Remix)</a>&nbsp;by Suenjo (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Beer Tourism and Travel</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Scrolling through the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/episodes/\"><em>Episodes</em></a> section of the TravelCommons website, I saw that it’s been over a year since I’ve done any beer content, and immediately began working on rectifying it. I asked John Holl, long-time beer journalist, editor of <a href=\"https://allaboutbeer.com/\">All About Beer</a>, host of the <a href=\"https://allaboutbeer.com/podcast/drink-beer-think-beer/\">Drink Beer, Think Beer podcast</a>, to give us his thoughts about Beer Tourism…<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: John, thanks for coming on the podcast. We want to talk about beer tourism and travel. I\'m an old guy and for the longest time the idea of beer tourism seemed to start and end with renting lederhosen and heading to Munich for Oktoberfest. And then, in the early/mid-00’s, we got specialty beer releases that morphed into festivals like 3 Floyds’ <a href=\"https://darklordday.info/index.php/Home\">Dark Lord Day</a>. I was living in Chicago at the time and that went from a couple hundred people queuing for a bottle release to, in 2019, 13,000-15,000 people traveling around the country to see it.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>John: Gave people a lot of excuses to cross that Indiana border.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: I\'ve been to Munster Indiana and there\'s not a lot of other reason to go there other than 3 Floyds. And then they <a href=\"https://www.3floyds.com/taproom/\">shut the brew pub down</a> during COVID and now there\'s absolutely no reason to go there. And now, every town/region/state seems to have some sort of a beer trail. Last month, in August, I was in Portland Maine and it was the <a href=\"https://mainebrewersguild.org/visit-breweries/brewery-trail-challenge/\">Maine Beer Trail</a>. And then I was in Asheville, North Carolina at <a href=\"https://ashevillealetrail.com/\">Asheville Ale Trail </a>as well as their brewing district. It seems to be an area that\'s really grown. What are your thoughts on that? How significant is beer tourism for local economies now?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>John: I think it depends on the location. Where there\'s a concentration of breweries, it makes sense to have a beer trail. It makes sense for a guild or an organization to get together to try to convince not only the tourists but the locals to come out as well. There\'s 10,000 breweries thereabouts, maybe a little less, in the US these days and a lot of them are concentrated together. There\'s strength in numbers and hopefully they\'re all doing something that is diverse enough that can get folks to go from one place to the next, to the next without getting Hazy IPA fatigue. And I think Portland Maine is a great example of the breweries that are there. You have some of the old stalwarts, Geary\'s and Allagash. And some of the older, newer ones like Bissel Brothers. And then, there\'s some really cool ones like Belleflower that are there. So you get breweries of different sizes, of different scopes and I think it\'s important for the bottom line of these places so long as they\'re delivering good quality beer. But what\'s cool for me is being a tourist in a new city. I get to go to different areas. I get to go see a place that is not just the picturesque downtown, it\'s not just what\'s on the postcards for sale at the local travel kiosk. So you get to go into neighborhoods where people live and work. And for me, that\'s always a better sense of getting to know a city, of getting to know people, of getting to know a place because neighborhoods can change, especially some place like Chicago, from block to block. You\'re walking into neighborhoods that have different vibes, that have different histories to them, and that feel different. And so when I\'m traveling for beer, it\'s fun for me to not only go and set up at a tap room and spend some time there, but also to walk the neighborhoods as well. And I think that location informs a lot of what beer makers do. I\'ll keep going back to <a href=\"https://dovetailbrewery.com/\">Dovetail</a>; I\'ve spent more time there than I\'ll actually admit, and it\'s right up against the Brown Line and they use that to their advantage. They talk about their coolship; they talk about how their windows open up to the brown line and that the beer is inoculated with whatever the transit line brings them. And I think that\'s a fun thing. You\'re not necessarily tasting a sense of place, but you get the idea that it might be there.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: God only knows I\'ve written the Brown Line enough times. So maybe I\'ve helped Dovetail inoculate some of their coolship beers.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>John: And go to the Pacific Northwest at this time of year, in mid-September/late October when in Yakima and in parts of Oregon, they are harvesting the hops right now. You can bounce from brewery to brewery and the air is aromatic with fresh hops. The brewers are making fresh and wet hot beers. People are coming in from around the country, from around the world. There\'s an excitement and an energy that exists because of the agricultural product that is going into these beers and because of the harvest window as well. So, it doesn\'t always have to be a festival; it can be for a harvest season. And I think that that\'s another cool way that folks who aren\'t even in the beer industry can experience a different aspect of their pints.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: What\'s the best way to find out what\'s going on in a location? How do you think about where you\'re gonna go?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>John: I like not having firm plans when I\'m traveling because the other thing about beer tourism -- we\'re talking about beer trails -- is you start at one place and you say, “OK, we got five places on our list today.” So we say you\'re just having a pint at each. It\'s still five pints at the end of the day and even for a serious drinker like me, that\'s a lot. But if you\'re having a good time, I think it\'s great to not have structure because if you say, “OK, we\'re at stop number two and, and we have three more stops in front of us,” but we\'re really liking this, and they have this other beer that I want to try, and we\'re comfortable, and we\'re in good seats, and the food truck is awesome and all that -- just stay there, live in that moment. I feel I\'ve seen too many people get caught up in this sort of ticking culture where we have to hit all of these spots for whatever sort of weird list and you miss out on the fun experiences. Beer is about camaraderie. It\'s about being in the place. It\'s about experiencing flavor. And if you\'re rushing through it, it\'s not that much fun. I think beer in the way that it\'s grown over the last couple of decades -- it\'s not doing super-well volume-wise or sales-wise comparatively; it\'s like 12-13% of the overall marketplace -- but I think it has helped people appreciate flavors better. And to be a little bit more curious and to be a little bit more experimental.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: I think there\'s also a learning component too that I think you brought up, which is, you\'re going to push yourself outside your normal boundaries, outside of what I\'ve called a travel bubble…</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>John: That\'s the cool thing about travel, right? You talk to folks all the time about when they go to a new place and they want to have the local drink or they want to have the local food because they want to immerse themselves in that culture. You can do that with beer no matter where you go. So much of what brewers are doing these days too. When you travel, if you only drink American Light Lager, or you only drink Irish Stout. So you only drink something, you know, particular. If you\'re traveling, you might try the göse, you might try a lambic, you might try a barley wine or something like that because you\'re feeling a little bit more loose and unencumbered from the constraints of your daily life. And that, for me, is sort of the fun thing about beer. Usually it\'ll taste better from that place because you\'re surrounded by the people who made it, and the people who also were excited to be there. It\'s like folks who go on vacation to a tropical island and they\'re drinking mai tais, and it\'s the best mai tai they’ve ever had. They learn how to make the mai tai, and they come home and they do it on their back patio and they think “This doesn\'t taste as good.” And it\'s because you\'ve lost that sense of place. And so for me, I\'m always just trying to experience not just what\'s in my glass, but what\'s around me as well.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: John, I appreciate you coming on and talking to us about beer tourism and beer travel. It\'s something we\'ve talked a lot about on this podcast only just because I really like beer. It\'s been great talking to you. Thanks very much, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/John_Holl\" title=\"\">John Hall</a>, editor of <a href=\"https://allaboutbeer.com/\">All About Beer</a>. Both your <a href=\"https://allaboutbeer.com/podcast/\">podcast</a> and your website -- check it out. Thank you very much.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>John: Mark, thank you.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And, as always, check out the show notes on the TravelCommons podcast for links to read and listen to John.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music —  <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Suenjo/11162\">Natchoongi (New Hope Remix)</a> by Suenjo (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #196</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>. And while you’re at TravelCommons.com, you can check out the show notes page for a transcript and any links I’ve mentioned. Or you can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, now to the promised meta-content. I’ve used Chartable for a couple of years now to give me some basic episode download metrics -- how many downloads in the first 7 days, in the first 30 days of an episode posting, in total -- whatever comes with the free version. Nothing fancy -- I’m not trying to sell ads; it’s for my own edification and enjoyment. The standard pattern is a big spike in downloads on the day I post the episode and then a steady growth after that. Usually the total downloads after 7 days number is 40-45% of an episode’s total downloads after a year. So anyhow, for the last episode, the Day 1 number was 6. Huh. Maybe Chartable is having some backend hiccups; I’ve seen it take a day for numbers to start populating. So I look again the next day -- same thing. Huh. Same thing <em>every</em> day that week. Now <em>this</em> behavior I haven’t seen before. Where did everyone go? I recheck all my podcast apps -- Overcast, Apple Podcasts, Pocket Casts, Podcast Addict -- yup, the episode is there. So what happened? Since I self-host TravelCommons -- because back in 2005 when I started, there was no other alternative -- I can look at the server logs. So look at the June and July logs -- yup, I can see more than 6 downloads of <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/06/20/podcast-194-best-laid-travel-plans-roaming-entropy/\" title=\"Podcast #194 — Best Laid Travel Plans; Roaming Entropy\">episode #194</a>. Which then sends me down a new rabbit hole -- why rely on Chartable when I can do it myself, maybe write my own download counting program? But I’m not any sort of programmer… which led me again to ChatGPT. Everyone’s talking about how generative AI will replace programmers, so I thought I’d give it a go. I typed “Write a python program to print out total counts of downloaded podcasts reported in an Apache web log file” into the box at the bottom of the ChatGPT web page, clicked the little arrow icon, and Boom!, out burped a program. And it actually ran, and did what I asked. Turns out my ask needed a bit of refinement, but after maybe 30-45 minutes, I had a pretty solid output, which I then pulled into Excel to slice and dice and graph and pivot because I kinda got tired of torturing ChatGPT… or myself; I’m not sure which. But anyhow, generative AI won’t completely replace programmers and the like (at least not yet), but it does work… at, maybe, 80% of its current hype. Just thought I’d share a little of my own personal experience.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter/(X?), or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_196.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #196 — Cheers to Beer Tourism and Travel','','inherit','closed','closed','','4372-revision-v1','','','2023-09-29 08:31:19','2023-09-29 13:31:19','',4372,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4375',0,'revision','',0),
(4376,1,'2023-09-29 08:50:00','2023-09-29 13:50:00','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/stable-diffusion-xl-beer-3-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"robot in a microbrewery taproom drinking a beer\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" />What Prompt Will Get Me a Pilsner?[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>In this episode, I dive deep into our Dutch tulip-themed trip last April. Before the tulip festival stories, I randomly wander through a potpourri of travel topics -- TSA passenger volumes returning to pre-COVID levels, having a surprisingly satisfying customer service experience with American Airlines, Hertz\'s EV push, and a bit of a chuckle about the misplaced visa panic in the news coverage of the EU\'s impending ETIAS system. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_196.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #196: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN after trips to Portland, ME and Asheville, NC. We flew up to Portland International Jetport; I love that -- <em>jetport</em> -- it’s like a throwback to the ‘50’s and ‘60’s when jet airplanes weren’t assumed. Going down that clickhole, apparently Orlando International was originally called <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orlando_International_Airport\">Orlando Jetport</a>. Feels like they shouldn’t have changed; would’ve had a very EPCOT-y vibe. But anyhow, I think Portland Jetport missed a trick by not playing Steve Miller’s <a href=\"https://youtu.be/JHa1hiFYbFQ?si=3c8q9OhgdJM8YQNR\"><em>Jet Airliner</em></a> on a continuous loop in baggage claim. But they do have a <a href=\"https://youtu.be/Az5p4g_Eyf0?si=HEB3oEj3PCClOO-C\">big stuffed moose</a> there, which is probably more on-brand.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>More… interesting were the 7-foot signs we passed walking up to the TSA lines for our flight back. <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1693357760732111140\">I posted a picture on Twitter</a>. The one to the left said “Are you packing? Guns of any kind are not permitted in carry-on bags”. The one on the right, “Have you checked your firearms?” The small one in between reminded people to dump their oversized liquids. I mean, Really!? We\'re now 22 years on from the Sept 11th attacks and people still can\'t figure this out; that you can’t take a gun on a plane -- nor a sword, nor a knife. Long-time listeners will know that I am in no way an apologist for the TSA, but when I see pictures they post of some of the stuff people try to bring on -- a hatchet at O’Hare, throwing knives at Milwaukee -- I’m not sure how patient <em>I’d</em> be if I had to deal with that level of obliviousness day-in and day-out.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>On the upside, though, I did see that the TSA would allow me to carry-on a live lobster if I wanted to take a bit of Maine back home with me. According to the TSA website “A live lobster is allowed through security and must be transported in a clear, plastic, spill proof container. A TSA officer will visually inspect your lobster at the checkpoint.” I wonder if that visual inspection includes checking that the rubber bands around the lobster claws are intact. I’d think a traveler wielding “un-holstered” lobster claws might not be armed, but certainly could be dangerous.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — Brilliant Day by Hans Atom (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hansatom/47919 Ft: Lisa DeBenedictis</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>I</em> would’ve loved to play 15 seconds of <em>Jet Airliner</em> just now for the bridge music if I wasn’t about 99% positive I’d get slapped with some copyright fine.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Thelma Smith stopped by the TravelCommons Facebook page to leave a comment about last episode’s discussion of renting a Hertz EV for my Portland trip, which I backed away from as I looked at charging options in the city and up in Bar Harbor. Thelma wrote<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>&nbsp;Wanted to chime in on EVs. We have a Tesla Model 3. When planning out a trip of any length we use <a href=\"https://www.plugshare.com/\">PlugShare</a>. It helps in finding all sorts of chargers and not just Tesla fast chargers. Might help in seeing what’s out there.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Thelma, thanks for that. First I’ve heard of it; looks like a nice crowdsourced status map for chargers. If Hertz had referenced it, it might’ve tipped me to an EV. While it didn’t show many more Bar Harbor options, it showed a lot more chargers in Portland. Hertz continues to send me EV offers, so with this, maybe I give it a go on my next trip.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>JD Power released their <a href=\"https://www.jdpower.com/business/press-releases/2023-north-america-airport-satisfaction-study\">2023 North American Airport Satisfaction Survey</a> last week. We talked in the last episode that, according to TSA counts, we’ve gotten back to pre-COVID passenger volumes. And so it kinda makes sense then to compare JD Power’s 2023 numbers to their pre-COVID 2019 scores. And, conveniently enough, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/10/14/podcast-156-airport-satisfaction-escooters-smaller-luggage/\">episode #156</a>, we talked to the survey’s author, Michael Taylor, after the release of the <a href=\"https://www.jdpower.com/business/press-releases/2019-north-america-airport-satisfaction-study\">2019 survey</a>. Back then, Michael predicted:<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Michael: Everybody\'s phasing in and out of construction. They\'ve got all these various plans that are revolving on the inside and the outside of the airport. And so we\'re going to see this churn in the rankings quite a bit in the next few years as these projects phase in and out.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Well, yes and no. The top of the Mega category was pretty stable -- Detroit, Minneapolis/St Paul, and Las Vegas kept their top 3 positions. But there was a bit of churn under that. San Francisco jumped 7 spots from 13th to 6th, in large part, no doubt to their huge renovations while Orlando dropped 5 spots, from 4th to 9th, and Phoenix dropped 6, from 7th to 13th; neither of which surprised me given my most recent experiences at each.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The benefits of finally finishing big renovations really showed up in the next category, the Large Airports. LaGuardia and New Orleans, airports that I’ve spent way too much time in, finished multi-billion dollar renovations between the 2019 and 2023 survey and the results showed. LaGuardia jumped 13 places from 27th, the last spot on the 2019 survey to 14th, which given all the inherent problems with LaGuardia’s location and the mess that is the tri-state air traffic control, I’m not sure they could’ve gotten much better. New Orleans, though, went from not much better 23rd spot in 2019 to 8th, a 15-place move. Portland, Oregon, 2019’s top Large airport plummeted 11 spots to 12th, while San Diego and Oakland each dropped 10 spots, to 23rd and 24th respectively.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>More interesting than this, to me, was the increase in the average scores in what has been a difficult year for air travel -- on a thousand-point scale, the Mega average increased 16 points, from 756 to 772, while the Large average grew 24 points, from 765 to 789. So if an airport didn’t improve its score, like Orlando or Oakland, its ranking tumbled.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>In the last episode, I talked about the rolling delays for implementation of ETIAS, the EU’s impending version of the US’s ESTA, a pre-travel authorization system. What originally was supposed to go-live in 2021 got pushed to May 2023, which given COVID made sense, when then slipped 6 months to November 2023. Well, OK, maybe a little more testing is for the best. But then, to a more nebulous “sometime in 2024.” That’s never a good sign. And now, a month later, they’re saying <a href=\"https://www.schengenvisainfo.com/news/no-etias-wont-become-operational-in-2024-eu-sources-say/\">May 2025</a>. It feels like this is becoming the EU’s Real ID. Really! Because the new <a href=\"https://www.dhs.gov/news/2022/12/05/dhs-announces-extension-real-id-full-enforcement-deadline\">US Real ID deadline</a> is also May 2025 -- until they change it again.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter (X?) message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page like Thelma did, or on the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can skip all that social media stuff and post your comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — &nbsp;<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Suenjo/11162\">Natchoongi (New Hope Remix)</a>&nbsp;by Suenjo (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Beer Tourism and Travel</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Scrolling through the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/episodes/\"><em>Episodes</em></a> section of the TravelCommons website, I saw that it’s been over a year since I’ve done any beer content, and immediately began working on rectifying it. I asked John Holl, long-time beer journalist, editor of <a href=\"https://allaboutbeer.com/\">All About Beer</a>, host of the <a href=\"https://allaboutbeer.com/podcast/drink-beer-think-beer/\">Drink Beer, Think Beer podcast</a>, to give us his thoughts about Beer Tourism…<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: John, thanks for coming on the podcast. We want to talk about beer tourism and travel. I\'m an old guy and for the longest time the idea of beer tourism seemed to start and end with renting lederhosen and heading to Munich for Oktoberfest. And then, in the early/mid-00’s, we got specialty beer releases that morphed into festivals like 3 Floyds’ <a href=\"https://darklordday.info/index.php/Home\">Dark Lord Day</a>. I was living in Chicago at the time and that went from a couple hundred people queuing for a bottle release to, in 2019, 13,000-15,000 people traveling around the country to see it.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>John: Gave people a lot of excuses to cross that Indiana border.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: I\'ve been to Munster Indiana and there\'s not a lot of other reason to go there other than 3 Floyds. And then they <a href=\"https://www.3floyds.com/taproom/\">shut the brew pub down</a> during COVID and now there\'s absolutely no reason to go there. And now, every town/region/state seems to have some sort of a beer trail. Last month, in August, I was in Portland Maine and it was the <a href=\"https://mainebrewersguild.org/visit-breweries/brewery-trail-challenge/\">Maine Beer Trail</a>. And then I was in Asheville, North Carolina at <a href=\"https://ashevillealetrail.com/\">Asheville Ale Trail </a>as well as their brewing district. It seems to be an area that\'s really grown. What are your thoughts on that? How significant is beer tourism for local economies now?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>John: I think it depends on the location. Where there\'s a concentration of breweries, it makes sense to have a beer trail. It makes sense for a guild or an organization to get together to try to convince not only the tourists but the locals to come out as well. There\'s 10,000 breweries thereabouts, maybe a little less, in the US these days and a lot of them are concentrated together. There\'s strength in numbers and hopefully they\'re all doing something that is diverse enough that can get folks to go from one place to the next, to the next without getting Hazy IPA fatigue. And I think Portland Maine is a great example of the breweries that are there. You have some of the old stalwarts, Geary\'s and Allagash. And some of the older, newer ones like Bissel Brothers. And then, there\'s some really cool ones like Belleflower that are there. So you get breweries of different sizes, of different scopes and I think it\'s important for the bottom line of these places so long as they\'re delivering good quality beer. But what\'s cool for me is being a tourist in a new city. I get to go to different areas. I get to go see a place that is not just the picturesque downtown, it\'s not just what\'s on the postcards for sale at the local travel kiosk. So you get to go into neighborhoods where people live and work. And for me, that\'s always a better sense of getting to know a city, of getting to know people, of getting to know a place because neighborhoods can change, especially some place like Chicago, from block to block. You\'re walking into neighborhoods that have different vibes, that have different histories to them, and that feel different. And so when I\'m traveling for beer, it\'s fun for me to not only go and set up at a tap room and spend some time there, but also to walk the neighborhoods as well. And I think that location informs a lot of what beer makers do. I\'ll keep going back to <a href=\"https://dovetailbrewery.com/\">Dovetail</a>; I\'ve spent more time there than I\'ll actually admit, and it\'s right up against the Brown Line and they use that to their advantage. They talk about their coolship; they talk about how their windows open up to the brown line and that the beer is inoculated with whatever the transit line brings them. And I think that\'s a fun thing. You\'re not necessarily tasting a sense of place, but you get the idea that it might be there.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: God only knows I\'ve written the Brown Line enough times. So maybe I\'ve helped Dovetail inoculate some of their coolship beers.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>John: And go to the Pacific Northwest at this time of year, in mid-September/late October when in Yakima and in parts of Oregon, they are harvesting the hops right now. You can bounce from brewery to brewery and the air is aromatic with fresh hops. The brewers are making fresh and wet hot beers. People are coming in from around the country, from around the world. There\'s an excitement and an energy that exists because of the agricultural product that is going into these beers and because of the harvest window as well. So, it doesn\'t always have to be a festival; it can be for a harvest season. And I think that that\'s another cool way that folks who aren\'t even in the beer industry can experience a different aspect of their pints.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: What\'s the best way to find out what\'s going on in a location? How do you think about where you\'re gonna go?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>John: I like not having firm plans when I\'m traveling because the other thing about beer tourism -- we\'re talking about beer trails -- is you start at one place and you say, “OK, we got five places on our list today.” So we say you\'re just having a pint at each. It\'s still five pints at the end of the day and even for a serious drinker like me, that\'s a lot. But if you\'re having a good time, I think it\'s great to not have structure because if you say, “OK, we\'re at stop number two and, and we have three more stops in front of us,” but we\'re really liking this, and they have this other beer that I want to try, and we\'re comfortable, and we\'re in good seats, and the food truck is awesome and all that -- just stay there, live in that moment. I feel I\'ve seen too many people get caught up in this sort of ticking culture where we have to hit all of these spots for whatever sort of weird list and you miss out on the fun experiences. Beer is about camaraderie. It\'s about being in the place. It\'s about experiencing flavor. And if you\'re rushing through it, it\'s not that much fun. I think beer in the way that it\'s grown over the last couple of decades -- it\'s not doing super-well volume-wise or sales-wise comparatively; it\'s like 12-13% of the overall marketplace -- but I think it has helped people appreciate flavors better. And to be a little bit more curious and to be a little bit more experimental.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: I think there\'s also a learning component too that I think you brought up, which is, you\'re going to push yourself outside your normal boundaries, outside of what I\'ve called a travel bubble…</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>John: That\'s the cool thing about travel, right? You talk to folks all the time about when they go to a new place and they want to have the local drink or they want to have the local food because they want to immerse themselves in that culture. You can do that with beer no matter where you go. So much of what brewers are doing these days too. When you travel, if you only drink American Light Lager, or you only drink Irish Stout. So you only drink something, you know, particular. If you\'re traveling, you might try the göse, you might try a lambic, you might try a barley wine or something like that because you\'re feeling a little bit more loose and unencumbered from the constraints of your daily life. And that, for me, is sort of the fun thing about beer. Usually it\'ll taste better from that place because you\'re surrounded by the people who made it, and the people who also were excited to be there. It\'s like folks who go on vacation to a tropical island and they\'re drinking mai tais, and it\'s the best mai tai they’ve ever had. They learn how to make the mai tai, and they come home and they do it on their back patio and they think “This doesn\'t taste as good.” And it\'s because you\'ve lost that sense of place. And so for me, I\'m always just trying to experience not just what\'s in my glass, but what\'s around me as well.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: John, I appreciate you coming on and talking to us about beer tourism and beer travel. It\'s something we\'ve talked a lot about on this podcast only just because I really like beer. It\'s been great talking to you. Thanks very much, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/John_Holl\" title=\"\">John Hall</a>, editor of <a href=\"https://allaboutbeer.com/\">All About Beer</a>. Both your <a href=\"https://allaboutbeer.com/podcast/\">podcast</a> and your website -- check it out. Thank you very much.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>John: Mark, thank you.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And, as always, check out the show notes on the TravelCommons podcast for links to read and listen to John.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — &nbsp;<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Suenjo/11162\">Natchoongi (New Hope Remix)</a>&nbsp;by Suenjo (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>How To Plan a Beer Trip and Beer Tourism?</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If John Holl has you thinking about beer tourism, the next logical question -- how do you plan it? Here’s John’s approach…<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>John: I plan out travel, especially for specific events like hop harvest or Oktoberfest, which I\'m going to for the first time this year. I plan that out at least a year in advance because I want to make sure that when I can get hotels and transportation, and to budget out all of that. Social media is terrible in a lot of ways, but it can also be helpful in certain ways, getting you excited about traveling to new places. When I hear about annual beer festivals in Belgium or see folks who are out at hop harvest, picking hops, it gets me in a certain sort of way, if I\'m sitting at my desk at home. saying “Gosh, I wish I was there.”&nbsp; So then I put stuff on the calendar and start to say, “OK, well, think about this” and then go from there. When I\'m traveling to a city for work, I\'m usually going to visit specific breweries or specific people. But nine times out of 10, I will also call friends of mine and say, “Where are you drinking these days?” or “What\'s exciting you these days?” There\'s always going to be the one place that the serious beer nerd should go to,&nbsp; but then you peel that onion back just a little bit and all of a sudden, it\'s “Well, you know, I actually had a really fun experience at such and such place” or “I had this one beer” or “They\'re doing some cool stuff” and I start to say, “All right... Well, I trust them, so what do I have to lose?” It\'s either gonna be a great pint or it\'s not...</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>So there you go, advanced planning for the big stuff and have beer nerd friends in every city who can point you to the out-of-the-way nuggets. The latter is probably a <em>bit</em> easier for John, a well-known beer journalist, than for the rest of us.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/04/10/podcast-174-how-the-pros-plan-their-taproom-tourism/\">episode #174</a>, I talked about this with Rob Cheshire, a long time TravelCommons listener and, for the last 3+ years, a UK craft beer podcaster with his <a href=\"https://thisweekincraft.beer/this-week-in-craft-beer-podcasts/\">This Week in Craft Beer</a> podcast<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: How do you plan your taproom visits?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Rob: It\'s all driven through Google for me. I might have some idea based on previous reading about some big-name places that I want to visit in a particular city. But beyond that, I\'m just going to Google. First of all, I\'ll plot a Google map for the city. I\'ll end up with 50-60, maybe even 100 pins on the map. Pretty quickly, I\'ll go to <a href=\"https://untappd.com\">Untappd</a> and look at the average brewery rating. And this really makes brewers cross how much I rely on Untappd for this type of thing because I had this conversation a load of times on the podcast with them. But I do rely on brewery ratings on Untappd, and I find it very reliable. Quite frankly, if a brewery has an average rating of anything close to 4, then, obviously it\'s a massive generalization to say whatever they brew, but most of their beers are gonna be great. If the brewery rating is anywhere close to 3.5, it\'s going to be very mediocre at best. And somewhere in between is where most people land. So 3.6, eh...;  3.8, it\'s a good brewery; 3.9 is a terrific brewery; 4 is a great brewery. And so I\'m looking for those 3.8 and 3.9 average brewery ratings. But what I\'m looking for, really, is that district where I can walk from one to another and really make an afternoon of it.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Me? I kinda mash the two up. Like Rob, I’m a pretty solid Untappd user. Rob often says it’s his “beer diary” and that’s pretty much what it is for me too. When people ask me for recommendations for a city -- Budapest was the most recent ask -- I can quickly pop open the app and give people a list. And when <em>I’m</em> in a new city trying to find a good place for a beer, I’ll open it up and look at the Nearby Activity tab to see where (and what) folks are drinking. And back to <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/06/20/podcast-194-best-laid-travel-plans-roaming-entropy/\">episode #194</a>’s discussion of <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fl%C3%A2neur\">flâneuring</a>, or “roaming entropy” as I like to call it, some of my best “wanders” had, as their eventual end-point, a bar or taproom that I found that way.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But, as John says, if you let your friends know you’re deep into beer, they’ll be looking out for you. Visiting Savannah, GA back in May, our friends couldn’t wait to take me downtown to <a href=\"https://www.twotidesbrewing.com/\">Two Tides Brewing</a>, a microbrewery in a <a href=\"https://www.cntraveler.com/bars/savannah/two-tides-brewing-co\">100-year-old house</a> with great beers but no door onto the balcony because of a “door tax” way back when, where houses were taxed on the number of doors they had. So we ducked down and walked through a big window with our glasses… <em>multiple</em> times. Great beer and a history lesson; not sure I would’ve found that without a little help. Coming up in a couple of weeks, we’re heading back to New York City and our daughter already has an <em>ambitious</em> list for us.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Rob Cheshire and I have traded beer touring tips for our home towns. Rob took me to his favorite places in the railway arches of London’s Bermondsey Beer Mile. But when Rob hit Chicago three weeks after we’d moved to Nashville, I couldn’t reciprocate the personal tour, and so instead emailed him the couple of taproom circuits I <em>would’ve</em> taken him on if he’d showed up a month sooner. And actually, for all of you -- my friends and listeners -- since I can’t email it to you, I’ll put my Chicago taproom circuits in this episode’s show notes on travelcommons.com. Or check out my list of&nbsp; “Yeah, I’d like to go back there” taprooms in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/05/26/podcast-187-moving-to-a-non-hub-airport-what-makes-a-great-taproom/\">episode #187 show notes</a>. Maybe these can help you with your beer tourism planning.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The two tent poles for our Asheville trip were hiking and beer tourism. But we were the Asheville pioneers among our friend group, so I didn’t have anyone to build taproom circuits for me. So I started down Rob’s path, firing up Google Maps and Untappd, but then… wait a minute. Let’s see what AI can do. So I fired up <a href=\"https://chat.openai.com/\">ChatGPT</a> and typed in “Develop a taproom circuit of microbrewery taprooms in Asheville, NC starting at the Aloft Hotel in Asheville and optimized to minimize walking distance and maximize Untappd ratings. Present it in a table with the brewery name in the first column, the distance from the previous taproom in the second column, the Untappd rating in the third column, and the type of beers served in the fourth column.” The response started with a caveat that it can’t access real-time data and so the Untappd ratings and distances are based on its last update in 2022. After that throat-clearing, ChatGPT spit out a table with 8 taprooms. Eyeballing the list, the names didn’t seem too out of whack, so then I checked the Untappd ratings. None of them were right, and indeed, so far out of whack (all on the high side) that eight months of additional check-in couldn’t have moved the ratings that much. Chalk that up to GPT hallucination, or being a people pleaser and not wanting to say “I don’t know”. Then I plotted the circuit on a map, and it wasn’t -- a circuit, that is. It was a bit more of a random walk, doubling back a couple of times. And, rather than working us back to the Aloft, it ended at the farthest away brewery. So with no friend recommendations and not much help from ChatGPT, I fell back to my old ways --  flâneuring. I figured with the beer density in Asheville, a random walk was more likely than not to land me in front of a beer tap. Which pretty much proved to be the case. We did what long-time listener Aaron Woodin called it in the last episode a “walk and gawk”, or maybe  a “walk and gulp.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #196</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As always, you can find us and listen to the current episodes on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. No longer Stitcher, though. SiriusXM pulled the plug on it, though I think you can find TravelCommons on the other Sirius platforms -- Pandora and maybe the Sirius app. But I know that you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page at TravelCommons.com for a transcript of the episode and links to places I’ve mentioned, and to John and Rob’s websites. If you’re not yet subscribed, there’s a drop down Subscribe menu at the top of TravelCommon’s home page. And along the side of the page, you’ll find links to all the TravelCommons’ socials.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to mpeacock on Twitter, write them on the TravelCommons page on Facebook or Instagram, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com.&nbsp; And thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in emails, Tweets and post comments on the website. I really appreciate it.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And until we talk again, safe travels; raise a cold (or cask-temperature) one; and thanks for stopping by the TravelCommons.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_196.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #196 — Cheers to Beer Tourism and Travel','','inherit','closed','closed','','4372-revision-v1','','','2023-09-29 08:50:00','2023-09-29 13:50:00','',4372,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4376',0,'revision','',0),
(4377,1,'2023-09-29 17:18:40','2023-09-29 22:18:40','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/stable-diffusion-xl-beer-3-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"robot in a microbrewery taproom drinking a beer\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" />What Prompt Will Get Me a Pilsner?[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>In this episode, I dive deep into our Dutch tulip-themed trip last April. Before the tulip festival stories, I randomly wander through a potpourri of travel topics -- TSA passenger volumes returning to pre-COVID levels, having a surprisingly satisfying customer service experience with American Airlines, Hertz\'s EV push, and a bit of a chuckle about the misplaced visa panic in the news coverage of the EU\'s impending ETIAS system. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_196.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #196: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN after trips to Portland, ME and Asheville, NC. We flew up to Portland International Jetport; I love that -- <em>jetport</em> -- it’s like a throwback to the ‘50’s and ‘60’s when jet airplanes weren’t assumed. Going down that clickhole, apparently Orlando International was originally called <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orlando_International_Airport\">Orlando Jetport</a>. Feels like they shouldn’t have changed; would’ve had a very EPCOT-y vibe. But anyhow, I think Portland Jetport missed a trick by not playing Steve Miller’s <a href=\"https://youtu.be/JHa1hiFYbFQ?si=3c8q9OhgdJM8YQNR\"><em>Jet Airliner</em></a> on a continuous loop in baggage claim. But they do have a <a href=\"https://youtu.be/Az5p4g_Eyf0?si=HEB3oEj3PCClOO-C\">big stuffed moose</a> there, which is probably more on-brand.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>More… interesting were the 7-foot signs we passed walking up to the TSA lines for our flight back. <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1693357760732111140\">I posted a picture on Twitter</a>. The one to the left said “Are you packing? Guns of any kind are not permitted in carry-on bags”. The one on the right, “Have you checked your firearms?” The small one in between reminded people to dump their oversized liquids. I mean, Really!? We\'re now 22 years on from the Sept 11th attacks and people still can\'t figure this out; that you can’t take a gun on a plane -- nor a sword, nor a knife. Long-time listeners will know that I am in no way an apologist for the TSA, but when I see pictures they post of some of the stuff people try to bring on -- a hatchet at O’Hare, throwing knives at Milwaukee -- I’m not sure how patient <em>I’d</em> be if I had to deal with that level of obliviousness day-in and day-out.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>On the upside, though, I did see that the TSA would allow me to carry-on a live lobster if I wanted to take a bit of Maine back home with me. According to the TSA website “A live lobster is allowed through security and must be transported in a clear, plastic, spill proof container. A TSA officer will visually inspect your lobster at the checkpoint.” I wonder if that visual inspection includes checking that the rubber bands around the lobster claws are intact. I’d think a traveler wielding “un-holstered” lobster claws might not be armed, but certainly could be dangerous.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/JeffSpeed68/54450\">Hula Hoop Party</a> by Stefan Kartenberg (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: Martijn de Boer, Blue Wave Theory</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>I</em> would’ve loved to play 15 seconds of <em>Jet Airliner</em> just now for the bridge music if I wasn’t about 99% positive I’d get slapped with some copyright fine.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Thelma Smith stopped by the TravelCommons Facebook page to leave a comment about last episode’s discussion of renting a Hertz EV for my Portland trip, which I backed away from as I looked at charging options in the city and up in Bar Harbor. Thelma wrote<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>&nbsp;Wanted to chime in on EVs. We have a Tesla Model 3. When planning out a trip of any length we use <a href=\"https://www.plugshare.com/\">PlugShare</a>. It helps in finding all sorts of chargers and not just Tesla fast chargers. Might help in seeing what’s out there.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Thelma, thanks for that. First I’ve heard of it; looks like a nice crowdsourced status map for chargers. If Hertz had referenced it, it might’ve tipped me to an EV. While it didn’t show many more Bar Harbor options, it showed a lot more chargers in Portland. Hertz continues to send me EV offers, so with this, maybe I give it a go on my next trip.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>JD Power released their <a href=\"https://www.jdpower.com/business/press-releases/2023-north-america-airport-satisfaction-study\">2023 North American Airport Satisfaction Survey</a> last week. We talked in the last episode that, according to TSA counts, we’ve gotten back to pre-COVID passenger volumes. And so it kinda makes sense then to compare JD Power’s 2023 numbers to their pre-COVID 2019 scores. And, conveniently enough, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/10/14/podcast-156-airport-satisfaction-escooters-smaller-luggage/\">episode #156</a>, we talked to the survey’s author, Michael Taylor, after the release of the <a href=\"https://www.jdpower.com/business/press-releases/2019-north-america-airport-satisfaction-study\">2019 survey</a>. Back then, Michael predicted:<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Michael: Everybody\'s phasing in and out of construction. They\'ve got all these various plans that are revolving on the inside and the outside of the airport. And so we\'re going to see this churn in the rankings quite a bit in the next few years as these projects phase in and out.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Well, yes and no. The top of the Mega category was pretty stable -- Detroit, Minneapolis/St Paul, and Las Vegas kept their top 3 positions. But there was a bit of churn under that. San Francisco jumped 7 spots from 13th to 6th, in large part, no doubt to their huge renovations while Orlando dropped 5 spots, from 4th to 9th, and Phoenix dropped 6, from 7th to 13th; neither of which surprised me given my most recent experiences at each.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The benefits of finally finishing big renovations really showed up in the next category, the Large Airports. LaGuardia and New Orleans, airports that I’ve spent way too much time in, finished multi-billion dollar renovations between the 2019 and 2023 survey and the results showed. LaGuardia jumped 13 places from 27th, the last spot on the 2019 survey to 14th, which given all the inherent problems with LaGuardia’s location and the mess that is the tri-state air traffic control, I’m not sure they could’ve gotten much better. New Orleans, though, went from not much better 23rd spot in 2019 to 8th, a 15-place move. Portland, Oregon, 2019’s top Large airport plummeted 11 spots to 12th, while San Diego and Oakland each dropped 10 spots, to 23rd and 24th respectively.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>More interesting than this, to me, was the increase in the average scores in what has been a difficult year for air travel -- on a thousand-point scale, the Mega average increased 16 points, from 756 to 772, while the Large average grew 24 points, from 765 to 789. So if an airport didn’t improve its score, like Orlando or Oakland, its ranking tumbled.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>In the last episode, I talked about the rolling delays for implementation of ETIAS, the EU’s impending version of the US’s ESTA, a pre-travel authorization system. What originally was supposed to go-live in 2021 got pushed to May 2023, which given COVID made sense, when then slipped 6 months to November 2023. Well, OK, maybe a little more testing is for the best. But then, to a more nebulous “sometime in 2024.” That’s never a good sign. And now, a month later, they’re saying <a href=\"https://www.schengenvisainfo.com/news/no-etias-wont-become-operational-in-2024-eu-sources-say/\">May 2025</a>. It feels like this is becoming the EU’s Real ID. Really! Because the new <a href=\"https://www.dhs.gov/news/2022/12/05/dhs-announces-extension-real-id-full-enforcement-deadline\">US Real ID deadline</a> is also May 2025 -- until they change it again.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter (X?) message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page like Thelma did, or on the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can skip all that social media stuff and post your comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/53277\">Fistful of Dub</a> (Feat. Snowflake and DJ Vadim) by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: snowflake and DJ Vadim</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Beer Tourism and Travel</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Scrolling through the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/episodes/\"><em>Episodes</em></a> section of the TravelCommons website, I saw that it’s been over a year since I’ve done any beer content, and immediately began working on rectifying it. I asked John Holl, long-time beer journalist, editor of <a href=\"https://allaboutbeer.com/\">All About Beer</a>, host of the <a href=\"https://allaboutbeer.com/podcast/drink-beer-think-beer/\">Drink Beer, Think Beer podcast</a>, to give us his thoughts about Beer Tourism…<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: John, thanks for coming on the podcast. We want to talk about beer tourism and travel. I\'m an old guy and for the longest time the idea of beer tourism seemed to start and end with renting lederhosen and heading to Munich for Oktoberfest. And then, in the early/mid-00’s, we got specialty beer releases that morphed into festivals like 3 Floyds’ <a href=\"https://darklordday.info/index.php/Home\">Dark Lord Day</a>. I was living in Chicago at the time and that went from a couple hundred people queuing for a bottle release to, in 2019, 13,000-15,000 people traveling around the country to see it.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>John: Gave people a lot of excuses to cross that Indiana border.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: I\'ve been to Munster Indiana and there\'s not a lot of other reason to go there other than 3 Floyds. And then they <a href=\"https://www.3floyds.com/taproom/\">shut the brew pub down</a> during COVID and now there\'s absolutely no reason to go there. And now, every town/region/state seems to have some sort of a beer trail. Last month, in August, I was in Portland Maine and it was the <a href=\"https://mainebrewersguild.org/visit-breweries/brewery-trail-challenge/\">Maine Beer Trail</a>. And then I was in Asheville, North Carolina at <a href=\"https://ashevillealetrail.com/\">Asheville Ale Trail </a>as well as their brewing district. It seems to be an area that\'s really grown. What are your thoughts on that? How significant is beer tourism for local economies now?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>John: I think it depends on the location. Where there\'s a concentration of breweries, it makes sense to have a beer trail. It makes sense for a guild or an organization to get together to try to convince not only the tourists but the locals to come out as well. There\'s 10,000 breweries thereabouts, maybe a little less, in the US these days and a lot of them are concentrated together. There\'s strength in numbers and hopefully they\'re all doing something that is diverse enough that can get folks to go from one place to the next, to the next without getting Hazy IPA fatigue. And I think Portland Maine is a great example of the breweries that are there. You have some of the old stalwarts, Geary\'s and Allagash. And some of the older, newer ones like Bissel Brothers. And then, there\'s some really cool ones like Belleflower that are there. So you get breweries of different sizes, of different scopes and I think it\'s important for the bottom line of these places so long as they\'re delivering good quality beer. But what\'s cool for me is being a tourist in a new city. I get to go to different areas. I get to go see a place that is not just the picturesque downtown, it\'s not just what\'s on the postcards for sale at the local travel kiosk. So you get to go into neighborhoods where people live and work. And for me, that\'s always a better sense of getting to know a city, of getting to know people, of getting to know a place because neighborhoods can change, especially some place like Chicago, from block to block. You\'re walking into neighborhoods that have different vibes, that have different histories to them, and that feel different. And so when I\'m traveling for beer, it\'s fun for me to not only go and set up at a tap room and spend some time there, but also to walk the neighborhoods as well. And I think that location informs a lot of what beer makers do. I\'ll keep going back to <a href=\"https://dovetailbrewery.com/\">Dovetail</a>; I\'ve spent more time there than I\'ll actually admit, and it\'s right up against the Brown Line and they use that to their advantage. They talk about their coolship; they talk about how their windows open up to the brown line and that the beer is inoculated with whatever the transit line brings them. And I think that\'s a fun thing. You\'re not necessarily tasting a sense of place, but you get the idea that it might be there.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: God only knows I\'ve written the Brown Line enough times. So maybe I\'ve helped Dovetail inoculate some of their coolship beers.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>John: And go to the Pacific Northwest at this time of year, in mid-September/late October when in Yakima and in parts of Oregon, they are harvesting the hops right now. You can bounce from brewery to brewery and the air is aromatic with fresh hops. The brewers are making fresh and wet hot beers. People are coming in from around the country, from around the world. There\'s an excitement and an energy that exists because of the agricultural product that is going into these beers and because of the harvest window as well. So, it doesn\'t always have to be a festival; it can be for a harvest season. And I think that that\'s another cool way that folks who aren\'t even in the beer industry can experience a different aspect of their pints.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: What\'s the best way to find out what\'s going on in a location? How do you think about where you\'re gonna go?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>John: I like not having firm plans when I\'m traveling because the other thing about beer tourism -- we\'re talking about beer trails -- is you start at one place and you say, “OK, we got five places on our list today.” So we say you\'re just having a pint at each. It\'s still five pints at the end of the day and even for a serious drinker like me, that\'s a lot. But if you\'re having a good time, I think it\'s great to not have structure because if you say, “OK, we\'re at stop number two and, and we have three more stops in front of us,” but we\'re really liking this, and they have this other beer that I want to try, and we\'re comfortable, and we\'re in good seats, and the food truck is awesome and all that -- just stay there, live in that moment. I feel I\'ve seen too many people get caught up in this sort of ticking culture where we have to hit all of these spots for whatever sort of weird list and you miss out on the fun experiences. Beer is about camaraderie. It\'s about being in the place. It\'s about experiencing flavor. And if you\'re rushing through it, it\'s not that much fun. I think beer in the way that it\'s grown over the last couple of decades -- it\'s not doing super-well volume-wise or sales-wise comparatively; it\'s like 12-13% of the overall marketplace -- but I think it has helped people appreciate flavors better. And to be a little bit more curious and to be a little bit more experimental.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: I think there\'s also a learning component too that I think you brought up, which is, you\'re going to push yourself outside your normal boundaries, outside of what I\'ve called a travel bubble…</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>John: That\'s the cool thing about travel, right? You talk to folks all the time about when they go to a new place and they want to have the local drink or they want to have the local food because they want to immerse themselves in that culture. You can do that with beer no matter where you go. So much of what brewers are doing these days too. When you travel, if you only drink American Light Lager, or you only drink Irish Stout. So you only drink something, you know, particular. If you\'re traveling, you might try the göse, you might try a lambic, you might try a barley wine or something like that because you\'re feeling a little bit more loose and unencumbered from the constraints of your daily life. And that, for me, is sort of the fun thing about beer. Usually it\'ll taste better from that place because you\'re surrounded by the people who made it, and the people who also were excited to be there. It\'s like folks who go on vacation to a tropical island and they\'re drinking mai tais, and it\'s the best mai tai they’ve ever had. They learn how to make the mai tai, and they come home and they do it on their back patio and they think “This doesn\'t taste as good.” And it\'s because you\'ve lost that sense of place. And so for me, I\'m always just trying to experience not just what\'s in my glass, but what\'s around me as well.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: John, I appreciate you coming on and talking to us about beer tourism and beer travel. It\'s something we\'ve talked a lot about on this podcast only just because I really like beer. It\'s been great talking to you. Thanks very much, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/John_Holl\" title=\"\">John Hall</a>, editor of <a href=\"https://allaboutbeer.com/\">All About Beer</a>. Both your <a href=\"https://allaboutbeer.com/podcast/\">podcast</a> and your website -- check it out. Thank you very much.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>John: Mark, thank you.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And, as always, check out the show notes on the TravelCommons podcast for links to read and listen to John.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/3lb3r3th/44072\">Misunderstood</a> by 3lb3r3th (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: Alchemistry</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>How To Plan a Beer Trip and Beer Tourism?</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If John Holl has you thinking about beer tourism, the next logical question -- how do you plan it? Here’s John’s approach…<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>John: I plan out travel, especially for specific events like hop harvest or Oktoberfest, which I\'m going to for the first time this year. I plan that out at least a year in advance because I want to make sure that when I can get hotels and transportation, and to budget out all of that. Social media is terrible in a lot of ways, but it can also be helpful in certain ways, getting you excited about traveling to new places. When I hear about annual beer festivals in Belgium or see folks who are out at hop harvest, picking hops, it gets me in a certain sort of way, if I\'m sitting at my desk at home. saying “Gosh, I wish I was there.”&nbsp; So then I put stuff on the calendar and start to say, “OK, well, think about this” and then go from there. When I\'m traveling to a city for work, I\'m usually going to visit specific breweries or specific people. But nine times out of 10, I will also call friends of mine and say, “Where are you drinking these days?” or “What\'s exciting you these days?” There\'s always going to be the one place that the serious beer nerd should go to,&nbsp; but then you peel that onion back just a little bit and all of a sudden, it\'s “Well, you know, I actually had a really fun experience at such and such place” or “I had this one beer” or “They\'re doing some cool stuff” and I start to say, “All right... Well, I trust them, so what do I have to lose?” It\'s either gonna be a great pint or it\'s not...</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>So there you go, advanced planning for the big stuff and have beer nerd friends in every city who can point you to the out-of-the-way nuggets. The latter is probably a <em>bit</em> easier for John, a well-known beer journalist, than for the rest of us.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/04/10/podcast-174-how-the-pros-plan-their-taproom-tourism/\">episode #174</a>, I talked about this with Rob Cheshire, a long time TravelCommons listener and, for the last 3+ years, a UK craft beer podcaster with his <a href=\"https://thisweekincraft.beer/this-week-in-craft-beer-podcasts/\">This Week in Craft Beer</a> podcast<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: How do you plan your taproom visits?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Rob: It\'s all driven through Google for me. I might have some idea based on previous reading about some big-name places that I want to visit in a particular city. But beyond that, I\'m just going to Google. First of all, I\'ll plot a Google map for the city. I\'ll end up with 50-60, maybe even 100 pins on the map. Pretty quickly, I\'ll go to <a href=\"https://untappd.com\">Untappd</a> and look at the average brewery rating. And this really makes brewers cross how much I rely on Untappd for this type of thing because I had this conversation a load of times on the podcast with them. But I do rely on brewery ratings on Untappd, and I find it very reliable. Quite frankly, if a brewery has an average rating of anything close to 4, then, obviously it\'s a massive generalization to say whatever they brew, but most of their beers are gonna be great. If the brewery rating is anywhere close to 3.5, it\'s going to be very mediocre at best. And somewhere in between is where most people land. So 3.6, eh...;&nbsp; 3.8, it\'s a good brewery; 3.9 is a terrific brewery; 4 is a great brewery. And so I\'m looking for those 3.8 and 3.9 average brewery ratings. But what I\'m looking for, really, is that district where I can walk from one to another and really make an afternoon of it.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Me? I kinda mash the two up. Like Rob, I’m a pretty solid Untappd user. Rob often says it’s his “beer diary” and that’s pretty much what it is for me too.&nbsp;When people ask me for recommendations for a city -- Budapest was the most recent ask -- I can quickly pop open the app and give people a list. And when <em>I’m</em> in a new city trying to find a good place for a beer, I’ll open it up and look at the Nearby Activity tab to see where (and what) folks are drinking. And back to <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/06/20/podcast-194-best-laid-travel-plans-roaming-entropy/\">episode #194</a>’s discussion of <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fl%C3%A2neur\">flâneuring</a>, or “roaming entropy” as I like to call it, some of my best “wanders” had, as their eventual end-point, a bar or taproom that I found that way.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But, as John says, if you let your friends know you’re deep into beer, they’ll be looking out for you. Visiting Savannah, GA back in May, our friends couldn’t wait to take me downtown to <a href=\"https://www.twotidesbrewing.com/\">Two Tides Brewing</a>, a microbrewery in a <a href=\"https://www.cntraveler.com/bars/savannah/two-tides-brewing-co\">100-year-old house</a> with great beers but no door onto the balcony because of a “door tax” way back when, where houses were taxed on the number of doors they had. So we ducked down and walked through a big window with our glasses… <em>multiple</em> times. Great beer and a history lesson; not sure I would’ve found that without a little help. Coming up in a couple of weeks, we’re heading back to New York City and our daughter already has an <em>ambitious</em> list for us.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Rob Cheshire and I have traded beer touring tips for our home towns. Rob took me to his favorite places in the railway arches of London’s Bermondsey Beer Mile. But when Rob hit Chicago three weeks after we’d moved to Nashville, I couldn’t reciprocate the personal tour, and so instead emailed him the couple of taproom circuits I <em>would’ve</em> taken him on if he’d showed up a month sooner. And actually, for all of you -- my friends and listeners -- since I can’t email it to you, I’ll put my Chicago taproom circuits in this episode’s show notes on travelcommons.com. Or check out my list of&nbsp; “Yeah, I’d like to go back there” taprooms in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/05/26/podcast-187-moving-to-a-non-hub-airport-what-makes-a-great-taproom/\">episode #187 show notes</a>. Maybe these can help you with your beer tourism planning.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The two tent poles for our Asheville trip were hiking and beer tourism. But we were the Asheville pioneers among our friend group, so I didn’t have anyone to build taproom circuits for me. So I started down Rob’s path, firing up Google Maps and Untappd, but then… wait a minute. Let’s see what AI can do. So I fired up <a href=\"https://chat.openai.com/\">ChatGPT</a> and typed in “Develop a taproom circuit of microbrewery taprooms in Asheville, NC starting at the Aloft Hotel in Asheville and optimized to minimize walking distance and maximize Untappd ratings. Present it in a table with the brewery name in the first column, the distance from the previous taproom in the second column, the Untappd rating in the third column, and the type of beers served in the fourth column.” The response started with a caveat that it can’t access real-time data and so the Untappd ratings and distances are based on its last update in 2022. After that throat-clearing, ChatGPT spit out a table with 8 taprooms. Eyeballing the list, the names didn’t seem too out of whack, so then I checked the Untappd ratings. None of them were right, and indeed, so far out of whack (all on the high side) that eight months of additional check-in couldn’t have moved the ratings that much. Chalk that up to GPT hallucination, or being a people pleaser and not wanting to say “I don’t know”. Then I plotted the circuit on a map, and it wasn’t -- a circuit, that is. It was a bit more of a random walk, doubling back a couple of times. And, rather than working us back to the Aloft, it ended at the farthest away brewery. So with no friend recommendations and not much help from ChatGPT, I fell back to my old ways --&nbsp; flâneuring. I figured with the beer density in Asheville, a random walk was more likely than not to land me in front of a beer tap. Which pretty much proved to be the case. We did what long-time listener Aaron Woodin called it in the last episode a “walk and gawk”, or maybe&nbsp; a “walk and gulp.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #196</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As always, you can find us and listen to the current episodes on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. No longer Stitcher, though. SiriusXM pulled the plug on it, though I think you can find TravelCommons on the other Sirius platforms -- Pandora and maybe the Sirius app. But I know that you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page at TravelCommons.com for a transcript of the episode and links to places I’ve mentioned, and to John and Rob’s websites. If you’re not yet subscribed, there’s a drop down Subscribe menu at the top of TravelCommon’s home page. And along the side of the page, you’ll find links to all the TravelCommons’ socials.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to mpeacock on Twitter, write them on the TravelCommons page on Facebook or Instagram, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com.&nbsp; And thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in emails, Tweets and post comments on the website. I really appreciate it.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And until we talk again, safe travels; raise a cold (or cask-temperature) one; and thanks for stopping by the TravelCommons.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_196.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #196 — Cheers to Beer Tourism and Travel','','inherit','closed','closed','','4372-revision-v1','','','2023-09-29 17:18:40','2023-09-29 22:18:40','',4372,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4377',0,'revision','',0),
(4378,1,'2023-09-29 17:28:16','2023-09-29 22:28:16','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/stable-diffusion-xl-beer-3-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"robot in a microbrewery taproom drinking a beer\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" />What Prompt Will Get Me a Pilsner?[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>In this episode, I dive deep into our Dutch tulip-themed trip last April. Before the tulip festival stories, I randomly wander through a potpourri of travel topics -- TSA passenger volumes returning to pre-COVID levels, having a surprisingly satisfying customer service experience with American Airlines, Hertz\'s EV push, and a bit of a chuckle about the misplaced visa panic in the news coverage of the EU\'s impending ETIAS system. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_196.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #196: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN after trips to Portland, ME and Asheville, NC. We flew up to Portland International Jetport; I love that -- <em>jetport</em> -- it’s like a throwback to the ‘50’s and ‘60’s when jet airplanes weren’t assumed. Going down that clickhole, apparently Orlando International was originally called <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orlando_International_Airport\">Orlando Jetport</a>. Feels like they shouldn’t have changed; would’ve had a very EPCOT-y vibe. But anyhow, I think Portland Jetport missed a trick by not playing Steve Miller’s <a href=\"https://youtu.be/JHa1hiFYbFQ?si=3c8q9OhgdJM8YQNR\"><em>Jet Airliner</em></a> on a continuous loop in baggage claim. But they do have a <a href=\"https://youtu.be/Az5p4g_Eyf0?si=HEB3oEj3PCClOO-C\">big stuffed moose</a> there, which is probably more on-brand.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>More… interesting were the 7-foot signs we passed walking up to the TSA lines for our flight back. <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1693357760732111140\">I posted a picture on Twitter</a>. The one to the left said “Are you packing? Guns of any kind are not permitted in carry-on bags”. The one on the right, “Have you checked your firearms?” The small one in between reminded people to dump their oversized liquids. I mean, Really!? We\'re now 22 years on from the Sept 11th attacks and people still can\'t figure this out; that you can’t take a gun on a plane -- nor a sword, nor a knife. Long-time listeners will know that I am in no way an apologist for the TSA, but when I see pictures they post of some of the stuff people try to bring on -- a hatchet at O’Hare, throwing knives at Milwaukee -- I’m not sure how patient <em>I’d</em> be if I had to deal with that level of obliviousness day-in and day-out.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>On the upside, though, I did see that the TSA would allow me to carry-on a live lobster if I wanted to take a bit of Maine back home with me. According to the TSA website “A live lobster is allowed through security and must be transported in a clear, plastic, spill proof container. A TSA officer will visually inspect your lobster at the checkpoint.” I wonder if that visual inspection includes checking that the rubber bands around the lobster claws are intact. I’d think a traveler wielding “un-holstered” lobster claws might not be armed, but certainly could be dangerous.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/JeffSpeed68/54450\">Hula Hoop Party</a> by Stefan Kartenberg (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. &nbsp;Ft: Martijn de Boer, Blue Wave Theory</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>I</em> would’ve loved to play 15 seconds of <em>Jet Airliner</em> just now for the bridge music if I wasn’t about 99% positive I’d get slapped with some copyright fine.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Thelma Smith stopped by the TravelCommons Facebook page to leave a comment about last episode’s discussion of renting a Hertz EV for my Portland trip, which I backed away from as I looked at charging options in the city and up in Bar Harbor. Thelma wrote<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>&nbsp;Wanted to chime in on EVs. We have a Tesla Model 3. When planning out a trip of any length we use <a href=\"https://www.plugshare.com/\">PlugShare</a>. It helps in finding all sorts of chargers and not just Tesla fast chargers. Might help in seeing what’s out there.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Thelma, thanks for that. First I’ve heard of it; looks like a nice crowdsourced status map for chargers. If Hertz had referenced it, it might’ve tipped me to an EV. While it didn’t show many more Bar Harbor options, it showed a lot more chargers in Portland. Hertz continues to send me EV offers, so with this, maybe I give it a go on my next trip.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>JD Power released their <a href=\"https://www.jdpower.com/business/press-releases/2023-north-america-airport-satisfaction-study\">2023 North American Airport Satisfaction Survey</a> last week. We talked in the last episode that, according to TSA counts, we’ve gotten back to pre-COVID passenger volumes. And so it kinda makes sense then to compare JD Power’s 2023 numbers to their pre-COVID 2019 scores. And, conveniently enough, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/10/14/podcast-156-airport-satisfaction-escooters-smaller-luggage/\">episode #156</a>, we talked to the survey’s author, Michael Taylor, after the release of the <a href=\"https://www.jdpower.com/business/press-releases/2019-north-america-airport-satisfaction-study\">2019 survey</a>. Back then, Michael predicted:<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Michael: Everybody\'s phasing in and out of construction. They\'ve got all these various plans that are revolving on the inside and the outside of the airport. And so we\'re going to see this churn in the rankings quite a bit in the next few years as these projects phase in and out.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Well, yes and no. The top of the Mega category was pretty stable -- Detroit, Minneapolis/St Paul, and Las Vegas kept their top 3 positions. But there was a bit of churn under that. San Francisco jumped 7 spots from 13th to 6th, in large part, no doubt to their huge renovations while Orlando dropped 5 spots, from 4th to 9th, and Phoenix dropped 6, from 7th to 13th; neither of which surprised me given my most recent experiences at each.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The benefits of finally finishing big renovations really showed up in the next category, the Large Airports. LaGuardia and New Orleans, airports that I’ve spent way too much time in, finished multi-billion dollar renovations between the 2019 and 2023 survey and the results showed. LaGuardia jumped 13 places from 27th, the last spot on the 2019 survey to 14th, which given all the inherent problems with LaGuardia’s location and the mess that is the tri-state air traffic control, I’m not sure they could’ve gotten much better. New Orleans, though, went from not much better 23rd spot in 2019 to 8th, a 15-place move. Portland, Oregon, 2019’s top Large airport plummeted 11 spots to 12th, while San Diego and Oakland each dropped 10 spots, to 23rd and 24th respectively.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>More interesting than this, to me, was the increase in the average scores in what has been a difficult year for air travel -- on a thousand-point scale, the Mega average increased 16 points, from 756 to 772, while the Large average grew 24 points, from 765 to 789. So if an airport didn’t improve its score, like Orlando or Oakland, its ranking tumbled.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>In the last episode, I talked about the rolling delays for implementation of ETIAS, the EU’s impending version of the US’s ESTA, a pre-travel authorization system. What originally was supposed to go-live in 2021 got pushed to May 2023, which given COVID made sense, when then slipped 6 months to November 2023. Well, OK, maybe a little more testing is for the best. But then, to a more nebulous “sometime in 2024.” That’s never a good sign. And now, a month later, they’re saying <a href=\"https://www.schengenvisainfo.com/news/no-etias-wont-become-operational-in-2024-eu-sources-say/\">May 2025</a>. It feels like this is becoming the EU’s Real ID. Really! Because the new <a href=\"https://www.dhs.gov/news/2022/12/05/dhs-announces-extension-real-id-full-enforcement-deadline\">US Real ID deadline</a> is also May 2025 -- until they change it again.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter (X?) message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page like Thelma did, or on the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can skip all that social media stuff and post your comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/53277\">Fistful of Dub</a>&nbsp;(Feat. Snowflake and DJ Vadim) by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. &nbsp;Ft: snowflake and DJ Vadim</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Beer Tourism and Travel</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Scrolling through the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/episodes/\"><em>Episodes</em></a> section of the TravelCommons website, I saw that it’s been over a year since I’ve done any beer content, and immediately began working on rectifying it. I asked John Holl, long-time beer journalist, editor of <a href=\"https://allaboutbeer.com/\">All About Beer</a>, host of the <a href=\"https://allaboutbeer.com/podcast/drink-beer-think-beer/\">Drink Beer, Think Beer podcast</a>, to give us his thoughts about Beer Tourism…<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: John, thanks for coming on the podcast. We want to talk about beer tourism and travel. I\'m an old guy and for the longest time the idea of beer tourism seemed to start and end with renting lederhosen and heading to Munich for Oktoberfest. And then, in the early/mid-00’s, we got specialty beer releases that morphed into festivals like 3 Floyds’ <a href=\"https://darklordday.info/index.php/Home\">Dark Lord Day</a>. I was living in Chicago at the time and that went from a couple hundred people queuing for a bottle release to, in 2019, 13,000-15,000 people traveling around the country to see it.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>John: Gave people a lot of excuses to cross that Indiana border.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: I\'ve been to Munster Indiana and there\'s not a lot of other reason to go there other than 3 Floyds. And then they <a href=\"https://www.3floyds.com/taproom/\">shut the brew pub down</a> during COVID and now there\'s absolutely no reason to go there. And now, every town/region/state seems to have some sort of a beer trail. Last month, in August, I was in Portland Maine and it was the <a href=\"https://mainebrewersguild.org/visit-breweries/brewery-trail-challenge/\">Maine Beer Trail</a>. And then I was in Asheville, North Carolina at <a href=\"https://ashevillealetrail.com/\">Asheville Ale Trail </a>as well as their brewing district. It seems to be an area that\'s really grown. What are your thoughts on that? How significant is beer tourism for local economies now?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>John: I think it depends on the location. Where there\'s a concentration of breweries, it makes sense to have a beer trail. It makes sense for a guild or an organization to get together to try to convince not only the tourists but the locals to come out as well. There\'s 10,000 breweries thereabouts, maybe a little less, in the US these days and a lot of them are concentrated together. There\'s strength in numbers and hopefully they\'re all doing something that is diverse enough that can get folks to go from one place to the next, to the next without getting Hazy IPA fatigue. And I think Portland Maine is a great example of the breweries that are there. You have some of the old stalwarts, Geary\'s and Allagash. And some of the older, newer ones like Bissel Brothers. And then, there\'s some really cool ones like Belleflower that are there. So you get breweries of different sizes, of different scopes and I think it\'s important for the bottom line of these places so long as they\'re delivering good quality beer. But what\'s cool for me is being a tourist in a new city. I get to go to different areas. I get to go see a place that is not just the picturesque downtown, it\'s not just what\'s on the postcards for sale at the local travel kiosk. So you get to go into neighborhoods where people live and work. And for me, that\'s always a better sense of getting to know a city, of getting to know people, of getting to know a place because neighborhoods can change, especially some place like Chicago, from block to block. You\'re walking into neighborhoods that have different vibes, that have different histories to them, and that feel different. And so when I\'m traveling for beer, it\'s fun for me to not only go and set up at a tap room and spend some time there, but also to walk the neighborhoods as well. And I think that location informs a lot of what beer makers do. I\'ll keep going back to <a href=\"https://dovetailbrewery.com/\">Dovetail</a>; I\'ve spent more time there than I\'ll actually admit, and it\'s right up against the Brown Line and they use that to their advantage. They talk about their coolship; they talk about how their windows open up to the brown line and that the beer is inoculated with whatever the transit line brings them. And I think that\'s a fun thing. You\'re not necessarily tasting a sense of place, but you get the idea that it might be there.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: God only knows I\'ve written the Brown Line enough times. So maybe I\'ve helped Dovetail inoculate some of their coolship beers.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>John: And go to the Pacific Northwest at this time of year, in mid-September/late October when in Yakima and in parts of Oregon, they are harvesting the hops right now. You can bounce from brewery to brewery and the air is aromatic with fresh hops. The brewers are making fresh and wet hot beers. People are coming in from around the country, from around the world. There\'s an excitement and an energy that exists because of the agricultural product that is going into these beers and because of the harvest window as well. So, it doesn\'t always have to be a festival; it can be for a harvest season. And I think that that\'s another cool way that folks who aren\'t even in the beer industry can experience a different aspect of their pints.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: What\'s the best way to find out what\'s going on in a location? How do you think about where you\'re gonna go?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>John: I like not having firm plans when I\'m traveling because the other thing about beer tourism -- we\'re talking about beer trails -- is you start at one place and you say, “OK, we got five places on our list today.” So we say you\'re just having a pint at each. It\'s still five pints at the end of the day and even for a serious drinker like me, that\'s a lot. But if you\'re having a good time, I think it\'s great to not have structure because if you say, “OK, we\'re at stop number two and, and we have three more stops in front of us,” but we\'re really liking this, and they have this other beer that I want to try, and we\'re comfortable, and we\'re in good seats, and the food truck is awesome and all that -- just stay there, live in that moment. I feel I\'ve seen too many people get caught up in this sort of ticking culture where we have to hit all of these spots for whatever sort of weird list and you miss out on the fun experiences. Beer is about camaraderie. It\'s about being in the place. It\'s about experiencing flavor. And if you\'re rushing through it, it\'s not that much fun. I think beer in the way that it\'s grown over the last couple of decades -- it\'s not doing super-well volume-wise or sales-wise comparatively; it\'s like 12-13% of the overall marketplace -- but I think it has helped people appreciate flavors better. And to be a little bit more curious and to be a little bit more experimental.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: I think there\'s also a learning component too that I think you brought up, which is, you\'re going to push yourself outside your normal boundaries, outside of what I\'ve called a travel bubble…</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>John: That\'s the cool thing about travel, right? You talk to folks all the time about when they go to a new place and they want to have the local drink or they want to have the local food because they want to immerse themselves in that culture. You can do that with beer no matter where you go. So much of what brewers are doing these days too. When you travel, if you only drink American Light Lager, or you only drink Irish Stout. So you only drink something, you know, particular. If you\'re traveling, you might try the göse, you might try a lambic, you might try a barley wine or something like that because you\'re feeling a little bit more loose and unencumbered from the constraints of your daily life. And that, for me, is sort of the fun thing about beer. Usually it\'ll taste better from that place because you\'re surrounded by the people who made it, and the people who also were excited to be there. It\'s like folks who go on vacation to a tropical island and they\'re drinking mai tais, and it\'s the best mai tai they’ve ever had. They learn how to make the mai tai, and they come home and they do it on their back patio and they think “This doesn\'t taste as good.” And it\'s because you\'ve lost that sense of place. And so for me, I\'m always just trying to experience not just what\'s in my glass, but what\'s around me as well.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: John, I appreciate you coming on and talking to us about beer tourism and beer travel. It\'s something we\'ve talked a lot about on this podcast only just because I really like beer. It\'s been great talking to you. Thanks very much, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/John_Holl\" title=\"\">John Hall</a>, editor of <a href=\"https://allaboutbeer.com/\">All About Beer</a>. Both your <a href=\"https://allaboutbeer.com/podcast/\">podcast</a> and your website -- check it out. Thank you very much.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>John: Mark, thank you.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And, as always, check out the show notes on the TravelCommons podcast for links to read and listen to John.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/3lb3r3th/44072\">Misunderstood</a> by 3lb3r3th (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. &nbsp;Ft: Alchemistry</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>How To Plan a Beer Trip and Beer Tourism?</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If John Holl has you thinking about beer tourism, the next logical question -- how do you plan it? Here’s John’s approach…<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>John: I plan out travel, especially for specific events like hop harvest or Oktoberfest, which I\'m going to for the first time this year. I plan that out at least a year in advance because I want to make sure that when I can get hotels and transportation, and to budget out all of that. Social media is terrible in a lot of ways, but it can also be helpful in certain ways, getting you excited about traveling to new places. When I hear about annual beer festivals in Belgium or see folks who are out at hop harvest, picking hops, it gets me in a certain sort of way, if I\'m sitting at my desk at home. saying “Gosh, I wish I was there.”&nbsp; So then I put stuff on the calendar and start to say, “OK, well, think about this” and then go from there. When I\'m traveling to a city for work, I\'m usually going to visit specific breweries or specific people. But nine times out of 10, I will also call friends of mine and say, “Where are you drinking these days?” or “What\'s exciting you these days?” There\'s always going to be the one place that the serious beer nerd should go to,&nbsp; but then you peel that onion back just a little bit and all of a sudden, it\'s “Well, you know, I actually had a really fun experience at such and such place” or “I had this one beer” or “They\'re doing some cool stuff” and I start to say, “All right... Well, I trust them, so what do I have to lose?” It\'s either gonna be a great pint or it\'s not...</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>So there you go, advanced planning for the big stuff and have beer nerd friends in every city who can point you to the out-of-the-way nuggets. The latter is probably a <em>bit</em> easier for John, a well-known beer journalist, than for the rest of us.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/04/10/podcast-174-how-the-pros-plan-their-taproom-tourism/\">episode #174</a>, I talked about this with Rob Cheshire, a long time TravelCommons listener and, for the last 3+ years, a UK craft beer podcaster with his <a href=\"https://thisweekincraft.beer/this-week-in-craft-beer-podcasts/\">This Week in Craft Beer</a> podcast<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: How do you plan your taproom visits?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Rob: It\'s all driven through Google for me. I might have some idea based on previous reading about some big-name places that I want to visit in a particular city. But beyond that, I\'m just going to Google. First of all, I\'ll plot a Google map for the city. I\'ll end up with 50-60, maybe even 100 pins on the map. Pretty quickly, I\'ll go to <a href=\"https://untappd.com\">Untappd</a> and look at the average brewery rating. And this really makes brewers cross how much I rely on Untappd for this type of thing because I had this conversation a load of times on the podcast with them. But I do rely on brewery ratings on Untappd, and I find it very reliable. Quite frankly, if a brewery has an average rating of anything close to 4, then, obviously it\'s a massive generalization to say whatever they brew, but most of their beers are gonna be great. If the brewery rating is anywhere close to 3.5, it\'s going to be very mediocre at best. And somewhere in between is where most people land. So 3.6, eh...;&nbsp; 3.8, it\'s a good brewery; 3.9 is a terrific brewery; 4 is a great brewery. And so I\'m looking for those 3.8 and 3.9 average brewery ratings. But what I\'m looking for, really, is that district where I can walk from one to another and really make an afternoon of it.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Me? I kinda mash the two up. Like Rob, I’m a pretty solid Untappd user. Rob often says it’s his “beer diary” and that’s pretty much what it is for me too.&nbsp;When people ask me for recommendations for a city -- Budapest was the most recent ask -- I can quickly pop open the app and give people a list. And when <em>I’m</em> in a new city trying to find a good place for a beer, I’ll open it up and look at the Nearby Activity tab to see where (and what) folks are drinking. And back to <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/06/20/podcast-194-best-laid-travel-plans-roaming-entropy/\">episode #194</a>’s discussion of <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fl%C3%A2neur\">flâneuring</a>, or “roaming entropy” as I like to call it, some of my best “wanders” had, as their eventual end-point, a bar or taproom that I found that way.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But, as John says, if you let your friends know you’re deep into beer, they’ll be looking out for you. Visiting Savannah, GA back in May, our friends couldn’t wait to take me downtown to <a href=\"https://www.twotidesbrewing.com/\">Two Tides Brewing</a>, a microbrewery in a <a href=\"https://www.cntraveler.com/bars/savannah/two-tides-brewing-co\">100-year-old house</a> with great beers but no door onto the balcony because of a “door tax” way back when, where houses were taxed on the number of doors they had. So we ducked down and walked through a big window with our glasses… <em>multiple</em> times. Great beer and a history lesson; not sure I would’ve found that without a little help. Coming up in a couple of weeks, we’re heading back to New York City and our daughter already has an <em>ambitious</em> list for us.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Rob Cheshire and I have traded beer touring tips for our home towns. Rob took me to his favorite places in the railway arches of London’s Bermondsey Beer Mile. But when Rob hit Chicago three weeks after we’d moved to Nashville, I couldn’t reciprocate the personal tour, and so instead emailed him the couple of taproom circuits I <em>would’ve</em> taken him on if he’d showed up a month sooner. And actually, for all of you -- my friends and listeners -- since I can’t email it to you, I’ll put my Chicago taproom circuits in this episode’s show notes on travelcommons.com. Or check out my list of&nbsp; “Yeah, I’d like to go back there” taprooms in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/05/26/podcast-187-moving-to-a-non-hub-airport-what-makes-a-great-taproom/\">episode #187 show notes</a>. Maybe these can help you with your beer tourism planning.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The two tent poles for our Asheville trip were hiking and beer tourism. But we were the Asheville pioneers among our friend group, so I didn’t have anyone to build taproom circuits for me. So I started down Rob’s path, firing up Google Maps and Untappd, but then… wait a minute. Let’s see what AI can do. So I fired up <a href=\"https://chat.openai.com/\">ChatGPT</a> and typed in “Develop a taproom circuit of microbrewery taprooms in Asheville, NC starting at the Aloft Hotel in Asheville and optimized to minimize walking distance and maximize Untappd ratings. Present it in a table with the brewery name in the first column, the distance from the previous taproom in the second column, the Untappd rating in the third column, and the type of beers served in the fourth column.” The response started with a caveat that it can’t access real-time data and so the Untappd ratings and distances are based on its last update in 2022. After that throat-clearing, ChatGPT spit out a table with 8 taprooms. Eyeballing the list, the names didn’t seem too out of whack, so then I checked the Untappd ratings. None of them were right, and indeed, so far out of whack (all on the high side) that eight months of additional check-in couldn’t have moved the ratings that much. Chalk that up to GPT hallucination, or being a people pleaser and not wanting to say “I don’t know”. Then I plotted the circuit on a map, and it wasn’t -- a circuit, that is. It was a bit more of a random walk, doubling back a couple of times. And, rather than working us back to the Aloft, it ended at the farthest away brewery. So with no friend recommendations and not much help from ChatGPT, I fell back to my old ways --&nbsp; flâneuring. I figured with the beer density in Asheville, a random walk was more likely than not to land me in front of a beer tap. Which pretty much proved to be the case. We did what long-time listener Aaron Woodin called it in the last episode a “walk and gawk”, or maybe&nbsp; a “walk and gulp.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"className\":\"has-medium-font-size\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #196</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As always, you can find us and listen to the current episodes on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. No longer Stitcher, though. SiriusXM pulled the plug on it, though I think you can find TravelCommons on the other Sirius platforms -- Pandora and maybe the Sirius app. But I know that you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page at TravelCommons.com for a transcript of the episode and links to places I’ve mentioned, and to John and Rob’s websites. If you’re not yet subscribed, there’s a drop down Subscribe menu at the top of TravelCommon’s home page. And along the side of the page, you’ll find links to all the TravelCommons’ socials.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to mpeacock on Twitter, write them on the TravelCommons page on Facebook or Instagram, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com.&nbsp; And thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in emails, Tweets and post comments on the website. I really appreciate it.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And until we talk again, safe travels; raise a cold (or cask-temperature) one; and thanks for stopping by the TravelCommons.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_196.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #196 — Cheers to Beer Tourism and Travel','','inherit','closed','closed','','4372-revision-v1','','','2023-09-29 17:28:16','2023-09-29 22:28:16','',4372,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4378',0,'revision','',0),
(4379,1,'2023-09-29 17:41:54','2023-09-29 22:41:54','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/stable-diffusion-xl-beer-3-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"robot in a microbrewery taproom drinking a beer\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" />What Prompt Will Get Me a Pilsner?[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>In this episode, I dive deep into our Dutch tulip-themed trip last April. Before the tulip festival stories, I randomly wander through a potpourri of travel topics -- TSA passenger volumes returning to pre-COVID levels, having a surprisingly satisfying customer service experience with American Airlines, Hertz\'s EV push, and a bit of a chuckle about the misplaced visa panic in the news coverage of the EU\'s impending ETIAS system. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_196.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #196: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN after trips to Portland, ME and Asheville, NC. We flew up to Portland International Jetport; I love that -- <em>jetport</em> -- it’s like a throwback to the ‘50’s and ‘60’s when jet airplanes weren’t assumed. Going down that clickhole, apparently Orlando International was originally called <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orlando_International_Airport\">Orlando Jetport</a>. Feels like they shouldn’t have changed; would’ve had a very EPCOT-y vibe. But anyhow, I think Portland Jetport missed a trick by not playing Steve Miller’s <a href=\"https://youtu.be/JHa1hiFYbFQ?si=3c8q9OhgdJM8YQNR\"><em>Jet Airliner</em></a> on a continuous loop in baggage claim. But they do have a <a href=\"https://youtu.be/Az5p4g_Eyf0?si=HEB3oEj3PCClOO-C\">big stuffed moose</a> there, which is probably more on-brand.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>More… interesting were the 7-foot signs we passed walking up to the TSA lines for our flight back. <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1693357760732111140\">I posted a picture on Twitter</a>. The one to the left said “Are you packing? Guns of any kind are not permitted in carry-on bags”. The one on the right, “Have you checked your firearms?” The small one in between reminded people to dump their oversized liquids. I mean, Really!? We\'re now 22 years on from the Sept 11th attacks and people still can\'t figure this out; that you can’t take a gun on a plane -- nor a sword, nor a knife. Long-time listeners will know that I am in no way an apologist for the TSA, but when I see pictures they post of some of the stuff people try to bring on -- a hatchet at O’Hare, throwing knives at Milwaukee -- I’m not sure how patient <em>I’d</em> be if I had to deal with that level of obliviousness day-in and day-out.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>On the upside, though, I did see that the TSA would allow me to carry-on a live lobster if I wanted to take a bit of Maine back home with me. According to the TSA website “A live lobster is allowed through security and must be transported in a clear, plastic, spill proof container. A TSA officer will visually inspect your lobster at the checkpoint.” I wonder if that visual inspection includes checking that the rubber bands around the lobster claws are intact. I’d think a traveler wielding “un-holstered” lobster claws might not be armed, but certainly could be dangerous.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/JeffSpeed68/54450\">Hula Hoop Party</a> by Stefan Kartenberg (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. &nbsp;Ft: Martijn de Boer, Blue Wave Theory</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>I</em> would’ve loved to play 15 seconds of <em>Jet Airliner</em> just now for the bridge music if I wasn’t about 99% positive I’d get slapped with some copyright fine.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Thelma Smith stopped by the TravelCommons Facebook page to leave a comment about last episode’s discussion of renting a Hertz EV for my Portland trip, which I backed away from as I looked at charging options in the city and up in Bar Harbor. Thelma wrote<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>&nbsp;Wanted to chime in on EVs. We have a Tesla Model 3. When planning out a trip of any length we use <a href=\"https://www.plugshare.com/\">PlugShare</a>. It helps in finding all sorts of chargers and not just Tesla fast chargers. Might help in seeing what’s out there.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Thelma, thanks for that. First I’ve heard of it; looks like a nice crowdsourced status map for chargers. If Hertz had referenced it, it might’ve tipped me to an EV. While it didn’t show many more Bar Harbor options, it showed a lot more chargers in Portland. Hertz continues to send me EV offers, so with this, maybe I give it a go on my next trip.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>JD Power released their <a href=\"https://www.jdpower.com/business/press-releases/2023-north-america-airport-satisfaction-study\">2023 North American Airport Satisfaction Survey</a> last week. We talked in the last episode that, according to TSA counts, we’ve gotten back to pre-COVID passenger volumes. And so it kinda makes sense then to compare JD Power’s 2023 numbers to their pre-COVID 2019 scores. And, conveniently enough, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/10/14/podcast-156-airport-satisfaction-escooters-smaller-luggage/\">episode #156</a>, we talked to the survey’s author, Michael Taylor, after the release of the <a href=\"https://www.jdpower.com/business/press-releases/2019-north-america-airport-satisfaction-study\">2019 survey</a>. Back then, Michael predicted:<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Michael: Everybody\'s phasing in and out of construction. They\'ve got all these various plans that are revolving on the inside and the outside of the airport. And so we\'re going to see this churn in the rankings quite a bit in the next few years as these projects phase in and out.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Well, yes and no. The top of the Mega category was pretty stable -- Detroit, Minneapolis/St Paul, and Las Vegas kept their top 3 positions. But there was a bit of churn under that. San Francisco jumped 7 spots from 13th to 6th, in large part, no doubt to their huge renovations while Orlando dropped 5 spots, from 4th to 9th, and Phoenix dropped 6, from 7th to 13th; neither of which surprised me given my most recent experiences at each.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The benefits of finally finishing big renovations really showed up in the next category, the Large Airports. LaGuardia and New Orleans, airports that I’ve spent way too much time in, finished multi-billion dollar renovations between the 2019 and 2023 survey and the results showed. LaGuardia jumped 13 places from 27th, the last spot on the 2019 survey to 14th, which given all the inherent problems with LaGuardia’s location and the mess that is the tri-state air traffic control, I’m not sure they could’ve gotten much better. New Orleans, though, went from not much better 23rd spot in 2019 to 8th, a 15-place move. Portland, Oregon, 2019’s top Large airport plummeted 11 spots to 12th, while San Diego and Oakland each dropped 10 spots, to 23rd and 24th respectively.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>More interesting than this, to me, was the increase in the average scores in what has been a difficult year for air travel -- on a thousand-point scale, the Mega average increased 16 points, from 756 to 772, while the Large average grew 24 points, from 765 to 789. So if an airport didn’t improve its score, like Orlando or Oakland, its ranking tumbled.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>In the last episode, I talked about the rolling delays for implementation of ETIAS, the EU’s impending version of the US’s ESTA, a pre-travel authorization system. What originally was supposed to go-live in 2021 got pushed to May 2023, which given COVID made sense, when then slipped 6 months to November 2023. Well, OK, maybe a little more testing is for the best. But then, to a more nebulous “sometime in 2024.” That’s never a good sign. And now, a month later, they’re saying <a href=\"https://www.schengenvisainfo.com/news/no-etias-wont-become-operational-in-2024-eu-sources-say/\">May 2025</a>. It feels like this is becoming the EU’s Real ID. Really! Because the new <a href=\"https://www.dhs.gov/news/2022/12/05/dhs-announces-extension-real-id-full-enforcement-deadline\">US Real ID deadline</a> is also May 2025 -- until they change it again.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter (X?) message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page like Thelma did, or on the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can skip all that social media stuff and post your comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/53277\">Fistful of Dub</a>&nbsp;(Feat. Snowflake and DJ Vadim) by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. &nbsp;Ft: snowflake and DJ Vadim</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Beer Tourism and Travel</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Scrolling through the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/episodes/\"><em>Episodes</em></a> section of the TravelCommons website, I saw that it’s been over a year since I’ve done any beer content, and immediately began working on rectifying it. I asked John Holl, long-time beer journalist, editor of <a href=\"https://allaboutbeer.com/\">All About Beer</a>, host of the <a href=\"https://allaboutbeer.com/podcast/drink-beer-think-beer/\">Drink Beer, Think Beer podcast</a>, to give us his thoughts about Beer Tourism…<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: John, thanks for coming on the podcast. We want to talk about beer tourism and travel. I\'m an old guy and for the longest time the idea of beer tourism seemed to start and end with renting lederhosen and heading to Munich for Oktoberfest. And then, in the early/mid-00’s, we got specialty beer releases that morphed into festivals like 3 Floyds’ <a href=\"https://darklordday.info/index.php/Home\">Dark Lord Day</a>. I was living in Chicago at the time and that went from a couple hundred people queuing for a bottle release to, in 2019, 13,000-15,000 people traveling around the country to see it.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>John: Gave people a lot of excuses to cross that Indiana border.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: I\'ve been to Munster Indiana and there\'s not a lot of other reason to go there other than 3 Floyds. And then they <a href=\"https://www.3floyds.com/taproom/\">shut the brew pub down</a> during COVID and now there\'s absolutely no reason to go there. And now, every town/region/state seems to have some sort of a beer trail. Last month, in August, I was in Portland Maine and it was the <a href=\"https://mainebrewersguild.org/visit-breweries/brewery-trail-challenge/\">Maine Beer Trail</a>. And then I was in Asheville, North Carolina at <a href=\"https://ashevillealetrail.com/\">Asheville Ale Trail </a>as well as their brewing district. It seems to be an area that\'s really grown. What are your thoughts on that? How significant is beer tourism for local economies now?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>John: I think it depends on the location. Where there\'s a concentration of breweries, it makes sense to have a beer trail. It makes sense for a guild or an organization to get together to try to convince not only the tourists but the locals to come out as well. There\'s 10,000 breweries thereabouts, maybe a little less, in the US these days and a lot of them are concentrated together. There\'s strength in numbers and hopefully they\'re all doing something that is diverse enough that can get folks to go from one place to the next, to the next without getting Hazy IPA fatigue. And I think Portland Maine is a great example of the breweries that are there. You have some of the old stalwarts, Geary\'s and Allagash. And some of the older, newer ones like Bissel Brothers. And then, there\'s some really cool ones like Belleflower that are there. So you get breweries of different sizes, of different scopes and I think it\'s important for the bottom line of these places so long as they\'re delivering good quality beer. But what\'s cool for me is being a tourist in a new city. I get to go to different areas. I get to go see a place that is not just the picturesque downtown, it\'s not just what\'s on the postcards for sale at the local travel kiosk. So you get to go into neighborhoods where people live and work. And for me, that\'s always a better sense of getting to know a city, of getting to know people, of getting to know a place because neighborhoods can change, especially some place like Chicago, from block to block. You\'re walking into neighborhoods that have different vibes, that have different histories to them, and that feel different. And so when I\'m traveling for beer, it\'s fun for me to not only go and set up at a tap room and spend some time there, but also to walk the neighborhoods as well. And I think that location informs a lot of what beer makers do. I\'ll keep going back to <a href=\"https://dovetailbrewery.com/\">Dovetail</a>; I\'ve spent more time there than I\'ll actually admit, and it\'s right up against the Brown Line and they use that to their advantage. They talk about their coolship; they talk about how their windows open up to the brown line and that the beer is inoculated with whatever the transit line brings them. And I think that\'s a fun thing. You\'re not necessarily tasting a sense of place, but you get the idea that it might be there.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: God only knows I\'ve written the Brown Line enough times. So maybe I\'ve helped Dovetail inoculate some of their coolship beers.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>John: And go to the Pacific Northwest at this time of year, in mid-September/late October when in Yakima and in parts of Oregon, they are harvesting the hops right now. You can bounce from brewery to brewery and the air is aromatic with fresh hops. The brewers are making fresh and wet hot beers. People are coming in from around the country, from around the world. There\'s an excitement and an energy that exists because of the agricultural product that is going into these beers and because of the harvest window as well. So, it doesn\'t always have to be a festival; it can be for a harvest season. And I think that that\'s another cool way that folks who aren\'t even in the beer industry can experience a different aspect of their pints.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: What\'s the best way to find out what\'s going on in a location? How do you think about where you\'re gonna go?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>John: I like not having firm plans when I\'m traveling because the other thing about beer tourism -- we\'re talking about beer trails -- is you start at one place and you say, “OK, we got five places on our list today.” So we say you\'re just having a pint at each. It\'s still five pints at the end of the day and even for a serious drinker like me, that\'s a lot. But if you\'re having a good time, I think it\'s great to not have structure because if you say, “OK, we\'re at stop number two and, and we have three more stops in front of us,” but we\'re really liking this, and they have this other beer that I want to try, and we\'re comfortable, and we\'re in good seats, and the food truck is awesome and all that -- just stay there, live in that moment. I feel I\'ve seen too many people get caught up in this sort of ticking culture where we have to hit all of these spots for whatever sort of weird list and you miss out on the fun experiences. Beer is about camaraderie. It\'s about being in the place. It\'s about experiencing flavor. And if you\'re rushing through it, it\'s not that much fun. I think beer in the way that it\'s grown over the last couple of decades -- it\'s not doing super-well volume-wise or sales-wise comparatively; it\'s like 12-13% of the overall marketplace -- but I think it has helped people appreciate flavors better. And to be a little bit more curious and to be a little bit more experimental.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: I think there\'s also a learning component too that I think you brought up, which is, you\'re going to push yourself outside your normal boundaries, outside of what I\'ve called a travel bubble…</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>John: That\'s the cool thing about travel, right? You talk to folks all the time about when they go to a new place and they want to have the local drink or they want to have the local food because they want to immerse themselves in that culture. You can do that with beer no matter where you go. So much of what brewers are doing these days too. When you travel, if you only drink American Light Lager, or you only drink Irish Stout. So you only drink something, you know, particular. If you\'re traveling, you might try the göse, you might try a lambic, you might try a barley wine or something like that because you\'re feeling a little bit more loose and unencumbered from the constraints of your daily life. And that, for me, is sort of the fun thing about beer. Usually it\'ll taste better from that place because you\'re surrounded by the people who made it, and the people who also were excited to be there. It\'s like folks who go on vacation to a tropical island and they\'re drinking mai tais, and it\'s the best mai tai they’ve ever had. They learn how to make the mai tai, and they come home and they do it on their back patio and they think “This doesn\'t taste as good.” And it\'s because you\'ve lost that sense of place. And so for me, I\'m always just trying to experience not just what\'s in my glass, but what\'s around me as well.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: John, I appreciate you coming on and talking to us about beer tourism and beer travel. It\'s something we\'ve talked a lot about on this podcast only just because I really like beer. It\'s been great talking to you. Thanks very much, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/John_Holl\" title=\"\">John Hall</a>, editor of <a href=\"https://allaboutbeer.com/\">All About Beer</a>. Both your <a href=\"https://allaboutbeer.com/podcast/\">podcast</a> and your website -- check it out. Thank you very much.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>John: Mark, thank you.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And, as always, check out the show notes on the TravelCommons podcast for links to read and listen to John.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/3lb3r3th/44072\">Misunderstood</a> by 3lb3r3th (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. &nbsp;Ft: Alchemistry</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>How To Plan a Beer Trip and Beer Tourism?</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If John Holl has you thinking about beer tourism, the next logical question -- how do you plan it? Here’s John’s approach…<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>John: I plan out travel, especially for specific events like hop harvest or Oktoberfest, which I\'m going to for the first time this year. I plan that out at least a year in advance because I want to make sure that when I can get hotels and transportation, and to budget out all of that. Social media is terrible in a lot of ways, but it can also be helpful in certain ways, getting you excited about traveling to new places. When I hear about annual beer festivals in Belgium or see folks who are out at hop harvest, picking hops, it gets me in a certain sort of way, if I\'m sitting at my desk at home. saying “Gosh, I wish I was there.”&nbsp; So then I put stuff on the calendar and start to say, “OK, well, think about this” and then go from there. When I\'m traveling to a city for work, I\'m usually going to visit specific breweries or specific people. But nine times out of 10, I will also call friends of mine and say, “Where are you drinking these days?” or “What\'s exciting you these days?” There\'s always going to be the one place that the serious beer nerd should go to,&nbsp; but then you peel that onion back just a little bit and all of a sudden, it\'s “Well, you know, I actually had a really fun experience at such and such place” or “I had this one beer” or “They\'re doing some cool stuff” and I start to say, “All right... Well, I trust them, so what do I have to lose?” It\'s either gonna be a great pint or it\'s not...</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>So there you go, advanced planning for the big stuff and have beer nerd friends in every city who can point you to the out-of-the-way nuggets. The latter is probably a <em>bit</em> easier for John, a well-known beer journalist, than for the rest of us.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/04/10/podcast-174-how-the-pros-plan-their-taproom-tourism/\">episode #174</a>, I talked about this with Rob Cheshire, a long time TravelCommons listener and, for the last 3+ years, a UK craft beer podcaster with his <a href=\"https://thisweekincraft.beer/this-week-in-craft-beer-podcasts/\">This Week in Craft Beer</a> podcast<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: How do you plan your taproom visits?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Rob: It\'s all driven through Google for me. I might have some idea based on previous reading about some big-name places that I want to visit in a particular city. But beyond that, I\'m just going to Google. First of all, I\'ll plot a Google map for the city. I\'ll end up with 50-60, maybe even 100 pins on the map. Pretty quickly, I\'ll go to <a href=\"https://untappd.com\">Untappd</a> and look at the average brewery rating. And this really makes brewers cross how much I rely on Untappd for this type of thing because I had this conversation a load of times on the podcast with them. But I do rely on brewery ratings on Untappd, and I find it very reliable. Quite frankly, if a brewery has an average rating of anything close to 4, then, obviously it\'s a massive generalization to say whatever they brew, but most of their beers are gonna be great. If the brewery rating is anywhere close to 3.5, it\'s going to be very mediocre at best. And somewhere in between is where most people land. So 3.6, eh...;&nbsp; 3.8, it\'s a good brewery; 3.9 is a terrific brewery; 4 is a great brewery. And so I\'m looking for those 3.8 and 3.9 average brewery ratings. But what I\'m looking for, really, is that district where I can walk from one to another and really make an afternoon of it.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Me? I kinda mash the two up. Like Rob, I’m a pretty solid Untappd user. Rob often says it’s his “beer diary” and that’s pretty much what it is for me too.&nbsp;When people ask me for recommendations for a city -- Budapest was the most recent ask -- I can quickly pop open the app and give people a list. And when <em>I’m</em> in a new city trying to find a good place for a beer, I’ll open it up and look at the Nearby Activity tab to see where (and what) folks are drinking. And back to <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/06/20/podcast-194-best-laid-travel-plans-roaming-entropy/\">episode #194</a>’s discussion of <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fl%C3%A2neur\">flâneuring</a>, or “roaming entropy” as I like to call it, some of my best “wanders” had, as their eventual end-point, a bar or taproom that I found that way.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But, as John says, if you let your friends know you’re deep into beer, they’ll be looking out for you. Visiting Savannah, GA back in May, our friends couldn’t wait to take me downtown to <a href=\"https://www.twotidesbrewing.com/\">Two Tides Brewing</a>, a microbrewery in a <a href=\"https://www.cntraveler.com/bars/savannah/two-tides-brewing-co\">100-year-old house</a> with great beers but no door onto the balcony because of a “door tax” way back when, where houses were taxed on the number of doors they had. So we ducked down and walked through a big window with our glasses… <em>multiple</em> times. Great beer and a history lesson; not sure I would’ve found that without a little help. Coming up in a couple of weeks, we’re heading back to New York City and our daughter already has an <em>ambitious</em> list for us.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Rob Cheshire and I have traded beer touring tips for our home towns. Rob took me to his favorite places in the railway arches of London’s Bermondsey Beer Mile. But when Rob hit Chicago three weeks after we’d moved to Nashville, I couldn’t reciprocate the personal tour, and so instead emailed him the couple of taproom circuits I <em>would’ve</em> taken him on if he’d showed up a month sooner. And actually, for all of you -- my friends and listeners -- since I can’t email it to you, I’ll put my Chicago taproom circuits in this episode’s show notes on travelcommons.com. Or check out my list of&nbsp; “Yeah, I’d like to go back there” taprooms in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/05/26/podcast-187-moving-to-a-non-hub-airport-what-makes-a-great-taproom/\">episode #187 show notes</a>. Maybe these can help you with your beer tourism planning.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The two tent poles for our Asheville trip were hiking and beer tourism. But we were the Asheville pioneers among our friend group, so I didn’t have anyone to build taproom circuits for me. So I started down Rob’s path, firing up Google Maps and Untappd, but then… wait a minute. Let’s see what AI can do. So I fired up <a href=\"https://chat.openai.com/\">ChatGPT</a> and typed in “Develop a taproom circuit of microbrewery taprooms in Asheville, NC starting at the Aloft Hotel in Asheville and optimized to minimize walking distance and maximize Untappd ratings. Present it in a table with the brewery name in the first column, the distance from the previous taproom in the second column, the Untappd rating in the third column, and the type of beers served in the fourth column.” The response started with a caveat that it can’t access real-time data and so the Untappd ratings and distances are based on its last update in 2022. After that throat-clearing, ChatGPT spit out a table with 8 taprooms. Eyeballing the list, the names didn’t seem too out of whack, so then I checked the Untappd ratings. None of them were right, and indeed, so far out of whack (all on the high side) that eight months of additional check-in couldn’t have moved the ratings that much. Chalk that up to GPT hallucination, or being a people pleaser and not wanting to say “I don’t know”. Then I plotted the circuit on a map, and it wasn’t -- a circuit, that is. It was a bit more of a random walk, doubling back a couple of times. And, rather than working us back to the Aloft, it ended at the farthest away brewery. So with no friend recommendations and not much help from ChatGPT, I fell back to my old ways --&nbsp; flâneuring. I figured with the beer density in Asheville, a random walk was more likely than not to land me in front of a beer tap. Which pretty much proved to be the case. We did what long-time listener Aaron Woodin called it in the last episode a “walk and gawk”, or maybe&nbsp; a “walk and gulp.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"className\":\"has-medium-font-size\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #196</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As always, you can find us and listen to the current episodes on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. No longer Stitcher, though. SiriusXM pulled the plug on it, though I think you can find TravelCommons on the other Sirius platforms -- Pandora and maybe the Sirius app. But I know that you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page at TravelCommons.com for a transcript of the episode and links to places I’ve mentioned, and to John and Rob’s websites. If you’re not yet subscribed, there’s a drop down Subscribe menu at the top of TravelCommon’s home page. And along the side of the page, you’ll find links to all the TravelCommons’ socials.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to mpeacock on Twitter, write them on the TravelCommons page on Facebook or Instagram, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com.&nbsp; And thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in emails, Tweets and post comments on the website. I really appreciate it.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And until we talk again, safe travels; raise a cold (or cask-temperature) one; and thanks for stopping by the TravelCommons.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_196.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #196 — Cheers to Beer Tourism and Travel!','','inherit','closed','closed','','4372-revision-v1','','','2023-09-29 17:41:54','2023-09-29 22:41:54','',4372,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4379',0,'revision','',0),
(4380,1,'2023-09-29 18:11:57','2023-09-29 23:11:57','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/stable-diffusion-xl-beer-3-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"robot in a microbrewery taproom drinking a beer\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" />What Prompt Will Get Me a Pilsner?[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>In this beer-focused episode, John Holl, editor of <a href=\"http://allaboutbeer.com\" title=\"All About Beer\"><em>All About Beer</em></a>, gives us his take on beer tourism and tips on how to beer travels. I talk about my experience planning my Asheville, NC taproom visits with ChatGPT. We also dive deep into the new <a href=\"https://www.jdpower.com/business/press-releases/2023-north-america-airport-satisfaction-study\" title=\"JD Power Airport Satisfaction Survey\">JD Power Airport Satisfaction Survey</a> and do a quick update about the EU\'s delayed ETIAS system. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_196.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #196: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN after trips to Portland, ME and Asheville, NC. We flew up to Portland International Jetport; I love that -- <em>jetport</em> -- it’s like a throwback to the ‘50’s and ‘60’s when jet airplanes weren’t assumed. Going down that clickhole, apparently Orlando International was originally called <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orlando_International_Airport\">Orlando Jetport</a>. Feels like they shouldn’t have changed; would’ve had a very EPCOT-y vibe. But anyhow, I think Portland Jetport missed a trick by not playing Steve Miller’s <a href=\"https://youtu.be/JHa1hiFYbFQ?si=3c8q9OhgdJM8YQNR\"><em>Jet Airliner</em></a> on a continuous loop in baggage claim. But they do have a <a href=\"https://youtu.be/Az5p4g_Eyf0?si=HEB3oEj3PCClOO-C\">big stuffed moose</a> there, which is probably more on-brand.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>More… interesting were the 7-foot signs we passed walking up to the TSA lines for our flight back. <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1693357760732111140\">I posted a picture on Twitter</a>. The one to the left said “Are you packing? Guns of any kind are not permitted in carry-on bags”. The one on the right, “Have you checked your firearms?” The small one in between reminded people to dump their oversized liquids. I mean, Really!? We\'re now 22 years on from the Sept 11th attacks and people still can\'t figure this out; that you can’t take a gun on a plane -- nor a sword, nor a knife. Long-time listeners will know that I am in no way an apologist for the TSA, but when I see pictures they post of some of the stuff people try to bring on -- a hatchet at O’Hare, throwing knives at Milwaukee -- I’m not sure how patient <em>I’d</em> be if I had to deal with that level of obliviousness day-in and day-out.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>On the upside, though, I did see that the TSA would allow me to carry-on a live lobster if I wanted to take a bit of Maine back home with me. According to the TSA website “A live lobster is allowed through security and must be transported in a clear, plastic, spill proof container. A TSA officer will visually inspect your lobster at the checkpoint.” I wonder if that visual inspection includes checking that the rubber bands around the lobster claws are intact. I’d think a traveler wielding “un-holstered” lobster claws might not be armed, but certainly could be dangerous.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/JeffSpeed68/54450\">Hula Hoop Party</a> by Stefan Kartenberg (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. &nbsp;Ft: Martijn de Boer, Blue Wave Theory</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>I</em> would’ve loved to play 15 seconds of <em>Jet Airliner</em> just now for the bridge music if I wasn’t about 99% positive I’d get slapped with some copyright fine.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Thelma Smith stopped by the TravelCommons Facebook page to leave a comment about last episode’s discussion of renting a Hertz EV for my Portland trip, which I backed away from as I looked at charging options in the city and up in Bar Harbor. Thelma wrote<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>&nbsp;Wanted to chime in on EVs. We have a Tesla Model 3. When planning out a trip of any length we use <a href=\"https://www.plugshare.com/\">PlugShare</a>. It helps in finding all sorts of chargers and not just Tesla fast chargers. Might help in seeing what’s out there.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Thelma, thanks for that. First I’ve heard of it; looks like a nice crowdsourced status map for chargers. If Hertz had referenced it, it might’ve tipped me to an EV. While it didn’t show many more Bar Harbor options, it showed a lot more chargers in Portland. Hertz continues to send me EV offers, so with this, maybe I give it a go on my next trip.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>JD Power released their <a href=\"https://www.jdpower.com/business/press-releases/2023-north-america-airport-satisfaction-study\">2023 North American Airport Satisfaction Survey</a> last week. We talked in the last episode that, according to TSA counts, we’ve gotten back to pre-COVID passenger volumes. And so it kinda makes sense then to compare JD Power’s 2023 numbers to their pre-COVID 2019 scores. And, conveniently enough, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/10/14/podcast-156-airport-satisfaction-escooters-smaller-luggage/\">episode #156</a>, we talked to the survey’s author, Michael Taylor, after the release of the <a href=\"https://www.jdpower.com/business/press-releases/2019-north-america-airport-satisfaction-study\">2019 survey</a>. Back then, Michael predicted:<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Michael: Everybody\'s phasing in and out of construction. They\'ve got all these various plans that are revolving on the inside and the outside of the airport. And so we\'re going to see this churn in the rankings quite a bit in the next few years as these projects phase in and out.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Well, yes and no. The top of the Mega category was pretty stable -- Detroit, Minneapolis/St Paul, and Las Vegas kept their top 3 positions. But there was a bit of churn under that. San Francisco jumped 7 spots from 13th to 6th, in large part, no doubt to their huge renovations while Orlando dropped 5 spots, from 4th to 9th, and Phoenix dropped 6, from 7th to 13th; neither of which surprised me given my most recent experiences at each.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The benefits of finally finishing big renovations really showed up in the next category, the Large Airports. LaGuardia and New Orleans, airports that I’ve spent way too much time in, finished multi-billion dollar renovations between the 2019 and 2023 survey and the results showed. LaGuardia jumped 13 places from 27th, the last spot on the 2019 survey to 14th, which given all the inherent problems with LaGuardia’s location and the mess that is the tri-state air traffic control, I’m not sure they could’ve gotten much better. New Orleans, though, went from not much better 23rd spot in 2019 to 8th, a 15-place move. Portland, Oregon, 2019’s top Large airport plummeted 11 spots to 12th, while San Diego and Oakland each dropped 10 spots, to 23rd and 24th respectively.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>More interesting than this, to me, was the increase in the average scores in what has been a difficult year for air travel -- on a thousand-point scale, the Mega average increased 16 points, from 756 to 772, while the Large average grew 24 points, from 765 to 789. So if an airport didn’t improve its score, like Orlando or Oakland, its ranking tumbled.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>In the last episode, I talked about the rolling delays for implementation of ETIAS, the EU’s impending version of the US’s ESTA, a pre-travel authorization system. What originally was supposed to go-live in 2021 got pushed to May 2023, which given COVID made sense, when then slipped 6 months to November 2023. Well, OK, maybe a little more testing is for the best. But then, to a more nebulous “sometime in 2024.” That’s never a good sign. And now, a month later, they’re saying <a href=\"https://www.schengenvisainfo.com/news/no-etias-wont-become-operational-in-2024-eu-sources-say/\">May 2025</a>. It feels like this is becoming the EU’s Real ID. Really! Because the new <a href=\"https://www.dhs.gov/news/2022/12/05/dhs-announces-extension-real-id-full-enforcement-deadline\">US Real ID deadline</a> is also May 2025 -- until they change it again.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter (X?) message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page like Thelma did, or on the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can skip all that social media stuff and post your comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/53277\">Fistful of Dub</a>&nbsp;(Feat. Snowflake and DJ Vadim) by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. &nbsp;Ft: snowflake and DJ Vadim</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Beer Tourism and Travel</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Scrolling through the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/episodes/\"><em>Episodes</em></a> section of the TravelCommons website, I saw that it’s been over a year since I’ve done any beer content, and immediately began working on rectifying it. I asked John Holl, long-time beer journalist, editor of <a href=\"https://allaboutbeer.com/\">All About Beer</a>, host of the <a href=\"https://allaboutbeer.com/podcast/drink-beer-think-beer/\">Drink Beer, Think Beer podcast</a>, to give us his thoughts about Beer Tourism…<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: John, thanks for coming on the podcast. We want to talk about beer tourism and travel. I\'m an old guy and for the longest time the idea of beer tourism seemed to start and end with renting lederhosen and heading to Munich for Oktoberfest. And then, in the early/mid-00’s, we got specialty beer releases that morphed into festivals like 3 Floyds’ <a href=\"https://darklordday.info/index.php/Home\">Dark Lord Day</a>. I was living in Chicago at the time and that went from a couple hundred people queuing for a bottle release to, in 2019, 13,000-15,000 people traveling around the country to see it.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>John: Gave people a lot of excuses to cross that Indiana border.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: I\'ve been to Munster Indiana and there\'s not a lot of other reason to go there other than 3 Floyds. And then they <a href=\"https://www.3floyds.com/taproom/\">shut the brew pub down</a> during COVID and now there\'s absolutely no reason to go there. And now, every town/region/state seems to have some sort of a beer trail. Last month, in August, I was in Portland Maine and it was the <a href=\"https://mainebrewersguild.org/visit-breweries/brewery-trail-challenge/\">Maine Beer Trail</a>. And then I was in Asheville, North Carolina at <a href=\"https://ashevillealetrail.com/\">Asheville Ale Trail </a>as well as their brewing district. It seems to be an area that\'s really grown. What are your thoughts on that? How significant is beer tourism for local economies now?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>John: I think it depends on the location. Where there\'s a concentration of breweries, it makes sense to have a beer trail. It makes sense for a guild or an organization to get together to try to convince not only the tourists but the locals to come out as well. There\'s 10,000 breweries thereabouts, maybe a little less, in the US these days and a lot of them are concentrated together. There\'s strength in numbers and hopefully they\'re all doing something that is diverse enough that can get folks to go from one place to the next, to the next without getting Hazy IPA fatigue. And I think Portland Maine is a great example of the breweries that are there. You have some of the old stalwarts, Geary\'s and Allagash. And some of the older, newer ones like Bissel Brothers. And then, there\'s some really cool ones like Belleflower that are there. So you get breweries of different sizes, of different scopes and I think it\'s important for the bottom line of these places so long as they\'re delivering good quality beer. But what\'s cool for me is being a tourist in a new city. I get to go to different areas. I get to go see a place that is not just the picturesque downtown, it\'s not just what\'s on the postcards for sale at the local travel kiosk. So you get to go into neighborhoods where people live and work. And for me, that\'s always a better sense of getting to know a city, of getting to know people, of getting to know a place because neighborhoods can change, especially some place like Chicago, from block to block. You\'re walking into neighborhoods that have different vibes, that have different histories to them, and that feel different. And so when I\'m traveling for beer, it\'s fun for me to not only go and set up at a tap room and spend some time there, but also to walk the neighborhoods as well. And I think that location informs a lot of what beer makers do. I\'ll keep going back to <a href=\"https://dovetailbrewery.com/\">Dovetail</a>; I\'ve spent more time there than I\'ll actually admit, and it\'s right up against the Brown Line and they use that to their advantage. They talk about their coolship; they talk about how their windows open up to the brown line and that the beer is inoculated with whatever the transit line brings them. And I think that\'s a fun thing. You\'re not necessarily tasting a sense of place, but you get the idea that it might be there.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: God only knows I\'ve written the Brown Line enough times. So maybe I\'ve helped Dovetail inoculate some of their coolship beers.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>John: And go to the Pacific Northwest at this time of year, in mid-September/late October when in Yakima and in parts of Oregon, they are harvesting the hops right now. You can bounce from brewery to brewery and the air is aromatic with fresh hops. The brewers are making fresh and wet hot beers. People are coming in from around the country, from around the world. There\'s an excitement and an energy that exists because of the agricultural product that is going into these beers and because of the harvest window as well. So, it doesn\'t always have to be a festival; it can be for a harvest season. And I think that that\'s another cool way that folks who aren\'t even in the beer industry can experience a different aspect of their pints.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: What\'s the best way to find out what\'s going on in a location? How do you think about where you\'re gonna go?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>John: I like not having firm plans when I\'m traveling because the other thing about beer tourism -- we\'re talking about beer trails -- is you start at one place and you say, “OK, we got five places on our list today.” So we say you\'re just having a pint at each. It\'s still five pints at the end of the day and even for a serious drinker like me, that\'s a lot. But if you\'re having a good time, I think it\'s great to not have structure because if you say, “OK, we\'re at stop number two and, and we have three more stops in front of us,” but we\'re really liking this, and they have this other beer that I want to try, and we\'re comfortable, and we\'re in good seats, and the food truck is awesome and all that -- just stay there, live in that moment. I feel I\'ve seen too many people get caught up in this sort of ticking culture where we have to hit all of these spots for whatever sort of weird list and you miss out on the fun experiences. Beer is about camaraderie. It\'s about being in the place. It\'s about experiencing flavor. And if you\'re rushing through it, it\'s not that much fun. I think beer in the way that it\'s grown over the last couple of decades -- it\'s not doing super-well volume-wise or sales-wise comparatively; it\'s like 12-13% of the overall marketplace -- but I think it has helped people appreciate flavors better. And to be a little bit more curious and to be a little bit more experimental.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: I think there\'s also a learning component too that I think you brought up, which is, you\'re going to push yourself outside your normal boundaries, outside of what I\'ve called a travel bubble…</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>John: That\'s the cool thing about travel, right? You talk to folks all the time about when they go to a new place and they want to have the local drink or they want to have the local food because they want to immerse themselves in that culture. You can do that with beer no matter where you go. So much of what brewers are doing these days too. When you travel, if you only drink American Light Lager, or you only drink Irish Stout. So you only drink something, you know, particular. If you\'re traveling, you might try the göse, you might try a lambic, you might try a barley wine or something like that because you\'re feeling a little bit more loose and unencumbered from the constraints of your daily life. And that, for me, is sort of the fun thing about beer. Usually it\'ll taste better from that place because you\'re surrounded by the people who made it, and the people who also were excited to be there. It\'s like folks who go on vacation to a tropical island and they\'re drinking mai tais, and it\'s the best mai tai they’ve ever had. They learn how to make the mai tai, and they come home and they do it on their back patio and they think “This doesn\'t taste as good.” And it\'s because you\'ve lost that sense of place. And so for me, I\'m always just trying to experience not just what\'s in my glass, but what\'s around me as well.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: John, I appreciate you coming on and talking to us about beer tourism and beer travel. It\'s something we\'ve talked a lot about on this podcast only just because I really like beer. It\'s been great talking to you. Thanks very much, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/John_Holl\" title=\"\">John Hall</a>, editor of <a href=\"https://allaboutbeer.com/\">All About Beer</a>. Both your <a href=\"https://allaboutbeer.com/podcast/\">podcast</a> and your website -- check it out. Thank you very much.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>John: Mark, thank you.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And, as always, check out the show notes on the TravelCommons podcast for links to read and listen to John.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/3lb3r3th/44072\">Misunderstood</a> by 3lb3r3th (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. &nbsp;Ft: Alchemistry</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>How To Plan a Beer Trip and Beer Tourism?</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If John Holl has you thinking about beer tourism, the next logical question -- how do you plan it? Here’s John’s approach…<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>John: I plan out travel, especially for specific events like hop harvest or Oktoberfest, which I\'m going to for the first time this year. I plan that out at least a year in advance because I want to make sure that when I can get hotels and transportation, and to budget out all of that. Social media is terrible in a lot of ways, but it can also be helpful in certain ways, getting you excited about traveling to new places. When I hear about annual beer festivals in Belgium or see folks who are out at hop harvest, picking hops, it gets me in a certain sort of way, if I\'m sitting at my desk at home. saying “Gosh, I wish I was there.”&nbsp; So then I put stuff on the calendar and start to say, “OK, well, think about this” and then go from there. When I\'m traveling to a city for work, I\'m usually going to visit specific breweries or specific people. But nine times out of 10, I will also call friends of mine and say, “Where are you drinking these days?” or “What\'s exciting you these days?” There\'s always going to be the one place that the serious beer nerd should go to,&nbsp; but then you peel that onion back just a little bit and all of a sudden, it\'s “Well, you know, I actually had a really fun experience at such and such place” or “I had this one beer” or “They\'re doing some cool stuff” and I start to say, “All right... Well, I trust them, so what do I have to lose?” It\'s either gonna be a great pint or it\'s not...</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>So there you go, advanced planning for the big stuff and have beer nerd friends in every city who can point you to the out-of-the-way nuggets. The latter is probably a <em>bit</em> easier for John, a well-known beer journalist, than for the rest of us.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/04/10/podcast-174-how-the-pros-plan-their-taproom-tourism/\">episode #174</a>, I talked about this with Rob Cheshire, a long time TravelCommons listener and, for the last 3+ years, a UK craft beer podcaster with his <a href=\"https://thisweekincraft.beer/this-week-in-craft-beer-podcasts/\">This Week in Craft Beer</a> podcast<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: How do you plan your taproom visits?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Rob: It\'s all driven through Google for me. I might have some idea based on previous reading about some big-name places that I want to visit in a particular city. But beyond that, I\'m just going to Google. First of all, I\'ll plot a Google map for the city. I\'ll end up with 50-60, maybe even 100 pins on the map. Pretty quickly, I\'ll go to <a href=\"https://untappd.com\">Untappd</a> and look at the average brewery rating. And this really makes brewers cross how much I rely on Untappd for this type of thing because I had this conversation a load of times on the podcast with them. But I do rely on brewery ratings on Untappd, and I find it very reliable. Quite frankly, if a brewery has an average rating of anything close to 4, then, obviously it\'s a massive generalization to say whatever they brew, but most of their beers are gonna be great. If the brewery rating is anywhere close to 3.5, it\'s going to be very mediocre at best. And somewhere in between is where most people land. So 3.6, eh...;&nbsp; 3.8, it\'s a good brewery; 3.9 is a terrific brewery; 4 is a great brewery. And so I\'m looking for those 3.8 and 3.9 average brewery ratings. But what I\'m looking for, really, is that district where I can walk from one to another and really make an afternoon of it.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Me? I kinda mash the two up. Like Rob, I’m a pretty solid Untappd user. Rob often says it’s his “beer diary” and that’s pretty much what it is for me too.&nbsp;When people ask me for recommendations for a city -- Budapest was the most recent ask -- I can quickly pop open the app and give people a list. And when <em>I’m</em> in a new city trying to find a good place for a beer, I’ll open it up and look at the Nearby Activity tab to see where (and what) folks are drinking. And back to <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/06/20/podcast-194-best-laid-travel-plans-roaming-entropy/\">episode #194</a>’s discussion of <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fl%C3%A2neur\">flâneuring</a>, or “roaming entropy” as I like to call it, some of my best “wanders” had, as their eventual end-point, a bar or taproom that I found that way.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But, as John says, if you let your friends know you’re deep into beer, they’ll be looking out for you. Visiting Savannah, GA back in May, our friends couldn’t wait to take me downtown to <a href=\"https://www.twotidesbrewing.com/\">Two Tides Brewing</a>, a microbrewery in a <a href=\"https://www.cntraveler.com/bars/savannah/two-tides-brewing-co\">100-year-old house</a> with great beers but no door onto the balcony because of a “door tax” way back when, where houses were taxed on the number of doors they had. So we ducked down and walked through a big window with our glasses… <em>multiple</em> times. Great beer and a history lesson; not sure I would’ve found that without a little help. Coming up in a couple of weeks, we’re heading back to New York City and our daughter already has an <em>ambitious</em> list for us.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Rob Cheshire and I have traded beer touring tips for our home towns. Rob took me to his favorite places in the railway arches of London’s Bermondsey Beer Mile. But when Rob hit Chicago three weeks after we’d moved to Nashville, I couldn’t reciprocate the personal tour, and so instead emailed him the couple of taproom circuits I <em>would’ve</em> taken him on if he’d showed up a month sooner. And actually, for all of you -- my friends and listeners -- since I can’t email it to you, I’ll put my Chicago taproom circuits in this episode’s show notes on travelcommons.com. Or check out my list of&nbsp; “Yeah, I’d like to go back there” taprooms in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/05/26/podcast-187-moving-to-a-non-hub-airport-what-makes-a-great-taproom/\">episode #187 show notes</a>. Maybe these can help you with your beer tourism planning.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The two tent poles for our Asheville trip were hiking and beer tourism. But we were the Asheville pioneers among our friend group, so I didn’t have anyone to build taproom circuits for me. So I started down Rob’s path, firing up Google Maps and Untappd, but then… wait a minute. Let’s see what AI can do. So I fired up <a href=\"https://chat.openai.com/\">ChatGPT</a> and typed in “Develop a taproom circuit of microbrewery taprooms in Asheville, NC starting at the Aloft Hotel in Asheville and optimized to minimize walking distance and maximize Untappd ratings. Present it in a table with the brewery name in the first column, the distance from the previous taproom in the second column, the Untappd rating in the third column, and the type of beers served in the fourth column.” The response started with a caveat that it can’t access real-time data and so the Untappd ratings and distances are based on its last update in 2022. After that throat-clearing, ChatGPT spit out a table with 8 taprooms. Eyeballing the list, the names didn’t seem too out of whack, so then I checked the Untappd ratings. None of them were right, and indeed, so far out of whack (all on the high side) that eight months of additional check-in couldn’t have moved the ratings that much. Chalk that up to GPT hallucination, or being a people pleaser and not wanting to say “I don’t know”. Then I plotted the circuit on a map, and it wasn’t -- a circuit, that is. It was a bit more of a random walk, doubling back a couple of times. And, rather than working us back to the Aloft, it ended at the farthest away brewery. So with no friend recommendations and not much help from ChatGPT, I fell back to my old ways --&nbsp; flâneuring. I figured with the beer density in Asheville, a random walk was more likely than not to land me in front of a beer tap. Which pretty much proved to be the case. We did what long-time listener Aaron Woodin called it in the last episode a “walk and gawk”, or maybe&nbsp; a “walk and gulp.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"className\":\"has-medium-font-size\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #196</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As always, you can find us and listen to the current episodes on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. No longer Stitcher, though. SiriusXM pulled the plug on it, though I think you can find TravelCommons on the other Sirius platforms -- Pandora and maybe the Sirius app. But I know that you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page at TravelCommons.com for a transcript of the episode and links to places I’ve mentioned, and to John and Rob’s websites. If you’re not yet subscribed, there’s a drop down Subscribe menu at the top of TravelCommon’s home page. And along the side of the page, you’ll find links to all the TravelCommons’ socials.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to mpeacock on Twitter, write them on the TravelCommons page on Facebook or Instagram, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com.&nbsp; And thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in emails, Tweets and post comments on the website. I really appreciate it.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And until we talk again, safe travels; raise a cold (or cask-temperature) one; and thanks for stopping by the TravelCommons.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_196.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #196 — Cheers to Beer Tourism and Travel!','','inherit','closed','closed','','4372-revision-v1','','','2023-09-29 18:11:57','2023-09-29 23:11:57','',4372,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4380',0,'revision','',0),
(4382,1,'2023-10-01 10:42:12','2023-10-01 15:42:12','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/stable-diffusion-xl-beer-3-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"robot in a microbrewery taproom drinking a beer\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" />What Prompt Will Get Me a Pilsner?[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>In this beer-focused episode, John Holl, editor of <a href=\"http://allaboutbeer.com\" title=\"All About Beer\"><em>All About Beer</em></a>, gives us his take on beer tourism and tips on how to beer travels. I talk about my experience planning my Asheville, NC taproom visits with ChatGPT. We also dive deep into the new <a href=\"https://www.jdpower.com/business/press-releases/2023-north-america-airport-satisfaction-study\" title=\"JD Power Airport Satisfaction Survey\">JD Power Airport Satisfaction Survey</a> and do a quick update about the EU\'s delayed ETIAS system. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_196.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #196: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN after trips to Portland, ME and Asheville, NC. We flew up to Portland International Jetport; I love that -- <em>jetport</em> -- it’s like a throwback to the ‘50’s and ‘60’s when jet airplanes weren’t assumed. Going down that clickhole, apparently Orlando International was originally called <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orlando_International_Airport\">Orlando Jetport</a>. Feels like they shouldn’t have changed; would’ve had a very EPCOT-y vibe. But anyhow, I think Portland Jetport missed a trick by not playing Steve Miller’s <a href=\"https://youtu.be/JHa1hiFYbFQ?si=3c8q9OhgdJM8YQNR\"><em>Jet Airliner</em></a> on a continuous loop in baggage claim. But they do have a <a href=\"https://youtu.be/Az5p4g_Eyf0?si=HEB3oEj3PCClOO-C\">big stuffed moose</a> there, which is probably more on-brand.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>More… interesting were the 7-foot signs we passed walking up to the TSA lines for our flight back. <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1693357760732111140\">I posted a picture on Twitter</a>. The one to the left said “Are you packing? Guns of any kind are not permitted in carry-on bags”. The one on the right, “Have you checked your firearms?” The small one in between reminded people to dump their oversized liquids. I mean, Really!? We\'re now 22 years on from the Sept 11th attacks and people still can\'t figure this out; that you can’t take a gun on a plane -- nor a sword, nor a knife. Long-time listeners will know that I am in no way an apologist for the TSA, but when I see pictures they post of some of the stuff people try to bring on -- a hatchet at O’Hare, throwing knives at Milwaukee -- I’m not sure how patient <em>I’d</em> be if I had to deal with that level of obliviousness day-in and day-out.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>On the upside, though, I did see that the TSA would allow me to carry-on a live lobster if I wanted to take a bit of Maine back home with me. According to the TSA website “A live lobster is allowed through security and must be transported in a clear, plastic, spill proof container. A TSA officer will visually inspect your lobster at the checkpoint.” I wonder if that visual inspection includes checking that the rubber bands around the lobster claws are intact. I’d think a traveler wielding “un-holstered” lobster claws might not be armed, but certainly could be dangerous.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/JeffSpeed68/54450\">Hula Hoop Party</a> by Stefan Kartenberg (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. &nbsp;Ft: Martijn de Boer, Blue Wave Theory</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>I</em> would’ve loved to play 15 seconds of <em>Jet Airliner</em> just now for the bridge music if I wasn’t about 99% positive I’d get slapped with some copyright fine.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Thelma Smith stopped by the TravelCommons Facebook page to leave a comment about last episode’s discussion of renting a Hertz EV for my Portland trip, which I backed away from as I looked at charging options in the city and up in Bar Harbor. Thelma wrote<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>&nbsp;Wanted to chime in on EVs. We have a Tesla Model 3. When planning out a trip of any length we use <a href=\"https://www.plugshare.com/\">PlugShare</a>. It helps in finding all sorts of chargers and not just Tesla fast chargers. Might help in seeing what’s out there.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Thelma, thanks for that. First I’ve heard of it; looks like a nice crowdsourced status map for chargers. If Hertz had referenced it, it might’ve tipped me to an EV. While it didn’t show many more Bar Harbor options, it showed a lot more chargers in Portland. Hertz continues to send me EV offers, so with this, maybe I give it a go on my next trip.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>JD Power released their <a href=\"https://www.jdpower.com/business/press-releases/2023-north-america-airport-satisfaction-study\">2023 North American Airport Satisfaction Survey</a> last week. We talked in the last episode that, according to TSA counts, we’ve gotten back to pre-COVID passenger volumes. And so it kinda makes sense then to compare JD Power’s 2023 numbers to their pre-COVID 2019 scores. And, conveniently enough, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/10/14/podcast-156-airport-satisfaction-escooters-smaller-luggage/\">episode #156</a>, we talked to the survey’s author, Michael Taylor, after the release of the <a href=\"https://www.jdpower.com/business/press-releases/2019-north-america-airport-satisfaction-study\">2019 survey</a>. Back then, Michael predicted:<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Michael: Everybody\'s phasing in and out of construction. They\'ve got all these various plans that are revolving on the inside and the outside of the airport. And so we\'re going to see this churn in the rankings quite a bit in the next few years as these projects phase in and out.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Well, yes and no. The top of the Mega category was pretty stable -- Detroit, Minneapolis/St Paul, and Las Vegas kept their top 3 positions. But there was a bit of churn under that. San Francisco jumped 7 spots from 13th to 6th, in large part, no doubt to their huge renovations while Orlando dropped 5 spots, from 4th to 9th, and Phoenix dropped 6, from 7th to 13th; neither of which surprised me given my most recent experiences at each.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The benefits of finally finishing big renovations really showed up in the next category, the Large Airports. LaGuardia and New Orleans, airports that I’ve spent way too much time in, finished multi-billion dollar renovations between the 2019 and 2023 survey and the results showed. LaGuardia jumped 13 places from 27th, the last spot on the 2019 survey to 14th, which given all the inherent problems with LaGuardia’s location and the mess that is the tri-state air traffic control, I’m not sure they could’ve gotten much better. New Orleans, though, went from not much better 23rd spot in 2019 to 8th, a 15-place move. Portland, Oregon, 2019’s top Large airport plummeted 11 spots to 12th, while San Diego and Oakland each dropped 10 spots, to 23rd and 24th respectively.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>More interesting than this, to me, was the increase in the average scores in what has been a difficult year for air travel -- on a thousand-point scale, the Mega average increased 16 points, from 756 to 772, while the Large average grew 24 points, from 765 to 789. So if an airport didn’t improve its score, like Orlando or Oakland, its ranking tumbled.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>In the last episode, I talked about the rolling delays for implementation of ETIAS, the EU’s impending version of the US’s ESTA, a pre-travel authorization system. What originally was supposed to go-live in 2021 got pushed to May 2023, which given COVID made sense, when then slipped 6 months to November 2023. Well, OK, maybe a little more testing is for the best. But then, to a more nebulous “sometime in 2024.” That’s never a good sign. And now, a month later, they’re saying <a href=\"https://www.schengenvisainfo.com/news/no-etias-wont-become-operational-in-2024-eu-sources-say/\">May 2025</a>. It feels like this is becoming the EU’s Real ID. Really! Because the new <a href=\"https://www.dhs.gov/news/2022/12/05/dhs-announces-extension-real-id-full-enforcement-deadline\">US Real ID deadline</a> is also May 2025 -- until they change it again.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter (X?) message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page like Thelma did, or on the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can skip all that social media stuff and post your comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/53277\">Fistful of Dub</a>&nbsp;(Feat. Snowflake and DJ Vadim) by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. &nbsp;Ft: snowflake and DJ Vadim</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Beer Tourism and Travel</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Scrolling through the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/episodes/\"><em>Episodes</em></a> section of the TravelCommons website, I saw that it’s been over a year since I’ve done any beer content, and immediately began working on rectifying it. I asked John Holl, long-time beer journalist, editor of <a href=\"https://allaboutbeer.com/\">All About Beer</a>, host of the <a href=\"https://allaboutbeer.com/podcast/drink-beer-think-beer/\">Drink Beer, Think Beer podcast</a>, to give us his thoughts about Beer Tourism…<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: John, thanks for coming on the podcast. We want to talk about beer tourism and travel. I\'m an old guy and for the longest time the idea of beer tourism seemed to start and end with renting lederhosen and heading to Munich for Oktoberfest. And then, in the early/mid-00’s, we got specialty beer releases that morphed into festivals like 3 Floyds’ <a href=\"https://darklordday.info/index.php/Home\">Dark Lord Day</a>. I was living in Chicago at the time and that went from a couple hundred people queuing for a bottle release to, in 2019, 13,000-15,000 people traveling around the country to see it.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>John: Gave people a lot of excuses to cross that Indiana border.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: I\'ve been to Munster Indiana and there\'s not a lot of other reason to go there other than 3 Floyds. And then they <a href=\"https://www.3floyds.com/taproom/\">shut the brew pub down</a> during COVID and now there\'s absolutely no reason to go there. And now, every town/region/state seems to have some sort of a beer trail. Last month, in August, I was in Portland Maine and it was the <a href=\"https://mainebrewersguild.org/visit-breweries/brewery-trail-challenge/\">Maine Beer Trail</a>. And then I was in Asheville, North Carolina at <a href=\"https://ashevillealetrail.com/\">Asheville Ale Trail </a>as well as their brewing district. It seems to be an area that\'s really grown. What are your thoughts on that? How significant is beer tourism for local economies now?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>John: I think it depends on the location. Where there\'s a concentration of breweries, it makes sense to have a beer trail. It makes sense for a guild or an organization to get together to try to convince not only the tourists but the locals to come out as well. There\'s 10,000 breweries thereabouts, maybe a little less, in the US these days and a lot of them are concentrated together. There\'s strength in numbers and hopefully they\'re all doing something that is diverse enough that can get folks to go from one place to the next, to the next without getting Hazy IPA fatigue. And I think Portland Maine is a great example of the breweries that are there. You have some of the old stalwarts, Geary\'s and Allagash. And some of the older, newer ones like Bissel Brothers. And then, there\'s some really cool ones like Belleflower that are there. So you get breweries of different sizes, of different scopes and I think it\'s important for the bottom line of these places so long as they\'re delivering good quality beer. But what\'s cool for me is being a tourist in a new city. I get to go to different areas. I get to go see a place that is not just the picturesque downtown, it\'s not just what\'s on the postcards for sale at the local travel kiosk. So you get to go into neighborhoods where people live and work. And for me, that\'s always a better sense of getting to know a city, of getting to know people, of getting to know a place because neighborhoods can change, especially some place like Chicago, from block to block. You\'re walking into neighborhoods that have different vibes, that have different histories to them, and that feel different. And so when I\'m traveling for beer, it\'s fun for me to not only go and set up at a tap room and spend some time there, but also to walk the neighborhoods as well. And I think that location informs a lot of what beer makers do. I\'ll keep going back to <a href=\"https://dovetailbrewery.com/\">Dovetail</a>; I\'ve spent more time there than I\'ll actually admit, and it\'s right up against the Brown Line and they use that to their advantage. They talk about their coolship; they talk about how their windows open up to the brown line and that the beer is inoculated with whatever the transit line brings them. And I think that\'s a fun thing. You\'re not necessarily tasting a sense of place, but you get the idea that it might be there.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: God only knows I\'ve written the Brown Line enough times. So maybe I\'ve helped Dovetail inoculate some of their coolship beers.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>John: And go to the Pacific Northwest at this time of year, in mid-September/late October when in Yakima and in parts of Oregon, they are harvesting the hops right now. You can bounce from brewery to brewery and the air is aromatic with fresh hops. The brewers are making fresh and wet hot beers. People are coming in from around the country, from around the world. There\'s an excitement and an energy that exists because of the agricultural product that is going into these beers and because of the harvest window as well. So, it doesn\'t always have to be a festival; it can be for a harvest season. And I think that that\'s another cool way that folks who aren\'t even in the beer industry can experience a different aspect of their pints.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: What\'s the best way to find out what\'s going on in a location? How do you think about where you\'re gonna go?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>John: I like not having firm plans when I\'m traveling because the other thing about beer tourism -- we\'re talking about beer trails -- is you start at one place and you say, “OK, we got five places on our list today.” So we say you\'re just having a pint at each. It\'s still five pints at the end of the day and even for a serious drinker like me, that\'s a lot. But if you\'re having a good time, I think it\'s great to not have structure because if you say, “OK, we\'re at stop number two and, and we have three more stops in front of us,” but we\'re really liking this, and they have this other beer that I want to try, and we\'re comfortable, and we\'re in good seats, and the food truck is awesome and all that -- just stay there, live in that moment. I feel I\'ve seen too many people get caught up in this sort of ticking culture where we have to hit all of these spots for whatever sort of weird list and you miss out on the fun experiences. Beer is about camaraderie. It\'s about being in the place. It\'s about experiencing flavor. And if you\'re rushing through it, it\'s not that much fun. I think beer in the way that it\'s grown over the last couple of decades -- it\'s not doing super-well volume-wise or sales-wise comparatively; it\'s like 12-13% of the overall marketplace -- but I think it has helped people appreciate flavors better. And to be a little bit more curious and to be a little bit more experimental.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: I think there\'s also a learning component too that I think you brought up, which is, you\'re going to push yourself outside your normal boundaries, outside of what I\'ve called a travel bubble…</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>John: That\'s the cool thing about travel, right? You talk to folks all the time about when they go to a new place and they want to have the local drink or they want to have the local food because they want to immerse themselves in that culture. You can do that with beer no matter where you go. So much of what brewers are doing these days too. When you travel, if you only drink American Light Lager, or you only drink Irish Stout. So you only drink something, you know, particular. If you\'re traveling, you might try the göse, you might try a lambic, you might try a barley wine or something like that because you\'re feeling a little bit more loose and unencumbered from the constraints of your daily life. And that, for me, is sort of the fun thing about beer. Usually it\'ll taste better from that place because you\'re surrounded by the people who made it, and the people who also were excited to be there. It\'s like folks who go on vacation to a tropical island and they\'re drinking mai tais, and it\'s the best mai tai they’ve ever had. They learn how to make the mai tai, and they come home and they do it on their back patio and they think “This doesn\'t taste as good.” And it\'s because you\'ve lost that sense of place. And so for me, I\'m always just trying to experience not just what\'s in my glass, but what\'s around me as well.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: John, I appreciate you coming on and talking to us about beer tourism and beer travel. It\'s something we\'ve talked a lot about on this podcast only just because I really like beer. It\'s been great talking to you. Thanks very much, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/John_Holl\" title=\"\">John Hall</a>, editor of <a href=\"https://allaboutbeer.com/\">All About Beer</a>. Both your <a href=\"https://allaboutbeer.com/podcast/\">podcast</a> and your website -- check it out. Thank you very much.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>John: Mark, thank you.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And, as always, check out the show notes on the TravelCommons podcast for links to read and listen to John.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/3lb3r3th/44072\">Misunderstood</a> by 3lb3r3th (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. &nbsp;Ft: Alchemistry</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>How To Plan a Beer Trip and Beer Tourism?</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If John Holl has you thinking about beer tourism, the next logical question -- how do you plan it? Here’s John’s approach…<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>John: I plan out travel, especially for specific events like hop harvest or Oktoberfest, which I\'m going to for the first time this year. I plan that out at least a year in advance because I want to make sure that when I can get hotels and transportation, and to budget out all of that. Social media is terrible in a lot of ways, but it can also be helpful in certain ways, getting you excited about traveling to new places. When I hear about annual beer festivals in Belgium or see folks who are out at hop harvest, picking hops, it gets me in a certain sort of way, if I\'m sitting at my desk at home. saying “Gosh, I wish I was there.”&nbsp; So then I put stuff on the calendar and start to say, “OK, well, think about this” and then go from there. When I\'m traveling to a city for work, I\'m usually going to visit specific breweries or specific people. But nine times out of 10, I will also call friends of mine and say, “Where are you drinking these days?” or “What\'s exciting you these days?” There\'s always going to be the one place that the serious beer nerd should go to,&nbsp; but then you peel that onion back just a little bit and all of a sudden, it\'s “Well, you know, I actually had a really fun experience at such and such place” or “I had this one beer” or “They\'re doing some cool stuff” and I start to say, “All right... Well, I trust them, so what do I have to lose?” It\'s either gonna be a great pint or it\'s not...</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>So there you go, advanced planning for the big stuff and have beer nerd friends in every city who can point you to the out-of-the-way nuggets. The latter is probably a <em>bit</em> easier for John, a well-known beer journalist, than for the rest of us.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/04/10/podcast-174-how-the-pros-plan-their-taproom-tourism/\">episode #174</a>, I talked about this with Rob Cheshire, a long time TravelCommons listener and, for the last 3+ years, a UK craft beer podcaster with his <a href=\"https://thisweekincraft.beer/this-week-in-craft-beer-podcasts/\">This Week in Craft Beer</a> podcast<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: How do you plan your taproom visits?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Rob: It\'s all driven through Google for me. I might have some idea based on previous reading about some big-name places that I want to visit in a particular city. But beyond that, I\'m just going to Google. First of all, I\'ll plot a Google map for the city. I\'ll end up with 50-60, maybe even 100 pins on the map. Pretty quickly, I\'ll go to <a href=\"https://untappd.com\">Untappd</a> and look at the average brewery rating. And this really makes brewers cross how much I rely on Untappd for this type of thing because I had this conversation a load of times on the podcast with them. But I do rely on brewery ratings on Untappd, and I find it very reliable. Quite frankly, if a brewery has an average rating of anything close to 4, then, obviously it\'s a massive generalization to say whatever they brew, but most of their beers are gonna be great. If the brewery rating is anywhere close to 3.5, it\'s going to be very mediocre at best. And somewhere in between is where most people land. So 3.6, eh...;&nbsp; 3.8, it\'s a good brewery; 3.9 is a terrific brewery; 4 is a great brewery. And so I\'m looking for those 3.8 and 3.9 average brewery ratings. But what I\'m looking for, really, is that district where I can walk from one to another and really make an afternoon of it.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Me? I kinda mash the two up. Like Rob, I’m a pretty solid Untappd user. Rob often says it’s his “beer diary” and that’s pretty much what it is for me too.&nbsp;When people ask me for recommendations for a city -- Budapest was the most recent ask -- I can quickly pop open the app and give people a list. And when <em>I’m</em> in a new city trying to find a good place for a beer, I’ll open it up and look at the Nearby Activity tab to see where (and what) folks are drinking. And back to <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/06/20/podcast-194-best-laid-travel-plans-roaming-entropy/\">episode #194</a>’s discussion of <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fl%C3%A2neur\">flâneuring</a>, or “roaming entropy” as I like to call it, some of my best “wanders” had, as their eventual end-point, a bar or taproom that I found that way.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But, as John says, if you let your friends know you’re deep into beer, they’ll be looking out for you. Visiting Savannah, GA back in May, our friends couldn’t wait to take me downtown to <a href=\"https://www.twotidesbrewing.com/\">Two Tides Brewing</a>, a microbrewery in a <a href=\"https://www.cntraveler.com/bars/savannah/two-tides-brewing-co\">100-year-old house</a> with great beers but no door onto the balcony because of a “door tax” way back when, where houses were taxed on the number of doors they had. So we ducked down and walked through a big window with our glasses… <em>multiple</em> times. Great beer and a history lesson; not sure I would’ve found that without a little help. Coming up in a couple of weeks, we’re heading back to New York City and our daughter already has an <em>ambitious</em> list for us.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Rob Cheshire and I have traded beer touring tips for our home towns. Rob took me to his favorite places in the railway arches of London’s Bermondsey Beer Mile. But when Rob hit Chicago three weeks after we’d moved to Nashville, I couldn’t reciprocate the personal tour, and so instead emailed him the couple of taproom circuits I <em>would’ve</em> taken him on if he’d showed up a month sooner. And actually, for all of you -- my friends and listeners -- since I can’t email it to you, I’ll put my Chicago taproom circuits in this episode’s show notes on travelcommons.com. Or check out my list of&nbsp; “Yeah, I’d like to go back there” taprooms in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/05/26/podcast-187-moving-to-a-non-hub-airport-what-makes-a-great-taproom/\">episode #187 show notes</a>. Maybe these can help you with your beer tourism planning.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The two tent poles for our Asheville trip were hiking and beer tourism. But we were the Asheville pioneers among our friend group, so I didn’t have anyone to build taproom circuits for me. So I started down Rob’s path, firing up Google Maps and Untappd, but then… wait a minute. Let’s see what AI can do. So I fired up <a href=\"https://chat.openai.com/\">ChatGPT</a> and typed in “Develop a taproom circuit of microbrewery taprooms in Asheville, NC starting at the Aloft Hotel in Asheville and optimized to minimize walking distance and maximize Untappd ratings. Present it in a table with the brewery name in the first column, the distance from the previous taproom in the second column, the Untappd rating in the third column, and the type of beers served in the fourth column.” The response started with a caveat that it can’t access real-time data and so the Untappd ratings and distances are based on its last update in 2022. After that throat-clearing, ChatGPT spit out a table with 8 taprooms. Eyeballing the list, the names didn’t seem too out of whack, so then I checked the Untappd ratings. None of them were right, and indeed, so far out of whack (all on the high side) that eight months of additional check-in couldn’t have moved the ratings that much. Chalk that up to GPT hallucination, or being a people pleaser and not wanting to say “I don’t know”. Then I plotted the circuit on a map, and it wasn’t -- a circuit, that is. It was a bit more of a random walk, doubling back a couple of times. And, rather than working us back to the Aloft, it ended at the farthest away brewery. So with no friend recommendations and not much help from ChatGPT, I fell back to my old ways --&nbsp; flâneuring. I figured with the beer density in Asheville, a random walk was more likely than not to land me in front of a beer tap. Which pretty much proved to be the case. We did what long-time listener Aaron Woodin called it in the last episode a “walk and gawk”, or maybe&nbsp; a “walk and gulp.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>My Chicago Taproom Circuits</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Here are the two Chicago taproom circuits I built for Rob Cheshire in the summer of 2022</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Logan Square/Palmer Circuit</strong> -- a kinda triangular circuit through 3-4 taprooms in Chicago\'s \"Hipster Ground Zero\" neighborhood with some good food options along the way.<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Take the Blue Line toward O\'Hare to the California St stop. Walk east on Adams to Monroe and then north a half-block. It\'s a $2.50 fare; like the Tube, you can tap on with a contactless credit card. It\'s way cheaper than an Uber and lets you bypass a load of traffic. Follow Google Maps walking directions; you\'re basically walking south on California (or one of the less-crowded neighborhood streets running parallel) down to Armitage and then west to...</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>Solemn Oath Still Life</em> -- This is kinda cheating. This is the Chicago outpost of one of my favorite suburban breweries. They have a good range of styles. They recently started up a second label, Hidden Hand, that goes deep into hazies. When you\'re done, walk out the door, turn right on Armitage (going back east), cross the street at some point, and end up at</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>Middle Brow Beer</em> -- The vibe here is a bit of a crunchy granola with Democratic Socialist/Labour Momentum sprinkles (or hundreds-and-thousands if you will), but they do some interesting wild beers fermented from yeast cultured from their garden. Good for one, maybe two beers.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Food -if you\'re getting peckish, there are some good options on Armitage on the way to the next stop.<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>Middle Brow</em> - While you\'re there, their bread and pizzas are great.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>90 Miles Cuban Cafe</em> - Very good Cuban food</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>Redhot Ranch</em> - Chicago street food; I get either a polish or a burger Chicago style</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>When you\'re done, continue walking east to Western, turn right (south), pass Margie\'s Candies and find the entrance to</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>Life On Marz</em> - Another cheat, the north side outpost of the south side Marz Brewing. It\'s a small place, but they do a nice selection of styles. When you\'re done, head left out the door and then over to the diagonal street, Milwaukee, not the north-south street (Western). The intersection is a bit tricky. Head northwest up Milwaukee to...</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>Pilot Project Brewing</em> - This is a brewing incubator, so there\'s usually some interesting stuff on offer. The last time I was in, they were serving Indian-inspired beers from Azadi Brewing. Brewer\'s Kitchen also does good stuff. Not everything works, but I\'ve had a surprisingly good hit rate. Take a left out the door, cross the street (watch out for the bicyclists; this is the most Amsterdam-ish street in Chicago) and head up a block to...</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>Navigator Taproom</em> - This is a pour-your-own, priced-by-the-ounce beer bar with a good selection of Chicago (they seem to have a lot from Pipeworks) and Midwest beers. Check out their beer menu on Untappd to see if there\'s anything that interests you. Continue up Milwaukee to the last stop</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>Revolution Brewing Brewpub</em> - This is the original Rev Brew joint; it opened before the brewery taproom a couple of miles north. If you\'re IPA\'d out and the temperatures aren\'t in the 90\'s, go for their Deep Woods offerings -- the variations on their Deth\'s Tar imperial stout (Josh Deth owns Rev Brew) or their Straight Jacket barleywine. If it\'s too hot (or you\'re too baked for those double-digit abv\'s), their Hero IPA series is good; lots of variants based on different hop combos.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And that\'s it. If you want to head straight back, you\'re a couple of blocks from the California Blue Line L stop. Get on the Forest Park Blue Line to Monroe stop in the Loop. If you\'re still walking straight, you can keep walking up Milwaukee through the neighborhood. It\'s an interesting neighborhood. The Blue Line runs parallel to Milwaukee. The next stop is the Logan Square stop, about a 15-20 minute walk. Or you can always just call an Uber.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Maplewood-Based Circuit</strong> -- this is less concentrated/less obvious, so I\'ll put in a few branches so you can choose your own adventure<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>Maplewood</em> -- Part of its charm (a little corner tavern at the end of a neighborhood street) makes it inconvenient to get there via public transportation. So to start here, it\'s probably best to Uber up.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Option - A bit of a walking circuit from Maplewood<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>Ravinia Brewing</em> -- Very optional. Not a bad place; I\'ve had a couple of good beers sitting out on their patio after a bike ride. I wouldn\'t go out of my way to go there, but it\'s two blocks from Maplewood</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>Metropolitan Brewing</em> -- This is ~10 min walk north from Maplewood through a little neighborhood. It\'s one of the original Chicago microbreweries, though a lager specialist which I know is not exactly on point for you. However, their patio looks down on the north branch of the Chicago River. So, if it\'s a nice day, this is worth a stop for the view -- and maybe a crisp palate cleanser.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>The Beer Temple</em> -- One of our favorite beer bars. It\'s what in Chicago is termed a \"slashie\" -- a bar and a liquor store. They always have a good beer selection and they\'re a verified venue on Untappd, so you can check out the menu to see if it\'s worth the 7-min walk from Metropolitan.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Food<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>Kuma\'s Corner</em> is about a 5-min walk west on Belmont from Beer Temple. Kuma\'s is a great burger place with a solid beer menu (an Untappd verified venue) and a heavy metal soundtrack.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>Honey Butter Fried Chicken</em> - Convenient if you\'re walking up to the Rev Brew Taproom</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>Revolution Brewing Taproom</em> -- If you didn\'t hit their brewpub on the Logan Square circuit, the brewery taproom is a 12-15-min walk from Beer Temple or Kuma\'s.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Option - Uber up to the Ravenswood neighborhood\'s Malt Row<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>Begyle Brewing</em> -- First brewery on Malt Row. Nice IPAs and a good barrel-aged imperial stout</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>Dovetail Brewing</em> -- The guys on the Steal This Beer podcast obsess over this brewery. Cool space; German lager-and-spontaneous ferm-focused. Walk down (south) Ravenswood Ave to the Irving Park Brown Line. Take it to two stops to the Paulina exit, walk south on Paulina St one block to...</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>Bitter Pops</em> -- Another great slashie and also an Untappd verified venue if you want to check out the tap list. Also a good place to buy a cold 4-pack to take back to your hotel room. Or cross Lincoln Ave and walk down a half block to...</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>The Green Lady</em> -- Old-time Chicago bar vibe with a great tap list.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Get back on the Brown Line and head down to the Loop, to the Quincy Stop which is ~1 block from the JW Marriott</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Option - Uber up to Half Acre Beer<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>Half Acre Beer</em> - Another original Chicago microbrewery. Augie Carton on Steal This Beer is a big fan of their Daisy Cutter pale ale, but I like their range of IPAs.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>Spiteful Brewing</em> - Next door to Half Acre. Good place; wouldn\'t make a special trip for it, but is worth the block walk if you\'re at Half Acre.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Probably best just to Uber back down to the JW from here.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"className\":\"has-medium-font-size\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #196</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As always, you can find us and listen to the current episodes on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. No longer Stitcher, though. SiriusXM pulled the plug on it, though I think you can find TravelCommons on the other Sirius platforms -- Pandora and maybe the Sirius app. But I know that you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page at TravelCommons.com for a transcript of the episode and links to places I’ve mentioned, and to John and Rob’s websites. If you’re not yet subscribed, there’s a drop down Subscribe menu at the top of TravelCommon’s home page. And along the side of the page, you’ll find links to all the TravelCommons’ socials.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to mpeacock on Twitter, write them on the TravelCommons page on Facebook or Instagram, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com.&nbsp; And thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in emails, Tweets and post comments on the website. I really appreciate it.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And until we talk again, safe travels; raise a cold (or cask-temperature) one; and thanks for stopping by the TravelCommons.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_196.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #196 — Cheers to Beer Tourism and Travel!','','inherit','closed','closed','','4372-revision-v1','','','2023-10-01 10:42:12','2023-10-01 15:42:12','',4372,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4382',0,'revision','',0),
(4387,1,'2023-11-07 18:48:45','2023-11-07 23:48:45','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Dalle-E_Renting_Tesla-300x300.png\" alt=\"road warrior renting a Tesla from a Hertz rental car lot.\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" />Swipe left or right to start this thing?[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It\'s the sustainability episode of the TravelCommons podcast, talking about my experience renting a Tesla from Hertz and my road-tested list of Christmas gift suggestions for the frequent traveler(s) in your life. I also talk about some new TSA biometrics equipment I faced (literally) in Nashville and yet another update on the EU\'s ETIAS system and the US\'s Real ID. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_197.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:audio -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-audio\"><audio controls src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_197.mp3\"></audio></figure>\n<!-- /wp:audio -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #197: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN after a pretty solid three weeks of travel -- a business trip to the Boston suburbs, then down to New York to meet up with Irene and Claire for a long weekend of knocking around Brooklyn and Queens, and then, after a day of reloading suitcases and picking up the cat, driving up to Chicago for friends and family. When we got back home last Friday, I was ready to just stay put for a little bit. Which is about all it will be because we head out to the UK in less than two weeks.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The Boston trip came up all of a sudden and I think is only my second post-pandemic business trip -- <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/06/15/podcast-176-why-business-travel-is-coming-back-learning-airport-history/\" title=\"\">my first was down to Miami in May 2021</a>.&nbsp; Maybe I’ve timed out of my road warrior status, because everything felt a bit off. Flying BNA-BOS, my choices were JetBlue or Delta. I don’t have status on either, so I choose JetBlue because it’s the earlier flight out. No status means I also have to pay $80-100 to reserve a seat after paying $450 for a one-way ticket. I could’ve expensed it through, but the annoyance vein in my temple started to pulsate. How dare you, JetBlue! And in return for my righteous anger, I get assigned, at the gate, a middle seat in the last boarding group. I resign myself to having to gate check my carry-on. But then when boarding is called, the pre-boarding announcement is for JetBlue <em>and</em> American elites. Ugh! Such an amateur mistake — not keeping track of alliances and partnerships.&nbsp; If I’d put my Aadvantage Platinum number into my reservation instead of my plain TrueBlue number, I probably could’ve saved myself all that righteous anger and vein throbbing. Luckily though, I always carry my physical elite cards with me, so I show my Aadvantage Platinum card to the agent, get waved on, and find an empty bin right above my seat.&nbsp; I was a little concerned about fitting my big carry-on in an A220 -- it was my first time on this plane -- but no problem. The overhead bins on this plane are huge.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>After my window seat neighbor got settled, I put on my Bose noise-canceling headphones, dialed up the white noise app on my iPhone, and, middle seat be damned, nodded off sitting up straight. One thing I <em>haven’t</em> lost while working virtually -- being able to fall asleep even before my 7am flight rotates off the runway.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — funkyGarden by Jeris (c) copyright 2020 Licensed under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/VJ_Memes/61356 Ft: airtone, SackJo22, Analog By Nature</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>It wouldn’t be a proper Following Up section without yet another update on the US’s Real ID or the EU’s ETIAS rolling delays. Let’s do ETIAS, the EU’s pre-travel authorization system that gobs of click-bait websites have mislabeled a “European Visa.” The EU has tweaked their go-live date again -- from last month’s <a href=\"https://www.schengenvisainfo.com/news/no-etias-wont-become-operational-in-2024-eu-sources-say/\">May 2025</a> to a less definite/more nebulous “<a href=\"https://travel-europe.europa.eu/etias/what-etias_en#etias-in-a-nutshell\">mid-2025</a>” -- which could be May or June or July. But I’m not sure why anyone in their right mind would want to flip the switch on this in the summer, during Europe’s peak tourist season. I’m taking the over on this; I don’t see it going live any earlier than October 2025.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The US, on the other hand, seems to be sticking to their May 2025 date -- for now. Remember, the initial deadline for needing a Real ID to board a commercial flight was January 2018 -- which then got kicked to October 2020. But then COVID hit and in April 2020, soon after just about every government building was emptied out and locked up, the bright sparks at Dept of Homeland Security decided that driving crowds of people toward closed DMVs to replace their old driver’s licenses wouldn’t be great and pushed the deadline a year to October 2021. Which, we’ll all remember, wasn’t <em>that</em> much better -- at least with regards to DMV accessibility. I remember lining up outside, in December 2021, in Chicago at a DMV to renew my driver’s license. And so another push, 19 months to May 2023. And then last December, they pushed it another 2 years to May 2025 because -- who knows. So the US has got nothing to say to the EU. But on my flights a couple of weeks ago, I started seeing new signage “RealID coming in May 2025”; even the Delta app, when I checked in for my BOS-LGA flight, had a banner about it. Huh? I mean, why wind everyone up about a deadline that’s 18 months away and, if the kabuki theater of the last 5 years is any guide, will get pushed again.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Now where DHS is moving much faster is rolling out biometrics to airport and customs checkpoints. Over the years here on TravelCommons, I have talked about my experiences with biometrics usage -- starting with my first fingerprint scan back in the late ‘90’s so I could skip the US customs line at Toronto-Pearson Airport, then in 2008 letting the first iteration of CLEAR scan my eyeballs in exchange for a shortcut to the front of the TSA line, then in 2011 a background check and another fingerprint scan for Global Entry so I could skip all the US customs lines -- so yes, I’ll do damn close to anything to skip an airport line. But over the past couple of years, it feels like DHS has been turning it up a notch. October 2021, our first international flight in a couple of years, on AirFrance, the gate agent took our picture when boarding and didn’t need to see our boarding pass. <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/06/20/podcast-194-best-laid-travel-plans-roaming-entropy/\" title=\"\">Last April, returning from the Netherlands</a>, the Global Entry kiosk no longer needed to scan my fingerprints; a quick side glance at the camera was enough to recognize me and let me through. And now, a couple of weeks ago, at the BNA PreCheck line, a big sign “Identity Verification Technology. Biometrics technology is available at this checkpoint. Your participation is optional.” This is new; it wasn’t there 2 months ago when we flew out to Maine. I give my driver’s license to the TSA guy standing next to something like a camera on a stick; it looks a bit like the electronic customs gates at LHR. He puts my ID in the machine, tells me to look at the camera, then looks at the screen and waves me through. A couple of things here -- I’m not sure how this is different from the TSA guy looking at my face and comparing it to the picture on my license; and I didn’t see any way that my participation was optional. And I certainly didn’t get to skip any lines for the biometric giveaway. I’ve been trying since April to get someone from TSA or DHS on the podcast to talk about this biometrics push and have gotten nothing but repeated “I’ll get back to you soon” from the TSA press secretary. Now maybe this new equipment gets us to the automated checkpoints I’ve been through in some smaller European airports -- which could shorten the security lines -- but I had to dig pretty deep into a bunch of jargon-y <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/sites/default/files/tsa_idm_roadmap_2022-03-01_508c_final.pdf\">PDF documents</a> on the TSA website to get even a hint of any benefits to the regular traveler. I dunno, maybe all the benefits are waiting on Real ID. Once everyone has that little gold star on their license, it’s clear sailing.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter (X?) message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page, or on the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can skip all that social media stuff and post your comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — Xena’s Kiss / Medea’s Kiss by mwic (c) copyright 2018 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mwic/58883</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Renting a Tesla</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>After 2, 3? episodes of <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/08/24/podcast-195-checking-out-hollands-tulip-festival/\" title=\"\">nattering on</a> about electric vehicles, I decided to take up Hertz on their incessant email offers and rented a Tesla for my Boston business trip -- giving EVs a try, but on someone else’s dime. The client site was only 18 miles from BOS and Google Maps told me there was a Tesla Supercharger nearby, so range risk wouldn’t be an issue. A couple of days before my flight, Hertz sent me an email which was pretty much a crash course on operating a Tesla, pictures, text, links to YouTube videos. I was both impressed and slightly overwhelmed, but I grabbed a beer out of the fridge -- a 16 oz, this was going to take a bit -- and ground through all the email links -- which, I think, saved me time trying to figure things out in the Hertz lot.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Over the past couple of years, we’ve talked about <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/05/09/podcast-175-how-to-find-local-tour-guides-rebuild-travel-muscles/\" title=\"\">barren Hertz lots</a>; <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/04/10/podcast-174-how-the-pros-plan-their-taproom-tourism/\" title=\"\">renters queueing up for cars to appear</a>. So when the Hertz employee pointed me to an EV aisle full up with 10-12 Tesla Model 3’s and a couple of Polestars it took me a moment to process all my options. My usual strategy, when I have a choice, is to run through the cars on the aisle and pick the one with the lowest mileage. But I wasn’t quite sure if that worked with a Tesla, and if it did, I didn’t recall from my crash course where to find the odometer. So, I chose a black Model 3 that had the least beat-up wheel rims -- trying to minimize any damage arguments at return time.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>After I got in, powered it up, and got acclimated to the massive tablet screen in the center console, I saw that the battery level was at 69%. One of the crash course’s tutorials said it’d be at 100% and I’d be charged if I returned it under 80%. I snapped a picture of the battery display and told the guy at the exit gate. He shrugged and told me to bring it back at the same level. He didn\'t seem very concerned.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming out of the lot, the Tesla drove fine. After a couple of days, the battery had dropped into the mid-40s, so I decided to try out the Tesla Supercharger network. Tesla’s nav app directed me to a nearby shopping center. The chargers were in the farthest back corner of the Target parking lot. I backed in -- looking at the other Teslas, it seemed the thing to do -- plugged in the charger, and was a little shocked to see that it would take an <em>hour</em> to get me charged up to 100%. Now Irene would have no problem with this -- an excuse to spend an hour shopping in Target? Bring it on. Me, not so much. Luckily, there was a Chipotle across the street, so I locked the car and walked over to grab lunch. When I got back, the car still had another 5 minutes before it got to 100%. I’m glad I didn’t wait ‘til it got down to 20%.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Though maybe I should’ve waited, because by my last day, I’d driven off a chunk of that 100% charge and, heading back to BOS, I wasn’t completely confident that I’d arrive with the battery at the 69% level I’d picked it up at. And I guess that’s a place where an EV rental requires a bit more logistical planning. A regular gas car -- there’s loads of places I could hit to quickly splash in a couple of last-minute gallons to keep the fuel gauge on Full. An EV? The Tesla nav app vectored me way off my usual I-90/I-93 tunnel routes to BOS, taking me way east, past some marshes just off the bay, to the back corner of another Target parking lot where I backed in amid a half-dozen other Teslas, their drivers all sitting there, working their phones, waiting for their cars to charge. I waited 10 minutes, splashed in enough electricity to get the battery gauge to 75%, and lit out. But I probably didn’t need to worry. Turning the car in, I told the Hertz guy I was under 80% charge because I got the car at 69%. No problem, he said. He didn\'t seem very concerned. Honestly, I’ve never seen Hertz guys so nonchalant about their cars; especially after Hertz said in their last earnings call that <a href=\"https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-10-26/hertz-misses-quarterly-profit-estimates-as-its-fleet-costs-rise\">EV repair costs are about double what they pay for gas-powered cars</a>.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>On the shuttle bus to the terminal, I opened the email receipt and saw that the $15 charge from my first Supercharger visit had made it onto my invoice. A couple of things crossed my mind -- definitely less than what I would’ve spent filling up a gas car, and I was impressed by the quick turnaround time because the toll charge I incurred two days before that, when leaving Logan through one of the tunnels, still hasn’t shown up and so is going to raise some eyebrows in A/P when I eventually try to expense it through. So all told, pretty good experience; kudos to Hertz. And now they’re trying to get me to rent a Polestar at LHR in a couple of weeks for our drive through the Devon countryside. Ehh, I don’t think I’ll push my luck.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/bridges/15563\">i knew</a> by bridges (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp;Ft: shannonsongs</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>2023 Traveler\'s Gift Guide</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Every couple of years around this time I update my gift guide to give folks suggestions for the frequent traveler in their lives. Or, if you are the frequent traveler, a list of hints you might want to drop on family members looking for ideas. The first time I did a gift guide, I published Thanksgiving week so people would have it for the Black Friday sales. But now with the Christmas shopping season having blown past that traditional Thanksgiving Friday start and with radio stations barely able to wait for the kids to finish counting their Halloween candy haul before <a href=\"https://www.fox5ny.com/news/radio-stations-christmas-music-holiday-season\">flipping the switch on their All-Christmas-Music format</a>, I’ve dragged the publishing date up to the front of November. The <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">2020 gift guide</a> was probably the most unique. All the restaurant lockdowns and indoor dining limits had us eating in our hotel rooms which put bring-your-own dining sets and in-room coffee brewing kits onto the gift list. The disappearance of airport and in-flight mask mandates means that #1 gift on that year’s list -- comfortable masks -- has also dropped off.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>What hasn’t dropped off and is regularly at the top of my list is <strong>Battery Packs</strong>.&nbsp; We’ve talked <em>a lot</em> about how we can’t easily travel anymore without a working mobile phone. It holds our boarding passes, gives us gate change and flight delay notifications, unlocks our car (if we’ve rented a Tesla), routes us around traffic jams, and connects us to our Airbnb hosts. So having that second or third charge immediately available is critical to making it through a long travel day. I carry a <a href=\"https://amzn.to/470YN1T\" title=\"\">Zendure SuperMini power bank</a> in my bag because its USB-C port quickly tops up my iPhone while the USB-A port takes care of my Samsung tablet. I’ve updated Irene’s lipstick charger to <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3u6IbXX\" title=\"\">an Anker with a flip-out Lighting connector</a> so she doesn’t have to fish around in her purse for a cable. But there are a lot of choices; just pick one.. or two.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Noise Canceling Headphones</strong> are also a perennial on my gift lists. I’ve been carrying Bose headphones for at least 15 years. Back then, the QC-3’s were de rigueur for any self-respecting road warrior. The “ah ha” moment for me was on a United Express Dash 8 turboprop flying to Sioux City, IA with an intermediate stop in Waterloo, IA. I was in a window seat on the wing and the droning of the prop just encased me; I couldn’t think of anything else -- until I flicked the switch on my Bose. I’m now on my 3rd pair, the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3Mzl3Yx\" title=\"\">Bose 700’s</a>. They’re not compact but they continue to earn their space in my travel bag. I picked up a pair of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/49EsZld\" title=\"\">Apple AirPod Pros</a> on a good Prime Day sale last month and so was able to compare the Bose and AirPod noise canceling on my Boston and New York flights. The AirPods are good, but not as good as the Bose. And the battery doesn’t last as long, which makes sense given the size differential. For me, the AirPod Pros are good for a 2-2.5-hr flight, but for, say, my upcoming UK trip, I’ll be packing the Bose.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://amzn.to/40vbaAK\" title=\"\">Apple AirTags</a></strong> earned a place on the list last October when I could see, sitting on the plane, that our bags weren’t going to make the connection in Newark on our way home from Rome. This didn’t get our bag to us, but it did save us the 30 minutes of suspense waiting for them to come out on the carousel, and let us instead go straight to the baggage service agent, be the first in line to file our report, and then head home after a very long travel day. They were definitely worth the purchase price just for that.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>For someone making the transition from virtual work to physical world road warrior, how ‘bout a <strong>Black 20-inch Carry-On Bag</strong>. Black not only makes you look thinner, it makes your bag look thinner to gate agents hunting for bag-sizer bait. My daughter had a baby blue roller bag for the longest time. She loved that color, and it was easy to spot on the luggage carousel, which was a good thing because it ended up there <em>a lot</em> because gate agents were always pulling her out of line to gate check that bag. So get a nondescript black bag with a set of clever, neon-colored luggage tags as a stocking stuffer. If you’re flying a budget airline that’s a stickler on size, get a hard-shell bag. It’ll keep its dimensions better when overstuffed, and the polycarbonate shell will slide past the metal bars of the sizer easier than the ballistic nylon of a soft-sided bag. You could range up in size to a 22-incher, but a 20-incher should safely fit in the overhead of just about every plane. I’m a big fan of the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3MwJLZr\" title=\"\">TravelPro line</a>; for me they strike the right balance between price and quality. But there are lots -- maybe way too many -- options out there for you to choose from.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Here’s a new list entrant -- a <strong>Travel Power Strip</strong>. Potentially one of the least sexy things I could put on a gift list, but I’ve always tried to populate these with the things I actually use -- and find myself needing the most when I’m on the road. And you think after, I dunno, 20 years of travelers needing to charge a bunch of electronics -- PCs, mobile phones, tablets -- hotels, B&amp;B’s, resorts would put outlets <em>that work</em> on the top of flat surfaces like nightstands, end tables, desks, …. But I’d say that on half of my trips <em>this year</em>, I had to move furniture or get down on my hands and knees to find a single outlet. So you can get one of those cube-shaped travel adapters that show up on most travel gift guides, and still have to crawl under furniture every time you need to plug something new in. And that’s why I recommend a compact power strip -- you move the nightstand once to reach down and plug it in, and then set the other end -- the end with the outlets, the end you’ll regularly need easy access to -- <em>on top</em> of the nightstand. Any power strip you buy nowadays will have some mix of USB and regular AC outlets. <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3SpsSng\" title=\"\">Anker</a> has a seemingly infinite range of them. But if Anker is a little boring for you, way back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/01/25/podcast-159-planning-the-trip-of-a-lifetime-in-southeast-asia/\">episode #159</a> in January 2020, long-time listener Arnoud Heijnis gave high marks to a <em>circular</em> power strip called the<a href=\"https://amzn.to/3SyAXGa\" title=\"\"> Power Bagel</a>. Three years on, MOGICS, the manufacturer, now sells an updated version called the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/40reQ6o\" title=\"\">Super Bagel</a>. Of course! With a lot of positive reviews confirming Arnoud’s view that the circle, the bagel shape, let you use every outlet, even when using those big wall wart power supplies</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>So there you go, 5 gift ideas to fit all budgets, and with more than enough time to beat any early on-line shipping deadline. Check out the show notes for links, and happy shopping!</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>Note: None of these suggestions are paid endorsements. This post contains links to Amazon where I can earn a small commission from qualifying purchases.</em></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"className\":\"has-medium-font-size\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #197</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As always, you can find us and listen to the current episodes on all the main podcast sites -- Apple Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, Google Podcasts, and Amazon Music. And you can always Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page at TravelCommons.com for a transcript of the episode and links to items on the gift guide. If you’re not yet subscribed, there’s a drop down Subscribe menu at the top of TravelCommon’s home page. And along the side of the page, you’ll find links to all the TravelCommons’ socials.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to mpeacock on Twitter, write them on the TravelCommons page on Facebook or Instagram, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com.&nbsp; And thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in emails, Tweets and post comments on the website. I really appreciate it.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And until we talk again, safe travels; and thanks for stopping by the TravelCommons.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_197.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #197 — Renting a Tesla; 2023 Traveler Gift Guide','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-197-renting-a-tesla-2023-traveler-gift-guide','','','2026-01-28 10:49:20','2026-01-28 16:49:20','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4387',0,'post','',0),
(4389,1,'2023-11-07 09:39:44','2023-11-07 14:39:44','55-year old weary road warrior looking at a single row of black Tesla Model 3s in a Hertz rental car lot. Give the road warrior a TravelPro carry-on roller bag. Do in the style of ‘90’s anime.','Dalle-E_Renting_Tesla','','inherit','open','closed','','dalle-e_renting_tesla','','','2023-11-07 09:43:55','2023-11-07 14:43:55','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Dalle-E_Renting_Tesla.png',0,'attachment','image/png',0),
(4390,1,'2023-11-07 09:46:03','2023-11-07 14:46:03','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Dalle-E_Renting_Tesla-300x300.png\" alt=\"road warrior looking at a single row of black Tesla Model 3s in a Hertz rental car lot.\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" />Where\'s the Key?[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>In this beer-focused episode, John Holl, editor of <a href=\"http://allaboutbeer.com\" title=\"All About Beer\"><em>All About Beer</em></a>, gives us his take on beer tourism and tips on how to beer travels. I talk about my experience planning my Asheville, NC taproom visits with ChatGPT. We also dive deep into the new <a href=\"https://www.jdpower.com/business/press-releases/2023-north-america-airport-satisfaction-study\" title=\"JD Power Airport Satisfaction Survey\">JD Power Airport Satisfaction Survey</a> and do a quick update about the EU\'s delayed ETIAS system. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_197.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #197: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN after trips to Portland, ME and Asheville, NC. We flew up to Portland International Jetport; I love that -- <em>jetport</em> -- it’s like a throwback to the ‘50’s and ‘60’s when jet airplanes weren’t assumed. Going down that clickhole, apparently Orlando International was originally called <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orlando_International_Airport\">Orlando Jetport</a>. Feels like they shouldn’t have changed; would’ve had a very EPCOT-y vibe. But anyhow, I think Portland Jetport missed a trick by not playing Steve Miller’s <a href=\"https://youtu.be/JHa1hiFYbFQ?si=3c8q9OhgdJM8YQNR\"><em>Jet Airliner</em></a> on a continuous loop in baggage claim. But they do have a <a href=\"https://youtu.be/Az5p4g_Eyf0?si=HEB3oEj3PCClOO-C\">big stuffed moose</a> there, which is probably more on-brand.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>More… interesting were the 7-foot signs we passed walking up to the TSA lines for our flight back. <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1693357760732111140\">I posted a picture on Twitter</a>. The one to the left said “Are you packing? Guns of any kind are not permitted in carry-on bags”. The one on the right, “Have you checked your firearms?” The small one in between reminded people to dump their oversized liquids. I mean, Really!? We\'re now 22 years on from the Sept 11th attacks and people still can\'t figure this out; that you can’t take a gun on a plane -- nor a sword, nor a knife. Long-time listeners will know that I am in no way an apologist for the TSA, but when I see pictures they post of some of the stuff people try to bring on -- a hatchet at O’Hare, throwing knives at Milwaukee -- I’m not sure how patient <em>I’d</em> be if I had to deal with that level of obliviousness day-in and day-out.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>On the upside, though, I did see that the TSA would allow me to carry-on a live lobster if I wanted to take a bit of Maine back home with me. According to the TSA website “A live lobster is allowed through security and must be transported in a clear, plastic, spill proof container. A TSA officer will visually inspect your lobster at the checkpoint.” I wonder if that visual inspection includes checking that the rubber bands around the lobster claws are intact. I’d think a traveler wielding “un-holstered” lobster claws might not be armed, but certainly could be dangerous.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/JeffSpeed68/54450\">Hula Hoop Party</a> by Stefan Kartenberg (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. &nbsp;Ft: Martijn de Boer, Blue Wave Theory</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>I</em> would’ve loved to play 15 seconds of <em>Jet Airliner</em> just now for the bridge music if I wasn’t about 99% positive I’d get slapped with some copyright fine.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Thelma Smith stopped by the TravelCommons Facebook page to leave a comment about last episode’s discussion of renting a Hertz EV for my Portland trip, which I backed away from as I looked at charging options in the city and up in Bar Harbor. Thelma wrote<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>&nbsp;Wanted to chime in on EVs. We have a Tesla Model 3. When planning out a trip of any length we use <a href=\"https://www.plugshare.com/\">PlugShare</a>. It helps in finding all sorts of chargers and not just Tesla fast chargers. Might help in seeing what’s out there.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Thelma, thanks for that. First I’ve heard of it; looks like a nice crowdsourced status map for chargers. If Hertz had referenced it, it might’ve tipped me to an EV. While it didn’t show many more Bar Harbor options, it showed a lot more chargers in Portland. Hertz continues to send me EV offers, so with this, maybe I give it a go on my next trip.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>JD Power released their <a href=\"https://www.jdpower.com/business/press-releases/2023-north-america-airport-satisfaction-study\">2023 North American Airport Satisfaction Survey</a> last week. We talked in the last episode that, according to TSA counts, we’ve gotten back to pre-COVID passenger volumes. And so it kinda makes sense then to compare JD Power’s 2023 numbers to their pre-COVID 2019 scores. And, conveniently enough, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/10/14/podcast-156-airport-satisfaction-escooters-smaller-luggage/\">episode #156</a>, we talked to the survey’s author, Michael Taylor, after the release of the <a href=\"https://www.jdpower.com/business/press-releases/2019-north-america-airport-satisfaction-study\">2019 survey</a>. Back then, Michael predicted:<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Michael: Everybody\'s phasing in and out of construction. They\'ve got all these various plans that are revolving on the inside and the outside of the airport. And so we\'re going to see this churn in the rankings quite a bit in the next few years as these projects phase in and out.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Well, yes and no. The top of the Mega category was pretty stable -- Detroit, Minneapolis/St Paul, and Las Vegas kept their top 3 positions. But there was a bit of churn under that. San Francisco jumped 7 spots from 13th to 6th, in large part, no doubt to their huge renovations while Orlando dropped 5 spots, from 4th to 9th, and Phoenix dropped 6, from 7th to 13th; neither of which surprised me given my most recent experiences at each.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The benefits of finally finishing big renovations really showed up in the next category, the Large Airports. LaGuardia and New Orleans, airports that I’ve spent way too much time in, finished multi-billion dollar renovations between the 2019 and 2023 survey and the results showed. LaGuardia jumped 13 places from 27th, the last spot on the 2019 survey to 14th, which given all the inherent problems with LaGuardia’s location and the mess that is the tri-state air traffic control, I’m not sure they could’ve gotten much better. New Orleans, though, went from not much better 23rd spot in 2019 to 8th, a 15-place move. Portland, Oregon, 2019’s top Large airport plummeted 11 spots to 12th, while San Diego and Oakland each dropped 10 spots, to 23rd and 24th respectively.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>More interesting than this, to me, was the increase in the average scores in what has been a difficult year for air travel -- on a thousand-point scale, the Mega average increased 16 points, from 756 to 772, while the Large average grew 24 points, from 765 to 789. So if an airport didn’t improve its score, like Orlando or Oakland, its ranking tumbled.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>In the last episode, I talked about the rolling delays for implementation of ETIAS, the EU’s impending version of the US’s ESTA, a pre-travel authorization system. What originally was supposed to go-live in 2021 got pushed to May 2023, which given COVID made sense, when then slipped 6 months to November 2023. Well, OK, maybe a little more testing is for the best. But then, to a more nebulous “sometime in 2024.” That’s never a good sign. And now, a month later, they’re saying <a href=\"https://www.schengenvisainfo.com/news/no-etias-wont-become-operational-in-2024-eu-sources-say/\">May 2025</a>. It feels like this is becoming the EU’s Real ID. Really! Because the new <a href=\"https://www.dhs.gov/news/2022/12/05/dhs-announces-extension-real-id-full-enforcement-deadline\">US Real ID deadline</a> is also May 2025 -- until they change it again.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter (X?) message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page like Thelma did, or on the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can skip all that social media stuff and post your comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/53277\">Fistful of Dub</a>&nbsp;(Feat. Snowflake and DJ Vadim) by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. &nbsp;Ft: snowflake and DJ Vadim</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Beer Tourism and Travel</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Scrolling through the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/episodes/\"><em>Episodes</em></a> section of the TravelCommons website, I saw that it’s been over a year since I’ve done any beer content, and immediately began working on rectifying it. I asked John Holl, long-time beer journalist, editor of <a href=\"https://allaboutbeer.com/\">All About Beer</a>, host of the <a href=\"https://allaboutbeer.com/podcast/drink-beer-think-beer/\">Drink Beer, Think Beer podcast</a>, to give us his thoughts about Beer Tourism…<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: John, thanks for coming on the podcast. We want to talk about beer tourism and travel. I\'m an old guy and for the longest time the idea of beer tourism seemed to start and end with renting lederhosen and heading to Munich for Oktoberfest. And then, in the early/mid-00’s, we got specialty beer releases that morphed into festivals like 3 Floyds’ <a href=\"https://darklordday.info/index.php/Home\">Dark Lord Day</a>. I was living in Chicago at the time and that went from a couple hundred people queuing for a bottle release to, in 2019, 13,000-15,000 people traveling around the country to see it.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>John: Gave people a lot of excuses to cross that Indiana border.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: I\'ve been to Munster Indiana and there\'s not a lot of other reason to go there other than 3 Floyds. And then they <a href=\"https://www.3floyds.com/taproom/\">shut the brew pub down</a> during COVID and now there\'s absolutely no reason to go there. And now, every town/region/state seems to have some sort of a beer trail. Last month, in August, I was in Portland Maine and it was the <a href=\"https://mainebrewersguild.org/visit-breweries/brewery-trail-challenge/\">Maine Beer Trail</a>. And then I was in Asheville, North Carolina at <a href=\"https://ashevillealetrail.com/\">Asheville Ale Trail </a>as well as their brewing district. It seems to be an area that\'s really grown. What are your thoughts on that? How significant is beer tourism for local economies now?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>John: I think it depends on the location. Where there\'s a concentration of breweries, it makes sense to have a beer trail. It makes sense for a guild or an organization to get together to try to convince not only the tourists but the locals to come out as well. There\'s 10,000 breweries thereabouts, maybe a little less, in the US these days and a lot of them are concentrated together. There\'s strength in numbers and hopefully they\'re all doing something that is diverse enough that can get folks to go from one place to the next, to the next without getting Hazy IPA fatigue. And I think Portland Maine is a great example of the breweries that are there. You have some of the old stalwarts, Geary\'s and Allagash. And some of the older, newer ones like Bissel Brothers. And then, there\'s some really cool ones like Belleflower that are there. So you get breweries of different sizes, of different scopes and I think it\'s important for the bottom line of these places so long as they\'re delivering good quality beer. But what\'s cool for me is being a tourist in a new city. I get to go to different areas. I get to go see a place that is not just the picturesque downtown, it\'s not just what\'s on the postcards for sale at the local travel kiosk. So you get to go into neighborhoods where people live and work. And for me, that\'s always a better sense of getting to know a city, of getting to know people, of getting to know a place because neighborhoods can change, especially some place like Chicago, from block to block. You\'re walking into neighborhoods that have different vibes, that have different histories to them, and that feel different. And so when I\'m traveling for beer, it\'s fun for me to not only go and set up at a tap room and spend some time there, but also to walk the neighborhoods as well. And I think that location informs a lot of what beer makers do. I\'ll keep going back to <a href=\"https://dovetailbrewery.com/\">Dovetail</a>; I\'ve spent more time there than I\'ll actually admit, and it\'s right up against the Brown Line and they use that to their advantage. They talk about their coolship; they talk about how their windows open up to the brown line and that the beer is inoculated with whatever the transit line brings them. And I think that\'s a fun thing. You\'re not necessarily tasting a sense of place, but you get the idea that it might be there.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: God only knows I\'ve written the Brown Line enough times. So maybe I\'ve helped Dovetail inoculate some of their coolship beers.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>John: And go to the Pacific Northwest at this time of year, in mid-September/late October when in Yakima and in parts of Oregon, they are harvesting the hops right now. You can bounce from brewery to brewery and the air is aromatic with fresh hops. The brewers are making fresh and wet hot beers. People are coming in from around the country, from around the world. There\'s an excitement and an energy that exists because of the agricultural product that is going into these beers and because of the harvest window as well. So, it doesn\'t always have to be a festival; it can be for a harvest season. And I think that that\'s another cool way that folks who aren\'t even in the beer industry can experience a different aspect of their pints.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: What\'s the best way to find out what\'s going on in a location? How do you think about where you\'re gonna go?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>John: I like not having firm plans when I\'m traveling because the other thing about beer tourism -- we\'re talking about beer trails -- is you start at one place and you say, “OK, we got five places on our list today.” So we say you\'re just having a pint at each. It\'s still five pints at the end of the day and even for a serious drinker like me, that\'s a lot. But if you\'re having a good time, I think it\'s great to not have structure because if you say, “OK, we\'re at stop number two and, and we have three more stops in front of us,” but we\'re really liking this, and they have this other beer that I want to try, and we\'re comfortable, and we\'re in good seats, and the food truck is awesome and all that -- just stay there, live in that moment. I feel I\'ve seen too many people get caught up in this sort of ticking culture where we have to hit all of these spots for whatever sort of weird list and you miss out on the fun experiences. Beer is about camaraderie. It\'s about being in the place. It\'s about experiencing flavor. And if you\'re rushing through it, it\'s not that much fun. I think beer in the way that it\'s grown over the last couple of decades -- it\'s not doing super-well volume-wise or sales-wise comparatively; it\'s like 12-13% of the overall marketplace -- but I think it has helped people appreciate flavors better. And to be a little bit more curious and to be a little bit more experimental.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: I think there\'s also a learning component too that I think you brought up, which is, you\'re going to push yourself outside your normal boundaries, outside of what I\'ve called a travel bubble…</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>John: That\'s the cool thing about travel, right? You talk to folks all the time about when they go to a new place and they want to have the local drink or they want to have the local food because they want to immerse themselves in that culture. You can do that with beer no matter where you go. So much of what brewers are doing these days too. When you travel, if you only drink American Light Lager, or you only drink Irish Stout. So you only drink something, you know, particular. If you\'re traveling, you might try the göse, you might try a lambic, you might try a barley wine or something like that because you\'re feeling a little bit more loose and unencumbered from the constraints of your daily life. And that, for me, is sort of the fun thing about beer. Usually it\'ll taste better from that place because you\'re surrounded by the people who made it, and the people who also were excited to be there. It\'s like folks who go on vacation to a tropical island and they\'re drinking mai tais, and it\'s the best mai tai they’ve ever had. They learn how to make the mai tai, and they come home and they do it on their back patio and they think “This doesn\'t taste as good.” And it\'s because you\'ve lost that sense of place. And so for me, I\'m always just trying to experience not just what\'s in my glass, but what\'s around me as well.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: John, I appreciate you coming on and talking to us about beer tourism and beer travel. It\'s something we\'ve talked a lot about on this podcast only just because I really like beer. It\'s been great talking to you. Thanks very much, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/John_Holl\" title=\"\">John Hall</a>, editor of <a href=\"https://allaboutbeer.com/\">All About Beer</a>. Both your <a href=\"https://allaboutbeer.com/podcast/\">podcast</a> and your website -- check it out. Thank you very much.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>John: Mark, thank you.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And, as always, check out the show notes on the TravelCommons podcast for links to read and listen to John.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/3lb3r3th/44072\">Misunderstood</a> by 3lb3r3th (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. &nbsp;Ft: Alchemistry</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>How To Plan a Beer Trip and Beer Tourism?</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If John Holl has you thinking about beer tourism, the next logical question -- how do you plan it? Here’s John’s approach…<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>John: I plan out travel, especially for specific events like hop harvest or Oktoberfest, which I\'m going to for the first time this year. I plan that out at least a year in advance because I want to make sure that when I can get hotels and transportation, and to budget out all of that. Social media is terrible in a lot of ways, but it can also be helpful in certain ways, getting you excited about traveling to new places. When I hear about annual beer festivals in Belgium or see folks who are out at hop harvest, picking hops, it gets me in a certain sort of way, if I\'m sitting at my desk at home. saying “Gosh, I wish I was there.”&nbsp; So then I put stuff on the calendar and start to say, “OK, well, think about this” and then go from there. When I\'m traveling to a city for work, I\'m usually going to visit specific breweries or specific people. But nine times out of 10, I will also call friends of mine and say, “Where are you drinking these days?” or “What\'s exciting you these days?” There\'s always going to be the one place that the serious beer nerd should go to,&nbsp; but then you peel that onion back just a little bit and all of a sudden, it\'s “Well, you know, I actually had a really fun experience at such and such place” or “I had this one beer” or “They\'re doing some cool stuff” and I start to say, “All right... Well, I trust them, so what do I have to lose?” It\'s either gonna be a great pint or it\'s not...</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>So there you go, advanced planning for the big stuff and have beer nerd friends in every city who can point you to the out-of-the-way nuggets. The latter is probably a <em>bit</em> easier for John, a well-known beer journalist, than for the rest of us.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/04/10/podcast-174-how-the-pros-plan-their-taproom-tourism/\">episode #174</a>, I talked about this with Rob Cheshire, a long time TravelCommons listener and, for the last 3+ years, a UK craft beer podcaster with his <a href=\"https://thisweekincraft.beer/this-week-in-craft-beer-podcasts/\">This Week in Craft Beer</a> podcast<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: How do you plan your taproom visits?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Rob: It\'s all driven through Google for me. I might have some idea based on previous reading about some big-name places that I want to visit in a particular city. But beyond that, I\'m just going to Google. First of all, I\'ll plot a Google map for the city. I\'ll end up with 50-60, maybe even 100 pins on the map. Pretty quickly, I\'ll go to <a href=\"https://untappd.com\">Untappd</a> and look at the average brewery rating. And this really makes brewers cross how much I rely on Untappd for this type of thing because I had this conversation a load of times on the podcast with them. But I do rely on brewery ratings on Untappd, and I find it very reliable. Quite frankly, if a brewery has an average rating of anything close to 4, then, obviously it\'s a massive generalization to say whatever they brew, but most of their beers are gonna be great. If the brewery rating is anywhere close to 3.5, it\'s going to be very mediocre at best. And somewhere in between is where most people land. So 3.6, eh...;&nbsp; 3.8, it\'s a good brewery; 3.9 is a terrific brewery; 4 is a great brewery. And so I\'m looking for those 3.8 and 3.9 average brewery ratings. But what I\'m looking for, really, is that district where I can walk from one to another and really make an afternoon of it.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Me? I kinda mash the two up. Like Rob, I’m a pretty solid Untappd user. Rob often says it’s his “beer diary” and that’s pretty much what it is for me too.&nbsp;When people ask me for recommendations for a city -- Budapest was the most recent ask -- I can quickly pop open the app and give people a list. And when <em>I’m</em> in a new city trying to find a good place for a beer, I’ll open it up and look at the Nearby Activity tab to see where (and what) folks are drinking. And back to <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/06/20/podcast-194-best-laid-travel-plans-roaming-entropy/\">episode #194</a>’s discussion of <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fl%C3%A2neur\">flâneuring</a>, or “roaming entropy” as I like to call it, some of my best “wanders” had, as their eventual end-point, a bar or taproom that I found that way.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But, as John says, if you let your friends know you’re deep into beer, they’ll be looking out for you. Visiting Savannah, GA back in May, our friends couldn’t wait to take me downtown to <a href=\"https://www.twotidesbrewing.com/\">Two Tides Brewing</a>, a microbrewery in a <a href=\"https://www.cntraveler.com/bars/savannah/two-tides-brewing-co\">100-year-old house</a> with great beers but no door onto the balcony because of a “door tax” way back when, where houses were taxed on the number of doors they had. So we ducked down and walked through a big window with our glasses… <em>multiple</em> times. Great beer and a history lesson; not sure I would’ve found that without a little help. Coming up in a couple of weeks, we’re heading back to New York City and our daughter already has an <em>ambitious</em> list for us.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Rob Cheshire and I have traded beer touring tips for our home towns. Rob took me to his favorite places in the railway arches of London’s Bermondsey Beer Mile. But when Rob hit Chicago three weeks after we’d moved to Nashville, I couldn’t reciprocate the personal tour, and so instead emailed him the couple of taproom circuits I <em>would’ve</em> taken him on if he’d showed up a month sooner. And actually, for all of you -- my friends and listeners -- since I can’t email it to you, I’ll put my Chicago taproom circuits in this episode’s show notes on travelcommons.com. Or check out my list of&nbsp; “Yeah, I’d like to go back there” taprooms in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/05/26/podcast-187-moving-to-a-non-hub-airport-what-makes-a-great-taproom/\">episode #187 show notes</a>. Maybe these can help you with your beer tourism planning.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The two tent poles for our Asheville trip were hiking and beer tourism. But we were the Asheville pioneers among our friend group, so I didn’t have anyone to build taproom circuits for me. So I started down Rob’s path, firing up Google Maps and Untappd, but then… wait a minute. Let’s see what AI can do. So I fired up <a href=\"https://chat.openai.com/\">ChatGPT</a> and typed in “Develop a taproom circuit of microbrewery taprooms in Asheville, NC starting at the Aloft Hotel in Asheville and optimized to minimize walking distance and maximize Untappd ratings. Present it in a table with the brewery name in the first column, the distance from the previous taproom in the second column, the Untappd rating in the third column, and the type of beers served in the fourth column.” The response started with a caveat that it can’t access real-time data and so the Untappd ratings and distances are based on its last update in 2022. After that throat-clearing, ChatGPT spit out a table with 8 taprooms. Eyeballing the list, the names didn’t seem too out of whack, so then I checked the Untappd ratings. None of them were right, and indeed, so far out of whack (all on the high side) that eight months of additional check-in couldn’t have moved the ratings that much. Chalk that up to GPT hallucination, or being a people pleaser and not wanting to say “I don’t know”. Then I plotted the circuit on a map, and it wasn’t -- a circuit, that is. It was a bit more of a random walk, doubling back a couple of times. And, rather than working us back to the Aloft, it ended at the farthest away brewery. So with no friend recommendations and not much help from ChatGPT, I fell back to my old ways --&nbsp; flâneuring. I figured with the beer density in Asheville, a random walk was more likely than not to land me in front of a beer tap. Which pretty much proved to be the case. We did what long-time listener Aaron Woodin called it in the last episode a “walk and gawk”, or maybe&nbsp; a “walk and gulp.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>My Chicago Taproom Circuits</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Here are the two Chicago taproom circuits I built for Rob Cheshire in the summer of 2022</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Logan Square/Palmer Circuit</strong> -- a kinda triangular circuit through 3-4 taprooms in Chicago\'s \"Hipster Ground Zero\" neighborhood with some good food options along the way.<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Take the Blue Line toward O\'Hare to the California St stop. Walk east on Adams to Monroe and then north a half-block. It\'s a $2.50 fare; like the Tube, you can tap on with a contactless credit card. It\'s way cheaper than an Uber and lets you bypass a load of traffic. Follow Google Maps walking directions; you\'re basically walking south on California (or one of the less-crowded neighborhood streets running parallel) down to Armitage and then west to...</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>Solemn Oath Still Life</em> -- This is kinda cheating. This is the Chicago outpost of one of my favorite suburban breweries. They have a good range of styles. They recently started up a second label, Hidden Hand, that goes deep into hazies. When you\'re done, walk out the door, turn right on Armitage (going back east), cross the street at some point, and end up at</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>Middle Brow Beer</em> -- The vibe here is a bit of a crunchy granola with Democratic Socialist/Labour Momentum sprinkles (or hundreds-and-thousands if you will), but they do some interesting wild beers fermented from yeast cultured from their garden. Good for one, maybe two beers.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Food -if you\'re getting peckish, there are some good options on Armitage on the way to the next stop.<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>Middle Brow</em> - While you\'re there, their bread and pizzas are great.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>90 Miles Cuban Cafe</em> - Very good Cuban food</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>Redhot Ranch</em> - Chicago street food; I get either a polish or a burger Chicago style</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>When you\'re done, continue walking east to Western, turn right (south), pass Margie\'s Candies and find the entrance to</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>Life On Marz</em> - Another cheat, the north side outpost of the south side Marz Brewing. It\'s a small place, but they do a nice selection of styles. When you\'re done, head left out the door and then over to the diagonal street, Milwaukee, not the north-south street (Western). The intersection is a bit tricky. Head northwest up Milwaukee to...</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>Pilot Project Brewing</em> - This is a brewing incubator, so there\'s usually some interesting stuff on offer. The last time I was in, they were serving Indian-inspired beers from Azadi Brewing. Brewer\'s Kitchen also does good stuff. Not everything works, but I\'ve had a surprisingly good hit rate. Take a left out the door, cross the street (watch out for the bicyclists; this is the most Amsterdam-ish street in Chicago) and head up a block to...</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>Navigator Taproom</em> - This is a pour-your-own, priced-by-the-ounce beer bar with a good selection of Chicago (they seem to have a lot from Pipeworks) and Midwest beers. Check out their beer menu on Untappd to see if there\'s anything that interests you. Continue up Milwaukee to the last stop</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>Revolution Brewing Brewpub</em> - This is the original Rev Brew joint; it opened before the brewery taproom a couple of miles north. If you\'re IPA\'d out and the temperatures aren\'t in the 90\'s, go for their Deep Woods offerings -- the variations on their Deth\'s Tar imperial stout (Josh Deth owns Rev Brew) or their Straight Jacket barleywine. If it\'s too hot (or you\'re too baked for those double-digit abv\'s), their Hero IPA series is good; lots of variants based on different hop combos.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And that\'s it. If you want to head straight back, you\'re a couple of blocks from the California Blue Line L stop. Get on the Forest Park Blue Line to Monroe stop in the Loop. If you\'re still walking straight, you can keep walking up Milwaukee through the neighborhood. It\'s an interesting neighborhood. The Blue Line runs parallel to Milwaukee. The next stop is the Logan Square stop, about a 15-20 minute walk. Or you can always just call an Uber.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Maplewood-Based Circuit</strong> -- this is less concentrated/less obvious, so I\'ll put in a few branches so you can choose your own adventure<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>Maplewood</em> -- Part of its charm (a little corner tavern at the end of a neighborhood street) makes it inconvenient to get there via public transportation. So to start here, it\'s probably best to Uber up.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Option - A bit of a walking circuit from Maplewood<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>Ravinia Brewing</em> -- Very optional. Not a bad place; I\'ve had a couple of good beers sitting out on their patio after a bike ride. I wouldn\'t go out of my way to go there, but it\'s two blocks from Maplewood</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>Metropolitan Brewing</em> -- This is ~10 min walk north from Maplewood through a little neighborhood. It\'s one of the original Chicago microbreweries, though a lager specialist which I know is not exactly on point for you. However, their patio looks down on the north branch of the Chicago River. So, if it\'s a nice day, this is worth a stop for the view -- and maybe a crisp palate cleanser.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>The Beer Temple</em> -- One of our favorite beer bars. It\'s what in Chicago is termed a \"slashie\" -- a bar and a liquor store. They always have a good beer selection and they\'re a verified venue on Untappd, so you can check out the menu to see if it\'s worth the 7-min walk from Metropolitan.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Food<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>Kuma\'s Corner</em> is about a 5-min walk west on Belmont from Beer Temple. Kuma\'s is a great burger place with a solid beer menu (an Untappd verified venue) and a heavy metal soundtrack.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>Honey Butter Fried Chicken</em> - Convenient if you\'re walking up to the Rev Brew Taproom</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>Revolution Brewing Taproom</em> -- If you didn\'t hit their brewpub on the Logan Square circuit, the brewery taproom is a 12-15-min walk from Beer Temple or Kuma\'s.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Option - Uber up to the Ravenswood neighborhood\'s Malt Row<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>Begyle Brewing</em> -- First brewery on Malt Row. Nice IPAs and a good barrel-aged imperial stout</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>Dovetail Brewing</em> -- The guys on the Steal This Beer podcast obsess over this brewery. Cool space; German lager-and-spontaneous ferm-focused. Walk down (south) Ravenswood Ave to the Irving Park Brown Line. Take it to two stops to the Paulina exit, walk south on Paulina St one block to...</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>Bitter Pops</em> -- Another great slashie and also an Untappd verified venue if you want to check out the tap list. Also a good place to buy a cold 4-pack to take back to your hotel room. Or cross Lincoln Ave and walk down a half block to...</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>The Green Lady</em> -- Old-time Chicago bar vibe with a great tap list.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Get back on the Brown Line and head down to the Loop, to the Quincy Stop which is ~1 block from the JW Marriott</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Option - Uber up to Half Acre Beer<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>Half Acre Beer</em> - Another original Chicago microbrewery. Augie Carton on Steal This Beer is a big fan of their Daisy Cutter pale ale, but I like their range of IPAs.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>Spiteful Brewing</em> - Next door to Half Acre. Good place; wouldn\'t make a special trip for it, but is worth the block walk if you\'re at Half Acre.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Probably best just to Uber back down to the JW from here.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"className\":\"has-medium-font-size\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #196</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As always, you can find us and listen to the current episodes on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. No longer Stitcher, though. SiriusXM pulled the plug on it, though I think you can find TravelCommons on the other Sirius platforms -- Pandora and maybe the Sirius app. But I know that you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page at TravelCommons.com for a transcript of the episode and links to places I’ve mentioned, and to John and Rob’s websites. If you’re not yet subscribed, there’s a drop down Subscribe menu at the top of TravelCommon’s home page. And along the side of the page, you’ll find links to all the TravelCommons’ socials.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to mpeacock on Twitter, write them on the TravelCommons page on Facebook or Instagram, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com.&nbsp; And thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in emails, Tweets and post comments on the website. I really appreciate it.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And until we talk again, safe travels; raise a cold (or cask-temperature) one; and thanks for stopping by the TravelCommons.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_197.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #197 — Renting a Tesla; 2023 Traveler Gift Guide','','inherit','closed','closed','','4387-revision-v1','','','2023-11-07 09:46:03','2023-11-07 14:46:03','',4387,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4390',0,'revision','',0);
INSERT INTO `wp_posts` VALUES
(4391,1,'2023-11-07 09:57:54','2023-11-07 14:57:54','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Dalle-E_Renting_Tesla-300x300.png\" alt=\"road warrior looking at a single row of black Tesla Model 3s in a Hertz rental car lot.\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" />Where\'s the Key?[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>In this beer-focused episode, John Holl, editor of <a href=\"http://allaboutbeer.com\" title=\"All About Beer\"><em>All About Beer</em></a>, gives us his take on beer tourism and tips on how to beer travels. I talk about my experience planning my Asheville, NC taproom visits with ChatGPT. We also dive deep into the new <a href=\"https://www.jdpower.com/business/press-releases/2023-north-america-airport-satisfaction-study\" title=\"JD Power Airport Satisfaction Survey\">JD Power Airport Satisfaction Survey</a> and do a quick update about the EU\'s delayed ETIAS system. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_197.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #197: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN after a pretty solid three weeks of travel -- a business trip to the Boston suburbs, then down to New York to meet up with Irene and Claire for a long weekend of knocking around Brooklyn and Queens, and then, after a day of reloading suitcases and picking up the cat, driving up to Chicago for friends and family. When we got back home last Friday, I was ready to just stay put for a little bit. Which is about all it will be because we head out to the UK in less than two weeks.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The Boston trip came up all of a sudden and I think is only my second post-pandemic business trip -- <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/06/15/podcast-176-why-business-travel-is-coming-back-learning-airport-history/\" title=\"\">my first was down to Miami in May 2021</a>.  Maybe I’ve timed out of my road warrior status, because everything felt a bit off. Flying BNA-BOS, my choices were JetBlue or Delta. I don’t have status on either, so I choose JetBlue because it’s the earlier flight out. No status means I also have to pay $80-100 to reserve a seat after paying $450 for a one-way ticket. I could’ve expensed it through, but the annoyance vein in my temple started to pulsate. How dare you, JetBlue! And in return for my righteous anger, I get assigned, at the gate, a middle seat in the last boarding group. I resign myself to having to gate check my carry-on. But then when boarding is called, the pre-boarding announcement is for JetBlue <em>and</em> American elites. Ugh! Such an amateur mistake — not keeping track of alliances and partnerships.  If I’d put my Aadvantage Platinum number into my reservation instead of my plain TrueBlue number, I probably could’ve saved myself all that righteous anger and vein throbbing. Luckily though, I always carry my physical elite cards with me, so I show my Aadvantage Platinum card to the agent, get waved on, and find an empty bin right above my seat.  I was a little concerned about fitting my big carry-on in an A220 -- it was my first time on this plane -- but no problem. The overhead bins on this plane are huge.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>After my window seat neighbor got settled, I put on my Bose noise-canceling headphones, dialed up the white noise app on my iPhone, and, middle seat be damned, nodded off sitting up straight. One thing I <em>haven’t</em> lost while working virtually -- being able to fall asleep even before my 7am flight rotates off the runway.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/JeffSpeed68/54450\">Hula Hoop Party</a> by Stefan Kartenberg (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. &nbsp;Ft: Martijn de Boer, Blue Wave Theory</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>It wouldn’t be a proper Following Up section without yet another update on the US’s Real ID or the EU’s ETIAS rolling delays. Let’s do ETIAS, the EU’s pre-travel authorization system that gobs of click-bait websites have mislabeled a “European Visa.” The EU has tweaked their go-live date again -- from last month’s <a href=\"https://www.schengenvisainfo.com/news/no-etias-wont-become-operational-in-2024-eu-sources-say/\">May 2025</a> to a less definite/more nebulous “<a href=\"https://travel-europe.europa.eu/etias/what-etias_en#etias-in-a-nutshell\">mid-2025</a>” -- which could be May or June or July. But I’m not sure why anyone in their right mind would want to flip the switch on this in the summer, during Europe’s peak tourist season. I’m taking the over on this; I don’t see it going live any earlier than October 2025.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The US, on the other hand, seems to be sticking to their May 2025 date -- for now. Remember, the initial deadline for needing a Real ID to board a commercial flight was January 2018 -- which then got kicked to October 2020. But then COVID hit and in April 2020, soon after just about every government building was emptied out and locked up, the bright sparks at Dept of Homeland Security decided that driving crowds of people toward closed DMVs to replace their old driver’s licenses wouldn’t be great and pushed the deadline a year to October 2021. Which, we’ll all remember, wasn’t <em>that</em> much better -- at least with regards to DMV accessibility. I remember lining up outside, in December 2021, in Chicago at a DMV to renew my driver’s license. And so another push, 19 months to May 2023. And then last December, they pushed it another 2 years to May 2025 because -- who knows. So the US has got nothing to say to the EU. But on my flights a couple of weeks ago, I started seeing new signage “RealID coming in May 2025”; even the Delta app, when I checked in for my BOS-LGA flight, had a banner about it. Huh? I mean, why wind everyone up about a deadline that’s 18 months away and, if the kabuki theater of the last 5 years is any guide, will get pushed again.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Now where DHS is moving much faster is rolling out biometrics to airport and customs checkpoints. Over the years here on TravelCommons, I have talked about my experiences with biometrics usage -- starting with my first fingerprint scan back in the late ‘90’s so I could skip the US customs line at Toronto-Pearson Airport, then in 2008 letting the first iteration of CLEAR scan my eyeballs in exchange for a shortcut to the front of the TSA line, then in 2011 a background check and another fingerprint scan for Global Entry so I could skip all the US customs lines -- so yes, I’ll do damn close to anything to skip an airport line. But over the past couple of years, it feels like DHS has been turning it up a notch. October 2021, our first international flight in a couple of years, on AirFrance, the gate agent took our picture when boarding and didn’t need to see our boarding pass. <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/06/20/podcast-194-best-laid-travel-plans-roaming-entropy/\" title=\"\">Last April, returning from the Netherlands</a>, the Global Entry kiosk no longer needed to scan my fingerprints; a quick side glance at the camera was enough to recognize me and let me through. And now, a couple of weeks ago, at the BNA PreCheck line, a big sign “Identity Verification Technology. Biometrics technology is available at this checkpoint. Your participation is optional.” This is new; it wasn’t there 2 months ago when we flew out to Maine. I give my driver’s license to the TSA guy standing next to something like a camera on a stick; it looks a bit like the electronic customs gates at LHR. He puts my ID in the machine, tells me to look at the camera, then looks at the screen and waves me through. A couple of things here -- I’m not sure how this is different from the TSA guy looking at my face and comparing it to the picture on my license; and I didn’t see any way that my participation was optional. And I certainly didn’t get to skip any lines for the biometric giveaway. I’ve been trying since April to get someone from TSA or DHS on the podcast to talk about this biometrics push and have gotten nothing but repeated “I’ll get back to you soon” from the TSA press secretary. Now maybe this new equipment gets us to the automated checkpoints I’ve been through in some smaller European airports -- which could shorten the security lines -- but I had to dig pretty deep into a bunch of jargon-y <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/sites/default/files/tsa_idm_roadmap_2022-03-01_508c_final.pdf\">PDF documents</a> on the TSA website to get even a hint of any benefits to the regular traveler. I dunno, maybe all the benefits are waiting on Real ID. Once everyone has that little gold star on their license, it’s clear sailing.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter (X?) message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page, or on the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can skip all that social media stuff and post your comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/53277\">Fistful of Dub</a>&nbsp;(Feat. Snowflake and DJ Vadim) by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. &nbsp;Ft: snowflake and DJ Vadim</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Renting a Tesla</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Scrolling through the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/episodes/\"><em>Episodes</em></a> section of the TravelCommons website, I saw that it’s been over a year since I’ve done any beer content, and immediately began working on rectifying it. I asked John Holl, long-time beer journalist, editor of <a href=\"https://allaboutbeer.com/\">All About Beer</a>, host of the <a href=\"https://allaboutbeer.com/podcast/drink-beer-think-beer/\">Drink Beer, Think Beer podcast</a>, to give us his thoughts about Beer Tourism…<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: John, thanks for coming on the podcast. We want to talk about beer tourism and travel. I\'m an old guy and for the longest time the idea of beer tourism seemed to start and end with renting lederhosen and heading to Munich for Oktoberfest. And then, in the early/mid-00’s, we got specialty beer releases that morphed into festivals like 3 Floyds’ <a href=\"https://darklordday.info/index.php/Home\">Dark Lord Day</a>. I was living in Chicago at the time and that went from a couple hundred people queuing for a bottle release to, in 2019, 13,000-15,000 people traveling around the country to see it.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>John: Gave people a lot of excuses to cross that Indiana border.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: I\'ve been to Munster Indiana and there\'s not a lot of other reason to go there other than 3 Floyds. And then they <a href=\"https://www.3floyds.com/taproom/\">shut the brew pub down</a> during COVID and now there\'s absolutely no reason to go there. And now, every town/region/state seems to have some sort of a beer trail. Last month, in August, I was in Portland Maine and it was the <a href=\"https://mainebrewersguild.org/visit-breweries/brewery-trail-challenge/\">Maine Beer Trail</a>. And then I was in Asheville, North Carolina at <a href=\"https://ashevillealetrail.com/\">Asheville Ale Trail </a>as well as their brewing district. It seems to be an area that\'s really grown. What are your thoughts on that? How significant is beer tourism for local economies now?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>John: I think it depends on the location. Where there\'s a concentration of breweries, it makes sense to have a beer trail. It makes sense for a guild or an organization to get together to try to convince not only the tourists but the locals to come out as well. There\'s 10,000 breweries thereabouts, maybe a little less, in the US these days and a lot of them are concentrated together. There\'s strength in numbers and hopefully they\'re all doing something that is diverse enough that can get folks to go from one place to the next, to the next without getting Hazy IPA fatigue. And I think Portland Maine is a great example of the breweries that are there. You have some of the old stalwarts, Geary\'s and Allagash. And some of the older, newer ones like Bissel Brothers. And then, there\'s some really cool ones like Belleflower that are there. So you get breweries of different sizes, of different scopes and I think it\'s important for the bottom line of these places so long as they\'re delivering good quality beer. But what\'s cool for me is being a tourist in a new city. I get to go to different areas. I get to go see a place that is not just the picturesque downtown, it\'s not just what\'s on the postcards for sale at the local travel kiosk. So you get to go into neighborhoods where people live and work. And for me, that\'s always a better sense of getting to know a city, of getting to know people, of getting to know a place because neighborhoods can change, especially some place like Chicago, from block to block. You\'re walking into neighborhoods that have different vibes, that have different histories to them, and that feel different. And so when I\'m traveling for beer, it\'s fun for me to not only go and set up at a tap room and spend some time there, but also to walk the neighborhoods as well. And I think that location informs a lot of what beer makers do. I\'ll keep going back to <a href=\"https://dovetailbrewery.com/\">Dovetail</a>; I\'ve spent more time there than I\'ll actually admit, and it\'s right up against the Brown Line and they use that to their advantage. They talk about their coolship; they talk about how their windows open up to the brown line and that the beer is inoculated with whatever the transit line brings them. And I think that\'s a fun thing. You\'re not necessarily tasting a sense of place, but you get the idea that it might be there.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: God only knows I\'ve written the Brown Line enough times. So maybe I\'ve helped Dovetail inoculate some of their coolship beers.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>John: And go to the Pacific Northwest at this time of year, in mid-September/late October when in Yakima and in parts of Oregon, they are harvesting the hops right now. You can bounce from brewery to brewery and the air is aromatic with fresh hops. The brewers are making fresh and wet hot beers. People are coming in from around the country, from around the world. There\'s an excitement and an energy that exists because of the agricultural product that is going into these beers and because of the harvest window as well. So, it doesn\'t always have to be a festival; it can be for a harvest season. And I think that that\'s another cool way that folks who aren\'t even in the beer industry can experience a different aspect of their pints.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: What\'s the best way to find out what\'s going on in a location? How do you think about where you\'re gonna go?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>John: I like not having firm plans when I\'m traveling because the other thing about beer tourism -- we\'re talking about beer trails -- is you start at one place and you say, “OK, we got five places on our list today.” So we say you\'re just having a pint at each. It\'s still five pints at the end of the day and even for a serious drinker like me, that\'s a lot. But if you\'re having a good time, I think it\'s great to not have structure because if you say, “OK, we\'re at stop number two and, and we have three more stops in front of us,” but we\'re really liking this, and they have this other beer that I want to try, and we\'re comfortable, and we\'re in good seats, and the food truck is awesome and all that -- just stay there, live in that moment. I feel I\'ve seen too many people get caught up in this sort of ticking culture where we have to hit all of these spots for whatever sort of weird list and you miss out on the fun experiences. Beer is about camaraderie. It\'s about being in the place. It\'s about experiencing flavor. And if you\'re rushing through it, it\'s not that much fun. I think beer in the way that it\'s grown over the last couple of decades -- it\'s not doing super-well volume-wise or sales-wise comparatively; it\'s like 12-13% of the overall marketplace -- but I think it has helped people appreciate flavors better. And to be a little bit more curious and to be a little bit more experimental.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: I think there\'s also a learning component too that I think you brought up, which is, you\'re going to push yourself outside your normal boundaries, outside of what I\'ve called a travel bubble…</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>John: That\'s the cool thing about travel, right? You talk to folks all the time about when they go to a new place and they want to have the local drink or they want to have the local food because they want to immerse themselves in that culture. You can do that with beer no matter where you go. So much of what brewers are doing these days too. When you travel, if you only drink American Light Lager, or you only drink Irish Stout. So you only drink something, you know, particular. If you\'re traveling, you might try the göse, you might try a lambic, you might try a barley wine or something like that because you\'re feeling a little bit more loose and unencumbered from the constraints of your daily life. And that, for me, is sort of the fun thing about beer. Usually it\'ll taste better from that place because you\'re surrounded by the people who made it, and the people who also were excited to be there. It\'s like folks who go on vacation to a tropical island and they\'re drinking mai tais, and it\'s the best mai tai they’ve ever had. They learn how to make the mai tai, and they come home and they do it on their back patio and they think “This doesn\'t taste as good.” And it\'s because you\'ve lost that sense of place. And so for me, I\'m always just trying to experience not just what\'s in my glass, but what\'s around me as well.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: John, I appreciate you coming on and talking to us about beer tourism and beer travel. It\'s something we\'ve talked a lot about on this podcast only just because I really like beer. It\'s been great talking to you. Thanks very much, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/John_Holl\" title=\"\">John Hall</a>, editor of <a href=\"https://allaboutbeer.com/\">All About Beer</a>. Both your <a href=\"https://allaboutbeer.com/podcast/\">podcast</a> and your website -- check it out. Thank you very much.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>John: Mark, thank you.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And, as always, check out the show notes on the TravelCommons podcast for links to read and listen to John.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/3lb3r3th/44072\">Misunderstood</a> by 3lb3r3th (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. &nbsp;Ft: Alchemistry</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>How To Plan a Beer Trip and Beer Tourism?</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If John Holl has you thinking about beer tourism, the next logical question -- how do you plan it? Here’s John’s approach…<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>John: I plan out travel, especially for specific events like hop harvest or Oktoberfest, which I\'m going to for the first time this year. I plan that out at least a year in advance because I want to make sure that when I can get hotels and transportation, and to budget out all of that. Social media is terrible in a lot of ways, but it can also be helpful in certain ways, getting you excited about traveling to new places. When I hear about annual beer festivals in Belgium or see folks who are out at hop harvest, picking hops, it gets me in a certain sort of way, if I\'m sitting at my desk at home. saying “Gosh, I wish I was there.”&nbsp; So then I put stuff on the calendar and start to say, “OK, well, think about this” and then go from there. When I\'m traveling to a city for work, I\'m usually going to visit specific breweries or specific people. But nine times out of 10, I will also call friends of mine and say, “Where are you drinking these days?” or “What\'s exciting you these days?” There\'s always going to be the one place that the serious beer nerd should go to,&nbsp; but then you peel that onion back just a little bit and all of a sudden, it\'s “Well, you know, I actually had a really fun experience at such and such place” or “I had this one beer” or “They\'re doing some cool stuff” and I start to say, “All right... Well, I trust them, so what do I have to lose?” It\'s either gonna be a great pint or it\'s not...</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>So there you go, advanced planning for the big stuff and have beer nerd friends in every city who can point you to the out-of-the-way nuggets. The latter is probably a <em>bit</em> easier for John, a well-known beer journalist, than for the rest of us.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/04/10/podcast-174-how-the-pros-plan-their-taproom-tourism/\">episode #174</a>, I talked about this with Rob Cheshire, a long time TravelCommons listener and, for the last 3+ years, a UK craft beer podcaster with his <a href=\"https://thisweekincraft.beer/this-week-in-craft-beer-podcasts/\">This Week in Craft Beer</a> podcast<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: How do you plan your taproom visits?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Rob: It\'s all driven through Google for me. I might have some idea based on previous reading about some big-name places that I want to visit in a particular city. But beyond that, I\'m just going to Google. First of all, I\'ll plot a Google map for the city. I\'ll end up with 50-60, maybe even 100 pins on the map. Pretty quickly, I\'ll go to <a href=\"https://untappd.com\">Untappd</a> and look at the average brewery rating. And this really makes brewers cross how much I rely on Untappd for this type of thing because I had this conversation a load of times on the podcast with them. But I do rely on brewery ratings on Untappd, and I find it very reliable. Quite frankly, if a brewery has an average rating of anything close to 4, then, obviously it\'s a massive generalization to say whatever they brew, but most of their beers are gonna be great. If the brewery rating is anywhere close to 3.5, it\'s going to be very mediocre at best. And somewhere in between is where most people land. So 3.6, eh...;&nbsp; 3.8, it\'s a good brewery; 3.9 is a terrific brewery; 4 is a great brewery. And so I\'m looking for those 3.8 and 3.9 average brewery ratings. But what I\'m looking for, really, is that district where I can walk from one to another and really make an afternoon of it.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Me? I kinda mash the two up. Like Rob, I’m a pretty solid Untappd user. Rob often says it’s his “beer diary” and that’s pretty much what it is for me too.&nbsp;When people ask me for recommendations for a city -- Budapest was the most recent ask -- I can quickly pop open the app and give people a list. And when <em>I’m</em> in a new city trying to find a good place for a beer, I’ll open it up and look at the Nearby Activity tab to see where (and what) folks are drinking. And back to <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/06/20/podcast-194-best-laid-travel-plans-roaming-entropy/\">episode #194</a>’s discussion of <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fl%C3%A2neur\">flâneuring</a>, or “roaming entropy” as I like to call it, some of my best “wanders” had, as their eventual end-point, a bar or taproom that I found that way.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But, as John says, if you let your friends know you’re deep into beer, they’ll be looking out for you. Visiting Savannah, GA back in May, our friends couldn’t wait to take me downtown to <a href=\"https://www.twotidesbrewing.com/\">Two Tides Brewing</a>, a microbrewery in a <a href=\"https://www.cntraveler.com/bars/savannah/two-tides-brewing-co\">100-year-old house</a> with great beers but no door onto the balcony because of a “door tax” way back when, where houses were taxed on the number of doors they had. So we ducked down and walked through a big window with our glasses… <em>multiple</em> times. Great beer and a history lesson; not sure I would’ve found that without a little help. Coming up in a couple of weeks, we’re heading back to New York City and our daughter already has an <em>ambitious</em> list for us.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Rob Cheshire and I have traded beer touring tips for our home towns. Rob took me to his favorite places in the railway arches of London’s Bermondsey Beer Mile. But when Rob hit Chicago three weeks after we’d moved to Nashville, I couldn’t reciprocate the personal tour, and so instead emailed him the couple of taproom circuits I <em>would’ve</em> taken him on if he’d showed up a month sooner. And actually, for all of you -- my friends and listeners -- since I can’t email it to you, I’ll put my Chicago taproom circuits in this episode’s show notes on travelcommons.com. Or check out my list of&nbsp; “Yeah, I’d like to go back there” taprooms in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/05/26/podcast-187-moving-to-a-non-hub-airport-what-makes-a-great-taproom/\">episode #187 show notes</a>. Maybe these can help you with your beer tourism planning.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The two tent poles for our Asheville trip were hiking and beer tourism. But we were the Asheville pioneers among our friend group, so I didn’t have anyone to build taproom circuits for me. So I started down Rob’s path, firing up Google Maps and Untappd, but then… wait a minute. Let’s see what AI can do. So I fired up <a href=\"https://chat.openai.com/\">ChatGPT</a> and typed in “Develop a taproom circuit of microbrewery taprooms in Asheville, NC starting at the Aloft Hotel in Asheville and optimized to minimize walking distance and maximize Untappd ratings. Present it in a table with the brewery name in the first column, the distance from the previous taproom in the second column, the Untappd rating in the third column, and the type of beers served in the fourth column.” The response started with a caveat that it can’t access real-time data and so the Untappd ratings and distances are based on its last update in 2022. After that throat-clearing, ChatGPT spit out a table with 8 taprooms. Eyeballing the list, the names didn’t seem too out of whack, so then I checked the Untappd ratings. None of them were right, and indeed, so far out of whack (all on the high side) that eight months of additional check-in couldn’t have moved the ratings that much. Chalk that up to GPT hallucination, or being a people pleaser and not wanting to say “I don’t know”. Then I plotted the circuit on a map, and it wasn’t -- a circuit, that is. It was a bit more of a random walk, doubling back a couple of times. And, rather than working us back to the Aloft, it ended at the farthest away brewery. So with no friend recommendations and not much help from ChatGPT, I fell back to my old ways --&nbsp; flâneuring. I figured with the beer density in Asheville, a random walk was more likely than not to land me in front of a beer tap. Which pretty much proved to be the case. We did what long-time listener Aaron Woodin called it in the last episode a “walk and gawk”, or maybe&nbsp; a “walk and gulp.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>My Chicago Taproom Circuits</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Here are the two Chicago taproom circuits I built for Rob Cheshire in the summer of 2022</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Logan Square/Palmer Circuit</strong> -- a kinda triangular circuit through 3-4 taprooms in Chicago\'s \"Hipster Ground Zero\" neighborhood with some good food options along the way.<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Take the Blue Line toward O\'Hare to the California St stop. Walk east on Adams to Monroe and then north a half-block. It\'s a $2.50 fare; like the Tube, you can tap on with a contactless credit card. It\'s way cheaper than an Uber and lets you bypass a load of traffic. Follow Google Maps walking directions; you\'re basically walking south on California (or one of the less-crowded neighborhood streets running parallel) down to Armitage and then west to...</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>Solemn Oath Still Life</em> -- This is kinda cheating. This is the Chicago outpost of one of my favorite suburban breweries. They have a good range of styles. They recently started up a second label, Hidden Hand, that goes deep into hazies. When you\'re done, walk out the door, turn right on Armitage (going back east), cross the street at some point, and end up at</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>Middle Brow Beer</em> -- The vibe here is a bit of a crunchy granola with Democratic Socialist/Labour Momentum sprinkles (or hundreds-and-thousands if you will), but they do some interesting wild beers fermented from yeast cultured from their garden. Good for one, maybe two beers.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Food -if you\'re getting peckish, there are some good options on Armitage on the way to the next stop.<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>Middle Brow</em> - While you\'re there, their bread and pizzas are great.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>90 Miles Cuban Cafe</em> - Very good Cuban food</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>Redhot Ranch</em> - Chicago street food; I get either a polish or a burger Chicago style</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>When you\'re done, continue walking east to Western, turn right (south), pass Margie\'s Candies and find the entrance to</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>Life On Marz</em> - Another cheat, the north side outpost of the south side Marz Brewing. It\'s a small place, but they do a nice selection of styles. When you\'re done, head left out the door and then over to the diagonal street, Milwaukee, not the north-south street (Western). The intersection is a bit tricky. Head northwest up Milwaukee to...</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>Pilot Project Brewing</em> - This is a brewing incubator, so there\'s usually some interesting stuff on offer. The last time I was in, they were serving Indian-inspired beers from Azadi Brewing. Brewer\'s Kitchen also does good stuff. Not everything works, but I\'ve had a surprisingly good hit rate. Take a left out the door, cross the street (watch out for the bicyclists; this is the most Amsterdam-ish street in Chicago) and head up a block to...</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>Navigator Taproom</em> - This is a pour-your-own, priced-by-the-ounce beer bar with a good selection of Chicago (they seem to have a lot from Pipeworks) and Midwest beers. Check out their beer menu on Untappd to see if there\'s anything that interests you. Continue up Milwaukee to the last stop</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>Revolution Brewing Brewpub</em> - This is the original Rev Brew joint; it opened before the brewery taproom a couple of miles north. If you\'re IPA\'d out and the temperatures aren\'t in the 90\'s, go for their Deep Woods offerings -- the variations on their Deth\'s Tar imperial stout (Josh Deth owns Rev Brew) or their Straight Jacket barleywine. If it\'s too hot (or you\'re too baked for those double-digit abv\'s), their Hero IPA series is good; lots of variants based on different hop combos.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And that\'s it. If you want to head straight back, you\'re a couple of blocks from the California Blue Line L stop. Get on the Forest Park Blue Line to Monroe stop in the Loop. If you\'re still walking straight, you can keep walking up Milwaukee through the neighborhood. It\'s an interesting neighborhood. The Blue Line runs parallel to Milwaukee. The next stop is the Logan Square stop, about a 15-20 minute walk. Or you can always just call an Uber.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Maplewood-Based Circuit</strong> -- this is less concentrated/less obvious, so I\'ll put in a few branches so you can choose your own adventure<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>Maplewood</em> -- Part of its charm (a little corner tavern at the end of a neighborhood street) makes it inconvenient to get there via public transportation. So to start here, it\'s probably best to Uber up.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Option - A bit of a walking circuit from Maplewood<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>Ravinia Brewing</em> -- Very optional. Not a bad place; I\'ve had a couple of good beers sitting out on their patio after a bike ride. I wouldn\'t go out of my way to go there, but it\'s two blocks from Maplewood</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>Metropolitan Brewing</em> -- This is ~10 min walk north from Maplewood through a little neighborhood. It\'s one of the original Chicago microbreweries, though a lager specialist which I know is not exactly on point for you. However, their patio looks down on the north branch of the Chicago River. So, if it\'s a nice day, this is worth a stop for the view -- and maybe a crisp palate cleanser.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>The Beer Temple</em> -- One of our favorite beer bars. It\'s what in Chicago is termed a \"slashie\" -- a bar and a liquor store. They always have a good beer selection and they\'re a verified venue on Untappd, so you can check out the menu to see if it\'s worth the 7-min walk from Metropolitan.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Food<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>Kuma\'s Corner</em> is about a 5-min walk west on Belmont from Beer Temple. Kuma\'s is a great burger place with a solid beer menu (an Untappd verified venue) and a heavy metal soundtrack.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>Honey Butter Fried Chicken</em> - Convenient if you\'re walking up to the Rev Brew Taproom</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>Revolution Brewing Taproom</em> -- If you didn\'t hit their brewpub on the Logan Square circuit, the brewery taproom is a 12-15-min walk from Beer Temple or Kuma\'s.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Option - Uber up to the Ravenswood neighborhood\'s Malt Row<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>Begyle Brewing</em> -- First brewery on Malt Row. Nice IPAs and a good barrel-aged imperial stout</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>Dovetail Brewing</em> -- The guys on the Steal This Beer podcast obsess over this brewery. Cool space; German lager-and-spontaneous ferm-focused. Walk down (south) Ravenswood Ave to the Irving Park Brown Line. Take it to two stops to the Paulina exit, walk south on Paulina St one block to...</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>Bitter Pops</em> -- Another great slashie and also an Untappd verified venue if you want to check out the tap list. Also a good place to buy a cold 4-pack to take back to your hotel room. Or cross Lincoln Ave and walk down a half block to...</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>The Green Lady</em> -- Old-time Chicago bar vibe with a great tap list.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Get back on the Brown Line and head down to the Loop, to the Quincy Stop which is ~1 block from the JW Marriott</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Option - Uber up to Half Acre Beer<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>Half Acre Beer</em> - Another original Chicago microbrewery. Augie Carton on Steal This Beer is a big fan of their Daisy Cutter pale ale, but I like their range of IPAs.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>Spiteful Brewing</em> - Next door to Half Acre. Good place; wouldn\'t make a special trip for it, but is worth the block walk if you\'re at Half Acre.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Probably best just to Uber back down to the JW from here.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"className\":\"has-medium-font-size\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #196</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As always, you can find us and listen to the current episodes on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. No longer Stitcher, though. SiriusXM pulled the plug on it, though I think you can find TravelCommons on the other Sirius platforms -- Pandora and maybe the Sirius app. But I know that you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page at TravelCommons.com for a transcript of the episode and links to places I’ve mentioned, and to John and Rob’s websites. If you’re not yet subscribed, there’s a drop down Subscribe menu at the top of TravelCommon’s home page. And along the side of the page, you’ll find links to all the TravelCommons’ socials.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to mpeacock on Twitter, write them on the TravelCommons page on Facebook or Instagram, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com.&nbsp; And thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in emails, Tweets and post comments on the website. I really appreciate it.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And until we talk again, safe travels; raise a cold (or cask-temperature) one; and thanks for stopping by the TravelCommons.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_197.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #197 — Renting a Tesla; 2023 Traveler Gift Guide','','inherit','closed','closed','','4387-revision-v1','','','2023-11-07 09:57:54','2023-11-07 14:57:54','',4387,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4391',0,'revision','',0),
(4392,1,'2023-11-07 11:02:19','2023-11-07 16:02:19','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Dalle-E_Renting_Tesla-300x300.png\" alt=\"road warrior looking at a single row of black Tesla Model 3s in a Hertz rental car lot.\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" />Where\'s the Key?[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>In this beer-focused episode, John Holl, editor of <a href=\"http://allaboutbeer.com\" title=\"All About Beer\"><em>All About Beer</em></a>, gives us his take on beer tourism and tips on how to beer travels. I talk about my experience planning my Asheville, NC taproom visits with ChatGPT. We also dive deep into the new <a href=\"https://www.jdpower.com/business/press-releases/2023-north-america-airport-satisfaction-study\" title=\"JD Power Airport Satisfaction Survey\">JD Power Airport Satisfaction Survey</a> and do a quick update about the EU\'s delayed ETIAS system. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_197.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #197: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN after a pretty solid three weeks of travel -- a business trip to the Boston suburbs, then down to New York to meet up with Irene and Claire for a long weekend of knocking around Brooklyn and Queens, and then, after a day of reloading suitcases and picking up the cat, driving up to Chicago for friends and family. When we got back home last Friday, I was ready to just stay put for a little bit. Which is about all it will be because we head out to the UK in less than two weeks.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The Boston trip came up all of a sudden and I think is only my second post-pandemic business trip -- <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/06/15/podcast-176-why-business-travel-is-coming-back-learning-airport-history/\" title=\"\">my first was down to Miami in May 2021</a>.  Maybe I’ve timed out of my road warrior status, because everything felt a bit off. Flying BNA-BOS, my choices were JetBlue or Delta. I don’t have status on either, so I choose JetBlue because it’s the earlier flight out. No status means I also have to pay $80-100 to reserve a seat after paying $450 for a one-way ticket. I could’ve expensed it through, but the annoyance vein in my temple started to pulsate. How dare you, JetBlue! And in return for my righteous anger, I get assigned, at the gate, a middle seat in the last boarding group. I resign myself to having to gate check my carry-on. But then when boarding is called, the pre-boarding announcement is for JetBlue <em>and</em> American elites. Ugh! Such an amateur mistake — not keeping track of alliances and partnerships.  If I’d put my Aadvantage Platinum number into my reservation instead of my plain TrueBlue number, I probably could’ve saved myself all that righteous anger and vein throbbing. Luckily though, I always carry my physical elite cards with me, so I show my Aadvantage Platinum card to the agent, get waved on, and find an empty bin right above my seat.  I was a little concerned about fitting my big carry-on in an A220 -- it was my first time on this plane -- but no problem. The overhead bins on this plane are huge.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>After my window seat neighbor got settled, I put on my Bose noise-canceling headphones, dialed up the white noise app on my iPhone, and, middle seat be damned, nodded off sitting up straight. One thing I <em>haven’t</em> lost while working virtually -- being able to fall asleep even before my 7am flight rotates off the runway.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/JeffSpeed68/54450\">Hula Hoop Party</a> by Stefan Kartenberg (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. &nbsp;Ft: Martijn de Boer, Blue Wave Theory</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>It wouldn’t be a proper Following Up section without yet another update on the US’s Real ID or the EU’s ETIAS rolling delays. Let’s do ETIAS, the EU’s pre-travel authorization system that gobs of click-bait websites have mislabeled a “European Visa.” The EU has tweaked their go-live date again -- from last month’s <a href=\"https://www.schengenvisainfo.com/news/no-etias-wont-become-operational-in-2024-eu-sources-say/\">May 2025</a> to a less definite/more nebulous “<a href=\"https://travel-europe.europa.eu/etias/what-etias_en#etias-in-a-nutshell\">mid-2025</a>” -- which could be May or June or July. But I’m not sure why anyone in their right mind would want to flip the switch on this in the summer, during Europe’s peak tourist season. I’m taking the over on this; I don’t see it going live any earlier than October 2025.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The US, on the other hand, seems to be sticking to their May 2025 date -- for now. Remember, the initial deadline for needing a Real ID to board a commercial flight was January 2018 -- which then got kicked to October 2020. But then COVID hit and in April 2020, soon after just about every government building was emptied out and locked up, the bright sparks at Dept of Homeland Security decided that driving crowds of people toward closed DMVs to replace their old driver’s licenses wouldn’t be great and pushed the deadline a year to October 2021. Which, we’ll all remember, wasn’t <em>that</em> much better -- at least with regards to DMV accessibility. I remember lining up outside, in December 2021, in Chicago at a DMV to renew my driver’s license. And so another push, 19 months to May 2023. And then last December, they pushed it another 2 years to May 2025 because -- who knows. So the US has got nothing to say to the EU. But on my flights a couple of weeks ago, I started seeing new signage “RealID coming in May 2025”; even the Delta app, when I checked in for my BOS-LGA flight, had a banner about it. Huh? I mean, why wind everyone up about a deadline that’s 18 months away and, if the kabuki theater of the last 5 years is any guide, will get pushed again.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Now where DHS is moving much faster is rolling out biometrics to airport and customs checkpoints. Over the years here on TravelCommons, I have talked about my experiences with biometrics usage -- starting with my first fingerprint scan back in the late ‘90’s so I could skip the US customs line at Toronto-Pearson Airport, then in 2008 letting the first iteration of CLEAR scan my eyeballs in exchange for a shortcut to the front of the TSA line, then in 2011 a background check and another fingerprint scan for Global Entry so I could skip all the US customs lines -- so yes, I’ll do damn close to anything to skip an airport line. But over the past couple of years, it feels like DHS has been turning it up a notch. October 2021, our first international flight in a couple of years, on AirFrance, the gate agent took our picture when boarding and didn’t need to see our boarding pass. <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/06/20/podcast-194-best-laid-travel-plans-roaming-entropy/\" title=\"\">Last April, returning from the Netherlands</a>, the Global Entry kiosk no longer needed to scan my fingerprints; a quick side glance at the camera was enough to recognize me and let me through. And now, a couple of weeks ago, at the BNA PreCheck line, a big sign “Identity Verification Technology. Biometrics technology is available at this checkpoint. Your participation is optional.” This is new; it wasn’t there 2 months ago when we flew out to Maine. I give my driver’s license to the TSA guy standing next to something like a camera on a stick; it looks a bit like the electronic customs gates at LHR. He puts my ID in the machine, tells me to look at the camera, then looks at the screen and waves me through. A couple of things here -- I’m not sure how this is different from the TSA guy looking at my face and comparing it to the picture on my license; and I didn’t see any way that my participation was optional. And I certainly didn’t get to skip any lines for the biometric giveaway. I’ve been trying since April to get someone from TSA or DHS on the podcast to talk about this biometrics push and have gotten nothing but repeated “I’ll get back to you soon” from the TSA press secretary. Now maybe this new equipment gets us to the automated checkpoints I’ve been through in some smaller European airports -- which could shorten the security lines -- but I had to dig pretty deep into a bunch of jargon-y <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/sites/default/files/tsa_idm_roadmap_2022-03-01_508c_final.pdf\">PDF documents</a> on the TSA website to get even a hint of any benefits to the regular traveler. I dunno, maybe all the benefits are waiting on Real ID. Once everyone has that little gold star on their license, it’s clear sailing.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter (X?) message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page, or on the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can skip all that social media stuff and post your comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/53277\">Fistful of Dub</a>&nbsp;(Feat. Snowflake and DJ Vadim) by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. &nbsp;Ft: snowflake and DJ Vadim</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Renting a Tesla</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>After 2, 3? episodes of <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/08/24/podcast-195-checking-out-hollands-tulip-festival/\" title=\"\">nattering on</a> about electric vehicles, I decided to take up Hertz on their incessant email offers and rented a Tesla for my Boston business trip -- giving EVs a try, but on someone else’s dime. The client site was only 18 miles from BOS and Google Maps told me there was a Tesla Supercharger nearby, so range risk wouldn’t be an issue. A couple of days before my flight, Hertz sent me an email which was pretty much a crash course on operating a Tesla, pictures, text, links to YouTube videos. I was both impressed and slightly overwhelmed, but I grabbed a beer out of the fridge -- a 16 oz, this was going to take a bit -- and ground through all the email links -- which, I think, saved me time trying to figure things out in the Hertz lot. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Over the past couple of years, we’ve talked about <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/05/09/podcast-175-how-to-find-local-tour-guides-rebuild-travel-muscles/\" title=\"\">barren Hertz lots</a>; <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/04/10/podcast-174-how-the-pros-plan-their-taproom-tourism/\" title=\"\">renters queueing up for cars to appear</a>. So when the Hertz employee pointed me to an EV aisle full up with 10-12 Tesla Model 3’s and a couple of Polestars it took me a moment to process all my options. My usual strategy, when I have a choice, is to run through the cars on the aisle and pick the one with the lowest mileage. But I wasn’t quite sure if that worked with a Tesla, and if it did, I didn’t recall from my crash course where to find the odometer. So, I chose a black Model 3 that had the least beat-up wheel rims -- trying to minimize any damage arguments at return time.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>After I got in, powered it up, and got acclimated to the massive tablet screen in the center console, I saw that the battery level was at 69%. One of the crash course’s tutorials said it’d be at 100% and I’d be charged if I returned it under 80%. I snapped a picture of the battery display and told the guy at the exit gate. He shrugged and told me to bring it back at the same level. He didn\'t seem very concerned.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming out of the lot, the Tesla drove fine. After a couple of days, the battery had dropped into the mid-40s, so I decided to try out the Tesla Supercharger network. Tesla’s nav app directed me to a nearby shopping center. The chargers were in the farthest back corner of the Target parking lot. I backed in -- looking at the other Teslas, it seemed the thing to do -- plugged in the charger, and was a little shocked to see that it would take an <em>hour</em> to get me charged up to 100%. Now Irene would have no problem with this -- an excuse to spend an hour shopping in Target? Bring it on. Me, not so much. Luckily, there was a Chipotle across the street, so I locked the car and walked over to grab lunch. When I got back, the car still had another 5 minutes before it got to 100%. I’m glad I didn’t wait ‘til it got down to 20%.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Though maybe I should’ve waited, because by my last day, I’d driven off a chunk of that 100% charge and, heading back to BOS, I wasn’t completely confident that I’d arrive with the battery at the 69% level I’d picked it up at. And I guess that’s a place where an EV rental requires a bit more logistical planning. A regular gas car -- there’s loads of places I could hit to quickly splash in a couple of last-minute gallons to keep the fuel gauge on Full. An EV? The Tesla nav app vectored me way off my usual I-90/I-93 tunnel routes to BOS, taking me way east, past some marshes just off the bay, to the back corner of another Target parking lot where I backed in amid a half-dozen other Teslas, their drivers all sitting there, working their phones, waiting for their cars to charge. I waited 10 minutes, splashed in enough electricity to get the battery gauge to 75%, and lit out. But I probably didn’t need to worry. Turning the car in, I told the Hertz guy I was under 80% charge because I got the car at 69%. No problem, he said. He didn\'t seem very concerned. Honestly, I’ve never seen Hertz guys so nonchalant about their cars; especially after Hertz said in their last earnings call that <a href=\"https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-10-26/hertz-misses-quarterly-profit-estimates-as-its-fleet-costs-rise\">EV repair costs are about double what they pay for gas-powered cars</a>.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>On the shuttle bus to the terminal, I opened the email receipt and saw that the $15 charge from my first Supercharger visit had made it onto my invoice. A couple of things crossed my mind -- definitely less than what I would’ve spent filling up a gas car, and I was impressed by the quick turnaround time because the toll charge I incurred two days before that, when leaving Logan through one of the tunnels, still hasn’t shown up and so is going to raise some eyebrows in A/P when I eventually try to expense it through. So all told, pretty good experience; kudos to Hertz. And now they’re trying to get me to rent a Polestar at LHR in a couple of weeks for our drive through the Devon countryside. Ehh, I don’t think I’ll push my luck.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/3lb3r3th/44072\">Misunderstood</a> by 3lb3r3th (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. &nbsp;Ft: Alchemistry</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>2023 Traveler\'s Gift Guide</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Every couple of years around this time I update my gift guide to give folks suggestions for the frequent traveler in their lives. Or, if you are the frequent traveler, a list of hints you might want to drop on family members looking for ideas. The first time I did a gift guide, I published Thanksgiving week so people would have it for the Black Friday sales. But now with the Christmas shopping season having blown past that traditional Thanksgiving Friday start and with radio stations barely able to wait for the kids to finish counting their Halloween candy haul before <a href=\"https://www.fox5ny.com/news/radio-stations-christmas-music-holiday-season\">flipping the switch on their All-Christmas-Music format</a>, I’ve dragged the publishing date up to the front of November. The <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">2020 gift guide</a> was probably the most unique. All the restaurant lockdowns and indoor dining limits had us eating in our hotel rooms which put bring-your-own dining sets and in-room coffee brewing kits onto the gift list. The disappearance of airport and in-flight mask mandates means that #1 gift on that year’s list -- comfortable masks -- has also dropped off.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>What hasn’t dropped off and is regularly at the top of my list is <strong>Battery Packs</strong>.&nbsp; We’ve talked <em>a lot</em> about how we can’t easily travel anymore without a working mobile phone. It holds our boarding passes, gives us gate change and flight delay notifications, unlocks our car (if we’ve rented a Tesla), routes us around traffic jams, and connects us to our Airbnb hosts. So having that second or third charge immediately available is critical to making it through a long travel day. I carry a Zendure SuperMini power bank in my bag because its USB-C port quickly tops up my iPhone while the USB-A port takes care of my Samsung tablet. I’ve updated Irene’s lipstick charger to an Anker with a flip-out Lighting connector so she doesn’t have to fish around in her purse for a cable. But there are a lot of choices; just pick one.. or two.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Noise Canceling Headphones</strong> are also a perennial on my gift lists. I’ve been carrying Bose headphones for at least 15 years. Back then, the QC-3’s were de rigueur for any self-respecting road warrior. The “ah ha” moment for me was on a United Express Dash 8 turboprop flying to Sioux City, IA with an intermediate stop in Waterloo, IA. I was in a window seat on the wing and the droning of the prop just encased me; I couldn’t think of anything else -- until I flicked the switch on my Bose. I’m now on my 3rd pair, the Bose 700’s. They’re not compact but they continue to earn their space in my travel bag. I picked up a pair of Apple AirPod Pros on a good Prime Day sale last month and so was able to compare the Bose and AirPod noise canceling on my Boston and New York flights. The AirPods are good, but not as good as the Bose. And the battery doesn’t last as long, which makes sense given the size differential. For me, the AirPod Pros are good for a 2-2.5-hr flight, but for, say, my upcoming UK trip, I’ll be packing the Bose.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Apple AirTags</strong> earned a place on the list last October when I could see, sitting on the plane, that our bags weren’t going to make the connection in Newark on our way home from Rome. This didn’t get our bag to us, but it did save us the 30 minutes of suspense waiting for them to come out on the carousel, and let us instead go straight to the baggage service agent, be the first in line to file our report, and then head home after a very long travel day. They were definitely worth the purchase price just for that.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>For someone making the transition from virtual work to physical world road warrior, how ‘bout a <strong>Black 20-inch Carry-On Bag</strong>. Black not only makes you look thinner, it makes your bag look thinner to gate agents hunting for bag-sizer bait. My daughter had a baby blue roller bag for the longest time. She loved that color, and it was easy to spot on the luggage carousel, which was a good thing because it ended up there <em>a lot</em> because gate agents were always pulling her out of line to gate check that bag. So get a nondescript black bag with a set of clever, neon-colored luggage tags as a stocking stuffer. If you’re flying a budget airline that’s a stickler on size, get a hard-shell bag. It’ll keep its dimensions better when overstuffed, and the polycarbonate shell will slide past the metal bars of the sizer easier than the ballistic nylon of a soft-sided bag. You could range up in size to a 22-incher, but a 20-incher should safely fit in the overhead of just about every plane. I’m a big fan of the TravelPro line; for me they strike the right balance between price and quality. But there are lots -- maybe way too many -- options out there for you to choose from.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Here’s a new list entrant -- a <strong>Travel Power Strip</strong>. Potentially one of the least sexy things I could put on a gift list, but I’ve always tried to populate these with the things I actually use -- and find myself needing the most when I’m on the road. And you think after, I dunno, 20 years of travelers needing to charge a bunch of electronics -- PCs, mobile phones, tablets -- hotels, b&amp;b’s, resorts would put outlets <em>that work</em> on the top of flat surfaces like nightstands, end tables, desks, …. But I’d say that on half of my trips <em>this year</em>, I had to move furniture or get down on my hands and knees to find a single outlet. So you can get one of those cube-shaped travel adapters that show up on most travel gift guides, and still have to crawl under furniture every time you need to plug something new in. And that’s why I recommend a compact power strip -- you move the nightstand once to reach down and plug it in, and then set the other end -- the end with the outlets, the end you’ll regularly need easy access to -- <em>on top</em> of the nightstand. Any power strip you buy nowadays will have some mix of USB and regular AC outlets. Anker has a seemingly infinite range of them. But if Anker is a little boring for you, way back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/01/25/podcast-159-planning-the-trip-of-a-lifetime-in-southeast-asia/\">episode #159</a> in January 2020, long-time listener Arnoud Heijnis gave high marks to a <em>circular</em> power strip called the Power Bagel. Three years on, MOGICS, the manufacturer, now sells an updated version called the Super Bagel. Of course! With a lot of positive reviews confirming Arnoud’s view that the circle, the bagel shape, let you use every outlet, even when using those big wall wart power supplies</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>So there you go, 5 gift ideas to fit all budgets, and with more than enough time to beat any early on-line shipping deadline. Check out the show notes for links, and happy shopping!</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>Note: None of these suggestions are paid endorsements. This post contains links to Amazon where I can earn a small commission from qualifying purchases.</em></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"className\":\"has-medium-font-size\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #197</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As always, you can find us and listen to the current episodes on all the main podcast sites -- Apple Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, Google Podcasts, and Amazon Music. And you can always Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page at TravelCommons.com for a transcript of the episode and links to items on the gift guide. If you’re not yet subscribed, there’s a drop down Subscribe menu at the top of TravelCommon’s home page. And along the side of the page, you’ll find links to all the TravelCommons’ socials.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to mpeacock on Twitter, write them on the TravelCommons page on Facebook or Instagram, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com.&nbsp; And thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in emails, Tweets and post comments on the website. I really appreciate it.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And until we talk again, safe travels; and thanks for stopping by the TravelCommons.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_197.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #197 — Renting a Tesla; 2023 Traveler Gift Guide','','inherit','closed','closed','','4387-revision-v1','','','2023-11-07 11:02:19','2023-11-07 16:02:19','',4387,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4392',0,'revision','',0),
(4393,1,'2023-11-07 17:29:58','2023-11-07 22:29:58','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Dalle-E_Renting_Tesla-300x300.png\" alt=\"road warrior looking at a single row of black Tesla Model 3s in a Hertz rental car lot.\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" />Where\'s the Key?[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>In this beer-focused episode, John Holl, editor of <a href=\"http://allaboutbeer.com\" title=\"All About Beer\"><em>All About Beer</em></a>, gives us his take on beer tourism and tips on how to beer travels. I talk about my experience planning my Asheville, NC taproom visits with ChatGPT. We also dive deep into the new <a href=\"https://www.jdpower.com/business/press-releases/2023-north-america-airport-satisfaction-study\" title=\"JD Power Airport Satisfaction Survey\">JD Power Airport Satisfaction Survey</a> and do a quick update about the EU\'s delayed ETIAS system. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_197.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #197: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN after a pretty solid three weeks of travel -- a business trip to the Boston suburbs, then down to New York to meet up with Irene and Claire for a long weekend of knocking around Brooklyn and Queens, and then, after a day of reloading suitcases and picking up the cat, driving up to Chicago for friends and family. When we got back home last Friday, I was ready to just stay put for a little bit. Which is about all it will be because we head out to the UK in less than two weeks.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The Boston trip came up all of a sudden and I think is only my second post-pandemic business trip -- <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/06/15/podcast-176-why-business-travel-is-coming-back-learning-airport-history/\" title=\"\">my first was down to Miami in May 2021</a>.&nbsp; Maybe I’ve timed out of my road warrior status, because everything felt a bit off. Flying BNA-BOS, my choices were JetBlue or Delta. I don’t have status on either, so I choose JetBlue because it’s the earlier flight out. No status means I also have to pay $80-100 to reserve a seat after paying $450 for a one-way ticket. I could’ve expensed it through, but the annoyance vein in my temple started to pulsate. How dare you, JetBlue! And in return for my righteous anger, I get assigned, at the gate, a middle seat in the last boarding group. I resign myself to having to gate check my carry-on. But then when boarding is called, the pre-boarding announcement is for JetBlue <em>and</em> American elites. Ugh! Such an amateur mistake — not keeping track of alliances and partnerships.&nbsp; If I’d put my Aadvantage Platinum number into my reservation instead of my plain TrueBlue number, I probably could’ve saved myself all that righteous anger and vein throbbing. Luckily though, I always carry my physical elite cards with me, so I show my Aadvantage Platinum card to the agent, get waved on, and find an empty bin right above my seat.&nbsp; I was a little concerned about fitting my big carry-on in an A220 -- it was my first time on this plane -- but no problem. The overhead bins on this plane are huge.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>After my window seat neighbor got settled, I put on my Bose noise-canceling headphones, dialed up the white noise app on my iPhone, and, middle seat be damned, nodded off sitting up straight. One thing I <em>haven’t</em> lost while working virtually -- being able to fall asleep even before my 7am flight rotates off the runway.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — funkyGarden by Jeris (c) copyright 2020 Licensed under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/VJ_Memes/61356 Ft: airtone, SackJo22, Analog By Nature</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>It wouldn’t be a proper Following Up section without yet another update on the US’s Real ID or the EU’s ETIAS rolling delays. Let’s do ETIAS, the EU’s pre-travel authorization system that gobs of click-bait websites have mislabeled a “European Visa.” The EU has tweaked their go-live date again -- from last month’s <a href=\"https://www.schengenvisainfo.com/news/no-etias-wont-become-operational-in-2024-eu-sources-say/\">May 2025</a> to a less definite/more nebulous “<a href=\"https://travel-europe.europa.eu/etias/what-etias_en#etias-in-a-nutshell\">mid-2025</a>” -- which could be May or June or July. But I’m not sure why anyone in their right mind would want to flip the switch on this in the summer, during Europe’s peak tourist season. I’m taking the over on this; I don’t see it going live any earlier than October 2025.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The US, on the other hand, seems to be sticking to their May 2025 date -- for now. Remember, the initial deadline for needing a Real ID to board a commercial flight was January 2018 -- which then got kicked to October 2020. But then COVID hit and in April 2020, soon after just about every government building was emptied out and locked up, the bright sparks at Dept of Homeland Security decided that driving crowds of people toward closed DMVs to replace their old driver’s licenses wouldn’t be great and pushed the deadline a year to October 2021. Which, we’ll all remember, wasn’t <em>that</em> much better -- at least with regards to DMV accessibility. I remember lining up outside, in December 2021, in Chicago at a DMV to renew my driver’s license. And so another push, 19 months to May 2023. And then last December, they pushed it another 2 years to May 2025 because -- who knows. So the US has got nothing to say to the EU. But on my flights a couple of weeks ago, I started seeing new signage “RealID coming in May 2025”; even the Delta app, when I checked in for my BOS-LGA flight, had a banner about it. Huh? I mean, why wind everyone up about a deadline that’s 18 months away and, if the kabuki theater of the last 5 years is any guide, will get pushed again.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Now where DHS is moving much faster is rolling out biometrics to airport and customs checkpoints. Over the years here on TravelCommons, I have talked about my experiences with biometrics usage -- starting with my first fingerprint scan back in the late ‘90’s so I could skip the US customs line at Toronto-Pearson Airport, then in 2008 letting the first iteration of CLEAR scan my eyeballs in exchange for a shortcut to the front of the TSA line, then in 2011 a background check and another fingerprint scan for Global Entry so I could skip all the US customs lines -- so yes, I’ll do damn close to anything to skip an airport line. But over the past couple of years, it feels like DHS has been turning it up a notch. October 2021, our first international flight in a couple of years, on AirFrance, the gate agent took our picture when boarding and didn’t need to see our boarding pass. <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/06/20/podcast-194-best-laid-travel-plans-roaming-entropy/\" title=\"\">Last April, returning from the Netherlands</a>, the Global Entry kiosk no longer needed to scan my fingerprints; a quick side glance at the camera was enough to recognize me and let me through. And now, a couple of weeks ago, at the BNA PreCheck line, a big sign “Identity Verification Technology. Biometrics technology is available at this checkpoint. Your participation is optional.” This is new; it wasn’t there 2 months ago when we flew out to Maine. I give my driver’s license to the TSA guy standing next to something like a camera on a stick; it looks a bit like the electronic customs gates at LHR. He puts my ID in the machine, tells me to look at the camera, then looks at the screen and waves me through. A couple of things here -- I’m not sure how this is different from the TSA guy looking at my face and comparing it to the picture on my license; and I didn’t see any way that my participation was optional. And I certainly didn’t get to skip any lines for the biometric giveaway. I’ve been trying since April to get someone from TSA or DHS on the podcast to talk about this biometrics push and have gotten nothing but repeated “I’ll get back to you soon” from the TSA press secretary. Now maybe this new equipment gets us to the automated checkpoints I’ve been through in some smaller European airports -- which could shorten the security lines -- but I had to dig pretty deep into a bunch of jargon-y <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/sites/default/files/tsa_idm_roadmap_2022-03-01_508c_final.pdf\">PDF documents</a> on the TSA website to get even a hint of any benefits to the regular traveler. I dunno, maybe all the benefits are waiting on Real ID. Once everyone has that little gold star on their license, it’s clear sailing.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter (X?) message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page, or on the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can skip all that social media stuff and post your comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — Xena’s Kiss / Medea’s Kiss by mwic (c) copyright 2018 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mwic/58883</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Renting a Tesla</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>After 2, 3? episodes of <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/08/24/podcast-195-checking-out-hollands-tulip-festival/\" title=\"\">nattering on</a> about electric vehicles, I decided to take up Hertz on their incessant email offers and rented a Tesla for my Boston business trip -- giving EVs a try, but on someone else’s dime. The client site was only 18 miles from BOS and Google Maps told me there was a Tesla Supercharger nearby, so range risk wouldn’t be an issue. A couple of days before my flight, Hertz sent me an email which was pretty much a crash course on operating a Tesla, pictures, text, links to YouTube videos. I was both impressed and slightly overwhelmed, but I grabbed a beer out of the fridge -- a 16 oz, this was going to take a bit -- and ground through all the email links -- which, I think, saved me time trying to figure things out in the Hertz lot.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Over the past couple of years, we’ve talked about <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/05/09/podcast-175-how-to-find-local-tour-guides-rebuild-travel-muscles/\" title=\"\">barren Hertz lots</a>; <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/04/10/podcast-174-how-the-pros-plan-their-taproom-tourism/\" title=\"\">renters queueing up for cars to appear</a>. So when the Hertz employee pointed me to an EV aisle full up with 10-12 Tesla Model 3’s and a couple of Polestars it took me a moment to process all my options. My usual strategy, when I have a choice, is to run through the cars on the aisle and pick the one with the lowest mileage. But I wasn’t quite sure if that worked with a Tesla, and if it did, I didn’t recall from my crash course where to find the odometer. So, I chose a black Model 3 that had the least beat-up wheel rims -- trying to minimize any damage arguments at return time.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>After I got in, powered it up, and got acclimated to the massive tablet screen in the center console, I saw that the battery level was at 69%. One of the crash course’s tutorials said it’d be at 100% and I’d be charged if I returned it under 80%. I snapped a picture of the battery display and told the guy at the exit gate. He shrugged and told me to bring it back at the same level. He didn\'t seem very concerned.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming out of the lot, the Tesla drove fine. After a couple of days, the battery had dropped into the mid-40s, so I decided to try out the Tesla Supercharger network. Tesla’s nav app directed me to a nearby shopping center. The chargers were in the farthest back corner of the Target parking lot. I backed in -- looking at the other Teslas, it seemed the thing to do -- plugged in the charger, and was a little shocked to see that it would take an <em>hour</em> to get me charged up to 100%. Now Irene would have no problem with this -- an excuse to spend an hour shopping in Target? Bring it on. Me, not so much. Luckily, there was a Chipotle across the street, so I locked the car and walked over to grab lunch. When I got back, the car still had another 5 minutes before it got to 100%. I’m glad I didn’t wait ‘til it got down to 20%.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Though maybe I should’ve waited, because by my last day, I’d driven off a chunk of that 100% charge and, heading back to BOS, I wasn’t completely confident that I’d arrive with the battery at the 69% level I’d picked it up at. And I guess that’s a place where an EV rental requires a bit more logistical planning. A regular gas car -- there’s loads of places I could hit to quickly splash in a couple of last-minute gallons to keep the fuel gauge on Full. An EV? The Tesla nav app vectored me way off my usual I-90/I-93 tunnel routes to BOS, taking me way east, past some marshes just off the bay, to the back corner of another Target parking lot where I backed in amid a half-dozen other Teslas, their drivers all sitting there, working their phones, waiting for their cars to charge. I waited 10 minutes, splashed in enough electricity to get the battery gauge to 75%, and lit out. But I probably didn’t need to worry. Turning the car in, I told the Hertz guy I was under 80% charge because I got the car at 69%. No problem, he said. He didn\'t seem very concerned. Honestly, I’ve never seen Hertz guys so nonchalant about their cars; especially after Hertz said in their last earnings call that <a href=\"https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-10-26/hertz-misses-quarterly-profit-estimates-as-its-fleet-costs-rise\">EV repair costs are about double what they pay for gas-powered cars</a>.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>On the shuttle bus to the terminal, I opened the email receipt and saw that the $15 charge from my first Supercharger visit had made it onto my invoice. A couple of things crossed my mind -- definitely less than what I would’ve spent filling up a gas car, and I was impressed by the quick turnaround time because the toll charge I incurred two days before that, when leaving Logan through one of the tunnels, still hasn’t shown up and so is going to raise some eyebrows in A/P when I eventually try to expense it through. So all told, pretty good experience; kudos to Hertz. And now they’re trying to get me to rent a Polestar at LHR in a couple of weeks for our drive through the Devon countryside. Ehh, I don’t think I’ll push my luck.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/bridges/15563\">i knew</a> by bridges (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. Ft: shannonsongs</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>2023 Traveler\'s Gift Guide</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Every couple of years around this time I update my gift guide to give folks suggestions for the frequent traveler in their lives. Or, if you are the frequent traveler, a list of hints you might want to drop on family members looking for ideas. The first time I did a gift guide, I published Thanksgiving week so people would have it for the Black Friday sales. But now with the Christmas shopping season having blown past that traditional Thanksgiving Friday start and with radio stations barely able to wait for the kids to finish counting their Halloween candy haul before <a href=\"https://www.fox5ny.com/news/radio-stations-christmas-music-holiday-season\">flipping the switch on their All-Christmas-Music format</a>, I’ve dragged the publishing date up to the front of November. The <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">2020 gift guide</a> was probably the most unique. All the restaurant lockdowns and indoor dining limits had us eating in our hotel rooms which put bring-your-own dining sets and in-room coffee brewing kits onto the gift list. The disappearance of airport and in-flight mask mandates means that #1 gift on that year’s list -- comfortable masks -- has also dropped off.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>What hasn’t dropped off and is regularly at the top of my list is <strong>Battery Packs</strong>.&nbsp; We’ve talked <em>a lot</em> about how we can’t easily travel anymore without a working mobile phone. It holds our boarding passes, gives us gate change and flight delay notifications, unlocks our car (if we’ve rented a Tesla), routes us around traffic jams, and connects us to our Airbnb hosts. So having that second or third charge immediately available is critical to making it through a long travel day. I carry a Zendure SuperMini power bank in my bag because its USB-C port quickly tops up my iPhone while the USB-A port takes care of my Samsung tablet. I’ve updated Irene’s lipstick charger to an Anker with a flip-out Lighting connector so she doesn’t have to fish around in her purse for a cable. But there are a lot of choices; just pick one.. or two.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Noise Canceling Headphones</strong> are also a perennial on my gift lists. I’ve been carrying Bose headphones for at least 15 years. Back then, the QC-3’s were de rigueur for any self-respecting road warrior. The “ah ha” moment for me was on a United Express Dash 8 turboprop flying to Sioux City, IA with an intermediate stop in Waterloo, IA. I was in a window seat on the wing and the droning of the prop just encased me; I couldn’t think of anything else -- until I flicked the switch on my Bose. I’m now on my 3rd pair, the Bose 700’s. They’re not compact but they continue to earn their space in my travel bag. I picked up a pair of Apple AirPod Pros on a good Prime Day sale last month and so was able to compare the Bose and AirPod noise canceling on my Boston and New York flights. The AirPods are good, but not as good as the Bose. And the battery doesn’t last as long, which makes sense given the size differential. For me, the AirPod Pros are good for a 2-2.5-hr flight, but for, say, my upcoming UK trip, I’ll be packing the Bose.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Apple AirTags</strong> earned a place on the list last October when I could see, sitting on the plane, that our bags weren’t going to make the connection in Newark on our way home from Rome. This didn’t get our bag to us, but it did save us the 30 minutes of suspense waiting for them to come out on the carousel, and let us instead go straight to the baggage service agent, be the first in line to file our report, and then head home after a very long travel day. They were definitely worth the purchase price just for that.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>For someone making the transition from virtual work to physical world road warrior, how ‘bout a <strong>Black 20-inch Carry-On Bag</strong>. Black not only makes you look thinner, it makes your bag look thinner to gate agents hunting for bag-sizer bait. My daughter had a baby blue roller bag for the longest time. She loved that color, and it was easy to spot on the luggage carousel, which was a good thing because it ended up there <em>a lot</em> because gate agents were always pulling her out of line to gate check that bag. So get a nondescript black bag with a set of clever, neon-colored luggage tags as a stocking stuffer. If you’re flying a budget airline that’s a stickler on size, get a hard-shell bag. It’ll keep its dimensions better when overstuffed, and the polycarbonate shell will slide past the metal bars of the sizer easier than the ballistic nylon of a soft-sided bag. You could range up in size to a 22-incher, but a 20-incher should safely fit in the overhead of just about every plane. I’m a big fan of the TravelPro line; for me they strike the right balance between price and quality. But there are lots -- maybe way too many -- options out there for you to choose from.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Here’s a new list entrant -- a <strong>Travel Power Strip</strong>. Potentially one of the least sexy things I could put on a gift list, but I’ve always tried to populate these with the things I actually use -- and find myself needing the most when I’m on the road. And you think after, I dunno, 20 years of travelers needing to charge a bunch of electronics -- PCs, mobile phones, tablets -- hotels, b&amp;b’s, resorts would put outlets <em>that work</em> on the top of flat surfaces like nightstands, end tables, desks, …. But I’d say that on half of my trips <em>this year</em>, I had to move furniture or get down on my hands and knees to find a single outlet. So you can get one of those cube-shaped travel adapters that show up on most travel gift guides, and still have to crawl under furniture every time you need to plug something new in. And that’s why I recommend a compact power strip -- you move the nightstand once to reach down and plug it in, and then set the other end -- the end with the outlets, the end you’ll regularly need easy access to -- <em>on top</em> of the nightstand. Any power strip you buy nowadays will have some mix of USB and regular AC outlets. Anker has a seemingly infinite range of them. But if Anker is a little boring for you, way back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/01/25/podcast-159-planning-the-trip-of-a-lifetime-in-southeast-asia/\">episode #159</a> in January 2020, long-time listener Arnoud Heijnis gave high marks to a <em>circular</em> power strip called the Power Bagel. Three years on, MOGICS, the manufacturer, now sells an updated version called the Super Bagel. Of course! With a lot of positive reviews confirming Arnoud’s view that the circle, the bagel shape, let you use every outlet, even when using those big wall wart power supplies</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>So there you go, 5 gift ideas to fit all budgets, and with more than enough time to beat any early on-line shipping deadline. Check out the show notes for links, and happy shopping!</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>Note: None of these suggestions are paid endorsements. This post contains links to Amazon where I can earn a small commission from qualifying purchases.</em></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"className\":\"has-medium-font-size\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #197</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As always, you can find us and listen to the current episodes on all the main podcast sites -- Apple Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, Google Podcasts, and Amazon Music. And you can always Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page at TravelCommons.com for a transcript of the episode and links to items on the gift guide. If you’re not yet subscribed, there’s a drop down Subscribe menu at the top of TravelCommon’s home page. And along the side of the page, you’ll find links to all the TravelCommons’ socials.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to mpeacock on Twitter, write them on the TravelCommons page on Facebook or Instagram, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com.&nbsp; And thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in emails, Tweets and post comments on the website. I really appreciate it.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And until we talk again, safe travels; and thanks for stopping by the TravelCommons.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_197.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #197 — Renting a Tesla; 2023 Traveler Gift Guide','','inherit','closed','closed','','4387-revision-v1','','','2023-11-07 17:29:58','2023-11-07 22:29:58','',4387,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4393',0,'revision','',0),
(4394,1,'2023-11-07 18:33:21','2023-11-07 23:33:21','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Dalle-E_Renting_Tesla-300x300.png\" alt=\"road warrior renting a Tesla from a Hertz rental car lot.\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" />Swipe left or right to start this thing?[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It\'s the sustainable episode of the TravelCommons podcast talking about my experience renting a Tesla from Hertz and my road-tested suggestions for Christmas gifts for the frequent traveler(s) in your life. I also talk about some new TSA biometrics equipment I faced in Nashville and yet another update on the EU\'s ETIAS system and the US\'s Real ID. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_197.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #197: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN after a pretty solid three weeks of travel -- a business trip to the Boston suburbs, then down to New York to meet up with Irene and Claire for a long weekend of knocking around Brooklyn and Queens, and then, after a day of reloading suitcases and picking up the cat, driving up to Chicago for friends and family. When we got back home last Friday, I was ready to just stay put for a little bit. Which is about all it will be because we head out to the UK in less than two weeks.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The Boston trip came up all of a sudden and I think is only my second post-pandemic business trip -- <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/06/15/podcast-176-why-business-travel-is-coming-back-learning-airport-history/\" title=\"\">my first was down to Miami in May 2021</a>.&nbsp; Maybe I’ve timed out of my road warrior status, because everything felt a bit off. Flying BNA-BOS, my choices were JetBlue or Delta. I don’t have status on either, so I choose JetBlue because it’s the earlier flight out. No status means I also have to pay $80-100 to reserve a seat after paying $450 for a one-way ticket. I could’ve expensed it through, but the annoyance vein in my temple started to pulsate. How dare you, JetBlue! And in return for my righteous anger, I get assigned, at the gate, a middle seat in the last boarding group. I resign myself to having to gate check my carry-on. But then when boarding is called, the pre-boarding announcement is for JetBlue <em>and</em> American elites. Ugh! Such an amateur mistake — not keeping track of alliances and partnerships.&nbsp; If I’d put my Aadvantage Platinum number into my reservation instead of my plain TrueBlue number, I probably could’ve saved myself all that righteous anger and vein throbbing. Luckily though, I always carry my physical elite cards with me, so I show my Aadvantage Platinum card to the agent, get waved on, and find an empty bin right above my seat.&nbsp; I was a little concerned about fitting my big carry-on in an A220 -- it was my first time on this plane -- but no problem. The overhead bins on this plane are huge.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>After my window seat neighbor got settled, I put on my Bose noise-canceling headphones, dialed up the white noise app on my iPhone, and, middle seat be damned, nodded off sitting up straight. One thing I <em>haven’t</em> lost while working virtually -- being able to fall asleep even before my 7am flight rotates off the runway.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — funkyGarden by Jeris (c) copyright 2020 Licensed under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/VJ_Memes/61356 Ft: airtone, SackJo22, Analog By Nature</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>It wouldn’t be a proper Following Up section without yet another update on the US’s Real ID or the EU’s ETIAS rolling delays. Let’s do ETIAS, the EU’s pre-travel authorization system that gobs of click-bait websites have mislabeled a “European Visa.” The EU has tweaked their go-live date again -- from last month’s <a href=\"https://www.schengenvisainfo.com/news/no-etias-wont-become-operational-in-2024-eu-sources-say/\">May 2025</a> to a less definite/more nebulous “<a href=\"https://travel-europe.europa.eu/etias/what-etias_en#etias-in-a-nutshell\">mid-2025</a>” -- which could be May or June or July. But I’m not sure why anyone in their right mind would want to flip the switch on this in the summer, during Europe’s peak tourist season. I’m taking the over on this; I don’t see it going live any earlier than October 2025.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The US, on the other hand, seems to be sticking to their May 2025 date -- for now. Remember, the initial deadline for needing a Real ID to board a commercial flight was January 2018 -- which then got kicked to October 2020. But then COVID hit and in April 2020, soon after just about every government building was emptied out and locked up, the bright sparks at Dept of Homeland Security decided that driving crowds of people toward closed DMVs to replace their old driver’s licenses wouldn’t be great and pushed the deadline a year to October 2021. Which, we’ll all remember, wasn’t <em>that</em> much better -- at least with regards to DMV accessibility. I remember lining up outside, in December 2021, in Chicago at a DMV to renew my driver’s license. And so another push, 19 months to May 2023. And then last December, they pushed it another 2 years to May 2025 because -- who knows. So the US has got nothing to say to the EU. But on my flights a couple of weeks ago, I started seeing new signage “RealID coming in May 2025”; even the Delta app, when I checked in for my BOS-LGA flight, had a banner about it. Huh? I mean, why wind everyone up about a deadline that’s 18 months away and, if the kabuki theater of the last 5 years is any guide, will get pushed again.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Now where DHS is moving much faster is rolling out biometrics to airport and customs checkpoints. Over the years here on TravelCommons, I have talked about my experiences with biometrics usage -- starting with my first fingerprint scan back in the late ‘90’s so I could skip the US customs line at Toronto-Pearson Airport, then in 2008 letting the first iteration of CLEAR scan my eyeballs in exchange for a shortcut to the front of the TSA line, then in 2011 a background check and another fingerprint scan for Global Entry so I could skip all the US customs lines -- so yes, I’ll do damn close to anything to skip an airport line. But over the past couple of years, it feels like DHS has been turning it up a notch. October 2021, our first international flight in a couple of years, on AirFrance, the gate agent took our picture when boarding and didn’t need to see our boarding pass. <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/06/20/podcast-194-best-laid-travel-plans-roaming-entropy/\" title=\"\">Last April, returning from the Netherlands</a>, the Global Entry kiosk no longer needed to scan my fingerprints; a quick side glance at the camera was enough to recognize me and let me through. And now, a couple of weeks ago, at the BNA PreCheck line, a big sign “Identity Verification Technology. Biometrics technology is available at this checkpoint. Your participation is optional.” This is new; it wasn’t there 2 months ago when we flew out to Maine. I give my driver’s license to the TSA guy standing next to something like a camera on a stick; it looks a bit like the electronic customs gates at LHR. He puts my ID in the machine, tells me to look at the camera, then looks at the screen and waves me through. A couple of things here -- I’m not sure how this is different from the TSA guy looking at my face and comparing it to the picture on my license; and I didn’t see any way that my participation was optional. And I certainly didn’t get to skip any lines for the biometric giveaway. I’ve been trying since April to get someone from TSA or DHS on the podcast to talk about this biometrics push and have gotten nothing but repeated “I’ll get back to you soon” from the TSA press secretary. Now maybe this new equipment gets us to the automated checkpoints I’ve been through in some smaller European airports -- which could shorten the security lines -- but I had to dig pretty deep into a bunch of jargon-y <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/sites/default/files/tsa_idm_roadmap_2022-03-01_508c_final.pdf\">PDF documents</a> on the TSA website to get even a hint of any benefits to the regular traveler. I dunno, maybe all the benefits are waiting on Real ID. Once everyone has that little gold star on their license, it’s clear sailing.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter (X?) message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page, or on the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can skip all that social media stuff and post your comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — Xena’s Kiss / Medea’s Kiss by mwic (c) copyright 2018 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mwic/58883</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Renting a Tesla</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>After 2, 3? episodes of <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/08/24/podcast-195-checking-out-hollands-tulip-festival/\" title=\"\">nattering on</a> about electric vehicles, I decided to take up Hertz on their incessant email offers and rented a Tesla for my Boston business trip -- giving EVs a try, but on someone else’s dime. The client site was only 18 miles from BOS and Google Maps told me there was a Tesla Supercharger nearby, so range risk wouldn’t be an issue. A couple of days before my flight, Hertz sent me an email which was pretty much a crash course on operating a Tesla, pictures, text, links to YouTube videos. I was both impressed and slightly overwhelmed, but I grabbed a beer out of the fridge -- a 16 oz, this was going to take a bit -- and ground through all the email links -- which, I think, saved me time trying to figure things out in the Hertz lot.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Over the past couple of years, we’ve talked about <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/05/09/podcast-175-how-to-find-local-tour-guides-rebuild-travel-muscles/\" title=\"\">barren Hertz lots</a>; <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/04/10/podcast-174-how-the-pros-plan-their-taproom-tourism/\" title=\"\">renters queueing up for cars to appear</a>. So when the Hertz employee pointed me to an EV aisle full up with 10-12 Tesla Model 3’s and a couple of Polestars it took me a moment to process all my options. My usual strategy, when I have a choice, is to run through the cars on the aisle and pick the one with the lowest mileage. But I wasn’t quite sure if that worked with a Tesla, and if it did, I didn’t recall from my crash course where to find the odometer. So, I chose a black Model 3 that had the least beat-up wheel rims -- trying to minimize any damage arguments at return time.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>After I got in, powered it up, and got acclimated to the massive tablet screen in the center console, I saw that the battery level was at 69%. One of the crash course’s tutorials said it’d be at 100% and I’d be charged if I returned it under 80%. I snapped a picture of the battery display and told the guy at the exit gate. He shrugged and told me to bring it back at the same level. He didn\'t seem very concerned.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming out of the lot, the Tesla drove fine. After a couple of days, the battery had dropped into the mid-40s, so I decided to try out the Tesla Supercharger network. Tesla’s nav app directed me to a nearby shopping center. The chargers were in the farthest back corner of the Target parking lot. I backed in -- looking at the other Teslas, it seemed the thing to do -- plugged in the charger, and was a little shocked to see that it would take an <em>hour</em> to get me charged up to 100%. Now Irene would have no problem with this -- an excuse to spend an hour shopping in Target? Bring it on. Me, not so much. Luckily, there was a Chipotle across the street, so I locked the car and walked over to grab lunch. When I got back, the car still had another 5 minutes before it got to 100%. I’m glad I didn’t wait ‘til it got down to 20%.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Though maybe I should’ve waited, because by my last day, I’d driven off a chunk of that 100% charge and, heading back to BOS, I wasn’t completely confident that I’d arrive with the battery at the 69% level I’d picked it up at. And I guess that’s a place where an EV rental requires a bit more logistical planning. A regular gas car -- there’s loads of places I could hit to quickly splash in a couple of last-minute gallons to keep the fuel gauge on Full. An EV? The Tesla nav app vectored me way off my usual I-90/I-93 tunnel routes to BOS, taking me way east, past some marshes just off the bay, to the back corner of another Target parking lot where I backed in amid a half-dozen other Teslas, their drivers all sitting there, working their phones, waiting for their cars to charge. I waited 10 minutes, splashed in enough electricity to get the battery gauge to 75%, and lit out. But I probably didn’t need to worry. Turning the car in, I told the Hertz guy I was under 80% charge because I got the car at 69%. No problem, he said. He didn\'t seem very concerned. Honestly, I’ve never seen Hertz guys so nonchalant about their cars; especially after Hertz said in their last earnings call that <a href=\"https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-10-26/hertz-misses-quarterly-profit-estimates-as-its-fleet-costs-rise\">EV repair costs are about double what they pay for gas-powered cars</a>.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>On the shuttle bus to the terminal, I opened the email receipt and saw that the $15 charge from my first Supercharger visit had made it onto my invoice. A couple of things crossed my mind -- definitely less than what I would’ve spent filling up a gas car, and I was impressed by the quick turnaround time because the toll charge I incurred two days before that, when leaving Logan through one of the tunnels, still hasn’t shown up and so is going to raise some eyebrows in A/P when I eventually try to expense it through. So all told, pretty good experience; kudos to Hertz. And now they’re trying to get me to rent a Polestar at LHR in a couple of weeks for our drive through the Devon countryside. Ehh, I don’t think I’ll push my luck.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/bridges/15563\">i knew</a> by bridges (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp;Ft: shannonsongs</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>2023 Traveler\'s Gift Guide</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Every couple of years around this time I update my gift guide to give folks suggestions for the frequent traveler in their lives. Or, if you are the frequent traveler, a list of hints you might want to drop on family members looking for ideas. The first time I did a gift guide, I published Thanksgiving week so people would have it for the Black Friday sales. But now with the Christmas shopping season having blown past that traditional Thanksgiving Friday start and with radio stations barely able to wait for the kids to finish counting their Halloween candy haul before <a href=\"https://www.fox5ny.com/news/radio-stations-christmas-music-holiday-season\">flipping the switch on their All-Christmas-Music format</a>, I’ve dragged the publishing date up to the front of November. The <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">2020 gift guide</a> was probably the most unique. All the restaurant lockdowns and indoor dining limits had us eating in our hotel rooms which put bring-your-own dining sets and in-room coffee brewing kits onto the gift list. The disappearance of airport and in-flight mask mandates means that #1 gift on that year’s list -- comfortable masks -- has also dropped off.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>What hasn’t dropped off and is regularly at the top of my list is <strong>Battery Packs</strong>.&nbsp; We’ve talked <em>a lot</em> about how we can’t easily travel anymore without a working mobile phone. It holds our boarding passes, gives us gate change and flight delay notifications, unlocks our car (if we’ve rented a Tesla), routes us around traffic jams, and connects us to our Airbnb hosts. So having that second or third charge immediately available is critical to making it through a long travel day. I carry a Zendure SuperMini power bank in my bag because its USB-C port quickly tops up my iPhone while the USB-A port takes care of my Samsung tablet. I’ve updated Irene’s lipstick charger to an Anker with a flip-out Lighting connector so she doesn’t have to fish around in her purse for a cable. But there are a lot of choices; just pick one.. or two.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Noise Canceling Headphones</strong> are also a perennial on my gift lists. I’ve been carrying Bose headphones for at least 15 years. Back then, the QC-3’s were de rigueur for any self-respecting road warrior. The “ah ha” moment for me was on a United Express Dash 8 turboprop flying to Sioux City, IA with an intermediate stop in Waterloo, IA. I was in a window seat on the wing and the droning of the prop just encased me; I couldn’t think of anything else -- until I flicked the switch on my Bose. I’m now on my 3rd pair, the Bose 700’s. They’re not compact but they continue to earn their space in my travel bag. I picked up a pair of Apple AirPod Pros on a good Prime Day sale last month and so was able to compare the Bose and AirPod noise canceling on my Boston and New York flights. The AirPods are good, but not as good as the Bose. And the battery doesn’t last as long, which makes sense given the size differential. For me, the AirPod Pros are good for a 2-2.5-hr flight, but for, say, my upcoming UK trip, I’ll be packing the Bose.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Apple AirTags</strong> earned a place on the list last October when I could see, sitting on the plane, that our bags weren’t going to make the connection in Newark on our way home from Rome. This didn’t get our bag to us, but it did save us the 30 minutes of suspense waiting for them to come out on the carousel, and let us instead go straight to the baggage service agent, be the first in line to file our report, and then head home after a very long travel day. They were definitely worth the purchase price just for that.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>For someone making the transition from virtual work to physical world road warrior, how ‘bout a <strong>Black 20-inch Carry-On Bag</strong>. Black not only makes you look thinner, it makes your bag look thinner to gate agents hunting for bag-sizer bait. My daughter had a baby blue roller bag for the longest time. She loved that color, and it was easy to spot on the luggage carousel, which was a good thing because it ended up there <em>a lot</em> because gate agents were always pulling her out of line to gate check that bag. So get a nondescript black bag with a set of clever, neon-colored luggage tags as a stocking stuffer. If you’re flying a budget airline that’s a stickler on size, get a hard-shell bag. It’ll keep its dimensions better when overstuffed, and the polycarbonate shell will slide past the metal bars of the sizer easier than the ballistic nylon of a soft-sided bag. You could range up in size to a 22-incher, but a 20-incher should safely fit in the overhead of just about every plane. I’m a big fan of the TravelPro line; for me they strike the right balance between price and quality. But there are lots -- maybe way too many -- options out there for you to choose from.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Here’s a new list entrant -- a <strong>Travel Power Strip</strong>. Potentially one of the least sexy things I could put on a gift list, but I’ve always tried to populate these with the things I actually use -- and find myself needing the most when I’m on the road. And you think after, I dunno, 20 years of travelers needing to charge a bunch of electronics -- PCs, mobile phones, tablets -- hotels, b&amp;b’s, resorts would put outlets <em>that work</em> on the top of flat surfaces like nightstands, end tables, desks, …. But I’d say that on half of my trips <em>this year</em>, I had to move furniture or get down on my hands and knees to find a single outlet. So you can get one of those cube-shaped travel adapters that show up on most travel gift guides, and still have to crawl under furniture every time you need to plug something new in. And that’s why I recommend a compact power strip -- you move the nightstand once to reach down and plug it in, and then set the other end -- the end with the outlets, the end you’ll regularly need easy access to -- <em>on top</em> of the nightstand. Any power strip you buy nowadays will have some mix of USB and regular AC outlets. Anker has a seemingly infinite range of them. But if Anker is a little boring for you, way back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/01/25/podcast-159-planning-the-trip-of-a-lifetime-in-southeast-asia/\">episode #159</a> in January 2020, long-time listener Arnoud Heijnis gave high marks to a <em>circular</em> power strip called the Power Bagel. Three years on, MOGICS, the manufacturer, now sells an updated version called the Super Bagel. Of course! With a lot of positive reviews confirming Arnoud’s view that the circle, the bagel shape, let you use every outlet, even when using those big wall wart power supplies</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>So there you go, 5 gift ideas to fit all budgets, and with more than enough time to beat any early on-line shipping deadline. Check out the show notes for links, and happy shopping!</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>Note: None of these suggestions are paid endorsements. This post contains links to Amazon where I can earn a small commission from qualifying purchases.</em></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"className\":\"has-medium-font-size\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #197</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As always, you can find us and listen to the current episodes on all the main podcast sites -- Apple Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, Google Podcasts, and Amazon Music. And you can always Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page at TravelCommons.com for a transcript of the episode and links to items on the gift guide. If you’re not yet subscribed, there’s a drop down Subscribe menu at the top of TravelCommon’s home page. And along the side of the page, you’ll find links to all the TravelCommons’ socials.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to mpeacock on Twitter, write them on the TravelCommons page on Facebook or Instagram, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com.&nbsp; And thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in emails, Tweets and post comments on the website. I really appreciate it.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And until we talk again, safe travels; and thanks for stopping by the TravelCommons.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_197.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #197 — Renting a Tesla; 2023 Traveler Gift Guide','','inherit','closed','closed','','4387-revision-v1','','','2023-11-07 18:33:21','2023-11-07 23:33:21','',4387,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4394',0,'revision','',0),
(4395,1,'2023-11-07 18:48:45','2023-11-07 23:48:45','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Dalle-E_Renting_Tesla-300x300.png\" alt=\"road warrior renting a Tesla from a Hertz rental car lot.\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" />Swipe left or right to start this thing?[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It\'s the sustainability episode of the TravelCommons podcast, talking about my experience renting a Tesla from Hertz and my road-tested list of Christmas gift suggestions for the frequent traveler(s) in your life. I also talk about some new TSA biometrics equipment I faced (literally) in Nashville and yet another update on the EU\'s ETIAS system and the US\'s Real ID. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_197.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #197: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN after a pretty solid three weeks of travel -- a business trip to the Boston suburbs, then down to New York to meet up with Irene and Claire for a long weekend of knocking around Brooklyn and Queens, and then, after a day of reloading suitcases and picking up the cat, driving up to Chicago for friends and family. When we got back home last Friday, I was ready to just stay put for a little bit. Which is about all it will be because we head out to the UK in less than two weeks.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The Boston trip came up all of a sudden and I think is only my second post-pandemic business trip -- <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/06/15/podcast-176-why-business-travel-is-coming-back-learning-airport-history/\" title=\"\">my first was down to Miami in May 2021</a>.&nbsp; Maybe I’ve timed out of my road warrior status, because everything felt a bit off. Flying BNA-BOS, my choices were JetBlue or Delta. I don’t have status on either, so I choose JetBlue because it’s the earlier flight out. No status means I also have to pay $80-100 to reserve a seat after paying $450 for a one-way ticket. I could’ve expensed it through, but the annoyance vein in my temple started to pulsate. How dare you, JetBlue! And in return for my righteous anger, I get assigned, at the gate, a middle seat in the last boarding group. I resign myself to having to gate check my carry-on. But then when boarding is called, the pre-boarding announcement is for JetBlue <em>and</em> American elites. Ugh! Such an amateur mistake — not keeping track of alliances and partnerships.&nbsp; If I’d put my Aadvantage Platinum number into my reservation instead of my plain TrueBlue number, I probably could’ve saved myself all that righteous anger and vein throbbing. Luckily though, I always carry my physical elite cards with me, so I show my Aadvantage Platinum card to the agent, get waved on, and find an empty bin right above my seat.&nbsp; I was a little concerned about fitting my big carry-on in an A220 -- it was my first time on this plane -- but no problem. The overhead bins on this plane are huge.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>After my window seat neighbor got settled, I put on my Bose noise-canceling headphones, dialed up the white noise app on my iPhone, and, middle seat be damned, nodded off sitting up straight. One thing I <em>haven’t</em> lost while working virtually -- being able to fall asleep even before my 7am flight rotates off the runway.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — funkyGarden by Jeris (c) copyright 2020 Licensed under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/VJ_Memes/61356 Ft: airtone, SackJo22, Analog By Nature</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>It wouldn’t be a proper Following Up section without yet another update on the US’s Real ID or the EU’s ETIAS rolling delays. Let’s do ETIAS, the EU’s pre-travel authorization system that gobs of click-bait websites have mislabeled a “European Visa.” The EU has tweaked their go-live date again -- from last month’s <a href=\"https://www.schengenvisainfo.com/news/no-etias-wont-become-operational-in-2024-eu-sources-say/\">May 2025</a> to a less definite/more nebulous “<a href=\"https://travel-europe.europa.eu/etias/what-etias_en#etias-in-a-nutshell\">mid-2025</a>” -- which could be May or June or July. But I’m not sure why anyone in their right mind would want to flip the switch on this in the summer, during Europe’s peak tourist season. I’m taking the over on this; I don’t see it going live any earlier than October 2025.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The US, on the other hand, seems to be sticking to their May 2025 date -- for now. Remember, the initial deadline for needing a Real ID to board a commercial flight was January 2018 -- which then got kicked to October 2020. But then COVID hit and in April 2020, soon after just about every government building was emptied out and locked up, the bright sparks at Dept of Homeland Security decided that driving crowds of people toward closed DMVs to replace their old driver’s licenses wouldn’t be great and pushed the deadline a year to October 2021. Which, we’ll all remember, wasn’t <em>that</em> much better -- at least with regards to DMV accessibility. I remember lining up outside, in December 2021, in Chicago at a DMV to renew my driver’s license. And so another push, 19 months to May 2023. And then last December, they pushed it another 2 years to May 2025 because -- who knows. So the US has got nothing to say to the EU. But on my flights a couple of weeks ago, I started seeing new signage “RealID coming in May 2025”; even the Delta app, when I checked in for my BOS-LGA flight, had a banner about it. Huh? I mean, why wind everyone up about a deadline that’s 18 months away and, if the kabuki theater of the last 5 years is any guide, will get pushed again.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Now where DHS is moving much faster is rolling out biometrics to airport and customs checkpoints. Over the years here on TravelCommons, I have talked about my experiences with biometrics usage -- starting with my first fingerprint scan back in the late ‘90’s so I could skip the US customs line at Toronto-Pearson Airport, then in 2008 letting the first iteration of CLEAR scan my eyeballs in exchange for a shortcut to the front of the TSA line, then in 2011 a background check and another fingerprint scan for Global Entry so I could skip all the US customs lines -- so yes, I’ll do damn close to anything to skip an airport line. But over the past couple of years, it feels like DHS has been turning it up a notch. October 2021, our first international flight in a couple of years, on AirFrance, the gate agent took our picture when boarding and didn’t need to see our boarding pass. <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/06/20/podcast-194-best-laid-travel-plans-roaming-entropy/\" title=\"\">Last April, returning from the Netherlands</a>, the Global Entry kiosk no longer needed to scan my fingerprints; a quick side glance at the camera was enough to recognize me and let me through. And now, a couple of weeks ago, at the BNA PreCheck line, a big sign “Identity Verification Technology. Biometrics technology is available at this checkpoint. Your participation is optional.” This is new; it wasn’t there 2 months ago when we flew out to Maine. I give my driver’s license to the TSA guy standing next to something like a camera on a stick; it looks a bit like the electronic customs gates at LHR. He puts my ID in the machine, tells me to look at the camera, then looks at the screen and waves me through. A couple of things here -- I’m not sure how this is different from the TSA guy looking at my face and comparing it to the picture on my license; and I didn’t see any way that my participation was optional. And I certainly didn’t get to skip any lines for the biometric giveaway. I’ve been trying since April to get someone from TSA or DHS on the podcast to talk about this biometrics push and have gotten nothing but repeated “I’ll get back to you soon” from the TSA press secretary. Now maybe this new equipment gets us to the automated checkpoints I’ve been through in some smaller European airports -- which could shorten the security lines -- but I had to dig pretty deep into a bunch of jargon-y <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/sites/default/files/tsa_idm_roadmap_2022-03-01_508c_final.pdf\">PDF documents</a> on the TSA website to get even a hint of any benefits to the regular traveler. I dunno, maybe all the benefits are waiting on Real ID. Once everyone has that little gold star on their license, it’s clear sailing.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter (X?) message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page, or on the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can skip all that social media stuff and post your comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — Xena’s Kiss / Medea’s Kiss by mwic (c) copyright 2018 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mwic/58883</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Renting a Tesla</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>After 2, 3? episodes of <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/08/24/podcast-195-checking-out-hollands-tulip-festival/\" title=\"\">nattering on</a> about electric vehicles, I decided to take up Hertz on their incessant email offers and rented a Tesla for my Boston business trip -- giving EVs a try, but on someone else’s dime. The client site was only 18 miles from BOS and Google Maps told me there was a Tesla Supercharger nearby, so range risk wouldn’t be an issue. A couple of days before my flight, Hertz sent me an email which was pretty much a crash course on operating a Tesla, pictures, text, links to YouTube videos. I was both impressed and slightly overwhelmed, but I grabbed a beer out of the fridge -- a 16 oz, this was going to take a bit -- and ground through all the email links -- which, I think, saved me time trying to figure things out in the Hertz lot.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Over the past couple of years, we’ve talked about <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/05/09/podcast-175-how-to-find-local-tour-guides-rebuild-travel-muscles/\" title=\"\">barren Hertz lots</a>; <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/04/10/podcast-174-how-the-pros-plan-their-taproom-tourism/\" title=\"\">renters queueing up for cars to appear</a>. So when the Hertz employee pointed me to an EV aisle full up with 10-12 Tesla Model 3’s and a couple of Polestars it took me a moment to process all my options. My usual strategy, when I have a choice, is to run through the cars on the aisle and pick the one with the lowest mileage. But I wasn’t quite sure if that worked with a Tesla, and if it did, I didn’t recall from my crash course where to find the odometer. So, I chose a black Model 3 that had the least beat-up wheel rims -- trying to minimize any damage arguments at return time.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>After I got in, powered it up, and got acclimated to the massive tablet screen in the center console, I saw that the battery level was at 69%. One of the crash course’s tutorials said it’d be at 100% and I’d be charged if I returned it under 80%. I snapped a picture of the battery display and told the guy at the exit gate. He shrugged and told me to bring it back at the same level. He didn\'t seem very concerned.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming out of the lot, the Tesla drove fine. After a couple of days, the battery had dropped into the mid-40s, so I decided to try out the Tesla Supercharger network. Tesla’s nav app directed me to a nearby shopping center. The chargers were in the farthest back corner of the Target parking lot. I backed in -- looking at the other Teslas, it seemed the thing to do -- plugged in the charger, and was a little shocked to see that it would take an <em>hour</em> to get me charged up to 100%. Now Irene would have no problem with this -- an excuse to spend an hour shopping in Target? Bring it on. Me, not so much. Luckily, there was a Chipotle across the street, so I locked the car and walked over to grab lunch. When I got back, the car still had another 5 minutes before it got to 100%. I’m glad I didn’t wait ‘til it got down to 20%.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Though maybe I should’ve waited, because by my last day, I’d driven off a chunk of that 100% charge and, heading back to BOS, I wasn’t completely confident that I’d arrive with the battery at the 69% level I’d picked it up at. And I guess that’s a place where an EV rental requires a bit more logistical planning. A regular gas car -- there’s loads of places I could hit to quickly splash in a couple of last-minute gallons to keep the fuel gauge on Full. An EV? The Tesla nav app vectored me way off my usual I-90/I-93 tunnel routes to BOS, taking me way east, past some marshes just off the bay, to the back corner of another Target parking lot where I backed in amid a half-dozen other Teslas, their drivers all sitting there, working their phones, waiting for their cars to charge. I waited 10 minutes, splashed in enough electricity to get the battery gauge to 75%, and lit out. But I probably didn’t need to worry. Turning the car in, I told the Hertz guy I was under 80% charge because I got the car at 69%. No problem, he said. He didn\'t seem very concerned. Honestly, I’ve never seen Hertz guys so nonchalant about their cars; especially after Hertz said in their last earnings call that <a href=\"https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-10-26/hertz-misses-quarterly-profit-estimates-as-its-fleet-costs-rise\">EV repair costs are about double what they pay for gas-powered cars</a>.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>On the shuttle bus to the terminal, I opened the email receipt and saw that the $15 charge from my first Supercharger visit had made it onto my invoice. A couple of things crossed my mind -- definitely less than what I would’ve spent filling up a gas car, and I was impressed by the quick turnaround time because the toll charge I incurred two days before that, when leaving Logan through one of the tunnels, still hasn’t shown up and so is going to raise some eyebrows in A/P when I eventually try to expense it through. So all told, pretty good experience; kudos to Hertz. And now they’re trying to get me to rent a Polestar at LHR in a couple of weeks for our drive through the Devon countryside. Ehh, I don’t think I’ll push my luck.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/bridges/15563\">i knew</a> by bridges (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp;Ft: shannonsongs</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>2023 Traveler\'s Gift Guide</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Every couple of years around this time I update my gift guide to give folks suggestions for the frequent traveler in their lives. Or, if you are the frequent traveler, a list of hints you might want to drop on family members looking for ideas. The first time I did a gift guide, I published Thanksgiving week so people would have it for the Black Friday sales. But now with the Christmas shopping season having blown past that traditional Thanksgiving Friday start and with radio stations barely able to wait for the kids to finish counting their Halloween candy haul before <a href=\"https://www.fox5ny.com/news/radio-stations-christmas-music-holiday-season\">flipping the switch on their All-Christmas-Music format</a>, I’ve dragged the publishing date up to the front of November. The <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">2020 gift guide</a> was probably the most unique. All the restaurant lockdowns and indoor dining limits had us eating in our hotel rooms which put bring-your-own dining sets and in-room coffee brewing kits onto the gift list. The disappearance of airport and in-flight mask mandates means that #1 gift on that year’s list -- comfortable masks -- has also dropped off.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>What hasn’t dropped off and is regularly at the top of my list is <strong>Battery Packs</strong>.  We’ve talked <em>a lot</em> about how we can’t easily travel anymore without a working mobile phone. It holds our boarding passes, gives us gate change and flight delay notifications, unlocks our car (if we’ve rented a Tesla), routes us around traffic jams, and connects us to our Airbnb hosts. So having that second or third charge immediately available is critical to making it through a long travel day. I carry a <a href=\"https://amzn.to/470YN1T\" title=\"\">Zendure SuperMini power bank</a> in my bag because its USB-C port quickly tops up my iPhone while the USB-A port takes care of my Samsung tablet. I’ve updated Irene’s lipstick charger to <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3u6IbXX\" title=\"\">an Anker with a flip-out Lighting connector</a> so she doesn’t have to fish around in her purse for a cable. But there are a lot of choices; just pick one.. or two. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Noise Canceling Headphones</strong> are also a perennial on my gift lists. I’ve been carrying Bose headphones for at least 15 years. Back then, the QC-3’s were de rigueur for any self-respecting road warrior. The “ah ha” moment for me was on a United Express Dash 8 turboprop flying to Sioux City, IA with an intermediate stop in Waterloo, IA. I was in a window seat on the wing and the droning of the prop just encased me; I couldn’t think of anything else -- until I flicked the switch on my Bose. I’m now on my 3rd pair, the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3Mzl3Yx\" title=\"\">Bose 700’s</a>. They’re not compact but they continue to earn their space in my travel bag. I picked up a pair of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/49EsZld\" title=\"\">Apple AirPod Pros</a> on a good Prime Day sale last month and so was able to compare the Bose and AirPod noise canceling on my Boston and New York flights. The AirPods are good, but not as good as the Bose. And the battery doesn’t last as long, which makes sense given the size differential. For me, the AirPod Pros are good for a 2-2.5-hr flight, but for, say, my upcoming UK trip, I’ll be packing the Bose.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://amzn.to/40vbaAK\" title=\"\">Apple AirTags</a></strong> earned a place on the list last October when I could see, sitting on the plane, that our bags weren’t going to make the connection in Newark on our way home from Rome. This didn’t get our bag to us, but it did save us the 30 minutes of suspense waiting for them to come out on the carousel, and let us instead go straight to the baggage service agent, be the first in line to file our report, and then head home after a very long travel day. They were definitely worth the purchase price just for that.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>For someone making the transition from virtual work to physical world road warrior, how ‘bout a <strong>Black 20-inch Carry-On Bag</strong>. Black not only makes you look thinner, it makes your bag look thinner to gate agents hunting for bag-sizer bait. My daughter had a baby blue roller bag for the longest time. She loved that color, and it was easy to spot on the luggage carousel, which was a good thing because it ended up there <em>a lot</em> because gate agents were always pulling her out of line to gate check that bag. So get a nondescript black bag with a set of clever, neon-colored luggage tags as a stocking stuffer. If you’re flying a budget airline that’s a stickler on size, get a hard-shell bag. It’ll keep its dimensions better when overstuffed, and the polycarbonate shell will slide past the metal bars of the sizer easier than the ballistic nylon of a soft-sided bag. You could range up in size to a 22-incher, but a 20-incher should safely fit in the overhead of just about every plane. I’m a big fan of the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3MwJLZr\" title=\"\">TravelPro line</a>; for me they strike the right balance between price and quality. But there are lots -- maybe way too many -- options out there for you to choose from.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Here’s a new list entrant -- a <strong>Travel Power Strip</strong>. Potentially one of the least sexy things I could put on a gift list, but I’ve always tried to populate these with the things I actually use -- and find myself needing the most when I’m on the road. And you think after, I dunno, 20 years of travelers needing to charge a bunch of electronics -- PCs, mobile phones, tablets -- hotels, B&amp;B’s, resorts would put outlets <em>that work</em> on the top of flat surfaces like nightstands, end tables, desks, …. But I’d say that on half of my trips <em>this year</em>, I had to move furniture or get down on my hands and knees to find a single outlet. So you can get one of those cube-shaped travel adapters that show up on most travel gift guides, and still have to crawl under furniture every time you need to plug something new in. And that’s why I recommend a compact power strip -- you move the nightstand once to reach down and plug it in, and then set the other end -- the end with the outlets, the end you’ll regularly need easy access to -- <em>on top</em> of the nightstand. Any power strip you buy nowadays will have some mix of USB and regular AC outlets. <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3SpsSng\" title=\"\">Anker</a> has a seemingly infinite range of them. But if Anker is a little boring for you, way back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/01/25/podcast-159-planning-the-trip-of-a-lifetime-in-southeast-asia/\">episode #159</a> in January 2020, long-time listener Arnoud Heijnis gave high marks to a <em>circular</em> power strip called the<a href=\"https://amzn.to/3SyAXGa\" title=\"\"> Power Bagel</a>. Three years on, MOGICS, the manufacturer, now sells an updated version called the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/40reQ6o\" title=\"\">Super Bagel</a>. Of course! With a lot of positive reviews confirming Arnoud’s view that the circle, the bagel shape, let you use every outlet, even when using those big wall wart power supplies</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>So there you go, 5 gift ideas to fit all budgets, and with more than enough time to beat any early on-line shipping deadline. Check out the show notes for links, and happy shopping!</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>Note: None of these suggestions are paid endorsements. This post contains links to Amazon where I can earn a small commission from qualifying purchases.</em></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"className\":\"has-medium-font-size\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #197</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As always, you can find us and listen to the current episodes on all the main podcast sites -- Apple Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, Google Podcasts, and Amazon Music. And you can always Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page at TravelCommons.com for a transcript of the episode and links to items on the gift guide. If you’re not yet subscribed, there’s a drop down Subscribe menu at the top of TravelCommon’s home page. And along the side of the page, you’ll find links to all the TravelCommons’ socials.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to mpeacock on Twitter, write them on the TravelCommons page on Facebook or Instagram, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com.&nbsp; And thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in emails, Tweets and post comments on the website. I really appreciate it.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And until we talk again, safe travels; and thanks for stopping by the TravelCommons.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_197.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #197 — Renting a Tesla; 2023 Traveler Gift Guide','','inherit','closed','closed','','4387-revision-v1','','','2023-11-07 18:48:45','2023-11-07 23:48:45','',4387,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4395',0,'revision','',0),
(4398,1,'2023-12-06 19:44:50','2023-12-07 00:44:50','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":4399,\"scale\":\"cover\",\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/DALL·E-2023-12-06-12.09.17.png\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/DALL·E-2023-12-06-12.09.17-300x300.png\" alt=\"Post-apocalyptic Santa Claus road warrior in a desolate landscape. He\'s in a tattered red and white suit, equipped with survival gear and goggles, holding a sack of travel-oriented gifts. The background shows a dystopian, barren terrain with a hint of a ruined cityscape. Holiday Travel Tips.\" class=\"wp-image-4399\" style=\"object-fit:cover\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\"><em>Santa Prepared for the Lines</em></figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph {\"hideFromFeed\":true} -->\n<p>Travel volume continues to grow, straining airline capacities and airport aisles —  and that\'s even before the Christmas travel crush hits. As you mentally prepare yourself to wade into the crowds, here are TravelCommons\' top holiday travel tips to keep you moving over the river and through the woods…</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list {\"ordered\":true} -->\n<ol><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Expand Your Fly-vs.-Drive Tipping Point</strong> — My normal tipping point is 350 miles; anything less and I\'ll drive it, though driving in the winter isn’t all sweetness and light – especially across stretches of I-70 through Kansas or up the Jersey Turnpike. But if you fly, expect all the holiday airport logistics to add 3 hours to your in-flight time; 2 hours before departure to allow for long TSA lines, and at least an hour after arrival to de-plane, collect your luggage, and get a rental car or Uber. And that’s if there are no delays. Maybe this adds another 50-100 miles to your holiday tipping point.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Use Multiple Navigation Apps — </strong>If you decide to drive, use more than one maps app to help you route around traffic jams from rush hour, construction, and accidents. I use both <a href=\"https://www.waze.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Waze</a> and <a href=\"https://maps.google.com/\">Google Maps</a> because, even though they’re both owned by Google, they often give me different directions. Waze seems quicker to reroute around accidents and traffic jams, but that quickness can make it a bit twitchy — sending you wandering through sub-divisions to save a minute of drive time. I use Waze as my primary guidance app, but periodically sanity-check it against Google Maps.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Do Your Research Before You Leave — </strong>You don’t have time to be clueless. Hit your airline or the <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/travel/travel-tips\">TSA website</a> so you know what’s allowed in your carry-on. Research the airports you’ll be using so you know how to get to your gates, where the good restaurants are, or better yet, if there’s a brewpub. Also, figure out the geography. Knowing alternatives to your destination airport gives you more flexibility dealing with cancelled flights or missed connections. In New York, the LaGuardia-to-Newark pivot is easy, but others aren’t so obvious.  Everyone knows that Chicago has two airports – O’Hare and Midway.  But what about Milwaukee’s Mitchell Field 80 miles north?  If Philadelphia is in trouble, how many folks think about Harrisburg or BWI?  Or Sacramento as an alternative to SFO?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Fly Non-Stop</strong> — I know this is in every list, but that\'s because it’s a foundational strategy – limit the points of failure in an overloaded system. Expecting airlines already operating at capacity to ferry even more passengers between airports operating at or over capacity during marginal weather – and to do this all on schedule? Suck it up, pay the extra $100 and have a fighting chance of getting to your family on time with your sanity and your luggage in hand.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Skip the Tight Connection</strong> — If you can’t fly direct, step away from any connection that’s less than 60 minutes. Think about it – a 15-minute delay on your flight into a big hub like <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27hare_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Chicago</a> or <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denver_International_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Denver</a> or <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detroit_Metropolitan_Wayne_County_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Detroit</a> (as good as on-time in the winter for most airlines) and you’re sprinting across terminals and concourses just to beat the closing door.  A 45-minute connection is just asking for a stress attack and/or an overnight stay at the airport branch of the <a href=\"http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092622/\">Bates Motel</a>.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Catch the Early Flight </strong>— Delays stack up as the day wears on.  As your airplane goes from airport to airport, the probability of it getting stuck increases.  Overnight, airlines have a chance to recover – late planes finally get to their destinations and operations groups can reassign planes.  So while the last flight out can be a crap shoot, I’ve rarely hit a delay on the first flight out.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Carry On your Luggage</strong> — As Steve Frick, a long-time TravelCommons listener says, \"There are two kinds of luggage — carry-on and lost.\" Unless you’re heading to the slopes for Christmas, everyone in your travel party should be able to fit into a carry-on sized bag. You can save $25/bag and increase the probability of having clean clothes at your destination. If you’re in boarding group 5 or later, odds are there’s no overhead bin space for you. Let the agent gate-check the bag for you. You won’t have to pay a checked bag fee and it’s very unlikely that they’ll lose your bag – it’s only traveling a couple hundred feet from the jet bridge to the luggage hold.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Simplify your Coffee Order</strong> — When you hit the airport Starbucks for your pre-flight coffee, remember that this isn’t your neighborhood Starbucks run by friendly Starbucks-trained baristas. It’s run by Sodexo which doesn’t care quite as&nbsp;much about coffee training. And they’re not quite as efficient. And there are usually a lot of people behind you in line. Keep your order to 3 adjectives or less. Tall skim latte is good. The half-decaf 3-pump no-foam vente vanilla latte — not so much.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Take the Phone Tree Path Less Traveled</strong> — If you have to call an airline or hotel and you don’t have a Platinum or Premiere status number to call, choose the unpopular path on the phone tree.  Travel companies don’t staff their customer service centers for peak loads – like the day when a Chicago blizzard cancels 400 flights.  It’s too expensive. So on those days, you’ll wait forever for an agent if you’ve followed the typical path down the phone tree.  Instead, swerve the crowd and choose the “Spanish” or “International Travel” option.  Once you connect with someone, they’ll take care of you.  They all work on the same systems in the same service centers.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Bring a Battery Pack</strong> — It’s tough to travel today without a working mobile phone. It holds our boarding passes, gives us gate change and flight delay notifications, and routes us around traffic jams. A dead phone while flights are being canceled is more than a minor inconvenience. Having that second or third charge immediately available is critical when trying to route around a long delay. Check out the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/11/07/podcast-197-renting-a-tesla-2023-traveler-gift-guide/\" title=\"\">2023 Traveler Gift Guide in show notes for episode #197</a> for the battery packs that I use.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ol>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph {\"hideFromFeed\":true} -->\n<p>But above all, be realistic. It’s gonna be a zoo. Steel yourself; get your inner karma tuned for it. Pack a snack and a book, and practice deep cleansing breaths.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','One More Top 10 List Of Holiday Travel Tips','','publish','closed','closed','','one-more-top-10-list-of-holiday-travel-tips','','','2025-09-14 12:59:43','2025-09-14 17:59:43','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4398',0,'post','',0),
(4399,1,'2023-12-06 13:27:23','2023-12-06 18:27:23','','DALL·E 2023-12-06 12.09.17','','inherit','open','closed','','dall%c2%b7e-2023-12-06-12-09-17','','','2023-12-06 13:28:59','2023-12-06 18:28:59','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/DALL·E-2023-12-06-12.09.17.png',0,'attachment','image/png',0),
(4400,1,'2023-12-06 13:38:13','2023-12-06 18:38:13','<!-- wp:paragraph {\"hideFromFeed\":true} -->\n<p>Travel volume continues to grow, straining airline capacities and airport aisles -- and that\'s even before the Christmas travel crush hits. As you mentally prepare yourself to wade into the crowds, here are TravelCommon\'s top holiday travel tips to keep you moving over the river and through the woods…</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":4399,\"width\":\"375px\",\"height\":\"auto\",\"sizeSlug\":\"full\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-full is-resized\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/DALL·E-2023-12-06-12.09.17.png\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/DALL·E-2023-12-06-12.09.17.png\" alt=\"Post-apocalyptic Santa Claus road warrior in a desolate landscape. He\'s in a tattered red and white suit, equipped with survival gear and goggles, holding a sack of travel-oriented gifts. The background shows a dystopian, barren terrain with a hint of a ruined cityscape.\" class=\"wp-image-4399\" style=\"width:375px;height:auto\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Santa Road Warrior Prepared for the Holiday TSA LInes</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->','One More Top 10 List Of Holiday Travel Tips','','inherit','closed','closed','','4398-revision-v1','','','2023-12-06 13:38:13','2023-12-06 18:38:13','',4398,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4400',0,'revision','',0),
(4401,1,'2023-12-06 13:39:59','2023-12-06 18:39:59','<!-- wp:paragraph {\"hideFromFeed\":true} -->\n<p>Travel volume continues to grow, straining airline capacities and airport aisles -- and that\'s even before the Christmas travel crush hits. As you mentally prepare yourself to wade into the crowds, here are TravelCommon\'s top holiday travel tips to keep you moving over the river and through the woods…</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":4399,\"width\":\"300px\",\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium is-resized\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/DALL·E-2023-12-06-12.09.17.png\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/DALL·E-2023-12-06-12.09.17-300x300.png\" alt=\"Post-apocalyptic Santa Claus road warrior in a desolate landscape. He\'s in a tattered red and white suit, equipped with survival gear and goggles, holding a sack of travel-oriented gifts. The background shows a dystopian, barren terrain with a hint of a ruined cityscape.\" class=\"wp-image-4399\" style=\"width:300px\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Santa Prepared for the Holiday TSA LInes</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->','One More Top 10 List Of Holiday Travel Tips','','inherit','closed','closed','','4398-revision-v1','','','2023-12-06 13:39:59','2023-12-06 18:39:59','',4398,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4401',0,'revision','',0),
(4402,1,'2023-12-06 13:40:42','2023-12-06 18:40:42','<!-- wp:paragraph {\"hideFromFeed\":true} -->\n<p>Travel volume continues to grow, straining airline capacities and airport aisles -- and that\'s even before the Christmas travel crush hits. As you mentally prepare yourself to wade into the crowds, here are TravelCommon\'s top holiday travel tips to keep you moving over the river and through the woods…</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":4399,\"width\":\"300px\",\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium is-resized\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/DALL·E-2023-12-06-12.09.17.png\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/DALL·E-2023-12-06-12.09.17-300x300.png\" alt=\"Post-apocalyptic Santa Claus road warrior in a desolate landscape. He\'s in a tattered red and white suit, equipped with survival gear and goggles, holding a sack of travel-oriented gifts. The background shows a dystopian, barren terrain with a hint of a ruined cityscape.\" class=\"wp-image-4399\" style=\"width:300px\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Santa Prepared for the TSA LInes</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->','One More Top 10 List Of Holiday Travel Tips','','inherit','closed','closed','','4398-revision-v1','','','2023-12-06 13:40:42','2023-12-06 18:40:42','',4398,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4402',0,'revision','',0),
(4403,1,'2023-12-06 13:44:26','2023-12-06 18:44:26','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":4399,\"width\":\"300px\",\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium is-resized\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/DALL·E-2023-12-06-12.09.17.png\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/DALL·E-2023-12-06-12.09.17-300x300.png\" alt=\"Post-apocalyptic Santa Claus road warrior in a desolate landscape. He\'s in a tattered red and white suit, equipped with survival gear and goggles, holding a sack of travel-oriented gifts. The background shows a dystopian, barren terrain with a hint of a ruined cityscape.\" class=\"wp-image-4399\" style=\"width:300px\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Santa Prepared for the TSA LInes</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph {\"hideFromFeed\":true} -->\n<p>Travel volume continues to grow, straining airline capacities and airport aisles -- and that\'s even before the Christmas travel crush hits. As you mentally prepare yourself to wade into the crowds, here are TravelCommon\'s top holiday travel tips to keep you moving over the river and through the woods…</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list {\"ordered\":true} -->\n<ol><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Expand Your Fly-vs.-Drive Tipping Point </strong>— My normal tipping point is 350 miles; anything less and I drive it. However, the holiday traffic changes the calculus a bit. If you fly, figure the airport logistics will add 3 hours to your in-flight time. Airlines are recommending passengers arrive 2 hours before their holiday flights, and when you arrive, all the additional people means it’ll take you at least an hour to de-plane, collect your luggage, and get off the airport property. And that’s if there are no delays. This increases the holiday fly-vs.-drive tipping point to at least 500 miles.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ol>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','One More Top 10 List Of Holiday Travel Tips','','inherit','closed','closed','','4398-revision-v1','','','2023-12-06 13:44:26','2023-12-06 18:44:26','',4398,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4403',0,'revision','',0),
(4404,1,'2023-12-06 14:09:29','2023-12-06 19:09:29','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":4399,\"width\":\"300px\",\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium is-resized\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/DALL·E-2023-12-06-12.09.17.png\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/DALL·E-2023-12-06-12.09.17-300x300.png\" alt=\"Post-apocalyptic Santa Claus road warrior in a desolate landscape. He\'s in a tattered red and white suit, equipped with survival gear and goggles, holding a sack of travel-oriented gifts. The background shows a dystopian, barren terrain with a hint of a ruined cityscape.\" class=\"wp-image-4399\" style=\"width:300px\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Santa Prepared for the TSA LInes</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph {\"hideFromFeed\":true} -->\n<p>Travel volume continues to grow, straining airline capacities and airport aisles -- and that\'s even before the Christmas travel crush hits. As you mentally prepare yourself to wade into the crowds, here are TravelCommon\'s top holiday travel tips to keep you moving over the river and through the woods…</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list {\"ordered\":true} -->\n<ol><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Expand Your Fly-vs.-Drive Tipping Point</strong> — My normal tipping point is 350 miles; anything less and I\'ll drive it, though driving in the winter isn’t all sweetness and light – especially across stretches of I-70 through Kansas or up the Jersey Turnpike. But if you fly, expect all the holiday airport logistics will add 3 hours to your in-flight time; 2 hours before departure to allow for long TSA lines, and when you arrive, at least an hour to de-plane, collect your luggage, and get a rental car or Uber. And that’s if there are no delays. Maybe this adds another 50-100 miles to your holiday tipping point.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Fly Non-Stop</strong> — I know this is in every list, but that\'s because it’s a foundational strategy – limit the points of failure in an overloaded system. Expecting airlines already operating at capacity to ferry even more passengers between airports operating at or over capacity during marginal weather – and to do this all on schedule? Suck it up, pay the extra $100 and have a fighting chance of getting to your family on time with your sanity and your luggage in hand.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Skip the Tight Connection</strong> — If you can’t fly direct, step away from any connection that’s less than 60 minutes. Think about it – a 15-minute delay on your flight into a big hub like <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27hare_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Chicago</a> or <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denver_International_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Denver</a> or <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detroit_Metropolitan_Wayne_County_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Detroit</a> (as good as on-time in the winter for most airlines) and you’re sprinting across terminals and concourses just to beat the closing door.  A 1-hr connection is just asking for a stress attack and/or an overnight stay at the airport branch of the <a href=\"http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092622/\">Bates Motel</a>.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ol>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list {\"ordered\":true} -->\n<ol></ol>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','One More Top 10 List Of Holiday Travel Tips','','inherit','closed','closed','','4398-revision-v1','','','2023-12-06 14:09:29','2023-12-06 19:09:29','',4398,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4404',0,'revision','',0),
(4405,1,'2023-12-06 15:02:59','2023-12-06 20:02:59','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":4399,\"width\":\"300px\",\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium is-resized\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/DALL·E-2023-12-06-12.09.17.png\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/DALL·E-2023-12-06-12.09.17-300x300.png\" alt=\"Post-apocalyptic Santa Claus road warrior in a desolate landscape. He\'s in a tattered red and white suit, equipped with survival gear and goggles, holding a sack of travel-oriented gifts. The background shows a dystopian, barren terrain with a hint of a ruined cityscape.\" class=\"wp-image-4399\" style=\"width:300px\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Santa Prepared for the TSA LInes</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph {\"hideFromFeed\":true} -->\n<p>Travel volume continues to grow, straining airline capacities and airport aisles -- and that\'s even before the Christmas travel crush hits. As you mentally prepare yourself to wade into the crowds, here are TravelCommon\'s top holiday travel tips to keep you moving over the river and through the woods…</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list {\"ordered\":true} -->\n<ol><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Expand Your Fly-vs.-Drive Tipping Point</strong> — My normal tipping point is 350 miles; anything less and I\'ll drive it, though driving in the winter isn’t all sweetness and light – especially across stretches of I-70 through Kansas or up the Jersey Turnpike. But if you fly, expect all the holiday airport logistics will add 3 hours to your in-flight time; 2 hours before departure to allow for long TSA lines, and when you arrive, at least an hour to de-plane, collect your luggage, and get a rental car or Uber. And that’s if there are no delays. Maybe this adds another 50-100 miles to your holiday tipping point.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Use Multiple Navigation Apps — </strong>If you decide to drive, use more than one maps app to help you route around traffic jams from rush hour, construction, and accidents. I personally use both <a href=\"https://www.waze.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Waze</a> and <a href=\"https://maps.google.com/\">Google Maps</a> because, even though they’re both owned by Google, they often give you different directions. I find Waze is quicker to react to  accidents and traffic jams, but can be a bit twitchy — sending you wandering through sub-divisions to save a minute of drive time. I tend to follow Waze but periodically check it against Google Maps.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Research Before You Leave — </strong>You don’t have time to be clueless. Hit your airline or <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/travel/travel-tips\">TSA website</a>  so you know what’s allowed in your carry-on. Research the airports you’ll be using so you know how to get to your gates, where the good restaurants are, or better yet, if there’s a brewpub. Also, figure out the geography. Knowing alternatives to your destination airport gives you more flexibility dealing with cancelled flights or missed connections. In New York, the LaGuardia-to-Newark pivot is easy, but others aren’t so obvious.  Everyone knows that Chicago has two airports – O’Hare and Midway.  But what about Milwaukee’s Mitchell Field 80 miles north?  If Philadelphia is in trouble, how many folks think about Harrisburg or BWI?  Or Sacramento as an alternative to SFO?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Fly Non-Stop</strong> — I know this is in every list, but that\'s because it’s a foundational strategy – limit the points of failure in an overloaded system. Expecting airlines already operating at capacity to ferry even more passengers between airports operating at or over capacity during marginal weather – and to do this all on schedule? Suck it up, pay the extra $100 and have a fighting chance of getting to your family on time with your sanity and your luggage in hand.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Skip the Tight Connection</strong> — If you can’t fly direct, step away from any connection that’s less than 60 minutes. Think about it – a 15-minute delay on your flight into a big hub like <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27hare_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Chicago</a> or <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denver_International_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Denver</a> or <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detroit_Metropolitan_Wayne_County_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Detroit</a> (as good as on-time in the winter for most airlines) and you’re sprinting across terminals and concourses just to beat the closing door.  A 1-hr connection is just asking for a stress attack and/or an overnight stay at the airport branch of the <a href=\"http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092622/\">Bates Motel</a>.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Catch the Early Flight </strong>— Delays stack up as the day wears on.  As your airplane goes from airport to airport, the probability of it getting stuck increases.  Overnight, airlines have a chance to recover – late planes finally get their destinations and operations groups can reassign planes.  So while the last flight out can be a crap shoot, I’ve rarely hit a delay on the first flight out.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Carry On your Luggage</strong> — As Steve Frick, a long-time TravelCommons listener say, \"There are two kinds of luggage -- carry-on and lost.\" Unless you’re heading to the slopes for Christmas, everyone in your travel party should be able to fit into a carry-on sized bag. You can save $25/bag and increase the probability of having clean clothes at your destination. If you’re seating area 4 or higher, odds are there’s no overhead bin space for you. Let the agent gate-check the bag for you. You won’t have to pay a checked bag fee and it’s very unlikely that they’ll lose your bag – it’s only traveling a couple hundred feet from the jet bridge to the luggage hold.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Simplify your Coffee Order</strong> — When you hit the airport Starbucks for your pre-flight coffee, remember that this isn’t your neighborhood Starbucks run by friendly Starbucks-trained baristas. It’s run by Sodexo which doesn’t care quite as much about coffee training. And they’re not quite as efficient. And there are usually a lot of people behind you in line. Keep your order to 3 adjectives or less. Tall skim latte is good. The half-decaf 3-pump no-foam vente vanilla latte — not so much.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Take the Phone Tree Path Less Traveled</strong> — If you have to call an airline or hotel and you don’t have a Platinum or Premiere status number to call, choose the unpopular path on the phone tree.  Travel companies don’t staff their customer service centers for peak loads – like the day when a Chicago blizzard cancels 400 flights.  It’s too expensive. So on those days, you’ll wait forever for an agent if you’ve followed the typical path down the phone tree.  On those days, choose the “Spanish” or “International Travel” option because everyone else is choosing English and domestic travel.  Once you connect with someone, they’ll take care of you.  They all work on the same systems in the same service centers.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Bring a Battery Pack</strong> — It’s tough to travel today without a working mobile phone. It holds our boarding passes, gives us gate change and flight delay notifications, and routes us around traffic jams. A dead phone while flights are being canceled is more than a minor inconvenience. Having that second or third charge immediately available is critical when trying to swerve a long delay. Check out the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/11/07/podcast-197-renting-a-tesla-2023-traveler-gift-guide/\" title=\"\">2023 Traveler Gift Guide in show notes of the last podcast episode</a> for the battery packs that I use.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ol>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list {\"ordered\":true} -->\n<ol></ol>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>But above all, be realistic. It’s gonna be a zoo. Steel yourself; get your inner karma tuned for it. Pack a snack and a book, and practice deep cleansing breaths.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','One More Top 10 List Of Holiday Travel Tips','','inherit','closed','closed','','4398-revision-v1','','','2023-12-06 15:02:59','2023-12-06 20:02:59','',4398,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4405',0,'revision','',0),
(4406,1,'2023-12-06 15:03:28','2023-12-06 20:03:28','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":4399,\"width\":\"300px\",\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium is-resized\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/DALL·E-2023-12-06-12.09.17.png\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/DALL·E-2023-12-06-12.09.17-300x300.png\" alt=\"Post-apocalyptic Santa Claus road warrior in a desolate landscape. He\'s in a tattered red and white suit, equipped with survival gear and goggles, holding a sack of travel-oriented gifts. The background shows a dystopian, barren terrain with a hint of a ruined cityscape.\" class=\"wp-image-4399\" style=\"width:300px\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Santa Prepared for the TSA LInes</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph {\"hideFromFeed\":true} -->\n<p>Travel volume continues to grow, straining airline capacities and airport aisles -- and that\'s even before the Christmas travel crush hits. As you mentally prepare yourself to wade into the crowds, here are TravelCommon\'s top holiday travel tips to keep you moving over the river and through the woods…</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list {\"ordered\":true} -->\n<ol><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Expand Your Fly-vs.-Drive Tipping Point</strong> — My normal tipping point is 350 miles; anything less and I\'ll drive it, though driving in the winter isn’t all sweetness and light – especially across stretches of I-70 through Kansas or up the Jersey Turnpike. But if you fly, expect all the holiday airport logistics will add 3 hours to your in-flight time; 2 hours before departure to allow for long TSA lines, and when you arrive, at least an hour to de-plane, collect your luggage, and get a rental car or Uber. And that’s if there are no delays. Maybe this adds another 50-100 miles to your holiday tipping point.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Use Multiple Navigation Apps — </strong>If you decide to drive, use more than one maps app to help you route around traffic jams from rush hour, construction, and accidents. I personally use both <a href=\"https://www.waze.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Waze</a> and <a href=\"https://maps.google.com/\">Google Maps</a> because, even though they’re both owned by Google, they often give you different directions. I find Waze is quicker to react to  accidents and traffic jams, but can be a bit twitchy — sending you wandering through sub-divisions to save a minute of drive time. I tend to follow Waze but periodically check it against Google Maps.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Research Before You Leave — </strong>You don’t have time to be clueless. Hit your airline or <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/travel/travel-tips\">TSA website</a>  so you know what’s allowed in your carry-on. Research the airports you’ll be using so you know how to get to your gates, where the good restaurants are, or better yet, if there’s a brewpub. Also, figure out the geography. Knowing alternatives to your destination airport gives you more flexibility dealing with cancelled flights or missed connections. In New York, the LaGuardia-to-Newark pivot is easy, but others aren’t so obvious.  Everyone knows that Chicago has two airports – O’Hare and Midway.  But what about Milwaukee’s Mitchell Field 80 miles north?  If Philadelphia is in trouble, how many folks think about Harrisburg or BWI?  Or Sacramento as an alternative to SFO?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Fly Non-Stop</strong> — I know this is in every list, but that\'s because it’s a foundational strategy – limit the points of failure in an overloaded system. Expecting airlines already operating at capacity to ferry even more passengers between airports operating at or over capacity during marginal weather – and to do this all on schedule? Suck it up, pay the extra $100 and have a fighting chance of getting to your family on time with your sanity and your luggage in hand.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Skip the Tight Connection</strong> — If you can’t fly direct, step away from any connection that’s less than 60 minutes. Think about it – a 15-minute delay on your flight into a big hub like <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27hare_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Chicago</a> or <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denver_International_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Denver</a> or <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detroit_Metropolitan_Wayne_County_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Detroit</a> (as good as on-time in the winter for most airlines) and you’re sprinting across terminals and concourses just to beat the closing door.  A 1-hr connection is just asking for a stress attack and/or an overnight stay at the airport branch of the <a href=\"http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092622/\">Bates Motel</a>.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Catch the Early Flight </strong>— Delays stack up as the day wears on.  As your airplane goes from airport to airport, the probability of it getting stuck increases.  Overnight, airlines have a chance to recover – late planes finally get their destinations and operations groups can reassign planes.  So while the last flight out can be a crap shoot, I’ve rarely hit a delay on the first flight out.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Carry On your Luggage</strong> — As Steve Frick, a long-time TravelCommons listener say, \"There are two kinds of luggage -- carry-on and lost.\" Unless you’re heading to the slopes for Christmas, everyone in your travel party should be able to fit into a carry-on sized bag. You can save $25/bag and increase the probability of having clean clothes at your destination. If you’re seating area 4 or higher, odds are there’s no overhead bin space for you. Let the agent gate-check the bag for you. You won’t have to pay a checked bag fee and it’s very unlikely that they’ll lose your bag – it’s only traveling a couple hundred feet from the jet bridge to the luggage hold.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Simplify your Coffee Order</strong> — When you hit the airport Starbucks for your pre-flight coffee, remember that this isn’t your neighborhood Starbucks run by friendly Starbucks-trained baristas. It’s run by Sodexo which doesn’t care quite as much about coffee training. And they’re not quite as efficient. And there are usually a lot of people behind you in line. Keep your order to 3 adjectives or less. Tall skim latte is good. The half-decaf 3-pump no-foam vente vanilla latte — not so much.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Take the Phone Tree Path Less Traveled</strong> — If you have to call an airline or hotel and you don’t have a Platinum or Premiere status number to call, choose the unpopular path on the phone tree.  Travel companies don’t staff their customer service centers for peak loads – like the day when a Chicago blizzard cancels 400 flights.  It’s too expensive. So on those days, you’ll wait forever for an agent if you’ve followed the typical path down the phone tree.  On those days, choose the “Spanish” or “International Travel” option because everyone else is choosing English and domestic travel.  Once you connect with someone, they’ll take care of you.  They all work on the same systems in the same service centers.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Bring a Battery Pack</strong> — It’s tough to travel today without a working mobile phone. It holds our boarding passes, gives us gate change and flight delay notifications, and routes us around traffic jams. A dead phone while flights are being canceled is more than a minor inconvenience. Having that second or third charge immediately available is critical when trying to swerve a long delay. Check out the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/11/07/podcast-197-renting-a-tesla-2023-traveler-gift-guide/\" title=\"\">2023 Traveler Gift Guide in show notes of the last podcast episode</a> for the battery packs that I use.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ol>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list {\"ordered\":true} -->\n<ol></ol>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph {\"hideFromFeed\":true} -->\n<p>But above all, be realistic. It’s gonna be a zoo. Steel yourself; get your inner karma tuned for it. Pack a snack and a book, and practice deep cleansing breaths.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','One More Top 10 List Of Holiday Travel Tips','','inherit','closed','closed','','4398-revision-v1','','','2023-12-06 15:03:28','2023-12-06 20:03:28','',4398,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4406',0,'revision','',0),
(4407,1,'2023-12-06 15:09:42','2023-12-06 20:09:42','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":4399,\"width\":\"300px\",\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium is-resized\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/DALL·E-2023-12-06-12.09.17.png\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/DALL·E-2023-12-06-12.09.17-300x300.png\" alt=\"Post-apocalyptic Santa Claus road warrior in a desolate landscape. He\'s in a tattered red and white suit, equipped with survival gear and goggles, holding a sack of travel-oriented gifts. The background shows a dystopian, barren terrain with a hint of a ruined cityscape.\" class=\"wp-image-4399\" style=\"width:300px\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Santa Prepared for the LInes</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph {\"hideFromFeed\":true} -->\n<p>Travel volume continues to grow, straining airline capacities and airport aisles -- and that\'s even before the Christmas travel crush hits. As you mentally prepare yourself to wade into the crowds, here are TravelCommon\'s top holiday travel tips to keep you moving over the river and through the woods…</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list {\"ordered\":true} -->\n<ol><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Expand Your Fly-vs.-Drive Tipping Point</strong> — My normal tipping point is 350 miles; anything less and I\'ll drive it, though driving in the winter isn’t all sweetness and light – especially across stretches of I-70 through Kansas or up the Jersey Turnpike. But if you fly, expect all the holiday airport logistics will add 3 hours to your in-flight time; 2 hours before departure to allow for long TSA lines, and when you arrive, at least an hour to de-plane, collect your luggage, and get a rental car or Uber. And that’s if there are no delays. Maybe this adds another 50-100 miles to your holiday tipping point.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Use Multiple Navigation Apps — </strong>If you decide to drive, use more than one maps app to help you route around traffic jams from rush hour, construction, and accidents. I personally use both <a href=\"https://www.waze.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Waze</a> and <a href=\"https://maps.google.com/\">Google Maps</a> because, even though they’re both owned by Google, they often give you different directions. Waze seems quicker to react to  accidents and traffic jams, but can be a bit twitchy — sending you wandering through sub-divisions to save a minute of drive time. I tend to follow Waze but periodically check it against Google Maps.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Research Before You Leave — </strong>You don’t have time to be clueless. Hit your airline or <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/travel/travel-tips\">TSA website</a>  so you know what’s allowed in your carry-on. Research the airports you’ll be using so you know how to get to your gates, where the good restaurants are, or better yet, if there’s a brewpub. Also, figure out the geography. Knowing alternatives to your destination airport gives you more flexibility dealing with cancelled flights or missed connections. In New York, the LaGuardia-to-Newark pivot is easy, but others aren’t so obvious.  Everyone knows that Chicago has two airports – O’Hare and Midway.  But what about Milwaukee’s Mitchell Field 80 miles north?  If Philadelphia is in trouble, how many folks think about Harrisburg or BWI?  Or Sacramento as an alternative to SFO?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Fly Non-Stop</strong> — I know this is in every list, but that\'s because it’s a foundational strategy – limit the points of failure in an overloaded system. Expecting airlines already operating at capacity to ferry even more passengers between airports operating at or over capacity during marginal weather – and to do this all on schedule? Suck it up, pay the extra $100 and have a fighting chance of getting to your family on time with your sanity and your luggage in hand.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Skip the Tight Connection</strong> — If you can’t fly direct, step away from any connection that’s less than 60 minutes. Think about it – a 15-minute delay on your flight into a big hub like <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27hare_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Chicago</a> or <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denver_International_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Denver</a> or <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detroit_Metropolitan_Wayne_County_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Detroit</a> (as good as on-time in the winter for most airlines) and you’re sprinting across terminals and concourses just to beat the closing door.  A 1-hr connection is just asking for a stress attack and/or an overnight stay at the airport branch of the <a href=\"http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092622/\">Bates Motel</a>.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Catch the Early Flight </strong>— Delays stack up as the day wears on.  As your airplane goes from airport to airport, the probability of it getting stuck increases.  Overnight, airlines have a chance to recover – late planes finally get their destinations and operations groups can reassign planes.  So while the last flight out can be a crap shoot, I’ve rarely hit a delay on the first flight out.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Carry On your Luggage</strong> — As Steve Frick, a long-time TravelCommons listener say, \"There are two kinds of luggage -- carry-on and lost.\" Unless you’re heading to the slopes for Christmas, everyone in your travel party should be able to fit into a carry-on sized bag. You can save $25/bag and increase the probability of having clean clothes at your destination. If you’re seating area 4 or higher, odds are there’s no overhead bin space for you. Let the agent gate-check the bag for you. You won’t have to pay a checked bag fee and it’s very unlikely that they’ll lose your bag – it’s only traveling a couple hundred feet from the jet bridge to the luggage hold.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Simplify your Coffee Order</strong> — When you hit the airport Starbucks for your pre-flight coffee, remember that this isn’t your neighborhood Starbucks run by friendly Starbucks-trained baristas. It’s run by Sodexo which doesn’t care quite as much about coffee training. And they’re not quite as efficient. And there are usually a lot of people behind you in line. Keep your order to 3 adjectives or less. Tall skim latte is good. The half-decaf 3-pump no-foam vente vanilla latte — not so much.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Take the Phone Tree Path Less Traveled</strong> — If you have to call an airline or hotel and you don’t have a Platinum or Premiere status number to call, choose the unpopular path on the phone tree.  Travel companies don’t staff their customer service centers for peak loads – like the day when a Chicago blizzard cancels 400 flights.  It’s too expensive. So on those days, you’ll wait forever for an agent if you’ve followed the typical path down the phone tree.  On those days, choose the “Spanish” or “International Travel” option because everyone else is choosing English and domestic travel.  Once you connect with someone, they’ll take care of you.  They all work on the same systems in the same service centers.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Bring a Battery Pack</strong> — It’s tough to travel today without a working mobile phone. It holds our boarding passes, gives us gate change and flight delay notifications, and routes us around traffic jams. A dead phone while flights are being canceled is more than a minor inconvenience. Having that second or third charge immediately available is critical when trying to swerve a long delay. Check out the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/11/07/podcast-197-renting-a-tesla-2023-traveler-gift-guide/\" title=\"\">2023 Traveler Gift Guide in show notes of the last podcast episode</a> for the battery packs that I use.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ol>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list {\"ordered\":true} -->\n<ol><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ol>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph {\"hideFromFeed\":true} -->\n<p>But above all, be realistic. It’s gonna be a zoo. Steel yourself; get your inner karma tuned for it. Pack a snack and a book, and practice deep cleansing breaths.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','One More Top 10 List Of Holiday Travel Tips','','inherit','closed','closed','','4398-revision-v1','','','2023-12-06 15:09:42','2023-12-06 20:09:42','',4398,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4407',0,'revision','',0),
(4408,1,'2023-12-06 15:14:49','2023-12-06 20:14:49','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":4399,\"scale\":\"cover\",\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/DALL·E-2023-12-06-12.09.17.png\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/DALL·E-2023-12-06-12.09.17-300x300.png\" alt=\"Post-apocalyptic Santa Claus road warrior in a desolate landscape. He\'s in a tattered red and white suit, equipped with survival gear and goggles, holding a sack of travel-oriented gifts. The background shows a dystopian, barren terrain with a hint of a ruined cityscape. Holiday Travel Tips.\" class=\"wp-image-4399\" style=\"object-fit:cover\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Santa Prepared for the LInes</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph {\"hideFromFeed\":true} -->\n<p>Travel volume continues to grow, straining airline capacities and airport aisles -- and that\'s even before the Christmas travel crush hits. As you mentally prepare yourself to wade into the crowds, here are TravelCommon\'s top holiday travel tips to keep you moving over the river and through the woods…</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list {\"ordered\":true} -->\n<ol><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Expand Your Fly-vs.-Drive Tipping Point</strong> — My normal tipping point is 350 miles; anything less and I\'ll drive it, though driving in the winter isn’t all sweetness and light – especially across stretches of I-70 through Kansas or up the Jersey Turnpike. But if you fly, expect all the holiday airport logistics will add 3 hours to your in-flight time; 2 hours before departure to allow for long TSA lines, and when you arrive, at least an hour to de-plane, collect your luggage, and get a rental car or Uber. And that’s if there are no delays. Maybe this adds another 50-100 miles to your holiday tipping point.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Use Multiple Navigation Apps&nbsp;—&nbsp;</strong>If you decide to drive, use more than one maps app to help you route around traffic jams from rush hour, construction, and accidents. I personally use both&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.waze.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Waze</a>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<a href=\"https://maps.google.com/\">Google Maps</a>&nbsp;because, even though they’re both owned by Google, they often give you different directions. Waze seems quicker to react to  accidents and traffic jams, but can be a bit twitchy — sending you wandering through sub-divisions to save a minute of drive time. I tend to follow Waze but periodically check it against Google Maps.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Research Before You Leave&nbsp;—&nbsp;</strong>You don’t have time to be clueless. Hit your airline or&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/travel/travel-tips\">TSA website</a>&nbsp; so you know what’s allowed in your carry-on. Research the airports you’ll be using so you know how to get to your gates, where the good restaurants are, or better yet, if there’s a brewpub. Also, figure out the geography. Knowing alternatives to your destination airport gives you more flexibility dealing with cancelled flights or missed connections. In New York, the&nbsp;LaGuardia-to-Newark pivot is&nbsp;easy, but others aren’t so obvious.&nbsp; Everyone knows that Chicago has two airports – O’Hare and Midway.&nbsp; But what about Milwaukee’s Mitchell Field 80 miles north? &nbsp;If Philadelphia is in trouble, how many folks think about Harrisburg or BWI?&nbsp; Or Sacramento as an alternative to SFO?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Fly Non-Stop</strong> — I know this is in every list, but that\'s because it’s a foundational strategy – limit the points of failure in an overloaded system. Expecting airlines already operating at capacity to ferry even more passengers between airports operating at or over capacity during marginal weather – and to do this all on schedule? Suck it up, pay the extra $100 and have a fighting chance of getting to your family on time with your sanity and your luggage in hand.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Skip the Tight Connection</strong> — If you can’t fly direct, step away from any connection that’s less than 60 minutes. Think about it – a 15-minute delay on your flight into a big hub like&nbsp;<a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27hare_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Chicago</a>&nbsp;or&nbsp;<a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denver_International_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Denver</a>&nbsp;or&nbsp;<a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detroit_Metropolitan_Wayne_County_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Detroit</a>&nbsp;(as good as on-time in the winter for most airlines) and you’re sprinting across terminals and concourses just to beat the closing door.&nbsp; A 1-hr connection is just asking for a stress attack and/or an overnight stay at the airport branch of the&nbsp;<a href=\"http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092622/\">Bates Motel</a>.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Catch the Early Flight&nbsp;</strong>—&nbsp;Delays stack up as the day wears on.&nbsp; As your airplane goes from airport to airport, the probability of it getting stuck increases. &nbsp;Overnight, airlines have a chance to recover – late planes finally get their destinations and operations groups can reassign planes.&nbsp; So while the last flight out can be a crap shoot, I’ve rarely hit a delay on the first flight out.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Carry On your Luggage</strong>&nbsp;— As Steve Frick, a long-time TravelCommons listener say, \"There are two kinds of luggage -- carry-on and lost.\" Unless you’re heading to the slopes for Christmas, everyone in your travel party should be able to fit into a carry-on sized bag. You can save $25/bag and increase the probability of having clean clothes at your destination. If you’re seating area 4 or higher, odds are there’s no overhead bin space for you. Let the agent gate-check the bag for you. You won’t have to pay a checked bag fee and it’s very unlikely that they’ll lose your bag – it’s only traveling a couple hundred feet from the jet bridge to the luggage hold.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Simplify your Coffee Order</strong> — When you hit the airport Starbucks for your pre-flight coffee, remember that this isn’t your neighborhood Starbucks run by friendly Starbucks-trained baristas. It’s run by Sodexo which doesn’t care quite as&nbsp;much about coffee training. And they’re not quite as efficient. And there are usually a lot of people behind you in line. Keep your order to 3 adjectives or less. Tall skim latte is good. The half-decaf 3-pump no-foam vente vanilla latte — not so much.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Take the Phone Tree Path Less Traveled</strong>&nbsp;— If you have to call an airline or hotel and you don’t have a Platinum or Premiere status number to call, choose the unpopular path on the phone tree.&nbsp; Travel companies don’t staff their customer service centers for peak loads – like the day when a Chicago blizzard cancels 400 flights.&nbsp; It’s too expensive. So on those days, you’ll wait forever for an agent if you’ve followed the typical path down the phone tree.&nbsp; On those days, choose the “Spanish” or “International Travel” option because everyone else is choosing English and domestic travel.&nbsp; Once you connect with someone, they’ll take care of you.&nbsp; They all work on the same systems in the same service centers.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Bring a Battery Pack</strong> — It’s tough to travel today without a working mobile phone. It holds our boarding passes, gives us gate change and flight delay notifications, and routes us around traffic jams. A dead phone while flights are being canceled is more than a minor inconvenience. Having that second or third charge immediately available is critical when trying to swerve a long delay. Check out the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/11/07/podcast-197-renting-a-tesla-2023-traveler-gift-guide/\" title=\"\">2023 Traveler Gift Guide in show notes of the last podcast episode</a> for the battery packs that I use.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ol>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list {\"ordered\":true} -->\n<ol><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ol>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph {\"hideFromFeed\":true} -->\n<p>But above all, be realistic. It’s gonna be a zoo. Steel yourself; get your inner karma tuned for it. Pack a snack and a book, and practice deep cleansing breaths.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','One More Top 10 List Of Holiday Travel Tips','','inherit','closed','closed','','4398-revision-v1','','','2023-12-06 15:14:49','2023-12-06 20:14:49','',4398,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4408',0,'revision','',0),
(4409,1,'2023-12-06 15:16:06','2023-12-06 20:16:06','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":4399,\"scale\":\"cover\",\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/DALL·E-2023-12-06-12.09.17.png\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/DALL·E-2023-12-06-12.09.17-300x300.png\" alt=\"Post-apocalyptic Santa Claus road warrior in a desolate landscape. He\'s in a tattered red and white suit, equipped with survival gear and goggles, holding a sack of travel-oriented gifts. The background shows a dystopian, barren terrain with a hint of a ruined cityscape. Holiday Travel Tips.\" class=\"wp-image-4399\" style=\"object-fit:cover\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\"><em>Santa Prepared for the Lines</em></figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph {\"hideFromFeed\":true} -->\n<p>Travel volume continues to grow, straining airline capacities and airport aisles -- and that\'s even before the Christmas travel crush hits. As you mentally prepare yourself to wade into the crowds, here are TravelCommon\'s top holiday travel tips to keep you moving over the river and through the woods…</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list {\"ordered\":true} -->\n<ol><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Expand Your Fly-vs.-Drive Tipping Point</strong> — My normal tipping point is 350 miles; anything less and I\'ll drive it, though driving in the winter isn’t all sweetness and light – especially across stretches of I-70 through Kansas or up the Jersey Turnpike. But if you fly, expect all the holiday airport logistics will add 3 hours to your in-flight time; 2 hours before departure to allow for long TSA lines, and when you arrive, at least an hour to de-plane, collect your luggage, and get a rental car or Uber. And that’s if there are no delays. Maybe this adds another 50-100 miles to your holiday tipping point.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Use Multiple Navigation Apps&nbsp;—&nbsp;</strong>If you decide to drive, use more than one maps app to help you route around traffic jams from rush hour, construction, and accidents. I personally use both&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.waze.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Waze</a>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<a href=\"https://maps.google.com/\">Google Maps</a>&nbsp;because, even though they’re both owned by Google, they often give you different directions. Waze seems quicker to react to  accidents and traffic jams, but can be a bit twitchy — sending you wandering through sub-divisions to save a minute of drive time. I tend to follow Waze but periodically check it against Google Maps.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Research Before You Leave&nbsp;—&nbsp;</strong>You don’t have time to be clueless. Hit your airline or&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/travel/travel-tips\">TSA website</a>&nbsp; so you know what’s allowed in your carry-on. Research the airports you’ll be using so you know how to get to your gates, where the good restaurants are, or better yet, if there’s a brewpub. Also, figure out the geography. Knowing alternatives to your destination airport gives you more flexibility dealing with cancelled flights or missed connections. In New York, the&nbsp;LaGuardia-to-Newark pivot is&nbsp;easy, but others aren’t so obvious.&nbsp; Everyone knows that Chicago has two airports – O’Hare and Midway.&nbsp; But what about Milwaukee’s Mitchell Field 80 miles north? &nbsp;If Philadelphia is in trouble, how many folks think about Harrisburg or BWI?&nbsp; Or Sacramento as an alternative to SFO?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Fly Non-Stop</strong> — I know this is in every list, but that\'s because it’s a foundational strategy – limit the points of failure in an overloaded system. Expecting airlines already operating at capacity to ferry even more passengers between airports operating at or over capacity during marginal weather – and to do this all on schedule? Suck it up, pay the extra $100 and have a fighting chance of getting to your family on time with your sanity and your luggage in hand.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Skip the Tight Connection</strong> — If you can’t fly direct, step away from any connection that’s less than 60 minutes. Think about it – a 15-minute delay on your flight into a big hub like&nbsp;<a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27hare_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Chicago</a>&nbsp;or&nbsp;<a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denver_International_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Denver</a>&nbsp;or&nbsp;<a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detroit_Metropolitan_Wayne_County_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Detroit</a>&nbsp;(as good as on-time in the winter for most airlines) and you’re sprinting across terminals and concourses just to beat the closing door.&nbsp; A 1-hr connection is just asking for a stress attack and/or an overnight stay at the airport branch of the&nbsp;<a href=\"http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092622/\">Bates Motel</a>.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Catch the Early Flight&nbsp;</strong>—&nbsp;Delays stack up as the day wears on.&nbsp; As your airplane goes from airport to airport, the probability of it getting stuck increases. &nbsp;Overnight, airlines have a chance to recover – late planes finally get their destinations and operations groups can reassign planes.&nbsp; So while the last flight out can be a crap shoot, I’ve rarely hit a delay on the first flight out.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Carry On your Luggage</strong>&nbsp;— As Steve Frick, a long-time TravelCommons listener say, \"There are two kinds of luggage -- carry-on and lost.\" Unless you’re heading to the slopes for Christmas, everyone in your travel party should be able to fit into a carry-on sized bag. You can save $25/bag and increase the probability of having clean clothes at your destination. If you’re seating area 4 or higher, odds are there’s no overhead bin space for you. Let the agent gate-check the bag for you. You won’t have to pay a checked bag fee and it’s very unlikely that they’ll lose your bag – it’s only traveling a couple hundred feet from the jet bridge to the luggage hold.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Simplify your Coffee Order</strong> — When you hit the airport Starbucks for your pre-flight coffee, remember that this isn’t your neighborhood Starbucks run by friendly Starbucks-trained baristas. It’s run by Sodexo which doesn’t care quite as&nbsp;much about coffee training. And they’re not quite as efficient. And there are usually a lot of people behind you in line. Keep your order to 3 adjectives or less. Tall skim latte is good. The half-decaf 3-pump no-foam vente vanilla latte — not so much.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Take the Phone Tree Path Less Traveled</strong>&nbsp;— If you have to call an airline or hotel and you don’t have a Platinum or Premiere status number to call, choose the unpopular path on the phone tree.&nbsp; Travel companies don’t staff their customer service centers for peak loads – like the day when a Chicago blizzard cancels 400 flights.&nbsp; It’s too expensive. So on those days, you’ll wait forever for an agent if you’ve followed the typical path down the phone tree.&nbsp; On those days, choose the “Spanish” or “International Travel” option because everyone else is choosing English and domestic travel.&nbsp; Once you connect with someone, they’ll take care of you.&nbsp; They all work on the same systems in the same service centers.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Bring a Battery Pack</strong> — It’s tough to travel today without a working mobile phone. It holds our boarding passes, gives us gate change and flight delay notifications, and routes us around traffic jams. A dead phone while flights are being canceled is more than a minor inconvenience. Having that second or third charge immediately available is critical when trying to swerve a long delay. Check out the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/11/07/podcast-197-renting-a-tesla-2023-traveler-gift-guide/\" title=\"\">2023 Traveler Gift Guide in show notes of the last podcast episode</a> for the battery packs that I use.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ol>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list {\"ordered\":true} -->\n<ol><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ol>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph {\"hideFromFeed\":true} -->\n<p>But above all, be realistic. It’s gonna be a zoo. Steel yourself; get your inner karma tuned for it. Pack a snack and a book, and practice deep cleansing breaths.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','One More Top 10 List Of Holiday Travel Tips','','inherit','closed','closed','','4398-revision-v1','','','2023-12-06 15:16:06','2023-12-06 20:16:06','',4398,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4409',0,'revision','',0),
(4410,1,'2023-12-06 15:17:50','2023-12-06 20:17:50','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":4399,\"scale\":\"cover\",\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/DALL·E-2023-12-06-12.09.17.png\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/DALL·E-2023-12-06-12.09.17-300x300.png\" alt=\"Post-apocalyptic Santa Claus road warrior in a desolate landscape. He\'s in a tattered red and white suit, equipped with survival gear and goggles, holding a sack of travel-oriented gifts. The background shows a dystopian, barren terrain with a hint of a ruined cityscape. Holiday Travel Tips.\" class=\"wp-image-4399\" style=\"object-fit:cover\"/></a><em>Santa Prepared for the Lines</em></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph {\"hideFromFeed\":true} -->\n<p>Travel volume continues to grow, straining airline capacities and airport aisles -- and that\'s even before the Christmas travel crush hits. As you mentally prepare yourself to wade into the crowds, here are TravelCommon\'s top holiday travel tips to keep you moving over the river and through the woods…</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list {\"ordered\":true} -->\n<ol><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Expand Your Fly-vs.-Drive Tipping Point</strong> — My normal tipping point is 350 miles; anything less and I\'ll drive it, though driving in the winter isn’t all sweetness and light – especially across stretches of I-70 through Kansas or up the Jersey Turnpike. But if you fly, expect all the holiday airport logistics will add 3 hours to your in-flight time; 2 hours before departure to allow for long TSA lines, and when you arrive, at least an hour to de-plane, collect your luggage, and get a rental car or Uber. And that’s if there are no delays. Maybe this adds another 50-100 miles to your holiday tipping point.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Use Multiple Navigation Apps&nbsp;—&nbsp;</strong>If you decide to drive, use more than one maps app to help you route around traffic jams from rush hour, construction, and accidents. I personally use both&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.waze.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Waze</a>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<a href=\"https://maps.google.com/\">Google Maps</a>&nbsp;because, even though they’re both owned by Google, they often give you different directions. Waze seems quicker to react to  accidents and traffic jams, but can be a bit twitchy — sending you wandering through sub-divisions to save a minute of drive time. I tend to follow Waze but periodically check it against Google Maps.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Research Before You Leave&nbsp;—&nbsp;</strong>You don’t have time to be clueless. Hit your airline or&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/travel/travel-tips\">TSA website</a>&nbsp; so you know what’s allowed in your carry-on. Research the airports you’ll be using so you know how to get to your gates, where the good restaurants are, or better yet, if there’s a brewpub. Also, figure out the geography. Knowing alternatives to your destination airport gives you more flexibility dealing with cancelled flights or missed connections. In New York, the&nbsp;LaGuardia-to-Newark pivot is&nbsp;easy, but others aren’t so obvious.&nbsp; Everyone knows that Chicago has two airports – O’Hare and Midway.&nbsp; But what about Milwaukee’s Mitchell Field 80 miles north? &nbsp;If Philadelphia is in trouble, how many folks think about Harrisburg or BWI?&nbsp; Or Sacramento as an alternative to SFO?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Fly Non-Stop</strong> — I know this is in every list, but that\'s because it’s a foundational strategy – limit the points of failure in an overloaded system. Expecting airlines already operating at capacity to ferry even more passengers between airports operating at or over capacity during marginal weather – and to do this all on schedule? Suck it up, pay the extra $100 and have a fighting chance of getting to your family on time with your sanity and your luggage in hand.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Skip the Tight Connection</strong> — If you can’t fly direct, step away from any connection that’s less than 60 minutes. Think about it – a 15-minute delay on your flight into a big hub like&nbsp;<a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27hare_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Chicago</a>&nbsp;or&nbsp;<a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denver_International_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Denver</a>&nbsp;or&nbsp;<a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detroit_Metropolitan_Wayne_County_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Detroit</a>&nbsp;(as good as on-time in the winter for most airlines) and you’re sprinting across terminals and concourses just to beat the closing door.&nbsp; A 1-hr connection is just asking for a stress attack and/or an overnight stay at the airport branch of the&nbsp;<a href=\"http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092622/\">Bates Motel</a>.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Catch the Early Flight&nbsp;</strong>—&nbsp;Delays stack up as the day wears on.&nbsp; As your airplane goes from airport to airport, the probability of it getting stuck increases. &nbsp;Overnight, airlines have a chance to recover – late planes finally get their destinations and operations groups can reassign planes.&nbsp; So while the last flight out can be a crap shoot, I’ve rarely hit a delay on the first flight out.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Carry On your Luggage</strong>&nbsp;— As Steve Frick, a long-time TravelCommons listener say, \"There are two kinds of luggage -- carry-on and lost.\" Unless you’re heading to the slopes for Christmas, everyone in your travel party should be able to fit into a carry-on sized bag. You can save $25/bag and increase the probability of having clean clothes at your destination. If you’re seating area 4 or higher, odds are there’s no overhead bin space for you. Let the agent gate-check the bag for you. You won’t have to pay a checked bag fee and it’s very unlikely that they’ll lose your bag – it’s only traveling a couple hundred feet from the jet bridge to the luggage hold.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Simplify your Coffee Order</strong> — When you hit the airport Starbucks for your pre-flight coffee, remember that this isn’t your neighborhood Starbucks run by friendly Starbucks-trained baristas. It’s run by Sodexo which doesn’t care quite as&nbsp;much about coffee training. And they’re not quite as efficient. And there are usually a lot of people behind you in line. Keep your order to 3 adjectives or less. Tall skim latte is good. The half-decaf 3-pump no-foam vente vanilla latte — not so much.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Take the Phone Tree Path Less Traveled</strong>&nbsp;— If you have to call an airline or hotel and you don’t have a Platinum or Premiere status number to call, choose the unpopular path on the phone tree.&nbsp; Travel companies don’t staff their customer service centers for peak loads – like the day when a Chicago blizzard cancels 400 flights.&nbsp; It’s too expensive. So on those days, you’ll wait forever for an agent if you’ve followed the typical path down the phone tree.&nbsp; On those days, choose the “Spanish” or “International Travel” option because everyone else is choosing English and domestic travel.&nbsp; Once you connect with someone, they’ll take care of you.&nbsp; They all work on the same systems in the same service centers.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Bring a Battery Pack</strong> — It’s tough to travel today without a working mobile phone. It holds our boarding passes, gives us gate change and flight delay notifications, and routes us around traffic jams. A dead phone while flights are being canceled is more than a minor inconvenience. Having that second or third charge immediately available is critical when trying to swerve a long delay. Check out the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/11/07/podcast-197-renting-a-tesla-2023-traveler-gift-guide/\" title=\"\">2023 Traveler Gift Guide in show notes of the last podcast episode</a> for the battery packs that I use.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ol>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list {\"ordered\":true} -->\n<ol><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ol>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph {\"hideFromFeed\":true} -->\n<p>But above all, be realistic. It’s gonna be a zoo. Steel yourself; get your inner karma tuned for it. Pack a snack and a book, and practice deep cleansing breaths.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','One More Top 10 List Of Holiday Travel Tips','','inherit','closed','closed','','4398-revision-v1','','','2023-12-06 15:17:50','2023-12-06 20:17:50','',4398,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4410',0,'revision','',0),
(4411,1,'2023-12-06 15:18:41','2023-12-06 20:18:41','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":4399,\"scale\":\"cover\",\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/DALL·E-2023-12-06-12.09.17.png\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/DALL·E-2023-12-06-12.09.17-300x300.png\" alt=\"Post-apocalyptic Santa Claus road warrior in a desolate landscape. He\'s in a tattered red and white suit, equipped with survival gear and goggles, holding a sack of travel-oriented gifts. The background shows a dystopian, barren terrain with a hint of a ruined cityscape. Holiday Travel Tips.\" class=\"wp-image-4399\" style=\"object-fit:cover\"/></a><caption><em>Santa Prepared for the Lines</em></caption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph {\"hideFromFeed\":true} -->\n<p>Travel volume continues to grow, straining airline capacities and airport aisles -- and that\'s even before the Christmas travel crush hits. As you mentally prepare yourself to wade into the crowds, here are TravelCommon\'s top holiday travel tips to keep you moving over the river and through the woods…</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list {\"ordered\":true} -->\n<ol><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Expand Your Fly-vs.-Drive Tipping Point</strong> — My normal tipping point is 350 miles; anything less and I\'ll drive it, though driving in the winter isn’t all sweetness and light – especially across stretches of I-70 through Kansas or up the Jersey Turnpike. But if you fly, expect all the holiday airport logistics will add 3 hours to your in-flight time; 2 hours before departure to allow for long TSA lines, and when you arrive, at least an hour to de-plane, collect your luggage, and get a rental car or Uber. And that’s if there are no delays. Maybe this adds another 50-100 miles to your holiday tipping point.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Use Multiple Navigation Apps&nbsp;—&nbsp;</strong>If you decide to drive, use more than one maps app to help you route around traffic jams from rush hour, construction, and accidents. I personally use both&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.waze.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Waze</a>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<a href=\"https://maps.google.com/\">Google Maps</a>&nbsp;because, even though they’re both owned by Google, they often give you different directions. Waze seems quicker to react to  accidents and traffic jams, but can be a bit twitchy — sending you wandering through sub-divisions to save a minute of drive time. I tend to follow Waze but periodically check it against Google Maps.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Research Before You Leave&nbsp;—&nbsp;</strong>You don’t have time to be clueless. Hit your airline or&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/travel/travel-tips\">TSA website</a>&nbsp; so you know what’s allowed in your carry-on. Research the airports you’ll be using so you know how to get to your gates, where the good restaurants are, or better yet, if there’s a brewpub. Also, figure out the geography. Knowing alternatives to your destination airport gives you more flexibility dealing with cancelled flights or missed connections. In New York, the&nbsp;LaGuardia-to-Newark pivot is&nbsp;easy, but others aren’t so obvious.&nbsp; Everyone knows that Chicago has two airports – O’Hare and Midway.&nbsp; But what about Milwaukee’s Mitchell Field 80 miles north? &nbsp;If Philadelphia is in trouble, how many folks think about Harrisburg or BWI?&nbsp; Or Sacramento as an alternative to SFO?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Fly Non-Stop</strong> — I know this is in every list, but that\'s because it’s a foundational strategy – limit the points of failure in an overloaded system. Expecting airlines already operating at capacity to ferry even more passengers between airports operating at or over capacity during marginal weather – and to do this all on schedule? Suck it up, pay the extra $100 and have a fighting chance of getting to your family on time with your sanity and your luggage in hand.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Skip the Tight Connection</strong> — If you can’t fly direct, step away from any connection that’s less than 60 minutes. Think about it – a 15-minute delay on your flight into a big hub like&nbsp;<a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27hare_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Chicago</a>&nbsp;or&nbsp;<a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denver_International_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Denver</a>&nbsp;or&nbsp;<a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detroit_Metropolitan_Wayne_County_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Detroit</a>&nbsp;(as good as on-time in the winter for most airlines) and you’re sprinting across terminals and concourses just to beat the closing door.&nbsp; A 1-hr connection is just asking for a stress attack and/or an overnight stay at the airport branch of the&nbsp;<a href=\"http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092622/\">Bates Motel</a>.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Catch the Early Flight&nbsp;</strong>—&nbsp;Delays stack up as the day wears on.&nbsp; As your airplane goes from airport to airport, the probability of it getting stuck increases. &nbsp;Overnight, airlines have a chance to recover – late planes finally get their destinations and operations groups can reassign planes.&nbsp; So while the last flight out can be a crap shoot, I’ve rarely hit a delay on the first flight out.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Carry On your Luggage</strong>&nbsp;— As Steve Frick, a long-time TravelCommons listener say, \"There are two kinds of luggage -- carry-on and lost.\" Unless you’re heading to the slopes for Christmas, everyone in your travel party should be able to fit into a carry-on sized bag. You can save $25/bag and increase the probability of having clean clothes at your destination. If you’re seating area 4 or higher, odds are there’s no overhead bin space for you. Let the agent gate-check the bag for you. You won’t have to pay a checked bag fee and it’s very unlikely that they’ll lose your bag – it’s only traveling a couple hundred feet from the jet bridge to the luggage hold.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Simplify your Coffee Order</strong> — When you hit the airport Starbucks for your pre-flight coffee, remember that this isn’t your neighborhood Starbucks run by friendly Starbucks-trained baristas. It’s run by Sodexo which doesn’t care quite as&nbsp;much about coffee training. And they’re not quite as efficient. And there are usually a lot of people behind you in line. Keep your order to 3 adjectives or less. Tall skim latte is good. The half-decaf 3-pump no-foam vente vanilla latte — not so much.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Take the Phone Tree Path Less Traveled</strong>&nbsp;— If you have to call an airline or hotel and you don’t have a Platinum or Premiere status number to call, choose the unpopular path on the phone tree.&nbsp; Travel companies don’t staff their customer service centers for peak loads – like the day when a Chicago blizzard cancels 400 flights.&nbsp; It’s too expensive. So on those days, you’ll wait forever for an agent if you’ve followed the typical path down the phone tree.&nbsp; On those days, choose the “Spanish” or “International Travel” option because everyone else is choosing English and domestic travel.&nbsp; Once you connect with someone, they’ll take care of you.&nbsp; They all work on the same systems in the same service centers.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Bring a Battery Pack</strong> — It’s tough to travel today without a working mobile phone. It holds our boarding passes, gives us gate change and flight delay notifications, and routes us around traffic jams. A dead phone while flights are being canceled is more than a minor inconvenience. Having that second or third charge immediately available is critical when trying to swerve a long delay. Check out the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/11/07/podcast-197-renting-a-tesla-2023-traveler-gift-guide/\" title=\"\">2023 Traveler Gift Guide in show notes of the last podcast episode</a> for the battery packs that I use.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ol>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list {\"ordered\":true} -->\n<ol><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ol>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph {\"hideFromFeed\":true} -->\n<p>But above all, be realistic. It’s gonna be a zoo. Steel yourself; get your inner karma tuned for it. Pack a snack and a book, and practice deep cleansing breaths.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','One More Top 10 List Of Holiday Travel Tips','','inherit','closed','closed','','4398-revision-v1','','','2023-12-06 15:18:41','2023-12-06 20:18:41','',4398,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4411',0,'revision','',0),
(4412,1,'2023-12-06 15:19:49','2023-12-06 20:19:49','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":4399,\"scale\":\"cover\",\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/DALL·E-2023-12-06-12.09.17.png\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/DALL·E-2023-12-06-12.09.17-300x300.png\" alt=\"Post-apocalyptic Santa Claus road warrior in a desolate landscape. He\'s in a tattered red and white suit, equipped with survival gear and goggles, holding a sack of travel-oriented gifts. The background shows a dystopian, barren terrain with a hint of a ruined cityscape. Holiday Travel Tips.\" class=\"wp-image-4399\" style=\"object-fit:cover\"/></a><figcaption><em>Santa Prepared for the Lines</em></figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph {\"hideFromFeed\":true} -->\n<p>Travel volume continues to grow, straining airline capacities and airport aisles -- and that\'s even before the Christmas travel crush hits. As you mentally prepare yourself to wade into the crowds, here are TravelCommon\'s top holiday travel tips to keep you moving over the river and through the woods…</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list {\"ordered\":true} -->\n<ol><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Expand Your Fly-vs.-Drive Tipping Point</strong> — My normal tipping point is 350 miles; anything less and I\'ll drive it, though driving in the winter isn’t all sweetness and light – especially across stretches of I-70 through Kansas or up the Jersey Turnpike. But if you fly, expect all the holiday airport logistics will add 3 hours to your in-flight time; 2 hours before departure to allow for long TSA lines, and when you arrive, at least an hour to de-plane, collect your luggage, and get a rental car or Uber. And that’s if there are no delays. Maybe this adds another 50-100 miles to your holiday tipping point.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Use Multiple Navigation Apps&nbsp;—&nbsp;</strong>If you decide to drive, use more than one maps app to help you route around traffic jams from rush hour, construction, and accidents. I personally use both&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.waze.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Waze</a>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<a href=\"https://maps.google.com/\">Google Maps</a>&nbsp;because, even though they’re both owned by Google, they often give you different directions. Waze seems quicker to react to  accidents and traffic jams, but can be a bit twitchy — sending you wandering through sub-divisions to save a minute of drive time. I tend to follow Waze but periodically check it against Google Maps.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Research Before You Leave&nbsp;—&nbsp;</strong>You don’t have time to be clueless. Hit your airline or&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/travel/travel-tips\">TSA website</a>&nbsp; so you know what’s allowed in your carry-on. Research the airports you’ll be using so you know how to get to your gates, where the good restaurants are, or better yet, if there’s a brewpub. Also, figure out the geography. Knowing alternatives to your destination airport gives you more flexibility dealing with cancelled flights or missed connections. In New York, the&nbsp;LaGuardia-to-Newark pivot is&nbsp;easy, but others aren’t so obvious.&nbsp; Everyone knows that Chicago has two airports – O’Hare and Midway.&nbsp; But what about Milwaukee’s Mitchell Field 80 miles north? &nbsp;If Philadelphia is in trouble, how many folks think about Harrisburg or BWI?&nbsp; Or Sacramento as an alternative to SFO?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Fly Non-Stop</strong> — I know this is in every list, but that\'s because it’s a foundational strategy – limit the points of failure in an overloaded system. Expecting airlines already operating at capacity to ferry even more passengers between airports operating at or over capacity during marginal weather – and to do this all on schedule? Suck it up, pay the extra $100 and have a fighting chance of getting to your family on time with your sanity and your luggage in hand.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Skip the Tight Connection</strong> — If you can’t fly direct, step away from any connection that’s less than 60 minutes. Think about it – a 15-minute delay on your flight into a big hub like&nbsp;<a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27hare_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Chicago</a>&nbsp;or&nbsp;<a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denver_International_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Denver</a>&nbsp;or&nbsp;<a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detroit_Metropolitan_Wayne_County_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Detroit</a>&nbsp;(as good as on-time in the winter for most airlines) and you’re sprinting across terminals and concourses just to beat the closing door.&nbsp; A 1-hr connection is just asking for a stress attack and/or an overnight stay at the airport branch of the&nbsp;<a href=\"http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092622/\">Bates Motel</a>.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Catch the Early Flight&nbsp;</strong>—&nbsp;Delays stack up as the day wears on.&nbsp; As your airplane goes from airport to airport, the probability of it getting stuck increases. &nbsp;Overnight, airlines have a chance to recover – late planes finally get their destinations and operations groups can reassign planes.&nbsp; So while the last flight out can be a crap shoot, I’ve rarely hit a delay on the first flight out.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Carry On your Luggage</strong>&nbsp;— As Steve Frick, a long-time TravelCommons listener say, \"There are two kinds of luggage -- carry-on and lost.\" Unless you’re heading to the slopes for Christmas, everyone in your travel party should be able to fit into a carry-on sized bag. You can save $25/bag and increase the probability of having clean clothes at your destination. If you’re seating area 4 or higher, odds are there’s no overhead bin space for you. Let the agent gate-check the bag for you. You won’t have to pay a checked bag fee and it’s very unlikely that they’ll lose your bag – it’s only traveling a couple hundred feet from the jet bridge to the luggage hold.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Simplify your Coffee Order</strong> — When you hit the airport Starbucks for your pre-flight coffee, remember that this isn’t your neighborhood Starbucks run by friendly Starbucks-trained baristas. It’s run by Sodexo which doesn’t care quite as&nbsp;much about coffee training. And they’re not quite as efficient. And there are usually a lot of people behind you in line. Keep your order to 3 adjectives or less. Tall skim latte is good. The half-decaf 3-pump no-foam vente vanilla latte — not so much.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Take the Phone Tree Path Less Traveled</strong>&nbsp;— If you have to call an airline or hotel and you don’t have a Platinum or Premiere status number to call, choose the unpopular path on the phone tree.&nbsp; Travel companies don’t staff their customer service centers for peak loads – like the day when a Chicago blizzard cancels 400 flights.&nbsp; It’s too expensive. So on those days, you’ll wait forever for an agent if you’ve followed the typical path down the phone tree.&nbsp; On those days, choose the “Spanish” or “International Travel” option because everyone else is choosing English and domestic travel.&nbsp; Once you connect with someone, they’ll take care of you.&nbsp; They all work on the same systems in the same service centers.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Bring a Battery Pack</strong> — It’s tough to travel today without a working mobile phone. It holds our boarding passes, gives us gate change and flight delay notifications, and routes us around traffic jams. A dead phone while flights are being canceled is more than a minor inconvenience. Having that second or third charge immediately available is critical when trying to swerve a long delay. Check out the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/11/07/podcast-197-renting-a-tesla-2023-traveler-gift-guide/\" title=\"\">2023 Traveler Gift Guide in show notes of the last podcast episode</a> for the battery packs that I use.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ol>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:list {\"ordered\":true} -->\n<ol><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ol>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph {\"hideFromFeed\":true} -->\n<p>But above all, be realistic. It’s gonna be a zoo. Steel yourself; get your inner karma tuned for it. Pack a snack and a book, and practice deep cleansing breaths.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','One More Top 10 List Of Holiday Travel Tips','','inherit','closed','closed','','4398-revision-v1','','','2023-12-06 15:19:49','2023-12-06 20:19:49','',4398,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4412',0,'revision','',0),
(4413,1,'2023-12-06 15:20:29','2023-12-06 20:20:29','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":4399,\"scale\":\"cover\",\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/DALL·E-2023-12-06-12.09.17.png\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/DALL·E-2023-12-06-12.09.17-300x300.png\" alt=\"Post-apocalyptic Santa Claus road warrior in a desolate landscape. He\'s in a tattered red and white suit, equipped with survival gear and goggles, holding a sack of travel-oriented gifts. The background shows a dystopian, barren terrain with a hint of a ruined cityscape. Holiday Travel Tips.\" class=\"wp-image-4399\" style=\"object-fit:cover\"/></a><figcaption><em>Santa Prepared for the Lines</em></figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph {\"hideFromFeed\":true} -->\n<p>Travel volume continues to grow, straining airline capacities and airport aisles -- and that\'s even before the Christmas travel crush hits. As you mentally prepare yourself to wade into the crowds, here are TravelCommon\'s top holiday travel tips to keep you moving over the river and through the woods…</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list {\"ordered\":true} -->\n<ol><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Expand Your Fly-vs.-Drive Tipping Point</strong> — My normal tipping point is 350 miles; anything less and I\'ll drive it, though driving in the winter isn’t all sweetness and light – especially across stretches of I-70 through Kansas or up the Jersey Turnpike. But if you fly, expect all the holiday airport logistics will add 3 hours to your in-flight time; 2 hours before departure to allow for long TSA lines, and when you arrive, at least an hour to de-plane, collect your luggage, and get a rental car or Uber. And that’s if there are no delays. Maybe this adds another 50-100 miles to your holiday tipping point.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Use Multiple Navigation Apps&nbsp;—&nbsp;</strong>If you decide to drive, use more than one maps app to help you route around traffic jams from rush hour, construction, and accidents. I personally use both&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.waze.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Waze</a>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<a href=\"https://maps.google.com/\">Google Maps</a>&nbsp;because, even though they’re both owned by Google, they often give you different directions. Waze seems quicker to react to  accidents and traffic jams, but can be a bit twitchy — sending you wandering through sub-divisions to save a minute of drive time. I tend to follow Waze but periodically check it against Google Maps.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Research Before You Leave&nbsp;—&nbsp;</strong>You don’t have time to be clueless. Hit your airline or&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/travel/travel-tips\">TSA website</a>&nbsp; so you know what’s allowed in your carry-on. Research the airports you’ll be using so you know how to get to your gates, where the good restaurants are, or better yet, if there’s a brewpub. Also, figure out the geography. Knowing alternatives to your destination airport gives you more flexibility dealing with cancelled flights or missed connections. In New York, the&nbsp;LaGuardia-to-Newark pivot is&nbsp;easy, but others aren’t so obvious.&nbsp; Everyone knows that Chicago has two airports – O’Hare and Midway.&nbsp; But what about Milwaukee’s Mitchell Field 80 miles north? &nbsp;If Philadelphia is in trouble, how many folks think about Harrisburg or BWI?&nbsp; Or Sacramento as an alternative to SFO?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Fly Non-Stop</strong> — I know this is in every list, but that\'s because it’s a foundational strategy – limit the points of failure in an overloaded system. Expecting airlines already operating at capacity to ferry even more passengers between airports operating at or over capacity during marginal weather – and to do this all on schedule? Suck it up, pay the extra $100 and have a fighting chance of getting to your family on time with your sanity and your luggage in hand.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Skip the Tight Connection</strong> — If you can’t fly direct, step away from any connection that’s less than 60 minutes. Think about it – a 15-minute delay on your flight into a big hub like&nbsp;<a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27hare_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Chicago</a>&nbsp;or&nbsp;<a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denver_International_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Denver</a>&nbsp;or&nbsp;<a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detroit_Metropolitan_Wayne_County_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Detroit</a>&nbsp;(as good as on-time in the winter for most airlines) and you’re sprinting across terminals and concourses just to beat the closing door.&nbsp; A 1-hr connection is just asking for a stress attack and/or an overnight stay at the airport branch of the&nbsp;<a href=\"http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092622/\">Bates Motel</a>.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Catch the Early Flight&nbsp;</strong>—&nbsp;Delays stack up as the day wears on.&nbsp; As your airplane goes from airport to airport, the probability of it getting stuck increases. &nbsp;Overnight, airlines have a chance to recover – late planes finally get their destinations and operations groups can reassign planes.&nbsp; So while the last flight out can be a crap shoot, I’ve rarely hit a delay on the first flight out.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Carry On your Luggage</strong>&nbsp;— As Steve Frick, a long-time TravelCommons listener say, \"There are two kinds of luggage -- carry-on and lost.\" Unless you’re heading to the slopes for Christmas, everyone in your travel party should be able to fit into a carry-on sized bag. You can save $25/bag and increase the probability of having clean clothes at your destination. If you’re seating area 4 or higher, odds are there’s no overhead bin space for you. Let the agent gate-check the bag for you. You won’t have to pay a checked bag fee and it’s very unlikely that they’ll lose your bag – it’s only traveling a couple hundred feet from the jet bridge to the luggage hold.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Simplify your Coffee Order</strong> — When you hit the airport Starbucks for your pre-flight coffee, remember that this isn’t your neighborhood Starbucks run by friendly Starbucks-trained baristas. It’s run by Sodexo which doesn’t care quite as&nbsp;much about coffee training. And they’re not quite as efficient. And there are usually a lot of people behind you in line. Keep your order to 3 adjectives or less. Tall skim latte is good. The half-decaf 3-pump no-foam vente vanilla latte — not so much.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Take the Phone Tree Path Less Traveled</strong>&nbsp;— If you have to call an airline or hotel and you don’t have a Platinum or Premiere status number to call, choose the unpopular path on the phone tree.&nbsp; Travel companies don’t staff their customer service centers for peak loads – like the day when a Chicago blizzard cancels 400 flights.&nbsp; It’s too expensive. So on those days, you’ll wait forever for an agent if you’ve followed the typical path down the phone tree.&nbsp; On those days, choose the “Spanish” or “International Travel” option because everyone else is choosing English and domestic travel.&nbsp; Once you connect with someone, they’ll take care of you.&nbsp; They all work on the same systems in the same service centers.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Bring a Battery Pack</strong> — It’s tough to travel today without a working mobile phone. It holds our boarding passes, gives us gate change and flight delay notifications, and routes us around traffic jams. A dead phone while flights are being canceled is more than a minor inconvenience. Having that second or third charge immediately available is critical when trying to swerve a long delay. Check out the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/11/07/podcast-197-renting-a-tesla-2023-traveler-gift-guide/\" title=\"\">2023 Traveler Gift Guide in show notes of the last podcast episode</a> for the battery packs that I use.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ol>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph {\"hideFromFeed\":true} -->\n<p>But above all, be realistic. It’s gonna be a zoo. Steel yourself; get your inner karma tuned for it. Pack a snack and a book, and practice deep cleansing breaths.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','One More Top 10 List Of Holiday Travel Tips','','inherit','closed','closed','','4398-revision-v1','','','2023-12-06 15:20:29','2023-12-06 20:20:29','',4398,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4413',0,'revision','',0),
(4414,1,'2023-12-06 15:21:09','2023-12-06 20:21:09','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":4399,\"scale\":\"cover\",\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/DALL·E-2023-12-06-12.09.17.png\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/DALL·E-2023-12-06-12.09.17-300x300.png\" alt=\"Post-apocalyptic Santa Claus road warrior in a desolate landscape. He\'s in a tattered red and white suit, equipped with survival gear and goggles, holding a sack of travel-oriented gifts. The background shows a dystopian, barren terrain with a hint of a ruined cityscape. Holiday Travel Tips.\" class=\"wp-image-4399\" style=\"object-fit:cover\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\"><em>Santa Prepared for the Lines</em></figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph {\"hideFromFeed\":true} -->\n<p>Travel volume continues to grow, straining airline capacities and airport aisles -- and that\'s even before the Christmas travel crush hits. As you mentally prepare yourself to wade into the crowds, here are TravelCommon\'s top holiday travel tips to keep you moving over the river and through the woods…</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list {\"ordered\":true} -->\n<ol><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Expand Your Fly-vs.-Drive Tipping Point</strong> — My normal tipping point is 350 miles; anything less and I\'ll drive it, though driving in the winter isn’t all sweetness and light – especially across stretches of I-70 through Kansas or up the Jersey Turnpike. But if you fly, expect all the holiday airport logistics will add 3 hours to your in-flight time; 2 hours before departure to allow for long TSA lines, and when you arrive, at least an hour to de-plane, collect your luggage, and get a rental car or Uber. And that’s if there are no delays. Maybe this adds another 50-100 miles to your holiday tipping point.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Use Multiple Navigation Apps&nbsp;—&nbsp;</strong>If you decide to drive, use more than one maps app to help you route around traffic jams from rush hour, construction, and accidents. I personally use both&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.waze.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Waze</a>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<a href=\"https://maps.google.com/\">Google Maps</a>&nbsp;because, even though they’re both owned by Google, they often give you different directions. Waze seems quicker to react to  accidents and traffic jams, but can be a bit twitchy — sending you wandering through sub-divisions to save a minute of drive time. I tend to follow Waze but periodically check it against Google Maps.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Research Before You Leave&nbsp;—&nbsp;</strong>You don’t have time to be clueless. Hit your airline or&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/travel/travel-tips\">TSA website</a>&nbsp; so you know what’s allowed in your carry-on. Research the airports you’ll be using so you know how to get to your gates, where the good restaurants are, or better yet, if there’s a brewpub. Also, figure out the geography. Knowing alternatives to your destination airport gives you more flexibility dealing with cancelled flights or missed connections. In New York, the&nbsp;LaGuardia-to-Newark pivot is&nbsp;easy, but others aren’t so obvious.&nbsp; Everyone knows that Chicago has two airports – O’Hare and Midway.&nbsp; But what about Milwaukee’s Mitchell Field 80 miles north? &nbsp;If Philadelphia is in trouble, how many folks think about Harrisburg or BWI?&nbsp; Or Sacramento as an alternative to SFO?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Fly Non-Stop</strong> — I know this is in every list, but that\'s because it’s a foundational strategy – limit the points of failure in an overloaded system. Expecting airlines already operating at capacity to ferry even more passengers between airports operating at or over capacity during marginal weather – and to do this all on schedule? Suck it up, pay the extra $100 and have a fighting chance of getting to your family on time with your sanity and your luggage in hand.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Skip the Tight Connection</strong> — If you can’t fly direct, step away from any connection that’s less than 60 minutes. Think about it – a 15-minute delay on your flight into a big hub like&nbsp;<a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27hare_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Chicago</a>&nbsp;or&nbsp;<a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denver_International_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Denver</a>&nbsp;or&nbsp;<a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detroit_Metropolitan_Wayne_County_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Detroit</a>&nbsp;(as good as on-time in the winter for most airlines) and you’re sprinting across terminals and concourses just to beat the closing door.&nbsp; A 1-hr connection is just asking for a stress attack and/or an overnight stay at the airport branch of the&nbsp;<a href=\"http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092622/\">Bates Motel</a>.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Catch the Early Flight&nbsp;</strong>—&nbsp;Delays stack up as the day wears on.&nbsp; As your airplane goes from airport to airport, the probability of it getting stuck increases. &nbsp;Overnight, airlines have a chance to recover – late planes finally get their destinations and operations groups can reassign planes.&nbsp; So while the last flight out can be a crap shoot, I’ve rarely hit a delay on the first flight out.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Carry On your Luggage</strong>&nbsp;— As Steve Frick, a long-time TravelCommons listener say, \"There are two kinds of luggage -- carry-on and lost.\" Unless you’re heading to the slopes for Christmas, everyone in your travel party should be able to fit into a carry-on sized bag. You can save $25/bag and increase the probability of having clean clothes at your destination. If you’re seating area 4 or higher, odds are there’s no overhead bin space for you. Let the agent gate-check the bag for you. You won’t have to pay a checked bag fee and it’s very unlikely that they’ll lose your bag – it’s only traveling a couple hundred feet from the jet bridge to the luggage hold.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Simplify your Coffee Order</strong> — When you hit the airport Starbucks for your pre-flight coffee, remember that this isn’t your neighborhood Starbucks run by friendly Starbucks-trained baristas. It’s run by Sodexo which doesn’t care quite as&nbsp;much about coffee training. And they’re not quite as efficient. And there are usually a lot of people behind you in line. Keep your order to 3 adjectives or less. Tall skim latte is good. The half-decaf 3-pump no-foam vente vanilla latte — not so much.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Take the Phone Tree Path Less Traveled</strong>&nbsp;— If you have to call an airline or hotel and you don’t have a Platinum or Premiere status number to call, choose the unpopular path on the phone tree.&nbsp; Travel companies don’t staff their customer service centers for peak loads – like the day when a Chicago blizzard cancels 400 flights.&nbsp; It’s too expensive. So on those days, you’ll wait forever for an agent if you’ve followed the typical path down the phone tree.&nbsp; On those days, choose the “Spanish” or “International Travel” option because everyone else is choosing English and domestic travel.&nbsp; Once you connect with someone, they’ll take care of you.&nbsp; They all work on the same systems in the same service centers.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Bring a Battery Pack</strong> — It’s tough to travel today without a working mobile phone. It holds our boarding passes, gives us gate change and flight delay notifications, and routes us around traffic jams. A dead phone while flights are being canceled is more than a minor inconvenience. Having that second or third charge immediately available is critical when trying to swerve a long delay. Check out the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/11/07/podcast-197-renting-a-tesla-2023-traveler-gift-guide/\" title=\"\">2023 Traveler Gift Guide in show notes of the last podcast episode</a> for the battery packs that I use.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ol>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph {\"hideFromFeed\":true} -->\n<p>But above all, be realistic. It’s gonna be a zoo. Steel yourself; get your inner karma tuned for it. Pack a snack and a book, and practice deep cleansing breaths.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','One More Top 10 List Of Holiday Travel Tips','','inherit','closed','closed','','4398-revision-v1','','','2023-12-06 15:21:09','2023-12-06 20:21:09','',4398,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4414',0,'revision','',0),
(4415,1,'2023-12-06 19:44:50','2023-12-07 00:44:50','<!-- wp:image {\"align\":\"right\",\"id\":4399,\"scale\":\"cover\",\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/DALL·E-2023-12-06-12.09.17.png\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/DALL·E-2023-12-06-12.09.17-300x300.png\" alt=\"Post-apocalyptic Santa Claus road warrior in a desolate landscape. He\'s in a tattered red and white suit, equipped with survival gear and goggles, holding a sack of travel-oriented gifts. The background shows a dystopian, barren terrain with a hint of a ruined cityscape. Holiday Travel Tips.\" class=\"wp-image-4399\" style=\"object-fit:cover\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\"><em>Santa Prepared for the Lines</em></figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph {\"hideFromFeed\":true} -->\n<p>Travel volume continues to grow, straining airline capacities and airport aisles —  and that\'s even before the Christmas travel crush hits. As you mentally prepare yourself to wade into the crowds, here are TravelCommons\' top holiday travel tips to keep you moving over the river and through the woods…</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list {\"ordered\":true} -->\n<ol><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Expand Your Fly-vs.-Drive Tipping Point</strong> — My normal tipping point is 350 miles; anything less and I\'ll drive it, though driving in the winter isn’t all sweetness and light – especially across stretches of I-70 through Kansas or up the Jersey Turnpike. But if you fly, expect all the holiday airport logistics to add 3 hours to your in-flight time; 2 hours before departure to allow for long TSA lines, and at least an hour after arrival to de-plane, collect your luggage, and get a rental car or Uber. And that’s if there are no delays. Maybe this adds another 50-100 miles to your holiday tipping point.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Use Multiple Navigation Apps — </strong>If you decide to drive, use more than one maps app to help you route around traffic jams from rush hour, construction, and accidents. I use both <a href=\"https://www.waze.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Waze</a> and <a href=\"https://maps.google.com/\">Google Maps</a> because, even though they’re both owned by Google, they often give me different directions. Waze seems quicker to reroute around accidents and traffic jams, but that quickness can make it a bit twitchy — sending you wandering through sub-divisions to save a minute of drive time. I use Waze as my primary guidance app, but periodically sanity-check it against Google Maps.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Do Your Research Before You Leave — </strong>You don’t have time to be clueless. Hit your airline or the <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/travel/travel-tips\">TSA website</a> so you know what’s allowed in your carry-on. Research the airports you’ll be using so you know how to get to your gates, where the good restaurants are, or better yet, if there’s a brewpub. Also, figure out the geography. Knowing alternatives to your destination airport gives you more flexibility dealing with cancelled flights or missed connections. In New York, the LaGuardia-to-Newark pivot is easy, but others aren’t so obvious.  Everyone knows that Chicago has two airports – O’Hare and Midway.  But what about Milwaukee’s Mitchell Field 80 miles north?  If Philadelphia is in trouble, how many folks think about Harrisburg or BWI?  Or Sacramento as an alternative to SFO?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Fly Non-Stop</strong> — I know this is in every list, but that\'s because it’s a foundational strategy – limit the points of failure in an overloaded system. Expecting airlines already operating at capacity to ferry even more passengers between airports operating at or over capacity during marginal weather – and to do this all on schedule? Suck it up, pay the extra $100 and have a fighting chance of getting to your family on time with your sanity and your luggage in hand.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Skip the Tight Connection</strong> — If you can’t fly direct, step away from any connection that’s less than 60 minutes. Think about it – a 15-minute delay on your flight into a big hub like <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27hare_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Chicago</a> or <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denver_International_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Denver</a> or <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detroit_Metropolitan_Wayne_County_Airport\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Detroit</a> (as good as on-time in the winter for most airlines) and you’re sprinting across terminals and concourses just to beat the closing door.  A 45-minute connection is just asking for a stress attack and/or an overnight stay at the airport branch of the <a href=\"http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092622/\">Bates Motel</a>.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Catch the Early Flight </strong>— Delays stack up as the day wears on.  As your airplane goes from airport to airport, the probability of it getting stuck increases.  Overnight, airlines have a chance to recover – late planes finally get to their destinations and operations groups can reassign planes.  So while the last flight out can be a crap shoot, I’ve rarely hit a delay on the first flight out.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Carry On your Luggage</strong> — As Steve Frick, a long-time TravelCommons listener says, \"There are two kinds of luggage — carry-on and lost.\" Unless you’re heading to the slopes for Christmas, everyone in your travel party should be able to fit into a carry-on sized bag. You can save $25/bag and increase the probability of having clean clothes at your destination. If you’re in boarding group 5 or later, odds are there’s no overhead bin space for you. Let the agent gate-check the bag for you. You won’t have to pay a checked bag fee and it’s very unlikely that they’ll lose your bag – it’s only traveling a couple hundred feet from the jet bridge to the luggage hold.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Simplify your Coffee Order</strong> — When you hit the airport Starbucks for your pre-flight coffee, remember that this isn’t your neighborhood Starbucks run by friendly Starbucks-trained baristas. It’s run by Sodexo which doesn’t care quite as&nbsp;much about coffee training. And they’re not quite as efficient. And there are usually a lot of people behind you in line. Keep your order to 3 adjectives or less. Tall skim latte is good. The half-decaf 3-pump no-foam vente vanilla latte — not so much.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Take the Phone Tree Path Less Traveled</strong> — If you have to call an airline or hotel and you don’t have a Platinum or Premiere status number to call, choose the unpopular path on the phone tree.  Travel companies don’t staff their customer service centers for peak loads – like the day when a Chicago blizzard cancels 400 flights.  It’s too expensive. So on those days, you’ll wait forever for an agent if you’ve followed the typical path down the phone tree.  Instead, swerve the crowd and choose the “Spanish” or “International Travel” option.  Once you connect with someone, they’ll take care of you.  They all work on the same systems in the same service centers.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Bring a Battery Pack</strong> — It’s tough to travel today without a working mobile phone. It holds our boarding passes, gives us gate change and flight delay notifications, and routes us around traffic jams. A dead phone while flights are being canceled is more than a minor inconvenience. Having that second or third charge immediately available is critical when trying to route around a long delay. Check out the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/11/07/podcast-197-renting-a-tesla-2023-traveler-gift-guide/\" title=\"\">2023 Traveler Gift Guide in show notes for episode #197</a> for the battery packs that I use.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ol>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph {\"hideFromFeed\":true} -->\n<p>But above all, be realistic. It’s gonna be a zoo. Steel yourself; get your inner karma tuned for it. Pack a snack and a book, and practice deep cleansing breaths.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','One More Top 10 List Of Holiday Travel Tips','','inherit','closed','closed','','4398-revision-v1','','','2023-12-06 19:44:50','2023-12-07 00:44:50','',4398,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4415',0,'revision','',0),
(4421,1,'2024-01-24 17:40:41','2024-01-24 22:40:41','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_1985\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/IMG_3006.jpeg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1985\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/IMG_3006-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"Bar at Modern Times\' Taproom\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"></a> I wonder what they serve here[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Looking at the <em><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/beer/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Beer</a></em> section of this new website design, I saw I needed more content. So I got hold of Rob Cheshire of the <em><a href=\"https://thisweekincraft.beer/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">This Week in Craft Beer</a></em> podcast to talk about our approaches to taproom tourism and to trade taproom travel stories. I also talk about mask hassles on a couple of recent flights, Hertz\'s continuing downward service spiral, and Uber and Lyft driver shortages.  All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_174.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #174: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>This Week</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you again from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois as things here start to open up from winter and COVID shutdowns. Increasing temperatures and vaccination rates have people out and about. Irene and I got a jump start on the better weather by flying out to San Diego on St Patrick’s Day to hang out at an Airbnb in <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_Beach,_San_Diego\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Ocean Beach</a> a block off the ocean and a couple of blocks south of Newport Avenue, the main drag that surprised me with its kinda hippy/surfer vibe. Which I liked. It reminded me of Huntington Beach in the mid-80’s when my folks moved there, before they tarted it all up. I give Ocean Beach credit for resisting the face lift, even if I meant I had to avoid the homeless guy changing his pants on the sidewalk when walking back with the morning coffee and doughnuts.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>It was a low-key trip. Nothing scheduled, no real itinerary; mostly walking the coast during the day -- beaches or rocks -- and then at night, chipping away at the list of some 150 microbrewery taprooms in the San Diego area; a lost cause for sure, but one I willingly threw myself at. Indeed, the only time we looked closely at the time was Sunday afternoon to make sure I could get to all my “gotta go” taprooms before they closed since we were flying back Monday after lunch.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The bookends to the trip, the flights out and back on United, were a bit more stressful. The flights were just about completely full. And for some reason, United kept shoving me out of my aisle seat to the adjacent middle seat. But because I checked our seats after receiving United’s “We’re full; you can move to another flight for free” e-mail before each flight, there was enough time to rejigger our seats to adjacent aisles, which gave each of us a bit of room to lean away from a full middle seat. The bigger and, honestly, more surprising hassles were mask compliance. On the flight out of ORD, the guy in the row behind me had a loud, extended grumble session with his seatmate after the flight attendant told him to pull his mask up over his nose. I thought he was winding himself up for a protest, but he eventually calmed down. The flight back was worse for Irene. A young couple with an infant landed in the middle and window seats next to her. Both continually pulled their masks down below their chins; at some point, the husband fell asleep and started snoring with his down. And this is after the flight attendants made a number of very clear and pointed announcements on mask rules.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>This all really surprised me. All my prior flights -- to Nashville, Philly, Phoenix -- there wasn’t any of this. Now I’m no mask scold, but like I said in the last episode, everyone agrees to wear one before they can check-in. So if you have a personal objection or don’t think you can handle it for 4 hours, don’t get on the plane. And if you do, treat yourself to a new mask before the flight; one with new elastic so it says up over your nose.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Astral/44268\">Dreaming</a> by Astral (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Long-time TravelCommons listener Nick Gassman sent in a note about last episode’s travel insurance update and COVID-related coverage. Nick writes:<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“In the UK, a recent survey found that whilst insurers would give you emergency medical cover if you caught COVID when you were away, none would cover you if the government advised against travel because of COVID and you therefore could not travel. Some would give you cancellation cover if you are diagnosed with COVID before travel, and others would further give cancellation cover if you had to self-isolate even without a positive test.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As ever with insurance, the thing is to make sure you understand the small print and to compare policies.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Nick, thanks for that. I think the advice to \"read the small print\" is valid in life in general, and in travel insurance in particular. I think the pandemic and known event carve-outs lurking in the small print caught a lot of travel insurance holders back when the initial lockdowns hit. I wonder, a year on after all that, how many more people are clicking through the “Buy Travel Insurance” box at the bottom of their Expedia booking page to the full rider and doing a Control-F in their browser to search for the word “COVID”.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>In the last <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/12/podcast-173-whats-new-in-travel-insurance-keeping-ahead-of-expiring-miles/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #173 — What’s New in Travel Insurance; Keeping Ahead of Expiring Miles\">couple </a>of <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/16/podcast-172-timeshares-without-the-pitch-notes-on-tucson/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #172 — Timeshares Without the Pitch; Notes on Tucson\">episodes</a>, I’ve been talking about my efforts to decipher the activity rules for British Airways’ frequent flier program to stave off a year-end extinction event for my non-insignificant stash of Avios points. Since I’m not planning to fly BA anytime soon, I booked our Ocean Beach Airbnb through a link on BA’s site and, to my surprise, I saw 1,800 Avios points automagically hit my account a week later. I can’t seem to find the expiration date to see if it updated, but I’m pretty sure this reset the 36-month clock. And it was a nice find, the Airbnb-Avios link. It let me double-dip on Avios and Chase Ultimate points. Not sure when I’ll get to spend them, but it was a nice little get.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>In the last <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/12/podcast-173-whats-new-in-travel-insurance-keeping-ahead-of-expiring-miles/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #173 — What’s New in Travel Insurance; Keeping Ahead of Expiring Miles\">episode</a>, I talked about having to work through a lot of cars in the Hertz PHX lot to find one with less than 24,000 miles. In SAN, I had to work to find a car -- period. We walked to the Five Star aisle and it was empty. I tried to flag down a Hertz employee, but he just waved me off. After 5 minutes or so, a car showed up. I didn’t bother to look at the mileage; we just got in and drove off. I was late for a lunch date with a fish taco. Returning the car, I did my normal drill - top off the tank, get a receipt, and then when dropping it off, place the receipt under the keys on the dashboard so the check-in guy will see it. It usually works -- except this time. The receipt hits my e-mail as we’re trundling the perimeter of the airfield in the rental bus. I open it up and see a fuel charge! Really? The last time this happened was about 4 years ago in ATL. I hit Twitter and the Hertz team fixed it in a half-hour. This time, the <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1374073837923360768\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter team got back to me</a> pretty quick asking for the rental agreement details, but then… nothing. I pinged them the next day, nothing. And the next day, nothing. So I challenged it with Amex and got the fueling charge and associated taxes credited back in a couple of days and then moved on. Until earlier this week, two weeks later, Hertz popped up on my Twitter DMs asking for more information. It’s amazing how fast their service has cratered during this bankruptcy, which makes me wonder how long it’ll take them to recover. I gotta get some good discount codes for Avis.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>There was a <a href=\"https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/04/uber-and-lyft-struggle-with-driver-shortage-as-demand-soars/\">spate</a> <a href=\"https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/7/22371850/uber-lyft-driver-shortage-covid-bonus-stimulus\">of</a> <a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/video/2021/04/08/uber-lyft-pledge-millions-to-fight-driver-shortage.html\">articles</a> this week about Uber and Lyft driver shortages. We experienced it first hand trying to get a morning ride out to ORD for our San Diego flight. I swallowed hard and agreed to a good-sized surge, waited for a while, and still had the Uber driver cancel on us at the last minute. It shouldn’t be surprising, though. Drivers left the platforms when demand cratered at the start of the pandemic, when Uber said (and this was last May when everything was shutdown) that their volume was down by 80% vs. the prior May (May 2019). And in Chicago, the run of Uber drivers getting carjacked at the beginning of this year probably didn’t help either. But with stimulus checks in the bank and vaccine rates rising, demand has snapped back, a lot faster than driver supply. The headline of the <a href=\"https://www.ft.com/content/2b71e009-bb96-46ee-b024-4c574ef41988\">Financial Times article</a> reads “Uber and Lyft ‘throwing money’ at US drivers to ease shortage” and says that Uber is spending $250 million on a one-time “stimulus” package of driver incentives. But even with that, it takes time to on-board even returning drivers -- re-doing vehicle inspections, background checks. In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/02/29/podcast-160-disappearing-seatback-screens-shrinking-difference-between-ride-share-and-taxis/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #160 — Disappearing Seatback Screens; Shrinking Difference Between Ride-Share and Taxis\">episode #160</a>, my last pre-pandemic episode back in February 2020, I talked about the shrinking difference between Uber and Lyft, and how I found myself beginning to shift back to regular cabs. These recent experiences are only accelerating that. I’m thinking I may need to reload taxi dispatch numbers back into my iPhone.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on our fab new web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mghicks/18378\">Emily and the Djembe</a> by mghicks (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/nc-sampling+/1.0/\">Noncommercial Sampling Plus</a> license. Ft: Emily via Briareus</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Taproom Tourism</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Putting together the new website, I was thinking about what to put on the top menu. “Subscribe” and “Episodes” were given, but I also put “Food” and “Beer” because, well, I write and talk about them a lot. But then, when I clicked through the new “Beer” menu, it felt a bit sparse. I needed to add some content. And so in the craft beer tradition of collaboration beers, I pinged Rob Cheshire, a long time TravelCommons listener and now craft beer podcaster with his <a href=\"https://thisweekincraft.beer/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">This Week in Craft Beer</a> podcast, to talk about why we go out of our way to find brewery taprooms, and how he organizes his travels to hit the most taprooms he can on each visit.<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: So what are you drinking?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Rob: I\'ve got a Bio Machine Brew Co I had on the podcast about six weeks ago.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: I\'m doing a Springbock from Half Acre, about 6.8%. It\'s not a shy beer</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Rob: Good Lunchtime beer. Yeah.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Taproom Tourism. Why do we go and search out brewery tap rooms as opposed to the cool beer bar?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Rob: You want to be drinking at the source I think is the first point. So it\'s just in terms of freshness and, quite frankly, value for money, but also variety. And just everything\'s better without the middleman. If I can sit and chat to the brewer while I\'m drinking their beer, then so much the better. At least even the guy behind the bar is going to know a lot more about products and the nature of the business than our average barman. And, you know, as good as they might be, it\'s always better dealing direct, I think.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: As I was thinking about it, I had that same set of thoughts. First of all, there\'s more selection and especially if you want to go past the usual suspects. So if you want to go past the usual IPAs, maybe random stouts and stuff like that, and the light wheat that they\'ll put on to keep the non-beer drinkers happy. If you want to get past that and you want to see where that brewer is stretching their muscles a little bit, then you\'re right. You gotta go to the taproom because nobody else is going to take it. And to your point also, from a cost standpoint, you\'re going to be able to do flights or at least small pours, which means you\'re going to be more willing to try the wacky beer.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Rob: Yes, definitely. I want to taste every single beer in the taproom if I can. Another aspect, I just like the atmosphere in taprooms. Some of them are super slick and fabulously well fitted out. And others are literally some barrels to sit on or empty pallets. Complete extremes of decor, but they\'re always sort of charming in their own way. And there\'s something about being in a brewery that pleases me, even if I\'m not drinking.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: My undergraduate degree is in chemical engineering and I never practiced as a chemical engineer. But having said that, I really like to go and look at breweries. There was one time we were in Portland. The brewery was in the basement. I\'m kind of looking at going “How in the hell did they get these tanks down here?” Because there was no obvious way that you could get a massive steel tank down into this basement. And then we ended up sitting wedged in a table between three fermentation tanks. It wasn\'t like we were looking at the brewery; we were in the brewery.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Rob: You were actually in an integral part of it. I had a very similar experience, actually, one of the new local breweries that\'s opened up here in Reading that I\'ve become quite friendly with called Crafty Cats, and they are brewing in an impractical barn, terribly difficult to sanitize everything. It\'s a broken concrete floor. We went round this brewery, and we started actually with the finished beer and he said, Well, taste this and taste this and this and which we\'re getting right back to the last one we tasted. It was the first time I\'ve ever tasted what I can only describe as the overwhelming smell of brewer’s yeast you get in a brewery. That was what this liquid tasted like, and I\'ve never tasted anything quite like it before. It was a really interesting experience.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: How do you plan your taproom visits?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Rob: It\'s all driven through Google for me. I might have some idea based on previous reading about some big-name places that I want to visit in a particular city. But beyond that, I\'m just going to Google. First of all, I\'ll plot a Google map for the city. I\'ll end up with 50-60, maybe even 100 pins on the map. Pretty quickly, I\'ll go to Untappd and look at the average brewery rating. And this really makes brewers cross how much I rely on Untappd for this type of thing because I had this conversation a load of times on the podcast with them. But I do rely on brewery ratings on Untappd, and I find it very reliable, quite frankly. If a brewery has an average rating of anything close to 4, then, obviously it\'s a massive generalization to say whatever they brew, but most of their beers are gonna be great. If the brewery rating is anywhere close to 3.5, it\'s going to be very mediocre at best. And somewhere in between is where most people land. So 3.6, eh...;&nbsp; 3.8, it\'s a good brewery; 3.9 is a terrific brewery; 4 is a great brewery. And so I\'m looking for those 3.8 and 3.9 average brewery ratings. But what I\'m looking for, really, is that district where I can walk from one to another and really make an afternoon of it.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: But that\'s kind of the DIY spin. And I know, Rob, that you\'re doing with This Week In Craft Brewing, you guys are launching tours, the Good Lord willing and COVID don\'t rise…</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Rob: Yeah. I\'ve been lucky enough to travel pretty frequently to East Coast of the US for business trips, particularly the past 10 years. And so I\'ve always been comfortable with traveling in the US, And in the last few years, I\'ve been basing my travel around taproom visits quite frankly. And so I\'ve been doing business trips where I have some business meetings, but really, what I\'m doing is trying to plan my schedule so I\'m in the right place at the right time each evening to visit the tap room that I want to visit. And so, I\'ve become quite familiar with the tap rooms most of the way down the East Coast. Since then, I\'ve got my This Week In Craft Beer business (if you want to call it a business) off the ground. It\'s a fun side project. We publish a weekly newsletter and we do a weekly podcast doing a different interview with the UK Craft Brewery each week. And so, in conversation with the brewers, I started to float the idea with them, either before or afterwards, when we\'re wrapping up and finishing off the beer and whatever. I would say, “Well, I\'m thinking about putting together tours to the US. Does that sound like something you\'d be interested in?” And so, on the back of a few of those conversations, I started to figure out that what we could do is actually promote it with the brewer and basically sell it to the brewer’s customers and have the brewer come on the tour. So we\'ll put together a schedule where we\'re going to visit, hopefully, some amazing tap rooms. From what I know about how brewers react to being visited by other brewers, usually they get the red carpet out. Brewers are very hospitable. It\'s almost like a private members club. You know, one brewer visits another brewer, and they may be supremely welcome. So I\'m hoping that we can leverage that, and I think we can put together a pretty killer 5-day, 4-night tour where we visit 2 tap rooms a day and have a fantastic curated experience at each one.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You may be seeding a whole other series of collabs, of cross-Atlantic collabs.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Rob: That would be nice. Yeah, I hope so.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Here\'s the last thing I wanted to think about – best, worst, most unusual taproom experience. It got me thinking about the number of times that going to tap rooms, search them out, and then going out to them has taken me to parts of town that I would not normally go. I mean, it gets you out of it, busts you out of what I\'ve called in the travel bubble or the tourist route.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Rob: I’ve been to a few places where I probably shouldn\'t have been in search of tap rooms. You know, that\'s the thing. Isn\'t as well as you know. I think I remember once in Baltimore where I, you know, I ended up probably in a slightly down-on-its-luck neighborhood. Let\'s call it that for one of the better turn of phrase. And that\'s when you start to think “Well, maybe, you know, is there a taproom down here? And maybe I shouldn\'t perhaps be wandering this district.” I don\'t know, but I do. What I do know when I\'m in the US is I can always break out my British accent and that, you know, it doesn\'t matter how sort of threatening the bad guys look as soon as they hear I\'m from the UK, they immediately become unofficial tour guides. And, you know, they want to point me in the right direction and give me advice and make sure I\'m enjoying my visit to the city. And it is an extraordinary experience and this, you know, it\'s overwhelming that level of hospitality that we always get from Americans. And that\'s it\'s not an exaggeration to say that I don\'t think I could find myself in any part of any city where that didn\'t work, and it hasn\'t happened yet anyway. So probably once too many. I\'ll push that luck too far. It\'s worked so far anyway.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: And again, you talk about doing business trips? I was in mid Jersey, and I found this place Demented Brewing, and I found it on Untappd. And so we head out there, we find it. It\'s across the street from a glass repair shop and sort of kitty corner from a motorcycle repair shop. But no food, no food trucks or anything and said “Okay, well, we\'re gonna need to lay a base here.” And so, across the street was this little place with an El Salvadorian flag hanging out the front of it. And it\'s some little family restaurant/bodega thing, and we roll in there. They look at us like, “Who in the hell are you guys?” We go. We like the menu posted up on the wall. It\'s like pupusa is I don\'t know. We\'re like, give us all of them, right? Just like give us one of all; we\'re gonna do a flight of pupusas and then we went back across the street, but at that time in New Jersey, they had to give you a tour.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Rob: You have to do a tour. Yeah, yeah, yeah.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Okay, so you hit that too. You had to do a tour before you could do the sample.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Rob: I\'ve been to more places in Jersey than probably anywhere else, actually.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: It\'s the only place I\'ve had that happen has been in Jersey. Okay, “Well, you got to do a tour, then you can have beer at the tap room.” I was like, “Okay, fine. Cool.” It was a very abbreviated tour.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Rob: Yeah. I actually watched that policy evolve in 2018 from at the start of the year, where they were quite strict about saying yet we\'ve got to give you a bit of a tour, you know. And after a while, it got to the stage where they just had laminates printed where they have shown you the map of the brewery. If you\'d like us to come and show you any particular feature on this, please let us know. But just otherwise, you can just sit at the bar and look at it while you have your beer and say that obviously sort of figured out that that was sufficient to satisfy the local regulations.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Rob: Probably my best taproom experience in Asia was in Hanoi, Vietnam, and there\'s a bar there called the Standing Bar, which I think is by far the most celebrated craft beer bar in probably the whole of Vietnam. Actually, a great selection of beer. When we were there, they had a comedy night and they\'d flown in English- speaking comedy acts from a number of different Asian capitals. And it was fantastic. There\'s a big local beer scene in Vietnam. It\'s called Bia Hoi. It’s basically lager, 3.5-3.8% alcohol I think, but served almost ice cold in ice glasses. So it\'s drunk extremely cold, and it\'s very hot and humid there, of course, and these Bia Hoi bars are -- to say they\'re on every street is understating it. About every third shop front is a Bia Hoi bar, and they\'re mostly… they\'re not bars in the way that you would recognize that term. They\'re oftentimes just a little sort of plastic furniture, almost in, but the front room on the ground floor, you know, So you walk in there and you sit down and they\'re always really tiny because we\'re obviously taller than the Vietnamese. So you know, you sort of get your knees under your chin. It felt like going back to kindergarten, where you\'re going to the parents\' evening at school and you\'re sitting on the tiny chairs that are designed for five- and six-year-olds. It was exactly like that, these bia hoy bars. It was a good experience drinking bia hoi.  Crap beer, of course, but you know, it was just, you know, it\'s cold and very refreshing. You can drink lots of it because it\'s very weak. But the point is, bia hoi is like 20 cents a pint. Something like; that is super super cheap. And the beer in the Standing Bar was, quite frankly, Western European craft beer prices and then some. You know, you were paying probably $10 plus for a pint, maybe more than that. So this was a good beer, you know, They had some good Vietnamese beers. They had imported beers from around Asia. So it was a good choice of craft beer, as I would recognize that. But 20-30 times the price of the local beers, you know. And it was bringing it back to the comedy night. Several of the comedians were absolutely ripping into the crowd, saying, “You know what? Are you guys doing it? How on earth can you justify paying the price of the beer in this bullshit bar when you could be next door drinking pints of bia hoi with the locals for 20 cents a pint? You know, it\'s ridiculous. You should be ashamed of yourselves” and you are absolutely right. It was a good experience.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Thanks again to Rob Cheshire for that collab. I hope you could tell that it was a lot of fun. Indeed, the full session ran around an hour and a half and a bit more beer. If you want to hear more of our taproom stories, head over to Rob’s This Week in Craft Beer <a href=\"https://thisweekincraft.beer/podcast/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">podcast feed</a>, he posted a longer version as a bonus Easter episode, or check out the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/03/28/podcast-174-uncut-taproom-tourism/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">TravelCommons website</a>, <a href=\"https://fb.watch/4NAd-8Ai30/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook page</a> or <a href=\"https://youtu.be/6bz4EJn4-7U\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a> for the full video.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #174</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The new website makes it a lot easier to subscribe. There’s a drop down menu at the top of each page, a set of subscribe links at the bottom, and a big red “Subscribe” button in the middle of the home page. You can use all those buttons, links and menus or you can just search for us on <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Thanks to Nick Gassman, not only for the e-mails, but for <a href=\"https://nickgassman.com/recommended-podcasts/other-podcasts/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">calling out</a> TravelCommons in the Recommended Podcast section of his blog site.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_174.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #174 — How the Pros Plan Their Taproom Tourism','','inherit','closed','closed','','3509-revision-v1','','','2024-01-24 17:40:41','2024-01-24 22:40:41','',3509,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4421',0,'revision','',0),
(4435,1,'2024-02-29 06:19:46','2024-02-29 11:19:46','','IMG_4238-EDIT','','inherit','open','closed','','img_4238-edit','','','2024-02-29 06:19:46','2024-02-29 11:19:46','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/IMG_4238-EDIT.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(4436,1,'2024-02-28 14:01:00','2024-02-28 19:01:00','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/IMG_4238-EDIT-400x400.jpg\" alt=\"fence gate with a sign saying Beware of The Bull\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /> Booking.com\'s Customer Service Center?[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I walked by <a href=\"https://www.shakespearesglobe.com/\" title=\"\">Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre</a> after a weekend of wrestling with <a href=\"https://www.booking.com/\" title=\"\">Booking.com</a> and <a href=\"https://travelnest.com/\" title=\"\">TravelNest</a>\'s service agents, trying unsuccessfully to not let them screw up my London vacation rental.  The Macbeth soliloquy about a tale \"full of sound and fury, signifying nothing\" pretty much summed up my experience -- lots of talk that yielded nothing. But before that, we catch up on Hertz\'s EV reversal, Sioux City, Iowa\'s embrace of their SUX airport code, and a flash-in-the-pan airport delay betting app.  All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_198.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:audio -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-audio\"><audio controls src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_198.mp3\"></audio></figure>\n<!-- /wp:audio -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #198: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN after an extended holiday break that had us in the UK for the back half of November -- the first week in Dorset on the south coast doing a bit of muddy hiking and then knocking around London the second week. As I mentioned a few episodes back, Irene and I took BA’s direct flights between Nashville and Heathrow. Our flights were on 787’s, but apparently the route has become popular enough for BA to announce they’re upgauging it to a triple 7. Interesting given that Nashville isn’t a hub airport. Had what has become my standard flight-to-Nashville moment -- helping a guy rearrange the overhead bin so he could fit his guitar in. Not sure if there are enough musicians to fill those extra seats though. Music tourists? Bachelorette parties? I dunno, but the Nashville airport will need to get their new international baggage claim hall sorted before then. When we arrived, we were told to get our luggage and then go to the immigration line -- the exact opposite of every other international arrival flow I’ve ever done. There was only one Global Entry terminal and it was over by the luggage belt rather than by the immigration line. So we all queued up for it while we waited for our luggage to arrive. After a 45-minute wait (and a lot of AirTag checking), we grabbed our bags and headed over to immigration, went to the Global Entry line which seemed to act like a Clear line for TSA -- we got a line cut to the next immigration agent, but still had to go through all the questions and photo taking. It was weird, inefficient, very unlike my recent arrivals at ORD and EWR. Maybe they just need more reps to work out the kinks, or bring in a more experienced manager. Whatever it is, they need to fix it before bigger jets and more people show up.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>After that jaunt in November, we’ve pretty much stayed put, with our spare bedroom being on the receiving end of travel -- our daughter Claire was here for a couple of weeks over Christmas and New Year’s, one couple who’d never been to Nashville before (amazing!) and two other couples for whom Nashville, handily enough, was 8 hours down the road on their first day driving to somewhere. You could say “Great! Chance to be a tourist in our own town!” but it’s more about being the <em>tour guide</em>, which, in Nashville, comes with the responsibility of having informed opinions about things like the best hot chicken joint and the best Broadway honky-tonk. Nashville’s Hot Chicken Week was a couple weeks ago, which gave me the excuse (as if I needed one) to buy the jumbo jar of Mylanta and hit every hot chicken joint to figure out the best -- which for me is <a href=\"https://www.reds615kitchen.com/\">Red’s 615 Kitchen</a> in the West End. I can’t say I’ve been <em>that</em> meticulous about my honky-tonk opinions; one can dodge only so many bachelorette parties and watch only so many cover bands. And then I’ve gotta keep finding new cool places to take our visitors the <em>next</em> time they pass through town. I’m telling you, this tour guide thing can be a bit exhausting.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/11510\">Funkist</a>&nbsp;– cdk dub mix by cdk (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: teru</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Well… the lead topic for <a href=\"http://staging.travelcommons.com/2023/11/07/podcast-197-renting-a-tesla-2023-traveler-gift-guide/\">the last episode</a> was “Renting a Tesla\'\'; finally relenting to Hertz’s incessant email offers/pleas for a November. Two months later, <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/business/autos/after-big-tesla-bet-hertz-selling-one-third-of-ev-fleet-5626a425?st=rtm10t2qnapxjhj&amp;reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink\">Hertz announces they’re selling off a third of their EV fleet</a> -- 20,000 of them. Paging through <a href=\"https://www.hertzcarsales.com/used-electric-vehicles.htm?geoZip=20001&amp;geoRadius=0\">hertzcarsales.com</a>, it’s mostly Tesla Model 3s, with a few Model Ys and Chevy Bolts sprinkled in. I was a little surprised when I read it because Hertz had been hitting their fleet electrification message so hard. But now looking back on some of my observations in the last episode -- the EV aisle at Logan airport full up with 10-12 Tesla Model 3’s and a couple of Polestars, the guys working there being so nonchalant about battery levels and car condition -- the clues were there. But someone was driving them. Half of these EVs have 30-60,000 miles on them -- which feels heavy for a fleet of 18-month-old cars, even if they’re rental cars. If nothing else, it cuts my Hertz email traffic <em>way</em> down.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Just one more thing on EVs. Also in that topic, I talked about the hassle of charging an EV. Not range anxiety -- I was only driving 20 miles from Logan; but the effort to find a charger and then the time it took to charge the battery. In London, we stayed in an <em>OK</em> neighborhood between King’s Cross Station and Clerkenwell, typical urban streetscape of walk-up apartment buildings and cars parked bumper-to-bumper along the curb. Walking down the sidewalk the first day there, I saw a cord coming out of a parked car. Where the hell is that going? I looked down at my feet -- it wasn’t running across the sidewalk into the building. No, it was plugged into the base of the street light. Pretty clever… and necessary since none of the folks living in these flats has a garage to charge in.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Back in November, right after I dropped the last episode in which I talked about my turboprop flight to Sioux City, IA as the “ah ha” moment justifying the price of my first pair of Bose noise-canceling headphones, the Wall Street Journal ran an <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/business/iowa-airport-branding-sux-sioux-city-bc46b7b3\">article</a> about how Sioux City, Iowa is embracing the three-letter code for their airport, SUX. And it reminded me again of that flight back in the mid-’90’s. The agent handed me the boarding pass (the age before smartphones). “SUX, Sucks? Is this a joke?” I asked. She just shrugged; I think she’d heard that before -- a lot. I think the Dash 8 was the smallest prop plane United Express flew. We stopped first in Waterloo, Iowa where most everyone else got out for the big John Deere plant there. After the flight attendant buttoned the door back up, she gave the rest of us a look and then pointed us to new seats -- kinda eyeballing the weight distribution; moving some of the bigger guys to seats behind the wing. The airport codes for that flight -- ORD to ALO to SUX -- ‘Alo to Sucks -- were fun. Could’ve been better if the plane had swung through Grand Rapids -- GRR -- for “Grrr…, it sucks”. An itinerary starting in Fresno -- FAT-- would give us the non-body-positive “Fat Sucks.” Or for a much more unlikely flight -- Singapore -- SIN -- to Sioux City for the much more righteous “Sin Sucks”. I could go on… but I won’t; it’s getting painful, even for me. Apparently, back at the turn of the century -- the 21st century -- Sioux City asked the FAA for a new airport code for what is officially named “Sioux Gateway Airport”. I guess they didn’t like the alternatives offered -- GWU, SGV, GAY -- so they kept SUX. And then people built businesses selling SUX merch -- Winter SUX, Work SUX.&nbsp; And probably the most apropos&nbsp; -- “it SUX to lose your luggage.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>With all the betting around the Super Bowl -- the Vegas lines, every party selling squares -- I circled back ‘round to something I saw in September, an app called Wingman. They call themselves a “flight delays prediction market”. Betting on flight delays -- sounds like it could be fun, especially when watching the departure board at ORD or LGA. Digging past the headline, I found out it’s a Web3 blockchain dapp (decentralized application) -- not sure if it could be any more buzzword-compliant -- using some crypto-tokens I’ve never heard of… which maybe let’s them serve gambling laws (?); I dunno. As it is, I didn’t end up giving Wingman a spin; it required connecting a crypto-wallet to the app -- which I don’t have… and probably never will. Looking at a site called DappRadar which claims to track 15,000 distributed apps, it looks like Wingman had <a href=\"https://dappradar.com/dapp/wingman?range-ha=all\">a moment of hotness back in September</a> after its burst of announcement publicity with 5-6-700 transactions. But in the new year, it’s had a few days with a handful -- less than ten; but most days with nothing. Disappointing. I was hoping this could be a new way to fund my flight-delay bar tabs.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter (X?) message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page, or on the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can skip all that social media stuff and post your comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/48705\">Jolanta Blues</a>&nbsp;by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: Admiral Bob, Martijn de Boer</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>London Vacation Rental Woes</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Listeners who <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">follow me on Twitter/X</a> know that I had one of my worst short-term rental experiences during our London trip with Booking.com. And I’ll talk about what I learned from that in a moment, but it got me thinking about vacation rentals in general. For the longest time, it was a local mom-and-pop business, typically in vacation areas -- ski resorts, beach towns. You called or stopped by a local realtor, or someone you knew who knew the area recommended a place, and then you rented it from the owner. Friends who rent beach houses on the East Coast tell me they’ve had the same renters for the same week in June, July, August for years. Then Airbnb started up in 2008, first as a platform to rent out spare rooms (remember couchsurfing.com?), but it pretty quickly moved home rentals out of its mom-&amp;-pop vacation spot model into a parallel urban hotel market.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I’m not deep in urban planning or rental market dynamics, so I’m not getting into the pluses and minuses of short-term rentals. You can get all that and more with a simple Google search. Maybe I’m old-school (or just old), but my use of short-term rentals is pretty much the same now as it was pre-Airbnb -- when it’s a bigger group and we’ll need more space to spread out than a hotel can give you. I also enjoy being able to stay in neighborhoods where there aren’t hotels, to be able to dig deeper into a city, but I also know that it can also be not great for the people who live in those neighborhoods. A couple of years back, we and another family booked into a flat in the Trastevere neighborhood in Rome. Great flat on a great street; really enjoyed the neighborhood and the time we had with our friends, being able to spend time in some place other than a restaurant or hotel bar, catching up while trying to figure out the espresso machine or the washer/dryer combo. All good. But looking across the landing to the other apartment on our floor, the sign taped to the door in Italian and Google-translated English saying “Keep it quiet”, you could tell the people <em>living</em> in this building weren’t having a great time. And then there’s the story our friends tell of when a condo in their building in Lincoln Park on the north side of Chicago was listed on Airbnb, and one night while at dinner, looking out their window they could see a porn movie being filmed there. Kinda put them off their meal.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>There are loads of vacation rental horror stories, but not from me. Looking through my trip histories on Airbnb and VRBO, I’ve had a really good run -- a great beach place in San Diego, a tiny house in Durango, CO, a walk up in Brooklyn’s Carroll Gardens neighborhood, a flat in Split, Croatia with a balcony where I drank my morning coffee watching the sailboats head out of the harbor…. All good, except for London.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Two years ago, November 2021, we were heading over London for a couple of weeks. The morning we were leaving, maybe 5 hours before heading to the airport, we get an email from our Booking.com host -- “So sorry, but a water pipe broke in the apartment, so we have to cancel your stay that starts tomorrow.” Wait, what!? Did I read that right? I read it again. Yup, I read it right; we have no place to stay when we land in London tomorrow morning. Luckily, it was just Irene and me; we didn’t <em>need</em> sprawl space. So I quickly pivoted from packing socks and underwear to logging onto Marriott.com to book a room before our Uber showed up, which I did, at the Montcalm East near Shoreditch. The last-minute booking was definitely more expensive, but I was confident it had a working toilet and shower -- well, that and I got free breakfast with my Titanium status.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Fast forward to this trip, in November 2023, with our daughter joining us, we needed a vacation rental. Given our last experience, we gave ourselves a 5-month head start, booking a place in June. I found a good place in London and booked it on Airbnb. Ten days later, I get a morning email canceling our reservation, but this time from Airbnb, saying the property we booked “doesn’t appear to be legitimate.” Right after that, I get another email, from the property owner, asking me to book direct with him, sending the full payment via bank transfer. So send a couple of thousand dollars in June for a November stay to a guy I’ve never dealt with before, and for whom I couldn’t find any other information -- property website, LinkedIn profile, social media presence? Felt just a bit scammy, so I took a pass. Not the last time I’d get this request.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Irene took over. That afternoon, she booked a flat on Booking.com. Fast forward to the beginning of November. Starting to get geared up for the trip and think maybe we should check the status of our booking. Huh -- Booking.com has a new note saying our reservation now can’t be paid through them. We ping the property owner -- “What gives?” We get back a blisto-gram of an email; not aimed at us, but at Booking.com. “Their fees are too high and they’re awful to work with. I told them to cancel all reservations.” Hmm, our reservation is still there, but doesn’t sound like we had a good chance of getting into the flat if we showed up. So Irene canceled it and booked a different flat.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>From whom, a couple of days later, we get an email asking us to cancel our Booking.com reservation and book directly with them, with full payment via bank transfer. This sounds familiar. They’re forced into this, going off-platform, they wrote, because London limits short-term rentals to 60 days a year. A quick Google search told me London’s limit is 90 days rather than 60. Not looking to dunk on these folks, but -- hmm, you’d think an experienced host would get this number right. Little bit of doubt, so we took another pass on sending a stranger a couple of thousand dollars with no fraud protections.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>So I search for another place in the same neighborhood and find one on Booking. I hit the Book button and pretty quickly get back a confirmation email from TravelNest, a vacation rental property management company. Good! No more asking me to book direct. They send me the contact info for the property owner so I can coordinate arrival logistics. I send the guy an email -- it bounces. I send texts and WhatsApp messages to him -- crickets. I go back to TravelNest. “Oh, don’t worry, we’ll contact him.” “With what? The same email that bounced; the same phone number that he hasn’t checked?” “Oh, don’t worry, he’ll turn up.” OK, I’ve got other things to worry about, and London was the second week of our trip, so we had time.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The end of our first week -- we were hiking/walking down in Dorset on the south coast -- I hadn’t heard anything and started to worry. I started pinging Booking and TravelNest; sending emails and calling. Nothing solved, but every time I talked to someone, it was “Don’t worry, we’ll take care of you.” I’m not going to go through every call, -- maybe I’ll put all those details on a Twitter thread -- but I spent 5-6 hours over 3 days on calls with these people and the problem, my problem, boiled down to this -- we were past the cancelation deadline; Booking.com viewed TravelNest as their property contact, not the MIA owner; and TravelNest didn’t want to cancel the reservation and lose the revenue in hopes that the owner would show up at the last minute.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You know where this is going. Tuesday morning, we’re driving up to London Heathrow from Bournemouth to drop off the Hertz car and “ping” goes the Booking.com app. It’s a message from TravelNest - “I am very sorry to let you know that the owner of the property you have booked via Travelnest cannot accommodate your upcoming booking. This is due to the host having stopped advertising their property through Travelnest. And we don’t have any alternatives to offer you.” Amazing. They’re just now figuring out that the guy stopped using them. They couldn’t have checked during one of those 5-6 hours of calls a few days ago.&nbsp; So after we dropped the car off, we took the shuttle bus over to Terminal 2. Irene and Claire grabbed a coffee while I got on the phone to Booking.com. “Oh, I’m so sorry, but don’t worry we’ll take care of you.” But they didn’t. They couldn’t find us a replacement property in the part of London we needed to be. So I ran the same play as two years ago, fired up Marriott.com and found us a room for the night. And then splurged for a black cab instead of the cheaper Heathrow Express so Claire and I could work our Airbnb apps to find a place for the rest of our time in London. Which we did after about the 3rd try.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>So out of this whole shitshow, what did I learn? First, the London short-term vacation rental market just seems broken. There were so many properties on Booking.com and Airbnb that showed availability, but really weren’t. All told, it took us 6 booking attempts before we finally got one to stick. I’ve never had that happen in any other place. Second, there’s something wrong with the group that runs Booking.com’s short-term rentals. Irene uses (well, <em>used</em>) them <em>a lot</em> for hotel bookings, and we’ve never had a problem. But vacation rentals, every bad experience has been a Booking.com property. As you might guess, we won’t be using them again. Third, immediately cancel reservations where a third party like TravelNest pops up. They don’t add value to <strong>you</strong>, the traveler; they just get in the way when a problem crops up and are just another point of failure.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Oh, and I guess there’s a fourth -- don’t trust anyone when they say “Don’t worry, we’ll take care of you.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"className\":\"has-medium-font-size\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #198</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As always, you can find us and listen to the current episodes on all the main podcast sites -- Apple Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, Google Podcasts, and Amazon Music. And you can always Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page at TravelCommons.com for a transcript of the episode and links to items on the gift guide. If you’re not yet subscribed, there’s a drop down Subscribe menu at the top of TravelCommon’s home page. And along the side of the page, you’ll find links to all the TravelCommons’ socials.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to mpeacock on Twitter, write them on the TravelCommons page on Facebook or Instagram, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com.&nbsp; And thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in emails, Tweets and post comments on the website. I really appreciate it.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And until we talk again, safe travels; and thanks for stopping by the TravelCommons.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_198.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #198 — London Vacation Rental Woes; Hertz\'s EV Retreat','London\'s vacation rental market is broken and Booking.com is no help. Also, Hertz\'s EV retreat, Sioux City, Iowa embraces their SUX airport code, a flash-in-the-pan airport delay crypto betting app.','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-198-london-vacation-rental-woes-hertzs-ev-retreat','','','2026-01-28 10:48:45','2026-01-28 16:48:45','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4436',0,'post','',1),
(4437,1,'2024-02-29 06:30:39','2024-02-29 11:30:39','[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/IMG_4238-EDIT-400x400.jpg\" alt=\"fence gate with a sign saying Beware of The Bull\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /> Door to Booking.com Customer Service Center?[/caption]\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It\'s the sustainability episode of the TravelCommons podcast, talking about my experience renting a Tesla from Hertz and my road-tested list of Christmas gift suggestions for the frequent traveler(s) in your life. I also talk about some new TSA biometrics equipment I faced (literally) in Nashville and yet another update on the EU\'s ETIAS system and the US\'s Real ID. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_198.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #198: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN after a pretty solid three weeks of travel -- a business trip to the Boston suburbs, then down to New York to meet up with Irene and Claire for a long weekend of knocking around Brooklyn and Queens, and then, after a day of reloading suitcases and picking up the cat, driving up to Chicago for friends and family. When we got back home last Friday, I was ready to just stay put for a little bit. Which is about all it will be because we head out to the UK in less than two weeks.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The Boston trip came up all of a sudden and I think is only my second post-pandemic business trip -- <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/06/15/podcast-176-why-business-travel-is-coming-back-learning-airport-history/\" title=\"\">my first was down to Miami in May 2021</a>.&nbsp; Maybe I’ve timed out of my road warrior status, because everything felt a bit off. Flying BNA-BOS, my choices were JetBlue or Delta. I don’t have status on either, so I choose JetBlue because it’s the earlier flight out. No status means I also have to pay $80-100 to reserve a seat after paying $450 for a one-way ticket. I could’ve expensed it through, but the annoyance vein in my temple started to pulsate. How dare you, JetBlue! And in return for my righteous anger, I get assigned, at the gate, a middle seat in the last boarding group. I resign myself to having to gate check my carry-on. But then when boarding is called, the pre-boarding announcement is for JetBlue <em>and</em> American elites. Ugh! Such an amateur mistake — not keeping track of alliances and partnerships.&nbsp; If I’d put my Aadvantage Platinum number into my reservation instead of my plain TrueBlue number, I probably could’ve saved myself all that righteous anger and vein throbbing. Luckily though, I always carry my physical elite cards with me, so I show my Aadvantage Platinum card to the agent, get waved on, and find an empty bin right above my seat.&nbsp; I was a little concerned about fitting my big carry-on in an A220 -- it was my first time on this plane -- but no problem. The overhead bins on this plane are huge.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>After my window seat neighbor got settled, I put on my Bose noise-canceling headphones, dialed up the white noise app on my iPhone, and, middle seat be damned, nodded off sitting up straight. One thing I <em>haven’t</em> lost while working virtually -- being able to fall asleep even before my 7am flight rotates off the runway.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — funkyGarden by Jeris (c) copyright 2020 Licensed under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/VJ_Memes/61356 Ft: airtone, SackJo22, Analog By Nature</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>It wouldn’t be a proper Following Up section without yet another update on the US’s Real ID or the EU’s ETIAS rolling delays. Let’s do ETIAS, the EU’s pre-travel authorization system that gobs of click-bait websites have mislabeled a “European Visa.” The EU has tweaked their go-live date again -- from last month’s <a href=\"https://www.schengenvisainfo.com/news/no-etias-wont-become-operational-in-2024-eu-sources-say/\">May 2025</a> to a less definite/more nebulous “<a href=\"https://travel-europe.europa.eu/etias/what-etias_en#etias-in-a-nutshell\">mid-2025</a>” -- which could be May or June or July. But I’m not sure why anyone in their right mind would want to flip the switch on this in the summer, during Europe’s peak tourist season. I’m taking the over on this; I don’t see it going live any earlier than October 2025.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The US, on the other hand, seems to be sticking to their May 2025 date -- for now. Remember, the initial deadline for needing a Real ID to board a commercial flight was January 2018 -- which then got kicked to October 2020. But then COVID hit and in April 2020, soon after just about every government building was emptied out and locked up, the bright sparks at Dept of Homeland Security decided that driving crowds of people toward closed DMVs to replace their old driver’s licenses wouldn’t be great and pushed the deadline a year to October 2021. Which, we’ll all remember, wasn’t <em>that</em> much better -- at least with regards to DMV accessibility. I remember lining up outside, in December 2021, in Chicago at a DMV to renew my driver’s license. And so another push, 19 months to May 2023. And then last December, they pushed it another 2 years to May 2025 because -- who knows. So the US has got nothing to say to the EU. But on my flights a couple of weeks ago, I started seeing new signage “RealID coming in May 2025”; even the Delta app, when I checked in for my BOS-LGA flight, had a banner about it. Huh? I mean, why wind everyone up about a deadline that’s 18 months away and, if the kabuki theater of the last 5 years is any guide, will get pushed again.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Now where DHS is moving much faster is rolling out biometrics to airport and customs checkpoints. Over the years here on TravelCommons, I have talked about my experiences with biometrics usage -- starting with my first fingerprint scan back in the late ‘90’s so I could skip the US customs line at Toronto-Pearson Airport, then in 2008 letting the first iteration of CLEAR scan my eyeballs in exchange for a shortcut to the front of the TSA line, then in 2011 a background check and another fingerprint scan for Global Entry so I could skip all the US customs lines -- so yes, I’ll do damn close to anything to skip an airport line. But over the past couple of years, it feels like DHS has been turning it up a notch. October 2021, our first international flight in a couple of years, on AirFrance, the gate agent took our picture when boarding and didn’t need to see our boarding pass. <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/06/20/podcast-194-best-laid-travel-plans-roaming-entropy/\" title=\"\">Last April, returning from the Netherlands</a>, the Global Entry kiosk no longer needed to scan my fingerprints; a quick side glance at the camera was enough to recognize me and let me through. And now, a couple of weeks ago, at the BNA PreCheck line, a big sign “Identity Verification Technology. Biometrics technology is available at this checkpoint. Your participation is optional.” This is new; it wasn’t there 2 months ago when we flew out to Maine. I give my driver’s license to the TSA guy standing next to something like a camera on a stick; it looks a bit like the electronic customs gates at LHR. He puts my ID in the machine, tells me to look at the camera, then looks at the screen and waves me through. A couple of things here -- I’m not sure how this is different from the TSA guy looking at my face and comparing it to the picture on my license; and I didn’t see any way that my participation was optional. And I certainly didn’t get to skip any lines for the biometric giveaway. I’ve been trying since April to get someone from TSA or DHS on the podcast to talk about this biometrics push and have gotten nothing but repeated “I’ll get back to you soon” from the TSA press secretary. Now maybe this new equipment gets us to the automated checkpoints I’ve been through in some smaller European airports -- which could shorten the security lines -- but I had to dig pretty deep into a bunch of jargon-y <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/sites/default/files/tsa_idm_roadmap_2022-03-01_508c_final.pdf\">PDF documents</a> on the TSA website to get even a hint of any benefits to the regular traveler. I dunno, maybe all the benefits are waiting on Real ID. Once everyone has that little gold star on their license, it’s clear sailing.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter (X?) message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page, or on the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can skip all that social media stuff and post your comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — Xena’s Kiss / Medea’s Kiss by mwic (c) copyright 2018 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mwic/58883</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Renting a Tesla</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>After 2, 3? episodes of <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/08/24/podcast-195-checking-out-hollands-tulip-festival/\" title=\"\">nattering on</a> about electric vehicles, I decided to take up Hertz on their incessant email offers and rented a Tesla for my Boston business trip -- giving EVs a try, but on someone else’s dime. The client site was only 18 miles from BOS and Google Maps told me there was a Tesla Supercharger nearby, so range risk wouldn’t be an issue. A couple of days before my flight, Hertz sent me an email which was pretty much a crash course on operating a Tesla, pictures, text, links to YouTube videos. I was both impressed and slightly overwhelmed, but I grabbed a beer out of the fridge -- a 16 oz, this was going to take a bit -- and ground through all the email links -- which, I think, saved me time trying to figure things out in the Hertz lot.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Over the past couple of years, we’ve talked about <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/05/09/podcast-175-how-to-find-local-tour-guides-rebuild-travel-muscles/\" title=\"\">barren Hertz lots</a>; <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/04/10/podcast-174-how-the-pros-plan-their-taproom-tourism/\" title=\"\">renters queueing up for cars to appear</a>. So when the Hertz employee pointed me to an EV aisle full up with 10-12 Tesla Model 3’s and a couple of Polestars it took me a moment to process all my options. My usual strategy, when I have a choice, is to run through the cars on the aisle and pick the one with the lowest mileage. But I wasn’t quite sure if that worked with a Tesla, and if it did, I didn’t recall from my crash course where to find the odometer. So, I chose a black Model 3 that had the least beat-up wheel rims -- trying to minimize any damage arguments at return time.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>After I got in, powered it up, and got acclimated to the massive tablet screen in the center console, I saw that the battery level was at 69%. One of the crash course’s tutorials said it’d be at 100% and I’d be charged if I returned it under 80%. I snapped a picture of the battery display and told the guy at the exit gate. He shrugged and told me to bring it back at the same level. He didn\'t seem very concerned.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming out of the lot, the Tesla drove fine. After a couple of days, the battery had dropped into the mid-40s, so I decided to try out the Tesla Supercharger network. Tesla’s nav app directed me to a nearby shopping center. The chargers were in the farthest back corner of the Target parking lot. I backed in -- looking at the other Teslas, it seemed the thing to do -- plugged in the charger, and was a little shocked to see that it would take an <em>hour</em> to get me charged up to 100%. Now Irene would have no problem with this -- an excuse to spend an hour shopping in Target? Bring it on. Me, not so much. Luckily, there was a Chipotle across the street, so I locked the car and walked over to grab lunch. When I got back, the car still had another 5 minutes before it got to 100%. I’m glad I didn’t wait ‘til it got down to 20%.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Though maybe I should’ve waited, because by my last day, I’d driven off a chunk of that 100% charge and, heading back to BOS, I wasn’t completely confident that I’d arrive with the battery at the 69% level I’d picked it up at. And I guess that’s a place where an EV rental requires a bit more logistical planning. A regular gas car -- there’s loads of places I could hit to quickly splash in a couple of last-minute gallons to keep the fuel gauge on Full. An EV? The Tesla nav app vectored me way off my usual I-90/I-93 tunnel routes to BOS, taking me way east, past some marshes just off the bay, to the back corner of another Target parking lot where I backed in amid a half-dozen other Teslas, their drivers all sitting there, working their phones, waiting for their cars to charge. I waited 10 minutes, splashed in enough electricity to get the battery gauge to 75%, and lit out. But I probably didn’t need to worry. Turning the car in, I told the Hertz guy I was under 80% charge because I got the car at 69%. No problem, he said. He didn\'t seem very concerned. Honestly, I’ve never seen Hertz guys so nonchalant about their cars; especially after Hertz said in their last earnings call that <a href=\"https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-10-26/hertz-misses-quarterly-profit-estimates-as-its-fleet-costs-rise\">EV repair costs are about double what they pay for gas-powered cars</a>.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>On the shuttle bus to the terminal, I opened the email receipt and saw that the $15 charge from my first Supercharger visit had made it onto my invoice. A couple of things crossed my mind -- definitely less than what I would’ve spent filling up a gas car, and I was impressed by the quick turnaround time because the toll charge I incurred two days before that, when leaving Logan through one of the tunnels, still hasn’t shown up and so is going to raise some eyebrows in A/P when I eventually try to expense it through. So all told, pretty good experience; kudos to Hertz. And now they’re trying to get me to rent a Polestar at LHR in a couple of weeks for our drive through the Devon countryside. Ehh, I don’t think I’ll push my luck.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/bridges/15563\">i knew</a> by bridges (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp;Ft: shannonsongs</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>2023 Traveler\'s Gift Guide</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Every couple of years around this time I update my gift guide to give folks suggestions for the frequent traveler in their lives. Or, if you are the frequent traveler, a list of hints you might want to drop on family members looking for ideas. The first time I did a gift guide, I published Thanksgiving week so people would have it for the Black Friday sales. But now with the Christmas shopping season having blown past that traditional Thanksgiving Friday start and with radio stations barely able to wait for the kids to finish counting their Halloween candy haul before <a href=\"https://www.fox5ny.com/news/radio-stations-christmas-music-holiday-season\">flipping the switch on their All-Christmas-Music format</a>, I’ve dragged the publishing date up to the front of November. The <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">2020 gift guide</a> was probably the most unique. All the restaurant lockdowns and indoor dining limits had us eating in our hotel rooms which put bring-your-own dining sets and in-room coffee brewing kits onto the gift list. The disappearance of airport and in-flight mask mandates means that #1 gift on that year’s list -- comfortable masks -- has also dropped off.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>What hasn’t dropped off and is regularly at the top of my list is <strong>Battery Packs</strong>.&nbsp; We’ve talked <em>a lot</em> about how we can’t easily travel anymore without a working mobile phone. It holds our boarding passes, gives us gate change and flight delay notifications, unlocks our car (if we’ve rented a Tesla), routes us around traffic jams, and connects us to our Airbnb hosts. So having that second or third charge immediately available is critical to making it through a long travel day. I carry a <a href=\"https://amzn.to/470YN1T\" title=\"\">Zendure SuperMini power bank</a> in my bag because its USB-C port quickly tops up my iPhone while the USB-A port takes care of my Samsung tablet. I’ve updated Irene’s lipstick charger to <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3u6IbXX\" title=\"\">an Anker with a flip-out Lighting connector</a> so she doesn’t have to fish around in her purse for a cable. But there are a lot of choices; just pick one.. or two.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Noise Canceling Headphones</strong> are also a perennial on my gift lists. I’ve been carrying Bose headphones for at least 15 years. Back then, the QC-3’s were de rigueur for any self-respecting road warrior. The “ah ha” moment for me was on a United Express Dash 8 turboprop flying to Sioux City, IA with an intermediate stop in Waterloo, IA. I was in a window seat on the wing and the droning of the prop just encased me; I couldn’t think of anything else -- until I flicked the switch on my Bose. I’m now on my 3rd pair, the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3Mzl3Yx\" title=\"\">Bose 700’s</a>. They’re not compact but they continue to earn their space in my travel bag. I picked up a pair of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/49EsZld\" title=\"\">Apple AirPod Pros</a> on a good Prime Day sale last month and so was able to compare the Bose and AirPod noise canceling on my Boston and New York flights. The AirPods are good, but not as good as the Bose. And the battery doesn’t last as long, which makes sense given the size differential. For me, the AirPod Pros are good for a 2-2.5-hr flight, but for, say, my upcoming UK trip, I’ll be packing the Bose.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://amzn.to/40vbaAK\" title=\"\">Apple AirTags</a></strong> earned a place on the list last October when I could see, sitting on the plane, that our bags weren’t going to make the connection in Newark on our way home from Rome. This didn’t get our bag to us, but it did save us the 30 minutes of suspense waiting for them to come out on the carousel, and let us instead go straight to the baggage service agent, be the first in line to file our report, and then head home after a very long travel day. They were definitely worth the purchase price just for that.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>For someone making the transition from virtual work to physical world road warrior, how ‘bout a <strong>Black 20-inch Carry-On Bag</strong>. Black not only makes you look thinner, it makes your bag look thinner to gate agents hunting for bag-sizer bait. My daughter had a baby blue roller bag for the longest time. She loved that color, and it was easy to spot on the luggage carousel, which was a good thing because it ended up there <em>a lot</em> because gate agents were always pulling her out of line to gate check that bag. So get a nondescript black bag with a set of clever, neon-colored luggage tags as a stocking stuffer. If you’re flying a budget airline that’s a stickler on size, get a hard-shell bag. It’ll keep its dimensions better when overstuffed, and the polycarbonate shell will slide past the metal bars of the sizer easier than the ballistic nylon of a soft-sided bag. You could range up in size to a 22-incher, but a 20-incher should safely fit in the overhead of just about every plane. I’m a big fan of the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3MwJLZr\" title=\"\">TravelPro line</a>; for me they strike the right balance between price and quality. But there are lots -- maybe way too many -- options out there for you to choose from.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Here’s a new list entrant -- a <strong>Travel Power Strip</strong>. Potentially one of the least sexy things I could put on a gift list, but I’ve always tried to populate these with the things I actually use -- and find myself needing the most when I’m on the road. And you think after, I dunno, 20 years of travelers needing to charge a bunch of electronics -- PCs, mobile phones, tablets -- hotels, B&amp;B’s, resorts would put outlets <em>that work</em> on the top of flat surfaces like nightstands, end tables, desks, …. But I’d say that on half of my trips <em>this year</em>, I had to move furniture or get down on my hands and knees to find a single outlet. So you can get one of those cube-shaped travel adapters that show up on most travel gift guides, and still have to crawl under furniture every time you need to plug something new in. And that’s why I recommend a compact power strip -- you move the nightstand once to reach down and plug it in, and then set the other end -- the end with the outlets, the end you’ll regularly need easy access to -- <em>on top</em> of the nightstand. Any power strip you buy nowadays will have some mix of USB and regular AC outlets. <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3SpsSng\" title=\"\">Anker</a> has a seemingly infinite range of them. But if Anker is a little boring for you, way back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/01/25/podcast-159-planning-the-trip-of-a-lifetime-in-southeast-asia/\">episode #159</a> in January 2020, long-time listener Arnoud Heijnis gave high marks to a <em>circular</em> power strip called the<a href=\"https://amzn.to/3SyAXGa\" title=\"\"> Power Bagel</a>. Three years on, MOGICS, the manufacturer, now sells an updated version called the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/40reQ6o\" title=\"\">Super Bagel</a>. Of course! With a lot of positive reviews confirming Arnoud’s view that the circle, the bagel shape, let you use every outlet, even when using those big wall wart power supplies</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>So there you go, 5 gift ideas to fit all budgets, and with more than enough time to beat any early on-line shipping deadline. Check out the show notes for links, and happy shopping!</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>Note: None of these suggestions are paid endorsements. This post contains links to Amazon where I can earn a small commission from qualifying purchases.</em></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"className\":\"has-medium-font-size\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul>\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #197</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As always, you can find us and listen to the current episodes on all the main podcast sites -- Apple Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, Google Podcasts, and Amazon Music. And you can always Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page at TravelCommons.com for a transcript of the episode and links to items on the gift guide. If you’re not yet subscribed, there’s a drop down Subscribe menu at the top of TravelCommon’s home page. And along the side of the page, you’ll find links to all the TravelCommons’ socials.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to mpeacock on Twitter, write them on the TravelCommons page on Facebook or Instagram, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com.&nbsp; And thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in emails, Tweets and post comments on the website. I really appreciate it.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And until we talk again, safe travels; and thanks for stopping by the TravelCommons.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_198.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n</ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #198 — London Vacation Rental Woes','','inherit','closed','closed','','4436-revision-v1','','','2024-02-29 06:30:39','2024-02-29 11:30:39','',4436,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4437',0,'revision','',0),
(4438,1,'2024-02-29 06:33:29','2024-02-29 11:33:29','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/IMG_4238-EDIT-400x400.jpg\" alt=\"fence gate with a sign saying Beware of The Bull\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /> Door to Booking.com Customer Service Center?[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It\'s the sustainability episode of the TravelCommons podcast, talking about my experience renting a Tesla from Hertz and my road-tested list of Christmas gift suggestions for the frequent traveler(s) in your life. I also talk about some new TSA biometrics equipment I faced (literally) in Nashville and yet another update on the EU\'s ETIAS system and the US\'s Real ID. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_198.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #198: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN after an extended holiday break that had us in the UK for the back half of November -- the first week in Dorset on the south coast doing a bit of muddy hiking and then knocking around London the second week. As I mentioned a few episodes back, Irene and I took BA’s direct flights between Nashville and Heathrow. Our flights were on 787’s, but apparently the route has become popular enough for BA to announce they’re upgauging it to a triple 7. Interesting given that Nashville isn’t a hub airport. Had what has become my standard flight-to-Nashville moment -- helping a guy rearrange the overhead bin so he could fit his guitar in. Not sure if there are enough musicians to fill those extra seats though. Music tourists? Bachelorette parties? I dunno, but the Nashville airport will need to get their new international baggage claim hall sorted before then. When we arrived, we were told to get our luggage and then go to the immigration line -- the exact opposite of every other international arrival flow I’ve ever done. There was only one Global Entry terminal and it was over by the luggage belt rather than by the immigration line. So we all queued up for it while we waited for our luggage to arrive. After a 45-minute wait (and a lot of AirTag checking), we grabbed our bags and headed over to immigration, went to the Global Entry line which seemed to act like a Clear line for TSA -- we got a line cut to the next immigration agent, but still had to go through all the questions and photo taking. It was weird, inefficient, very unlike my recent arrivals at ORD and EWR. Maybe they just need more reps to work out the kinks, or bring in a more experienced manager. Whatever it is, they need to fix it before bigger jets and more people show up.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>After that jaunt in November, we’ve pretty much stayed put, with our spare bedroom being on the receiving end of travel -- our daughter Claire was here for a couple of weeks over Christmas and New Year’s, one couple who’d never been to Nashville before (amazing!) and two other couples for whom Nashville, handily enough, was 8 hours down the road on their first day driving to somewhere. You could say “Great! Chance to be a tourist in our own town!” but it’s more about being the <em>tour guide</em>, which, in Nashville, comes with the responsibility of having informed opinions about things like the best hot chicken joint and the best Broadway honky-tonk. Nashville’s Hot Chicken Week was a couple weeks ago, which gave me the excuse (as if I needed one) to buy the jumbo jar of Mylanta and hit every hot chicken joint to figure out the best -- which for me is <a href=\"https://www.reds615kitchen.com/\">Red’s 615 Kitchen</a> in the West End. I can’t say I’ve been <em>that</em> meticulous about my honky-tonk opinions; one can dodge only so many bachelorette parties and watch only so many cover bands. And then I’ve gotta keep finding new cool places to take our visitors the <em>next</em> time they pass through town. I’m telling you, this tour guide thing can be a bit exhausting.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — funkyGarden by Jeris (c) copyright 2020 Licensed under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/VJ_Memes/61356 Ft: airtone, SackJo22, Analog By Nature</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>It wouldn’t be a proper Following Up section without yet another update on the US’s Real ID or the EU’s ETIAS rolling delays. Let’s do ETIAS, the EU’s pre-travel authorization system that gobs of click-bait websites have mislabeled a “European Visa.” The EU has tweaked their go-live date again -- from last month’s <a href=\"https://www.schengenvisainfo.com/news/no-etias-wont-become-operational-in-2024-eu-sources-say/\">May 2025</a> to a less definite/more nebulous “<a href=\"https://travel-europe.europa.eu/etias/what-etias_en#etias-in-a-nutshell\">mid-2025</a>” -- which could be May or June or July. But I’m not sure why anyone in their right mind would want to flip the switch on this in the summer, during Europe’s peak tourist season. I’m taking the over on this; I don’t see it going live any earlier than October 2025.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The US, on the other hand, seems to be sticking to their May 2025 date -- for now. Remember, the initial deadline for needing a Real ID to board a commercial flight was January 2018 -- which then got kicked to October 2020. But then COVID hit and in April 2020, soon after just about every government building was emptied out and locked up, the bright sparks at Dept of Homeland Security decided that driving crowds of people toward closed DMVs to replace their old driver’s licenses wouldn’t be great and pushed the deadline a year to October 2021. Which, we’ll all remember, wasn’t <em>that</em> much better -- at least with regards to DMV accessibility. I remember lining up outside, in December 2021, in Chicago at a DMV to renew my driver’s license. And so another push, 19 months to May 2023. And then last December, they pushed it another 2 years to May 2025 because -- who knows. So the US has got nothing to say to the EU. But on my flights a couple of weeks ago, I started seeing new signage “RealID coming in May 2025”; even the Delta app, when I checked in for my BOS-LGA flight, had a banner about it. Huh? I mean, why wind everyone up about a deadline that’s 18 months away and, if the kabuki theater of the last 5 years is any guide, will get pushed again.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Now where DHS is moving much faster is rolling out biometrics to airport and customs checkpoints. Over the years here on TravelCommons, I have talked about my experiences with biometrics usage -- starting with my first fingerprint scan back in the late ‘90’s so I could skip the US customs line at Toronto-Pearson Airport, then in 2008 letting the first iteration of CLEAR scan my eyeballs in exchange for a shortcut to the front of the TSA line, then in 2011 a background check and another fingerprint scan for Global Entry so I could skip all the US customs lines -- so yes, I’ll do damn close to anything to skip an airport line. But over the past couple of years, it feels like DHS has been turning it up a notch. October 2021, our first international flight in a couple of years, on AirFrance, the gate agent took our picture when boarding and didn’t need to see our boarding pass. <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/06/20/podcast-194-best-laid-travel-plans-roaming-entropy/\" title=\"\">Last April, returning from the Netherlands</a>, the Global Entry kiosk no longer needed to scan my fingerprints; a quick side glance at the camera was enough to recognize me and let me through. And now, a couple of weeks ago, at the BNA PreCheck line, a big sign “Identity Verification Technology. Biometrics technology is available at this checkpoint. Your participation is optional.” This is new; it wasn’t there 2 months ago when we flew out to Maine. I give my driver’s license to the TSA guy standing next to something like a camera on a stick; it looks a bit like the electronic customs gates at LHR. He puts my ID in the machine, tells me to look at the camera, then looks at the screen and waves me through. A couple of things here -- I’m not sure how this is different from the TSA guy looking at my face and comparing it to the picture on my license; and I didn’t see any way that my participation was optional. And I certainly didn’t get to skip any lines for the biometric giveaway. I’ve been trying since April to get someone from TSA or DHS on the podcast to talk about this biometrics push and have gotten nothing but repeated “I’ll get back to you soon” from the TSA press secretary. Now maybe this new equipment gets us to the automated checkpoints I’ve been through in some smaller European airports -- which could shorten the security lines -- but I had to dig pretty deep into a bunch of jargon-y <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/sites/default/files/tsa_idm_roadmap_2022-03-01_508c_final.pdf\">PDF documents</a> on the TSA website to get even a hint of any benefits to the regular traveler. I dunno, maybe all the benefits are waiting on Real ID. Once everyone has that little gold star on their license, it’s clear sailing.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter (X?) message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page, or on the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can skip all that social media stuff and post your comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — Xena’s Kiss / Medea’s Kiss by mwic (c) copyright 2018 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mwic/58883</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Renting a Tesla</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>After 2, 3? episodes of <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/08/24/podcast-195-checking-out-hollands-tulip-festival/\" title=\"\">nattering on</a> about electric vehicles, I decided to take up Hertz on their incessant email offers and rented a Tesla for my Boston business trip -- giving EVs a try, but on someone else’s dime. The client site was only 18 miles from BOS and Google Maps told me there was a Tesla Supercharger nearby, so range risk wouldn’t be an issue. A couple of days before my flight, Hertz sent me an email which was pretty much a crash course on operating a Tesla, pictures, text, links to YouTube videos. I was both impressed and slightly overwhelmed, but I grabbed a beer out of the fridge -- a 16 oz, this was going to take a bit -- and ground through all the email links -- which, I think, saved me time trying to figure things out in the Hertz lot.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Over the past couple of years, we’ve talked about <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/05/09/podcast-175-how-to-find-local-tour-guides-rebuild-travel-muscles/\" title=\"\">barren Hertz lots</a>; <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/04/10/podcast-174-how-the-pros-plan-their-taproom-tourism/\" title=\"\">renters queueing up for cars to appear</a>. So when the Hertz employee pointed me to an EV aisle full up with 10-12 Tesla Model 3’s and a couple of Polestars it took me a moment to process all my options. My usual strategy, when I have a choice, is to run through the cars on the aisle and pick the one with the lowest mileage. But I wasn’t quite sure if that worked with a Tesla, and if it did, I didn’t recall from my crash course where to find the odometer. So, I chose a black Model 3 that had the least beat-up wheel rims -- trying to minimize any damage arguments at return time.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>After I got in, powered it up, and got acclimated to the massive tablet screen in the center console, I saw that the battery level was at 69%. One of the crash course’s tutorials said it’d be at 100% and I’d be charged if I returned it under 80%. I snapped a picture of the battery display and told the guy at the exit gate. He shrugged and told me to bring it back at the same level. He didn\'t seem very concerned.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming out of the lot, the Tesla drove fine. After a couple of days, the battery had dropped into the mid-40s, so I decided to try out the Tesla Supercharger network. Tesla’s nav app directed me to a nearby shopping center. The chargers were in the farthest back corner of the Target parking lot. I backed in -- looking at the other Teslas, it seemed the thing to do -- plugged in the charger, and was a little shocked to see that it would take an <em>hour</em> to get me charged up to 100%. Now Irene would have no problem with this -- an excuse to spend an hour shopping in Target? Bring it on. Me, not so much. Luckily, there was a Chipotle across the street, so I locked the car and walked over to grab lunch. When I got back, the car still had another 5 minutes before it got to 100%. I’m glad I didn’t wait ‘til it got down to 20%.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Though maybe I should’ve waited, because by my last day, I’d driven off a chunk of that 100% charge and, heading back to BOS, I wasn’t completely confident that I’d arrive with the battery at the 69% level I’d picked it up at. And I guess that’s a place where an EV rental requires a bit more logistical planning. A regular gas car -- there’s loads of places I could hit to quickly splash in a couple of last-minute gallons to keep the fuel gauge on Full. An EV? The Tesla nav app vectored me way off my usual I-90/I-93 tunnel routes to BOS, taking me way east, past some marshes just off the bay, to the back corner of another Target parking lot where I backed in amid a half-dozen other Teslas, their drivers all sitting there, working their phones, waiting for their cars to charge. I waited 10 minutes, splashed in enough electricity to get the battery gauge to 75%, and lit out. But I probably didn’t need to worry. Turning the car in, I told the Hertz guy I was under 80% charge because I got the car at 69%. No problem, he said. He didn\'t seem very concerned. Honestly, I’ve never seen Hertz guys so nonchalant about their cars; especially after Hertz said in their last earnings call that <a href=\"https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-10-26/hertz-misses-quarterly-profit-estimates-as-its-fleet-costs-rise\">EV repair costs are about double what they pay for gas-powered cars</a>.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>On the shuttle bus to the terminal, I opened the email receipt and saw that the $15 charge from my first Supercharger visit had made it onto my invoice. A couple of things crossed my mind -- definitely less than what I would’ve spent filling up a gas car, and I was impressed by the quick turnaround time because the toll charge I incurred two days before that, when leaving Logan through one of the tunnels, still hasn’t shown up and so is going to raise some eyebrows in A/P when I eventually try to expense it through. So all told, pretty good experience; kudos to Hertz. And now they’re trying to get me to rent a Polestar at LHR in a couple of weeks for our drive through the Devon countryside. Ehh, I don’t think I’ll push my luck.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/bridges/15563\">i knew</a> by bridges (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp;Ft: shannonsongs</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>2023 Traveler\'s Gift Guide</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Every couple of years around this time I update my gift guide to give folks suggestions for the frequent traveler in their lives. Or, if you are the frequent traveler, a list of hints you might want to drop on family members looking for ideas. The first time I did a gift guide, I published Thanksgiving week so people would have it for the Black Friday sales. But now with the Christmas shopping season having blown past that traditional Thanksgiving Friday start and with radio stations barely able to wait for the kids to finish counting their Halloween candy haul before <a href=\"https://www.fox5ny.com/news/radio-stations-christmas-music-holiday-season\">flipping the switch on their All-Christmas-Music format</a>, I’ve dragged the publishing date up to the front of November. The <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">2020 gift guide</a> was probably the most unique. All the restaurant lockdowns and indoor dining limits had us eating in our hotel rooms which put bring-your-own dining sets and in-room coffee brewing kits onto the gift list. The disappearance of airport and in-flight mask mandates means that #1 gift on that year’s list -- comfortable masks -- has also dropped off.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>What hasn’t dropped off and is regularly at the top of my list is <strong>Battery Packs</strong>.&nbsp; We’ve talked <em>a lot</em> about how we can’t easily travel anymore without a working mobile phone. It holds our boarding passes, gives us gate change and flight delay notifications, unlocks our car (if we’ve rented a Tesla), routes us around traffic jams, and connects us to our Airbnb hosts. So having that second or third charge immediately available is critical to making it through a long travel day. I carry a <a href=\"https://amzn.to/470YN1T\" title=\"\">Zendure SuperMini power bank</a> in my bag because its USB-C port quickly tops up my iPhone while the USB-A port takes care of my Samsung tablet. I’ve updated Irene’s lipstick charger to <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3u6IbXX\" title=\"\">an Anker with a flip-out Lighting connector</a> so she doesn’t have to fish around in her purse for a cable. But there are a lot of choices; just pick one.. or two.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Noise Canceling Headphones</strong> are also a perennial on my gift lists. I’ve been carrying Bose headphones for at least 15 years. Back then, the QC-3’s were de rigueur for any self-respecting road warrior. The “ah ha” moment for me was on a United Express Dash 8 turboprop flying to Sioux City, IA with an intermediate stop in Waterloo, IA. I was in a window seat on the wing and the droning of the prop just encased me; I couldn’t think of anything else -- until I flicked the switch on my Bose. I’m now on my 3rd pair, the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3Mzl3Yx\" title=\"\">Bose 700’s</a>. They’re not compact but they continue to earn their space in my travel bag. I picked up a pair of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/49EsZld\" title=\"\">Apple AirPod Pros</a> on a good Prime Day sale last month and so was able to compare the Bose and AirPod noise canceling on my Boston and New York flights. The AirPods are good, but not as good as the Bose. And the battery doesn’t last as long, which makes sense given the size differential. For me, the AirPod Pros are good for a 2-2.5-hr flight, but for, say, my upcoming UK trip, I’ll be packing the Bose.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://amzn.to/40vbaAK\" title=\"\">Apple AirTags</a></strong> earned a place on the list last October when I could see, sitting on the plane, that our bags weren’t going to make the connection in Newark on our way home from Rome. This didn’t get our bag to us, but it did save us the 30 minutes of suspense waiting for them to come out on the carousel, and let us instead go straight to the baggage service agent, be the first in line to file our report, and then head home after a very long travel day. They were definitely worth the purchase price just for that.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>For someone making the transition from virtual work to physical world road warrior, how ‘bout a <strong>Black 20-inch Carry-On Bag</strong>. Black not only makes you look thinner, it makes your bag look thinner to gate agents hunting for bag-sizer bait. My daughter had a baby blue roller bag for the longest time. She loved that color, and it was easy to spot on the luggage carousel, which was a good thing because it ended up there <em>a lot</em> because gate agents were always pulling her out of line to gate check that bag. So get a nondescript black bag with a set of clever, neon-colored luggage tags as a stocking stuffer. If you’re flying a budget airline that’s a stickler on size, get a hard-shell bag. It’ll keep its dimensions better when overstuffed, and the polycarbonate shell will slide past the metal bars of the sizer easier than the ballistic nylon of a soft-sided bag. You could range up in size to a 22-incher, but a 20-incher should safely fit in the overhead of just about every plane. I’m a big fan of the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3MwJLZr\" title=\"\">TravelPro line</a>; for me they strike the right balance between price and quality. But there are lots -- maybe way too many -- options out there for you to choose from.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Here’s a new list entrant -- a <strong>Travel Power Strip</strong>. Potentially one of the least sexy things I could put on a gift list, but I’ve always tried to populate these with the things I actually use -- and find myself needing the most when I’m on the road. And you think after, I dunno, 20 years of travelers needing to charge a bunch of electronics -- PCs, mobile phones, tablets -- hotels, B&amp;B’s, resorts would put outlets <em>that work</em> on the top of flat surfaces like nightstands, end tables, desks, …. But I’d say that on half of my trips <em>this year</em>, I had to move furniture or get down on my hands and knees to find a single outlet. So you can get one of those cube-shaped travel adapters that show up on most travel gift guides, and still have to crawl under furniture every time you need to plug something new in. And that’s why I recommend a compact power strip -- you move the nightstand once to reach down and plug it in, and then set the other end -- the end with the outlets, the end you’ll regularly need easy access to -- <em>on top</em> of the nightstand. Any power strip you buy nowadays will have some mix of USB and regular AC outlets. <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3SpsSng\" title=\"\">Anker</a> has a seemingly infinite range of them. But if Anker is a little boring for you, way back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/01/25/podcast-159-planning-the-trip-of-a-lifetime-in-southeast-asia/\">episode #159</a> in January 2020, long-time listener Arnoud Heijnis gave high marks to a <em>circular</em> power strip called the<a href=\"https://amzn.to/3SyAXGa\" title=\"\"> Power Bagel</a>. Three years on, MOGICS, the manufacturer, now sells an updated version called the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/40reQ6o\" title=\"\">Super Bagel</a>. Of course! With a lot of positive reviews confirming Arnoud’s view that the circle, the bagel shape, let you use every outlet, even when using those big wall wart power supplies</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>So there you go, 5 gift ideas to fit all budgets, and with more than enough time to beat any early on-line shipping deadline. Check out the show notes for links, and happy shopping!</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>Note: None of these suggestions are paid endorsements. This post contains links to Amazon where I can earn a small commission from qualifying purchases.</em></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"className\":\"has-medium-font-size\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul>\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #197</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As always, you can find us and listen to the current episodes on all the main podcast sites -- Apple Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, Google Podcasts, and Amazon Music. And you can always Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page at TravelCommons.com for a transcript of the episode and links to items on the gift guide. If you’re not yet subscribed, there’s a drop down Subscribe menu at the top of TravelCommon’s home page. And along the side of the page, you’ll find links to all the TravelCommons’ socials.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to mpeacock on Twitter, write them on the TravelCommons page on Facebook or Instagram, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com.&nbsp; And thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in emails, Tweets and post comments on the website. I really appreciate it.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And until we talk again, safe travels; and thanks for stopping by the TravelCommons.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_198.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n</ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #198 — London Vacation Rental Woes','','inherit','closed','closed','','4436-revision-v1','','','2024-02-29 06:33:29','2024-02-29 11:33:29','',4436,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4438',0,'revision','',0),
(4439,1,'2024-02-29 08:07:59','2024-02-29 13:07:59','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/IMG_4238-EDIT-400x400.jpg\" alt=\"fence gate with a sign saying Beware of The Bull\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /> Door to Booking.com Customer Service Center?[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It\'s the sustainability episode of the TravelCommons podcast, talking about my experience renting a Tesla from Hertz and my road-tested list of Christmas gift suggestions for the frequent traveler(s) in your life. I also talk about some new TSA biometrics equipment I faced (literally) in Nashville and yet another update on the EU\'s ETIAS system and the US\'s Real ID. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_198.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #198: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN after an extended holiday break that had us in the UK for the back half of November -- the first week in Dorset on the south coast doing a bit of muddy hiking and then knocking around London the second week. As I mentioned a few episodes back, Irene and I took BA’s direct flights between Nashville and Heathrow. Our flights were on 787’s, but apparently the route has become popular enough for BA to announce they’re upgauging it to a triple 7. Interesting given that Nashville isn’t a hub airport. Had what has become my standard flight-to-Nashville moment -- helping a guy rearrange the overhead bin so he could fit his guitar in. Not sure if there are enough musicians to fill those extra seats though. Music tourists? Bachelorette parties? I dunno, but the Nashville airport will need to get their new international baggage claim hall sorted before then. When we arrived, we were told to get our luggage and then go to the immigration line -- the exact opposite of every other international arrival flow I’ve ever done. There was only one Global Entry terminal and it was over by the luggage belt rather than by the immigration line. So we all queued up for it while we waited for our luggage to arrive. After a 45-minute wait (and a lot of AirTag checking), we grabbed our bags and headed over to immigration, went to the Global Entry line which seemed to act like a Clear line for TSA -- we got a line cut to the next immigration agent, but still had to go through all the questions and photo taking. It was weird, inefficient, very unlike my recent arrivals at ORD and EWR. Maybe they just need more reps to work out the kinks, or bring in a more experienced manager. Whatever it is, they need to fix it before bigger jets and more people show up.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>After that jaunt in November, we’ve pretty much stayed put, with our spare bedroom being on the receiving end of travel -- our daughter Claire was here for a couple of weeks over Christmas and New Year’s, one couple who’d never been to Nashville before (amazing!) and two other couples for whom Nashville, handily enough, was 8 hours down the road on their first day driving to somewhere. You could say “Great! Chance to be a tourist in our own town!” but it’s more about being the <em>tour guide</em>, which, in Nashville, comes with the responsibility of having informed opinions about things like the best hot chicken joint and the best Broadway honky-tonk. Nashville’s Hot Chicken Week was a couple weeks ago, which gave me the excuse (as if I needed one) to buy the jumbo jar of Mylanta and hit every hot chicken joint to figure out the best -- which for me is <a href=\"https://www.reds615kitchen.com/\">Red’s 615 Kitchen</a> in the West End. I can’t say I’ve been <em>that</em> meticulous about my honky-tonk opinions; one can dodge only so many bachelorette parties and watch only so many cover bands. And then I’ve gotta keep finding new cool places to take our visitors the <em>next</em> time they pass through town. I’m telling you, this tour guide thing can be a bit exhausting.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/11510\">Funkist</a> – cdk dub mix by cdk (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: teru</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Well… the lead topic for <a href=\"http://staging.travelcommons.com/2023/11/07/podcast-197-renting-a-tesla-2023-traveler-gift-guide/\">the last episode</a> was “Renting a Tesla\'\'; finally relenting to Hertz’s incessant email offers/pleas for a November. Two months later, <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/business/autos/after-big-tesla-bet-hertz-selling-one-third-of-ev-fleet-5626a425?st=rtm10t2qnapxjhj&amp;reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink\">Hertz announces they’re selling off a third of their EV fleet</a> -- 20,000 of them. Paging through <a href=\"https://www.hertzcarsales.com/used-electric-vehicles.htm?geoZip=20001&amp;geoRadius=0\">hertzcarsales.com</a>, it’s mostly Tesla Model 3s, with a few Model Ys and Chevy Bolts sprinkled in. I was a little surprised when I read it because Hertz had been hitting their fleet electrification message so hard. But now looking back on some of my observations in the last episode -- the EV aisle at Logan airport full up with 10-12 Tesla Model 3’s and a couple of Polestars, the guys working there being so nonchalant about battery levels and car condition -- the clues were there. But someone was driving them. Half of these EVs have 30-60,000 miles on them -- which feels heavy for a fleet of 18-month-old cars, even if they’re rental cars. If nothing else, it cuts my Hertz email traffic <em>way</em> down.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Just one more thing on EVs. Also in that topic, I talked about the hassle of charging an EV. Not range anxiety -- I was only driving 20 miles from Logan; but the effort to find a charger and then the time it took to charge the battery. In London, we stayed in an <em>OK</em> neighborhood between King’s Cross Station and Clerkenwell, typical urban streetscape of walk-up apartment buildings and cars parked bumper-to-bumper along the curb. Walking down the sidewalk the first day there, I saw a cord coming out of a parked car. Where the hell is that going? I looked down at my feet -- it wasn’t running across the sidewalk into the building. No, it was plugged into the base of the street light. Pretty clever… and necessary since none of the folks living in these flats has a garage to charge in.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Back in November, right after I dropped the last episode in which I talked about my turboprop flight to Sioux City, IA as the “ah ha” moment justifying the price of my first pair of Bose noise-canceling headphones, the Wall Street Journal ran an <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/business/iowa-airport-branding-sux-sioux-city-bc46b7b3\">article</a> about how Sioux City, Iowa is embracing the three-letter code for their airport, SUX. And it reminded me again of that flight back in the mid-’90’s. The agent handed me the boarding pass (the age before smartphones). “SUX, Sucks? Is this a joke?” I asked. She just shrugged; I think she’d heard that before -- a lot. I think the Dash 8 was the smallest prop plane United Express flew. We stopped first in Waterloo, Iowa where most everyone else got out for the big John Deere plant there. After the flight attendant buttoned the door back up, she gave the rest of us a look and then pointed us to new seats -- kinda eyeballing the weight distribution; moving some of the bigger guys to seats behind the wing. The airport codes for that flight -- ORD to ALO to SUX -- ‘Alo to Sucks -- were fun. Could’ve been better if the plane had swung through Grand Rapids -- GRR -- for “Grrr…, it sucks”. An itinerary starting in Fresno -- FAT-- would give us the non-body-positive “Fat Sucks.” Or for a much more unlikely flight -- Singapore -- SIN -- to Sioux City for the much more righteous “Sin Sucks”. I could go on… but I won’t; it’s getting painful, even for me. Apparently, back at the turn of the century -- the 21st century -- Sioux City asked the FAA for a new airport code for what is officially named “Sioux Gateway Airport”. I guess they didn’t like the alternatives offered -- GWU, SGV, GAY -- so they kept SUX. And then people built businesses selling SUX merch -- Winter SUX, Work SUX.  And probably the most apropos  -- “it SUX to lose your luggage.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>With all the betting around the Super Bowl -- the Vegas lines, every party selling squares -- I circled back ‘round to something I saw in September, an app called Wingman. They call themselves a “flight delays prediction market”. Betting on flight delays -- sounds like it could be fun, especially when watching the departure board at ORD or LGA. Digging past the headline, I found out it’s a Web3 blockchain dapp (decentralized application) -- not sure if it could be any more buzzword-compliant -- using some crypto-tokens I’ve never heard of… which maybe let’s them serve gambling laws (?); I dunno. As it is, I didn’t end up giving Wingman a spin; it required connecting a crypto-wallet to the app -- which I don’t have… and probably never will. Looking at a site called DappRadar which claims to track 15,000 distributed apps, it looks like Wingman had <a href=\"https://dappradar.com/dapp/wingman?range-ha=all\">a moment of hotness back in September</a> after its burst of announcement publicity with 5-6-700 transactions. But in the new year, it’s had a few days with a handful -- less than ten; but most days with nothing. Disappointing. I was hoping this could be a new way to fund my flight-delay bar tabs.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter (X?) message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page, or on the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can skip all that social media stuff and post your comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/48705\">Jolanta Blues</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license.  Ft: Admiral Bob, Martijn de Boer</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>London Vacation Rental Woes</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>After 2, 3? episodes of <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/08/24/podcast-195-checking-out-hollands-tulip-festival/\" title=\"\">nattering on</a> about electric vehicles, I decided to take up Hertz on their incessant email offers and rented a Tesla for my Boston business trip -- giving EVs a try, but on someone else’s dime. The client site was only 18 miles from BOS and Google Maps told me there was a Tesla Supercharger nearby, so range risk wouldn’t be an issue. A couple of days before my flight, Hertz sent me an email which was pretty much a crash course on operating a Tesla, pictures, text, links to YouTube videos. I was both impressed and slightly overwhelmed, but I grabbed a beer out of the fridge -- a 16 oz, this was going to take a bit -- and ground through all the email links -- which, I think, saved me time trying to figure things out in the Hertz lot.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Over the past couple of years, we’ve talked about <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/05/09/podcast-175-how-to-find-local-tour-guides-rebuild-travel-muscles/\" title=\"\">barren Hertz lots</a>; <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/04/10/podcast-174-how-the-pros-plan-their-taproom-tourism/\" title=\"\">renters queueing up for cars to appear</a>. So when the Hertz employee pointed me to an EV aisle full up with 10-12 Tesla Model 3’s and a couple of Polestars it took me a moment to process all my options. My usual strategy, when I have a choice, is to run through the cars on the aisle and pick the one with the lowest mileage. But I wasn’t quite sure if that worked with a Tesla, and if it did, I didn’t recall from my crash course where to find the odometer. So, I chose a black Model 3 that had the least beat-up wheel rims -- trying to minimize any damage arguments at return time.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>After I got in, powered it up, and got acclimated to the massive tablet screen in the center console, I saw that the battery level was at 69%. One of the crash course’s tutorials said it’d be at 100% and I’d be charged if I returned it under 80%. I snapped a picture of the battery display and told the guy at the exit gate. He shrugged and told me to bring it back at the same level. He didn\'t seem very concerned.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming out of the lot, the Tesla drove fine. After a couple of days, the battery had dropped into the mid-40s, so I decided to try out the Tesla Supercharger network. Tesla’s nav app directed me to a nearby shopping center. The chargers were in the farthest back corner of the Target parking lot. I backed in -- looking at the other Teslas, it seemed the thing to do -- plugged in the charger, and was a little shocked to see that it would take an <em>hour</em> to get me charged up to 100%. Now Irene would have no problem with this -- an excuse to spend an hour shopping in Target? Bring it on. Me, not so much. Luckily, there was a Chipotle across the street, so I locked the car and walked over to grab lunch. When I got back, the car still had another 5 minutes before it got to 100%. I’m glad I didn’t wait ‘til it got down to 20%.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Though maybe I should’ve waited, because by my last day, I’d driven off a chunk of that 100% charge and, heading back to BOS, I wasn’t completely confident that I’d arrive with the battery at the 69% level I’d picked it up at. And I guess that’s a place where an EV rental requires a bit more logistical planning. A regular gas car -- there’s loads of places I could hit to quickly splash in a couple of last-minute gallons to keep the fuel gauge on Full. An EV? The Tesla nav app vectored me way off my usual I-90/I-93 tunnel routes to BOS, taking me way east, past some marshes just off the bay, to the back corner of another Target parking lot where I backed in amid a half-dozen other Teslas, their drivers all sitting there, working their phones, waiting for their cars to charge. I waited 10 minutes, splashed in enough electricity to get the battery gauge to 75%, and lit out. But I probably didn’t need to worry. Turning the car in, I told the Hertz guy I was under 80% charge because I got the car at 69%. No problem, he said. He didn\'t seem very concerned. Honestly, I’ve never seen Hertz guys so nonchalant about their cars; especially after Hertz said in their last earnings call that <a href=\"https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-10-26/hertz-misses-quarterly-profit-estimates-as-its-fleet-costs-rise\">EV repair costs are about double what they pay for gas-powered cars</a>.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>On the shuttle bus to the terminal, I opened the email receipt and saw that the $15 charge from my first Supercharger visit had made it onto my invoice. A couple of things crossed my mind -- definitely less than what I would’ve spent filling up a gas car, and I was impressed by the quick turnaround time because the toll charge I incurred two days before that, when leaving Logan through one of the tunnels, still hasn’t shown up and so is going to raise some eyebrows in A/P when I eventually try to expense it through. So all told, pretty good experience; kudos to Hertz. And now they’re trying to get me to rent a Polestar at LHR in a couple of weeks for our drive through the Devon countryside. Ehh, I don’t think I’ll push my luck.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/bridges/15563\">i knew</a> by bridges (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp;Ft: shannonsongs</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>2023 Traveler\'s Gift Guide</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Every couple of years around this time I update my gift guide to give folks suggestions for the frequent traveler in their lives. Or, if you are the frequent traveler, a list of hints you might want to drop on family members looking for ideas. The first time I did a gift guide, I published Thanksgiving week so people would have it for the Black Friday sales. But now with the Christmas shopping season having blown past that traditional Thanksgiving Friday start and with radio stations barely able to wait for the kids to finish counting their Halloween candy haul before <a href=\"https://www.fox5ny.com/news/radio-stations-christmas-music-holiday-season\">flipping the switch on their All-Christmas-Music format</a>, I’ve dragged the publishing date up to the front of November. The <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">2020 gift guide</a> was probably the most unique. All the restaurant lockdowns and indoor dining limits had us eating in our hotel rooms which put bring-your-own dining sets and in-room coffee brewing kits onto the gift list. The disappearance of airport and in-flight mask mandates means that #1 gift on that year’s list -- comfortable masks -- has also dropped off.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>What hasn’t dropped off and is regularly at the top of my list is <strong>Battery Packs</strong>.&nbsp; We’ve talked <em>a lot</em> about how we can’t easily travel anymore without a working mobile phone. It holds our boarding passes, gives us gate change and flight delay notifications, unlocks our car (if we’ve rented a Tesla), routes us around traffic jams, and connects us to our Airbnb hosts. So having that second or third charge immediately available is critical to making it through a long travel day. I carry a <a href=\"https://amzn.to/470YN1T\" title=\"\">Zendure SuperMini power bank</a> in my bag because its USB-C port quickly tops up my iPhone while the USB-A port takes care of my Samsung tablet. I’ve updated Irene’s lipstick charger to <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3u6IbXX\" title=\"\">an Anker with a flip-out Lighting connector</a> so she doesn’t have to fish around in her purse for a cable. But there are a lot of choices; just pick one.. or two.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Noise Canceling Headphones</strong> are also a perennial on my gift lists. I’ve been carrying Bose headphones for at least 15 years. Back then, the QC-3’s were de rigueur for any self-respecting road warrior. The “ah ha” moment for me was on a United Express Dash 8 turboprop flying to Sioux City, IA with an intermediate stop in Waterloo, IA. I was in a window seat on the wing and the droning of the prop just encased me; I couldn’t think of anything else -- until I flicked the switch on my Bose. I’m now on my 3rd pair, the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3Mzl3Yx\" title=\"\">Bose 700’s</a>. They’re not compact but they continue to earn their space in my travel bag. I picked up a pair of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/49EsZld\" title=\"\">Apple AirPod Pros</a> on a good Prime Day sale last month and so was able to compare the Bose and AirPod noise canceling on my Boston and New York flights. The AirPods are good, but not as good as the Bose. And the battery doesn’t last as long, which makes sense given the size differential. For me, the AirPod Pros are good for a 2-2.5-hr flight, but for, say, my upcoming UK trip, I’ll be packing the Bose.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://amzn.to/40vbaAK\" title=\"\">Apple AirTags</a></strong> earned a place on the list last October when I could see, sitting on the plane, that our bags weren’t going to make the connection in Newark on our way home from Rome. This didn’t get our bag to us, but it did save us the 30 minutes of suspense waiting for them to come out on the carousel, and let us instead go straight to the baggage service agent, be the first in line to file our report, and then head home after a very long travel day. They were definitely worth the purchase price just for that.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>For someone making the transition from virtual work to physical world road warrior, how ‘bout a <strong>Black 20-inch Carry-On Bag</strong>. Black not only makes you look thinner, it makes your bag look thinner to gate agents hunting for bag-sizer bait. My daughter had a baby blue roller bag for the longest time. She loved that color, and it was easy to spot on the luggage carousel, which was a good thing because it ended up there <em>a lot</em> because gate agents were always pulling her out of line to gate check that bag. So get a nondescript black bag with a set of clever, neon-colored luggage tags as a stocking stuffer. If you’re flying a budget airline that’s a stickler on size, get a hard-shell bag. It’ll keep its dimensions better when overstuffed, and the polycarbonate shell will slide past the metal bars of the sizer easier than the ballistic nylon of a soft-sided bag. You could range up in size to a 22-incher, but a 20-incher should safely fit in the overhead of just about every plane. I’m a big fan of the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3MwJLZr\" title=\"\">TravelPro line</a>; for me they strike the right balance between price and quality. But there are lots -- maybe way too many -- options out there for you to choose from.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Here’s a new list entrant -- a <strong>Travel Power Strip</strong>. Potentially one of the least sexy things I could put on a gift list, but I’ve always tried to populate these with the things I actually use -- and find myself needing the most when I’m on the road. And you think after, I dunno, 20 years of travelers needing to charge a bunch of electronics -- PCs, mobile phones, tablets -- hotels, B&amp;B’s, resorts would put outlets <em>that work</em> on the top of flat surfaces like nightstands, end tables, desks, …. But I’d say that on half of my trips <em>this year</em>, I had to move furniture or get down on my hands and knees to find a single outlet. So you can get one of those cube-shaped travel adapters that show up on most travel gift guides, and still have to crawl under furniture every time you need to plug something new in. And that’s why I recommend a compact power strip -- you move the nightstand once to reach down and plug it in, and then set the other end -- the end with the outlets, the end you’ll regularly need easy access to -- <em>on top</em> of the nightstand. Any power strip you buy nowadays will have some mix of USB and regular AC outlets. <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3SpsSng\" title=\"\">Anker</a> has a seemingly infinite range of them. But if Anker is a little boring for you, way back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/01/25/podcast-159-planning-the-trip-of-a-lifetime-in-southeast-asia/\">episode #159</a> in January 2020, long-time listener Arnoud Heijnis gave high marks to a <em>circular</em> power strip called the<a href=\"https://amzn.to/3SyAXGa\" title=\"\"> Power Bagel</a>. Three years on, MOGICS, the manufacturer, now sells an updated version called the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/40reQ6o\" title=\"\">Super Bagel</a>. Of course! With a lot of positive reviews confirming Arnoud’s view that the circle, the bagel shape, let you use every outlet, even when using those big wall wart power supplies</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>So there you go, 5 gift ideas to fit all budgets, and with more than enough time to beat any early on-line shipping deadline. Check out the show notes for links, and happy shopping!</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>Note: None of these suggestions are paid endorsements. This post contains links to Amazon where I can earn a small commission from qualifying purchases.</em></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"className\":\"has-medium-font-size\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul>\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #197</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As always, you can find us and listen to the current episodes on all the main podcast sites -- Apple Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, Google Podcasts, and Amazon Music. And you can always Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page at TravelCommons.com for a transcript of the episode and links to items on the gift guide. If you’re not yet subscribed, there’s a drop down Subscribe menu at the top of TravelCommon’s home page. And along the side of the page, you’ll find links to all the TravelCommons’ socials.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to mpeacock on Twitter, write them on the TravelCommons page on Facebook or Instagram, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com.&nbsp; And thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in emails, Tweets and post comments on the website. I really appreciate it.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And until we talk again, safe travels; and thanks for stopping by the TravelCommons.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_198.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n</ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #198 — London Vacation Rental Woes','','inherit','closed','closed','','4436-revision-v1','','','2024-02-29 08:07:59','2024-02-29 13:07:59','',4436,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4439',0,'revision','',0),
(4440,1,'2024-02-29 08:13:59','2024-02-29 13:13:59','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/IMG_4238-EDIT-400x400.jpg\" alt=\"fence gate with a sign saying Beware of The Bull\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /> Door to Booking.com Customer Service Center?[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It\'s the sustainability episode of the TravelCommons podcast, talking about my experience renting a Tesla from Hertz and my road-tested list of Christmas gift suggestions for the frequent traveler(s) in your life. I also talk about some new TSA biometrics equipment I faced (literally) in Nashville and yet another update on the EU\'s ETIAS system and the US\'s Real ID. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_198.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #198: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN after an extended holiday break that had us in the UK for the back half of November -- the first week in Dorset on the south coast doing a bit of muddy hiking and then knocking around London the second week. As I mentioned a few episodes back, Irene and I took BA’s direct flights between Nashville and Heathrow. Our flights were on 787’s, but apparently the route has become popular enough for BA to announce they’re upgauging it to a triple 7. Interesting given that Nashville isn’t a hub airport. Had what has become my standard flight-to-Nashville moment -- helping a guy rearrange the overhead bin so he could fit his guitar in. Not sure if there are enough musicians to fill those extra seats though. Music tourists? Bachelorette parties? I dunno, but the Nashville airport will need to get their new international baggage claim hall sorted before then. When we arrived, we were told to get our luggage and then go to the immigration line -- the exact opposite of every other international arrival flow I’ve ever done. There was only one Global Entry terminal and it was over by the luggage belt rather than by the immigration line. So we all queued up for it while we waited for our luggage to arrive. After a 45-minute wait (and a lot of AirTag checking), we grabbed our bags and headed over to immigration, went to the Global Entry line which seemed to act like a Clear line for TSA -- we got a line cut to the next immigration agent, but still had to go through all the questions and photo taking. It was weird, inefficient, very unlike my recent arrivals at ORD and EWR. Maybe they just need more reps to work out the kinks, or bring in a more experienced manager. Whatever it is, they need to fix it before bigger jets and more people show up.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>After that jaunt in November, we’ve pretty much stayed put, with our spare bedroom being on the receiving end of travel -- our daughter Claire was here for a couple of weeks over Christmas and New Year’s, one couple who’d never been to Nashville before (amazing!) and two other couples for whom Nashville, handily enough, was 8 hours down the road on their first day driving to somewhere. You could say “Great! Chance to be a tourist in our own town!” but it’s more about being the <em>tour guide</em>, which, in Nashville, comes with the responsibility of having informed opinions about things like the best hot chicken joint and the best Broadway honky-tonk. Nashville’s Hot Chicken Week was a couple weeks ago, which gave me the excuse (as if I needed one) to buy the jumbo jar of Mylanta and hit every hot chicken joint to figure out the best -- which for me is <a href=\"https://www.reds615kitchen.com/\">Red’s 615 Kitchen</a> in the West End. I can’t say I’ve been <em>that</em> meticulous about my honky-tonk opinions; one can dodge only so many bachelorette parties and watch only so many cover bands. And then I’ve gotta keep finding new cool places to take our visitors the <em>next</em> time they pass through town. I’m telling you, this tour guide thing can be a bit exhausting.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/11510\">Funkist</a> – cdk dub mix by cdk (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: teru</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Well… the lead topic for <a href=\"http://staging.travelcommons.com/2023/11/07/podcast-197-renting-a-tesla-2023-traveler-gift-guide/\">the last episode</a> was “Renting a Tesla\'\'; finally relenting to Hertz’s incessant email offers/pleas for a November. Two months later, <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/business/autos/after-big-tesla-bet-hertz-selling-one-third-of-ev-fleet-5626a425?st=rtm10t2qnapxjhj&amp;reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink\">Hertz announces they’re selling off a third of their EV fleet</a> -- 20,000 of them. Paging through <a href=\"https://www.hertzcarsales.com/used-electric-vehicles.htm?geoZip=20001&amp;geoRadius=0\">hertzcarsales.com</a>, it’s mostly Tesla Model 3s, with a few Model Ys and Chevy Bolts sprinkled in. I was a little surprised when I read it because Hertz had been hitting their fleet electrification message so hard. But now looking back on some of my observations in the last episode -- the EV aisle at Logan airport full up with 10-12 Tesla Model 3’s and a couple of Polestars, the guys working there being so nonchalant about battery levels and car condition -- the clues were there. But someone was driving them. Half of these EVs have 30-60,000 miles on them -- which feels heavy for a fleet of 18-month-old cars, even if they’re rental cars. If nothing else, it cuts my Hertz email traffic <em>way</em> down.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Just one more thing on EVs. Also in that topic, I talked about the hassle of charging an EV. Not range anxiety -- I was only driving 20 miles from Logan; but the effort to find a charger and then the time it took to charge the battery. In London, we stayed in an <em>OK</em> neighborhood between King’s Cross Station and Clerkenwell, typical urban streetscape of walk-up apartment buildings and cars parked bumper-to-bumper along the curb. Walking down the sidewalk the first day there, I saw a cord coming out of a parked car. Where the hell is that going? I looked down at my feet -- it wasn’t running across the sidewalk into the building. No, it was plugged into the base of the street light. Pretty clever… and necessary since none of the folks living in these flats has a garage to charge in.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Back in November, right after I dropped the last episode in which I talked about my turboprop flight to Sioux City, IA as the “ah ha” moment justifying the price of my first pair of Bose noise-canceling headphones, the Wall Street Journal ran an <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/business/iowa-airport-branding-sux-sioux-city-bc46b7b3\">article</a> about how Sioux City, Iowa is embracing the three-letter code for their airport, SUX. And it reminded me again of that flight back in the mid-’90’s. The agent handed me the boarding pass (the age before smartphones). “SUX, Sucks? Is this a joke?” I asked. She just shrugged; I think she’d heard that before -- a lot. I think the Dash 8 was the smallest prop plane United Express flew. We stopped first in Waterloo, Iowa where most everyone else got out for the big John Deere plant there. After the flight attendant buttoned the door back up, she gave the rest of us a look and then pointed us to new seats -- kinda eyeballing the weight distribution; moving some of the bigger guys to seats behind the wing. The airport codes for that flight -- ORD to ALO to SUX -- ‘Alo to Sucks -- were fun. Could’ve been better if the plane had swung through Grand Rapids -- GRR -- for “Grrr…, it sucks”. An itinerary starting in Fresno -- FAT-- would give us the non-body-positive “Fat Sucks.” Or for a much more unlikely flight -- Singapore -- SIN -- to Sioux City for the much more righteous “Sin Sucks”. I could go on… but I won’t; it’s getting painful, even for me. Apparently, back at the turn of the century -- the 21st century -- Sioux City asked the FAA for a new airport code for what is officially named “Sioux Gateway Airport”. I guess they didn’t like the alternatives offered -- GWU, SGV, GAY -- so they kept SUX. And then people built businesses selling SUX merch -- Winter SUX, Work SUX.  And probably the most apropos  -- “it SUX to lose your luggage.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>With all the betting around the Super Bowl -- the Vegas lines, every party selling squares -- I circled back ‘round to something I saw in September, an app called Wingman. They call themselves a “flight delays prediction market”. Betting on flight delays -- sounds like it could be fun, especially when watching the departure board at ORD or LGA. Digging past the headline, I found out it’s a Web3 blockchain dapp (decentralized application) -- not sure if it could be any more buzzword-compliant -- using some crypto-tokens I’ve never heard of… which maybe let’s them serve gambling laws (?); I dunno. As it is, I didn’t end up giving Wingman a spin; it required connecting a crypto-wallet to the app -- which I don’t have… and probably never will. Looking at a site called DappRadar which claims to track 15,000 distributed apps, it looks like Wingman had <a href=\"https://dappradar.com/dapp/wingman?range-ha=all\">a moment of hotness back in September</a> after its burst of announcement publicity with 5-6-700 transactions. But in the new year, it’s had a few days with a handful -- less than ten; but most days with nothing. Disappointing. I was hoping this could be a new way to fund my flight-delay bar tabs.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter (X?) message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page, or on the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can skip all that social media stuff and post your comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/48705\">Jolanta Blues</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license.  Ft: Admiral Bob, Martijn de Boer</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>London Vacation Rental Woes</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Listeners who <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">follow me on Twitter/X</a> know that I had one of my worst short-term rental experiences during our London trip with Booking.com. And I’ll talk about what I learned from that in a moment, but it got me thinking about vacation rentals in general. For the longest time, it was a local mom-and-pop business, typically in vacation areas -- ski resorts, beach towns. You called or stopped by a local realtor, or someone you knew who knew the area recommended a place, and then you rented it from the owner. Friends who rent beach houses on the East Coast tell me they’ve had the same renters for the same week in June, July, August for years. Then Airbnb started up in 2008, first as a platform to rent out spare rooms (remember couchsurfing.com?), but it pretty quickly moved home rentals out of its mom-&amp;-pop vacation spot model into a parallel urban hotel market.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I’m not deep in urban planning or rental market dynamics, so I’m not getting into the pluses and minuses of short-term rentals. You can get all that and more with a simple Google search. Maybe I’m old-school (or just old), but my use of short-term rentals is pretty much the same now as it was pre-Airbnb -- when it’s a bigger group and we’ll need more space to spread out than a hotel can give you. I also enjoy being able to stay in neighborhoods where there aren’t hotels, to be able to dig deeper into a city, but I also know that it can also be not great for the people who live in those neighborhoods. A couple of years back, we and another family booked into a flat in the Trastevere neighborhood in Rome. Great flat on a great street; really enjoyed the neighborhood and the time we had with our friends, being able to spend time in some place other than a restaurant or hotel bar, catching up while trying to figure out the espresso machine or the washer/dryer combo. All good. But looking across the landing to the other apartment on our floor, the sign taped to the door in Italian and Google-translated English saying “Keep it quiet”, you could tell the people <em>living</em> in this building weren’t having a great time. And then there’s the story our friends tell of when a condo in their building in Lincoln Park on the north side of Chicago was listed on Airbnb, and one night while at dinner, looking out their window they could see a porn movie being filmed there. Kinda put them off their meal.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>There are loads of vacation rental horror stories, but not from me. Looking through my trip histories on Airbnb and VRBO, I’ve had a really good run -- a great beach place in San Diego, a tiny house in Durango, CO, a walk up in Brooklyn’s Carroll Gardens neighborhood, a flat in Split, Croatia with a balcony where I drank my morning coffee watching the sailboats head out of the harbor…. All good, except for London.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Two years ago, November 2021, we were heading over London for a couple of weeks. The morning we were leaving, maybe 5 hours before heading to the airport, we get an email from our Booking.com host -- “So sorry, but a water pipe broke in the apartment, so we have to cancel your stay that starts tomorrow.” Wait, what!? Did I read that right? I read it again. Yup, I read it right; we have no place to stay when we land in London tomorrow morning. Luckily, it was just Irene and me; we didn’t <em>need</em> sprawl space. So I quickly pivoted from packing socks and underwear to logging onto Marriott.com to book a room before our Uber showed up, which I did, at the Montcalm East near Shoreditch. The last-minute booking was definitely more expensive, but I was confident it had a working toilet and shower -- well, that and I got free breakfast with my Titanium status.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Fast forward to this trip, in November 2023, with our daughter joining us, we needed a vacation rental. Given our last experience, we gave ourselves a 5-month head start, booking a place in June. I found a good place in London and booked it on Airbnb. Ten days later, I get a morning email canceling our reservation, but this time from Airbnb, saying the property we booked “doesn’t appear to be legitimate.” Right after that, I get another email, from the property owner, asking me to book direct with him, sending the full payment via bank transfer. So send a couple of thousand dollars in June for a November stay to a guy I’ve never dealt with before, and for whom I couldn’t find any other information -- property website, LinkedIn profile, social media presence? Felt just a bit scammy, so I took a pass. Not the last time I’d get this request.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Irene took over. That afternoon, she booked a flat on Booking.com. Fast forward to the beginning of November. Starting to get geared up for the trip and think maybe we should check the status of our booking. Huh -- Booking.com has a new note saying our reservation now can’t be paid through them. We ping the property owner -- “What gives?” We get back a blisto-gram of an email; not aimed at us, but at Booking.com. “Their fees are too high and they’re awful to work with. I told them to cancel all reservations.” Hmm, our reservation is still there, but doesn’t sound like we had a good chance of getting into the flat if we showed up. So Irene canceled it and booked a different flat.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>From whom, a couple of days later, we get an email asking us to cancel our Booking.com reservation and book directly with them, with full payment via bank transfer. This sounds familiar. They’re forced into this, going off-platform, they wrote, because London limits short-term rentals to 60 days a year. A quick Google search told me London’s limit is 90 days rather than 60. Not looking to dunk on these folks, but -- hmm, you’d think an experienced host would get this number right. Little bit of doubt, so we took another pass on sending a stranger a couple of thousand dollars with no fraud protections.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>So I search for another place in the same neighborhood and find one on Booking. I hit the Book button and pretty quickly get back a confirmation email from TravelNest, a vacation rental property management company. Good! No more asking me to book direct. They send me the contact info for the property owner so I can coordinate arrival logistics. I send the guy an email -- it bounces. I send texts and WhatsApp messages to him -- crickets. I go back to TravelNest. “Oh, don’t worry, we’ll contact him.” “With what? The same email that bounced; the same phone number that he hasn’t checked?” “Oh, don’t worry, he’ll turn up.” OK, I’ve got other things to worry about, and London was the second week of our trip, so we had time.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The end of our first week -- we were hiking/walking down in Dorset on the south coast -- I hadn’t heard anything and started to worry. I started pinging Booking and TravelNest; sending emails and calling. Nothing solved, but every time I talked to someone, it was “Don’t worry, we’ll take care of you.” I’m not going to go through every call, -- maybe I’ll put all those details on a Twitter thread -- but I spent 5-6 hours over 3 days on calls with these people and the problem, my problem, boiled down to this -- we were past the cancelation deadline; Booking.com viewed TravelNest as their property contact, not the MIA owner; and TravelNest didn’t want to cancel the reservation and lose the revenue in hopes that the owner would show up at the last minute.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You know where this is going. Tuesday morning, we’re driving up to London Heathrow from Bournemouth to drop off the Hertz car and “ping” goes the Booking.com app. It’s a message from TravelNest - “I am very sorry to let you know that the owner of the property you have booked via Travelnest cannot accommodate your upcoming booking. This is due to the host having stopped advertising their property through Travelnest. And we don’t have any alternatives to offer you.” Amazing. They’re just now figuring out that the guy stopped using them. They couldn’t have checked during one of those 5-6 hours of calls a few days ago.  So after we dropped the car off, we took the shuttle bus over to Terminal 2. Irene and Claire grabbed a coffee while I got on the phone to Booking.com. “Oh, I’m so sorry, but don’t worry we’ll take care of you.” But they didn’t. They couldn’t find us a replacement property in the part of London we needed to be. So I ran the same play as two years ago, fired up Marriott.com and found us a room for the night. And then splurged for a black cab instead of the cheaper Heathrow Express so Claire and I could work our Airbnb apps to find a place for the rest of our time in London. Which we did after about the 3rd try.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>So out of this whole shitshow, what did I learn? First, the London short-term vacation rental market just seems broken. There were so many properties on Booking.com and Airbnb that showed availability, but really weren’t. All told, it took us 6 booking attempts before we finally got one to stick. I’ve never had that happen in any other place. Second, there’s something wrong with the group that runs Booking.com’s short-term rentals. Irene uses (well, <em>used</em>) them <em>a lot</em> for hotel bookings, and we’ve never had a problem. But vacation rentals, every bad experience has been a Booking.com property. As you might guess, we won’t be using them again. Third, immediately cancel reservations where a third party like TravelNest pops up. They don’t add value to <strong>you</strong>, the traveler; they just get in the way when a problem crops up and are just another point of failure.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Oh, and I guess there’s a fourth -- don’t trust anyone when they say “Don’t worry, we’ll take care of you.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"className\":\"has-medium-font-size\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul>\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #197</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As always, you can find us and listen to the current episodes on all the main podcast sites -- Apple Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, Google Podcasts, and Amazon Music. And you can always Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page at TravelCommons.com for a transcript of the episode and links to items on the gift guide. If you’re not yet subscribed, there’s a drop down Subscribe menu at the top of TravelCommon’s home page. And along the side of the page, you’ll find links to all the TravelCommons’ socials.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to mpeacock on Twitter, write them on the TravelCommons page on Facebook or Instagram, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com.&nbsp; And thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in emails, Tweets and post comments on the website. I really appreciate it.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And until we talk again, safe travels; and thanks for stopping by the TravelCommons.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_198.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n</ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #198 — London Vacation Rental Woes','','inherit','closed','closed','','4436-revision-v1','','','2024-02-29 08:13:59','2024-02-29 13:13:59','',4436,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4440',0,'revision','',0),
(4441,1,'2024-02-29 10:11:05','2024-02-29 15:11:05','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/IMG_4238-EDIT-400x400.jpg\" alt=\"fence gate with a sign saying Beware of The Bull\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /> Door to Booking.com Customer Service Center?[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It\'s the sustainability episode of the TravelCommons podcast, talking about my experience renting a Tesla from Hertz and my road-tested list of Christmas gift suggestions for the frequent traveler(s) in your life. I also talk about some new TSA biometrics equipment I faced (literally) in Nashville and yet another update on the EU\'s ETIAS system and the US\'s Real ID. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_198.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #198: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN after an extended holiday break that had us in the UK for the back half of November -- the first week in Dorset on the south coast doing a bit of muddy hiking and then knocking around London the second week. As I mentioned a few episodes back, Irene and I took BA’s direct flights between Nashville and Heathrow. Our flights were on 787’s, but apparently the route has become popular enough for BA to announce they’re upgauging it to a triple 7. Interesting given that Nashville isn’t a hub airport. Had what has become my standard flight-to-Nashville moment -- helping a guy rearrange the overhead bin so he could fit his guitar in. Not sure if there are enough musicians to fill those extra seats though. Music tourists? Bachelorette parties? I dunno, but the Nashville airport will need to get their new international baggage claim hall sorted before then. When we arrived, we were told to get our luggage and then go to the immigration line -- the exact opposite of every other international arrival flow I’ve ever done. There was only one Global Entry terminal and it was over by the luggage belt rather than by the immigration line. So we all queued up for it while we waited for our luggage to arrive. After a 45-minute wait (and a lot of AirTag checking), we grabbed our bags and headed over to immigration, went to the Global Entry line which seemed to act like a Clear line for TSA -- we got a line cut to the next immigration agent, but still had to go through all the questions and photo taking. It was weird, inefficient, very unlike my recent arrivals at ORD and EWR. Maybe they just need more reps to work out the kinks, or bring in a more experienced manager. Whatever it is, they need to fix it before bigger jets and more people show up.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>After that jaunt in November, we’ve pretty much stayed put, with our spare bedroom being on the receiving end of travel -- our daughter Claire was here for a couple of weeks over Christmas and New Year’s, one couple who’d never been to Nashville before (amazing!) and two other couples for whom Nashville, handily enough, was 8 hours down the road on their first day driving to somewhere. You could say “Great! Chance to be a tourist in our own town!” but it’s more about being the <em>tour guide</em>, which, in Nashville, comes with the responsibility of having informed opinions about things like the best hot chicken joint and the best Broadway honky-tonk. Nashville’s Hot Chicken Week was a couple weeks ago, which gave me the excuse (as if I needed one) to buy the jumbo jar of Mylanta and hit every hot chicken joint to figure out the best -- which for me is <a href=\"https://www.reds615kitchen.com/\">Red’s 615 Kitchen</a> in the West End. I can’t say I’ve been <em>that</em> meticulous about my honky-tonk opinions; one can dodge only so many bachelorette parties and watch only so many cover bands. And then I’ve gotta keep finding new cool places to take our visitors the <em>next</em> time they pass through town. I’m telling you, this tour guide thing can be a bit exhausting.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/11510\">Funkist</a> – cdk dub mix by cdk (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: teru</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Well… the lead topic for <a href=\"http://staging.travelcommons.com/2023/11/07/podcast-197-renting-a-tesla-2023-traveler-gift-guide/\">the last episode</a> was “Renting a Tesla\'\'; finally relenting to Hertz’s incessant email offers/pleas for a November. Two months later, <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/business/autos/after-big-tesla-bet-hertz-selling-one-third-of-ev-fleet-5626a425?st=rtm10t2qnapxjhj&amp;reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink\">Hertz announces they’re selling off a third of their EV fleet</a> -- 20,000 of them. Paging through <a href=\"https://www.hertzcarsales.com/used-electric-vehicles.htm?geoZip=20001&amp;geoRadius=0\">hertzcarsales.com</a>, it’s mostly Tesla Model 3s, with a few Model Ys and Chevy Bolts sprinkled in. I was a little surprised when I read it because Hertz had been hitting their fleet electrification message so hard. But now looking back on some of my observations in the last episode -- the EV aisle at Logan airport full up with 10-12 Tesla Model 3’s and a couple of Polestars, the guys working there being so nonchalant about battery levels and car condition -- the clues were there. But someone was driving them. Half of these EVs have 30-60,000 miles on them -- which feels heavy for a fleet of 18-month-old cars, even if they’re rental cars. If nothing else, it cuts my Hertz email traffic <em>way</em> down.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Just one more thing on EVs. Also in that topic, I talked about the hassle of charging an EV. Not range anxiety -- I was only driving 20 miles from Logan; but the effort to find a charger and then the time it took to charge the battery. In London, we stayed in an <em>OK</em> neighborhood between King’s Cross Station and Clerkenwell, typical urban streetscape of walk-up apartment buildings and cars parked bumper-to-bumper along the curb. Walking down the sidewalk the first day there, I saw a cord coming out of a parked car. Where the hell is that going? I looked down at my feet -- it wasn’t running across the sidewalk into the building. No, it was plugged into the base of the street light. Pretty clever… and necessary since none of the folks living in these flats has a garage to charge in.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Back in November, right after I dropped the last episode in which I talked about my turboprop flight to Sioux City, IA as the “ah ha” moment justifying the price of my first pair of Bose noise-canceling headphones, the Wall Street Journal ran an <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/business/iowa-airport-branding-sux-sioux-city-bc46b7b3\">article</a> about how Sioux City, Iowa is embracing the three-letter code for their airport, SUX. And it reminded me again of that flight back in the mid-’90’s. The agent handed me the boarding pass (the age before smartphones). “SUX, Sucks? Is this a joke?” I asked. She just shrugged; I think she’d heard that before -- a lot. I think the Dash 8 was the smallest prop plane United Express flew. We stopped first in Waterloo, Iowa where most everyone else got out for the big John Deere plant there. After the flight attendant buttoned the door back up, she gave the rest of us a look and then pointed us to new seats -- kinda eyeballing the weight distribution; moving some of the bigger guys to seats behind the wing. The airport codes for that flight -- ORD to ALO to SUX -- ‘Alo to Sucks -- were fun. Could’ve been better if the plane had swung through Grand Rapids -- GRR -- for “Grrr…, it sucks”. An itinerary starting in Fresno -- FAT-- would give us the non-body-positive “Fat Sucks.” Or for a much more unlikely flight -- Singapore -- SIN -- to Sioux City for the much more righteous “Sin Sucks”. I could go on… but I won’t; it’s getting painful, even for me. Apparently, back at the turn of the century -- the 21st century -- Sioux City asked the FAA for a new airport code for what is officially named “Sioux Gateway Airport”. I guess they didn’t like the alternatives offered -- GWU, SGV, GAY -- so they kept SUX. And then people built businesses selling SUX merch -- Winter SUX, Work SUX.  And probably the most apropos  -- “it SUX to lose your luggage.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>With all the betting around the Super Bowl -- the Vegas lines, every party selling squares -- I circled back ‘round to something I saw in September, an app called Wingman. They call themselves a “flight delays prediction market”. Betting on flight delays -- sounds like it could be fun, especially when watching the departure board at ORD or LGA. Digging past the headline, I found out it’s a Web3 blockchain dapp (decentralized application) -- not sure if it could be any more buzzword-compliant -- using some crypto-tokens I’ve never heard of… which maybe let’s them serve gambling laws (?); I dunno. As it is, I didn’t end up giving Wingman a spin; it required connecting a crypto-wallet to the app -- which I don’t have… and probably never will. Looking at a site called DappRadar which claims to track 15,000 distributed apps, it looks like Wingman had <a href=\"https://dappradar.com/dapp/wingman?range-ha=all\">a moment of hotness back in September</a> after its burst of announcement publicity with 5-6-700 transactions. But in the new year, it’s had a few days with a handful -- less than ten; but most days with nothing. Disappointing. I was hoping this could be a new way to fund my flight-delay bar tabs.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter (X?) message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page, or on the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can skip all that social media stuff and post your comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/48705\">Jolanta Blues</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license.  Ft: Admiral Bob, Martijn de Boer</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>London Vacation Rental Woes</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Listeners who <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">follow me on Twitter/X</a> know that I had one of my worst short-term rental experiences during our London trip with Booking.com. And I’ll talk about what I learned from that in a moment, but it got me thinking about vacation rentals in general. For the longest time, it was a local mom-and-pop business, typically in vacation areas -- ski resorts, beach towns. You called or stopped by a local realtor, or someone you knew who knew the area recommended a place, and then you rented it from the owner. Friends who rent beach houses on the East Coast tell me they’ve had the same renters for the same week in June, July, August for years. Then Airbnb started up in 2008, first as a platform to rent out spare rooms (remember couchsurfing.com?), but it pretty quickly moved home rentals out of its mom-&amp;-pop vacation spot model into a parallel urban hotel market.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I’m not deep in urban planning or rental market dynamics, so I’m not getting into the pluses and minuses of short-term rentals. You can get all that and more with a simple Google search. Maybe I’m old-school (or just old), but my use of short-term rentals is pretty much the same now as it was pre-Airbnb -- when it’s a bigger group and we’ll need more space to spread out than a hotel can give you. I also enjoy being able to stay in neighborhoods where there aren’t hotels, to be able to dig deeper into a city, but I also know that it can also be not great for the people who live in those neighborhoods. A couple of years back, we and another family booked into a flat in the Trastevere neighborhood in Rome. Great flat on a great street; really enjoyed the neighborhood and the time we had with our friends, being able to spend time in some place other than a restaurant or hotel bar, catching up while trying to figure out the espresso machine or the washer/dryer combo. All good. But looking across the landing to the other apartment on our floor, the sign taped to the door in Italian and Google-translated English saying “Keep it quiet”, you could tell the people <em>living</em> in this building weren’t having a great time. And then there’s the story our friends tell of when a condo in their building in Lincoln Park on the north side of Chicago was listed on Airbnb, and one night while at dinner, looking out their window they could see a porn movie being filmed there. Kinda put them off their meal.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>There are loads of vacation rental horror stories, but not from me. Looking through my trip histories on Airbnb and VRBO, I’ve had a really good run -- a great beach place in San Diego, a tiny house in Durango, CO, a walk up in Brooklyn’s Carroll Gardens neighborhood, a flat in Split, Croatia with a balcony where I drank my morning coffee watching the sailboats head out of the harbor…. All good, except for London.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Two years ago, November 2021, we were heading over London for a couple of weeks. The morning we were leaving, maybe 5 hours before heading to the airport, we get an email from our Booking.com host -- “So sorry, but a water pipe broke in the apartment, so we have to cancel your stay that starts tomorrow.” Wait, what!? Did I read that right? I read it again. Yup, I read it right; we have no place to stay when we land in London tomorrow morning. Luckily, it was just Irene and me; we didn’t <em>need</em> sprawl space. So I quickly pivoted from packing socks and underwear to logging onto Marriott.com to book a room before our Uber showed up, which I did, at the Montcalm East near Shoreditch. The last-minute booking was definitely more expensive, but I was confident it had a working toilet and shower -- well, that and I got free breakfast with my Titanium status.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Fast forward to this trip, in November 2023, with our daughter joining us, we needed a vacation rental. Given our last experience, we gave ourselves a 5-month head start, booking a place in June. I found a good place in London and booked it on Airbnb. Ten days later, I get a morning email canceling our reservation, but this time from Airbnb, saying the property we booked “doesn’t appear to be legitimate.” Right after that, I get another email, from the property owner, asking me to book direct with him, sending the full payment via bank transfer. So send a couple of thousand dollars in June for a November stay to a guy I’ve never dealt with before, and for whom I couldn’t find any other information -- property website, LinkedIn profile, social media presence? Felt just a bit scammy, so I took a pass. Not the last time I’d get this request.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Irene took over. That afternoon, she booked a flat on Booking.com. Fast forward to the beginning of November. Starting to get geared up for the trip and think maybe we should check the status of our booking. Huh -- Booking.com has a new note saying our reservation now can’t be paid through them. We ping the property owner -- “What gives?” We get back a blisto-gram of an email; not aimed at us, but at Booking.com. “Their fees are too high and they’re awful to work with. I told them to cancel all reservations.” Hmm, our reservation is still there, but doesn’t sound like we had a good chance of getting into the flat if we showed up. So Irene canceled it and booked a different flat.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>From whom, a couple of days later, we get an email asking us to cancel our Booking.com reservation and book directly with them, with full payment via bank transfer. This sounds familiar. They’re forced into this, going off-platform, they wrote, because London limits short-term rentals to 60 days a year. A quick Google search told me London’s limit is 90 days rather than 60. Not looking to dunk on these folks, but -- hmm, you’d think an experienced host would get this number right. Little bit of doubt, so we took another pass on sending a stranger a couple of thousand dollars with no fraud protections.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>So I search for another place in the same neighborhood and find one on Booking. I hit the Book button and pretty quickly get back a confirmation email from TravelNest, a vacation rental property management company. Good! No more asking me to book direct. They send me the contact info for the property owner so I can coordinate arrival logistics. I send the guy an email -- it bounces. I send texts and WhatsApp messages to him -- crickets. I go back to TravelNest. “Oh, don’t worry, we’ll contact him.” “With what? The same email that bounced; the same phone number that he hasn’t checked?” “Oh, don’t worry, he’ll turn up.” OK, I’ve got other things to worry about, and London was the second week of our trip, so we had time.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The end of our first week -- we were hiking/walking down in Dorset on the south coast -- I hadn’t heard anything and started to worry. I started pinging Booking and TravelNest; sending emails and calling. Nothing solved, but every time I talked to someone, it was “Don’t worry, we’ll take care of you.” I’m not going to go through every call, -- maybe I’ll put all those details on a Twitter thread -- but I spent 5-6 hours over 3 days on calls with these people and the problem, my problem, boiled down to this -- we were past the cancelation deadline; Booking.com viewed TravelNest as their property contact, not the MIA owner; and TravelNest didn’t want to cancel the reservation and lose the revenue in hopes that the owner would show up at the last minute.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You know where this is going. Tuesday morning, we’re driving up to London Heathrow from Bournemouth to drop off the Hertz car and “ping” goes the Booking.com app. It’s a message from TravelNest - “I am very sorry to let you know that the owner of the property you have booked via Travelnest cannot accommodate your upcoming booking. This is due to the host having stopped advertising their property through Travelnest. And we don’t have any alternatives to offer you.” Amazing. They’re just now figuring out that the guy stopped using them. They couldn’t have checked during one of those 5-6 hours of calls a few days ago.  So after we dropped the car off, we took the shuttle bus over to Terminal 2. Irene and Claire grabbed a coffee while I got on the phone to Booking.com. “Oh, I’m so sorry, but don’t worry we’ll take care of you.” But they didn’t. They couldn’t find us a replacement property in the part of London we needed to be. So I ran the same play as two years ago, fired up Marriott.com and found us a room for the night. And then splurged for a black cab instead of the cheaper Heathrow Express so Claire and I could work our Airbnb apps to find a place for the rest of our time in London. Which we did after about the 3rd try.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>So out of this whole shitshow, what did I learn? First, the London short-term vacation rental market just seems broken. There were so many properties on Booking.com and Airbnb that showed availability, but really weren’t. All told, it took us 6 booking attempts before we finally got one to stick. I’ve never had that happen in any other place. Second, there’s something wrong with the group that runs Booking.com’s short-term rentals. Irene uses (well, <em>used</em>) them <em>a lot</em> for hotel bookings, and we’ve never had a problem. But vacation rentals, every bad experience has been a Booking.com property. As you might guess, we won’t be using them again. Third, immediately cancel reservations where a third party like TravelNest pops up. They don’t add value to <strong>you</strong>, the traveler; they just get in the way when a problem crops up and are just another point of failure.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Oh, and I guess there’s a fourth -- don’t trust anyone when they say “Don’t worry, we’ll take care of you.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"className\":\"has-medium-font-size\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #198</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As always, you can find us and listen to the current episodes on all the main podcast sites -- Apple Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, Google Podcasts, and Amazon Music. And you can always Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page at TravelCommons.com for a transcript of the episode and links to items on the gift guide. If you’re not yet subscribed, there’s a drop down Subscribe menu at the top of TravelCommon’s home page. And along the side of the page, you’ll find links to all the TravelCommons’ socials.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to mpeacock on Twitter, write them on the TravelCommons page on Facebook or Instagram, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com.&nbsp; And thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in emails, Tweets and post comments on the website. I really appreciate it.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And until we talk again, safe travels; and thanks for stopping by the TravelCommons.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_198.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #198 — London Vacation Rental Woes','','inherit','closed','closed','','4436-revision-v1','','','2024-02-29 10:11:05','2024-02-29 15:11:05','',4436,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4441',0,'revision','',0),
(4442,1,'2024-02-29 10:36:06','2024-02-29 15:36:06','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/IMG_4238-EDIT-400x400.jpg\" alt=\"fence gate with a sign saying Beware of The Bull\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /> Door to Booking.com Customer Service Center?[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I walked by <a href=\"https://www.shakespearesglobe.com/\" title=\"\">Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre</a> a couple of days after wrestling with <a href=\"https://www.booking.com/\" title=\"\">Booking.com</a> and <a href=\"https://travelnest.com/\" title=\"\">TravelNest</a>\'s service agents, trying unsuccessfully to not let them screw up my London vacation rental.  The Macbeth soliloquy about a tale \"full of sound and fury, signifying nothing\" pretty much summed up my experience.  the sustainability episode of the TravelCommons podcast, talking about my experience renting a Tesla from Hertz and my road-tested list of Christmas gift suggestions for the frequent traveler(s) in your life. I also talk about some new TSA biometrics equipment I faced (literally) in Nashville and yet another update on the EU\'s ETIAS system and the US\'s Real ID. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_198.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #198: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN after an extended holiday break that had us in the UK for the back half of November -- the first week in Dorset on the south coast doing a bit of muddy hiking and then knocking around London the second week. As I mentioned a few episodes back, Irene and I took BA’s direct flights between Nashville and Heathrow. Our flights were on 787’s, but apparently the route has become popular enough for BA to announce they’re upgauging it to a triple 7. Interesting given that Nashville isn’t a hub airport. Had what has become my standard flight-to-Nashville moment -- helping a guy rearrange the overhead bin so he could fit his guitar in. Not sure if there are enough musicians to fill those extra seats though. Music tourists? Bachelorette parties? I dunno, but the Nashville airport will need to get their new international baggage claim hall sorted before then. When we arrived, we were told to get our luggage and then go to the immigration line -- the exact opposite of every other international arrival flow I’ve ever done. There was only one Global Entry terminal and it was over by the luggage belt rather than by the immigration line. So we all queued up for it while we waited for our luggage to arrive. After a 45-minute wait (and a lot of AirTag checking), we grabbed our bags and headed over to immigration, went to the Global Entry line which seemed to act like a Clear line for TSA -- we got a line cut to the next immigration agent, but still had to go through all the questions and photo taking. It was weird, inefficient, very unlike my recent arrivals at ORD and EWR. Maybe they just need more reps to work out the kinks, or bring in a more experienced manager. Whatever it is, they need to fix it before bigger jets and more people show up.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>After that jaunt in November, we’ve pretty much stayed put, with our spare bedroom being on the receiving end of travel -- our daughter Claire was here for a couple of weeks over Christmas and New Year’s, one couple who’d never been to Nashville before (amazing!) and two other couples for whom Nashville, handily enough, was 8 hours down the road on their first day driving to somewhere. You could say “Great! Chance to be a tourist in our own town!” but it’s more about being the <em>tour guide</em>, which, in Nashville, comes with the responsibility of having informed opinions about things like the best hot chicken joint and the best Broadway honky-tonk. Nashville’s Hot Chicken Week was a couple weeks ago, which gave me the excuse (as if I needed one) to buy the jumbo jar of Mylanta and hit every hot chicken joint to figure out the best -- which for me is <a href=\"https://www.reds615kitchen.com/\">Red’s 615 Kitchen</a> in the West End. I can’t say I’ve been <em>that</em> meticulous about my honky-tonk opinions; one can dodge only so many bachelorette parties and watch only so many cover bands. And then I’ve gotta keep finding new cool places to take our visitors the <em>next</em> time they pass through town. I’m telling you, this tour guide thing can be a bit exhausting.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/11510\">Funkist</a>&nbsp;– cdk dub mix by cdk (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: teru</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Well… the lead topic for <a href=\"http://staging.travelcommons.com/2023/11/07/podcast-197-renting-a-tesla-2023-traveler-gift-guide/\">the last episode</a> was “Renting a Tesla\'\'; finally relenting to Hertz’s incessant email offers/pleas for a November. Two months later, <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/business/autos/after-big-tesla-bet-hertz-selling-one-third-of-ev-fleet-5626a425?st=rtm10t2qnapxjhj&amp;reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink\">Hertz announces they’re selling off a third of their EV fleet</a> -- 20,000 of them. Paging through <a href=\"https://www.hertzcarsales.com/used-electric-vehicles.htm?geoZip=20001&amp;geoRadius=0\">hertzcarsales.com</a>, it’s mostly Tesla Model 3s, with a few Model Ys and Chevy Bolts sprinkled in. I was a little surprised when I read it because Hertz had been hitting their fleet electrification message so hard. But now looking back on some of my observations in the last episode -- the EV aisle at Logan airport full up with 10-12 Tesla Model 3’s and a couple of Polestars, the guys working there being so nonchalant about battery levels and car condition -- the clues were there. But someone was driving them. Half of these EVs have 30-60,000 miles on them -- which feels heavy for a fleet of 18-month-old cars, even if they’re rental cars. If nothing else, it cuts my Hertz email traffic <em>way</em> down.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Just one more thing on EVs. Also in that topic, I talked about the hassle of charging an EV. Not range anxiety -- I was only driving 20 miles from Logan; but the effort to find a charger and then the time it took to charge the battery. In London, we stayed in an <em>OK</em> neighborhood between King’s Cross Station and Clerkenwell, typical urban streetscape of walk-up apartment buildings and cars parked bumper-to-bumper along the curb. Walking down the sidewalk the first day there, I saw a cord coming out of a parked car. Where the hell is that going? I looked down at my feet -- it wasn’t running across the sidewalk into the building. No, it was plugged into the base of the street light. Pretty clever… and necessary since none of the folks living in these flats has a garage to charge in.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Back in November, right after I dropped the last episode in which I talked about my turboprop flight to Sioux City, IA as the “ah ha” moment justifying the price of my first pair of Bose noise-canceling headphones, the Wall Street Journal ran an <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/business/iowa-airport-branding-sux-sioux-city-bc46b7b3\">article</a> about how Sioux City, Iowa is embracing the three-letter code for their airport, SUX. And it reminded me again of that flight back in the mid-’90’s. The agent handed me the boarding pass (the age before smartphones). “SUX, Sucks? Is this a joke?” I asked. She just shrugged; I think she’d heard that before -- a lot. I think the Dash 8 was the smallest prop plane United Express flew. We stopped first in Waterloo, Iowa where most everyone else got out for the big John Deere plant there. After the flight attendant buttoned the door back up, she gave the rest of us a look and then pointed us to new seats -- kinda eyeballing the weight distribution; moving some of the bigger guys to seats behind the wing. The airport codes for that flight -- ORD to ALO to SUX -- ‘Alo to Sucks -- were fun. Could’ve been better if the plane had swung through Grand Rapids -- GRR -- for “Grrr…, it sucks”. An itinerary starting in Fresno -- FAT-- would give us the non-body-positive “Fat Sucks.” Or for a much more unlikely flight -- Singapore -- SIN -- to Sioux City for the much more righteous “Sin Sucks”. I could go on… but I won’t; it’s getting painful, even for me. Apparently, back at the turn of the century -- the 21st century -- Sioux City asked the FAA for a new airport code for what is officially named “Sioux Gateway Airport”. I guess they didn’t like the alternatives offered -- GWU, SGV, GAY -- so they kept SUX. And then people built businesses selling SUX merch -- Winter SUX, Work SUX.&nbsp; And probably the most apropos&nbsp; -- “it SUX to lose your luggage.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>With all the betting around the Super Bowl -- the Vegas lines, every party selling squares -- I circled back ‘round to something I saw in September, an app called Wingman. They call themselves a “flight delays prediction market”. Betting on flight delays -- sounds like it could be fun, especially when watching the departure board at ORD or LGA. Digging past the headline, I found out it’s a Web3 blockchain dapp (decentralized application) -- not sure if it could be any more buzzword-compliant -- using some crypto-tokens I’ve never heard of… which maybe let’s them serve gambling laws (?); I dunno. As it is, I didn’t end up giving Wingman a spin; it required connecting a crypto-wallet to the app -- which I don’t have… and probably never will. Looking at a site called DappRadar which claims to track 15,000 distributed apps, it looks like Wingman had <a href=\"https://dappradar.com/dapp/wingman?range-ha=all\">a moment of hotness back in September</a> after its burst of announcement publicity with 5-6-700 transactions. But in the new year, it’s had a few days with a handful -- less than ten; but most days with nothing. Disappointing. I was hoping this could be a new way to fund my flight-delay bar tabs.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter (X?) message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page, or on the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can skip all that social media stuff and post your comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/48705\">Jolanta Blues</a>&nbsp;by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: Admiral Bob, Martijn de Boer</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>London Vacation Rental Woes</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Listeners who <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">follow me on Twitter/X</a> know that I had one of my worst short-term rental experiences during our London trip with Booking.com. And I’ll talk about what I learned from that in a moment, but it got me thinking about vacation rentals in general. For the longest time, it was a local mom-and-pop business, typically in vacation areas -- ski resorts, beach towns. You called or stopped by a local realtor, or someone you knew who knew the area recommended a place, and then you rented it from the owner. Friends who rent beach houses on the East Coast tell me they’ve had the same renters for the same week in June, July, August for years. Then Airbnb started up in 2008, first as a platform to rent out spare rooms (remember couchsurfing.com?), but it pretty quickly moved home rentals out of its mom-&amp;-pop vacation spot model into a parallel urban hotel market.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I’m not deep in urban planning or rental market dynamics, so I’m not getting into the pluses and minuses of short-term rentals. You can get all that and more with a simple Google search. Maybe I’m old-school (or just old), but my use of short-term rentals is pretty much the same now as it was pre-Airbnb -- when it’s a bigger group and we’ll need more space to spread out than a hotel can give you. I also enjoy being able to stay in neighborhoods where there aren’t hotels, to be able to dig deeper into a city, but I also know that it can also be not great for the people who live in those neighborhoods. A couple of years back, we and another family booked into a flat in the Trastevere neighborhood in Rome. Great flat on a great street; really enjoyed the neighborhood and the time we had with our friends, being able to spend time in some place other than a restaurant or hotel bar, catching up while trying to figure out the espresso machine or the washer/dryer combo. All good. But looking across the landing to the other apartment on our floor, the sign taped to the door in Italian and Google-translated English saying “Keep it quiet”, you could tell the people <em>living</em> in this building weren’t having a great time. And then there’s the story our friends tell of when a condo in their building in Lincoln Park on the north side of Chicago was listed on Airbnb, and one night while at dinner, looking out their window they could see a porn movie being filmed there. Kinda put them off their meal.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>There are loads of vacation rental horror stories, but not from me. Looking through my trip histories on Airbnb and VRBO, I’ve had a really good run -- a great beach place in San Diego, a tiny house in Durango, CO, a walk up in Brooklyn’s Carroll Gardens neighborhood, a flat in Split, Croatia with a balcony where I drank my morning coffee watching the sailboats head out of the harbor…. All good, except for London.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Two years ago, November 2021, we were heading over London for a couple of weeks. The morning we were leaving, maybe 5 hours before heading to the airport, we get an email from our Booking.com host -- “So sorry, but a water pipe broke in the apartment, so we have to cancel your stay that starts tomorrow.” Wait, what!? Did I read that right? I read it again. Yup, I read it right; we have no place to stay when we land in London tomorrow morning. Luckily, it was just Irene and me; we didn’t <em>need</em> sprawl space. So I quickly pivoted from packing socks and underwear to logging onto Marriott.com to book a room before our Uber showed up, which I did, at the Montcalm East near Shoreditch. The last-minute booking was definitely more expensive, but I was confident it had a working toilet and shower -- well, that and I got free breakfast with my Titanium status.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Fast forward to this trip, in November 2023, with our daughter joining us, we needed a vacation rental. Given our last experience, we gave ourselves a 5-month head start, booking a place in June. I found a good place in London and booked it on Airbnb. Ten days later, I get a morning email canceling our reservation, but this time from Airbnb, saying the property we booked “doesn’t appear to be legitimate.” Right after that, I get another email, from the property owner, asking me to book direct with him, sending the full payment via bank transfer. So send a couple of thousand dollars in June for a November stay to a guy I’ve never dealt with before, and for whom I couldn’t find any other information -- property website, LinkedIn profile, social media presence? Felt just a bit scammy, so I took a pass. Not the last time I’d get this request.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Irene took over. That afternoon, she booked a flat on Booking.com. Fast forward to the beginning of November. Starting to get geared up for the trip and think maybe we should check the status of our booking. Huh -- Booking.com has a new note saying our reservation now can’t be paid through them. We ping the property owner -- “What gives?” We get back a blisto-gram of an email; not aimed at us, but at Booking.com. “Their fees are too high and they’re awful to work with. I told them to cancel all reservations.” Hmm, our reservation is still there, but doesn’t sound like we had a good chance of getting into the flat if we showed up. So Irene canceled it and booked a different flat.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>From whom, a couple of days later, we get an email asking us to cancel our Booking.com reservation and book directly with them, with full payment via bank transfer. This sounds familiar. They’re forced into this, going off-platform, they wrote, because London limits short-term rentals to 60 days a year. A quick Google search told me London’s limit is 90 days rather than 60. Not looking to dunk on these folks, but -- hmm, you’d think an experienced host would get this number right. Little bit of doubt, so we took another pass on sending a stranger a couple of thousand dollars with no fraud protections.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>So I search for another place in the same neighborhood and find one on Booking. I hit the Book button and pretty quickly get back a confirmation email from TravelNest, a vacation rental property management company. Good! No more asking me to book direct. They send me the contact info for the property owner so I can coordinate arrival logistics. I send the guy an email -- it bounces. I send texts and WhatsApp messages to him -- crickets. I go back to TravelNest. “Oh, don’t worry, we’ll contact him.” “With what? The same email that bounced; the same phone number that he hasn’t checked?” “Oh, don’t worry, he’ll turn up.” OK, I’ve got other things to worry about, and London was the second week of our trip, so we had time.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The end of our first week -- we were hiking/walking down in Dorset on the south coast -- I hadn’t heard anything and started to worry. I started pinging Booking and TravelNest; sending emails and calling. Nothing solved, but every time I talked to someone, it was “Don’t worry, we’ll take care of you.” I’m not going to go through every call, -- maybe I’ll put all those details on a Twitter thread -- but I spent 5-6 hours over 3 days on calls with these people and the problem, my problem, boiled down to this -- we were past the cancelation deadline; Booking.com viewed TravelNest as their property contact, not the MIA owner; and TravelNest didn’t want to cancel the reservation and lose the revenue in hopes that the owner would show up at the last minute.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You know where this is going. Tuesday morning, we’re driving up to London Heathrow from Bournemouth to drop off the Hertz car and “ping” goes the Booking.com app. It’s a message from TravelNest - “I am very sorry to let you know that the owner of the property you have booked via Travelnest cannot accommodate your upcoming booking. This is due to the host having stopped advertising their property through Travelnest. And we don’t have any alternatives to offer you.” Amazing. They’re just now figuring out that the guy stopped using them. They couldn’t have checked during one of those 5-6 hours of calls a few days ago.&nbsp; So after we dropped the car off, we took the shuttle bus over to Terminal 2. Irene and Claire grabbed a coffee while I got on the phone to Booking.com. “Oh, I’m so sorry, but don’t worry we’ll take care of you.” But they didn’t. They couldn’t find us a replacement property in the part of London we needed to be. So I ran the same play as two years ago, fired up Marriott.com and found us a room for the night. And then splurged for a black cab instead of the cheaper Heathrow Express so Claire and I could work our Airbnb apps to find a place for the rest of our time in London. Which we did after about the 3rd try.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>So out of this whole shitshow, what did I learn? First, the London short-term vacation rental market just seems broken. There were so many properties on Booking.com and Airbnb that showed availability, but really weren’t. All told, it took us 6 booking attempts before we finally got one to stick. I’ve never had that happen in any other place. Second, there’s something wrong with the group that runs Booking.com’s short-term rentals. Irene uses (well, <em>used</em>) them <em>a lot</em> for hotel bookings, and we’ve never had a problem. But vacation rentals, every bad experience has been a Booking.com property. As you might guess, we won’t be using them again. Third, immediately cancel reservations where a third party like TravelNest pops up. They don’t add value to <strong>you</strong>, the traveler; they just get in the way when a problem crops up and are just another point of failure.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Oh, and I guess there’s a fourth -- don’t trust anyone when they say “Don’t worry, we’ll take care of you.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"className\":\"has-medium-font-size\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #198</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As always, you can find us and listen to the current episodes on all the main podcast sites -- Apple Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, Google Podcasts, and Amazon Music. And you can always Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page at TravelCommons.com for a transcript of the episode and links to items on the gift guide. If you’re not yet subscribed, there’s a drop down Subscribe menu at the top of TravelCommon’s home page. And along the side of the page, you’ll find links to all the TravelCommons’ socials.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to mpeacock on Twitter, write them on the TravelCommons page on Facebook or Instagram, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com.&nbsp; And thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in emails, Tweets and post comments on the website. I really appreciate it.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And until we talk again, safe travels; and thanks for stopping by the TravelCommons.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_198.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #198 — London Vacation Rental Woes','','inherit','closed','closed','','4436-revision-v1','','','2024-02-29 10:36:06','2024-02-29 15:36:06','',4436,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4442',0,'revision','',0),
(4443,1,'2024-03-01 10:33:33','2024-03-01 15:33:33','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/IMG_4238-EDIT-400x400.jpg\" alt=\"fence gate with a sign saying Beware of The Bull\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /> Door to Booking.com Customer Service Center?[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I walked by <a href=\"https://www.shakespearesglobe.com/\" title=\"\">Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre</a> after a weekend of wrestling with <a href=\"https://www.booking.com/\" title=\"\">Booking.com</a> and <a href=\"https://travelnest.com/\" title=\"\">TravelNest</a>\'s service agents, trying unsuccessfully to not let them screw up my London vacation rental.  The Macbeth soliloquy about a tale \"full of sound and fury, signifying nothing\" pretty much summed up my experience -- lots of talk that yielded nothing. But before that, we catch up on Hertz\'s EV reversal, Sioux City, Iowa\'s embrace of their SUX airport code, and a flash-in-the-pan airport delay betting app.  All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_198.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #198: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN after an extended holiday break that had us in the UK for the back half of November -- the first week in Dorset on the south coast doing a bit of muddy hiking and then knocking around London the second week. As I mentioned a few episodes back, Irene and I took BA’s direct flights between Nashville and Heathrow. Our flights were on 787’s, but apparently the route has become popular enough for BA to announce they’re upgauging it to a triple 7. Interesting given that Nashville isn’t a hub airport. Had what has become my standard flight-to-Nashville moment -- helping a guy rearrange the overhead bin so he could fit his guitar in. Not sure if there are enough musicians to fill those extra seats though. Music tourists? Bachelorette parties? I dunno, but the Nashville airport will need to get their new international baggage claim hall sorted before then. When we arrived, we were told to get our luggage and then go to the immigration line -- the exact opposite of every other international arrival flow I’ve ever done. There was only one Global Entry terminal and it was over by the luggage belt rather than by the immigration line. So we all queued up for it while we waited for our luggage to arrive. After a 45-minute wait (and a lot of AirTag checking), we grabbed our bags and headed over to immigration, went to the Global Entry line which seemed to act like a Clear line for TSA -- we got a line cut to the next immigration agent, but still had to go through all the questions and photo taking. It was weird, inefficient, very unlike my recent arrivals at ORD and EWR. Maybe they just need more reps to work out the kinks, or bring in a more experienced manager. Whatever it is, they need to fix it before bigger jets and more people show up.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>After that jaunt in November, we’ve pretty much stayed put, with our spare bedroom being on the receiving end of travel -- our daughter Claire was here for a couple of weeks over Christmas and New Year’s, one couple who’d never been to Nashville before (amazing!) and two other couples for whom Nashville, handily enough, was 8 hours down the road on their first day driving to somewhere. You could say “Great! Chance to be a tourist in our own town!” but it’s more about being the <em>tour guide</em>, which, in Nashville, comes with the responsibility of having informed opinions about things like the best hot chicken joint and the best Broadway honky-tonk. Nashville’s Hot Chicken Week was a couple weeks ago, which gave me the excuse (as if I needed one) to buy the jumbo jar of Mylanta and hit every hot chicken joint to figure out the best -- which for me is <a href=\"https://www.reds615kitchen.com/\">Red’s 615 Kitchen</a> in the West End. I can’t say I’ve been <em>that</em> meticulous about my honky-tonk opinions; one can dodge only so many bachelorette parties and watch only so many cover bands. And then I’ve gotta keep finding new cool places to take our visitors the <em>next</em> time they pass through town. I’m telling you, this tour guide thing can be a bit exhausting.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/11510\">Funkist</a>&nbsp;– cdk dub mix by cdk (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: teru</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Well… the lead topic for <a href=\"http://staging.travelcommons.com/2023/11/07/podcast-197-renting-a-tesla-2023-traveler-gift-guide/\">the last episode</a> was “Renting a Tesla\'\'; finally relenting to Hertz’s incessant email offers/pleas for a November. Two months later, <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/business/autos/after-big-tesla-bet-hertz-selling-one-third-of-ev-fleet-5626a425?st=rtm10t2qnapxjhj&amp;reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink\">Hertz announces they’re selling off a third of their EV fleet</a> -- 20,000 of them. Paging through <a href=\"https://www.hertzcarsales.com/used-electric-vehicles.htm?geoZip=20001&amp;geoRadius=0\">hertzcarsales.com</a>, it’s mostly Tesla Model 3s, with a few Model Ys and Chevy Bolts sprinkled in. I was a little surprised when I read it because Hertz had been hitting their fleet electrification message so hard. But now looking back on some of my observations in the last episode -- the EV aisle at Logan airport full up with 10-12 Tesla Model 3’s and a couple of Polestars, the guys working there being so nonchalant about battery levels and car condition -- the clues were there. But someone was driving them. Half of these EVs have 30-60,000 miles on them -- which feels heavy for a fleet of 18-month-old cars, even if they’re rental cars. If nothing else, it cuts my Hertz email traffic <em>way</em> down.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Just one more thing on EVs. Also in that topic, I talked about the hassle of charging an EV. Not range anxiety -- I was only driving 20 miles from Logan; but the effort to find a charger and then the time it took to charge the battery. In London, we stayed in an <em>OK</em> neighborhood between King’s Cross Station and Clerkenwell, typical urban streetscape of walk-up apartment buildings and cars parked bumper-to-bumper along the curb. Walking down the sidewalk the first day there, I saw a cord coming out of a parked car. Where the hell is that going? I looked down at my feet -- it wasn’t running across the sidewalk into the building. No, it was plugged into the base of the street light. Pretty clever… and necessary since none of the folks living in these flats has a garage to charge in.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Back in November, right after I dropped the last episode in which I talked about my turboprop flight to Sioux City, IA as the “ah ha” moment justifying the price of my first pair of Bose noise-canceling headphones, the Wall Street Journal ran an <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/business/iowa-airport-branding-sux-sioux-city-bc46b7b3\">article</a> about how Sioux City, Iowa is embracing the three-letter code for their airport, SUX. And it reminded me again of that flight back in the mid-’90’s. The agent handed me the boarding pass (the age before smartphones). “SUX, Sucks? Is this a joke?” I asked. She just shrugged; I think she’d heard that before -- a lot. I think the Dash 8 was the smallest prop plane United Express flew. We stopped first in Waterloo, Iowa where most everyone else got out for the big John Deere plant there. After the flight attendant buttoned the door back up, she gave the rest of us a look and then pointed us to new seats -- kinda eyeballing the weight distribution; moving some of the bigger guys to seats behind the wing. The airport codes for that flight -- ORD to ALO to SUX -- ‘Alo to Sucks -- were fun. Could’ve been better if the plane had swung through Grand Rapids -- GRR -- for “Grrr…, it sucks”. An itinerary starting in Fresno -- FAT-- would give us the non-body-positive “Fat Sucks.” Or for a much more unlikely flight -- Singapore -- SIN -- to Sioux City for the much more righteous “Sin Sucks”. I could go on… but I won’t; it’s getting painful, even for me. Apparently, back at the turn of the century -- the 21st century -- Sioux City asked the FAA for a new airport code for what is officially named “Sioux Gateway Airport”. I guess they didn’t like the alternatives offered -- GWU, SGV, GAY -- so they kept SUX. And then people built businesses selling SUX merch -- Winter SUX, Work SUX.&nbsp; And probably the most apropos&nbsp; -- “it SUX to lose your luggage.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>With all the betting around the Super Bowl -- the Vegas lines, every party selling squares -- I circled back ‘round to something I saw in September, an app called Wingman. They call themselves a “flight delays prediction market”. Betting on flight delays -- sounds like it could be fun, especially when watching the departure board at ORD or LGA. Digging past the headline, I found out it’s a Web3 blockchain dapp (decentralized application) -- not sure if it could be any more buzzword-compliant -- using some crypto-tokens I’ve never heard of… which maybe let’s them serve gambling laws (?); I dunno. As it is, I didn’t end up giving Wingman a spin; it required connecting a crypto-wallet to the app -- which I don’t have… and probably never will. Looking at a site called DappRadar which claims to track 15,000 distributed apps, it looks like Wingman had <a href=\"https://dappradar.com/dapp/wingman?range-ha=all\">a moment of hotness back in September</a> after its burst of announcement publicity with 5-6-700 transactions. But in the new year, it’s had a few days with a handful -- less than ten; but most days with nothing. Disappointing. I was hoping this could be a new way to fund my flight-delay bar tabs.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter (X?) message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page, or on the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can skip all that social media stuff and post your comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/48705\">Jolanta Blues</a>&nbsp;by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: Admiral Bob, Martijn de Boer</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>London Vacation Rental Woes</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Listeners who <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">follow me on Twitter/X</a> know that I had one of my worst short-term rental experiences during our London trip with Booking.com. And I’ll talk about what I learned from that in a moment, but it got me thinking about vacation rentals in general. For the longest time, it was a local mom-and-pop business, typically in vacation areas -- ski resorts, beach towns. You called or stopped by a local realtor, or someone you knew who knew the area recommended a place, and then you rented it from the owner. Friends who rent beach houses on the East Coast tell me they’ve had the same renters for the same week in June, July, August for years. Then Airbnb started up in 2008, first as a platform to rent out spare rooms (remember couchsurfing.com?), but it pretty quickly moved home rentals out of its mom-&amp;-pop vacation spot model into a parallel urban hotel market.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I’m not deep in urban planning or rental market dynamics, so I’m not getting into the pluses and minuses of short-term rentals. You can get all that and more with a simple Google search. Maybe I’m old-school (or just old), but my use of short-term rentals is pretty much the same now as it was pre-Airbnb -- when it’s a bigger group and we’ll need more space to spread out than a hotel can give you. I also enjoy being able to stay in neighborhoods where there aren’t hotels, to be able to dig deeper into a city, but I also know that it can also be not great for the people who live in those neighborhoods. A couple of years back, we and another family booked into a flat in the Trastevere neighborhood in Rome. Great flat on a great street; really enjoyed the neighborhood and the time we had with our friends, being able to spend time in some place other than a restaurant or hotel bar, catching up while trying to figure out the espresso machine or the washer/dryer combo. All good. But looking across the landing to the other apartment on our floor, the sign taped to the door in Italian and Google-translated English saying “Keep it quiet”, you could tell the people <em>living</em> in this building weren’t having a great time. And then there’s the story our friends tell of when a condo in their building in Lincoln Park on the north side of Chicago was listed on Airbnb, and one night while at dinner, looking out their window they could see a porn movie being filmed there. Kinda put them off their meal.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>There are loads of vacation rental horror stories, but not from me. Looking through my trip histories on Airbnb and VRBO, I’ve had a really good run -- a great beach place in San Diego, a tiny house in Durango, CO, a walk up in Brooklyn’s Carroll Gardens neighborhood, a flat in Split, Croatia with a balcony where I drank my morning coffee watching the sailboats head out of the harbor…. All good, except for London.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Two years ago, November 2021, we were heading over London for a couple of weeks. The morning we were leaving, maybe 5 hours before heading to the airport, we get an email from our Booking.com host -- “So sorry, but a water pipe broke in the apartment, so we have to cancel your stay that starts tomorrow.” Wait, what!? Did I read that right? I read it again. Yup, I read it right; we have no place to stay when we land in London tomorrow morning. Luckily, it was just Irene and me; we didn’t <em>need</em> sprawl space. So I quickly pivoted from packing socks and underwear to logging onto Marriott.com to book a room before our Uber showed up, which I did, at the Montcalm East near Shoreditch. The last-minute booking was definitely more expensive, but I was confident it had a working toilet and shower -- well, that and I got free breakfast with my Titanium status.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Fast forward to this trip, in November 2023, with our daughter joining us, we needed a vacation rental. Given our last experience, we gave ourselves a 5-month head start, booking a place in June. I found a good place in London and booked it on Airbnb. Ten days later, I get a morning email canceling our reservation, but this time from Airbnb, saying the property we booked “doesn’t appear to be legitimate.” Right after that, I get another email, from the property owner, asking me to book direct with him, sending the full payment via bank transfer. So send a couple of thousand dollars in June for a November stay to a guy I’ve never dealt with before, and for whom I couldn’t find any other information -- property website, LinkedIn profile, social media presence? Felt just a bit scammy, so I took a pass. Not the last time I’d get this request.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Irene took over. That afternoon, she booked a flat on Booking.com. Fast forward to the beginning of November. Starting to get geared up for the trip and think maybe we should check the status of our booking. Huh -- Booking.com has a new note saying our reservation now can’t be paid through them. We ping the property owner -- “What gives?” We get back a blisto-gram of an email; not aimed at us, but at Booking.com. “Their fees are too high and they’re awful to work with. I told them to cancel all reservations.” Hmm, our reservation is still there, but doesn’t sound like we had a good chance of getting into the flat if we showed up. So Irene canceled it and booked a different flat.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>From whom, a couple of days later, we get an email asking us to cancel our Booking.com reservation and book directly with them, with full payment via bank transfer. This sounds familiar. They’re forced into this, going off-platform, they wrote, because London limits short-term rentals to 60 days a year. A quick Google search told me London’s limit is 90 days rather than 60. Not looking to dunk on these folks, but -- hmm, you’d think an experienced host would get this number right. Little bit of doubt, so we took another pass on sending a stranger a couple of thousand dollars with no fraud protections.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>So I search for another place in the same neighborhood and find one on Booking. I hit the Book button and pretty quickly get back a confirmation email from TravelNest, a vacation rental property management company. Good! No more asking me to book direct. They send me the contact info for the property owner so I can coordinate arrival logistics. I send the guy an email -- it bounces. I send texts and WhatsApp messages to him -- crickets. I go back to TravelNest. “Oh, don’t worry, we’ll contact him.” “With what? The same email that bounced; the same phone number that he hasn’t checked?” “Oh, don’t worry, he’ll turn up.” OK, I’ve got other things to worry about, and London was the second week of our trip, so we had time.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The end of our first week -- we were hiking/walking down in Dorset on the south coast -- I hadn’t heard anything and started to worry. I started pinging Booking and TravelNest; sending emails and calling. Nothing solved, but every time I talked to someone, it was “Don’t worry, we’ll take care of you.” I’m not going to go through every call, -- maybe I’ll put all those details on a Twitter thread -- but I spent 5-6 hours over 3 days on calls with these people and the problem, my problem, boiled down to this -- we were past the cancelation deadline; Booking.com viewed TravelNest as their property contact, not the MIA owner; and TravelNest didn’t want to cancel the reservation and lose the revenue in hopes that the owner would show up at the last minute.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You know where this is going. Tuesday morning, we’re driving up to London Heathrow from Bournemouth to drop off the Hertz car and “ping” goes the Booking.com app. It’s a message from TravelNest - “I am very sorry to let you know that the owner of the property you have booked via Travelnest cannot accommodate your upcoming booking. This is due to the host having stopped advertising their property through Travelnest. And we don’t have any alternatives to offer you.” Amazing. They’re just now figuring out that the guy stopped using them. They couldn’t have checked during one of those 5-6 hours of calls a few days ago.&nbsp; So after we dropped the car off, we took the shuttle bus over to Terminal 2. Irene and Claire grabbed a coffee while I got on the phone to Booking.com. “Oh, I’m so sorry, but don’t worry we’ll take care of you.” But they didn’t. They couldn’t find us a replacement property in the part of London we needed to be. So I ran the same play as two years ago, fired up Marriott.com and found us a room for the night. And then splurged for a black cab instead of the cheaper Heathrow Express so Claire and I could work our Airbnb apps to find a place for the rest of our time in London. Which we did after about the 3rd try.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>So out of this whole shitshow, what did I learn? First, the London short-term vacation rental market just seems broken. There were so many properties on Booking.com and Airbnb that showed availability, but really weren’t. All told, it took us 6 booking attempts before we finally got one to stick. I’ve never had that happen in any other place. Second, there’s something wrong with the group that runs Booking.com’s short-term rentals. Irene uses (well, <em>used</em>) them <em>a lot</em> for hotel bookings, and we’ve never had a problem. But vacation rentals, every bad experience has been a Booking.com property. As you might guess, we won’t be using them again. Third, immediately cancel reservations where a third party like TravelNest pops up. They don’t add value to <strong>you</strong>, the traveler; they just get in the way when a problem crops up and are just another point of failure.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Oh, and I guess there’s a fourth -- don’t trust anyone when they say “Don’t worry, we’ll take care of you.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"className\":\"has-medium-font-size\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #198</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As always, you can find us and listen to the current episodes on all the main podcast sites -- Apple Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, Google Podcasts, and Amazon Music. And you can always Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page at TravelCommons.com for a transcript of the episode and links to items on the gift guide. If you’re not yet subscribed, there’s a drop down Subscribe menu at the top of TravelCommon’s home page. And along the side of the page, you’ll find links to all the TravelCommons’ socials.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to mpeacock on Twitter, write them on the TravelCommons page on Facebook or Instagram, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com.&nbsp; And thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in emails, Tweets and post comments on the website. I really appreciate it.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And until we talk again, safe travels; and thanks for stopping by the TravelCommons.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_198.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #198 — London Vacation Rental Woes','','inherit','closed','closed','','4436-revision-v1','','','2024-03-01 10:33:33','2024-03-01 15:33:33','',4436,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4443',0,'revision','',0),
(4445,1,'2024-03-01 10:50:46','2024-03-01 15:50:46','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/IMG_4238-EDIT-400x400.jpg\" alt=\"fence gate with a sign saying Beware of The Bull\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /> Door to Booking.com Customer Service Center?[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I walked by <a href=\"https://www.shakespearesglobe.com/\" title=\"\">Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre</a> after a weekend of wrestling with <a href=\"https://www.booking.com/\" title=\"\">Booking.com</a> and <a href=\"https://travelnest.com/\" title=\"\">TravelNest</a>\'s service agents, trying unsuccessfully to not let them screw up my London vacation rental.  The Macbeth soliloquy about a tale \"full of sound and fury, signifying nothing\" pretty much summed up my experience -- lots of talk that yielded nothing. But before that, we catch up on Hertz\'s EV reversal, Sioux City, Iowa\'s embrace of their SUX airport code, and a flash-in-the-pan airport delay betting app.  All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_198.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #198: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN after an extended holiday break that had us in the UK for the back half of November -- the first week in Dorset on the south coast doing a bit of muddy hiking and then knocking around London the second week. As I mentioned a few episodes back, Irene and I took BA’s direct flights between Nashville and Heathrow. Our flights were on 787’s, but apparently the route has become popular enough for BA to announce they’re upgauging it to a triple 7. Interesting given that Nashville isn’t a hub airport. Had what has become my standard flight-to-Nashville moment -- helping a guy rearrange the overhead bin so he could fit his guitar in. Not sure if there are enough musicians to fill those extra seats though. Music tourists? Bachelorette parties? I dunno, but the Nashville airport will need to get their new international baggage claim hall sorted before then. When we arrived, we were told to get our luggage and then go to the immigration line -- the exact opposite of every other international arrival flow I’ve ever done. There was only one Global Entry terminal and it was over by the luggage belt rather than by the immigration line. So we all queued up for it while we waited for our luggage to arrive. After a 45-minute wait (and a lot of AirTag checking), we grabbed our bags and headed over to immigration, went to the Global Entry line which seemed to act like a Clear line for TSA -- we got a line cut to the next immigration agent, but still had to go through all the questions and photo taking. It was weird, inefficient, very unlike my recent arrivals at ORD and EWR. Maybe they just need more reps to work out the kinks, or bring in a more experienced manager. Whatever it is, they need to fix it before bigger jets and more people show up.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>After that jaunt in November, we’ve pretty much stayed put, with our spare bedroom being on the receiving end of travel -- our daughter Claire was here for a couple of weeks over Christmas and New Year’s, one couple who’d never been to Nashville before (amazing!) and two other couples for whom Nashville, handily enough, was 8 hours down the road on their first day driving to somewhere. You could say “Great! Chance to be a tourist in our own town!” but it’s more about being the <em>tour guide</em>, which, in Nashville, comes with the responsibility of having informed opinions about things like the best hot chicken joint and the best Broadway honky-tonk. Nashville’s Hot Chicken Week was a couple weeks ago, which gave me the excuse (as if I needed one) to buy the jumbo jar of Mylanta and hit every hot chicken joint to figure out the best -- which for me is <a href=\"https://www.reds615kitchen.com/\">Red’s 615 Kitchen</a> in the West End. I can’t say I’ve been <em>that</em> meticulous about my honky-tonk opinions; one can dodge only so many bachelorette parties and watch only so many cover bands. And then I’ve gotta keep finding new cool places to take our visitors the <em>next</em> time they pass through town. I’m telling you, this tour guide thing can be a bit exhausting.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/11510\">Funkist</a>&nbsp;– cdk dub mix by cdk (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: teru</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Well… the lead topic for <a href=\"http://staging.travelcommons.com/2023/11/07/podcast-197-renting-a-tesla-2023-traveler-gift-guide/\">the last episode</a> was “Renting a Tesla\'\'; finally relenting to Hertz’s incessant email offers/pleas for a November. Two months later, <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/business/autos/after-big-tesla-bet-hertz-selling-one-third-of-ev-fleet-5626a425?st=rtm10t2qnapxjhj&amp;reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink\">Hertz announces they’re selling off a third of their EV fleet</a> -- 20,000 of them. Paging through <a href=\"https://www.hertzcarsales.com/used-electric-vehicles.htm?geoZip=20001&amp;geoRadius=0\">hertzcarsales.com</a>, it’s mostly Tesla Model 3s, with a few Model Ys and Chevy Bolts sprinkled in. I was a little surprised when I read it because Hertz had been hitting their fleet electrification message so hard. But now looking back on some of my observations in the last episode -- the EV aisle at Logan airport full up with 10-12 Tesla Model 3’s and a couple of Polestars, the guys working there being so nonchalant about battery levels and car condition -- the clues were there. But someone was driving them. Half of these EVs have 30-60,000 miles on them -- which feels heavy for a fleet of 18-month-old cars, even if they’re rental cars. If nothing else, it cuts my Hertz email traffic <em>way</em> down.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Just one more thing on EVs. Also in that topic, I talked about the hassle of charging an EV. Not range anxiety -- I was only driving 20 miles from Logan; but the effort to find a charger and then the time it took to charge the battery. In London, we stayed in an <em>OK</em> neighborhood between King’s Cross Station and Clerkenwell, typical urban streetscape of walk-up apartment buildings and cars parked bumper-to-bumper along the curb. Walking down the sidewalk the first day there, I saw a cord coming out of a parked car. Where the hell is that going? I looked down at my feet -- it wasn’t running across the sidewalk into the building. No, it was plugged into the base of the street light. Pretty clever… and necessary since none of the folks living in these flats has a garage to charge in.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Back in November, right after I dropped the last episode in which I talked about my turboprop flight to Sioux City, IA as the “ah ha” moment justifying the price of my first pair of Bose noise-canceling headphones, the Wall Street Journal ran an <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/business/iowa-airport-branding-sux-sioux-city-bc46b7b3\">article</a> about how Sioux City, Iowa is embracing the three-letter code for their airport, SUX. And it reminded me again of that flight back in the mid-’90’s. The agent handed me the boarding pass (the age before smartphones). “SUX, Sucks? Is this a joke?” I asked. She just shrugged; I think she’d heard that before -- a lot. I think the Dash 8 was the smallest prop plane United Express flew. We stopped first in Waterloo, Iowa where most everyone else got out for the big John Deere plant there. After the flight attendant buttoned the door back up, she gave the rest of us a look and then pointed us to new seats -- kinda eyeballing the weight distribution; moving some of the bigger guys to seats behind the wing. The airport codes for that flight -- ORD to ALO to SUX -- ‘Alo to Sucks -- were fun. Could’ve been better if the plane had swung through Grand Rapids -- GRR -- for “Grrr…, it sucks”. An itinerary starting in Fresno -- FAT-- would give us the non-body-positive “Fat Sucks.” Or for a much more unlikely flight -- Singapore -- SIN -- to Sioux City for the much more righteous “Sin Sucks”. I could go on… but I won’t; it’s getting painful, even for me. Apparently, back at the turn of the century -- the 21st century -- Sioux City asked the FAA for a new airport code for what is officially named “Sioux Gateway Airport”. I guess they didn’t like the alternatives offered -- GWU, SGV, GAY -- so they kept SUX. And then people built businesses selling SUX merch -- Winter SUX, Work SUX.&nbsp; And probably the most apropos&nbsp; -- “it SUX to lose your luggage.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>With all the betting around the Super Bowl -- the Vegas lines, every party selling squares -- I circled back ‘round to something I saw in September, an app called Wingman. They call themselves a “flight delays prediction market”. Betting on flight delays -- sounds like it could be fun, especially when watching the departure board at ORD or LGA. Digging past the headline, I found out it’s a Web3 blockchain dapp (decentralized application) -- not sure if it could be any more buzzword-compliant -- using some crypto-tokens I’ve never heard of… which maybe let’s them serve gambling laws (?); I dunno. As it is, I didn’t end up giving Wingman a spin; it required connecting a crypto-wallet to the app -- which I don’t have… and probably never will. Looking at a site called DappRadar which claims to track 15,000 distributed apps, it looks like Wingman had <a href=\"https://dappradar.com/dapp/wingman?range-ha=all\">a moment of hotness back in September</a> after its burst of announcement publicity with 5-6-700 transactions. But in the new year, it’s had a few days with a handful -- less than ten; but most days with nothing. Disappointing. I was hoping this could be a new way to fund my flight-delay bar tabs.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter (X?) message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page, or on the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can skip all that social media stuff and post your comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/48705\">Jolanta Blues</a>&nbsp;by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: Admiral Bob, Martijn de Boer</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>London Vacation Rental Woes</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Listeners who <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">follow me on Twitter/X</a> know that I had one of my worst short-term rental experiences during our London trip with Booking.com. And I’ll talk about what I learned from that in a moment, but it got me thinking about vacation rentals in general. For the longest time, it was a local mom-and-pop business, typically in vacation areas -- ski resorts, beach towns. You called or stopped by a local realtor, or someone you knew who knew the area recommended a place, and then you rented it from the owner. Friends who rent beach houses on the East Coast tell me they’ve had the same renters for the same week in June, July, August for years. Then Airbnb started up in 2008, first as a platform to rent out spare rooms (remember couchsurfing.com?), but it pretty quickly moved home rentals out of its mom-&amp;-pop vacation spot model into a parallel urban hotel market.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I’m not deep in urban planning or rental market dynamics, so I’m not getting into the pluses and minuses of short-term rentals. You can get all that and more with a simple Google search. Maybe I’m old-school (or just old), but my use of short-term rentals is pretty much the same now as it was pre-Airbnb -- when it’s a bigger group and we’ll need more space to spread out than a hotel can give you. I also enjoy being able to stay in neighborhoods where there aren’t hotels, to be able to dig deeper into a city, but I also know that it can also be not great for the people who live in those neighborhoods. A couple of years back, we and another family booked into a flat in the Trastevere neighborhood in Rome. Great flat on a great street; really enjoyed the neighborhood and the time we had with our friends, being able to spend time in some place other than a restaurant or hotel bar, catching up while trying to figure out the espresso machine or the washer/dryer combo. All good. But looking across the landing to the other apartment on our floor, the sign taped to the door in Italian and Google-translated English saying “Keep it quiet”, you could tell the people <em>living</em> in this building weren’t having a great time. And then there’s the story our friends tell of when a condo in their building in Lincoln Park on the north side of Chicago was listed on Airbnb, and one night while at dinner, looking out their window they could see a porn movie being filmed there. Kinda put them off their meal.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>There are loads of vacation rental horror stories, but not from me. Looking through my trip histories on Airbnb and VRBO, I’ve had a really good run -- a great beach place in San Diego, a tiny house in Durango, CO, a walk up in Brooklyn’s Carroll Gardens neighborhood, a flat in Split, Croatia with a balcony where I drank my morning coffee watching the sailboats head out of the harbor…. All good, except for London.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Two years ago, November 2021, we were heading over London for a couple of weeks. The morning we were leaving, maybe 5 hours before heading to the airport, we get an email from our Booking.com host -- “So sorry, but a water pipe broke in the apartment, so we have to cancel your stay that starts tomorrow.” Wait, what!? Did I read that right? I read it again. Yup, I read it right; we have no place to stay when we land in London tomorrow morning. Luckily, it was just Irene and me; we didn’t <em>need</em> sprawl space. So I quickly pivoted from packing socks and underwear to logging onto Marriott.com to book a room before our Uber showed up, which I did, at the Montcalm East near Shoreditch. The last-minute booking was definitely more expensive, but I was confident it had a working toilet and shower -- well, that and I got free breakfast with my Titanium status.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Fast forward to this trip, in November 2023, with our daughter joining us, we needed a vacation rental. Given our last experience, we gave ourselves a 5-month head start, booking a place in June. I found a good place in London and booked it on Airbnb. Ten days later, I get a morning email canceling our reservation, but this time from Airbnb, saying the property we booked “doesn’t appear to be legitimate.” Right after that, I get another email, from the property owner, asking me to book direct with him, sending the full payment via bank transfer. So send a couple of thousand dollars in June for a November stay to a guy I’ve never dealt with before, and for whom I couldn’t find any other information -- property website, LinkedIn profile, social media presence? Felt just a bit scammy, so I took a pass. Not the last time I’d get this request.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Irene took over. That afternoon, she booked a flat on Booking.com. Fast forward to the beginning of November. Starting to get geared up for the trip and think maybe we should check the status of our booking. Huh -- Booking.com has a new note saying our reservation now can’t be paid through them. We ping the property owner -- “What gives?” We get back a blisto-gram of an email; not aimed at us, but at Booking.com. “Their fees are too high and they’re awful to work with. I told them to cancel all reservations.” Hmm, our reservation is still there, but doesn’t sound like we had a good chance of getting into the flat if we showed up. So Irene canceled it and booked a different flat.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>From whom, a couple of days later, we get an email asking us to cancel our Booking.com reservation and book directly with them, with full payment via bank transfer. This sounds familiar. They’re forced into this, going off-platform, they wrote, because London limits short-term rentals to 60 days a year. A quick Google search told me London’s limit is 90 days rather than 60. Not looking to dunk on these folks, but -- hmm, you’d think an experienced host would get this number right. Little bit of doubt, so we took another pass on sending a stranger a couple of thousand dollars with no fraud protections.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>So I search for another place in the same neighborhood and find one on Booking. I hit the Book button and pretty quickly get back a confirmation email from TravelNest, a vacation rental property management company. Good! No more asking me to book direct. They send me the contact info for the property owner so I can coordinate arrival logistics. I send the guy an email -- it bounces. I send texts and WhatsApp messages to him -- crickets. I go back to TravelNest. “Oh, don’t worry, we’ll contact him.” “With what? The same email that bounced; the same phone number that he hasn’t checked?” “Oh, don’t worry, he’ll turn up.” OK, I’ve got other things to worry about, and London was the second week of our trip, so we had time.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The end of our first week -- we were hiking/walking down in Dorset on the south coast -- I hadn’t heard anything and started to worry. I started pinging Booking and TravelNest; sending emails and calling. Nothing solved, but every time I talked to someone, it was “Don’t worry, we’ll take care of you.” I’m not going to go through every call, -- maybe I’ll put all those details on a Twitter thread -- but I spent 5-6 hours over 3 days on calls with these people and the problem, my problem, boiled down to this -- we were past the cancelation deadline; Booking.com viewed TravelNest as their property contact, not the MIA owner; and TravelNest didn’t want to cancel the reservation and lose the revenue in hopes that the owner would show up at the last minute.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You know where this is going. Tuesday morning, we’re driving up to London Heathrow from Bournemouth to drop off the Hertz car and “ping” goes the Booking.com app. It’s a message from TravelNest - “I am very sorry to let you know that the owner of the property you have booked via Travelnest cannot accommodate your upcoming booking. This is due to the host having stopped advertising their property through Travelnest. And we don’t have any alternatives to offer you.” Amazing. They’re just now figuring out that the guy stopped using them. They couldn’t have checked during one of those 5-6 hours of calls a few days ago.&nbsp; So after we dropped the car off, we took the shuttle bus over to Terminal 2. Irene and Claire grabbed a coffee while I got on the phone to Booking.com. “Oh, I’m so sorry, but don’t worry we’ll take care of you.” But they didn’t. They couldn’t find us a replacement property in the part of London we needed to be. So I ran the same play as two years ago, fired up Marriott.com and found us a room for the night. And then splurged for a black cab instead of the cheaper Heathrow Express so Claire and I could work our Airbnb apps to find a place for the rest of our time in London. Which we did after about the 3rd try.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>So out of this whole shitshow, what did I learn? First, the London short-term vacation rental market just seems broken. There were so many properties on Booking.com and Airbnb that showed availability, but really weren’t. All told, it took us 6 booking attempts before we finally got one to stick. I’ve never had that happen in any other place. Second, there’s something wrong with the group that runs Booking.com’s short-term rentals. Irene uses (well, <em>used</em>) them <em>a lot</em> for hotel bookings, and we’ve never had a problem. But vacation rentals, every bad experience has been a Booking.com property. As you might guess, we won’t be using them again. Third, immediately cancel reservations where a third party like TravelNest pops up. They don’t add value to <strong>you</strong>, the traveler; they just get in the way when a problem crops up and are just another point of failure.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Oh, and I guess there’s a fourth -- don’t trust anyone when they say “Don’t worry, we’ll take care of you.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"className\":\"has-medium-font-size\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #198</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As always, you can find us and listen to the current episodes on all the main podcast sites -- Apple Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, Google Podcasts, and Amazon Music. And you can always Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page at TravelCommons.com for a transcript of the episode and links to items on the gift guide. If you’re not yet subscribed, there’s a drop down Subscribe menu at the top of TravelCommon’s home page. And along the side of the page, you’ll find links to all the TravelCommons’ socials.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to mpeacock on Twitter, write them on the TravelCommons page on Facebook or Instagram, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com.&nbsp; And thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in emails, Tweets and post comments on the website. I really appreciate it.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And until we talk again, safe travels; and thanks for stopping by the TravelCommons.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_198.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #198 — London Vacation Rental Woes','London\'s vacation rental market is broken and Booking.com is no help. Also, Hertz\'s EV retreat, Sioux City, Iowa embraces their SUX airport code, a flash-in-the-pan airport delay crypto betting app.','inherit','closed','closed','','4436-revision-v1','','','2024-03-01 10:50:46','2024-03-01 15:50:46','',4436,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4445',0,'revision','',0),
(4446,1,'2024-03-01 10:53:13','2024-03-01 15:53:13','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/IMG_4238-EDIT-400x400.jpg\" alt=\"fence gate with a sign saying Beware of The Bull\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /> Door to Booking.com Customer Service Center?[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I walked by <a href=\"https://www.shakespearesglobe.com/\" title=\"\">Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre</a> after a weekend of wrestling with <a href=\"https://www.booking.com/\" title=\"\">Booking.com</a> and <a href=\"https://travelnest.com/\" title=\"\">TravelNest</a>\'s service agents, trying unsuccessfully to not let them screw up my London vacation rental.  The Macbeth soliloquy about a tale \"full of sound and fury, signifying nothing\" pretty much summed up my experience -- lots of talk that yielded nothing. But before that, we catch up on Hertz\'s EV reversal, Sioux City, Iowa\'s embrace of their SUX airport code, and a flash-in-the-pan airport delay betting app.  All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_198.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #198: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN after an extended holiday break that had us in the UK for the back half of November -- the first week in Dorset on the south coast doing a bit of muddy hiking and then knocking around London the second week. As I mentioned a few episodes back, Irene and I took BA’s direct flights between Nashville and Heathrow. Our flights were on 787’s, but apparently the route has become popular enough for BA to announce they’re upgauging it to a triple 7. Interesting given that Nashville isn’t a hub airport. Had what has become my standard flight-to-Nashville moment -- helping a guy rearrange the overhead bin so he could fit his guitar in. Not sure if there are enough musicians to fill those extra seats though. Music tourists? Bachelorette parties? I dunno, but the Nashville airport will need to get their new international baggage claim hall sorted before then. When we arrived, we were told to get our luggage and then go to the immigration line -- the exact opposite of every other international arrival flow I’ve ever done. There was only one Global Entry terminal and it was over by the luggage belt rather than by the immigration line. So we all queued up for it while we waited for our luggage to arrive. After a 45-minute wait (and a lot of AirTag checking), we grabbed our bags and headed over to immigration, went to the Global Entry line which seemed to act like a Clear line for TSA -- we got a line cut to the next immigration agent, but still had to go through all the questions and photo taking. It was weird, inefficient, very unlike my recent arrivals at ORD and EWR. Maybe they just need more reps to work out the kinks, or bring in a more experienced manager. Whatever it is, they need to fix it before bigger jets and more people show up.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>After that jaunt in November, we’ve pretty much stayed put, with our spare bedroom being on the receiving end of travel -- our daughter Claire was here for a couple of weeks over Christmas and New Year’s, one couple who’d never been to Nashville before (amazing!) and two other couples for whom Nashville, handily enough, was 8 hours down the road on their first day driving to somewhere. You could say “Great! Chance to be a tourist in our own town!” but it’s more about being the <em>tour guide</em>, which, in Nashville, comes with the responsibility of having informed opinions about things like the best hot chicken joint and the best Broadway honky-tonk. Nashville’s Hot Chicken Week was a couple weeks ago, which gave me the excuse (as if I needed one) to buy the jumbo jar of Mylanta and hit every hot chicken joint to figure out the best -- which for me is <a href=\"https://www.reds615kitchen.com/\">Red’s 615 Kitchen</a> in the West End. I can’t say I’ve been <em>that</em> meticulous about my honky-tonk opinions; one can dodge only so many bachelorette parties and watch only so many cover bands. And then I’ve gotta keep finding new cool places to take our visitors the <em>next</em> time they pass through town. I’m telling you, this tour guide thing can be a bit exhausting.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/11510\">Funkist</a>&nbsp;– cdk dub mix by cdk (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: teru</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Well… the lead topic for <a href=\"http://staging.travelcommons.com/2023/11/07/podcast-197-renting-a-tesla-2023-traveler-gift-guide/\">the last episode</a> was “Renting a Tesla\'\'; finally relenting to Hertz’s incessant email offers/pleas for a November. Two months later, <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/business/autos/after-big-tesla-bet-hertz-selling-one-third-of-ev-fleet-5626a425?st=rtm10t2qnapxjhj&amp;reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink\">Hertz announces they’re selling off a third of their EV fleet</a> -- 20,000 of them. Paging through <a href=\"https://www.hertzcarsales.com/used-electric-vehicles.htm?geoZip=20001&amp;geoRadius=0\">hertzcarsales.com</a>, it’s mostly Tesla Model 3s, with a few Model Ys and Chevy Bolts sprinkled in. I was a little surprised when I read it because Hertz had been hitting their fleet electrification message so hard. But now looking back on some of my observations in the last episode -- the EV aisle at Logan airport full up with 10-12 Tesla Model 3’s and a couple of Polestars, the guys working there being so nonchalant about battery levels and car condition -- the clues were there. But someone was driving them. Half of these EVs have 30-60,000 miles on them -- which feels heavy for a fleet of 18-month-old cars, even if they’re rental cars. If nothing else, it cuts my Hertz email traffic <em>way</em> down.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Just one more thing on EVs. Also in that topic, I talked about the hassle of charging an EV. Not range anxiety -- I was only driving 20 miles from Logan; but the effort to find a charger and then the time it took to charge the battery. In London, we stayed in an <em>OK</em> neighborhood between King’s Cross Station and Clerkenwell, typical urban streetscape of walk-up apartment buildings and cars parked bumper-to-bumper along the curb. Walking down the sidewalk the first day there, I saw a cord coming out of a parked car. Where the hell is that going? I looked down at my feet -- it wasn’t running across the sidewalk into the building. No, it was plugged into the base of the street light. Pretty clever… and necessary since none of the folks living in these flats has a garage to charge in.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Back in November, right after I dropped the last episode in which I talked about my turboprop flight to Sioux City, IA as the “ah ha” moment justifying the price of my first pair of Bose noise-canceling headphones, the Wall Street Journal ran an <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/business/iowa-airport-branding-sux-sioux-city-bc46b7b3\">article</a> about how Sioux City, Iowa is embracing the three-letter code for their airport, SUX. And it reminded me again of that flight back in the mid-’90’s. The agent handed me the boarding pass (the age before smartphones). “SUX, Sucks? Is this a joke?” I asked. She just shrugged; I think she’d heard that before -- a lot. I think the Dash 8 was the smallest prop plane United Express flew. We stopped first in Waterloo, Iowa where most everyone else got out for the big John Deere plant there. After the flight attendant buttoned the door back up, she gave the rest of us a look and then pointed us to new seats -- kinda eyeballing the weight distribution; moving some of the bigger guys to seats behind the wing. The airport codes for that flight -- ORD to ALO to SUX -- ‘Alo to Sucks -- were fun. Could’ve been better if the plane had swung through Grand Rapids -- GRR -- for “Grrr…, it sucks”. An itinerary starting in Fresno -- FAT-- would give us the non-body-positive “Fat Sucks.” Or for a much more unlikely flight -- Singapore -- SIN -- to Sioux City for the much more righteous “Sin Sucks”. I could go on… but I won’t; it’s getting painful, even for me. Apparently, back at the turn of the century -- the 21st century -- Sioux City asked the FAA for a new airport code for what is officially named “Sioux Gateway Airport”. I guess they didn’t like the alternatives offered -- GWU, SGV, GAY -- so they kept SUX. And then people built businesses selling SUX merch -- Winter SUX, Work SUX.&nbsp; And probably the most apropos&nbsp; -- “it SUX to lose your luggage.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>With all the betting around the Super Bowl -- the Vegas lines, every party selling squares -- I circled back ‘round to something I saw in September, an app called Wingman. They call themselves a “flight delays prediction market”. Betting on flight delays -- sounds like it could be fun, especially when watching the departure board at ORD or LGA. Digging past the headline, I found out it’s a Web3 blockchain dapp (decentralized application) -- not sure if it could be any more buzzword-compliant -- using some crypto-tokens I’ve never heard of… which maybe let’s them serve gambling laws (?); I dunno. As it is, I didn’t end up giving Wingman a spin; it required connecting a crypto-wallet to the app -- which I don’t have… and probably never will. Looking at a site called DappRadar which claims to track 15,000 distributed apps, it looks like Wingman had <a href=\"https://dappradar.com/dapp/wingman?range-ha=all\">a moment of hotness back in September</a> after its burst of announcement publicity with 5-6-700 transactions. But in the new year, it’s had a few days with a handful -- less than ten; but most days with nothing. Disappointing. I was hoping this could be a new way to fund my flight-delay bar tabs.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter (X?) message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page, or on the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can skip all that social media stuff and post your comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/48705\">Jolanta Blues</a>&nbsp;by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: Admiral Bob, Martijn de Boer</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>London Vacation Rental Woes</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Listeners who <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">follow me on Twitter/X</a> know that I had one of my worst short-term rental experiences during our London trip with Booking.com. And I’ll talk about what I learned from that in a moment, but it got me thinking about vacation rentals in general. For the longest time, it was a local mom-and-pop business, typically in vacation areas -- ski resorts, beach towns. You called or stopped by a local realtor, or someone you knew who knew the area recommended a place, and then you rented it from the owner. Friends who rent beach houses on the East Coast tell me they’ve had the same renters for the same week in June, July, August for years. Then Airbnb started up in 2008, first as a platform to rent out spare rooms (remember couchsurfing.com?), but it pretty quickly moved home rentals out of its mom-&amp;-pop vacation spot model into a parallel urban hotel market.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I’m not deep in urban planning or rental market dynamics, so I’m not getting into the pluses and minuses of short-term rentals. You can get all that and more with a simple Google search. Maybe I’m old-school (or just old), but my use of short-term rentals is pretty much the same now as it was pre-Airbnb -- when it’s a bigger group and we’ll need more space to spread out than a hotel can give you. I also enjoy being able to stay in neighborhoods where there aren’t hotels, to be able to dig deeper into a city, but I also know that it can also be not great for the people who live in those neighborhoods. A couple of years back, we and another family booked into a flat in the Trastevere neighborhood in Rome. Great flat on a great street; really enjoyed the neighborhood and the time we had with our friends, being able to spend time in some place other than a restaurant or hotel bar, catching up while trying to figure out the espresso machine or the washer/dryer combo. All good. But looking across the landing to the other apartment on our floor, the sign taped to the door in Italian and Google-translated English saying “Keep it quiet”, you could tell the people <em>living</em> in this building weren’t having a great time. And then there’s the story our friends tell of when a condo in their building in Lincoln Park on the north side of Chicago was listed on Airbnb, and one night while at dinner, looking out their window they could see a porn movie being filmed there. Kinda put them off their meal.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>There are loads of vacation rental horror stories, but not from me. Looking through my trip histories on Airbnb and VRBO, I’ve had a really good run -- a great beach place in San Diego, a tiny house in Durango, CO, a walk up in Brooklyn’s Carroll Gardens neighborhood, a flat in Split, Croatia with a balcony where I drank my morning coffee watching the sailboats head out of the harbor…. All good, except for London.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Two years ago, November 2021, we were heading over London for a couple of weeks. The morning we were leaving, maybe 5 hours before heading to the airport, we get an email from our Booking.com host -- “So sorry, but a water pipe broke in the apartment, so we have to cancel your stay that starts tomorrow.” Wait, what!? Did I read that right? I read it again. Yup, I read it right; we have no place to stay when we land in London tomorrow morning. Luckily, it was just Irene and me; we didn’t <em>need</em> sprawl space. So I quickly pivoted from packing socks and underwear to logging onto Marriott.com to book a room before our Uber showed up, which I did, at the Montcalm East near Shoreditch. The last-minute booking was definitely more expensive, but I was confident it had a working toilet and shower -- well, that and I got free breakfast with my Titanium status.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Fast forward to this trip, in November 2023, with our daughter joining us, we needed a vacation rental. Given our last experience, we gave ourselves a 5-month head start, booking a place in June. I found a good place in London and booked it on Airbnb. Ten days later, I get a morning email canceling our reservation, but this time from Airbnb, saying the property we booked “doesn’t appear to be legitimate.” Right after that, I get another email, from the property owner, asking me to book direct with him, sending the full payment via bank transfer. So send a couple of thousand dollars in June for a November stay to a guy I’ve never dealt with before, and for whom I couldn’t find any other information -- property website, LinkedIn profile, social media presence? Felt just a bit scammy, so I took a pass. Not the last time I’d get this request.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Irene took over. That afternoon, she booked a flat on Booking.com. Fast forward to the beginning of November. Starting to get geared up for the trip and think maybe we should check the status of our booking. Huh -- Booking.com has a new note saying our reservation now can’t be paid through them. We ping the property owner -- “What gives?” We get back a blisto-gram of an email; not aimed at us, but at Booking.com. “Their fees are too high and they’re awful to work with. I told them to cancel all reservations.” Hmm, our reservation is still there, but doesn’t sound like we had a good chance of getting into the flat if we showed up. So Irene canceled it and booked a different flat.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>From whom, a couple of days later, we get an email asking us to cancel our Booking.com reservation and book directly with them, with full payment via bank transfer. This sounds familiar. They’re forced into this, going off-platform, they wrote, because London limits short-term rentals to 60 days a year. A quick Google search told me London’s limit is 90 days rather than 60. Not looking to dunk on these folks, but -- hmm, you’d think an experienced host would get this number right. Little bit of doubt, so we took another pass on sending a stranger a couple of thousand dollars with no fraud protections.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>So I search for another place in the same neighborhood and find one on Booking. I hit the Book button and pretty quickly get back a confirmation email from TravelNest, a vacation rental property management company. Good! No more asking me to book direct. They send me the contact info for the property owner so I can coordinate arrival logistics. I send the guy an email -- it bounces. I send texts and WhatsApp messages to him -- crickets. I go back to TravelNest. “Oh, don’t worry, we’ll contact him.” “With what? The same email that bounced; the same phone number that he hasn’t checked?” “Oh, don’t worry, he’ll turn up.” OK, I’ve got other things to worry about, and London was the second week of our trip, so we had time.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The end of our first week -- we were hiking/walking down in Dorset on the south coast -- I hadn’t heard anything and started to worry. I started pinging Booking and TravelNest; sending emails and calling. Nothing solved, but every time I talked to someone, it was “Don’t worry, we’ll take care of you.” I’m not going to go through every call, -- maybe I’ll put all those details on a Twitter thread -- but I spent 5-6 hours over 3 days on calls with these people and the problem, my problem, boiled down to this -- we were past the cancelation deadline; Booking.com viewed TravelNest as their property contact, not the MIA owner; and TravelNest didn’t want to cancel the reservation and lose the revenue in hopes that the owner would show up at the last minute.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You know where this is going. Tuesday morning, we’re driving up to London Heathrow from Bournemouth to drop off the Hertz car and “ping” goes the Booking.com app. It’s a message from TravelNest - “I am very sorry to let you know that the owner of the property you have booked via Travelnest cannot accommodate your upcoming booking. This is due to the host having stopped advertising their property through Travelnest. And we don’t have any alternatives to offer you.” Amazing. They’re just now figuring out that the guy stopped using them. They couldn’t have checked during one of those 5-6 hours of calls a few days ago.&nbsp; So after we dropped the car off, we took the shuttle bus over to Terminal 2. Irene and Claire grabbed a coffee while I got on the phone to Booking.com. “Oh, I’m so sorry, but don’t worry we’ll take care of you.” But they didn’t. They couldn’t find us a replacement property in the part of London we needed to be. So I ran the same play as two years ago, fired up Marriott.com and found us a room for the night. And then splurged for a black cab instead of the cheaper Heathrow Express so Claire and I could work our Airbnb apps to find a place for the rest of our time in London. Which we did after about the 3rd try.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>So out of this whole shitshow, what did I learn? First, the London short-term vacation rental market just seems broken. There were so many properties on Booking.com and Airbnb that showed availability, but really weren’t. All told, it took us 6 booking attempts before we finally got one to stick. I’ve never had that happen in any other place. Second, there’s something wrong with the group that runs Booking.com’s short-term rentals. Irene uses (well, <em>used</em>) them <em>a lot</em> for hotel bookings, and we’ve never had a problem. But vacation rentals, every bad experience has been a Booking.com property. As you might guess, we won’t be using them again. Third, immediately cancel reservations where a third party like TravelNest pops up. They don’t add value to <strong>you</strong>, the traveler; they just get in the way when a problem crops up and are just another point of failure.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Oh, and I guess there’s a fourth -- don’t trust anyone when they say “Don’t worry, we’ll take care of you.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"className\":\"has-medium-font-size\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #198</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As always, you can find us and listen to the current episodes on all the main podcast sites -- Apple Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, Google Podcasts, and Amazon Music. And you can always Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page at TravelCommons.com for a transcript of the episode and links to items on the gift guide. If you’re not yet subscribed, there’s a drop down Subscribe menu at the top of TravelCommon’s home page. And along the side of the page, you’ll find links to all the TravelCommons’ socials.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to mpeacock on Twitter, write them on the TravelCommons page on Facebook or Instagram, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com.&nbsp; And thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in emails, Tweets and post comments on the website. I really appreciate it.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And until we talk again, safe travels; and thanks for stopping by the TravelCommons.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_198.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #198 — London Vacation Rental Woes; Hertz\'s EV Retreat','London\'s vacation rental market is broken and Booking.com is no help. Also, Hertz\'s EV retreat, Sioux City, Iowa embraces their SUX airport code, a flash-in-the-pan airport delay crypto betting app.','inherit','closed','closed','','4436-revision-v1','','','2024-03-01 10:53:13','2024-03-01 15:53:13','',4436,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4446',0,'revision','',0),
(4447,1,'2024-03-01 10:54:14','2024-03-01 15:54:14','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/IMG_4238-EDIT-400x400.jpg\" alt=\"fence gate with a sign saying Beware of The Bull\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /> Booking.com\'s Customer Service Center?[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I walked by <a href=\"https://www.shakespearesglobe.com/\" title=\"\">Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre</a> after a weekend of wrestling with <a href=\"https://www.booking.com/\" title=\"\">Booking.com</a> and <a href=\"https://travelnest.com/\" title=\"\">TravelNest</a>\'s service agents, trying unsuccessfully to not let them screw up my London vacation rental.  The Macbeth soliloquy about a tale \"full of sound and fury, signifying nothing\" pretty much summed up my experience -- lots of talk that yielded nothing. But before that, we catch up on Hertz\'s EV reversal, Sioux City, Iowa\'s embrace of their SUX airport code, and a flash-in-the-pan airport delay betting app.  All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_198.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #198: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN after an extended holiday break that had us in the UK for the back half of November -- the first week in Dorset on the south coast doing a bit of muddy hiking and then knocking around London the second week. As I mentioned a few episodes back, Irene and I took BA’s direct flights between Nashville and Heathrow. Our flights were on 787’s, but apparently the route has become popular enough for BA to announce they’re upgauging it to a triple 7. Interesting given that Nashville isn’t a hub airport. Had what has become my standard flight-to-Nashville moment -- helping a guy rearrange the overhead bin so he could fit his guitar in. Not sure if there are enough musicians to fill those extra seats though. Music tourists? Bachelorette parties? I dunno, but the Nashville airport will need to get their new international baggage claim hall sorted before then. When we arrived, we were told to get our luggage and then go to the immigration line -- the exact opposite of every other international arrival flow I’ve ever done. There was only one Global Entry terminal and it was over by the luggage belt rather than by the immigration line. So we all queued up for it while we waited for our luggage to arrive. After a 45-minute wait (and a lot of AirTag checking), we grabbed our bags and headed over to immigration, went to the Global Entry line which seemed to act like a Clear line for TSA -- we got a line cut to the next immigration agent, but still had to go through all the questions and photo taking. It was weird, inefficient, very unlike my recent arrivals at ORD and EWR. Maybe they just need more reps to work out the kinks, or bring in a more experienced manager. Whatever it is, they need to fix it before bigger jets and more people show up.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>After that jaunt in November, we’ve pretty much stayed put, with our spare bedroom being on the receiving end of travel -- our daughter Claire was here for a couple of weeks over Christmas and New Year’s, one couple who’d never been to Nashville before (amazing!) and two other couples for whom Nashville, handily enough, was 8 hours down the road on their first day driving to somewhere. You could say “Great! Chance to be a tourist in our own town!” but it’s more about being the <em>tour guide</em>, which, in Nashville, comes with the responsibility of having informed opinions about things like the best hot chicken joint and the best Broadway honky-tonk. Nashville’s Hot Chicken Week was a couple weeks ago, which gave me the excuse (as if I needed one) to buy the jumbo jar of Mylanta and hit every hot chicken joint to figure out the best -- which for me is <a href=\"https://www.reds615kitchen.com/\">Red’s 615 Kitchen</a> in the West End. I can’t say I’ve been <em>that</em> meticulous about my honky-tonk opinions; one can dodge only so many bachelorette parties and watch only so many cover bands. And then I’ve gotta keep finding new cool places to take our visitors the <em>next</em> time they pass through town. I’m telling you, this tour guide thing can be a bit exhausting.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/11510\">Funkist</a>&nbsp;– cdk dub mix by cdk (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: teru</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Well… the lead topic for <a href=\"http://staging.travelcommons.com/2023/11/07/podcast-197-renting-a-tesla-2023-traveler-gift-guide/\">the last episode</a> was “Renting a Tesla\'\'; finally relenting to Hertz’s incessant email offers/pleas for a November. Two months later, <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/business/autos/after-big-tesla-bet-hertz-selling-one-third-of-ev-fleet-5626a425?st=rtm10t2qnapxjhj&amp;reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink\">Hertz announces they’re selling off a third of their EV fleet</a> -- 20,000 of them. Paging through <a href=\"https://www.hertzcarsales.com/used-electric-vehicles.htm?geoZip=20001&amp;geoRadius=0\">hertzcarsales.com</a>, it’s mostly Tesla Model 3s, with a few Model Ys and Chevy Bolts sprinkled in. I was a little surprised when I read it because Hertz had been hitting their fleet electrification message so hard. But now looking back on some of my observations in the last episode -- the EV aisle at Logan airport full up with 10-12 Tesla Model 3’s and a couple of Polestars, the guys working there being so nonchalant about battery levels and car condition -- the clues were there. But someone was driving them. Half of these EVs have 30-60,000 miles on them -- which feels heavy for a fleet of 18-month-old cars, even if they’re rental cars. If nothing else, it cuts my Hertz email traffic <em>way</em> down.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Just one more thing on EVs. Also in that topic, I talked about the hassle of charging an EV. Not range anxiety -- I was only driving 20 miles from Logan; but the effort to find a charger and then the time it took to charge the battery. In London, we stayed in an <em>OK</em> neighborhood between King’s Cross Station and Clerkenwell, typical urban streetscape of walk-up apartment buildings and cars parked bumper-to-bumper along the curb. Walking down the sidewalk the first day there, I saw a cord coming out of a parked car. Where the hell is that going? I looked down at my feet -- it wasn’t running across the sidewalk into the building. No, it was plugged into the base of the street light. Pretty clever… and necessary since none of the folks living in these flats has a garage to charge in.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Back in November, right after I dropped the last episode in which I talked about my turboprop flight to Sioux City, IA as the “ah ha” moment justifying the price of my first pair of Bose noise-canceling headphones, the Wall Street Journal ran an <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/business/iowa-airport-branding-sux-sioux-city-bc46b7b3\">article</a> about how Sioux City, Iowa is embracing the three-letter code for their airport, SUX. And it reminded me again of that flight back in the mid-’90’s. The agent handed me the boarding pass (the age before smartphones). “SUX, Sucks? Is this a joke?” I asked. She just shrugged; I think she’d heard that before -- a lot. I think the Dash 8 was the smallest prop plane United Express flew. We stopped first in Waterloo, Iowa where most everyone else got out for the big John Deere plant there. After the flight attendant buttoned the door back up, she gave the rest of us a look and then pointed us to new seats -- kinda eyeballing the weight distribution; moving some of the bigger guys to seats behind the wing. The airport codes for that flight -- ORD to ALO to SUX -- ‘Alo to Sucks -- were fun. Could’ve been better if the plane had swung through Grand Rapids -- GRR -- for “Grrr…, it sucks”. An itinerary starting in Fresno -- FAT-- would give us the non-body-positive “Fat Sucks.” Or for a much more unlikely flight -- Singapore -- SIN -- to Sioux City for the much more righteous “Sin Sucks”. I could go on… but I won’t; it’s getting painful, even for me. Apparently, back at the turn of the century -- the 21st century -- Sioux City asked the FAA for a new airport code for what is officially named “Sioux Gateway Airport”. I guess they didn’t like the alternatives offered -- GWU, SGV, GAY -- so they kept SUX. And then people built businesses selling SUX merch -- Winter SUX, Work SUX.&nbsp; And probably the most apropos&nbsp; -- “it SUX to lose your luggage.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>With all the betting around the Super Bowl -- the Vegas lines, every party selling squares -- I circled back ‘round to something I saw in September, an app called Wingman. They call themselves a “flight delays prediction market”. Betting on flight delays -- sounds like it could be fun, especially when watching the departure board at ORD or LGA. Digging past the headline, I found out it’s a Web3 blockchain dapp (decentralized application) -- not sure if it could be any more buzzword-compliant -- using some crypto-tokens I’ve never heard of… which maybe let’s them serve gambling laws (?); I dunno. As it is, I didn’t end up giving Wingman a spin; it required connecting a crypto-wallet to the app -- which I don’t have… and probably never will. Looking at a site called DappRadar which claims to track 15,000 distributed apps, it looks like Wingman had <a href=\"https://dappradar.com/dapp/wingman?range-ha=all\">a moment of hotness back in September</a> after its burst of announcement publicity with 5-6-700 transactions. But in the new year, it’s had a few days with a handful -- less than ten; but most days with nothing. Disappointing. I was hoping this could be a new way to fund my flight-delay bar tabs.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter (X?) message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page, or on the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can skip all that social media stuff and post your comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/48705\">Jolanta Blues</a>&nbsp;by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: Admiral Bob, Martijn de Boer</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>London Vacation Rental Woes</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Listeners who <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">follow me on Twitter/X</a> know that I had one of my worst short-term rental experiences during our London trip with Booking.com. And I’ll talk about what I learned from that in a moment, but it got me thinking about vacation rentals in general. For the longest time, it was a local mom-and-pop business, typically in vacation areas -- ski resorts, beach towns. You called or stopped by a local realtor, or someone you knew who knew the area recommended a place, and then you rented it from the owner. Friends who rent beach houses on the East Coast tell me they’ve had the same renters for the same week in June, July, August for years. Then Airbnb started up in 2008, first as a platform to rent out spare rooms (remember couchsurfing.com?), but it pretty quickly moved home rentals out of its mom-&amp;-pop vacation spot model into a parallel urban hotel market.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I’m not deep in urban planning or rental market dynamics, so I’m not getting into the pluses and minuses of short-term rentals. You can get all that and more with a simple Google search. Maybe I’m old-school (or just old), but my use of short-term rentals is pretty much the same now as it was pre-Airbnb -- when it’s a bigger group and we’ll need more space to spread out than a hotel can give you. I also enjoy being able to stay in neighborhoods where there aren’t hotels, to be able to dig deeper into a city, but I also know that it can also be not great for the people who live in those neighborhoods. A couple of years back, we and another family booked into a flat in the Trastevere neighborhood in Rome. Great flat on a great street; really enjoyed the neighborhood and the time we had with our friends, being able to spend time in some place other than a restaurant or hotel bar, catching up while trying to figure out the espresso machine or the washer/dryer combo. All good. But looking across the landing to the other apartment on our floor, the sign taped to the door in Italian and Google-translated English saying “Keep it quiet”, you could tell the people <em>living</em> in this building weren’t having a great time. And then there’s the story our friends tell of when a condo in their building in Lincoln Park on the north side of Chicago was listed on Airbnb, and one night while at dinner, looking out their window they could see a porn movie being filmed there. Kinda put them off their meal.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>There are loads of vacation rental horror stories, but not from me. Looking through my trip histories on Airbnb and VRBO, I’ve had a really good run -- a great beach place in San Diego, a tiny house in Durango, CO, a walk up in Brooklyn’s Carroll Gardens neighborhood, a flat in Split, Croatia with a balcony where I drank my morning coffee watching the sailboats head out of the harbor…. All good, except for London.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Two years ago, November 2021, we were heading over London for a couple of weeks. The morning we were leaving, maybe 5 hours before heading to the airport, we get an email from our Booking.com host -- “So sorry, but a water pipe broke in the apartment, so we have to cancel your stay that starts tomorrow.” Wait, what!? Did I read that right? I read it again. Yup, I read it right; we have no place to stay when we land in London tomorrow morning. Luckily, it was just Irene and me; we didn’t <em>need</em> sprawl space. So I quickly pivoted from packing socks and underwear to logging onto Marriott.com to book a room before our Uber showed up, which I did, at the Montcalm East near Shoreditch. The last-minute booking was definitely more expensive, but I was confident it had a working toilet and shower -- well, that and I got free breakfast with my Titanium status.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Fast forward to this trip, in November 2023, with our daughter joining us, we needed a vacation rental. Given our last experience, we gave ourselves a 5-month head start, booking a place in June. I found a good place in London and booked it on Airbnb. Ten days later, I get a morning email canceling our reservation, but this time from Airbnb, saying the property we booked “doesn’t appear to be legitimate.” Right after that, I get another email, from the property owner, asking me to book direct with him, sending the full payment via bank transfer. So send a couple of thousand dollars in June for a November stay to a guy I’ve never dealt with before, and for whom I couldn’t find any other information -- property website, LinkedIn profile, social media presence? Felt just a bit scammy, so I took a pass. Not the last time I’d get this request.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Irene took over. That afternoon, she booked a flat on Booking.com. Fast forward to the beginning of November. Starting to get geared up for the trip and think maybe we should check the status of our booking. Huh -- Booking.com has a new note saying our reservation now can’t be paid through them. We ping the property owner -- “What gives?” We get back a blisto-gram of an email; not aimed at us, but at Booking.com. “Their fees are too high and they’re awful to work with. I told them to cancel all reservations.” Hmm, our reservation is still there, but doesn’t sound like we had a good chance of getting into the flat if we showed up. So Irene canceled it and booked a different flat.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>From whom, a couple of days later, we get an email asking us to cancel our Booking.com reservation and book directly with them, with full payment via bank transfer. This sounds familiar. They’re forced into this, going off-platform, they wrote, because London limits short-term rentals to 60 days a year. A quick Google search told me London’s limit is 90 days rather than 60. Not looking to dunk on these folks, but -- hmm, you’d think an experienced host would get this number right. Little bit of doubt, so we took another pass on sending a stranger a couple of thousand dollars with no fraud protections.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>So I search for another place in the same neighborhood and find one on Booking. I hit the Book button and pretty quickly get back a confirmation email from TravelNest, a vacation rental property management company. Good! No more asking me to book direct. They send me the contact info for the property owner so I can coordinate arrival logistics. I send the guy an email -- it bounces. I send texts and WhatsApp messages to him -- crickets. I go back to TravelNest. “Oh, don’t worry, we’ll contact him.” “With what? The same email that bounced; the same phone number that he hasn’t checked?” “Oh, don’t worry, he’ll turn up.” OK, I’ve got other things to worry about, and London was the second week of our trip, so we had time.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The end of our first week -- we were hiking/walking down in Dorset on the south coast -- I hadn’t heard anything and started to worry. I started pinging Booking and TravelNest; sending emails and calling. Nothing solved, but every time I talked to someone, it was “Don’t worry, we’ll take care of you.” I’m not going to go through every call, -- maybe I’ll put all those details on a Twitter thread -- but I spent 5-6 hours over 3 days on calls with these people and the problem, my problem, boiled down to this -- we were past the cancelation deadline; Booking.com viewed TravelNest as their property contact, not the MIA owner; and TravelNest didn’t want to cancel the reservation and lose the revenue in hopes that the owner would show up at the last minute.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You know where this is going. Tuesday morning, we’re driving up to London Heathrow from Bournemouth to drop off the Hertz car and “ping” goes the Booking.com app. It’s a message from TravelNest - “I am very sorry to let you know that the owner of the property you have booked via Travelnest cannot accommodate your upcoming booking. This is due to the host having stopped advertising their property through Travelnest. And we don’t have any alternatives to offer you.” Amazing. They’re just now figuring out that the guy stopped using them. They couldn’t have checked during one of those 5-6 hours of calls a few days ago.&nbsp; So after we dropped the car off, we took the shuttle bus over to Terminal 2. Irene and Claire grabbed a coffee while I got on the phone to Booking.com. “Oh, I’m so sorry, but don’t worry we’ll take care of you.” But they didn’t. They couldn’t find us a replacement property in the part of London we needed to be. So I ran the same play as two years ago, fired up Marriott.com and found us a room for the night. And then splurged for a black cab instead of the cheaper Heathrow Express so Claire and I could work our Airbnb apps to find a place for the rest of our time in London. Which we did after about the 3rd try.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>So out of this whole shitshow, what did I learn? First, the London short-term vacation rental market just seems broken. There were so many properties on Booking.com and Airbnb that showed availability, but really weren’t. All told, it took us 6 booking attempts before we finally got one to stick. I’ve never had that happen in any other place. Second, there’s something wrong with the group that runs Booking.com’s short-term rentals. Irene uses (well, <em>used</em>) them <em>a lot</em> for hotel bookings, and we’ve never had a problem. But vacation rentals, every bad experience has been a Booking.com property. As you might guess, we won’t be using them again. Third, immediately cancel reservations where a third party like TravelNest pops up. They don’t add value to <strong>you</strong>, the traveler; they just get in the way when a problem crops up and are just another point of failure.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Oh, and I guess there’s a fourth -- don’t trust anyone when they say “Don’t worry, we’ll take care of you.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"className\":\"has-medium-font-size\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #198</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As always, you can find us and listen to the current episodes on all the main podcast sites -- Apple Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, Google Podcasts, and Amazon Music. And you can always Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page at TravelCommons.com for a transcript of the episode and links to items on the gift guide. If you’re not yet subscribed, there’s a drop down Subscribe menu at the top of TravelCommon’s home page. And along the side of the page, you’ll find links to all the TravelCommons’ socials.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to mpeacock on Twitter, write them on the TravelCommons page on Facebook or Instagram, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com.&nbsp; And thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in emails, Tweets and post comments on the website. I really appreciate it.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And until we talk again, safe travels; and thanks for stopping by the TravelCommons.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_198.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #198 — London Vacation Rental Woes; Hertz\'s EV Retreat','London\'s vacation rental market is broken and Booking.com is no help. Also, Hertz\'s EV retreat, Sioux City, Iowa embraces their SUX airport code, a flash-in-the-pan airport delay crypto betting app.','inherit','closed','closed','','4436-revision-v1','','','2024-03-01 10:54:14','2024-03-01 15:54:14','',4436,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4447',0,'revision','',0),
(4460,1,'2024-04-11 13:41:02','2024-04-11 18:41:02','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/DALL-E_2024-04-10_13.01.39-300x300.jpg\" alt=\" a traveler standing in front of a facial recognition scanner at an airport. The scanner is emitting error signals, and the traveler looks frustrated.\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" />I knew these travel delays were aging me[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Using my face as my boarding pass to get on a flight to Oaxaca, Mexico and then as my passport to get back in the US got me thinking about how facial recognition has permeated the travel experience. To help us understand where this is going, we talk with two travel industry experts, <a href=\"http://shj.cs.illinois.edu/\">Dr. Sheldon Jacobson</a> and <a href=\"https://atmosphereresearch.com/\">Henry Harteveldt</a>. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>But before that, we talk about eating grasshoppers, an EV experience with Avis, and a couple of my travel tips that need to be revised.  All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_199.mp3\" title=\"\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:audio -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-audio\"><audio controls src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_199.mp3\"></audio></figure>\n<!-- /wp:audio -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #199: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN a couple of days after a last-minute 200-mile trip up to Carbondale, Illinois, home of the <a href=\"https://siu.edu/\" title=\"\">Southern Illinois University</a> Salukis… but that didn’t matter. What <em>did</em> matter is that Carbondale was right in the <a href=\"https://eclipse.siu.edu/\" title=\"\">center of the solar eclipse’s path</a> across North America, which meant we had 4 minutes of total eclipse.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Looking up, straight into the sun with its corona glowing, wavering around the black disk of the moon -- I’ve seen… we’ve all seen pictures of total eclipses, and of this one all across social and regular media Monday afternoon. But the pictures couldn’t do justice to being there, even if <em>there</em> was the far end of the Salukis stadium parking lot, backing up to a scraggly bit of woods. The experience more than made up for the 3-hr drive there and the 5½-hour bumper-to-bumper traffic back. I add it to my list of things that, even though we’ve seen seemingly an infinite number of pictures of them, experiencing them in real life was worth the hassle to physically travel to see them. The Taj Mahal, the Great Wall of China, Niagara Falls -- all on the list. As opposed to, say, The Mona Lisa in the Louvre. The crowd of people with their phones in the air trying to get a picture was much better than the Mona Lisa itself.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Before that, the start of March, we were in Oaxaca, Mexico for a week. I’ve had Oaxaca on my “To Visit” list for 4-5 years now. For me, it was a good match -- the combination of interesting food, lots of culture, and no beach. I’ve done “resort-y” Mexico -- Cabo, Cancún, Puerto Vallarta -- not a big fan. While there were a lot of tourists in Oaxaca, it didn’t seem to be overrun with them like, say, the center of Cabo is. Maybe because the city center is bigger, so there’s more space to absorb them, or maybe the absolute number of tourists are lower; it wasn’t an easy nor a cheap flight to get there.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>We hit the food scene pretty hard, high- and low-brow; food stands in the market; high-end places serving up phenomenal <a href=\"https://www.rickbayless.com/recipe/oaxacan-black-mole/\" title=\"\">moles</a>. But the food that made the biggest impression is the insects. It wasn’t some tourist-baiting shtick. Walking past a group of street vendors, I saw one of the women making a snack of a couple of grasshoppers wrapped in a small tortilla. At a mezcal bar on the eastern edge of the Centro, the bartender put down a small bowl of grasshoppers as a bar snack. (If you follow <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" title=\"\">TravelCommons on Instagram</a>, you can see a picture in my Oaxaca story) “Those are good grasshoppers,” he told us. “I drive an hour up towards Pueblo to get them. They’re not farmed like the ones you get in the markets.” I have to admit that I’m not enough of an insect connoisseur to be able to pick out the finer nuances of free-range vs. farmed grasshoppers, but they were as good as Beer Nuts as a bar snack. Or maybe that was just the 3rd, or 4th, or 5th shot of mezcal talking.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/duckett/2333\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Another Girl (instrumental)</a> by duckett (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/duckett/23334 Ft: fourstones, miafas</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Friend of the podcast Allan Marko swung by the website to leave this comment about the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2024/02/28/podcast-198-london-vacation-rental-woes-hertzs-ev-retreat/\" title=\"\">last episode</a>:<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“I was assigned an EV by Avis at Fort Lauderdale [at the end of February]. Curious enough to try it out for the relatively short distances I would be traveling, I got in. After starting, I noticed it only had a 10% charge, so, “check please.” I fired up the Avis app and selected a Chevy Malibu with 1,200 miles on it.&nbsp; As for booking.com, we had tremendous luck using that website for most of our accommodations over a two month period in SE Asia five years ago - exclusively for hotels though.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Allan, thanks for that. Expecting you to drive off with a 10% charge? Avis would never think to give you a car with just an ⅛-th of a tank. And if they did, it would take them 10 minutes to fill the tank and get it back to you. But for that EV? Even at a Tesla Supercharger, at least an hour, maybe more. No wonder they tried to get you to do it. And regards to booking.com, my experience with their hotel product is the same as yours -- never had a problem. But their property rentals, never again!</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>One of my regular travel pro tips from years ago was “Don’t take the last flight out” because, if you missed your connection or your flight was canceled, you had a backup. And, as an IRROP passenger -- industry lingo for “irregular operations” -- you have priority on open seats on that later flight; even more so if you have frequent flier status. But nowadays, with US airlines sporting load factors over 80%, this strategy is a lot tougher to make work. Last June, back in episode #194, I talked about how United’s delay leaving Amsterdam meant we missed our connection home, and how I spent about an hour between the service agents at ORD and on the phone, saying “This is unacceptable” 2, 3, 4 times before they found two seats on the later flight to BNA that they’d been saying was completely full. And now this trip flying home from Oaxaca through DFW on American, I had gotten an email saying there could be bad weather, but I thought, “Well, there’s always that later flight.” En route from Oaxaca to DFW, I’m connected to the plane WiFi and an hour before we land, I get a notice from American -- our flight to Nashville had been canceled. OK, that sucks, but no panic, they’d rebook me on the later flight. But I keep reading -- no rebooking; it just tells me to go to the American app. The WiFi over northern Mexico is not the greatest, but when I do get the app to respond, it’s not showing the later flight as an option. Indeed, the options keep changing with each refresh, but nothing earlier than the next day, Friday, or sometimes, not until Saturday, two days later. It wasn’t until after we landed, passed through Immigration, and were waiting at baggage claim to pick up our luggage to go through Customs that we finally got a message through the app that they’d found us seats on the later flight. Still got home that night, but in both these instances, the customer service experience has degraded just so far. I’ve had to push <em>very hard</em>, and, honestly, be a bit of a jerk to get what used to come seamlessly.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And another travel tip that seems to need retiring --<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/12/07/top-10-holiday-travel-tips-3/\" title=\"\"> “Use Twitter as a Concierge Service”</a>. While struggling to rebook while still in the air from Oaxaca, I pinged American on Twitter hoping for a little more help. What I got was an amazing (and depressing) amount of spam messaging masquerading as AA customer service managers. It’s easy to get fooled in the panic of trying to find a way home, but a few rules to keep in mind -- only communicate with the airline’s gold-checked verified accounts; ignore messages from everyone else -- like “AMERICAN AIR HELP DESK” (all in caps) or “Jason frank (uppercase Jason, lowercase case frank) American Air manger” (as opposed to “manager”); and never give anyone your phone number.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And there’s a quick programming note at the end of this episode, so for those interested, hold off on hitting the Skip button when you hear the music.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" title=\"\">Twitter (X?) message to mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" title=\"\">Facebook page</a>, or on the <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" title=\"\">Instagram</a> account at travelcommons -- or you can skip all that social media stuff and post your comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djiz/10514\">Nube - Djiz Rmx</a> by Kwame (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: SylviaO</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Smile for Security: The Future of Facial Recognition in Travel</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Over the years on the podcast, we’ve talked about how travelers are seeing more and more use of biometrics in their travel days. I’ve told the story of my first fingerprint scan back in the late ‘90’s so I could skip the US immigration line on my weekly commute home from Toronto-Pearson Airport. My colleague’s reaction -- “I’m not giving the US government my biometrics!” Me -- “I can skip a 3-minute line? Where do I sign up?” Which I think shows that the privacy-vs.-convenience choices haven\'t fundamentally changed all that much in the subsequent 25 years.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But (surprise!), technology has, and it seems to be accelerating the use of biometrics, specifically facial recognition. Boarding our flight to Oaxaca, our face was our boarding pass -- just look at the camera, wait for the “bing”, and move on. And coming back, the Global Entry kiosks no longer need passports, no longer have you twisting your hand just so to get the fingerprint pad to read all five fingers; just walk up, it takes your picture, and tells you to move on.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Which got me wondering -- where is this going? To help answer this, I invited on two guys who have been digging deep into this for a number of years. First up, <a href=\"http://shj.cs.illinois.edu/\">Dr. Sheldon Jacobson</a>, Professor in Computer Science at the University of Illinois. Sheldon was last on the podcast in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/09/22/podcast-189-why-we-travel-when-the-first-flight-isnt-best/\" title=\"\">episode #189</a> in September 2022 talking about why another of my travel tips, “catch the earliest flight you can”, is not always right. Over the years, Sheldon has developed operations research models to optimize aviation security. So I asked him to come back on the podcast to talk about the growth of biometrics…<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Sheldon, thanks for coming back on to the Travel Commons podcast. Wanted to talk with you about biometrics, facial recognition, all the things that seem to be increasing with regards to air travel.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: The airlines, as well as the Transportation Security Administration need to know who you are when you are traveling and they relied on identification cards, driver\'s license, real IDs and are continuing to be part of the future. But ultimately, the best way to determine who you are is through your face and biometrics and artificial intelligence imbued with it. In fact, it is a solution that people are recognizing; the airlines are starting to use it. And of course, the Transportation Security Administration is investing billions of dollars to advance this idea. And there\'s a reason why they\'re doing this. They\'re doing this simply because the traditional model of airport security screening has been to detect stuff -- prohibited items, knives, explosives, firearms, even, you know, full size tubes of toothpaste could be a threat based on explosives that can be embedded in them. However, the real threat are the people and facial recognition is a means to transform the platform for airport security from the detection of items to knowing your traveler. And that\'s where we\'re heading right now. And this is the future of airport security.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: And how does that work? How do you think that works?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: TSA has not broadcast this and I don\'t even know if they\'re thinking about it, but I have thought about it and I have proposed to them because I visited them in October 2023. And I told them that if they can bring facial recognition biometrics and the use of AI to truly validate and authenticate the travelers, the need for physical screening will be reduced tremendously to the point that they can create a new class of traveler, which I would call a “Super PreCheck” traveler who subjects themselves to greater background vetting. But then they would be treated like a known crew member at an airport and require no further physical screening. That is the future of airport security.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: It\'s almost like “Back to the Future”, right? It\'s almost like back to pre 9/11 days.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: Now, some will argue, “Oh, someone will gain the system and we will have a terrorist threat because of that.” And I would argue the exact opposite, that the only people who would be willing to subject themselves to the background check would be people who know that they\'re going to get through it fine. And the ones who are truly threats cannot risk it because rarely are people acting by themselves. They\'re often acting in a network. And as a result of that, for them to be exposed, they would be exposing their whole network. And the risk of doing that is far too great. What it would also do is it would parse the whole spectrum of travelers into a group of people who are willing to be known and a group of travelers that are not willing to be known. But over time, the ones who are willing to be known will be much larger, which means you can target your resources and your attention on this so-called unknown group and actually make it more secure for the air system by targeting your resources in that way. After September 11th, everybody was treated the same -- one size fits all. TSA PreCheck moved away from that. Now, I\'m proposing we move even further. And our original research we presented to the TSA in 2003 when we proposed this idea of differential screening to them and how it would work and why it would be beneficial. We said that you really need three classes, two would be fine, but three would be better. And it turns out that third class is what we would now call a “Super PreCheck” class of passengers. And those are the people who would be treated like crew members, the known crew members. And a lot of people would be willing to pay for that privilege and we\'ve put boundaries on what that means. It wouldn\'t be renewed every five years; it would be renewed potentially every year. It would be more expensive. But there\'s a lot of business travelers who are willing to pay that price to basically pass through security untethered, but they aren\'t a risk to the system anyway. So why waste resources and time on them? It would transform the footprint and create what I would call “security tunnels” rather than security checkpoints for many of these people.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: That seems to make sense. What was the reaction to that at TSA?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: That\'s a good question. I don\'t know. I don\'t know if I can say that.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Ok, I got it.. Understood. I just had to ask. Well, that\'s a great concept and I appreciate that insight around you guys’ research. You\'re right. I mean, there\'s something that says you just look at what people are willing to sign up with -- with Clear. with Global Entry, with PreCheck. Again, frequent travelers will always look to streamline that experience. And so I would agree, I would say there would be people in a heartbeat who would raise their hand for that.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: Exactly. Right now, people who sign up for Clear pay $189 on the top end for one year, being able to be identified as who they are and go to the front of the precheck line. That\'s all they\'re paying for and they\'re not paying for anything more. If the TSA implements a new class of passengers then Clear would become superfluous and literally would go away.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Yes, that was what I was thinking also.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: It\'s just, it will not be needed anymore. And in some sense, the pathway of using what the TSA calls the “credential authentication technology” which basically validates who you are using biometrics as well as that you\'re entitled to, imply that you don\'t even need a boarding pass right now when they implement this, and in some airports they have it, Clear will have to find a new business model because the TSA is going to assert that model into their own operations.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: You can kind of feel that. And indeed, I still think this most recent version of Clear -- and I had originally signed up for the initial version way back 10-15 years ago (whenever it first started),&nbsp; Rev 1.0, and then they went bankrupt and now we\'ve got Rev 2.0. But even today, I still have a challenge to see a compelling business model for the service that they offer. Oftentimes at a lot of the airports I\'ll go to, the difference between a Clear line and just the basic PreCheck line is pretty much nothing.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: Exactly. I\'ve never been impressed with their business model. They\'ve tried to sell it for stadiums and large entertainment venues. The challenges,&nbsp; it\'s just been difficult and most of their money, most of their resources, most of the revenue still comes through airports and they need that. I just don\'t see the future of it being very bright.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Is there more facial recognition coming or different facial recognition coming? Where do you see that path going?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: Well, we are nowhere near the end game on this facial recognition as effective as it is. I mean, the concept is ideal and wonderful. It\'s still not perfect. It misses certain people of color. It struggles at certain times, and research is continuing to bring the error rates down, lower and lower and lower, especially if you\'re going to create security tunnels where people just walk through it. And your picture is being taken literally in real time matched up using recognition. And then the next thing you know, you\'re at your boarding gate because everything worked out fine for you. And now it will be the majority, the vast majority of travelers. So we are nowhere near the end of this and we are at the beginning. I think the challenge right now is the perception that people do think there is a privacy concern. And like I said, I think it\'s exactly the opposite. I think this is opening up opportunities where we are going to spike in one dimension of AI which is facial recognition. And then the rest of the screening aspect at airports and validation literally gets dampened and in some cases, completely eliminated. I\'m a firm believer and supporter of facial recognition for airport security and air travel. I know that if they do it right, and they seem to be on that pathway, that we are going to have a very different experience at airport screening for security and even air travel in the next 5 to 10 years. It\'s just going to be radically and dramatically different. And I think when people realize that and begin to experience that they\'re going to be happy for it. But at this point, a lot of the rhetoric is around privacy, but our privacy is being violated so often, so frequently and in so many venues that argument is no longer holding any water. I am convinced that this is a positive future for air travel in all aspects.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Sheldon, thanks very much again for joining us on the TravelCommons podcast and sharing that. That\'s great stuff.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Our second guest is <a href=\"https://atmosphereresearch.com/\">Henry Harteveldt</a>, a travel industry analyst for many years. He had the depth of experience and industry contacts to give us a grounded sense on what’s coming with regarding biometrics…<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Henry, thanks for joining us today on the Travel Commons podcast. Wanted to talk about biometrics in and around air travel and specifically, I don\'t know if this is recency bias or what, but it just seems like I\'ve seen a whole lot more of, especially facial recognition over the past couple of years. What\'s your cut at it from a travel industry standpoint?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: In the Crawl/Walk/Run continuum, I would say that with biometrics, we are somewhere between crawl and walk. Think of biometrics as the baby who is crawling really fast and it\'s going to start walking any day now. But in the meantime, it\'s scooting all over the place. So let\'s break it down… Using facial recognition cameras for boarding flights has actually been around since before COVID began. I think the trial started somewhere in the 2016-17 time frame for international flights. That’s the only time it\'s used right now, and it started to roll out in 2018- 2019. Delta was one of the first to embrace the technology and JetBlue as well. And what it does when it works well, and this is something we should come back to to discuss, but when biometrics, facial recognition works as everybody wants it to, it speeds up the boarding process. It reduces the need for us to show not just a physical boarding pass but also a physical passport. And, as a result, on a wide-body jet, it can shave perhaps 10 or more minutes off the boarding time; on a single-aisle plane, a 737 or an A320-type of plane, that could shave 5 to 7 minutes off. So it speeds up the boarding process and makes everything a little bit more efficient. It\'s not perfect. There are people who are uncomfortable using it. There are people who are not familiar with it. So airlines have to have a belt and suspender type of approach. They\'ll have to have gate staff there for the time being. But I don\'t think we are that far away from where international travel is primarily biometrics based boarding, at least in major airports. And I think we will start soon to see it being tested for domestic travel, but there\'s going to be a wrinkle with that when we use the biometric readers at the gate to get on the plane. The database links back to US Customs and Border Patrol which has photographs of US citizens, resident aliens, and international visitors, and it can call up that data to validate that you are you and I am me. With domestic flights. I think only the TSA has the biometric data right now for PreCheck. So it may take a little bit of work to get to a point for that. So that\'s boarding. But let\'s talk about airport security. Yes, TSA is indeed testing and in some cases, I think it\'s actually beyond testing, they are rolling it out facial recognition that again eliminates the need for us to take out a driver\'s license or passport or any other physical ID and, importantly, eliminates the need for us to show any type of boarding pass, whether it\'s a paper boarding pass or digital boarding pass. And again, in theory, it speeds up the number of people who can get into and through the security screening process and reduces the need for human agents at those checkpoints. Now again, we\'re still very much at the beginning of this. And TSA is saying we are going to have a security screening officer at that checkpoint in case something goes wrong or in case someone isn\'t comfortable using biometrics.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Yeah, that was my experience in Nashville. There was a guy standing right there.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: And as we record this, the TSA is testing at Las Vegas, basically this walkthrough type of environment, a new type of screening which is biometrics-based to validate who you are. You put your bags on the belt, you go through, it\'s a lot less invasive, a lot less intrusive and supposed to be a lot faster. I actually want to go over to Las Vegas just to check it out and see what it\'s like. They have this in Dubai and they are testing it elsewhere in England and in France, they are testing it on Eurostar. Now, there are a lot of other things coming along with biometrics at a lot of European airports and in Asia as well. I was just in Singapore. There are biometrics-based scanners so that you don\'t have to queue up and have a border patrol officer review your passport, stamp your passport.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: I had it at Heathrow last November. I went through the e-gates. So I was just surprised; I walked through to the other end and I was like, “Wait, this is it?&nbsp; Nobody to stamp my passport?” No, nothing. Just like, “No. Get out of here. Go, move on.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: Right. Now, for those of us of a certain age, part of the love of travel is hearing that clunky thunk of the passport officer stamping your passport and, every time you get a new passport, the passport service mails back your old one. Those become mementos of our lives.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Yes, absolutely.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: And there is a part of me that will miss the day when we get our passports stamped just as there is a part of me that misses airline branded paper, boarding passes to show “Oh, here\'s where I have been” and so on.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: That obviously, then, pivots over to -- how should the travelers think about biometric data and the storage of that and the risk of that as a condition of travel?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: Look, it is obviously a personal decision. Our research shows that right now in the US, far more travelers would trust sharing their personal biometric information with an airline than with any government agency. So in the US right now, it\'s nearly 80% of airline passengers who, and this is first quarter 2024 data fresh off the press if you will, nearly 80% of us, airline passengers, business and leisure say they\'re willing to share their personal biometric data -- fingerprints, iris scans, etc. -- with an airline they fly regularly if it will lead to a more efficient airport experience or journey. Only a quarter of passengers say they\'re comfortable sharing their personal information right now with any government agency or entity even though, again, with the same benefits of an easier journey. Now, both of those numbers are up from 2023. The government only keeps certain information for a certain amount of time, usually 30 days or less and then it is expunged. So I am in the crowd that is comfortable sharing biometric information with governments and airlines because doing so makes my journey more efficient. It\'s faster, it\'s less stressful. It\'s fewer people that I need to interact with. Remember we\'re somewhere between Crawl and Walk. But where I see it, from the analyst perspective, the time difference, the time it will take us to go from Crawl to Walk will probably be many times longer in the time that will be needed to go from Walk to Run. Because again, as improvements emerge with the technology, the hardware, as well as the software, changes in society, changes in social acceptance of biometrics, the appreciation for benefits, we will reach that so-called tipping point where all of a sudden we see massive and welcome acceleration. It\'s interesting. Younger travelers are a lot more suspicious of the government than some of their older counterparts. And travelers over 65 are less willing to share personal data with the government. The sweet spot is travelers from 30 to 64-ish, call it.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: That\'s an interesting distribution.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: And I think that an important point for anyone listening here -- if you work for an airline, for a technology company, for an airport, for a government agency or, for that matter, if you work at a hotel company, cruise line or other parts of the travel industry. You cannot view your customers as a homogeneous block and you have to understand their welcoming the use of technology. The irony is as we all know, Gen Z are digital natives. They\'re very comfortable using technology. They will put anything and everything on social media it seems like, but they have some very legitimate concerns in their minds about how will governments use their biometric data and could it be used against them? And I\'ll just add that hotels are looking at how they evolve the check in process. You know, I think one of the dumbest questions in the world is when we are standing at the front desk of a hotel suitcase in hand, giving them our credit card and ID and the agent says “Checking in?” Like “No, I thought I would just, I have nothing better to do. So I thought I would bring a suitcase to a hotel in a different city and hand over a credit card and my personal information just to say hello.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Right. “And by the way, I like standing in line. So that\'s why I\'ve been waiting for 10 minutes to get up and have this conversation with you.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: Exactly. But you know, hotels are looking at how they improve the check in process. And granted, at the five-star true luxury properties and resorts, I think they will say, “Look, we value and our guests value the human interaction,” but they\'re going to be a part of that. Guests can say “Look, there\'s some things I can do for myself and then I want to talk to somebody about some other stuff.” But I think with four-star and below, be prepared for more biometric-based self-service check in checkout experiences. And I think, frankly, a lot of people would welcome it because it\'s a lot more secure for 99.9% of us. Eventually. I think biometrics will be more than welcome. And again, if it makes our journeys that much more efficient and less stressful, less unpleasant, there is to me, no downside.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Yes, I think that the cases you\'ve laid out is the appropriate one, which is, it\'s a combination of frictionless or making travel much more efficient than what we have today, doing away with as many lines as we can, and on the same token, being more efficient for the travel company, be it a hotel, be it an airline, be it the company running the airport so that their costs stay down and our costs stay down to travel. So the trade off on that, people are going to strike their own balance around privacy versus efficiency. Henry, thank you very much. This has been a great conversation. I\'ve really enjoyed it. Thanks for coming on a TravelCommons podcast.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: Thank you for inviting me. I enjoyed it as well.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Thanks to <a href=\"http://shj.cs.illinois.edu/\">Dr. Sheldon Jacobson</a> and <a href=\"https://atmosphereresearch.com/\">Henry Harteveldt</a> for taking the time to talk to us about biometrics, facial recognition and give us an idea of what we travelers should expect to see soon. Check out the show notes at TravelCommons.com for links to their work.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"className\":\"has-medium-font-size\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em><a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/track/0geYaxa8LozoV8afrKwdTo?si=aa1cf0be8ee9400a\" title=\"\">Pictures of You</a></em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #199</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I hope you enjoyed the show; the conversations with Sheldon and Henry. They had so much great insight; the editing decisions were tough. This is usually the point where I say “and I hope you decide to stay subscribed” but this is, as they say in the UK, the penultimate episode of the TravelCommons podcast; a fancy way to say “second-to-the-last”. The next episode will be #200, so a good round number to end it. I’ll unpack it all next month, but just wanted to give you all a heads up.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As always, you can find us and listen to the current episodes on all the main podcast sites -- Apple Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, and Amazon Music. Google has shut down their Podcast app, at least in the US, but you can now get the regular TravelCommons audio episodes on the TravelCommons’ YouTube channel. Go figure -- I can never keep track of what bits Google is shutting down or renaming. But you can always ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page at TravelCommons.com for a transcript of the episode and links to Sheldon and Henry’s websites. And along the side of the page, you’ll find links to all the TravelCommons’ socials.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" title=\"\">mpeacock on Twitter</a>, write them on the TravelCommons page on <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" title=\"\">Facebook </a>or <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" title=\"\">Instagram</a>, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com.&nbsp; And thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in emails, Tweets and post comments on the website. I really appreciate it.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And until we talk again, safe travels; and thanks for stopping by the TravelCommons.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_199.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #199 — Smile for Security: Facial Recognition in Travel','','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-199-smile-for-security-facial-recognition-in-travel','','','2026-01-28 10:47:53','2026-01-28 16:47:53','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4460',0,'post','',0),
(4461,1,'2024-04-10 13:13:26','2024-04-10 18:13:26','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/IMG_4238-EDIT-400x400.jpg\" alt=\"fence gate with a sign saying Beware of The Bull\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /> Booking.com\'s Customer Service Center?[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I walked by <a href=\"https://www.shakespearesglobe.com/\" title=\"\">Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre</a> after a weekend of wrestling with <a href=\"https://www.booking.com/\" title=\"\">Booking.com</a> and <a href=\"https://travelnest.com/\" title=\"\">TravelNest</a>\'s service agents, trying unsuccessfully to not let them screw up my London vacation rental.  The Macbeth soliloquy about a tale \"full of sound and fury, signifying nothing\" pretty much summed up my experience -- lots of talk that yielded nothing. But before that, we catch up on Hertz\'s EV reversal, Sioux City, Iowa\'s embrace of their SUX airport code, and a flash-in-the-pan airport delay betting app.  All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_198.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #199: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN a couple of days after a last-minute 200-mile trip up to Carbondale, Illinois, home of the <a href=\"https://siu.edu/\" title=\"\">Southern Illinois University</a> Salukis… but that didn’t matter. What <em>did</em> matter is that Carbondale was right in the <a href=\"https://eclipse.siu.edu/\" title=\"\">center of the solar eclipse’s path</a> across North America, which meant we had 4 minutes of total eclipse. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Looking up, straight into the sun with its corona glowing, wavering around the black disk of the moon -- I’ve seen… we’ve all seen pictures of total eclipses, and of this one all across social and regular media Monday afternoon. But the pictures couldn’t do justice to being there, even if <em>there</em> was the far end of the Salukis stadium parking lot, backing up to a scraggly bit of woods. The experience more than made up for the 3-hr drive there and the 5½-hour bumper-to-bumper traffic back. I add it to my list of things that, even though we’ve seen seemingly an infinite number of pictures of them, experiencing them in real life was worth the hassle to physically travel to see them. The Taj Mahal, the Great Wall of China, Niagara Falls -- all on the list. As opposed to, say, The Mona Lisa in the Louvre. The crowd of people with their phones in the air trying to get a picture was much better than the Mona Lisa itself.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Before that, the start of March, we were in Oaxaca, Mexico for a week. I’ve had Oaxaca on my “To Visit” list for 4-5 years now. For me, it was a good match -- the combination of interesting food, lots of culture, and no beach. I’ve done “resort-y” Mexico -- Cabo, Cancún, Puerto Vallarta -- not a big fan. While there were a lot of tourists in Oaxaca, it didn’t seem to be overrun with them like, say, the center of Cabo is. Maybe because the city center is bigger, so there’s more space to absorb them, or maybe the absolute number of tourists are lower; it wasn’t an easy nor a cheap flight to get there.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>We hit the food scene pretty hard, high- and low-brow; food stands in the market; high-end places serving up phenomenal moles. But the food that made the biggest impression is the insects. It wasn’t some tourist-baiting shtick. Walking past a group of street vendors, I saw one of the women making a snack of a couple of grasshoppers wrapped in a small tortilla. At a mezcal bar on the eastern edge of the Centro, the bartender put down a small bowl of grasshoppers as a bar snack. (If you follow TravelCommons on Instagram, you can see a picture in my Oaxaca story) “Those are good grasshoppers,” he told us. “I drive an hour up towards Pueblo to get them. They’re not farmed like the ones you get in the markets.” I have to admit that I’m not enough of an insect connoisseur to be able to pick out the finer nuances of free-range vs. farmed grasshoppers, but they were as good as Beer Nuts as a bar snack. Or maybe that was just the 3rd, or 4th, or 5th shot of mezcal talking.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/11510\">Funkist</a>&nbsp;– cdk dub mix by cdk (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: teru</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Friend of the podcast Allan Marko swung by the website to leave this comment about the last episode<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“I was assigned an EV by Avis at Fort Lauderdale [at the end of February]. Curious enough to try it out for the relatively short distances I would be traveling, I got in. After starting, I noticed it only had a 10% charge, so, “check please.” I fired up the Avis app and selected a Chevy Malibu with 1,200 miles on it.&nbsp; As for booking.com, we had tremendous luck using that website for most of our accommodations over a two month period in SE Asia five years ago - exclusively for hotels though.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Allan, thanks for that. Expecting you to drive off with a 10% charge? Avis would never think to give you a car with just an ⅛-th of a tank. And if they did, it would take them 10 minutes to fill the tank and get it back to you. But for that EV? Even at a Tesla Supercharger, at least an hour, maybe more. No wonder they tried to get you to do it. And regards to booking.com, my experience with their hotel product is the same as yours -- never had a problem. But their property rentals, never again!</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>One of my regular travel pro tips from years ago was “Don’t take the last flight out” because, if you missed your connection or your flight was canceled, you had a backup. And, as an IRROP passenger -- industry lingo for “irregular operations” -- you have priority on open seats on that later flight; even more so if you have frequent flier status. But nowadays, with US airlines sporting load factors over 80%, this strategy is a lot tougher to make work. Last June, back in episode #194, I talked about how United’s delay leaving Amsterdam meant we missed our connection home, and how I spent about an hour between the service agents at ORD and on the phone, saying “This is unacceptable” 2, 3, 4 times before they found two seats on the later flight to BNA that they’d been saying was completely full. And now this trip flying home from Oaxaca through DFW on American, I had gotten an email saying there could be bad weather, but I thought, “Well, there’s always that later flight.” En route from Oaxaca to DFW, I’m connected to the plane WiFi and an hour before we land, I get a notice from American -- our flight to Nashville had been canceled. OK, that sucks, but no panic, they’d rebook me on the later flight. But I keep reading -- no rebooking; it just tells me to go to the American app. The WiFi over northern Mexico is not the greatest, but when I do get the app to respond, it’s not showing the later flight as an option. Indeed, the options keep changing with each refresh, but nothing earlier than the next day, Friday, or sometimes, not until Saturday, two days later. It wasn’t until after we landed, passed through Immigration, and were waiting at baggage claim to pick up our luggage to go through Customs that we finally got a message through the app that they’d found us seats on the later flight. Still got home that night, but in both these instances, the customer service experience has degraded just so far. I’ve had to push <em>very hard</em>, and, honestly, be a bit of a jerk to get what used to come seamlessly.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And another travel tip that seems to need retiring -- “Use Twitter as a Concierge Service”. While struggling to rebook while still in the air from Oaxaca, I pinged American on Twitter hoping for a little more help. What I got was an amazing (and depressing) amount of spam messaging masquerading as AA customer service managers. It’s easy to get fooled in the panic of trying to find a way home, but a few rules to keep in mind -- only communicate with the airline’s gold-checked verified accounts; ignore messages from everyone else -- like “AMERICAN AIR HELP DESK” (all in caps) or “Jason frank (uppercase Jason, lowercase case frank) American Air manger” (as opposed to “manager”); and never give anyone your phone number.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And there’s a quick programming note at the end of this episode, so for those interested, hold off on hitting the Skip button when you hear the music.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter (X?) message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page, or on the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can skip all that social media stuff and post your comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/48705\">Jolanta Blues</a>&nbsp;by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: Admiral Bob, Martijn de Boer</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>London Vacation Rental Woes</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Listeners who <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">follow me on Twitter/X</a> know that I had one of my worst short-term rental experiences during our London trip with Booking.com. And I’ll talk about what I learned from that in a moment, but it got me thinking about vacation rentals in general. For the longest time, it was a local mom-and-pop business, typically in vacation areas -- ski resorts, beach towns. You called or stopped by a local realtor, or someone you knew who knew the area recommended a place, and then you rented it from the owner. Friends who rent beach houses on the East Coast tell me they’ve had the same renters for the same week in June, July, August for years. Then Airbnb started up in 2008, first as a platform to rent out spare rooms (remember couchsurfing.com?), but it pretty quickly moved home rentals out of its mom-&amp;-pop vacation spot model into a parallel urban hotel market.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I’m not deep in urban planning or rental market dynamics, so I’m not getting into the pluses and minuses of short-term rentals. You can get all that and more with a simple Google search. Maybe I’m old-school (or just old), but my use of short-term rentals is pretty much the same now as it was pre-Airbnb -- when it’s a bigger group and we’ll need more space to spread out than a hotel can give you. I also enjoy being able to stay in neighborhoods where there aren’t hotels, to be able to dig deeper into a city, but I also know that it can also be not great for the people who live in those neighborhoods. A couple of years back, we and another family booked into a flat in the Trastevere neighborhood in Rome. Great flat on a great street; really enjoyed the neighborhood and the time we had with our friends, being able to spend time in some place other than a restaurant or hotel bar, catching up while trying to figure out the espresso machine or the washer/dryer combo. All good. But looking across the landing to the other apartment on our floor, the sign taped to the door in Italian and Google-translated English saying “Keep it quiet”, you could tell the people <em>living</em> in this building weren’t having a great time. And then there’s the story our friends tell of when a condo in their building in Lincoln Park on the north side of Chicago was listed on Airbnb, and one night while at dinner, looking out their window they could see a porn movie being filmed there. Kinda put them off their meal.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>There are loads of vacation rental horror stories, but not from me. Looking through my trip histories on Airbnb and VRBO, I’ve had a really good run -- a great beach place in San Diego, a tiny house in Durango, CO, a walk up in Brooklyn’s Carroll Gardens neighborhood, a flat in Split, Croatia with a balcony where I drank my morning coffee watching the sailboats head out of the harbor…. All good, except for London.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Two years ago, November 2021, we were heading over London for a couple of weeks. The morning we were leaving, maybe 5 hours before heading to the airport, we get an email from our Booking.com host -- “So sorry, but a water pipe broke in the apartment, so we have to cancel your stay that starts tomorrow.” Wait, what!? Did I read that right? I read it again. Yup, I read it right; we have no place to stay when we land in London tomorrow morning. Luckily, it was just Irene and me; we didn’t <em>need</em> sprawl space. So I quickly pivoted from packing socks and underwear to logging onto Marriott.com to book a room before our Uber showed up, which I did, at the Montcalm East near Shoreditch. The last-minute booking was definitely more expensive, but I was confident it had a working toilet and shower -- well, that and I got free breakfast with my Titanium status.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Fast forward to this trip, in November 2023, with our daughter joining us, we needed a vacation rental. Given our last experience, we gave ourselves a 5-month head start, booking a place in June. I found a good place in London and booked it on Airbnb. Ten days later, I get a morning email canceling our reservation, but this time from Airbnb, saying the property we booked “doesn’t appear to be legitimate.” Right after that, I get another email, from the property owner, asking me to book direct with him, sending the full payment via bank transfer. So send a couple of thousand dollars in June for a November stay to a guy I’ve never dealt with before, and for whom I couldn’t find any other information -- property website, LinkedIn profile, social media presence? Felt just a bit scammy, so I took a pass. Not the last time I’d get this request.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Irene took over. That afternoon, she booked a flat on Booking.com. Fast forward to the beginning of November. Starting to get geared up for the trip and think maybe we should check the status of our booking. Huh -- Booking.com has a new note saying our reservation now can’t be paid through them. We ping the property owner -- “What gives?” We get back a blisto-gram of an email; not aimed at us, but at Booking.com. “Their fees are too high and they’re awful to work with. I told them to cancel all reservations.” Hmm, our reservation is still there, but doesn’t sound like we had a good chance of getting into the flat if we showed up. So Irene canceled it and booked a different flat.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>From whom, a couple of days later, we get an email asking us to cancel our Booking.com reservation and book directly with them, with full payment via bank transfer. This sounds familiar. They’re forced into this, going off-platform, they wrote, because London limits short-term rentals to 60 days a year. A quick Google search told me London’s limit is 90 days rather than 60. Not looking to dunk on these folks, but -- hmm, you’d think an experienced host would get this number right. Little bit of doubt, so we took another pass on sending a stranger a couple of thousand dollars with no fraud protections.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>So I search for another place in the same neighborhood and find one on Booking. I hit the Book button and pretty quickly get back a confirmation email from TravelNest, a vacation rental property management company. Good! No more asking me to book direct. They send me the contact info for the property owner so I can coordinate arrival logistics. I send the guy an email -- it bounces. I send texts and WhatsApp messages to him -- crickets. I go back to TravelNest. “Oh, don’t worry, we’ll contact him.” “With what? The same email that bounced; the same phone number that he hasn’t checked?” “Oh, don’t worry, he’ll turn up.” OK, I’ve got other things to worry about, and London was the second week of our trip, so we had time.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The end of our first week -- we were hiking/walking down in Dorset on the south coast -- I hadn’t heard anything and started to worry. I started pinging Booking and TravelNest; sending emails and calling. Nothing solved, but every time I talked to someone, it was “Don’t worry, we’ll take care of you.” I’m not going to go through every call, -- maybe I’ll put all those details on a Twitter thread -- but I spent 5-6 hours over 3 days on calls with these people and the problem, my problem, boiled down to this -- we were past the cancelation deadline; Booking.com viewed TravelNest as their property contact, not the MIA owner; and TravelNest didn’t want to cancel the reservation and lose the revenue in hopes that the owner would show up at the last minute.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You know where this is going. Tuesday morning, we’re driving up to London Heathrow from Bournemouth to drop off the Hertz car and “ping” goes the Booking.com app. It’s a message from TravelNest - “I am very sorry to let you know that the owner of the property you have booked via Travelnest cannot accommodate your upcoming booking. This is due to the host having stopped advertising their property through Travelnest. And we don’t have any alternatives to offer you.” Amazing. They’re just now figuring out that the guy stopped using them. They couldn’t have checked during one of those 5-6 hours of calls a few days ago.&nbsp; So after we dropped the car off, we took the shuttle bus over to Terminal 2. Irene and Claire grabbed a coffee while I got on the phone to Booking.com. “Oh, I’m so sorry, but don’t worry we’ll take care of you.” But they didn’t. They couldn’t find us a replacement property in the part of London we needed to be. So I ran the same play as two years ago, fired up Marriott.com and found us a room for the night. And then splurged for a black cab instead of the cheaper Heathrow Express so Claire and I could work our Airbnb apps to find a place for the rest of our time in London. Which we did after about the 3rd try.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>So out of this whole shitshow, what did I learn? First, the London short-term vacation rental market just seems broken. There were so many properties on Booking.com and Airbnb that showed availability, but really weren’t. All told, it took us 6 booking attempts before we finally got one to stick. I’ve never had that happen in any other place. Second, there’s something wrong with the group that runs Booking.com’s short-term rentals. Irene uses (well, <em>used</em>) them <em>a lot</em> for hotel bookings, and we’ve never had a problem. But vacation rentals, every bad experience has been a Booking.com property. As you might guess, we won’t be using them again. Third, immediately cancel reservations where a third party like TravelNest pops up. They don’t add value to <strong>you</strong>, the traveler; they just get in the way when a problem crops up and are just another point of failure.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Oh, and I guess there’s a fourth -- don’t trust anyone when they say “Don’t worry, we’ll take care of you.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"className\":\"has-medium-font-size\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #199</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As always, you can find us and listen to the current episodes on all the main podcast sites -- Apple Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, Google Podcasts, and Amazon Music. And you can always Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page at TravelCommons.com for a transcript of the episode and links to items on the gift guide. If you’re not yet subscribed, there’s a drop down Subscribe menu at the top of TravelCommons\' home page. And along the side of the page, you’ll find links to all the TravelCommons’ socials.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to mpeacock on Twitter, write them on the TravelCommons page on Facebook or Instagram, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com.&nbsp; And thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in emails, Tweets and post comments on the website. I really appreciate it.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And until we talk again, safe travels; and thanks for stopping by the TravelCommons.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_198.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #199 — Smile for Security: Facial Recognition in Travel','','inherit','closed','closed','','4460-revision-v1','','','2024-04-10 13:13:26','2024-04-10 18:13:26','',4460,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4461',0,'revision','',0),
(4462,1,'2024-04-10 13:22:47','2024-04-10 18:22:47','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/IMG_4238-EDIT-400x400.jpg\" alt=\"fence gate with a sign saying Beware of The Bull\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /> Booking.com\'s Customer Service Center?[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I walked by <a href=\"https://www.shakespearesglobe.com/\" title=\"\">Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre</a> after a weekend of wrestling with <a href=\"https://www.booking.com/\" title=\"\">Booking.com</a> and <a href=\"https://travelnest.com/\" title=\"\">TravelNest</a>\'s service agents, trying unsuccessfully to not let them screw up my London vacation rental.  The Macbeth soliloquy about a tale \"full of sound and fury, signifying nothing\" pretty much summed up my experience -- lots of talk that yielded nothing. But before that, we catch up on Hertz\'s EV reversal, Sioux City, Iowa\'s embrace of their SUX airport code, and a flash-in-the-pan airport delay betting app.  All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_198.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #199: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN a couple of days after a last-minute 200-mile trip up to Carbondale, Illinois, home of the <a href=\"https://siu.edu/\" title=\"\">Southern Illinois University</a> Salukis… but that didn’t matter. What <em>did</em> matter is that Carbondale was right in the <a href=\"https://eclipse.siu.edu/\" title=\"\">center of the solar eclipse’s path</a> across North America, which meant we had 4 minutes of total eclipse. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Looking up, straight into the sun with its corona glowing, wavering around the black disk of the moon -- I’ve seen… we’ve all seen pictures of total eclipses, and of this one all across social and regular media Monday afternoon. But the pictures couldn’t do justice to being there, even if <em>there</em> was the far end of the Salukis stadium parking lot, backing up to a scraggly bit of woods. The experience more than made up for the 3-hr drive there and the 5½-hour bumper-to-bumper traffic back. I add it to my list of things that, even though we’ve seen seemingly an infinite number of pictures of them, experiencing them in real life was worth the hassle to physically travel to see them. The Taj Mahal, the Great Wall of China, Niagara Falls -- all on the list. As opposed to, say, The Mona Lisa in the Louvre. The crowd of people with their phones in the air trying to get a picture was much better than the Mona Lisa itself.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Before that, the start of March, we were in Oaxaca, Mexico for a week. I’ve had Oaxaca on my “To Visit” list for 4-5 years now. For me, it was a good match -- the combination of interesting food, lots of culture, and no beach. I’ve done “resort-y” Mexico -- Cabo, Cancún, Puerto Vallarta -- not a big fan. While there were a lot of tourists in Oaxaca, it didn’t seem to be overrun with them like, say, the center of Cabo is. Maybe because the city center is bigger, so there’s more space to absorb them, or maybe the absolute number of tourists are lower; it wasn’t an easy nor a cheap flight to get there.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>We hit the food scene pretty hard, high- and low-brow; food stands in the market; high-end places serving up phenomenal moles. But the food that made the biggest impression is the insects. It wasn’t some tourist-baiting shtick. Walking past a group of street vendors, I saw one of the women making a snack of a couple of grasshoppers wrapped in a small tortilla. At a mezcal bar on the eastern edge of the Centro, the bartender put down a small bowl of grasshoppers as a bar snack. (If you follow TravelCommons on Instagram, you can see a picture in my Oaxaca story) “Those are good grasshoppers,” he told us. “I drive an hour up towards Pueblo to get them. They’re not farmed like the ones you get in the markets.” I have to admit that I’m not enough of an insect connoisseur to be able to pick out the finer nuances of free-range vs. farmed grasshoppers, but they were as good as Beer Nuts as a bar snack. Or maybe that was just the 3rd, or 4th, or 5th shot of mezcal talking.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/11510\">Funkist</a>&nbsp;– cdk dub mix by cdk (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: teru</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Friend of the podcast Allan Marko swung by the website to leave this comment about the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2024/02/28/podcast-198-london-vacation-rental-woes-hertzs-ev-retreat/\" title=\"\">last episode</a>:<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“I was assigned an EV by Avis at Fort Lauderdale [at the end of February]. Curious enough to try it out for the relatively short distances I would be traveling, I got in. After starting, I noticed it only had a 10% charge, so, “check please.” I fired up the Avis app and selected a Chevy Malibu with 1,200 miles on it.&nbsp; As for booking.com, we had tremendous luck using that website for most of our accommodations over a two month period in SE Asia five years ago - exclusively for hotels though.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Allan, thanks for that. Expecting you to drive off with a 10% charge? Avis would never think to give you a car with just an ⅛-th of a tank. And if they did, it would take them 10 minutes to fill the tank and get it back to you. But for that EV? Even at a Tesla Supercharger, at least an hour, maybe more. No wonder they tried to get you to do it. And regards to booking.com, my experience with their hotel product is the same as yours -- never had a problem. But their property rentals, never again!</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>One of my regular travel pro tips from years ago was “Don’t take the last flight out” because, if you missed your connection or your flight was canceled, you had a backup. And, as an IRROP passenger -- industry lingo for “irregular operations” -- you have priority on open seats on that later flight; even more so if you have frequent flier status. But nowadays, with US airlines sporting load factors over 80%, this strategy is a lot tougher to make work. Last June, back in episode #194, I talked about how United’s delay leaving Amsterdam meant we missed our connection home, and how I spent about an hour between the service agents at ORD and on the phone, saying “This is unacceptable” 2, 3, 4 times before they found two seats on the later flight to BNA that they’d been saying was completely full. And now this trip flying home from Oaxaca through DFW on American, I had gotten an email saying there could be bad weather, but I thought, “Well, there’s always that later flight.” En route from Oaxaca to DFW, I’m connected to the plane WiFi and an hour before we land, I get a notice from American -- our flight to Nashville had been canceled. OK, that sucks, but no panic, they’d rebook me on the later flight. But I keep reading -- no rebooking; it just tells me to go to the American app. The WiFi over northern Mexico is not the greatest, but when I do get the app to respond, it’s not showing the later flight as an option. Indeed, the options keep changing with each refresh, but nothing earlier than the next day, Friday, or sometimes, not until Saturday, two days later. It wasn’t until after we landed, passed through Immigration, and were waiting at baggage claim to pick up our luggage to go through Customs that we finally got a message through the app that they’d found us seats on the later flight. Still got home that night, but in both these instances, the customer service experience has degraded just so far. I’ve had to push <em>very hard</em>, and, honestly, be a bit of a jerk to get what used to come seamlessly.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And another travel tip that seems to need retiring --<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/12/07/top-10-holiday-travel-tips-3/\" title=\"\"> “Use Twitter as a Concierge Service”</a>. While struggling to rebook while still in the air from Oaxaca, I pinged American on Twitter hoping for a little more help. What I got was an amazing (and depressing) amount of spam messaging masquerading as AA customer service managers. It’s easy to get fooled in the panic of trying to find a way home, but a few rules to keep in mind -- only communicate with the airline’s gold-checked verified accounts; ignore messages from everyone else -- like “AMERICAN AIR HELP DESK” (all in caps) or “Jason frank (uppercase Jason, lowercase case frank) American Air manger” (as opposed to “manager”); and never give anyone your phone number.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And there’s a quick programming note at the end of this episode, so for those interested, hold off on hitting the Skip button when you hear the music.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter (X?) message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page, or on the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can skip all that social media stuff and post your comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/48705\">Jolanta Blues</a>&nbsp;by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: Admiral Bob, Martijn de Boer</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Smile for Security: The Future of Facial Recognition in Travel</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Over the years on the podcast, we’ve talked about how travelers are seeing more and more use of biometrics in their travel days. I’ve told the story of my first fingerprint scan back in the late ‘90’s so I could skip the US immigration line on my weekly commute home from Toronto-Pearson Airport. My colleague’s reaction -- “I’m not giving the US government my biometrics!” Me -- “I can skip a 3-minute line? Where do I sign up?” Which I think shows that the privacy-vs.-convenience choices haven\'t fundamentally changed all that much in the subsequent 25 years.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But (surprise!), technology has, and it seems to be accelerating the use of biometrics, specifically facial recognition. Boarding our flight to Oaxaca, our face was our boarding pass -- just look at the camera, wait for the “bing”, and move on. And coming back, the Global Entry kiosks no longer need passports, no longer have you twisting your hand just so to get the fingerprint pad to read all five fingers; just walk up, it takes your picture, and tells you to move on.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Which got me wondering -- where is this going? To help answer this, I invited on two guys who have been digging deep into this for a number of years. First up, <a href=\"http://shj.cs.illinois.edu/\">Dr. Sheldon Jacobson</a>, Professor in Computer Science at the University of Illinois. Sheldon was last on the podcast in episode #189 in September 2022 talking about why another of my travel tips, “catch the earliest flight you can”, is not always right. Over the years, Sheldon has developed operations research models to optimize aviation security. So I asked him to come back on the podcast to talk about the growth of biometrics…<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Sheldon, thanks for coming back on to the Travel Commons podcast. Wanted to talk with you about biometrics, facial recognition, all the things that seem to be increasing with regards to air travel.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: The airlines, as well as the Transportation Security Administration need to know who you are when you are traveling and they relied on identification cards, driver\'s license, real IDs and are continuing to be part of the future. But ultimately, the best way to determine who you are is through your face and biometrics and artificial intelligence imbued with it. In fact, it is a solution that people are recognizing; the airlines are starting to use it. And of course, the Transportation Security Administration is investing billions of dollars to advance this idea. And there\'s a reason why they\'re doing this. They\'re doing this simply because the traditional model of airport security screening has been to detect stuff -- prohibited items, knives, explosives, firearms, even, you know, full size tubes of toothpaste could be a threat based on explosives that can be embedded in them. However, the real threat are the people and facial recognition is a means to transform the platform for airport security from the detection of items to knowing your traveler. And that\'s where we\'re heading right now. And this is the future of airport security.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: And how does that work? How do you think that works?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: TSA has not broadcast this and I don\'t even know if they\'re thinking about it, but I have thought about it and I have proposed to them because I visited them in October 2023. And I told them that if they can bring facial recognition biometrics and the use of AI to truly validate and authenticate the travelers, the need for physical screening will be reduced tremendously to the point that they can create a new class of traveler, which I would call a “Super PreCheck” traveler who subjects themselves to greater background vetting. But then they would be treated like a known crew member at an airport and require no further physical screening. That is the future of airport security.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: It\'s almost like “Back to the Future”, right? It\'s almost like back to pre 9/11 days.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: Now, some will argue, “Oh, someone will gain the system and we will have a terrorist threat because of that.” And I would argue the exact opposite, that the only people who would be willing to subject themselves to the background check would be people who know that they\'re going to get through it fine. And the ones who are truly threats cannot risk it because rarely are people acting by themselves. They\'re often acting in a network. And as a result of that, for them to be exposed, they would be exposing their whole network. And the risk of doing that is far too great. What it would also do is it would parse the whole spectrum of travelers into a group of people who are willing to be known and a group of travelers that are not willing to be known. But over time, the ones who are willing to be known will be much larger, which means you can target your resources and your attention on this so-called unknown group and actually make it more secure for the air system by targeting your resources in that way. After September 11th, everybody was treated the same -- one size fits all. TSA PreCheck moved away from that. Now, I\'m proposing we move even further. And our original research we presented to the TSA in 2003 when we proposed this idea of differential screening to them and how it would work and why it would be beneficial. We said that you really need three classes, two would be fine, but three would be better. And it turns out that third class is what we would now call a “Super PreCheck” class of passengers. And those are the people who would be treated like crew members, the known crew members. And a lot of people would be willing to pay for that privilege and we\'ve put boundaries on what that means. It wouldn\'t be renewed every five years; it would be renewed potentially every year. It would be more expensive. But there\'s a lot of business travelers who are willing to pay that price to basically pass through security untethered, but they aren\'t a risk to the system anyway. So why waste resources and time on them? It would transform the footprint and create what I would call “security tunnels” rather than security checkpoints for many of these people.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: That seems to make sense. What was the reaction to that at TSA?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: That\'s a good question. I don\'t know. I don\'t know if I can say that.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Ok, I got it.. Understood. I just had to ask. Well, that\'s a great concept and I appreciate that insight around you guys’ research. You\'re right. I mean, there\'s something that says you just look at what people are willing to sign up with -- with Clear. with Global Entry, with PreCheck. Again, frequent travelers will always look to streamline that experience. And so I would agree, I would say there would be people in a heartbeat who would raise their hand for that.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: Exactly. Right now, people who sign up for Clear pay $189 on the top end for one year, being able to be identified as who they are and go to the front of the precheck line. That\'s all they\'re paying for and they\'re not paying for anything more. If the TSA implements a new class of passengers then Clear would become superfluous and literally would go away.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Yes, that was what I was thinking also.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: It\'s just, it will not be needed anymore. And in some sense, the pathway of using what the TSA calls the “credential authentication technology” which basically validates who you are using biometrics as well as that you\'re entitled to, imply that you don\'t even need a boarding pass right now when they implement this, and in some airports they have it, Clear will have to find a new business model because the TSA is going to assert that model into their own operations.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: You can kind of feel that. And indeed, I still think this most recent version of Clear -- and I had originally signed up for the initial version way back 10-15 years ago (whenever it first started),&nbsp; Rev 1.0, and then they went bankrupt and now we\'ve got Rev 2.0. But even today, I still have a challenge to see a compelling business model for the service that they offer. Oftentimes at a lot of the airports I\'ll go to, the difference between a Clear line and just the basic PreCheck line is pretty much nothing.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: Exactly. I\'ve never been impressed with their business model. They\'ve tried to sell it for stadiums and large entertainment venues. The challenges,&nbsp; it\'s just been difficult and most of their money, most of their resources, most of the revenue still comes through airports and they need that. I just don\'t see the future of it being very bright.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Is there more facial recognition coming or different facial recognition coming? Where do you see that path going?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: Well, we are nowhere near the end game on this facial recognition as effective as it is. I mean, the concept is ideal and wonderful. It\'s still not perfect. It misses certain people of color. It struggles at certain times, and research is continuing to bring the error rates down, lower and lower and lower, especially if you\'re going to create security tunnels where people just walk through it. And your picture is being taken literally in real time matched up using recognition. And then the next thing you know, you\'re at your boarding gate because everything worked out fine for you. And now it will be the majority, the vast majority of travelers. So we are nowhere near the end of this and we are at the beginning. I think the challenge right now is the perception that people do think there is a privacy concern. And like I said, I think it\'s exactly the opposite. I think this is opening up opportunities where we are going to spike in one dimension of AI which is facial recognition. And then the rest of the screening aspect at airports and validation literally gets dampened and in some cases, completely eliminated. I\'m a firm believer and supporter of facial recognition for airport security and air travel. I know that if they do it right, and they seem to be on that pathway, that we are going to have a very different experience at airport screening for security and even air travel in the next 5 to 10 years. It\'s just going to be radically and dramatically different. And I think when people realize that and begin to experience that they\'re going to be happy for it. But at this point, a lot of the rhetoric is around privacy, but our privacy is being violated so often, so frequently and in so many venues that argument is no longer holding any water. I am convinced that this is a positive future for air travel in all aspects.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Sheldon, thanks very much again for joining us on the TravelCommons podcast and sharing that. That\'s great stuff.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Our second guest is <a href=\"https://atmosphereresearch.com/\">Henry Harteveldt</a>, a travel industry analyst for many years. He had the depth of experience and industry contacts to give us a grounded sense on what’s coming with regarding biometrics…<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Henry, thanks for joining us today on the Travel Commons podcast. Wanted to talk about biometrics in and around air travel and specifically, I don\'t know if this is recency bias or what, but it just seems like I\'ve seen a whole lot more of, especially facial recognition over the past couple of years. What\'s your cut at it from a travel industry standpoint?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: In the Crawl/Walk/Run continuum, I would say that with biometrics, we are somewhere between crawl and walk. Think of biometrics as the baby who is crawling really fast and it\'s going to start walking any day now. But in the meantime, it\'s scooting all over the place. So let\'s break it down… Using facial recognition cameras for boarding flights has actually been around since before COVID began. I think the trial started somewhere in the 2016-17 time frame for international flights. That’s the only time it\'s used right now, and it started to roll out in 2018- 2019. Delta was one of the first to embrace the technology and JetBlue as well. And what it does when it works well, and this is something we should come back to to discuss, but when biometrics, facial recognition works as everybody wants it to, it speeds up the boarding process. It reduces the need for us to show not just a physical boarding pass but also a physical passport. And, as a result, on a wide-body jet, it can shave perhaps 10 or more minutes off the boarding time; on a single-aisle plane, a 737 or an A320-type of plane, that could shave 5 to 7 minutes off. So it speeds up the boarding process and makes everything a little bit more efficient. It\'s not perfect. There are people who are uncomfortable using it. There are people who are not familiar with it. So airlines have to have a belt and suspender type of approach. They\'ll have to have gate staff there for the time being. But I don\'t think we are that far away from where international travel is primarily biometrics based boarding, at least in major airports. And I think we will start soon to see it being tested for domestic travel, but there\'s going to be a wrinkle with that when we use the biometric readers at the gate to get on the plane. The database links back to US Customs and Border Patrol which has photographs of US citizens, resident aliens, and international visitors, and it can call up that data to validate that you are you and I am me. With domestic flights. I think only the TSA has the biometric data right now for PreCheck. So it may take a little bit of work to get to a point for that. So that\'s boarding. But let\'s talk about airport security. Yes, TSA is indeed testing and in some cases, I think it\'s actually beyond testing, they are rolling it out facial recognition that again eliminates the need for us to take out a driver\'s license or passport or any other physical ID and, importantly, eliminates the need for us to show any type of boarding pass, whether it\'s a paper boarding pass or digital boarding pass. And again, in theory, it speeds up the number of people who can get into and through the security screening process and reduces the need for human agents at those checkpoints. Now again, we\'re still very much at the beginning of this. And TSA is saying we are going to have a security screening officer at that checkpoint in case something goes wrong or in case someone isn\'t comfortable using biometrics.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Yeah, that was my experience in Nashville. There was a guy standing right there.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: And as we record this, the TSA is testing at Las Vegas, basically this walkthrough type of environment, a new type of screening which is biometrics-based to validate who you are. You put your bags on the belt, you go through, it\'s a lot less invasive, a lot less intrusive and supposed to be a lot faster. I actually want to go over to Las Vegas just to check it out and see what it\'s like. They have this in Dubai and they are testing it elsewhere in England and in France, they are testing it on Eurostar. Now, there are a lot of other things coming along with biometrics at a lot of European airports and in Asia as well. I was just in Singapore. There are biometrics-based scanners so that you don\'t have to queue up and have a border patrol officer review your passport, stamp your passport.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: I had it at Heathrow last November. I went through the e-gates. So I was just surprised; I walked through to the other end and I was like, “Wait, this is it?&nbsp; Nobody to stamp my passport?” No, nothing. Just like, “No. Get out of here. Go, move on.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: Right. Now, for those of us of a certain age, part of the love of travel is hearing that clunky thunk of the passport officer stamping your passport and, every time you get a new passport, the passport service mails back your old one. Those become mementos of our lives.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Yes, absolutely.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: And there is a part of me that will miss the day when we get our passports stamped just as there is a part of me that misses airline branded paper, boarding passes to show “Oh, here\'s where I have been” and so on.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: That obviously, then, pivots over to -- how should the travelers think about biometric data and the storage of that and the risk of that as a condition of travel?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: Look, it is obviously a personal decision. Our research shows that right now in the US, far more travelers would trust sharing their personal biometric information with an airline than with any government agency. So in the US right now, it\'s nearly 80% of airline passengers who, and this is first quarter 2024 data fresh off the press if you will, nearly 80% of us, airline passengers, business and leisure say they\'re willing to share their personal biometric data -- fingerprints, iris scans, etc. -- with an airline they fly regularly if it will lead to a more efficient airport experience or journey. Only a quarter of passengers say they\'re comfortable sharing their personal information right now with any government agency or entity even though, again, with the same benefits of an easier journey. Now, both of those numbers are up from 2023. The government only keeps certain information for a certain amount of time, usually 30 days or less and then it is expunged. So I am in the crowd that is comfortable sharing biometric information with governments and airlines because doing so makes my journey more efficient. It\'s faster, it\'s less stressful. It\'s fewer people that I need to interact with. Remember we\'re somewhere between Crawl and Walk. But where I see it, from the analyst perspective, the time difference, the time it will take us to go from Crawl to Walk will probably be many times longer in the time that will be needed to go from Walk to Run. Because again, as improvements emerge with the technology, the hardware, as well as the software, changes in society, changes in social acceptance of biometrics, the appreciation for benefits, we will reach that so-called tipping point where all of a sudden we see massive and welcome acceleration. It\'s interesting. Younger travelers are a lot more suspicious of the government than some of their older counterparts. And travelers over 65 are less willing to share personal data with the government. The sweet spot is travelers from 30 to 64-ish, call it.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: That\'s an interesting distribution.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: And I think that an important point for anyone listening here -- if you work for an airline, for a technology company, for an airport, for a government agency or, for that matter, if you work at a hotel company, cruise line or other parts of the travel industry. You cannot view your customers as a homogeneous block and you have to understand their welcoming the use of technology. The irony is as we all know, Gen Z are digital natives. They\'re very comfortable using technology. They will put anything and everything on social media it seems like, but they have some very legitimate concerns in their minds about how will governments use their biometric data and could it be used against them? And I\'ll just add that hotels are looking at how they evolve the check in process. You know, I think one of the dumbest questions in the world is when we are standing at the front desk of a hotel suitcase in hand, giving them our credit card and ID and the agent says “Checking in?” Like “No, I thought I would just, I have nothing better to do. So I thought I would bring a suitcase to a hotel in a different city and hand over a credit card and my personal information just to say hello.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Right. “And by the way, I like standing in line. So that\'s why I\'ve been waiting for 10 minutes to get up and have this conversation with you.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: Exactly. But you know, hotels are looking at how they improve the check in process. And granted, at the five-star true luxury properties and resorts, I think they will say, “Look, we value and our guests value the human interaction,” but they\'re going to be a part of that. Guests can say “Look, there\'s some things I can do for myself and then I want to talk to somebody about some other stuff.” But I think with four-star and below, be prepared for more biometric-based self-service check in checkout experiences. And I think, frankly, a lot of people would welcome it because it\'s a lot more secure for 99.9% of us. Eventually. I think biometrics will be more than welcome. And again, if it makes our journeys that much more efficient and less stressful, less unpleasant, there is to me, no downside.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Yes, I think that the cases you\'ve laid out is the appropriate one, which is, it\'s a combination of frictionless or making travel much more efficient than what we have today, doing away with as many lines as we can, and on the same token, being more efficient for the travel company, be it a hotel, be it an airline, be it the company running the airport so that their costs stay down and our costs stay down to travel. So the trade off on that, people are going to strike their own balance around privacy versus efficiency. Henry, thank you very much. This has been a great conversation. I\'ve really enjoyed it. Thanks for coming on a TravelCommons podcast.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: Thank you for inviting me. I enjoyed it as well.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Thanks to <a href=\"http://shj.cs.illinois.edu/\">Dr. Sheldon Jacobson</a> and <a href=\"https://atmosphereresearch.com/\">Henry Harteveldt</a> for taking the time to talk to us about biometrics, facial recognition and give us an idea of what we travelers should expect to see soon. Check out the show notes at TravelCommons.com for links to their work.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"className\":\"has-medium-font-size\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #199</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I hope you enjoyed the show; the conversations with Sheldon and Henry. They had so much great insight; the editing decisions were tough. This is usually the point where I say “and I hope you decide to stay subscribed” but this is, as they say in the UK, the penultimate episode of the TravelCommons podcast; a fancy way to say “second-to-the-last”. The next episode will be #200, so a good round number to end it. I’ll unpack it all next month, but just wanted to give you all a heads up.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As always, you can find us and listen to the current episodes on all the main podcast sites -- Apple Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, and Amazon Music. Google has shut down their Podcast app, at least in the US, but you can now get the regular TravelCommons audio episodes on the TravelCommons’ YouTube channel. Go figure -- I can never keep track of what bits Google is shutting down or renaming. But you can always ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page at TravelCommons.com for a transcript of the episode and links to Sheldon and Henry’s websites. And along the side of the page, you’ll find links to all the TravelCommons’ socials.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to mpeacock on Twitter, write them on the TravelCommons page on Facebook or Instagram, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com.&nbsp; And thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in emails, Tweets and post comments on the website. I really appreciate it.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And until we talk again, safe travels; and thanks for stopping by the TravelCommons.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_190.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #199 — Smile for Security: Facial Recognition in Travel','','inherit','closed','closed','','4460-revision-v1','','','2024-04-10 13:22:47','2024-04-10 18:22:47','',4460,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4462',0,'revision','',0),
(4464,1,'2024-04-10 18:09:59','2024-04-10 23:09:59','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/DALL·E-2024-04-10_13.01.39-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"fence gate with a sign saying Beware of The Bull\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /> Booking.com\'s Customer Service Center?[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I walked by <a href=\"https://www.shakespearesglobe.com/\" title=\"\">Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre</a> after a weekend of wrestling with <a href=\"https://www.booking.com/\" title=\"\">Booking.com</a> and <a href=\"https://travelnest.com/\" title=\"\">TravelNest</a>\'s service agents, trying unsuccessfully to not let them screw up my London vacation rental.  The Macbeth soliloquy about a tale \"full of sound and fury, signifying nothing\" pretty much summed up my experience -- lots of talk that yielded nothing. But before that, we catch up on Hertz\'s EV reversal, Sioux City, Iowa\'s embrace of their SUX airport code, and a flash-in-the-pan airport delay betting app.  All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_199.mp3\" title=\"\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #199: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN a couple of days after a last-minute 200-mile trip up to Carbondale, Illinois, home of the <a href=\"https://siu.edu/\" title=\"\">Southern Illinois University</a> Salukis… but that didn’t matter. What <em>did</em> matter is that Carbondale was right in the <a href=\"https://eclipse.siu.edu/\" title=\"\">center of the solar eclipse’s path</a> across North America, which meant we had 4 minutes of total eclipse. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Looking up, straight into the sun with its corona glowing, wavering around the black disk of the moon -- I’ve seen… we’ve all seen pictures of total eclipses, and of this one all across social and regular media Monday afternoon. But the pictures couldn’t do justice to being there, even if <em>there</em> was the far end of the Salukis stadium parking lot, backing up to a scraggly bit of woods. The experience more than made up for the 3-hr drive there and the 5½-hour bumper-to-bumper traffic back. I add it to my list of things that, even though we’ve seen seemingly an infinite number of pictures of them, experiencing them in real life was worth the hassle to physically travel to see them. The Taj Mahal, the Great Wall of China, Niagara Falls -- all on the list. As opposed to, say, The Mona Lisa in the Louvre. The crowd of people with their phones in the air trying to get a picture was much better than the Mona Lisa itself.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Before that, the start of March, we were in Oaxaca, Mexico for a week. I’ve had Oaxaca on my “To Visit” list for 4-5 years now. For me, it was a good match -- the combination of interesting food, lots of culture, and no beach. I’ve done “resort-y” Mexico -- Cabo, Cancún, Puerto Vallarta -- not a big fan. While there were a lot of tourists in Oaxaca, it didn’t seem to be overrun with them like, say, the center of Cabo is. Maybe because the city center is bigger, so there’s more space to absorb them, or maybe the absolute number of tourists are lower; it wasn’t an easy nor a cheap flight to get there.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>We hit the food scene pretty hard, high- and low-brow; food stands in the market; high-end places serving up phenomenal moles. But the food that made the biggest impression is the insects. It wasn’t some tourist-baiting shtick. Walking past a group of street vendors, I saw one of the women making a snack of a couple of grasshoppers wrapped in a small tortilla. At a mezcal bar on the eastern edge of the Centro, the bartender put down a small bowl of grasshoppers as a bar snack. (If you follow TravelCommons on Instagram, you can see a picture in my Oaxaca story) “Those are good grasshoppers,” he told us. “I drive an hour up towards Pueblo to get them. They’re not farmed like the ones you get in the markets.” I have to admit that I’m not enough of an insect connoisseur to be able to pick out the finer nuances of free-range vs. farmed grasshoppers, but they were as good as Beer Nuts as a bar snack. Or maybe that was just the 3rd, or 4th, or 5th shot of mezcal talking.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/11510\">Funkist</a>&nbsp;– cdk dub mix by cdk (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: teru</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Friend of the podcast Allan Marko swung by the website to leave this comment about the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2024/02/28/podcast-198-london-vacation-rental-woes-hertzs-ev-retreat/\" title=\"\">last episode</a>:<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“I was assigned an EV by Avis at Fort Lauderdale [at the end of February]. Curious enough to try it out for the relatively short distances I would be traveling, I got in. After starting, I noticed it only had a 10% charge, so, “check please.” I fired up the Avis app and selected a Chevy Malibu with 1,200 miles on it.&nbsp; As for booking.com, we had tremendous luck using that website for most of our accommodations over a two month period in SE Asia five years ago - exclusively for hotels though.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Allan, thanks for that. Expecting you to drive off with a 10% charge? Avis would never think to give you a car with just an ⅛-th of a tank. And if they did, it would take them 10 minutes to fill the tank and get it back to you. But for that EV? Even at a Tesla Supercharger, at least an hour, maybe more. No wonder they tried to get you to do it. And regards to booking.com, my experience with their hotel product is the same as yours -- never had a problem. But their property rentals, never again!</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>One of my regular travel pro tips from years ago was “Don’t take the last flight out” because, if you missed your connection or your flight was canceled, you had a backup. And, as an IRROP passenger -- industry lingo for “irregular operations” -- you have priority on open seats on that later flight; even more so if you have frequent flier status. But nowadays, with US airlines sporting load factors over 80%, this strategy is a lot tougher to make work. Last June, back in episode #194, I talked about how United’s delay leaving Amsterdam meant we missed our connection home, and how I spent about an hour between the service agents at ORD and on the phone, saying “This is unacceptable” 2, 3, 4 times before they found two seats on the later flight to BNA that they’d been saying was completely full. And now this trip flying home from Oaxaca through DFW on American, I had gotten an email saying there could be bad weather, but I thought, “Well, there’s always that later flight.” En route from Oaxaca to DFW, I’m connected to the plane WiFi and an hour before we land, I get a notice from American -- our flight to Nashville had been canceled. OK, that sucks, but no panic, they’d rebook me on the later flight. But I keep reading -- no rebooking; it just tells me to go to the American app. The WiFi over northern Mexico is not the greatest, but when I do get the app to respond, it’s not showing the later flight as an option. Indeed, the options keep changing with each refresh, but nothing earlier than the next day, Friday, or sometimes, not until Saturday, two days later. It wasn’t until after we landed, passed through Immigration, and were waiting at baggage claim to pick up our luggage to go through Customs that we finally got a message through the app that they’d found us seats on the later flight. Still got home that night, but in both these instances, the customer service experience has degraded just so far. I’ve had to push <em>very hard</em>, and, honestly, be a bit of a jerk to get what used to come seamlessly.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And another travel tip that seems to need retiring --<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/12/07/top-10-holiday-travel-tips-3/\" title=\"\"> “Use Twitter as a Concierge Service”</a>. While struggling to rebook while still in the air from Oaxaca, I pinged American on Twitter hoping for a little more help. What I got was an amazing (and depressing) amount of spam messaging masquerading as AA customer service managers. It’s easy to get fooled in the panic of trying to find a way home, but a few rules to keep in mind -- only communicate with the airline’s gold-checked verified accounts; ignore messages from everyone else -- like “AMERICAN AIR HELP DESK” (all in caps) or “Jason frank (uppercase Jason, lowercase case frank) American Air manger” (as opposed to “manager”); and never give anyone your phone number.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And there’s a quick programming note at the end of this episode, so for those interested, hold off on hitting the Skip button when you hear the music.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter (X?) message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page, or on the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can skip all that social media stuff and post your comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/48705\">Jolanta Blues</a>&nbsp;by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: Admiral Bob, Martijn de Boer</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Smile for Security: The Future of Facial Recognition in Travel</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Over the years on the podcast, we’ve talked about how travelers are seeing more and more use of biometrics in their travel days. I’ve told the story of my first fingerprint scan back in the late ‘90’s so I could skip the US immigration line on my weekly commute home from Toronto-Pearson Airport. My colleague’s reaction -- “I’m not giving the US government my biometrics!” Me -- “I can skip a 3-minute line? Where do I sign up?” Which I think shows that the privacy-vs.-convenience choices haven\'t fundamentally changed all that much in the subsequent 25 years.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But (surprise!), technology has, and it seems to be accelerating the use of biometrics, specifically facial recognition. Boarding our flight to Oaxaca, our face was our boarding pass -- just look at the camera, wait for the “bing”, and move on. And coming back, the Global Entry kiosks no longer need passports, no longer have you twisting your hand just so to get the fingerprint pad to read all five fingers; just walk up, it takes your picture, and tells you to move on.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Which got me wondering -- where is this going? To help answer this, I invited on two guys who have been digging deep into this for a number of years. First up, <a href=\"http://shj.cs.illinois.edu/\">Dr. Sheldon Jacobson</a>, Professor in Computer Science at the University of Illinois. Sheldon was last on the podcast in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/09/22/podcast-189-why-we-travel-when-the-first-flight-isnt-best/\" title=\"\">episode #189</a> in September 2022 talking about why another of my travel tips, “catch the earliest flight you can”, is not always right. Over the years, Sheldon has developed operations research models to optimize aviation security. So I asked him to come back on the podcast to talk about the growth of biometrics…<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Sheldon, thanks for coming back on to the Travel Commons podcast. Wanted to talk with you about biometrics, facial recognition, all the things that seem to be increasing with regards to air travel.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: The airlines, as well as the Transportation Security Administration need to know who you are when you are traveling and they relied on identification cards, driver\'s license, real IDs and are continuing to be part of the future. But ultimately, the best way to determine who you are is through your face and biometrics and artificial intelligence imbued with it. In fact, it is a solution that people are recognizing; the airlines are starting to use it. And of course, the Transportation Security Administration is investing billions of dollars to advance this idea. And there\'s a reason why they\'re doing this. They\'re doing this simply because the traditional model of airport security screening has been to detect stuff -- prohibited items, knives, explosives, firearms, even, you know, full size tubes of toothpaste could be a threat based on explosives that can be embedded in them. However, the real threat are the people and facial recognition is a means to transform the platform for airport security from the detection of items to knowing your traveler. And that\'s where we\'re heading right now. And this is the future of airport security.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: And how does that work? How do you think that works?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: TSA has not broadcast this and I don\'t even know if they\'re thinking about it, but I have thought about it and I have proposed to them because I visited them in October 2023. And I told them that if they can bring facial recognition biometrics and the use of AI to truly validate and authenticate the travelers, the need for physical screening will be reduced tremendously to the point that they can create a new class of traveler, which I would call a “Super PreCheck” traveler who subjects themselves to greater background vetting. But then they would be treated like a known crew member at an airport and require no further physical screening. That is the future of airport security.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: It\'s almost like “Back to the Future”, right? It\'s almost like back to pre 9/11 days.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: Now, some will argue, “Oh, someone will gain the system and we will have a terrorist threat because of that.” And I would argue the exact opposite, that the only people who would be willing to subject themselves to the background check would be people who know that they\'re going to get through it fine. And the ones who are truly threats cannot risk it because rarely are people acting by themselves. They\'re often acting in a network. And as a result of that, for them to be exposed, they would be exposing their whole network. And the risk of doing that is far too great. What it would also do is it would parse the whole spectrum of travelers into a group of people who are willing to be known and a group of travelers that are not willing to be known. But over time, the ones who are willing to be known will be much larger, which means you can target your resources and your attention on this so-called unknown group and actually make it more secure for the air system by targeting your resources in that way. After September 11th, everybody was treated the same -- one size fits all. TSA PreCheck moved away from that. Now, I\'m proposing we move even further. And our original research we presented to the TSA in 2003 when we proposed this idea of differential screening to them and how it would work and why it would be beneficial. We said that you really need three classes, two would be fine, but three would be better. And it turns out that third class is what we would now call a “Super PreCheck” class of passengers. And those are the people who would be treated like crew members, the known crew members. And a lot of people would be willing to pay for that privilege and we\'ve put boundaries on what that means. It wouldn\'t be renewed every five years; it would be renewed potentially every year. It would be more expensive. But there\'s a lot of business travelers who are willing to pay that price to basically pass through security untethered, but they aren\'t a risk to the system anyway. So why waste resources and time on them? It would transform the footprint and create what I would call “security tunnels” rather than security checkpoints for many of these people.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: That seems to make sense. What was the reaction to that at TSA?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: That\'s a good question. I don\'t know. I don\'t know if I can say that.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Ok, I got it.. Understood. I just had to ask. Well, that\'s a great concept and I appreciate that insight around you guys’ research. You\'re right. I mean, there\'s something that says you just look at what people are willing to sign up with -- with Clear. with Global Entry, with PreCheck. Again, frequent travelers will always look to streamline that experience. And so I would agree, I would say there would be people in a heartbeat who would raise their hand for that.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: Exactly. Right now, people who sign up for Clear pay $189 on the top end for one year, being able to be identified as who they are and go to the front of the precheck line. That\'s all they\'re paying for and they\'re not paying for anything more. If the TSA implements a new class of passengers then Clear would become superfluous and literally would go away.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Yes, that was what I was thinking also.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: It\'s just, it will not be needed anymore. And in some sense, the pathway of using what the TSA calls the “credential authentication technology” which basically validates who you are using biometrics as well as that you\'re entitled to, imply that you don\'t even need a boarding pass right now when they implement this, and in some airports they have it, Clear will have to find a new business model because the TSA is going to assert that model into their own operations.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: You can kind of feel that. And indeed, I still think this most recent version of Clear -- and I had originally signed up for the initial version way back 10-15 years ago (whenever it first started),&nbsp; Rev 1.0, and then they went bankrupt and now we\'ve got Rev 2.0. But even today, I still have a challenge to see a compelling business model for the service that they offer. Oftentimes at a lot of the airports I\'ll go to, the difference between a Clear line and just the basic PreCheck line is pretty much nothing.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: Exactly. I\'ve never been impressed with their business model. They\'ve tried to sell it for stadiums and large entertainment venues. The challenges,&nbsp; it\'s just been difficult and most of their money, most of their resources, most of the revenue still comes through airports and they need that. I just don\'t see the future of it being very bright.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Is there more facial recognition coming or different facial recognition coming? Where do you see that path going?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: Well, we are nowhere near the end game on this facial recognition as effective as it is. I mean, the concept is ideal and wonderful. It\'s still not perfect. It misses certain people of color. It struggles at certain times, and research is continuing to bring the error rates down, lower and lower and lower, especially if you\'re going to create security tunnels where people just walk through it. And your picture is being taken literally in real time matched up using recognition. And then the next thing you know, you\'re at your boarding gate because everything worked out fine for you. And now it will be the majority, the vast majority of travelers. So we are nowhere near the end of this and we are at the beginning. I think the challenge right now is the perception that people do think there is a privacy concern. And like I said, I think it\'s exactly the opposite. I think this is opening up opportunities where we are going to spike in one dimension of AI which is facial recognition. And then the rest of the screening aspect at airports and validation literally gets dampened and in some cases, completely eliminated. I\'m a firm believer and supporter of facial recognition for airport security and air travel. I know that if they do it right, and they seem to be on that pathway, that we are going to have a very different experience at airport screening for security and even air travel in the next 5 to 10 years. It\'s just going to be radically and dramatically different. And I think when people realize that and begin to experience that they\'re going to be happy for it. But at this point, a lot of the rhetoric is around privacy, but our privacy is being violated so often, so frequently and in so many venues that argument is no longer holding any water. I am convinced that this is a positive future for air travel in all aspects.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Sheldon, thanks very much again for joining us on the TravelCommons podcast and sharing that. That\'s great stuff.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Our second guest is <a href=\"https://atmosphereresearch.com/\">Henry Harteveldt</a>, a travel industry analyst for many years. He had the depth of experience and industry contacts to give us a grounded sense on what’s coming with regarding biometrics…<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Henry, thanks for joining us today on the Travel Commons podcast. Wanted to talk about biometrics in and around air travel and specifically, I don\'t know if this is recency bias or what, but it just seems like I\'ve seen a whole lot more of, especially facial recognition over the past couple of years. What\'s your cut at it from a travel industry standpoint?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: In the Crawl/Walk/Run continuum, I would say that with biometrics, we are somewhere between crawl and walk. Think of biometrics as the baby who is crawling really fast and it\'s going to start walking any day now. But in the meantime, it\'s scooting all over the place. So let\'s break it down… Using facial recognition cameras for boarding flights has actually been around since before COVID began. I think the trial started somewhere in the 2016-17 time frame for international flights. That’s the only time it\'s used right now, and it started to roll out in 2018- 2019. Delta was one of the first to embrace the technology and JetBlue as well. And what it does when it works well, and this is something we should come back to to discuss, but when biometrics, facial recognition works as everybody wants it to, it speeds up the boarding process. It reduces the need for us to show not just a physical boarding pass but also a physical passport. And, as a result, on a wide-body jet, it can shave perhaps 10 or more minutes off the boarding time; on a single-aisle plane, a 737 or an A320-type of plane, that could shave 5 to 7 minutes off. So it speeds up the boarding process and makes everything a little bit more efficient. It\'s not perfect. There are people who are uncomfortable using it. There are people who are not familiar with it. So airlines have to have a belt and suspender type of approach. They\'ll have to have gate staff there for the time being. But I don\'t think we are that far away from where international travel is primarily biometrics based boarding, at least in major airports. And I think we will start soon to see it being tested for domestic travel, but there\'s going to be a wrinkle with that when we use the biometric readers at the gate to get on the plane. The database links back to US Customs and Border Patrol which has photographs of US citizens, resident aliens, and international visitors, and it can call up that data to validate that you are you and I am me. With domestic flights. I think only the TSA has the biometric data right now for PreCheck. So it may take a little bit of work to get to a point for that. So that\'s boarding. But let\'s talk about airport security. Yes, TSA is indeed testing and in some cases, I think it\'s actually beyond testing, they are rolling it out facial recognition that again eliminates the need for us to take out a driver\'s license or passport or any other physical ID and, importantly, eliminates the need for us to show any type of boarding pass, whether it\'s a paper boarding pass or digital boarding pass. And again, in theory, it speeds up the number of people who can get into and through the security screening process and reduces the need for human agents at those checkpoints. Now again, we\'re still very much at the beginning of this. And TSA is saying we are going to have a security screening officer at that checkpoint in case something goes wrong or in case someone isn\'t comfortable using biometrics.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Yeah, that was my experience in Nashville. There was a guy standing right there.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: And as we record this, the TSA is testing at Las Vegas, basically this walkthrough type of environment, a new type of screening which is biometrics-based to validate who you are. You put your bags on the belt, you go through, it\'s a lot less invasive, a lot less intrusive and supposed to be a lot faster. I actually want to go over to Las Vegas just to check it out and see what it\'s like. They have this in Dubai and they are testing it elsewhere in England and in France, they are testing it on Eurostar. Now, there are a lot of other things coming along with biometrics at a lot of European airports and in Asia as well. I was just in Singapore. There are biometrics-based scanners so that you don\'t have to queue up and have a border patrol officer review your passport, stamp your passport.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: I had it at Heathrow last November. I went through the e-gates. So I was just surprised; I walked through to the other end and I was like, “Wait, this is it?&nbsp; Nobody to stamp my passport?” No, nothing. Just like, “No. Get out of here. Go, move on.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: Right. Now, for those of us of a certain age, part of the love of travel is hearing that clunky thunk of the passport officer stamping your passport and, every time you get a new passport, the passport service mails back your old one. Those become mementos of our lives.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Yes, absolutely.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: And there is a part of me that will miss the day when we get our passports stamped just as there is a part of me that misses airline branded paper, boarding passes to show “Oh, here\'s where I have been” and so on.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: That obviously, then, pivots over to -- how should the travelers think about biometric data and the storage of that and the risk of that as a condition of travel?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: Look, it is obviously a personal decision. Our research shows that right now in the US, far more travelers would trust sharing their personal biometric information with an airline than with any government agency. So in the US right now, it\'s nearly 80% of airline passengers who, and this is first quarter 2024 data fresh off the press if you will, nearly 80% of us, airline passengers, business and leisure say they\'re willing to share their personal biometric data -- fingerprints, iris scans, etc. -- with an airline they fly regularly if it will lead to a more efficient airport experience or journey. Only a quarter of passengers say they\'re comfortable sharing their personal information right now with any government agency or entity even though, again, with the same benefits of an easier journey. Now, both of those numbers are up from 2023. The government only keeps certain information for a certain amount of time, usually 30 days or less and then it is expunged. So I am in the crowd that is comfortable sharing biometric information with governments and airlines because doing so makes my journey more efficient. It\'s faster, it\'s less stressful. It\'s fewer people that I need to interact with. Remember we\'re somewhere between Crawl and Walk. But where I see it, from the analyst perspective, the time difference, the time it will take us to go from Crawl to Walk will probably be many times longer in the time that will be needed to go from Walk to Run. Because again, as improvements emerge with the technology, the hardware, as well as the software, changes in society, changes in social acceptance of biometrics, the appreciation for benefits, we will reach that so-called tipping point where all of a sudden we see massive and welcome acceleration. It\'s interesting. Younger travelers are a lot more suspicious of the government than some of their older counterparts. And travelers over 65 are less willing to share personal data with the government. The sweet spot is travelers from 30 to 64-ish, call it.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: That\'s an interesting distribution.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: And I think that an important point for anyone listening here -- if you work for an airline, for a technology company, for an airport, for a government agency or, for that matter, if you work at a hotel company, cruise line or other parts of the travel industry. You cannot view your customers as a homogeneous block and you have to understand their welcoming the use of technology. The irony is as we all know, Gen Z are digital natives. They\'re very comfortable using technology. They will put anything and everything on social media it seems like, but they have some very legitimate concerns in their minds about how will governments use their biometric data and could it be used against them? And I\'ll just add that hotels are looking at how they evolve the check in process. You know, I think one of the dumbest questions in the world is when we are standing at the front desk of a hotel suitcase in hand, giving them our credit card and ID and the agent says “Checking in?” Like “No, I thought I would just, I have nothing better to do. So I thought I would bring a suitcase to a hotel in a different city and hand over a credit card and my personal information just to say hello.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Right. “And by the way, I like standing in line. So that\'s why I\'ve been waiting for 10 minutes to get up and have this conversation with you.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: Exactly. But you know, hotels are looking at how they improve the check in process. And granted, at the five-star true luxury properties and resorts, I think they will say, “Look, we value and our guests value the human interaction,” but they\'re going to be a part of that. Guests can say “Look, there\'s some things I can do for myself and then I want to talk to somebody about some other stuff.” But I think with four-star and below, be prepared for more biometric-based self-service check in checkout experiences. And I think, frankly, a lot of people would welcome it because it\'s a lot more secure for 99.9% of us. Eventually. I think biometrics will be more than welcome. And again, if it makes our journeys that much more efficient and less stressful, less unpleasant, there is to me, no downside.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Yes, I think that the cases you\'ve laid out is the appropriate one, which is, it\'s a combination of frictionless or making travel much more efficient than what we have today, doing away with as many lines as we can, and on the same token, being more efficient for the travel company, be it a hotel, be it an airline, be it the company running the airport so that their costs stay down and our costs stay down to travel. So the trade off on that, people are going to strike their own balance around privacy versus efficiency. Henry, thank you very much. This has been a great conversation. I\'ve really enjoyed it. Thanks for coming on a TravelCommons podcast.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: Thank you for inviting me. I enjoyed it as well.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Thanks to <a href=\"http://shj.cs.illinois.edu/\">Dr. Sheldon Jacobson</a> and <a href=\"https://atmosphereresearch.com/\">Henry Harteveldt</a> for taking the time to talk to us about biometrics, facial recognition and give us an idea of what we travelers should expect to see soon. Check out the show notes at TravelCommons.com for links to their work.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"className\":\"has-medium-font-size\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #199</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I hope you enjoyed the show; the conversations with Sheldon and Henry. They had so much great insight; the editing decisions were tough. This is usually the point where I say “and I hope you decide to stay subscribed” but this is, as they say in the UK, the penultimate episode of the TravelCommons podcast; a fancy way to say “second-to-the-last”. The next episode will be #200, so a good round number to end it. I’ll unpack it all next month, but just wanted to give you all a heads up.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As always, you can find us and listen to the current episodes on all the main podcast sites -- Apple Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, and Amazon Music. Google has shut down their Podcast app, at least in the US, but you can now get the regular TravelCommons audio episodes on the TravelCommons’ YouTube channel. Go figure -- I can never keep track of what bits Google is shutting down or renaming. But you can always ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page at TravelCommons.com for a transcript of the episode and links to Sheldon and Henry’s websites. And along the side of the page, you’ll find links to all the TravelCommons’ socials.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to mpeacock on Twitter, write them on the TravelCommons page on Facebook or Instagram, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com.&nbsp; And thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in emails, Tweets and post comments on the website. I really appreciate it.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And until we talk again, safe travels; and thanks for stopping by the TravelCommons.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_190.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #199 — Smile for Security: Facial Recognition in Travel','','inherit','closed','closed','','4460-revision-v1','','','2024-04-10 18:09:59','2024-04-10 23:09:59','',4460,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4464',0,'revision','',0),
(4465,1,'2024-04-10 21:50:48','2024-04-11 02:50:48','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/DALL·E-2024-04-10_13.01.39-300x300.jpg\" alt=\" a traveler standing in front of a facial recognition scanner at an airport. The scanner is emitting error signals, and the traveler looks frustrated.\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /> Booking.com\'s Customer Service Center?[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I walked by <a href=\"https://www.shakespearesglobe.com/\" title=\"\">Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre</a> after a weekend of wrestling with <a href=\"https://www.booking.com/\" title=\"\">Booking.com</a> and <a href=\"https://travelnest.com/\" title=\"\">TravelNest</a>\'s service agents, trying unsuccessfully to not let them screw up my London vacation rental.  The Macbeth soliloquy about a tale \"full of sound and fury, signifying nothing\" pretty much summed up my experience -- lots of talk that yielded nothing. But before that, we catch up on Hertz\'s EV reversal, Sioux City, Iowa\'s embrace of their SUX airport code, and a flash-in-the-pan airport delay betting app.  All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_199.mp3\" title=\"\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #199: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN a couple of days after a last-minute 200-mile trip up to Carbondale, Illinois, home of the <a href=\"https://siu.edu/\" title=\"\">Southern Illinois University</a> Salukis… but that didn’t matter. What <em>did</em> matter is that Carbondale was right in the <a href=\"https://eclipse.siu.edu/\" title=\"\">center of the solar eclipse’s path</a> across North America, which meant we had 4 minutes of total eclipse. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Looking up, straight into the sun with its corona glowing, wavering around the black disk of the moon -- I’ve seen… we’ve all seen pictures of total eclipses, and of this one all across social and regular media Monday afternoon. But the pictures couldn’t do justice to being there, even if <em>there</em> was the far end of the Salukis stadium parking lot, backing up to a scraggly bit of woods. The experience more than made up for the 3-hr drive there and the 5½-hour bumper-to-bumper traffic back. I add it to my list of things that, even though we’ve seen seemingly an infinite number of pictures of them, experiencing them in real life was worth the hassle to physically travel to see them. The Taj Mahal, the Great Wall of China, Niagara Falls -- all on the list. As opposed to, say, The Mona Lisa in the Louvre. The crowd of people with their phones in the air trying to get a picture was much better than the Mona Lisa itself.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Before that, the start of March, we were in Oaxaca, Mexico for a week. I’ve had Oaxaca on my “To Visit” list for 4-5 years now. For me, it was a good match -- the combination of interesting food, lots of culture, and no beach. I’ve done “resort-y” Mexico -- Cabo, Cancún, Puerto Vallarta -- not a big fan. While there were a lot of tourists in Oaxaca, it didn’t seem to be overrun with them like, say, the center of Cabo is. Maybe because the city center is bigger, so there’s more space to absorb them, or maybe the absolute number of tourists are lower; it wasn’t an easy nor a cheap flight to get there.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>We hit the food scene pretty hard, high- and low-brow; food stands in the market; high-end places serving up phenomenal moles. But the food that made the biggest impression is the insects. It wasn’t some tourist-baiting shtick. Walking past a group of street vendors, I saw one of the women making a snack of a couple of grasshoppers wrapped in a small tortilla. At a mezcal bar on the eastern edge of the Centro, the bartender put down a small bowl of grasshoppers as a bar snack. (If you follow TravelCommons on Instagram, you can see a picture in my Oaxaca story) “Those are good grasshoppers,” he told us. “I drive an hour up towards Pueblo to get them. They’re not farmed like the ones you get in the markets.” I have to admit that I’m not enough of an insect connoisseur to be able to pick out the finer nuances of free-range vs. farmed grasshoppers, but they were as good as Beer Nuts as a bar snack. Or maybe that was just the 3rd, or 4th, or 5th shot of mezcal talking.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/11510\">Funkist</a>&nbsp;– cdk dub mix by cdk (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: teru</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Friend of the podcast Allan Marko swung by the website to leave this comment about the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2024/02/28/podcast-198-london-vacation-rental-woes-hertzs-ev-retreat/\" title=\"\">last episode</a>:<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“I was assigned an EV by Avis at Fort Lauderdale [at the end of February]. Curious enough to try it out for the relatively short distances I would be traveling, I got in. After starting, I noticed it only had a 10% charge, so, “check please.” I fired up the Avis app and selected a Chevy Malibu with 1,200 miles on it.&nbsp; As for booking.com, we had tremendous luck using that website for most of our accommodations over a two month period in SE Asia five years ago - exclusively for hotels though.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Allan, thanks for that. Expecting you to drive off with a 10% charge? Avis would never think to give you a car with just an ⅛-th of a tank. And if they did, it would take them 10 minutes to fill the tank and get it back to you. But for that EV? Even at a Tesla Supercharger, at least an hour, maybe more. No wonder they tried to get you to do it. And regards to booking.com, my experience with their hotel product is the same as yours -- never had a problem. But their property rentals, never again!</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>One of my regular travel pro tips from years ago was “Don’t take the last flight out” because, if you missed your connection or your flight was canceled, you had a backup. And, as an IRROP passenger -- industry lingo for “irregular operations” -- you have priority on open seats on that later flight; even more so if you have frequent flier status. But nowadays, with US airlines sporting load factors over 80%, this strategy is a lot tougher to make work. Last June, back in episode #194, I talked about how United’s delay leaving Amsterdam meant we missed our connection home, and how I spent about an hour between the service agents at ORD and on the phone, saying “This is unacceptable” 2, 3, 4 times before they found two seats on the later flight to BNA that they’d been saying was completely full. And now this trip flying home from Oaxaca through DFW on American, I had gotten an email saying there could be bad weather, but I thought, “Well, there’s always that later flight.” En route from Oaxaca to DFW, I’m connected to the plane WiFi and an hour before we land, I get a notice from American -- our flight to Nashville had been canceled. OK, that sucks, but no panic, they’d rebook me on the later flight. But I keep reading -- no rebooking; it just tells me to go to the American app. The WiFi over northern Mexico is not the greatest, but when I do get the app to respond, it’s not showing the later flight as an option. Indeed, the options keep changing with each refresh, but nothing earlier than the next day, Friday, or sometimes, not until Saturday, two days later. It wasn’t until after we landed, passed through Immigration, and were waiting at baggage claim to pick up our luggage to go through Customs that we finally got a message through the app that they’d found us seats on the later flight. Still got home that night, but in both these instances, the customer service experience has degraded just so far. I’ve had to push <em>very hard</em>, and, honestly, be a bit of a jerk to get what used to come seamlessly.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And another travel tip that seems to need retiring --<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/12/07/top-10-holiday-travel-tips-3/\" title=\"\"> “Use Twitter as a Concierge Service”</a>. While struggling to rebook while still in the air from Oaxaca, I pinged American on Twitter hoping for a little more help. What I got was an amazing (and depressing) amount of spam messaging masquerading as AA customer service managers. It’s easy to get fooled in the panic of trying to find a way home, but a few rules to keep in mind -- only communicate with the airline’s gold-checked verified accounts; ignore messages from everyone else -- like “AMERICAN AIR HELP DESK” (all in caps) or “Jason frank (uppercase Jason, lowercase case frank) American Air manger” (as opposed to “manager”); and never give anyone your phone number.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And there’s a quick programming note at the end of this episode, so for those interested, hold off on hitting the Skip button when you hear the music.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter (X?) message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page, or on the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can skip all that social media stuff and post your comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/48705\">Jolanta Blues</a>&nbsp;by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: Admiral Bob, Martijn de Boer</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Smile for Security: The Future of Facial Recognition in Travel</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Over the years on the podcast, we’ve talked about how travelers are seeing more and more use of biometrics in their travel days. I’ve told the story of my first fingerprint scan back in the late ‘90’s so I could skip the US immigration line on my weekly commute home from Toronto-Pearson Airport. My colleague’s reaction -- “I’m not giving the US government my biometrics!” Me -- “I can skip a 3-minute line? Where do I sign up?” Which I think shows that the privacy-vs.-convenience choices haven\'t fundamentally changed all that much in the subsequent 25 years.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But (surprise!), technology has, and it seems to be accelerating the use of biometrics, specifically facial recognition. Boarding our flight to Oaxaca, our face was our boarding pass -- just look at the camera, wait for the “bing”, and move on. And coming back, the Global Entry kiosks no longer need passports, no longer have you twisting your hand just so to get the fingerprint pad to read all five fingers; just walk up, it takes your picture, and tells you to move on.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Which got me wondering -- where is this going? To help answer this, I invited on two guys who have been digging deep into this for a number of years. First up, <a href=\"http://shj.cs.illinois.edu/\">Dr. Sheldon Jacobson</a>, Professor in Computer Science at the University of Illinois. Sheldon was last on the podcast in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/09/22/podcast-189-why-we-travel-when-the-first-flight-isnt-best/\" title=\"\">episode #189</a> in September 2022 talking about why another of my travel tips, “catch the earliest flight you can”, is not always right. Over the years, Sheldon has developed operations research models to optimize aviation security. So I asked him to come back on the podcast to talk about the growth of biometrics…<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Sheldon, thanks for coming back on to the Travel Commons podcast. Wanted to talk with you about biometrics, facial recognition, all the things that seem to be increasing with regards to air travel.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: The airlines, as well as the Transportation Security Administration need to know who you are when you are traveling and they relied on identification cards, driver\'s license, real IDs and are continuing to be part of the future. But ultimately, the best way to determine who you are is through your face and biometrics and artificial intelligence imbued with it. In fact, it is a solution that people are recognizing; the airlines are starting to use it. And of course, the Transportation Security Administration is investing billions of dollars to advance this idea. And there\'s a reason why they\'re doing this. They\'re doing this simply because the traditional model of airport security screening has been to detect stuff -- prohibited items, knives, explosives, firearms, even, you know, full size tubes of toothpaste could be a threat based on explosives that can be embedded in them. However, the real threat are the people and facial recognition is a means to transform the platform for airport security from the detection of items to knowing your traveler. And that\'s where we\'re heading right now. And this is the future of airport security.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: And how does that work? How do you think that works?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: TSA has not broadcast this and I don\'t even know if they\'re thinking about it, but I have thought about it and I have proposed to them because I visited them in October 2023. And I told them that if they can bring facial recognition biometrics and the use of AI to truly validate and authenticate the travelers, the need for physical screening will be reduced tremendously to the point that they can create a new class of traveler, which I would call a “Super PreCheck” traveler who subjects themselves to greater background vetting. But then they would be treated like a known crew member at an airport and require no further physical screening. That is the future of airport security.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: It\'s almost like “Back to the Future”, right? It\'s almost like back to pre 9/11 days.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: Now, some will argue, “Oh, someone will gain the system and we will have a terrorist threat because of that.” And I would argue the exact opposite, that the only people who would be willing to subject themselves to the background check would be people who know that they\'re going to get through it fine. And the ones who are truly threats cannot risk it because rarely are people acting by themselves. They\'re often acting in a network. And as a result of that, for them to be exposed, they would be exposing their whole network. And the risk of doing that is far too great. What it would also do is it would parse the whole spectrum of travelers into a group of people who are willing to be known and a group of travelers that are not willing to be known. But over time, the ones who are willing to be known will be much larger, which means you can target your resources and your attention on this so-called unknown group and actually make it more secure for the air system by targeting your resources in that way. After September 11th, everybody was treated the same -- one size fits all. TSA PreCheck moved away from that. Now, I\'m proposing we move even further. And our original research we presented to the TSA in 2003 when we proposed this idea of differential screening to them and how it would work and why it would be beneficial. We said that you really need three classes, two would be fine, but three would be better. And it turns out that third class is what we would now call a “Super PreCheck” class of passengers. And those are the people who would be treated like crew members, the known crew members. And a lot of people would be willing to pay for that privilege and we\'ve put boundaries on what that means. It wouldn\'t be renewed every five years; it would be renewed potentially every year. It would be more expensive. But there\'s a lot of business travelers who are willing to pay that price to basically pass through security untethered, but they aren\'t a risk to the system anyway. So why waste resources and time on them? It would transform the footprint and create what I would call “security tunnels” rather than security checkpoints for many of these people.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: That seems to make sense. What was the reaction to that at TSA?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: That\'s a good question. I don\'t know. I don\'t know if I can say that.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Ok, I got it.. Understood. I just had to ask. Well, that\'s a great concept and I appreciate that insight around you guys’ research. You\'re right. I mean, there\'s something that says you just look at what people are willing to sign up with -- with Clear. with Global Entry, with PreCheck. Again, frequent travelers will always look to streamline that experience. And so I would agree, I would say there would be people in a heartbeat who would raise their hand for that.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: Exactly. Right now, people who sign up for Clear pay $189 on the top end for one year, being able to be identified as who they are and go to the front of the precheck line. That\'s all they\'re paying for and they\'re not paying for anything more. If the TSA implements a new class of passengers then Clear would become superfluous and literally would go away.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Yes, that was what I was thinking also.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: It\'s just, it will not be needed anymore. And in some sense, the pathway of using what the TSA calls the “credential authentication technology” which basically validates who you are using biometrics as well as that you\'re entitled to, imply that you don\'t even need a boarding pass right now when they implement this, and in some airports they have it, Clear will have to find a new business model because the TSA is going to assert that model into their own operations.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: You can kind of feel that. And indeed, I still think this most recent version of Clear -- and I had originally signed up for the initial version way back 10-15 years ago (whenever it first started),&nbsp; Rev 1.0, and then they went bankrupt and now we\'ve got Rev 2.0. But even today, I still have a challenge to see a compelling business model for the service that they offer. Oftentimes at a lot of the airports I\'ll go to, the difference between a Clear line and just the basic PreCheck line is pretty much nothing.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: Exactly. I\'ve never been impressed with their business model. They\'ve tried to sell it for stadiums and large entertainment venues. The challenges,&nbsp; it\'s just been difficult and most of their money, most of their resources, most of the revenue still comes through airports and they need that. I just don\'t see the future of it being very bright.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Is there more facial recognition coming or different facial recognition coming? Where do you see that path going?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: Well, we are nowhere near the end game on this facial recognition as effective as it is. I mean, the concept is ideal and wonderful. It\'s still not perfect. It misses certain people of color. It struggles at certain times, and research is continuing to bring the error rates down, lower and lower and lower, especially if you\'re going to create security tunnels where people just walk through it. And your picture is being taken literally in real time matched up using recognition. And then the next thing you know, you\'re at your boarding gate because everything worked out fine for you. And now it will be the majority, the vast majority of travelers. So we are nowhere near the end of this and we are at the beginning. I think the challenge right now is the perception that people do think there is a privacy concern. And like I said, I think it\'s exactly the opposite. I think this is opening up opportunities where we are going to spike in one dimension of AI which is facial recognition. And then the rest of the screening aspect at airports and validation literally gets dampened and in some cases, completely eliminated. I\'m a firm believer and supporter of facial recognition for airport security and air travel. I know that if they do it right, and they seem to be on that pathway, that we are going to have a very different experience at airport screening for security and even air travel in the next 5 to 10 years. It\'s just going to be radically and dramatically different. And I think when people realize that and begin to experience that they\'re going to be happy for it. But at this point, a lot of the rhetoric is around privacy, but our privacy is being violated so often, so frequently and in so many venues that argument is no longer holding any water. I am convinced that this is a positive future for air travel in all aspects.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Sheldon, thanks very much again for joining us on the TravelCommons podcast and sharing that. That\'s great stuff.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Our second guest is <a href=\"https://atmosphereresearch.com/\">Henry Harteveldt</a>, a travel industry analyst for many years. He had the depth of experience and industry contacts to give us a grounded sense on what’s coming with regarding biometrics…<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Henry, thanks for joining us today on the Travel Commons podcast. Wanted to talk about biometrics in and around air travel and specifically, I don\'t know if this is recency bias or what, but it just seems like I\'ve seen a whole lot more of, especially facial recognition over the past couple of years. What\'s your cut at it from a travel industry standpoint?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: In the Crawl/Walk/Run continuum, I would say that with biometrics, we are somewhere between crawl and walk. Think of biometrics as the baby who is crawling really fast and it\'s going to start walking any day now. But in the meantime, it\'s scooting all over the place. So let\'s break it down… Using facial recognition cameras for boarding flights has actually been around since before COVID began. I think the trial started somewhere in the 2016-17 time frame for international flights. That’s the only time it\'s used right now, and it started to roll out in 2018- 2019. Delta was one of the first to embrace the technology and JetBlue as well. And what it does when it works well, and this is something we should come back to to discuss, but when biometrics, facial recognition works as everybody wants it to, it speeds up the boarding process. It reduces the need for us to show not just a physical boarding pass but also a physical passport. And, as a result, on a wide-body jet, it can shave perhaps 10 or more minutes off the boarding time; on a single-aisle plane, a 737 or an A320-type of plane, that could shave 5 to 7 minutes off. So it speeds up the boarding process and makes everything a little bit more efficient. It\'s not perfect. There are people who are uncomfortable using it. There are people who are not familiar with it. So airlines have to have a belt and suspender type of approach. They\'ll have to have gate staff there for the time being. But I don\'t think we are that far away from where international travel is primarily biometrics based boarding, at least in major airports. And I think we will start soon to see it being tested for domestic travel, but there\'s going to be a wrinkle with that when we use the biometric readers at the gate to get on the plane. The database links back to US Customs and Border Patrol which has photographs of US citizens, resident aliens, and international visitors, and it can call up that data to validate that you are you and I am me. With domestic flights. I think only the TSA has the biometric data right now for PreCheck. So it may take a little bit of work to get to a point for that. So that\'s boarding. But let\'s talk about airport security. Yes, TSA is indeed testing and in some cases, I think it\'s actually beyond testing, they are rolling it out facial recognition that again eliminates the need for us to take out a driver\'s license or passport or any other physical ID and, importantly, eliminates the need for us to show any type of boarding pass, whether it\'s a paper boarding pass or digital boarding pass. And again, in theory, it speeds up the number of people who can get into and through the security screening process and reduces the need for human agents at those checkpoints. Now again, we\'re still very much at the beginning of this. And TSA is saying we are going to have a security screening officer at that checkpoint in case something goes wrong or in case someone isn\'t comfortable using biometrics.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Yeah, that was my experience in Nashville. There was a guy standing right there.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: And as we record this, the TSA is testing at Las Vegas, basically this walkthrough type of environment, a new type of screening which is biometrics-based to validate who you are. You put your bags on the belt, you go through, it\'s a lot less invasive, a lot less intrusive and supposed to be a lot faster. I actually want to go over to Las Vegas just to check it out and see what it\'s like. They have this in Dubai and they are testing it elsewhere in England and in France, they are testing it on Eurostar. Now, there are a lot of other things coming along with biometrics at a lot of European airports and in Asia as well. I was just in Singapore. There are biometrics-based scanners so that you don\'t have to queue up and have a border patrol officer review your passport, stamp your passport.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: I had it at Heathrow last November. I went through the e-gates. So I was just surprised; I walked through to the other end and I was like, “Wait, this is it?&nbsp; Nobody to stamp my passport?” No, nothing. Just like, “No. Get out of here. Go, move on.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: Right. Now, for those of us of a certain age, part of the love of travel is hearing that clunky thunk of the passport officer stamping your passport and, every time you get a new passport, the passport service mails back your old one. Those become mementos of our lives.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Yes, absolutely.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: And there is a part of me that will miss the day when we get our passports stamped just as there is a part of me that misses airline branded paper, boarding passes to show “Oh, here\'s where I have been” and so on.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: That obviously, then, pivots over to -- how should the travelers think about biometric data and the storage of that and the risk of that as a condition of travel?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: Look, it is obviously a personal decision. Our research shows that right now in the US, far more travelers would trust sharing their personal biometric information with an airline than with any government agency. So in the US right now, it\'s nearly 80% of airline passengers who, and this is first quarter 2024 data fresh off the press if you will, nearly 80% of us, airline passengers, business and leisure say they\'re willing to share their personal biometric data -- fingerprints, iris scans, etc. -- with an airline they fly regularly if it will lead to a more efficient airport experience or journey. Only a quarter of passengers say they\'re comfortable sharing their personal information right now with any government agency or entity even though, again, with the same benefits of an easier journey. Now, both of those numbers are up from 2023. The government only keeps certain information for a certain amount of time, usually 30 days or less and then it is expunged. So I am in the crowd that is comfortable sharing biometric information with governments and airlines because doing so makes my journey more efficient. It\'s faster, it\'s less stressful. It\'s fewer people that I need to interact with. Remember we\'re somewhere between Crawl and Walk. But where I see it, from the analyst perspective, the time difference, the time it will take us to go from Crawl to Walk will probably be many times longer in the time that will be needed to go from Walk to Run. Because again, as improvements emerge with the technology, the hardware, as well as the software, changes in society, changes in social acceptance of biometrics, the appreciation for benefits, we will reach that so-called tipping point where all of a sudden we see massive and welcome acceleration. It\'s interesting. Younger travelers are a lot more suspicious of the government than some of their older counterparts. And travelers over 65 are less willing to share personal data with the government. The sweet spot is travelers from 30 to 64-ish, call it.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: That\'s an interesting distribution.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: And I think that an important point for anyone listening here -- if you work for an airline, for a technology company, for an airport, for a government agency or, for that matter, if you work at a hotel company, cruise line or other parts of the travel industry. You cannot view your customers as a homogeneous block and you have to understand their welcoming the use of technology. The irony is as we all know, Gen Z are digital natives. They\'re very comfortable using technology. They will put anything and everything on social media it seems like, but they have some very legitimate concerns in their minds about how will governments use their biometric data and could it be used against them? And I\'ll just add that hotels are looking at how they evolve the check in process. You know, I think one of the dumbest questions in the world is when we are standing at the front desk of a hotel suitcase in hand, giving them our credit card and ID and the agent says “Checking in?” Like “No, I thought I would just, I have nothing better to do. So I thought I would bring a suitcase to a hotel in a different city and hand over a credit card and my personal information just to say hello.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Right. “And by the way, I like standing in line. So that\'s why I\'ve been waiting for 10 minutes to get up and have this conversation with you.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: Exactly. But you know, hotels are looking at how they improve the check in process. And granted, at the five-star true luxury properties and resorts, I think they will say, “Look, we value and our guests value the human interaction,” but they\'re going to be a part of that. Guests can say “Look, there\'s some things I can do for myself and then I want to talk to somebody about some other stuff.” But I think with four-star and below, be prepared for more biometric-based self-service check in checkout experiences. And I think, frankly, a lot of people would welcome it because it\'s a lot more secure for 99.9% of us. Eventually. I think biometrics will be more than welcome. And again, if it makes our journeys that much more efficient and less stressful, less unpleasant, there is to me, no downside.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Yes, I think that the cases you\'ve laid out is the appropriate one, which is, it\'s a combination of frictionless or making travel much more efficient than what we have today, doing away with as many lines as we can, and on the same token, being more efficient for the travel company, be it a hotel, be it an airline, be it the company running the airport so that their costs stay down and our costs stay down to travel. So the trade off on that, people are going to strike their own balance around privacy versus efficiency. Henry, thank you very much. This has been a great conversation. I\'ve really enjoyed it. Thanks for coming on a TravelCommons podcast.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: Thank you for inviting me. I enjoyed it as well.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Thanks to <a href=\"http://shj.cs.illinois.edu/\">Dr. Sheldon Jacobson</a> and <a href=\"https://atmosphereresearch.com/\">Henry Harteveldt</a> for taking the time to talk to us about biometrics, facial recognition and give us an idea of what we travelers should expect to see soon. Check out the show notes at TravelCommons.com for links to their work.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"className\":\"has-medium-font-size\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #199</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I hope you enjoyed the show; the conversations with Sheldon and Henry. They had so much great insight; the editing decisions were tough. This is usually the point where I say “and I hope you decide to stay subscribed” but this is, as they say in the UK, the penultimate episode of the TravelCommons podcast; a fancy way to say “second-to-the-last”. The next episode will be #200, so a good round number to end it. I’ll unpack it all next month, but just wanted to give you all a heads up.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As always, you can find us and listen to the current episodes on all the main podcast sites -- Apple Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, and Amazon Music. Google has shut down their Podcast app, at least in the US, but you can now get the regular TravelCommons audio episodes on the TravelCommons’ YouTube channel. Go figure -- I can never keep track of what bits Google is shutting down or renaming. But you can always ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page at TravelCommons.com for a transcript of the episode and links to Sheldon and Henry’s websites. And along the side of the page, you’ll find links to all the TravelCommons’ socials.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to mpeacock on Twitter, write them on the TravelCommons page on Facebook or Instagram, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com.&nbsp; And thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in emails, Tweets and post comments on the website. I really appreciate it.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And until we talk again, safe travels; and thanks for stopping by the TravelCommons.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_190.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #199 — Smile for Security: Facial Recognition in Travel','','inherit','closed','closed','','4460-revision-v1','','','2024-04-10 21:50:48','2024-04-11 02:50:48','',4460,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4465',0,'revision','',0),
(4466,1,'2024-04-10 22:10:21','2024-04-11 03:10:21','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/DALL·E-2024-04-10_13.01.39-300x300.jpg\" alt=\" a traveler standing in front of a facial recognition scanner at an airport. The scanner is emitting error signals, and the traveler looks frustrated.\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /> Booking.com\'s Customer Service Center?[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I walked by <a href=\"https://www.shakespearesglobe.com/\" title=\"\">Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre</a> after a weekend of wrestling with <a href=\"https://www.booking.com/\" title=\"\">Booking.com</a> and <a href=\"https://travelnest.com/\" title=\"\">TravelNest</a>\'s service agents, trying unsuccessfully to not let them screw up my London vacation rental.  The Macbeth soliloquy about a tale \"full of sound and fury, signifying nothing\" pretty much summed up my experience -- lots of talk that yielded nothing. But before that, we catch up on Hertz\'s EV reversal, Sioux City, Iowa\'s embrace of their SUX airport code, and a flash-in-the-pan airport delay betting app.  All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_199.mp3\" title=\"\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #199: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN a couple of days after a last-minute 200-mile trip up to Carbondale, Illinois, home of the <a href=\"https://siu.edu/\" title=\"\">Southern Illinois University</a> Salukis… but that didn’t matter. What <em>did</em> matter is that Carbondale was right in the <a href=\"https://eclipse.siu.edu/\" title=\"\">center of the solar eclipse’s path</a> across North America, which meant we had 4 minutes of total eclipse.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Looking up, straight into the sun with its corona glowing, wavering around the black disk of the moon -- I’ve seen… we’ve all seen pictures of total eclipses, and of this one all across social and regular media Monday afternoon. But the pictures couldn’t do justice to being there, even if <em>there</em> was the far end of the Salukis stadium parking lot, backing up to a scraggly bit of woods. The experience more than made up for the 3-hr drive there and the 5½-hour bumper-to-bumper traffic back. I add it to my list of things that, even though we’ve seen seemingly an infinite number of pictures of them, experiencing them in real life was worth the hassle to physically travel to see them. The Taj Mahal, the Great Wall of China, Niagara Falls -- all on the list. As opposed to, say, The Mona Lisa in the Louvre. The crowd of people with their phones in the air trying to get a picture was much better than the Mona Lisa itself.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Before that, the start of March, we were in Oaxaca, Mexico for a week. I’ve had Oaxaca on my “To Visit” list for 4-5 years now. For me, it was a good match -- the combination of interesting food, lots of culture, and no beach. I’ve done “resort-y” Mexico -- Cabo, Cancún, Puerto Vallarta -- not a big fan. While there were a lot of tourists in Oaxaca, it didn’t seem to be overrun with them like, say, the center of Cabo is. Maybe because the city center is bigger, so there’s more space to absorb them, or maybe the absolute number of tourists are lower; it wasn’t an easy nor a cheap flight to get there.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>We hit the food scene pretty hard, high- and low-brow; food stands in the market; high-end places serving up phenomenal moles. But the food that made the biggest impression is the insects. It wasn’t some tourist-baiting shtick. Walking past a group of street vendors, I saw one of the women making a snack of a couple of grasshoppers wrapped in a small tortilla. At a mezcal bar on the eastern edge of the Centro, the bartender put down a small bowl of grasshoppers as a bar snack. (If you follow TravelCommons on Instagram, you can see a picture in my Oaxaca story) “Those are good grasshoppers,” he told us. “I drive an hour up towards Pueblo to get them. They’re not farmed like the ones you get in the markets.” I have to admit that I’m not enough of an insect connoisseur to be able to pick out the finer nuances of free-range vs. farmed grasshoppers, but they were as good as Beer Nuts as a bar snack. Or maybe that was just the 3rd, or 4th, or 5th shot of mezcal talking.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/duckett/2333\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Another Girl (instrumental)</a> by duckett (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/duckett/23334 Ft: fourstones, miafas</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Friend of the podcast Allan Marko swung by the website to leave this comment about the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2024/02/28/podcast-198-london-vacation-rental-woes-hertzs-ev-retreat/\" title=\"\">last episode</a>:<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“I was assigned an EV by Avis at Fort Lauderdale [at the end of February]. Curious enough to try it out for the relatively short distances I would be traveling, I got in. After starting, I noticed it only had a 10% charge, so, “check please.” I fired up the Avis app and selected a Chevy Malibu with 1,200 miles on it.&nbsp; As for booking.com, we had tremendous luck using that website for most of our accommodations over a two month period in SE Asia five years ago - exclusively for hotels though.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Allan, thanks for that. Expecting you to drive off with a 10% charge? Avis would never think to give you a car with just an ⅛-th of a tank. And if they did, it would take them 10 minutes to fill the tank and get it back to you. But for that EV? Even at a Tesla Supercharger, at least an hour, maybe more. No wonder they tried to get you to do it. And regards to booking.com, my experience with their hotel product is the same as yours -- never had a problem. But their property rentals, never again!</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>One of my regular travel pro tips from years ago was “Don’t take the last flight out” because, if you missed your connection or your flight was canceled, you had a backup. And, as an IRROP passenger -- industry lingo for “irregular operations” -- you have priority on open seats on that later flight; even more so if you have frequent flier status. But nowadays, with US airlines sporting load factors over 80%, this strategy is a lot tougher to make work. Last June, back in episode #194, I talked about how United’s delay leaving Amsterdam meant we missed our connection home, and how I spent about an hour between the service agents at ORD and on the phone, saying “This is unacceptable” 2, 3, 4 times before they found two seats on the later flight to BNA that they’d been saying was completely full. And now this trip flying home from Oaxaca through DFW on American, I had gotten an email saying there could be bad weather, but I thought, “Well, there’s always that later flight.” En route from Oaxaca to DFW, I’m connected to the plane WiFi and an hour before we land, I get a notice from American -- our flight to Nashville had been canceled. OK, that sucks, but no panic, they’d rebook me on the later flight. But I keep reading -- no rebooking; it just tells me to go to the American app. The WiFi over northern Mexico is not the greatest, but when I do get the app to respond, it’s not showing the later flight as an option. Indeed, the options keep changing with each refresh, but nothing earlier than the next day, Friday, or sometimes, not until Saturday, two days later. It wasn’t until after we landed, passed through Immigration, and were waiting at baggage claim to pick up our luggage to go through Customs that we finally got a message through the app that they’d found us seats on the later flight. Still got home that night, but in both these instances, the customer service experience has degraded just so far. I’ve had to push <em>very hard</em>, and, honestly, be a bit of a jerk to get what used to come seamlessly.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And another travel tip that seems to need retiring --<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/12/07/top-10-holiday-travel-tips-3/\" title=\"\"> “Use Twitter as a Concierge Service”</a>. While struggling to rebook while still in the air from Oaxaca, I pinged American on Twitter hoping for a little more help. What I got was an amazing (and depressing) amount of spam messaging masquerading as AA customer service managers. It’s easy to get fooled in the panic of trying to find a way home, but a few rules to keep in mind -- only communicate with the airline’s gold-checked verified accounts; ignore messages from everyone else -- like “AMERICAN AIR HELP DESK” (all in caps) or “Jason frank (uppercase Jason, lowercase case frank) American Air manger” (as opposed to “manager”); and never give anyone your phone number.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And there’s a quick programming note at the end of this episode, so for those interested, hold off on hitting the Skip button when you hear the music.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter (X?) message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page, or on the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can skip all that social media stuff and post your comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djiz/10514\">Nube - Djiz Rmx</a> by Kwame (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: SylviaO</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Smile for Security: The Future of Facial Recognition in Travel</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Over the years on the podcast, we’ve talked about how travelers are seeing more and more use of biometrics in their travel days. I’ve told the story of my first fingerprint scan back in the late ‘90’s so I could skip the US immigration line on my weekly commute home from Toronto-Pearson Airport. My colleague’s reaction -- “I’m not giving the US government my biometrics!” Me -- “I can skip a 3-minute line? Where do I sign up?” Which I think shows that the privacy-vs.-convenience choices haven\'t fundamentally changed all that much in the subsequent 25 years.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But (surprise!), technology has, and it seems to be accelerating the use of biometrics, specifically facial recognition. Boarding our flight to Oaxaca, our face was our boarding pass -- just look at the camera, wait for the “bing”, and move on. And coming back, the Global Entry kiosks no longer need passports, no longer have you twisting your hand just so to get the fingerprint pad to read all five fingers; just walk up, it takes your picture, and tells you to move on.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Which got me wondering -- where is this going? To help answer this, I invited on two guys who have been digging deep into this for a number of years. First up, <a href=\"http://shj.cs.illinois.edu/\">Dr. Sheldon Jacobson</a>, Professor in Computer Science at the University of Illinois. Sheldon was last on the podcast in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/09/22/podcast-189-why-we-travel-when-the-first-flight-isnt-best/\" title=\"\">episode #189</a> in September 2022 talking about why another of my travel tips, “catch the earliest flight you can”, is not always right. Over the years, Sheldon has developed operations research models to optimize aviation security. So I asked him to come back on the podcast to talk about the growth of biometrics…<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Sheldon, thanks for coming back on to the Travel Commons podcast. Wanted to talk with you about biometrics, facial recognition, all the things that seem to be increasing with regards to air travel.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: The airlines, as well as the Transportation Security Administration need to know who you are when you are traveling and they relied on identification cards, driver\'s license, real IDs and are continuing to be part of the future. But ultimately, the best way to determine who you are is through your face and biometrics and artificial intelligence imbued with it. In fact, it is a solution that people are recognizing; the airlines are starting to use it. And of course, the Transportation Security Administration is investing billions of dollars to advance this idea. And there\'s a reason why they\'re doing this. They\'re doing this simply because the traditional model of airport security screening has been to detect stuff -- prohibited items, knives, explosives, firearms, even, you know, full size tubes of toothpaste could be a threat based on explosives that can be embedded in them. However, the real threat are the people and facial recognition is a means to transform the platform for airport security from the detection of items to knowing your traveler. And that\'s where we\'re heading right now. And this is the future of airport security.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: And how does that work? How do you think that works?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: TSA has not broadcast this and I don\'t even know if they\'re thinking about it, but I have thought about it and I have proposed to them because I visited them in October 2023. And I told them that if they can bring facial recognition biometrics and the use of AI to truly validate and authenticate the travelers, the need for physical screening will be reduced tremendously to the point that they can create a new class of traveler, which I would call a “Super PreCheck” traveler who subjects themselves to greater background vetting. But then they would be treated like a known crew member at an airport and require no further physical screening. That is the future of airport security.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: It\'s almost like “Back to the Future”, right? It\'s almost like back to pre 9/11 days.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: Now, some will argue, “Oh, someone will gain the system and we will have a terrorist threat because of that.” And I would argue the exact opposite, that the only people who would be willing to subject themselves to the background check would be people who know that they\'re going to get through it fine. And the ones who are truly threats cannot risk it because rarely are people acting by themselves. They\'re often acting in a network. And as a result of that, for them to be exposed, they would be exposing their whole network. And the risk of doing that is far too great. What it would also do is it would parse the whole spectrum of travelers into a group of people who are willing to be known and a group of travelers that are not willing to be known. But over time, the ones who are willing to be known will be much larger, which means you can target your resources and your attention on this so-called unknown group and actually make it more secure for the air system by targeting your resources in that way. After September 11th, everybody was treated the same -- one size fits all. TSA PreCheck moved away from that. Now, I\'m proposing we move even further. And our original research we presented to the TSA in 2003 when we proposed this idea of differential screening to them and how it would work and why it would be beneficial. We said that you really need three classes, two would be fine, but three would be better. And it turns out that third class is what we would now call a “Super PreCheck” class of passengers. And those are the people who would be treated like crew members, the known crew members. And a lot of people would be willing to pay for that privilege and we\'ve put boundaries on what that means. It wouldn\'t be renewed every five years; it would be renewed potentially every year. It would be more expensive. But there\'s a lot of business travelers who are willing to pay that price to basically pass through security untethered, but they aren\'t a risk to the system anyway. So why waste resources and time on them? It would transform the footprint and create what I would call “security tunnels” rather than security checkpoints for many of these people.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: That seems to make sense. What was the reaction to that at TSA?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: That\'s a good question. I don\'t know. I don\'t know if I can say that.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Ok, I got it.. Understood. I just had to ask. Well, that\'s a great concept and I appreciate that insight around you guys’ research. You\'re right. I mean, there\'s something that says you just look at what people are willing to sign up with -- with Clear. with Global Entry, with PreCheck. Again, frequent travelers will always look to streamline that experience. And so I would agree, I would say there would be people in a heartbeat who would raise their hand for that.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: Exactly. Right now, people who sign up for Clear pay $189 on the top end for one year, being able to be identified as who they are and go to the front of the precheck line. That\'s all they\'re paying for and they\'re not paying for anything more. If the TSA implements a new class of passengers then Clear would become superfluous and literally would go away.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Yes, that was what I was thinking also.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: It\'s just, it will not be needed anymore. And in some sense, the pathway of using what the TSA calls the “credential authentication technology” which basically validates who you are using biometrics as well as that you\'re entitled to, imply that you don\'t even need a boarding pass right now when they implement this, and in some airports they have it, Clear will have to find a new business model because the TSA is going to assert that model into their own operations.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: You can kind of feel that. And indeed, I still think this most recent version of Clear -- and I had originally signed up for the initial version way back 10-15 years ago (whenever it first started),&nbsp; Rev 1.0, and then they went bankrupt and now we\'ve got Rev 2.0. But even today, I still have a challenge to see a compelling business model for the service that they offer. Oftentimes at a lot of the airports I\'ll go to, the difference between a Clear line and just the basic PreCheck line is pretty much nothing.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: Exactly. I\'ve never been impressed with their business model. They\'ve tried to sell it for stadiums and large entertainment venues. The challenges,&nbsp; it\'s just been difficult and most of their money, most of their resources, most of the revenue still comes through airports and they need that. I just don\'t see the future of it being very bright.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Is there more facial recognition coming or different facial recognition coming? Where do you see that path going?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: Well, we are nowhere near the end game on this facial recognition as effective as it is. I mean, the concept is ideal and wonderful. It\'s still not perfect. It misses certain people of color. It struggles at certain times, and research is continuing to bring the error rates down, lower and lower and lower, especially if you\'re going to create security tunnels where people just walk through it. And your picture is being taken literally in real time matched up using recognition. And then the next thing you know, you\'re at your boarding gate because everything worked out fine for you. And now it will be the majority, the vast majority of travelers. So we are nowhere near the end of this and we are at the beginning. I think the challenge right now is the perception that people do think there is a privacy concern. And like I said, I think it\'s exactly the opposite. I think this is opening up opportunities where we are going to spike in one dimension of AI which is facial recognition. And then the rest of the screening aspect at airports and validation literally gets dampened and in some cases, completely eliminated. I\'m a firm believer and supporter of facial recognition for airport security and air travel. I know that if they do it right, and they seem to be on that pathway, that we are going to have a very different experience at airport screening for security and even air travel in the next 5 to 10 years. It\'s just going to be radically and dramatically different. And I think when people realize that and begin to experience that they\'re going to be happy for it. But at this point, a lot of the rhetoric is around privacy, but our privacy is being violated so often, so frequently and in so many venues that argument is no longer holding any water. I am convinced that this is a positive future for air travel in all aspects.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Sheldon, thanks very much again for joining us on the TravelCommons podcast and sharing that. That\'s great stuff.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Our second guest is <a href=\"https://atmosphereresearch.com/\">Henry Harteveldt</a>, a travel industry analyst for many years. He had the depth of experience and industry contacts to give us a grounded sense on what’s coming with regarding biometrics…<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Henry, thanks for joining us today on the Travel Commons podcast. Wanted to talk about biometrics in and around air travel and specifically, I don\'t know if this is recency bias or what, but it just seems like I\'ve seen a whole lot more of, especially facial recognition over the past couple of years. What\'s your cut at it from a travel industry standpoint?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: In the Crawl/Walk/Run continuum, I would say that with biometrics, we are somewhere between crawl and walk. Think of biometrics as the baby who is crawling really fast and it\'s going to start walking any day now. But in the meantime, it\'s scooting all over the place. So let\'s break it down… Using facial recognition cameras for boarding flights has actually been around since before COVID began. I think the trial started somewhere in the 2016-17 time frame for international flights. That’s the only time it\'s used right now, and it started to roll out in 2018- 2019. Delta was one of the first to embrace the technology and JetBlue as well. And what it does when it works well, and this is something we should come back to to discuss, but when biometrics, facial recognition works as everybody wants it to, it speeds up the boarding process. It reduces the need for us to show not just a physical boarding pass but also a physical passport. And, as a result, on a wide-body jet, it can shave perhaps 10 or more minutes off the boarding time; on a single-aisle plane, a 737 or an A320-type of plane, that could shave 5 to 7 minutes off. So it speeds up the boarding process and makes everything a little bit more efficient. It\'s not perfect. There are people who are uncomfortable using it. There are people who are not familiar with it. So airlines have to have a belt and suspender type of approach. They\'ll have to have gate staff there for the time being. But I don\'t think we are that far away from where international travel is primarily biometrics based boarding, at least in major airports. And I think we will start soon to see it being tested for domestic travel, but there\'s going to be a wrinkle with that when we use the biometric readers at the gate to get on the plane. The database links back to US Customs and Border Patrol which has photographs of US citizens, resident aliens, and international visitors, and it can call up that data to validate that you are you and I am me. With domestic flights. I think only the TSA has the biometric data right now for PreCheck. So it may take a little bit of work to get to a point for that. So that\'s boarding. But let\'s talk about airport security. Yes, TSA is indeed testing and in some cases, I think it\'s actually beyond testing, they are rolling it out facial recognition that again eliminates the need for us to take out a driver\'s license or passport or any other physical ID and, importantly, eliminates the need for us to show any type of boarding pass, whether it\'s a paper boarding pass or digital boarding pass. And again, in theory, it speeds up the number of people who can get into and through the security screening process and reduces the need for human agents at those checkpoints. Now again, we\'re still very much at the beginning of this. And TSA is saying we are going to have a security screening officer at that checkpoint in case something goes wrong or in case someone isn\'t comfortable using biometrics.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Yeah, that was my experience in Nashville. There was a guy standing right there.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: And as we record this, the TSA is testing at Las Vegas, basically this walkthrough type of environment, a new type of screening which is biometrics-based to validate who you are. You put your bags on the belt, you go through, it\'s a lot less invasive, a lot less intrusive and supposed to be a lot faster. I actually want to go over to Las Vegas just to check it out and see what it\'s like. They have this in Dubai and they are testing it elsewhere in England and in France, they are testing it on Eurostar. Now, there are a lot of other things coming along with biometrics at a lot of European airports and in Asia as well. I was just in Singapore. There are biometrics-based scanners so that you don\'t have to queue up and have a border patrol officer review your passport, stamp your passport.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: I had it at Heathrow last November. I went through the e-gates. So I was just surprised; I walked through to the other end and I was like, “Wait, this is it?&nbsp; Nobody to stamp my passport?” No, nothing. Just like, “No. Get out of here. Go, move on.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: Right. Now, for those of us of a certain age, part of the love of travel is hearing that clunky thunk of the passport officer stamping your passport and, every time you get a new passport, the passport service mails back your old one. Those become mementos of our lives.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Yes, absolutely.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: And there is a part of me that will miss the day when we get our passports stamped just as there is a part of me that misses airline branded paper, boarding passes to show “Oh, here\'s where I have been” and so on.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: That obviously, then, pivots over to -- how should the travelers think about biometric data and the storage of that and the risk of that as a condition of travel?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: Look, it is obviously a personal decision. Our research shows that right now in the US, far more travelers would trust sharing their personal biometric information with an airline than with any government agency. So in the US right now, it\'s nearly 80% of airline passengers who, and this is first quarter 2024 data fresh off the press if you will, nearly 80% of us, airline passengers, business and leisure say they\'re willing to share their personal biometric data -- fingerprints, iris scans, etc. -- with an airline they fly regularly if it will lead to a more efficient airport experience or journey. Only a quarter of passengers say they\'re comfortable sharing their personal information right now with any government agency or entity even though, again, with the same benefits of an easier journey. Now, both of those numbers are up from 2023. The government only keeps certain information for a certain amount of time, usually 30 days or less and then it is expunged. So I am in the crowd that is comfortable sharing biometric information with governments and airlines because doing so makes my journey more efficient. It\'s faster, it\'s less stressful. It\'s fewer people that I need to interact with. Remember we\'re somewhere between Crawl and Walk. But where I see it, from the analyst perspective, the time difference, the time it will take us to go from Crawl to Walk will probably be many times longer in the time that will be needed to go from Walk to Run. Because again, as improvements emerge with the technology, the hardware, as well as the software, changes in society, changes in social acceptance of biometrics, the appreciation for benefits, we will reach that so-called tipping point where all of a sudden we see massive and welcome acceleration. It\'s interesting. Younger travelers are a lot more suspicious of the government than some of their older counterparts. And travelers over 65 are less willing to share personal data with the government. The sweet spot is travelers from 30 to 64-ish, call it.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: That\'s an interesting distribution.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: And I think that an important point for anyone listening here -- if you work for an airline, for a technology company, for an airport, for a government agency or, for that matter, if you work at a hotel company, cruise line or other parts of the travel industry. You cannot view your customers as a homogeneous block and you have to understand their welcoming the use of technology. The irony is as we all know, Gen Z are digital natives. They\'re very comfortable using technology. They will put anything and everything on social media it seems like, but they have some very legitimate concerns in their minds about how will governments use their biometric data and could it be used against them? And I\'ll just add that hotels are looking at how they evolve the check in process. You know, I think one of the dumbest questions in the world is when we are standing at the front desk of a hotel suitcase in hand, giving them our credit card and ID and the agent says “Checking in?” Like “No, I thought I would just, I have nothing better to do. So I thought I would bring a suitcase to a hotel in a different city and hand over a credit card and my personal information just to say hello.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Right. “And by the way, I like standing in line. So that\'s why I\'ve been waiting for 10 minutes to get up and have this conversation with you.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: Exactly. But you know, hotels are looking at how they improve the check in process. And granted, at the five-star true luxury properties and resorts, I think they will say, “Look, we value and our guests value the human interaction,” but they\'re going to be a part of that. Guests can say “Look, there\'s some things I can do for myself and then I want to talk to somebody about some other stuff.” But I think with four-star and below, be prepared for more biometric-based self-service check in checkout experiences. And I think, frankly, a lot of people would welcome it because it\'s a lot more secure for 99.9% of us. Eventually. I think biometrics will be more than welcome. And again, if it makes our journeys that much more efficient and less stressful, less unpleasant, there is to me, no downside.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Yes, I think that the cases you\'ve laid out is the appropriate one, which is, it\'s a combination of frictionless or making travel much more efficient than what we have today, doing away with as many lines as we can, and on the same token, being more efficient for the travel company, be it a hotel, be it an airline, be it the company running the airport so that their costs stay down and our costs stay down to travel. So the trade off on that, people are going to strike their own balance around privacy versus efficiency. Henry, thank you very much. This has been a great conversation. I\'ve really enjoyed it. Thanks for coming on a TravelCommons podcast.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: Thank you for inviting me. I enjoyed it as well.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Thanks to <a href=\"http://shj.cs.illinois.edu/\">Dr. Sheldon Jacobson</a> and <a href=\"https://atmosphereresearch.com/\">Henry Harteveldt</a> for taking the time to talk to us about biometrics, facial recognition and give us an idea of what we travelers should expect to see soon. Check out the show notes at TravelCommons.com for links to their work.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"className\":\"has-medium-font-size\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #199</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I hope you enjoyed the show; the conversations with Sheldon and Henry. They had so much great insight; the editing decisions were tough. This is usually the point where I say “and I hope you decide to stay subscribed” but this is, as they say in the UK, the penultimate episode of the TravelCommons podcast; a fancy way to say “second-to-the-last”. The next episode will be #200, so a good round number to end it. I’ll unpack it all next month, but just wanted to give you all a heads up.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As always, you can find us and listen to the current episodes on all the main podcast sites -- Apple Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, and Amazon Music. Google has shut down their Podcast app, at least in the US, but you can now get the regular TravelCommons audio episodes on the TravelCommons’ YouTube channel. Go figure -- I can never keep track of what bits Google is shutting down or renaming. But you can always ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page at TravelCommons.com for a transcript of the episode and links to Sheldon and Henry’s websites. And along the side of the page, you’ll find links to all the TravelCommons’ socials.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to mpeacock on Twitter, write them on the TravelCommons page on Facebook or Instagram, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com.&nbsp; And thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in emails, Tweets and post comments on the website. I really appreciate it.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And until we talk again, safe travels; and thanks for stopping by the TravelCommons.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_190.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #199 — Smile for Security: Facial Recognition in Travel','','inherit','closed','closed','','4460-revision-v1','','','2024-04-10 22:10:21','2024-04-11 03:10:21','',4460,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4466',0,'revision','',0),
(4467,1,'2024-04-10 22:22:13','2024-04-11 03:22:13','a square photorealistic image of a humorous scene depicting a male traveler 55 years old  standing in front of a facial recognition scanner at an airport. The scanner is emitting error signals, and the traveler looks  frustrated, The background features other travelers moving smoothly through similar scanners, highlighting the contrast.','DALL-E_2024-04-10_13.01.39','','inherit','open','closed','','dall-e_2024-04-10_13-01-39','','','2024-04-10 22:22:45','2024-04-11 03:22:45','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/DALL-E_2024-04-10_13.01.39.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(4468,1,'2024-04-10 22:36:41','2024-04-11 03:36:41','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/DALL-E_2024-04-10_13.01.39-300x300.jpg\" alt=\" a traveler standing in front of a facial recognition scanner at an airport. The scanner is emitting error signals, and the traveler looks frustrated.\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /> Booking.com\'s Customer Service Center?[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I walked by <a href=\"https://www.shakespearesglobe.com/\" title=\"\">Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre</a> after a weekend of wrestling with <a href=\"https://www.booking.com/\" title=\"\">Booking.com</a> and <a href=\"https://travelnest.com/\" title=\"\">TravelNest</a>\'s service agents, trying unsuccessfully to not let them screw up my London vacation rental.  The Macbeth soliloquy about a tale \"full of sound and fury, signifying nothing\" pretty much summed up my experience -- lots of talk that yielded nothing. But before that, we catch up on Hertz\'s EV reversal, Sioux City, Iowa\'s embrace of their SUX airport code, and a flash-in-the-pan airport delay betting app.  All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_199.mp3\" title=\"\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #199: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN a couple of days after a last-minute 200-mile trip up to Carbondale, Illinois, home of the <a href=\"https://siu.edu/\" title=\"\">Southern Illinois University</a> Salukis… but that didn’t matter. What <em>did</em> matter is that Carbondale was right in the <a href=\"https://eclipse.siu.edu/\" title=\"\">center of the solar eclipse’s path</a> across North America, which meant we had 4 minutes of total eclipse.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Looking up, straight into the sun with its corona glowing, wavering around the black disk of the moon -- I’ve seen… we’ve all seen pictures of total eclipses, and of this one all across social and regular media Monday afternoon. But the pictures couldn’t do justice to being there, even if <em>there</em> was the far end of the Salukis stadium parking lot, backing up to a scraggly bit of woods. The experience more than made up for the 3-hr drive there and the 5½-hour bumper-to-bumper traffic back. I add it to my list of things that, even though we’ve seen seemingly an infinite number of pictures of them, experiencing them in real life was worth the hassle to physically travel to see them. The Taj Mahal, the Great Wall of China, Niagara Falls -- all on the list. As opposed to, say, The Mona Lisa in the Louvre. The crowd of people with their phones in the air trying to get a picture was much better than the Mona Lisa itself.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Before that, the start of March, we were in Oaxaca, Mexico for a week. I’ve had Oaxaca on my “To Visit” list for 4-5 years now. For me, it was a good match -- the combination of interesting food, lots of culture, and no beach. I’ve done “resort-y” Mexico -- Cabo, Cancún, Puerto Vallarta -- not a big fan. While there were a lot of tourists in Oaxaca, it didn’t seem to be overrun with them like, say, the center of Cabo is. Maybe because the city center is bigger, so there’s more space to absorb them, or maybe the absolute number of tourists are lower; it wasn’t an easy nor a cheap flight to get there.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>We hit the food scene pretty hard, high- and low-brow; food stands in the market; high-end places serving up phenomenal moles. But the food that made the biggest impression is the insects. It wasn’t some tourist-baiting shtick. Walking past a group of street vendors, I saw one of the women making a snack of a couple of grasshoppers wrapped in a small tortilla. At a mezcal bar on the eastern edge of the Centro, the bartender put down a small bowl of grasshoppers as a bar snack. (If you follow TravelCommons on Instagram, you can see a picture in my Oaxaca story) “Those are good grasshoppers,” he told us. “I drive an hour up towards Pueblo to get them. They’re not farmed like the ones you get in the markets.” I have to admit that I’m not enough of an insect connoisseur to be able to pick out the finer nuances of free-range vs. farmed grasshoppers, but they were as good as Beer Nuts as a bar snack. Or maybe that was just the 3rd, or 4th, or 5th shot of mezcal talking.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/duckett/2333\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Another Girl (instrumental)</a> by duckett (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/duckett/23334 Ft: fourstones, miafas</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Friend of the podcast Allan Marko swung by the website to leave this comment about the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2024/02/28/podcast-198-london-vacation-rental-woes-hertzs-ev-retreat/\" title=\"\">last episode</a>:<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“I was assigned an EV by Avis at Fort Lauderdale [at the end of February]. Curious enough to try it out for the relatively short distances I would be traveling, I got in. After starting, I noticed it only had a 10% charge, so, “check please.” I fired up the Avis app and selected a Chevy Malibu with 1,200 miles on it.&nbsp; As for booking.com, we had tremendous luck using that website for most of our accommodations over a two month period in SE Asia five years ago - exclusively for hotels though.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Allan, thanks for that. Expecting you to drive off with a 10% charge? Avis would never think to give you a car with just an ⅛-th of a tank. And if they did, it would take them 10 minutes to fill the tank and get it back to you. But for that EV? Even at a Tesla Supercharger, at least an hour, maybe more. No wonder they tried to get you to do it. And regards to booking.com, my experience with their hotel product is the same as yours -- never had a problem. But their property rentals, never again!</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>One of my regular travel pro tips from years ago was “Don’t take the last flight out” because, if you missed your connection or your flight was canceled, you had a backup. And, as an IRROP passenger -- industry lingo for “irregular operations” -- you have priority on open seats on that later flight; even more so if you have frequent flier status. But nowadays, with US airlines sporting load factors over 80%, this strategy is a lot tougher to make work. Last June, back in episode #194, I talked about how United’s delay leaving Amsterdam meant we missed our connection home, and how I spent about an hour between the service agents at ORD and on the phone, saying “This is unacceptable” 2, 3, 4 times before they found two seats on the later flight to BNA that they’d been saying was completely full. And now this trip flying home from Oaxaca through DFW on American, I had gotten an email saying there could be bad weather, but I thought, “Well, there’s always that later flight.” En route from Oaxaca to DFW, I’m connected to the plane WiFi and an hour before we land, I get a notice from American -- our flight to Nashville had been canceled. OK, that sucks, but no panic, they’d rebook me on the later flight. But I keep reading -- no rebooking; it just tells me to go to the American app. The WiFi over northern Mexico is not the greatest, but when I do get the app to respond, it’s not showing the later flight as an option. Indeed, the options keep changing with each refresh, but nothing earlier than the next day, Friday, or sometimes, not until Saturday, two days later. It wasn’t until after we landed, passed through Immigration, and were waiting at baggage claim to pick up our luggage to go through Customs that we finally got a message through the app that they’d found us seats on the later flight. Still got home that night, but in both these instances, the customer service experience has degraded just so far. I’ve had to push <em>very hard</em>, and, honestly, be a bit of a jerk to get what used to come seamlessly.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And another travel tip that seems to need retiring --<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/12/07/top-10-holiday-travel-tips-3/\" title=\"\"> “Use Twitter as a Concierge Service”</a>. While struggling to rebook while still in the air from Oaxaca, I pinged American on Twitter hoping for a little more help. What I got was an amazing (and depressing) amount of spam messaging masquerading as AA customer service managers. It’s easy to get fooled in the panic of trying to find a way home, but a few rules to keep in mind -- only communicate with the airline’s gold-checked verified accounts; ignore messages from everyone else -- like “AMERICAN AIR HELP DESK” (all in caps) or “Jason frank (uppercase Jason, lowercase case frank) American Air manger” (as opposed to “manager”); and never give anyone your phone number.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And there’s a quick programming note at the end of this episode, so for those interested, hold off on hitting the Skip button when you hear the music.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter (X?) message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page, or on the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can skip all that social media stuff and post your comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djiz/10514\">Nube - Djiz Rmx</a> by Kwame (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: SylviaO</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Smile for Security: The Future of Facial Recognition in Travel</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Over the years on the podcast, we’ve talked about how travelers are seeing more and more use of biometrics in their travel days. I’ve told the story of my first fingerprint scan back in the late ‘90’s so I could skip the US immigration line on my weekly commute home from Toronto-Pearson Airport. My colleague’s reaction -- “I’m not giving the US government my biometrics!” Me -- “I can skip a 3-minute line? Where do I sign up?” Which I think shows that the privacy-vs.-convenience choices haven\'t fundamentally changed all that much in the subsequent 25 years.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But (surprise!), technology has, and it seems to be accelerating the use of biometrics, specifically facial recognition. Boarding our flight to Oaxaca, our face was our boarding pass -- just look at the camera, wait for the “bing”, and move on. And coming back, the Global Entry kiosks no longer need passports, no longer have you twisting your hand just so to get the fingerprint pad to read all five fingers; just walk up, it takes your picture, and tells you to move on.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Which got me wondering -- where is this going? To help answer this, I invited on two guys who have been digging deep into this for a number of years. First up, <a href=\"http://shj.cs.illinois.edu/\">Dr. Sheldon Jacobson</a>, Professor in Computer Science at the University of Illinois. Sheldon was last on the podcast in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/09/22/podcast-189-why-we-travel-when-the-first-flight-isnt-best/\" title=\"\">episode #189</a> in September 2022 talking about why another of my travel tips, “catch the earliest flight you can”, is not always right. Over the years, Sheldon has developed operations research models to optimize aviation security. So I asked him to come back on the podcast to talk about the growth of biometrics…<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Sheldon, thanks for coming back on to the Travel Commons podcast. Wanted to talk with you about biometrics, facial recognition, all the things that seem to be increasing with regards to air travel.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: The airlines, as well as the Transportation Security Administration need to know who you are when you are traveling and they relied on identification cards, driver\'s license, real IDs and are continuing to be part of the future. But ultimately, the best way to determine who you are is through your face and biometrics and artificial intelligence imbued with it. In fact, it is a solution that people are recognizing; the airlines are starting to use it. And of course, the Transportation Security Administration is investing billions of dollars to advance this idea. And there\'s a reason why they\'re doing this. They\'re doing this simply because the traditional model of airport security screening has been to detect stuff -- prohibited items, knives, explosives, firearms, even, you know, full size tubes of toothpaste could be a threat based on explosives that can be embedded in them. However, the real threat are the people and facial recognition is a means to transform the platform for airport security from the detection of items to knowing your traveler. And that\'s where we\'re heading right now. And this is the future of airport security.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: And how does that work? How do you think that works?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: TSA has not broadcast this and I don\'t even know if they\'re thinking about it, but I have thought about it and I have proposed to them because I visited them in October 2023. And I told them that if they can bring facial recognition biometrics and the use of AI to truly validate and authenticate the travelers, the need for physical screening will be reduced tremendously to the point that they can create a new class of traveler, which I would call a “Super PreCheck” traveler who subjects themselves to greater background vetting. But then they would be treated like a known crew member at an airport and require no further physical screening. That is the future of airport security.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: It\'s almost like “Back to the Future”, right? It\'s almost like back to pre 9/11 days.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: Now, some will argue, “Oh, someone will gain the system and we will have a terrorist threat because of that.” And I would argue the exact opposite, that the only people who would be willing to subject themselves to the background check would be people who know that they\'re going to get through it fine. And the ones who are truly threats cannot risk it because rarely are people acting by themselves. They\'re often acting in a network. And as a result of that, for them to be exposed, they would be exposing their whole network. And the risk of doing that is far too great. What it would also do is it would parse the whole spectrum of travelers into a group of people who are willing to be known and a group of travelers that are not willing to be known. But over time, the ones who are willing to be known will be much larger, which means you can target your resources and your attention on this so-called unknown group and actually make it more secure for the air system by targeting your resources in that way. After September 11th, everybody was treated the same -- one size fits all. TSA PreCheck moved away from that. Now, I\'m proposing we move even further. And our original research we presented to the TSA in 2003 when we proposed this idea of differential screening to them and how it would work and why it would be beneficial. We said that you really need three classes, two would be fine, but three would be better. And it turns out that third class is what we would now call a “Super PreCheck” class of passengers. And those are the people who would be treated like crew members, the known crew members. And a lot of people would be willing to pay for that privilege and we\'ve put boundaries on what that means. It wouldn\'t be renewed every five years; it would be renewed potentially every year. It would be more expensive. But there\'s a lot of business travelers who are willing to pay that price to basically pass through security untethered, but they aren\'t a risk to the system anyway. So why waste resources and time on them? It would transform the footprint and create what I would call “security tunnels” rather than security checkpoints for many of these people.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: That seems to make sense. What was the reaction to that at TSA?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: That\'s a good question. I don\'t know. I don\'t know if I can say that.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Ok, I got it.. Understood. I just had to ask. Well, that\'s a great concept and I appreciate that insight around you guys’ research. You\'re right. I mean, there\'s something that says you just look at what people are willing to sign up with -- with Clear. with Global Entry, with PreCheck. Again, frequent travelers will always look to streamline that experience. And so I would agree, I would say there would be people in a heartbeat who would raise their hand for that.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: Exactly. Right now, people who sign up for Clear pay $189 on the top end for one year, being able to be identified as who they are and go to the front of the precheck line. That\'s all they\'re paying for and they\'re not paying for anything more. If the TSA implements a new class of passengers then Clear would become superfluous and literally would go away.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Yes, that was what I was thinking also.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: It\'s just, it will not be needed anymore. And in some sense, the pathway of using what the TSA calls the “credential authentication technology” which basically validates who you are using biometrics as well as that you\'re entitled to, imply that you don\'t even need a boarding pass right now when they implement this, and in some airports they have it, Clear will have to find a new business model because the TSA is going to assert that model into their own operations.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: You can kind of feel that. And indeed, I still think this most recent version of Clear -- and I had originally signed up for the initial version way back 10-15 years ago (whenever it first started),&nbsp; Rev 1.0, and then they went bankrupt and now we\'ve got Rev 2.0. But even today, I still have a challenge to see a compelling business model for the service that they offer. Oftentimes at a lot of the airports I\'ll go to, the difference between a Clear line and just the basic PreCheck line is pretty much nothing.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: Exactly. I\'ve never been impressed with their business model. They\'ve tried to sell it for stadiums and large entertainment venues. The challenges,&nbsp; it\'s just been difficult and most of their money, most of their resources, most of the revenue still comes through airports and they need that. I just don\'t see the future of it being very bright.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Is there more facial recognition coming or different facial recognition coming? Where do you see that path going?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: Well, we are nowhere near the end game on this facial recognition as effective as it is. I mean, the concept is ideal and wonderful. It\'s still not perfect. It misses certain people of color. It struggles at certain times, and research is continuing to bring the error rates down, lower and lower and lower, especially if you\'re going to create security tunnels where people just walk through it. And your picture is being taken literally in real time matched up using recognition. And then the next thing you know, you\'re at your boarding gate because everything worked out fine for you. And now it will be the majority, the vast majority of travelers. So we are nowhere near the end of this and we are at the beginning. I think the challenge right now is the perception that people do think there is a privacy concern. And like I said, I think it\'s exactly the opposite. I think this is opening up opportunities where we are going to spike in one dimension of AI which is facial recognition. And then the rest of the screening aspect at airports and validation literally gets dampened and in some cases, completely eliminated. I\'m a firm believer and supporter of facial recognition for airport security and air travel. I know that if they do it right, and they seem to be on that pathway, that we are going to have a very different experience at airport screening for security and even air travel in the next 5 to 10 years. It\'s just going to be radically and dramatically different. And I think when people realize that and begin to experience that they\'re going to be happy for it. But at this point, a lot of the rhetoric is around privacy, but our privacy is being violated so often, so frequently and in so many venues that argument is no longer holding any water. I am convinced that this is a positive future for air travel in all aspects.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Sheldon, thanks very much again for joining us on the TravelCommons podcast and sharing that. That\'s great stuff.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Our second guest is <a href=\"https://atmosphereresearch.com/\">Henry Harteveldt</a>, a travel industry analyst for many years. He had the depth of experience and industry contacts to give us a grounded sense on what’s coming with regarding biometrics…<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Henry, thanks for joining us today on the Travel Commons podcast. Wanted to talk about biometrics in and around air travel and specifically, I don\'t know if this is recency bias or what, but it just seems like I\'ve seen a whole lot more of, especially facial recognition over the past couple of years. What\'s your cut at it from a travel industry standpoint?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: In the Crawl/Walk/Run continuum, I would say that with biometrics, we are somewhere between crawl and walk. Think of biometrics as the baby who is crawling really fast and it\'s going to start walking any day now. But in the meantime, it\'s scooting all over the place. So let\'s break it down… Using facial recognition cameras for boarding flights has actually been around since before COVID began. I think the trial started somewhere in the 2016-17 time frame for international flights. That’s the only time it\'s used right now, and it started to roll out in 2018- 2019. Delta was one of the first to embrace the technology and JetBlue as well. And what it does when it works well, and this is something we should come back to to discuss, but when biometrics, facial recognition works as everybody wants it to, it speeds up the boarding process. It reduces the need for us to show not just a physical boarding pass but also a physical passport. And, as a result, on a wide-body jet, it can shave perhaps 10 or more minutes off the boarding time; on a single-aisle plane, a 737 or an A320-type of plane, that could shave 5 to 7 minutes off. So it speeds up the boarding process and makes everything a little bit more efficient. It\'s not perfect. There are people who are uncomfortable using it. There are people who are not familiar with it. So airlines have to have a belt and suspender type of approach. They\'ll have to have gate staff there for the time being. But I don\'t think we are that far away from where international travel is primarily biometrics based boarding, at least in major airports. And I think we will start soon to see it being tested for domestic travel, but there\'s going to be a wrinkle with that when we use the biometric readers at the gate to get on the plane. The database links back to US Customs and Border Patrol which has photographs of US citizens, resident aliens, and international visitors, and it can call up that data to validate that you are you and I am me. With domestic flights. I think only the TSA has the biometric data right now for PreCheck. So it may take a little bit of work to get to a point for that. So that\'s boarding. But let\'s talk about airport security. Yes, TSA is indeed testing and in some cases, I think it\'s actually beyond testing, they are rolling it out facial recognition that again eliminates the need for us to take out a driver\'s license or passport or any other physical ID and, importantly, eliminates the need for us to show any type of boarding pass, whether it\'s a paper boarding pass or digital boarding pass. And again, in theory, it speeds up the number of people who can get into and through the security screening process and reduces the need for human agents at those checkpoints. Now again, we\'re still very much at the beginning of this. And TSA is saying we are going to have a security screening officer at that checkpoint in case something goes wrong or in case someone isn\'t comfortable using biometrics.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Yeah, that was my experience in Nashville. There was a guy standing right there.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: And as we record this, the TSA is testing at Las Vegas, basically this walkthrough type of environment, a new type of screening which is biometrics-based to validate who you are. You put your bags on the belt, you go through, it\'s a lot less invasive, a lot less intrusive and supposed to be a lot faster. I actually want to go over to Las Vegas just to check it out and see what it\'s like. They have this in Dubai and they are testing it elsewhere in England and in France, they are testing it on Eurostar. Now, there are a lot of other things coming along with biometrics at a lot of European airports and in Asia as well. I was just in Singapore. There are biometrics-based scanners so that you don\'t have to queue up and have a border patrol officer review your passport, stamp your passport.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: I had it at Heathrow last November. I went through the e-gates. So I was just surprised; I walked through to the other end and I was like, “Wait, this is it?&nbsp; Nobody to stamp my passport?” No, nothing. Just like, “No. Get out of here. Go, move on.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: Right. Now, for those of us of a certain age, part of the love of travel is hearing that clunky thunk of the passport officer stamping your passport and, every time you get a new passport, the passport service mails back your old one. Those become mementos of our lives.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Yes, absolutely.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: And there is a part of me that will miss the day when we get our passports stamped just as there is a part of me that misses airline branded paper, boarding passes to show “Oh, here\'s where I have been” and so on.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: That obviously, then, pivots over to -- how should the travelers think about biometric data and the storage of that and the risk of that as a condition of travel?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: Look, it is obviously a personal decision. Our research shows that right now in the US, far more travelers would trust sharing their personal biometric information with an airline than with any government agency. So in the US right now, it\'s nearly 80% of airline passengers who, and this is first quarter 2024 data fresh off the press if you will, nearly 80% of us, airline passengers, business and leisure say they\'re willing to share their personal biometric data -- fingerprints, iris scans, etc. -- with an airline they fly regularly if it will lead to a more efficient airport experience or journey. Only a quarter of passengers say they\'re comfortable sharing their personal information right now with any government agency or entity even though, again, with the same benefits of an easier journey. Now, both of those numbers are up from 2023. The government only keeps certain information for a certain amount of time, usually 30 days or less and then it is expunged. So I am in the crowd that is comfortable sharing biometric information with governments and airlines because doing so makes my journey more efficient. It\'s faster, it\'s less stressful. It\'s fewer people that I need to interact with. Remember we\'re somewhere between Crawl and Walk. But where I see it, from the analyst perspective, the time difference, the time it will take us to go from Crawl to Walk will probably be many times longer in the time that will be needed to go from Walk to Run. Because again, as improvements emerge with the technology, the hardware, as well as the software, changes in society, changes in social acceptance of biometrics, the appreciation for benefits, we will reach that so-called tipping point where all of a sudden we see massive and welcome acceleration. It\'s interesting. Younger travelers are a lot more suspicious of the government than some of their older counterparts. And travelers over 65 are less willing to share personal data with the government. The sweet spot is travelers from 30 to 64-ish, call it.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: That\'s an interesting distribution.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: And I think that an important point for anyone listening here -- if you work for an airline, for a technology company, for an airport, for a government agency or, for that matter, if you work at a hotel company, cruise line or other parts of the travel industry. You cannot view your customers as a homogeneous block and you have to understand their welcoming the use of technology. The irony is as we all know, Gen Z are digital natives. They\'re very comfortable using technology. They will put anything and everything on social media it seems like, but they have some very legitimate concerns in their minds about how will governments use their biometric data and could it be used against them? And I\'ll just add that hotels are looking at how they evolve the check in process. You know, I think one of the dumbest questions in the world is when we are standing at the front desk of a hotel suitcase in hand, giving them our credit card and ID and the agent says “Checking in?” Like “No, I thought I would just, I have nothing better to do. So I thought I would bring a suitcase to a hotel in a different city and hand over a credit card and my personal information just to say hello.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Right. “And by the way, I like standing in line. So that\'s why I\'ve been waiting for 10 minutes to get up and have this conversation with you.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: Exactly. But you know, hotels are looking at how they improve the check in process. And granted, at the five-star true luxury properties and resorts, I think they will say, “Look, we value and our guests value the human interaction,” but they\'re going to be a part of that. Guests can say “Look, there\'s some things I can do for myself and then I want to talk to somebody about some other stuff.” But I think with four-star and below, be prepared for more biometric-based self-service check in checkout experiences. And I think, frankly, a lot of people would welcome it because it\'s a lot more secure for 99.9% of us. Eventually. I think biometrics will be more than welcome. And again, if it makes our journeys that much more efficient and less stressful, less unpleasant, there is to me, no downside.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Yes, I think that the cases you\'ve laid out is the appropriate one, which is, it\'s a combination of frictionless or making travel much more efficient than what we have today, doing away with as many lines as we can, and on the same token, being more efficient for the travel company, be it a hotel, be it an airline, be it the company running the airport so that their costs stay down and our costs stay down to travel. So the trade off on that, people are going to strike their own balance around privacy versus efficiency. Henry, thank you very much. This has been a great conversation. I\'ve really enjoyed it. Thanks for coming on a TravelCommons podcast.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: Thank you for inviting me. I enjoyed it as well.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Thanks to <a href=\"http://shj.cs.illinois.edu/\">Dr. Sheldon Jacobson</a> and <a href=\"https://atmosphereresearch.com/\">Henry Harteveldt</a> for taking the time to talk to us about biometrics, facial recognition and give us an idea of what we travelers should expect to see soon. Check out the show notes at TravelCommons.com for links to their work.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"className\":\"has-medium-font-size\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #199</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I hope you enjoyed the show; the conversations with Sheldon and Henry. They had so much great insight; the editing decisions were tough. This is usually the point where I say “and I hope you decide to stay subscribed” but this is, as they say in the UK, the penultimate episode of the TravelCommons podcast; a fancy way to say “second-to-the-last”. The next episode will be #200, so a good round number to end it. I’ll unpack it all next month, but just wanted to give you all a heads up.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As always, you can find us and listen to the current episodes on all the main podcast sites -- Apple Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, and Amazon Music. Google has shut down their Podcast app, at least in the US, but you can now get the regular TravelCommons audio episodes on the TravelCommons’ YouTube channel. Go figure -- I can never keep track of what bits Google is shutting down or renaming. But you can always ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page at TravelCommons.com for a transcript of the episode and links to Sheldon and Henry’s websites. And along the side of the page, you’ll find links to all the TravelCommons’ socials.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to mpeacock on Twitter, write them on the TravelCommons page on Facebook or Instagram, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com.&nbsp; And thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in emails, Tweets and post comments on the website. I really appreciate it.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And until we talk again, safe travels; and thanks for stopping by the TravelCommons.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_190.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #199 — Smile for Security: Facial Recognition in Travel','','inherit','closed','closed','','4460-revision-v1','','','2024-04-10 22:36:41','2024-04-11 03:36:41','',4460,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4468',0,'revision','',0),
(4469,1,'2024-04-11 13:31:03','2024-04-11 18:31:03','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/DALL-E_2024-04-10_13.01.39-300x300.jpg\" alt=\" a traveler standing in front of a facial recognition scanner at an airport. The scanner is emitting error signals, and the traveler looks frustrated.\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /> Booking.com\'s Customer Service Center?[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Using my face as my boarding pass to get on a flight to Oaxaca, Mexico and then as my passport to get back in the US got me thinking about how facial recognition has permeated the travel experience. To help us understand where this is going, we talk with two travel industry experts, <a href=\"http://shj.cs.illinois.edu/\">Dr. Sheldon Jacobson</a> and <a href=\"https://atmosphereresearch.com/\">Henry Harteveldt</a>. But before that, we talk about eating grasshoppers, an EV experience with Avis, and a couple of my travel tips that need to be revised.  All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_199.mp3\" title=\"\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #199: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN a couple of days after a last-minute 200-mile trip up to Carbondale, Illinois, home of the <a href=\"https://siu.edu/\" title=\"\">Southern Illinois University</a> Salukis… but that didn’t matter. What <em>did</em> matter is that Carbondale was right in the <a href=\"https://eclipse.siu.edu/\" title=\"\">center of the solar eclipse’s path</a> across North America, which meant we had 4 minutes of total eclipse.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Looking up, straight into the sun with its corona glowing, wavering around the black disk of the moon -- I’ve seen… we’ve all seen pictures of total eclipses, and of this one all across social and regular media Monday afternoon. But the pictures couldn’t do justice to being there, even if <em>there</em> was the far end of the Salukis stadium parking lot, backing up to a scraggly bit of woods. The experience more than made up for the 3-hr drive there and the 5½-hour bumper-to-bumper traffic back. I add it to my list of things that, even though we’ve seen seemingly an infinite number of pictures of them, experiencing them in real life was worth the hassle to physically travel to see them. The Taj Mahal, the Great Wall of China, Niagara Falls -- all on the list. As opposed to, say, The Mona Lisa in the Louvre. The crowd of people with their phones in the air trying to get a picture was much better than the Mona Lisa itself.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Before that, the start of March, we were in Oaxaca, Mexico for a week. I’ve had Oaxaca on my “To Visit” list for 4-5 years now. For me, it was a good match -- the combination of interesting food, lots of culture, and no beach. I’ve done “resort-y” Mexico -- Cabo, Cancún, Puerto Vallarta -- not a big fan. While there were a lot of tourists in Oaxaca, it didn’t seem to be overrun with them like, say, the center of Cabo is. Maybe because the city center is bigger, so there’s more space to absorb them, or maybe the absolute number of tourists are lower; it wasn’t an easy nor a cheap flight to get there.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>We hit the food scene pretty hard, high- and low-brow; food stands in the market; high-end places serving up phenomenal <a href=\"https://www.rickbayless.com/recipe/oaxacan-black-mole/\" title=\"\">moles</a>. But the food that made the biggest impression is the insects. It wasn’t some tourist-baiting shtick. Walking past a group of street vendors, I saw one of the women making a snack of a couple of grasshoppers wrapped in a small tortilla. At a mezcal bar on the eastern edge of the Centro, the bartender put down a small bowl of grasshoppers as a bar snack. (If you follow <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" title=\"\">TravelCommons on Instagram</a>, you can see a picture in my Oaxaca story) “Those are good grasshoppers,” he told us. “I drive an hour up towards Pueblo to get them. They’re not farmed like the ones you get in the markets.” I have to admit that I’m not enough of an insect connoisseur to be able to pick out the finer nuances of free-range vs. farmed grasshoppers, but they were as good as Beer Nuts as a bar snack. Or maybe that was just the 3rd, or 4th, or 5th shot of mezcal talking.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/duckett/2333\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Another Girl (instrumental)</a> by duckett (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/duckett/23334 Ft: fourstones, miafas</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Friend of the podcast Allan Marko swung by the website to leave this comment about the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2024/02/28/podcast-198-london-vacation-rental-woes-hertzs-ev-retreat/\" title=\"\">last episode</a>:<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“I was assigned an EV by Avis at Fort Lauderdale [at the end of February]. Curious enough to try it out for the relatively short distances I would be traveling, I got in. After starting, I noticed it only had a 10% charge, so, “check please.” I fired up the Avis app and selected a Chevy Malibu with 1,200 miles on it.&nbsp; As for booking.com, we had tremendous luck using that website for most of our accommodations over a two month period in SE Asia five years ago - exclusively for hotels though.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Allan, thanks for that. Expecting you to drive off with a 10% charge? Avis would never think to give you a car with just an ⅛-th of a tank. And if they did, it would take them 10 minutes to fill the tank and get it back to you. But for that EV? Even at a Tesla Supercharger, at least an hour, maybe more. No wonder they tried to get you to do it. And regards to booking.com, my experience with their hotel product is the same as yours -- never had a problem. But their property rentals, never again!</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>One of my regular travel pro tips from years ago was “Don’t take the last flight out” because, if you missed your connection or your flight was canceled, you had a backup. And, as an IRROP passenger -- industry lingo for “irregular operations” -- you have priority on open seats on that later flight; even more so if you have frequent flier status. But nowadays, with US airlines sporting load factors over 80%, this strategy is a lot tougher to make work. Last June, back in episode #194, I talked about how United’s delay leaving Amsterdam meant we missed our connection home, and how I spent about an hour between the service agents at ORD and on the phone, saying “This is unacceptable” 2, 3, 4 times before they found two seats on the later flight to BNA that they’d been saying was completely full. And now this trip flying home from Oaxaca through DFW on American, I had gotten an email saying there could be bad weather, but I thought, “Well, there’s always that later flight.” En route from Oaxaca to DFW, I’m connected to the plane WiFi and an hour before we land, I get a notice from American -- our flight to Nashville had been canceled. OK, that sucks, but no panic, they’d rebook me on the later flight. But I keep reading -- no rebooking; it just tells me to go to the American app. The WiFi over northern Mexico is not the greatest, but when I do get the app to respond, it’s not showing the later flight as an option. Indeed, the options keep changing with each refresh, but nothing earlier than the next day, Friday, or sometimes, not until Saturday, two days later. It wasn’t until after we landed, passed through Immigration, and were waiting at baggage claim to pick up our luggage to go through Customs that we finally got a message through the app that they’d found us seats on the later flight. Still got home that night, but in both these instances, the customer service experience has degraded just so far. I’ve had to push <em>very hard</em>, and, honestly, be a bit of a jerk to get what used to come seamlessly.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And another travel tip that seems to need retiring --<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/12/07/top-10-holiday-travel-tips-3/\" title=\"\"> “Use Twitter as a Concierge Service”</a>. While struggling to rebook while still in the air from Oaxaca, I pinged American on Twitter hoping for a little more help. What I got was an amazing (and depressing) amount of spam messaging masquerading as AA customer service managers. It’s easy to get fooled in the panic of trying to find a way home, but a few rules to keep in mind -- only communicate with the airline’s gold-checked verified accounts; ignore messages from everyone else -- like “AMERICAN AIR HELP DESK” (all in caps) or “Jason frank (uppercase Jason, lowercase case frank) American Air manger” (as opposed to “manager”); and never give anyone your phone number.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And there’s a quick programming note at the end of this episode, so for those interested, hold off on hitting the Skip button when you hear the music.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" title=\"\">Twitter (X?) message to mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" title=\"\">Facebook page</a>, or on the <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" title=\"\">Instagram</a> account at travelcommons -- or you can skip all that social media stuff and post your comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djiz/10514\">Nube - Djiz Rmx</a> by Kwame (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: SylviaO</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Smile for Security: The Future of Facial Recognition in Travel</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Over the years on the podcast, we’ve talked about how travelers are seeing more and more use of biometrics in their travel days. I’ve told the story of my first fingerprint scan back in the late ‘90’s so I could skip the US immigration line on my weekly commute home from Toronto-Pearson Airport. My colleague’s reaction -- “I’m not giving the US government my biometrics!” Me -- “I can skip a 3-minute line? Where do I sign up?” Which I think shows that the privacy-vs.-convenience choices haven\'t fundamentally changed all that much in the subsequent 25 years.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But (surprise!), technology has, and it seems to be accelerating the use of biometrics, specifically facial recognition. Boarding our flight to Oaxaca, our face was our boarding pass -- just look at the camera, wait for the “bing”, and move on. And coming back, the Global Entry kiosks no longer need passports, no longer have you twisting your hand just so to get the fingerprint pad to read all five fingers; just walk up, it takes your picture, and tells you to move on.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Which got me wondering -- where is this going? To help answer this, I invited on two guys who have been digging deep into this for a number of years. First up, <a href=\"http://shj.cs.illinois.edu/\">Dr. Sheldon Jacobson</a>, Professor in Computer Science at the University of Illinois. Sheldon was last on the podcast in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/09/22/podcast-189-why-we-travel-when-the-first-flight-isnt-best/\" title=\"\">episode #189</a> in September 2022 talking about why another of my travel tips, “catch the earliest flight you can”, is not always right. Over the years, Sheldon has developed operations research models to optimize aviation security. So I asked him to come back on the podcast to talk about the growth of biometrics…<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Sheldon, thanks for coming back on to the Travel Commons podcast. Wanted to talk with you about biometrics, facial recognition, all the things that seem to be increasing with regards to air travel.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: The airlines, as well as the Transportation Security Administration need to know who you are when you are traveling and they relied on identification cards, driver\'s license, real IDs and are continuing to be part of the future. But ultimately, the best way to determine who you are is through your face and biometrics and artificial intelligence imbued with it. In fact, it is a solution that people are recognizing; the airlines are starting to use it. And of course, the Transportation Security Administration is investing billions of dollars to advance this idea. And there\'s a reason why they\'re doing this. They\'re doing this simply because the traditional model of airport security screening has been to detect stuff -- prohibited items, knives, explosives, firearms, even, you know, full size tubes of toothpaste could be a threat based on explosives that can be embedded in them. However, the real threat are the people and facial recognition is a means to transform the platform for airport security from the detection of items to knowing your traveler. And that\'s where we\'re heading right now. And this is the future of airport security.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: And how does that work? How do you think that works?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: TSA has not broadcast this and I don\'t even know if they\'re thinking about it, but I have thought about it and I have proposed to them because I visited them in October 2023. And I told them that if they can bring facial recognition biometrics and the use of AI to truly validate and authenticate the travelers, the need for physical screening will be reduced tremendously to the point that they can create a new class of traveler, which I would call a “Super PreCheck” traveler who subjects themselves to greater background vetting. But then they would be treated like a known crew member at an airport and require no further physical screening. That is the future of airport security.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: It\'s almost like “Back to the Future”, right? It\'s almost like back to pre 9/11 days.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: Now, some will argue, “Oh, someone will gain the system and we will have a terrorist threat because of that.” And I would argue the exact opposite, that the only people who would be willing to subject themselves to the background check would be people who know that they\'re going to get through it fine. And the ones who are truly threats cannot risk it because rarely are people acting by themselves. They\'re often acting in a network. And as a result of that, for them to be exposed, they would be exposing their whole network. And the risk of doing that is far too great. What it would also do is it would parse the whole spectrum of travelers into a group of people who are willing to be known and a group of travelers that are not willing to be known. But over time, the ones who are willing to be known will be much larger, which means you can target your resources and your attention on this so-called unknown group and actually make it more secure for the air system by targeting your resources in that way. After September 11th, everybody was treated the same -- one size fits all. TSA PreCheck moved away from that. Now, I\'m proposing we move even further. And our original research we presented to the TSA in 2003 when we proposed this idea of differential screening to them and how it would work and why it would be beneficial. We said that you really need three classes, two would be fine, but three would be better. And it turns out that third class is what we would now call a “Super PreCheck” class of passengers. And those are the people who would be treated like crew members, the known crew members. And a lot of people would be willing to pay for that privilege and we\'ve put boundaries on what that means. It wouldn\'t be renewed every five years; it would be renewed potentially every year. It would be more expensive. But there\'s a lot of business travelers who are willing to pay that price to basically pass through security untethered, but they aren\'t a risk to the system anyway. So why waste resources and time on them? It would transform the footprint and create what I would call “security tunnels” rather than security checkpoints for many of these people.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: That seems to make sense. What was the reaction to that at TSA?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: That\'s a good question. I don\'t know. I don\'t know if I can say that.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Ok, I got it.. Understood. I just had to ask. Well, that\'s a great concept and I appreciate that insight around you guys’ research. You\'re right. I mean, there\'s something that says you just look at what people are willing to sign up with -- with Clear. with Global Entry, with PreCheck. Again, frequent travelers will always look to streamline that experience. And so I would agree, I would say there would be people in a heartbeat who would raise their hand for that.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: Exactly. Right now, people who sign up for Clear pay $189 on the top end for one year, being able to be identified as who they are and go to the front of the precheck line. That\'s all they\'re paying for and they\'re not paying for anything more. If the TSA implements a new class of passengers then Clear would become superfluous and literally would go away.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Yes, that was what I was thinking also.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: It\'s just, it will not be needed anymore. And in some sense, the pathway of using what the TSA calls the “credential authentication technology” which basically validates who you are using biometrics as well as that you\'re entitled to, imply that you don\'t even need a boarding pass right now when they implement this, and in some airports they have it, Clear will have to find a new business model because the TSA is going to assert that model into their own operations.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: You can kind of feel that. And indeed, I still think this most recent version of Clear -- and I had originally signed up for the initial version way back 10-15 years ago (whenever it first started),&nbsp; Rev 1.0, and then they went bankrupt and now we\'ve got Rev 2.0. But even today, I still have a challenge to see a compelling business model for the service that they offer. Oftentimes at a lot of the airports I\'ll go to, the difference between a Clear line and just the basic PreCheck line is pretty much nothing.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: Exactly. I\'ve never been impressed with their business model. They\'ve tried to sell it for stadiums and large entertainment venues. The challenges,&nbsp; it\'s just been difficult and most of their money, most of their resources, most of the revenue still comes through airports and they need that. I just don\'t see the future of it being very bright.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Is there more facial recognition coming or different facial recognition coming? Where do you see that path going?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: Well, we are nowhere near the end game on this facial recognition as effective as it is. I mean, the concept is ideal and wonderful. It\'s still not perfect. It misses certain people of color. It struggles at certain times, and research is continuing to bring the error rates down, lower and lower and lower, especially if you\'re going to create security tunnels where people just walk through it. And your picture is being taken literally in real time matched up using recognition. And then the next thing you know, you\'re at your boarding gate because everything worked out fine for you. And now it will be the majority, the vast majority of travelers. So we are nowhere near the end of this and we are at the beginning. I think the challenge right now is the perception that people do think there is a privacy concern. And like I said, I think it\'s exactly the opposite. I think this is opening up opportunities where we are going to spike in one dimension of AI which is facial recognition. And then the rest of the screening aspect at airports and validation literally gets dampened and in some cases, completely eliminated. I\'m a firm believer and supporter of facial recognition for airport security and air travel. I know that if they do it right, and they seem to be on that pathway, that we are going to have a very different experience at airport screening for security and even air travel in the next 5 to 10 years. It\'s just going to be radically and dramatically different. And I think when people realize that and begin to experience that they\'re going to be happy for it. But at this point, a lot of the rhetoric is around privacy, but our privacy is being violated so often, so frequently and in so many venues that argument is no longer holding any water. I am convinced that this is a positive future for air travel in all aspects.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Sheldon, thanks very much again for joining us on the TravelCommons podcast and sharing that. That\'s great stuff.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Our second guest is <a href=\"https://atmosphereresearch.com/\">Henry Harteveldt</a>, a travel industry analyst for many years. He had the depth of experience and industry contacts to give us a grounded sense on what’s coming with regarding biometrics…<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Henry, thanks for joining us today on the Travel Commons podcast. Wanted to talk about biometrics in and around air travel and specifically, I don\'t know if this is recency bias or what, but it just seems like I\'ve seen a whole lot more of, especially facial recognition over the past couple of years. What\'s your cut at it from a travel industry standpoint?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: In the Crawl/Walk/Run continuum, I would say that with biometrics, we are somewhere between crawl and walk. Think of biometrics as the baby who is crawling really fast and it\'s going to start walking any day now. But in the meantime, it\'s scooting all over the place. So let\'s break it down… Using facial recognition cameras for boarding flights has actually been around since before COVID began. I think the trial started somewhere in the 2016-17 time frame for international flights. That’s the only time it\'s used right now, and it started to roll out in 2018- 2019. Delta was one of the first to embrace the technology and JetBlue as well. And what it does when it works well, and this is something we should come back to to discuss, but when biometrics, facial recognition works as everybody wants it to, it speeds up the boarding process. It reduces the need for us to show not just a physical boarding pass but also a physical passport. And, as a result, on a wide-body jet, it can shave perhaps 10 or more minutes off the boarding time; on a single-aisle plane, a 737 or an A320-type of plane, that could shave 5 to 7 minutes off. So it speeds up the boarding process and makes everything a little bit more efficient. It\'s not perfect. There are people who are uncomfortable using it. There are people who are not familiar with it. So airlines have to have a belt and suspender type of approach. They\'ll have to have gate staff there for the time being. But I don\'t think we are that far away from where international travel is primarily biometrics based boarding, at least in major airports. And I think we will start soon to see it being tested for domestic travel, but there\'s going to be a wrinkle with that when we use the biometric readers at the gate to get on the plane. The database links back to US Customs and Border Patrol which has photographs of US citizens, resident aliens, and international visitors, and it can call up that data to validate that you are you and I am me. With domestic flights. I think only the TSA has the biometric data right now for PreCheck. So it may take a little bit of work to get to a point for that. So that\'s boarding. But let\'s talk about airport security. Yes, TSA is indeed testing and in some cases, I think it\'s actually beyond testing, they are rolling it out facial recognition that again eliminates the need for us to take out a driver\'s license or passport or any other physical ID and, importantly, eliminates the need for us to show any type of boarding pass, whether it\'s a paper boarding pass or digital boarding pass. And again, in theory, it speeds up the number of people who can get into and through the security screening process and reduces the need for human agents at those checkpoints. Now again, we\'re still very much at the beginning of this. And TSA is saying we are going to have a security screening officer at that checkpoint in case something goes wrong or in case someone isn\'t comfortable using biometrics.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Yeah, that was my experience in Nashville. There was a guy standing right there.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: And as we record this, the TSA is testing at Las Vegas, basically this walkthrough type of environment, a new type of screening which is biometrics-based to validate who you are. You put your bags on the belt, you go through, it\'s a lot less invasive, a lot less intrusive and supposed to be a lot faster. I actually want to go over to Las Vegas just to check it out and see what it\'s like. They have this in Dubai and they are testing it elsewhere in England and in France, they are testing it on Eurostar. Now, there are a lot of other things coming along with biometrics at a lot of European airports and in Asia as well. I was just in Singapore. There are biometrics-based scanners so that you don\'t have to queue up and have a border patrol officer review your passport, stamp your passport.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: I had it at Heathrow last November. I went through the e-gates. So I was just surprised; I walked through to the other end and I was like, “Wait, this is it?&nbsp; Nobody to stamp my passport?” No, nothing. Just like, “No. Get out of here. Go, move on.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: Right. Now, for those of us of a certain age, part of the love of travel is hearing that clunky thunk of the passport officer stamping your passport and, every time you get a new passport, the passport service mails back your old one. Those become mementos of our lives.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Yes, absolutely.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: And there is a part of me that will miss the day when we get our passports stamped just as there is a part of me that misses airline branded paper, boarding passes to show “Oh, here\'s where I have been” and so on.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: That obviously, then, pivots over to -- how should the travelers think about biometric data and the storage of that and the risk of that as a condition of travel?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: Look, it is obviously a personal decision. Our research shows that right now in the US, far more travelers would trust sharing their personal biometric information with an airline than with any government agency. So in the US right now, it\'s nearly 80% of airline passengers who, and this is first quarter 2024 data fresh off the press if you will, nearly 80% of us, airline passengers, business and leisure say they\'re willing to share their personal biometric data -- fingerprints, iris scans, etc. -- with an airline they fly regularly if it will lead to a more efficient airport experience or journey. Only a quarter of passengers say they\'re comfortable sharing their personal information right now with any government agency or entity even though, again, with the same benefits of an easier journey. Now, both of those numbers are up from 2023. The government only keeps certain information for a certain amount of time, usually 30 days or less and then it is expunged. So I am in the crowd that is comfortable sharing biometric information with governments and airlines because doing so makes my journey more efficient. It\'s faster, it\'s less stressful. It\'s fewer people that I need to interact with. Remember we\'re somewhere between Crawl and Walk. But where I see it, from the analyst perspective, the time difference, the time it will take us to go from Crawl to Walk will probably be many times longer in the time that will be needed to go from Walk to Run. Because again, as improvements emerge with the technology, the hardware, as well as the software, changes in society, changes in social acceptance of biometrics, the appreciation for benefits, we will reach that so-called tipping point where all of a sudden we see massive and welcome acceleration. It\'s interesting. Younger travelers are a lot more suspicious of the government than some of their older counterparts. And travelers over 65 are less willing to share personal data with the government. The sweet spot is travelers from 30 to 64-ish, call it.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: That\'s an interesting distribution.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: And I think that an important point for anyone listening here -- if you work for an airline, for a technology company, for an airport, for a government agency or, for that matter, if you work at a hotel company, cruise line or other parts of the travel industry. You cannot view your customers as a homogeneous block and you have to understand their welcoming the use of technology. The irony is as we all know, Gen Z are digital natives. They\'re very comfortable using technology. They will put anything and everything on social media it seems like, but they have some very legitimate concerns in their minds about how will governments use their biometric data and could it be used against them? And I\'ll just add that hotels are looking at how they evolve the check in process. You know, I think one of the dumbest questions in the world is when we are standing at the front desk of a hotel suitcase in hand, giving them our credit card and ID and the agent says “Checking in?” Like “No, I thought I would just, I have nothing better to do. So I thought I would bring a suitcase to a hotel in a different city and hand over a credit card and my personal information just to say hello.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Right. “And by the way, I like standing in line. So that\'s why I\'ve been waiting for 10 minutes to get up and have this conversation with you.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: Exactly. But you know, hotels are looking at how they improve the check in process. And granted, at the five-star true luxury properties and resorts, I think they will say, “Look, we value and our guests value the human interaction,” but they\'re going to be a part of that. Guests can say “Look, there\'s some things I can do for myself and then I want to talk to somebody about some other stuff.” But I think with four-star and below, be prepared for more biometric-based self-service check in checkout experiences. And I think, frankly, a lot of people would welcome it because it\'s a lot more secure for 99.9% of us. Eventually. I think biometrics will be more than welcome. And again, if it makes our journeys that much more efficient and less stressful, less unpleasant, there is to me, no downside.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Yes, I think that the cases you\'ve laid out is the appropriate one, which is, it\'s a combination of frictionless or making travel much more efficient than what we have today, doing away with as many lines as we can, and on the same token, being more efficient for the travel company, be it a hotel, be it an airline, be it the company running the airport so that their costs stay down and our costs stay down to travel. So the trade off on that, people are going to strike their own balance around privacy versus efficiency. Henry, thank you very much. This has been a great conversation. I\'ve really enjoyed it. Thanks for coming on a TravelCommons podcast.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: Thank you for inviting me. I enjoyed it as well.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Thanks to <a href=\"http://shj.cs.illinois.edu/\">Dr. Sheldon Jacobson</a> and <a href=\"https://atmosphereresearch.com/\">Henry Harteveldt</a> for taking the time to talk to us about biometrics, facial recognition and give us an idea of what we travelers should expect to see soon. Check out the show notes at TravelCommons.com for links to their work.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"className\":\"has-medium-font-size\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #199</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I hope you enjoyed the show; the conversations with Sheldon and Henry. They had so much great insight; the editing decisions were tough. This is usually the point where I say “and I hope you decide to stay subscribed” but this is, as they say in the UK, the penultimate episode of the TravelCommons podcast; a fancy way to say “second-to-the-last”. The next episode will be #200, so a good round number to end it. I’ll unpack it all next month, but just wanted to give you all a heads up.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As always, you can find us and listen to the current episodes on all the main podcast sites -- Apple Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, and Amazon Music. Google has shut down their Podcast app, at least in the US, but you can now get the regular TravelCommons audio episodes on the TravelCommons’ YouTube channel. Go figure -- I can never keep track of what bits Google is shutting down or renaming. But you can always ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page at TravelCommons.com for a transcript of the episode and links to Sheldon and Henry’s websites. And along the side of the page, you’ll find links to all the TravelCommons’ socials.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" title=\"\">mpeacock on Twitter</a>, write them on the TravelCommons page on <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" title=\"\">Facebook </a>or <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" title=\"\">Instagram</a>, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com.  And thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in emails, Tweets and post comments on the website. I really appreciate it.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And until we talk again, safe travels; and thanks for stopping by the TravelCommons.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_190.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #199 — Smile for Security: Facial Recognition in Travel','','inherit','closed','closed','','4460-revision-v1','','','2024-04-11 13:31:03','2024-04-11 18:31:03','',4460,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4469',0,'revision','',0),
(4470,1,'2024-04-11 13:41:02','2024-04-11 18:41:02','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/DALL-E_2024-04-10_13.01.39-300x300.jpg\" alt=\" a traveler standing in front of a facial recognition scanner at an airport. The scanner is emitting error signals, and the traveler looks frustrated.\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" />I knew these travel delays were aging me[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Using my face as my boarding pass to get on a flight to Oaxaca, Mexico and then as my passport to get back in the US got me thinking about how facial recognition has permeated the travel experience. To help us understand where this is going, we talk with two travel industry experts, <a href=\"http://shj.cs.illinois.edu/\">Dr. Sheldon Jacobson</a> and <a href=\"https://atmosphereresearch.com/\">Henry Harteveldt</a>. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>But before that, we talk about eating grasshoppers, an EV experience with Avis, and a couple of my travel tips that need to be revised.  All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_199.mp3\" title=\"\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #199: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN a couple of days after a last-minute 200-mile trip up to Carbondale, Illinois, home of the <a href=\"https://siu.edu/\" title=\"\">Southern Illinois University</a> Salukis… but that didn’t matter. What <em>did</em> matter is that Carbondale was right in the <a href=\"https://eclipse.siu.edu/\" title=\"\">center of the solar eclipse’s path</a> across North America, which meant we had 4 minutes of total eclipse.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Looking up, straight into the sun with its corona glowing, wavering around the black disk of the moon -- I’ve seen… we’ve all seen pictures of total eclipses, and of this one all across social and regular media Monday afternoon. But the pictures couldn’t do justice to being there, even if <em>there</em> was the far end of the Salukis stadium parking lot, backing up to a scraggly bit of woods. The experience more than made up for the 3-hr drive there and the 5½-hour bumper-to-bumper traffic back. I add it to my list of things that, even though we’ve seen seemingly an infinite number of pictures of them, experiencing them in real life was worth the hassle to physically travel to see them. The Taj Mahal, the Great Wall of China, Niagara Falls -- all on the list. As opposed to, say, The Mona Lisa in the Louvre. The crowd of people with their phones in the air trying to get a picture was much better than the Mona Lisa itself.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Before that, the start of March, we were in Oaxaca, Mexico for a week. I’ve had Oaxaca on my “To Visit” list for 4-5 years now. For me, it was a good match -- the combination of interesting food, lots of culture, and no beach. I’ve done “resort-y” Mexico -- Cabo, Cancún, Puerto Vallarta -- not a big fan. While there were a lot of tourists in Oaxaca, it didn’t seem to be overrun with them like, say, the center of Cabo is. Maybe because the city center is bigger, so there’s more space to absorb them, or maybe the absolute number of tourists are lower; it wasn’t an easy nor a cheap flight to get there.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>We hit the food scene pretty hard, high- and low-brow; food stands in the market; high-end places serving up phenomenal <a href=\"https://www.rickbayless.com/recipe/oaxacan-black-mole/\" title=\"\">moles</a>. But the food that made the biggest impression is the insects. It wasn’t some tourist-baiting shtick. Walking past a group of street vendors, I saw one of the women making a snack of a couple of grasshoppers wrapped in a small tortilla. At a mezcal bar on the eastern edge of the Centro, the bartender put down a small bowl of grasshoppers as a bar snack. (If you follow <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" title=\"\">TravelCommons on Instagram</a>, you can see a picture in my Oaxaca story) “Those are good grasshoppers,” he told us. “I drive an hour up towards Pueblo to get them. They’re not farmed like the ones you get in the markets.” I have to admit that I’m not enough of an insect connoisseur to be able to pick out the finer nuances of free-range vs. farmed grasshoppers, but they were as good as Beer Nuts as a bar snack. Or maybe that was just the 3rd, or 4th, or 5th shot of mezcal talking.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/duckett/2333\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Another Girl (instrumental)</a> by duckett (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/duckett/23334 Ft: fourstones, miafas</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Friend of the podcast Allan Marko swung by the website to leave this comment about the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2024/02/28/podcast-198-london-vacation-rental-woes-hertzs-ev-retreat/\" title=\"\">last episode</a>:<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“I was assigned an EV by Avis at Fort Lauderdale [at the end of February]. Curious enough to try it out for the relatively short distances I would be traveling, I got in. After starting, I noticed it only had a 10% charge, so, “check please.” I fired up the Avis app and selected a Chevy Malibu with 1,200 miles on it.&nbsp; As for booking.com, we had tremendous luck using that website for most of our accommodations over a two month period in SE Asia five years ago - exclusively for hotels though.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Allan, thanks for that. Expecting you to drive off with a 10% charge? Avis would never think to give you a car with just an ⅛-th of a tank. And if they did, it would take them 10 minutes to fill the tank and get it back to you. But for that EV? Even at a Tesla Supercharger, at least an hour, maybe more. No wonder they tried to get you to do it. And regards to booking.com, my experience with their hotel product is the same as yours -- never had a problem. But their property rentals, never again!</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>One of my regular travel pro tips from years ago was “Don’t take the last flight out” because, if you missed your connection or your flight was canceled, you had a backup. And, as an IRROP passenger -- industry lingo for “irregular operations” -- you have priority on open seats on that later flight; even more so if you have frequent flier status. But nowadays, with US airlines sporting load factors over 80%, this strategy is a lot tougher to make work. Last June, back in episode #194, I talked about how United’s delay leaving Amsterdam meant we missed our connection home, and how I spent about an hour between the service agents at ORD and on the phone, saying “This is unacceptable” 2, 3, 4 times before they found two seats on the later flight to BNA that they’d been saying was completely full. And now this trip flying home from Oaxaca through DFW on American, I had gotten an email saying there could be bad weather, but I thought, “Well, there’s always that later flight.” En route from Oaxaca to DFW, I’m connected to the plane WiFi and an hour before we land, I get a notice from American -- our flight to Nashville had been canceled. OK, that sucks, but no panic, they’d rebook me on the later flight. But I keep reading -- no rebooking; it just tells me to go to the American app. The WiFi over northern Mexico is not the greatest, but when I do get the app to respond, it’s not showing the later flight as an option. Indeed, the options keep changing with each refresh, but nothing earlier than the next day, Friday, or sometimes, not until Saturday, two days later. It wasn’t until after we landed, passed through Immigration, and were waiting at baggage claim to pick up our luggage to go through Customs that we finally got a message through the app that they’d found us seats on the later flight. Still got home that night, but in both these instances, the customer service experience has degraded just so far. I’ve had to push <em>very hard</em>, and, honestly, be a bit of a jerk to get what used to come seamlessly.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And another travel tip that seems to need retiring --<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/12/07/top-10-holiday-travel-tips-3/\" title=\"\"> “Use Twitter as a Concierge Service”</a>. While struggling to rebook while still in the air from Oaxaca, I pinged American on Twitter hoping for a little more help. What I got was an amazing (and depressing) amount of spam messaging masquerading as AA customer service managers. It’s easy to get fooled in the panic of trying to find a way home, but a few rules to keep in mind -- only communicate with the airline’s gold-checked verified accounts; ignore messages from everyone else -- like “AMERICAN AIR HELP DESK” (all in caps) or “Jason frank (uppercase Jason, lowercase case frank) American Air manger” (as opposed to “manager”); and never give anyone your phone number.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And there’s a quick programming note at the end of this episode, so for those interested, hold off on hitting the Skip button when you hear the music.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" title=\"\">Twitter (X?) message to mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" title=\"\">Facebook page</a>, or on the <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" title=\"\">Instagram</a> account at travelcommons -- or you can skip all that social media stuff and post your comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djiz/10514\">Nube - Djiz Rmx</a> by Kwame (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: SylviaO</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Smile for Security: The Future of Facial Recognition in Travel</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Over the years on the podcast, we’ve talked about how travelers are seeing more and more use of biometrics in their travel days. I’ve told the story of my first fingerprint scan back in the late ‘90’s so I could skip the US immigration line on my weekly commute home from Toronto-Pearson Airport. My colleague’s reaction -- “I’m not giving the US government my biometrics!” Me -- “I can skip a 3-minute line? Where do I sign up?” Which I think shows that the privacy-vs.-convenience choices haven\'t fundamentally changed all that much in the subsequent 25 years.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But (surprise!), technology has, and it seems to be accelerating the use of biometrics, specifically facial recognition. Boarding our flight to Oaxaca, our face was our boarding pass -- just look at the camera, wait for the “bing”, and move on. And coming back, the Global Entry kiosks no longer need passports, no longer have you twisting your hand just so to get the fingerprint pad to read all five fingers; just walk up, it takes your picture, and tells you to move on.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Which got me wondering -- where is this going? To help answer this, I invited on two guys who have been digging deep into this for a number of years. First up, <a href=\"http://shj.cs.illinois.edu/\">Dr. Sheldon Jacobson</a>, Professor in Computer Science at the University of Illinois. Sheldon was last on the podcast in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/09/22/podcast-189-why-we-travel-when-the-first-flight-isnt-best/\" title=\"\">episode #189</a> in September 2022 talking about why another of my travel tips, “catch the earliest flight you can”, is not always right. Over the years, Sheldon has developed operations research models to optimize aviation security. So I asked him to come back on the podcast to talk about the growth of biometrics…<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Sheldon, thanks for coming back on to the Travel Commons podcast. Wanted to talk with you about biometrics, facial recognition, all the things that seem to be increasing with regards to air travel.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: The airlines, as well as the Transportation Security Administration need to know who you are when you are traveling and they relied on identification cards, driver\'s license, real IDs and are continuing to be part of the future. But ultimately, the best way to determine who you are is through your face and biometrics and artificial intelligence imbued with it. In fact, it is a solution that people are recognizing; the airlines are starting to use it. And of course, the Transportation Security Administration is investing billions of dollars to advance this idea. And there\'s a reason why they\'re doing this. They\'re doing this simply because the traditional model of airport security screening has been to detect stuff -- prohibited items, knives, explosives, firearms, even, you know, full size tubes of toothpaste could be a threat based on explosives that can be embedded in them. However, the real threat are the people and facial recognition is a means to transform the platform for airport security from the detection of items to knowing your traveler. And that\'s where we\'re heading right now. And this is the future of airport security.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: And how does that work? How do you think that works?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: TSA has not broadcast this and I don\'t even know if they\'re thinking about it, but I have thought about it and I have proposed to them because I visited them in October 2023. And I told them that if they can bring facial recognition biometrics and the use of AI to truly validate and authenticate the travelers, the need for physical screening will be reduced tremendously to the point that they can create a new class of traveler, which I would call a “Super PreCheck” traveler who subjects themselves to greater background vetting. But then they would be treated like a known crew member at an airport and require no further physical screening. That is the future of airport security.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: It\'s almost like “Back to the Future”, right? It\'s almost like back to pre 9/11 days.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: Now, some will argue, “Oh, someone will gain the system and we will have a terrorist threat because of that.” And I would argue the exact opposite, that the only people who would be willing to subject themselves to the background check would be people who know that they\'re going to get through it fine. And the ones who are truly threats cannot risk it because rarely are people acting by themselves. They\'re often acting in a network. And as a result of that, for them to be exposed, they would be exposing their whole network. And the risk of doing that is far too great. What it would also do is it would parse the whole spectrum of travelers into a group of people who are willing to be known and a group of travelers that are not willing to be known. But over time, the ones who are willing to be known will be much larger, which means you can target your resources and your attention on this so-called unknown group and actually make it more secure for the air system by targeting your resources in that way. After September 11th, everybody was treated the same -- one size fits all. TSA PreCheck moved away from that. Now, I\'m proposing we move even further. And our original research we presented to the TSA in 2003 when we proposed this idea of differential screening to them and how it would work and why it would be beneficial. We said that you really need three classes, two would be fine, but three would be better. And it turns out that third class is what we would now call a “Super PreCheck” class of passengers. And those are the people who would be treated like crew members, the known crew members. And a lot of people would be willing to pay for that privilege and we\'ve put boundaries on what that means. It wouldn\'t be renewed every five years; it would be renewed potentially every year. It would be more expensive. But there\'s a lot of business travelers who are willing to pay that price to basically pass through security untethered, but they aren\'t a risk to the system anyway. So why waste resources and time on them? It would transform the footprint and create what I would call “security tunnels” rather than security checkpoints for many of these people.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: That seems to make sense. What was the reaction to that at TSA?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: That\'s a good question. I don\'t know. I don\'t know if I can say that.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Ok, I got it.. Understood. I just had to ask. Well, that\'s a great concept and I appreciate that insight around you guys’ research. You\'re right. I mean, there\'s something that says you just look at what people are willing to sign up with -- with Clear. with Global Entry, with PreCheck. Again, frequent travelers will always look to streamline that experience. And so I would agree, I would say there would be people in a heartbeat who would raise their hand for that.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: Exactly. Right now, people who sign up for Clear pay $189 on the top end for one year, being able to be identified as who they are and go to the front of the precheck line. That\'s all they\'re paying for and they\'re not paying for anything more. If the TSA implements a new class of passengers then Clear would become superfluous and literally would go away.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Yes, that was what I was thinking also.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: It\'s just, it will not be needed anymore. And in some sense, the pathway of using what the TSA calls the “credential authentication technology” which basically validates who you are using biometrics as well as that you\'re entitled to, imply that you don\'t even need a boarding pass right now when they implement this, and in some airports they have it, Clear will have to find a new business model because the TSA is going to assert that model into their own operations.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: You can kind of feel that. And indeed, I still think this most recent version of Clear -- and I had originally signed up for the initial version way back 10-15 years ago (whenever it first started),&nbsp; Rev 1.0, and then they went bankrupt and now we\'ve got Rev 2.0. But even today, I still have a challenge to see a compelling business model for the service that they offer. Oftentimes at a lot of the airports I\'ll go to, the difference between a Clear line and just the basic PreCheck line is pretty much nothing.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: Exactly. I\'ve never been impressed with their business model. They\'ve tried to sell it for stadiums and large entertainment venues. The challenges,&nbsp; it\'s just been difficult and most of their money, most of their resources, most of the revenue still comes through airports and they need that. I just don\'t see the future of it being very bright.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Is there more facial recognition coming or different facial recognition coming? Where do you see that path going?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: Well, we are nowhere near the end game on this facial recognition as effective as it is. I mean, the concept is ideal and wonderful. It\'s still not perfect. It misses certain people of color. It struggles at certain times, and research is continuing to bring the error rates down, lower and lower and lower, especially if you\'re going to create security tunnels where people just walk through it. And your picture is being taken literally in real time matched up using recognition. And then the next thing you know, you\'re at your boarding gate because everything worked out fine for you. And now it will be the majority, the vast majority of travelers. So we are nowhere near the end of this and we are at the beginning. I think the challenge right now is the perception that people do think there is a privacy concern. And like I said, I think it\'s exactly the opposite. I think this is opening up opportunities where we are going to spike in one dimension of AI which is facial recognition. And then the rest of the screening aspect at airports and validation literally gets dampened and in some cases, completely eliminated. I\'m a firm believer and supporter of facial recognition for airport security and air travel. I know that if they do it right, and they seem to be on that pathway, that we are going to have a very different experience at airport screening for security and even air travel in the next 5 to 10 years. It\'s just going to be radically and dramatically different. And I think when people realize that and begin to experience that they\'re going to be happy for it. But at this point, a lot of the rhetoric is around privacy, but our privacy is being violated so often, so frequently and in so many venues that argument is no longer holding any water. I am convinced that this is a positive future for air travel in all aspects.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Sheldon, thanks very much again for joining us on the TravelCommons podcast and sharing that. That\'s great stuff.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Our second guest is <a href=\"https://atmosphereresearch.com/\">Henry Harteveldt</a>, a travel industry analyst for many years. He had the depth of experience and industry contacts to give us a grounded sense on what’s coming with regarding biometrics…<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Henry, thanks for joining us today on the Travel Commons podcast. Wanted to talk about biometrics in and around air travel and specifically, I don\'t know if this is recency bias or what, but it just seems like I\'ve seen a whole lot more of, especially facial recognition over the past couple of years. What\'s your cut at it from a travel industry standpoint?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: In the Crawl/Walk/Run continuum, I would say that with biometrics, we are somewhere between crawl and walk. Think of biometrics as the baby who is crawling really fast and it\'s going to start walking any day now. But in the meantime, it\'s scooting all over the place. So let\'s break it down… Using facial recognition cameras for boarding flights has actually been around since before COVID began. I think the trial started somewhere in the 2016-17 time frame for international flights. That’s the only time it\'s used right now, and it started to roll out in 2018- 2019. Delta was one of the first to embrace the technology and JetBlue as well. And what it does when it works well, and this is something we should come back to to discuss, but when biometrics, facial recognition works as everybody wants it to, it speeds up the boarding process. It reduces the need for us to show not just a physical boarding pass but also a physical passport. And, as a result, on a wide-body jet, it can shave perhaps 10 or more minutes off the boarding time; on a single-aisle plane, a 737 or an A320-type of plane, that could shave 5 to 7 minutes off. So it speeds up the boarding process and makes everything a little bit more efficient. It\'s not perfect. There are people who are uncomfortable using it. There are people who are not familiar with it. So airlines have to have a belt and suspender type of approach. They\'ll have to have gate staff there for the time being. But I don\'t think we are that far away from where international travel is primarily biometrics based boarding, at least in major airports. And I think we will start soon to see it being tested for domestic travel, but there\'s going to be a wrinkle with that when we use the biometric readers at the gate to get on the plane. The database links back to US Customs and Border Patrol which has photographs of US citizens, resident aliens, and international visitors, and it can call up that data to validate that you are you and I am me. With domestic flights. I think only the TSA has the biometric data right now for PreCheck. So it may take a little bit of work to get to a point for that. So that\'s boarding. But let\'s talk about airport security. Yes, TSA is indeed testing and in some cases, I think it\'s actually beyond testing, they are rolling it out facial recognition that again eliminates the need for us to take out a driver\'s license or passport or any other physical ID and, importantly, eliminates the need for us to show any type of boarding pass, whether it\'s a paper boarding pass or digital boarding pass. And again, in theory, it speeds up the number of people who can get into and through the security screening process and reduces the need for human agents at those checkpoints. Now again, we\'re still very much at the beginning of this. And TSA is saying we are going to have a security screening officer at that checkpoint in case something goes wrong or in case someone isn\'t comfortable using biometrics.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Yeah, that was my experience in Nashville. There was a guy standing right there.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: And as we record this, the TSA is testing at Las Vegas, basically this walkthrough type of environment, a new type of screening which is biometrics-based to validate who you are. You put your bags on the belt, you go through, it\'s a lot less invasive, a lot less intrusive and supposed to be a lot faster. I actually want to go over to Las Vegas just to check it out and see what it\'s like. They have this in Dubai and they are testing it elsewhere in England and in France, they are testing it on Eurostar. Now, there are a lot of other things coming along with biometrics at a lot of European airports and in Asia as well. I was just in Singapore. There are biometrics-based scanners so that you don\'t have to queue up and have a border patrol officer review your passport, stamp your passport.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: I had it at Heathrow last November. I went through the e-gates. So I was just surprised; I walked through to the other end and I was like, “Wait, this is it?&nbsp; Nobody to stamp my passport?” No, nothing. Just like, “No. Get out of here. Go, move on.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: Right. Now, for those of us of a certain age, part of the love of travel is hearing that clunky thunk of the passport officer stamping your passport and, every time you get a new passport, the passport service mails back your old one. Those become mementos of our lives.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Yes, absolutely.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: And there is a part of me that will miss the day when we get our passports stamped just as there is a part of me that misses airline branded paper, boarding passes to show “Oh, here\'s where I have been” and so on.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: That obviously, then, pivots over to -- how should the travelers think about biometric data and the storage of that and the risk of that as a condition of travel?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: Look, it is obviously a personal decision. Our research shows that right now in the US, far more travelers would trust sharing their personal biometric information with an airline than with any government agency. So in the US right now, it\'s nearly 80% of airline passengers who, and this is first quarter 2024 data fresh off the press if you will, nearly 80% of us, airline passengers, business and leisure say they\'re willing to share their personal biometric data -- fingerprints, iris scans, etc. -- with an airline they fly regularly if it will lead to a more efficient airport experience or journey. Only a quarter of passengers say they\'re comfortable sharing their personal information right now with any government agency or entity even though, again, with the same benefits of an easier journey. Now, both of those numbers are up from 2023. The government only keeps certain information for a certain amount of time, usually 30 days or less and then it is expunged. So I am in the crowd that is comfortable sharing biometric information with governments and airlines because doing so makes my journey more efficient. It\'s faster, it\'s less stressful. It\'s fewer people that I need to interact with. Remember we\'re somewhere between Crawl and Walk. But where I see it, from the analyst perspective, the time difference, the time it will take us to go from Crawl to Walk will probably be many times longer in the time that will be needed to go from Walk to Run. Because again, as improvements emerge with the technology, the hardware, as well as the software, changes in society, changes in social acceptance of biometrics, the appreciation for benefits, we will reach that so-called tipping point where all of a sudden we see massive and welcome acceleration. It\'s interesting. Younger travelers are a lot more suspicious of the government than some of their older counterparts. And travelers over 65 are less willing to share personal data with the government. The sweet spot is travelers from 30 to 64-ish, call it.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: That\'s an interesting distribution.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: And I think that an important point for anyone listening here -- if you work for an airline, for a technology company, for an airport, for a government agency or, for that matter, if you work at a hotel company, cruise line or other parts of the travel industry. You cannot view your customers as a homogeneous block and you have to understand their welcoming the use of technology. The irony is as we all know, Gen Z are digital natives. They\'re very comfortable using technology. They will put anything and everything on social media it seems like, but they have some very legitimate concerns in their minds about how will governments use their biometric data and could it be used against them? And I\'ll just add that hotels are looking at how they evolve the check in process. You know, I think one of the dumbest questions in the world is when we are standing at the front desk of a hotel suitcase in hand, giving them our credit card and ID and the agent says “Checking in?” Like “No, I thought I would just, I have nothing better to do. So I thought I would bring a suitcase to a hotel in a different city and hand over a credit card and my personal information just to say hello.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Right. “And by the way, I like standing in line. So that\'s why I\'ve been waiting for 10 minutes to get up and have this conversation with you.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: Exactly. But you know, hotels are looking at how they improve the check in process. And granted, at the five-star true luxury properties and resorts, I think they will say, “Look, we value and our guests value the human interaction,” but they\'re going to be a part of that. Guests can say “Look, there\'s some things I can do for myself and then I want to talk to somebody about some other stuff.” But I think with four-star and below, be prepared for more biometric-based self-service check in checkout experiences. And I think, frankly, a lot of people would welcome it because it\'s a lot more secure for 99.9% of us. Eventually. I think biometrics will be more than welcome. And again, if it makes our journeys that much more efficient and less stressful, less unpleasant, there is to me, no downside.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Yes, I think that the cases you\'ve laid out is the appropriate one, which is, it\'s a combination of frictionless or making travel much more efficient than what we have today, doing away with as many lines as we can, and on the same token, being more efficient for the travel company, be it a hotel, be it an airline, be it the company running the airport so that their costs stay down and our costs stay down to travel. So the trade off on that, people are going to strike their own balance around privacy versus efficiency. Henry, thank you very much. This has been a great conversation. I\'ve really enjoyed it. Thanks for coming on a TravelCommons podcast.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: Thank you for inviting me. I enjoyed it as well.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Thanks to <a href=\"http://shj.cs.illinois.edu/\">Dr. Sheldon Jacobson</a> and <a href=\"https://atmosphereresearch.com/\">Henry Harteveldt</a> for taking the time to talk to us about biometrics, facial recognition and give us an idea of what we travelers should expect to see soon. Check out the show notes at TravelCommons.com for links to their work.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"className\":\"has-medium-font-size\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #199</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I hope you enjoyed the show; the conversations with Sheldon and Henry. They had so much great insight; the editing decisions were tough. This is usually the point where I say “and I hope you decide to stay subscribed” but this is, as they say in the UK, the penultimate episode of the TravelCommons podcast; a fancy way to say “second-to-the-last”. The next episode will be #200, so a good round number to end it. I’ll unpack it all next month, but just wanted to give you all a heads up.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As always, you can find us and listen to the current episodes on all the main podcast sites -- Apple Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, and Amazon Music. Google has shut down their Podcast app, at least in the US, but you can now get the regular TravelCommons audio episodes on the TravelCommons’ YouTube channel. Go figure -- I can never keep track of what bits Google is shutting down or renaming. But you can always ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page at TravelCommons.com for a transcript of the episode and links to Sheldon and Henry’s websites. And along the side of the page, you’ll find links to all the TravelCommons’ socials.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" title=\"\">mpeacock on Twitter</a>, write them on the TravelCommons page on <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" title=\"\">Facebook </a>or <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" title=\"\">Instagram</a>, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com.  And thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in emails, Tweets and post comments on the website. I really appreciate it.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And until we talk again, safe travels; and thanks for stopping by the TravelCommons.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_190.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #199 — Smile for Security: Facial Recognition in Travel','','inherit','closed','closed','','4460-revision-v1','','','2024-04-11 13:41:02','2024-04-11 18:41:02','',4460,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4470',0,'revision','',0),
(4491,1,'2024-05-21 15:55:28','2024-05-21 20:55:28','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/DALL-E_2024-04-10_13.01.39-300x300.jpg\" alt=\" a traveler standing in front of a facial recognition scanner at an airport. The scanner is emitting error signals, and the traveler looks frustrated.\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" />I knew these travel delays were aging me[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Using my face as my boarding pass to get on a flight to Oaxaca, Mexico and then as my passport to get back in the US got me thinking about how facial recognition has permeated the travel experience. To help us understand where this is going, we talk with two travel industry experts, <a href=\"http://shj.cs.illinois.edu/\">Dr. Sheldon Jacobson</a> and <a href=\"https://atmosphereresearch.com/\">Henry Harteveldt</a>. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>But before that, we talk about eating grasshoppers, an EV experience with Avis, and a couple of my travel tips that need to be revised.  All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_199.mp3\" title=\"\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #199: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN a couple of days after a last-minute 200-mile trip up to Carbondale, Illinois, home of the <a href=\"https://siu.edu/\" title=\"\">Southern Illinois University</a> Salukis… but that didn’t matter. What <em>did</em> matter is that Carbondale was right in the <a href=\"https://eclipse.siu.edu/\" title=\"\">center of the solar eclipse’s path</a> across North America, which meant we had 4 minutes of total eclipse.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Looking up, straight into the sun with its corona glowing, wavering around the black disk of the moon -- I’ve seen… we’ve all seen pictures of total eclipses, and of this one all across social and regular media Monday afternoon. But the pictures couldn’t do justice to being there, even if <em>there</em> was the far end of the Salukis stadium parking lot, backing up to a scraggly bit of woods. The experience more than made up for the 3-hr drive there and the 5½-hour bumper-to-bumper traffic back. I add it to my list of things that, even though we’ve seen seemingly an infinite number of pictures of them, experiencing them in real life was worth the hassle to physically travel to see them. The Taj Mahal, the Great Wall of China, Niagara Falls -- all on the list. As opposed to, say, The Mona Lisa in the Louvre. The crowd of people with their phones in the air trying to get a picture was much better than the Mona Lisa itself.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Before that, the start of March, we were in Oaxaca, Mexico for a week. I’ve had Oaxaca on my “To Visit” list for 4-5 years now. For me, it was a good match -- the combination of interesting food, lots of culture, and no beach. I’ve done “resort-y” Mexico -- Cabo, Cancún, Puerto Vallarta -- not a big fan. While there were a lot of tourists in Oaxaca, it didn’t seem to be overrun with them like, say, the center of Cabo is. Maybe because the city center is bigger, so there’s more space to absorb them, or maybe the absolute number of tourists are lower; it wasn’t an easy nor a cheap flight to get there.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>We hit the food scene pretty hard, high- and low-brow; food stands in the market; high-end places serving up phenomenal <a href=\"https://www.rickbayless.com/recipe/oaxacan-black-mole/\" title=\"\">moles</a>. But the food that made the biggest impression is the insects. It wasn’t some tourist-baiting shtick. Walking past a group of street vendors, I saw one of the women making a snack of a couple of grasshoppers wrapped in a small tortilla. At a mezcal bar on the eastern edge of the Centro, the bartender put down a small bowl of grasshoppers as a bar snack. (If you follow <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" title=\"\">TravelCommons on Instagram</a>, you can see a picture in my Oaxaca story) “Those are good grasshoppers,” he told us. “I drive an hour up towards Pueblo to get them. They’re not farmed like the ones you get in the markets.” I have to admit that I’m not enough of an insect connoisseur to be able to pick out the finer nuances of free-range vs. farmed grasshoppers, but they were as good as Beer Nuts as a bar snack. Or maybe that was just the 3rd, or 4th, or 5th shot of mezcal talking.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/duckett/2333\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Another Girl (instrumental)</a> by duckett (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/duckett/23334 Ft: fourstones, miafas</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Friend of the podcast Allan Marko swung by the website to leave this comment about the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2024/02/28/podcast-198-london-vacation-rental-woes-hertzs-ev-retreat/\" title=\"\">last episode</a>:<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“I was assigned an EV by Avis at Fort Lauderdale [at the end of February]. Curious enough to try it out for the relatively short distances I would be traveling, I got in. After starting, I noticed it only had a 10% charge, so, “check please.” I fired up the Avis app and selected a Chevy Malibu with 1,200 miles on it.&nbsp; As for booking.com, we had tremendous luck using that website for most of our accommodations over a two month period in SE Asia five years ago - exclusively for hotels though.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Allan, thanks for that. Expecting you to drive off with a 10% charge? Avis would never think to give you a car with just an ⅛-th of a tank. And if they did, it would take them 10 minutes to fill the tank and get it back to you. But for that EV? Even at a Tesla Supercharger, at least an hour, maybe more. No wonder they tried to get you to do it. And regards to booking.com, my experience with their hotel product is the same as yours -- never had a problem. But their property rentals, never again!</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>One of my regular travel pro tips from years ago was “Don’t take the last flight out” because, if you missed your connection or your flight was canceled, you had a backup. And, as an IRROP passenger -- industry lingo for “irregular operations” -- you have priority on open seats on that later flight; even more so if you have frequent flier status. But nowadays, with US airlines sporting load factors over 80%, this strategy is a lot tougher to make work. Last June, back in episode #194, I talked about how United’s delay leaving Amsterdam meant we missed our connection home, and how I spent about an hour between the service agents at ORD and on the phone, saying “This is unacceptable” 2, 3, 4 times before they found two seats on the later flight to BNA that they’d been saying was completely full. And now this trip flying home from Oaxaca through DFW on American, I had gotten an email saying there could be bad weather, but I thought, “Well, there’s always that later flight.” En route from Oaxaca to DFW, I’m connected to the plane WiFi and an hour before we land, I get a notice from American -- our flight to Nashville had been canceled. OK, that sucks, but no panic, they’d rebook me on the later flight. But I keep reading -- no rebooking; it just tells me to go to the American app. The WiFi over northern Mexico is not the greatest, but when I do get the app to respond, it’s not showing the later flight as an option. Indeed, the options keep changing with each refresh, but nothing earlier than the next day, Friday, or sometimes, not until Saturday, two days later. It wasn’t until after we landed, passed through Immigration, and were waiting at baggage claim to pick up our luggage to go through Customs that we finally got a message through the app that they’d found us seats on the later flight. Still got home that night, but in both these instances, the customer service experience has degraded just so far. I’ve had to push <em>very hard</em>, and, honestly, be a bit of a jerk to get what used to come seamlessly.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And another travel tip that seems to need retiring --<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/12/07/top-10-holiday-travel-tips-3/\" title=\"\"> “Use Twitter as a Concierge Service”</a>. While struggling to rebook while still in the air from Oaxaca, I pinged American on Twitter hoping for a little more help. What I got was an amazing (and depressing) amount of spam messaging masquerading as AA customer service managers. It’s easy to get fooled in the panic of trying to find a way home, but a few rules to keep in mind -- only communicate with the airline’s gold-checked verified accounts; ignore messages from everyone else -- like “AMERICAN AIR HELP DESK” (all in caps) or “Jason frank (uppercase Jason, lowercase case frank) American Air manger” (as opposed to “manager”); and never give anyone your phone number.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And there’s a quick programming note at the end of this episode, so for those interested, hold off on hitting the Skip button when you hear the music.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" title=\"\">Twitter (X?) message to mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" title=\"\">Facebook page</a>, or on the <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" title=\"\">Instagram</a> account at travelcommons -- or you can skip all that social media stuff and post your comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djiz/10514\">Nube - Djiz Rmx</a> by Kwame (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: SylviaO</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Smile for Security: The Future of Facial Recognition in Travel</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Over the years on the podcast, we’ve talked about how travelers are seeing more and more use of biometrics in their travel days. I’ve told the story of my first fingerprint scan back in the late ‘90’s so I could skip the US immigration line on my weekly commute home from Toronto-Pearson Airport. My colleague’s reaction -- “I’m not giving the US government my biometrics!” Me -- “I can skip a 3-minute line? Where do I sign up?” Which I think shows that the privacy-vs.-convenience choices haven\'t fundamentally changed all that much in the subsequent 25 years.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But (surprise!), technology has, and it seems to be accelerating the use of biometrics, specifically facial recognition. Boarding our flight to Oaxaca, our face was our boarding pass -- just look at the camera, wait for the “bing”, and move on. And coming back, the Global Entry kiosks no longer need passports, no longer have you twisting your hand just so to get the fingerprint pad to read all five fingers; just walk up, it takes your picture, and tells you to move on.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Which got me wondering -- where is this going? To help answer this, I invited on two guys who have been digging deep into this for a number of years. First up, <a href=\"http://shj.cs.illinois.edu/\">Dr. Sheldon Jacobson</a>, Professor in Computer Science at the University of Illinois. Sheldon was last on the podcast in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/09/22/podcast-189-why-we-travel-when-the-first-flight-isnt-best/\" title=\"\">episode #189</a> in September 2022 talking about why another of my travel tips, “catch the earliest flight you can”, is not always right. Over the years, Sheldon has developed operations research models to optimize aviation security. So I asked him to come back on the podcast to talk about the growth of biometrics…<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Sheldon, thanks for coming back on to the Travel Commons podcast. Wanted to talk with you about biometrics, facial recognition, all the things that seem to be increasing with regards to air travel.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: The airlines, as well as the Transportation Security Administration need to know who you are when you are traveling and they relied on identification cards, driver\'s license, real IDs and are continuing to be part of the future. But ultimately, the best way to determine who you are is through your face and biometrics and artificial intelligence imbued with it. In fact, it is a solution that people are recognizing; the airlines are starting to use it. And of course, the Transportation Security Administration is investing billions of dollars to advance this idea. And there\'s a reason why they\'re doing this. They\'re doing this simply because the traditional model of airport security screening has been to detect stuff -- prohibited items, knives, explosives, firearms, even, you know, full size tubes of toothpaste could be a threat based on explosives that can be embedded in them. However, the real threat are the people and facial recognition is a means to transform the platform for airport security from the detection of items to knowing your traveler. And that\'s where we\'re heading right now. And this is the future of airport security.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: And how does that work? How do you think that works?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: TSA has not broadcast this and I don\'t even know if they\'re thinking about it, but I have thought about it and I have proposed to them because I visited them in October 2023. And I told them that if they can bring facial recognition biometrics and the use of AI to truly validate and authenticate the travelers, the need for physical screening will be reduced tremendously to the point that they can create a new class of traveler, which I would call a “Super PreCheck” traveler who subjects themselves to greater background vetting. But then they would be treated like a known crew member at an airport and require no further physical screening. That is the future of airport security.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: It\'s almost like “Back to the Future”, right? It\'s almost like back to pre 9/11 days.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: Now, some will argue, “Oh, someone will gain the system and we will have a terrorist threat because of that.” And I would argue the exact opposite, that the only people who would be willing to subject themselves to the background check would be people who know that they\'re going to get through it fine. And the ones who are truly threats cannot risk it because rarely are people acting by themselves. They\'re often acting in a network. And as a result of that, for them to be exposed, they would be exposing their whole network. And the risk of doing that is far too great. What it would also do is it would parse the whole spectrum of travelers into a group of people who are willing to be known and a group of travelers that are not willing to be known. But over time, the ones who are willing to be known will be much larger, which means you can target your resources and your attention on this so-called unknown group and actually make it more secure for the air system by targeting your resources in that way. After September 11th, everybody was treated the same -- one size fits all. TSA PreCheck moved away from that. Now, I\'m proposing we move even further. And our original research we presented to the TSA in 2003 when we proposed this idea of differential screening to them and how it would work and why it would be beneficial. We said that you really need three classes, two would be fine, but three would be better. And it turns out that third class is what we would now call a “Super PreCheck” class of passengers. And those are the people who would be treated like crew members, the known crew members. And a lot of people would be willing to pay for that privilege and we\'ve put boundaries on what that means. It wouldn\'t be renewed every five years; it would be renewed potentially every year. It would be more expensive. But there\'s a lot of business travelers who are willing to pay that price to basically pass through security untethered, but they aren\'t a risk to the system anyway. So why waste resources and time on them? It would transform the footprint and create what I would call “security tunnels” rather than security checkpoints for many of these people.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: That seems to make sense. What was the reaction to that at TSA?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: That\'s a good question. I don\'t know. I don\'t know if I can say that.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Ok, I got it.. Understood. I just had to ask. Well, that\'s a great concept and I appreciate that insight around you guys’ research. You\'re right. I mean, there\'s something that says you just look at what people are willing to sign up with -- with Clear. with Global Entry, with PreCheck. Again, frequent travelers will always look to streamline that experience. And so I would agree, I would say there would be people in a heartbeat who would raise their hand for that.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: Exactly. Right now, people who sign up for Clear pay $189 on the top end for one year, being able to be identified as who they are and go to the front of the precheck line. That\'s all they\'re paying for and they\'re not paying for anything more. If the TSA implements a new class of passengers then Clear would become superfluous and literally would go away.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Yes, that was what I was thinking also.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: It\'s just, it will not be needed anymore. And in some sense, the pathway of using what the TSA calls the “credential authentication technology” which basically validates who you are using biometrics as well as that you\'re entitled to, imply that you don\'t even need a boarding pass right now when they implement this, and in some airports they have it, Clear will have to find a new business model because the TSA is going to assert that model into their own operations.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: You can kind of feel that. And indeed, I still think this most recent version of Clear -- and I had originally signed up for the initial version way back 10-15 years ago (whenever it first started),&nbsp; Rev 1.0, and then they went bankrupt and now we\'ve got Rev 2.0. But even today, I still have a challenge to see a compelling business model for the service that they offer. Oftentimes at a lot of the airports I\'ll go to, the difference between a Clear line and just the basic PreCheck line is pretty much nothing.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: Exactly. I\'ve never been impressed with their business model. They\'ve tried to sell it for stadiums and large entertainment venues. The challenges,&nbsp; it\'s just been difficult and most of their money, most of their resources, most of the revenue still comes through airports and they need that. I just don\'t see the future of it being very bright.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Is there more facial recognition coming or different facial recognition coming? Where do you see that path going?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: Well, we are nowhere near the end game on this facial recognition as effective as it is. I mean, the concept is ideal and wonderful. It\'s still not perfect. It misses certain people of color. It struggles at certain times, and research is continuing to bring the error rates down, lower and lower and lower, especially if you\'re going to create security tunnels where people just walk through it. And your picture is being taken literally in real time matched up using recognition. And then the next thing you know, you\'re at your boarding gate because everything worked out fine for you. And now it will be the majority, the vast majority of travelers. So we are nowhere near the end of this and we are at the beginning. I think the challenge right now is the perception that people do think there is a privacy concern. And like I said, I think it\'s exactly the opposite. I think this is opening up opportunities where we are going to spike in one dimension of AI which is facial recognition. And then the rest of the screening aspect at airports and validation literally gets dampened and in some cases, completely eliminated. I\'m a firm believer and supporter of facial recognition for airport security and air travel. I know that if they do it right, and they seem to be on that pathway, that we are going to have a very different experience at airport screening for security and even air travel in the next 5 to 10 years. It\'s just going to be radically and dramatically different. And I think when people realize that and begin to experience that they\'re going to be happy for it. But at this point, a lot of the rhetoric is around privacy, but our privacy is being violated so often, so frequently and in so many venues that argument is no longer holding any water. I am convinced that this is a positive future for air travel in all aspects.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Sheldon, thanks very much again for joining us on the TravelCommons podcast and sharing that. That\'s great stuff.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Our second guest is <a href=\"https://atmosphereresearch.com/\">Henry Harteveldt</a>, a travel industry analyst for many years. He had the depth of experience and industry contacts to give us a grounded sense on what’s coming with regarding biometrics…<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Henry, thanks for joining us today on the Travel Commons podcast. Wanted to talk about biometrics in and around air travel and specifically, I don\'t know if this is recency bias or what, but it just seems like I\'ve seen a whole lot more of, especially facial recognition over the past couple of years. What\'s your cut at it from a travel industry standpoint?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: In the Crawl/Walk/Run continuum, I would say that with biometrics, we are somewhere between crawl and walk. Think of biometrics as the baby who is crawling really fast and it\'s going to start walking any day now. But in the meantime, it\'s scooting all over the place. So let\'s break it down… Using facial recognition cameras for boarding flights has actually been around since before COVID began. I think the trial started somewhere in the 2016-17 time frame for international flights. That’s the only time it\'s used right now, and it started to roll out in 2018- 2019. Delta was one of the first to embrace the technology and JetBlue as well. And what it does when it works well, and this is something we should come back to to discuss, but when biometrics, facial recognition works as everybody wants it to, it speeds up the boarding process. It reduces the need for us to show not just a physical boarding pass but also a physical passport. And, as a result, on a wide-body jet, it can shave perhaps 10 or more minutes off the boarding time; on a single-aisle plane, a 737 or an A320-type of plane, that could shave 5 to 7 minutes off. So it speeds up the boarding process and makes everything a little bit more efficient. It\'s not perfect. There are people who are uncomfortable using it. There are people who are not familiar with it. So airlines have to have a belt and suspender type of approach. They\'ll have to have gate staff there for the time being. But I don\'t think we are that far away from where international travel is primarily biometrics based boarding, at least in major airports. And I think we will start soon to see it being tested for domestic travel, but there\'s going to be a wrinkle with that when we use the biometric readers at the gate to get on the plane. The database links back to US Customs and Border Patrol which has photographs of US citizens, resident aliens, and international visitors, and it can call up that data to validate that you are you and I am me. With domestic flights. I think only the TSA has the biometric data right now for PreCheck. So it may take a little bit of work to get to a point for that. So that\'s boarding. But let\'s talk about airport security. Yes, TSA is indeed testing and in some cases, I think it\'s actually beyond testing, they are rolling it out facial recognition that again eliminates the need for us to take out a driver\'s license or passport or any other physical ID and, importantly, eliminates the need for us to show any type of boarding pass, whether it\'s a paper boarding pass or digital boarding pass. And again, in theory, it speeds up the number of people who can get into and through the security screening process and reduces the need for human agents at those checkpoints. Now again, we\'re still very much at the beginning of this. And TSA is saying we are going to have a security screening officer at that checkpoint in case something goes wrong or in case someone isn\'t comfortable using biometrics.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Yeah, that was my experience in Nashville. There was a guy standing right there.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: And as we record this, the TSA is testing at Las Vegas, basically this walkthrough type of environment, a new type of screening which is biometrics-based to validate who you are. You put your bags on the belt, you go through, it\'s a lot less invasive, a lot less intrusive and supposed to be a lot faster. I actually want to go over to Las Vegas just to check it out and see what it\'s like. They have this in Dubai and they are testing it elsewhere in England and in France, they are testing it on Eurostar. Now, there are a lot of other things coming along with biometrics at a lot of European airports and in Asia as well. I was just in Singapore. There are biometrics-based scanners so that you don\'t have to queue up and have a border patrol officer review your passport, stamp your passport.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: I had it at Heathrow last November. I went through the e-gates. So I was just surprised; I walked through to the other end and I was like, “Wait, this is it?&nbsp; Nobody to stamp my passport?” No, nothing. Just like, “No. Get out of here. Go, move on.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: Right. Now, for those of us of a certain age, part of the love of travel is hearing that clunky thunk of the passport officer stamping your passport and, every time you get a new passport, the passport service mails back your old one. Those become mementos of our lives.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Yes, absolutely.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: And there is a part of me that will miss the day when we get our passports stamped just as there is a part of me that misses airline branded paper, boarding passes to show “Oh, here\'s where I have been” and so on.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: That obviously, then, pivots over to -- how should the travelers think about biometric data and the storage of that and the risk of that as a condition of travel?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: Look, it is obviously a personal decision. Our research shows that right now in the US, far more travelers would trust sharing their personal biometric information with an airline than with any government agency. So in the US right now, it\'s nearly 80% of airline passengers who, and this is first quarter 2024 data fresh off the press if you will, nearly 80% of us, airline passengers, business and leisure say they\'re willing to share their personal biometric data -- fingerprints, iris scans, etc. -- with an airline they fly regularly if it will lead to a more efficient airport experience or journey. Only a quarter of passengers say they\'re comfortable sharing their personal information right now with any government agency or entity even though, again, with the same benefits of an easier journey. Now, both of those numbers are up from 2023. The government only keeps certain information for a certain amount of time, usually 30 days or less and then it is expunged. So I am in the crowd that is comfortable sharing biometric information with governments and airlines because doing so makes my journey more efficient. It\'s faster, it\'s less stressful. It\'s fewer people that I need to interact with. Remember we\'re somewhere between Crawl and Walk. But where I see it, from the analyst perspective, the time difference, the time it will take us to go from Crawl to Walk will probably be many times longer in the time that will be needed to go from Walk to Run. Because again, as improvements emerge with the technology, the hardware, as well as the software, changes in society, changes in social acceptance of biometrics, the appreciation for benefits, we will reach that so-called tipping point where all of a sudden we see massive and welcome acceleration. It\'s interesting. Younger travelers are a lot more suspicious of the government than some of their older counterparts. And travelers over 65 are less willing to share personal data with the government. The sweet spot is travelers from 30 to 64-ish, call it.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: That\'s an interesting distribution.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: And I think that an important point for anyone listening here -- if you work for an airline, for a technology company, for an airport, for a government agency or, for that matter, if you work at a hotel company, cruise line or other parts of the travel industry. You cannot view your customers as a homogeneous block and you have to understand their welcoming the use of technology. The irony is as we all know, Gen Z are digital natives. They\'re very comfortable using technology. They will put anything and everything on social media it seems like, but they have some very legitimate concerns in their minds about how will governments use their biometric data and could it be used against them? And I\'ll just add that hotels are looking at how they evolve the check in process. You know, I think one of the dumbest questions in the world is when we are standing at the front desk of a hotel suitcase in hand, giving them our credit card and ID and the agent says “Checking in?” Like “No, I thought I would just, I have nothing better to do. So I thought I would bring a suitcase to a hotel in a different city and hand over a credit card and my personal information just to say hello.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Right. “And by the way, I like standing in line. So that\'s why I\'ve been waiting for 10 minutes to get up and have this conversation with you.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: Exactly. But you know, hotels are looking at how they improve the check in process. And granted, at the five-star true luxury properties and resorts, I think they will say, “Look, we value and our guests value the human interaction,” but they\'re going to be a part of that. Guests can say “Look, there\'s some things I can do for myself and then I want to talk to somebody about some other stuff.” But I think with four-star and below, be prepared for more biometric-based self-service check in checkout experiences. And I think, frankly, a lot of people would welcome it because it\'s a lot more secure for 99.9% of us. Eventually. I think biometrics will be more than welcome. And again, if it makes our journeys that much more efficient and less stressful, less unpleasant, there is to me, no downside.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Yes, I think that the cases you\'ve laid out is the appropriate one, which is, it\'s a combination of frictionless or making travel much more efficient than what we have today, doing away with as many lines as we can, and on the same token, being more efficient for the travel company, be it a hotel, be it an airline, be it the company running the airport so that their costs stay down and our costs stay down to travel. So the trade off on that, people are going to strike their own balance around privacy versus efficiency. Henry, thank you very much. This has been a great conversation. I\'ve really enjoyed it. Thanks for coming on a TravelCommons podcast.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: Thank you for inviting me. I enjoyed it as well.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Thanks to <a href=\"http://shj.cs.illinois.edu/\">Dr. Sheldon Jacobson</a> and <a href=\"https://atmosphereresearch.com/\">Henry Harteveldt</a> for taking the time to talk to us about biometrics, facial recognition and give us an idea of what we travelers should expect to see soon. Check out the show notes at TravelCommons.com for links to their work.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"className\":\"has-medium-font-size\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em><a href=\"https://music.apple.com/us/album/hard-way/75388292\" title=\"\">Pictures of You</a></em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #199</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I hope you enjoyed the show; the conversations with Sheldon and Henry. They had so much great insight; the editing decisions were tough. This is usually the point where I say “and I hope you decide to stay subscribed” but this is, as they say in the UK, the penultimate episode of the TravelCommons podcast; a fancy way to say “second-to-the-last”. The next episode will be #200, so a good round number to end it. I’ll unpack it all next month, but just wanted to give you all a heads up.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As always, you can find us and listen to the current episodes on all the main podcast sites -- Apple Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, and Amazon Music. Google has shut down their Podcast app, at least in the US, but you can now get the regular TravelCommons audio episodes on the TravelCommons’ YouTube channel. Go figure -- I can never keep track of what bits Google is shutting down or renaming. But you can always ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page at TravelCommons.com for a transcript of the episode and links to Sheldon and Henry’s websites. And along the side of the page, you’ll find links to all the TravelCommons’ socials.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" title=\"\">mpeacock on Twitter</a>, write them on the TravelCommons page on <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" title=\"\">Facebook </a>or <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" title=\"\">Instagram</a>, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com.&nbsp; And thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in emails, Tweets and post comments on the website. I really appreciate it.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And until we talk again, safe travels; and thanks for stopping by the TravelCommons.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_190.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #199 — Smile for Security: Facial Recognition in Travel','','inherit','closed','closed','','4460-revision-v1','','','2024-05-21 15:55:28','2024-05-21 20:55:28','',4460,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4491',0,'revision','',0),
(4492,1,'2024-05-21 15:56:51','2024-05-21 20:56:51','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/DALL-E_2024-04-10_13.01.39-300x300.jpg\" alt=\" a traveler standing in front of a facial recognition scanner at an airport. The scanner is emitting error signals, and the traveler looks frustrated.\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" />I knew these travel delays were aging me[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Using my face as my boarding pass to get on a flight to Oaxaca, Mexico and then as my passport to get back in the US got me thinking about how facial recognition has permeated the travel experience. To help us understand where this is going, we talk with two travel industry experts, <a href=\"http://shj.cs.illinois.edu/\">Dr. Sheldon Jacobson</a> and <a href=\"https://atmosphereresearch.com/\">Henry Harteveldt</a>. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>But before that, we talk about eating grasshoppers, an EV experience with Avis, and a couple of my travel tips that need to be revised.  All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_199.mp3\" title=\"\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #199: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN a couple of days after a last-minute 200-mile trip up to Carbondale, Illinois, home of the <a href=\"https://siu.edu/\" title=\"\">Southern Illinois University</a> Salukis… but that didn’t matter. What <em>did</em> matter is that Carbondale was right in the <a href=\"https://eclipse.siu.edu/\" title=\"\">center of the solar eclipse’s path</a> across North America, which meant we had 4 minutes of total eclipse.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Looking up, straight into the sun with its corona glowing, wavering around the black disk of the moon -- I’ve seen… we’ve all seen pictures of total eclipses, and of this one all across social and regular media Monday afternoon. But the pictures couldn’t do justice to being there, even if <em>there</em> was the far end of the Salukis stadium parking lot, backing up to a scraggly bit of woods. The experience more than made up for the 3-hr drive there and the 5½-hour bumper-to-bumper traffic back. I add it to my list of things that, even though we’ve seen seemingly an infinite number of pictures of them, experiencing them in real life was worth the hassle to physically travel to see them. The Taj Mahal, the Great Wall of China, Niagara Falls -- all on the list. As opposed to, say, The Mona Lisa in the Louvre. The crowd of people with their phones in the air trying to get a picture was much better than the Mona Lisa itself.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Before that, the start of March, we were in Oaxaca, Mexico for a week. I’ve had Oaxaca on my “To Visit” list for 4-5 years now. For me, it was a good match -- the combination of interesting food, lots of culture, and no beach. I’ve done “resort-y” Mexico -- Cabo, Cancún, Puerto Vallarta -- not a big fan. While there were a lot of tourists in Oaxaca, it didn’t seem to be overrun with them like, say, the center of Cabo is. Maybe because the city center is bigger, so there’s more space to absorb them, or maybe the absolute number of tourists are lower; it wasn’t an easy nor a cheap flight to get there.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>We hit the food scene pretty hard, high- and low-brow; food stands in the market; high-end places serving up phenomenal <a href=\"https://www.rickbayless.com/recipe/oaxacan-black-mole/\" title=\"\">moles</a>. But the food that made the biggest impression is the insects. It wasn’t some tourist-baiting shtick. Walking past a group of street vendors, I saw one of the women making a snack of a couple of grasshoppers wrapped in a small tortilla. At a mezcal bar on the eastern edge of the Centro, the bartender put down a small bowl of grasshoppers as a bar snack. (If you follow <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" title=\"\">TravelCommons on Instagram</a>, you can see a picture in my Oaxaca story) “Those are good grasshoppers,” he told us. “I drive an hour up towards Pueblo to get them. They’re not farmed like the ones you get in the markets.” I have to admit that I’m not enough of an insect connoisseur to be able to pick out the finer nuances of free-range vs. farmed grasshoppers, but they were as good as Beer Nuts as a bar snack. Or maybe that was just the 3rd, or 4th, or 5th shot of mezcal talking.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/duckett/2333\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Another Girl (instrumental)</a> by duckett (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/duckett/23334 Ft: fourstones, miafas</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Friend of the podcast Allan Marko swung by the website to leave this comment about the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2024/02/28/podcast-198-london-vacation-rental-woes-hertzs-ev-retreat/\" title=\"\">last episode</a>:<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“I was assigned an EV by Avis at Fort Lauderdale [at the end of February]. Curious enough to try it out for the relatively short distances I would be traveling, I got in. After starting, I noticed it only had a 10% charge, so, “check please.” I fired up the Avis app and selected a Chevy Malibu with 1,200 miles on it.&nbsp; As for booking.com, we had tremendous luck using that website for most of our accommodations over a two month period in SE Asia five years ago - exclusively for hotels though.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Allan, thanks for that. Expecting you to drive off with a 10% charge? Avis would never think to give you a car with just an ⅛-th of a tank. And if they did, it would take them 10 minutes to fill the tank and get it back to you. But for that EV? Even at a Tesla Supercharger, at least an hour, maybe more. No wonder they tried to get you to do it. And regards to booking.com, my experience with their hotel product is the same as yours -- never had a problem. But their property rentals, never again!</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>One of my regular travel pro tips from years ago was “Don’t take the last flight out” because, if you missed your connection or your flight was canceled, you had a backup. And, as an IRROP passenger -- industry lingo for “irregular operations” -- you have priority on open seats on that later flight; even more so if you have frequent flier status. But nowadays, with US airlines sporting load factors over 80%, this strategy is a lot tougher to make work. Last June, back in episode #194, I talked about how United’s delay leaving Amsterdam meant we missed our connection home, and how I spent about an hour between the service agents at ORD and on the phone, saying “This is unacceptable” 2, 3, 4 times before they found two seats on the later flight to BNA that they’d been saying was completely full. And now this trip flying home from Oaxaca through DFW on American, I had gotten an email saying there could be bad weather, but I thought, “Well, there’s always that later flight.” En route from Oaxaca to DFW, I’m connected to the plane WiFi and an hour before we land, I get a notice from American -- our flight to Nashville had been canceled. OK, that sucks, but no panic, they’d rebook me on the later flight. But I keep reading -- no rebooking; it just tells me to go to the American app. The WiFi over northern Mexico is not the greatest, but when I do get the app to respond, it’s not showing the later flight as an option. Indeed, the options keep changing with each refresh, but nothing earlier than the next day, Friday, or sometimes, not until Saturday, two days later. It wasn’t until after we landed, passed through Immigration, and were waiting at baggage claim to pick up our luggage to go through Customs that we finally got a message through the app that they’d found us seats on the later flight. Still got home that night, but in both these instances, the customer service experience has degraded just so far. I’ve had to push <em>very hard</em>, and, honestly, be a bit of a jerk to get what used to come seamlessly.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And another travel tip that seems to need retiring --<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/12/07/top-10-holiday-travel-tips-3/\" title=\"\"> “Use Twitter as a Concierge Service”</a>. While struggling to rebook while still in the air from Oaxaca, I pinged American on Twitter hoping for a little more help. What I got was an amazing (and depressing) amount of spam messaging masquerading as AA customer service managers. It’s easy to get fooled in the panic of trying to find a way home, but a few rules to keep in mind -- only communicate with the airline’s gold-checked verified accounts; ignore messages from everyone else -- like “AMERICAN AIR HELP DESK” (all in caps) or “Jason frank (uppercase Jason, lowercase case frank) American Air manger” (as opposed to “manager”); and never give anyone your phone number.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And there’s a quick programming note at the end of this episode, so for those interested, hold off on hitting the Skip button when you hear the music.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" title=\"\">Twitter (X?) message to mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" title=\"\">Facebook page</a>, or on the <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" title=\"\">Instagram</a> account at travelcommons -- or you can skip all that social media stuff and post your comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djiz/10514\">Nube - Djiz Rmx</a> by Kwame (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: SylviaO</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Smile for Security: The Future of Facial Recognition in Travel</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Over the years on the podcast, we’ve talked about how travelers are seeing more and more use of biometrics in their travel days. I’ve told the story of my first fingerprint scan back in the late ‘90’s so I could skip the US immigration line on my weekly commute home from Toronto-Pearson Airport. My colleague’s reaction -- “I’m not giving the US government my biometrics!” Me -- “I can skip a 3-minute line? Where do I sign up?” Which I think shows that the privacy-vs.-convenience choices haven\'t fundamentally changed all that much in the subsequent 25 years.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But (surprise!), technology has, and it seems to be accelerating the use of biometrics, specifically facial recognition. Boarding our flight to Oaxaca, our face was our boarding pass -- just look at the camera, wait for the “bing”, and move on. And coming back, the Global Entry kiosks no longer need passports, no longer have you twisting your hand just so to get the fingerprint pad to read all five fingers; just walk up, it takes your picture, and tells you to move on.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Which got me wondering -- where is this going? To help answer this, I invited on two guys who have been digging deep into this for a number of years. First up, <a href=\"http://shj.cs.illinois.edu/\">Dr. Sheldon Jacobson</a>, Professor in Computer Science at the University of Illinois. Sheldon was last on the podcast in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/09/22/podcast-189-why-we-travel-when-the-first-flight-isnt-best/\" title=\"\">episode #189</a> in September 2022 talking about why another of my travel tips, “catch the earliest flight you can”, is not always right. Over the years, Sheldon has developed operations research models to optimize aviation security. So I asked him to come back on the podcast to talk about the growth of biometrics…<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Sheldon, thanks for coming back on to the Travel Commons podcast. Wanted to talk with you about biometrics, facial recognition, all the things that seem to be increasing with regards to air travel.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: The airlines, as well as the Transportation Security Administration need to know who you are when you are traveling and they relied on identification cards, driver\'s license, real IDs and are continuing to be part of the future. But ultimately, the best way to determine who you are is through your face and biometrics and artificial intelligence imbued with it. In fact, it is a solution that people are recognizing; the airlines are starting to use it. And of course, the Transportation Security Administration is investing billions of dollars to advance this idea. And there\'s a reason why they\'re doing this. They\'re doing this simply because the traditional model of airport security screening has been to detect stuff -- prohibited items, knives, explosives, firearms, even, you know, full size tubes of toothpaste could be a threat based on explosives that can be embedded in them. However, the real threat are the people and facial recognition is a means to transform the platform for airport security from the detection of items to knowing your traveler. And that\'s where we\'re heading right now. And this is the future of airport security.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: And how does that work? How do you think that works?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: TSA has not broadcast this and I don\'t even know if they\'re thinking about it, but I have thought about it and I have proposed to them because I visited them in October 2023. And I told them that if they can bring facial recognition biometrics and the use of AI to truly validate and authenticate the travelers, the need for physical screening will be reduced tremendously to the point that they can create a new class of traveler, which I would call a “Super PreCheck” traveler who subjects themselves to greater background vetting. But then they would be treated like a known crew member at an airport and require no further physical screening. That is the future of airport security.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: It\'s almost like “Back to the Future”, right? It\'s almost like back to pre 9/11 days.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: Now, some will argue, “Oh, someone will gain the system and we will have a terrorist threat because of that.” And I would argue the exact opposite, that the only people who would be willing to subject themselves to the background check would be people who know that they\'re going to get through it fine. And the ones who are truly threats cannot risk it because rarely are people acting by themselves. They\'re often acting in a network. And as a result of that, for them to be exposed, they would be exposing their whole network. And the risk of doing that is far too great. What it would also do is it would parse the whole spectrum of travelers into a group of people who are willing to be known and a group of travelers that are not willing to be known. But over time, the ones who are willing to be known will be much larger, which means you can target your resources and your attention on this so-called unknown group and actually make it more secure for the air system by targeting your resources in that way. After September 11th, everybody was treated the same -- one size fits all. TSA PreCheck moved away from that. Now, I\'m proposing we move even further. And our original research we presented to the TSA in 2003 when we proposed this idea of differential screening to them and how it would work and why it would be beneficial. We said that you really need three classes, two would be fine, but three would be better. And it turns out that third class is what we would now call a “Super PreCheck” class of passengers. And those are the people who would be treated like crew members, the known crew members. And a lot of people would be willing to pay for that privilege and we\'ve put boundaries on what that means. It wouldn\'t be renewed every five years; it would be renewed potentially every year. It would be more expensive. But there\'s a lot of business travelers who are willing to pay that price to basically pass through security untethered, but they aren\'t a risk to the system anyway. So why waste resources and time on them? It would transform the footprint and create what I would call “security tunnels” rather than security checkpoints for many of these people.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: That seems to make sense. What was the reaction to that at TSA?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: That\'s a good question. I don\'t know. I don\'t know if I can say that.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Ok, I got it.. Understood. I just had to ask. Well, that\'s a great concept and I appreciate that insight around you guys’ research. You\'re right. I mean, there\'s something that says you just look at what people are willing to sign up with -- with Clear. with Global Entry, with PreCheck. Again, frequent travelers will always look to streamline that experience. And so I would agree, I would say there would be people in a heartbeat who would raise their hand for that.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: Exactly. Right now, people who sign up for Clear pay $189 on the top end for one year, being able to be identified as who they are and go to the front of the precheck line. That\'s all they\'re paying for and they\'re not paying for anything more. If the TSA implements a new class of passengers then Clear would become superfluous and literally would go away.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Yes, that was what I was thinking also.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: It\'s just, it will not be needed anymore. And in some sense, the pathway of using what the TSA calls the “credential authentication technology” which basically validates who you are using biometrics as well as that you\'re entitled to, imply that you don\'t even need a boarding pass right now when they implement this, and in some airports they have it, Clear will have to find a new business model because the TSA is going to assert that model into their own operations.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: You can kind of feel that. And indeed, I still think this most recent version of Clear -- and I had originally signed up for the initial version way back 10-15 years ago (whenever it first started),&nbsp; Rev 1.0, and then they went bankrupt and now we\'ve got Rev 2.0. But even today, I still have a challenge to see a compelling business model for the service that they offer. Oftentimes at a lot of the airports I\'ll go to, the difference between a Clear line and just the basic PreCheck line is pretty much nothing.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: Exactly. I\'ve never been impressed with their business model. They\'ve tried to sell it for stadiums and large entertainment venues. The challenges,&nbsp; it\'s just been difficult and most of their money, most of their resources, most of the revenue still comes through airports and they need that. I just don\'t see the future of it being very bright.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Is there more facial recognition coming or different facial recognition coming? Where do you see that path going?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: Well, we are nowhere near the end game on this facial recognition as effective as it is. I mean, the concept is ideal and wonderful. It\'s still not perfect. It misses certain people of color. It struggles at certain times, and research is continuing to bring the error rates down, lower and lower and lower, especially if you\'re going to create security tunnels where people just walk through it. And your picture is being taken literally in real time matched up using recognition. And then the next thing you know, you\'re at your boarding gate because everything worked out fine for you. And now it will be the majority, the vast majority of travelers. So we are nowhere near the end of this and we are at the beginning. I think the challenge right now is the perception that people do think there is a privacy concern. And like I said, I think it\'s exactly the opposite. I think this is opening up opportunities where we are going to spike in one dimension of AI which is facial recognition. And then the rest of the screening aspect at airports and validation literally gets dampened and in some cases, completely eliminated. I\'m a firm believer and supporter of facial recognition for airport security and air travel. I know that if they do it right, and they seem to be on that pathway, that we are going to have a very different experience at airport screening for security and even air travel in the next 5 to 10 years. It\'s just going to be radically and dramatically different. And I think when people realize that and begin to experience that they\'re going to be happy for it. But at this point, a lot of the rhetoric is around privacy, but our privacy is being violated so often, so frequently and in so many venues that argument is no longer holding any water. I am convinced that this is a positive future for air travel in all aspects.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Sheldon, thanks very much again for joining us on the TravelCommons podcast and sharing that. That\'s great stuff.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Our second guest is <a href=\"https://atmosphereresearch.com/\">Henry Harteveldt</a>, a travel industry analyst for many years. He had the depth of experience and industry contacts to give us a grounded sense on what’s coming with regarding biometrics…<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Henry, thanks for joining us today on the Travel Commons podcast. Wanted to talk about biometrics in and around air travel and specifically, I don\'t know if this is recency bias or what, but it just seems like I\'ve seen a whole lot more of, especially facial recognition over the past couple of years. What\'s your cut at it from a travel industry standpoint?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: In the Crawl/Walk/Run continuum, I would say that with biometrics, we are somewhere between crawl and walk. Think of biometrics as the baby who is crawling really fast and it\'s going to start walking any day now. But in the meantime, it\'s scooting all over the place. So let\'s break it down… Using facial recognition cameras for boarding flights has actually been around since before COVID began. I think the trial started somewhere in the 2016-17 time frame for international flights. That’s the only time it\'s used right now, and it started to roll out in 2018- 2019. Delta was one of the first to embrace the technology and JetBlue as well. And what it does when it works well, and this is something we should come back to to discuss, but when biometrics, facial recognition works as everybody wants it to, it speeds up the boarding process. It reduces the need for us to show not just a physical boarding pass but also a physical passport. And, as a result, on a wide-body jet, it can shave perhaps 10 or more minutes off the boarding time; on a single-aisle plane, a 737 or an A320-type of plane, that could shave 5 to 7 minutes off. So it speeds up the boarding process and makes everything a little bit more efficient. It\'s not perfect. There are people who are uncomfortable using it. There are people who are not familiar with it. So airlines have to have a belt and suspender type of approach. They\'ll have to have gate staff there for the time being. But I don\'t think we are that far away from where international travel is primarily biometrics based boarding, at least in major airports. And I think we will start soon to see it being tested for domestic travel, but there\'s going to be a wrinkle with that when we use the biometric readers at the gate to get on the plane. The database links back to US Customs and Border Patrol which has photographs of US citizens, resident aliens, and international visitors, and it can call up that data to validate that you are you and I am me. With domestic flights. I think only the TSA has the biometric data right now for PreCheck. So it may take a little bit of work to get to a point for that. So that\'s boarding. But let\'s talk about airport security. Yes, TSA is indeed testing and in some cases, I think it\'s actually beyond testing, they are rolling it out facial recognition that again eliminates the need for us to take out a driver\'s license or passport or any other physical ID and, importantly, eliminates the need for us to show any type of boarding pass, whether it\'s a paper boarding pass or digital boarding pass. And again, in theory, it speeds up the number of people who can get into and through the security screening process and reduces the need for human agents at those checkpoints. Now again, we\'re still very much at the beginning of this. And TSA is saying we are going to have a security screening officer at that checkpoint in case something goes wrong or in case someone isn\'t comfortable using biometrics.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Yeah, that was my experience in Nashville. There was a guy standing right there.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: And as we record this, the TSA is testing at Las Vegas, basically this walkthrough type of environment, a new type of screening which is biometrics-based to validate who you are. You put your bags on the belt, you go through, it\'s a lot less invasive, a lot less intrusive and supposed to be a lot faster. I actually want to go over to Las Vegas just to check it out and see what it\'s like. They have this in Dubai and they are testing it elsewhere in England and in France, they are testing it on Eurostar. Now, there are a lot of other things coming along with biometrics at a lot of European airports and in Asia as well. I was just in Singapore. There are biometrics-based scanners so that you don\'t have to queue up and have a border patrol officer review your passport, stamp your passport.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: I had it at Heathrow last November. I went through the e-gates. So I was just surprised; I walked through to the other end and I was like, “Wait, this is it?&nbsp; Nobody to stamp my passport?” No, nothing. Just like, “No. Get out of here. Go, move on.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: Right. Now, for those of us of a certain age, part of the love of travel is hearing that clunky thunk of the passport officer stamping your passport and, every time you get a new passport, the passport service mails back your old one. Those become mementos of our lives.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Yes, absolutely.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: And there is a part of me that will miss the day when we get our passports stamped just as there is a part of me that misses airline branded paper, boarding passes to show “Oh, here\'s where I have been” and so on.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: That obviously, then, pivots over to -- how should the travelers think about biometric data and the storage of that and the risk of that as a condition of travel?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: Look, it is obviously a personal decision. Our research shows that right now in the US, far more travelers would trust sharing their personal biometric information with an airline than with any government agency. So in the US right now, it\'s nearly 80% of airline passengers who, and this is first quarter 2024 data fresh off the press if you will, nearly 80% of us, airline passengers, business and leisure say they\'re willing to share their personal biometric data -- fingerprints, iris scans, etc. -- with an airline they fly regularly if it will lead to a more efficient airport experience or journey. Only a quarter of passengers say they\'re comfortable sharing their personal information right now with any government agency or entity even though, again, with the same benefits of an easier journey. Now, both of those numbers are up from 2023. The government only keeps certain information for a certain amount of time, usually 30 days or less and then it is expunged. So I am in the crowd that is comfortable sharing biometric information with governments and airlines because doing so makes my journey more efficient. It\'s faster, it\'s less stressful. It\'s fewer people that I need to interact with. Remember we\'re somewhere between Crawl and Walk. But where I see it, from the analyst perspective, the time difference, the time it will take us to go from Crawl to Walk will probably be many times longer in the time that will be needed to go from Walk to Run. Because again, as improvements emerge with the technology, the hardware, as well as the software, changes in society, changes in social acceptance of biometrics, the appreciation for benefits, we will reach that so-called tipping point where all of a sudden we see massive and welcome acceleration. It\'s interesting. Younger travelers are a lot more suspicious of the government than some of their older counterparts. And travelers over 65 are less willing to share personal data with the government. The sweet spot is travelers from 30 to 64-ish, call it.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: That\'s an interesting distribution.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: And I think that an important point for anyone listening here -- if you work for an airline, for a technology company, for an airport, for a government agency or, for that matter, if you work at a hotel company, cruise line or other parts of the travel industry. You cannot view your customers as a homogeneous block and you have to understand their welcoming the use of technology. The irony is as we all know, Gen Z are digital natives. They\'re very comfortable using technology. They will put anything and everything on social media it seems like, but they have some very legitimate concerns in their minds about how will governments use their biometric data and could it be used against them? And I\'ll just add that hotels are looking at how they evolve the check in process. You know, I think one of the dumbest questions in the world is when we are standing at the front desk of a hotel suitcase in hand, giving them our credit card and ID and the agent says “Checking in?” Like “No, I thought I would just, I have nothing better to do. So I thought I would bring a suitcase to a hotel in a different city and hand over a credit card and my personal information just to say hello.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Right. “And by the way, I like standing in line. So that\'s why I\'ve been waiting for 10 minutes to get up and have this conversation with you.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: Exactly. But you know, hotels are looking at how they improve the check in process. And granted, at the five-star true luxury properties and resorts, I think they will say, “Look, we value and our guests value the human interaction,” but they\'re going to be a part of that. Guests can say “Look, there\'s some things I can do for myself and then I want to talk to somebody about some other stuff.” But I think with four-star and below, be prepared for more biometric-based self-service check in checkout experiences. And I think, frankly, a lot of people would welcome it because it\'s a lot more secure for 99.9% of us. Eventually. I think biometrics will be more than welcome. And again, if it makes our journeys that much more efficient and less stressful, less unpleasant, there is to me, no downside.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Yes, I think that the cases you\'ve laid out is the appropriate one, which is, it\'s a combination of frictionless or making travel much more efficient than what we have today, doing away with as many lines as we can, and on the same token, being more efficient for the travel company, be it a hotel, be it an airline, be it the company running the airport so that their costs stay down and our costs stay down to travel. So the trade off on that, people are going to strike their own balance around privacy versus efficiency. Henry, thank you very much. This has been a great conversation. I\'ve really enjoyed it. Thanks for coming on a TravelCommons podcast.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: Thank you for inviting me. I enjoyed it as well.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Thanks to <a href=\"http://shj.cs.illinois.edu/\">Dr. Sheldon Jacobson</a> and <a href=\"https://atmosphereresearch.com/\">Henry Harteveldt</a> for taking the time to talk to us about biometrics, facial recognition and give us an idea of what we travelers should expect to see soon. Check out the show notes at TravelCommons.com for links to their work.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"className\":\"has-medium-font-size\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em><a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/track/0geYaxa8LozoV8afrKwdTo?si=aa1cf0be8ee9400a\" title=\"\">Pictures of You</a></em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #199</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I hope you enjoyed the show; the conversations with Sheldon and Henry. They had so much great insight; the editing decisions were tough. This is usually the point where I say “and I hope you decide to stay subscribed” but this is, as they say in the UK, the penultimate episode of the TravelCommons podcast; a fancy way to say “second-to-the-last”. The next episode will be #200, so a good round number to end it. I’ll unpack it all next month, but just wanted to give you all a heads up.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As always, you can find us and listen to the current episodes on all the main podcast sites -- Apple Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, and Amazon Music. Google has shut down their Podcast app, at least in the US, but you can now get the regular TravelCommons audio episodes on the TravelCommons’ YouTube channel. Go figure -- I can never keep track of what bits Google is shutting down or renaming. But you can always ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page at TravelCommons.com for a transcript of the episode and links to Sheldon and Henry’s websites. And along the side of the page, you’ll find links to all the TravelCommons’ socials.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" title=\"\">mpeacock on Twitter</a>, write them on the TravelCommons page on <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" title=\"\">Facebook </a>or <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" title=\"\">Instagram</a>, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com.&nbsp; And thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in emails, Tweets and post comments on the website. I really appreciate it.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And until we talk again, safe travels; and thanks for stopping by the TravelCommons.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_190.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #199 — Smile for Security: Facial Recognition in Travel','','inherit','closed','closed','','4460-revision-v1','','','2024-05-21 15:56:51','2024-05-21 20:56:51','',4460,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4492',0,'revision','',0);
INSERT INTO `wp_posts` VALUES
(4494,1,'2024-05-23 17:23:45','2024-05-23 22:23:45','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/abandoned-motel-sign-300x300.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" />TravelCommons\' final stop[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Finishing up 19 years of thinking way too much about travel, I indulge in a little bit of nostalgia and talk about my personal travel philosophy. But before that, we compare three Mid-South river cities -- Nashville, Louisville, and Memphis -- talk about the recovery of business travel, and enjoy a full listener mail bag. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_200.mp3\" title=\"\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:audio -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-audio\"><audio controls src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_200.mp3\"></audio></figure>\n<!-- /wp:audio -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #200: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you, for the last time, from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN after a couple of road trips, one up I-65 to Louisville, KY for a pre-Kentucky Derby bike ride called (of course) <a href=\"https://www.courier-journal.com/story/entertainment/events/kentucky-derby/festival/2024/02/19/kentucky-derby-festival-pnc-tour-de-lou-adds-finisher-medal-in-2024/72657430007/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Tour de Lou</a>, and then the next week, out west along I-40 to Memphis. It’s given me a chance to compare, if I throw Nashville into the mix, three mid-sized, Mid-South river cities that I’ve lived in. Nashville is the largest of the three both in population and area; Louisville and Memphis are a bit smaller and pretty much the same size. And Nashville <em>feels</em> bigger -- more buildings in the downtown skyline when you drive in, and more big cranes putting up more. Nashville’s neighborhoods feel more linked up, more contiguous space to walk, with fewer “flat spots,” places you feel like you should walk a bit quicker. However, the older, more established neighborhoods of Old Louisville and Midtown Memphis offered more interesting walks. Memphis’ <a href=\"https://overtonpark.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Overton Park</a> is the best city park, with a mix of lawns, gardens, some old-growth forest to walk through, and a concert shell built in the 1930’s where, when we passed by, a hip-hop group was doing a rehearsal walk-thru. Glad the federal and state governments <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_Park#History\" title=\"\">failed to plow a good bit of it under back</a> in the ‘60’s and ‘70’s when they wanted to route I-40 straight through the city.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As I said, all three are river cities -- Memphis on the Mississippi, Louisville on the Ohio, and Nashville on the Cumberland. And maybe because the Mississippi and the Ohio are much bigger rivers, Memphis and Louisville do much more with their riverfronts than Nashville. We walked along the Mississippi through the just renovated <a href=\"https://www.tomleepark.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Tom Lee Park</a> in Memphis -- guys were putting some final touches on the walking paths and garden beds -- and I biked along <a href=\"https://ourwaterfront.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Louisville’s Waterfront Park</a>; both really nice spaces, almost like “front lawns” for those cities. And maybe there’s something to that. The Mississippi and Ohio Rivers are boundaries for those cities (and indeed, those states) where the Cumberland River winds through Nashville which, in many ways, seems to turn its back to the river. I mean Chicago does <a href=\"https://www.chicago.gov/city/en/sites/chicagoriverwalk/home.html.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">much more</a> with the <em>much</em> smaller Chicago River than Nashville does with the Cumberland.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But, of course, Nashville’s music scene is way beyond what Louisville and Memphis offer -- even beyond the honky tonk maelstrom that is Lower Broadway. Live music starts in the airport and follows you throughout the city. Irene and I joke there must be a city ordinance mandating live music in any gathering of 10 or more people. Memphis tries hard with its Beale Street district. It has a number of clubs with live blues, R&amp;B, and rock music coming out the windows into the street, but it doesn’t have the density, the concentration of Lower Broadway, and Beale Street tails off after a couple of blocks, into one of those “flat spots” that make you want to look over your shoulder a bit more often.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Next road trip is out east to Chattanooga. Feels like we’re drawing a circle with a radius of a 2-3 hr drive time and hitting all the cities within it for a day or three each. Kinda trading summer TSA security lines for summer construction traffic jams.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge music —&nbsp;<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Psykick/52938\">Another Way</a>&nbsp;by Psykick (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Psykick/52938</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Long-time listener Thelma Stubelt wrote in about the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2024/04/11/podcast-199-smile-for-security-facial-recognition-in-travel/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Podcast #199 — Smile for Security: Facial Recognition in Travel\">last episode’s</a> biometrics discussion<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“I really enjoyed the last episode. I work for immigration. They are working on making Green Cards part of the Apple Wallet. I know Global Entry is doing it as well. We have also been simplifying the biometrics process. A lot of the documents being produced had a fingerprint on the card. That is no longer being put on.&nbsp; I’m going to Vegas in the fall. Looking forward to seeing TSAs new system.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Thelma, thanks for that. My brother-in-law still has the Green Card from when he came to the US with his Hungarian refugee parents in the late \'50\'s; with his baby picture on it. We get a chuckle whenever he has to pull it out of his wallet. Somehow, I don’t see an Apple Wallet version of that doing the same job. But, as Henry and Sheldon said in the last episode, the move is toward more, not less biometrics. And Thelma’s note adds a few more data points that confirms that trend.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Of course, automated facial recognition might be more efficient, but is not always resilient. The UK’s facial recognition <a href=\"https://www.bbc.com/news/business-68972065\">eGate system was down for 4 hours </a>last week for a “system network issue.” They had to fall back to old-school manual facial recognition -- that is, an immigration officer looking at you and then at the picture of you in your passport. This seems to be becoming an annual event in the UK. Last May, they had a <a href=\"https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-65731795\">similar 3-4-hour eGate outage</a>. Note to self -- don’t fly to the UK next May. But at least it’s happening in a country that prides itself on orderly queueing.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Back in the COVID era, in episodes in 2020 and 2021, I was <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/03/21/podcast-161-new-crisis-old-question-driving-down-to-key-west/\">skeptical</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/06/15/podcast-176-why-business-travel-is-coming-back-learning-airport-history/\">of</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/09/27/podcast-179-high-tech-airport-lines-business-travel-still-missing/\">predictions</a> like Bill Gates’ that <a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/17/coronavirus-bill-gates-says-more-than-50percent-of-business-travel-will-disappear-long-term.html\">50% of business travel will go away</a>; hot takes that virtual meetings are the “new normal”. The reality? First quarter earnings calls from travel companies all saying that business travel is back. <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/business/hospitality/welcome-back-road-warriors-business-travel-returns-6241d575?st=mejrn8dduygzq5v&amp;reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink\">Alaska Air and Southwest both said corporate travel sales grew over 20% and are back to pre-pandemic levels</a>; as did Hilton and <a href=\"https://skift.com/2024/05/09/hyatt-signals-strength-in-business-travel-loyalty-and-all-inclusives/\">Hyatt</a>. <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean\">Regression to the mean</a>, you might call it “<a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_inertia\">behavioral inertia</a>”, is a strong force. Just ask all the folks laid off from e-commerce companies.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And, as always, thanks to the notes from folks who listened all the way to the end of the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2024/04/11/podcast-199-smile-for-security-facial-recognition-in-travel/\">previous episode</a> where I said that this episode would be my last. I have to tell you that, if I was a listener, I wouldn’t have heard it. I’d be hitting the “next track” button on Overcast within the second bar of Evangeline’s <em>Pictures of You</em> song.<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Thelma, in her biometrics note, also said “I have been a listener of yours for I believe 18 years. I will miss your show but wish you all the best. My old time fav was your love of bashing TSA. Another favorite thing on the podcast was the outro music. When you played the whole thing I couldn’t help but sing along.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Thanks very much for sticking it out for pretty much the full duration. Either I’m mellowing with age or the TSA finally cleaned up their act 3 or 4 years ago, or maybe PreCheck has taken away the reasons for those old debates about shoe sole thickness or the definition of a solid.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Another lifer, Jerry Sarfati, wrote in “I’m sorry to hear that you will be ending the Travel Commons podcast. I am a LONG time listener, I guess about 18 years.&nbsp; I found your podcast when I was a “road warrior”. &nbsp; Now I’m retired, but still enjoy listening to you.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Rob Cheshire of <a href=\"https://thisweekincraft.beer/\"><em>This Week in Craft Beer</em></a> wrote “Truly the end of an era!”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Roger Nash left the Instagram comment -- “Going to miss you, sir”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And @LAflyr hit me up on Twitter to say -- “Sad to hear about the upcoming end of the journey.&nbsp; However, reaching 200 episodes is truly an achievement.&nbsp; Thanks for all the stories and entertainment over the years!”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Robert Fennerty wrote - “I will miss the Travel Commons podcast for many reasons. In increasingly important order, here are my top 3 reasons:<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Travel Tips:</strong> I have incorporated many of your ideas and devices into my travel regimen. Most recently, the Super Bagel has become my go to power center and it has reduced the weight of my laptop bag, thereby allowing me to stuff other less useful junk inside.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Cogent Observations:</strong> The show has had so many cathartic YES I KNOW moments. For example, every time I walk into a hotel bathroom and the bottles have unintelligible labels, I think of you. In the example below, we know that my hands will smell like magnolia after I depress the plunger on one of those bottles. But will I have washed my hands or moistened them? No one can know for sure.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>You:</strong> Every time a new episode enters my podcast feed, I smile. Your voice is very reassuring and I think it lowers my pulse a few beats per minute. So I will miss your company, especially when I’m on the road.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Wow! Thank you very much Robert for that. And to everyone who wrote in. I really do appreciate your comments; they mean a lot.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Now this is the point in this segment where I usually say, if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com or to @mpeacock on Twitter, or to @travelcommons on Instagram or Facebook. Well, feel free to keep doing that. I’ll still be there, but it’ll just be between you and me.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/52154\">release.JOY.release</a> by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: essesq, Haskel (hej31)</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Wrapping Up the TravelCommons Journey</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>So here’s <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/05/15/first-travelcommons-podcast/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"First TravelCommons Podcast\">how it started</a> 19 years ago<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>This is the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/05/15/first-travelcommons-podcast/\" title=\"First TravelCommons Podcast\">first TravelCommons podcast</a>, so bear with us. We got kind of a lousy microphone and we\'re gonna be trying some new stuff along the way, but I hope you enjoy what we gotta say. Why should you care, why should you listen, why should you even think about subscribing to this podcast? Well, if you\'re interested in travel, that\'s what we\'re gonna talk about -- the ground level experiences of a traveler, someone who\'s in airplanes and hotels and rental cars every week. That\'s me. We\'re talking to you today from the bathroom of the Wardman Park Marriott. I don\'t have fancy reverb filters and all the other great stuff. So instead, I thought I\'d just surround myself with a lot of tile and hopefully this thing will sound pretty good. So, anyhow, Wardman Park Marriott in Northwest DC.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I\'m on kind of one of my normal triangulation trips. Last week, I was out on the West Coast. This week, I\'m out on the East Coast. Started off in ORD yesterday afternoon. Typical ORD day -- 6 am thunderstorm shot the entire schedule to hell in a hand basket; 60- to 120-minute delays the whole time. I tell you; it was a mess. And then today flying down from New York, taking the shuttle out of LGA, they push us back and then we sit for 45 minutes on the runway because we got caught right in the middle of one of those times when LGA takes the entire 30 airplanes that are out on the runway and tell them all to turn around and go the other way because the wind shifted. It was beautiful. It\'s been a beautiful trip; kind of a normal trip actually.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And here’s how we’re ending it -- with, if nothing else, a <em>lot</em> better sound quality… and a bit more effort in clean-up editing. But I do think the through line, from episode 1 to 200, has been consistent -- capturing the voice of the traveler, and through being more about the journey than the destination.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>A few years back, Rob Cheshire turned me onto a podcast called <a href=\"https://www.stealthisbeer.com/\">Steal This Beer</a>. Their tag line is “A candid discussion about beer, over beer, by a couple of guys who think about beer way too much.” Swap “travel” for “beer” and it could make a better tagline for this podcast -- “A discussion about travel by a guy who thinks about travel way too much.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And I would think too much about travel because, as with many road warrior listeners who would chime in over the years, travel was one of the main drivers of my day-to-day existence. There was a stretch of time -- years, actually -- where I would travel all but 6 or 7 weeks in a year. So 80+% of my life would be dependent on how well, each week, the FAA, the TSA, 2-4 airports, 1-3 airlines, 2-3 hotels, and Hertz did their respective jobs. The joint probability of that many independent variables all lining up in the right way for me to get to where I wanted to be on time is vanishingly small. Looking at it this way, it’s no wonder I sounded so cranky so often on this podcast.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Some road warriors who “think way too much” go <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2009/12/15/up-in-the-air-captures-life-in-the-travel-bubble/\">full-on George Clooney</a> in the movie <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_in_the_Air_(2009_film)\"><em>Up In The Air</em></a>, obsessively collecting “travel hacks” to swerve lines, precious metal status levels, doing whatever they can to be able to move through their travel days with minimum friction and maximum efficiency. I’ve called that over the years “living in the travel bubble.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If I’d gone that way, this podcast would’ve ended maybe 100 episodes ago. I’ve talked a lot over the years about breaking out of the travel bubble -- by <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2008/04/29/podcast-64-escaping-the-travel-bubble-marks-travel-tips/\">taking subways and commuter trains</a> instead of taxis and Ubers, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/09/29/podcast-196-cheers-to-beer-tourism-and-travel/\">searching out</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/09/28/podcast-124-craft-beer-hunting-i-hate-rick-steves/\">local</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/10/12/podcast-111-seatback-recline-wars-craft-beer-tourism/\">beer</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/04/10/podcast-174-how-the-pros-plan-their-taproom-tourism/\">joints</a>, and just <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/06/20/podcast-194-best-laid-travel-plans-roaming-entropy/\">roaming randomly</a> around a city -- or what the cool kids call <em><a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-emotional-benefits-of-wandering-11671131450?st=mmqyql6e1cktnub&amp;reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink\" title=\"\">flâneuring</a></em>. I always figured it’s a symptom of adult ADHD; a short attention span, a need for external stimuli. As you might guess, I’m no fun on a beach vacation. Going to a new place or digging into new bits of places like New York or San Francisco where I’ve been, what, 50 times before -- seeing, experiencing new things would hit that dopamine button and make up for having to grit my teeth through the umpteenth flight delay at ORD or LGA.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And to lay further back on the analyst’s couch, I find that when I’m traveling, when I’m in the midst of all this new stuff, I’m often better able to dig down and think about things that, when I’m home, the day-to-day activities get in the way. Travel can keep my day-to-day stuff at arm’s length -- 2 arms’ length if I’m not in an English-speaking place. I can tune out a lot of the peripheral chatter -- the television in the corner, the adjacent conversations -- because I don’t understand it.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But even when I can’t understand what’s being said around me, I found travel still expanding my understanding, my perspectives. It’s one thing to read about the size of China’s population or the poverty in India or the humid heat in Vietnam or the homeless encampments in San Francisco, but it’s a whole next-level to see it and experience it in person. What seems black and white from a distance starts to dither into gray when it’s up close. It forces me to do a much better job of seeing the other side, to see how my actions could be perceived by others, and I hope it ends up making me a more empathetic person. Which is why I never bought into the “new normal” predictions of Bill Gates and others that travel would never be the same. There’s too many people like me.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But the lack of travel during the Covid shutdowns, the move to more virtual work, and my own slouching toward retirement has made it more of a struggle to generate new and what I thought was interesting content that is “more about the journey”. Two years ago, I wrote in a note “I’m definitely not making it to episode #200”. I surprised myself by making it here, but it seems like a good point to wrap it up -- landmark episode number and 19 years after the first episode in May 2005.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>So what’s next? I’m not really sure. Actually, no. I do know that I’m going to clean up the TravelCommons website -- fix the SSL certificate Robert Fenerty <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/06/20/podcast-194-best-laid-travel-plans-roaming-entropy/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">pinged me about last June</a>; delete the out-of-date posts. And reconfigure it to focus more on the written work, the blog posts than the podcast because I think that’ll be what comes next -- written stuff that’s more about the destination than the journey, to flip the tag line around.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I’ve done it pretty infrequently in the past; the podcast took priority. The last one was about <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Quick Notes on Our Trip to Tucson\">our January 2021 trip to Tucson</a>. But I’ve found myself giving out a lot of travel recommendations recently -- from guys around my age who know I’ve done a bit of travel asking me “What should I do in this place?” Like last weekend, I ran into a guy at a <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/barriquebrewing/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">taproom</a> who, when I sat next to him at the beginning of the year, asked me for recommendations for Rome. “That <a href=\"https://www.football-pub.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">beer bar </a>down that alley in Trastevere you recommended was great!” he said. “And that neighborhood too! We wouldn’t have gone there if you hadn’t suggested it.” Maybe travel writing editors have over-rotated from “tell me where to go” to “tell me a story about a place”, but it’ll be good to have something to keep me occupied.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"className\":\"has-medium-font-size\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em><a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/track/0geYaxa8LozoV8afrKwdTo?si=aa1cf0be8ee9400a\" title=\"\">Pictures of You</a></em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #200</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I hope you enjoyed this last show, and thanks so much to all of you who have been along on this ride.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As I said earlier, you can still ping me at <a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a>, mpeacock on Twitter, the TravelCommons page on Facebook and Instagram, and the travelcommons.com website will still be around. I’ll put links to any new posts on all the socials. If you aren’t on social media -- which I can completely understand -- and want to know when I post something, send your email address to me at <a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a> and I’ll email out a link to new material. Who knows, maybe I’ll do a TravelCommons newsletter.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Thelma’s comment in her note about the outro song, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/track/0geYaxa8LozoV8afrKwdTo?si=fb4c8ad5edd24ab4\"><em>Pictures of You</em></a> by the Scottish band Evangeline, got me digging in through the archives, all the way back to <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/09/14/podcast-14-september-11th-travel-stories-writing-a-great-travel-song/\">episode #14</a> where the band leader explained the origins of the song. It only seems right to close out this last episode with his words and his full song.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As always, safe travels; and thanks for stopping by the TravelCommons.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Willie Evans - “Hi, I\'m Willie Evans from Scots Band Evangeline sending good thoughts to Mark and all the listeners of the TravelCommons podcast. Touring is a part of our job that we love. It\'s exciting, it\'s fun, it\'s energizing, and it\'s great to get out there and meet the fans and see new places. The downside, however, is that it can be a bit boring and predictable, with each day being pretty much the same as the day before. And inevitably, we all miss our friends and our loved ones back home. The song <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/track/0geYaxa8LozoV8afrKwdTo?si=fb4c8ad5edd24ab4\"><em>Pictures of You</em></a> from our <em>Hard Way</em> album is about that longing for our wives and families. And whether you\'re an entertainer or musician or perhaps a salesman or businessman who travels a lot, then I hope you can identify with it. Hope you enjoy the song. Have a great day.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_200.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #200 — Wrapping Up the TravelCommons Journey','Finishing 19 years of podcasting where I\'ve been thinking way too much about travel, I indulge in some nostalgia and talk about my personal travel philosophy','publish','closed','closed','','podcast-200-wrapping-up-the-travelcommons-journey','','','2026-01-26 18:22:45','2026-01-27 00:22:45','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4494',0,'post','',0),
(4495,1,'2024-05-22 17:44:19','2024-05-22 22:44:19','','abandoned-motel-sign','','inherit','open','closed','','abandoned-motel-sign','','','2024-05-22 17:44:19','2024-05-22 22:44:19','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/abandoned-motel-sign.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(4496,1,'2024-05-22 17:45:36','2024-05-22 22:45:36','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"hhttps://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/abandoned-motel-sign-300x300.jpg\" alt=\" a traveler standing in front of a facial recognition scanner at an airport. The scanner is emitting error signals, and the traveler looks frustrated.\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" />I knew these travel delays were aging me[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Using my face as my boarding pass to get on a flight to Oaxaca, Mexico and then as my passport to get back in the US got me thinking about how facial recognition has permeated the travel experience. To help us understand where this is going, we talk with two travel industry experts, <a href=\"http://shj.cs.illinois.edu/\">Dr. Sheldon Jacobson</a> and <a href=\"https://atmosphereresearch.com/\">Henry Harteveldt</a>. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>But before that, we talk about eating grasshoppers, an EV experience with Avis, and a couple of my travel tips that need to be revised.  All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_199.mp3\" title=\"\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #199: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN a couple of days after a last-minute 200-mile trip up to Carbondale, Illinois, home of the <a href=\"https://siu.edu/\" title=\"\">Southern Illinois University</a> Salukis… but that didn’t matter. What <em>did</em> matter is that Carbondale was right in the <a href=\"https://eclipse.siu.edu/\" title=\"\">center of the solar eclipse’s path</a> across North America, which meant we had 4 minutes of total eclipse.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Looking up, straight into the sun with its corona glowing, wavering around the black disk of the moon -- I’ve seen… we’ve all seen pictures of total eclipses, and of this one all across social and regular media Monday afternoon. But the pictures couldn’t do justice to being there, even if <em>there</em> was the far end of the Salukis stadium parking lot, backing up to a scraggly bit of woods. The experience more than made up for the 3-hr drive there and the 5½-hour bumper-to-bumper traffic back. I add it to my list of things that, even though we’ve seen seemingly an infinite number of pictures of them, experiencing them in real life was worth the hassle to physically travel to see them. The Taj Mahal, the Great Wall of China, Niagara Falls -- all on the list. As opposed to, say, The Mona Lisa in the Louvre. The crowd of people with their phones in the air trying to get a picture was much better than the Mona Lisa itself.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Before that, the start of March, we were in Oaxaca, Mexico for a week. I’ve had Oaxaca on my “To Visit” list for 4-5 years now. For me, it was a good match -- the combination of interesting food, lots of culture, and no beach. I’ve done “resort-y” Mexico -- Cabo, Cancún, Puerto Vallarta -- not a big fan. While there were a lot of tourists in Oaxaca, it didn’t seem to be overrun with them like, say, the center of Cabo is. Maybe because the city center is bigger, so there’s more space to absorb them, or maybe the absolute number of tourists are lower; it wasn’t an easy nor a cheap flight to get there.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>We hit the food scene pretty hard, high- and low-brow; food stands in the market; high-end places serving up phenomenal <a href=\"https://www.rickbayless.com/recipe/oaxacan-black-mole/\" title=\"\">moles</a>. But the food that made the biggest impression is the insects. It wasn’t some tourist-baiting shtick. Walking past a group of street vendors, I saw one of the women making a snack of a couple of grasshoppers wrapped in a small tortilla. At a mezcal bar on the eastern edge of the Centro, the bartender put down a small bowl of grasshoppers as a bar snack. (If you follow <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" title=\"\">TravelCommons on Instagram</a>, you can see a picture in my Oaxaca story) “Those are good grasshoppers,” he told us. “I drive an hour up towards Pueblo to get them. They’re not farmed like the ones you get in the markets.” I have to admit that I’m not enough of an insect connoisseur to be able to pick out the finer nuances of free-range vs. farmed grasshoppers, but they were as good as Beer Nuts as a bar snack. Or maybe that was just the 3rd, or 4th, or 5th shot of mezcal talking.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/duckett/2333\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Another Girl (instrumental)</a> by duckett (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/duckett/23334 Ft: fourstones, miafas</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Friend of the podcast Allan Marko swung by the website to leave this comment about the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2024/02/28/podcast-198-london-vacation-rental-woes-hertzs-ev-retreat/\" title=\"\">last episode</a>:<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“I was assigned an EV by Avis at Fort Lauderdale [at the end of February]. Curious enough to try it out for the relatively short distances I would be traveling, I got in. After starting, I noticed it only had a 10% charge, so, “check please.” I fired up the Avis app and selected a Chevy Malibu with 1,200 miles on it.&nbsp; As for booking.com, we had tremendous luck using that website for most of our accommodations over a two month period in SE Asia five years ago - exclusively for hotels though.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Allan, thanks for that. Expecting you to drive off with a 10% charge? Avis would never think to give you a car with just an ⅛-th of a tank. And if they did, it would take them 10 minutes to fill the tank and get it back to you. But for that EV? Even at a Tesla Supercharger, at least an hour, maybe more. No wonder they tried to get you to do it. And regards to booking.com, my experience with their hotel product is the same as yours -- never had a problem. But their property rentals, never again!</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>One of my regular travel pro tips from years ago was “Don’t take the last flight out” because, if you missed your connection or your flight was canceled, you had a backup. And, as an IRROP passenger -- industry lingo for “irregular operations” -- you have priority on open seats on that later flight; even more so if you have frequent flier status. But nowadays, with US airlines sporting load factors over 80%, this strategy is a lot tougher to make work. Last June, back in episode #194, I talked about how United’s delay leaving Amsterdam meant we missed our connection home, and how I spent about an hour between the service agents at ORD and on the phone, saying “This is unacceptable” 2, 3, 4 times before they found two seats on the later flight to BNA that they’d been saying was completely full. And now this trip flying home from Oaxaca through DFW on American, I had gotten an email saying there could be bad weather, but I thought, “Well, there’s always that later flight.” En route from Oaxaca to DFW, I’m connected to the plane WiFi and an hour before we land, I get a notice from American -- our flight to Nashville had been canceled. OK, that sucks, but no panic, they’d rebook me on the later flight. But I keep reading -- no rebooking; it just tells me to go to the American app. The WiFi over northern Mexico is not the greatest, but when I do get the app to respond, it’s not showing the later flight as an option. Indeed, the options keep changing with each refresh, but nothing earlier than the next day, Friday, or sometimes, not until Saturday, two days later. It wasn’t until after we landed, passed through Immigration, and were waiting at baggage claim to pick up our luggage to go through Customs that we finally got a message through the app that they’d found us seats on the later flight. Still got home that night, but in both these instances, the customer service experience has degraded just so far. I’ve had to push <em>very hard</em>, and, honestly, be a bit of a jerk to get what used to come seamlessly.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And another travel tip that seems to need retiring --<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/12/07/top-10-holiday-travel-tips-3/\" title=\"\"> “Use Twitter as a Concierge Service”</a>. While struggling to rebook while still in the air from Oaxaca, I pinged American on Twitter hoping for a little more help. What I got was an amazing (and depressing) amount of spam messaging masquerading as AA customer service managers. It’s easy to get fooled in the panic of trying to find a way home, but a few rules to keep in mind -- only communicate with the airline’s gold-checked verified accounts; ignore messages from everyone else -- like “AMERICAN AIR HELP DESK” (all in caps) or “Jason frank (uppercase Jason, lowercase case frank) American Air manger” (as opposed to “manager”); and never give anyone your phone number.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And there’s a quick programming note at the end of this episode, so for those interested, hold off on hitting the Skip button when you hear the music.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" title=\"\">Twitter (X?) message to mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" title=\"\">Facebook page</a>, or on the <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" title=\"\">Instagram</a> account at travelcommons -- or you can skip all that social media stuff and post your comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djiz/10514\">Nube - Djiz Rmx</a> by Kwame (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: SylviaO</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Smile for Security: The Future of Facial Recognition in Travel</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Over the years on the podcast, we’ve talked about how travelers are seeing more and more use of biometrics in their travel days. I’ve told the story of my first fingerprint scan back in the late ‘90’s so I could skip the US immigration line on my weekly commute home from Toronto-Pearson Airport. My colleague’s reaction -- “I’m not giving the US government my biometrics!” Me -- “I can skip a 3-minute line? Where do I sign up?” Which I think shows that the privacy-vs.-convenience choices haven\'t fundamentally changed all that much in the subsequent 25 years.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But (surprise!), technology has, and it seems to be accelerating the use of biometrics, specifically facial recognition. Boarding our flight to Oaxaca, our face was our boarding pass -- just look at the camera, wait for the “bing”, and move on. And coming back, the Global Entry kiosks no longer need passports, no longer have you twisting your hand just so to get the fingerprint pad to read all five fingers; just walk up, it takes your picture, and tells you to move on.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Which got me wondering -- where is this going? To help answer this, I invited on two guys who have been digging deep into this for a number of years. First up, <a href=\"http://shj.cs.illinois.edu/\">Dr. Sheldon Jacobson</a>, Professor in Computer Science at the University of Illinois. Sheldon was last on the podcast in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/09/22/podcast-189-why-we-travel-when-the-first-flight-isnt-best/\" title=\"\">episode #189</a> in September 2022 talking about why another of my travel tips, “catch the earliest flight you can”, is not always right. Over the years, Sheldon has developed operations research models to optimize aviation security. So I asked him to come back on the podcast to talk about the growth of biometrics…<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Sheldon, thanks for coming back on to the Travel Commons podcast. Wanted to talk with you about biometrics, facial recognition, all the things that seem to be increasing with regards to air travel.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: The airlines, as well as the Transportation Security Administration need to know who you are when you are traveling and they relied on identification cards, driver\'s license, real IDs and are continuing to be part of the future. But ultimately, the best way to determine who you are is through your face and biometrics and artificial intelligence imbued with it. In fact, it is a solution that people are recognizing; the airlines are starting to use it. And of course, the Transportation Security Administration is investing billions of dollars to advance this idea. And there\'s a reason why they\'re doing this. They\'re doing this simply because the traditional model of airport security screening has been to detect stuff -- prohibited items, knives, explosives, firearms, even, you know, full size tubes of toothpaste could be a threat based on explosives that can be embedded in them. However, the real threat are the people and facial recognition is a means to transform the platform for airport security from the detection of items to knowing your traveler. And that\'s where we\'re heading right now. And this is the future of airport security.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: And how does that work? How do you think that works?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: TSA has not broadcast this and I don\'t even know if they\'re thinking about it, but I have thought about it and I have proposed to them because I visited them in October 2023. And I told them that if they can bring facial recognition biometrics and the use of AI to truly validate and authenticate the travelers, the need for physical screening will be reduced tremendously to the point that they can create a new class of traveler, which I would call a “Super PreCheck” traveler who subjects themselves to greater background vetting. But then they would be treated like a known crew member at an airport and require no further physical screening. That is the future of airport security.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: It\'s almost like “Back to the Future”, right? It\'s almost like back to pre 9/11 days.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: Now, some will argue, “Oh, someone will gain the system and we will have a terrorist threat because of that.” And I would argue the exact opposite, that the only people who would be willing to subject themselves to the background check would be people who know that they\'re going to get through it fine. And the ones who are truly threats cannot risk it because rarely are people acting by themselves. They\'re often acting in a network. And as a result of that, for them to be exposed, they would be exposing their whole network. And the risk of doing that is far too great. What it would also do is it would parse the whole spectrum of travelers into a group of people who are willing to be known and a group of travelers that are not willing to be known. But over time, the ones who are willing to be known will be much larger, which means you can target your resources and your attention on this so-called unknown group and actually make it more secure for the air system by targeting your resources in that way. After September 11th, everybody was treated the same -- one size fits all. TSA PreCheck moved away from that. Now, I\'m proposing we move even further. And our original research we presented to the TSA in 2003 when we proposed this idea of differential screening to them and how it would work and why it would be beneficial. We said that you really need three classes, two would be fine, but three would be better. And it turns out that third class is what we would now call a “Super PreCheck” class of passengers. And those are the people who would be treated like crew members, the known crew members. And a lot of people would be willing to pay for that privilege and we\'ve put boundaries on what that means. It wouldn\'t be renewed every five years; it would be renewed potentially every year. It would be more expensive. But there\'s a lot of business travelers who are willing to pay that price to basically pass through security untethered, but they aren\'t a risk to the system anyway. So why waste resources and time on them? It would transform the footprint and create what I would call “security tunnels” rather than security checkpoints for many of these people.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: That seems to make sense. What was the reaction to that at TSA?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: That\'s a good question. I don\'t know. I don\'t know if I can say that.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Ok, I got it.. Understood. I just had to ask. Well, that\'s a great concept and I appreciate that insight around you guys’ research. You\'re right. I mean, there\'s something that says you just look at what people are willing to sign up with -- with Clear. with Global Entry, with PreCheck. Again, frequent travelers will always look to streamline that experience. And so I would agree, I would say there would be people in a heartbeat who would raise their hand for that.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: Exactly. Right now, people who sign up for Clear pay $189 on the top end for one year, being able to be identified as who they are and go to the front of the precheck line. That\'s all they\'re paying for and they\'re not paying for anything more. If the TSA implements a new class of passengers then Clear would become superfluous and literally would go away.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Yes, that was what I was thinking also.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: It\'s just, it will not be needed anymore. And in some sense, the pathway of using what the TSA calls the “credential authentication technology” which basically validates who you are using biometrics as well as that you\'re entitled to, imply that you don\'t even need a boarding pass right now when they implement this, and in some airports they have it, Clear will have to find a new business model because the TSA is going to assert that model into their own operations.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: You can kind of feel that. And indeed, I still think this most recent version of Clear -- and I had originally signed up for the initial version way back 10-15 years ago (whenever it first started),&nbsp; Rev 1.0, and then they went bankrupt and now we\'ve got Rev 2.0. But even today, I still have a challenge to see a compelling business model for the service that they offer. Oftentimes at a lot of the airports I\'ll go to, the difference between a Clear line and just the basic PreCheck line is pretty much nothing.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: Exactly. I\'ve never been impressed with their business model. They\'ve tried to sell it for stadiums and large entertainment venues. The challenges,&nbsp; it\'s just been difficult and most of their money, most of their resources, most of the revenue still comes through airports and they need that. I just don\'t see the future of it being very bright.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Is there more facial recognition coming or different facial recognition coming? Where do you see that path going?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: Well, we are nowhere near the end game on this facial recognition as effective as it is. I mean, the concept is ideal and wonderful. It\'s still not perfect. It misses certain people of color. It struggles at certain times, and research is continuing to bring the error rates down, lower and lower and lower, especially if you\'re going to create security tunnels where people just walk through it. And your picture is being taken literally in real time matched up using recognition. And then the next thing you know, you\'re at your boarding gate because everything worked out fine for you. And now it will be the majority, the vast majority of travelers. So we are nowhere near the end of this and we are at the beginning. I think the challenge right now is the perception that people do think there is a privacy concern. And like I said, I think it\'s exactly the opposite. I think this is opening up opportunities where we are going to spike in one dimension of AI which is facial recognition. And then the rest of the screening aspect at airports and validation literally gets dampened and in some cases, completely eliminated. I\'m a firm believer and supporter of facial recognition for airport security and air travel. I know that if they do it right, and they seem to be on that pathway, that we are going to have a very different experience at airport screening for security and even air travel in the next 5 to 10 years. It\'s just going to be radically and dramatically different. And I think when people realize that and begin to experience that they\'re going to be happy for it. But at this point, a lot of the rhetoric is around privacy, but our privacy is being violated so often, so frequently and in so many venues that argument is no longer holding any water. I am convinced that this is a positive future for air travel in all aspects.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Sheldon, thanks very much again for joining us on the TravelCommons podcast and sharing that. That\'s great stuff.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Our second guest is <a href=\"https://atmosphereresearch.com/\">Henry Harteveldt</a>, a travel industry analyst for many years. He had the depth of experience and industry contacts to give us a grounded sense on what’s coming with regarding biometrics…<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Henry, thanks for joining us today on the Travel Commons podcast. Wanted to talk about biometrics in and around air travel and specifically, I don\'t know if this is recency bias or what, but it just seems like I\'ve seen a whole lot more of, especially facial recognition over the past couple of years. What\'s your cut at it from a travel industry standpoint?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: In the Crawl/Walk/Run continuum, I would say that with biometrics, we are somewhere between crawl and walk. Think of biometrics as the baby who is crawling really fast and it\'s going to start walking any day now. But in the meantime, it\'s scooting all over the place. So let\'s break it down… Using facial recognition cameras for boarding flights has actually been around since before COVID began. I think the trial started somewhere in the 2016-17 time frame for international flights. That’s the only time it\'s used right now, and it started to roll out in 2018- 2019. Delta was one of the first to embrace the technology and JetBlue as well. And what it does when it works well, and this is something we should come back to to discuss, but when biometrics, facial recognition works as everybody wants it to, it speeds up the boarding process. It reduces the need for us to show not just a physical boarding pass but also a physical passport. And, as a result, on a wide-body jet, it can shave perhaps 10 or more minutes off the boarding time; on a single-aisle plane, a 737 or an A320-type of plane, that could shave 5 to 7 minutes off. So it speeds up the boarding process and makes everything a little bit more efficient. It\'s not perfect. There are people who are uncomfortable using it. There are people who are not familiar with it. So airlines have to have a belt and suspender type of approach. They\'ll have to have gate staff there for the time being. But I don\'t think we are that far away from where international travel is primarily biometrics based boarding, at least in major airports. And I think we will start soon to see it being tested for domestic travel, but there\'s going to be a wrinkle with that when we use the biometric readers at the gate to get on the plane. The database links back to US Customs and Border Patrol which has photographs of US citizens, resident aliens, and international visitors, and it can call up that data to validate that you are you and I am me. With domestic flights. I think only the TSA has the biometric data right now for PreCheck. So it may take a little bit of work to get to a point for that. So that\'s boarding. But let\'s talk about airport security. Yes, TSA is indeed testing and in some cases, I think it\'s actually beyond testing, they are rolling it out facial recognition that again eliminates the need for us to take out a driver\'s license or passport or any other physical ID and, importantly, eliminates the need for us to show any type of boarding pass, whether it\'s a paper boarding pass or digital boarding pass. And again, in theory, it speeds up the number of people who can get into and through the security screening process and reduces the need for human agents at those checkpoints. Now again, we\'re still very much at the beginning of this. And TSA is saying we are going to have a security screening officer at that checkpoint in case something goes wrong or in case someone isn\'t comfortable using biometrics.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Yeah, that was my experience in Nashville. There was a guy standing right there.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: And as we record this, the TSA is testing at Las Vegas, basically this walkthrough type of environment, a new type of screening which is biometrics-based to validate who you are. You put your bags on the belt, you go through, it\'s a lot less invasive, a lot less intrusive and supposed to be a lot faster. I actually want to go over to Las Vegas just to check it out and see what it\'s like. They have this in Dubai and they are testing it elsewhere in England and in France, they are testing it on Eurostar. Now, there are a lot of other things coming along with biometrics at a lot of European airports and in Asia as well. I was just in Singapore. There are biometrics-based scanners so that you don\'t have to queue up and have a border patrol officer review your passport, stamp your passport.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: I had it at Heathrow last November. I went through the e-gates. So I was just surprised; I walked through to the other end and I was like, “Wait, this is it?&nbsp; Nobody to stamp my passport?” No, nothing. Just like, “No. Get out of here. Go, move on.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: Right. Now, for those of us of a certain age, part of the love of travel is hearing that clunky thunk of the passport officer stamping your passport and, every time you get a new passport, the passport service mails back your old one. Those become mementos of our lives.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Yes, absolutely.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: And there is a part of me that will miss the day when we get our passports stamped just as there is a part of me that misses airline branded paper, boarding passes to show “Oh, here\'s where I have been” and so on.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: That obviously, then, pivots over to -- how should the travelers think about biometric data and the storage of that and the risk of that as a condition of travel?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: Look, it is obviously a personal decision. Our research shows that right now in the US, far more travelers would trust sharing their personal biometric information with an airline than with any government agency. So in the US right now, it\'s nearly 80% of airline passengers who, and this is first quarter 2024 data fresh off the press if you will, nearly 80% of us, airline passengers, business and leisure say they\'re willing to share their personal biometric data -- fingerprints, iris scans, etc. -- with an airline they fly regularly if it will lead to a more efficient airport experience or journey. Only a quarter of passengers say they\'re comfortable sharing their personal information right now with any government agency or entity even though, again, with the same benefits of an easier journey. Now, both of those numbers are up from 2023. The government only keeps certain information for a certain amount of time, usually 30 days or less and then it is expunged. So I am in the crowd that is comfortable sharing biometric information with governments and airlines because doing so makes my journey more efficient. It\'s faster, it\'s less stressful. It\'s fewer people that I need to interact with. Remember we\'re somewhere between Crawl and Walk. But where I see it, from the analyst perspective, the time difference, the time it will take us to go from Crawl to Walk will probably be many times longer in the time that will be needed to go from Walk to Run. Because again, as improvements emerge with the technology, the hardware, as well as the software, changes in society, changes in social acceptance of biometrics, the appreciation for benefits, we will reach that so-called tipping point where all of a sudden we see massive and welcome acceleration. It\'s interesting. Younger travelers are a lot more suspicious of the government than some of their older counterparts. And travelers over 65 are less willing to share personal data with the government. The sweet spot is travelers from 30 to 64-ish, call it.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: That\'s an interesting distribution.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: And I think that an important point for anyone listening here -- if you work for an airline, for a technology company, for an airport, for a government agency or, for that matter, if you work at a hotel company, cruise line or other parts of the travel industry. You cannot view your customers as a homogeneous block and you have to understand their welcoming the use of technology. The irony is as we all know, Gen Z are digital natives. They\'re very comfortable using technology. They will put anything and everything on social media it seems like, but they have some very legitimate concerns in their minds about how will governments use their biometric data and could it be used against them? And I\'ll just add that hotels are looking at how they evolve the check in process. You know, I think one of the dumbest questions in the world is when we are standing at the front desk of a hotel suitcase in hand, giving them our credit card and ID and the agent says “Checking in?” Like “No, I thought I would just, I have nothing better to do. So I thought I would bring a suitcase to a hotel in a different city and hand over a credit card and my personal information just to say hello.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Right. “And by the way, I like standing in line. So that\'s why I\'ve been waiting for 10 minutes to get up and have this conversation with you.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: Exactly. But you know, hotels are looking at how they improve the check in process. And granted, at the five-star true luxury properties and resorts, I think they will say, “Look, we value and our guests value the human interaction,” but they\'re going to be a part of that. Guests can say “Look, there\'s some things I can do for myself and then I want to talk to somebody about some other stuff.” But I think with four-star and below, be prepared for more biometric-based self-service check in checkout experiences. And I think, frankly, a lot of people would welcome it because it\'s a lot more secure for 99.9% of us. Eventually. I think biometrics will be more than welcome. And again, if it makes our journeys that much more efficient and less stressful, less unpleasant, there is to me, no downside.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Yes, I think that the cases you\'ve laid out is the appropriate one, which is, it\'s a combination of frictionless or making travel much more efficient than what we have today, doing away with as many lines as we can, and on the same token, being more efficient for the travel company, be it a hotel, be it an airline, be it the company running the airport so that their costs stay down and our costs stay down to travel. So the trade off on that, people are going to strike their own balance around privacy versus efficiency. Henry, thank you very much. This has been a great conversation. I\'ve really enjoyed it. Thanks for coming on a TravelCommons podcast.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: Thank you for inviting me. I enjoyed it as well.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Thanks to <a href=\"http://shj.cs.illinois.edu/\">Dr. Sheldon Jacobson</a> and <a href=\"https://atmosphereresearch.com/\">Henry Harteveldt</a> for taking the time to talk to us about biometrics, facial recognition and give us an idea of what we travelers should expect to see soon. Check out the show notes at TravelCommons.com for links to their work.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"className\":\"has-medium-font-size\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em><a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/track/0geYaxa8LozoV8afrKwdTo?si=aa1cf0be8ee9400a\" title=\"\">Pictures of You</a></em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #199</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I hope you enjoyed the show; the conversations with Sheldon and Henry. They had so much great insight; the editing decisions were tough. This is usually the point where I say “and I hope you decide to stay subscribed” but this is, as they say in the UK, the penultimate episode of the TravelCommons podcast; a fancy way to say “second-to-the-last”. The next episode will be #200, so a good round number to end it. I’ll unpack it all next month, but just wanted to give you all a heads up.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As always, you can find us and listen to the current episodes on all the main podcast sites -- Apple Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, and Amazon Music. Google has shut down their Podcast app, at least in the US, but you can now get the regular TravelCommons audio episodes on the TravelCommons’ YouTube channel. Go figure -- I can never keep track of what bits Google is shutting down or renaming. But you can always ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page at TravelCommons.com for a transcript of the episode and links to Sheldon and Henry’s websites. And along the side of the page, you’ll find links to all the TravelCommons’ socials.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" title=\"\">mpeacock on Twitter</a>, write them on the TravelCommons page on <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" title=\"\">Facebook </a>or <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" title=\"\">Instagram</a>, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com.&nbsp; And thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in emails, Tweets and post comments on the website. I really appreciate it.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And until we talk again, safe travels; and thanks for stopping by the TravelCommons.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_190.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #200 — Wrapping Up the TravelCommons Journey','','inherit','closed','closed','','4494-revision-v1','','','2024-05-22 17:45:36','2024-05-22 22:45:36','',4494,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4496',0,'revision','',0),
(4497,1,'2024-05-22 17:47:56','2024-05-22 22:47:56','[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"hhttps://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/abandoned-motel-sign-300x300.jpg\" alt=\" a traveler standing in front of a facial recognition scanner at an airport. The scanner is emitting error signals, and the traveler looks frustrated.\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /> I knew these travel delays were aging me[/caption]\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Using my face as my boarding pass to get on a flight to Oaxaca, Mexico and then as my passport to get back in the US got me thinking about how facial recognition has permeated the travel experience. To help us understand where this is going, we talk with two travel industry experts, <a href=\"http://shj.cs.illinois.edu/\">Dr. Sheldon Jacobson</a> and <a href=\"https://atmosphereresearch.com/\">Henry Harteveldt</a>. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>But before that, we talk about eating grasshoppers, an EV experience with Avis, and a couple of my travel tips that need to be revised.  All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_199.mp3\" title=\"\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #199: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN a couple of days after a last-minute 200-mile trip up to Carbondale, Illinois, home of the <a href=\"https://siu.edu/\" title=\"\">Southern Illinois University</a> Salukis… but that didn’t matter. What <em>did</em> matter is that Carbondale was right in the <a href=\"https://eclipse.siu.edu/\" title=\"\">center of the solar eclipse’s path</a> across North America, which meant we had 4 minutes of total eclipse.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Looking up, straight into the sun with its corona glowing, wavering around the black disk of the moon -- I’ve seen… we’ve all seen pictures of total eclipses, and of this one all across social and regular media Monday afternoon. But the pictures couldn’t do justice to being there, even if <em>there</em> was the far end of the Salukis stadium parking lot, backing up to a scraggly bit of woods. The experience more than made up for the 3-hr drive there and the 5½-hour bumper-to-bumper traffic back. I add it to my list of things that, even though we’ve seen seemingly an infinite number of pictures of them, experiencing them in real life was worth the hassle to physically travel to see them. The Taj Mahal, the Great Wall of China, Niagara Falls -- all on the list. As opposed to, say, The Mona Lisa in the Louvre. The crowd of people with their phones in the air trying to get a picture was much better than the Mona Lisa itself.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Before that, the start of March, we were in Oaxaca, Mexico for a week. I’ve had Oaxaca on my “To Visit” list for 4-5 years now. For me, it was a good match -- the combination of interesting food, lots of culture, and no beach. I’ve done “resort-y” Mexico -- Cabo, Cancún, Puerto Vallarta -- not a big fan. While there were a lot of tourists in Oaxaca, it didn’t seem to be overrun with them like, say, the center of Cabo is. Maybe because the city center is bigger, so there’s more space to absorb them, or maybe the absolute number of tourists are lower; it wasn’t an easy nor a cheap flight to get there.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>We hit the food scene pretty hard, high- and low-brow; food stands in the market; high-end places serving up phenomenal <a href=\"https://www.rickbayless.com/recipe/oaxacan-black-mole/\" title=\"\">moles</a>. But the food that made the biggest impression is the insects. It wasn’t some tourist-baiting shtick. Walking past a group of street vendors, I saw one of the women making a snack of a couple of grasshoppers wrapped in a small tortilla. At a mezcal bar on the eastern edge of the Centro, the bartender put down a small bowl of grasshoppers as a bar snack. (If you follow <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" title=\"\">TravelCommons on Instagram</a>, you can see a picture in my Oaxaca story) “Those are good grasshoppers,” he told us. “I drive an hour up towards Pueblo to get them. They’re not farmed like the ones you get in the markets.” I have to admit that I’m not enough of an insect connoisseur to be able to pick out the finer nuances of free-range vs. farmed grasshoppers, but they were as good as Beer Nuts as a bar snack. Or maybe that was just the 3rd, or 4th, or 5th shot of mezcal talking.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/duckett/2333\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Another Girl (instrumental)</a> by duckett (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/duckett/23334 Ft: fourstones, miafas</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Friend of the podcast Allan Marko swung by the website to leave this comment about the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2024/02/28/podcast-198-london-vacation-rental-woes-hertzs-ev-retreat/\" title=\"\">last episode</a>:<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“I was assigned an EV by Avis at Fort Lauderdale [at the end of February]. Curious enough to try it out for the relatively short distances I would be traveling, I got in. After starting, I noticed it only had a 10% charge, so, “check please.” I fired up the Avis app and selected a Chevy Malibu with 1,200 miles on it.&nbsp; As for booking.com, we had tremendous luck using that website for most of our accommodations over a two month period in SE Asia five years ago - exclusively for hotels though.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Allan, thanks for that. Expecting you to drive off with a 10% charge? Avis would never think to give you a car with just an ⅛-th of a tank. And if they did, it would take them 10 minutes to fill the tank and get it back to you. But for that EV? Even at a Tesla Supercharger, at least an hour, maybe more. No wonder they tried to get you to do it. And regards to booking.com, my experience with their hotel product is the same as yours -- never had a problem. But their property rentals, never again!</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>One of my regular travel pro tips from years ago was “Don’t take the last flight out” because, if you missed your connection or your flight was canceled, you had a backup. And, as an IRROP passenger -- industry lingo for “irregular operations” -- you have priority on open seats on that later flight; even more so if you have frequent flier status. But nowadays, with US airlines sporting load factors over 80%, this strategy is a lot tougher to make work. Last June, back in episode #194, I talked about how United’s delay leaving Amsterdam meant we missed our connection home, and how I spent about an hour between the service agents at ORD and on the phone, saying “This is unacceptable” 2, 3, 4 times before they found two seats on the later flight to BNA that they’d been saying was completely full. And now this trip flying home from Oaxaca through DFW on American, I had gotten an email saying there could be bad weather, but I thought, “Well, there’s always that later flight.” En route from Oaxaca to DFW, I’m connected to the plane WiFi and an hour before we land, I get a notice from American -- our flight to Nashville had been canceled. OK, that sucks, but no panic, they’d rebook me on the later flight. But I keep reading -- no rebooking; it just tells me to go to the American app. The WiFi over northern Mexico is not the greatest, but when I do get the app to respond, it’s not showing the later flight as an option. Indeed, the options keep changing with each refresh, but nothing earlier than the next day, Friday, or sometimes, not until Saturday, two days later. It wasn’t until after we landed, passed through Immigration, and were waiting at baggage claim to pick up our luggage to go through Customs that we finally got a message through the app that they’d found us seats on the later flight. Still got home that night, but in both these instances, the customer service experience has degraded just so far. I’ve had to push <em>very hard</em>, and, honestly, be a bit of a jerk to get what used to come seamlessly.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And another travel tip that seems to need retiring --<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/12/07/top-10-holiday-travel-tips-3/\" title=\"\"> “Use Twitter as a Concierge Service”</a>. While struggling to rebook while still in the air from Oaxaca, I pinged American on Twitter hoping for a little more help. What I got was an amazing (and depressing) amount of spam messaging masquerading as AA customer service managers. It’s easy to get fooled in the panic of trying to find a way home, but a few rules to keep in mind -- only communicate with the airline’s gold-checked verified accounts; ignore messages from everyone else -- like “AMERICAN AIR HELP DESK” (all in caps) or “Jason frank (uppercase Jason, lowercase case frank) American Air manger” (as opposed to “manager”); and never give anyone your phone number.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And there’s a quick programming note at the end of this episode, so for those interested, hold off on hitting the Skip button when you hear the music.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" title=\"\">Twitter (X?) message to mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" title=\"\">Facebook page</a>, or on the <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" title=\"\">Instagram</a> account at travelcommons -- or you can skip all that social media stuff and post your comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djiz/10514\">Nube - Djiz Rmx</a> by Kwame (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: SylviaO</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Smile for Security: The Future of Facial Recognition in Travel</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Over the years on the podcast, we’ve talked about how travelers are seeing more and more use of biometrics in their travel days. I’ve told the story of my first fingerprint scan back in the late ‘90’s so I could skip the US immigration line on my weekly commute home from Toronto-Pearson Airport. My colleague’s reaction -- “I’m not giving the US government my biometrics!” Me -- “I can skip a 3-minute line? Where do I sign up?” Which I think shows that the privacy-vs.-convenience choices haven\'t fundamentally changed all that much in the subsequent 25 years.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But (surprise!), technology has, and it seems to be accelerating the use of biometrics, specifically facial recognition. Boarding our flight to Oaxaca, our face was our boarding pass -- just look at the camera, wait for the “bing”, and move on. And coming back, the Global Entry kiosks no longer need passports, no longer have you twisting your hand just so to get the fingerprint pad to read all five fingers; just walk up, it takes your picture, and tells you to move on.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Which got me wondering -- where is this going? To help answer this, I invited on two guys who have been digging deep into this for a number of years. First up, <a href=\"http://shj.cs.illinois.edu/\">Dr. Sheldon Jacobson</a>, Professor in Computer Science at the University of Illinois. Sheldon was last on the podcast in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/09/22/podcast-189-why-we-travel-when-the-first-flight-isnt-best/\" title=\"\">episode #189</a> in September 2022 talking about why another of my travel tips, “catch the earliest flight you can”, is not always right. Over the years, Sheldon has developed operations research models to optimize aviation security. So I asked him to come back on the podcast to talk about the growth of biometrics…<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Sheldon, thanks for coming back on to the Travel Commons podcast. Wanted to talk with you about biometrics, facial recognition, all the things that seem to be increasing with regards to air travel.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: The airlines, as well as the Transportation Security Administration need to know who you are when you are traveling and they relied on identification cards, driver\'s license, real IDs and are continuing to be part of the future. But ultimately, the best way to determine who you are is through your face and biometrics and artificial intelligence imbued with it. In fact, it is a solution that people are recognizing; the airlines are starting to use it. And of course, the Transportation Security Administration is investing billions of dollars to advance this idea. And there\'s a reason why they\'re doing this. They\'re doing this simply because the traditional model of airport security screening has been to detect stuff -- prohibited items, knives, explosives, firearms, even, you know, full size tubes of toothpaste could be a threat based on explosives that can be embedded in them. However, the real threat are the people and facial recognition is a means to transform the platform for airport security from the detection of items to knowing your traveler. And that\'s where we\'re heading right now. And this is the future of airport security.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: And how does that work? How do you think that works?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: TSA has not broadcast this and I don\'t even know if they\'re thinking about it, but I have thought about it and I have proposed to them because I visited them in October 2023. And I told them that if they can bring facial recognition biometrics and the use of AI to truly validate and authenticate the travelers, the need for physical screening will be reduced tremendously to the point that they can create a new class of traveler, which I would call a “Super PreCheck” traveler who subjects themselves to greater background vetting. But then they would be treated like a known crew member at an airport and require no further physical screening. That is the future of airport security.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: It\'s almost like “Back to the Future”, right? It\'s almost like back to pre 9/11 days.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: Now, some will argue, “Oh, someone will gain the system and we will have a terrorist threat because of that.” And I would argue the exact opposite, that the only people who would be willing to subject themselves to the background check would be people who know that they\'re going to get through it fine. And the ones who are truly threats cannot risk it because rarely are people acting by themselves. They\'re often acting in a network. And as a result of that, for them to be exposed, they would be exposing their whole network. And the risk of doing that is far too great. What it would also do is it would parse the whole spectrum of travelers into a group of people who are willing to be known and a group of travelers that are not willing to be known. But over time, the ones who are willing to be known will be much larger, which means you can target your resources and your attention on this so-called unknown group and actually make it more secure for the air system by targeting your resources in that way. After September 11th, everybody was treated the same -- one size fits all. TSA PreCheck moved away from that. Now, I\'m proposing we move even further. And our original research we presented to the TSA in 2003 when we proposed this idea of differential screening to them and how it would work and why it would be beneficial. We said that you really need three classes, two would be fine, but three would be better. And it turns out that third class is what we would now call a “Super PreCheck” class of passengers. And those are the people who would be treated like crew members, the known crew members. And a lot of people would be willing to pay for that privilege and we\'ve put boundaries on what that means. It wouldn\'t be renewed every five years; it would be renewed potentially every year. It would be more expensive. But there\'s a lot of business travelers who are willing to pay that price to basically pass through security untethered, but they aren\'t a risk to the system anyway. So why waste resources and time on them? It would transform the footprint and create what I would call “security tunnels” rather than security checkpoints for many of these people.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: That seems to make sense. What was the reaction to that at TSA?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: That\'s a good question. I don\'t know. I don\'t know if I can say that.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Ok, I got it.. Understood. I just had to ask. Well, that\'s a great concept and I appreciate that insight around you guys’ research. You\'re right. I mean, there\'s something that says you just look at what people are willing to sign up with -- with Clear. with Global Entry, with PreCheck. Again, frequent travelers will always look to streamline that experience. And so I would agree, I would say there would be people in a heartbeat who would raise their hand for that.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: Exactly. Right now, people who sign up for Clear pay $189 on the top end for one year, being able to be identified as who they are and go to the front of the precheck line. That\'s all they\'re paying for and they\'re not paying for anything more. If the TSA implements a new class of passengers then Clear would become superfluous and literally would go away.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Yes, that was what I was thinking also.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: It\'s just, it will not be needed anymore. And in some sense, the pathway of using what the TSA calls the “credential authentication technology” which basically validates who you are using biometrics as well as that you\'re entitled to, imply that you don\'t even need a boarding pass right now when they implement this, and in some airports they have it, Clear will have to find a new business model because the TSA is going to assert that model into their own operations.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: You can kind of feel that. And indeed, I still think this most recent version of Clear -- and I had originally signed up for the initial version way back 10-15 years ago (whenever it first started),&nbsp; Rev 1.0, and then they went bankrupt and now we\'ve got Rev 2.0. But even today, I still have a challenge to see a compelling business model for the service that they offer. Oftentimes at a lot of the airports I\'ll go to, the difference between a Clear line and just the basic PreCheck line is pretty much nothing.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: Exactly. I\'ve never been impressed with their business model. They\'ve tried to sell it for stadiums and large entertainment venues. The challenges,&nbsp; it\'s just been difficult and most of their money, most of their resources, most of the revenue still comes through airports and they need that. I just don\'t see the future of it being very bright.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Is there more facial recognition coming or different facial recognition coming? Where do you see that path going?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: Well, we are nowhere near the end game on this facial recognition as effective as it is. I mean, the concept is ideal and wonderful. It\'s still not perfect. It misses certain people of color. It struggles at certain times, and research is continuing to bring the error rates down, lower and lower and lower, especially if you\'re going to create security tunnels where people just walk through it. And your picture is being taken literally in real time matched up using recognition. And then the next thing you know, you\'re at your boarding gate because everything worked out fine for you. And now it will be the majority, the vast majority of travelers. So we are nowhere near the end of this and we are at the beginning. I think the challenge right now is the perception that people do think there is a privacy concern. And like I said, I think it\'s exactly the opposite. I think this is opening up opportunities where we are going to spike in one dimension of AI which is facial recognition. And then the rest of the screening aspect at airports and validation literally gets dampened and in some cases, completely eliminated. I\'m a firm believer and supporter of facial recognition for airport security and air travel. I know that if they do it right, and they seem to be on that pathway, that we are going to have a very different experience at airport screening for security and even air travel in the next 5 to 10 years. It\'s just going to be radically and dramatically different. And I think when people realize that and begin to experience that they\'re going to be happy for it. But at this point, a lot of the rhetoric is around privacy, but our privacy is being violated so often, so frequently and in so many venues that argument is no longer holding any water. I am convinced that this is a positive future for air travel in all aspects.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Sheldon, thanks very much again for joining us on the TravelCommons podcast and sharing that. That\'s great stuff.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Our second guest is <a href=\"https://atmosphereresearch.com/\">Henry Harteveldt</a>, a travel industry analyst for many years. He had the depth of experience and industry contacts to give us a grounded sense on what’s coming with regarding biometrics…<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Henry, thanks for joining us today on the Travel Commons podcast. Wanted to talk about biometrics in and around air travel and specifically, I don\'t know if this is recency bias or what, but it just seems like I\'ve seen a whole lot more of, especially facial recognition over the past couple of years. What\'s your cut at it from a travel industry standpoint?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: In the Crawl/Walk/Run continuum, I would say that with biometrics, we are somewhere between crawl and walk. Think of biometrics as the baby who is crawling really fast and it\'s going to start walking any day now. But in the meantime, it\'s scooting all over the place. So let\'s break it down… Using facial recognition cameras for boarding flights has actually been around since before COVID began. I think the trial started somewhere in the 2016-17 time frame for international flights. That’s the only time it\'s used right now, and it started to roll out in 2018- 2019. Delta was one of the first to embrace the technology and JetBlue as well. And what it does when it works well, and this is something we should come back to to discuss, but when biometrics, facial recognition works as everybody wants it to, it speeds up the boarding process. It reduces the need for us to show not just a physical boarding pass but also a physical passport. And, as a result, on a wide-body jet, it can shave perhaps 10 or more minutes off the boarding time; on a single-aisle plane, a 737 or an A320-type of plane, that could shave 5 to 7 minutes off. So it speeds up the boarding process and makes everything a little bit more efficient. It\'s not perfect. There are people who are uncomfortable using it. There are people who are not familiar with it. So airlines have to have a belt and suspender type of approach. They\'ll have to have gate staff there for the time being. But I don\'t think we are that far away from where international travel is primarily biometrics based boarding, at least in major airports. And I think we will start soon to see it being tested for domestic travel, but there\'s going to be a wrinkle with that when we use the biometric readers at the gate to get on the plane. The database links back to US Customs and Border Patrol which has photographs of US citizens, resident aliens, and international visitors, and it can call up that data to validate that you are you and I am me. With domestic flights. I think only the TSA has the biometric data right now for PreCheck. So it may take a little bit of work to get to a point for that. So that\'s boarding. But let\'s talk about airport security. Yes, TSA is indeed testing and in some cases, I think it\'s actually beyond testing, they are rolling it out facial recognition that again eliminates the need for us to take out a driver\'s license or passport or any other physical ID and, importantly, eliminates the need for us to show any type of boarding pass, whether it\'s a paper boarding pass or digital boarding pass. And again, in theory, it speeds up the number of people who can get into and through the security screening process and reduces the need for human agents at those checkpoints. Now again, we\'re still very much at the beginning of this. And TSA is saying we are going to have a security screening officer at that checkpoint in case something goes wrong or in case someone isn\'t comfortable using biometrics.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Yeah, that was my experience in Nashville. There was a guy standing right there.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: And as we record this, the TSA is testing at Las Vegas, basically this walkthrough type of environment, a new type of screening which is biometrics-based to validate who you are. You put your bags on the belt, you go through, it\'s a lot less invasive, a lot less intrusive and supposed to be a lot faster. I actually want to go over to Las Vegas just to check it out and see what it\'s like. They have this in Dubai and they are testing it elsewhere in England and in France, they are testing it on Eurostar. Now, there are a lot of other things coming along with biometrics at a lot of European airports and in Asia as well. I was just in Singapore. There are biometrics-based scanners so that you don\'t have to queue up and have a border patrol officer review your passport, stamp your passport.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: I had it at Heathrow last November. I went through the e-gates. So I was just surprised; I walked through to the other end and I was like, “Wait, this is it?&nbsp; Nobody to stamp my passport?” No, nothing. Just like, “No. Get out of here. Go, move on.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: Right. Now, for those of us of a certain age, part of the love of travel is hearing that clunky thunk of the passport officer stamping your passport and, every time you get a new passport, the passport service mails back your old one. Those become mementos of our lives.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Yes, absolutely.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: And there is a part of me that will miss the day when we get our passports stamped just as there is a part of me that misses airline branded paper, boarding passes to show “Oh, here\'s where I have been” and so on.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: That obviously, then, pivots over to -- how should the travelers think about biometric data and the storage of that and the risk of that as a condition of travel?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: Look, it is obviously a personal decision. Our research shows that right now in the US, far more travelers would trust sharing their personal biometric information with an airline than with any government agency. So in the US right now, it\'s nearly 80% of airline passengers who, and this is first quarter 2024 data fresh off the press if you will, nearly 80% of us, airline passengers, business and leisure say they\'re willing to share their personal biometric data -- fingerprints, iris scans, etc. -- with an airline they fly regularly if it will lead to a more efficient airport experience or journey. Only a quarter of passengers say they\'re comfortable sharing their personal information right now with any government agency or entity even though, again, with the same benefits of an easier journey. Now, both of those numbers are up from 2023. The government only keeps certain information for a certain amount of time, usually 30 days or less and then it is expunged. So I am in the crowd that is comfortable sharing biometric information with governments and airlines because doing so makes my journey more efficient. It\'s faster, it\'s less stressful. It\'s fewer people that I need to interact with. Remember we\'re somewhere between Crawl and Walk. But where I see it, from the analyst perspective, the time difference, the time it will take us to go from Crawl to Walk will probably be many times longer in the time that will be needed to go from Walk to Run. Because again, as improvements emerge with the technology, the hardware, as well as the software, changes in society, changes in social acceptance of biometrics, the appreciation for benefits, we will reach that so-called tipping point where all of a sudden we see massive and welcome acceleration. It\'s interesting. Younger travelers are a lot more suspicious of the government than some of their older counterparts. And travelers over 65 are less willing to share personal data with the government. The sweet spot is travelers from 30 to 64-ish, call it.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: That\'s an interesting distribution.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: And I think that an important point for anyone listening here -- if you work for an airline, for a technology company, for an airport, for a government agency or, for that matter, if you work at a hotel company, cruise line or other parts of the travel industry. You cannot view your customers as a homogeneous block and you have to understand their welcoming the use of technology. The irony is as we all know, Gen Z are digital natives. They\'re very comfortable using technology. They will put anything and everything on social media it seems like, but they have some very legitimate concerns in their minds about how will governments use their biometric data and could it be used against them? And I\'ll just add that hotels are looking at how they evolve the check in process. You know, I think one of the dumbest questions in the world is when we are standing at the front desk of a hotel suitcase in hand, giving them our credit card and ID and the agent says “Checking in?” Like “No, I thought I would just, I have nothing better to do. So I thought I would bring a suitcase to a hotel in a different city and hand over a credit card and my personal information just to say hello.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Right. “And by the way, I like standing in line. So that\'s why I\'ve been waiting for 10 minutes to get up and have this conversation with you.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: Exactly. But you know, hotels are looking at how they improve the check in process. And granted, at the five-star true luxury properties and resorts, I think they will say, “Look, we value and our guests value the human interaction,” but they\'re going to be a part of that. Guests can say “Look, there\'s some things I can do for myself and then I want to talk to somebody about some other stuff.” But I think with four-star and below, be prepared for more biometric-based self-service check in checkout experiences. And I think, frankly, a lot of people would welcome it because it\'s a lot more secure for 99.9% of us. Eventually. I think biometrics will be more than welcome. And again, if it makes our journeys that much more efficient and less stressful, less unpleasant, there is to me, no downside.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Yes, I think that the cases you\'ve laid out is the appropriate one, which is, it\'s a combination of frictionless or making travel much more efficient than what we have today, doing away with as many lines as we can, and on the same token, being more efficient for the travel company, be it a hotel, be it an airline, be it the company running the airport so that their costs stay down and our costs stay down to travel. So the trade off on that, people are going to strike their own balance around privacy versus efficiency. Henry, thank you very much. This has been a great conversation. I\'ve really enjoyed it. Thanks for coming on a TravelCommons podcast.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: Thank you for inviting me. I enjoyed it as well.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Thanks to <a href=\"http://shj.cs.illinois.edu/\">Dr. Sheldon Jacobson</a> and <a href=\"https://atmosphereresearch.com/\">Henry Harteveldt</a> for taking the time to talk to us about biometrics, facial recognition and give us an idea of what we travelers should expect to see soon. Check out the show notes at TravelCommons.com for links to their work.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"className\":\"has-medium-font-size\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em><a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/track/0geYaxa8LozoV8afrKwdTo?si=aa1cf0be8ee9400a\" title=\"\">Pictures of You</a></em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #199</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I hope you enjoyed the show; the conversations with Sheldon and Henry. They had so much great insight; the editing decisions were tough. This is usually the point where I say “and I hope you decide to stay subscribed” but this is, as they say in the UK, the penultimate episode of the TravelCommons podcast; a fancy way to say “second-to-the-last”. The next episode will be #200, so a good round number to end it. I’ll unpack it all next month, but just wanted to give you all a heads up.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As always, you can find us and listen to the current episodes on all the main podcast sites -- Apple Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, and Amazon Music. Google has shut down their Podcast app, at least in the US, but you can now get the regular TravelCommons audio episodes on the TravelCommons’ YouTube channel. Go figure -- I can never keep track of what bits Google is shutting down or renaming. But you can always ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page at TravelCommons.com for a transcript of the episode and links to Sheldon and Henry’s websites. And along the side of the page, you’ll find links to all the TravelCommons’ socials.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" title=\"\">mpeacock on Twitter</a>, write them on the TravelCommons page on <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" title=\"\">Facebook </a>or <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" title=\"\">Instagram</a>, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com.&nbsp; And thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in emails, Tweets and post comments on the website. I really appreciate it.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And until we talk again, safe travels; and thanks for stopping by the TravelCommons.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_190.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #200 — Wrapping Up the TravelCommons Journey','','inherit','closed','closed','','4494-revision-v1','','','2024-05-22 17:47:56','2024-05-22 22:47:56','',4494,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4497',0,'revision','',0),
(4498,1,'2024-05-22 17:48:39','2024-05-22 22:48:39','[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"hhttps://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/abandoned-motel-sign-300x300.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /> I knew these travel delays were aging me[/caption]\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Using my face as my boarding pass to get on a flight to Oaxaca, Mexico and then as my passport to get back in the US got me thinking about how facial recognition has permeated the travel experience. To help us understand where this is going, we talk with two travel industry experts, <a href=\"http://shj.cs.illinois.edu/\">Dr. Sheldon Jacobson</a> and <a href=\"https://atmosphereresearch.com/\">Henry Harteveldt</a>. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>But before that, we talk about eating grasshoppers, an EV experience with Avis, and a couple of my travel tips that need to be revised.  All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_199.mp3\" title=\"\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #199: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN a couple of days after a last-minute 200-mile trip up to Carbondale, Illinois, home of the <a href=\"https://siu.edu/\" title=\"\">Southern Illinois University</a> Salukis… but that didn’t matter. What <em>did</em> matter is that Carbondale was right in the <a href=\"https://eclipse.siu.edu/\" title=\"\">center of the solar eclipse’s path</a> across North America, which meant we had 4 minutes of total eclipse.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Looking up, straight into the sun with its corona glowing, wavering around the black disk of the moon -- I’ve seen… we’ve all seen pictures of total eclipses, and of this one all across social and regular media Monday afternoon. But the pictures couldn’t do justice to being there, even if <em>there</em> was the far end of the Salukis stadium parking lot, backing up to a scraggly bit of woods. The experience more than made up for the 3-hr drive there and the 5½-hour bumper-to-bumper traffic back. I add it to my list of things that, even though we’ve seen seemingly an infinite number of pictures of them, experiencing them in real life was worth the hassle to physically travel to see them. The Taj Mahal, the Great Wall of China, Niagara Falls -- all on the list. As opposed to, say, The Mona Lisa in the Louvre. The crowd of people with their phones in the air trying to get a picture was much better than the Mona Lisa itself.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Before that, the start of March, we were in Oaxaca, Mexico for a week. I’ve had Oaxaca on my “To Visit” list for 4-5 years now. For me, it was a good match -- the combination of interesting food, lots of culture, and no beach. I’ve done “resort-y” Mexico -- Cabo, Cancún, Puerto Vallarta -- not a big fan. While there were a lot of tourists in Oaxaca, it didn’t seem to be overrun with them like, say, the center of Cabo is. Maybe because the city center is bigger, so there’s more space to absorb them, or maybe the absolute number of tourists are lower; it wasn’t an easy nor a cheap flight to get there.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>We hit the food scene pretty hard, high- and low-brow; food stands in the market; high-end places serving up phenomenal <a href=\"https://www.rickbayless.com/recipe/oaxacan-black-mole/\" title=\"\">moles</a>. But the food that made the biggest impression is the insects. It wasn’t some tourist-baiting shtick. Walking past a group of street vendors, I saw one of the women making a snack of a couple of grasshoppers wrapped in a small tortilla. At a mezcal bar on the eastern edge of the Centro, the bartender put down a small bowl of grasshoppers as a bar snack. (If you follow <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" title=\"\">TravelCommons on Instagram</a>, you can see a picture in my Oaxaca story) “Those are good grasshoppers,” he told us. “I drive an hour up towards Pueblo to get them. They’re not farmed like the ones you get in the markets.” I have to admit that I’m not enough of an insect connoisseur to be able to pick out the finer nuances of free-range vs. farmed grasshoppers, but they were as good as Beer Nuts as a bar snack. Or maybe that was just the 3rd, or 4th, or 5th shot of mezcal talking.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/duckett/2333\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Another Girl (instrumental)</a> by duckett (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/duckett/23334 Ft: fourstones, miafas</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Friend of the podcast Allan Marko swung by the website to leave this comment about the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2024/02/28/podcast-198-london-vacation-rental-woes-hertzs-ev-retreat/\" title=\"\">last episode</a>:<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“I was assigned an EV by Avis at Fort Lauderdale [at the end of February]. Curious enough to try it out for the relatively short distances I would be traveling, I got in. After starting, I noticed it only had a 10% charge, so, “check please.” I fired up the Avis app and selected a Chevy Malibu with 1,200 miles on it.&nbsp; As for booking.com, we had tremendous luck using that website for most of our accommodations over a two month period in SE Asia five years ago - exclusively for hotels though.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Allan, thanks for that. Expecting you to drive off with a 10% charge? Avis would never think to give you a car with just an ⅛-th of a tank. And if they did, it would take them 10 minutes to fill the tank and get it back to you. But for that EV? Even at a Tesla Supercharger, at least an hour, maybe more. No wonder they tried to get you to do it. And regards to booking.com, my experience with their hotel product is the same as yours -- never had a problem. But their property rentals, never again!</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>One of my regular travel pro tips from years ago was “Don’t take the last flight out” because, if you missed your connection or your flight was canceled, you had a backup. And, as an IRROP passenger -- industry lingo for “irregular operations” -- you have priority on open seats on that later flight; even more so if you have frequent flier status. But nowadays, with US airlines sporting load factors over 80%, this strategy is a lot tougher to make work. Last June, back in episode #194, I talked about how United’s delay leaving Amsterdam meant we missed our connection home, and how I spent about an hour between the service agents at ORD and on the phone, saying “This is unacceptable” 2, 3, 4 times before they found two seats on the later flight to BNA that they’d been saying was completely full. And now this trip flying home from Oaxaca through DFW on American, I had gotten an email saying there could be bad weather, but I thought, “Well, there’s always that later flight.” En route from Oaxaca to DFW, I’m connected to the plane WiFi and an hour before we land, I get a notice from American -- our flight to Nashville had been canceled. OK, that sucks, but no panic, they’d rebook me on the later flight. But I keep reading -- no rebooking; it just tells me to go to the American app. The WiFi over northern Mexico is not the greatest, but when I do get the app to respond, it’s not showing the later flight as an option. Indeed, the options keep changing with each refresh, but nothing earlier than the next day, Friday, or sometimes, not until Saturday, two days later. It wasn’t until after we landed, passed through Immigration, and were waiting at baggage claim to pick up our luggage to go through Customs that we finally got a message through the app that they’d found us seats on the later flight. Still got home that night, but in both these instances, the customer service experience has degraded just so far. I’ve had to push <em>very hard</em>, and, honestly, be a bit of a jerk to get what used to come seamlessly.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And another travel tip that seems to need retiring --<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/12/07/top-10-holiday-travel-tips-3/\" title=\"\"> “Use Twitter as a Concierge Service”</a>. While struggling to rebook while still in the air from Oaxaca, I pinged American on Twitter hoping for a little more help. What I got was an amazing (and depressing) amount of spam messaging masquerading as AA customer service managers. It’s easy to get fooled in the panic of trying to find a way home, but a few rules to keep in mind -- only communicate with the airline’s gold-checked verified accounts; ignore messages from everyone else -- like “AMERICAN AIR HELP DESK” (all in caps) or “Jason frank (uppercase Jason, lowercase case frank) American Air manger” (as opposed to “manager”); and never give anyone your phone number.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And there’s a quick programming note at the end of this episode, so for those interested, hold off on hitting the Skip button when you hear the music.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" title=\"\">Twitter (X?) message to mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" title=\"\">Facebook page</a>, or on the <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" title=\"\">Instagram</a> account at travelcommons -- or you can skip all that social media stuff and post your comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djiz/10514\">Nube - Djiz Rmx</a> by Kwame (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: SylviaO</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Smile for Security: The Future of Facial Recognition in Travel</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Over the years on the podcast, we’ve talked about how travelers are seeing more and more use of biometrics in their travel days. I’ve told the story of my first fingerprint scan back in the late ‘90’s so I could skip the US immigration line on my weekly commute home from Toronto-Pearson Airport. My colleague’s reaction -- “I’m not giving the US government my biometrics!” Me -- “I can skip a 3-minute line? Where do I sign up?” Which I think shows that the privacy-vs.-convenience choices haven\'t fundamentally changed all that much in the subsequent 25 years.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But (surprise!), technology has, and it seems to be accelerating the use of biometrics, specifically facial recognition. Boarding our flight to Oaxaca, our face was our boarding pass -- just look at the camera, wait for the “bing”, and move on. And coming back, the Global Entry kiosks no longer need passports, no longer have you twisting your hand just so to get the fingerprint pad to read all five fingers; just walk up, it takes your picture, and tells you to move on.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Which got me wondering -- where is this going? To help answer this, I invited on two guys who have been digging deep into this for a number of years. First up, <a href=\"http://shj.cs.illinois.edu/\">Dr. Sheldon Jacobson</a>, Professor in Computer Science at the University of Illinois. Sheldon was last on the podcast in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/09/22/podcast-189-why-we-travel-when-the-first-flight-isnt-best/\" title=\"\">episode #189</a> in September 2022 talking about why another of my travel tips, “catch the earliest flight you can”, is not always right. Over the years, Sheldon has developed operations research models to optimize aviation security. So I asked him to come back on the podcast to talk about the growth of biometrics…<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Sheldon, thanks for coming back on to the Travel Commons podcast. Wanted to talk with you about biometrics, facial recognition, all the things that seem to be increasing with regards to air travel.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: The airlines, as well as the Transportation Security Administration need to know who you are when you are traveling and they relied on identification cards, driver\'s license, real IDs and are continuing to be part of the future. But ultimately, the best way to determine who you are is through your face and biometrics and artificial intelligence imbued with it. In fact, it is a solution that people are recognizing; the airlines are starting to use it. And of course, the Transportation Security Administration is investing billions of dollars to advance this idea. And there\'s a reason why they\'re doing this. They\'re doing this simply because the traditional model of airport security screening has been to detect stuff -- prohibited items, knives, explosives, firearms, even, you know, full size tubes of toothpaste could be a threat based on explosives that can be embedded in them. However, the real threat are the people and facial recognition is a means to transform the platform for airport security from the detection of items to knowing your traveler. And that\'s where we\'re heading right now. And this is the future of airport security.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: And how does that work? How do you think that works?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: TSA has not broadcast this and I don\'t even know if they\'re thinking about it, but I have thought about it and I have proposed to them because I visited them in October 2023. And I told them that if they can bring facial recognition biometrics and the use of AI to truly validate and authenticate the travelers, the need for physical screening will be reduced tremendously to the point that they can create a new class of traveler, which I would call a “Super PreCheck” traveler who subjects themselves to greater background vetting. But then they would be treated like a known crew member at an airport and require no further physical screening. That is the future of airport security.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: It\'s almost like “Back to the Future”, right? It\'s almost like back to pre 9/11 days.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: Now, some will argue, “Oh, someone will gain the system and we will have a terrorist threat because of that.” And I would argue the exact opposite, that the only people who would be willing to subject themselves to the background check would be people who know that they\'re going to get through it fine. And the ones who are truly threats cannot risk it because rarely are people acting by themselves. They\'re often acting in a network. And as a result of that, for them to be exposed, they would be exposing their whole network. And the risk of doing that is far too great. What it would also do is it would parse the whole spectrum of travelers into a group of people who are willing to be known and a group of travelers that are not willing to be known. But over time, the ones who are willing to be known will be much larger, which means you can target your resources and your attention on this so-called unknown group and actually make it more secure for the air system by targeting your resources in that way. After September 11th, everybody was treated the same -- one size fits all. TSA PreCheck moved away from that. Now, I\'m proposing we move even further. And our original research we presented to the TSA in 2003 when we proposed this idea of differential screening to them and how it would work and why it would be beneficial. We said that you really need three classes, two would be fine, but three would be better. And it turns out that third class is what we would now call a “Super PreCheck” class of passengers. And those are the people who would be treated like crew members, the known crew members. And a lot of people would be willing to pay for that privilege and we\'ve put boundaries on what that means. It wouldn\'t be renewed every five years; it would be renewed potentially every year. It would be more expensive. But there\'s a lot of business travelers who are willing to pay that price to basically pass through security untethered, but they aren\'t a risk to the system anyway. So why waste resources and time on them? It would transform the footprint and create what I would call “security tunnels” rather than security checkpoints for many of these people.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: That seems to make sense. What was the reaction to that at TSA?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: That\'s a good question. I don\'t know. I don\'t know if I can say that.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Ok, I got it.. Understood. I just had to ask. Well, that\'s a great concept and I appreciate that insight around you guys’ research. You\'re right. I mean, there\'s something that says you just look at what people are willing to sign up with -- with Clear. with Global Entry, with PreCheck. Again, frequent travelers will always look to streamline that experience. And so I would agree, I would say there would be people in a heartbeat who would raise their hand for that.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: Exactly. Right now, people who sign up for Clear pay $189 on the top end for one year, being able to be identified as who they are and go to the front of the precheck line. That\'s all they\'re paying for and they\'re not paying for anything more. If the TSA implements a new class of passengers then Clear would become superfluous and literally would go away.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Yes, that was what I was thinking also.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: It\'s just, it will not be needed anymore. And in some sense, the pathway of using what the TSA calls the “credential authentication technology” which basically validates who you are using biometrics as well as that you\'re entitled to, imply that you don\'t even need a boarding pass right now when they implement this, and in some airports they have it, Clear will have to find a new business model because the TSA is going to assert that model into their own operations.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: You can kind of feel that. And indeed, I still think this most recent version of Clear -- and I had originally signed up for the initial version way back 10-15 years ago (whenever it first started),&nbsp; Rev 1.0, and then they went bankrupt and now we\'ve got Rev 2.0. But even today, I still have a challenge to see a compelling business model for the service that they offer. Oftentimes at a lot of the airports I\'ll go to, the difference between a Clear line and just the basic PreCheck line is pretty much nothing.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: Exactly. I\'ve never been impressed with their business model. They\'ve tried to sell it for stadiums and large entertainment venues. The challenges,&nbsp; it\'s just been difficult and most of their money, most of their resources, most of the revenue still comes through airports and they need that. I just don\'t see the future of it being very bright.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Is there more facial recognition coming or different facial recognition coming? Where do you see that path going?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: Well, we are nowhere near the end game on this facial recognition as effective as it is. I mean, the concept is ideal and wonderful. It\'s still not perfect. It misses certain people of color. It struggles at certain times, and research is continuing to bring the error rates down, lower and lower and lower, especially if you\'re going to create security tunnels where people just walk through it. And your picture is being taken literally in real time matched up using recognition. And then the next thing you know, you\'re at your boarding gate because everything worked out fine for you. And now it will be the majority, the vast majority of travelers. So we are nowhere near the end of this and we are at the beginning. I think the challenge right now is the perception that people do think there is a privacy concern. And like I said, I think it\'s exactly the opposite. I think this is opening up opportunities where we are going to spike in one dimension of AI which is facial recognition. And then the rest of the screening aspect at airports and validation literally gets dampened and in some cases, completely eliminated. I\'m a firm believer and supporter of facial recognition for airport security and air travel. I know that if they do it right, and they seem to be on that pathway, that we are going to have a very different experience at airport screening for security and even air travel in the next 5 to 10 years. It\'s just going to be radically and dramatically different. And I think when people realize that and begin to experience that they\'re going to be happy for it. But at this point, a lot of the rhetoric is around privacy, but our privacy is being violated so often, so frequently and in so many venues that argument is no longer holding any water. I am convinced that this is a positive future for air travel in all aspects.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Sheldon, thanks very much again for joining us on the TravelCommons podcast and sharing that. That\'s great stuff.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Our second guest is <a href=\"https://atmosphereresearch.com/\">Henry Harteveldt</a>, a travel industry analyst for many years. He had the depth of experience and industry contacts to give us a grounded sense on what’s coming with regarding biometrics…<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Henry, thanks for joining us today on the Travel Commons podcast. Wanted to talk about biometrics in and around air travel and specifically, I don\'t know if this is recency bias or what, but it just seems like I\'ve seen a whole lot more of, especially facial recognition over the past couple of years. What\'s your cut at it from a travel industry standpoint?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: In the Crawl/Walk/Run continuum, I would say that with biometrics, we are somewhere between crawl and walk. Think of biometrics as the baby who is crawling really fast and it\'s going to start walking any day now. But in the meantime, it\'s scooting all over the place. So let\'s break it down… Using facial recognition cameras for boarding flights has actually been around since before COVID began. I think the trial started somewhere in the 2016-17 time frame for international flights. That’s the only time it\'s used right now, and it started to roll out in 2018- 2019. Delta was one of the first to embrace the technology and JetBlue as well. And what it does when it works well, and this is something we should come back to to discuss, but when biometrics, facial recognition works as everybody wants it to, it speeds up the boarding process. It reduces the need for us to show not just a physical boarding pass but also a physical passport. And, as a result, on a wide-body jet, it can shave perhaps 10 or more minutes off the boarding time; on a single-aisle plane, a 737 or an A320-type of plane, that could shave 5 to 7 minutes off. So it speeds up the boarding process and makes everything a little bit more efficient. It\'s not perfect. There are people who are uncomfortable using it. There are people who are not familiar with it. So airlines have to have a belt and suspender type of approach. They\'ll have to have gate staff there for the time being. But I don\'t think we are that far away from where international travel is primarily biometrics based boarding, at least in major airports. And I think we will start soon to see it being tested for domestic travel, but there\'s going to be a wrinkle with that when we use the biometric readers at the gate to get on the plane. The database links back to US Customs and Border Patrol which has photographs of US citizens, resident aliens, and international visitors, and it can call up that data to validate that you are you and I am me. With domestic flights. I think only the TSA has the biometric data right now for PreCheck. So it may take a little bit of work to get to a point for that. So that\'s boarding. But let\'s talk about airport security. Yes, TSA is indeed testing and in some cases, I think it\'s actually beyond testing, they are rolling it out facial recognition that again eliminates the need for us to take out a driver\'s license or passport or any other physical ID and, importantly, eliminates the need for us to show any type of boarding pass, whether it\'s a paper boarding pass or digital boarding pass. And again, in theory, it speeds up the number of people who can get into and through the security screening process and reduces the need for human agents at those checkpoints. Now again, we\'re still very much at the beginning of this. And TSA is saying we are going to have a security screening officer at that checkpoint in case something goes wrong or in case someone isn\'t comfortable using biometrics.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Yeah, that was my experience in Nashville. There was a guy standing right there.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: And as we record this, the TSA is testing at Las Vegas, basically this walkthrough type of environment, a new type of screening which is biometrics-based to validate who you are. You put your bags on the belt, you go through, it\'s a lot less invasive, a lot less intrusive and supposed to be a lot faster. I actually want to go over to Las Vegas just to check it out and see what it\'s like. They have this in Dubai and they are testing it elsewhere in England and in France, they are testing it on Eurostar. Now, there are a lot of other things coming along with biometrics at a lot of European airports and in Asia as well. I was just in Singapore. There are biometrics-based scanners so that you don\'t have to queue up and have a border patrol officer review your passport, stamp your passport.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: I had it at Heathrow last November. I went through the e-gates. So I was just surprised; I walked through to the other end and I was like, “Wait, this is it?&nbsp; Nobody to stamp my passport?” No, nothing. Just like, “No. Get out of here. Go, move on.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: Right. Now, for those of us of a certain age, part of the love of travel is hearing that clunky thunk of the passport officer stamping your passport and, every time you get a new passport, the passport service mails back your old one. Those become mementos of our lives.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Yes, absolutely.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: And there is a part of me that will miss the day when we get our passports stamped just as there is a part of me that misses airline branded paper, boarding passes to show “Oh, here\'s where I have been” and so on.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: That obviously, then, pivots over to -- how should the travelers think about biometric data and the storage of that and the risk of that as a condition of travel?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: Look, it is obviously a personal decision. Our research shows that right now in the US, far more travelers would trust sharing their personal biometric information with an airline than with any government agency. So in the US right now, it\'s nearly 80% of airline passengers who, and this is first quarter 2024 data fresh off the press if you will, nearly 80% of us, airline passengers, business and leisure say they\'re willing to share their personal biometric data -- fingerprints, iris scans, etc. -- with an airline they fly regularly if it will lead to a more efficient airport experience or journey. Only a quarter of passengers say they\'re comfortable sharing their personal information right now with any government agency or entity even though, again, with the same benefits of an easier journey. Now, both of those numbers are up from 2023. The government only keeps certain information for a certain amount of time, usually 30 days or less and then it is expunged. So I am in the crowd that is comfortable sharing biometric information with governments and airlines because doing so makes my journey more efficient. It\'s faster, it\'s less stressful. It\'s fewer people that I need to interact with. Remember we\'re somewhere between Crawl and Walk. But where I see it, from the analyst perspective, the time difference, the time it will take us to go from Crawl to Walk will probably be many times longer in the time that will be needed to go from Walk to Run. Because again, as improvements emerge with the technology, the hardware, as well as the software, changes in society, changes in social acceptance of biometrics, the appreciation for benefits, we will reach that so-called tipping point where all of a sudden we see massive and welcome acceleration. It\'s interesting. Younger travelers are a lot more suspicious of the government than some of their older counterparts. And travelers over 65 are less willing to share personal data with the government. The sweet spot is travelers from 30 to 64-ish, call it.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: That\'s an interesting distribution.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: And I think that an important point for anyone listening here -- if you work for an airline, for a technology company, for an airport, for a government agency or, for that matter, if you work at a hotel company, cruise line or other parts of the travel industry. You cannot view your customers as a homogeneous block and you have to understand their welcoming the use of technology. The irony is as we all know, Gen Z are digital natives. They\'re very comfortable using technology. They will put anything and everything on social media it seems like, but they have some very legitimate concerns in their minds about how will governments use their biometric data and could it be used against them? And I\'ll just add that hotels are looking at how they evolve the check in process. You know, I think one of the dumbest questions in the world is when we are standing at the front desk of a hotel suitcase in hand, giving them our credit card and ID and the agent says “Checking in?” Like “No, I thought I would just, I have nothing better to do. So I thought I would bring a suitcase to a hotel in a different city and hand over a credit card and my personal information just to say hello.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Right. “And by the way, I like standing in line. So that\'s why I\'ve been waiting for 10 minutes to get up and have this conversation with you.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: Exactly. But you know, hotels are looking at how they improve the check in process. And granted, at the five-star true luxury properties and resorts, I think they will say, “Look, we value and our guests value the human interaction,” but they\'re going to be a part of that. Guests can say “Look, there\'s some things I can do for myself and then I want to talk to somebody about some other stuff.” But I think with four-star and below, be prepared for more biometric-based self-service check in checkout experiences. And I think, frankly, a lot of people would welcome it because it\'s a lot more secure for 99.9% of us. Eventually. I think biometrics will be more than welcome. And again, if it makes our journeys that much more efficient and less stressful, less unpleasant, there is to me, no downside.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Yes, I think that the cases you\'ve laid out is the appropriate one, which is, it\'s a combination of frictionless or making travel much more efficient than what we have today, doing away with as many lines as we can, and on the same token, being more efficient for the travel company, be it a hotel, be it an airline, be it the company running the airport so that their costs stay down and our costs stay down to travel. So the trade off on that, people are going to strike their own balance around privacy versus efficiency. Henry, thank you very much. This has been a great conversation. I\'ve really enjoyed it. Thanks for coming on a TravelCommons podcast.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: Thank you for inviting me. I enjoyed it as well.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Thanks to <a href=\"http://shj.cs.illinois.edu/\">Dr. Sheldon Jacobson</a> and <a href=\"https://atmosphereresearch.com/\">Henry Harteveldt</a> for taking the time to talk to us about biometrics, facial recognition and give us an idea of what we travelers should expect to see soon. Check out the show notes at TravelCommons.com for links to their work.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"className\":\"has-medium-font-size\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em><a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/track/0geYaxa8LozoV8afrKwdTo?si=aa1cf0be8ee9400a\" title=\"\">Pictures of You</a></em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #199</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I hope you enjoyed the show; the conversations with Sheldon and Henry. They had so much great insight; the editing decisions were tough. This is usually the point where I say “and I hope you decide to stay subscribed” but this is, as they say in the UK, the penultimate episode of the TravelCommons podcast; a fancy way to say “second-to-the-last”. The next episode will be #200, so a good round number to end it. I’ll unpack it all next month, but just wanted to give you all a heads up.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As always, you can find us and listen to the current episodes on all the main podcast sites -- Apple Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, and Amazon Music. Google has shut down their Podcast app, at least in the US, but you can now get the regular TravelCommons audio episodes on the TravelCommons’ YouTube channel. Go figure -- I can never keep track of what bits Google is shutting down or renaming. But you can always ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page at TravelCommons.com for a transcript of the episode and links to Sheldon and Henry’s websites. And along the side of the page, you’ll find links to all the TravelCommons’ socials.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" title=\"\">mpeacock on Twitter</a>, write them on the TravelCommons page on <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" title=\"\">Facebook </a>or <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" title=\"\">Instagram</a>, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com.&nbsp; And thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in emails, Tweets and post comments on the website. I really appreciate it.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And until we talk again, safe travels; and thanks for stopping by the TravelCommons.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_190.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #200 — Wrapping Up the TravelCommons Journey','','inherit','closed','closed','','4494-revision-v1','','','2024-05-22 17:48:39','2024-05-22 22:48:39','',4494,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4498',0,'revision','',0),
(4499,1,'2024-05-22 17:54:52','2024-05-22 22:54:52','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/DALL-E_2024-04-10_13.01.39-300x300.jpg\" alt=\" a traveler standing in front of a facial recognition scanner at an airport. The scanner is emitting error signals, and the traveler looks frustrated.\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" />I knew these travel delays were aging me[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Using my face as my boarding pass to get on a flight to Oaxaca, Mexico and then as my passport to get back in the US got me thinking about how facial recognition has permeated the travel experience. To help us understand where this is going, we talk with two travel industry experts, <a href=\"http://shj.cs.illinois.edu/\">Dr. Sheldon Jacobson</a> and <a href=\"https://atmosphereresearch.com/\">Henry Harteveldt</a>. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>But before that, we talk about eating grasshoppers, an EV experience with Avis, and a couple of my travel tips that need to be revised.  All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_199.mp3\" title=\"\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #199: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN a couple of days after a last-minute 200-mile trip up to Carbondale, Illinois, home of the <a href=\"https://siu.edu/\" title=\"\">Southern Illinois University</a> Salukis… but that didn’t matter. What <em>did</em> matter is that Carbondale was right in the <a href=\"https://eclipse.siu.edu/\" title=\"\">center of the solar eclipse’s path</a> across North America, which meant we had 4 minutes of total eclipse.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Looking up, straight into the sun with its corona glowing, wavering around the black disk of the moon -- I’ve seen… we’ve all seen pictures of total eclipses, and of this one all across social and regular media Monday afternoon. But the pictures couldn’t do justice to being there, even if <em>there</em> was the far end of the Salukis stadium parking lot, backing up to a scraggly bit of woods. The experience more than made up for the 3-hr drive there and the 5½-hour bumper-to-bumper traffic back. I add it to my list of things that, even though we’ve seen seemingly an infinite number of pictures of them, experiencing them in real life was worth the hassle to physically travel to see them. The Taj Mahal, the Great Wall of China, Niagara Falls -- all on the list. As opposed to, say, The Mona Lisa in the Louvre. The crowd of people with their phones in the air trying to get a picture was much better than the Mona Lisa itself.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Before that, the start of March, we were in Oaxaca, Mexico for a week. I’ve had Oaxaca on my “To Visit” list for 4-5 years now. For me, it was a good match -- the combination of interesting food, lots of culture, and no beach. I’ve done “resort-y” Mexico -- Cabo, Cancún, Puerto Vallarta -- not a big fan. While there were a lot of tourists in Oaxaca, it didn’t seem to be overrun with them like, say, the center of Cabo is. Maybe because the city center is bigger, so there’s more space to absorb them, or maybe the absolute number of tourists are lower; it wasn’t an easy nor a cheap flight to get there.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>We hit the food scene pretty hard, high- and low-brow; food stands in the market; high-end places serving up phenomenal <a href=\"https://www.rickbayless.com/recipe/oaxacan-black-mole/\" title=\"\">moles</a>. But the food that made the biggest impression is the insects. It wasn’t some tourist-baiting shtick. Walking past a group of street vendors, I saw one of the women making a snack of a couple of grasshoppers wrapped in a small tortilla. At a mezcal bar on the eastern edge of the Centro, the bartender put down a small bowl of grasshoppers as a bar snack. (If you follow <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" title=\"\">TravelCommons on Instagram</a>, you can see a picture in my Oaxaca story) “Those are good grasshoppers,” he told us. “I drive an hour up towards Pueblo to get them. They’re not farmed like the ones you get in the markets.” I have to admit that I’m not enough of an insect connoisseur to be able to pick out the finer nuances of free-range vs. farmed grasshoppers, but they were as good as Beer Nuts as a bar snack. Or maybe that was just the 3rd, or 4th, or 5th shot of mezcal talking.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/duckett/2333\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Another Girl (instrumental)</a> by duckett (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/duckett/23334 Ft: fourstones, miafas</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Friend of the podcast Allan Marko swung by the website to leave this comment about the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2024/02/28/podcast-198-london-vacation-rental-woes-hertzs-ev-retreat/\" title=\"\">last episode</a>:<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“I was assigned an EV by Avis at Fort Lauderdale [at the end of February]. Curious enough to try it out for the relatively short distances I would be traveling, I got in. After starting, I noticed it only had a 10% charge, so, “check please.” I fired up the Avis app and selected a Chevy Malibu with 1,200 miles on it.&nbsp; As for booking.com, we had tremendous luck using that website for most of our accommodations over a two month period in SE Asia five years ago - exclusively for hotels though.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Allan, thanks for that. Expecting you to drive off with a 10% charge? Avis would never think to give you a car with just an ⅛-th of a tank. And if they did, it would take them 10 minutes to fill the tank and get it back to you. But for that EV? Even at a Tesla Supercharger, at least an hour, maybe more. No wonder they tried to get you to do it. And regards to booking.com, my experience with their hotel product is the same as yours -- never had a problem. But their property rentals, never again!</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>One of my regular travel pro tips from years ago was “Don’t take the last flight out” because, if you missed your connection or your flight was canceled, you had a backup. And, as an IRROP passenger -- industry lingo for “irregular operations” -- you have priority on open seats on that later flight; even more so if you have frequent flier status. But nowadays, with US airlines sporting load factors over 80%, this strategy is a lot tougher to make work. Last June, back in episode #194, I talked about how United’s delay leaving Amsterdam meant we missed our connection home, and how I spent about an hour between the service agents at ORD and on the phone, saying “This is unacceptable” 2, 3, 4 times before they found two seats on the later flight to BNA that they’d been saying was completely full. And now this trip flying home from Oaxaca through DFW on American, I had gotten an email saying there could be bad weather, but I thought, “Well, there’s always that later flight.” En route from Oaxaca to DFW, I’m connected to the plane WiFi and an hour before we land, I get a notice from American -- our flight to Nashville had been canceled. OK, that sucks, but no panic, they’d rebook me on the later flight. But I keep reading -- no rebooking; it just tells me to go to the American app. The WiFi over northern Mexico is not the greatest, but when I do get the app to respond, it’s not showing the later flight as an option. Indeed, the options keep changing with each refresh, but nothing earlier than the next day, Friday, or sometimes, not until Saturday, two days later. It wasn’t until after we landed, passed through Immigration, and were waiting at baggage claim to pick up our luggage to go through Customs that we finally got a message through the app that they’d found us seats on the later flight. Still got home that night, but in both these instances, the customer service experience has degraded just so far. I’ve had to push <em>very hard</em>, and, honestly, be a bit of a jerk to get what used to come seamlessly.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And another travel tip that seems to need retiring --<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/12/07/top-10-holiday-travel-tips-3/\" title=\"\"> “Use Twitter as a Concierge Service”</a>. While struggling to rebook while still in the air from Oaxaca, I pinged American on Twitter hoping for a little more help. What I got was an amazing (and depressing) amount of spam messaging masquerading as AA customer service managers. It’s easy to get fooled in the panic of trying to find a way home, but a few rules to keep in mind -- only communicate with the airline’s gold-checked verified accounts; ignore messages from everyone else -- like “AMERICAN AIR HELP DESK” (all in caps) or “Jason frank (uppercase Jason, lowercase case frank) American Air manger” (as opposed to “manager”); and never give anyone your phone number.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And there’s a quick programming note at the end of this episode, so for those interested, hold off on hitting the Skip button when you hear the music.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" title=\"\">Twitter (X?) message to mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" title=\"\">Facebook page</a>, or on the <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" title=\"\">Instagram</a> account at travelcommons -- or you can skip all that social media stuff and post your comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djiz/10514\">Nube - Djiz Rmx</a> by Kwame (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: SylviaO</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Smile for Security: The Future of Facial Recognition in Travel</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Over the years on the podcast, we’ve talked about how travelers are seeing more and more use of biometrics in their travel days. I’ve told the story of my first fingerprint scan back in the late ‘90’s so I could skip the US immigration line on my weekly commute home from Toronto-Pearson Airport. My colleague’s reaction -- “I’m not giving the US government my biometrics!” Me -- “I can skip a 3-minute line? Where do I sign up?” Which I think shows that the privacy-vs.-convenience choices haven\'t fundamentally changed all that much in the subsequent 25 years.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But (surprise!), technology has, and it seems to be accelerating the use of biometrics, specifically facial recognition. Boarding our flight to Oaxaca, our face was our boarding pass -- just look at the camera, wait for the “bing”, and move on. And coming back, the Global Entry kiosks no longer need passports, no longer have you twisting your hand just so to get the fingerprint pad to read all five fingers; just walk up, it takes your picture, and tells you to move on.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Which got me wondering -- where is this going? To help answer this, I invited on two guys who have been digging deep into this for a number of years. First up, <a href=\"http://shj.cs.illinois.edu/\">Dr. Sheldon Jacobson</a>, Professor in Computer Science at the University of Illinois. Sheldon was last on the podcast in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/09/22/podcast-189-why-we-travel-when-the-first-flight-isnt-best/\" title=\"\">episode #189</a> in September 2022 talking about why another of my travel tips, “catch the earliest flight you can”, is not always right. Over the years, Sheldon has developed operations research models to optimize aviation security. So I asked him to come back on the podcast to talk about the growth of biometrics…<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Sheldon, thanks for coming back on to the Travel Commons podcast. Wanted to talk with you about biometrics, facial recognition, all the things that seem to be increasing with regards to air travel.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: The airlines, as well as the Transportation Security Administration need to know who you are when you are traveling and they relied on identification cards, driver\'s license, real IDs and are continuing to be part of the future. But ultimately, the best way to determine who you are is through your face and biometrics and artificial intelligence imbued with it. In fact, it is a solution that people are recognizing; the airlines are starting to use it. And of course, the Transportation Security Administration is investing billions of dollars to advance this idea. And there\'s a reason why they\'re doing this. They\'re doing this simply because the traditional model of airport security screening has been to detect stuff -- prohibited items, knives, explosives, firearms, even, you know, full size tubes of toothpaste could be a threat based on explosives that can be embedded in them. However, the real threat are the people and facial recognition is a means to transform the platform for airport security from the detection of items to knowing your traveler. And that\'s where we\'re heading right now. And this is the future of airport security.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: And how does that work? How do you think that works?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: TSA has not broadcast this and I don\'t even know if they\'re thinking about it, but I have thought about it and I have proposed to them because I visited them in October 2023. And I told them that if they can bring facial recognition biometrics and the use of AI to truly validate and authenticate the travelers, the need for physical screening will be reduced tremendously to the point that they can create a new class of traveler, which I would call a “Super PreCheck” traveler who subjects themselves to greater background vetting. But then they would be treated like a known crew member at an airport and require no further physical screening. That is the future of airport security.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: It\'s almost like “Back to the Future”, right? It\'s almost like back to pre 9/11 days.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: Now, some will argue, “Oh, someone will gain the system and we will have a terrorist threat because of that.” And I would argue the exact opposite, that the only people who would be willing to subject themselves to the background check would be people who know that they\'re going to get through it fine. And the ones who are truly threats cannot risk it because rarely are people acting by themselves. They\'re often acting in a network. And as a result of that, for them to be exposed, they would be exposing their whole network. And the risk of doing that is far too great. What it would also do is it would parse the whole spectrum of travelers into a group of people who are willing to be known and a group of travelers that are not willing to be known. But over time, the ones who are willing to be known will be much larger, which means you can target your resources and your attention on this so-called unknown group and actually make it more secure for the air system by targeting your resources in that way. After September 11th, everybody was treated the same -- one size fits all. TSA PreCheck moved away from that. Now, I\'m proposing we move even further. And our original research we presented to the TSA in 2003 when we proposed this idea of differential screening to them and how it would work and why it would be beneficial. We said that you really need three classes, two would be fine, but three would be better. And it turns out that third class is what we would now call a “Super PreCheck” class of passengers. And those are the people who would be treated like crew members, the known crew members. And a lot of people would be willing to pay for that privilege and we\'ve put boundaries on what that means. It wouldn\'t be renewed every five years; it would be renewed potentially every year. It would be more expensive. But there\'s a lot of business travelers who are willing to pay that price to basically pass through security untethered, but they aren\'t a risk to the system anyway. So why waste resources and time on them? It would transform the footprint and create what I would call “security tunnels” rather than security checkpoints for many of these people.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: That seems to make sense. What was the reaction to that at TSA?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: That\'s a good question. I don\'t know. I don\'t know if I can say that.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Ok, I got it.. Understood. I just had to ask. Well, that\'s a great concept and I appreciate that insight around you guys’ research. You\'re right. I mean, there\'s something that says you just look at what people are willing to sign up with -- with Clear. with Global Entry, with PreCheck. Again, frequent travelers will always look to streamline that experience. And so I would agree, I would say there would be people in a heartbeat who would raise their hand for that.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: Exactly. Right now, people who sign up for Clear pay $189 on the top end for one year, being able to be identified as who they are and go to the front of the precheck line. That\'s all they\'re paying for and they\'re not paying for anything more. If the TSA implements a new class of passengers then Clear would become superfluous and literally would go away.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Yes, that was what I was thinking also.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: It\'s just, it will not be needed anymore. And in some sense, the pathway of using what the TSA calls the “credential authentication technology” which basically validates who you are using biometrics as well as that you\'re entitled to, imply that you don\'t even need a boarding pass right now when they implement this, and in some airports they have it, Clear will have to find a new business model because the TSA is going to assert that model into their own operations.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: You can kind of feel that. And indeed, I still think this most recent version of Clear -- and I had originally signed up for the initial version way back 10-15 years ago (whenever it first started),&nbsp; Rev 1.0, and then they went bankrupt and now we\'ve got Rev 2.0. But even today, I still have a challenge to see a compelling business model for the service that they offer. Oftentimes at a lot of the airports I\'ll go to, the difference between a Clear line and just the basic PreCheck line is pretty much nothing.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: Exactly. I\'ve never been impressed with their business model. They\'ve tried to sell it for stadiums and large entertainment venues. The challenges,&nbsp; it\'s just been difficult and most of their money, most of their resources, most of the revenue still comes through airports and they need that. I just don\'t see the future of it being very bright.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Is there more facial recognition coming or different facial recognition coming? Where do you see that path going?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: Well, we are nowhere near the end game on this facial recognition as effective as it is. I mean, the concept is ideal and wonderful. It\'s still not perfect. It misses certain people of color. It struggles at certain times, and research is continuing to bring the error rates down, lower and lower and lower, especially if you\'re going to create security tunnels where people just walk through it. And your picture is being taken literally in real time matched up using recognition. And then the next thing you know, you\'re at your boarding gate because everything worked out fine for you. And now it will be the majority, the vast majority of travelers. So we are nowhere near the end of this and we are at the beginning. I think the challenge right now is the perception that people do think there is a privacy concern. And like I said, I think it\'s exactly the opposite. I think this is opening up opportunities where we are going to spike in one dimension of AI which is facial recognition. And then the rest of the screening aspect at airports and validation literally gets dampened and in some cases, completely eliminated. I\'m a firm believer and supporter of facial recognition for airport security and air travel. I know that if they do it right, and they seem to be on that pathway, that we are going to have a very different experience at airport screening for security and even air travel in the next 5 to 10 years. It\'s just going to be radically and dramatically different. And I think when people realize that and begin to experience that they\'re going to be happy for it. But at this point, a lot of the rhetoric is around privacy, but our privacy is being violated so often, so frequently and in so many venues that argument is no longer holding any water. I am convinced that this is a positive future for air travel in all aspects.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Sheldon, thanks very much again for joining us on the TravelCommons podcast and sharing that. That\'s great stuff.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Our second guest is <a href=\"https://atmosphereresearch.com/\">Henry Harteveldt</a>, a travel industry analyst for many years. He had the depth of experience and industry contacts to give us a grounded sense on what’s coming with regarding biometrics…<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Henry, thanks for joining us today on the Travel Commons podcast. Wanted to talk about biometrics in and around air travel and specifically, I don\'t know if this is recency bias or what, but it just seems like I\'ve seen a whole lot more of, especially facial recognition over the past couple of years. What\'s your cut at it from a travel industry standpoint?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: In the Crawl/Walk/Run continuum, I would say that with biometrics, we are somewhere between crawl and walk. Think of biometrics as the baby who is crawling really fast and it\'s going to start walking any day now. But in the meantime, it\'s scooting all over the place. So let\'s break it down… Using facial recognition cameras for boarding flights has actually been around since before COVID began. I think the trial started somewhere in the 2016-17 time frame for international flights. That’s the only time it\'s used right now, and it started to roll out in 2018- 2019. Delta was one of the first to embrace the technology and JetBlue as well. And what it does when it works well, and this is something we should come back to to discuss, but when biometrics, facial recognition works as everybody wants it to, it speeds up the boarding process. It reduces the need for us to show not just a physical boarding pass but also a physical passport. And, as a result, on a wide-body jet, it can shave perhaps 10 or more minutes off the boarding time; on a single-aisle plane, a 737 or an A320-type of plane, that could shave 5 to 7 minutes off. So it speeds up the boarding process and makes everything a little bit more efficient. It\'s not perfect. There are people who are uncomfortable using it. There are people who are not familiar with it. So airlines have to have a belt and suspender type of approach. They\'ll have to have gate staff there for the time being. But I don\'t think we are that far away from where international travel is primarily biometrics based boarding, at least in major airports. And I think we will start soon to see it being tested for domestic travel, but there\'s going to be a wrinkle with that when we use the biometric readers at the gate to get on the plane. The database links back to US Customs and Border Patrol which has photographs of US citizens, resident aliens, and international visitors, and it can call up that data to validate that you are you and I am me. With domestic flights. I think only the TSA has the biometric data right now for PreCheck. So it may take a little bit of work to get to a point for that. So that\'s boarding. But let\'s talk about airport security. Yes, TSA is indeed testing and in some cases, I think it\'s actually beyond testing, they are rolling it out facial recognition that again eliminates the need for us to take out a driver\'s license or passport or any other physical ID and, importantly, eliminates the need for us to show any type of boarding pass, whether it\'s a paper boarding pass or digital boarding pass. And again, in theory, it speeds up the number of people who can get into and through the security screening process and reduces the need for human agents at those checkpoints. Now again, we\'re still very much at the beginning of this. And TSA is saying we are going to have a security screening officer at that checkpoint in case something goes wrong or in case someone isn\'t comfortable using biometrics.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Yeah, that was my experience in Nashville. There was a guy standing right there.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: And as we record this, the TSA is testing at Las Vegas, basically this walkthrough type of environment, a new type of screening which is biometrics-based to validate who you are. You put your bags on the belt, you go through, it\'s a lot less invasive, a lot less intrusive and supposed to be a lot faster. I actually want to go over to Las Vegas just to check it out and see what it\'s like. They have this in Dubai and they are testing it elsewhere in England and in France, they are testing it on Eurostar. Now, there are a lot of other things coming along with biometrics at a lot of European airports and in Asia as well. I was just in Singapore. There are biometrics-based scanners so that you don\'t have to queue up and have a border patrol officer review your passport, stamp your passport.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: I had it at Heathrow last November. I went through the e-gates. So I was just surprised; I walked through to the other end and I was like, “Wait, this is it?&nbsp; Nobody to stamp my passport?” No, nothing. Just like, “No. Get out of here. Go, move on.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: Right. Now, for those of us of a certain age, part of the love of travel is hearing that clunky thunk of the passport officer stamping your passport and, every time you get a new passport, the passport service mails back your old one. Those become mementos of our lives.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Yes, absolutely.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: And there is a part of me that will miss the day when we get our passports stamped just as there is a part of me that misses airline branded paper, boarding passes to show “Oh, here\'s where I have been” and so on.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: That obviously, then, pivots over to -- how should the travelers think about biometric data and the storage of that and the risk of that as a condition of travel?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: Look, it is obviously a personal decision. Our research shows that right now in the US, far more travelers would trust sharing their personal biometric information with an airline than with any government agency. So in the US right now, it\'s nearly 80% of airline passengers who, and this is first quarter 2024 data fresh off the press if you will, nearly 80% of us, airline passengers, business and leisure say they\'re willing to share their personal biometric data -- fingerprints, iris scans, etc. -- with an airline they fly regularly if it will lead to a more efficient airport experience or journey. Only a quarter of passengers say they\'re comfortable sharing their personal information right now with any government agency or entity even though, again, with the same benefits of an easier journey. Now, both of those numbers are up from 2023. The government only keeps certain information for a certain amount of time, usually 30 days or less and then it is expunged. So I am in the crowd that is comfortable sharing biometric information with governments and airlines because doing so makes my journey more efficient. It\'s faster, it\'s less stressful. It\'s fewer people that I need to interact with. Remember we\'re somewhere between Crawl and Walk. But where I see it, from the analyst perspective, the time difference, the time it will take us to go from Crawl to Walk will probably be many times longer in the time that will be needed to go from Walk to Run. Because again, as improvements emerge with the technology, the hardware, as well as the software, changes in society, changes in social acceptance of biometrics, the appreciation for benefits, we will reach that so-called tipping point where all of a sudden we see massive and welcome acceleration. It\'s interesting. Younger travelers are a lot more suspicious of the government than some of their older counterparts. And travelers over 65 are less willing to share personal data with the government. The sweet spot is travelers from 30 to 64-ish, call it.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: That\'s an interesting distribution.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: And I think that an important point for anyone listening here -- if you work for an airline, for a technology company, for an airport, for a government agency or, for that matter, if you work at a hotel company, cruise line or other parts of the travel industry. You cannot view your customers as a homogeneous block and you have to understand their welcoming the use of technology. The irony is as we all know, Gen Z are digital natives. They\'re very comfortable using technology. They will put anything and everything on social media it seems like, but they have some very legitimate concerns in their minds about how will governments use their biometric data and could it be used against them? And I\'ll just add that hotels are looking at how they evolve the check in process. You know, I think one of the dumbest questions in the world is when we are standing at the front desk of a hotel suitcase in hand, giving them our credit card and ID and the agent says “Checking in?” Like “No, I thought I would just, I have nothing better to do. So I thought I would bring a suitcase to a hotel in a different city and hand over a credit card and my personal information just to say hello.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Right. “And by the way, I like standing in line. So that\'s why I\'ve been waiting for 10 minutes to get up and have this conversation with you.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: Exactly. But you know, hotels are looking at how they improve the check in process. And granted, at the five-star true luxury properties and resorts, I think they will say, “Look, we value and our guests value the human interaction,” but they\'re going to be a part of that. Guests can say “Look, there\'s some things I can do for myself and then I want to talk to somebody about some other stuff.” But I think with four-star and below, be prepared for more biometric-based self-service check in checkout experiences. And I think, frankly, a lot of people would welcome it because it\'s a lot more secure for 99.9% of us. Eventually. I think biometrics will be more than welcome. And again, if it makes our journeys that much more efficient and less stressful, less unpleasant, there is to me, no downside.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Yes, I think that the cases you\'ve laid out is the appropriate one, which is, it\'s a combination of frictionless or making travel much more efficient than what we have today, doing away with as many lines as we can, and on the same token, being more efficient for the travel company, be it a hotel, be it an airline, be it the company running the airport so that their costs stay down and our costs stay down to travel. So the trade off on that, people are going to strike their own balance around privacy versus efficiency. Henry, thank you very much. This has been a great conversation. I\'ve really enjoyed it. Thanks for coming on a TravelCommons podcast.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: Thank you for inviting me. I enjoyed it as well.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Thanks to <a href=\"http://shj.cs.illinois.edu/\">Dr. Sheldon Jacobson</a> and <a href=\"https://atmosphereresearch.com/\">Henry Harteveldt</a> for taking the time to talk to us about biometrics, facial recognition and give us an idea of what we travelers should expect to see soon. Check out the show notes at TravelCommons.com for links to their work.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"className\":\"has-medium-font-size\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em><a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/track/0geYaxa8LozoV8afrKwdTo?si=aa1cf0be8ee9400a\" title=\"\">Pictures of You</a></em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #199</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I hope you enjoyed the show; the conversations with Sheldon and Henry. They had so much great insight; the editing decisions were tough. This is usually the point where I say “and I hope you decide to stay subscribed” but this is, as they say in the UK, the penultimate episode of the TravelCommons podcast; a fancy way to say “second-to-the-last”. The next episode will be #200, so a good round number to end it. I’ll unpack it all next month, but just wanted to give you all a heads up.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As always, you can find us and listen to the current episodes on all the main podcast sites -- Apple Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, and Amazon Music. Google has shut down their Podcast app, at least in the US, but you can now get the regular TravelCommons audio episodes on the TravelCommons’ YouTube channel. Go figure -- I can never keep track of what bits Google is shutting down or renaming. But you can always ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page at TravelCommons.com for a transcript of the episode and links to Sheldon and Henry’s websites. And along the side of the page, you’ll find links to all the TravelCommons’ socials.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" title=\"\">mpeacock on Twitter</a>, write them on the TravelCommons page on <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" title=\"\">Facebook </a>or <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" title=\"\">Instagram</a>, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com.&nbsp; And thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in emails, Tweets and post comments on the website. I really appreciate it.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And until we talk again, safe travels; and thanks for stopping by the TravelCommons.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_199.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #199 — Smile for Security: Facial Recognition in Travel','','inherit','closed','closed','','4460-revision-v1','','','2024-05-22 17:54:52','2024-05-22 22:54:52','',4460,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4499',0,'revision','',0),
(4500,1,'2024-05-22 18:01:40','2024-05-22 23:01:40','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/abandoned-motel-sign-300x300.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /> I knew these travel delays were aging me[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>xxx</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>But before that, we talk about eating grasshoppers, an EV experience with Avis, and a couple of my travel tips that need to be revised. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_200.mp3\" title=\"\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #200: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you, for the last time, from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN after a couple of road trips, one up I-65 to Louisville, KY for a pre-Kentucky Derby bike ride called (of course) Tour de Lou, and then the next week, out west along I-40 to Memphis. It’s given me a chance to compare, if I throw Nashville into the mix, three mid-sized, Mid-South river cities that I’ve lived in. Nashville is the largest of the three both in population and area; Louisville and Memphis are a bit smaller and pretty much the same size. And Nashville <em>feels</em> bigger -- more buildings in the downtown skyline when you drive in, and more big cranes putting up more. Nashville’s neighborhoods feel more linked up, more contiguous space to walk, with fewer “flat spots,” places you feel like you should walk a bit quicker. However, the older, more established neighborhoods of Old Louisville and Midtown Memphis offered more interesting walks. Memphis’ Overton Park is the best city park, with a mix of lawns, gardens, some old-growth forest to walk through, and a concert shell built in the 1930’s where, when we passed by, a hip-hop group was doing a rehearsal walk-thru. Glad the federal and state governments failed to plow a good bit of it under back in the ‘60’s and ‘70’s when they wanted to route I-40 straight through the city.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As I said, all three are river cities -- Memphis on the Mississippi, Louisville on the Ohio, and Nashville on the Cumberland. And maybe because the Mississippi and the Ohio are much bigger rivers, Memphis and Louisville do much more with their riverfronts than Nashville. We walked along the Mississippi through the just renovated Tom Lee Park in Memphis -- guys were putting some final touches on the walking paths and garden beds -- and I biked along Louisville’s Waterfront Park; both really nice spaces, almost like “front lawns” for those cities. And maybe there’s something to that. The Mississippi and Ohio Rivers are boundaries for those cities (and indeed, those states) where the Cumberland River winds through Nashville which, in many ways, seems to turn its back to the river. I mean Chicago does much more with the <em>much</em> smaller Chicago River than Nashville does with the Cumberland.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But, of course, Nashville’s music scene is way beyond what Louisville and Memphis offer -- even beyond the honky tonk maelstrom that is Lower Broadway. Live music starts in the airport and follows you throughout the city. Irene and I joke there must be a city ordinance mandating live music in any gathering of 10 or more people. Memphis tries hard with its Beale Street district. It has a number of clubs with live blues, R&amp;B, and rock music coming out the windows into the street, but it doesn’t have the density, the concentration of Lower Broadway, and Beale Street tails off after a couple of blocks, into one of those “flat spots” that make you want to look over your shoulder a bit more often.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Next road trip is out east to Chattanooga. Feels like we’re drawing a circle with a radius of a 2-3 hr drive time and hitting all the cities within it for a day or three each. Kinda trading summer TSA security lines for summer construction traffic jams.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/duckett/2333\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Another Girl (instrumental)</a> by duckett (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/duckett/23334 Ft: fourstones, miafas</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Long-time listener Thelma Stubelt wrote in about the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2024/04/11/podcast-199-smile-for-security-facial-recognition-in-travel/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Podcast #199 — Smile for Security: Facial Recognition in Travel\">last episode’s</a> biometrics discussion<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“I really enjoyed the last episode. I work for immigration. They are working on making Green Cards part of the Apple Wallet. I know Global Entry is doing it as well. We have also been simplifying the biometrics process. A lot of the documents being produced had a fingerprint on the card. That is no longer being put on.  I’m going to Vegas in the fall. Looking forward to seeing TSAs new system.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Thelma, thanks for that. My brother-in-law still has the Green Card from when he came to the US with his Hungarian refugee parents in the late \'50\'s; with his baby picture on it. We get a chuckle whenever he has to pull it out of his wallet. Somehow, I don’t see an Apple Wallet version of that doing the same job. But, as Henry and Sheldon said in the last episode, the move is toward more, not less biometrics. And Thelma’s note adds a few more data points that confirms that trend.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Of course, automated facial recognition might be more efficient, but is not always resilient. The UK’s facial recognition <a href=\"https://www.bbc.com/news/business-68972065\">eGate system was down for 4 hours </a>last week for a “system network issue.” They had to fall back to old-school manual facial recognition -- that is, an immigration officer looking at you and then at the picture of you in your passport. This seems to be becoming an annual event in the UK. Last May, they had a <a href=\"https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-65731795\">similar 3-4-hour eGate outage</a>. Note to self -- don’t fly to the UK next May. But at least it’s happening in a country that prides itself on orderly queueing.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Back in the COVID era, in episodes in 2020 and 2021, I was <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/03/21/podcast-161-new-crisis-old-question-driving-down-to-key-west/\">skeptical</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/06/15/podcast-176-why-business-travel-is-coming-back-learning-airport-history/\">of</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/09/27/podcast-179-high-tech-airport-lines-business-travel-still-missing/\">predictions</a> like Bill Gates’ that <a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/17/coronavirus-bill-gates-says-more-than-50percent-of-business-travel-will-disappear-long-term.html\">50% of business travel will go away</a>; hot takes that virtual meetings are the “new normal”. The reality? First quarter earnings calls from travel companies all saying that business travel is back. <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/business/hospitality/welcome-back-road-warriors-business-travel-returns-6241d575?st=mejrn8dduygzq5v&amp;reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink\">Alaska Air and Southwest both said corporate travel sales grew over 20% and are back to pre-pandemic levels</a>; as did Hilton and <a href=\"https://skift.com/2024/05/09/hyatt-signals-strength-in-business-travel-loyalty-and-all-inclusives/\">Hyatt</a>. <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean\">Regression to the mean</a>, you might call it “<a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_inertia\">behavioral inertia</a>”, is a strong force. Just ask all the folks laid off from e-commerce companies.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And, as always, thanks to the notes from folks who listened all the way to the end of the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2024/04/11/podcast-199-smile-for-security-facial-recognition-in-travel/\">previous episode</a> where I said that this episode would be my last. I have to tell you that, if I was a listener, I wouldn’t have heard it. I’d be hitting the “next track” button on Overcast within the second bar of Evangeline’s <em>Pictures of You</em> song.<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Thelma, in her biometrics note, also said “I have been a listener of yours for I believe 18 years. I will miss your show but wish you all the best. My old time fav was your love of bashing TSA. Another favorite thing on the podcast was the outro music. When you played the whole thing I couldn’t help but sing along.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Thanks very much for sticking it out for pretty much the full duration. Either I’m mellowing with age or the TSA finally cleaned up their act 3 or 4 years ago, or maybe PreCheck has taken away the reasons for those old debates about shoe sole thickness or the definition of a solid.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Another lifer, Jerry Sarfati, wrote in “I’m sorry to hear that you will be ending the Travel Commons podcast. I am a LONG time listener, I guess about 18 years.  I found your podcast when I was a “road warrior”.   Now I’m retired, but still enjoy listening to you.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Rob Cheshire of <a href=\"https://thisweekincraft.beer/\"><em>This Week in Craft Beer</em></a> wrote “Truly the end of an era!”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Roger Nash left the Instagram comment -- “Going to miss you, sir”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And @LAflyr hit me up on Twitter to say -- “Sad to hear about the upcoming end of the journey.  However, reaching 200 episodes is truly an achievement.  Thanks for all the stories and entertainment over the years!”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Robert Fennerty wrote - “I will miss the Travel Commons podcast for many reasons. In increasingly important order, here are my top 3 reasons:<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Travel Tips:</strong> I have incorporated many of your ideas and devices into my travel regimen. Most recently, the Super Bagel has become my go to power center and it has reduced the weight of my laptop bag, thereby allowing me to stuff other less useful junk inside. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Cogent Observations:</strong> The show has had so many cathartic YES I KNOW moments. For example, every time I walk into a hotel bathroom and the bottles have unintelligible labels, I think of you. In the example below, we know that my hands will smell like magnolia after I depress the plunger on one of those bottles. But will I have washed my hands or moistened them? No one can know for sure.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>You:</strong> Every time a new episode enters my podcast feed, I smile. Your voice is very reassuring and I think it lowers my pulse a few beats per minute. So I will miss your company, especially when I’m on the road.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Wow! Thank you very much Robert for that. And to everyone who wrote in. I really do appreciate your comments; they mean a lot. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Now this is the point in this segment where I usually say, if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com or to @mpeacock on Twitter, or to @travelcommons on Instagram or Facebook. Well, feel free to keep doing that. I’ll still be there, but it’ll just be between you and me.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djiz/10514\">Nube - Djiz Rmx</a> by Kwame (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: SylviaO</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Smile for Security: The Future of Facial Recognition in Travel</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Over the years on the podcast, we’ve talked about how travelers are seeing more and more use of biometrics in their travel days. I’ve told the story of my first fingerprint scan back in the late ‘90’s so I could skip the US immigration line on my weekly commute home from Toronto-Pearson Airport. My colleague’s reaction -- “I’m not giving the US government my biometrics!” Me -- “I can skip a 3-minute line? Where do I sign up?” Which I think shows that the privacy-vs.-convenience choices haven\'t fundamentally changed all that much in the subsequent 25 years.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But (surprise!), technology has, and it seems to be accelerating the use of biometrics, specifically facial recognition. Boarding our flight to Oaxaca, our face was our boarding pass -- just look at the camera, wait for the “bing”, and move on. And coming back, the Global Entry kiosks no longer need passports, no longer have you twisting your hand just so to get the fingerprint pad to read all five fingers; just walk up, it takes your picture, and tells you to move on.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Which got me wondering -- where is this going? To help answer this, I invited on two guys who have been digging deep into this for a number of years. First up, <a href=\"http://shj.cs.illinois.edu/\">Dr. Sheldon Jacobson</a>, Professor in Computer Science at the University of Illinois. Sheldon was last on the podcast in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/09/22/podcast-189-why-we-travel-when-the-first-flight-isnt-best/\" title=\"\">episode #189</a> in September 2022 talking about why another of my travel tips, “catch the earliest flight you can”, is not always right. Over the years, Sheldon has developed operations research models to optimize aviation security. So I asked him to come back on the podcast to talk about the growth of biometrics…<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Sheldon, thanks for coming back on to the Travel Commons podcast. Wanted to talk with you about biometrics, facial recognition, all the things that seem to be increasing with regards to air travel.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: The airlines, as well as the Transportation Security Administration need to know who you are when you are traveling and they relied on identification cards, driver\'s license, real IDs and are continuing to be part of the future. But ultimately, the best way to determine who you are is through your face and biometrics and artificial intelligence imbued with it. In fact, it is a solution that people are recognizing; the airlines are starting to use it. And of course, the Transportation Security Administration is investing billions of dollars to advance this idea. And there\'s a reason why they\'re doing this. They\'re doing this simply because the traditional model of airport security screening has been to detect stuff -- prohibited items, knives, explosives, firearms, even, you know, full size tubes of toothpaste could be a threat based on explosives that can be embedded in them. However, the real threat are the people and facial recognition is a means to transform the platform for airport security from the detection of items to knowing your traveler. And that\'s where we\'re heading right now. And this is the future of airport security.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: And how does that work? How do you think that works?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: TSA has not broadcast this and I don\'t even know if they\'re thinking about it, but I have thought about it and I have proposed to them because I visited them in October 2023. And I told them that if they can bring facial recognition biometrics and the use of AI to truly validate and authenticate the travelers, the need for physical screening will be reduced tremendously to the point that they can create a new class of traveler, which I would call a “Super PreCheck” traveler who subjects themselves to greater background vetting. But then they would be treated like a known crew member at an airport and require no further physical screening. That is the future of airport security.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: It\'s almost like “Back to the Future”, right? It\'s almost like back to pre 9/11 days.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: Now, some will argue, “Oh, someone will gain the system and we will have a terrorist threat because of that.” And I would argue the exact opposite, that the only people who would be willing to subject themselves to the background check would be people who know that they\'re going to get through it fine. And the ones who are truly threats cannot risk it because rarely are people acting by themselves. They\'re often acting in a network. And as a result of that, for them to be exposed, they would be exposing their whole network. And the risk of doing that is far too great. What it would also do is it would parse the whole spectrum of travelers into a group of people who are willing to be known and a group of travelers that are not willing to be known. But over time, the ones who are willing to be known will be much larger, which means you can target your resources and your attention on this so-called unknown group and actually make it more secure for the air system by targeting your resources in that way. After September 11th, everybody was treated the same -- one size fits all. TSA PreCheck moved away from that. Now, I\'m proposing we move even further. And our original research we presented to the TSA in 2003 when we proposed this idea of differential screening to them and how it would work and why it would be beneficial. We said that you really need three classes, two would be fine, but three would be better. And it turns out that third class is what we would now call a “Super PreCheck” class of passengers. And those are the people who would be treated like crew members, the known crew members. And a lot of people would be willing to pay for that privilege and we\'ve put boundaries on what that means. It wouldn\'t be renewed every five years; it would be renewed potentially every year. It would be more expensive. But there\'s a lot of business travelers who are willing to pay that price to basically pass through security untethered, but they aren\'t a risk to the system anyway. So why waste resources and time on them? It would transform the footprint and create what I would call “security tunnels” rather than security checkpoints for many of these people.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: That seems to make sense. What was the reaction to that at TSA?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: That\'s a good question. I don\'t know. I don\'t know if I can say that.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Ok, I got it.. Understood. I just had to ask. Well, that\'s a great concept and I appreciate that insight around you guys’ research. You\'re right. I mean, there\'s something that says you just look at what people are willing to sign up with -- with Clear. with Global Entry, with PreCheck. Again, frequent travelers will always look to streamline that experience. And so I would agree, I would say there would be people in a heartbeat who would raise their hand for that.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: Exactly. Right now, people who sign up for Clear pay $189 on the top end for one year, being able to be identified as who they are and go to the front of the precheck line. That\'s all they\'re paying for and they\'re not paying for anything more. If the TSA implements a new class of passengers then Clear would become superfluous and literally would go away.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Yes, that was what I was thinking also.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: It\'s just, it will not be needed anymore. And in some sense, the pathway of using what the TSA calls the “credential authentication technology” which basically validates who you are using biometrics as well as that you\'re entitled to, imply that you don\'t even need a boarding pass right now when they implement this, and in some airports they have it, Clear will have to find a new business model because the TSA is going to assert that model into their own operations.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: You can kind of feel that. And indeed, I still think this most recent version of Clear -- and I had originally signed up for the initial version way back 10-15 years ago (whenever it first started),&nbsp; Rev 1.0, and then they went bankrupt and now we\'ve got Rev 2.0. But even today, I still have a challenge to see a compelling business model for the service that they offer. Oftentimes at a lot of the airports I\'ll go to, the difference between a Clear line and just the basic PreCheck line is pretty much nothing.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: Exactly. I\'ve never been impressed with their business model. They\'ve tried to sell it for stadiums and large entertainment venues. The challenges,&nbsp; it\'s just been difficult and most of their money, most of their resources, most of the revenue still comes through airports and they need that. I just don\'t see the future of it being very bright.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Is there more facial recognition coming or different facial recognition coming? Where do you see that path going?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: Well, we are nowhere near the end game on this facial recognition as effective as it is. I mean, the concept is ideal and wonderful. It\'s still not perfect. It misses certain people of color. It struggles at certain times, and research is continuing to bring the error rates down, lower and lower and lower, especially if you\'re going to create security tunnels where people just walk through it. And your picture is being taken literally in real time matched up using recognition. And then the next thing you know, you\'re at your boarding gate because everything worked out fine for you. And now it will be the majority, the vast majority of travelers. So we are nowhere near the end of this and we are at the beginning. I think the challenge right now is the perception that people do think there is a privacy concern. And like I said, I think it\'s exactly the opposite. I think this is opening up opportunities where we are going to spike in one dimension of AI which is facial recognition. And then the rest of the screening aspect at airports and validation literally gets dampened and in some cases, completely eliminated. I\'m a firm believer and supporter of facial recognition for airport security and air travel. I know that if they do it right, and they seem to be on that pathway, that we are going to have a very different experience at airport screening for security and even air travel in the next 5 to 10 years. It\'s just going to be radically and dramatically different. And I think when people realize that and begin to experience that they\'re going to be happy for it. But at this point, a lot of the rhetoric is around privacy, but our privacy is being violated so often, so frequently and in so many venues that argument is no longer holding any water. I am convinced that this is a positive future for air travel in all aspects.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Sheldon, thanks very much again for joining us on the TravelCommons podcast and sharing that. That\'s great stuff.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Our second guest is <a href=\"https://atmosphereresearch.com/\">Henry Harteveldt</a>, a travel industry analyst for many years. He had the depth of experience and industry contacts to give us a grounded sense on what’s coming with regarding biometrics…<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Henry, thanks for joining us today on the Travel Commons podcast. Wanted to talk about biometrics in and around air travel and specifically, I don\'t know if this is recency bias or what, but it just seems like I\'ve seen a whole lot more of, especially facial recognition over the past couple of years. What\'s your cut at it from a travel industry standpoint?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: In the Crawl/Walk/Run continuum, I would say that with biometrics, we are somewhere between crawl and walk. Think of biometrics as the baby who is crawling really fast and it\'s going to start walking any day now. But in the meantime, it\'s scooting all over the place. So let\'s break it down… Using facial recognition cameras for boarding flights has actually been around since before COVID began. I think the trial started somewhere in the 2016-17 time frame for international flights. That’s the only time it\'s used right now, and it started to roll out in 2018- 2019. Delta was one of the first to embrace the technology and JetBlue as well. And what it does when it works well, and this is something we should come back to to discuss, but when biometrics, facial recognition works as everybody wants it to, it speeds up the boarding process. It reduces the need for us to show not just a physical boarding pass but also a physical passport. And, as a result, on a wide-body jet, it can shave perhaps 10 or more minutes off the boarding time; on a single-aisle plane, a 737 or an A320-type of plane, that could shave 5 to 7 minutes off. So it speeds up the boarding process and makes everything a little bit more efficient. It\'s not perfect. There are people who are uncomfortable using it. There are people who are not familiar with it. So airlines have to have a belt and suspender type of approach. They\'ll have to have gate staff there for the time being. But I don\'t think we are that far away from where international travel is primarily biometrics based boarding, at least in major airports. And I think we will start soon to see it being tested for domestic travel, but there\'s going to be a wrinkle with that when we use the biometric readers at the gate to get on the plane. The database links back to US Customs and Border Patrol which has photographs of US citizens, resident aliens, and international visitors, and it can call up that data to validate that you are you and I am me. With domestic flights. I think only the TSA has the biometric data right now for PreCheck. So it may take a little bit of work to get to a point for that. So that\'s boarding. But let\'s talk about airport security. Yes, TSA is indeed testing and in some cases, I think it\'s actually beyond testing, they are rolling it out facial recognition that again eliminates the need for us to take out a driver\'s license or passport or any other physical ID and, importantly, eliminates the need for us to show any type of boarding pass, whether it\'s a paper boarding pass or digital boarding pass. And again, in theory, it speeds up the number of people who can get into and through the security screening process and reduces the need for human agents at those checkpoints. Now again, we\'re still very much at the beginning of this. And TSA is saying we are going to have a security screening officer at that checkpoint in case something goes wrong or in case someone isn\'t comfortable using biometrics.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Yeah, that was my experience in Nashville. There was a guy standing right there.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: And as we record this, the TSA is testing at Las Vegas, basically this walkthrough type of environment, a new type of screening which is biometrics-based to validate who you are. You put your bags on the belt, you go through, it\'s a lot less invasive, a lot less intrusive and supposed to be a lot faster. I actually want to go over to Las Vegas just to check it out and see what it\'s like. They have this in Dubai and they are testing it elsewhere in England and in France, they are testing it on Eurostar. Now, there are a lot of other things coming along with biometrics at a lot of European airports and in Asia as well. I was just in Singapore. There are biometrics-based scanners so that you don\'t have to queue up and have a border patrol officer review your passport, stamp your passport.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: I had it at Heathrow last November. I went through the e-gates. So I was just surprised; I walked through to the other end and I was like, “Wait, this is it?&nbsp; Nobody to stamp my passport?” No, nothing. Just like, “No. Get out of here. Go, move on.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: Right. Now, for those of us of a certain age, part of the love of travel is hearing that clunky thunk of the passport officer stamping your passport and, every time you get a new passport, the passport service mails back your old one. Those become mementos of our lives.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Yes, absolutely.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: And there is a part of me that will miss the day when we get our passports stamped just as there is a part of me that misses airline branded paper, boarding passes to show “Oh, here\'s where I have been” and so on.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: That obviously, then, pivots over to -- how should the travelers think about biometric data and the storage of that and the risk of that as a condition of travel?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: Look, it is obviously a personal decision. Our research shows that right now in the US, far more travelers would trust sharing their personal biometric information with an airline than with any government agency. So in the US right now, it\'s nearly 80% of airline passengers who, and this is first quarter 2024 data fresh off the press if you will, nearly 80% of us, airline passengers, business and leisure say they\'re willing to share their personal biometric data -- fingerprints, iris scans, etc. -- with an airline they fly regularly if it will lead to a more efficient airport experience or journey. Only a quarter of passengers say they\'re comfortable sharing their personal information right now with any government agency or entity even though, again, with the same benefits of an easier journey. Now, both of those numbers are up from 2023. The government only keeps certain information for a certain amount of time, usually 30 days or less and then it is expunged. So I am in the crowd that is comfortable sharing biometric information with governments and airlines because doing so makes my journey more efficient. It\'s faster, it\'s less stressful. It\'s fewer people that I need to interact with. Remember we\'re somewhere between Crawl and Walk. But where I see it, from the analyst perspective, the time difference, the time it will take us to go from Crawl to Walk will probably be many times longer in the time that will be needed to go from Walk to Run. Because again, as improvements emerge with the technology, the hardware, as well as the software, changes in society, changes in social acceptance of biometrics, the appreciation for benefits, we will reach that so-called tipping point where all of a sudden we see massive and welcome acceleration. It\'s interesting. Younger travelers are a lot more suspicious of the government than some of their older counterparts. And travelers over 65 are less willing to share personal data with the government. The sweet spot is travelers from 30 to 64-ish, call it.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: That\'s an interesting distribution.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: And I think that an important point for anyone listening here -- if you work for an airline, for a technology company, for an airport, for a government agency or, for that matter, if you work at a hotel company, cruise line or other parts of the travel industry. You cannot view your customers as a homogeneous block and you have to understand their welcoming the use of technology. The irony is as we all know, Gen Z are digital natives. They\'re very comfortable using technology. They will put anything and everything on social media it seems like, but they have some very legitimate concerns in their minds about how will governments use their biometric data and could it be used against them? And I\'ll just add that hotels are looking at how they evolve the check in process. You know, I think one of the dumbest questions in the world is when we are standing at the front desk of a hotel suitcase in hand, giving them our credit card and ID and the agent says “Checking in?” Like “No, I thought I would just, I have nothing better to do. So I thought I would bring a suitcase to a hotel in a different city and hand over a credit card and my personal information just to say hello.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Right. “And by the way, I like standing in line. So that\'s why I\'ve been waiting for 10 minutes to get up and have this conversation with you.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: Exactly. But you know, hotels are looking at how they improve the check in process. And granted, at the five-star true luxury properties and resorts, I think they will say, “Look, we value and our guests value the human interaction,” but they\'re going to be a part of that. Guests can say “Look, there\'s some things I can do for myself and then I want to talk to somebody about some other stuff.” But I think with four-star and below, be prepared for more biometric-based self-service check in checkout experiences. And I think, frankly, a lot of people would welcome it because it\'s a lot more secure for 99.9% of us. Eventually. I think biometrics will be more than welcome. And again, if it makes our journeys that much more efficient and less stressful, less unpleasant, there is to me, no downside.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Yes, I think that the cases you\'ve laid out is the appropriate one, which is, it\'s a combination of frictionless or making travel much more efficient than what we have today, doing away with as many lines as we can, and on the same token, being more efficient for the travel company, be it a hotel, be it an airline, be it the company running the airport so that their costs stay down and our costs stay down to travel. So the trade off on that, people are going to strike their own balance around privacy versus efficiency. Henry, thank you very much. This has been a great conversation. I\'ve really enjoyed it. Thanks for coming on a TravelCommons podcast.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: Thank you for inviting me. I enjoyed it as well.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Thanks to <a href=\"http://shj.cs.illinois.edu/\">Dr. Sheldon Jacobson</a> and <a href=\"https://atmosphereresearch.com/\">Henry Harteveldt</a> for taking the time to talk to us about biometrics, facial recognition and give us an idea of what we travelers should expect to see soon. Check out the show notes at TravelCommons.com for links to their work.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"className\":\"has-medium-font-size\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em><a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/track/0geYaxa8LozoV8afrKwdTo?si=aa1cf0be8ee9400a\" title=\"\">Pictures of You</a></em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #200</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I hope you enjoyed the show; the conversations with Sheldon and Henry. They had so much great insight; the editing decisions were tough. This is usually the point where I say “and I hope you decide to stay subscribed” but this is, as they say in the UK, the penultimate episode of the TravelCommons podcast; a fancy way to say “second-to-the-last”. The next episode will be #200, so a good round number to end it. I’ll unpack it all next month, but just wanted to give you all a heads up.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As always, you can find us and listen to the current episodes on all the main podcast sites -- Apple Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, and Amazon Music. Google has shut down their Podcast app, at least in the US, but you can now get the regular TravelCommons audio episodes on the TravelCommons’ YouTube channel. Go figure -- I can never keep track of what bits Google is shutting down or renaming. But you can always ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page at TravelCommons.com for a transcript of the episode and links to Sheldon and Henry’s websites. And along the side of the page, you’ll find links to all the TravelCommons’ socials.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" title=\"\">mpeacock on Twitter</a>, write them on the TravelCommons page on <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" title=\"\">Facebook </a>or <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" title=\"\">Instagram</a>, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com.&nbsp; And thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in emails, Tweets and post comments on the website. I really appreciate it.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And until we talk again, safe travels; and thanks for stopping by the TravelCommons.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_200.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #200 — Wrapping Up the TravelCommons Journey','','inherit','closed','closed','','4494-revision-v1','','','2024-05-22 18:01:40','2024-05-22 23:01:40','',4494,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4500',0,'revision','',0),
(4501,1,'2024-05-22 18:06:28','2024-05-22 23:06:28','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/abandoned-motel-sign-300x300.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /> I knew these travel delays were aging me[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>xxx</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>But before that, we talk about eating grasshoppers, an EV experience with Avis, and a couple of my travel tips that need to be revised. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_200.mp3\" title=\"\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #200: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you, for the last time, from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN after a couple of road trips, one up I-65 to Louisville, KY for a pre-Kentucky Derby bike ride called (of course) Tour de Lou, and then the next week, out west along I-40 to Memphis. It’s given me a chance to compare, if I throw Nashville into the mix, three mid-sized, Mid-South river cities that I’ve lived in. Nashville is the largest of the three both in population and area; Louisville and Memphis are a bit smaller and pretty much the same size. And Nashville <em>feels</em> bigger -- more buildings in the downtown skyline when you drive in, and more big cranes putting up more. Nashville’s neighborhoods feel more linked up, more contiguous space to walk, with fewer “flat spots,” places you feel like you should walk a bit quicker. However, the older, more established neighborhoods of Old Louisville and Midtown Memphis offered more interesting walks. Memphis’ Overton Park is the best city park, with a mix of lawns, gardens, some old-growth forest to walk through, and a concert shell built in the 1930’s where, when we passed by, a hip-hop group was doing a rehearsal walk-thru. Glad the federal and state governments failed to plow a good bit of it under back in the ‘60’s and ‘70’s when they wanted to route I-40 straight through the city.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As I said, all three are river cities -- Memphis on the Mississippi, Louisville on the Ohio, and Nashville on the Cumberland. And maybe because the Mississippi and the Ohio are much bigger rivers, Memphis and Louisville do much more with their riverfronts than Nashville. We walked along the Mississippi through the just renovated Tom Lee Park in Memphis -- guys were putting some final touches on the walking paths and garden beds -- and I biked along Louisville’s Waterfront Park; both really nice spaces, almost like “front lawns” for those cities. And maybe there’s something to that. The Mississippi and Ohio Rivers are boundaries for those cities (and indeed, those states) where the Cumberland River winds through Nashville which, in many ways, seems to turn its back to the river. I mean Chicago does much more with the <em>much</em> smaller Chicago River than Nashville does with the Cumberland.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But, of course, Nashville’s music scene is way beyond what Louisville and Memphis offer -- even beyond the honky tonk maelstrom that is Lower Broadway. Live music starts in the airport and follows you throughout the city. Irene and I joke there must be a city ordinance mandating live music in any gathering of 10 or more people. Memphis tries hard with its Beale Street district. It has a number of clubs with live blues, R&amp;B, and rock music coming out the windows into the street, but it doesn’t have the density, the concentration of Lower Broadway, and Beale Street tails off after a couple of blocks, into one of those “flat spots” that make you want to look over your shoulder a bit more often.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Next road trip is out east to Chattanooga. Feels like we’re drawing a circle with a radius of a 2-3 hr drive time and hitting all the cities within it for a day or three each. Kinda trading summer TSA security lines for summer construction traffic jams.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/duckett/2333\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Another Girl (instrumental)</a> by duckett (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/duckett/23334 Ft: fourstones, miafas</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Long-time listener Thelma Stubelt wrote in about the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2024/04/11/podcast-199-smile-for-security-facial-recognition-in-travel/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Podcast #199 — Smile for Security: Facial Recognition in Travel\">last episode’s</a> biometrics discussion<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“I really enjoyed the last episode. I work for immigration. They are working on making Green Cards part of the Apple Wallet. I know Global Entry is doing it as well. We have also been simplifying the biometrics process. A lot of the documents being produced had a fingerprint on the card. That is no longer being put on.  I’m going to Vegas in the fall. Looking forward to seeing TSAs new system.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Thelma, thanks for that. My brother-in-law still has the Green Card from when he came to the US with his Hungarian refugee parents in the late \'50\'s; with his baby picture on it. We get a chuckle whenever he has to pull it out of his wallet. Somehow, I don’t see an Apple Wallet version of that doing the same job. But, as Henry and Sheldon said in the last episode, the move is toward more, not less biometrics. And Thelma’s note adds a few more data points that confirms that trend.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Of course, automated facial recognition might be more efficient, but is not always resilient. The UK’s facial recognition <a href=\"https://www.bbc.com/news/business-68972065\">eGate system was down for 4 hours </a>last week for a “system network issue.” They had to fall back to old-school manual facial recognition -- that is, an immigration officer looking at you and then at the picture of you in your passport. This seems to be becoming an annual event in the UK. Last May, they had a <a href=\"https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-65731795\">similar 3-4-hour eGate outage</a>. Note to self -- don’t fly to the UK next May. But at least it’s happening in a country that prides itself on orderly queueing.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Back in the COVID era, in episodes in 2020 and 2021, I was <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/03/21/podcast-161-new-crisis-old-question-driving-down-to-key-west/\">skeptical</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/06/15/podcast-176-why-business-travel-is-coming-back-learning-airport-history/\">of</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/09/27/podcast-179-high-tech-airport-lines-business-travel-still-missing/\">predictions</a> like Bill Gates’ that <a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/17/coronavirus-bill-gates-says-more-than-50percent-of-business-travel-will-disappear-long-term.html\">50% of business travel will go away</a>; hot takes that virtual meetings are the “new normal”. The reality? First quarter earnings calls from travel companies all saying that business travel is back. <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/business/hospitality/welcome-back-road-warriors-business-travel-returns-6241d575?st=mejrn8dduygzq5v&amp;reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink\">Alaska Air and Southwest both said corporate travel sales grew over 20% and are back to pre-pandemic levels</a>; as did Hilton and <a href=\"https://skift.com/2024/05/09/hyatt-signals-strength-in-business-travel-loyalty-and-all-inclusives/\">Hyatt</a>. <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean\">Regression to the mean</a>, you might call it “<a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_inertia\">behavioral inertia</a>”, is a strong force. Just ask all the folks laid off from e-commerce companies.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And, as always, thanks to the notes from folks who listened all the way to the end of the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2024/04/11/podcast-199-smile-for-security-facial-recognition-in-travel/\">previous episode</a> where I said that this episode would be my last. I have to tell you that, if I was a listener, I wouldn’t have heard it. I’d be hitting the “next track” button on Overcast within the second bar of Evangeline’s <em>Pictures of You</em> song.<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Thelma, in her biometrics note, also said “I have been a listener of yours for I believe 18 years. I will miss your show but wish you all the best. My old time fav was your love of bashing TSA. Another favorite thing on the podcast was the outro music. When you played the whole thing I couldn’t help but sing along.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Thanks very much for sticking it out for pretty much the full duration. Either I’m mellowing with age or the TSA finally cleaned up their act 3 or 4 years ago, or maybe PreCheck has taken away the reasons for those old debates about shoe sole thickness or the definition of a solid.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Another lifer, Jerry Sarfati, wrote in “I’m sorry to hear that you will be ending the Travel Commons podcast. I am a LONG time listener, I guess about 18 years.  I found your podcast when I was a “road warrior”.   Now I’m retired, but still enjoy listening to you.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Rob Cheshire of <a href=\"https://thisweekincraft.beer/\"><em>This Week in Craft Beer</em></a> wrote “Truly the end of an era!”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Roger Nash left the Instagram comment -- “Going to miss you, sir”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And @LAflyr hit me up on Twitter to say -- “Sad to hear about the upcoming end of the journey.  However, reaching 200 episodes is truly an achievement.  Thanks for all the stories and entertainment over the years!”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Robert Fennerty wrote - “I will miss the Travel Commons podcast for many reasons. In increasingly important order, here are my top 3 reasons:<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Travel Tips:</strong> I have incorporated many of your ideas and devices into my travel regimen. Most recently, the Super Bagel has become my go to power center and it has reduced the weight of my laptop bag, thereby allowing me to stuff other less useful junk inside. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Cogent Observations:</strong> The show has had so many cathartic YES I KNOW moments. For example, every time I walk into a hotel bathroom and the bottles have unintelligible labels, I think of you. In the example below, we know that my hands will smell like magnolia after I depress the plunger on one of those bottles. But will I have washed my hands or moistened them? No one can know for sure.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>You:</strong> Every time a new episode enters my podcast feed, I smile. Your voice is very reassuring and I think it lowers my pulse a few beats per minute. So I will miss your company, especially when I’m on the road.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Wow! Thank you very much Robert for that. And to everyone who wrote in. I really do appreciate your comments; they mean a lot. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Now this is the point in this segment where I usually say, if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com or to @mpeacock on Twitter, or to @travelcommons on Instagram or Facebook. Well, feel free to keep doing that. I’ll still be there, but it’ll just be between you and me.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djiz/10514\">Nube - Djiz Rmx</a> by Kwame (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: SylviaO</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Wrapping Up the TravelCommons Journey</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>So here’s how it started 19 years ago<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>This is the first TravelCommons podcast, so bear with us. We got kind of a lousy microphone and we\'re gonna be trying some new stuff along the way, but I hope you enjoy what we gotta say. Why should you care, why should you listen, why should you even think about subscribing to this podcast? Well, if you\'re interested in travel, that\'s what we\'re gonna talk about -- the ground level experiences of a traveler, someone who\'s in airplanes and hotels and rental cars every week. That\'s me. We\'re talking to you today from the bathroom of the Wardman Park Marriott. I don\'t have fancy reverb filters and all the other great stuff. So instead, I thought I\'d just surround myself with a lot of tile and hopefully this thing will sound pretty good. So, anyhow, Wardman Park Marriott in Northwest DC. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I\'m on kind of one of my normal triangulation trips. Last week, I was out on the West Coast. This week, I\'m out on the East Coast. Started off in ORD yesterday afternoon. Typical ORD day -- 6 am thunderstorm shot the entire schedule to hell in a handbasket; 60- to 120-minute delays the whole time. I tell you; it was a mess. And then today flying down from New York, taking the shuttle out of LGA, they push us back and then we sit for 45 minutes on the runway because we got caught right in the middle of one of those times when LGA takes the entire 30 airplanes that are out on the runway and tell them all to turn around and go the other way because the wind shifted. It was beautiful. It\'s been a beautiful trip; kind of a normal trip actually.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And here’s how we’re ending it -- with, if nothing else, a <em>lot</em> better sound quality… and a bit more effort in clean-up editing. But I do think the through line, from episode 1 to 200, has been consistent -- capturing the voice of the traveler, and through being more about the journey than the destination. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>A few years back, Rob Cheshire turned me onto a podcast called <a href=\"https://www.stealthisbeer.com/\">Steal This Beer</a>. Their tag line is “A candid discussion about beer, over beer, by a couple of guys who think about beer way too much.” Swap “travel” for “beer” and it could make a better tagline for this podcast -- “A discussion about travel by a guy who thinks about travel way too much.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And I would think too much about travel because, as with many road warrior listeners who would chime in over the years, travel was one of the main drivers of my day-to-day existence. There was a stretch of time -- years, actually -- where I would travel all but 6 or 7 weeks in a year. So 80+% of my life would be dependent on how well, each week, the FAA, the TSA, 2-4 airports, 1-3 airlines, 2-3 hotels, and Hertz did their respective jobs. The joint probability of that many independent variables all lining up in the right way for me to get to where I wanted to be on time is vanishingly small. Looking at it this way, it’s no wonder I sounded so cranky so often on this podcast.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Some road warriors who “think way too much” go <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2009/12/15/up-in-the-air-captures-life-in-the-travel-bubble/\">full-on George Clooney</a> in the movie <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_in_the_Air_(2009_film)\"><em>Up In The Air</em></a>, obsessively collecting “travel hacks” to swerve lines, precious metal status levels, doing whatever they can to be able to move through their travel days with minimum friction and maximum efficiency. I’ve called that over the years “living in the travel bubble.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If I’d gone that way, this podcast would’ve ended maybe 100 episodes ago. I’ve talked a lot over the years about breaking out of the travel bubble -- by <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2008/04/29/podcast-64-escaping-the-travel-bubble-marks-travel-tips/\">taking subways and commuter trains</a> instead of taxis and Ubers, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/09/29/podcast-196-cheers-to-beer-tourism-and-travel/\">searching out</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/09/28/podcast-124-craft-beer-hunting-i-hate-rick-steves/\">local</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/10/12/podcast-111-seatback-recline-wars-craft-beer-tourism/\">beer</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/04/10/podcast-174-how-the-pros-plan-their-taproom-tourism/\">joints</a>, and just <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/06/20/podcast-194-best-laid-travel-plans-roaming-entropy/\">roaming randomly</a> around a city -- or what the cool kids call <em>flâneuring</em>. I always figured it’s a symptom of adult ADHD; a short attention span, a need for external stimuli. As you might guess, I’m no fun on a beach vacation. Going to a new place or digging into new bits of places like New York or San Francisco where I’ve been, what, 50 times before -- seeing, experiencing new things would hit that dopamine button and make up for having to grit my teeth through the umpteenth flight delay at ORD or LGA.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And to lay further back on the analyst’s couch, I find that when I’m traveling, when I’m in the midst of all this new stuff, I’m often better able to dig down and think about things that, when I’m home, the day-to-day activities get in the way. Travel can keep my day-to-day stuff at arm’s length -- 2 arms’ length if I’m not in an English-speaking place. I can tune out a lot of the peripheral chatter -- the television in the corner, the adjacent conversations -- because I don’t understand it. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But even when I can’t understand what’s being said around me, I found travel still expanding my understanding, my perspectives. It’s one thing to read about the size of China’s population or the poverty in India or the humid heat in Vietnam or the homeless encampments in San Francisco, but it’s a whole next-level to see it and experience it in person. What seems black and white from a distance starts to dither into gray when it’s up close. It forces me to do a much better job of seeing the other side, to see how my actions could be perceived by others, and I hope it ends up making me a more empathetic person. Which is why I never bought into the “new normal” predictions of Bill Gates and others that travel would never be the same. There’s too many people like me.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But the lack of travel during the Covid shutdowns, the move to more virtual work, and my own slouching toward retirement has made it more of a struggle to generate new and what I thought was interesting content that is “more about the journey”. Two years ago, I wrote in a note “I’m definitely not making it to episode #200”. I surprised myself by making it here, but it seems like a good point to wrap it up -- landmark episode number and 19 years after the first episode in May 2005. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>So what’s next? I’m not really sure. Actually, no. I do know that I’m going to clean up the TravelCommons website -- fix the SSL certificate Robert Fenerty pinged me about last June; delete the out-of-date posts. And reconfigure it to focus more on the written work, the blog posts than the podcast because I think that’ll be what comes next -- written stuff that’s more about the destination than the journey, to flip the tag line around. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I’ve done it pretty infrequently in the past; the podcast took priority. The last one was about our January 2021 trip to Tucson. But I’ve found myself giving out a lot of travel recommendations recently -- from guys around my age who know I’ve done a bit of travel asking me “What should I do in this place?” Like last weekend, I ran into a guy at a taproom who, when I sat next to him at the beginning of the year, asked me for recommendations for Rome. “That beer bar down that alley in Trastevere you recommended was great!” he said. “And that neighborhood too! We wouldn’t have gone there if you hadn’t suggested it.” Maybe travel writing editors have over-rotated from “tell me where to go” to “tell me a story about a place”, but it’ll be good to have something to keep me occupied.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"className\":\"has-medium-font-size\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em><a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/track/0geYaxa8LozoV8afrKwdTo?si=aa1cf0be8ee9400a\" title=\"\">Pictures of You</a></em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #200</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I hope you enjoyed this last show, and thanks so much to all of you who have been along on this ride. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As I said earlier, you can still ping me at <a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a>, mpeacock on Twitter, the TravelCommons page on Facebook and Instagram, and the travelcommons.com website will still be around. I’ll put links to any new posts on all the socials. If you aren’t on social media -- which I can completely understand -- and want to know when I post something, send your email address to me at <a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a> and I’ll email out a link to new material. Who knows, maybe I’ll do a TravelCommons newsletter.  </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Thelma’s comment in her note about the outro song, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/track/0geYaxa8LozoV8afrKwdTo?si=fb4c8ad5edd24ab4\"><em>Pictures of You</em></a> by the Scottish band Evangeline, got me digging in through the archives, all the way back to <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/09/14/podcast-14-september-11th-travel-stories-writing-a-great-travel-song/\">episode #14</a> where the band leader explained the origins of the song. It only seems right to close out this last episode with his words and his full song.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As always, safe travels; and thanks for stopping by the TravelCommons.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Willie Evans - “Hi, I\'m Willie Evans from Scots Band Evangeline sending good thoughts to Mark and all the listeners of the TravelCommons podcast. Touring is a part of our job that we love. It\'s exciting, it\'s fun, it\'s energizing, and it\'s great to get out there and meet the fans and see new places. The downside, however, is that it can be a bit boring and predictable, with each day being pretty much the same as the day before. And inevitably, we all miss our friends and our loved ones back home. The song <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/track/0geYaxa8LozoV8afrKwdTo?si=fb4c8ad5edd24ab4\"><em>Pictures of You</em></a> from our <em>Hard Way</em> album is about that longing for our wives and families. And whether you\'re an entertainer or musician or perhaps a salesman or businessman who travels a lot, then I hope you can identify with it. Hope you enjoy the song. Have a great day.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_200.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #200 — Wrapping Up the TravelCommons Journey','','inherit','closed','closed','','4494-revision-v1','','','2024-05-22 18:06:28','2024-05-22 23:06:28','',4494,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4501',0,'revision','',0),
(4502,1,'2024-05-22 18:48:23','2024-05-22 23:48:23','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/abandoned-motel-sign-300x300.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /> I knew these travel delays were aging me[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Finishing up 19 years of thinking way too much about travel, I indulge in a little bit of nostalgia and talk about my personal travel philosophy. But before that, we compare three Mid-South river cities -- Nashville, Louisville, and Memphis -- talk about the recovery of business travel, and enjoy a full listener mail bag. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_200.mp3\" title=\"\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #200: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you, for the last time, from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN after a couple of road trips, one up I-65 to Louisville, KY for a pre-Kentucky Derby bike ride called (of course) <a href=\"https://www.courier-journal.com/story/entertainment/events/kentucky-derby/festival/2024/02/19/kentucky-derby-festival-pnc-tour-de-lou-adds-finisher-medal-in-2024/72657430007/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Tour de Lou</a>, and then the next week, out west along I-40 to Memphis. It’s given me a chance to compare, if I throw Nashville into the mix, three mid-sized, Mid-South river cities that I’ve lived in. Nashville is the largest of the three both in population and area; Louisville and Memphis are a bit smaller and pretty much the same size. And Nashville <em>feels</em> bigger -- more buildings in the downtown skyline when you drive in, and more big cranes putting up more. Nashville’s neighborhoods feel more linked up, more contiguous space to walk, with fewer “flat spots,” places you feel like you should walk a bit quicker. However, the older, more established neighborhoods of Old Louisville and Midtown Memphis offered more interesting walks. Memphis’ <a href=\"https://overtonpark.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Overton Park</a> is the best city park, with a mix of lawns, gardens, some old-growth forest to walk through, and a concert shell built in the 1930’s where, when we passed by, a hip-hop group was doing a rehearsal walk-thru. Glad the federal and state governments <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_Park#History\" title=\"\">failed to plow a good bit of it under back</a> in the ‘60’s and ‘70’s when they wanted to route I-40 straight through the city.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As I said, all three are river cities -- Memphis on the Mississippi, Louisville on the Ohio, and Nashville on the Cumberland. And maybe because the Mississippi and the Ohio are much bigger rivers, Memphis and Louisville do much more with their riverfronts than Nashville. We walked along the Mississippi through the just renovated <a href=\"https://www.tomleepark.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Tom Lee Park</a> in Memphis -- guys were putting some final touches on the walking paths and garden beds -- and I biked along <a href=\"https://ourwaterfront.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Louisville’s Waterfront Park</a>; both really nice spaces, almost like “front lawns” for those cities. And maybe there’s something to that. The Mississippi and Ohio Rivers are boundaries for those cities (and indeed, those states) where the Cumberland River winds through Nashville which, in many ways, seems to turn its back to the river. I mean Chicago does <a href=\"https://www.chicago.gov/city/en/sites/chicagoriverwalk/home.html.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">much more</a> with the <em>much</em> smaller Chicago River than Nashville does with the Cumberland.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But, of course, Nashville’s music scene is way beyond what Louisville and Memphis offer -- even beyond the honky tonk maelstrom that is Lower Broadway. Live music starts in the airport and follows you throughout the city. Irene and I joke there must be a city ordinance mandating live music in any gathering of 10 or more people. Memphis tries hard with its Beale Street district. It has a number of clubs with live blues, R&amp;B, and rock music coming out the windows into the street, but it doesn’t have the density, the concentration of Lower Broadway, and Beale Street tails off after a couple of blocks, into one of those “flat spots” that make you want to look over your shoulder a bit more often.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Next road trip is out east to Chattanooga. Feels like we’re drawing a circle with a radius of a 2-3 hr drive time and hitting all the cities within it for a day or three each. Kinda trading summer TSA security lines for summer construction traffic jams.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/duckett/2333\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Another Girl (instrumental)</a> by duckett (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/duckett/23334 Ft: fourstones, miafas</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Long-time listener Thelma Stubelt wrote in about the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2024/04/11/podcast-199-smile-for-security-facial-recognition-in-travel/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Podcast #199 — Smile for Security: Facial Recognition in Travel\">last episode’s</a> biometrics discussion<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“I really enjoyed the last episode. I work for immigration. They are working on making Green Cards part of the Apple Wallet. I know Global Entry is doing it as well. We have also been simplifying the biometrics process. A lot of the documents being produced had a fingerprint on the card. That is no longer being put on.  I’m going to Vegas in the fall. Looking forward to seeing TSAs new system.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Thelma, thanks for that. My brother-in-law still has the Green Card from when he came to the US with his Hungarian refugee parents in the late \'50\'s; with his baby picture on it. We get a chuckle whenever he has to pull it out of his wallet. Somehow, I don’t see an Apple Wallet version of that doing the same job. But, as Henry and Sheldon said in the last episode, the move is toward more, not less biometrics. And Thelma’s note adds a few more data points that confirms that trend.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Of course, automated facial recognition might be more efficient, but is not always resilient. The UK’s facial recognition <a href=\"https://www.bbc.com/news/business-68972065\">eGate system was down for 4 hours </a>last week for a “system network issue.” They had to fall back to old-school manual facial recognition -- that is, an immigration officer looking at you and then at the picture of you in your passport. This seems to be becoming an annual event in the UK. Last May, they had a <a href=\"https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-65731795\">similar 3-4-hour eGate outage</a>. Note to self -- don’t fly to the UK next May. But at least it’s happening in a country that prides itself on orderly queueing.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Back in the COVID era, in episodes in 2020 and 2021, I was <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/03/21/podcast-161-new-crisis-old-question-driving-down-to-key-west/\">skeptical</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/06/15/podcast-176-why-business-travel-is-coming-back-learning-airport-history/\">of</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/09/27/podcast-179-high-tech-airport-lines-business-travel-still-missing/\">predictions</a> like Bill Gates’ that <a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/17/coronavirus-bill-gates-says-more-than-50percent-of-business-travel-will-disappear-long-term.html\">50% of business travel will go away</a>; hot takes that virtual meetings are the “new normal”. The reality? First quarter earnings calls from travel companies all saying that business travel is back. <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/business/hospitality/welcome-back-road-warriors-business-travel-returns-6241d575?st=mejrn8dduygzq5v&amp;reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink\">Alaska Air and Southwest both said corporate travel sales grew over 20% and are back to pre-pandemic levels</a>; as did Hilton and <a href=\"https://skift.com/2024/05/09/hyatt-signals-strength-in-business-travel-loyalty-and-all-inclusives/\">Hyatt</a>. <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean\">Regression to the mean</a>, you might call it “<a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_inertia\">behavioral inertia</a>”, is a strong force. Just ask all the folks laid off from e-commerce companies.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And, as always, thanks to the notes from folks who listened all the way to the end of the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2024/04/11/podcast-199-smile-for-security-facial-recognition-in-travel/\">previous episode</a> where I said that this episode would be my last. I have to tell you that, if I was a listener, I wouldn’t have heard it. I’d be hitting the “next track” button on Overcast within the second bar of Evangeline’s <em>Pictures of You</em> song.<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Thelma, in her biometrics note, also said “I have been a listener of yours for I believe 18 years. I will miss your show but wish you all the best. My old time fav was your love of bashing TSA. Another favorite thing on the podcast was the outro music. When you played the whole thing I couldn’t help but sing along.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Thanks very much for sticking it out for pretty much the full duration. Either I’m mellowing with age or the TSA finally cleaned up their act 3 or 4 years ago, or maybe PreCheck has taken away the reasons for those old debates about shoe sole thickness or the definition of a solid.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Another lifer, Jerry Sarfati, wrote in “I’m sorry to hear that you will be ending the Travel Commons podcast. I am a LONG time listener, I guess about 18 years.  I found your podcast when I was a “road warrior”.   Now I’m retired, but still enjoy listening to you.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Rob Cheshire of <a href=\"https://thisweekincraft.beer/\"><em>This Week in Craft Beer</em></a> wrote “Truly the end of an era!”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Roger Nash left the Instagram comment -- “Going to miss you, sir”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And @LAflyr hit me up on Twitter to say -- “Sad to hear about the upcoming end of the journey.  However, reaching 200 episodes is truly an achievement.  Thanks for all the stories and entertainment over the years!”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Robert Fennerty wrote - “I will miss the Travel Commons podcast for many reasons. In increasingly important order, here are my top 3 reasons:<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Travel Tips:</strong> I have incorporated many of your ideas and devices into my travel regimen. Most recently, the Super Bagel has become my go to power center and it has reduced the weight of my laptop bag, thereby allowing me to stuff other less useful junk inside. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Cogent Observations:</strong> The show has had so many cathartic YES I KNOW moments. For example, every time I walk into a hotel bathroom and the bottles have unintelligible labels, I think of you. In the example below, we know that my hands will smell like magnolia after I depress the plunger on one of those bottles. But will I have washed my hands or moistened them? No one can know for sure.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>You:</strong> Every time a new episode enters my podcast feed, I smile. Your voice is very reassuring and I think it lowers my pulse a few beats per minute. So I will miss your company, especially when I’m on the road.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Wow! Thank you very much Robert for that. And to everyone who wrote in. I really do appreciate your comments; they mean a lot. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Now this is the point in this segment where I usually say, if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com or to @mpeacock on Twitter, or to @travelcommons on Instagram or Facebook. Well, feel free to keep doing that. I’ll still be there, but it’ll just be between you and me.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djiz/10514\">Nube - Djiz Rmx</a> by Kwame (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: SylviaO</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Wrapping Up the TravelCommons Journey</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>So here’s <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/05/15/first-travelcommons-podcast/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"First TravelCommons Podcast\">how it started</a> 19 years ago<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>This is the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/05/15/first-travelcommons-podcast/\" title=\"First TravelCommons Podcast\">first TravelCommons podcast</a>, so bear with us. We got kind of a lousy microphone and we\'re gonna be trying some new stuff along the way, but I hope you enjoy what we gotta say. Why should you care, why should you listen, why should you even think about subscribing to this podcast? Well, if you\'re interested in travel, that\'s what we\'re gonna talk about -- the ground level experiences of a traveler, someone who\'s in airplanes and hotels and rental cars every week. That\'s me. We\'re talking to you today from the bathroom of the Wardman Park Marriott. I don\'t have fancy reverb filters and all the other great stuff. So instead, I thought I\'d just surround myself with a lot of tile and hopefully this thing will sound pretty good. So, anyhow, Wardman Park Marriott in Northwest DC. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I\'m on kind of one of my normal triangulation trips. Last week, I was out on the West Coast. This week, I\'m out on the East Coast. Started off in ORD yesterday afternoon. Typical ORD day -- 6 am thunderstorm shot the entire schedule to hell in a hand basket; 60- to 120-minute delays the whole time. I tell you; it was a mess. And then today flying down from New York, taking the shuttle out of LGA, they push us back and then we sit for 45 minutes on the runway because we got caught right in the middle of one of those times when LGA takes the entire 30 airplanes that are out on the runway and tell them all to turn around and go the other way because the wind shifted. It was beautiful. It\'s been a beautiful trip; kind of a normal trip actually.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And here’s how we’re ending it -- with, if nothing else, a <em>lot</em> better sound quality… and a bit more effort in clean-up editing. But I do think the through line, from episode 1 to 200, has been consistent -- capturing the voice of the traveler, and through being more about the journey than the destination. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>A few years back, Rob Cheshire turned me onto a podcast called <a href=\"https://www.stealthisbeer.com/\">Steal This Beer</a>. Their tag line is “A candid discussion about beer, over beer, by a couple of guys who think about beer way too much.” Swap “travel” for “beer” and it could make a better tagline for this podcast -- “A discussion about travel by a guy who thinks about travel way too much.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And I would think too much about travel because, as with many road warrior listeners who would chime in over the years, travel was one of the main drivers of my day-to-day existence. There was a stretch of time -- years, actually -- where I would travel all but 6 or 7 weeks in a year. So 80+% of my life would be dependent on how well, each week, the FAA, the TSA, 2-4 airports, 1-3 airlines, 2-3 hotels, and Hertz did their respective jobs. The joint probability of that many independent variables all lining up in the right way for me to get to where I wanted to be on time is vanishingly small. Looking at it this way, it’s no wonder I sounded so cranky so often on this podcast.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Some road warriors who “think way too much” go <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2009/12/15/up-in-the-air-captures-life-in-the-travel-bubble/\">full-on George Clooney</a> in the movie <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_in_the_Air_(2009_film)\"><em>Up In The Air</em></a>, obsessively collecting “travel hacks” to swerve lines, precious metal status levels, doing whatever they can to be able to move through their travel days with minimum friction and maximum efficiency. I’ve called that over the years “living in the travel bubble.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If I’d gone that way, this podcast would’ve ended maybe 100 episodes ago. I’ve talked a lot over the years about breaking out of the travel bubble -- by <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2008/04/29/podcast-64-escaping-the-travel-bubble-marks-travel-tips/\">taking subways and commuter trains</a> instead of taxis and Ubers, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/09/29/podcast-196-cheers-to-beer-tourism-and-travel/\">searching out</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/09/28/podcast-124-craft-beer-hunting-i-hate-rick-steves/\">local</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/10/12/podcast-111-seatback-recline-wars-craft-beer-tourism/\">beer</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/04/10/podcast-174-how-the-pros-plan-their-taproom-tourism/\">joints</a>, and just <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/06/20/podcast-194-best-laid-travel-plans-roaming-entropy/\">roaming randomly</a> around a city -- or what the cool kids call <em><a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-emotional-benefits-of-wandering-11671131450?st=mmqyql6e1cktnub&amp;reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink\" title=\"\">flâneuring</a></em>. I always figured it’s a symptom of adult ADHD; a short attention span, a need for external stimuli. As you might guess, I’m no fun on a beach vacation. Going to a new place or digging into new bits of places like New York or San Francisco where I’ve been, what, 50 times before -- seeing, experiencing new things would hit that dopamine button and make up for having to grit my teeth through the umpteenth flight delay at ORD or LGA.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And to lay further back on the analyst’s couch, I find that when I’m traveling, when I’m in the midst of all this new stuff, I’m often better able to dig down and think about things that, when I’m home, the day-to-day activities get in the way. Travel can keep my day-to-day stuff at arm’s length -- 2 arms’ length if I’m not in an English-speaking place. I can tune out a lot of the peripheral chatter -- the television in the corner, the adjacent conversations -- because I don’t understand it. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But even when I can’t understand what’s being said around me, I found travel still expanding my understanding, my perspectives. It’s one thing to read about the size of China’s population or the poverty in India or the humid heat in Vietnam or the homeless encampments in San Francisco, but it’s a whole next-level to see it and experience it in person. What seems black and white from a distance starts to dither into gray when it’s up close. It forces me to do a much better job of seeing the other side, to see how my actions could be perceived by others, and I hope it ends up making me a more empathetic person. Which is why I never bought into the “new normal” predictions of Bill Gates and others that travel would never be the same. There’s too many people like me.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But the lack of travel during the Covid shutdowns, the move to more virtual work, and my own slouching toward retirement has made it more of a struggle to generate new and what I thought was interesting content that is “more about the journey”. Two years ago, I wrote in a note “I’m definitely not making it to episode #200”. I surprised myself by making it here, but it seems like a good point to wrap it up -- landmark episode number and 19 years after the first episode in May 2005. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>So what’s next? I’m not really sure. Actually, no. I do know that I’m going to clean up the TravelCommons website -- fix the SSL certificate Robert Fenerty <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/06/20/podcast-194-best-laid-travel-plans-roaming-entropy/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">pinged me about last June</a>; delete the out-of-date posts. And reconfigure it to focus more on the written work, the blog posts than the podcast because I think that’ll be what comes next -- written stuff that’s more about the destination than the journey, to flip the tag line around. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I’ve done it pretty infrequently in the past; the podcast took priority. The last one was about <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Quick Notes on Our Trip to Tucson\">our January 2021 trip to Tucson</a>. But I’ve found myself giving out a lot of travel recommendations recently -- from guys around my age who know I’ve done a bit of travel asking me “What should I do in this place?” Like last weekend, I ran into a guy at a taproom who, when I sat next to him at the beginning of the year, asked me for recommendations for Rome. “That beer bar down that alley in Trastevere you recommended was great!” he said. “And that neighborhood too! We wouldn’t have gone there if you hadn’t suggested it.” Maybe travel writing editors have over-rotated from “tell me where to go” to “tell me a story about a place”, but it’ll be good to have something to keep me occupied.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"className\":\"has-medium-font-size\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em><a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/track/0geYaxa8LozoV8afrKwdTo?si=aa1cf0be8ee9400a\" title=\"\">Pictures of You</a></em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #200</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I hope you enjoyed this last show, and thanks so much to all of you who have been along on this ride. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As I said earlier, you can still ping me at <a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a>, mpeacock on Twitter, the TravelCommons page on Facebook and Instagram, and the travelcommons.com website will still be around. I’ll put links to any new posts on all the socials. If you aren’t on social media -- which I can completely understand -- and want to know when I post something, send your email address to me at <a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a> and I’ll email out a link to new material. Who knows, maybe I’ll do a TravelCommons newsletter.  </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Thelma’s comment in her note about the outro song, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/track/0geYaxa8LozoV8afrKwdTo?si=fb4c8ad5edd24ab4\"><em>Pictures of You</em></a> by the Scottish band Evangeline, got me digging in through the archives, all the way back to <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/09/14/podcast-14-september-11th-travel-stories-writing-a-great-travel-song/\">episode #14</a> where the band leader explained the origins of the song. It only seems right to close out this last episode with his words and his full song.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As always, safe travels; and thanks for stopping by the TravelCommons.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Willie Evans - “Hi, I\'m Willie Evans from Scots Band Evangeline sending good thoughts to Mark and all the listeners of the TravelCommons podcast. Touring is a part of our job that we love. It\'s exciting, it\'s fun, it\'s energizing, and it\'s great to get out there and meet the fans and see new places. The downside, however, is that it can be a bit boring and predictable, with each day being pretty much the same as the day before. And inevitably, we all miss our friends and our loved ones back home. The song <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/track/0geYaxa8LozoV8afrKwdTo?si=fb4c8ad5edd24ab4\"><em>Pictures of You</em></a> from our <em>Hard Way</em> album is about that longing for our wives and families. And whether you\'re an entertainer or musician or perhaps a salesman or businessman who travels a lot, then I hope you can identify with it. Hope you enjoy the song. Have a great day.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_200.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #200 — Wrapping Up the TravelCommons Journey','Finishing 19 years of podcasting where I\'ve been thinking way too much about travel, I indulge in some nostalgia and talk about my personal travel philosophy','inherit','closed','closed','','4494-revision-v1','','','2024-05-22 18:48:23','2024-05-22 23:48:23','',4494,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4502',0,'revision','',0),
(4503,1,'2024-05-22 18:51:55','2024-05-22 23:51:55','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/abandoned-motel-sign-300x300.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" />TravelCommons\' final stop[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Finishing up 19 years of thinking way too much about travel, I indulge in a little bit of nostalgia and talk about my personal travel philosophy. But before that, we compare three Mid-South river cities -- Nashville, Louisville, and Memphis -- talk about the recovery of business travel, and enjoy a full listener mail bag. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_200.mp3\" title=\"\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #200: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you, for the last time, from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN after a couple of road trips, one up I-65 to Louisville, KY for a pre-Kentucky Derby bike ride called (of course) <a href=\"https://www.courier-journal.com/story/entertainment/events/kentucky-derby/festival/2024/02/19/kentucky-derby-festival-pnc-tour-de-lou-adds-finisher-medal-in-2024/72657430007/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Tour de Lou</a>, and then the next week, out west along I-40 to Memphis. It’s given me a chance to compare, if I throw Nashville into the mix, three mid-sized, Mid-South river cities that I’ve lived in. Nashville is the largest of the three both in population and area; Louisville and Memphis are a bit smaller and pretty much the same size. And Nashville <em>feels</em> bigger -- more buildings in the downtown skyline when you drive in, and more big cranes putting up more. Nashville’s neighborhoods feel more linked up, more contiguous space to walk, with fewer “flat spots,” places you feel like you should walk a bit quicker. However, the older, more established neighborhoods of Old Louisville and Midtown Memphis offered more interesting walks. Memphis’ <a href=\"https://overtonpark.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Overton Park</a> is the best city park, with a mix of lawns, gardens, some old-growth forest to walk through, and a concert shell built in the 1930’s where, when we passed by, a hip-hop group was doing a rehearsal walk-thru. Glad the federal and state governments <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_Park#History\" title=\"\">failed to plow a good bit of it under back</a> in the ‘60’s and ‘70’s when they wanted to route I-40 straight through the city.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As I said, all three are river cities -- Memphis on the Mississippi, Louisville on the Ohio, and Nashville on the Cumberland. And maybe because the Mississippi and the Ohio are much bigger rivers, Memphis and Louisville do much more with their riverfronts than Nashville. We walked along the Mississippi through the just renovated <a href=\"https://www.tomleepark.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Tom Lee Park</a> in Memphis -- guys were putting some final touches on the walking paths and garden beds -- and I biked along <a href=\"https://ourwaterfront.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Louisville’s Waterfront Park</a>; both really nice spaces, almost like “front lawns” for those cities. And maybe there’s something to that. The Mississippi and Ohio Rivers are boundaries for those cities (and indeed, those states) where the Cumberland River winds through Nashville which, in many ways, seems to turn its back to the river. I mean Chicago does <a href=\"https://www.chicago.gov/city/en/sites/chicagoriverwalk/home.html.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">much more</a> with the <em>much</em> smaller Chicago River than Nashville does with the Cumberland.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But, of course, Nashville’s music scene is way beyond what Louisville and Memphis offer -- even beyond the honky tonk maelstrom that is Lower Broadway. Live music starts in the airport and follows you throughout the city. Irene and I joke there must be a city ordinance mandating live music in any gathering of 10 or more people. Memphis tries hard with its Beale Street district. It has a number of clubs with live blues, R&amp;B, and rock music coming out the windows into the street, but it doesn’t have the density, the concentration of Lower Broadway, and Beale Street tails off after a couple of blocks, into one of those “flat spots” that make you want to look over your shoulder a bit more often.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Next road trip is out east to Chattanooga. Feels like we’re drawing a circle with a radius of a 2-3 hr drive time and hitting all the cities within it for a day or three each. Kinda trading summer TSA security lines for summer construction traffic jams.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/duckett/2333\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Another Girl (instrumental)</a> by duckett (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/duckett/23334 Ft: fourstones, miafas</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Long-time listener Thelma Stubelt wrote in about the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2024/04/11/podcast-199-smile-for-security-facial-recognition-in-travel/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Podcast #199 — Smile for Security: Facial Recognition in Travel\">last episode’s</a> biometrics discussion<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“I really enjoyed the last episode. I work for immigration. They are working on making Green Cards part of the Apple Wallet. I know Global Entry is doing it as well. We have also been simplifying the biometrics process. A lot of the documents being produced had a fingerprint on the card. That is no longer being put on.  I’m going to Vegas in the fall. Looking forward to seeing TSAs new system.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Thelma, thanks for that. My brother-in-law still has the Green Card from when he came to the US with his Hungarian refugee parents in the late \'50\'s; with his baby picture on it. We get a chuckle whenever he has to pull it out of his wallet. Somehow, I don’t see an Apple Wallet version of that doing the same job. But, as Henry and Sheldon said in the last episode, the move is toward more, not less biometrics. And Thelma’s note adds a few more data points that confirms that trend.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Of course, automated facial recognition might be more efficient, but is not always resilient. The UK’s facial recognition <a href=\"https://www.bbc.com/news/business-68972065\">eGate system was down for 4 hours </a>last week for a “system network issue.” They had to fall back to old-school manual facial recognition -- that is, an immigration officer looking at you and then at the picture of you in your passport. This seems to be becoming an annual event in the UK. Last May, they had a <a href=\"https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-65731795\">similar 3-4-hour eGate outage</a>. Note to self -- don’t fly to the UK next May. But at least it’s happening in a country that prides itself on orderly queueing.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Back in the COVID era, in episodes in 2020 and 2021, I was <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/03/21/podcast-161-new-crisis-old-question-driving-down-to-key-west/\">skeptical</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/06/15/podcast-176-why-business-travel-is-coming-back-learning-airport-history/\">of</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/09/27/podcast-179-high-tech-airport-lines-business-travel-still-missing/\">predictions</a> like Bill Gates’ that <a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/17/coronavirus-bill-gates-says-more-than-50percent-of-business-travel-will-disappear-long-term.html\">50% of business travel will go away</a>; hot takes that virtual meetings are the “new normal”. The reality? First quarter earnings calls from travel companies all saying that business travel is back. <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/business/hospitality/welcome-back-road-warriors-business-travel-returns-6241d575?st=mejrn8dduygzq5v&amp;reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink\">Alaska Air and Southwest both said corporate travel sales grew over 20% and are back to pre-pandemic levels</a>; as did Hilton and <a href=\"https://skift.com/2024/05/09/hyatt-signals-strength-in-business-travel-loyalty-and-all-inclusives/\">Hyatt</a>. <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean\">Regression to the mean</a>, you might call it “<a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_inertia\">behavioral inertia</a>”, is a strong force. Just ask all the folks laid off from e-commerce companies.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And, as always, thanks to the notes from folks who listened all the way to the end of the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2024/04/11/podcast-199-smile-for-security-facial-recognition-in-travel/\">previous episode</a> where I said that this episode would be my last. I have to tell you that, if I was a listener, I wouldn’t have heard it. I’d be hitting the “next track” button on Overcast within the second bar of Evangeline’s <em>Pictures of You</em> song.<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Thelma, in her biometrics note, also said “I have been a listener of yours for I believe 18 years. I will miss your show but wish you all the best. My old time fav was your love of bashing TSA. Another favorite thing on the podcast was the outro music. When you played the whole thing I couldn’t help but sing along.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Thanks very much for sticking it out for pretty much the full duration. Either I’m mellowing with age or the TSA finally cleaned up their act 3 or 4 years ago, or maybe PreCheck has taken away the reasons for those old debates about shoe sole thickness or the definition of a solid.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Another lifer, Jerry Sarfati, wrote in “I’m sorry to hear that you will be ending the Travel Commons podcast. I am a LONG time listener, I guess about 18 years.  I found your podcast when I was a “road warrior”.   Now I’m retired, but still enjoy listening to you.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Rob Cheshire of <a href=\"https://thisweekincraft.beer/\"><em>This Week in Craft Beer</em></a> wrote “Truly the end of an era!”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Roger Nash left the Instagram comment -- “Going to miss you, sir”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And @LAflyr hit me up on Twitter to say -- “Sad to hear about the upcoming end of the journey.  However, reaching 200 episodes is truly an achievement.  Thanks for all the stories and entertainment over the years!”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Robert Fennerty wrote - “I will miss the Travel Commons podcast for many reasons. In increasingly important order, here are my top 3 reasons:<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Travel Tips:</strong> I have incorporated many of your ideas and devices into my travel regimen. Most recently, the Super Bagel has become my go to power center and it has reduced the weight of my laptop bag, thereby allowing me to stuff other less useful junk inside. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Cogent Observations:</strong> The show has had so many cathartic YES I KNOW moments. For example, every time I walk into a hotel bathroom and the bottles have unintelligible labels, I think of you. In the example below, we know that my hands will smell like magnolia after I depress the plunger on one of those bottles. But will I have washed my hands or moistened them? No one can know for sure.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>You:</strong> Every time a new episode enters my podcast feed, I smile. Your voice is very reassuring and I think it lowers my pulse a few beats per minute. So I will miss your company, especially when I’m on the road.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Wow! Thank you very much Robert for that. And to everyone who wrote in. I really do appreciate your comments; they mean a lot. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Now this is the point in this segment where I usually say, if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com or to @mpeacock on Twitter, or to @travelcommons on Instagram or Facebook. Well, feel free to keep doing that. I’ll still be there, but it’ll just be between you and me.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djiz/10514\">Nube - Djiz Rmx</a> by Kwame (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: SylviaO</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Wrapping Up the TravelCommons Journey</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>So here’s <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/05/15/first-travelcommons-podcast/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"First TravelCommons Podcast\">how it started</a> 19 years ago<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>This is the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/05/15/first-travelcommons-podcast/\" title=\"First TravelCommons Podcast\">first TravelCommons podcast</a>, so bear with us. We got kind of a lousy microphone and we\'re gonna be trying some new stuff along the way, but I hope you enjoy what we gotta say. Why should you care, why should you listen, why should you even think about subscribing to this podcast? Well, if you\'re interested in travel, that\'s what we\'re gonna talk about -- the ground level experiences of a traveler, someone who\'s in airplanes and hotels and rental cars every week. That\'s me. We\'re talking to you today from the bathroom of the Wardman Park Marriott. I don\'t have fancy reverb filters and all the other great stuff. So instead, I thought I\'d just surround myself with a lot of tile and hopefully this thing will sound pretty good. So, anyhow, Wardman Park Marriott in Northwest DC. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I\'m on kind of one of my normal triangulation trips. Last week, I was out on the West Coast. This week, I\'m out on the East Coast. Started off in ORD yesterday afternoon. Typical ORD day -- 6 am thunderstorm shot the entire schedule to hell in a hand basket; 60- to 120-minute delays the whole time. I tell you; it was a mess. And then today flying down from New York, taking the shuttle out of LGA, they push us back and then we sit for 45 minutes on the runway because we got caught right in the middle of one of those times when LGA takes the entire 30 airplanes that are out on the runway and tell them all to turn around and go the other way because the wind shifted. It was beautiful. It\'s been a beautiful trip; kind of a normal trip actually.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And here’s how we’re ending it -- with, if nothing else, a <em>lot</em> better sound quality… and a bit more effort in clean-up editing. But I do think the through line, from episode 1 to 200, has been consistent -- capturing the voice of the traveler, and through being more about the journey than the destination. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>A few years back, Rob Cheshire turned me onto a podcast called <a href=\"https://www.stealthisbeer.com/\">Steal This Beer</a>. Their tag line is “A candid discussion about beer, over beer, by a couple of guys who think about beer way too much.” Swap “travel” for “beer” and it could make a better tagline for this podcast -- “A discussion about travel by a guy who thinks about travel way too much.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And I would think too much about travel because, as with many road warrior listeners who would chime in over the years, travel was one of the main drivers of my day-to-day existence. There was a stretch of time -- years, actually -- where I would travel all but 6 or 7 weeks in a year. So 80+% of my life would be dependent on how well, each week, the FAA, the TSA, 2-4 airports, 1-3 airlines, 2-3 hotels, and Hertz did their respective jobs. The joint probability of that many independent variables all lining up in the right way for me to get to where I wanted to be on time is vanishingly small. Looking at it this way, it’s no wonder I sounded so cranky so often on this podcast.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Some road warriors who “think way too much” go <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2009/12/15/up-in-the-air-captures-life-in-the-travel-bubble/\">full-on George Clooney</a> in the movie <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_in_the_Air_(2009_film)\"><em>Up In The Air</em></a>, obsessively collecting “travel hacks” to swerve lines, precious metal status levels, doing whatever they can to be able to move through their travel days with minimum friction and maximum efficiency. I’ve called that over the years “living in the travel bubble.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If I’d gone that way, this podcast would’ve ended maybe 100 episodes ago. I’ve talked a lot over the years about breaking out of the travel bubble -- by <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2008/04/29/podcast-64-escaping-the-travel-bubble-marks-travel-tips/\">taking subways and commuter trains</a> instead of taxis and Ubers, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/09/29/podcast-196-cheers-to-beer-tourism-and-travel/\">searching out</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/09/28/podcast-124-craft-beer-hunting-i-hate-rick-steves/\">local</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/10/12/podcast-111-seatback-recline-wars-craft-beer-tourism/\">beer</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/04/10/podcast-174-how-the-pros-plan-their-taproom-tourism/\">joints</a>, and just <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/06/20/podcast-194-best-laid-travel-plans-roaming-entropy/\">roaming randomly</a> around a city -- or what the cool kids call <em><a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-emotional-benefits-of-wandering-11671131450?st=mmqyql6e1cktnub&amp;reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink\" title=\"\">flâneuring</a></em>. I always figured it’s a symptom of adult ADHD; a short attention span, a need for external stimuli. As you might guess, I’m no fun on a beach vacation. Going to a new place or digging into new bits of places like New York or San Francisco where I’ve been, what, 50 times before -- seeing, experiencing new things would hit that dopamine button and make up for having to grit my teeth through the umpteenth flight delay at ORD or LGA.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And to lay further back on the analyst’s couch, I find that when I’m traveling, when I’m in the midst of all this new stuff, I’m often better able to dig down and think about things that, when I’m home, the day-to-day activities get in the way. Travel can keep my day-to-day stuff at arm’s length -- 2 arms’ length if I’m not in an English-speaking place. I can tune out a lot of the peripheral chatter -- the television in the corner, the adjacent conversations -- because I don’t understand it. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But even when I can’t understand what’s being said around me, I found travel still expanding my understanding, my perspectives. It’s one thing to read about the size of China’s population or the poverty in India or the humid heat in Vietnam or the homeless encampments in San Francisco, but it’s a whole next-level to see it and experience it in person. What seems black and white from a distance starts to dither into gray when it’s up close. It forces me to do a much better job of seeing the other side, to see how my actions could be perceived by others, and I hope it ends up making me a more empathetic person. Which is why I never bought into the “new normal” predictions of Bill Gates and others that travel would never be the same. There’s too many people like me.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But the lack of travel during the Covid shutdowns, the move to more virtual work, and my own slouching toward retirement has made it more of a struggle to generate new and what I thought was interesting content that is “more about the journey”. Two years ago, I wrote in a note “I’m definitely not making it to episode #200”. I surprised myself by making it here, but it seems like a good point to wrap it up -- landmark episode number and 19 years after the first episode in May 2005. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>So what’s next? I’m not really sure. Actually, no. I do know that I’m going to clean up the TravelCommons website -- fix the SSL certificate Robert Fenerty <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/06/20/podcast-194-best-laid-travel-plans-roaming-entropy/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">pinged me about last June</a>; delete the out-of-date posts. And reconfigure it to focus more on the written work, the blog posts than the podcast because I think that’ll be what comes next -- written stuff that’s more about the destination than the journey, to flip the tag line around. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I’ve done it pretty infrequently in the past; the podcast took priority. The last one was about <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Quick Notes on Our Trip to Tucson\">our January 2021 trip to Tucson</a>. But I’ve found myself giving out a lot of travel recommendations recently -- from guys around my age who know I’ve done a bit of travel asking me “What should I do in this place?” Like last weekend, I ran into a guy at a taproom who, when I sat next to him at the beginning of the year, asked me for recommendations for Rome. “That beer bar down that alley in Trastevere you recommended was great!” he said. “And that neighborhood too! We wouldn’t have gone there if you hadn’t suggested it.” Maybe travel writing editors have over-rotated from “tell me where to go” to “tell me a story about a place”, but it’ll be good to have something to keep me occupied.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"className\":\"has-medium-font-size\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em><a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/track/0geYaxa8LozoV8afrKwdTo?si=aa1cf0be8ee9400a\" title=\"\">Pictures of You</a></em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #200</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I hope you enjoyed this last show, and thanks so much to all of you who have been along on this ride. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As I said earlier, you can still ping me at <a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a>, mpeacock on Twitter, the TravelCommons page on Facebook and Instagram, and the travelcommons.com website will still be around. I’ll put links to any new posts on all the socials. If you aren’t on social media -- which I can completely understand -- and want to know when I post something, send your email address to me at <a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a> and I’ll email out a link to new material. Who knows, maybe I’ll do a TravelCommons newsletter.  </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Thelma’s comment in her note about the outro song, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/track/0geYaxa8LozoV8afrKwdTo?si=fb4c8ad5edd24ab4\"><em>Pictures of You</em></a> by the Scottish band Evangeline, got me digging in through the archives, all the way back to <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/09/14/podcast-14-september-11th-travel-stories-writing-a-great-travel-song/\">episode #14</a> where the band leader explained the origins of the song. It only seems right to close out this last episode with his words and his full song.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As always, safe travels; and thanks for stopping by the TravelCommons.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Willie Evans - “Hi, I\'m Willie Evans from Scots Band Evangeline sending good thoughts to Mark and all the listeners of the TravelCommons podcast. Touring is a part of our job that we love. It\'s exciting, it\'s fun, it\'s energizing, and it\'s great to get out there and meet the fans and see new places. The downside, however, is that it can be a bit boring and predictable, with each day being pretty much the same as the day before. And inevitably, we all miss our friends and our loved ones back home. The song <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/track/0geYaxa8LozoV8afrKwdTo?si=fb4c8ad5edd24ab4\"><em>Pictures of You</em></a> from our <em>Hard Way</em> album is about that longing for our wives and families. And whether you\'re an entertainer or musician or perhaps a salesman or businessman who travels a lot, then I hope you can identify with it. Hope you enjoy the song. Have a great day.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_200.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #200 — Wrapping Up the TravelCommons Journey','Finishing 19 years of podcasting where I\'ve been thinking way too much about travel, I indulge in some nostalgia and talk about my personal travel philosophy','inherit','closed','closed','','4494-revision-v1','','','2024-05-22 18:51:55','2024-05-22 23:51:55','',4494,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4503',0,'revision','',0),
(4505,1,'2024-05-23 17:28:22','2024-05-23 22:28:22','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/abandoned-motel-sign-300x300.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" />TravelCommons\' final stop[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Finishing up 19 years of thinking way too much about travel, I indulge in a little bit of nostalgia and talk about my personal travel philosophy. But before that, we compare three Mid-South river cities -- Nashville, Louisville, and Memphis -- talk about the recovery of business travel, and enjoy a full listener mail bag. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_200.mp3\" title=\"\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #200: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you, for the last time, from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN after a couple of road trips, one up I-65 to Louisville, KY for a pre-Kentucky Derby bike ride called (of course) <a href=\"https://www.courier-journal.com/story/entertainment/events/kentucky-derby/festival/2024/02/19/kentucky-derby-festival-pnc-tour-de-lou-adds-finisher-medal-in-2024/72657430007/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Tour de Lou</a>, and then the next week, out west along I-40 to Memphis. It’s given me a chance to compare, if I throw Nashville into the mix, three mid-sized, Mid-South river cities that I’ve lived in. Nashville is the largest of the three both in population and area; Louisville and Memphis are a bit smaller and pretty much the same size. And Nashville <em>feels</em> bigger -- more buildings in the downtown skyline when you drive in, and more big cranes putting up more. Nashville’s neighborhoods feel more linked up, more contiguous space to walk, with fewer “flat spots,” places you feel like you should walk a bit quicker. However, the older, more established neighborhoods of Old Louisville and Midtown Memphis offered more interesting walks. Memphis’ <a href=\"https://overtonpark.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Overton Park</a> is the best city park, with a mix of lawns, gardens, some old-growth forest to walk through, and a concert shell built in the 1930’s where, when we passed by, a hip-hop group was doing a rehearsal walk-thru. Glad the federal and state governments <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_Park#History\" title=\"\">failed to plow a good bit of it under back</a> in the ‘60’s and ‘70’s when they wanted to route I-40 straight through the city.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As I said, all three are river cities -- Memphis on the Mississippi, Louisville on the Ohio, and Nashville on the Cumberland. And maybe because the Mississippi and the Ohio are much bigger rivers, Memphis and Louisville do much more with their riverfronts than Nashville. We walked along the Mississippi through the just renovated <a href=\"https://www.tomleepark.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Tom Lee Park</a> in Memphis -- guys were putting some final touches on the walking paths and garden beds -- and I biked along <a href=\"https://ourwaterfront.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Louisville’s Waterfront Park</a>; both really nice spaces, almost like “front lawns” for those cities. And maybe there’s something to that. The Mississippi and Ohio Rivers are boundaries for those cities (and indeed, those states) where the Cumberland River winds through Nashville which, in many ways, seems to turn its back to the river. I mean Chicago does <a href=\"https://www.chicago.gov/city/en/sites/chicagoriverwalk/home.html.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">much more</a> with the <em>much</em> smaller Chicago River than Nashville does with the Cumberland.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But, of course, Nashville’s music scene is way beyond what Louisville and Memphis offer -- even beyond the honky tonk maelstrom that is Lower Broadway. Live music starts in the airport and follows you throughout the city. Irene and I joke there must be a city ordinance mandating live music in any gathering of 10 or more people. Memphis tries hard with its Beale Street district. It has a number of clubs with live blues, R&amp;B, and rock music coming out the windows into the street, but it doesn’t have the density, the concentration of Lower Broadway, and Beale Street tails off after a couple of blocks, into one of those “flat spots” that make you want to look over your shoulder a bit more often.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Next road trip is out east to Chattanooga. Feels like we’re drawing a circle with a radius of a 2-3 hr drive time and hitting all the cities within it for a day or three each. Kinda trading summer TSA security lines for summer construction traffic jams.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Psykick/52938\">Another Way</a> by Psykick (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Psykick/52938</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Long-time listener Thelma Stubelt wrote in about the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2024/04/11/podcast-199-smile-for-security-facial-recognition-in-travel/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Podcast #199 — Smile for Security: Facial Recognition in Travel\">last episode’s</a> biometrics discussion<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“I really enjoyed the last episode. I work for immigration. They are working on making Green Cards part of the Apple Wallet. I know Global Entry is doing it as well. We have also been simplifying the biometrics process. A lot of the documents being produced had a fingerprint on the card. That is no longer being put on.&nbsp; I’m going to Vegas in the fall. Looking forward to seeing TSAs new system.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Thelma, thanks for that. My brother-in-law still has the Green Card from when he came to the US with his Hungarian refugee parents in the late \'50\'s; with his baby picture on it. We get a chuckle whenever he has to pull it out of his wallet. Somehow, I don’t see an Apple Wallet version of that doing the same job. But, as Henry and Sheldon said in the last episode, the move is toward more, not less biometrics. And Thelma’s note adds a few more data points that confirms that trend.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Of course, automated facial recognition might be more efficient, but is not always resilient. The UK’s facial recognition <a href=\"https://www.bbc.com/news/business-68972065\">eGate system was down for 4 hours </a>last week for a “system network issue.” They had to fall back to old-school manual facial recognition -- that is, an immigration officer looking at you and then at the picture of you in your passport. This seems to be becoming an annual event in the UK. Last May, they had a <a href=\"https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-65731795\">similar 3-4-hour eGate outage</a>. Note to self -- don’t fly to the UK next May. But at least it’s happening in a country that prides itself on orderly queueing.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Back in the COVID era, in episodes in 2020 and 2021, I was <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/03/21/podcast-161-new-crisis-old-question-driving-down-to-key-west/\">skeptical</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/06/15/podcast-176-why-business-travel-is-coming-back-learning-airport-history/\">of</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/09/27/podcast-179-high-tech-airport-lines-business-travel-still-missing/\">predictions</a> like Bill Gates’ that <a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/17/coronavirus-bill-gates-says-more-than-50percent-of-business-travel-will-disappear-long-term.html\">50% of business travel will go away</a>; hot takes that virtual meetings are the “new normal”. The reality? First quarter earnings calls from travel companies all saying that business travel is back. <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/business/hospitality/welcome-back-road-warriors-business-travel-returns-6241d575?st=mejrn8dduygzq5v&amp;reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink\">Alaska Air and Southwest both said corporate travel sales grew over 20% and are back to pre-pandemic levels</a>; as did Hilton and <a href=\"https://skift.com/2024/05/09/hyatt-signals-strength-in-business-travel-loyalty-and-all-inclusives/\">Hyatt</a>. <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean\">Regression to the mean</a>, you might call it “<a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_inertia\">behavioral inertia</a>”, is a strong force. Just ask all the folks laid off from e-commerce companies.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And, as always, thanks to the notes from folks who listened all the way to the end of the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2024/04/11/podcast-199-smile-for-security-facial-recognition-in-travel/\">previous episode</a> where I said that this episode would be my last. I have to tell you that, if I was a listener, I wouldn’t have heard it. I’d be hitting the “next track” button on Overcast within the second bar of Evangeline’s <em>Pictures of You</em> song.<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Thelma, in her biometrics note, also said “I have been a listener of yours for I believe 18 years. I will miss your show but wish you all the best. My old time fav was your love of bashing TSA. Another favorite thing on the podcast was the outro music. When you played the whole thing I couldn’t help but sing along.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Thanks very much for sticking it out for pretty much the full duration. Either I’m mellowing with age or the TSA finally cleaned up their act 3 or 4 years ago, or maybe PreCheck has taken away the reasons for those old debates about shoe sole thickness or the definition of a solid.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Another lifer, Jerry Sarfati, wrote in “I’m sorry to hear that you will be ending the Travel Commons podcast. I am a LONG time listener, I guess about 18 years.&nbsp; I found your podcast when I was a “road warrior”. &nbsp; Now I’m retired, but still enjoy listening to you.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Rob Cheshire of <a href=\"https://thisweekincraft.beer/\"><em>This Week in Craft Beer</em></a> wrote “Truly the end of an era!”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Roger Nash left the Instagram comment -- “Going to miss you, sir”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And @LAflyr hit me up on Twitter to say -- “Sad to hear about the upcoming end of the journey.&nbsp; However, reaching 200 episodes is truly an achievement.&nbsp; Thanks for all the stories and entertainment over the years!”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Robert Fennerty wrote - “I will miss the Travel Commons podcast for many reasons. In increasingly important order, here are my top 3 reasons:<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Travel Tips:</strong> I have incorporated many of your ideas and devices into my travel regimen. Most recently, the Super Bagel has become my go to power center and it has reduced the weight of my laptop bag, thereby allowing me to stuff other less useful junk inside.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Cogent Observations:</strong> The show has had so many cathartic YES I KNOW moments. For example, every time I walk into a hotel bathroom and the bottles have unintelligible labels, I think of you. In the example below, we know that my hands will smell like magnolia after I depress the plunger on one of those bottles. But will I have washed my hands or moistened them? No one can know for sure.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>You:</strong> Every time a new episode enters my podcast feed, I smile. Your voice is very reassuring and I think it lowers my pulse a few beats per minute. So I will miss your company, especially when I’m on the road.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Wow! Thank you very much Robert for that. And to everyone who wrote in. I really do appreciate your comments; they mean a lot.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Now this is the point in this segment where I usually say, if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com or to @mpeacock on Twitter, or to @travelcommons on Instagram or Facebook. Well, feel free to keep doing that. I’ll still be there, but it’ll just be between you and me.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/52154\">release.JOY.release</a> by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.  Ft: essesq, Haskel (hej31)</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Wrapping Up the TravelCommons Journey</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>So here’s <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/05/15/first-travelcommons-podcast/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"First TravelCommons Podcast\">how it started</a> 19 years ago<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>This is the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/05/15/first-travelcommons-podcast/\" title=\"First TravelCommons Podcast\">first TravelCommons podcast</a>, so bear with us. We got kind of a lousy microphone and we\'re gonna be trying some new stuff along the way, but I hope you enjoy what we gotta say. Why should you care, why should you listen, why should you even think about subscribing to this podcast? Well, if you\'re interested in travel, that\'s what we\'re gonna talk about -- the ground level experiences of a traveler, someone who\'s in airplanes and hotels and rental cars every week. That\'s me. We\'re talking to you today from the bathroom of the Wardman Park Marriott. I don\'t have fancy reverb filters and all the other great stuff. So instead, I thought I\'d just surround myself with a lot of tile and hopefully this thing will sound pretty good. So, anyhow, Wardman Park Marriott in Northwest DC.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I\'m on kind of one of my normal triangulation trips. Last week, I was out on the West Coast. This week, I\'m out on the East Coast. Started off in ORD yesterday afternoon. Typical ORD day -- 6 am thunderstorm shot the entire schedule to hell in a hand basket; 60- to 120-minute delays the whole time. I tell you; it was a mess. And then today flying down from New York, taking the shuttle out of LGA, they push us back and then we sit for 45 minutes on the runway because we got caught right in the middle of one of those times when LGA takes the entire 30 airplanes that are out on the runway and tell them all to turn around and go the other way because the wind shifted. It was beautiful. It\'s been a beautiful trip; kind of a normal trip actually.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And here’s how we’re ending it -- with, if nothing else, a <em>lot</em> better sound quality… and a bit more effort in clean-up editing. But I do think the through line, from episode 1 to 200, has been consistent -- capturing the voice of the traveler, and through being more about the journey than the destination.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>A few years back, Rob Cheshire turned me onto a podcast called <a href=\"https://www.stealthisbeer.com/\">Steal This Beer</a>. Their tag line is “A candid discussion about beer, over beer, by a couple of guys who think about beer way too much.” Swap “travel” for “beer” and it could make a better tagline for this podcast -- “A discussion about travel by a guy who thinks about travel way too much.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And I would think too much about travel because, as with many road warrior listeners who would chime in over the years, travel was one of the main drivers of my day-to-day existence. There was a stretch of time -- years, actually -- where I would travel all but 6 or 7 weeks in a year. So 80+% of my life would be dependent on how well, each week, the FAA, the TSA, 2-4 airports, 1-3 airlines, 2-3 hotels, and Hertz did their respective jobs. The joint probability of that many independent variables all lining up in the right way for me to get to where I wanted to be on time is vanishingly small. Looking at it this way, it’s no wonder I sounded so cranky so often on this podcast.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Some road warriors who “think way too much” go <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2009/12/15/up-in-the-air-captures-life-in-the-travel-bubble/\">full-on George Clooney</a> in the movie <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_in_the_Air_(2009_film)\"><em>Up In The Air</em></a>, obsessively collecting “travel hacks” to swerve lines, precious metal status levels, doing whatever they can to be able to move through their travel days with minimum friction and maximum efficiency. I’ve called that over the years “living in the travel bubble.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If I’d gone that way, this podcast would’ve ended maybe 100 episodes ago. I’ve talked a lot over the years about breaking out of the travel bubble -- by <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2008/04/29/podcast-64-escaping-the-travel-bubble-marks-travel-tips/\">taking subways and commuter trains</a> instead of taxis and Ubers, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/09/29/podcast-196-cheers-to-beer-tourism-and-travel/\">searching out</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/09/28/podcast-124-craft-beer-hunting-i-hate-rick-steves/\">local</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/10/12/podcast-111-seatback-recline-wars-craft-beer-tourism/\">beer</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/04/10/podcast-174-how-the-pros-plan-their-taproom-tourism/\">joints</a>, and just <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/06/20/podcast-194-best-laid-travel-plans-roaming-entropy/\">roaming randomly</a> around a city -- or what the cool kids call <em><a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-emotional-benefits-of-wandering-11671131450?st=mmqyql6e1cktnub&amp;reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink\" title=\"\">flâneuring</a></em>. I always figured it’s a symptom of adult ADHD; a short attention span, a need for external stimuli. As you might guess, I’m no fun on a beach vacation. Going to a new place or digging into new bits of places like New York or San Francisco where I’ve been, what, 50 times before -- seeing, experiencing new things would hit that dopamine button and make up for having to grit my teeth through the umpteenth flight delay at ORD or LGA.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And to lay further back on the analyst’s couch, I find that when I’m traveling, when I’m in the midst of all this new stuff, I’m often better able to dig down and think about things that, when I’m home, the day-to-day activities get in the way. Travel can keep my day-to-day stuff at arm’s length -- 2 arms’ length if I’m not in an English-speaking place. I can tune out a lot of the peripheral chatter -- the television in the corner, the adjacent conversations -- because I don’t understand it.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But even when I can’t understand what’s being said around me, I found travel still expanding my understanding, my perspectives. It’s one thing to read about the size of China’s population or the poverty in India or the humid heat in Vietnam or the homeless encampments in San Francisco, but it’s a whole next-level to see it and experience it in person. What seems black and white from a distance starts to dither into gray when it’s up close. It forces me to do a much better job of seeing the other side, to see how my actions could be perceived by others, and I hope it ends up making me a more empathetic person. Which is why I never bought into the “new normal” predictions of Bill Gates and others that travel would never be the same. There’s too many people like me.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But the lack of travel during the Covid shutdowns, the move to more virtual work, and my own slouching toward retirement has made it more of a struggle to generate new and what I thought was interesting content that is “more about the journey”. Two years ago, I wrote in a note “I’m definitely not making it to episode #200”. I surprised myself by making it here, but it seems like a good point to wrap it up -- landmark episode number and 19 years after the first episode in May 2005.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>So what’s next? I’m not really sure. Actually, no. I do know that I’m going to clean up the TravelCommons website -- fix the SSL certificate Robert Fenerty <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/06/20/podcast-194-best-laid-travel-plans-roaming-entropy/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">pinged me about last June</a>; delete the out-of-date posts. And reconfigure it to focus more on the written work, the blog posts than the podcast because I think that’ll be what comes next -- written stuff that’s more about the destination than the journey, to flip the tag line around.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I’ve done it pretty infrequently in the past; the podcast took priority. The last one was about <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Quick Notes on Our Trip to Tucson\">our January 2021 trip to Tucson</a>. But I’ve found myself giving out a lot of travel recommendations recently -- from guys around my age who know I’ve done a bit of travel asking me “What should I do in this place?” Like last weekend, I ran into a guy at a taproom who, when I sat next to him at the beginning of the year, asked me for recommendations for Rome. “That beer bar down that alley in Trastevere you recommended was great!” he said. “And that neighborhood too! We wouldn’t have gone there if you hadn’t suggested it.” Maybe travel writing editors have over-rotated from “tell me where to go” to “tell me a story about a place”, but it’ll be good to have something to keep me occupied.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"className\":\"has-medium-font-size\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em><a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/track/0geYaxa8LozoV8afrKwdTo?si=aa1cf0be8ee9400a\" title=\"\">Pictures of You</a></em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #200</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I hope you enjoyed this last show, and thanks so much to all of you who have been along on this ride.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As I said earlier, you can still ping me at <a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a>, mpeacock on Twitter, the TravelCommons page on Facebook and Instagram, and the travelcommons.com website will still be around. I’ll put links to any new posts on all the socials. If you aren’t on social media -- which I can completely understand -- and want to know when I post something, send your email address to me at <a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a> and I’ll email out a link to new material. Who knows, maybe I’ll do a TravelCommons newsletter.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Thelma’s comment in her note about the outro song, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/track/0geYaxa8LozoV8afrKwdTo?si=fb4c8ad5edd24ab4\"><em>Pictures of You</em></a> by the Scottish band Evangeline, got me digging in through the archives, all the way back to <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/09/14/podcast-14-september-11th-travel-stories-writing-a-great-travel-song/\">episode #14</a> where the band leader explained the origins of the song. It only seems right to close out this last episode with his words and his full song.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As always, safe travels; and thanks for stopping by the TravelCommons.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Willie Evans - “Hi, I\'m Willie Evans from Scots Band Evangeline sending good thoughts to Mark and all the listeners of the TravelCommons podcast. Touring is a part of our job that we love. It\'s exciting, it\'s fun, it\'s energizing, and it\'s great to get out there and meet the fans and see new places. The downside, however, is that it can be a bit boring and predictable, with each day being pretty much the same as the day before. And inevitably, we all miss our friends and our loved ones back home. The song <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/track/0geYaxa8LozoV8afrKwdTo?si=fb4c8ad5edd24ab4\"><em>Pictures of You</em></a> from our <em>Hard Way</em> album is about that longing for our wives and families. And whether you\'re an entertainer or musician or perhaps a salesman or businessman who travels a lot, then I hope you can identify with it. Hope you enjoy the song. Have a great day.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_200.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #200 — Wrapping Up the TravelCommons Journey','Finishing 19 years of podcasting where I\'ve been thinking way too much about travel, I indulge in some nostalgia and talk about my personal travel philosophy','inherit','closed','closed','','4494-revision-v1','','','2024-05-23 17:28:22','2024-05-23 22:28:22','',4494,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4505',0,'revision','',0),
(4517,1,'2024-05-30 10:16:11','2024-05-30 15:16:11','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/abandoned-motel-sign-300x300.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" />TravelCommons\' final stop[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Finishing up 19 years of thinking way too much about travel, I indulge in a little bit of nostalgia and talk about my personal travel philosophy. But before that, we compare three Mid-South river cities -- Nashville, Louisville, and Memphis -- talk about the recovery of business travel, and enjoy a full listener mail bag. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_200.mp3\" title=\"\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #200: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you, for the last time, from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN after a couple of road trips, one up I-65 to Louisville, KY for a pre-Kentucky Derby bike ride called (of course) <a href=\"https://www.courier-journal.com/story/entertainment/events/kentucky-derby/festival/2024/02/19/kentucky-derby-festival-pnc-tour-de-lou-adds-finisher-medal-in-2024/72657430007/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Tour de Lou</a>, and then the next week, out west along I-40 to Memphis. It’s given me a chance to compare, if I throw Nashville into the mix, three mid-sized, Mid-South river cities that I’ve lived in. Nashville is the largest of the three both in population and area; Louisville and Memphis are a bit smaller and pretty much the same size. And Nashville <em>feels</em> bigger -- more buildings in the downtown skyline when you drive in, and more big cranes putting up more. Nashville’s neighborhoods feel more linked up, more contiguous space to walk, with fewer “flat spots,” places you feel like you should walk a bit quicker. However, the older, more established neighborhoods of Old Louisville and Midtown Memphis offered more interesting walks. Memphis’ <a href=\"https://overtonpark.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Overton Park</a> is the best city park, with a mix of lawns, gardens, some old-growth forest to walk through, and a concert shell built in the 1930’s where, when we passed by, a hip-hop group was doing a rehearsal walk-thru. Glad the federal and state governments <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_Park#History\" title=\"\">failed to plow a good bit of it under back</a> in the ‘60’s and ‘70’s when they wanted to route I-40 straight through the city.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As I said, all three are river cities -- Memphis on the Mississippi, Louisville on the Ohio, and Nashville on the Cumberland. And maybe because the Mississippi and the Ohio are much bigger rivers, Memphis and Louisville do much more with their riverfronts than Nashville. We walked along the Mississippi through the just renovated <a href=\"https://www.tomleepark.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Tom Lee Park</a> in Memphis -- guys were putting some final touches on the walking paths and garden beds -- and I biked along <a href=\"https://ourwaterfront.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Louisville’s Waterfront Park</a>; both really nice spaces, almost like “front lawns” for those cities. And maybe there’s something to that. The Mississippi and Ohio Rivers are boundaries for those cities (and indeed, those states) where the Cumberland River winds through Nashville which, in many ways, seems to turn its back to the river. I mean Chicago does <a href=\"https://www.chicago.gov/city/en/sites/chicagoriverwalk/home.html.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">much more</a> with the <em>much</em> smaller Chicago River than Nashville does with the Cumberland.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But, of course, Nashville’s music scene is way beyond what Louisville and Memphis offer -- even beyond the honky tonk maelstrom that is Lower Broadway. Live music starts in the airport and follows you throughout the city. Irene and I joke there must be a city ordinance mandating live music in any gathering of 10 or more people. Memphis tries hard with its Beale Street district. It has a number of clubs with live blues, R&amp;B, and rock music coming out the windows into the street, but it doesn’t have the density, the concentration of Lower Broadway, and Beale Street tails off after a couple of blocks, into one of those “flat spots” that make you want to look over your shoulder a bit more often.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Next road trip is out east to Chattanooga. Feels like we’re drawing a circle with a radius of a 2-3 hr drive time and hitting all the cities within it for a day or three each. Kinda trading summer TSA security lines for summer construction traffic jams.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge music —&nbsp;<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Psykick/52938\">Another Way</a>&nbsp;by Psykick (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Psykick/52938</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Long-time listener Thelma Stubelt wrote in about the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2024/04/11/podcast-199-smile-for-security-facial-recognition-in-travel/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Podcast #199 — Smile for Security: Facial Recognition in Travel\">last episode’s</a> biometrics discussion<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“I really enjoyed the last episode. I work for immigration. They are working on making Green Cards part of the Apple Wallet. I know Global Entry is doing it as well. We have also been simplifying the biometrics process. A lot of the documents being produced had a fingerprint on the card. That is no longer being put on.&nbsp; I’m going to Vegas in the fall. Looking forward to seeing TSAs new system.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Thelma, thanks for that. My brother-in-law still has the Green Card from when he came to the US with his Hungarian refugee parents in the late \'50\'s; with his baby picture on it. We get a chuckle whenever he has to pull it out of his wallet. Somehow, I don’t see an Apple Wallet version of that doing the same job. But, as Henry and Sheldon said in the last episode, the move is toward more, not less biometrics. And Thelma’s note adds a few more data points that confirms that trend.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Of course, automated facial recognition might be more efficient, but is not always resilient. The UK’s facial recognition <a href=\"https://www.bbc.com/news/business-68972065\">eGate system was down for 4 hours </a>last week for a “system network issue.” They had to fall back to old-school manual facial recognition -- that is, an immigration officer looking at you and then at the picture of you in your passport. This seems to be becoming an annual event in the UK. Last May, they had a <a href=\"https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-65731795\">similar 3-4-hour eGate outage</a>. Note to self -- don’t fly to the UK next May. But at least it’s happening in a country that prides itself on orderly queueing.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Back in the COVID era, in episodes in 2020 and 2021, I was <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/03/21/podcast-161-new-crisis-old-question-driving-down-to-key-west/\">skeptical</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/06/15/podcast-176-why-business-travel-is-coming-back-learning-airport-history/\">of</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/09/27/podcast-179-high-tech-airport-lines-business-travel-still-missing/\">predictions</a> like Bill Gates’ that <a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/17/coronavirus-bill-gates-says-more-than-50percent-of-business-travel-will-disappear-long-term.html\">50% of business travel will go away</a>; hot takes that virtual meetings are the “new normal”. The reality? First quarter earnings calls from travel companies all saying that business travel is back. <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/business/hospitality/welcome-back-road-warriors-business-travel-returns-6241d575?st=mejrn8dduygzq5v&amp;reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink\">Alaska Air and Southwest both said corporate travel sales grew over 20% and are back to pre-pandemic levels</a>; as did Hilton and <a href=\"https://skift.com/2024/05/09/hyatt-signals-strength-in-business-travel-loyalty-and-all-inclusives/\">Hyatt</a>. <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean\">Regression to the mean</a>, you might call it “<a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_inertia\">behavioral inertia</a>”, is a strong force. Just ask all the folks laid off from e-commerce companies.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And, as always, thanks to the notes from folks who listened all the way to the end of the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2024/04/11/podcast-199-smile-for-security-facial-recognition-in-travel/\">previous episode</a> where I said that this episode would be my last. I have to tell you that, if I was a listener, I wouldn’t have heard it. I’d be hitting the “next track” button on Overcast within the second bar of Evangeline’s <em>Pictures of You</em> song.<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Thelma, in her biometrics note, also said “I have been a listener of yours for I believe 18 years. I will miss your show but wish you all the best. My old time fav was your love of bashing TSA. Another favorite thing on the podcast was the outro music. When you played the whole thing I couldn’t help but sing along.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Thanks very much for sticking it out for pretty much the full duration. Either I’m mellowing with age or the TSA finally cleaned up their act 3 or 4 years ago, or maybe PreCheck has taken away the reasons for those old debates about shoe sole thickness or the definition of a solid.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Another lifer, Jerry Sarfati, wrote in “I’m sorry to hear that you will be ending the Travel Commons podcast. I am a LONG time listener, I guess about 18 years.&nbsp; I found your podcast when I was a “road warrior”. &nbsp; Now I’m retired, but still enjoy listening to you.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Rob Cheshire of <a href=\"https://thisweekincraft.beer/\"><em>This Week in Craft Beer</em></a> wrote “Truly the end of an era!”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Roger Nash left the Instagram comment -- “Going to miss you, sir”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And @LAflyr hit me up on Twitter to say -- “Sad to hear about the upcoming end of the journey.&nbsp; However, reaching 200 episodes is truly an achievement.&nbsp; Thanks for all the stories and entertainment over the years!”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Robert Fennerty wrote - “I will miss the Travel Commons podcast for many reasons. In increasingly important order, here are my top 3 reasons:<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Travel Tips:</strong> I have incorporated many of your ideas and devices into my travel regimen. Most recently, the Super Bagel has become my go to power center and it has reduced the weight of my laptop bag, thereby allowing me to stuff other less useful junk inside.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Cogent Observations:</strong> The show has had so many cathartic YES I KNOW moments. For example, every time I walk into a hotel bathroom and the bottles have unintelligible labels, I think of you. In the example below, we know that my hands will smell like magnolia after I depress the plunger on one of those bottles. But will I have washed my hands or moistened them? No one can know for sure.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>You:</strong> Every time a new episode enters my podcast feed, I smile. Your voice is very reassuring and I think it lowers my pulse a few beats per minute. So I will miss your company, especially when I’m on the road.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Wow! Thank you very much Robert for that. And to everyone who wrote in. I really do appreciate your comments; they mean a lot.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Now this is the point in this segment where I usually say, if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com or to @mpeacock on Twitter, or to @travelcommons on Instagram or Facebook. Well, feel free to keep doing that. I’ll still be there, but it’ll just be between you and me.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/52154\">release.JOY.release</a> by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: essesq, Haskel (hej31)</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Wrapping Up the TravelCommons Journey</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>So here’s <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/05/15/first-travelcommons-podcast/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"First TravelCommons Podcast\">how it started</a> 19 years ago<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>This is the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/05/15/first-travelcommons-podcast/\" title=\"First TravelCommons Podcast\">first TravelCommons podcast</a>, so bear with us. We got kind of a lousy microphone and we\'re gonna be trying some new stuff along the way, but I hope you enjoy what we gotta say. Why should you care, why should you listen, why should you even think about subscribing to this podcast? Well, if you\'re interested in travel, that\'s what we\'re gonna talk about -- the ground level experiences of a traveler, someone who\'s in airplanes and hotels and rental cars every week. That\'s me. We\'re talking to you today from the bathroom of the Wardman Park Marriott. I don\'t have fancy reverb filters and all the other great stuff. So instead, I thought I\'d just surround myself with a lot of tile and hopefully this thing will sound pretty good. So, anyhow, Wardman Park Marriott in Northwest DC.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I\'m on kind of one of my normal triangulation trips. Last week, I was out on the West Coast. This week, I\'m out on the East Coast. Started off in ORD yesterday afternoon. Typical ORD day -- 6 am thunderstorm shot the entire schedule to hell in a hand basket; 60- to 120-minute delays the whole time. I tell you; it was a mess. And then today flying down from New York, taking the shuttle out of LGA, they push us back and then we sit for 45 minutes on the runway because we got caught right in the middle of one of those times when LGA takes the entire 30 airplanes that are out on the runway and tell them all to turn around and go the other way because the wind shifted. It was beautiful. It\'s been a beautiful trip; kind of a normal trip actually.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And here’s how we’re ending it -- with, if nothing else, a <em>lot</em> better sound quality… and a bit more effort in clean-up editing. But I do think the through line, from episode 1 to 200, has been consistent -- capturing the voice of the traveler, and through being more about the journey than the destination.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>A few years back, Rob Cheshire turned me onto a podcast called <a href=\"https://www.stealthisbeer.com/\">Steal This Beer</a>. Their tag line is “A candid discussion about beer, over beer, by a couple of guys who think about beer way too much.” Swap “travel” for “beer” and it could make a better tagline for this podcast -- “A discussion about travel by a guy who thinks about travel way too much.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And I would think too much about travel because, as with many road warrior listeners who would chime in over the years, travel was one of the main drivers of my day-to-day existence. There was a stretch of time -- years, actually -- where I would travel all but 6 or 7 weeks in a year. So 80+% of my life would be dependent on how well, each week, the FAA, the TSA, 2-4 airports, 1-3 airlines, 2-3 hotels, and Hertz did their respective jobs. The joint probability of that many independent variables all lining up in the right way for me to get to where I wanted to be on time is vanishingly small. Looking at it this way, it’s no wonder I sounded so cranky so often on this podcast.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Some road warriors who “think way too much” go <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2009/12/15/up-in-the-air-captures-life-in-the-travel-bubble/\">full-on George Clooney</a> in the movie <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_in_the_Air_(2009_film)\"><em>Up In The Air</em></a>, obsessively collecting “travel hacks” to swerve lines, precious metal status levels, doing whatever they can to be able to move through their travel days with minimum friction and maximum efficiency. I’ve called that over the years “living in the travel bubble.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If I’d gone that way, this podcast would’ve ended maybe 100 episodes ago. I’ve talked a lot over the years about breaking out of the travel bubble -- by <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2008/04/29/podcast-64-escaping-the-travel-bubble-marks-travel-tips/\">taking subways and commuter trains</a> instead of taxis and Ubers, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/09/29/podcast-196-cheers-to-beer-tourism-and-travel/\">searching out</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/09/28/podcast-124-craft-beer-hunting-i-hate-rick-steves/\">local</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/10/12/podcast-111-seatback-recline-wars-craft-beer-tourism/\">beer</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/04/10/podcast-174-how-the-pros-plan-their-taproom-tourism/\">joints</a>, and just <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/06/20/podcast-194-best-laid-travel-plans-roaming-entropy/\">roaming randomly</a> around a city -- or what the cool kids call <em><a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-emotional-benefits-of-wandering-11671131450?st=mmqyql6e1cktnub&amp;reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink\" title=\"\">flâneuring</a></em>. I always figured it’s a symptom of adult ADHD; a short attention span, a need for external stimuli. As you might guess, I’m no fun on a beach vacation. Going to a new place or digging into new bits of places like New York or San Francisco where I’ve been, what, 50 times before -- seeing, experiencing new things would hit that dopamine button and make up for having to grit my teeth through the umpteenth flight delay at ORD or LGA.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And to lay further back on the analyst’s couch, I find that when I’m traveling, when I’m in the midst of all this new stuff, I’m often better able to dig down and think about things that, when I’m home, the day-to-day activities get in the way. Travel can keep my day-to-day stuff at arm’s length -- 2 arms’ length if I’m not in an English-speaking place. I can tune out a lot of the peripheral chatter -- the television in the corner, the adjacent conversations -- because I don’t understand it.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But even when I can’t understand what’s being said around me, I found travel still expanding my understanding, my perspectives. It’s one thing to read about the size of China’s population or the poverty in India or the humid heat in Vietnam or the homeless encampments in San Francisco, but it’s a whole next-level to see it and experience it in person. What seems black and white from a distance starts to dither into gray when it’s up close. It forces me to do a much better job of seeing the other side, to see how my actions could be perceived by others, and I hope it ends up making me a more empathetic person. Which is why I never bought into the “new normal” predictions of Bill Gates and others that travel would never be the same. There’s too many people like me.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But the lack of travel during the Covid shutdowns, the move to more virtual work, and my own slouching toward retirement has made it more of a struggle to generate new and what I thought was interesting content that is “more about the journey”. Two years ago, I wrote in a note “I’m definitely not making it to episode #200”. I surprised myself by making it here, but it seems like a good point to wrap it up -- landmark episode number and 19 years after the first episode in May 2005.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>So what’s next? I’m not really sure. Actually, no. I do know that I’m going to clean up the TravelCommons website -- fix the SSL certificate Robert Fenerty <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/06/20/podcast-194-best-laid-travel-plans-roaming-entropy/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">pinged me about last June</a>; delete the out-of-date posts. And reconfigure it to focus more on the written work, the blog posts than the podcast because I think that’ll be what comes next -- written stuff that’s more about the destination than the journey, to flip the tag line around.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I’ve done it pretty infrequently in the past; the podcast took priority. The last one was about <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Quick Notes on Our Trip to Tucson\">our January 2021 trip to Tucson</a>. But I’ve found myself giving out a lot of travel recommendations recently -- from guys around my age who know I’ve done a bit of travel asking me “What should I do in this place?” Like last weekend, I ran into a guy at a <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/barriquebrewing/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">taproom</a> who, when I sat next to him at the beginning of the year, asked me for recommendations for Rome. “That <a href=\"https://www.football-pub.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">beer bar </a>down that alley in Trastevere you recommended was great!” he said. “And that neighborhood too! We wouldn’t have gone there if you hadn’t suggested it.” Maybe travel writing editors have over-rotated from “tell me where to go” to “tell me a story about a place”, but it’ll be good to have something to keep me occupied.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"className\":\"has-medium-font-size\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em><a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/track/0geYaxa8LozoV8afrKwdTo?si=aa1cf0be8ee9400a\" title=\"\">Pictures of You</a></em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #200</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I hope you enjoyed this last show, and thanks so much to all of you who have been along on this ride.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As I said earlier, you can still ping me at <a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a>, mpeacock on Twitter, the TravelCommons page on Facebook and Instagram, and the travelcommons.com website will still be around. I’ll put links to any new posts on all the socials. If you aren’t on social media -- which I can completely understand -- and want to know when I post something, send your email address to me at <a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a> and I’ll email out a link to new material. Who knows, maybe I’ll do a TravelCommons newsletter.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Thelma’s comment in her note about the outro song, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/track/0geYaxa8LozoV8afrKwdTo?si=fb4c8ad5edd24ab4\"><em>Pictures of You</em></a> by the Scottish band Evangeline, got me digging in through the archives, all the way back to <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/09/14/podcast-14-september-11th-travel-stories-writing-a-great-travel-song/\">episode #14</a> where the band leader explained the origins of the song. It only seems right to close out this last episode with his words and his full song.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As always, safe travels; and thanks for stopping by the TravelCommons.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Willie Evans - “Hi, I\'m Willie Evans from Scots Band Evangeline sending good thoughts to Mark and all the listeners of the TravelCommons podcast. Touring is a part of our job that we love. It\'s exciting, it\'s fun, it\'s energizing, and it\'s great to get out there and meet the fans and see new places. The downside, however, is that it can be a bit boring and predictable, with each day being pretty much the same as the day before. And inevitably, we all miss our friends and our loved ones back home. The song <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/track/0geYaxa8LozoV8afrKwdTo?si=fb4c8ad5edd24ab4\"><em>Pictures of You</em></a> from our <em>Hard Way</em> album is about that longing for our wives and families. And whether you\'re an entertainer or musician or perhaps a salesman or businessman who travels a lot, then I hope you can identify with it. Hope you enjoy the song. Have a great day.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_200.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #200 — Wrapping Up the TravelCommons Journey','Finishing 19 years of podcasting where I\'ve been thinking way too much about travel, I indulge in some nostalgia and talk about my personal travel philosophy','inherit','closed','closed','','4494-revision-v1','','','2024-05-30 10:16:11','2024-05-30 15:16:11','',4494,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4517',0,'revision','',0),
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(4524,1,'2024-05-31 21:37:16','2024-06-01 02:37:16','<!-- wp:navigation-link {\"className\":\" menu-item menu-item-type-post_type menu-item-object-page menu-item-home\",\"description\":\"\",\"id\":\"3141\",\"kind\":\"post-type\",\"label\":\"Home\",\"opensInNewTab\":false,\"rel\":null,\"title\":\"\",\"type\":\"page\",\"url\":\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/\"} /--><!-- wp:navigation-link {\"className\":\" menu-item menu-item-type-post_type menu-item-object-page\",\"description\":\"\",\"id\":\"3144\",\"kind\":\"post-type\",\"label\":\"Episodes\",\"opensInNewTab\":false,\"rel\":null,\"title\":\"\",\"type\":\"page\",\"url\":\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/episodes/\"} /--><!-- wp:navigation-link {\"className\":\" menu-item menu-item-type-post_type menu-item-object-page\",\"description\":\"\",\"id\":\"3145\",\"kind\":\"post-type\",\"label\":\"Blog\",\"opensInNewTab\":false,\"rel\":null,\"title\":\"\",\"type\":\"page\",\"url\":\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/blog/\"} /--><!-- wp:navigation-link {\"className\":\" menu-item menu-item-type-taxonomy menu-item-object-category\",\"description\":\"\",\"id\":\"2\",\"kind\":\"taxonomy\",\"label\":\"Food\",\"opensInNewTab\":false,\"rel\":null,\"title\":\"\",\"type\":\"category\",\"url\":\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/food-2/\"} /--><!-- wp:navigation-link {\"className\":\" menu-item menu-item-type-taxonomy menu-item-object-category\",\"description\":\"\",\"id\":\"392\",\"kind\":\"taxonomy\",\"label\":\"Beer\",\"opensInNewTab\":false,\"rel\":null,\"title\":\"\",\"type\":\"category\",\"url\":\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/category/beer/\"} /--><!-- wp:navigation-submenu {\"className\":\" menu-item menu-item-type-custom menu-item-object-custom\",\"description\":\"\",\"id\":null,\"kind\":\"custom\",\"label\":\"Subscribe\",\"opensInNewTab\":false,\"rel\":null,\"title\":\"\",\"type\":\"custom\",\"url\":\"\"} --><!-- wp:navigation-link {\"className\":\" menu-item menu-item-type-custom menu-item-object-custom\",\"description\":\"\",\"id\":null,\"kind\":\"custom\",\"label\":\"Apple Podcasts\",\"opensInNewTab\":false,\"rel\":null,\"title\":\"\",\"type\":\"custom\",\"url\":\"https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id73330536\"} /--><!-- wp:navigation-link {\"className\":\" menu-item menu-item-type-custom menu-item-object-custom\",\"description\":\"\",\"id\":null,\"kind\":\"custom\",\"label\":\"Spotify\",\"opensInNewTab\":false,\"rel\":null,\"title\":\"\",\"type\":\"custom\",\"url\":\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\"} /--><!-- wp:navigation-link {\"className\":\" menu-item menu-item-type-custom menu-item-object-custom\",\"description\":\"\",\"id\":null,\"kind\":\"custom\",\"label\":\"Google Podcasts\",\"opensInNewTab\":false,\"rel\":null,\"title\":\"\",\"type\":\"custom\",\"url\":\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\"} /--><!-- wp:navigation-link {\"className\":\" menu-item menu-item-type-custom menu-item-object-custom\",\"description\":\"\",\"id\":null,\"kind\":\"custom\",\"label\":\"SoundCloud\",\"opensInNewTab\":false,\"rel\":null,\"title\":\"\",\"type\":\"custom\",\"url\":\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\"} /--><!-- wp:navigation-link {\"className\":\" menu-item menu-item-type-custom menu-item-object-custom\",\"description\":\"\",\"id\":null,\"kind\":\"custom\",\"label\":\"Amazon Music\",\"opensInNewTab\":false,\"rel\":null,\"title\":\"\",\"type\":\"custom\",\"url\":\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\"} /--><!-- wp:navigation-link {\"className\":\" menu-item menu-item-type-custom menu-item-object-custom\",\"description\":\"\",\"id\":null,\"kind\":\"custom\",\"label\":\"Stitcher\",\"opensInNewTab\":false,\"rel\":null,\"title\":\"\",\"type\":\"custom\",\"url\":\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"} /--><!-- wp:navigation-link {\"className\":\" menu-item menu-item-type-custom menu-item-object-custom\",\"description\":\"\",\"id\":null,\"kind\":\"custom\",\"label\":\"Podcast RSS Feed\",\"opensInNewTab\":false,\"rel\":null,\"title\":\"\",\"type\":\"custom\",\"url\":\"http://feeds.feedburner.com/TravelcommonsPodcast\"} /--><!-- /wp:navigation-submenu --><!-- wp:navigation-link {\"className\":\" menu-item menu-item-type-post_type menu-item-object-page\",\"description\":\"\",\"id\":\"85\",\"kind\":\"post-type\",\"label\":\"About Us\",\"opensInNewTab\":false,\"rel\":null,\"title\":\"About Us\",\"type\":\"page\",\"url\":\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/about-2-2/\"} /-->','Main Navigation','','publish','closed','closed','','main-navigation','','','2024-05-31 21:37:16','2024-06-01 02:37:16','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2024/05/31/main-navigation/',0,'wp_navigation','',0),
(4532,1,'2024-06-01 20:08:20','2024-06-02 01:08:20','','IMG_6027','','inherit','open','closed','','img_6027','','','2024-06-01 20:08:20','2024-06-02 01:08:20','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/IMG_6027.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(4535,1,'2024-06-01 20:30:19','2024-06-02 01:30:19','','DALL·E 2024-06-01 20.22.07','Paging Thru My Travel Journals','inherit','open','closed','','dall%c2%b7e-2024-06-01-20-22-07','','','2024-06-01 20:35:34','2024-06-02 01:35:34','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/DALL·E-2024-06-01-20.22.07.webp',0,'attachment','image/webp',0),
(4556,1,'2024-06-02 10:22:14','2024-06-02 15:22:14','','B017DED6-2FDB-4305-986C-5FF4AEFA0D9D','','inherit','open','closed','','b017ded6-2fdb-4305-986c-5ff4aefa0d9d','','','2024-06-02 10:22:14','2024-06-02 15:22:14','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/B017DED6-2FDB-4305-986C-5FF4AEFA0D9D.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(4557,1,'2024-06-02 10:27:01','2024-06-02 15:27:01','','71fvjFWkLqL._SL1200_','','inherit','open','closed','','71fvjfwklql-_sl1200_','','','2024-06-02 10:27:01','2024-06-02 15:27:01','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/71fvjFWkLqL._SL1200_.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(4559,1,'2024-06-02 10:30:17','2024-06-02 15:30:17','<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/logo.png\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1733\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/logo-300x67.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"67\" /></a>Thanks to the folks at <a href=\"https://nordvpn.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">NordVPN</a>, we\'re giving away a 1-year VPN subscription so that one lucky TravelCommons listener can work/play safer on the Internet.\r\n\r\nWe\'re using Rafflecopter to run the giveaway:\r\n<ul>\r\n 	<li>You only have do one of the types of entry listed below, not all of them.</li>\r\n 	<li>Each entry type (follows, blog posts, etc) counts as 1 additional “ticket” except for an iTunes review which counts for 2 \"tickets\"</li>\r\n 	<li>I verify every winner, so if you don’t follow instructions (e.g., when you post a comment you don’t answer the question, you didn\'t actually leave an iTunes review) you will be disqualified.</li>\r\n 	<li>Due to the volume of entries I get, I am unable to verify that entries worked or “went through” properly ahead of time.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\nAnd now for the Terms &amp; Conditions:\r\n\r\n<em>Terms &amp; Conditions: The prizes for this giveaway was provided free of charge by NordVPN. Giveaway ends March 2, 2017 at 11:59 PM Central Time. Winners will be selected at random by Rafflecopter.com and verified by TravelCommons. Winner will have 72 hours to respond before prize is forfeited and a new winner is selected. TravelCommons will not be responsible for a winner\'s inability to activate the prize. No purchase necessary to enter. </em>','[Finished] NordVPN 1-Year Subscription Giveaway','','inherit','closed','closed','','1718-revision-v1','','','2024-06-02 10:30:17','2024-06-02 15:30:17','',1718,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4559',0,'revision','',0),
(4560,1,'2024-06-02 10:30:47','2024-06-02 15:30:47','Last week, I swapped my standard corporate-issue <a href=\"http://www.laptopmag.com/review/laptops/dell-latitude-e6400.aspx?utm_source=Blog&amp;utm_medium=text&amp;utm_content=Dell_Latitude_E6400&amp;utm_campaign=smartlinks\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Dell Latitude E6400</a> laptop for an <a href=\"http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/sm/WF05a/321957-321957-64295-3841267-3955550-4094022.html\">HP Mini 5102</a> netbook and an <a href=\"http://www.apple.com/ipad/specs/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Wi-Fi + 3G iPad</a>. After a week\'s trip to Scottsdale with my lighter (by 1.4 lbs) briefcase, I found myself liking both devices, but for very different reasons...\n\n<!--more-->\n<ul>\n	<li><strong>E-Mail</strong> -- The main reason I\'m willing to dump the 14-in Dell screen for a 10-in netbook display is that most of my computer time is now spent running e-mail.  Back when I was developing code or creating PowerPoint decks, I was willing to lug some extra pounds to get extra pixels.  Now that my life revolves around Outlook, screen size isn\'t as important.  But a good keyboard is, and the HP\'s traditional keyboard is much more usable for a touch typist than the iPad\'s onscreen keyboard.  You can\'t rest your fingers on the iPad\'s virtual keys, and eliminating the semi-colon key causes some real problems for touch typists.  Also, being able to work in the actual Outlook client on the HP is a huge advantage over iPad\'s mail client.\nWinner -- <em>HP netbook</em></li>\n	<li><strong>Web Browsing</strong> -- Even though the HP\'s screen specs out larger than the iPad (10.1-in diagonal vs. 9.7-in diagonal), the iPad\'s screen looks bigger and brighter.  Perhaps it\'s the 132 pixels per inch (ppi), but it probably because the iPad\'s tablet form factor frees it from the desktop (or your lap) and makes it seem natural to bring it closer to your eyes.  And if you\'re browsing rather than typing, touching the web site is a more direct interaction than connecting your finger to the cursor through the touchpad.  Unless, that is, your browsing involves web sites like Hulu, which lands you directly in the cross fire of Steve Jobs\' Flash jihad.\nWinner -- <em>Apple iPad</em></li>\n	<li><strong>Writing</strong> -- Again, it\'s the keyboard.  While I\'m getting better on the iPad virtual keyboard after a week\'s practice, I switched over to the HP\'s physical keyboard to write this post.  As important, though, it\'s easier to get files on and off the HP.  The iron sandbox that Apple has erected around the iPhone/iPad may improve its security, but makes it difficult to use as something other than an isolated machine.\nWinner -- <em>HP Netbook</em></li>\n	<li><strong>Performance</strong> -- Moving from the Dell\'s 2.26 GHz Core 2 Duo processor to the HP\'s 1.66 GHz Atom chip, you expect to wait a few more seconds for applications to start up.  And you do.  But if you\'re just doing e-mail, web browsing, and some light Word/Excel/PowerPoint work, the Atom keeps up.  There are no such compromises with the iPad\'s custom A4 chip.  Video is smooth, and there\'s none of the stutter-step scrolling that has become so frustrating on my 3G iPhone.\nWinner -- <em>Apple iPad</em></li>\n	<li><strong>Battery </strong>-- This is the one disappointment with the HP 5102 Mini.  The 4-cell 29-watt-hour lithium ion battery specs out at 4½ hours, but was dying after my 3½ hour flight from Chicago to Phoenix.  It could be that I don\'t have Windows 7 configured correctly, but I couldn\'t get much more battery life even after some deep Power Option tweaking. My experience with the iPad\'s custom 25-watt-hour lithium polymer battery is the complete opposite.  I have yet to see the battery gauge turn red -- a pleasant change from my iPhone experience.\nWinner -- <em>Apple iPad</em></li>\n	<li><strong>Cost </strong>-- Doing a straight feature/cost comparison is tough -- these are two very different machines.  Comparing the two machines in my briefcase -- the HP 5102 Mini netbook with 2 GB memory and 160 GB hard drive lists for $535 on HP\'s web site while my 64 GB Wi-Fi + 3G iPad goes for $829 on apple.com -- HP looks the winner.  But if you can drop down to the 32 GB Wi-Fi + 3G iPad and factor in its lower cost AT&amp;T 3G plan, you get pretty close to breakeven after 12 months.  Is it a fair comparison, I don\'t know -- but it\'s a data point.\nWinner -- ranges from <em>HP netbook</em> to <em>a tie</em></li>\n</ul>\nWhat\'s the bottom line?  It\'s not clear.  I really like both machines, but for very different reasons.  The HP is a solid little machine -- great keyboard, reasonable performance, and a compact size that doesn\'t get crushed when the guy in front of me pushes his seat back in an American Airlines MD-80.  The iPad provides a much better way to browse web sites (non-Flash, of course) and watch videos.  I\'d love to drop one of them, but I can\'t -- not yet.\n\n<strong> </strong>','IPad vs. Netbook -- First Impressions','','inherit','closed','closed','','233-revision-v1','','','2024-06-02 10:30:47','2024-06-02 15:30:47','',233,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4560',0,'revision','',0),
(4561,1,'2024-06-02 10:33:52','2024-06-02 15:33:52','\"What do tech-savvy frequent flyers want most? The desire to stay connected via Wi-Fi topped the technology requests, according to a<a href=\"http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press/2009/090522a.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> new study</a> conducted by American Airlines and HP,\" says an HP press release from last week.  The online survey conducted by American Airlines reports that \"47 percent of business travelers surveyed indicated Wi-Fi was the most important airport amenity, outscoring basic travels needs such as food by nearly 30 percentage points\" -- a not-so-surprising coincidence given AA\'s<a href=\"http://www.aa.com/aa/i18nForward.do?p=/urls/gogo.jsp\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> recent announcement</a> of their roll-out of the <a href=\"http://www.gogoinflight.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Gogo</a> inflight Internet service.\n\nThe survey was obviously constructed to provide publicity around the Gogo roll-out, but I have to disagree with two of the key findings.  First, given the dire state of on-board food, I rate airport food availability much higher than WiFi -- especially if I\'m getting on a flight heading to or from the West Coast.  Between my BlackBerry and iPhone, I can handle almost all my communication needs with cellular data.  But having to make a meal from one of those $6 snack boxes?  That\'s a crisis in the making.\n\nThe other finding I take issue with is their claim that \"work efficiency drops dramatically in the air\" for lack of voice and data network connectivity.  On the contrary, I think my work efficiency <em>increases </em>without Outlook pinging me with a new e-mail or TweetDeck beeping with the latest tweet or my iPhone vibrating with a new text message or a colleague asking a quick question on IM or somebody calling me to ask how things are going....  I look forward to my 4-hours of enforced solitude on my flights between Chicago and San Francisco.  I get an amazing amount of reading and writing done.  Thank God that Gogo wants to charge $13/flight for their service.  If it was free, I\'d never get anything done.','Gratuitous Research On WiFi Cravings','','inherit','closed','closed','','130-revision-v1','','','2024-06-02 10:33:52','2024-06-02 15:33:52','',130,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4561',0,'revision','',0),
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-->\n\n<!-- wp:template-part {\"slug\":\"footer\",\"theme\":\"twentytwentyfive-kimi-child\",\"tagName\":\"footer\",\"area\":\"footer\"} /-->','Blog Home','Displays the latest posts as either the site homepage or as the \"Posts page\" as defined under reading settings. 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{\"queryId\":1,\"query\":{\"perPage\":10,\"postType\":\"post\",\"order\":\"desc\",\"orderBy\":\"date\",\"inherit\":false},\"align\":\"wide\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-query alignwide\"><!-- wp:post-template -->\n<!-- wp:group {\"className\":\"post-list-item\",\"layout\":{\"type\":\"default\"},\"hideFromFeed\":true} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-group post-list-item\"><!-- wp:post-featured-image {\"aspectRatio\":\"4/3\",\"width\":\"200px\",\"height\":\"150px\",\"style\":{\"layout\":{\"selfStretch\":\"fixed\",\"flexSize\":\"200px\"}}} /-->\n\n<!-- wp:group {\"className\":\"post-content-wrapper\",\"layout\":{\"type\":\"default\"},\"hideFromFeed\":true} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-group post-content-wrapper\"><!-- wp:post-title {\"isLink\":true,\"fontSize\":\"x-large\"} /-->\n\n<!-- wp:post-excerpt {\"moreText\":\"Continue Reading →\",\"showMoreOnNewLine\":false,\"excerptLength\":25} /-->\n\n<!-- wp:post-date {\"format\":\"F j, 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-->\n\n<!-- wp:template-part {\"slug\":\"footer\",\"theme\":\"twentytwentyfive-kimi-child\",\"tagName\":\"footer\",\"area\":\"footer\"} /-->','Blog Home','Displays the latest posts as either the site homepage or as the \"Posts page\" as defined under reading settings. 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(4658,1,'2026-01-26 17:26:37','2026-01-26 22:26:37','<!-- wp:template-part {\"slug\":\"header\",\"theme\":\"twentytwentyfive-kimi-child\",\"tagName\":\"header\",\"area\":\"header\"} /-->\n\n<!-- wp:group {\"tagName\":\"main\",\"style\":{\"spacing\":{\"padding\":{\"top\":\"var:preset|spacing|50\",\"bottom\":\"var:preset|spacing|50\"}}},\"hideFromFeed\":true} -->\n<main class=\"wp-block-group\" style=\"padding-top:var(--wp--preset--spacing--50);padding-bottom:var(--wp--preset--spacing--50)\"><!-- wp:group {\"layout\":{\"type\":\"constrained\"},\"hideFromFeed\":true} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-group\"><!-- wp:group {\"align\":\"wide\",\"style\":{\"spacing\":{\"padding\":{\"top\":\"var:preset|spacing|50\",\"bottom\":\"var:preset|spacing|50\"}}},\"hideFromFeed\":true} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-group alignwide\" style=\"padding-top:var(--wp--preset--spacing--50);padding-bottom:var(--wp--preset--spacing--50)\"><!-- wp:site-title {\"textAlign\":\"center\",\"isLink\":false,\"style\":{\"typography\":{\"fontSize\":\"3rem\",\"fontWeight\":\"700\",\"fontStyle\":\"normal\"}}} /-->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph {\"align\":\"center\",\"style\":{\"typography\":{\"fontSize\":\"1.25rem\",\"fontStyle\":\"italic\"}}} -->\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center\" style=\"font-size:1.25rem;font-style:italic\">It\'s As Much About the Journey as the Destination</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:group {\"className\":\"subscribe-cta\",\"style\":{\"spacing\":{\"padding\":{\"top\":\"var:preset|spacing|30\",\"right\":\"var:preset|spacing|30\",\"bottom\":\"var:preset|spacing|30\",\"left\":\"var:preset|spacing|30\"}}},\"hideFromFeed\":true} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-group subscribe-cta\" style=\"padding-top:var(--wp--preset--spacing--30);padding-right:var(--wp--preset--spacing--30);padding-bottom:var(--wp--preset--spacing--30);padding-left:var(--wp--preset--spacing--30)\"><!-- wp:paragraph 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{\"queryId\":1,\"query\":{\"perPage\":10,\"postType\":\"post\",\"order\":\"desc\",\"orderBy\":\"date\",\"inherit\":false},\"align\":\"wide\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-query alignwide\"><!-- wp:post-template -->\n<!-- wp:group {\"className\":\"post-list-item\",\"layout\":{\"type\":\"default\"},\"hideFromFeed\":true} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-group post-list-item\"><!-- wp:post-featured-image {\"aspectRatio\":\"4/3\",\"width\":\"200px\",\"height\":\"150px\",\"style\":{\"layout\":{\"selfStretch\":\"fixed\",\"flexSize\":\"200px\"}}} /-->\n\n<!-- wp:group {\"className\":\"post-content-wrapper\",\"layout\":{\"type\":\"default\"},\"hideFromFeed\":true} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-group post-content-wrapper\"><!-- wp:post-title {\"isLink\":true,\"fontSize\":\"x-large\"} /-->\n\n<!-- wp:post-excerpt {\"moreText\":\"Continue Reading →\",\"showMoreOnNewLine\":false,\"excerptLength\":25} /-->\n\n<!-- wp:post-date {\"format\":\"F j, 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-->\n\n<!-- wp:template-part {\"slug\":\"footer\",\"theme\":\"twentytwentyfive-kimi-child\",\"tagName\":\"footer\",\"area\":\"footer\"} /-->','Blog Home','Displays the latest posts as either the site homepage or as the \"Posts page\" as defined under reading settings. 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(4660,1,'2026-01-26 17:39:17','2026-01-26 22:39:17','<!-- wp:template-part {\"slug\":\"header\",\"theme\":\"twentytwentyfive-kimi-child\",\"tagName\":\"header\",\"area\":\"header\"} /-->\n\n<!-- wp:group {\"tagName\":\"main\",\"style\":{\"spacing\":{\"padding\":{\"top\":\"var:preset|spacing|50\",\"bottom\":\"var:preset|spacing|50\"}}},\"hideFromFeed\":true} -->\n<main class=\"wp-block-group\" style=\"padding-top:var(--wp--preset--spacing--50);padding-bottom:var(--wp--preset--spacing--50)\"><!-- wp:group {\"layout\":{\"type\":\"constrained\"},\"hideFromFeed\":true} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-group\"><!-- wp:group {\"align\":\"wide\",\"style\":{\"spacing\":{\"padding\":{\"top\":\"var:preset|spacing|50\",\"bottom\":\"var:preset|spacing|50\"}}},\"hideFromFeed\":true} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-group alignwide\" style=\"padding-top:var(--wp--preset--spacing--50);padding-bottom:var(--wp--preset--spacing--50)\"><!-- wp:site-title 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-->\n\n<!-- wp:template-part {\"slug\":\"footer\",\"theme\":\"twentytwentyfive-kimi-child\",\"tagName\":\"footer\",\"area\":\"footer\"} /-->','Blog Home','Displays the latest posts as either the site homepage or as the \"Posts page\" as defined under reading settings. 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(4672,1,'2026-01-26 17:39:51','2026-01-26 23:39:51','<!-- wp:group {\"className\":\"is-style-default\",\"style\":{\"spacing\":{\"padding\":{\"top\":\"var:preset|spacing|30\",\"bottom\":\"var:preset|spacing|30\",\"right\":\"var:preset|spacing|50\",\"left\":\"var:preset|spacing|50\"},\"margin\":{\"top\":\"0\",\"bottom\":\"0\"}}},\"fontSize\":\"large\",\"layout\":{\"type\":\"constrained\"},\"hideFromFeed\":true} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-group is-style-default has-large-font-size\" style=\"margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;padding-top:var(--wp--preset--spacing--30);padding-right:var(--wp--preset--spacing--50);padding-bottom:var(--wp--preset--spacing--30);padding-left:var(--wp--preset--spacing--50)\"><!-- wp:group {\"align\":\"wide\",\"layout\":{\"type\":\"default\"},\"hideFromFeed\":true} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-group alignwide\"><!-- wp:group {\"align\":\"full\",\"layout\":{\"type\":\"flex\",\"flexWrap\":\"wrap\",\"justifyContent\":\"space-between\",\"verticalAlignment\":\"top\"},\"hideFromFeed\":true} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-group alignfull\"><!-- wp:columns -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-columns\"><!-- wp:column {\"width\":\"100%\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-column\" style=\"flex-basis:100%\"><!-- wp:image {\"id\":3245,\"sizeSlug\":\"full\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/travelcommons_logo_80x80.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/travelcommons_logo_80x80.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3245\"/></a></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:site-title {\"level\":2} /-->\n\n<!-- wp:site-tagline /--></div>\n<!-- /wp:column -->\n\n<!-- wp:column -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-column\"></div>\n<!-- /wp:column -->\n\n<!-- wp:column -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-column\"></div>\n<!-- /wp:column -->\n\n<!-- wp:column -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-column\"></div>\n<!-- /wp:column -->\n\n<!-- wp:column {\"width\":\"\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-column\"><!-- wp:spacer {\"height\":\"var:preset|spacing|40\",\"width\":\"0px\"} -->\n<div style=\"height:var(--wp--preset--spacing--40);width:0px\" aria-hidden=\"true\" class=\"wp-block-spacer\"></div>\n<!-- /wp:spacer --></div>\n<!-- /wp:column --></div>\n<!-- /wp:columns -->\n\n<!-- wp:group {\"style\":{\"spacing\":{\"blockGap\":\"var:preset|spacing|80\"}},\"layout\":{\"type\":\"flex\",\"flexWrap\":\"wrap\",\"verticalAlignment\":\"top\",\"justifyContent\":\"space-between\"},\"hideFromFeed\":true} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-group\"><!-- wp:navigation {\"ref\":4667,\"overlayMenu\":\"never\",\"layout\":{\"type\":\"flex\",\"orientation\":\"vertical\"}} /--></div>\n<!-- /wp:group --></div>\n<!-- /wp:group -->\n\n<!-- wp:group {\"align\":\"full\",\"style\":{\"spacing\":{\"blockGap\":\"var:preset|spacing|20\"}},\"layout\":{\"type\":\"flex\",\"flexWrap\":\"wrap\",\"justifyContent\":\"space-between\"},\"hideFromFeed\":true} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-group alignfull\"><!-- wp:paragraph {\"fontSize\":\"small\"} -->\n<p class=\"has-small-font-size\">© 2026 The Peacock Group LLC. All rights reserved.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph {\"fontSize\":\"small\"} -->\n<p class=\"has-small-font-size\"></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph --></div>\n<!-- /wp:group --></div>\n<!-- /wp:group --></div>\n<!-- /wp:group -->','Footer','','inherit','closed','closed','','4659-revision-v1','','','2026-01-26 17:39:51','2026-01-26 23:39:51','',4659,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4672',0,'revision','',0),
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(4682,1,'2026-01-26 17:52:56','2026-01-26 23:52:56','<!-- wp:navigation-link {\"label\":\"Home\",\"type\":\"page\",\"url\":\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/\",\"kind\":\"post-type\"} /-->\n\n<!-- wp:navigation-link {\"label\":\"Destinations\",\"type\":\"page\",\"id\":4647,\"url\":\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/destinations/\",\"kind\":\"post-type\",\"metadata\":{\"bindings\":{\"url\":{\"source\":\"core/post-data\",\"args\":{\"field\":\"link\"}}}}} /-->\n\n<!-- wp:navigation-link {\"label\":\"Podcast Archive\",\"type\":\"page\",\"url\":\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-archive/\",\"kind\":\"post-type\"} /-->\n\n<!-- wp:navigation-link {\"label\":\"About Us\",\"type\":\"page\",\"id\":85,\"url\":\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/about-2-2/\",\"kind\":\"post-type\",\"metadata\":{\"bindings\":{\"url\":{\"source\":\"core/post-data\",\"args\":{\"field\":\"link\"}}}}} /-->','Header menu','','inherit','closed','closed','','4645-revision-v1','','','2026-01-26 17:52:56','2026-01-26 23:52:56','',4645,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4682',0,'revision','',0),
(4683,1,'2026-01-26 17:53:40','2026-01-26 23:53:40','<!-- wp:navigation-link {\"label\":\"Home\",\"type\":\"page\",\"url\":\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/\",\"kind\":\"post-type\"} /-->\n\n<!-- wp:navigation-link {\"label\":\"Destinations\",\"type\":\"page\",\"url\":\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/destinations/\",\"kind\":\"post-type\"} /-->\n\n<!-- wp:navigation-link {\"label\":\"Podcast Archive\",\"type\":\"page\",\"url\":\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-archive/\",\"kind\":\"post-type\"} /-->\n\n<!-- wp:navigation-link {\"label\":\"About Us\",\"type\":\"page\",\"url\":\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/about-2-2/\",\"kind\":\"post-type\"} /-->','Header menu','','inherit','closed','closed','','4645-revision-v1','','','2026-01-26 17:53:40','2026-01-26 23:53:40','',4645,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4683',0,'revision','',0),
(4685,1,'2026-01-26 18:22:41','2026-01-27 00:22:41','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/abandoned-motel-sign-300x300.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" />TravelCommons\' final stop[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Finishing up 19 years of thinking way too much about travel, I indulge in a little bit of nostalgia and talk about my personal travel philosophy. But before that, we compare three Mid-South river cities -- Nashville, Louisville, and Memphis -- talk about the recovery of business travel, and enjoy a full listener mail bag. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_200.mp3\" title=\"\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:audio -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-audio\"><audio controls src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_200.mp3\"></audio></figure>\n<!-- /wp:audio -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #200: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you, for the last time, from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN after a couple of road trips, one up I-65 to Louisville, KY for a pre-Kentucky Derby bike ride called (of course) <a href=\"https://www.courier-journal.com/story/entertainment/events/kentucky-derby/festival/2024/02/19/kentucky-derby-festival-pnc-tour-de-lou-adds-finisher-medal-in-2024/72657430007/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Tour de Lou</a>, and then the next week, out west along I-40 to Memphis. It’s given me a chance to compare, if I throw Nashville into the mix, three mid-sized, Mid-South river cities that I’ve lived in. Nashville is the largest of the three both in population and area; Louisville and Memphis are a bit smaller and pretty much the same size. And Nashville <em>feels</em> bigger -- more buildings in the downtown skyline when you drive in, and more big cranes putting up more. Nashville’s neighborhoods feel more linked up, more contiguous space to walk, with fewer “flat spots,” places you feel like you should walk a bit quicker. However, the older, more established neighborhoods of Old Louisville and Midtown Memphis offered more interesting walks. Memphis’ <a href=\"https://overtonpark.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Overton Park</a> is the best city park, with a mix of lawns, gardens, some old-growth forest to walk through, and a concert shell built in the 1930’s where, when we passed by, a hip-hop group was doing a rehearsal walk-thru. Glad the federal and state governments <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_Park#History\" title=\"\">failed to plow a good bit of it under back</a> in the ‘60’s and ‘70’s when they wanted to route I-40 straight through the city.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As I said, all three are river cities -- Memphis on the Mississippi, Louisville on the Ohio, and Nashville on the Cumberland. And maybe because the Mississippi and the Ohio are much bigger rivers, Memphis and Louisville do much more with their riverfronts than Nashville. We walked along the Mississippi through the just renovated <a href=\"https://www.tomleepark.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Tom Lee Park</a> in Memphis -- guys were putting some final touches on the walking paths and garden beds -- and I biked along <a href=\"https://ourwaterfront.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Louisville’s Waterfront Park</a>; both really nice spaces, almost like “front lawns” for those cities. And maybe there’s something to that. The Mississippi and Ohio Rivers are boundaries for those cities (and indeed, those states) where the Cumberland River winds through Nashville which, in many ways, seems to turn its back to the river. I mean Chicago does <a href=\"https://www.chicago.gov/city/en/sites/chicagoriverwalk/home.html.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">much more</a> with the <em>much</em> smaller Chicago River than Nashville does with the Cumberland.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But, of course, Nashville’s music scene is way beyond what Louisville and Memphis offer -- even beyond the honky tonk maelstrom that is Lower Broadway. Live music starts in the airport and follows you throughout the city. Irene and I joke there must be a city ordinance mandating live music in any gathering of 10 or more people. Memphis tries hard with its Beale Street district. It has a number of clubs with live blues, R&amp;B, and rock music coming out the windows into the street, but it doesn’t have the density, the concentration of Lower Broadway, and Beale Street tails off after a couple of blocks, into one of those “flat spots” that make you want to look over your shoulder a bit more often.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Next road trip is out east to Chattanooga. Feels like we’re drawing a circle with a radius of a 2-3 hr drive time and hitting all the cities within it for a day or three each. Kinda trading summer TSA security lines for summer construction traffic jams.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge music —&nbsp;<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Psykick/52938\">Another Way</a>&nbsp;by Psykick (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Psykick/52938</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Long-time listener Thelma Stubelt wrote in about the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2024/04/11/podcast-199-smile-for-security-facial-recognition-in-travel/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Podcast #199 — Smile for Security: Facial Recognition in Travel\">last episode’s</a> biometrics discussion<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“I really enjoyed the last episode. I work for immigration. They are working on making Green Cards part of the Apple Wallet. I know Global Entry is doing it as well. We have also been simplifying the biometrics process. A lot of the documents being produced had a fingerprint on the card. That is no longer being put on.&nbsp; I’m going to Vegas in the fall. Looking forward to seeing TSAs new system.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Thelma, thanks for that. My brother-in-law still has the Green Card from when he came to the US with his Hungarian refugee parents in the late \'50\'s; with his baby picture on it. We get a chuckle whenever he has to pull it out of his wallet. Somehow, I don’t see an Apple Wallet version of that doing the same job. But, as Henry and Sheldon said in the last episode, the move is toward more, not less biometrics. And Thelma’s note adds a few more data points that confirms that trend.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Of course, automated facial recognition might be more efficient, but is not always resilient. The UK’s facial recognition <a href=\"https://www.bbc.com/news/business-68972065\">eGate system was down for 4 hours </a>last week for a “system network issue.” They had to fall back to old-school manual facial recognition -- that is, an immigration officer looking at you and then at the picture of you in your passport. This seems to be becoming an annual event in the UK. Last May, they had a <a href=\"https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-65731795\">similar 3-4-hour eGate outage</a>. Note to self -- don’t fly to the UK next May. But at least it’s happening in a country that prides itself on orderly queueing.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Back in the COVID era, in episodes in 2020 and 2021, I was <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/03/21/podcast-161-new-crisis-old-question-driving-down-to-key-west/\">skeptical</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/06/15/podcast-176-why-business-travel-is-coming-back-learning-airport-history/\">of</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/09/27/podcast-179-high-tech-airport-lines-business-travel-still-missing/\">predictions</a> like Bill Gates’ that <a href=\"https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/17/coronavirus-bill-gates-says-more-than-50percent-of-business-travel-will-disappear-long-term.html\">50% of business travel will go away</a>; hot takes that virtual meetings are the “new normal”. The reality? First quarter earnings calls from travel companies all saying that business travel is back. <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/business/hospitality/welcome-back-road-warriors-business-travel-returns-6241d575?st=mejrn8dduygzq5v&amp;reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink\">Alaska Air and Southwest both said corporate travel sales grew over 20% and are back to pre-pandemic levels</a>; as did Hilton and <a href=\"https://skift.com/2024/05/09/hyatt-signals-strength-in-business-travel-loyalty-and-all-inclusives/\">Hyatt</a>. <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean\">Regression to the mean</a>, you might call it “<a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_inertia\">behavioral inertia</a>”, is a strong force. Just ask all the folks laid off from e-commerce companies.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And, as always, thanks to the notes from folks who listened all the way to the end of the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2024/04/11/podcast-199-smile-for-security-facial-recognition-in-travel/\">previous episode</a> where I said that this episode would be my last. I have to tell you that, if I was a listener, I wouldn’t have heard it. I’d be hitting the “next track” button on Overcast within the second bar of Evangeline’s <em>Pictures of You</em> song.<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Thelma, in her biometrics note, also said “I have been a listener of yours for I believe 18 years. I will miss your show but wish you all the best. My old time fav was your love of bashing TSA. Another favorite thing on the podcast was the outro music. When you played the whole thing I couldn’t help but sing along.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Thanks very much for sticking it out for pretty much the full duration. Either I’m mellowing with age or the TSA finally cleaned up their act 3 or 4 years ago, or maybe PreCheck has taken away the reasons for those old debates about shoe sole thickness or the definition of a solid.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Another lifer, Jerry Sarfati, wrote in “I’m sorry to hear that you will be ending the Travel Commons podcast. I am a LONG time listener, I guess about 18 years.&nbsp; I found your podcast when I was a “road warrior”. &nbsp; Now I’m retired, but still enjoy listening to you.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Rob Cheshire of <a href=\"https://thisweekincraft.beer/\"><em>This Week in Craft Beer</em></a> wrote “Truly the end of an era!”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Roger Nash left the Instagram comment -- “Going to miss you, sir”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And @LAflyr hit me up on Twitter to say -- “Sad to hear about the upcoming end of the journey.&nbsp; However, reaching 200 episodes is truly an achievement.&nbsp; Thanks for all the stories and entertainment over the years!”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Robert Fennerty wrote - “I will miss the Travel Commons podcast for many reasons. In increasingly important order, here are my top 3 reasons:<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Travel Tips:</strong> I have incorporated many of your ideas and devices into my travel regimen. Most recently, the Super Bagel has become my go to power center and it has reduced the weight of my laptop bag, thereby allowing me to stuff other less useful junk inside.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Cogent Observations:</strong> The show has had so many cathartic YES I KNOW moments. For example, every time I walk into a hotel bathroom and the bottles have unintelligible labels, I think of you. In the example below, we know that my hands will smell like magnolia after I depress the plunger on one of those bottles. But will I have washed my hands or moistened them? No one can know for sure.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>You:</strong> Every time a new episode enters my podcast feed, I smile. Your voice is very reassuring and I think it lowers my pulse a few beats per minute. So I will miss your company, especially when I’m on the road.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Wow! Thank you very much Robert for that. And to everyone who wrote in. I really do appreciate your comments; they mean a lot.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Now this is the point in this segment where I usually say, if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com or to @mpeacock on Twitter, or to @travelcommons on Instagram or Facebook. Well, feel free to keep doing that. I’ll still be there, but it’ll just be between you and me.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/SackJo22/52154\">release.JOY.release</a> by SackJo22 (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: essesq, Haskel (hej31)</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Wrapping Up the TravelCommons Journey</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>So here’s <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/05/15/first-travelcommons-podcast/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"First TravelCommons Podcast\">how it started</a> 19 years ago<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>This is the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/05/15/first-travelcommons-podcast/\" title=\"First TravelCommons Podcast\">first TravelCommons podcast</a>, so bear with us. We got kind of a lousy microphone and we\'re gonna be trying some new stuff along the way, but I hope you enjoy what we gotta say. Why should you care, why should you listen, why should you even think about subscribing to this podcast? Well, if you\'re interested in travel, that\'s what we\'re gonna talk about -- the ground level experiences of a traveler, someone who\'s in airplanes and hotels and rental cars every week. That\'s me. We\'re talking to you today from the bathroom of the Wardman Park Marriott. I don\'t have fancy reverb filters and all the other great stuff. So instead, I thought I\'d just surround myself with a lot of tile and hopefully this thing will sound pretty good. So, anyhow, Wardman Park Marriott in Northwest DC.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I\'m on kind of one of my normal triangulation trips. Last week, I was out on the West Coast. This week, I\'m out on the East Coast. Started off in ORD yesterday afternoon. Typical ORD day -- 6 am thunderstorm shot the entire schedule to hell in a hand basket; 60- to 120-minute delays the whole time. I tell you; it was a mess. And then today flying down from New York, taking the shuttle out of LGA, they push us back and then we sit for 45 minutes on the runway because we got caught right in the middle of one of those times when LGA takes the entire 30 airplanes that are out on the runway and tell them all to turn around and go the other way because the wind shifted. It was beautiful. It\'s been a beautiful trip; kind of a normal trip actually.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And here’s how we’re ending it -- with, if nothing else, a <em>lot</em> better sound quality… and a bit more effort in clean-up editing. But I do think the through line, from episode 1 to 200, has been consistent -- capturing the voice of the traveler, and through being more about the journey than the destination.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>A few years back, Rob Cheshire turned me onto a podcast called <a href=\"https://www.stealthisbeer.com/\">Steal This Beer</a>. Their tag line is “A candid discussion about beer, over beer, by a couple of guys who think about beer way too much.” Swap “travel” for “beer” and it could make a better tagline for this podcast -- “A discussion about travel by a guy who thinks about travel way too much.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And I would think too much about travel because, as with many road warrior listeners who would chime in over the years, travel was one of the main drivers of my day-to-day existence. There was a stretch of time -- years, actually -- where I would travel all but 6 or 7 weeks in a year. So 80+% of my life would be dependent on how well, each week, the FAA, the TSA, 2-4 airports, 1-3 airlines, 2-3 hotels, and Hertz did their respective jobs. The joint probability of that many independent variables all lining up in the right way for me to get to where I wanted to be on time is vanishingly small. Looking at it this way, it’s no wonder I sounded so cranky so often on this podcast.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Some road warriors who “think way too much” go <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2009/12/15/up-in-the-air-captures-life-in-the-travel-bubble/\">full-on George Clooney</a> in the movie <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_in_the_Air_(2009_film)\"><em>Up In The Air</em></a>, obsessively collecting “travel hacks” to swerve lines, precious metal status levels, doing whatever they can to be able to move through their travel days with minimum friction and maximum efficiency. I’ve called that over the years “living in the travel bubble.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If I’d gone that way, this podcast would’ve ended maybe 100 episodes ago. I’ve talked a lot over the years about breaking out of the travel bubble -- by <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2008/04/29/podcast-64-escaping-the-travel-bubble-marks-travel-tips/\">taking subways and commuter trains</a> instead of taxis and Ubers, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/09/29/podcast-196-cheers-to-beer-tourism-and-travel/\">searching out</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/09/28/podcast-124-craft-beer-hunting-i-hate-rick-steves/\">local</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2014/10/12/podcast-111-seatback-recline-wars-craft-beer-tourism/\">beer</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/04/10/podcast-174-how-the-pros-plan-their-taproom-tourism/\">joints</a>, and just <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/06/20/podcast-194-best-laid-travel-plans-roaming-entropy/\">roaming randomly</a> around a city -- or what the cool kids call <em><a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-emotional-benefits-of-wandering-11671131450?st=mmqyql6e1cktnub&amp;reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink\" title=\"\">flâneuring</a></em>. I always figured it’s a symptom of adult ADHD; a short attention span, a need for external stimuli. As you might guess, I’m no fun on a beach vacation. Going to a new place or digging into new bits of places like New York or San Francisco where I’ve been, what, 50 times before -- seeing, experiencing new things would hit that dopamine button and make up for having to grit my teeth through the umpteenth flight delay at ORD or LGA.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And to lay further back on the analyst’s couch, I find that when I’m traveling, when I’m in the midst of all this new stuff, I’m often better able to dig down and think about things that, when I’m home, the day-to-day activities get in the way. Travel can keep my day-to-day stuff at arm’s length -- 2 arms’ length if I’m not in an English-speaking place. I can tune out a lot of the peripheral chatter -- the television in the corner, the adjacent conversations -- because I don’t understand it.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But even when I can’t understand what’s being said around me, I found travel still expanding my understanding, my perspectives. It’s one thing to read about the size of China’s population or the poverty in India or the humid heat in Vietnam or the homeless encampments in San Francisco, but it’s a whole next-level to see it and experience it in person. What seems black and white from a distance starts to dither into gray when it’s up close. It forces me to do a much better job of seeing the other side, to see how my actions could be perceived by others, and I hope it ends up making me a more empathetic person. Which is why I never bought into the “new normal” predictions of Bill Gates and others that travel would never be the same. There’s too many people like me.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But the lack of travel during the Covid shutdowns, the move to more virtual work, and my own slouching toward retirement has made it more of a struggle to generate new and what I thought was interesting content that is “more about the journey”. Two years ago, I wrote in a note “I’m definitely not making it to episode #200”. I surprised myself by making it here, but it seems like a good point to wrap it up -- landmark episode number and 19 years after the first episode in May 2005.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>So what’s next? I’m not really sure. Actually, no. I do know that I’m going to clean up the TravelCommons website -- fix the SSL certificate Robert Fenerty <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/06/20/podcast-194-best-laid-travel-plans-roaming-entropy/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">pinged me about last June</a>; delete the out-of-date posts. And reconfigure it to focus more on the written work, the blog posts than the podcast because I think that’ll be what comes next -- written stuff that’s more about the destination than the journey, to flip the tag line around.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I’ve done it pretty infrequently in the past; the podcast took priority. The last one was about <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/02/01/quick-notes-on-our-trip-to-tucson/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Quick Notes on Our Trip to Tucson\">our January 2021 trip to Tucson</a>. But I’ve found myself giving out a lot of travel recommendations recently -- from guys around my age who know I’ve done a bit of travel asking me “What should I do in this place?” Like last weekend, I ran into a guy at a <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/barriquebrewing/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">taproom</a> who, when I sat next to him at the beginning of the year, asked me for recommendations for Rome. “That <a href=\"https://www.football-pub.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">beer bar </a>down that alley in Trastevere you recommended was great!” he said. “And that neighborhood too! We wouldn’t have gone there if you hadn’t suggested it.” Maybe travel writing editors have over-rotated from “tell me where to go” to “tell me a story about a place”, but it’ll be good to have something to keep me occupied.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"className\":\"has-medium-font-size\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em><a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/track/0geYaxa8LozoV8afrKwdTo?si=aa1cf0be8ee9400a\" title=\"\">Pictures of You</a></em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #200</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I hope you enjoyed this last show, and thanks so much to all of you who have been along on this ride.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As I said earlier, you can still ping me at <a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a>, mpeacock on Twitter, the TravelCommons page on Facebook and Instagram, and the travelcommons.com website will still be around. I’ll put links to any new posts on all the socials. If you aren’t on social media -- which I can completely understand -- and want to know when I post something, send your email address to me at <a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a> and I’ll email out a link to new material. Who knows, maybe I’ll do a TravelCommons newsletter.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Thelma’s comment in her note about the outro song, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/track/0geYaxa8LozoV8afrKwdTo?si=fb4c8ad5edd24ab4\"><em>Pictures of You</em></a> by the Scottish band Evangeline, got me digging in through the archives, all the way back to <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2005/09/14/podcast-14-september-11th-travel-stories-writing-a-great-travel-song/\">episode #14</a> where the band leader explained the origins of the song. It only seems right to close out this last episode with his words and his full song.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As always, safe travels; and thanks for stopping by the TravelCommons.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Willie Evans - “Hi, I\'m Willie Evans from Scots Band Evangeline sending good thoughts to Mark and all the listeners of the TravelCommons podcast. Touring is a part of our job that we love. It\'s exciting, it\'s fun, it\'s energizing, and it\'s great to get out there and meet the fans and see new places. The downside, however, is that it can be a bit boring and predictable, with each day being pretty much the same as the day before. And inevitably, we all miss our friends and our loved ones back home. The song <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/track/0geYaxa8LozoV8afrKwdTo?si=fb4c8ad5edd24ab4\"><em>Pictures of You</em></a> from our <em>Hard Way</em> album is about that longing for our wives and families. And whether you\'re an entertainer or musician or perhaps a salesman or businessman who travels a lot, then I hope you can identify with it. Hope you enjoy the song. Have a great day.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_200.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #200 — Wrapping Up the TravelCommons Journey','Finishing 19 years of podcasting where I\'ve been thinking way too much about travel, I indulge in some nostalgia and talk about my personal travel philosophy','inherit','closed','closed','','4494-revision-v1','','','2026-01-26 18:22:41','2026-01-27 00:22:41','',4494,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4685',0,'revision','',0),
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(4701,1,'2026-01-26 20:57:02','2026-01-27 02:57:02','<!-- wp:template-part {\"slug\":\"header\",\"theme\":\"twentytwentyfive-kimi-child\",\"tagName\":\"header\",\"area\":\"header\"} /-->\n\n<!-- wp:group {\"tagName\":\"main\",\"style\":{\"spacing\":{\"padding\":{\"top\":\"var:preset|spacing|50\",\"bottom\":\"var:preset|spacing|50\"}}},\"hideFromFeed\":true} -->\n<main class=\"wp-block-group\" style=\"padding-top:var(--wp--preset--spacing--50);padding-bottom:var(--wp--preset--spacing--50)\"><!-- wp:group {\"layout\":{\"type\":\"constrained\"},\"hideFromFeed\":true} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-group\"><!-- wp:group {\"align\":\"wide\",\"style\":{\"spacing\":{\"padding\":{\"top\":\"var:preset|spacing|50\",\"bottom\":\"var:preset|spacing|50\"}}},\"hideFromFeed\":true} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-group alignwide\" style=\"padding-top:var(--wp--preset--spacing--50);padding-bottom:var(--wp--preset--spacing--50)\"><!-- wp:site-title {\"textAlign\":\"center\",\"isLink\":false,\"style\":{\"typography\":{\"fontSize\":\"3rem\",\"fontWeight\":\"700\",\"fontStyle\":\"normal\"}}} /-->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph {\"align\":\"center\",\"style\":{\"typography\":{\"fontSize\":\"1.25rem\",\"fontStyle\":\"italic\",\"fontWeight\":\"100\"}}} -->\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center\" style=\"font-size:1.25rem;font-style:italic;font-weight:100\">It\'s As Much About the Journey as It is the Destination</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:group {\"className\":\"subscribe-cta\",\"style\":{\"spacing\":{\"padding\":{\"top\":\"var:preset|spacing|30\",\"right\":\"var:preset|spacing|30\",\"bottom\":\"var:preset|spacing|30\",\"left\":\"var:preset|spacing|30\"}}},\"hideFromFeed\":true} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-group subscribe-cta\" style=\"padding-top:var(--wp--preset--spacing--30);padding-right:var(--wp--preset--spacing--30);padding-bottom:var(--wp--preset--spacing--30);padding-left:var(--wp--preset--spacing--30)\"><!-- wp:paragraph 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{\"queryId\":1,\"query\":{\"perPage\":10,\"postType\":\"post\",\"order\":\"desc\",\"orderBy\":\"date\",\"inherit\":false},\"align\":\"wide\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-query alignwide\"><!-- wp:post-template -->\n<!-- wp:group {\"className\":\"post-list-item\",\"layout\":{\"type\":\"default\"},\"hideFromFeed\":true} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-group post-list-item\"><!-- wp:post-featured-image {\"aspectRatio\":\"4/3\",\"width\":\"200px\",\"height\":\"150px\",\"style\":{\"layout\":{\"selfStretch\":\"fixed\",\"flexSize\":\"200px\"}}} /-->\n\n<!-- wp:group {\"className\":\"post-content-wrapper\",\"layout\":{\"type\":\"default\"},\"hideFromFeed\":true} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-group post-content-wrapper\"><!-- wp:post-title {\"isLink\":true,\"fontSize\":\"x-large\"} /-->\n\n<!-- wp:post-excerpt {\"moreText\":\"Continue Reading →\",\"showMoreOnNewLine\":false,\"excerptLength\":60} /-->\n\n<!-- wp:post-date {\"format\":\"F j, Y\",\"isLink\":true,\"metadata\":{\"bindings\":{\"datetime\":{\"source\":\"core/post-data\",\"args\":{\"field\":\"date\"}}}}} /--></div>\n<!-- /wp:group --></div>\n<!-- /wp:group -->\n\n<!-- wp:separator {\"className\":\"is-style-wide\",\"style\":{\"spacing\":{\"margin\":{\"top\":\"var:preset|spacing|40\",\"bottom\":\"var:preset|spacing|40\"}}}} -->\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity is-style-wide\" style=\"margin-top:var(--wp--preset--spacing--40);margin-bottom:var(--wp--preset--spacing--40)\"/>\n<!-- /wp:separator -->\n<!-- /wp:post-template -->\n\n<!-- wp:query-pagination {\"paginationArrow\":\"arrow\",\"align\":\"wide\",\"layout\":{\"type\":\"flex\",\"justifyContent\":\"space-between\"}} -->\n<!-- wp:query-pagination-previous {\"label\":\"Previous\"} /-->\n\n<!-- wp:query-pagination-numbers /-->\n\n<!-- wp:query-pagination-next {\"label\":\"Next\"} /-->\n<!-- /wp:query-pagination --></div>\n<!-- /wp:query --></div>\n<!-- /wp:group --></main>\n<!-- /wp:group -->\n\n<!-- wp:template-part {\"slug\":\"footer\",\"theme\":\"twentytwentyfive-kimi-child\",\"tagName\":\"footer\",\"area\":\"footer\"} /-->','Blog Home','Displays the latest posts as either the site homepage or as the \"Posts page\" as defined under reading settings. 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(4702,1,'2026-01-26 20:58:55','2026-01-27 02:58:55','<!-- wp:template-part {\"slug\":\"header\",\"theme\":\"twentytwentyfive-kimi-child\",\"tagName\":\"header\",\"area\":\"header\"} /-->\n\n<!-- wp:group {\"tagName\":\"main\",\"style\":{\"spacing\":{\"padding\":{\"top\":\"var:preset|spacing|50\",\"bottom\":\"var:preset|spacing|50\"}}},\"hideFromFeed\":true} -->\n<main class=\"wp-block-group\" style=\"padding-top:var(--wp--preset--spacing--50);padding-bottom:var(--wp--preset--spacing--50)\"><!-- wp:group {\"layout\":{\"type\":\"constrained\"},\"hideFromFeed\":true} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-group\"><!-- wp:group {\"align\":\"wide\",\"style\":{\"spacing\":{\"padding\":{\"top\":\"var:preset|spacing|50\",\"bottom\":\"var:preset|spacing|50\"}}},\"hideFromFeed\":true} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-group alignwide\" style=\"padding-top:var(--wp--preset--spacing--50);padding-bottom:var(--wp--preset--spacing--50)\"><!-- wp:site-title {\"textAlign\":\"center\",\"isLink\":false,\"style\":{\"typography\":{\"fontSize\":\"3rem\",\"fontWeight\":\"700\",\"fontStyle\":\"normal\"}}} /-->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph {\"align\":\"center\",\"style\":{\"typography\":{\"fontSize\":\"1.25rem\",\"fontStyle\":\"italic\",\"fontWeight\":\"100\"}}} -->\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center\" style=\"font-size:1.25rem;font-style:italic;font-weight:100\">It\'s As Much About the Journey as the Destination</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:group {\"className\":\"subscribe-cta\",\"style\":{\"spacing\":{\"padding\":{\"top\":\"var:preset|spacing|30\",\"right\":\"var:preset|spacing|30\",\"bottom\":\"var:preset|spacing|30\",\"left\":\"var:preset|spacing|30\"}}},\"hideFromFeed\":true} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-group subscribe-cta\" style=\"padding-top:var(--wp--preset--spacing--30);padding-right:var(--wp--preset--spacing--30);padding-bottom:var(--wp--preset--spacing--30);padding-left:var(--wp--preset--spacing--30)\"><!-- wp:paragraph {\"align\":\"center\",\"style\":{\"typography\":{\"fontSize\":\"1.125rem\",\"fontWeight\":\"600\"}}} -->\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center\" style=\"font-size:1.125rem;font-weight:600\">Subscribe to TravelCommons</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph {\"align\":\"center\"} -->\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center\">Join the Journey</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:buttons {\"layout\":{\"type\":\"flex\",\"justifyContent\":\"center\"}} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-buttons\"><!-- wp:button {\"backgroundColor\":\"primary\",\"textColor\":\"base\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-button\"><a class=\"wp-block-button__link has-base-color has-primary-background-color has-text-color has-background wp-element-button\" href=\"https://travelcommons.substack.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Subscribe Now</a></div>\n<!-- /wp:button --></div>\n<!-- /wp:buttons --></div>\n<!-- /wp:group --></div>\n<!-- /wp:group -->\n\n<!-- wp:query {\"queryId\":1,\"query\":{\"perPage\":10,\"postType\":\"post\",\"order\":\"desc\",\"orderBy\":\"date\",\"inherit\":false},\"align\":\"wide\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-query alignwide\"><!-- wp:post-template -->\n<!-- wp:group {\"className\":\"post-list-item\",\"layout\":{\"type\":\"default\"},\"hideFromFeed\":true} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-group post-list-item\"><!-- wp:post-featured-image {\"aspectRatio\":\"4/3\",\"width\":\"200px\",\"height\":\"150px\",\"style\":{\"layout\":{\"selfStretch\":\"fixed\",\"flexSize\":\"200px\"}}} /-->\n\n<!-- wp:group {\"className\":\"post-content-wrapper\",\"layout\":{\"type\":\"default\"},\"hideFromFeed\":true} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-group post-content-wrapper\"><!-- wp:post-title {\"isLink\":true,\"fontSize\":\"x-large\"} /-->\n\n<!-- wp:post-excerpt {\"moreText\":\"Continue Reading →\",\"showMoreOnNewLine\":false,\"excerptLength\":60} /-->\n\n<!-- wp:post-date {\"format\":\"F j, Y\",\"isLink\":true,\"metadata\":{\"bindings\":{\"datetime\":{\"source\":\"core/post-data\",\"args\":{\"field\":\"date\"}}}}} /--></div>\n<!-- /wp:group --></div>\n<!-- /wp:group -->\n\n<!-- wp:separator {\"className\":\"is-style-wide\",\"style\":{\"spacing\":{\"margin\":{\"top\":\"var:preset|spacing|40\",\"bottom\":\"var:preset|spacing|40\"}}}} -->\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity is-style-wide\" style=\"margin-top:var(--wp--preset--spacing--40);margin-bottom:var(--wp--preset--spacing--40)\"/>\n<!-- /wp:separator -->\n<!-- /wp:post-template -->\n\n<!-- wp:query-pagination {\"paginationArrow\":\"arrow\",\"align\":\"wide\",\"layout\":{\"type\":\"flex\",\"justifyContent\":\"space-between\"}} -->\n<!-- wp:query-pagination-previous {\"label\":\"Previous\"} /-->\n\n<!-- wp:query-pagination-numbers /-->\n\n<!-- wp:query-pagination-next {\"label\":\"Next\"} /-->\n<!-- /wp:query-pagination --></div>\n<!-- /wp:query --></div>\n<!-- /wp:group --></main>\n<!-- /wp:group -->\n\n<!-- wp:template-part {\"slug\":\"footer\",\"theme\":\"twentytwentyfive-kimi-child\",\"tagName\":\"footer\",\"area\":\"footer\"} /-->','Blog Home','Displays the latest posts as either the site homepage or as the \"Posts page\" as defined under reading settings. 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(4703,1,'2026-01-26 21:14:04','2026-01-27 03:14:04','<!-- wp:template-part {\"slug\":\"header\",\"theme\":\"twentytwentyfive-kimi-child-2\",\"tagName\":\"header\",\"area\":\"header\"} /-->\n\n<!-- wp:group {\"tagName\":\"main\",\"style\":{\"spacing\":{\"padding\":{\"top\":\"var:preset|spacing|50\",\"bottom\":\"var:preset|spacing|50\"}}},\"hideFromFeed\":true} -->\n<main class=\"wp-block-group\" style=\"padding-top:var(--wp--preset--spacing--50);padding-bottom:var(--wp--preset--spacing--50)\"><!-- wp:group {\"layout\":{\"type\":\"constrained\"},\"hideFromFeed\":true} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-group\"><!-- wp:group {\"align\":\"wide\",\"style\":{\"spacing\":{\"padding\":{\"top\":\"var:preset|spacing|50\",\"bottom\":\"var:preset|spacing|40\"}}},\"hideFromFeed\":true} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-group alignwide\" style=\"padding-top:var(--wp--preset--spacing--50);padding-bottom:var(--wp--preset--spacing--40)\"><!-- wp:site-title {\"textAlign\":\"center\",\"style\":{\"typography\":{\"fontSize\":\"2.5rem\",\"fontWeight\":\"700\"}}} /-->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph {\"align\":\"center\",\"style\":{\"typography\":{\"fontSize\":\"1.125rem\",\"fontStyle\":\"italic\"}}} -->\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center\" style=\"font-size:1.125rem;font-style:italic\">It\'s As Much About the Journey as the Destination</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph --></div>\n<!-- /wp:group -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"textAlign\":\"center\",\"level\":1,\"style\":{\"spacing\":{\"margin\":{\"bottom\":\"var:preset|spacing|30\"}}}} -->\n<h1 class=\"wp-block-heading has-text-align-center\" style=\"margin-bottom:var(--wp--preset--spacing--30)\">Podcast Archive</h1>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph {\"align\":\"center\",\"style\":{\"spacing\":{\"margin\":{\"bottom\":\"var:preset|spacing|50\"}}}} -->\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center\" style=\"margin-bottom:var(--wp--preset--spacing--50)\">All episodes of the TravelCommons podcast — stories from the road, travel tips, and conversations with fellow travelers.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:query {\"queryId\":9,\"query\":{\"perPage\":8,\"pages\":0,\"offset\":0,\"postType\":\"post\",\"order\":\"desc\",\"orderBy\":\"date\",\"author\":\"\",\"search\":\"\",\"exclude\":[],\"sticky\":\"\",\"inherit\":false,\"taxQuery\":{\"category\":[4]},\"parents\":[],\"format\":[]},\"className\":\"alignwide\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-query alignwide\"><!-- wp:post-template {\"layout\":{\"type\":\"default\"}} -->\n<!-- wp:group {\"className\":\"podcast-archive-item\",\"style\":{\"spacing\":{\"padding\":{\"top\":\"var:preset|spacing|40\",\"right\":\"var:preset|spacing|40\",\"bottom\":\"var:preset|spacing|40\",\"left\":\"var:preset|spacing|40\"},\"margin\":{\"bottom\":\"var:preset|spacing|40\"}},\"border\":{\"bottom\":{\"color\":\"var:preset|color|contrast-3\",\"width\":\"1px\"}}},\"hideFromFeed\":true} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-group podcast-archive-item\" style=\"border-bottom-color:var(--wp--preset--color--contrast-3);border-bottom-width:1px;margin-bottom:var(--wp--preset--spacing--40);padding-top:var(--wp--preset--spacing--40);padding-right:var(--wp--preset--spacing--40);padding-bottom:var(--wp--preset--spacing--40);padding-left:var(--wp--preset--spacing--40)\"><!-- wp:columns {\"verticalAlignment\":\"center\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-columns are-vertically-aligned-center\"><!-- wp:column {\"width\":\"25%\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-column\" style=\"flex-basis:25%\"><!-- wp:post-featured-image {\"isLink\":true,\"aspectRatio\":\"1/1\",\"style\":{\"border\":{\"radius\":\"8px\"}}} /--></div>\n<!-- /wp:column -->\n\n<!-- wp:column {\"width\":\"75%\"} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-column\" style=\"flex-basis:75%\"><!-- wp:group {\"layout\":{\"type\":\"flex\",\"flexWrap\":\"wrap\",\"justifyContent\":\"space-between\"},\"hideFromFeed\":true} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-group\"><!-- wp:post-title {\"isLink\":true,\"style\":{\"typography\":{\"fontWeight\":\"600\"},\"layout\":{\"selfStretch\":\"fill\"}},\"fontSize\":\"large\"} /-->\n\n<!-- wp:post-date {\"format\":\"F j, Y\",\"metadata\":{\"bindings\":{\"datetime\":{\"source\":\"core/post-data\",\"args\":{\"field\":\"date\"}}}},\"className\":\"podcast-date\",\"fontSize\":\"small\"} /--></div>\n<!-- /wp:group -->\n\n<!-- wp:post-excerpt {\"moreText\":\"Listen to Episode →\",\"showMoreOnNewLine\":false,\"excerptLength\":30,\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} /-->\n\n<!-- wp:group {\"className\":\"podcast-meta\",\"layout\":{\"type\":\"flex\",\"flexWrap\":\"wrap\",\"justifyContent\":\"left\"},\"hideFromFeed\":true} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-group podcast-meta\"><!-- wp:paragraph {\"className\":\"episode-number\",\"fontSize\":\"small\"} -->\n<p class=\"episode-number has-small-font-size\">Episode</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:post-terms {\"term\":\"post_tag\",\"prefix\":\"Tags: \",\"fontSize\":\"small\"} /--></div>\n<!-- /wp:group --></div>\n<!-- /wp:column --></div>\n<!-- /wp:columns --></div>\n<!-- /wp:group -->\n<!-- /wp:post-template -->\n\n<!-- wp:query-pagination {\"paginationArrow\":\"arrow\",\"align\":\"wide\",\"layout\":{\"type\":\"flex\",\"justifyContent\":\"space-between\",\"flexWrap\":\"wrap\"}} -->\n<!-- wp:query-pagination-previous {\"label\":\"← Previous Episodes\"} /-->\n\n<!-- wp:query-pagination-numbers /-->\n\n<!-- wp:query-pagination-next {\"label\":\"Next Episodes →\"} /-->\n<!-- /wp:query-pagination --></div>\n<!-- /wp:query -->\n\n<!-- wp:group {\"align\":\"wide\",\"style\":{\"spacing\":{\"padding\":{\"top\":\"var:preset|spacing|60\",\"bottom\":\"var:preset|spacing|40\"}}},\"hideFromFeed\":true} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-group alignwide\" style=\"padding-top:var(--wp--preset--spacing--60);padding-bottom:var(--wp--preset--spacing--40)\"><!-- wp:paragraph {\"align\":\"center\"} -->\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center\">Enjoying the podcast? <a href=\"https://travelcommons.substack.com\">Subscribe to our newsletter</a> for travel stories delivered to your inbox.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph --></div>\n<!-- /wp:group --></div>\n<!-- /wp:group --></main>\n<!-- /wp:group -->\n\n<!-- wp:template-part {\"slug\":\"footer\",\"theme\":\"twentytwentyfive-kimi-child-2\",\"tagName\":\"footer\",\"area\":\"footer\"} /-->','archive-podcast','','publish','closed','closed','','archive-podcast','','','2026-01-26 21:14:04','2026-01-27 03:14:04','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2026/01/26/archive-podcast/',0,'wp_template','',0),
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(4713,1,'2026-01-26 21:54:59','2026-01-27 03:54:59','<!-- wp:navigation-link {\"label\":\"Home\",\"type\":\"page\",\"url\":\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/\",\"kind\":\"post-type\"} /-->\n\n<!-- wp:navigation-link {\"label\":\"Destinations\",\"type\":\"page\",\"id\":4647,\"url\":\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/destinations/\",\"kind\":\"post-type\",\"metadata\":{\"bindings\":{\"url\":{\"source\":\"core/post-data\",\"args\":{\"field\":\"link\"}}}}} /-->\n\n<!-- wp:navigation-link {\"label\":\"Podcast Archive\",\"type\":\"page\",\"id\":4648,\"url\":\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-archive/\",\"kind\":\"post-type\",\"metadata\":{\"bindings\":{\"url\":{\"source\":\"core/post-data\",\"args\":{\"field\":\"link\"}}}}} /-->\n\n<!-- wp:navigation-link {\"label\":\"About Us\",\"type\":\"page\",\"id\":85,\"url\":\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/about-2-2/\",\"kind\":\"post-type\",\"metadata\":{\"bindings\":{\"url\":{\"source\":\"core/post-data\",\"args\":{\"field\":\"link\"}}}}} /-->','Menu','','inherit','closed','closed','','4709-revision-v1','','','2026-01-26 21:54:59','2026-01-27 03:54:59','',4709,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4713',0,'revision','',0),
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(4715,1,'2026-01-26 22:00:42','2026-01-27 04:00:42','<!-- wp:navigation-link {\"label\":\"Home\",\"type\":\"page\",\"url\":\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com\",\"kind\":\"post-type\"} /-->\n\n<!-- wp:navigation-link {\"label\":\"Destinations\",\"type\":\"page\",\"id\":4647,\"url\":\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/destinations/\",\"kind\":\"post-type\",\"metadata\":{\"bindings\":{\"url\":{\"source\":\"core/post-data\",\"args\":{\"field\":\"link\"}}}}} /-->\n\n<!-- wp:navigation-link {\"label\":\"Podcast Archive\",\"type\":\"page\",\"id\":4648,\"url\":\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast-archive/\",\"kind\":\"post-type\",\"metadata\":{\"bindings\":{\"url\":{\"source\":\"core/post-data\",\"args\":{\"field\":\"link\"}}}}} /-->\n\n<!-- wp:navigation-link {\"label\":\"About Us\",\"type\":\"page\",\"id\":85,\"url\":\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/about-2-2/\",\"kind\":\"post-type\",\"metadata\":{\"bindings\":{\"url\":{\"source\":\"core/post-data\",\"args\":{\"field\":\"link\"}}}}} /-->','Footer menu 3','','inherit','closed','closed','','4714-revision-v1','','','2026-01-26 22:00:42','2026-01-27 04:00:42','',4714,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4715',0,'revision','',0),
(4741,1,'2026-01-27 10:55:17','2026-01-27 16:55:17','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/DALL-E_2024-04-10_13.01.39-300x300.jpg\" alt=\" a traveler standing in front of a facial recognition scanner at an airport. The scanner is emitting error signals, and the traveler looks frustrated.\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" />I knew these travel delays were aging me[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Using my face as my boarding pass to get on a flight to Oaxaca, Mexico and then as my passport to get back in the US got me thinking about how facial recognition has permeated the travel experience. To help us understand where this is going, we talk with two travel industry experts, <a href=\"http://shj.cs.illinois.edu/\">Dr. Sheldon Jacobson</a> and <a href=\"https://atmosphereresearch.com/\">Henry Harteveldt</a>. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>But before that, we talk about eating grasshoppers, an EV experience with Avis, and a couple of my travel tips that need to be revised.  All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_199.mp3\" title=\"\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:audio -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-audio\"><audio controls src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_199.mp3\"></audio></figure>\n<!-- /wp:audio -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #199: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN a couple of days after a last-minute 200-mile trip up to Carbondale, Illinois, home of the <a href=\"https://siu.edu/\" title=\"\">Southern Illinois University</a> Salukis… but that didn’t matter. What <em>did</em> matter is that Carbondale was right in the <a href=\"https://eclipse.siu.edu/\" title=\"\">center of the solar eclipse’s path</a> across North America, which meant we had 4 minutes of total eclipse.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Looking up, straight into the sun with its corona glowing, wavering around the black disk of the moon -- I’ve seen… we’ve all seen pictures of total eclipses, and of this one all across social and regular media Monday afternoon. But the pictures couldn’t do justice to being there, even if <em>there</em> was the far end of the Salukis stadium parking lot, backing up to a scraggly bit of woods. The experience more than made up for the 3-hr drive there and the 5½-hour bumper-to-bumper traffic back. I add it to my list of things that, even though we’ve seen seemingly an infinite number of pictures of them, experiencing them in real life was worth the hassle to physically travel to see them. The Taj Mahal, the Great Wall of China, Niagara Falls -- all on the list. As opposed to, say, The Mona Lisa in the Louvre. The crowd of people with their phones in the air trying to get a picture was much better than the Mona Lisa itself.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Before that, the start of March, we were in Oaxaca, Mexico for a week. I’ve had Oaxaca on my “To Visit” list for 4-5 years now. For me, it was a good match -- the combination of interesting food, lots of culture, and no beach. I’ve done “resort-y” Mexico -- Cabo, Cancún, Puerto Vallarta -- not a big fan. While there were a lot of tourists in Oaxaca, it didn’t seem to be overrun with them like, say, the center of Cabo is. Maybe because the city center is bigger, so there’s more space to absorb them, or maybe the absolute number of tourists are lower; it wasn’t an easy nor a cheap flight to get there.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>We hit the food scene pretty hard, high- and low-brow; food stands in the market; high-end places serving up phenomenal <a href=\"https://www.rickbayless.com/recipe/oaxacan-black-mole/\" title=\"\">moles</a>. But the food that made the biggest impression is the insects. It wasn’t some tourist-baiting shtick. Walking past a group of street vendors, I saw one of the women making a snack of a couple of grasshoppers wrapped in a small tortilla. At a mezcal bar on the eastern edge of the Centro, the bartender put down a small bowl of grasshoppers as a bar snack. (If you follow <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" title=\"\">TravelCommons on Instagram</a>, you can see a picture in my Oaxaca story) “Those are good grasshoppers,” he told us. “I drive an hour up towards Pueblo to get them. They’re not farmed like the ones you get in the markets.” I have to admit that I’m not enough of an insect connoisseur to be able to pick out the finer nuances of free-range vs. farmed grasshoppers, but they were as good as Beer Nuts as a bar snack. Or maybe that was just the 3rd, or 4th, or 5th shot of mezcal talking.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/duckett/2333\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Another Girl (instrumental)</a> by duckett (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/duckett/23334 Ft: fourstones, miafas</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Friend of the podcast Allan Marko swung by the website to leave this comment about the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2024/02/28/podcast-198-london-vacation-rental-woes-hertzs-ev-retreat/\" title=\"\">last episode</a>:<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“I was assigned an EV by Avis at Fort Lauderdale [at the end of February]. Curious enough to try it out for the relatively short distances I would be traveling, I got in. After starting, I noticed it only had a 10% charge, so, “check please.” I fired up the Avis app and selected a Chevy Malibu with 1,200 miles on it.&nbsp; As for booking.com, we had tremendous luck using that website for most of our accommodations over a two month period in SE Asia five years ago - exclusively for hotels though.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Allan, thanks for that. Expecting you to drive off with a 10% charge? Avis would never think to give you a car with just an ⅛-th of a tank. And if they did, it would take them 10 minutes to fill the tank and get it back to you. But for that EV? Even at a Tesla Supercharger, at least an hour, maybe more. No wonder they tried to get you to do it. And regards to booking.com, my experience with their hotel product is the same as yours -- never had a problem. But their property rentals, never again!</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>One of my regular travel pro tips from years ago was “Don’t take the last flight out” because, if you missed your connection or your flight was canceled, you had a backup. And, as an IRROP passenger -- industry lingo for “irregular operations” -- you have priority on open seats on that later flight; even more so if you have frequent flier status. But nowadays, with US airlines sporting load factors over 80%, this strategy is a lot tougher to make work. Last June, back in episode #194, I talked about how United’s delay leaving Amsterdam meant we missed our connection home, and how I spent about an hour between the service agents at ORD and on the phone, saying “This is unacceptable” 2, 3, 4 times before they found two seats on the later flight to BNA that they’d been saying was completely full. And now this trip flying home from Oaxaca through DFW on American, I had gotten an email saying there could be bad weather, but I thought, “Well, there’s always that later flight.” En route from Oaxaca to DFW, I’m connected to the plane WiFi and an hour before we land, I get a notice from American -- our flight to Nashville had been canceled. OK, that sucks, but no panic, they’d rebook me on the later flight. But I keep reading -- no rebooking; it just tells me to go to the American app. The WiFi over northern Mexico is not the greatest, but when I do get the app to respond, it’s not showing the later flight as an option. Indeed, the options keep changing with each refresh, but nothing earlier than the next day, Friday, or sometimes, not until Saturday, two days later. It wasn’t until after we landed, passed through Immigration, and were waiting at baggage claim to pick up our luggage to go through Customs that we finally got a message through the app that they’d found us seats on the later flight. Still got home that night, but in both these instances, the customer service experience has degraded just so far. I’ve had to push <em>very hard</em>, and, honestly, be a bit of a jerk to get what used to come seamlessly.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And another travel tip that seems to need retiring --<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/12/07/top-10-holiday-travel-tips-3/\" title=\"\"> “Use Twitter as a Concierge Service”</a>. While struggling to rebook while still in the air from Oaxaca, I pinged American on Twitter hoping for a little more help. What I got was an amazing (and depressing) amount of spam messaging masquerading as AA customer service managers. It’s easy to get fooled in the panic of trying to find a way home, but a few rules to keep in mind -- only communicate with the airline’s gold-checked verified accounts; ignore messages from everyone else -- like “AMERICAN AIR HELP DESK” (all in caps) or “Jason frank (uppercase Jason, lowercase case frank) American Air manger” (as opposed to “manager”); and never give anyone your phone number.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And there’s a quick programming note at the end of this episode, so for those interested, hold off on hitting the Skip button when you hear the music.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" title=\"\">Twitter (X?) message to mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" title=\"\">Facebook page</a>, or on the <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" title=\"\">Instagram</a> account at travelcommons -- or you can skip all that social media stuff and post your comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djiz/10514\">Nube - Djiz Rmx</a> by Kwame (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: SylviaO</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Smile for Security: The Future of Facial Recognition in Travel</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Over the years on the podcast, we’ve talked about how travelers are seeing more and more use of biometrics in their travel days. I’ve told the story of my first fingerprint scan back in the late ‘90’s so I could skip the US immigration line on my weekly commute home from Toronto-Pearson Airport. My colleague’s reaction -- “I’m not giving the US government my biometrics!” Me -- “I can skip a 3-minute line? Where do I sign up?” Which I think shows that the privacy-vs.-convenience choices haven\'t fundamentally changed all that much in the subsequent 25 years.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But (surprise!), technology has, and it seems to be accelerating the use of biometrics, specifically facial recognition. Boarding our flight to Oaxaca, our face was our boarding pass -- just look at the camera, wait for the “bing”, and move on. And coming back, the Global Entry kiosks no longer need passports, no longer have you twisting your hand just so to get the fingerprint pad to read all five fingers; just walk up, it takes your picture, and tells you to move on.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Which got me wondering -- where is this going? To help answer this, I invited on two guys who have been digging deep into this for a number of years. First up, <a href=\"http://shj.cs.illinois.edu/\">Dr. Sheldon Jacobson</a>, Professor in Computer Science at the University of Illinois. Sheldon was last on the podcast in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/09/22/podcast-189-why-we-travel-when-the-first-flight-isnt-best/\" title=\"\">episode #189</a> in September 2022 talking about why another of my travel tips, “catch the earliest flight you can”, is not always right. Over the years, Sheldon has developed operations research models to optimize aviation security. So I asked him to come back on the podcast to talk about the growth of biometrics…<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Sheldon, thanks for coming back on to the Travel Commons podcast. Wanted to talk with you about biometrics, facial recognition, all the things that seem to be increasing with regards to air travel.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: The airlines, as well as the Transportation Security Administration need to know who you are when you are traveling and they relied on identification cards, driver\'s license, real IDs and are continuing to be part of the future. But ultimately, the best way to determine who you are is through your face and biometrics and artificial intelligence imbued with it. In fact, it is a solution that people are recognizing; the airlines are starting to use it. And of course, the Transportation Security Administration is investing billions of dollars to advance this idea. And there\'s a reason why they\'re doing this. They\'re doing this simply because the traditional model of airport security screening has been to detect stuff -- prohibited items, knives, explosives, firearms, even, you know, full size tubes of toothpaste could be a threat based on explosives that can be embedded in them. However, the real threat are the people and facial recognition is a means to transform the platform for airport security from the detection of items to knowing your traveler. And that\'s where we\'re heading right now. And this is the future of airport security.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: And how does that work? How do you think that works?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: TSA has not broadcast this and I don\'t even know if they\'re thinking about it, but I have thought about it and I have proposed to them because I visited them in October 2023. And I told them that if they can bring facial recognition biometrics and the use of AI to truly validate and authenticate the travelers, the need for physical screening will be reduced tremendously to the point that they can create a new class of traveler, which I would call a “Super PreCheck” traveler who subjects themselves to greater background vetting. But then they would be treated like a known crew member at an airport and require no further physical screening. That is the future of airport security.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: It\'s almost like “Back to the Future”, right? It\'s almost like back to pre 9/11 days.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: Now, some will argue, “Oh, someone will gain the system and we will have a terrorist threat because of that.” And I would argue the exact opposite, that the only people who would be willing to subject themselves to the background check would be people who know that they\'re going to get through it fine. And the ones who are truly threats cannot risk it because rarely are people acting by themselves. They\'re often acting in a network. And as a result of that, for them to be exposed, they would be exposing their whole network. And the risk of doing that is far too great. What it would also do is it would parse the whole spectrum of travelers into a group of people who are willing to be known and a group of travelers that are not willing to be known. But over time, the ones who are willing to be known will be much larger, which means you can target your resources and your attention on this so-called unknown group and actually make it more secure for the air system by targeting your resources in that way. After September 11th, everybody was treated the same -- one size fits all. TSA PreCheck moved away from that. Now, I\'m proposing we move even further. And our original research we presented to the TSA in 2003 when we proposed this idea of differential screening to them and how it would work and why it would be beneficial. We said that you really need three classes, two would be fine, but three would be better. And it turns out that third class is what we would now call a “Super PreCheck” class of passengers. And those are the people who would be treated like crew members, the known crew members. And a lot of people would be willing to pay for that privilege and we\'ve put boundaries on what that means. It wouldn\'t be renewed every five years; it would be renewed potentially every year. It would be more expensive. But there\'s a lot of business travelers who are willing to pay that price to basically pass through security untethered, but they aren\'t a risk to the system anyway. So why waste resources and time on them? It would transform the footprint and create what I would call “security tunnels” rather than security checkpoints for many of these people.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: That seems to make sense. What was the reaction to that at TSA?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: That\'s a good question. I don\'t know. I don\'t know if I can say that.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Ok, I got it.. Understood. I just had to ask. Well, that\'s a great concept and I appreciate that insight around you guys’ research. You\'re right. I mean, there\'s something that says you just look at what people are willing to sign up with -- with Clear. with Global Entry, with PreCheck. Again, frequent travelers will always look to streamline that experience. And so I would agree, I would say there would be people in a heartbeat who would raise their hand for that.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: Exactly. Right now, people who sign up for Clear pay $189 on the top end for one year, being able to be identified as who they are and go to the front of the precheck line. That\'s all they\'re paying for and they\'re not paying for anything more. If the TSA implements a new class of passengers then Clear would become superfluous and literally would go away.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Yes, that was what I was thinking also.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: It\'s just, it will not be needed anymore. And in some sense, the pathway of using what the TSA calls the “credential authentication technology” which basically validates who you are using biometrics as well as that you\'re entitled to, imply that you don\'t even need a boarding pass right now when they implement this, and in some airports they have it, Clear will have to find a new business model because the TSA is going to assert that model into their own operations.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: You can kind of feel that. And indeed, I still think this most recent version of Clear -- and I had originally signed up for the initial version way back 10-15 years ago (whenever it first started),&nbsp; Rev 1.0, and then they went bankrupt and now we\'ve got Rev 2.0. But even today, I still have a challenge to see a compelling business model for the service that they offer. Oftentimes at a lot of the airports I\'ll go to, the difference between a Clear line and just the basic PreCheck line is pretty much nothing.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: Exactly. I\'ve never been impressed with their business model. They\'ve tried to sell it for stadiums and large entertainment venues. The challenges,&nbsp; it\'s just been difficult and most of their money, most of their resources, most of the revenue still comes through airports and they need that. I just don\'t see the future of it being very bright.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Is there more facial recognition coming or different facial recognition coming? Where do you see that path going?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: Well, we are nowhere near the end game on this facial recognition as effective as it is. I mean, the concept is ideal and wonderful. It\'s still not perfect. It misses certain people of color. It struggles at certain times, and research is continuing to bring the error rates down, lower and lower and lower, especially if you\'re going to create security tunnels where people just walk through it. And your picture is being taken literally in real time matched up using recognition. And then the next thing you know, you\'re at your boarding gate because everything worked out fine for you. And now it will be the majority, the vast majority of travelers. So we are nowhere near the end of this and we are at the beginning. I think the challenge right now is the perception that people do think there is a privacy concern. And like I said, I think it\'s exactly the opposite. I think this is opening up opportunities where we are going to spike in one dimension of AI which is facial recognition. And then the rest of the screening aspect at airports and validation literally gets dampened and in some cases, completely eliminated. I\'m a firm believer and supporter of facial recognition for airport security and air travel. I know that if they do it right, and they seem to be on that pathway, that we are going to have a very different experience at airport screening for security and even air travel in the next 5 to 10 years. It\'s just going to be radically and dramatically different. And I think when people realize that and begin to experience that they\'re going to be happy for it. But at this point, a lot of the rhetoric is around privacy, but our privacy is being violated so often, so frequently and in so many venues that argument is no longer holding any water. I am convinced that this is a positive future for air travel in all aspects.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Sheldon, thanks very much again for joining us on the TravelCommons podcast and sharing that. That\'s great stuff.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Our second guest is <a href=\"https://atmosphereresearch.com/\">Henry Harteveldt</a>, a travel industry analyst for many years. He had the depth of experience and industry contacts to give us a grounded sense on what’s coming with regarding biometrics…<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Henry, thanks for joining us today on the Travel Commons podcast. Wanted to talk about biometrics in and around air travel and specifically, I don\'t know if this is recency bias or what, but it just seems like I\'ve seen a whole lot more of, especially facial recognition over the past couple of years. What\'s your cut at it from a travel industry standpoint?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: In the Crawl/Walk/Run continuum, I would say that with biometrics, we are somewhere between crawl and walk. Think of biometrics as the baby who is crawling really fast and it\'s going to start walking any day now. But in the meantime, it\'s scooting all over the place. So let\'s break it down… Using facial recognition cameras for boarding flights has actually been around since before COVID began. I think the trial started somewhere in the 2016-17 time frame for international flights. That’s the only time it\'s used right now, and it started to roll out in 2018- 2019. Delta was one of the first to embrace the technology and JetBlue as well. And what it does when it works well, and this is something we should come back to to discuss, but when biometrics, facial recognition works as everybody wants it to, it speeds up the boarding process. It reduces the need for us to show not just a physical boarding pass but also a physical passport. And, as a result, on a wide-body jet, it can shave perhaps 10 or more minutes off the boarding time; on a single-aisle plane, a 737 or an A320-type of plane, that could shave 5 to 7 minutes off. So it speeds up the boarding process and makes everything a little bit more efficient. It\'s not perfect. There are people who are uncomfortable using it. There are people who are not familiar with it. So airlines have to have a belt and suspender type of approach. They\'ll have to have gate staff there for the time being. But I don\'t think we are that far away from where international travel is primarily biometrics based boarding, at least in major airports. And I think we will start soon to see it being tested for domestic travel, but there\'s going to be a wrinkle with that when we use the biometric readers at the gate to get on the plane. The database links back to US Customs and Border Patrol which has photographs of US citizens, resident aliens, and international visitors, and it can call up that data to validate that you are you and I am me. With domestic flights. I think only the TSA has the biometric data right now for PreCheck. So it may take a little bit of work to get to a point for that. So that\'s boarding. But let\'s talk about airport security. Yes, TSA is indeed testing and in some cases, I think it\'s actually beyond testing, they are rolling it out facial recognition that again eliminates the need for us to take out a driver\'s license or passport or any other physical ID and, importantly, eliminates the need for us to show any type of boarding pass, whether it\'s a paper boarding pass or digital boarding pass. And again, in theory, it speeds up the number of people who can get into and through the security screening process and reduces the need for human agents at those checkpoints. Now again, we\'re still very much at the beginning of this. And TSA is saying we are going to have a security screening officer at that checkpoint in case something goes wrong or in case someone isn\'t comfortable using biometrics.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Yeah, that was my experience in Nashville. There was a guy standing right there.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: And as we record this, the TSA is testing at Las Vegas, basically this walkthrough type of environment, a new type of screening which is biometrics-based to validate who you are. You put your bags on the belt, you go through, it\'s a lot less invasive, a lot less intrusive and supposed to be a lot faster. I actually want to go over to Las Vegas just to check it out and see what it\'s like. They have this in Dubai and they are testing it elsewhere in England and in France, they are testing it on Eurostar. Now, there are a lot of other things coming along with biometrics at a lot of European airports and in Asia as well. I was just in Singapore. There are biometrics-based scanners so that you don\'t have to queue up and have a border patrol officer review your passport, stamp your passport.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: I had it at Heathrow last November. I went through the e-gates. So I was just surprised; I walked through to the other end and I was like, “Wait, this is it?&nbsp; Nobody to stamp my passport?” No, nothing. Just like, “No. Get out of here. Go, move on.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: Right. Now, for those of us of a certain age, part of the love of travel is hearing that clunky thunk of the passport officer stamping your passport and, every time you get a new passport, the passport service mails back your old one. Those become mementos of our lives.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Yes, absolutely.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: And there is a part of me that will miss the day when we get our passports stamped just as there is a part of me that misses airline branded paper, boarding passes to show “Oh, here\'s where I have been” and so on.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: That obviously, then, pivots over to -- how should the travelers think about biometric data and the storage of that and the risk of that as a condition of travel?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: Look, it is obviously a personal decision. Our research shows that right now in the US, far more travelers would trust sharing their personal biometric information with an airline than with any government agency. So in the US right now, it\'s nearly 80% of airline passengers who, and this is first quarter 2024 data fresh off the press if you will, nearly 80% of us, airline passengers, business and leisure say they\'re willing to share their personal biometric data -- fingerprints, iris scans, etc. -- with an airline they fly regularly if it will lead to a more efficient airport experience or journey. Only a quarter of passengers say they\'re comfortable sharing their personal information right now with any government agency or entity even though, again, with the same benefits of an easier journey. Now, both of those numbers are up from 2023. The government only keeps certain information for a certain amount of time, usually 30 days or less and then it is expunged. So I am in the crowd that is comfortable sharing biometric information with governments and airlines because doing so makes my journey more efficient. It\'s faster, it\'s less stressful. It\'s fewer people that I need to interact with. Remember we\'re somewhere between Crawl and Walk. But where I see it, from the analyst perspective, the time difference, the time it will take us to go from Crawl to Walk will probably be many times longer in the time that will be needed to go from Walk to Run. Because again, as improvements emerge with the technology, the hardware, as well as the software, changes in society, changes in social acceptance of biometrics, the appreciation for benefits, we will reach that so-called tipping point where all of a sudden we see massive and welcome acceleration. It\'s interesting. Younger travelers are a lot more suspicious of the government than some of their older counterparts. And travelers over 65 are less willing to share personal data with the government. The sweet spot is travelers from 30 to 64-ish, call it.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: That\'s an interesting distribution.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: And I think that an important point for anyone listening here -- if you work for an airline, for a technology company, for an airport, for a government agency or, for that matter, if you work at a hotel company, cruise line or other parts of the travel industry. You cannot view your customers as a homogeneous block and you have to understand their welcoming the use of technology. The irony is as we all know, Gen Z are digital natives. They\'re very comfortable using technology. They will put anything and everything on social media it seems like, but they have some very legitimate concerns in their minds about how will governments use their biometric data and could it be used against them? And I\'ll just add that hotels are looking at how they evolve the check in process. You know, I think one of the dumbest questions in the world is when we are standing at the front desk of a hotel suitcase in hand, giving them our credit card and ID and the agent says “Checking in?” Like “No, I thought I would just, I have nothing better to do. So I thought I would bring a suitcase to a hotel in a different city and hand over a credit card and my personal information just to say hello.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Right. “And by the way, I like standing in line. So that\'s why I\'ve been waiting for 10 minutes to get up and have this conversation with you.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: Exactly. But you know, hotels are looking at how they improve the check in process. And granted, at the five-star true luxury properties and resorts, I think they will say, “Look, we value and our guests value the human interaction,” but they\'re going to be a part of that. Guests can say “Look, there\'s some things I can do for myself and then I want to talk to somebody about some other stuff.” But I think with four-star and below, be prepared for more biometric-based self-service check in checkout experiences. And I think, frankly, a lot of people would welcome it because it\'s a lot more secure for 99.9% of us. Eventually. I think biometrics will be more than welcome. And again, if it makes our journeys that much more efficient and less stressful, less unpleasant, there is to me, no downside.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Yes, I think that the cases you\'ve laid out is the appropriate one, which is, it\'s a combination of frictionless or making travel much more efficient than what we have today, doing away with as many lines as we can, and on the same token, being more efficient for the travel company, be it a hotel, be it an airline, be it the company running the airport so that their costs stay down and our costs stay down to travel. So the trade off on that, people are going to strike their own balance around privacy versus efficiency. Henry, thank you very much. This has been a great conversation. I\'ve really enjoyed it. Thanks for coming on a TravelCommons podcast.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: Thank you for inviting me. I enjoyed it as well.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Thanks to <a href=\"http://shj.cs.illinois.edu/\">Dr. Sheldon Jacobson</a> and <a href=\"https://atmosphereresearch.com/\">Henry Harteveldt</a> for taking the time to talk to us about biometrics, facial recognition and give us an idea of what we travelers should expect to see soon. Check out the show notes at TravelCommons.com for links to their work.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"className\":\"has-medium-font-size\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em><a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/track/0geYaxa8LozoV8afrKwdTo?si=aa1cf0be8ee9400a\" title=\"\">Pictures of You</a></em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #199</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I hope you enjoyed the show; the conversations with Sheldon and Henry. They had so much great insight; the editing decisions were tough. This is usually the point where I say “and I hope you decide to stay subscribed” but this is, as they say in the UK, the penultimate episode of the TravelCommons podcast; a fancy way to say “second-to-the-last”. The next episode will be #200, so a good round number to end it. I’ll unpack it all next month, but just wanted to give you all a heads up.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As always, you can find us and listen to the current episodes on all the main podcast sites -- Apple Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, and Amazon Music. Google has shut down their Podcast app, at least in the US, but you can now get the regular TravelCommons audio episodes on the TravelCommons’ YouTube channel. Go figure -- I can never keep track of what bits Google is shutting down or renaming. But you can always ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page at TravelCommons.com for a transcript of the episode and links to Sheldon and Henry’s websites. And along the side of the page, you’ll find links to all the TravelCommons’ socials.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" title=\"\">mpeacock on Twitter</a>, write them on the TravelCommons page on <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" title=\"\">Facebook </a>or <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" title=\"\">Instagram</a>, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com.&nbsp; And thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in emails, Tweets and post comments on the website. I really appreciate it.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And until we talk again, safe travels; and thanks for stopping by the TravelCommons.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_199.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #199 — Smile for Security: Facial Recognition in Travel','','inherit','closed','closed','','4460-revision-v1','','','2026-01-27 10:55:17','2026-01-27 16:55:17','',4460,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4741',0,'revision','',0),
(4743,1,'2026-01-27 10:57:10','2026-01-27 16:57:10','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/DALL-E_2024-04-10_13.01.39-300x300.jpg\" alt=\" a traveler standing in front of a facial recognition scanner at an airport. The scanner is emitting error signals, and the traveler looks frustrated.\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" />I knew these travel delays were aging me[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Using my face as my boarding pass to get on a flight to Oaxaca, Mexico and then as my passport to get back in the US got me thinking about how facial recognition has permeated the travel experience. To help us understand where this is going, we talk with two travel industry experts, <a href=\"http://shj.cs.illinois.edu/\">Dr. Sheldon Jacobson</a> and <a href=\"https://atmosphereresearch.com/\">Henry Harteveldt</a>. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>But before that, we talk about eating grasshoppers, an EV experience with Avis, and a couple of my travel tips that need to be revised.  All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_199.mp3\" title=\"\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #199: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN a couple of days after a last-minute 200-mile trip up to Carbondale, Illinois, home of the <a href=\"https://siu.edu/\" title=\"\">Southern Illinois University</a> Salukis… but that didn’t matter. What <em>did</em> matter is that Carbondale was right in the <a href=\"https://eclipse.siu.edu/\" title=\"\">center of the solar eclipse’s path</a> across North America, which meant we had 4 minutes of total eclipse.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Looking up, straight into the sun with its corona glowing, wavering around the black disk of the moon -- I’ve seen… we’ve all seen pictures of total eclipses, and of this one all across social and regular media Monday afternoon. But the pictures couldn’t do justice to being there, even if <em>there</em> was the far end of the Salukis stadium parking lot, backing up to a scraggly bit of woods. The experience more than made up for the 3-hr drive there and the 5½-hour bumper-to-bumper traffic back. I add it to my list of things that, even though we’ve seen seemingly an infinite number of pictures of them, experiencing them in real life was worth the hassle to physically travel to see them. The Taj Mahal, the Great Wall of China, Niagara Falls -- all on the list. As opposed to, say, The Mona Lisa in the Louvre. The crowd of people with their phones in the air trying to get a picture was much better than the Mona Lisa itself.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Before that, the start of March, we were in Oaxaca, Mexico for a week. I’ve had Oaxaca on my “To Visit” list for 4-5 years now. For me, it was a good match -- the combination of interesting food, lots of culture, and no beach. I’ve done “resort-y” Mexico -- Cabo, Cancún, Puerto Vallarta -- not a big fan. While there were a lot of tourists in Oaxaca, it didn’t seem to be overrun with them like, say, the center of Cabo is. Maybe because the city center is bigger, so there’s more space to absorb them, or maybe the absolute number of tourists are lower; it wasn’t an easy nor a cheap flight to get there.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>We hit the food scene pretty hard, high- and low-brow; food stands in the market; high-end places serving up phenomenal <a href=\"https://www.rickbayless.com/recipe/oaxacan-black-mole/\" title=\"\">moles</a>. But the food that made the biggest impression is the insects. It wasn’t some tourist-baiting shtick. Walking past a group of street vendors, I saw one of the women making a snack of a couple of grasshoppers wrapped in a small tortilla. At a mezcal bar on the eastern edge of the Centro, the bartender put down a small bowl of grasshoppers as a bar snack. (If you follow <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" title=\"\">TravelCommons on Instagram</a>, you can see a picture in my Oaxaca story) “Those are good grasshoppers,” he told us. “I drive an hour up towards Pueblo to get them. They’re not farmed like the ones you get in the markets.” I have to admit that I’m not enough of an insect connoisseur to be able to pick out the finer nuances of free-range vs. farmed grasshoppers, but they were as good as Beer Nuts as a bar snack. Or maybe that was just the 3rd, or 4th, or 5th shot of mezcal talking.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/duckett/2333\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Another Girl (instrumental)</a> by duckett (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/duckett/23334 Ft: fourstones, miafas</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Friend of the podcast Allan Marko swung by the website to leave this comment about the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2024/02/28/podcast-198-london-vacation-rental-woes-hertzs-ev-retreat/\" title=\"\">last episode</a>:<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“I was assigned an EV by Avis at Fort Lauderdale [at the end of February]. Curious enough to try it out for the relatively short distances I would be traveling, I got in. After starting, I noticed it only had a 10% charge, so, “check please.” I fired up the Avis app and selected a Chevy Malibu with 1,200 miles on it.&nbsp; As for booking.com, we had tremendous luck using that website for most of our accommodations over a two month period in SE Asia five years ago - exclusively for hotels though.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Allan, thanks for that. Expecting you to drive off with a 10% charge? Avis would never think to give you a car with just an ⅛-th of a tank. And if they did, it would take them 10 minutes to fill the tank and get it back to you. But for that EV? Even at a Tesla Supercharger, at least an hour, maybe more. No wonder they tried to get you to do it. And regards to booking.com, my experience with their hotel product is the same as yours -- never had a problem. But their property rentals, never again!</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>One of my regular travel pro tips from years ago was “Don’t take the last flight out” because, if you missed your connection or your flight was canceled, you had a backup. And, as an IRROP passenger -- industry lingo for “irregular operations” -- you have priority on open seats on that later flight; even more so if you have frequent flier status. But nowadays, with US airlines sporting load factors over 80%, this strategy is a lot tougher to make work. Last June, back in episode #194, I talked about how United’s delay leaving Amsterdam meant we missed our connection home, and how I spent about an hour between the service agents at ORD and on the phone, saying “This is unacceptable” 2, 3, 4 times before they found two seats on the later flight to BNA that they’d been saying was completely full. And now this trip flying home from Oaxaca through DFW on American, I had gotten an email saying there could be bad weather, but I thought, “Well, there’s always that later flight.” En route from Oaxaca to DFW, I’m connected to the plane WiFi and an hour before we land, I get a notice from American -- our flight to Nashville had been canceled. OK, that sucks, but no panic, they’d rebook me on the later flight. But I keep reading -- no rebooking; it just tells me to go to the American app. The WiFi over northern Mexico is not the greatest, but when I do get the app to respond, it’s not showing the later flight as an option. Indeed, the options keep changing with each refresh, but nothing earlier than the next day, Friday, or sometimes, not until Saturday, two days later. It wasn’t until after we landed, passed through Immigration, and were waiting at baggage claim to pick up our luggage to go through Customs that we finally got a message through the app that they’d found us seats on the later flight. Still got home that night, but in both these instances, the customer service experience has degraded just so far. I’ve had to push <em>very hard</em>, and, honestly, be a bit of a jerk to get what used to come seamlessly.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And another travel tip that seems to need retiring --<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/12/07/top-10-holiday-travel-tips-3/\" title=\"\"> “Use Twitter as a Concierge Service”</a>. While struggling to rebook while still in the air from Oaxaca, I pinged American on Twitter hoping for a little more help. What I got was an amazing (and depressing) amount of spam messaging masquerading as AA customer service managers. It’s easy to get fooled in the panic of trying to find a way home, but a few rules to keep in mind -- only communicate with the airline’s gold-checked verified accounts; ignore messages from everyone else -- like “AMERICAN AIR HELP DESK” (all in caps) or “Jason frank (uppercase Jason, lowercase case frank) American Air manger” (as opposed to “manager”); and never give anyone your phone number.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And there’s a quick programming note at the end of this episode, so for those interested, hold off on hitting the Skip button when you hear the music.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" title=\"\">Twitter (X?) message to mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" title=\"\">Facebook page</a>, or on the <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" title=\"\">Instagram</a> account at travelcommons -- or you can skip all that social media stuff and post your comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djiz/10514\">Nube - Djiz Rmx</a> by Kwame (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: SylviaO</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Smile for Security: The Future of Facial Recognition in Travel</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Over the years on the podcast, we’ve talked about how travelers are seeing more and more use of biometrics in their travel days. I’ve told the story of my first fingerprint scan back in the late ‘90’s so I could skip the US immigration line on my weekly commute home from Toronto-Pearson Airport. My colleague’s reaction -- “I’m not giving the US government my biometrics!” Me -- “I can skip a 3-minute line? Where do I sign up?” Which I think shows that the privacy-vs.-convenience choices haven\'t fundamentally changed all that much in the subsequent 25 years.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But (surprise!), technology has, and it seems to be accelerating the use of biometrics, specifically facial recognition. Boarding our flight to Oaxaca, our face was our boarding pass -- just look at the camera, wait for the “bing”, and move on. And coming back, the Global Entry kiosks no longer need passports, no longer have you twisting your hand just so to get the fingerprint pad to read all five fingers; just walk up, it takes your picture, and tells you to move on.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Which got me wondering -- where is this going? To help answer this, I invited on two guys who have been digging deep into this for a number of years. First up, <a href=\"http://shj.cs.illinois.edu/\">Dr. Sheldon Jacobson</a>, Professor in Computer Science at the University of Illinois. Sheldon was last on the podcast in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/09/22/podcast-189-why-we-travel-when-the-first-flight-isnt-best/\" title=\"\">episode #189</a> in September 2022 talking about why another of my travel tips, “catch the earliest flight you can”, is not always right. Over the years, Sheldon has developed operations research models to optimize aviation security. So I asked him to come back on the podcast to talk about the growth of biometrics…<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Sheldon, thanks for coming back on to the Travel Commons podcast. Wanted to talk with you about biometrics, facial recognition, all the things that seem to be increasing with regards to air travel.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: The airlines, as well as the Transportation Security Administration need to know who you are when you are traveling and they relied on identification cards, driver\'s license, real IDs and are continuing to be part of the future. But ultimately, the best way to determine who you are is through your face and biometrics and artificial intelligence imbued with it. In fact, it is a solution that people are recognizing; the airlines are starting to use it. And of course, the Transportation Security Administration is investing billions of dollars to advance this idea. And there\'s a reason why they\'re doing this. They\'re doing this simply because the traditional model of airport security screening has been to detect stuff -- prohibited items, knives, explosives, firearms, even, you know, full size tubes of toothpaste could be a threat based on explosives that can be embedded in them. However, the real threat are the people and facial recognition is a means to transform the platform for airport security from the detection of items to knowing your traveler. And that\'s where we\'re heading right now. And this is the future of airport security.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: And how does that work? How do you think that works?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: TSA has not broadcast this and I don\'t even know if they\'re thinking about it, but I have thought about it and I have proposed to them because I visited them in October 2023. And I told them that if they can bring facial recognition biometrics and the use of AI to truly validate and authenticate the travelers, the need for physical screening will be reduced tremendously to the point that they can create a new class of traveler, which I would call a “Super PreCheck” traveler who subjects themselves to greater background vetting. But then they would be treated like a known crew member at an airport and require no further physical screening. That is the future of airport security.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: It\'s almost like “Back to the Future”, right? It\'s almost like back to pre 9/11 days.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: Now, some will argue, “Oh, someone will gain the system and we will have a terrorist threat because of that.” And I would argue the exact opposite, that the only people who would be willing to subject themselves to the background check would be people who know that they\'re going to get through it fine. And the ones who are truly threats cannot risk it because rarely are people acting by themselves. They\'re often acting in a network. And as a result of that, for them to be exposed, they would be exposing their whole network. And the risk of doing that is far too great. What it would also do is it would parse the whole spectrum of travelers into a group of people who are willing to be known and a group of travelers that are not willing to be known. But over time, the ones who are willing to be known will be much larger, which means you can target your resources and your attention on this so-called unknown group and actually make it more secure for the air system by targeting your resources in that way. After September 11th, everybody was treated the same -- one size fits all. TSA PreCheck moved away from that. Now, I\'m proposing we move even further. And our original research we presented to the TSA in 2003 when we proposed this idea of differential screening to them and how it would work and why it would be beneficial. We said that you really need three classes, two would be fine, but three would be better. And it turns out that third class is what we would now call a “Super PreCheck” class of passengers. And those are the people who would be treated like crew members, the known crew members. And a lot of people would be willing to pay for that privilege and we\'ve put boundaries on what that means. It wouldn\'t be renewed every five years; it would be renewed potentially every year. It would be more expensive. But there\'s a lot of business travelers who are willing to pay that price to basically pass through security untethered, but they aren\'t a risk to the system anyway. So why waste resources and time on them? It would transform the footprint and create what I would call “security tunnels” rather than security checkpoints for many of these people.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: That seems to make sense. What was the reaction to that at TSA?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: That\'s a good question. I don\'t know. I don\'t know if I can say that.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Ok, I got it.. Understood. I just had to ask. Well, that\'s a great concept and I appreciate that insight around you guys’ research. You\'re right. I mean, there\'s something that says you just look at what people are willing to sign up with -- with Clear. with Global Entry, with PreCheck. Again, frequent travelers will always look to streamline that experience. And so I would agree, I would say there would be people in a heartbeat who would raise their hand for that.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: Exactly. Right now, people who sign up for Clear pay $189 on the top end for one year, being able to be identified as who they are and go to the front of the precheck line. That\'s all they\'re paying for and they\'re not paying for anything more. If the TSA implements a new class of passengers then Clear would become superfluous and literally would go away.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Yes, that was what I was thinking also.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: It\'s just, it will not be needed anymore. And in some sense, the pathway of using what the TSA calls the “credential authentication technology” which basically validates who you are using biometrics as well as that you\'re entitled to, imply that you don\'t even need a boarding pass right now when they implement this, and in some airports they have it, Clear will have to find a new business model because the TSA is going to assert that model into their own operations.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: You can kind of feel that. And indeed, I still think this most recent version of Clear -- and I had originally signed up for the initial version way back 10-15 years ago (whenever it first started),&nbsp; Rev 1.0, and then they went bankrupt and now we\'ve got Rev 2.0. But even today, I still have a challenge to see a compelling business model for the service that they offer. Oftentimes at a lot of the airports I\'ll go to, the difference between a Clear line and just the basic PreCheck line is pretty much nothing.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: Exactly. I\'ve never been impressed with their business model. They\'ve tried to sell it for stadiums and large entertainment venues. The challenges,&nbsp; it\'s just been difficult and most of their money, most of their resources, most of the revenue still comes through airports and they need that. I just don\'t see the future of it being very bright.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Is there more facial recognition coming or different facial recognition coming? Where do you see that path going?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: Well, we are nowhere near the end game on this facial recognition as effective as it is. I mean, the concept is ideal and wonderful. It\'s still not perfect. It misses certain people of color. It struggles at certain times, and research is continuing to bring the error rates down, lower and lower and lower, especially if you\'re going to create security tunnels where people just walk through it. And your picture is being taken literally in real time matched up using recognition. And then the next thing you know, you\'re at your boarding gate because everything worked out fine for you. And now it will be the majority, the vast majority of travelers. So we are nowhere near the end of this and we are at the beginning. I think the challenge right now is the perception that people do think there is a privacy concern. And like I said, I think it\'s exactly the opposite. I think this is opening up opportunities where we are going to spike in one dimension of AI which is facial recognition. And then the rest of the screening aspect at airports and validation literally gets dampened and in some cases, completely eliminated. I\'m a firm believer and supporter of facial recognition for airport security and air travel. I know that if they do it right, and they seem to be on that pathway, that we are going to have a very different experience at airport screening for security and even air travel in the next 5 to 10 years. It\'s just going to be radically and dramatically different. And I think when people realize that and begin to experience that they\'re going to be happy for it. But at this point, a lot of the rhetoric is around privacy, but our privacy is being violated so often, so frequently and in so many venues that argument is no longer holding any water. I am convinced that this is a positive future for air travel in all aspects.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Sheldon, thanks very much again for joining us on the TravelCommons podcast and sharing that. That\'s great stuff.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Our second guest is <a href=\"https://atmosphereresearch.com/\">Henry Harteveldt</a>, a travel industry analyst for many years. He had the depth of experience and industry contacts to give us a grounded sense on what’s coming with regarding biometrics…<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Henry, thanks for joining us today on the Travel Commons podcast. Wanted to talk about biometrics in and around air travel and specifically, I don\'t know if this is recency bias or what, but it just seems like I\'ve seen a whole lot more of, especially facial recognition over the past couple of years. What\'s your cut at it from a travel industry standpoint?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: In the Crawl/Walk/Run continuum, I would say that with biometrics, we are somewhere between crawl and walk. Think of biometrics as the baby who is crawling really fast and it\'s going to start walking any day now. But in the meantime, it\'s scooting all over the place. So let\'s break it down… Using facial recognition cameras for boarding flights has actually been around since before COVID began. I think the trial started somewhere in the 2016-17 time frame for international flights. That’s the only time it\'s used right now, and it started to roll out in 2018- 2019. Delta was one of the first to embrace the technology and JetBlue as well. And what it does when it works well, and this is something we should come back to to discuss, but when biometrics, facial recognition works as everybody wants it to, it speeds up the boarding process. It reduces the need for us to show not just a physical boarding pass but also a physical passport. And, as a result, on a wide-body jet, it can shave perhaps 10 or more minutes off the boarding time; on a single-aisle plane, a 737 or an A320-type of plane, that could shave 5 to 7 minutes off. So it speeds up the boarding process and makes everything a little bit more efficient. It\'s not perfect. There are people who are uncomfortable using it. There are people who are not familiar with it. So airlines have to have a belt and suspender type of approach. They\'ll have to have gate staff there for the time being. But I don\'t think we are that far away from where international travel is primarily biometrics based boarding, at least in major airports. And I think we will start soon to see it being tested for domestic travel, but there\'s going to be a wrinkle with that when we use the biometric readers at the gate to get on the plane. The database links back to US Customs and Border Patrol which has photographs of US citizens, resident aliens, and international visitors, and it can call up that data to validate that you are you and I am me. With domestic flights. I think only the TSA has the biometric data right now for PreCheck. So it may take a little bit of work to get to a point for that. So that\'s boarding. But let\'s talk about airport security. Yes, TSA is indeed testing and in some cases, I think it\'s actually beyond testing, they are rolling it out facial recognition that again eliminates the need for us to take out a driver\'s license or passport or any other physical ID and, importantly, eliminates the need for us to show any type of boarding pass, whether it\'s a paper boarding pass or digital boarding pass. And again, in theory, it speeds up the number of people who can get into and through the security screening process and reduces the need for human agents at those checkpoints. Now again, we\'re still very much at the beginning of this. And TSA is saying we are going to have a security screening officer at that checkpoint in case something goes wrong or in case someone isn\'t comfortable using biometrics.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Yeah, that was my experience in Nashville. There was a guy standing right there.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: And as we record this, the TSA is testing at Las Vegas, basically this walkthrough type of environment, a new type of screening which is biometrics-based to validate who you are. You put your bags on the belt, you go through, it\'s a lot less invasive, a lot less intrusive and supposed to be a lot faster. I actually want to go over to Las Vegas just to check it out and see what it\'s like. They have this in Dubai and they are testing it elsewhere in England and in France, they are testing it on Eurostar. Now, there are a lot of other things coming along with biometrics at a lot of European airports and in Asia as well. I was just in Singapore. There are biometrics-based scanners so that you don\'t have to queue up and have a border patrol officer review your passport, stamp your passport.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: I had it at Heathrow last November. I went through the e-gates. So I was just surprised; I walked through to the other end and I was like, “Wait, this is it?&nbsp; Nobody to stamp my passport?” No, nothing. Just like, “No. Get out of here. Go, move on.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: Right. Now, for those of us of a certain age, part of the love of travel is hearing that clunky thunk of the passport officer stamping your passport and, every time you get a new passport, the passport service mails back your old one. Those become mementos of our lives.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Yes, absolutely.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: And there is a part of me that will miss the day when we get our passports stamped just as there is a part of me that misses airline branded paper, boarding passes to show “Oh, here\'s where I have been” and so on.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: That obviously, then, pivots over to -- how should the travelers think about biometric data and the storage of that and the risk of that as a condition of travel?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: Look, it is obviously a personal decision. Our research shows that right now in the US, far more travelers would trust sharing their personal biometric information with an airline than with any government agency. So in the US right now, it\'s nearly 80% of airline passengers who, and this is first quarter 2024 data fresh off the press if you will, nearly 80% of us, airline passengers, business and leisure say they\'re willing to share their personal biometric data -- fingerprints, iris scans, etc. -- with an airline they fly regularly if it will lead to a more efficient airport experience or journey. Only a quarter of passengers say they\'re comfortable sharing their personal information right now with any government agency or entity even though, again, with the same benefits of an easier journey. Now, both of those numbers are up from 2023. The government only keeps certain information for a certain amount of time, usually 30 days or less and then it is expunged. So I am in the crowd that is comfortable sharing biometric information with governments and airlines because doing so makes my journey more efficient. It\'s faster, it\'s less stressful. It\'s fewer people that I need to interact with. Remember we\'re somewhere between Crawl and Walk. But where I see it, from the analyst perspective, the time difference, the time it will take us to go from Crawl to Walk will probably be many times longer in the time that will be needed to go from Walk to Run. Because again, as improvements emerge with the technology, the hardware, as well as the software, changes in society, changes in social acceptance of biometrics, the appreciation for benefits, we will reach that so-called tipping point where all of a sudden we see massive and welcome acceleration. It\'s interesting. Younger travelers are a lot more suspicious of the government than some of their older counterparts. And travelers over 65 are less willing to share personal data with the government. The sweet spot is travelers from 30 to 64-ish, call it.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: That\'s an interesting distribution.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: And I think that an important point for anyone listening here -- if you work for an airline, for a technology company, for an airport, for a government agency or, for that matter, if you work at a hotel company, cruise line or other parts of the travel industry. You cannot view your customers as a homogeneous block and you have to understand their welcoming the use of technology. The irony is as we all know, Gen Z are digital natives. They\'re very comfortable using technology. They will put anything and everything on social media it seems like, but they have some very legitimate concerns in their minds about how will governments use their biometric data and could it be used against them? And I\'ll just add that hotels are looking at how they evolve the check in process. You know, I think one of the dumbest questions in the world is when we are standing at the front desk of a hotel suitcase in hand, giving them our credit card and ID and the agent says “Checking in?” Like “No, I thought I would just, I have nothing better to do. So I thought I would bring a suitcase to a hotel in a different city and hand over a credit card and my personal information just to say hello.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Right. “And by the way, I like standing in line. So that\'s why I\'ve been waiting for 10 minutes to get up and have this conversation with you.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: Exactly. But you know, hotels are looking at how they improve the check in process. And granted, at the five-star true luxury properties and resorts, I think they will say, “Look, we value and our guests value the human interaction,” but they\'re going to be a part of that. Guests can say “Look, there\'s some things I can do for myself and then I want to talk to somebody about some other stuff.” But I think with four-star and below, be prepared for more biometric-based self-service check in checkout experiences. And I think, frankly, a lot of people would welcome it because it\'s a lot more secure for 99.9% of us. Eventually. I think biometrics will be more than welcome. And again, if it makes our journeys that much more efficient and less stressful, less unpleasant, there is to me, no downside.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Yes, I think that the cases you\'ve laid out is the appropriate one, which is, it\'s a combination of frictionless or making travel much more efficient than what we have today, doing away with as many lines as we can, and on the same token, being more efficient for the travel company, be it a hotel, be it an airline, be it the company running the airport so that their costs stay down and our costs stay down to travel. So the trade off on that, people are going to strike their own balance around privacy versus efficiency. Henry, thank you very much. This has been a great conversation. I\'ve really enjoyed it. Thanks for coming on a TravelCommons podcast.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: Thank you for inviting me. I enjoyed it as well.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Thanks to <a href=\"http://shj.cs.illinois.edu/\">Dr. Sheldon Jacobson</a> and <a href=\"https://atmosphereresearch.com/\">Henry Harteveldt</a> for taking the time to talk to us about biometrics, facial recognition and give us an idea of what we travelers should expect to see soon. Check out the show notes at TravelCommons.com for links to their work.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"className\":\"has-medium-font-size\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em><a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/track/0geYaxa8LozoV8afrKwdTo?si=aa1cf0be8ee9400a\" title=\"\">Pictures of You</a></em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #199</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I hope you enjoyed the show; the conversations with Sheldon and Henry. They had so much great insight; the editing decisions were tough. This is usually the point where I say “and I hope you decide to stay subscribed” but this is, as they say in the UK, the penultimate episode of the TravelCommons podcast; a fancy way to say “second-to-the-last”. The next episode will be #200, so a good round number to end it. I’ll unpack it all next month, but just wanted to give you all a heads up.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As always, you can find us and listen to the current episodes on all the main podcast sites -- Apple Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, and Amazon Music. Google has shut down their Podcast app, at least in the US, but you can now get the regular TravelCommons audio episodes on the TravelCommons’ YouTube channel. Go figure -- I can never keep track of what bits Google is shutting down or renaming. But you can always ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page at TravelCommons.com for a transcript of the episode and links to Sheldon and Henry’s websites. And along the side of the page, you’ll find links to all the TravelCommons’ socials.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" title=\"\">mpeacock on Twitter</a>, write them on the TravelCommons page on <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" title=\"\">Facebook </a>or <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" title=\"\">Instagram</a>, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com.&nbsp; And thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in emails, Tweets and post comments on the website. I really appreciate it.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And until we talk again, safe travels; and thanks for stopping by the TravelCommons.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_199.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #199 — Smile for Security: Facial Recognition in Travel','','inherit','closed','closed','','4460-revision-v1','','','2026-01-27 10:57:10','2026-01-27 16:57:10','',4460,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4743',0,'revision','',0),
(4752,1,'2026-01-27 11:36:52','2026-01-27 17:36:52','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Coming Soon!</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Destinations','','inherit','closed','closed','','4647-revision-v1','','','2026-01-27 11:36:52','2026-01-27 17:36:52','',4647,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4752',0,'revision','',0),
(4760,1,'2024-06-02 14:39:00','2024-06-02 20:39:00','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>In the <a href=\"https://staging.travelcommons.com/2024/05/23/podcast-200-wrapping-up-the-travelcommons-journey/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">last podcast episode</a>, I mentioned that I’ve found myself giving out a lot of travel recommendations recently. So rather than limiting them to a 2-barstool radius in my <a title=\"\" href=\"https://www.instagram.com/barriquebrewing/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">favorite</a> <a title=\"\" href=\"https://www.southerngristbrewing.com/nations\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Nashville</a> <a title=\"\" href=\"https://www.faitlaforcebrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">taprooms</a>, here are (in no particular order) the things I\'ve been recommending lately...</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Restaurants, Bars, and Taprooms</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong><em>Nashville</em></strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":20,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"none\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><img src=\"https://staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/IMG_7057-EDIT-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"A glass of hazy IPA in a rustic, red-painted wooden cupholder in a record store. The holder is mounted to a black bin of vinyl records with album art visible.\" class=\"wp-image-20\"/><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Album shopping in Vinyl Tap</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://www.vinyltapnashville.com/\" title=\"\">Vinyl Tap</a></strong> Talk to any Nashvillian who\'s lived here for more than five years and it won\'t take long \'til they start complaining about all the changes -- especially traffic and, if they live in East Nashville, gentrification. East Nashville is traveling the same path as Brooklyn, Chicago\'s Wicker Park, and Madrid\'s Malasaña neighborhoods. Escalating rents have forced many of the musicians who \"urban pioneered\" East Nashville to retreat north to Madison and Goodlettsville. But they\'ll reconvene at Vinyl Tap to support a friend\'s set. The guy next to you watching this band will more than likely be plugging in as the lead guitarist for the next. Vinyl Tap is a weird combination of craft beer bar, vinyl record store, and music venue; but they make all three work.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/barriquebrewing/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\"><strong>Barrique Brewing</strong></a> This is my favorite taproom in Nashville, though its focus on lagers and barrel-aged sours might not be for everyone. There\'s typically one IPA on tap, 3-4 different lagers (light, dark, smoked), a couple of British styles on beer engines, and a cooler full of sour bottles. It\'s in an industrial pocket on the redevelopment path between the Tennessee Titans\' new stadium and Oracle\'s new corporate headquarters. Don\'t sleep on this place \'cause it\'ll be plowed under in 3-4 years.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a title=\"\" href=\"https://www.tailornashville.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><strong>Tailor</strong></a> Owner Vivek Surti calls his food \"First Generation American Cuisine,\" built on his \"experience growing up here in middle Tennessee as a first-generation American of Indian descent\". Much more elegant than how I describe it to friends -- Hillbilly Indian. Tailor is a dinner party restaurant. There are two seatings during which every table is served the same dish at the same time, accompanied by Surti\'s explanations of what\'s in front of you. I\'ve eaten there three times and have yet to be disappointed.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong><em>Louisville</em></strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":21,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"none\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><img src=\"https://staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/IMG_4465-EDIT-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Barrels of bourbon whiskey at Angel Envy distillery in Louisville, KY\" class=\"wp-image-21\"/></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a title=\"\" href=\"https://www.angelsenvy.com/us/en/bourbon-distillery-tours-louisville/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Angel\'s Envy</a> </strong> You can\'t go to Kentucky without hitting a bourbon distillery, and this one is conveniently located in downtown Louisville. The tour takes you from mash deck to distilling columns to bottling line. But for me, the best part is the tasting that finishes the tour. Rather than just pouring out a couple of shots at a hightop, they seat the tour group in a barrel-lined tasting room, teach you how to properly taste whiskey, and then walk the group through a discussion about what everyone tastes and smells. Very educational... and great whiskey too!</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a title=\"\" href=\"https://610magnolia.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><strong>610 Magnolia</strong></a> Located in a little house in the Old Louisville neighborhood, 610 Magnolia is a great example of what I call \"comfortable fine dining\" -- a warm, cozy dining room; friendly (but not overly familiar) wait staff; a wine list with a nice range of price points; and, of course, imaginative and well-executed food.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong><em>Chattanooga</em></strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.callioperestaurant.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\"><strong>Calliope</strong></a> Helmed by a Jordanian chef in a not-so-great neighborhood, it\'s Middle Eastern food using local, Southern ingredients. And any place that puts lamb neck on their menu will get me in the door. It was excellent, and when they put the whole, head-on red snapper on our table so I could dig out the fish cheeks and collar meat, I was sold. They also have a fun wine list with bottles from Lebanon, Georgia (the country, not the state), Armenia, and Cyprus, as well as usual suspects (France, California).</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.elsiesdaughters.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\"><strong>Elsie\'s Daughter</strong></a> And any menu that lists a bone marrow tartine will also my attention. Cozy bar; interesting drinks; tight menu. Good place for a night cap and a late-night bite.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a title=\"\" href=\"https://niedlovs.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><strong>Niedlov\'s Cafe &amp; Bakery</strong></a> Popular place for breakfast with a nice selection of pastries and breakfast sandwiches. Pick up a loaf of their daily special bread on your way out.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong><em>Memphis</em></strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a title=\"\" href=\"https://www.gusfriedchicken.com/locations/downtown-memphis\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><strong>Gus\'s Fried Chicken</strong></a> While asking a group of Memphians their favorite barbecue joint is still the best way to start an argument, there\'s no disagreement about the best fried chicken. This is the place for lunch after a walk through <a title=\"\" href=\"https://www.tomleepark.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Tom Lee Park</a> along the bank of the Mississippi River.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a title=\"\" href=\"https://wiseacrebrew.com/brewery\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><strong>Wiseacre Brewing - Downtown</strong></a> I haven\'t been too excited by the Wiseacre beers that make it up to Nashville, so this taproom wasn\'t high on my list. But it was a couple of blocks over from the <a title=\"\" href=\"https://www.civilrightsmuseum.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">National Civil Rights Museum</a>, so we walked over. And were glad we did. There\'s a broad range of well-executed beers, nice bright space, friendly bar staff, and a good pizza kitchen.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Oaxaca (Oaxaca de Juárez)</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":17,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"none\",\"align\":\"right\",\"className\":\"is-style-default\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium is-style-default\"><img src=\"https://staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/B017DED6-2FDB-4305-986C-5FF4AEFA0D9D-scaled-1-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-17\"/></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>As I talked about in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2024/04/11/podcast-199-smile-for-security-facial-recognition-in-travel/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">episode #199</a>, I\'ve always been a bit \"ehh\" about Mexico. I’ve done “resort-y” Mexico — Cabo, Cancún, Puerto Vallarta — and am not a big fan. It just feels like LA or Houston with a better selection of tequila. But <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oaxaca_City\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Oaxaca</a> is different. We were there for a week at the start of March. For me, it\'s a good fit — interesting food, lots of culture, a mezcal scene to dig into, and no beach. And it\'s not overrun with tourists.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Areas</strong> - We stayed in the Jalatlaco neighborhood and then moved further west into the main part of town, north of the Zócalo. Both neighborhoods were cool. We could walk to a number of bars and restaurants, and never felt unsafe.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Restaurants</strong> - Best high-end restaurant - <a title=\"\" href=\"https://www.casaoaxacaelrestaurante.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Casa Oaxaca</a>; best street food - <a title=\"\" href=\"https://maps.app.goo.gl/rxXVHGpDF1k86GQ48\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Pasillo de Humo</a>. This city is about food. There are a lot of great restaurants.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Mezcal</strong> - The state of Oaxaca (of which Oaxaca City is the capital) makes <a title=\"\" href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mezcal#Production\">80-90% of the mezcal in Mexico</a>, so you should tuck into it. A typical bar\'s mezcal menu can be overwhelming, so invest in a bit of education. The bartender at <a title=\"\" href=\"https://mezcalspeakeasy.com/\">Sobrio by Mezcal Speakeasy</a> patiently walked us through a vertical tasting; same type of agave, three different distillation techniques. <a title=\"\" href=\"https://mezcaloteca.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">La Mezcaloteca</a> was a reservation-only hour-long educational tasting. And unlike in the US, none of the Oaxaca mezcals I drank were smoky.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Book</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":19,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"none\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><img src=\"https://staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/71fvjFWkLqL._SL1200_-200x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-19\"/></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3X1xyC9\" title=\"\"><em>The Picnic: A Rush for Freedom and the Collapse of Communism</em></a> by Matthew Longo is one of the best books I\'ve read this year so far.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>My first and last trips to Hungary bookend Longo\'s story. My first visit was in the spring of 1989. It was before the main events of <em>The Picnic</em>, but I could feel the tension of change building. My last visit was the autumn of 2019, around the time of the 30th anniversary activities of Pan European Picnic and the fall of the Communist regime. By then, the public\'s mood had pivoted -- from excitement and fear of political change to disappointment and cynicism as to what that change had actually delivered. With this background, I looked forward to reading <em>The Picnic</em>.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>And it didn\'t disappoint. The book is, at its core, a range of oral histories -- from the then-Hungarian Prime Minister trying to reform the country without sparking a re-run of the 1956 Soviet invasion, to the Hungarian dissidents who organized the picnic, to a number of East German families who breached the Austrian-Hungarian border during and immediately after the picnic. These stories make the book a compelling read. It moves quickly; pulling the reader into the building risk and the subsequent let-down felt by all the participants.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I give Longo a lot of credit for not getting in the way of these folks telling their stories; letting their own words stand without surrounding them with his own commentary. As a professor of politics at Leiden University, Longo has a definite point of view -- and he does the right thing by keeping it to the Prologue and the Epilogue; less than 20 pages.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Highly recommended if you\'re interested in modern European history.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Things I\'m Recommending Right Now (Summer 2024)','Here are the travel and food recommendations I\'ve been giving for quick trips to Nashville, Louisville, and Memphis... and a longer one to Oaxaca. ','publish','closed','closed','','things-im-recommending-right-now','','','2026-08-25 17:45:10','2026-08-25 22:45:10','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4760',0,'post','',0),
(4761,1,'2026-01-27 17:36:18','2026-01-27 23:36:18','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>In the <a href=\"https://staging.travelcommons.com/2024/05/23/podcast-200-wrapping-up-the-travelcommons-journey/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">last podcast episode</a>, I mentioned that I’ve found myself giving out a lot of travel recommendations recently. So rather than limiting them to a 2-barstool radius in my <a title=\"\" href=\"https://www.instagram.com/barriquebrewing/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">favorite</a> <a title=\"\" href=\"https://www.southerngristbrewing.com/nations\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Nashville</a> <a title=\"\" href=\"https://www.faitlaforcebrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">taprooms</a>, here are (in no particular order) the things I\'ve been recommending lately...</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Restaurants, Bars, and Taprooms</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong><em>Nashville</em></strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":20,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"none\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><img src=\"https://staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/IMG_7057-EDIT-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"A glass of hazy IPA in a rustic, red-painted wooden cupholder in a record store. The holder is mounted to a black bin of vinyl records with album art visible.\" class=\"wp-image-20\"/><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Album shopping in Vinyl Tap</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://www.vinyltapnashville.com/\" title=\"\">Vinyl Tap</a></strong> Talk to any Nashvillian who\'s lived here for more than five years and it won\'t take long \'til they start complaining about all the changes -- especially traffic and, if they live in East Nashville, gentrification. East Nashville is traveling the same path as Brooklyn, Chicago\'s Wicker Park, and Madrid\'s Malasaña neighborhoods. Escalating rents have forced many of the musicians who \"urban pioneered\" East Nashville to retreat north to Madison and Goodlettsville. But they\'ll reconvene at Vinyl Tap to support a friend\'s set. The guy next to you watching this band will more than likely be plugging in as the lead guitarist for the next. Vinyl Tap is a weird combination of craft beer bar, vinyl record store, and music venue; but they make all three work.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/barriquebrewing/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\"><strong>Barrique Brewing</strong></a> This is my favorite taproom in Nashville, though its focus on lagers and barrel-aged sours might not be for everyone. There\'s typically one IPA on tap, 3-4 different lagers (light, dark, smoked), a couple of British styles on beer engines, and a cooler full of sour bottles. It\'s in an industrial pocket on the redevelopment path between the Tennessee Titans\' new stadium and Oracle\'s new corporate headquarters. Don\'t sleep on this place \'cause it\'ll be plowed under in 3-4 years.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a title=\"\" href=\"https://www.tailornashville.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><strong>Tailor</strong></a> Owner Vivek Surti calls his food \"First Generation American Cuisine,\" built on his \"experience growing up here in middle Tennessee as a first-generation American of Indian descent\". Much more elegant than how I describe it to friends -- Hillbilly Indian. Tailor is a dinner party restaurant. There are two seatings during which every table is served the same dish at the same time, accompanied by Surti\'s explanations of what\'s in front of you. I\'ve eaten there three times and have yet to be disappointed.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong><em>Louisville</em></strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":21,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"none\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><img src=\"https://staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/IMG_4465-EDIT-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Barrels of bourbon whiskey at Angel Envy distillery in Louisville, KY\" class=\"wp-image-21\"/></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a title=\"\" href=\"https://www.angelsenvy.com/us/en/bourbon-distillery-tours-louisville/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Angel\'s Envy</a> </strong> You can\'t go to Kentucky without hitting a bourbon distillery, and this one is conveniently located in downtown Louisville. The tour takes you from mash deck to distilling columns to bottling line. But for me, the best part is the tasting that finishes the tour. Rather than just pouring out a couple of shots at a hightop, they seat the tour group in a barrel-lined tasting room, teach you how to properly taste whiskey, and then walk the group through a discussion about what everyone tastes and smells. Very educational... and great whiskey too!</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a title=\"\" href=\"https://610magnolia.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><strong>610 Magnolia</strong></a> Located in a little house in the Old Louisville neighborhood, 610 Magnolia is a great example of what I call \"comfortable fine dining\" -- a warm, cozy dining room; friendly (but not overly familiar) wait staff; a wine list with a nice range of price points; and, of course, imaginative and well-executed food.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong><em>Chattanooga</em></strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.callioperestaurant.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\"><strong>Calliope</strong></a> Helmed by a Jordanian chef in a not-so-great neighborhood, it\'s Middle Eastern food using local, Southern ingredients. And any place that puts lamb neck on their menu will get me in the door. It was excellent, and when they put the whole, head-on red snapper on our table so I could dig out the fish cheeks and collar meat, I was sold. They also have a fun wine list with bottles from Lebanon, Georgia (the country, not the state), Armenia, and Cyprus, as well as usual suspects (France, California).</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.elsiesdaughters.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\"><strong>Elsie\'s Daughter</strong></a> And any menu that lists a bone marrow tartine will also my attention. Cozy bar; interesting drinks; tight menu. Good place for a night cap and a late-night bite.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a title=\"\" href=\"https://niedlovs.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><strong>Niedlov\'s Cafe &amp; Bakery</strong></a> Popular place for breakfast with a nice selection of pastries and breakfast sandwiches. Pick up a loaf of their daily special bread on your way out.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong><em>Memphis</em></strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a title=\"\" href=\"https://www.gusfriedchicken.com/locations/downtown-memphis\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><strong>Gus\'s Fried Chicken</strong></a> While asking a group of Memphians their favorite barbecue joint is still the best way to start an argument, there\'s no disagreement about the best fried chicken. This is the place for lunch after a walk through <a title=\"\" href=\"https://www.tomleepark.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Tom Lee Park</a> along the bank of the Mississippi River.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a title=\"\" href=\"https://wiseacrebrew.com/brewery\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><strong>Wiseacre Brewing - Downtown</strong></a> I haven\'t been too excited by the Wiseacre beers that make it up to Nashville, so this taproom wasn\'t high on my list. But it was a couple of blocks over from the <a title=\"\" href=\"https://www.civilrightsmuseum.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">National Civil Rights Museum</a>, so we walked over. And were glad we did. There\'s a broad range of well-executed beers, nice bright space, friendly bar staff, and a good pizza kitchen.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Oaxaca (Oaxaca de Juárez)</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":17,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"none\",\"align\":\"right\",\"className\":\"is-style-default\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium is-style-default\"><img src=\"https://staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/B017DED6-2FDB-4305-986C-5FF4AEFA0D9D-scaled-1-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-17\"/></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>As I talked about in <a href=\"https://staging.travelcommons.com/2024/04/11/podcast-199-smile-for-security-facial-recognition-in-travel/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">episode #199</a>, I\'ve always been a bit \"ehh\" about Mexico. I’ve done “resort-y” Mexico — Cabo, Cancún, Puerto Vallarta — and am not a big fan. It just feels like LA or Houston with a better selection of tequila. But <a title=\"\" href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oaxaca_City\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Oaxaca</a> is different. We were there for a week at the start of March. For me, it\'s a good fit — interesting food, lots of culture, a mezcal scene to dig into, and no beach. And it\'s not overrun with tourists.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Areas</strong> - We stayed in the Jalatlaco neighborhood and then moved further west into the main part of town, north of the Zócalo. Both neighborhoods were cool. We could walk to a number of bars and restaurants, and never felt unsafe.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Restaurants</strong> - Best high-end restaurant - <a title=\"\" href=\"https://www.casaoaxacaelrestaurante.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Casa Oaxaca</a>; best street food - <a title=\"\" href=\"https://maps.app.goo.gl/rxXVHGpDF1k86GQ48\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Pasillo de Humo</a>. This city is about food. There are a lot of great restaurants.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Mezcal</strong> - The state of Oaxaca (of which Oaxaca City is the capital) makes <a title=\"\" href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mezcal#Production\">80-90% of the mezcal in Mexico</a>, so you should tuck into it. A typical bar\'s mezcal menu can be overwhelming, so invest in a bit of education. The bartender at <a title=\"\" href=\"https://mezcalspeakeasy.com/\">Sobrio by Mezcal Speakeasy</a> patiently walked us through a vertical tasting; same type of agave, three different distillation techniques. <a title=\"\" href=\"https://mezcaloteca.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">La Mezcaloteca</a> was a reservation-only hour-long educational tasting. And unlike in the US, none of the Oaxaca mezcals I drank were smoky.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Book</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":19,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"none\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><img src=\"https://staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/71fvjFWkLqL._SL1200_-200x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-19\"/></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3X1xyC9\" title=\"\"><em>The Picnic: A Rush for Freedom and the Collapse of Communism</em></a> by Matthew Longo is one of the best books I\'ve read this year so far.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>My first and last trips to Hungary bookend Longo\'s story. My first visit was in the spring of 1989. It was before the main events of <em>The Picnic</em>, but I could feel the tension of change building. My last visit was the autumn of 2019, around the time of the 30th anniversary activities of Pan European Picnic and the fall of the Communist regime. By then, the public\'s mood had pivoted -- from excitement and fear of political change to disappointment and cynicism as to what that change had actually delivered. With this background, I looked forward to reading <em>The Picnic</em>.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>And it didn\'t disappoint. The book is, at its core, a range of oral histories -- from the then-Hungarian Prime Minister trying to reform the country without sparking a re-run of the 1956 Soviet invasion, to the Hungarian dissidents who organized the picnic, to a number of East German families who breached the Austrian-Hungarian border during and immediately after the picnic. These stories make the book a compelling read. It moves quickly; pulling the reader into the building risk and the subsequent let-down felt by all the participants.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I give Longo a lot of credit for not getting in the way of these folks telling their stories; letting their own words stand without surrounding them with his own commentary. As a professor of politics at Leiden University, Longo has a definite point of view -- and he does the right thing by keeping it to the Prologue and the Epilogue; less than 20 pages.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Highly recommended if you\'re interested in modern European history.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Things I\'m Recommending Right Now','Here are the travel and food recommendations I\'ve been giving for quick trips to Nashville, Louisville, and Memphis... and a longer one to Oaxaca','inherit','closed','closed','','4760-revision-v1','','','2026-01-27 17:36:18','2026-01-27 23:36:18','',4760,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4761',0,'revision','',0),
(4762,1,'2026-01-27 17:42:52','2026-01-27 23:42:52','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>In the <a href=\"https://staging.travelcommons.com/2024/05/23/podcast-200-wrapping-up-the-travelcommons-journey/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">last podcast episode</a>, I mentioned that I’ve found myself giving out a lot of travel recommendations recently. So rather than limiting them to a 2-barstool radius in my <a title=\"\" href=\"https://www.instagram.com/barriquebrewing/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">favorite</a> <a title=\"\" href=\"https://www.southerngristbrewing.com/nations\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Nashville</a> <a title=\"\" href=\"https://www.faitlaforcebrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">taprooms</a>, here are (in no particular order) the things I\'ve been recommending lately...</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Restaurants, Bars, and Taprooms</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong><em>Nashville</em></strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":20,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"none\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><img src=\"https://staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/IMG_7057-EDIT-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"A glass of hazy IPA in a rustic, red-painted wooden cupholder in a record store. The holder is mounted to a black bin of vinyl records with album art visible.\" class=\"wp-image-20\"/><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Album shopping in Vinyl Tap</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://www.vinyltapnashville.com/\" title=\"\">Vinyl Tap</a></strong> Talk to any Nashvillian who\'s lived here for more than five years and it won\'t take long \'til they start complaining about all the changes -- especially traffic and, if they live in East Nashville, gentrification. East Nashville is traveling the same path as Brooklyn, Chicago\'s Wicker Park, and Madrid\'s Malasaña neighborhoods. Escalating rents have forced many of the musicians who \"urban pioneered\" East Nashville to retreat north to Madison and Goodlettsville. But they\'ll reconvene at Vinyl Tap to support a friend\'s set. The guy next to you watching this band will more than likely be plugging in as the lead guitarist for the next. Vinyl Tap is a weird combination of craft beer bar, vinyl record store, and music venue; but they make all three work.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/barriquebrewing/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\"><strong>Barrique Brewing</strong></a> This is my favorite taproom in Nashville, though its focus on lagers and barrel-aged sours might not be for everyone. There\'s typically one IPA on tap, 3-4 different lagers (light, dark, smoked), a couple of British styles on beer engines, and a cooler full of sour bottles. It\'s in an industrial pocket on the redevelopment path between the Tennessee Titans\' new stadium and Oracle\'s new corporate headquarters. Don\'t sleep on this place \'cause it\'ll be plowed under in 3-4 years.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a title=\"\" href=\"https://www.tailornashville.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><strong>Tailor</strong></a> Owner Vivek Surti calls his food \"First Generation American Cuisine,\" built on his \"experience growing up here in middle Tennessee as a first-generation American of Indian descent\". Much more elegant than how I describe it to friends -- Hillbilly Indian. Tailor is a dinner party restaurant. There are two seatings during which every table is served the same dish at the same time, accompanied by Surti\'s explanations of what\'s in front of you. I\'ve eaten there three times and have yet to be disappointed.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong><em>Louisville</em></strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":21,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"none\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><img src=\"https://staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/IMG_4465-EDIT-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Barrels of bourbon whiskey at Angel Envy distillery in Louisville, KY\" class=\"wp-image-21\"/></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a title=\"\" href=\"https://www.angelsenvy.com/us/en/bourbon-distillery-tours-louisville/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Angel\'s Envy</a> </strong> You can\'t go to Kentucky without hitting a bourbon distillery, and this one is conveniently located in downtown Louisville. The tour takes you from mash deck to distilling columns to bottling line. But for me, the best part is the tasting that finishes the tour. Rather than just pouring out a couple of shots at a hightop, they seat the tour group in a barrel-lined tasting room, teach you how to properly taste whiskey, and then walk the group through a discussion about what everyone tastes and smells. Very educational... and great whiskey too!</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a title=\"\" href=\"https://610magnolia.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><strong>610 Magnolia</strong></a> Located in a little house in the Old Louisville neighborhood, 610 Magnolia is a great example of what I call \"comfortable fine dining\" -- a warm, cozy dining room; friendly (but not overly familiar) wait staff; a wine list with a nice range of price points; and, of course, imaginative and well-executed food.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong><em>Chattanooga</em></strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.callioperestaurant.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\"><strong>Calliope</strong></a> Helmed by a Jordanian chef in a not-so-great neighborhood, it\'s Middle Eastern food using local, Southern ingredients. And any place that puts lamb neck on their menu will get me in the door. It was excellent, and when they put the whole, head-on red snapper on our table so I could dig out the fish cheeks and collar meat, I was sold. They also have a fun wine list with bottles from Lebanon, Georgia (the country, not the state), Armenia, and Cyprus, as well as usual suspects (France, California).</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.elsiesdaughters.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\"><strong>Elsie\'s Daughter</strong></a> And any menu that lists a bone marrow tartine will also my attention. Cozy bar; interesting drinks; tight menu. Good place for a night cap and a late-night bite.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a title=\"\" href=\"https://niedlovs.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><strong>Niedlov\'s Cafe &amp; Bakery</strong></a> Popular place for breakfast with a nice selection of pastries and breakfast sandwiches. Pick up a loaf of their daily special bread on your way out.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong><em>Memphis</em></strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a title=\"\" href=\"https://www.gusfriedchicken.com/locations/downtown-memphis\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><strong>Gus\'s Fried Chicken</strong></a> While asking a group of Memphians their favorite barbecue joint is still the best way to start an argument, there\'s no disagreement about the best fried chicken. This is the place for lunch after a walk through <a title=\"\" href=\"https://www.tomleepark.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Tom Lee Park</a> along the bank of the Mississippi River.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a title=\"\" href=\"https://wiseacrebrew.com/brewery\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><strong>Wiseacre Brewing - Downtown</strong></a> I haven\'t been too excited by the Wiseacre beers that make it up to Nashville, so this taproom wasn\'t high on my list. But it was a couple of blocks over from the <a title=\"\" href=\"https://www.civilrightsmuseum.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">National Civil Rights Museum</a>, so we walked over. And were glad we did. There\'s a broad range of well-executed beers, nice bright space, friendly bar staff, and a good pizza kitchen.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Oaxaca (Oaxaca de Juárez)</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":17,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"none\",\"align\":\"right\",\"className\":\"is-style-default\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium is-style-default\"><img src=\"https://staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/B017DED6-2FDB-4305-986C-5FF4AEFA0D9D-scaled-1-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-17\"/></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>As I talked about in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2024/04/11/podcast-199-smile-for-security-facial-recognition-in-travel/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">episode #199</a>, I\'ve always been a bit \"ehh\" about Mexico. I’ve done “resort-y” Mexico — Cabo, Cancún, Puerto Vallarta — and am not a big fan. It just feels like LA or Houston with a better selection of tequila. But <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oaxaca_City\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Oaxaca</a> is different. We were there for a week at the start of March. For me, it\'s a good fit — interesting food, lots of culture, a mezcal scene to dig into, and no beach. And it\'s not overrun with tourists.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Areas</strong> - We stayed in the Jalatlaco neighborhood and then moved further west into the main part of town, north of the Zócalo. Both neighborhoods were cool. We could walk to a number of bars and restaurants, and never felt unsafe.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Restaurants</strong> - Best high-end restaurant - <a title=\"\" href=\"https://www.casaoaxacaelrestaurante.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Casa Oaxaca</a>; best street food - <a title=\"\" href=\"https://maps.app.goo.gl/rxXVHGpDF1k86GQ48\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Pasillo de Humo</a>. This city is about food. There are a lot of great restaurants.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Mezcal</strong> - The state of Oaxaca (of which Oaxaca City is the capital) makes <a title=\"\" href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mezcal#Production\">80-90% of the mezcal in Mexico</a>, so you should tuck into it. A typical bar\'s mezcal menu can be overwhelming, so invest in a bit of education. The bartender at <a title=\"\" href=\"https://mezcalspeakeasy.com/\">Sobrio by Mezcal Speakeasy</a> patiently walked us through a vertical tasting; same type of agave, three different distillation techniques. <a title=\"\" href=\"https://mezcaloteca.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">La Mezcaloteca</a> was a reservation-only hour-long educational tasting. And unlike in the US, none of the Oaxaca mezcals I drank were smoky.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Book</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":19,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"none\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><img src=\"https://staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/71fvjFWkLqL._SL1200_-200x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-19\"/></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3X1xyC9\" title=\"\"><em>The Picnic: A Rush for Freedom and the Collapse of Communism</em></a> by Matthew Longo is one of the best books I\'ve read this year so far.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>My first and last trips to Hungary bookend Longo\'s story. My first visit was in the spring of 1989. It was before the main events of <em>The Picnic</em>, but I could feel the tension of change building. My last visit was the autumn of 2019, around the time of the 30th anniversary activities of Pan European Picnic and the fall of the Communist regime. By then, the public\'s mood had pivoted -- from excitement and fear of political change to disappointment and cynicism as to what that change had actually delivered. With this background, I looked forward to reading <em>The Picnic</em>.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>And it didn\'t disappoint. The book is, at its core, a range of oral histories -- from the then-Hungarian Prime Minister trying to reform the country without sparking a re-run of the 1956 Soviet invasion, to the Hungarian dissidents who organized the picnic, to a number of East German families who breached the Austrian-Hungarian border during and immediately after the picnic. These stories make the book a compelling read. It moves quickly; pulling the reader into the building risk and the subsequent let-down felt by all the participants.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I give Longo a lot of credit for not getting in the way of these folks telling their stories; letting their own words stand without surrounding them with his own commentary. As a professor of politics at Leiden University, Longo has a definite point of view -- and he does the right thing by keeping it to the Prologue and the Epilogue; less than 20 pages.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Highly recommended if you\'re interested in modern European history.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Things I\'m Recommending Right Now','Here are the travel and food recommendations I\'ve been giving for quick trips to Nashville, Louisville, and Memphis... and a longer one to Oaxaca','inherit','closed','closed','','4760-revision-v1','','','2026-01-27 17:42:52','2026-01-27 23:42:52','',4760,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4762',0,'revision','',0),
(4763,1,'2026-01-28 10:47:50','2026-01-28 16:47:50','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/DALL-E_2024-04-10_13.01.39-300x300.jpg\" alt=\" a traveler standing in front of a facial recognition scanner at an airport. The scanner is emitting error signals, and the traveler looks frustrated.\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" />I knew these travel delays were aging me[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Using my face as my boarding pass to get on a flight to Oaxaca, Mexico and then as my passport to get back in the US got me thinking about how facial recognition has permeated the travel experience. To help us understand where this is going, we talk with two travel industry experts, <a href=\"http://shj.cs.illinois.edu/\">Dr. Sheldon Jacobson</a> and <a href=\"https://atmosphereresearch.com/\">Henry Harteveldt</a>. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>But before that, we talk about eating grasshoppers, an EV experience with Avis, and a couple of my travel tips that need to be revised.  All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_199.mp3\" title=\"\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:audio -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-audio\"><audio controls src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_199.mp3\"></audio></figure>\n<!-- /wp:audio -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #199: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN a couple of days after a last-minute 200-mile trip up to Carbondale, Illinois, home of the <a href=\"https://siu.edu/\" title=\"\">Southern Illinois University</a> Salukis… but that didn’t matter. What <em>did</em> matter is that Carbondale was right in the <a href=\"https://eclipse.siu.edu/\" title=\"\">center of the solar eclipse’s path</a> across North America, which meant we had 4 minutes of total eclipse.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Looking up, straight into the sun with its corona glowing, wavering around the black disk of the moon -- I’ve seen… we’ve all seen pictures of total eclipses, and of this one all across social and regular media Monday afternoon. But the pictures couldn’t do justice to being there, even if <em>there</em> was the far end of the Salukis stadium parking lot, backing up to a scraggly bit of woods. The experience more than made up for the 3-hr drive there and the 5½-hour bumper-to-bumper traffic back. I add it to my list of things that, even though we’ve seen seemingly an infinite number of pictures of them, experiencing them in real life was worth the hassle to physically travel to see them. The Taj Mahal, the Great Wall of China, Niagara Falls -- all on the list. As opposed to, say, The Mona Lisa in the Louvre. The crowd of people with their phones in the air trying to get a picture was much better than the Mona Lisa itself.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Before that, the start of March, we were in Oaxaca, Mexico for a week. I’ve had Oaxaca on my “To Visit” list for 4-5 years now. For me, it was a good match -- the combination of interesting food, lots of culture, and no beach. I’ve done “resort-y” Mexico -- Cabo, Cancún, Puerto Vallarta -- not a big fan. While there were a lot of tourists in Oaxaca, it didn’t seem to be overrun with them like, say, the center of Cabo is. Maybe because the city center is bigger, so there’s more space to absorb them, or maybe the absolute number of tourists are lower; it wasn’t an easy nor a cheap flight to get there.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>We hit the food scene pretty hard, high- and low-brow; food stands in the market; high-end places serving up phenomenal <a href=\"https://www.rickbayless.com/recipe/oaxacan-black-mole/\" title=\"\">moles</a>. But the food that made the biggest impression is the insects. It wasn’t some tourist-baiting shtick. Walking past a group of street vendors, I saw one of the women making a snack of a couple of grasshoppers wrapped in a small tortilla. At a mezcal bar on the eastern edge of the Centro, the bartender put down a small bowl of grasshoppers as a bar snack. (If you follow <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" title=\"\">TravelCommons on Instagram</a>, you can see a picture in my Oaxaca story) “Those are good grasshoppers,” he told us. “I drive an hour up towards Pueblo to get them. They’re not farmed like the ones you get in the markets.” I have to admit that I’m not enough of an insect connoisseur to be able to pick out the finer nuances of free-range vs. farmed grasshoppers, but they were as good as Beer Nuts as a bar snack. Or maybe that was just the 3rd, or 4th, or 5th shot of mezcal talking.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/duckett/2333\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Another Girl (instrumental)</a> by duckett (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/duckett/23334 Ft: fourstones, miafas</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Friend of the podcast Allan Marko swung by the website to leave this comment about the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2024/02/28/podcast-198-london-vacation-rental-woes-hertzs-ev-retreat/\" title=\"\">last episode</a>:<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“I was assigned an EV by Avis at Fort Lauderdale [at the end of February]. Curious enough to try it out for the relatively short distances I would be traveling, I got in. After starting, I noticed it only had a 10% charge, so, “check please.” I fired up the Avis app and selected a Chevy Malibu with 1,200 miles on it.&nbsp; As for booking.com, we had tremendous luck using that website for most of our accommodations over a two month period in SE Asia five years ago - exclusively for hotels though.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Allan, thanks for that. Expecting you to drive off with a 10% charge? Avis would never think to give you a car with just an ⅛-th of a tank. And if they did, it would take them 10 minutes to fill the tank and get it back to you. But for that EV? Even at a Tesla Supercharger, at least an hour, maybe more. No wonder they tried to get you to do it. And regards to booking.com, my experience with their hotel product is the same as yours -- never had a problem. But their property rentals, never again!</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>One of my regular travel pro tips from years ago was “Don’t take the last flight out” because, if you missed your connection or your flight was canceled, you had a backup. And, as an IRROP passenger -- industry lingo for “irregular operations” -- you have priority on open seats on that later flight; even more so if you have frequent flier status. But nowadays, with US airlines sporting load factors over 80%, this strategy is a lot tougher to make work. Last June, back in episode #194, I talked about how United’s delay leaving Amsterdam meant we missed our connection home, and how I spent about an hour between the service agents at ORD and on the phone, saying “This is unacceptable” 2, 3, 4 times before they found two seats on the later flight to BNA that they’d been saying was completely full. And now this trip flying home from Oaxaca through DFW on American, I had gotten an email saying there could be bad weather, but I thought, “Well, there’s always that later flight.” En route from Oaxaca to DFW, I’m connected to the plane WiFi and an hour before we land, I get a notice from American -- our flight to Nashville had been canceled. OK, that sucks, but no panic, they’d rebook me on the later flight. But I keep reading -- no rebooking; it just tells me to go to the American app. The WiFi over northern Mexico is not the greatest, but when I do get the app to respond, it’s not showing the later flight as an option. Indeed, the options keep changing with each refresh, but nothing earlier than the next day, Friday, or sometimes, not until Saturday, two days later. It wasn’t until after we landed, passed through Immigration, and were waiting at baggage claim to pick up our luggage to go through Customs that we finally got a message through the app that they’d found us seats on the later flight. Still got home that night, but in both these instances, the customer service experience has degraded just so far. I’ve had to push <em>very hard</em>, and, honestly, be a bit of a jerk to get what used to come seamlessly.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And another travel tip that seems to need retiring --<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/12/07/top-10-holiday-travel-tips-3/\" title=\"\"> “Use Twitter as a Concierge Service”</a>. While struggling to rebook while still in the air from Oaxaca, I pinged American on Twitter hoping for a little more help. What I got was an amazing (and depressing) amount of spam messaging masquerading as AA customer service managers. It’s easy to get fooled in the panic of trying to find a way home, but a few rules to keep in mind -- only communicate with the airline’s gold-checked verified accounts; ignore messages from everyone else -- like “AMERICAN AIR HELP DESK” (all in caps) or “Jason frank (uppercase Jason, lowercase case frank) American Air manger” (as opposed to “manager”); and never give anyone your phone number.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And there’s a quick programming note at the end of this episode, so for those interested, hold off on hitting the Skip button when you hear the music.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" title=\"\">Twitter (X?) message to mpeacock</a>, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" title=\"\">Facebook page</a>, or on the <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" title=\"\">Instagram</a> account at travelcommons -- or you can skip all that social media stuff and post your comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djiz/10514\">Nube - Djiz Rmx</a> by Kwame (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: SylviaO</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Smile for Security: The Future of Facial Recognition in Travel</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Over the years on the podcast, we’ve talked about how travelers are seeing more and more use of biometrics in their travel days. I’ve told the story of my first fingerprint scan back in the late ‘90’s so I could skip the US immigration line on my weekly commute home from Toronto-Pearson Airport. My colleague’s reaction -- “I’m not giving the US government my biometrics!” Me -- “I can skip a 3-minute line? Where do I sign up?” Which I think shows that the privacy-vs.-convenience choices haven\'t fundamentally changed all that much in the subsequent 25 years.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But (surprise!), technology has, and it seems to be accelerating the use of biometrics, specifically facial recognition. Boarding our flight to Oaxaca, our face was our boarding pass -- just look at the camera, wait for the “bing”, and move on. And coming back, the Global Entry kiosks no longer need passports, no longer have you twisting your hand just so to get the fingerprint pad to read all five fingers; just walk up, it takes your picture, and tells you to move on.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Which got me wondering -- where is this going? To help answer this, I invited on two guys who have been digging deep into this for a number of years. First up, <a href=\"http://shj.cs.illinois.edu/\">Dr. Sheldon Jacobson</a>, Professor in Computer Science at the University of Illinois. Sheldon was last on the podcast in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/09/22/podcast-189-why-we-travel-when-the-first-flight-isnt-best/\" title=\"\">episode #189</a> in September 2022 talking about why another of my travel tips, “catch the earliest flight you can”, is not always right. Over the years, Sheldon has developed operations research models to optimize aviation security. So I asked him to come back on the podcast to talk about the growth of biometrics…<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Sheldon, thanks for coming back on to the Travel Commons podcast. Wanted to talk with you about biometrics, facial recognition, all the things that seem to be increasing with regards to air travel.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: The airlines, as well as the Transportation Security Administration need to know who you are when you are traveling and they relied on identification cards, driver\'s license, real IDs and are continuing to be part of the future. But ultimately, the best way to determine who you are is through your face and biometrics and artificial intelligence imbued with it. In fact, it is a solution that people are recognizing; the airlines are starting to use it. And of course, the Transportation Security Administration is investing billions of dollars to advance this idea. And there\'s a reason why they\'re doing this. They\'re doing this simply because the traditional model of airport security screening has been to detect stuff -- prohibited items, knives, explosives, firearms, even, you know, full size tubes of toothpaste could be a threat based on explosives that can be embedded in them. However, the real threat are the people and facial recognition is a means to transform the platform for airport security from the detection of items to knowing your traveler. And that\'s where we\'re heading right now. And this is the future of airport security.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: And how does that work? How do you think that works?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: TSA has not broadcast this and I don\'t even know if they\'re thinking about it, but I have thought about it and I have proposed to them because I visited them in October 2023. And I told them that if they can bring facial recognition biometrics and the use of AI to truly validate and authenticate the travelers, the need for physical screening will be reduced tremendously to the point that they can create a new class of traveler, which I would call a “Super PreCheck” traveler who subjects themselves to greater background vetting. But then they would be treated like a known crew member at an airport and require no further physical screening. That is the future of airport security.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: It\'s almost like “Back to the Future”, right? It\'s almost like back to pre 9/11 days.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: Now, some will argue, “Oh, someone will gain the system and we will have a terrorist threat because of that.” And I would argue the exact opposite, that the only people who would be willing to subject themselves to the background check would be people who know that they\'re going to get through it fine. And the ones who are truly threats cannot risk it because rarely are people acting by themselves. They\'re often acting in a network. And as a result of that, for them to be exposed, they would be exposing their whole network. And the risk of doing that is far too great. What it would also do is it would parse the whole spectrum of travelers into a group of people who are willing to be known and a group of travelers that are not willing to be known. But over time, the ones who are willing to be known will be much larger, which means you can target your resources and your attention on this so-called unknown group and actually make it more secure for the air system by targeting your resources in that way. After September 11th, everybody was treated the same -- one size fits all. TSA PreCheck moved away from that. Now, I\'m proposing we move even further. And our original research we presented to the TSA in 2003 when we proposed this idea of differential screening to them and how it would work and why it would be beneficial. We said that you really need three classes, two would be fine, but three would be better. And it turns out that third class is what we would now call a “Super PreCheck” class of passengers. And those are the people who would be treated like crew members, the known crew members. And a lot of people would be willing to pay for that privilege and we\'ve put boundaries on what that means. It wouldn\'t be renewed every five years; it would be renewed potentially every year. It would be more expensive. But there\'s a lot of business travelers who are willing to pay that price to basically pass through security untethered, but they aren\'t a risk to the system anyway. So why waste resources and time on them? It would transform the footprint and create what I would call “security tunnels” rather than security checkpoints for many of these people.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: That seems to make sense. What was the reaction to that at TSA?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: That\'s a good question. I don\'t know. I don\'t know if I can say that.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Ok, I got it.. Understood. I just had to ask. Well, that\'s a great concept and I appreciate that insight around you guys’ research. You\'re right. I mean, there\'s something that says you just look at what people are willing to sign up with -- with Clear. with Global Entry, with PreCheck. Again, frequent travelers will always look to streamline that experience. And so I would agree, I would say there would be people in a heartbeat who would raise their hand for that.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: Exactly. Right now, people who sign up for Clear pay $189 on the top end for one year, being able to be identified as who they are and go to the front of the precheck line. That\'s all they\'re paying for and they\'re not paying for anything more. If the TSA implements a new class of passengers then Clear would become superfluous and literally would go away.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Yes, that was what I was thinking also.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: It\'s just, it will not be needed anymore. And in some sense, the pathway of using what the TSA calls the “credential authentication technology” which basically validates who you are using biometrics as well as that you\'re entitled to, imply that you don\'t even need a boarding pass right now when they implement this, and in some airports they have it, Clear will have to find a new business model because the TSA is going to assert that model into their own operations.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: You can kind of feel that. And indeed, I still think this most recent version of Clear -- and I had originally signed up for the initial version way back 10-15 years ago (whenever it first started),&nbsp; Rev 1.0, and then they went bankrupt and now we\'ve got Rev 2.0. But even today, I still have a challenge to see a compelling business model for the service that they offer. Oftentimes at a lot of the airports I\'ll go to, the difference between a Clear line and just the basic PreCheck line is pretty much nothing.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: Exactly. I\'ve never been impressed with their business model. They\'ve tried to sell it for stadiums and large entertainment venues. The challenges,&nbsp; it\'s just been difficult and most of their money, most of their resources, most of the revenue still comes through airports and they need that. I just don\'t see the future of it being very bright.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Is there more facial recognition coming or different facial recognition coming? Where do you see that path going?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Sheldon: Well, we are nowhere near the end game on this facial recognition as effective as it is. I mean, the concept is ideal and wonderful. It\'s still not perfect. It misses certain people of color. It struggles at certain times, and research is continuing to bring the error rates down, lower and lower and lower, especially if you\'re going to create security tunnels where people just walk through it. And your picture is being taken literally in real time matched up using recognition. And then the next thing you know, you\'re at your boarding gate because everything worked out fine for you. And now it will be the majority, the vast majority of travelers. So we are nowhere near the end of this and we are at the beginning. I think the challenge right now is the perception that people do think there is a privacy concern. And like I said, I think it\'s exactly the opposite. I think this is opening up opportunities where we are going to spike in one dimension of AI which is facial recognition. And then the rest of the screening aspect at airports and validation literally gets dampened and in some cases, completely eliminated. I\'m a firm believer and supporter of facial recognition for airport security and air travel. I know that if they do it right, and they seem to be on that pathway, that we are going to have a very different experience at airport screening for security and even air travel in the next 5 to 10 years. It\'s just going to be radically and dramatically different. And I think when people realize that and begin to experience that they\'re going to be happy for it. But at this point, a lot of the rhetoric is around privacy, but our privacy is being violated so often, so frequently and in so many venues that argument is no longer holding any water. I am convinced that this is a positive future for air travel in all aspects.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Sheldon, thanks very much again for joining us on the TravelCommons podcast and sharing that. That\'s great stuff.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Our second guest is <a href=\"https://atmosphereresearch.com/\">Henry Harteveldt</a>, a travel industry analyst for many years. He had the depth of experience and industry contacts to give us a grounded sense on what’s coming with regarding biometrics…<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Henry, thanks for joining us today on the Travel Commons podcast. Wanted to talk about biometrics in and around air travel and specifically, I don\'t know if this is recency bias or what, but it just seems like I\'ve seen a whole lot more of, especially facial recognition over the past couple of years. What\'s your cut at it from a travel industry standpoint?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: In the Crawl/Walk/Run continuum, I would say that with biometrics, we are somewhere between crawl and walk. Think of biometrics as the baby who is crawling really fast and it\'s going to start walking any day now. But in the meantime, it\'s scooting all over the place. So let\'s break it down… Using facial recognition cameras for boarding flights has actually been around since before COVID began. I think the trial started somewhere in the 2016-17 time frame for international flights. That’s the only time it\'s used right now, and it started to roll out in 2018- 2019. Delta was one of the first to embrace the technology and JetBlue as well. And what it does when it works well, and this is something we should come back to to discuss, but when biometrics, facial recognition works as everybody wants it to, it speeds up the boarding process. It reduces the need for us to show not just a physical boarding pass but also a physical passport. And, as a result, on a wide-body jet, it can shave perhaps 10 or more minutes off the boarding time; on a single-aisle plane, a 737 or an A320-type of plane, that could shave 5 to 7 minutes off. So it speeds up the boarding process and makes everything a little bit more efficient. It\'s not perfect. There are people who are uncomfortable using it. There are people who are not familiar with it. So airlines have to have a belt and suspender type of approach. They\'ll have to have gate staff there for the time being. But I don\'t think we are that far away from where international travel is primarily biometrics based boarding, at least in major airports. And I think we will start soon to see it being tested for domestic travel, but there\'s going to be a wrinkle with that when we use the biometric readers at the gate to get on the plane. The database links back to US Customs and Border Patrol which has photographs of US citizens, resident aliens, and international visitors, and it can call up that data to validate that you are you and I am me. With domestic flights. I think only the TSA has the biometric data right now for PreCheck. So it may take a little bit of work to get to a point for that. So that\'s boarding. But let\'s talk about airport security. Yes, TSA is indeed testing and in some cases, I think it\'s actually beyond testing, they are rolling it out facial recognition that again eliminates the need for us to take out a driver\'s license or passport or any other physical ID and, importantly, eliminates the need for us to show any type of boarding pass, whether it\'s a paper boarding pass or digital boarding pass. And again, in theory, it speeds up the number of people who can get into and through the security screening process and reduces the need for human agents at those checkpoints. Now again, we\'re still very much at the beginning of this. And TSA is saying we are going to have a security screening officer at that checkpoint in case something goes wrong or in case someone isn\'t comfortable using biometrics.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Yeah, that was my experience in Nashville. There was a guy standing right there.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: And as we record this, the TSA is testing at Las Vegas, basically this walkthrough type of environment, a new type of screening which is biometrics-based to validate who you are. You put your bags on the belt, you go through, it\'s a lot less invasive, a lot less intrusive and supposed to be a lot faster. I actually want to go over to Las Vegas just to check it out and see what it\'s like. They have this in Dubai and they are testing it elsewhere in England and in France, they are testing it on Eurostar. Now, there are a lot of other things coming along with biometrics at a lot of European airports and in Asia as well. I was just in Singapore. There are biometrics-based scanners so that you don\'t have to queue up and have a border patrol officer review your passport, stamp your passport.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: I had it at Heathrow last November. I went through the e-gates. So I was just surprised; I walked through to the other end and I was like, “Wait, this is it?&nbsp; Nobody to stamp my passport?” No, nothing. Just like, “No. Get out of here. Go, move on.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: Right. Now, for those of us of a certain age, part of the love of travel is hearing that clunky thunk of the passport officer stamping your passport and, every time you get a new passport, the passport service mails back your old one. Those become mementos of our lives.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Yes, absolutely.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: And there is a part of me that will miss the day when we get our passports stamped just as there is a part of me that misses airline branded paper, boarding passes to show “Oh, here\'s where I have been” and so on.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: That obviously, then, pivots over to -- how should the travelers think about biometric data and the storage of that and the risk of that as a condition of travel?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: Look, it is obviously a personal decision. Our research shows that right now in the US, far more travelers would trust sharing their personal biometric information with an airline than with any government agency. So in the US right now, it\'s nearly 80% of airline passengers who, and this is first quarter 2024 data fresh off the press if you will, nearly 80% of us, airline passengers, business and leisure say they\'re willing to share their personal biometric data -- fingerprints, iris scans, etc. -- with an airline they fly regularly if it will lead to a more efficient airport experience or journey. Only a quarter of passengers say they\'re comfortable sharing their personal information right now with any government agency or entity even though, again, with the same benefits of an easier journey. Now, both of those numbers are up from 2023. The government only keeps certain information for a certain amount of time, usually 30 days or less and then it is expunged. So I am in the crowd that is comfortable sharing biometric information with governments and airlines because doing so makes my journey more efficient. It\'s faster, it\'s less stressful. It\'s fewer people that I need to interact with. Remember we\'re somewhere between Crawl and Walk. But where I see it, from the analyst perspective, the time difference, the time it will take us to go from Crawl to Walk will probably be many times longer in the time that will be needed to go from Walk to Run. Because again, as improvements emerge with the technology, the hardware, as well as the software, changes in society, changes in social acceptance of biometrics, the appreciation for benefits, we will reach that so-called tipping point where all of a sudden we see massive and welcome acceleration. It\'s interesting. Younger travelers are a lot more suspicious of the government than some of their older counterparts. And travelers over 65 are less willing to share personal data with the government. The sweet spot is travelers from 30 to 64-ish, call it.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: That\'s an interesting distribution.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: And I think that an important point for anyone listening here -- if you work for an airline, for a technology company, for an airport, for a government agency or, for that matter, if you work at a hotel company, cruise line or other parts of the travel industry. You cannot view your customers as a homogeneous block and you have to understand their welcoming the use of technology. The irony is as we all know, Gen Z are digital natives. They\'re very comfortable using technology. They will put anything and everything on social media it seems like, but they have some very legitimate concerns in their minds about how will governments use their biometric data and could it be used against them? And I\'ll just add that hotels are looking at how they evolve the check in process. You know, I think one of the dumbest questions in the world is when we are standing at the front desk of a hotel suitcase in hand, giving them our credit card and ID and the agent says “Checking in?” Like “No, I thought I would just, I have nothing better to do. So I thought I would bring a suitcase to a hotel in a different city and hand over a credit card and my personal information just to say hello.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Right. “And by the way, I like standing in line. So that\'s why I\'ve been waiting for 10 minutes to get up and have this conversation with you.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: Exactly. But you know, hotels are looking at how they improve the check in process. And granted, at the five-star true luxury properties and resorts, I think they will say, “Look, we value and our guests value the human interaction,” but they\'re going to be a part of that. Guests can say “Look, there\'s some things I can do for myself and then I want to talk to somebody about some other stuff.” But I think with four-star and below, be prepared for more biometric-based self-service check in checkout experiences. And I think, frankly, a lot of people would welcome it because it\'s a lot more secure for 99.9% of us. Eventually. I think biometrics will be more than welcome. And again, if it makes our journeys that much more efficient and less stressful, less unpleasant, there is to me, no downside.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: Yes, I think that the cases you\'ve laid out is the appropriate one, which is, it\'s a combination of frictionless or making travel much more efficient than what we have today, doing away with as many lines as we can, and on the same token, being more efficient for the travel company, be it a hotel, be it an airline, be it the company running the airport so that their costs stay down and our costs stay down to travel. So the trade off on that, people are going to strike their own balance around privacy versus efficiency. Henry, thank you very much. This has been a great conversation. I\'ve really enjoyed it. Thanks for coming on a TravelCommons podcast.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Henry: Thank you for inviting me. I enjoyed it as well.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Thanks to <a href=\"http://shj.cs.illinois.edu/\">Dr. Sheldon Jacobson</a> and <a href=\"https://atmosphereresearch.com/\">Henry Harteveldt</a> for taking the time to talk to us about biometrics, facial recognition and give us an idea of what we travelers should expect to see soon. Check out the show notes at TravelCommons.com for links to their work.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"className\":\"has-medium-font-size\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em><a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/track/0geYaxa8LozoV8afrKwdTo?si=aa1cf0be8ee9400a\" title=\"\">Pictures of You</a></em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #199</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I hope you enjoyed the show; the conversations with Sheldon and Henry. They had so much great insight; the editing decisions were tough. This is usually the point where I say “and I hope you decide to stay subscribed” but this is, as they say in the UK, the penultimate episode of the TravelCommons podcast; a fancy way to say “second-to-the-last”. The next episode will be #200, so a good round number to end it. I’ll unpack it all next month, but just wanted to give you all a heads up.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As always, you can find us and listen to the current episodes on all the main podcast sites -- Apple Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, and Amazon Music. Google has shut down their Podcast app, at least in the US, but you can now get the regular TravelCommons audio episodes on the TravelCommons’ YouTube channel. Go figure -- I can never keep track of what bits Google is shutting down or renaming. But you can always ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page at TravelCommons.com for a transcript of the episode and links to Sheldon and Henry’s websites. And along the side of the page, you’ll find links to all the TravelCommons’ socials.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" title=\"\">mpeacock on Twitter</a>, write them on the TravelCommons page on <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" title=\"\">Facebook </a>or <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" title=\"\">Instagram</a>, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com.&nbsp; And thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in emails, Tweets and post comments on the website. I really appreciate it.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And until we talk again, safe travels; and thanks for stopping by the TravelCommons.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_199.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #199 — Smile for Security: Facial Recognition in Travel','','inherit','closed','closed','','4460-revision-v1','','','2026-01-28 10:47:50','2026-01-28 16:47:50','',4460,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4763',0,'revision','',0),
(4764,1,'2026-01-28 10:48:42','2026-01-28 16:48:42','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/IMG_4238-EDIT-400x400.jpg\" alt=\"fence gate with a sign saying Beware of The Bull\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /> Booking.com\'s Customer Service Center?[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I walked by <a href=\"https://www.shakespearesglobe.com/\" title=\"\">Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre</a> after a weekend of wrestling with <a href=\"https://www.booking.com/\" title=\"\">Booking.com</a> and <a href=\"https://travelnest.com/\" title=\"\">TravelNest</a>\'s service agents, trying unsuccessfully to not let them screw up my London vacation rental.  The Macbeth soliloquy about a tale \"full of sound and fury, signifying nothing\" pretty much summed up my experience -- lots of talk that yielded nothing. But before that, we catch up on Hertz\'s EV reversal, Sioux City, Iowa\'s embrace of their SUX airport code, and a flash-in-the-pan airport delay betting app.  All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_198.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:audio -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-audio\"><audio controls src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_198.mp3\"></audio></figure>\n<!-- /wp:audio -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #198: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN after an extended holiday break that had us in the UK for the back half of November -- the first week in Dorset on the south coast doing a bit of muddy hiking and then knocking around London the second week. As I mentioned a few episodes back, Irene and I took BA’s direct flights between Nashville and Heathrow. Our flights were on 787’s, but apparently the route has become popular enough for BA to announce they’re upgauging it to a triple 7. Interesting given that Nashville isn’t a hub airport. Had what has become my standard flight-to-Nashville moment -- helping a guy rearrange the overhead bin so he could fit his guitar in. Not sure if there are enough musicians to fill those extra seats though. Music tourists? Bachelorette parties? I dunno, but the Nashville airport will need to get their new international baggage claim hall sorted before then. When we arrived, we were told to get our luggage and then go to the immigration line -- the exact opposite of every other international arrival flow I’ve ever done. There was only one Global Entry terminal and it was over by the luggage belt rather than by the immigration line. So we all queued up for it while we waited for our luggage to arrive. After a 45-minute wait (and a lot of AirTag checking), we grabbed our bags and headed over to immigration, went to the Global Entry line which seemed to act like a Clear line for TSA -- we got a line cut to the next immigration agent, but still had to go through all the questions and photo taking. It was weird, inefficient, very unlike my recent arrivals at ORD and EWR. Maybe they just need more reps to work out the kinks, or bring in a more experienced manager. Whatever it is, they need to fix it before bigger jets and more people show up.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>After that jaunt in November, we’ve pretty much stayed put, with our spare bedroom being on the receiving end of travel -- our daughter Claire was here for a couple of weeks over Christmas and New Year’s, one couple who’d never been to Nashville before (amazing!) and two other couples for whom Nashville, handily enough, was 8 hours down the road on their first day driving to somewhere. You could say “Great! Chance to be a tourist in our own town!” but it’s more about being the <em>tour guide</em>, which, in Nashville, comes with the responsibility of having informed opinions about things like the best hot chicken joint and the best Broadway honky-tonk. Nashville’s Hot Chicken Week was a couple weeks ago, which gave me the excuse (as if I needed one) to buy the jumbo jar of Mylanta and hit every hot chicken joint to figure out the best -- which for me is <a href=\"https://www.reds615kitchen.com/\">Red’s 615 Kitchen</a> in the West End. I can’t say I’ve been <em>that</em> meticulous about my honky-tonk opinions; one can dodge only so many bachelorette parties and watch only so many cover bands. And then I’ve gotta keep finding new cool places to take our visitors the <em>next</em> time they pass through town. I’m telling you, this tour guide thing can be a bit exhausting.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/11510\">Funkist</a>&nbsp;– cdk dub mix by cdk (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: teru</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Well… the lead topic for <a href=\"http://staging.travelcommons.com/2023/11/07/podcast-197-renting-a-tesla-2023-traveler-gift-guide/\">the last episode</a> was “Renting a Tesla\'\'; finally relenting to Hertz’s incessant email offers/pleas for a November. Two months later, <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/business/autos/after-big-tesla-bet-hertz-selling-one-third-of-ev-fleet-5626a425?st=rtm10t2qnapxjhj&amp;reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink\">Hertz announces they’re selling off a third of their EV fleet</a> -- 20,000 of them. Paging through <a href=\"https://www.hertzcarsales.com/used-electric-vehicles.htm?geoZip=20001&amp;geoRadius=0\">hertzcarsales.com</a>, it’s mostly Tesla Model 3s, with a few Model Ys and Chevy Bolts sprinkled in. I was a little surprised when I read it because Hertz had been hitting their fleet electrification message so hard. But now looking back on some of my observations in the last episode -- the EV aisle at Logan airport full up with 10-12 Tesla Model 3’s and a couple of Polestars, the guys working there being so nonchalant about battery levels and car condition -- the clues were there. But someone was driving them. Half of these EVs have 30-60,000 miles on them -- which feels heavy for a fleet of 18-month-old cars, even if they’re rental cars. If nothing else, it cuts my Hertz email traffic <em>way</em> down.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Just one more thing on EVs. Also in that topic, I talked about the hassle of charging an EV. Not range anxiety -- I was only driving 20 miles from Logan; but the effort to find a charger and then the time it took to charge the battery. In London, we stayed in an <em>OK</em> neighborhood between King’s Cross Station and Clerkenwell, typical urban streetscape of walk-up apartment buildings and cars parked bumper-to-bumper along the curb. Walking down the sidewalk the first day there, I saw a cord coming out of a parked car. Where the hell is that going? I looked down at my feet -- it wasn’t running across the sidewalk into the building. No, it was plugged into the base of the street light. Pretty clever… and necessary since none of the folks living in these flats has a garage to charge in.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Back in November, right after I dropped the last episode in which I talked about my turboprop flight to Sioux City, IA as the “ah ha” moment justifying the price of my first pair of Bose noise-canceling headphones, the Wall Street Journal ran an <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/business/iowa-airport-branding-sux-sioux-city-bc46b7b3\">article</a> about how Sioux City, Iowa is embracing the three-letter code for their airport, SUX. And it reminded me again of that flight back in the mid-’90’s. The agent handed me the boarding pass (the age before smartphones). “SUX, Sucks? Is this a joke?” I asked. She just shrugged; I think she’d heard that before -- a lot. I think the Dash 8 was the smallest prop plane United Express flew. We stopped first in Waterloo, Iowa where most everyone else got out for the big John Deere plant there. After the flight attendant buttoned the door back up, she gave the rest of us a look and then pointed us to new seats -- kinda eyeballing the weight distribution; moving some of the bigger guys to seats behind the wing. The airport codes for that flight -- ORD to ALO to SUX -- ‘Alo to Sucks -- were fun. Could’ve been better if the plane had swung through Grand Rapids -- GRR -- for “Grrr…, it sucks”. An itinerary starting in Fresno -- FAT-- would give us the non-body-positive “Fat Sucks.” Or for a much more unlikely flight -- Singapore -- SIN -- to Sioux City for the much more righteous “Sin Sucks”. I could go on… but I won’t; it’s getting painful, even for me. Apparently, back at the turn of the century -- the 21st century -- Sioux City asked the FAA for a new airport code for what is officially named “Sioux Gateway Airport”. I guess they didn’t like the alternatives offered -- GWU, SGV, GAY -- so they kept SUX. And then people built businesses selling SUX merch -- Winter SUX, Work SUX.&nbsp; And probably the most apropos&nbsp; -- “it SUX to lose your luggage.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>With all the betting around the Super Bowl -- the Vegas lines, every party selling squares -- I circled back ‘round to something I saw in September, an app called Wingman. They call themselves a “flight delays prediction market”. Betting on flight delays -- sounds like it could be fun, especially when watching the departure board at ORD or LGA. Digging past the headline, I found out it’s a Web3 blockchain dapp (decentralized application) -- not sure if it could be any more buzzword-compliant -- using some crypto-tokens I’ve never heard of… which maybe let’s them serve gambling laws (?); I dunno. As it is, I didn’t end up giving Wingman a spin; it required connecting a crypto-wallet to the app -- which I don’t have… and probably never will. Looking at a site called DappRadar which claims to track 15,000 distributed apps, it looks like Wingman had <a href=\"https://dappradar.com/dapp/wingman?range-ha=all\">a moment of hotness back in September</a> after its burst of announcement publicity with 5-6-700 transactions. But in the new year, it’s had a few days with a handful -- less than ten; but most days with nothing. Disappointing. I was hoping this could be a new way to fund my flight-delay bar tabs.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter (X?) message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page, or on the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can skip all that social media stuff and post your comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/48705\">Jolanta Blues</a>&nbsp;by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license.&nbsp; Ft: Admiral Bob, Martijn de Boer</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>London Vacation Rental Woes</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Listeners who <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">follow me on Twitter/X</a> know that I had one of my worst short-term rental experiences during our London trip with Booking.com. And I’ll talk about what I learned from that in a moment, but it got me thinking about vacation rentals in general. For the longest time, it was a local mom-and-pop business, typically in vacation areas -- ski resorts, beach towns. You called or stopped by a local realtor, or someone you knew who knew the area recommended a place, and then you rented it from the owner. Friends who rent beach houses on the East Coast tell me they’ve had the same renters for the same week in June, July, August for years. Then Airbnb started up in 2008, first as a platform to rent out spare rooms (remember couchsurfing.com?), but it pretty quickly moved home rentals out of its mom-&amp;-pop vacation spot model into a parallel urban hotel market.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I’m not deep in urban planning or rental market dynamics, so I’m not getting into the pluses and minuses of short-term rentals. You can get all that and more with a simple Google search. Maybe I’m old-school (or just old), but my use of short-term rentals is pretty much the same now as it was pre-Airbnb -- when it’s a bigger group and we’ll need more space to spread out than a hotel can give you. I also enjoy being able to stay in neighborhoods where there aren’t hotels, to be able to dig deeper into a city, but I also know that it can also be not great for the people who live in those neighborhoods. A couple of years back, we and another family booked into a flat in the Trastevere neighborhood in Rome. Great flat on a great street; really enjoyed the neighborhood and the time we had with our friends, being able to spend time in some place other than a restaurant or hotel bar, catching up while trying to figure out the espresso machine or the washer/dryer combo. All good. But looking across the landing to the other apartment on our floor, the sign taped to the door in Italian and Google-translated English saying “Keep it quiet”, you could tell the people <em>living</em> in this building weren’t having a great time. And then there’s the story our friends tell of when a condo in their building in Lincoln Park on the north side of Chicago was listed on Airbnb, and one night while at dinner, looking out their window they could see a porn movie being filmed there. Kinda put them off their meal.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>There are loads of vacation rental horror stories, but not from me. Looking through my trip histories on Airbnb and VRBO, I’ve had a really good run -- a great beach place in San Diego, a tiny house in Durango, CO, a walk up in Brooklyn’s Carroll Gardens neighborhood, a flat in Split, Croatia with a balcony where I drank my morning coffee watching the sailboats head out of the harbor…. All good, except for London.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Two years ago, November 2021, we were heading over London for a couple of weeks. The morning we were leaving, maybe 5 hours before heading to the airport, we get an email from our Booking.com host -- “So sorry, but a water pipe broke in the apartment, so we have to cancel your stay that starts tomorrow.” Wait, what!? Did I read that right? I read it again. Yup, I read it right; we have no place to stay when we land in London tomorrow morning. Luckily, it was just Irene and me; we didn’t <em>need</em> sprawl space. So I quickly pivoted from packing socks and underwear to logging onto Marriott.com to book a room before our Uber showed up, which I did, at the Montcalm East near Shoreditch. The last-minute booking was definitely more expensive, but I was confident it had a working toilet and shower -- well, that and I got free breakfast with my Titanium status.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Fast forward to this trip, in November 2023, with our daughter joining us, we needed a vacation rental. Given our last experience, we gave ourselves a 5-month head start, booking a place in June. I found a good place in London and booked it on Airbnb. Ten days later, I get a morning email canceling our reservation, but this time from Airbnb, saying the property we booked “doesn’t appear to be legitimate.” Right after that, I get another email, from the property owner, asking me to book direct with him, sending the full payment via bank transfer. So send a couple of thousand dollars in June for a November stay to a guy I’ve never dealt with before, and for whom I couldn’t find any other information -- property website, LinkedIn profile, social media presence? Felt just a bit scammy, so I took a pass. Not the last time I’d get this request.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Irene took over. That afternoon, she booked a flat on Booking.com. Fast forward to the beginning of November. Starting to get geared up for the trip and think maybe we should check the status of our booking. Huh -- Booking.com has a new note saying our reservation now can’t be paid through them. We ping the property owner -- “What gives?” We get back a blisto-gram of an email; not aimed at us, but at Booking.com. “Their fees are too high and they’re awful to work with. I told them to cancel all reservations.” Hmm, our reservation is still there, but doesn’t sound like we had a good chance of getting into the flat if we showed up. So Irene canceled it and booked a different flat.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>From whom, a couple of days later, we get an email asking us to cancel our Booking.com reservation and book directly with them, with full payment via bank transfer. This sounds familiar. They’re forced into this, going off-platform, they wrote, because London limits short-term rentals to 60 days a year. A quick Google search told me London’s limit is 90 days rather than 60. Not looking to dunk on these folks, but -- hmm, you’d think an experienced host would get this number right. Little bit of doubt, so we took another pass on sending a stranger a couple of thousand dollars with no fraud protections.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>So I search for another place in the same neighborhood and find one on Booking. I hit the Book button and pretty quickly get back a confirmation email from TravelNest, a vacation rental property management company. Good! No more asking me to book direct. They send me the contact info for the property owner so I can coordinate arrival logistics. I send the guy an email -- it bounces. I send texts and WhatsApp messages to him -- crickets. I go back to TravelNest. “Oh, don’t worry, we’ll contact him.” “With what? The same email that bounced; the same phone number that he hasn’t checked?” “Oh, don’t worry, he’ll turn up.” OK, I’ve got other things to worry about, and London was the second week of our trip, so we had time.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The end of our first week -- we were hiking/walking down in Dorset on the south coast -- I hadn’t heard anything and started to worry. I started pinging Booking and TravelNest; sending emails and calling. Nothing solved, but every time I talked to someone, it was “Don’t worry, we’ll take care of you.” I’m not going to go through every call, -- maybe I’ll put all those details on a Twitter thread -- but I spent 5-6 hours over 3 days on calls with these people and the problem, my problem, boiled down to this -- we were past the cancelation deadline; Booking.com viewed TravelNest as their property contact, not the MIA owner; and TravelNest didn’t want to cancel the reservation and lose the revenue in hopes that the owner would show up at the last minute.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You know where this is going. Tuesday morning, we’re driving up to London Heathrow from Bournemouth to drop off the Hertz car and “ping” goes the Booking.com app. It’s a message from TravelNest - “I am very sorry to let you know that the owner of the property you have booked via Travelnest cannot accommodate your upcoming booking. This is due to the host having stopped advertising their property through Travelnest. And we don’t have any alternatives to offer you.” Amazing. They’re just now figuring out that the guy stopped using them. They couldn’t have checked during one of those 5-6 hours of calls a few days ago.&nbsp; So after we dropped the car off, we took the shuttle bus over to Terminal 2. Irene and Claire grabbed a coffee while I got on the phone to Booking.com. “Oh, I’m so sorry, but don’t worry we’ll take care of you.” But they didn’t. They couldn’t find us a replacement property in the part of London we needed to be. So I ran the same play as two years ago, fired up Marriott.com and found us a room for the night. And then splurged for a black cab instead of the cheaper Heathrow Express so Claire and I could work our Airbnb apps to find a place for the rest of our time in London. Which we did after about the 3rd try.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>So out of this whole shitshow, what did I learn? First, the London short-term vacation rental market just seems broken. There were so many properties on Booking.com and Airbnb that showed availability, but really weren’t. All told, it took us 6 booking attempts before we finally got one to stick. I’ve never had that happen in any other place. Second, there’s something wrong with the group that runs Booking.com’s short-term rentals. Irene uses (well, <em>used</em>) them <em>a lot</em> for hotel bookings, and we’ve never had a problem. But vacation rentals, every bad experience has been a Booking.com property. As you might guess, we won’t be using them again. Third, immediately cancel reservations where a third party like TravelNest pops up. They don’t add value to <strong>you</strong>, the traveler; they just get in the way when a problem crops up and are just another point of failure.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Oh, and I guess there’s a fourth -- don’t trust anyone when they say “Don’t worry, we’ll take care of you.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"className\":\"has-medium-font-size\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #198</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As always, you can find us and listen to the current episodes on all the main podcast sites -- Apple Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, Google Podcasts, and Amazon Music. And you can always Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page at TravelCommons.com for a transcript of the episode and links to items on the gift guide. If you’re not yet subscribed, there’s a drop down Subscribe menu at the top of TravelCommon’s home page. And along the side of the page, you’ll find links to all the TravelCommons’ socials.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to mpeacock on Twitter, write them on the TravelCommons page on Facebook or Instagram, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com.&nbsp; And thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in emails, Tweets and post comments on the website. I really appreciate it.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And until we talk again, safe travels; and thanks for stopping by the TravelCommons.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_198.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #198 — London Vacation Rental Woes; Hertz\'s EV Retreat','London\'s vacation rental market is broken and Booking.com is no help. Also, Hertz\'s EV retreat, Sioux City, Iowa embraces their SUX airport code, a flash-in-the-pan airport delay crypto betting app.','inherit','closed','closed','','4436-revision-v1','','','2026-01-28 10:48:42','2026-01-28 16:48:42','',4436,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4764',0,'revision','',0),
(4765,1,'2026-01-28 10:49:18','2026-01-28 16:49:18','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Dalle-E_Renting_Tesla-300x300.png\" alt=\"road warrior renting a Tesla from a Hertz rental car lot.\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" />Swipe left or right to start this thing?[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It\'s the sustainability episode of the TravelCommons podcast, talking about my experience renting a Tesla from Hertz and my road-tested list of Christmas gift suggestions for the frequent traveler(s) in your life. I also talk about some new TSA biometrics equipment I faced (literally) in Nashville and yet another update on the EU\'s ETIAS system and the US\'s Real ID. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_197.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:audio -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-audio\"><audio controls src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_197.mp3\"></audio></figure>\n<!-- /wp:audio -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #197: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN after a pretty solid three weeks of travel -- a business trip to the Boston suburbs, then down to New York to meet up with Irene and Claire for a long weekend of knocking around Brooklyn and Queens, and then, after a day of reloading suitcases and picking up the cat, driving up to Chicago for friends and family. When we got back home last Friday, I was ready to just stay put for a little bit. Which is about all it will be because we head out to the UK in less than two weeks.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The Boston trip came up all of a sudden and I think is only my second post-pandemic business trip -- <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/06/15/podcast-176-why-business-travel-is-coming-back-learning-airport-history/\" title=\"\">my first was down to Miami in May 2021</a>.&nbsp; Maybe I’ve timed out of my road warrior status, because everything felt a bit off. Flying BNA-BOS, my choices were JetBlue or Delta. I don’t have status on either, so I choose JetBlue because it’s the earlier flight out. No status means I also have to pay $80-100 to reserve a seat after paying $450 for a one-way ticket. I could’ve expensed it through, but the annoyance vein in my temple started to pulsate. How dare you, JetBlue! And in return for my righteous anger, I get assigned, at the gate, a middle seat in the last boarding group. I resign myself to having to gate check my carry-on. But then when boarding is called, the pre-boarding announcement is for JetBlue <em>and</em> American elites. Ugh! Such an amateur mistake — not keeping track of alliances and partnerships.&nbsp; If I’d put my Aadvantage Platinum number into my reservation instead of my plain TrueBlue number, I probably could’ve saved myself all that righteous anger and vein throbbing. Luckily though, I always carry my physical elite cards with me, so I show my Aadvantage Platinum card to the agent, get waved on, and find an empty bin right above my seat.&nbsp; I was a little concerned about fitting my big carry-on in an A220 -- it was my first time on this plane -- but no problem. The overhead bins on this plane are huge.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>After my window seat neighbor got settled, I put on my Bose noise-canceling headphones, dialed up the white noise app on my iPhone, and, middle seat be damned, nodded off sitting up straight. One thing I <em>haven’t</em> lost while working virtually -- being able to fall asleep even before my 7am flight rotates off the runway.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — funkyGarden by Jeris (c) copyright 2020 Licensed under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/VJ_Memes/61356 Ft: airtone, SackJo22, Analog By Nature</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>It wouldn’t be a proper Following Up section without yet another update on the US’s Real ID or the EU’s ETIAS rolling delays. Let’s do ETIAS, the EU’s pre-travel authorization system that gobs of click-bait websites have mislabeled a “European Visa.” The EU has tweaked their go-live date again -- from last month’s <a href=\"https://www.schengenvisainfo.com/news/no-etias-wont-become-operational-in-2024-eu-sources-say/\">May 2025</a> to a less definite/more nebulous “<a href=\"https://travel-europe.europa.eu/etias/what-etias_en#etias-in-a-nutshell\">mid-2025</a>” -- which could be May or June or July. But I’m not sure why anyone in their right mind would want to flip the switch on this in the summer, during Europe’s peak tourist season. I’m taking the over on this; I don’t see it going live any earlier than October 2025.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The US, on the other hand, seems to be sticking to their May 2025 date -- for now. Remember, the initial deadline for needing a Real ID to board a commercial flight was January 2018 -- which then got kicked to October 2020. But then COVID hit and in April 2020, soon after just about every government building was emptied out and locked up, the bright sparks at Dept of Homeland Security decided that driving crowds of people toward closed DMVs to replace their old driver’s licenses wouldn’t be great and pushed the deadline a year to October 2021. Which, we’ll all remember, wasn’t <em>that</em> much better -- at least with regards to DMV accessibility. I remember lining up outside, in December 2021, in Chicago at a DMV to renew my driver’s license. And so another push, 19 months to May 2023. And then last December, they pushed it another 2 years to May 2025 because -- who knows. So the US has got nothing to say to the EU. But on my flights a couple of weeks ago, I started seeing new signage “RealID coming in May 2025”; even the Delta app, when I checked in for my BOS-LGA flight, had a banner about it. Huh? I mean, why wind everyone up about a deadline that’s 18 months away and, if the kabuki theater of the last 5 years is any guide, will get pushed again.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Now where DHS is moving much faster is rolling out biometrics to airport and customs checkpoints. Over the years here on TravelCommons, I have talked about my experiences with biometrics usage -- starting with my first fingerprint scan back in the late ‘90’s so I could skip the US customs line at Toronto-Pearson Airport, then in 2008 letting the first iteration of CLEAR scan my eyeballs in exchange for a shortcut to the front of the TSA line, then in 2011 a background check and another fingerprint scan for Global Entry so I could skip all the US customs lines -- so yes, I’ll do damn close to anything to skip an airport line. But over the past couple of years, it feels like DHS has been turning it up a notch. October 2021, our first international flight in a couple of years, on AirFrance, the gate agent took our picture when boarding and didn’t need to see our boarding pass. <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/06/20/podcast-194-best-laid-travel-plans-roaming-entropy/\" title=\"\">Last April, returning from the Netherlands</a>, the Global Entry kiosk no longer needed to scan my fingerprints; a quick side glance at the camera was enough to recognize me and let me through. And now, a couple of weeks ago, at the BNA PreCheck line, a big sign “Identity Verification Technology. Biometrics technology is available at this checkpoint. Your participation is optional.” This is new; it wasn’t there 2 months ago when we flew out to Maine. I give my driver’s license to the TSA guy standing next to something like a camera on a stick; it looks a bit like the electronic customs gates at LHR. He puts my ID in the machine, tells me to look at the camera, then looks at the screen and waves me through. A couple of things here -- I’m not sure how this is different from the TSA guy looking at my face and comparing it to the picture on my license; and I didn’t see any way that my participation was optional. And I certainly didn’t get to skip any lines for the biometric giveaway. I’ve been trying since April to get someone from TSA or DHS on the podcast to talk about this biometrics push and have gotten nothing but repeated “I’ll get back to you soon” from the TSA press secretary. Now maybe this new equipment gets us to the automated checkpoints I’ve been through in some smaller European airports -- which could shorten the security lines -- but I had to dig pretty deep into a bunch of jargon-y <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/sites/default/files/tsa_idm_roadmap_2022-03-01_508c_final.pdf\">PDF documents</a> on the TSA website to get even a hint of any benefits to the regular traveler. I dunno, maybe all the benefits are waiting on Real ID. Once everyone has that little gold star on their license, it’s clear sailing.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter (X?) message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page, or on the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can skip all that social media stuff and post your comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — Xena’s Kiss / Medea’s Kiss by mwic (c) copyright 2018 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mwic/58883</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Renting a Tesla</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>After 2, 3? episodes of <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/08/24/podcast-195-checking-out-hollands-tulip-festival/\" title=\"\">nattering on</a> about electric vehicles, I decided to take up Hertz on their incessant email offers and rented a Tesla for my Boston business trip -- giving EVs a try, but on someone else’s dime. The client site was only 18 miles from BOS and Google Maps told me there was a Tesla Supercharger nearby, so range risk wouldn’t be an issue. A couple of days before my flight, Hertz sent me an email which was pretty much a crash course on operating a Tesla, pictures, text, links to YouTube videos. I was both impressed and slightly overwhelmed, but I grabbed a beer out of the fridge -- a 16 oz, this was going to take a bit -- and ground through all the email links -- which, I think, saved me time trying to figure things out in the Hertz lot.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Over the past couple of years, we’ve talked about <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/05/09/podcast-175-how-to-find-local-tour-guides-rebuild-travel-muscles/\" title=\"\">barren Hertz lots</a>; <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/04/10/podcast-174-how-the-pros-plan-their-taproom-tourism/\" title=\"\">renters queueing up for cars to appear</a>. So when the Hertz employee pointed me to an EV aisle full up with 10-12 Tesla Model 3’s and a couple of Polestars it took me a moment to process all my options. My usual strategy, when I have a choice, is to run through the cars on the aisle and pick the one with the lowest mileage. But I wasn’t quite sure if that worked with a Tesla, and if it did, I didn’t recall from my crash course where to find the odometer. So, I chose a black Model 3 that had the least beat-up wheel rims -- trying to minimize any damage arguments at return time.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>After I got in, powered it up, and got acclimated to the massive tablet screen in the center console, I saw that the battery level was at 69%. One of the crash course’s tutorials said it’d be at 100% and I’d be charged if I returned it under 80%. I snapped a picture of the battery display and told the guy at the exit gate. He shrugged and told me to bring it back at the same level. He didn\'t seem very concerned.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming out of the lot, the Tesla drove fine. After a couple of days, the battery had dropped into the mid-40s, so I decided to try out the Tesla Supercharger network. Tesla’s nav app directed me to a nearby shopping center. The chargers were in the farthest back corner of the Target parking lot. I backed in -- looking at the other Teslas, it seemed the thing to do -- plugged in the charger, and was a little shocked to see that it would take an <em>hour</em> to get me charged up to 100%. Now Irene would have no problem with this -- an excuse to spend an hour shopping in Target? Bring it on. Me, not so much. Luckily, there was a Chipotle across the street, so I locked the car and walked over to grab lunch. When I got back, the car still had another 5 minutes before it got to 100%. I’m glad I didn’t wait ‘til it got down to 20%.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Though maybe I should’ve waited, because by my last day, I’d driven off a chunk of that 100% charge and, heading back to BOS, I wasn’t completely confident that I’d arrive with the battery at the 69% level I’d picked it up at. And I guess that’s a place where an EV rental requires a bit more logistical planning. A regular gas car -- there’s loads of places I could hit to quickly splash in a couple of last-minute gallons to keep the fuel gauge on Full. An EV? The Tesla nav app vectored me way off my usual I-90/I-93 tunnel routes to BOS, taking me way east, past some marshes just off the bay, to the back corner of another Target parking lot where I backed in amid a half-dozen other Teslas, their drivers all sitting there, working their phones, waiting for their cars to charge. I waited 10 minutes, splashed in enough electricity to get the battery gauge to 75%, and lit out. But I probably didn’t need to worry. Turning the car in, I told the Hertz guy I was under 80% charge because I got the car at 69%. No problem, he said. He didn\'t seem very concerned. Honestly, I’ve never seen Hertz guys so nonchalant about their cars; especially after Hertz said in their last earnings call that <a href=\"https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-10-26/hertz-misses-quarterly-profit-estimates-as-its-fleet-costs-rise\">EV repair costs are about double what they pay for gas-powered cars</a>.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>On the shuttle bus to the terminal, I opened the email receipt and saw that the $15 charge from my first Supercharger visit had made it onto my invoice. A couple of things crossed my mind -- definitely less than what I would’ve spent filling up a gas car, and I was impressed by the quick turnaround time because the toll charge I incurred two days before that, when leaving Logan through one of the tunnels, still hasn’t shown up and so is going to raise some eyebrows in A/P when I eventually try to expense it through. So all told, pretty good experience; kudos to Hertz. And now they’re trying to get me to rent a Polestar at LHR in a couple of weeks for our drive through the Devon countryside. Ehh, I don’t think I’ll push my luck.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/bridges/15563\">i knew</a> by bridges (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.&nbsp;Ft: shannonsongs</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>2023 Traveler\'s Gift Guide</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Every couple of years around this time I update my gift guide to give folks suggestions for the frequent traveler in their lives. Or, if you are the frequent traveler, a list of hints you might want to drop on family members looking for ideas. The first time I did a gift guide, I published Thanksgiving week so people would have it for the Black Friday sales. But now with the Christmas shopping season having blown past that traditional Thanksgiving Friday start and with radio stations barely able to wait for the kids to finish counting their Halloween candy haul before <a href=\"https://www.fox5ny.com/news/radio-stations-christmas-music-holiday-season\">flipping the switch on their All-Christmas-Music format</a>, I’ve dragged the publishing date up to the front of November. The <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/11/04/10-best-travel-gift-ideas-for-these-unprecedented-times/\">2020 gift guide</a> was probably the most unique. All the restaurant lockdowns and indoor dining limits had us eating in our hotel rooms which put bring-your-own dining sets and in-room coffee brewing kits onto the gift list. The disappearance of airport and in-flight mask mandates means that #1 gift on that year’s list -- comfortable masks -- has also dropped off.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>What hasn’t dropped off and is regularly at the top of my list is <strong>Battery Packs</strong>.&nbsp; We’ve talked <em>a lot</em> about how we can’t easily travel anymore without a working mobile phone. It holds our boarding passes, gives us gate change and flight delay notifications, unlocks our car (if we’ve rented a Tesla), routes us around traffic jams, and connects us to our Airbnb hosts. So having that second or third charge immediately available is critical to making it through a long travel day. I carry a <a href=\"https://amzn.to/470YN1T\" title=\"\">Zendure SuperMini power bank</a> in my bag because its USB-C port quickly tops up my iPhone while the USB-A port takes care of my Samsung tablet. I’ve updated Irene’s lipstick charger to <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3u6IbXX\" title=\"\">an Anker with a flip-out Lighting connector</a> so she doesn’t have to fish around in her purse for a cable. But there are a lot of choices; just pick one.. or two.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Noise Canceling Headphones</strong> are also a perennial on my gift lists. I’ve been carrying Bose headphones for at least 15 years. Back then, the QC-3’s were de rigueur for any self-respecting road warrior. The “ah ha” moment for me was on a United Express Dash 8 turboprop flying to Sioux City, IA with an intermediate stop in Waterloo, IA. I was in a window seat on the wing and the droning of the prop just encased me; I couldn’t think of anything else -- until I flicked the switch on my Bose. I’m now on my 3rd pair, the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3Mzl3Yx\" title=\"\">Bose 700’s</a>. They’re not compact but they continue to earn their space in my travel bag. I picked up a pair of <a href=\"https://amzn.to/49EsZld\" title=\"\">Apple AirPod Pros</a> on a good Prime Day sale last month and so was able to compare the Bose and AirPod noise canceling on my Boston and New York flights. The AirPods are good, but not as good as the Bose. And the battery doesn’t last as long, which makes sense given the size differential. For me, the AirPod Pros are good for a 2-2.5-hr flight, but for, say, my upcoming UK trip, I’ll be packing the Bose.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://amzn.to/40vbaAK\" title=\"\">Apple AirTags</a></strong> earned a place on the list last October when I could see, sitting on the plane, that our bags weren’t going to make the connection in Newark on our way home from Rome. This didn’t get our bag to us, but it did save us the 30 minutes of suspense waiting for them to come out on the carousel, and let us instead go straight to the baggage service agent, be the first in line to file our report, and then head home after a very long travel day. They were definitely worth the purchase price just for that.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>For someone making the transition from virtual work to physical world road warrior, how ‘bout a <strong>Black 20-inch Carry-On Bag</strong>. Black not only makes you look thinner, it makes your bag look thinner to gate agents hunting for bag-sizer bait. My daughter had a baby blue roller bag for the longest time. She loved that color, and it was easy to spot on the luggage carousel, which was a good thing because it ended up there <em>a lot</em> because gate agents were always pulling her out of line to gate check that bag. So get a nondescript black bag with a set of clever, neon-colored luggage tags as a stocking stuffer. If you’re flying a budget airline that’s a stickler on size, get a hard-shell bag. It’ll keep its dimensions better when overstuffed, and the polycarbonate shell will slide past the metal bars of the sizer easier than the ballistic nylon of a soft-sided bag. You could range up in size to a 22-incher, but a 20-incher should safely fit in the overhead of just about every plane. I’m a big fan of the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3MwJLZr\" title=\"\">TravelPro line</a>; for me they strike the right balance between price and quality. But there are lots -- maybe way too many -- options out there for you to choose from.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Here’s a new list entrant -- a <strong>Travel Power Strip</strong>. Potentially one of the least sexy things I could put on a gift list, but I’ve always tried to populate these with the things I actually use -- and find myself needing the most when I’m on the road. And you think after, I dunno, 20 years of travelers needing to charge a bunch of electronics -- PCs, mobile phones, tablets -- hotels, B&amp;B’s, resorts would put outlets <em>that work</em> on the top of flat surfaces like nightstands, end tables, desks, …. But I’d say that on half of my trips <em>this year</em>, I had to move furniture or get down on my hands and knees to find a single outlet. So you can get one of those cube-shaped travel adapters that show up on most travel gift guides, and still have to crawl under furniture every time you need to plug something new in. And that’s why I recommend a compact power strip -- you move the nightstand once to reach down and plug it in, and then set the other end -- the end with the outlets, the end you’ll regularly need easy access to -- <em>on top</em> of the nightstand. Any power strip you buy nowadays will have some mix of USB and regular AC outlets. <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3SpsSng\" title=\"\">Anker</a> has a seemingly infinite range of them. But if Anker is a little boring for you, way back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/01/25/podcast-159-planning-the-trip-of-a-lifetime-in-southeast-asia/\">episode #159</a> in January 2020, long-time listener Arnoud Heijnis gave high marks to a <em>circular</em> power strip called the<a href=\"https://amzn.to/3SyAXGa\" title=\"\"> Power Bagel</a>. Three years on, MOGICS, the manufacturer, now sells an updated version called the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/40reQ6o\" title=\"\">Super Bagel</a>. Of course! With a lot of positive reviews confirming Arnoud’s view that the circle, the bagel shape, let you use every outlet, even when using those big wall wart power supplies</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>So there you go, 5 gift ideas to fit all budgets, and with more than enough time to beat any early on-line shipping deadline. Check out the show notes for links, and happy shopping!</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>Note: None of these suggestions are paid endorsements. This post contains links to Amazon where I can earn a small commission from qualifying purchases.</em></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"className\":\"has-medium-font-size\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #197</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As always, you can find us and listen to the current episodes on all the main podcast sites -- Apple Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, Google Podcasts, and Amazon Music. And you can always Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page at TravelCommons.com for a transcript of the episode and links to items on the gift guide. If you’re not yet subscribed, there’s a drop down Subscribe menu at the top of TravelCommon’s home page. And along the side of the page, you’ll find links to all the TravelCommons’ socials.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to mpeacock on Twitter, write them on the TravelCommons page on Facebook or Instagram, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com.&nbsp; And thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in emails, Tweets and post comments on the website. I really appreciate it.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And until we talk again, safe travels; and thanks for stopping by the TravelCommons.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_197.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #197 — Renting a Tesla; 2023 Traveler Gift Guide','','inherit','closed','closed','','4387-revision-v1','','','2026-01-28 10:49:18','2026-01-28 16:49:18','',4387,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4765',0,'revision','',0),
(4766,1,'2026-01-28 10:49:50','2026-01-28 16:49:50','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/stable-diffusion-xl-beer-3-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"robot in a microbrewery taproom drinking a beer\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" />What Prompt Will Get Me a Pilsner?[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>In this beer-focused episode, John Holl, editor of <a href=\"http://allaboutbeer.com\" title=\"All About Beer\"><em>All About Beer</em></a>, gives us his take on beer tourism and tips on how to beer travels. I talk about my experience planning my Asheville, NC taproom visits with ChatGPT. We also dive deep into the new <a href=\"https://www.jdpower.com/business/press-releases/2023-north-america-airport-satisfaction-study\" title=\"JD Power Airport Satisfaction Survey\">JD Power Airport Satisfaction Survey</a> and do a quick update about the EU\'s delayed ETIAS system. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_196.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:audio -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-audio\"><audio controls src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_196.mp3\"></audio></figure>\n<!-- /wp:audio -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #196: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN after trips to Portland, ME and Asheville, NC. We flew up to Portland International Jetport; I love that -- <em>jetport</em> -- it’s like a throwback to the ‘50’s and ‘60’s when jet airplanes weren’t assumed. Going down that clickhole, apparently Orlando International was originally called <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orlando_International_Airport\">Orlando Jetport</a>. Feels like they shouldn’t have changed; would’ve had a very EPCOT-y vibe. But anyhow, I think Portland Jetport missed a trick by not playing Steve Miller’s <a href=\"https://youtu.be/JHa1hiFYbFQ?si=3c8q9OhgdJM8YQNR\"><em>Jet Airliner</em></a> on a continuous loop in baggage claim. But they do have a <a href=\"https://youtu.be/Az5p4g_Eyf0?si=HEB3oEj3PCClOO-C\">big stuffed moose</a> there, which is probably more on-brand.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>More… interesting were the 7-foot signs we passed walking up to the TSA lines for our flight back. <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock/status/1693357760732111140\">I posted a picture on Twitter</a>. The one to the left said “Are you packing? Guns of any kind are not permitted in carry-on bags”. The one on the right, “Have you checked your firearms?” The small one in between reminded people to dump their oversized liquids. I mean, Really!? We\'re now 22 years on from the Sept 11th attacks and people still can\'t figure this out; that you can’t take a gun on a plane -- nor a sword, nor a knife. Long-time listeners will know that I am in no way an apologist for the TSA, but when I see pictures they post of some of the stuff people try to bring on -- a hatchet at O’Hare, throwing knives at Milwaukee -- I’m not sure how patient <em>I’d</em> be if I had to deal with that level of obliviousness day-in and day-out.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>On the upside, though, I did see that the TSA would allow me to carry-on a live lobster if I wanted to take a bit of Maine back home with me. According to the TSA website “A live lobster is allowed through security and must be transported in a clear, plastic, spill proof container. A TSA officer will visually inspect your lobster at the checkpoint.” I wonder if that visual inspection includes checking that the rubber bands around the lobster claws are intact. I’d think a traveler wielding “un-holstered” lobster claws might not be armed, but certainly could be dangerous.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/JeffSpeed68/54450\">Hula Hoop Party</a> by Stefan Kartenberg (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. &nbsp;Ft: Martijn de Boer, Blue Wave Theory</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>I</em> would’ve loved to play 15 seconds of <em>Jet Airliner</em> just now for the bridge music if I wasn’t about 99% positive I’d get slapped with some copyright fine.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Thelma Smith stopped by the TravelCommons Facebook page to leave a comment about last episode’s discussion of renting a Hertz EV for my Portland trip, which I backed away from as I looked at charging options in the city and up in Bar Harbor. Thelma wrote<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>&nbsp;Wanted to chime in on EVs. We have a Tesla Model 3. When planning out a trip of any length we use <a href=\"https://www.plugshare.com/\">PlugShare</a>. It helps in finding all sorts of chargers and not just Tesla fast chargers. Might help in seeing what’s out there.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Thelma, thanks for that. First I’ve heard of it; looks like a nice crowdsourced status map for chargers. If Hertz had referenced it, it might’ve tipped me to an EV. While it didn’t show many more Bar Harbor options, it showed a lot more chargers in Portland. Hertz continues to send me EV offers, so with this, maybe I give it a go on my next trip.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>JD Power released their <a href=\"https://www.jdpower.com/business/press-releases/2023-north-america-airport-satisfaction-study\">2023 North American Airport Satisfaction Survey</a> last week. We talked in the last episode that, according to TSA counts, we’ve gotten back to pre-COVID passenger volumes. And so it kinda makes sense then to compare JD Power’s 2023 numbers to their pre-COVID 2019 scores. And, conveniently enough, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/10/14/podcast-156-airport-satisfaction-escooters-smaller-luggage/\">episode #156</a>, we talked to the survey’s author, Michael Taylor, after the release of the <a href=\"https://www.jdpower.com/business/press-releases/2019-north-america-airport-satisfaction-study\">2019 survey</a>. Back then, Michael predicted:<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Michael: Everybody\'s phasing in and out of construction. They\'ve got all these various plans that are revolving on the inside and the outside of the airport. And so we\'re going to see this churn in the rankings quite a bit in the next few years as these projects phase in and out.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Well, yes and no. The top of the Mega category was pretty stable -- Detroit, Minneapolis/St Paul, and Las Vegas kept their top 3 positions. But there was a bit of churn under that. San Francisco jumped 7 spots from 13th to 6th, in large part, no doubt to their huge renovations while Orlando dropped 5 spots, from 4th to 9th, and Phoenix dropped 6, from 7th to 13th; neither of which surprised me given my most recent experiences at each.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The benefits of finally finishing big renovations really showed up in the next category, the Large Airports. LaGuardia and New Orleans, airports that I’ve spent way too much time in, finished multi-billion dollar renovations between the 2019 and 2023 survey and the results showed. LaGuardia jumped 13 places from 27th, the last spot on the 2019 survey to 14th, which given all the inherent problems with LaGuardia’s location and the mess that is the tri-state air traffic control, I’m not sure they could’ve gotten much better. New Orleans, though, went from not much better 23rd spot in 2019 to 8th, a 15-place move. Portland, Oregon, 2019’s top Large airport plummeted 11 spots to 12th, while San Diego and Oakland each dropped 10 spots, to 23rd and 24th respectively.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>More interesting than this, to me, was the increase in the average scores in what has been a difficult year for air travel -- on a thousand-point scale, the Mega average increased 16 points, from 756 to 772, while the Large average grew 24 points, from 765 to 789. So if an airport didn’t improve its score, like Orlando or Oakland, its ranking tumbled.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>In the last episode, I talked about the rolling delays for implementation of ETIAS, the EU’s impending version of the US’s ESTA, a pre-travel authorization system. What originally was supposed to go-live in 2021 got pushed to May 2023, which given COVID made sense, when then slipped 6 months to November 2023. Well, OK, maybe a little more testing is for the best. But then, to a more nebulous “sometime in 2024.” That’s never a good sign. And now, a month later, they’re saying <a href=\"https://www.schengenvisainfo.com/news/no-etias-wont-become-operational-in-2024-eu-sources-say/\">May 2025</a>. It feels like this is becoming the EU’s Real ID. Really! Because the new <a href=\"https://www.dhs.gov/news/2022/12/05/dhs-announces-extension-real-id-full-enforcement-deadline\">US Real ID deadline</a> is also May 2025 -- until they change it again.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter (X?) message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page like Thelma did, or on the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can skip all that social media stuff and post your comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music —&nbsp;<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/53277\">Fistful of Dub</a>&nbsp;(Feat. Snowflake and DJ Vadim) by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. &nbsp;Ft: snowflake and DJ Vadim</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Beer Tourism and Travel</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Scrolling through the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/episodes/\"><em>Episodes</em></a> section of the TravelCommons website, I saw that it’s been over a year since I’ve done any beer content, and immediately began working on rectifying it. I asked John Holl, long-time beer journalist, editor of <a href=\"https://allaboutbeer.com/\">All About Beer</a>, host of the <a href=\"https://allaboutbeer.com/podcast/drink-beer-think-beer/\">Drink Beer, Think Beer podcast</a>, to give us his thoughts about Beer Tourism…<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: John, thanks for coming on the podcast. We want to talk about beer tourism and travel. I\'m an old guy and for the longest time the idea of beer tourism seemed to start and end with renting lederhosen and heading to Munich for Oktoberfest. And then, in the early/mid-00’s, we got specialty beer releases that morphed into festivals like 3 Floyds’ <a href=\"https://darklordday.info/index.php/Home\">Dark Lord Day</a>. I was living in Chicago at the time and that went from a couple hundred people queuing for a bottle release to, in 2019, 13,000-15,000 people traveling around the country to see it.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>John: Gave people a lot of excuses to cross that Indiana border.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: I\'ve been to Munster Indiana and there\'s not a lot of other reason to go there other than 3 Floyds. And then they <a href=\"https://www.3floyds.com/taproom/\">shut the brew pub down</a> during COVID and now there\'s absolutely no reason to go there. And now, every town/region/state seems to have some sort of a beer trail. Last month, in August, I was in Portland Maine and it was the <a href=\"https://mainebrewersguild.org/visit-breweries/brewery-trail-challenge/\">Maine Beer Trail</a>. And then I was in Asheville, North Carolina at <a href=\"https://ashevillealetrail.com/\">Asheville Ale Trail </a>as well as their brewing district. It seems to be an area that\'s really grown. What are your thoughts on that? How significant is beer tourism for local economies now?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>John: I think it depends on the location. Where there\'s a concentration of breweries, it makes sense to have a beer trail. It makes sense for a guild or an organization to get together to try to convince not only the tourists but the locals to come out as well. There\'s 10,000 breweries thereabouts, maybe a little less, in the US these days and a lot of them are concentrated together. There\'s strength in numbers and hopefully they\'re all doing something that is diverse enough that can get folks to go from one place to the next, to the next without getting Hazy IPA fatigue. And I think Portland Maine is a great example of the breweries that are there. You have some of the old stalwarts, Geary\'s and Allagash. And some of the older, newer ones like Bissel Brothers. And then, there\'s some really cool ones like Belleflower that are there. So you get breweries of different sizes, of different scopes and I think it\'s important for the bottom line of these places so long as they\'re delivering good quality beer. But what\'s cool for me is being a tourist in a new city. I get to go to different areas. I get to go see a place that is not just the picturesque downtown, it\'s not just what\'s on the postcards for sale at the local travel kiosk. So you get to go into neighborhoods where people live and work. And for me, that\'s always a better sense of getting to know a city, of getting to know people, of getting to know a place because neighborhoods can change, especially some place like Chicago, from block to block. You\'re walking into neighborhoods that have different vibes, that have different histories to them, and that feel different. And so when I\'m traveling for beer, it\'s fun for me to not only go and set up at a tap room and spend some time there, but also to walk the neighborhoods as well. And I think that location informs a lot of what beer makers do. I\'ll keep going back to <a href=\"https://dovetailbrewery.com/\">Dovetail</a>; I\'ve spent more time there than I\'ll actually admit, and it\'s right up against the Brown Line and they use that to their advantage. They talk about their coolship; they talk about how their windows open up to the brown line and that the beer is inoculated with whatever the transit line brings them. And I think that\'s a fun thing. You\'re not necessarily tasting a sense of place, but you get the idea that it might be there.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: God only knows I\'ve written the Brown Line enough times. So maybe I\'ve helped Dovetail inoculate some of their coolship beers.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>John: And go to the Pacific Northwest at this time of year, in mid-September/late October when in Yakima and in parts of Oregon, they are harvesting the hops right now. You can bounce from brewery to brewery and the air is aromatic with fresh hops. The brewers are making fresh and wet hot beers. People are coming in from around the country, from around the world. There\'s an excitement and an energy that exists because of the agricultural product that is going into these beers and because of the harvest window as well. So, it doesn\'t always have to be a festival; it can be for a harvest season. And I think that that\'s another cool way that folks who aren\'t even in the beer industry can experience a different aspect of their pints.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: What\'s the best way to find out what\'s going on in a location? How do you think about where you\'re gonna go?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>John: I like not having firm plans when I\'m traveling because the other thing about beer tourism -- we\'re talking about beer trails -- is you start at one place and you say, “OK, we got five places on our list today.” So we say you\'re just having a pint at each. It\'s still five pints at the end of the day and even for a serious drinker like me, that\'s a lot. But if you\'re having a good time, I think it\'s great to not have structure because if you say, “OK, we\'re at stop number two and, and we have three more stops in front of us,” but we\'re really liking this, and they have this other beer that I want to try, and we\'re comfortable, and we\'re in good seats, and the food truck is awesome and all that -- just stay there, live in that moment. I feel I\'ve seen too many people get caught up in this sort of ticking culture where we have to hit all of these spots for whatever sort of weird list and you miss out on the fun experiences. Beer is about camaraderie. It\'s about being in the place. It\'s about experiencing flavor. And if you\'re rushing through it, it\'s not that much fun. I think beer in the way that it\'s grown over the last couple of decades -- it\'s not doing super-well volume-wise or sales-wise comparatively; it\'s like 12-13% of the overall marketplace -- but I think it has helped people appreciate flavors better. And to be a little bit more curious and to be a little bit more experimental.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: I think there\'s also a learning component too that I think you brought up, which is, you\'re going to push yourself outside your normal boundaries, outside of what I\'ve called a travel bubble…</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>John: That\'s the cool thing about travel, right? You talk to folks all the time about when they go to a new place and they want to have the local drink or they want to have the local food because they want to immerse themselves in that culture. You can do that with beer no matter where you go. So much of what brewers are doing these days too. When you travel, if you only drink American Light Lager, or you only drink Irish Stout. So you only drink something, you know, particular. If you\'re traveling, you might try the göse, you might try a lambic, you might try a barley wine or something like that because you\'re feeling a little bit more loose and unencumbered from the constraints of your daily life. And that, for me, is sort of the fun thing about beer. Usually it\'ll taste better from that place because you\'re surrounded by the people who made it, and the people who also were excited to be there. It\'s like folks who go on vacation to a tropical island and they\'re drinking mai tais, and it\'s the best mai tai they’ve ever had. They learn how to make the mai tai, and they come home and they do it on their back patio and they think “This doesn\'t taste as good.” And it\'s because you\'ve lost that sense of place. And so for me, I\'m always just trying to experience not just what\'s in my glass, but what\'s around me as well.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: John, I appreciate you coming on and talking to us about beer tourism and beer travel. It\'s something we\'ve talked a lot about on this podcast only just because I really like beer. It\'s been great talking to you. Thanks very much, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/John_Holl\" title=\"\">John Hall</a>, editor of <a href=\"https://allaboutbeer.com/\">All About Beer</a>. Both your <a href=\"https://allaboutbeer.com/podcast/\">podcast</a> and your website -- check it out. Thank you very much.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>John: Mark, thank you.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And, as always, check out the show notes on the TravelCommons podcast for links to read and listen to John.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/3lb3r3th/44072\">Misunderstood</a> by 3lb3r3th (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. &nbsp;Ft: Alchemistry</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>How To Plan a Beer Trip and Beer Tourism?</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If John Holl has you thinking about beer tourism, the next logical question -- how do you plan it? Here’s John’s approach…<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>John: I plan out travel, especially for specific events like hop harvest or Oktoberfest, which I\'m going to for the first time this year. I plan that out at least a year in advance because I want to make sure that when I can get hotels and transportation, and to budget out all of that. Social media is terrible in a lot of ways, but it can also be helpful in certain ways, getting you excited about traveling to new places. When I hear about annual beer festivals in Belgium or see folks who are out at hop harvest, picking hops, it gets me in a certain sort of way, if I\'m sitting at my desk at home. saying “Gosh, I wish I was there.”&nbsp; So then I put stuff on the calendar and start to say, “OK, well, think about this” and then go from there. When I\'m traveling to a city for work, I\'m usually going to visit specific breweries or specific people. But nine times out of 10, I will also call friends of mine and say, “Where are you drinking these days?” or “What\'s exciting you these days?” There\'s always going to be the one place that the serious beer nerd should go to,&nbsp; but then you peel that onion back just a little bit and all of a sudden, it\'s “Well, you know, I actually had a really fun experience at such and such place” or “I had this one beer” or “They\'re doing some cool stuff” and I start to say, “All right... Well, I trust them, so what do I have to lose?” It\'s either gonna be a great pint or it\'s not...</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>So there you go, advanced planning for the big stuff and have beer nerd friends in every city who can point you to the out-of-the-way nuggets. The latter is probably a <em>bit</em> easier for John, a well-known beer journalist, than for the rest of us.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/04/10/podcast-174-how-the-pros-plan-their-taproom-tourism/\">episode #174</a>, I talked about this with Rob Cheshire, a long time TravelCommons listener and, for the last 3+ years, a UK craft beer podcaster with his <a href=\"https://thisweekincraft.beer/this-week-in-craft-beer-podcasts/\">This Week in Craft Beer</a> podcast<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Mark: How do you plan your taproom visits?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Rob: It\'s all driven through Google for me. I might have some idea based on previous reading about some big-name places that I want to visit in a particular city. But beyond that, I\'m just going to Google. First of all, I\'ll plot a Google map for the city. I\'ll end up with 50-60, maybe even 100 pins on the map. Pretty quickly, I\'ll go to <a href=\"https://untappd.com\">Untappd</a> and look at the average brewery rating. And this really makes brewers cross how much I rely on Untappd for this type of thing because I had this conversation a load of times on the podcast with them. But I do rely on brewery ratings on Untappd, and I find it very reliable. Quite frankly, if a brewery has an average rating of anything close to 4, then, obviously it\'s a massive generalization to say whatever they brew, but most of their beers are gonna be great. If the brewery rating is anywhere close to 3.5, it\'s going to be very mediocre at best. And somewhere in between is where most people land. So 3.6, eh...;&nbsp; 3.8, it\'s a good brewery; 3.9 is a terrific brewery; 4 is a great brewery. And so I\'m looking for those 3.8 and 3.9 average brewery ratings. But what I\'m looking for, really, is that district where I can walk from one to another and really make an afternoon of it.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Me? I kinda mash the two up. Like Rob, I’m a pretty solid Untappd user. Rob often says it’s his “beer diary” and that’s pretty much what it is for me too.&nbsp;When people ask me for recommendations for a city -- Budapest was the most recent ask -- I can quickly pop open the app and give people a list. And when <em>I’m</em> in a new city trying to find a good place for a beer, I’ll open it up and look at the Nearby Activity tab to see where (and what) folks are drinking. And back to <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/06/20/podcast-194-best-laid-travel-plans-roaming-entropy/\">episode #194</a>’s discussion of <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fl%C3%A2neur\">flâneuring</a>, or “roaming entropy” as I like to call it, some of my best “wanders” had, as their eventual end-point, a bar or taproom that I found that way.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But, as John says, if you let your friends know you’re deep into beer, they’ll be looking out for you. Visiting Savannah, GA back in May, our friends couldn’t wait to take me downtown to <a href=\"https://www.twotidesbrewing.com/\">Two Tides Brewing</a>, a microbrewery in a <a href=\"https://www.cntraveler.com/bars/savannah/two-tides-brewing-co\">100-year-old house</a> with great beers but no door onto the balcony because of a “door tax” way back when, where houses were taxed on the number of doors they had. So we ducked down and walked through a big window with our glasses… <em>multiple</em> times. Great beer and a history lesson; not sure I would’ve found that without a little help. Coming up in a couple of weeks, we’re heading back to New York City and our daughter already has an <em>ambitious</em> list for us.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Rob Cheshire and I have traded beer touring tips for our home towns. Rob took me to his favorite places in the railway arches of London’s Bermondsey Beer Mile. But when Rob hit Chicago three weeks after we’d moved to Nashville, I couldn’t reciprocate the personal tour, and so instead emailed him the couple of taproom circuits I <em>would’ve</em> taken him on if he’d showed up a month sooner. And actually, for all of you -- my friends and listeners -- since I can’t email it to you, I’ll put my Chicago taproom circuits in this episode’s show notes on travelcommons.com. Or check out my list of&nbsp; “Yeah, I’d like to go back there” taprooms in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/05/26/podcast-187-moving-to-a-non-hub-airport-what-makes-a-great-taproom/\">episode #187 show notes</a>. Maybe these can help you with your beer tourism planning.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The two tent poles for our Asheville trip were hiking and beer tourism. But we were the Asheville pioneers among our friend group, so I didn’t have anyone to build taproom circuits for me. So I started down Rob’s path, firing up Google Maps and Untappd, but then… wait a minute. Let’s see what AI can do. So I fired up <a href=\"https://chat.openai.com/\">ChatGPT</a> and typed in “Develop a taproom circuit of microbrewery taprooms in Asheville, NC starting at the Aloft Hotel in Asheville and optimized to minimize walking distance and maximize Untappd ratings. Present it in a table with the brewery name in the first column, the distance from the previous taproom in the second column, the Untappd rating in the third column, and the type of beers served in the fourth column.” The response started with a caveat that it can’t access real-time data and so the Untappd ratings and distances are based on its last update in 2022. After that throat-clearing, ChatGPT spit out a table with 8 taprooms. Eyeballing the list, the names didn’t seem too out of whack, so then I checked the Untappd ratings. None of them were right, and indeed, so far out of whack (all on the high side) that eight months of additional check-in couldn’t have moved the ratings that much. Chalk that up to GPT hallucination, or being a people pleaser and not wanting to say “I don’t know”. Then I plotted the circuit on a map, and it wasn’t -- a circuit, that is. It was a bit more of a random walk, doubling back a couple of times. And, rather than working us back to the Aloft, it ended at the farthest away brewery. So with no friend recommendations and not much help from ChatGPT, I fell back to my old ways --&nbsp; flâneuring. I figured with the beer density in Asheville, a random walk was more likely than not to land me in front of a beer tap. Which pretty much proved to be the case. We did what long-time listener Aaron Woodin called it in the last episode a “walk and gawk”, or maybe&nbsp; a “walk and gulp.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>My Chicago Taproom Circuits</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Here are the two Chicago taproom circuits I built for Rob Cheshire in the summer of 2022</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Logan Square/Palmer Circuit</strong> -- a kinda triangular circuit through 3-4 taprooms in Chicago\'s \"Hipster Ground Zero\" neighborhood with some good food options along the way.<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Take the Blue Line toward O\'Hare to the California St stop. Walk east on Adams to Monroe and then north a half-block. It\'s a $2.50 fare; like the Tube, you can tap on with a contactless credit card. It\'s way cheaper than an Uber and lets you bypass a load of traffic. Follow Google Maps walking directions; you\'re basically walking south on California (or one of the less-crowded neighborhood streets running parallel) down to Armitage and then west to...</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>Solemn Oath Still Life</em> -- This is kinda cheating. This is the Chicago outpost of one of my favorite suburban breweries. They have a good range of styles. They recently started up a second label, Hidden Hand, that goes deep into hazies. When you\'re done, walk out the door, turn right on Armitage (going back east), cross the street at some point, and end up at</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>Middle Brow Beer</em> -- The vibe here is a bit of a crunchy granola with Democratic Socialist/Labour Momentum sprinkles (or hundreds-and-thousands if you will), but they do some interesting wild beers fermented from yeast cultured from their garden. Good for one, maybe two beers.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Food -if you\'re getting peckish, there are some good options on Armitage on the way to the next stop.<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>Middle Brow</em> - While you\'re there, their bread and pizzas are great.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>90 Miles Cuban Cafe</em> - Very good Cuban food</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>Redhot Ranch</em> - Chicago street food; I get either a polish or a burger Chicago style</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>When you\'re done, continue walking east to Western, turn right (south), pass Margie\'s Candies and find the entrance to</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>Life On Marz</em> - Another cheat, the north side outpost of the south side Marz Brewing. It\'s a small place, but they do a nice selection of styles. When you\'re done, head left out the door and then over to the diagonal street, Milwaukee, not the north-south street (Western). The intersection is a bit tricky. Head northwest up Milwaukee to...</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>Pilot Project Brewing</em> - This is a brewing incubator, so there\'s usually some interesting stuff on offer. The last time I was in, they were serving Indian-inspired beers from Azadi Brewing. Brewer\'s Kitchen also does good stuff. Not everything works, but I\'ve had a surprisingly good hit rate. Take a left out the door, cross the street (watch out for the bicyclists; this is the most Amsterdam-ish street in Chicago) and head up a block to...</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>Navigator Taproom</em> - This is a pour-your-own, priced-by-the-ounce beer bar with a good selection of Chicago (they seem to have a lot from Pipeworks) and Midwest beers. Check out their beer menu on Untappd to see if there\'s anything that interests you. Continue up Milwaukee to the last stop</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>Revolution Brewing Brewpub</em> - This is the original Rev Brew joint; it opened before the brewery taproom a couple of miles north. If you\'re IPA\'d out and the temperatures aren\'t in the 90\'s, go for their Deep Woods offerings -- the variations on their Deth\'s Tar imperial stout (Josh Deth owns Rev Brew) or their Straight Jacket barleywine. If it\'s too hot (or you\'re too baked for those double-digit abv\'s), their Hero IPA series is good; lots of variants based on different hop combos.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And that\'s it. If you want to head straight back, you\'re a couple of blocks from the California Blue Line L stop. Get on the Forest Park Blue Line to Monroe stop in the Loop. If you\'re still walking straight, you can keep walking up Milwaukee through the neighborhood. It\'s an interesting neighborhood. The Blue Line runs parallel to Milwaukee. The next stop is the Logan Square stop, about a 15-20 minute walk. Or you can always just call an Uber.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Maplewood-Based Circuit</strong> -- this is less concentrated/less obvious, so I\'ll put in a few branches so you can choose your own adventure<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>Maplewood</em> -- Part of its charm (a little corner tavern at the end of a neighborhood street) makes it inconvenient to get there via public transportation. So to start here, it\'s probably best to Uber up.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Option - A bit of a walking circuit from Maplewood<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>Ravinia Brewing</em> -- Very optional. Not a bad place; I\'ve had a couple of good beers sitting out on their patio after a bike ride. I wouldn\'t go out of my way to go there, but it\'s two blocks from Maplewood</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>Metropolitan Brewing</em> -- This is ~10 min walk north from Maplewood through a little neighborhood. It\'s one of the original Chicago microbreweries, though a lager specialist which I know is not exactly on point for you. However, their patio looks down on the north branch of the Chicago River. So, if it\'s a nice day, this is worth a stop for the view -- and maybe a crisp palate cleanser.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>The Beer Temple</em> -- One of our favorite beer bars. It\'s what in Chicago is termed a \"slashie\" -- a bar and a liquor store. They always have a good beer selection and they\'re a verified venue on Untappd, so you can check out the menu to see if it\'s worth the 7-min walk from Metropolitan.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Food<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>Kuma\'s Corner</em> is about a 5-min walk west on Belmont from Beer Temple. Kuma\'s is a great burger place with a solid beer menu (an Untappd verified venue) and a heavy metal soundtrack.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>Honey Butter Fried Chicken</em> - Convenient if you\'re walking up to the Rev Brew Taproom</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>Revolution Brewing Taproom</em> -- If you didn\'t hit their brewpub on the Logan Square circuit, the brewery taproom is a 12-15-min walk from Beer Temple or Kuma\'s.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Option - Uber up to the Ravenswood neighborhood\'s Malt Row<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>Begyle Brewing</em> -- First brewery on Malt Row. Nice IPAs and a good barrel-aged imperial stout</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>Dovetail Brewing</em> -- The guys on the Steal This Beer podcast obsess over this brewery. Cool space; German lager-and-spontaneous ferm-focused. Walk down (south) Ravenswood Ave to the Irving Park Brown Line. Take it to two stops to the Paulina exit, walk south on Paulina St one block to...</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>Bitter Pops</em> -- Another great slashie and also an Untappd verified venue if you want to check out the tap list. Also a good place to buy a cold 4-pack to take back to your hotel room. Or cross Lincoln Ave and walk down a half block to...</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>The Green Lady</em> -- Old-time Chicago bar vibe with a great tap list.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Get back on the Brown Line and head down to the Loop, to the Quincy Stop which is ~1 block from the JW Marriott</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Option - Uber up to Half Acre Beer<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>Half Acre Beer</em> - Another original Chicago microbrewery. Augie Carton on Steal This Beer is a big fan of their Daisy Cutter pale ale, but I like their range of IPAs.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><em>Spiteful Brewing</em> - Next door to Half Acre. Good place; wouldn\'t make a special trip for it, but is worth the block walk if you\'re at Half Acre.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Probably best just to Uber back down to the JW from here.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"className\":\"has-medium-font-size\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #196</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As always, you can find us and listen to the current episodes on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. No longer Stitcher, though. SiriusXM pulled the plug on it, though I think you can find TravelCommons on the other Sirius platforms -- Pandora and maybe the Sirius app. But I know that you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page at TravelCommons.com for a transcript of the episode and links to places I’ve mentioned, and to John and Rob’s websites. If you’re not yet subscribed, there’s a drop down Subscribe menu at the top of TravelCommon’s home page. And along the side of the page, you’ll find links to all the TravelCommons’ socials.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to mpeacock on Twitter, write them on the TravelCommons page on Facebook or Instagram, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com.&nbsp; And thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in emails, Tweets and post comments on the website. I really appreciate it.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And until we talk again, safe travels; raise a cold (or cask-temperature) one; and thanks for stopping by the TravelCommons.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_196.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #196 — Cheers to Beer Tourism and Travel!','','inherit','closed','closed','','4372-revision-v1','','','2026-01-28 10:49:50','2026-01-28 16:49:50','',4372,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4766',0,'revision','',0),
(4767,1,'2026-01-28 10:50:40','2026-01-28 16:50:40','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/IMG_6301-EDIT-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Field of orange tulips during Holland\'s Tulip Festival\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" /> Just Another Tulip Field[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>In this episode, I dive deep into our Dutch tulip-themed trip last April. Before the tulip festival stories, I randomly wander through a potpourri of travel topics -- TSA passenger volumes returning to pre-COVID levels, having a surprisingly satisfying customer service experience with American Airlines, Hertz\'s EV push, and a bit of a chuckle about the misplaced visa panic in the news coverage of the EU\'s impending ETIAS system. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_195.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:audio -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-audio\"><audio controls src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_195.mp3\"></audio></figure>\n<!-- /wp:audio -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #195: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN after a triangulating drive -- Nashville to Annapolis, MD to New York City and then home. And in doing so, I have managed to miss/skip(?) the completion of the post-COVID travel recovery -- at least according to <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/travel/passenger-volumes\">TSA checkpoint passenger volumes</a>. The TSA website continues to update a website page with numbers from 2019 to yesterday 2023 in a convenient table format for easy copy-pasting into Excel. Crunching the TSA numbers starting the Friday before Memorial Day, the generally accepted start of the summer travel season, passenger volumes are up, on average, 11% over last year and equal to pre-COVID 2019.&nbsp; So volumes have recovered, but on the airlines’ Q2 earnings calls, the CEOs again reminded their listeners that not all passengers are equal. <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/southwest-airlines-luv-q2-earnings-report-2023-83811808?st=ivs07m9d98qw5ot&amp;reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink\">Southwest’s CEO said</a> “It’s clear that travel patterns post-pandemic are not what they were pre-pandemic,” as the airline said they’d shift planes from business-oriented short-haul routes to longer routes aimed at leisure travelers, and move some flights from start and end-of-the-day departures that flyers like me would book for same-day out-and-back trips.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I’ve talked in previous episodes about how one of the things I really miss moving from Nashville to Chicago is direct flights to places. The other thing I miss -- and pretty much on an equal weighting -- is good Chinese food. I’ve found good Vietnamese food, solid Mexican -- but haven’t found anything like what we would get in Chicago’s Chinatown. So when we hit New York City, we quickly found our way deep into Chinatown, joining the 20-30-person queue in front of a storefront bakery, <a href=\"https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/mei-lai-wah-bakery\">Mei Lai Wah</a>, for <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cha_siu_bao\">char siu bao</a>, BBQ pork buns, one of our favorites -- hoping they wouldn’t sell out before we got to the front of the line. Minutes tick by; the lines not moving. Then someone pops out of the bakery and yells “Anyone paying with cash, come up to the front!” As regular listeners know, I’m a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">knuckle-dragging cash carrier</a>. My wallet full of twenties and I sprinted to the front. I studied the menu; the cashier said “All we have left is #1, #5, and #20.” “Fine, I’ll take two of each.” I gave her one of my twenties and walked back out to the street where my wife, my daughter, and I inhaled those fresh buns while the credit card gang kept waiting. It’s good to have options.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — Brilliant Day by Hans Atom (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hansatom/47919 Ft: Lisa DeBenedictis</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Long time listener Aaron Woodin left a comment on Twitter, or X, or whatever Elon is calling it this week…<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>&nbsp;“Excellent podcast, Mark. I agree about Rotterdam - amazing city, underrated by tourists. I took a freighter cruise from there 5 yrs ago. Love that word Flâneuring - my pet term is \"walk and gawk.\"</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Aaron, thanks for that. A freighter cruise… that’s gotta be very cool. And “walk and galk” -- I like that. But I think I like it even better if I can shoehorn the word “entropy” in there because it makes me feel that suffering through engineering thermodynamics was worth something. Maybe “entropic walking and galking.” Yeah, I like that!</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>TravelCommons contributor Chris Chufo forwarded me a tweet saying “The way you say ‘representative’ to an automated system is the real you” and, as folks say nowadays, I felt seen. Mine is a crisp, demanding “Agent”, trying to pitch the tone and volume in just the right way to interrupt rather than wait through the 3 minutes of recorded verbiage. So when I had to call into American Airlines last week, it pulled me up short “Hi, Mark. In a few words, tell us what we can do for you?” And that was it. No long announcement, no litany of number presses, just silence… waiting…. “Uhh, I’d like to talk to an agent about a reservation.” “I’ll connect you to an agent. Your expected wait time is 1 hr… and 14 minutes.” OK, some things will never change.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I had to call American because in their most recent retumbling of their JFK flight schedules, they’d shrunk the connection time to our flight from JFK to LHR from 6 hours (way too long!) to 1 hour -- a bit too snug for my liking, especially given the delays at JFK -- and LGA and EWR -- caused by the ongoing shortage of air traffic controllers. In the last episode, I talked about the cascade of tiny delays that caused me to lose my wager on a snug sub-2 hr connection on our way home from AMS. But it was the end of our trip, so annoying, but not critical. Here, though, missing our outbound flight would absolutely <em>not</em> be a great way to start the trip. Though after reading about <a href=\"https://www.insider.com/laguardia-airport-thousands-passengers-got-stuck-on-planes-for-hours-2023-7\">last weekend’s 60-plane departure queue at LGA</a>, even a more reasonable 2½-hr connection time didn’t feel safe.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>So I skipped the hour-plus live agent queue for the chat feature in American’s app. I was pleasantly surprised to get connected to an agent in just a couple of minutes. I banged in my confirmation code and my ask -- put us back on our original flight to JFK; I’d prefer to entertain myself for 6 hours rather than miss our flight. “Please give me 3-5 minutes to review your reservation.” Felt like a canned response the agent hit a button to send -- which was fine with me. Being on chat rather than a live call, I could wander around, get other things done while checking the screen every now and again for a response. Which I eventually got -- “I’ll have to transfer you to one of my colleagues”. That’s fine. We’re 20 minutes in, so even with this, I’m still doing better than the live call queue. And, in a couple of minutes when the next agent popped on, asking me how he could help, I just copy-pasted my answers to the same questions from the first agent. And then I waited for it -- one second, two seconds, “Please give me 3-5 minutes to review your reservation.” Just like clockwork. Eventually he came back “As your original flight isn’t available, would the direct BNA-LHR flight work?” Uh, yes, but it’s actually a British Airways flight. I’d looked at that flight, but it has a boatload more fees -- fuel surcharges, landing taxes. “No additional charges?” I asked. “No, it’s free of cost,” he replied. I screenshotted the chat screen and told him I’d take it. Problem solved with an even better option -- a direct flight -- and all in less than the hour hold time for a live agent. Maybe not quite as personal as talking to someone, but it got it done.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I’m flying up to Portland, Maine and need a rental car for a side trip further up the coast, to Bar Harbor, to Acadia National Forest for a bit of hiking. So I hit the Hertz site and got a big push to rent an EV, an electric vehicle. Looking at the prices, it was more than a standard car, but not <em>that</em> much more. So I was intrigued. But as I walked down the booking path, it was the same as a regular car; no guidance on what I think of as EV-specific things, like how do I pay for charging -- do I need to set up an account with someone, maybe download an app -- and what’s the EV equivalent to having to return the car with a full tank? So I backed out, did a Google search which, as I’d expected, did a better job of landing me on the right pages on Hertz’s website than Hertz did. It’s interesting. If you use a Tesla Supercharger, Hertz passes through the charge to your card, but <em>without</em> a mark-up -- unlike what they do with toll charge transponders. And returning the car full? Hertz wants it above 70% or they’ll charge you $35 for the EV version of a refill charge -- which I didn’t think was unreasonable. So now I hit Tesla’s website looking for chargers. There’s one at a shopping mall in Portland, but nothing near my hotel downtown. And the ones around Bar Harbor are at hotels that I’m not staying at. I’m tempted, but it feels a bit more of a hassle than I want to sign up for. But it feels like they’re getting close, at least Hertz is. Maybe it’ll work out for my next rental.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I got a bit of a chuckle out of the recent flurry of travel stories about the coming of ETIAS -- the European Travel Information and Authorization System, the EU’s version of the US’s ESTA, the Electronic System for Travel Authorization, a pre-departure authorization for travelers who aren’t required to have a visa. I chuckled because we talked about this back in January, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/01/26/podcast-192-new-year-travel-planning-tips-gin-conquers-the-world/\">episode #192</a>, when I dug into ETIAS in case we needed it for our April tulip festival trip to the Netherlands. I found out we didn’t -- by that point, the May 2023 go-live had been pushed back to November 2023, and looking at the ETIAS website now, it’s been pushed again, now to much more ambiguous “sometime in 2024.” So I’m not sure what caused the sudden interest, but the number of news stories that were just plain wrong -- incorrectly wailing “Oh, now we’ll need a visa to go to Europe” in spite of what is said in the first paragraphs of just about every <a href=\"https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/MEMO_18_4362\">EU website page about ETIAS</a> (phrases like “The ETIAS authorization is not a visa”) -- just makes me shake my head.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter (X?) message to mpeacock like Aaron did, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can skip all that social media stuff and post your comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And a quick program note - at the end of this episode, there’ll be a bit of a meta-discussion -- the podcast talking about the podcast -- about having to DIY my own podcast metrics reporting. Probably not terribly interesting for most folks, hence me stuffing it in the ending, the part most folks skip over. But if you’re interested, hold off on hitting the “skip track” button when you hear the “Pictures of You” wrap-up music.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — &nbsp;<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Suenjo/11162\">Natchoongi (New Hope Remix)</a>&nbsp;by Suenjo (c) copyright 2007 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Notes on Holland’s Tulip Festival</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As I mentioned in the last couple of episodes, Irene and I did a 10-day swing through the Netherlands in April, all centered around the tulip festival -- the tulip parade, the tulip gardens -- and then building other stuff around that. Which meant that the usual Holland tourist destination, Amsterdam, wasn’t; and instead our entry and exit point with a night or two tacked on to make the logistics easier; especially after we couldn’t score tickets to the big Vermeer (Girl with the Pearl Earring) exhibit at the Rijksmuseum. Having said that, we still managed to hit a couple of places for some unique Dutch-ness -- <a href=\"https://goo.gl/maps/7sjkC4sJ5KhrPnS9A\">Van Dobben</a>, a 70-some-year-old sandwich joint that’s known for their <a href=\"https://thingstodoinamsterdam.com/blog/dutch-croquettes/\">beef croquettes</a> which, I’m told, is classic Dutch bar food --&nbsp; a 3-4 inch long rectangle of deep-fried, breaded creamed beef served on a bun with mustard. They were fine, though they seem like the kind of food best&nbsp; appreciated at 2 in the morning rather than noon. The better thing about Van Dobben was sitting at the counter, watching the waitresses give their customers -- a mix of construction workers, local shop owners, office workers, and not too many tourists -- a good natured hard time. We then had to walk off those little gastric depth charges because we had dinner that night at <a href=\"https://www.vinkeles.com/\">Vinkeles</a>, a great restaurant that received its second Michelin star the week we visited. The food was great -- highly recommended. We showed up early for a pre-dinner cocktail at the bar, which Irene did. But I audibled at the last minute, telling the bartender I’d never had genever -- the Dutch ancestor to gin -- and asked for his direction. He brought over two small tulip glasses filled to the rim, one with a clear liquid, the other a light amber, a barrel-aged genever. There was no room for ice in those little tulips; the genevers were served neat, at room temperature. It was a nice introduction. I managed to fit in a few more of those full little tulip glasses before the end of our trip.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>We actually organized the whole itinerary around Haarlem because it seemed more or less ground-zero for our tulip-ing: the Tulip Parade, kinda the Dutch version of the Rose Parade, ended there Saturday night after an all-day wander through villages to the south; and it wasn’t far from the big tulip displays at the Keukenhof Gardens. Heading down to the Keukenhof was the only time app-based travel payment didn’t work. The bus line had an app, but it didn’t seem completely connected to their web site, which is where I bought our tickets. And the web site said we had to have physical printed tickets; showing the PDF on our phone wouldn’t work. Lucky for us we were staying at a hotel in Haarlem rather than an Airbnb. The desk clerk happily printed our tickets for us.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Ticket hassles aside, the Gardens were great. Walking through the parking lot, through the ranks of tour buses; I started to appreciate what a big thing this tulip festival is. But I also had a building sense of dread. Is this going to be a repeat of last year’s shoulder-to-shoulder crowds in Italy? No, it wasn’t. The Keukenhof was a big enough place to absorb everyone, with tulip beds everywhere, to spread everyone out across the grounds.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But we didn’t <em>really</em> need to stay in Haarlem just to see these gardens; half the tour buses in the parking lot were day trips from Amsterdam. The next day, Saturday, we took advantage of Haarlem’s location, renting bikes and riding back down toward Tulip Ground Zero. Doing a spur-of-the-moment bike ride in the Netherlands is so easy -- lots of bike rental places with reasonable day rates, lots of bike lanes (and bike-aware drivers), and mostly flat terrain -- means you can have a good day out without needing to pack the whole Mamil -- middle-aged men in lycra -- kit. We headed southwest, pointed vaguely in the direction of the <a href=\"https://thetulipbarn.com/\">Tulip Barn</a>, a tulip farm where you can pay to go wander and Instagram your way through their tulip fields. But a couple of miles from the Tulip Barn, I stopped at a big cycle network map to figure out our next turn. I could figure out that the red arrow labeled “U Staat Hier” meant “You Are Here”, but was taking a little longer to figure out the rest. In the meantime, Irene looked past the trees down one of the streets and saw a huge tulip field. We parked our bikes and joined, for free, the maybe 30 other people -- families, couples -- wandering around the tulip beds. Pink, red, orange, yellow, white -- it was rows of tulips to the horizon. But it was also a working tulip field. Guys were putting on and pulling off bed covers, and, wildest thing, driving a little machine through the beds that snipped off the tulip flowers, leaving the tall stems; friend-of-the-show Chris Chufo said it looked like a tulip zamboni. I mean, “What the hell?” Turns out that this field and all the outdoor fields we saw, raise tulip <em>bulbs</em>, not flowers. The cut flowers are grown in covered fields and greenhouses. The tulip zamboni knocks off the outdoor blooms so the plant puts its energy into growing the bulb. I’m glad we got there when we did, and that there was only one guy running the zamboni. Check the show notes; I’ll see if I can post my video of the tulip topping.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Later that night -- <em>much</em> later, the Tulip Parade finally made it to Haarlem. A band warmed up the waiting crowd playing ‘50’s and early ‘60’s rock-and-roll using a vintage Cadillac convertible as their stage -- which would’ve fit in in, say, Nashville, but seemed a bit odd in western Holland. But only to me, I guess, because the crowd loved it. When the floats finally arrived, they did not disappoint. The craftsmanship was excellent; they were all decorated, their surfaces completely covered with floral materials -- tulips, daffodils, hyacinths, even cut-up bulbs and nut shells for brown and black colors, hence my earlier comparison to the Rose Parade. It also reminded me of smaller Mardi Gras parades in New Orleans -- the float sponsors seemed very local -- nearby car and farm equipment dealerships -- local marching bands. No bead tossing, but a lot of folks running over to hand out things to the people lined up along the route. It was just the right size -- big enough to support the craftsmanship needed for high-quality floats, but not so big that the local sponsors get elbowed out by big multinational corporations. One more advantage of our Haarlem location -- at the end of the parade, they parked the floats along the road at the end of the route. At the end of the night and again the next morning, we were able to walk up close to them, which made me appreciate the craftsmanship even more.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I’m in no way, shape, or form, any sort of gardener. I have, at best, a black thumb. And I’m not a big flower guy. I saw lots of guys with big full-frame digital cameras setting up tripods over tulip beds for what I can only imagine was an effort to capture the perfect flower pic -- whatever that may be. But I came back way more impressed than I expected to be with the beauty of the flat Dutch countryside in bloom.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #195</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>. And while you’re at TravelCommons.com, you can check out the show notes page for a transcript and any links I’ve mentioned. Or you can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, now to the promised meta-content. I’ve used Chartable for a couple of years now to give me some basic episode download metrics -- how many downloads in the first 7 days, in the first 30 days of an episode posting, in total -- whatever comes with the free version. Nothing fancy -- I’m not trying to sell ads; it’s for my own edification and enjoyment. The standard pattern is a big spike in downloads on the day I post the episode and then a steady growth after that. Usually the total downloads after 7 days number is 40-45% of an episode’s total downloads after a year. So anyhow, for the last episode, the Day 1 number was 6. Huh. Maybe Chartable is having some backend hiccups; I’ve seen it take a day for numbers to start populating. So I look again the next day -- same thing. Huh. Same thing <em>every</em> day that week. Now <em>this</em> behavior I haven’t seen before. Where did everyone go? I recheck all my podcast apps -- Overcast, Apple Podcasts, Pocket Casts, Podcast Addict -- yup, the episode is there. So what happened? Since I self-host TravelCommons -- because back in 2005 when I started, there was no other alternative -- I can look at the server logs. So look at the June and July logs -- yup, I can see more than 6 downloads of <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/06/20/podcast-194-best-laid-travel-plans-roaming-entropy/\" title=\"Podcast #194 — Best Laid Travel Plans; Roaming Entropy\">episode #194</a>. Which then sends me down a new rabbit hole -- why rely on Chartable when I can do it myself, maybe write my own download counting program? But I’m not any sort of programmer… which led me again to ChatGPT. Everyone’s talking about how generative AI will replace programmers, so I thought I’d give it a go. I typed “Write a python program to print out total counts of downloaded podcasts reported in an Apache web log file” into the box at the bottom of the ChatGPT web page, clicked the little arrow icon, and Boom!, out burped a program. And it actually ran, and did what I asked. Turns out my ask needed a bit of refinement, but after maybe 30-45 minutes, I had a pretty solid output, which I then pulled into Excel to slice and dice and graph and pivot because I kinda got tired of torturing ChatGPT… or myself; I’m not sure which. But anyhow, generative AI won’t completely replace programmers and the like (at least not yet), but it does work… at, maybe, 80% of its current hype. Just thought I’d share a little of my own personal experience.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter/(X?), or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_195.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #195 — Checking Out Holland\'s Tulip Festival','','inherit','closed','closed','','4343-revision-v1','','','2026-01-28 10:50:40','2026-01-28 16:50:40','',4343,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4767',0,'revision','',0),
(4768,1,'2026-01-28 10:51:19','2026-01-28 16:51:19','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/replicate-prediction-57paxyjb7xj7hm5kqombv3ecdy-300x300.png\" alt=\"Robot using a laptop to make travel plans while on a beach\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\"> Future of Travel Planning[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Back behind the microphone after, despite my finely tuned travel plans, I had to resort to being stubbornly cranky to fix a ORD connection drama when coming home from a tulip-peeping trip in Holland. We also wander into the world of flâneuring, aimlessly walking around a city as a way to swerve over-tourism. Listeners weigh in on Priority Pass lounge access and online passport renewal experiences, and I count all the apps I needed to go cashless in Holland. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_194.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:audio -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-audio\"><audio controls src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_194.mp3\"></audio></figure>\n<!-- /wp:audio -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #194: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN after a good bit of travel - 10 days in the Netherlands bracketed by road trips to Louisville, Savannah, GA, and Chicago, and then a tough week of beer drinking here in Nashville when the Craft Brewers Conference touched down. So, I’ve been keeping occupied since the last episode. But it’s all been personal travel; all of my business travel has been replaced with Zoom and Teams sessions. I may be a bit of an outlier, but none of the US airlines’ Q1 earnings announcements were great, in no small part because business travel still isn’t back to pre-pandemic levels. Delta is hoping it’ll settle at 75% of 2019 levels while <a href=\"https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-04-21/industrial-strength-business-travel-recovery-is-showing-cracks-lgqvl4n3?utm_source=website&amp;utm_medium=share\">United’s CEO said</a>&nbsp; “We believe demand is just structurally different than it was pre-pandemic, and we’re still figuring out that new normal.” Maybe not quite the Bill Gates “over 50 percent of business travel… will go away” prediction, but with our 2-year crash course in virtual work, having the post-pandemic setpoint for business travel volume be 20-25% lower doesn’t seem too far fetched.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And even with the non-business “revenge” travel boom filling seats, personal travel is a lot more price sensitive, or elastic as economists like to say, than business travel. My travel patterns are a testament to that -- with higher airfares but a more flexible schedule (I can Zoom from anywhere), it’s been more road trips than plane flights. I’ve had some pretty drives, like through East Tennessee and central Kentucky, but also some real grind-outs, like I-75 pretty much from the Tennessee-Georgia border through Atlanta, all the way down to Macon.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But driving <em>does</em> make packing easier, without the space constraints of a carry-on bag. Which caught up with me, I think, on our Netherlands trip. I was out of practice, sloppy; forgetting to pack so much of what would be my normal kit -- collapsible umbrella, gloves, hat -- so that when the cold rain shifted to snow our first day in Amsterdam (it had been in the 70’s when we left Nashville), our standard throwaway line “If we’ve forgotten it, we’ll just buy it there” became very real. I was very happy to find a couple of sporting goods stores a block down from our hotel. I gotta do some remedial packing training before my next flight.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/50485\">Sunset Boulevard</a> by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license. Ft: Siobhan Dakay, unreal_dm</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Robert Fenerty hit the TravelCommons website to comment on last episode’s thoughts about ponying up for a not-quite-Amex Platinum card from Chase or Capital One, one that includes a Priority Pass membership. He said<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“You need to fix the cert on travelcommons.com, Safari is complaining.” Yup, I know. Converting the site to https has been on my to-do list for a long time. I’ll get to it, I promise… some day.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“Given the paucity of direct flights from Nashville, I suppose lounge access makes sense. But please don’t get a credit card just for Priority Pass access. I’ve had one for years through my Chase Sapphire Reserve card. But even as a 1K flier, I rarely use it. With Priority Pass, you’ll encounter capacity-controlled second-rate lounges where travelers on certain flights stroll past you while you’re being added to the 45-minute wait list. And after your 45 minute wait you’ll be treated to a sardine-packed lounge where the primary benefits are lack of blaring TVs, cat food sandwiches, and a second-rate chair that might adjoin an electrical outlet.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“Every time I buy a bold $20 glass of Cabernet at a Vino Volo or sip a remarkable east coast hazy at an airport bar with 20 taps, I think about how happy I am to not be begging for a second rate drink at a second rate lounge.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Agree that Priority Pass members definitely seem to be on the bottom of the “priority” list. I’ve been on the other side of that 45-minute wait list, walking into a lounge in ORD’s international terminal, bypassing the queue of Priority Pass holders because I had an AirFrance business class ticket. I’ve also encountered the cat-food sandwich phenomenon. I guess that’s why Amex’s Centurion Lounge is so popular -- great food, nice local beers and top-shelf liquor -- and so crowded and now charging for each guest. Food and drink costs during connections -- another thing I forgot to factor in when I moved to a non-hub city.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Jim McDonough hit the TravelCommons Facebook page to pile onto my rant about the US’s stop-start on-line passport renewal efforts.<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I have dual citizenship with the US and Ireland. Getting an Irish passport was a bureaucratic nightmare and took a couple of years from beginning to end. I saw it was expiring at the end of 2022 and went on-line to see how to renew it. Turns out there was a simple application to fill out on-line, got my wife to take a photo of me against a neutral background and uploaded it, paid by credit card, and had a new Irish passport in my mailbox five business days later. It can be done, USA. Try harder.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Jim’s comment got me looking… and sure enough, I can renew my UK passport online also. And checking the US passport renewal page just before recording says the online renewal portal is still <em>paused</em> -- we’re coming up on the 4th month of that pause. Maybe the US State Dept just needs to buy Ireland\'s or the UK\'s system rather than trying to build their own.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>One of the TravelCommons’ thru lines over the past 5-6 years has been the move to a cashless society and me being <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/12/19/podcast-136-is-cash-a-waning-king-dont-make-it-hard-to-cash-in-on-loyalty/\">a bit of a knuckle dragger </a>about it. It’s a stuttering progress -- tripping over small cash-only family-run restaurants in Chicago and here in Nashville, card-only places in Amsterdam; <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/12/24/podcast-191-my-notes-on-italy-and-split-croatia/\">a long weekend in Croatia last fall</a>, before they switched to the euro, that had me hunting down ATMs because not only were there signs saying “Cash Only” but also “Kuna Only” -- the currency that would be defunct in a couple of months. The Netherlands, like I said, was all about the tap -- double-click the iPhone, tap the little block, and hear the ding. I hit an ATM for €200 through force of habit and after 10 days, came home with €40-50 of it. But looking at my iPhone halfway through the trip, it looked like I’d traded cash for apps. I tweeted a screenshot of my phone; I’d added 9 apps to my phone just for those 10 days. Four were for different transit systems - one for Amsterdam, one for Rotterdam, one for the bus from Haarlem down to the tulip gardens, and one for the trains between them. There was Bolt, the Uber/taxicab mash-up, and Donkey Republic to unlock rental bikes. I can go cashless -- as long as my phone battery holds out.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Back in December, right after ChatGPT was released/unleashed (?) on the world, I wrote a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/12/12/how-good-are-chatgpts-top-5-holiday-travel-tips/\">blog post</a> comparing its holiday travel tips to mine. I thought the ChatGPT recommendations were <em>fine</em>, but mine were way more insightful. Now that Google and Microsoft have joined the AI chat game, I thought I’d ask all three “What’s the TravelCommons Podcast like”<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>First, ChatGPT’s response: “The TravelCommons podcast is a podcast that focuses on travel experiences and insights. Hosted by travel enthusiast and former consultant Mark Peacock, the podcast covers a range of topics related to travel, from the latest news and trends to personal travel stories and tips.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“Listeners can expect to hear Peacock\'s own experiences and anecdotes about his travels, as well as interviews with other travel experts and enthusiasts. The podcast often covers topics related to technology and travel, such as the latest travel apps and gadgets, as well as discussions about travel safety, sustainable travel, and more.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“One of the unique aspects of the TravelCommons podcast is that Peacock often records episodes while he\'s on the road, providing listeners with a firsthand account of his travel experiences. This adds an element of excitement and immediacy to the podcast, making it feel like you\'re right there with Peacock as he explores new destinations.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“Overall, if you\'re a travel enthusiast or just looking for some inspiration for your next trip, the TravelCommons podcast is definitely worth checking out.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Not bad, though it’s been a while since I’ve recorded on the road. Maybe I need to get back to that to recapture some of the “excitement and immediacy” of the older episodes.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Next up, Google’s Bard: “The TravelCommons podcast is a weekly podcast for frequent travelers. The host, Matt Kepnes, shares his insights and advice on all things travel, from planning and booking trips to navigating airports and hotels. He also interviews experts in the travel industry, such as airline pilots, hoteliers, and travel writers.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“The podcast is well-produced and informative, and Matt\'s enthusiasm for travel is contagious. He makes even the most mundane travel topics interesting, and he always has a few tips up his sleeve to help you make the most of your trips.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Uh, no. Somehow Bard has transferred TravelCommons to Nomadic Matt. I think I need to check and make sure I still own the travelcommons.com domain name.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And finally, Microsoft’s Bing Chat which is powered by the most recent version of ChatGPT: “TravelCommons is a podcast that focuses on the experience of travel. It is hosted by Mark Peacock, who is a frequent traveler himself. The podcast covers a wide range of topics related to travel, including tips for packing and planning, reviews of airlines and hotels, and discussions about the latest trends in travel. The podcast has been around since 2005 and has a loyal following of listeners who appreciate its honest and informative approach to travel.”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>That’s pretty spot on! I may have to update the TravelCommons media guide with that.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page like Jim or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or, if you can fight thru the Safari security warnings like Robert did, you can post your comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music — <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Vidian/52190\">Memories (infiniti loop)</a> by Vidian (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license. Ft: TheDice</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Best Laid Travel Plans...</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The first topic in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/03/31/podcast-193-making-the-most-of-miles-nashville-vs-nash-vegas/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Podcast #193 — Making the Most of Miles; Nashville vs Nash-Vegas\">the last episode</a> was “Still Overthinking Travel Planning” -- which I do because, well, I’ve spent a good bit of my waking life traveling. But kinda like how generals always fight the last war, I’m probably not doing a great job of accounting for the changes in today’s travel landscape -- full planes and hotels, limited flexibility, taking what you can get.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Living in Nashville, a non-hub city, means, more often than not, I have to plan for a connection, especially when choosing our flight home from Amsterdam in April, having to factor in the time needed to pass through Customs, maybe having to transit from an international to a domestic terminal, having to clear TSA security again -- all in addition to some cushion for a late flight. But when I looked across all our possible connections, the times were either snug, less than 2 hours, or boringly long, 4-6 hours. So I decided to risk it, taking the snug layover through ORD. I figured we knew the airport, so no time lost trying to figure out the terminal connection, and most importantly, if we <em>did</em> get caught up somewhere and missed our connection, there was another flight to Nashville at 6pm, some 4 hours later.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As you might guess, all didn’t go smoothly because if it did, I wouldn’t be talking about it on the podcast. There’s not much interesting about “I booked a snug connection and everything was fine.” It actually started to go off the rails a few days before our departure, on our last night in Rotterdam. We stayed at the <a href=\"https://www.hotelpincoffs.nl/en\">Hotel Pincoffs</a> on the left bank -- highly recommended -- and after dinner, we hit the lounge where ordered a glass of what was labeled a Dutch coastal gin called <a href=\"https://hermitgin.com/\">Hermit</a>, skipping the tonic as I talked about in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/01/26/podcast-192-new-year-travel-planning-tips-gin-conquers-the-world/\">episode #192</a>, so I could taste the botanicals and the salty water they plugged on the label.&nbsp; I liked it <em>a lot</em>, so much so that I ordered another glass, and then spent 3 hours the next day rummaging through Amsterdam liquor stores ‘til I found a bottle to take home. Which meant I was now checking my bag on my flight to ORD.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Two days later, our snug connection begins to decay. The inbound United flight was late which dominoed out our departure time by 20 minutes. The captain said not to worry, he’d push the throttle and make it up in the air. I’ve heard that promise before, and sure enough, we hit the gate 20 minutes late. OK, snug-ger, but still doable. The Global Entry kiosk was fast, almost too fast. ORD has <a href=\"https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/local-media-release/global-entry-begins-touchless-receipt-less-processing-ord\">new facial biometric kiosks</a>. I walked up and before I figured out how to use it, it had recognized my face and told me to move on. Slightly creepy, but that’s a topic for another episode.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>We find the luggage carousel just as the bags with the orange Priority tags start popping out. I let myself feel a bit optimistic. I’m watching for my gin-bearing bag. And watch. And watch. Non-priority bags come out. Still I’m watching. And feeling optimism decay. We work through the Customs exit line only to walk straight into an even longer line to recheck our bags for our Nashville flight. Only 2, 3 people are working it. I’m feeling like <a href=\"https://youtu.be/N8uUTW9zPbM\">Stevie Ray Vaughn when he sings</a> “tick tock, people, time’s ticking away.” I tweet a picture to United saying “I’d be pretty thrilled if I made my ORD-BNA connection after our AMS-ORD flight arrived late.” No response. We finally get up to the bag checker. She scans the bag tag; I can see her screen flash red. “Nope,” she says, “You won’t make your flight” and then turns to the next person in line.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>We stand there for a moment and then drag our bags over to the line for the re-booking agent. But as I’ve said many times on this podcast, work all the channels. My usual Twitter play didn’t seem to be working (United’s social media hub must be short-staffed), so I dial up the Premiere line and tell my entire tale of woe to the phone agent while still in line for the in-person one. Getting up to the ORD agent, I tell her the same thing; United’s delay caused me to miss my connection, so just book me on the 6pm to Nashville. Seems easy enough -- but not in today’s travel world. The rebooking agent tells me there are no seats left to Nashville today… on any carrier. “This is unacceptable,” I said. She goes palms up and turns to the next person in line. “Wait,” I said, “if you can’t get me home tonight, United owes me overnight accommodations.” She stopped, thought for a moment, and then wrote down a number. “You need to call them.” It was the same number I’d called while in line.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But though all that, I hadn’t hung up on that phone agent; she was still there. “I’m sorry but there are no seats to Nashville, but I can get you to Memphis.” She’s trying to help, but I don’t think she realizes that Tennessee is a long state -- Memphis is a 3-hour drive to Nashville. “This is unacceptable,” I said. She apologizes again. 15 minutes into the call, she offers to transfer me to her supervisor. I tell her my story with perhaps a little frustration creeping into my tone. “Can I put you on hold?” she asks. Sure, why not? In the meantime, Irene is checking on Southwest flight; apparently United agents can’t see them. The supervisor eventually comes back, “Would the 6pm flight be OK for you?” 6pm <em>today</em>? After 36 minutes on the phone and saying “This is unacceptable” 2 or 3 times, they scrounged up the seats I’d been asking for all along. We hopped on the AirTrain to get over to Terminal 1 and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/tortas.frontera/\" title=\"\">Tortas Frontera</a>, my favorite ORD restaurant, for a couple of unplanned margaritas. While checking the United app for my new boarding pass, I saw that United twitter had finally responded. “We\'re sorry about the stressful day you\'ve had today. As a gesture of goodwill, we\'re able to deposit 2,500 miles into each of your accounts.” Using a 1.5¢/mile conversion rate, that just about covered our Frontera tab. In today’s travel world, that’s probably the best outcome I could’ve hoped for.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music --<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/ramblinglibrarian/55007\">Dawn at the Top of the World ft. copperhead &amp; Robert Seikawitch</a> by Ivan Chew (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/\">Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)</a> license</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Roaming Entropy</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Well before this “revenge” travel boom, over-tourism was a trending topic. I talked about it on many past episodes - biking up to Delicate Arch in Moab, Utah to find a swarm of photographers setting up to get their “golden hour shot” at sunset; trying to get in front of unloading tour buses along Iceland’s Golden Circle, and most recently squeezing through narrow streets in Rome when I made the mistake of agreeing to meet a friend at Trevi Fountain.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But, as you might guess, that’s not my preferred touring style. Instead, I tend to do what my family calls my “solo toro” routine -- going off on my own to wander a city, randomly walking, letting traffic lights make the call when it’s time to make a turn. Often I’ll have some end-point in mind -- a taproom, a church -- but my path getting there won’t be the most direct.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I didn’t think this was unique, but still, I’ve been pleasantly surprised to run across <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-emotional-benefits-of-wandering-11671131450?st=mmqyql6e1cktnub&amp;reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink\" title=\"\">a couple of articles</a> that put a proper name to this -- flâneuring, from <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fl%C3%A2neur\" title=\"\">flâneur</a>, the (of course) French word from the 19th Century that means \"a stroller, a loafer, a wanderer,\" someone who walks around a city without a fixed destination or purpose, just observing and enjoying the sights, sounds and smells. The English author Virginia Woolfe called it “street haunting” which I like, but I think my favorite term is “roaming entropy,” coined by some <a href=\"https://www.hartleylab.org/uploads/5/3/1/0/53101939/heller%E2%80%8A_et_al._2020.pdf\" title=\"\">NYU researchers</a> whose work showed a positive correlation between someone’s mood and how many new/varied/unexpected locations they visited.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>“Roaming entropy,” “experiential diversity,” they say, promotes cognitive development -- which makes sense to me. In many ways, this is one of the main reasons people travel, to experience something new. Way back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/08/13/podcast-166-what-is-the-meaning-of-travel/\">episode #166</a>, Emily Thomas talked about how philosophers such as Descartes and Montagne thought experiencing “otherness of travel” was important to broadening your mind, forcing you to think past your familiar experiences. But many folks want to experience something new, but without the risk of disappointment -- or something worse -- that the term “roaming entropy” implies. And there’s nothing new to that. Guidebooks have been around forever. When Irene and I started traveling through Europe, we’d always carry a Green Michelin guide, and we’d check off the 1-, 2-, and 3-star sites as we’d hit them. Not really all that different from people today queuing up for selfies at an Instagram-famous spot.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But ticking off a list of Insta-sites or starred spots doesn’t open you to the possibility of serendipitous delight, the joy of discovering something unexpected. On the flip side, it does tend to keep you out of serendipitous disaster. I don’t recall my wanders putting me in harm’s way, but there have been a few times where I felt I’d pushed the envelope a bit far -- in Cape Town, J’burg; in Brussels -- and so beat a very direct, non-random retreat to someplace safer.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The NYU researchers also talked about “sociodemographic experiential variability,” which is their polysyllabic way of describing walking around in different ethnic/cultural neighborhoods during flâneuring. I’m always hitting up food carts for, say, tamales in Mexican neighborhoods, or not-really-well-defined meats on skewers in Asian night markets, or Cuban coffee joints in Miami. Come to think of it, a lot of my sociodemographic experiential variability involves food or booze. Though in my defense, if you keep stopping to buy stuff, you then have to carry it around with you the rest of the day, weighing you down, maybe forcing you to shorten your walk. And that’s not what “roaming entropy” is about. It’s all about riding the random wave.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #194</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>. And while you’re at TravelCommons.com, you can check out the show notes page for a transcript and any links I’ve mentioned. Or you can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_194.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #194 — Best Laid Travel Plans; Roaming Entropy','Stubbornness fixed some ORD connection drama when coming home from a tulip-peeping trip in Holland, even after all my travel planning. We wander into the world of flâneuring, aimlessly walking around a city as a way to swerve overtourism. Listeners weigh in on Priority Pass lounge access and online passport renewal experiences, and I count all the apps I needed to go cashless.','inherit','closed','closed','','4312-revision-v1','','','2026-01-28 10:51:19','2026-01-28 16:51:19','',4312,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4768',0,'revision','',0),
(4769,1,'2026-01-28 10:51:53','2026-01-28 16:51:53','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Nash-vegas-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Honky Tonk signs on Broadway in Nashville\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\">Trapped in Nash-Vegas[/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Doing a bit of winter travel, the bar tab from waiting out a weather delay got me rethinking the economics of airport lounge memberships. Doing yet more travel planning but with a focus on making the most of the points and miles we accumulated on credit cards during the pandemic. And after eight months in Nashville, I compare the two sides of the local music scene -- the Nash-Vegas honky tonks vs the smaller, eclectic off-Broadway scene. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_193.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:audio -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-audio\"><audio controls src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_193.mp3\"></audio></figure>\n<!-- /wp:audio -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #193: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you from the TravelCommons studios in Nashville, TN after a couple of bits of travel; to Chicago at the end of January because, really, that’s the garden time of the year in Chicago -- waking up to subzero temperatures, wind howling off the lake. Yup, good times; really missed it.&nbsp; But the next month, flying to and from Albuquerque, NM for some skiing in Taos, reminded me of something I <em>really</em> miss about Chicago -- direct flights to almost everywhere in the US. ABQ is about the same distance from Chicago as it is from Nashville. But what’s a 3¼ hour direct flight from Chicago turned out to be a 6½ hour journey from Nashville, complete with a coffee stop in Houston. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/05/26/podcast-187-moving-to-a-non-hub-airport-what-makes-a-great-taproom/\">episode #187</a>, I talked about having to adjust my mental travel calculus, my travel reflexes, to <em>not</em> living in an airport hub city -- for the first time in about 40 years. Those extra 3 hours made that adjustment very real.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>When we landed, we met up with our daughter Claire and hopped the bus to the rental car center to see what Hertz had waiting for us. There were 5 of us skiing, so I wanted to get the biggest vehicle they had, but I was playing a bit of chicken with Hertz. I had enough Hertz points to cover a large car for the week, but they’d only let me cover 1 day of a specialty class like an SUV. With all the car rentals quoting $100/day, I slammed my points down on the large car and hoped there was some sort of an SUV in the Five Star row when we got there. So when we rocked up to the Hertz lot, my heart sank just a bit; there was nothing in the Five Star row. After a minute of staring at the empty spaces, a woman came out of the office “Oh, we’ve upgraded you to President’s Circle. I turn 90 degrees and see an entire row of SUVs. We picked the biggest one, a Ford Explorer with 16,000 miles and captain’s chairs for everyone. Started the trip off on the right note.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The trip home at the end of the week, everyone’s flight was blown sideways by the big winter storm two days before. It didn’t surprise us; it had blown off the mountain with 50-70 mph winds, so we weren’t surprised when the flight delay notices started dinging our iPhones. United hit us with a 2-hour delay (our plane didn’t make it out of Fresno the night before), but since we had a 3-hr layover in DEN, the only thing that changed was which airport bar we were killing time in.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Claire caught the worst of it, though, trying to get home to New York. With no direct flights between ABQ and LGA, she had to connect through ORD. The flight out went without a hitch. The flight back… the first leg, ABQ-ORD, was fine. It was the ORD-LGA leg that went badly wrong, which surprised me because those flights, between ORD and LGA, are like a shuttle, every hour, like clockwork. But for Claire, the shuttle broke… literally. After an hour delay, they loaded up the plane, de-iced the wings, and then found out an engine was broken, so back to the gate where -- you guessed it -- it can’t be fixed. 2½ hours past departure time, Claire pings me -- “it’s starting to snow; I doubt I’m getting on any plane tonight.” “Don’t write it off yet”, I told her. “It’s not a weather issue, so American will have to pay for a hotel and breakfast for the 120 or so people on that plane. That fact alone will cause them to look hard for another plane for you.” And that’s exactly what they did. It took them a few hours to scrounge one up but Claire got home that night… or rather that morning, at 3am. Always amazes me how an airline can figure out a solution when it’s <em>their</em> money on the line.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Javolenus/41932\">Ianiscus</a> by Javolenus (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. Ft: Wired_Ant</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Back to waiting out that flight delay in ABQ, my bar tab from waiting out the 2-hr delay got me re-thinking my stance on airport lounges, especially now that the US ones have upped their game on food and alcohol. It wouldn’t have changed anything in ABQ. It’s too small; no lounges. Indeed, I think we were at the only bar. But elsewhere… when we fly internationally, I usually get lounge access through my United or American status. In the US, I gave up my American and then United lounge memberships years ago because I wasn’t using them. I love American Express’s Centurion Lounges but charging $50 to bring a guest in and hiking the annual fee for the Platinum card to $695, the math just didn’t work for me. I could just do day passes; maybe use Loungebuddy for that. Or run the math on the not-quite-Platinum cards from Chase and Capital One, the ones that include Priority Pass membership. I dunno; a couple of avoided bar tabs may cover their annual fees.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/01/26/podcast-192-new-year-travel-planning-tips-gin-conquers-the-world/\">the last episode</a>, wading into the debate between booking direct with an airline or hotel or through a 3rd party, I told the story about how a -- <em>how do I say this politely?</em> -- false/misleading/just plain wrong property listing on Booking.com tricked us into booking a night in a place that looked to be much more geared to hourly stays, if you know what I mean. And how Booking.com did absolutely nothing to resolve our dispute. Long-time listener Nick Gassman pointed me to a <a href=\"https://www.theguardian.com/money/2023/jan/11/a-glossy-bookingcom-flat-turned-out-to-be-a-squalid-loft\">Guardian article</a> where a Booking.com customer wrote to the consumer affairs reporter with a very similar experience (dare I say “scam”?) -- misleading listing, shock when opening the door to the actual place, walking/running away to find another place to stay, getting dinged with a night’s charge for being a “no show”, and then Booking.com going “palms up” when asked to fix it. The interesting twist on this one was -- with the host reporting them as “no shows”, they couldn’t leave a review on the property to warn others. Nick also sent me a link to a <a href=\"https://www.reddit.com/r/BestofRedditorUpdates/comments/11saoz0/new_update_from_court_in_ongoing_case_airbnb/\">Reddit post</a> about a guy going to arbitration with Airbnb, also disputing a “no show” when he canceled a place that had security cameras on the inside of a studio apartment. These are reminders that, for all their <a href=\"https://www.booking.com/trust_and_safety.html\">web pages</a> and <a href=\"https://news.airbnb.com/airbnb-launches-trust-safety-advisory-coalition/\">press releases</a> with large boldface headlines, “trust and safety”, their legal terms &amp; conditions in a much smaller font says that all they do is connect hosts and guests; they’re not party to that transaction and don’t have any control over the quality or safety of your experience. I’m not saying don’t use them. We use Booking and Airbnb all the time, and have had 1, maybe 2 or 3, bad experiences. What I am saying is, go in eyes wide open. In this very hot travel market, Booking and Airbnb feel they need to take care of hosts right now more than they do guests.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/12/24/podcast-191-my-notes-on-italy-and-split-croatia/\">episode #191</a>, I said “In more travel document good news, the US State Department opened up on-line passport renewals on what they’re calling a ‘limited release’.” Well, listener Rob Holbrook isn’t feeling the good vibes. Rob said “I tried the renewal portal but it was constantly down, and then they shut it down completely. I’m not sure if the pilot outlived its usefulness, if passport renewal is too complex to do on-line, or if it opened up unexpected security risks.” The State Department shut down the renewal portal in early February to “implement customer feedback to improve the process.”&nbsp; Back then, they said it would be back up in March; now they’re saying “TBD” I’m just hoping they’re not using the same IT gang that coded up the first version of the Obamacare HealthCare.gov site. So we’re back to sending paper forms in, and the wait time is slowly creeping up -- before spring break season, State was saying 8-11 weeks; <a href=\"https://www.state.gov/update-on-passport-processing-times/\">last week, they added 2 weeks</a>; now estimating 10-13 weeks. If you’re planning to hit Europe this summer, you need to sprint down to Walgreens for that passport photo <em>right now</em>!</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send \'em along to like Nick and Rob did to comments@travelcommons.com -- you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or the Instagram account at travelcommons -- or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music -- <a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/cdk/48914\">In Peace (Somewhere Else Mix)</a> by cdk (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. Ft: Snowflake</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Still Overthinking Travel Planning</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Last summer, back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/08/18/podcast-188-my-top-tips-to-survive-travel-chaos/\">episode #188</a>, I talked about getting a great frequent flier deal on my Croatia-Italy flights, completely busting through the traditional 2¢/mile benchmark. It got me thinking that maybe the inflation in award redemption requirements hadn’t kept up with the real dollar cost increases for flights, and that I was shooting that gap to get a smokin’ deal. Well, when booking flights to go over to the Netherlands next month, I’m here to tell you -- that gap has snapped shut. I first started looking at KLM, the Dutch airline, and its SkyTeam partner Delta in hopes of a decent flight selection <em>and</em>, as importantly, I have a slug of Amex Membership Rewards points I’m looking to burn off, and KLM and Delta are transfer partners. But after a couple of hours of twisting our travel plans in knots around their flight matrices, the best I could get was ¾ of a cent/mile -- so those Amex points are still there. Next up, British Airways because they have a direct flight to LHR from Nashville, but I quickly ran into the same problem I always have with BA Avios points -- they don’t cover fuel surcharges and, for some reason, BA prices their fares low and slams a big fuel surcharge on top of it. I dunno why they do it -- maybe there’s a tax angle there somewhere. The final ticket price comes out the same as other carriers, but a flight booked with a similar amount of miles ends up requiring a huge cash payment, like 2-3 times what other carriers want. So the Avios points also stay put; maybe I’ll push them over to Iberia for a trip to Spain or Portugal next year. What started with a couple of numbers scrawled on a piece of paper quickly turned into a spreadsheet with columns for the different possible travel windows -- leaving on a Weds vs. a Thurs, returning on a Fri vs. Saturday -- 3 rows for each carrier, the first cell in the matrix the cost of buying the ticket straight out, the second cell split between miles and cash payment, the third cell the cents per mile calc -- is it worth burning the points or just buying the ticket. After all that, the best deal was on United at 1.54¢/mile -- a bit off 2¢/mile, but looking at valuation tables on <a href=\"https://thepointsguy.com/guide/monthly-valuations/\">The Points Guy</a>, <a href=\"https://www.bankrate.com/finance/credit-cards/points-and-miles-valuations/#airline-rewards\">Bankrate</a>, and <a href=\"https://frequentmiler.com/airline-miles-worth/\">Frequent Miler</a> websites, I could see it was a solid deal and booked it.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Although, I have to say that I paid more attention than usual to the United routings after reading a <a href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/21/travel/lufthansa-refunds-collect.html\">NY Times article</a> that long-time listener and contributor Chris Chufo sent me about the hassles people are having getting refunds or compensation from Lufthansa, United’s trans-Atlantic Star Alliance partner. Reading through the litany of complaints surprised me. I’ve flown Lufthansa <em>a lot</em> -- I feel I know their hub, Frankfurt Airport, better than any other European airport -- and I can’t recall any big issue I’ve had with their service. Indeed, back in 2013 when flying Lufthansa home from a family vacation, a weather delay in… <em>Amsterdam</em> caused us to miss our connection home from Frankfurt. I talked about it in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2013/09/06/podcast-106-summer-vacation-in-amsterdam-restaurant-trends/\">episode #106</a>; we had no problem getting hotel and food vouchers and getting re-booked on the next morning’s flight out. Great service, no arguments -- and we were flying on United miles. It was the complete opposite treatment we’d expect from, say, United. But that was then. This NY Times article quotes a German travel industry exec saying that Lufthansa got aggressive about swerving EU customer protection laws during COVID. Was this just their reaction to a pandemic-caused cash crunch? Or is it a new set point, cutting costs in customer service to fund lower fares to match up better with European budgeteers like Ryanair and WizzAir and Easyjet? I hope not. But still, when booking this trip to Amsterdam, I clicked through to the flight details to make sure I hadn’t booked a Lufthansa code-share, that I was flying on United metal. Which is quite the change; 10 years ago, it was the other way around; when I was looking for what I thought was much better Lufthansa service.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music --<a href=\"http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/35724\">Blue Like Venus</a> by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. Ft: Admiral Bob</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Nashville vs. Nash-Vegas</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As I mentioned at the start of <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/08/18/podcast-188-my-top-tips-to-survive-travel-chaos/\">episode #188</a>,&nbsp; in July we relocated the TravelCommons studio -- and the rest of our worldly belongings -- from Chicago to Nashville. After 25 years into my 4th tour of duty in Chicago, I&nbsp; wanted a change of scenery. And it definitely has been that -- moving from the <a href=\"https://worldpopulationreview.com/us-cities\">3rd most populous city in the US to the 20th</a>; from the 8th highest population density to the 178th most dense of the US’s top 200 cities. We joke that whenever we put an address into Google Maps, it could be completely on the other side of the city, but no matter how far away it looks, we’d hit the Directions button and be told it’s only a 15-minute drive. It took us 15 minutes just to get out of our neighborhood in Chicago.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>When we told friends our move plans, just about everyone replied, “Oh, we love Nashville. We look forward to visiting.” Once we got down here and started knocking around, we realized that what they were all talking about was “Nash-Vegas” -- the 5 blocks of honky tonks on Lower Broadway, the 3 blocks over to the Country Music Hall of Fame, the open-air party buses cruising the perimeter full of bachelorette partiers yelling out at every red light. It’s definitely something to be seen, and it brings a steady stream of tourists. I’m always amazed how full the Broadway sidewalks are at, say, 11:30am on a Tuesday. As you might’ve guessed, we’re not often on Broadway.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But that’s not to say the tourists have it completely wrong; Nashville <em>is</em> Music City with a capital “M”. If you fly in on Southwest or American, it starts with walking past live music at Tootsie’s as you walk up Concourse C. And then it just continues. Irene and I are convinced that there’s a law requiring any gathering of 10 or more people to have a stage with a live performer. The first couple of months we were down here, we hit all the area farmers’ markets we could find, and just about every one had a stage with a singer/songwriter and a guitar or a full-on band. Peak Nashville for us was when we were in line at a local hot chicken joint watching a guy with a guitar set up his gear and start to place just inside the entry door. It was like having live music at a McDonald’s. I was talking to a bartender at an East Nashville place called <a href=\"http://www.vinyltapnashville.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Vinyl Tap</a> -- a beer bar/vinyl record store/live music venue (of course). We got talking; he’d moved down from New York City to be a session trombone player. And that’s not an uncommon conversation. In New York and LA, bartenders are working between acting gigs. In Nashville, they’re musicians between sessions.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And so we’ve waded into the live music scene, much more than we did in Chicago. In January, we made the rounds of Monday night singer/songwriter open mic nights. Some were pretty informal - at a microbrewery, <a href=\"https://www.tnbrew.com/livemusic\" title=\"\">Tennessee Brew Works</a>, the MC put out a legal pad at 5pm for people to sign up and then took them in that order, each person doing 2 songs. At <a href=\"https://bluebirdcafe.com/how-to-play/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Bluebird Cafe</a>, very famous place, a bit more structure -- on-line sign-ups opened at 11am. That night, there were two lines to get in -- to the left of the front door, the folks who made it on the list, lined up to play their best song to the people who lined up to the right of the door, who showed up to listen. And everyone, listeners and signers, sat together in the audience. Irene and I ended up at a two-top right in front of the stage. On our left was a guy who drove in from Clarksville, TN to play and his wife. Behind us was a table full of Canadians including a woman from Quebec who sang in French, and a guy who’d flown in from Vancouver that morning just to play his song on that stage. And he wasn’t the only one; there were people on the stage who had driven in from Houston, Little Rock, Michigan, Nebraska…. I hadn’t realized how big a draw this music scene is.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Maybe 3 weeks ago, I saw a blurb on Twitter about <a href=\"https://thirdmanrecords.com/products/nashville-steel-guitar-arts-council-live-at-third-man-records\" title=\"\">a show</a> put on by the “Pedal Steel Guitar Arts Council.” Now that felt very Nashville. At $15/ticket, how could we go wrong? Plus, it was at the performance space at Jack White’s Third Man Records which had been on Irene’s list of places to check out. So, we went. Back to my bartender discussions, one thing I noticed early on going to shows in Nashville is how many working musicians there are here -- not hobbyists, not passion project people, but people whose main paying job is to play music -- session musicians, live backing musicians. And some of these smaller shows are session musicians getting up on stage with their friends to play, often to an audience of other friends and family. At this show, when the first steel guitar player hit the stage, a little girl behind us called out “Hey, grandpa!” It ended up being a very interesting show, one that immediately attacked the stereotype of pedal steel guitars as twangy country music instruments. Grandpa was followed by a father-and-son pedal steel-and-cello duo, who were followed by a guy doing pedal steel ambient music. Very interesting stuff, and stuff I’m not sure I’d see anywhere else.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Maybe it’s those Broadway honky tonk cover bands and the mainstream country music recording sessions that pay the bills, and so let’s these musicians play different (some might say “weird”) stuff on their own time. But if/when you get down to Nashville, spend an afternoon, a night on Lower Broadway -- because how can you say you’ve been here and <em>not</em> do that -- but save some time to check out the smaller places, the open mic nights. Make sure you see the Nashville music scene, not just the Nash-Vegas one.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #193</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>. And while you’re at TravelCommons.com, you can check out the show notes page for a transcript and any links I’ve mentioned. Or you can click on the link in this episode’s description in your podcast app to get to the show notes page.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_193.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #193 — Making the Most of Miles; Nashville vs Nash-Vegas','Weather delay bar tab got me rethinking the economics of airport lounge memberships. Continuing to plan travel but focusing on making the most of the miles we accumulated on credit cards during the pandemic. And comparing Nashville’s music scene: Nash-Vegas honky tonks vs the smaller, eclectic off-Broadway scene.','inherit','closed','closed','','4284-revision-v1','','','2026-01-28 10:51:53','2026-01-28 16:51:53','',4284,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4769',0,'revision','',0),
(4778,1,'2026-02-10 20:17:17','2026-02-11 02:17:17','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>In the <a href=\"https://staging.travelcommons.com/2024/05/23/podcast-200-wrapping-up-the-travelcommons-journey/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">last podcast episode</a>, I mentioned that I’ve found myself giving out a lot of travel recommendations recently. So rather than limiting them to a 2-barstool radius in my <a title=\"\" href=\"https://www.instagram.com/barriquebrewing/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">favorite</a> <a title=\"\" href=\"https://www.southerngristbrewing.com/nations\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Nashville</a> <a title=\"\" href=\"https://www.faitlaforcebrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">taprooms</a>, here are (in no particular order) the things I\'ve been recommending lately...</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Restaurants, Bars, and Taprooms</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong><em>Nashville</em></strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":20,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"none\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><img src=\"https://staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/IMG_7057-EDIT-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"A glass of hazy IPA in a rustic, red-painted wooden cupholder in a record store. The holder is mounted to a black bin of vinyl records with album art visible.\" class=\"wp-image-20\"/><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Album shopping in Vinyl Tap</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://www.vinyltapnashville.com/\" title=\"\">Vinyl Tap</a></strong> Talk to any Nashvillian who\'s lived here for more than five years and it won\'t take long \'til they start complaining about all the changes -- especially traffic and, if they live in East Nashville, gentrification. East Nashville is traveling the same path as Brooklyn, Chicago\'s Wicker Park, and Madrid\'s Malasaña neighborhoods. Escalating rents have forced many of the musicians who \"urban pioneered\" East Nashville to retreat north to Madison and Goodlettsville. But they\'ll reconvene at Vinyl Tap to support a friend\'s set. The guy next to you watching this band will more than likely be plugging in as the lead guitarist for the next. Vinyl Tap is a weird combination of craft beer bar, vinyl record store, and music venue; but they make all three work.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/barriquebrewing/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\"><strong>Barrique Brewing</strong></a> This is my favorite taproom in Nashville, though its focus on lagers and barrel-aged sours might not be for everyone. There\'s typically one IPA on tap, 3-4 different lagers (light, dark, smoked), a couple of British styles on beer engines, and a cooler full of sour bottles. It\'s in an industrial pocket on the redevelopment path between the Tennessee Titans\' new stadium and Oracle\'s new corporate headquarters. Don\'t sleep on this place \'cause it\'ll be plowed under in 3-4 years.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a title=\"\" href=\"https://www.tailornashville.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><strong>Tailor</strong></a> Owner Vivek Surti calls his food \"First Generation American Cuisine,\" built on his \"experience growing up here in middle Tennessee as a first-generation American of Indian descent\". Much more elegant than how I describe it to friends -- Hillbilly Indian. Tailor is a dinner party restaurant. There are two seatings during which every table is served the same dish at the same time, accompanied by Surti\'s explanations of what\'s in front of you. I\'ve eaten there three times and have yet to be disappointed.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong><em>Louisville</em></strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":21,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"none\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><img src=\"https://staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/IMG_4465-EDIT-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Barrels of bourbon whiskey at Angel Envy distillery in Louisville, KY\" class=\"wp-image-21\"/></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a title=\"\" href=\"https://www.angelsenvy.com/us/en/bourbon-distillery-tours-louisville/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Angel\'s Envy</a> </strong> You can\'t go to Kentucky without hitting a bourbon distillery, and this one is conveniently located in downtown Louisville. The tour takes you from mash deck to distilling columns to bottling line. But for me, the best part is the tasting that finishes the tour. Rather than just pouring out a couple of shots at a hightop, they seat the tour group in a barrel-lined tasting room, teach you how to properly taste whiskey, and then walk the group through a discussion about what everyone tastes and smells. Very educational... and great whiskey too!</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a title=\"\" href=\"https://610magnolia.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><strong>610 Magnolia</strong></a> Located in a little house in the Old Louisville neighborhood, 610 Magnolia is a great example of what I call \"comfortable fine dining\" -- a warm, cozy dining room; friendly (but not overly familiar) wait staff; a wine list with a nice range of price points; and, of course, imaginative and well-executed food.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong><em>Chattanooga</em></strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.callioperestaurant.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\"><strong>Calliope</strong></a> Helmed by a Jordanian chef in a not-so-great neighborhood, it\'s Middle Eastern food using local, Southern ingredients. And any place that puts lamb neck on their menu will get me in the door. It was excellent, and when they put the whole, head-on red snapper on our table so I could dig out the fish cheeks and collar meat, I was sold. They also have a fun wine list with bottles from Lebanon, Georgia (the country, not the state), Armenia, and Cyprus, as well as usual suspects (France, California).</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.elsiesdaughters.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\"><strong>Elsie\'s Daughter</strong></a> And any menu that lists a bone marrow tartine will also my attention. Cozy bar; interesting drinks; tight menu. Good place for a night cap and a late-night bite.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a title=\"\" href=\"https://niedlovs.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><strong>Niedlov\'s Cafe &amp; Bakery</strong></a> Popular place for breakfast with a nice selection of pastries and breakfast sandwiches. Pick up a loaf of their daily special bread on your way out.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong><em>Memphis</em></strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a title=\"\" href=\"https://www.gusfriedchicken.com/locations/downtown-memphis\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><strong>Gus\'s Fried Chicken</strong></a> While asking a group of Memphians their favorite barbecue joint is still the best way to start an argument, there\'s no disagreement about the best fried chicken. This is the place for lunch after a walk through <a title=\"\" href=\"https://www.tomleepark.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Tom Lee Park</a> along the bank of the Mississippi River.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a title=\"\" href=\"https://wiseacrebrew.com/brewery\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><strong>Wiseacre Brewing - Downtown</strong></a> I haven\'t been too excited by the Wiseacre beers that make it up to Nashville, so this taproom wasn\'t high on my list. But it was a couple of blocks over from the <a title=\"\" href=\"https://www.civilrightsmuseum.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">National Civil Rights Museum</a>, so we walked over. And were glad we did. There\'s a broad range of well-executed beers, nice bright space, friendly bar staff, and a good pizza kitchen.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Oaxaca (Oaxaca de Juárez)</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":17,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"none\",\"align\":\"right\",\"className\":\"is-style-default\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium is-style-default\"><img src=\"https://staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/B017DED6-2FDB-4305-986C-5FF4AEFA0D9D-scaled-1-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-17\"/></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>As I talked about in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2024/04/11/podcast-199-smile-for-security-facial-recognition-in-travel/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">episode #199</a>, I\'ve always been a bit \"ehh\" about Mexico. I’ve done “resort-y” Mexico — Cabo, Cancún, Puerto Vallarta — and am not a big fan. It just feels like LA or Houston with a better selection of tequila. But <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oaxaca_City\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Oaxaca</a> is different. We were there for a week at the start of March. For me, it\'s a good fit — interesting food, lots of culture, a mezcal scene to dig into, and no beach. And it\'s not overrun with tourists.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Areas</strong> - We stayed in the Jalatlaco neighborhood and then moved further west into the main part of town, north of the Zócalo. Both neighborhoods were cool. We could walk to a number of bars and restaurants, and never felt unsafe.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Restaurants</strong> - Best high-end restaurant - <a title=\"\" href=\"https://www.casaoaxacaelrestaurante.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Casa Oaxaca</a>; best street food - <a title=\"\" href=\"https://maps.app.goo.gl/rxXVHGpDF1k86GQ48\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Pasillo de Humo</a>. This city is about food. There are a lot of great restaurants.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Mezcal</strong> - The state of Oaxaca (of which Oaxaca City is the capital) makes <a title=\"\" href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mezcal#Production\">80-90% of the mezcal in Mexico</a>, so you should tuck into it. A typical bar\'s mezcal menu can be overwhelming, so invest in a bit of education. The bartender at <a title=\"\" href=\"https://mezcalspeakeasy.com/\">Sobrio by Mezcal Speakeasy</a> patiently walked us through a vertical tasting; same type of agave, three different distillation techniques. <a title=\"\" href=\"https://mezcaloteca.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">La Mezcaloteca</a> was a reservation-only hour-long educational tasting. And unlike in the US, none of the Oaxaca mezcals I drank were smoky.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Book</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":19,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"none\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><img src=\"https://staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/71fvjFWkLqL._SL1200_-200x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-19\"/></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3X1xyC9\" title=\"\"><em>The Picnic: A Rush for Freedom and the Collapse of Communism</em></a> by Matthew Longo is one of the best books I\'ve read this year so far.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>My first and last trips to Hungary bookend Longo\'s story. My first visit was in the spring of 1989. It was before the main events of <em>The Picnic</em>, but I could feel the tension of change building. My last visit was the autumn of 2019, around the time of the 30th anniversary activities of Pan European Picnic and the fall of the Communist regime. By then, the public\'s mood had pivoted -- from excitement and fear of political change to disappointment and cynicism as to what that change had actually delivered. With this background, I looked forward to reading <em>The Picnic</em>.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>And it didn\'t disappoint. The book is, at its core, a range of oral histories -- from the then-Hungarian Prime Minister trying to reform the country without sparking a re-run of the 1956 Soviet invasion, to the Hungarian dissidents who organized the picnic, to a number of East German families who breached the Austrian-Hungarian border during and immediately after the picnic. These stories make the book a compelling read. It moves quickly; pulling the reader into the building risk and the subsequent let-down felt by all the participants.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I give Longo a lot of credit for not getting in the way of these folks telling their stories; letting their own words stand without surrounding them with his own commentary. As a professor of politics at Leiden University, Longo has a definite point of view -- and he does the right thing by keeping it to the Prologue and the Epilogue; less than 20 pages.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Highly recommended if you\'re interested in modern European history.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Things I\'m Recommending Right Now (Summer 2024)','Here are the travel and food recommendations I\'ve been giving for quick trips to Nashville, Louisville, and Memphis... and a longer one to Oaxaca','inherit','closed','closed','','4760-revision-v1','','','2026-02-10 20:17:17','2026-02-11 02:17:17','',4760,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4778',0,'revision','',0),
(4779,1,'2026-02-10 20:52:51','2026-02-11 02:52:51','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Coming to you from the TravelCommons <em>desk</em> in Nashville, TN, almost two years since wrapping up the podcast with <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2024/05/23/podcast-200-wrapping-up-the-travelcommons-journey/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Podcast #200 — Wrapping Up the TravelCommons Journey\">episode #200</a>. In those parting comments, I said that if there was a next iteration of TravelCommons, it would probably be written — a blog rather than a podcast.  </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>And so here it is, words without the voice.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>The New Tagline</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I also said in my sign-off that the focus of NextGen TravelCommons would shift a bit, tweaking the tagline from “<em>more</em> about the journey than the destination” to “<em>as much</em> about the journey as the destination.” Because as I finally accept reality and drop the “semi-” modifier from my “retired” status, the destination now matters.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>When I was traveling for work, the destination was a means to the end — some place I had to physically get to so I could do what mattered -- the meeting, the sales call, the presentation. But now that I don’t have anything to sell or present, it’s the destinations that matter. And I get to choose them; places I actually want to be in — to experience them; to enjoy them.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>What “Retirement Travel” Really Means</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>What first comes to mind is what retirement travel <em>isn’t</em>. It doesn’t mean unlimited budget (at least not for me) or completely ignoring the journey — the logistics and the mechanics of getting to the destination. Without the shield of the corporate travel budget — other people’s money to buy my way out of a jam — getting the logistics right is even more important than before.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Instead, I’m learning to leave behind those travel habits I’d built around constraints that no longer exist. I’m no longer travelling to hit other people’s schedules — having to do what I called in the podcast <em>stupid travel</em>; itineraries like Chicago on Monday, Toronto on Tuesday, London on Wednesday, Zurich on Thursday, landing back in Chicago at Friday midnight — so I could minimize the time away from home and family. And smacking the alarm at 0 Dark 30 is now a rare exception rather than the bleary-eyed rule.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Running on my own calendar gives me the flexibility to optimize for serendipity — though that doesn’t feel like something you can actually do, plan for a happy accident.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Flying up to Maine for Christmas, we booked our usual Southwest itinerary through Baltimore (BWI). Weather was great for mid-December; everything was fine in Nashville, Baltimore, and Portland, and everywhere in between. So why was boarding delayed? My travel senses twitched. Eventually they announced what I expected — the plane was broken. The part to fix it wouldn’t show up until after lunch. No problem, they said. They’d put us on the next flight to BWI… but we’d miss our connection to Portland. Not to worry, though; they’ll put us on the next Portland flight, leaving us with a nice, leisurely eight-hour connection in BWI.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Where’s the happy accident here?&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4796,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/IMG_0053-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/IMG_0053-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-4796\"/></a></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Before we boarded our new BNA-BWI flight, we texted friends in Annapolis. They were parked curbside when we walked out of BWI. Saved from walking multiple iterations of the <a href=\"https://bwiairport.com/at-bwi/things-to-do/fitness/cardio-trail/\">BWI Cardio Trail</a>, we had time for a much less healthy crabcake lunch seven minutes away at <a href=\"https://gandmcrabcakes.com/\">G&amp;M Restaurant </a>and then beers at <a href=\"https://www.guinnessbrewerybaltimore.com/\">Guinness’ Open Gate Brewery</a>. Two weeks earlier, we’d said to each other “When are we going to get together again?” Serendipity — and Southwest Airlines — made it happen sooner than any of us expected.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Leaning Into Flexibility</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Back in July, I was trying to plan a family trip to Hungary while also fitting in a trip to Michigan for a friend’s wedding. I knew our Hungary itinerary would need two stops -- from Nashville to a US gateway hub and then from a European hub to Budapest (BUD) -- and couldn’t figure out how to squeeze in both the Michigan up-and-back and the double-hop to BUD.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Then the epiphany hit: my old travel reflexes still wanted to book stupid itineraries.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4785,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/IMG_9291-EDIT-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/IMG_9291-EDIT-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Detroit-style pizza on a white plate with the right-center piece missing\" class=\"wp-image-4785\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Detroit-style pizza from Loui’s Pizza</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Now that I own my own calendar, I don’t have to do that. Instead, we flew up to Detroit (DTW) for the wedding, spent what was effectively a four-day layover visiting friends and searching southeast Michigan for the best Detroit-style pizza (our vote - Loui\'s Pizza in Hazel Park). After that, we then flew out of DTW, a Delta/SkyTeam international gateway, to Amsterdam (AMS) for a quick hop to BUD.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>What seemed hard was actually easy once my old road warrior id gave way to my new reality of retirement.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>What To Expect Going Forward</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I’m not quite sure yet, which long-time TravelCommons listeners will not find unexpected. I\'m still thinking way too much about travel; just trying out some different ways to talk about it. Here\'s how I\'m thinking it\'ll go:</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>More About Destinations:</strong>&nbsp; I’ve done a bit of this in the past —blog posts about trips to Santa Fe and Tucson, podcasts about trips to Holland’s tulip festival, Italy, and Louisville. I’ll do more of that, skipping the Top 10 lists (which Google and OpenAI can do better than me), keeping the \"here\'s what mattered, what surprised me, and what I’d recommend to you if we were sitting together at a bar” flavor. Stories in the pending queue: a Gulf Coast Mardi Gras road trip, a bike tour through Albania, and Thanksgiving in Mexico City.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Trip Mechanics that Matter:</strong> Long-time listeners may (justifiably) be thinking “What else can you say now that the TSA is finally enforcing Real ID.” Very fair. But now I’m less interested in road warrior skills, like how to most efficiently navigate O’Hare, and more interested in the stuff that can sneak up on regular travelers, like how to navigate the growing thicket of electronic travel authorizations (ESTA, ETA, ETIAS).</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Honest Recommendations</strong>: If I recommend a place, it\'s because I\'ve been there and would go back, and think that you should too. Not because they sponsored the post or because it showed up on some \"Top 10\" list.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>It’s All My Words:</strong> No sponsored posts. No AI-generated posts. For better or (mostly) for worse, I will have written everything you read here.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>You can find all this here on <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com\">TravelCommons.com</a>, on the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/feed/\" title=\"\">RSS feed</a> if you’re enough of a propeller-head to figure out apps like Feedly, or <a href=\"https://travelcommons.substack.com/\" title=\"\">subscribe to the newsletter</a> on Substack. I’m aiming for a twice-a-month rhythm, but we’ll see. I might still throw in some audio now and again, but my focus will be on the written.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><br>In the meantime, if you\'ve got questions about a place I\'ve been or topics you\'d like me to dig into, let me know — in the comments below, by email at <a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a>, or ping me at @mpeacock on X/Twitter or @travelcommons on Instagram.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','TravelCommons Redux —  Same Suitcase, Different Traveler','After wrapping up the podcast with Episode #200, TravelCommons is back — in writing this time. With retirement replacing road warrior life, Mark will balance destination stories with advice about trip logistics that actually matters. He leans into serendipity, shares examples from Maine and Hungary trip planning, and lays out his future plans for the blog.','publish','closed','closed','','travelcommons-redux-same-suitcase-different-traveler','','','2026-04-14 09:17:43','2026-04-14 15:17:43','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4779',0,'post','',3),
(4781,1,'2026-02-10 20:33:08','2026-02-11 02:33:08','A well-worn carry-on suitcase sitting upright beside a small café table outdoors, morning light, European cobblestone street, a half-drunk espresso and an open notebook on the table, empty chair, warm golden tones, slightly cinematic, no people, no text','ChatGPT Image Feb 10, 2026, 08_32_30 PM','','inherit','open','closed','','chatgpt-image-feb-10-2026-08_32_30-pm','','','2026-02-10 20:35:46','2026-02-11 02:35:46','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/ChatGPT-Image-Feb-10-2026-08_32_30-PM.png',0,'attachment','image/png',0),
(4782,1,'2026-02-10 20:52:42','2026-02-11 02:52:42','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Coming to you from the TravelCommons <em>desk</em> in Nashville, TN, almost two years since wrapping up the podcast with <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2024/05/23/podcast-200-wrapping-up-the-travelcommons-journey/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Podcast #200 — Wrapping Up the TravelCommons Journey\">episode #200</a>. In those parting comments, I said that if there was a next iteration of TravelCommons, it would probably be written — a blog rather than a podcast.  </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>And so here it is, words without the voice.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>The New Tagline</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I also said in my sign-off that the focus of NextGen TravelCommons would shift a bit, tweaking the tagline from “<em>more</em> about the journey than the destination” to “<em>as much</em> about the journey as the destination.” Because as I finally accept reality and drop the “semi-” modifier from my “retired” status, the destination now matters.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>When I was travelling for work, the destination was a means to the end — some place I had to physically get to so I could do what mattered -- the meeting, the sales call, the presentation. But now that I don’t have anything to sell or present, it’s the destinations that matter. And I get to choose them; places I actually want to be in — to experience them; to enjoy them.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>What “Retirement Travel” Really Means</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>What first comes to mind is what retirement travel <em>isn’t</em>. It doesn’t mean unlimited budget (at least not for me) or completely ignoring the journey — the logistics and the mechanics of getting to the destination. Without the shield of the corporate travel budget — other people’s money to buy my way out of a jam — getting the logistics right is even more important than before. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Instead, I’m learning to leave behind those travel habits I’d built around constraints that no longer exist. I’m no longer travelling to hit other people’s schedules — having to do what I called in the podcast <em>stupid travel</em>; itineraries like Chicago on Monday, Toronto on Tuesday, London on Wednesday, Zurich on Thursday, landing back in Chicago at Friday midnight — so I could minimize the time away from home and family. And smacking the alarm at 0 Dark 30 is now a rare exception rather than the bleary-eyed rule.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Running on my own calendar gives me the flexibility to optimize for serendipity — though that doesn’t feel like something you can actually do, plan for a happy accident. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Flying up to Maine for Christmas, we booked our usual Southwest itinerary through Baltimore (BWI). Weather was great for mid-December; everything was fine in Nashville, Baltimore, and Portland, and everywhere in between. So why was boarding delayed? My travel senses twitched. Eventually they announced what I expected — the plane was broken. The part to fix it wouldn’t show up until after lunch. No problem, they said. They’d put us on the next flight to BWI… but we’d miss our connection to Portland. Not to worry, though; they’ll put us on the next Portland flight, leaving us with a nice, leisurely eight-hour connection in BWI. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Where’s the happy accident here? </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Before we boarded our new BNA-BWI flight, we texted friends in Annapolis. They were parked curbside when we walked out of BWI. Saved from walking multiple iterations of the <a href=\"https://bwiairport.com/at-bwi/things-to-do/fitness/cardio-trail/\">BWI Cardio Trail</a>, we had time for a much less healthy crabcake lunch seven minutes away at <a href=\"https://gandmcrabcakes.com/\">G&amp;M Restaurant </a>and then beers at <a href=\"https://www.guinnessbrewerybaltimore.com/\">Guinness’ Open Gate Brewery</a>. Two weeks earlier, we’d said to each other “When are we going to get together again?” Serendipity — and Southwest Airlines — made it happen sooner than any of us expected.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Leaning Into Flexibility</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Back in July, I was trying to plan a family trip to Hungary while also fitting in a trip to Michigan for a friend’s wedding. I knew our Hungary itinerary would need two stops -- from Nashville to a US gateway hub and then from a European hub to Budapest (BUD) -- and couldn’t figure out how to squeeze in both the Michigan up-and-back and the double-hop to BUD.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Then the epiphany hit: my old travel reflexes still wanted to book stupid itineraries.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Now that I own my own calendar, I don’t have to do that. Instead, we flew up to Detroit (DTW) for the wedding, spent what was effectively a four-day layover visiting friends and searching southeast Michigan for the best Detroit-style pizza. After that, we then flew out of DTW, a Delta/SkyTeam international gateway, to Amsterdam (AMS) for a quick hop to BUD.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>What seemed hard was actually easy once my old road warrior id gave way to my new reality of retirement.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>What To Expect Going Forward</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I’m not quite sure yet, which long-time TravelCommons listeners will not find unexpected. I\'m still thinking way too much about travel; just trying out some different ways to talk about it. Here\'s how I\'m thinking it\'ll go:</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>More About Destinations:</strong>  I’ve done a bit of this in the past —blog posts about trips to Santa Fe and Tucson, podcasts about trips to Holland’s tulip festival, Italy, and Louisville. I’ll do more of that, skipping the Top 10 lists (which Google and OpenAI can do better than me), keeping the \"here\'s what mattered, what surprised me, and what I’d recommend to you if we were sitting together at a bar” flavor. Stories in the pending queue: a Gulf Coast Mardi Gras road trip, a bike tour through Albania, and Thanksgiving in Mexico City.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Trip Mechanics that Matter:</strong> Long-time listeners may (justifiably) be thinking “What else can you say now that the TSA is finally enforcing Real ID.” Very fair. But now I’m less interested in road warrior skills, like how to most efficiently navigate O’Hare, and more interested in the stuff that can sneak up on regular travelers, like how to navigate the growing thicket of electronic travel authorizations (ESTA, ETA, ETIAS).</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Honest Recommendations</strong>: If I recommend a place, it\'s because I\'ve been there and would go back, and think that you should too. Not because they sponsored the post or because it showed up on some \"Top 10\" list.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>It’s All My Words:</strong> No sponsored posts. No AI-generated posts. For better or (mostly) for worse, I will have written everything you read here.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>You can find all this here on <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com\">TravelCommons.com</a>, on the RSS feed if you’re enough of a propeller-head to figure out apps like Feedly, or subscribe to the newsletter on Substack. I’m aiming for a twice-a-month rhythm, but we’ll see. I might still throw in some audio now and again, but my focus will be on the written.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><br>In the meantime, if you\'ve got questions about a place I\'ve been or topics you\'d like me to dig into, let me know — in the comments below, by email at <a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a>, or ping me at @mpeacock on X/Twitter or @travelcommons on Instagram.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','TravelCommons Redux —  Same Suitcase, Different Traveler','After wrapping up the podcast after 200 episodes, TravelCommons is back — in writing this time. With retirement replacing road warrior life, Mark will balance destination stories with advice about trip logistics that actually matters. He leans into serendipity, shares examples from Maine and Hungary trip planning, and lays out his future plans for the blog.','inherit','closed','closed','','4779-revision-v1','','','2026-02-10 20:52:42','2026-02-11 02:52:42','',4779,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4782',0,'revision','',0),
(4784,1,'2026-02-10 21:20:16','2026-02-11 03:20:16','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Coming to you from the TravelCommons <em>desk</em> in Nashville, TN, almost two years since wrapping up the podcast with <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2024/05/23/podcast-200-wrapping-up-the-travelcommons-journey/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Podcast #200 — Wrapping Up the TravelCommons Journey\">episode #200</a>. In those parting comments, I said that if there was a next iteration of TravelCommons, it would probably be written — a blog rather than a podcast.  </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>And so here it is, words without the voice.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>The New Tagline</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I also said in my sign-off that the focus of NextGen TravelCommons would shift a bit, tweaking the tagline from “<em>more</em> about the journey than the destination” to “<em>as much</em> about the journey as the destination.” Because as I finally accept reality and drop the “semi-” modifier from my “retired” status, the destination now matters.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>When I was traveling for work, the destination was a means to the end — some place I had to physically get to so I could do what mattered -- the meeting, the sales call, the presentation. But now that I don’t have anything to sell or present, it’s the destinations that matter. And I get to choose them; places I actually want to be in — to experience them; to enjoy them.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>What “Retirement Travel” Really Means</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>What first comes to mind is what retirement travel <em>isn’t</em>. It doesn’t mean unlimited budget (at least not for me) or completely ignoring the journey — the logistics and the mechanics of getting to the destination. Without the shield of the corporate travel budget — other people’s money to buy my way out of a jam — getting the logistics right is even more important than before. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Instead, I’m learning to leave behind those travel habits I’d built around constraints that no longer exist. I’m no longer travelling to hit other people’s schedules — having to do what I called in the podcast <em>stupid travel</em>; itineraries like Chicago on Monday, Toronto on Tuesday, London on Wednesday, Zurich on Thursday, landing back in Chicago at Friday midnight — so I could minimize the time away from home and family. And smacking the alarm at 0 Dark 30 is now a rare exception rather than the bleary-eyed rule.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Running on my own calendar gives me the flexibility to optimize for serendipity — though that doesn’t feel like something you can actually do, plan for a happy accident. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Flying up to Maine for Christmas, we booked our usual Southwest itinerary through Baltimore (BWI). Weather was great for mid-December; everything was fine in Nashville, Baltimore, and Portland, and everywhere in between. So why was boarding delayed? My travel senses twitched. Eventually they announced what I expected — the plane was broken. The part to fix it wouldn’t show up until after lunch. No problem, they said. They’d put us on the next flight to BWI… but we’d miss our connection to Portland. Not to worry, though; they’ll put us on the next Portland flight, leaving us with a nice, leisurely eight-hour connection in BWI. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Where’s the happy accident here? </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Before we boarded our new BNA-BWI flight, we texted friends in Annapolis. They were parked curbside when we walked out of BWI. Saved from walking multiple iterations of the <a href=\"https://bwiairport.com/at-bwi/things-to-do/fitness/cardio-trail/\">BWI Cardio Trail</a>, we had time for a much less healthy crabcake lunch seven minutes away at <a href=\"https://gandmcrabcakes.com/\">G&amp;M Restaurant </a>and then beers at <a href=\"https://www.guinnessbrewerybaltimore.com/\">Guinness’ Open Gate Brewery</a>. Two weeks earlier, we’d said to each other “When are we going to get together again?” Serendipity — and Southwest Airlines — made it happen sooner than any of us expected.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Leaning Into Flexibility</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Back in July, I was trying to plan a family trip to Hungary while also fitting in a trip to Michigan for a friend’s wedding. I knew our Hungary itinerary would need two stops -- from Nashville to a US gateway hub and then from a European hub to Budapest (BUD) -- and couldn’t figure out how to squeeze in both the Michigan up-and-back and the double-hop to BUD.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Then the epiphany hit: my old travel reflexes still wanted to book stupid itineraries.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Now that I own my own calendar, I don’t have to do that. Instead, we flew up to Detroit (DTW) for the wedding, spent what was effectively a four-day layover visiting friends and searching southeast Michigan for the best Detroit-style pizza. After that, we then flew out of DTW, a Delta/SkyTeam international gateway, to Amsterdam (AMS) for a quick hop to BUD.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>What seemed hard was actually easy once my old road warrior id gave way to my new reality of retirement.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>What To Expect Going Forward</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I’m not quite sure yet, which long-time TravelCommons listeners will not find unexpected. I\'m still thinking way too much about travel; just trying out some different ways to talk about it. Here\'s how I\'m thinking it\'ll go:</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>More About Destinations:</strong>  I’ve done a bit of this in the past —blog posts about trips to Santa Fe and Tucson, podcasts about trips to Holland’s tulip festival, Italy, and Louisville. I’ll do more of that, skipping the Top 10 lists (which Google and OpenAI can do better than me), keeping the \"here\'s what mattered, what surprised me, and what I’d recommend to you if we were sitting together at a bar” flavor. Stories in the pending queue: a Gulf Coast Mardi Gras road trip, a bike tour through Albania, and Thanksgiving in Mexico City.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Trip Mechanics that Matter:</strong> Long-time listeners may (justifiably) be thinking “What else can you say now that the TSA is finally enforcing Real ID.” Very fair. But now I’m less interested in road warrior skills, like how to most efficiently navigate O’Hare, and more interested in the stuff that can sneak up on regular travelers, like how to navigate the growing thicket of electronic travel authorizations (ESTA, ETA, ETIAS).</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Honest Recommendations</strong>: If I recommend a place, it\'s because I\'ve been there and would go back, and think that you should too. Not because they sponsored the post or because it showed up on some \"Top 10\" list.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>It’s All My Words:</strong> No sponsored posts. No AI-generated posts. For better or (mostly) for worse, I will have written everything you read here.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>You can find all this here on <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com\">TravelCommons.com</a>, on the RSS feed if you’re enough of a propeller-head to figure out apps like Feedly, or subscribe to the newsletter on Substack. I’m aiming for a twice-a-month rhythm, but we’ll see. I might still throw in some audio now and again, but my focus will be on the written.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><br>In the meantime, if you\'ve got questions about a place I\'ve been or topics you\'d like me to dig into, let me know — in the comments below, by email at <a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a>, or ping me at @mpeacock on X/Twitter or @travelcommons on Instagram.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','TravelCommons Redux —  Same Suitcase, Different Traveler','After wrapping up the podcast after 200 episodes, TravelCommons is back — in writing this time. With retirement replacing road warrior life, Mark will balance destination stories with advice about trip logistics that actually matters. He leans into serendipity, shares examples from Maine and Hungary trip planning, and lays out his future plans for the blog.','inherit','closed','closed','','4779-revision-v1','','','2026-02-10 21:20:16','2026-02-11 03:20:16','',4779,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4784',0,'revision','',0),
(4785,1,'2026-02-11 18:38:33','2026-02-12 00:38:33','','IMG_9291-EDIT','Detroit-style pizza from Loui\'s Pizza','inherit','open','closed','','img_9291-edit','','','2026-02-11 18:43:04','2026-02-12 00:43:04','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/IMG_9291-EDIT.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(4787,1,'2026-02-11 18:44:20','2026-02-12 00:44:20','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Coming to you from the TravelCommons <em>desk</em> in Nashville, TN, almost two years since wrapping up the podcast with <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2024/05/23/podcast-200-wrapping-up-the-travelcommons-journey/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Podcast #200 — Wrapping Up the TravelCommons Journey\">episode #200</a>. In those parting comments, I said that if there was a next iteration of TravelCommons, it would probably be written — a blog rather than a podcast.  </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>And so here it is, words without the voice.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>The New Tagline</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I also said in my sign-off that the focus of NextGen TravelCommons would shift a bit, tweaking the tagline from “<em>more</em> about the journey than the destination” to “<em>as much</em> about the journey as the destination.” Because as I finally accept reality and drop the “semi-” modifier from my “retired” status, the destination now matters.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>When I was traveling for work, the destination was a means to the end — some place I had to physically get to so I could do what mattered -- the meeting, the sales call, the presentation. But now that I don’t have anything to sell or present, it’s the destinations that matter. And I get to choose them; places I actually want to be in — to experience them; to enjoy them.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>What “Retirement Travel” Really Means</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>What first comes to mind is what retirement travel <em>isn’t</em>. It doesn’t mean unlimited budget (at least not for me) or completely ignoring the journey — the logistics and the mechanics of getting to the destination. Without the shield of the corporate travel budget — other people’s money to buy my way out of a jam — getting the logistics right is even more important than before.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Instead, I’m learning to leave behind those travel habits I’d built around constraints that no longer exist. I’m no longer travelling to hit other people’s schedules — having to do what I called in the podcast <em>stupid travel</em>; itineraries like Chicago on Monday, Toronto on Tuesday, London on Wednesday, Zurich on Thursday, landing back in Chicago at Friday midnight — so I could minimize the time away from home and family. And smacking the alarm at 0 Dark 30 is now a rare exception rather than the bleary-eyed rule.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Running on my own calendar gives me the flexibility to optimize for serendipity — though that doesn’t feel like something you can actually do, plan for a happy accident.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Flying up to Maine for Christmas, we booked our usual Southwest itinerary through Baltimore (BWI). Weather was great for mid-December; everything was fine in Nashville, Baltimore, and Portland, and everywhere in between. So why was boarding delayed? My travel senses twitched. Eventually they announced what I expected — the plane was broken. The part to fix it wouldn’t show up until after lunch. No problem, they said. They’d put us on the next flight to BWI… but we’d miss our connection to Portland. Not to worry, though; they’ll put us on the next Portland flight, leaving us with a nice, leisurely eight-hour connection in BWI.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Where’s the happy accident here?&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Before we boarded our new BNA-BWI flight, we texted friends in Annapolis. They were parked curbside when we walked out of BWI. Saved from walking multiple iterations of the <a href=\"https://bwiairport.com/at-bwi/things-to-do/fitness/cardio-trail/\">BWI Cardio Trail</a>, we had time for a much less healthy crabcake lunch seven minutes away at <a href=\"https://gandmcrabcakes.com/\">G&amp;M Restaurant </a>and then beers at <a href=\"https://www.guinnessbrewerybaltimore.com/\">Guinness’ Open Gate Brewery</a>. Two weeks earlier, we’d said to each other “When are we going to get together again?” Serendipity — and Southwest Airlines — made it happen sooner than any of us expected.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Leaning Into Flexibility</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Back in July, I was trying to plan a family trip to Hungary while also fitting in a trip to Michigan for a friend’s wedding. I knew our Hungary itinerary would need two stops -- from Nashville to a US gateway hub and then from a European hub to Budapest (BUD) -- and couldn’t figure out how to squeeze in both the Michigan up-and-back and the double-hop to BUD.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Then the epiphany hit: my old travel reflexes still wanted to book stupid itineraries.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4785,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/IMG_9291-EDIT-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/IMG_9291-EDIT-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Detroit-style pizza on a white plate with the right-center piece missing\" class=\"wp-image-4785\"/></a></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Now that I own my own calendar, I don’t have to do that. Instead, we flew up to Detroit (DTW) for the wedding, spent what was effectively a four-day layover visiting friends and searching southeast Michigan for the best Detroit-style pizza (our vote - Loui\'s Pizza in Hazel Park). After that, we then flew out of DTW, a Delta/SkyTeam international gateway, to Amsterdam (AMS) for a quick hop to BUD. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>What seemed hard was actually easy once my old road warrior id gave way to my new reality of retirement.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>What To Expect Going Forward</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I’m not quite sure yet, which long-time TravelCommons listeners will not find unexpected. I\'m still thinking way too much about travel; just trying out some different ways to talk about it. Here\'s how I\'m thinking it\'ll go:</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>More About Destinations:</strong>&nbsp; I’ve done a bit of this in the past —blog posts about trips to Santa Fe and Tucson, podcasts about trips to Holland’s tulip festival, Italy, and Louisville. I’ll do more of that, skipping the Top 10 lists (which Google and OpenAI can do better than me), keeping the \"here\'s what mattered, what surprised me, and what I’d recommend to you if we were sitting together at a bar” flavor. Stories in the pending queue: a Gulf Coast Mardi Gras road trip, a bike tour through Albania, and Thanksgiving in Mexico City.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Trip Mechanics that Matter:</strong> Long-time listeners may (justifiably) be thinking “What else can you say now that the TSA is finally enforcing Real ID.” Very fair. But now I’m less interested in road warrior skills, like how to most efficiently navigate O’Hare, and more interested in the stuff that can sneak up on regular travelers, like how to navigate the growing thicket of electronic travel authorizations (ESTA, ETA, ETIAS).</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Honest Recommendations</strong>: If I recommend a place, it\'s because I\'ve been there and would go back, and think that you should too. Not because they sponsored the post or because it showed up on some \"Top 10\" list.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>It’s All My Words:</strong> No sponsored posts. No AI-generated posts. For better or (mostly) for worse, I will have written everything you read here.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>You can find all this here on <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com\">TravelCommons.com</a>, on the RSS feed if you’re enough of a propeller-head to figure out apps like Feedly, or subscribe to the newsletter on Substack. I’m aiming for a twice-a-month rhythm, but we’ll see. I might still throw in some audio now and again, but my focus will be on the written.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><br>In the meantime, if you\'ve got questions about a place I\'ve been or topics you\'d like me to dig into, let me know — in the comments below, by email at <a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a>, or ping me at @mpeacock on X/Twitter or @travelcommons on Instagram.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','TravelCommons Redux —  Same Suitcase, Different Traveler','After wrapping up the podcast after 200 episodes, TravelCommons is back — in writing this time. With retirement replacing road warrior life, Mark will balance destination stories with advice about trip logistics that actually matters. He leans into serendipity, shares examples from Maine and Hungary trip planning, and lays out his future plans for the blog.','inherit','closed','closed','','4779-revision-v1','','','2026-02-11 18:44:20','2026-02-12 00:44:20','',4779,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4787',0,'revision','',0),
(4788,1,'2026-02-11 18:45:10','2026-02-12 00:45:10','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Coming to you from the TravelCommons <em>desk</em> in Nashville, TN, almost two years since wrapping up the podcast with <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2024/05/23/podcast-200-wrapping-up-the-travelcommons-journey/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Podcast #200 — Wrapping Up the TravelCommons Journey\">episode #200</a>. In those parting comments, I said that if there was a next iteration of TravelCommons, it would probably be written — a blog rather than a podcast.  </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>And so here it is, words without the voice.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>The New Tagline</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I also said in my sign-off that the focus of NextGen TravelCommons would shift a bit, tweaking the tagline from “<em>more</em> about the journey than the destination” to “<em>as much</em> about the journey as the destination.” Because as I finally accept reality and drop the “semi-” modifier from my “retired” status, the destination now matters.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>When I was traveling for work, the destination was a means to the end — some place I had to physically get to so I could do what mattered -- the meeting, the sales call, the presentation. But now that I don’t have anything to sell or present, it’s the destinations that matter. And I get to choose them; places I actually want to be in — to experience them; to enjoy them.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>What “Retirement Travel” Really Means</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>What first comes to mind is what retirement travel <em>isn’t</em>. It doesn’t mean unlimited budget (at least not for me) or completely ignoring the journey — the logistics and the mechanics of getting to the destination. Without the shield of the corporate travel budget — other people’s money to buy my way out of a jam — getting the logistics right is even more important than before.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Instead, I’m learning to leave behind those travel habits I’d built around constraints that no longer exist. I’m no longer travelling to hit other people’s schedules — having to do what I called in the podcast <em>stupid travel</em>; itineraries like Chicago on Monday, Toronto on Tuesday, London on Wednesday, Zurich on Thursday, landing back in Chicago at Friday midnight — so I could minimize the time away from home and family. And smacking the alarm at 0 Dark 30 is now a rare exception rather than the bleary-eyed rule.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Running on my own calendar gives me the flexibility to optimize for serendipity — though that doesn’t feel like something you can actually do, plan for a happy accident.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Flying up to Maine for Christmas, we booked our usual Southwest itinerary through Baltimore (BWI). Weather was great for mid-December; everything was fine in Nashville, Baltimore, and Portland, and everywhere in between. So why was boarding delayed? My travel senses twitched. Eventually they announced what I expected — the plane was broken. The part to fix it wouldn’t show up until after lunch. No problem, they said. They’d put us on the next flight to BWI… but we’d miss our connection to Portland. Not to worry, though; they’ll put us on the next Portland flight, leaving us with a nice, leisurely eight-hour connection in BWI.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Where’s the happy accident here?&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Before we boarded our new BNA-BWI flight, we texted friends in Annapolis. They were parked curbside when we walked out of BWI. Saved from walking multiple iterations of the <a href=\"https://bwiairport.com/at-bwi/things-to-do/fitness/cardio-trail/\">BWI Cardio Trail</a>, we had time for a much less healthy crabcake lunch seven minutes away at <a href=\"https://gandmcrabcakes.com/\">G&amp;M Restaurant </a>and then beers at <a href=\"https://www.guinnessbrewerybaltimore.com/\">Guinness’ Open Gate Brewery</a>. Two weeks earlier, we’d said to each other “When are we going to get together again?” Serendipity — and Southwest Airlines — made it happen sooner than any of us expected.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Leaning Into Flexibility</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Back in July, I was trying to plan a family trip to Hungary while also fitting in a trip to Michigan for a friend’s wedding. I knew our Hungary itinerary would need two stops -- from Nashville to a US gateway hub and then from a European hub to Budapest (BUD) -- and couldn’t figure out how to squeeze in both the Michigan up-and-back and the double-hop to BUD.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Then the epiphany hit: my old travel reflexes still wanted to book stupid itineraries.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4785,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/IMG_9291-EDIT-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/IMG_9291-EDIT-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Detroit-style pizza on a white plate with the right-center piece missing\" class=\"wp-image-4785\"/></a></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Now that I own my own calendar, I don’t have to do that. Instead, we flew up to Detroit (DTW) for the wedding, spent what was effectively a four-day layover visiting friends and searching southeast Michigan for the best Detroit-style pizza (our vote - Loui\'s Pizza in Hazel Park). After that, we then flew out of DTW, a Delta/SkyTeam international gateway, to Amsterdam (AMS) for a quick hop to BUD. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>What seemed hard was actually easy once my old road warrior id gave way to my new reality of retirement.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>What To Expect Going Forward</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I’m not quite sure yet, which long-time TravelCommons listeners will not find unexpected. I\'m still thinking way too much about travel; just trying out some different ways to talk about it. Here\'s how I\'m thinking it\'ll go:</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>More About Destinations:</strong>&nbsp; I’ve done a bit of this in the past —blog posts about trips to Santa Fe and Tucson, podcasts about trips to Holland’s tulip festival, Italy, and Louisville. I’ll do more of that, skipping the Top 10 lists (which Google and OpenAI can do better than me), keeping the \"here\'s what mattered, what surprised me, and what I’d recommend to you if we were sitting together at a bar” flavor. Stories in the pending queue: a Gulf Coast Mardi Gras road trip, a bike tour through Albania, and Thanksgiving in Mexico City.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Trip Mechanics that Matter:</strong> Long-time listeners may (justifiably) be thinking “What else can you say now that the TSA is finally enforcing Real ID.” Very fair. But now I’m less interested in road warrior skills, like how to most efficiently navigate O’Hare, and more interested in the stuff that can sneak up on regular travelers, like how to navigate the growing thicket of electronic travel authorizations (ESTA, ETA, ETIAS).</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Honest Recommendations</strong>: If I recommend a place, it\'s because I\'ve been there and would go back, and think that you should too. Not because they sponsored the post or because it showed up on some \"Top 10\" list.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>It’s All My Words:</strong> No sponsored posts. No AI-generated posts. For better or (mostly) for worse, I will have written everything you read here.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>You can find all this here on <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com\">TravelCommons.com</a>, on the RSS feed if you’re enough of a propeller-head to figure out apps like Feedly, or subscribe to the newsletter on Substack. I’m aiming for a twice-a-month rhythm, but we’ll see. I might still throw in some audio now and again, but my focus will be on the written.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><br>In the meantime, if you\'ve got questions about a place I\'ve been or topics you\'d like me to dig into, let me know — in the comments below, by email at <a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a>, or ping me at @mpeacock on X/Twitter or @travelcommons on Instagram.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','TravelCommons Redux —  Same Suitcase, Different Traveler','After wrapping up the podcast with Episode #200, TravelCommons is back — in writing this time. With retirement replacing road warrior life, Mark will balance destination stories with advice about trip logistics that actually matters. He leans into serendipity, shares examples from Maine and Hungary trip planning, and lays out his future plans for the blog.','inherit','closed','closed','','4779-revision-v1','','','2026-02-11 18:45:10','2026-02-12 00:45:10','',4779,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4788',0,'revision','',0),
(4791,1,'2026-02-11 20:53:52','2026-02-12 02:53:52','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Coming to you from the TravelCommons <em>desk</em> in Nashville, TN, almost two years since wrapping up the podcast with <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2024/05/23/podcast-200-wrapping-up-the-travelcommons-journey/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Podcast #200 — Wrapping Up the TravelCommons Journey\">episode #200</a>. In those parting comments, I said that if there was a next iteration of TravelCommons, it would probably be written — a blog rather than a podcast.  </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>And so here it is, words without the voice.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>The New Tagline</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I also said in my sign-off that the focus of NextGen TravelCommons would shift a bit, tweaking the tagline from “<em>more</em> about the journey than the destination” to “<em>as much</em> about the journey as the destination.” Because as I finally accept reality and drop the “semi-” modifier from my “retired” status, the destination now matters.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>When I was traveling for work, the destination was a means to the end — some place I had to physically get to so I could do what mattered -- the meeting, the sales call, the presentation. But now that I don’t have anything to sell or present, it’s the destinations that matter. And I get to choose them; places I actually want to be in — to experience them; to enjoy them.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>What “Retirement Travel” Really Means</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>What first comes to mind is what retirement travel <em>isn’t</em>. It doesn’t mean unlimited budget (at least not for me) or completely ignoring the journey — the logistics and the mechanics of getting to the destination. Without the shield of the corporate travel budget — other people’s money to buy my way out of a jam — getting the logistics right is even more important than before.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Instead, I’m learning to leave behind those travel habits I’d built around constraints that no longer exist. I’m no longer travelling to hit other people’s schedules — having to do what I called in the podcast <em>stupid travel</em>; itineraries like Chicago on Monday, Toronto on Tuesday, London on Wednesday, Zurich on Thursday, landing back in Chicago at Friday midnight — so I could minimize the time away from home and family. And smacking the alarm at 0 Dark 30 is now a rare exception rather than the bleary-eyed rule.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Running on my own calendar gives me the flexibility to optimize for serendipity — though that doesn’t feel like something you can actually do, plan for a happy accident.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Flying up to Maine for Christmas, we booked our usual Southwest itinerary through Baltimore (BWI). Weather was great for mid-December; everything was fine in Nashville, Baltimore, and Portland, and everywhere in between. So why was boarding delayed? My travel senses twitched. Eventually they announced what I expected — the plane was broken. The part to fix it wouldn’t show up until after lunch. No problem, they said. They’d put us on the next flight to BWI… but we’d miss our connection to Portland. Not to worry, though; they’ll put us on the next Portland flight, leaving us with a nice, leisurely eight-hour connection in BWI.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Where’s the happy accident here?&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Before we boarded our new BNA-BWI flight, we texted friends in Annapolis. They were parked curbside when we walked out of BWI. Saved from walking multiple iterations of the <a href=\"https://bwiairport.com/at-bwi/things-to-do/fitness/cardio-trail/\">BWI Cardio Trail</a>, we had time for a much less healthy crabcake lunch seven minutes away at <a href=\"https://gandmcrabcakes.com/\">G&amp;M Restaurant </a>and then beers at <a href=\"https://www.guinnessbrewerybaltimore.com/\">Guinness’ Open Gate Brewery</a>. Two weeks earlier, we’d said to each other “When are we going to get together again?” Serendipity — and Southwest Airlines — made it happen sooner than any of us expected.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Leaning Into Flexibility</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Back in July, I was trying to plan a family trip to Hungary while also fitting in a trip to Michigan for a friend’s wedding. I knew our Hungary itinerary would need two stops -- from Nashville to a US gateway hub and then from a European hub to Budapest (BUD) -- and couldn’t figure out how to squeeze in both the Michigan up-and-back and the double-hop to BUD.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Then the epiphany hit: my old travel reflexes still wanted to book stupid itineraries.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4785,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/IMG_9291-EDIT-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/IMG_9291-EDIT-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Detroit-style pizza on a white plate with the right-center piece missing\" class=\"wp-image-4785\"/></a></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Now that I own my own calendar, I don’t have to do that. Instead, we flew up to Detroit (DTW) for the wedding, spent what was effectively a four-day layover visiting friends and searching southeast Michigan for the best Detroit-style pizza (our vote - Loui\'s Pizza in Hazel Park). After that, we then flew out of DTW, a Delta/SkyTeam international gateway, to Amsterdam (AMS) for a quick hop to BUD.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>What seemed hard was actually easy once my old road warrior id gave way to my new reality of retirement.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>What To Expect Going Forward</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I’m not quite sure yet, which long-time TravelCommons listeners will not find unexpected. I\'m still thinking way too much about travel; just trying out some different ways to talk about it. Here\'s how I\'m thinking it\'ll go:</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>More About Destinations:</strong>&nbsp; I’ve done a bit of this in the past —blog posts about trips to Santa Fe and Tucson, podcasts about trips to Holland’s tulip festival, Italy, and Louisville. I’ll do more of that, skipping the Top 10 lists (which Google and OpenAI can do better than me), keeping the \"here\'s what mattered, what surprised me, and what I’d recommend to you if we were sitting together at a bar” flavor. Stories in the pending queue: a Gulf Coast Mardi Gras road trip, a bike tour through Albania, and Thanksgiving in Mexico City.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Trip Mechanics that Matter:</strong> Long-time listeners may (justifiably) be thinking “What else can you say now that the TSA is finally enforcing Real ID.” Very fair. But now I’m less interested in road warrior skills, like how to most efficiently navigate O’Hare, and more interested in the stuff that can sneak up on regular travelers, like how to navigate the growing thicket of electronic travel authorizations (ESTA, ETA, ETIAS).</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Honest Recommendations</strong>: If I recommend a place, it\'s because I\'ve been there and would go back, and think that you should too. Not because they sponsored the post or because it showed up on some \"Top 10\" list.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>It’s All My Words:</strong> No sponsored posts. No AI-generated posts. For better or (mostly) for worse, I will have written everything you read here.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>You can find all this here on <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com\">TravelCommons.com</a>, on the RSS feed if you’re enough of a propeller-head to figure out apps like Feedly, or subscribe to the newsletter on Substack. I’m aiming for a twice-a-month rhythm, but we’ll see. I might still throw in some audio now and again, but my focus will be on the written.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><br>In the meantime, if you\'ve got questions about a place I\'ve been or topics you\'d like me to dig into, let me know — in the comments below, by email at <a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a>, or ping me at @mpeacock on X/Twitter or @travelcommons on Instagram.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:html -->\n<iframe src=\"https://travelcommons.substack.com/embed\" width=\"480\" height=\"320\" style=\"border: 1px solid #EEE; background: white\" frameborder=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\"></iframe>\n<!-- /wp:html -->','TravelCommons Redux —  Same Suitcase, Different Traveler','After wrapping up the podcast with Episode #200, TravelCommons is back — in writing this time. With retirement replacing road warrior life, Mark will balance destination stories with advice about trip logistics that actually matters. He leans into serendipity, shares examples from Maine and Hungary trip planning, and lays out his future plans for the blog.','inherit','closed','closed','','4779-revision-v1','','','2026-02-11 20:53:52','2026-02-12 02:53:52','',4779,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4791',0,'revision','',0),
(4793,1,'2026-02-11 21:02:31','2026-02-12 03:02:31','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Coming to you from the TravelCommons <em>desk</em> in Nashville, TN, almost two years since wrapping up the podcast with <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2024/05/23/podcast-200-wrapping-up-the-travelcommons-journey/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Podcast #200 — Wrapping Up the TravelCommons Journey\">episode #200</a>. In those parting comments, I said that if there was a next iteration of TravelCommons, it would probably be written — a blog rather than a podcast.  </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>And so here it is, words without the voice.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>The New Tagline</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I also said in my sign-off that the focus of NextGen TravelCommons would shift a bit, tweaking the tagline from “<em>more</em> about the journey than the destination” to “<em>as much</em> about the journey as the destination.” Because as I finally accept reality and drop the “semi-” modifier from my “retired” status, the destination now matters.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>When I was traveling for work, the destination was a means to the end — some place I had to physically get to so I could do what mattered -- the meeting, the sales call, the presentation. But now that I don’t have anything to sell or present, it’s the destinations that matter. And I get to choose them; places I actually want to be in — to experience them; to enjoy them.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>What “Retirement Travel” Really Means</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>What first comes to mind is what retirement travel <em>isn’t</em>. It doesn’t mean unlimited budget (at least not for me) or completely ignoring the journey — the logistics and the mechanics of getting to the destination. Without the shield of the corporate travel budget — other people’s money to buy my way out of a jam — getting the logistics right is even more important than before.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Instead, I’m learning to leave behind those travel habits I’d built around constraints that no longer exist. I’m no longer travelling to hit other people’s schedules — having to do what I called in the podcast <em>stupid travel</em>; itineraries like Chicago on Monday, Toronto on Tuesday, London on Wednesday, Zurich on Thursday, landing back in Chicago at Friday midnight — so I could minimize the time away from home and family. And smacking the alarm at 0 Dark 30 is now a rare exception rather than the bleary-eyed rule.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Running on my own calendar gives me the flexibility to optimize for serendipity — though that doesn’t feel like something you can actually do, plan for a happy accident.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Flying up to Maine for Christmas, we booked our usual Southwest itinerary through Baltimore (BWI). Weather was great for mid-December; everything was fine in Nashville, Baltimore, and Portland, and everywhere in between. So why was boarding delayed? My travel senses twitched. Eventually they announced what I expected — the plane was broken. The part to fix it wouldn’t show up until after lunch. No problem, they said. They’d put us on the next flight to BWI… but we’d miss our connection to Portland. Not to worry, though; they’ll put us on the next Portland flight, leaving us with a nice, leisurely eight-hour connection in BWI.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Where’s the happy accident here?&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Before we boarded our new BNA-BWI flight, we texted friends in Annapolis. They were parked curbside when we walked out of BWI. Saved from walking multiple iterations of the <a href=\"https://bwiairport.com/at-bwi/things-to-do/fitness/cardio-trail/\">BWI Cardio Trail</a>, we had time for a much less healthy crabcake lunch seven minutes away at <a href=\"https://gandmcrabcakes.com/\">G&amp;M Restaurant </a>and then beers at <a href=\"https://www.guinnessbrewerybaltimore.com/\">Guinness’ Open Gate Brewery</a>. Two weeks earlier, we’d said to each other “When are we going to get together again?” Serendipity — and Southwest Airlines — made it happen sooner than any of us expected.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Leaning Into Flexibility</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Back in July, I was trying to plan a family trip to Hungary while also fitting in a trip to Michigan for a friend’s wedding. I knew our Hungary itinerary would need two stops -- from Nashville to a US gateway hub and then from a European hub to Budapest (BUD) -- and couldn’t figure out how to squeeze in both the Michigan up-and-back and the double-hop to BUD.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Then the epiphany hit: my old travel reflexes still wanted to book stupid itineraries.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4785,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/IMG_9291-EDIT-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/IMG_9291-EDIT-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Detroit-style pizza on a white plate with the right-center piece missing\" class=\"wp-image-4785\"/></a></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Now that I own my own calendar, I don’t have to do that. Instead, we flew up to Detroit (DTW) for the wedding, spent what was effectively a four-day layover visiting friends and searching southeast Michigan for the best Detroit-style pizza (our vote - Loui\'s Pizza in Hazel Park). After that, we then flew out of DTW, a Delta/SkyTeam international gateway, to Amsterdam (AMS) for a quick hop to BUD.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>What seemed hard was actually easy once my old road warrior id gave way to my new reality of retirement.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>What To Expect Going Forward</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I’m not quite sure yet, which long-time TravelCommons listeners will not find unexpected. I\'m still thinking way too much about travel; just trying out some different ways to talk about it. Here\'s how I\'m thinking it\'ll go:</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>More About Destinations:</strong>&nbsp; I’ve done a bit of this in the past —blog posts about trips to Santa Fe and Tucson, podcasts about trips to Holland’s tulip festival, Italy, and Louisville. I’ll do more of that, skipping the Top 10 lists (which Google and OpenAI can do better than me), keeping the \"here\'s what mattered, what surprised me, and what I’d recommend to you if we were sitting together at a bar” flavor. Stories in the pending queue: a Gulf Coast Mardi Gras road trip, a bike tour through Albania, and Thanksgiving in Mexico City.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Trip Mechanics that Matter:</strong> Long-time listeners may (justifiably) be thinking “What else can you say now that the TSA is finally enforcing Real ID.” Very fair. But now I’m less interested in road warrior skills, like how to most efficiently navigate O’Hare, and more interested in the stuff that can sneak up on regular travelers, like how to navigate the growing thicket of electronic travel authorizations (ESTA, ETA, ETIAS).</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Honest Recommendations</strong>: If I recommend a place, it\'s because I\'ve been there and would go back, and think that you should too. Not because they sponsored the post or because it showed up on some \"Top 10\" list.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>It’s All My Words:</strong> No sponsored posts. No AI-generated posts. For better or (mostly) for worse, I will have written everything you read here.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>You can find all this here on <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com\">TravelCommons.com</a>, on the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/feed/\" title=\"\">RSS feed</a> if you’re enough of a propeller-head to figure out apps like Feedly, or <a href=\"https://travelcommons.substack.com/\" title=\"\">subscribe to the newsletter</a> on Substack. I’m aiming for a twice-a-month rhythm, but we’ll see. I might still throw in some audio now and again, but my focus will be on the written.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><br>In the meantime, if you\'ve got questions about a place I\'ve been or topics you\'d like me to dig into, let me know — in the comments below, by email at <a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a>, or ping me at @mpeacock on X/Twitter or @travelcommons on Instagram.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','TravelCommons Redux —  Same Suitcase, Different Traveler','After wrapping up the podcast with Episode #200, TravelCommons is back — in writing this time. With retirement replacing road warrior life, Mark will balance destination stories with advice about trip logistics that actually matters. He leans into serendipity, shares examples from Maine and Hungary trip planning, and lays out his future plans for the blog.','inherit','closed','closed','','4779-revision-v1','','','2026-02-11 21:02:31','2026-02-12 03:02:31','',4779,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4793',0,'revision','',0),
(4795,1,'2026-02-23 19:52:10','2026-02-24 01:52:10','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Coming to you from the TravelCommons <em>desk</em> in Nashville, TN, almost two years since wrapping up the podcast with <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2024/05/23/podcast-200-wrapping-up-the-travelcommons-journey/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Podcast #200 — Wrapping Up the TravelCommons Journey\">episode #200</a>. In those parting comments, I said that if there was a next iteration of TravelCommons, it would probably be written — a blog rather than a podcast.  </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>And so here it is, words without the voice.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>The New Tagline</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I also said in my sign-off that the focus of NextGen TravelCommons would shift a bit, tweaking the tagline from “<em>more</em> about the journey than the destination” to “<em>as much</em> about the journey as the destination.” Because as I finally accept reality and drop the “semi-” modifier from my “retired” status, the destination now matters.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>When I was traveling for work, the destination was a means to the end — some place I had to physically get to so I could do what mattered -- the meeting, the sales call, the presentation. But now that I don’t have anything to sell or present, it’s the destinations that matter. And I get to choose them; places I actually want to be in — to experience them; to enjoy them.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>What “Retirement Travel” Really Means</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>What first comes to mind is what retirement travel <em>isn’t</em>. It doesn’t mean unlimited budget (at least not for me) or completely ignoring the journey — the logistics and the mechanics of getting to the destination. Without the shield of the corporate travel budget — other people’s money to buy my way out of a jam — getting the logistics right is even more important than before.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Instead, I’m learning to leave behind those travel habits I’d built around constraints that no longer exist. I’m no longer travelling to hit other people’s schedules — having to do what I called in the podcast <em>stupid travel</em>; itineraries like Chicago on Monday, Toronto on Tuesday, London on Wednesday, Zurich on Thursday, landing back in Chicago at Friday midnight — so I could minimize the time away from home and family. And smacking the alarm at 0 Dark 30 is now a rare exception rather than the bleary-eyed rule.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Running on my own calendar gives me the flexibility to optimize for serendipity — though that doesn’t feel like something you can actually do, plan for a happy accident.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Flying up to Maine for Christmas, we booked our usual Southwest itinerary through Baltimore (BWI). Weather was great for mid-December; everything was fine in Nashville, Baltimore, and Portland, and everywhere in between. So why was boarding delayed? My travel senses twitched. Eventually they announced what I expected — the plane was broken. The part to fix it wouldn’t show up until after lunch. No problem, they said. They’d put us on the next flight to BWI… but we’d miss our connection to Portland. Not to worry, though; they’ll put us on the next Portland flight, leaving us with a nice, leisurely eight-hour connection in BWI.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Where’s the happy accident here?&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Before we boarded our new BNA-BWI flight, we texted friends in Annapolis. They were parked curbside when we walked out of BWI. Saved from walking multiple iterations of the <a href=\"https://bwiairport.com/at-bwi/things-to-do/fitness/cardio-trail/\">BWI Cardio Trail</a>, we had time for a much less healthy crabcake lunch seven minutes away at <a href=\"https://gandmcrabcakes.com/\">G&amp;M Restaurant </a>and then beers at <a href=\"https://www.guinnessbrewerybaltimore.com/\">Guinness’ Open Gate Brewery</a>. Two weeks earlier, we’d said to each other “When are we going to get together again?” Serendipity — and Southwest Airlines — made it happen sooner than any of us expected.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Leaning Into Flexibility</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Back in July, I was trying to plan a family trip to Hungary while also fitting in a trip to Michigan for a friend’s wedding. I knew our Hungary itinerary would need two stops -- from Nashville to a US gateway hub and then from a European hub to Budapest (BUD) -- and couldn’t figure out how to squeeze in both the Michigan up-and-back and the double-hop to BUD.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Then the epiphany hit: my old travel reflexes still wanted to book stupid itineraries.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4785,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/IMG_9291-EDIT-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/IMG_9291-EDIT-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Detroit-style pizza on a white plate with the right-center piece missing\" class=\"wp-image-4785\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Detroit-style pizza from Loui’s Pizza</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Now that I own my own calendar, I don’t have to do that. Instead, we flew up to Detroit (DTW) for the wedding, spent what was effectively a four-day layover visiting friends and searching southeast Michigan for the best Detroit-style pizza (our vote - Loui\'s Pizza in Hazel Park). After that, we then flew out of DTW, a Delta/SkyTeam international gateway, to Amsterdam (AMS) for a quick hop to BUD.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>What seemed hard was actually easy once my old road warrior id gave way to my new reality of retirement.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>What To Expect Going Forward</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I’m not quite sure yet, which long-time TravelCommons listeners will not find unexpected. I\'m still thinking way too much about travel; just trying out some different ways to talk about it. Here\'s how I\'m thinking it\'ll go:</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>More About Destinations:</strong>&nbsp; I’ve done a bit of this in the past —blog posts about trips to Santa Fe and Tucson, podcasts about trips to Holland’s tulip festival, Italy, and Louisville. I’ll do more of that, skipping the Top 10 lists (which Google and OpenAI can do better than me), keeping the \"here\'s what mattered, what surprised me, and what I’d recommend to you if we were sitting together at a bar” flavor. Stories in the pending queue: a Gulf Coast Mardi Gras road trip, a bike tour through Albania, and Thanksgiving in Mexico City.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Trip Mechanics that Matter:</strong> Long-time listeners may (justifiably) be thinking “What else can you say now that the TSA is finally enforcing Real ID.” Very fair. But now I’m less interested in road warrior skills, like how to most efficiently navigate O’Hare, and more interested in the stuff that can sneak up on regular travelers, like how to navigate the growing thicket of electronic travel authorizations (ESTA, ETA, ETIAS).</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Honest Recommendations</strong>: If I recommend a place, it\'s because I\'ve been there and would go back, and think that you should too. Not because they sponsored the post or because it showed up on some \"Top 10\" list.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>It’s All My Words:</strong> No sponsored posts. No AI-generated posts. For better or (mostly) for worse, I will have written everything you read here.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>You can find all this here on <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com\">TravelCommons.com</a>, on the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/feed/\" title=\"\">RSS feed</a> if you’re enough of a propeller-head to figure out apps like Feedly, or <a href=\"https://travelcommons.substack.com/\" title=\"\">subscribe to the newsletter</a> on Substack. I’m aiming for a twice-a-month rhythm, but we’ll see. I might still throw in some audio now and again, but my focus will be on the written.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><br>In the meantime, if you\'ve got questions about a place I\'ve been or topics you\'d like me to dig into, let me know — in the comments below, by email at <a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a>, or ping me at @mpeacock on X/Twitter or @travelcommons on Instagram.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','TravelCommons Redux —  Same Suitcase, Different Traveler','After wrapping up the podcast with Episode #200, TravelCommons is back — in writing this time. With retirement replacing road warrior life, Mark will balance destination stories with advice about trip logistics that actually matters. He leans into serendipity, shares examples from Maine and Hungary trip planning, and lays out his future plans for the blog.','inherit','closed','closed','','4779-revision-v1','','','2026-02-23 19:52:10','2026-02-24 01:52:10','',4779,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4795',0,'revision','',0),
(4796,1,'2026-02-23 19:56:31','2026-02-24 01:56:31','','IMG_0053','','inherit','open','closed','','img_0053','','','2026-02-23 19:56:31','2026-02-24 01:56:31','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/IMG_0053.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(4798,1,'2026-02-23 20:01:18','2026-02-24 02:01:18','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Coming to you from the TravelCommons <em>desk</em> in Nashville, TN, almost two years since wrapping up the podcast with <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2024/05/23/podcast-200-wrapping-up-the-travelcommons-journey/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Podcast #200 — Wrapping Up the TravelCommons Journey\">episode #200</a>. In those parting comments, I said that if there was a next iteration of TravelCommons, it would probably be written — a blog rather than a podcast.  </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>And so here it is, words without the voice.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>The New Tagline</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I also said in my sign-off that the focus of NextGen TravelCommons would shift a bit, tweaking the tagline from “<em>more</em> about the journey than the destination” to “<em>as much</em> about the journey as the destination.” Because as I finally accept reality and drop the “semi-” modifier from my “retired” status, the destination now matters.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>When I was traveling for work, the destination was a means to the end — some place I had to physically get to so I could do what mattered -- the meeting, the sales call, the presentation. But now that I don’t have anything to sell or present, it’s the destinations that matter. And I get to choose them; places I actually want to be in — to experience them; to enjoy them.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>What “Retirement Travel” Really Means</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>What first comes to mind is what retirement travel <em>isn’t</em>. It doesn’t mean unlimited budget (at least not for me) or completely ignoring the journey — the logistics and the mechanics of getting to the destination. Without the shield of the corporate travel budget — other people’s money to buy my way out of a jam — getting the logistics right is even more important than before.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Instead, I’m learning to leave behind those travel habits I’d built around constraints that no longer exist. I’m no longer travelling to hit other people’s schedules — having to do what I called in the podcast <em>stupid travel</em>; itineraries like Chicago on Monday, Toronto on Tuesday, London on Wednesday, Zurich on Thursday, landing back in Chicago at Friday midnight — so I could minimize the time away from home and family. And smacking the alarm at 0 Dark 30 is now a rare exception rather than the bleary-eyed rule.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Running on my own calendar gives me the flexibility to optimize for serendipity — though that doesn’t feel like something you can actually do, plan for a happy accident.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Flying up to Maine for Christmas, we booked our usual Southwest itinerary through Baltimore (BWI). Weather was great for mid-December; everything was fine in Nashville, Baltimore, and Portland, and everywhere in between. So why was boarding delayed? My travel senses twitched. Eventually they announced what I expected — the plane was broken. The part to fix it wouldn’t show up until after lunch. No problem, they said. They’d put us on the next flight to BWI… but we’d miss our connection to Portland. Not to worry, though; they’ll put us on the next Portland flight, leaving us with a nice, leisurely eight-hour connection in BWI.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Where’s the happy accident here?&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4796,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/IMG_0053-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/IMG_0053-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-4796\"/></a></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Before we boarded our new BNA-BWI flight, we texted friends in Annapolis. They were parked curbside when we walked out of BWI. Saved from walking multiple iterations of the <a href=\"https://bwiairport.com/at-bwi/things-to-do/fitness/cardio-trail/\">BWI Cardio Trail</a>, we had time for a much less healthy crabcake lunch seven minutes away at <a href=\"https://gandmcrabcakes.com/\">G&amp;M Restaurant </a>and then beers at <a href=\"https://www.guinnessbrewerybaltimore.com/\">Guinness’ Open Gate Brewery</a>. Two weeks earlier, we’d said to each other “When are we going to get together again?” Serendipity — and Southwest Airlines — made it happen sooner than any of us expected.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Leaning Into Flexibility</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Back in July, I was trying to plan a family trip to Hungary while also fitting in a trip to Michigan for a friend’s wedding. I knew our Hungary itinerary would need two stops -- from Nashville to a US gateway hub and then from a European hub to Budapest (BUD) -- and couldn’t figure out how to squeeze in both the Michigan up-and-back and the double-hop to BUD.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Then the epiphany hit: my old travel reflexes still wanted to book stupid itineraries.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4785,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/IMG_9291-EDIT-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/IMG_9291-EDIT-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Detroit-style pizza on a white plate with the right-center piece missing\" class=\"wp-image-4785\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Detroit-style pizza from Loui’s Pizza</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Now that I own my own calendar, I don’t have to do that. Instead, we flew up to Detroit (DTW) for the wedding, spent what was effectively a four-day layover visiting friends and searching southeast Michigan for the best Detroit-style pizza (our vote - Loui\'s Pizza in Hazel Park). After that, we then flew out of DTW, a Delta/SkyTeam international gateway, to Amsterdam (AMS) for a quick hop to BUD.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>What seemed hard was actually easy once my old road warrior id gave way to my new reality of retirement.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>What To Expect Going Forward</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I’m not quite sure yet, which long-time TravelCommons listeners will not find unexpected. I\'m still thinking way too much about travel; just trying out some different ways to talk about it. Here\'s how I\'m thinking it\'ll go:</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>More About Destinations:</strong>&nbsp; I’ve done a bit of this in the past —blog posts about trips to Santa Fe and Tucson, podcasts about trips to Holland’s tulip festival, Italy, and Louisville. I’ll do more of that, skipping the Top 10 lists (which Google and OpenAI can do better than me), keeping the \"here\'s what mattered, what surprised me, and what I’d recommend to you if we were sitting together at a bar” flavor. Stories in the pending queue: a Gulf Coast Mardi Gras road trip, a bike tour through Albania, and Thanksgiving in Mexico City.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Trip Mechanics that Matter:</strong> Long-time listeners may (justifiably) be thinking “What else can you say now that the TSA is finally enforcing Real ID.” Very fair. But now I’m less interested in road warrior skills, like how to most efficiently navigate O’Hare, and more interested in the stuff that can sneak up on regular travelers, like how to navigate the growing thicket of electronic travel authorizations (ESTA, ETA, ETIAS).</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Honest Recommendations</strong>: If I recommend a place, it\'s because I\'ve been there and would go back, and think that you should too. Not because they sponsored the post or because it showed up on some \"Top 10\" list.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>It’s All My Words:</strong> No sponsored posts. No AI-generated posts. For better or (mostly) for worse, I will have written everything you read here.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>You can find all this here on <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com\">TravelCommons.com</a>, on the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/feed/\" title=\"\">RSS feed</a> if you’re enough of a propeller-head to figure out apps like Feedly, or <a href=\"https://travelcommons.substack.com/\" title=\"\">subscribe to the newsletter</a> on Substack. I’m aiming for a twice-a-month rhythm, but we’ll see. I might still throw in some audio now and again, but my focus will be on the written.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><br>In the meantime, if you\'ve got questions about a place I\'ve been or topics you\'d like me to dig into, let me know — in the comments below, by email at <a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a>, or ping me at @mpeacock on X/Twitter or @travelcommons on Instagram.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','TravelCommons Redux —  Same Suitcase, Different Traveler','After wrapping up the podcast with Episode #200, TravelCommons is back — in writing this time. With retirement replacing road warrior life, Mark will balance destination stories with advice about trip logistics that actually matters. He leans into serendipity, shares examples from Maine and Hungary trip planning, and lays out his future plans for the blog.','inherit','closed','closed','','4779-revision-v1','','','2026-02-23 20:01:18','2026-02-24 02:01:18','',4779,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4798',0,'revision','',0),
(4799,1,'2026-02-25 09:26:01','2026-02-25 15:26:01','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>This Mardi Gras trip had been knocking around the back of my mind for a while. And for me, that’s a big piece of retirement travel — finally getting on with the travel I’ve thought about but never found the time to do.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Planning the Trip</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:group {\"layout\":{\"type\":\"flex\",\"flexWrap\":\"nowrap\"},\"hideFromFeed\":true} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-group\"><!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We’d been Mardi Gras semi-regulars, heading down to New Orleans every other year in pre-COVID times. We loved the big Uptown parades along St Charles St, but returning for the first time since 2018, I wanted to open our Mardi Gras aperture.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph --></div>\n<!-- /wp:group -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I’ve always thought about going further west, to see the celebrations in Lafayette and Cajun Country. And then I remembered my high school friend Scott who lives in Mobile — he’s always banging on about how Mobile was the first US city to do Mardi Gras, that New Orleans is just copying them.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:group {\"layout\":{\"type\":\"flex\",\"flexWrap\":\"nowrap\"},\"hideFromFeed\":true} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-group\"><!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>So I pulled up Google Maps and pretty quickly had a nice loop laid out.&nbsp; Our first stop would be Mobile in honor of its “First City” status; a straight 7-hour shot down I-65 from Nashville with a Buc-ee’s refueling stop along the way. From Mobile, it would be an easy two-hour mix of I-10 and US-90 along the Mississippi Gulf Coast to our next stop, New Orleans. And from there,&nbsp; another two hours up to our final stop, Lafayette and Acadiana.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph --></div>\n<!-- /wp:group -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4810,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"center\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image aligncenter size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Screenshot-2026-02-25-at-8.23.12-AM.png\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Screenshot-2026-02-25-at-8.23.12-AM-300x300.png\" alt=\"Google Map screenshot with a thick blue line defining a road trip\" class=\"wp-image-4810\"/></a></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Now, Mardi Gras isn’t just the day; it’s a whole season. It starts in early January on Epiphany and builds momentum, with parades and events first on the weekends, then nearly every day, whipping everyone up to the final pre-Lenten blowout, Fat Tuesday. Over the years, we’ve skipped that final frenzy and instead visited the couple of weeks before Fat Tuesday. It’s been a good strategy; great parades without the full-contact craziness.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>First Mardi Gras Parade</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4801,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/IMG_8888_Original.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/IMG_8888_Original-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Masked Mardi Gras participants in black-and-gold capes and feathered helmets standing on a brick sidewalk before the parade\" class=\"wp-image-4801\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Order of the Incas Pre-Parade Logistics Huddle</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Our first parade in Mobile was the <a href=\"https://mobilemask.com/organization/order-of-inca/\" title=\"\">Order of the Incas</a> on Friday night. It was chilly; even on the Gulf Coast, February nights can bite. But the parade route was full; it looked like mostly families. Next to us three generations of one family were a well-structured team — grade-school kids at the low metal barriers lining the street,&nbsp; yelling at every float, begging for throws, then stashing their catches in big shoulder bags; high-school kids behind them, also yelling and waving, snagging whatever passed over the heads of the younger kids; parents behind them, drinking beers and minding the wagon where the kids dumped their shoulder bags; and then the grandparent who, spotting a special throw lying unclaimed in the street, reached through the barrier with their cane to drag it to the curb so a grandkid could pick it up. Obviously not their first parade.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4806,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/9444839F-9B5F-4F03-836B-B7146A67827C_Original.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/9444839F-9B5F-4F03-836B-B7146A67827C_Original-240x300.jpg\" alt=\"Brightly lit Mardi Gras float with a giant neon bird and castle walls rolling past a glowing church steeple at night\" class=\"wp-image-4806\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Order of the Incas Parade Float</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I’m used to folks shouting for throws; I do it myself. But here in Mobile, people were shouting for something new to me — Moon Pies. And they got them; showers of chocolate and vanilla mini-Moon Pies. Then something big smacked me in the chest and bounced back out to the street — a full box of Moon Pies. I looked up at the float. Really? You couldn’t be bothered to open it up? Then a full box of Tastykakes hit Irene on the forehead and dropped to the ground. One of the high school kids picked it up. “Do you want this?” he asked. “Nah, you keep it, “ I said. He quickly stuffed it into his shoulder bag.&nbsp; After that, waving for throws became as much of a defensive act — blocking incoming boxes — as it was trying to catch the odd string of beads.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Krewe Barn Party</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Saturday afternoon, we headed south of downtown into a neighborhood of generic warehouse buildings to meet up with my high school friend Scott at a “barn party” — a pre-parade preview of the floats his krewe, the <a href=\"https://mobilemask.com/organization/comic-cowboys/\">Cosmic Cowboys</a>, would be rolling on Fat Tuesday.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Seemed like a bunch of the krewes stored their floats here. We walked by another barn party for the <a href=\"https://mobilemask.com/organization/order-of-lashes/\">Krewe of LaShe’s</a> (a women’s krewe — LaShe’s → lashes)&nbsp; where they’d set up kids’ rides on the front lawn of their storage building. Leaving, we got caught up in float traffic as <a href=\"https://mobilemask.com/organization/neptunes-daughters/\" title=\"\">Neptune’s Daughters</a> squeezed out toward that night’s parade marshalling area.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Fairhope’s More Intimate Mardi Gras Parade</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4807,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/IMG_8898-1-scaled.jpeg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/IMG_8898-1-225x300.jpeg\" alt=\"Night Mardi Gras parade float with an oversized gray horse and a smiling sun in sunglasses above the crowd\" class=\"wp-image-4807\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Fairhope Parade Float</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We were staying across the bay, on the eastern shore of Mobile Bay because everything in Mobile was booked. So after the barn party, we headed back over the bay to Fairhope, to see what a small town parade would be like. If we thought Friday night’s parade in Mobile was mostly families, Fairhope’s <a href=\"https://mobilemask.com/organization/knights-of-ecor-rouge/\">Knights of Ecor Rouge</a> parade was even more so. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Kids lining the parade route were screaming to their friends in the marching bands. Riders on the floats took it as a personal challenge to hurl their throws to friends on the second floor balconies, or through upper-floor windows into watch parties. The parade was shorter — 30 minutes vs. the Incas’ hour — but the floats and the throws and the bands were just as good.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>King Cake Crawl</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Our Mardi Gras trips have built an appreciation not just for parades, but also for king cakes. A king cake is a yeasted dough cake, often braided in a ring, traditionally filled with cinnamon sugar, and topped with a glaze or icing and sprinkled with sugar in Mardi Gras colors of purple, green, and gold.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I got hooked on king cakes when traveling to New Orleans back in my consulting days. The project team would usually stay at the Sheraton on Canal Street, and every morning during Mardi Gras, there’d be a king cake in the concierge lounge breakfast spread. When Irene would join me, we’d leave the concierge cakes behind and troll the neighborhoods to find the best and/or most unique king cakes.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Sunday, we drove back over the bay to Mobile in the rain — our first day of bad weather. I-10 and US 98 run right next to each other across the top of Mobile Bay. I-10 is more of a causeway while US 98 touches down and skips across the just-above-water-line islands of sediment left behind as the Mobile River and the other rivers feed into the bay. We took US 98 this time so we could drive by the <a href=\"https://www.ussalabama.com/\">USS Alabama battleship</a>, swerve the parade barricades, and hit <a href=\"https://www.dropoutbakeryandcompany.com/\">Dropout Bakery</a> for what many locals said was the best king cake in Mobile.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4803,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/IMG_9258_Original-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/IMG_9258_Original-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Latte with heart latte art beside a frosted king cake slice topped with a tiny green baby in a takeout box\" class=\"wp-image-4803\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Dropout Bakery King Cake Complete with Baby</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We were hopeful, because our tasting notes on a couple of East Bay king cake slices were “weirdly flat” and “not bad….” So, not great. We found Dropout tucked away in the corner of an incubator/co-working space. No seating, so we walked our boxed cake a block over to a coffee joint and there cut into the perfectly sized two-person king cake — and got what we were looking for. It looked great; it tasted great; it made the walk in the rain worth it.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Packing Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:group {\"layout\":{\"type\":\"flex\",\"flexWrap\":\"nowrap\"},\"hideFromFeed\":true} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-group\"><!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We wandered around the neighborhood a bit; found a very solid taproom — Braided River Brewing — for a couple of pints, but the rain wasn’t letting up. If anything, it was raining harder. The wind picked up. The temperature dropped. We called it; we headed back over the bay for some dinner and to pack up our collection of parade throws. Next morning, we were heading to New Orleans.<br></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph --></div>\n<!-- /wp:group -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4808,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/IMG_8910-1-scaled.jpeg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/IMG_8910-1-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"Mardi Gras throws spread on a hotel table—beads, Moon Pies, glow necklace, cups, plush toys, and small trinkets\" class=\"wp-image-4808\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Our 2-Day Haul of Mobile Parade Throws</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph {\"hideFromFeed\":true} -->\n<p><strong>Next Stop</strong>: <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2026/03/10/gulf-coast-mardi-gras-road-trip-stop-2-new-orleans/\" title=\"\">Gulf Coast Mardi Gras Road Trip Stop 2 — New Orleans</a></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Recommendations for Mobile and East Bay</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Mobile</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.dropoutbakeryandcompany.com/\">Dropout Bakery</a>, 358 St Louis St, Mobile — One of the best king cakes of the trip</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Nova Espresso, 306 St Anthony St, Mobile — Great place to eat your Dropout Bakery purchases</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.braidedriverbrewing.com/\">Braided River Brewing Company</a>, 420 St Louis St, Mobile — The best taproom I visited this stop</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>East Bay</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.kitchenonmaindaphne.com/\">Kitchen On Main</a>, 1716 Main St, Daphne — Cozy, friendly neighborhood restaurant</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.pearlfairhope.com/\">Pearl</a>, 334 Fairhope Ave, Fairhope — Local oysters, gumbo, and a good craft beer selection</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Thanks to everyone for the “Welcome Back!” replies on the website and socials to my first return post. As I said on Instagram, the key will be getting this post out on time. I’ve managed that, and so on to getting the next one out.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Debbie Trueblood commented on the website — “So nice to see you back. And yes, I read your post in “your voice”!” Which gave me an idea — maybe I should feed some past episodes into an AI to generate my own TravelCommons voice model that could be used as an option to read aloud these posts. This AI stuff just keeps getting whackier.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>If you’ve hit the TravelCommons website, you’ve noticed it looks a lot different, a lot simpler, and a lot faster. I was forced into the change when a security upgrade broke the old template. So, speaking of AI, I spent a couple of nights vibe-coding the basics of a new WordPress template that now drives the website.&nbsp; But still on the to-do list — links to the socials, search functionality, a Destinations section to consolidate location content — so stay tuned. It’s a bit of a construction zone.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>You can find all this here on <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com\">TravelCommons.com</a>, on the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/feed/\" title=\"\">RSS feed</a> if you’re enough of a propeller-head to figure out apps like Feedly, or <a href=\"https://travelcommons.substack.com/\" title=\"\">subscribe to the newsletter</a> on Substack. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>In the meantime, if you\'ve got questions about a place I\'ve been or topics you\'d like me to dig into, let me know — in the comments below, by email at <a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a>, or ping me at @mpeacock on X/Twitter, @travelcommons on Instagram or on the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons\" title=\"\">Facebook page</a>.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Remember that you can find all my posts  here on <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com\">TravelCommons.com</a>, on the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/feed/\" title=\"\">RSS feed</a>, or <a href=\"https://travelcommons.substack.com/\" title=\"\">the Substack newsletter</a>. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Gulf Coast Mardi Gras Road Trip Stop 1 — Mobile','First stop on a Gulf Coast Mardi Gras Road Trip: Mobile, Alabama, where they throw full boxes of Moon Pies at your head and claim they invented the whole thing before New Orleans. Three-generation families working parade routes like pros, krewe barn parties, and a rainy Sunday hunt for the best king cake.','publish','open','open','','gulf-coast-mardi-gras-road-trip-stop-1-mobile','','','2026-04-02 11:01:47','2026-04-02 17:01:47','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4799',0,'post','',0),
(4800,1,'2026-02-24 22:58:09','2026-02-25 04:58:09','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>This trip had been knocking around the back of my mind for a while. And for me, that’s a big piece of retirement travel — finally getting on with the travel I’ve thought about but never found the time to do.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Planning the Trip</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We’d been Mardi Gras semi-regulars, heading down to New Orleans every other year in pre-COVID times. We loved the big Uptown parades along St Charles St, but returning for the first time since 2018, I wanted to open our Mardi Gras aperture.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I’ve always thought about going further west, to see the celebrations in Lafayette and Cajun Country. And then I remembered my high school friend Scott who lives in Mobile — he’s always banging on about how Mobile was the first US city to do Mardi Gras, that New Orleans is just copying them.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>So I pulled up Google Maps and pretty quickly had a nice loop laid out.&nbsp; Our first stop would be Mobile in honor of its “First City” status; a straight 7-hour shot down I-65 from Nashville with a Buc-ee’s refueling stop along the way. From Mobile, it would be an easy two-hour mix of I-10 and US-90 along the Mississippi Gulf Coast to our next stop, New Orleans. And from there,&nbsp; another two hours up to our final stop, Lafayette and Acadiana.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Now, Mardi Gras isn’t just the day; it’s a whole season. It starts in early January on Epiphany and builds momentum, with parades and events first on the weekends, then nearly every day, whipping everyone up to the final pre-Lenten blowout, Fat Tuesday. Over the years, we’ve skipped that final frenzy and instead visited the couple of weeks before Fat Tuesday. It’s been a good strategy; great parades without the full-contact craziness.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>First Parade — Order of the Incas</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Our first parade in Mobile was the <a href=\"https://mobilemask.com/organization/order-of-inca/\" title=\"\">Order of the Incas</a> on Friday night. It was chilly; even on the Gulf Coast, February nights can bite. But the parade route was full; it looked like mostly families. Next to us three generations of one family were a well-structured team — grade-school kids at the low metal barriers lining the street,  yelling at every float, begging for throws, then stashing their catches in big shoulder bags; high-school kids behind them, also yelling and waving, snagging whatever passed over the heads of the younger kids; parents behind them, drinking beers and minding the wagon where the kids dumped their shoulder bags; and then the grandparent who, spotting a special throw lying unclaimed in the street, reached through the barrier with their cane to drag it to the curb so a grandkid could pick it up. Obviously not their first parade.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I’m used to folks shouting for throws; I do it myself. But here in Mobile, people were shouting for something new to me — Moon Pies. And they got them; showers of chocolate and vanilla mini-Moon Pies. Then something big smacked me in the chest and bounced back out to the street — a full box of Moon Pies. I looked up at the float. Really? You couldn’t be bothered to open it up? Then a full box of Tastykakes hit Irene on the forehead and dropped to the ground. One of the high school kids picked it up. “Do you want this?” he asked. “Nah, you keep it, “ I said. He quickly stuffed it into his shoulder bag.&nbsp; After that, waving for throws became as much of a defensive act — blocking incoming boxes — as it was trying to catch the odd string of beads.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Krewe Barn Party</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Saturday afternoon, we headed south of downtown into a neighborhood of generic warehouse buildings to meet up with my high school friend Scott at a “barn party” — a pre-parade preview of the floats his krewe, the <a href=\"https://mobilemask.com/organization/comic-cowboys/\">Cosmic Cowboys</a>, would be rolling on Fat Tuesday.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Seemed like a bunch of the krewes stored their floats here. We walked by another barn party for the <a href=\"https://mobilemask.com/organization/order-of-lashes/\">Krewe of LaShe’s</a> (a women’s krewe — LaShe’s → lashes)  where they’d set up kids’ rides on the front lawn of their storage building. Leaving, we got caught up in float traffic as <a href=\"https://mobilemask.com/organization/neptunes-daughters/\" title=\"\">Neptune’s Daughters</a> squeezed out toward that night’s parade marshalling area.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Fairhope’s More Intimate Parade</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We were staying across the bay, on the eastern shore of Mobile Bay because everything in Mobile was booked. So after the barn party, we headed back over the bay to Fairhope, to see what a small town parade would be like. If we thought Friday night’s parade in Mobile was mostly families, Fairhope’s <a href=\"https://mobilemask.com/organization/knights-of-ecor-rouge/\">Knights of Ecor Rouge</a> parade was even more so. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Kids lining the parade route were screaming to their friends in the marching bands. Riders on the floats took it as a personal challenge to hurl their throws to friends on the second floor balconies, or through upper-floor windows into watch parties. The parade was shorter — 30 minutes vs. the Incas’ hour — but the floats and the throws and the bands were just as good.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>King Cake Crawl</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Our Mardi Gras trips have built an appreciation not just for parades, but also for king cakes. A king cake is a yeasted dough cake, often braided in a ring, traditionally filled with cinnamon sugar, and topped with a glaze or icing and sprinkled with sugar in Mardi Gras colors of purple, green, and gold.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I got hooked on king cakes when traveling to New Orleans back in my consulting days. The project team would usually stay at the Sheraton on Canal Street, and every morning during Mardi Gras, there’d be a king cake in the concierge lounge breakfast spread. When Irene would join me, we’d leave the concierge cakes behind and troll the neighborhoods to find the best and/or most unique king cakes.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Sunday, we drove back over the bay to Mobile in the rain — our first day of bad weather. I-10 and US 98 run right next to each other across the top of Mobile Bay. I-10 is more of a causeway while US 98 touches down and skips across the just-above-water-line islands of sediment left behind as the Mobile River and the other rivers feed into the bay. We took US 98 this time so we could drive by the <a href=\"https://www.ussalabama.com/\">USS Alabama battleship</a>, swerve the parade barricades, and hit <a href=\"https://www.dropoutbakeryandcompany.com/\">Dropout Bakery</a> for what many locals said was the best king cake in Mobile.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We were hopeful, because our tasting notes on a couple of East Bay king cake slices were “weirdly flat” and “not bad….” So, not great. We found Dropout tucked away in the corner of an incubator/co-working space. No seating, so we walked our boxed cake a block over to a coffee joint and there cut into the perfectly sized two-person king cake — and got what we were looking for. It looked great; it tasted great; it made the walk in the rain worth it.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Packing Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We wandered around the neighborhood a bit; found a very solid taproom — Braided River Brewing — for a couple of pints, but the rain wasn’t letting up. If anything, it was raining harder. The wind picked up. The temperature dropped. We called it; we headed back over the bay for some dinner and to pack up our collection of parade throws. Next morning, we were heading to New Orleans.<br></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Coming Next</strong> — Gulf Coast Mardi Gras Road Trip Stop 2 — New Orleans</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Recommendations for Mobile and East Bay</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Mobile</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.dropoutbakeryandcompany.com/\">Dropout Bakery</a>, 358 St Louis St, Mobile — One of the best king cakes of the trip</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Nova Espresso, 306 St Anthony St, Mobile — Great place to eat your Dropout Bakery purchases</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.braidedriverbrewing.com/\">Braided River Brewing Company</a>, 420 St Louis St, Mobile — The best taproom I visited this stop</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>East Bay</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.kitchenonmaindaphne.com/\">Kitchen On Main</a>, 1716 Main St, Daphne — Cozy, friendly neighborhood restaurant</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.pearlfairhope.com/\">Pearl</a>, 334 Fairhope Ave, Fairhope — Local oysters, gumbo, and a good craft beer selection</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Thanks to everyone for the “Welcome Back!” replies on the website and socials to my first return post. As I said on Instagram, the key will be getting this post out on time. I’ve managed that, and so on to getting the next one out.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Debbie Trueblood commented on the website — “So nice to see you back. And yes, I read your post in “your voice”!” Which gave me an idea — maybe I should feed some past episodes into an AI to generate my own TravelCommons voice model that could be used as an option to read aloud these posts. This AI stuff just keeps getting whackier.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>If you’ve hit the TravelCommons website, you’ve noticed it looks a lot different, a lot simpler, and a lot faster. I was forced into the change when a security upgrade broke the old template. So, speaking of AI, I spent a couple of nights vibe-coding the basics of a new WordPress template that now drives the website.&nbsp; But still on the to-do list — links to the socials, search functionality, a Destinations section to consolidate location content — so stay tuned. It’s a bit of a construction zone.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>You can find all this here on <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com\">TravelCommons.com</a>, on the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/feed/\" title=\"\">RSS feed</a> if you’re enough of a propeller-head to figure out apps like Feedly, or <a href=\"https://travelcommons.substack.com/\" title=\"\">subscribe to the newsletter</a> on Substack. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>In the meantime, if you\'ve got questions about a place I\'ve been or topics you\'d like me to dig into, let me know — in the comments below, by email at <a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a>, or ping me at @mpeacock on X/Twitter, @travelcommons on Instagram or on the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons\" title=\"\">Facebook page</a>.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Remember that you can find all my posts  here on <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com\">TravelCommons.com</a>, on the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/feed/\" title=\"\">RSS feed</a>, or <a href=\"https://travelcommons.substack.com/\" title=\"\">the Substack newsletter</a>. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Gulf Coast Mardi Gras Road Trip Stop 1 - Mobile','','inherit','closed','closed','','4799-revision-v1','','','2026-02-24 22:58:09','2026-02-25 04:58:09','',4799,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4800',0,'revision','',0),
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(4810,1,'2026-02-25 08:49:30','2026-02-25 14:49:30','','Screenshot 2026-02-25 at 8.23.12 AM','The Gulf Coast Mardi Gras Road Trip Loop','inherit','open','closed','','screenshot-2026-02-25-at-8-23-12-am','','','2026-04-14 09:33:23','2026-04-14 15:33:23','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Screenshot-2026-02-25-at-8.23.12-AM.png',0,'attachment','image/png',0),
(4811,1,'2026-02-25 08:51:49','2026-02-25 14:51:49','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>This trip had been knocking around the back of my mind for a while. And for me, that’s a big piece of retirement travel — finally getting on with the travel I’ve thought about but never found the time to do.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Planning the Trip</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We’d been Mardi Gras semi-regulars, heading down to New Orleans every other year in pre-COVID times. We loved the big Uptown parades along St Charles St, but returning for the first time since 2018, I wanted to open our Mardi Gras aperture.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I’ve always thought about going further west, to see the celebrations in Lafayette and Cajun Country. And then I remembered my high school friend Scott who lives in Mobile — he’s always banging on about how Mobile was the first US city to do Mardi Gras, that New Orleans is just copying them.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4810,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Screenshot-2026-02-25-at-8.23.12-AM.png\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Screenshot-2026-02-25-at-8.23.12-AM-300x300.png\" alt=\"Google Map screenshot with a thick blue line defining a road trip\" class=\"wp-image-4810\"/></a></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:group {\"layout\":{\"type\":\"flex\",\"flexWrap\":\"nowrap\"},\"hideFromFeed\":true} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-group\"><!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>So I pulled up Google Maps and pretty quickly had a nice loop laid out.&nbsp; Our first stop would be Mobile in honor of its “First City” status; a straight 7-hour shot down I-65 from Nashville with a Buc-ee’s refueling stop along the way. From Mobile, it would be an easy two-hour mix of I-10 and US-90 along the Mississippi Gulf Coast to our next stop, New Orleans. And from there,&nbsp; another two hours up to our final stop, Lafayette and Acadiana.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph --></div>\n<!-- /wp:group -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Now, Mardi Gras isn’t just the day; it’s a whole season. It starts in early January on Epiphany and builds momentum, with parades and events first on the weekends, then nearly every day, whipping everyone up to the final pre-Lenten blowout, Fat Tuesday. Over the years, we’ve skipped that final frenzy and instead visited the couple of weeks before Fat Tuesday. It’s been a good strategy; great parades without the full-contact craziness.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>First Parade — Order of the Incas</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Our first parade in Mobile was the <a href=\"https://mobilemask.com/organization/order-of-inca/\" title=\"\">Order of the Incas</a> on Friday night. It was chilly; even on the Gulf Coast, February nights can bite. But the parade route was full; it looked like mostly families. Next to us three generations of one family were a well-structured team — grade-school kids at the low metal barriers lining the street,  yelling at every float, begging for throws, then stashing their catches in big shoulder bags; high-school kids behind them, also yelling and waving, snagging whatever passed over the heads of the younger kids; parents behind them, drinking beers and minding the wagon where the kids dumped their shoulder bags; and then the grandparent who, spotting a special throw lying unclaimed in the street, reached through the barrier with their cane to drag it to the curb so a grandkid could pick it up. Obviously not their first parade.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I’m used to folks shouting for throws; I do it myself. But here in Mobile, people were shouting for something new to me — Moon Pies. And they got them; showers of chocolate and vanilla mini-Moon Pies. Then something big smacked me in the chest and bounced back out to the street — a full box of Moon Pies. I looked up at the float. Really? You couldn’t be bothered to open it up? Then a full box of Tastykakes hit Irene on the forehead and dropped to the ground. One of the high school kids picked it up. “Do you want this?” he asked. “Nah, you keep it, “ I said. He quickly stuffed it into his shoulder bag.&nbsp; After that, waving for throws became as much of a defensive act — blocking incoming boxes — as it was trying to catch the odd string of beads.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Krewe Barn Party</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Saturday afternoon, we headed south of downtown into a neighborhood of generic warehouse buildings to meet up with my high school friend Scott at a “barn party” — a pre-parade preview of the floats his krewe, the <a href=\"https://mobilemask.com/organization/comic-cowboys/\">Cosmic Cowboys</a>, would be rolling on Fat Tuesday.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Seemed like a bunch of the krewes stored their floats here. We walked by another barn party for the <a href=\"https://mobilemask.com/organization/order-of-lashes/\">Krewe of LaShe’s</a> (a women’s krewe — LaShe’s → lashes)  where they’d set up kids’ rides on the front lawn of their storage building. Leaving, we got caught up in float traffic as <a href=\"https://mobilemask.com/organization/neptunes-daughters/\" title=\"\">Neptune’s Daughters</a> squeezed out toward that night’s parade marshalling area.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Fairhope’s More Intimate Parade</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We were staying across the bay, on the eastern shore of Mobile Bay because everything in Mobile was booked. So after the barn party, we headed back over the bay to Fairhope, to see what a small town parade would be like. If we thought Friday night’s parade in Mobile was mostly families, Fairhope’s <a href=\"https://mobilemask.com/organization/knights-of-ecor-rouge/\">Knights of Ecor Rouge</a> parade was even more so. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Kids lining the parade route were screaming to their friends in the marching bands. Riders on the floats took it as a personal challenge to hurl their throws to friends on the second floor balconies, or through upper-floor windows into watch parties. The parade was shorter — 30 minutes vs. the Incas’ hour — but the floats and the throws and the bands were just as good.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>King Cake Crawl</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Our Mardi Gras trips have built an appreciation not just for parades, but also for king cakes. A king cake is a yeasted dough cake, often braided in a ring, traditionally filled with cinnamon sugar, and topped with a glaze or icing and sprinkled with sugar in Mardi Gras colors of purple, green, and gold.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I got hooked on king cakes when traveling to New Orleans back in my consulting days. The project team would usually stay at the Sheraton on Canal Street, and every morning during Mardi Gras, there’d be a king cake in the concierge lounge breakfast spread. When Irene would join me, we’d leave the concierge cakes behind and troll the neighborhoods to find the best and/or most unique king cakes.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Sunday, we drove back over the bay to Mobile in the rain — our first day of bad weather. I-10 and US 98 run right next to each other across the top of Mobile Bay. I-10 is more of a causeway while US 98 touches down and skips across the just-above-water-line islands of sediment left behind as the Mobile River and the other rivers feed into the bay. We took US 98 this time so we could drive by the <a href=\"https://www.ussalabama.com/\">USS Alabama battleship</a>, swerve the parade barricades, and hit <a href=\"https://www.dropoutbakeryandcompany.com/\">Dropout Bakery</a> for what many locals said was the best king cake in Mobile.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We were hopeful, because our tasting notes on a couple of East Bay king cake slices were “weirdly flat” and “not bad….” So, not great. We found Dropout tucked away in the corner of an incubator/co-working space. No seating, so we walked our boxed cake a block over to a coffee joint and there cut into the perfectly sized two-person king cake — and got what we were looking for. It looked great; it tasted great; it made the walk in the rain worth it.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Packing Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We wandered around the neighborhood a bit; found a very solid taproom — Braided River Brewing — for a couple of pints, but the rain wasn’t letting up. If anything, it was raining harder. The wind picked up. The temperature dropped. We called it; we headed back over the bay for some dinner and to pack up our collection of parade throws. Next morning, we were heading to New Orleans.<br></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Coming Next</strong> — Gulf Coast Mardi Gras Road Trip Stop 2 — New Orleans</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Recommendations for Mobile and East Bay</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Mobile</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.dropoutbakeryandcompany.com/\">Dropout Bakery</a>, 358 St Louis St, Mobile — One of the best king cakes of the trip</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Nova Espresso, 306 St Anthony St, Mobile — Great place to eat your Dropout Bakery purchases</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.braidedriverbrewing.com/\">Braided River Brewing Company</a>, 420 St Louis St, Mobile — The best taproom I visited this stop</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>East Bay</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.kitchenonmaindaphne.com/\">Kitchen On Main</a>, 1716 Main St, Daphne — Cozy, friendly neighborhood restaurant</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.pearlfairhope.com/\">Pearl</a>, 334 Fairhope Ave, Fairhope — Local oysters, gumbo, and a good craft beer selection</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Thanks to everyone for the “Welcome Back!” replies on the website and socials to my first return post. As I said on Instagram, the key will be getting this post out on time. I’ve managed that, and so on to getting the next one out.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Debbie Trueblood commented on the website — “So nice to see you back. And yes, I read your post in “your voice”!” Which gave me an idea — maybe I should feed some past episodes into an AI to generate my own TravelCommons voice model that could be used as an option to read aloud these posts. This AI stuff just keeps getting whackier.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>If you’ve hit the TravelCommons website, you’ve noticed it looks a lot different, a lot simpler, and a lot faster. I was forced into the change when a security upgrade broke the old template. So, speaking of AI, I spent a couple of nights vibe-coding the basics of a new WordPress template that now drives the website.&nbsp; But still on the to-do list — links to the socials, search functionality, a Destinations section to consolidate location content — so stay tuned. It’s a bit of a construction zone.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>You can find all this here on <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com\">TravelCommons.com</a>, on the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/feed/\" title=\"\">RSS feed</a> if you’re enough of a propeller-head to figure out apps like Feedly, or <a href=\"https://travelcommons.substack.com/\" title=\"\">subscribe to the newsletter</a> on Substack. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>In the meantime, if you\'ve got questions about a place I\'ve been or topics you\'d like me to dig into, let me know — in the comments below, by email at <a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a>, or ping me at @mpeacock on X/Twitter, @travelcommons on Instagram or on the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons\" title=\"\">Facebook page</a>.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Remember that you can find all my posts  here on <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com\">TravelCommons.com</a>, on the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/feed/\" title=\"\">RSS feed</a>, or <a href=\"https://travelcommons.substack.com/\" title=\"\">the Substack newsletter</a>. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Gulf Coast Mardi Gras Road Trip Stop 1 - Mobile','First stop on a Gulf Coast Mardi Gras Road Trip: Mobile, Alabama, where they throw full boxes of Moon Pies at your head and claim they invented the whole thing before New Orleans. Three-generation families working parade routes like pros, krewe barn parties, and a rainy Sunday hunt for the best king cake.','inherit','closed','closed','','4799-revision-v1','','','2026-02-25 08:51:49','2026-02-25 14:51:49','',4799,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4811',0,'revision','',0),
(4812,1,'2026-02-25 08:55:12','2026-02-25 14:55:12','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>This trip had been knocking around the back of my mind for a while. And for me, that’s a big piece of retirement travel — finally getting on with the travel I’ve thought about but never found the time to do.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Planning the Trip</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:group {\"layout\":{\"type\":\"flex\",\"flexWrap\":\"nowrap\"},\"hideFromFeed\":true} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-group\"><!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We’d been Mardi Gras semi-regulars, heading down to New Orleans every other year in pre-COVID times. We loved the big Uptown parades along St Charles St, but returning for the first time since 2018, I wanted to open our Mardi Gras aperture.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph --></div>\n<!-- /wp:group -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I’ve always thought about going further west, to see the celebrations in Lafayette and Cajun Country. And then I remembered my high school friend Scott who lives in Mobile — he’s always banging on about how Mobile was the first US city to do Mardi Gras, that New Orleans is just copying them.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:group {\"layout\":{\"type\":\"flex\",\"flexWrap\":\"nowrap\"},\"hideFromFeed\":true} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-group\"><!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>So I pulled up Google Maps and pretty quickly had a nice loop laid out.&nbsp; Our first stop would be Mobile in honor of its “First City” status; a straight 7-hour shot down I-65 from Nashville with a Buc-ee’s refueling stop along the way. From Mobile, it would be an easy two-hour mix of I-10 and US-90 along the Mississippi Gulf Coast to our next stop, New Orleans. And from there,&nbsp; another two hours up to our final stop, Lafayette and Acadiana.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph --></div>\n<!-- /wp:group -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4810,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"center\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image aligncenter size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Screenshot-2026-02-25-at-8.23.12-AM.png\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Screenshot-2026-02-25-at-8.23.12-AM-300x300.png\" alt=\"Google Map screenshot with a thick blue line defining a road trip\" class=\"wp-image-4810\"/></a></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Now, Mardi Gras isn’t just the day; it’s a whole season. It starts in early January on Epiphany and builds momentum, with parades and events first on the weekends, then nearly every day, whipping everyone up to the final pre-Lenten blowout, Fat Tuesday. Over the years, we’ve skipped that final frenzy and instead visited the couple of weeks before Fat Tuesday. It’s been a good strategy; great parades without the full-contact craziness.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>First Parade — Order of the Incas</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4801,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/IMG_8888_Original.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/IMG_8888_Original-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Masked Mardi Gras participants in black-and-gold capes and feathered helmets standing on a brick sidewalk before the parade\" class=\"wp-image-4801\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Order of the Incas Pre-Parade Logistics Huddle</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Our first parade in Mobile was the <a href=\"https://mobilemask.com/organization/order-of-inca/\" title=\"\">Order of the Incas</a> on Friday night. It was chilly; even on the Gulf Coast, February nights can bite. But the parade route was full; it looked like mostly families. Next to us three generations of one family were a well-structured team — grade-school kids at the low metal barriers lining the street,  yelling at every float, begging for throws, then stashing their catches in big shoulder bags; high-school kids behind them, also yelling and waving, snagging whatever passed over the heads of the younger kids; parents behind them, drinking beers and minding the wagon where the kids dumped their shoulder bags; and then the grandparent who, spotting a special throw lying unclaimed in the street, reached through the barrier with their cane to drag it to the curb so a grandkid could pick it up. Obviously not their first parade.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I’m used to folks shouting for throws; I do it myself. But here in Mobile, people were shouting for something new to me — Moon Pies. And they got them; showers of chocolate and vanilla mini-Moon Pies. Then something big smacked me in the chest and bounced back out to the street — a full box of Moon Pies. I looked up at the float. Really? You couldn’t be bothered to open it up? Then a full box of Tastykakes hit Irene on the forehead and dropped to the ground. One of the high school kids picked it up. “Do you want this?” he asked. “Nah, you keep it, “ I said. He quickly stuffed it into his shoulder bag.&nbsp; After that, waving for throws became as much of a defensive act — blocking incoming boxes — as it was trying to catch the odd string of beads.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Krewe Barn Party</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Saturday afternoon, we headed south of downtown into a neighborhood of generic warehouse buildings to meet up with my high school friend Scott at a “barn party” — a pre-parade preview of the floats his krewe, the <a href=\"https://mobilemask.com/organization/comic-cowboys/\">Cosmic Cowboys</a>, would be rolling on Fat Tuesday.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Seemed like a bunch of the krewes stored their floats here. We walked by another barn party for the <a href=\"https://mobilemask.com/organization/order-of-lashes/\">Krewe of LaShe’s</a> (a women’s krewe — LaShe’s → lashes)  where they’d set up kids’ rides on the front lawn of their storage building. Leaving, we got caught up in float traffic as <a href=\"https://mobilemask.com/organization/neptunes-daughters/\" title=\"\">Neptune’s Daughters</a> squeezed out toward that night’s parade marshalling area.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Fairhope’s More Intimate Parade</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We were staying across the bay, on the eastern shore of Mobile Bay because everything in Mobile was booked. So after the barn party, we headed back over the bay to Fairhope, to see what a small town parade would be like. If we thought Friday night’s parade in Mobile was mostly families, Fairhope’s <a href=\"https://mobilemask.com/organization/knights-of-ecor-rouge/\">Knights of Ecor Rouge</a> parade was even more so. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Kids lining the parade route were screaming to their friends in the marching bands. Riders on the floats took it as a personal challenge to hurl their throws to friends on the second floor balconies, or through upper-floor windows into watch parties. The parade was shorter — 30 minutes vs. the Incas’ hour — but the floats and the throws and the bands were just as good.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>King Cake Crawl</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Our Mardi Gras trips have built an appreciation not just for parades, but also for king cakes. A king cake is a yeasted dough cake, often braided in a ring, traditionally filled with cinnamon sugar, and topped with a glaze or icing and sprinkled with sugar in Mardi Gras colors of purple, green, and gold.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I got hooked on king cakes when traveling to New Orleans back in my consulting days. The project team would usually stay at the Sheraton on Canal Street, and every morning during Mardi Gras, there’d be a king cake in the concierge lounge breakfast spread. When Irene would join me, we’d leave the concierge cakes behind and troll the neighborhoods to find the best and/or most unique king cakes.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Sunday, we drove back over the bay to Mobile in the rain — our first day of bad weather. I-10 and US 98 run right next to each other across the top of Mobile Bay. I-10 is more of a causeway while US 98 touches down and skips across the just-above-water-line islands of sediment left behind as the Mobile River and the other rivers feed into the bay. We took US 98 this time so we could drive by the <a href=\"https://www.ussalabama.com/\">USS Alabama battleship</a>, swerve the parade barricades, and hit <a href=\"https://www.dropoutbakeryandcompany.com/\">Dropout Bakery</a> for what many locals said was the best king cake in Mobile.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We were hopeful, because our tasting notes on a couple of East Bay king cake slices were “weirdly flat” and “not bad….” So, not great. We found Dropout tucked away in the corner of an incubator/co-working space. No seating, so we walked our boxed cake a block over to a coffee joint and there cut into the perfectly sized two-person king cake — and got what we were looking for. It looked great; it tasted great; it made the walk in the rain worth it.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Packing Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We wandered around the neighborhood a bit; found a very solid taproom — Braided River Brewing — for a couple of pints, but the rain wasn’t letting up. If anything, it was raining harder. The wind picked up. The temperature dropped. We called it; we headed back over the bay for some dinner and to pack up our collection of parade throws. Next morning, we were heading to New Orleans.<br></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Coming Next</strong> — Gulf Coast Mardi Gras Road Trip Stop 2 — New Orleans</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Recommendations for Mobile and East Bay</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Mobile</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.dropoutbakeryandcompany.com/\">Dropout Bakery</a>, 358 St Louis St, Mobile — One of the best king cakes of the trip</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Nova Espresso, 306 St Anthony St, Mobile — Great place to eat your Dropout Bakery purchases</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.braidedriverbrewing.com/\">Braided River Brewing Company</a>, 420 St Louis St, Mobile — The best taproom I visited this stop</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>East Bay</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.kitchenonmaindaphne.com/\">Kitchen On Main</a>, 1716 Main St, Daphne — Cozy, friendly neighborhood restaurant</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.pearlfairhope.com/\">Pearl</a>, 334 Fairhope Ave, Fairhope — Local oysters, gumbo, and a good craft beer selection</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Thanks to everyone for the “Welcome Back!” replies on the website and socials to my first return post. As I said on Instagram, the key will be getting this post out on time. I’ve managed that, and so on to getting the next one out.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Debbie Trueblood commented on the website — “So nice to see you back. And yes, I read your post in “your voice”!” Which gave me an idea — maybe I should feed some past episodes into an AI to generate my own TravelCommons voice model that could be used as an option to read aloud these posts. This AI stuff just keeps getting whackier.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>If you’ve hit the TravelCommons website, you’ve noticed it looks a lot different, a lot simpler, and a lot faster. I was forced into the change when a security upgrade broke the old template. So, speaking of AI, I spent a couple of nights vibe-coding the basics of a new WordPress template that now drives the website.&nbsp; But still on the to-do list — links to the socials, search functionality, a Destinations section to consolidate location content — so stay tuned. It’s a bit of a construction zone.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>You can find all this here on <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com\">TravelCommons.com</a>, on the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/feed/\" title=\"\">RSS feed</a> if you’re enough of a propeller-head to figure out apps like Feedly, or <a href=\"https://travelcommons.substack.com/\" title=\"\">subscribe to the newsletter</a> on Substack. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>In the meantime, if you\'ve got questions about a place I\'ve been or topics you\'d like me to dig into, let me know — in the comments below, by email at <a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a>, or ping me at @mpeacock on X/Twitter, @travelcommons on Instagram or on the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons\" title=\"\">Facebook page</a>.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Remember that you can find all my posts  here on <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com\">TravelCommons.com</a>, on the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/feed/\" title=\"\">RSS feed</a>, or <a href=\"https://travelcommons.substack.com/\" title=\"\">the Substack newsletter</a>. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Gulf Coast Mardi Gras Road Trip Stop 1 - Mobile','First stop on a Gulf Coast Mardi Gras Road Trip: Mobile, Alabama, where they throw full boxes of Moon Pies at your head and claim they invented the whole thing before New Orleans. Three-generation families working parade routes like pros, krewe barn parties, and a rainy Sunday hunt for the best king cake.','inherit','closed','closed','','4799-revision-v1','','','2026-02-25 08:55:12','2026-02-25 14:55:12','',4799,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4812',0,'revision','',0),
(4813,1,'2026-02-25 09:03:24','2026-02-25 15:03:24','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>This Mardi Gras trip had been knocking around the back of my mind for a while. And for me, that’s a big piece of retirement travel — finally getting on with the travel I’ve thought about but never found the time to do.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Planning the Trip</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:group {\"layout\":{\"type\":\"flex\",\"flexWrap\":\"nowrap\"},\"hideFromFeed\":true} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-group\"><!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We’d been Mardi Gras semi-regulars, heading down to New Orleans every other year in pre-COVID times. We loved the big Uptown parades along St Charles St, but returning for the first time since 2018, I wanted to open our Mardi Gras aperture.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph --></div>\n<!-- /wp:group -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I’ve always thought about going further west, to see the celebrations in Lafayette and Cajun Country. And then I remembered my high school friend Scott who lives in Mobile — he’s always banging on about how Mobile was the first US city to do Mardi Gras, that New Orleans is just copying them.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:group {\"layout\":{\"type\":\"flex\",\"flexWrap\":\"nowrap\"},\"hideFromFeed\":true} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-group\"><!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>So I pulled up Google Maps and pretty quickly had a nice loop laid out.&nbsp; Our first stop would be Mobile in honor of its “First City” status; a straight 7-hour shot down I-65 from Nashville with a Buc-ee’s refueling stop along the way. From Mobile, it would be an easy two-hour mix of I-10 and US-90 along the Mississippi Gulf Coast to our next stop, New Orleans. And from there,&nbsp; another two hours up to our final stop, Lafayette and Acadiana.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph --></div>\n<!-- /wp:group -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4810,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"center\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image aligncenter size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Screenshot-2026-02-25-at-8.23.12-AM.png\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Screenshot-2026-02-25-at-8.23.12-AM-300x300.png\" alt=\"Google Map screenshot with a thick blue line defining a road trip\" class=\"wp-image-4810\"/></a></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Now, Mardi Gras isn’t just the day; it’s a whole season. It starts in early January on Epiphany and builds momentum, with parades and events first on the weekends, then nearly every day, whipping everyone up to the final pre-Lenten blowout, Fat Tuesday. Over the years, we’ve skipped that final frenzy and instead visited the couple of weeks before Fat Tuesday. It’s been a good strategy; great parades without the full-contact craziness.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>First Mardi Gras Parade</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4801,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/IMG_8888_Original.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/IMG_8888_Original-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Masked Mardi Gras participants in black-and-gold capes and feathered helmets standing on a brick sidewalk before the parade\" class=\"wp-image-4801\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Order of the Incas Pre-Parade Logistics Huddle</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Our first parade in Mobile was the <a href=\"https://mobilemask.com/organization/order-of-inca/\" title=\"\">Order of the Incas</a> on Friday night. It was chilly; even on the Gulf Coast, February nights can bite. But the parade route was full; it looked like mostly families. Next to us three generations of one family were a well-structured team — grade-school kids at the low metal barriers lining the street,  yelling at every float, begging for throws, then stashing their catches in big shoulder bags; high-school kids behind them, also yelling and waving, snagging whatever passed over the heads of the younger kids; parents behind them, drinking beers and minding the wagon where the kids dumped their shoulder bags; and then the grandparent who, spotting a special throw lying unclaimed in the street, reached through the barrier with their cane to drag it to the curb so a grandkid could pick it up. Obviously not their first parade.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4806,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/9444839F-9B5F-4F03-836B-B7146A67827C_Original.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/9444839F-9B5F-4F03-836B-B7146A67827C_Original-240x300.jpg\" alt=\"Brightly lit Mardi Gras float with a giant neon bird and castle walls rolling past a glowing church steeple at night\" class=\"wp-image-4806\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Order of the Incas Parade Float</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I’m used to folks shouting for throws; I do it myself. But here in Mobile, people were shouting for something new to me — Moon Pies. And they got them; showers of chocolate and vanilla mini-Moon Pies. Then something big smacked me in the chest and bounced back out to the street — a full box of Moon Pies. I looked up at the float. Really? You couldn’t be bothered to open it up? Then a full box of Tastykakes hit Irene on the forehead and dropped to the ground. One of the high school kids picked it up. “Do you want this?” he asked. “Nah, you keep it, “ I said. He quickly stuffed it into his shoulder bag.&nbsp; After that, waving for throws became as much of a defensive act — blocking incoming boxes — as it was trying to catch the odd string of beads.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Krewe Barn Party</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Saturday afternoon, we headed south of downtown into a neighborhood of generic warehouse buildings to meet up with my high school friend Scott at a “barn party” — a pre-parade preview of the floats his krewe, the <a href=\"https://mobilemask.com/organization/comic-cowboys/\">Cosmic Cowboys</a>, would be rolling on Fat Tuesday.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Seemed like a bunch of the krewes stored their floats here. We walked by another barn party for the <a href=\"https://mobilemask.com/organization/order-of-lashes/\">Krewe of LaShe’s</a> (a women’s krewe — LaShe’s → lashes)  where they’d set up kids’ rides on the front lawn of their storage building. Leaving, we got caught up in float traffic as <a href=\"https://mobilemask.com/organization/neptunes-daughters/\" title=\"\">Neptune’s Daughters</a> squeezed out toward that night’s parade marshalling area.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Fairhope’s More Intimate Mardi Gras Parade</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4807,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/IMG_8898-1-scaled.jpeg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/IMG_8898-1-225x300.jpeg\" alt=\"Night Mardi Gras parade float with an oversized gray horse and a smiling sun in sunglasses above the crowd\" class=\"wp-image-4807\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Fairhope Parade Float</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We were staying across the bay, on the eastern shore of Mobile Bay because everything in Mobile was booked. So after the barn party, we headed back over the bay to Fairhope, to see what a small town parade would be like. If we thought Friday night’s parade in Mobile was mostly families, Fairhope’s <a href=\"https://mobilemask.com/organization/knights-of-ecor-rouge/\">Knights of Ecor Rouge</a> parade was even more so. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Kids lining the parade route were screaming to their friends in the marching bands. Riders on the floats took it as a personal challenge to hurl their throws to friends on the second floor balconies, or through upper-floor windows into watch parties. The parade was shorter — 30 minutes vs. the Incas’ hour — but the floats and the throws and the bands were just as good.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>King Cake Crawl</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Our Mardi Gras trips have built an appreciation not just for parades, but also for king cakes. A king cake is a yeasted dough cake, often braided in a ring, traditionally filled with cinnamon sugar, and topped with a glaze or icing and sprinkled with sugar in Mardi Gras colors of purple, green, and gold.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I got hooked on king cakes when traveling to New Orleans back in my consulting days. The project team would usually stay at the Sheraton on Canal Street, and every morning during Mardi Gras, there’d be a king cake in the concierge lounge breakfast spread. When Irene would join me, we’d leave the concierge cakes behind and troll the neighborhoods to find the best and/or most unique king cakes.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Sunday, we drove back over the bay to Mobile in the rain — our first day of bad weather. I-10 and US 98 run right next to each other across the top of Mobile Bay. I-10 is more of a causeway while US 98 touches down and skips across the just-above-water-line islands of sediment left behind as the Mobile River and the other rivers feed into the bay. We took US 98 this time so we could drive by the <a href=\"https://www.ussalabama.com/\">USS Alabama battleship</a>, swerve the parade barricades, and hit <a href=\"https://www.dropoutbakeryandcompany.com/\">Dropout Bakery</a> for what many locals said was the best king cake in Mobile.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4803,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/IMG_9258_Original-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/IMG_9258_Original-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Latte with heart latte art beside a frosted king cake slice topped with a tiny green baby in a takeout box\" class=\"wp-image-4803\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Dropbox Bakery King Cake Complete with Baby</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We were hopeful, because our tasting notes on a couple of East Bay king cake slices were “weirdly flat” and “not bad….” So, not great. We found Dropout tucked away in the corner of an incubator/co-working space. No seating, so we walked our boxed cake a block over to a coffee joint and there cut into the perfectly sized two-person king cake — and got what we were looking for. It looked great; it tasted great; it made the walk in the rain worth it.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Packing Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:group {\"layout\":{\"type\":\"flex\",\"flexWrap\":\"nowrap\"},\"hideFromFeed\":true} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-group\"><!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We wandered around the neighborhood a bit; found a very solid taproom — Braided River Brewing — for a couple of pints, but the rain wasn’t letting up. If anything, it was raining harder. The wind picked up. The temperature dropped. We called it; we headed back over the bay for some dinner and to pack up our collection of parade throws. Next morning, we were heading to New Orleans.<br></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph --></div>\n<!-- /wp:group -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4808,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/IMG_8910-1-scaled.jpeg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/IMG_8910-1-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"Mardi Gras throws spread on a hotel table—beads, Moon Pies, glow necklace, cups, plush toys, and small trinkets\" class=\"wp-image-4808\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Our 2-Day Haul of Mobile Parade Throws</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Coming Next</strong> — Gulf Coast Mardi Gras Road Trip Stop 2 — New Orleans</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Recommendations for Mobile and East Bay</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Mobile</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.dropoutbakeryandcompany.com/\">Dropout Bakery</a>, 358 St Louis St, Mobile — One of the best king cakes of the trip</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Nova Espresso, 306 St Anthony St, Mobile — Great place to eat your Dropout Bakery purchases</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.braidedriverbrewing.com/\">Braided River Brewing Company</a>, 420 St Louis St, Mobile — The best taproom I visited this stop</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>East Bay</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.kitchenonmaindaphne.com/\">Kitchen On Main</a>, 1716 Main St, Daphne — Cozy, friendly neighborhood restaurant</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.pearlfairhope.com/\">Pearl</a>, 334 Fairhope Ave, Fairhope — Local oysters, gumbo, and a good craft beer selection</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Thanks to everyone for the “Welcome Back!” replies on the website and socials to my first return post. As I said on Instagram, the key will be getting this post out on time. I’ve managed that, and so on to getting the next one out.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Debbie Trueblood commented on the website — “So nice to see you back. And yes, I read your post in “your voice”!” Which gave me an idea — maybe I should feed some past episodes into an AI to generate my own TravelCommons voice model that could be used as an option to read aloud these posts. This AI stuff just keeps getting whackier.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>If you’ve hit the TravelCommons website, you’ve noticed it looks a lot different, a lot simpler, and a lot faster. I was forced into the change when a security upgrade broke the old template. So, speaking of AI, I spent a couple of nights vibe-coding the basics of a new WordPress template that now drives the website.&nbsp; But still on the to-do list — links to the socials, search functionality, a Destinations section to consolidate location content — so stay tuned. It’s a bit of a construction zone.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>You can find all this here on <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com\">TravelCommons.com</a>, on the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/feed/\" title=\"\">RSS feed</a> if you’re enough of a propeller-head to figure out apps like Feedly, or <a href=\"https://travelcommons.substack.com/\" title=\"\">subscribe to the newsletter</a> on Substack. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>In the meantime, if you\'ve got questions about a place I\'ve been or topics you\'d like me to dig into, let me know — in the comments below, by email at <a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a>, or ping me at @mpeacock on X/Twitter, @travelcommons on Instagram or on the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons\" title=\"\">Facebook page</a>.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Remember that you can find all my posts  here on <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com\">TravelCommons.com</a>, on the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/feed/\" title=\"\">RSS feed</a>, or <a href=\"https://travelcommons.substack.com/\" title=\"\">the Substack newsletter</a>. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Gulf Coast Mardi Gras Road Trip Stop 1 - Mobile','First stop on a Gulf Coast Mardi Gras Road Trip: Mobile, Alabama, where they throw full boxes of Moon Pies at your head and claim they invented the whole thing before New Orleans. Three-generation families working parade routes like pros, krewe barn parties, and a rainy Sunday hunt for the best king cake.','inherit','closed','closed','','4799-revision-v1','','','2026-02-25 09:03:24','2026-02-25 15:03:24','',4799,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4813',0,'revision','',0);
INSERT INTO `wp_posts` VALUES
(4815,1,'2026-02-26 10:24:19','2026-02-26 16:24:19','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>This Mardi Gras trip had been knocking around the back of my mind for a while. And for me, that’s a big piece of retirement travel — finally getting on with the travel I’ve thought about but never found the time to do.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Planning the Trip</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:group {\"layout\":{\"type\":\"flex\",\"flexWrap\":\"nowrap\"},\"hideFromFeed\":true} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-group\"><!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We’d been Mardi Gras semi-regulars, heading down to New Orleans every other year in pre-COVID times. We loved the big Uptown parades along St Charles St, but returning for the first time since 2018, I wanted to open our Mardi Gras aperture.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph --></div>\n<!-- /wp:group -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I’ve always thought about going further west, to see the celebrations in Lafayette and Cajun Country. And then I remembered my high school friend Scott who lives in Mobile — he’s always banging on about how Mobile was the first US city to do Mardi Gras, that New Orleans is just copying them.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:group {\"layout\":{\"type\":\"flex\",\"flexWrap\":\"nowrap\"},\"hideFromFeed\":true} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-group\"><!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>So I pulled up Google Maps and pretty quickly had a nice loop laid out.&nbsp; Our first stop would be Mobile in honor of its “First City” status; a straight 7-hour shot down I-65 from Nashville with a Buc-ee’s refueling stop along the way. From Mobile, it would be an easy two-hour mix of I-10 and US-90 along the Mississippi Gulf Coast to our next stop, New Orleans. And from there,&nbsp; another two hours up to our final stop, Lafayette and Acadiana.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph --></div>\n<!-- /wp:group -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4810,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"center\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image aligncenter size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Screenshot-2026-02-25-at-8.23.12-AM.png\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Screenshot-2026-02-25-at-8.23.12-AM-300x300.png\" alt=\"Google Map screenshot with a thick blue line defining a road trip\" class=\"wp-image-4810\"/></a></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Now, Mardi Gras isn’t just the day; it’s a whole season. It starts in early January on Epiphany and builds momentum, with parades and events first on the weekends, then nearly every day, whipping everyone up to the final pre-Lenten blowout, Fat Tuesday. Over the years, we’ve skipped that final frenzy and instead visited the couple of weeks before Fat Tuesday. It’s been a good strategy; great parades without the full-contact craziness.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>First Mardi Gras Parade</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4801,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/IMG_8888_Original.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/IMG_8888_Original-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Masked Mardi Gras participants in black-and-gold capes and feathered helmets standing on a brick sidewalk before the parade\" class=\"wp-image-4801\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Order of the Incas Pre-Parade Logistics Huddle</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Our first parade in Mobile was the <a href=\"https://mobilemask.com/organization/order-of-inca/\" title=\"\">Order of the Incas</a> on Friday night. It was chilly; even on the Gulf Coast, February nights can bite. But the parade route was full; it looked like mostly families. Next to us three generations of one family were a well-structured team — grade-school kids at the low metal barriers lining the street,&nbsp; yelling at every float, begging for throws, then stashing their catches in big shoulder bags; high-school kids behind them, also yelling and waving, snagging whatever passed over the heads of the younger kids; parents behind them, drinking beers and minding the wagon where the kids dumped their shoulder bags; and then the grandparent who, spotting a special throw lying unclaimed in the street, reached through the barrier with their cane to drag it to the curb so a grandkid could pick it up. Obviously not their first parade.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4806,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/9444839F-9B5F-4F03-836B-B7146A67827C_Original.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/9444839F-9B5F-4F03-836B-B7146A67827C_Original-240x300.jpg\" alt=\"Brightly lit Mardi Gras float with a giant neon bird and castle walls rolling past a glowing church steeple at night\" class=\"wp-image-4806\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Order of the Incas Parade Float</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I’m used to folks shouting for throws; I do it myself. But here in Mobile, people were shouting for something new to me — Moon Pies. And they got them; showers of chocolate and vanilla mini-Moon Pies. Then something big smacked me in the chest and bounced back out to the street — a full box of Moon Pies. I looked up at the float. Really? You couldn’t be bothered to open it up? Then a full box of Tastykakes hit Irene on the forehead and dropped to the ground. One of the high school kids picked it up. “Do you want this?” he asked. “Nah, you keep it, “ I said. He quickly stuffed it into his shoulder bag.&nbsp; After that, waving for throws became as much of a defensive act — blocking incoming boxes — as it was trying to catch the odd string of beads.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Krewe Barn Party</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Saturday afternoon, we headed south of downtown into a neighborhood of generic warehouse buildings to meet up with my high school friend Scott at a “barn party” — a pre-parade preview of the floats his krewe, the <a href=\"https://mobilemask.com/organization/comic-cowboys/\">Cosmic Cowboys</a>, would be rolling on Fat Tuesday.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Seemed like a bunch of the krewes stored their floats here. We walked by another barn party for the <a href=\"https://mobilemask.com/organization/order-of-lashes/\">Krewe of LaShe’s</a> (a women’s krewe — LaShe’s → lashes)&nbsp; where they’d set up kids’ rides on the front lawn of their storage building. Leaving, we got caught up in float traffic as <a href=\"https://mobilemask.com/organization/neptunes-daughters/\" title=\"\">Neptune’s Daughters</a> squeezed out toward that night’s parade marshalling area.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Fairhope’s More Intimate Mardi Gras Parade</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4807,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/IMG_8898-1-scaled.jpeg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/IMG_8898-1-225x300.jpeg\" alt=\"Night Mardi Gras parade float with an oversized gray horse and a smiling sun in sunglasses above the crowd\" class=\"wp-image-4807\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Fairhope Parade Float</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We were staying across the bay, on the eastern shore of Mobile Bay because everything in Mobile was booked. So after the barn party, we headed back over the bay to Fairhope, to see what a small town parade would be like. If we thought Friday night’s parade in Mobile was mostly families, Fairhope’s <a href=\"https://mobilemask.com/organization/knights-of-ecor-rouge/\">Knights of Ecor Rouge</a> parade was even more so. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Kids lining the parade route were screaming to their friends in the marching bands. Riders on the floats took it as a personal challenge to hurl their throws to friends on the second floor balconies, or through upper-floor windows into watch parties. The parade was shorter — 30 minutes vs. the Incas’ hour — but the floats and the throws and the bands were just as good.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>King Cake Crawl</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Our Mardi Gras trips have built an appreciation not just for parades, but also for king cakes. A king cake is a yeasted dough cake, often braided in a ring, traditionally filled with cinnamon sugar, and topped with a glaze or icing and sprinkled with sugar in Mardi Gras colors of purple, green, and gold.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I got hooked on king cakes when traveling to New Orleans back in my consulting days. The project team would usually stay at the Sheraton on Canal Street, and every morning during Mardi Gras, there’d be a king cake in the concierge lounge breakfast spread. When Irene would join me, we’d leave the concierge cakes behind and troll the neighborhoods to find the best and/or most unique king cakes.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Sunday, we drove back over the bay to Mobile in the rain — our first day of bad weather. I-10 and US 98 run right next to each other across the top of Mobile Bay. I-10 is more of a causeway while US 98 touches down and skips across the just-above-water-line islands of sediment left behind as the Mobile River and the other rivers feed into the bay. We took US 98 this time so we could drive by the <a href=\"https://www.ussalabama.com/\">USS Alabama battleship</a>, swerve the parade barricades, and hit <a href=\"https://www.dropoutbakeryandcompany.com/\">Dropout Bakery</a> for what many locals said was the best king cake in Mobile.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4803,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/IMG_9258_Original-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/IMG_9258_Original-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Latte with heart latte art beside a frosted king cake slice topped with a tiny green baby in a takeout box\" class=\"wp-image-4803\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Dropout Bakery King Cake Complete with Baby</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We were hopeful, because our tasting notes on a couple of East Bay king cake slices were “weirdly flat” and “not bad….” So, not great. We found Dropout tucked away in the corner of an incubator/co-working space. No seating, so we walked our boxed cake a block over to a coffee joint and there cut into the perfectly sized two-person king cake — and got what we were looking for. It looked great; it tasted great; it made the walk in the rain worth it.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Packing Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:group {\"layout\":{\"type\":\"flex\",\"flexWrap\":\"nowrap\"},\"hideFromFeed\":true} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-group\"><!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We wandered around the neighborhood a bit; found a very solid taproom — Braided River Brewing — for a couple of pints, but the rain wasn’t letting up. If anything, it was raining harder. The wind picked up. The temperature dropped. We called it; we headed back over the bay for some dinner and to pack up our collection of parade throws. Next morning, we were heading to New Orleans.<br></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph --></div>\n<!-- /wp:group -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4808,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/IMG_8910-1-scaled.jpeg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/IMG_8910-1-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"Mardi Gras throws spread on a hotel table—beads, Moon Pies, glow necklace, cups, plush toys, and small trinkets\" class=\"wp-image-4808\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Our 2-Day Haul of Mobile Parade Throws</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Coming Next</strong> — Gulf Coast Mardi Gras Road Trip Stop 2 — New Orleans</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Recommendations for Mobile and East Bay</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Mobile</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.dropoutbakeryandcompany.com/\">Dropout Bakery</a>, 358 St Louis St, Mobile — One of the best king cakes of the trip</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Nova Espresso, 306 St Anthony St, Mobile — Great place to eat your Dropout Bakery purchases</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.braidedriverbrewing.com/\">Braided River Brewing Company</a>, 420 St Louis St, Mobile — The best taproom I visited this stop</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>East Bay</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.kitchenonmaindaphne.com/\">Kitchen On Main</a>, 1716 Main St, Daphne — Cozy, friendly neighborhood restaurant</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.pearlfairhope.com/\">Pearl</a>, 334 Fairhope Ave, Fairhope — Local oysters, gumbo, and a good craft beer selection</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Thanks to everyone for the “Welcome Back!” replies on the website and socials to my first return post. As I said on Instagram, the key will be getting this post out on time. I’ve managed that, and so on to getting the next one out.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Debbie Trueblood commented on the website — “So nice to see you back. And yes, I read your post in “your voice”!” Which gave me an idea — maybe I should feed some past episodes into an AI to generate my own TravelCommons voice model that could be used as an option to read aloud these posts. This AI stuff just keeps getting whackier.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>If you’ve hit the TravelCommons website, you’ve noticed it looks a lot different, a lot simpler, and a lot faster. I was forced into the change when a security upgrade broke the old template. So, speaking of AI, I spent a couple of nights vibe-coding the basics of a new WordPress template that now drives the website.&nbsp; But still on the to-do list — links to the socials, search functionality, a Destinations section to consolidate location content — so stay tuned. It’s a bit of a construction zone.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>You can find all this here on <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com\">TravelCommons.com</a>, on the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/feed/\" title=\"\">RSS feed</a> if you’re enough of a propeller-head to figure out apps like Feedly, or <a href=\"https://travelcommons.substack.com/\" title=\"\">subscribe to the newsletter</a> on Substack. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>In the meantime, if you\'ve got questions about a place I\'ve been or topics you\'d like me to dig into, let me know — in the comments below, by email at <a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a>, or ping me at @mpeacock on X/Twitter, @travelcommons on Instagram or on the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons\" title=\"\">Facebook page</a>.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Remember that you can find all my posts  here on <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com\">TravelCommons.com</a>, on the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/feed/\" title=\"\">RSS feed</a>, or <a href=\"https://travelcommons.substack.com/\" title=\"\">the Substack newsletter</a>. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Gulf Coast Mardi Gras Road Trip Stop 1 - Mobile','First stop on a Gulf Coast Mardi Gras Road Trip: Mobile, Alabama, where they throw full boxes of Moon Pies at your head and claim they invented the whole thing before New Orleans. Three-generation families working parade routes like pros, krewe barn parties, and a rainy Sunday hunt for the best king cake.','inherit','closed','closed','','4799-revision-v1','','','2026-02-26 10:24:19','2026-02-26 16:24:19','',4799,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4815',0,'revision','',0),
(4819,1,'2026-03-10 10:00:00','2026-03-10 16:00:00','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><em>This trip had been knocking around the back of my mind for a while. And for me, that’s a big piece of retirement travel — finally getting on with the travel I’ve thought about but never found the time to do. Like this road trip to hit Mardi Gras in Mobile (<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2026/02/25/gulf-coast-mardi-gras-road-trip-stop-1-mobile/\" title=\"\">our first stop</a>), New Orleans, and Cajun Country.</em></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4810,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Screenshot-2026-02-25-at-8.23.12-AM.png\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Screenshot-2026-02-25-at-8.23.12-AM-300x300.png\" alt=\"Google Map screenshot with a thick blue line defining a road trip\" class=\"wp-image-4810\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">The Gulf Coast Mardi Gras Road Trip Loop</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Monday morning, we packed up our parade haul — mini-Moon Pies, frisbees, plastic cups, plush toys, packages of ramen soup, and, of course, beads — and pointed the car west on I-10 towards the second stop on our Mardi Gras road trip, New Orleans.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Biloxi Detour</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>After just 90 minutes, we made a lunch detour at Biloxi, MS, to a little one-room joint, <a href=\"https://www.parrains-cajun-cooking.com/\">Parrain\'s Cajun Cooking</a>. It’s just a mile north of the casinos, but with its randomly painted wide woodplank walls and an old-school kitchen service window, it feels like it exists in a more low-key parallel universe. No king cake for breakfast, so we ordered a lap around the menu — cups of gumbo, jambalaya, and red beans and rice; adding in an order of deep-fried boudin balls because… why not?</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Back to An Old Haunt</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Our dinner in New Orleans was a bit more up-scale. We walked down Magazine St. to an old favorite, <a href=\"https://www.pecherestaurant.com/\">Pêche</a>.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4832,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_8915-EDIT-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_8915-EDIT-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"Marble oyster bar at Pêche with menus and a glass of white wine, while staff shuck oysters behind the counter\" class=\"wp-image-4832\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Oyster bar seats: the best seats in the house</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I first ate there when it opened in 2014 and haven’t stopped — because it hasn’t given me a reason to stop. And having been away from New Orleans for seven years, it was the obvious first stop. Walking in, it was packed - the bar, the tables, and the six-person back counter in front of the oyster shuckers that was my usual spot, and where I wanted us to eat. So we put our name in and headed over to the bar.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It’s a good-sized bar. Every seat was taken, and most people were eating as well as drinking. We settled in with the rest of the folks leaning against the walls, drinks in hand, waiting for a seat to open up. They had all sort of self-organized into an informal queue. A seat would open up and everyone would acknowledge the next person waiting. In other places I’ve lived — Chicago, Philly — people would\'ve been angling to jump in front. But further south, it feels like politeness and some level of social order are still expected.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>After one drink, a couple of seats at the back counter opened up. I ordered my usual — a half dozen oysters and the whole fish. Irene added a side of Brussels in her continuing quest for more vegetables.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I picked the Alabama oysters off the raw bar menu because, after years of eating Gulf oysters, I\'ve found them to be much tastier than Louisiana oysters, which I think are better cooked — fried for po’ boys, simmered in a gumbo, or char-broiled in the shell. And also because the oyster shucker had cracked open a couple for us to try.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Then, while waiting for our fish, he gave us the Florida and Louisiana oysters that we\'d passed up. So we\'d ordered a half dozen oysters and then got comp\'d another half dozen by the shucker. Gotta love New Orleans’ lagniappe culture. I tipped him extra — all the cash I had left in my wallet.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Gift from the Weather Gods</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4826,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_9290-EDIT-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_9290-EDIT-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Parade route parking sign draped with Mardi Gras beads as crowds line a broad, oak-shaded avenue\" class=\"wp-image-4826\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">New Orleans posts rules for parade day. Mardi Gras posts beads</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>When I laid out this trip, the parade math wasn’t in our favor. Staying in New Orleans Monday through Wednesday nights was only going to give us one parade night — Wednesday. But the same Sunday rainstorm that chased us off our last Mobile parade forced New Orleans to reschedule its two Sunday parades to what had been an empty Tuesday night. One step back, then two steps forward — the rain dance ended up in our favor.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Tuesday afternoon, we walked along Tchoupitoulas St. through the Warehouse District, with a half-block detour for lunch at another old favorite, <a href=\"https://cochonbutcher.com/\">Cochon Butcher</a>. Then we wound our way under the mess of overpasses that is US-90, helped by a squad of cop cars and motorcycles that were holding up traffic so parade floats could make the turn toward the marshalling yards across from the World of Mardi Gras Museum. A reminder that behind every successful Mardi Gras parade is a whole lot of logistics.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Walking past the marshalling yard, we saw float riders for the first parade — <a href=\"https://www.mkfemmefatale.org/\"><em>Femme</em> <em>Fatales</em></a> — starting to assemble. Cars double-parked, unloading groups of middle-aged women hugging and chatting as they headed toward their floats… at maybe 2 p.m. for a 6 p.m. step-off.&nbsp; No wonder they looked so happy — and a bit lit — when we saw them again rolling past the Avenue Pub.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Walking Magazine Street and St Charles Avenue</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4831,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_8926-EDIT-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_8926-EDIT-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Metal tray piled with boiled crawfish and corn on the cob, seasoned and steaming on a wooden table\" class=\"wp-image-4831\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Crawfish and corn: laying a base before the next round of Mardi Gras beers</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We kept walking — up to Magazine St. and through the Garden District. Some stretches looked emptier than I remembered: empty storefronts, “for lease” signs, fewer places open-for-business. Some of that was probably businesses closing early for the parade. But it still felt quieter. Then as we approached Louisiana Ave., it came alive again. We dove into <a href=\"https://www.boilseafoodhouse.com/lower-garden-district\">Boil Seafood House</a> for our first crawfish of the trip and then headed up to the parade route.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4827,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"left\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignleft size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_9291-EDIT-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_9291-EDIT-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Two-story white house with tall columns decorated in oversized colorful flowers and Mardi Gras garlands\" class=\"wp-image-4827\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Uptown house commits to Mardi Gras colors</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Walking back across the Garden District along St Charles Ave. from Louisiana Ave., we could feel the crowd’s vibe shift — from friends and families relaxing outside their houses and across on St Charles’ grassy median they call “<a href=\"https://mikescottwrites.com/2019/06/13/new-orleans-101-why-do-we-call-it-a-neutral-ground-instead-of-a-median/\">neutral ground</a>,” to something a bit more rowdy, with a bit more of an edge to it as we got into the more commercial stretch.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Avenue Pub Balcony View</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I was happy to step off the street and into yet another old haunt, <a href=\"https://theavenuepub.com/\">the Avenue Pub</a>. It was surprisingly uncrowded, both on the first floor and on the second-floor balcony that looks over the parade route.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4829,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_9293-EDIT-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_9293-EDIT-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Brightly lit Mardi Gras float at night with crowds reaching up from both sides of the street\" class=\"wp-image-4829\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Two-story floats turn throws into a competitive sport</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We got to the balcony railing just as the <em>Femme Fatales </em>rolled by. We didn’t expect them to be able to hit us with their throws on the second floor, but the two-story floats made it possible. And the riders were good. Some even cleared us, the first row leaning on the railing, and hit the folks in the second row leaning against the back wall. We all traded beads and frisbees and light-up balls so everyone on the balcony went home with a complete collection of the night’s throws.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Wednesday Night Let-Down</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4833,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_9315-EDIT-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_9315-EDIT-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Nighttime Mardi Gras parade float with two green-costumed torchbearer characters on the front platform and a rider in white standing above, lit by bright blue and gold lights on a city street\" class=\"wp-image-4833\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Watching One Last Float</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>After Tuesday night’s rescheduled parades, the regularly scheduled Wednesday parades were a bit of a let-down. The <em>Muses</em> parade wasn\'t as good as I remembered. And we completely skipped the last parade even though all we had to do was ride the elevator down and walk out the hotel door. Instead, we watched out our window as a high school band marched up Poydras St. from the parade’s end-point to their buses home.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We were parade-ed out.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Scrolling back through Google Photos, looking at photos I took in 2015, those parade floats looked more intricate and clever, and they were all led by flambeaux — guys marching in front carrying big propane-fed torches. There wasn’t any of that on Tuesday or Wednesday night. Just tractors and trucks hauling float trailers that seemed to be built to maximize the number of riders.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We still enjoyed these parades, and maybe I\'ve got a case of rosy retrospection. But I just didn\'t think these parades were as good as the ones we saw 8-10 years ago.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Pilgrimage to the Ultimate King Cake</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4828,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_9298-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_9298-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"People waiting in a long line outside Dong Phuong Bakery under a bright blue sky\" class=\"wp-image-4828\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">We thought we\'d showed up “early\"</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We got up early Wednesday morning to hit the ultimate king cake shop: <a href=\"https://www.dpbakery.com/\">Dong Phuong Bakery</a>.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It’s about a 30-minute drive east — way out of the normal tourist zone, in some suburban light-industrial area. We got there at 7:50 a.m., just before the 8:00 opening time, figuring we\'d be fine.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>As I pulled up, I could see we were way wrong.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>The parking lot was full. Cars were parked along the shoulder of the road. And the line of people ran the length of the building and then started doing Disney-esque switchbacks. I told Irene to get in line while I hunted for parking.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>A rumor came down the line that the first guy showed up at 6:30 a.m. I didn’t doubt it. I saw people walking back to their trucks carrying a bag with their three-cake limit in one hand and a camp chair in the other.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4825,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_9303-EDIT-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_9303-EDIT-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Dong Phuong king cake in a bakery box with purple, green, and gold sugar and a tiny plastic baby on top\" class=\"wp-image-4825\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">The king cake standard by which all others will now be judged</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Talking to people around us, everyone was from New Orleans, had been from New Orleans, or was visiting family there. We were the only ones within conversational radius with no obvious NOLA connection. We were also the only ones not maxing out the three-cake limit.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>After an hour in the queue, we bought one traditional cream cheese-filled king cake. During our wait, Irene ducked into the bakery and came back with a couple of savory bun-style pork things that were very good. I’d make the drive back just for those.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>But the king cake? Definitively the best of the 8-10 we tried on the trip. Runner-up: Dropout Bakery back in Mobile.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Slipping Out of the Bubble to Bywate</strong>r</h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>On our last afternoon in New Orleans, we popped over to Bywater.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I’ve been going there since my “<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/07/31/podcast-100-southern-road-trip-breaking-up-with-american-airlines/\">Drive South</a>” trip in 2012, when a guy sitting next to me in a Louisville bar told me about it. (One of the underappreciated benefits of sitting at a bar: accidental travel intelligence.)</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4830,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_8933-EDIT-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_8933-EDIT-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Stack of hanging signs on a building: “For Sale” placards above a bold sign reading “HAUNTED&quot;\" class=\"wp-image-4830\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">New Orleans real estate marketing <em>is</em> unique</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Bywater has always seemed to me to be a bit run-down—or maybe “highly worn”—in a slightly hipster way. Smallish shotgun-ish houses all crammed tightly together along narrow streets that default to single lanes because of the cars parked on both sides.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I’ve always liked it because it’s anti-French Quarter in the best way. Not a “tourists go home” vibe. More of an “I don\'t give a damn about you, whoever you are” vibe. An indifference that feels honest rather than performative.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>This time through, Bywater looked a bit cleaner, tidier. Not necessarily gentrified, just that a lot of places looked to have been recently painted. And an old manufacturing or steel fabrication plant on the edge of the neighborhood had been converted into a very solid microbrewery.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Maybe this tidying-up is the early stage of gentrification — conversions to Airbnbs and boutique inns behind fresh paint jobs. Maybe the tourist bubble has made it out here..</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Or maybe the Home Depot had a really good sale.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Packing Up and Heading West (again)</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4834,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_9281-EDIT-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_9281-EDIT-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Two powdered-sugar beignets in a paper tray on a café table beside a green to-go coffee cup in New Orleans\" class=\"wp-image-4834\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Breakfast at Café Beignet</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We came back to New Orleans expecting one parade night and got two. We came back hoping our old favorites survived the COVID years and the subsequent inflation surge, and we found Pêche, Cochon Butcher, Avenue Pub, and Café Beignet still standing.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Maybe it\'s where we were hanging out — the Central Business District (CBD), the Warehouse District, the Garden District — high tourism neighborhoods that have been floating on a raft of revenge tourism. Maybe the neighborhoods away from the river, outside the usual tourist path, have had a harder time. But whatever it is, I\'ll take it. I was happy to eat and drink well on our return to New Orleans.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We gathered up our growing tangle of beads, stuffed animals, plastic cups, special chalices, and whatever else we’d accumulated (except the Moon Pies; we ate those), loaded the car, and pointed ourselves west toward the next stop: Lafayette and Acadiana.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Coming next:</strong> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2026/04/14/gulf-coast-mardi-gras-road-trip-stop-3-lafayette-acadiana/\" title=\"\">Gulf Coast Mardi Gras Road Trip Stop 3 — Lafayette and Acadiana</a></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Recommendations for New Orleans</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Food &amp; Drink</strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://pecherestaurant.com/\">Pêche Seafood Grill</a>, 800 Magazine St. — Ask for the back counter seats in front of the oyster shuckers. Worth the wait.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.cochonbutcher.com/\">Cochon Butcher</a>, 930 Tchoupitoulas St. — Solid lunch spot for sandwiches and small plates</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://theavenuepub.com/\">Avenue Pub</a>, 1732 St. Charles Ave. — Second floor balcony for parade watching, great tap list</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.boilseafoodhouse.com/lower-garden-district\">Boil Seafood House</a>, 3340 Magazine St. — Divey but good Gulf seafood</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.dpbakery.com/\">Dong Phuong Bakery</a>, 14207 Chef Menteur Hwy — King cake and savory pork buns; arrive earlier than you think you need to</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":2240,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/IMG_0136.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/IMG_0136-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Glittery green sign reading “throw me something” mounted on a ladder near Mardi Gras parade route\" class=\"wp-image-2240\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Parade strategy, simplified: stand here and be obvious</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Parade Strategy</strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Skip the French Quarter parades — too crowded, tight streets, small parades</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Garden District along St. Charles Ave. is the sweet spot — better crowd, easier to catch throws</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Avenue Pub\'s second floor balcony gives you parade views with a great beer selection</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Check parade schedules — weather cancellations will reshuffle everything</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Neighborhoods</strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Stay in the Warehouse District or CBD for easy walking to parades and restaurants</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bywater for anti-tourist authenticity (though that may be changing)</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Gulf Coast Mardi Gras Road Trip Stop 2 — New Orleans','Stop 2 of our Gulf Coast Mardi Gras road trip drops us into New Orleans for parades, oysters, king cake, and a little parade-weather luck. We revisit old favorites like Pêche and Cochon Butcher. Includes parade strategy, neighborhood notes, and where to eat and drink.','publish','open','open','','gulf-coast-mardi-gras-road-trip-stop-2-new-orleans','','\nhttps://mikescottwrites.com/2019/06/13/new-orleans-101-why-do-we-call-it-a-neutral-ground-instead-of-a-median/','2026-05-21 16:40:09','2026-05-21 21:40:09','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4819',0,'post','',0),
(4820,1,'2026-03-09 08:57:49','2026-03-09 14:57:49','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>This Mardi Gras trip had been knocking around the back of my mind for a while. And for me, that’s a big piece of retirement travel — finally getting on with the travel I’ve thought about but never found the time to do.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Planning the Trip</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:group {\"layout\":{\"type\":\"flex\",\"flexWrap\":\"nowrap\"},\"hideFromFeed\":true} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-group\"><!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We’d been Mardi Gras semi-regulars, heading down to New Orleans every other year in pre-COVID times. We loved the big Uptown parades along St Charles St, but returning for the first time since 2018, I wanted to open our Mardi Gras aperture.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph --></div>\n<!-- /wp:group -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I’ve always thought about going further west, to see the celebrations in Lafayette and Cajun Country. And then I remembered my high school friend Scott who lives in Mobile — he’s always banging on about how Mobile was the first US city to do Mardi Gras, that New Orleans is just copying them.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:group {\"layout\":{\"type\":\"flex\",\"flexWrap\":\"nowrap\"},\"hideFromFeed\":true} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-group\"><!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>So I pulled up Google Maps and pretty quickly had a nice loop laid out.&nbsp; Our first stop would be Mobile in honor of its “First City” status; a straight 7-hour shot down I-65 from Nashville with a Buc-ee’s refueling stop along the way. From Mobile, it would be an easy two-hour mix of I-10 and US-90 along the Mississippi Gulf Coast to our next stop, New Orleans. And from there,&nbsp; another two hours up to our final stop, Lafayette and Acadiana.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph --></div>\n<!-- /wp:group -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4810,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"center\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image aligncenter size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Screenshot-2026-02-25-at-8.23.12-AM.png\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Screenshot-2026-02-25-at-8.23.12-AM-300x300.png\" alt=\"Google Map screenshot with a thick blue line defining a road trip\" class=\"wp-image-4810\"/></a></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Now, Mardi Gras isn’t just the day; it’s a whole season. It starts in early January on Epiphany and builds momentum, with parades and events first on the weekends, then nearly every day, whipping everyone up to the final pre-Lenten blowout, Fat Tuesday. Over the years, we’ve skipped that final frenzy and instead visited the couple of weeks before Fat Tuesday. It’s been a good strategy; great parades without the full-contact craziness.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>First Mardi Gras Parade</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4801,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/IMG_8888_Original.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/IMG_8888_Original-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Masked Mardi Gras participants in black-and-gold capes and feathered helmets standing on a brick sidewalk before the parade\" class=\"wp-image-4801\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Order of the Incas Pre-Parade Logistics Huddle</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Our first parade in Mobile was the <a href=\"https://mobilemask.com/organization/order-of-inca/\" title=\"\">Order of the Incas</a> on Friday night. It was chilly; even on the Gulf Coast, February nights can bite. But the parade route was full; it looked like mostly families. Next to us three generations of one family were a well-structured team — grade-school kids at the low metal barriers lining the street,&nbsp; yelling at every float, begging for throws, then stashing their catches in big shoulder bags; high-school kids behind them, also yelling and waving, snagging whatever passed over the heads of the younger kids; parents behind them, drinking beers and minding the wagon where the kids dumped their shoulder bags; and then the grandparent who, spotting a special throw lying unclaimed in the street, reached through the barrier with their cane to drag it to the curb so a grandkid could pick it up. Obviously not their first parade.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4806,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/9444839F-9B5F-4F03-836B-B7146A67827C_Original.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/9444839F-9B5F-4F03-836B-B7146A67827C_Original-240x300.jpg\" alt=\"Brightly lit Mardi Gras float with a giant neon bird and castle walls rolling past a glowing church steeple at night\" class=\"wp-image-4806\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Order of the Incas Parade Float</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I’m used to folks shouting for throws; I do it myself. But here in Mobile, people were shouting for something new to me — Moon Pies. And they got them; showers of chocolate and vanilla mini-Moon Pies. Then something big smacked me in the chest and bounced back out to the street — a full box of Moon Pies. I looked up at the float. Really? You couldn’t be bothered to open it up? Then a full box of Tastykakes hit Irene on the forehead and dropped to the ground. One of the high school kids picked it up. “Do you want this?” he asked. “Nah, you keep it, “ I said. He quickly stuffed it into his shoulder bag.&nbsp; After that, waving for throws became as much of a defensive act — blocking incoming boxes — as it was trying to catch the odd string of beads.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Krewe Barn Party</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Saturday afternoon, we headed south of downtown into a neighborhood of generic warehouse buildings to meet up with my high school friend Scott at a “barn party” — a pre-parade preview of the floats his krewe, the <a href=\"https://mobilemask.com/organization/comic-cowboys/\">Cosmic Cowboys</a>, would be rolling on Fat Tuesday.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Seemed like a bunch of the krewes stored their floats here. We walked by another barn party for the <a href=\"https://mobilemask.com/organization/order-of-lashes/\">Krewe of LaShe’s</a> (a women’s krewe — LaShe’s → lashes)&nbsp; where they’d set up kids’ rides on the front lawn of their storage building. Leaving, we got caught up in float traffic as <a href=\"https://mobilemask.com/organization/neptunes-daughters/\" title=\"\">Neptune’s Daughters</a> squeezed out toward that night’s parade marshalling area.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Fairhope’s More Intimate Mardi Gras Parade</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4807,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/IMG_8898-1-scaled.jpeg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/IMG_8898-1-225x300.jpeg\" alt=\"Night Mardi Gras parade float with an oversized gray horse and a smiling sun in sunglasses above the crowd\" class=\"wp-image-4807\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Fairhope Parade Float</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We were staying across the bay, on the eastern shore of Mobile Bay because everything in Mobile was booked. So after the barn party, we headed back over the bay to Fairhope, to see what a small town parade would be like. If we thought Friday night’s parade in Mobile was mostly families, Fairhope’s <a href=\"https://mobilemask.com/organization/knights-of-ecor-rouge/\">Knights of Ecor Rouge</a> parade was even more so. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Kids lining the parade route were screaming to their friends in the marching bands. Riders on the floats took it as a personal challenge to hurl their throws to friends on the second floor balconies, or through upper-floor windows into watch parties. The parade was shorter — 30 minutes vs. the Incas’ hour — but the floats and the throws and the bands were just as good.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>King Cake Crawl</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Our Mardi Gras trips have built an appreciation not just for parades, but also for king cakes. A king cake is a yeasted dough cake, often braided in a ring, traditionally filled with cinnamon sugar, and topped with a glaze or icing and sprinkled with sugar in Mardi Gras colors of purple, green, and gold.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I got hooked on king cakes when traveling to New Orleans back in my consulting days. The project team would usually stay at the Sheraton on Canal Street, and every morning during Mardi Gras, there’d be a king cake in the concierge lounge breakfast spread. When Irene would join me, we’d leave the concierge cakes behind and troll the neighborhoods to find the best and/or most unique king cakes.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Sunday, we drove back over the bay to Mobile in the rain — our first day of bad weather. I-10 and US 98 run right next to each other across the top of Mobile Bay. I-10 is more of a causeway while US 98 touches down and skips across the just-above-water-line islands of sediment left behind as the Mobile River and the other rivers feed into the bay. We took US 98 this time so we could drive by the <a href=\"https://www.ussalabama.com/\">USS Alabama battleship</a>, swerve the parade barricades, and hit <a href=\"https://www.dropoutbakeryandcompany.com/\">Dropout Bakery</a> for what many locals said was the best king cake in Mobile.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4803,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/IMG_9258_Original-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/IMG_9258_Original-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Latte with heart latte art beside a frosted king cake slice topped with a tiny green baby in a takeout box\" class=\"wp-image-4803\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Dropout Bakery King Cake Complete with Baby</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We were hopeful, because our tasting notes on a couple of East Bay king cake slices were “weirdly flat” and “not bad….” So, not great. We found Dropout tucked away in the corner of an incubator/co-working space. No seating, so we walked our boxed cake a block over to a coffee joint and there cut into the perfectly sized two-person king cake — and got what we were looking for. It looked great; it tasted great; it made the walk in the rain worth it.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Packing Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:group {\"layout\":{\"type\":\"flex\",\"flexWrap\":\"nowrap\"},\"hideFromFeed\":true} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-group\"><!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We wandered around the neighborhood a bit; found a very solid taproom — Braided River Brewing — for a couple of pints, but the rain wasn’t letting up. If anything, it was raining harder. The wind picked up. The temperature dropped. We called it; we headed back over the bay for some dinner and to pack up our collection of parade throws. Next morning, we were heading to New Orleans.<br></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph --></div>\n<!-- /wp:group -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4808,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/IMG_8910-1-scaled.jpeg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/IMG_8910-1-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"Mardi Gras throws spread on a hotel table—beads, Moon Pies, glow necklace, cups, plush toys, and small trinkets\" class=\"wp-image-4808\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Our 2-Day Haul of Mobile Parade Throws</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Coming Next</strong>: Gulf Coast Mardi Gras Road Trip Stop 2 — New Orleans</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Recommendations for Mobile and East Bay</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Mobile</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.dropoutbakeryandcompany.com/\">Dropout Bakery</a>, 358 St Louis St, Mobile — One of the best king cakes of the trip</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Nova Espresso, 306 St Anthony St, Mobile — Great place to eat your Dropout Bakery purchases</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.braidedriverbrewing.com/\">Braided River Brewing Company</a>, 420 St Louis St, Mobile — The best taproom I visited this stop</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>East Bay</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.kitchenonmaindaphne.com/\">Kitchen On Main</a>, 1716 Main St, Daphne — Cozy, friendly neighborhood restaurant</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.pearlfairhope.com/\">Pearl</a>, 334 Fairhope Ave, Fairhope — Local oysters, gumbo, and a good craft beer selection</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Thanks to everyone for the “Welcome Back!” replies on the website and socials to my first return post. As I said on Instagram, the key will be getting this post out on time. I’ve managed that, and so on to getting the next one out.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Debbie Trueblood commented on the website — “So nice to see you back. And yes, I read your post in “your voice”!” Which gave me an idea — maybe I should feed some past episodes into an AI to generate my own TravelCommons voice model that could be used as an option to read aloud these posts. This AI stuff just keeps getting whackier.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>If you’ve hit the TravelCommons website, you’ve noticed it looks a lot different, a lot simpler, and a lot faster. I was forced into the change when a security upgrade broke the old template. So, speaking of AI, I spent a couple of nights vibe-coding the basics of a new WordPress template that now drives the website.&nbsp; But still on the to-do list — links to the socials, search functionality, a Destinations section to consolidate location content — so stay tuned. It’s a bit of a construction zone.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>You can find all this here on <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com\">TravelCommons.com</a>, on the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/feed/\" title=\"\">RSS feed</a> if you’re enough of a propeller-head to figure out apps like Feedly, or <a href=\"https://travelcommons.substack.com/\" title=\"\">subscribe to the newsletter</a> on Substack. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>In the meantime, if you\'ve got questions about a place I\'ve been or topics you\'d like me to dig into, let me know — in the comments below, by email at <a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a>, or ping me at @mpeacock on X/Twitter, @travelcommons on Instagram or on the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons\" title=\"\">Facebook page</a>.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Remember that you can find all my posts  here on <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com\">TravelCommons.com</a>, on the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/feed/\" title=\"\">RSS feed</a>, or <a href=\"https://travelcommons.substack.com/\" title=\"\">the Substack newsletter</a>. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Gulf Coast Mardi Gras Road Trip Stop 1 - Mobile','First stop on a Gulf Coast Mardi Gras Road Trip: Mobile, Alabama, where they throw full boxes of Moon Pies at your head and claim they invented the whole thing before New Orleans. Three-generation families working parade routes like pros, krewe barn parties, and a rainy Sunday hunt for the best king cake.','inherit','closed','closed','','4799-revision-v1','','','2026-03-09 08:57:49','2026-03-09 14:57:49','',4799,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4820',0,'revision','',0),
(4821,1,'2026-03-09 08:59:55','2026-03-09 14:59:55','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>This Mardi Gras trip had been knocking around the back of my mind for a while. And for me, that’s a big piece of retirement travel — finally getting on with the travel I’ve thought about but never found the time to do.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Planning the Trip</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:group {\"layout\":{\"type\":\"flex\",\"flexWrap\":\"nowrap\"},\"hideFromFeed\":true} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-group\"><!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We’d been Mardi Gras semi-regulars, heading down to New Orleans every other year in pre-COVID times. We loved the big Uptown parades along St Charles St, but returning for the first time since 2018, I wanted to open our Mardi Gras aperture.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph --></div>\n<!-- /wp:group -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I’ve always thought about going further west, to see the celebrations in Lafayette and Cajun Country. And then I remembered my high school friend Scott who lives in Mobile — he’s always banging on about how Mobile was the first US city to do Mardi Gras, that New Orleans is just copying them.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:group {\"layout\":{\"type\":\"flex\",\"flexWrap\":\"nowrap\"},\"hideFromFeed\":true} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-group\"><!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>So I pulled up Google Maps and pretty quickly had a nice loop laid out.&nbsp; Our first stop would be Mobile in honor of its “First City” status; a straight 7-hour shot down I-65 from Nashville with a Buc-ee’s refueling stop along the way. From Mobile, it would be an easy two-hour mix of I-10 and US-90 along the Mississippi Gulf Coast to our next stop, New Orleans. And from there,&nbsp; another two hours up to our final stop, Lafayette and Acadiana.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph --></div>\n<!-- /wp:group -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4810,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"center\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image aligncenter size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Screenshot-2026-02-25-at-8.23.12-AM.png\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Screenshot-2026-02-25-at-8.23.12-AM-300x300.png\" alt=\"Google Map screenshot with a thick blue line defining a road trip\" class=\"wp-image-4810\"/></a></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Now, Mardi Gras isn’t just the day; it’s a whole season. It starts in early January on Epiphany and builds momentum, with parades and events first on the weekends, then nearly every day, whipping everyone up to the final pre-Lenten blowout, Fat Tuesday. Over the years, we’ve skipped that final frenzy and instead visited the couple of weeks before Fat Tuesday. It’s been a good strategy; great parades without the full-contact craziness.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>First Mardi Gras Parade</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4801,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/IMG_8888_Original.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/IMG_8888_Original-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Masked Mardi Gras participants in black-and-gold capes and feathered helmets standing on a brick sidewalk before the parade\" class=\"wp-image-4801\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Order of the Incas Pre-Parade Logistics Huddle</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Our first parade in Mobile was the <a href=\"https://mobilemask.com/organization/order-of-inca/\" title=\"\">Order of the Incas</a> on Friday night. It was chilly; even on the Gulf Coast, February nights can bite. But the parade route was full; it looked like mostly families. Next to us three generations of one family were a well-structured team — grade-school kids at the low metal barriers lining the street,&nbsp; yelling at every float, begging for throws, then stashing their catches in big shoulder bags; high-school kids behind them, also yelling and waving, snagging whatever passed over the heads of the younger kids; parents behind them, drinking beers and minding the wagon where the kids dumped their shoulder bags; and then the grandparent who, spotting a special throw lying unclaimed in the street, reached through the barrier with their cane to drag it to the curb so a grandkid could pick it up. Obviously not their first parade.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4806,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/9444839F-9B5F-4F03-836B-B7146A67827C_Original.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/9444839F-9B5F-4F03-836B-B7146A67827C_Original-240x300.jpg\" alt=\"Brightly lit Mardi Gras float with a giant neon bird and castle walls rolling past a glowing church steeple at night\" class=\"wp-image-4806\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Order of the Incas Parade Float</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I’m used to folks shouting for throws; I do it myself. But here in Mobile, people were shouting for something new to me — Moon Pies. And they got them; showers of chocolate and vanilla mini-Moon Pies. Then something big smacked me in the chest and bounced back out to the street — a full box of Moon Pies. I looked up at the float. Really? You couldn’t be bothered to open it up? Then a full box of Tastykakes hit Irene on the forehead and dropped to the ground. One of the high school kids picked it up. “Do you want this?” he asked. “Nah, you keep it, “ I said. He quickly stuffed it into his shoulder bag.&nbsp; After that, waving for throws became as much of a defensive act — blocking incoming boxes — as it was trying to catch the odd string of beads.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Krewe Barn Party</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Saturday afternoon, we headed south of downtown into a neighborhood of generic warehouse buildings to meet up with my high school friend Scott at a “barn party” — a pre-parade preview of the floats his krewe, the <a href=\"https://mobilemask.com/organization/comic-cowboys/\">Cosmic Cowboys</a>, would be rolling on Fat Tuesday.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Seemed like a bunch of the krewes stored their floats here. We walked by another barn party for the <a href=\"https://mobilemask.com/organization/order-of-lashes/\">Krewe of LaShe’s</a> (a women’s krewe — LaShe’s → lashes)&nbsp; where they’d set up kids’ rides on the front lawn of their storage building. Leaving, we got caught up in float traffic as <a href=\"https://mobilemask.com/organization/neptunes-daughters/\" title=\"\">Neptune’s Daughters</a> squeezed out toward that night’s parade marshalling area.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Fairhope’s More Intimate Mardi Gras Parade</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4807,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/IMG_8898-1-scaled.jpeg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/IMG_8898-1-225x300.jpeg\" alt=\"Night Mardi Gras parade float with an oversized gray horse and a smiling sun in sunglasses above the crowd\" class=\"wp-image-4807\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Fairhope Parade Float</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We were staying across the bay, on the eastern shore of Mobile Bay because everything in Mobile was booked. So after the barn party, we headed back over the bay to Fairhope, to see what a small town parade would be like. If we thought Friday night’s parade in Mobile was mostly families, Fairhope’s <a href=\"https://mobilemask.com/organization/knights-of-ecor-rouge/\">Knights of Ecor Rouge</a> parade was even more so. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Kids lining the parade route were screaming to their friends in the marching bands. Riders on the floats took it as a personal challenge to hurl their throws to friends on the second floor balconies, or through upper-floor windows into watch parties. The parade was shorter — 30 minutes vs. the Incas’ hour — but the floats and the throws and the bands were just as good.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>King Cake Crawl</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Our Mardi Gras trips have built an appreciation not just for parades, but also for king cakes. A king cake is a yeasted dough cake, often braided in a ring, traditionally filled with cinnamon sugar, and topped with a glaze or icing and sprinkled with sugar in Mardi Gras colors of purple, green, and gold.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I got hooked on king cakes when traveling to New Orleans back in my consulting days. The project team would usually stay at the Sheraton on Canal Street, and every morning during Mardi Gras, there’d be a king cake in the concierge lounge breakfast spread. When Irene would join me, we’d leave the concierge cakes behind and troll the neighborhoods to find the best and/or most unique king cakes.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Sunday, we drove back over the bay to Mobile in the rain — our first day of bad weather. I-10 and US 98 run right next to each other across the top of Mobile Bay. I-10 is more of a causeway while US 98 touches down and skips across the just-above-water-line islands of sediment left behind as the Mobile River and the other rivers feed into the bay. We took US 98 this time so we could drive by the <a href=\"https://www.ussalabama.com/\">USS Alabama battleship</a>, swerve the parade barricades, and hit <a href=\"https://www.dropoutbakeryandcompany.com/\">Dropout Bakery</a> for what many locals said was the best king cake in Mobile.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4803,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/IMG_9258_Original-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/IMG_9258_Original-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Latte with heart latte art beside a frosted king cake slice topped with a tiny green baby in a takeout box\" class=\"wp-image-4803\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Dropout Bakery King Cake Complete with Baby</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We were hopeful, because our tasting notes on a couple of East Bay king cake slices were “weirdly flat” and “not bad….” So, not great. We found Dropout tucked away in the corner of an incubator/co-working space. No seating, so we walked our boxed cake a block over to a coffee joint and there cut into the perfectly sized two-person king cake — and got what we were looking for. It looked great; it tasted great; it made the walk in the rain worth it.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Packing Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:group {\"layout\":{\"type\":\"flex\",\"flexWrap\":\"nowrap\"},\"hideFromFeed\":true} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-group\"><!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We wandered around the neighborhood a bit; found a very solid taproom — Braided River Brewing — for a couple of pints, but the rain wasn’t letting up. If anything, it was raining harder. The wind picked up. The temperature dropped. We called it; we headed back over the bay for some dinner and to pack up our collection of parade throws. Next morning, we were heading to New Orleans.<br></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph --></div>\n<!-- /wp:group -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4808,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/IMG_8910-1-scaled.jpeg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/IMG_8910-1-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"Mardi Gras throws spread on a hotel table—beads, Moon Pies, glow necklace, cups, plush toys, and small trinkets\" class=\"wp-image-4808\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Our 2-Day Haul of Mobile Parade Throws</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph {\"hideFromFeed\":true} -->\n<p><strong>Coming Next</strong>: Gulf Coast Mardi Gras Road Trip Stop 2 — New Orleans</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Recommendations for Mobile and East Bay</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Mobile</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.dropoutbakeryandcompany.com/\">Dropout Bakery</a>, 358 St Louis St, Mobile — One of the best king cakes of the trip</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Nova Espresso, 306 St Anthony St, Mobile — Great place to eat your Dropout Bakery purchases</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.braidedriverbrewing.com/\">Braided River Brewing Company</a>, 420 St Louis St, Mobile — The best taproom I visited this stop</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>East Bay</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.kitchenonmaindaphne.com/\">Kitchen On Main</a>, 1716 Main St, Daphne — Cozy, friendly neighborhood restaurant</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.pearlfairhope.com/\">Pearl</a>, 334 Fairhope Ave, Fairhope — Local oysters, gumbo, and a good craft beer selection</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Thanks to everyone for the “Welcome Back!” replies on the website and socials to my first return post. As I said on Instagram, the key will be getting this post out on time. I’ve managed that, and so on to getting the next one out.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Debbie Trueblood commented on the website — “So nice to see you back. And yes, I read your post in “your voice”!” Which gave me an idea — maybe I should feed some past episodes into an AI to generate my own TravelCommons voice model that could be used as an option to read aloud these posts. This AI stuff just keeps getting whackier.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>If you’ve hit the TravelCommons website, you’ve noticed it looks a lot different, a lot simpler, and a lot faster. I was forced into the change when a security upgrade broke the old template. So, speaking of AI, I spent a couple of nights vibe-coding the basics of a new WordPress template that now drives the website.&nbsp; But still on the to-do list — links to the socials, search functionality, a Destinations section to consolidate location content — so stay tuned. It’s a bit of a construction zone.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>You can find all this here on <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com\">TravelCommons.com</a>, on the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/feed/\" title=\"\">RSS feed</a> if you’re enough of a propeller-head to figure out apps like Feedly, or <a href=\"https://travelcommons.substack.com/\" title=\"\">subscribe to the newsletter</a> on Substack. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>In the meantime, if you\'ve got questions about a place I\'ve been or topics you\'d like me to dig into, let me know — in the comments below, by email at <a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a>, or ping me at @mpeacock on X/Twitter, @travelcommons on Instagram or on the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons\" title=\"\">Facebook page</a>.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Remember that you can find all my posts  here on <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com\">TravelCommons.com</a>, on the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/feed/\" title=\"\">RSS feed</a>, or <a href=\"https://travelcommons.substack.com/\" title=\"\">the Substack newsletter</a>. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Gulf Coast Mardi Gras Road Trip Stop 1 - Mobile','First stop on a Gulf Coast Mardi Gras Road Trip: Mobile, Alabama, where they throw full boxes of Moon Pies at your head and claim they invented the whole thing before New Orleans. Three-generation families working parade routes like pros, krewe barn parties, and a rainy Sunday hunt for the best king cake.','inherit','closed','closed','','4799-revision-v1','','','2026-03-09 08:59:55','2026-03-09 14:59:55','',4799,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4821',0,'revision','',0),
(4822,1,'2026-03-09 09:05:10','2026-03-09 15:05:10','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><em>This trip had been knocking around the back of my mind for a while. And for me, that’s a big piece of retirement travel — finally getting on with the travel I’ve thought about but never found the time to do. LIke this road trip to experience Mardi Gras in Mobile, New Orleans, and Cajun Country.</em> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Monday morning, we packed up our parade haul — mini-Moon Pies, frisbees, plastic cups, plush toys, packages of ramen soup, and, of course, beads — and pointed the car west on I-10 towards the second stop on our Mardi Gras road trip, New Orleans.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Biloxi Detour</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>After just 90 minutes, we made a lunch detour at Biloxi, MS, to a little one-room joint, <a href=\"https://www.parrains-cajun-cooking.com/\">Parrain\'s Cajun Cooking</a>. It’s just a mile north of the casinos, but with its randomly painted wide woodplank walls and an old-school kitchen service window, it feels like it exists in a more low-key parallel universe. No king cake for breakfast, so we ordered a lap around the menu — cups of gumbo, jambalaya, and red beans and rice; adding in an order of deep-fried boudin balls because… why not?</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Back to An Old Haunt</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Our dinner in New Orleans was a bit more up-scale. We walked down Magazine St. to an old favorite, <a href=\"https://www.pecherestaurant.com/\">Pêche</a>.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I first ate there when it opened in 2014 and haven’t stopped — because it hasn’t given me a reason to stop. And having been away from New Orleans for seven years, it was the obvious first stop. Walking in, it was packed - the bar, the tables, and the six-person back counter in front of the oyster shuckers that was my usual spot, and where I wanted us to eat. So we put our name in and headed over to the bar.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It’s a good-sized bar. Every seat was taken, and most people were eating as well as drinking. We settled in with the rest of the folks leaning against the walls, drinks in hand, waiting for a seat to open up. They had all sort of self-organized into an informal queue. A seat would open up and everyone would acknowledge the next person waiting. In other places I’ve lived — Chicago, Philly — people would\'ve been angling to jump in front. But further south, it feels like politeness and some level of social order are still expected.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>After one drink, a couple of seats at the back counter opened up. I ordered my usual — a half dozen oysters and the whole fish. Irene added a side of Brussels in her continuing quest for more vegetables.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I picked the Alabama oysters off the raw bar menu because, after years of eating Gulf oysters, I\'ve found them to be much tastier than Louisiana oysters, which I think are better cooked — fried for po’ boys, simmered in a gumbo, or char-broiled in the shell. And also because the oyster shucker had cracked open a couple for us to try.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Then, while waiting for our fish, he gave us the Florida and Louisiana oysters that we\'d passed up. So we\'d ordered a half dozen oysters and then got comp\'d another half dozen by the shucker. Gotta love New Orleans’ lagniappe culture. I tipped him extra — all the cash I had left in my wallet.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Gift from the Weather Gods</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>When I laid out this trip, the parade math wasn’t in our favor. Staying in New Orleans Monday through Wednesday nights was only going to give us one parade night — Wednesday. But the same Sunday rainstorm that chased us off our last Mobile parade forced New Orleans to reschedule its two Sunday parades to what had been an empty Tuesday night. One step back, then two steps forward — the rain dance ended up in our favor.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Tuesday afternoon, we walked along Tchoupitoulas St. through the Warehouse District, with a half-block detour for lunch at another old favorite, <a href=\"https://cochonbutcher.com/\">Cochon Butcher</a>. Then we wound our way under the mess of overpasses that is US-90, helped by a squad of cop cars and motorcycles that were holding up traffic so parade floats could make the turn toward the marshalling yards across from the World of Mardi Gras Museum. A reminder that behind every successful Mardi Gras parade is a whole lot of logistics.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Walking past the marshalling yard, we saw float riders for the first parade — <a href=\"https://www.mkfemmefatale.org/\"><em>Femme</em> <em>Fatales</em></a><em> </em>— starting to assemble. Cars double-parked, unloading groups of middle-aged women hugging and chatting as they headed toward their floats… at maybe 2 p.m. for a 6 p.m. step-off.&nbsp; No wonder they looked so happy — and a bit lit — when we saw them again rolling past the Avenue Pub.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Walking Magazine Street and St Charles Avenue</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We kept walking — up to Magazine St. and through the Garden District. Some stretches looked emptier than I remembered: empty storefronts, “for lease” signs, fewer places open-for-business. Some of that was probably businesses closing early for the parade. But it still felt quieter. Then as we approached Louisiana Ave., it came alive again. We dove into <a href=\"https://www.boilseafoodhouse.com/lower-garden-district\">Boil Seafood House</a> for our first crawfish of the trip and then headed up to the parade route.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Walking back across the Garden District along St Charles Ave. from Louisiana Ave., we could feel the crowd’s vibe shift — from friends and families relaxing outside their houses and across on St Charles’ grassy median they call “<a href=\"https://mikescottwrites.com/2019/06/13/new-orleans-101-why-do-we-call-it-a-neutral-ground-instead-of-a-median/\">neutral ground</a>,” to something a bit more rowdy, with a bit more of an edge to it as we got into the more commercial stretch.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Avenue Pub Balcony View</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I was happy to step off the street and into yet another old haunt, <a href=\"https://theavenuepub.com/\">the Avenue Pub</a>. It was surprisingly uncrowded, both on the first floor and on the second-floor balcony that looks over the parade route.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We got to the balcony railing just as the <em>Femme Fatales </em>rolled by. We didn’t expect them to be able to hit us with their throws on the second floor, but the two-story floats made it possible. And the riders were good. Some even cleared us, the first row leaning on the railing, and hit the folks in the second row leaning against the back wall. We all traded beads and frisbees and light-up balls so everyone on the balcony went home with a complete collection of the night’s throws.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Wednesday Night Let-Down</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>After Tuesday night’s rescheduled parades, the regularly scheduled Wednesday parades were a bit of a let-down. The <em>Muses</em> parade wasn\'t as good as I remembered. And we completely skipped the last parade even though all we had to do was ride the elevator down and walk out the hotel door. Instead, we watched out our window as a high school band marched up Poydras St. from the parade’s end-point to their buses home.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We were parade-ed out.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Scrolling back through Google Photos, looking at photos I took in 2015, those parade floats looked more intricate and clever, and they were all led by flambeaux — guys marching in front carrying big propane-fed torches. There wasn’t any of that on Tuesday or Wednesday night. Just tractors and trucks hauling float trailers that seemed to be built to maximize the number of riders.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We still enjoyed these parades, and maybe I\'ve got a case of rosy retrospection. But I just didn\'t think these parades were as good as the ones we saw 8-10 years ago.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Pilgrimage to the Ultimate King Cake</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We got up early Wednesday morning to hit the ultimate king cake shop: <a href=\"https://www.dpbakery.com/\">Dong Phuong Bakery</a>.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It’s about a 30-minute drive east — way out of the normal tourist zone, in some suburban light-industrial area. We got there at 7:50 a.m., just before the 8:00 opening time, figuring we\'d be fine.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>As I pulled up, I could see we were way wrong.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>The parking lot was full. Cars were parked along the shoulder of the road. And the line of people ran the length of the building and then started doing Disney-esque switchbacks. I told Irene to get in line while I hunted for parking.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>A rumor came down the line that the first guy showed up at 6:30 a.m. I didn’t doubt it. I saw people walking back to their trucks carrying a bag with their three-cake limit in one hand and a camp chair in the other.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Talking to people around us, everyone was from New Orleans, had been from New Orleans, or was visiting family there. We were the only ones within conversational radius with no obvious NOLA connection. We were also the only ones not maxing out the three-cake limit.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>After an hour in the queue, we bought one traditional cream cheese-filled king cake. During our wait, Irene ducked into the bakery and came back with a couple of savory bun-style pork things that were very good. I’d make the drive back just for those.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>But the king cake? Definitively the best of the 8-10 we tried on the trip. Runner-up: Dropout Bakery back in Mobile.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Slipping Out of the Bubble to Bywate</strong>r</h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>On our last afternoon in New Orleans, we popped over to Bywater.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I’ve been going there since my “<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/07/31/podcast-100-southern-road-trip-breaking-up-with-american-airlines/\">Drive South</a>” trip in 2012, when a guy sitting next to me in a Louisville bar told me about it. (One of the underappreciated benefits of sitting at a bar: accidental travel intelligence.)</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Bywater has always seemed to me to be a bit run-down—or maybe “highly worn”—in a slightly hipster way. Smallish shotgun-ish houses all crammed tightly together along narrow streets that default to single lanes because of the cars parked on both sides.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I’ve always liked it because it’s anti-French Quarter in the best way. Not a “tourists go home” vibe. More of an “I don\'t give a damn about you, whoever you are” vibe. An indifference that feels honest rather than performative.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>This time through, Bywater looked a bit cleaner, tidier. Not necessarily gentrified, just that a lot of places looked to have been recently painted. And an old manufacturing or steel fabrication plant on the edge of the neighborhood had been converted into a very solid microbrewery.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Maybe this tidying-up is the early stage of gentrification — conversions to Airbnbs and boutique inns behind fresh paint jobs. Maybe the tourist bubble has made it out here..</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Or maybe the Home Depot had a really good sale.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Packing up and Heading West (again)</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We came back to New Orleans expecting one parade night and got two. We came back hoping our old favorites survived the COVID years and the following inflation surge, and we found Pêche, Cochon Butcher, Avenue Pub, and Café Beignet still standing.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Maybe it\'s where we were hanging out — the Central Business District (CBD), the Warehouse District, the Garden District — high tourism neighborhoods that have been floating on the raft of revenge tourism. Maybe the neighborhoods away from the river, outside the usual tourist path, have had a harder time. But whatever it is, I\'ll take it. I was happy to eat and drink well on our return to New Orleans.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We gathered up our growing tangle of beads, stuffed animals, plastic cups, special chalices, and whatever else we’d accumulated (except the Moon Pies; we ate those), loaded the car, and pointed ourselves west toward the next stop: Lafayette and Acadiana.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Coming next:</strong> Gulf Coast Mardi Gras Road Trip Stop 3 — Lafayette and Acadiana</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Recommendations for New Orleans</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Food &amp; Drink</strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://pecherestaurant.com/\">Pêche Seafood Grill</a>, 800 Magazine St. — Ask for the back counter seats in front of the oyster shuckers. Worth the wait.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.cochonbutcher.com/\">Cochon Butcher</a>, 930 Tchoupitoulas St. — Solid lunch spot for sandwiches and small plates</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://theavenuepub.com/\">Avenue Pub</a>, 1732 St. Charles Ave. — Second floor balcony for parade watching, great tap list</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.boilseafoodhouse.com/lower-garden-district\">Boil Seafood House</a>, 2815 Magazine St. — Divey but good Gulf seafood</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.dpbakery.com/\">Dong Phuong Bakery</a>, 14207 Chef Menteur Hwy — King cake and savory pork buns; arrive earlier than you think you need to</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Parade Strategy</strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Skip the French Quarter parades — too crowded, tight streets, small parades</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Garden District along St. Charles Ave. is the sweet spot — better crowd, easier to catch throws</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Avenue Pub\'s second floor balcony gives you parade views with a great beer selection</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Check parade schedules — weather cancellations will reshuffle everything</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Neighborhoods</strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Stay in the Warehouse District or CBD for easy walking to parades and restaurants</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bywater for anti-tourist authenticity (though that may be changing)</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Gulf Coast Mardi Gras Road Trip Stop 2 - New Orleans','','inherit','closed','closed','','4819-revision-v1','','','2026-03-09 09:05:10','2026-03-09 15:05:10','',4819,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4822',0,'revision','',0),
(4824,1,'2026-03-09 09:09:21','2026-03-09 15:09:21','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><em>This trip had been knocking around the back of my mind for a while. And for me, that’s a big piece of retirement travel — finally getting on with the travel I’ve thought about but never found the time to do. LIke this road trip to experience Mardi Gras in Mobile, New Orleans, and Cajun Country.</em> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Monday morning, we packed up our parade haul — mini-Moon Pies, frisbees, plastic cups, plush toys, packages of ramen soup, and, of course, beads — and pointed the car west on I-10 towards the second stop on our Mardi Gras road trip, New Orleans.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Biloxi Detour</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>After just 90 minutes, we made a lunch detour at Biloxi, MS, to a little one-room joint, <a href=\"https://www.parrains-cajun-cooking.com/\">Parrain\'s Cajun Cooking</a>. It’s just a mile north of the casinos, but with its randomly painted wide woodplank walls and an old-school kitchen service window, it feels like it exists in a more low-key parallel universe. No king cake for breakfast, so we ordered a lap around the menu — cups of gumbo, jambalaya, and red beans and rice; adding in an order of deep-fried boudin balls because… why not?</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Back to An Old Haunt</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Our dinner in New Orleans was a bit more up-scale. We walked down Magazine St. to an old favorite, <a href=\"https://www.pecherestaurant.com/\">Pêche</a>.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I first ate there when it opened in 2014 and haven’t stopped — because it hasn’t given me a reason to stop. And having been away from New Orleans for seven years, it was the obvious first stop. Walking in, it was packed - the bar, the tables, and the six-person back counter in front of the oyster shuckers that was my usual spot, and where I wanted us to eat. So we put our name in and headed over to the bar.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It’s a good-sized bar. Every seat was taken, and most people were eating as well as drinking. We settled in with the rest of the folks leaning against the walls, drinks in hand, waiting for a seat to open up. They had all sort of self-organized into an informal queue. A seat would open up and everyone would acknowledge the next person waiting. In other places I’ve lived — Chicago, Philly — people would\'ve been angling to jump in front. But further south, it feels like politeness and some level of social order are still expected.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>After one drink, a couple of seats at the back counter opened up. I ordered my usual — a half dozen oysters and the whole fish. Irene added a side of Brussels in her continuing quest for more vegetables.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I picked the Alabama oysters off the raw bar menu because, after years of eating Gulf oysters, I\'ve found them to be much tastier than Louisiana oysters, which I think are better cooked — fried for po’ boys, simmered in a gumbo, or char-broiled in the shell. And also because the oyster shucker had cracked open a couple for us to try.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Then, while waiting for our fish, he gave us the Florida and Louisiana oysters that we\'d passed up. So we\'d ordered a half dozen oysters and then got comp\'d another half dozen by the shucker. Gotta love New Orleans’ lagniappe culture. I tipped him extra — all the cash I had left in my wallet.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Gift from the Weather Gods</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>When I laid out this trip, the parade math wasn’t in our favor. Staying in New Orleans Monday through Wednesday nights was only going to give us one parade night — Wednesday. But the same Sunday rainstorm that chased us off our last Mobile parade forced New Orleans to reschedule its two Sunday parades to what had been an empty Tuesday night. One step back, then two steps forward — the rain dance ended up in our favor.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Tuesday afternoon, we walked along Tchoupitoulas St. through the Warehouse District, with a half-block detour for lunch at another old favorite, <a href=\"https://cochonbutcher.com/\">Cochon Butcher</a>. Then we wound our way under the mess of overpasses that is US-90, helped by a squad of cop cars and motorcycles that were holding up traffic so parade floats could make the turn toward the marshalling yards across from the World of Mardi Gras Museum. A reminder that behind every successful Mardi Gras parade is a whole lot of logistics.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Walking past the marshalling yard, we saw float riders for the first parade — <a href=\"https://www.mkfemmefatale.org/\"><em>Femme</em> <em>Fatales</em></a><em> </em>— starting to assemble. Cars double-parked, unloading groups of middle-aged women hugging and chatting as they headed toward their floats… at maybe 2 p.m. for a 6 p.m. step-off.&nbsp; No wonder they looked so happy — and a bit lit — when we saw them again rolling past the Avenue Pub.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Walking Magazine Street and St Charles Avenue</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We kept walking — up to Magazine St. and through the Garden District. Some stretches looked emptier than I remembered: empty storefronts, “for lease” signs, fewer places open-for-business. Some of that was probably businesses closing early for the parade. But it still felt quieter. Then as we approached Louisiana Ave., it came alive again. We dove into <a href=\"https://www.boilseafoodhouse.com/lower-garden-district\">Boil Seafood House</a> for our first crawfish of the trip and then headed up to the parade route.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Walking back across the Garden District along St Charles Ave. from Louisiana Ave., we could feel the crowd’s vibe shift — from friends and families relaxing outside their houses and across on St Charles’ grassy median they call “<a href=\"https://mikescottwrites.com/2019/06/13/new-orleans-101-why-do-we-call-it-a-neutral-ground-instead-of-a-median/\">neutral ground</a>,” to something a bit more rowdy, with a bit more of an edge to it as we got into the more commercial stretch.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Avenue Pub Balcony View</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I was happy to step off the street and into yet another old haunt, <a href=\"https://theavenuepub.com/\">the Avenue Pub</a>. It was surprisingly uncrowded, both on the first floor and on the second-floor balcony that looks over the parade route.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We got to the balcony railing just as the <em>Femme Fatales </em>rolled by. We didn’t expect them to be able to hit us with their throws on the second floor, but the two-story floats made it possible. And the riders were good. Some even cleared us, the first row leaning on the railing, and hit the folks in the second row leaning against the back wall. We all traded beads and frisbees and light-up balls so everyone on the balcony went home with a complete collection of the night’s throws.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Wednesday Night Let-Down</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>After Tuesday night’s rescheduled parades, the regularly scheduled Wednesday parades were a bit of a let-down. The <em>Muses</em> parade wasn\'t as good as I remembered. And we completely skipped the last parade even though all we had to do was ride the elevator down and walk out the hotel door. Instead, we watched out our window as a high school band marched up Poydras St. from the parade’s end-point to their buses home.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We were parade-ed out.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Scrolling back through Google Photos, looking at photos I took in 2015, those parade floats looked more intricate and clever, and they were all led by flambeaux — guys marching in front carrying big propane-fed torches. There wasn’t any of that on Tuesday or Wednesday night. Just tractors and trucks hauling float trailers that seemed to be built to maximize the number of riders.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We still enjoyed these parades, and maybe I\'ve got a case of rosy retrospection. But I just didn\'t think these parades were as good as the ones we saw 8-10 years ago.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Pilgrimage to the Ultimate King Cake</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We got up early Wednesday morning to hit the ultimate king cake shop: <a href=\"https://www.dpbakery.com/\">Dong Phuong Bakery</a>.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It’s about a 30-minute drive east — way out of the normal tourist zone, in some suburban light-industrial area. We got there at 7:50 a.m., just before the 8:00 opening time, figuring we\'d be fine.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>As I pulled up, I could see we were way wrong.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>The parking lot was full. Cars were parked along the shoulder of the road. And the line of people ran the length of the building and then started doing Disney-esque switchbacks. I told Irene to get in line while I hunted for parking.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>A rumor came down the line that the first guy showed up at 6:30 a.m. I didn’t doubt it. I saw people walking back to their trucks carrying a bag with their three-cake limit in one hand and a camp chair in the other.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Talking to people around us, everyone was from New Orleans, had been from New Orleans, or was visiting family there. We were the only ones within conversational radius with no obvious NOLA connection. We were also the only ones not maxing out the three-cake limit.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>After an hour in the queue, we bought one traditional cream cheese-filled king cake. During our wait, Irene ducked into the bakery and came back with a couple of savory bun-style pork things that were very good. I’d make the drive back just for those.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>But the king cake? Definitively the best of the 8-10 we tried on the trip. Runner-up: Dropout Bakery back in Mobile.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Slipping Out of the Bubble to Bywate</strong>r</h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>On our last afternoon in New Orleans, we popped over to Bywater.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I’ve been going there since my “<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/07/31/podcast-100-southern-road-trip-breaking-up-with-american-airlines/\">Drive South</a>” trip in 2012, when a guy sitting next to me in a Louisville bar told me about it. (One of the underappreciated benefits of sitting at a bar: accidental travel intelligence.)</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Bywater has always seemed to me to be a bit run-down—or maybe “highly worn”—in a slightly hipster way. Smallish shotgun-ish houses all crammed tightly together along narrow streets that default to single lanes because of the cars parked on both sides.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I’ve always liked it because it’s anti-French Quarter in the best way. Not a “tourists go home” vibe. More of an “I don\'t give a damn about you, whoever you are” vibe. An indifference that feels honest rather than performative.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>This time through, Bywater looked a bit cleaner, tidier. Not necessarily gentrified, just that a lot of places looked to have been recently painted. And an old manufacturing or steel fabrication plant on the edge of the neighborhood had been converted into a very solid microbrewery.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Maybe this tidying-up is the early stage of gentrification — conversions to Airbnbs and boutique inns behind fresh paint jobs. Maybe the tourist bubble has made it out here..</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Or maybe the Home Depot had a really good sale.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Packing up and Heading West (again)</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We came back to New Orleans expecting one parade night and got two. We came back hoping our old favorites survived the COVID years and the following inflation surge, and we found Pêche, Cochon Butcher, Avenue Pub, and Café Beignet still standing.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Maybe it\'s where we were hanging out — the Central Business District (CBD), the Warehouse District, the Garden District — high tourism neighborhoods that have been floating on the raft of revenge tourism. Maybe the neighborhoods away from the river, outside the usual tourist path, have had a harder time. But whatever it is, I\'ll take it. I was happy to eat and drink well on our return to New Orleans.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We gathered up our growing tangle of beads, stuffed animals, plastic cups, special chalices, and whatever else we’d accumulated (except the Moon Pies; we ate those), loaded the car, and pointed ourselves west toward the next stop: Lafayette and Acadiana.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Coming next:</strong> Gulf Coast Mardi Gras Road Trip Stop 3 — Lafayette and Acadiana</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Recommendations for New Orleans</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Food &amp; Drink</strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://pecherestaurant.com/\">Pêche Seafood Grill</a>, 800 Magazine St. — Ask for the back counter seats in front of the oyster shuckers. Worth the wait.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.cochonbutcher.com/\">Cochon Butcher</a>, 930 Tchoupitoulas St. — Solid lunch spot for sandwiches and small plates</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://theavenuepub.com/\">Avenue Pub</a>, 1732 St. Charles Ave. — Second floor balcony for parade watching, great tap list</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.boilseafoodhouse.com/lower-garden-district\">Boil Seafood House</a>, 2815 Magazine St. — Divey but good Gulf seafood</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.dpbakery.com/\">Dong Phuong Bakery</a>, 14207 Chef Menteur Hwy — King cake and savory pork buns; arrive earlier than you think you need to</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Parade Strategy</strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Skip the French Quarter parades — too crowded, tight streets, small parades</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Garden District along St. Charles Ave. is the sweet spot — better crowd, easier to catch throws</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Avenue Pub\'s second floor balcony gives you parade views with a great beer selection</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Check parade schedules — weather cancellations will reshuffle everything</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Neighborhoods</strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Stay in the Warehouse District or CBD for easy walking to parades and restaurants</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bywater for anti-tourist authenticity (though that may be changing)</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Gulf Coast Mardi Gras Road Trip Stop 2 - New Orleans','Stop 2 of our Gulf Coast Mardi Gras road trip drops us into New Orleans for parades, oysters, king cake, and a little parade-weather luck. We revisit old favorites like Pêche and Cochon Butcher, watch the Femme Fatales roll past from Avenue Pub’s balcony on St. Charles, and make the pilgrimage to Dong Phuong for the ultimate king cake. Includes parade strategy, neighborhood notes, and where to eat and drink.','inherit','closed','closed','','4819-revision-v1','','','2026-03-09 09:09:21','2026-03-09 15:09:21','',4819,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4824',0,'revision','',0),
(4825,1,'2026-03-09 09:31:07','2026-03-09 15:31:07','Dong Phuong king cake in box','IMG_9303-EDIT','The king cake standard by which all others will now be judged','inherit','open','closed','','img_9303-edit','','','2026-03-09 10:07:48','2026-03-09 16:07:48','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_9303-EDIT.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(4826,1,'2026-03-09 09:31:15','2026-03-09 15:31:15','Parade route parking sign with beads','IMG_9290-EDIT','New Orleans loves rules. Mardi Gras loves ignoring them','inherit','open','closed','','img_9290-edit','','','2026-03-09 09:45:51','2026-03-09 15:45:51','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_9290-EDIT.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(4827,1,'2026-03-09 09:31:22','2026-03-09 15:31:22','Uptown porch decorated with oversized flowers','IMG_9291-EDIT','Uptown goes full craft-project—in the best way','inherit','open','closed','','img_9291-edit-2','','','2026-03-09 09:45:11','2026-03-09 15:45:11','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_9291-EDIT.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(4828,1,'2026-03-09 09:31:31','2026-03-09 15:31:31','Dong Phuong Bakery exterior with line','IMG_9298','We arrived “early.” Dong Phuong laughed','inherit','open','closed','','img_9298','','','2026-03-09 09:44:29','2026-03-09 15:44:29','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_9298.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(4829,1,'2026-03-09 09:31:38','2026-03-09 15:31:38','Overhead view of colorful nighttime float','IMG_9293-EDIT','Two-story floats turn “good throws” into a competitive sport','inherit','open','closed','','img_9293-edit','','','2026-03-09 09:43:40','2026-03-09 15:43:40','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_9293-EDIT.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(4830,1,'2026-03-09 09:31:47','2026-03-09 15:31:47','“For Sale” signs with “HAUNTED”','IMG_8933-EDIT','New Orleans real estate disclosures, simplified.','inherit','open','closed','','img_8933-edit','','','2026-03-09 09:42:43','2026-03-09 15:42:43','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_8933-EDIT.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(4831,1,'2026-03-09 09:31:56','2026-03-09 15:31:56','Tray of boiled crawfish and corn','IMG_8926-EDIT','Crawfish: the official fuel of “we’re on Gulf Coast time now.”','inherit','open','closed','','img_8926-edit','','','2026-03-09 09:41:25','2026-03-09 15:41:25','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_8926-EDIT.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(4832,1,'2026-03-09 09:32:05','2026-03-09 15:32:05','Pêche oyster counter','IMG_8915-EDIT','Oyster bar seats: the best seats in the house—always','inherit','open','closed','','img_8915-edit','','','2026-03-09 09:38:46','2026-03-09 15:38:46','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_8915-EDIT.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(4833,1,'2026-03-09 10:03:06','2026-03-09 16:03:06','Mardi Gras Parade Float','IMG_9315-EDIT','','inherit','open','closed','','img_9315-edit','','','2026-03-09 10:03:40','2026-03-09 16:03:40','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_9315-EDIT.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(4834,1,'2026-03-09 10:16:08','2026-03-09 16:16:08','Beignets and Coffee','IMG_9281-EDIT','Breakfast at Café Beignet','inherit','open','closed','','img_9281-edit','','','2026-03-09 10:17:30','2026-03-09 16:17:30','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_9281-EDIT.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(4835,1,'2026-03-09 10:25:50','2026-03-09 16:25:50','Mardi Gras Bead Decoration','IMG_0137','After the parades: beads migrate to the nearest fence like they’ve got their own itinerary','inherit','open','closed','','img_0137','','','2026-03-09 10:26:42','2026-03-09 16:26:42','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_0137.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(4836,1,'2026-03-09 10:28:18','2026-03-09 16:28:18','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><em>This trip had been knocking around the back of my mind for a while. And for me, that’s a big piece of retirement travel — finally getting on with the travel I’ve thought about but never found the time to do. LIke this road trip to hit Mardi Gras in Mobile, New Orleans, and Cajun Country.</em> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4810,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Screenshot-2026-02-25-at-8.23.12-AM.png\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Screenshot-2026-02-25-at-8.23.12-AM-300x300.png\" alt=\"Google Map screenshot with a thick blue line defining a road trip\" class=\"wp-image-4810\"/></a></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Monday morning, we packed up our parade haul — mini-Moon Pies, frisbees, plastic cups, plush toys, packages of ramen soup, and, of course, beads — and pointed the car west on I-10 towards the second stop on our Mardi Gras road trip, New Orleans.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Biloxi Detour</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>After just 90 minutes, we made a lunch detour at Biloxi, MS, to a little one-room joint, <a href=\"https://www.parrains-cajun-cooking.com/\">Parrain\'s Cajun Cooking</a>. It’s just a mile north of the casinos, but with its randomly painted wide woodplank walls and an old-school kitchen service window, it feels like it exists in a more low-key parallel universe. No king cake for breakfast, so we ordered a lap around the menu — cups of gumbo, jambalaya, and red beans and rice; adding in an order of deep-fried boudin balls because… why not?</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Back to An Old Haunt</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Our dinner in New Orleans was a bit more up-scale. We walked down Magazine St. to an old favorite, <a href=\"https://www.pecherestaurant.com/\">Pêche</a>.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4832,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_8915-EDIT-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_8915-EDIT-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"Marble oyster bar at Pêche with menus and a glass of white wine, while staff shuck oysters behind the counter\" class=\"wp-image-4832\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Oyster bar seats: the best seats in the house</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I first ate there when it opened in 2014 and haven’t stopped — because it hasn’t given me a reason to stop. And having been away from New Orleans for seven years, it was the obvious first stop. Walking in, it was packed - the bar, the tables, and the six-person back counter in front of the oyster shuckers that was my usual spot, and where I wanted us to eat. So we put our name in and headed over to the bar.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It’s a good-sized bar. Every seat was taken, and most people were eating as well as drinking. We settled in with the rest of the folks leaning against the walls, drinks in hand, waiting for a seat to open up. They had all sort of self-organized into an informal queue. A seat would open up and everyone would acknowledge the next person waiting. In other places I’ve lived — Chicago, Philly — people would\'ve been angling to jump in front. But further south, it feels like politeness and some level of social order are still expected.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>After one drink, a couple of seats at the back counter opened up. I ordered my usual — a half dozen oysters and the whole fish. Irene added a side of Brussels in her continuing quest for more vegetables.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I picked the Alabama oysters off the raw bar menu because, after years of eating Gulf oysters, I\'ve found them to be much tastier than Louisiana oysters, which I think are better cooked — fried for po’ boys, simmered in a gumbo, or char-broiled in the shell. And also because the oyster shucker had cracked open a couple for us to try.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Then, while waiting for our fish, he gave us the Florida and Louisiana oysters that we\'d passed up. So we\'d ordered a half dozen oysters and then got comp\'d another half dozen by the shucker. Gotta love New Orleans’ lagniappe culture. I tipped him extra — all the cash I had left in my wallet.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Gift from the Weather Gods</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4826,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_9290-EDIT-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_9290-EDIT-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Parade route parking sign draped with Mardi Gras beads as crowds line a broad, oak-shaded avenue\" class=\"wp-image-4826\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">New Orleans posts rules for parade day. Mardi Gras posts beads</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>When I laid out this trip, the parade math wasn’t in our favor. Staying in New Orleans Monday through Wednesday nights was only going to give us one parade night — Wednesday. But the same Sunday rainstorm that chased us off our last Mobile parade forced New Orleans to reschedule its two Sunday parades to what had been an empty Tuesday night. One step back, then two steps forward — the rain dance ended up in our favor.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Tuesday afternoon, we walked along Tchoupitoulas St. through the Warehouse District, with a half-block detour for lunch at another old favorite, <a href=\"https://cochonbutcher.com/\">Cochon Butcher</a>. Then we wound our way under the mess of overpasses that is US-90, helped by a squad of cop cars and motorcycles that were holding up traffic so parade floats could make the turn toward the marshalling yards across from the World of Mardi Gras Museum. A reminder that behind every successful Mardi Gras parade is a whole lot of logistics.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Walking past the marshalling yard, we saw float riders for the first parade — <a href=\"https://www.mkfemmefatale.org/\"><em>Femme</em> <em>Fatales</em></a><em> </em>— starting to assemble. Cars double-parked, unloading groups of middle-aged women hugging and chatting as they headed toward their floats… at maybe 2 p.m. for a 6 p.m. step-off.&nbsp; No wonder they looked so happy — and a bit lit — when we saw them again rolling past the Avenue Pub.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Walking Magazine Street and St Charles Avenue</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4831,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_8926-EDIT-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_8926-EDIT-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Metal tray piled with boiled crawfish and corn on the cob, seasoned and steaming on a wooden table\" class=\"wp-image-4831\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Crawfish and corn: laying a base before the next round of Mardi Gras beers</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We kept walking — up to Magazine St. and through the Garden District. Some stretches looked emptier than I remembered: empty storefronts, “for lease” signs, fewer places open-for-business. Some of that was probably businesses closing early for the parade. But it still felt quieter. Then as we approached Louisiana Ave., it came alive again. We dove into <a href=\"https://www.boilseafoodhouse.com/lower-garden-district\">Boil Seafood House</a> for our first crawfish of the trip and then headed up to the parade route.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4827,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"left\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignleft size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_9291-EDIT-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_9291-EDIT-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Two-story white house with tall columns decorated in oversized colorful flowers and Mardi Gras garlands\" class=\"wp-image-4827\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Uptown house commits to Mardi Gras colors</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Walking back across the Garden District along St Charles Ave. from Louisiana Ave., we could feel the crowd’s vibe shift — from friends and families relaxing outside their houses and across on St Charles’ grassy median they call “<a href=\"https://mikescottwrites.com/2019/06/13/new-orleans-101-why-do-we-call-it-a-neutral-ground-instead-of-a-median/\">neutral ground</a>,” to something a bit more rowdy, with a bit more of an edge to it as we got into the more commercial stretch.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Avenue Pub Balcony View</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I was happy to step off the street and into yet another old haunt, <a href=\"https://theavenuepub.com/\">the Avenue Pub</a>. It was surprisingly uncrowded, both on the first floor and on the second-floor balcony that looks over the parade route.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4829,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_9293-EDIT-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_9293-EDIT-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Brightly lit Mardi Gras float at night with crowds reaching up from both sides of the street\" class=\"wp-image-4829\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Two-story floats turn throws into a competitive sport</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We got to the balcony railing just as the <em>Femme Fatales </em>rolled by. We didn’t expect them to be able to hit us with their throws on the second floor, but the two-story floats made it possible. And the riders were good. Some even cleared us, the first row leaning on the railing, and hit the folks in the second row leaning against the back wall. We all traded beads and frisbees and light-up balls so everyone on the balcony went home with a complete collection of the night’s throws.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Wednesday Night Let-Down</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4833,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_9315-EDIT-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_9315-EDIT-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Nighttime Mardi Gras parade float with two green-costumed torchbearer characters on the front platform and a rider in white standing above, lit by bright blue and gold lights on a city street\" class=\"wp-image-4833\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Watching One Last Float</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>After Tuesday night’s rescheduled parades, the regularly scheduled Wednesday parades were a bit of a let-down. The <em>Muses</em> parade wasn\'t as good as I remembered. And we completely skipped the last parade even though all we had to do was ride the elevator down and walk out the hotel door. Instead, we watched out our window as a high school band marched up Poydras St. from the parade’s end-point to their buses home.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We were parade-ed out.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Scrolling back through Google Photos, looking at photos I took in 2015, those parade floats looked more intricate and clever, and they were all led by flambeaux — guys marching in front carrying big propane-fed torches. There wasn’t any of that on Tuesday or Wednesday night. Just tractors and trucks hauling float trailers that seemed to be built to maximize the number of riders.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We still enjoyed these parades, and maybe I\'ve got a case of rosy retrospection. But I just didn\'t think these parades were as good as the ones we saw 8-10 years ago.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Pilgrimage to the Ultimate King Cake</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4828,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_9298-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_9298-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"People waiting in a long line outside Dong Phuong Bakery under a bright blue sky\" class=\"wp-image-4828\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">We thought we\'d showed up “early\"</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We got up early Wednesday morning to hit the ultimate king cake shop: <a href=\"https://www.dpbakery.com/\">Dong Phuong Bakery</a>.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It’s about a 30-minute drive east — way out of the normal tourist zone, in some suburban light-industrial area. We got there at 7:50 a.m., just before the 8:00 opening time, figuring we\'d be fine.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>As I pulled up, I could see we were way wrong.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>The parking lot was full. Cars were parked along the shoulder of the road. And the line of people ran the length of the building and then started doing Disney-esque switchbacks. I told Irene to get in line while I hunted for parking.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>A rumor came down the line that the first guy showed up at 6:30 a.m. I didn’t doubt it. I saw people walking back to their trucks carrying a bag with their three-cake limit in one hand and a camp chair in the other.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4825,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_9303-EDIT-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_9303-EDIT-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Dong Phuong king cake in a bakery box with purple, green, and gold sugar and a tiny plastic baby on top\" class=\"wp-image-4825\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">The king cake standard by which all others will now be judged</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Talking to people around us, everyone was from New Orleans, had been from New Orleans, or was visiting family there. We were the only ones within conversational radius with no obvious NOLA connection. We were also the only ones not maxing out the three-cake limit.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>After an hour in the queue, we bought one traditional cream cheese-filled king cake. During our wait, Irene ducked into the bakery and came back with a couple of savory bun-style pork things that were very good. I’d make the drive back just for those.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>But the king cake? Definitively the best of the 8-10 we tried on the trip. Runner-up: Dropout Bakery back in Mobile.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Slipping Out of the Bubble to Bywate</strong>r</h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>On our last afternoon in New Orleans, we popped over to Bywater.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I’ve been going there since my “<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/07/31/podcast-100-southern-road-trip-breaking-up-with-american-airlines/\">Drive South</a>” trip in 2012, when a guy sitting next to me in a Louisville bar told me about it. (One of the underappreciated benefits of sitting at a bar: accidental travel intelligence.)</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4830,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_8933-EDIT-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_8933-EDIT-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Stack of hanging signs on a building: “For Sale” placards above a bold sign reading “HAUNTED&quot;\" class=\"wp-image-4830\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">New Orleans real estate marketing <em>is</em> unique</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Bywater has always seemed to me to be a bit run-down—or maybe “highly worn”—in a slightly hipster way. Smallish shotgun-ish houses all crammed tightly together along narrow streets that default to single lanes because of the cars parked on both sides.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I’ve always liked it because it’s anti-French Quarter in the best way. Not a “tourists go home” vibe. More of an “I don\'t give a damn about you, whoever you are” vibe. An indifference that feels honest rather than performative.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>This time through, Bywater looked a bit cleaner, tidier. Not necessarily gentrified, just that a lot of places looked to have been recently painted. And an old manufacturing or steel fabrication plant on the edge of the neighborhood had been converted into a very solid microbrewery.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Maybe this tidying-up is the early stage of gentrification — conversions to Airbnbs and boutique inns behind fresh paint jobs. Maybe the tourist bubble has made it out here..</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Or maybe the Home Depot had a really good sale.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Packing up and Heading West (again)</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4834,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_9281-EDIT-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_9281-EDIT-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Two powdered-sugar beignets in a paper tray on a café table beside a green to-go coffee cup in New Orleans\" class=\"wp-image-4834\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Breakfast at Café Beignet</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We came back to New Orleans expecting one parade night and got two. We came back hoping our old favorites survived the COVID years and the following inflation surge, and we found Pêche, Cochon Butcher, Avenue Pub, and Café Beignet still standing.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Maybe it\'s where we were hanging out — the Central Business District (CBD), the Warehouse District, the Garden District — high tourism neighborhoods that have been floating on the raft of revenge tourism. Maybe the neighborhoods away from the river, outside the usual tourist path, have had a harder time. But whatever it is, I\'ll take it. I was happy to eat and drink well on our return to New Orleans.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We gathered up our growing tangle of beads, stuffed animals, plastic cups, special chalices, and whatever else we’d accumulated (except the Moon Pies; we ate those), loaded the car, and pointed ourselves west toward the next stop: Lafayette and Acadiana.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Coming next:</strong> Gulf Coast Mardi Gras Road Trip Stop 3 — Lafayette and Acadiana</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Recommendations for New Orleans</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Food &amp; Drink</strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://pecherestaurant.com/\">Pêche Seafood Grill</a>, 800 Magazine St. — Ask for the back counter seats in front of the oyster shuckers. Worth the wait.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.cochonbutcher.com/\">Cochon Butcher</a>, 930 Tchoupitoulas St. — Solid lunch spot for sandwiches and small plates</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://theavenuepub.com/\">Avenue Pub</a>, 1732 St. Charles Ave. — Second floor balcony for parade watching, great tap list</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.boilseafoodhouse.com/lower-garden-district\">Boil Seafood House</a>, 2815 Magazine St. — Divey but good Gulf seafood</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.dpbakery.com/\">Dong Phuong Bakery</a>, 14207 Chef Menteur Hwy — King cake and savory pork buns; arrive earlier than you think you need to</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":2240,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/IMG_0136.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/IMG_0136-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Glittery green sign reading “throw me something” mounted on a ladder near Mardi Gras parade route\" class=\"wp-image-2240\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Parade strategy, simplified: stand here and be obvious</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Parade Strategy</strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Skip the French Quarter parades — too crowded, tight streets, small parades</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Garden District along St. Charles Ave. is the sweet spot — better crowd, easier to catch throws</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Avenue Pub\'s second floor balcony gives you parade views with a great beer selection</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Check parade schedules — weather cancellations will reshuffle everything</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Neighborhoods</strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Stay in the Warehouse District or CBD for easy walking to parades and restaurants</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bywater for anti-tourist authenticity (though that may be changing)</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Gulf Coast Mardi Gras Road Trip Stop 2 - New Orleans','Stop 2 of our Gulf Coast Mardi Gras road trip drops us into New Orleans for parades, oysters, king cake, and a little parade-weather luck. We revisit old favorites like Pêche and Cochon Butcher, watch the Femme Fatales roll past from Avenue Pub’s balcony on St. Charles, and make the pilgrimage to Dong Phuong for the ultimate king cake. Includes parade strategy, neighborhood notes, and where to eat and drink.','inherit','closed','closed','','4819-revision-v1','','','2026-03-09 10:28:18','2026-03-09 16:28:18','',4819,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4836',0,'revision','',0),
(4838,1,'2026-03-09 18:20:26','2026-03-10 00:20:26','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><em>This trip had been knocking around the back of my mind for a while. And for me, that’s a big piece of retirement travel — finally getting on with the travel I’ve thought about but never found the time to do. Like this road trip to hit Mardi Gras in Mobile, New Orleans, and Cajun Country.</em> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4810,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Screenshot-2026-02-25-at-8.23.12-AM.png\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Screenshot-2026-02-25-at-8.23.12-AM-300x300.png\" alt=\"Google Map screenshot with a thick blue line defining a road trip\" class=\"wp-image-4810\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">The Gulf Coast Mardi Gras Road Trip Loop</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Monday morning, we packed up our parade haul — mini-Moon Pies, frisbees, plastic cups, plush toys, packages of ramen soup, and, of course, beads — and pointed the car west on I-10 towards the second stop on our Mardi Gras road trip, New Orleans.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Biloxi Detour</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>After just 90 minutes, we made a lunch detour at Biloxi, MS, to a little one-room joint, <a href=\"https://www.parrains-cajun-cooking.com/\">Parrain\'s Cajun Cooking</a>. It’s just a mile north of the casinos, but with its randomly painted wide woodplank walls and an old-school kitchen service window, it feels like it exists in a more low-key parallel universe. No king cake for breakfast, so we ordered a lap around the menu — cups of gumbo, jambalaya, and red beans and rice; adding in an order of deep-fried boudin balls because… why not?</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Back to An Old Haunt</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Our dinner in New Orleans was a bit more up-scale. We walked down Magazine St. to an old favorite, <a href=\"https://www.pecherestaurant.com/\">Pêche</a>.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4832,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_8915-EDIT-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_8915-EDIT-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"Marble oyster bar at Pêche with menus and a glass of white wine, while staff shuck oysters behind the counter\" class=\"wp-image-4832\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Oyster bar seats: the best seats in the house</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I first ate there when it opened in 2014 and haven’t stopped — because it hasn’t given me a reason to stop. And having been away from New Orleans for seven years, it was the obvious first stop. Walking in, it was packed - the bar, the tables, and the six-person back counter in front of the oyster shuckers that was my usual spot, and where I wanted us to eat. So we put our name in and headed over to the bar.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It’s a good-sized bar. Every seat was taken, and most people were eating as well as drinking. We settled in with the rest of the folks leaning against the walls, drinks in hand, waiting for a seat to open up. They had all sort of self-organized into an informal queue. A seat would open up and everyone would acknowledge the next person waiting. In other places I’ve lived — Chicago, Philly — people would\'ve been angling to jump in front. But further south, it feels like politeness and some level of social order are still expected.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>After one drink, a couple of seats at the back counter opened up. I ordered my usual — a half dozen oysters and the whole fish. Irene added a side of Brussels in her continuing quest for more vegetables.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I picked the Alabama oysters off the raw bar menu because, after years of eating Gulf oysters, I\'ve found them to be much tastier than Louisiana oysters, which I think are better cooked — fried for po’ boys, simmered in a gumbo, or char-broiled in the shell. And also because the oyster shucker had cracked open a couple for us to try.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Then, while waiting for our fish, he gave us the Florida and Louisiana oysters that we\'d passed up. So we\'d ordered a half dozen oysters and then got comp\'d another half dozen by the shucker. Gotta love New Orleans’ lagniappe culture. I tipped him extra — all the cash I had left in my wallet.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Gift from the Weather Gods</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4826,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_9290-EDIT-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_9290-EDIT-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Parade route parking sign draped with Mardi Gras beads as crowds line a broad, oak-shaded avenue\" class=\"wp-image-4826\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">New Orleans posts rules for parade day. Mardi Gras posts beads</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>When I laid out this trip, the parade math wasn’t in our favor. Staying in New Orleans Monday through Wednesday nights was only going to give us one parade night — Wednesday. But the same Sunday rainstorm that chased us off our last Mobile parade forced New Orleans to reschedule its two Sunday parades to what had been an empty Tuesday night. One step back, then two steps forward — the rain dance ended up in our favor.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Tuesday afternoon, we walked along Tchoupitoulas St. through the Warehouse District, with a half-block detour for lunch at another old favorite, <a href=\"https://cochonbutcher.com/\">Cochon Butcher</a>. Then we wound our way under the mess of overpasses that is US-90, helped by a squad of cop cars and motorcycles that were holding up traffic so parade floats could make the turn toward the marshalling yards across from the World of Mardi Gras Museum. A reminder that behind every successful Mardi Gras parade is a whole lot of logistics.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Walking past the marshalling yard, we saw float riders for the first parade — <a href=\"https://www.mkfemmefatale.org/\"><em>Femme</em> <em>Fatales</em></a><em> </em>— starting to assemble. Cars double-parked, unloading groups of middle-aged women hugging and chatting as they headed toward their floats… at maybe 2 p.m. for a 6 p.m. step-off.&nbsp; No wonder they looked so happy — and a bit lit — when we saw them again rolling past the Avenue Pub.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Walking Magazine Street and St Charles Avenue</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4831,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_8926-EDIT-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_8926-EDIT-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Metal tray piled with boiled crawfish and corn on the cob, seasoned and steaming on a wooden table\" class=\"wp-image-4831\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Crawfish and corn: laying a base before the next round of Mardi Gras beers</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We kept walking — up to Magazine St. and through the Garden District. Some stretches looked emptier than I remembered: empty storefronts, “for lease” signs, fewer places open-for-business. Some of that was probably businesses closing early for the parade. But it still felt quieter. Then as we approached Louisiana Ave., it came alive again. We dove into <a href=\"https://www.boilseafoodhouse.com/lower-garden-district\">Boil Seafood House</a> for our first crawfish of the trip and then headed up to the parade route.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4827,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"left\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignleft size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_9291-EDIT-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_9291-EDIT-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Two-story white house with tall columns decorated in oversized colorful flowers and Mardi Gras garlands\" class=\"wp-image-4827\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Uptown house commits to Mardi Gras colors</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Walking back across the Garden District along St Charles Ave. from Louisiana Ave., we could feel the crowd’s vibe shift — from friends and families relaxing outside their houses and across on St Charles’ grassy median they call “<a href=\"https://mikescottwrites.com/2019/06/13/new-orleans-101-why-do-we-call-it-a-neutral-ground-instead-of-a-median/\">neutral ground</a>,” to something a bit more rowdy, with a bit more of an edge to it as we got into the more commercial stretch.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Avenue Pub Balcony View</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I was happy to step off the street and into yet another old haunt, <a href=\"https://theavenuepub.com/\">the Avenue Pub</a>. It was surprisingly uncrowded, both on the first floor and on the second-floor balcony that looks over the parade route.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4829,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_9293-EDIT-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_9293-EDIT-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Brightly lit Mardi Gras float at night with crowds reaching up from both sides of the street\" class=\"wp-image-4829\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Two-story floats turn throws into a competitive sport</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We got to the balcony railing just as the <em>Femme Fatales </em>rolled by. We didn’t expect them to be able to hit us with their throws on the second floor, but the two-story floats made it possible. And the riders were good. Some even cleared us, the first row leaning on the railing, and hit the folks in the second row leaning against the back wall. We all traded beads and frisbees and light-up balls so everyone on the balcony went home with a complete collection of the night’s throws.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Wednesday Night Let-Down</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4833,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_9315-EDIT-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_9315-EDIT-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Nighttime Mardi Gras parade float with two green-costumed torchbearer characters on the front platform and a rider in white standing above, lit by bright blue and gold lights on a city street\" class=\"wp-image-4833\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Watching One Last Float</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>After Tuesday night’s rescheduled parades, the regularly scheduled Wednesday parades were a bit of a let-down. The <em>Muses</em> parade wasn\'t as good as I remembered. And we completely skipped the last parade even though all we had to do was ride the elevator down and walk out the hotel door. Instead, we watched out our window as a high school band marched up Poydras St. from the parade’s end-point to their buses home.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We were parade-ed out.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Scrolling back through Google Photos, looking at photos I took in 2015, those parade floats looked more intricate and clever, and they were all led by flambeaux — guys marching in front carrying big propane-fed torches. There wasn’t any of that on Tuesday or Wednesday night. Just tractors and trucks hauling float trailers that seemed to be built to maximize the number of riders.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We still enjoyed these parades, and maybe I\'ve got a case of rosy retrospection. But I just didn\'t think these parades were as good as the ones we saw 8-10 years ago.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Pilgrimage to the Ultimate King Cake</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4828,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_9298-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_9298-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"People waiting in a long line outside Dong Phuong Bakery under a bright blue sky\" class=\"wp-image-4828\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">We thought we\'d showed up “early\"</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We got up early Wednesday morning to hit the ultimate king cake shop: <a href=\"https://www.dpbakery.com/\">Dong Phuong Bakery</a>.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It’s about a 30-minute drive east — way out of the normal tourist zone, in some suburban light-industrial area. We got there at 7:50 a.m., just before the 8:00 opening time, figuring we\'d be fine.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>As I pulled up, I could see we were way wrong.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>The parking lot was full. Cars were parked along the shoulder of the road. And the line of people ran the length of the building and then started doing Disney-esque switchbacks. I told Irene to get in line while I hunted for parking.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>A rumor came down the line that the first guy showed up at 6:30 a.m. I didn’t doubt it. I saw people walking back to their trucks carrying a bag with their three-cake limit in one hand and a camp chair in the other.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4825,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_9303-EDIT-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_9303-EDIT-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Dong Phuong king cake in a bakery box with purple, green, and gold sugar and a tiny plastic baby on top\" class=\"wp-image-4825\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">The king cake standard by which all others will now be judged</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Talking to people around us, everyone was from New Orleans, had been from New Orleans, or was visiting family there. We were the only ones within conversational radius with no obvious NOLA connection. We were also the only ones not maxing out the three-cake limit.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>After an hour in the queue, we bought one traditional cream cheese-filled king cake. During our wait, Irene ducked into the bakery and came back with a couple of savory bun-style pork things that were very good. I’d make the drive back just for those.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>But the king cake? Definitively the best of the 8-10 we tried on the trip. Runner-up: Dropout Bakery back in Mobile.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Slipping Out of the Bubble to Bywate</strong>r</h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>On our last afternoon in New Orleans, we popped over to Bywater.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I’ve been going there since my “<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/07/31/podcast-100-southern-road-trip-breaking-up-with-american-airlines/\">Drive South</a>” trip in 2012, when a guy sitting next to me in a Louisville bar told me about it. (One of the underappreciated benefits of sitting at a bar: accidental travel intelligence.)</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4830,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_8933-EDIT-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_8933-EDIT-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Stack of hanging signs on a building: “For Sale” placards above a bold sign reading “HAUNTED&quot;\" class=\"wp-image-4830\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">New Orleans real estate marketing <em>is</em> unique</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Bywater has always seemed to me to be a bit run-down—or maybe “highly worn”—in a slightly hipster way. Smallish shotgun-ish houses all crammed tightly together along narrow streets that default to single lanes because of the cars parked on both sides.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I’ve always liked it because it’s anti-French Quarter in the best way. Not a “tourists go home” vibe. More of an “I don\'t give a damn about you, whoever you are” vibe. An indifference that feels honest rather than performative.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>This time through, Bywater looked a bit cleaner, tidier. Not necessarily gentrified, just that a lot of places looked to have been recently painted. And an old manufacturing or steel fabrication plant on the edge of the neighborhood had been converted into a very solid microbrewery.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Maybe this tidying-up is the early stage of gentrification — conversions to Airbnbs and boutique inns behind fresh paint jobs. Maybe the tourist bubble has made it out here..</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Or maybe the Home Depot had a really good sale.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Packing Up and Heading West (again)</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4834,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_9281-EDIT-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_9281-EDIT-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Two powdered-sugar beignets in a paper tray on a café table beside a green to-go coffee cup in New Orleans\" class=\"wp-image-4834\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Breakfast at Café Beignet</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We came back to New Orleans expecting one parade night and got two. We came back hoping our old favorites survived the COVID years and the following inflation surge, and we found Pêche, Cochon Butcher, Avenue Pub, and Café Beignet still standing.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Maybe it\'s where we were hanging out — the Central Business District (CBD), the Warehouse District, the Garden District — high tourism neighborhoods that have been floating on the raft of revenge tourism. Maybe the neighborhoods away from the river, outside the usual tourist path, have had a harder time. But whatever it is, I\'ll take it. I was happy to eat and drink well on our return to New Orleans.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We gathered up our growing tangle of beads, stuffed animals, plastic cups, special chalices, and whatever else we’d accumulated (except the Moon Pies; we ate those), loaded the car, and pointed ourselves west toward the next stop: Lafayette and Acadiana.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Coming next:</strong> Gulf Coast Mardi Gras Road Trip Stop 3 — Lafayette and Acadiana</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Recommendations for New Orleans</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Food &amp; Drink</strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://pecherestaurant.com/\">Pêche Seafood Grill</a>, 800 Magazine St. — Ask for the back counter seats in front of the oyster shuckers. Worth the wait.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.cochonbutcher.com/\">Cochon Butcher</a>, 930 Tchoupitoulas St. — Solid lunch spot for sandwiches and small plates</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://theavenuepub.com/\">Avenue Pub</a>, 1732 St. Charles Ave. — Second floor balcony for parade watching, great tap list</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.boilseafoodhouse.com/lower-garden-district\">Boil Seafood House</a>, 2815 Magazine St. — Divey but good Gulf seafood</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.dpbakery.com/\">Dong Phuong Bakery</a>, 14207 Chef Menteur Hwy — King cake and savory pork buns; arrive earlier than you think you need to</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":2240,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/IMG_0136.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/IMG_0136-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Glittery green sign reading “throw me something” mounted on a ladder near Mardi Gras parade route\" class=\"wp-image-2240\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Parade strategy, simplified: stand here and be obvious</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Parade Strategy</strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Skip the French Quarter parades — too crowded, tight streets, small parades</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Garden District along St. Charles Ave. is the sweet spot — better crowd, easier to catch throws</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Avenue Pub\'s second floor balcony gives you parade views with a great beer selection</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Check parade schedules — weather cancellations will reshuffle everything</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Neighborhoods</strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Stay in the Warehouse District or CBD for easy walking to parades and restaurants</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bywater for anti-tourist authenticity (though that may be changing)</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Gulf Coast Mardi Gras Road Trip Stop 2 - New Orleans','Stop 2 of our Gulf Coast Mardi Gras road trip drops us into New Orleans for parades, oysters, king cake, and a little parade-weather luck. We revisit old favorites like Pêche and Cochon Butcher, watch the Femme Fatales roll past from Avenue Pub’s balcony on St. Charles, and make the pilgrimage to Dong Phuong for the ultimate king cake. Includes parade strategy, neighborhood notes, and where to eat and drink.','inherit','closed','closed','','4819-revision-v1','','','2026-03-09 18:20:26','2026-03-10 00:20:26','',4819,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4838',0,'revision','',0),
(4840,1,'2026-03-09 18:39:04','2026-03-10 00:39:04','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><em>This trip had been knocking around the back of my mind for a while. And for me, that’s a big piece of retirement travel — finally getting on with the travel I’ve thought about but never found the time to do. Like this road trip to hit Mardi Gras in Mobile, New Orleans, and Cajun Country.</em> </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4810,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Screenshot-2026-02-25-at-8.23.12-AM.png\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Screenshot-2026-02-25-at-8.23.12-AM-300x300.png\" alt=\"Google Map screenshot with a thick blue line defining a road trip\" class=\"wp-image-4810\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">The Gulf Coast Mardi Gras Road Trip Loop</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Monday morning, we packed up our parade haul — mini-Moon Pies, frisbees, plastic cups, plush toys, packages of ramen soup, and, of course, beads — and pointed the car west on I-10 towards the second stop on our Mardi Gras road trip, New Orleans.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Biloxi Detour</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>After just 90 minutes, we made a lunch detour at Biloxi, MS, to a little one-room joint, <a href=\"https://www.parrains-cajun-cooking.com/\">Parrain\'s Cajun Cooking</a>. It’s just a mile north of the casinos, but with its randomly painted wide woodplank walls and an old-school kitchen service window, it feels like it exists in a more low-key parallel universe. No king cake for breakfast, so we ordered a lap around the menu — cups of gumbo, jambalaya, and red beans and rice; adding in an order of deep-fried boudin balls because… why not?</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Back to An Old Haunt</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Our dinner in New Orleans was a bit more up-scale. We walked down Magazine St. to an old favorite, <a href=\"https://www.pecherestaurant.com/\">Pêche</a>.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4832,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_8915-EDIT-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_8915-EDIT-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"Marble oyster bar at Pêche with menus and a glass of white wine, while staff shuck oysters behind the counter\" class=\"wp-image-4832\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Oyster bar seats: the best seats in the house</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I first ate there when it opened in 2014 and haven’t stopped — because it hasn’t given me a reason to stop. And having been away from New Orleans for seven years, it was the obvious first stop. Walking in, it was packed - the bar, the tables, and the six-person back counter in front of the oyster shuckers that was my usual spot, and where I wanted us to eat. So we put our name in and headed over to the bar.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It’s a good-sized bar. Every seat was taken, and most people were eating as well as drinking. We settled in with the rest of the folks leaning against the walls, drinks in hand, waiting for a seat to open up. They had all sort of self-organized into an informal queue. A seat would open up and everyone would acknowledge the next person waiting. In other places I’ve lived — Chicago, Philly — people would\'ve been angling to jump in front. But further south, it feels like politeness and some level of social order are still expected.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>After one drink, a couple of seats at the back counter opened up. I ordered my usual — a half dozen oysters and the whole fish. Irene added a side of Brussels in her continuing quest for more vegetables.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I picked the Alabama oysters off the raw bar menu because, after years of eating Gulf oysters, I\'ve found them to be much tastier than Louisiana oysters, which I think are better cooked — fried for po’ boys, simmered in a gumbo, or char-broiled in the shell. And also because the oyster shucker had cracked open a couple for us to try.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Then, while waiting for our fish, he gave us the Florida and Louisiana oysters that we\'d passed up. So we\'d ordered a half dozen oysters and then got comp\'d another half dozen by the shucker. Gotta love New Orleans’ lagniappe culture. I tipped him extra — all the cash I had left in my wallet.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Gift from the Weather Gods</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4826,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_9290-EDIT-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_9290-EDIT-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Parade route parking sign draped with Mardi Gras beads as crowds line a broad, oak-shaded avenue\" class=\"wp-image-4826\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">New Orleans posts rules for parade day. Mardi Gras posts beads</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>When I laid out this trip, the parade math wasn’t in our favor. Staying in New Orleans Monday through Wednesday nights was only going to give us one parade night — Wednesday. But the same Sunday rainstorm that chased us off our last Mobile parade forced New Orleans to reschedule its two Sunday parades to what had been an empty Tuesday night. One step back, then two steps forward — the rain dance ended up in our favor.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Tuesday afternoon, we walked along Tchoupitoulas St. through the Warehouse District, with a half-block detour for lunch at another old favorite, <a href=\"https://cochonbutcher.com/\">Cochon Butcher</a>. Then we wound our way under the mess of overpasses that is US-90, helped by a squad of cop cars and motorcycles that were holding up traffic so parade floats could make the turn toward the marshalling yards across from the World of Mardi Gras Museum. A reminder that behind every successful Mardi Gras parade is a whole lot of logistics.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Walking past the marshalling yard, we saw float riders for the first parade — <a href=\"https://www.mkfemmefatale.org/\"><em>Femme</em> <em>Fatales</em></a> — starting to assemble. Cars double-parked, unloading groups of middle-aged women hugging and chatting as they headed toward their floats… at maybe 2 p.m. for a 6 p.m. step-off.  No wonder they looked so happy — and a bit lit — when we saw them again rolling past the Avenue Pub.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Walking Magazine Street and St Charles Avenue</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4831,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_8926-EDIT-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_8926-EDIT-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Metal tray piled with boiled crawfish and corn on the cob, seasoned and steaming on a wooden table\" class=\"wp-image-4831\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Crawfish and corn: laying a base before the next round of Mardi Gras beers</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We kept walking — up to Magazine St. and through the Garden District. Some stretches looked emptier than I remembered: empty storefronts, “for lease” signs, fewer places open-for-business. Some of that was probably businesses closing early for the parade. But it still felt quieter. Then as we approached Louisiana Ave., it came alive again. We dove into <a href=\"https://www.boilseafoodhouse.com/lower-garden-district\">Boil Seafood House</a> for our first crawfish of the trip and then headed up to the parade route.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4827,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"left\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignleft size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_9291-EDIT-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_9291-EDIT-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Two-story white house with tall columns decorated in oversized colorful flowers and Mardi Gras garlands\" class=\"wp-image-4827\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Uptown house commits to Mardi Gras colors</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Walking back across the Garden District along St Charles Ave. from Louisiana Ave., we could feel the crowd’s vibe shift — from friends and families relaxing outside their houses and across on St Charles’ grassy median they call “<a href=\"https://mikescottwrites.com/2019/06/13/new-orleans-101-why-do-we-call-it-a-neutral-ground-instead-of-a-median/\">neutral ground</a>,” to something a bit more rowdy, with a bit more of an edge to it as we got into the more commercial stretch.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Avenue Pub Balcony View</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I was happy to step off the street and into yet another old haunt, <a href=\"https://theavenuepub.com/\">the Avenue Pub</a>. It was surprisingly uncrowded, both on the first floor and on the second-floor balcony that looks over the parade route.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4829,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_9293-EDIT-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_9293-EDIT-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Brightly lit Mardi Gras float at night with crowds reaching up from both sides of the street\" class=\"wp-image-4829\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Two-story floats turn throws into a competitive sport</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We got to the balcony railing just as the <em>Femme Fatales </em>rolled by. We didn’t expect them to be able to hit us with their throws on the second floor, but the two-story floats made it possible. And the riders were good. Some even cleared us, the first row leaning on the railing, and hit the folks in the second row leaning against the back wall. We all traded beads and frisbees and light-up balls so everyone on the balcony went home with a complete collection of the night’s throws.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Wednesday Night Let-Down</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4833,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_9315-EDIT-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_9315-EDIT-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Nighttime Mardi Gras parade float with two green-costumed torchbearer characters on the front platform and a rider in white standing above, lit by bright blue and gold lights on a city street\" class=\"wp-image-4833\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Watching One Last Float</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>After Tuesday night’s rescheduled parades, the regularly scheduled Wednesday parades were a bit of a let-down. The <em>Muses</em> parade wasn\'t as good as I remembered. And we completely skipped the last parade even though all we had to do was ride the elevator down and walk out the hotel door. Instead, we watched out our window as a high school band marched up Poydras St. from the parade’s end-point to their buses home.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We were parade-ed out.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Scrolling back through Google Photos, looking at photos I took in 2015, those parade floats looked more intricate and clever, and they were all led by flambeaux — guys marching in front carrying big propane-fed torches. There wasn’t any of that on Tuesday or Wednesday night. Just tractors and trucks hauling float trailers that seemed to be built to maximize the number of riders.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We still enjoyed these parades, and maybe I\'ve got a case of rosy retrospection. But I just didn\'t think these parades were as good as the ones we saw 8-10 years ago.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Pilgrimage to the Ultimate King Cake</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4828,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_9298-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_9298-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"People waiting in a long line outside Dong Phuong Bakery under a bright blue sky\" class=\"wp-image-4828\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">We thought we\'d showed up “early\"</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We got up early Wednesday morning to hit the ultimate king cake shop: <a href=\"https://www.dpbakery.com/\">Dong Phuong Bakery</a>.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It’s about a 30-minute drive east — way out of the normal tourist zone, in some suburban light-industrial area. We got there at 7:50 a.m., just before the 8:00 opening time, figuring we\'d be fine.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>As I pulled up, I could see we were way wrong.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>The parking lot was full. Cars were parked along the shoulder of the road. And the line of people ran the length of the building and then started doing Disney-esque switchbacks. I told Irene to get in line while I hunted for parking.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>A rumor came down the line that the first guy showed up at 6:30 a.m. I didn’t doubt it. I saw people walking back to their trucks carrying a bag with their three-cake limit in one hand and a camp chair in the other.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4825,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_9303-EDIT-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_9303-EDIT-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Dong Phuong king cake in a bakery box with purple, green, and gold sugar and a tiny plastic baby on top\" class=\"wp-image-4825\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">The king cake standard by which all others will now be judged</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Talking to people around us, everyone was from New Orleans, had been from New Orleans, or was visiting family there. We were the only ones within conversational radius with no obvious NOLA connection. We were also the only ones not maxing out the three-cake limit.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>After an hour in the queue, we bought one traditional cream cheese-filled king cake. During our wait, Irene ducked into the bakery and came back with a couple of savory bun-style pork things that were very good. I’d make the drive back just for those.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>But the king cake? Definitively the best of the 8-10 we tried on the trip. Runner-up: Dropout Bakery back in Mobile.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Slipping Out of the Bubble to Bywate</strong>r</h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>On our last afternoon in New Orleans, we popped over to Bywater.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I’ve been going there since my “<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/07/31/podcast-100-southern-road-trip-breaking-up-with-american-airlines/\">Drive South</a>” trip in 2012, when a guy sitting next to me in a Louisville bar told me about it. (One of the underappreciated benefits of sitting at a bar: accidental travel intelligence.)</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4830,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_8933-EDIT-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_8933-EDIT-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Stack of hanging signs on a building: “For Sale” placards above a bold sign reading “HAUNTED&quot;\" class=\"wp-image-4830\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">New Orleans real estate marketing <em>is</em> unique</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Bywater has always seemed to me to be a bit run-down—or maybe “highly worn”—in a slightly hipster way. Smallish shotgun-ish houses all crammed tightly together along narrow streets that default to single lanes because of the cars parked on both sides.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I’ve always liked it because it’s anti-French Quarter in the best way. Not a “tourists go home” vibe. More of an “I don\'t give a damn about you, whoever you are” vibe. An indifference that feels honest rather than performative.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>This time through, Bywater looked a bit cleaner, tidier. Not necessarily gentrified, just that a lot of places looked to have been recently painted. And an old manufacturing or steel fabrication plant on the edge of the neighborhood had been converted into a very solid microbrewery.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Maybe this tidying-up is the early stage of gentrification — conversions to Airbnbs and boutique inns behind fresh paint jobs. Maybe the tourist bubble has made it out here..</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Or maybe the Home Depot had a really good sale.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Packing Up and Heading West (again)</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4834,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_9281-EDIT-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_9281-EDIT-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Two powdered-sugar beignets in a paper tray on a café table beside a green to-go coffee cup in New Orleans\" class=\"wp-image-4834\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Breakfast at Café Beignet</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We came back to New Orleans expecting one parade night and got two. We came back hoping our old favorites survived the COVID years and the subsequent inflation surge, and we found Pêche, Cochon Butcher, Avenue Pub, and Café Beignet still standing.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Maybe it\'s where we were hanging out — the Central Business District (CBD), the Warehouse District, the Garden District — high tourism neighborhoods that have been floating on a raft of revenge tourism. Maybe the neighborhoods away from the river, outside the usual tourist path, have had a harder time. But whatever it is, I\'ll take it. I was happy to eat and drink well on our return to New Orleans.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We gathered up our growing tangle of beads, stuffed animals, plastic cups, special chalices, and whatever else we’d accumulated (except the Moon Pies; we ate those), loaded the car, and pointed ourselves west toward the next stop: Lafayette and Acadiana.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Coming next:</strong> Gulf Coast Mardi Gras Road Trip Stop 3 — Lafayette and Acadiana</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Recommendations for New Orleans</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Food &amp; Drink</strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://pecherestaurant.com/\">Pêche Seafood Grill</a>, 800 Magazine St. — Ask for the back counter seats in front of the oyster shuckers. Worth the wait.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.cochonbutcher.com/\">Cochon Butcher</a>, 930 Tchoupitoulas St. — Solid lunch spot for sandwiches and small plates</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://theavenuepub.com/\">Avenue Pub</a>, 1732 St. Charles Ave. — Second floor balcony for parade watching, great tap list</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.boilseafoodhouse.com/lower-garden-district\">Boil Seafood House</a>, 3340 Magazine St. — Divey but good Gulf seafood</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.dpbakery.com/\">Dong Phuong Bakery</a>, 14207 Chef Menteur Hwy — King cake and savory pork buns; arrive earlier than you think you need to</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":2240,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/IMG_0136.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/IMG_0136-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Glittery green sign reading “throw me something” mounted on a ladder near Mardi Gras parade route\" class=\"wp-image-2240\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Parade strategy, simplified: stand here and be obvious</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Parade Strategy</strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Skip the French Quarter parades — too crowded, tight streets, small parades</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Garden District along St. Charles Ave. is the sweet spot — better crowd, easier to catch throws</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Avenue Pub\'s second floor balcony gives you parade views with a great beer selection</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Check parade schedules — weather cancellations will reshuffle everything</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Neighborhoods</strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Stay in the Warehouse District or CBD for easy walking to parades and restaurants</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bywater for anti-tourist authenticity (though that may be changing)</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Gulf Coast Mardi Gras Road Trip Stop 2 - New Orleans','Stop 2 of our Gulf Coast Mardi Gras road trip drops us into New Orleans for parades, oysters, king cake, and a little parade-weather luck. We revisit old favorites like Pêche and Cochon Butcher, watch the Femme Fatales roll past from Avenue Pub’s balcony on St. Charles, and make the pilgrimage to Dong Phuong for the ultimate king cake. Includes parade strategy, neighborhood notes, and where to eat and drink.','inherit','closed','closed','','4819-revision-v1','','','2026-03-09 18:39:04','2026-03-10 00:39:04','',4819,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4840',0,'revision','',0),
(4842,1,'2026-03-13 13:01:29','2026-03-13 19:01:29','<!-- wp:image {\"id\":1938,\"width\":261,\"height\":261,\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright is-resized\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/IMG_0091-1024x1024.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-1938\" style=\"width:261px;height:261px\"/><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Rejected and Retired Suitcases</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<p>I spend a lot of time with my luggage. I average 40-50 trips and 100,000 miles a year. I hate shopping for luggage, though. I\'d been putting off buying a new bag for a long time, as in years, until I was left with no working luggage when the handle died on my vintage Swiss Army black roller. Before that, the airlines forcibly grounded my Bluesmart smart bag for an unremovable lithium battery, and I had to retire my grey Samsonite bag after the wheels got wonky — the rubber wore off and the wheels splayed out after 2½ years of trundling it across New Orleans sidewalks.</p>\n<p>With my next trip looming, I was finally forced to shop for a new suitcase. But what to buy? I started with a survey of fellow travelers. Actually, it was more like stalking; I eyeballed every piece of luggage that passed by me for two weeks. Then I wandered through the basement luggage departments of a couple of Macy\'s, opening bags and waving off clerks. After all that, I gave into my OCD and built this prioritized carry-on luggage shopping evaluation criteria:</p>\n<ol>\n<li><em>It has to fit into my carrier\'s carry-on sizer</em>. Now that may seem a bit of a “duh”, but there is some ambiguity; the <a href=\"https://travel-made-simple.com/carry-on-size-chart/\">approved height</a> of a carry-on bag varies by airline between 19 and 22-inches. If I want to play it safe, I’d go for a 20-inch bag, but then I also want to maximize my carry-on space. Most US carriers accept a 22-inch bag and that’s mostly what I fly. So for my main bag, I go for maximum packing volume and choose a 22-inch bag.</li>\n<li><em>And my carrier\'s weight limit (if they have one)</em>. Many European carriers have a size <em>and</em> a weight limit. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/05/30/podcast-121-tsa-lines-my-luggage-is-where/\">episode #121</a>, I talked about the baggage strip tease I had to do at the Wow Air desk in Reykjavik to make their 7 kg/15 lbs carry-on weight limit. My 22-inch bag is 7 lbs, taking up almost half of the weight allowance. So last month, after booking some flights in and out of Riga, Latvia on AirBaltic, I bought a <a href=\"https://amzn.to/32lIURe\">much lighter 20-inch bag</a>. </li>\n<li>I<em>t needs to be black</em>. As I said in my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2017/10/18/ruthless-packing-tips/\">Ruthless Packing Tips post</a>, black not only makes you look thinner, it makes your bag look thinner to gate agents scanning for bag-sizer bait. Black also doesn\'t show stains. My grey Samsonite bag, after 3-4 months of my travel schedule, started to look a lot less non-black. Smudges from grease on overhead bin hinges, muck from taxi trunks, muddy water from New Orleans gutters, spilled coffee…. It\'s why I can\'t have nice luggage.</li>\n<li><em>Two wheels, not four</em>. This is more of a personal preference. My Bluesmart was a 4-wheel spinner and my wife swears by hers, but because the 4 wheels have to extend from the bottom of the bag, spinners sacrifice packing space for agility. Also, I find 4-wheelers have a tendency to wander off -- rolling away down ramps or on uneven floors. I go for the 2-wheeler, and with the biggest wheels I can find to make it an easier, smoother pull. I was surprised how much this limited my selection. Spinners definitely rule.</li>\n<li><em>The inside of the suitcase has to be plain and empty</em>. No clever collection of zipped compartments, or built-in suit hangers, or ratcheting clothes dividers; just a wide open box that I\'m free to structure how I want for each trip. I was surprised how this also limited my selection. Indeed, in the end, I couldn’t find just a plain box, and settled for a bag where I could detach the suit hanger and clothes divider and stash them in the back of a closet somewhere, never to be seen again.</li>\n<li><em>Buy on-line</em>. A <a href=\"https://www.testfacts.com/luggage-prices-analyzed/\">recent study</a> of 32,672 luggage price showed that you can save an average of $110/39% buying on-line. Walmart and Target’s on-line stores had the highest discounts. And while Amazon was in 10th place for average discount (in the 40% range), it was tops with the greatest variety — over 12,000 luggage items.</li>\n</ol>\n<p>So what did I buy? For my main bag, I bought a black <a href=\"https://www.swissarmy.com/us/en&amp;eoq=!t/Products/Travel-Gear/Werks-Traveler-5-0/collection/trg-collection/travelgear_collection_TRA-C2955\">Victorinox Werks Traveler 5.0</a> 22-inch 2-wheeler. Victorinox is what used to be Swiss Army; I figured if my last bag survived 10 years of hard mileage, that said something for durability. However, Victorinox has moved to a new model year, to Werks 6.0, which doesn\'t appear to have a 22-inch or a 2-wheel option. If you\'re OK with spinners, the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/33mYDkl\">Werks 5.0 22-inch spinner</a> is still available on Amazon. My 2-wheeler is a solid bag; highly recommended.</p>\n<p>For my European budget travel, and for 2-day trips where I don\'t need all the space of the Victorinox, I landed on the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/32lIURe\">TravelPro Maxlite 5</a>. It fit the AirBaltic dimensions, it\'s one of the lighter bags I saw at 5.4 lbs, and my daughter has had a good run with her TravelPro bag. Mine has worked well on two trips -- hopscotching through the Baltics and then a quick trip down to Charlottesville, VA. Another <a href=\"https://amzn.to/32lIURe\">solid bag</a> that\'s highly recommended.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:block {\"ref\":2601} /-->','How To Choose The Best Carry-On Luggage','','inherit','closed','closed','','2562-revision-v1','','','2026-03-13 13:01:29','2026-03-13 19:01:29','',2562,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4842',0,'revision','',0),
(4843,1,'2026-03-13 13:06:28','2026-03-13 19:06:28','<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright\">\n<p><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/IMG_0159.jpg\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1402\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/IMG_0159-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"225\" height=\"300\" /></a></p><figcaption>This Won\'t Help Your Flier Sat Score</figcaption></figure>\n</div>\n<p>In this episode, we talk with Michael Taylor, author of <a href=\"https://www.jdpower.com/business/press-releases/2019-north-america-airport-satisfaction-study\">JD Power\'s 2019 Airport Satisfaction Survey</a>, about what keeps fliers happy. I also talk about what I like about eScooters, shopping for a smaller bag for upcoming flights on a Euro budget airline, and how Hertz\'s contract updates remind me to delete my Bluetooth pairings in rental cars. All this and more at the <strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_156.mp3\">direct link</a></strong> to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #156: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago in the middle of what looks like a 6-week run of solid travel. Traveled to DC, Charlottesville, and Nashville, in that order, in the 3 weeks since the last episode. Heading back to Charlottesville this week, then a week hopscotching through the Baltics with my son Andrew -- Riga, Latvia; Talinn, Estonia; Helsinki, Finland -- and then back down to Charlottesville. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I flew Southwest on my non-Charlottesville flights -- into DC Reagan and Nashville -- and United again to Charlottesville. The Southwest flights went smoothly, except for trying to get to Chicago Midway for the DC flight. The Uber driver didn’t follow the app’s recommended route; instead, he pretended he was a cab driver and took the normal route down the Stevenson Expressway which was crawling due to an earlier accident. I wasn’t paying attention - first time I’ve had an Uber driver freelance on me - and didn’t notice he’d skipped the exit to the faster path until it was too late. We made our flight, but not without a bit of hustle through Midway. No tip, let alone a 5-star review for that guy.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Southwest flies into the old Terminal A at what I still call Washington National. I went to college in DC in the early ‘80’s, before it was named for President Reagan and when Terminal A was pretty much all that was there. I had forgotten what a long schlepp it is from that terminal to the Metro station. I remember way back then asking someone why they built the Metro station so far away. “Because they’re going to build new terminals right across from it.” Which they finally did, some 20 years after that Metro station was opened. Sometimes it seems that airport planning horizons are not in years, or even decades; feels more like they’re planning in lifetimes.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>In between the Southwest flights, my United flight continued the string of disruptions trying to get into or out of Charlottesville. I checked that my flight was on-time before calling an Uber -- no weather delays at either end, United and FlightAware apps say the inbound plane is on-time…. Then, halfway to ORD, I get the text from United; a 2½-hour delay for crew arrival. What!? The next text “Because of crew scheduling disruptions this evening in Chicago, we’ve assigned your flight a new crew…. We know this delay wasn’t in your plans today, so we appreciate your patience.” No shit a 2½-hour delay wasn’t in my plans, especially when it’s because United stole our original crew because they screwed up their scheduling. And really United, you can’t find another pilot in ORD, your largest hub, that’s a little closer? I tell you what else isn’t in my plans, flying United to Charlottesville this week. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/stefsax/7785\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Awel</a> </em>by stefsax (c) copyright 2006 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/stefsax/7785 </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>That’s the sound of my new <a href=\"https://www.marriott.com/loyalty/member-benefits/titanium.mi\">Marriott Bonvoy Lifetime Titanium Elite</a> card hitting the kitchen counter. The mailer package was appropriately upscale, but the sheer weight of the thing stunned me. I put a quick video of it on the TravelCommons Facebook page. Cate Rose commented “Hope it scans into your Stocard app so you don’t actually have to carry it in your luggage allowance”. My thought exactly.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I got a note that Chicago’s electric scooter pilot ends tomorrow, which made me realize that I’ve seen them in just about every city I’ve been to this summer -- Budapest, Krakow, Charlottesville, Nashville, Washington, DC. I think the only places I didn’t see them were in Scotland and Ireland. They’re handy; because they’re dockless, I’ve found they have a wider distribution than, say, a traditional docked bike share and you can take them directly to your planned destination. And they’re a good fill-in between walking and an Uber or a Lyft. And, they’re fun! When I was in DC a couple of weeks ago, I was in the <a href=\"https://washington.org/visit-dc/neighborhoods/brookland\">Brookland</a> neighborhood in the Northeast part of town, and wanted to try out a new taproom there, <a href=\"http://www.rightproperbrewing.com/what-we-do\">Right Proper Brewing</a>. Now Brookland is not the nicest part of DC. It’s much better than when I went to school there, but there are still iffy parts. I wasn’t completely comfortable walking down to Right Proper from the Brookland Metro stop, but it seemed too short for an Uber ride and there was no bus that went down there. But, there was a scooter a couple of blocks from the Metro station. Running down 9th St at 10 mph felt a bit better than speedwalking at 4. And could leave it right in front of the taproom. It was exactly what I wanted. Two problems I’ve seen -- first, too many people riding them on the sidewalk, especially in DC. Maybe because I bike a lot in Chicago, I’m comfortable in bike lanes and navigating around cars on the street and keeping an eye out for potholes. I actually wouldn’t be comfortable riding a scooter on the sidewalk; I’d be afraid of popping a pedestrian who suddenly walked in front of me. To me, cars are much more predictable than pedestrians. The second thing, the need to have half-a-dozen scooter apps on your phone. In Chicago, there are 8 scooter companies, in addition to Uber and Lyft’s scooters. And you need to download their app to find and rent their scooter. Which meant that when I wanted to find a scooter near the Brookland Metro stop, I’d have to cycle thru 5 or 6 apps. Except I didn’t because I found an app called <a href=\"https://scootermap.com/\">Scooter Map</a> that shows all the scooter brands on one map. I think it’s targeted at folks who are making money recharging scooters (not quite sure how that works) but it worked fine for me. I fired it up and saw all the different scooters that were near me. One caveat -- I’ve only ridden these scooters on sunny days. I’m not sure how enthusiastic I’d be riding one in the rain or snow. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>For the Baltics trip next week, we’re taking Finnair out and back from Chicago, an early morning ferry ride from Tallinn to Helsinki, and then AirBaltic for everything else. Which then got me thinking about luggage sizes, because I bought my current bag, the <a href=\"https://www.swissarmy.com/us/en&amp;eoq=!t/Products/Travel-Gear/Werks-Traveler-5-0/collection/trg-collection/travelgear_collection_TRA-C2955\">Victorinox Werks</a> 22-incher, to use every last inch of US carry-on allowance. It even catches some side-eye from American and United where I have status. So I didn’t figure it’d fit into any European budget carrier’s luggage sizer. Looking up <a href=\"https://www.airbaltic.com/en/cabin-baggage\">AirBaltic’s carry-on allowance</a>, my Victorinox is a couple of inches too tall and an inch too deep. But what really got me shopping for a new bag for this trip is the weight. AirBaltic has an 8 kg/17½ lbs weight limit. In <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/05/30/podcast-121-tsa-lines-my-luggage-is-where/\">episode #121</a>, I talked about the baggage strip tease exercise with Wow Air to make their 7 kg/15 lbs carry-on weight limit. I’d take my bag off the scale, pull some clothes out, zip it back up, and put it back on the scale. Still too heavy. Repeat 3 more times until the agent takes pity — or just gets tired of me — and gives me the approval tag to put on my bag. After which I walk about 10 feet, open my bag and put my armful of clothes back in. My Victorinox is a bit over 7 lbs, so not only is it too tall, the bag itself uses over 40% of the weight allowance. And even though I’ve talked before about how much I hate shopping for luggage, I searched for a smaller, lighter bag that wouldn’t cost a fortune, since my Victorinox will stay my primary bag. I landed on the the <a href=\"https://amzn.to/32lIURe\">TravelPro Maxlite 5</a>. I, or rather my daughter has a good history with TravelPro. It fit the AirBaltic dimensions and is one of the lighter bags I saw at 5.4 lbs which is down to 30% of the 8 kg weight allowance. It also meets three of the key suitcase criteria I laid down in the “how to shop for a suitcase” topic in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2018/01/25/podcast-137-new-years-travel-status-tips-how-to-shop-for-a-suitcase/\">episode #137</a> -- it’s black, it’s a 2-wheeler so no lost space on extended spinner wheels, and the inside is, for the most part, a wide open box without clothes hangers or a bunch of zip compartments. I’m taking it to Charlottesville tomorrow for a shakedown cruise.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Three years ago, back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2016/11/22/podcast-125-uber-driver-stories-overseas-for-the-election/\">episode #125</a>, in a Travel Security tip, I talked about the need to delete your phone’s Bluetooth pairing when you return a rental car. Usually when I go to pair my phone, I’ll first go through and delete 3-5 pairings before pairing my own. And they all have personalized names like “Timmy’s iPhone”. And most phones by default will download your contacts to the car when paired, so leave all of their contacts and phone numbers in their rental. That is just bad in so many ways. And now Hertz has gotten around to noticing it. In their newest rental terms and conditions, they specifically carve out any liability from you leaving a Bluetooth pairing behind. It’s a pain to remember, especially if you’re running for a flight, but as you’re taking that last scan around the car for your sunglasses and iPhone, remember not to leave your identity behind either.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music -- Black Rainbow by Pitx (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Pitx/19513 Ft: ERH, acclivity</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Keeping Fliers Happy </strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>A couple of weeks ago, JD Power released their 2019 North American Airport Satisfaction Study.  The headline - “North American Airports Struggle to Keep Travelers Happy Amid Construction Delays and Surging Passenger Volumes” caught my eye, so I reached out to the study’s author, Michael Taylor, to dig into it a bit more. And so last Friday, we had a wide-ranging conversation. I was going to edit it down, but as I listened to it, I couldn’t think about what to cut. So here it is in its entirety…</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Interview with <a href=\"https://www.jdpower.com/business/content/michael-taylor\">Michael Taylor</a>, Travel Intelligence Lead at J.D. Power</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Thanks again to Michael for taking the time to talk to us. Here\'s the <a href=\"https://www.jdpower.com/business/press-releases/2019-north-america-airport-satisfaction-study\">link</a> to the study summary on the JD Power website.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #156</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Find </span>TravelCommons on<a href=\"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/travelcommons-10271\"> Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://tunein.com/podcasts/Travel/TravelCommons-p1117718/\">TuneIn</a>, <a href=\"http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330536\">iTunes</a>, and  <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\">Spotify</a>  The links, along with the RSS feeds, are on the right-hand side of the TravelCommons website, under the heading Subscribe. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Right below that, in the Social Media section, are links to the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, and <a href=\"http://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a> and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> feeds. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li> If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li> And if you check out the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram</a> page, you can click thru to highlights from my trips to Budapest and Ireland. And if you follow it, you can catch some pics from next week’s trip through the Baltics.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,  or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_156.mp3\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #156 — Airport Satisfaction; eScooters; Smaller Luggage','','inherit','closed','closed','','2543-revision-v1','','','2026-03-13 13:06:28','2026-03-13 19:06:28','',2543,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4843',0,'revision','',0),
(4853,1,'2026-03-25 17:53:50','2026-03-25 23:53:50','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>This Mardi Gras trip had been knocking around the back of my mind for a while. And for me, that’s a big piece of retirement travel — finally getting on with the travel I’ve thought about but never found the time to do.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Planning the Trip</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:group {\"layout\":{\"type\":\"flex\",\"flexWrap\":\"nowrap\"},\"hideFromFeed\":true} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-group\"><!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We’d been Mardi Gras semi-regulars, heading down to New Orleans every other year in pre-COVID times. We loved the big Uptown parades along St Charles St, but returning for the first time since 2018, I wanted to open our Mardi Gras aperture.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph --></div>\n<!-- /wp:group -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I’ve always thought about going further west, to see the celebrations in Lafayette and Cajun Country. And then I remembered my high school friend Scott who lives in Mobile — he’s always banging on about how Mobile was the first US city to do Mardi Gras, that New Orleans is just copying them.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:group {\"layout\":{\"type\":\"flex\",\"flexWrap\":\"nowrap\"},\"hideFromFeed\":true} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-group\"><!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>So I pulled up Google Maps and pretty quickly had a nice loop laid out.&nbsp; Our first stop would be Mobile in honor of its “First City” status; a straight 7-hour shot down I-65 from Nashville with a Buc-ee’s refueling stop along the way. From Mobile, it would be an easy two-hour mix of I-10 and US-90 along the Mississippi Gulf Coast to our next stop, New Orleans. And from there,&nbsp; another two hours up to our final stop, Lafayette and Acadiana.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph --></div>\n<!-- /wp:group -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4810,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"center\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image aligncenter size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Screenshot-2026-02-25-at-8.23.12-AM.png\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Screenshot-2026-02-25-at-8.23.12-AM-300x300.png\" alt=\"Google Map screenshot with a thick blue line defining a road trip\" class=\"wp-image-4810\"/></a></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Now, Mardi Gras isn’t just the day; it’s a whole season. It starts in early January on Epiphany and builds momentum, with parades and events first on the weekends, then nearly every day, whipping everyone up to the final pre-Lenten blowout, Fat Tuesday. Over the years, we’ve skipped that final frenzy and instead visited the couple of weeks before Fat Tuesday. It’s been a good strategy; great parades without the full-contact craziness.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>First Mardi Gras Parade</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4801,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/IMG_8888_Original.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/IMG_8888_Original-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Masked Mardi Gras participants in black-and-gold capes and feathered helmets standing on a brick sidewalk before the parade\" class=\"wp-image-4801\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Order of the Incas Pre-Parade Logistics Huddle</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Our first parade in Mobile was the <a href=\"https://mobilemask.com/organization/order-of-inca/\" title=\"\">Order of the Incas</a> on Friday night. It was chilly; even on the Gulf Coast, February nights can bite. But the parade route was full; it looked like mostly families. Next to us three generations of one family were a well-structured team — grade-school kids at the low metal barriers lining the street,&nbsp; yelling at every float, begging for throws, then stashing their catches in big shoulder bags; high-school kids behind them, also yelling and waving, snagging whatever passed over the heads of the younger kids; parents behind them, drinking beers and minding the wagon where the kids dumped their shoulder bags; and then the grandparent who, spotting a special throw lying unclaimed in the street, reached through the barrier with their cane to drag it to the curb so a grandkid could pick it up. Obviously not their first parade.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4806,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/9444839F-9B5F-4F03-836B-B7146A67827C_Original.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/9444839F-9B5F-4F03-836B-B7146A67827C_Original-240x300.jpg\" alt=\"Brightly lit Mardi Gras float with a giant neon bird and castle walls rolling past a glowing church steeple at night\" class=\"wp-image-4806\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Order of the Incas Parade Float</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I’m used to folks shouting for throws; I do it myself. But here in Mobile, people were shouting for something new to me — Moon Pies. And they got them; showers of chocolate and vanilla mini-Moon Pies. Then something big smacked me in the chest and bounced back out to the street — a full box of Moon Pies. I looked up at the float. Really? You couldn’t be bothered to open it up? Then a full box of Tastykakes hit Irene on the forehead and dropped to the ground. One of the high school kids picked it up. “Do you want this?” he asked. “Nah, you keep it, “ I said. He quickly stuffed it into his shoulder bag.&nbsp; After that, waving for throws became as much of a defensive act — blocking incoming boxes — as it was trying to catch the odd string of beads.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Krewe Barn Party</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Saturday afternoon, we headed south of downtown into a neighborhood of generic warehouse buildings to meet up with my high school friend Scott at a “barn party” — a pre-parade preview of the floats his krewe, the <a href=\"https://mobilemask.com/organization/comic-cowboys/\">Cosmic Cowboys</a>, would be rolling on Fat Tuesday.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Seemed like a bunch of the krewes stored their floats here. We walked by another barn party for the <a href=\"https://mobilemask.com/organization/order-of-lashes/\">Krewe of LaShe’s</a> (a women’s krewe — LaShe’s → lashes)&nbsp; where they’d set up kids’ rides on the front lawn of their storage building. Leaving, we got caught up in float traffic as <a href=\"https://mobilemask.com/organization/neptunes-daughters/\" title=\"\">Neptune’s Daughters</a> squeezed out toward that night’s parade marshalling area.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Fairhope’s More Intimate Mardi Gras Parade</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4807,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/IMG_8898-1-scaled.jpeg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/IMG_8898-1-225x300.jpeg\" alt=\"Night Mardi Gras parade float with an oversized gray horse and a smiling sun in sunglasses above the crowd\" class=\"wp-image-4807\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Fairhope Parade Float</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We were staying across the bay, on the eastern shore of Mobile Bay because everything in Mobile was booked. So after the barn party, we headed back over the bay to Fairhope, to see what a small town parade would be like. If we thought Friday night’s parade in Mobile was mostly families, Fairhope’s <a href=\"https://mobilemask.com/organization/knights-of-ecor-rouge/\">Knights of Ecor Rouge</a> parade was even more so. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Kids lining the parade route were screaming to their friends in the marching bands. Riders on the floats took it as a personal challenge to hurl their throws to friends on the second floor balconies, or through upper-floor windows into watch parties. The parade was shorter — 30 minutes vs. the Incas’ hour — but the floats and the throws and the bands were just as good.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>King Cake Crawl</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Our Mardi Gras trips have built an appreciation not just for parades, but also for king cakes. A king cake is a yeasted dough cake, often braided in a ring, traditionally filled with cinnamon sugar, and topped with a glaze or icing and sprinkled with sugar in Mardi Gras colors of purple, green, and gold.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I got hooked on king cakes when traveling to New Orleans back in my consulting days. The project team would usually stay at the Sheraton on Canal Street, and every morning during Mardi Gras, there’d be a king cake in the concierge lounge breakfast spread. When Irene would join me, we’d leave the concierge cakes behind and troll the neighborhoods to find the best and/or most unique king cakes.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Sunday, we drove back over the bay to Mobile in the rain — our first day of bad weather. I-10 and US 98 run right next to each other across the top of Mobile Bay. I-10 is more of a causeway while US 98 touches down and skips across the just-above-water-line islands of sediment left behind as the Mobile River and the other rivers feed into the bay. We took US 98 this time so we could drive by the <a href=\"https://www.ussalabama.com/\">USS Alabama battleship</a>, swerve the parade barricades, and hit <a href=\"https://www.dropoutbakeryandcompany.com/\">Dropout Bakery</a> for what many locals said was the best king cake in Mobile.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4803,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/IMG_9258_Original-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/IMG_9258_Original-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Latte with heart latte art beside a frosted king cake slice topped with a tiny green baby in a takeout box\" class=\"wp-image-4803\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Dropout Bakery King Cake Complete with Baby</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We were hopeful, because our tasting notes on a couple of East Bay king cake slices were “weirdly flat” and “not bad….” So, not great. We found Dropout tucked away in the corner of an incubator/co-working space. No seating, so we walked our boxed cake a block over to a coffee joint and there cut into the perfectly sized two-person king cake — and got what we were looking for. It looked great; it tasted great; it made the walk in the rain worth it.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Packing Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:group {\"layout\":{\"type\":\"flex\",\"flexWrap\":\"nowrap\"},\"hideFromFeed\":true} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-group\"><!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We wandered around the neighborhood a bit; found a very solid taproom — Braided River Brewing — for a couple of pints, but the rain wasn’t letting up. If anything, it was raining harder. The wind picked up. The temperature dropped. We called it; we headed back over the bay for some dinner and to pack up our collection of parade throws. Next morning, we were heading to New Orleans.<br></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph --></div>\n<!-- /wp:group -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4808,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/IMG_8910-1-scaled.jpeg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/IMG_8910-1-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"Mardi Gras throws spread on a hotel table—beads, Moon Pies, glow necklace, cups, plush toys, and small trinkets\" class=\"wp-image-4808\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Our 2-Day Haul of Mobile Parade Throws</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph {\"hideFromFeed\":true} -->\n<p><strong>Coming Next</strong>: <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2026/03/10/gulf-coast-mardi-gras-road-trip-stop-2-new-orleans/\" title=\"\">Gulf Coast Mardi Gras Road Trip Stop 2 — New Orleans</a></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Recommendations for Mobile and East Bay</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Mobile</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.dropoutbakeryandcompany.com/\">Dropout Bakery</a>, 358 St Louis St, Mobile — One of the best king cakes of the trip</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Nova Espresso, 306 St Anthony St, Mobile — Great place to eat your Dropout Bakery purchases</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.braidedriverbrewing.com/\">Braided River Brewing Company</a>, 420 St Louis St, Mobile — The best taproom I visited this stop</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>East Bay</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.kitchenonmaindaphne.com/\">Kitchen On Main</a>, 1716 Main St, Daphne — Cozy, friendly neighborhood restaurant</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.pearlfairhope.com/\">Pearl</a>, 334 Fairhope Ave, Fairhope — Local oysters, gumbo, and a good craft beer selection</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Thanks to everyone for the “Welcome Back!” replies on the website and socials to my first return post. As I said on Instagram, the key will be getting this post out on time. I’ve managed that, and so on to getting the next one out.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Debbie Trueblood commented on the website — “So nice to see you back. And yes, I read your post in “your voice”!” Which gave me an idea — maybe I should feed some past episodes into an AI to generate my own TravelCommons voice model that could be used as an option to read aloud these posts. This AI stuff just keeps getting whackier.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>If you’ve hit the TravelCommons website, you’ve noticed it looks a lot different, a lot simpler, and a lot faster. I was forced into the change when a security upgrade broke the old template. So, speaking of AI, I spent a couple of nights vibe-coding the basics of a new WordPress template that now drives the website.&nbsp; But still on the to-do list — links to the socials, search functionality, a Destinations section to consolidate location content — so stay tuned. It’s a bit of a construction zone.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>You can find all this here on <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com\">TravelCommons.com</a>, on the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/feed/\" title=\"\">RSS feed</a> if you’re enough of a propeller-head to figure out apps like Feedly, or <a href=\"https://travelcommons.substack.com/\" title=\"\">subscribe to the newsletter</a> on Substack. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>In the meantime, if you\'ve got questions about a place I\'ve been or topics you\'d like me to dig into, let me know — in the comments below, by email at <a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a>, or ping me at @mpeacock on X/Twitter, @travelcommons on Instagram or on the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons\" title=\"\">Facebook page</a>.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Remember that you can find all my posts  here on <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com\">TravelCommons.com</a>, on the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/feed/\" title=\"\">RSS feed</a>, or <a href=\"https://travelcommons.substack.com/\" title=\"\">the Substack newsletter</a>. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Gulf Coast Mardi Gras Road Trip Stop 1 — Mobile','First stop on a Gulf Coast Mardi Gras Road Trip: Mobile, Alabama, where they throw full boxes of Moon Pies at your head and claim they invented the whole thing before New Orleans. Three-generation families working parade routes like pros, krewe barn parties, and a rainy Sunday hunt for the best king cake.','inherit','closed','closed','','4799-revision-v1','','','2026-03-25 17:53:50','2026-03-25 23:53:50','',4799,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4853',0,'revision','',0),
(4855,1,'2026-03-25 17:55:20','2026-03-25 23:55:20','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><em>This trip had been knocking around the back of my mind for a while. And for me, that’s a big piece of retirement travel — finally getting on with the travel I’ve thought about but never found the time to do. Like this road trip to hit Mardi Gras in Mobile (<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2026/02/25/gulf-coast-mardi-gras-road-trip-stop-1-mobile/\" title=\"\">our first stop</a>), New Orleans, and Cajun Country.</em></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4810,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Screenshot-2026-02-25-at-8.23.12-AM.png\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Screenshot-2026-02-25-at-8.23.12-AM-300x300.png\" alt=\"Google Map screenshot with a thick blue line defining a road trip\" class=\"wp-image-4810\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">The Gulf Coast Mardi Gras Road Trip Loop</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Monday morning, we packed up our parade haul — mini-Moon Pies, frisbees, plastic cups, plush toys, packages of ramen soup, and, of course, beads — and pointed the car west on I-10 towards the second stop on our Mardi Gras road trip, New Orleans.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Biloxi Detour</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>After just 90 minutes, we made a lunch detour at Biloxi, MS, to a little one-room joint, <a href=\"https://www.parrains-cajun-cooking.com/\">Parrain\'s Cajun Cooking</a>. It’s just a mile north of the casinos, but with its randomly painted wide woodplank walls and an old-school kitchen service window, it feels like it exists in a more low-key parallel universe. No king cake for breakfast, so we ordered a lap around the menu — cups of gumbo, jambalaya, and red beans and rice; adding in an order of deep-fried boudin balls because… why not?</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Back to An Old Haunt</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Our dinner in New Orleans was a bit more up-scale. We walked down Magazine St. to an old favorite, <a href=\"https://www.pecherestaurant.com/\">Pêche</a>.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4832,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_8915-EDIT-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_8915-EDIT-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"Marble oyster bar at Pêche with menus and a glass of white wine, while staff shuck oysters behind the counter\" class=\"wp-image-4832\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Oyster bar seats: the best seats in the house</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I first ate there when it opened in 2014 and haven’t stopped — because it hasn’t given me a reason to stop. And having been away from New Orleans for seven years, it was the obvious first stop. Walking in, it was packed - the bar, the tables, and the six-person back counter in front of the oyster shuckers that was my usual spot, and where I wanted us to eat. So we put our name in and headed over to the bar.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It’s a good-sized bar. Every seat was taken, and most people were eating as well as drinking. We settled in with the rest of the folks leaning against the walls, drinks in hand, waiting for a seat to open up. They had all sort of self-organized into an informal queue. A seat would open up and everyone would acknowledge the next person waiting. In other places I’ve lived — Chicago, Philly — people would\'ve been angling to jump in front. But further south, it feels like politeness and some level of social order are still expected.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>After one drink, a couple of seats at the back counter opened up. I ordered my usual — a half dozen oysters and the whole fish. Irene added a side of Brussels in her continuing quest for more vegetables.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I picked the Alabama oysters off the raw bar menu because, after years of eating Gulf oysters, I\'ve found them to be much tastier than Louisiana oysters, which I think are better cooked — fried for po’ boys, simmered in a gumbo, or char-broiled in the shell. And also because the oyster shucker had cracked open a couple for us to try.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Then, while waiting for our fish, he gave us the Florida and Louisiana oysters that we\'d passed up. So we\'d ordered a half dozen oysters and then got comp\'d another half dozen by the shucker. Gotta love New Orleans’ lagniappe culture. I tipped him extra — all the cash I had left in my wallet.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Gift from the Weather Gods</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4826,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_9290-EDIT-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_9290-EDIT-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Parade route parking sign draped with Mardi Gras beads as crowds line a broad, oak-shaded avenue\" class=\"wp-image-4826\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">New Orleans posts rules for parade day. Mardi Gras posts beads</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>When I laid out this trip, the parade math wasn’t in our favor. Staying in New Orleans Monday through Wednesday nights was only going to give us one parade night — Wednesday. But the same Sunday rainstorm that chased us off our last Mobile parade forced New Orleans to reschedule its two Sunday parades to what had been an empty Tuesday night. One step back, then two steps forward — the rain dance ended up in our favor.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Tuesday afternoon, we walked along Tchoupitoulas St. through the Warehouse District, with a half-block detour for lunch at another old favorite, <a href=\"https://cochonbutcher.com/\">Cochon Butcher</a>. Then we wound our way under the mess of overpasses that is US-90, helped by a squad of cop cars and motorcycles that were holding up traffic so parade floats could make the turn toward the marshalling yards across from the World of Mardi Gras Museum. A reminder that behind every successful Mardi Gras parade is a whole lot of logistics.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Walking past the marshalling yard, we saw float riders for the first parade — <a href=\"https://www.mkfemmefatale.org/\"><em>Femme</em> <em>Fatales</em></a> — starting to assemble. Cars double-parked, unloading groups of middle-aged women hugging and chatting as they headed toward their floats… at maybe 2 p.m. for a 6 p.m. step-off.&nbsp; No wonder they looked so happy — and a bit lit — when we saw them again rolling past the Avenue Pub.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Walking Magazine Street and St Charles Avenue</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4831,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_8926-EDIT-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_8926-EDIT-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Metal tray piled with boiled crawfish and corn on the cob, seasoned and steaming on a wooden table\" class=\"wp-image-4831\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Crawfish and corn: laying a base before the next round of Mardi Gras beers</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We kept walking — up to Magazine St. and through the Garden District. Some stretches looked emptier than I remembered: empty storefronts, “for lease” signs, fewer places open-for-business. Some of that was probably businesses closing early for the parade. But it still felt quieter. Then as we approached Louisiana Ave., it came alive again. We dove into <a href=\"https://www.boilseafoodhouse.com/lower-garden-district\">Boil Seafood House</a> for our first crawfish of the trip and then headed up to the parade route.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4827,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"left\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignleft size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_9291-EDIT-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_9291-EDIT-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Two-story white house with tall columns decorated in oversized colorful flowers and Mardi Gras garlands\" class=\"wp-image-4827\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Uptown house commits to Mardi Gras colors</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Walking back across the Garden District along St Charles Ave. from Louisiana Ave., we could feel the crowd’s vibe shift — from friends and families relaxing outside their houses and across on St Charles’ grassy median they call “<a href=\"https://mikescottwrites.com/2019/06/13/new-orleans-101-why-do-we-call-it-a-neutral-ground-instead-of-a-median/\">neutral ground</a>,” to something a bit more rowdy, with a bit more of an edge to it as we got into the more commercial stretch.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Avenue Pub Balcony View</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I was happy to step off the street and into yet another old haunt, <a href=\"https://theavenuepub.com/\">the Avenue Pub</a>. It was surprisingly uncrowded, both on the first floor and on the second-floor balcony that looks over the parade route.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4829,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_9293-EDIT-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_9293-EDIT-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Brightly lit Mardi Gras float at night with crowds reaching up from both sides of the street\" class=\"wp-image-4829\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Two-story floats turn throws into a competitive sport</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We got to the balcony railing just as the <em>Femme Fatales </em>rolled by. We didn’t expect them to be able to hit us with their throws on the second floor, but the two-story floats made it possible. And the riders were good. Some even cleared us, the first row leaning on the railing, and hit the folks in the second row leaning against the back wall. We all traded beads and frisbees and light-up balls so everyone on the balcony went home with a complete collection of the night’s throws.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Wednesday Night Let-Down</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4833,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_9315-EDIT-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_9315-EDIT-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Nighttime Mardi Gras parade float with two green-costumed torchbearer characters on the front platform and a rider in white standing above, lit by bright blue and gold lights on a city street\" class=\"wp-image-4833\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Watching One Last Float</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>After Tuesday night’s rescheduled parades, the regularly scheduled Wednesday parades were a bit of a let-down. The <em>Muses</em> parade wasn\'t as good as I remembered. And we completely skipped the last parade even though all we had to do was ride the elevator down and walk out the hotel door. Instead, we watched out our window as a high school band marched up Poydras St. from the parade’s end-point to their buses home.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We were parade-ed out.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Scrolling back through Google Photos, looking at photos I took in 2015, those parade floats looked more intricate and clever, and they were all led by flambeaux — guys marching in front carrying big propane-fed torches. There wasn’t any of that on Tuesday or Wednesday night. Just tractors and trucks hauling float trailers that seemed to be built to maximize the number of riders.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We still enjoyed these parades, and maybe I\'ve got a case of rosy retrospection. But I just didn\'t think these parades were as good as the ones we saw 8-10 years ago.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Pilgrimage to the Ultimate King Cake</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4828,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_9298-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_9298-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"People waiting in a long line outside Dong Phuong Bakery under a bright blue sky\" class=\"wp-image-4828\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">We thought we\'d showed up “early\"</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We got up early Wednesday morning to hit the ultimate king cake shop: <a href=\"https://www.dpbakery.com/\">Dong Phuong Bakery</a>.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It’s about a 30-minute drive east — way out of the normal tourist zone, in some suburban light-industrial area. We got there at 7:50 a.m., just before the 8:00 opening time, figuring we\'d be fine.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>As I pulled up, I could see we were way wrong.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>The parking lot was full. Cars were parked along the shoulder of the road. And the line of people ran the length of the building and then started doing Disney-esque switchbacks. I told Irene to get in line while I hunted for parking.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>A rumor came down the line that the first guy showed up at 6:30 a.m. I didn’t doubt it. I saw people walking back to their trucks carrying a bag with their three-cake limit in one hand and a camp chair in the other.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4825,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_9303-EDIT-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_9303-EDIT-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Dong Phuong king cake in a bakery box with purple, green, and gold sugar and a tiny plastic baby on top\" class=\"wp-image-4825\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">The king cake standard by which all others will now be judged</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Talking to people around us, everyone was from New Orleans, had been from New Orleans, or was visiting family there. We were the only ones within conversational radius with no obvious NOLA connection. We were also the only ones not maxing out the three-cake limit.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>After an hour in the queue, we bought one traditional cream cheese-filled king cake. During our wait, Irene ducked into the bakery and came back with a couple of savory bun-style pork things that were very good. I’d make the drive back just for those.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>But the king cake? Definitively the best of the 8-10 we tried on the trip. Runner-up: Dropout Bakery back in Mobile.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Slipping Out of the Bubble to Bywate</strong>r</h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>On our last afternoon in New Orleans, we popped over to Bywater.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I’ve been going there since my “<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/07/31/podcast-100-southern-road-trip-breaking-up-with-american-airlines/\">Drive South</a>” trip in 2012, when a guy sitting next to me in a Louisville bar told me about it. (One of the underappreciated benefits of sitting at a bar: accidental travel intelligence.)</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4830,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_8933-EDIT-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_8933-EDIT-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Stack of hanging signs on a building: “For Sale” placards above a bold sign reading “HAUNTED&quot;\" class=\"wp-image-4830\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">New Orleans real estate marketing <em>is</em> unique</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Bywater has always seemed to me to be a bit run-down—or maybe “highly worn”—in a slightly hipster way. Smallish shotgun-ish houses all crammed tightly together along narrow streets that default to single lanes because of the cars parked on both sides.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I’ve always liked it because it’s anti-French Quarter in the best way. Not a “tourists go home” vibe. More of an “I don\'t give a damn about you, whoever you are” vibe. An indifference that feels honest rather than performative.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>This time through, Bywater looked a bit cleaner, tidier. Not necessarily gentrified, just that a lot of places looked to have been recently painted. And an old manufacturing or steel fabrication plant on the edge of the neighborhood had been converted into a very solid microbrewery.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Maybe this tidying-up is the early stage of gentrification — conversions to Airbnbs and boutique inns behind fresh paint jobs. Maybe the tourist bubble has made it out here..</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Or maybe the Home Depot had a really good sale.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Packing Up and Heading West (again)</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4834,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_9281-EDIT-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_9281-EDIT-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Two powdered-sugar beignets in a paper tray on a café table beside a green to-go coffee cup in New Orleans\" class=\"wp-image-4834\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Breakfast at Café Beignet</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We came back to New Orleans expecting one parade night and got two. We came back hoping our old favorites survived the COVID years and the subsequent inflation surge, and we found Pêche, Cochon Butcher, Avenue Pub, and Café Beignet still standing.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Maybe it\'s where we were hanging out — the Central Business District (CBD), the Warehouse District, the Garden District — high tourism neighborhoods that have been floating on a raft of revenge tourism. Maybe the neighborhoods away from the river, outside the usual tourist path, have had a harder time. But whatever it is, I\'ll take it. I was happy to eat and drink well on our return to New Orleans.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We gathered up our growing tangle of beads, stuffed animals, plastic cups, special chalices, and whatever else we’d accumulated (except the Moon Pies; we ate those), loaded the car, and pointed ourselves west toward the next stop: Lafayette and Acadiana.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Coming next:</strong> Gulf Coast Mardi Gras Road Trip Stop 3 — Lafayette and Acadiana</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Recommendations for New Orleans</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Food &amp; Drink</strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://pecherestaurant.com/\">Pêche Seafood Grill</a>, 800 Magazine St. — Ask for the back counter seats in front of the oyster shuckers. Worth the wait.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.cochonbutcher.com/\">Cochon Butcher</a>, 930 Tchoupitoulas St. — Solid lunch spot for sandwiches and small plates</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://theavenuepub.com/\">Avenue Pub</a>, 1732 St. Charles Ave. — Second floor balcony for parade watching, great tap list</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.boilseafoodhouse.com/lower-garden-district\">Boil Seafood House</a>, 3340 Magazine St. — Divey but good Gulf seafood</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.dpbakery.com/\">Dong Phuong Bakery</a>, 14207 Chef Menteur Hwy — King cake and savory pork buns; arrive earlier than you think you need to</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":2240,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/IMG_0136.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/IMG_0136-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Glittery green sign reading “throw me something” mounted on a ladder near Mardi Gras parade route\" class=\"wp-image-2240\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Parade strategy, simplified: stand here and be obvious</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Parade Strategy</strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Skip the French Quarter parades — too crowded, tight streets, small parades</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Garden District along St. Charles Ave. is the sweet spot — better crowd, easier to catch throws</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Avenue Pub\'s second floor balcony gives you parade views with a great beer selection</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Check parade schedules — weather cancellations will reshuffle everything</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Neighborhoods</strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Stay in the Warehouse District or CBD for easy walking to parades and restaurants</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bywater for anti-tourist authenticity (though that may be changing)</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Gulf Coast Mardi Gras Road Trip Stop 2 — New Orleans','Stop 2 of our Gulf Coast Mardi Gras road trip drops us into New Orleans for parades, oysters, king cake, and a little parade-weather luck. We revisit old favorites like Pêche and Cochon Butcher, watch the Femme Fatales roll past from Avenue Pub’s balcony on St. Charles, and make the pilgrimage to Dong Phuong for the ultimate king cake. Includes parade strategy, neighborhood notes, and where to eat and drink.','inherit','closed','closed','','4819-revision-v1','','','2026-03-25 17:55:20','2026-03-25 23:55:20','',4819,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4855',0,'revision','',0),
(4856,1,'2026-03-26 09:30:00','2026-03-26 15:30:00','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I’ve been talking about packing, luggage, and tech gear since I started TravelCommons back in 2005 — how to wring out every last bit of value out of the carry-on and underseat space the airlines give us, and to have the right tools to swerve all the obstacles the travel gods (and TSA) put in our way.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>But shifting from road warrior travel to retirement travel isn’t just a swivel from business to leisure. It\'s a change in what I’m optimizing for -- from doing everything to survive the travel friction that stands between me and the next meeting, to giving myself a better shot at enjoying where I am. Which translates to a few key changes.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>First, slower travel. I\'m not triangulating across three cities in four days anymore. As I said back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2026/02/10/travelcommons-redux-same-suitcase-different-traveler/\">TravelCommons Redux</a> post, retirement travel means not having to do any more stupid travel -- the ORD-MIA-SEA or ORD-LHR-DEN bunny hops. Retirement travel means longer stays in fewer places, which changes what I’m packing for and how I do it.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Second, no corporate travel expense account. I no longer have other people’s money to buy my way out of a jam. In road-warrior mode, I’d pack light and assume I could buy or replace whatever I forgot. I had a company card. I filed expenses. None of that exists anymore. I own the whole stack — research, booking, insurance, disruption recovery, all of it.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Third, I\'m older. I confirmed this in the mirror while shaving this morning. Not a complaint, just a recognition of reality. But it does mean I can’t take as much for granted as I could back in 2005 when I started TravelCommons; skipping sleep for red-eyes, heaving heavy bags into the overhead, tossing nothing but Advil and Zyrtec into a random pill bottle.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>So, having reset the baseline, let’s get into it.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:separator -->\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity\"/>\n<!-- /wp:separator -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Core Packing Rules Still Stand </strong>—<strong> With a Few Tweaks</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Rule 1: Pick a single color family for your clothes, and make it black. </strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>A long-time rule that’s still true. Three reasons: black makes everyone look thinner (always nice-to-have), it spans casual to smart dress codes, and black doesn’t show stains (absolutely need-to-have). I can’t be one-and-done on a pair of pants because of incoming from a fork-handling mishap. But the real point of this rule isn’t black, it’s wardrobe discipline. If black gives you PTSD flashbacks from your teen goth phase, then go for blue or grey or earth tones. But pick one. Don’t pack five shirts that all demand their own separate color ecosystem.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Rule 2: No one-and-done outfits. </strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Every piece has to do at least two jobs. Every shirt has to work under multiple sweaters and with more than one pair of pants. If it can only be worn one way, it doesn\'t make the bag. Pack a travel wardrobe, not a series of costume changes. Versatility is key. And yet another reason to pack black.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Rule 3: Pack layers, think additively.</strong> </h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Multiple thin layers beat one bulky piece every time. Thin layers give you range; bulky items are a commitment. A black merino wool sweater has been my long time go-to, but merino has been taking over more of my travel wardrobe — quarter-zips, t-shirts, socks. It’s versatile —  naturally odor-resistant so I can wear it multiple times before washing, wicks moisture, and is wrinkle-resistant enough that I can pull it out of a fully-packed bag and wear it to dinner without looking like I slept in it -- which maybe I did.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Rule 4: Leave <em>most</em> of the workout gear at home. </strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Gym shoes take up a lot of space — that hasn\'t changed. But in retirement travel, they’re no longer just for the 6 a.m. hotel gym session. The right pair can take you from the gym, through the museum, and into a casual restaurant for dinner. And as we get older, resistance training is important for maintaining muscle mass. So a tweak to the original rule: wear your gym shoes on the plane and stuff a couple of rolled up resistance bands into your packed shoes.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Rule 5: Use a nondescript black rolling carry-on bag.</strong> </h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Black not only makes you look thinner, it makes your bag look thinner to gate agents scanning for bag-sizer bait.. My daughter\'s baby-blue roller was a walking invitation to be gate-checked; her current dark-purple bag is much closer to black and mostly sails through. Hard-side versus soft-side still depends on the problem you’re trying to solve. If the risk is a budget carrier’s strict sizer — or if you’re prone to overpacking — a hard shell can help. If the risk is weight, I want the lightest stripped-down bag I can get. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4860,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_0232-EDIT-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_0232-EDIT-1024x1024.jpg\" alt=\"Black, purple, and blue rolling suitcases packed side by side in a car trunk, with the purple and black bags centered and an umbrella tucked at the bottom\" class=\"wp-image-4860\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Left to right: the evidence. Blue gets gate-checked. Purple is getting there. Black goes through.</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:separator -->\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity\"/>\n<!-- /wp:separator -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>New Rules For Retired Travelers</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Rule 6: Laundry becomes part of the itinerary.</strong> </h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Here’s a new rule. When I was doing road warrior travel — one-night hops, weekly returns home, hotel laundry on the expense account in a crisis — I didn’t think about laundry at all. Now my trips are longer; sometimes multiple weeks before heading home, which should mean I need to pack more.  But it doesn’t. Slower travel leaves time for laundry. My default itinerary these days is to book an Airbnb with a washer/dryer every 7-10 days. Toss the underwear into the washer and head out for a beer. Come back, swap in another load and go tour a church… or go back for another beer. Longer trip, same size bag.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4862,\"sizeSlug\":\"full\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/ChatGPT-Image-Mar-25-2026-07_55_41-PM.png\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/ChatGPT-Image-Mar-25-2026-07_55_41-PM.png\" alt=\"Small apartment laundry nook with a front-loading washer holding dark clothes, a folded dark sweater, a black packing cube, a glass and bottle of beer, and a city map on the counter by a window\" class=\"wp-image-4862\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">With slower travel, laundry stops become part of the itinerary instead of a crisis</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Rule 7: Medications earn their carry-on slot before your clothes do.</strong> </h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Looking back at my <em>What’s In My Briefcase</em> posts — I did <a href=\"https://www.flickr.com/photos/travelcommons/102434287/\">one</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/02/06/podcast-87-sick-on-the-road-whats-in-my-briefcase/\">every</a> 4-5 <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/04/22/whats-in-my-briefcase-2015/\">years</a> — two of the constants were the bottle half-filled with Advil and Zyrtec tablets I mentioned earlier, and a tin of wintergreen Altoids. But age is often accompanied by more medicine — maybe a statin or a beta blocker, or something with a little more oomph than ibuprofen. And pack extra because, where you’re going, they might not be as easily available. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>In Croatia, Irene had an itchy rash -- must’ve brushed up against something on one of our hikes -- and went looking for their version of Cortizone at a pharmacy in Hvar. But she couldn’t get it. In Croatia, hydrocortisone cream isn’t over-the-counter; it requires a prescription. Good thing to figure out <em>before</em> getting on the plane.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4863,\"sizeSlug\":\"full\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/ChatGPT-Image-Mar-25-2026-08_01_17-PM.png\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/ChatGPT-Image-Mar-25-2026-08_01_17-PM.png\" alt=\"Open black medication pouch on a wooden table with a pill organizer, prescription bottles, loose tablets, a small mint tin, a pen, reading glasses, and the corner of a passport in soft natural light\" class=\"wp-image-4863\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">This got a lot more complicated after my 60th birthday</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:separator -->\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity\"/>\n<!-- /wp:separator -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Just One Key Change</h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>The through-line from 2006 to now isn\'t really about bags or black or merino wool — it\'s about who I\'m packing for. Road warrior me was packing to survive the trip. Retired me is packing to enjoy it. I’m not packing to survive a bad connection and make a 9 a.m. meeting in an unwrinkled state; I’m packing to enjoy the destination instead of just surviving the itinerary. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>That changes a few things at the edges — a pill organizer, scheduled laundry stops, more stylish gym shoes — but the core really hasn’t changed. I’m still pulling out my now-kinda-beat-up black bag, still making sure everything that goes into it has earned its place.<br></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Coming next:</strong> 2026 updates to <em>What’s In My Briefcase</em> and <em>My Travel Tech Stack</em></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Packing Advice from a Retired Road Warrior','Packing rules for retired travelers change, and not just because trips are longer. Updates to carry-on packing rules with 3 new rules road warriors never needed','publish','open','open','','packing-advice-from-a-retired-road-warrior','','','2026-03-26 09:13:27','2026-03-26 15:13:27','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4856',0,'post','',0),
(4859,1,'2026-03-25 18:11:58','2026-03-26 00:11:58','open carry-on with disciplined wardrobe','ChatGPT Image Mar 25, 2026, 07_11_05 PM','Retired road warrior’s packing discipline: one black carry-on, a few versatile layers, and just enough gear to stay comfortable without hauling half the closet','inherit','open','closed','','chatgpt-image-mar-25-2026-07_11_05-pm','','','2026-03-25 18:12:46','2026-03-26 00:12:46','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/ChatGPT-Image-Mar-25-2026-07_11_05-PM.png',0,'attachment','image/png',0),
(4860,1,'2026-03-25 18:14:03','2026-03-26 00:14:03','Luggage in car trunk','IMG_0232-EDIT','Left to right: the evidence. Blue gets gate-checked. Purple is getting there. Black goes through.','inherit','open','closed','','img_0232-edit','','','2026-03-25 18:35:59','2026-03-26 00:35:59','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_0232-EDIT.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(4861,1,'2026-03-25 18:44:30','2026-03-26 00:44:30','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I’ve been talking about packing, luggage, and tech gear since I started TravelCommons back in 2005 — how to wring out every last bit of value out of the carry-on and underseat space the airlines give us, and to have the right tools to swerve all the obstacles the travel gods (and TSA) put in our way.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>But shifting from road warrior travel to retirement travel isn’t just a swivel from business to leisure. It\'s a change in what I’m optimizing for -- from doing everything to survive the travel friction that stands between me and the next meeting, to giving myself a better shot at enjoying where I am. Which translates to a few key changes.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>First, slower travel. I\'m not triangulating across three cities in four days anymore. As I said back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2026/02/10/travelcommons-redux-same-suitcase-different-traveler/\">TravelCommons Redux</a> post, retirement travel means not having to do any more stupid travel -- the ORD-MIA-SEA or ORD-LHR-DEN bunny hops. Retirement travel means longer stays in fewer places, which changes what I’m packing for and how I do it.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Second, no corporate travel expense account. I no longer have other people’s money to buy my way out of a jam. In road-warrior mode, I’d pack light and assume I could buy or replace whatever I forgot. I had a company card. I filed expenses. None of that exists anymore. I own the whole stack — research, booking, insurance, disruption recovery, all of it.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Third, I\'m older. I confirmed this in the mirror while shaving this morning. Not a complaint, just a recognition of reality. But it does mean I can’t take as much for granted as I could back in 2005 when I started TravelCommons; skipping sleep for red-eyes, heaving heavy bags into the overhead, tossing nothing but Advil and Zyrtec into a random pill bottle.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>So, having reset the baseline, let’s get into it.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:separator -->\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity\"/>\n<!-- /wp:separator -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Core Packing Rules Still Stand </strong>—<strong> With a Few Tweaks</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Rule 1: Pick a single color family for your clothes, and make it black. </strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>A long-time rule that’s still true. Three reasons: black makes everyone look thinner (always nice-to-have), it spans casual to smart dress codes, and black doesn’t show stains (absolutely need-to-have). I can’t be one-and-done on a pair of pants because of incoming from a fork-handling mishap. But the real point of this rule isn’t black, it’s wardrobe discipline. If black gives you PTSD flashbacks from your teen goth phase, then go for blue or grey or earth tones. But pick one. Don’t pack five shirts that all demand their own separate color ecosystem.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Rule 2: No one-and-done outfits. </strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Every piece has to do at least two jobs. Every shirt has to work under multiple sweaters and with more than one pair of pants. If it can only be worn one way, it doesn\'t make the bag. Pack a travel wardrobe, not a series of costume changes. Versatility is key. And yet another reason to pack black.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Rule 3: Pack layers, think additively.</strong> </h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Multiple thin layers beat one bulky piece every time. Thin layers give you range; bulky items are a commitment. A black merino wool sweater has been my long time go-to, but merino has been taking over more of my travel wardrobe — quarter-zips, t-shirts, socks. It’s versatile —  naturally odor-resistant so I can wear it multiple times before washing, wicks moisture, and is wrinkle-resistant enough that I can pull it out of a fully-packed bag and wear it to dinner without looking like I slept in it -- which maybe I did.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Rule 4: Leave <em>most</em> of the workout gear at home. </strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Gym shoes take up a lot of space — that hasn\'t changed. But in retirement travel, they’re no longer just for the 6 a.m. hotel gym session. The right pair can take you from the gym, through the museum, and into a casual restaurant for dinner. And as we get older, resistance training is important for maintaining muscle mass. So a tweak to the original rule: wear your gym shoes on the plane and stuff a couple of rolled up resistance bands into your packed shoes.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Rule 5: Use a nondescript black rolling carry-on bag.</strong> </h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Black not only makes you look thinner, it makes your bag look thinner to gate agents scanning for bag-sizer bait.. My daughter\'s baby-blue roller was a walking invitation to be gate-checked; her current dark-purple bag is much closer to black and mostly sails through. Hard-side versus soft-side still depends on the problem you’re trying to solve. If the risk is a budget carrier’s strict sizer — or if you’re prone to overpacking — a hard shell can help. If the risk is weight, I want the lightest stripped-down bag I can get. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:separator -->\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity\"/>\n<!-- /wp:separator -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>New Rules For Retired Travelers</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Rule 6: Laundry becomes part of the itinerary.</strong> </h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Here’s a new rule. When I was doing road warrior travel — one-night hops, weekly returns home, hotel laundry on the expense account in a crisis — I didn’t think about laundry at all. Now my trips are longer; sometimes multiple weeks before heading home, which should mean I need to pack more.  But it doesn’t. Slower travel leaves time for laundry. My default itinerary these days is to book an Airbnb with a washer/dryer every 7-10 days. Toss the underwear into the washer and head out for a beer. Come back, swap in another load and go tour a church… or go back for another beer. Longer trip, same size bag.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Rule 7: Medications earn their carry-on slot before your clothes do.</strong> </h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Looking back at my <em>What’s In My Briefcase</em> posts — I did <a href=\"https://www.flickr.com/photos/travelcommons/102434287/\">one</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/02/06/podcast-87-sick-on-the-road-whats-in-my-briefcase/\">every</a> 4-5 <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/04/22/whats-in-my-briefcase-2015/\">years</a> — two of the constants were the bottle half-filled with Advil and Zyrtec tablets I mentioned earlier, and a tin of wintergreen Altoids. But age is often accompanied by more medicine — maybe a statin or a beta blocker, or something with a little more oomph than ibuprofen. And pack extra because, where you’re going, they might not be as easily available. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>In Croatia, Irene had an itchy rash -- must’ve brushed up against something on one of our hikes -- and went looking for their version of Cortizone at a pharmacy in Hvar. But she couldn’t get it. In Croatia, hydrocortisone cream isn’t over-the-counter; it requires a prescription. Good thing to figure out <em>before</em> getting on the plane.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:separator -->\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity\"/>\n<!-- /wp:separator -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Just One Key Change</h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>The through-line from 2006 to now isn\'t really about bags or black or merino wool — it\'s about who I\'m packing for. Road warrior me was packing to survive the trip. Retired me is packing to enjoy it. I’m not packing to survive a bad connection and make a 9 a.m. meeting in an unwrinkled state; I’m packing to enjoy the destination instead of just surviving the itinerary. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>That changes a few things at the edges — a pill organizer, scheduled laundry stops, more stylish gym shoes — but the core really hasn’t changed. I’m still pulling out my now-kinda-beat-up black bag, still making sure everything that goes into it has earned its place.<br></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Coming next:</strong> 2026 updates to <em>What’s In My Briefcase</em> and <em>My Travel Tech Stack</em></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Packing Rules Revisited by Retired Road Warrior','','inherit','closed','closed','','4856-revision-v1','','','2026-03-25 18:44:30','2026-03-26 00:44:30','',4856,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4861',0,'revision','',0),
(4862,1,'2026-03-25 18:55:55','2026-03-26 00:55:55','','ChatGPT Image Mar 25, 2026, 07_55_41 PM','With slower travel, laundry stops become part of the itinerary instead of a crisis','inherit','open','closed','','chatgpt-image-mar-25-2026-07_55_41-pm','','','2026-03-25 18:57:22','2026-03-26 00:57:22','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/ChatGPT-Image-Mar-25-2026-07_55_41-PM.png',0,'attachment','image/png',0),
(4863,1,'2026-03-25 19:01:26','2026-03-26 01:01:26','','ChatGPT Image Mar 25, 2026, 08_01_17 PM','This got a lot more complicated after my 60th birthday','inherit','open','closed','','chatgpt-image-mar-25-2026-08_01_17-pm','','','2026-03-25 19:02:58','2026-03-26 01:02:58','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/ChatGPT-Image-Mar-25-2026-08_01_17-PM.png',0,'attachment','image/png',0),
(4864,1,'2026-03-25 19:09:37','2026-03-26 01:09:37','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I’ve been talking about packing, luggage, and tech gear since I started TravelCommons back in 2005 — how to wring out every last bit of value out of the carry-on and underseat space the airlines give us, and to have the right tools to swerve all the obstacles the travel gods (and TSA) put in our way.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>But shifting from road warrior travel to retirement travel isn’t just a swivel from business to leisure. It\'s a change in what I’m optimizing for -- from doing everything to survive the travel friction that stands between me and the next meeting, to giving myself a better shot at enjoying where I am. Which translates to a few key changes.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>First, slower travel. I\'m not triangulating across three cities in four days anymore. As I said back in the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2026/02/10/travelcommons-redux-same-suitcase-different-traveler/\">TravelCommons Redux</a> post, retirement travel means not having to do any more stupid travel -- the ORD-MIA-SEA or ORD-LHR-DEN bunny hops. Retirement travel means longer stays in fewer places, which changes what I’m packing for and how I do it.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Second, no corporate travel expense account. I no longer have other people’s money to buy my way out of a jam. In road-warrior mode, I’d pack light and assume I could buy or replace whatever I forgot. I had a company card. I filed expenses. None of that exists anymore. I own the whole stack — research, booking, insurance, disruption recovery, all of it.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Third, I\'m older. I confirmed this in the mirror while shaving this morning. Not a complaint, just a recognition of reality. But it does mean I can’t take as much for granted as I could back in 2005 when I started TravelCommons; skipping sleep for red-eyes, heaving heavy bags into the overhead, tossing nothing but Advil and Zyrtec into a random pill bottle.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>So, having reset the baseline, let’s get into it.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:separator -->\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity\"/>\n<!-- /wp:separator -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Core Packing Rules Still Stand </strong>—<strong> With a Few Tweaks</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Rule 1: Pick a single color family for your clothes, and make it black. </strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>A long-time rule that’s still true. Three reasons: black makes everyone look thinner (always nice-to-have), it spans casual to smart dress codes, and black doesn’t show stains (absolutely need-to-have). I can’t be one-and-done on a pair of pants because of incoming from a fork-handling mishap. But the real point of this rule isn’t black, it’s wardrobe discipline. If black gives you PTSD flashbacks from your teen goth phase, then go for blue or grey or earth tones. But pick one. Don’t pack five shirts that all demand their own separate color ecosystem.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Rule 2: No one-and-done outfits. </strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Every piece has to do at least two jobs. Every shirt has to work under multiple sweaters and with more than one pair of pants. If it can only be worn one way, it doesn\'t make the bag. Pack a travel wardrobe, not a series of costume changes. Versatility is key. And yet another reason to pack black.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Rule 3: Pack layers, think additively.</strong> </h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Multiple thin layers beat one bulky piece every time. Thin layers give you range; bulky items are a commitment. A black merino wool sweater has been my long time go-to, but merino has been taking over more of my travel wardrobe — quarter-zips, t-shirts, socks. It’s versatile —  naturally odor-resistant so I can wear it multiple times before washing, wicks moisture, and is wrinkle-resistant enough that I can pull it out of a fully-packed bag and wear it to dinner without looking like I slept in it -- which maybe I did.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Rule 4: Leave <em>most</em> of the workout gear at home. </strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Gym shoes take up a lot of space — that hasn\'t changed. But in retirement travel, they’re no longer just for the 6 a.m. hotel gym session. The right pair can take you from the gym, through the museum, and into a casual restaurant for dinner. And as we get older, resistance training is important for maintaining muscle mass. So a tweak to the original rule: wear your gym shoes on the plane and stuff a couple of rolled up resistance bands into your packed shoes.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Rule 5: Use a nondescript black rolling carry-on bag.</strong> </h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Black not only makes you look thinner, it makes your bag look thinner to gate agents scanning for bag-sizer bait.. My daughter\'s baby-blue roller was a walking invitation to be gate-checked; her current dark-purple bag is much closer to black and mostly sails through. Hard-side versus soft-side still depends on the problem you’re trying to solve. If the risk is a budget carrier’s strict sizer — or if you’re prone to overpacking — a hard shell can help. If the risk is weight, I want the lightest stripped-down bag I can get. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4860,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_0232-EDIT-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_0232-EDIT-1024x1024.jpg\" alt=\"Black, purple, and blue rolling suitcases packed side by side in a car trunk, with the purple and black bags centered and an umbrella tucked at the bottom\" class=\"wp-image-4860\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Left to right: the evidence. Blue gets gate-checked. Purple is getting there. Black goes through.</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:separator -->\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity\"/>\n<!-- /wp:separator -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>New Rules For Retired Travelers</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Rule 6: Laundry becomes part of the itinerary.</strong> </h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Here’s a new rule. When I was doing road warrior travel — one-night hops, weekly returns home, hotel laundry on the expense account in a crisis — I didn’t think about laundry at all. Now my trips are longer; sometimes multiple weeks before heading home, which should mean I need to pack more.  But it doesn’t. Slower travel leaves time for laundry. My default itinerary these days is to book an Airbnb with a washer/dryer every 7-10 days. Toss the underwear into the washer and head out for a beer. Come back, swap in another load and go tour a church… or go back for another beer. Longer trip, same size bag.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4862,\"sizeSlug\":\"full\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/ChatGPT-Image-Mar-25-2026-07_55_41-PM.png\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/ChatGPT-Image-Mar-25-2026-07_55_41-PM.png\" alt=\"Small apartment laundry nook with a front-loading washer holding dark clothes, a folded dark sweater, a black packing cube, a glass and bottle of beer, and a city map on the counter by a window\" class=\"wp-image-4862\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">With slower travel, laundry stops become part of the itinerary instead of a crisis</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Rule 7: Medications earn their carry-on slot before your clothes do.</strong> </h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Looking back at my <em>What’s In My Briefcase</em> posts — I did <a href=\"https://www.flickr.com/photos/travelcommons/102434287/\">one</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2011/02/06/podcast-87-sick-on-the-road-whats-in-my-briefcase/\">every</a> 4-5 <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2015/04/22/whats-in-my-briefcase-2015/\">years</a> — two of the constants were the bottle half-filled with Advil and Zyrtec tablets I mentioned earlier, and a tin of wintergreen Altoids. But age is often accompanied by more medicine — maybe a statin or a beta blocker, or something with a little more oomph than ibuprofen. And pack extra because, where you’re going, they might not be as easily available. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>In Croatia, Irene had an itchy rash -- must’ve brushed up against something on one of our hikes -- and went looking for their version of Cortizone at a pharmacy in Hvar. But she couldn’t get it. In Croatia, hydrocortisone cream isn’t over-the-counter; it requires a prescription. Good thing to figure out <em>before</em> getting on the plane.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4863,\"sizeSlug\":\"full\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/ChatGPT-Image-Mar-25-2026-08_01_17-PM.png\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/ChatGPT-Image-Mar-25-2026-08_01_17-PM.png\" alt=\"Open black medication pouch on a wooden table with a pill organizer, prescription bottles, loose tablets, a small mint tin, a pen, reading glasses, and the corner of a passport in soft natural light\" class=\"wp-image-4863\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">This got a lot more complicated after my 60th birthday</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:separator -->\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity\"/>\n<!-- /wp:separator -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Just One Key Change</h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>The through-line from 2006 to now isn\'t really about bags or black or merino wool — it\'s about who I\'m packing for. Road warrior me was packing to survive the trip. Retired me is packing to enjoy it. I’m not packing to survive a bad connection and make a 9 a.m. meeting in an unwrinkled state; I’m packing to enjoy the destination instead of just surviving the itinerary. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>That changes a few things at the edges — a pill organizer, scheduled laundry stops, more stylish gym shoes — but the core really hasn’t changed. I’m still pulling out my now-kinda-beat-up black bag, still making sure everything that goes into it has earned its place.<br></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Coming next:</strong> 2026 updates to <em>What’s In My Briefcase</em> and <em>My Travel Tech Stack</em></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Packing Advice from a Retired Road Warrior','Packing rules for retired travelers change, and not just because trips are longer. Updates to carry-on packing rules with 3 new rules road warriors never needed','inherit','closed','closed','','4856-revision-v1','','','2026-03-25 19:09:37','2026-03-26 01:09:37','',4856,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4864',0,'revision','',0),
(4867,1,'2026-04-02 11:01:44','2026-04-02 17:01:44','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>This Mardi Gras trip had been knocking around the back of my mind for a while. And for me, that’s a big piece of retirement travel — finally getting on with the travel I’ve thought about but never found the time to do.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Planning the Trip</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:group {\"layout\":{\"type\":\"flex\",\"flexWrap\":\"nowrap\"},\"hideFromFeed\":true} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-group\"><!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We’d been Mardi Gras semi-regulars, heading down to New Orleans every other year in pre-COVID times. We loved the big Uptown parades along St Charles St, but returning for the first time since 2018, I wanted to open our Mardi Gras aperture.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph --></div>\n<!-- /wp:group -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I’ve always thought about going further west, to see the celebrations in Lafayette and Cajun Country. And then I remembered my high school friend Scott who lives in Mobile — he’s always banging on about how Mobile was the first US city to do Mardi Gras, that New Orleans is just copying them.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:group {\"layout\":{\"type\":\"flex\",\"flexWrap\":\"nowrap\"},\"hideFromFeed\":true} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-group\"><!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>So I pulled up Google Maps and pretty quickly had a nice loop laid out.&nbsp; Our first stop would be Mobile in honor of its “First City” status; a straight 7-hour shot down I-65 from Nashville with a Buc-ee’s refueling stop along the way. From Mobile, it would be an easy two-hour mix of I-10 and US-90 along the Mississippi Gulf Coast to our next stop, New Orleans. And from there,&nbsp; another two hours up to our final stop, Lafayette and Acadiana.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph --></div>\n<!-- /wp:group -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4810,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"center\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image aligncenter size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Screenshot-2026-02-25-at-8.23.12-AM.png\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Screenshot-2026-02-25-at-8.23.12-AM-300x300.png\" alt=\"Google Map screenshot with a thick blue line defining a road trip\" class=\"wp-image-4810\"/></a></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Now, Mardi Gras isn’t just the day; it’s a whole season. It starts in early January on Epiphany and builds momentum, with parades and events first on the weekends, then nearly every day, whipping everyone up to the final pre-Lenten blowout, Fat Tuesday. Over the years, we’ve skipped that final frenzy and instead visited the couple of weeks before Fat Tuesday. It’s been a good strategy; great parades without the full-contact craziness.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>First Mardi Gras Parade</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4801,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/IMG_8888_Original.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/IMG_8888_Original-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Masked Mardi Gras participants in black-and-gold capes and feathered helmets standing on a brick sidewalk before the parade\" class=\"wp-image-4801\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Order of the Incas Pre-Parade Logistics Huddle</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Our first parade in Mobile was the <a href=\"https://mobilemask.com/organization/order-of-inca/\" title=\"\">Order of the Incas</a> on Friday night. It was chilly; even on the Gulf Coast, February nights can bite. But the parade route was full; it looked like mostly families. Next to us three generations of one family were a well-structured team — grade-school kids at the low metal barriers lining the street,&nbsp; yelling at every float, begging for throws, then stashing their catches in big shoulder bags; high-school kids behind them, also yelling and waving, snagging whatever passed over the heads of the younger kids; parents behind them, drinking beers and minding the wagon where the kids dumped their shoulder bags; and then the grandparent who, spotting a special throw lying unclaimed in the street, reached through the barrier with their cane to drag it to the curb so a grandkid could pick it up. Obviously not their first parade.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4806,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/9444839F-9B5F-4F03-836B-B7146A67827C_Original.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/9444839F-9B5F-4F03-836B-B7146A67827C_Original-240x300.jpg\" alt=\"Brightly lit Mardi Gras float with a giant neon bird and castle walls rolling past a glowing church steeple at night\" class=\"wp-image-4806\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Order of the Incas Parade Float</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I’m used to folks shouting for throws; I do it myself. But here in Mobile, people were shouting for something new to me — Moon Pies. And they got them; showers of chocolate and vanilla mini-Moon Pies. Then something big smacked me in the chest and bounced back out to the street — a full box of Moon Pies. I looked up at the float. Really? You couldn’t be bothered to open it up? Then a full box of Tastykakes hit Irene on the forehead and dropped to the ground. One of the high school kids picked it up. “Do you want this?” he asked. “Nah, you keep it, “ I said. He quickly stuffed it into his shoulder bag.&nbsp; After that, waving for throws became as much of a defensive act — blocking incoming boxes — as it was trying to catch the odd string of beads.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Krewe Barn Party</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Saturday afternoon, we headed south of downtown into a neighborhood of generic warehouse buildings to meet up with my high school friend Scott at a “barn party” — a pre-parade preview of the floats his krewe, the <a href=\"https://mobilemask.com/organization/comic-cowboys/\">Cosmic Cowboys</a>, would be rolling on Fat Tuesday.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Seemed like a bunch of the krewes stored their floats here. We walked by another barn party for the <a href=\"https://mobilemask.com/organization/order-of-lashes/\">Krewe of LaShe’s</a> (a women’s krewe — LaShe’s → lashes)&nbsp; where they’d set up kids’ rides on the front lawn of their storage building. Leaving, we got caught up in float traffic as <a href=\"https://mobilemask.com/organization/neptunes-daughters/\" title=\"\">Neptune’s Daughters</a> squeezed out toward that night’s parade marshalling area.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Fairhope’s More Intimate Mardi Gras Parade</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4807,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/IMG_8898-1-scaled.jpeg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/IMG_8898-1-225x300.jpeg\" alt=\"Night Mardi Gras parade float with an oversized gray horse and a smiling sun in sunglasses above the crowd\" class=\"wp-image-4807\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Fairhope Parade Float</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We were staying across the bay, on the eastern shore of Mobile Bay because everything in Mobile was booked. So after the barn party, we headed back over the bay to Fairhope, to see what a small town parade would be like. If we thought Friday night’s parade in Mobile was mostly families, Fairhope’s <a href=\"https://mobilemask.com/organization/knights-of-ecor-rouge/\">Knights of Ecor Rouge</a> parade was even more so. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Kids lining the parade route were screaming to their friends in the marching bands. Riders on the floats took it as a personal challenge to hurl their throws to friends on the second floor balconies, or through upper-floor windows into watch parties. The parade was shorter — 30 minutes vs. the Incas’ hour — but the floats and the throws and the bands were just as good.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>King Cake Crawl</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Our Mardi Gras trips have built an appreciation not just for parades, but also for king cakes. A king cake is a yeasted dough cake, often braided in a ring, traditionally filled with cinnamon sugar, and topped with a glaze or icing and sprinkled with sugar in Mardi Gras colors of purple, green, and gold.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I got hooked on king cakes when traveling to New Orleans back in my consulting days. The project team would usually stay at the Sheraton on Canal Street, and every morning during Mardi Gras, there’d be a king cake in the concierge lounge breakfast spread. When Irene would join me, we’d leave the concierge cakes behind and troll the neighborhoods to find the best and/or most unique king cakes.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Sunday, we drove back over the bay to Mobile in the rain — our first day of bad weather. I-10 and US 98 run right next to each other across the top of Mobile Bay. I-10 is more of a causeway while US 98 touches down and skips across the just-above-water-line islands of sediment left behind as the Mobile River and the other rivers feed into the bay. We took US 98 this time so we could drive by the <a href=\"https://www.ussalabama.com/\">USS Alabama battleship</a>, swerve the parade barricades, and hit <a href=\"https://www.dropoutbakeryandcompany.com/\">Dropout Bakery</a> for what many locals said was the best king cake in Mobile.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4803,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/IMG_9258_Original-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/IMG_9258_Original-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Latte with heart latte art beside a frosted king cake slice topped with a tiny green baby in a takeout box\" class=\"wp-image-4803\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Dropout Bakery King Cake Complete with Baby</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We were hopeful, because our tasting notes on a couple of East Bay king cake slices were “weirdly flat” and “not bad….” So, not great. We found Dropout tucked away in the corner of an incubator/co-working space. No seating, so we walked our boxed cake a block over to a coffee joint and there cut into the perfectly sized two-person king cake — and got what we were looking for. It looked great; it tasted great; it made the walk in the rain worth it.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Packing Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:group {\"layout\":{\"type\":\"flex\",\"flexWrap\":\"nowrap\"},\"hideFromFeed\":true} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-group\"><!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We wandered around the neighborhood a bit; found a very solid taproom — Braided River Brewing — for a couple of pints, but the rain wasn’t letting up. If anything, it was raining harder. The wind picked up. The temperature dropped. We called it; we headed back over the bay for some dinner and to pack up our collection of parade throws. Next morning, we were heading to New Orleans.<br></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph --></div>\n<!-- /wp:group -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4808,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/IMG_8910-1-scaled.jpeg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/IMG_8910-1-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"Mardi Gras throws spread on a hotel table—beads, Moon Pies, glow necklace, cups, plush toys, and small trinkets\" class=\"wp-image-4808\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Our 2-Day Haul of Mobile Parade Throws</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph {\"hideFromFeed\":true} -->\n<p><strong>Next Stop</strong>: <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2026/03/10/gulf-coast-mardi-gras-road-trip-stop-2-new-orleans/\" title=\"\">Gulf Coast Mardi Gras Road Trip Stop 2 — New Orleans</a></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Recommendations for Mobile and East Bay</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Mobile</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.dropoutbakeryandcompany.com/\">Dropout Bakery</a>, 358 St Louis St, Mobile — One of the best king cakes of the trip</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Nova Espresso, 306 St Anthony St, Mobile — Great place to eat your Dropout Bakery purchases</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.braidedriverbrewing.com/\">Braided River Brewing Company</a>, 420 St Louis St, Mobile — The best taproom I visited this stop</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>East Bay</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.kitchenonmaindaphne.com/\">Kitchen On Main</a>, 1716 Main St, Daphne — Cozy, friendly neighborhood restaurant</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.pearlfairhope.com/\">Pearl</a>, 334 Fairhope Ave, Fairhope — Local oysters, gumbo, and a good craft beer selection</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Thanks to everyone for the “Welcome Back!” replies on the website and socials to my first return post. As I said on Instagram, the key will be getting this post out on time. I’ve managed that, and so on to getting the next one out.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Debbie Trueblood commented on the website — “So nice to see you back. And yes, I read your post in “your voice”!” Which gave me an idea — maybe I should feed some past episodes into an AI to generate my own TravelCommons voice model that could be used as an option to read aloud these posts. This AI stuff just keeps getting whackier.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>If you’ve hit the TravelCommons website, you’ve noticed it looks a lot different, a lot simpler, and a lot faster. I was forced into the change when a security upgrade broke the old template. So, speaking of AI, I spent a couple of nights vibe-coding the basics of a new WordPress template that now drives the website.&nbsp; But still on the to-do list — links to the socials, search functionality, a Destinations section to consolidate location content — so stay tuned. It’s a bit of a construction zone.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>You can find all this here on <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com\">TravelCommons.com</a>, on the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/feed/\" title=\"\">RSS feed</a> if you’re enough of a propeller-head to figure out apps like Feedly, or <a href=\"https://travelcommons.substack.com/\" title=\"\">subscribe to the newsletter</a> on Substack. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>In the meantime, if you\'ve got questions about a place I\'ve been or topics you\'d like me to dig into, let me know — in the comments below, by email at <a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a>, or ping me at @mpeacock on X/Twitter, @travelcommons on Instagram or on the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons\" title=\"\">Facebook page</a>.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Remember that you can find all my posts  here on <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com\">TravelCommons.com</a>, on the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/feed/\" title=\"\">RSS feed</a>, or <a href=\"https://travelcommons.substack.com/\" title=\"\">the Substack newsletter</a>. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Gulf Coast Mardi Gras Road Trip Stop 1 — Mobile','First stop on a Gulf Coast Mardi Gras Road Trip: Mobile, Alabama, where they throw full boxes of Moon Pies at your head and claim they invented the whole thing before New Orleans. Three-generation families working parade routes like pros, krewe barn parties, and a rainy Sunday hunt for the best king cake.','inherit','closed','closed','','4799-revision-v1','','','2026-04-02 11:01:44','2026-04-02 17:01:44','',4799,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4867',0,'revision','',0),
(4869,1,'2026-04-14 10:31:08','2026-04-14 16:31:08','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><em>This trip had been knocking around the back of my mind for a while. And for me, that’s a big piece of retirement travel — finally getting on with the travel I’ve thought about but never found the time to do. LIke this road trip to experience Mardi Gras in </em><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2026/02/25/gulf-coast-mardi-gras-road-trip-stop-1-mobile/\"><em>Mobile</em></a><em>, </em><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2026/03/10/gulf-coast-mardi-gras-road-trip-stop-2-new-orleans/\"><em>New Orleans</em></a><em>, and Cajun Country.</em><br></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4810,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Screenshot-2026-02-25-at-8.23.12-AM.png\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Screenshot-2026-02-25-at-8.23.12-AM-300x300.png\" alt=\"Google Map screenshot with a thick blue line defining a road trip\" class=\"wp-image-4810\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">The Gulf Coast Mardi Gras Road Trip Loop</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>My high school geography class should’ve prepared me for how flat everything is along the Gulf Coast, but it didn’t. On Thursday morning, driving from New Orleans to Lafayette along US 90, the land was flat and the sky was big. And driving the roads outside of Lafayette, I was struck by how much it reminded me of the rural Midwest — places like downstate Illinois and Indiana where, once you get off the interstates, you find long stretches of flat fields punctuated by stands of farm trees and the occasional small town. The accent is different but the landscape, when you\'ve pushed up from the coastal bayous, is a lot the same.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Driving through towns on US 90 rather than around them on I-10, it was clear how important the off-shore oil business is here. I didn\'t see any of the big oil names like Exxon or Chevron. Instead, it was their smaller suppliers — supply yards stacked with lengths of metal tubing, shops doing pump repairs, dockyards along the rivers that the US 90 bridges arch high over.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Tabasco Detour</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>A little over two hours into our drive, we took a quick detour to Avery Island to tour the Tabasco plant. It was nice — a quiet campus of buildings. We did the <a href=\"https://www.tabasco.com/visit-avery-island/tabasco-tour/\">self-guided tour</a>; we hadn’t planned far enough ahead for the guided tour. The standout was the barrel house, a rickhouse of pepper mash-filled barrels covered in salt. There was a definite pepper \"tang\" in the air.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4875,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"center\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image aligncenter size-large\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_8945-EDIT-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_8945-EDIT-1024x768.jpg\" alt=\"Long interior view of the Tabasco barrel warehouse on Avery Island, with rows of wooden barrels stretching into the distance under a metal roof\" class=\"wp-image-4875\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">The source of the pepper \"tang\" in the air</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>But if I read the placards correctly, most of their pepper growing and mashing now takes place at contract farms in Latin America and Africa. Compared to other small plant tours I’ve taken — whiskey distilleries, the Louisville Slugger factory — this one was more about displays explaining the sauce than showing it being made, save for the last buildings where mixing vats and bottling lines sat behind plexiglass.&nbsp; I wanted to see a bit more action. Maybe we would’ve gotten more out of the guided tour.&nbsp; The tasting bar at the Tabasco store, though, was worth the stop. We came away with a couple of bottles that we hadn’t seen in grocery stores back home.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Walking Around Lafayette</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Lafayette is a nice town. It has a walkable city center core with the requisite upscale coffee joints and small sundry shops. We walked past <a href=\"https://www.popspoboys.com/\">Pop’s Poboys</a>, looked back at the menu through the window, turned around, and walked in. We might have found a more “authentic” po-boy place, but Pop’s had an interesting menu -- the classics plus some new twists -- and it was there and we were hungry. It was a solid choice.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4876,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_8960-EDIT.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_8960-EDIT-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Sticker on a window reading “2022 Buy Leauxcal,” with smaller text saying “Festival supported by local businesses,” above a sign that reads “No Public Restrooms.”\" class=\"wp-image-4876\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Cajun \"Buy Local\" Campaign</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Lafayette leans hard into its Cajun heritage; its role as the main city of Acadiana. About 2½ miles from downtown, along Bayou Vermilion, is <a href=\"https://bayouvermiliondistrict.org/vermilionville/\">Vermilionville Historic Village</a>. It’s an outdoor “living history” museum with restored houses, costumed interpreters doing craft demonstrations, recreating what daily life looked like in this corner of Louisiana between the 1790’s and the 1880’s. It wasn’t crowded; we could take our time.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Walking through one of the houses, I was surprised to find an interpreter sitting quietly in the front room doing some quilting. We talked for about 10 minutes about Vermillionville, what brought her there (marriage to a local; she’s originally from Pennsylvania), and her quilting.&nbsp; I’m usually not one for Williamsburg-style reenactments, but I surprised myself by liking Vermillionville. Maybe because it was much more low-key than other “living history” places I’ve visited.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>More Parade Strategy</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We stayed in a bed-and-breakfast about a 5-minute walk from downtown — a big house and a collection of outbuildings that had originally been part of a plantation. Nice-sized room, solid breakfast, but most importantly, it was very conveniently located for parade watching — maybe 2½ blocks from the parade route and right near the start.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>That lined up with the parade strategy — don’t get stuck in the middle of the route. Position yourself either at the start (as we did in Mobile and Fairhope) or right at the end (as we did in New Orleans). The start gets you out before traffic locks up; works best when it\'s just one parade. The end works better when there are multiple krewes stepping off — when there’s a parade of parades.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4870,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"center\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image aligncenter size-large\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_9360-EDIT-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_9360-EDIT-1024x768.jpg\" alt=\"Brightly lit Mardi Gras float in Lafayette at night, with masked riders on two levels tossing throws to people reaching up from the street\" class=\"wp-image-4870\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Lafayette parade float riders launching their throws</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We caught two parades in Lafayette — the kick-off on Friday night and the <a href=\"https://www.kreweofbonaparte.org/\">Krewe of Bonaparte</a> on Saturday night. Bonaparte was definitely the better parade — longer, more interesting floats, more interesting throws. It was also our last parade of the trip, so we weren\'t aggressively going after throws. Most of what we caught came from reflexes and self-defense — putting an arm up to block our face only to have a string of beads wrap around it. We gave away everything we caught to the folks standing beside us. We didn’t need any more; we were already triaging the throws we brought with us from Mobile and New Orleans.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Driving Out to Cajun Country</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Saturday morning, we drove north out of Lafayette to catch the Mardi Gras festivals in Mamou and Eunice. It was about an hour drive to Mamou, mostly through flat fields punctuated by huge ponds, many big enough to have small, one-man shallow-draft paddle wheel boats working them. I guessed they were either rice fields or crawfish ponds. Irene fired up Google and found out it wasn’t an either/or. Farmers raise both in what is really more like a flooded field than a pond. The rice gives the crawfish shade and food, while the crawfish waste fertilizes the rice. Who knew? Reminded me to find a crawfish dinner before heading home.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We didn’t know exactly where in Mamou we were going, but it’s not that big of a town, so we pulled off the highway and parked on a residential sidestreet, and followed a parade of people, coolers, and camp chairs up to the couple of blocks of commercial district and the music stage thrown up across the main drag.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>On our right I saw Fred’s Lounge, a low-slung dive bar that’s supposed to be sorta Ground Zero for the Cajun music revival — at least that’s what the historic plaque bolted on the wall next to the front door says. We walked in, or at least tried to. It was jammed; we couldn’t move. There was a band somewhere in front of us and they sounded great.&nbsp; </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>On any other day, we would’ve stayed. But on this day, we had an alternative. We backed out, grabbed beers from a vendor stand across the street, and stood among the camp chairs to watch <a href=\"https://www.mamouplayboys.com/\">Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys</a> play the street stage in what, given their name, must be their home town. Great music; good weather; cold beer. We made the right call.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:video {\"id\":4878,\"align\":\"center\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-video aligncenter\"><video controls src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_9351.mov\" playsinline></video><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Watching Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys on the street stage in Mamou</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:video -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Hunting Boudin</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>On our first two stops — Mobile and New Orleans — Irene was on a king cake hunt; trying every slice of king cake she could find. But today it was my turn to lead and instead of hunting cake, I was hunting pork. Boudin to be specific.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Boudin is a pork and rice sausage. It’s Acadiana’s version of what a lot of cuisines do with the less glamorous parts of the pig. Hungary has hurka; Thailand has sai krok isan. All a way to use everything but the oink from a butchered pig.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>In Acadiana, boudin isn’t restaurant food. It is grocery store food; gas station food. You walk up to the meat counter and order a link. It comes out of the steamer hot and and you eat it standing at the counter or over the hood of your car in the parking lot, squeezing the meat out of the casing. Or eating it whole if they’ve cooked it right.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>My Boudin Trail research called out <a href=\"https://maps.app.goo.gl/dU9dssT3a4GZkm2s6\">Charlie\'s Meat Market &amp; Grocery</a> in Mamou as a top spot. But Charlie’s closes at noon on Saturdays, so we had to leave before the Mamou Playboys finished their set. Charlie’s isn’t fancy; just a local corner store in a residential neighborhood. We bought a couple of links at the meat counter in the back and walked outside.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4872,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_9349-EDIT-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_9349-EDIT-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Man eating a link of boudin outdoors in front of Charlie’s Meat Market, seated beside a large blue chair decorated for Mardi Gras\" class=\"wp-image-4872\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">There\'s no elegant way to eat boudin</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Between bites, we got talking to a guy loading up a couple of Yeti coolers with packages of frozen, vacuum-packed boudin. “I came over from Texas for Mardi Gras,” he said. “When I told folks I’d be in Mamou, I got buried with the orders for Charlie’s boudin. It’s the best.”&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It was damn good boudin, though right then, I only had a sample size of one. But he looked like he knew his boudin, so I went back in to buy 3 packages and a bag of ice to keep them cold.Another good call. Before my boudin hunt was done, we’d also hit <a href=\"https://www.beststopinscott.com/\">The Best Stop Supermarket</a> in Scott and <a href=\"https://www.billysboudin.com/\">Billy\'s Boudin &amp; Cracklins</a> back in Lafayette. Both were solid, but the Texan was right — Charlie’s was the best.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Next Stop - Pork Cracklins</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Fifteen minutes south of Mamou is Eunice. It\'s bigger than Mamou, so their festivities were more spread out — a bigger music stage at the bottom of the main street, flanked by strings of food trucks; up in the middle of the commercial strip, more food tents set up by a local charity group.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Irene went to check out some of the shops while I made for the food tent — specifically, the guy frying big cubes of pork in what looked like a barrel cut lengthways in half, rendering them down into pork cracklins. We talked while he stirred the pork in the bubbling fat with a long metal spatula. He’d been volunteering at this festival for 10, maybe 15 years. When that batch was done, I bought some — a paper bag of salty, hot cubes of fried pork fat, meat, and skin. Then I walked into the nearest bar and bought a cold beer to cut the fat; kind of a statin stand-in to give my cholesterol levels a fighting chance.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:video {\"id\":4886} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-video\"><video controls src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_8964.mov\" playsinline></video><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Frying Up Some Chunks of Pork</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:video -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Heading Home</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We packed our parade throw haul next to the boudin cooler and headed northeast on I-10 toward Nashville — crossing the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atchafalaya_Basin_Bridge\">Atchafalaya Basin Bridge</a>, the third longest bridge in the US, carrying 18 miles of traffic over the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atchafalaya_Basin\">Atchafalaya Swamp</a>. Interesting for the first five minutes; then just flat sky and flat water that wasn’t. It gave me time to think back on this trip that I’d been planning for a couple of years. I got what I wanted from it -- three different ways of celebrating a very unique holiday.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4873,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_8967-EDIT-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_8967-EDIT-300x125.jpg\" alt=\"Piles of colorful Mardi Gras bead necklaces and throws spread across a tabletop and draped over a chair\" class=\"wp-image-4873\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Our growing bead problem</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Mobile and Fairhope felt genuinely local — manageably sized, not over-touristed. Maybe still carrying a bit of a chip on their shoulder for not getting their due as the oldest Mardi Gras in the country.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>New Orleans was New Orleans — the main event, the version that everyone has in their head when they think “Mardi Gras.” Seven years on, the parades didn’t feel as grand as I remembered them from pre-COVID times. But seeing that my favorite restaurants were still standing and still cranking out good food more than made up for it.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>And then there was Acadiana. Lafayette’s Mardi Gras parades felt a lot like Mobile’s. But experiencing Cajun culture in Lafayette and then in Mamou and Eunice gave us the most local version of Mardi Gras — music stages on small-town main streets, hot boudin from a corner market, pork cracklins in a paper bag. It felt more genuine, less produced.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I’m glad I waited until after retirement to do this trip. I was able to give this trip the time it needed to breathe — to spend enough time to appreciate each place’s celebrations on its own terms.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:separator -->\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity\"/>\n<!-- /wp:separator -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Recommendations for Lafayette and Acadiana</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Food &amp; Drink</strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.popspoboys.com/\">Pop\'s Poboys</a> — Solid poboy menu, classics and twists; right downtown</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://maps.app.goo.gl/dU9dssT3a4GZkm2s6\">Charlie\'s Meat Market &amp; Grocery</a>, Mamou — Best boudin on the Boudin Trail; arrive before noon on Saturdays</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.billysboudin.com/\">Billy\'s Boudin &amp; Cracklins</a>, Lafayette — Good cracklins; solid all-around stop</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Culture</strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://bayouvermiliondistrict.org/vermilionville/\">Vermilionville Historic Village</a> —  Quick drive from downtown if you\'re into history</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Fred\'s Lounge, Mamou — Show up on Saturday morning for live music</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.mamouplayboys.com/events/\">Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys</a> — Check their <em>Events</em>  page to see if you can catch them live</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:separator -->\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity\"/>\n<!-- /wp:separator -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Check out the first two road trip stops —</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2026/02/25/gulf-coast-mardi-gras-road-trip-stop-1-mobile/\" title=\"\">Mobile</a></strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4806,\"sizeSlug\":\"thumbnail\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-thumbnail\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/9444839F-9B5F-4F03-836B-B7146A67827C_Original.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/9444839F-9B5F-4F03-836B-B7146A67827C_Original-150x150.jpg\" alt=\"Brightly lit Mardi Gras float with a giant neon bird and castle walls rolling past a glowing church steeple at night\" class=\"wp-image-4806\"/></a></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2026/03/10/gulf-coast-mardi-gras-road-trip-stop-2-new-orleans/\" title=\"\"><strong>New Orleans</strong></a></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4835,\"sizeSlug\":\"thumbnail\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-thumbnail\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_0137.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_0137-150x150.jpg\" alt=\"Mardi Gras bead necklaces in purple, green, and gold draped along a black iron fence outside a house\" class=\"wp-image-4835\"/></a></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Gulf Coast Mardi Gras Road Trip Stop 3 — Lafayette &amp; Acadiana','Final stop on my Gulf Coast Mardi Gras road trip is Lafayette and Cajun Country. Parades and Cajun history in Lafayette; small-town festivals and local music in Mamou and Eunice; following the boudin trail with fresh pork cracklins at the end.','publish','open','open','','gulf-coast-mardi-gras-road-trip-stop-3-lafayette-acadiana','','','2026-04-14 12:34:44','2026-04-14 18:34:44','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4869',0,'post','',0),
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(4875,1,'2026-04-14 09:38:57','2026-04-14 15:38:57','','IMG_8945-EDIT','The source of the pepper \"tang\" in the air','inherit','open','closed','','img_8945-edit','','','2026-04-14 09:41:40','2026-04-14 15:41:40','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_8945-EDIT.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(4876,1,'2026-04-14 09:39:03','2026-04-14 15:39:03','','IMG_8960-EDIT','Cajun \"Buy Local\" Campaign','inherit','open','closed','','img_8960-edit','','','2026-04-14 09:40:25','2026-04-14 15:40:25','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_8960-EDIT.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(4877,1,'2026-04-14 09:46:33','2026-04-14 15:46:33','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><em>This trip had been knocking around the back of my mind for a while. And for me, that’s a big piece of retirement travel — finally getting on with the travel I’ve thought about but never found the time to do. LIke this road trip to experience Mardi Gras in </em><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2026/02/25/gulf-coast-mardi-gras-road-trip-stop-1-mobile/\"><em>Mobile</em></a><em>, </em><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2026/03/10/gulf-coast-mardi-gras-road-trip-stop-2-new-orleans/\"><em>New Orleans</em></a><em>, and Cajun Country.</em><br></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4810,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Screenshot-2026-02-25-at-8.23.12-AM.png\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Screenshot-2026-02-25-at-8.23.12-AM-300x300.png\" alt=\"Google Map screenshot with a thick blue line defining a road trip\" class=\"wp-image-4810\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">The Gulf Coast Mardi Gras Road Trip Loop</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>My high school geography class should’ve prepared me for how flat everything is along the Gulf Coast, but it didn’t. On Thursday morning, driving from New Orleans to Lafayette along US 90, the land was flat and the sky was big. And driving the roads outside of Lafayette, I was struck by how much it reminded me of the rural Midwest — places like downstate Illinois and Indiana where, once you get off the interstates, you find long stretches of flat fields punctuated by stands of farm trees and the occasional small town. The accent is different but the landscape, when you\'ve pushed up from the coastal bayous, is a lot the same.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Driving through towns on US 90 rather than around them on I-10, it was clear how important the off-shore oil business is here. I didn\'t see any of the big oil names like Exxon or Chevron. Instead, it was their smaller suppliers — supply yards stacked with lengths of metal tubing, shops doing pump repairs, dockyards along the rivers that the US 90 bridges arch high over.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Tabasco Detour</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>A little over two hours into our drive, we took a quick detour to Avery Island to tour the Tabasco plant. It was nice — a quiet campus of buildings. We did the <a href=\"https://www.tabasco.com/visit-avery-island/tabasco-tour/\">self-guided tour</a>; we hadn’t planned far enough ahead for the guided tour. The standout was the barrel house, a rickhouse of pepper mash-filled barrels covered in salt. There was a definite pepper \"tang\" in the air.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4875,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_8945-EDIT-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_8945-EDIT-300x225.jpg\" alt=\"Long interior view of the Tabasco barrel warehouse on Avery Island, with rows of wooden barrels stretching into the distance under a metal roof\" class=\"wp-image-4875\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">The source of the pepper \"tang\" in the air</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>But if I read the placards correctly, most of their pepper growing and mashing now takes place at contract farms in Latin America and Africa. Compared to other small plant tours I’ve taken — whiskey distilleries, the Louisville Slugger factory — this one was more about displays explaining the sauce than showing it being made, save for the last buildings where mixing vats and bottling lines sat behind plexiglass.&nbsp; I wanted to see a bit more action. Maybe we would’ve gotten more out of the guided tour.&nbsp; The tasting bar at the Tabasco store, though, was worth the stop. We came away with a couple of bottles that we hadn’t seen in grocery stores back home.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Walking Around Lafayette</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Lafayette is a nice town. It has a walkable city center core with the requisite upscale coffee joints and small sundry shops. We walked past <a href=\"https://www.popspoboys.com/\">Pop’s Poboys</a>, looked back at the menu through the window, turned around, and walked in. We might have found a more “authentic” po-boy place, but Pop’s had an interesting menu -- the classics plus some new twists -- and it was there and we were hungry. It was a solid choice.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Lafayette leans hard into its Cajun heritage; its role as the main city of Acadiana. About 2½ miles from downtown, along Bayou Vermilion, is <a href=\"https://bayouvermiliondistrict.org/vermilionville/\">Vermilionville Historic Village</a>. It’s an outdoor “living history” museum with restored houses, costumed interpreters doing craft demonstrations, recreating what daily life looked like in this corner of Louisiana between the 1790’s and the 1880’s. It wasn’t crowded; we could take our time.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Walking through one of the houses, I was surprised to find an interpreter sitting quietly in the front room doing some quilting. We talked for about 10 minutes about Vermillionville, what brought her there (marriage to a local; she’s originally from Pennsylvania), and her quilting.&nbsp; I’m usually not one for Williamsburg-style reenactments, but I surprised myself by liking Vermillionville. Maybe because it was much more low-key than other “living history” places I’ve visited.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>More Parade Strategy</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We stayed in a bed-and-breakfast about a 5-minute walk from downtown — a big house and a collection of outbuildings that had originally been part of a plantation. Nice-sized room, solid breakfast, but most importantly, it was very conveniently located for parade watching — maybe 2½ blocks from the parade route and right near the start.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>That lined up with the parade strategy — don’t get stuck in the middle of the route. Position yourself either at the start (as we did in Mobile and Fairhope) or right at the end (as we did in New Orleans). The start gets you out before traffic locks up; works best when it\'s just one parade. The end works better when there are multiple krewes stepping off — when there’s a parade of parades.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We caught two parades in Lafayette — the kick-off on Friday night and the <a href=\"https://www.kreweofbonaparte.org/\">Krewe of Bonaparte</a> on Saturday night. Bonaparte was definitely the better parade — longer, more interesting floats, more interesting throws. It was also our last parade of the trip, so we weren\'t aggressively going after throws. Most of what we caught came from reflexes and self-defense — putting an arm up to block our face only to have a string of beads wrap around it. We gave away everything we caught to the folks standing beside us. We didn’t need any more; we were already triaging the throws we brought with us from Mobile and New Orleans.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Driving Out to Cajun Country</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Saturday morning, we drove north out of Lafayette to catch the Mardi Gras festivals in Mamou and Eunice. It was about an hour drive to Mamou, mostly through flat fields punctuated by huge ponds, many big enough to have small, one-man shallow-draft paddle wheel boats working them. I guessed they were either rice fields or crawfish ponds. Irene fired up Google and found out it wasn’t an either/or. Farmers raise both in what is really more like a flooded field than a pond. The rice gives the crawfish shade and food, while the crawfish waste fertilizes the rice. Who knew? Reminded me to find a crawfish dinner before heading home.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We didn’t know exactly where in Mamou we were going, but it’s not that big of a town, so we pulled off the highway and parked on a residential sidestreet, and followed a parade of people, coolers, and camp chairs up to the couple of blocks of commercial district and the music stage thrown up across the main drag.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>On our right I saw Fred’s Lounge, a low-slung dive bar that’s supposed to be sorta Ground Zero for the Cajun music revival — at least that’s what the historic plaque bolted on the wall next to the front door says. We walked in, or at least tried to. It was jammed; we couldn’t move. There was a band somewhere in front of us and they sounded great.  </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>On any other day, we would’ve stayed. But on this day, we had an alternative. We backed out, grabbed beers from a vendor stand across the street, and stood among the camp chairs to watch <a href=\"https://www.mamouplayboys.com/\">Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys</a> play the street stage in what, given their name, must be their home town. Great music; good weather; cold beer. We made the right call.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Hunting Boudin</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>On our first two stops — Mobile and New Orleans — Irene was on a king cake hunt; trying every slice of king cake she could find. But today it was my turn to lead and instead of hunting cake, I was hunting pork. Boudin to be specific.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Boudin is a pork and rice sausage. It’s Acadiana’s version of what a lot of cuisines do with the less glamorous parts of the pig. Hungary has hurka; Thailand has sai krok isan. All a way to use everything but the oink from a butchered pig.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>In Acadiana, boudin isn’t restaurant food. It is grocery store food; gas station food. You walk up to the meat counter and order a link. It comes out of the steamer hot and and you eat it standing at the counter or over the hood of your car in the parking lot, squeezing the meat out of the casing. Or eating it whole if they’ve cooked it right.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>My Boudin Trail research called out <a href=\"https://maps.app.goo.gl/dU9dssT3a4GZkm2s6\">Charlie\'s Meat Market &amp; Grocery</a> in Mamou as a top spot. But Charlie’s closes at noon on Saturdays, so we had to leave before the Mamou Playboys finished their set. Charlie’s isn’t fancy; just a local corner store in a residential neighborhood. We bought a couple of links at the meat counter in the back and walked outside.&nbsp;<br><br>Between bites, we got talking to a guy loading up a couple of Yeti coolers with packages of frozen, vacuum-packed boudin. “I came over from Texas for Mardi Gras,” he said. “When I told folks I’d be in Mamou, I got buried with the orders for Charlie’s boudin. It’s the best.”&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It was damn good boudin, though right then, I only had a sample size of one. But he looked like he knew his boudin, so I went back in to buy 3 packages and a bag of ice to keep them cold.Another good call. Before my boudin hunt was done, we’d also hit <a href=\"https://www.beststopinscott.com/\">The Best Stop Supermarket</a> in Scott and <a href=\"https://www.billysboudin.com/\">Billy\'s Boudin &amp; Cracklins</a> back in Lafayette. Both were solid, but the Texan was right — Charlie’s was the best.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Next Stop - Pork Cracklins</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Fifteen minutes south of Mamou is Eunice. It\'s bigger than Mamou, so their festivities were more spread out — a bigger music stage at the bottom of the main street, flanked by strings of food trucks; up in the middle of the commercial strip, more food tents set up by a local charity group.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Irene went to check out some of the shops while I made for the food tent — specifically, the guy frying big cubes of pork in what looked like a barrel cut lengthways in half, rendering them down into pork cracklins. We talked while he stirred the pork in the bubbling fat with a long metal spatula. He’d been volunteering at this festival for 10, maybe 15 years. When that batch was done, I bought some — a paper bag of salty, hot cubes of fried pork fat, meat, and skin. Then I walked into the nearest bar and bought a cold beer to cut the fat; kind of a statin stand-in to give my cholesterol levels a fighting chance.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Heading Home</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We packed our parade throw haul next to the boudin cooler and headed northeast on I-10 toward Nashville — crossing the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atchafalaya_Basin_Bridge\">Atchafalaya Basin Bridge</a>, the third longest bridge in the US, carrying 18 miles of traffic over the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atchafalaya_Basin\">Atchafalaya Swamp</a>. Interesting for the first five minutes; then just flat sky and flat water that wasn’t. It gave me time to think back on this trip that I’d been planning for a couple of years. I got what I wanted from it -- three different ways of celebrating a very unique holiday.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Mobile and Fairhope felt genuinely local — manageably sized, not over-touristed. Maybe still carrying a bit of a chip on their shoulder for not getting their due as the oldest Mardi Gras in the country.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>New Orleans was New Orleans — the main event, the version that everyone has in their head when they think “Mardi Gras.” Seven years on, the parades didn’t feel as grand as I remembered them from pre-COVID times. But seeing that my favorite restaurants were still standing and still cranking out good food more than made up for it.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>And then there was Acadiana. Lafayette’s Mardi Gras parades felt a lot like Mobile’s. But experiencing Cajun culture in Lafayette and then in Mamou and Eunice gave us the most local version of Mardi Gras — music stages on small-town main streets, hot boudin from a corner market, pork cracklins in a paper bag. It felt more genuine, less produced.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I’m glad I waited until after retirement to do this trip. I was able to give this trip the time it needed to breathe — to spend enough time to appreciate each place’s celebrations on its own terms.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Gulf Coast Mardi Gras Road Trip Stop 3 — Lafayette &amp; Acadiana','','inherit','closed','closed','','4869-revision-v1','','','2026-04-14 09:46:33','2026-04-14 15:46:33','',4869,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4877',0,'revision','',0),
(4878,1,'2026-04-14 09:49:11','2026-04-14 15:49:11','Video of a daytime Mardi Gras crowd gathered in downtown Mamou, Louisiana, watching a Cajun band perform on an outdoor street stage, with people in purple, green, and gold festival clothing filling the foreground','IMG_9351','Watching Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys on the street stage in Mamou','inherit','open','closed','','img_9351','','','2026-04-14 09:52:32','2026-04-14 15:52:32','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_9351.mov',0,'attachment','video/quicktime',0),
(4879,1,'2026-04-14 09:54:48','2026-04-14 15:54:48','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><em>This trip had been knocking around the back of my mind for a while. And for me, that’s a big piece of retirement travel — finally getting on with the travel I’ve thought about but never found the time to do. LIke this road trip to experience Mardi Gras in </em><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2026/02/25/gulf-coast-mardi-gras-road-trip-stop-1-mobile/\"><em>Mobile</em></a><em>, </em><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2026/03/10/gulf-coast-mardi-gras-road-trip-stop-2-new-orleans/\"><em>New Orleans</em></a><em>, and Cajun Country.</em><br></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4810,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Screenshot-2026-02-25-at-8.23.12-AM.png\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Screenshot-2026-02-25-at-8.23.12-AM-300x300.png\" alt=\"Google Map screenshot with a thick blue line defining a road trip\" class=\"wp-image-4810\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">The Gulf Coast Mardi Gras Road Trip Loop</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>My high school geography class should’ve prepared me for how flat everything is along the Gulf Coast, but it didn’t. On Thursday morning, driving from New Orleans to Lafayette along US 90, the land was flat and the sky was big. And driving the roads outside of Lafayette, I was struck by how much it reminded me of the rural Midwest — places like downstate Illinois and Indiana where, once you get off the interstates, you find long stretches of flat fields punctuated by stands of farm trees and the occasional small town. The accent is different but the landscape, when you\'ve pushed up from the coastal bayous, is a lot the same.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Driving through towns on US 90 rather than around them on I-10, it was clear how important the off-shore oil business is here. I didn\'t see any of the big oil names like Exxon or Chevron. Instead, it was their smaller suppliers — supply yards stacked with lengths of metal tubing, shops doing pump repairs, dockyards along the rivers that the US 90 bridges arch high over.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Tabasco Detour</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>A little over two hours into our drive, we took a quick detour to Avery Island to tour the Tabasco plant. It was nice — a quiet campus of buildings. We did the <a href=\"https://www.tabasco.com/visit-avery-island/tabasco-tour/\">self-guided tour</a>; we hadn’t planned far enough ahead for the guided tour. The standout was the barrel house, a rickhouse of pepper mash-filled barrels covered in salt. There was a definite pepper \"tang\" in the air.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4875,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-large\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_8945-EDIT-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_8945-EDIT-1024x768.jpg\" alt=\"Long interior view of the Tabasco barrel warehouse on Avery Island, with rows of wooden barrels stretching into the distance under a metal roof\" class=\"wp-image-4875\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">The source of the pepper \"tang\" in the air</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>But if I read the placards correctly, most of their pepper growing and mashing now takes place at contract farms in Latin America and Africa. Compared to other small plant tours I’ve taken — whiskey distilleries, the Louisville Slugger factory — this one was more about displays explaining the sauce than showing it being made, save for the last buildings where mixing vats and bottling lines sat behind plexiglass.&nbsp; I wanted to see a bit more action. Maybe we would’ve gotten more out of the guided tour.&nbsp; The tasting bar at the Tabasco store, though, was worth the stop. We came away with a couple of bottles that we hadn’t seen in grocery stores back home.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Walking Around Lafayette</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Lafayette is a nice town. It has a walkable city center core with the requisite upscale coffee joints and small sundry shops. We walked past <a href=\"https://www.popspoboys.com/\">Pop’s Poboys</a>, looked back at the menu through the window, turned around, and walked in. We might have found a more “authentic” po-boy place, but Pop’s had an interesting menu -- the classics plus some new twists -- and it was there and we were hungry. It was a solid choice.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4876,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_8960-EDIT.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_8960-EDIT-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Sticker on a window reading “2022 Buy Leauxcal,” with smaller text saying “Festival supported by local businesses,” above a sign that reads “No Public Restrooms.”\" class=\"wp-image-4876\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Cajun \"Buy Local\" Campaign</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Lafayette leans hard into its Cajun heritage; its role as the main city of Acadiana. About 2½ miles from downtown, along Bayou Vermilion, is <a href=\"https://bayouvermiliondistrict.org/vermilionville/\">Vermilionville Historic Village</a>. It’s an outdoor “living history” museum with restored houses, costumed interpreters doing craft demonstrations, recreating what daily life looked like in this corner of Louisiana between the 1790’s and the 1880’s. It wasn’t crowded; we could take our time.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Walking through one of the houses, I was surprised to find an interpreter sitting quietly in the front room doing some quilting. We talked for about 10 minutes about Vermillionville, what brought her there (marriage to a local; she’s originally from Pennsylvania), and her quilting.&nbsp; I’m usually not one for Williamsburg-style reenactments, but I surprised myself by liking Vermillionville. Maybe because it was much more low-key than other “living history” places I’ve visited.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>More Parade Strategy</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We stayed in a bed-and-breakfast about a 5-minute walk from downtown — a big house and a collection of outbuildings that had originally been part of a plantation. Nice-sized room, solid breakfast, but most importantly, it was very conveniently located for parade watching — maybe 2½ blocks from the parade route and right near the start.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>That lined up with the parade strategy — don’t get stuck in the middle of the route. Position yourself either at the start (as we did in Mobile and Fairhope) or right at the end (as we did in New Orleans). The start gets you out before traffic locks up; works best when it\'s just one parade. The end works better when there are multiple krewes stepping off — when there’s a parade of parades.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4870,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-large\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_9360-EDIT-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_9360-EDIT-1024x768.jpg\" alt=\"Brightly lit Mardi Gras float in Lafayette at night, with masked riders on two levels tossing throws to people reaching up from the street\" class=\"wp-image-4870\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Lafayette parade float riders launching their throws</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We caught two parades in Lafayette — the kick-off on Friday night and the <a href=\"https://www.kreweofbonaparte.org/\">Krewe of Bonaparte</a> on Saturday night. Bonaparte was definitely the better parade — longer, more interesting floats, more interesting throws. It was also our last parade of the trip, so we weren\'t aggressively going after throws. Most of what we caught came from reflexes and self-defense — putting an arm up to block our face only to have a string of beads wrap around it. We gave away everything we caught to the folks standing beside us. We didn’t need any more; we were already triaging the throws we brought with us from Mobile and New Orleans.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Driving Out to Cajun Country</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Saturday morning, we drove north out of Lafayette to catch the Mardi Gras festivals in Mamou and Eunice. It was about an hour drive to Mamou, mostly through flat fields punctuated by huge ponds, many big enough to have small, one-man shallow-draft paddle wheel boats working them. I guessed they were either rice fields or crawfish ponds. Irene fired up Google and found out it wasn’t an either/or. Farmers raise both in what is really more like a flooded field than a pond. The rice gives the crawfish shade and food, while the crawfish waste fertilizes the rice. Who knew? Reminded me to find a crawfish dinner before heading home.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We didn’t know exactly where in Mamou we were going, but it’s not that big of a town, so we pulled off the highway and parked on a residential sidestreet, and followed a parade of people, coolers, and camp chairs up to the couple of blocks of commercial district and the music stage thrown up across the main drag.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>On our right I saw Fred’s Lounge, a low-slung dive bar that’s supposed to be sorta Ground Zero for the Cajun music revival — at least that’s what the historic plaque bolted on the wall next to the front door says. We walked in, or at least tried to. It was jammed; we couldn’t move. There was a band somewhere in front of us and they sounded great.&nbsp; </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>On any other day, we would’ve stayed. But on this day, we had an alternative. We backed out, grabbed beers from a vendor stand across the street, and stood among the camp chairs to watch <a href=\"https://www.mamouplayboys.com/\">Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys</a> play the street stage in what, given their name, must be their home town. Great music; good weather; cold beer. We made the right call.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:video {\"id\":4878} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-video\"><video controls src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_9351.mov\" playsinline></video><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Watching Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys on the street stage in Mamou</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:video -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Hunting Boudin</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>On our first two stops — Mobile and New Orleans — Irene was on a king cake hunt; trying every slice of king cake she could find. But today it was my turn to lead and instead of hunting cake, I was hunting pork. Boudin to be specific.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Boudin is a pork and rice sausage. It’s Acadiana’s version of what a lot of cuisines do with the less glamorous parts of the pig. Hungary has hurka; Thailand has sai krok isan. All a way to use everything but the oink from a butchered pig.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>In Acadiana, boudin isn’t restaurant food. It is grocery store food; gas station food. You walk up to the meat counter and order a link. It comes out of the steamer hot and and you eat it standing at the counter or over the hood of your car in the parking lot, squeezing the meat out of the casing. Or eating it whole if they’ve cooked it right.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>My Boudin Trail research called out <a href=\"https://maps.app.goo.gl/dU9dssT3a4GZkm2s6\">Charlie\'s Meat Market &amp; Grocery</a> in Mamou as a top spot. But Charlie’s closes at noon on Saturdays, so we had to leave before the Mamou Playboys finished their set. Charlie’s isn’t fancy; just a local corner store in a residential neighborhood. We bought a couple of links at the meat counter in the back and walked outside.&nbsp;<br><br>Between bites, we got talking to a guy loading up a couple of Yeti coolers with packages of frozen, vacuum-packed boudin. “I came over from Texas for Mardi Gras,” he said. “When I told folks I’d be in Mamou, I got buried with the orders for Charlie’s boudin. It’s the best.”&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It was damn good boudin, though right then, I only had a sample size of one. But he looked like he knew his boudin, so I went back in to buy 3 packages and a bag of ice to keep them cold.Another good call. Before my boudin hunt was done, we’d also hit <a href=\"https://www.beststopinscott.com/\">The Best Stop Supermarket</a> in Scott and <a href=\"https://www.billysboudin.com/\">Billy\'s Boudin &amp; Cracklins</a> back in Lafayette. Both were solid, but the Texan was right — Charlie’s was the best.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Next Stop - Pork Cracklins</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Fifteen minutes south of Mamou is Eunice. It\'s bigger than Mamou, so their festivities were more spread out — a bigger music stage at the bottom of the main street, flanked by strings of food trucks; up in the middle of the commercial strip, more food tents set up by a local charity group.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Irene went to check out some of the shops while I made for the food tent — specifically, the guy frying big cubes of pork in what looked like a barrel cut lengthways in half, rendering them down into pork cracklins. We talked while he stirred the pork in the bubbling fat with a long metal spatula. He’d been volunteering at this festival for 10, maybe 15 years. When that batch was done, I bought some — a paper bag of salty, hot cubes of fried pork fat, meat, and skin. Then I walked into the nearest bar and bought a cold beer to cut the fat; kind of a statin stand-in to give my cholesterol levels a fighting chance.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Heading Home</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We packed our parade throw haul next to the boudin cooler and headed northeast on I-10 toward Nashville — crossing the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atchafalaya_Basin_Bridge\">Atchafalaya Basin Bridge</a>, the third longest bridge in the US, carrying 18 miles of traffic over the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atchafalaya_Basin\">Atchafalaya Swamp</a>. Interesting for the first five minutes; then just flat sky and flat water that wasn’t. It gave me time to think back on this trip that I’d been planning for a couple of years. I got what I wanted from it -- three different ways of celebrating a very unique holiday.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Mobile and Fairhope felt genuinely local — manageably sized, not over-touristed. Maybe still carrying a bit of a chip on their shoulder for not getting their due as the oldest Mardi Gras in the country.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>New Orleans was New Orleans — the main event, the version that everyone has in their head when they think “Mardi Gras.” Seven years on, the parades didn’t feel as grand as I remembered them from pre-COVID times. But seeing that my favorite restaurants were still standing and still cranking out good food more than made up for it.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>And then there was Acadiana. Lafayette’s Mardi Gras parades felt a lot like Mobile’s. But experiencing Cajun culture in Lafayette and then in Mamou and Eunice gave us the most local version of Mardi Gras — music stages on small-town main streets, hot boudin from a corner market, pork cracklins in a paper bag. It felt more genuine, less produced.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I’m glad I waited until after retirement to do this trip. I was able to give this trip the time it needed to breathe — to spend enough time to appreciate each place’s celebrations on its own terms.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Gulf Coast Mardi Gras Road Trip Stop 3 — Lafayette &amp; Acadiana','','inherit','closed','closed','','4869-revision-v1','','','2026-04-14 09:54:48','2026-04-14 15:54:48','',4869,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4879',0,'revision','',0),
(4880,1,'2026-04-14 09:56:19','2026-04-14 15:56:19','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><em>This trip had been knocking around the back of my mind for a while. And for me, that’s a big piece of retirement travel — finally getting on with the travel I’ve thought about but never found the time to do. LIke this road trip to experience Mardi Gras in </em><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2026/02/25/gulf-coast-mardi-gras-road-trip-stop-1-mobile/\"><em>Mobile</em></a><em>, </em><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2026/03/10/gulf-coast-mardi-gras-road-trip-stop-2-new-orleans/\"><em>New Orleans</em></a><em>, and Cajun Country.</em><br></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4810,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Screenshot-2026-02-25-at-8.23.12-AM.png\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Screenshot-2026-02-25-at-8.23.12-AM-300x300.png\" alt=\"Google Map screenshot with a thick blue line defining a road trip\" class=\"wp-image-4810\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">The Gulf Coast Mardi Gras Road Trip Loop</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>My high school geography class should’ve prepared me for how flat everything is along the Gulf Coast, but it didn’t. On Thursday morning, driving from New Orleans to Lafayette along US 90, the land was flat and the sky was big. And driving the roads outside of Lafayette, I was struck by how much it reminded me of the rural Midwest — places like downstate Illinois and Indiana where, once you get off the interstates, you find long stretches of flat fields punctuated by stands of farm trees and the occasional small town. The accent is different but the landscape, when you\'ve pushed up from the coastal bayous, is a lot the same.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Driving through towns on US 90 rather than around them on I-10, it was clear how important the off-shore oil business is here. I didn\'t see any of the big oil names like Exxon or Chevron. Instead, it was their smaller suppliers — supply yards stacked with lengths of metal tubing, shops doing pump repairs, dockyards along the rivers that the US 90 bridges arch high over.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Tabasco Detour</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>A little over two hours into our drive, we took a quick detour to Avery Island to tour the Tabasco plant. It was nice — a quiet campus of buildings. We did the <a href=\"https://www.tabasco.com/visit-avery-island/tabasco-tour/\">self-guided tour</a>; we hadn’t planned far enough ahead for the guided tour. The standout was the barrel house, a rickhouse of pepper mash-filled barrels covered in salt. There was a definite pepper \"tang\" in the air.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4875,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"center\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image aligncenter size-large\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_8945-EDIT-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_8945-EDIT-1024x768.jpg\" alt=\"Long interior view of the Tabasco barrel warehouse on Avery Island, with rows of wooden barrels stretching into the distance under a metal roof\" class=\"wp-image-4875\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">The source of the pepper \"tang\" in the air</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>But if I read the placards correctly, most of their pepper growing and mashing now takes place at contract farms in Latin America and Africa. Compared to other small plant tours I’ve taken — whiskey distilleries, the Louisville Slugger factory — this one was more about displays explaining the sauce than showing it being made, save for the last buildings where mixing vats and bottling lines sat behind plexiglass.&nbsp; I wanted to see a bit more action. Maybe we would’ve gotten more out of the guided tour.&nbsp; The tasting bar at the Tabasco store, though, was worth the stop. We came away with a couple of bottles that we hadn’t seen in grocery stores back home.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Walking Around Lafayette</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Lafayette is a nice town. It has a walkable city center core with the requisite upscale coffee joints and small sundry shops. We walked past <a href=\"https://www.popspoboys.com/\">Pop’s Poboys</a>, looked back at the menu through the window, turned around, and walked in. We might have found a more “authentic” po-boy place, but Pop’s had an interesting menu -- the classics plus some new twists -- and it was there and we were hungry. It was a solid choice.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4876,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_8960-EDIT.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_8960-EDIT-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Sticker on a window reading “2022 Buy Leauxcal,” with smaller text saying “Festival supported by local businesses,” above a sign that reads “No Public Restrooms.”\" class=\"wp-image-4876\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Cajun \"Buy Local\" Campaign</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Lafayette leans hard into its Cajun heritage; its role as the main city of Acadiana. About 2½ miles from downtown, along Bayou Vermilion, is <a href=\"https://bayouvermiliondistrict.org/vermilionville/\">Vermilionville Historic Village</a>. It’s an outdoor “living history” museum with restored houses, costumed interpreters doing craft demonstrations, recreating what daily life looked like in this corner of Louisiana between the 1790’s and the 1880’s. It wasn’t crowded; we could take our time.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Walking through one of the houses, I was surprised to find an interpreter sitting quietly in the front room doing some quilting. We talked for about 10 minutes about Vermillionville, what brought her there (marriage to a local; she’s originally from Pennsylvania), and her quilting.&nbsp; I’m usually not one for Williamsburg-style reenactments, but I surprised myself by liking Vermillionville. Maybe because it was much more low-key than other “living history” places I’ve visited.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>More Parade Strategy</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We stayed in a bed-and-breakfast about a 5-minute walk from downtown — a big house and a collection of outbuildings that had originally been part of a plantation. Nice-sized room, solid breakfast, but most importantly, it was very conveniently located for parade watching — maybe 2½ blocks from the parade route and right near the start.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>That lined up with the parade strategy — don’t get stuck in the middle of the route. Position yourself either at the start (as we did in Mobile and Fairhope) or right at the end (as we did in New Orleans). The start gets you out before traffic locks up; works best when it\'s just one parade. The end works better when there are multiple krewes stepping off — when there’s a parade of parades.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4870,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"center\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image aligncenter size-large\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_9360-EDIT-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_9360-EDIT-1024x768.jpg\" alt=\"Brightly lit Mardi Gras float in Lafayette at night, with masked riders on two levels tossing throws to people reaching up from the street\" class=\"wp-image-4870\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Lafayette parade float riders launching their throws</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We caught two parades in Lafayette — the kick-off on Friday night and the <a href=\"https://www.kreweofbonaparte.org/\">Krewe of Bonaparte</a> on Saturday night. Bonaparte was definitely the better parade — longer, more interesting floats, more interesting throws. It was also our last parade of the trip, so we weren\'t aggressively going after throws. Most of what we caught came from reflexes and self-defense — putting an arm up to block our face only to have a string of beads wrap around it. We gave away everything we caught to the folks standing beside us. We didn’t need any more; we were already triaging the throws we brought with us from Mobile and New Orleans.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Driving Out to Cajun Country</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Saturday morning, we drove north out of Lafayette to catch the Mardi Gras festivals in Mamou and Eunice. It was about an hour drive to Mamou, mostly through flat fields punctuated by huge ponds, many big enough to have small, one-man shallow-draft paddle wheel boats working them. I guessed they were either rice fields or crawfish ponds. Irene fired up Google and found out it wasn’t an either/or. Farmers raise both in what is really more like a flooded field than a pond. The rice gives the crawfish shade and food, while the crawfish waste fertilizes the rice. Who knew? Reminded me to find a crawfish dinner before heading home.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We didn’t know exactly where in Mamou we were going, but it’s not that big of a town, so we pulled off the highway and parked on a residential sidestreet, and followed a parade of people, coolers, and camp chairs up to the couple of blocks of commercial district and the music stage thrown up across the main drag.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>On our right I saw Fred’s Lounge, a low-slung dive bar that’s supposed to be sorta Ground Zero for the Cajun music revival — at least that’s what the historic plaque bolted on the wall next to the front door says. We walked in, or at least tried to. It was jammed; we couldn’t move. There was a band somewhere in front of us and they sounded great.&nbsp; </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>On any other day, we would’ve stayed. But on this day, we had an alternative. We backed out, grabbed beers from a vendor stand across the street, and stood among the camp chairs to watch <a href=\"https://www.mamouplayboys.com/\">Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys</a> play the street stage in what, given their name, must be their home town. Great music; good weather; cold beer. We made the right call.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:video {\"id\":4878,\"align\":\"center\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-video aligncenter\"><video controls src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_9351.mov\" playsinline></video><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Watching Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys on the street stage in Mamou</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:video -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Hunting Boudin</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>On our first two stops — Mobile and New Orleans — Irene was on a king cake hunt; trying every slice of king cake she could find. But today it was my turn to lead and instead of hunting cake, I was hunting pork. Boudin to be specific.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Boudin is a pork and rice sausage. It’s Acadiana’s version of what a lot of cuisines do with the less glamorous parts of the pig. Hungary has hurka; Thailand has sai krok isan. All a way to use everything but the oink from a butchered pig.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>In Acadiana, boudin isn’t restaurant food. It is grocery store food; gas station food. You walk up to the meat counter and order a link. It comes out of the steamer hot and and you eat it standing at the counter or over the hood of your car in the parking lot, squeezing the meat out of the casing. Or eating it whole if they’ve cooked it right.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>My Boudin Trail research called out <a href=\"https://maps.app.goo.gl/dU9dssT3a4GZkm2s6\">Charlie\'s Meat Market &amp; Grocery</a> in Mamou as a top spot. But Charlie’s closes at noon on Saturdays, so we had to leave before the Mamou Playboys finished their set. Charlie’s isn’t fancy; just a local corner store in a residential neighborhood. We bought a couple of links at the meat counter in the back and walked outside.&nbsp;<br><br>Between bites, we got talking to a guy loading up a couple of Yeti coolers with packages of frozen, vacuum-packed boudin. “I came over from Texas for Mardi Gras,” he said. “When I told folks I’d be in Mamou, I got buried with the orders for Charlie’s boudin. It’s the best.”&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It was damn good boudin, though right then, I only had a sample size of one. But he looked like he knew his boudin, so I went back in to buy 3 packages and a bag of ice to keep them cold.Another good call. Before my boudin hunt was done, we’d also hit <a href=\"https://www.beststopinscott.com/\">The Best Stop Supermarket</a> in Scott and <a href=\"https://www.billysboudin.com/\">Billy\'s Boudin &amp; Cracklins</a> back in Lafayette. Both were solid, but the Texan was right — Charlie’s was the best.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Next Stop - Pork Cracklins</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Fifteen minutes south of Mamou is Eunice. It\'s bigger than Mamou, so their festivities were more spread out — a bigger music stage at the bottom of the main street, flanked by strings of food trucks; up in the middle of the commercial strip, more food tents set up by a local charity group.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Irene went to check out some of the shops while I made for the food tent — specifically, the guy frying big cubes of pork in what looked like a barrel cut lengthways in half, rendering them down into pork cracklins. We talked while he stirred the pork in the bubbling fat with a long metal spatula. He’d been volunteering at this festival for 10, maybe 15 years. When that batch was done, I bought some — a paper bag of salty, hot cubes of fried pork fat, meat, and skin. Then I walked into the nearest bar and bought a cold beer to cut the fat; kind of a statin stand-in to give my cholesterol levels a fighting chance.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Heading Home</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We packed our parade throw haul next to the boudin cooler and headed northeast on I-10 toward Nashville — crossing the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atchafalaya_Basin_Bridge\">Atchafalaya Basin Bridge</a>, the third longest bridge in the US, carrying 18 miles of traffic over the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atchafalaya_Basin\">Atchafalaya Swamp</a>. Interesting for the first five minutes; then just flat sky and flat water that wasn’t. It gave me time to think back on this trip that I’d been planning for a couple of years. I got what I wanted from it -- three different ways of celebrating a very unique holiday.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Mobile and Fairhope felt genuinely local — manageably sized, not over-touristed. Maybe still carrying a bit of a chip on their shoulder for not getting their due as the oldest Mardi Gras in the country.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>New Orleans was New Orleans — the main event, the version that everyone has in their head when they think “Mardi Gras.” Seven years on, the parades didn’t feel as grand as I remembered them from pre-COVID times. But seeing that my favorite restaurants were still standing and still cranking out good food more than made up for it.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>And then there was Acadiana. Lafayette’s Mardi Gras parades felt a lot like Mobile’s. But experiencing Cajun culture in Lafayette and then in Mamou and Eunice gave us the most local version of Mardi Gras — music stages on small-town main streets, hot boudin from a corner market, pork cracklins in a paper bag. It felt more genuine, less produced.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I’m glad I waited until after retirement to do this trip. I was able to give this trip the time it needed to breathe — to spend enough time to appreciate each place’s celebrations on its own terms.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Gulf Coast Mardi Gras Road Trip Stop 3 — Lafayette &amp; Acadiana','','inherit','closed','closed','','4869-revision-v1','','','2026-04-14 09:56:19','2026-04-14 15:56:19','',4869,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4880',0,'revision','',0),
(4881,1,'2026-04-14 09:57:29','2026-04-14 15:57:29','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><em>This trip had been knocking around the back of my mind for a while. And for me, that’s a big piece of retirement travel — finally getting on with the travel I’ve thought about but never found the time to do. LIke this road trip to experience Mardi Gras in </em><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2026/02/25/gulf-coast-mardi-gras-road-trip-stop-1-mobile/\"><em>Mobile</em></a><em>, </em><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2026/03/10/gulf-coast-mardi-gras-road-trip-stop-2-new-orleans/\"><em>New Orleans</em></a><em>, and Cajun Country.</em><br></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4810,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Screenshot-2026-02-25-at-8.23.12-AM.png\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Screenshot-2026-02-25-at-8.23.12-AM-300x300.png\" alt=\"Google Map screenshot with a thick blue line defining a road trip\" class=\"wp-image-4810\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">The Gulf Coast Mardi Gras Road Trip Loop</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>My high school geography class should’ve prepared me for how flat everything is along the Gulf Coast, but it didn’t. On Thursday morning, driving from New Orleans to Lafayette along US 90, the land was flat and the sky was big. And driving the roads outside of Lafayette, I was struck by how much it reminded me of the rural Midwest — places like downstate Illinois and Indiana where, once you get off the interstates, you find long stretches of flat fields punctuated by stands of farm trees and the occasional small town. The accent is different but the landscape, when you\'ve pushed up from the coastal bayous, is a lot the same.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Driving through towns on US 90 rather than around them on I-10, it was clear how important the off-shore oil business is here. I didn\'t see any of the big oil names like Exxon or Chevron. Instead, it was their smaller suppliers — supply yards stacked with lengths of metal tubing, shops doing pump repairs, dockyards along the rivers that the US 90 bridges arch high over.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Tabasco Detour</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>A little over two hours into our drive, we took a quick detour to Avery Island to tour the Tabasco plant. It was nice — a quiet campus of buildings. We did the <a href=\"https://www.tabasco.com/visit-avery-island/tabasco-tour/\">self-guided tour</a>; we hadn’t planned far enough ahead for the guided tour. The standout was the barrel house, a rickhouse of pepper mash-filled barrels covered in salt. There was a definite pepper \"tang\" in the air.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4875,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"center\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image aligncenter size-large\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_8945-EDIT-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_8945-EDIT-1024x768.jpg\" alt=\"Long interior view of the Tabasco barrel warehouse on Avery Island, with rows of wooden barrels stretching into the distance under a metal roof\" class=\"wp-image-4875\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">The source of the pepper \"tang\" in the air</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>But if I read the placards correctly, most of their pepper growing and mashing now takes place at contract farms in Latin America and Africa. Compared to other small plant tours I’ve taken — whiskey distilleries, the Louisville Slugger factory — this one was more about displays explaining the sauce than showing it being made, save for the last buildings where mixing vats and bottling lines sat behind plexiglass.&nbsp; I wanted to see a bit more action. Maybe we would’ve gotten more out of the guided tour.&nbsp; The tasting bar at the Tabasco store, though, was worth the stop. We came away with a couple of bottles that we hadn’t seen in grocery stores back home.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Walking Around Lafayette</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Lafayette is a nice town. It has a walkable city center core with the requisite upscale coffee joints and small sundry shops. We walked past <a href=\"https://www.popspoboys.com/\">Pop’s Poboys</a>, looked back at the menu through the window, turned around, and walked in. We might have found a more “authentic” po-boy place, but Pop’s had an interesting menu -- the classics plus some new twists -- and it was there and we were hungry. It was a solid choice.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4876,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_8960-EDIT.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_8960-EDIT-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Sticker on a window reading “2022 Buy Leauxcal,” with smaller text saying “Festival supported by local businesses,” above a sign that reads “No Public Restrooms.”\" class=\"wp-image-4876\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Cajun \"Buy Local\" Campaign</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Lafayette leans hard into its Cajun heritage; its role as the main city of Acadiana. About 2½ miles from downtown, along Bayou Vermilion, is <a href=\"https://bayouvermiliondistrict.org/vermilionville/\">Vermilionville Historic Village</a>. It’s an outdoor “living history” museum with restored houses, costumed interpreters doing craft demonstrations, recreating what daily life looked like in this corner of Louisiana between the 1790’s and the 1880’s. It wasn’t crowded; we could take our time.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Walking through one of the houses, I was surprised to find an interpreter sitting quietly in the front room doing some quilting. We talked for about 10 minutes about Vermillionville, what brought her there (marriage to a local; she’s originally from Pennsylvania), and her quilting.&nbsp; I’m usually not one for Williamsburg-style reenactments, but I surprised myself by liking Vermillionville. Maybe because it was much more low-key than other “living history” places I’ve visited.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>More Parade Strategy</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We stayed in a bed-and-breakfast about a 5-minute walk from downtown — a big house and a collection of outbuildings that had originally been part of a plantation. Nice-sized room, solid breakfast, but most importantly, it was very conveniently located for parade watching — maybe 2½ blocks from the parade route and right near the start.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>That lined up with the parade strategy — don’t get stuck in the middle of the route. Position yourself either at the start (as we did in Mobile and Fairhope) or right at the end (as we did in New Orleans). The start gets you out before traffic locks up; works best when it\'s just one parade. The end works better when there are multiple krewes stepping off — when there’s a parade of parades.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4870,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_9360-EDIT-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_9360-EDIT-300x225.jpg\" alt=\"Brightly lit Mardi Gras float in Lafayette at night, with masked riders on two levels tossing throws to people reaching up from the street\" class=\"wp-image-4870\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Lafayette parade float riders launching their throws</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We caught two parades in Lafayette — the kick-off on Friday night and the <a href=\"https://www.kreweofbonaparte.org/\">Krewe of Bonaparte</a> on Saturday night. Bonaparte was definitely the better parade — longer, more interesting floats, more interesting throws. It was also our last parade of the trip, so we weren\'t aggressively going after throws. Most of what we caught came from reflexes and self-defense — putting an arm up to block our face only to have a string of beads wrap around it. We gave away everything we caught to the folks standing beside us. We didn’t need any more; we were already triaging the throws we brought with us from Mobile and New Orleans.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Driving Out to Cajun Country</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Saturday morning, we drove north out of Lafayette to catch the Mardi Gras festivals in Mamou and Eunice. It was about an hour drive to Mamou, mostly through flat fields punctuated by huge ponds, many big enough to have small, one-man shallow-draft paddle wheel boats working them. I guessed they were either rice fields or crawfish ponds. Irene fired up Google and found out it wasn’t an either/or. Farmers raise both in what is really more like a flooded field than a pond. The rice gives the crawfish shade and food, while the crawfish waste fertilizes the rice. Who knew? Reminded me to find a crawfish dinner before heading home.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We didn’t know exactly where in Mamou we were going, but it’s not that big of a town, so we pulled off the highway and parked on a residential sidestreet, and followed a parade of people, coolers, and camp chairs up to the couple of blocks of commercial district and the music stage thrown up across the main drag.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>On our right I saw Fred’s Lounge, a low-slung dive bar that’s supposed to be sorta Ground Zero for the Cajun music revival — at least that’s what the historic plaque bolted on the wall next to the front door says. We walked in, or at least tried to. It was jammed; we couldn’t move. There was a band somewhere in front of us and they sounded great.&nbsp; </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>On any other day, we would’ve stayed. But on this day, we had an alternative. We backed out, grabbed beers from a vendor stand across the street, and stood among the camp chairs to watch <a href=\"https://www.mamouplayboys.com/\">Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys</a> play the street stage in what, given their name, must be their home town. Great music; good weather; cold beer. We made the right call.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:video {\"id\":4878,\"align\":\"center\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-video aligncenter\"><video controls src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_9351.mov\" playsinline></video><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Watching Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys on the street stage in Mamou</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:video -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Hunting Boudin</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>On our first two stops — Mobile and New Orleans — Irene was on a king cake hunt; trying every slice of king cake she could find. But today it was my turn to lead and instead of hunting cake, I was hunting pork. Boudin to be specific.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Boudin is a pork and rice sausage. It’s Acadiana’s version of what a lot of cuisines do with the less glamorous parts of the pig. Hungary has hurka; Thailand has sai krok isan. All a way to use everything but the oink from a butchered pig.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>In Acadiana, boudin isn’t restaurant food. It is grocery store food; gas station food. You walk up to the meat counter and order a link. It comes out of the steamer hot and and you eat it standing at the counter or over the hood of your car in the parking lot, squeezing the meat out of the casing. Or eating it whole if they’ve cooked it right.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>My Boudin Trail research called out <a href=\"https://maps.app.goo.gl/dU9dssT3a4GZkm2s6\">Charlie\'s Meat Market &amp; Grocery</a> in Mamou as a top spot. But Charlie’s closes at noon on Saturdays, so we had to leave before the Mamou Playboys finished their set. Charlie’s isn’t fancy; just a local corner store in a residential neighborhood. We bought a couple of links at the meat counter in the back and walked outside.&nbsp;<br><br>Between bites, we got talking to a guy loading up a couple of Yeti coolers with packages of frozen, vacuum-packed boudin. “I came over from Texas for Mardi Gras,” he said. “When I told folks I’d be in Mamou, I got buried with the orders for Charlie’s boudin. It’s the best.”&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It was damn good boudin, though right then, I only had a sample size of one. But he looked like he knew his boudin, so I went back in to buy 3 packages and a bag of ice to keep them cold.Another good call. Before my boudin hunt was done, we’d also hit <a href=\"https://www.beststopinscott.com/\">The Best Stop Supermarket</a> in Scott and <a href=\"https://www.billysboudin.com/\">Billy\'s Boudin &amp; Cracklins</a> back in Lafayette. Both were solid, but the Texan was right — Charlie’s was the best.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Next Stop - Pork Cracklins</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Fifteen minutes south of Mamou is Eunice. It\'s bigger than Mamou, so their festivities were more spread out — a bigger music stage at the bottom of the main street, flanked by strings of food trucks; up in the middle of the commercial strip, more food tents set up by a local charity group.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Irene went to check out some of the shops while I made for the food tent — specifically, the guy frying big cubes of pork in what looked like a barrel cut lengthways in half, rendering them down into pork cracklins. We talked while he stirred the pork in the bubbling fat with a long metal spatula. He’d been volunteering at this festival for 10, maybe 15 years. When that batch was done, I bought some — a paper bag of salty, hot cubes of fried pork fat, meat, and skin. Then I walked into the nearest bar and bought a cold beer to cut the fat; kind of a statin stand-in to give my cholesterol levels a fighting chance.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Heading Home</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We packed our parade throw haul next to the boudin cooler and headed northeast on I-10 toward Nashville — crossing the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atchafalaya_Basin_Bridge\">Atchafalaya Basin Bridge</a>, the third longest bridge in the US, carrying 18 miles of traffic over the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atchafalaya_Basin\">Atchafalaya Swamp</a>. Interesting for the first five minutes; then just flat sky and flat water that wasn’t. It gave me time to think back on this trip that I’d been planning for a couple of years. I got what I wanted from it -- three different ways of celebrating a very unique holiday.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Mobile and Fairhope felt genuinely local — manageably sized, not over-touristed. Maybe still carrying a bit of a chip on their shoulder for not getting their due as the oldest Mardi Gras in the country.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>New Orleans was New Orleans — the main event, the version that everyone has in their head when they think “Mardi Gras.” Seven years on, the parades didn’t feel as grand as I remembered them from pre-COVID times. But seeing that my favorite restaurants were still standing and still cranking out good food more than made up for it.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>And then there was Acadiana. Lafayette’s Mardi Gras parades felt a lot like Mobile’s. But experiencing Cajun culture in Lafayette and then in Mamou and Eunice gave us the most local version of Mardi Gras — music stages on small-town main streets, hot boudin from a corner market, pork cracklins in a paper bag. It felt more genuine, less produced.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I’m glad I waited until after retirement to do this trip. I was able to give this trip the time it needed to breathe — to spend enough time to appreciate each place’s celebrations on its own terms.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Gulf Coast Mardi Gras Road Trip Stop 3 — Lafayette &amp; Acadiana','','inherit','closed','closed','','4869-revision-v1','','','2026-04-14 09:57:29','2026-04-14 15:57:29','',4869,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4881',0,'revision','',0),
(4882,1,'2026-04-14 09:58:07','2026-04-14 15:58:07','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><em>This trip had been knocking around the back of my mind for a while. And for me, that’s a big piece of retirement travel — finally getting on with the travel I’ve thought about but never found the time to do. LIke this road trip to experience Mardi Gras in </em><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2026/02/25/gulf-coast-mardi-gras-road-trip-stop-1-mobile/\"><em>Mobile</em></a><em>, </em><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2026/03/10/gulf-coast-mardi-gras-road-trip-stop-2-new-orleans/\"><em>New Orleans</em></a><em>, and Cajun Country.</em><br></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4810,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Screenshot-2026-02-25-at-8.23.12-AM.png\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Screenshot-2026-02-25-at-8.23.12-AM-300x300.png\" alt=\"Google Map screenshot with a thick blue line defining a road trip\" class=\"wp-image-4810\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">The Gulf Coast Mardi Gras Road Trip Loop</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>My high school geography class should’ve prepared me for how flat everything is along the Gulf Coast, but it didn’t. On Thursday morning, driving from New Orleans to Lafayette along US 90, the land was flat and the sky was big. And driving the roads outside of Lafayette, I was struck by how much it reminded me of the rural Midwest — places like downstate Illinois and Indiana where, once you get off the interstates, you find long stretches of flat fields punctuated by stands of farm trees and the occasional small town. The accent is different but the landscape, when you\'ve pushed up from the coastal bayous, is a lot the same.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Driving through towns on US 90 rather than around them on I-10, it was clear how important the off-shore oil business is here. I didn\'t see any of the big oil names like Exxon or Chevron. Instead, it was their smaller suppliers — supply yards stacked with lengths of metal tubing, shops doing pump repairs, dockyards along the rivers that the US 90 bridges arch high over.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Tabasco Detour</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>A little over two hours into our drive, we took a quick detour to Avery Island to tour the Tabasco plant. It was nice — a quiet campus of buildings. We did the <a href=\"https://www.tabasco.com/visit-avery-island/tabasco-tour/\">self-guided tour</a>; we hadn’t planned far enough ahead for the guided tour. The standout was the barrel house, a rickhouse of pepper mash-filled barrels covered in salt. There was a definite pepper \"tang\" in the air.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4875,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"center\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image aligncenter size-large\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_8945-EDIT-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_8945-EDIT-1024x768.jpg\" alt=\"Long interior view of the Tabasco barrel warehouse on Avery Island, with rows of wooden barrels stretching into the distance under a metal roof\" class=\"wp-image-4875\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">The source of the pepper \"tang\" in the air</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>But if I read the placards correctly, most of their pepper growing and mashing now takes place at contract farms in Latin America and Africa. Compared to other small plant tours I’ve taken — whiskey distilleries, the Louisville Slugger factory — this one was more about displays explaining the sauce than showing it being made, save for the last buildings where mixing vats and bottling lines sat behind plexiglass.&nbsp; I wanted to see a bit more action. Maybe we would’ve gotten more out of the guided tour.&nbsp; The tasting bar at the Tabasco store, though, was worth the stop. We came away with a couple of bottles that we hadn’t seen in grocery stores back home.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Walking Around Lafayette</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Lafayette is a nice town. It has a walkable city center core with the requisite upscale coffee joints and small sundry shops. We walked past <a href=\"https://www.popspoboys.com/\">Pop’s Poboys</a>, looked back at the menu through the window, turned around, and walked in. We might have found a more “authentic” po-boy place, but Pop’s had an interesting menu -- the classics plus some new twists -- and it was there and we were hungry. It was a solid choice.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4876,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_8960-EDIT.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_8960-EDIT-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Sticker on a window reading “2022 Buy Leauxcal,” with smaller text saying “Festival supported by local businesses,” above a sign that reads “No Public Restrooms.”\" class=\"wp-image-4876\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Cajun \"Buy Local\" Campaign</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Lafayette leans hard into its Cajun heritage; its role as the main city of Acadiana. About 2½ miles from downtown, along Bayou Vermilion, is <a href=\"https://bayouvermiliondistrict.org/vermilionville/\">Vermilionville Historic Village</a>. It’s an outdoor “living history” museum with restored houses, costumed interpreters doing craft demonstrations, recreating what daily life looked like in this corner of Louisiana between the 1790’s and the 1880’s. It wasn’t crowded; we could take our time.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Walking through one of the houses, I was surprised to find an interpreter sitting quietly in the front room doing some quilting. We talked for about 10 minutes about Vermillionville, what brought her there (marriage to a local; she’s originally from Pennsylvania), and her quilting.&nbsp; I’m usually not one for Williamsburg-style reenactments, but I surprised myself by liking Vermillionville. Maybe because it was much more low-key than other “living history” places I’ve visited.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>More Parade Strategy</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We stayed in a bed-and-breakfast about a 5-minute walk from downtown — a big house and a collection of outbuildings that had originally been part of a plantation. Nice-sized room, solid breakfast, but most importantly, it was very conveniently located for parade watching — maybe 2½ blocks from the parade route and right near the start.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>That lined up with the parade strategy — don’t get stuck in the middle of the route. Position yourself either at the start (as we did in Mobile and Fairhope) or right at the end (as we did in New Orleans). The start gets you out before traffic locks up; works best when it\'s just one parade. The end works better when there are multiple krewes stepping off — when there’s a parade of parades.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4870,\"sizeSlug\":\"full\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-full\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_9360-EDIT-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_9360-EDIT-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"Brightly lit Mardi Gras float in Lafayette at night, with masked riders on two levels tossing throws to people reaching up from the street\" class=\"wp-image-4870\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Lafayette parade float riders launching their throws</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We caught two parades in Lafayette — the kick-off on Friday night and the <a href=\"https://www.kreweofbonaparte.org/\">Krewe of Bonaparte</a> on Saturday night. Bonaparte was definitely the better parade — longer, more interesting floats, more interesting throws. It was also our last parade of the trip, so we weren\'t aggressively going after throws. Most of what we caught came from reflexes and self-defense — putting an arm up to block our face only to have a string of beads wrap around it. We gave away everything we caught to the folks standing beside us. We didn’t need any more; we were already triaging the throws we brought with us from Mobile and New Orleans.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Driving Out to Cajun Country</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Saturday morning, we drove north out of Lafayette to catch the Mardi Gras festivals in Mamou and Eunice. It was about an hour drive to Mamou, mostly through flat fields punctuated by huge ponds, many big enough to have small, one-man shallow-draft paddle wheel boats working them. I guessed they were either rice fields or crawfish ponds. Irene fired up Google and found out it wasn’t an either/or. Farmers raise both in what is really more like a flooded field than a pond. The rice gives the crawfish shade and food, while the crawfish waste fertilizes the rice. Who knew? Reminded me to find a crawfish dinner before heading home.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We didn’t know exactly where in Mamou we were going, but it’s not that big of a town, so we pulled off the highway and parked on a residential sidestreet, and followed a parade of people, coolers, and camp chairs up to the couple of blocks of commercial district and the music stage thrown up across the main drag.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>On our right I saw Fred’s Lounge, a low-slung dive bar that’s supposed to be sorta Ground Zero for the Cajun music revival — at least that’s what the historic plaque bolted on the wall next to the front door says. We walked in, or at least tried to. It was jammed; we couldn’t move. There was a band somewhere in front of us and they sounded great.&nbsp; </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>On any other day, we would’ve stayed. But on this day, we had an alternative. We backed out, grabbed beers from a vendor stand across the street, and stood among the camp chairs to watch <a href=\"https://www.mamouplayboys.com/\">Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys</a> play the street stage in what, given their name, must be their home town. Great music; good weather; cold beer. We made the right call.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:video {\"id\":4878,\"align\":\"center\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-video aligncenter\"><video controls src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_9351.mov\" playsinline></video><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Watching Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys on the street stage in Mamou</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:video -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Hunting Boudin</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>On our first two stops — Mobile and New Orleans — Irene was on a king cake hunt; trying every slice of king cake she could find. But today it was my turn to lead and instead of hunting cake, I was hunting pork. Boudin to be specific.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Boudin is a pork and rice sausage. It’s Acadiana’s version of what a lot of cuisines do with the less glamorous parts of the pig. Hungary has hurka; Thailand has sai krok isan. All a way to use everything but the oink from a butchered pig.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>In Acadiana, boudin isn’t restaurant food. It is grocery store food; gas station food. You walk up to the meat counter and order a link. It comes out of the steamer hot and and you eat it standing at the counter or over the hood of your car in the parking lot, squeezing the meat out of the casing. Or eating it whole if they’ve cooked it right.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>My Boudin Trail research called out <a href=\"https://maps.app.goo.gl/dU9dssT3a4GZkm2s6\">Charlie\'s Meat Market &amp; Grocery</a> in Mamou as a top spot. But Charlie’s closes at noon on Saturdays, so we had to leave before the Mamou Playboys finished their set. Charlie’s isn’t fancy; just a local corner store in a residential neighborhood. We bought a couple of links at the meat counter in the back and walked outside.&nbsp;<br><br>Between bites, we got talking to a guy loading up a couple of Yeti coolers with packages of frozen, vacuum-packed boudin. “I came over from Texas for Mardi Gras,” he said. “When I told folks I’d be in Mamou, I got buried with the orders for Charlie’s boudin. It’s the best.”&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It was damn good boudin, though right then, I only had a sample size of one. But he looked like he knew his boudin, so I went back in to buy 3 packages and a bag of ice to keep them cold.Another good call. Before my boudin hunt was done, we’d also hit <a href=\"https://www.beststopinscott.com/\">The Best Stop Supermarket</a> in Scott and <a href=\"https://www.billysboudin.com/\">Billy\'s Boudin &amp; Cracklins</a> back in Lafayette. Both were solid, but the Texan was right — Charlie’s was the best.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Next Stop - Pork Cracklins</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Fifteen minutes south of Mamou is Eunice. It\'s bigger than Mamou, so their festivities were more spread out — a bigger music stage at the bottom of the main street, flanked by strings of food trucks; up in the middle of the commercial strip, more food tents set up by a local charity group.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Irene went to check out some of the shops while I made for the food tent — specifically, the guy frying big cubes of pork in what looked like a barrel cut lengthways in half, rendering them down into pork cracklins. We talked while he stirred the pork in the bubbling fat with a long metal spatula. He’d been volunteering at this festival for 10, maybe 15 years. When that batch was done, I bought some — a paper bag of salty, hot cubes of fried pork fat, meat, and skin. Then I walked into the nearest bar and bought a cold beer to cut the fat; kind of a statin stand-in to give my cholesterol levels a fighting chance.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Heading Home</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We packed our parade throw haul next to the boudin cooler and headed northeast on I-10 toward Nashville — crossing the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atchafalaya_Basin_Bridge\">Atchafalaya Basin Bridge</a>, the third longest bridge in the US, carrying 18 miles of traffic over the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atchafalaya_Basin\">Atchafalaya Swamp</a>. Interesting for the first five minutes; then just flat sky and flat water that wasn’t. It gave me time to think back on this trip that I’d been planning for a couple of years. I got what I wanted from it -- three different ways of celebrating a very unique holiday.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Mobile and Fairhope felt genuinely local — manageably sized, not over-touristed. Maybe still carrying a bit of a chip on their shoulder for not getting their due as the oldest Mardi Gras in the country.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>New Orleans was New Orleans — the main event, the version that everyone has in their head when they think “Mardi Gras.” Seven years on, the parades didn’t feel as grand as I remembered them from pre-COVID times. But seeing that my favorite restaurants were still standing and still cranking out good food more than made up for it.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>And then there was Acadiana. Lafayette’s Mardi Gras parades felt a lot like Mobile’s. But experiencing Cajun culture in Lafayette and then in Mamou and Eunice gave us the most local version of Mardi Gras — music stages on small-town main streets, hot boudin from a corner market, pork cracklins in a paper bag. It felt more genuine, less produced.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I’m glad I waited until after retirement to do this trip. I was able to give this trip the time it needed to breathe — to spend enough time to appreciate each place’s celebrations on its own terms.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Gulf Coast Mardi Gras Road Trip Stop 3 — Lafayette &amp; Acadiana','','inherit','closed','closed','','4869-revision-v1','','','2026-04-14 09:58:07','2026-04-14 15:58:07','',4869,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4882',0,'revision','',0),
(4883,1,'2026-04-14 09:59:12','2026-04-14 15:59:12','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><em>This trip had been knocking around the back of my mind for a while. And for me, that’s a big piece of retirement travel — finally getting on with the travel I’ve thought about but never found the time to do. LIke this road trip to experience Mardi Gras in </em><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2026/02/25/gulf-coast-mardi-gras-road-trip-stop-1-mobile/\"><em>Mobile</em></a><em>, </em><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2026/03/10/gulf-coast-mardi-gras-road-trip-stop-2-new-orleans/\"><em>New Orleans</em></a><em>, and Cajun Country.</em><br></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4810,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Screenshot-2026-02-25-at-8.23.12-AM.png\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Screenshot-2026-02-25-at-8.23.12-AM-300x300.png\" alt=\"Google Map screenshot with a thick blue line defining a road trip\" class=\"wp-image-4810\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">The Gulf Coast Mardi Gras Road Trip Loop</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>My high school geography class should’ve prepared me for how flat everything is along the Gulf Coast, but it didn’t. On Thursday morning, driving from New Orleans to Lafayette along US 90, the land was flat and the sky was big. And driving the roads outside of Lafayette, I was struck by how much it reminded me of the rural Midwest — places like downstate Illinois and Indiana where, once you get off the interstates, you find long stretches of flat fields punctuated by stands of farm trees and the occasional small town. The accent is different but the landscape, when you\'ve pushed up from the coastal bayous, is a lot the same.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Driving through towns on US 90 rather than around them on I-10, it was clear how important the off-shore oil business is here. I didn\'t see any of the big oil names like Exxon or Chevron. Instead, it was their smaller suppliers — supply yards stacked with lengths of metal tubing, shops doing pump repairs, dockyards along the rivers that the US 90 bridges arch high over.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Tabasco Detour</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>A little over two hours into our drive, we took a quick detour to Avery Island to tour the Tabasco plant. It was nice — a quiet campus of buildings. We did the <a href=\"https://www.tabasco.com/visit-avery-island/tabasco-tour/\">self-guided tour</a>; we hadn’t planned far enough ahead for the guided tour. The standout was the barrel house, a rickhouse of pepper mash-filled barrels covered in salt. There was a definite pepper \"tang\" in the air.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4875,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"center\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image aligncenter size-large\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_8945-EDIT-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_8945-EDIT-1024x768.jpg\" alt=\"Long interior view of the Tabasco barrel warehouse on Avery Island, with rows of wooden barrels stretching into the distance under a metal roof\" class=\"wp-image-4875\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">The source of the pepper \"tang\" in the air</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>But if I read the placards correctly, most of their pepper growing and mashing now takes place at contract farms in Latin America and Africa. Compared to other small plant tours I’ve taken — whiskey distilleries, the Louisville Slugger factory — this one was more about displays explaining the sauce than showing it being made, save for the last buildings where mixing vats and bottling lines sat behind plexiglass.&nbsp; I wanted to see a bit more action. Maybe we would’ve gotten more out of the guided tour.&nbsp; The tasting bar at the Tabasco store, though, was worth the stop. We came away with a couple of bottles that we hadn’t seen in grocery stores back home.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Walking Around Lafayette</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Lafayette is a nice town. It has a walkable city center core with the requisite upscale coffee joints and small sundry shops. We walked past <a href=\"https://www.popspoboys.com/\">Pop’s Poboys</a>, looked back at the menu through the window, turned around, and walked in. We might have found a more “authentic” po-boy place, but Pop’s had an interesting menu -- the classics plus some new twists -- and it was there and we were hungry. It was a solid choice.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4876,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_8960-EDIT.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_8960-EDIT-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Sticker on a window reading “2022 Buy Leauxcal,” with smaller text saying “Festival supported by local businesses,” above a sign that reads “No Public Restrooms.”\" class=\"wp-image-4876\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Cajun \"Buy Local\" Campaign</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Lafayette leans hard into its Cajun heritage; its role as the main city of Acadiana. About 2½ miles from downtown, along Bayou Vermilion, is <a href=\"https://bayouvermiliondistrict.org/vermilionville/\">Vermilionville Historic Village</a>. It’s an outdoor “living history” museum with restored houses, costumed interpreters doing craft demonstrations, recreating what daily life looked like in this corner of Louisiana between the 1790’s and the 1880’s. It wasn’t crowded; we could take our time.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Walking through one of the houses, I was surprised to find an interpreter sitting quietly in the front room doing some quilting. We talked for about 10 minutes about Vermillionville, what brought her there (marriage to a local; she’s originally from Pennsylvania), and her quilting.&nbsp; I’m usually not one for Williamsburg-style reenactments, but I surprised myself by liking Vermillionville. Maybe because it was much more low-key than other “living history” places I’ve visited.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>More Parade Strategy</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We stayed in a bed-and-breakfast about a 5-minute walk from downtown — a big house and a collection of outbuildings that had originally been part of a plantation. Nice-sized room, solid breakfast, but most importantly, it was very conveniently located for parade watching — maybe 2½ blocks from the parade route and right near the start.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>That lined up with the parade strategy — don’t get stuck in the middle of the route. Position yourself either at the start (as we did in Mobile and Fairhope) or right at the end (as we did in New Orleans). The start gets you out before traffic locks up; works best when it\'s just one parade. The end works better when there are multiple krewes stepping off — when there’s a parade of parades.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4870,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"center\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image aligncenter size-large\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_9360-EDIT-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_9360-EDIT-1024x768.jpg\" alt=\"Brightly lit Mardi Gras float in Lafayette at night, with masked riders on two levels tossing throws to people reaching up from the street\" class=\"wp-image-4870\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Lafayette parade float riders launching their throws</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We caught two parades in Lafayette — the kick-off on Friday night and the <a href=\"https://www.kreweofbonaparte.org/\">Krewe of Bonaparte</a> on Saturday night. Bonaparte was definitely the better parade — longer, more interesting floats, more interesting throws. It was also our last parade of the trip, so we weren\'t aggressively going after throws. Most of what we caught came from reflexes and self-defense — putting an arm up to block our face only to have a string of beads wrap around it. We gave away everything we caught to the folks standing beside us. We didn’t need any more; we were already triaging the throws we brought with us from Mobile and New Orleans.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Driving Out to Cajun Country</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Saturday morning, we drove north out of Lafayette to catch the Mardi Gras festivals in Mamou and Eunice. It was about an hour drive to Mamou, mostly through flat fields punctuated by huge ponds, many big enough to have small, one-man shallow-draft paddle wheel boats working them. I guessed they were either rice fields or crawfish ponds. Irene fired up Google and found out it wasn’t an either/or. Farmers raise both in what is really more like a flooded field than a pond. The rice gives the crawfish shade and food, while the crawfish waste fertilizes the rice. Who knew? Reminded me to find a crawfish dinner before heading home.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We didn’t know exactly where in Mamou we were going, but it’s not that big of a town, so we pulled off the highway and parked on a residential sidestreet, and followed a parade of people, coolers, and camp chairs up to the couple of blocks of commercial district and the music stage thrown up across the main drag.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>On our right I saw Fred’s Lounge, a low-slung dive bar that’s supposed to be sorta Ground Zero for the Cajun music revival — at least that’s what the historic plaque bolted on the wall next to the front door says. We walked in, or at least tried to. It was jammed; we couldn’t move. There was a band somewhere in front of us and they sounded great.&nbsp; </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>On any other day, we would’ve stayed. But on this day, we had an alternative. We backed out, grabbed beers from a vendor stand across the street, and stood among the camp chairs to watch <a href=\"https://www.mamouplayboys.com/\">Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys</a> play the street stage in what, given their name, must be their home town. Great music; good weather; cold beer. We made the right call.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:video {\"id\":4878,\"align\":\"center\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-video aligncenter\"><video controls src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_9351.mov\" playsinline></video><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Watching Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys on the street stage in Mamou</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:video -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Hunting Boudin</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>On our first two stops — Mobile and New Orleans — Irene was on a king cake hunt; trying every slice of king cake she could find. But today it was my turn to lead and instead of hunting cake, I was hunting pork. Boudin to be specific.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Boudin is a pork and rice sausage. It’s Acadiana’s version of what a lot of cuisines do with the less glamorous parts of the pig. Hungary has hurka; Thailand has sai krok isan. All a way to use everything but the oink from a butchered pig.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>In Acadiana, boudin isn’t restaurant food. It is grocery store food; gas station food. You walk up to the meat counter and order a link. It comes out of the steamer hot and and you eat it standing at the counter or over the hood of your car in the parking lot, squeezing the meat out of the casing. Or eating it whole if they’ve cooked it right.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>My Boudin Trail research called out <a href=\"https://maps.app.goo.gl/dU9dssT3a4GZkm2s6\">Charlie\'s Meat Market &amp; Grocery</a> in Mamou as a top spot. But Charlie’s closes at noon on Saturdays, so we had to leave before the Mamou Playboys finished their set. Charlie’s isn’t fancy; just a local corner store in a residential neighborhood. We bought a couple of links at the meat counter in the back and walked outside.&nbsp;<br><br>Between bites, we got talking to a guy loading up a couple of Yeti coolers with packages of frozen, vacuum-packed boudin. “I came over from Texas for Mardi Gras,” he said. “When I told folks I’d be in Mamou, I got buried with the orders for Charlie’s boudin. It’s the best.”&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It was damn good boudin, though right then, I only had a sample size of one. But he looked like he knew his boudin, so I went back in to buy 3 packages and a bag of ice to keep them cold.Another good call. Before my boudin hunt was done, we’d also hit <a href=\"https://www.beststopinscott.com/\">The Best Stop Supermarket</a> in Scott and <a href=\"https://www.billysboudin.com/\">Billy\'s Boudin &amp; Cracklins</a> back in Lafayette. Both were solid, but the Texan was right — Charlie’s was the best.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Next Stop - Pork Cracklins</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Fifteen minutes south of Mamou is Eunice. It\'s bigger than Mamou, so their festivities were more spread out — a bigger music stage at the bottom of the main street, flanked by strings of food trucks; up in the middle of the commercial strip, more food tents set up by a local charity group.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Irene went to check out some of the shops while I made for the food tent — specifically, the guy frying big cubes of pork in what looked like a barrel cut lengthways in half, rendering them down into pork cracklins. We talked while he stirred the pork in the bubbling fat with a long metal spatula. He’d been volunteering at this festival for 10, maybe 15 years. When that batch was done, I bought some — a paper bag of salty, hot cubes of fried pork fat, meat, and skin. Then I walked into the nearest bar and bought a cold beer to cut the fat; kind of a statin stand-in to give my cholesterol levels a fighting chance.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Heading Home</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We packed our parade throw haul next to the boudin cooler and headed northeast on I-10 toward Nashville — crossing the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atchafalaya_Basin_Bridge\">Atchafalaya Basin Bridge</a>, the third longest bridge in the US, carrying 18 miles of traffic over the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atchafalaya_Basin\">Atchafalaya Swamp</a>. Interesting for the first five minutes; then just flat sky and flat water that wasn’t. It gave me time to think back on this trip that I’d been planning for a couple of years. I got what I wanted from it -- three different ways of celebrating a very unique holiday.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Mobile and Fairhope felt genuinely local — manageably sized, not over-touristed. Maybe still carrying a bit of a chip on their shoulder for not getting their due as the oldest Mardi Gras in the country.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>New Orleans was New Orleans — the main event, the version that everyone has in their head when they think “Mardi Gras.” Seven years on, the parades didn’t feel as grand as I remembered them from pre-COVID times. But seeing that my favorite restaurants were still standing and still cranking out good food more than made up for it.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>And then there was Acadiana. Lafayette’s Mardi Gras parades felt a lot like Mobile’s. But experiencing Cajun culture in Lafayette and then in Mamou and Eunice gave us the most local version of Mardi Gras — music stages on small-town main streets, hot boudin from a corner market, pork cracklins in a paper bag. It felt more genuine, less produced.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I’m glad I waited until after retirement to do this trip. I was able to give this trip the time it needed to breathe — to spend enough time to appreciate each place’s celebrations on its own terms.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Gulf Coast Mardi Gras Road Trip Stop 3 — Lafayette &amp; Acadiana','','inherit','closed','closed','','4869-revision-v1','','','2026-04-14 09:59:12','2026-04-14 15:59:12','',4869,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4883',0,'revision','',0),
(4884,1,'2026-04-14 09:59:35','2026-04-14 15:59:35','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><em>This trip had been knocking around the back of my mind for a while. And for me, that’s a big piece of retirement travel — finally getting on with the travel I’ve thought about but never found the time to do. LIke this road trip to experience Mardi Gras in </em><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2026/02/25/gulf-coast-mardi-gras-road-trip-stop-1-mobile/\"><em>Mobile</em></a><em>, </em><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2026/03/10/gulf-coast-mardi-gras-road-trip-stop-2-new-orleans/\"><em>New Orleans</em></a><em>, and Cajun Country.</em><br></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4810,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Screenshot-2026-02-25-at-8.23.12-AM.png\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Screenshot-2026-02-25-at-8.23.12-AM-300x300.png\" alt=\"Google Map screenshot with a thick blue line defining a road trip\" class=\"wp-image-4810\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">The Gulf Coast Mardi Gras Road Trip Loop</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>My high school geography class should’ve prepared me for how flat everything is along the Gulf Coast, but it didn’t. On Thursday morning, driving from New Orleans to Lafayette along US 90, the land was flat and the sky was big. And driving the roads outside of Lafayette, I was struck by how much it reminded me of the rural Midwest — places like downstate Illinois and Indiana where, once you get off the interstates, you find long stretches of flat fields punctuated by stands of farm trees and the occasional small town. The accent is different but the landscape, when you\'ve pushed up from the coastal bayous, is a lot the same.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Driving through towns on US 90 rather than around them on I-10, it was clear how important the off-shore oil business is here. I didn\'t see any of the big oil names like Exxon or Chevron. Instead, it was their smaller suppliers — supply yards stacked with lengths of metal tubing, shops doing pump repairs, dockyards along the rivers that the US 90 bridges arch high over.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Tabasco Detour</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>A little over two hours into our drive, we took a quick detour to Avery Island to tour the Tabasco plant. It was nice — a quiet campus of buildings. We did the <a href=\"https://www.tabasco.com/visit-avery-island/tabasco-tour/\">self-guided tour</a>; we hadn’t planned far enough ahead for the guided tour. The standout was the barrel house, a rickhouse of pepper mash-filled barrels covered in salt. There was a definite pepper \"tang\" in the air.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4875,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"center\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image aligncenter size-large\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_8945-EDIT-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_8945-EDIT-1024x768.jpg\" alt=\"Long interior view of the Tabasco barrel warehouse on Avery Island, with rows of wooden barrels stretching into the distance under a metal roof\" class=\"wp-image-4875\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">The source of the pepper \"tang\" in the air</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>But if I read the placards correctly, most of their pepper growing and mashing now takes place at contract farms in Latin America and Africa. Compared to other small plant tours I’ve taken — whiskey distilleries, the Louisville Slugger factory — this one was more about displays explaining the sauce than showing it being made, save for the last buildings where mixing vats and bottling lines sat behind plexiglass.&nbsp; I wanted to see a bit more action. Maybe we would’ve gotten more out of the guided tour.&nbsp; The tasting bar at the Tabasco store, though, was worth the stop. We came away with a couple of bottles that we hadn’t seen in grocery stores back home.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Walking Around Lafayette</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Lafayette is a nice town. It has a walkable city center core with the requisite upscale coffee joints and small sundry shops. We walked past <a href=\"https://www.popspoboys.com/\">Pop’s Poboys</a>, looked back at the menu through the window, turned around, and walked in. We might have found a more “authentic” po-boy place, but Pop’s had an interesting menu -- the classics plus some new twists -- and it was there and we were hungry. It was a solid choice.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4876,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_8960-EDIT.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_8960-EDIT-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Sticker on a window reading “2022 Buy Leauxcal,” with smaller text saying “Festival supported by local businesses,” above a sign that reads “No Public Restrooms.”\" class=\"wp-image-4876\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Cajun \"Buy Local\" Campaign</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Lafayette leans hard into its Cajun heritage; its role as the main city of Acadiana. About 2½ miles from downtown, along Bayou Vermilion, is <a href=\"https://bayouvermiliondistrict.org/vermilionville/\">Vermilionville Historic Village</a>. It’s an outdoor “living history” museum with restored houses, costumed interpreters doing craft demonstrations, recreating what daily life looked like in this corner of Louisiana between the 1790’s and the 1880’s. It wasn’t crowded; we could take our time.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Walking through one of the houses, I was surprised to find an interpreter sitting quietly in the front room doing some quilting. We talked for about 10 minutes about Vermillionville, what brought her there (marriage to a local; she’s originally from Pennsylvania), and her quilting.&nbsp; I’m usually not one for Williamsburg-style reenactments, but I surprised myself by liking Vermillionville. Maybe because it was much more low-key than other “living history” places I’ve visited.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>More Parade Strategy</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We stayed in a bed-and-breakfast about a 5-minute walk from downtown — a big house and a collection of outbuildings that had originally been part of a plantation. Nice-sized room, solid breakfast, but most importantly, it was very conveniently located for parade watching — maybe 2½ blocks from the parade route and right near the start.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>That lined up with the parade strategy — don’t get stuck in the middle of the route. Position yourself either at the start (as we did in Mobile and Fairhope) or right at the end (as we did in New Orleans). The start gets you out before traffic locks up; works best when it\'s just one parade. The end works better when there are multiple krewes stepping off — when there’s a parade of parades.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4870,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"center\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image aligncenter size-large\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_9360-EDIT-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_9360-EDIT-1024x768.jpg\" alt=\"Brightly lit Mardi Gras float in Lafayette at night, with masked riders on two levels tossing throws to people reaching up from the street\" class=\"wp-image-4870\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Lafayette parade float riders launching their throws</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We caught two parades in Lafayette — the kick-off on Friday night and the <a href=\"https://www.kreweofbonaparte.org/\">Krewe of Bonaparte</a> on Saturday night. Bonaparte was definitely the better parade — longer, more interesting floats, more interesting throws. It was also our last parade of the trip, so we weren\'t aggressively going after throws. Most of what we caught came from reflexes and self-defense — putting an arm up to block our face only to have a string of beads wrap around it. We gave away everything we caught to the folks standing beside us. We didn’t need any more; we were already triaging the throws we brought with us from Mobile and New Orleans.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Driving Out to Cajun Country</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Saturday morning, we drove north out of Lafayette to catch the Mardi Gras festivals in Mamou and Eunice. It was about an hour drive to Mamou, mostly through flat fields punctuated by huge ponds, many big enough to have small, one-man shallow-draft paddle wheel boats working them. I guessed they were either rice fields or crawfish ponds. Irene fired up Google and found out it wasn’t an either/or. Farmers raise both in what is really more like a flooded field than a pond. The rice gives the crawfish shade and food, while the crawfish waste fertilizes the rice. Who knew? Reminded me to find a crawfish dinner before heading home.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We didn’t know exactly where in Mamou we were going, but it’s not that big of a town, so we pulled off the highway and parked on a residential sidestreet, and followed a parade of people, coolers, and camp chairs up to the couple of blocks of commercial district and the music stage thrown up across the main drag.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>On our right I saw Fred’s Lounge, a low-slung dive bar that’s supposed to be sorta Ground Zero for the Cajun music revival — at least that’s what the historic plaque bolted on the wall next to the front door says. We walked in, or at least tried to. It was jammed; we couldn’t move. There was a band somewhere in front of us and they sounded great.&nbsp; </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>On any other day, we would’ve stayed. But on this day, we had an alternative. We backed out, grabbed beers from a vendor stand across the street, and stood among the camp chairs to watch <a href=\"https://www.mamouplayboys.com/\">Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys</a> play the street stage in what, given their name, must be their home town. Great music; good weather; cold beer. We made the right call.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:video {\"id\":4878,\"align\":\"center\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-video aligncenter\"><video controls src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_9351.mov\" playsinline></video><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Watching Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys on the street stage in Mamou</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:video -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Hunting Boudin</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>On our first two stops — Mobile and New Orleans — Irene was on a king cake hunt; trying every slice of king cake she could find. But today it was my turn to lead and instead of hunting cake, I was hunting pork. Boudin to be specific.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Boudin is a pork and rice sausage. It’s Acadiana’s version of what a lot of cuisines do with the less glamorous parts of the pig. Hungary has hurka; Thailand has sai krok isan. All a way to use everything but the oink from a butchered pig.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>In Acadiana, boudin isn’t restaurant food. It is grocery store food; gas station food. You walk up to the meat counter and order a link. It comes out of the steamer hot and and you eat it standing at the counter or over the hood of your car in the parking lot, squeezing the meat out of the casing. Or eating it whole if they’ve cooked it right.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>My Boudin Trail research called out <a href=\"https://maps.app.goo.gl/dU9dssT3a4GZkm2s6\">Charlie\'s Meat Market &amp; Grocery</a> in Mamou as a top spot. But Charlie’s closes at noon on Saturdays, so we had to leave before the Mamou Playboys finished their set. Charlie’s isn’t fancy; just a local corner store in a residential neighborhood. We bought a couple of links at the meat counter in the back and walked outside. <br><br>Between bites, we got talking to a guy loading up a couple of Yeti coolers with packages of frozen, vacuum-packed boudin. “I came over from Texas for Mardi Gras,” he said. “When I told folks I’d be in Mamou, I got buried with the orders for Charlie’s boudin. It’s the best.” </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It was damn good boudin, though right then, I only had a sample size of one. But he looked like he knew his boudin, so I went back in to buy 3 packages and a bag of ice to keep them cold.Another good call. Before my boudin hunt was done, we’d also hit <a href=\"https://www.beststopinscott.com/\">The Best Stop Supermarket</a> in Scott and <a href=\"https://www.billysboudin.com/\">Billy\'s Boudin &amp; Cracklins</a> back in Lafayette. Both were solid, but the Texan was right — Charlie’s was the best.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Next Stop - Pork Cracklins</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Fifteen minutes south of Mamou is Eunice. It\'s bigger than Mamou, so their festivities were more spread out — a bigger music stage at the bottom of the main street, flanked by strings of food trucks; up in the middle of the commercial strip, more food tents set up by a local charity group.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Irene went to check out some of the shops while I made for the food tent — specifically, the guy frying big cubes of pork in what looked like a barrel cut lengthways in half, rendering them down into pork cracklins. We talked while he stirred the pork in the bubbling fat with a long metal spatula. He’d been volunteering at this festival for 10, maybe 15 years. When that batch was done, I bought some — a paper bag of salty, hot cubes of fried pork fat, meat, and skin. Then I walked into the nearest bar and bought a cold beer to cut the fat; kind of a statin stand-in to give my cholesterol levels a fighting chance.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Heading Home</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We packed our parade throw haul next to the boudin cooler and headed northeast on I-10 toward Nashville — crossing the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atchafalaya_Basin_Bridge\">Atchafalaya Basin Bridge</a>, the third longest bridge in the US, carrying 18 miles of traffic over the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atchafalaya_Basin\">Atchafalaya Swamp</a>. Interesting for the first five minutes; then just flat sky and flat water that wasn’t. It gave me time to think back on this trip that I’d been planning for a couple of years. I got what I wanted from it -- three different ways of celebrating a very unique holiday.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Mobile and Fairhope felt genuinely local — manageably sized, not over-touristed. Maybe still carrying a bit of a chip on their shoulder for not getting their due as the oldest Mardi Gras in the country.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>New Orleans was New Orleans — the main event, the version that everyone has in their head when they think “Mardi Gras.” Seven years on, the parades didn’t feel as grand as I remembered them from pre-COVID times. But seeing that my favorite restaurants were still standing and still cranking out good food more than made up for it.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>And then there was Acadiana. Lafayette’s Mardi Gras parades felt a lot like Mobile’s. But experiencing Cajun culture in Lafayette and then in Mamou and Eunice gave us the most local version of Mardi Gras — music stages on small-town main streets, hot boudin from a corner market, pork cracklins in a paper bag. It felt more genuine, less produced.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I’m glad I waited until after retirement to do this trip. I was able to give this trip the time it needed to breathe — to spend enough time to appreciate each place’s celebrations on its own terms.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Gulf Coast Mardi Gras Road Trip Stop 3 — Lafayette &amp; Acadiana','','inherit','closed','closed','','4869-revision-v1','','','2026-04-14 09:59:35','2026-04-14 15:59:35','',4869,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4884',0,'revision','',0),
(4885,1,'2026-04-14 10:02:09','2026-04-14 16:02:09','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><em>This trip had been knocking around the back of my mind for a while. And for me, that’s a big piece of retirement travel — finally getting on with the travel I’ve thought about but never found the time to do. LIke this road trip to experience Mardi Gras in </em><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2026/02/25/gulf-coast-mardi-gras-road-trip-stop-1-mobile/\"><em>Mobile</em></a><em>, </em><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2026/03/10/gulf-coast-mardi-gras-road-trip-stop-2-new-orleans/\"><em>New Orleans</em></a><em>, and Cajun Country.</em><br></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4810,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Screenshot-2026-02-25-at-8.23.12-AM.png\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Screenshot-2026-02-25-at-8.23.12-AM-300x300.png\" alt=\"Google Map screenshot with a thick blue line defining a road trip\" class=\"wp-image-4810\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">The Gulf Coast Mardi Gras Road Trip Loop</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>My high school geography class should’ve prepared me for how flat everything is along the Gulf Coast, but it didn’t. On Thursday morning, driving from New Orleans to Lafayette along US 90, the land was flat and the sky was big. And driving the roads outside of Lafayette, I was struck by how much it reminded me of the rural Midwest — places like downstate Illinois and Indiana where, once you get off the interstates, you find long stretches of flat fields punctuated by stands of farm trees and the occasional small town. The accent is different but the landscape, when you\'ve pushed up from the coastal bayous, is a lot the same.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Driving through towns on US 90 rather than around them on I-10, it was clear how important the off-shore oil business is here. I didn\'t see any of the big oil names like Exxon or Chevron. Instead, it was their smaller suppliers — supply yards stacked with lengths of metal tubing, shops doing pump repairs, dockyards along the rivers that the US 90 bridges arch high over.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Tabasco Detour</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>A little over two hours into our drive, we took a quick detour to Avery Island to tour the Tabasco plant. It was nice — a quiet campus of buildings. We did the <a href=\"https://www.tabasco.com/visit-avery-island/tabasco-tour/\">self-guided tour</a>; we hadn’t planned far enough ahead for the guided tour. The standout was the barrel house, a rickhouse of pepper mash-filled barrels covered in salt. There was a definite pepper \"tang\" in the air.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4875,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"center\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image aligncenter size-large\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_8945-EDIT-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_8945-EDIT-1024x768.jpg\" alt=\"Long interior view of the Tabasco barrel warehouse on Avery Island, with rows of wooden barrels stretching into the distance under a metal roof\" class=\"wp-image-4875\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">The source of the pepper \"tang\" in the air</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>But if I read the placards correctly, most of their pepper growing and mashing now takes place at contract farms in Latin America and Africa. Compared to other small plant tours I’ve taken — whiskey distilleries, the Louisville Slugger factory — this one was more about displays explaining the sauce than showing it being made, save for the last buildings where mixing vats and bottling lines sat behind plexiglass.&nbsp; I wanted to see a bit more action. Maybe we would’ve gotten more out of the guided tour.&nbsp; The tasting bar at the Tabasco store, though, was worth the stop. We came away with a couple of bottles that we hadn’t seen in grocery stores back home.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Walking Around Lafayette</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Lafayette is a nice town. It has a walkable city center core with the requisite upscale coffee joints and small sundry shops. We walked past <a href=\"https://www.popspoboys.com/\">Pop’s Poboys</a>, looked back at the menu through the window, turned around, and walked in. We might have found a more “authentic” po-boy place, but Pop’s had an interesting menu -- the classics plus some new twists -- and it was there and we were hungry. It was a solid choice.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4876,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_8960-EDIT.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_8960-EDIT-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Sticker on a window reading “2022 Buy Leauxcal,” with smaller text saying “Festival supported by local businesses,” above a sign that reads “No Public Restrooms.”\" class=\"wp-image-4876\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Cajun \"Buy Local\" Campaign</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Lafayette leans hard into its Cajun heritage; its role as the main city of Acadiana. About 2½ miles from downtown, along Bayou Vermilion, is <a href=\"https://bayouvermiliondistrict.org/vermilionville/\">Vermilionville Historic Village</a>. It’s an outdoor “living history” museum with restored houses, costumed interpreters doing craft demonstrations, recreating what daily life looked like in this corner of Louisiana between the 1790’s and the 1880’s. It wasn’t crowded; we could take our time.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Walking through one of the houses, I was surprised to find an interpreter sitting quietly in the front room doing some quilting. We talked for about 10 minutes about Vermillionville, what brought her there (marriage to a local; she’s originally from Pennsylvania), and her quilting.&nbsp; I’m usually not one for Williamsburg-style reenactments, but I surprised myself by liking Vermillionville. Maybe because it was much more low-key than other “living history” places I’ve visited.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>More Parade Strategy</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We stayed in a bed-and-breakfast about a 5-minute walk from downtown — a big house and a collection of outbuildings that had originally been part of a plantation. Nice-sized room, solid breakfast, but most importantly, it was very conveniently located for parade watching — maybe 2½ blocks from the parade route and right near the start.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>That lined up with the parade strategy — don’t get stuck in the middle of the route. Position yourself either at the start (as we did in Mobile and Fairhope) or right at the end (as we did in New Orleans). The start gets you out before traffic locks up; works best when it\'s just one parade. The end works better when there are multiple krewes stepping off — when there’s a parade of parades.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4870,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"center\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image aligncenter size-large\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_9360-EDIT-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_9360-EDIT-1024x768.jpg\" alt=\"Brightly lit Mardi Gras float in Lafayette at night, with masked riders on two levels tossing throws to people reaching up from the street\" class=\"wp-image-4870\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Lafayette parade float riders launching their throws</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We caught two parades in Lafayette — the kick-off on Friday night and the <a href=\"https://www.kreweofbonaparte.org/\">Krewe of Bonaparte</a> on Saturday night. Bonaparte was definitely the better parade — longer, more interesting floats, more interesting throws. It was also our last parade of the trip, so we weren\'t aggressively going after throws. Most of what we caught came from reflexes and self-defense — putting an arm up to block our face only to have a string of beads wrap around it. We gave away everything we caught to the folks standing beside us. We didn’t need any more; we were already triaging the throws we brought with us from Mobile and New Orleans.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Driving Out to Cajun Country</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Saturday morning, we drove north out of Lafayette to catch the Mardi Gras festivals in Mamou and Eunice. It was about an hour drive to Mamou, mostly through flat fields punctuated by huge ponds, many big enough to have small, one-man shallow-draft paddle wheel boats working them. I guessed they were either rice fields or crawfish ponds. Irene fired up Google and found out it wasn’t an either/or. Farmers raise both in what is really more like a flooded field than a pond. The rice gives the crawfish shade and food, while the crawfish waste fertilizes the rice. Who knew? Reminded me to find a crawfish dinner before heading home.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We didn’t know exactly where in Mamou we were going, but it’s not that big of a town, so we pulled off the highway and parked on a residential sidestreet, and followed a parade of people, coolers, and camp chairs up to the couple of blocks of commercial district and the music stage thrown up across the main drag.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>On our right I saw Fred’s Lounge, a low-slung dive bar that’s supposed to be sorta Ground Zero for the Cajun music revival — at least that’s what the historic plaque bolted on the wall next to the front door says. We walked in, or at least tried to. It was jammed; we couldn’t move. There was a band somewhere in front of us and they sounded great.&nbsp; </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>On any other day, we would’ve stayed. But on this day, we had an alternative. We backed out, grabbed beers from a vendor stand across the street, and stood among the camp chairs to watch <a href=\"https://www.mamouplayboys.com/\">Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys</a> play the street stage in what, given their name, must be their home town. Great music; good weather; cold beer. We made the right call.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:video {\"id\":4878,\"align\":\"center\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-video aligncenter\"><video controls src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_9351.mov\" playsinline></video><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Watching Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys on the street stage in Mamou</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:video -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Hunting Boudin</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>On our first two stops — Mobile and New Orleans — Irene was on a king cake hunt; trying every slice of king cake she could find. But today it was my turn to lead and instead of hunting cake, I was hunting pork. Boudin to be specific.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Boudin is a pork and rice sausage. It’s Acadiana’s version of what a lot of cuisines do with the less glamorous parts of the pig. Hungary has hurka; Thailand has sai krok isan. All a way to use everything but the oink from a butchered pig.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>In Acadiana, boudin isn’t restaurant food. It is grocery store food; gas station food. You walk up to the meat counter and order a link. It comes out of the steamer hot and and you eat it standing at the counter or over the hood of your car in the parking lot, squeezing the meat out of the casing. Or eating it whole if they’ve cooked it right.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:group {\"layout\":{\"type\":\"flex\",\"flexWrap\":\"nowrap\"},\"hideFromFeed\":true} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-group\"><!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>My Boudin Trail research called out <a href=\"https://maps.app.goo.gl/dU9dssT3a4GZkm2s6\">Charlie\'s Meat Market &amp; Grocery</a> in Mamou as a top spot. But Charlie’s closes at noon on Saturdays, so we had to leave before the Mamou Playboys finished their set. Charlie’s isn’t fancy; just a local corner store in a residential neighborhood. We bought a couple of links at the meat counter in the back and walked outside. <br><br>Between bites, we got talking to a guy loading up a couple of Yeti coolers with packages of frozen, vacuum-packed boudin. “I came over from Texas for Mardi Gras,” he said. “When I told folks I’d be in Mamou, I got buried with the orders for Charlie’s boudin. It’s the best.” </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph --></div>\n<!-- /wp:group -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It was damn good boudin, though right then, I only had a sample size of one. But he looked like he knew his boudin, so I went back in to buy 3 packages and a bag of ice to keep them cold.Another good call. Before my boudin hunt was done, we’d also hit <a href=\"https://www.beststopinscott.com/\">The Best Stop Supermarket</a> in Scott and <a href=\"https://www.billysboudin.com/\">Billy\'s Boudin &amp; Cracklins</a> back in Lafayette. Both were solid, but the Texan was right — Charlie’s was the best.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Next Stop - Pork Cracklins</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Fifteen minutes south of Mamou is Eunice. It\'s bigger than Mamou, so their festivities were more spread out — a bigger music stage at the bottom of the main street, flanked by strings of food trucks; up in the middle of the commercial strip, more food tents set up by a local charity group.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Irene went to check out some of the shops while I made for the food tent — specifically, the guy frying big cubes of pork in what looked like a barrel cut lengthways in half, rendering them down into pork cracklins. We talked while he stirred the pork in the bubbling fat with a long metal spatula. He’d been volunteering at this festival for 10, maybe 15 years. When that batch was done, I bought some — a paper bag of salty, hot cubes of fried pork fat, meat, and skin. Then I walked into the nearest bar and bought a cold beer to cut the fat; kind of a statin stand-in to give my cholesterol levels a fighting chance.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Heading Home</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We packed our parade throw haul next to the boudin cooler and headed northeast on I-10 toward Nashville — crossing the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atchafalaya_Basin_Bridge\">Atchafalaya Basin Bridge</a>, the third longest bridge in the US, carrying 18 miles of traffic over the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atchafalaya_Basin\">Atchafalaya Swamp</a>. Interesting for the first five minutes; then just flat sky and flat water that wasn’t. It gave me time to think back on this trip that I’d been planning for a couple of years. I got what I wanted from it -- three different ways of celebrating a very unique holiday.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Mobile and Fairhope felt genuinely local — manageably sized, not over-touristed. Maybe still carrying a bit of a chip on their shoulder for not getting their due as the oldest Mardi Gras in the country.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>New Orleans was New Orleans — the main event, the version that everyone has in their head when they think “Mardi Gras.” Seven years on, the parades didn’t feel as grand as I remembered them from pre-COVID times. But seeing that my favorite restaurants were still standing and still cranking out good food more than made up for it.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>And then there was Acadiana. Lafayette’s Mardi Gras parades felt a lot like Mobile’s. But experiencing Cajun culture in Lafayette and then in Mamou and Eunice gave us the most local version of Mardi Gras — music stages on small-town main streets, hot boudin from a corner market, pork cracklins in a paper bag. It felt more genuine, less produced.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I’m glad I waited until after retirement to do this trip. I was able to give this trip the time it needed to breathe — to spend enough time to appreciate each place’s celebrations on its own terms.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Gulf Coast Mardi Gras Road Trip Stop 3 — Lafayette &amp; Acadiana','','inherit','closed','closed','','4869-revision-v1','','','2026-04-14 10:02:09','2026-04-14 16:02:09','',4869,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4885',0,'revision','',0),
(4886,1,'2026-04-14 10:09:20','2026-04-14 16:09:20','','IMG_8964','Frying Up Some Chunks of Pork','inherit','open','closed','','img_8964','','','2026-04-14 10:09:39','2026-04-14 16:09:39','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_8964.mov',0,'attachment','video/quicktime',0),
(4887,1,'2026-04-14 10:18:04','2026-04-14 16:18:04','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><em>This trip had been knocking around the back of my mind for a while. And for me, that’s a big piece of retirement travel — finally getting on with the travel I’ve thought about but never found the time to do. LIke this road trip to experience Mardi Gras in </em><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2026/02/25/gulf-coast-mardi-gras-road-trip-stop-1-mobile/\"><em>Mobile</em></a><em>, </em><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2026/03/10/gulf-coast-mardi-gras-road-trip-stop-2-new-orleans/\"><em>New Orleans</em></a><em>, and Cajun Country.</em><br></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4810,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Screenshot-2026-02-25-at-8.23.12-AM.png\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Screenshot-2026-02-25-at-8.23.12-AM-300x300.png\" alt=\"Google Map screenshot with a thick blue line defining a road trip\" class=\"wp-image-4810\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">The Gulf Coast Mardi Gras Road Trip Loop</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>My high school geography class should’ve prepared me for how flat everything is along the Gulf Coast, but it didn’t. On Thursday morning, driving from New Orleans to Lafayette along US 90, the land was flat and the sky was big. And driving the roads outside of Lafayette, I was struck by how much it reminded me of the rural Midwest — places like downstate Illinois and Indiana where, once you get off the interstates, you find long stretches of flat fields punctuated by stands of farm trees and the occasional small town. The accent is different but the landscape, when you\'ve pushed up from the coastal bayous, is a lot the same.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Driving through towns on US 90 rather than around them on I-10, it was clear how important the off-shore oil business is here. I didn\'t see any of the big oil names like Exxon or Chevron. Instead, it was their smaller suppliers — supply yards stacked with lengths of metal tubing, shops doing pump repairs, dockyards along the rivers that the US 90 bridges arch high over.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Tabasco Detour</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>A little over two hours into our drive, we took a quick detour to Avery Island to tour the Tabasco plant. It was nice — a quiet campus of buildings. We did the <a href=\"https://www.tabasco.com/visit-avery-island/tabasco-tour/\">self-guided tour</a>; we hadn’t planned far enough ahead for the guided tour. The standout was the barrel house, a rickhouse of pepper mash-filled barrels covered in salt. There was a definite pepper \"tang\" in the air.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4875,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"center\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image aligncenter size-large\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_8945-EDIT-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_8945-EDIT-1024x768.jpg\" alt=\"Long interior view of the Tabasco barrel warehouse on Avery Island, with rows of wooden barrels stretching into the distance under a metal roof\" class=\"wp-image-4875\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">The source of the pepper \"tang\" in the air</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>But if I read the placards correctly, most of their pepper growing and mashing now takes place at contract farms in Latin America and Africa. Compared to other small plant tours I’ve taken — whiskey distilleries, the Louisville Slugger factory — this one was more about displays explaining the sauce than showing it being made, save for the last buildings where mixing vats and bottling lines sat behind plexiglass.&nbsp; I wanted to see a bit more action. Maybe we would’ve gotten more out of the guided tour.&nbsp; The tasting bar at the Tabasco store, though, was worth the stop. We came away with a couple of bottles that we hadn’t seen in grocery stores back home.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Walking Around Lafayette</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Lafayette is a nice town. It has a walkable city center core with the requisite upscale coffee joints and small sundry shops. We walked past <a href=\"https://www.popspoboys.com/\">Pop’s Poboys</a>, looked back at the menu through the window, turned around, and walked in. We might have found a more “authentic” po-boy place, but Pop’s had an interesting menu -- the classics plus some new twists -- and it was there and we were hungry. It was a solid choice.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4876,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_8960-EDIT.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_8960-EDIT-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Sticker on a window reading “2022 Buy Leauxcal,” with smaller text saying “Festival supported by local businesses,” above a sign that reads “No Public Restrooms.”\" class=\"wp-image-4876\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Cajun \"Buy Local\" Campaign</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Lafayette leans hard into its Cajun heritage; its role as the main city of Acadiana. About 2½ miles from downtown, along Bayou Vermilion, is <a href=\"https://bayouvermiliondistrict.org/vermilionville/\">Vermilionville Historic Village</a>. It’s an outdoor “living history” museum with restored houses, costumed interpreters doing craft demonstrations, recreating what daily life looked like in this corner of Louisiana between the 1790’s and the 1880’s. It wasn’t crowded; we could take our time.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Walking through one of the houses, I was surprised to find an interpreter sitting quietly in the front room doing some quilting. We talked for about 10 minutes about Vermillionville, what brought her there (marriage to a local; she’s originally from Pennsylvania), and her quilting.&nbsp; I’m usually not one for Williamsburg-style reenactments, but I surprised myself by liking Vermillionville. Maybe because it was much more low-key than other “living history” places I’ve visited.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>More Parade Strategy</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We stayed in a bed-and-breakfast about a 5-minute walk from downtown — a big house and a collection of outbuildings that had originally been part of a plantation. Nice-sized room, solid breakfast, but most importantly, it was very conveniently located for parade watching — maybe 2½ blocks from the parade route and right near the start.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>That lined up with the parade strategy — don’t get stuck in the middle of the route. Position yourself either at the start (as we did in Mobile and Fairhope) or right at the end (as we did in New Orleans). The start gets you out before traffic locks up; works best when it\'s just one parade. The end works better when there are multiple krewes stepping off — when there’s a parade of parades.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4870,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"center\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image aligncenter size-large\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_9360-EDIT-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_9360-EDIT-1024x768.jpg\" alt=\"Brightly lit Mardi Gras float in Lafayette at night, with masked riders on two levels tossing throws to people reaching up from the street\" class=\"wp-image-4870\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Lafayette parade float riders launching their throws</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We caught two parades in Lafayette — the kick-off on Friday night and the <a href=\"https://www.kreweofbonaparte.org/\">Krewe of Bonaparte</a> on Saturday night. Bonaparte was definitely the better parade — longer, more interesting floats, more interesting throws. It was also our last parade of the trip, so we weren\'t aggressively going after throws. Most of what we caught came from reflexes and self-defense — putting an arm up to block our face only to have a string of beads wrap around it. We gave away everything we caught to the folks standing beside us. We didn’t need any more; we were already triaging the throws we brought with us from Mobile and New Orleans.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Driving Out to Cajun Country</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Saturday morning, we drove north out of Lafayette to catch the Mardi Gras festivals in Mamou and Eunice. It was about an hour drive to Mamou, mostly through flat fields punctuated by huge ponds, many big enough to have small, one-man shallow-draft paddle wheel boats working them. I guessed they were either rice fields or crawfish ponds. Irene fired up Google and found out it wasn’t an either/or. Farmers raise both in what is really more like a flooded field than a pond. The rice gives the crawfish shade and food, while the crawfish waste fertilizes the rice. Who knew? Reminded me to find a crawfish dinner before heading home.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We didn’t know exactly where in Mamou we were going, but it’s not that big of a town, so we pulled off the highway and parked on a residential sidestreet, and followed a parade of people, coolers, and camp chairs up to the couple of blocks of commercial district and the music stage thrown up across the main drag.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>On our right I saw Fred’s Lounge, a low-slung dive bar that’s supposed to be sorta Ground Zero for the Cajun music revival — at least that’s what the historic plaque bolted on the wall next to the front door says. We walked in, or at least tried to. It was jammed; we couldn’t move. There was a band somewhere in front of us and they sounded great.&nbsp; </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>On any other day, we would’ve stayed. But on this day, we had an alternative. We backed out, grabbed beers from a vendor stand across the street, and stood among the camp chairs to watch <a href=\"https://www.mamouplayboys.com/\">Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys</a> play the street stage in what, given their name, must be their home town. Great music; good weather; cold beer. We made the right call.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:video {\"id\":4878,\"align\":\"center\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-video aligncenter\"><video controls src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_9351.mov\" playsinline></video><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Watching Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys on the street stage in Mamou</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:video -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Hunting Boudin</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>On our first two stops — Mobile and New Orleans — Irene was on a king cake hunt; trying every slice of king cake she could find. But today it was my turn to lead and instead of hunting cake, I was hunting pork. Boudin to be specific.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Boudin is a pork and rice sausage. It’s Acadiana’s version of what a lot of cuisines do with the less glamorous parts of the pig. Hungary has hurka; Thailand has sai krok isan. All a way to use everything but the oink from a butchered pig.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>In Acadiana, boudin isn’t restaurant food. It is grocery store food; gas station food. You walk up to the meat counter and order a link. It comes out of the steamer hot and and you eat it standing at the counter or over the hood of your car in the parking lot, squeezing the meat out of the casing. Or eating it whole if they’ve cooked it right.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>My Boudin Trail research called out <a href=\"https://maps.app.goo.gl/dU9dssT3a4GZkm2s6\">Charlie\'s Meat Market &amp; Grocery</a> in Mamou as a top spot. But Charlie’s closes at noon on Saturdays, so we had to leave before the Mamou Playboys finished their set. Charlie’s isn’t fancy; just a local corner store in a residential neighborhood. We bought a couple of links at the meat counter in the back and walked outside.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4872,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_9349-EDIT-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_9349-EDIT-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Man eating a link of boudin outdoors in front of Charlie’s Meat Market, seated beside a large blue chair decorated for Mardi Gras\" class=\"wp-image-4872\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">There\'s no elegant way to eat boudin</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Between bites, we got talking to a guy loading up a couple of Yeti coolers with packages of frozen, vacuum-packed boudin. “I came over from Texas for Mardi Gras,” he said. “When I told folks I’d be in Mamou, I got buried with the orders for Charlie’s boudin. It’s the best.” </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It was damn good boudin, though right then, I only had a sample size of one. But he looked like he knew his boudin, so I went back in to buy 3 packages and a bag of ice to keep them cold.Another good call. Before my boudin hunt was done, we’d also hit <a href=\"https://www.beststopinscott.com/\">The Best Stop Supermarket</a> in Scott and <a href=\"https://www.billysboudin.com/\">Billy\'s Boudin &amp; Cracklins</a> back in Lafayette. Both were solid, but the Texan was right — Charlie’s was the best.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Next Stop - Pork Cracklins</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Fifteen minutes south of Mamou is Eunice. It\'s bigger than Mamou, so their festivities were more spread out — a bigger music stage at the bottom of the main street, flanked by strings of food trucks; up in the middle of the commercial strip, more food tents set up by a local charity group.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Irene went to check out some of the shops while I made for the food tent — specifically, the guy frying big cubes of pork in what looked like a barrel cut lengthways in half, rendering them down into pork cracklins. We talked while he stirred the pork in the bubbling fat with a long metal spatula. He’d been volunteering at this festival for 10, maybe 15 years. When that batch was done, I bought some — a paper bag of salty, hot cubes of fried pork fat, meat, and skin. Then I walked into the nearest bar and bought a cold beer to cut the fat; kind of a statin stand-in to give my cholesterol levels a fighting chance.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:video {\"id\":4886} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-video\"><video controls src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_8964.mov\" playsinline></video><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Frying Up Some Chunks of Pork</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:video -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Heading Home</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We packed our parade throw haul next to the boudin cooler and headed northeast on I-10 toward Nashville — crossing the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atchafalaya_Basin_Bridge\">Atchafalaya Basin Bridge</a>, the third longest bridge in the US, carrying 18 miles of traffic over the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atchafalaya_Basin\">Atchafalaya Swamp</a>. Interesting for the first five minutes; then just flat sky and flat water that wasn’t. It gave me time to think back on this trip that I’d been planning for a couple of years. I got what I wanted from it -- three different ways of celebrating a very unique holiday.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4873,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_8967-EDIT-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_8967-EDIT-300x125.jpg\" alt=\"Piles of colorful Mardi Gras bead necklaces and throws spread across a tabletop and draped over a chair\" class=\"wp-image-4873\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Our growing bead problem</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Mobile and Fairhope felt genuinely local — manageably sized, not over-touristed. Maybe still carrying a bit of a chip on their shoulder for not getting their due as the oldest Mardi Gras in the country.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>New Orleans was New Orleans — the main event, the version that everyone has in their head when they think “Mardi Gras.” Seven years on, the parades didn’t feel as grand as I remembered them from pre-COVID times. But seeing that my favorite restaurants were still standing and still cranking out good food more than made up for it.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>And then there was Acadiana. Lafayette’s Mardi Gras parades felt a lot like Mobile’s. But experiencing Cajun culture in Lafayette and then in Mamou and Eunice gave us the most local version of Mardi Gras — music stages on small-town main streets, hot boudin from a corner market, pork cracklins in a paper bag. It felt more genuine, less produced.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I’m glad I waited until after retirement to do this trip. I was able to give this trip the time it needed to breathe — to spend enough time to appreciate each place’s celebrations on its own terms.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:separator -->\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity\"/>\n<!-- /wp:separator -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Recommendations for Lafayette and Acadiana</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Food &amp; Drink</strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.popspoboys.com/\">Pop\'s Poboys</a> — Solid poboy menu, classics and twists; right downtown</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://maps.app.goo.gl/dU9dssT3a4GZkm2s6\">Charlie\'s Meat Market &amp; Grocery</a>, Mamou — Best boudin on the Boudin Trail; arrive before noon on Saturdays</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.billysboudin.com/\">Billy\'s Boudin &amp; Cracklins</a>, Lafayette — Good cracklins; solid all-around stop</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Culture</strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://bayouvermiliondistrict.org/vermilionville/\">Vermilionville Historic Village</a> —  Quick drive from downtown if you\'re into history</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Fred\'s Lounge, Mamou — Show up on Saturday morning for live music</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.mamouplayboys.com/events/\" title=\"\">Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys</a> — Check their <em>Events</em> page to see if you can catch them live</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Gulf Coast Mardi Gras Road Trip Stop 3 — Lafayette &amp; Acadiana','','inherit','closed','closed','','4869-revision-v1','','','2026-04-14 10:18:04','2026-04-14 16:18:04','',4869,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4887',0,'revision','',0),
(4888,1,'2026-04-14 10:30:06','2026-04-14 16:30:06','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><em>This trip had been knocking around the back of my mind for a while. And for me, that’s a big piece of retirement travel — finally getting on with the travel I’ve thought about but never found the time to do. LIke this road trip to experience Mardi Gras in </em><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2026/02/25/gulf-coast-mardi-gras-road-trip-stop-1-mobile/\"><em>Mobile</em></a><em>, </em><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2026/03/10/gulf-coast-mardi-gras-road-trip-stop-2-new-orleans/\"><em>New Orleans</em></a><em>, and Cajun Country.</em><br></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4810,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Screenshot-2026-02-25-at-8.23.12-AM.png\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Screenshot-2026-02-25-at-8.23.12-AM-300x300.png\" alt=\"Google Map screenshot with a thick blue line defining a road trip\" class=\"wp-image-4810\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">The Gulf Coast Mardi Gras Road Trip Loop</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>My high school geography class should’ve prepared me for how flat everything is along the Gulf Coast, but it didn’t. On Thursday morning, driving from New Orleans to Lafayette along US 90, the land was flat and the sky was big. And driving the roads outside of Lafayette, I was struck by how much it reminded me of the rural Midwest — places like downstate Illinois and Indiana where, once you get off the interstates, you find long stretches of flat fields punctuated by stands of farm trees and the occasional small town. The accent is different but the landscape, when you\'ve pushed up from the coastal bayous, is a lot the same.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Driving through towns on US 90 rather than around them on I-10, it was clear how important the off-shore oil business is here. I didn\'t see any of the big oil names like Exxon or Chevron. Instead, it was their smaller suppliers — supply yards stacked with lengths of metal tubing, shops doing pump repairs, dockyards along the rivers that the US 90 bridges arch high over.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Tabasco Detour</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>A little over two hours into our drive, we took a quick detour to Avery Island to tour the Tabasco plant. It was nice — a quiet campus of buildings. We did the <a href=\"https://www.tabasco.com/visit-avery-island/tabasco-tour/\">self-guided tour</a>; we hadn’t planned far enough ahead for the guided tour. The standout was the barrel house, a rickhouse of pepper mash-filled barrels covered in salt. There was a definite pepper \"tang\" in the air.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4875,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"center\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image aligncenter size-large\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_8945-EDIT-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_8945-EDIT-1024x768.jpg\" alt=\"Long interior view of the Tabasco barrel warehouse on Avery Island, with rows of wooden barrels stretching into the distance under a metal roof\" class=\"wp-image-4875\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">The source of the pepper \"tang\" in the air</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>But if I read the placards correctly, most of their pepper growing and mashing now takes place at contract farms in Latin America and Africa. Compared to other small plant tours I’ve taken — whiskey distilleries, the Louisville Slugger factory — this one was more about displays explaining the sauce than showing it being made, save for the last buildings where mixing vats and bottling lines sat behind plexiglass.&nbsp; I wanted to see a bit more action. Maybe we would’ve gotten more out of the guided tour.&nbsp; The tasting bar at the Tabasco store, though, was worth the stop. We came away with a couple of bottles that we hadn’t seen in grocery stores back home.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Walking Around Lafayette</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Lafayette is a nice town. It has a walkable city center core with the requisite upscale coffee joints and small sundry shops. We walked past <a href=\"https://www.popspoboys.com/\">Pop’s Poboys</a>, looked back at the menu through the window, turned around, and walked in. We might have found a more “authentic” po-boy place, but Pop’s had an interesting menu -- the classics plus some new twists -- and it was there and we were hungry. It was a solid choice.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4876,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_8960-EDIT.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_8960-EDIT-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Sticker on a window reading “2022 Buy Leauxcal,” with smaller text saying “Festival supported by local businesses,” above a sign that reads “No Public Restrooms.”\" class=\"wp-image-4876\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Cajun \"Buy Local\" Campaign</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Lafayette leans hard into its Cajun heritage; its role as the main city of Acadiana. About 2½ miles from downtown, along Bayou Vermilion, is <a href=\"https://bayouvermiliondistrict.org/vermilionville/\">Vermilionville Historic Village</a>. It’s an outdoor “living history” museum with restored houses, costumed interpreters doing craft demonstrations, recreating what daily life looked like in this corner of Louisiana between the 1790’s and the 1880’s. It wasn’t crowded; we could take our time.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Walking through one of the houses, I was surprised to find an interpreter sitting quietly in the front room doing some quilting. We talked for about 10 minutes about Vermillionville, what brought her there (marriage to a local; she’s originally from Pennsylvania), and her quilting.&nbsp; I’m usually not one for Williamsburg-style reenactments, but I surprised myself by liking Vermillionville. Maybe because it was much more low-key than other “living history” places I’ve visited.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>More Parade Strategy</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We stayed in a bed-and-breakfast about a 5-minute walk from downtown — a big house and a collection of outbuildings that had originally been part of a plantation. Nice-sized room, solid breakfast, but most importantly, it was very conveniently located for parade watching — maybe 2½ blocks from the parade route and right near the start.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>That lined up with the parade strategy — don’t get stuck in the middle of the route. Position yourself either at the start (as we did in Mobile and Fairhope) or right at the end (as we did in New Orleans). The start gets you out before traffic locks up; works best when it\'s just one parade. The end works better when there are multiple krewes stepping off — when there’s a parade of parades.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4870,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"center\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image aligncenter size-large\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_9360-EDIT-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_9360-EDIT-1024x768.jpg\" alt=\"Brightly lit Mardi Gras float in Lafayette at night, with masked riders on two levels tossing throws to people reaching up from the street\" class=\"wp-image-4870\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Lafayette parade float riders launching their throws</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We caught two parades in Lafayette — the kick-off on Friday night and the <a href=\"https://www.kreweofbonaparte.org/\">Krewe of Bonaparte</a> on Saturday night. Bonaparte was definitely the better parade — longer, more interesting floats, more interesting throws. It was also our last parade of the trip, so we weren\'t aggressively going after throws. Most of what we caught came from reflexes and self-defense — putting an arm up to block our face only to have a string of beads wrap around it. We gave away everything we caught to the folks standing beside us. We didn’t need any more; we were already triaging the throws we brought with us from Mobile and New Orleans.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Driving Out to Cajun Country</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Saturday morning, we drove north out of Lafayette to catch the Mardi Gras festivals in Mamou and Eunice. It was about an hour drive to Mamou, mostly through flat fields punctuated by huge ponds, many big enough to have small, one-man shallow-draft paddle wheel boats working them. I guessed they were either rice fields or crawfish ponds. Irene fired up Google and found out it wasn’t an either/or. Farmers raise both in what is really more like a flooded field than a pond. The rice gives the crawfish shade and food, while the crawfish waste fertilizes the rice. Who knew? Reminded me to find a crawfish dinner before heading home.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We didn’t know exactly where in Mamou we were going, but it’s not that big of a town, so we pulled off the highway and parked on a residential sidestreet, and followed a parade of people, coolers, and camp chairs up to the couple of blocks of commercial district and the music stage thrown up across the main drag.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>On our right I saw Fred’s Lounge, a low-slung dive bar that’s supposed to be sorta Ground Zero for the Cajun music revival — at least that’s what the historic plaque bolted on the wall next to the front door says. We walked in, or at least tried to. It was jammed; we couldn’t move. There was a band somewhere in front of us and they sounded great.&nbsp; </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>On any other day, we would’ve stayed. But on this day, we had an alternative. We backed out, grabbed beers from a vendor stand across the street, and stood among the camp chairs to watch <a href=\"https://www.mamouplayboys.com/\">Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys</a> play the street stage in what, given their name, must be their home town. Great music; good weather; cold beer. We made the right call.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:video {\"id\":4878,\"align\":\"center\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-video aligncenter\"><video controls src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_9351.mov\" playsinline></video><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Watching Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys on the street stage in Mamou</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:video -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Hunting Boudin</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>On our first two stops — Mobile and New Orleans — Irene was on a king cake hunt; trying every slice of king cake she could find. But today it was my turn to lead and instead of hunting cake, I was hunting pork. Boudin to be specific.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Boudin is a pork and rice sausage. It’s Acadiana’s version of what a lot of cuisines do with the less glamorous parts of the pig. Hungary has hurka; Thailand has sai krok isan. All a way to use everything but the oink from a butchered pig.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>In Acadiana, boudin isn’t restaurant food. It is grocery store food; gas station food. You walk up to the meat counter and order a link. It comes out of the steamer hot and and you eat it standing at the counter or over the hood of your car in the parking lot, squeezing the meat out of the casing. Or eating it whole if they’ve cooked it right.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>My Boudin Trail research called out <a href=\"https://maps.app.goo.gl/dU9dssT3a4GZkm2s6\">Charlie\'s Meat Market &amp; Grocery</a> in Mamou as a top spot. But Charlie’s closes at noon on Saturdays, so we had to leave before the Mamou Playboys finished their set. Charlie’s isn’t fancy; just a local corner store in a residential neighborhood. We bought a couple of links at the meat counter in the back and walked outside.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4872,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_9349-EDIT-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_9349-EDIT-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Man eating a link of boudin outdoors in front of Charlie’s Meat Market, seated beside a large blue chair decorated for Mardi Gras\" class=\"wp-image-4872\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">There\'s no elegant way to eat boudin</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Between bites, we got talking to a guy loading up a couple of Yeti coolers with packages of frozen, vacuum-packed boudin. “I came over from Texas for Mardi Gras,” he said. “When I told folks I’d be in Mamou, I got buried with the orders for Charlie’s boudin. It’s the best.” </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It was damn good boudin, though right then, I only had a sample size of one. But he looked like he knew his boudin, so I went back in to buy 3 packages and a bag of ice to keep them cold.Another good call. Before my boudin hunt was done, we’d also hit <a href=\"https://www.beststopinscott.com/\">The Best Stop Supermarket</a> in Scott and <a href=\"https://www.billysboudin.com/\">Billy\'s Boudin &amp; Cracklins</a> back in Lafayette. Both were solid, but the Texan was right — Charlie’s was the best.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Next Stop - Pork Cracklins</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Fifteen minutes south of Mamou is Eunice. It\'s bigger than Mamou, so their festivities were more spread out — a bigger music stage at the bottom of the main street, flanked by strings of food trucks; up in the middle of the commercial strip, more food tents set up by a local charity group.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Irene went to check out some of the shops while I made for the food tent — specifically, the guy frying big cubes of pork in what looked like a barrel cut lengthways in half, rendering them down into pork cracklins. We talked while he stirred the pork in the bubbling fat with a long metal spatula. He’d been volunteering at this festival for 10, maybe 15 years. When that batch was done, I bought some — a paper bag of salty, hot cubes of fried pork fat, meat, and skin. Then I walked into the nearest bar and bought a cold beer to cut the fat; kind of a statin stand-in to give my cholesterol levels a fighting chance.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:video {\"id\":4886} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-video\"><video controls src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_8964.mov\" playsinline></video><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Frying Up Some Chunks of Pork</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:video -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Heading Home</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We packed our parade throw haul next to the boudin cooler and headed northeast on I-10 toward Nashville — crossing the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atchafalaya_Basin_Bridge\">Atchafalaya Basin Bridge</a>, the third longest bridge in the US, carrying 18 miles of traffic over the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atchafalaya_Basin\">Atchafalaya Swamp</a>. Interesting for the first five minutes; then just flat sky and flat water that wasn’t. It gave me time to think back on this trip that I’d been planning for a couple of years. I got what I wanted from it -- three different ways of celebrating a very unique holiday.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4873,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_8967-EDIT-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_8967-EDIT-300x125.jpg\" alt=\"Piles of colorful Mardi Gras bead necklaces and throws spread across a tabletop and draped over a chair\" class=\"wp-image-4873\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Our growing bead problem</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Mobile and Fairhope felt genuinely local — manageably sized, not over-touristed. Maybe still carrying a bit of a chip on their shoulder for not getting their due as the oldest Mardi Gras in the country.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>New Orleans was New Orleans — the main event, the version that everyone has in their head when they think “Mardi Gras.” Seven years on, the parades didn’t feel as grand as I remembered them from pre-COVID times. But seeing that my favorite restaurants were still standing and still cranking out good food more than made up for it.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>And then there was Acadiana. Lafayette’s Mardi Gras parades felt a lot like Mobile’s. But experiencing Cajun culture in Lafayette and then in Mamou and Eunice gave us the most local version of Mardi Gras — music stages on small-town main streets, hot boudin from a corner market, pork cracklins in a paper bag. It felt more genuine, less produced.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I’m glad I waited until after retirement to do this trip. I was able to give this trip the time it needed to breathe — to spend enough time to appreciate each place’s celebrations on its own terms.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:separator -->\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity\"/>\n<!-- /wp:separator -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Recommendations for Lafayette and Acadiana</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Food &amp; Drink</strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.popspoboys.com/\">Pop\'s Poboys</a> — Solid poboy menu, classics and twists; right downtown</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://maps.app.goo.gl/dU9dssT3a4GZkm2s6\">Charlie\'s Meat Market &amp; Grocery</a>, Mamou — Best boudin on the Boudin Trail; arrive before noon on Saturdays</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.billysboudin.com/\">Billy\'s Boudin &amp; Cracklins</a>, Lafayette — Good cracklins; solid all-around stop</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Culture</strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://bayouvermiliondistrict.org/vermilionville/\">Vermilionville Historic Village</a> —  Quick drive from downtown if you\'re into history</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Fred\'s Lounge, Mamou — Show up on Saturday morning for live music</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.mamouplayboys.com/events/\" title=\"\">Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys</a> — Check their <em>Events</em> page to see if you can catch them live</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Gulf Coast Mardi Gras Road Trip Stop 3 — Lafayette &amp; Acadiana','Final stop on my Gulf Coast Mardi Gras road trip is Lafayette and Cajun Country. Parades and Cajun history in Lafayette; small-town festivals and local music in Mamou and Eunice; following the boudin trail with fresh pork cracklins at the end.','inherit','closed','closed','','4869-revision-v1','','','2026-04-14 10:30:06','2026-04-14 16:30:06','',4869,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4888',0,'revision','',0),
(4889,1,'2026-04-14 10:32:44','2026-04-14 16:32:44','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><em>This trip had been knocking around the back of my mind for a while. And for me, that’s a big piece of retirement travel — finally getting on with the travel I’ve thought about but never found the time to do. Like this road trip to hit Mardi Gras in Mobile (<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2026/02/25/gulf-coast-mardi-gras-road-trip-stop-1-mobile/\" title=\"\">our first stop</a>), New Orleans, and Cajun Country.</em></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4810,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Screenshot-2026-02-25-at-8.23.12-AM.png\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Screenshot-2026-02-25-at-8.23.12-AM-300x300.png\" alt=\"Google Map screenshot with a thick blue line defining a road trip\" class=\"wp-image-4810\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">The Gulf Coast Mardi Gras Road Trip Loop</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Monday morning, we packed up our parade haul — mini-Moon Pies, frisbees, plastic cups, plush toys, packages of ramen soup, and, of course, beads — and pointed the car west on I-10 towards the second stop on our Mardi Gras road trip, New Orleans.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Biloxi Detour</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>After just 90 minutes, we made a lunch detour at Biloxi, MS, to a little one-room joint, <a href=\"https://www.parrains-cajun-cooking.com/\">Parrain\'s Cajun Cooking</a>. It’s just a mile north of the casinos, but with its randomly painted wide woodplank walls and an old-school kitchen service window, it feels like it exists in a more low-key parallel universe. No king cake for breakfast, so we ordered a lap around the menu — cups of gumbo, jambalaya, and red beans and rice; adding in an order of deep-fried boudin balls because… why not?</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Back to An Old Haunt</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Our dinner in New Orleans was a bit more up-scale. We walked down Magazine St. to an old favorite, <a href=\"https://www.pecherestaurant.com/\">Pêche</a>.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4832,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_8915-EDIT-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_8915-EDIT-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"Marble oyster bar at Pêche with menus and a glass of white wine, while staff shuck oysters behind the counter\" class=\"wp-image-4832\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Oyster bar seats: the best seats in the house</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I first ate there when it opened in 2014 and haven’t stopped — because it hasn’t given me a reason to stop. And having been away from New Orleans for seven years, it was the obvious first stop. Walking in, it was packed - the bar, the tables, and the six-person back counter in front of the oyster shuckers that was my usual spot, and where I wanted us to eat. So we put our name in and headed over to the bar.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It’s a good-sized bar. Every seat was taken, and most people were eating as well as drinking. We settled in with the rest of the folks leaning against the walls, drinks in hand, waiting for a seat to open up. They had all sort of self-organized into an informal queue. A seat would open up and everyone would acknowledge the next person waiting. In other places I’ve lived — Chicago, Philly — people would\'ve been angling to jump in front. But further south, it feels like politeness and some level of social order are still expected.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>After one drink, a couple of seats at the back counter opened up. I ordered my usual — a half dozen oysters and the whole fish. Irene added a side of Brussels in her continuing quest for more vegetables.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I picked the Alabama oysters off the raw bar menu because, after years of eating Gulf oysters, I\'ve found them to be much tastier than Louisiana oysters, which I think are better cooked — fried for po’ boys, simmered in a gumbo, or char-broiled in the shell. And also because the oyster shucker had cracked open a couple for us to try.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Then, while waiting for our fish, he gave us the Florida and Louisiana oysters that we\'d passed up. So we\'d ordered a half dozen oysters and then got comp\'d another half dozen by the shucker. Gotta love New Orleans’ lagniappe culture. I tipped him extra — all the cash I had left in my wallet.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Gift from the Weather Gods</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4826,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_9290-EDIT-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_9290-EDIT-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Parade route parking sign draped with Mardi Gras beads as crowds line a broad, oak-shaded avenue\" class=\"wp-image-4826\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">New Orleans posts rules for parade day. Mardi Gras posts beads</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>When I laid out this trip, the parade math wasn’t in our favor. Staying in New Orleans Monday through Wednesday nights was only going to give us one parade night — Wednesday. But the same Sunday rainstorm that chased us off our last Mobile parade forced New Orleans to reschedule its two Sunday parades to what had been an empty Tuesday night. One step back, then two steps forward — the rain dance ended up in our favor.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Tuesday afternoon, we walked along Tchoupitoulas St. through the Warehouse District, with a half-block detour for lunch at another old favorite, <a href=\"https://cochonbutcher.com/\">Cochon Butcher</a>. Then we wound our way under the mess of overpasses that is US-90, helped by a squad of cop cars and motorcycles that were holding up traffic so parade floats could make the turn toward the marshalling yards across from the World of Mardi Gras Museum. A reminder that behind every successful Mardi Gras parade is a whole lot of logistics.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Walking past the marshalling yard, we saw float riders for the first parade — <a href=\"https://www.mkfemmefatale.org/\"><em>Femme</em> <em>Fatales</em></a> — starting to assemble. Cars double-parked, unloading groups of middle-aged women hugging and chatting as they headed toward their floats… at maybe 2 p.m. for a 6 p.m. step-off.&nbsp; No wonder they looked so happy — and a bit lit — when we saw them again rolling past the Avenue Pub.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Walking Magazine Street and St Charles Avenue</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4831,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_8926-EDIT-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_8926-EDIT-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Metal tray piled with boiled crawfish and corn on the cob, seasoned and steaming on a wooden table\" class=\"wp-image-4831\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Crawfish and corn: laying a base before the next round of Mardi Gras beers</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We kept walking — up to Magazine St. and through the Garden District. Some stretches looked emptier than I remembered: empty storefronts, “for lease” signs, fewer places open-for-business. Some of that was probably businesses closing early for the parade. But it still felt quieter. Then as we approached Louisiana Ave., it came alive again. We dove into <a href=\"https://www.boilseafoodhouse.com/lower-garden-district\">Boil Seafood House</a> for our first crawfish of the trip and then headed up to the parade route.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4827,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"left\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignleft size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_9291-EDIT-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_9291-EDIT-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Two-story white house with tall columns decorated in oversized colorful flowers and Mardi Gras garlands\" class=\"wp-image-4827\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Uptown house commits to Mardi Gras colors</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Walking back across the Garden District along St Charles Ave. from Louisiana Ave., we could feel the crowd’s vibe shift — from friends and families relaxing outside their houses and across on St Charles’ grassy median they call “<a href=\"https://mikescottwrites.com/2019/06/13/new-orleans-101-why-do-we-call-it-a-neutral-ground-instead-of-a-median/\">neutral ground</a>,” to something a bit more rowdy, with a bit more of an edge to it as we got into the more commercial stretch.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Avenue Pub Balcony View</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I was happy to step off the street and into yet another old haunt, <a href=\"https://theavenuepub.com/\">the Avenue Pub</a>. It was surprisingly uncrowded, both on the first floor and on the second-floor balcony that looks over the parade route.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4829,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_9293-EDIT-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_9293-EDIT-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Brightly lit Mardi Gras float at night with crowds reaching up from both sides of the street\" class=\"wp-image-4829\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Two-story floats turn throws into a competitive sport</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We got to the balcony railing just as the <em>Femme Fatales </em>rolled by. We didn’t expect them to be able to hit us with their throws on the second floor, but the two-story floats made it possible. And the riders were good. Some even cleared us, the first row leaning on the railing, and hit the folks in the second row leaning against the back wall. We all traded beads and frisbees and light-up balls so everyone on the balcony went home with a complete collection of the night’s throws.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Wednesday Night Let-Down</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4833,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_9315-EDIT-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_9315-EDIT-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Nighttime Mardi Gras parade float with two green-costumed torchbearer characters on the front platform and a rider in white standing above, lit by bright blue and gold lights on a city street\" class=\"wp-image-4833\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Watching One Last Float</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>After Tuesday night’s rescheduled parades, the regularly scheduled Wednesday parades were a bit of a let-down. The <em>Muses</em> parade wasn\'t as good as I remembered. And we completely skipped the last parade even though all we had to do was ride the elevator down and walk out the hotel door. Instead, we watched out our window as a high school band marched up Poydras St. from the parade’s end-point to their buses home.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We were parade-ed out.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Scrolling back through Google Photos, looking at photos I took in 2015, those parade floats looked more intricate and clever, and they were all led by flambeaux — guys marching in front carrying big propane-fed torches. There wasn’t any of that on Tuesday or Wednesday night. Just tractors and trucks hauling float trailers that seemed to be built to maximize the number of riders.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We still enjoyed these parades, and maybe I\'ve got a case of rosy retrospection. But I just didn\'t think these parades were as good as the ones we saw 8-10 years ago.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Pilgrimage to the Ultimate King Cake</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4828,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_9298-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_9298-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"People waiting in a long line outside Dong Phuong Bakery under a bright blue sky\" class=\"wp-image-4828\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">We thought we\'d showed up “early\"</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We got up early Wednesday morning to hit the ultimate king cake shop: <a href=\"https://www.dpbakery.com/\">Dong Phuong Bakery</a>.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It’s about a 30-minute drive east — way out of the normal tourist zone, in some suburban light-industrial area. We got there at 7:50 a.m., just before the 8:00 opening time, figuring we\'d be fine.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>As I pulled up, I could see we were way wrong.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>The parking lot was full. Cars were parked along the shoulder of the road. And the line of people ran the length of the building and then started doing Disney-esque switchbacks. I told Irene to get in line while I hunted for parking.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>A rumor came down the line that the first guy showed up at 6:30 a.m. I didn’t doubt it. I saw people walking back to their trucks carrying a bag with their three-cake limit in one hand and a camp chair in the other.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4825,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_9303-EDIT-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_9303-EDIT-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Dong Phuong king cake in a bakery box with purple, green, and gold sugar and a tiny plastic baby on top\" class=\"wp-image-4825\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">The king cake standard by which all others will now be judged</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Talking to people around us, everyone was from New Orleans, had been from New Orleans, or was visiting family there. We were the only ones within conversational radius with no obvious NOLA connection. We were also the only ones not maxing out the three-cake limit.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>After an hour in the queue, we bought one traditional cream cheese-filled king cake. During our wait, Irene ducked into the bakery and came back with a couple of savory bun-style pork things that were very good. I’d make the drive back just for those.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>But the king cake? Definitively the best of the 8-10 we tried on the trip. Runner-up: Dropout Bakery back in Mobile.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Slipping Out of the Bubble to Bywate</strong>r</h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>On our last afternoon in New Orleans, we popped over to Bywater.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I’ve been going there since my “<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/07/31/podcast-100-southern-road-trip-breaking-up-with-american-airlines/\">Drive South</a>” trip in 2012, when a guy sitting next to me in a Louisville bar told me about it. (One of the underappreciated benefits of sitting at a bar: accidental travel intelligence.)</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4830,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_8933-EDIT-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_8933-EDIT-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Stack of hanging signs on a building: “For Sale” placards above a bold sign reading “HAUNTED&quot;\" class=\"wp-image-4830\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">New Orleans real estate marketing <em>is</em> unique</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Bywater has always seemed to me to be a bit run-down—or maybe “highly worn”—in a slightly hipster way. Smallish shotgun-ish houses all crammed tightly together along narrow streets that default to single lanes because of the cars parked on both sides.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I’ve always liked it because it’s anti-French Quarter in the best way. Not a “tourists go home” vibe. More of an “I don\'t give a damn about you, whoever you are” vibe. An indifference that feels honest rather than performative.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>This time through, Bywater looked a bit cleaner, tidier. Not necessarily gentrified, just that a lot of places looked to have been recently painted. And an old manufacturing or steel fabrication plant on the edge of the neighborhood had been converted into a very solid microbrewery.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Maybe this tidying-up is the early stage of gentrification — conversions to Airbnbs and boutique inns behind fresh paint jobs. Maybe the tourist bubble has made it out here..</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Or maybe the Home Depot had a really good sale.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Packing Up and Heading West (again)</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4834,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_9281-EDIT-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_9281-EDIT-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Two powdered-sugar beignets in a paper tray on a café table beside a green to-go coffee cup in New Orleans\" class=\"wp-image-4834\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Breakfast at Café Beignet</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We came back to New Orleans expecting one parade night and got two. We came back hoping our old favorites survived the COVID years and the subsequent inflation surge, and we found Pêche, Cochon Butcher, Avenue Pub, and Café Beignet still standing.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Maybe it\'s where we were hanging out — the Central Business District (CBD), the Warehouse District, the Garden District — high tourism neighborhoods that have been floating on a raft of revenge tourism. Maybe the neighborhoods away from the river, outside the usual tourist path, have had a harder time. But whatever it is, I\'ll take it. I was happy to eat and drink well on our return to New Orleans.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We gathered up our growing tangle of beads, stuffed animals, plastic cups, special chalices, and whatever else we’d accumulated (except the Moon Pies; we ate those), loaded the car, and pointed ourselves west toward the next stop: Lafayette and Acadiana.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Coming next:</strong> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2026/04/14/gulf-coast-mardi-gras-road-trip-stop-3-lafayette-acadiana/\" title=\"\">Gulf Coast Mardi Gras Road Trip Stop 3 — Lafayette and Acadiana</a></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Recommendations for New Orleans</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Food &amp; Drink</strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://pecherestaurant.com/\">Pêche Seafood Grill</a>, 800 Magazine St. — Ask for the back counter seats in front of the oyster shuckers. Worth the wait.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.cochonbutcher.com/\">Cochon Butcher</a>, 930 Tchoupitoulas St. — Solid lunch spot for sandwiches and small plates</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://theavenuepub.com/\">Avenue Pub</a>, 1732 St. Charles Ave. — Second floor balcony for parade watching, great tap list</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.boilseafoodhouse.com/lower-garden-district\">Boil Seafood House</a>, 3340 Magazine St. — Divey but good Gulf seafood</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.dpbakery.com/\">Dong Phuong Bakery</a>, 14207 Chef Menteur Hwy — King cake and savory pork buns; arrive earlier than you think you need to</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":2240,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/IMG_0136.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/IMG_0136-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Glittery green sign reading “throw me something” mounted on a ladder near Mardi Gras parade route\" class=\"wp-image-2240\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Parade strategy, simplified: stand here and be obvious</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Parade Strategy</strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Skip the French Quarter parades — too crowded, tight streets, small parades</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Garden District along St. Charles Ave. is the sweet spot — better crowd, easier to catch throws</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Avenue Pub\'s second floor balcony gives you parade views with a great beer selection</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Check parade schedules — weather cancellations will reshuffle everything</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Neighborhoods</strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Stay in the Warehouse District or CBD for easy walking to parades and restaurants</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bywater for anti-tourist authenticity (though that may be changing)</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Gulf Coast Mardi Gras Road Trip Stop 2 — New Orleans','Stop 2 of our Gulf Coast Mardi Gras road trip drops us into New Orleans for parades, oysters, king cake, and a little parade-weather luck. We revisit old favorites like Pêche and Cochon Butcher, watch the Femme Fatales roll past from Avenue Pub’s balcony on St. Charles, and make the pilgrimage to Dong Phuong for the ultimate king cake. Includes parade strategy, neighborhood notes, and where to eat and drink.','inherit','closed','closed','','4819-revision-v1','','','2026-04-14 10:32:44','2026-04-14 16:32:44','',4819,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4889',0,'revision','',0),
(4891,1,'2026-04-14 11:13:01','2026-04-14 17:13:01','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><em>This trip had been knocking around the back of my mind for a while. And for me, that’s a big piece of retirement travel — finally getting on with the travel I’ve thought about but never found the time to do. LIke this road trip to experience Mardi Gras in </em><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2026/02/25/gulf-coast-mardi-gras-road-trip-stop-1-mobile/\"><em>Mobile</em></a><em>, </em><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2026/03/10/gulf-coast-mardi-gras-road-trip-stop-2-new-orleans/\"><em>New Orleans</em></a><em>, and Cajun Country.</em><br></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4810,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Screenshot-2026-02-25-at-8.23.12-AM.png\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Screenshot-2026-02-25-at-8.23.12-AM-300x300.png\" alt=\"Google Map screenshot with a thick blue line defining a road trip\" class=\"wp-image-4810\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">The Gulf Coast Mardi Gras Road Trip Loop</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>My high school geography class should’ve prepared me for how flat everything is along the Gulf Coast, but it didn’t. On Thursday morning, driving from New Orleans to Lafayette along US 90, the land was flat and the sky was big. And driving the roads outside of Lafayette, I was struck by how much it reminded me of the rural Midwest — places like downstate Illinois and Indiana where, once you get off the interstates, you find long stretches of flat fields punctuated by stands of farm trees and the occasional small town. The accent is different but the landscape, when you\'ve pushed up from the coastal bayous, is a lot the same.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Driving through towns on US 90 rather than around them on I-10, it was clear how important the off-shore oil business is here. I didn\'t see any of the big oil names like Exxon or Chevron. Instead, it was their smaller suppliers — supply yards stacked with lengths of metal tubing, shops doing pump repairs, dockyards along the rivers that the US 90 bridges arch high over.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Tabasco Detour</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>A little over two hours into our drive, we took a quick detour to Avery Island to tour the Tabasco plant. It was nice — a quiet campus of buildings. We did the <a href=\"https://www.tabasco.com/visit-avery-island/tabasco-tour/\">self-guided tour</a>; we hadn’t planned far enough ahead for the guided tour. The standout was the barrel house, a rickhouse of pepper mash-filled barrels covered in salt. There was a definite pepper \"tang\" in the air.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4875,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"center\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image aligncenter size-large\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_8945-EDIT-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_8945-EDIT-1024x768.jpg\" alt=\"Long interior view of the Tabasco barrel warehouse on Avery Island, with rows of wooden barrels stretching into the distance under a metal roof\" class=\"wp-image-4875\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">The source of the pepper \"tang\" in the air</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>But if I read the placards correctly, most of their pepper growing and mashing now takes place at contract farms in Latin America and Africa. Compared to other small plant tours I’ve taken — whiskey distilleries, the Louisville Slugger factory — this one was more about displays explaining the sauce than showing it being made, save for the last buildings where mixing vats and bottling lines sat behind plexiglass.&nbsp; I wanted to see a bit more action. Maybe we would’ve gotten more out of the guided tour.&nbsp; The tasting bar at the Tabasco store, though, was worth the stop. We came away with a couple of bottles that we hadn’t seen in grocery stores back home.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Walking Around Lafayette</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Lafayette is a nice town. It has a walkable city center core with the requisite upscale coffee joints and small sundry shops. We walked past <a href=\"https://www.popspoboys.com/\">Pop’s Poboys</a>, looked back at the menu through the window, turned around, and walked in. We might have found a more “authentic” po-boy place, but Pop’s had an interesting menu -- the classics plus some new twists -- and it was there and we were hungry. It was a solid choice.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4876,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_8960-EDIT.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_8960-EDIT-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Sticker on a window reading “2022 Buy Leauxcal,” with smaller text saying “Festival supported by local businesses,” above a sign that reads “No Public Restrooms.”\" class=\"wp-image-4876\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Cajun \"Buy Local\" Campaign</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Lafayette leans hard into its Cajun heritage; its role as the main city of Acadiana. About 2½ miles from downtown, along Bayou Vermilion, is <a href=\"https://bayouvermiliondistrict.org/vermilionville/\">Vermilionville Historic Village</a>. It’s an outdoor “living history” museum with restored houses, costumed interpreters doing craft demonstrations, recreating what daily life looked like in this corner of Louisiana between the 1790’s and the 1880’s. It wasn’t crowded; we could take our time.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Walking through one of the houses, I was surprised to find an interpreter sitting quietly in the front room doing some quilting. We talked for about 10 minutes about Vermillionville, what brought her there (marriage to a local; she’s originally from Pennsylvania), and her quilting.&nbsp; I’m usually not one for Williamsburg-style reenactments, but I surprised myself by liking Vermillionville. Maybe because it was much more low-key than other “living history” places I’ve visited.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>More Parade Strategy</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We stayed in a bed-and-breakfast about a 5-minute walk from downtown — a big house and a collection of outbuildings that had originally been part of a plantation. Nice-sized room, solid breakfast, but most importantly, it was very conveniently located for parade watching — maybe 2½ blocks from the parade route and right near the start.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>That lined up with the parade strategy — don’t get stuck in the middle of the route. Position yourself either at the start (as we did in Mobile and Fairhope) or right at the end (as we did in New Orleans). The start gets you out before traffic locks up; works best when it\'s just one parade. The end works better when there are multiple krewes stepping off — when there’s a parade of parades.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4870,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"center\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image aligncenter size-large\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_9360-EDIT-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_9360-EDIT-1024x768.jpg\" alt=\"Brightly lit Mardi Gras float in Lafayette at night, with masked riders on two levels tossing throws to people reaching up from the street\" class=\"wp-image-4870\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Lafayette parade float riders launching their throws</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We caught two parades in Lafayette — the kick-off on Friday night and the <a href=\"https://www.kreweofbonaparte.org/\">Krewe of Bonaparte</a> on Saturday night. Bonaparte was definitely the better parade — longer, more interesting floats, more interesting throws. It was also our last parade of the trip, so we weren\'t aggressively going after throws. Most of what we caught came from reflexes and self-defense — putting an arm up to block our face only to have a string of beads wrap around it. We gave away everything we caught to the folks standing beside us. We didn’t need any more; we were already triaging the throws we brought with us from Mobile and New Orleans.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Driving Out to Cajun Country</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Saturday morning, we drove north out of Lafayette to catch the Mardi Gras festivals in Mamou and Eunice. It was about an hour drive to Mamou, mostly through flat fields punctuated by huge ponds, many big enough to have small, one-man shallow-draft paddle wheel boats working them. I guessed they were either rice fields or crawfish ponds. Irene fired up Google and found out it wasn’t an either/or. Farmers raise both in what is really more like a flooded field than a pond. The rice gives the crawfish shade and food, while the crawfish waste fertilizes the rice. Who knew? Reminded me to find a crawfish dinner before heading home.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We didn’t know exactly where in Mamou we were going, but it’s not that big of a town, so we pulled off the highway and parked on a residential sidestreet, and followed a parade of people, coolers, and camp chairs up to the couple of blocks of commercial district and the music stage thrown up across the main drag.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>On our right I saw Fred’s Lounge, a low-slung dive bar that’s supposed to be sorta Ground Zero for the Cajun music revival — at least that’s what the historic plaque bolted on the wall next to the front door says. We walked in, or at least tried to. It was jammed; we couldn’t move. There was a band somewhere in front of us and they sounded great.&nbsp; </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>On any other day, we would’ve stayed. But on this day, we had an alternative. We backed out, grabbed beers from a vendor stand across the street, and stood among the camp chairs to watch <a href=\"https://www.mamouplayboys.com/\">Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys</a> play the street stage in what, given their name, must be their home town. Great music; good weather; cold beer. We made the right call.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:video {\"id\":4878,\"align\":\"center\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-video aligncenter\"><video controls src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_9351.mov\" playsinline></video><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Watching Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys on the street stage in Mamou</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:video -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Hunting Boudin</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>On our first two stops — Mobile and New Orleans — Irene was on a king cake hunt; trying every slice of king cake she could find. But today it was my turn to lead and instead of hunting cake, I was hunting pork. Boudin to be specific.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Boudin is a pork and rice sausage. It’s Acadiana’s version of what a lot of cuisines do with the less glamorous parts of the pig. Hungary has hurka; Thailand has sai krok isan. All a way to use everything but the oink from a butchered pig.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>In Acadiana, boudin isn’t restaurant food. It is grocery store food; gas station food. You walk up to the meat counter and order a link. It comes out of the steamer hot and and you eat it standing at the counter or over the hood of your car in the parking lot, squeezing the meat out of the casing. Or eating it whole if they’ve cooked it right.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>My Boudin Trail research called out <a href=\"https://maps.app.goo.gl/dU9dssT3a4GZkm2s6\">Charlie\'s Meat Market &amp; Grocery</a> in Mamou as a top spot. But Charlie’s closes at noon on Saturdays, so we had to leave before the Mamou Playboys finished their set. Charlie’s isn’t fancy; just a local corner store in a residential neighborhood. We bought a couple of links at the meat counter in the back and walked outside.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4872,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_9349-EDIT-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_9349-EDIT-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Man eating a link of boudin outdoors in front of Charlie’s Meat Market, seated beside a large blue chair decorated for Mardi Gras\" class=\"wp-image-4872\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">There\'s no elegant way to eat boudin</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Between bites, we got talking to a guy loading up a couple of Yeti coolers with packages of frozen, vacuum-packed boudin. “I came over from Texas for Mardi Gras,” he said. “When I told folks I’d be in Mamou, I got buried with the orders for Charlie’s boudin. It’s the best.”&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It was damn good boudin, though right then, I only had a sample size of one. But he looked like he knew his boudin, so I went back in to buy 3 packages and a bag of ice to keep them cold.Another good call. Before my boudin hunt was done, we’d also hit <a href=\"https://www.beststopinscott.com/\">The Best Stop Supermarket</a> in Scott and <a href=\"https://www.billysboudin.com/\">Billy\'s Boudin &amp; Cracklins</a> back in Lafayette. Both were solid, but the Texan was right — Charlie’s was the best.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Next Stop - Pork Cracklins</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Fifteen minutes south of Mamou is Eunice. It\'s bigger than Mamou, so their festivities were more spread out — a bigger music stage at the bottom of the main street, flanked by strings of food trucks; up in the middle of the commercial strip, more food tents set up by a local charity group.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Irene went to check out some of the shops while I made for the food tent — specifically, the guy frying big cubes of pork in what looked like a barrel cut lengthways in half, rendering them down into pork cracklins. We talked while he stirred the pork in the bubbling fat with a long metal spatula. He’d been volunteering at this festival for 10, maybe 15 years. When that batch was done, I bought some — a paper bag of salty, hot cubes of fried pork fat, meat, and skin. Then I walked into the nearest bar and bought a cold beer to cut the fat; kind of a statin stand-in to give my cholesterol levels a fighting chance.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:video {\"id\":4886} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-video\"><video controls src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_8964.mov\" playsinline></video><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Frying Up Some Chunks of Pork</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:video -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Heading Home</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We packed our parade throw haul next to the boudin cooler and headed northeast on I-10 toward Nashville — crossing the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atchafalaya_Basin_Bridge\">Atchafalaya Basin Bridge</a>, the third longest bridge in the US, carrying 18 miles of traffic over the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atchafalaya_Basin\">Atchafalaya Swamp</a>. Interesting for the first five minutes; then just flat sky and flat water that wasn’t. It gave me time to think back on this trip that I’d been planning for a couple of years. I got what I wanted from it -- three different ways of celebrating a very unique holiday.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4873,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_8967-EDIT-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_8967-EDIT-300x125.jpg\" alt=\"Piles of colorful Mardi Gras bead necklaces and throws spread across a tabletop and draped over a chair\" class=\"wp-image-4873\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Our growing bead problem</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Mobile and Fairhope felt genuinely local — manageably sized, not over-touristed. Maybe still carrying a bit of a chip on their shoulder for not getting their due as the oldest Mardi Gras in the country.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>New Orleans was New Orleans — the main event, the version that everyone has in their head when they think “Mardi Gras.” Seven years on, the parades didn’t feel as grand as I remembered them from pre-COVID times. But seeing that my favorite restaurants were still standing and still cranking out good food more than made up for it.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>And then there was Acadiana. Lafayette’s Mardi Gras parades felt a lot like Mobile’s. But experiencing Cajun culture in Lafayette and then in Mamou and Eunice gave us the most local version of Mardi Gras — music stages on small-town main streets, hot boudin from a corner market, pork cracklins in a paper bag. It felt more genuine, less produced.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I’m glad I waited until after retirement to do this trip. I was able to give this trip the time it needed to breathe — to spend enough time to appreciate each place’s celebrations on its own terms.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:separator -->\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity\"/>\n<!-- /wp:separator -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Recommendations for Lafayette and Acadiana</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Food &amp; Drink</strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.popspoboys.com/\">Pop\'s Poboys</a> — Solid poboy menu, classics and twists; right downtown</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://maps.app.goo.gl/dU9dssT3a4GZkm2s6\">Charlie\'s Meat Market &amp; Grocery</a>, Mamou — Best boudin on the Boudin Trail; arrive before noon on Saturdays</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.billysboudin.com/\">Billy\'s Boudin &amp; Cracklins</a>, Lafayette — Good cracklins; solid all-around stop</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Culture</strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://bayouvermiliondistrict.org/vermilionville/\">Vermilionville Historic Village</a> —  Quick drive from downtown if you\'re into history</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Fred\'s Lounge, Mamou — Show up on Saturday morning for live music</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Gulf Coast Mardi Gras Road Trip Stop 3 — Lafayette &amp; Acadiana','Final stop on my Gulf Coast Mardi Gras road trip is Lafayette and Cajun Country. Parades and Cajun history in Lafayette; small-town festivals and local music in Mamou and Eunice; following the boudin trail with fresh pork cracklins at the end.','inherit','closed','closed','','4869-revision-v1','','','2026-04-14 11:13:01','2026-04-14 17:13:01','',4869,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4891',0,'revision','',0),
(4893,1,'2026-04-14 12:34:41','2026-04-14 18:34:41','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><em>This trip had been knocking around the back of my mind for a while. And for me, that’s a big piece of retirement travel — finally getting on with the travel I’ve thought about but never found the time to do. LIke this road trip to experience Mardi Gras in </em><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2026/02/25/gulf-coast-mardi-gras-road-trip-stop-1-mobile/\"><em>Mobile</em></a><em>, </em><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2026/03/10/gulf-coast-mardi-gras-road-trip-stop-2-new-orleans/\"><em>New Orleans</em></a><em>, and Cajun Country.</em><br></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4810,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Screenshot-2026-02-25-at-8.23.12-AM.png\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Screenshot-2026-02-25-at-8.23.12-AM-300x300.png\" alt=\"Google Map screenshot with a thick blue line defining a road trip\" class=\"wp-image-4810\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">The Gulf Coast Mardi Gras Road Trip Loop</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>My high school geography class should’ve prepared me for how flat everything is along the Gulf Coast, but it didn’t. On Thursday morning, driving from New Orleans to Lafayette along US 90, the land was flat and the sky was big. And driving the roads outside of Lafayette, I was struck by how much it reminded me of the rural Midwest — places like downstate Illinois and Indiana where, once you get off the interstates, you find long stretches of flat fields punctuated by stands of farm trees and the occasional small town. The accent is different but the landscape, when you\'ve pushed up from the coastal bayous, is a lot the same.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Driving through towns on US 90 rather than around them on I-10, it was clear how important the off-shore oil business is here. I didn\'t see any of the big oil names like Exxon or Chevron. Instead, it was their smaller suppliers — supply yards stacked with lengths of metal tubing, shops doing pump repairs, dockyards along the rivers that the US 90 bridges arch high over.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Tabasco Detour</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>A little over two hours into our drive, we took a quick detour to Avery Island to tour the Tabasco plant. It was nice — a quiet campus of buildings. We did the <a href=\"https://www.tabasco.com/visit-avery-island/tabasco-tour/\">self-guided tour</a>; we hadn’t planned far enough ahead for the guided tour. The standout was the barrel house, a rickhouse of pepper mash-filled barrels covered in salt. There was a definite pepper \"tang\" in the air.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4875,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"center\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image aligncenter size-large\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_8945-EDIT-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_8945-EDIT-1024x768.jpg\" alt=\"Long interior view of the Tabasco barrel warehouse on Avery Island, with rows of wooden barrels stretching into the distance under a metal roof\" class=\"wp-image-4875\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">The source of the pepper \"tang\" in the air</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>But if I read the placards correctly, most of their pepper growing and mashing now takes place at contract farms in Latin America and Africa. Compared to other small plant tours I’ve taken — whiskey distilleries, the Louisville Slugger factory — this one was more about displays explaining the sauce than showing it being made, save for the last buildings where mixing vats and bottling lines sat behind plexiglass.&nbsp; I wanted to see a bit more action. Maybe we would’ve gotten more out of the guided tour.&nbsp; The tasting bar at the Tabasco store, though, was worth the stop. We came away with a couple of bottles that we hadn’t seen in grocery stores back home.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Walking Around Lafayette</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Lafayette is a nice town. It has a walkable city center core with the requisite upscale coffee joints and small sundry shops. We walked past <a href=\"https://www.popspoboys.com/\">Pop’s Poboys</a>, looked back at the menu through the window, turned around, and walked in. We might have found a more “authentic” po-boy place, but Pop’s had an interesting menu -- the classics plus some new twists -- and it was there and we were hungry. It was a solid choice.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4876,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_8960-EDIT.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_8960-EDIT-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Sticker on a window reading “2022 Buy Leauxcal,” with smaller text saying “Festival supported by local businesses,” above a sign that reads “No Public Restrooms.”\" class=\"wp-image-4876\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Cajun \"Buy Local\" Campaign</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Lafayette leans hard into its Cajun heritage; its role as the main city of Acadiana. About 2½ miles from downtown, along Bayou Vermilion, is <a href=\"https://bayouvermiliondistrict.org/vermilionville/\">Vermilionville Historic Village</a>. It’s an outdoor “living history” museum with restored houses, costumed interpreters doing craft demonstrations, recreating what daily life looked like in this corner of Louisiana between the 1790’s and the 1880’s. It wasn’t crowded; we could take our time.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Walking through one of the houses, I was surprised to find an interpreter sitting quietly in the front room doing some quilting. We talked for about 10 minutes about Vermillionville, what brought her there (marriage to a local; she’s originally from Pennsylvania), and her quilting.&nbsp; I’m usually not one for Williamsburg-style reenactments, but I surprised myself by liking Vermillionville. Maybe because it was much more low-key than other “living history” places I’ve visited.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>More Parade Strategy</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We stayed in a bed-and-breakfast about a 5-minute walk from downtown — a big house and a collection of outbuildings that had originally been part of a plantation. Nice-sized room, solid breakfast, but most importantly, it was very conveniently located for parade watching — maybe 2½ blocks from the parade route and right near the start.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>That lined up with the parade strategy — don’t get stuck in the middle of the route. Position yourself either at the start (as we did in Mobile and Fairhope) or right at the end (as we did in New Orleans). The start gets you out before traffic locks up; works best when it\'s just one parade. The end works better when there are multiple krewes stepping off — when there’s a parade of parades.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4870,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"center\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image aligncenter size-large\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_9360-EDIT-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_9360-EDIT-1024x768.jpg\" alt=\"Brightly lit Mardi Gras float in Lafayette at night, with masked riders on two levels tossing throws to people reaching up from the street\" class=\"wp-image-4870\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Lafayette parade float riders launching their throws</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We caught two parades in Lafayette — the kick-off on Friday night and the <a href=\"https://www.kreweofbonaparte.org/\">Krewe of Bonaparte</a> on Saturday night. Bonaparte was definitely the better parade — longer, more interesting floats, more interesting throws. It was also our last parade of the trip, so we weren\'t aggressively going after throws. Most of what we caught came from reflexes and self-defense — putting an arm up to block our face only to have a string of beads wrap around it. We gave away everything we caught to the folks standing beside us. We didn’t need any more; we were already triaging the throws we brought with us from Mobile and New Orleans.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Driving Out to Cajun Country</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Saturday morning, we drove north out of Lafayette to catch the Mardi Gras festivals in Mamou and Eunice. It was about an hour drive to Mamou, mostly through flat fields punctuated by huge ponds, many big enough to have small, one-man shallow-draft paddle wheel boats working them. I guessed they were either rice fields or crawfish ponds. Irene fired up Google and found out it wasn’t an either/or. Farmers raise both in what is really more like a flooded field than a pond. The rice gives the crawfish shade and food, while the crawfish waste fertilizes the rice. Who knew? Reminded me to find a crawfish dinner before heading home.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We didn’t know exactly where in Mamou we were going, but it’s not that big of a town, so we pulled off the highway and parked on a residential sidestreet, and followed a parade of people, coolers, and camp chairs up to the couple of blocks of commercial district and the music stage thrown up across the main drag.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>On our right I saw Fred’s Lounge, a low-slung dive bar that’s supposed to be sorta Ground Zero for the Cajun music revival — at least that’s what the historic plaque bolted on the wall next to the front door says. We walked in, or at least tried to. It was jammed; we couldn’t move. There was a band somewhere in front of us and they sounded great.&nbsp; </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>On any other day, we would’ve stayed. But on this day, we had an alternative. We backed out, grabbed beers from a vendor stand across the street, and stood among the camp chairs to watch <a href=\"https://www.mamouplayboys.com/\">Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys</a> play the street stage in what, given their name, must be their home town. Great music; good weather; cold beer. We made the right call.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:video {\"id\":4878,\"align\":\"center\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-video aligncenter\"><video controls src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_9351.mov\" playsinline></video><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Watching Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys on the street stage in Mamou</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:video -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Hunting Boudin</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>On our first two stops — Mobile and New Orleans — Irene was on a king cake hunt; trying every slice of king cake she could find. But today it was my turn to lead and instead of hunting cake, I was hunting pork. Boudin to be specific.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Boudin is a pork and rice sausage. It’s Acadiana’s version of what a lot of cuisines do with the less glamorous parts of the pig. Hungary has hurka; Thailand has sai krok isan. All a way to use everything but the oink from a butchered pig.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>In Acadiana, boudin isn’t restaurant food. It is grocery store food; gas station food. You walk up to the meat counter and order a link. It comes out of the steamer hot and and you eat it standing at the counter or over the hood of your car in the parking lot, squeezing the meat out of the casing. Or eating it whole if they’ve cooked it right.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>My Boudin Trail research called out <a href=\"https://maps.app.goo.gl/dU9dssT3a4GZkm2s6\">Charlie\'s Meat Market &amp; Grocery</a> in Mamou as a top spot. But Charlie’s closes at noon on Saturdays, so we had to leave before the Mamou Playboys finished their set. Charlie’s isn’t fancy; just a local corner store in a residential neighborhood. We bought a couple of links at the meat counter in the back and walked outside.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4872,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_9349-EDIT-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_9349-EDIT-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Man eating a link of boudin outdoors in front of Charlie’s Meat Market, seated beside a large blue chair decorated for Mardi Gras\" class=\"wp-image-4872\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">There\'s no elegant way to eat boudin</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Between bites, we got talking to a guy loading up a couple of Yeti coolers with packages of frozen, vacuum-packed boudin. “I came over from Texas for Mardi Gras,” he said. “When I told folks I’d be in Mamou, I got buried with the orders for Charlie’s boudin. It’s the best.”&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It was damn good boudin, though right then, I only had a sample size of one. But he looked like he knew his boudin, so I went back in to buy 3 packages and a bag of ice to keep them cold.Another good call. Before my boudin hunt was done, we’d also hit <a href=\"https://www.beststopinscott.com/\">The Best Stop Supermarket</a> in Scott and <a href=\"https://www.billysboudin.com/\">Billy\'s Boudin &amp; Cracklins</a> back in Lafayette. Both were solid, but the Texan was right — Charlie’s was the best.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Next Stop - Pork Cracklins</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Fifteen minutes south of Mamou is Eunice. It\'s bigger than Mamou, so their festivities were more spread out — a bigger music stage at the bottom of the main street, flanked by strings of food trucks; up in the middle of the commercial strip, more food tents set up by a local charity group.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Irene went to check out some of the shops while I made for the food tent — specifically, the guy frying big cubes of pork in what looked like a barrel cut lengthways in half, rendering them down into pork cracklins. We talked while he stirred the pork in the bubbling fat with a long metal spatula. He’d been volunteering at this festival for 10, maybe 15 years. When that batch was done, I bought some — a paper bag of salty, hot cubes of fried pork fat, meat, and skin. Then I walked into the nearest bar and bought a cold beer to cut the fat; kind of a statin stand-in to give my cholesterol levels a fighting chance.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:video {\"id\":4886} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-video\"><video controls src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_8964.mov\" playsinline></video><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Frying Up Some Chunks of Pork</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:video -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Heading Home</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We packed our parade throw haul next to the boudin cooler and headed northeast on I-10 toward Nashville — crossing the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atchafalaya_Basin_Bridge\">Atchafalaya Basin Bridge</a>, the third longest bridge in the US, carrying 18 miles of traffic over the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atchafalaya_Basin\">Atchafalaya Swamp</a>. Interesting for the first five minutes; then just flat sky and flat water that wasn’t. It gave me time to think back on this trip that I’d been planning for a couple of years. I got what I wanted from it -- three different ways of celebrating a very unique holiday.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4873,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_8967-EDIT-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/IMG_8967-EDIT-300x125.jpg\" alt=\"Piles of colorful Mardi Gras bead necklaces and throws spread across a tabletop and draped over a chair\" class=\"wp-image-4873\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Our growing bead problem</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Mobile and Fairhope felt genuinely local — manageably sized, not over-touristed. Maybe still carrying a bit of a chip on their shoulder for not getting their due as the oldest Mardi Gras in the country.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>New Orleans was New Orleans — the main event, the version that everyone has in their head when they think “Mardi Gras.” Seven years on, the parades didn’t feel as grand as I remembered them from pre-COVID times. But seeing that my favorite restaurants were still standing and still cranking out good food more than made up for it.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>And then there was Acadiana. Lafayette’s Mardi Gras parades felt a lot like Mobile’s. But experiencing Cajun culture in Lafayette and then in Mamou and Eunice gave us the most local version of Mardi Gras — music stages on small-town main streets, hot boudin from a corner market, pork cracklins in a paper bag. It felt more genuine, less produced.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I’m glad I waited until after retirement to do this trip. I was able to give this trip the time it needed to breathe — to spend enough time to appreciate each place’s celebrations on its own terms.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:separator -->\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity\"/>\n<!-- /wp:separator -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Recommendations for Lafayette and Acadiana</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Food &amp; Drink</strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.popspoboys.com/\">Pop\'s Poboys</a> — Solid poboy menu, classics and twists; right downtown</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://maps.app.goo.gl/dU9dssT3a4GZkm2s6\">Charlie\'s Meat Market &amp; Grocery</a>, Mamou — Best boudin on the Boudin Trail; arrive before noon on Saturdays</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.billysboudin.com/\">Billy\'s Boudin &amp; Cracklins</a>, Lafayette — Good cracklins; solid all-around stop</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Culture</strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://bayouvermiliondistrict.org/vermilionville/\">Vermilionville Historic Village</a> —  Quick drive from downtown if you\'re into history</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Fred\'s Lounge, Mamou — Show up on Saturday morning for live music</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.mamouplayboys.com/events/\">Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys</a> — Check their <em>Events</em>  page to see if you can catch them live</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:separator -->\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity\"/>\n<!-- /wp:separator -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Check out the first two road trip stops —</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2026/02/25/gulf-coast-mardi-gras-road-trip-stop-1-mobile/\" title=\"\">Mobile</a></strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4806,\"sizeSlug\":\"thumbnail\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-thumbnail\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/9444839F-9B5F-4F03-836B-B7146A67827C_Original.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/9444839F-9B5F-4F03-836B-B7146A67827C_Original-150x150.jpg\" alt=\"Brightly lit Mardi Gras float with a giant neon bird and castle walls rolling past a glowing church steeple at night\" class=\"wp-image-4806\"/></a></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2026/03/10/gulf-coast-mardi-gras-road-trip-stop-2-new-orleans/\" title=\"\"><strong>New Orleans</strong></a></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4835,\"sizeSlug\":\"thumbnail\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-thumbnail\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_0137.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_0137-150x150.jpg\" alt=\"Mardi Gras bead necklaces in purple, green, and gold draped along a black iron fence outside a house\" class=\"wp-image-4835\"/></a></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Gulf Coast Mardi Gras Road Trip Stop 3 — Lafayette &amp; Acadiana','Final stop on my Gulf Coast Mardi Gras road trip is Lafayette and Cajun Country. Parades and Cajun history in Lafayette; small-town festivals and local music in Mamou and Eunice; following the boudin trail with fresh pork cracklins at the end.','inherit','closed','closed','','4869-revision-v1','','','2026-04-14 12:34:41','2026-04-14 18:34:41','',4869,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4893',0,'revision','',0),
(4903,1,'2026-05-18 09:30:00','2026-05-18 14:30:00','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We were at the end of a BNA runway, waiting for the first leg of our trip to Lyon to take off, when the notifications hit my phone. First <a href=\"https://flighty.com/\" title=\"\">Flighty</a>, then United’s own app both lit up red. Our Chicago-Paris flight had been cancelled. Not delayed — cancelled. The plane broke, or as United put it “taking the plane out of service to address a maintenance issue.” Oh, and they’re really sorry. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>So for now, as the plane rotated off the runway, all we knew was that we were going to O’Hare.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>When the App Offers You “Stupid Travel”</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>My old road warrior reflexes kicked in. I paid United\'s $8 for in-flight WiFi and started working the problem. The United app’s rebooking options were all variations on a single itinerary — ORD-SFO-CDG the next day. In other words, “We’ve cancelled your 8-hour flight to Paris and instead we suggest you fly 4 hours west to San Francisco, and then 11 hours east to Paris.”&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Still, I booked it. I needed some sort of backup because I could see even these options disappearing with each screen refresh. More road warrior reflexes — grab the least-bad thing you can see while you work on something better. A bad confirmed seat is still better than a theoretical good seat.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Push Back. Always Push Back.</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Then I hit every non-voice support channel I could find simultaneously: United’s in-app chat, plus a flaming Twitter/X post designed to get the attention of United’s social media team. Which it did.  Once we touched down at ORD, I dialed the Premier Desk and was talking to a live agent before I was off the jet bridge.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4906,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-04-19-at-9.55.46-AM.png\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-04-19-at-9.55.46-AM-216x300.png\" alt=\"Screenshot of a tweet by @mpeacock complaining that United Airlines cancelled his ORD-CDG flight while his connecting flight was on the runway at BNA, with a reply from the official United Airlines account asking him to send a DM with his confirmation number\" class=\"wp-image-4906\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">1.9K views got United\'s attention — sometimes a flaming tweet is its own customer service channel</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>So now I had three conversations going — app chat, social media, and phone — and in each one I pushed back on ORD-SFO-CDG routing. Every agent at the other end immediately agreed it made no sense. Not one of them defended it. They got us seats on the next day\'s direct ORD-CDG flight which was showing as waitlist-only in the app. A human can open seats that the rebooking algorithm can’t — or won’t — touch. And when they do it, always say thank you.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>In parallel, Irene was pushing too. Her phone agent seemed to lean into it a bit harder and found something more aggressive: ORD-IAD-DUB on United, then DUB-FRA-CDG on Lufthansa. I paused for more than a moment. Four flights? That’s way too many points of failure. But it <em>would</em> get us into Paris the next evening, cutting our delay from a full day to maybe six hours.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>So, why not?&nbsp; Famous last words.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We raced over to the ORD-IAD gate and waited while Irene’s phone agent finalized the changes so the gate agent could check us in. We were the last ones boarding, so of course there was no overhead space left. They took our bags and checked them through to Dublin.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Status Still Matters</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>This was one of those times that reminds you airline status is more than just an earlier boarding group. It’s a lever to get your trip back on the track.&nbsp;&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4908,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_0736-scaled.jpeg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_0736-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"United MileagePlus Premier Gold 1 Million Miler card resting on a black carry-on bag with a green luggage tag behind it\" class=\"wp-image-4908\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">When the app gives up, airline status can still get a human to work the problem</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Every phone and chat agent opened with: \"Thank you for being a 1 million mile flyer\"&nbsp; and then worked with me as long as I needed. I never felt rushed; never sensed there was a timer flashing red on their screen, telling them to wrap it up and pick up the next call.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>At the ORD-IAD gate, I could see status indicators next to our names on the gate agent\'s screen and heard him mention our status when he called to get seats opened up for us.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Does status solve everything? No, especially not a broken plane. But does it help when your trip goes sideways, seats are scarce, and you need a human to do something the app won’t do? Yes, absolutely.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>The Second Plane Also Broke</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We landed at Dulles early; which felt like a small win that let us walk, not run to our next gate. We boarded the IAD-DUB flight, settled in, and then waited to take off. And then waited some more.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>The pilot finally announced what we all kinda knew; it\'s a maintenance issue. This time, it was something about the pilots’ cabin temperature regulation not working. Which I am very much in favor of fixing. I want the pilots on my trans-Atlantic flights to be as comfortable and focused as possible.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4907,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/MilkRunCollage.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/MilkRunCollage-300x189.jpg\" alt=\"Flight itinerary screenshot showing a Washington Dulles to Dublin to Frankfurt to Paris routing.\" class=\"wp-image-4907\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">The milk run that looked clever right up until the IAD-DUB plane broke</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>As we sat at the gate with the door open and maintenance crews moving in and out, I watched our Dublin-to-Frankfurt connection time shrink. Then disappear. I started searching for other DUB-CDG options but came up empty. Meanwhile the gate agent came on and told us that, by law, given the delay, they had to let passengers deplane and wait in the terminal. This was a decision point.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Stay on the plane and risk getting stranded in Dublin, farther from Paris with fewer options? Or get off here, stop the madness, and reset? I found an IAD-CDG flight leaving the next day, so we got off.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We told our tale of woe to the gate agent, who cancelled us off the Dublin flight and had our bags pulled. The gate agent gave us hotel and meal vouchers while I had a phone agent lock in the IAD-CDG flight. We finally sat down in baggage claim and caught a quick breath before our bags popped out on the carousel in front of us.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Give Credit Where Credit’s Due</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Waiting for the hotel shuttle, thinking back over the past 9 hours — every single customer-facing United employee we dealt with was helpful, patient, and genuinely sympathetic. Not one was rude, or tried to brush us off, or hid behind “the system won’t let me.” They all tried their best.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I don\'t know how much of that was training, how much was because of my status; but it mattered. It took a bit of the edge off of what was a very lousy day. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>One More Problem: French Trains</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We got to our hotel room at 12:30am but I still wasn’t finished. Our original itinerary was BNA-ORD-CDG on United, and then a 2-hour TGV ride to Lyon. But arriving a day later meant rebooking the train too.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I fire up the <a href=\"https://www.sncf-connect.com/\" title=\"\">SNCF Connect</a> app and get… nothing. OK, it’s early Sunday morning in France, but I didn’t think the French 35-hour work week applied to their mobile apps too.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4911,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_0402.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_0402-173x300.jpg\" alt=\"SNCF Connect screenshot showing multiple Paris Charles de Gaulle to Lyon Part-Dieu TGV options marked “Train fully booked.”\" class=\"wp-image-4911\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">The French train app added its own plot twist: every direct CDG-to-Lyon train was fully booked</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Luckily, their web site decided to work the weekend and I started down the rebooking path — until I couldn’t go any further. Every CDG-Lyon train was sold out, from the noon train I was trying to rebook all the way through the last train at 8pm. A quick look at Google Maps told me the alternative — renting a car — would be a 5-6-hour trip. This just keeps getting better.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Back to the SNCF web site. I looked at the noon train’s route. One intermediate stop — EuroDisney. Maybe that was the problem; families flying in that morning have bought up all the seats. So I broke up my search — CDG-to-EuroDisney, then EuroDisney-to-Lyon. Found seats on an earlier train to EuroDisney and then seats on the noon train to Lyon. It would mean hanging around the train station for 50 minutes, but way better than 5 hours behind a rental car wheel. And maybe they’d have some decent croissants.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>But what if I booked both legs separately but on the same train?  Yup, it worked. CDG-to EuroDisney and EuroDisney-to-Lyon, all on the noon train. Why couldn’t I book it straight through as one trip? I didn’t know and was too tired to care. I just wanted to turn off the light and end this day.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>What I’d Do Differently</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I didn’t need hindsight to know that we should’ve cut our losses in Chicago and taken the next day’s direct flight to Paris. The ORD-IAD-DUB-FRA-CDG milk run had too many failure points and I knew it. It would’ve been much smarter to burn United’s vouchers on a downtown hotel, a couple of cocktails, and a good meal.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Note to self — you gotta break those old stupid travel reflexes.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Silver Lining: Trips to Udvar-Hazy and Ocelot Brewing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>That said, we had a day to kill around Dulles, and we used it well.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4913,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_2788-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_2788-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Aircraft hanging from the arched ceiling inside the Smithsonian Udvar-Hazy Center near Dulles Airport\" class=\"wp-image-4913\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">A forced layover at Dulles turned into a long-overdue visit to the Udvar-Hazy Center</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>First stop: the <a href=\"https://airandspace.si.edu/visit/udvar-hazy-center\" title=\"\">Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center</a>, the massive Chantilly, Virginia annex of the Smithsonian\'s National Air and Space Museum. It was a quick Uber ride from our hotel, and I’d always wanted to visit. But for all the times I’ve been through or around Dulles, I never could make it happen. Enormous hangars packed with aircraft and spacecraft — an SR-71, the Space Shuttle Discovery, a Concorde. I loved it. Figure a solid 2 hours if you like to read all the placards.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Then we continued our clockwise lap around IAD to <a href=\"https://ocelotbrewing.com/\" title=\"\">Ocelot Brewing</a>. Great beer, great place tucked away in some generic office park. The Uber driver asked us “How’d you find this place?”&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>“Years of practice,” I replied.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Coming Next: Lyon, Eventually</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>The good news is that this was not the whole trip. It was just the opening act.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4914,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_0413.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_0413-300x128.jpg\" alt=\"Flight status screenshot for United flight UA 915 showing a delayed departure and estimated arrival\" class=\"wp-image-4914\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">One last delay before we got off the ground for France</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Fate did give us one last head fake, though. Walking up to the gate for our IAD-CDG flight, we hear the agent announce “We’re going to delay boarding while the paramedics take care of an ill inbound passenger.” But when it was all done, we left just 30 minutes late and the pilot made up half of that on the flight over.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>No problems at CDG passport control despite the <a href=\"https://www.visahq.com/news/2026-05-09/fr/paris-cdg-passport-control-queues-lengthen-as-victory-day-rush-meets-new-ees-checks/\" title=\"\">horror stories circulating </a>of huge delays caused by the new EU requirement to collect biometrics — face photos and fingerprints — from non-EU passengers. I think the French just ignored it. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>And then my pieced-together TGV itinerary worked without a hitch. But I didn’t let myself relax until we’d stepped into our hotel room in Lyon and laid down for a 20-minute nap.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','The Long Way to Lyon','Two cancelled planes, four airline agents, and one creative French train booking — this is how we finally made it to Lyon. Here\'s what millions of miles of travel experience taught us about pushing back, staying calm, and finding the silver lining when your trip falls apart at the gate.','publish','open','open','','the-long-way-to-lyon','','','2026-05-18 09:38:28','2026-05-18 14:38:28','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4903',0,'post','',1),
(4904,1,'2026-05-17 09:49:10','2026-05-17 15:49:10','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We were at the end of a BNA runway, waiting for the first leg of our trip to Lyon to take off, when the notifications hit my phone. First <a href=\"https://flighty.com/\" title=\"\">Flighty</a>, then United’s own app both lighting up red. Our Chicago-Paris flight had been cancelled. Not delayed — cancelled. The plane broke, or as United put it “taking the plane out of service to address a maintenance issue.” Oh, and they’re really sorry. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>So for now, as the plane rotated off the runway, all we knew was that we were going to O’Hare.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>When the App Offers You “Stupid Travel”</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>My old road warrior reflexes kicked in. I paid United\'s $8 for in-flight WiFi and started working the problem. The United app’s rebooking options were all variations on a single itinerary — ORD-SFO-CDG the next day. In other words, “We’ve cancelled your 8-hour flight to Paris and instead we suggest you fly 4 hours west to San Francisco, and then 11 hours east to Paris.”&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Still, I booked it. I needed some sort of backup because I could see even these options disappearing with each screen refresh. More road warrior reflexes — grab the least-bad thing you can see while you work on something better. A bad confirmed seat is still better than a theoretical good seat.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Push Back. Always Push Back. But Don’t Be a Jerk.</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Then I hit every non-voice support channel I could find simultaneously: United’s in-app chat, plus a flaming Twitter/X post designed to get the attention of United’s social media team. Which it did.&nbsp; Once we touched down at ORD, I dialed the Premier Desk and was talking to a live agent before I was off the jetbridge.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>So now I had three conversations going — app chat, social media, and phone — and in each one I pushed back on ORD-SFO-CDG routing. Every agent at the other end immediately agreed it made no sense. Not one of them defended it. They got us seats on the next day\'s direct ORD-CDG flight which was showing as waitlist-only in the app. A human can open seats that the rebooking algorithm can’t — or won’t — touch. And when they do it, always say thank you.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>In parallel, Irene was pushing too. Her phone agent seemed to lean into it a bit harder and found something more aggressive: ORD-IAD-DUB on United, then DUB-FRA-CDG on Lufthansa. I paused for more than a moment. Four flights? That’s way too many points of failure. But it <em>would</em> get us into Paris the next evening, cutting our delay from a full day to maybe six hours.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>So, why not?&nbsp; Famous last words.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We raced over to the ORD-IAD gate and waited while Irene’s phone agent finalized the changes so the gate agent could check us in. We were the last ones boarding, so of course there was no overhead space left. They took our bags and checked them through to Dublin.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Status Still Matters</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>This was one of those times that reminds you airline status is more than just an earlier boarding group. It’s a lever to get your trip back on the track.&nbsp;&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Every phone and chat agent opened with: \"Thank you for being a 1 million mile flyer\"&nbsp; and then worked with me as long as I needed. I never felt rushed; never sensed there was a timer flashing red on their screen, telling them to wrap it up and pick up the next call.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>At the ORD-IAD gate, I could see status indicators next to our names on the gate agent\'s screen and heard him mention our status when he called to get seats opened up for us.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Does status solve everything? No, especially not a broken plane. But does it help when your trip goes sideways, seats are scarce, and you need a human to do something the app won’t do? Yes, absolutely.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>The Second Plane Also Broke</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We landed at Dulles early; which felt like a small win that let us walk, not run to our next gate. We boarded the IAD-DUB flight, settled in, and then waited to take off. And then waited some more.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>The pilot finally announced what we all kinda knew; it\'s a maintenance issue. This time, it was something about the pilots’ cabin temperature regulation not working. Which, once again, I am very much in favor of fixing. I want the pilots on my trans-Atlantic flights to be as comfortable and focused as possible.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>As we sat at the gate with the door open and maintenance crews moving in and out, I watched our Dublin-to-Frankfurt connection time shrink. Then disappear. I started searching for other DUB-CDG options but came up empty. Meanwhile the gate agent came on and told us that, by law, given the delay, they had to let passengers deplane and wait in the terminal. This was a decision point.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Stay on the plane and risk getting stranded in Dublin, farther from Paris with fewer options? Or get off here, stop the madness, and reset? I found an IAD-CDG flight leaving the next day, so we got off.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We told our tale of woe to the gate agent, who cancelled us off the Dublin flight and had our bags pulled. The gate agent gave us hotel and meal vouchers while I had a phone agent lock in the next day’s IAD-CDG flight. We finally sat down in baggage claim and caught a quick breath before our bags popped out on the carousel in front of us.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Give Credit Where Credit’s Due</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Waiting for the hotel shuttle, thinking back over the past 9 hours — every single customer-facing United employee we dealt with was helpful, patient, and genuinely sympathetic. Not one was rude, or tried to brush us off, or hid behind “the system won’t let me.” They all tried their best.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I don\'t know how much of that is training, how much was because of my status; but it mattered. It took a bit of the edge off of what was a very lousy day.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>One More Problem: French Trains</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We got to our hotel room at 12:30am but I still wasn’t finished. Our original itinerary was BNA-ORD-CDG on United, and then a 2-hour TGV ride to Lyon. But arriving a day later meant rebooking the train too.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I fire up the <a href=\"https://www.sncf-connect.com/\" title=\"\">SNCF Connect</a> app and get… nothing. OK, it’s early Sunday morning in France, but I didn’t think the French 35-hour work week applied to their mobile apps too. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Luckily, their web site decided to work the weekend and I started down the rebooking path — until I couldn’t go any further. Every CDG-Lyon train was sold out, from the noon train I was trying to rebook all the way through the last train at 8pm. A quick look at Google Maps told me the alternative — renting a car — would be a 5-6-hour trip. This just keeps getting better.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Back to the SNCF web site. I looked at the noon train’s route. One intermediate stop — EuroDisney. Maybe that was the problem; families flying in that morning have bought up all the seats. So I broke up my search — CDG-to-EuroDisney, then EuroDisney-to-Lyon. Found seats on an earlier train to EuroDisney and then seats on the noon train to Lyon. It would mean hanging around the train station for 50 minutes, but way better than 5 hours behind a rental car wheel. And maybe they’d have some decent croissants.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>But now what if I booked both legs separately but on the same train?&nbsp; Yup, it worked. CDG-to EuroDisney and EuroDisney-to-Lyon, all on the noon train. Why couldn’t I book it straight through as one trip? I didn’t know and was too tired to care. I just wanted to turn off the light and end this day.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>What I’d Do Differently</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I didn’t need hindsight to know that we should’ve cut our losses in Chicago and taken the next day’s direct flight to Paris. The ORD-IAD-DUB-FRA-CDG milk run had too many failure points and I knew it. It would’ve been much smarter to burn United’s vouchers on a downtown hotel, a couple of cocktails, and a good meal.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Note to self — you gotta break those old stupid travel reflexes.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Silver Lining: Trips to Udvar-Hazy and Ocelot Brewing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>That said, we had a day to kill around Dulles, and we used it well.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>First stop: the <a href=\"https://airandspace.si.edu/visit/udvar-hazy-center\" title=\"\">Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center</a>, the massive Chantilly, Virginia annex of the Smithsonian\'s National Air and Space Museum. It was a quick Uber ride from our hotel, and I’d always wanted to visit. But for all the times I’ve been through or around Dulles, I never could make it happen. Enormous hangars packed with aircraft and spacecraft — an SR-71, the Space Shuttle Discovery, a Concorde. I loved it. Figure a solid 2 hours if you like to read all the placards.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Then we continued our clockwise lap around IAD to <a href=\"https://ocelotbrewing.com/\" title=\"\">Ocelot Brewing</a>. Great beer, great place tucked away in some generic office park. The Uber driver asked us “How’d you find this place?” </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>“Years of practice,” I replied.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Coming Next: Lyon, Eventually</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>The good news is that this was not the whole trip. It was just the opening act.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Fate did give us one last head fake, though. Walking up to the gate for our IAD-CDG flight, we hear the agent announce “We’re going to delay boarding while the paramedics take care of an ill inbound passenger.” But when it was all done, we left just 30 minutes late and the pilot made up half of that on the flight over.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>No problems at CDG passport control despite the <a href=\"https://www.visahq.com/news/2026-05-09/fr/paris-cdg-passport-control-queues-lengthen-as-victory-day-rush-meets-new-ees-checks/\" title=\"\">horror stories circulating </a>of huge delays caused by the new EU requirement to collect biometrics — face photos and fingerprints — from all non-EU passengers. I think the French just ignored it. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>And then my pieced-together TGV itinerary worked without a hitch. But I didn’t let myself relax until we’d stepped into our hotel room in Lyon and laid down for a 20-minute nap.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','The Long Winding Way to Lyon','Two cancelled planes, four airline agents, and one very creative French train booking — this is how we finally made it to Lyon. Here\'s what a million miles of travel experience taught us about pushing back, staying calm, and finding the silver lining when your trip falls apart at the gate.','inherit','closed','closed','','4903-revision-v1','','','2026-05-17 09:49:10','2026-05-17 15:49:10','',4903,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4904',0,'revision','',0),
(4905,1,'2026-05-17 10:04:54','2026-05-17 16:04:54','','IMG_0732-EDIT','Solid advice under any circumstances. Especially this one.','inherit','open','closed','','img_0732-edit','','','2026-05-17 11:01:09','2026-05-17 17:01:09','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_0732-EDIT.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(4906,1,'2026-05-17 10:32:31','2026-05-17 16:32:31','','Screenshot 2026-04-19 at 9.55.46 AM','1.9K views got United\'s attention — sometimes a well-aimed tweet is its own customer service channel','inherit','open','closed','','screenshot-2026-04-19-at-9-55-46-am','','','2026-05-17 11:07:36','2026-05-17 17:07:36','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-04-19-at-9.55.46-AM.png',0,'attachment','image/png',0),
(4907,1,'2026-05-17 10:35:30','2026-05-17 16:35:30','','MilkRunCollage','The milk run that looked clever right up until the second airplane broke','inherit','open','closed','','milkruncollage','','','2026-05-17 21:48:03','2026-05-18 02:48:03','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/MilkRunCollage.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(4908,1,'2026-05-17 10:42:08','2026-05-17 16:42:08','','IMG_0736','When the app gives up, airline status can still get a human to work the problem','inherit','open','closed','','img_0736','','','2026-05-17 11:02:52','2026-05-17 17:02:52','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_0736.jpeg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(4910,1,'2026-05-17 10:43:35','2026-05-17 16:43:35','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We were at the end of a BNA runway, waiting for the first leg of our trip to Lyon to take off, when the notifications hit my phone. First <a href=\"https://flighty.com/\" title=\"\">Flighty</a>, then United’s own app both lighting up red. Our Chicago-Paris flight had been cancelled. Not delayed — cancelled. The plane broke, or as United put it “taking the plane out of service to address a maintenance issue.” Oh, and they’re really sorry. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>So for now, as the plane rotated off the runway, all we knew was that we were going to O’Hare.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>When the App Offers You “Stupid Travel”</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>My old road warrior reflexes kicked in. I paid United\'s $8 for in-flight WiFi and started working the problem. The United app’s rebooking options were all variations on a single itinerary — ORD-SFO-CDG the next day. In other words, “We’ve cancelled your 8-hour flight to Paris and instead we suggest you fly 4 hours west to San Francisco, and then 11 hours east to Paris.”&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Still, I booked it. I needed some sort of backup because I could see even these options disappearing with each screen refresh. More road warrior reflexes — grab the least-bad thing you can see while you work on something better. A bad confirmed seat is still better than a theoretical good seat.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Push Back. Always Push Back. But Don’t Be a Jerk.</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Then I hit every non-voice support channel I could find simultaneously: United’s in-app chat, plus a flaming Twitter/X post designed to get the attention of United’s social media team. Which it did.&nbsp; Once we touched down at ORD, I dialed the Premier Desk and was talking to a live agent before I was off the jetbridge.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4906,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-04-19-at-9.55.46-AM.png\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-04-19-at-9.55.46-AM-216x300.png\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-4906\"/></a></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>So now I had three conversations going — app chat, social media, and phone — and in each one I pushed back on ORD-SFO-CDG routing. Every agent at the other end immediately agreed it made no sense. Not one of them defended it. They got us seats on the next day\'s direct ORD-CDG flight which was showing as waitlist-only in the app. A human can open seats that the rebooking algorithm can’t — or won’t — touch. And when they do it, always say thank you.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>In parallel, Irene was pushing too. Her phone agent seemed to lean into it a bit harder and found something more aggressive: ORD-IAD-DUB on United, then DUB-FRA-CDG on Lufthansa. I paused for more than a moment. Four flights? That’s way too many points of failure. But it <em>would</em> get us into Paris the next evening, cutting our delay from a full day to maybe six hours.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>So, why not?&nbsp; Famous last words.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We raced over to the ORD-IAD gate and waited while Irene’s phone agent finalized the changes so the gate agent could check us in. We were the last ones boarding, so of course there was no overhead space left. They took our bags and checked them through to Dublin.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Status Still Matters</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>This was one of those times that reminds you airline status is more than just an earlier boarding group. It’s a lever to get your trip back on the track.&nbsp;&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4908,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_0736-scaled.jpeg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_0736-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-4908\"/></a></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Every phone and chat agent opened with: \"Thank you for being a 1 million mile flyer\"&nbsp; and then worked with me as long as I needed. I never felt rushed; never sensed there was a timer flashing red on their screen, telling them to wrap it up and pick up the next call.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>At the ORD-IAD gate, I could see status indicators next to our names on the gate agent\'s screen and heard him mention our status when he called to get seats opened up for us.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Does status solve everything? No, especially not a broken plane. But does it help when your trip goes sideways, seats are scarce, and you need a human to do something the app won’t do? Yes, absolutely.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>The Second Plane Also Broke</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We landed at Dulles early; which felt like a small win that let us walk, not run to our next gate. We boarded the IAD-DUB flight, settled in, and then waited to take off. And then waited some more.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>The pilot finally announced what we all kinda knew; it\'s a maintenance issue. This time, it was something about the pilots’ cabin temperature regulation not working. Which, once again, I am very much in favor of fixing. I want the pilots on my trans-Atlantic flights to be as comfortable and focused as possible.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4907,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/MilkRunCollage.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/MilkRunCollage-300x189.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-4907\"/></a></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>As we sat at the gate with the door open and maintenance crews moving in and out, I watched our Dublin-to-Frankfurt connection time shrink. Then disappear. I started searching for other DUB-CDG options but came up empty. Meanwhile the gate agent came on and told us that, by law, given the delay, they had to let passengers deplane and wait in the terminal. This was a decision point.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Stay on the plane and risk getting stranded in Dublin, farther from Paris with fewer options? Or get off here, stop the madness, and reset? I found an IAD-CDG flight leaving the next day, so we got off.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We told our tale of woe to the gate agent, who cancelled us off the Dublin flight and had our bags pulled. The gate agent gave us hotel and meal vouchers while I had a phone agent lock in the next day’s IAD-CDG flight. We finally sat down in baggage claim and caught a quick breath before our bags popped out on the carousel in front of us.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Give Credit Where Credit’s Due</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Waiting for the hotel shuttle, thinking back over the past 9 hours — every single customer-facing United employee we dealt with was helpful, patient, and genuinely sympathetic. Not one was rude, or tried to brush us off, or hid behind “the system won’t let me.” They all tried their best.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I don\'t know how much of that is training, how much was because of my status; but it mattered. It took a bit of the edge off of what was a very lousy day.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>One More Problem: French Trains</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We got to our hotel room at 12:30am but I still wasn’t finished. Our original itinerary was BNA-ORD-CDG on United, and then a 2-hour TGV ride to Lyon. But arriving a day later meant rebooking the train too.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I fire up the <a href=\"https://www.sncf-connect.com/\" title=\"\">SNCF Connect</a> app and get… nothing. OK, it’s early Sunday morning in France, but I didn’t think the French 35-hour work week applied to their mobile apps too. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Luckily, their web site decided to work the weekend and I started down the rebooking path — until I couldn’t go any further. Every CDG-Lyon train was sold out, from the noon train I was trying to rebook all the way through the last train at 8pm. A quick look at Google Maps told me the alternative — renting a car — would be a 5-6-hour trip. This just keeps getting better.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Back to the SNCF web site. I looked at the noon train’s route. One intermediate stop — EuroDisney. Maybe that was the problem; families flying in that morning have bought up all the seats. So I broke up my search — CDG-to-EuroDisney, then EuroDisney-to-Lyon. Found seats on an earlier train to EuroDisney and then seats on the noon train to Lyon. It would mean hanging around the train station for 50 minutes, but way better than 5 hours behind a rental car wheel. And maybe they’d have some decent croissants.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>But now what if I booked both legs separately but on the same train?&nbsp; Yup, it worked. CDG-to EuroDisney and EuroDisney-to-Lyon, all on the noon train. Why couldn’t I book it straight through as one trip? I didn’t know and was too tired to care. I just wanted to turn off the light and end this day.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>What I’d Do Differently</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I didn’t need hindsight to know that we should’ve cut our losses in Chicago and taken the next day’s direct flight to Paris. The ORD-IAD-DUB-FRA-CDG milk run had too many failure points and I knew it. It would’ve been much smarter to burn United’s vouchers on a downtown hotel, a couple of cocktails, and a good meal.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Note to self — you gotta break those old stupid travel reflexes.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Silver Lining: Trips to Udvar-Hazy and Ocelot Brewing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>That said, we had a day to kill around Dulles, and we used it well.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>First stop: the <a href=\"https://airandspace.si.edu/visit/udvar-hazy-center\" title=\"\">Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center</a>, the massive Chantilly, Virginia annex of the Smithsonian\'s National Air and Space Museum. It was a quick Uber ride from our hotel, and I’d always wanted to visit. But for all the times I’ve been through or around Dulles, I never could make it happen. Enormous hangars packed with aircraft and spacecraft — an SR-71, the Space Shuttle Discovery, a Concorde. I loved it. Figure a solid 2 hours if you like to read all the placards.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Then we continued our clockwise lap around IAD to <a href=\"https://ocelotbrewing.com/\" title=\"\">Ocelot Brewing</a>. Great beer, great place tucked away in some generic office park. The Uber driver asked us “How’d you find this place?” </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>“Years of practice,” I replied.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Coming Next: Lyon, Eventually</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>The good news is that this was not the whole trip. It was just the opening act.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Fate did give us one last head fake, though. Walking up to the gate for our IAD-CDG flight, we hear the agent announce “We’re going to delay boarding while the paramedics take care of an ill inbound passenger.” But when it was all done, we left just 30 minutes late and the pilot made up half of that on the flight over.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>No problems at CDG passport control despite the <a href=\"https://www.visahq.com/news/2026-05-09/fr/paris-cdg-passport-control-queues-lengthen-as-victory-day-rush-meets-new-ees-checks/\" title=\"\">horror stories circulating </a>of huge delays caused by the new EU requirement to collect biometrics — face photos and fingerprints — from all non-EU passengers. I think the French just ignored it. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>And then my pieced-together TGV itinerary worked without a hitch. But I didn’t let myself relax until we’d stepped into our hotel room in Lyon and laid down for a 20-minute nap.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','The Long Winding Way to Lyon','Two cancelled planes, four airline agents, and one very creative French train booking — this is how we finally made it to Lyon. Here\'s what a million miles of travel experience taught us about pushing back, staying calm, and finding the silver lining when your trip falls apart at the gate.','inherit','closed','closed','','4903-revision-v1','','','2026-05-17 10:43:35','2026-05-17 16:43:35','',4903,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4910',0,'revision','',0),
(4911,1,'2026-05-17 10:44:29','2026-05-17 16:44:29','','Screenshot','The French train app added its own plot twist: every direct CDG-to-Lyon train was fully booked','inherit','open','closed','','screenshot','','','2026-05-17 21:50:40','2026-05-18 02:50:40','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_0402.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(4913,1,'2026-05-17 10:52:16','2026-05-17 16:52:16','','IMG_2788','A forced layover at Dulles turned into a long-overdue visit to the Udvar-Hazy Center','inherit','open','closed','','img_2788','','','2026-05-17 11:05:06','2026-05-17 17:05:06','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_2788.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(4914,1,'2026-05-17 10:52:40','2026-05-17 16:52:40','','Screenshot','One last delay before we got off the ground for France','inherit','open','closed','','screenshot-2','','','2026-05-17 21:57:12','2026-05-18 02:57:12','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_0413.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(4915,1,'2026-05-17 11:07:43','2026-05-17 17:07:43','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We were at the end of a BNA runway, waiting for the first leg of our trip to Lyon to take off, when the notifications hit my phone. First <a href=\"https://flighty.com/\" title=\"\">Flighty</a>, then United’s own app both lighting up red. Our Chicago-Paris flight had been cancelled. Not delayed — cancelled. The plane broke, or as United put it “taking the plane out of service to address a maintenance issue.” Oh, and they’re really sorry. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>So for now, as the plane rotated off the runway, all we knew was that we were going to O’Hare.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>When the App Offers You “Stupid Travel”</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>My old road warrior reflexes kicked in. I paid United\'s $8 for in-flight WiFi and started working the problem. The United app’s rebooking options were all variations on a single itinerary — ORD-SFO-CDG the next day. In other words, “We’ve cancelled your 8-hour flight to Paris and instead we suggest you fly 4 hours west to San Francisco, and then 11 hours east to Paris.”&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Still, I booked it. I needed some sort of backup because I could see even these options disappearing with each screen refresh. More road warrior reflexes — grab the least-bad thing you can see while you work on something better. A bad confirmed seat is still better than a theoretical good seat.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Push Back. Always Push Back. But Don’t Be a Jerk.</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Then I hit every non-voice support channel I could find simultaneously: United’s in-app chat, plus a flaming Twitter/X post designed to get the attention of United’s social media team. Which it did.&nbsp; Once we touched down at ORD, I dialed the Premier Desk and was talking to a live agent before I was off the jetbridge.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4906,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-04-19-at-9.55.46-AM.png\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-04-19-at-9.55.46-AM-216x300.png\" alt=\"Screenshot of a tweet by @mpeacock complaining that United Airlines cancelled his ORD-CDG flight while his connecting flight was on the runway at BNA, with a reply from the official United Airlines account asking him to send a DM with his confirmation number\" class=\"wp-image-4906\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">1.9K views got United\'s attention — sometimes a flaming tweet is its own customer service channel</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>So now I had three conversations going — app chat, social media, and phone — and in each one I pushed back on ORD-SFO-CDG routing. Every agent at the other end immediately agreed it made no sense. Not one of them defended it. They got us seats on the next day\'s direct ORD-CDG flight which was showing as waitlist-only in the app. A human can open seats that the rebooking algorithm can’t — or won’t — touch. And when they do it, always say thank you.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>In parallel, Irene was pushing too. Her phone agent seemed to lean into it a bit harder and found something more aggressive: ORD-IAD-DUB on United, then DUB-FRA-CDG on Lufthansa. I paused for more than a moment. Four flights? That’s way too many points of failure. But it <em>would</em> get us into Paris the next evening, cutting our delay from a full day to maybe six hours.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>So, why not?&nbsp; Famous last words.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We raced over to the ORD-IAD gate and waited while Irene’s phone agent finalized the changes so the gate agent could check us in. We were the last ones boarding, so of course there was no overhead space left. They took our bags and checked them through to Dublin.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Status Still Matters</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>This was one of those times that reminds you airline status is more than just an earlier boarding group. It’s a lever to get your trip back on the track.&nbsp;&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4908,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_0736-scaled.jpeg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_0736-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-4908\"/></a></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Every phone and chat agent opened with: \"Thank you for being a 1 million mile flyer\"&nbsp; and then worked with me as long as I needed. I never felt rushed; never sensed there was a timer flashing red on their screen, telling them to wrap it up and pick up the next call.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>At the ORD-IAD gate, I could see status indicators next to our names on the gate agent\'s screen and heard him mention our status when he called to get seats opened up for us.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Does status solve everything? No, especially not a broken plane. But does it help when your trip goes sideways, seats are scarce, and you need a human to do something the app won’t do? Yes, absolutely.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>The Second Plane Also Broke</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We landed at Dulles early; which felt like a small win that let us walk, not run to our next gate. We boarded the IAD-DUB flight, settled in, and then waited to take off. And then waited some more.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>The pilot finally announced what we all kinda knew; it\'s a maintenance issue. This time, it was something about the pilots’ cabin temperature regulation not working. Which, once again, I am very much in favor of fixing. I want the pilots on my trans-Atlantic flights to be as comfortable and focused as possible.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4907,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/MilkRunCollage.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/MilkRunCollage-300x189.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-4907\"/></a></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>As we sat at the gate with the door open and maintenance crews moving in and out, I watched our Dublin-to-Frankfurt connection time shrink. Then disappear. I started searching for other DUB-CDG options but came up empty. Meanwhile the gate agent came on and told us that, by law, given the delay, they had to let passengers deplane and wait in the terminal. This was a decision point.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Stay on the plane and risk getting stranded in Dublin, farther from Paris with fewer options? Or get off here, stop the madness, and reset? I found an IAD-CDG flight leaving the next day, so we got off.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We told our tale of woe to the gate agent, who cancelled us off the Dublin flight and had our bags pulled. The gate agent gave us hotel and meal vouchers while I had a phone agent lock in the next day’s IAD-CDG flight. We finally sat down in baggage claim and caught a quick breath before our bags popped out on the carousel in front of us.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Give Credit Where Credit’s Due</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Waiting for the hotel shuttle, thinking back over the past 9 hours — every single customer-facing United employee we dealt with was helpful, patient, and genuinely sympathetic. Not one was rude, or tried to brush us off, or hid behind “the system won’t let me.” They all tried their best.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I don\'t know how much of that is training, how much was because of my status; but it mattered. It took a bit of the edge off of what was a very lousy day.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>One More Problem: French Trains</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We got to our hotel room at 12:30am but I still wasn’t finished. Our original itinerary was BNA-ORD-CDG on United, and then a 2-hour TGV ride to Lyon. But arriving a day later meant rebooking the train too.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I fire up the <a href=\"https://www.sncf-connect.com/\" title=\"\">SNCF Connect</a> app and get… nothing. OK, it’s early Sunday morning in France, but I didn’t think the French 35-hour work week applied to their mobile apps too. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4911,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_0402.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_0402-173x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-4911\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Screenshot</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Luckily, their web site decided to work the weekend and I started down the rebooking path — until I couldn’t go any further. Every CDG-Lyon train was sold out, from the noon train I was trying to rebook all the way through the last train at 8pm. A quick look at Google Maps told me the alternative — renting a car — would be a 5-6-hour trip. This just keeps getting better.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Back to the SNCF web site. I looked at the noon train’s route. One intermediate stop — EuroDisney. Maybe that was the problem; families flying in that morning have bought up all the seats. So I broke up my search — CDG-to-EuroDisney, then EuroDisney-to-Lyon. Found seats on an earlier train to EuroDisney and then seats on the noon train to Lyon. It would mean hanging around the train station for 50 minutes, but way better than 5 hours behind a rental car wheel. And maybe they’d have some decent croissants.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>But now what if I booked both legs separately but on the same train?&nbsp; Yup, it worked. CDG-to EuroDisney and EuroDisney-to-Lyon, all on the noon train. Why couldn’t I book it straight through as one trip? I didn’t know and was too tired to care. I just wanted to turn off the light and end this day.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>What I’d Do Differently</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I didn’t need hindsight to know that we should’ve cut our losses in Chicago and taken the next day’s direct flight to Paris. The ORD-IAD-DUB-FRA-CDG milk run had too many failure points and I knew it. It would’ve been much smarter to burn United’s vouchers on a downtown hotel, a couple of cocktails, and a good meal.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Note to self — you gotta break those old stupid travel reflexes.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Silver Lining: Trips to Udvar-Hazy and Ocelot Brewing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>That said, we had a day to kill around Dulles, and we used it well.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4913,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_2788-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_2788-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-4913\"/></a></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>First stop: the <a href=\"https://airandspace.si.edu/visit/udvar-hazy-center\" title=\"\">Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center</a>, the massive Chantilly, Virginia annex of the Smithsonian\'s National Air and Space Museum. It was a quick Uber ride from our hotel, and I’d always wanted to visit. But for all the times I’ve been through or around Dulles, I never could make it happen. Enormous hangars packed with aircraft and spacecraft — an SR-71, the Space Shuttle Discovery, a Concorde. I loved it. Figure a solid 2 hours if you like to read all the placards.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Then we continued our clockwise lap around IAD to <a href=\"https://ocelotbrewing.com/\" title=\"\">Ocelot Brewing</a>. Great beer, great place tucked away in some generic office park. The Uber driver asked us “How’d you find this place?” </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>“Years of practice,” I replied.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Coming Next: Lyon, Eventually</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>The good news is that this was not the whole trip. It was just the opening act.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4914,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_0413.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_0413-300x128.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-4914\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Screenshot</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Fate did give us one last head fake, though. Walking up to the gate for our IAD-CDG flight, we hear the agent announce “We’re going to delay boarding while the paramedics take care of an ill inbound passenger.” But when it was all done, we left just 30 minutes late and the pilot made up half of that on the flight over.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>No problems at CDG passport control despite the <a href=\"https://www.visahq.com/news/2026-05-09/fr/paris-cdg-passport-control-queues-lengthen-as-victory-day-rush-meets-new-ees-checks/\" title=\"\">horror stories circulating </a>of huge delays caused by the new EU requirement to collect biometrics — face photos and fingerprints — from all non-EU passengers. I think the French just ignored it. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>And then my pieced-together TGV itinerary worked without a hitch. But I didn’t let myself relax until we’d stepped into our hotel room in Lyon and laid down for a 20-minute nap.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','The Long Way to Lyon','Two cancelled planes, four airline agents, and one very creative French train booking — this is how we finally made it to Lyon. Here\'s what a million miles of travel experience taught us about pushing back, staying calm, and finding the silver lining when your trip falls apart at the gate.','inherit','closed','closed','','4903-revision-v1','','','2026-05-17 11:07:43','2026-05-17 17:07:43','',4903,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4915',0,'revision','',0),
(4916,1,'2026-05-17 11:11:18','2026-05-17 17:11:18','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We were at the end of a BNA runway, waiting for the first leg of our trip to Lyon to take off, when the notifications hit my phone. First <a href=\"https://flighty.com/\" title=\"\">Flighty</a>, then United’s own app both lighting up red. Our Chicago-Paris flight had been cancelled. Not delayed — cancelled. The plane broke, or as United put it “taking the plane out of service to address a maintenance issue.” Oh, and they’re really sorry. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>So for now, as the plane rotated off the runway, all we knew was that we were going to O’Hare.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>When the App Offers You “Stupid Travel”</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>My old road warrior reflexes kicked in. I paid United\'s $8 for in-flight WiFi and started working the problem. The United app’s rebooking options were all variations on a single itinerary — ORD-SFO-CDG the next day. In other words, “We’ve cancelled your 8-hour flight to Paris and instead we suggest you fly 4 hours west to San Francisco, and then 11 hours east to Paris.”&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Still, I booked it. I needed some sort of backup because I could see even these options disappearing with each screen refresh. More road warrior reflexes — grab the least-bad thing you can see while you work on something better. A bad confirmed seat is still better than a theoretical good seat.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Push Back. Always Push Back. But Don’t Be a Jerk.</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Then I hit every non-voice support channel I could find simultaneously: United’s in-app chat, plus a flaming Twitter/X post designed to get the attention of United’s social media team. Which it did.&nbsp; Once we touched down at ORD, I dialed the Premier Desk and was talking to a live agent before I was off the jetbridge.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4906,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-04-19-at-9.55.46-AM.png\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-04-19-at-9.55.46-AM-216x300.png\" alt=\"Screenshot of a tweet by @mpeacock complaining that United Airlines cancelled his ORD-CDG flight while his connecting flight was on the runway at BNA, with a reply from the official United Airlines account asking him to send a DM with his confirmation number\" class=\"wp-image-4906\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">1.9K views got United\'s attention — sometimes a flaming tweet is its own customer service channel</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>So now I had three conversations going — app chat, social media, and phone — and in each one I pushed back on ORD-SFO-CDG routing. Every agent at the other end immediately agreed it made no sense. Not one of them defended it. They got us seats on the next day\'s direct ORD-CDG flight which was showing as waitlist-only in the app. A human can open seats that the rebooking algorithm can’t — or won’t — touch. And when they do it, always say thank you.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>In parallel, Irene was pushing too. Her phone agent seemed to lean into it a bit harder and found something more aggressive: ORD-IAD-DUB on United, then DUB-FRA-CDG on Lufthansa. I paused for more than a moment. Four flights? That’s way too many points of failure. But it <em>would</em> get us into Paris the next evening, cutting our delay from a full day to maybe six hours.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>So, why not?&nbsp; Famous last words.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We raced over to the ORD-IAD gate and waited while Irene’s phone agent finalized the changes so the gate agent could check us in. We were the last ones boarding, so of course there was no overhead space left. They took our bags and checked them through to Dublin.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Status Still Matters</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>This was one of those times that reminds you airline status is more than just an earlier boarding group. It’s a lever to get your trip back on the track.&nbsp;&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4908,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_0736-scaled.jpeg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_0736-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"United MileagePlus Premier Gold 1 Million Miler card resting on a black carry-on bag with a green luggage tag behind it\" class=\"wp-image-4908\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">When the app gives up, airline status can still get a human to work the problem</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Every phone and chat agent opened with: \"Thank you for being a 1 million mile flyer\"&nbsp; and then worked with me as long as I needed. I never felt rushed; never sensed there was a timer flashing red on their screen, telling them to wrap it up and pick up the next call.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>At the ORD-IAD gate, I could see status indicators next to our names on the gate agent\'s screen and heard him mention our status when he called to get seats opened up for us.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Does status solve everything? No, especially not a broken plane. But does it help when your trip goes sideways, seats are scarce, and you need a human to do something the app won’t do? Yes, absolutely.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>The Second Plane Also Broke</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We landed at Dulles early; which felt like a small win that let us walk, not run to our next gate. We boarded the IAD-DUB flight, settled in, and then waited to take off. And then waited some more.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>The pilot finally announced what we all kinda knew; it\'s a maintenance issue. This time, it was something about the pilots’ cabin temperature regulation not working. Which, once again, I am very much in favor of fixing. I want the pilots on my trans-Atlantic flights to be as comfortable and focused as possible.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4907,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/MilkRunCollage.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/MilkRunCollage-300x189.jpg\" alt=\"Flight itinerary screenshot showing a Washington Dulles to Dublin to Frankfurt to Paris routing.\" class=\"wp-image-4907\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">The milk run that looked clever right up until the IAD-DUB plane broke</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>As we sat at the gate with the door open and maintenance crews moving in and out, I watched our Dublin-to-Frankfurt connection time shrink. Then disappear. I started searching for other DUB-CDG options but came up empty. Meanwhile the gate agent came on and told us that, by law, given the delay, they had to let passengers deplane and wait in the terminal. This was a decision point.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Stay on the plane and risk getting stranded in Dublin, farther from Paris with fewer options? Or get off here, stop the madness, and reset? I found an IAD-CDG flight leaving the next day, so we got off.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We told our tale of woe to the gate agent, who cancelled us off the Dublin flight and had our bags pulled. The gate agent gave us hotel and meal vouchers while I had a phone agent lock in the next day’s IAD-CDG flight. We finally sat down in baggage claim and caught a quick breath before our bags popped out on the carousel in front of us.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Give Credit Where Credit’s Due</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Waiting for the hotel shuttle, thinking back over the past 9 hours — every single customer-facing United employee we dealt with was helpful, patient, and genuinely sympathetic. Not one was rude, or tried to brush us off, or hid behind “the system won’t let me.” They all tried their best.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I don\'t know how much of that is training, how much was because of my status; but it mattered. It took a bit of the edge off of what was a very lousy day.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>One More Problem: French Trains</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We got to our hotel room at 12:30am but I still wasn’t finished. Our original itinerary was BNA-ORD-CDG on United, and then a 2-hour TGV ride to Lyon. But arriving a day later meant rebooking the train too.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I fire up the <a href=\"https://www.sncf-connect.com/\" title=\"\">SNCF Connect</a> app and get… nothing. OK, it’s early Sunday morning in France, but I didn’t think the French 35-hour work week applied to their mobile apps too. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4911,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_0402.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_0402-173x300.jpg\" alt=\"SNCF Connect screenshot showing multiple Paris Charles de Gaulle to Lyon Part-Dieu TGV options marked “Train fully booked.”\" class=\"wp-image-4911\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">The French train app added its own plot twist: every direct CDG-to-Lyon train was fully booked</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Luckily, their web site decided to work the weekend and I started down the rebooking path — until I couldn’t go any further. Every CDG-Lyon train was sold out, from the noon train I was trying to rebook all the way through the last train at 8pm. A quick look at Google Maps told me the alternative — renting a car — would be a 5-6-hour trip. This just keeps getting better.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Back to the SNCF web site. I looked at the noon train’s route. One intermediate stop — EuroDisney. Maybe that was the problem; families flying in that morning have bought up all the seats. So I broke up my search — CDG-to-EuroDisney, then EuroDisney-to-Lyon. Found seats on an earlier train to EuroDisney and then seats on the noon train to Lyon. It would mean hanging around the train station for 50 minutes, but way better than 5 hours behind a rental car wheel. And maybe they’d have some decent croissants.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>But now what if I booked both legs separately but on the same train?&nbsp; Yup, it worked. CDG-to EuroDisney and EuroDisney-to-Lyon, all on the noon train. Why couldn’t I book it straight through as one trip? I didn’t know and was too tired to care. I just wanted to turn off the light and end this day.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>What I’d Do Differently</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I didn’t need hindsight to know that we should’ve cut our losses in Chicago and taken the next day’s direct flight to Paris. The ORD-IAD-DUB-FRA-CDG milk run had too many failure points and I knew it. It would’ve been much smarter to burn United’s vouchers on a downtown hotel, a couple of cocktails, and a good meal.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Note to self — you gotta break those old stupid travel reflexes.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Silver Lining: Trips to Udvar-Hazy and Ocelot Brewing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>That said, we had a day to kill around Dulles, and we used it well.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4913,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_2788-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_2788-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Aircraft hanging from the arched ceiling inside the Smithsonian Udvar-Hazy Center near Dulles Airport\" class=\"wp-image-4913\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">A forced layover at Dulles turned into a long-overdue visit to the Udvar-Hazy Center</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>First stop: the <a href=\"https://airandspace.si.edu/visit/udvar-hazy-center\" title=\"\">Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center</a>, the massive Chantilly, Virginia annex of the Smithsonian\'s National Air and Space Museum. It was a quick Uber ride from our hotel, and I’d always wanted to visit. But for all the times I’ve been through or around Dulles, I never could make it happen. Enormous hangars packed with aircraft and spacecraft — an SR-71, the Space Shuttle Discovery, a Concorde. I loved it. Figure a solid 2 hours if you like to read all the placards.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Then we continued our clockwise lap around IAD to <a href=\"https://ocelotbrewing.com/\" title=\"\">Ocelot Brewing</a>. Great beer, great place tucked away in some generic office park. The Uber driver asked us “How’d you find this place?” </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>“Years of practice,” I replied.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Coming Next: Lyon, Eventually</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>The good news is that this was not the whole trip. It was just the opening act.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4914,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_0413.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_0413-300x128.jpg\" alt=\"Flight status screenshot for United flight UA 915 showing a delayed departure and estimated arrival\" class=\"wp-image-4914\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">One last delay before we got off the ground for France.</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Fate did give us one last head fake, though. Walking up to the gate for our IAD-CDG flight, we hear the agent announce “We’re going to delay boarding while the paramedics take care of an ill inbound passenger.” But when it was all done, we left just 30 minutes late and the pilot made up half of that on the flight over.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>No problems at CDG passport control despite the <a href=\"https://www.visahq.com/news/2026-05-09/fr/paris-cdg-passport-control-queues-lengthen-as-victory-day-rush-meets-new-ees-checks/\" title=\"\">horror stories circulating </a>of huge delays caused by the new EU requirement to collect biometrics — face photos and fingerprints — from all non-EU passengers. I think the French just ignored it. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>And then my pieced-together TGV itinerary worked without a hitch. But I didn’t let myself relax until we’d stepped into our hotel room in Lyon and laid down for a 20-minute nap.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','The Long Way to Lyon','Two cancelled planes, four airline agents, and one very creative French train booking — this is how we finally made it to Lyon. Here\'s what a million miles of travel experience taught us about pushing back, staying calm, and finding the silver lining when your trip falls apart at the gate.','inherit','closed','closed','','4903-revision-v1','','','2026-05-17 11:11:18','2026-05-17 17:11:18','',4903,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4916',0,'revision','',0),
(4917,1,'2026-05-17 21:34:55','2026-05-18 02:34:55','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We were at the end of a BNA runway, waiting for the first leg of our trip to Lyon to take off, when the notifications hit my phone. First <a href=\"https://flighty.com/\" title=\"\">Flighty</a>, then United’s own app both lighting up red. Our Chicago-Paris flight had been cancelled. Not delayed — cancelled. The plane broke, or as United put it “taking the plane out of service to address a maintenance issue.” Oh, and they’re really sorry.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>So for now, as the plane rotated off the runway, all we knew was that we were going to O’Hare.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>When the App Offers You “Stupid Travel”</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>My old road warrior reflexes kicked in. I paid United\'s $8 for in-flight WiFi and started working the problem. The United app’s rebooking options were all variations on a single itinerary — ORD-SFO-CDG the next day. In other words, “We’ve cancelled your 8-hour flight to Paris and instead we suggest you fly 4 hours west to San Francisco, and then 11 hours east to Paris.”&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Still, I booked it. I needed some sort of backup because I could see even these options disappearing with each screen refresh. More road warrior reflexes — grab the least-bad thing you can see while you work on something better. A bad confirmed seat is still better than a theoretical good seat.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Push Back. Always Push Back. But Don’t Be a Jerk.</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Then I hit every non-voice support channel I could find simultaneously: United’s in-app chat, plus a flaming Twitter/X post designed to get the attention of United’s social media team. Which it did.  Once we touched down at ORD, I dialed the Premier Desk and was talking to a live agent before I was off the jet bridge.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4906,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-04-19-at-9.55.46-AM.png\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-04-19-at-9.55.46-AM-216x300.png\" alt=\"Screenshot of a tweet by @mpeacock complaining that United Airlines cancelled his ORD-CDG flight while his connecting flight was on the runway at BNA, with a reply from the official United Airlines account asking him to send a DM with his confirmation number\" class=\"wp-image-4906\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">1.9K views got United\'s attention — sometimes a flaming tweet is its own customer service channel</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>So now I had three conversations going — app chat, social media, and phone — and in each one I pushed back on ORD-SFO-CDG routing. Every agent at the other end immediately agreed it made no sense. Not one of them defended it. They got us seats on the next day\'s direct ORD-CDG flight which was showing as waitlist-only in the app. A human can open seats that the rebooking algorithm can’t — or won’t — touch. And when they do it, always say thank you.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>In parallel, Irene was pushing too. Her phone agent seemed to lean into it a bit harder and found something more aggressive: ORD-IAD-DUB on United, then DUB-FRA-CDG on Lufthansa. I paused for more than a moment. Four flights? That’s way too many points of failure. But it <em>would</em> get us into Paris the next evening, cutting our delay from a full day to maybe six hours.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>So, why not?&nbsp; Famous last words.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We raced over to the ORD-IAD gate and waited while Irene’s phone agent finalized the changes so the gate agent could check us in. We were the last ones boarding, so of course there was no overhead space left. They took our bags and checked them through to Dublin.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Status Still Matters</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>This was one of those times that reminds you airline status is more than just an earlier boarding group. It’s a lever to get your trip back on the track.&nbsp;&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4908,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_0736-scaled.jpeg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_0736-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"United MileagePlus Premier Gold 1 Million Miler card resting on a black carry-on bag with a green luggage tag behind it\" class=\"wp-image-4908\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">When the app gives up, airline status can still get a human to work the problem</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Every phone and chat agent opened with: \"Thank you for being a 1 million mile flyer\"&nbsp; and then worked with me as long as I needed. I never felt rushed; never sensed there was a timer flashing red on their screen, telling them to wrap it up and pick up the next call.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>At the ORD-IAD gate, I could see status indicators next to our names on the gate agent\'s screen and heard him mention our status when he called to get seats opened up for us.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Does status solve everything? No, especially not a broken plane. But does it help when your trip goes sideways, seats are scarce, and you need a human to do something the app won’t do? Yes, absolutely.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>The Second Plane Also Broke</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We landed at Dulles early; which felt like a small win that let us walk, not run to our next gate. We boarded the IAD-DUB flight, settled in, and then waited to take off. And then waited some more.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>The pilot finally announced what we all kinda knew; it\'s a maintenance issue. This time, it was something about the pilots’ cabin temperature regulation not working. Which, once again, I am very much in favor of fixing. I want the pilots on my trans-Atlantic flights to be as comfortable and focused as possible.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4907,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/MilkRunCollage.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/MilkRunCollage-300x189.jpg\" alt=\"Flight itinerary screenshot showing a Washington Dulles to Dublin to Frankfurt to Paris routing.\" class=\"wp-image-4907\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">The milk run that looked clever right up until the IAD-DUB plane broke</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>As we sat at the gate with the door open and maintenance crews moving in and out, I watched our Dublin-to-Frankfurt connection time shrink. Then disappear. I started searching for other DUB-CDG options but came up empty. Meanwhile the gate agent came on and told us that, by law, given the delay, they had to let passengers deplane and wait in the terminal. This was a decision point.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Stay on the plane and risk getting stranded in Dublin, farther from Paris with fewer options? Or get off here, stop the madness, and reset? I found an IAD-CDG flight leaving the next day, so we got off.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We told our tale of woe to the gate agent, who cancelled us off the Dublin flight and had our bags pulled. The gate agent gave us hotel and meal vouchers while I had a phone agent lock in the next day’s IAD-CDG flight. We finally sat down in baggage claim and caught a quick breath before our bags popped out on the carousel in front of us.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Give Credit Where Credit’s Due</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Waiting for the hotel shuttle, thinking back over the past 9 hours — every single customer-facing United employee we dealt with was helpful, patient, and genuinely sympathetic. Not one was rude, or tried to brush us off, or hid behind “the system won’t let me.” They all tried their best.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I don\'t know how much of that is training, how much was because of my status; but it mattered. It took a bit of the edge off of what was a very lousy day.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>One More Problem: French Trains</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We got to our hotel room at 12:30am but I still wasn’t finished. Our original itinerary was BNA-ORD-CDG on United, and then a 2-hour TGV ride to Lyon. But arriving a day later meant rebooking the train too.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I fire up the <a href=\"https://www.sncf-connect.com/\" title=\"\">SNCF Connect</a> app and get… nothing. OK, it’s early Sunday morning in France, but I didn’t think the French 35-hour work week applied to their mobile apps too.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4911,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_0402.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_0402-173x300.jpg\" alt=\"SNCF Connect screenshot showing multiple Paris Charles de Gaulle to Lyon Part-Dieu TGV options marked “Train fully booked.”\" class=\"wp-image-4911\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">The French train app added its own plot twist: every direct CDG-to-Lyon train was fully booked</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Luckily, their web site decided to work the weekend and I started down the rebooking path — until I couldn’t go any further. Every CDG-Lyon train was sold out, from the noon train I was trying to rebook all the way through the last train at 8pm. A quick look at Google Maps told me the alternative — renting a car — would be a 5-6-hour trip. This just keeps getting better.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Back to the SNCF web site. I looked at the noon train’s route. One intermediate stop — EuroDisney. Maybe that was the problem; families flying in that morning have bought up all the seats. So I broke up my search — CDG-to-EuroDisney, then EuroDisney-to-Lyon. Found seats on an earlier train to EuroDisney and then seats on the noon train to Lyon. It would mean hanging around the train station for 50 minutes, but way better than 5 hours behind a rental car wheel. And maybe they’d have some decent croissants.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>But now what if I booked both legs separately but on the same train?&nbsp; Yup, it worked. CDG-to EuroDisney and EuroDisney-to-Lyon, all on the noon train. Why couldn’t I book it straight through as one trip? I didn’t know and was too tired to care. I just wanted to turn off the light and end this day.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>What I’d Do Differently</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I didn’t need hindsight to know that we should’ve cut our losses in Chicago and taken the next day’s direct flight to Paris. The ORD-IAD-DUB-FRA-CDG milk run had too many failure points and I knew it. It would’ve been much smarter to burn United’s vouchers on a downtown hotel, a couple of cocktails, and a good meal.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Note to self — you gotta break those old stupid travel reflexes.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Silver Lining: Trips to Udvar-Hazy and Ocelot Brewing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>That said, we had a day to kill around Dulles, and we used it well.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4913,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_2788-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_2788-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Aircraft hanging from the arched ceiling inside the Smithsonian Udvar-Hazy Center near Dulles Airport\" class=\"wp-image-4913\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">A forced layover at Dulles turned into a long-overdue visit to the Udvar-Hazy Center</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>First stop: the <a href=\"https://airandspace.si.edu/visit/udvar-hazy-center\" title=\"\">Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center</a>, the massive Chantilly, Virginia annex of the Smithsonian\'s National Air and Space Museum. It was a quick Uber ride from our hotel, and I’d always wanted to visit. But for all the times I’ve been through or around Dulles, I never could make it happen. Enormous hangars packed with aircraft and spacecraft — an SR-71, the Space Shuttle Discovery, a Concorde. I loved it. Figure a solid 2 hours if you like to read all the placards.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Then we continued our clockwise lap around IAD to <a href=\"https://ocelotbrewing.com/\" title=\"\">Ocelot Brewing</a>. Great beer, great place tucked away in some generic office park. The Uber driver asked us “How’d you find this place?”&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>“Years of practice,” I replied.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Coming Next: Lyon, Eventually</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>The good news is that this was not the whole trip. It was just the opening act.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4914,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_0413.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_0413-300x128.jpg\" alt=\"Flight status screenshot for United flight UA 915 showing a delayed departure and estimated arrival\" class=\"wp-image-4914\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">One last delay before we got off the ground for France.</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Fate did give us one last head fake, though. Walking up to the gate for our IAD-CDG flight, we hear the agent announce “We’re going to delay boarding while the paramedics take care of an ill inbound passenger.” But when it was all done, we left just 30 minutes late and the pilot made up half of that on the flight over.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>No problems at CDG passport control despite the <a href=\"https://www.visahq.com/news/2026-05-09/fr/paris-cdg-passport-control-queues-lengthen-as-victory-day-rush-meets-new-ees-checks/\" title=\"\">horror stories circulating </a>of huge delays caused by the new EU requirement to collect biometrics — face photos and fingerprints — from all non-EU passengers. I think the French just ignored it.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>And then my pieced-together TGV itinerary worked without a hitch. But I didn’t let myself relax until we’d stepped into our hotel room in Lyon and laid down for a 20-minute nap.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','The Long Way to Lyon','Two cancelled planes, four airline agents, and one very creative French train booking — this is how we finally made it to Lyon. Here\'s what a million miles of travel experience taught us about pushing back, staying calm, and finding the silver lining when your trip falls apart at the gate.','inherit','closed','closed','','4903-revision-v1','','','2026-05-17 21:34:55','2026-05-18 02:34:55','',4903,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4917',0,'revision','',0),
(4919,1,'2026-05-17 21:43:59','2026-05-18 02:43:59','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We were at the end of a BNA runway, waiting for the first leg of our trip to Lyon to take off, when the notifications hit my phone. First <a href=\"https://flighty.com/\" title=\"\">Flighty</a>, then United’s own app both lit up red. Our Chicago-Paris flight had been cancelled. Not delayed — cancelled. The plane broke, or as United put it “taking the plane out of service to address a maintenance issue.” Oh, and they’re really sorry. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>So for now, as the plane rotated off the runway, all we knew was that we were going to O’Hare.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>When the App Offers You “Stupid Travel”</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>My old road warrior reflexes kicked in. I paid United\'s $8 for in-flight WiFi and started working the problem. The United app’s rebooking options were all variations on a single itinerary — ORD-SFO-CDG the next day. In other words, “We’ve cancelled your 8-hour flight to Paris and instead we suggest you fly 4 hours west to San Francisco, and then 11 hours east to Paris.”&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Still, I booked it. I needed some sort of backup because I could see even these options disappearing with each screen refresh. More road warrior reflexes — grab the least-bad thing you can see while you work on something better. A bad confirmed seat is still better than a theoretical good seat.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Push Back. Always Push Back. But Don’t Be a Jerk.</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Then I hit every non-voice support channel I could find simultaneously: United’s in-app chat, plus a flaming Twitter/X post designed to get the attention of United’s social media team. Which it did.  Once we touched down at ORD, I dialed the Premier Desk and was talking to a live agent before I was off the jet bridge.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4906,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-04-19-at-9.55.46-AM.png\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-04-19-at-9.55.46-AM-216x300.png\" alt=\"Screenshot of a tweet by @mpeacock complaining that United Airlines cancelled his ORD-CDG flight while his connecting flight was on the runway at BNA, with a reply from the official United Airlines account asking him to send a DM with his confirmation number\" class=\"wp-image-4906\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">1.9K views got United\'s attention — sometimes a flaming tweet is its own customer service channel</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>So now I had three conversations going — app chat, social media, and phone — and in each one I pushed back on ORD-SFO-CDG routing. Every agent at the other end immediately agreed it made no sense. Not one of them defended it. They got us seats on the next day\'s direct ORD-CDG flight which was showing as waitlist-only in the app. A human can open seats that the rebooking algorithm can’t — or won’t — touch. And when they do it, always say thank you.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>In parallel, Irene was pushing too. Her phone agent seemed to lean into it a bit harder and found something more aggressive: ORD-IAD-DUB on United, then DUB-FRA-CDG on Lufthansa. I paused for more than a moment. Four flights? That’s way too many points of failure. But it <em>would</em> get us into Paris the next evening, cutting our delay from a full day to maybe six hours.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>So, why not?&nbsp; Famous last words.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We raced over to the ORD-IAD gate and waited while Irene’s phone agent finalized the changes so the gate agent could check us in. We were the last ones boarding, so of course there was no overhead space left. They took our bags and checked them through to Dublin.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Status Still Matters</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>This was one of those times that reminds you airline status is more than just an earlier boarding group. It’s a lever to get your trip back on the track.&nbsp;&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4908,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_0736-scaled.jpeg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_0736-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"United MileagePlus Premier Gold 1 Million Miler card resting on a black carry-on bag with a green luggage tag behind it\" class=\"wp-image-4908\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">When the app gives up, airline status can still get a human to work the problem</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Every phone and chat agent opened with: \"Thank you for being a 1 million mile flyer\"&nbsp; and then worked with me as long as I needed. I never felt rushed; never sensed there was a timer flashing red on their screen, telling them to wrap it up and pick up the next call.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>At the ORD-IAD gate, I could see status indicators next to our names on the gate agent\'s screen and heard him mention our status when he called to get seats opened up for us.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Does status solve everything? No, especially not a broken plane. But does it help when your trip goes sideways, seats are scarce, and you need a human to do something the app won’t do? Yes, absolutely.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>The Second Plane Also Broke</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We landed at Dulles early; which felt like a small win that let us walk, not run to our next gate. We boarded the IAD-DUB flight, settled in, and then waited to take off. And then waited some more.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>The pilot finally announced what we all kinda knew; it\'s a maintenance issue. This time, it was something about the pilots’ cabin temperature regulation not working. Which, once again, I am very much in favor of fixing. I want the pilots on my trans-Atlantic flights to be as comfortable and focused as possible.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4907,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/MilkRunCollage.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/MilkRunCollage-300x189.jpg\" alt=\"Flight itinerary screenshot showing a Washington Dulles to Dublin to Frankfurt to Paris routing.\" class=\"wp-image-4907\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">The milk run that looked clever right up until the IAD-DUB plane broke</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>As we sat at the gate with the door open and maintenance crews moving in and out, I watched our Dublin-to-Frankfurt connection time shrink. Then disappear. I started searching for other DUB-CDG options but came up empty. Meanwhile the gate agent came on and told us that, by law, given the delay, they had to let passengers deplane and wait in the terminal. This was a decision point.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Stay on the plane and risk getting stranded in Dublin, farther from Paris with fewer options? Or get off here, stop the madness, and reset? I found an IAD-CDG flight leaving the next day, so we got off.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We told our tale of woe to the gate agent, who cancelled us off the Dublin flight and had our bags pulled. The gate agent gave us hotel and meal vouchers while I had a phone agent lock in the next day’s IAD-CDG flight. We finally sat down in baggage claim and caught a quick breath before our bags popped out on the carousel in front of us.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Give Credit Where Credit’s Due</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Waiting for the hotel shuttle, thinking back over the past 9 hours — every single customer-facing United employee we dealt with was helpful, patient, and genuinely sympathetic. Not one was rude, or tried to brush us off, or hid behind “the system won’t let me.” They all tried their best.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I don\'t know how much of that is training, how much was because of my status; but it mattered. It took a bit of the edge off of what was a very lousy day.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>One More Problem: French Trains</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We got to our hotel room at 12:30am but I still wasn’t finished. Our original itinerary was BNA-ORD-CDG on United, and then a 2-hour TGV ride to Lyon. But arriving a day later meant rebooking the train too.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I fire up the <a href=\"https://www.sncf-connect.com/\" title=\"\">SNCF Connect</a> app and get… nothing. OK, it’s early Sunday morning in France, but I didn’t think the French 35-hour work week applied to their mobile apps too.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4911,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_0402.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_0402-173x300.jpg\" alt=\"SNCF Connect screenshot showing multiple Paris Charles de Gaulle to Lyon Part-Dieu TGV options marked “Train fully booked.”\" class=\"wp-image-4911\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">The French train app added its own plot twist: every direct CDG-to-Lyon train was fully booked</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Luckily, their web site decided to work the weekend and I started down the rebooking path — until I couldn’t go any further. Every CDG-Lyon train was sold out, from the noon train I was trying to rebook all the way through the last train at 8pm. A quick look at Google Maps told me the alternative — renting a car — would be a 5-6-hour trip. This just keeps getting better.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Back to the SNCF web site. I looked at the noon train’s route. One intermediate stop — EuroDisney. Maybe that was the problem; families flying in that morning have bought up all the seats. So I broke up my search — CDG-to-EuroDisney, then EuroDisney-to-Lyon. Found seats on an earlier train to EuroDisney and then seats on the noon train to Lyon. It would mean hanging around the train station for 50 minutes, but way better than 5 hours behind a rental car wheel. And maybe they’d have some decent croissants.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>But now what if I booked both legs separately but on the same train?&nbsp; Yup, it worked. CDG-to EuroDisney and EuroDisney-to-Lyon, all on the noon train. Why couldn’t I book it straight through as one trip? I didn’t know and was too tired to care. I just wanted to turn off the light and end this day.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>What I’d Do Differently</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I didn’t need hindsight to know that we should’ve cut our losses in Chicago and taken the next day’s direct flight to Paris. The ORD-IAD-DUB-FRA-CDG milk run had too many failure points and I knew it. It would’ve been much smarter to burn United’s vouchers on a downtown hotel, a couple of cocktails, and a good meal.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Note to self — you gotta break those old stupid travel reflexes.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Silver Lining: Trips to Udvar-Hazy and Ocelot Brewing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>That said, we had a day to kill around Dulles, and we used it well.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4913,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_2788-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_2788-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Aircraft hanging from the arched ceiling inside the Smithsonian Udvar-Hazy Center near Dulles Airport\" class=\"wp-image-4913\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">A forced layover at Dulles turned into a long-overdue visit to the Udvar-Hazy Center</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>First stop: the <a href=\"https://airandspace.si.edu/visit/udvar-hazy-center\" title=\"\">Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center</a>, the massive Chantilly, Virginia annex of the Smithsonian\'s National Air and Space Museum. It was a quick Uber ride from our hotel, and I’d always wanted to visit. But for all the times I’ve been through or around Dulles, I never could make it happen. Enormous hangars packed with aircraft and spacecraft — an SR-71, the Space Shuttle Discovery, a Concorde. I loved it. Figure a solid 2 hours if you like to read all the placards.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Then we continued our clockwise lap around IAD to <a href=\"https://ocelotbrewing.com/\" title=\"\">Ocelot Brewing</a>. Great beer, great place tucked away in some generic office park. The Uber driver asked us “How’d you find this place?”&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>“Years of practice,” I replied.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Coming Next: Lyon, Eventually</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>The good news is that this was not the whole trip. It was just the opening act.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4914,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_0413.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_0413-300x128.jpg\" alt=\"Flight status screenshot for United flight UA 915 showing a delayed departure and estimated arrival\" class=\"wp-image-4914\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">One last delay before we got off the ground for France.</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Fate did give us one last head fake, though. Walking up to the gate for our IAD-CDG flight, we hear the agent announce “We’re going to delay boarding while the paramedics take care of an ill inbound passenger.” But when it was all done, we left just 30 minutes late and the pilot made up half of that on the flight over.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>No problems at CDG passport control despite the <a href=\"https://www.visahq.com/news/2026-05-09/fr/paris-cdg-passport-control-queues-lengthen-as-victory-day-rush-meets-new-ees-checks/\" title=\"\">horror stories circulating </a>of huge delays caused by the new EU requirement to collect biometrics — face photos and fingerprints — from all non-EU passengers. I think the French just ignored it.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>And then my pieced-together TGV itinerary worked without a hitch. But I didn’t let myself relax until we’d stepped into our hotel room in Lyon and laid down for a 20-minute nap.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','The Long Way to Lyon','Two cancelled planes, four airline agents, and one very creative French train booking — this is how we finally made it to Lyon. Here\'s what a million miles of travel experience taught us about pushing back, staying calm, and finding the silver lining when your trip falls apart at the gate.','inherit','closed','closed','','4903-revision-v1','','','2026-05-17 21:43:59','2026-05-18 02:43:59','',4903,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4919',0,'revision','',0),
(4921,1,'2026-05-17 22:01:30','2026-05-18 03:01:30','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We were at the end of a BNA runway, waiting for the first leg of our trip to Lyon to take off, when the notifications hit my phone. First <a href=\"https://flighty.com/\" title=\"\">Flighty</a>, then United’s own app both lit up red. Our Chicago-Paris flight had been cancelled. Not delayed — cancelled. The plane broke, or as United put it “taking the plane out of service to address a maintenance issue.” Oh, and they’re really sorry. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>So for now, as the plane rotated off the runway, all we knew was that we were going to O’Hare.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>When the App Offers You “Stupid Travel”</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>My old road warrior reflexes kicked in. I paid United\'s $8 for in-flight WiFi and started working the problem. The United app’s rebooking options were all variations on a single itinerary — ORD-SFO-CDG the next day. In other words, “We’ve cancelled your 8-hour flight to Paris and instead we suggest you fly 4 hours west to San Francisco, and then 11 hours east to Paris.”&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Still, I booked it. I needed some sort of backup because I could see even these options disappearing with each screen refresh. More road warrior reflexes — grab the least-bad thing you can see while you work on something better. A bad confirmed seat is still better than a theoretical good seat.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Push Back. Always Push Back. But Don’t Be a Jerk.</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Then I hit every non-voice support channel I could find simultaneously: United’s in-app chat, plus a flaming Twitter/X post designed to get the attention of United’s social media team. Which it did.  Once we touched down at ORD, I dialed the Premier Desk and was talking to a live agent before I was off the jet bridge.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4906,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-04-19-at-9.55.46-AM.png\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-04-19-at-9.55.46-AM-216x300.png\" alt=\"Screenshot of a tweet by @mpeacock complaining that United Airlines cancelled his ORD-CDG flight while his connecting flight was on the runway at BNA, with a reply from the official United Airlines account asking him to send a DM with his confirmation number\" class=\"wp-image-4906\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">1.9K views got United\'s attention — sometimes a flaming tweet is its own customer service channel</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>So now I had three conversations going — app chat, social media, and phone — and in each one I pushed back on ORD-SFO-CDG routing. Every agent at the other end immediately agreed it made no sense. Not one of them defended it. They got us seats on the next day\'s direct ORD-CDG flight which was showing as waitlist-only in the app. A human can open seats that the rebooking algorithm can’t — or won’t — touch. And when they do it, always say thank you.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>In parallel, Irene was pushing too. Her phone agent seemed to lean into it a bit harder and found something more aggressive: ORD-IAD-DUB on United, then DUB-FRA-CDG on Lufthansa. I paused for more than a moment. Four flights? That’s way too many points of failure. But it <em>would</em> get us into Paris the next evening, cutting our delay from a full day to maybe six hours.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>So, why not?&nbsp; Famous last words.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We raced over to the ORD-IAD gate and waited while Irene’s phone agent finalized the changes so the gate agent could check us in. We were the last ones boarding, so of course there was no overhead space left. They took our bags and checked them through to Dublin.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Status Still Matters</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>This was one of those times that reminds you airline status is more than just an earlier boarding group. It’s a lever to get your trip back on the track.&nbsp;&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4908,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_0736-scaled.jpeg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_0736-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"United MileagePlus Premier Gold 1 Million Miler card resting on a black carry-on bag with a green luggage tag behind it\" class=\"wp-image-4908\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">When the app gives up, airline status can still get a human to work the problem</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Every phone and chat agent opened with: \"Thank you for being a 1 million mile flyer\"&nbsp; and then worked with me as long as I needed. I never felt rushed; never sensed there was a timer flashing red on their screen, telling them to wrap it up and pick up the next call.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>At the ORD-IAD gate, I could see status indicators next to our names on the gate agent\'s screen and heard him mention our status when he called to get seats opened up for us.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Does status solve everything? No, especially not a broken plane. But does it help when your trip goes sideways, seats are scarce, and you need a human to do something the app won’t do? Yes, absolutely.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>The Second Plane Also Broke</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We landed at Dulles early; which felt like a small win that let us walk, not run to our next gate. We boarded the IAD-DUB flight, settled in, and then waited to take off. And then waited some more.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>The pilot finally announced what we all kinda knew; it\'s a maintenance issue. This time, it was something about the pilots’ cabin temperature regulation not working. Which, once again, I am very much in favor of fixing. I want the pilots on my trans-Atlantic flights to be as comfortable and focused as possible.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4907,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/MilkRunCollage.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/MilkRunCollage-300x189.jpg\" alt=\"Flight itinerary screenshot showing a Washington Dulles to Dublin to Frankfurt to Paris routing.\" class=\"wp-image-4907\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">The milk run that looked clever right up until the IAD-DUB plane broke</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>As we sat at the gate with the door open and maintenance crews moving in and out, I watched our Dublin-to-Frankfurt connection time shrink. Then disappear. I started searching for other DUB-CDG options but came up empty. Meanwhile the gate agent came on and told us that, by law, given the delay, they had to let passengers deplane and wait in the terminal. This was a decision point.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Stay on the plane and risk getting stranded in Dublin, farther from Paris with fewer options? Or get off here, stop the madness, and reset? I found an IAD-CDG flight leaving the next day, so we got off.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We told our tale of woe to the gate agent, who cancelled us off the Dublin flight and had our bags pulled. The gate agent gave us hotel and meal vouchers while I had a phone agent lock in the next day’s IAD-CDG flight. We finally sat down in baggage claim and caught a quick breath before our bags popped out on the carousel in front of us.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Give Credit Where Credit’s Due</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Waiting for the hotel shuttle, thinking back over the past 9 hours — every single customer-facing United employee we dealt with was helpful, patient, and genuinely sympathetic. Not one was rude, or tried to brush us off, or hid behind “the system won’t let me.” They all tried their best.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I don\'t know how much of that is training, how much was because of my status; but it mattered. It took a bit of the edge off of what was a very lousy day.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>One More Problem: French Trains</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We got to our hotel room at 12:30am but I still wasn’t finished. Our original itinerary was BNA-ORD-CDG on United, and then a 2-hour TGV ride to Lyon. But arriving a day later meant rebooking the train too.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I fire up the <a href=\"https://www.sncf-connect.com/\" title=\"\">SNCF Connect</a> app and get… nothing. OK, it’s early Sunday morning in France, but I didn’t think the French 35-hour work week applied to their mobile apps too.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4911,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_0402.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_0402-173x300.jpg\" alt=\"SNCF Connect screenshot showing multiple Paris Charles de Gaulle to Lyon Part-Dieu TGV options marked “Train fully booked.”\" class=\"wp-image-4911\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">The French train app added its own plot twist: every direct CDG-to-Lyon train was fully booked</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Luckily, their web site decided to work the weekend and I started down the rebooking path — until I couldn’t go any further. Every CDG-Lyon train was sold out, from the noon train I was trying to rebook all the way through the last train at 8pm. A quick look at Google Maps told me the alternative — renting a car — would be a 5-6-hour trip. This just keeps getting better.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Back to the SNCF web site. I looked at the noon train’s route. One intermediate stop — EuroDisney. Maybe that was the problem; families flying in that morning have bought up all the seats. So I broke up my search — CDG-to-EuroDisney, then EuroDisney-to-Lyon. Found seats on an earlier train to EuroDisney and then seats on the noon train to Lyon. It would mean hanging around the train station for 50 minutes, but way better than 5 hours behind a rental car wheel. And maybe they’d have some decent croissants.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>But now what if I booked both legs separately but on the same train?&nbsp; Yup, it worked. CDG-to EuroDisney and EuroDisney-to-Lyon, all on the noon train. Why couldn’t I book it straight through as one trip? I didn’t know and was too tired to care. I just wanted to turn off the light and end this day.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>What I’d Do Differently</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I didn’t need hindsight to know that we should’ve cut our losses in Chicago and taken the next day’s direct flight to Paris. The ORD-IAD-DUB-FRA-CDG milk run had too many failure points and I knew it. It would’ve been much smarter to burn United’s vouchers on a downtown hotel, a couple of cocktails, and a good meal.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Note to self — you gotta break those old stupid travel reflexes.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Silver Lining: Trips to Udvar-Hazy and Ocelot Brewing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>That said, we had a day to kill around Dulles, and we used it well.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4913,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_2788-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_2788-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Aircraft hanging from the arched ceiling inside the Smithsonian Udvar-Hazy Center near Dulles Airport\" class=\"wp-image-4913\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">A forced layover at Dulles turned into a long-overdue visit to the Udvar-Hazy Center</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>First stop: the <a href=\"https://airandspace.si.edu/visit/udvar-hazy-center\" title=\"\">Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center</a>, the massive Chantilly, Virginia annex of the Smithsonian\'s National Air and Space Museum. It was a quick Uber ride from our hotel, and I’d always wanted to visit. But for all the times I’ve been through or around Dulles, I never could make it happen. Enormous hangars packed with aircraft and spacecraft — an SR-71, the Space Shuttle Discovery, a Concorde. I loved it. Figure a solid 2 hours if you like to read all the placards.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Then we continued our clockwise lap around IAD to <a href=\"https://ocelotbrewing.com/\" title=\"\">Ocelot Brewing</a>. Great beer, great place tucked away in some generic office park. The Uber driver asked us “How’d you find this place?”&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>“Years of practice,” I replied.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Coming Next: Lyon, Eventually</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>The good news is that this was not the whole trip. It was just the opening act.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4914,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_0413.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_0413-300x128.jpg\" alt=\"Flight status screenshot for United flight UA 915 showing a delayed departure and estimated arrival\" class=\"wp-image-4914\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">One last delay before we got off the ground for France</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Fate did give us one last head fake, though. Walking up to the gate for our IAD-CDG flight, we hear the agent announce “We’re going to delay boarding while the paramedics take care of an ill inbound passenger.” But when it was all done, we left just 30 minutes late and the pilot made up half of that on the flight over.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>No problems at CDG passport control despite the <a href=\"https://www.visahq.com/news/2026-05-09/fr/paris-cdg-passport-control-queues-lengthen-as-victory-day-rush-meets-new-ees-checks/\" title=\"\">horror stories circulating </a>of huge delays caused by the new EU requirement to collect biometrics — face photos and fingerprints — from all non-EU passengers. I think the French just ignored it.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>And then my pieced-together TGV itinerary worked without a hitch. But I didn’t let myself relax until we’d stepped into our hotel room in Lyon and laid down for a 20-minute nap.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','The Long Way to Lyon','Two cancelled planes, four airline agents, and one very creative French train booking — this is how we finally made it to Lyon. Here\'s what a million miles of travel experience taught us about pushing back, staying calm, and finding the silver lining when your trip falls apart at the gate.','inherit','closed','closed','','4903-revision-v1','','','2026-05-17 22:01:30','2026-05-18 03:01:30','',4903,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4921',0,'revision','',0),
(4922,1,'2026-05-17 22:02:13','2026-05-18 03:02:13','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We were at the end of a BNA runway, waiting for the first leg of our trip to Lyon to take off, when the notifications hit my phone. First <a href=\"https://flighty.com/\" title=\"\">Flighty</a>, then United’s own app both lit up red. Our Chicago-Paris flight had been cancelled. Not delayed — cancelled. The plane broke, or as United put it “taking the plane out of service to address a maintenance issue.” Oh, and they’re really sorry. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>So for now, as the plane rotated off the runway, all we knew was that we were going to O’Hare.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>When the App Offers You “Stupid Travel”</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>My old road warrior reflexes kicked in. I paid United\'s $8 for in-flight WiFi and started working the problem. The United app’s rebooking options were all variations on a single itinerary — ORD-SFO-CDG the next day. In other words, “We’ve cancelled your 8-hour flight to Paris and instead we suggest you fly 4 hours west to San Francisco, and then 11 hours east to Paris.”&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Still, I booked it. I needed some sort of backup because I could see even these options disappearing with each screen refresh. More road warrior reflexes — grab the least-bad thing you can see while you work on something better. A bad confirmed seat is still better than a theoretical good seat.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Push Back. Always Push Back.</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Then I hit every non-voice support channel I could find simultaneously: United’s in-app chat, plus a flaming Twitter/X post designed to get the attention of United’s social media team. Which it did.  Once we touched down at ORD, I dialed the Premier Desk and was talking to a live agent before I was off the jet bridge.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4906,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-04-19-at-9.55.46-AM.png\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-04-19-at-9.55.46-AM-216x300.png\" alt=\"Screenshot of a tweet by @mpeacock complaining that United Airlines cancelled his ORD-CDG flight while his connecting flight was on the runway at BNA, with a reply from the official United Airlines account asking him to send a DM with his confirmation number\" class=\"wp-image-4906\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">1.9K views got United\'s attention — sometimes a flaming tweet is its own customer service channel</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>So now I had three conversations going — app chat, social media, and phone — and in each one I pushed back on ORD-SFO-CDG routing. Every agent at the other end immediately agreed it made no sense. Not one of them defended it. They got us seats on the next day\'s direct ORD-CDG flight which was showing as waitlist-only in the app. A human can open seats that the rebooking algorithm can’t — or won’t — touch. And when they do it, always say thank you.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>In parallel, Irene was pushing too. Her phone agent seemed to lean into it a bit harder and found something more aggressive: ORD-IAD-DUB on United, then DUB-FRA-CDG on Lufthansa. I paused for more than a moment. Four flights? That’s way too many points of failure. But it <em>would</em> get us into Paris the next evening, cutting our delay from a full day to maybe six hours.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>So, why not?&nbsp; Famous last words.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We raced over to the ORD-IAD gate and waited while Irene’s phone agent finalized the changes so the gate agent could check us in. We were the last ones boarding, so of course there was no overhead space left. They took our bags and checked them through to Dublin.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Status Still Matters</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>This was one of those times that reminds you airline status is more than just an earlier boarding group. It’s a lever to get your trip back on the track.&nbsp;&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4908,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_0736-scaled.jpeg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_0736-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"United MileagePlus Premier Gold 1 Million Miler card resting on a black carry-on bag with a green luggage tag behind it\" class=\"wp-image-4908\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">When the app gives up, airline status can still get a human to work the problem</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Every phone and chat agent opened with: \"Thank you for being a 1 million mile flyer\"&nbsp; and then worked with me as long as I needed. I never felt rushed; never sensed there was a timer flashing red on their screen, telling them to wrap it up and pick up the next call.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>At the ORD-IAD gate, I could see status indicators next to our names on the gate agent\'s screen and heard him mention our status when he called to get seats opened up for us.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Does status solve everything? No, especially not a broken plane. But does it help when your trip goes sideways, seats are scarce, and you need a human to do something the app won’t do? Yes, absolutely.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>The Second Plane Also Broke</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We landed at Dulles early; which felt like a small win that let us walk, not run to our next gate. We boarded the IAD-DUB flight, settled in, and then waited to take off. And then waited some more.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>The pilot finally announced what we all kinda knew; it\'s a maintenance issue. This time, it was something about the pilots’ cabin temperature regulation not working. Which, once again, I am very much in favor of fixing. I want the pilots on my trans-Atlantic flights to be as comfortable and focused as possible.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4907,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/MilkRunCollage.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/MilkRunCollage-300x189.jpg\" alt=\"Flight itinerary screenshot showing a Washington Dulles to Dublin to Frankfurt to Paris routing.\" class=\"wp-image-4907\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">The milk run that looked clever right up until the IAD-DUB plane broke</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>As we sat at the gate with the door open and maintenance crews moving in and out, I watched our Dublin-to-Frankfurt connection time shrink. Then disappear. I started searching for other DUB-CDG options but came up empty. Meanwhile the gate agent came on and told us that, by law, given the delay, they had to let passengers deplane and wait in the terminal. This was a decision point.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Stay on the plane and risk getting stranded in Dublin, farther from Paris with fewer options? Or get off here, stop the madness, and reset? I found an IAD-CDG flight leaving the next day, so we got off.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We told our tale of woe to the gate agent, who cancelled us off the Dublin flight and had our bags pulled. The gate agent gave us hotel and meal vouchers while I had a phone agent lock in the next day’s IAD-CDG flight. We finally sat down in baggage claim and caught a quick breath before our bags popped out on the carousel in front of us.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Give Credit Where Credit’s Due</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Waiting for the hotel shuttle, thinking back over the past 9 hours — every single customer-facing United employee we dealt with was helpful, patient, and genuinely sympathetic. Not one was rude, or tried to brush us off, or hid behind “the system won’t let me.” They all tried their best.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I don\'t know how much of that is training, how much was because of my status; but it mattered. It took a bit of the edge off of what was a very lousy day.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>One More Problem: French Trains</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We got to our hotel room at 12:30am but I still wasn’t finished. Our original itinerary was BNA-ORD-CDG on United, and then a 2-hour TGV ride to Lyon. But arriving a day later meant rebooking the train too.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I fire up the <a href=\"https://www.sncf-connect.com/\" title=\"\">SNCF Connect</a> app and get… nothing. OK, it’s early Sunday morning in France, but I didn’t think the French 35-hour work week applied to their mobile apps too.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4911,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_0402.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_0402-173x300.jpg\" alt=\"SNCF Connect screenshot showing multiple Paris Charles de Gaulle to Lyon Part-Dieu TGV options marked “Train fully booked.”\" class=\"wp-image-4911\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">The French train app added its own plot twist: every direct CDG-to-Lyon train was fully booked</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Luckily, their web site decided to work the weekend and I started down the rebooking path — until I couldn’t go any further. Every CDG-Lyon train was sold out, from the noon train I was trying to rebook all the way through the last train at 8pm. A quick look at Google Maps told me the alternative — renting a car — would be a 5-6-hour trip. This just keeps getting better.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Back to the SNCF web site. I looked at the noon train’s route. One intermediate stop — EuroDisney. Maybe that was the problem; families flying in that morning have bought up all the seats. So I broke up my search — CDG-to-EuroDisney, then EuroDisney-to-Lyon. Found seats on an earlier train to EuroDisney and then seats on the noon train to Lyon. It would mean hanging around the train station for 50 minutes, but way better than 5 hours behind a rental car wheel. And maybe they’d have some decent croissants.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>But now what if I booked both legs separately but on the same train?&nbsp; Yup, it worked. CDG-to EuroDisney and EuroDisney-to-Lyon, all on the noon train. Why couldn’t I book it straight through as one trip? I didn’t know and was too tired to care. I just wanted to turn off the light and end this day.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>What I’d Do Differently</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I didn’t need hindsight to know that we should’ve cut our losses in Chicago and taken the next day’s direct flight to Paris. The ORD-IAD-DUB-FRA-CDG milk run had too many failure points and I knew it. It would’ve been much smarter to burn United’s vouchers on a downtown hotel, a couple of cocktails, and a good meal.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Note to self — you gotta break those old stupid travel reflexes.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Silver Lining: Trips to Udvar-Hazy and Ocelot Brewing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>That said, we had a day to kill around Dulles, and we used it well.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4913,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_2788-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_2788-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Aircraft hanging from the arched ceiling inside the Smithsonian Udvar-Hazy Center near Dulles Airport\" class=\"wp-image-4913\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">A forced layover at Dulles turned into a long-overdue visit to the Udvar-Hazy Center</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>First stop: the <a href=\"https://airandspace.si.edu/visit/udvar-hazy-center\" title=\"\">Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center</a>, the massive Chantilly, Virginia annex of the Smithsonian\'s National Air and Space Museum. It was a quick Uber ride from our hotel, and I’d always wanted to visit. But for all the times I’ve been through or around Dulles, I never could make it happen. Enormous hangars packed with aircraft and spacecraft — an SR-71, the Space Shuttle Discovery, a Concorde. I loved it. Figure a solid 2 hours if you like to read all the placards.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Then we continued our clockwise lap around IAD to <a href=\"https://ocelotbrewing.com/\" title=\"\">Ocelot Brewing</a>. Great beer, great place tucked away in some generic office park. The Uber driver asked us “How’d you find this place?”&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>“Years of practice,” I replied.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Coming Next: Lyon, Eventually</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>The good news is that this was not the whole trip. It was just the opening act.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4914,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_0413.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_0413-300x128.jpg\" alt=\"Flight status screenshot for United flight UA 915 showing a delayed departure and estimated arrival\" class=\"wp-image-4914\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">One last delay before we got off the ground for France</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Fate did give us one last head fake, though. Walking up to the gate for our IAD-CDG flight, we hear the agent announce “We’re going to delay boarding while the paramedics take care of an ill inbound passenger.” But when it was all done, we left just 30 minutes late and the pilot made up half of that on the flight over.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>No problems at CDG passport control despite the <a href=\"https://www.visahq.com/news/2026-05-09/fr/paris-cdg-passport-control-queues-lengthen-as-victory-day-rush-meets-new-ees-checks/\" title=\"\">horror stories circulating </a>of huge delays caused by the new EU requirement to collect biometrics — face photos and fingerprints — from all non-EU passengers. I think the French just ignored it.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>And then my pieced-together TGV itinerary worked without a hitch. But I didn’t let myself relax until we’d stepped into our hotel room in Lyon and laid down for a 20-minute nap.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','The Long Way to Lyon','Two cancelled planes, four airline agents, and one very creative French train booking — this is how we finally made it to Lyon. Here\'s what a million miles of travel experience taught us about pushing back, staying calm, and finding the silver lining when your trip falls apart at the gate.','inherit','closed','closed','','4903-revision-v1','','','2026-05-17 22:02:13','2026-05-18 03:02:13','',4903,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4922',0,'revision','',0),
(4924,1,'2026-05-17 22:05:55','2026-05-18 03:05:55','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We were at the end of a BNA runway, waiting for the first leg of our trip to Lyon to take off, when the notifications hit my phone. First <a href=\"https://flighty.com/\" title=\"\">Flighty</a>, then United’s own app both lit up red. Our Chicago-Paris flight had been cancelled. Not delayed — cancelled. The plane broke, or as United put it “taking the plane out of service to address a maintenance issue.” Oh, and they’re really sorry. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>So for now, as the plane rotated off the runway, all we knew was that we were going to O’Hare.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>When the App Offers You “Stupid Travel”</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>My old road warrior reflexes kicked in. I paid United\'s $8 for in-flight WiFi and started working the problem. The United app’s rebooking options were all variations on a single itinerary — ORD-SFO-CDG the next day. In other words, “We’ve cancelled your 8-hour flight to Paris and instead we suggest you fly 4 hours west to San Francisco, and then 11 hours east to Paris.”&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Still, I booked it. I needed some sort of backup because I could see even these options disappearing with each screen refresh. More road warrior reflexes — grab the least-bad thing you can see while you work on something better. A bad confirmed seat is still better than a theoretical good seat.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Push Back. Always Push Back.</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Then I hit every non-voice support channel I could find simultaneously: United’s in-app chat, plus a flaming Twitter/X post designed to get the attention of United’s social media team. Which it did.  Once we touched down at ORD, I dialed the Premier Desk and was talking to a live agent before I was off the jet bridge.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4906,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-04-19-at-9.55.46-AM.png\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-04-19-at-9.55.46-AM-216x300.png\" alt=\"Screenshot of a tweet by @mpeacock complaining that United Airlines cancelled his ORD-CDG flight while his connecting flight was on the runway at BNA, with a reply from the official United Airlines account asking him to send a DM with his confirmation number\" class=\"wp-image-4906\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">1.9K views got United\'s attention — sometimes a flaming tweet is its own customer service channel</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>So now I had three conversations going — app chat, social media, and phone — and in each one I pushed back on ORD-SFO-CDG routing. Every agent at the other end immediately agreed it made no sense. Not one of them defended it. They got us seats on the next day\'s direct ORD-CDG flight which was showing as waitlist-only in the app. A human can open seats that the rebooking algorithm can’t — or won’t — touch. And when they do it, always say thank you.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>In parallel, Irene was pushing too. Her phone agent seemed to lean into it a bit harder and found something more aggressive: ORD-IAD-DUB on United, then DUB-FRA-CDG on Lufthansa. I paused for more than a moment. Four flights? That’s way too many points of failure. But it <em>would</em> get us into Paris the next evening, cutting our delay from a full day to maybe six hours.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>So, why not?&nbsp; Famous last words.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We raced over to the ORD-IAD gate and waited while Irene’s phone agent finalized the changes so the gate agent could check us in. We were the last ones boarding, so of course there was no overhead space left. They took our bags and checked them through to Dublin.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Status Still Matters</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>This was one of those times that reminds you airline status is more than just an earlier boarding group. It’s a lever to get your trip back on the track.&nbsp;&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4908,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_0736-scaled.jpeg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_0736-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"United MileagePlus Premier Gold 1 Million Miler card resting on a black carry-on bag with a green luggage tag behind it\" class=\"wp-image-4908\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">When the app gives up, airline status can still get a human to work the problem</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Every phone and chat agent opened with: \"Thank you for being a 1 million mile flyer\"&nbsp; and then worked with me as long as I needed. I never felt rushed; never sensed there was a timer flashing red on their screen, telling them to wrap it up and pick up the next call.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>At the ORD-IAD gate, I could see status indicators next to our names on the gate agent\'s screen and heard him mention our status when he called to get seats opened up for us.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Does status solve everything? No, especially not a broken plane. But does it help when your trip goes sideways, seats are scarce, and you need a human to do something the app won’t do? Yes, absolutely.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>The Second Plane Also Broke</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We landed at Dulles early; which felt like a small win that let us walk, not run to our next gate. We boarded the IAD-DUB flight, settled in, and then waited to take off. And then waited some more.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>The pilot finally announced what we all kinda knew; it\'s a maintenance issue. This time, it was something about the pilots’ cabin temperature regulation not working. Which I am very much in favor of fixing. I want the pilots on my trans-Atlantic flights to be as comfortable and focused as possible.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4907,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/MilkRunCollage.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/MilkRunCollage-300x189.jpg\" alt=\"Flight itinerary screenshot showing a Washington Dulles to Dublin to Frankfurt to Paris routing.\" class=\"wp-image-4907\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">The milk run that looked clever right up until the IAD-DUB plane broke</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>As we sat at the gate with the door open and maintenance crews moving in and out, I watched our Dublin-to-Frankfurt connection time shrink. Then disappear. I started searching for other DUB-CDG options but came up empty. Meanwhile the gate agent came on and told us that, by law, given the delay, they had to let passengers deplane and wait in the terminal. This was a decision point.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Stay on the plane and risk getting stranded in Dublin, farther from Paris with fewer options? Or get off here, stop the madness, and reset? I found an IAD-CDG flight leaving the next day, so we got off.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We told our tale of woe to the gate agent, who cancelled us off the Dublin flight and had our bags pulled. The gate agent gave us hotel and meal vouchers while I had a phone agent lock in the IAD-CDG flight. We finally sat down in baggage claim and caught a quick breath before our bags popped out on the carousel in front of us.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Give Credit Where Credit’s Due</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Waiting for the hotel shuttle, thinking back over the past 9 hours — every single customer-facing United employee we dealt with was helpful, patient, and genuinely sympathetic. Not one was rude, or tried to brush us off, or hid behind “the system won’t let me.” They all tried their best.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I don\'t know how much of that is training, how much was because of my status; but it mattered. It took a bit of the edge off of what was a very lousy day.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>One More Problem: French Trains</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We got to our hotel room at 12:30am but I still wasn’t finished. Our original itinerary was BNA-ORD-CDG on United, and then a 2-hour TGV ride to Lyon. But arriving a day later meant rebooking the train too.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I fire up the <a href=\"https://www.sncf-connect.com/\" title=\"\">SNCF Connect</a> app and get… nothing. OK, it’s early Sunday morning in France, but I didn’t think the French 35-hour work week applied to their mobile apps too.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4911,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_0402.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_0402-173x300.jpg\" alt=\"SNCF Connect screenshot showing multiple Paris Charles de Gaulle to Lyon Part-Dieu TGV options marked “Train fully booked.”\" class=\"wp-image-4911\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">The French train app added its own plot twist: every direct CDG-to-Lyon train was fully booked</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Luckily, their web site decided to work the weekend and I started down the rebooking path — until I couldn’t go any further. Every CDG-Lyon train was sold out, from the noon train I was trying to rebook all the way through the last train at 8pm. A quick look at Google Maps told me the alternative — renting a car — would be a 5-6-hour trip. This just keeps getting better.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Back to the SNCF web site. I looked at the noon train’s route. One intermediate stop — EuroDisney. Maybe that was the problem; families flying in that morning have bought up all the seats. So I broke up my search — CDG-to-EuroDisney, then EuroDisney-to-Lyon. Found seats on an earlier train to EuroDisney and then seats on the noon train to Lyon. It would mean hanging around the train station for 50 minutes, but way better than 5 hours behind a rental car wheel. And maybe they’d have some decent croissants.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>But now what if I booked both legs separately but on the same train?&nbsp; Yup, it worked. CDG-to EuroDisney and EuroDisney-to-Lyon, all on the noon train. Why couldn’t I book it straight through as one trip? I didn’t know and was too tired to care. I just wanted to turn off the light and end this day.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>What I’d Do Differently</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I didn’t need hindsight to know that we should’ve cut our losses in Chicago and taken the next day’s direct flight to Paris. The ORD-IAD-DUB-FRA-CDG milk run had too many failure points and I knew it. It would’ve been much smarter to burn United’s vouchers on a downtown hotel, a couple of cocktails, and a good meal.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Note to self — you gotta break those old stupid travel reflexes.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Silver Lining: Trips to Udvar-Hazy and Ocelot Brewing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>That said, we had a day to kill around Dulles, and we used it well.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4913,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_2788-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_2788-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Aircraft hanging from the arched ceiling inside the Smithsonian Udvar-Hazy Center near Dulles Airport\" class=\"wp-image-4913\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">A forced layover at Dulles turned into a long-overdue visit to the Udvar-Hazy Center</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>First stop: the <a href=\"https://airandspace.si.edu/visit/udvar-hazy-center\" title=\"\">Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center</a>, the massive Chantilly, Virginia annex of the Smithsonian\'s National Air and Space Museum. It was a quick Uber ride from our hotel, and I’d always wanted to visit. But for all the times I’ve been through or around Dulles, I never could make it happen. Enormous hangars packed with aircraft and spacecraft — an SR-71, the Space Shuttle Discovery, a Concorde. I loved it. Figure a solid 2 hours if you like to read all the placards.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Then we continued our clockwise lap around IAD to <a href=\"https://ocelotbrewing.com/\" title=\"\">Ocelot Brewing</a>. Great beer, great place tucked away in some generic office park. The Uber driver asked us “How’d you find this place?”&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>“Years of practice,” I replied.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Coming Next: Lyon, Eventually</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>The good news is that this was not the whole trip. It was just the opening act.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4914,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_0413.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_0413-300x128.jpg\" alt=\"Flight status screenshot for United flight UA 915 showing a delayed departure and estimated arrival\" class=\"wp-image-4914\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">One last delay before we got off the ground for France</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Fate did give us one last head fake, though. Walking up to the gate for our IAD-CDG flight, we hear the agent announce “We’re going to delay boarding while the paramedics take care of an ill inbound passenger.” But when it was all done, we left just 30 minutes late and the pilot made up half of that on the flight over.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>No problems at CDG passport control despite the <a href=\"https://www.visahq.com/news/2026-05-09/fr/paris-cdg-passport-control-queues-lengthen-as-victory-day-rush-meets-new-ees-checks/\" title=\"\">horror stories circulating </a>of huge delays caused by the new EU requirement to collect biometrics — face photos and fingerprints — from all non-EU passengers. I think the French just ignored it.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>And then my pieced-together TGV itinerary worked without a hitch. But I didn’t let myself relax until we’d stepped into our hotel room in Lyon and laid down for a 20-minute nap.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','The Long Way to Lyon','Two cancelled planes, four airline agents, and one very creative French train booking — this is how we finally made it to Lyon. Here\'s what a million miles of travel experience taught us about pushing back, staying calm, and finding the silver lining when your trip falls apart at the gate.','inherit','closed','closed','','4903-revision-v1','','','2026-05-17 22:05:55','2026-05-18 03:05:55','',4903,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4924',0,'revision','',0),
(4926,1,'2026-05-17 22:12:19','2026-05-18 03:12:19','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We were at the end of a BNA runway, waiting for the first leg of our trip to Lyon to take off, when the notifications hit my phone. First <a href=\"https://flighty.com/\" title=\"\">Flighty</a>, then United’s own app both lit up red. Our Chicago-Paris flight had been cancelled. Not delayed — cancelled. The plane broke, or as United put it “taking the plane out of service to address a maintenance issue.” Oh, and they’re really sorry. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>So for now, as the plane rotated off the runway, all we knew was that we were going to O’Hare.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>When the App Offers You “Stupid Travel”</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>My old road warrior reflexes kicked in. I paid United\'s $8 for in-flight WiFi and started working the problem. The United app’s rebooking options were all variations on a single itinerary — ORD-SFO-CDG the next day. In other words, “We’ve cancelled your 8-hour flight to Paris and instead we suggest you fly 4 hours west to San Francisco, and then 11 hours east to Paris.”&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Still, I booked it. I needed some sort of backup because I could see even these options disappearing with each screen refresh. More road warrior reflexes — grab the least-bad thing you can see while you work on something better. A bad confirmed seat is still better than a theoretical good seat.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Push Back. Always Push Back.</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Then I hit every non-voice support channel I could find simultaneously: United’s in-app chat, plus a flaming Twitter/X post designed to get the attention of United’s social media team. Which it did.  Once we touched down at ORD, I dialed the Premier Desk and was talking to a live agent before I was off the jet bridge.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4906,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-04-19-at-9.55.46-AM.png\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-04-19-at-9.55.46-AM-216x300.png\" alt=\"Screenshot of a tweet by @mpeacock complaining that United Airlines cancelled his ORD-CDG flight while his connecting flight was on the runway at BNA, with a reply from the official United Airlines account asking him to send a DM with his confirmation number\" class=\"wp-image-4906\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">1.9K views got United\'s attention — sometimes a flaming tweet is its own customer service channel</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>So now I had three conversations going — app chat, social media, and phone — and in each one I pushed back on ORD-SFO-CDG routing. Every agent at the other end immediately agreed it made no sense. Not one of them defended it. They got us seats on the next day\'s direct ORD-CDG flight which was showing as waitlist-only in the app. A human can open seats that the rebooking algorithm can’t — or won’t — touch. And when they do it, always say thank you.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>In parallel, Irene was pushing too. Her phone agent seemed to lean into it a bit harder and found something more aggressive: ORD-IAD-DUB on United, then DUB-FRA-CDG on Lufthansa. I paused for more than a moment. Four flights? That’s way too many points of failure. But it <em>would</em> get us into Paris the next evening, cutting our delay from a full day to maybe six hours.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>So, why not?&nbsp; Famous last words.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We raced over to the ORD-IAD gate and waited while Irene’s phone agent finalized the changes so the gate agent could check us in. We were the last ones boarding, so of course there was no overhead space left. They took our bags and checked them through to Dublin.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Status Still Matters</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>This was one of those times that reminds you airline status is more than just an earlier boarding group. It’s a lever to get your trip back on the track.&nbsp;&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4908,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_0736-scaled.jpeg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_0736-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"United MileagePlus Premier Gold 1 Million Miler card resting on a black carry-on bag with a green luggage tag behind it\" class=\"wp-image-4908\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">When the app gives up, airline status can still get a human to work the problem</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Every phone and chat agent opened with: \"Thank you for being a 1 million mile flyer\"&nbsp; and then worked with me as long as I needed. I never felt rushed; never sensed there was a timer flashing red on their screen, telling them to wrap it up and pick up the next call.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>At the ORD-IAD gate, I could see status indicators next to our names on the gate agent\'s screen and heard him mention our status when he called to get seats opened up for us.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Does status solve everything? No, especially not a broken plane. But does it help when your trip goes sideways, seats are scarce, and you need a human to do something the app won’t do? Yes, absolutely.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>The Second Plane Also Broke</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We landed at Dulles early; which felt like a small win that let us walk, not run to our next gate. We boarded the IAD-DUB flight, settled in, and then waited to take off. And then waited some more.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>The pilot finally announced what we all kinda knew; it\'s a maintenance issue. This time, it was something about the pilots’ cabin temperature regulation not working. Which I am very much in favor of fixing. I want the pilots on my trans-Atlantic flights to be as comfortable and focused as possible.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4907,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/MilkRunCollage.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/MilkRunCollage-300x189.jpg\" alt=\"Flight itinerary screenshot showing a Washington Dulles to Dublin to Frankfurt to Paris routing.\" class=\"wp-image-4907\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">The milk run that looked clever right up until the IAD-DUB plane broke</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>As we sat at the gate with the door open and maintenance crews moving in and out, I watched our Dublin-to-Frankfurt connection time shrink. Then disappear. I started searching for other DUB-CDG options but came up empty. Meanwhile the gate agent came on and told us that, by law, given the delay, they had to let passengers deplane and wait in the terminal. This was a decision point.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Stay on the plane and risk getting stranded in Dublin, farther from Paris with fewer options? Or get off here, stop the madness, and reset? I found an IAD-CDG flight leaving the next day, so we got off.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We told our tale of woe to the gate agent, who cancelled us off the Dublin flight and had our bags pulled. The gate agent gave us hotel and meal vouchers while I had a phone agent lock in the IAD-CDG flight. We finally sat down in baggage claim and caught a quick breath before our bags popped out on the carousel in front of us.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Give Credit Where Credit’s Due</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Waiting for the hotel shuttle, thinking back over the past 9 hours — every single customer-facing United employee we dealt with was helpful, patient, and genuinely sympathetic. Not one was rude, or tried to brush us off, or hid behind “the system won’t let me.” They all tried their best.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I don\'t know how much of that was training, how much was because of my status; but it mattered. It took a bit of the edge off of what was a very lousy day. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>One More Problem: French Trains</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We got to our hotel room at 12:30am but I still wasn’t finished. Our original itinerary was BNA-ORD-CDG on United, and then a 2-hour TGV ride to Lyon. But arriving a day later meant rebooking the train too.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I fire up the <a href=\"https://www.sncf-connect.com/\" title=\"\">SNCF Connect</a> app and get… nothing. OK, it’s early Sunday morning in France, but I didn’t think the French 35-hour work week applied to their mobile apps too.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4911,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_0402.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_0402-173x300.jpg\" alt=\"SNCF Connect screenshot showing multiple Paris Charles de Gaulle to Lyon Part-Dieu TGV options marked “Train fully booked.”\" class=\"wp-image-4911\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">The French train app added its own plot twist: every direct CDG-to-Lyon train was fully booked</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Luckily, their web site decided to work the weekend and I started down the rebooking path — until I couldn’t go any further. Every CDG-Lyon train was sold out, from the noon train I was trying to rebook all the way through the last train at 8pm. A quick look at Google Maps told me the alternative — renting a car — would be a 5-6-hour trip. This just keeps getting better.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Back to the SNCF web site. I looked at the noon train’s route. One intermediate stop — EuroDisney. Maybe that was the problem; families flying in that morning have bought up all the seats. So I broke up my search — CDG-to-EuroDisney, then EuroDisney-to-Lyon. Found seats on an earlier train to EuroDisney and then seats on the noon train to Lyon. It would mean hanging around the train station for 50 minutes, but way better than 5 hours behind a rental car wheel. And maybe they’d have some decent croissants.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>But what if I booked both legs separately but on the same train?  Yup, it worked. CDG-to EuroDisney and EuroDisney-to-Lyon, all on the noon train. Why couldn’t I book it straight through as one trip? I didn’t know and was too tired to care. I just wanted to turn off the light and end this day.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>What I’d Do Differently</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I didn’t need hindsight to know that we should’ve cut our losses in Chicago and taken the next day’s direct flight to Paris. The ORD-IAD-DUB-FRA-CDG milk run had too many failure points and I knew it. It would’ve been much smarter to burn United’s vouchers on a downtown hotel, a couple of cocktails, and a good meal.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Note to self — you gotta break those old stupid travel reflexes.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Silver Lining: Trips to Udvar-Hazy and Ocelot Brewing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>That said, we had a day to kill around Dulles, and we used it well.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4913,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_2788-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_2788-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Aircraft hanging from the arched ceiling inside the Smithsonian Udvar-Hazy Center near Dulles Airport\" class=\"wp-image-4913\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">A forced layover at Dulles turned into a long-overdue visit to the Udvar-Hazy Center</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>First stop: the <a href=\"https://airandspace.si.edu/visit/udvar-hazy-center\" title=\"\">Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center</a>, the massive Chantilly, Virginia annex of the Smithsonian\'s National Air and Space Museum. It was a quick Uber ride from our hotel, and I’d always wanted to visit. But for all the times I’ve been through or around Dulles, I never could make it happen. Enormous hangars packed with aircraft and spacecraft — an SR-71, the Space Shuttle Discovery, a Concorde. I loved it. Figure a solid 2 hours if you like to read all the placards.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Then we continued our clockwise lap around IAD to <a href=\"https://ocelotbrewing.com/\" title=\"\">Ocelot Brewing</a>. Great beer, great place tucked away in some generic office park. The Uber driver asked us “How’d you find this place?”&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>“Years of practice,” I replied.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Coming Next: Lyon, Eventually</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>The good news is that this was not the whole trip. It was just the opening act.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4914,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_0413.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_0413-300x128.jpg\" alt=\"Flight status screenshot for United flight UA 915 showing a delayed departure and estimated arrival\" class=\"wp-image-4914\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">One last delay before we got off the ground for France</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Fate did give us one last head fake, though. Walking up to the gate for our IAD-CDG flight, we hear the agent announce “We’re going to delay boarding while the paramedics take care of an ill inbound passenger.” But when it was all done, we left just 30 minutes late and the pilot made up half of that on the flight over.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>No problems at CDG passport control despite the <a href=\"https://www.visahq.com/news/2026-05-09/fr/paris-cdg-passport-control-queues-lengthen-as-victory-day-rush-meets-new-ees-checks/\" title=\"\">horror stories circulating </a>of huge delays caused by the new EU requirement to collect biometrics — face photos and fingerprints — from non-EU passengers. I think the French just ignored it. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>And then my pieced-together TGV itinerary worked without a hitch. But I didn’t let myself relax until we’d stepped into our hotel room in Lyon and laid down for a 20-minute nap.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','The Long Way to Lyon','Two cancelled planes, four airline agents, and one very creative French train booking — this is how we finally made it to Lyon. Here\'s what a million miles of travel experience taught us about pushing back, staying calm, and finding the silver lining when your trip falls apart at the gate.','inherit','closed','closed','','4903-revision-v1','','','2026-05-17 22:12:19','2026-05-18 03:12:19','',4903,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4926',0,'revision','',0),
(4927,1,'2026-05-18 09:38:26','2026-05-18 14:38:26','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We were at the end of a BNA runway, waiting for the first leg of our trip to Lyon to take off, when the notifications hit my phone. First <a href=\"https://flighty.com/\" title=\"\">Flighty</a>, then United’s own app both lit up red. Our Chicago-Paris flight had been cancelled. Not delayed — cancelled. The plane broke, or as United put it “taking the plane out of service to address a maintenance issue.” Oh, and they’re really sorry. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>So for now, as the plane rotated off the runway, all we knew was that we were going to O’Hare.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>When the App Offers You “Stupid Travel”</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>My old road warrior reflexes kicked in. I paid United\'s $8 for in-flight WiFi and started working the problem. The United app’s rebooking options were all variations on a single itinerary — ORD-SFO-CDG the next day. In other words, “We’ve cancelled your 8-hour flight to Paris and instead we suggest you fly 4 hours west to San Francisco, and then 11 hours east to Paris.”&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Still, I booked it. I needed some sort of backup because I could see even these options disappearing with each screen refresh. More road warrior reflexes — grab the least-bad thing you can see while you work on something better. A bad confirmed seat is still better than a theoretical good seat.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Push Back. Always Push Back.</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Then I hit every non-voice support channel I could find simultaneously: United’s in-app chat, plus a flaming Twitter/X post designed to get the attention of United’s social media team. Which it did.  Once we touched down at ORD, I dialed the Premier Desk and was talking to a live agent before I was off the jet bridge.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4906,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-04-19-at-9.55.46-AM.png\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-04-19-at-9.55.46-AM-216x300.png\" alt=\"Screenshot of a tweet by @mpeacock complaining that United Airlines cancelled his ORD-CDG flight while his connecting flight was on the runway at BNA, with a reply from the official United Airlines account asking him to send a DM with his confirmation number\" class=\"wp-image-4906\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">1.9K views got United\'s attention — sometimes a flaming tweet is its own customer service channel</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>So now I had three conversations going — app chat, social media, and phone — and in each one I pushed back on ORD-SFO-CDG routing. Every agent at the other end immediately agreed it made no sense. Not one of them defended it. They got us seats on the next day\'s direct ORD-CDG flight which was showing as waitlist-only in the app. A human can open seats that the rebooking algorithm can’t — or won’t — touch. And when they do it, always say thank you.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>In parallel, Irene was pushing too. Her phone agent seemed to lean into it a bit harder and found something more aggressive: ORD-IAD-DUB on United, then DUB-FRA-CDG on Lufthansa. I paused for more than a moment. Four flights? That’s way too many points of failure. But it <em>would</em> get us into Paris the next evening, cutting our delay from a full day to maybe six hours.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>So, why not?&nbsp; Famous last words.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We raced over to the ORD-IAD gate and waited while Irene’s phone agent finalized the changes so the gate agent could check us in. We were the last ones boarding, so of course there was no overhead space left. They took our bags and checked them through to Dublin.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Status Still Matters</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>This was one of those times that reminds you airline status is more than just an earlier boarding group. It’s a lever to get your trip back on the track.&nbsp;&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4908,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_0736-scaled.jpeg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_0736-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"United MileagePlus Premier Gold 1 Million Miler card resting on a black carry-on bag with a green luggage tag behind it\" class=\"wp-image-4908\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">When the app gives up, airline status can still get a human to work the problem</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Every phone and chat agent opened with: \"Thank you for being a 1 million mile flyer\"&nbsp; and then worked with me as long as I needed. I never felt rushed; never sensed there was a timer flashing red on their screen, telling them to wrap it up and pick up the next call.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>At the ORD-IAD gate, I could see status indicators next to our names on the gate agent\'s screen and heard him mention our status when he called to get seats opened up for us.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Does status solve everything? No, especially not a broken plane. But does it help when your trip goes sideways, seats are scarce, and you need a human to do something the app won’t do? Yes, absolutely.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>The Second Plane Also Broke</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We landed at Dulles early; which felt like a small win that let us walk, not run to our next gate. We boarded the IAD-DUB flight, settled in, and then waited to take off. And then waited some more.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>The pilot finally announced what we all kinda knew; it\'s a maintenance issue. This time, it was something about the pilots’ cabin temperature regulation not working. Which I am very much in favor of fixing. I want the pilots on my trans-Atlantic flights to be as comfortable and focused as possible.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4907,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/MilkRunCollage.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/MilkRunCollage-300x189.jpg\" alt=\"Flight itinerary screenshot showing a Washington Dulles to Dublin to Frankfurt to Paris routing.\" class=\"wp-image-4907\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">The milk run that looked clever right up until the IAD-DUB plane broke</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>As we sat at the gate with the door open and maintenance crews moving in and out, I watched our Dublin-to-Frankfurt connection time shrink. Then disappear. I started searching for other DUB-CDG options but came up empty. Meanwhile the gate agent came on and told us that, by law, given the delay, they had to let passengers deplane and wait in the terminal. This was a decision point.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Stay on the plane and risk getting stranded in Dublin, farther from Paris with fewer options? Or get off here, stop the madness, and reset? I found an IAD-CDG flight leaving the next day, so we got off.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We told our tale of woe to the gate agent, who cancelled us off the Dublin flight and had our bags pulled. The gate agent gave us hotel and meal vouchers while I had a phone agent lock in the IAD-CDG flight. We finally sat down in baggage claim and caught a quick breath before our bags popped out on the carousel in front of us.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Give Credit Where Credit’s Due</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Waiting for the hotel shuttle, thinking back over the past 9 hours — every single customer-facing United employee we dealt with was helpful, patient, and genuinely sympathetic. Not one was rude, or tried to brush us off, or hid behind “the system won’t let me.” They all tried their best.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I don\'t know how much of that was training, how much was because of my status; but it mattered. It took a bit of the edge off of what was a very lousy day. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>One More Problem: French Trains</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We got to our hotel room at 12:30am but I still wasn’t finished. Our original itinerary was BNA-ORD-CDG on United, and then a 2-hour TGV ride to Lyon. But arriving a day later meant rebooking the train too.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I fire up the <a href=\"https://www.sncf-connect.com/\" title=\"\">SNCF Connect</a> app and get… nothing. OK, it’s early Sunday morning in France, but I didn’t think the French 35-hour work week applied to their mobile apps too.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4911,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_0402.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_0402-173x300.jpg\" alt=\"SNCF Connect screenshot showing multiple Paris Charles de Gaulle to Lyon Part-Dieu TGV options marked “Train fully booked.”\" class=\"wp-image-4911\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">The French train app added its own plot twist: every direct CDG-to-Lyon train was fully booked</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Luckily, their web site decided to work the weekend and I started down the rebooking path — until I couldn’t go any further. Every CDG-Lyon train was sold out, from the noon train I was trying to rebook all the way through the last train at 8pm. A quick look at Google Maps told me the alternative — renting a car — would be a 5-6-hour trip. This just keeps getting better.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Back to the SNCF web site. I looked at the noon train’s route. One intermediate stop — EuroDisney. Maybe that was the problem; families flying in that morning have bought up all the seats. So I broke up my search — CDG-to-EuroDisney, then EuroDisney-to-Lyon. Found seats on an earlier train to EuroDisney and then seats on the noon train to Lyon. It would mean hanging around the train station for 50 minutes, but way better than 5 hours behind a rental car wheel. And maybe they’d have some decent croissants.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>But what if I booked both legs separately but on the same train?  Yup, it worked. CDG-to EuroDisney and EuroDisney-to-Lyon, all on the noon train. Why couldn’t I book it straight through as one trip? I didn’t know and was too tired to care. I just wanted to turn off the light and end this day.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>What I’d Do Differently</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I didn’t need hindsight to know that we should’ve cut our losses in Chicago and taken the next day’s direct flight to Paris. The ORD-IAD-DUB-FRA-CDG milk run had too many failure points and I knew it. It would’ve been much smarter to burn United’s vouchers on a downtown hotel, a couple of cocktails, and a good meal.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Note to self — you gotta break those old stupid travel reflexes.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Silver Lining: Trips to Udvar-Hazy and Ocelot Brewing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>That said, we had a day to kill around Dulles, and we used it well.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4913,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_2788-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_2788-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Aircraft hanging from the arched ceiling inside the Smithsonian Udvar-Hazy Center near Dulles Airport\" class=\"wp-image-4913\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">A forced layover at Dulles turned into a long-overdue visit to the Udvar-Hazy Center</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>First stop: the <a href=\"https://airandspace.si.edu/visit/udvar-hazy-center\" title=\"\">Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center</a>, the massive Chantilly, Virginia annex of the Smithsonian\'s National Air and Space Museum. It was a quick Uber ride from our hotel, and I’d always wanted to visit. But for all the times I’ve been through or around Dulles, I never could make it happen. Enormous hangars packed with aircraft and spacecraft — an SR-71, the Space Shuttle Discovery, a Concorde. I loved it. Figure a solid 2 hours if you like to read all the placards.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Then we continued our clockwise lap around IAD to <a href=\"https://ocelotbrewing.com/\" title=\"\">Ocelot Brewing</a>. Great beer, great place tucked away in some generic office park. The Uber driver asked us “How’d you find this place?”&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>“Years of practice,” I replied.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Coming Next: Lyon, Eventually</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>The good news is that this was not the whole trip. It was just the opening act.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4914,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_0413.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_0413-300x128.jpg\" alt=\"Flight status screenshot for United flight UA 915 showing a delayed departure and estimated arrival\" class=\"wp-image-4914\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">One last delay before we got off the ground for France</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Fate did give us one last head fake, though. Walking up to the gate for our IAD-CDG flight, we hear the agent announce “We’re going to delay boarding while the paramedics take care of an ill inbound passenger.” But when it was all done, we left just 30 minutes late and the pilot made up half of that on the flight over.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>No problems at CDG passport control despite the <a href=\"https://www.visahq.com/news/2026-05-09/fr/paris-cdg-passport-control-queues-lengthen-as-victory-day-rush-meets-new-ees-checks/\" title=\"\">horror stories circulating </a>of huge delays caused by the new EU requirement to collect biometrics — face photos and fingerprints — from non-EU passengers. I think the French just ignored it. </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>And then my pieced-together TGV itinerary worked without a hitch. But I didn’t let myself relax until we’d stepped into our hotel room in Lyon and laid down for a 20-minute nap.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','The Long Way to Lyon','Two cancelled planes, four airline agents, and one creative French train booking — this is how we finally made it to Lyon. Here\'s what millions of miles of travel experience taught us about pushing back, staying calm, and finding the silver lining when your trip falls apart at the gate.','inherit','closed','closed','','4903-revision-v1','','','2026-05-18 09:38:26','2026-05-18 14:38:26','',4903,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4927',0,'revision','',0),
(4937,1,'2026-05-21 16:40:06','2026-05-21 21:40:06','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><em>This trip had been knocking around the back of my mind for a while. And for me, that’s a big piece of retirement travel — finally getting on with the travel I’ve thought about but never found the time to do. Like this road trip to hit Mardi Gras in Mobile (<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2026/02/25/gulf-coast-mardi-gras-road-trip-stop-1-mobile/\" title=\"\">our first stop</a>), New Orleans, and Cajun Country.</em></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4810,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Screenshot-2026-02-25-at-8.23.12-AM.png\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Screenshot-2026-02-25-at-8.23.12-AM-300x300.png\" alt=\"Google Map screenshot with a thick blue line defining a road trip\" class=\"wp-image-4810\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">The Gulf Coast Mardi Gras Road Trip Loop</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Monday morning, we packed up our parade haul — mini-Moon Pies, frisbees, plastic cups, plush toys, packages of ramen soup, and, of course, beads — and pointed the car west on I-10 towards the second stop on our Mardi Gras road trip, New Orleans.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Biloxi Detour</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>After just 90 minutes, we made a lunch detour at Biloxi, MS, to a little one-room joint, <a href=\"https://www.parrains-cajun-cooking.com/\">Parrain\'s Cajun Cooking</a>. It’s just a mile north of the casinos, but with its randomly painted wide woodplank walls and an old-school kitchen service window, it feels like it exists in a more low-key parallel universe. No king cake for breakfast, so we ordered a lap around the menu — cups of gumbo, jambalaya, and red beans and rice; adding in an order of deep-fried boudin balls because… why not?</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Back to An Old Haunt</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Our dinner in New Orleans was a bit more up-scale. We walked down Magazine St. to an old favorite, <a href=\"https://www.pecherestaurant.com/\">Pêche</a>.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4832,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_8915-EDIT-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_8915-EDIT-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"Marble oyster bar at Pêche with menus and a glass of white wine, while staff shuck oysters behind the counter\" class=\"wp-image-4832\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Oyster bar seats: the best seats in the house</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I first ate there when it opened in 2014 and haven’t stopped — because it hasn’t given me a reason to stop. And having been away from New Orleans for seven years, it was the obvious first stop. Walking in, it was packed - the bar, the tables, and the six-person back counter in front of the oyster shuckers that was my usual spot, and where I wanted us to eat. So we put our name in and headed over to the bar.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It’s a good-sized bar. Every seat was taken, and most people were eating as well as drinking. We settled in with the rest of the folks leaning against the walls, drinks in hand, waiting for a seat to open up. They had all sort of self-organized into an informal queue. A seat would open up and everyone would acknowledge the next person waiting. In other places I’ve lived — Chicago, Philly — people would\'ve been angling to jump in front. But further south, it feels like politeness and some level of social order are still expected.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>After one drink, a couple of seats at the back counter opened up. I ordered my usual — a half dozen oysters and the whole fish. Irene added a side of Brussels in her continuing quest for more vegetables.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I picked the Alabama oysters off the raw bar menu because, after years of eating Gulf oysters, I\'ve found them to be much tastier than Louisiana oysters, which I think are better cooked — fried for po’ boys, simmered in a gumbo, or char-broiled in the shell. And also because the oyster shucker had cracked open a couple for us to try.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Then, while waiting for our fish, he gave us the Florida and Louisiana oysters that we\'d passed up. So we\'d ordered a half dozen oysters and then got comp\'d another half dozen by the shucker. Gotta love New Orleans’ lagniappe culture. I tipped him extra — all the cash I had left in my wallet.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Gift from the Weather Gods</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4826,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_9290-EDIT-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_9290-EDIT-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Parade route parking sign draped with Mardi Gras beads as crowds line a broad, oak-shaded avenue\" class=\"wp-image-4826\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">New Orleans posts rules for parade day. Mardi Gras posts beads</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>When I laid out this trip, the parade math wasn’t in our favor. Staying in New Orleans Monday through Wednesday nights was only going to give us one parade night — Wednesday. But the same Sunday rainstorm that chased us off our last Mobile parade forced New Orleans to reschedule its two Sunday parades to what had been an empty Tuesday night. One step back, then two steps forward — the rain dance ended up in our favor.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Tuesday afternoon, we walked along Tchoupitoulas St. through the Warehouse District, with a half-block detour for lunch at another old favorite, <a href=\"https://cochonbutcher.com/\">Cochon Butcher</a>. Then we wound our way under the mess of overpasses that is US-90, helped by a squad of cop cars and motorcycles that were holding up traffic so parade floats could make the turn toward the marshalling yards across from the World of Mardi Gras Museum. A reminder that behind every successful Mardi Gras parade is a whole lot of logistics.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Walking past the marshalling yard, we saw float riders for the first parade — <a href=\"https://www.mkfemmefatale.org/\"><em>Femme</em> <em>Fatales</em></a> — starting to assemble. Cars double-parked, unloading groups of middle-aged women hugging and chatting as they headed toward their floats… at maybe 2 p.m. for a 6 p.m. step-off.&nbsp; No wonder they looked so happy — and a bit lit — when we saw them again rolling past the Avenue Pub.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Walking Magazine Street and St Charles Avenue</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4831,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_8926-EDIT-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_8926-EDIT-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Metal tray piled with boiled crawfish and corn on the cob, seasoned and steaming on a wooden table\" class=\"wp-image-4831\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Crawfish and corn: laying a base before the next round of Mardi Gras beers</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We kept walking — up to Magazine St. and through the Garden District. Some stretches looked emptier than I remembered: empty storefronts, “for lease” signs, fewer places open-for-business. Some of that was probably businesses closing early for the parade. But it still felt quieter. Then as we approached Louisiana Ave., it came alive again. We dove into <a href=\"https://www.boilseafoodhouse.com/lower-garden-district\">Boil Seafood House</a> for our first crawfish of the trip and then headed up to the parade route.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4827,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"left\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignleft size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_9291-EDIT-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_9291-EDIT-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Two-story white house with tall columns decorated in oversized colorful flowers and Mardi Gras garlands\" class=\"wp-image-4827\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Uptown house commits to Mardi Gras colors</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Walking back across the Garden District along St Charles Ave. from Louisiana Ave., we could feel the crowd’s vibe shift — from friends and families relaxing outside their houses and across on St Charles’ grassy median they call “<a href=\"https://mikescottwrites.com/2019/06/13/new-orleans-101-why-do-we-call-it-a-neutral-ground-instead-of-a-median/\">neutral ground</a>,” to something a bit more rowdy, with a bit more of an edge to it as we got into the more commercial stretch.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Avenue Pub Balcony View</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I was happy to step off the street and into yet another old haunt, <a href=\"https://theavenuepub.com/\">the Avenue Pub</a>. It was surprisingly uncrowded, both on the first floor and on the second-floor balcony that looks over the parade route.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4829,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_9293-EDIT-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_9293-EDIT-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Brightly lit Mardi Gras float at night with crowds reaching up from both sides of the street\" class=\"wp-image-4829\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Two-story floats turn throws into a competitive sport</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We got to the balcony railing just as the <em>Femme Fatales </em>rolled by. We didn’t expect them to be able to hit us with their throws on the second floor, but the two-story floats made it possible. And the riders were good. Some even cleared us, the first row leaning on the railing, and hit the folks in the second row leaning against the back wall. We all traded beads and frisbees and light-up balls so everyone on the balcony went home with a complete collection of the night’s throws.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Wednesday Night Let-Down</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4833,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_9315-EDIT-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_9315-EDIT-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Nighttime Mardi Gras parade float with two green-costumed torchbearer characters on the front platform and a rider in white standing above, lit by bright blue and gold lights on a city street\" class=\"wp-image-4833\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Watching One Last Float</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>After Tuesday night’s rescheduled parades, the regularly scheduled Wednesday parades were a bit of a let-down. The <em>Muses</em> parade wasn\'t as good as I remembered. And we completely skipped the last parade even though all we had to do was ride the elevator down and walk out the hotel door. Instead, we watched out our window as a high school band marched up Poydras St. from the parade’s end-point to their buses home.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We were parade-ed out.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Scrolling back through Google Photos, looking at photos I took in 2015, those parade floats looked more intricate and clever, and they were all led by flambeaux — guys marching in front carrying big propane-fed torches. There wasn’t any of that on Tuesday or Wednesday night. Just tractors and trucks hauling float trailers that seemed to be built to maximize the number of riders.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We still enjoyed these parades, and maybe I\'ve got a case of rosy retrospection. But I just didn\'t think these parades were as good as the ones we saw 8-10 years ago.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Pilgrimage to the Ultimate King Cake</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4828,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_9298-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_9298-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"People waiting in a long line outside Dong Phuong Bakery under a bright blue sky\" class=\"wp-image-4828\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">We thought we\'d showed up “early\"</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We got up early Wednesday morning to hit the ultimate king cake shop: <a href=\"https://www.dpbakery.com/\">Dong Phuong Bakery</a>.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It’s about a 30-minute drive east — way out of the normal tourist zone, in some suburban light-industrial area. We got there at 7:50 a.m., just before the 8:00 opening time, figuring we\'d be fine.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>As I pulled up, I could see we were way wrong.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>The parking lot was full. Cars were parked along the shoulder of the road. And the line of people ran the length of the building and then started doing Disney-esque switchbacks. I told Irene to get in line while I hunted for parking.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>A rumor came down the line that the first guy showed up at 6:30 a.m. I didn’t doubt it. I saw people walking back to their trucks carrying a bag with their three-cake limit in one hand and a camp chair in the other.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4825,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_9303-EDIT-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_9303-EDIT-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Dong Phuong king cake in a bakery box with purple, green, and gold sugar and a tiny plastic baby on top\" class=\"wp-image-4825\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">The king cake standard by which all others will now be judged</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Talking to people around us, everyone was from New Orleans, had been from New Orleans, or was visiting family there. We were the only ones within conversational radius with no obvious NOLA connection. We were also the only ones not maxing out the three-cake limit.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>After an hour in the queue, we bought one traditional cream cheese-filled king cake. During our wait, Irene ducked into the bakery and came back with a couple of savory bun-style pork things that were very good. I’d make the drive back just for those.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>But the king cake? Definitively the best of the 8-10 we tried on the trip. Runner-up: Dropout Bakery back in Mobile.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Slipping Out of the Bubble to Bywate</strong>r</h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>On our last afternoon in New Orleans, we popped over to Bywater.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I’ve been going there since my “<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2012/07/31/podcast-100-southern-road-trip-breaking-up-with-american-airlines/\">Drive South</a>” trip in 2012, when a guy sitting next to me in a Louisville bar told me about it. (One of the underappreciated benefits of sitting at a bar: accidental travel intelligence.)</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4830,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_8933-EDIT-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_8933-EDIT-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Stack of hanging signs on a building: “For Sale” placards above a bold sign reading “HAUNTED&quot;\" class=\"wp-image-4830\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">New Orleans real estate marketing <em>is</em> unique</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Bywater has always seemed to me to be a bit run-down—or maybe “highly worn”—in a slightly hipster way. Smallish shotgun-ish houses all crammed tightly together along narrow streets that default to single lanes because of the cars parked on both sides.&nbsp;</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I’ve always liked it because it’s anti-French Quarter in the best way. Not a “tourists go home” vibe. More of an “I don\'t give a damn about you, whoever you are” vibe. An indifference that feels honest rather than performative.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>This time through, Bywater looked a bit cleaner, tidier. Not necessarily gentrified, just that a lot of places looked to have been recently painted. And an old manufacturing or steel fabrication plant on the edge of the neighborhood had been converted into a very solid microbrewery.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Maybe this tidying-up is the early stage of gentrification — conversions to Airbnbs and boutique inns behind fresh paint jobs. Maybe the tourist bubble has made it out here..</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Or maybe the Home Depot had a really good sale.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Packing Up and Heading West (again)</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4834,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_9281-EDIT-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_9281-EDIT-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Two powdered-sugar beignets in a paper tray on a café table beside a green to-go coffee cup in New Orleans\" class=\"wp-image-4834\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Breakfast at Café Beignet</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We came back to New Orleans expecting one parade night and got two. We came back hoping our old favorites survived the COVID years and the subsequent inflation surge, and we found Pêche, Cochon Butcher, Avenue Pub, and Café Beignet still standing.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Maybe it\'s where we were hanging out — the Central Business District (CBD), the Warehouse District, the Garden District — high tourism neighborhoods that have been floating on a raft of revenge tourism. Maybe the neighborhoods away from the river, outside the usual tourist path, have had a harder time. But whatever it is, I\'ll take it. I was happy to eat and drink well on our return to New Orleans.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We gathered up our growing tangle of beads, stuffed animals, plastic cups, special chalices, and whatever else we’d accumulated (except the Moon Pies; we ate those), loaded the car, and pointed ourselves west toward the next stop: Lafayette and Acadiana.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><strong>Coming next:</strong> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2026/04/14/gulf-coast-mardi-gras-road-trip-stop-3-lafayette-acadiana/\" title=\"\">Gulf Coast Mardi Gras Road Trip Stop 3 — Lafayette and Acadiana</a></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Recommendations for New Orleans</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Food &amp; Drink</strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://pecherestaurant.com/\">Pêche Seafood Grill</a>, 800 Magazine St. — Ask for the back counter seats in front of the oyster shuckers. Worth the wait.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.cochonbutcher.com/\">Cochon Butcher</a>, 930 Tchoupitoulas St. — Solid lunch spot for sandwiches and small plates</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://theavenuepub.com/\">Avenue Pub</a>, 1732 St. Charles Ave. — Second floor balcony for parade watching, great tap list</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.boilseafoodhouse.com/lower-garden-district\">Boil Seafood House</a>, 3340 Magazine St. — Divey but good Gulf seafood</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.dpbakery.com/\">Dong Phuong Bakery</a>, 14207 Chef Menteur Hwy — King cake and savory pork buns; arrive earlier than you think you need to</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":2240,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/IMG_0136.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/IMG_0136-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Glittery green sign reading “throw me something” mounted on a ladder near Mardi Gras parade route\" class=\"wp-image-2240\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Parade strategy, simplified: stand here and be obvious</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Parade Strategy</strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Skip the French Quarter parades — too crowded, tight streets, small parades</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Garden District along St. Charles Ave. is the sweet spot — better crowd, easier to catch throws</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Avenue Pub\'s second floor balcony gives you parade views with a great beer selection</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Check parade schedules — weather cancellations will reshuffle everything</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Neighborhoods</strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Stay in the Warehouse District or CBD for easy walking to parades and restaurants</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bywater for anti-tourist authenticity (though that may be changing)</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Gulf Coast Mardi Gras Road Trip Stop 2 — New Orleans','Stop 2 of our Gulf Coast Mardi Gras road trip drops us into New Orleans for parades, oysters, king cake, and a little parade-weather luck. We revisit old favorites like Pêche and Cochon Butcher. Includes parade strategy, neighborhood notes, and where to eat and drink.','inherit','closed','closed','','4819-revision-v1','','','2026-05-21 16:40:06','2026-05-21 21:40:06','',4819,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4937',0,'revision','',0),
(4942,1,'2026-07-02 20:44:25','2026-07-03 01:44:25','<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4952,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Screenshot-2026-07-02-at-4.26.42-PM.png\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Screenshot-2026-07-02-at-4.26.42-PM-300x227.png\" alt=\"Screenshot of ChatGPT\'s reasoning for leaving Lyon off the itinerary, listing trade-offs with red X marks and concluding in bold that Lyon is a 10/10 city but not a 10/10 fit for this specific trip\" class=\"wp-image-4952\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">ChatGPT\'s closing argument against Lyon, bold verdict and all</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>After wading through a half-dozen of its recommended itineraries, I asked ChatGPT why it hadn\'t put Lyon on any of them. What I got back was a 500-word, four-part essay on why I was wrong, with its final conclusion helpfully bolded so I wouldn\'t miss it: \"<strong>Lyon is a 10/10 city — just not a 10/10 fit for this specific trip.</strong>\" All it was missing was a bold and centered <strong>Q.E.D.</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We’d booked a bike tour with Backroads through Burgundy for the last week of April and I thought it’d be interesting to see what AI would suggest we do on the week before. So I fired up ChatGPT and Claude and them to fed them the same prompt:</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:quote -->\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote\"><!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>We\'re flying out of Nashville (BNA);</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>At least two nights in every stop so we\'re not bunny-hopping;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>We have to be in Auxerre the night before the tour starts;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>We\'re here for the local food, wine, cheese, and beer;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>We like walking through towns to see what there is to see (I struggled mightily not to use the possibly-past-trend word <em>flâneuring</em>);</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And we\'d like a lunch or dinner in at least one Michelin-starred restaurant.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></blockquote>\n<!-- /wp:quote -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I already had what I thought was a pretty good itinerary  — fly BNA to CDG, catch the TGV from the station inside the airport to Lyon (which, as my post, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2026/05/18/the-long-way-to-lyon/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"The Long Way to Lyon\"><em>The Long Way to Lyon</em></a>, showed, wasn\'t quite as straightforward as I thought), spend a couple of days there, train two hours up to Dijon for a couple more days, then over to Auxerre to hang out until we started the tour.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Reasonable, I thought. The models disagreed. When I pushed ChatGPT to justify itself, that’s when it got a little shirty. We started in Lyon anyway and had a great time.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>The Last Time I Tried This</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It\'s a long way from just three years ago; the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/09/29/podcast-196-cheers-to-beer-tourism-and-travel/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Podcast #196 — Cheers to Beer Tourism and Travel!\">last time I tried using AI to plan a trip.</a> Back in 2023, shortly after ChatGPT 3 launched, I asked it to:</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:quote -->\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote\"><!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Develop a taproom circuit of microbrewery taprooms in Asheville, NC starting at the Aloft Hotel in Asheville. Optimize it to minimize walking distance and maximize Untappd ratings.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph --></blockquote>\n<!-- /wp:quote -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4373,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/stable-diffusion-xl-beer-3.jpeg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/stable-diffusion-xl-beer-3-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"IAI-generated, comic-style illustration of a humanoid robot leaning on a wooden bar with a full glass of golden beer in front of it, shelves of bottles behind, in an industrial-looking taproom\" class=\"wp-image-4373\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">This is the ChatGPT I thought would plan my Asheville trip</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It spat out a nice little table of eight taprooms that looked solid <strong>—</strong> at first glance. But then looking closer, none of the ratings actually matched <a href=\"https://untappd.com\" title=\"Untappd\">Untappd</a>, and the \"circuit\" was less a loop and more a random wander around town. The problem: back then, ChatGPT 3 had no web access and a bad habit of confidently making things up to fill in the gaps.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>After that experiment, I shelved AI for travel planning. I kept using it more and more for other things <strong>—</strong> technical analysis, research, and image generation <strong>—</strong> but not for trips. Then we locked in the Burgundy trip, which got me thinking about giving AI another shot at planning a trip. I\'d felt the models getting dramatically better everywhere else I was using them. And honestly, I didn\'t have many ideas on what to do with the week beyond \"eat and drink in Lyon and Dijon”, so I gave AI another go.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:group {\"layout\":{\"type\":\"flex\",\"flexWrap\":\"nowrap\"},\"hideFromFeed\":true} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-group\"><!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Model Triangulation</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading --></div>\n<!-- /wp:group -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4948,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/IMG_0630-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/IMG_0630-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"A &quot;maBaguette&quot; automated baguette vending machine on a roadside in rural Burgundy, offering fresh artisan baguettes around the clock for 1.20 euros, self-service (libre service)\" class=\"wp-image-4948\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">A baguette machine on the side of an empty lot. Automation even the French will endorse.</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Another thing that\'s changed since Asheville is the sheer number of large language models (LLMs). Back then, it was ChatGPT. Today, it’s easy to paste the same prompt into seven state-of-the-art models — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Mistral, Kimi, Deepseek, and Qwen. Three American, one French, three Chinese.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Seven was about four too many for me. So after skimming the first round of answers, I cut it down to three: ChatGPT and Claude — my usual suspects — and Mistral, mostly because I thought a French model might have some unique local insight buried somewhere in its training data.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I do what I call <em>model triangulation</em>. I give each model the same prompt and watch how their answers line up. If two or three of them agree on something, I figure it’s pretty safe to believe it. I started doing this as an error check — a way to swerve the hallucinations, and it has mostly worked.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>AI is the new mid-level travel agent</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4946,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Gemini_Generated_Image_clj4yfclj4yfclj4.png\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Gemini_Generated_Image_clj4yfclj4yfclj4-1024x559.png\" alt=\"AI-generated cartoon of a humanoid robot travel agent named Aurora at a cluttered desk with vintage computers, Guide Michelin books, and a Côte d\'Or map, fielding confused questions about Burgundy wine\" class=\"wp-image-4946\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Meet Aurora, Unit-A01 — the world\'s last mid-level travel agent, sweating over Burgundy\'s \"local charm factor.\" </figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>The three models gave me pretty similar results, all sitting right in the “fat part of the curve” of tourist recommendations. In Lyon: don\'t miss Vieux Lyon (the old town) and get into a traditional bouchon for beef bourguignon or a pike quenelle. In Dijon: hit Fallot\'s for a mustard tasting. None of it wrong; none of it bad; just none of it unique.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4945,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/8BA8EB00-9074-46D7-A5AB-4A01715E9F3F.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/8BA8EB00-9074-46D7-A5AB-4A01715E9F3F-169x300.jpg\" alt=\"Four-photo collage of dinner at Café Comptoir Abel, a classic Lyon bouchon: sliced sausage over green lentils, white asparagus with salad, a bottle of Yann Chave Crozes-Hermitage 2024, and a red-wine beef braise with potatoes and carrots.\" class=\"wp-image-4945\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">The \"fat part of the curve\" <em>can</em> be tasty</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>AI didn\'t give me any blinding insights or uncover any hidden finds. What the models <em>did</em> do was collect all the usual suspects — those recommendations that show up in every guidebook, tourism site, travel blog, and review site — filtered them through all the wants and constraints I’d given it, and then hand back a clean, easy-to-read itinerary. Which has real value. It gave me in minutes what would’ve taken me a couple of days of Googling and stitching the results all together. Or what a competent mid-level travel agent would\'ve given me — if those still exist.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>The Part AI Didn\'t (Couldn’t?) Do</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>What I <em>didn\'t</em> get was the next-level research that leads you to the real highlight of the trip. To find great restaurants, Irene leaned on her old standby, the <a href=\"https://guide.michelin.com/us/en\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Michelin Guide</a>. I went hunting for local opinions — Chrome-translated pieces from Le Figaro and Lyon Capitale — spelunking through specialty wine blogs and forums for wine bar recommendations and, as always, hitting Untappd to see where people were checking in interesting beers.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4947,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/IMG_0479-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/IMG_0479-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"A frothy cocktail served in a miniature white clawfoot bathtub with two black straws and a yellow rubber duck perched on top, at a tiki bar with &quot;Drink Me&quot; mugs behind\" class=\"wp-image-4947\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Don\'t know how the models missed Dijon\'s tiki bar</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>For me, AI quickly did the first-level work — the initial research that lays out the contours of the trip, and assembling an itinerary around them. Yes, that\'s the easy part of the trip planning, but it\'s still work that has to get done. And every hour AI saved me there was another hour I could spend digging further into the stuff it couldn\'t reach.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Where AI Actually Won</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>The place where AI was able to shed its mid-level travel agent tag was weather forecasting. Not a big deal for two weeks in one spot — pull up AccuWeather, give it a look, and you’re done. But this was a touring vacation where we were pulling up stakes every two days. That’s a lot of forecast tabs, a lot of copy-paste to get it all into one place that I could look at and figure out what to pack. Sounded like a good job for AI.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>So I gave ChatGPT and Claude the same prompt:</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:quote -->\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote\"><!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Use your web search tools to give me a day-by-day forecast for the two-week Burgundy itinerary in this public TripIt link.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph --></blockquote>\n<!-- /wp:quote -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Claude immediately pulled up short -- “TripIt blocks automated access to their pages” -- while ChatGPT ploughed ahead. Huh. Well, no matter — I printed the itinerary as a PDF, uploaded it to Claude, and off it went. About four minutes later, both models came back with daily forecasts for every stop, plus a very useful summary. Something that probably would\'ve taken me thirty minutes to assemble was done in four.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4951,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Screenshot-2026-07-02-at-4.24.23-PM.png\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Screenshot-2026-07-02-at-4.24.23-PM-300x242.png\" alt=\"Screenshot of an AI-generated &quot;Burgundy Bike Ride · Updated Forecast&quot; for Lyon and Dijon; days that shifted more than 3°F from the prior forecast are highlighted, with gains up to +9°F and TGV/train transfer notes\" class=\"wp-image-4951\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Claude\'s day-before refresh, the big swings flagged automatically</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>But the best part came the day before we left. While packing, I went back to both chats and asked them to refresh their forecasts <em>and</em> flag every change of more than three degrees Fahrenheit — the kind of swing that would make me rethink, say, the ratio of short-sleeve to long-sleeve shirts I pack. Three minutes later, I had updated forecasts, and in Claude\'s case, the big-change days color-highlighted. That\'s something I would’ve never found time to do myself the day before leaving.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Treat It Like a Friend</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>So I will lean harder in AI travel planning. The models keep getting smarter and they’re getting wired into more real-time data and more travel services. But my Burgundy travel planning reminded me that they’re not psychic — at least, not yet. The more thought and detail you put into the prompt, the better the response.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4949,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/IMG_0664-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/IMG_0664-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"A silver e-bike parked on gravel in front of a large painted wall sign for the Chassagne-Montrachet Caveau Municipal, advertising the region\'s white and red wines, under a clear blue Burgundy sky\" class=\"wp-image-4949\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Gotta turn around; AI didn\'t tell me I\'d passed some of the world\'s best white wines!</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I’m working on my prompting skills again for a road trip my son Andrew and I are planning through the Canadian Maritimes. Like my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2026/02/25/gulf-coast-mardi-gras-road-trip-stop-1-mobile/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Gulf Coast</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2026/03/10/gulf-coast-mardi-gras-road-trip-stop-2-new-orleans/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Mardi</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2026/04/14/gulf-coast-mardi-gras-road-trip-stop-3-lafayette-acadiana/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Gras</a> road trip, this trip has been knocking around the back of my mind for a while. But, like with Burgundy, I don’t have much of a plan beyond “drink local beer and eat local seafood”. Andrew has already uploaded his Untappd history to Claude and had it draft an initial itinerary. Now he’s unleashed a few AI agents to hunt down more ideas.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>But even with agents scouring the Internet, AI isn’t all-seeing and all-knowing — not yet — so I can\'t just take its itinerary and run. I\'ll treat its recommendations the way I would a good friend\'s or a sharp travel agent\'s: give them strong consideration, check they\'re still correct, and then make up my own mind.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Because after all, it\'s my trip.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:separator -->\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity\"/>\n<!-- /wp:separator -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>What about your trips? Any stories or tips for using AI to help with your travel planning?  Let me know — in the comments below, by email at <a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a>, or ping me at @mpeacock on X/Twitter or @travelcommons on Instagram.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','AI Travel Planning: The Good, The Meh, and the Almost-Magic','Can AI really plan a better trip? After testing ChatGPT, Claude, and other AI models on a Burgundy vacation, I found they\'re surprisingly good at building itineraries and weather forecasts—but they\'re no substitute for local research, good judgment, or the instincts of an experienced traveler.','publish','open','open','','ai-travel-planning-the-good-the-meh-and-the-almost-magic','','https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2026/02/25/gulf-coast-mardi-gras-road-trip-stop-1-mobile/\nhttps://migrate.travelcommons.com/2026/05/18/the-long-way-to-lyon/','2026-07-02 21:31:17','2026-07-03 02:31:17','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4942',0,'post','',0),
(4943,1,'2026-07-02 12:21:12','2026-07-02 17:21:12','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>After wading through a half-dozen of its recommended itineraries, I asked ChatGPT why it hadn\'t put Lyon on any of them. What I got back was a 500-word, four-part essay on why I was wrong, with its final conclusion helpfully bolded so I wouldn\'t miss it: \"<strong>Lyon is a 10/10 city — just not a 10/10 fit for this specific trip.</strong>\" All it was missing was a bold and centered <strong>Q.E.D.</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We’d booked a bike tour with Backroads through Burgundy for the last week of April and I thought it’d be interesting to see what AI would suggest we do on the week before. So I fired up ChatGPT and Claude and them to fed them the same prompt:</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:quote -->\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote\"><!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>We\'re flying out of Nashville (BNA);</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>At least two nights in every stop so we\'re not bunny-hopping;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>We have to be in Auxerre the night before the tour starts;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>We\'re here for the local food, wine, cheese, and beer;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>We like walking through towns to see what there is to see (I struggled mightily not to use the possibly-past-trend word <em>flâneuring</em>);</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And we\'d like a lunch or dinner in at least one Michelin-starred restaurant.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></blockquote>\n<!-- /wp:quote -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I already had what I thought was a pretty good itinerary knocking around in the back of my head — fly BNA to CDG, catch the TGV from the station inside the airport to Lyon (which, as my post, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2026/05/18/the-long-way-to-lyon/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><em>The Long Way to Lyon</em></a>, showed, wasn\'t quite as straightforward as I thought), spend a couple of days there, train two hours up to Dijon for a couple more days, then over to Auxerre to hang out until we started the tour.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Reasonable, I thought. The models disagreed. When I pushed ChatGPT to justify itself, that’s when it got a little shirty. We started in Lyon anyway and had a great time.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>The Last Time I Tried This</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It\'s a long way from just three years ago; the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/09/29/podcast-196-cheers-to-beer-tourism-and-travel/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">last time I tried using AI to plan a trip.</a> Back in 2023, shortly after ChatGPT 3 launched, I asked it to:</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:quote -->\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote\"><!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Develop a taproom circuit of microbrewery taprooms in Asheville, NC starting at the Aloft Hotel in Asheville. Optimize it to minimize walking distance and maximize Untappd ratings.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph --></blockquote>\n<!-- /wp:quote -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It spat out a nice little table of eight taprooms that looked solid <strong>—</strong> at first glance. But then looking closer, none of the ratings actually matched Untappd, and the \"circuit\" was less a loop and more a random wander around town. The problem: back then, ChatGPT 3 had no web access and a bad habit of confidently making things up to fill in the gaps.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>After that experiment, I shelved AI for travel planning. I kept using it more and more for other things <strong>—</strong> technical analysis, research, and image generation <strong>—</strong> but not for trips. Then we locked in the Burgundy trip, which got me thinking about giving AI another shot at planning a trip. I\'d felt the models getting dramatically better everywhere else I was using them. And honestly, I didn\'t have many ideas on what to do with the week beyond \"eat and drink in Lyon and Dijon”, so I gave AI another go.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Model Triangulation</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Another thing that\'s changed since Asheville is the sheer number of large language models (LLMs). Back then, it was ChatGPT. Today, it’s easy to paste the same prompt into seven state-of-the-art models — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Mistral, Kimi, Deepseek, and Qwen. Three American, one French, three Chinese.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Seven was about four too many for me. So after skimming the first round of answers, I cut it down to three: ChatGPT and Claude — my usual suspects — and Mistral, mostly because I thought a French model might have some unique local insight buried somewhere in its training data.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I do what I call <em>model triangulation</em>.I give each model the same prompt and watch how their answers line up. If two or three of them agree on something, I figure it’s pretty safe to believe it. I started doing this as an error check — a way to swerve the hallucinations, and it has mostly worked.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>AI is the new mid-level travel agent</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>The three models gave me pretty similar results, all sitting right in the “fat part of the curve” of tourist recommendations. In Lyon: don\'t miss Vieux Lyon (the old town) and get into a traditional bouchon for beef bourguignon or a pike quenelle. In Dijon: hit Fallot\'s for a mustard tasting. None of it wrong; none of it bad; just none of it unique.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>AI didn\'t give me any blinding insights or uncover any hidden finds. What the models <em>did</em> do was collect all the usual suspects — those recommendations that show up in every guidebook, tourism site, travel blog, and review site — filtered them through all the wants and constraints I’d given it, and hand back a clean, easy-to-read itinerary. Which has real value. It gave me in minutes what would’ve taken me a couple of days of Googling and stitching the results all together. Or what a competent mid-level travel agent would\'ve given me — if those still exist.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>The Part AI Didn\'t (Couldn’t?) Do</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>What I <em>didn\'t</em> get was the next-level research that leads you to the real highlight of the trip. To find great restaurants, Irene leaned on her old standby, the <a href=\"https://guide.michelin.com/us/en\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Michelin Guide</a>. I went hunting for local opinions — Chrome-translated pieces from Le Figaro and Lyon Capitale — spelunking through specialty wine blogs and forums for wine bar recommendations and, as always, hitting Untappd to see where people were checking in interesting beers.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>For me, AI quickly did the first-level work — the initial research that lays out the contours of the trip, and assembling an itinerary around them. Yes, that\'s the easy part of the trip planning, but it\'s still work that has to get done. And every hour AI saved me there was another hour I could spend digging further into the stuff it couldn\'t reach.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Where AI Actually Won</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>The place where AI was able to shed its mid-level travel agent tag was weather forecasting. Not a big deal for two weeks in one spot — pull up AccuWeather, give it a look, and you’re done. But this was a touring vacation where we were pulling up stakes every two days. That’s a lot of forecast tabs, a lot of copy-paste to get it all into one place that I could look at and figure out what to pack. Sounded like a good job for AI.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>So I gave ChatGPT and Claude the same prompt:</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:quote -->\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote\"><!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Use your web search tools to give me a day-by-day forecast for the two-week Burgundy itinerary in this public TripIt link.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph --></blockquote>\n<!-- /wp:quote -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Claude immediately pulled up short -- “TripIt blocks automated access to their pages” -- while ChatGPT ploughed ahead. Huh. Well, no matter — I printed the itinerary as a PDF, uploaded it to Claude, and off it went. About four minutes later, both models came back with daily forecasts for every stop, plus a very useful summary. Something that probably would\'ve taken me thirty minutes to assemble was done in four.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>But the best part came the day before we left. While packing, I went back to both chats and asked them to refresh their forecasts <em>and</em> flag every change of more than three degrees Fahrenheit — the kind of swing that would make me rethink, say, the ratio of short-sleeve to long-sleeve shirts I pack. Three minutes later, I had updated forecasts, and in Claude\'s case, the big-change days color-highlighted. That\'s something I would’ve never found time to do myself the day before leaving.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Treat It Like a Friend</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>So I will lean harder in AI travel planning. The models keep getting smarter and they’re getting wired into more real-time data and more travel services. But my Burgundy travel planning reminded me that they’re not psychic — at least, not yet. The more thought and detail you put into the prompt, the better the response.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I’m working on my prompting skills again for a road trip my son Andrew and I are planning through the Canadian Maritimes. Like my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2026/02/25/gulf-coast-mardi-gras-road-trip-stop-1-mobile/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Gulf Coast</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2026/03/10/gulf-coast-mardi-gras-road-trip-stop-2-new-orleans/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Mardi</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2026/04/14/gulf-coast-mardi-gras-road-trip-stop-3-lafayette-acadiana/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Gras</a> road trip, this trip has been knocking around the back of my mind for a while. But, like with Burgundy, I don’t have much of a plan beyond “drink local beer and eat local seafood”. Andrew has already uploaded his Untappd history to Claude and had it draft an initial itinerary. Now he’s unleashed a few AI agents to hunt down for more ideas.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>But even with agents scouring the Internet, AI isn’t all-seeing and all-knowing — not yet — so I can\'t just take its itinerary and run. I\'ll treat its recommendations the way I would a good friend\'s or a sharp travel agent\'s: give them strong consideration, check they\'re still correct, and then make up my own mind.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Because after all, it\'s my trip.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','AI in Travel Planning: The Good, The Meh, and the Almost-Magic','','inherit','closed','closed','','4942-revision-v1','','','2026-07-02 12:21:12','2026-07-02 17:21:12','',4942,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4943',0,'revision','',0),
(4944,1,'2026-07-02 15:34:05','2026-07-02 20:34:05','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>After wading through a half-dozen of its recommended itineraries, I asked ChatGPT why it hadn\'t put Lyon on any of them. What I got back was a 500-word, four-part essay on why I was wrong, with its final conclusion helpfully bolded so I wouldn\'t miss it: \"<strong>Lyon is a 10/10 city — just not a 10/10 fit for this specific trip.</strong>\" All it was missing was a bold and centered <strong>Q.E.D.</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We’d booked a bike tour with Backroads through Burgundy for the last week of April and I thought it’d be interesting to see what AI would suggest we do on the week before. So I fired up ChatGPT and Claude and them to fed them the same prompt:</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:quote -->\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote\"><!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>We\'re flying out of Nashville (BNA);</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>At least two nights in every stop so we\'re not bunny-hopping;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>We have to be in Auxerre the night before the tour starts;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>We\'re here for the local food, wine, cheese, and beer;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>We like walking through towns to see what there is to see (I struggled mightily not to use the possibly-past-trend word <em>flâneuring</em>);</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And we\'d like a lunch or dinner in at least one Michelin-starred restaurant.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></blockquote>\n<!-- /wp:quote -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I already had what I thought was a pretty good itinerary knocking around in the back of my head — fly BNA to CDG, catch the TGV from the station inside the airport to Lyon (which, as my post, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2026/05/18/the-long-way-to-lyon/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"The Long Way to Lyon\"><em>The Long Way to Lyon</em></a>, showed, wasn\'t quite as straightforward as I thought), spend a couple of days there, train two hours up to Dijon for a couple more days, then over to Auxerre to hang out until we started the tour.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Reasonable, I thought. The models disagreed. When I pushed ChatGPT to justify itself, that’s when it got a little shirty. We started in Lyon anyway and had a great time.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>The Last Time I Tried This</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It\'s a long way from just three years ago; the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/09/29/podcast-196-cheers-to-beer-tourism-and-travel/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Podcast #196 — Cheers to Beer Tourism and Travel!\">last time I tried using AI to plan a trip.</a> Back in 2023, shortly after ChatGPT 3 launched, I asked it to:</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:quote -->\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote\"><!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Develop a taproom circuit of microbrewery taprooms in Asheville, NC starting at the Aloft Hotel in Asheville. Optimize it to minimize walking distance and maximize Untappd ratings.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph --></blockquote>\n<!-- /wp:quote -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It spat out a nice little table of eight taprooms that looked solid <strong>—</strong> at first glance. But then looking closer, none of the ratings actually matched <a href=\"https://untappd.com\" title=\"Untappd\">Untappd</a>, and the \"circuit\" was less a loop and more a random wander around town. The problem: back then, ChatGPT 3 had no web access and a bad habit of confidently making things up to fill in the gaps.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>After that experiment, I shelved AI for travel planning. I kept using it more and more for other things <strong>—</strong> technical analysis, research, and image generation <strong>—</strong> but not for trips. Then we locked in the Burgundy trip, which got me thinking about giving AI another shot at planning a trip. I\'d felt the models getting dramatically better everywhere else I was using them. And honestly, I didn\'t have many ideas on what to do with the week beyond \"eat and drink in Lyon and Dijon”, so I gave AI another go.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Model Triangulation</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Another thing that\'s changed since Asheville is the sheer number of large language models (LLMs). Back then, it was ChatGPT. Today, it’s easy to paste the same prompt into seven state-of-the-art models — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Mistral, Kimi, Deepseek, and Qwen. Three American, one French, three Chinese.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Seven was about four too many for me. So after skimming the first round of answers, I cut it down to three: ChatGPT and Claude — my usual suspects — and Mistral, mostly because I thought a French model might have some unique local insight buried somewhere in its training data.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I do what I call <em>model triangulation</em>. I give each model the same prompt and watch how their answers line up. If two or three of them agree on something, I figure it’s pretty safe to believe it. I started doing this as an error check — a way to swerve the hallucinations, and it has mostly worked.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>AI is the new mid-level travel agent</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>The three models gave me pretty similar results, all sitting right in the “fat part of the curve” of tourist recommendations. In Lyon: don\'t miss Vieux Lyon (the old town) and get into a traditional bouchon for beef bourguignon or a pike quenelle. In Dijon: hit Fallot\'s for a mustard tasting. None of it wrong; none of it bad; just none of it unique.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>AI didn\'t give me any blinding insights or uncover any hidden finds. What the models <em>did</em> do was collect all the usual suspects — those recommendations that show up in every guidebook, tourism site, travel blog, and review site — filtered them through all the wants and constraints I’d given it, and hand back a clean, easy-to-read itinerary. Which has real value. It gave me in minutes what would’ve taken me a couple of days of Googling and stitching the results all together. Or what a competent mid-level travel agent would\'ve given me — if those still exist.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>The Part AI Didn\'t (Couldn’t?) Do</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>What I <em>didn\'t</em> get was the next-level research that leads you to the real highlight of the trip. To find great restaurants, Irene leaned on her old standby, the <a href=\"https://guide.michelin.com/us/en\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Michelin Guide</a>. I went hunting for local opinions — Chrome-translated pieces from Le Figaro and Lyon Capitale — spelunking through specialty wine blogs and forums for wine bar recommendations and, as always, hitting Untappd to see where people were checking in interesting beers.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>For me, AI quickly did the first-level work — the initial research that lays out the contours of the trip, and assembling an itinerary around them. Yes, that\'s the easy part of the trip planning, but it\'s still work that has to get done. And every hour AI saved me there was another hour I could spend digging further into the stuff it couldn\'t reach.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Where AI Actually Won</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>The place where AI was able to shed its mid-level travel agent tag was weather forecasting. Not a big deal for two weeks in one spot — pull up AccuWeather, give it a look, and you’re done. But this was a touring vacation where we were pulling up stakes every two days. That’s a lot of forecast tabs, a lot of copy-paste to get it all into one place that I could look at and figure out what to pack. Sounded like a good job for AI.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>So I gave ChatGPT and Claude the same prompt:</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:quote -->\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote\"><!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Use your web search tools to give me a day-by-day forecast for the two-week Burgundy itinerary in this public TripIt link.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph --></blockquote>\n<!-- /wp:quote -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Claude immediately pulled up short -- “TripIt blocks automated access to their pages” -- while ChatGPT ploughed ahead. Huh. Well, no matter — I printed the itinerary as a PDF, uploaded it to Claude, and off it went. About four minutes later, both models came back with daily forecasts for every stop, plus a very useful summary. Something that probably would\'ve taken me thirty minutes to assemble was done in four.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>But the best part came the day before we left. While packing, I went back to both chats and asked them to refresh their forecasts <em>and</em> flag every change of more than three degrees Fahrenheit — the kind of swing that would make me rethink, say, the ratio of short-sleeve to long-sleeve shirts I pack. Three minutes later, I had updated forecasts, and in Claude\'s case, the big-change days color-highlighted. That\'s something I would’ve never found time to do myself the day before leaving.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Treat It Like a Friend</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>So I will lean harder in AI travel planning. The models keep getting smarter and they’re getting wired into more real-time data and more travel services. But my Burgundy travel planning reminded me that they’re not psychic — at least, not yet. The more thought and detail you put into the prompt, the better the response.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I’m working on my prompting skills again for a road trip my son Andrew and I are planning through the Canadian Maritimes. Like my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2026/02/25/gulf-coast-mardi-gras-road-trip-stop-1-mobile/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Gulf Coast</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2026/03/10/gulf-coast-mardi-gras-road-trip-stop-2-new-orleans/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Mardi</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2026/04/14/gulf-coast-mardi-gras-road-trip-stop-3-lafayette-acadiana/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Gras</a> road trip, this trip has been knocking around the back of my mind for a while. But, like with Burgundy, I don’t have much of a plan beyond “drink local beer and eat local seafood”. Andrew has already uploaded his Untappd history to Claude and had it draft an initial itinerary. Now he’s unleashed a few AI agents to hunt down for more ideas.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>But even with agents scouring the Internet, AI isn’t all-seeing and all-knowing — not yet — so I can\'t just take its itinerary and run. I\'ll treat its recommendations the way I would a good friend\'s or a sharp travel agent\'s: give them strong consideration, check they\'re still correct, and then make up my own mind.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Because after all, it\'s my trip.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','AI Travel Planning: The Good, The Meh, and the Almost-Magic','Can AI really plan a better trip? After testing ChatGPT, Claude, and other AI models on a Burgundy vacation, I found they\'re surprisingly good at building itineraries and weather forecasts—but they\'re no substitute for local research, good judgment, or the instincts of an experienced traveler.','inherit','closed','closed','','4942-revision-v1','','','2026-07-02 15:34:05','2026-07-02 20:34:05','',4942,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4944',0,'revision','',0),
(4945,1,'2026-07-02 15:56:41','2026-07-02 20:56:41','','8BA8EB00-9074-46D7-A5AB-4A01715E9F3F','The \"fat part of the curve\" can be tasty','inherit','open','closed','','8ba8eb00-9074-46d7-a5ab-4a01715e9f3f','','','2026-07-02 16:29:26','2026-07-02 21:29:26','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/8BA8EB00-9074-46D7-A5AB-4A01715E9F3F.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(4946,1,'2026-07-02 15:56:46','2026-07-02 20:56:46','','Gemini_Generated_Image_clj4yfclj4yfclj4','Meet Aurora, Unit-A01 — the world\'s last mid-level travel agent, sweating over Burgundy\'s \"local charm factor.\" ','inherit','open','closed','','gemini_generated_image_clj4yfclj4yfclj4','','','2026-07-02 16:16:17','2026-07-02 21:16:17','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Gemini_Generated_Image_clj4yfclj4yfclj4.png',0,'attachment','image/png',0),
(4947,1,'2026-07-02 15:56:50','2026-07-02 20:56:50','','IMG_0479','Don\'t know how the models missed Dijon\'s tiki bar','inherit','open','closed','','img_0479','','','2026-07-02 21:08:27','2026-07-03 02:08:27','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/IMG_0479.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(4948,1,'2026-07-02 15:57:00','2026-07-02 20:57:00','','IMG_0630','A baguette machine on the side of an empty lot. Automation even the French will endorse.','inherit','open','closed','','img_0630','','','2026-07-02 17:03:02','2026-07-02 22:03:02','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/IMG_0630.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(4949,1,'2026-07-02 15:57:14','2026-07-02 20:57:14','','IMG_0664','Gotta turn around; AI didn\'t tell me I\'d passed some of the world\'s best white wines!','inherit','open','closed','','img_0664','','','2026-07-02 20:39:29','2026-07-03 01:39:29','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/IMG_0664.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(4950,1,'2026-07-02 15:57:28','2026-07-02 20:57:28','','stable-diffusion-xl-base-10_in-the-style-of-a','How AI would like you to picture it — the reality still needs a little supervision','inherit','open','closed','','stable-diffusion-xl-base-10_in-the-style-of-a','','','2026-07-02 16:08:40','2026-07-02 21:08:40','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/stable-diffusion-xl-base-10_in-the-style-of-a.jpeg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),
(4951,1,'2026-07-02 15:57:30','2026-07-02 20:57:30','','Screenshot 2026-07-02 at 4.24.23 PM','Claude\'s day-before refresh, the big swings flagged automatically','inherit','open','closed','','screenshot-2026-07-02-at-4-24-23-pm','','','2026-07-02 16:19:55','2026-07-02 21:19:55','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Screenshot-2026-07-02-at-4.24.23-PM.png',0,'attachment','image/png',0),
(4952,1,'2026-07-02 15:57:32','2026-07-02 20:57:32','','Screenshot 2026-07-02 at 4.26.42 PM','ChatGPT\'s closing argument against Lyon, bold verdict and all','inherit','open','closed','','screenshot-2026-07-02-at-4-26-42-pm','','','2026-07-02 16:09:59','2026-07-02 21:09:59','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Screenshot-2026-07-02-at-4.26.42-PM.png',0,'attachment','image/png',0),
(4953,1,'2026-07-02 16:17:04','2026-07-02 21:17:04','<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4952,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Screenshot-2026-07-02-at-4.26.42-PM.png\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Screenshot-2026-07-02-at-4.26.42-PM-300x227.png\" alt=\"Screenshot of ChatGPT\'s reasoning for leaving Lyon off the itinerary, listing trade-offs with red X marks and concluding in bold that Lyon is a 10/10 city but not a 10/10 fit for this specific trip\" class=\"wp-image-4952\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">ChatGPT\'s closing argument against Lyon, bold verdict and all</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>After wading through a half-dozen of its recommended itineraries, I asked ChatGPT why it hadn\'t put Lyon on any of them. What I got back was a 500-word, four-part essay on why I was wrong, with its final conclusion helpfully bolded so I wouldn\'t miss it: \"<strong>Lyon is a 10/10 city — just not a 10/10 fit for this specific trip.</strong>\" All it was missing was a bold and centered <strong>Q.E.D.</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We’d booked a bike tour with Backroads through Burgundy for the last week of April and I thought it’d be interesting to see what AI would suggest we do on the week before. So I fired up ChatGPT and Claude and them to fed them the same prompt:</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:quote -->\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote\"><!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>We\'re flying out of Nashville (BNA);</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>At least two nights in every stop so we\'re not bunny-hopping;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>We have to be in Auxerre the night before the tour starts;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>We\'re here for the local food, wine, cheese, and beer;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>We like walking through towns to see what there is to see (I struggled mightily not to use the possibly-past-trend word <em>flâneuring</em>);</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And we\'d like a lunch or dinner in at least one Michelin-starred restaurant.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></blockquote>\n<!-- /wp:quote -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I already had what I thought was a pretty good itinerary knocking around in the back of my head — fly BNA to CDG, catch the TGV from the station inside the airport to Lyon (which, as my post, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2026/05/18/the-long-way-to-lyon/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"The Long Way to Lyon\"><em>The Long Way to Lyon</em></a>, showed, wasn\'t quite as straightforward as I thought), spend a couple of days there, train two hours up to Dijon for a couple more days, then over to Auxerre to hang out until we started the tour.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Reasonable, I thought. The models disagreed. When I pushed ChatGPT to justify itself, that’s when it got a little shirty. We started in Lyon anyway and had a great time.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>The Last Time I Tried This</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It\'s a long way from just three years ago; the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/09/29/podcast-196-cheers-to-beer-tourism-and-travel/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Podcast #196 — Cheers to Beer Tourism and Travel!\">last time I tried using AI to plan a trip.</a> Back in 2023, shortly after ChatGPT 3 launched, I asked it to:</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:quote -->\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote\"><!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Develop a taproom circuit of microbrewery taprooms in Asheville, NC starting at the Aloft Hotel in Asheville. Optimize it to minimize walking distance and maximize Untappd ratings.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph --></blockquote>\n<!-- /wp:quote -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It spat out a nice little table of eight taprooms that looked solid <strong>—</strong> at first glance. But then looking closer, none of the ratings actually matched <a href=\"https://untappd.com\" title=\"Untappd\">Untappd</a>, and the \"circuit\" was less a loop and more a random wander around town. The problem: back then, ChatGPT 3 had no web access and a bad habit of confidently making things up to fill in the gaps.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>After that experiment, I shelved AI for travel planning. I kept using it more and more for other things <strong>—</strong> technical analysis, research, and image generation <strong>—</strong> but not for trips. Then we locked in the Burgundy trip, which got me thinking about giving AI another shot at planning a trip. I\'d felt the models getting dramatically better everywhere else I was using them. And honestly, I didn\'t have many ideas on what to do with the week beyond \"eat and drink in Lyon and Dijon”, so I gave AI another go.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Model Triangulation</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Another thing that\'s changed since Asheville is the sheer number of large language models (LLMs). Back then, it was ChatGPT. Today, it’s easy to paste the same prompt into seven state-of-the-art models — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Mistral, Kimi, Deepseek, and Qwen. Three American, one French, three Chinese.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Seven was about four too many for me. So after skimming the first round of answers, I cut it down to three: ChatGPT and Claude — my usual suspects — and Mistral, mostly because I thought a French model might have some unique local insight buried somewhere in its training data.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I do what I call <em>model triangulation</em>. I give each model the same prompt and watch how their answers line up. If two or three of them agree on something, I figure it’s pretty safe to believe it. I started doing this as an error check — a way to swerve the hallucinations, and it has mostly worked.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>AI is the new mid-level travel agent</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4946,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Gemini_Generated_Image_clj4yfclj4yfclj4.png\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Gemini_Generated_Image_clj4yfclj4yfclj4-1024x559.png\" alt=\"AI-generated cartoon of a humanoid robot travel agent named Aurora at a cluttered desk with vintage computers, Guide Michelin books, and a Côte d\'Or map, fielding confused questions about Burgundy wine\" class=\"wp-image-4946\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Meet Aurora, Unit-A01 — the world\'s last mid-level travel agent, sweating over Burgundy\'s \"local charm factor.\" </figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>The three models gave me pretty similar results, all sitting right in the “fat part of the curve” of tourist recommendations. In Lyon: don\'t miss Vieux Lyon (the old town) and get into a traditional bouchon for beef bourguignon or a pike quenelle. In Dijon: hit Fallot\'s for a mustard tasting. None of it wrong; none of it bad; just none of it unique.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>AI didn\'t give me any blinding insights or uncover any hidden finds. What the models <em>did</em> do was collect all the usual suspects — those recommendations that show up in every guidebook, tourism site, travel blog, and review site — filtered them through all the wants and constraints I’d given it, and hand back a clean, easy-to-read itinerary. Which has real value. It gave me in minutes what would’ve taken me a couple of days of Googling and stitching the results all together. Or what a competent mid-level travel agent would\'ve given me — if those still exist.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>The Part AI Didn\'t (Couldn’t?) Do</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4947,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/IMG_0479-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/IMG_0479-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"A frothy cocktail served in a miniature white clawfoot bathtub with two black straws and a yellow rubber duck perched on top, at a tiki bar with &quot;Drink Me&quot; mugs behind\" class=\"wp-image-4947\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Somehow the models missed Dijon\'s tiki bar</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>What I <em>didn\'t</em> get was the next-level research that leads you to the real highlight of the trip. To find great restaurants, Irene leaned on her old standby, the <a href=\"https://guide.michelin.com/us/en\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Michelin Guide</a>. I went hunting for local opinions — Chrome-translated pieces from Le Figaro and Lyon Capitale — spelunking through specialty wine blogs and forums for wine bar recommendations and, as always, hitting Untappd to see where people were checking in interesting beers.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>For me, AI quickly did the first-level work — the initial research that lays out the contours of the trip, and assembling an itinerary around them. Yes, that\'s the easy part of the trip planning, but it\'s still work that has to get done. And every hour AI saved me there was another hour I could spend digging further into the stuff it couldn\'t reach.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Where AI Actually Won</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>The place where AI was able to shed its mid-level travel agent tag was weather forecasting. Not a big deal for two weeks in one spot — pull up AccuWeather, give it a look, and you’re done. But this was a touring vacation where we were pulling up stakes every two days. That’s a lot of forecast tabs, a lot of copy-paste to get it all into one place that I could look at and figure out what to pack. Sounded like a good job for AI.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>So I gave ChatGPT and Claude the same prompt:</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:quote -->\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote\"><!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Use your web search tools to give me a day-by-day forecast for the two-week Burgundy itinerary in this public TripIt link.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph --></blockquote>\n<!-- /wp:quote -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Claude immediately pulled up short -- “TripIt blocks automated access to their pages” -- while ChatGPT ploughed ahead. Huh. Well, no matter — I printed the itinerary as a PDF, uploaded it to Claude, and off it went. About four minutes later, both models came back with daily forecasts for every stop, plus a very useful summary. Something that probably would\'ve taken me thirty minutes to assemble was done in four.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>But the best part came the day before we left. While packing, I went back to both chats and asked them to refresh their forecasts <em>and</em> flag every change of more than three degrees Fahrenheit — the kind of swing that would make me rethink, say, the ratio of short-sleeve to long-sleeve shirts I pack. Three minutes later, I had updated forecasts, and in Claude\'s case, the big-change days color-highlighted. That\'s something I would’ve never found time to do myself the day before leaving.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Treat It Like a Friend</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>So I will lean harder in AI travel planning. The models keep getting smarter and they’re getting wired into more real-time data and more travel services. But my Burgundy travel planning reminded me that they’re not psychic — at least, not yet. The more thought and detail you put into the prompt, the better the response.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I’m working on my prompting skills again for a road trip my son Andrew and I are planning through the Canadian Maritimes. Like my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2026/02/25/gulf-coast-mardi-gras-road-trip-stop-1-mobile/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Gulf Coast</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2026/03/10/gulf-coast-mardi-gras-road-trip-stop-2-new-orleans/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Mardi</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2026/04/14/gulf-coast-mardi-gras-road-trip-stop-3-lafayette-acadiana/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Gras</a> road trip, this trip has been knocking around the back of my mind for a while. But, like with Burgundy, I don’t have much of a plan beyond “drink local beer and eat local seafood”. Andrew has already uploaded his Untappd history to Claude and had it draft an initial itinerary. Now he’s unleashed a few AI agents to hunt down for more ideas.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>But even with agents scouring the Internet, AI isn’t all-seeing and all-knowing — not yet — so I can\'t just take its itinerary and run. I\'ll treat its recommendations the way I would a good friend\'s or a sharp travel agent\'s: give them strong consideration, check they\'re still correct, and then make up my own mind.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Because after all, it\'s my trip.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','AI Travel Planning: The Good, The Meh, and the Almost-Magic','Can AI really plan a better trip? After testing ChatGPT, Claude, and other AI models on a Burgundy vacation, I found they\'re surprisingly good at building itineraries and weather forecasts—but they\'re no substitute for local research, good judgment, or the instincts of an experienced traveler.','inherit','closed','closed','','4942-revision-v1','','','2026-07-02 16:17:04','2026-07-02 21:17:04','',4942,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4953',0,'revision','',0),
(4954,1,'2026-07-02 16:22:01','2026-07-02 21:22:01','<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4952,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Screenshot-2026-07-02-at-4.26.42-PM.png\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Screenshot-2026-07-02-at-4.26.42-PM-300x227.png\" alt=\"Screenshot of ChatGPT\'s reasoning for leaving Lyon off the itinerary, listing trade-offs with red X marks and concluding in bold that Lyon is a 10/10 city but not a 10/10 fit for this specific trip\" class=\"wp-image-4952\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">ChatGPT\'s closing argument against Lyon, bold verdict and all</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>After wading through a half-dozen of its recommended itineraries, I asked ChatGPT why it hadn\'t put Lyon on any of them. What I got back was a 500-word, four-part essay on why I was wrong, with its final conclusion helpfully bolded so I wouldn\'t miss it: \"<strong>Lyon is a 10/10 city — just not a 10/10 fit for this specific trip.</strong>\" All it was missing was a bold and centered <strong>Q.E.D.</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We’d booked a bike tour with Backroads through Burgundy for the last week of April and I thought it’d be interesting to see what AI would suggest we do on the week before. So I fired up ChatGPT and Claude and them to fed them the same prompt:</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:quote -->\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote\"><!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>We\'re flying out of Nashville (BNA);</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>At least two nights in every stop so we\'re not bunny-hopping;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>We have to be in Auxerre the night before the tour starts;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>We\'re here for the local food, wine, cheese, and beer;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>We like walking through towns to see what there is to see (I struggled mightily not to use the possibly-past-trend word <em>flâneuring</em>);</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And we\'d like a lunch or dinner in at least one Michelin-starred restaurant.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></blockquote>\n<!-- /wp:quote -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I already had what I thought was a pretty good itinerary knocking around in the back of my head — fly BNA to CDG, catch the TGV from the station inside the airport to Lyon (which, as my post, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2026/05/18/the-long-way-to-lyon/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"The Long Way to Lyon\"><em>The Long Way to Lyon</em></a>, showed, wasn\'t quite as straightforward as I thought), spend a couple of days there, train two hours up to Dijon for a couple more days, then over to Auxerre to hang out until we started the tour.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Reasonable, I thought. The models disagreed. When I pushed ChatGPT to justify itself, that’s when it got a little shirty. We started in Lyon anyway and had a great time.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>The Last Time I Tried This</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It\'s a long way from just three years ago; the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/09/29/podcast-196-cheers-to-beer-tourism-and-travel/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Podcast #196 — Cheers to Beer Tourism and Travel!\">last time I tried using AI to plan a trip.</a> Back in 2023, shortly after ChatGPT 3 launched, I asked it to:</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:quote -->\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote\"><!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Develop a taproom circuit of microbrewery taprooms in Asheville, NC starting at the Aloft Hotel in Asheville. Optimize it to minimize walking distance and maximize Untappd ratings.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph --></blockquote>\n<!-- /wp:quote -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It spat out a nice little table of eight taprooms that looked solid <strong>—</strong> at first glance. But then looking closer, none of the ratings actually matched <a href=\"https://untappd.com\" title=\"Untappd\">Untappd</a>, and the \"circuit\" was less a loop and more a random wander around town. The problem: back then, ChatGPT 3 had no web access and a bad habit of confidently making things up to fill in the gaps.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>After that experiment, I shelved AI for travel planning. I kept using it more and more for other things <strong>—</strong> technical analysis, research, and image generation <strong>—</strong> but not for trips. Then we locked in the Burgundy trip, which got me thinking about giving AI another shot at planning a trip. I\'d felt the models getting dramatically better everywhere else I was using them. And honestly, I didn\'t have many ideas on what to do with the week beyond \"eat and drink in Lyon and Dijon”, so I gave AI another go.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Model Triangulation</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Another thing that\'s changed since Asheville is the sheer number of large language models (LLMs). Back then, it was ChatGPT. Today, it’s easy to paste the same prompt into seven state-of-the-art models — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Mistral, Kimi, Deepseek, and Qwen. Three American, one French, three Chinese.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Seven was about four too many for me. So after skimming the first round of answers, I cut it down to three: ChatGPT and Claude — my usual suspects — and Mistral, mostly because I thought a French model might have some unique local insight buried somewhere in its training data.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I do what I call <em>model triangulation</em>. I give each model the same prompt and watch how their answers line up. If two or three of them agree on something, I figure it’s pretty safe to believe it. I started doing this as an error check — a way to swerve the hallucinations, and it has mostly worked.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>AI is the new mid-level travel agent</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4946,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Gemini_Generated_Image_clj4yfclj4yfclj4.png\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Gemini_Generated_Image_clj4yfclj4yfclj4-1024x559.png\" alt=\"AI-generated cartoon of a humanoid robot travel agent named Aurora at a cluttered desk with vintage computers, Guide Michelin books, and a Côte d\'Or map, fielding confused questions about Burgundy wine\" class=\"wp-image-4946\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Meet Aurora, Unit-A01 — the world\'s last mid-level travel agent, sweating over Burgundy\'s \"local charm factor.\" </figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>The three models gave me pretty similar results, all sitting right in the “fat part of the curve” of tourist recommendations. In Lyon: don\'t miss Vieux Lyon (the old town) and get into a traditional bouchon for beef bourguignon or a pike quenelle. In Dijon: hit Fallot\'s for a mustard tasting. None of it wrong; none of it bad; just none of it unique.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>AI didn\'t give me any blinding insights or uncover any hidden finds. What the models <em>did</em> do was collect all the usual suspects — those recommendations that show up in every guidebook, tourism site, travel blog, and review site — filtered them through all the wants and constraints I’d given it, and hand back a clean, easy-to-read itinerary. Which has real value. It gave me in minutes what would’ve taken me a couple of days of Googling and stitching the results all together. Or what a competent mid-level travel agent would\'ve given me — if those still exist.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>The Part AI Didn\'t (Couldn’t?) Do</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4947,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/IMG_0479-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/IMG_0479-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"A frothy cocktail served in a miniature white clawfoot bathtub with two black straws and a yellow rubber duck perched on top, at a tiki bar with &quot;Drink Me&quot; mugs behind\" class=\"wp-image-4947\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Somehow the models missed Dijon\'s tiki bar</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>What I <em>didn\'t</em> get was the next-level research that leads you to the real highlight of the trip. To find great restaurants, Irene leaned on her old standby, the <a href=\"https://guide.michelin.com/us/en\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Michelin Guide</a>. I went hunting for local opinions — Chrome-translated pieces from Le Figaro and Lyon Capitale — spelunking through specialty wine blogs and forums for wine bar recommendations and, as always, hitting Untappd to see where people were checking in interesting beers.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>For me, AI quickly did the first-level work — the initial research that lays out the contours of the trip, and assembling an itinerary around them. Yes, that\'s the easy part of the trip planning, but it\'s still work that has to get done. And every hour AI saved me there was another hour I could spend digging further into the stuff it couldn\'t reach.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Where AI Actually Won</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>The place where AI was able to shed its mid-level travel agent tag was weather forecasting. Not a big deal for two weeks in one spot — pull up AccuWeather, give it a look, and you’re done. But this was a touring vacation where we were pulling up stakes every two days. That’s a lot of forecast tabs, a lot of copy-paste to get it all into one place that I could look at and figure out what to pack. Sounded like a good job for AI.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>So I gave ChatGPT and Claude the same prompt:</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:quote -->\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote\"><!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Use your web search tools to give me a day-by-day forecast for the two-week Burgundy itinerary in this public TripIt link.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph --></blockquote>\n<!-- /wp:quote -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Claude immediately pulled up short -- “TripIt blocks automated access to their pages” -- while ChatGPT ploughed ahead. Huh. Well, no matter — I printed the itinerary as a PDF, uploaded it to Claude, and off it went. About four minutes later, both models came back with daily forecasts for every stop, plus a very useful summary. Something that probably would\'ve taken me thirty minutes to assemble was done in four.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4951,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Screenshot-2026-07-02-at-4.24.23-PM.png\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Screenshot-2026-07-02-at-4.24.23-PM-300x242.png\" alt=\"Screenshot of an AI-generated &quot;Burgundy Bike Ride · Updated Forecast&quot; for Lyon and Dijon; days that shifted more than 3°F from the prior forecast are highlighted, with gains up to +9°F and TGV/train transfer notes\" class=\"wp-image-4951\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Claude\'s day-before refresh, the big swings flagged automatically</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>But the best part came the day before we left. While packing, I went back to both chats and asked them to refresh their forecasts <em>and</em> flag every change of more than three degrees Fahrenheit — the kind of swing that would make me rethink, say, the ratio of short-sleeve to long-sleeve shirts I pack. Three minutes later, I had updated forecasts, and in Claude\'s case, the big-change days color-highlighted. That\'s something I would’ve never found time to do myself the day before leaving.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Treat It Like a Friend</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>So I will lean harder in AI travel planning. The models keep getting smarter and they’re getting wired into more real-time data and more travel services. But my Burgundy travel planning reminded me that they’re not psychic — at least, not yet. The more thought and detail you put into the prompt, the better the response.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I’m working on my prompting skills again for a road trip my son Andrew and I are planning through the Canadian Maritimes. Like my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2026/02/25/gulf-coast-mardi-gras-road-trip-stop-1-mobile/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Gulf Coast</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2026/03/10/gulf-coast-mardi-gras-road-trip-stop-2-new-orleans/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Mardi</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2026/04/14/gulf-coast-mardi-gras-road-trip-stop-3-lafayette-acadiana/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Gras</a> road trip, this trip has been knocking around the back of my mind for a while. But, like with Burgundy, I don’t have much of a plan beyond “drink local beer and eat local seafood”. Andrew has already uploaded his Untappd history to Claude and had it draft an initial itinerary. Now he’s unleashed a few AI agents to hunt down for more ideas.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>But even with agents scouring the Internet, AI isn’t all-seeing and all-knowing — not yet — so I can\'t just take its itinerary and run. I\'ll treat its recommendations the way I would a good friend\'s or a sharp travel agent\'s: give them strong consideration, check they\'re still correct, and then make up my own mind.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Because after all, it\'s my trip.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','AI Travel Planning: The Good, The Meh, and the Almost-Magic','Can AI really plan a better trip? After testing ChatGPT, Claude, and other AI models on a Burgundy vacation, I found they\'re surprisingly good at building itineraries and weather forecasts—but they\'re no substitute for local research, good judgment, or the instincts of an experienced traveler.','inherit','closed','closed','','4942-revision-v1','','','2026-07-02 16:22:01','2026-07-02 21:22:01','',4942,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4954',0,'revision','',0),
(4955,1,'2026-07-02 16:27:02','2026-07-02 21:27:02','<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4952,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Screenshot-2026-07-02-at-4.26.42-PM.png\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Screenshot-2026-07-02-at-4.26.42-PM-300x227.png\" alt=\"Screenshot of ChatGPT\'s reasoning for leaving Lyon off the itinerary, listing trade-offs with red X marks and concluding in bold that Lyon is a 10/10 city but not a 10/10 fit for this specific trip\" class=\"wp-image-4952\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">ChatGPT\'s closing argument against Lyon, bold verdict and all</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>After wading through a half-dozen of its recommended itineraries, I asked ChatGPT why it hadn\'t put Lyon on any of them. What I got back was a 500-word, four-part essay on why I was wrong, with its final conclusion helpfully bolded so I wouldn\'t miss it: \"<strong>Lyon is a 10/10 city — just not a 10/10 fit for this specific trip.</strong>\" All it was missing was a bold and centered <strong>Q.E.D.</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We’d booked a bike tour with Backroads through Burgundy for the last week of April and I thought it’d be interesting to see what AI would suggest we do on the week before. So I fired up ChatGPT and Claude and them to fed them the same prompt:</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:quote -->\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote\"><!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>We\'re flying out of Nashville (BNA);</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>At least two nights in every stop so we\'re not bunny-hopping;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>We have to be in Auxerre the night before the tour starts;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>We\'re here for the local food, wine, cheese, and beer;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>We like walking through towns to see what there is to see (I struggled mightily not to use the possibly-past-trend word <em>flâneuring</em>);</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And we\'d like a lunch or dinner in at least one Michelin-starred restaurant.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></blockquote>\n<!-- /wp:quote -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I already had what I thought was a pretty good itinerary knocking around in the back of my head — fly BNA to CDG, catch the TGV from the station inside the airport to Lyon (which, as my post, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2026/05/18/the-long-way-to-lyon/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"The Long Way to Lyon\"><em>The Long Way to Lyon</em></a>, showed, wasn\'t quite as straightforward as I thought), spend a couple of days there, train two hours up to Dijon for a couple more days, then over to Auxerre to hang out until we started the tour.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Reasonable, I thought. The models disagreed. When I pushed ChatGPT to justify itself, that’s when it got a little shirty. We started in Lyon anyway and had a great time.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>The Last Time I Tried This</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It\'s a long way from just three years ago; the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/09/29/podcast-196-cheers-to-beer-tourism-and-travel/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Podcast #196 — Cheers to Beer Tourism and Travel!\">last time I tried using AI to plan a trip.</a> Back in 2023, shortly after ChatGPT 3 launched, I asked it to:</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:quote -->\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote\"><!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Develop a taproom circuit of microbrewery taprooms in Asheville, NC starting at the Aloft Hotel in Asheville. Optimize it to minimize walking distance and maximize Untappd ratings.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph --></blockquote>\n<!-- /wp:quote -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4373,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/stable-diffusion-xl-beer-3.jpeg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/stable-diffusion-xl-beer-3-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"IAI-generated, comic-style illustration of a humanoid robot leaning on a wooden bar with a full glass of golden beer in front of it, shelves of bottles behind, in an industrial-looking taproom\" class=\"wp-image-4373\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">This is the ChatGPT I wanted planning Asheville</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It spat out a nice little table of eight taprooms that looked solid <strong>—</strong> at first glance. But then looking closer, none of the ratings actually matched <a href=\"https://untappd.com\" title=\"Untappd\">Untappd</a>, and the \"circuit\" was less a loop and more a random wander around town. The problem: back then, ChatGPT 3 had no web access and a bad habit of confidently making things up to fill in the gaps.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>After that experiment, I shelved AI for travel planning. I kept using it more and more for other things <strong>—</strong> technical analysis, research, and image generation <strong>—</strong> but not for trips. Then we locked in the Burgundy trip, which got me thinking about giving AI another shot at planning a trip. I\'d felt the models getting dramatically better everywhere else I was using them. And honestly, I didn\'t have many ideas on what to do with the week beyond \"eat and drink in Lyon and Dijon”, so I gave AI another go.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Model Triangulation</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Another thing that\'s changed since Asheville is the sheer number of large language models (LLMs). Back then, it was ChatGPT. Today, it’s easy to paste the same prompt into seven state-of-the-art models — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Mistral, Kimi, Deepseek, and Qwen. Three American, one French, three Chinese.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Seven was about four too many for me. So after skimming the first round of answers, I cut it down to three: ChatGPT and Claude — my usual suspects — and Mistral, mostly because I thought a French model might have some unique local insight buried somewhere in its training data.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I do what I call <em>model triangulation</em>. I give each model the same prompt and watch how their answers line up. If two or three of them agree on something, I figure it’s pretty safe to believe it. I started doing this as an error check — a way to swerve the hallucinations, and it has mostly worked.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>AI is the new mid-level travel agent</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4946,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Gemini_Generated_Image_clj4yfclj4yfclj4.png\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Gemini_Generated_Image_clj4yfclj4yfclj4-1024x559.png\" alt=\"AI-generated cartoon of a humanoid robot travel agent named Aurora at a cluttered desk with vintage computers, Guide Michelin books, and a Côte d\'Or map, fielding confused questions about Burgundy wine\" class=\"wp-image-4946\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Meet Aurora, Unit-A01 — the world\'s last mid-level travel agent, sweating over Burgundy\'s \"local charm factor.\" </figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>The three models gave me pretty similar results, all sitting right in the “fat part of the curve” of tourist recommendations. In Lyon: don\'t miss Vieux Lyon (the old town) and get into a traditional bouchon for beef bourguignon or a pike quenelle. In Dijon: hit Fallot\'s for a mustard tasting. None of it wrong; none of it bad; just none of it unique.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>AI didn\'t give me any blinding insights or uncover any hidden finds. What the models <em>did</em> do was collect all the usual suspects — those recommendations that show up in every guidebook, tourism site, travel blog, and review site — filtered them through all the wants and constraints I’d given it, and hand back a clean, easy-to-read itinerary. Which has real value. It gave me in minutes what would’ve taken me a couple of days of Googling and stitching the results all together. Or what a competent mid-level travel agent would\'ve given me — if those still exist.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>The Part AI Didn\'t (Couldn’t?) Do</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4947,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/IMG_0479-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/IMG_0479-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"A frothy cocktail served in a miniature white clawfoot bathtub with two black straws and a yellow rubber duck perched on top, at a tiki bar with &quot;Drink Me&quot; mugs behind\" class=\"wp-image-4947\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Somehow the models missed Dijon\'s tiki bar</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>What I <em>didn\'t</em> get was the next-level research that leads you to the real highlight of the trip. To find great restaurants, Irene leaned on her old standby, the <a href=\"https://guide.michelin.com/us/en\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Michelin Guide</a>. I went hunting for local opinions — Chrome-translated pieces from Le Figaro and Lyon Capitale — spelunking through specialty wine blogs and forums for wine bar recommendations and, as always, hitting Untappd to see where people were checking in interesting beers.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>For me, AI quickly did the first-level work — the initial research that lays out the contours of the trip, and assembling an itinerary around them. Yes, that\'s the easy part of the trip planning, but it\'s still work that has to get done. And every hour AI saved me there was another hour I could spend digging further into the stuff it couldn\'t reach.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Where AI Actually Won</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>The place where AI was able to shed its mid-level travel agent tag was weather forecasting. Not a big deal for two weeks in one spot — pull up AccuWeather, give it a look, and you’re done. But this was a touring vacation where we were pulling up stakes every two days. That’s a lot of forecast tabs, a lot of copy-paste to get it all into one place that I could look at and figure out what to pack. Sounded like a good job for AI.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>So I gave ChatGPT and Claude the same prompt:</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:quote -->\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote\"><!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Use your web search tools to give me a day-by-day forecast for the two-week Burgundy itinerary in this public TripIt link.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph --></blockquote>\n<!-- /wp:quote -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Claude immediately pulled up short -- “TripIt blocks automated access to their pages” -- while ChatGPT ploughed ahead. Huh. Well, no matter — I printed the itinerary as a PDF, uploaded it to Claude, and off it went. About four minutes later, both models came back with daily forecasts for every stop, plus a very useful summary. Something that probably would\'ve taken me thirty minutes to assemble was done in four.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4951,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Screenshot-2026-07-02-at-4.24.23-PM.png\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Screenshot-2026-07-02-at-4.24.23-PM-300x242.png\" alt=\"Screenshot of an AI-generated &quot;Burgundy Bike Ride · Updated Forecast&quot; for Lyon and Dijon; days that shifted more than 3°F from the prior forecast are highlighted, with gains up to +9°F and TGV/train transfer notes\" class=\"wp-image-4951\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Claude\'s day-before refresh, the big swings flagged automatically</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>But the best part came the day before we left. While packing, I went back to both chats and asked them to refresh their forecasts <em>and</em> flag every change of more than three degrees Fahrenheit — the kind of swing that would make me rethink, say, the ratio of short-sleeve to long-sleeve shirts I pack. Three minutes later, I had updated forecasts, and in Claude\'s case, the big-change days color-highlighted. That\'s something I would’ve never found time to do myself the day before leaving.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Treat It Like a Friend</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>So I will lean harder in AI travel planning. The models keep getting smarter and they’re getting wired into more real-time data and more travel services. But my Burgundy travel planning reminded me that they’re not psychic — at least, not yet. The more thought and detail you put into the prompt, the better the response.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I’m working on my prompting skills again for a road trip my son Andrew and I are planning through the Canadian Maritimes. Like my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2026/02/25/gulf-coast-mardi-gras-road-trip-stop-1-mobile/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Gulf Coast</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2026/03/10/gulf-coast-mardi-gras-road-trip-stop-2-new-orleans/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Mardi</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2026/04/14/gulf-coast-mardi-gras-road-trip-stop-3-lafayette-acadiana/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Gras</a> road trip, this trip has been knocking around the back of my mind for a while. But, like with Burgundy, I don’t have much of a plan beyond “drink local beer and eat local seafood”. Andrew has already uploaded his Untappd history to Claude and had it draft an initial itinerary. Now he’s unleashed a few AI agents to hunt down for more ideas.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>But even with agents scouring the Internet, AI isn’t all-seeing and all-knowing — not yet — so I can\'t just take its itinerary and run. I\'ll treat its recommendations the way I would a good friend\'s or a sharp travel agent\'s: give them strong consideration, check they\'re still correct, and then make up my own mind.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Because after all, it\'s my trip.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','AI Travel Planning: The Good, The Meh, and the Almost-Magic','Can AI really plan a better trip? After testing ChatGPT, Claude, and other AI models on a Burgundy vacation, I found they\'re surprisingly good at building itineraries and weather forecasts—but they\'re no substitute for local research, good judgment, or the instincts of an experienced traveler.','inherit','closed','closed','','4942-revision-v1','','','2026-07-02 16:27:02','2026-07-02 21:27:02','',4942,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4955',0,'revision','',0),
(4956,1,'2026-07-02 16:35:25','2026-07-02 21:35:25','<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4952,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Screenshot-2026-07-02-at-4.26.42-PM.png\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Screenshot-2026-07-02-at-4.26.42-PM-300x227.png\" alt=\"Screenshot of ChatGPT\'s reasoning for leaving Lyon off the itinerary, listing trade-offs with red X marks and concluding in bold that Lyon is a 10/10 city but not a 10/10 fit for this specific trip\" class=\"wp-image-4952\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">ChatGPT\'s closing argument against Lyon, bold verdict and all</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>After wading through a half-dozen of its recommended itineraries, I asked ChatGPT why it hadn\'t put Lyon on any of them. What I got back was a 500-word, four-part essay on why I was wrong, with its final conclusion helpfully bolded so I wouldn\'t miss it: \"<strong>Lyon is a 10/10 city — just not a 10/10 fit for this specific trip.</strong>\" All it was missing was a bold and centered <strong>Q.E.D.</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We’d booked a bike tour with Backroads through Burgundy for the last week of April and I thought it’d be interesting to see what AI would suggest we do on the week before. So I fired up ChatGPT and Claude and them to fed them the same prompt:</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:quote -->\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote\"><!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>We\'re flying out of Nashville (BNA);</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>At least two nights in every stop so we\'re not bunny-hopping;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>We have to be in Auxerre the night before the tour starts;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>We\'re here for the local food, wine, cheese, and beer;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>We like walking through towns to see what there is to see (I struggled mightily not to use the possibly-past-trend word <em>flâneuring</em>);</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And we\'d like a lunch or dinner in at least one Michelin-starred restaurant.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></blockquote>\n<!-- /wp:quote -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I already had what I thought was a pretty good itinerary knocking around in the back of my head — fly BNA to CDG, catch the TGV from the station inside the airport to Lyon (which, as my post, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2026/05/18/the-long-way-to-lyon/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"The Long Way to Lyon\"><em>The Long Way to Lyon</em></a>, showed, wasn\'t quite as straightforward as I thought), spend a couple of days there, train two hours up to Dijon for a couple more days, then over to Auxerre to hang out until we started the tour.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Reasonable, I thought. The models disagreed. When I pushed ChatGPT to justify itself, that’s when it got a little shirty. We started in Lyon anyway and had a great time.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>The Last Time I Tried This</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It\'s a long way from just three years ago; the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/09/29/podcast-196-cheers-to-beer-tourism-and-travel/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Podcast #196 — Cheers to Beer Tourism and Travel!\">last time I tried using AI to plan a trip.</a> Back in 2023, shortly after ChatGPT 3 launched, I asked it to:</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:quote -->\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote\"><!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Develop a taproom circuit of microbrewery taprooms in Asheville, NC starting at the Aloft Hotel in Asheville. Optimize it to minimize walking distance and maximize Untappd ratings.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph --></blockquote>\n<!-- /wp:quote -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4373,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/stable-diffusion-xl-beer-3.jpeg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/stable-diffusion-xl-beer-3-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"IAI-generated, comic-style illustration of a humanoid robot leaning on a wooden bar with a full glass of golden beer in front of it, shelves of bottles behind, in an industrial-looking taproom\" class=\"wp-image-4373\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">This is the ChatGPT I thought would plan my Asheville trip</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It spat out a nice little table of eight taprooms that looked solid <strong>—</strong> at first glance. But then looking closer, none of the ratings actually matched <a href=\"https://untappd.com\" title=\"Untappd\">Untappd</a>, and the \"circuit\" was less a loop and more a random wander around town. The problem: back then, ChatGPT 3 had no web access and a bad habit of confidently making things up to fill in the gaps.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>After that experiment, I shelved AI for travel planning. I kept using it more and more for other things <strong>—</strong> technical analysis, research, and image generation <strong>—</strong> but not for trips. Then we locked in the Burgundy trip, which got me thinking about giving AI another shot at planning a trip. I\'d felt the models getting dramatically better everywhere else I was using them. And honestly, I didn\'t have many ideas on what to do with the week beyond \"eat and drink in Lyon and Dijon”, so I gave AI another go.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Model Triangulation</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Another thing that\'s changed since Asheville is the sheer number of large language models (LLMs). Back then, it was ChatGPT. Today, it’s easy to paste the same prompt into seven state-of-the-art models — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Mistral, Kimi, Deepseek, and Qwen. Three American, one French, three Chinese.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Seven was about four too many for me. So after skimming the first round of answers, I cut it down to three: ChatGPT and Claude — my usual suspects — and Mistral, mostly because I thought a French model might have some unique local insight buried somewhere in its training data.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I do what I call <em>model triangulation</em>. I give each model the same prompt and watch how their answers line up. If two or three of them agree on something, I figure it’s pretty safe to believe it. I started doing this as an error check — a way to swerve the hallucinations, and it has mostly worked.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>AI is the new mid-level travel agent</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4946,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Gemini_Generated_Image_clj4yfclj4yfclj4.png\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Gemini_Generated_Image_clj4yfclj4yfclj4-1024x559.png\" alt=\"AI-generated cartoon of a humanoid robot travel agent named Aurora at a cluttered desk with vintage computers, Guide Michelin books, and a Côte d\'Or map, fielding confused questions about Burgundy wine\" class=\"wp-image-4946\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Meet Aurora, Unit-A01 — the world\'s last mid-level travel agent, sweating over Burgundy\'s \"local charm factor.\" </figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>The three models gave me pretty similar results, all sitting right in the “fat part of the curve” of tourist recommendations. In Lyon: don\'t miss Vieux Lyon (the old town) and get into a traditional bouchon for beef bourguignon or a pike quenelle. In Dijon: hit Fallot\'s for a mustard tasting. None of it wrong; none of it bad; just none of it unique.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4945,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/8BA8EB00-9074-46D7-A5AB-4A01715E9F3F.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/8BA8EB00-9074-46D7-A5AB-4A01715E9F3F-169x300.jpg\" alt=\"Four-photo collage of dinner at Café Comptoir Abel, a classic Lyon bouchon: sliced sausage over green lentils, white asparagus with salad, a bottle of Yann Chave Crozes-Hermitage 2024, and a red-wine beef braise with potatoes and carrots.\" class=\"wp-image-4945\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">The \"fat part of the curve\" <em>can</em> be tasty</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>AI didn\'t give me any blinding insights or uncover any hidden finds. What the models <em>did</em> do was collect all the usual suspects — those recommendations that show up in every guidebook, tourism site, travel blog, and review site — filtered them through all the wants and constraints I’d given it, and hand back a clean, easy-to-read itinerary. Which has real value. It gave me in minutes what would’ve taken me a couple of days of Googling and stitching the results all together. Or what a competent mid-level travel agent would\'ve given me — if those still exist.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>The Part AI Didn\'t (Couldn’t?) Do</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>What I <em>didn\'t</em> get was the next-level research that leads you to the real highlight of the trip. To find great restaurants, Irene leaned on her old standby, the <a href=\"https://guide.michelin.com/us/en\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Michelin Guide</a>. I went hunting for local opinions — Chrome-translated pieces from Le Figaro and Lyon Capitale — spelunking through specialty wine blogs and forums for wine bar recommendations and, as always, hitting Untappd to see where people were checking in interesting beers.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4947,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/IMG_0479-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/IMG_0479-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"A frothy cocktail served in a miniature white clawfoot bathtub with two black straws and a yellow rubber duck perched on top, at a tiki bar with &quot;Drink Me&quot; mugs behind\" class=\"wp-image-4947\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Don\'t know how the models missed Dijon\'s tiki bar</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>For me, AI quickly did the first-level work — the initial research that lays out the contours of the trip, and assembling an itinerary around them. Yes, that\'s the easy part of the trip planning, but it\'s still work that has to get done. And every hour AI saved me there was another hour I could spend digging further into the stuff it couldn\'t reach.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Where AI Actually Won</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>The place where AI was able to shed its mid-level travel agent tag was weather forecasting. Not a big deal for two weeks in one spot — pull up AccuWeather, give it a look, and you’re done. But this was a touring vacation where we were pulling up stakes every two days. That’s a lot of forecast tabs, a lot of copy-paste to get it all into one place that I could look at and figure out what to pack. Sounded like a good job for AI.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>So I gave ChatGPT and Claude the same prompt:</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:quote -->\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote\"><!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Use your web search tools to give me a day-by-day forecast for the two-week Burgundy itinerary in this public TripIt link.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph --></blockquote>\n<!-- /wp:quote -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Claude immediately pulled up short -- “TripIt blocks automated access to their pages” -- while ChatGPT ploughed ahead. Huh. Well, no matter — I printed the itinerary as a PDF, uploaded it to Claude, and off it went. About four minutes later, both models came back with daily forecasts for every stop, plus a very useful summary. Something that probably would\'ve taken me thirty minutes to assemble was done in four.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4951,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Screenshot-2026-07-02-at-4.24.23-PM.png\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Screenshot-2026-07-02-at-4.24.23-PM-300x242.png\" alt=\"Screenshot of an AI-generated &quot;Burgundy Bike Ride · Updated Forecast&quot; for Lyon and Dijon; days that shifted more than 3°F from the prior forecast are highlighted, with gains up to +9°F and TGV/train transfer notes\" class=\"wp-image-4951\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Claude\'s day-before refresh, the big swings flagged automatically</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>But the best part came the day before we left. While packing, I went back to both chats and asked them to refresh their forecasts <em>and</em> flag every change of more than three degrees Fahrenheit — the kind of swing that would make me rethink, say, the ratio of short-sleeve to long-sleeve shirts I pack. Three minutes later, I had updated forecasts, and in Claude\'s case, the big-change days color-highlighted. That\'s something I would’ve never found time to do myself the day before leaving.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Treat It Like a Friend</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>So I will lean harder in AI travel planning. The models keep getting smarter and they’re getting wired into more real-time data and more travel services. But my Burgundy travel planning reminded me that they’re not psychic — at least, not yet. The more thought and detail you put into the prompt, the better the response.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I’m working on my prompting skills again for a road trip my son Andrew and I are planning through the Canadian Maritimes. Like my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2026/02/25/gulf-coast-mardi-gras-road-trip-stop-1-mobile/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Gulf Coast</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2026/03/10/gulf-coast-mardi-gras-road-trip-stop-2-new-orleans/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Mardi</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2026/04/14/gulf-coast-mardi-gras-road-trip-stop-3-lafayette-acadiana/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Gras</a> road trip, this trip has been knocking around the back of my mind for a while. But, like with Burgundy, I don’t have much of a plan beyond “drink local beer and eat local seafood”. Andrew has already uploaded his Untappd history to Claude and had it draft an initial itinerary. Now he’s unleashed a few AI agents to hunt down for more ideas.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>But even with agents scouring the Internet, AI isn’t all-seeing and all-knowing — not yet — so I can\'t just take its itinerary and run. I\'ll treat its recommendations the way I would a good friend\'s or a sharp travel agent\'s: give them strong consideration, check they\'re still correct, and then make up my own mind.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Because after all, it\'s my trip.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','AI Travel Planning: The Good, The Meh, and the Almost-Magic','Can AI really plan a better trip? After testing ChatGPT, Claude, and other AI models on a Burgundy vacation, I found they\'re surprisingly good at building itineraries and weather forecasts—but they\'re no substitute for local research, good judgment, or the instincts of an experienced traveler.','inherit','closed','closed','','4942-revision-v1','','','2026-07-02 16:35:25','2026-07-02 21:35:25','',4942,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4956',0,'revision','',0),
(4957,1,'2026-07-02 20:41:04','2026-07-03 01:41:04','<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4952,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Screenshot-2026-07-02-at-4.26.42-PM.png\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Screenshot-2026-07-02-at-4.26.42-PM-300x227.png\" alt=\"Screenshot of ChatGPT\'s reasoning for leaving Lyon off the itinerary, listing trade-offs with red X marks and concluding in bold that Lyon is a 10/10 city but not a 10/10 fit for this specific trip\" class=\"wp-image-4952\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">ChatGPT\'s closing argument against Lyon, bold verdict and all</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>After wading through a half-dozen of its recommended itineraries, I asked ChatGPT why it hadn\'t put Lyon on any of them. What I got back was a 500-word, four-part essay on why I was wrong, with its final conclusion helpfully bolded so I wouldn\'t miss it: \"<strong>Lyon is a 10/10 city — just not a 10/10 fit for this specific trip.</strong>\" All it was missing was a bold and centered <strong>Q.E.D.</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We’d booked a bike tour with Backroads through Burgundy for the last week of April and I thought it’d be interesting to see what AI would suggest we do on the week before. So I fired up ChatGPT and Claude and them to fed them the same prompt:</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:quote -->\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote\"><!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>We\'re flying out of Nashville (BNA);</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>At least two nights in every stop so we\'re not bunny-hopping;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>We have to be in Auxerre the night before the tour starts;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>We\'re here for the local food, wine, cheese, and beer;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>We like walking through towns to see what there is to see (I struggled mightily not to use the possibly-past-trend word <em>flâneuring</em>);</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And we\'d like a lunch or dinner in at least one Michelin-starred restaurant.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></blockquote>\n<!-- /wp:quote -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I already had what I thought was a pretty good itinerary knocking around in the back of my head — fly BNA to CDG, catch the TGV from the station inside the airport to Lyon (which, as my post, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2026/05/18/the-long-way-to-lyon/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"The Long Way to Lyon\"><em>The Long Way to Lyon</em></a>, showed, wasn\'t quite as straightforward as I thought), spend a couple of days there, train two hours up to Dijon for a couple more days, then over to Auxerre to hang out until we started the tour.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Reasonable, I thought. The models disagreed. When I pushed ChatGPT to justify itself, that’s when it got a little shirty. We started in Lyon anyway and had a great time.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>The Last Time I Tried This</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It\'s a long way from just three years ago; the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/09/29/podcast-196-cheers-to-beer-tourism-and-travel/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Podcast #196 — Cheers to Beer Tourism and Travel!\">last time I tried using AI to plan a trip.</a> Back in 2023, shortly after ChatGPT 3 launched, I asked it to:</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:quote -->\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote\"><!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Develop a taproom circuit of microbrewery taprooms in Asheville, NC starting at the Aloft Hotel in Asheville. Optimize it to minimize walking distance and maximize Untappd ratings.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph --></blockquote>\n<!-- /wp:quote -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4373,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/stable-diffusion-xl-beer-3.jpeg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/stable-diffusion-xl-beer-3-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"IAI-generated, comic-style illustration of a humanoid robot leaning on a wooden bar with a full glass of golden beer in front of it, shelves of bottles behind, in an industrial-looking taproom\" class=\"wp-image-4373\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">This is the ChatGPT I thought would plan my Asheville trip</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It spat out a nice little table of eight taprooms that looked solid <strong>—</strong> at first glance. But then looking closer, none of the ratings actually matched <a href=\"https://untappd.com\" title=\"Untappd\">Untappd</a>, and the \"circuit\" was less a loop and more a random wander around town. The problem: back then, ChatGPT 3 had no web access and a bad habit of confidently making things up to fill in the gaps.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>After that experiment, I shelved AI for travel planning. I kept using it more and more for other things <strong>—</strong> technical analysis, research, and image generation <strong>—</strong> but not for trips. Then we locked in the Burgundy trip, which got me thinking about giving AI another shot at planning a trip. I\'d felt the models getting dramatically better everywhere else I was using them. And honestly, I didn\'t have many ideas on what to do with the week beyond \"eat and drink in Lyon and Dijon”, so I gave AI another go.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:group {\"layout\":{\"type\":\"flex\",\"flexWrap\":\"nowrap\"},\"hideFromFeed\":true} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-group\"><!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Model Triangulation</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading --></div>\n<!-- /wp:group -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4948,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/IMG_0630-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/IMG_0630-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"A &quot;maBaguette&quot; automated baguette vending machine on a roadside in rural Burgundy, offering fresh artisan baguettes around the clock for 1.20 euros, self-service (libre service)\" class=\"wp-image-4948\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">A baguette machine on the side of an empty lot. Automation even the French will endorse.</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Another thing that\'s changed since Asheville is the sheer number of large language models (LLMs). Back then, it was ChatGPT. Today, it’s easy to paste the same prompt into seven state-of-the-art models — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Mistral, Kimi, Deepseek, and Qwen. Three American, one French, three Chinese.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Seven was about four too many for me. So after skimming the first round of answers, I cut it down to three: ChatGPT and Claude — my usual suspects — and Mistral, mostly because I thought a French model might have some unique local insight buried somewhere in its training data.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I do what I call <em>model triangulation</em>. I give each model the same prompt and watch how their answers line up. If two or three of them agree on something, I figure it’s pretty safe to believe it. I started doing this as an error check — a way to swerve the hallucinations, and it has mostly worked.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>AI is the new mid-level travel agent</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4946,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Gemini_Generated_Image_clj4yfclj4yfclj4.png\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Gemini_Generated_Image_clj4yfclj4yfclj4-1024x559.png\" alt=\"AI-generated cartoon of a humanoid robot travel agent named Aurora at a cluttered desk with vintage computers, Guide Michelin books, and a Côte d\'Or map, fielding confused questions about Burgundy wine\" class=\"wp-image-4946\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Meet Aurora, Unit-A01 — the world\'s last mid-level travel agent, sweating over Burgundy\'s \"local charm factor.\" </figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>The three models gave me pretty similar results, all sitting right in the “fat part of the curve” of tourist recommendations. In Lyon: don\'t miss Vieux Lyon (the old town) and get into a traditional bouchon for beef bourguignon or a pike quenelle. In Dijon: hit Fallot\'s for a mustard tasting. None of it wrong; none of it bad; just none of it unique.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4945,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/8BA8EB00-9074-46D7-A5AB-4A01715E9F3F.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/8BA8EB00-9074-46D7-A5AB-4A01715E9F3F-169x300.jpg\" alt=\"Four-photo collage of dinner at Café Comptoir Abel, a classic Lyon bouchon: sliced sausage over green lentils, white asparagus with salad, a bottle of Yann Chave Crozes-Hermitage 2024, and a red-wine beef braise with potatoes and carrots.\" class=\"wp-image-4945\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">The \"fat part of the curve\" <em>can</em> be tasty</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>AI didn\'t give me any blinding insights or uncover any hidden finds. What the models <em>did</em> do was collect all the usual suspects — those recommendations that show up in every guidebook, tourism site, travel blog, and review site — filtered them through all the wants and constraints I’d given it, and hand back a clean, easy-to-read itinerary. Which has real value. It gave me in minutes what would’ve taken me a couple of days of Googling and stitching the results all together. Or what a competent mid-level travel agent would\'ve given me — if those still exist.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>The Part AI Didn\'t (Couldn’t?) Do</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>What I <em>didn\'t</em> get was the next-level research that leads you to the real highlight of the trip. To find great restaurants, Irene leaned on her old standby, the <a href=\"https://guide.michelin.com/us/en\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Michelin Guide</a>. I went hunting for local opinions — Chrome-translated pieces from Le Figaro and Lyon Capitale — spelunking through specialty wine blogs and forums for wine bar recommendations and, as always, hitting Untappd to see where people were checking in interesting beers.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4947,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/IMG_0479-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/IMG_0479-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"A frothy cocktail served in a miniature white clawfoot bathtub with two black straws and a yellow rubber duck perched on top, at a tiki bar with &quot;Drink Me&quot; mugs behind\" class=\"wp-image-4947\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Don\'t know how the models missed Dijon\'s tiki bar</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>For me, AI quickly did the first-level work — the initial research that lays out the contours of the trip, and assembling an itinerary around them. Yes, that\'s the easy part of the trip planning, but it\'s still work that has to get done. And every hour AI saved me there was another hour I could spend digging further into the stuff it couldn\'t reach.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Where AI Actually Won</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>The place where AI was able to shed its mid-level travel agent tag was weather forecasting. Not a big deal for two weeks in one spot — pull up AccuWeather, give it a look, and you’re done. But this was a touring vacation where we were pulling up stakes every two days. That’s a lot of forecast tabs, a lot of copy-paste to get it all into one place that I could look at and figure out what to pack. Sounded like a good job for AI.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>So I gave ChatGPT and Claude the same prompt:</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:quote -->\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote\"><!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Use your web search tools to give me a day-by-day forecast for the two-week Burgundy itinerary in this public TripIt link.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph --></blockquote>\n<!-- /wp:quote -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Claude immediately pulled up short -- “TripIt blocks automated access to their pages” -- while ChatGPT ploughed ahead. Huh. Well, no matter — I printed the itinerary as a PDF, uploaded it to Claude, and off it went. About four minutes later, both models came back with daily forecasts for every stop, plus a very useful summary. Something that probably would\'ve taken me thirty minutes to assemble was done in four.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4951,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Screenshot-2026-07-02-at-4.24.23-PM.png\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Screenshot-2026-07-02-at-4.24.23-PM-300x242.png\" alt=\"Screenshot of an AI-generated &quot;Burgundy Bike Ride · Updated Forecast&quot; for Lyon and Dijon; days that shifted more than 3°F from the prior forecast are highlighted, with gains up to +9°F and TGV/train transfer notes\" class=\"wp-image-4951\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Claude\'s day-before refresh, the big swings flagged automatically</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>But the best part came the day before we left. While packing, I went back to both chats and asked them to refresh their forecasts <em>and</em> flag every change of more than three degrees Fahrenheit — the kind of swing that would make me rethink, say, the ratio of short-sleeve to long-sleeve shirts I pack. Three minutes later, I had updated forecasts, and in Claude\'s case, the big-change days color-highlighted. That\'s something I would’ve never found time to do myself the day before leaving.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Treat It Like a Friend</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>So I will lean harder in AI travel planning. The models keep getting smarter and they’re getting wired into more real-time data and more travel services. But my Burgundy travel planning reminded me that they’re not psychic — at least, not yet. The more thought and detail you put into the prompt, the better the response.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4949,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/IMG_0664-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/IMG_0664-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"A silver e-bike parked on gravel in front of a large painted wall sign for the Chassagne-Montrachet Caveau Municipal, advertising the region\'s white and red wines, under a clear blue Burgundy sky\" class=\"wp-image-4949\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Gotta turn around; AI didn\'t tell me I\'d passed some of the world\'s best white wines!</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I’m working on my prompting skills again for a road trip my son Andrew and I are planning through the Canadian Maritimes. Like my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2026/02/25/gulf-coast-mardi-gras-road-trip-stop-1-mobile/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Gulf Coast</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2026/03/10/gulf-coast-mardi-gras-road-trip-stop-2-new-orleans/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Mardi</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2026/04/14/gulf-coast-mardi-gras-road-trip-stop-3-lafayette-acadiana/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Gras</a> road trip, this trip has been knocking around the back of my mind for a while. But, like with Burgundy, I don’t have much of a plan beyond “drink local beer and eat local seafood”. Andrew has already uploaded his Untappd history to Claude and had it draft an initial itinerary. Now he’s unleashed a few AI agents to hunt down for more ideas.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>But even with agents scouring the Internet, AI isn’t all-seeing and all-knowing — not yet — so I can\'t just take its itinerary and run. I\'ll treat its recommendations the way I would a good friend\'s or a sharp travel agent\'s: give them strong consideration, check they\'re still correct, and then make up my own mind.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Because after all, it\'s my trip.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','AI Travel Planning: The Good, The Meh, and the Almost-Magic','Can AI really plan a better trip? After testing ChatGPT, Claude, and other AI models on a Burgundy vacation, I found they\'re surprisingly good at building itineraries and weather forecasts—but they\'re no substitute for local research, good judgment, or the instincts of an experienced traveler.','inherit','closed','closed','','4942-revision-v1','','','2026-07-02 20:41:04','2026-07-03 01:41:04','',4942,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4957',0,'revision','',0),
(4958,1,'2026-07-02 21:10:56','2026-07-03 02:10:56','<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4952,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Screenshot-2026-07-02-at-4.26.42-PM.png\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Screenshot-2026-07-02-at-4.26.42-PM-300x227.png\" alt=\"Screenshot of ChatGPT\'s reasoning for leaving Lyon off the itinerary, listing trade-offs with red X marks and concluding in bold that Lyon is a 10/10 city but not a 10/10 fit for this specific trip\" class=\"wp-image-4952\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">ChatGPT\'s closing argument against Lyon, bold verdict and all</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>After wading through a half-dozen of its recommended itineraries, I asked ChatGPT why it hadn\'t put Lyon on any of them. What I got back was a 500-word, four-part essay on why I was wrong, with its final conclusion helpfully bolded so I wouldn\'t miss it: \"<strong>Lyon is a 10/10 city — just not a 10/10 fit for this specific trip.</strong>\" All it was missing was a bold and centered <strong>Q.E.D.</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We’d booked a bike tour with Backroads through Burgundy for the last week of April and I thought it’d be interesting to see what AI would suggest we do on the week before. So I fired up ChatGPT and Claude and them to fed them the same prompt:</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:quote -->\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote\"><!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>We\'re flying out of Nashville (BNA);</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>At least two nights in every stop so we\'re not bunny-hopping;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>We have to be in Auxerre the night before the tour starts;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>We\'re here for the local food, wine, cheese, and beer;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>We like walking through towns to see what there is to see (I struggled mightily not to use the possibly-past-trend word <em>flâneuring</em>);</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And we\'d like a lunch or dinner in at least one Michelin-starred restaurant.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></blockquote>\n<!-- /wp:quote -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I already had what I thought was a pretty good itinerary  — fly BNA to CDG, catch the TGV from the station inside the airport to Lyon (which, as my post, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2026/05/18/the-long-way-to-lyon/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"The Long Way to Lyon\"><em>The Long Way to Lyon</em></a>, showed, wasn\'t quite as straightforward as I thought), spend a couple of days there, train two hours up to Dijon for a couple more days, then over to Auxerre to hang out until we started the tour.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Reasonable, I thought. The models disagreed. When I pushed ChatGPT to justify itself, that’s when it got a little shirty. We started in Lyon anyway and had a great time.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>The Last Time I Tried This</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It\'s a long way from just three years ago; the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/09/29/podcast-196-cheers-to-beer-tourism-and-travel/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Podcast #196 — Cheers to Beer Tourism and Travel!\">last time I tried using AI to plan a trip.</a> Back in 2023, shortly after ChatGPT 3 launched, I asked it to:</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:quote -->\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote\"><!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Develop a taproom circuit of microbrewery taprooms in Asheville, NC starting at the Aloft Hotel in Asheville. Optimize it to minimize walking distance and maximize Untappd ratings.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph --></blockquote>\n<!-- /wp:quote -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4373,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/stable-diffusion-xl-beer-3.jpeg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/stable-diffusion-xl-beer-3-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"IAI-generated, comic-style illustration of a humanoid robot leaning on a wooden bar with a full glass of golden beer in front of it, shelves of bottles behind, in an industrial-looking taproom\" class=\"wp-image-4373\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">This is the ChatGPT I thought would plan my Asheville trip</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It spat out a nice little table of eight taprooms that looked solid <strong>—</strong> at first glance. But then looking closer, none of the ratings actually matched <a href=\"https://untappd.com\" title=\"Untappd\">Untappd</a>, and the \"circuit\" was less a loop and more a random wander around town. The problem: back then, ChatGPT 3 had no web access and a bad habit of confidently making things up to fill in the gaps.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>After that experiment, I shelved AI for travel planning. I kept using it more and more for other things <strong>—</strong> technical analysis, research, and image generation <strong>—</strong> but not for trips. Then we locked in the Burgundy trip, which got me thinking about giving AI another shot at planning a trip. I\'d felt the models getting dramatically better everywhere else I was using them. And honestly, I didn\'t have many ideas on what to do with the week beyond \"eat and drink in Lyon and Dijon”, so I gave AI another go.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:group {\"layout\":{\"type\":\"flex\",\"flexWrap\":\"nowrap\"},\"hideFromFeed\":true} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-group\"><!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Model Triangulation</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading --></div>\n<!-- /wp:group -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4948,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/IMG_0630-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/IMG_0630-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"A &quot;maBaguette&quot; automated baguette vending machine on a roadside in rural Burgundy, offering fresh artisan baguettes around the clock for 1.20 euros, self-service (libre service)\" class=\"wp-image-4948\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">A baguette machine on the side of an empty lot. Automation even the French will endorse.</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Another thing that\'s changed since Asheville is the sheer number of large language models (LLMs). Back then, it was ChatGPT. Today, it’s easy to paste the same prompt into seven state-of-the-art models — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Mistral, Kimi, Deepseek, and Qwen. Three American, one French, three Chinese.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Seven was about four too many for me. So after skimming the first round of answers, I cut it down to three: ChatGPT and Claude — my usual suspects — and Mistral, mostly because I thought a French model might have some unique local insight buried somewhere in its training data.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I do what I call <em>model triangulation</em>. I give each model the same prompt and watch how their answers line up. If two or three of them agree on something, I figure it’s pretty safe to believe it. I started doing this as an error check — a way to swerve the hallucinations, and it has mostly worked.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>AI is the new mid-level travel agent</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4946,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Gemini_Generated_Image_clj4yfclj4yfclj4.png\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Gemini_Generated_Image_clj4yfclj4yfclj4-1024x559.png\" alt=\"AI-generated cartoon of a humanoid robot travel agent named Aurora at a cluttered desk with vintage computers, Guide Michelin books, and a Côte d\'Or map, fielding confused questions about Burgundy wine\" class=\"wp-image-4946\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Meet Aurora, Unit-A01 — the world\'s last mid-level travel agent, sweating over Burgundy\'s \"local charm factor.\" </figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>The three models gave me pretty similar results, all sitting right in the “fat part of the curve” of tourist recommendations. In Lyon: don\'t miss Vieux Lyon (the old town) and get into a traditional bouchon for beef bourguignon or a pike quenelle. In Dijon: hit Fallot\'s for a mustard tasting. None of it wrong; none of it bad; just none of it unique.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4945,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/8BA8EB00-9074-46D7-A5AB-4A01715E9F3F.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/8BA8EB00-9074-46D7-A5AB-4A01715E9F3F-169x300.jpg\" alt=\"Four-photo collage of dinner at Café Comptoir Abel, a classic Lyon bouchon: sliced sausage over green lentils, white asparagus with salad, a bottle of Yann Chave Crozes-Hermitage 2024, and a red-wine beef braise with potatoes and carrots.\" class=\"wp-image-4945\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">The \"fat part of the curve\" <em>can</em> be tasty</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>AI didn\'t give me any blinding insights or uncover any hidden finds. What the models <em>did</em> do was collect all the usual suspects — those recommendations that show up in every guidebook, tourism site, travel blog, and review site — filtered them through all the wants and constraints I’d given it, and hand back a clean, easy-to-read itinerary. Which has real value. It gave me in minutes what would’ve taken me a couple of days of Googling and stitching the results all together. Or what a competent mid-level travel agent would\'ve given me — if those still exist.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>The Part AI Didn\'t (Couldn’t?) Do</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>What I <em>didn\'t</em> get was the next-level research that leads you to the real highlight of the trip. To find great restaurants, Irene leaned on her old standby, the <a href=\"https://guide.michelin.com/us/en\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Michelin Guide</a>. I went hunting for local opinions — Chrome-translated pieces from Le Figaro and Lyon Capitale — spelunking through specialty wine blogs and forums for wine bar recommendations and, as always, hitting Untappd to see where people were checking in interesting beers.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4947,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/IMG_0479-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/IMG_0479-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"A frothy cocktail served in a miniature white clawfoot bathtub with two black straws and a yellow rubber duck perched on top, at a tiki bar with &quot;Drink Me&quot; mugs behind\" class=\"wp-image-4947\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Don\'t know how the models missed Dijon\'s tiki bar</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>For me, AI quickly did the first-level work — the initial research that lays out the contours of the trip, and assembling an itinerary around them. Yes, that\'s the easy part of the trip planning, but it\'s still work that has to get done. And every hour AI saved me there was another hour I could spend digging further into the stuff it couldn\'t reach.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Where AI Actually Won</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>The place where AI was able to shed its mid-level travel agent tag was weather forecasting. Not a big deal for two weeks in one spot — pull up AccuWeather, give it a look, and you’re done. But this was a touring vacation where we were pulling up stakes every two days. That’s a lot of forecast tabs, a lot of copy-paste to get it all into one place that I could look at and figure out what to pack. Sounded like a good job for AI.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>So I gave ChatGPT and Claude the same prompt:</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:quote -->\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote\"><!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Use your web search tools to give me a day-by-day forecast for the two-week Burgundy itinerary in this public TripIt link.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph --></blockquote>\n<!-- /wp:quote -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Claude immediately pulled up short -- “TripIt blocks automated access to their pages” -- while ChatGPT ploughed ahead. Huh. Well, no matter — I printed the itinerary as a PDF, uploaded it to Claude, and off it went. About four minutes later, both models came back with daily forecasts for every stop, plus a very useful summary. Something that probably would\'ve taken me thirty minutes to assemble was done in four.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4951,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Screenshot-2026-07-02-at-4.24.23-PM.png\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Screenshot-2026-07-02-at-4.24.23-PM-300x242.png\" alt=\"Screenshot of an AI-generated &quot;Burgundy Bike Ride · Updated Forecast&quot; for Lyon and Dijon; days that shifted more than 3°F from the prior forecast are highlighted, with gains up to +9°F and TGV/train transfer notes\" class=\"wp-image-4951\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Claude\'s day-before refresh, the big swings flagged automatically</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>But the best part came the day before we left. While packing, I went back to both chats and asked them to refresh their forecasts <em>and</em> flag every change of more than three degrees Fahrenheit — the kind of swing that would make me rethink, say, the ratio of short-sleeve to long-sleeve shirts I pack. Three minutes later, I had updated forecasts, and in Claude\'s case, the big-change days color-highlighted. That\'s something I would’ve never found time to do myself the day before leaving.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Treat It Like a Friend</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>So I will lean harder in AI travel planning. The models keep getting smarter and they’re getting wired into more real-time data and more travel services. But my Burgundy travel planning reminded me that they’re not psychic — at least, not yet. The more thought and detail you put into the prompt, the better the response.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4949,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/IMG_0664-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/IMG_0664-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"A silver e-bike parked on gravel in front of a large painted wall sign for the Chassagne-Montrachet Caveau Municipal, advertising the region\'s white and red wines, under a clear blue Burgundy sky\" class=\"wp-image-4949\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Gotta turn around; AI didn\'t tell me I\'d passed some of the world\'s best white wines!</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I’m working on my prompting skills again for a road trip my son Andrew and I are planning through the Canadian Maritimes. Like my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2026/02/25/gulf-coast-mardi-gras-road-trip-stop-1-mobile/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Gulf Coast</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2026/03/10/gulf-coast-mardi-gras-road-trip-stop-2-new-orleans/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Mardi</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2026/04/14/gulf-coast-mardi-gras-road-trip-stop-3-lafayette-acadiana/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Gras</a> road trip, this trip has been knocking around the back of my mind for a while. But, like with Burgundy, I don’t have much of a plan beyond “drink local beer and eat local seafood”. Andrew has already uploaded his Untappd history to Claude and had it draft an initial itinerary. Now he’s unleashed a few AI agents to hunt down for more ideas.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>But even with agents scouring the Internet, AI isn’t all-seeing and all-knowing — not yet — so I can\'t just take its itinerary and run. I\'ll treat its recommendations the way I would a good friend\'s or a sharp travel agent\'s: give them strong consideration, check they\'re still correct, and then make up my own mind.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Because after all, it\'s my trip.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','AI Travel Planning: The Good, The Meh, and the Almost-Magic','Can AI really plan a better trip? After testing ChatGPT, Claude, and other AI models on a Burgundy vacation, I found they\'re surprisingly good at building itineraries and weather forecasts—but they\'re no substitute for local research, good judgment, or the instincts of an experienced traveler.','inherit','closed','closed','','4942-revision-v1','','','2026-07-02 21:10:56','2026-07-03 02:10:56','',4942,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4958',0,'revision','',0),
(4960,1,'2026-07-02 21:20:15','2026-07-03 02:20:15','<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4952,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Screenshot-2026-07-02-at-4.26.42-PM.png\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Screenshot-2026-07-02-at-4.26.42-PM-300x227.png\" alt=\"Screenshot of ChatGPT\'s reasoning for leaving Lyon off the itinerary, listing trade-offs with red X marks and concluding in bold that Lyon is a 10/10 city but not a 10/10 fit for this specific trip\" class=\"wp-image-4952\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">ChatGPT\'s closing argument against Lyon, bold verdict and all</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>After wading through a half-dozen of its recommended itineraries, I asked ChatGPT why it hadn\'t put Lyon on any of them. What I got back was a 500-word, four-part essay on why I was wrong, with its final conclusion helpfully bolded so I wouldn\'t miss it: \"<strong>Lyon is a 10/10 city — just not a 10/10 fit for this specific trip.</strong>\" All it was missing was a bold and centered <strong>Q.E.D.</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We’d booked a bike tour with Backroads through Burgundy for the last week of April and I thought it’d be interesting to see what AI would suggest we do on the week before. So I fired up ChatGPT and Claude and them to fed them the same prompt:</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:quote -->\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote\"><!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>We\'re flying out of Nashville (BNA);</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>At least two nights in every stop so we\'re not bunny-hopping;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>We have to be in Auxerre the night before the tour starts;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>We\'re here for the local food, wine, cheese, and beer;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>We like walking through towns to see what there is to see (I struggled mightily not to use the possibly-past-trend word <em>flâneuring</em>);</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And we\'d like a lunch or dinner in at least one Michelin-starred restaurant.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></blockquote>\n<!-- /wp:quote -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I already had what I thought was a pretty good itinerary  — fly BNA to CDG, catch the TGV from the station inside the airport to Lyon (which, as my post, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2026/05/18/the-long-way-to-lyon/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"The Long Way to Lyon\"><em>The Long Way to Lyon</em></a>, showed, wasn\'t quite as straightforward as I thought), spend a couple of days there, train two hours up to Dijon for a couple more days, then over to Auxerre to hang out until we started the tour.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Reasonable, I thought. The models disagreed. When I pushed ChatGPT to justify itself, that’s when it got a little shirty. We started in Lyon anyway and had a great time.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>The Last Time I Tried This</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It\'s a long way from just three years ago; the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/09/29/podcast-196-cheers-to-beer-tourism-and-travel/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Podcast #196 — Cheers to Beer Tourism and Travel!\">last time I tried using AI to plan a trip.</a> Back in 2023, shortly after ChatGPT 3 launched, I asked it to:</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:quote -->\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote\"><!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Develop a taproom circuit of microbrewery taprooms in Asheville, NC starting at the Aloft Hotel in Asheville. Optimize it to minimize walking distance and maximize Untappd ratings.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph --></blockquote>\n<!-- /wp:quote -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4373,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/stable-diffusion-xl-beer-3.jpeg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/stable-diffusion-xl-beer-3-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"IAI-generated, comic-style illustration of a humanoid robot leaning on a wooden bar with a full glass of golden beer in front of it, shelves of bottles behind, in an industrial-looking taproom\" class=\"wp-image-4373\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">This is the ChatGPT I thought would plan my Asheville trip</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It spat out a nice little table of eight taprooms that looked solid <strong>—</strong> at first glance. But then looking closer, none of the ratings actually matched <a href=\"https://untappd.com\" title=\"Untappd\">Untappd</a>, and the \"circuit\" was less a loop and more a random wander around town. The problem: back then, ChatGPT 3 had no web access and a bad habit of confidently making things up to fill in the gaps.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>After that experiment, I shelved AI for travel planning. I kept using it more and more for other things <strong>—</strong> technical analysis, research, and image generation <strong>—</strong> but not for trips. Then we locked in the Burgundy trip, which got me thinking about giving AI another shot at planning a trip. I\'d felt the models getting dramatically better everywhere else I was using them. And honestly, I didn\'t have many ideas on what to do with the week beyond \"eat and drink in Lyon and Dijon”, so I gave AI another go.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:group {\"layout\":{\"type\":\"flex\",\"flexWrap\":\"nowrap\"},\"hideFromFeed\":true} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-group\"><!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Model Triangulation</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading --></div>\n<!-- /wp:group -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4948,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/IMG_0630-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/IMG_0630-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"A &quot;maBaguette&quot; automated baguette vending machine on a roadside in rural Burgundy, offering fresh artisan baguettes around the clock for 1.20 euros, self-service (libre service)\" class=\"wp-image-4948\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">A baguette machine on the side of an empty lot. Automation even the French will endorse.</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Another thing that\'s changed since Asheville is the sheer number of large language models (LLMs). Back then, it was ChatGPT. Today, it’s easy to paste the same prompt into seven state-of-the-art models — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Mistral, Kimi, Deepseek, and Qwen. Three American, one French, three Chinese.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Seven was about four too many for me. So after skimming the first round of answers, I cut it down to three: ChatGPT and Claude — my usual suspects — and Mistral, mostly because I thought a French model might have some unique local insight buried somewhere in its training data.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I do what I call <em>model triangulation</em>. I give each model the same prompt and watch how their answers line up. If two or three of them agree on something, I figure it’s pretty safe to believe it. I started doing this as an error check — a way to swerve the hallucinations, and it has mostly worked.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>AI is the new mid-level travel agent</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4946,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Gemini_Generated_Image_clj4yfclj4yfclj4.png\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Gemini_Generated_Image_clj4yfclj4yfclj4-1024x559.png\" alt=\"AI-generated cartoon of a humanoid robot travel agent named Aurora at a cluttered desk with vintage computers, Guide Michelin books, and a Côte d\'Or map, fielding confused questions about Burgundy wine\" class=\"wp-image-4946\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Meet Aurora, Unit-A01 — the world\'s last mid-level travel agent, sweating over Burgundy\'s \"local charm factor.\" </figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>The three models gave me pretty similar results, all sitting right in the “fat part of the curve” of tourist recommendations. In Lyon: don\'t miss Vieux Lyon (the old town) and get into a traditional bouchon for beef bourguignon or a pike quenelle. In Dijon: hit Fallot\'s for a mustard tasting. None of it wrong; none of it bad; just none of it unique.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4945,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/8BA8EB00-9074-46D7-A5AB-4A01715E9F3F.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/8BA8EB00-9074-46D7-A5AB-4A01715E9F3F-169x300.jpg\" alt=\"Four-photo collage of dinner at Café Comptoir Abel, a classic Lyon bouchon: sliced sausage over green lentils, white asparagus with salad, a bottle of Yann Chave Crozes-Hermitage 2024, and a red-wine beef braise with potatoes and carrots.\" class=\"wp-image-4945\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">The \"fat part of the curve\" <em>can</em> be tasty</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>AI didn\'t give me any blinding insights or uncover any hidden finds. What the models <em>did</em> do was collect all the usual suspects — those recommendations that show up in every guidebook, tourism site, travel blog, and review site — filtered them through all the wants and constraints I’d given it, and then hand back a clean, easy-to-read itinerary. Which has real value. It gave me in minutes what would’ve taken me a couple of days of Googling and stitching the results all together. Or what a competent mid-level travel agent would\'ve given me — if those still exist.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>The Part AI Didn\'t (Couldn’t?) Do</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>What I <em>didn\'t</em> get was the next-level research that leads you to the real highlight of the trip. To find great restaurants, Irene leaned on her old standby, the <a href=\"https://guide.michelin.com/us/en\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Michelin Guide</a>. I went hunting for local opinions — Chrome-translated pieces from Le Figaro and Lyon Capitale — spelunking through specialty wine blogs and forums for wine bar recommendations and, as always, hitting Untappd to see where people were checking in interesting beers.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4947,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/IMG_0479-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/IMG_0479-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"A frothy cocktail served in a miniature white clawfoot bathtub with two black straws and a yellow rubber duck perched on top, at a tiki bar with &quot;Drink Me&quot; mugs behind\" class=\"wp-image-4947\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Don\'t know how the models missed Dijon\'s tiki bar</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>For me, AI quickly did the first-level work — the initial research that lays out the contours of the trip, and assembling an itinerary around them. Yes, that\'s the easy part of the trip planning, but it\'s still work that has to get done. And every hour AI saved me there was another hour I could spend digging further into the stuff it couldn\'t reach.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Where AI Actually Won</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>The place where AI was able to shed its mid-level travel agent tag was weather forecasting. Not a big deal for two weeks in one spot — pull up AccuWeather, give it a look, and you’re done. But this was a touring vacation where we were pulling up stakes every two days. That’s a lot of forecast tabs, a lot of copy-paste to get it all into one place that I could look at and figure out what to pack. Sounded like a good job for AI.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>So I gave ChatGPT and Claude the same prompt:</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:quote -->\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote\"><!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Use your web search tools to give me a day-by-day forecast for the two-week Burgundy itinerary in this public TripIt link.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph --></blockquote>\n<!-- /wp:quote -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Claude immediately pulled up short -- “TripIt blocks automated access to their pages” -- while ChatGPT ploughed ahead. Huh. Well, no matter — I printed the itinerary as a PDF, uploaded it to Claude, and off it went. About four minutes later, both models came back with daily forecasts for every stop, plus a very useful summary. Something that probably would\'ve taken me thirty minutes to assemble was done in four.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4951,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Screenshot-2026-07-02-at-4.24.23-PM.png\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Screenshot-2026-07-02-at-4.24.23-PM-300x242.png\" alt=\"Screenshot of an AI-generated &quot;Burgundy Bike Ride · Updated Forecast&quot; for Lyon and Dijon; days that shifted more than 3°F from the prior forecast are highlighted, with gains up to +9°F and TGV/train transfer notes\" class=\"wp-image-4951\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Claude\'s day-before refresh, the big swings flagged automatically</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>But the best part came the day before we left. While packing, I went back to both chats and asked them to refresh their forecasts <em>and</em> flag every change of more than three degrees Fahrenheit — the kind of swing that would make me rethink, say, the ratio of short-sleeve to long-sleeve shirts I pack. Three minutes later, I had updated forecasts, and in Claude\'s case, the big-change days color-highlighted. That\'s something I would’ve never found time to do myself the day before leaving.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Treat It Like a Friend</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>So I will lean harder in AI travel planning. The models keep getting smarter and they’re getting wired into more real-time data and more travel services. But my Burgundy travel planning reminded me that they’re not psychic — at least, not yet. The more thought and detail you put into the prompt, the better the response.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4949,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/IMG_0664-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/IMG_0664-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"A silver e-bike parked on gravel in front of a large painted wall sign for the Chassagne-Montrachet Caveau Municipal, advertising the region\'s white and red wines, under a clear blue Burgundy sky\" class=\"wp-image-4949\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Gotta turn around; AI didn\'t tell me I\'d passed some of the world\'s best white wines!</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I’m working on my prompting skills again for a road trip my son Andrew and I are planning through the Canadian Maritimes. Like my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2026/02/25/gulf-coast-mardi-gras-road-trip-stop-1-mobile/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Gulf Coast</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2026/03/10/gulf-coast-mardi-gras-road-trip-stop-2-new-orleans/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Mardi</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2026/04/14/gulf-coast-mardi-gras-road-trip-stop-3-lafayette-acadiana/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Gras</a> road trip, this trip has been knocking around the back of my mind for a while. But, like with Burgundy, I don’t have much of a plan beyond “drink local beer and eat local seafood”. Andrew has already uploaded his Untappd history to Claude and had it draft an initial itinerary. Now he’s unleashed a few AI agents to hunt down more ideas.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>But even with agents scouring the Internet, AI isn’t all-seeing and all-knowing — not yet — so I can\'t just take its itinerary and run. I\'ll treat its recommendations the way I would a good friend\'s or a sharp travel agent\'s: give them strong consideration, check they\'re still correct, and then make up my own mind.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Because after all, it\'s my trip.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','AI Travel Planning: The Good, The Meh, and the Almost-Magic','Can AI really plan a better trip? After testing ChatGPT, Claude, and other AI models on a Burgundy vacation, I found they\'re surprisingly good at building itineraries and weather forecasts—but they\'re no substitute for local research, good judgment, or the instincts of an experienced traveler.','inherit','closed','closed','','4942-revision-v1','','','2026-07-02 21:20:15','2026-07-03 02:20:15','',4942,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4960',0,'revision','',0),
(4962,1,'2026-07-02 21:24:51','2026-07-03 02:24:51','<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4952,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Screenshot-2026-07-02-at-4.26.42-PM.png\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Screenshot-2026-07-02-at-4.26.42-PM-300x227.png\" alt=\"Screenshot of ChatGPT\'s reasoning for leaving Lyon off the itinerary, listing trade-offs with red X marks and concluding in bold that Lyon is a 10/10 city but not a 10/10 fit for this specific trip\" class=\"wp-image-4952\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">ChatGPT\'s closing argument against Lyon, bold verdict and all</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>After wading through a half-dozen of its recommended itineraries, I asked ChatGPT why it hadn\'t put Lyon on any of them. What I got back was a 500-word, four-part essay on why I was wrong, with its final conclusion helpfully bolded so I wouldn\'t miss it: \"<strong>Lyon is a 10/10 city — just not a 10/10 fit for this specific trip.</strong>\" All it was missing was a bold and centered <strong>Q.E.D.</strong></p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>We’d booked a bike tour with Backroads through Burgundy for the last week of April and I thought it’d be interesting to see what AI would suggest we do on the week before. So I fired up ChatGPT and Claude and them to fed them the same prompt:</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:quote -->\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote\"><!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>We\'re flying out of Nashville (BNA);</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>At least two nights in every stop so we\'re not bunny-hopping;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>We have to be in Auxerre the night before the tour starts;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>We\'re here for the local food, wine, cheese, and beer;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>We like walking through towns to see what there is to see (I struggled mightily not to use the possibly-past-trend word <em>flâneuring</em>);</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And we\'d like a lunch or dinner in at least one Michelin-starred restaurant.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></blockquote>\n<!-- /wp:quote -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I already had what I thought was a pretty good itinerary  — fly BNA to CDG, catch the TGV from the station inside the airport to Lyon (which, as my post, <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2026/05/18/the-long-way-to-lyon/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"The Long Way to Lyon\"><em>The Long Way to Lyon</em></a>, showed, wasn\'t quite as straightforward as I thought), spend a couple of days there, train two hours up to Dijon for a couple more days, then over to Auxerre to hang out until we started the tour.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Reasonable, I thought. The models disagreed. When I pushed ChatGPT to justify itself, that’s when it got a little shirty. We started in Lyon anyway and had a great time.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>The Last Time I Tried This</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It\'s a long way from just three years ago; the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2023/09/29/podcast-196-cheers-to-beer-tourism-and-travel/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Podcast #196 — Cheers to Beer Tourism and Travel!\">last time I tried using AI to plan a trip.</a> Back in 2023, shortly after ChatGPT 3 launched, I asked it to:</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:quote -->\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote\"><!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Develop a taproom circuit of microbrewery taprooms in Asheville, NC starting at the Aloft Hotel in Asheville. Optimize it to minimize walking distance and maximize Untappd ratings.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph --></blockquote>\n<!-- /wp:quote -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4373,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/stable-diffusion-xl-beer-3.jpeg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/stable-diffusion-xl-beer-3-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"IAI-generated, comic-style illustration of a humanoid robot leaning on a wooden bar with a full glass of golden beer in front of it, shelves of bottles behind, in an industrial-looking taproom\" class=\"wp-image-4373\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">This is the ChatGPT I thought would plan my Asheville trip</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>It spat out a nice little table of eight taprooms that looked solid <strong>—</strong> at first glance. But then looking closer, none of the ratings actually matched <a href=\"https://untappd.com\" title=\"Untappd\">Untappd</a>, and the \"circuit\" was less a loop and more a random wander around town. The problem: back then, ChatGPT 3 had no web access and a bad habit of confidently making things up to fill in the gaps.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>After that experiment, I shelved AI for travel planning. I kept using it more and more for other things <strong>—</strong> technical analysis, research, and image generation <strong>—</strong> but not for trips. Then we locked in the Burgundy trip, which got me thinking about giving AI another shot at planning a trip. I\'d felt the models getting dramatically better everywhere else I was using them. And honestly, I didn\'t have many ideas on what to do with the week beyond \"eat and drink in Lyon and Dijon”, so I gave AI another go.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:group {\"layout\":{\"type\":\"flex\",\"flexWrap\":\"nowrap\"},\"hideFromFeed\":true} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-group\"><!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Model Triangulation</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading --></div>\n<!-- /wp:group -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4948,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/IMG_0630-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/IMG_0630-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"A &quot;maBaguette&quot; automated baguette vending machine on a roadside in rural Burgundy, offering fresh artisan baguettes around the clock for 1.20 euros, self-service (libre service)\" class=\"wp-image-4948\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">A baguette machine on the side of an empty lot. Automation even the French will endorse.</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Another thing that\'s changed since Asheville is the sheer number of large language models (LLMs). Back then, it was ChatGPT. Today, it’s easy to paste the same prompt into seven state-of-the-art models — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Mistral, Kimi, Deepseek, and Qwen. Three American, one French, three Chinese.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Seven was about four too many for me. So after skimming the first round of answers, I cut it down to three: ChatGPT and Claude — my usual suspects — and Mistral, mostly because I thought a French model might have some unique local insight buried somewhere in its training data.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I do what I call <em>model triangulation</em>. I give each model the same prompt and watch how their answers line up. If two or three of them agree on something, I figure it’s pretty safe to believe it. I started doing this as an error check — a way to swerve the hallucinations, and it has mostly worked.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>AI is the new mid-level travel agent</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4946,\"sizeSlug\":\"large\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Gemini_Generated_Image_clj4yfclj4yfclj4.png\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Gemini_Generated_Image_clj4yfclj4yfclj4-1024x559.png\" alt=\"AI-generated cartoon of a humanoid robot travel agent named Aurora at a cluttered desk with vintage computers, Guide Michelin books, and a Côte d\'Or map, fielding confused questions about Burgundy wine\" class=\"wp-image-4946\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Meet Aurora, Unit-A01 — the world\'s last mid-level travel agent, sweating over Burgundy\'s \"local charm factor.\" </figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>The three models gave me pretty similar results, all sitting right in the “fat part of the curve” of tourist recommendations. In Lyon: don\'t miss Vieux Lyon (the old town) and get into a traditional bouchon for beef bourguignon or a pike quenelle. In Dijon: hit Fallot\'s for a mustard tasting. None of it wrong; none of it bad; just none of it unique.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4945,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/8BA8EB00-9074-46D7-A5AB-4A01715E9F3F.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/8BA8EB00-9074-46D7-A5AB-4A01715E9F3F-169x300.jpg\" alt=\"Four-photo collage of dinner at Café Comptoir Abel, a classic Lyon bouchon: sliced sausage over green lentils, white asparagus with salad, a bottle of Yann Chave Crozes-Hermitage 2024, and a red-wine beef braise with potatoes and carrots.\" class=\"wp-image-4945\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">The \"fat part of the curve\" <em>can</em> be tasty</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>AI didn\'t give me any blinding insights or uncover any hidden finds. What the models <em>did</em> do was collect all the usual suspects — those recommendations that show up in every guidebook, tourism site, travel blog, and review site — filtered them through all the wants and constraints I’d given it, and then hand back a clean, easy-to-read itinerary. Which has real value. It gave me in minutes what would’ve taken me a couple of days of Googling and stitching the results all together. Or what a competent mid-level travel agent would\'ve given me — if those still exist.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>The Part AI Didn\'t (Couldn’t?) Do</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>What I <em>didn\'t</em> get was the next-level research that leads you to the real highlight of the trip. To find great restaurants, Irene leaned on her old standby, the <a href=\"https://guide.michelin.com/us/en\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Michelin Guide</a>. I went hunting for local opinions — Chrome-translated pieces from Le Figaro and Lyon Capitale — spelunking through specialty wine blogs and forums for wine bar recommendations and, as always, hitting Untappd to see where people were checking in interesting beers.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4947,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/IMG_0479-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/IMG_0479-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"A frothy cocktail served in a miniature white clawfoot bathtub with two black straws and a yellow rubber duck perched on top, at a tiki bar with &quot;Drink Me&quot; mugs behind\" class=\"wp-image-4947\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Don\'t know how the models missed Dijon\'s tiki bar</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>For me, AI quickly did the first-level work — the initial research that lays out the contours of the trip, and assembling an itinerary around them. Yes, that\'s the easy part of the trip planning, but it\'s still work that has to get done. And every hour AI saved me there was another hour I could spend digging further into the stuff it couldn\'t reach.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Where AI Actually Won</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>The place where AI was able to shed its mid-level travel agent tag was weather forecasting. Not a big deal for two weeks in one spot — pull up AccuWeather, give it a look, and you’re done. But this was a touring vacation where we were pulling up stakes every two days. That’s a lot of forecast tabs, a lot of copy-paste to get it all into one place that I could look at and figure out what to pack. Sounded like a good job for AI.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>So I gave ChatGPT and Claude the same prompt:</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:quote -->\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote\"><!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Use your web search tools to give me a day-by-day forecast for the two-week Burgundy itinerary in this public TripIt link.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph --></blockquote>\n<!-- /wp:quote -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Claude immediately pulled up short -- “TripIt blocks automated access to their pages” -- while ChatGPT ploughed ahead. Huh. Well, no matter — I printed the itinerary as a PDF, uploaded it to Claude, and off it went. About four minutes later, both models came back with daily forecasts for every stop, plus a very useful summary. Something that probably would\'ve taken me thirty minutes to assemble was done in four.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4951,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Screenshot-2026-07-02-at-4.24.23-PM.png\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Screenshot-2026-07-02-at-4.24.23-PM-300x242.png\" alt=\"Screenshot of an AI-generated &quot;Burgundy Bike Ride · Updated Forecast&quot; for Lyon and Dijon; days that shifted more than 3°F from the prior forecast are highlighted, with gains up to +9°F and TGV/train transfer notes\" class=\"wp-image-4951\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Claude\'s day-before refresh, the big swings flagged automatically</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>But the best part came the day before we left. While packing, I went back to both chats and asked them to refresh their forecasts <em>and</em> flag every change of more than three degrees Fahrenheit — the kind of swing that would make me rethink, say, the ratio of short-sleeve to long-sleeve shirts I pack. Three minutes later, I had updated forecasts, and in Claude\'s case, the big-change days color-highlighted. That\'s something I would’ve never found time to do myself the day before leaving.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Treat It Like a Friend</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>So I will lean harder in AI travel planning. The models keep getting smarter and they’re getting wired into more real-time data and more travel services. But my Burgundy travel planning reminded me that they’re not psychic — at least, not yet. The more thought and detail you put into the prompt, the better the response.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":4949,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"media\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/IMG_0664-scaled.jpg\"><img src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/IMG_0664-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"A silver e-bike parked on gravel in front of a large painted wall sign for the Chassagne-Montrachet Caveau Municipal, advertising the region\'s white and red wines, under a clear blue Burgundy sky\" class=\"wp-image-4949\"/></a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Gotta turn around; AI didn\'t tell me I\'d passed some of the world\'s best white wines!</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I’m working on my prompting skills again for a road trip my son Andrew and I are planning through the Canadian Maritimes. Like my <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2026/02/25/gulf-coast-mardi-gras-road-trip-stop-1-mobile/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Gulf Coast</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2026/03/10/gulf-coast-mardi-gras-road-trip-stop-2-new-orleans/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Mardi</a> <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2026/04/14/gulf-coast-mardi-gras-road-trip-stop-3-lafayette-acadiana/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Gras</a> road trip, this trip has been knocking around the back of my mind for a while. But, like with Burgundy, I don’t have much of a plan beyond “drink local beer and eat local seafood”. Andrew has already uploaded his Untappd history to Claude and had it draft an initial itinerary. Now he’s unleashed a few AI agents to hunt down more ideas.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>But even with agents scouring the Internet, AI isn’t all-seeing and all-knowing — not yet — so I can\'t just take its itinerary and run. I\'ll treat its recommendations the way I would a good friend\'s or a sharp travel agent\'s: give them strong consideration, check they\'re still correct, and then make up my own mind.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Because after all, it\'s my trip.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:separator -->\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity\"/>\n<!-- /wp:separator -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>What about your trips? Any stories or tips for using AI to help with your travel planning?  Let me know — in the comments below, by email at <a href=\"mailto:comments@travelcommons.com\">comments@travelcommons.com</a>, or ping me at @mpeacock on X/Twitter or @travelcommons on Instagram.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','AI Travel Planning: The Good, The Meh, and the Almost-Magic','Can AI really plan a better trip? After testing ChatGPT, Claude, and other AI models on a Burgundy vacation, I found they\'re surprisingly good at building itineraries and weather forecasts—but they\'re no substitute for local research, good judgment, or the instincts of an experienced traveler.','inherit','closed','closed','','4942-revision-v1','','','2026-07-02 21:24:51','2026-07-03 02:24:51','',4942,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4962',0,'revision','',0);
INSERT INTO `wp_posts` VALUES
(4970,1,'2026-08-06 08:14:51','2026-08-06 13:14:51','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/IMG_4803.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/IMG_4803-300x300.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" alt=\"Taproom Draft Beer Taps Arranged as a Smiley Face\"></a>I\'m Happy To See You Too![/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>The last episode recording in Chicago before we relocate the TravelCommons studios, and our lives, down to Nashville. We close out our threads on in-flight mask mandates and hotel housekeeping, and critique an academic paper about the moral hazard of frequent flier elite status. I talk through the changes I\'ll have to make when flying out of a non-hub airport. And then, as I\'m making a list of the Chicago breweries I want to re-visit before leaving, I think through the characteristics that makes a taproom great. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_187.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #187: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you, for the last time, from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois because we’re packing everything up and moving the 500 miles down I-65 to Nashville at the end of June. After 25 years here, we decided we needed a change of scenery. So with all the packing and everything, I don’t see a June episode in the offing.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Way back when I was doing heavy international travel -- Chicago on Monday, Toronto on Tuesday, New York to London on Wednesday, Zurich on Thursday, getting back to Chicago at Friday midnight -- what then seemed like necessary travel, but now, looking back on it, seems like stupid travel -- people would ask me my favorite city. I thought about it a lot, but would always end up with the same answer -- Chicago. And not just because it was my home; I was offering up that answer when we lived in Philadelphia. No, my explanation to the raised eyebrows that answer often generated was that Chicago was the right size -- big enough to support a wide range of interesting stuff (sports, culture, restaurants, microbreweries), but not so big that you couldn’t get your arms around it, and with enough Midwest pragmatism, from people moving in from Indiana and Iowa and Minnesota and Wisconsin, to keep everything grounded, to keep it from getting too wacky. And to their “But what about the weather?” question I’d say “yes, it can be -10° in Chicago in January, but it can be +110° in Phoenix in August; most every place has 3 months of lousy weather (save for maybe San Diego) sometime during the year; different people choose the 3 months they can endure.”&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But over the past few years, I realized my answer about Chicago didn’t hold up any more -- not about the weather, the winters still suck; it’s that the pragmatism seems to be gone, with violent crime -- robberies, shootings, carjackings -- and definitely not-pragmatic local government decisions filling the void. It has started to feel like a replay of the 1970’s, which were not a great time in Chicago.&nbsp; Now, I don’t think it’s permanent. It’s a pendulum. Just like the city came back from a bad stretch in the ‘70’s to be a great place in the mid/late ‘80’s. It’ll happen again; I just don’t want to hang around for the low point. And according to the half-dozen movers we talked to, we’re not the only ones.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Dive Deep (Loveshadow remix)</em> by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/50488 Ft: Loveshadow</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>A quick public service announcement -- the COVID Real ID extension expires in less than a year. <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/news/press/releases/2021/04/27/dhs-announces-extension-real-id-full-enforcement-deadline\">According to the TSA</a>, “Beginning May 3, 2023, every air traveler 18 years of age and older will need a REAL ID-compliant driver’s license or identification card… at airport security checkpoints for domestic air travel.”&nbsp; Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/01/16/podcast-183-covid-test-anxiety-michelin-food-adventures/\">episode #183</a> in January, I talked about getting a Real ID version of my Illinois driver’s license when I had to renew it. No additional cost and maybe 3 additional minutes of time. But if you can’t pick up a Real ID driver’s license before next May, you’ll have to remember to take along <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/travel/security-screening/identification\">your passport or your Global Entry card</a>.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>In the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/04/21/podcast-186-mask-mandate-scramble-small-airport-survival/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #186 — Mask Mandate Scramble; Small Airport Survival\">last episode</a>, we walked through the abrupt end of the US CDC’s transportation mask mandate -- on planes, buses, trains,....&nbsp; That news cycle lasted right at about a week, the last entry being the CDC asking the Dept of Justice to appeal the federal judge’s ruling that struck down the mandate that they had extended for 2 weeks to May 3rd. On May 3rd, the CDC posted a <a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2022/s0503-covid-19-travel.html\">press release reiterating their <em>recommendation</em></a> that everyone aged 2 and older wear masks on planes and trains, and in airports and stations -- but nothing about the status of that appeal. I’m guessing that they decided to accept the facts on the ground and quietly forget about any appeal -- which is probably the only real option they have.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And then this week, adding to those facts on the ground, the European CDC has dropped their transportation mask mandate recommendations. The difference, though, is the European CDC’s recommendations are just that, recommendations. The enforceable <em>rules</em> are made by each country, and Spain and Italy, many of the countries hardest hit by the initial wave of COVID, have extended their mask mandates to mid-June.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, I wasn’t going to say anything more about hotel housekeeping because <em>even I’m</em> bored with it, but then I ran across an <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/hotel-housekeepers-want-you-to-request-daily-room-cleaning-11652650925\">article</a> in the Wall Street Journal about how hotel housekeeping unions are pushing for a return to daily room service. Certainly a big part of the push is to drive more work, more hours for the union members. But also because rooms are dirtier and take longer to clean when they have gone a few days without service, especially with the current guest mix that’s still heavier with leisure travelers, who tend to have more people in the room than the road-warrior business traveler. As you’d guess, hotel owners disagree, but for changing reasons. Their arc of rationale has gone from the pre-pandemic “be green, save water, and we’ll give you an extra 500 points to skip housekeeping” to pandemic “we’re keeping everyone safe by staying out of your room” to the current “it’s your choice, and ‘labor shortage’”.&nbsp; OK, that’s it. I’m <em>really </em>not going to talk about room cleaning anymore.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But I <em>will</em> talk about TSA checkpoint passenger volumes again. <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/09/27/podcast-179-high-tech-airport-lines-business-travel-still-missing/\">Back in September 2021</a>, the last time I scraped the numbers off the TSA <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/coronavirus/passenger-throughput\">website</a>, average daily passenger volumes were bouncing around 1.7 million, down 20% from the July summer peak of over 2 million and down 24% from pre-pandemic September 2019 numbers. Six months later, looking at the last month-and-a-half -- April to mid-May -- the average daily volume is 2.1 million and growing, and now just 10-12% off the April/May 2019 numbers. So if those TSA checkpoints and airplanes are feeling a bit more crowded, it’s because they are. Tough to remember back to my first post-lockdown flight in June 2020, when daily passenger volumes were 5-600,000 and the Southwest boarding agent said “There’s 40 of you on a plane with 175 seats. So everyone gets their own row.” I, in no way, want to go back to those times, but having a bit more plane space <em>was</em> nice.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I get <em>a lot</em> of emails from public relations firms. I read the subject lines of all of them because every once in a rare while, there’s something that catches my eye, like the pitch that led to last episode’s interview about Daytona Beach airport trying to survive in the shadow of the behemoth that is Orlando Int’l. So when I read the subject line “Study Finds that Frequent-Flyer Programs Increase Cost of Business Travel” in my inbox a few weeks back, I just had to click through. The study, <a href=\"https://www.informs.org/About-INFORMS/News-Room/Press-Releases/Study-Finds-that-Frequent-Flyer-Programs-Increase-Cost-of-Business-Travel\">just published</a> in the journal <em>Marketing Science</em> which I admit I don’t read as often as I should because I get tied up pouring through the CDC’s <em>Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report</em>, is titled <em>Reaching for Gold: Frequent-Flyer Status Incentives and Moral Hazard</em>, written by professors from University of Michigan and Duke business schools. According to the press release, after “(analyzing) the transactional database of a leading U.S.-based airline’s frequent-flyer program (that) included the histories and point accumulations of 3.5 million frequent-flyer program members during the 2010 and 2011 point-earning cycles” their main insights were -- “‘Points Members’ are More Likely to Choose Higher Fares When Not Paying for It” and “the closer frequent-flyer program members get to ‘elite status’ the more likely they are to choose an airline even when it may be more expensive than a competitor’s flight”. Hmm, that feels a bit “Dawn breaking over Marblehead”. How can you be researching frequent flier programs and act like you’ve never heard of (let alone done) a mileage run. Maybe the press release overly summarized the research and just isn’t communicating its subtlety. So I hit Google to find the <a href=\"https://yesimorhun.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/18/2018/11/Orhun_Guo_2018.pdf\">actual paper</a>. 29 pages of text and equations, and 15 pages of bibliography and data tables later -- nope, the press release was pretty much it. If the moral hazard of business travelers using their employer’s money to pay for more expensive flights to make status is eliminated, the paper estimates that companies would save at least 7% of their travel costs. Looking at 2019 data, the <a href=\"https://www.statista.com/statistics/562804/us-air-traffic-domestic-average-ticket-price/\">average cost of a walk-up US domestic ticket</a> -- one booked less than a week in advance, so the typical road warrior ticket -- is about $500. 7% is $35. I dunno, maybe some full-contact procurement guy will get excited about that $35 savings, but I don\'t know any executive in his or her right mind is thinking to themselves “Oh yes, pissing off the people who are jamming themselves in to coach seats and spending nights away from their family for $35 a trip” is a great idea.&nbsp; Except at GM. I remember when frequent flier programs first came out, GM didn’t let their travelers keep the points from business trips, which led to all sorts of weird booking behavior. Until that policy died a quiet death a few years later. Kinda like this research -- I’m sure these professors are nice, smart people; but they gotta get out of their offices a bit more.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music - <em>Drops of H2O ( The Filtered Water Treatment )</em> by J.Lang (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djlang59/37792 Ft: Airtone</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Moving to a Non-Hub Airport</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>One thing that kinda snuck up on me about our move to Nashville -- it’ll be the first time in almost 40 years that I haven’t lived in an airport hub city: Chicago with American and United at ORD; San Francisco with their United hub; Dallas when I signed up for American’s Advantage program my first day of work; Philadelphia with US Air, though I avoided them as much as I could; Detroit with Northwest; and then back to Chicago, now a 3-hub town after Southwest took over MDW after the big expansion.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Nashville <em>was</em> a hub in the late ‘80’s/early ‘90’s -- well, a mini-hub, actually -- when American was playing around with their network. They built mini-hubs in Nashville, Raleigh/Durham, and San Jose. The experiment lasted maybe 10 years but never really made any money. I think the only thing of American left in those airports are Admirals Clubs; in Nashville, they’re down to 9% of the passenger volume.&nbsp; Today, Nashville’s direct flight distribution looks like any non-hub airport -- the top 4 destinations are Big 3 hubs -- ATL, DEN, DFW, ORD -- with the fifth being MCO, thanks to all that Mouseketeer traffic.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The #1 travel tip on my and any other experienced traveler’s list is “fly non-stop” -- much easier from a hub airport, of course, and then your frequent flier strategy just falls out from there. If you live in Atlanta, you’re doubling down on Delta’s SkyMiles; realistically, there’s not another option. Non-hub? It could be just as straight-forward -- if your flight patterns take you primarily to one of those hub cities -- Chicago, Atlanta, San Francisco -- then your choice too is made for you. But if you’re in sales or consulting -- or maybe slouching toward retirement -- and your flight patterns are a bit more scattershot, then you have to think -- what’s my objective? -- flying non-stop for the shortest flight times and lowest probability of disruption; making elite status because the perks make my travel easier; or is it building up points to help fund my vacations?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Thinking about my consulting colleagues who flew out of non-hub airports every week, they were all about status. One guy I worked with lived in Ft Myers, Florida and was all in on Delta. Even when flying every week to projects in, say, Dallas or Chicago, he’d always skip the direct American flights and connect through Atlanta, killing the time from all those missed connections with drinks in Delta’s Sky Club -- which was free with his Diamond Medallion status.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>My calculus is a little easier. One of the side benefits of flying <em>a lot</em> for over 35 years is that I stacked up enough mileage for lifetime mid-tier elite status on American and United. Not enough status to get into their clubs for free, but along with the usual early boarding and free bags, it’s gotten me free club entry to OneWorld and Star Alliance partners’ lounges -- which is very valuable when trying to navigate the rabbit warrens that are FRA and LHR after north Atlantic turbulence has screwed up your in-flight sleep plans.&nbsp; If I didn’t already have these metal levels or I was in striking distance of a new level -- say close to the 2 million I’d need to jump from United Premier Gold to lifetime Platinum -- then I’d probably suck it up like my colleagues do, and get, say, the top tier United credit card with free club access for a place to sit out ORD, DEN, and IAH weather delays.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Those lifetime statuses let me step off the elite hamster wheel, so I’m now looking at non-stop flights and earning miles. Out of Nashville, Southwest has the most non-stop flights, so I’ll probably be flying them a fair bit. But while Southwest’s Companion Pass perk -- their “buy a ticket, get one free” top tier status is phenomenal, I can’t BOGO Southwest to Europe, so I need to be banking miles on one of the Big 3 so I can book on their OneWorld, Star Alliance, or SkyTeam partners -- which is where travel credit cards come back into the picture. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/09/19/podcast-167-6-months-on-why-keep-travel-cards/\">episode #167</a> in September 2020, we talked about people replacing their mileage cards with cash-back cards since no one was flying. But that trend is reverting to the mean and credit card companies have big slugs of mileage to dole out after buying them cheap in 2020 when the airlines needed real cash real fast. So my non-hub strategy -- fly direct when I can, leverage those hard-earned lifetime statuses when I can, and charge everything I can on a mileage-earning card -- including any drinks I may need to see me through those missed connections.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music —  &nbsp;<em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/trifonic/445\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bored on Your Backside</a></em> by Trifonic (c) copyright 2005 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Sampling Plus 1.0 license. http://ccmixter.org/files/trifonic/445</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>What Makes a Great Taproom?</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>With a month left in Chicago, Irene and I have built a list of “Places to Hit Before Move” that’s some mix of greatest hits and places we’ve always wanted to go but have, for some reason or another, never gotten ‘round to. And then I have a separate list of Chicago taprooms I want to hit one more time -- Goose Island, Revolution Brewing, Off Color, Solemn Oath, Marz, Dovetail, and Metropolitan Brewing. Which then got me thinking -- why these and not other; what makes a good taproom for me?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>First thing to do is to open up Untappd, the beer social networking app that\'s been my beer diary for over 11 years now.&nbsp; I’ve checked beer in at over 1,900 locations and the #1 location category is -- a brewery taproom. I scrolled through the list on the app and jotted down the ones I thought “Yeah, I’d like to go back there.”&nbsp;&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Probably the smallest group is about unique brewery experiences; where I actually did the brewery tour and it was something more than just row after row of steel tanks. Cantillon in Brussels is everyone’s favorite; they send you off on your own guided with nothing but a paper brochure and tell you not to break anything. And then, after you’ve navigated coolships and barrel rooms, they pour you their amazing lambic beers. Or the original Lagunitas Brewery in Petaluma, CA where the tour guide tossed us just-filled IPA bottles he’d grabbed before they got to the packaging machine.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But except for these few exceptions, my favorite places have a wide beer selection (something more than 5 taps of IPAs) and/or a cool space and/or the chance to chat with the brewer. Labietis’ original place in Riga, Latvia hit the first two square on the head: a <em>diverse</em> beer menu -- a juniper beer inspired by Latvian folk songs, a wheat beer with meadowsweet, a lager with Latvian hops -- that’s located in the back courtyard of what looked like, in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/11/30/podcast-157-notes-from-the-baltics-riga-latvia-and-tallinn-estonia/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #157 — Notes from the Baltics: Riga, Latvia and Tallinn, Estonia\">the fall of 2019</a>, a block of now slightly derelict early 20th Century manor houses. A little closer to home on my Chicago list, Metropolitan Brewing does nothing but German-style lagers which are a perfect fit for their taproom patio that looks out on the north branch of the Chicago River.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Going to a brewery’s taproom is kinda like seeing a band in concert -- I’m going to get a fuller picture of that band than I will just hearing their hit songs on the radio or a Spotify playlist. Hitting a good taproom can be similar -- getting past the high-volume core beers to see what the brewer can really do. When we were in Santa Fe last month, I went out of my way to hit Rowley Farmhouse Ales because I really liked their range during our last visit in 2018. So of course I ordered the Teosinte, a funky, earthy, grassy sour made from Oaxacan green dent corn grown a couple hundred miles east, near the Texas-New Mexico border. It was an incredibly interesting beer. I wouldn’t buy a six-pack of it, but I was more than happy to have a glass of it.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But probably the best time I have at taprooms is when I get to talk to the brewer. During one of my trips last year to Nashville, I found myself an hour south in Columbia, TN, which bills itself “Muletown.” I missed the 2021 “Mule Day” festival; it was canceled due to COVID. Instead, I wound my way through a light industrial neighborhood hard against some freight train tracks billed as Columbia’s Art District to find <a href=\"http://www.badideabrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bad Idea Brewing</a>. There were two other folks sitting at the bar; the brewer was behind it, serving. And we just got talking -- about the beer, about his brewery, about Columbia, about brewing in Columbia, about what kind of beer sells in Columbia. And through all that, taster glasses kept landing in front of me -- “try this,” “what do you think of that?” he’d ask. What was going to be a quick side trip for a beer turned into a nice afternoon of conversation… and beer.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I guess there’s one more thing that can make for a great taproom, or maybe more of a great taproom experience and that is -- it took me to a part of a city that I wouldn’t have otherwise gone. I talked a bit about this in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/04/10/podcast-174-how-the-pros-plan-their-taproom-tourism/\">episode #174</a> when I talked with Rob Cheshire of the UK podcast <a href=\"https://thisweekincraft.beer/podcast/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">This Week in Craft Beer</a> about planning taproom visits. Navigating the maze of a Beijing hutong to find Great Leap Brewing, or exiting a Paris Metro stop in a North African neighborhood on my way to <a href=\"http://deck-donohue.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Deck &amp; Donohue</a>, or riding an e-scooter through a questionable neighborhood in northeast DC to <a href=\"https://www.rightproperbrewing.com/brookland\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Right Proper Brewing</a>. These three were fine places with solid beers, but they’re more memorable for the trip to find them than for the places themselves.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But you can’t always tell this from Google search. So if you go to the show notes on travelcommons.com you’ll find my list of&nbsp; “Yeah, I’d like to go back there” taprooms.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>My<em> Yeah, I’d like to go back there</em>  Taproom List</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Chicago<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.gooseisland.com/fulton-brewery/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Goose Island Taproom</a>, 1800 W Fulton St — Yes, it\'s now owned by AB InBev, but it was the original Chicago microbrewery in the late \'80\'s and they created the whole barrel-aged stout category with Bourbon County Stout</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"http://www.revbrew.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Revolution Brewing Brewery &amp; Taproom</a>, 3340 N Kedzie Ave— Great beers; wide range of styles; bring your own food</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"http://maplewoodbrew.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Maplewood Brewery &amp; Distillery</a>, 2717 N Maplewood Ave (South of Diversey) — Small, neighborhood bar tucked up against the Kennedy Expressway</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"http://dovetailbrewery.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Dovetail Brewery</a>, 1800 W Belle Plaine Ave — German lagers and spontaneously fermented beers; the best taproom on the Ravenswood neighborhood\'s <a href=\"https://ravenswoodchicago.org/neighborhood/malt-row/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">\"Malt Row\"</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"http://www.offcolorbrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Off Color Brewing</a>, 1460 N Kingsbury St — Great range of beer styles, all of which are well-done</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.solemnoathbrewery.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Solemn Oath Brewery</a>, 1661 Quincy Ave #179, Naperville, IL — In a <em>faaar</em> west neighborhood of Chicago, one of the OG suburban breweries. Great beers and a great outdoor space, especially in the winter.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"http://marzbrewing.com/\">Marz Community Brewing</a>, 3630 S Iron St</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Elsewhere in the US<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://oxbowbeer.com/location/portland/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Oxbow Blending &amp; Bottling</a>, 49 Washington Ave, Portland, ME — Great selection of farmhouse ales with an outpost of&nbsp;<a href=\"http://www.duckfatfriteshack.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Duckfat</a>&nbsp;serving up fries on the patio</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li> <a href=\"http://www.allagash.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Allagash Brewing Company</a>, 50 Industrial Way, Portland, ME — One of the OG Maine breweries; huge range of beers beyond Allagash White; nice outdoor space; two more taprooms across the street makes it a nice afternoon destination</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://otherhalfbrewing.com/location/domino-park/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Other Half Brewing Domino Park</a>, 34 River St, Brooklyn, NY — Great hazy IPAs; great views of Manhattan across the East River</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.rightproperbrewing.com/brookland\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Right Proper Brewing Brookland Production House + Tasting Room</a>, 920 Girard St NE, Washington, DC — A nice little taproom in a DC neighborhood that is <em>way</em> off the typical tourist track</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://beardedirisbrewing.com/location/germantown/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bearded Iris Brewing</a>, 101 Van Buren St, Nashville, TN — Original Germantown taproom with great hazy IPAs, pool tables and a nice patio</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"http://www.faitlaforcebrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Fait la Force Brewing</a>, 1414 3rd Ave S, Nashville, TN — An unassuming place tucked away in the Chestnut Hill neighborhood; comfortable space; great range of beer styles; had a great conversation with the brewer behind the bar</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"http://www.badideabrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bad Idea Brewing Company</a>, 307 W 11th St, Columbia, TN — Comfortable taproom with well-executed beers in Columbia\'s Art District; another place I had a nice conversation with the brewer</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"http://www.lagunitas.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Lagunitas Brewing Company</a>, 1280 N McDowell Blvd, Petaluma, CA — Yes, they\'ve been bought out by Heineken, but the original brewery still has a bit of that old Cali anarchic feel</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.pueblovidabrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pueblo Vida Brewing Company</a>, 115 E Broadway Blvd, Tucson, AZ — A little joint in downtown Tucson that executes great beers with a focus on local ingredients</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"http://www.eppigbrewing.com/waterfront-biergarten\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Eppig Brewing Waterfront Biergarten</a>, 2817 Dickens St, San Diego, CA — It\'s all about drinking good beers outside in the sunshine along the marina</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Outside the US<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.thebarrelproject.co.uk/beer-menu/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">London Beer Factory - Barrel Project</a>, 80 Druid St, London SE1 2HQ — Great beers; very cool space in railway arch along London\'s <a href=\"https://www.londonxlondon.com/bermondsey-beer-mile/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bermondsey Beer Mile</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"http://www.cantillon.be/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Brasserie Cantillon</a>, Rue Gheude 56, 1070 Anderlecht, Belgium — Ground zero for spontaneously fermented lambic and gueuze beers; just follow the train of beer geeks to the door</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://mikkeller.com/locations/mikkeller-baghaven\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Mikkeller Baghaven</a>, Refshalevej 169B, 1432 København — Lots of spontaneously fermented sour beer on a converted industrial island</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"http://www.fmaravillas.com/\">Fábrica Maravillas</a>, C. de Valverde, 29, 28004 Madrid — Nice taproom tucked into Madrid\'s Malasaña neighborhood serving good pale ales and IPAs </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://deck-donohue.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Deck &amp; Donohue</a>, 1 Av. des Marronniers, 94380 Bonneuil-sur-Marne, France — Took me outside the usual Paris tourist circuit to a North African shopping street</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://labietis.lv/en/krogs/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Labietis Brewpub</a>, 2, Aristida Briāna iela 9a, Rīga, LV-1001, Latvia — Out-of-the-way taproom; interesting selection of beer styles, not just the usual IPAs, but herb beers, fruit beers, and meads; helpful bartenders do a good job of describing what\'s on tap</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #187</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As I said at the top of the show, there’s probably not going to be a June show, between packing up the Chicago studio and then unpacking it in Nashville. Good news, though -- the sound quality in Nashville might get a step-function improvement. Just about every apt building Irene and I looked at had a music studio as one of the amenities. The sound proofing, the sound deadening, and maybe a better microphone should make things sound a bit better. Quite a ways from those first episodes, recording with the iRiver MP3 player’s built-in mic while standing in a shower stall. Oh my!</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. You’ll have to go to the TravelCommons’ website if you want to torture your ears listening to those first bathroom-studio episodes; what one listener labelled a “pottycast”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_187.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #187 — Moving to a Non-Hub Airport; What Makes A Great Taproom?','','inherit','closed','closed','','4145-revision-v1','','','2026-08-06 08:14:51','2026-08-06 13:14:51','',4145,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4970',0,'revision','',0),
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(4972,1,'2026-08-25 10:14:21','2026-08-25 15:14:21','{\"styles\":[],\"settings\":[],\"isGlobalStylesUserThemeJSON\":true,\"version\":3}','Custom Styles','','inherit','closed','closed','','4705-revision-v1','','','2026-08-25 10:14:21','2026-08-25 15:14:21','',4705,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4972',0,'revision','',0),
(4975,0,'2026-08-25 15:07:31','2026-08-25 20:07:31','v2: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','cornerstone_d41d8cd9','','publish','closed','closed','','cornerstone_d41d8cd9','','','2026-08-25 16:26:20','2026-08-25 21:26:20','',0,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?jb_store_lcp=cornerstone_d41d8cd9',0,'jb_store_lcp','',0),
(4982,1,'2026-08-25 17:45:05','2026-08-25 22:45:05','<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>In the <a href=\"https://staging.travelcommons.com/2024/05/23/podcast-200-wrapping-up-the-travelcommons-journey/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">last podcast episode</a>, I mentioned that I’ve found myself giving out a lot of travel recommendations recently. So rather than limiting them to a 2-barstool radius in my <a title=\"\" href=\"https://www.instagram.com/barriquebrewing/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">favorite</a> <a title=\"\" href=\"https://www.southerngristbrewing.com/nations\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Nashville</a> <a title=\"\" href=\"https://www.faitlaforcebrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">taprooms</a>, here are (in no particular order) the things I\'ve been recommending lately...</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Restaurants, Bars, and Taprooms</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong><em>Nashville</em></strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":20,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"none\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><img src=\"https://staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/IMG_7057-EDIT-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"A glass of hazy IPA in a rustic, red-painted wooden cupholder in a record store. The holder is mounted to a black bin of vinyl records with album art visible.\" class=\"wp-image-20\"/><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Album shopping in Vinyl Tap</figcaption></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://www.vinyltapnashville.com/\" title=\"\">Vinyl Tap</a></strong> Talk to any Nashvillian who\'s lived here for more than five years and it won\'t take long \'til they start complaining about all the changes -- especially traffic and, if they live in East Nashville, gentrification. East Nashville is traveling the same path as Brooklyn, Chicago\'s Wicker Park, and Madrid\'s Malasaña neighborhoods. Escalating rents have forced many of the musicians who \"urban pioneered\" East Nashville to retreat north to Madison and Goodlettsville. But they\'ll reconvene at Vinyl Tap to support a friend\'s set. The guy next to you watching this band will more than likely be plugging in as the lead guitarist for the next. Vinyl Tap is a weird combination of craft beer bar, vinyl record store, and music venue; but they make all three work.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/barriquebrewing/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\"><strong>Barrique Brewing</strong></a> This is my favorite taproom in Nashville, though its focus on lagers and barrel-aged sours might not be for everyone. There\'s typically one IPA on tap, 3-4 different lagers (light, dark, smoked), a couple of British styles on beer engines, and a cooler full of sour bottles. It\'s in an industrial pocket on the redevelopment path between the Tennessee Titans\' new stadium and Oracle\'s new corporate headquarters. Don\'t sleep on this place \'cause it\'ll be plowed under in 3-4 years.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a title=\"\" href=\"https://www.tailornashville.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><strong>Tailor</strong></a> Owner Vivek Surti calls his food \"First Generation American Cuisine,\" built on his \"experience growing up here in middle Tennessee as a first-generation American of Indian descent\". Much more elegant than how I describe it to friends -- Hillbilly Indian. Tailor is a dinner party restaurant. There are two seatings during which every table is served the same dish at the same time, accompanied by Surti\'s explanations of what\'s in front of you. I\'ve eaten there three times and have yet to be disappointed.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong><em>Louisville</em></strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":21,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"none\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><img src=\"https://staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/IMG_4465-EDIT-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"Barrels of bourbon whiskey at Angel Envy distillery in Louisville, KY\" class=\"wp-image-21\"/></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a title=\"\" href=\"https://www.angelsenvy.com/us/en/bourbon-distillery-tours-louisville/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Angel\'s Envy</a> </strong> You can\'t go to Kentucky without hitting a bourbon distillery, and this one is conveniently located in downtown Louisville. The tour takes you from mash deck to distilling columns to bottling line. But for me, the best part is the tasting that finishes the tour. Rather than just pouring out a couple of shots at a hightop, they seat the tour group in a barrel-lined tasting room, teach you how to properly taste whiskey, and then walk the group through a discussion about what everyone tastes and smells. Very educational... and great whiskey too!</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a title=\"\" href=\"https://610magnolia.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><strong>610 Magnolia</strong></a> Located in a little house in the Old Louisville neighborhood, 610 Magnolia is a great example of what I call \"comfortable fine dining\" -- a warm, cozy dining room; friendly (but not overly familiar) wait staff; a wine list with a nice range of price points; and, of course, imaginative and well-executed food.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong><em>Chattanooga</em></strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.callioperestaurant.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\"><strong>Calliope</strong></a> Helmed by a Jordanian chef in a not-so-great neighborhood, it\'s Middle Eastern food using local, Southern ingredients. And any place that puts lamb neck on their menu will get me in the door. It was excellent, and when they put the whole, head-on red snapper on our table so I could dig out the fish cheeks and collar meat, I was sold. They also have a fun wine list with bottles from Lebanon, Georgia (the country, not the state), Armenia, and Cyprus, as well as usual suspects (France, California).</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.elsiesdaughters.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\"><strong>Elsie\'s Daughter</strong></a> And any menu that lists a bone marrow tartine will also my attention. Cozy bar; interesting drinks; tight menu. Good place for a night cap and a late-night bite.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a title=\"\" href=\"https://niedlovs.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><strong>Niedlov\'s Cafe &amp; Bakery</strong></a> Popular place for breakfast with a nice selection of pastries and breakfast sandwiches. Pick up a loaf of their daily special bread on your way out.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"level\":3} -->\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong><em>Memphis</em></strong></h3>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a title=\"\" href=\"https://www.gusfriedchicken.com/locations/downtown-memphis\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><strong>Gus\'s Fried Chicken</strong></a> While asking a group of Memphians their favorite barbecue joint is still the best way to start an argument, there\'s no disagreement about the best fried chicken. This is the place for lunch after a walk through <a title=\"\" href=\"https://www.tomleepark.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Tom Lee Park</a> along the bank of the Mississippi River.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a title=\"\" href=\"https://wiseacrebrew.com/brewery\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><strong>Wiseacre Brewing - Downtown</strong></a> I haven\'t been too excited by the Wiseacre beers that make it up to Nashville, so this taproom wasn\'t high on my list. But it was a couple of blocks over from the <a title=\"\" href=\"https://www.civilrightsmuseum.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">National Civil Rights Museum</a>, so we walked over. And were glad we did. There\'s a broad range of well-executed beers, nice bright space, friendly bar staff, and a good pizza kitchen.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Oaxaca (Oaxaca de Juárez)</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":17,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"none\",\"align\":\"right\",\"className\":\"is-style-default\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium is-style-default\"><img src=\"https://staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/B017DED6-2FDB-4305-986C-5FF4AEFA0D9D-scaled-1-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-17\"/></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>As I talked about in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2024/04/11/podcast-199-smile-for-security-facial-recognition-in-travel/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">episode #199</a>, I\'ve always been a bit \"ehh\" about Mexico. I’ve done “resort-y” Mexico — Cabo, Cancún, Puerto Vallarta — and am not a big fan. It just feels like LA or Houston with a better selection of tequila. But <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oaxaca_City\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Oaxaca</a> is different. We were there for a week at the start of March. For me, it\'s a good fit — interesting food, lots of culture, a mezcal scene to dig into, and no beach. And it\'s not overrun with tourists.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Areas</strong> - We stayed in the Jalatlaco neighborhood and then moved further west into the main part of town, north of the Zócalo. Both neighborhoods were cool. We could walk to a number of bars and restaurants, and never felt unsafe.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Restaurants</strong> - Best high-end restaurant - <a title=\"\" href=\"https://www.casaoaxacaelrestaurante.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Casa Oaxaca</a>; best street food - <a title=\"\" href=\"https://maps.app.goo.gl/rxXVHGpDF1k86GQ48\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Pasillo de Humo</a>. This city is about food. There are a lot of great restaurants.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong>Mezcal</strong> - The state of Oaxaca (of which Oaxaca City is the capital) makes <a title=\"\" href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mezcal#Production\">80-90% of the mezcal in Mexico</a>, so you should tuck into it. A typical bar\'s mezcal menu can be overwhelming, so invest in a bit of education. The bartender at <a title=\"\" href=\"https://mezcalspeakeasy.com/\">Sobrio by Mezcal Speakeasy</a> patiently walked us through a vertical tasting; same type of agave, three different distillation techniques. <a title=\"\" href=\"https://mezcaloteca.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">La Mezcaloteca</a> was a reservation-only hour-long educational tasting. And unlike in the US, none of the Oaxaca mezcals I drank were smoky.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Book</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:image {\"id\":19,\"sizeSlug\":\"medium\",\"linkDestination\":\"none\",\"align\":\"right\"} -->\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-medium\"><img src=\"https://staging.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/71fvjFWkLqL._SL1200_-200x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-19\"/></figure>\n<!-- /wp:image -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p><a href=\"https://amzn.to/3X1xyC9\" title=\"\"><em>The Picnic: A Rush for Freedom and the Collapse of Communism</em></a> by Matthew Longo is one of the best books I\'ve read this year so far.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>My first and last trips to Hungary bookend Longo\'s story. My first visit was in the spring of 1989. It was before the main events of <em>The Picnic</em>, but I could feel the tension of change building. My last visit was the autumn of 2019, around the time of the 30th anniversary activities of Pan European Picnic and the fall of the Communist regime. By then, the public\'s mood had pivoted -- from excitement and fear of political change to disappointment and cynicism as to what that change had actually delivered. With this background, I looked forward to reading <em>The Picnic</em>.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>And it didn\'t disappoint. The book is, at its core, a range of oral histories -- from the then-Hungarian Prime Minister trying to reform the country without sparking a re-run of the 1956 Soviet invasion, to the Hungarian dissidents who organized the picnic, to a number of East German families who breached the Austrian-Hungarian border during and immediately after the picnic. These stories make the book a compelling read. It moves quickly; pulling the reader into the building risk and the subsequent let-down felt by all the participants.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>I give Longo a lot of credit for not getting in the way of these folks telling their stories; letting their own words stand without surrounding them with his own commentary. As a professor of politics at Leiden University, Longo has a definite point of view -- and he does the right thing by keeping it to the Prologue and the Epilogue; less than 20 pages.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Highly recommended if you\'re interested in modern European history.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->','Things I\'m Recommending Right Now (Summer 2024)','Here are the travel and food recommendations I\'ve been giving for quick trips to Nashville, Louisville, and Memphis... and a longer one to Oaxaca. ','inherit','closed','closed','','4760-revision-v1','','','2026-08-25 17:45:05','2026-08-25 22:45:05','',4760,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4982',0,'revision','',0),
(4991,1,'2026-08-27 15:19:33','2026-08-27 20:19:33','<p>[caption id=\"attachment_4000\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/IMG_4803.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-4000 size-medium\" src=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/IMG_4803-300x300.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" alt=\"Taproom Draft Beer Taps Arranged as a Smiley Face\"></a>I\'m Happy To See You Too![/caption]</p>\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>The last episode recording in Chicago before we relocate the TravelCommons studios, and our lives, down to Nashville. We close out our threads on in-flight mask mandates and hotel housekeeping, and critique an academic paper about the moral hazard of frequent flier elite status. I talk through the changes I\'ll have to make when flying out of a non-hub airport. And then, as I\'m making a list of the Chicago breweries I want to re-visit before leaving, I think through the characteristics that makes a taproom great. All this and more - <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_187.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>click here to download</strong></a> the podcast file, go up to the <em>Subscribe</em> section in the top menu bar to subscribe on your favorite site, or listen right here by clicking on the arrow on the player.</p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p> Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #187: </p>\n<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Since The Last Episode</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"https://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"https://archive.org/details/qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Coming to you, for the last time, from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois because we’re packing everything up and moving the 500 miles down I-65 to Nashville at the end of June. After 25 years here, we decided we needed a change of scenery. So with all the packing and everything, I don’t see a June episode in the offing.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Way back when I was doing heavy international travel -- Chicago on Monday, Toronto on Tuesday, New York to London on Wednesday, Zurich on Thursday, getting back to Chicago at Friday midnight -- what then seemed like necessary travel, but now, looking back on it, seems like stupid travel -- people would ask me my favorite city. I thought about it a lot, but would always end up with the same answer -- Chicago. And not just because it was my home; I was offering up that answer when we lived in Philadelphia. No, my explanation to the raised eyebrows that answer often generated was that Chicago was the right size -- big enough to support a wide range of interesting stuff (sports, culture, restaurants, microbreweries), but not so big that you couldn’t get your arms around it, and with enough Midwest pragmatism, from people moving in from Indiana and Iowa and Minnesota and Wisconsin, to keep everything grounded, to keep it from getting too wacky. And to their “But what about the weather?” question I’d say “yes, it can be -10° in Chicago in January, but it can be +110° in Phoenix in August; most every place has 3 months of lousy weather (save for maybe San Diego) sometime during the year; different people choose the 3 months they can endure.”&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But over the past few years, I realized my answer about Chicago didn’t hold up any more -- not about the weather, the winters still suck; it’s that the pragmatism seems to be gone, with violent crime -- robberies, shootings, carjackings -- and definitely not-pragmatic local government decisions filling the void. It has started to feel like a replay of the 1970’s, which were not a great time in Chicago.&nbsp; Now, I don’t think it’s permanent. It’s a pendulum. Just like the city came back from a bad stretch in the ‘70’s to be a great place in the mid/late ‘80’s. It’ll happen again; I just don’t want to hang around for the low point. And according to the half-dozen movers we talked to, we’re not the only ones.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music -- <em>Dive Deep (Loveshadow remix)</em> by spinningmerkaba (c) copyright 2015 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/50488 Ft: Loveshadow</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Following Up</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>A quick public service announcement -- the COVID Real ID extension expires in less than a year. <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/news/press/releases/2021/04/27/dhs-announces-extension-real-id-full-enforcement-deadline\">According to the TSA</a>, “Beginning May 3, 2023, every air traveler 18 years of age and older will need a REAL ID-compliant driver’s license or identification card… at airport security checkpoints for domestic air travel.”&nbsp; Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/01/16/podcast-183-covid-test-anxiety-michelin-food-adventures/\">episode #183</a> in January, I talked about getting a Real ID version of my Illinois driver’s license when I had to renew it. No additional cost and maybe 3 additional minutes of time. But if you can’t pick up a Real ID driver’s license before next May, you’ll have to remember to take along <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/travel/security-screening/identification\">your passport or your Global Entry card</a>.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>In the <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2022/04/21/podcast-186-mask-mandate-scramble-small-airport-survival/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" title=\"Podcast #186 — Mask Mandate Scramble; Small Airport Survival\">last episode</a>, we walked through the abrupt end of the US CDC’s transportation mask mandate -- on planes, buses, trains,....&nbsp; That news cycle lasted right at about a week, the last entry being the CDC asking the Dept of Justice to appeal the federal judge’s ruling that struck down the mandate that they had extended for 2 weeks to May 3rd. On May 3rd, the CDC posted a <a href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2022/s0503-covid-19-travel.html\">press release reiterating their <em>recommendation</em></a> that everyone aged 2 and older wear masks on planes and trains, and in airports and stations -- but nothing about the status of that appeal. I’m guessing that they decided to accept the facts on the ground and quietly forget about any appeal -- which is probably the only real option they have.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And then this week, adding to those facts on the ground, the European CDC has dropped their transportation mask mandate recommendations. The difference, though, is the European CDC’s recommendations are just that, recommendations. The enforceable <em>rules</em> are made by each country, and Spain and Italy, many of the countries hardest hit by the initial wave of COVID, have extended their mask mandates to mid-June.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, I wasn’t going to say anything more about hotel housekeeping because <em>even I’m</em> bored with it, but then I ran across an <a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/hotel-housekeepers-want-you-to-request-daily-room-cleaning-11652650925\">article</a> in the Wall Street Journal about how hotel housekeeping unions are pushing for a return to daily room service. Certainly a big part of the push is to drive more work, more hours for the union members. But also because rooms are dirtier and take longer to clean when they have gone a few days without service, especially with the current guest mix that’s still heavier with leisure travelers, who tend to have more people in the room than the road-warrior business traveler. As you’d guess, hotel owners disagree, but for changing reasons. Their arc of rationale has gone from the pre-pandemic “be green, save water, and we’ll give you an extra 500 points to skip housekeeping” to pandemic “we’re keeping everyone safe by staying out of your room” to the current “it’s your choice, and ‘labor shortage’”.&nbsp; OK, that’s it. I’m <em>really </em>not going to talk about room cleaning anymore.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But I <em>will</em> talk about TSA checkpoint passenger volumes again. <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/09/27/podcast-179-high-tech-airport-lines-business-travel-still-missing/\">Back in September 2021</a>, the last time I scraped the numbers off the TSA <a href=\"https://www.tsa.gov/coronavirus/passenger-throughput\">website</a>, average daily passenger volumes were bouncing around 1.7 million, down 20% from the July summer peak of over 2 million and down 24% from pre-pandemic September 2019 numbers. Six months later, looking at the last month-and-a-half -- April to mid-May -- the average daily volume is 2.1 million and growing, and now just 10-12% off the April/May 2019 numbers. So if those TSA checkpoints and airplanes are feeling a bit more crowded, it’s because they are. Tough to remember back to my first post-lockdown flight in June 2020, when daily passenger volumes were 5-600,000 and the Southwest boarding agent said “There’s 40 of you on a plane with 175 seats. So everyone gets their own row.” I, in no way, want to go back to those times, but having a bit more plane space <em>was</em> nice.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I get <em>a lot</em> of emails from public relations firms. I read the subject lines of all of them because every once in a rare while, there’s something that catches my eye, like the pitch that led to last episode’s interview about Daytona Beach airport trying to survive in the shadow of the behemoth that is Orlando Int’l. So when I read the subject line “Study Finds that Frequent-Flyer Programs Increase Cost of Business Travel” in my inbox a few weeks back, I just had to click through. The study, <a href=\"https://www.informs.org/About-INFORMS/News-Room/Press-Releases/Study-Finds-that-Frequent-Flyer-Programs-Increase-Cost-of-Business-Travel\">just published</a> in the journal <em>Marketing Science</em> which I admit I don’t read as often as I should because I get tied up pouring through the CDC’s <em>Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report</em>, is titled <em>Reaching for Gold: Frequent-Flyer Status Incentives and Moral Hazard</em>, written by professors from University of Michigan and Duke business schools. According to the press release, after “(analyzing) the transactional database of a leading U.S.-based airline’s frequent-flyer program (that) included the histories and point accumulations of 3.5 million frequent-flyer program members during the 2010 and 2011 point-earning cycles” their main insights were -- “‘Points Members’ are More Likely to Choose Higher Fares When Not Paying for It” and “the closer frequent-flyer program members get to ‘elite status’ the more likely they are to choose an airline even when it may be more expensive than a competitor’s flight”. Hmm, that feels a bit “Dawn breaking over Marblehead”. How can you be researching frequent flier programs and act like you’ve never heard of (let alone done) a mileage run. Maybe the press release overly summarized the research and just isn’t communicating its subtlety. So I hit Google to find the <a href=\"https://yesimorhun.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/18/2018/11/Orhun_Guo_2018.pdf\">actual paper</a>. 29 pages of text and equations, and 15 pages of bibliography and data tables later -- nope, the press release was pretty much it. If the moral hazard of business travelers using their employer’s money to pay for more expensive flights to make status is eliminated, the paper estimates that companies would save at least 7% of their travel costs. Looking at 2019 data, the <a href=\"https://www.statista.com/statistics/562804/us-air-traffic-domestic-average-ticket-price/\">average cost of a walk-up US domestic ticket</a> -- one booked less than a week in advance, so the typical road warrior ticket -- is about $500. 7% is $35. I dunno, maybe some full-contact procurement guy will get excited about that $35 savings, but I don\'t know any executive in his or her right mind is thinking to themselves “Oh yes, pissing off the people who are jamming themselves in to coach seats and spending nights away from their family for $35 a trip” is a great idea.&nbsp; Except at GM. I remember when frequent flier programs first came out, GM didn’t let their travelers keep the points from business trips, which led to all sorts of weird booking behavior. Until that policy died a quiet death a few years later. Kinda like this research -- I’m sure these professors are nice, smart people; but they gotta get out of their offices a bit more.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music - <em>Drops of H2O ( The Filtered Water Treatment )</em> by J.Lang (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djlang59/37792 Ft: Airtone</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Moving to a Non-Hub Airport</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>One thing that kinda snuck up on me about our move to Nashville -- it’ll be the first time in almost 40 years that I haven’t lived in an airport hub city: Chicago with American and United at ORD; San Francisco with their United hub; Dallas when I signed up for American’s Advantage program my first day of work; Philadelphia with US Air, though I avoided them as much as I could; Detroit with Northwest; and then back to Chicago, now a 3-hub town after Southwest took over MDW after the big expansion.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Nashville <em>was</em> a hub in the late ‘80’s/early ‘90’s -- well, a mini-hub, actually -- when American was playing around with their network. They built mini-hubs in Nashville, Raleigh/Durham, and San Jose. The experiment lasted maybe 10 years but never really made any money. I think the only thing of American left in those airports are Admirals Clubs; in Nashville, they’re down to 9% of the passenger volume.&nbsp; Today, Nashville’s direct flight distribution looks like any non-hub airport -- the top 4 destinations are Big 3 hubs -- ATL, DEN, DFW, ORD -- with the fifth being MCO, thanks to all that Mouseketeer traffic.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>The #1 travel tip on my and any other experienced traveler’s list is “fly non-stop” -- much easier from a hub airport, of course, and then your frequent flier strategy just falls out from there. If you live in Atlanta, you’re doubling down on Delta’s SkyMiles; realistically, there’s not another option. Non-hub? It could be just as straight-forward -- if your flight patterns take you primarily to one of those hub cities -- Chicago, Atlanta, San Francisco -- then your choice too is made for you. But if you’re in sales or consulting -- or maybe slouching toward retirement -- and your flight patterns are a bit more scattershot, then you have to think -- what’s my objective? -- flying non-stop for the shortest flight times and lowest probability of disruption; making elite status because the perks make my travel easier; or is it building up points to help fund my vacations?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Thinking about my consulting colleagues who flew out of non-hub airports every week, they were all about status. One guy I worked with lived in Ft Myers, Florida and was all in on Delta. Even when flying every week to projects in, say, Dallas or Chicago, he’d always skip the direct American flights and connect through Atlanta, killing the time from all those missed connections with drinks in Delta’s Sky Club -- which was free with his Diamond Medallion status.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>My calculus is a little easier. One of the side benefits of flying <em>a lot</em> for over 35 years is that I stacked up enough mileage for lifetime mid-tier elite status on American and United. Not enough status to get into their clubs for free, but along with the usual early boarding and free bags, it’s gotten me free club entry to OneWorld and Star Alliance partners’ lounges -- which is very valuable when trying to navigate the rabbit warrens that are FRA and LHR after north Atlantic turbulence has screwed up your in-flight sleep plans.&nbsp; If I didn’t already have these metal levels or I was in striking distance of a new level -- say close to the 2 million I’d need to jump from United Premier Gold to lifetime Platinum -- then I’d probably suck it up like my colleagues do, and get, say, the top tier United credit card with free club access for a place to sit out ORD, DEN, and IAH weather delays.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Those lifetime statuses let me step off the elite hamster wheel, so I’m now looking at non-stop flights and earning miles. Out of Nashville, Southwest has the most non-stop flights, so I’ll probably be flying them a fair bit. But while Southwest’s Companion Pass perk -- their “buy a ticket, get one free” top tier status is phenomenal, I can’t BOGO Southwest to Europe, so I need to be banking miles on one of the Big 3 so I can book on their OneWorld, Star Alliance, or SkyTeam partners -- which is where travel credit cards come back into the picture. Back in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2020/09/19/podcast-167-6-months-on-why-keep-travel-cards/\">episode #167</a> in September 2020, we talked about people replacing their mileage cards with cash-back cards since no one was flying. But that trend is reverting to the mean and credit card companies have big slugs of mileage to dole out after buying them cheap in 2020 when the airlines needed real cash real fast. So my non-hub strategy -- fly direct when I can, leverage those hard-earned lifetime statuses when I can, and charge everything I can on a mileage-earning card -- including any drinks I may need to see me through those missed connections.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Bridge Music —  &nbsp;<em><a href=\"http://ccmixter.org/files/trifonic/445\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bored on Your Backside</a></em> by Trifonic (c) copyright 2005 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Sampling Plus 1.0 license. http://ccmixter.org/files/trifonic/445</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>What Makes a Great Taproom?</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>With a month left in Chicago, Irene and I have built a list of “Places to Hit Before Move” that’s some mix of greatest hits and places we’ve always wanted to go but have, for some reason or another, never gotten ‘round to. And then I have a separate list of Chicago taprooms I want to hit one more time -- Goose Island, Revolution Brewing, Off Color, Solemn Oath, Marz, Dovetail, and Metropolitan Brewing. Which then got me thinking -- why these and not other; what makes a good taproom for me?</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>First thing to do is to open up Untappd, the beer social networking app that\'s been my beer diary for over 11 years now.&nbsp; I’ve checked beer in at over 1,900 locations and the #1 location category is -- a brewery taproom. I scrolled through the list on the app and jotted down the ones I thought “Yeah, I’d like to go back there.”&nbsp;&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Probably the smallest group is about unique brewery experiences; where I actually did the brewery tour and it was something more than just row after row of steel tanks. Cantillon in Brussels is everyone’s favorite; they send you off on your own guided with nothing but a paper brochure and tell you not to break anything. And then, after you’ve navigated coolships and barrel rooms, they pour you their amazing lambic beers. Or the original Lagunitas Brewery in Petaluma, CA where the tour guide tossed us just-filled IPA bottles he’d grabbed before they got to the packaging machine.&nbsp;</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But except for these few exceptions, my favorite places have a wide beer selection (something more than 5 taps of IPAs) and/or a cool space and/or the chance to chat with the brewer. Labietis’ original place in Riga, Latvia hit the first two square on the head: a <em>diverse</em> beer menu -- a juniper beer inspired by Latvian folk songs, a wheat beer with meadowsweet, a lager with Latvian hops -- that’s located in the back courtyard of what looked like, in <a title=\"Podcast #157 — Notes from the Baltics: Riga, Latvia and Tallinn, Estonia\" href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2019/11/30/podcast-157-notes-from-the-baltics-riga-latvia-and-tallinn-estonia/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the fall of 2019</a>, a block of now slightly derelict early 20th Century manor houses.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Going to a brewery’s taproom is kinda like seeing a band in concert -- I’m going to get a fuller picture of that band than I will just hearing their hit songs on the radio or a Spotify playlist. Hitting a good taproom can be similar -- getting past the high-volume core beers to see what the brewer can really do. When we were in Santa Fe last month, I went out of my way to hit Rowley Farmhouse Ales because I really liked their range during our last visit in 2018. So of course I ordered the Teosinte, a funky, earthy, grassy sour made from Oaxacan green dent corn grown a couple hundred miles east, near the Texas-New Mexico border. It was an incredibly interesting beer. I wouldn’t buy a six-pack of it, but I was more than happy to have a glass of it.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But probably the best time I have at taprooms is when I get to talk to the brewer. During one of my trips last year to Nashville, I found myself an hour south in Columbia, TN, which bills itself “Muletown.” I missed the 2021 “Mule Day” festival; it was canceled due to COVID. Instead, I wound my way through a light industrial neighborhood hard against some freight train tracks billed as Columbia’s Art District to find <a href=\"http://www.badideabrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bad Idea Brewing</a>. There were two other folks sitting at the bar; the brewer was behind it, serving. And we just got talking -- about the beer, about his brewery, about Columbia, about brewing in Columbia, about what kind of beer sells in Columbia. And through all that, taster glasses kept landing in front of me -- “try this,” “what do you think of that?” he’d ask. What was going to be a quick side trip for a beer turned into a nice afternoon of conversation… and beer.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I guess there’s one more thing that can make for a great taproom, or maybe more of a great taproom experience and that is -- it took me to a part of a city that I wouldn’t have otherwise gone. I talked a bit about this in <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/2021/04/10/podcast-174-how-the-pros-plan-their-taproom-tourism/\">episode #174</a> when I talked with Rob Cheshire of the UK podcast <a href=\"https://thisweekincraft.beer/podcast/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">This Week in Craft Beer</a> about planning taproom visits. Navigating the maze of a Beijing hutong to find Great Leap Brewing, or exiting a Paris Metro stop in a North African neighborhood on my way to <a href=\"http://deck-donohue.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Deck &amp; Donohue</a>, or riding an e-scooter through a questionable neighborhood in northeast DC to <a href=\"https://www.rightproperbrewing.com/brookland\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Right Proper Brewing</a>. These three were fine places with solid beers, but they’re more memorable for the trip to find them than for the places themselves.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>But you can’t always tell this from Google search. So if you go to the show notes on travelcommons.com you’ll find my list of&nbsp; “Yeah, I’d like to go back there” taprooms.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>My<em> Yeah, I’d like to go back there</em>  Taproom List</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Chicago<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.gooseisland.com/fulton-brewery/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Goose Island Taproom</a>, 1800 W Fulton St — Yes, it\'s now owned by AB InBev, but it was the original Chicago microbrewery in the late \'80\'s and they created the whole barrel-aged stout category with Bourbon County Stout</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"http://www.revbrew.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Revolution Brewing Brewery &amp; Taproom</a>, 3340 N Kedzie Ave— Great beers; wide range of styles; bring your own food</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"http://maplewoodbrew.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Maplewood Brewery &amp; Distillery</a>, 2717 N Maplewood Ave (South of Diversey) — Small, neighborhood bar tucked up against the Kennedy Expressway</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"http://dovetailbrewery.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Dovetail Brewery</a>, 1800 W Belle Plaine Ave — German lagers and spontaneously fermented beers; the best taproom on the Ravenswood neighborhood\'s <a href=\"https://ravenswoodchicago.org/neighborhood/malt-row/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">\"Malt Row\"</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"http://www.offcolorbrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Off Color Brewing</a>, 1460 N Kingsbury St — Great range of beer styles, all of which are well-done</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.solemnoathbrewery.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Solemn Oath Brewery</a>, 1661 Quincy Ave #179, Naperville, IL — In a <em>faaar</em> west neighborhood of Chicago, one of the OG suburban breweries. Great beers and a great outdoor space, especially in the winter.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"http://marzbrewing.com/\">Marz Community Brewing</a>, 3630 S Iron St</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Elsewhere in the US<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://oxbowbeer.com/location/portland/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Oxbow Blending &amp; Bottling</a>, 49 Washington Ave, Portland, ME — Great selection of farmhouse ales with an outpost of&nbsp;<a href=\"http://www.duckfatfriteshack.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Duckfat</a>&nbsp;serving up fries on the patio</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li> <a href=\"http://www.allagash.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Allagash Brewing Company</a>, 50 Industrial Way, Portland, ME — One of the OG Maine breweries; huge range of beers beyond Allagash White; nice outdoor space; two more taprooms across the street makes it a nice afternoon destination</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://otherhalfbrewing.com/location/domino-park/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Other Half Brewing Domino Park</a>, 34 River St, Brooklyn, NY — Great hazy IPAs; great views of Manhattan across the East River</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.rightproperbrewing.com/brookland\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Right Proper Brewing Brookland Production House + Tasting Room</a>, 920 Girard St NE, Washington, DC — A nice little taproom in a DC neighborhood that is <em>way</em> off the typical tourist track</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://beardedirisbrewing.com/location/germantown/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bearded Iris Brewing</a>, 101 Van Buren St, Nashville, TN — Original Germantown taproom with great hazy IPAs, pool tables and a nice patio</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"http://www.faitlaforcebrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Fait la Force Brewing</a>, 1414 3rd Ave S, Nashville, TN — An unassuming place tucked away in the Chestnut Hill neighborhood; comfortable space; great range of beer styles; had a great conversation with the brewer behind the bar</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"http://www.badideabrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bad Idea Brewing Company</a>, 307 W 11th St, Columbia, TN — Comfortable taproom with well-executed beers in Columbia\'s Art District; another place I had a nice conversation with the brewer</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"http://www.lagunitas.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Lagunitas Brewing Company</a>, 1280 N McDowell Blvd, Petaluma, CA — Yes, they\'ve been bought out by Heineken, but the original brewery still has a bit of that old Cali anarchic feel</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.pueblovidabrewing.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pueblo Vida Brewing Company</a>, 115 E Broadway Blvd, Tucson, AZ — A little joint in downtown Tucson that executes great beers with a focus on local ingredients</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"http://www.eppigbrewing.com/waterfront-biergarten\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Eppig Brewing Waterfront Biergarten</a>, 2817 Dickens St, San Diego, CA — It\'s all about drinking good beers outside in the sunshine along the marina</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Outside the US<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://www.thebarrelproject.co.uk/beer-menu/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">London Beer Factory - Barrel Project</a>, 80 Druid St, London SE1 2HQ — Great beers; very cool space in railway arch along London\'s <a href=\"https://www.londonxlondon.com/bermondsey-beer-mile/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bermondsey Beer Mile</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"http://www.cantillon.be/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Brasserie Cantillon</a>, Rue Gheude 56, 1070 Anderlecht, Belgium — Ground zero for spontaneously fermented lambic and gueuze beers; just follow the train of beer geeks to the door</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://mikkeller.com/locations/mikkeller-baghaven\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Mikkeller Baghaven</a>, Refshalevej 169B, 1432 København — Lots of spontaneously fermented sour beer on a converted industrial island</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"http://www.fmaravillas.com/\">Fábrica Maravillas</a>, C. de Valverde, 29, 28004 Madrid — Nice taproom tucked into Madrid\'s Malasaña neighborhood serving good pale ales and IPAs </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://deck-donohue.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Deck &amp; Donohue</a>, 1 Av. des Marronniers, 94380 Bonneuil-sur-Marne, France — Took me outside the usual Paris tourist circuit to a North African shopping street</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><a href=\"https://labietis.lv/en/krogs/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Labietis Brewpub</a>, 2, Aristida Briāna iela 9a, Rīga, LV-1001, Latvia — Out-of-the-way taproom; interesting selection of beer styles, not just the usual IPAs, but herb beers, fruit beers, and meads; helpful bartenders do a good job of describing what\'s on tap</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list --></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->\n\n<!-- wp:heading {\"fontSize\":\"medium\"} -->\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\"><strong>Closing</strong></h2>\n<!-- /wp:heading -->\n\n<!-- wp:list -->\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Closing music -- <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #187</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>I hope you all enjoyed the show and I hope you decide to stay subscribed. </li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>As I said at the top of the show, there’s probably not going to be a June show, between packing up the Chicago studio and then unpacking it in Nashville. Good news, though -- the sound quality in Nashville might get a step-function improvement. Just about every apt building Irene and I looked at had a music studio as one of the amenities. The sound proofing, the sound deadening, and maybe a better microphone should make things sound a bit better. Quite a ways from those first episodes, recording with the iRiver MP3 player’s built-in mic while standing in a shower stall. Oh my!</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>You can find us and listen to us on all the main podcast sites -- <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/travelcommons/id73330536\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/4qjSwt9tfxiIQYlHDDtAyf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify</a>, <a href=\"https://www.stitcher.com/show/travelcommons-10271\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stitcher</a>, <a href=\"https://soundcloud.com/travelcommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">SoundCloud</a>, <a href=\"https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJuZXIuY29tL1RyYXZlbGNvbW1vbnNQb2RjYXN0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google Podcasts</a>, and <a href=\"https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6f4e7ff0-f04a-44a5-813c-9848badf7bfd/TravelCommons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music</a>. Or you can also ask Alexa, Siri, or Google to play TravelCommons on your smart speakers. You’ll have to go to the TravelCommons’ website if you want to torture your ears listening to those first bathroom-studio episodes; what one listener labelled a “pottycast”</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>And across the bottom of each page on the web site, you’ll find links to the TravelCommons’ social&nbsp; -- <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Facebook</a>, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter</a>, <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Instagram</a>, and the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWt6ix2pUn7U-55riz23W_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube channel</a>.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you’re already subscribed, how ‘bout leaving us a review on one of the sites? Or better yet, tell someone about TravelCommons. That word-of-mouth thing; it’s really the only way to grow.</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler -- send ‘em along, text or audio file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">@mpeacock</a> on Twitter, or post them on the TravelCommons’ <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/travelcommons/\">Instagram account</a>,&nbsp; or website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>Follow me on <a href=\"https://twitter.com/mpeacock\">Twitter</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li>\"Like\" the TravelCommons <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/travelcommons/\">Facebook page</a></li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item -->\n\n<!-- wp:list-item -->\n<li><strong><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_187.mp3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Direct link</a></strong> to the show</li>\n<!-- /wp:list-item --></ul>\n<!-- /wp:list -->','Podcast #187 — Moving to a Non-Hub Airport; What Makes A Great Taproom?','','inherit','closed','closed','','4145-revision-v1','','','2026-08-27 15:19:33','2026-08-27 20:19:33','',4145,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=4991',0,'revision','',0),
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(5000,1,'2026-08-28 10:08:58','2026-08-28 15:08:58','Recorded in the <a href=\"http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=39.1319444444,-77.2263888889&amp;spn=0.1,0.1&amp;q=39.1319444444,-77.2263888889 (Gaithersburg%2C%20Maryland)&amp;t=h\">Gaithersburg, MD</a> Marriott outside <a href=\"http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/washington-dc\">Washington, DC</a> at the end of an intense week of travel that had me flying from the East Coast to the West Coast and then back east again... on four different airlines. With many airlines\' plummeting customer satisfaction scores, we ask the question \"Who raves about their airline?\" Recent trips allow me to do a \"seat-to-seat\" comparison of two high-buzz airlines -- <a href=\"http://www.jetblue.com/\">JetBlue</a> and Virgin America. Our recurring <em>Travel Tech</em> topic talks about replacing a laptop with the latest evolution of Nokia\'s Internet tablet, and hunting down power outlets in airports. Also, a listener suggestion on local food in DC\'s <a href=\"http://www.mwaa.com/national/\">Reagan National Airport</a> leads to frustration at missing a great burger. Here\'s a <a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_58.mp3\"><strong>direct link</strong></a> to the podcast file.\n\n<hr />\n\nHere are the show notes from TravelCommons podcast #58:\n<ul>\n 	<li>Intro music -- <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/download/qd-4214/qd-4214-makkina-08-Warmth.mp3\"><em>Warmth</em></a> by <a href=\"http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=qed&amp;collectionid=qd-4214\">Makkina</a></li>\n 	<li>Recorded in the Gaithersburg, MD Marriott outside Washington, DC</li>\n 	<li>Had an extensive tour of East and West Coast airports over the past three weeks -- EWR, DCA, IAD, FLL, RDU, SNA, OAK, and SFO</li>\n 	<li>Flying to the Northeast is much more painful than flying to the West Coast, even though the ORD-SFO flight is twice as long</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/junoon-infiniti/\">Nachoon Gi</a></em> by Junoon</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Following Up</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Dave of the <a href=\"http://sandandtsunamis.blogspot.com\">Sand and Tsunamis blog</a> talked about hitting the <a href=\"http://www.fiveguys.com/\">Five Guys Famous Burger</a> stand in DC\'s Reagan National Airport. I wanted to try it out on my DC trip last week. Unfortunately, Five Guys is buried behind security in the <a href=\"http://www.usairways.com\">USAir</a> concourse and I was flying United</li>\n 	<li>Chris Christensen of the <a href=\"http://AmateurTraveler.com\">Amateur Traveler</a> podcast sent along a review of TravelCommons from Acura Style magazine</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/lucas-divine/\">Old Mexico</a></em> by Jeffery Luck Lucas</li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Who Raves about Their Airline?</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li>Most of the airline customer satisfaction problems are with what used to be called \"legacy\" carriers, now called \"network\" carriers -- USAir, Northwest, Delta, American, United</li>\n 	<li>Many elite fliers living in hub cities of network carriers (e.g., Philadelphia for USAir, Detroit for Northwest) complain about being \"trapped\"</li>\n 	<li>A stark comparison to the ringing endorsement of JetBlue offered by Business Week\'s executive editor in this <a href=\"http://www.businessweek.com/mediacenter/podcasts/cover_stories/covercast_02_22_07.htm\">podcast</a></li>\n 	<li>Virgin America still feels like they\'re in \"beta\" mode</li>\n 	<li>JetBlue offers a great in-flight experience -- good leg room, choice of snacks, free <a href=\"http://www.directv.com\">DirecTV</a> in seatback screens -- but the ground experience in JFK is a hassle</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://udayantripathi.com\">Udayan Tripathi</a> describes his flight across the US on Frontier Airlines</li>\n 	<li>Bridge Music -- <em><a href=\"http://www.brunomisonne.com/aviation%20music_003.htm\">Johannesburg airport tower party</a></em> by <a href=\"http://www.brunomisonne.com\">Bruno Misonne</a></li>\n</ul>\n<strong>Travel Tech Potpourri</strong>\n<ul>\n 	<li><a href=\"http://marcloehrwald.com/\">Marc Löhrwald</a> is very satisfied with the <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N800\">Nokia N800</a> as a PC replacement, and doesn\'t have to take it out of his briefcase when passing through security. He is, though, going to upgrade to the new N810</li>\n 	<li>Finding power outlets in airports can be a bit of an Easter Egg hunt</li>\n 	<li>O\'Hare\'s Terminal 1 has put in a number of free workstations with plenty of plugs at eye level</li>\n 	<li>Other airports push their pay-to-charge vending machines</li>\n 	<li>Here\'s a <a href=\"http://flickr.com/photos/travelcommons/1736936801/\">picture</a> of the Medusa-like cell phone and PDA charger in <a href=\"http://www.rdu.com\">Raleigh-Durham airport</a></li>\n 	<li>Closing music -- <a href=\"http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=wCWrQCJPoPI&amp;offerid=99176.467861474&amp;type=10&amp;subid=\"><strong>iTunes link</strong></a> to <em>Pictures of You</em> by Evangeline</li>\n 	<li>Bridge music from <a href=\"http://magnatune.com/\">Magnatune</a> and <a href=\"http://www.brunomisonne.com\">Bruno Misonne</a></li>\n 	<li>Feedback at comments@travelcommons.com, the comment board on <a href=\"http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=3865\">podcastalley.com</a>, or right here in the comments section below</li>\n 	<li><a href=\"https://migrate.travelcommons.com/podcast/travelcommons_58.mp3\"><strong>Direct link</strong></a> to the show</li>\n</ul>','Podcast #58 - Who Raves About Their Airline; Powering Up in Airports','','inherit','closed','closed','','82-revision-v1','','','2026-08-28 10:08:58','2026-08-28 15:08:58','',82,'https://migrate.travelcommons.com/?p=5000',0,'revision','',0);
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